Arnold was not, then, one of those critics who are interested in life itself, and through the literary work seize on the soul of the author in its original brightness, or set forth the life-stains in the successive incarnations of his heart and mind.  Nor was he of those who consider the work itself final, and endeavor simply to understand it,—­form and matter,—­and so to mediate between genius and our slower intelligence.  He followed neither the psychological nor the aesthetic method.  It need hardly be said that he was born too early to be able ever to conceive of literature as a phenomenon of society, and its great men as only terms in an evolutionary series.  He had only a moderate knowledge of literature, and his stock of ideas was small; his manner of speech was hard and dry, there was a trick in his style, and his self-repetition is tiresome.

What gave him vogue, then, and what still keeps his more literary work alive?  Is it anything more than the temper in which he worked, and the spirit which he evoked in the reader?  He stood for the very spirit of intelligence in his time.  He made his readers respect ideas, and want to have as many as possible.  He enveloped them in an atmosphere of mental curiosity and alertness, and put them in contact with novel and attractive themes.  In particular, he took their minds to the Continent and made them feel that they were becoming cosmopolitan by knowing Joubert; or at home, he rallied them in opposition to the dullness of the period, to “barbarism” or other objectionable traits in the social classes:  and he volleyed contempt upon the common multitudinous foe in general, and from time to time cheered them with some delectable examples of single combat.  It cannot be concealed that there was much malicious pleasure in it all.  He was not indisposed to high-bred cruelty.  Like Lamb, he “loved a fool,” but it was in a mortar; and pleasant it was to see the spectacle when he really took a man in hand for the chastisement of irony.  It is thus that “the seraphim illuminati sneer.”  And in all his controversial writing there was a brilliancy and unsparingness that will appeal to the deepest instincts of a fighting race, willy-nilly; and as one had only to read the words to feel himself among the children of light, so that our withers were unwrung, there was high enjoyment.

This liveliness of intellectual conflict, together with the sense of ideas, was a boon to youth especially; and the academic air in which the thought and style always moved, with scholarly self-possession and assurance, with the dogmatism of “enlightenment” in all ages and among all sects, with serenity and security unassailable, from within at least—­this academic “clearness and purity without shadow or stain” had an overpowering charm to the college-bred and cultivated, who found the rare combination of information, taste, and aggressiveness in one of their own ilk.  Above all, there was the play of intelligence on every page; there was an application of ideas to life in many regions of the world’s interests; there was contact with a mind keen, clear, and firm, armed for controversy or persuasion equally, and filled with eager belief in itself, its ways, and its will.