which marks the highest point of the composition.
The only part on which there may be some difference between admirers is the final simile of the Tyrian trader. This finishes off the piece in nineteen lines, of which the poet was—and justly—proud, which are quite admirable by themselves, but which cannot perhaps produce any very clear evidences of right to be where they are. No ingenuity can work out the parallel between the “uncloudedly joyous” scholar who is bid avoid the palsied, diseased enfants du siècle, and the grave Tyrian who was indignant at the competition of the merry Greek, and shook out more sail to seek fresh markets. It is, once more, simply an instance of Mr Arnold’s fancy for an end-note of relief, of cheer, of pleasant contrast. On his own most rigid principles, I fear it would have to go as a mere sewn-on patch of purple: on mine, I welcome it as one of the most engaging passages of a poem delightful throughout, and at its very best the equal of anything that was written in its author’s lifetime, fertile as that was in poetry.
He himself, though he was but just over thirty when this poem appeared, and though his life was to last for a longer period than had passed since his birth to 1853, was to make few further contributions to poetry itself. The reasons of this comparative sterility are interesting, and not quite so obvious as they may appear. It is true, indeed,—it is an arch-truth which has been too rarely recognised,—that something like complete idleness, or at any rate complete freedom from regular mental occupation, is necessary to the man who is to do poetic work great in quality and in quantity at once. The hardest occupation—and Mr Arnold’s, though hard, was not exactly that—will indeed leave a man sufficient time, so far as mere time is concerned, to turn out as much verse as the most fertile of poets has ever produced. But then that will scarcely do. The Muses are feminine—and it has been observed that you cannot make up even to the most amiable and reasonable of that sex for refusing to attend to her at the minute when she wants you, by devoting even hours, even days, when you are at leisure for her. To put the thing more seriously, though perhaps not more truly, the human brain is not so constituted that you can ride or drive or “train” from school to school, examining as you go, for half-a-dozen or half-a-score hours a-day, or that you can devote the same time to the weariest and dreariest of all businesses, the reading of hundreds of all but identical answers to the same stock questions, and yet be fresh and fertile for imaginative composition. The nearest contradictory instances to this proposition are those of Scott and Southey, and they are, in more ways than one or two, very damaging instances—exceptions which, in a rather horrible manner, do prove the rule. To less harassing, and especially less peremptory, work than Mr Arnold’s, as well as far more literary in kind, Scott sacrificed the minor literary graces, Southey immolated the choicer fruits of genius which he undoubtedly possessed the power of producing; and both “died from the top downward.”
But there was something more than this. Mr Arnold’s poetic ambition, as we have seen, did not aim at very long and elaborate works. His forte was the occasional piece—which might still suggest itself and be completed—which, as we shall see, did sometimes suggest itself and was completed—in the intervals, the holidays, the relaxations of his task. And if these lucid and lucent intervals, though existent, were so rare, their existence and their rarity together suggest that something more than untoward circumstance is to blame for the fact that they did not show themselves oftener. A full and constant tide of inspiration is imperative; it will not be denied; it may kill the poet if he cannot or will not give vent to it, but it will not be patient of repression—quietly content to appear now and then, even on such occasions as the deaths of a Clough and a Stanley. Nor is it against charity or liberality, while it is in the highest degree consonant with reason and criticism, to infer that Mr Arnold’s poetic vein was not very full-blooded, that it was patient of refusal to indulge it, that his poetry, in nearly the happiest of his master’s phrases, was not exactly “inevitable,” despite the exquisiteness of its quality on occasion.
It is fortunate for the biographer that this earliest part of Mr Arnold’s life is so fertile in poetry, for otherwise, in the dearth of information, it would be a terribly barren subject. The thirty years of life yield us hardly twenty pages of letters, of which the first, with its already cited sketch of Laleham, is perhaps the most interesting. At the Trafalgar Square riots of March 1848 the writer is convinced that “the hour of the hereditary peerage and eldest sonship and immense properties has struck”; sees “a wave of more than American vulgarity, moral, intellectual, and social, preparing to break over us”; and already holds that strange delusion of his that “the French are the most civilised of European peoples.” He develops this on the strength of “the intelligence of their idea-moved classes” in a letter to his sister; meets Emerson in April; goes to a Chartist “convention,” and has a pleasant legend for Miss Martineau that the late Lord Houghton “refused to be sworn in as a special constable, that he might be free to assume the post of President of the Republic at a moment’s notice.” He continues to despair of his country as hopelessly as the Tuxford waiter;[8] finds Bournemouth “a very stupid place”—which is distressing; it is a stupid place enough now, but it was not then: “a great moorland covered with furze and low pine coming down to the sea” could never be that—and meets Miss Brontë, “past thirty and plain, with expressive grey eyes though.” The rest we must imagine.
Chapter II.
Life from 1851-62—Second Series of Poems—Merope—On Translating Homer.
We must now return a little and give some account of Mr Arnold’s actual life, from a period somewhat before that reached at the end of the last chapter. The account need not be long, for the life, as has been said, was not in the ordinary sense eventful; but it is necessary, and can be in this chapter usefully interspersed with an account of his work, which, for nine of the eleven years we shall cover, was, though interesting, of much less interest than that of those immediately before and those immediately succeeding.
One understands at least part of the reason for the gradual drying up of his poetic vein from a sentence of his in a letter of 1858, when he and his wife at last took a house in Chester Square: “It will be something to unpack one’s portmanteau for the first time since I was married, nearly seven years ago.” “Something,” indeed; and one’s only wonder is how he, and still more Mrs Arnold (especially as they now had three children), could have endured the other thing so long. There is no direct information in the Letters as to the reason of this nomadic existence, the only headquarters of which appear to have been the residence of Mrs Arnold’s father, the judge, in Eaton Place, with flights to friends’ houses and to lodgings at the places of inspection and others, especially Dover and Brighton. And guesswork is nowhere more unprofitable than in cases where private matters of income, taste, and other things are concerned. But it certainly would appear, though I have no positive information on the subject, that in the early days of State interference with education “My Lords” managed matters with an equally sublime disregard of the comfort of their officials and the probable efficiency of the system.[9]
Till I noticed the statement quoted opposite, I was quite unable to construct any reasonable theory from such a passage as that in a letter of December 1852[10] and from others which show us Mr Arnold in Lincolnshire, in Shropshire, and in the eastern counties. Even with the elucidation it seems a shockingly bad system. One doubts whether it be worse for an inspector or for the school inspected by him, that he should have no opportunity for food from breakfast to four o’clock, when he staves off death by inviting disease in the shape of the malefic bun; for him or for certain luckless pupil-teachers that, after dinner, he should be “in for [them] till ten o’clock.” With this kind of thing when on duty, and no home when off it, a man must begin to appreciate the Biblical passages about partridges, and the wings of a dove, and so forth, most heartily and vividly long before seven years are out, more particularly if he be a man so much given to domesticity as was Matthew Arnold.
