Democratic Sentinel, Volume 8, Number 37, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 October 1884 — Matthew Arnold. [ARTICLE]

Matthew Arnold.

Mr. Arnold is especially an author who should be read, and the disparity between his easy mastery in his natural position as an essayist and the inadequacy of his public address explains much of the kind of disappointment which, with all the admiration and even affection with which he was regarded, he produced upon this side of the water. The image of a cultivated scholar, who, with incomparably felicity of expression and an unsurpassed lightness of exact touch, poises and points and shades and exquisitely colors his thought, so that the whole effect is that of smiling supremacy and unchallenged command, was quite lost in the public speaker, although the substance of the discourse, as in the opening of the paper upon Emerson, and in the motive and treatment of that upon numbers, was very

characteristic. Mr. Arnold, indeed, is purely a man* of letters, versed in the great works of literature, a sagacious observer of the currents of cultivated thought in his own time, a critic of large and generous sympathies, with complete intellectual independence in moral discussion, judging literary and mental achievement by well-defined canons. He is master of the art of arts in literary and moral criticism, the art of “putting things, ” which is simply the gift of saying what he has to say in a manner which commands attention.— George William Curtis, in Harper’s Magazine.