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.” 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 À¹µ¯ºµ¹±, 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 fo
rmer, 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.
Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold Page 115
