In his critical temper, lucidity, courage, and serenity were equally blended.  In his criticism of books, as in his criticism of life, he aimed first at Lucidity—­at that clear light, uncoloured by prepossession, which should enable him to see things as they really are.  In a word, he judged for himself; and, however much his judgment might run counter to prejudice or tradition, he dared to enounce it and persist in it.  He spoke with proper contempt of the “tenth-rate critics, for whom any violent shock to the public taste would be a temerity not to be risked”; but that temerity he himself had in rich abundance.  Homer and Sophocles are the only poets of whom, if my memory serves me, he never wrote a disparaging word.  Shakespeare is, and rightly, an object of national worship; yet Arnold ventured to point out his “over-curiousness of expression”; and, where he writes—­

    Till that Bellona’s bridegroom, lapped in proof,
    Confronted him with self-comparisons,

Arnold dared to say that the writing was “detestable.”

Macaulay is, perhaps less rightly, another object of national worship; yet Arnold denounced the “confident shallowness which makes him so admired by public speakers and leading-article writers, and so intolerable to all searchers for truth”; and frankly avowed that to his mind “a man’s power to detect the ring of false metal in the Lays of Ancient Rome was a good measure of his fitness to give an opinion about poetical matters at all.”  According to Macaulay, Burke was “the greatest man since Shakespeare.”  Arnold admired Burke, revered him, paid him the highest compliment by trying to apply his ideas to actual life; but, when Burke urged his great arguments by obstetrical and pathological illustrations, Arnold was ready to denounce his extravagances, his capriciousness, his lapses from good taste.

The same perfectly courageous criticism, qualifying generous admiration, he applied in turn to Jeremy Taylor and Addison, to Milton, and Pope, and Gray, and Keats, and Shelley, and Scott—­to all the principal luminaries of our literary heaven.  He went all lengths with Mr. Swinburne in praising Byron’s “sincerity and strength,” but he qualified the praise:  “Our soul had felt him like the thunder’s roll,” but “he taught us little.”  Devout Wordsworthian as he is, he does not shrink from saying that much of Wordsworth’s work is “quite uninspired, flat and dull,” and sets himself to the task of “relieving him from a great deal of the poetical baggage which now encumbers him.”

And so Lucidity, which reveals the Truth, enounces its decisions with absolute courage; and to Lucidity and Courage is added the crowning grace of Serenity.  However much the subject of his study may offend his taste or sin against his judgment, he never loses his temper with the author whom he is criticising.  He never bludgeons or scalps or scarifies; but serenely indicates, with the calm gesture of a superior authority, the defects and blots which mar perfection, but which the unthinking multitude ignores, or, at worst, admires.