“a day and a night and a morrow.”  By December danger-signals are up in a letter to his mother, to the effect that “it is intolerable absurdity to profess [who does?] to see Christianity through the spectacles of a number of second- or third-rate men who lived in Queen Elizabeth’s time”—­that time so fertile in nothing but the second-rate and the third.  But it is followed a little later by the less disputable observation, “It is difficult to make out exactly at what [F.D.] Maurice is driving; perhaps he is always a little dim in his own mind” on that point.

The illuminations at the Prince of Wales’s marriage, where like other people he found “the crowd very good-humoured,” are noted; and the beginning of Thyrsis where and while the fritillaries blow.  But from the literary point of view few letters are more interesting than a short one to Sir Mountstuart (then Mr) Grant Duff, dated May 14, 1863, in which Mr Arnold declines an edition of Heine, the loan of which was offered for his lecture—­later the well-known essay.  His object, he says, “is not so much to give a literary history of Heine’s work as to mark his place in modern European letters, and the special tendency and significance of what he did.”  He will, therefore, not even read these things of Heine’s that he has not read, but will take the Romancero alone for his text, with a few quotations from elsewhere, With a mere passing indication of the fact that Matthew Arnold here, like every good critic of this century, avowedly pursues that plan of “placing” writers which some of his own admirers so foolishly decry, I may observe that this is a locus classicus for his own special kind of criticism.  It is possible—­I do not know whether he did so—­that Sir Mountstuart may, on receiving the letter, have smiled and thought of “Mon siege est fait”; but I am sure he would be the first to admit that the cases were different.  I do not myself think that Mr Arnold’s strong point was that complete grasp of a literary personality, and its place, which some critics aim at but which few achieve.  His impatience—­here perhaps half implied and later openly avowed—­of the historic estimate in literature, would of itself have made this process irksome to him.  But on the lines of his own special vocation as a critic it was not only irksome, it was unnecessary.  His function was to mark the special—­perhaps it would be safer to say a special—­tendency of his man, and to bring that out with all his devices of ingenious reduplication, fascinating rhetoric, and skilful parading of certain favourite axioms and general principles.  This function would not have been assisted—­I think it nearly certain that it would have been hampered and baulked—­by that attempt to find “the whole” which the Greek philosopher and poet so sadly and so truly declares that few boast to find.  It was a side, a face, a phase of each man and writer, that he wished to bring out; and, though he might sometimes exaggerate this, yet his exaggeration was scarcely illegitimate.  To bring out something he had to block out much.  If he had attempted to show the whole Goethe, the whole Heine, the whole Homer or Shakespeare even, they would have been difficult if not impossible to group and to compare in the fashion in which he wished to deal with them.