Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life

[118] and yet so beneficent, were about to be left to fight its battles single-handed. Possibly it would be so when it came to the point; but the most ominous thing is the fact, lying behind all the condition of affairs, that this covert antagonism is in a manner reciprocal. It is very curious, for instance, to trace through the pages of Matthew Arnold's correspondence, just published, the traces of a profound international distrust pervading his whole life, long before he had ever planned crossing the Atlantic. A man of cold temperament, often narrow, often whimsical, but thoroughly wishing to be just, he can never even compliment an American except with an implied surprise that he should be such a wholly exceptional specimen of his kind. If he thinks well of the offender, it is as some tailor or footman sometimes compliments one of us in London: “You an American, sir? I give you my word of honor I never should have suspected it!” Finally he touches the precise point now at issue when he writes to his mother at the very beginning of our Civil War. “I don't imagine the feeling of kinship with them [Americans] exists at all among the higher classes; after immediate blood-relationship, the relationship of the soul is the ”