Matthew Arnold | Page 7

"S---- has written a letter full of shriekings and cursings about
my innocent article; the Americans will get their notion of it from that,

and I shall never be able to enter America again." That "innocent
article" was an estimate, based on his experience in two recent visits to
the United States, of American civilization. "Innocent" perhaps it was,
but it was essentially critical. He began by saying that in America the
"political and social problem" had been well solved; that there the
constitution and government were to the people as well-fitting clothes
to a man; that there was a closer union between classes there than
elsewhere, and a more "homogeneous" nation. But then he went on to
say that, besides the political and social problem, there was a "human
problem," and that in trying to solve this America had been less
successful--indeed, very unsuccessful. The "human problem" was the
problem of civilization, and civilization meant "humanization in
society"--the development of the best in man, in and by a social system.
And here he pronounced America defective. America generally--life,
people, possessions--was not "interesting." Americans lived willingly
in places called by such names as Briggsville, Jacksonville and
Marcellus. The general tendency of public opinion was against
distinction. America offered no satisfaction to the sense for beauty, the
sense for elevation. Tall talk and self-glorification were rampant, and
no criticism was tolerated. In fine, there were many countries, less free
and less prosperous, which were more civilized.
That "innocent article," written in 1888, shows exactly the same
balanced tone and temper--the same critical attitude towards things
with which in the main he sympathizes--as the letters of 1848.
And what is true of the beginning and the end is true of the long tract
which lay between. From first to last he was a Critic--a calm and
impartial judge, a serene distributer of praise and blame--never a zealot,
never a prophet, never an advocate, never a dealer in that "blague and
mob-pleasing" of which he truly said that it "is a real talent and tempts
many men to apostasy."
For some forty years he taught his fellow-men, and all his teaching was
conveyed through the critical medium. He never dogmatized, preached,
or laid down the law. Some great masters have taught by passionate
glorification of favourite personalities or ideals, passionate

denunciation of what they disliked or despised. Not such was Arnold's
method; he himself described it, most happily, as "sinuous, easy,
unpolemical." By his free yet courteous handling of subjects the most
august and conventions the most respectable, he won to his side a band
of disciples who had been repelled by the brutality and cocksureness of
more boisterous teachers. He was as temperate in eulogy as in
condemnation; he could hint a virtue and hesitate a liking.[4]
It happens, as we have just seen, that his earliest and latest criticisms
were criticisms of Institutions, and a great part of his critical writing
deals with similar topics; but these will be more conveniently
considered when we come to estimate his effect on Society and Politics.
That effect will perhaps be found to have been more considerable than
his contemporaries imagined; for, though it became a convention to
praise his literary performances and judgments, it was no less a
convention to dismiss as visionary and absurd whatever he wrote about
the State and the Community.
But in the meantime we must say a word about his critical method
when applied to Life, and when applied to Books. When one speaks of
criticism, one is generally thinking of prose. But, when we speak of
Arnold's criticism, it is necessary to widen the scope of one's
observation; for he was never more essentially the critic than when he
concealed the true character of his method in the guise of poetry. Even
if we decline to accept his strange judgment that all poetry "is at bottom
a criticism of life," still we must perceive that, as a matter of fact, many
of his own poems are as essentially critical as his Essays or his
Lectures.
We all remember that he poked fun at those misguided Wordsworthians
who seek to glorify their master by claiming for him an "ethical system
as distinctive and capable of exposition as Bishop Butler's," and "a
scientific system of thought." But surely we find in his own poetry a
sustained doctrine of self-mastery, duty, and pursuit of truth, which is
essentially ethical, and, in its form, as nearly "scientific" and systematic
as the nature of poetry permits. And this doctrine is conveyed, not by
positive, hortatory, or didactic methods, but by Criticism--the calm

praise of what commends itself to his judgment, the gentle but decisive
rebuke of whatever offends or darkens or misleads. Of him it may be
truly said, as he said of Goethe, that