him the corruption of the poet had not been
the generation of the critic, as his great predecessor in the two
arts, himself secure and supreme in both, had scornfully said. Both
faculties had always existed, and did always exist, side by side in
him. He might exercise one more freely at one time, one at another;
but the author of the _Preface_ of 1853 was a critic, and a ripe
one, in his heyday of poetry, the author of _Westminster Abbey_
was a poet in his mellowest autumn of criticism.

And yet he was something more than both these things, more than both
of these at once. But for that unlucky divagation in the Wilderness,
his life would have been the life of a man of letters only as far as
choice went, with the duties of no dishonourable profession
superadded. And even with the divagation it was mainly and really
this. To find parallels for Mr Arnold in his unflinching devotion to
literature we must, I fear, go elsewhere than to Dryden or to
Coleridge, we must go to Johnson and Southey. And here again we may
find something in him beyond both, in that he had an even nobler
conception of Literature than either. That he would have put her even
too high, would have assigned to her functions which she is unable to
discharge, is true enough; but this is at least no vulgar error.
Against ignoble neglect, against stolid misunderstanding, against
mushroom rivalry, he championed her alike. And it was most certainly
from no base motive. If he wanted an English Academy, I am quite sure
it was not from any desire for a canary ribbon or a sixteen-pointed
star. Yet, after Southey himself in the first half of the century, who
has done so much for letters _qua_ letters as Mr Arnold in the
second? His poems were never popular, and he tried no other of the
popular departments of literature. But he wrote, and I think he could
write, nothing that was not literature, in and by the fact that he was
its writer. It has been observed of others in other kinds, that
somehow or other, by merely living, by pursuing their own arts or
crafts whatever they were, they raised those arts and crafts in
dignity, they bestowed on them as it were a rank, a position. A few--a
very few--at successive times have done this for literature in
England, and Mr Arnold was perhaps the last who did it notably in
ours. One cannot imagine him writing merely for money, for position,
even for fame--for anything but the _devoir_ of the born and
sworn servant of Apollo and