dity and composure
of character or mind for that. He is brilliantly clever, of course, and
he is honest enough, but he is passionate, and in no way great, I
think." In Religion--obscurantism, resistance to the light, the smug
endeavour to make the best of both worlds, offended Arnold as much on
the one hand, as insolence, violence, ignorant negation, "lightly
running amuck at august things," offended him on the other. He loved a
"free handling, _in a becoming spirit_, of religious matters," and did
not always find it in the writings of his Liberal friends. It is true
that he once made a signal lapse from his own canon of religious
criticism, but he withdrew it with genuine regret that "an illustration
likely to be torn from its context, to be improperly used, and to give
pain, should ever have been adopted." In Literature, again, though his
judgment was critical, his charity was unbounded. He could find
something to praise even in the most immature and unpretending efforts;
and he knew how to distinguish what we call "good of its sort," good in
the second order of achievement, from what is simply bad. In
literature, as in opinion, it was only when moral faults were mingled
with intellectual defects that he became censorious. He detested
literary humbug--a pretence of knowledge without the reality, a show of
philosophy masking poverty of thought; the vanity of quaintness, the
"ring of false metal," the glorification of commonplace.

And so again when we come to Life--the social life of the civilized
community--he was the consistent teacher and the bright example of an
exalted and scrupulous morality. Even the intellectual brilliancy of
authors whom he intensely admired did not often blind him to ethical
defects. It is true that some objects of his literary admiration--Goethe
and Byron and George Sand--could scarcely be regarded as moral
exemplars; but, while he praised the genius, he marked his disapproval
of the moral defect. In writing of George Sand, who had so profoundly
influenced his early life, he did not deny or extenuate "her passions
and her errors." Byron, though he thought him "the greatest natural
force, the greatest elementary power, which has appeared in our
literature since Shakespeare," he roundly accused of "vulgarity and
effrontery," "coarseness and commonness," "affectation and brutal
selfishness." In the case of Goethe, he said that "the moralist and the
man of the world may unite in condemning" his