Editing Matthew Arnold (section)

==Character==
[[File:Matthew arnold cartoon.png|thumb|Caricature from ''[[Punch (magazine)|Punch]]'', 1881: "Admit that Homer sometimes nods, That poets ''do'' write trash, Our Bard has written "''[[Balder Dead]]''," And also Balder-dash"]]

"Matthew Arnold", wrote [[G. W. E. Russell]] in ''Portraits of the Seventies'', is "a man of the world entirely free from worldliness and a man of letters without the faintest trace of [[pedant]]ry".<ref>Russell, 1916{{page needed|date=April 2017}}</ref> Arnold was a familiar figure at the [[Athenaeum Club, London|Athenaeum Club]], a frequent diner-out and guest at great country houses, charming, fond of fishing (but not of shooting),<ref>Andrew Carnegie described him as the most charming man that he ever knew (Autobiography, p 298) and said, "Arnold visited us in Scotland in 1887, and talking one day of sport he said he did not shoot, he could not kill anything that had wings and could soar in the clear blue sky; but, he added, he could not give up fishing—'the accessories are so delightful.{{'"}} Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie, The Riverside Press Cambridge (1920), p. 301; https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/17976</ref> and a lively conversationalist, with a self-consciously cultivated air combining [[fop]]pishness and Olympian grandeur. He read constantly, widely, and deeply, and in the intervals of supporting himself and his family by the quiet drudgery of school inspecting, filled notebook after notebook with meditations of an almost monastic tone. In his writings, he often baffled and sometimes annoyed his contemporaries by the apparent contradiction between his urbane, even frivolous manner in controversy, and the "high seriousness" of his critical views and the melancholy, almost plaintive note of much of his poetry. "A voice poking fun in the wilderness" was [[Herbert Warren|T. H. Warren]]'s description of him.{{Citation needed|date=October 2022}}