And the Keats, less disputable in its general estimate, is equally good in itself, and specially interesting as a capital example of Mr Arnold’s polemic — the capital example, indeed, if we except the not wholly dissimilar but much later article on Shelley’s Life. He is rather unduly severe on the single letter of Keats which he quotes; but that was his way, and it is after all only a justifiable rhetorical reculade, with the intent to leap upon the maudlin defenders of the poet as a sort of hero of M. Feydeau, and rend them. The improvement of the mere fashion, as compared with the fantasticalities of the Friendship’s Garland period, is simply enormous. And the praise which follows is praise really in the grand style — praise, the style and quality of which are positively rejoicing to the heart from their combination of fervour and accuracy, from their absolute fulfilment of the ideal of a word shockingly misused in these latter days, the word Appreciation. The personal sympathy which Mr Arnold evidently had with Gray neither makes nor mars here; all is purely critical, purely literary. And yet higher praise has never been given by any save the mere superlative-sloppers of the lower press, nor juster criticism meted out by the veriest critical Rhadamanthus. Of its scale and kind, this, I think, is the most perfect example of Mr Arnold’s critical power, and it is so late that it shows that power to have been not merely far off exhaustion, but actually, like sound old wine, certain to improve for years to come.
In the seven years that were left to him after the publication of the Byron, Mr Arnold did not entirely confine himself to the service of his only true mistress Literature. But he never fell again so completely into the power of Duessa as he had fallen between 1867 and 1877. His infidelities were chiefly in the direction of politics, not of religion or irreligion, and they were of a less gay and frivolous character than those of a generally similar kind in earlier dates. They were partly devoted to the change which has brought it about, that, while during the third quarter of the century the Conservatives were in power, though on three different occasions, yet in each for absolutely insignificant terms, in the fourth Mr Gladstone’s tenure of office from 1880 to 1885 has been the only period of real Liberal domination. But although he dealt with the phenomenon from various points of view in such articles as “The Nadir of Liberalism,” the “Zenith of Conservatism,” and so forth, it was chiefly, as was natural at the time, in relation to Ireland that he exercised his political pen, and enough has been said about these Irish articles by anticipation above. Discourses in America, the result of his lecturing tour to that country in 1883-84, and the articles on Amiel, Tolstoi, and Shelley’s Life, which represent his very last stage of life, require more particular attention.
The Discourses in America, two of them specially written, and the other, originally a Cambridge “Rede” discourse, recast for the Western Hemisphere, must always rank with the most curious and interesting of Mr Arnold’s works: but the very circumstances of their composition and delivery made it improbable, if not impossible, that they should form one of his best. These circumstances were of a kind which reproduces itself frequently in the careers of all men of any public distinction. In his days of comparative obscurity, or in some position of “greater freedom and less responsibility,” even when he ceases to be obscure, a man deals faithfully, but perhaps a little flippantly, with this or that person, thing, nation, subject, doctrine. Afterwards he is brought into a relation with the person or nation, into a position as regards the thing, subject, or doctrine, which necessitates, if not exactly a distinct recantation in the humiliating sense attached to the Latin, yet a more or less graceful and ingenious palinode in the more honourable one which we allow to the Greek equivalent and original. Mr Arnold could never be lacking in grace or in ingenuity; but he certainly had, in his earlier work, allowed it to be perfectly visible that the world of American politics, American manners, American institutions and ways generally, was not in his eyes by any means a world all of sweetness or all of light.
His sense of the ludicrous, and his sense of art, alike precluded even the idea of a clumsy apology, and though, as was to be expected, the folk of the baser sort who exist everywhere may not have been pleased with his Discourses, the people of the United States generally did not owe him or show him any grudge for being frank and consistent as well as polite. The subjects were selected and grouped with great skill. “Numbers” dealt with the burning question of democracy, which must ever be uppermost — or as nethermost not less important — in a republic; and dealt with it after the more moderate, not the extremer form, of that combination of literature and politics which Mr Arnold had always affected. “Literature and Science,” the middle discourse, attacked a question which, so far as the nationality of his audience was concerned, had nothing burning about it, which the lecturer was singularly well qualified to treat from the one side, and which is likely to retain its actuality and its moment for many a day and year, perhaps many a century. “Emerson,” the last, descended from generalities to the consideration of a particular subject, at once specially American and specially literary. It would have been hard indeed to exhibit better composition in the grouping of the subjects as regards their classes, and criticism may be defied to find better examples of each class than those actually taken.
