The Poems of Matthew Arnold 1840 - 1867 Book

THE POEMS OF MATTHEW ARNOLD -- 1922 -- INTRODUCTION I do not hold up Joubert as a very astonishing and powerful geuius, but rather as a delightful and edifying genius. . . . He is the most prepossessing and convincing of witnesses to the good of loving light. Because he sincerely loved light, and did not prefer to it any little private clarkness of his own, he found light. . . . And because he was full of light he was also full of happiness. . . . His life was as charming as his thoughts. For certainly it is natural that the love of light, which is already, in some measure, the possession of light,, should irradiate and beatify the whole life of hiin who has it. MANY a reader of Essays in. Criticism must haye paused and in thought transferred to Matthew Arnold these words of his in praise of Joubert, as well as the fine passage in which he goes on to ask What, in literature, we mean by fame Only two kinds of authors he tells us are secure of fame the first being the Homers, Dantes, Shakespeares, the great abiding fountains of truth, whose praise is for ever and ever. But beside these sacred personages stand certain elect ones, less majestic, yet to be recognized as of the same family and character with the greatest, exercising like then1 an immortal function, and like them inspiring a permanent interest. The fame of these also is assured. They will never, like the Shakespeares, command the homage of the multitude but they are safe the multitude will not trample them down. To this company Matthew Arnold belongs. We all feel it, and some of us can give reasons for our confidence but perhaps, if all our reasons were collected, a the feeling would be found to reach deeper into certainty than any of them. He was never popular, and never will be. Yet no one can say that, although at one time he seemed to vie with the public in distrusting it, his poetry missed its mark. On the other hand, while his critical writings had swift and almost instantaneous effect for good, the repute they brought him was moderate, and largely made up of misconception. For the mass of his countrymen he came somehow to personify a number of things which their minds vaguely associated with kid gloves, and by his ironical way of playing with the nlisconception he did more than a little to confirm it. But in truth Arnold was a serious man who saw life as a serious business, and chiefly relied, for making the best of it, upon a serene common sense. He had elegance, to be sure, and was inclined - at any rate, in controversy-to be conscious of it, but it was elegance of that plain Attic order to which common sense gives the law and almost the inspiration. The man and the style were one. Alike in his life and his writings he observed and preached the golden mean, with a mind which was none the less English and practical if, in expressing it, he deliberately and almost defiantly avoided that emphasis which Englishmen love to a fault. Matthew Arnold, eldest son of Dr. Thomas Arnold, the famous Head Master of Rugby, was born on Christmas Eve, 1822, at Laleham on the Thames, where his father at that time taught private pupils. The child was barely six years old when the family removed to Rugby, and at seven he returned to Laleham to be taught by his uncle, the Rev. John Buckland...Read More