THE EXPONENT of the idea of “Sweetness and Light” as qualities of the cultured intellect, Matthew Arnold occupied a distinctive place in the literature of his generation, and it is probable that much of what he has written will survive even after many such marked changes of taste as have already taken place. He represented the realities of that high intellectual refinement to which some of his imitators had no other title than that given them by their desire to be credited with it. In the generation to which he belonged English aristocratic liberalism showed itself ineffective to deal with the rapidly accumulating problems of civilization. The conservatism which means “holding its own and other people’s also” under—

	“The good old rule, the simple plan,
	That he can take who has the power
	And he can keep who can,”

was never unequal to its opportunities. But when for aristocratic liberalism, opportunity meant the sacrifice of its own individual and class privileges, the closing years of the century show nothing but hesitation and vacillation, the longing for progress and the lack of courage to advance, which expresses itself in the sadness of the highest intellect of the English literature of this period. The whole æsthetic movement, with its idea that the world can be saved by the sweetness of those high minds whose culture separates them from the rest, seems to be a reaction from politics, due to the indecision of great political leaders who, when trusted with power, feared to use it to carry out what they had advocated in opposition. Even when he is most the poet and essayist, Matthew Arnold is still the sociologist, the student of the fundamental principles of society. The sadness which underlies his work, prose as well as verse, and develops itself in the sudden antithesis of his exquisite:—

	“Strew on her roses, roses,
	But never a spray of yew;
	In quiet she reposes—
	Ah, would that I did too!”

—this and the protest against “Philistinism” are equally symptoms of discontent, with conditions out of which were soon to be developed the rude and vigorous vulgarity of that middle-class Toryism which thrusts itself forward with its insulting and Philistine question, addressed to the ghosts of Tomlinsonian culture:—

	“Ye have read, ye have heard, ye have thought, God wot, and the tale is yet to run!
	By the worth of the body that once ye had, give answer: What have ye done?”

  Perhaps the study of Homer, Æschylus, and Dante may yet produce in England a Winkelried in literature who will give a Winkelried’s answer to that question, but the Shelleys and Byrons who died expatriated and in disgrace in the first half of the century left no successors in the second half. We had instead the melancholy Tennyson at the Court of Arthur, and the saddened Arnold at Athens in the time of Pericles,—both representatives of the ineffectual protest of poetic souls against an environment they could not control.

  The son of the celebrated Doctor Arnold of Rugby, Matthew Arnold was born at Laleham, December 24th, 1822. Graduating at Oxford in 1844, he held the professorship of Poetry there from 1857 to 1867, after having served from 1851 to 1867 as Government Inspector of Schools. In 1883–84 he lectured in the United States, and, on his return to England, showed that the intellectual exclusiveness to which he tended did not make him unfriendly to Republican institutions, or hopeless of a government by the masses—who, according to his view, if incapable of saving themselves, were to be saved nevertheless by a “remnant” of men of high intellect. As a poet, Arnold is at his best in his lyrics, some of which are unsurpassed in English. The style of his essays is a model of highly polished smoothness. He died in Liverpool, April 15th, 1888.