It is not clear that quite such high praise can be given to the execution, and the reason is plain: it was in the execution, not in the composition and scheme, that the hard practical difficulties of the task came in. Long harnessed official as he was, and preacher as he was, in his critical character, of Law, Order, Restraint, Mr Arnold was both too much of an Englishman and too much of a genius not to be ill to ride with the curb. And, save perhaps in “Literature and Science” (which was not at first written for an American audience at all), the pressure of the curb — I had almost said of the twitch — is too often evident, or at least suggested. This especially applies to the first, the longest, the most ambitious, and, as its author would say, most “nobly serious” of the three. There are quite admirable things in “Numbers”; and the descant on the worship of the great goddess Aselgeia, and its effect upon France, is not only nobly serious from the point of view of morality, but is one of Mr Arnold’s best claims to the title of a political philosopher, and even of a political prophet. But it is less easy to say that this passage appears to be either specially in place or well composed with its companions. Perhaps the same is true of the earlier part, and its extensive dealings with Isaiah and Plato. As regards the prophet, it is pretty certain that of Mr Arnold’s hearers, the larger number did not care to have Isaiah spoken about in that particular manner, while some at least of the rest did not care to have him spoken about at all. Of the philosopher, it is equally safe to say that the great majority knew very little, and that of the small minority, some must have had obstinate questionings connected with the appearance of Plato as an authority on the moral health of nations, and with the application of Mr Arnold’s own very true and very noble doctrine about Aselgeia. In fact, although the lecture is the most thoughtful, the most serious in part, the most forcible, and the truest of all Mr Arnold’s political or social discourses, yet it shares with all of them the reproach of a touch of desultory dilettantism.
The others, at least equally interesting in parts, are much better as wholes. The opening of the “Emerson,” with its fond reminiscence of Oxford, is in a vein which Mr Arnold did not often work, but which always yielded him gold. In the words about Newman, one seems to recognise very much more than meets the ear — an explanation of much in the Arnoldian gospel, on something like the principle of revulsion, of soured love, which accounts for still more in the careers of his contemporaries, Mr Pattison and Mr Froude. He is less happy on Carlyle — he never was very happy on Carlyle, and for obvious reasons — but here he jars less than usual. As for Emerson himself, some readers have liked Emerson better than Carlyle at first, but have found that Carlyle “wears” a great deal better than Emerson. It seems to have been the other way with Mr Arnold; yet he is not uncritical about Emer
son himself. On Emerson’s poetry he is even, as on his own principles he was, perhaps, bound to be, rather hypercritical. Most of it, no doubt, is not poetry at all; but it has “once in a hundred years,” as Mr O’Shaughnessy sang, the blossoming of the aloe, the star-shower of poetic meteors. And while, with all reverence, one is bound to say that his denying the title of “great writer” to Carlyle is merely absurd — is one of those caprices which somebody once told us are the eternal foes of art — he is not unjust in denying that title to Emerson. But after justifying his policy of not “cracking up” by still further denying his subject the title of a great philosophic thinker, he proceeds to find a pedestal for him at last as a friend and leader of those who would “live in the spirit.” With such a judgment one has no fault to find, because it must be in all cases an almost purely personal one. To some Gautier, with his doctrine of
“Sculpte, lime, cisèle,”
as the great commandment of the creative artist, has been a friend and leader in the life of the spirit: to Mr Arnold he was only a sort of unspiritual innkeeper. To Mr Arnold, Maurice de Guérin, with his second-hand Quinetism, was a friend and leader in the life of the spirit; others scarcely find him so. “This is this to thee and that to me.”
