That subtle and sensitive genius did not go wrong when it selected Joubert as an eminent example of those gifts of the French mind which most commended themselves to itself—an exquisite justesse, an alertness of spirit not shaking off rule and measure, above all, a consummate propriety in the true and best, not the limited sense of the word. Nor is it difficult to observe in the shy philosopher a temperament which must have commended itself to Mr Arnold almost as strongly as his literary quality, and very closely indeed connected with that—the temperament of equity, of epieikeia, of freedom from swagger and brag and self-assertion. And here, once more, the things receive precisely their right treatment, the treatment proportioned and adjusted at once to their own value and nature and to the use which their critic is intending to make of them. For it is one of the greatest literary excellences of the Essays in Criticism that, with rare exceptions, they bear a real relation to each other and to the whole—that they are not a bundle but an organism; a university, not a mob.
The subjects of the two last essays, Spinoza and Marcus Aurelius, may at first sight, and not at first sight only, seem oddly chosen. For although the conception of literature illustrated in the earlier part of the book is certainly wide, and admits—nay, insists upon, as it always did with Mr Arnold—considerations of subject in general and of morals and religion in particular, yet it is throughout one of literature as such. Now, we cannot say that the interest of Spinoza or that of Marcus Aurelius, great as it is in both cases, is wholly, or in the main, or even in any considerable part, a literary interest. With Spinoza it is a philosophical-religious interest, with Marcus Aurelius a moral-religious, almost purely. The one may indeed illustrate that attempt to see things in a perfectly white light which Mr Arnold thought so important in literature; the other, that attention to conduct which he thought more important still. But they illustrate these things in themselves, not in relation to literature. They are less literary even than St Francis; far less than the author of the Imitation.
It cannot therefore but be suspected that in including them Mr Arnold, unconsciously perhaps, but more probably with some consciousness, was feeling his way towards that wide extension of the province of the critic, that resurrection of the general Socratic attitude, which he afterwards adventured. But it cannot be said that his experiments are on this particular occasion in any way disastrous. With both his subjects he had the very strongest sympathy—with Spinoza (as already with Heine) as a remarkable example of the Hebraic spirit and genius, rebellious to or transcending the usual limitations of Hebraism; with Marcus Aurelius as an example of that non-Christian morality and religiosity which also had so strong an attraction for him. There is no trace in either essay of the disquieting and almost dismaying jocularity which was later to invade his discussion of such things: we are still far from Bottles; the three Lord Shaftesburys relieve us by not even threatening to appear. And accordingly the two essays add in no small degree, though somewhat after the fashion of an appendix or belated episode, to the charm of the book. They have an unction which never, as it so often does in the case of Mr Arnold’s dangerous master and model Renan, degenerates into unctuosity; they are nobly serious, but without being in the least dull; they contain some exceedingly just and at the same time perfectly urbane criticism of the ordinary reviewing kind, and though they are not without instances of the author’s by-blows of slightly unproved opinion, yet these are by no means eminent in them, and are not of a provocative nature. And I do not think it fanciful to suppose that the note of grave if unclassified piety, of reconciliation and resignation, with which they close the book, was intended—that it was a deliberate “evening voluntary” to play out of church the assistants at a most remarkable function—such a function as criticism in English had not celebrated before, such as, I think, it may without unfairness be said has not been repeated since. Essays in Criticism, let us repeat, is a book which is classed and placed, and it will remain in that class and place: the fresh wreaths and the fresh mud, that may be in turn unfitly thrown upon it, will affect neither.
Between this remarkable book and the later ones of the same lustrum, we may conveniently take up the thread of biography proper where we last dropped it. The letters are fuller for this period than perhaps for any other; but this very fulness makes it all the more difficult to select incidents, never, perhaps, of the very first importance, but vying with each other in the minor biographical interests. A second fishing expedition to Viel Salm was attempted in August 1862; but it did not escape the curse which seems to dog attempts at repetition of the same pleasure. The river was hopelessly low; the fish would not take; and the traveller came back in very little more than “a day and a night and a morrow.” By December danger-signals are up in a letter to his mother, to the effect that “it is intolerable absurdity to profess [who does?] to see Christianity through the spectacles of a number of second- or third-rate men who lived in Queen Elizabeth’s time”—that time so fertile in nothing but the second-rate and the third. But it is followed a little later by the less disputable observation, “It is difficult to make out exactly at what [F.D.] Maurice is driving; perhaps he is always a little dim in his own mind” on that point.
The illuminations at the Prince of Wales’s marriage, where like other people he found “the crowd very good-humoured,” are noted; and the beginning of Thyrsis where and while the fritillaries blow. But from the literary point of view few letters are more interesting than a short one to Sir Mountstuart (then Mr) Grant Duff, dated May 14, 1863, in which Mr Arnold declines an edition of Heine, the loan of which was offered for his lecture—later the well-known essay. His object, he says, “is not so much to give a literary history of Heine’s work as to mark his place in modern European letters, and the special tendency and significance of what he did.” He will, therefore, not even read these things of Heine’s that he has not read, but will take the Romancero alone for his text, with a few quotations from elsewhere, With a mere passing indication of the fact that Matthew Arnold here, like every good critic of this century, avowedly pursues that plan of “placing” writers which some of his own admirers so foolishly decry, I may observe that this is a locus classicus for his own special kind of criticism. It is possible—I do not know whether he did so—that Sir Mountstuart may, on receiving the letter, have smiled and thought of “Mon siége est fait”; but I am sure he would be the first to admit that the cases were different. I do not myself think that Mr Arnold’s strong point was that complete grasp of a literary personality, and its place, which some critics aim at but which few achieve. His impatience—here perhaps half implied and later openly avowed—of the historic estimate in literature, would of itself have made this process irksome to him. But on the lines of his own special vocation as a critic it was not only irksome, it was unnecessary. His function was to mark the special—perhaps it would be safer to say a special—tendency of his man, and to bring that out with all his devices of ingenious reduplication, fascinating rhetoric, and skilful parading of certain favourite axioms and general principles. This function would not have been assisted—I think it nearly certain that it would have been hampered and baulked—by that attempt to find “the whole” which the Greek philosopher and poet so sadly and so truly declares that few boast to find. It was a side, a face, a phase of each man and writer, that he wished to bring out; and, though he might sometimes exaggerate this, yet his exaggeration was scarcely illegitimate. To bring out something he had to block out much. If he had attempted to show the whole Goethe, the whole Heine, the whole Homer or Shakespeare even, they would have been difficult if not impossible to group and to compare in the fashion in which he wished to deal with them.
