ideas than any other author of his time of the same rank, so he discloses less knowledge of his own or foreign literatures.  His occupations forbade wide acquisition; he husbanded his time, and economized also by giving the best direction to his private studies, and he accomplished much; but he could not master the field as any man whose profession was literature might easily do.  Consequently, in comparison with Coleridge or Lowell, his critical work seems dry and bare, with neither the fluency nor the richness of a master.

In yet another point this paucity of matter appears.  What Mr. Richard Holt Hutton says in his essay on the poetry of Arnold is so apposite here that it will be best to quote the passage.  He is speaking, in an aside, of Arnold’s criticisms:—­

“They are fine, they are keen, they are often true; but they are always too much limited to the thin superficial layer of the moral nature of their subjects, and seem to take little comparative interest in the deeper individuality beneath.  Read his essay on Heine, and you will see the critic engrossed with the relation of Heine to the political and social ideas of his day, and passing over with comparative indifference the true soul of Heine, the fountain of both his poetry and his cynicism.  Read his five lectures on translating Homer, and observe how exclusively the critic’s mind is occupied with the form as distinguished from the substance of the Homeric poetry.  Even when he concerns himself with the greatest modern poets,—­with Shakespeare as in the preface to the earlier edition of his poems, or with Goethe in reiterated poetical criticisms, or when he again and again in his poems treats of Wordsworth,—­it is always the style and superficial doctrine of their poetry, not the individual character and unique genius, which occupy him.  He will tell you whether a poet is ‘sane and clear,’ or stormy and fervent; whether he is rapid and noble, or loquacious and quaint; whether a thinker penetrates the husks of conventional thought which mislead the crowd; whether there is sweetness as well as lucidity in his aims; whether a descriptive writer has ‘distinction’ of style, or is admirable only for his vivacity:  but he rarely goes to the individual heart of any of the subjects of his criticism; he finds their style and class, but not their personality in that class; he ranks his men, but does not portray them; hardly even seems to find much interest in the individual roots of their character.”

In brief, this is to say that Arnold took little interest in human nature; nor is there anything in his later essays on Byron, Keats, Wordsworth, Milton, or Gray, to cause us to revise the judgment on this point.  In fact, so far as he touched on the personality of Keats or Gray, to take the capital instances, he was most unsatisfactory.