The third (strictly the middle) piece fortunately requires no allowances, and suffers from no drawbacks. “Literature and Science” is an apology for a liberal education, and for a rationally ordered hierarchy of human study, which it would be almost impossible to improve, and respecting which it is difficult to think that it can ever grow obsolete. Not only was Mr Arnold here on his own ground, but he was fighting for his true mistress, with the lance and sword and shield that he had proved. And the result is like that, of the fortunate fights of romance: he thrusts his antagonists straight over the crupper, he sends them rolling on the ground, and clutching its sand with their fingers. Even Mr Huxley, stoutest and best of all the Paynim knights, never succeeded in wiping off this defeat; and it is tolerably certain that no one else will. The language of the piece is unusually lacking in ornateness or fanciful digression; but the logic is the strongest that Mr Arnold ever brought to bear.
The three last essays we have mentioned, apart from the pathetic and adventitious interest which attaches to them as last, would be in any case among the best of their author’s, and their value is (at least, as it seems to me) in an ascending scale. To care very much for that on Count Tolstoi is not easy for those who are unfashionable enough not to care very much for the eloquent Russian himself. Nothing is satisfactory that one can only read in translations. But Mr Arnold, in whom a certain perennial youthfulness was (as it often, if not always, is in the chosen of the earth) one of his most amiable features, seems to have conceived a new engouement for this new and quaintly flavoured Russian literature. Had he lived longer, he probably would have sung us something in a cautionary strain; just as it can never be sufficiently regretted that he did not live long enough to handle Ibsenism. And it would have been very particularly pleasant to hear him on those Memoirs of a Mongol Minx (as they have been profanely called), which are assigned to the great Marie Bashkirtseff; or on those others of the learned She-Mathematician, who waited with a friend on a gentleman and suggested that he should marry one of them, no matter which, and lead both about. But the mixture of freshness, of passion, and of regard for conduct in Count Tolstoi could not but appeal to him; and he has given us a very charming causerie on Anna Karenina, notable — like O’Rourke’s noble feast — to
“Those who were there
And those who were not,” —
to those who have read the book itself, and to those who have not yet found time to read it.
I cannot plead much greater affection for the lucubrations of Amiel than for Count Tolstoi’s dealings with that odd compound of crudity and rottenness, the Russian nature; but Mr Arnold’s “Amiel” is admirable. Never was there a more “gentlemanly correction,” a more delicate and good-humoured setting to rights, than that which he administers to Amiel’s two great panegyrists (who happened to be Mr Arnold’s own niece and Mr Arnold’s own friend). On subjects like Maya and the “great wheel” it would almost be impossible to conceive, and certainly impossible to find, a happier commentator than Mr Arnold, though perhaps in the regions of theology he had a private Maya, a very Great Wheel, of his own. The firmness with which he rebukes the maunderings of the Genevese hypochondriac — of whom some one once unkindly remarked that he was not so much intoxicated with Idealism as suffering from the subsequent headache — is equalled by the kindness of the dealing; and the quiet decision with which he puts his fine writing in its proper place is better still. Nobody could call Mr Arnold a Philistine or one insensible to finesse, grace, sehnsucht, the impalpable and intangible charm of melancholy and of thought. And his comments on Amiel’s loaded pathos and his muddled meditation are therefore invaluable. Nor is he less happy or less just in the praise which, though not the first, he was one of the first to give to by far the strongest side of Amiel’s talent, his really remarkable power of literary criticism.