And except on the sheer assumption, which is surely a fallacy, that suppressio veri is always and not only sometimes suggestio falsi, I do not see that he exceeded a due licence in this matter, while that he was wise in his generation there can be no doubt. He wanted to influence the average Englishman, and he knew perfectly well there is nothing the average Englishman dislikes so much as guarded and elaborately conditioned statements. The immense popularity and influence of Macaulay had been due to his hatred of half-lights, of “perhapses”; and little as Mr Arnold liked Macaulay’s fiddle, he was wise enough to borrow his rosin, albeit in disguise. If a critic makes too many provisos, if he “buts” too much, if he attempts to paint the warts as well as the beauties, he will be accused of want of sympathy, he will be taxed with timorousness and hedging, at best he will be blamed for wire-drawn and hair-splitting argument. The preambles of exposition, the conclusions of summing up, will often be considered tedious or impertinent. The opposite plan of selecting a nail and hitting that on the head till you have driven it home was, in fact, as much Mr Arnold’s as it was Macaulay’s. The hammer-play of the first was far more graceful and far less monotonous: yet it was hammer-play all the same. But we must return to our Letters.
A dinner with Lord Houghton—“all the advanced Liberals in religion and politics, and a Cingalese in full costume”—a visit to Cambridge and a stroll to Grantchester, notice of about the first elaborate appreciation of his critical work which had appeared in England, the article by the late Mr S.H. Reynolds in the Westminster Review for October 1863, visits to the Rothschilds at Aston Clinton and Mentmore, and interesting notices of the composition of the Joubert, the French Eton, &c., fill up the year. The death of Thackeray extracts one of those criticisms of his great contemporaries which act as little douches from time to time, in the words, “I cannot say that I thoroughly liked him, though we were on friendly terms: and he was not to my mind a great writer.” But the personal reflections which follow are of value. He finds “the sudden cessation of so vigorous an existence very sobering. To-day I am forty-one; the middle of life in any case, and for me perhaps much more than the middle. I have ripened and am ripening so slowly that I should be glad of as much time as possible. Yet I can feel, I rejoice to say, an inward spring which seems more and more to gain strength and to promise to resist outward shocks, if they must come, however rough. But of this inward spring one must not talk [it is only to his mother that he writes this] for it does not like being talked about, and threatens to depart if one will not leave it in mystery.”
An interview with Mr Disraeli at Aston Clinton, not, as one may suppose, without pleasant words, opens 1864. “It is only from politicians who have themselves felt the spell of literature that one gets these charming speeches,” he says, and they, not unnaturally, charmed him so much that he left his dressing-case and his umbrella behind him. But the anti-crusade is more and more declared. He “means to deliver the middle-class out of the hand of their Dissenting ministers,” and in the interval wants to know how “that beast of a word ‘waggonette’ is spelt?” The early summer was spent at Woodford, on the borders of Epping Forest, and the early autumn at Llandudno, where Welsh scenery and the poetry of the Celtic race “quite overpower” him. Alas! some other poetry did not, and when we find him in September thinking Enoch Arden “perhaps the best thing Tennyson has done,” we are not surprised to find this remarkable special appreciation followed by a general depreciation, which is quite in keeping. He is even tempted (and of course asked) to write a criticism of the Laureate, but justly replies, “How is that possible?”
From 1865 we get numerous notices of the notices of the Essays, and a pleasant and full account of a second official tour on the Continent, with special dwellings at most of the Western and Central European capitals. The tour lasted from April to November, and I have sometimes thought that it might, by itself, give a better idea of Mr Arnold as an epistoler than the Letters at large seem to have given. Early in 1866 we hear of the beginnings of the Friendship’s Garland series, though the occasion for that name did not come till afterwards. And he spent the summer of that year (as he did that of the next) in a farmhouse at West Humble, near Dorking, while he caught “a salmon” in the Deveron during September.
The occasion is perhaps a good one to say a few words on the relations between Mr Arnold and M. Renan, though the latter is not so prominent in the Continental letters as Sainte-Beuve and M. Scherer are. The author of the Vie de Jésus was a very slightly younger man than Mr Arnold (he was born in 1823), but in consequence of his having left the seminary and begun early to live by literary work, he was somewhat in advance of his English compeer in literary repute. His contributions to the Débats and the Revue des Deux Mondes began to be collected soon after 1850, and his first remarkable single book, Averroès et l’Averroisme, dates from that year. I do not know how early Mr Arnold became acquainted with his written work. But they actually met in 1859, during the business of the Foreign Education Commission, and there is a very remarkable passage in a letter to Mrs Forster on Christmas Eve of that year. He tells his sister of “Ernest Renan, a Frenchman I met in Paris,” and notes the considerable resemblance between their lines of endeavour, observing, however, that Renan is chiefly “trying to inculcate morality, in a high sense of the word, on the French,” while he is trying to inculcate intelligence on the English. After which he makes a long and enthusiastic reference to the essay, Sur la Poésie des Races Celtiques, the literary results of which we shall soon see. I do not know whether Mr Arnold ever expressed to his intimates—for the reference to M. Renan in “Numbers” is not quite explicit—what he thought of those later and very peculiar developments of “morality in a high sense of the word” which culminated in the Abbesse de Jouarre and other things. His sense of humour must have painfully suggested to him that his own familiar friend and pattern Frenchman had become one of the most conspicuous examples of that French lubricity which he himself denounced. But there was no danger of his imitating M. Renan in this respect. In others the following was quite unmistakable, and, I am bound to say, on the whole rather disastrous. In literary criticism Mr Arnold needed no teaching from M. Renan, and as his English training on one of its sides preserved him from the Frenchman’s sentimental hedonism, so on another it kept him from the wildest excesses of M. Renan’s critical reconstructions of sacred history. But he copied a great deal too much of his master’s dilettante attitude to religion as a whole, and, as we shall see, he adopted and carried a great deal further M. Renan’s (I am told) not particularly well-informed and (I am sure) very hazardous and fantastic ideas about Celtic literature. On the whole, the two were far too much alike to do each other any good. Exquisite even as M. Renan’s mere style is, it is exquisite by reason of sweetness, with a certain not quite white and slightly phosphorescent light, not by strength or by practical and masculine force. Now it was the latter qualities that Mr Arnold wanted; sweetness and light he could not want.
As the tenure of his Chair drew to a close, and as he began to loathe examination papers more and more (indeed I know no one to whom usus concinnat amorem in the case of these documents), he made some endeavours to obtain employment which might be, if not both more profitable and less onerous, at any rate one or the other. First he tried for a Charity Commissionership; then for the librarianship of the House of Commons. For the former post it may be permitted to think that his extremely strong—in fact partisan—opinions, both on education and on the Church of England, were a most serious disqualification; his appointment to the latter would have been an honour to the House and to England, and would have shown that sometimes at any rate the right man can find the right place. But he got neither. He delivered his last Oxford lecture in the summer term of 1867. I remember that there were strong undergraduate hopes that Mr Browning, who was an Honorary M.A., might be got to succeed him; but it was decided that the honorary qualification was insufficient, and I daresay there were other objections. Mr Arnold had a sort of “send-off” in the shape of two great dinners at Balliol and Merton, at which he and Mr Browning were the principal guests, and the close of his professorial career was further made memorable by the issue of the Study of Celtic Literature in prose and the New Poems in verse, with Schools and Universities on the Continent to follow next year. Of these something must be said before this chapter is closed.
