Chapter III: The Family of Fox How

Doctor Arnold's eldest daughter, Jane Arnold, afterward Mrs. W.E. Forster, my godmother, stands out for me on the tapestry of the past, as one of the noblest personalities I have ever known. She was twenty-one when her father died, and she had been his chief companion among his children for years before death took him from her. He taught her Latin and Greek, he imbued her with his own political and historical interests, and her ardent Christian faith answered to his own. After his death she was her mother's right hand at Fox How; and her letters to her brothers--to my father, especially, since he was longest and farthest away--show her quick and cultivated mind, and all the sweetness of her nature. We hear of her teaching a younger brother Latin and Greek; she goes over to Miss Martineau on the other side of the valley to translate some German for that busy woman; she reads Dante beside her mother, when the rest of the family have gone to bed; she sympathizes passionately with Mazzini and Garibaldi; and every week she walks over Loughrigg through fair weather and foul, summer and winter, to teach in a night school at Skelwith. Then the young Quaker manufacturer, William Forster, appears on the scene, and she falls happily and completely in love. Her letters to the brother in New Zealand become, in a moment, all joy and ardor, and nothing could be prettier than the account, given by one of the sisters, of the quiet wedding in Rydal Chapel, the family breakfast, the bride's simple dress and radiant look, Matthew Arnold giving his sister away--with the great fells standing sentinel. And there exists a delightful unpublished letter by Harriet Martineau which gives some idea of the excitement roused in the quiet Ambleside valley by Jane Arnold's engagement to the tall Yorkshireman who came from surroundings so different from the academic and scholarly world in which the Arnolds had been brought up.

Then followed married life at Rawdon near Bradford, with supreme happiness at home, and many and growing interests in the manufacturing, religious, and social life around the young wife. In 1861 William Forster became member for Bradford, and in 1869 Gladstone included him in that Ministry of all the talents, which foundered under the onslaughts of Disraeli in 1874. Forster became Vice-President of the Council, which meant Minister for Education, with a few other trifles like the cattle-plague thrown in. The Education Bill, which William Forster brought in in 1870 (as a girl of eighteen, I was in the Ladies' Gallery of the House of Commons on the great day to hear his speech), has been the foundation-stone ever since of English popular education. It has always been clear to me that the scheme of the bill was largely influenced by William Forster's wife, and, through her, by the convictions and beliefs of her father. The compromise by which the Church schools, with the creeds and the Church catechism, were preserved, under a conscience clause, while the dissenters got their way as to the banishment of creeds and catechisms, and the substitution for them of "simple Bible-teaching," in the schools founded under the new School Boards, which the bill set up all over England, has practically--with, of course, modifications--held its ground for nearly half a century. It was illogical; and the dissenters have never ceased to resent the perpetuation of the Church school which it achieved. But English life is illogical. It met the real situation; and it would never have taken the shape it did--in my opinion--but for the ardent beliefs of the young and remarkable woman, at once a strong Liberal and a devoted daughter of the English Church, as Arnold, Kingsley, and Maurice understood it, who had married her Quaker husband in 1850, and had thereby been the innocent cause of his automatic severance from the Quaker body. His respect for her judgment and intellectual power was only equaled by his devotion to her. And when the last great test of his own life came, how she stood by him!--through those terrible days of the Land League struggle, when, as Chief Secretary for Ireland, Forster carried his life in his hand month after month, to be worn out finally by the double toil of Parliament and Ireland, and to die just before Mr. Gladstone split the Liberal party in 1886, by the introduction of the Home Rule Bill, in which Forster would not have followed him.

I shall, however, have something to say later on in these Reminiscences about those tragic days. To those who watched Mrs. Forster through them, and who knew her intimately, she was one of the most interesting figures of that crowded time. Few people, however, outside the circle of her kindred, knew her intimately. She was, of course, in the ordinary social and political world, both before and after her husband's entrance upon office, and admission to the Cabinet; dining out and receiving at home; attending Drawing-rooms and public functions; staying at country houses, and invited to Windsor, like other Ministers' wives, and keenly interested in all the varying fortunes of Forster's party. But though she was in that world, she was never truly of it. She moved through it, yet veiled from it, by that pure, unconscious selflessness which is the saint's gift. Those who ask nothing for themselves, whose whole strength is spent on affections that are their life, and on ideals at one with their affections, are not easily popular, like the self-seeking, parti-colored folk who make up the rest of us; who flatter, caress, and court, that we in our turn may be flattered and courted. Their gentleness masks the indomitable soul within; and so their fellows are often unaware of their true spiritual rank.

