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Arnold, Matthew, 1822-1888

"Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold"

A grave without rest, death without the privileges of the
departed, who have no longer any need to spend money, or to write
letters, or to compose books What a melancholy situation!"[181]
He died, and has left a blemished name; with his crying faults,--his
intemperate susceptibility, his unscrupulousness in passion, his
inconceivable attacks on his enemies, his still more inconceivable
attacks on his friends, his want of generosity, his sensuality, his
incessant mocking,--how could it be otherwise? Not only was he not one
of Mr. Carlyle's "respectable" people, he was profoundly
_dis_respectable; and not even the merit of not being a Philistine can
make up for a man's being that. To his intellectual deliverance there
was an addition of something else wanting, and that something else was
something immense: the old-fashioned, laborious, eternally needful moral
deliverance. Goethe says that he was deficient in _love_; to me his
weakness seems to be not so much a deficiency in love as a deficiency in
self-respect, in true dignity of character.


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