It happens, as we have just seen, that his earliest and latest criticisms were criticisms of Institutions, and a great part of his critical writing deals with similar topics; but these will be more conveniently considered when we come to estimate his effect on Society and Politics.  That effect will perhaps be found to have been more considerable than his contemporaries imagined; for, though it became a convention to praise his literary performances and judgments, it was no less a convention to dismiss as visionary and absurd whatever he wrote about the State and the Community.

But in the meantime we must say a word about his critical method when applied to Life, and when applied to Books.  When one speaks of criticism, one is generally thinking of prose.  But, when we speak of Arnold’s criticism, it is necessary to widen the scope of one’s observation; for he was never more essentially the critic than when he concealed the true character of his method in the guise of poetry.  Even if we decline to accept his strange judgment that all poetry “is at bottom a criticism of life,” still we must perceive that, as a matter of fact, many of his own poems are as essentially critical as his Essays or his Lectures.

We all remember that he poked fun at those misguided Wordsworthians who seek to glorify their master by claiming for him an “ethical system as distinctive and capable of exposition as Bishop Butler’s,” and “a scientific system of thought.”  But surely we find in his own poetry a sustained doctrine of self-mastery, duty, and pursuit of truth, which is essentially ethical, and, in its form, as nearly “scientific” and systematic as the nature of poetry permits.  And this doctrine is conveyed, not by positive, hortatory, or didactic methods, but by Criticism—­the calm praise of what commends itself to his judgment, the gentle but decisive rebuke of whatever offends or darkens or misleads.  Of him it may be truly said, as he said of Goethe, that

    He took the suffering human race,
    He read each wound, each weakness clear;
    And struck his finger on the place,
    And said:  Thou ailest here, and here.

His deepest conviction about “the suffering human race” would seem to have been that its worst miseries arise from a too exalted estimate of its capacities.  Men are perpetually disappointed and disillusioned because they expect too much from human life and human nature, and persuade themselves that their experience, here and hereafter, will be, not what they have any reasonable grounds for expecting, but what they imagine or desire.  The true philosophy is that which

    Neither makes man too much a god,
        Nor God too much a man.

Wordsworth thought it a boon to “feel that we are greater than we know”:  Arnold thought it a misfortune.  Wordsworth drew from the shadowy impressions of the past the most splendid intimations of the future.  Against such vain imaginings Arnold set, in prose, the “inexorable sentence” in which Butler warned us to eschew pleasant self-deception; and, in verse, the persistent question—­