It is interesting to recall the instinctive sympathy with which a nature so different from Charlotte Bronte's as that of Arnold's eldest daughter, met the challenge of the Bronte genius. It would not have been wonderful--in those days--if the quiet Fox How household, with its strong religious atmosphere, its daily psalms and lessons, its love for _The Christian Year_, its belief in "discipline" (how that comes out in all the letters!) had been repelled by the blunt strength of _Jane Eyre_; just as it would not have been wonderful if they had held aloof from Miss Martineau, in the days when it pleased that remarkable woman to preach mesmeric atheism, or atheistic mesmerism, as we choose to put it. But there was a lifelong friendship between them and Harriet Martineau; and they recognized at once the sincerity and truth--the literary rank, in fact--of _Jane Eyre_. Not long after her marriage, Jane Forster with her husband went over to Haworth to see Charlotte Bronte. My aunt's letter, describing the visit to the dismal parsonage and church, is given without her name in Mrs. Gaskell's _Life_, and Mr. Shorter, in reprinting it in the second of his large volumes, does not seem to be aware of the identity of the writer.

Miss Bronte put me so in mind of her own Jane Eyre [wrote my
godmother]. She looked smaller than ever, and moved about so
quietly and noiselessly, just like a little bird, as Rochester
called her; except that all birds are joyous, and that joy can
never have entered that house since it was built. And yet, perhaps,
when that old man (Mr. Bronte) married and took home his bride,
and children's voices and feet were heard about the house, even
that desolate graveyard and biting blast could not quench
cheerfulness and hope. Now (i.e. since the deaths of Emily and
Anne) there is something touching in the sight of that little
creature entombed in such a place, and moving about herself there
like a spirit; especially when you think that the slight still
frame incloses a force of strong, fiery life, which nothing has
been able to freeze or extinguish.

This letter was written before my birth and about six years before the writer of it appeared, as an angel of help, in the dingy dock-side inn, where we tired travelers had taken shelter on our arrival from the other side of the world, and where I was first kissed by my godmother. As I grew up into girlhood, "Aunt K." (K. was the pet name by which Matthew Arnold always wrote to her) became for me part of the magic of Fox How, though I saw her, of course, often in her own home also. I felt toward her a passionate and troubled affection. She was to me "a thing enskied" and heavenly--for all her quick human interests, and her sweet ways with those she loved. How could any one be so good!--was often the despairing reflection of the child who adored her, caught herself in the toils of a hot temper and a stubborn will; but all the same, to see her enter a room was joy, and to sit by her the highest privilege. I don't know whether she could be strictly called beautiful. But to me everything about her was beautiful--her broad brow, her clear brown eyes and wavy brown hair, the touch of stately grace with which she moved, the mouth so responsive and soft, yet, at need, so determined, the hand so delicate, yet so characteristic.

She was the eldest of nine. Of her relation to the next of them--her brother Matthew--there are many indications in the collection of my uncle's letters, edited by Mr. George Russell. It was to her that "Resignation" was addressed, in recollection of their mountain walks and talks together; and in a letter to her, the Sonnet "To Shakespeare," "Others abide our question--thou art free," was first written out. Their affection for each other, in spite of profound differences of opinion, only quickened and deepened with time.

Between my father and his elder brother Matthew Arnold there was barely a year's difference of age. The elder was born in December, 1822, and the younger in November, 1823. They were always warmly attached to each other, and in spite of much that was outwardly divergent--sharply divergent--they were more alike fundamentally than was often suspected. Both had derived from some remoter ancestry--possibly through their Cornish mother, herself the daughter of a Penrose and a Trevenen--elements and qualities which were lacking in the strong personality of their father. Imagination, "rebellion against fact," spirituality, a tendency to dream, unworldliness, the passionate love of beauty and charm, "ineffectualness" in the practical competitive life--these, according to Matthew Arnold, when he came to lecture at Oxford on "The Study of Celtic Literature," were and are the characteristic marks of the Celt. They were unequally distributed between the two brothers. "Unworldliness," "rebellion against fact," "ineffectualness" in common life, fell rather to my father's share than my uncle's; though my uncle's "worldliness," of which he was sometimes accused, if it ever existed, was never more than skin-deep. Imagination in my father led to a lifelong and mystical preoccupation with religion; it made Matthew Arnold one of the great poets of the nineteenth century.

