INTRODUCTION.

I.

ADMIRERS of Arnold's prose find it well to admit frankly that his style has an unfortunate knack of exciting prejudice. Emerson has somewhere spoken. of the unkind trick fate plays a man when it gives him a strut in his gait. Here and there in Arnold's prose, there is just a trace-sometimes more than a trace-of such a strut. He condescends to his readers with a gracious elaborateness; he is at great pains to make them feel that they are his equals; he undervalues himself playfully; he assures us that "he is an unlearned belletristic trifler ";' he insists over and over again that "he is an unpretending writer, without a philosophy based on interdependent, subordinate, and coherent principles."" All this he does, of course, smilingly; but the smile seems to many on whom its favors fall, supercilious; and the playful undervaluation of self looks shrewdly like an affectation. He is very debonair,-this apologetic writer; very self-assured; at times even jaunty.'

Thorough-going admirers of Arnold have always

1 Celtic Literature, p. 21.

2 Culture and Anarchy, p. 152; Friendship's Garland, p. 273. 3 Various critics have complained of Arnold's tone and bearing. Mr. Saintsbury, for example, objects to his "mincing" manner; Professor Jowett, to his "flippancy."

relished this strain in his style; they have enjoyed its delicate challenge, the nice duplicity of its innuendoes; they have found its insinuations and its covert, satirical humor infinitely entertaining and stimulating. Moreover, however seriously disposed they may have been, however exacting of all the virtues from the author of their choice, they have been able to reconcile their enjoyment of Arnold with their serious inclinations, for they have been confident that these tricks of manner implied no essential or radical defect in Arnold's humanity, no lack either of sincerity or of earnestness or of broad sympathy.

Such admirers and interpreters of Arnold have been amply justified of their confidence since the publication in 1895 of Arnold's Letters. The Arnold of these letters is a man the essential integrity-wholeness-of whose nature is incontestable. His sincerity, kindliness, wide-ranging sympathy with all classes of men, are unmistakably expressed on every page of his correspondence. We see him having to do with. people widely diverse in their relations to him; with those close of kin, with chance friends, with many men of business or officials, with a wide circle of literary acquaintances, with workingmen, and with foreign savants. In all of his intercourse the same sweet-tempered frankness and the same readiness of sympathy are manifest. There is never a trace of the duplicity or the treacherous irony that are to be found in much of his prose.

Moreover, the record that these Letters contain of close application to uncongenial tasks must have been. a revelation to many readers who have had to rely

upon books for their knowledge of literary men. Popular caricatures of Arnold had represented him as "a high priest of the kid-glove persuasion," as an incorrigible dilettante, as a kind of literary fop idling his time away over poetry and recommending the parmaceti of culture as the sovereignest thing in } nature for the inward bruises of the spirit. This conception of Arnold, if it has at all maintained itself, certainly cannot survive the revelations of the Letters. The truth is beyond cavil that he was one of the most self-sacrificingly laborious men of his time.

For a long period of years Arnold held the post of inspector of schools. Day after day, and week after week, he gave up one of the finest of minds, one of the most sensitive of temperaments, one of the most delicate of literary organizations, to the drudgery of examining in its minutest details the work of the schools in such elementary subjects as mathematics and grammar. On January 7, 1863, he writes to his mother, "I am now at the work I dislike most in the world-looking over and marking examination papers. I was stopped last week by my eyes, and the last year or two these sixty papers a day of close hand-writing to read have, I am sorry to say, much tried my eyes for the time.' Two years later he laments again: "I am being driven furious by seven hundred closely-written grammar papers, which I have to look over.' During these years he was holding the Chair of Poetry at Oxford, and he had long since established his reputation as one of the

1 Letters, i. 207. 2 Letters, i. 285

foremost of the younger poets. Yet for a livelihood he was forced still to endure-and he endured them till within a few years of his death in 1888-the exactions of this wearing and exasperating drudgery. Moreover, despite occasional outbursts of impatience, he gave himself to the work freely, heartily, and effectively. He was sent on several occasions to the Continent to examine and report on foreign school systems; his reports on German and French education show immense diligence of investigation, a thorough grasp of detail, and patience and persistence in the acquisition of facts that in and for themselves must have been unattractive and unrewarding.

The record of this severe labor is to be found in Arnold's Letters, and it must dispose once for all of any charge that he was a mere dilettante and coiner of phrases. Through a long period of years he was working diligently, wearisomely, in minutely prac tical ways, to better the educational system of England; he was persistently striving both to spread sounder ideals of elementary education and to make more effective the system actually in vogue. And thus, unpretentiously and laboriously, he was serving the cause of sweetness and light as well as through his somewhat debonair contributions to literature.

In another way his Letters have done much to reveal the innermost core of Arnold's nature, and so, ultimately, to explain the genesis of his prose. They place it beyond a doubt that in all he wrote Arnold had an underlying purpose, clearly apprehended and faithfully pursued. In 1867, in a letter to his mother, he says: "I more and more become conscious of

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having something to do and of a resolution to do
it... Whether one lives long or not, to be less and
less personal in one's desires and workings is the great —
matter.' In a letter of 1863 he had already written
in much the same strain: "However, one cannot
change English ideas as much as, if I live, I hope to
change them, without saying imperturbably what one
thinks, and making a good many people uncomfort-
able." And in a letter of the same year he exclaims:
"It is very animating to think that one at last has a
chance of getting at the English public. Such a pub-
lic as it is, and such a work as one wants to do with
A work to do! The phrase recalls Cardinal
Newman and the well-known anecdote of his Sicilian
illness, when through all the days of greatest danger
he insisted that he should get well because he had a
work to do in England. Despite Arnold's difference.
in temperament from Newman and the widely dis-
similar task he proposed to himself, he was no less in
earnest than Newman, and no less convinced of the
importance of his task.

3

The occasional supercilious jauntiness of Arnold's style, then, need not trouble even the most conscientious of his admirers. To many of his readers it is in itself, as has been already suggested, delightfully stimulating. Others, the more conscientious folk and. perhaps also the severer judges of literary quality, are bound to find it artistically a blemish; but they need not at any rate regard it as implying any radical defect in Arnold's humanity or as the result of cheap

1Letters, i. 400,

'Letters, i. 225.

3 Letters, i. 233.