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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Matthew Arnold, by George Saintsbury
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Matthew Arnold
+
+Author: George Saintsbury
+
+Release Date: July 13, 2005 [EBook #16284]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MATTHEW ARNOLD ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Carol David, Ben Beasley and
+the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+MODERN ENGLISH WRITERS.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+MATTHEW ARNOLD...... Professor SAINTSBURY.
+
+R.L. STEVENSON...... L. COPE CORNFORD.
+
+JOHN RUSKIN ....... Mrs MEYNELL.
+
+ALFRED TENNYSON ..... ANDREW LANG.
+
+THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY ... EDWARD CLODD.
+
+THACKERAY ........ CHARLES WHIBLEY.
+
+GEORGE ELIOT....... A.T. QUILLER-COUCH.
+
+BROWNING......... C.H. HERFORD.
+
+FROUDE.......... JOHN OLIVER HOBBES.
+
+DICKENS ......... W.E. HENLEY.
+
+[Symbol: 3 asterisks] _Other Volumes will be announced in due
+course_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+WILLIAM BLACKWOOD & SONS, EDINBURGH AND LONDON
+
+MATTHEW ARNOLD
+
+BY
+
+
+GEORGE SAINTSBURY
+
+PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC AND ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE
+UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH
+
+THIRD IMPRESSION
+
+WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS
+EDINBURGH AND LONDON
+MCMII
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+
+Mr. Matthew Arnold, like other good men of our times, disliked the
+idea of being made the subject of a regular biography; and the only
+official and authoritative sources of information as to the details of
+his life are the _Letters_ published by his family, under the
+editorship of Mr G.W.E. Russell (2 vols., London, 1895)[1]. To these,
+therefore, it seems to be a duty to confine oneself, as far as such
+details are concerned, save as regards a very few additional facts
+which are public property. But very few more facts can really be
+wanted except by curiosity; for in the life of no recent person of
+distinction did things literary play so large a part as in Mr
+Arnold's: of no one could it be said with so much truth that, family
+affections and necessary avocations apart, he was _totus in
+illis_. And these things we have in abundance.[2] If the following
+pages seem to discuss them too minutely, it can only be pleaded that
+those to whom it seems so are hardly in sympathy with Matthew Arnold
+himself. And if the discussion seems to any one too often to take the
+form of a critical examination, let him remember Mr. Arnold's own
+words in comparing the treatment of Milton by Macaulay and by M.
+Scherer:--
+
+  "Whoever comes to the _Essay on Milton_ with the desire to get
+  at the real truth about Milton, whether as a man or a poet, will
+  feel that the essay in nowise helps him. A reader who only wants
+  rhetoric, a reader who wants a panegyric on Milton, a panegyric on
+  the Puritans, will find what he wants. A reader who wants criticism
+  will be disappointed."
+
+I have endeavoured, in dealing with the master of all English critics
+in the latter half of the nineteenth century, to "help the reader who
+wants criticism."
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] Mr Arthur Galton's _Matthew Arnold_ (London, 1897) adds a
+few pleasant notes, chiefly about dachshunds.
+
+[2] It is impossible, in dealing with them, to be too grateful to Mr.
+T. B. Smart's _Bibliography of Matthew Arnold_ (London, 1892), a
+most craftsmanlike piece of work.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+CHAP.
+
+I. LIFE TILL MARRIAGE, AND WORK TILL THE PUBLICATION OF THE
+_POEMS_ OF 1853
+
+II. LIFE FROM 1851-62--SECOND SERIES OF _POEMS_--_MEROPE_--_ON
+TRANSLATING HOMER_
+
+III. _A FRENCH ETON_--_ESSAYS IN CRITICISM_--_CELTIC LITERATURE_--_NEW
+POEMS_--LIFE FROM 1862 TO 1867
+
+IV. IN THE WILDERNESS
+
+V. THE LAST DECADE
+
+VI. CONCLUSION
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+INDEX
+
+
+
+
+
+MATTHEW ARNOLD.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+LIFE TILL MARRIAGE, AND WORK TILL THE PUBLICATION OF THE _POEMS_
+OF 1853.
+
+
+Even those who are by no means greedy of details as to the biography
+of authors, may without inconsistency regret that Matthew Arnold's
+_Letters_ do not begin till he was just five-and-twenty. And then
+they are not copious, telling us in particular next to nothing about
+his literary work (which is, later, their constant subject) till he
+was past thirty. We could spare schoolboy letters, which, though often
+interesting, are pretty identical, save when written by little prigs.
+But the letters of an undergraduate--especially when the person is
+Matthew Arnold, and the University the Oxford of the years
+1841-45--ought to be not a little symptomatic, not a little
+illuminative. We might have learnt from them something more than we
+know at present about the genesis and early stages of that not
+entirely comprehensible or classifiable form of Liberalism in matters
+political, ecclesiastical, and general which, with a kind of altered
+Voltairian touch, attended his Conservatism in literature. Moreover,
+it is a real loss that we have scarcely anything from his own pen
+about his poems before _Sohrab and Rustum_--that is to say, about the
+great majority of the best of them. By the time at which we have full
+and frequent commentaries on himself, he is a married man, a harnessed
+and hard-working inspector of schools, feeling himself too busy for
+poetry, not as yet tempted by promptings within or invitations from
+without to betake himself to critical prose in any quantity or
+variety. Indeed, by a not much more than allowable hyperbole, we may
+say that we start with the book of his poetry all but shut, and the
+book of his prose all but unopened.
+
+We must therefore make what we can of the subject, and of course a
+great deal more is to be made in such a case of the work than of the
+life. The facts of the latter are but scanty. Matthew Arnold, as all
+the world knows, was the son--the eldest son--of the famous Dr
+(Thomas) Arnold, Head-master of Rugby, and Regius Professor of Modern
+History at Oxford, where he had earlier been a Fellow of Oriel. Dr
+Arnold survives in the general memory now chiefly by virtue of his
+head-mastership, which was really a remarkable one, whatever
+distinction it may owe to the loyalty of such a group of pupils as his
+son, Dean Stanley, Clough, "Tom Brown" Hughes, and others. But he was,
+if not positively great, a notable and influential person in many
+ways. As a historian he was alert and intelligent, though perhaps too
+much under the influence of that subtlest and most dangerous kind of
+"popular breeze" which persuades those on whom it blows that they are
+sailing not with but away from the vulgar. As a scholar he was
+ingenious, if not very erudite or deep. He was really a master, and
+has been thought by some good judges a great master, of that admirable
+late Georgian academic style of English prose, which is almost the
+equal of the greatest. But he was, if not exactly _cupidus novarum
+rerum_ in Church and State, very ready to entertain them; he was
+curiously deficient in logic; and though the religious sense was
+strong in him, he held, and transmitted to his son, the heresy--the
+foundation of all heresies--that religion is something that you can
+"bespeak," that you can select and arrange to your own taste; that it
+is not "to take or to leave" at your peril and as it offers itself.
+
+On August 11, 1820, Dr Arnold married Mary Penrose, and as he had
+devoted his teaching energies, which were early developed, not to
+school or university work, but to the taking of private pupils at
+Laleham on the Thames, between Staines and Chertsey, their eldest son
+was born there, on Christmas Eve, 1822. He was always enthusiastic
+about the Thames valley, though not more so than it deserves, and in
+his very earliest letter (January 2, 1848) we find record of a visit,
+when he found "the stream with the old volume, width, shine, rapid
+fulness, 'kempshott,'[1] and swans, unchanged and unequalled." He was
+only six years old when his father was elected to the head-mastership
+of Rugby; he was educated in his early years at his birthplace, where
+an uncle, the Rev. John Buckland, carried on the establishment, and at
+the age of fourteen he was sent to Winchester, his father's school.
+Here he only remained a year, and entered Rugby in August 1837. He
+remained there for four years, obtaining an open Balliol scholarship
+in 1840, though he did not go up till October 1841. In 1840 he had
+also gained the prize for poetry at Rugby itself with _Alaric at
+Rome_, a piece which was immediately printed, but never reprinted
+by its author, though it is now easily obtainable in the 1896 edition
+of those poems of his which fell out of copyright at the seven years
+after his death.
+
+It is an observation seldom falsified, that such exercises, by poets
+of the higher class, display neither their special characteristics,
+nor any special characteristics at all. Matthew Arnold's was not one
+of the exceptions. It is very much better than most school prize
+poems: it shows the critical and scholarly character of the writer
+with very fair foreshadowing; but it does not fore-shadow his poetry
+in the very least. It is quite free from the usual formal faults of a
+boy's verse, except some evidences of a deficient ear, especially for
+rhyme ("full" and "beautiful," "palaces" and "days"). It manages a
+rather difficult metre (the sixain rhymed _ababcc_ and ending
+with an Alexandrine) without too much of the monotony which is its
+special danger. And some of the tricks which the boy-poet has caught
+are interesting and abode with him, such as the _anadiplosis_--
+
+  "Yes, there are stories registered on high,
+  Yes, there are stains Time's fingers cannot blot";
+
+in which kind he was to produce some years later the matchless
+
+  "Still nursing the unconquerable hope,
+  Still clutching the inviolable shade,"
+
+of the _Scholar-Gipsy_. On the whole, the thing is correct but
+colourless; even its melancholy is probably mere Byronism, and has
+nothing directly to do with the later quality of _Dover Beach_
+and _Poor Matthias_.
+
+Of Mr Arnold's undergraduate years we have unluckily but little
+authentic record, and, as has been said, not one letter. The most
+interesting evidence comes from Principal Shairp's well-known lines in
+_Balliol Scholars, 1840-1843_, written, or at least published,
+many years later, in 1873:--
+
+  "The one wide-welcomed for a father's fame,
+  Entered with free bold step that seemed to claim
+    Fame for himself, nor on another lean.
+
+  So full of power, yet blithe and debonair,
+    Rallying his friends with pleasant banter gay,
+  Or half a-dream chaunting with jaunty air
+    Great words of Goethe, catch of Beranger,
+  We see the banter sparkle in his prose,
+  But knew not then the undertone that flows
+    So calmly sad, through all his stately lay."[2]
+
+Like some other persons of much distinction, and a great many of
+little or none, he "missed his first," in December 1844; and though he
+obtained, three months later, the consolation prize of a Fellowship
+(at Oriel, too), he made no post-graduate stay of any length at the
+university. The then very general, though even then not universal,
+necessity of taking orders before very long would probably in any case
+have sent him wandering; for it is clear from the first that his bent
+was hopelessly anti-clerical, and he was not merely too honest, but
+much too proud a man, to consent to be put in one of the priests'
+offices for a morsel of bread. It may well be doubted--though he felt
+and expressed not merely in splendid passages of prose and verse for
+public perusal, but in private letters quite towards the close of his
+life, that passionate attachment which Oxford more than any other
+place of the kind inspires--whether he would have been long at home
+there as a resident. For the place has at once a certain republicanism
+and a certain tyranny about its idea, which could not wholly suit the
+aspiring and restless spirit of the author of _Switzerland_. None
+of her sons is important to Oxford--the meanest of them has in his
+sonship the same quality as the greatest. Now it was very much at Mr
+Arnold's heart to be important, and he was not eager to impart or
+share his qualities.
+
+However this may be, there were ample reasons why he should leave the
+fold. The Bar (though he was actually called and for many years went
+circuit as Marshal to his father-in-law, Mr Justice Wightman) would
+have suited him, in practice if not in principle, even less than the
+Church; and he had no scientific leanings except a taste for botany.
+Although the constantly renewed cries for some not clearly defined
+system of public support for men of letters are, as a rule, absurd,
+there is no doubt that Mr Arnold was the very man for a sinecure, and
+would have justified the existence of Pipe or Hanaper to all
+reasonable men. But his political friends had done away with nearly
+all such things, and no one of the very few that remained fell to his
+lot. His father had died in 1842, but the son served a short
+apprenticeship to school-teaching at Rugby, then became private
+secretary to Lord Lansdowne, the President of the Council (it is now
+that we first meet him as an epistoler), and early in 1851 was
+appointed by his chief to an inspectorship of schools. Having now a
+livelihood, he married, in June of that year, Frances Lucy Wightman,
+daughter of a judge of the Queen's Bench. Their first child, Thomas,
+was born on July 6, 1852, and Mr Arnold was now completely estated in
+the three positions of husband, father, and inspector of schools,
+which occupied--to his great delight in the first two cases, not quite
+so in the third--most of his life that was not given to literature.
+Some not ungenerous but perhaps rather unnecessary indignation has
+been spent upon his "drudgery" and its scanty rewards. It is enough to
+say that few men can arrange at their pleasure the quantity and
+quality of their work, and that not every man, even of genius, has had
+his bread-and-butter secured for life at eight-and-twenty.
+
+But in the ten or twelve years which had passed since _Alaric at
+Rome_, literature itself had been by no means neglected, and in
+another twelvemonth after the birth of his first-born, Matthew Arnold
+had practically established his claim as a poet by utterances to which
+he made comparatively small additions later, though more than half his
+life was yet to run. And he had issued one prose exercise in
+criticism, of such solidity and force as had not been shown by any
+poet since Dryden, except Coleridge.
+
+These documents can hardly be said to include the Newdigate poem
+(_Cromwell_) of 1843: they consist of _The Strayed Reveller and other
+Poems_, by "A.," 1849; _Empedocles on Etna, and other Poems_, [still]
+by "A.," 1852; and _Poems_ by Matthew Arnold, a new edition, 1853--the
+third consisting of the contents of the two earlier, with _Empedocles_
+and a few minor things omitted, but with very important additions,
+including _Sohrab and Rustum, The Church of Brou, Requiescat_, and
+_The Scholar-Gipsy_. The contents of all three must be carefully
+considered, and the consideration may be prefaced by a few words on
+_Cromwell_.
+
+This [Greek: agonisma], like the other, Mr Arnold never included in
+any collection of his work; but it was printed at Oxford in the year
+of its success, and again at the same place, separately or with other
+prize poems, in 1846, 1863, and 1891. It may also be found in the
+useful non-copyright edition above referred to. Couched in the
+consecrated couplet, but not as of old limited to fifty lines, it is
+"good rhymes," as the elder Mr Pope used to say to the younger; but a
+prudent taster would perhaps have abstained, even more carefully than
+in the case of the _Alaric_, from predicting a real poet in the
+author. It is probably better than six Newdigates out of seven at
+least, but it has no distinction. The young, but not so very young,
+poet--he was as old as Tennyson when he produced his unequal but
+wonderful first volume--begins by borrowing Wordsworth's two voices of
+the mountain and the sea, shows some impression here and there from
+Tennyson's own master-issue, the great collection of 1842, which had
+appeared a year before, ventures on an Alexandrine--
+
+  "Between the barren mountains and the stormy sea"
+
+--which comes as a pleasant relief, and displays more than once (as he
+did afterwards in _Tristram and Iseult_) an uncertain but by no means
+infelicitous variety of couplet which he never fully or fairly worked
+out, but left for Mr William Morris to employ with success many years
+later. Otherwise the thing is good, but negligible. It would have
+taken an extremely strong competition, or an extremely incompetent
+examiner, to deprive it of the prize; but he must have been a sanguine
+man who, in giving the author that prize, expected to receive from him
+returns of poetry.
+
+Yet they came. If we did not know that the middle of this century was
+one of the nadirs of English[3] criticism, and if we did not know
+further that even good critics often go strangely wrong both in praise
+and in blame of new verse, it would be most surprising that _The
+Strayed Reveller_ volume should have attracted so little attention.
+It is full of faults, but that is part of the beauty of it. Some of
+these faults are those which, persevering, prevented Mr Arnold from
+attaining a higher position than he actually holds in poetry; but no
+critic could know that. There is nothing here worse, or more
+necessarily fatal, than many things in Tennyson's 1830 and 1832
+collections: he overwent those, so might Mr Arnold have overgone
+these. And the promise--nay, the performance--is such as had been seen
+in no verse save Tennyson's, and the almost unnoticed Browning's, for
+some thirty years. The title-poem, though it should have pleased even
+a severe judge, might have aroused uncomfortable doubts even in an
+amiable one. In the first place, its rhymelessness is a caprice, a
+will-worship. Except blank verse, every rhymeless metre in English has
+on it the curse of the _tour de force_, of the acrobatic. Campion
+and Collins, Southey and Shelley, have done great things in it; but
+neither _Rose-cheeked Laura_ nor _Evening_, neither the
+great things in _Thalaba_ nor the great things in _Queen
+Mab_, can escape the charge of being caprices. And caprice, as some
+have held, is the eternal enemy of art.
+
+But the caprice of _The Strayed Reveller_ does not cease with its
+rhymelessness. The rhythm and the line-division are also studiously
+odd, unnatural, paradoxical. Except for the "poetic diction" of
+putting "Goddess" after "Circe" instead of before it, the first stave
+is merely a prose sentence, of strictly prosaic though not
+inharmonious rhythm. But in this stave there is no instance of the
+strangest peculiarity, and what seems to some the worst fault of the
+piece, the profusion of broken-up decasyllables, which sometimes
+suggest a very "corrupt" manuscript, or a passage of that singular
+stuff in the Caroline dramatists which is neither blank verse, nor any
+other, nor prose. Here are a few out of many instances--
+
+      "Is it, then, evening
+  So soon? [_I see the night-dews
+  Clustered in thick beads_], dim," etc.
+
+       *       *       *
+  ["_When the white dawn first
+  Through the rough fir-planks. _"]
+
+       *       *       *
+  ["_Thanks, gracious One!
+  Ah! the sweet fumes again._"]
+
+       *       *       *
+  ["_They see the Centaurs
+  In the upper glens._"]
+
+One could treble these--indeed in one instance (the
+sketch of the Indian) the entire stanza of _eleven_ lines, by the
+insertion of one "and" only, becomes a smooth blank-verse piece of
+_seven_, two of which are indeed hemistichs, and three "weak-ended,"
+but only such as are frequent in Shakespeare--
+
+  "They see the Indian drifting, knife in hand,
+  His frail boat moored to a floating isle--thick-matted
+  With large-leaved [_and_] low-creeping melon-plants
+  And the dark cucumber.
+  He reaps and stows them, drifting, drifting: round him,
+  Round his green harvest-plot, flow the cool lake-waves,
+  The mountains ring them."
+
+Nor, perhaps, though the poem is a pretty one, will it stand criticism
+of a different kind much better. Such mighty personages as Ulysses and
+Circe are scarcely wanted as mere bystanders and "supers" to an
+imaginative young gentleman who enumerates, somewhat promiscuously, a
+few of the possible visions of the Gods. There is neither classical,
+nor romantic, nor logical justification for any such mild effect of
+the dread Wine of Circe: and one is driven to the conclusion that the
+author chiefly wanted a frame, after his own fashion, for a set of
+disconnected vignettes like those of Tennyson's _Palace of Art_
+and _Dream of Fair Women_.
+
+But if the title poem is vulnerable, there is plenty of compensation.
+The opening sonnet--
+
+  "Two lessons, Nature, let me learn of thee"--
+
+is perhaps rather learnt from Wordsworth, yet it does not fail to
+strike the note which fairly differentiates the Arnoldian variety of
+Wordsworthianism--the note which rings from _Resignation_ to
+_Poor Matthias_, and which is a very curious cross between two
+things that at first sight may seem unmarriageable, the Wordsworthian
+enthusiasm and the Byronic despair. But of this[4] more when we have
+had more of its examples before us. The second piece in the volume
+must, or should, have struck--for there is very little evidence that
+it did strike--readers of the volume as something at once considerable
+and, in no small measure, new. _Mycerinus_, a piece of some 120
+lines or so, in thirteen six-line stanzas and a blank-verse
+_coda_, is one of those characteristic poems of this century,
+which are neither mere "copies of verses," mere occasional pieces, nor
+substantive compositions of the old kind, with at least an attempt at
+a beginning, middle, and end. They attempt rather situations than
+stories, rather facets than complete bodies of thought, or
+description, or character. They supply an obvious way of escape for
+the Romantic tendency which does not wish to break wholly with
+classical tradition; and above all, they admit of indulgence in that
+immense _variety_ which seems to have become one of the chief
+devices of modern art, attempting the compliances necessary to gratify
+modern taste.
+
+The Herodotean anecdote of the Egyptian King Mycerinus, his
+indignation at the sentence of death in six years as a recompense for
+his just rule, and his device of lengthening his days by revelling all
+night, is neither an unpromising nor a wholly promising subject. The
+foolish good sense of Mr Toots would probably observe--and
+justly--that before six years, or six months, or even six days were
+over, King Mycerinus must have got very sleepy; and the philosophic
+mind would certainly recall the parallel of Cleobis and Biton as to
+the best gift for man. Mr Arnold, however, draws no direct moral. The
+stanza-part of the poem, the king's expostulation, contains very fine
+poetry, and "the note" rings again throughout it, especially in the
+couplet--
+
+  "And prayers, and gifts, and tears, are fruitless all,
+  _And the night waxes, and the shadows fall_."
+
+The blank-verse tail-piece is finer still in execution; it is, with
+the still finer companion-_coda_ of _Sohrab and Rustum_, the
+author's masterpiece in the kind, and it is, like that, an early and
+consummate example of Mr Arnold's favourite device of finishing
+without a finish, of "playing out the audience," so to speak, with
+something healing and reconciling, description, simile, what not, to
+relieve the strain of his generally sad philosophy and his often
+melancholy themes.
+
+One may less admire, despite its famous and often-quoted line,
+
+  "Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole,"
+
+the sonnet _To a Friend_, praising Homer and Epictetus and
+Sophocles, for it seems to some to have a smatch of priggishness. Nor
+am I one of those who think very highly of the much longer _Sick
+King in Bokhara_ which (with a fragment of an _Antigone_,
+whereof more hereafter) follows, as this sonnet precedes, _The
+Strayed Reveller_ itself. There is "the note," again, and I daresay
+the orientalism has the exactness of colour on which, as we know from
+the _Letters_, Mr Arnold prided himself. Yet the handling of the
+piece seems to me prolix and uncertain, and the drift either very
+obscure or somewhat unimportant. But about the _Shakespeare_
+sonnet which follows there can be no controversy among the competent.
+"Almost adequate" is in such a case the highest praise; and it must be
+given.
+
+The companions of this sonnet are respectable, but do not deserve much
+warmer words; and then we turn to a style of poem remarkably different
+from anything which the author had yet published and from most of his
+subsequent work. It is not unnoteworthy that the batch of poems called
+in the later collected editions _Switzerland_, and completed at
+last by the piece called _On the Terrace at Berne_, appeared
+originally piecemeal, and with no indication of connection. The first
+of its numbers is here, _To my Friends who Ridiculed a Tender
+Leave-taking_. It applies both the note of thought which has been
+indicated, and the quality of style which had already disengaged
+itself, to the commonest--the greatest--theme of poetry, but to one
+which this poet had not yet tried--to Love. Let it be remembered that
+the thought has the cast of a strictly pessimist quietism--that the
+style aims, if it aims at any single thing, at the reproduction of the
+simpler side of classicalism, at an almost prim and quakerish
+_elegance_, a sort of childlike grace. There is, however, by no
+means any great austerity in the tone: on the contrary, the refrain
+(altered later)--
+
+  "Ere the parting kiss be dry,
+  Quick! thy tablets, Memory!"--
+
+approaches the luscious. It is not easy to decide, and it is perhaps
+in both senses impertinent to speculate, whether the "Marguerite"
+(whose La Tour-like portrait is drawn in this piece with such relish,
+and who is so philosophically left to her fate by her lover on the
+Terrace at Berne later) had any live original. She seems a little more
+human in some ways than most of those cloud-Junos of the poets, the
+heroines of sonnet-sequence and song-string. She herself has a
+distinct touch of philosophy, anticipating with nonchalant resignation
+the year's severance, and with equally nonchalant anticipation the
+time when
+
+  "Some day next year I shall be,
+  Entering heedless, kissed by thee."
+
+Her wooer paints her with gusto, but scarcely with ardour; and ends
+with the boding note--
+
+  "Yet, if little stays with man,
+  Ah! retain we all we can!"--
+
+seeming to be at least as doubtful of his own constancy as of hers.
+Nor do we meet her again in the volume. The well-known complementary
+pieces which make up _Switzerland_ were either not written, or
+held back.
+
+The inferior but interesting _Modern Sappho_, almost the poet's
+only experiment in "Moore-ish" method and melody--
+
+  "They are gone--all is still! Foolish heart, dost thou quiver?"--
+
+is a curiosity rather than anything else. The style is ill suited to
+the thought; besides, Matthew Arnold, a master at times of blank
+verse, and of the statelier stanza, was less often an adept at the
+lighter and more rushing lyrical measures. He is infinitely more at
+home in the beautiful _New Sirens_, which, for what reason it is
+difficult to discover, he never reprinted till many years later,
+partly at Mr Swinburne's most judicious suggestion. The scheme is
+trochaic, and Mr Arnold (deriving beyond all doubt inspiration from
+Keats) was happier than most poets with that charming but difficult
+foot. The note is the old one of yearning rather than passionate
+melancholy, applied in a new way and put most clearly, though by no
+means most poetically, in the lines--
+
+    "Can men worship the wan features,
+    The sunk eyes, the wailing tone,
+    Of unsphered, discrowned creatures,
+  Souls as little godlike as their own?"
+
+The answer is, "No," of course; but, as some one informed Mr Arnold
+many years later, we knew that before, and it is distressing to be
+told it, as we are a little later, with a rhyme of "dawning" and
+"morning." Yet the poem is a very beautiful one--in some ways the
+equal of its author's best up to this time; at least he had yet done
+nothing except the _Shakespeare_ sonnet equal to the splendid
+stanza beginning--
+
+  "And we too, from upland valleys;"
+
+and the cry of the repentant sirens, punished as they had sinned--
+
+  "'Come,' you say, 'the hours are dreary.'"
+
+Yet the strong Tennysonian influence (which the poet rather
+ungraciously kicked against in his criticism) shows itself here also;
+and we know perfectly well that the good lines--
+
+  "When the first _rose_ flush was steeping
+  All the frore peak's _awful_ crown"--
+
+are but an unconscious reminiscence of the great ones--
+
+  "And on the glimmering summit far withdrawn,
+  God made himself an _awful rose_ of dawn."
+
+He kept this level, though here following not Tennyson or Keats but
+Shelley, in the three ambitious and elaborate lyrics, _The Voice_, _To
+Fausta_, and _Stagirius_, fine things, if somehow a little suggestive
+of inability on their author's part fully to meet the demands of the
+forms he attempts--"the note," in short, expressed practically as well
+as in theory. _Stagirius_ in particular wants but a very little to be
+a perfect expression of the obstinate questionings of the century; and
+yet wanting a little, it wants so much! Others, _To a Gipsy Child_ and
+_The Hayswater Boat_ (Mr Arnold never reprinted this), are but faint
+Wordsworthian echoes; and thus we come to _The Forsaken Merman_.