There is a sketch of my father made in 1847, which preserves the dreamy, sensitive look of early youth, when he was the center of a band of remarkable friends--Clough, Stanley, F.T. Palgrave, Alfred Domett (Browning's Waring), and others. It is the face--nobly and delicately cut--of one to whom the successes of the practical, competitive life could never be of the same importance as those events which take place in thought, and for certain minds are the only real events. "For ages and ages the world has been constantly slipping ever more and more out of the Celt's grasp," wrote Matthew Arnold. But all the while the Celt has great compensations. To him belongs another world than the visible; the world of phantasmagoria, of emotion, the world of passionate beginnings, rather than of things achieved. After the romantic and defiant days of his youth, my father, still pursuing the same natural tendency, found all that he needed in Catholicism, and specially, I think, in that endless poetry and mystery of the Mass which keeps Catholicism alive.

Matthew Arnold was very different in outward aspect. The face, strong and rugged, the large mouth, the broad lined brow, and vigorous coal-black hair, bore no resemblance, except for that fugitive yet vigorous something which we call "family likeness," to either his father or mother--still less to the brother so near to him in age. But the Celtic trace is there, though derived, I have sometimes thought, rather from an Irish than a Cornish source. Doctor Arnold's mother, Martha Delafield, according to a genealogy I see no reason to doubt, was partly of Irish blood; one finds, at any rate, Fitzgeralds and Dillons among the names of her forebears. And I have seen in Ireland faces belonging to the "black Celt" type--faces full of power and humor, and softness, visibly molded out of the good common earth by the nimble spirit within, which have reminded me of my uncle. Nothing, indeed, at first sight could have been less romantic or dreamy than his outer aspect. "Ineffectualness" was not to be thought of in connection with him. He stood four-square--a courteous, competent man of affairs, an admirable inspector of schools, a delightful companion, a guest whom everybody wanted and no one could bind for long; one of the sanest, most independent, most cheerful and lovable of mortals. Yet his poems show what was the real inner life and genius of the man; how rich in that very "emotion," "love of beauty and charm," "rebellion against fact," "spirituality," "melancholy" which he himself catalogued as the cradle gifts of the Celt. Crossed, indeed, always, with the Rugby "earnestness," with that in him which came to him from his father.

It is curious to watch the growing perception of "Matt's" powers among the circle of his nearest kin, as it is reflected in these family letters to the emigrant brother, which reached him across the seas from 1847 to 1856, and now lie under my hand. The _Poems by A._ came out, as all lovers of English poetry know, in 1849. My grandmother writes to my father in March of that year, after protesting that she has not much news to give him:

But the little volume of Poems!--that is indeed a subject of new and
very great interest. By degrees we hear more of public opinion
concerning them, and I am very much mistaken if their power both in
thought and execution is not more and more felt and acknowledged. I
had a letter from dear Miss Fenwick to-day, whose first impressions
were that they were by _you_, for it seems she had heard of the
volume as much admired, and as by one of the family, and she had
hardly thought it could be by one so moving in the busy haunts of
men as dear Matt.... Matt himself says: "I have learned a good
deal as to what is _practicable_ from the objections of people,
even when I thought them not reasonable, and in some degree they
may determine my course as to publishing; e.g., I had thoughts of
publishing another volume of short poems next spring, and a tragedy
I have long had in my head, the spring after: at present I shall
leave the short poems to take their chance, only writing them
when I cannot help it, and try to get on with my Tragedy
('Merope'), which however will not be a very quick affair. But as
that must be in a regular and usual form, it may perhaps, if it
succeeds, enable me to use meters in short poems which seem proper to
myself; whether they suit the habits of readers at first sight or
not. But all this is rather vague at present.... I think I am
getting quite indifferent about the book. I have given away the
only copy I had, and now never look at them. The most enthusiastic
people about them are young men of course; but I have heard of one
or two people who found pleasure in 'Resignation,' and poems of
that stamp, which is what I like."

