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Matthew Arnold, Civilization in the United States: First and Last Impressions of America., General Grant. (search)
hither, to accompany him to the theatre on the evening of the 14th of April. Grant declined, because he was to go off that evening to visit his children who were at school in New Jersey; when he reached Philadelphia, he heard that the President and Mr. Seward had been assassinated. He immediately returned to Washington, to find the joy there turned to mourning. With this tragic event, and with the grand review in the following month of Meade's and Sherman's armies by the new President, Mr. Johnson, the Memoirs end. Modest for himself, Grant is boastful, as Americans are apt to be, for his nation. He says with perfect truth that troops who have fought a few battles and won, and followed up their victories, improve upon what they were before to an extent that can hardly be counted by percentage; and that his troops and Sherman's which had gone through this training, were by the end of the war become very good and seasoned soldiers. But he is fond of adding, in what I must call t
Matthew Arnold, Civilization in the United States: First and Last Impressions of America., III: a word more about America. (search)
up. An aristocracy — if I may once more repeat words, which, however often repeated, have still a value, from their truth — aristocracy now sets up in our country a false ideal, which materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class. It misleads the young, makes the worldly more worldly, the limited more limited, the stationary more stationary. Even to the imaginative, whom Lord John Manners thinks its sure friend, it is more a hindrance than a help. Johnson says well: Whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future, predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings. But what is a Duke of Norfolk or an Earl of Warwick, dressed in broad-cloth and tweed, and going about his business or pleasure in hansom cabs and railway carriages, like the rest of us? Imagination herself would entreat him to take himself out of the way, and to leave us to the Norfolks and Warwicks of history. I say this without a particle of ha