+
+It is, I believe, not so "correct" as it once was to admire this; but
+I confess indocility to correctness, at least the correctness which
+varies with fashion. _The Forsaken Merman_ is not a perfect poem--it
+has _longueurs_, though it is not long; it has those inadequacies,
+those incompetences of expression, which are so oddly characteristic
+of its author; and his elaborate simplicity, though more at home here
+than in some other places, occasionally gives a dissonance. But it is
+a great poem--one by itself, one which finds and keeps its own place
+in the foreordained gallery or museum, with which every true lover of
+poetry is provided, though he inherits it by degrees. No one, I
+suppose, will deny its pathos; I should be sorry for any one who fails
+to perceive its beauty. The brief picture of the land, and the fuller
+one of the sea, and that (more elaborate still) of the occupations of
+the fugitive, all have their own charm. But the triumph of the piece
+is in one of those metrical _coups_ which give the triumph of all the
+greatest poetry, in the sudden change from the slower movements of the
+earlier stanzas or strophes to the quicker sweep of the famous
+conclusion--
+
+  "The salt tide rolls seaward,
+  Lights shine from the town"--
+
+to
+
+  "She left lonely for ever
+  The kings of the sea."
+
+Here the poet's poetry has come to its own.
+
+_In Utrumque Paratus_ sounds the note again, and has one exceedingly
+fine stanza:--
+
+  "Thin, thin the pleasant human noises grow,
+      And faint the city gleams;
+  Rare the lone pastoral huts--marvel not thou!
+  The solemn peaks but to the stars are known,
+  But to the stars, and the cold lunar beams;
+  Alone the sun arises, and alone
+      Spring the great streams."
+
+But _Resignation_, the last poem in the book, goes far higher. Again,
+it is too long; and, as is not the case in the _Merman_, or even in
+_The Strayed Reveller_ itself, the _general_ drift of the poem, the
+allegory (if it be an allegory) of the two treadings of "the self-same
+road" with Fausta and so forth, is unnecessarily obscure, and does not
+tempt one to spend much trouble in penetrating its obscurity. But the
+splendid passage beginning--
+
+  "The Poet to whose mighty heart,"
+
+and ending--
+
+  "His sad lucidity of soul,"
+
+has far more interest than concerns the mere introduction, in this
+last line itself, of one of the famous Arnoldian catchwords of later
+years. It has far more than lies even in its repetition, with fuller
+detail, of what has been called the author's main poetic note of
+half-melancholy contemplation of life. It has, once more, the interest
+of _poetry_--of poetical presentation, which is independent of any
+subject or intention, which is capable of being adapted perhaps to
+all, certainly to most, which lies in form, in sound, in metre, in
+imagery, in language, in suggestion--rather than in matter, in sense,
+in definite purpose or scheme.
+
+It is one of the heaviest indictments against the criticism of the
+mid-nineteenth century that this remarkable book--the most remarkable
+first book of verse that appeared between Tennyson's and Browning's in
+the early thirties and _The Defence of Guenevere_ in 1858--seems to
+have attracted next to no notice at all. It received neither the
+ungenerous and purblind, though not wholly unjust, abuse which in the
+long--run did so much good to Tennyson himself, nor the absurd and
+pernicious bleatings of praise which have greeted certain novices of
+late years. It seems to have been simply let alone, or else made the
+subject of quite insignificant comments.
+
+In the same year (1849) Mr Arnold was represented in the _Examiner_ of
+July 21 by a sonnet to the Hungarian nation, which he never included
+in any book, and which remained peacefully in the dust-bin till a
+reference in his _Letters_ quite recently set the ruthless reprinter
+on its track. Except for an ending, itself not very good, the thing is
+quite valueless: the author himself says to his mother, "it is not
+worth much." And three years passed before he followed up his first
+volume with a second, which should still more clearly have warned the
+intelligent critic that here was somebody, though such a critic would
+not have been guilty of undue hedging if he had professed himself
+still unable to decide whether a new great poet had arisen or not.
+
+This volume was _Empedodes on Etna and other Poems_, [still] _By A._
+London: Fellowes, 1852. It contained two attempts--the title-piece and
+_Tristram and Iseult_--much longer and more ambitious than anything
+that the poet had yet done, and thirty-three smaller poems, of which
+two--_Destiny_ and _Courage_--were never reprinted. It was again very
+unequal--perhaps more so than the earlier volume, though it went
+higher and oftener high. But the author became dissatisfied with it
+very shortly after its appearance in the month of October, and
+withdrew it when, as is said, less than fifty copies had been sold.
+
+One may perhaps not impertinently doubt whether the critical reason,
+_v. infra_--in itself a just and penetrating one, as well as admirably
+expressed--which, in the Preface of the 1853 collection, the poet gave
+for its exclusion (save in very small part) from that volume tells the
+whole truth. At any rate, I think most good judges quarrel with
+_Empedodes_, not because the situation is unmanageable, but because
+the poet has not managed it. The contrast, in dramatic trio, of the
+world-worn and disappointed philosopher, the practical and rather
+prosaic physician, and the fresh gifts and unspoilt gusto of the
+youthful poet, is neither impossible nor unpromising. Perhaps, as a
+situation, it is a little nearer than Mr Arnold quite knew to that of
+_Paracelsus_, and it is handled with less force, if with more
+clearness, than Browning's piece. But one does not know what is more
+amiss with it than is amiss with most of its author's longer
+pieces--namely, that neither story nor character-drawing was his
+_forte_, that the dialogue is too colourless, and that though the
+description is often charming, it is seldom masterly. As before, there
+are jarring rhymes--"school" and "oracle," "Faun" and "scorn."
+Empedocles himself is sometimes dreadfully tedious; but the part of
+Callicles throughout is lavishly poetical. Not merely the show
+passages--that which the Roman father,
+
+  "Though young, intolerably severe,"
+
+saved from banishment and retained by itself in the 1853 volume, as
+_Cadmus and Harmonia_, and the beautiful lyrical close,--but the
+picture of the highest wooded glen on Etna, and the Flaying of
+Marsyas, are delightful things.
+
+_Tristram and Iseult_, with fewer good patches, has a greater
+technical interest. It is only one, but it is the most remarkable, of
+the places where we perceive in Mr Arnold one of the most curious of
+the notes of transition-poets. They will not frankly follow another's
+metrical form, and they cannot strike out a new one for themselves. In
+this piece the author--most attractively to the critic, if not always
+quite satisfactorily to the reader--makes for, and flits about,
+half-a-dozen different forms of verse. Now it is the equivalenced
+octosyllable of the Coleridgean stamp rather than of Scott's or
+Byron's; now trochaic decasyllabics of a rather rococo kind; and once
+at least a splendid anapaestic couplet, which catches the ear and
+clings to the memory for a lifetime--
+
+  "What voices are these on the clear night air?
+  What lights in the court? What steps on the stair?"
+
+But the most interesting experiment by far is in the rhymed heroic,
+which appears fragmentarily in the first two parts and substantively
+in the third. The interest of this, which (one cannot but regret it)
+Mr Arnold did not carry further, relapsing on a stiff if stately blank
+verse, is not merely intrinsic, but both retrospective and
+prospective. It is not the ordinary "stopped" eighteenth-century
+couplet at all; nor the earlier one of Drayton and Daniel. It is the
+"enjambed," very mobile, and in the right hands admirably fluent and
+adaptable couplet, which William Browne and Chamberlayne practised in
+the early and middle seventeenth century, which Leigh Hunt revived and
+taught to Keats, and of which, later than Mr Arnold himself, Mr
+William Morris was such an admirable practitioner. Its use here is
+decidedly happy; and the whole of this part shows in Mr Arnold a
+temporary Romantic impulse, which again we cannot but regret that he
+did not obey. The picture-work of the earlier lines is the best he
+ever did. The figure of Iseult with the White Hands stands out with
+the right Prae-Raphaelite distinctness and charm; and the story of
+Merlin and Vivian, with which, in the manner so dear to him, he
+diverts the attention of the reader from the main topic at the end, is
+beautifully told. For attaching quality on something like a large
+scale I should put this part of _Tristram and Iseult_ much above both
+_Sohrab and Rustum_ and _Balder Dead_; but the earlier parts are not
+worthy of it, and the whole, like _Empedocles_, is something of a
+failure, though both poems afford ample consolation in passages.
+
+The smaller pieces, however, could have saved the volume had their
+larger companions been very much weaker. The _Memorial Verses_ on
+Wordsworth (published first in _Fraser_) have taken their place once
+for all. If they have not the poetical beauty in different ways of
+Carew on Donne, of Dryden on Oldham, even of Tickell upon Addison, of
+_Adonais_ above all, of Wordsworth's own beautiful _Effusion_ on the
+group of dead poets in 1834, they do not fall far short even in this
+respect. And for adequacy of meaning, not unpoetically expressed, they
+are almost supreme. If Mr Arnold's own unlucky and maimed definition
+of poetry as "a criticism of life" had been true, they would be poetry
+in quintessence; and, as it is, they are poetry.
+
+Far more so is the glorious _Summer Night_, which came near the middle
+of the book. There is a cheering doctrine of mystical optimism which
+will have it that a sufficiently intense devotion to any ideal never
+fails of at least one moment of consummate realisation and enjoyment.
+Such a moment was granted to Matthew Arnold when he wrote _A Summer
+Night_. Whether that rather vague life-philosophy of his, that
+erection of a melancholy agnosticism _plus_ asceticism into a creed,
+was anything more than a not ungraceful or undignified will-worship of
+Pride, we need not here argue out. But we have seen how faithfully the
+note of it rings through the verse of these years. And here it rings
+not only faithfully, but almost triumphantly. The lips are touched at
+last: the eyes are thoroughly opened to see what the lips shall speak:
+the brain almost unconsciously frames and fills the adequate and
+inevitable scheme. And, as always at these right poetic moments, the
+minor felicities follow the major. The false rhymes are nowhere; the
+imperfect phrases, the little sham simplicities or pedantries, hide
+themselves; and the poet is free, from the splendid opening landscape
+through the meditative exposition, and the fine picture of the
+shipwreck, to the magnificent final invocation of the "Clearness
+divine!"
+
+His freedom, save once, is not so unquestionably exhibited in the
+remarkable group of poems--the future constituents of the
+_Switzerland_ group, but still not classified under any special
+head--which in the original volume chiefly follow _Empedocles_, with
+the batch later called "Faded Leaves" to introduce them. It is,
+perhaps, if such things were worth attempting at all, an argument for
+supposing some real undercurrent of fact or feeling in them, that they
+are not grouped at their first appearance, and that some of them are
+perhaps designedly separated from the rest. Even the name "Marguerite"
+does not appear in _A Farewell_; though nobody who marked as well as
+read, could fail to connect it with the _To my Friends_ of the former
+volume. We are to suppose, it would appear, that the twelvemonth has
+passed, and that Marguerite's anticipation of the renewed kiss is
+fulfilled in the first stanzas. But the lover's anticipation, too, is
+fulfilled, though as usual not quite as he made it; he wearies of his
+restless and yet unmasterful passion; he rather muses and morals in
+his usual key on the "way of a man with a maid" than complains or
+repines. And then we go off for a time from Marguerite, though not
+exactly from Switzerland, in the famous "_Obermann_" stanzas, a
+variation of the Wordsworth memorial lines, melodious, but a very
+little _impotent_--the English utterance of what Sainte-Beuve, I
+think, called "the discouraged generation of 1850." Now mere
+discouragement, except as a passing mood, though extremely natural, is
+also a little contemptible--pessimism-and-water, mere peevishness to
+the "fierce indignation," mere whining compared with the great ironic
+despair. As for _Consolation_, which in form as in matter strongly
+resembles part of the _Strayed Reveller_, I must say, at the risk of
+the charge of Philistinism, that I cannot see why most of it should
+not have been printed as prose. In fact, it would be a very bold and
+astonishingly ingenious person who, not knowing the original,
+perceived any verse-division in this--
+
+  "The bleak, stern hour, whose severe moments I would annihilate,
+  is passed by others in warmth, light, joy."
+
+Nor perhaps can very much be said for some of the other things. The
+sonnet afterwards entitled _The World's Triumphs_ is not strong;
+_The Second Best_ is but "a chain of extremely valuable
+thoughts"; _Revolution_ a conceit. _The Youth of Nature_ and
+_The Youth of Man_ do but take up less musically the _threnos_ for
+Wordsworth. But _Morality_ is both rhyme and poetry; _Progress_ is at
+least rhyme; and _The Future_, though rhymeless again, is the best of
+all Mr Arnold's waywardnesses of this kind. It is, however, in the
+earlier division of the smaller poems--those which come between
+_Empedocles_ and _Tristram_--that the interest is most concentrated,
+and that the best thing--better as far as its subject is concerned
+even than the _Summer Night_--appears. For though all does _not_
+depend upon the subject, yet of two poems equally good in other ways,
+that which has the better subject will be the better. Here we have the
+bulk of the "Marguerite" or _Switzerland_ poems--in other words, we
+leave the windy vagaries of mental indigestion and come to the real
+things--Life and Love.
+
+_The River_ does not name any one, though the "arch eyes"
+identify Marguerite; and _Excuse_, _Indifference_, and _Too
+Late_ are obviously of the company. But none of these is exactly of
+the first class. We grow warmer with _On the Rhine_, containing,
+among other things, the good distich--
+
+  "Eyes too expressive to lie blue,
+  Too lovely to be grey";
+
+on which Mr Swinburne gave a probably unconscious _scholion_ as
+well as variation in his own--
+
+  "Those eyes, the greenest of things blue,
+  The bluest of things grey."
+
+The intense pathos, which the poet could rarely "let himself go"
+sufficiently to reach, together with the seventeenth-century touch
+which in English not unfrequently rewards the self-sacrifice necessary
+to scholarly poets in such abandonment, appears in _Longing_;
+_The Lake_ takes up the faint thread of story gracefully enough;
+and _Parting_ does the same with more importance in a combination,
+sometimes very effective, of iambic couplets and anapaestic strophes,
+and with a touch of direct if not exalted nature in its revelation of
+that terrible thing, retrospective jealousy, in the lover. Woe to the
+man who allows himself to think--
+
+  "To the lips! ah! of others
+    Those lips have been pressed,
+  And others, ere I was,
+    Were clasped to that breast,"
+
+and who does not at once exorcise the demon with the fortunately
+all-potent spell of _Bocca bacciata_, and the rest! _Absence_ and
+_Destiny_ show him in the same Purgatory; and it is impossible to say
+that he has actually escaped in the crowning poem of the series--the
+crowning-point perhaps of his poetry, the piece beginning
+
+  "Yes! in the sea of life enisled."
+
+It is neither uninteresting nor unimportant that this exquisite piece,
+by a man's admiration of which (for there are some not wholly lost,
+who do _not_ admire it) his soundness in the Catholic Faith of
+poetry may be tested, perhaps as well as by any other, has borne more
+than one or two titles, It is in the 1852 volume, _To Marguerite. In
+returning a volume of the letters of Ortis_. In 1853 it became
+_Isolation_, its best name; and later it took the much less
+satisfactory one of _To Marguerite--continued_, being annexed to
+another.
+
+_Isolation_ is preferable for many reasons; not least because the
+actual Marguerite appears nowhere in the poem, and, except in the
+opening monosyllable, can hardly be said to be even rhetorically
+addressed. The poet's affection--it is scarcely passion--is there, but
+in transcendence: he meditates more than he feels. And that function
+of the riddle of the painful earth which Lucretius, thousands of years
+ago, put in his grim _Nequicquam!_ which one of Mr Arnold's own
+contemporaries formulated with less magnificence and more popularity,
+but still with music and truth in _Strangers Yet_--here receives
+almost its final poetical expression. The image--the islands in the
+sea--is capitally projected in the first stanza; it is exquisitely
+amplified in the second; the moral comes with due force in the third;
+and the whole winds up with one of the great poetic phrases of the
+century--one of the "jewels five [literally five!] words long" of
+English verse--a phrase complete and final, with epithets in unerring
+cumulation--
+
+  "The unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea."
+
+_Human Life_, no ill thing in itself, reads a little weakly after
+_Isolation_; but _Despondency_ is a pretty piece of melancholy, and,
+with a comfortable stool, will suit a man well. In the sonnet, _When I
+shall be divorced_, Mr Arnold tried the Elizabethan vein with less
+success than in his Shakespeare piece; and _Self-Deception_ and _Lines
+written by a Death-Bed_, with some beauty have more monotony. The
+closing lines of the last are at the same time the moral of the book
+and the formula of the Arnoldian "note"--
+
+  "Calm's not life's crown, though calm is well.
+  'Tis all perhaps which man acquires,
+  But 'tis not what our youth desires."
+
+Again, we remember some one's parody-remonstrance thirty years later,
+and again we may think that the condemnation which Mr Arnold himself
+was soon to pronounce upon _Empedocles_ is rather disastrously
+far-reaching, while even this phrase is a boomerang. Musical and
+philosophical despair is one of the innumerable strings of the poetic
+lyre; but 'tis not what our youth, or our age either, desires for a
+monochord.
+
+The remarkable manifesto just referred to was not long delayed.
+Whatever may have been his opinion as to the reception of the two
+volumes "by A," he made up his mind, a year after the issue and
+withdrawal of the second, to put forth a third, with his name, and
+containing, besides a full selection from the other two, fresh
+specimens of the greatest importance. In the two former there had been
+no avowed "purpose"; here, not merely were the contents sifted on
+principle, the important _Empedocles_ as well as some minor
+things being omitted: not merely did some of the new numbers,
+especially _Sohrab and Rustum_, directly and intentionally
+illustrate the: poet's theories, but those theories themselves were
+definitely put in a _Preface_, which is the most important
+critical document issued in England for something like a generation,
+and which, as prefixed by a poet to his poetry, admits no competitors
+in English, except some work of Dryden's and some of Wordsworth's.
+
+Beginning with his reasons for discarding _Empedocles_, reasons
+which he sums up in a sentence, famous, but too important not to
+require citation at least in a note,[5] he passes suddenly to the
+reasons which were _not_ his, and of which he makes a good
+rhetorical starting-point for his main course. The bad critics of that
+day had promulgated the doctrine, which they maintained till a time
+within the memory of most men who have reached middle life, though the
+error has since in the usual course given way to others--that "the
+Poet must leave the exhausted past and draw his subjects from matters
+of present import." This was the genuine
+"_Times_-_v._-all-the-works-of-Thucydides" fallacy of the
+mid-nineteenth century, the fine flower of Cobdenism, the heartfelt
+motto of Philistia--as Philistia then was. For other times other
+Philistines, and Ekron we have always with us, ready, as it was once
+said, "to bestow its freedom in pinchbeck boxes" on its elect.
+
+This error Mr Arnold has no difficulty in laying low at once; but
+unluckily his swashing blow carries him with it, and he falls headlong
+into fresh error himself. "What," he asks very well, "are the eternal
+objects of Poetry, among all nations and at all times?" And he
+answers--equally well, though not perhaps with impregnable logical
+completeness and accuracy--"They are actions, human actions;
+possessing an inherent interest in themselves, and which are to be
+communicated in an interesting manner by the art of the Poet." Here he
+tells the truth, but not the whole truth; he should have added
+"thoughts and feelings" to "actions," or he deprives Poetry of half
+her realm. But he is so far sufficient against his Harapha (for at
+that date there were no critical Goliaths about). Human action
+_does_ possess an "inherent," an "eternal," poetical interest and
+capacity in itself. That interest, that capacity, is incapable of
+"exhaustion"--nay (as Mr Arnold, though with bad arguments as well as
+good, urges later), it is, on the whole, a likelier subject for the
+poet when it is old, because it is capable of being grasped and
+presented more certainly. But the defender hastens to indulge in more
+than one of those dangerous sallies from his trenches which have been
+fatal to so many heroes. He proclaims that the poet cannot "make an
+intrinsically inferior action equally delightful with a more excellent
+one by his treatment of it," forgetting that, until the action is
+presented, we do not know whether it is "inferior" or not. He asks,
+"What modern poem presents personages as interesting as Achilles,
+Prometheus, Clytemnestra, Dido?" unsuspicious, or perhaps reckless, of
+the fact that not a few men, who admire and know the classics quite as
+well as he does, will cheerfully take up his challenge at any weapons
+he likes to name, and with a score of instances for his quartette. It
+is true that, thanks to the ineptitude of his immediate antagonists,
+he recovers himself not ill by cleverly selecting the respectable
+Hermann and Dorothea, the stagy-romantic Childe Harold, the creature
+called "Jocelyn," and the shadowy or scrappy personages of the
+_Excursion_, to match against his four. But this is manifestly
+unfair. To bring Lamartine and Wordsworth in as personage-makers is
+only honest rhetorically (a kind of honesty on which Wamba or
+Launcelot Gobbo shall put the gloss for us). Nay, even those to whom
+Goethe and Byron are not the ideal of modern poetry may retort that
+Mephistopheles--that even Faust himself--is a much more "interesting"
+person than the sulky invulnerable son of Thetis, while Gulnare,
+Parisina, and others are not much worse than Dido. But these are mere
+details. The main purpose of the _Preface_ is to assert in the most
+emphatic manner the Aristotelian (or partly Aristotelian) doctrine
+that "All depends on the subject," and to connect the assertion with a
+further one, of which even less proof is offered, that "the Greeks
+understood this far better than we do," and that they were _also_ the
+unapproachable masters of "the grand style." These positions, which,
+to do Mr Arnold justice, he maintained unflinchingly to his dying day,
+are supported, not exactly by argument, but by a great deal of
+ingenious and audacious illustration and variation of statement, even
+Shakespeare, even Keats, being arraigned for their wicked refusal to
+subordinate "expression" to choice and conception of subject. The
+merely Philistine modernism is cleverly set up again that it may be
+easily smitten down; the necessity of Criticism, and of the study of
+the ancients in order to it, is most earnestly and convincingly
+championed; and the piece ends with its other famous sentence about
+"the wholesome regulative laws of Poetry" and their "eternal enemy,
+Caprice."
+
+As Mr Arnold's critical position will be considered as a whole later,
+it would be waste of time to say very much more of this first
+manifesto of his. It need only be observed that he might have been
+already, as he often was later, besought to give some little notion of
+what "the _grand style_" was; that, true and sound as is much of
+the Preface, it is not a little exposed to the damaging retort, "Yes:
+this is _your_ doxy, and she seems fair to you, no doubt; but so
+does ours seem fair to us." Moreover, the "all-depends-on-the-subject"
+doctrine here, as always, swerves from one fatal difficulty. If, in
+what pleases poetically, poetical expression is always present, while
+in only some of what pleases poetically is the subject at the required
+height, is it not illogical to rule out, as the source of the poetic
+pleasure, that which is always present in favour of that which is
+sometimes absent?
+
+We know from the _Letters_--and we should have been able to
+divine without them--that _Sohrab and Rustum_, the first in
+order, the largest in bulk, and the most ambitious in scheme of the
+poems which appeared for the first time in the new volume, was written
+in direct exemplification of the theories of the _Preface_. The
+theme is old, and though not "classical" in place, is thoroughly so in
+its nature, being the story of a combat between a father and a son,
+who know not each other till too late, of the generosity of the son,
+of the final triumph of the father, of the _anagnorisis_, with
+the resignation of the vanquished and the victor's despair. The medium
+is blank verse, of a partly but not wholly Miltonic stamp, very
+carefully written, and rising at the end into a really magnificent
+strain, with the famous picture of "the majestic river" Oxus floating
+on regardless of these human woes, to where the stars
+
+  "Emerge, and shine upon the Aral Sea."
+
+Even here, it is true, the Devil's Advocate may ask whether this, like
+the _Mycerinus_ close, that of _Empedocles_, and others,
+especially one famous thing, to which we shall come presently, is not
+more of a purple tail-patch, a "tag," a "curtain," than of a
+legitimate and integral finale. It is certain that Mr Arnold,
+following the Greeks in intention no doubt, if not quite so closely as
+he intended, was very fond of these "curtains"--these little
+rhetorical reconciliations and soothings for the reader. But this is
+the most in place of any of them, and certainly the noblest
+_tirade_ that its author has left.
+
+Most of the new poems here are at a level but a little lower than this
+part of _Sohrab and Rustum_, while some of them are even above it
+as wholes. _Philomela_ is beautiful, in spite of the obstinate
+will-worship of its unrhymed Pindaric: the _Stanzas to the Memory of
+Edward Quillinan_ are really pathetic, though slightly irritating
+in their "sweet simplicity"; and if _Thekla's Answer_ is nothing
+particular, _The Neckan_ nothing but a weaker doublet of the
+_Merman, A Dream_ is noteworthy in itself, and as an outlier of
+the _Marguerite_ group. Then we have three things, of which the
+first is, though unequal, great at the close, while the other two rank
+with the greatest things Mr Arnold ever did. These are _The Church
+of Brou_, _Requiescat_, and _The Scholar-Gipsy_.
+
+If, as no critic ever can, the critic could thoroughly discover the
+secret of the inequality of _The Church of Brou_, he might, like
+the famous pedant, "put away" Mr Arnold "fully conjugated in his
+desk." The poem is in theme and scheme purely Romantic, and
+"nineteenth century" in its looking back to a simple and pathetic
+story of the Middle Age--love, bereavement, and pious resignation. It
+is divided into three parts. The first, in trochaic ballad metre,
+telling the story, is one of the poet's weakest things. You may oft
+see as good in Helen Maria Williams and the Delia Cruscans. The
+second, describing the church where the duke and duchess sleep, in an
+eight-line stanza of good fashion, is satisfactory but nothing more.
+And then the third, after a manner hardly paralleled save in Crashaw's
+_Flaming Heart_, breaks from twaddle and respectable verse into a
+rocket-rush of heroic couplets, scattering star-showers of poetry all
+over and round the bewildered reader. It is artifice rather than art,
+perhaps, to lisp and drawl, that, when you _do_ speak out, your
+speech may be the more effective. But hardly anything can make one
+quarrel with such a piece of poetry as that beginning--
+
+  "So rest, for ever rest, O princely pair!"
+
+and ending--
+
+  "The rustle of the eternal rain of Love."
+
+On the other hand, in _Requiescat_ there is not a false note,
+unless it be the dubious word "vasty" in the last line; and even that
+may shelter itself under the royal mantle of Shakespeare. The poet has
+here achieved what he too often fails in, the triple union of
+simplicity, pathos, and (in the best sense) elegance. The dangerous
+repetitions of "roses, roses," "tired, tired," &c., come all right;
+and above all he has the flexibility and quiver of metre that he too
+often lacks. His trisyllabic interspersions--the leap in the vein that
+makes iambic verse alive and passionate--are as happy as they can be,
+and the relapse into the uniform dissyllabic gives just the right
+contrast. He must be [Greek: e therion e theos]--and whichever he
+be, he is not to be envied--who can read _Requiescat_ for the
+first or the fiftieth time without mist in the eyes and without a
+catch in the voice.