"The most enthusiastic people about them are young men, of course." The sentence might stand as the motto of all poetic beginnings. The young poet writes first of all for the young of his own day. They make his bodyguard. They open to him the gates of the House of Fame. But if the divine power is really his, it soon frees itself from the shackles of Time and Circumstance. The true poet becomes, in the language of the Greek epigram on Homer, "the ageless mouth of all the world." And if, "The Strayed Reveller," and the Sonnet "To Shakespeare," and "Resignation," delighted those who were young in 1849, that same generation, as the years passed over it, instead of outgrowing their poet, took him all the more closely to their hearts. Only so can we explain the steady spread and deepening of his poetic reputation which befell my uncle up to the very end of his life, and had assured him by then--leaving out of count the later development of his influence both in the field of poetry and elsewhere--his place in the history of English literature.

But his entry as a poet was gradual, and but little heralded, compared to the debuts of our own time. Here is an interesting appreciation from his sister Mary, about whom I shall have more to say presently. At the time this letter was written, in 1849, she was twenty-three, and already a widow, after a tragic year of married life during which her young husband had developed paralysis of the brain. She was living in London, attending Bedford College, and F.D. Maurice's sermons, much influenced, like her brothers, by Emerson and Carlyle, and at this moment a fine, restless, immature creature, much younger than her years in some respects, and much older in others--with worlds hitherto unsuspected in the quiet home life. She writes:

I have been in London for several months this year, and I have seen a
good deal of Matt, considering the very different lives we lead. I
used to breakfast with him sometimes, and then his Poems seemed to
make me know Matt so much better than I had ever done before.
Indeed it was almost like a new Introduction to him. I do not
think those Poems could be read--quite independently of their
poetical power--without leading one to expect a great deal from
Matt; without raising I mean the kind of expectation one has from
and for those who have, in some way or other, come face to face
with life and asked it, in real earnest, what it means. I felt
there was so much more of this practical questioning in Matt's
book than I was at all prepared for; in fact that it showed a
knowledge of life and conflict which was _strangely like experience_
if it was not the thing itself; and this with all Matt's great
power I should not have looked for. I do not yet know the book
well, but I think that "Mycerinus" struck me most, perhaps, as
illustrating what I have been speaking of.

And again, to another member of the family:

It is the moral strength, or, at any rate, the _moral consciousness_
which struck and surprised me so much in the poems. I could have been
prepared for any degree of poetical power, for there being a great
deal more than I could at all appreciate; but there is something
altogether different from this, something which such a man as
Clough has, for instance, which I did not expect to find in Matt;
but it is there. Of course when I speak of his Poems I only speak
of the impression received from those I understand. Some are
perfect riddles to me, such as that to the Child at Douglas, which
is surely more poetical than true.

_Strangely like experience!_ The words are an interesting proof of the difficulty we all have in seeing with accuracy the persons and things which are nearest to us. The astonishment of the sisters--for the same feeling is expressed by Mrs. Forster--was very natural. In these early days, "Matt" often figures in the family letters as the worldling of the group--the dear one who is making way in surroundings quite unknown to the Fox How circle, where, under the shadow of the mountains, the sisters, idealists all of them, looking out a little austerely, for all their tenderness, on the human scene, are watching with a certain anxiety lest Matt should be "spoiled." As Lord Lansdowne's private secretary, very much liked by his chief, he goes among rich and important people, and finds himself, as a rule, much cleverer than they; above all, able to amuse them, so often the surest road to social and other success. Already at Oxford "Matt" had been something of an exquisite--or, as Miss Bronte puts it, a trifle "foppish"; and (in the manuscript) _Fox How Magazine_, to which all the nine contributed, and in which Matthew Arnold's boyish poems may still be read, there are many family jests leveled at Matt's high standard in dress and deportment.

But how soon the nascent dread lest their poet should be somehow separated from them by the "great world" passes away from mother and sisters--forever! With every year of his life Matthew Arnold, besides making the sunshine of his own married home, became a more attached, a more devoted son and brother. The two volumes of his published letters are there to show it. I will only quote here a sentence from a letter of Mrs. Arnold's, written in 1850, a year after the publication of the _Poems by A._ She and her eldest daughter, then shortly to become William Forster's wife, were at the time in London. "K" had been seriously ill, and the marriage had been postponed for a short time.

Matt [says Mrs. Arnold] has been with us almost every day since we
came up--now so long ago!--and it is pleasant indeed to see his
dear face, and to find him always so affectionate, and so
unspoiled by his being so much sought after in a kind of society
entirely different from anything we can enter into.

