By those who go to literature primarily for a practical wisdom presented in terms applicable to modern life, the work of Arnold will be reckoned highly important, if not indispensable.  He will be placed by them among the great humanizers of the last century, and by comparison with his contemporaries will be seen to have furnished a complementary contribution of the highest value.  Of the other great teachers whose work may most fitly be compared with his, two were preeminently men of feeling.  Carlyle was governed by an overmastering moral fervor which gave great weight to his utterances, but which exercised itself in a narrow field and which often distorted and misinterpreted the facts.  Ruskin was governed by his affections, and though an ardent lover of truth and beauty, was often the victim of caprice and extravagance.  Emerson and Arnold, on the other hand, were governed primarily by the intellect, but with quite different results.  Emerson presents life in its ideality; he comparatively neglects life in its phenomenal aspect, that is, as it appears to the ordinary man.  Arnold, while not without emotional equipment, and inspired by idealism of a high order, introduces a yet larger element of practical season. Tendens manus ripae ulterioris amore, he is yet first of all a man of this world.  His chief instrument is common sense, and he looks at questions from the point of view of the highly intelligent and cultivated man.  His dislike of metaphysics was as deep as Ruskin’s, and he was impatient of abstractions of any sort.  With as great a desire to further the true progress of his time as Carlyle or Ruskin, he joined a greater calmness and disinterestedness.  “To be less and less personal in one’s desires and workings” he learned to look upon as after all the great matter.  Of the lessons that are impressed upon us by his whole life and work rather than by specific teachings, perhaps the most precious is the inspiration to live our lives thoughtfully, in no haphazard and hand-to-mouth way, and to live always for the idea and the spirit, making all things else subservient.  He does not dazzle us with extraordinary power prodigally spent, but he was a good steward of natural gifts, high, though below the highest.  His life of forethought and reason may be profitably compared with a life spoiled by passion and animalism like that of Byron or of Burns.  His counsels are the fruit of this well-ordered life and are perfectly in consonance with it.  While he was a man of less striking personality and less brilliant literary gift than some of his contemporaries, and though his appeal was without the moving power that comes from great emotion, we find a compensation in his greater balance and sanity.  He makes singularly few mistakes, and these chiefly of detail.  Of all the teachings of the age his ideal of perfection is the wisest and the most permanent.

III

[Sidenote:  His Teachers and his Personal Philosophy]