+
+But the greatest of these--the greatest by far--is
+_The Scholar-Gipsy_. I have read--and that not once only, nor
+only in the works of unlettered and negligible persons--expressions of
+irritation at the local Oxonian colour. This is surely amazing. One
+may not be an Athenian, and never have been at Athens, yet be able to
+enjoy the local colour of the _Phaedrus_. One may not be an
+Italian, and never have been in Italy, yet find the _Divina
+Commedia_ made not teasing but infinitely vivid and agreeable by
+Dante's innumerable references to his country, Florentine and general.
+That some keener thrill, some nobler gust, may arise in the reading of
+the poem to those who have actually watched
+
+  "The line of festal light in Christ Church Hall"
+
+from above Hinksey, who know the Fyfield elm in May, and have "trailed
+their fingers in the stripling Thames" at Bablockhithe,--may be
+granted. But in the name of Bandusia and of Gargarus, what offence can
+these things give to any worthy wight who by his ill luck has not seen
+them with eyes? The objection is so apt to suggest a suspicion, as
+illiberal almost as itself, that one had better not dwell on it.
+
+Let us hope that there are after all few to whom it has presented
+itself--that most, even if they be not sons by actual matriculation of
+Oxford, feel that, as of other "Cities of God," they are citizens of
+her by spiritual adoption, and by the welcome accorded in all such
+cities to God's children. But if the scholar had been an alumnus of
+Timbuctoo, and for Cumnor and Godstow had been substituted strange
+places in _-wa_ and _-ja_, I cannot think that, even to
+those who are of Oxford, the intrinsic greatness of this noble poem
+would be much affected, though it might lose a separable charm. For it
+has everything--a sufficient scheme, a definite meaning and purpose, a
+sustained and adequate command of poetical presentation, and passages
+and phrases of the most exquisite beauty. Although it begins as a
+pastoral, the mere traditional and conventional frippery of that form
+is by no means so prominent in it as in the later (and, I think, less
+consummate) companion and sequel _Thyrsis_. With hardly an
+exception, the poet throughout escapes in his phraseology the two main
+dangers which so constantly beset him--too great stiffness and too
+great simplicity. His "Graian" personification is not overdone; his
+landscape is exquisite; the stately stanza not merely sweeps, but
+sways and swings, with as much grace as state. And therefore the
+Arnoldian "note"--the special form of the _maladie du siecle_
+which, as we have seen, this poet chooses to celebrate--acquires for
+once the full and due poetic expression and music, both symphonic and
+in such special clangours as the never-to-be-too-often-quoted
+distich--
+
+  "Still nursing the unconquerable hope,
+  Still clutching the inviolable shade"--
+
+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 siecle_, 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;[6] 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 Bronte, "past
+thirty and plain, with expressive grey eyes though." The rest we must
+imagine.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] The editor glosses this variously spelt and etymologically
+puzzling word "landing-stage." But unless I mistake, a "kempshott,"
+"campshed," or "campshedding" is not a landing-stage (though it helps
+to make one) so much as a river-wall of stakes and planks, put to
+guard the bank against floods, the wash of barges, &c.
+
+[2] _Glen Desseray and other Poems_. By John Campbell Shairp,
+London, 1888. P. 218.
+
+[3] This statement may seem too sweeping, especially as there is
+neither room nor occasion for justifying it fully. Let us only
+indicate, as among the heads of such a justification, the following
+sins of English criticism between 1840-1860,--the slow and reluctant
+acceptance even of Tennyson, even of Thackeray; the obstinate refusal
+to give Browning, even after _Bells and Pomegranates_, a fair
+hearing; the recalcitrance to Carlyle among the elder, and Mr Ruskin
+among the younger, innovators in prose; the rejection of a book of
+erratic genius like _Lavengro_; the ignoring of work of such
+combined intrinsic beauty and historic importance as _The Defence of
+Guenevere_ and FitzGerald's _Omar Khayyam_. For a sort of
+quintessence of literary Philistinism, see the advice of Richard Ford
+(himself no Philistine) to George Borrow, in Professor Knapp's
+_Life_ of the latter, i. 387.
+
+[4] This "undertone," as Mr Shairp calls it.
+
+[5] "What, then, are the situations, from the representation of which,
+though accurate, no poetical enjoyment can be derived? They are those
+in which the suffering finds no vent in action; in which a continuous
+state of mental distress is prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope,
+or resistance; in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to
+be done. In such situations there is inevitably something morbid, in
+the description of them something monotonous. When they occur in
+actual life, they are painful, not tragic; the representation of them
+in poetry is painful also."
+
+[6] "The Tuxford waiter desponds exactly as you do."--_Sydney Smith
+to Jeffrey_.
+
+
+
+
+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.[1]
+
+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[2] 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
+Bronte 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 Bronte'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 naif 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_,[3] 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 daemonic, 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 Merimee, 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, AEschylus, 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 _Athenaeum_ 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 _donnee_ 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. AEpytus, 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. AEpytus, 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 [Greek:
+hamartia] 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 aesthetic _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 General de toutes les Ecoles de la Grande Bretagne,"
+returned to France for a time, saw Merimee 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."[4] 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 mediaeval 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.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] The mystery is partly explained, in a fashion of no little
+biographical importance, by the statement in Mr Arnold's first general
+report for the year 1852, that his district included Lincoln,
+Nottingham, Derby, Stafford, Salop, Hereford, Worcester, Warwick,
+Leicester, Rutland and Northants, Gloucester, Monmouth, _all_
+South Wales, most of North Wales, and some schools in the East and
+West Ridings. This apparently impossible range had its monstrosity
+reduced by the limitation of his inspectorship to Nonconformist
+schools of other denominations than the Roman Catholic, especially
+Wesleyan and the then powerful "British" schools. As the schools
+multiplied the district was reduced, and at last he had Westminster
+only; but the exclusion of Anglican and Roman Catholic schools
+remained till 1870. And it is impossible not to connect the somewhat
+exaggerated place which the Dissenters hold in his social and
+political theories (as well as perhaps some of his views about the
+"Philistine") with these associations of his. We must never forget
+that for nearly twenty years Mr Arnold worked in the shadow, not of
+Barchester Towers, but of Salem Chapel.
+
+[2] "I have papers sent me to look over which will give me to the 20th
+of January in _London_ without moving, then for a week to
+_Huntingdonshire_ schools, then for another to London, ...and
+then _Birmingham_ for a month."
+
+[3] There are persons who would spell this _moral_; but I am not
+writing French, and in English the practice of good writers from
+Chesterfield downwards is my authority.
+
+[4] The letters are full of pleasant child-worship, the best passage
+of all being perhaps the dialogue between Tom and "Budge," at vol. i.
+p. 56, with the five-year-old cynicism of the elder's reply, "Oh this
+is _false_ Budge, this is all _false_!" to his infant brother's
+protestations of affection.
+
+
+
+
+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
+[Greek: epieikeia], 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 Soreze, 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 Guerins, Heine,
+_Pagan and Mediaeval 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 Eugenie de Guerin 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 Guerin," 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
+_devotes_," 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 Guerin 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 Eugenie, 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 Macaree_, as his friend Maurice de
+Guerin 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 mediaeval 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 mediaeval 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 Guerin 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
+_pensee_-writer. He is _rococo_ beside La Bruyere, 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.
+
+That subtle and sensitive genius did not go wrong when it selected
+Joubert as an eminent example of those gifts of the French mind which
+most commended themselves to itself--an exquisite _justesse_, an
+alertness of spirit not shaking off rule and measure, above all, a
+consummate propriety in the true and best, not the limited sense of
+the word. Nor is it difficult to observe in the shy philosopher a
+temperament which must have commended itself to Mr Arnold almost as
+strongly as his literary quality, and very closely indeed connected
+with that--the temperament of equity, of _epieikeia_, of freedom
+from swagger and brag and self-assertion. And here, once more, the
+things receive precisely their right treatment, the treatment
+proportioned and adjusted at once to their own value and nature and to
+the use which their critic is intending to make of them. For it is one
+of the greatest literary excellences of the _Essays in Criticism_
+that, with rare exceptions, they bear a real relation to each other
+and to the whole--that they are not a bundle but an organism; a
+university, not a mob.
+
+The subjects of the two last essays, _Spinoza_ and _Marcus
+Aurelius_, may at first sight, and not at first sight only, seem
+oddly chosen. For although the conception of literature illustrated in
+the earlier part of the book is certainly wide, and admits--nay,
+insists upon, as it always did with Mr Arnold--considerations of
+subject in general and of morals and religion in particular, yet it is
+throughout one of literature as such. Now, we cannot say that the
+interest of Spinoza or that of Marcus Aurelius, great as it is in both
+cases, is wholly, or in the main, or even in any considerable part, a
+literary interest. With Spinoza it is a philosophical-religious
+interest, with Marcus Aurelius a moral-religious, almost purely. The
+one may indeed illustrate that attempt to see things in a perfectly
+white light which Mr Arnold thought so important in literature; the
+other, that attention to conduct which he thought more important
+still. But they illustrate these things in themselves, not in relation
+to literature. They are less literary even than St Francis; far less
+than the author of the _Imitation_.
+
+It cannot therefore but be suspected that in including them Mr Arnold,
+unconsciously perhaps, but more probably with some consciousness, was
+feeling his way towards that wide extension of the province of the
+critic, that resurrection of the general Socratic attitude, which he
+afterwards adventured. But it cannot be said that his experiments are
+on this particular occasion in any way disastrous. With both his
+subjects he had the very strongest sympathy--with Spinoza (as already
+with Heine) as a remarkable example of the Hebraic spirit and genius,
+rebellious to or transcending the usual limitations of Hebraism; with
+Marcus Aurelius as an example of that non-Christian morality and
+religiosity which also had so strong an attraction for him. There is
+no trace in either essay of the disquieting and almost dismaying
+jocularity which was later to invade his discussion of such things: we
+are still far from Bottles; the three Lord Shaftesburys relieve us by
+not even threatening to appear. And accordingly the two essays add in
+no small degree, though somewhat after the fashion of an appendix or
+belated episode, to the charm of the book. They have an unction which
+never, as it so often does in the case of Mr Arnold's dangerous master
+and model Renan, degenerates into unctuosity; they are nobly serious,
+but without being in the least dull; they contain some exceedingly
+just and at the same time perfectly urbane criticism of the ordinary
+reviewing kind, and though they are not without instances of the
+author's by-blows of slightly unproved opinion, yet these are by no
+means eminent in them, and are not of a provocative nature. And I do
+not think it fanciful to suppose that the note of grave if
+unclassified piety, of reconciliation and resignation, with which they
+close the book, was intended--that it was a deliberate "evening
+voluntary" to play out of church the assistants at a most remarkable
+function--such a function as criticism in English had not celebrated
+before, such as, I think, it may without unfairness be said has not
+been repeated since. _Essays in Criticism_, let us repeat, is a
+book which is classed and placed, and it will remain in that class and
+place: the fresh wreaths and the fresh mud, that may be in turn
+unfitly thrown upon it, will affect neither.
+
+Between this remarkable book and the later ones of the same
+_lustrum_, we may conveniently take up the thread of biography
+proper where we last dropped it. The letters are fuller for this
+period than perhaps for any other; but this very fulness makes it all
+the more difficult to select incidents, never, perhaps, of the very
+first importance, but vying with each other in the minor biographical
+interests. A second fishing expedition to Viel Salm was attempted in
+August 1862; but it did not escape the curse which seems to dog
+attempts at repetition of the same pleasure. The river was hopelessly
+low; the fish would not take; and the traveller came back in very
+little more than "a day and a night and a morrow." By December
+danger-signals are up in a letter to his mother, to the effect that
+"it is intolerable absurdity to profess [who does?] to see
+Christianity through the spectacles of a number of second- or
+third-rate men who lived in Queen Elizabeth's time"--that time so
+fertile in nothing but the second-rate and the third. But it is
+followed a little later by the less disputable observation, "It is
+difficult to make out exactly at what [F.D.] Maurice is driving;
+perhaps he is always a little dim in his own mind" on that point.
+
+The illuminations at the Prince of Wales's marriage, where like other
+people he found "the crowd very good-humoured," are noted; and the
+beginning of _Thyrsis_ where and while the fritillaries blow. But
+from the literary point of view few letters are more interesting than
+a short one to Sir Mountstuart (then Mr) Grant Duff, dated May 14,
+1863, in which Mr Arnold declines an edition of Heine, the loan of
+which was offered for his lecture--later the well-known essay. His
+object, he says, "is not so much to give a literary history of Heine's
+work as to mark his place in modern European letters, and the special
+tendency and significance of what he did." He will, therefore, not
+even read these things of Heine's that he has not read, but will take
+the _Romancero_ alone for his text, with a few quotations from
+elsewhere, With a mere passing indication of the fact that Matthew
+Arnold here, like every good critic of this century, avowedly pursues
+that plan of "placing" writers which some of his own admirers so
+foolishly decry, I may observe that this is a _locus classicus_
+for his own special kind of criticism. It is possible--I do not know
+whether he did so--that Sir Mountstuart may, on receiving the letter,
+have smiled and thought of "Mon siege est fait"; but I am sure he
+would be the first to admit that the cases were different. I do not
+myself think that Mr Arnold's strong point was that complete grasp of
+a literary personality, and its place, which some critics aim at but
+which few achieve. His impatience--here perhaps half implied and later
+openly avowed--of the historic estimate in literature, would of itself
+have made this process irksome to him. But on the lines of his own
+special vocation as a critic it was not only irksome, it was
+unnecessary. His function was to mark the special--perhaps it would be
+safer to say _a_ special--tendency of his man, and to bring that
+out with all his devices of ingenious reduplication, fascinating
+rhetoric, and skilful parading of certain favourite axioms and general
+principles. This function would not have been assisted--I think it
+nearly certain that it would have been hampered and baulked--by that
+attempt to find "the whole" which the Greek philosopher and poet so
+sadly and so truly declares that few boast to find. It was a side, a
+face, a phase of each man and writer, that he wished to bring out;
+and, though he might sometimes exaggerate this, yet his exaggeration
+was scarcely illegitimate. To bring out something he had to block out
+much. If he had attempted to show the whole Goethe, the whole Heine,
+the whole Homer or Shakespeare even, they would have been difficult if
+not impossible to group and to compare in the fashion in which he
+wished to deal with them.
+
+And except on the sheer assumption, which is surely a fallacy, that
+_suppressio veri_ is always and not only sometimes _suggestio
+falsi_, I do not see that he exceeded a due licence in this matter,
+while that he was wise in his generation there can be no doubt. He
+wanted to influence the average Englishman, and he knew perfectly well
+there is nothing the average Englishman dislikes so much as guarded
+and elaborately conditioned statements. The immense popularity and
+influence of Macaulay had been due to his hatred of half-lights, of
+"perhapses"; and little as Mr Arnold liked Macaulay's fiddle, he was
+wise enough to borrow his rosin, albeit in disguise. If a critic makes
+too many provisos, if he "buts" too much, if he attempts to paint the
+warts as well as the beauties, he will be accused of want of sympathy,
+he will be taxed with timorousness and hedging, at best he will be
+blamed for wire-drawn and hair-splitting argument. The preambles of
+exposition, the conclusions of summing up, will often be considered
+tedious or impertinent. The opposite plan of selecting a nail and
+hitting that on the head till you have driven it home was, in fact, as
+much Mr Arnold's as it was Macaulay's. The hammer-play of the first
+was far more graceful and far less monotonous: yet it was hammer-play
+all the same. But we must return to our _Letters_.
+
+A dinner with Lord Houghton--"all the advanced Liberals in religion
+and politics, and a Cingalese in full costume"--a visit to Cambridge
+and a stroll to Grantchester, notice of about the first elaborate
+appreciation of his critical work which had appeared in England, the
+article by the late Mr S.H. Reynolds in the _Westminster Review_
+for October 1863, visits to the Rothschilds at Aston Clinton and
+Mentmore, and interesting notices of the composition of the
+_Joubert_, the _French Eton_, &c., fill up the year. The
+death of Thackeray extracts one of those criticisms of his great
+contemporaries which act as little douches from time to time, in the
+words, "I cannot say that I thoroughly liked him, though we were on
+friendly terms: and he was not to my mind a great writer." But the
+personal reflections which follow are of value. He finds "the sudden
+cessation of so vigorous an existence very sobering. To-day I am
+forty-one; the middle of life in any case, and for me perhaps much
+more than the middle. I have ripened and am ripening so slowly that I
+should be glad of as much time as possible. Yet I can feel, I rejoice
+to say, an inward spring which seems more and more to gain strength
+and to promise to resist outward shocks, if they must come, however
+rough. But of this inward spring one must not talk [it is only to his
+mother that he writes this] for it does not like being talked about,
+and threatens to depart if one will not leave it in mystery."
+
+An interview with Mr Disraeli at Aston Clinton, not, as one may
+suppose, without pleasant words, opens 1864. "It is only from
+politicians who have themselves felt the spell of literature that one
+gets these charming speeches," he says, and they, not unnaturally,
+charmed him so much that he left his dressing-case and his umbrella
+behind him. But the anti-crusade is more and more declared. He "means
+to deliver the middle-class out of the hand of their Dissenting
+ministers," and in the interval wants to know how "that beast of a
+word 'waggonette' is spelt?" The early summer was spent at Woodford,
+on the borders of Epping Forest, and the early autumn at Llandudno,
+where Welsh scenery and the poetry of the Celtic race "quite
+overpower" him. Alas! some other poetry did not, and when we find him
+in September thinking _Enoch Arden_ "perhaps the best thing
+Tennyson has done," we are not surprised to find this remarkable
+special appreciation followed by a general depreciation, which is
+quite in keeping. He is even tempted (and of course asked) to write a
+criticism of the Laureate, but justly replies, "How is that possible?"
+
+From 1865 we get numerous notices of the notices of the _Essays_,
+and a pleasant and full account of a second official tour on the
+Continent, with special dwellings at most of the Western and Central
+European capitals. The tour lasted from April to November, and I have
+sometimes thought that it might, by itself, give a better idea of Mr
+Arnold as an epistoler than the _Letters_ at large seem to have
+given. Early in 1866 we hear of the beginnings of the _Friendship's
+Garland_ series, though the occasion for that name did not come
+till afterwards. And he spent the summer of that year (as he did that
+of the next) in a farmhouse at West Humble, near Dorking, while he
+caught "_a_ salmon" in the Deveron during September.
+
+The occasion is perhaps a good one to say a few words on the relations
+between Mr Arnold and M. Renan, though the latter is not so prominent
+in the Continental letters as Sainte-Beuve and M. Scherer are. The
+author of the _Vie de Jesus_ was a very slightly younger man than
+Mr Arnold (he was born in 1823), but in consequence of his having left
+the seminary and begun early to live by literary work, he was somewhat
+in advance of his English compeer in literary repute. His
+contributions to the _Debats_ and the _Revue des Deux Mondes_
+began to be collected soon after 1850, and his first remarkable single
+book, _Averroes et l'Averroisme_, dates from that year. I do not
+know how early Mr Arnold became acquainted with his written work. But
+they actually met in 1859, during the business of the Foreign
+Education Commission, and there is a very remarkable passage in a
+letter to Mrs Forster on Christmas Eve of that year. He tells his
+sister of "Ernest Renan, a Frenchman I met in Paris," and notes the
+considerable resemblance between their lines of endeavour, observing,
+however, that Renan is chiefly "trying to inculcate morality, in a
+high sense of the word, on the French," while _he_ is trying to
+inculcate intelligence on the English. After which he makes a long and
+enthusiastic reference to the essay, _Sur la Poesie des Races
+Celtiques_, the literary results of which we shall soon see. I do
+not know whether Mr Arnold ever expressed to his intimates--for the
+reference to M. Renan in "Numbers" is not quite explicit--what he
+thought of those later and very peculiar developments of "morality in
+a high sense of the word" which culminated in the _Abbesse de
+Jouarre_ and other things. His sense of humour must have painfully
+suggested to him that his own familiar friend and pattern Frenchman
+had become one of the most conspicuous examples of that French
+lubricity which he himself denounced. But there was no danger of his
+imitating M. Renan in this respect. In others the following was quite
+unmistakable, and, I am bound to say, on the whole rather disastrous.
+In literary criticism Mr Arnold needed no teaching from M. Renan, and
+as his English training on one of its sides preserved him from the
+Frenchman's sentimental hedonism, so on another it kept him from the
+wildest excesses of M. Renan's critical reconstructions of sacred
+history. But he copied a great deal too much of his master's
+dilettante attitude to religion as a whole, and, as we shall see, he
+adopted and carried a great deal further M. Renan's (I am told) not
+particularly well-informed and (I am sure) very hazardous and
+fantastic ideas about Celtic literature. On the whole, the two were
+far too much alike to do each other any good. Exquisite even as M.
+Renan's mere style is, it is exquisite by reason of sweetness, with a
+certain not quite white and slightly phosphorescent light, not by
+strength or by practical and masculine force. Now it was the latter
+qualities that Mr Arnold wanted; sweetness and light he could not
+want.
+
+As the tenure of his Chair drew to a close, and as he began to loathe
+examination papers more and more (indeed I know no one to whom _usus
+concinnat amorem_ in the case of these documents), he made some
+endeavours to obtain employment which might be, if not both more
+profitable and less onerous, at any rate one or the other. First he
+tried for a Charity Commissionership; then for the librarianship of
+the House of Commons. For the former post it may be permitted to think
+that his extremely strong--in fact partisan--opinions, both on
+education and on the Church of England, were a most serious
+disqualification; his appointment to the latter would have been an
+honour to the House and to England, and would have shown that
+sometimes at any rate the right man can find the right place. But he
+got neither. He delivered his last Oxford lecture in the summer term
+of 1867. I remember that there were strong undergraduate hopes that Mr
+Browning, who was an Honorary M.A., might be got to succeed him; but
+it was decided that the honorary qualification was insufficient, and I
+daresay there were other objections. Mr Arnold had a sort of
+"send-off" in the shape of two great dinners at Balliol and Merton, at
+which he and Mr Browning were the principal guests, and the close of
+his professorial career was further made memorable by the issue of the
+_Study of Celtic Literature_ in prose and the _New Poems_ in verse,
+with _Schools and Universities on the Continent_ to follow next year.
+Of these something must be said before this chapter is closed.
+
+_On the Study of Celtic Literature_ is the first book of his to
+which, as a whole, and from his own point of view, we may take rather
+serious objections. That it has merits not affected by these
+objections need hardly be said; indeed I think it would not be foolish
+to say that it is--or was--even the superior of the _Homer_ in
+comparative and indirect importance. In that Mr Arnold had but, at the
+best, roused men to enter upon new ways of dealing with old and
+familiar matter; in this he was leading them to conquest of new
+realms. Now, as we have seen, it was exactly this exploration, this
+expansion, of which English was then in most need, just as it is now
+perhaps in most need of concentration and retreat upon the older
+acquisitions.
+
+So far so good; but if we go farther, we do not at first fare better.
+It would be grossly unjust to charge Mr Arnold with all the nonsense
+which has since been talked about Celtic Renascences; but I fear we
+cannot write all that nonsense off his account. In particular, he set
+an example, which has in this and other matters been far too widely
+followed, of speaking without sufficient knowledge of fact. It cannot
+be too peremptorily laid down that the literary equivalent of a
+"revoke"--the literary act after which, if he does it on purpose, you
+must not play with a man--is speaking of authors and books which he
+has not read and cannot read in the original, while he leaves you
+ignorant of his ignorance. _This_ Mr Arnold never committed, and
+could never have committed. But short of it, and while escaping its
+penalty, a man may err by speaking too freely even of what he
+confesses that he does not know; and of this minor and less
+discreditable sin, I own (acknowledging most frankly that I know even
+less of the _originals_ than he did), I think Mr Arnold was here
+guilty.
+
+Exactly how much Gaelic, Irish, or Welsh Mr Arnold knew at first-hand,
+I cannot say: he frankly enough confesses that his knowledge was very
+closely limited. But what is really surprising, is that he does not
+seem to have taken much trouble to extend it at second-hand. A very
+few Welsh triads and scraps of Irish are all that, even in
+translation, he seems to have consulted: he never, I think, names
+Dafydd ap Gwilym, usually put forward as the greatest of Celtic poets;
+and in the main his citations are derived either from _Ossian_
+("this do seem going far," as an American poetess observes), or else
+from the _Mabinogion_, where some of the articles are positively
+known to be late translations of French-English originals, and the
+others are very uncertain. You really cannot found any safe literary
+generalisations on so very small a basis of such very shaky matter. In
+fact, Mr Arnold's argument for the presence of "Celtic magic," &c., in
+Celtic poetry comes to something like this. "There is a quality of
+magic in Shakespeare, Keats, &c.; this magic must be Celtic: therefore
+it must be in Celtic poetry." Fill up the double enthymeme who list, I
+am not going to endeavour to do so. I shall only say that two
+sentences give the key-note of the book as argument. "Rhyme itself,
+all the weight of evidence tends to show, came into our poetry from
+the Celts." Now to some of us all the weight of evidence tends to show
+that it came from the Latins. "Our only first-rate body of
+contemporary poetry is the German." Now at the time (1867), for more
+than thirty years, Germany had not had a single poet of the first or
+the second class except Heine, who, as Mr Arnold himself very truly
+says, was not a German but a Jew.
+
+But once more, what we go to Mr Matthew Arnold for is not fact, it is
+not argument, it is not even learning. It is phrase, attitude, style,
+that by which, as he says admirably in this very book, "what a man has
+to say is recast and heightened in such a manner as to add dignity and
+distinction to it." It is the new critical attitude, the appreciation
+of literary beauty in and for itself, the sense of "the word," the
+power of discerning and the power of reflecting charm, the method not
+more different from the wooden deduction of the old school of critics
+than from the merely unenlightened and Philistine commonness of the
+reviewers, his earlier contemporaries, or from the aimless "I like
+that" and "I don't like this" which does duty now, and did then, and
+has done always, for criticism itself. True, Mr Arnold himself might
+be wilful, capricious, haphazard; true, he might often be absolutely
+unable to give any real reason for the faith that was in him; true, he
+sometimes might have known more than he did know about his subject.
+But in all these points he saved himself: in his wilfulness, by the
+grace and charm that sometimes attend caprice; in his want of reason,
+by his genuineness of faith itself; in his occasional lack of the
+fullest knowledge, by the admirable use--not merely display--which he
+made of what knowledge he had. There may be hardly a page of the two
+books of his lectures in which it is not possible to find some
+opportunity for disagreement--sometimes pretty grave disagreement; but
+I am sure that no two more valuable books, in their kind and subject,
+to their country and time, have been ever issued from the press.
