"Matthew Arnold" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... tall roofs, the spires of the churches, gave it a pleasantly medieval air. There was a homeliness in it which warmed the heart. Hayward talked of Richard Feverel and Madame Bovary, of Verlaine, Dante, and Matthew Arnold. In those days Fitzgerald's translation of Omar Khayyam was known only to the elect, and Hayward repeated it to Philip. He was very fond of reciting poetry, his own and that of others, which he did in a monotonous sing-song. By the time they reached home ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... is immense," declared Matthew Arnold, and there are few lovers of literature who doubt his triumphant assertion. But the past of poetry is immense also: impressive in its sheer bulk and in its immemorial duration. At a period earlier than any recorded history, poetry seems to have occupied the attention of ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... That work alone is wrought in virtue which keeps the powers up to their normal and healthful activity, and is subordinated to the end of self-support and harmonious self-development. The ideal attitude toward work is beautifully presented in Matthew Arnold's sonnet on ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... interesting little story, or a clever repartee, or some amusing incident-but whatever it is, {pls. check orig for next word}make the appeal general. It is a mistake to talk only about those things that interest you; when Matthew Arnold was once asked what his favorite topic for conversation was, he answered, "That in which my companion ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... He understood the leprosy of the leper, the darkness of the blind, the fierce misery of those who live for pleasure, the strange poverty of the rich. Some one wrote to me in trouble, 'When you are not on your pedestal you are not interesting.' How remote was the writer from what Matthew Arnold calls 'the Secret of Jesus.' Either would have taught him that whatever happens to another happens to oneself, and if you want an inscription to read at dawn and at night-time, and for pleasure or for pain, write up on the walls ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... reciting Bradshaw. For a brilliant sketch of his social aspect we may consult Lord Beaumaris in Lord Beaconsfield's Endymion; and of what he was in Parliament we have the same great man's account, reported by Matthew Arnold: "Full of nerve, dash, fire, and resource, he carried the ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... different from the sadness with which the more mature singers of two generations later announce their questioning and their disillusionment. The difference is just the difference between Shelley and Matthew Arnold. There is a philosophic depth in this later music which the former wholly lacked. Arnold speaks for his time when he announces himself as standing between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born. A ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... accomplished with matter. If they are undeveloped or grow relaxed and flabby, the dreadful chasm between good intentions and their execution is liable to appear and widen. Character might be in a sense defined as a plexus of motor habits. To call conduct three-fourths of life, with Matthew Arnold; to describe man as one-third intellect and two-thirds will, with Schopenhauer; to urge that man is what he does or that he is the sum of his movements, with F.W. Robertson; that character is simply muscle habits, with Maudsley; that the age of art is now ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... that the imperfections of men of genius are of far greater concern to their contemporaries than to posterity. Time dispels the mists and allows the gross matter to settle to the bottom. We now have Wordsworth in the selections of Matthew Arnold, we read the Waverley Novels with Lockhart's Life of Scott before us, and we render praise to Coleridge for what he has accomplished since his death. With none of these advantages, Hazlitt's performance seems remarkable enough. No contemporary with the exception of Leigh Hunt displayed ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... and he would be free. But before 1870 orders, even deacon's orders, were indelible. Neither a priest nor a deacon could sit in Parliament, or enter any other learned profession. Froude was in great difficulty and distress. He consulted his friends Arthur Stanley, Matthew Arnold, and Arthur Clough. Clough, though a layman, felt the same perplexity as himself. As a Fellow and Tutor of Oriel he had signed the Articles. Now that he no longer believed in them, ought he not to live up his appointments? The Provost, Dr. Hawkins, induced him to pause and reflect. Meanwhile ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... Matthew Arnold's travelling companion ("Essays in Criticism," 1st Edition, Preface), who was so nervous about railway murders, and who refused to be consoled by being reminded that though the worst should happen, there would ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... shrieks from the spectators. Strangers fell sobbing into each other's arms, and women staggered to the door at the point of fainting. There was a general dissolution, as in chaos, from the mists of which a new creation bursts forth.' This description is perhaps the best possible antidote to Matthew Arnold's fastidious observation that 'The Robbers' is ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... regard to the way he has done it. Even if he knows that he has done it well, if the testimony of all his faculties is to that effect, there is somehow the lurking sense that it was not he who really did it, but that there is a power, to turn Matthew Arnold's phrase to our use, "not ourselves, that works for" beauty as well as righteousness, and that it was this mystical force which wrought through him to the exquisite result. If you come to the second-best results, to the gold so alloyed that you may ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... of his best friends and closest associates. And the readiness with which men fall into common form, the levity with which they settle the most complex and difficult issues, stirred in Turgot what Michelet calls ferocite, and Mr. Matthew Arnold calls soeva indignatio. 