However, it was, no doubt, not so bad as it looks. They say the rack is not, though probably no one would care to try. There were holidays; there was a large circle of hospitable family friends, and strangers were only too anxious to welcome (and perhaps to propitiate) Her Majesty’s Inspector. The agreeable anomalies of the British legal system (which, let Dickens and other grumblers say what they like, have made many good people happy and only a few miserable) allowed Mr Arnold for many years to act (sometimes while simultaneously inspecting) as his father-in-law’s Marshal on circuit, with varied company and scenery, little or nothing to do, a handsome fee for doing it, and no worse rose-leaf in the bed than heavy dinners and hot port wine, even this being alleviated by “the perpetual haunch of venison.”
For the rest, there are some pleasing miscellaneous touches in the letters for these years, and there is a certain liveliness of phrase in them which disappears in the later. It is pleasant to find Mr Arnold on his first visit to Cambridge (where, like a good Wordsworthian, he wanted above all things to see the statue of Newton) saying what all of us say, “I feel that the Middle Ages, and all their poetry and impressiveness, are in Oxford and not here.” In one letter—written to his sister “K” (Mrs Forster) as his critical letters usually are—we find three noteworthy criticisms on contemporaries, all tinged with that slight want of cordial appreciation which characterises his criticism of this kind throughout (except, perhaps, in the case of Browning). The first is on Alexander Smith—it was the time of the undue ascension of the Life-Drama rocket before its equally undue fall. “It can do me no good [an odd phrase] to be irritated with that young man, who certainly has an extraordinary faculty, although I think he is a phenomenon of a very dubious character.” The second, harsher but more definite, is on Villette. “Why is Villette disagreeable? Because the writer’s mind [it is worth remembering that he had met Charlotte Brontë at Miss Martineau’s] contains nothing but hunger, rebellion, and rage, and therefore that is all she can in fact put into her book. No fine writing can hide this thoroughly, and it will be fatal to her in the long-run.” The Fates were kinder: and Miss Brontë’s mind did contain something besides these ugly things. But it was her special weakness that her own thoughts and experiences were insufficiently mingled and tempered by a wider knowledge of life and literature. The third is on My Novel, which he says he has “read with great pleasure, though Bulwer’s nature is by no means a perfect one either, which makes itself felt in his book; but his gush, his better humour, his abundant materials, and his mellowed constructive skill—all these are great things.” One would give many pages of the Letters for that naïf admission that “gush” is “a great thing.”
A little later (May 1853), all his spare time is being spent on a poem, which he thinks by far the best thing he has yet done, to wit, Sohrab and Rustum. And he “never felt so sure of himself or so really and truly at ease as to criticism.” He stays in barracks at the depot of the 17th Lancers with a brother-in-law, and we regret to find that “Death or Glory” manners do not please him. The instance is a cornet spinning his rings on the table after dinner. “College does civilise a boy,” he ejaculates, which is true—always providing that it is a good college. Yet, with that almost unconscious naturalness which is particularly noticeable in him, he is much dissatisfied with Oxford—thinks it (as we all do) terribly fallen off since his days. Perhaps the infusion of Dissenters’ sons (it is just at the time of the first Commission in 1854) may brace its flaccid sinews, though the middle-class, he confesses, is abominably disagreeable. He sees a good deal of this poor middle-class in his inspecting tours, and decides elsewhere about the same time that “of all dull, stagnant, unedifying entourages, that of middle-class Dissent is the stupidest.” It is sad to find that he thinks women utterly unfit for teachers and lecturers; but Girton and Lady Margaret’s may take comfort, it is “no natural incapacity, but the fault of their bringing-up.” With regard to his second series of Poems (v. infra) he thinks Balder will “consolidate the peculiar sort of reputation he got by Sohrab and Rustum;” and a little later, in April 1856, we have his own opinion of himself as a poet, whose charm is “literalness and simplicity.” Mr Ruskin is also treated—with less appreciation than one could wish.
The second series just mentioned was issued in 1855, a second edition of the first having been called for the year before. It contained, like its predecessor, such of his earlier work as he chose to republish and had not yet republished, chiefly from the Empedocles volume. But Empedocles itself was only represented by some scraps, mainly grouped as The Harp-Player on Etna. Faded Leaves, grouped with an addition, here appear: Stagirius is called Desire, and the Stanzas in Memory of the Author of Obermann now become Obermann simply. Only two absolutely new poems, a longer and a shorter, appear: the first is Balder Dead, the second Separation, the added number of Faded Leaves. This is of no great value. Balder is interesting, though not extremely good. Its subject is connected with that of Gray’s Descent of Odin, but handled much more fully, and in blank-verse narrative instead of ballad form. The story, like most of those in Norse mythology, has great capabilities; but it may be questioned whether the Greek-Miltonic chastened style which the poet affects is well calculated to bring them out. The death of Nanna, and the blind fratricide Hoder, are touchingly done, and Hermod’s ride to Hela’s realm is stately. But as a whole the thing is rather dim and tame.
Mr Arnold’s election to the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford (May 1857) was a really notable event, not merely in his own career, but to some, and no small, extent in the history of English literature during the nineteenth century. The post is of no great value. I remember the late Sir Francis Doyle, who was Commissioner of Customs as well as Professor, saying to me once with a humorous melancholy, “Ah! Eau de Cologne pays much better than Poetry!” But its duties are far from heavy, and can be adjusted pretty much as the holder pleases. And as a position it is unique. It is, though not of extreme antiquity, the oldest purely literary Professorship in the British Isles; and it remained, till long after Mr Arnold’s time, the only one of the kind in the two great English Universities. In consequence partly of the regulation that it can be held for ten years only—nominally five, with a practically invariable re-election for another five—there is at least the opportunity, which, since Mr Arnold’s own time, has been generally taken, of maintaining and refreshing the distinction of the occupant of the chair. Before his time there had been a good many undistinguished professors, but Warton and Keble, in their different ways, must have adorned even a Chair of Poetry even in the University of Oxford. Above all, the entire (or almost entire) freedom of action left to the Professor should have, and in the case of Keble at least had already had, the most stimulating effect on minds capable of stimulation. For the Professor of Poetry at Oxford is neither, like some Professors, bound to the chariot-wheels of examinations and courses of set teaching, nor, like others, has he to feel that his best, his most original, efforts can have no interest, and hardly any meaning, for all but a small circle of experts. His field is illimitable; his expatiation in it is practically untrammelled. It is open to all; full of flowers and fruits that all can enjoy; and it only depends on his own choice and his own literary and intellectual powers whether his prelections shall take actual rank as literature with the very best of that other literature, with the whole of which, by custom, as an extension from poetry, he is at liberty to deal. In the first century of the chair the custom of delivering these Prelections in Latin had been a slight hamper—indeed to this day it prevents the admirable work of Keble from being known as it should be known. But this was now removed, and Mr Arnold, whose reputation (it could hardly be called fame as yet) was already great with the knowing ones, had not merely Oxford but the English reading world as audience.