+
+The _New Poems_ make a volume of unusual importance in the
+history of poetical careers. Mr Arnold lived more than twenty years
+after the date of their publication; but his poetical production
+during that time filled no more than a few pages. At this date he was
+a man of forty-five--an age at which the poetical impulse has been
+supposed to run low, but perhaps with no sufficient reason. Poets of
+such very different types as Dryden and Tennyson have produced work
+equal to their best, if not actually their best, at that age and
+later. Mr Browning had, a few years before, produced what are perhaps
+his actually greatest volumes, _Men and Women_ and _Dramatis
+Personae_, the one at forty-three, the other at fifty-two.
+According to Mr Arnold's own conception of poetry-making, as depending
+upon the subject and upon the just and artist-like exposition of that
+subject, no age should be too late.
+
+Certainly this age was not too late with him. The contents all
+answered strictly enough to their title, except that _Empedocles on
+Etna_ and some half-dozen of its companions were, at Mr Browning's
+request, reprinted from the almost unpublished volume of 1852, and
+that _Thyrsis, St Brandan, A Southern Night_, and the _Grande
+Chartreuse_ had made magazine appearances. Again the moment was
+most important. When Mr Arnold had last made (omitting with an apology
+the "transient and embarrassed phantom" of _Merope_) an
+appearance in 1855, the transition age of English nineteenth-century
+poetry was in full force. No one's place was safe but Tennyson's; and
+even his was denied by some, including Mr Arnold himself, who never
+got his eyes quite clear of scales in that matter. Browning, though he
+had handed in indisputable proofs, had not yet had them allowed; the
+Spasmodics had not disappeared; the great prae-Raphaelite school was
+but on the way. The critics knew not what to think; the vulgar thought
+(to the tune of myriad copies) of Tupper. Both classes, critic and
+public, rent _Maud_ and neglected _Men and Women: The Defence
+of Guenevere_ had not yet rung the matins--bell in the ears of the
+new generation.
+
+Now things were all altered. The mixture of popularity and perfection
+in the _Idylls_ and the _Enoch Arden_ volume--the title poem
+and _Aylmer's Field_ for some, _The Voyage_ and _Tithonus_ and _In the
+Valley of Cauterets_ for others--had put Tennyson's place
+
+  "Beyond the arrows, shouts, and views of men."
+
+The three-volume collection of Browning's _Poems_, and
+_Dramatis Personae_ which followed to clench it, had nearly, if
+not quite, done the same for him. _The Defence of Guenevere_ and
+_The Life and Death of Jason, Atalanta, Chastelard_, and most of
+all the _Poems and Ballads_, had launched an entirely new
+poetical school with almost unexampled pomp and promise on the world.
+The Spasmodics were forgotten, the Tupper cult had been nearly (not
+yet quite) laughed out of existence. That Mr Arnold's own poems had
+had any widely extended sale or reading could hardly be said; but they
+were read by those who were or were shortly to be themselves read. You
+had not to look far in any Oxford college (I cannot speak of
+Cambridge) before you found them on those undergraduate shelves which
+mean so much; while many who, from general distaste to poetry or from
+accident, knew them not, or hardly knew them, were familiar with their
+author's prose work, or at least knew him as one whom others knew.
+
+The volume itself was well calculated to take advantage, to at least a
+moderate extent, of this conjunction of circumstance. At no time was
+the appeal of Mr Arnold's poetry of the most impetuous or peremptory
+order. And it might be contended that this collection contains nothing
+quite up to the very best things of the earlier poems, to the
+_Shakespeare_ sonnet, to _The Scholar-Gipsy_, to the _Isolation_
+stanzas. But with the majority of its readers it was sure rather to
+send them to these earlier things than to remind them thereof, and its
+own attractions were abundant, various, and strong.
+
+In the poet himself there was perhaps a slight consciousness of "the
+silver age." The prefatory _Stanzas_, a title changed in the
+collected works to _Persistency of Poetry_, sound this note--
+
+  "Though the Muse be gone away,
+  Though she move not earth to-day,
+  Souls, erewhile who caught her word,
+  Ah! still harp on what they heard."
+
+A confession perhaps a little dangerous, when the Muses were speaking
+in no uncertain tones not merely to juniors like Mr Morris and Mr
+Swinburne but to seniors like Tennyson and Browning. But the actual
+contents were more than reassuring. Of _Empedocles_ it is not
+necessary to speak again: _Thyrsis_ could not but charm. The
+famous line,
+
+  "And that sweet city with her dreaming spires,"
+
+sets the key dangerously high; but it is kept by the magnificent
+address to the cuckoo,
+
+  "Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go?"
+
+and the flower-piece that follows; by that other single masterpiece,
+
+  "The coronals of that forgotten time;"
+
+by the more solemn splendour of the stanza beginning
+
+  "And long the way appears which seemed so short;"
+
+by the Signal tree; and by the allegoric close with the reassertion of
+the Scholar. All these things stand by themselves, hold their sure and
+reserved place, even in the rush and crowd of the poetry of the
+sixties, the richest, perhaps, since the time from 1805 to 1822.
+
+_Saint Brandan_, which follows, has pathos if not great power,
+and connects itself agreeably with those Celtic and mediaeval studies
+which had just attracted and occupied Mr Arnold. The sonnets which
+form the next division might be variously judged. None of them equals
+the _Shakespeare_; and one may legitimately hold the opinion that
+the sonnet was not specially Mr Arnold's form. Its greatest examples
+have always been reached by the reflex, the almost combative, action
+of intense poetic feeling--Shakespeare's, Milton's, Wordsworth's,
+Rossetti's--and intensity was not Mr Arnold's characteristic. Yet
+_Austerity of Poetry, East London_, and _Monica's Last Prayer_ must
+always stand so high in the second class that it is hardly critical
+weakness to allow them the first. And then the tide rises. _Calais
+Sands_ may not be more than very pretty, but it is that, and _Dover
+Beach_ is very much more. Mr Arnold's theological prepossessions and
+assumptions may appear in it, and it may be unfortunately weak as an
+argument, for except the flood itself nothing is so certain a
+testimony to the flood as the ebb. But the order, the purpose, the
+argument, the subject, matter little to poetry. The expression, the
+thing that is _not_ the subject, the tendency outside the subject,
+which makes for poetry, are here, and almost of the very best. Here
+you have that passionate interpretation of life, which is so different
+a thing from the criticism of it; that marvellous pictorial effect to
+which the art of line and colour itself is commonplace and _banal_,
+and which prose literature never attains except by a _tour de force_;
+that almost more marvellous accompaniment of vowel and consonant
+music, independent of the sense but reinforcing it, which is the glory
+of English poetry among all, and of nineteenth-century poetry among
+all English, poetries. As is the case with most Englishmen, the sea
+usually inspired Mr Arnold--it is as natural to great English poets to
+leave the echo of the very word ringing at the close of their verse as
+it was to Dante to end with "stars." But it has not often inspired any
+poet so well as this, nor anywhere this poet better than here. If at
+any time a critic may without fatuity utter judgment with some
+confidence, it is where he disagrees with the sentiment and admires
+the poem; and for my part I find in _Dover Beach_, even without the
+_Merman_, without the _Scholar-Gipsy_, without _Isolation_, a document
+which I could be content to indorse "Poetry, _sans phrase_."
+
+_The Terrace at Berne_ has been already dealt with, but that mood for
+epicede, which was so frequent in Mr Arnold, finds in the _Carnac_
+stanzas adequate, and in _A Southern Night_ consummate, expression.
+_The Fragment of Chorus of a Dejaneira_, written long before, but now
+first published, has the usual faults of Mr Arnold's rhymeless verse.
+It is really quite impossible, when one reads such stuff as--
+
+  "Thither in your adversity
+  Do you betake yourselves for light,
+  But strangely misinterpret all you hear.
+  For you will not put on
+  New hearts with the inquirer's holy robe
+  And purged considerate minds"--
+
+not to ask what, poetically speaking, is the difference between this
+and the following--
+
+  "To college in the pursuit of duly
+  Did I betake myself for lecture;
+  But very soon I got extremely wet,
+  For I had not put on
+  The stout ulster appropriate to Britain,
+  And my umbrella was at home."
+
+But _Palladium_, if not magnificent, is reconciling, the Shakespearian
+_Youth's Agitations_ beautiful, and _Growing Old_ delightful, not
+without a touch of terror. It is the reply, the _verneinung_, to
+Browning's magnificent _Rabbi ben Ezra_, and one has almost to fly to
+that stronghold in order to resist its chilling influence. But it is
+poetry for all that, and whatever there is in it of weakness is
+redeemed, though not quite so poetically, by _The Last Word_. The
+_Lines written in Kensington Gardens_ (which had appeared with
+_Empedocles_, but were missed above) may be half saddened, half
+endeared to some by their own remembrance of the "black-crowned
+red-boled" giants there celebrated--trees long since killed by London
+smoke, as the good-natured say, as others, by the idiotic tidiness of
+the gardeners, who swept the needles up and left the roots without
+natural comfort and protection. And then, after lesser things, the
+interesting, if not intensely poetical, _Epilogue to Lessing's
+Laocoon_ leads us to one of the most remarkable of all Mr Arnold's
+poems, _Bacchanalia, or the New Age_. The word remarkable has been
+used advisedly. _Bacchanalia_, though it has poignant and exquisite
+poetic moments, is not one of the most specially _poetical_ of its
+author's pieces. But it is certainly his only considerable piece of
+that really poetic humour which is so rare and delightful a thing.
+And, like all poetic humour, it oscillates between cynicism and
+passion almost bewilderingly. For a little more of this what pages and
+pages of jocularity about Bottles and the Rev. Esau Hittall would we
+not have given! what volumes of polemic with the _Guardian_ and
+amateur discussions of the Gospel of St John! In the first place, note
+the metrical structure, the sober level octosyllables of the overture
+changing suddenly to a dance-measure which, for a wonder in English,
+almost keeps the true dactylic movement. How effective is the
+rhetorical iteration of
+
+  "The famous orators have shone,
+  The famous poets sung and gone,"
+
+and so on for nearly half a score of lines! How perfect the sad
+contrast of the refrain--
+
+  "_Ah! so the quiet was!
+  So was the hush!_"
+
+how justly set and felicitously worded the rural picture of the
+opening! how riotous the famous irruption of the New Agers! how
+adequate the quiet-moral of the end, that the Past is as the Present,
+and more also! And then he went and wrote about Bottles!
+
+"Progress," with a splendid opening--
+
+  "The master stood upon the mount and taught--
+  He saw a fire in his disciples' eyes,"--
+
+conducts us to two other fine, though rhymeless, dirges. In the first,
+_Rugby Chapel_, the intensity of feeling is sufficient to carry off
+the lack of lyrical accomplishment. The other is the still better
+_Heine's Grave_, and contains the famous and slightly pusillanimous
+lines about the "weary Titan," which are among the best known of their
+author's, and form at once the motto and the stigma of mid-century
+Liberal policy. And then the book is concluded by two other
+elegies--in rhyme this time--_The Stanzas written at the Grande
+Chartreuse_ and _Obermann once more_. They are, however, elegies of a
+different kind, much more self-centred, and, indeed, little more than
+fresh variations on "the note," as I ventured to call it before. Their
+descriptive and autobiographic interest is great, and if poetry were a
+criticism of life, there is plenty of that of them. The third
+book--_Schools and Universities on the Continent_ (1868)--in which are
+put the complete results of the second Continental exploration--is, I
+suppose, much less known than the non-professional work, though
+perhaps not quite so unknown as the earlier report on elementary
+education. By far the larger part of it--the whole, indeed, except a
+"General Conclusion" of some forty pages--is a reasoned account of the
+actual state of matters in France, Italy, Germany, and Switzerland. It
+is not exactly judicial; for the conclusion--perhaps the foregone
+conclusion--obviously colours every page. But it is an excellent
+example (as, indeed, is all its author's non-popular writing) of clear
+and orderly exposition--never arranged _ad captandum_, but also never
+"dry." Indeed there certainly are some tastes, and there may be many,
+to which the style is a distinct relief after the less quiet and more
+mannered graces of some of the rest.
+
+Opinions may differ more as to the value of the book as a lesson, or
+as an argument. Mr Arnold had started with a strong belief in the
+desirableness--indeed of the necessity--of State-control of the most
+thoroughgoing kind in education; and he was not at all likely to miss
+the opportunity of fetching new weapons from the very arsenals and
+_places d'armes_ of that system. He was thoroughly convinced that
+English ways generally, and especially the ways of English schools and
+colleges, were wrong; and he had, of course, no difficulty in pointing
+triumphantly to the fact that, if the institutions of Continental
+countries differed in some ways from each other, they all differed in
+nearly the same way from ours. It may undoubtedly be claimed for
+him--by those who see any force in the argument--that events have
+followed him. Education, both secondary and university in England,
+_has_ to a large extent gone since on the lines he indicates; the
+threatened superiority of the German bagman has asserted itself even
+more and more; the "teaching of literature" has planted a terrible
+fixed foot in our schools and colleges. But perhaps the weight usually
+assigned to this kind of corroboration is rather imaginary. That a
+thing has happened does not prove that it ought to have happened,
+except on a theory of determinism, which puts "conduct" out of sight
+altogether. There are those who will still, in the vein of
+Mephistopheles-Akinetos, urge that the system which gave us the men
+who pulled us out of the Indian Mutiny can stand comparison with the
+system which gave France the authors of the _debacle_; that the
+successes of Germany over France in war have no necessary connection
+with education, and those of Germany over England in commerce,
+diplomacy, &c., still less. They will even go further--some of
+them--and ask whether the Continental practices and the Arnoldian
+principles do not necessitate divers terribly large and terribly
+ill-based assumptions, as that all men are _educable_, that the value
+of education is undiminished by its diffusion, that all, or at least
+most, subjects are capable of being made educational instruments, and
+a great many more.
+
+On the other hand, they will cheerfully grant that Mr Arnold never
+succumbed to that senseless belief in examination which has done, and
+is doing, such infinite harm. But they will add to the debit side that
+the account of English university studies which ends the book was even
+at the time of writing so inaccurate as to be quite incomprehensible,
+unless we suppose that Mr Arnold was thinking of the days of his own
+youth, and not of those with complete accuracy. He says "the
+examination for the degree of bachelor of arts, which we place at the
+end of our three years' university course, is merely the
+_Abiturienten-examen_ of Germany, the _epreuve du baccalaureat_ of
+France, placed in both those countries at the entrance to university
+studies"; and it is by this that he justifies Signer Matteucci's
+absurd description of Oxford and Cambridge as _hauts lycees_ Now, in
+the first place, there is not one single word in this sentence, or in
+the context, or, so far as I remember, in the whole book, about the
+Honours system, which for very many years before 1868 had exalted the
+standard infinitely higher in the case of a very large proportion of
+men. And in the second place, there is not a word about the
+Scholarship system, which in the same way had for very many years
+provided an entrance standard actually higher--far higher in some
+ways--than the _concluding_ examinations of the French _baccalaureat_.
+My own days at Oxford were from 1863 to 1868, the year of Mr Arnold's
+book. During that time there were always in the university some 400
+men who had actually obtained scholarships on this standard; and a
+very considerable number who had competed on it, and done fairly.
+Whether Mr Arnold shared Mark Pattison's craze about the abolition of
+the pass-man altogether, I do not know. But he ought to have known,
+and I should think he must have known, that at the time of his writing
+the mere and sheer pass-man--the man whose knowledge was represented
+by the minimum of Smalls, Mods, and Greats--was, if not actually in a
+minority,--in some colleges at least he was that--at any rate in a
+pretty bare majority. With his love of interference and control, he
+might have retorted that this did not matter, that the university
+_permitted_ every one to stick to the minimum. But as a matter of fact
+he suggests that it provided no alternative, no _maximum_ or _majus_
+at all.
+
+By the time that we have now reached, that of his giving up the
+professorship, Mr Arnold's position was, for good and for evil, mostly
+fixed. When he took up the duties of his chair he was, though by no
+means a very young man and already the author of much remarkable work,
+yet almost unknown out of Oxford and a small official circle in
+London. He had now, at forty-five, not exactly popularity, but a very
+considerable, and a very lively and growing, reputation. By far the
+most and the best of his poetry was written; but it was only just
+coming to be at all generally read or at all justly appreciated. He
+had, partly in obeying, and partly in working against his official
+superiors, acquired a distinct position as an educational reformer. He
+had become something of a figure in society. But, above all, he had
+proclaimed with undoubting authority, and had exemplified with
+remarkable and varied skill, a new or at least a very greatly altered
+kind of literary criticism. And this had already threatened incursions
+into domains from which men of letters as such had generally kept
+aloof, or which, if they had touched, they had touched not as men of
+letters. Something of Socrates, something of Addison, something of
+Johnson, mingled in Mr Arnold's presentation of himself as, if not
+exactly an arbiter, at any rate a suggester of elegances in all
+things, poetry and politics, prose and polite manners, public thought,
+public morality, religion itself. These pretensions, if urged in a
+less agreeable manner, would have been intolerable; they were not
+universally tolerated as it was: but the gifts and graces of the
+critic made them--so far--inoffensive, even rather fascinating, to all
+save the least accommodating or the most clear-sighted, and to some
+even of these.
+
+And we must remember that this appearance of Mr Arnold as the mild and
+ingenious tamer of the ferocious manners of Britons coincided with far
+wider and more remarkable innovations. This was the time, at home, of
+the second Parliamentary Reform, which did at least as much to
+infringe the authority of his enemy the Philistine, as the first had
+done to break the power of the half-dreaded, half-courted Barbarian.
+This was the time when, abroad, the long-disguised and disorganised
+power of Germany was to rearrange the map of Europe, and to bring
+about a considerable rearrangement of Mr Arnold's own ideas as to the
+respective greatness of foreign nations. And finally the walls of
+another stronghold of British Philistia, its intense and apparently
+impregnable self-satisfaction with Free-trade and cheap money and so
+forth, were tottering and crumbling. A blast against them--indeed a
+series of blasts from _Chartism_ to the _Latter-day
+Pamphlets_--had been blown long before by Carlyle, in very
+different tones from Mr Arnold's. They had lost their stoutest
+champion and their most eloquent panegyrist in Macaulay. But Sadowa
+and household suffrage gave the final summons, if not the final shake.
+Mr Arnold had done his best to co-operate; but his object, to do him
+justice, was to be rather a raiser of the walls of Thebes than an
+over-thrower of those of Jericho, or even of Ashdod. He set about, in
+all seriousness, to clear away the rubbish and begin the
+re-edification; unluckily, in but too many cases, with dubious
+judgment, and by straying into quarters where he had no vocation. But
+he never entirely neglected his real business and his real vocation,
+and fortunately he returned to them almost entirely before it was too
+late.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+IN THE WILDERNESS.
+
+
+That the end of Mr Arnold's tenure of the Professorship of Poetry was
+a most important epoch in his life is sufficiently evident. In the ten
+years that came to an end then, he had, as two such extremely
+competent judges as Mr Disraeli and Crabb Robinson in different ways
+told him,[1] passed from comparative obscurity into something more
+than comparative prominence. His chair had been for him a real
+_cathedra_, and his deliverances from it had always assumed, and
+had at length, to a great extent, achieved, real authority. In
+criticism it was evident that if he had not revealed positively novel
+aspects of truth, he had formulated and put on record aspects which
+were presenting themselves to many, nay, most, of the best critical
+minds of his day. His criticism had drawn his poetry with it, if not
+into actual popularity, yet into something like attention. His
+attempts to obtain some other employment less irksome, less absorbing,
+and more profitable, had indeed been unsuccessful; but he was rising
+in his own department, and his work, if still in part uncongenial and
+decidedly laborious, appears to have been much less severe than in
+earlier days. Partly this work itself, partly his writings, and partly
+other causes had opened to him a very large circle of acquaintance,
+which it was in his own power to extend or contract as he pleased. His
+domestic life was perfectly happy, if his means were not very great:
+and his now assured literary position made it easy for him to increase
+these means, not indeed largely, but to a not despicable extent, by
+writing. The question was, "What should he write?"
+
+It is probably idle ever to wish that a man had done anything
+different from that which he has done. Without being a rigid
+Determinist, one may be pretty well convinced that the actual conduct
+is the joint result of abilities, and of desires, and of opportunity
+to exercise them, and that the man, had he really done otherwise,
+would have been unsuccessful or unhappy or both. But I fear that if I
+had been arbiter of Mr Arnold's fate at this moment I should have
+arranged it differently. He should have given us more poems--the man
+who, far later, wrote the magnificent _Westminster Abbey_ on such a
+subject as Dean Stanley, had plenty more poetry in his sack. And in
+prose he should have given us infinite essays, as many as De Quincey's
+or as Sainte-Beuve's own, and more than Hazlitt's, of the kind of the
+_Heine_ and the _Joubert_ earlier, of the _Wordsworth_ and the _Byron_
+later. I can see no reason why, in the twenty-one years' lease of life
+upon which he now entered, he should not have produced a volume a-year
+of these,--there are more than enough subjects in the various
+literatures that he knew; and though it is possible that in such
+extended application his method might have proved monotonous, or his
+range have seemed narrow, it is not likely. To complete the thing, I
+should have given him, instead of his inspectorship, a headship at
+Oxford, for which, it seems to me, he was admirably fitted. But _Dis
+aliter visum_: at least it seemed otherwise good to Mr Arnold himself
+as far as his literary employments were concerned, and the gods did
+not interfere.
+
+We have seen that he had, some years before, conceived the ambitious
+idea of changing the mind of England on a good many points by no means
+merely literary; and he seems, not altogether unnaturally, to have
+thought that now was the time to apply seriously to that work. His
+tenure of the Oxford chair had given him the public ear; and the
+cessation of that tenure had removed any official seal of etiquette
+which it might have laid on his own lips. A far less alert and acute
+mind than his must have seen that the Reform troubles of 1866 and the
+"leap in the dark" of 1867 were certain to bring about very great
+changes indeed at home; and that the war of the first-named year meant
+the alteration of many things abroad. He at least thought--and there
+was some justification of a good many kinds for him in thinking--that
+intellectual changes, of importance equal to the political, were
+coming or come upon the world. And so for a time he seems to have
+grown rather cold towards the Muses, his earliest and always his
+truest loves. Social, political, and religious matters tempted him
+away from literature; and for a matter of ten years it can hardly be
+said that he had anything to do with her except to take her name in
+vain in the title of by far his worst, as it was by far his most
+popular, volume.
+
+It has been hinted in a note on one of the early pages in this book
+that the secret of this unfortunate twist is at least partly to be
+found in the peculiar character of Mr Arnold's official employment.
+For nearly twenty years he had been constantly thrown into contact
+with the English Dissenters; and, far earlier than the time which we
+have reached, they seem not only, in familiar phrase, to have "got
+upon his nerves," but to have affected his brain. He saw all things in
+Dissent--or, at least, in the middle-class Philistine Dissenter. His
+Philistia is not in the least a true portrait of the average
+middle-class household thirty or forty years ago; though, I daresay (I
+have little direct knowledge), it is not an unfair one of the average
+Dissenting middle-class household. The religion which Mr Arnold
+attacks is not the religion of the Church of England at all, or only
+of what was even then a decaying and uninfluential part of it, the
+extremer and more intolerant sect of the Evangelicals. Once more, I
+cannot from personal knowledge say whether this portrait was true of
+Dissent, but I can believe it.
+
+Now, to derive an idea of England from the English Dissenter is and
+was absurd. Politically, indeed, he had only too much power between
+1832 and 1866, from the tradition which made Liberal politicians fond
+of petting him. Socially, intellectually, and to a great extent
+religiously, he had next to no power at all. To take the average
+manager of a "British" school as the average representative of the
+British nation was the wildest and most mischievous of confusions. Yet
+this practically was the basis of Mr Arnold's crusade between 1867 and
+1877.
+
+The First Blast of the Trumpet was, intentionally no doubt, the last
+of the Oxford lectures, and for that very reason a rather gentle and
+insinuating one. _Culture its Enemies_, which was the origin and
+first part, so to say, of _Culture and Anarchy_, carried the
+campaign begun in the _Essays in Criticism_ forward; but only in
+the most cautious manner, a caution no doubt partly due to the fact of
+the author's expressed, and very natural and proper, intention of
+closing his professorial exercises with the _bocca dolce_. Still
+this is at least conceivably due to the fact that the boldest
+extension of the campaign itself had not definitely entered, or at
+least possessed, the author's mind. A considerable time, indeed from
+July 1867 to January 1868, passed before the publication of the
+lecture as an article in the _Cornhill_ was followed up by the
+series from the latter month to August, which bore the general title
+of _Anarchy and Authority_, and completed the material of
+_Culture and Anarchy_ itself. This, as a book, appeared in 1869.
+
+It began, according to the author's favourite manner, which was
+already passing into something like a mannerism, with a sort of
+half-playful, half-serious battery against a living writer (in this
+case Mr Frederic Harrison), and with a laudatory citation from a dead
+one (in this case Bishop Wilson). Mr Harrison had blasphemed "the cant
+about culture," and Mr Arnold protests that culture's only aim is in
+the Bishop's words, "to make reason and the will of God prevail." In
+the first chapter, famous thenceforward in English literature by its
+title, borrowed from Swift, of "Sweetness and Light," we have the old
+rallyings of the _Daily Telegraph_ and the _Nonconformist_.
+Then the general view is laid down, and is developed in those that
+follow, but still with more of a political than a religious bent, and
+with the political bent itself chiefly limited to the social aspect.
+
+"Doing as one Likes" scatters a mild rain of ridicule on this supposed
+fetich of all classes in England; and then, the very famous, if not
+perhaps very felicitous, nickname-classification of
+"Barbarian-Philistine-Populace" is launched, defended, discussed in a
+chapter to itself. To do Mr Arnold justice, the three classes are, if
+not very philosophically defined, very impartially and amusingly
+rallied, the rallier taking up that part of humble Philistine
+conscious of his own weaknesses, which, till he made it slightly
+tiresome by too long a run, was piquant enough. The fourth chapter,
+"Hebraism and Hellenism," coasts the sands and rocks (on which, as it
+seems to some, Mr Arnold was later to make shipwreck) very nearly in
+the title and rather nearly in the contents, but still with a fairly
+safe offing. The opposition might be put too bluntly by saying that
+"Hellenism" represents to Mr Arnold the love of truth at any price,
+and "Hebraism" the love of goodness at any price; but the actual
+difference is not far from this, or from those of knowing and doing,
+fear of stupidity and fear of sin, &c. We have the quotation from Mr
+Carlyle about Socrates being "terribly at ease in Zion," the
+promulgation of the word Renascence for Renaissauce, and so forth.
