Page:Matthew Arnold, Coates, Century, April 1894.djvu/4

Rh of the enlightened few, he was always the friend of the people.

During his visits to this country, there were few things in which he manifested so eager an interest as in the conversation of our laboring men as overheard by him from time to time. Frequently he repeated to me sentences which had reached him in the street, upon the trains, or at railway stations, asking, "Is not such intelligence uncommon amongst your working people?" Upon my replying in the negative, he would say, "It is surprising; you would not meet with it in England." A democrat by conviction rather than by temperament, urging democracy as "the only method consistent with the human instinct toward expansion," he was yet an educator, and believed in equality upon a high, not upon a low, plane. Like Ruskin, he demanded of men their best, and with less than their best refused to be satisfied.

Culture,—the sentiment for beauty, the passion for perfection, "the acquaintance with the best that has been thought and said in the world,"—this he deemed the remedy for the unideaed frivolity of the barbarian, the arid, self-complacent dullness of the Philistine, the hopeless intellectual squalor of the populace. Against vice and stupidity he waged uncompromising war, assailing them with all the arms of light, with "lucid wit and lambent irony"; but his true temper was "uncontentious, mild, and winning," and his longing was for peace—for tranquil thoughts and equable delights. Life was not to him, as to so many, a series of sorrowful frustrations. He had ability equal to every task imposed; and with his simple tastes and inexhaustible interests, it would have been easy for him to live in the enjoyment of a home wholly congenial, writing, amidst temperate scenes beloved, poetry and criticism which should not die. But the "hopeless tangle of the age," his earnest, wistful solicitude for men, the spectacle of their lives,—ignorant, unlovely, joyless, debased,—compelled him to seek a solution and a remedy for the evils which beset them.

Like Newman, he had weapons of wit, of raillery, of disdain; and he used them freely, unsparingly, hesitating not to wound, if only he might heal. Many, failing to see the importance of his mission, ridiculed him as "an elegant and spurious Jeremiah," and as the apostle of "sweetness and light." But he brought them sweetness, and he brought them light. He overthrew the Philistinism, corrected the taste, and enriched the ideals of two continents.

Mr. Arnold's criticism of America has been widely discussed. I remember that after the marriage of his daughter to an American, a friend laughingly remarked to him, "And now you have given us hostages, and you will never be able to tell us the truth about ourselves any more." Mr. Arnold smiled, and made no answer; but of him it may be said, if of any, "He was so severe a lover of justice, and so precise a lover of truth, that he was superior to all possible temptations for the violation of either."

When to our ears came the first intimation that in us also he had found things of which he did not wholly approve, we were filled with amazement, and a storm of indignation swept over the land. But even in the midst of our wrath, hushing it to sudden stillness, came the news that the great world-critic was dead—that in praise or in blame he would speak to men no more. Then sorrowfully we remembered how wise had been his judgments as to other countries, and we bethought ourselves that of us and of our institutions he had indeed said nothing unkind, but had spoken only as he had spoken of peoples and of institutions old and new. Our size had not impressed him, our numbers had not awed him, our wealth had not inspired him. He had recalled the great nations of the earth, and had remembered that they were neither the largest nor the richest nor the most populous nations. He had thought of little Greece and little England, and had realized that races, like individuals, are developed by adversity; and he had felt that in our strength there lay a weakness; in our extent, our numbers, and our wealth, a menace to our future. "A revealer of racial faults and racial virtues," it was not given him to flatter and prophesy smooth things; rather to awaken in men divine dissatisfactions, to quicken in them the sense of their infirmities, to lead them to the study of perfection.

His love for England will not be questioned: it is written in enduring monuments, in many paragraphs as deathless as the panegyric, familiar to all, which he pronounced upon Oxford, the home of his youth:

Beautiful city! so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene!—

"There are our young barbarians all at play!"

And yet, steeped in sentiment as she lies, spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age, who will deny that Oxford, by her ineffable charm, keeps ever calling us nearer to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection,—to beauty, in a word, which is only truth seen from another side? Adorable dreamer, whose heart has been so romantic! who hast given thyself so prodigally, given thyself to sides and to heroes not mine, only never to the Philistines! Home of lost causes and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names and impossible loyalties! what example could ever so inspire us to keep down the Philistine in ourselves, what teacher could ever so save us from that bondage to which we are all prone? ... Apparitions of a day, what is our puny warfare against the Philistines compared with that