“an illustration likely to be torn from its context, to be improperly used, and to give pain, should ever have been adopted.”  In Literature, again, though his judgment was critical, his charity was unbounded.  He could find something to praise even in the most immature and unpretending efforts; and he knew how to distinguish what we call “good of its sort,” good in the second order of achievement, from what is simply bad.  In literature, as in opinion, it was only when moral faults were mingled with intellectual defects that he became censorious.  He detested literary humbug—­a pretence of knowledge without the reality, a show of philosophy masking poverty of thought; the vanity of quaintness, the “ring of false metal,” the glorification of commonplace.

And so again when we come to Life—­the social life of the civilized community—­he was the consistent teacher and the bright example of an exalted and scrupulous morality.  Even the intellectual brilliancy of authors whom he intensely admired did not often blind him to ethical defects.  It is true that some objects of his literary admiration—­Goethe and Byron and George Sand—­could scarcely be regarded as moral exemplars; but, while he praised the genius, he marked his disapproval of the moral defect.  In writing of George Sand, who had so profoundly influenced his early life, he did not deny or extenuate “her passions and her errors.”  Byron, though he thought him “the greatest natural force, the greatest elementary power, which has appeared in our literature since Shakespeare,” he roundly accused of “vulgarity and effrontery,” “coarseness and commonness,” “affectation and brutal selfishness.”  In the case of Goethe, he said that “the moralist and the man of the world may unite in condemning” his laxity of life; and even in Faust, which he esteemed the “most wonderful work of poetry in our century,” the fact that it is a “seduction-drama” marred his pleasure.  In the same tone he wrote, in the last year of his life, about Renan’s Abbesse—­“I regret the escapade extremely; he was entirely out of his role in writing such a book....  Renan descends sensibly in the scale from having produced his Abbesse.”  Heine, with all his genius, “lacked the old-fashioned, laborious, eternally needful moral deliverance”:  he left a name blemished by “intemperate susceptibility, unscrupulousness in passion, inconceivable attacks on his enemies, still more inconceivable attacks on his friends, want of generosity, sensuality, incessant mocking.”

[Illustration:  Pains Hill Cottage, Cobham, Surrey

Matthew Arnold’s home from 1873 until his death in 1888]