Page:The poetical works of Matthew Arnold, 1897.djvu/22

xii form was everything." It was effort, it was a tearing of himself to pieces to do his best "to attain or approach perfection in the region of thought and to unite this with perfection of form." He found the exhaustion of the best poetical production, coupled with the claims of his serious work, a tremendous strain. Goethe, he reminded himself, was likewise hampered by "the endless matters" that claimed his attention. Indeed, all poets have found fault with their environment: one with his professorship, another with his lectures, another with his very idleness. The birds may very likely say that if it were not for the atmosphere they could fly to the stars!

But Matthew Arnold was not a complaining man. As the editor of his letters says: "Self-denial was the law of his life, yet the word never crossed his lips." What a lovely record that, while always working beyond the limits of his strength, "he never by a word or a sign betrayed a consciousness of the dull indifference to his gifts and services which stirred the fruitless indignation of his friends."

His capacity for work was extraordinary. Occasionally in his letters he hints at the demands upon him. We catch glimpses of him examining half a dozen schools in a day, looking over scores of examination papers, putting his hand to the stores of his well-ordered mind to write reviews or essays for magazines, preparing his Oxford lectures; yet never, amid all the rush of his busy existence, did he neglect the claims of his dearly beloved family, his mother, or his sister, or (if he happened to be away from home) his wife: writing them the fullest, sweetest, happiest letters, giving himself in them as a child gives the typical cup of cold water to a thirsty traveller.

In 1858 he took a house in London, in Chester Square, and, for the first time in the seven years after his marriage, settled down to live.

The following year he was sent abroad as Foreign Assistant Commissioner to report on the Systems of Continental Education. This enabled him not only to see the inner life of France and other countries, but also to travel in a leisurely and satisfactory way. He was fond of beautiful Nature, and his prose descriptions of scenery have a genuinely poetic touch.

On his return he embodied some of his foreign experiences in a pamphlet entitled "England and the Italian Question." He felt that he had inherited from his father his pamphleteering talent. "Even the positive style of statement," he said, "I inherit."