And he had it at a peculiarly important time, to the importance of which he himself, in this very position, was not the least contributor. Although the greatest writers of the second period of the century—Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle, Thackeray—had, in all cases but the last, a long, and in the two first a very long and a wonderfully fruitful career still before them, yet the phase to which they belonged was as a dominant phase at its height, and as a crescent was beginning to give place to another. Within a few years—in most cases within a few months—of Mr Arnold’s installation, The Defence of Guenevere and FitzGerald’s Omar Khayyam heralded fresh forms of poetry which have not been superseded yet; The Origin of Species and Essays and Reviews announced changed attitudes of thought; the death of Macaulay removed the last writer who, modern as he was in some ways, and popular, united popularity with a distinctly eighteenth-century tone and tradition; the death of Leigh Hunt removed the last save Landor (always and in all things an outsider) of the great Romantic generation of the first third of the century; The Ordeal of Richard Feverel started a new kind of novel.
The division which Mr Arnold, both by office and taste, was called to lead in this newly levied army, was not far from being the most important of all; and it was certainly that of all which required the most thorough reformation of staff, morale,[11] and tactics. The English literary criticism of 1830-1860, speaking in round numbers, is curiously and to this day rather unintelligibly bad. There is, no doubt, no set of matters in which it is less safe to generalise than in matters literary, and this is by no means the only instance in which the seemingly natural anticipation that a period of great criticism will follow a period of great creation is falsified. But it most certainly is falsified here. The criticism of the great Romantic period of 1798-1830 was done for it by itself, and in some cases by its greatest practitioners, not by its immediate successors. The philosophic as well as poetical intuition of Coleridge; the marvellous if capricious sympathy and the more marvellous phrase of Lamb; the massive and masculine if not always quite trustworthy or well-governed intellect of Hazlitt, had left no likes behind. Two survivors of this great race, Leigh Hunt and De Quincey, were indeed critics, and no inconsiderable ones; but the natural force of both had long been much abated, and both had been not so much critics as essayists; the tendency of Hunt to flowery sentimentality or familiar chat, and that of De Quincey to incessant divergences of “rigmarole,” being formidable enemies to real critical competence. The greatest prosemen—not novelists—of the generation now closing, Carlyle and Macaulay, were indeed both considerable critics. But the shadow of death in the one case, the “shadow of Frederick” in the other, had cut short their critical careers: and presumptuous as the statement may seem, it may be questioned whether either had been a great critic—in criticism pure and simple—of literature.
What is almost more important is that the average literary criticism of William IV.’s reign and of the first twenty years of her present Majesty’s was exceedingly bad. At one side, of course, the work of men like Thackeray, who were men of genius but not critics by profession, or in some respects by equipment, escapes this verdict. At the other were men (very few of them indeed) like Lockhart, who had admirable critical qualifications, but had allowed certain theories and predilections to harden and ossify within them, and who in some cases had not outgrown the rough uncivil ways of the great revolutionary struggle. Between these the average critic, if not quite so ignorant of literature as a certain proportion of the immensely larger body of reviewers to-day, was certainly even more blind to its general principles. Such critical work as that of Phillips, long a favourite pen on the Times, and enjoying (I do not know with how much justice) the repute of being the person whom Thackeray’s Thunder and Small Beer has gibbeted for ever, excites amazement nowadays at its bland but evidently sincere ignoring of the very rudiments of criticism. I do not know that even in the most interesting remains of George Brimley (who, had fate spared him, might have grown into a great as he already was a good critic) we may not trace something of the same hopeless amateurishness, the same uncertainty and “wobbling” between the expression of unconnected and unargued likes and dislikes concerning the matter of the piece, and real critical considerations on its merits or demerits of scheme and form.
Not for the first time help came to us Trojans Graia ab urbe. Of the general merits of French literary criticism it is possible to entertain a somewhat lower idea than that which (in consequence of the very circumstances with which we are now dealing) it has been for many years fashionable in England to hold. But between 1830 and 1860 the French had a very strong critical school indeed—a school whose scholars and masters showed the dæmonic, or at least prophetic, inspiration of Michelet, the milder and feebler but still inspiring enthusiasm of Quinet, the academic clearness and discipline of Villemain and Nisard, the Lucianic wit of Mérimée, the matchless appreciation of Gautier, and, above all, the great new critical idiosyncrasy of Sainte-Beuve. Between these men there were the widest possible differences, not merely of personal taste and genius, but of literary theory and practice. But where they all differed quite infinitely from the lower class of English critics, and favourably from all but the highest in their happiest moments, was in a singular mixture of scholarship and appreciation. Even the most Romantic of them usually tried to compare the subject with its likes in his own and even, to some extent, in other literatures; even the most Classical acknowledged, to some extent, that it was his duty to appreciate, to understand, to grasp the case of the victim before ordering him off to execution.
In the practice of Sainte-Beuve himself, these two acknowledgments of the duty of the critic embraced each other in the happiest union. The want of enthusiasm which has been sometimes rather sillily charged against him, comes in reality to no more than this—that he is too busy in analysing, putting together again, comparing, setting things in different lights and in different companies, to have much time for dithyrambs. And the preference of second-to first-class subjects, which has been also urged, is little more than the result of the fact that these processes are more telling, more interesting, and more needed in the case of the former than in the case of the latter. Homer, Æschylus, Lucretius, Dante, Shakespeare will always make their own way with all fit readers sooner or later: it is not so with Meleager or Macrobius or Marmontel, with William Langland or with Thomas Love Peacock.
But Sainte-Beuve must not carry us too far from Mr Arnold, all important as was the influence of the one upon the other. It is enough to say that the new Professor of Poetry (who might be less appetisingly but more correctly called a Professor of Criticism) had long entertained the wish to attempt, and now had the means of effecting, a reform in English criticism, partly on Sainte-Beuve’s own lines, partly on others which he had already made publicly known in his famous Preface, and in some later critical writings, and which he was for the rest of his life always unflinchingly to champion, sometimes rather disastrously to extend.
Still it has always been held that this chair is not merely a chair of criticism; and Mr Arnold lodged a poetical diploma-piece in the shape of Merope. This was avowedly written as a sort of professorial manifesto—a document to show what the only Professor of Poetry whom England allowed herself thought, in theory and practice, of at least dramatic poetry. It was, as was to be expected from the author’s official position and his not widespread but well-grounded reputation, much less neglected than his earlier poetry had been. He even tells us that “it sells well”; but the reviewers were not pleased. The Athenæum review is “a choice specimen of style,” and the Spectator “of argumentation”; the Saturday Review is only “deadly prosy,” but none were exactly favourable till G.H. Lewes in The Leader was “very gratifying.” Private criticism was a little kinder. The present Archbishop of Canterbury (to whom, indeed, Mr Arnold had just given “a flaming testimonial for Rugby”) read it “with astonishment at its goodness,” a sentence which, it may be observed, is a little double-edged. Kingsley (whom the editor of the Letters good-naturedly but perhaps rather superfluously reintroduces to the British public as “author of The Saints’ Tragedy and other poems”) was “very handsome.” Froude, though he begs the poet to “discontinue the line,” was not uncomplimentary in other ways. His own conclusion, from reviews and letters together, is pretty plainly put in two sentences, that he “saw the book was not going to take as he wished,” and that “she [Merope] is more calculated to inaugurate my professorship with dignity than to move deeply the present race of humans.” Let us see what “she” is actually like.
