His opponents, finding the
current too strong for them, retreated into smooth water, waiting, like
a defeated political party, for a favorable change of the tide. When,
therefore, Matthew Arnold came to America in the autumn of 1883
expressly to lecture on Emerson, as a writer and thinker, there was
great expectation on both sides, and both were equally disappointed. His
friends who knew that he liked Emerson, thought he had found too much
fault with him, and the other party considered he had praised him too
highly.
Few men have ever done so much good in England as Matthew Arnold.
Somewhere about the year 1830 Goethe remarked, that Englishmen, as such,
were without reflection; party politics and the interests of trade
interfered to prevent it; but they were great as practical men. This
continued to be the order of the day, in spite of an occasional warning
from Macaulay, for thirty years more, until finally Matthew Arnold came
forward and said, "Do not be blinded any longer by the prejudices of
self-interest, but endeavor to see things as they actually are." This
was the continual chant of his life, repeated in a hundred different
forms. He made use of the popularity he had gained by his fine, classic
poetry, to teach his countrymen a lesson in culture. [Footnote: Lowell
also made an excellent point when he warned Englishmen, at the Coleridge
memorial, that if they were to regain the intellectual altitude of their
ancestors, they must give up the adoration of common-sense, and pay more
respect to imagination and ideality.
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