Matthew Arnold (1822 – 1888)
English poet, essayist and cultural critic.
Ah! two desires toss about
The poet's feverish blood;
One drives him to the world without,
And one to solitude.
The power of the Latin classic is in character, that of the Greek is in beauty. Now character is capable of being taught, learnt, and assimilated: beauty hardly.
Sand-strewn caverns, cool and deep,
Where the winds are all asleep.
Charge once more, then, and be dumb!
Let the victors, when they come,
When the forts of folly fall,
Find thy body by the wall.
The best poetry will be found to have a power of forming, sustaining, and delighting us, as nothing else can.
The great apostle of the Philistines, Lord Macaulay.
Critical power...tends to make an intellectual situation of which the creative power can profitably avail itself. It tends to establish an order of ideas, if not absolutely true, yet true by comparison with that which it displaces; to make the best ideas prevail.
The crown of literature is poetry.
So, loath to suffer mute.
We, peopling the void air,
Make Gods to whom to impute
The ills we ought to bear.
There is the world of ideas and there is the world of practice; the French are often for suppressing the one and the English the other; but neither is to be suppressed.
Conduct is three-fourths of our life and its largest concern.
Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace; and America is just ourselves, with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly.
One must, I think, be struck more and more the longer one lives, to find how much in our present society a man's life of each day depends for its solidity and value upon whether he reads during that day, and far more still on what he reads during it.
Inequality has the natural and necessary effect, under the present circumstances, of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class.
Creep into thy narrow bed,
Creep, and let no more be said!
Coleridge, poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium.
What shelter to grow ripe is ours?
What leisure to grow wise?
Goethe in Weimar sleeps, and Greece,
Long since, saw Byron’s struggle cease.
What really dissatisfies in American civilisation is the want of the interesting, a want due chiefly to the want of those two great elements of the interesting, which are elevation and beauty.
Nations are not truly great solely because the individuals composing them are numerous, free, and active; but they are great when these numbers, this freedom, and this activity are employed in the service of an ideal higher than that of an ordinary man, taken by himself.