It is rather curious that the story of Merope should have been so tempting as, to mention nothing else, Maffei’s attempt in Italian, Voltaire’s in French, and this of Mr Arnold’s in English, show it to have been to modern admirers and would-be practitioners of the Classical drama: and the curiosity is of a tell-tale kind. For the fact is that the donnée is very much more of the Romantic than of the Classical description, and offers much greater conveniences to the Romantic than to the Classical practitioner. With minor variations, the story as generally dramatised is this. Merope, the widowed queen of the murdered Heraclid Cresphontes, has saved her youngest son from the murderer and usurper, Polyphontes, and sent him out of the country. When he has grown up, and has secretly returned to Messenia to take vengeance, Polyphontes is pressing Merope to let bygones be bygones and marry him, so as to reconcile the jarring parties in the State. Æpytus, the son, to facilitate his reception, represents himself as a messenger charged to bring the news of his own death; and Merope, hearing this and believing the messenger to be also the assassin, obtains access to the chamber where he is resting after his journey, and is about to murder her own sleeping son when he is saved by the inevitable anagnorisis. The party of Cresphontes is then secretly roused. Æpytus, at the sacrifice which the tyrant holds in honour of the news of his rival’s death, snatches the sacrificial axe and kills Polyphontes himself, and all ends well.
There is, of course, a strong dramatic moment here; but I cannot think the plot by any means an ideal one for classical tragedy. At any rate the Aristotelian conditions—the real ones, not the fanciful distortions of sixteenth-seventeenth century criticism—are very ill satisfied. There is bloodshed, but there is no tragic bloodshed, as there would have been had Merope actually killed her son. The arresting and triumphant “grip” of the tragic misfortunes of Oedipus and Orestes, the combination of the course of fate and the ἁμαρτία of the individual, is totally absent. The wooing of Merope by Polyphontes is not so much preposterous as insignificant, though Voltaire, by a touch of modernism, has rescued it or half-rescued it from this most terrible of limbos. The right triumphs, no doubt; but who cares whether it does or not? And Mr Arnold, with the heroic obstinacy of the doctrinaire, has done nothing to help the effect of a scheme in itself sufficiently uninspiring to the modern reader. When he was at work upon the piece he had “thought and hoped” that it would have what Buddha called “the character of Fixity, that true sign of the law.” A not unfriendly critic might have pointed out, with gloomy forebodings, that a sign of law is not necessarily a sign of poetry, and that, as a prophet of his own had laid it down, poetry should “transport” not “fix.” At any rate, it is clear to any one who reads the book that the author was in a mood of deliberate provocation and exaggeration—not a favourable mood for art. The quiet grace of Sophocles is perhaps impossible to reproduce in English, but Mr Arnold’s verse is more than quiet, it is positively tame. The dreary tirades of Polyphontes and Merope, and their snip-snap stichomythia, read equally ill in English. Mr Swinburne, who has succeeded where Mr Arnold failed, saw by a true intuition that, to equal the effect of the Greek chorus, full English lyric with rhyme and musical sweep was required. Mr Arnold himself, as might have been expected from his previous experiments in unrhymed Pindarics, has given us strophes and antistrophes most punctiliously equivalent in syllables; but sometimes with hardly any, and never with very much, vesture of poetry about them. It is absolutely preposterous to suppose that the effect on a Greek ear of a strophe even of Sophocles or Euripides, let alone the great Agamemnonian choruses, was anything like the effect on an English ear of such wooden stuff as this:—
“Three brothers roved the field,
And to two did Destiny
Give the thrones that they conquer’d,
But the third, what delays him
From his unattained crown?”
But Mr Arnold would say “This is your unchaste modern love for passages and patches. Tell me how I managed this worthy action?” To which the only answer can be, “Sir, the action is rather uninteresting. Save at one moment you have not raised the interest anywhere, and you have certainly not made the most of it there.”
The fact is, that very few even of thorough-going Arnoldians have had, or, except merely as “fighting a prize,” could have had, much to say for Merope. The author pleads that he only meant “to give people a specimen of the world created by the Greek imagination.” In the first place, one really cannot help (with the opening speech of the Prometheus, and the close of the Eumenides, and the whole of the Agamemnon in one’s mind) saying that this is rather hard on the Greeks. And in the second place, what a curious way of setting about the object, when luckily specimens of the actual “world” so “created,” not mere pastiches and plaster models of them, are still to be had, and of the very best! But the fact is, thirdly, that Mr Arnold, as all men so often do, and as he not very seldom did, was clearly trying not so much to extol one thing as to depreciate another. Probably in his heart of hearts (which is generally a much wiser heart than that according to which the mouth speaks and the pen writes) he knew his failure. At any rate, he never attempted anything of the kind again, and Merope, that queen of plaster, remains alone in his gallery, with, as we see in other galleries, merely some disjecta membra—“Fragment of an Antigone,” “Fragment of a Dejaneira,” grouped at her feet. In the definitive edition indeed, she is not with these but with Empedocles on Etna, a rather unlucky contrast. For Empedocles, if very much less deliberately Greek than Merope, is very much better poetry, and it is almost impossible that the comparison of the two should not suggest to the reader that the attempt to be Greek is exactly and precisely the cause of the failure to be poetical. Mr Arnold had forgotten his master’s words about the oikeia hedone. The pleasure of Greek art is one thing—the pleasure of English poetry another.
His inaugural lecture, “On the Modern Element in Literature,” was printed many years afterwards in Macmillan’s Magazine for February 1869; and this long hesitation seems to have been followed by an even longer repentance, for the piece was never included in any one of his volumes of essays. But the ten years of his professorship are, according to the wise parsimony of the chair, amply represented by the two famous little books—On Translating Homer, which, with its supplementary “Last Words,” appeared in 1861-62, and On the Study of Celtic Literature, which appeared at the termination of his tenure in 1867. It may be questioned whether he ever did anything of more influence than these books, this being due partly to the fashion of their publication—which, in the latter case at least, applied the triple shock of lecture at the greatest of English literary centres, of magazine article, and of book—and partly to the fact that they were about subjects in which a real or a factitious, a direct or an indirect, interest was taken by almost every one. Every educated person knew and cared something (or at least would not have liked to be supposed not to care and know something) about Homer; very few educated persons knew anything about Celtic literature. But in these later lectures he put in a more popular and provocative form than that of his French Eton (see next chapter) that mixture of literary, political, social, and miscellaneous critique of his countrymen for which he was thenceforward best known; and which, if it brought down some hard knocks from his adversaries, and perhaps was not altogether a healthy mixture for himself, could at least not be charged by any reasonable person with lack of piquancy and actuality.
Both books are, and, despite some drawbacks of personal and ephemeral allusion, always will be, interesting; and both had, perhaps even more than the Essays in Criticism themselves, a stimulating effect upon English men of letters which can hardly be overvalued. It may indeed be said without paradox that they owe not a little of their value to their faults; but they owe a great deal more to their merits.
