[Footnote 2:  Wordsworth.]

[Footnote 3:  See p. 207.  Philip Henry, 5th Earl Stanhope (1805-1875), Historian, and Patron of Letters.]

[Illustration:  Laleham Ferry

Matthew Arnold was born on Christmas Eve, 1822, at Laleham, near
Staines.

Photo H.W.  Taunt]

CHAPTER II

METHOD

The Matthew Arnold whom we know begins in 1848; and, when we first make his acquaintance, in his earliest letters to his mother and his eldest sister, he is already a Critic.  He is only twenty-five years old, and he is writing in the year of Revolution.  Thrones are going down with a crash all over Europe; the voices of triumphant freedom are in the air; the long-deferred millennium of peace and brotherhood seems to be just on the eve of realization.  But, amid all this glorious hurly-burly, this “joy of eventful living,” the young philosopher stands calm and unshaken; interested indeed, and to some extent sympathetic, but wholly detached and impartially critical.  He thinks that the fall of the French Monarchy is likely to produce social changes here, for “no one looks on, seeing his neighbour mending, without asking himself if he cannot mend in the same way.”  He is convinced that “the hour of the hereditary peerage and eldest sonship and immense properties has struck”; he thinks that a five years’ continuance of these institutions is “long enough, certainly, for patience, already at death’s door, to have to die in.”  He pities (in a sonnet) “the armies of the homeless and unfed.”  But all the time he resents the “hot, dizzy trash which people are talking” about the Revolution.  He sees a torrent of American vulgarity and “laideur” threatening to overflow Europe.  He thinks England, as it is, “not liveable-in,” but is convinced that a Government of Chartists would not mend matters; and, after telling a Republican friend that “God knows it, I am with you,” he thus qualifies his sympathy—­

    Yet, when I muse on what life is, I seem
      Rather to patience prompted, than that proud
      Prospect of hope which France proclaims so loud—­
    France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme.

In fine, he is critical of his own country, critical of all foreign nations, critical of existing institutions, critical of well-meant but uninstructed attempts to set them right.  And, as he was in the beginning, so he continued throughout his life and to its close.  It is impossible to conceive of him as an enthusiastic and unqualified partisan of any cause, creed, party, society, or system.  Admiration he had, for worthy objects, in abundant store; high appreciation for what was excellent; sympathy with all sincere and upward-tending endeavour.  But few indeed were the objects which he found wholly admirable, and keen was his eye for the flaws and foibles which war against absolute perfection.