+"Porro unum est necessarium," a favourite tag of Mr Arnold's, rather
+holds up another side of the same lesson than continues it in a fresh
+direction; and then "Our Liberal Practitioners" brings it closer to
+politics, but (since the immediate subject is the Disestablishment of
+the Irish Church) nearer also to the quicksands. Yet Mr Arnold still
+keeps away from them; though from what followed it would seem that he
+could only have done so by some such _tour de force_ as the
+famous "clubhauling" in _Peter Simple_. Had _Culture and
+Anarchy_ stood by itself, it would have been, though very far from
+its author's masterpiece, an interesting document both in regard to
+his own mental history and that of England during the third quarter of
+the century, containing some of his best prose, and little, if any, of
+his worst sense.
+
+But your crusader--still more your anti-crusader--never stops, and Mr
+Arnold was now pledged to this crusade or anti-crusade. In October
+1869 he began, still in the _Cornhill_,--completing it by further
+instalments in the same place later in the year, and publishing it in
+1870,--the book called _St Paul and Protestantism_, where he
+necessarily exchanges the mixed handling of _Culture and Anarchy_
+for a dead-set at the religious side of his imaginary citadel of
+Philistia. The point of at least ostensible connection--of real
+departure--is taken from the "Hebraism and Hellenism" contrast of the
+earlier book; and the same contrast is strongly urged throughout,
+especially in the _coda_, "A Comment on Christmas." But this
+contrast is gradually shaped into an onslaught on Puritanism, or
+rather on its dogmatic side, for its appreciation of "conduct" of
+morality is ever more and more eulogised. As regards the Church of
+England herself, the attack is oblique; in fact, it is disclaimed, and
+a sort of a Latitudinarian Union, with the Church for centre, and
+dogma left out, is advocated. Another of our Arnoldian friends, the
+"Zeit-Geist," makes his appearance, and it is more than hinted that
+one of the most important operations of this spirit is the exploding
+of miracles. The book is perfectly serious--its seriousness, indeed,
+is quite evidently deliberate and laboured, so that the author does
+not even fear to appear dull. But it is still admirably written, as
+well as studiously moderate and reverent; no exception can be taken to
+it on the score of taste, whatever may be taken on the score of
+orthodoxy from the one side, where no doubt the author would hasten to
+plead guilty, or on those of logic, history, and the needs of human
+nature on the other, where no doubt his "not guilty" would be equally
+emphatic.
+
+The case is again altered, and very unfortunately altered, in the
+next, the most popular and, as has been said, the most famous of the
+series--its zenith at once and its nadir--_Literature and Dogma_.
+A very much smaller part of this had appeared in magazine form;
+indeed, the contents of _St Paul and Protestantism_ itself must
+have seemed odd in that shape, and only strong sympathies on the part
+of the editor could have obtained admission for any part of
+_Literature and Dogma_. Much of it must have been written amid
+the excitement of the French-Prussian War, when the English public was
+athirst for "skits" of all sorts, and when Mr Arnold himself was "i'
+the vein," being engaged in the composition of much of the matter of
+_Friendship's Garland_. _St Paul and Protestantism_ had had
+two editions in the same year (_Culture and Anarchy_, a far
+better thing, waited six for its second), and altogether the state of
+things was such as to invite any author to pursue the triumph and
+partake the gale. And he might at first flatter himself that he had
+caught the one and made cyclone-use of the other; for the book,
+appearing at the end of 1872, with the date of 1873, passed through
+three editions in that year, a fourth in 1874, and a fifth two years
+later. It was thus by far Mr Arnold's most popular book; I repeat also
+that it is quite his worst.
+
+That it was in hopelessly bad taste here and there--in taste so bad
+that Mr Arnold himself later cut out the most famous passage of the
+book, to which accordingly we need here only allude--can be denied by
+nobody except those persons who hold "good form" to be, as somebody or
+other puts it, "an insular British delusion of the fifties and
+sixties." But this excision of his and, I think, some others, besides
+the "citations and illustrations" which he confesses to having
+excluded from the popular edition, may give us the welcome leave to
+deal very briefly with this side of the matter in other respects also.
+We may pass over the fun which Mr Arnold had with Archbishop Thomson
+(who, whatsoe'er the failings on his part, was at any rate a logician)
+on the theory of causation; with the University of Cambridge about
+_hominum divomque voluptas alma Venus_ (I have forgotten what was
+the bearing of this joke, and it is probably not worth inquiring
+into); with the Bishop of Gloucester about the Personality of God;
+with the Athanasian Creed, and its "science got ruffled by fighting."
+These things, as "form," class themselves; one mutters something well
+known about _risu inepto_, and passes on. Such a tone on such a
+subject can only be carried off completely by the gigantic strength of
+Swift, though no doubt it is well enough in keeping with the merely
+negative and destructive purpose of Voltaire. It would be cruel to
+bring _Literature and Dogma_ into competition with _A Tale of a
+Tub_; it would be more than unjust to bring it into comparison with
+_Le Taureau blanc_. And neither comparison is necessary, because
+the great fault of _Literature and Dogma_ appears, not when it is
+considered as a piece of doubtful or not doubtful taste, but when it
+is regarded as a serious composition.
+
+In the first place, the child-like fashion in which Mr Arnold
+swallowed the results of that very remarkable "science," Biblical
+criticism, has always struck some readers with astonishment and a kind
+of terror. This new La Fontaine asking everybody, "Avez-vous lu
+Kuenen?" is a lesson more humbling to the pride of literature than
+almost any that can be found. "The prophecy of the details of Peter's
+death," we are told in _Literature and Dogma_, "is almost
+certainly an addition after the event, _because it is not at all in
+the manner of Jesus_." Observe that we have absolutely no details,
+no evidence of any sort whatever, outside the Gospels for the "manner
+of Jesus." It is not, as in some at least of the more risky exercises
+of profane criticism in a similar field, as if we had some absolutely
+or almost absolutely authenticated documents, and others to judge by
+them. External evidence, except for the mere fact of Christ's
+existence and death, we have none. So you must, by the inner light,
+pick and choose out of the very same documents, resting on the very
+same authority, what, according to your good pleasure, is "in the
+manner of Jesus," and then black-mark the rest as being not so. Of
+course, when Mr Arnold thus wrote, the method had not been pushed
+_ad absurdum_, as it was later by his friend M. Renan in the
+_Histoire d'Israel_, to the dismay and confusion of no less
+intelligent and unorthodox a critic than his other friend, M. Scherer.
+But it is more or less the method of all Biblical criticism of this
+sort, and Mr Arnold follows it blindly.
+
+Again, the chief bent of the book is to establish that "miracles do
+not happen." Alas! it is Mr Arnold's unhappy lot that if miracles
+_do_ happen his argument confessedly disappears, while even if
+miracles do not happen it is, for his purpose, valueless. Like almost
+all critics of his class recently, especially like Professor Huxley in
+another division, he appears not to comprehend what, to the believers
+in the supernatural, the supernatural means. He applies, as they all
+apply, the tests of the natural, and says, "Now really, you know,
+these tests are destructive." He says--he cannot prove--that miracles
+do not happen now; his adversaries, if they were wise, would simply
+answer, "_Apres?_" Do any of them pretend to prescribe to their
+God that His methods shall be always the same, or that those methods
+shall stand the tests of the laboratory and the School of Charters?
+that He shall give "a good title," like a man who is selling a house?
+Some at least would rather not; they would feel appallingly little
+interest in a Divinity after this sworn-attorney and
+chartered-accountant fashion, who must produce vouchers for all His
+acts. And further (to speak with reverence), the Divinity whom they
+_do_ worship would be likely to answer Mr Arnold in the words of
+a prophet of Mr Arnold's own--
+
+  "Du gleichst dem Geist den du begreifst,
+  Nicht Mir!"
+
+But this is not all. There is not only begging of the question but
+ignoring of the issue. _Literature and Dogma_, to do it strict
+justice, is certainly not, in intention at any rate, a destructive
+book. It is meant, and meant very seriously, to be constructive--to
+provide a substitute for the effete religion of Hooker and Wilson, of
+Laud and Pusey, as well as for that of Baxter and Wesley and Mr Miall.
+This new religion is to have for its Jachin Literature--that is to
+say, a delicate aesthetic appreciation of all that is beautiful in
+Christianity and out of it; and for its Boaz Conduct--that is to say,
+a morality at least as rigid as that of the purest Judaism, though
+more amiable. If dogma is to be banished, so is anything like licence;
+and in the very book itself Mr Arnold formulated, against his once
+(and still partly) beloved France, something like that denunciation of
+her worship of Lubricity which he afterwards put more plainly still.
+Even Hellenism, the lauded Hellenism, is told to mend its ways (indeed
+there was need for it), and the Literature-without-Dogmatist will have
+to behave himself with an almost Pharisaic correctness, though in
+point of belief he is to be piously Sadducee.
+
+Now this is all very pretty and very creditable, but it will not work.
+The goods, to use the vulgar but precise formula of English law, "are
+not of the nature and quality demanded by the purchaser." Nobody wants
+a religion of that sort. Conduct is good; poetic appreciation is
+perhaps better, though not for the general. But then religion happens
+to be something different from either, though no doubt closely
+connected with both. Mr Arnold does not exactly offer us a stone for
+bread, but he does, like the benevolent French princess in the story,
+offer us pie-crust. Pie-crust is a good thing; it is a close
+connection of bread; but it will not do for a substitute, and, in
+addition, it is much more difficult for the general to obtain.
+Moreover, there is a serious, a historical, difficulty about Conduct
+_plus_ poetic appreciation, but _minus_ what we call religion. Mr
+Arnold, in a stately sonnet, has told us that Sophocles was his ideal
+as a life-philosopher who was also a poet. He knew, presumably, the
+stories told about Sophocles in Athenaeus, and though these might be
+idle scandal, he knew far too much not to be aware that there is
+nothing intrinsically impossible about them. It would have been rather
+interesting to hear him fully on this subject. But he was too busy
+with expatiating on the sweet reasonableness of Jesus and "the
+_Aberglaube_ of the Second Advent" to trouble himself with awkward
+matters of this kind at the moment.
+
+It may be suspected, however, that he did trouble himself with them,
+or with something like them, afterwards. The book--a deliberate
+provocation--naturally found plenty of respondents, though I do not
+remember that any one smashed it, as, for instance, Dean Mansel could
+have done if he had been alive, or as Cardinal Newman could, had he
+been still in the fold. Mr Arnold was perhaps not less really
+disquieted by its comparative popularity. For he had quite enough of
+Phocion in him to feel, if not to say, that he must have said
+something at least ambiguous, when the multitude applauded. At any
+rate, though the ill-omened series did not cease, nothing further
+appeared in it which showed the tone of _Literature and Dogma_.
+Indeed, of the concluding volumes, _God and the Bible_ and
+_Last Essays on Church and Religion_, the first is an elaborate
+and rather anxious apology, and the second a collection of diverse and
+comparatively "anodyne" essays. It is significant--as showing how much
+of the success of _Literature and Dogma_ had been a success of
+scandal--that neither of these volumes enjoyed the least popularity.
+_God and the Bible_ was never reprinted till the popular edition
+of the series thus far in 1884; and _Last Essays_ was never
+reprinted at all, or had not been up to the date of the invaluable
+_Bibliography_ of the works. Indeed the copies now, 1899, on sale
+appear to be of the first edition. This cool reception does not
+discredit either Barbarians or Philistines or Populace. There are good
+things in the _Last Essays_ (to which we shall return), but the
+general effect of them is that of a man who is withdrawing from a
+foray, not exactly beaten, but unsuccessful and disgusted, and is
+trying to cover his retreat by alarums and excursions.
+
+_God and the Bible_ tells much the same tale. It originally
+appeared by instalments in the _Contemporary Review_, where it
+must have been something of a choke-pear even for the readers of that
+then young and thoughtful periodical. Unless the replier has the
+vigour of Swift, or at least of Bentley, the adroitness in fence of
+Pascal, or at least of Voltaire, "replies, duplies, quadruplies" are
+apt to be wofully tedious reading, and Mr Arnold was rather a
+_veles_ than a _triarius_ of controversy. He could harass,
+but he did not himself stand harassing very well; and here he was not
+merely the object of attacks from all sides, but was most uneasily
+conscious that, in some cases at least, he did not wish his enemies to
+destroy each other. He had absolutely no sympathy with the rabid
+anti-Christianity of Clifford, very little with the mere agnosticism
+of Huxley; he wanted to be allowed to take just so much Biblical
+criticism as suited him and no more. He wished to prove, in his own
+remarkable way, the truth and necessity of Christianity, and to this
+wish the contradictions of sinners were too manifold. One must be
+stony-hearted not to feel some pity for him, as, just when he thinks
+he has evaded an orthodox brick, the tile of a disbeliever in the
+Fourth Gospel whizzes at him; or as, while he is trying to patch up
+his romantic reconstructions of imaginary Jewish history and religion,
+the push of some aggressive reviewer bids him make good his challenge
+to metaphysical theologians. But this interest is only passing.
+
+In the Preface there is indeed some of the old attempt at liveliness.
+Professor Clifford himself, then dead, is disposed of with a not
+ungraceful mixture of pity and satire; Messrs Moody and Sankey are not
+unpleasantly rallied; Satan and Tisiphone, Mr Ruskin and Sir Robert
+Phillimore, once more remind one of the groves of Blarney or the more
+doubtful chorus in the _Anti-Jacobin_. But the apologist is not
+really light-hearted: he cannot keep the more solemn part of his
+apologia out of the Preface itself, and assures us that the story of
+Adam's fall "is all a legend. It never really happened, any of it."
+Again one asks Mr Arnold, as seriously as possible, "How _do_ you
+know that? On your own calculus, with your own estimate of evidence,
+how is it possible for you to know that? You may, on your principles,
+say that you are insufficiently persuaded that it _did_ happen;
+but how can you, without preternatural revelation (the very thing you
+will not admit) say that it did _not?_ Surely there is some want
+of intellectual seriousness in thus lightly ignoring every rule of law
+and logic, of history and of common-sense?"
+
+But the embarrassment thus revealed naturally shows itself even more
+in the book itself, notwithstanding the fact that Mr Arnold expressly
+declines to reply to those who have attacked _Literature and
+Dogma_ as anti-Christian and irreligious. Not even by summarily
+banishing this not inconsiderable host can he face the rest
+comfortably: and he has to resort to the strangest reasons of defence,
+to the most eccentric invitation of reinforcements from afar.
+
+The strangest of all these, the clearest proof in itself of flurry and
+sense of need, is exhibited in his summoning--of all wonderful things
+--of Comparative Philology to the rescue of Literature. To rebut the
+criticism on his denial of a Personal God, he takes refuge in the
+ethnological meaning of Deus, which, it seems, is "Shining." The poor
+plain mind, already staggered by Mr Arnold's private revelations as to
+what did _not_ happen 6000 years ago (or earlier) in the garden
+of Eden, quite succumbs before this privilegium of omniscience. One
+had thought that the results of philology and etymology of this sort
+were extremely ingenious guesses, to be admitted in so far as they do
+not conflict with facts, and till the next guess comes, but nothing
+more. Lo! they are quoted as if they were on a par with "two and two
+make four," or the law of Excluded Middle. We may not take Moses and
+the prophets without proof, but Curtius and Professor Max Mueller may
+speak, and we must but hear. And later, when Mr Arnold is trying to
+cope with Descartes, he flies for refuge to "the roots _as_, _bhu_,
+and _sta_."
+
+One is tempted rather to laugh at this; but on some sides it is very
+serious. That no God of any religion can be more of a mere hypothesis
+than _as_, _bhu_, and _sta_, never seems to have occurred to
+Mr Arnold for one moment, nor that he was cutting the throat of his
+own argument. We must not, however, fall into his own mistake and
+quadruplicate to his duply. It may be sufficient to say that the long
+defence of the Fourth Gospel which this book contains is one of the
+oddest things in all literature. What, on Mr Arnold's principles, it
+matters whether the Fourth Gospel was written in the first century,
+the fourth, or the fourteenth, it is impossible for the poor plain
+mind to see. He will not have it as revelation, and as anything else
+its date is quite immaterial.
+
+The fact is that this severe censor of "learned pseudo--science mixed
+with popular legend," as he terms theology, appears to have no idea of
+the value of evidence whatever. The traditional history of the Bible
+is not even to be considered; but a conjectural reconstruction of it
+by a Dutch critic, without in the older cases one jot or tittle of
+evidence outside the covers of the Bible itself, deserves every
+respect, if not reverent acceptance _en bloc_. Miracles are
+fictions, and the scenes in the garden of Eden and at the Sepulchre
+never happened; but _as_, _bhu_, and _sta_ are very solemn
+facts, and you can find out all about the Divinity, because the word
+Deus means (not "has been guessed to mean," but _means_)
+"Shining." That Shakespeare knew everything is much more certain than
+that miracles do not happen; and he certainly knew Mr Arnold's case if
+not Mr Arnold, when he introduced a certain main episode in _A
+Midsummer Night's Dream_. To frown on Oberon and caress Bottom is
+venial compared with the dismissal of the Bible as popular legend, and
+the implicit belief in _as_, _bhu_, and _sta_.
+
+A wilfully hostile historian of Mr Arnold could not dwell too long on
+these unfortunate books, for the handles they present are infinite;
+but for my part I shall take leave to say little more about them. To
+ask, in the common phrase, whether they did any harm would be to beg
+the question in their own manner; to ask whether they produced any
+effect would lead us too far. They certainly expressed a prevalent
+tendency. Most fortunately Mr Arnold was allowed another ten years and
+more wherein to escape from the wilderness which yielded these Dead
+Sea fruits, and to till his proper garden once more. Yet we have not
+quite done with the other fruits themselves.
+
+The actual finale, _Last Essays on Church_ and _Religion_,
+was still less popular, was indeed the least popular of all his works,
+seeing that, as has been said above, it has never been reprinted. It
+is easy to understand this, for it is perhaps the only one of his
+books which can be definitely called dull. The apologetic tone
+noticeable in _God and the Bible_ continues, but the apology is
+illustrated and maintained in an even less attractive manner. The
+Preface is perhaps the least dead part of the book; but its line of
+argument shares, and perhaps even exaggerates, the controversial
+infelicity of this unfortunate series. Mr Arnold deals in it at some
+length with the comments of two foreign critics, M. Challemel-Lacour
+and Signor de Gubernatis, on _Literature and Dogma_, bringing out
+(what surely could have been no news to any but very ill-educated
+Englishmen) the fact of their surprise, not at his taking the Bible
+with so little seriousness, but at his taking it with any seriousness
+at all. And he seems never even to dream of the obvious retort:
+"Certainly. These men are at any rate 'thorough'; they are not
+dilettante dalliers between two opinions. They have got far beyond
+your half-way house and have arrived at their destination. We have no
+desire to arrive at the destination, and therefore, if you will excuse
+us, we decline to visit the half-way house." It is less surprising
+that he did not see the force of the objections of another critic, M.
+Maurice Vernes, to the equally illogical and unhistorical plan of
+arbitrarily selecting this utterance as that of "Jesus," and another,
+given by the same authority, as not that of "Jesus." A man, who was
+sensible of this paralogism, could never take Mr Arnold's views on
+Church and Religion at all.
+
+But when we leave the Preface, even such faint liveliness as this
+deserts us. The text contains four (or five, the second being divided
+into two parts) essays, lectures, or papers, _A Psychological
+Parallel_, _Bishop Butler and the Zeit-Geist_, The Church of England_,
+and _A Last Word on the Burials Bill_. All had appeared in
+_Macmillan's Magazine_ or the _Contemporary Review_ during
+1876, while _Bishop Butler_ had been delivered as two lectures at
+Edinburgh, and _The Church of England_ as an address to the
+London Clergy at Sion College, during the spring of that year.
+
+Over all there is a curious constraint, the evidence of a mood not
+very difficult to analyse, and in the analysis of which lies almost
+all the satisfaction or edification to be got out of the book. The
+writer, though by no means abandoning his own point of view, and even
+flattering himself that some _modus vivendi_ is about to be
+established between himself and the more moderate supporters of the
+Church and of religion, betrays not merely the well-known
+self-excusing and self-accusing tone, but odd flashes of discontent
+and weariness--nay, even a fretfulness such as might have been that of
+a Moses at Rephidim who could not bring water out of the rock. _A
+Psychological Parallel_ is an attempt to buttress the apologia by
+referring to Sir Matthew Hale's views on witchcraft, to Smith, the
+Cambridge Platonist and Latitudinarian, and to the _Book of
+Enoch_ (of which, by the way, it is a pity that Mr Arnold did not
+live to see Mr Charles's excellent translation, since he desiderated a
+good one). Of course the argument is sun-clear. If Hale was mistaken
+about witchcraft, St Paul may have been mistaken about the
+Resurrection. Expressions attributed to Christ occur in the _Book of
+Enoch_, therefore they are not original and divine, &c., &c. And it
+would be out of place to attempt any reply to this argument, the reply
+being in each case as sun-clear as the argument itself. No believer in
+supernatural religion that I ever met considered Sir Matthew Hale to
+have been inspired; and no believer in the divinity of Christ can fail
+to hold that His adoption of words (if He did adopt them) makes them
+His.
+
+The gist of the Butler lectures is considerably less clear, and, if
+only for that reason, it cannot be succinctly stated or answered. In
+particular, it requires rather careful "collection" in order to
+discover what our friend the Zeit-Geist has to do in this galley. I
+should imagine that, though an Edinburgh audience is by no means
+alarmed at philosophy, the majority, perhaps the enormous majority, of
+Mr Arnold's hearers must have had a singularly dim idea as to his
+exact drift. Indeed I cannot say that after reading the piece when it
+first appeared, and again, twenty years later, for the purposes of
+this book, I have any very distinct notion of that drift myself. If it
+merely means that Butler, being an eighteenth-century person, was
+afflicted with the eighteenth-century limitations by the Zeit-Geist,
+eighty-six pages, and an imposing German compound at the head of every
+other one of them, seem a good deal for telling us this. If it is a
+sort of indirect attack upon--an oblique demurrer to--Butler's
+constructive-aggressive orthodoxy in psychology and religion, one is
+bound to say with all politeness, first, that it is a case of _impar
+congressus_, and secondly, that the adventurous knight does not
+give himself a fair chance. It will take more than eighty-six not very
+large pages, and a German word at the top of the alternate ones, to do
+that! In the opening sketch of Butler himself Mr Arnold could not but
+be agreeable and even delightful. It gives us, indeed, most pleasant
+promise of work in this same good kind soon to follow; but for the
+rest we grope till we find, after some seventy-three of the
+eighty-six, that what Mr Arnold wanted to say is that Butler did not
+handle, and could not then have handled, miracles and the fulfilment
+of prophecy satisfactorily. Butler, like St Paul, is undoubtedly
+inconvenient for those who believe that miracles do not happen, and
+that prophecies were either not made or not fulfilled. So he must be
+got rid of. But whether he is got rid of,--whether Mr Arnold and the
+Zeit-Geist have put him on the shelf as a venerable but antiquated
+object,--that is another question.
+
+The two remaining essays show us Mr Arnold, in his character of at
+least would-be practical statesman, dealing no longer with points of
+doctrine but with the affairs of the Church as a political body. The
+circumstances of the first--the address delivered at Sion College--had
+a certain piquancy: whether they had also sweet reasonableness and an
+entire accordance with the fitness of things is a question no doubt
+capable of being debated. Me the situation strikes, I must confess, as
+a little grotesque. The layman in the wide sense, the amateur, always
+occupies a rather equivocal position when he addresses experts and the
+profession; but his position is never so equivocal as when he doubles
+the part of non-expert with that of candid friend. How Mr Arnold
+succeeded in this exceedingly delicate attempt I do not propose to
+examine at any length. He thought himself that he had "sufficiently
+marked the way in which the new world was to be reached." Paths to new
+worlds are always interesting, but in reading, or rather re-reading,
+the sailing directions of this Columbus twenty years after date, one
+may be a little disappointed. The sum appears to be a somewhat
+Tootsian declaration that things of general are of no consequence. The
+Church is better than Dissent; at least she would be so if she dropped
+all her dogma, the greater part of her superstitions about the rights
+of property and "my duty to my neighbour," and as much as possible of
+the barriers which separate her from Dissent itself. A most moderate
+eirenicon. Still less need be said of the Burials Bill paper, which is
+a sort of appendix or corollary to the Sion speech, at the end of
+which the subject had been referred to. The particular question, in
+this phase of it, has long ceased to burn, and one need not disturb
+the ashes.
+
+We must now turn to the incursions of this time into politics, which,
+if not much happier, were more amusing. The chief monument of them is
+the long unreprinted _Friendship's Garland_, which has always had
+some fervent devotees, and is very characteristic. It so happened that
+the period when _Essays in Criticism_, combined with his Oxford
+Lectures, introduced Mr Arnold to the public, was the period of the
+first years of the _Pall Mall Gazette_, when that brilliant
+periodical, with the help of many of the original staff of the
+_Saturday Review_, and others, was renewing for the sixties the
+sensation of a new kind of journalism, which the _Saturday_
+itself had given to the fifties, while its form and daily appearance
+gave it even greater opportunities. As early as the summer of 1866,
+during the agitation into which the public mind had been thrown by the
+astounding rapidity and thoroughness of the Prussian successes in the
+Seven Weeks' War, Mr Arnold had begun a series of letters, couched in
+the style of _persiflage_, which Kinglake had introduced, or
+reintroduced, twenty years earlier in _Eothen_, and which the
+_Saturday_ had taken up and widely developed. He also took not a
+few hints from Carlyle in _Sartor_ and the _Latterday
+Pamphlets_. And for some years at intervals, with the help of a
+troupe of imaginary correspondents and _comparses_--Arminius von
+Thundertentronckh, Adolescens Leo of the _Daily Telegraph_, the
+Bottles family of wealthy Dissenters, with cravings for their deceased
+wife's sisters, as well as a large number of more or less celebrated
+personages of the day, introduced in their proper persons, and by
+their proper names--he instructed England on its own weakness, folly,
+and vulgarity, on the wisdom and strength of the Germans, on the
+importance of _Geist_ and ideas, &c., &c. The author brought
+himself in by name as a simple inhabitant of Grub Street, victimised,
+bullied, or compassionately looked down upon by everybody; and by this
+well-known device took licence for pretty familiar treatment of other
+people. When the greater crash of 1870 came, and the intelligent
+British mind was more puzzled, yet more _Prusso-mimic_, than
+ever, he supplemented these letters, framed or bound them up, as it
+were, with a moving account of the death of Arminius before Paris, and
+launched the whole as a book.
+
+The letters had been much laughed over; but I do not think the book
+was very widely bought--at any rate, its very high price during the
+time in which it was out of print shows that no large number was
+printed. Perhaps this cold welcome was not altogether so discreditable
+to the British public as it would have been, had its sole cause been
+the undoubted but unpalatable truths told by the writer. Either, as
+some say, because of its thick-hidedness, or, as others, because of
+its arrogant self-sufficiency, the British public has never resented
+these much. But, in the first place, the thing was a falsetto. Mr
+Arnold had plenty of wit but not much humour; and after a time one
+feels that Bottles and Leo & Co. may be, as Dousterswivel says, "very
+witty and comedy," but that we should not be altogether sorry if they
+would _go_. Further, the direct personalities--the worst
+instances concerned Lord Elcho, Mr Frederic Harrison, and the late Mr
+Sala--struck, and strike, some people as being not precisely in good
+taste. The constant allusions and references to minor and ephemeral
+things and persons were not of course then unintelligible, but they
+were even then teasing, In all these points, if _Friendship's
+Garland_ be compared, I will once more not say with _A Tale of a
+Tub_, but even with the _History of John Bull_, its weakness
+will come out rather strongly.