The faults are apparent enough even in the first series, which falls to be noticed in this chapter; yet it is really difficult to say when a more important book of English criticism had appeared. Dryden’s Essay of Dramatic Poesy, Johnson’s Lives at their frequent best, Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, are greater things; but hardly the best of them was in its day more “important for us.” To read even the best of that immediately preceding criticism of which something has been said above—nay, even to recur to Coleridge and Hazlitt and Lamb—and then to take up On Translating Homer, is to pass to a critic with a far fuller equipment, with a new method, with a style of his own, and with an almost entirely novel conception of the whole art of criticism. For the first time (even Coleridge with much wider reading had not co-ordinated it from this point of view) we find the two great ancient and the three or four great modern literatures of Europe taken synoptically, used to illustrate and explain each other, to point out each other’s defects and throw up each other’s merits. Almost for the first time, too, we have ancient literature treated more or less like modern—neither from the merely philological point of view, nor with reference to the stock platitudes and traditions about it. The critic is not afraid of doctrines and general principles—in fact, he is rather too fond of them—but his object is anything rather than mere arid deduction and codification. He has the aesthetic sense as thoroughly as Hazlitt and Lamb, but without the wilfulness of either, or at least with a different kind of wilfulness from that of either. Finally, in one of the numerous ways in which he shows that his subject is alive to him, he mixes it up with the queerest personalities and sudden zigzags, with all manner of digressions and side-flings. And last of all, he has that new style of which we spoke—a style by no means devoid of affectation and even trick, threatening, to experienced eyes, the disease of mannerism, but attractive in its very provocations, almost wholly original, and calculated, at least while it retains its freshness, to drive what is said home into the reader’s mind and to stick it there.
The faults, we said, both critical and non-critical, are certainly not lacking; and if they were not partly excused by the author’s avowedly militant position, might seem sometimes rather grave. Whatever may have been the want of taste, and even the want of sense, in the translation of F.W. Newman, it is almost sufficient to say that they were neither greater nor less than might have been expected from a person who, if the most scholarly of eccentrics, was also the most eccentric even of English scholars. It is difficult not to think that Mr Arnold makes too much of them and refers too frequently to them. Such “iteration” is literally “damnable”: it must be condemned as unfair, out of place, out of taste, and even not distantly approaching that lack of urbanity with which Mr Arnold was never tired of reproaching his countrymen. Another translator, Mr Wright, was indeed needlessly sensitive to Mr Arnold’s strictures; but these strictures themselves were needlessly severe. It is all very well for a reviewer, especially if he be young and anonymous, to tell a living writer that his book has “no reason for existing”; but chairs of literature are not maintained by universities that their occupants may, in relation to living persons, exercise the functions of young anonymous reviewers. It may indeed be doubted whether these occupants should, except in the most guarded way, touch living persons at all.
Critically too, as well as from the point of view of manners, the Lectures on Translating Homer are open to not a few criticisms. In the first place, the assumptions are enormous, and, in some cases at least, demonstrably baseless. One of Mr Arnold’s strongest points, for instance, not merely against Mr Newman but against Homeric translators generally, is concerned with the renderings of the Homeric compound adjectives, especially the stock ones—koruthaiolos, merops, and the rest. The originals, he is never weary of repeating, did not strike a Greek and do not strike a Greek scholar as out of the way; the English equivalents do so strike an English reader. Now as to the Greeks themselves, we know nothing: they have left us no positive information on the subject. But if (which is no doubt at least partly true) koruthaiolos and dolichoskion do not strike us, who have been familiar with Greek almost as long as we can remember, as out of the way, is that an argument? Most of us, I suppose, at about nine or ten years old, some no doubt a little or a good deal earlier, learnt these words as part of the ordinary Greek that was presented to us, just as much as kai and ara; but if we had learnt Greek as we learn English, beginning with quite ordinary words, would it be so? I think not; nor would it be so if people began Greek at a later and more critical stage of their education.
It is also true that the book is full of that exceedingly arbitrary and unproved assertion, of that rather fanciful terminology, of those sometimes questionable æsthetic obiter dicta, of which, from first to last, Mr Arnold was so prolific. When he talks about the mysterious “grand style,” and tells us that Milton can never be affected, we murmur, “De gustibus!” and add mentally, “Though Milton is the greatest of affected writers, Milton is, after Comus at least, never anything else!” When he tells us again that at that moment (1861) “English literature as a living intellectual instrument ranks after the literatures of France and Germany,” we remember that at the time France possessed perhaps only one writer, Victor Hugo, and Germany absolutely none, of the calibre of a dozen Englishmen—Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle, Thackeray, Dickens, and not a few others, from Landor to Mr Ruskin; that Germany, further, had scarcely one, though France had more than one or two, great writers of the second class: and we say, “Either your ‘living intellectual instrument’ is a juggle of words, or you really are neglecting fact.” Many—very many—similar retorts are possible; and the most hopeless variance of all must come when we arrive at Mr Arnold’s championship of that ungainly and sterile mule the English hexameter, and when we review the specimens of the animal that he turns out from his own stables for our inspection.
But it matters not. For all this, and very much more than all this, which may be passed over as unnecessary or improper, nothing like the book had, for positive critical quality, and still more for germinal influence, been seen by its generation, and nothing of the same quality and influence has been seen for more than a technical generation since. It would of course be uncritical in the last degree to take the change in English criticism which followed as wholly and directly Mr Arnold’s work. He was not even the voice crying in the wilderness: only one of many voices in a land ready at least to be eared and pathed. But he was the earliest of such voices, the clearest, most original, most potent; and a great deal of what followed was directly due to him.
The non-literary events of his life during this period were sufficiently varied if not very momentous. We have mentioned the domiciling in Chester Square, which took place in February 1858, perhaps on the strength of the additional income from Oxford. In the late summer of that year he went alone to Switzerland, and next spring, shortly after the New Year, received, to his very great joy, a roving commission to France, Belgium, Switzerland, and Piedmont, to report on elementary education. “Foreign life,” he says, with that perfect naturalness which makes the charm of his letters, “is still to me perfectly delightful and liberating in the last degree.” And he was duly “presented” at home, in order that he might be presentable abroad. But the first days of the actual sojourn (as we have them recorded in a letter to his mother of April 14) were saddened by that death of his brother William, which he has enshrined in verse.