On the Study of Celtic Literature is the first book of his to which, as a whole, and from his own point of view, we may take rather serious objections. That it has merits not affected by these objections need hardly be said; indeed I think it would not be foolish to say that it is—or was—even the superior of the Homer in comparative and indirect importance. In that Mr Arnold had but, at the best, roused men to enter upon new ways of dealing with old and familiar matter; in this he was leading them to conquest of new realms. Now, as we have seen, it was exactly this exploration, this expansion, of which English was then in most need, just as it is now perhaps in most need of concentration and retreat upon the older acquisitions.
So far so good; but if we go farther, we do not at first fare better. It would be grossly unjust to charge Mr Arnold with all the nonsense which has since been talked about Celtic Renascences; but I fear we cannot write all that nonsense off his account. In particular, he set an example, which has in this and other matters been far too widely followed, of speaking without sufficient knowledge of fact. It cannot be too peremptorily laid down that the literary equivalent of a “revoke”—the literary act after which, if he does it on purpose, you must not play with a man—is speaking of authors and books which he has not read and cannot read in the original, while he leaves you ignorant of his ignorance. This Mr Arnold never committed, and could never have committed. But short of it, and while escaping its penalty, a man may err by speaking too freely even of what he confesses that he does not know; and of this minor and less discreditable sin, I own (acknowledging most frankly that I know even less of the originals than he did), I think Mr Arnold was here guilty.
Exactly how much Gaelic, Irish, or Welsh Mr Arnold knew at first-hand, I cannot say: he frankly enough confesses that his knowledge was very closely limited. But what is really surprising, is that he does not seem to have taken much trouble to extend it at second-hand. A very few Welsh triads and scraps of Irish are all that, even in translation, he seems to have consulted: he never, I think, names Dafydd ap Gwilym, usually put forward as the greatest of Celtic poets; and in the main his citations are derived either from Ossian (“this do seem going far,” as an American poetess observes), or else from the Mabinogion, where some of the articles are positively known to be late translations of French-English originals, and the others are very uncertain. You really cannot found any safe literary generalisations on so very small a basis of such very shaky matter. In fact, Mr Arnold’s argument for the presence of “Celtic magic,” &c., in Celtic poetry comes to something like this. “There is a quality of magic in Shakespeare, Keats, &c.; this magic must be Celtic: therefore it must be in Celtic poetry.” Fill up the double enthymeme who list, I am not going to endeavour to do so. I shall only say that two sentences give the key-note of the book as argument. “Rhyme itself, all the weight of evidence tends to show, came into our poetry from the Celts.” Now to some of us all the weight of evidence tends to show that it came from the Latins. “Our only first-rate body of contemporary poetry is the German.” Now at the time (1867), for more than thirty years, Germany had not had a single poet of the first or the second class except Heine, who, as Mr Arnold himself very truly says, was not a German but a Jew.
But once more, what we go to Mr Matthew Arnold for is not fact, it is not argument, it is not even learning. It is phrase, attitude, style, that by which, as he says admirably in this very book, “what a man has to say is recast and heightened in such a manner as to add dignity and distinction to it.” It is the new critical attitude, the appreciation of literary beauty in and for itself, the sense of “the word,” the power of discerning and the power of reflecting charm, the method not more different from the wooden deduction of the old school of critics than from the merely unenlightened and Philistine commonness of the reviewers, his earlier contemporaries, or from the aimless “I like that” and “I don’t like this” which does duty now, and did then, and has done always, for criticism itself. True, Mr Arnold himself might be wilful, capricious, haphazard; true, he might often be absolutely unable to give any real reason for the faith that was in him; true, he sometimes might have known more than he did know about his subject. But in all these points he saved himself: in his wilfulness, by the grace and charm that sometimes attend caprice; in his want of reason, by his genuineness of faith itself; in his occasional lack of the fullest knowledge, by the admirable use—not merely display—which he made of what knowledge he had. There may be hardly a page of the two books of his lectures in which it is not possible to find some opportunity for disagreement—sometimes pretty grave disagreement; but I am sure that no two more valuable books, in their kind and subject, to their country and time, have been ever issued from the press.
The New Poems make a volume of unusual importance in the history of poetical careers. Mr Arnold lived more than twenty years after the date of their publication; but his poetical production during that time filled no more than a few pages. At this date he was a man of forty-five—an age at which the poetical impulse has been supposed to run low, but perhaps with no sufficient reason. Poets of such very different types as Dryden and Tennyson have produced work equal to their best, if not actually their best, at that age and later. Mr Browning had, a few years before, produced what are perhaps his actually greatest volumes, Men and Women and Dramatis Personae, the one at forty-three, the other at fifty-two. According to Mr Arnold’s own conception of poetry-making, as depending upon the subject and upon the just and artist-like exposition of that subject, no age should be too late.
Certainly this age was not too late with him. The contents all answered strictly enough to their title, except that Empedocles on Etna and some half-dozen of its companions were, at Mr Browning’s request, reprinted from the almost unpublished volume of 1852, and that Thyrsis, St Brandan, A Southern Night, and the Grande Chartreuse had made magazine appearances. Again the moment was most important. When Mr Arnold had last made (omitting with an apology the “transient and embarrassed phantom” of Merope) an appearance in 1855, the transition age of English nineteenth-century poetry was in full force. No one’s place was safe but Tennyson’s; and even his was denied by some, including Mr Arnold himself, who never got his eyes quite clear of scales in that matter. Browning, though he had handed in indisputable proofs, had not yet had them allowed; the Spasmodics had not disappeared; the great prae-Raphaelite school was but on the way. The critics knew not what to think; the vulgar thought (to the tune of myriad copies) of Tupper. Both classes, critic and public, rent Maud and neglected Men and Women: The Defence of Guenevere had not yet rung the matins—bell in the ears of the new generation.
Now things were all altered. The mixture of popularity and perfection in the Idylls and the Enoch Arden volume—the title poem and Aylmer’s Field for some, The Voyage and Tithonus and In the Valley of Cauterets for others—had put Tennyson’s place
“Beyond the arrows, shouts, and views of men.”
The three-volume collection of Browning’s Poems, and Dramatis Personae which followed to clench it, had nearly, if not quite, done the same for him. The Defence of Guenevere and The Life and Death of Jason, Atalanta, Chastelard, and most of all the Poems and Ballads, had launched an entirely new poetical school with almost unexampled pomp and promise on the world. The Spasmodics were forgotten, the Tupper cult had been nearly (not yet quite) laughed out of existence. That Mr Arnold’s own poems had had any widely extended sale or reading could hardly be said; but they were read by those who were or were shortly to be themselves read. You had not to look far in any Oxford college (I cannot speak of Cambridge) before you found them on those undergraduate shelves which mean so much; while many who, from general distaste to poetry or from accident, knew them not, or hardly knew them, were familiar with their author’s prose work, or at least knew him as one whom others knew.
The volume itself was well calculated to take advantage, to at least a moderate extent, of this conjunction of circumstance. At no time was the appeal of Mr Arnold’s poetry of the most impetuous or peremptory order. And it might be contended that this collection contains nothing quite up to the very best things of the earlier poems, to the Shakespeare sonnet, to The Scholar-Gipsy, to the Isolation stanzas. But with the majority of its readers it was sure rather to send them to these earlier things than to remind them thereof, and its own attractions were abundant, various, and strong.