But, indeed, the time saved, day after day, for an invalid sister, by a run-after young man of twenty-seven, who might so easily have made one or other of the trifling or selfish excuses we are all so ready to make, was only a prophecy of those many "nameless unremembered acts" of simple kindness which filled the background of Matthew Arnold's middle and later life, and were not revealed, many of them, even to his own people, till after his death--kindness to a pupil-teacher, an unsuccessful writer, a hard-worked schoolmaster or schoolmistress, a budding poet, a school-boy. It was not possible to "spoil" Matthew Arnold. Meredith's "Comic Spirit" in him, his irrepressible humor, would alone have saved him from it. And as to his relation to "society," and the great ones in it, no one more frankly amused himself--within certain very definite limits--with the "cakes and ale" of life, and no one held more lightly to them. He never denied--none but the foolish ever do deny--the immense personal opportunities and advantages of an aristocratic class, wherever it exists. He was quite conscious--none but those without imagination can fail to be conscious--of the glamour of long descent and great affairs. But he laughed at the "Barbarians," the materialized or stupid holders of power and place, and their "fortified posts"--i.e., the country houses--just as he laughed at the Philistines and Mr. Bottles; when he preached a sermon in later life, it was on Menander's motto, "Choose Equality"; and he and Clough--the Republican--were not really far apart. He mocked even at Clough, indeed, addressing his letters to him, "Citizen Clough, Oriel Lyceum, Oxford"; but in the midst of the revolutionary hubbub of 1848 he pours himself out to Clough only--he and "Thyrsis," to use his own expression in a letter, "agreeing like two lambs in a world of wolves," and in his early sonnet (1848) "To a Republican Friend" (who was certainly Clough) he says:

If sadness at the long heart-wasting show
Wherein earth's great ones are disquieted;
If thoughts, not idle, while before me flow

The armies of the homeless and unfed--
If these are yours, if this is what you are,
Then I am yours, and what you feel, I share.

Yet, as he adds, in the succeeding sonnet, he has no belief in sudden radical change, nor in any earthly millennium--

Seeing this vale, this earth, whereon we dream,
Is on all sides o'ershadowed by the high
Uno'erleaped mountains of necessity,
Sparing us narrower margin than we dream.

On the eagerness with which Matthew Arnold followed the revolutionary spectacle of 1848, an unpublished letter written--piquantly enough!--from Lansdowne House itself, on February 28th, in that famous year, to my father in New Zealand, throws a vivid light. One feels the artist in the writer. First, the quiet of the great house and courtyard, the flower-pricked grass, the "still-faced babies"; then the sudden clash of the street-cries! "Your uncle's description of this house," writes the present Lord Lansdowne, in 1910, "might almost have been written yesterday, instead of in 1848. Little is changed, Romulus and Remus and the she-wolf are still on the top of the bookcase, and the clock is still hard by; but the picture of the Jewish Exiles...has been given to a local School of Art in Wiltshire! The green lawn remains, but I am afraid the crocuses, which I can remember as a child, no longer come up through the turf. And lastly one of the 'still-faced babies' [i.e., Lord Lansdowne himself] is still often to be seen in the gravel court! He was three years old when the letter was written."

Here, then, is the letter:

LANSDOWNE HOUSE, _Feb. 8, 1848._

MY DEAREST TOM,--...Here I sit, opposite a marble group of Romulus
and Remus and the wolf; the two children fighting like mad, and
the limp-uddered she-wolf affectionately snarling at the little
demons struggling on her back. Above it is a great picture,
Rembrandt's Jewish Exiles, which would do for Consuelo and Albert
resting in one of their wanderings, worn out upon a wild stony
heath sloping to the Baltic--she leaning over her two children
who sleep in their torn rags at her feet. Behind me a most musical
clock, marking now 24 Minutes past 1 P.M. On my left two great
windows looking out on the court in front of the house, through
one of which, slightly opened, comes in gushes the soft damp
breath, with a tone of spring-life in it, which the close of an
English February sometimes brings--so different from a November
mildness. The green lawn which occupies nearly half the court is
studded over with crocuses of all colors--growing out of the grass,
for there are no flower-beds; delightful for the large still-faced
white-robed babies whom their nurses carry up and down on the
gravel court where it skirts the green. And from the square and
the neighboring streets, through the open door whereat the civil
porter moves to and fro, come the sounds of vehicles and men, in
all gradations, some from near and some from far, but mellowed by
the time they reach this backstanding lordly mansion.

