On the last day of his life he said in a note to the present writer:  “S——­ has written a letter full of shriekings and cursings about my innocent article; the Americans will get their notion of it from that, and I shall never be able to enter America again.”  That “innocent article” was an estimate, based on his experience in two recent visits to the United States, of American civilization.  “Innocent” perhaps it was, but it was essentially critical.  He began by saying that in America the “political and social problem” had been well solved; that there the constitution and government were to the people as well-fitting clothes to a man; that there was a closer union between classes there than elsewhere, and a more “homogeneous” nation.  But then he went on to say that, besides the political and social problem, there was a “human problem,” and that in trying to solve this America had been less successful—­indeed, very unsuccessful.  The “human problem” was the problem of civilization, and civilization meant “humanization in society”—­the development of the best in man, in and by a social system.  And here he pronounced America defective.  America generally—­life, people, possessions—­was not “interesting.”  Americans lived willingly in places called by such names as Briggsville, Jacksonville and Marcellus.  The general tendency of public opinion was against distinction.  America offered no satisfaction to the sense for beauty, the sense for elevation.  Tall talk and self-glorification were rampant, and no criticism was tolerated.  In fine, there were many countries, less free and less prosperous, which were more civilized.

That “innocent article,” written in 1888, shows exactly the same balanced tone and temper—­the same critical attitude towards things with which in the main he sympathizes—­as the letters of 1848.

And what is true of the beginning and the end is true of the long tract which lay between.  From first to last he was a Critic—­a calm and impartial judge, a serene distributer of praise and blame—­never a zealot, never a prophet, never an advocate, never a dealer in that “blague and mob-pleasing” of which he truly said that it “is a real talent and tempts many men to apostasy.”

For some forty years he taught his fellow-men, and all his teaching was conveyed through the critical medium.  He never dogmatized, preached, or laid down the law.  Some great masters have taught by passionate glorification of favourite personalities or ideals, passionate denunciation of what they disliked or despised.  Not such was Arnold’s method; he himself described it, most happily, as “sinuous, easy, unpolemical.”  By his free yet courteous handling of subjects the most august and conventions the most respectable, he won to his side a band of disciples who had been repelled by the brutality and cocksureness of more boisterous teachers.  He was as temperate in eulogy as in condemnation; he could hint a virtue and hesitate a liking.[4]