In the poet himself there was perhaps a slight consciousness of “the silver age.” The prefatory Stanzas, a title changed in the collected works to Persistency of Poetry, sound this note—
“Though the Muse be gone away,
Though she move not earth to-day,
Souls, erewhile who caught her word,
Ah! still harp on what they heard.”
A confession perhaps a little dangerous, when the Muses were speaking in no uncertain tones not merely to juniors like Mr Morris and Mr Swinburne but to seniors like Tennyson and Browning. But the actual contents were more than reassuring. Of Empedocles it is not necessary to speak again: Thyrsis could not but charm. The famous line,
“And that sweet city with her dreaming spires,”
sets the key dangerously high; but it is kept by the magnificent address to the cuckoo,
”Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go?“
and the flower-piece that follows; by that other single masterpiece,
”The coronals of that forgotten time;“
by the more solemn splendour of the stanza beginning
“And long the way appears which seemed so short;”
by the Signal tree; and by the allegoric close with the reassertion of the Scholar. All these things stand by themselves, hold their sure and reserved place, even in the rush and crowd of the poetry of the sixties, the richest, perhaps, since the time from 1805 to 1822.
Saint Brandan, which follows, has pathos if not great power, and connects itself agreeably with those Celtic and mediaeval studies which had just attracted and occupied Mr Arnold. The sonnets which form the next division might be variously judged. None of them equals the Shakespeare; and one may legitimately hold the opinion that the sonnet was not specially Mr Arnold’s form. Its greatest examples have always been reached by the reflex, the almost combative, action of intense poetic feeling—Shakespeare’s, Milton’s, Wordsworth’s, Rossetti’s—and intensity was not Mr Arnold’s characteristic. Yet Austerity of Poetry, East London, and Monica’s Last Prayer must always stand so high in the second class that it is hardly critical weakness to allow them the first. And then the tide rises. Calais Sands may not be more than very pretty, but it is that, and Dover Beach is very much more. Mr Arnold’s theological prepossessions and assumptions may appear in it, and it may be unfortunately weak as an argument, for except the flood itself nothing is so certain a testimony to the flood as the ebb. But the order, the purpose, the argument, the subject, matter little to poetry. The expression, the thing that is not the subject, the tendency outside the subject, which makes for poetry, are here, and almost of the very best. Here you have that passionate interpretation of life, which is so different a thing from the criticism of it; that marvellous pictorial effect to which the art of line and colour itself is commonplace and banal, and which prose literature never attains except by a tour de force; that almost more marvellous accompaniment of vowel and consonant music, independent of the sense but reinforcing it, which is the glory of English poetry among all, and of nineteenth-century poetry among all English, poetries. As is the case with most Englishmen, the sea usually inspired Mr Arnold—it is as natural to great English poets to leave the echo of the very word ringing at the close of their verse as it was to Dante to end with “stars.” But it has not often inspired any poet so well as this, nor anywhere this poet better than here. If at any time a critic may without fatuity utter judgment with some confidence, it is where he disagrees with the sentiment and admires the poem; and for my part I find in Dover Beach, even without the Merman, without the Scholar-Gipsy, without Isolation, a document which I could be content to indorse “Poetry, sans phrase.”
The Terrace at Berne has been already dealt with, but that mood for epicede, which was so frequent in Mr Arnold, finds in the Carnac stanzas adequate, and in A Southern Night consummate, expression. The Fragment of Chorus of a Dejaneira, written long before, but now first published, has the usual faults of Mr Arnold’s rhymeless verse. It is really quite impossible, when one reads such stuff as—
“Thither in your adversity
Do you betake yourselves for light,
But strangely misinterpret all you hear.
For you will not put on
New hearts with the inquirer’s holy robe
And purged considerate minds”—
not to ask what, poetically speaking, is the difference between this and the following—
“To college in the pursuit of duly
Did I betake myself for lecture;
But very soon I got extremely wet,
For I had not put on
The stout ulster appropriate to Britain,
And my umbrella was at home.”
But Palladium, if not magnificent, is reconciling, the Shakespearian Youth’s Agitations beautiful, and Growing Old delightful, not without a touch of terror. It is the reply, the verneinung, to Browning’s magnificent Rabbi ben Ezra, and one has almost to fly to that stronghold in order to resist its chilling influence. But it is poetry for all that, and whatever there is in it of weakness is redeemed, though not quite so poetically, by The Last Word. The Lines written in Kensington Gardens (which had appeared with Empedocles, but were missed above) may be half saddened, half endeared to some by their own remembrance of the “black-crowned red-boled” giants there celebrated—trees long since killed by London smoke, as the good-natured say, as others, by the idiotic tidiness of the gardeners, who swept the needles up and left the roots without natural comfort and protection. And then, after lesser things, the interesting, if not intensely poetical, Epilogue to Lessing’s Laocoon leads us to one of the most remarkable of all Mr Arnold’s poems, Bacchanalia, or the New Age. The word remarkable has been used advisedly. Bacchanalia, though it has poignant and exquisite poetic moments, is not one of the most specially poetical of its author’s pieces. But it is certainly his only considerable piece of that really poetic humour which is so rare and delightful a thing. And, like all poetic humour, it oscillates between cynicism and passion almost bewilderingly. For a little more of this what pages and pages of jocularity about Bottles and the Rev. Esau Hittall would we not have given! what volumes of polemic with the Guardian and amateur discussions of the Gospel of St John! In the first place, note the metrical structure, the sober level octosyllables of the overture changing suddenly to a dance-measure which, for a wonder in English, almost keeps the true dactylic movement. How effective is the rhetorical iteration of
“The famous orators have shone,
The famous poets sung and gone,”
and so on for nearly half a score of lines! How perfect the sad contrast of the refrain—
“Ah! so the quiet was!
So was the hush!”
how justly set and felicitously worded the rural picture of the opening! how riotous the famous irruption of the New Agers! how adequate the quiet-moral of the end, that the Past is as the Present, and more also! And then he went and wrote about Bottles!
“Progress,” with a splendid opening—
“The master stood upon the mount and taught—
He saw a fire in his disciples’ eyes,”—
conducts us to two other fine, though rhymeless, dirges. In the first, Rugby Chapel, the intensity of feeling is sufficient to carry off the lack of lyrical accomplishment. The other is the still better Heine’s Grave, and contains the famous and slightly pusillanimous lines about the “weary Titan,” which are among the best known of their author’s, and form at once the motto and the stigma of mid-century Liberal policy. And then the book is concluded by two other elegies—in rhyme this time—The Stanzas written at the Grande Chartreuse and Obermann once more. They are, however, elegies of a different kind, much more self-centred, and, indeed, little more than fresh variations on “the note,” as I ventured to call it before. Their descriptive and autobiographic interest is great, and if poetry were a criticism of life, there is plenty of that of them. The third book—Schools and Universities on the Continent (1868)—in which are put the complete results of the second Continental exploration—is, I suppose, much less known than the non-professional work, though perhaps not quite so unknown as the earlier report on elementary education. By far the larger part of it—the whole, indeed, except a “General Conclusion” of some forty pages—is a reasoned account of the actual state of matters in France, Italy, Germany, and Switzerland. It is not exactly judicial; for the conclusion—perhaps the foregone conclusion—obviously colours every page. But it is an excellent example (as, indeed, is all its author’s non-popular writing) of clear and orderly exposition—never arranged ad captandum, but also never “dry.” Indeed there certainly are some tastes, and there may be many, to which the style is a distinct relief after the less quiet and more mannered graces of some of the rest.