But above all cries comes one whereat every stone in this and other
lordly mansions may totter and quake for fear:

"Se...c...ond Edition of the Morning _Herald_--L...a...test news from Paris:--arrival of the King of the French."

I have gone out and bought the said portentous _Herald_, and send it
herewith, that you may read and know. As the human race forever
stumbles up its great steps, so it is now. You remember the Reform
Banquets [in Paris] last summer?--well!--the diners omitted the
king's health, and abused Guizot's majority as corrupt and servile:
the majority and the king grew excited; the Government forbade the
Banquets to continue. The king met the Chamber with the words
"_passions aveugles_" to characterize the dispositions of the
Banqueters: and Guizot grandly declared against the spirit of
Revolution all over the world. His practice suited his words, or
seemed to suit them, for both in Switzerland and Italy, the French
Government incurred the charge of siding against the Liberals. Add
to this the corruption cases you remember, the Praslin murder, and
later events, which powerfully stimulated the disgust (moral
indignation that People does not feel!) entertained by the lower
against the governing class.

Then Thiers, seeing the breeze rising, and hoping to use it, made
most telling speeches in the debate on the Address, clearly
defining the crisis as a question between revolution and
counter-revolution, and declaring enthusiastically for the
former. Lamartine and others, the sentimental and the plain honest,
were very damaging on the same side. The Government were harsh--
abrupt--almost scornful. They would not yield--would not permit
banquets: would give no Reform till they chose. Guizot spoke
(alone in the Chamber, I think) to this effect. With decreasing
Majorities the Government carried the different clauses of the
address, amidst furious scenes; opposition members crying that they
were worse than Polignac. It was resolved to hold an Opposition
banquet in Paris in spite of the Government, last Tuesday, the 22d.
In the week between the close of the debate and this day there was
a profound, uneasy excitement, but nothing I think to appall the
rulers. They had the fortifications; all kinds of stores; and
100,000 troops of the line. To be quite secure, however, they
determined to take a formal legal objection to the banquet at the
doors; but not to prevent the procession thereto. On that the
Opposition published a proclamation inviting the National Guard,
who sympathized, to form part of the procession in uniform. Then
the Government forbade the meeting altogether--absolutely--and
the Opposition resigned themselves to try the case in a Court of Law.

_So did not the people!_

They gathered all over Paris: the National Guard, whom Ministers did
not trust, were not called out: the Line checked and dispersed the
mob on all points. But next day the mob were there again: the
Ministers in a constitutional fright called out the National Guard:
a body of these hard by the Opera refused to clear the street, they
joined the people. Troops were brought up: the Mob and the National
Guard refused to give them passage down the Rue le Pelletier, which
they occupied: after a moment's hesitation, they were marched on
along the Boulevard.

This settled the matter! Everywhere the National Guard fraternized
with the people: the troops stood indifferent. The King dismissed
the Ministers: he sent for Mole; a shade better: not enough: he
sent for Thiers--a pause; this was several shades better--still
not enough: meanwhile the crowd continued, and attacks on different
posts, with slight bloodshed, increased the excitement: finally
_the King abdicated_ in favor of the Count of Paris, and fled. The
Count of Paris was taken by his mother to the Chamber--the people
broke in; too late--not enough:--a republic--an appeal to the
people. The royal family escaped to all parts, Belgium, Eu,
England: _a Provisional Government named_.

You will see how they stand: they have adopted the last measures of
Revolution.--News has just come that the National Guard have declared
against a Republic, and that a collision is inevitable.

If possible I will write by the next mail, and send you a later paper
than the _Herald_ by this mail.

Your truly affectionate, dearest Tom,

M. ARNOLD.

To this let me add here two or three other letters or fragments, all unpublished, which I find among the papers from which I have been drawing, ending, for the present, with the jubilant letter describing his election to the Poetry Professorship at Oxford, in 1857. Here, first of all, is an amusing reference, dated 1849, to Keble, then the idol of every well-disposed Anglican household:

I dined last night with a Mr. Grove,[1] a celebrated man of science:
his wife is pretty and agreeable, but not on a first interview. The
husband and I agree wonderfully on some points. He is a bad sleeper,
and hardly ever free from headache; he equally dislikes and
disapproves of modern existence and the state of excitement in
which everybody lives: and he sighs after a paternal despotism
and the calm existence of a Russian or Asiatic. He showed me a
picture of Faraday, which is wonderfully fine: I am almost inclined
to get it: it has a curious likeness to Keble, only with a calm,
earnest look unlike the latter's Flibbertigibbet, fanatical,
twinkling expression.

