Page:The poetical works of Matthew Arnold, 1897.djvu/23

Rh At this time he joined the Queen's Westminster Rifle Volunteers and greatly enjoyed the drilling which he felt "braces one's muscles and does one a world of good."

He was always fond of sport with gun and rod: he keenly enjoyed shooting grouse on a Scotch moor or pulling in a two-pound trout from a clear sparkling mountain stream. His first salmon was a matter of chronicle.

Before he had reached the age of forty he had recognized his special function, already early indicated: it was to tame "the wild beast of Philistinism," using literature as his method. "I have always the risk before me," he said, "of being torn to pieces by him and, even if I succeed to the utmost, of dying in a ditch or a workhouse at the end of it all." He hated with a royal hatred what he called "the vulgarity, the meddlesomeness, and the grossness of the British multitude." They were "Philistines"; but the Aristocracy, so blinded in their confirmed conservatism, were "Barbarians." And the epithets became by-words.

Yet, in spite of his severe criticism on men, manners, and morals, he early determined, and he never failed, "to be scrupulously polite in print," and though he was equally determined to say imperturbably what he thought and to make a great many people uncomfortable, yet he saw that the great thing was "to speak without a particle of vice, malice, or rancor." Time, study, and nature taught him "the precious truth" that everything turns on the way one exercises the power of persuasion and charm, and that without it, all fury, energy, reasoning power, and acquirement were thrown away and rendered their owner more miserable. "Even in one's ridicule," he said, "one must preserve a sweetness and good humor."

Perfectly sweet-tempered himself, he dissociated personality from criticism, and while respecting authors he was often relentless in his judgment of their works. This severity he applied to Thackeray and Ruskin, to Tennyson and Coventry Patmore, to Swinburne and Mrs. Browning. His favorites, after the Greek poets, were Wordsworth and Goethe.

He expressed frankly his own feelings under criticism: at first he felt annoyed; then he cheered himself by remembering how, within a few days, the effect of it upon him would have wholly passed, and then he would begin to think of the openings which he might find to answer back, and so he quickly recovered his gayety and good spirits and was enabled to look on the article as "simply an object of interest" to him.