Seamus Perry on Matthew Arnold and the different types of libraries

I've been reading Matthew Arnold, of whom I am very fond: he is the most savingly normal of the Victorian geniuses. He was a student at Balliol, my own college, where he seems to have been dazzling and irritating in equal measure; but he failed to get the glittering first, and that was no doubt the making of him.

He continued to look back upon the place with wistful love: he is responsible for ‘that sweet city with her dreaming spires’ that gets mauled daily by our tour guides.

He could strike a wryer note too: ‘Beautiful city! so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene!’ Arnold wrote a handful of fine poems, some of the best of the 19th century, and he also wrote a lot of wonderfully characterful prose, anatomising the cultural and moral crisis which festered at the heart of modern commercial Britain.

But his main professional life for 35 long years was as an inspector of schools.

That was no sinecure: he travelled the length of the country, exhausted and uncomfortable and frequently downcast, yet tenaciously involved in the work.

Every pundit in Victorian England was busy pontificating about the working classes, but, as one of his biographers says, it was Arnold who actually had an acquaintance with the reality of their lives, especially those of the children.

Many of Arnold’s surviving letters are, fittingly enough, in Balliol, where I think we look after them very well.

But if you want to read the superb letters he wrote to his fellow Balliol poet Arthur Hugh Clough you need to go to Yale: they have ended up in the famous Beinecke Library, where I spent a couple of very agreeable days in August.

American libraries are generally superb and come in two types.

Some, like the Houghton Library at Harvard, seek to emulate the leathery elegance of an old-style gentleman’s club, except instead of well-thumbed copies of Country Life arriving at your desk you are brought the manuscript of Ode to a Nightingale, which can be a momentarily disorientating experience.

The other type is the modernist palace: the Beinecke is one of those. An immense cubist sugar lump sits, apparently precariously, on four smaller giant sugar lumps.

Once you’re in, you are taken down an escalator to a subterranean reading room, looking upon a sunken gravel garden furnished with stylish bits of abstract sculpture. Here, staff of exemplary friendliness hand you their treasures with a smile.

I think Arnold would be happy enough to have his papers looked after in this alien place.

Like the most far-sighted of his contemporaries he knew that America was the great new fact about the world, and he intuitively understood, though not without some trepidation, that the future would have an American shape.

Leaving that lovely, bright, freezing shrine to air-conditioning, and ascending into the thick heat of the Connecticut summer, I thought of W.H. Auden’s lines: ‘God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.’

Seamus Perry is chairman of the board of the Oxford English faculty