Opinions may differ more as to the value of the book as a lesson, or as an argument. Mr Arnold had started with a strong belief in the desirableness—indeed of the necessity—of State-control of the most thoroughgoing kind in education; and he was not at all likely to miss the opportunity of fetching new weapons from the very arsenals and places d’armes of that system. He was thoroughly convinced that English ways generally, and especially the ways of English schools and colleges, were wrong; and he had, of course, no difficulty in pointing triumphantly to the fact that, if the institutions of Continental countries differed in some ways from each other, they all differed in nearly the same way from ours. It may undoubtedly be claimed for him—by those who see any force in the argument—that events have followed him. Education, both secondary and university in England, has to a large extent gone since on the lines he indicates; the threatened superiority of the German bagman has asserted itself even more and more; the “teaching of literature” has planted a terrible fixed foot in our schools and colleges. But perhaps the weight usually assigned to this kind of corroboration is rather imaginary. That a thing has happened does not prove that it ought to have happened, except on a theory of determinism, which puts “conduct” out of sight altogether. There are those who will still, in the vein of Mephistopheles-Akinetos, urge that the system which gave us the men who pulled us out of the Indian Mutiny can stand comparison with the system which gave France the authors of the débâcle; that the successes of Germany over France in war have no necessary connection with education, and those of Germany over England in commerce, diplomacy, &c., still less. They will even go further—some of them—and ask whether the Continental practices and the Arnoldian principles do not necessitate divers terribly large and terribly ill-based assumptions, as that all men are educable, that the value of education is undiminished by its diffusion, that all, or at least most, subjects are capable of being made educational instruments, and a great many more.
On the other hand, they will cheerfully grant that Mr Arnold never succumbed to that senseless belief in examination which has done, and is doing, such infinite harm. But they will add to the debit side that the account of English university studies which ends the book was even at the time of writing so inaccurate as to be quite incomprehensible, unless we suppose that Mr Arnold was thinking of the days of his own youth, and not of those with complete accuracy. He says “the examination for the degree of bachelor of arts, which we place at the end of our three years’ university course, is merely the Abiturienten-examen of Germany, the épreuve du baccalauréat of France, placed in both those countries at the entrance to university studies”; and it is by this that he justifies Signer Matteucci’s absurd description of Oxford and Cambridge as hauts lyceés Now, in the first place, there is not one single word in this sentence, or in the context, or, so far as I remember, in the whole book, about the Honours system, which for very many years before 1868 had exalted the standard infinitely higher in the case of a very large proportion of men. And in the second place, there is not a word about the Scholarship system, which in the same way had for very many years provided an entrance standard actually higher—far higher in some ways—than the concluding examinations of the French baccalauréat. My own days at Oxford were from 1863 to 1868, the year of Mr Arnold’s book. During that time there were always in the university some 400 men who had actually obtained scholarships on this standard; and a very considerable number who had competed on it, and done fairly. Whether Mr Arnold shared Mark Pattison’s craze about the abolition of the pass-man altogether, I do not know. But he ought to have known, and I should think he must have known, that at the time of his writing the mere and sheer pass-man—the man whose knowledge was represented by the minimum of Smalls, Mods, and Greats—was, if not actually in a minority,—in some colleges at least he was that—at any rate in a pretty bare majority. With his love of interference and control, he might have retorted that this did not matter, that the university permitted every one to stick to the minimum. But as a matter of fact he suggests that it provided no alternative, no maximum or majus at all.
By the time that we have now reached, that of his giving up the professorship, Mr Arnold’s position was, for good and for evil, mostly fixed. When he took up the duties of his chair he was, though by no means a very young man and already the author of much remarkable work, yet almost unknown out of Oxford and a small official circle in London. He had now, at forty-five, not exactly popularity, but a very considerable, and a very lively and growing, reputation. By far the most and the best of his poetry was written; but it was only just coming to be at all generally read or at all justly appreciated. He had, partly in obeying, and partly in working against his official superiors, acquired a distinct position as an educational reformer. He had become something of a figure in society. But, above all, he had proclaimed with undoubting authority, and had exemplified with remarkable and varied skill, a new or at least a very greatly altered kind of literary criticism. And this had already threatened incursions into domains from which men of letters as such had generally kept aloof, or which, if they had touched, they had touched not as men of letters. Something of Socrates, something of Addison, something of Johnson, mingled in Mr Arnold’s presentation of himself as, if not exactly an arbiter, at any rate a suggester of elegances in all things, poetry and politics, prose and polite manners, public thought, public morality, religion itself. These pretensions, if urged in a less agreeable manner, would have been intolerable; they were not universally tolerated as it was: but the gifts and graces of the critic made them—so far—inoffensive, even rather fascinating, to all save the least accommodating or the most clear-sighted, and to some even of these.
And we must remember that this appearance of Mr Arnold as the mild and ingenious tamer of the ferocious manners of Britons coincided with far wider and more remarkable innovations. This was the time, at home, of the second Parliamentary Reform, which did at least as much to infringe the authority of his enemy the Philistine, as the first had done to break the power of the half-dreaded, half-courted Barbarian. This was the time when, abroad, the long-disguised and disorganised power of Germany was to rearrange the map of Europe, and to bring about a considerable rearrangement of Mr Arnold’s own ideas as to the respective greatness of foreign nations. And finally the walls of another stronghold of British Philistia, its intense and apparently impregnable self-satisfaction with Free-trade and cheap money and so forth, were tottering and crumbling. A blast against them—indeed a series of blasts from Chartism to the Latter-day Pamphlets—had been blown long before by Carlyle, in very different tones from Mr Arnold’s. They had lost their stoutest champion and their most eloquent panegyrist in Macaulay. But Sadowa and household suffrage gave the final summons, if not the final shake. Mr Arnold had done his best to co-operate; but his object, to do him justice, was to be rather a raiser of the walls of Thebes than an over-thrower of those of Jericho, or even of Ashdod. He set about, in all seriousness, to clear away the rubbish and begin the re-edification; unluckily, in but too many cases, with dubious judgment, and by straying into quarters where he had no vocation. But he never entirely neglected his real business and his real vocation, and fortunately he returned to them almost entirely before it was too late.
Chapter IV.
In the Wilderness.
