He was born in 1822 and was the son of Doctor Thomas Arnold, the great teacher who was so long headmaster of the famous Rugby school, and whose scholarly and Christian influence is so faithfully brought out in Hughes’s ever popular story Tom Brown’s School Days.
Matthew Arnold received his preparatory education in his father’s school at Rugby, and his college training at Oxford. He was always a student and always active in educational work, as an inspector of schools, and for ten years as professor of poetry at Oxford. He twice visited the United States and both times lectured here. His criticisms of America and Americans were severe, for he saw predominant the spirit of money-getting, the thirst for material prosperity and the absence of spiritual interests. In 1888, while at the house of a friend in Liverpool, he died suddenly and peacefully from an attack of heart disease.
Arnold was one of the most exacting and critical of English writers, a man who applied to his own works the same severe standards that he set up for others. As a result his writings have become one of the standards of purity and taste in style.
The story of Sohrab and Rustum pleased him, and he enjoyed writing the poem, as may be seen from a letter to his mother, written in 1853. He says:
“All my spare time has been spent on a poem which I have just finished, and which I think by far the best thing I have yet done, and I think it will be generally liked; though one can never be sure of this. I have had the greatest pleasure in composing it, a rare thing with me, and, as I think, a good test of the pleasure what you write is likely to afford to others. But the story is a very noble and excellent one.”
Two men, both competent to judge, have given at length their opinion of Matthew Arnold’s character. So admirable a man deserves to be known by the young, although most of his writings will be understood and appreciated only by persons of some maturity in years. Mr. John Morley says:
“He was incapable of sacrificing the smallest interest of anybody to his own; he had not a spark of envy or jealousy; he stood well aloof from all the hustlings and jostlings by which selfish men push on; he bore life’s disappointments—and he was disappointed in some reasonable hopes—with good nature and fortitude; he cast no burden upon others, and never shrank from bearing his own share of the daily load to the last ounce of it; he took the deepest, sincerest, and most active interest in the well-being of his country and his countrymen.”
Mr. George E. Woodbury in an essay on Arnold remarks concerning the man as shown in his private letters: