Arnold, MATTHEW, one of the greater modern English poets, and the Sainte-Beuve of English criticism, eldest son of Dr Arnold of Rugby, was born at Laleham, near Staines, 24th December 1822, and educated at Winchester, Rugby, and Balliol College, Oxford. He won the Newdigate with a poem on Cromwell in 1843, and next year graduating with honours, was elected a fellow of Ariel in 1845. After acting for a few years as private secretary to Lord Lansdowne, he was appointed one of the lay inspectors of schools in 1851, an office from which he retired in 1885. During the years 1857-67 he was professor of Poetry at Oxford. He was more than once sent by government to inquire into the state of education on the Continent, especially in France, Germany, and Holland; and his masterly reports, with their pregnant hints and downright statement of English deficiencies, when published in book form, attracted much attention in England. In 1883 a pension of £250 was conferred on him, and in the same year he lectured in the United States. He held an Italian order, which was conferred on him after he had for two years had charge of the young Duke of Genoa, while under education at Harrow. He died suddenly at Liverpool, 15th April 1888.
Arnold became known as a poet of classical taste and exquisite purity of imagination by the volume published under his name in 1854, consisting of new poems and selections from his two earlier volumes signed 'A.' In 1885 he issued a collected edition of his poems in three volumes. The English-speaking public in both the Old and the New World have long recognised Arnold as standing almost in the front rank of modern poets. Nowhere do we find greater dignity of thought and sentiment, greater distinction in manner and utterance. His verses have the stately calm and purity of marble, but with the faultlessness of an antique statue they have also something of its coldness and severity. His volumes contain nothing unworthy of him—he has always been his own severest critic—no other poet has sustained his flight with so strong and steady a wing. His lines never contain anything but what is essential; the redundant and the merely decorative find no place in poetry where the form is always on the same high level as the thought. Only once has he made an experiment for which his powers were inadequate or unsuited. He lacks the dramatic instinct, and his Merop, an imitation of an old Greek play, apart altogether from its being an essay in a form that has long been dead, was doomed to failure from its lack of dramatic harmony and the sense of reality. As a critic, Arnold is only less eminent than as a poet. His criticisms on poetry contributed to the magazines and reviews did much to raise criticism in England to the level of a serious and almost systematic science, and it was doubly fortunate for English literature that such invaluable criticisms should be embodied in such sweet and lucid prose. Indeed, it would be difficult to overestimate the indirect benefit to our younger writers of having constantly before them such an admirable model and such a high standard for comparison. His literary judgments, pronounced from time to time in magazine articles, in prefaces to selections of poetry, or in occasional lectures or speeches, have long been received by the literary world with a respect much higher than that paid to the utterances of any other writer. His chief prose writings are Essays in Criticism, collected in 1865; Lectures on the Study of Celtic Literature (1867); Culture and Anarchy (1869); Last Essays on Church and Religion (1877); Mixed Essays (1879); and Irish Essays (1882). In his contributions to theology, St Paul and Protestantism (1870), and Literature and Dogma (1872), the reading public were no less startled by the audacious application of literary criticism to religion, than by the exquisite literary form. See his Letters, edited by G. W. E. Russell (1895).