CHAPTER VI.

CONCLUSION.

The personal matters which usually, and more or less gracefully, fill
the beginning of the end of a biography, are perhaps superfluous in
the case of a man who died so recently, and who was so well known as
Mr Matthew Arnold. Moreover, if given at all, they should be given by
some one who knew him more intimately than did the present writer. He
was of a singularly agreeable presence, without being in the sense of
the painter's model exactly "handsome"; and in particular he could
boast a very pleasant and not in the least artificial smile. Some
artificiality of manner was sometimes attributed to him, I think
rather unjustly; but he certainly had "tricks and manners" of the kind
very natural to men of decided idiosyncrasy, unless they transcend all
mere trick, after the fashion which we know in Scott, which we are
sure of, without knowing, in Shakespeare. One of these Mr George
Russell glances at in the preface to the _Letters_, a passage
which I read with not a little amusement, because I could confirm it
from a memory of my only conversation with Mr Arnold. He had been
good-humouredly expostulating with me for overvaluing some French
poet. I forget at the distance of seventeen or eighteen years who it
was, but it was not Gautier. I replied in some such words as, "Well;
perhaps he is not very important in himself, but I think he is
'important _for us_,' if I may borrow that." So he looked at me
and said, "_I_ didn't write that anywhere, did I?" And when I
reminded him that he had told us how Sainte-Beuve said it of
Lamartine, he declared that he had quite forgotten it. Which might, or
might not, be Socratic.

But I should imagine that the complaints of his affectations in
ordinary society were as much exaggerated as I am sure that the
opposite complaints of the humdrum character of his letters are.
Somebody talks of the "wicked charm" which a popular epithet or
nickname possesses, and something of the sort seems to have hung about
"The Apostle of Culture," "The Prophet of Sweetness and Light," and
the rest. He only deserved his finical reputation inasmuch as he was
unduly given to the use of these catch-words, not because he in any
undue way affected to "look the part" or live up to them. And as for
the letters, it must be remembered that he was a very busy man, with
clerical work of the official kind enough to disgust a very
Scriblerus; that he had, so far as the published lette