[Footnote 1: Afterward Sir William Grove, F.R.S., author of the famous essay on "The Correlation of Physical Force."]

Did ever anybody apply such adjectives to John Keble before! Yet if any one will look carefully at the engraving of Keble so often seen in quiet parsonages, they will understand, I think, exactly what Matthew Arnold meant.

In 1850 great changes came upon the Arnold family. The "Doctor's" elder three children--Jane, Matthew, and my father--married in that year, and a host of new interests sprang up for every member of the Fox How circle. I find in a letter to my father from Arthur Stanley, his father's biographer, and his own Oxford tutor, the following reference to "Matt's" marriage, and to the second series of Poems--containing "Sohrab and Rustum"--which were published in 1854. "You will have heard," writes Stanley, "of the great success of Matt's poems. He is in good heart about them. He is also--I must say so, though perhaps I have no right to say so--greatly improved by his marriage--retaining all the genius and nobleness of mind which you remember, with all the lesser faults pruned and softened down." Matt himself wrote to give news of his wedding, to describe the bride--Judge Wightman's daughter, the dear and gracious little lady whom we grandchildren knew and loved as "Aunt Fanny Lucy"--and to wish my father joy of his own. And then there is nothing among the waifs and strays that have come to me worth printing, till 1855, when my uncle writes to New Zealand:

I hope you have got my book by this time. What you will like best, I
think, will be the "Scholar Gipsy." I am sure that old Cumner and
Oxford country will stir a chord in you. For the preface I doubt if
you will care, not having much before your eyes the sins and
offenses at which it is directed: the first being that we have
numbers of young gentlemen with really wonderful powers of
perception and expression, but to whom there is wholly wanting
a "_bedeutendes Individuum"_--so that their productions are most
unedifying and unsatisfactory. But this is a long story.

As to Church matters. I think people in general concern themselves less
with them than they did when you left England. Certainly religion is
not, to all appearance at least, losing ground here: but since the great
people of Newman's party went over, the disputes among the comparatively
unimportant remains of them do not excite much interest. I am going to
hear Manning at the Spanish Chapel next Sunday. Newman gives himself up
almost entirely to organizing and educating the Roman Catholics, and is
gone off greatly, they say, as a preacher.

God bless you, my dearest Tom: I cannot tell you the almost painful
longing I sometimes have to see you once more.

The following year the brothers met again; and there followed, almost immediately, my uncle's election to the Poetry Professorship at Oxford. He writes, in answer to my father's congratulations:

HAMPTON, _May 16, 1857._

MY DEAR TOM,--My thoughts have often turned to you during my canvass
for the Professorship--and they have turned to you more than ever
during the last few days which I have been spending at Oxford. You
alone of my brothers are associated with that life at Oxford, the
_freest_ and most delightful part, perhaps, of my life, when with
you and Clough and Walrond I shook off all the bonds and
formalities of the place, and enjoyed the spring of life and that
unforgotten Oxfordshire and Berkshire country. Do you remember a
poem of mine called "The Scholar Gipsy"? It was meant to fix the
remembrance of those delightful wanderings of ours in the Cumner
hills before they were quite effaced--and as such Clough and
Walrond accepted it, and it has had much success at Oxford, I am
told, as was perhaps likely from its _couleur locale_. I am hardly
ever at Oxford now, but the sentiment of the place is overpowering
to me when I have leisure to feel it, and can shake off the
interruptions which it is not so easy to shake off now as it was
when we were young. But on Tuesday afternoon I smuggled myself away,
and got up into one of our old coombs among the Cumner hills, and
into a field waving deep with cowslips and grasses, and gathered
such a bunch as you and I used to gather in the cowslip field on
Lutterworth road long years ago.

You dear old boy, I love your congratulations although I see and
hear so little of you, and, alas! _can_ see and hear but so little
of you. I was supported by people of all opinions, the great bond
of union being, I believe, the affectionate interest felt in papa's
memory. I think it probable that I shall lecture in English: there
is no direction whatever in the Statute as to the language in which
the lectures shall be: and the Latin has so died out, even among
scholars, that it seems idle to entomb a lecture which, in English,
might be stimulating and interesting.