'Turgot was filled with an astonished, awful, oppressive sense of the immoral thoughtlessness of men; of the heedless, hazardous way in which they deal with things of the greatest ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... that such a taste was general; but in case one of the three should share it, she put a cookery book in one bookcase. In the other two severally to balance it, she slipt at the last moment a volume of Maeterlinck, to which at that period she was greatly attached; and Matthew Arnold's poems, to which also at that ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... Anna Dickinson, Olive Logan, Kate Field,—later, Mrs. Livermore and Mrs. Howe, Alcott, Phillips, Douglass, Tilton, Curtis, Beecher, and, several years later, General Kilpatrick, with Henry Vincent, Bradlaugh, and Matthew Arnold from England; these and many others were stars of the ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... with Mr. Matthew Arnold, that the extravagance of thought and diction which characterizes much of our modern poetry is traceable to the influence of Shakspeare. We see in it only the futile effort of misguided persons to torture out of language the secret of that inspiration ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... who could not speak Greek, and ultimately synonymous with the uncivilised and people without culture, particularly literary; this is the sense in which Matthew Arnold uses it. ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... Thomas Hardy Dante Goethe Walter Pater Shakespeare Matthew Arnold Dostoievsky El Greco Shelley Edgar Allan Poe Milton Keats Walt Whitman Charles ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... No one who has ever risen to any great height in the world refuses to move till he knows whither he is going." Such are the words of one who, though he felt the spell of Newman, soon struck on a different intellectual path. Matthew Arnold, too, experienced the spell. "Who could resist," he says in a lecture on Emerson, "the charm of that spiritual apparition, gliding in the dim afternoon light through the aisles of St. Mary's, rising into the pulpit, and then in the most ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... said that the Ancients did not know how to hold converse with nature, and that little or no sign of it can be found in their writings. Matthew Arnold has traced to a Celtic source the sympathy with, and deep communing with nature that first appeared among European poets. Under the patronage of Charlemagne the cloisters and brotherhoods became even more learned and cultivated than they had been before. Whatever the people ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... and penetrated it, the more masterly did it become; because it was not so much the expression of a thought as the thought itself taking shape in a perfectly pure medium of language. Bunyan had the same gift; of later authors Ruskin had it very strongly, and Matthew Arnold in a lesser degree. There is another species of beautiful prose, the prose of Jeremy Taylor, of Pater, even of Stevenson; but this is a slow and elaborate construction, pinched and pulled this way and that; ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... proceed, for the very grace of it, to some shade of active response. And there was always a place of particular arrest in the vista brief and blank, but inclusively blank, blank after ancient, settled, more and more subsiding things, blank almost, in short, with all Matthew Arnold's "ennui of the middle ages," rather than, poorly and meanly and emptily, before such states, which was previously what I had most known of blankness. This determined pause was at the window of a spare and solitary shop, a place of no amplitude ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... at Linlathen, when Darwin's theory was much discussed, and when our genial host—Mr. Erskine—talked so dispassionately but decidedly against evolution as explanatory of the rise of what was new. A little later in the same year Matthew Arnold discussed the same subject with some friends at the Athenaeum Club, defending the chief aim of Darwin's theory, and enlarging from a different point of view what Wallace had done in the same direction. I remember well that he characterised the two men as fellow-workers, ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... of 1848 Matthew Arnold wrote to his mother: "Tell Miss Martineau it is said here that Monckton Milnes refused to be sworn in a special constable, that he might be free to assume the post of President of the Republic at a moment's notice." ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... p. 272 f. ** 'The English Novel', p. 280. Of the numerous discussions of this thesis, the student should consult at least those by Matthew Arnold ('Preface' to his edition of 'Wordsworth's Poems'), John Ruskin ('Stones of Venice', vol. iii., chap. iv.), and Victor Hugo ('William Shakespeare', ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... scrutiny. My conclusion is adverse to the claim of the sonnets to rank as autobiographical documents, but I have felt bound, out of respect to writers from whose views I dissent, to give in detail the evidence on which I base my judgment. Matthew Arnold sagaciously laid down the maxim that 'the criticism which alone can much help us for the future is a criticism which regards Europe as being, for intellectual and artistic {vii} purposes, one great confederation, bound to a joint action and working to a ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... Matthew Arnold was born at Laleham, December 24, 1822, the eldest son of Thomas Arnold, the great head master of Rugby. He was educated at Laleham, Winchester, Rugby, and Balliol College, Oxford. In 1845 he was elected a fellow of Oriel, but Arnold desired to be a man of the world, ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... nothing in particular, to have accepted with alacrity the invitation that he and his dear comrades should prolong their visit, and to have prolonged it with them for a whole year, in the course of which Circe bore him a son, named Telegonus. As Matthew Arnold would have said, 'What ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... impaired if Mr. Ruskin's co-operation had been invited. The outcroppings of a vulgar egotism might indicate a substratum necessary to be taken into account, but it would have been a clear loss of labor to follow the leadings of any eccentric vein. One might wonder at the absence of Mr. Matthew Arnold, the high priest of culture; but we have to remember that Mr. Arnold is solicitous to stand apart, that he holds up ideals which he is careful to inform us are not those of his time, and that he is fastidious in selecting a point of view where he cannot be jostled, with perspectives ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... Matthew Arnold dared to say, in face of the general British approval of Mr. Bright, that there is, after all, something greater than the "assertion of personal liberty," than the freedom to "do as you like"; and he put forward against it the notion of "the nation ...
