passing the whole of
life. Few critics have been really less "disinterested," few have kept
their eyes less steadily "upon the object": but that fact does not
lessen the value of his precepts of disinterestedness and objectivity;
nor is it necessary, in becoming "a child of light," to join in spirit
the unhappy "remnant" of the academy, or to drink too deep of that
honeyed satisfaction, with which he fills his readers, of being on his
side. As a critic, Arnold succeeds if his main purpose does not fail,
and that was to reinforce the party of ideas, of culture, of the
children of light; to impart, not moral vigor, but openness and
reasonableness of mind; and to arouse and arm the intellectual in
contradistinction to the other energies of civilization.

The poetry of Arnold, to pass to the second portion of his work, was
less widely welcomed than his prose, and made its way very slowly; but
it now seems the most important and permanent part. It is not small in
quantity, though his unproductiveness in later years has made it appear
that he was less fluent and abundant in verse than he really was. The
remarkable thing, as one turns to his poems, is the contrast in spirit
that they afford to the essays: there is here an atmosphere of entire
calm. We seem to be in a different world. This fact, with the singular
silence of his familiar letters in regard to his verse, indicates that
his poetic life was truly a thing apart.

In one respect only is there something in common between his prose and
verse: just as interest in human nature was absent in the latter, it is
absent also in the former. There is no action in the poems; neither is
there character for its own sake. Arnold was a man of the mind, and he
betrays no interest in personality except for its intellectual traits;
in Clough as in Obermann, it is the life of thought, not the human
being, that he portrays. As a poet, he expresses the moods of the
meditative spirit in view of nature and our mortal existence; and he
represents life, not lyrically by its changeful moments, nor tragically
by its conflict in great characters, but philosophically by a
self-contained and unvarying monologue, deeper or less deep in feeling
and with cadences of tone, but always with the same grave and serious
effect. He is constantly thinking, whatever his subject or his mood; his
attitude is intellectual, his sentiments are maxims, his conclusions are
advisory. His world is the sphere of though