'For doleful are the ghosts, the troops of dead,
Whom Hela with austere control presides';

while this in its plain, heroic completeness is touched with a stately
life that is a presage of immortality. It is evident, indeed, that
Arnold wrote _Balder Dead_ in his most fortunate hour, and that _Merope_
is his one serious mistake in literature. For a genius thus peculiar and
introspective drama--the presentation of character through action--is
impossible; to a method thus reticent and severe drama--the expression of
emotion in action--is improper. 'Not here, O Apollo!' It is written
that none shall bind his brows with the twin laurels of epos and drama.
Shakespeare did not, nor could Homer; and how should Matthew Arnold?

His Prose.

He has opinions and the courage of them; he has assurance and he has
charm; he writes with an engaging clearness. It is very possible to
disagree with him; but it is difficult indeed to resist his many graces
of manner, and decline to be entertained and even interested by the
variety and quality of his matter. He was described as 'the most
un-English of Britons,' the most cosmopolitan of islanders; and you feel
as you read him that in truth his mind was French. He took pattern by
Goethe, and was impressed by Leopardi; he was judiciously classic, but
his romanticism was neither hidebound nor inhuman; he apprehended Heine
and Marcus Aurelius, Spinoza and Sainte-Beuve, Joubert and Maurice de
Guerin, Wordsworth and Pascal, Rachel and Sarah Bernhardt, Burke and
Arthur Clough, Eliza Cook and Homer; he was an authority on education,
poetry, civilisation, the _Song of Roland_, the love-letters of Keats,
the Genius of Bottles, the significance of _eutrapelos_ and _eutrapelia_.
In fact, we have every reason to be proud of him. For the present is a
noisy and affected age; it is given overmuch to clamorous devotion and
extravagant repudiation; there is an element of swagger in all its words
and ways; it has a distressing and immoral turn for publicity. Matthew
Arnold's function was to protest against its fashions by his own
intellectual practice, and now and then to take it to task and to call it
to order. He was not particularly original, but he had in an eminent
degree the formative capacity, the genius of shaping and developing,
which is a chief quality of the French mind and which is not so common
among us English as our kindest critics would have us believe. He would
take a han