— Towards The Goal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... distinguished between the moment of inspiration, "when the great thought strikes for the first time along the brain and flushes the cheek with the sudden revelation of beauty or grandeur, and the hour of patient, elaborate execution." Accordingly he quoted with approval the lines of Matthew Arnold:— ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... writers,—as it were, a bottle of philosophical phosphates against seasons of spiritual cowardice or debility. There one opened and read: "Sudden the worst turns best to the brave" or Thoreau's "I have yet to hear a single word of wisdom spoken to me by my elders," or again Matthew Arnold's ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... hardly belonged to the same school as Ruskin and Carlyle, but fought many of their battles, and was even more concentrated on their main task—the task of convicting liberal bourgeois England of priggishness and provinciality. I mean, of course, Matthew Arnold. Against Mill's "liberty" and Carlyle's "strength" and Ruskin's "nature," he set up a new presence and entity which he called "culture," the disinterested play of the mind through the sifting of the best books and authorities. Though ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... one who will not be offended if I class him with this school—the finest of critics as one of the most finished of poets—Matthew Arnold. Only my reader must remember that of none of my poets am I free to choose that which is most characteristic: I have the scope of ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... Mr. Matthew Arnold twitted our nation with the fact that "the journeyman work of literature" was much better done in France—the books of reference, the biographical dictionaries, and the translations from the classics. He did not especially mention dictionaries ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... well educated, and from his portrait a shrewd observer might divine in him a genteel taste for literature. The fine features bear witness to the influence of an American environment, yet suggest the intellectual Englishman of Matthew Arnold's time. The face is distinguished, ascetic, the chestnut hair lighter and thinner than my own; the side whiskers are not too obtrusive, the eyes blue-grey. There is a large black cravat crossed and ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Bentley, the greatest classical scholar then living, must have vexed the sensitive poet when he told him that his version was a pretty poem but he must not call it Homer. By this criticism, however, as Matthew Arnold has observed, the work is judged in spite of all its power and attractiveness. Pope wants Homer's simplicity and directness, and his artifices of style are utterly alien to the Homeric spirit. Dr. Johnson quotes the judgment of critics who say that Pope's Homer 'exhibits ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... would commend us. But we do not talk like that now. The waters of the sullen Lethe, rolling doom, are sounding too loudly in our own ears. We would die at peace with all centuries. Mr. Frederic Harrison writes a formal Defence of the Eighteenth Century, Mr. Matthew Arnold reprints half a dozen of Dr. Johnson's Lives of the Poets. Mr. Leslie Stephen composes a history of thought during this objurgated period, and also edits, in sumptuously inconvenient volumes, the works of its two great novelists, Richardson and Fielding; and, finally, there now trembles ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... and husband of Mary Godwin, there was nothing left to wish. In his verse, however, the truest word concerning him will always be that exquisite sentence of Matthew Arnold: ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... inhabitants of Melos (the island where the "Venus of Milo" was found), hitherto neutral, to own their lordship. The envoys meet, and hold a debate which Thucydides gives in full, and which, for sweet reasonableness of form, would have satisfied Matthew Arnold. "The powerful exact what they can," said the Athenians, "and the weak grant what they must." When the Meleans say that sooner than be slaves they will appeal to the gods, the Athenians reply: "Of the gods we believe and of men we know that, by a ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... Browning and Miss Blagden was initiated in the early months of the residence of the Brownings in Florence; but it was in this winter of 1849-1850 that they began to see each other so constantly. The poems of Matthew Arnold were published that winter, among which Mrs. Browning especially liked "The Deserted Merman" and "The Sick King of Bokkara," and about this time the authorship of "Jane Eyre" was revealed, and Charlotte Bronte discovered under the nom-de-plume of ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... had gone to see the great apostle of beauty, I should have had to go clandestinely—en cachette, as they say here; and that is not my nature; I like to do everything frankly, freely, naivement, au grand jour. That is the great thing—to be free, to be frank, to be naif. Doesn't Matthew Arnold say that somewhere—or is it Swinburne, ...
