n out of Oxford and a small official circle in
London. He had now, at forty-five, not exactly popularity, but a very
considerable, and a very lively and growing, reputation. By far the
most and the best of his poetry was written; but it was only just
coming to be at all generally read or at all justly appreciated. He
had, partly in obeying, and partly in working against his official
superiors, acquired a distinct position as an educational reformer. He
had become something of a figure in society. But, above all, he had
proclaimed with undoubting authority, and had exemplified with
remarkable and varied skill, a new or at least a very greatly altered
kind of literary criticism. And this had already threatened incursions
into domains from which men of letters as such had generally kept
aloof, or which, if they had touched, they had touched not as men of
letters. Something of Socrates, something of Addison, something of
Johnson, mingled in Mr Arnold's presentation of himself as, if not
exactly an arbiter, at any rate a suggester of elegances in all
things, poetry and politics, prose and polite manners, public thought,
public morality, religion itself. These pretensions, if urged in a
less agreeable manner, would have been intolerable; they were not
universally tolerated as it was: but the gifts and graces of the
critic made them--so far--inoffensive, even rather fascinating, to all
save the least accommodating or the most clear-sighted, and to some
even of these.

And we must remember that this appearance of Mr Arnold as the mild and
ingenious tamer of the ferocious manners of Britons coincided with far
wider and more remarkable innovations. This was the time, at home, of
the second Parliamentary Reform, which did at least as much to
infringe the authority of his enemy the Philistine, as the first had
done to break the power of the half-dreaded, half-courted Barbarian.
This was the time when, abroad, the long-disguised and disorganised
power of Germany was to rearrange the map of Europe, and to bring
about a considerable rearrangement of Mr Arnold's own ideas as to the
respective greatness of foreign nations. And finally the walls of
another stronghold of British Philistia, its intense and apparently
impregnable self-satisfaction with Free-trade and cheap money and so
forth, were tottering and crumbling. A blast against them--indeed a
series of blasts from _Chartism_ to the _Latter-day
Pamphlets_--had been blown long befo