In the context of his age Matthew Arnold is a key-figure. He fully shared its moral concern, if not all its moral attitudes. He was a man with a mission, who could not be content with the role solely of poet or literary critic, dedicated as these callings might be. He became an apostle of ‘culture’, a word not to be taken in any merely aesthetic sense-despite the necessity, for the critic, of a truly critical ‘detachment’—but as implying a force for moral good. That he was conscious of this missionary purpose is-save for his verse, in which he appears in a different light—clear in all he wrote. A statement in a private letter of 1863 reveals not only a sense of duty to be done but of fervour in doing it: ‘It is very animating to think that one at last has a chance of getting at the English public. Such a public as it is and such a work as one wants to do with it.’ As a poet, however, and occasionally even as a literary critic, it is the ‘other’ self that speaks-introverted, selfdoubting, nostalgic:

So acutely aware of this was he that he could describe himself as ‘fragments’. But here too he is a key-figure: his age, for all its apparent certitudes, was fragmented. His own incertitude especially betrays itself in his attitude to religion, with which alone we are concerned.