— A Bundle of Letters • Henry James
... Oxford. Thomas Hill Green, with the rugged face, and the deep brown eyes, and the look that made pretence and cowardice ashamed, was dead, leaving a thought and a teaching behind him that his Oxford will not let die. Matthew Arnold had yet some years to live and could occasionally be seen at Balliol or at All Souls; while Christ Church and Balliol still represented the rival centres of that great feud between Liberal and Orthodox which had convulsed the University ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and the excitements and the fevers of conquest, but through the persistent and homely tests of peace, through the cultivation of those qualities that laid the foundations of civilized living. Isidore Konti designed the frieze typifying the swarming generations, by Matthew Arnold called "the teeming millions of men," and to Hermon A. MacNeil fell the task of developing the circular frieze of toilers, sustaining the group at the top, three strong figures, the dominating male, ready to shoot his arrow straight alit ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry
... If, as Matthew Arnold says, conduct is three-fourths of life, then a careful inquiry into the laws of conduct is indispensable to the proper interpretation of the meaning and purpose of life. Conduct of itself, however, is merely the outward expression of character; and character again has its roots in personality; ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... own day and generation, and no contemporary writer of real worth escaped his notice. He is never lavish in his praise, but is for the most part just and discriminating. Walt Whitman is mentioned only thrice in the Journals, Lowell only twice, Longfellow once or twice, Matthew Arnold three times, but Jones Very is quoted and discussed sixteen times. Very was a poet who had no fast colors; he has quite faded out ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... original. They think it is unmanly. I once spent a week with the commander of one of our armies of occupation, and I never heard the same remarks so often in all my life. They thought everything was an affectation. Once, when I mentioned Matthew Arnold at the mess, they ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... Matthew Arnold; and the gentle Keble utters the same sentiment, remarking, with a delicate pathos, how seldom those even who have known ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... biographer of Keats, said when Hall Caine came into the room was: "You have the head of Keats." He predicted that the young author would become a great critic. Another of Hall Caine's lectures, delivered during this period, "The Supernatural in Poetry," brought a long letter of eulogy from Matthew Arnold. His lecture on Rossetti won him the friendship of this great man, a correspondence ensued, and when Caine was twenty-five years old, Rossetti wrote and asked him to come up to London to see him. Caine went and ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... at least a great initiation; he got his first glimpse of that possibility of a "free play of mind" over a subject which was to throw him with force at a later stage of culture, when subjects had considerably multiplied, into the critical arms of Matthew Arnold. So he is himself at least interested in seeing the matter—as a progress in which the first step was taken, before that crude scenic appeal, by his wondering, among his companions, where the absurd, the absurd for them, ended and the fun, the ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... Howells had been in Hartford working at the play with Clemens, Matthew Arnold had arrived in Boston. On inquiring for Howells, at his home, the visitor was told that he had gone to see Mark Twain. Arnold was perhaps the only literary Englishman left who had not accepted Mark Twain at his larger value. He seemed ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... the word renaissance as indicating the "movement of transition from the medieval to the modern world," Matthew Arnold gave it the English form "renascence"—adopted by J. R. Green, Coleridge, and others. In Germany, this great revival of letters and learning was contemporaneous with the Reformation, which had long been preparing (e. g., in England since John Wyclif) and was specially assisted by the ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson
... many eminent English men of letters who at one time came to the United States was Matthew Arnold. The American lecture promoters were active in securing these gentlemen, and the American audiences were most appreciative. Many came with letters of introduction ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... so long as he was more poetic than venerable he stood in perpetual rebellion against the motives, pursuits, and satisfactions of his time)—Wordsworth till he was forty-five, Byron all his short life, Newman, Carlyle, Dickens, Matthew Arnold, Ruskin—among English writers those have proved themselves the dynamic people. There are many others, and many later; but we need recall only these few great names, far enough distant to be clearly visible. It was they who moved the country, shaking its torpor like successive earthquakes. ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... incident of this time so characteristic of both men that I will yield to the temptation of giving it here. After I had gone to Hartford in response to Clemens's telegram, Matthew Arnold arrived in Boston, and one of my family called on his, to explain why I was not at home to receive his introduction: I had gone to see Mark Twain. "Oh, but he doesn't like that sort of thing, does he?" "He likes Mr. Clemens very much," ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... you a few prolegomena on this matter. You must study the plants of course, species by species. Take Watson's 'Cybele Britannica,' and Moore's 'Cybele Hibernica;' and let—as Mr. Matthew Arnold would say—"your thought play freely about them." Look carefully, too, in the case of each species, at the note on its distribution, which you will find appended in Bentham's 'Handbook,' and in Hooker's 'Student's Flora.' ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... Time a Child" Hartley Coleridge The World I am Passing Through Lydia Maria Child Terminus Ralph Waldo Emerson Rabbi Ben Ezra Robert Browning Human Life Audrey Thomas de Vere Young and Old Charles Kingsley The Isle of the Long Ago Benjamin Franklin Taylor Growing Old Matthew Arnold Past John Galsworthy Twilight A. Mary F. Robinson Youth and Age George Arnold Forty Years On Edward Ernest Bowen Dregs Ernest Dowson The Paradox of Time Austin Dobson Age William Winter Omnia Sonmia Rosamund Marriott Watson The Year's End Timothy Cole An Old Man's ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... less importance to these than to the great changes in thought which have found in Oxford their inspiration, and which make it a city of pilgrimage for those interested in the development of England's real life. Matthew Arnold's famous description, hackneyed though it is by quotation, gives one aspect of Oxford, an aspect which will appeal to ...