+
+But this was not all. It was quite evident--and it was no shame and no
+disadvantage to him--that the jester was endeavouring to urge a very
+serious earnest behind, and by means of, his jest; that he was no mere
+railer, or caviller, or even satirist, but a convinced reformer and
+apostle. Yet when we try to get at his programme--at his gospel--there
+is no vestige of anything tangible about either. Not very many
+impartial persons could possibly accept Mr Arnold's favourite
+doctrine, that the salvation of the people lies in state-provided
+middle-class schools; and this was specially difficult in 1871, if
+they remembered how some few years before Mr Arnold had been extolling
+the state-provided middle-class schools of France. While, for the
+rest, a man might be (as many men were) thoroughly dissatisfied with
+the part England had played abroad in Italy, in the American Civil
+War, in Denmark, in the war of 1866, in the war of 1870, and at home
+from 1845 onwards, and yet not be able for the life of him to discover
+any way of safety in _Friendship's Garland_.
+
+Nor, to take with the _Garland_ for convenience sake _Irish
+Essays_, 1882, the political book which closed this period with the
+political book that opened it, do we find things much better, even
+long after "the Wilderness" had been mostly left behind. There is
+indeed less falsetto and less flippancy; perhaps Mr Arnold had
+silently learnt a lesson, perhaps the opportunities of regular essays
+in "three-decker" reviews--of a lay sermon to working men, of a speech
+at the greatest public school in the world--discouraged the
+playfulness which had seemed permissible in addressing a skittish
+young evening newspaper. But the unpracticalness--not in the
+Philistine but in the strictly scientific sense--is more glaring than
+ever, and there are other faults with it. Great part of _An
+Unregarded Irish Grievance_ is occupied by a long-drawn-out
+comparison of England's behaviour to Ireland with that of Mr Murdstone
+and his friend and manager Quinion to David Copperfield. In the first
+place, one thinks wickedly of the gibe in _Friendship's Garland_
+about "Mr Vernon Harcourt developing a system of unsectarian religion
+from the life of Mr Pickwick." In the second, one asks on what
+principles of literary art a comparison, not wholly improper as a mere
+illustration in passing, can be worked to death and turned inside out
+and upside down, for some twenty mortal pages.
+
+And so in other places. Yet the worst faults are not in form but in
+substance. Minor contradictions do not matter, though in a copy of the
+book I have read there is a damaging comparison by some annotator
+between Mr Arnold's description of English Government at p. 4 and his
+rosy picture of education under Government at p. 107. This might
+happen to anybody, and is not fatal. What is fatal is that this censor
+of the "unideaed" has evidently himself no "ideas," no first
+principles, in politics at all. That, play what tricks you will, all
+possible politics come round either to the Rule of the One, the Rule
+of the Few, or the Rule of the Many, and that the consequences of
+these rules, differentiated a little but not materially by historical
+and racial characteristics, are as constant as anything commonly
+called scientific,--this never seems to have occurred to Mr Arnold at
+all. He did not fully appreciate Thackeray, and Thackeray died too
+soon to know very much of him. But I have always thought that, for a
+criticism of life possessing prophetic genius, the Chevalier Strong's
+wedding congratulations to Arthur Pendennis are almost uncanny as
+regards the Matthaean gospel. "Nothing," said the Chevalier, when he
+had established himself as agent to the Duke of Garbanzos, "is so
+important to the welfare of the household as _Good Sherry_." And
+so we find that the Irish question, like all others, will be solved by
+the substitution of State-governed for private middle-class schools,
+by the saturation of England with "ideas," by all our old friends.
+
+The rest matches. Mr Arnold pooh-poohs the notion that Ireland, except
+by force, will never be blended with England; it would be as sensible
+to say this "of Scotland, Wales, or Cornwall." He was not, I think,
+dead--he was certainly not dead long--when Wales actually did follow,
+less formidably, of course, in the path of Ireland, beginning with the
+Church, going on to the Land, and not distantly threatening the State.
+As usual he goes to his books. He quotes Goethe--a great man of
+letters, but perhaps the most pedantic of great men of letters except
+Milton--to prove that "the English are pedants." He quotes Burke--the
+unregenerate Irish Whig Burke, not the prophet whose tongue the French
+Revolution had touched as it opened his eyes--to tell us what to do
+with Ireland. But the main point in at least one of these essays, _The
+Incompatibles_, is again connected with _David Copperfield_. I have
+said that, from the merely literary point of view, the perpetual
+ringing of the changes on Creakle, Murdstone, Quinion--Quinion,
+Murdstone, Creakle--is inartistic and irritating. But from the
+philosophical and political point of view it is far worse. No
+Englishman with any sense of fact ever has taken, or could take,
+Dickens's characters as normal types. They are always fantastic
+exaggerations, full of genius occasionally, but as unlike actual
+reality as those illustrations by Cruikshank which are their nearest
+companions in the art of line. Of the three figures selected in
+particular, Creakle is a caricature; Murdstone, though not exactly
+that, is a repulsive exception; and Quinion is so mere a _comparse_ or
+"super" that to base any generalisation on him is absurd. The dislike
+of the British public to be "talked book to" may be healthy or
+unhealthy; but if it takes no great heed of this kind of talking book,
+small blame to it! The same hopeless, not to say the same wilful,
+neglect of the practical appears throughout. Mr Arnold (to his credit
+be it said) had no great hopes of the Land Bill of 1881. But his own
+panaceas--a sort of Cadi-court for "bag-and-baggaging" bad landlords,
+and the concurrent endowment of Catholicism--were, at least, no
+better, and went, if it were possible, even more in the teeth of
+history.
+
+It may be worth while (taking the usual chronological licence for the
+sake of logical coherence) to say a few words on the other political
+and quasi-political pieces reprinted with _Irish Essays_--the address
+to Ipswich working men, _Ecce Convertimur ad Gentes_, the Eton speech
+on _Eutrapelia_, and the ambitious _Future of Liberalism_[2] The first
+is a curious but not very important appeal to the lower class to
+educate the middle, with episodic praises of "equality," "academies,"
+and the like, as well as glances at a more extensive system of
+"municipalisation," which, not to the satisfaction of everybody, has
+come about since. The second contains some admirable remarks on
+classical education, some still more admirable protests against
+reading about the classics instead of reading the classics, and the
+famous discourse on _Eutrapelia_, with its doctrine that "conduct is
+three-fourths of life," its denunciation of "moral inadequacy," and
+its really great indications of societies dying of the triumph of
+Liberalism and Conservatism respectively. A discourse quite admirable
+in intention, though if "heckling" had been in order on that occasion,
+a sharp youth might have put Mr Arnold in some difficulty by asking
+where the canons of "moral adequacy" are written.
+
+But _The Future of Liberalism_, which the Elizabethans would have
+called a "cooling-card" after the Liberal triumph of 1880, exhibits
+its author's political quiddity most clearly. Much that he says is
+perfectly true; much of it, whether true or not, is, as Mr Weller
+observes, "wery pretty." But the old mistake recurs of playing on a
+phrase _ad nauseam_--in this case a phrase of Cobbett's (one of
+the greatest of phrase-makers, but also one of the chief of the
+apostles of unreason) about "the principles of Pratt, the principles
+of Yorke." It was, of course, a capital _argumentum ad invidiam_,
+and Mr Arnold frankly adopted it. He compared himself to Cobbett--a
+compliment, no doubt; but one which, I fear, Cobbett, who hated
+nothing so much as a university man, would not have appreciated.
+Cobbett thought of nothing but the agricultural labourer's "full
+belly"--at least this is how he himself put it; and it would have
+enforced Mr Arnold's argument and antithesis had he known or dared to
+use it. Mr Arnold thought of nothing but the middle classes' empty
+mind. The two parties, as represented by the rather small Lord Camden
+and the rather great Lord Hardwicke, cared for neither of these
+things--so "the principles of Pratt, the principles of Yorke" comes in
+as a refrain. To the average Briton quotation is no more argument
+than, on higher authority, is blank verse. Still it might do for
+ornament, if not for argument,--might help the lesson and point it at
+least. So we turn to the lesson itself. This "Liberal of the future,"
+as Mr Arnold styles himself, begins, with orthodoxy if not with
+philosophy, by warning the Tories off entirely. "They cannot really
+profit the nation, or give it what it needs." Perhaps; but suppose we
+ask for a little reason, just a ghost of a premiss or two for this
+extensive conclusion? There is no voice, neither any that answers. And
+then, the Tories dismissed with a wave to all but temporary oblivion
+(they are to be allowed, it seems, to appear from time to time to
+chasten Liberalism), our prophet turns to Liberalism itself. It ought
+to promote "the humanisation of man in society," and it doesn't
+promote this. Ah! what a blessed word is "humanisation," the very
+equivalent, in syllables as in blessedness, of "Mesopotamia"! But when
+for the considerable rest of the essay we try to find out what
+humanisation _is_, why we find nothing but the old negative
+impalpable gospel, that we must "_dis_materialise our upper
+class, _dis_vulgarise our middle class, _dis_brutalise our
+lower class." "Om-m-ject and sum-m-m-ject!" "om-m-ject and
+sum-m-m-ject," in short, as that famous flash of Thomas Carlyle's
+genius discovered and summarised Coleridge, and with Coleridge the
+whole nineteenth century. A screed of jargon--a patter of
+shibboleth--and that is all. Never a thought for this momentous
+question--"May you not possibly--indeed most probably--in attempting
+to remove what you choose to consider as the defects of these classes,
+remove also what you acknowledge to be their virtues--the governing
+faculty of the upper class, the conduct and moral health of the
+middle, the force and vigour of the lower?" A momentous question
+indeed, and one which, as some think, has _got_ something of an answer
+since, and no comfortable one!
+
+I must apologise, and I do, for anything that may appear too polemical
+in this chapter. But the circumstances of the case made it almost as
+impossible, as it would have been uninteresting, to be merely
+recitative and colourless; and Mr Arnold's own example gives ample
+licence. In particular, any one who has had actual and close knowledge
+of the actual progress of politics for many years may be pardoned for
+speaking with some decision on the practice of sitting at ease in
+Zion, and raying out curious observations on Barbarians and Eutrapelia
+and the character of Mr Quinion. We may have too little of such things
+in English politics--no doubt for a good many years before Mr Arnold's
+day we _had_ too little of them. But too much, though a not
+unpopular, is a very clumsy and very unscientific antidote to too
+little; and in Mr Arnold's own handling of politics, I venture to
+think that there was too much of them by a very great deal.
+
+It is very pleasant to turn from the literary results of this period,
+from the spectacle of Pegasus
+
+  "Stumbling in miry roads of alien art,"
+
+and harnessing himself to all manner of unsuitable vehicles, to the
+private history of the decade. This, though sadly chequered by Mr
+Arnold's first domestic troubles, was on the whole prosperous, was
+somewhat less laborious than the earlier years, and was lightened by
+ever more of the social and public distractions, which no man entirely
+dislikes, and which--to a certain extent and in a certain way--Mr
+Arnold did not dislike at all. The changes of occupation and of
+literary aim by the termination of the professorship coincided, as
+such things have a habit of doing, with changes in place and
+circumstance. The Chester Square house grew too small for the
+children, and a move to Harrow was first meditated and then achieved.
+A very pleasant letter to his mother, in November 1867, tells how he
+was present at the farewell dinner to Dickens on his departure for
+America, how they wanted him (vainly) to come to the high table and
+speak, and how Lord Lytton finally brought him into his own speech. He
+adds that some one has given him "a magnificent box of four hundred
+Manilla cheroots" (he must surely have counted wrong, for they usually
+make these things in two-hundred-and-fifties or five-hundreds),
+welcome to hand on, though he did not smoke himself. In another he
+expresses the evangelical desire to "do Mr Swinburne some good."
+
+But in January 1868 his baby-child Basil died; and the intense family
+affection, which was one of his strongest characteristics, suffered of
+course cruelly, as is recorded in a series of touching letters to his
+sister and mother. He fell and hurt himself at Cannon Street, too, but
+was comforted by his sister with a leading case about an illiterate
+man who fell into a reservoir through not reading a notice. The Harrow
+house became a reality at Lady Day, and at Midsummer he went to stay
+at Panshanger, and "heard the word 'Philistine' used a hundred times
+during dinner and 'Barbarian' nearly as often" (it must be remembered
+that the "Culture and Anarchy" articles were coming out now). This
+half-childish delight in such matters (like Mr Pendennis's "It's all
+in the papers, and my name too!") is one of the most fascinating
+things about him, and one of not a few, proving that, if there was
+some affectation, there was no dissimulation in his nature. Too many
+men, I fear, would have said nothing about them, or assumed a lofty
+disdain. In September he mentions to Mr Grant Duff a plan (which one
+only wishes he had carried out, letting all the "Dogma" series go
+[Greek: kat ouron] as it deserved) for "a sketch of Greek poetry,
+illustrated by extracts in harmonious prose." This would have been one
+of the few great literary histories of the world, and so Apollo kept
+it in his own lap. The winter repeated, far more heavily, the domestic
+blow of the spring, and Tom, his eldest son, who had always been
+delicate, died, aged sixteen only, at Harrow, where since the removal
+he had been at school. There is something about this in the
+_Letters_; but on the great principle of _curae leves_, less,
+as we should expect, than about the baby's death.
+
+In February next year Mr Arnold's double repute, as a practical and
+official "educationist" and as a man of letters, brought him the offer
+of the care of Prince Thomas of Savoy, son of the Duke of Genoa, and
+grandson of Victor Emmanuel, who was to attend Harrow School and board
+with the Arnolds. The charge, though honourable and, I suppose,
+profitable, might not have been entirely to the taste of everybody;
+but it seemed to Mr Arnold a new link with the Continent, and he
+welcomed it. The same year saw a visit to Knebworth, and a very
+interesting and by no means unsound criticism on that important event
+in the life of a poet, the issue of the first collected edition of his
+poems.[3] This was in two volumes, and is now rather precious. "It
+might be fairly urged that I have less poetic sentiment than Tennyson,
+and less intellectual vigour and abundance than Browning; yet because
+I have perhaps more of a fusion of the two than either of them, and
+have more regularly applied that fusion to the main line of modern
+development, I am likely enough to have my turn." One can only query
+whether poetry has anything to do with "modern development," and
+desiderate the addition to "sentiment" of "art." He seems to imply
+that Mr Gladstone personally prevented his appointment to a
+commissionership under the Endowed Schools Act. But the year ended
+with a complimentary reference from Mr Disraeli at Latimers about
+"Sweetness and Light."
+
+In February 1870 the famous Persian cat Atossa (now in the most
+comfortable lap of all the gods or goddesses, with Hodge and Bona
+Marietta and Hinse of Hinsfeldt) makes her first appearance; and in
+June Mr Arnold received the Oxford D.C.L. He set it down to "a young
+and original sort of man, Lord Salisbury, being Chancellor"; and Lord
+Salisbury himself afterwards told him that "no doubt he ought to have
+addressed him as 'vir dulcissime et lucidissime.'" But though he was
+much pleased by his reception, he thought Lord Salisbury "dangerous,"
+as being unliterary, and only scientific and religious in his tastes.
+
+In December he had an amusing and (as it ended well) not
+unsatisfactory experience of the ways of Income Tax Commissioners.
+These gentlemen acted on even vaguer principles than those on which
+they once assessed a poor dramatic amateur, who had by accident
+received L6 "author's rights" for a week, at L300 per annum, on the
+sound arithmetical argument that there are fifty (indeed, there are
+fifty-two) weeks in a year, and that fifty times six is three hundred.
+They put Mr Arnold's literary profits at L1000, and he had to
+expostulate in person before they would let him down to L200, though
+he pathetically explained that "he should have to write more articles
+than he ever had done" to prevent his being a loser even at that.
+About the catastrophe of the _Annee Terrible_, his craze for
+"righteousness" makes him a very little Pecksniffian--one thinks of
+the Tower of Siloam. But it is pleasant to hear that, early in 1871,
+they are arranging for him "a perfect district, Westminster and a
+small rural part near Harrow." So one hopes that the days of posting
+from shire to shire and subsisting on buns were over. He is interested
+about Deutsch (the comet of a season for his famous Talmud articles),
+receives the Commandership of the Crown of Italy for his services to
+Prince Thomas, and is proposed for the Middlesex magistracy, but (to
+one's sorrow) declines. There is fishing at Chenies (_vide_ an
+admirable essay of Mr Froude's) in the early summer, a visit to
+Switzerland in the later, and in September "the pigs are grown very
+large and handsome, and experts advise their conversion into bacon."
+But Mrs Arnold "does not like the idea." Indeed this is the drawback
+of pig-keeping, which is otherwise a most fascinating pastime; but you
+can escape it, and unite pleasure with profit, by merely breeding the
+pigs and selling the litters young.
+
+After this respite fate was again cruel. On February 16, 1872, Mr
+Arnold's second son died at Harrow, and again the reception of the
+blow and its effect are marked by lesser voicefulness in the grief.
+Yet one phrase, "I cannot write his name without stopping to look at
+it in stupefaction at his not being alive," is equal to volumes. The
+letters of this year are few, but in September begins a correspondence
+of some interest and duration with a French pastor, M. Fontanes. Nor
+does 1873 give much except description of a tour to Italy, while in
+May the Arnolds moved from Harrow, with its painful memories, to
+Cobham, which was Mr Arnold's home for the rest of his life. In
+September he "shoots worse than ever" (_vide_ _Friendship's
+Garland_) in the famous preserves of Six Mile Bottom, and soon
+after his mother dies. But it is not given to all men not to be
+motherless till they themselves are fifty. And 1874 is again rather
+barren, even such yield as it gives being rather didactic and
+controversial, as for instance in a letter to his sister, who had
+apparently remonstrated with some vigour against the tone of
+_Literature and Dogma_. A pleasant letter to Miss Kingsley on her
+father's death (1875) puts in good evidence against the charge of
+grudging appreciation of contemporaries which has often been brought
+against Mr Arnold, and which some unguarded expressions, rather
+injudiciously published in other letters, may seem to confirm.
+
+Another in December contains an instance[4] of that dislike to
+history, which long before its publication careful students of his
+works had always noticed in him. The fact is, that to a man of ideas,
+as Mr Arnold would have liked to be called--a man of theories or of
+crotchets, as in extending order of unkindness people actually did
+call him--history must be an annoying study. The things that ought to
+happen do not happen, and the things that do happen have to be
+awkwardly explained away or hazardously ignored His almost pettish
+disgust for the historic estimate in literature itself may have either
+caused or been caused by this more general dislike, and the dislike
+itself explains the leniency with which he always regarded the sheer
+guess-work of the Biblical critics. But it is possible to sympathise
+with his disapproval of the divorce of History and Law, which used to
+be united in the Oxford schools. Together they made a discipline,
+inferior indeed, but only inferior, to that of the great school of
+_Literae Humaniores_, the best intellectual training in the world.
+When they are divided, it may be feared that law becomes a mere
+technicality, if not a mere bread-study, and that history is at once
+thin and vague.
+
+But Clio must have made interest with Nemesis; for, but a page or two
+afterwards, this disregard of history leads Mr Arnold into a very odd
+blunder. His French friend, M. Fontanes, had thought of writing about
+Godwin, but Mr Arnold dissuades him. "Godwin," he says, "est
+interessant, mais il n'est pas une source; des courants actuels qui
+nous portent, aucun ne vient de lui." Godwin is the high priest of
+Anarchism; he is our first Socialist philosopher, he advocated no
+marriage, woman's rights, the abolition of religion. And _dans nos
+courants actuels rien ne vient de lui!_ This was early in 1876, and
+later in the same year we have from him the singular judgment that
+George Sand, just dead, was "the greatest spirit in our European world
+from the time that Goethe departed." The chronicle may be
+appropriately closed for the time by mentioning that in the spring of
+1877 Mr Arnold was approached with a view to his standing once more
+for the Poetry Chair, and declined. The invitation, however, was a
+sort of summons to him to go back to his proper work, and in effect,
+though doubtless not in intention, he had already obeyed it. "A French
+Critic on Milton," published in January 1877, is the first literary
+article of any importance that his bibliography records for the whole
+decade which we have surveyed in this chapter.
+
+_Note._--It is particularly unlucky that the _Prose
+Passages_, which the author selected from his works and published
+in 1879, did not appear later. It is almost sufficient to say that
+less than one-fourth of their contents is devoted to literature, all
+the rest to the "Dead Sea fruit." I have therefore said nothing about
+the book in the text. It is, however, a useful though incomplete and
+one-sided chrestomathy of Mr Arnold's style from the formal point of
+view, illustrating both his minor devices of phrase and the ingenious
+_ordonnance_ of his paragraphs in building up thought and
+statement.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] Mr Disraeli's words (in 1864) have been referred to above (p.
+100). They were actually: "At that time [when they had met at Lord
+Houghton's some seven or eight years earlier] ... you yourself were
+little known. Now you are well known. You have made a reputation, but
+you will go further yet. You have a great future before you, and you
+deserve it." Crabb Robinson was a much older acquaintance, and is
+credited, I believe, with the remark far earlier, that "he shouldn't
+_dare_ to be intimate" with so clever a young man as Matthew
+Arnold. Very shortly before his death in February 1867, he had met Mr
+Arnold in the Athenaeum, and asked "which of all my books I should
+myself name as the one that had got me my great reputation. I said I
+had not a great reputation, upon which he answered: 'Then it is some
+other Matthew Arnold who writes the books.'" The passage, which
+contains an odd prophecy of the speaker's own death, and an
+interesting indication that Mr Arnold rightly considered the
+_Essays_ to be "the book that got him his reputation," will be
+found in _Letters_, i. 351.
+
+[2] Of the remaining contents, the _Prefaces_ of 1853-5 are
+invaluable, at least the first is, but this has been already noticed.
+Of _The French Play in London_, I am, perhaps, no good judge, as I
+take little interest in the acted drama. It is much occupied with the
+inferiority of French poetry, and especially of the poetry of Hugo;
+the inferiority of English civilisation, especially of the middle
+class. There are good things in it, but they are better said
+elsewhere. The rest needs no notice.
+
+[3] A note on the contents of this and the subsequent collected
+editions may not be unwelcome; for, as was always the case with him,
+he varied them not a little. This first collection was advertised as
+comprehending "the First and Second Series of the Author's Poems and
+the New Poems," but as a matter of fact half-a-dozen pieces--including
+things as interesting as _A Dream_ and _Stagirius_--are omitted,
+though the fine _In Utrumque Paratus_ reappears for the first time as
+a consolation. As reprinted in 1877, this collection dropped _The
+Church of Brou_ except the third part, and recovered not only
+_Stagirius_ and others but _The New Sirens_, besides giving, for the
+first time in book-form, _Haworth Churchyard_, printed twenty-two
+years before in _Fraser_. A further reprint in 1881 restored the whole
+_Church of Brou_ and _A Dream_, and gave two or three small additions,
+especially _Geist's Grave_. The _three-volume_ edition of 1885 also
+republished _Merope_ for the first time, and added _Westminster Abbey_
+and _Poor Matthias_. The _one_-volume edition of 1890 reproduced all
+this, adding _Horatian Echo_ and _Kaiser Dead_; it is complete save
+for the two prize poems, and six or seven smaller pieces.
+
+[4] "I do not like the course for the History School at all; nothing
+but read, read, read, endless histories in English, many of them by
+quite second-rate men; nothing to form the mind as reading really
+great authors forms it, or even to exercise it as learning a new
+language, or mathematics, or one of the natural sciences exercises
+it."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+THE LAST DECADE.
+
+It would be unhistorical to assert, and unphilosophical to assume,
+that in the change or reversion noted at the end of the last chapter,
+Mr Arnold had any consciousness of relinquishment, still more to hint
+any definite sense of failure on his part. He would probably have said
+(if any one had been impertinent enough to ask, and he had
+condescended to reply) that he had said his say, had shot his bolt,
+and might leave them to produce their effect. But that there was, if
+no repentance, a certain disgust, I cannot but believe. He must have
+seen--he almost acknowledges that he saw--that the work which he at
+least thought was conservative was being utilised by others in a
+purely destructive spirit; he must have found himself in very
+unwelcome alliances; and (which is worst of all to a delicate and
+sensitive spirit) he must constantly have found fools dotting his
+_i_'s and emphasising his innuendoes in their own clumsy and
+Philistine fashion. At any rate, it is purely historical to say that
+he did henceforward almost entirely change his main line of operation
+as to religious matters, and that though, as has been shown, he
+persisted, not too fortunately, in politics, his method of discussion
+in that likewise was altered. As we heard no more of the three Lord
+Shaftesburys, so Bottles and his unwelcome society were permitted to
+remain unchronicled. In the latter department seriousness came upon Mr
+Arnold; in the former, if not a total, yet a general and certainly
+most welcome silence.
+
+Most welcome: for he was voiceful enough on other and his proper
+subjects. "Falkland," which followed "A French Critic on Milton," in
+March in the _Fortnightly_, and "George Sand," which followed it,
+as has been said, in June in the _Nineteenth Century_, somewhat
+deserved the title (_Mixed Essays_) of the volume in which they
+were two years later reprinted. But the last essay of the year 1877,
+that on Mr Stopford Brooke's _Primer_, was, like the "French
+Critic," and even more than that, pure literature. "A French Critic on
+Goethe," which appeared in the _Quarterly Review_ for January
+1878, followed next. The other pieces of this year, which also, with
+one exception, appeared in _Mixed Essays_, were, with that
+exception, evidences of a slight but venial relapse, or let us say of
+convalescence not yet quite turned into health. "Equality"
+(_Fortnightly_, March 1878), "Irish Catholicism and British
+Liberalism" (_Fortnightly_, July 1878), and "Porro Unum est
+Necessarium" (_Fortnightly_, November 1878), were, if not of "the
+utmost last provincial band," yet not of the pure Quirites, the
+genuine citizens of the sacred city of Mr Arnold's thought: and he
+seceded from this latter in not a few of those estimable but
+unimportant Irish essays which have been noticed in the last chapter.