That the end of Mr Arnold’s tenure of the Professorship of Poetry was a most important epoch in his life is sufficiently evident. In the ten years that came to an end then, he had, as two such extremely competent judges as Mr Disraeli and Crabb Robinson in different ways told him,[13] passed from comparative obscurity into something more than comparative prominence. His chair had been for him a real cathedra, and his deliverances from it had always assumed, and had at length, to a great extent, achieved, real authority. In criticism it was evident that if he had not revealed positively novel aspects of truth, he had formulated and put on record aspects which were presenting themselves to many, nay, most, of the best critical minds of his day. His criticism had drawn his poetry with it, if not into actual popularity, yet into something like attention. His attempts to obtain some other employment less irksome, less absorbing, and more profitable, had indeed been unsuccessful; but he was rising in his own department, and his work, if still in part uncongenial and decidedly laborious, appears to have been much less severe than in earlier days. Partly this work itself, partly his writings, and partly other causes had opened to him a very large circle of acquaintance, which it was in his own power to extend or contract as he pleased. His domestic life was perfectly happy, if his means were not very great: and his now assured literary position made it easy for him to increase these means, not indeed largely, but to a not despicable extent, by writing. The question was, “What should he write?”
It is probably idle ever to wish that a man had done anything different from that which he has done. Without being a rigid Determinist, one may be pretty well convinced that the actual conduct is the joint result of abilities, and of desires, and of opportunity to exercise them, and that the man, had he really done otherwise, would have been unsuccessful or unhappy or both. But I fear that if I had been arbiter of Mr Arnold’s fate at this moment I should have arranged it differently. He should have given us more poems—the man who, far later, wrote the magnificent Westminster Abbey on such a subject as Dean Stanley, had plenty more poetry in his sack. And in prose he should have given us infinite essays, as many as De Quincey’s or as Sainte-Beuve’s own, and more than Hazlitt’s, of the kind of the Heine and the Joubert earlier, of the Wordsworth and the Byron later. I can see no reason why, in the twenty-one years’ lease of life upon which he now entered, he should not have produced a volume a-year of these,—there are more than enough subjects in the various literatures that he knew; and though it is possible that in such extended application his method might have proved monotonous, or his range have seemed narrow, it is not likely. To complete the thing, I should have given him, instead of his inspectorship, a headship at Oxford, for which, it seems to me, he was admirably fitted. But Dis aliter visum: at least it seemed otherwise good to Mr Arnold himself as far as his literary employments were concerned, and the gods did not interfere.
We have seen that he had, some years before, conceived the ambitious idea of changing the mind of England on a good many points by no means merely literary; and he seems, not altogether unnaturally, to have thought that now was the time to apply seriously to that work. His tenure of the Oxford chair had given him the public ear; and the cessation of that tenure had removed any official seal of etiquette which it might have laid on his own lips. A far less alert and acute mind than his must have seen that the Reform troubles of 1866 and the “leap in the dark” of 1867 were certain to bring about very great changes indeed at home; and that the war of the first-named year meant the alteration of many things abroad. He at least thought—and there was some justification of a good many kinds for him in thinking—that intellectual changes, of importance equal to the political, were coming or come upon the world. And so for a time he seems to have grown rather cold towards the Muses, his earliest and always his truest loves. Social, political, and religious matters tempted him away from literature; and for a matter of ten years it can hardly be said that he had anything to do with her except to take her name in vain in the title of by far his worst, as it was by far his most popular, volume.
It has been hinted in a note on one of the early pages in this book that the secret of this unfortunate twist is at least partly to be found in the peculiar character of Mr Arnold’s official employment. For nearly twenty years he had been constantly thrown into contact with the English Dissenters; and, far earlier than the time which we have reached, they seem not only, in familiar phrase, to have “got upon his nerves,” but to have affected his brain. He saw all things in Dissent—or, at least, in the middle-class Philistine Dissenter. His Philistia is not in the least a true portrait of the average middle-class household thirty or forty years ago; though, I daresay (I have little direct knowledge), it is not an unfair one of the average Dissenting middle-class household. The religion which Mr Arnold attacks is not the religion of the Church of England at all, or only of what was even then a decaying and uninfluential part of it, the extremer and more intolerant sect of the Evangelicals. Once more, I cannot from personal knowledge say whether this portrait was true of Dissent, but I can believe it.
Now, to derive an idea of England from the English Dissenter is and was absurd. Politically, indeed, he had only too much power between 1832 and 1866, from the tradition which made Liberal politicians fond of petting him. Socially, intellectually, and to a great extent religiously, he had next to no power at all. To take the average manager of a “British” school as the average representative of the British nation was the wildest and most mischievous of confusions. Yet this practically was the basis of Mr Arnold’s crusade between 1867 and 1877.
The First Blast of the Trumpet was, intentionally no doubt, the last of the Oxford lectures, and for that very reason a rather gentle and insinuating one. Culture its Enemies, which was the origin and first part, so to say, of Culture and Anarchy, carried the campaign begun in the Essays in Criticism forward; but only in the most cautious manner, a caution no doubt partly due to the fact of the author’s expressed, and very natural and proper, intention of closing his professorial exercises with the bocca dolce. Still this is at least conceivably due to the fact that the boldest extension of the campaign itself had not definitely entered, or at least possessed, the author’s mind. A considerable time, indeed from July 1867 to January 1868, passed before the publication of the lecture as an article in the Cornhill was followed up by the series from the latter month to August, which bore the general title of Anarchy and Authority, and completed the material of Culture and Anarchy itself. This, as a book, appeared in 1869.
It began, according to the author’s favourite manner, which was already passing into something like a mannerism, with a sort of half-playful, half-serious battery against a living writer (in this case Mr Frederic Harrison), and with a laudatory citation from a dead one (in this case Bishop Wilson). Mr Harrison had blasphemed “the cant about culture,” and Mr Arnold protests that culture’s only aim is in the Bishop’s words, “to make reason and the will of God prevail.” In the first chapter, famous thenceforward in English literature by its title, borrowed from Swift, of “Sweetness and Light,” we have the old rallyings of the Daily Telegraph and the Nonconformist. Then the general view is laid down, and is developed in those that follow, but still with more of a political than a religious bent, and with the political bent itself chiefly limited to the social aspect.
“Doing as one Likes” scatters a mild rain of ridicule on this supposed fetich of all classes in England; and then, the very famous, if not perhaps very felicitous, nickname-classification of “Barbarian-Philistine-Populace” is launched, defended, discussed in a chapter to itself. To do Mr Arnold justice, the three classes are, if not very philosophically defined, very impartially and amusingly rallied, the rallier taking up that part of humble Philistine conscious of his own weaknesses, which, till he made it slightly tiresome by too long a run, was piquant enough. The fourth chapter, “Hebraism and Hellenism,” coasts the sands and rocks (on which, as it seems to some, Mr Arnold was later to make shipwreck) very nearly in the title and rather nearly in the contents, but still with a fairly safe offing. The opposition might be put too bluntly by saying that “Hellenism” represents to Mr Arnold the love of truth at any price, and “Hebraism” the love of goodness at any price; but the actual difference is not far from this, or from those of knowing and doing, fear of stupidity and fear of sin, &c. We have the quotation from Mr Carlyle about Socrates being “terribly at ease in Zion,” the promulgation of the word Renascence for Renaissauce, and so forth. “Porro unum est necessarium,” a favourite tag of Mr Arnold’s, rather holds up another side of the same lesson than continues it in a fresh direction; and then “Our Liberal Practitioners” brings it closer to politics, but (since the immediate subject is the Disestablishment of the Irish Church) nearer also to the quicksands. Yet Mr Arnold still keeps away from them; though from what followed it would seem that he could only have done so by some such tour de force as the famous ”clubhauling“ in Peter Simple. Had Culture and Anarchy stood by itself, it would have been, though very far from its author’s masterpiece, an interesting document both in regard to his own mental history and that of England during the third quarter of the century, containing some of his best prose, and little, if any, of his worst sense.
