The scope of the word conspicuously appears also in the phrase, which became proverbial, declaring that literature is “a criticism of life.”  In such an employment of terms, ordinary meanings evaporate:  and it becomes necessary to know the thought of the author rather than the usage of men.  Without granting the dictum, therefore, which would be far from the purpose, is it not clear that by “critic” and “criticism” Arnold intended to designate, or at least to convey, something peculiar to his own conception,—­not strictly related to literature at all, it may be, but more closely tied to society in its general mental activity?  In other words, Arnold was a critic of civilization more than of books, and aimed at illumination by means of ideas.  With this goes his manner,—­that habitual air of telling you something which you did not know before, and doing it for your good,—­which stamps him as a preacher born.  Under the mask of the critic is the long English face of the gospeler; that type whose persistent physiognomy was never absent from the conventicle of English thought.

This evangelizing prepossession of Arnold’s mind must be recognized in order to understand alike his attitude of superiority, his stiffly didactic method, and his success in attracting converts in whom the seed proved barren.  The first impression that his entire work makes is one of limitation; so strict is this limitation, and it profits him so much, that it seems the element in which he had his being.  On a close survey, the fewness of his ideas is most surprising, though the fact is somewhat cloaked by the lucidity of his thought, its logical vigor, and the manner of its presentation.  He takes a text, either some formula of his own or some adopted phrase that he has made his own, and from that he starts out only to return to it again and again with ceaseless iteration.  In his illustrations, for example, when he has pilloried some poor gentleman, otherwise unknown, for the astounded and amused contemplation of the Anglican monocle, he cannot let him alone.  So too when, with the journalist’s nack for nicknames, he divides all England into three parts, he cannot forget the rhetorical exploit.  He never lets the points he has made fall into oblivion; and hence his work in general, as a critic, is skeletonized to the memory in watchwords, formulas, and nicknames, which, taken altogether, make up only a small number of ideas.

His scale, likewise, is meagre.  His essay is apt to be a book review or a plea merely; it is without that free illusiveness and undeveloped suggestion which indicate a full mind and give to such brief pieces of writing the sense of overflow.  He takes no large subject as a whole, but either a small one or else some phases of the larger one; and he exhausts all that he touches.  He seems to have no more to say.  It is probable that his acquaintance with literature was incommensurate with his reputation or apparent scope as a writer.  As he has fewer