+
+But the literary contents of _Mixed Essays_ are very interesting,
+and the Johnson paper (really a preface to the six selected lives,
+which he edited for Messrs Macmillan in 1878) is a most excellent
+piece of work. His selection of the Lives is perhaps not quite
+unerring. For he ought surely to have given the "Cowley," with its
+(from his own point of view) invaluable _point de repere_ in the
+estimate of the "metaphysicals." And he might have missed the "Swift,"
+which, though extremely interesting as a personal study from its
+mixture of prejudice and constraint, its willingness to wound, and
+yet--not its fear but--its honest compunction at striking, is, for the
+purpose of the volume, misplaced. But he had a right to give what he
+chose: and his preface has points of the very highest value. The
+opening passage about the _point de repere_ itself, the fixed
+halting-place to which we can always resort for fresh starts, fresh
+calculations, is one of the great critical _loci_ of the world,
+and especially involves the main contribution of the nineteenth
+century to criticism if not to literature altogether. We may exalt,
+without very much doubt or dread, the positive achievements of the
+century of Tennyson and Browning, of Carlyle and Thackeray, of Heine
+and Hugo. But we have seen such strange revolutions in this respect
+that it may not do to be too confident. The glory of which no man can
+deprive our poor dying _siecle_ is that not one, of all the
+others since history began, has taken such pains to understand those
+before it, has, in other words, so discovered and so utilised the
+value of _points de repere_. It may be that this value is, except
+in the rarest cases, all that a critic can ever pretend to--that he
+may be happy if, as few do, he reaches this. But in the formulation of
+the idea (for he did much more than merely borrow it from the French)
+Mr Arnold showed his genius, his faculty of putting
+
+  "What oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed."
+
+And when a man does this in prose or in verse, in criticism or in
+creation, he has his reward--a reward that no man can take away, even
+if any one were disposed to try.
+
+As a whole, _Mixed Essays_ itself, which followed _Last Essays
+on Church and Religion_ at an interval of two years, is an almost
+immeasurably livelier book than its predecessor, and to some judgments
+at least seems to excel that predecessor in solid value as much as in
+the graces. "Mixed" is perhaps not a strictly accurate title, for the
+volume consists of two halves, the contents of each of which are
+homogeneous enough, but which have next to nothing to do with each
+other. But even in the non-literary essays we are out of "The
+Wilderness" in its worst sense. Most of the essays had, as has just
+been shown, appeared in different periodicals, while "Equality" was
+also delivered as a lecture during the years 1877 and 1878. The
+exception was the paper called "Democracy," which he reprinted from
+his first work on Foreign Schools in 1861, where it had appeared as an
+Introduction. The juxtaposition is by no means uninteresting or
+uninstructive, though perhaps it is not entirely favourable to the
+idea of Mr Arnold's development as a _zoon politicon_. It has
+been said before that his earliest political writing is a good deal
+less fantastic and more sane than that of his middle period, and
+though "the last of life for which the first was made" was now
+restoring to him much of his power in this direction, yet he was
+always much joined to idols in matters political. In grasp "Democracy"
+does not quite come up to its rather ambitious title; and a moment's
+thought will show why. In 1861 Democracy was a very academic subject.
+All projects for further Parliamentary Reform had failed utterly in
+England; and nobody dreamt of what the next five or six years would
+bring. In France there was what looked like a crushing military
+despotism: in other Continental countries the repression which had
+followed the outbreaks of 1848-49 was only just being relaxed, or not
+relaxed at all. American democracy had not had its second baptism of
+Civil War. The favourite fancies about the respective _ethos_ of
+aristocracy, of the middle-class, and of the lower do indeed appear,
+but for the most part Mr Arnold confines himself to the simple
+question of State interference, for which in his own subject of
+education he was so anxious, and which he would gladly have seen
+extended. It has been more than once remarked already that he may
+justly be regarded as a politician of more seriousness than he has
+here been represented as possessing, if espousing the cause of the
+things which actually happen is taken as the criterion. For State
+interference has grown and is growing every day. But then it may be
+held--and as a matter of principle he would not himself have contested
+it--that a man's politics should be directed, not by what he thinks
+will happen, but by what he thinks ought to happen. And some of us,
+while not in love by any means with the middle-class Liberal ideas of
+1830-1860, think that the saving grace of that day that is dead was
+precisely its objection to State interference.
+
+"Equality," which follows, and which starts what might be called at
+the time of the book its contemporary interest, is much more
+far-reaching and of greater curiosity; indeed, it may perhaps be held
+to be the most curious, in a certain sense, of all its author's
+writings, and to give, in a not fully satisfactory but suggestive
+fashion, a key to his complex character which is supplied by no other
+of his essays. That there was (in no silly or derogatory sense of an
+often absurdly used word) a slightly un-English side to that
+character, few acute judges would deny. But its results, in the
+greater part of the works, are so diffused, and, as it were,
+subterranean, that they are difficult to extract and concentrate. Here
+we seem to get the spirit much nearer proof. For the Equality which Mr
+Arnold here champions is not English but French equality; not
+political and judicial equality before the law, but social equality
+enforced by the law. He himself admits, and perhaps even a little
+exaggerates, his attitude of _Athanasius contra mundum_ in this
+respect, amassing with relish expressions, in the sense opposite to
+his own, from such representative and yet essentially diverse
+authorities as Lord Beaconsfield, Mr Gladstone, Sir Erskine May, Mr
+Froude, and Mr Lowe. Against them he arrays Menander and George
+Sand--a counter-championship not itself suggestive of Equality. This
+may be "only his fun"--a famous utterance which it is never more
+necessary to keep in mind than when speaking or writing of Mr Arnold,
+for his fun, such as it was, was pervading, and occasionally rather
+cryptic. But the bulk of the paper is perfectly serious. Social
+equality, and its compulsory establishment by a law against free
+bequest or by public opinion, these are his themes. He asserts that
+the Continent is in favour of them; that the English colonies,
+_ci-devant_ and actual, are in favour of them; that the Greeks were in
+favour of them; that the Bible is in favour of them. He cites Mr
+Hamerton as to the virtues of the French peasant. He renews his old
+tilt at the manners of the English lower-middle class, at Messrs Moody
+and Sankey, at the great "Jingo" song of twenty years ago (as to
+which, by the way, a modern Fletcher of Saltoun might have something
+to say to-day), at the Puritans, at Mr Goldwin Smith, at many things
+and many persons.
+
+I feel that history has given me at the moment rather an unfair
+advantage over Mr Arnold here. One could always pick plenty of holes
+in "Equality," could suggest that the Greeks did not make such a very
+good thing of it with their equality (which included slavery); that
+the Biblical point is far from past argument; that M. Zola, for
+instance, supplies an interesting commentary on Mr Hamerton's
+rose-coloured pictures of the French peasantry; that whatever Mr
+Arnold's own lot may have been, others who have lived in small French
+towns with the _commis voyageur_ have not found his manners so
+greatly superior to those of the English bagman. But just at this
+moment, and, in fact, in an increasing degree ever since Mr Arnold
+wrote, the glorification of France has become difficult or impossible.
+Sir Erskine May, it seems, had warned him in vain about the political
+effect of French Equality even at that time: but one need not confine
+oneself to politics. At the end of the nineteenth century France has
+enjoyed the blessings of social equality, enforced by compulsory
+division of estates, for a hundred years and more. Perhaps equality
+has nothing to do with the decadence of her literature, with that
+state of morals which Mr Arnold himself deplored with almost Puritan
+emphasis, with the state of religion which he holds up as an awful
+example, fit to warn England to flee to the refuge of his own
+undogmatic _Nephelococcygia_, with the ineffable scandals of
+Panama and the Dreyfus case, with the mixture of blind illucidity and
+febrile passion which characterises the French press. Only, what is
+left? Where are the improvements due to this great influence? They
+are, according to Mr Arnold, in the amiable dignity of the French
+peasant and the polished refinement of the French middle-class.
+Frankly, one may prefer Hodge and Bottles.
+
+"Irish Catholicism and British Liberalism" has less actuality, and,
+moreover, it belongs to a group of which enough has been said in
+reference to the _Irish Essays_. But "Porro Unum est Necessarium"
+possesses not merely an accidental but a real claim to fresh
+attention, not merely at the moment when there is at last some chance
+of the dream of Mr Arnold's life, the interference of the State in
+English secondary education, being realised, but because it is one of
+the expressions of that dream which was in his life so important. It
+consists partly of statistics and partly of a moan over the fact that,
+in the heat and heyday of Mr Gladstone's _levee en masse_ against
+the Tory Government of 1874-80, the Liberal programme contained
+nothing about this darling object. And the superiority of France is
+trotted out again; but it would be cruel to insist any more. Yet at
+last Mr Arnold becomes practical, and contends for pretty much the
+substance of present Secondary Education Reform schemes--limited
+inspection, qualification of masters, leaving certificates, &c. "It do
+not over-stimulate," to quote an author to whom Mr Arnold was shortly
+to devote much attention; but we leave the political or semi-political
+batch in considerably greater charity with the author than his prose
+volumes for years past had rendered possible.
+
+No reserves, no allowances of the least importance are necessary in
+dealing with the rest of the volume. I do not think it fanciful to
+discern a sort of involuntary or rather unconscious "Ouf!" of relief
+in the first, the "Guide to English Literature," on the subject, as
+has been said, of Mr Stopford Brooke's always excellent and then novel
+_Primer_. A tribute to duty is, indeed, paid at starting: we are told
+sternly that we must not laugh (as it is to be feared too many of us
+did and do) at the famous boast of the French Minister, as to all the
+boys in France learning the same lesson at the same hour. For this was
+the result of State interference: and all the works of State
+interference are blessing and blessed. But, this due rite paid, Mr
+Arnold gives himself up to enjoyment, laudation, and a few
+good-natured and, for the most part, extremely judicious proposals for
+making the good better still. Even if this last characteristic were
+not present, it would be unjust to call the article a puff. Besides,
+are puffs so wholly bad? A man may be not very fond of sweets, and yet
+think a good puff now and then, a puff with its three corners just hot
+from the oven, full of jam, light, artistically frothed, to be a very
+pleasing thing. And, as I have said, Mr Arnold's review is much more
+than a puff. Once, indeed, there is even a hypercriticism, due to that
+slight want of familiarity with literary history proper which has been
+noticed more than once. Mr Arnold finds fault with Mr Brooke for
+adopting, as one of his chapter divisions, "from the Restoration to
+George III." He objects to this that "George III. has nothing to do
+with literature," and suggests "to the Death of Pope and Swift." This
+is a curious mistake, of a kind which lesser critics have often
+repeated. Perhaps George III. _had_ nothing to do with literature; but
+his accession immediately preceded, and may even, as the beginning of
+a pure English _regime_, have done something to produce, numerous
+appearances of the Romantic revival--Percy's _Reliques_, Hurd's
+_Essays_, Macpherson's _Ossian_, _The Castle of Otranto_, and others.
+The deaths of Pope and Swift have no such synchronism. They mark,
+indeed, the disappearance of the strongest men of the old school, but
+not the appearance of even the weakest and most infantine of the new.
+Still this, though interesting in itself, is a trifle, and the whole
+paper, short as it is, is a sort of _Nunc Dimittis_ in a new sense, a
+hymn of praise for dismissal, not from but to work--to the singer's
+proper function, from which he has been long divorced.
+
+"Falkland," which follows, is less purely literary, but yet closely
+connected with literature. One thinks with some ruth of its original
+text, which was a discourse on Falkland by that modern Lucius Gary,
+the late Lord Carnarvon--the most curious and pathetic instance of a
+man of the nineteenth century speaking of one who was almost his exact
+prototype, in virtues and graces as in weaknesses and disabilities of
+temperament, during the seventeenth. It would, of course, have been
+indecent for Mr Arnold to bring this parallel out, writing as he did
+in his own name and at the moment, and I do not find any reference to
+it in the _Letters_; but I can remember how strongly it was felt
+at the time. His own interest in Falkland as the martyr of Sweetness
+and Light, of lucidity of mind and largeness of temper, was most
+natural, and its sources most obvious. It would be cruel, and is quite
+unnecessary, to insist on the too certain fact that, in this instance
+at any rate, these excellent qualities were accompanied by a distinct
+weakness of will, by a mania for sitting between two stools, and by
+that--it may be lovable, it may be even estimable--incapacity to
+think, to speak, to behave like a man of this world, which besets the
+conscientious idealist who is not a fanatic. On the contrary, let us
+not grudge Mr Arnold a hero so congenial to himself, and so little
+repulsive to any of us. He could not have had a better subject; nor
+can Falkland ever hope for a _vates_ better consecrated, by
+taste, temper, and ability, to sing his praises.
+
+Then we are back again in pure literature, with the two notable
+_Quarterly_ articles, already glanced at, on M. Scherer as "A
+French Critic on Milton" and "A French Critic on Goethe." There was a
+very strong sympathy, creditable to both, between the two. M. Scherer
+went further than Mr Arnold in the negative character of his views on
+religion; but they agreed as to dogma. His literary criticism was
+somewhat harder and drier than Mr Arnold's; but the two agreed in
+acuteness, lucidity, and a wide, if not quite a thoroughgoing, use of
+the comparative method. Both were absolutely at one in their
+uncompromising exaltation of "conduct." So that Mr Arnold was writing
+quite _con amore_ when he took up his pen to recommend M. Scherer
+to the British public, which mostly knew him not at that time.
+
+But he did not begin directly with his main subject. He had always, as
+we have seen, had a particular grudge at Macaulay, who indeed
+represented in many ways the tendencies which Mr Arnold was born to
+oppose. Now just at this time certain younger critics, while by no
+means championing Macaulay generally, had raised pretty loud and
+repeated protests against Mr Arnold's exaggerated depreciation of the
+_Lays_ as "pinchbeck"; and I am rather disposed to think that he
+took this opportunity for a sort of sally in flank. He fastens on one
+of Macaulay's weakest points, a point the weakness of which was
+admitted by Macaulay himself--the "gaudily and ungracefully
+ornamented" (as its author calls it) _Essay on Milton_. And he
+points out, with truth enough, that its "gaudy and ungraceful
+ornament" is by no means its only fault--that it is bad as criticism,
+that it shows no clear grasp of Milton's real merits, that it ignores
+his faults, that it attributes to him qualities which were the very
+reverse of his real qualities. He next deals slighter but still
+telling blows at Addison, defends Johnson, in passing, as only
+negatively deficient in the necessary qualifications, not positively
+conventional like Addison, or rhetorical like Macaulay, and then with
+a turn, itself excellently rhetorical in the good sense, passes to M.
+Scherer's own dealings with the subject. Thenceforward he rather
+effaces himself, and chiefly abstracts and summarises the "French
+Critic's" deliverances, laying special stress on the encomiums given
+to Milton's style. The piece is one of his most artfully constructed;
+and I do not anywhere know a better example of ingenious and
+attractive introduction of a friend, as we may call it, to a new
+society.
+
+The method is not very different in "A French Critic on Goethe,"
+though Carlyle, the English "awful example" selected for contrast, is
+less maltreated than Macaulay, and shares the disadvantageous part
+with Lewes, and with divers German critics. On the whole, this essay,
+good as it is, seems to me less effective than the other; perhaps
+because Mr Arnold is in less accord with his author, and even seems to
+be in two minds about that author's subject--about Goethe himself.
+Earlier, as we have partly seen, he had, both in prose and in verse,
+spoken with praise--for him altogether extraordinary, if not
+positively extravagant--of Goethe; he now seems a little doubtful, and
+asks rather wistfully for "the just judgment of forty years," the calm
+revised estimate of the Age of Wisdom. But M. Scherer's estimate is in
+parts lower than he can bring himself to admit; and this turns the
+final passages of the essay into a rather unsatisfactory chain of "I
+agree with this," "I do not agree with that." But the paper retains
+the great merit which has been assigned to its predecessor as a piece
+of ushering; and that, we must remember, was what it was designed to
+be.
+
+In "George Sand," which completes the volume, we have Mr Arnold no
+longer as harbinger of another, but in the character, in which after
+all he is most welcome, of speaker on his own account. His estimate of
+this prolific _amuseuse_ will probably in the long-run seem
+excessive to the majority of catholic and comparative critics; nor is
+it at all difficult to account for the excess. Mr Arnold belonged
+exactly to the generation to which in England, even more than in
+France, George Sand came as a soothing and sympathetic exponent of
+personal sorrows. Even the works of her "storm-and-stress" period were
+not too far behind them; and her later calmer productions seem to have
+had, at least for some natures among the "discouraged generation of
+1850" (to which, as we have said, Mr Arnold himself by his first
+publications belonged), something of that healing power which he has
+assigned, in larger measure and with greater truth, to Wordsworth. A
+man is never to be blamed for a certain generous overvaluation of
+those who have thus succoured him; it would be as just to blame him
+for thinking his mother more beautiful, his father wiser than they
+actually were. And Mr Arnold's obituary here has a great deal of
+charm. The personal and biographical part is done with admirable
+taste, not a grain too much or too little of that _moi_ so
+_haissable_ in excess, so piquant as a mere seasoning, being
+introduced: and the panegyric is skilful in the extreme. To be sure,
+Mr Hamerton reappears, and Mr Arnold joins in the chorus of delight
+because the French peasant no longer takes off his hat. Alas! there is
+no need to go to the country of _La Terre_ to discover this sign
+of moral elevation. But the delusion itself is only another proof of
+Mr Arnold's constancy to his early ideas. And looking back on the
+whole volume, one is almost tempted to say that, barring the first
+_Essays in Criticism_ itself, he had written no better book.
+
+Before very long the skill in selecting and editing which had been
+first applied to Johnson's _Lives_ found extended opportunities.
+Mr Arnold had much earlier, in the _Essays in Criticism_,
+expressed a wish that the practice of introducing books by a critical
+and biographical Essay, which had long been naturalised in France, and
+had in former times not been unknown in England, should be revived
+among us. His words had been heard even before he himself took up the
+practice, and for about the usual time--your thirty years is as a
+matter of fact your generation--it flourished and prospered, not let
+us hope to the great detriment of readers, and certainly to the modest
+advantage of the public man when vexed by want of pence. Nor can it
+exactly be said to have ceased--though for some years grumbles have
+been uttered. "Why," says one haughty critic,--"why mar a beautiful
+edition of So-and-so's works by incorporating with them this or that
+man's estimate of their value?" "The publishers," says an inspired
+_communique_, "are beginning to recognise that the public has no
+need of such things in the case of works of established repute, of
+which there is nothing new to be said." No doubt both these are
+genuine utterances: no doubt the haughty critic would have steadily
+refused to "mar" the book by _his_ estimate if he had been asked
+to do so; no doubt the particular firm of publishers were not in the
+least influenced by a desire to save the ten, twenty, fifty, or a
+hundred guineas which this or that man might have demanded for saying
+nothing new.
+
+But Mr Arnold did not agree with these severe folk. He thought--and
+not a few good wits have thought with him--not only that these
+Introductions are an opportunity for men like himself, with original
+gifts of thought and style, to display these gifts, but that the
+mighty public, for all its knowledge of everything that has been
+thought and said about everybody, might find something new to it even
+in the observations of lesser folk. As a matter of fact, of course,
+and neither to talk nor to quote nonsense, the utility of such
+Introductions, even if moderately well done, is unmistakable. Not one
+in a thousand of the probable readers of any book has all the
+information which even a fairly competent introducer will put before
+him; not one in a hundred knows the previous estimates of the author;
+not many possess that acquaintance with his whole work which it is
+part of the business of the introducer to acquire, and adjust for the
+better understanding of the particular book. Of course, if an
+Introduction is imperfectly furnished with fact and thought and
+reading--if it is desultory, in bad taste, and so forth--it had better
+not be there. But this is only saying that a bad Introduction is a bad
+thing, which does not get us much beyond the intellectual edification
+of the niece of Gorboduc. Unless the introducer is a boggler, the
+Introduction will probably do good to those who want it and can be
+neglected by those who don't; while in the rarer and better cases it
+will itself acquire, or even possess from the first, that very value
+as a _point de repere_ which Mr Arnold had discussed. It will be
+good relatively and good in itself,--a contribution at once to the
+literature of knowledge and to the literature of power.
+
+Of Mr Arnold's efforts in editing I may be permitted to neglect his
+"intromittings" with Isaiah, for reasons already sufficiently given.
+In more hopeful matter there are three examples which are not soon
+likely to lose interest or value: the selection of his own poems, that
+from Wordsworth, and that from Byron. To the first the English habits
+of his own day did not permit him to prefix any extensive
+Introduction, and though the principle is sound, one is almost sorry
+for the application. Neither Wordsworth nor Coleridge would have had
+any scruples in doing this, and while Mr Arnold had the sense of the
+ludicrous which Wordsworth lacked, he was less subject to disastrous
+divagations than Coleridge. Still, the 1853 Preface enables those who
+have some slight power of expansion to fill in what is wanted from the
+point of view of purpose; and the selection itself is quite excellent.
+Almost the only things that, as a basis for a good knowledge of the
+poet, one finds it necessary to subjoin, are the beautiful
+_Resignation_, which Mr Humphry Ward had the good taste to
+include in the appendix to his _English Poets_; and the curious,
+characteristic, and not much short of admirable _Dream_, which in
+the earlier issues formed part of _Switzerland_, and should never
+have been excluded from it. It is probably the best selection by a
+poet from his own works that has ever been issued, and this is saying
+not a little. Nor does one like Mr Arnold less for his saying,
+reported either by Mr Ward or Lord Coleridge, that he had rather have
+given _all_ the poems.
+
+As for the "Wordsworth" and the "Byron," they gain enormously by "this
+man's estimate of them," and do not lose by "this man's" selection. I
+have had occasion, not once or twice only, and for purposes not
+invariably the same, to go through the Wordsworth book carefully, side
+by side with the complete poems, in order to see whether anything has
+necessarily to be added. I really do not know what has, unless it be a
+few of the oases from the deserts of the _Excursion_, the
+_Prelude_, and the then not published _Recluse_. Wordsworth's real
+titles are put in once for all; the things by which he must stand or
+fall are there. The professor, the very thorough-going student, the
+literary historian, must go farther; the idle person with a love of
+literature will; but nobody need.
+
+And the Introduction (for after all we can all make our selections for
+ourselves, with a very little trouble) is still more precious. I know
+few critical essays which give me more pleasure in reading and
+re-reading than this. Not that I agree with it by any means as a
+whole; but he is in the mere "Pettys" of criticism (it is true not
+many seem to get beyond) who judges a critical essay by his own
+agreement with it. Mr Arnold puts Wordsworth, as a poet and an English
+poet, far higher than I can put him. He is not so great a poet to my
+thinking as Spenser or Shelley; if it were possible in these
+competitions to allow weight for age, he is not as great a poet as
+Keats; I am sure he is not a greater poet than Tennyson; I cannot give
+him rank above Heine or Hugo, though the first may be sometimes
+naughty and the second frequently silly or rhetorical; and when Mr
+Arnold begins to reckon Moliere in, I confess I am lost. When and
+where did Moliere write poetry? But these things do not matter; they
+are the things on which reviewers exercise their "will it be
+believed?" and on which critics agree to differ. We may include with
+them the disparaging passage on Gautier (of whom I suspect Mr Arnold
+knew little, and whom he was not quite fitted to judge had he known
+more) and the exaltation of "life" and "conduct" and all the rest of
+it. These are the colours of the regiment, the blazonry of the knight;
+we take them with it and him, and having once said our say against
+them, pass them as admitted.
+
+But what is really precious is first the excellent criticism scattered
+broadcast all over the essay, and secondly, the onslaught on the
+Wordsworthians. They might perhaps retort with a _tu quoque_.
+When Mr Arnold attacks these poor folk for saying that Wordsworth's
+poetry is precious because its philosophy is sound, we remember a
+certain Preface with its "all depends on the subject," and chuckle a
+little, a very little. But Mr Arnold is right here. No philosophy, no
+subject, will make poetry without poetical treatment, and the
+consequence is that _The Excursion_ and _The Prelude_ are,
+as wholes, not good poems at all. They contain, indeed, passages of
+magnificent poetry. But how one longs, how, as one sees from this
+essay, Mr Arnold longed, for some mercury-process which would simply
+amalgamate the gold out of them and allow us to throw the dross down
+any nearest cataract, or let it be blown away by any casual hurricane!
+
+The Byron paper contains more disputable statements--indeed the
+passage about Shelley, if it were quite serious, which may be doubted,
+would almost disqualify Mr Arnold as a critic of poetry. But it is
+hardly less interesting, and scarcely at all less valuable. In the
+first place, it is a very great thing that a man should be able to
+admire both Byron and Wordsworth. Of a mere Byronite, indeed, Mr
+Arnold has even less than he has of a Wordsworthian pure and simple.
+He makes the most damaging admissions; he has to fall back on Goethe
+for comfort and confirmation; he is greatly disturbed by M. Scherer's
+rough treatment of his subject. In no essay, I think, does he quote so
+much from others, does he seem to feel it such a relief to find a
+backer, a somebody to fight with on a side point, a somebody (for
+instance Professor Nichol) to correct and gloss and digress upon while
+complimenting him. Mr Arnold is obviously not at ease in this
+Zion--which indeed is a Zion of an odd kind. Yet this very uneasiness
+gives to the _Essay_ a glancing variety, a sort of animation and
+excitement, which are not common things in critical prelections. Nor,
+though one may think that Mr Arnold's general estimate of Byron is not
+even half as sound as his general estimate of Wordsworth, does the
+former appear to be in even the slightest degree insincere. Much as
+there must have been in Byron's loose art, his voluble
+inadequacy--nay, even in his choice of subject--that was repellent to
+Mr Arnold: much more as there must have been in his unchastened
+conduct, his flashy affectations, his lack of dignity, morality,
+_tenue_ of every kind,--yet there were real links between them. Mr
+Arnold saw in Byron an ally, if not an altogether admirable or
+trustworthy ally, against the Philistine. He saw in him a link with
+general European literature, a check and antidote to the merely
+insular. Byron's undoubtedly "sincere and strong" dislike of the
+extreme Romantic view of literature was not distasteful to Mr Arnold.
+Indeed, in his own earlier poems there are not wanting Byronic touches
+and echoes, not so easy to separate and put the finger on, as to see
+and hear "confusedly." Lastly, he had, by that sort of reaction which
+often exhibits itself in men of the study, an obvious admiration for
+Force--the admiration which makes him in his letters praise France up
+to 1870 and Germany after that date--and he thought he saw Force in
+Byron. So that the _Essay_ is written with a stimulating mingle-mangle
+of attraction and reluctance, of advocacy and admission. It is very
+far indeed from being one of his best critically. You may, on his own
+principles, "catch him out" in it a score of times. But it is a good
+piece of special pleading, an excellent piece of writing, and one of
+the very best and most consummate literary _causeries_ in
+English.
+
+In strict chronological order, a third example of these most
+interesting and stimulating Prefaces should have been mentioned
+between the "Wordsworth" and the "Byron"--the latter of which, indeed,
+contains a reference to it. This is the famous Introduction to Mr T.H.