But your crusader—still more your anti-crusader—never stops, and Mr Arnold was now pledged to this crusade or anti-crusade. In October 1869 he began, still in the Cornhill,—completing it by further instalments in the same place later in the year, and publishing it in 1870,—the book called St Paul and Protestantism, where he necessarily exchanges the mixed handling of Culture and Anarchy for a dead-set at the religious side of his imaginary citadel of Philistia. The point of at least ostensible connection—of real departure—is taken from the ”Hebraism and Hellenism“ contrast of the earlier book; and the same contrast is strongly urged throughout, especially in the coda, “A Comment on Christmas.” But this contrast is gradually shaped into an onslaught on Puritanism, or rather on its dogmatic side, for its appreciation of “conduct” of morality is ever more and more eulogised. As regards the Church of England herself, the attack is oblique; in fact, it is disclaimed, and a sort of a Latitudinarian Union, with the Church for centre, and dogma left out, is advocated. Another of our Arnoldian friends, the “Zeit-Geist,” makes his appearance, and it is more than hinted that one of the most important operations of this spirit is the exploding of miracles. The book is perfectly serious—its seriousness, indeed, is quite evidently deliberate and laboured, so that the author does not even fear to appear dull. But it is still admirably written, as well as studiously moderate and reverent; no exception can be taken to it on the score of taste, whatever may be taken on the score of orthodoxy from the one side, where no doubt the author would hasten to plead guilty, or on those of logic, history, and the needs of human nature on the other, where no doubt his “not guilty” would be equally emphatic.
The case is again altered, and very unfortunately altered, in the next, the most popular and, as has been said, the most famous of the series—its zenith at once and its nadir—Literature and Dogma. A very much smaller part of this had appeared in magazine form; indeed, the contents of St Paul and Protestantism itself must have seemed odd in that shape, and only strong sympathies on the part of the editor could have obtained admission for any part of Literature and Dogma. Much of it must have been written amid the excitement of the French-Prussian War, when the English public was athirst for “skits” of all sorts, and when Mr Arnold himself was “i’ the vein,” being engaged in the composition of much of the matter of Friendship’s Garland. St Paul and Protestantism had had two editions in the same year (Culture and Anarchy, a far better thing, waited six for its second), and altogether the state of things was such as to invite any author to pursue the triumph and partake the gale. And he might at first flatter himself that he had caught the one and made cyclone-use of the other; for the book, appearing at the end of 1872, with the date of 1873, passed through three editions in that year, a fourth in 1874, and a fifth two years later. It was thus by far Mr Arnold’s most popular book; I repeat also that it is quite his worst.
That it was in hopelessly bad taste here and there—in taste so bad that Mr Arnold himself later cut out the most famous passage of the book, to which accordingly we need here only allude—can be denied by nobody except those persons who hold “good form” to be, as somebody or other puts it, “an insular British delusion of the fifties and sixties.” But this excision of his and, I think, some others, besides the “citations and illustrations” which he confesses to having excluded from the popular edition, may give us the welcome leave to deal very briefly with this side of the matter in other respects also. We may pass over the fun which Mr Arnold had with Archbishop Thomson (who, whatsoe’er the failings on his part, was at any rate a logician) on the theory of causation; with the University of Cambridge about hominum divomque voluptas alma Venus (I have forgotten what was the bearing of this joke, and it is probably not worth inquiring into); with the Bishop of Gloucester about the Personality of God; with the Athanasian Creed, and its “science got ruffled by fighting.” These things, as “form,” class themselves; one mutters something well known about risu inepto, and passes on. Such a tone on such a subject can only be carried off completely by the gigantic strength of Swift, though no doubt it is well enough in keeping with the merely negative and destructive purpose of Voltaire. It would be cruel to bring Literature and Dogma into competition with A Tale of a Tub; it would be more than unjust to bring it into comparison with Le Taureau blanc. And neither comparison is necessary, because the great fault of Literature and Dogma appears, not when it is considered as a piece of doubtful or not doubtful taste, but when it is regarded as a serious composition.
In the first place, the child-like fashion in which Mr Arnold swallowed the results of that very remarkable “science,” Biblical criticism, has always struck some readers with astonishment and a kind of terror. This new La Fontaine asking everybody, “Avez-vous lu Kuenen?” is a lesson more humbling to the pride of literature than almost any that can be found. “The prophecy of the details of Peter’s death,” we are told in Literature and Dogma, “is almost certainly an addition after the event, because it is not at all in the manner of Jesus.” Observe that we have absolutely no details, no evidence of any sort whatever, outside the Gospels for the “manner of Jesus.” It is not, as in some at least of the more risky exercises of profane criticism in a similar field, as if we had some absolutely or almost absolutely authenticated documents, and others to judge by them. External evidence, except for the mere fact of Christ’s existence and death, we have none. So you must, by the inner light, pick and choose out of the very same documents, resting on the very same authority, what, according to your good pleasure, is “in the manner of Jesus,” and then black-mark the rest as being not so. Of course, when Mr Arnold thus wrote, the method had not been pushed ad absurdum, as it was later by his friend M. Renan in the Histoire d’Israël, to the dismay and confusion of no less intelligent and unorthodox a critic than his other friend, M. Scherer. But it is more or less the method of all Biblical criticism of this sort, and Mr Arnold follows it blindly.
Again, the chief bent of the book is to establish that “miracles do not happen.” Alas! it is Mr Arnold’s unhappy lot that if miracles do happen his argument confessedly disappears, while even if miracles do not happen it is, for his purpose, valueless Like almost all critics of his class recently, especially like Professor Huxley in another division, he appears not to comprehend what, to the believers in the supernatural, the supernatural means. He applies, as they all apply, the tests of the natural, and says, “Now really, you know, these tests are destructive.” He says—he cannot prove—that miracles do not happen now; his adversaries, if they were wise, would simply answer, “Après?” Do any of them pretend to prescribe to their God that His methods shall be always the same, or that those methods shall stand the tests of the laboratory and the School of Charters? that He shall give “a good title,” like a man who is selling a house? Some at least would rather not; they would feel appallingly little interest in a Divinity after this sworn-attorney and chartered-accountant fashion, who must produce vouchers for all His acts. And further (to speak with reverence), the Divinity whom they do worship would be likely to answer Mr Arnold in the words of a prophet of Mr Arnold’s own—
“Du gleichst dem Geist den du begreifst,
Nicht Mir!”