On the same occasion, writing to his mother, the new Professor gives an amusing account of the election day, when my uncle and aunt came up to town from Hampton, where they were living, in order to get telegraphic news of the polling from friends at Oxford. "Christ Church"--i.e., the High Church party in Oxford--had put up an opposition candidate, and the excitement was great. My uncle was by this time the father of three small boys, Tom, Trevenen--_alias_ Budge--and Richard--"Diddy."

We went first to the telegraph station at Charing Cross. Then, about
4, we got a message from Walrond--"nothing certain is known, but
it is rumored that you are ahead." Then we went to get some toys
for the children in the Lowther Arcade, and could scarcely have
found a more genuine distraction than in selecting wagons for Tom
and Trev, with horses of precisely the same color, not one of which
should have a hair more in his tail than the other--and a musical
cart for Diddy. A little after five we went back to the telegraph
office, and got the following message--"Nothing declared, but you
are said to be quite safe. Go to Eaton Place." ["Eaton Place" was
then the house of Judge Wightman, Mrs. Matthew Arnold's father.]
To Eaton Place we went, and then a little after 6 o'clock we were
joined by the Judge in the highest state of joyful excitement with
the news of my majority of 85, which had been telegraphed to him
from Oxford after he had started and had been given to him at
Paddington Station.... The income is L130 a year or thereabouts:
the duties consist as far as I can learn in assisting to look over
the prize compositions, in delivering a Latin oration in praise of
founders at every alternate commemoration, and in preparing and
giving three Latin lectures on ancient poetry in the course of the
year. _These lectures I hope to give in English_.

The italics are mine. The intention expressed here and in the letter to my father was, as is well known, carried out, and Matthew Arnold's Lectures at Oxford, together with the other poetic and critical work produced by him during the years of his professorship, became so great a force in the development of English criticism and English taste, that the lifelike detail of this letter acquires a kind of historical value. As a child of fourteen I first made acquaintance with Oxford while my uncle was still Professor. I remember well some of his lectures, the crowded lecture-hall, the manner and personality of the speaker, and my own shy pride in him--from a great distance. For I was a self-conscious, bookish child, and my days of real friendship with him were still far ahead. But during the years that followed, the ten years that he held his professorship, what a spell he wielded over Oxford, and literary England in general! Looking back, one sees how the first series of _Essays in Criticism_, the _Lectures on Celtic Literature_, or _On Translating Homer, Culture, and Anarchy_ and the rest, were all the time working on English taste and feeling, whether through sympathy or antagonism; so that after those ten years, 1857-1867, the intellectual life of the country had absorbed, for good and all, an influence, and a stimulus, which had set it moving on new paths to new ends. With these thoughts in mind, supplying a comment on the letter which few people could have foreseen in 1857, let me quote a few more sentences:

Keble voted for me after all. He told the Coleridges he was so much
pleased with my letter (to the electors) that he could not refrain.
... I had support from all sides. Archdeacon Denison voted for me,
also Sir John Yarde Buller, and Henley, of the high Tory party. It
was an immense victory--some 200 more voted than have ever, it is
said, voted in a Professorship election before. It is a great
lesson to Christ Church, which was rather disposed to imagine it
could carry everything by its great numbers.

Good-by, my dearest mother.... I have just been up to see the three
dear little brown heads on their pillows, all asleep.... My
affectionate thanks to Mrs. Wordsworth and Mrs. Fletcher for
their kind interest in my success.

It is pleasant to think of Wordsworth's widow, in her "old age serene and bright," and of the poet's old friend, Mrs. Fletcher, watching and rejoicing in the first triumphs of the younger singer.

So the ten years of approach and attack--in the intellectual sense--came to an end, and the ten central years of mastery and success began. Toward the end of that time, as a girl of sixteen, I became a resident in Oxford. Up to then Ruskin--the _Stones of Venice_ and certain chapters in _Modern Painters_--had been my chief intellectual passion in a childhood and first youth that cut but a very poor figure, as I look back upon them, beside the "wonderful children" of this generation! But it must have been about 1868 that I first read _Essays in Criticism._ It is not too much to say that the book set for me the currents of life; its effect heightened, no doubt, by the sense of kinship. Above all it determined in me, as in many others, an enduring love of France and of French literature, which played the part of schoolmaster to a crude youth. I owe this to my uncle, and it was a priceless boon. If he had only lived a little longer--if he had not died so soon after I had really begun to know him--how many debts to him would have been confessed, how many things said, which, after all, were never said!