Page:The poetical works of Matthew Arnold, 1897.djvu/26

xvi serene, impartial studies in the highest regions of philosophic and literary thought immediately placed Matthew Arnold on a level with Goethe in Germany, with Saint-Beuve, Taine, and Scherer in France. There had been English critics before, but in his own field Matthew Arnold stood alone and unapproached.

In 1866 he applied for a vacant charity commissionership which would have brought him in £300 more salary, but it was given to a lawyer, as he supposed it would be.

In 1867 he applied for the librarianship of the House of Commons, not really caring much for it, as the residence no longer went with it, but for his wife's sake. He disliked to ask for it, but was almost reconciled to the disagreeableness by the great kindness shown him. He failed to get it. This same year his "New Poems" appeared: they were all "new" except seven, which, at the earnest solicitation of Robert Browning, he reprinted from "Empedocles on Etna." One thousand copies were quickly sold. He brought out, also, his remarks on the Study of Celtic Literature: they were the substance of four lectures delivered at Oxford; for the first time English readers were made to see what a deep and lofty influence the hitherto despised Celt had exercised in helping to develop the most poetic elements of their literature.

Early in 1868 his "dear, dear little man," his youngest son, Basil, died; he himself fell at a railway station and was seriously injured. He moved to Harrow, where he took a comfortable house with ample grounds. Here, in November, his oldest son, Thomas, died at the age of sixteen. Deeply as he felt the loss of these dear ones, and of his brother William, and of his wife's father in the preceding years, his trust that all was well was unbroken. Bereavements and disappointments serve only to strengthen the really noble. In spite of growing older he felt no older, and he attributed his youthfulness of feelings to his "going on reading and thinking." At this time he had been seeing a good deal of high society at Aston Clinton, where the Rothschilds lived. He was very fond of Sir Anthony and Lady Rothschild, and he confessed that he "liked these occasional appearances in the world,—No," he adds, "I do not like them, but they do one good and one learns something from them; but, as a general rule, I agree with all the men of soul from Pythagoras to Byron in thinking that this type of society is the most drying, wasting, depressing, and fatal thing possible."

In 1869 he published his Essay in Political and Social Criticism entitled "Culture and Anarchy," which had previously