He had, however, plenty to distract him. France was all astir with the Austrian war, and it is impossible to read his expressions of half-awed admiration of French military and other greatness without rather mischievous amusement. He visited the Morbihan, which struck him as it must strike every one. Here he is pathetic over a promising but not performing dinner at Auray—“soup, Carnac oysters, shrimps, fricandeau of veal, breast of veal, and asparagus;” but “everything so detestable” that his dinner was bread and cheese. He must have been unlucky: the little Breton inns, at any rate a few years later than this, used, it is true, to be dirty to an extent appalling to an Englishman; but their provender was usually far from contemptible. There is more sense of Breton scenery in another letter a little later. Both here and, presently, in Gascony he notes truly enough “the incredible degree to which the Revolution has cleared the feudal ages out of the minds of the country people”; but if he reflected on the bad national effect of this breach with the past, he does not say so. By June 12 he is in Holland, and does not like it—weather, language, &c., all English in the worst sense, apparently without the Norman and Latin element which just saves us. And though he was a very short time in the Netherlands, he has to relieve his feelings by more abuse of them when he gets back to Paris—in fact, he speaks of Holland exactly as the typical Frenchman speaks of England, and is accordingly very funny to read. The two things that make Holland most interesting, history and art, were exactly those that appealed to Mr Arnold least. Then after a refreshing bath of Paris, he goes to Strasbourg, and Time—Time the Humourist as well as the Avenger and Consoler—makes him commit himself dreadfully. He “thinks there cannot be a moment’s doubt” that the French will beat the Prussians even far more completely and rapidly than they are beating the Austrians. Lord Cowley, it seems, “entirely shared” his conviction that “the French will always beat any number of Germans who come into the field against them, and never be beaten by any one but the English.” Let us hope that Jove, when he whistled half this prophecy down the wind, affirmed the rest of it! Switzerland comes next; and he is beginning to want very much to be back in England, partly “for the children, but partly also from affection for that foolish old country”—which paternal and patriotic desire was granted about the end of the month, though only for a short time, during which he wrote a pamphlet on the Italian question. Then “M. le Professeur Docteur Arnold, Directeur Général de toutes les Écoles de la Grande Bretagne,” returned to France for a time, saw Mérimée and George Sand and Renan, as well as a good deal of Sainte-Beuve, and was back again for good in the foolish old country at the end of the month.
In the early winter of 1859-60 we find him a volunteer, commenting not too happily on “the hideous English toadyism which invests lords and great people with commands,” a remark which seems to clench the inference that he had not appreciated the effect of the Revolution upon France. For nearly three parts of 1860 we have not a single letter, except one in January pleasantly referring to his youngest child “in black velvet and red-and-white tartan, looking such a duck that it was hard to take one’s eyes off him.”[12] This letter, by the way, ends with an odd admission from the author of the remark quoted just now. He says of the Americans, “It seems as if few stocks could be trusted to grow up properly without having a priesthood and an aristocracy to act as their schoolmasters at some time or other of their national existence.” This is a confession. The gap, however, is partly atoned for by a very pleasant batch in September from Viel Salm in the Ardennes, where the whole family spent a short time, and where the Director-General of all the schools in Great Britain had splendid fishing, the hapless Ardennes trout being only accustomed to nets.
Then the interest returns to literature, and the lectures on translating Homer, and Tennyson’s “deficiency in intellectual power,” and Mr Arnold’s own interest in the Middle Ages, which may surprise some folk. It seems that he has “a strong sense of the irrationality of that period” and of “the utter folly of those who take it seriously and play at restoring it.” Still it has “poetically the greatest charm and refreshment for me.” One may perhaps be permitted to doubt whether you can get much real poetical refreshment out of a thing which is irrational and which you don’t take seriously: the practice seems to be not unlike that mediæval one of keeping fools for your delectation. Nor can the observations on Tennyson be said to be quite just or quite pleasant. But every age and every individual is unjust to his or its immediate predecessor—a saying dangerous and double-edged, but true for all that. Then he “entangles himself in the study of accents”—it would be difficult to find any adventurer who has not entangled himself in that study—and groans over “a frightful parcel of grammar papers,” which he only just “manages in time,” apparently on the very unwholesome principle (though this was not the same batch) of doing twenty before going to bed when he comes in from a dinner-party at eleven o’clock. Colds, Brighton, praise from Sainte-Beuve, critical attacks in the English papers, and (not quite unprovoked) from F.W. Newman, reflections on the Age of Wisdom (forty), and a meeting with Thackeray, the Laureate of that age, diversify the history agreeably. Then we come to a dead, and now rather more than dull, controversy over the Revised Code, of which we need not say much. Official etiquette on such matters, especially in England, is very loose, though he himself seems to have at one time thought it distantly possible, though not likely, that he would be ejected for the part he took. And his first five years’ tenure of the Oxford Chair ends with the delivery of the Creweian oration, as to the composition of which he consoles himself (having heard both from the Vice-Chancellor and others that there was to be “a great row”) by reflecting that “it doesn’t much matter what he writes, as he shall not be heard.” I do not know whether the prediction was justified; but if so, the same fate had, according to tradition, befallen his Newdigate some twenty years earlier. In neither case can the “row” have had any personal reference. Though his lectures were never largely attended by undergraduates, he was always popular in Oxford.
Chapter III.
A French Eton—Essays in Criticism—Celtic Literature—New Poems—Life from 1862 to 1867.
The period of Mr Arnold’s second tenure of the Poetry Chair, from 1862 to 1867, was much more fertile in remarkable books than that of his first. It was during this time that he established himself at once as the leader of English critics by his Essays in Criticism (some of which had first taken form as Oxford Lectures) and that he made his last appearance with a considerable collection of New Poems. It was during this, or immediately after its expiration, that he issued his second collected book of lectures on The Study of Celtic Literature; and it was then that he put in more popular, though still in not extremely popular, forms the results of his investigations into Continental education. It was during this time also that his thoughts took the somewhat unfortunate twist towards the mission of reforming his country, not merely in matters literary, where he was excellently qualified for the apostolate, but in the much more dubiously warranted function of political, “sociological,” and above all, ecclesiastical or anti-ecclesiastical gospeller. With all these things we must now deal.
No one of Mr Arnold’s books is more important, or more useful in studying the evolution of his thought and style, than A French Eton (1864). Although he was advancing in middle-life when it was written, and had evidently, as the phrase goes, “made up his bundle of prejudices,” he had not written, or at least published, very much prose; his mannerisms had not hardened. And above all, he was but just catching the public ear, and so was not tempted to assume the part of Chesterfield-Socrates, which he played later, to the diversion of some, to the real improvement of many, but a little to his own disaster. He was very thoroughly acquainted with the facts of his subject, which was not always the case later; and though his assumptions—the insensibility of aristocracies to ideas, the superiority of the French to the English in this respect, the failure of the Anglican Church, and so forth—are already as questionable as they are confident, he puts them with a certain modesty, a certain ἐπιείκεια, which was perhaps not always so obvious when he came to preach that quality itself later. About the gist of the book it is not necessary to say very much. He practically admits the obvious and unanswerable objection that his French Eton, whether we look for it at Toulouse or look for it at Sorèze, is very French, but not at all Eton. He does not really attempt to meet the more dangerous though less epigrammatic demurrer, “Do you want schools to turn out products of this sort?” It was only indirectly his fault, but it was a more or less direct consequence of his arguments, that a process of making ducks and drakes of English grammar-school endowments began, and was (chiefly in the “seventies”) carried on, with results, the mischievousness of which apparently has been known and noted only by experts, and which they have chiefly kept to themselves.
