MATTHEW ARNOLD
HE terribly sudden death of Matthew Arnold has deprived England of an intellectual force of a high order. A striking and influential individuality is lost to English thought and letters. Matthew Arnold was the poet and critic of the age of transition which separates so widely the England of to-day from the England of the Reform Bill, or, to come down even later, from the England of the Great Exhibition. The changes in taste, in feeling, in the general attitude towards the fundamental problems of religion, of society, and of politics, have been enormous, and in all of them, except, perhaps, the last, Matthew Arnold has been an abiding influence. We shall never, perhaps, fully appreciate the way in which he softened the asperities of the conflicts which raged round him by his imperturbable good humour, and even by the mannerisms which diverted the stress of feeling. The solvent of his criticism was diluted to the exact strength where it
