o last he was a Critic--a calm and
impartial judge, a serene distributer of praise and blame--never a
zealot, never a prophet, never an advocate, never a dealer in that
"_blague_ and mob-pleasing" of which he truly said that it "is a real
talent and tempts many men to apostasy."

For some forty years he taught his fellow-men, and all his teaching was
conveyed through the critical medium. He never dogmatized, preached, or
laid down the law. Some great masters have taught by passionate
glorification of favourite personalities or ideals, passionate
denunciation of what they disliked or despised. Not such was Arnold's
method; he himself described it, most happily, as "sinuous, easy,
unpolemical." By his free yet courteous handling of subjects the most
august and conventions the most respectable, he won to his side a band
of disciples who had been repelled by the brutality and cocksureness of
more boisterous teachers. He was as temperate in eulogy as in
condemnation; he could hint a virtue and hesitate a liking.[4]

It happens, as we have just seen, that his earliest and latest
criticisms were criticisms of Institutions, and a great part of his
critical writing deals with similar topics; but these will be more
conveniently considered when we come to estimate his effect on Society
and Politics. That effect will perhaps be found to have been more
considerable than his contemporaries imagined; for, though it became a
convention to praise his literary performances and judgments, it was no
less a convention to dismiss as visionary and absurd whatever he wrote
about the State and the Community.

But in the meantime we must say a word about his critical method when
applied to Life, and when applied to Books. When one speaks of
criticism, one is generally thinking of prose. But, when we speak of
Arnold's criticism, it is necessary to widen the scope of one's
observation; for he was never more essentially the critic than when he
concealed the true character of his method in the guise of poetry. Even
if we decline to accept his strange judgment that all poetry "is at
bottom a criticism of life," still we must perceive that, as a matter of
fact, many of his own poems are as essentially critical as his Essays or
his Lectures.

We all remember that he poked fun at those misguided Wordsworthians who
seek to glorify their master by claiming for him an "ethical system as
distinctive and capable of exposition as Bishop Butler's," and "a