All this is already ancient history, and history not ancient enough to be venerable. But the book as a book, and also as a document in the case, has, and always will have, interest. “The cries and catchwords” which Mr Arnold denounces, as men so often do denounce their own most besetting temptations, have not yet quite mastered him; but they have made a lodgment. The revolt—in itself quite justifiable, and even admirable—from the complacent acceptance of English middle-class thought, English post-Reform-Bill politics, English mid-century taste and ethics and philosophy,—from everything, in short, of which Macaulay was the equally accepted and representative eulogist and exponent, is conspicuous. It is from foreign and almost hostile sources that we must expect help. The State is to resume, or to initiate, its guidance of a very large part, if not of the whole, of the matters which popular thought, Liberal and Conservative alike, then assigned to individual action or private combination. We have not yet Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace labelled with their tickets and furnished with their descriptions; but the three classes are already sharply separated in Mr Arnold’s mind, and we can see that only in the Philistine who burns Dagon, and accepts circumcision and culture fully, is there to be any salvation. The anti-clerical and anti-theological animus is already strong; the attitude dantis jura Catonis is arranged; the jura themselves, if not actually graven and tabulated, can be seen coming with very little difficulty. Above all, the singing-robes are pretty clearly laid aside; the Scholar-Gipsy exercises no further spell; we have turned to prose and (as we can best manage it) sense.
But A French Eton is perhaps most interesting for its style. In this respect it marks a stage, and a distinct one, between the Preface of 1853 and the later and better known works. More of a concio ad vulgus than the former, it shows a pretty obvious endeavour to soften and popularise, without unduly vulgarising, the academic tone of the earlier work. And it does not yet display those “mincing graces” which were sometimes attributed (according to a very friendly and most competent critic, “harshly, but justly”) to the later. The mannerisms, indeed, like the dogmatisms, are pretty clearly imminent. Slightly exotic vocabulary—“habitude” “repartition,” for “habit,” “distribution”—makes its appearance. That abhorrence of the conjunction, which made Mr Arnold later give us rows of adjectives and substantives, with never an “and” to string them together, is here. But no one of these tricks, nor any other, is present in excess: there is nothing that can justly be called falsetto; and in especial, though some names of merely ephemeral interest are in evidence—Baines, Roebuck, Miall, &c., Mr Arnold’s well-known substitutes for Cleon and Cinesias—there is nothing like the torrent of personal allusion in Friendship’s Garland. “Bottles” and his company are not yet with us; the dose of persiflage is rigorously kept down; the author has not reached the stage when he seemed to hold sincerely the principle so wickedly put by Mr Lewis Carroll, that
“What I tell you three times is true,”
and that the truth could be made truest by making the three thirty.
The result is that he never wrote better. A little of the dignity of his earlier manner—when he simply followed that admirable older Oxford style, of which Newman was the greatest master and the last—is gone, but it has taken some stiffness with it. Some—indeed a good deal—of the piquancy of the later is not yet apparent; but its absence implies, and is more than compensated by, the concomitant absence of those airs and flings, those interludes as of an academic jester, in cap and gown and liripipe instead of motley, which have been charged, not quite unjustly, on the Arnold that we know best. There is hardly in English a better example of the blending and conciliation of the two modes of argumentative writing referred to in Bishop Kurd’s acute observation, that if your first object is to convince, you cannot use a style too soft and insinuating; if you want to confute, the rougher and more unsparing the better. And the description and characterisation are quite excellent.
Between A French Eton and the second collection of Oxford Lectures came, in 1865, the famous Essays in Criticism, the first full and varied, and perhaps always the best, expression and illustration of the author’s critical attitude, the detailed manifesto and exemplar of the new critical method, and so one of the epoch-making books of the later nineteenth century in English. It consisted, in the first edition, of a Preface (afterwards somewhat altered and toned down) and of nine essays (afterwards to be made ten by the addition of A Persian Passion-Play). The two first of these were general, on The Function of Criticism at the Present Time and The Literary Influence of Academies, while the other seven dealt respectively with the two Guérins, Heine, Pagan and Mediæval Religious Sentiment, Joubert, Spinoza, and Marcus Aurelius. I am afraid it must be taken as only too strong a confirmation of Mr Arnold’s own belief as to the indifference of the English people to criticism that no second edition of this book was called for till four years were past, no third for ten, and no fourth for nearly twenty.
Yet, to any one whom the gods have made in the very slightest degree critical, it is one of the most fascinating (if sometimes also one of the most provoking) of books; and the fascination and provocation should surely have been felt even by others. As always with the author, there is nothing easier than to pick holes in it: in fact, on his own principles, one is simply bound to pick holes. He evidently enjoyed himself very much in the Preface: but it may be doubted whether the severe Goddess of Taste can have altogether smiled on his enjoyment. He is superciliously bland to the unlucky and no doubt rather unwise Mr Wright (v. supra): he tells the Guardian in a periphrasis that it is dull, and “Presbyter Anglicanus” that he is born of Hyrcanian tigers, and the editor of the Saturday Review that he is a late and embarrassed convert to the Philistines. He introduces not merely Mr Spurgeon, a Philistine of some substance and memory, but hapless forgotten shadows like “Mr Clay,” “Mr Diffanger,” “Inspector Tanner,” “Professor Pepper” to the contempt of the world. And then, when we are beginning to find all this laughter rather “thorn-crackling” and a little forced, the thing ends with the famous and magnificent epiphonema (as they would have said in the old days) to Oxford, which must for ever conciliate all sons of hers and all gracious outsiders to its author, just as it turns generation after generation of her enemies sick with an agonised grin.
So, again, one may marvel, and almost grow angry, at the whim which made Mr Arnold waste two whole essays on an amiable and interesting person like Eugénie de Guérin and a mere nobody like her brother. They are very pretty essays in themselves; but then (as Mr Arnold has taught us), “all depends on the subject,” and the subjects here are so exceedingly unimportant! Besides, as he himself almost openly confessed, and as everybody admits now, he really did not understand French poetry at all. When we come to “Keats and Guérin,” there is nothing for it but to take refuge in Byron’s
“Such names coupled!”
and pass with averted face. Seventy-two mortal pages of Matthew Arnold’s, at his very best time, wasted on a brother and sister who happened to be taken up by Sainte-Beuve!
But the rest of the book is entirely free from liability to any such criticism as this. To some criticism—even to a good deal—it is beyond doubt exposed. The first and most famous paper—the general manifesto, as the earlier Preface to the Poems is the special one, of its author’s literary creed—on The Function of Criticism at the Present Time must indeed underlie much the same objections as those that have been made to the introduction. Here is the celebrated passage about “Wragg is in custody,” the text of which, though no doubt painful in subject and inurbane in phraseology, is really a rather slender basis on which to draw up an indictment against a nation. Here is the astounding—the, if serious, almost preternatural—statement that “not very much of current English literature comes into this best that is known and thought in the world. Not very much I fear: certainly less than of the current literature of France and Germany.” And this was 1865, when the Germans had had no great poet but Heine for a generation, nor any great poets but Goethe and Heine for some five hundred years, no great prose-writer but Heine (unless you call Goethe one), and were not going to have any! It was 1865, when all the great French writers, themselves of but some thirty years’ standing, were dying off, not to be succeeded! 1865, when for seventy years England had not lacked, and for nearly thirty more was not to lack, poets and prose-writers of the first order by the dozen and almost the score! Here, too, is the marvellous companion-statement that in the England of the first quarter of the century was “no national glow of life.” It was the chill of death, I suppose, which made the nation fasten on the throat of the world and choke it into submission during a twenty years’ struggle.
