Matthew Arnold | Page 3

colourless; even its melancholy is probably mere Byronism, and has nothing directly to do with the later quality of Dover Beach and Poor Matthias.
Of Mr Arnold's undergraduate years we have unluckily but little authentic record, and, as has been said, not one letter. The most interesting evidence comes from Principal Shairp's well-known lines in _Balliol Scholars, 1840-1843_, written, or at least published, many years later, in 1873:--
"The one wide-welcomed for a father's fame, Entered with free bold step that seemed to claim Fame for himself, nor on another lean.
So full of power, yet blithe and debonair, Rallying his friends with pleasant banter gay, Or half a-dream chaunting with jaunty air Great words of Goethe, catch of B��ranger, We see the banter sparkle in his prose, But knew not then the undertone that flows So calmly sad, through all his stately lay."[2]
Like some other persons of much distinction, and a great many of little or none, he "missed his first," in December 1844; and though he obtained, three months later, the consolation prize of a Fellowship (at Oriel, too), he made no post-graduate stay of any length at the university. The then very general, though even then not universal, necessity of taking orders before very long would probably in any case have sent him wandering; for it is clear from the first that his bent was hopelessly anti-clerical, and he was not merely too honest, but much too proud a man, to consent to be put in one of the priests' offices for a morsel of bread. It may well be doubted--though he felt and expressed not merely in splendid passages of prose and verse for public perusal, but in private letters quite towards the close of his life, that passionate attachment which Oxford more than any other place of the kind inspires--whether he would have been long at home there as a resident. For the place has at once a certain republicanism and a certain tyranny about its idea, which could not wholly suit the aspiring and restless spirit of the author of Switzerland. None of her sons is important to Oxford--the meanest of them has in his sonship the same quality as the greatest. Now it was very much at Mr Arnold's heart to be important, and he was not eager to impart or share his qualities.
However this may be, there were ample reasons why he should leave the fold. The Bar (though he was actually called and for many years went circuit as Marshal to his father-in-law, Mr Justice Wightman) would have suited him, in practice if not in principle, even less than the Church; and he had no scientific leanings except a taste for botany. Although the constantly renewed cries for some not clearly defined system of public support for men of letters are, as a rule, absurd, there is no doubt that Mr Arnold was the very man for a sinecure, and would have justified the existence of Pipe or Hanaper to all reasonable men. But his political friends had done away with nearly all such things, and no one of the very few that remained fell to his lot. His father had died in 1842, but the son served a short apprenticeship to school-teaching at Rugby, then became private secretary to Lord Lansdowne, the President of the Council (it is now that we first meet him as an epistoler), and early in 1851 was appointed by his chief to an inspectorship of schools. Having now a livelihood, he married, in June of that year, Frances Lucy Wightman, daughter of a judge of the Queen's Bench. Their first child, Thomas, was born on July 6, 1852, and Mr Arnold was now completely estated in the three positions of husband, father, and inspector of schools, which occupied--to his great delight in the first two cases, not quite so in the third--most of his life that was not given to literature. Some not ungenerous but perhaps rather unnecessary indignation has been spent upon his "drudgery" and its scanty rewards. It is enough to say that few men can arrange at their pleasure the quantity and quality of their work, and that not every man, even of genius, has had his bread-and-butter secured for life at eight-and-twenty.
But in the ten or twelve years which had passed since Alaric at Rome, literature itself had been by no means neglected, and in another twelvemonth after the birth of his first-born, Matthew Arnold had practically established his claim as a poet by utterances to which he made comparatively small additions later, though more than half his life was yet to run. And he had issued one prose exercise in criticism, of such solidity and force as had not been shown by any poet since Dryden, except Coleridge.
These documents can hardly be said