— The Charm of Oxford • J. Wells
... works, and do not read them at all; you practically decide that it is enough to possess them, and that the mere possession of them gives you a cachet. The truth is, you are a sham. And your soul is a sea of uneasy remorse. You reflect: "According to what Matthew Arnold says, I ought to be perfectly mad about Wordsworth's Prelude. And I am not. Why am I not? Have I got to be learned, to undertake a vast course of study, in order to be perfectly mad about Wordsworth's Prelude? Or am I born ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett
... Matthew Arnold, in an address on Emerson delivered in Boston, gave an excellent estimate of the rank we should accord to him in the great hierarchy of letters. Some, perhaps, will think that Arnold was unappreciative and cold, but dispassionate ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... job, not unlike that of a sheep dog. The colonial commissioner and I tried to help. I do not think we were much use. But I have this to my credit. I carried a message to the engine driver and told him to whistle loud and long before he started. Having read long ago Matthew Arnold's Essay on Heine, I know the French for "whistle" or a word which conveyed the idea of whistling to ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... of the man and his poetry and philosophy. Birds and Poets, too, contains a paper on Whitman, entitled The Flight of the Eagle, besides an essay on Emerson, whom he also treated incidentally in his paper, Matthew Arnold on Emerson and Carlyle, in Indoor Studies; and the latter volume contains his ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... to keep his intellect undulled by the routine of his dreary work, Matthew Arnold was wont to write a few lines of poetry each day. Poetry, like music and song, is an effective dispeller of care; and those who find Omar Khayyam or "In Memoriam" incapable of removing the of burden of their woes, will ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... first—the order is not material—a certain quality of expression, and secondly, a certain quality of subject. "What that quality of subject must be has been, as it seems to me, crudely and wrongly stated, but rightly indicated, in Mr. Matthew Arnold's formula of the "Criticism of Life." That is to say, in less debatable words, the greatest poet must show most knowledge of human nature. Now both these conditions are fulfilled in the sonnets of Shakespere with a completeness and intensity impossible to parallel ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... in, "and that is a difficulty that meets us at every turn. It is something that Matthew Arnold urged with great effect in his paper on that crank of a Tolstoy. He asked what would become of the people who need the work if we served and waited on ourselves, as Tolstoy preached. The question ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... At her mother's knee she had learned the First Commandment, "Thou shalt have none other gods but me"; and Joanna's god, though serving her sweet innocent soul all the reasonable purposes of a deity, was Matthew Arnold's gigantic clergyman in a white tie. In obedience to his maxims alone lay salvation: Joanna's conviction was unshakable. As a matter of course Paragot must walk the same path. There was ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... pimpernel, he and a friend were walking towards a certain camp of gryengroes well known to them both. They were bound upon a quaint expedition. Will the reader "be surprised to learn" that it was connected with Matthew Arnold and a race in which he took a good ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... of Matthew Arnold's, which I happened to remember, gave a certain importance to the half-hour I spent in the buffet of the station at Cette while I waited for the train to Montpellier. I had left Narbonne in the afternoon, and by the time I reached Cette the darkness had descended. I therefore missed the sight ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... the most notable of the foreign passengers was William T. Stead. Few names are more widely known to the world of contemporary literature and journalism than that of the brilliant editor of the Review of Reviews. Matthew Arnold called him "the inventor of the new journalism in England." He was on his way to America to take part in the Men and Religion Forward Movement and was to have delivered an address in Union Square on the Thursday ...
