,
the various departments of it in which his influence was most distinctly
felt; but first of all a word must be said about his Method.

[Footnote 1: Tennyson.]

[Footnote 2: Wordsworth.]

[Footnote 3: See p. 207. Philip Henry, 5th Earl Stanhope (1805-1875),
Historian, and Patron of Letters.]

[Illustration: Laleham Ferry

Matthew Arnold was born on Christmas Eve, 1822, at Laleham, near
Staines.

_Photo H.W. Taunt_]

CHAPTER II

METHOD

The Matthew Arnold whom we know begins in 1848; and, when we first make
his acquaintance, in his earliest letters to his mother and his eldest
sister, he is already a Critic. He is only twenty-five years old, and he
is writing in the year of Revolution. Thrones are going down with a
crash all over Europe; the voices of triumphant freedom are in the air;
the long-deferred millennium of peace and brotherhood seems to be just
on the eve of realization. But, amid all this glorious hurly-burly, this
"joy of eventful living," the young philosopher stands calm and
unshaken; interested indeed, and to some extent sympathetic, but wholly
detached and impartially critical. He thinks that the fall of the French
Monarchy is likely to produce social changes here, for "no one looks on,
seeing his neighbour mending, without asking himself if he cannot mend
in the same way." He is convinced that "the hour of the hereditary
peerage and eldest sonship and immense properties has struck"; he thinks
that a five years' continuance of these institutions is "long enough,
certainly, for patience, already at death's door, to have to die in." He
pities (in a sonnet) "the armies of the homeless and unfed." But all the
time he resents the "hot, dizzy trash which people are talking" about
the Revolution. He sees a torrent of American vulgarity and "_laideur_"
threatening to overflow Europe. He thinks England, as it is, "not
liveable-in," but is convinced that a Government of Chartists would not
mend matters; and, after telling a Republican friend that "God knows it,
I am with you," he thus qualifies his sympathy--

Yet, when I muse on what life is, I seem
Rather to patience prompted, than that proud
Prospect of hope which France proclaims so loud--
France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme.

In fine, he is critical of his own country, critical of all foreign
nations, critical of existing institutions, critical of well-meant but
uninstructed attempts to set them right.