But these things are only Mr Arnold’s way. I have never been able to satisfy myself whether they were deliberate paradoxes, or sincere and rather pathetic paralogisms. For instance, did he really think that the Revue des Deux Mondes, an organ of “dukes, dunces, and dévotes,” as it used to be called even in those days by the wicked knowing ones, a nursing mother of Academies certainly, and a most respectable periodical in all ways—that this good Revue actually “had for its main function to understand and utter the best that is known and thought in the world,” absolutely existed as an organ for “the free play of mind”? I should be disposed to think that the truer explanation of such things is that they were neither quite paradoxes nor quite paralogisms; but the offspring of an innocent willingness to believe what he wished, and of an almost equally innocent desire to provoke the adversary. Unless (as unluckily they sometimes are) they be taken at the foot of the letter, they can do no harm, and their very piquancy helps the rest to do a great deal of good.
For there can be no doubt that in the main contention of his manifesto, as of his book, Mr Arnold was absolutely right. It was true that England, save for spasmodic and very partial appearances of it in a few of her great men of letters—Ben Jonson, Dryden, Addison, Johnson—had been wonderfully deficient in criticism up to the end of the eighteenth century; and that though in the early nineteenth she had produced one great philosophical critic, another even greater on the purely literary side, and a third of unique appreciative sympathy, in Coleridge, Hazlitt, and Lamb, she had not followed these up, and had, even in them, shown certain critical limitations. It was true that though the Germans had little and the French nothing to teach us in range, both had much to teach us in thoroughness, method, style of criticism. And it was truest of all (though Mr Arnold, who did not like the historic estimate, would have admitted this with a certain grudge) that the time imperatively demanded a thorough “stock-taking” of our own literature in the light and with the help of others.
Let palma—let the maxima palma—of criticism be given to him in that he first fought for the creed of this literary orthodoxy, and first exemplified (with whatever admixture of will-worship of his own, with whatever quaint rites and ceremonies) the carrying out of the cult. It is possible that his direct influence may have been exaggerated; one of the most necessary, though not of the most grateful, businesses of the literary historian is to point out that with rare exceptions, and those almost wholly on the poetic side, great men of letters rather show in a general, early, and original fashion a common tendency than definitely lead an otherwise sluggish multitude to the promised land. But no investigation has deprived, or is at all likely to deprive, the Essays in Criticism of their place as an epoch-making book, as the manual of a new and often independent, but, on the whole, like-minded, critical movement in England.
Nor can the blow of the first essay be said to be ill followed up in the second, the almost equally famous (perhaps the more famous) Influence of Academies. Of course here also, here as always, you may make reservations. It is a very strong argument, an argument stronger than any of Mr Arnold’s, that the institutions of a nation, if they are to last, if they are to do any good, must be in accordance with the spirit of the nation; that if the French Academy has been beneficial, it is because the French spirit is academic; and that if (as we may fear, or hope, or believe, according to our different principles) the English spirit is unacademic, an Academy would probably be impotent and perhaps ridiculous in England. But we can allow for this; and when we have allowed for it, once more Mr Arnold’s warnings are warnings on the right side, true, urgent, beneficial. There are still the minor difficulties. Even at the time, much less as was known of France in England then than now, there were those who opened their eyes first and then rubbed them at the assertion that “openness of mind and flexibility of intelligence” were the characteristics of the French people. But once more also, no matter! The central drift is right, and the central drift carries many excellent things with it, and may be allowed to wash away the less excellent. Mr Arnold is right on the average qualities of French prose; whether he is right about the “provinciality” of Jeremy Taylor as compared to Bossuet or not, he is right about “critical freaks,” though, by the way—but it is perhaps unnecessary to finish that sentence. He is right about the style of Mr Palgrave and right about the style of Mr Kinglake; and I do not know that I feel more especially bound to pronounce him wrong about the ideas of Lord Macaulay. But had he been as wrong in all these things as he was right, the central drift would still be inestimable—the drift of censure and contrast applied to English eccentricity, the argument that this eccentricity, if it is not very good, is but too likely to be very bad.
Yet it is perhaps in the illustrative essays that the author shows at his best. Even in the Guérin pieces, annoyance at the waste of first-rate power on tenth-rate people need not wholly blind us to the grace of the exposition and to the charming eulogy of “distinction” at the end. That, if Mr Arnold had known a little more about that French Romantic School which he despised, he would have hardly assigned this distinction to Maurice; and that Eugénie, though undoubtedly a “fair soul,” was in this not distinguished from hundreds and thousands of other women, need not matter very much after all. And with the rest there need be few allowances, or only amicable ones. One may doubt whether Heine’s charm is not mainly due to the very lawlessness, the very contempt of “subject,” the very quips and cranks and caprices that Mr Arnold so sternly bans. But who shall deny the excellence and the exquisiteness of this, the first English tribute of any real worth to the greatest of German poets, to one of the great poets of the world, to the poet who with Tennyson and Hugo completes the representative trinity of European poets of the nineteenth century proper? Very seldom (his applause of Gray, the only other instance, is not quite on a par with this) does the critic so nearly approach enthusiasm—not merely engouement on the one side or serene approval on the other. No matter that he pretends to admire Heine for his “modern spirit” (why, O Macarée, as his friend Maurice de Guérin might have said, should a modern spirit be better than an ancient one, or what is either before the Eternal?) instead of for what has been, conceitedly it may be, called the “tear-dew and star-fire and rainbow-gold” of his phrase and verse. He felt this magic at any rate. No matter that he applies the wrong comparison instead of the right one, and depreciates French in order to exalt German, instead of thanking Apollo for these two good different things. The root of the matter is the right root, a discriminating enthusiasm: and the flower of the matter is one of the most charming critical essays in English. It is good, no doubt, to have made up one’s mind about Heine before reading Mr Arnold; but one almost envies those who were led to that enchanted garden by so delightful an interpreter.
Almost equally delightful, and with no touch of the sadness which must always blend with any treatment of Heine, is the next essay, the pet, I believe, of some very excellent judges, on “Pagan and Mediaeval Religious Sentiment,” with its notable translation of Theocritus and its contrast with St Francis. One feels, indeed, that Mr Arnold was not quite so well equipped with knowledge on the one side as on the other; indeed, he never was well read in mediæval literature. But his thesis, as a thesis, is capable of defence; in the sternest times of military etiquette he could not have been put to death on the charge of holding out an untenable post; and he puts the different sides with incomparable skill and charm. Mr Arnold glosses Pagan morals rather doubtfully, but so skilfully; he rumples and blackens mediæval life more than rather unfairly, but with such a light and masterly touch!
Different again, inferior perhaps, but certainly not in any hostile sense inferior, is the “Joubert.” It has been the fashion with some to join this essay to the Guérin pieces as an instance of some incorrigible twist in Mr Arnold’s French estimates, of some inability to admire the right things, even when he did admire I cannot agree with them. Joubert, of course, has his own shortcomings as a pensée-writer. He is rococo beside La Bruyére, dilettante beside La Rochefoucauld, shallow beside Pascal. There is at times, even if you take him by himself, and without comparison, something thin and amateurish and conventional about him. But this is by no means always or very often the case; and his merits, very great in themselves, were even greater for Mr Arnold’s general purpose.