— Sinking of the Titanic - and Great Sea Disasters • Various
... Emerson, who stimulated his religious nature, his improved literary expression; while Whitman was to him a great humanizing power, and Matthew Arnold taught him clear thinking and clean writing. He had passed through these different influences by the time he was twenty-one or twenty-two; had taught for a while; and from 1863 to 1873 was vault-keeper and afterwards chief of the organization division of the Bureau of National Banks, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... generation, to Carlyle and Ruskin, and in a certain degree to Matthew Arnold. Each had his group of enthusiastic disciples who responded eagerly to their master's call. They renounced shams or machine-made articles or middle-class Philistinism as the case might be. They went in for sincerity, or Turner, or "sweetness and light," with all the ardor of youthful ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... a little book which many times that morning he had been attempting to read. It was an edition of Matthew Arnold's poems, and one of the stanzas was ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... interesting address lately delivered at the reopening of the Liverpool University College and School of Medicine, Mr. Matthew Arnold said if there was one word which he should like to plant in the memories of his audience, and to leave sticking there after he had gone, it was the word lucidity. If he had to fix upon the three great wants at this moment of the three principal nations of Europe, he should say that the great ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 360, November 25, 1882 • Various
... satisfaction while thus suspended in mid-air; nor are we appreciably advanced by the temper which, after pointing out some alleged fundamental antinomy, "quietly accepts"—i.e., in practice ignores—it. Problems of this description are not solved by what Matthew Arnold called a want of intellectual seriousness; is it true, we ask, that the "mystical view of the Divine immanence" compels us to believe in the allness of God, and so to deny ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... deep desire? A God, a God their severance ruled, And bade between their shores to be The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea. —Matthew Arnold. ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... on this trip that they had, so the legend says, that strange interview with Judas Iscariot, out of which Matthew Arnold has made a ballad. Sailing in the wintry northern seas at Christmas time, St. Brandan saw an iceberg floating by, on which a human form rested motionless; and when it moved at last, he saw by its resemblance to the painted pictures he had seen that it must be Judas Iscariot, ...
— Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... Matthew Arnold said: "Better be a Napoleon of book-blacks, or an Alexander of chimney-sweeps, than an attorney, who, like necessity, knows no law." There are born shoemakers cobbling in Congress, while statesmen are pegging away on a shoe-last because their brains ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... us take another view. Suppose Walt Whitman had never existed, and some bold essayist, like Mr. Higginson or Matthew Arnold, had projected him in abstract, outlined him on a scholarly ideal background, formulated and put in harmless critical periods the principles of art which he illustrates, and which are the inevitable logic of his poems,— said essayist would have won great applause. "Yes, indeed, that were ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... in Thukydides (though reminiscences of Herodotos and Demosthenes also abound) but gives an effect of solidity that is symmetrical with both the method and the man. Moreover, one may assert of it what Matthew Arnold declared could not be said regarding Homer's style, that it rises and falls with the matter it treats, so that at every climax we may be sure of finding the charm of vividness and at many intermediate points the merit of grace. It ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume 1 (of 6) • Cassius Dio
... writing to his brother John: "Some weeks ago, one night, the poet Tennyson and Matthew Arnold were discovered here sitting smoking in the garden. Tennyson had been here before, but was still new to Jane—who was alone for the first hour or two of it. A fine, large-featured, dim-eyed, bronze-colored, shaggy-headed man is Alfred; dusty, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... Matthew Arnold, in his essay on the Function of Criticism at the Present Time, is moved by the case of Poor Wragg, who was "in custody," ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... of Poetry to man, must we limit ourselves to its past or present influence. The future of Poetry, says Mr. Matthew Arnold, and no one was more qualified to speak, "The future of Poetry is immense, because in Poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay. But for Poetry the ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... vol. i, chaps. i and ii; and for perhaps the boldest and most suggestive of recent statements, see Max Muller, Physical Religion, being the Gifford Lectures before the University of Glasgow for 1890, London, 1891, lecture xiv. See also, for very cogent statements and arguments, Matthew Arnold's Literature and Dogma, especially chap. v, and, for a recent utterance of great clearness and force, Prof. Osler's Address before the Johns Hopkins University, given in Science for March ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... Spenser in these two poems, the form is essentially different. The resemblance with Lycidas is closer, and closer still with the poems of Leopardi, though Patmore has not followed the Italian habit of mingling rhymed and non-rhymed verse, nor did he ever experiment, like Goethe, Heine, Matthew Arnold, and Henley, in wholly unrhymed irregular ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... disliking superiority; and as the old Northern sage declared, "the average of men is but moiety." Moiety does not mean necessarily mediocrity, but also that which is below mediocrity. What we call in England to-day, as Matthew Arnold called it, the Philistine element, continues to prove in our own time, to almost every superior man, the danger of being ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... effect. Cowardice, vanity, overweening self-consciousness, are the causes of most melancholy. No doubt it has physical causes too. Dr. Johnson suffered,—one of the best and bravest of men. But most of us suffer—if suffer we do—because we over-estimate ourselves and our own importance. Mr. Matthew Arnold has tried to enforce this lesson. After a horrible murder in a railway carriage, Mr. Arnold observed, with pain, the "almost bloodthirsty clinging to life" of his fellow-passengers. In vain he pointed out to them that even if they were to depart, "the ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... Mantua and Genoese, had a wonderful, faraway imaginative association for me, and still have. Matthew Arnold's magic of poetry, magical words and lines, explain all its charm for me. A feeling beyond the words or the sense is what I require in poetry. In vain did I try to express in rhyme what I felt. The lines halted for the last word. ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... suitable for singing. English poetry is especially rich in meditative and devotional elements, and of no period has this been more true than of the nineteenth century. Cowper, Wordsworth, Coleridge, the Brownings, Tennyson and Matthew Arnold, on the other side of the sea, with Bryant, Longfellow, Emerson, Whittier, Lowell, Holmes, Lanier, Sill and Gilder on this side—these and many others—have made most precious additions to our store of religious poetry. The century has been one of great perturbations in ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins." He "loved me," said Paul, "and gave Himself for me." It is open, doubtless, to question the legitimacy of these apostolic deductions, and to fall back upon Matthew Arnold's Aberglaube; but who, it has been well said, "are most likely to have correctly apprehended the significance which Jesus attached to His death, men like John and Peter and Paul, or an equal number of scholars in our time, however discerning and ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... worth pausing to inquire how a man who seemed to his own age one of the great teachers and spiritual masters of humanity—the peer of Pythagoras and Buddha, of Plato, Epictetus, St. Francis and Rousseau—comes in this generation to be held a little higher than Emerson, a good deal lower than Matthew Arnold, immeasurably so than Renan. And is it not worth pausing again to reflect that, contemporaneously with these men, and almost unknown to Western Europe, lived one who bids fair to produce a greater effect on the world than has been produced ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... literature of this age is rich with the writings of Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his sister Christina, William Morris, Matthew Arnold, Edwin Arnold, Jean Ingelow, Owen Meredith, Arthur Hugh Clough, Adelaide Procter, and a host of ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year • Various
... verses manufactured to pop with the corks and fizz with the champagne at academic banquets should much outlive the occasion; or that the habit of producing such verses on demand should foster in the producer that "high seriousness" which Matthew Arnold asserts to be one mark of all great poetry. Holmes's poetry is mostly on the colloquial level, excellent society-verse, but even in its serious moments too smart and too pretty to be taken very gravely; with a certain glitter, ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... direct his thoughts to the consideration of these principles; and the result is a body of reflections, marking every stage of his own development, on life, literature, and art, which, in the opinion of critics like Edmond Scherer and Matthew Arnold, gave him his highest claim to the ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... In Matthew Arnold's poem, Sohrab and Rustum, Rustum fights with and overcomes Sohrab, and finds too late that he has slain his ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... granting that communism were practicable, granting that Owen's hopes had some prospect of fulfillment, the doctrine still embodies evils that must make it forever inexpedient. The readers of Mr. Matthew Arnold's works must have noticed the emphasis with which he dwells on the instinct of expansion as a factor in human progress. It is the refutation alike of communism and socialism that they thwart the instinct ...
— The Altruist in Politics • Benjamin Cardozo
... So with Charlotte Bronte. Matthew Arnold seems to have thought the most probable thing to be said of her eyes was that they were grey and expressive. Thus, after seeing them, does he describe them in one of his letters. Whereas Mrs Gaskell, who shows signs of attention, says that Charlotte's ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... not entitled to read "je vous aime". Charlotte was so made that kindness shown her moved her to tears of gratitude. When Charlotte said "respect" she meant it. Her feeling for M. Heger was purely what Mr. Matthew Arnold said religion was, an affair of "morality touched with emotion". All her utterances, where there is any feeling in them, no matter what, have a poignancy, a vibration which is Brontesque and nothing more. And this Brontesque quality is what the theorists have (like ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... in Christendom recognizes, with Kuenen or Matthew Arnold, the grandeur of the Old Testament ideal. But that this ideal penetrated equally to our everyday liturgy is less understood of the world. "Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, who hast chosen Israel from all peoples and given him the Law." ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill
... the Heavenly order, that I counted the number of the beast, while I was writing the manuscript and preparing the print of the second volume in Philadelphia, I received soon a letter from Boston containing the information, that Matthew Arnold who is on the 86th place of the 144 witnesses and in the deputation who after my having excommunicated Bishop Benedict Fenwick from my ecclesiastical communion, came to move me to occupy the church for my performances, was inspired and remained when the other left my room when I received the communication ...
— Secret Enemies of True Republicanism • Andrew B. Smolnikar
... of the first Omar of Naishapur. The genius of the East has, indeed, ever been slow to reveal itself in the West. It took a Crusade to bring to our knowledge anything of the schner Geist of the Orient; and it was not until the day of Matthew Arnold that the Epic of Persia[1] was brought into the proper realm of English poesy. What wonder, then, that not until the first Omaric madness had passed away were the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Jr., lifted into the light after an infinity of sudor ...