But this is not all. There is not only begging of the question but ignoring of the issue. Literature and Dogma, to do it strict justice, is certainly not, in intention at any rate, a destructive book. It is meant, and meant very seriously, to be constructive—to provide a substitute for the effete religion of Hooker and Wilson, of Laud and Pusey, as well as for that of Baxter and Wesley and Mr Miall. This new religion is to have for its Jachin Literature—that is to say, a delicate æsthetic appreciation of all that is beautiful in Christianity and out of it; and for its Boaz Conduct—that is to say, a morality at least as rigid as that of the purest Judaism, though more amiable. If dogma is to be banished, so is anything like licence; and in the very book itself Mr Arnold formulated, against his once (and still partly) beloved France, something like that denunciation of her worship of Lubricity which he afterwards put more plainly still. Even Hellenism, the lauded Hellenism, is told to mend its ways (indeed there was need for it), and the Literature-without-Dogmatist will have to behave himself with an almost Pharisaic correctness, though in point of belief he is to be piously Sadducee.
Now this is all very pretty and very creditable, but it will not work. The goods, to use the vulgar but precise formula of English law, “are not of the nature and quality demanded by the purchaser.” Nobody wants a religion of that sort. Conduct is good; poetic appreciation is perhaps better, though not for the general. But then religion happens to be something different from either, though no doubt closely connected with both. Mr Arnold does not exactly offer us a stone for bread, but he does, like the benevolent French princess in the story, offer us pie-crust. Pie-crust is a good thing; it is a close connection of bread; but it will not do for a substitute, and, in addition, it is much more difficult for the general to obtain. Moreover, there is a serious, a historical, difficulty about Conduct plus poetic appreciation, but minus what we call religion. Mr Arnold, in a stately sonnet, has told us that Sophocles was his ideal as a life-philosopher who was also a poet. He knew, presumably, the stories told about Sophocles in Athenæus, and though these might be idle scandal, he knew far too much not to be aware that there is nothing intrinsically impossible about them. It would have been rather interesting to hear him fully on this subject. But he was too busy with expatiating on the sweet reasonableness of Jesus and “the Aberglaube of the Second Advent” to trouble himself with awkward matters of this kind at the moment.
It may be suspected, however, that he did trouble himself with them, or with something like them, afterwards. The book—a deliberate provocation—naturally found plenty of respondents, though I do not remember that any one smashed it, as, for instance, Dean Mansel could have done if he had been alive, or as Cardinal Newman could, had he been still in the fold. Mr Arnold was perhaps not less really disquieted by its comparative popularity. For he had quite enough of Phocion in him to feel, if not to say, that he must have said something at least ambiguous, when the multitude applauded. At any rate, though the ill-omened series did not cease, nothing further appeared in it which showed the tone of Literature and Dogma. Indeed, of the concluding volumes, God and the Bible and Last Essays on Church and Religion, the first is an elaborate and rather anxious apology, and the second a collection of diverse and comparatively “anodyne” essays. It is significant—as showing how much of the success of Literature and Dogma had been a success of scandal—that neither of these volumes enjoyed the least popularity. God and the Bible was never reprinted till the popular edition of the series thus far in 1884; and Last Essays was never reprinted at all, or had not been up to the date of the invaluable Bibliography of the works. Indeed the copies now, 1899, on sale appear to be of the first edition. This cool reception does not discredit either Barbarians or Philistines or Populace. There are good things in the Last Essays (to which we shall return), but the general effect of them is that of a man who is withdrawing from a foray, not exactly beaten, but unsuccessful and disgusted, and is trying to cover his retreat by alarums and excursions.
God and the Bible tells much the same tale. It originally appeared by instalments in the Contemporary Review, where it must have been something of a choke-pear even for the readers of that then young and thoughtful periodical. Unless the replier has the vigour of Swift, or at least of Bentley, the adroitness in fence of Pascal, or at least of Voltaire, “replies, duplies, quadruplies” are apt to be wofully tedious reading, and Mr Arnold was rather a veles than a triarius of controversy. He could harass, but he did not himself stand harassing very well; and here he was not merely the object of attacks from all sides, but was most uneasily conscious that, in some cases at least, he did not wish his enemies to destroy each other. He had absolutely no sympathy with the rabid anti-Christianity of Clifford, very little with the mere agnosticism of Huxley; he wanted to be allowed to take just so much Biblical criticism as suited him and no more. He wished to prove, in his own remarkable way, the truth and necessity of Christianity, and to this wish the contradictions of sinners were too manifold. One must be stony-hearted not to feel some pity for him, as, just when he thinks he has evaded an orthodox brick, the tile of a disbeliever in the Fourth Gospel whizzes at him; or as, while he is trying to patch up his romantic reconstructions of imaginary Jewish history and religion, the push of some aggressive reviewer bids him make good his challenge to metaphysical theologians. But this interest is only passing.
In the Preface there is indeed some of the old attempt at liveliness. Professor Clifford himself, then dead, is disposed of with a not ungraceful mixture of pity and satire; Messrs Moody and Sankey are not unpleasantly rallied; Satan and Tisiphone, Mr Ruskin and Sir Robert Phillimore, once more remind one of the groves of Blarney or the more doubtful chorus in the Anti-Jacobin. But the apologist is not really light-hearted: he cannot keep the more solemn part of his apologia out of the Preface itself, and assures us that the story of Adam’s fall “is all a legend. It never really happened, any of it.” Again one asks Mr Arnold, as seriously as possible, “How do you know that? On your own calculus, with your own estimate of evidence, how is it possible for you to know that? You may, on your principles, say that you are insufficiently persuaded that it did happen; but how can you, without preternatural revelation (the very thing you will not admit) say that it did not? Surely there is some want of intellectual seriousness in thus lightly ignoring every rule of law and logic, of history and of common-sense?”
But the embarrassment thus revealed naturally shows itself even more in the book itself, notwithstanding the fact that Mr Arnold expressly declines to reply to those who have attacked Literature and Dogma as anti-Christian and irreligious. Not even by summarily banishing this not inconsiderable host can he face the rest comfortably: and he has to resort to the strangest reasons of defence, to the most eccentric invitation of reinforcements from afar.
The strangest of all these, the clearest proof in itself of flurry and sense of need, is exhibited in his summoning—of all wonderful things—of Comparative Philology to the rescue of Literature. To rebut the criticism on his denial of a Personal God, he takes refuge in the ethnological meaning of Deus, which, it seems, is “Shining.” The poor plain mind, already staggered by Mr Arnold’s private revelations as to what did not happen 6000 years ago (or earlier) in the garden of Eden, quite succumbs before this privilegium of omniscience. One had thought that the results of philology and etymology of this sort were extremely ingenious guesses, to be admitted in so far as they do not conflict with facts, and till the next guess comes, but nothing more. Lo! they are quoted as if they were on a par with “two and two make four,” or the law of Excluded Middle. We may not take Moses and the prophets without proof, but Curtius and Professor Max Müller may speak, and we must but hear. And later, when Mr Arnold is trying to cope with Descartes, he flies for refuge to “the roots as, bhu, and sta.”