with all alike the Middle Class is serenely content.  After reporting these exceedingly frank comments of foreign critics to his English readers, Arnold thus expresses his own conviction on the matters in dispute.  “All due deductions made for envy, exaggeration, and injustice, enough stuck by me of these remarks to determine me to go on trying to keep my mind fixed on these, instead of singing hosannahs to our actual state of development and civilization.  The old recipe, to think a little more and bustle a little less, seemed to me still to be the best recipe to follow.  So I take comfort when I find the Guardian reproaching me with having no influence; for I know what influence means—­a party, practical proposals, action; and I say to myself:  ’Even suppose I could get some followers, and assemble them, brimming with affectionate enthusiasm, to a committee-room in some inn; what on earth should I say to them?  What resolutions could I propose?  I could only propose the old Socratic commonplace, Know thyself; and how black they would all look at that!’ No; to enquire, perhaps too curiously, what that present state of English development and civilization is, which according to Mr. Lowe is so perfect that to give votes to the working class is stark madness; and, on the other hand, to be less sanguine about the divine and saving effect of a vote on its possessor than my friends in the committee-room at the Spotted Dog—­that is my inevitable portion.  To bring things under the light of one’s intelligence, to see how they look there, to accustom oneself simply to regard the Marylebone Vestry, or the Educational Home, or the Irish Church Establishment, or our railway management, or our Divorce Court, or our gin-palaces open on Sunday and the Crystal Palace shut, as absurdities—­that is, I am sure, invaluable exercise for us just at present.  Let all persist in it who can, and steadily set their desires on introducing, with time, a little more soul and spirit into the too, too solid flesh of English society.”

[Illustration:  Fisher’s Buildings, Balliol College, Oxford

Showing Matthew Arnold’s Rooms

Photo H.W.  Taunt]

So much for his first deliberate attempt in the way of social criticism.  It was levelled, we observe, at the thoughts and doings of the great Middle Class, and it is natural to ask why that class was so specially the target for his scorn.  To that class, as he was fond of declaring, half in fun and half in earnest, he himself belonged.  “I always thought my marriage,” he used to say, “such a perfect marriage of the Middle Classes—­a schoolmaster’s son and a judge’s daughter.”  In the preface to the Essays in Criticism, he spoke of “the English Middle Class, of which I am myself a feeble unit.”  He used to declare that his feeling towards his brethren of the Middle Class was that of St. Paul towards his brethren of Israel:  “My heart’s desire and prayer for them is that they may be saved.”  In Culture and Anarchy he was constrained to admit that “through circumstances which will perhaps one day be known, if ever the affecting history of my conversion comes to be written, I have, for the most part, broken with the ideas and the tea-meetings of my own class”; but he found that he had not, by that conversion, come much nearer to the ideas and works of the Aristocracy or the Populace.