ork.
The airy persiflage of his prose--its reiterated lucidities--pleasing to
some, irritating to others, will have a place, but not a very important
place, in English Literature. Even those magical and penetrating
"aphorisms" with which he has held the door open to so many
religious and moral vistas tease us a little now, and--suggestive
enough in their hour--do not deepen and deepen upon the intellect
with the weight of "aphorisms" from Epictetus or Goethe.

The "stream of tendency that makes for righteousness" runs a little
shallow, and it has so many pebbles under its clear wave! That word
of his, "the Secret of Jesus," wears best of all. It was a happy
thought to use the word "secret"--a thought upon which those whose
religious creed binds them to "the method" rather than "the secret,"
may well ponder!

As a critic, too, though illuminating and reassuring, he is far from
clairvoyant. A quaint vein of pure, good-tempered, ethical
_Philistinism_ prevents his really entering the evasive souls of
Shelley or Keats or Heine. With Wordsworth or Byron he is
more at home. But he misses many subtleties, even in their
simple temperaments. He is no Proteus, no Wizard of critical
metempsychosis. For all his airy wit, he is "a plain, blunt man, who
loves his friend." In fact, when one compares him, as a sheer
illuminator of psychological twilights, to Walter Pater, one realizes
at once how easily a quite great man may "render himself stupid" by
sprinkling himself with the holy water of Fixed Principles!

No, it is neither of Arnold, the Theological Free-Lance, or of Arnold,
the Critic of Literature, that I want to speak, but of Arnold, the Poet.

Personally I hold the opinion that he was a greater poet than either
Tennyson or Browning. His philosophy is a far nobler, truer, and
more permanent thing than theirs, and there are passages and single
lines in his poetry which over-top, by enormous distances, anything
that they achieved.

You ask me what the Philosophy of Matthew Arnold was? It is easy
to answer that. It was the philosophy of all the very greatest among
mortal men! In his poetry he passes completely out of the region of
Theological argument, and his attitude to life is the attitude
of Sophocles and Virgil and Montaigne and Cervantes and
Shakespeare and Goethe. Those who read Matthew Arnold, and love
him, know that his intellectual tone is the tone of those great
classical writers, and his conclusions their concl