r poetry, not the
individual character and unique genius, which occupy him. He
will tell you whether a poet is 'sane and clear,' or stormy
and fervent; whether he is rapid and noble, or loquacious and
quaint; whether a thinker penetrates the husks of
conventional thought which mislead the crowd; whether there
is sweetness as well as lucidity in his aims; whether a
descriptive writer has 'distinction' of style, or is
admirable only for his vivacity: but he rarely goes to the
individual heart of any of the subjects of his criticism; he
finds their style and class, but not their personality in
that class; he _ranks_ his men, but does not portray them;
hardly even seems to find much interest in the _individual_
roots of their character."

In brief, this is to say that Arnold took little interest in human
nature; nor is there anything in his later essays on Byron, Keats,
Wordsworth, Milton, or Gray, to cause us to revise the judgment on this
point. In fact, so far as he touched on the personality of Keats or
Gray, to take the capital instances, he was most unsatisfactory.

Arnold was not, then, one of those critics who are interested in life
itself, and through the literary work seize on the soul of the author in
its original brightness, or set forth the life-stains in the successive
incarnations of his heart and mind. Nor was he of those who consider the
work itself final, and endeavor simply to understand it,--form and
matter,--and so to mediate between genius and our slower intelligence.
He followed neither the psychological nor the aesthetic method. It need
hardly be said that he was born too early to be able ever to conceive of
literature as a phenomenon of society, and its great men as only terms
in an evolutionary series. He had only a moderate knowledge of
literature, and his stock of ideas was small; his manner of speech was
hard and dry, there was a trick in his style, and his self-repetition
is tiresome.

What gave him vogue, then, and what still keeps his more literary work
alive? Is it anything more than the temper in which he worked, and the
spirit which he evoked in the reader? He stood for the very spirit of
intelligence in his time. He made his readers respect ideas, and want to
have as many as possible. He enveloped them in an atmosphere of mental
curiosity and alertness, and put them in contact with novel and
attractive themes. In particu