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Jr. (The Rubiyt of Omar Khayym Jr.) • Wallace Irwin
... awaits us. Upon the average book a writer may be silent; he may set it down to his ill-hap that when his own youth was in the acrid fermentation, he should have fallen and fed upon the cheerless fields of Obermann. Yet to Mr. Matthew Arnold, who led him to these pastures, he still bears a grudge. The day is perhaps not far off when people will begin to count "Moll Flanders," ay, or "The Country Wife," more wholesome and more pious diet than these ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Crossroads,' collects a number of weighty opinions confirming this judgment. Carlyle, who proclaimed the merits of silence in some thirty volumes, blames democracy for ignoring the 'noble, silent men' who could serve it best, and placing power in the hands of windbags. Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, Sir James Stephen, Sir Henry Maine, and Lecky, all agree that 'the people have for the most part neither the will nor the power to find out the best men to lead them.' In France the denunciations of democratic ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... Bishop Wilson: Thomas Wilson (1663-1755), bishop of the Isle of Man. Details of his life are given in the folio edition of his works (1782). An appreciation of his religious writings is given by Matthew Arnold in Culture and Anarchy. Bishop Wilson's words, "To make reason and the will of God prevail," are the theme of Arnold's ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... of Stubbs. The influence exercised on their contemporaries by recluses such as Newman or Darwin may be compared with the more worldly activities of Huxley and Samuel Wilberforce. Often we see equally diverse elements in following the course of a single life. In Matthew Arnold we wonder at the poet of 'The Strayed Reveller' coexisting with the zealous inspector of schools; in William Morris we find it hard to reconcile the creative craftsman with the fervent apostle of social discontent. ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... well as I, Brand; the last great wave of religion has spent itself; and I suppose Matthew Arnold would have us wait for the mysterious East, the mother of religions, to send us another. Do you ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... Sumner, Garfield, Cleveland, and other notable men of those days. I heard Tyndall deliver his course of lectures on Light in Washington in 1870 or '71, but missed seeing Huxley during his visit here. I dined with the Rossettis in London in 1871, but was not impressed by them nor they by me. I met Matthew Arnold in New York and heard his lecture on Emerson. My books are, in a way, a record of my life—that part of it that came to flower and fruit in my mind. You could reconstruct my days pretty well from those volumes. ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... will here make itself felt, and that although all men will insist on being spoken to by the universe in some way, few will insist on being spoken to in just the same way. We have here, in short, the sphere of what Matthew Arnold likes to call Aberglaube, legitimate, inexpugnable, yet doomed to eternal variations ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... knowledge, was that which Buddha held up to his followers: "Self is the God of self; who else should be the God?" In this century Goethe, Wordsworth, beyond all others Wilhelm von Humboldt, have set forth this ideal. Less strongly intellectual natures, as Maine de Biran, De Senancourt, and Matthew Arnold, listen with admiration, but feel how unknown to the mass of human kind must remain ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... that the French mystics were never mystical, runs through all our travels, so obstinately recurring in architecture, sculpture, legend, philosophy, religion, and poetry, that it becomes tiresome; and yet it is an idea that, in spite of Matthew Arnold and many other great critics, never has got lodgment in the English or German mind, and probably never will. Every one who loves travel will hope that it never may. If you are driven to notice it as the most distinctive mark of French ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... love it in him. He was their master-conception, their true ideal, acting before them, captivating the attention of their senses and emotions. This is what a man of our times, possessed of rare receptivity and great range of comprehension, considered to be the pith of Jesus' teaching. Matthew Arnold gave much time and labour to trying to persuade men that this was what the religion they professed, or which was professed around them, most essentially meant. And he reminded us that the adequacy ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... scepticism grew only deeper and deeper. The study of W.R. Greg's "Creed of Christendom", of Matthew Arnold's "Literature and Dogma", helped to widen the mental horizon, while making a return to the old faith more and more impossible. The church services were a weekly torture, but feeling as I did that I was only a doubter, I spoke to none of my doubts. It was possible, I felt, that all my difficulties ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... a distinguished guest, distinguished for the manner in which he has brought together all that is most modern in sentiment with all that is most scholastic in thought and language; permit me to say, Mr. Matthew Arnold. I appeal to him if I am not right when I say that it is by a language in common that all differences of origin sooner or later we are welded together—that Etruscans, and Sabines, and Oscans, and Romans, became one family as Latins once, as Italians ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... to a much earlier period of her life, the year 1837. Of her cordiality and kindliness to those who approached her in a right spirit of sincerity and simplicity, many have spoken. For English readers we cannot do better than quote Mr. Matthew Arnold's interesting account, given in the Fortnightly, 1877, of his visit to her in August, 1846. Desirous of seeing the green lanes of Berry, the rocky heaths of Bourbonnais, the descriptions of which in Valentine ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... perhaps more remarkable, by the fact that wherever Boswell and Johnson go they constantly find volumes of sermons lying about, not only in the private houses, but also in the inns where they stay. There never was a period when "conduct," as Matthew Arnold used to call it, was so admitted to be the three-fourths of life he claimed for it, as it was between the Restoration and the French Revolution. It was conduct, not faith, ethics not religion, the "whole duty of man" in this ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... touched everybody with courtesy, and was, as Matthew Arnold said, "The friend of those who live in the spirit of high, generous standards." We see in his example what deep, real courtesy is. Courtesy, to him, was sincerity, and fairness, and good-will, all round. He welcomed shy merit, ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B. |