But the best wine was still kept for the very last. It will have been observed in these brief sketches of his work that, since his return to the fields of literature proper, Mr Arnold had drawn nearer to the causerie and farther from the abstract critical essay, — that he had taken to that mixture of biography, abstract of work, and interspersed critical comment which Sainte-Beuve, though he did not exactly invent it, had perfected, and which somebody, I think, has recently described as “intensely irritating.” Well! well! pearls, as we all know, are irritating to certain classes of consumers. He had from the first done this well, he now did it consummately. That he took occasion, in the paper on Shelley’s life which appeared in the Nineteenth Century for January 1888, to repeat his pet heresy about Shelley’s poetry, matters nothing at all. It is an innocent defiance, and no attempt whatever is made to support it by argument. The purpose of the essay is quite different. Already, some years before, in his article on Keats, Mr Arnold had dealt some pretty sharp blows both at the indiscretion of a certain class of modern literary biographers, and at the pawing and morbid sentimentality of the same persons or others. He had a new and a better opportunity in the matter he was now handling, and he struck more strongly, more repeatedly, and with truer aim than ever. From the moment of its appearance to the present day, this piece has been an unceasing joy to all who love literature with a sane devotion. Its composition is excellent; it selects just the right points, dwells on them in just the right way, and drops them just when we have had enough. In mere style it yields to nothing of its author’s, and is conspicuously and quite triumphantly free from his repetitions and other mannerisms. No English writer — indeed one may say no writer at all — has ever tempered such a blend of quiet contempt with perfect good-humour and perfect good-breeding. Dryden would have written with an equally fatal serenity, but not so lightly; Voltaire with as much lightness, but not nearly so much like a gentleman — which may also be said Of Courier. Thackeray could not have helped a blaze of indignation — honest and healthy, but possibly just plusquam-artistic — at the unspeakable persons who think that by blackening the unhappy Harriet they can whiten Shelley. And almost any one would have been likely either to commit the complementary error of being too severe on Shelley himself, or, if this were avoided, to underlie the charge of being callous and unsympathetic. Every one of these rocks, and others, Mr Arnold has avoided; and he has left us in the piece one of the most perfect examples that exist of the English essay on subjects connected with literature. In its own special division of causerie the thing is not only without a superior, it is almost without a peer; its insinuated or passing literary comments are usually as happy as its censure of vital matters, and even the above-referred-to heresy itself gives it a certain piquancy. Ill indeed was the fate that took its author away so soon after the completion of this little masterpiece; yet he could not have desired to leave the world with a better diploma-performance, lod
ged as an example of his actual accomplishment.
We must now return, for the last time unfortunately, to the narrative of biographical events. December 1877 furnishes, in some letters to his sister, evidence that he was increasingly “spread” (as the French say quaintly) by notices of parties and persons — Mr Disraeli and Mr Gladstone, Mr Huxley and Mr Ruskin. One is glad to hear of the last-named that the writer “is getting to like him “ — the passages on the author of Modern Painters in the earlier letters are certainly not enthusiastic — and that “he gains much by his fancy being forbidden to range through the world of coloured cravats.” This beneficial effect of evening dress is not limited to Mr Ruskin, and is so well expressed that one only wishes Mr Arnold had let his own fancy range more freely in such epistolary criticisms of life. We hear that Mr J.R. Green “likes the Reformation and Puritanism less the more he looks into them,” again a not uncommon experience — and that Mr Stopford Brooke is deriving much edification from the review of his Primer. The next year continues the series of letters to M. Fontanes, and gives a pleasant phrase in one to another sister, Mrs Cropper. “My poems have had no better friends in their early and needy days than my own sisters” — wherein Mr Arnold unconsciously quotes Goblin Market, “there is no friend like a sister.” Later, Mr Freeman is dashed off, a la maniere noire, as “an ardent, learned, and honest man, but a ferocious pedant.” 1879 yields a letter to Miss Arnold, expressing the intention to send the Wordsworth book of selections to M. Scherer, and beg him to review it, which request resulted in one of the very best, perhaps the very best, of that critic’s essays in English Literature. Mr Arnold is distressed later at Renan’s taking Victor Hugo’s poetry so prodigiously au serieux, just as some of us have been, if not distressed, yet mildly astonished, at Mr Arnold for not taking it, with all its faults, half seriously enough. Geist, the dachshund, appears agreeably, with many other birds and beasts, in a May letter of this year, and botany reinforces zoology in a later one to Mr Grant Duff.
Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold Page 124
