Page:The poetical works of Matthew Arnold, 1897.djvu/31

Rh from America. But the meeting never took place. An hour before the steamship was due he started out in the best of spirits to take the tram-car. He may have hurried a little; he had already neglected the physician's injunctions and exerted himself in leaping a low fence near his sister's house. He suddenly fell forward, and never spoke again. He died on the fifteenth at the age of sixty-five years and three months.

"The lives and deaths of the 'pure in heart,'" he himself said, "have perhaps the privilege of touching us more deeply than those of others, partly, no doubt, because with them the disproportion of suffering to desert seems so unusually great."

Matthew Arnold was one of the great intellectual and moral forces of the century. As an essayist he was one of the first to raise criticism to its true significance, placing it on foundations of reason and justice, dissociating from it the elements of personality, making it free, broad, and generous, however severe it might be. And it was never destructive, but always constructive, criticism; he never failed in all that he wrote to reiterate his persuasive assertion of the superiority of the intellectual life. If he failed at all, it was in carrying the virtue of fastidiousness to an extreme.

As a moralist, or perhaps rather as a lay-preacher of theology, he took a position even more radical than that which in his father had so offended the conservative members of the Anglican Church. He never wearied of attacking the narrowness of the English dissenters and showing up the bareness and unlovliness of their cherished creeds. The great middle class of England which he termed materialized, and the lower class which he said was brutalized, cordially detested him for the "artful iteration" by which he called attention to their foibles. His Parthian arrows, in the form of memorable phrases, stuck in their armor and rankled. As they were tipped, not with poison, but with the wholesome bitterness of reason, they ultimately inoculated many unwilling readers with that restlessness and dissatisfaction which bring about a healthier moral state. He was called a Jeremiah, preaching a doctrine of pessimism; but no epithet was unfairer. What he strenuously strove to communicate to the great people which he loved was more abundant life, a more reasonable faith, a sweeter and more luminous view of God's action in the world. As a theological writer Matthew Arnold's influence has so passed into our later thought that he already seems almost trite, but that was inevitable. After prophecy has been fulfilled, the prophet is