enthusiasm, to a committee-room in some inn; what on earth
should I say to them? What resolutions could I propose? I could only
propose the old Socratic commonplace, _Know thyself_; and how black they
would all look at that!' No; to enquire, perhaps too curiously, what
that present state of English development and civilization is, which
according to Mr. Lowe is so perfect that to give votes to the working
class is stark madness; and, on the other hand, to be less sanguine
about the divine and saving effect of a vote on its possessor than my
friends in the committee-room at the _Spotted Dog_--that is my
inevitable portion. To bring things under the light of one's
intelligence, to see how they look there, to accustom oneself simply to
regard the Marylebone Vestry, or the Educational Home, or the Irish
Church Establishment, or our railway management, or our Divorce Court,
or our gin-palaces open on Sunday and the Crystal Palace shut, as
absurdities--that is, I am sure, invaluable exercise for us just at
present. Let all persist in it who can, and steadily set their desires
on introducing, with time, a little more soul and spirit into the too,
too solid flesh of English society."

[Illustration: Fisher's Buildings, Balliol College, Oxford

Showing Matthew Arnold's Rooms

_Photo H.W. Taunt_]

So much for his first deliberate attempt in the way of social criticism.
It was levelled, we observe, at the thoughts and doings of the great
Middle Class, and it is natural to ask why that class was so specially
the target for his scorn. To that class, as he was fond of declaring,
half in fun and half in earnest, he himself belonged. "I always thought
my marriage," he used to say, "such a perfect marriage of the Middle
Classes--a schoolmaster's son and a judge's daughter." In the preface to
the _Essays in Criticism_, he spoke of "the English Middle Class, of
which I am myself a feeble unit." He used to declare that his feeling
towards his brethren of the Middle Class was that of St. Paul towards
his brethren of Israel: "My heart's desire and prayer for them is that
they may be saved." In _Culture and Anarchy_ he was constrained to admit
that "through circumstances which will perhaps one day be known, if ever
the affecting history of my conversion comes to be written, I have, for
the most part, broken with the ideas and the tea-meetings of my own
class"; but he found that he had not, by that conversion, come much
nearer to the ideas