Page:Studies of a Biographer 2.djvu/91

 I feel the same, in a rather different sense, about Arnold. It is difficult to reconcile the claims of honest criticism and personal esteem. But, besides this, I have a difficulty to which I must refer at the risk of giving an impression of mock-modesty. I feel, that is, the great difficulty of speaking to purpose of a man whose intellectual type was so different from my own. Had Arnold been called upon to pronounce judgment upon me, he must, however reluctantly, have set me down as a Philistine. It is a word which I dislike; but I cannot deny that, in his phraseology, it would be indisputably appropriate. Arnold was a typical Oxford man in the days when Oxford was stirred by the 'movement' of which it is supposed to be proper to speak respectfully. I was taught in my childhood to regard 'Puseyism' and 'Tractarianism' with a vague shuddering horror; and, as I grew older, I am afraid that the horror only became milder as it was mixed with something too like contempt. The young leader whose opinions I assimilated in college days belonged to a different and more prosaic school. They scorned sentimentalism and aesthetic revivals, and, if they took any interest in speculative matters, read John Stuart