+Ward's _English Poets_, which, in that work and in the second
+series of _Essays in Criticism_, where it subsequently appeared,
+has perhaps had more readers than any other of its author's critical
+papers. It contains, moreover, that still more famous definition of
+poetry as "a criticism of life" which has been so often attacked and
+has sometimes been defended. I own to having been, both at the time
+and since, one of its most decided and irreconcilable assailants. Nor
+do I think that Mr Arnold would have much relished the apology made, I
+think, by Mr Leslie Stephen since his death, that its critics "mistake
+an epigram for a philosophical definition." In the first place, the
+epigrammatic quality is not clearly apparent; and in the second place,
+an epigram would in the particular place have been anything but
+appropriate, while a philosophical definition is exactly what was
+wanted.
+
+Mr Arnold himself never attempted any such defence. He pleaded, with
+literal justice, that the phrase "a criticism of life" was only part
+of his formula, which adds, "under the conditions fixed for such a
+criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty." But this
+does not make the matter much better, while it shows beyond
+controversy that it _was_ a philosophical definition that he was
+attempting. It merely takes us round in a circle, telling us that
+poetry is poetical, that the archdeacon performs archidiaconal
+functions. And while it is not more illuminative than that famous and
+useful jest, it has the drawback of being positively delusive, which
+the jest is not. Unless we are to assign some quite new meaning to
+"criticism"--and the assignment of new meanings to the terms of an
+explanation is the worst of all explanatory improprieties--poetry is
+_not_ a criticism of life. It may be a passionate interpretation of
+life--that has seemed to some not a bad attempt at the
+unachievable,--a criticism it cannot be. Prose fiction may be and
+should be such; drama may be and should be such; but not poetry. And
+it is especially unfortunate that such poetry as answers best to the
+term is exactly that poetry which Mr Arnold liked least. Dryden and
+Pope have much good and true criticism of life: _The Vanity of Human
+Wishes_ is magnificent criticism of life; but Mr Arnold has told us
+that Dryden and Pope and Johnson are but "classics of our prose." That
+there is criticism of life _in_ poetry is true; but then in poetry
+there is everything.
+
+It would also, no doubt, be possible to pick other holes in the paper.
+The depreciation of the "historic estimate," instead of a simple hint
+to correct it by the intrinsic, is certainly one. Another is a
+distinct arbitrariness in the commendation or discommendation of the
+examples selected. No one in his senses would put the _Chanson de
+Roland_ on a level with the _Iliad_ as a whole; but some among those
+people who happen to possess an equal acquaintance with Greek and Old
+French will demur to Mr Arnold's assignment of an ineffably superior
+poetical quality to one of the two passages he quotes over the other.
+So yet again with the denial of "high seriousness" to Chaucer. One
+feels disposed to enter and argue out a whole handful of not quite
+contradictory pleas, such as "He _has_ high seriousness" (_vide_ the
+"Temple of Mars," the beginning of the _Parliament of Fowls_, and many
+other places): "Why should he have high seriousness?" (a most
+effective demurrer); and "What _is_ high seriousness, except a fond
+thing vainly invented for the nonce?"
+
+But, as has so constantly to be said in reference to Mr Arnold, these
+things do not matter. He must have his catchwords: and so "criticism
+of life" and "high seriousness" are introduced at their and his peril.
+He must have his maintenance of the great classics, and so he exposes
+what I fear may be called no very extensive or accurate acquaintance
+with Old French. He must impress on us that conduct is three-fourths
+of life, and so he makes what even those who stop short of
+_latreia_ in regard to Burns may well think mistakes about that
+poet likewise. But all the spirit, all the tendency, of the
+_Introduction_ is what it ought to be, and the plea for the
+"real" estimate is as wholly right in principle as it is partly wrong
+in application.
+
+It is well borne out by the two interesting articles on Gray and Keats
+which Mr Arnold contributed to the same work. In the former, and here
+perhaps only, do we find him putting his shoulder to the work of
+critical advocacy and sympathy with an absolutely whole heart. With
+Wordsworth, with Byron, with Heine, he was on points more or fewer at
+grave difference; though he affected to regard Goethe as a _magnus
+Apollo_ of criticism and creation both, I think in his heart of
+hearts there must have been some misgivings; and it is impossible that
+he should not have known his fancy for people like the Guerins to be
+mere _engouement_. Gray's case was different. The resemblances
+between subject and critic were extraordinary. Mr Arnold is really an
+industrious, sociable, and moderately cheerful Gray of the nineteenth
+century; Gray an indolent, recluse, more melancholy Arnold of the
+eighteenth. Again, the literary quality of the bard of the
+_Elegy_ was exactly of the kind which stimulates critics most.
+From Sainte-Beuve downwards the fraternity has, justly or unjustly,
+been accused of a tendency to extol writers who are a little
+problematical, who approach the second class, above the unquestioned
+masters. And there was the yet further stimulus of redressing wrongs.
+Gray, though a most scholarly poet, has always pleased the vulgar
+rather than the critics, and he had the singular fate of being
+dispraised both by Johnson and by Wordsworth. But in this paper of Mr
+Arnold's the wheel came full circle. Everything that can possibly be
+said for Gray--more than some of us would by any means indorse--is
+here said for him: here he has provided an everlasting critical
+harbour, into which he may retreat whensoever the popular or the
+critical breeze turns adverse.
+
+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 Emerson 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, cisele,"
+
+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 Guerin, 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, lodged 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.
+
+1880 is at first less fertile, but gives an amusing account of a
+semi-royal reception of Cardinal Newman at the Duke of Norfolk's in
+May, and a very interesting series of letters from Pontresina in the
+autumn. Fortunately for us Mrs Arnold was not with him, and we profit
+by his letters to her. In one of them there is a very pleasing and
+probably unconscious touch. "Rapallo [the Duchess of Genoa's husband]
+smokes the whole evening: _but I think he has a good heart_." And
+later still we have the curious and not uncharacteristic information
+that he is reading _David Copperfield_ for the first time (whence
+no doubt its undue predominance in a certain essay), and the
+description of Burns as "a beast with splendid gleams," a view which
+has been fully developed since. On February 21, 1881, there is another
+interview, flattering as ever, with Lord Beaconsfield, and later he
+tells M. Fontanes, "I never much liked Carlyle," which indeed we knew.
+The same correspondent has the only references preserved to Dean
+Stanley's death; but the magnificent verses which that death produced
+make anything else superfluous. They appeared in the first number of
+the _Nineteenth Century_ for 1882, when New Year's Day gives us a
+melancholy prediction. If "I live to be eighty [_i.e._, in some
+three years from the present moment], I shall probably be the only
+person in England who reads anything but newspapers and scientific
+publications." Too gloomy a view, let us hope; yet with something in
+it. And a letter, a very little later, gives us interesting hints of
+his method in verse composition, which was to hunt a Dictionary
+(Richardson's) for good but unusual words--Theophile Gautier's way
+also, as it happens, though probably he did not know that.
+
+These later letters contain so many references to living people that
+one has to be careful in quoting from them; but as regards himself,
+there is of course no such need of care. That self-ruthlessness which
+always prevented him from scamping work is amazingly illustrated in
+one of October 1882, which tells how he sat up till five in the
+morning rewriting a lecture he was to deliver in Liverpool, and got up
+at eight to start for the place of delivery. Let us hope that a
+champagne luncheon there--"chiefly doctors, but you know I like
+doctors"--revived him after the night and the journey. And two months
+later he makes pleasant allusion to "that demon Traill," in reference
+to a certain admirable parody of _Poor Matthias_. He had thought
+Mr Gladstone "hopelessly prejudiced against" him, and was
+proportionately surprised when in August 1883 he was offered by that
+Minister a pension of L250 for service to the poetry and literature of
+England. Few Civil List pensions have been so well deserved. But Mr
+Arnold, as most men of his quality would have been, was at once struck
+with the danger of evil constructions being put by the baser sort on
+the acceptance of an extra allowance from public funds by a man who
+already had a fair income from them, and a comfortable pension in the
+ordinary way to look forward to. Mr John Morley, however, and Lord
+Lingen, luckily succeeded in quieting his scruples, and only the very
+basest sort grumbled. The great advantage, of course, was that it
+enabled him to retire, as soon as his time was up, without too great
+loss of income.
+
+A lecturing tour to America was already planned, and October 7, 1883
+is the last date from Cobham, "New York" succeeding it without any;
+for Mr Arnold had the reprehensible and, in official persons, rare
+habit of very constantly omitting dates, though not places. The St
+Nicholas Club, "a delightful, poky, dark, exclusive little old club of
+the Dutch families," is the only place in which he finds peace. For,
+as one expected, the interviewers made life terrible. These American
+letters are interesting reading enough, but naturally tend to be
+little more than a replica of similar letters from other Englishmen
+who have done the same thing. As has been quite frankly admitted here,
+Mr Arnold never made any effort, and seldom seems to have been
+independently prompted, to write what are called "amusing" letters: he
+merely tells a plain tale of journeys, lectures, meals, persons,
+scenery, manners and customs, etc. Chicago seems to have vindicated
+its character for "character" by hospitably forcing him to eat dinner
+and supper "on end," and by describing him in its newspapers as "an
+elderly bird pecking at grapes on a trellis." The whole tour,
+including a visit to Canada, lasted nearly five months, and
+brought--not the profit which some people expected, but--a good sum,
+with wrinkles as to more if the experiment were repeated. And when he
+came back to England, the lectures were collected and printed.
+
+In February 1885 we have, addressed to his eldest daughter, then
+married and living in America, a definition of "real civilisation" as
+the state "when the world does not begin till 8 P.M. and goes on from
+that till 1 A.M., not later." This is, though doubtless jestful,
+really a _point de repere_ for the manners of the later
+nineteenth century as concerns a busy man who likes society. In the
+eighteenth, and earlier in the nineteenth, men as busy as Mr Arnold
+practically abstained from "the world" except quite rarely, while "the
+world" was not busy. The dachshunds come in for frequent mention.
+
+On a Sunday in May of this year comes the warning of "a horrid pain
+across my chest," which, however, "Andrew Clark thinks [wrongly,
+alas!] to be not heart" but indigestion. The _Discourses in
+America_, for which their author had a great predilection, came out
+later. In August the pain is mentioned again; and the subsequent
+remark, "I was a little tired, but the cool champagne at dinner
+brought me round," is another ominous hint that it was _not_
+indigestion. Two of the most valuable of all the letters come in
+October, one saying, "I think Oxford is still, on the whole, the place
+in the world to which I am most attached" ["And so say all of us"];
+the other, after some notice of the Corpus plate, telling how "I got
+out to Hinksey and up the hill to within sight of the Cumnor firs. I
+cannot describe the effect which this landscape always has upon me:
+the hillside with its valleys, and Oxford in the great Thames valley
+below." And this walk is again referred to later. He was pleased by a
+requisition that he should stand yet again for the Poetry
+Professorship, though of course he did not accede to it. And at the
+beginning of winter he had a foreign mission (his last) to Berlin, to
+get some information for the Government as to German school fees. He
+was much lionised, and seems to have enjoyed himself very much during
+his stay, the Crown Princess being specially gracious to him.
+
+Nor was he long in England on his return, though long enough to bring
+another mention of the chest pain, and an excellent definition of
+education--would there were no worse!--"Reading five pages of the
+Greek Anthology every day, and looking out all the words I do not
+know." In February 1886 he was back again investigating the Swiss and
+Bavarian school systems; and that amiable animal-worship of his
+receives a fresh evidence in the mention and mourning of the death of
+"dear Lola" (not Montes, but another; in short, a pony), with a sigh
+for "a _meche_ of her hair." The journey was finished by way of
+France towards the end of March. At Hamburg Mr Arnold was "really [and
+very creditably] glad to have had the opportunity of calling a man
+Your Magnificence," that being, it seems, the proper official style in
+addressing the burgomaster. And May took him back to America, to see
+his married daughter and divers old friends. He remained there till
+the beginning of September, improving, as he thought, in health, but
+meeting towards the close an awkward bathing accident, which involved
+no risk of drowning, but gave him a shock that was followed by a week
+or two of troublesome attacks of pain across the chest. There is very
+much in the letters of the time about the political crisis of 1886.
+His retirement from official work came in November, and the letters
+are fuller than ever of delight in the Cobham landscape.
+
+But the warnings grew more frequent, and we know that long before this
+he had had no delusions about their nature. Indeed, it is doubtful
+whether he had ever had any, considering the fact of the malady, which
+had, as he says in a singularly manly and dignified _commentatio
+mortis_ dated January 29, 1887, struck down his father and
+grandfather in middle life long before they came to his present age.
+He "refuses every invitation to lecture or make addresses." The
+letters of 1887, too, are very few, and contain little of interest,
+except an indication of a visit to Fox How; while much the same may be
+said of those, also few, from the early months of 1888. The last of
+all contains a reference to _Robert Elsmere_. Five days later, on
+April 15, a sudden exertion, it seems, brought on the fatal attack,
+and he died. He had outlived his grand climacteric of sixty-three
+(which he had thought would be "the end as well as the climax") by two
+years and three months.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+CONCLUSION.
+
+
+The personal matters which usually, and more or less gracefully, fill
+the beginning of the end of a biography, are perhaps superfluous in
+the case of a man who died so recently, and who was so well known as
+Mr Matthew Arnold. Moreover, if given at all, they should be given by
+some one who knew him more intimately than did the present writer. He
+was of a singularly agreeable presence, without being in the sense of
+the painter's model exactly "handsome"; and in particular he could
+boast a very pleasant and not in the least artificial smile. Some
+artificiality of manner was sometimes attributed to him, I think
+rather unjustly; but he certainly had "tricks and manners" of the kind
+very natural to men of decided idiosyncrasy, unless they transcend all
+mere trick, after the fashion which we know in Scott, which we are
+sure of, without knowing, in Shakespeare. One of these Mr George
+Russell glances at in the preface to the _Letters_, a passage
+which I read with not a little amusement, because I could confirm it
+from a memory of my only conversation with Mr Arnold. He had been
+good-humouredly expostulating with me for overvaluing some French
+poet. I forget at the distance of seventeen or eighteen years who it
+was, but it was not Gautier. I replied in some such words as, "Well;
+perhaps he is not very important in himself, but I think he is
+'important _for us_,' if I may borrow that." So he looked at me
+and said, "_I_ didn't write that anywhere, did I?" And when I
+reminded him that he had told us how Sainte-Beuve said it of
+Lamartine, he declared that he had quite forgotten it. Which might, or
+might not, be Socratic.
+
+But I should imagine that the complaints of his affectations in
+ordinary society were as much exaggerated as I am sure that the
+opposite complaints of the humdrum character of his letters are.
+Somebody talks of the "wicked charm" which a popular epithet or
+nickname possesses, and something of the sort seems to have hung about
+"The Apostle of Culture," "The Prophet of Sweetness and Light," and
+the rest. He only deserved his finical reputation inasmuch as he was
+unduly given to the use of these catch-words, not because he in any
+undue way affected to "look the part" or live up to them. And as for
+the letters, it must be remembered that he was a very busy man, with
+clerical work of the official kind enough to disgust a very
+Scriblerus; that he had, so far as the published letters show us, no
+very intimate friend, male or (still better) female, outside his own
+family; and further, that the degeneration of the art of
+letter-writing is not a mere phrase, it is a fact. Has any of my
+readers many--or any--correspondents like Scott or like Southey, like
+Lamb or like FitzGerald, like Madame de Sevigne or like Lady Mary? He
+is lucky if he has. Indeed, the simplicity of the _Letters_ is
+the very surest evidence of a real simplicity in the nature. In the
+so-called best letter-writers it may be shrewdly suspected that this
+simplicity is, with rare exceptions, absent. Scott had it; but then
+Scott's genius as a novelist overflowed into his letters, as did
+Southey's talent of universal writing, and Lamb's unalterable
+quintessence of quaintness. But though I will allow no one to take
+precedence of me as a champion of Madame de Sevigne, I do not think
+that simplicity is exactly the note of that beautiful and gracious
+person; it is certainly not that of our own Lady Mary, or of Horace
+Walpole, or of Pope, or of Byron. Some of these, as we know, or
+suspect with a strength equal to knowledge, write with at least a
+sidelong glance at possible publication; some with a deliberate
+intention of it; all, I think, with a sort of unconscious
+consciousness of "how it will look" on paper. Of this in Mr Arnold's
+letters there is absolutely no sign. Even when he writes to
+comparative strangers, he never lays himself out for a "point" or a
+phrase, rarely even for a joke. To his family (and it should be
+remembered that the immense majority of the letters that we possess
+are family letters) he is naturally more familiar, but the familiarity
+does not bring with it any quips or gambols. Only in the very early
+letters, and chiefly in those to Wyndham Slade, is there any
+appearance of second thought, of "conceit," in the good sense. Later,
+he seems to have been too much absorbed in his three functions of
+official, critic, and poet to do more than shake hands by letter and
+talk without effort.
+
+But if he, as the phrase is, "put himself out" little as to
+letter-writing, it was by no means the same in those other functions
+which have been just referred to. In later years (it is Mr Humphry
+Ward, I think, who is our sufficient authority for it) poetry was but
+occasional amusement and solace to him, prose his regular avocation
+from task-work; and there is abundant evidence that, willingly or
+unwillingly, he never allowed either to usurp the place of the
+vocation which he had accepted. Not everybody, perhaps, is so
+scrupulous. It is not an absolutely unknown thing to hear men boast of
+getting through their work somehow or other, that they may devote
+themselves to _parerga_ which they like, and which they are
+pleased to consider more dignified, more important, nearer the chief
+end of man. And from the extremely common assumption that other
+people, whether they confess this or not, act upon it, one may at
+least not uncharitably suppose that a much larger number would so act
+if they dared, or had the opportunity. This was not Mr Arnold's
+conception of the relations of the hired labourer and the labour which
+gains him his hire. Not only does he seem to have performed his actual
+inspecting duties with that exact punctiliousness which in such cases
+is much better than zeal, but he did not grudge the expenditure of his
+art on the requirements, and not the strict requirements only, of his
+craft. The unfitness of poets for business has been often enough
+proved to be a mere fond thing vainly invented; but it was never
+better disproved than in this particular instance.
+
+Of the manner in which he had discharged these duties, some idea may
+be formed from the volume of _Reports_ which was edited, the year
+after his death, by Sir Francis Sandford. It would really be difficult
+to imagine a better display of that "sweet reasonableness," the
+frequency of which phrase on a man's lips does not invariably imply
+the presence of the corresponding thing in his conduct. It would be
+impossible for the most plodding inspector, who never dared commit a
+sonnet or an essay, to deal with his subject in a way showing better
+acquaintance with it, more interest in it, or more business-like
+abstinence from fads, and flights, and flings. Faint and far-off
+suggestions of the biographer of Arminius may, indeed, by a very
+sensitive reader, be discovered in the slightly eccentric suggestion
+that the Latin of the Vulgate (of which Mr Arnold himself was justly
+fond) should be taught in primary schools, and in the rather perverse
+coupling of "Scott and Mrs Hemans." But these are absolutely the only
+approaches to naughtiness in the whole volume. It is a real misfortune
+that the nature of the subject should make readers of the book
+unlikely to be ever numerous; for it supplies a side of its author's
+character nowhere else (except in glimpses) provided by his extant
+work. It may even be doubted, by those who have read it, whether
+"cutting blocks with a razor" is such a Gothamite proceeding as it is
+sometimes held to be. For in this case the blocks are chopped as well
+as the homeliest bill-hook could do it; and we know that the razor was
+none the blunter. At any rate, the ethical document is one of the
+highest value, and very fit, indeed, to be recommended to the
+attention of young gentlemen of genius who think it the business of
+the State to provide for them, and not to require any dismal drudgery
+from them in return.
+
+But the importance of Mr Arnold to English history and English
+literature has, of course, little or nothing to do with his official
+work. The faithful performance of that work is important to his
+character; and the character of the work itself colours very
+importantly, and, as we have seen, not perhaps always to unmitigated
+advantage, the nature of his performances as a man of letters. But it
+is as a man of letters, as a poet, as a critic, and perhaps most of
+all as both combined, that he ranks for history and for the world.
+
+A detailed examination of his poetic performance has been attempted in
+the earlier pages of this little book, as well as some general remarks
+upon it; but we may well find room here for something more general
+still. That the poet is as much above the prose-writer in rank as he
+is admittedly of an older creation, has always been held; and here, as
+elsewhere, I am not careful to attempt innovation. In fact, though it
+may seem unkind to say so, it may be suspected that nobody has ever
+tried to elevate the function of the prose-writer above that of the
+poet, unless he thought he could write great prose and knew he could
+not write great poetry. But in another order of estimate than this, Mr
+Arnold's poetic work may seem of greater value than his prose, always
+admirable and sometimes consummate as the latter is, if we take each
+at its best.
+
+At its best--and this is how, though he would himself seem to have
+sometimes felt inclined to dispute the fact, we must reckon a poet.
+His is not poetry of the absolutely trustworthy kind. It is not like
+that of Shelley or of Keats, who, when their period of mere juvenility
+is past, simply cannot help writing poetry; nor is it, on the other
+hand, like that of Wordsworth, who flies and flounders with an
+incalculable and apparently irresponsible alternation. It is
+rather--though I should rank it far higher, on all but the historic
+estimate, than Gray's--like that of Gray. The poet has in him a vein,
+or, if the metaphor be preferred, a spring, of the most real and
+rarest poetry. But the vein is constantly broken by faults, and never
+very thick; the spring is intermittent, and runs at times by drops
+only. There is always, as it were, an effort to get it to yield
+freely, to run clear and constant. And--again as in the case of
+Gray--the poet subjects himself to a further disability by all manner
+of artificial restrictions, struggles to comply with this or that
+system, theories, formulas, tricks. He will not "indulge his genius."
+And so it is but rarely that we get things like the _Scholar-Gipsy_,
+like the _Forsaken Merman_, like the second _Isolation_; and when we
+do get such things there is sometimes, as in the case of the
+peroration to _Sohrab and Rustum_, and perhaps the splendid
+opening of _Westminster Abbey_ and _Thyrsis_, a certain
+sense of parade, of the elaborate assumption of the singing-robe.
+There is too seldom the sensation which Coleridge unconsciously
+suggested in the poem that heralded the poetry of the nineteenth
+century. We do not feel that
+
+  "The fair breeze blew, the while foam flew,
+    The furrow followed free"--
+
+that
+
+  "We were the first that ever burst
+    Into that silent sea;"
+
+but that a mighty launch of elaborate preparation is taking place,
+that we are pleased and orderly spectators standing round, and that
+the ship is gliding in due manner, but with no rush or burst, into the
+sea of poetry. While elsewhere there may be even the sense of effort
+and preparation without the success.
+
+But, once more, a poet is to be judged first by his best things, and
+secondly by a certain _aura_ or atmosphere, by a nameless,
+intangible, but sensible quality, which, now nearer and fuller, now
+farther and fainter, is over his work throughout. In both respects Mr
+Arnold passes the test. The things mentioned above and others, even
+many others, are the right things. They do not need the help of that
+rotten reed, the subject, to warrant and support them; we know that
+they are in accordance with the great masters, but we do not care
+whether they are or not. They sound the poetic note; they give the
+poetic flash and iridescence; they cause the poetic intoxication. Even
+in things not by any means of the best as wholes, you may follow that
+gleam safely. The exquisite revulsion of the undertone in
+_Bacchanalia_--
+
+  "Ah! so the silence was,
+    So was the hush;"
+
+the honey-dropping trochees of the _New Sirens_; the description
+of the poet in _Resignation_; the outburst--
+
+  "What voices are these on the clear night air?"
+
+of _Tristram and Iseult_; the melancholy meditation of _A
+Summer Night_ and _Dover Beach_, with the plangent note so
+cunningly yet so easily accommodated to the general tone and motive of
+the piece,--these and a hundred other things fulfil all the
+requirements of the true poetic criticism, which only marks, and only
+asks for, the _differentia_ of poetry.
+
+And this poetic moment--this (if one may use the words, about another
+matter, of one who wrote no poetry, yet had more than all but three or
+four poets), this "exolution, liquefaction, transformation, the kiss
+of the spouse, and ingression into the divine shadow" which poetry and
+poetry alone confers upon the fit readers of it--is never far off or
+absent for long together in Mr Arnold's verse. His command of it is
+indeed uncertain. But all over his work, from _The Strayed
+Reveller_ to _Westminster Abbey_, it may happen at any minute,
+and it does happen at many minutes. This is what makes a poet: not the
+most judicious selection of subject, not the most studious
+contemplation and, as far as he manages it, representation of the
+grand style and the great masters. And this is what Mr Arnold has.
+
+That his prose, admirable as it always is in form and invaluable as it
+often is in matter, is on the whole inferior to his verse, is by no
+means a common opinion, though it was expressed by some good judges
+both during his life and at the time of his death. As we have seen,
+both from a chance indication in his own letters and from Mr Humphry
+Ward's statement, he took very great pains with it; indeed, internal
+evidence would be sufficient to establish this if we had no positive
+external testimony whatsoever. He came at a fortunate time, when the
+stately yet not pompous or over-elaborated model of the latest
+Georgian prose, raised from early Georgian "drabness" by the efforts
+of Johnson, Gibbon, and Burke, but not proceeding to the extremes of
+any of the three, was still the academic standard; but when a certain
+freedom on the one side, and a certain grace and colour on the other,
+were being taken from the new experiments of nineteenth-century prose
+proper. Whether he or his contemporary Mr Froude was the greatest
+master of this particular blend is a question which no doubt had best
+be answered by the individual taste of the competent. I should say
+myself that Mr Froude at certain moments rose higher than Mr Arnold
+ever did; nothing of the latter's can approach that magnificent
+passage on the passing of the Middle Ages and on the church-bell sound
+that memorises it. And Mr Froude was also free from the mannerisms, at
+times amounting to very distinct affectation, to which, in his middle
+period more especially, Mr Arnold succumbed. But he did not quite keep
+his friend's high level of distinction and _tenue_. It was almost
+impossible for Mr Arnold to be slipshod--I do not mean in the sense of
+the composition books, which is mostly an unimportant sense, but in
+one quite different; and he never, as Mr Froude sometimes did,
+contented himself with correct but ordinary writing. If his defect was
+mannerism, his quality was certain manner.
+
+The most noticeable, the most easily imitated, and the most doubtful
+of his mannerisms was, of course, the famous iteration, which was
+probably at first natural, but which, as we see from the
+_Letters_, he afterwards deliberately fostered and accentuated,
+in order, as he thought, the better to get his new ideas into the
+heads of what the type-writer sometimes calls the "Br_u_tish"
+public. That it became at times extremely teasing is beyond argument,
+and I should be rather afraid that Prince Posterity will be even more
+teased by it than we are, because to him the ideas it enforces will
+be, and will have been ever since he can remember, obvious and
+common-place enough. But when this and some other peccadillos (on
+which it is unnecessary to dwell, lest we imitate the
+composition-books aforesaid) were absent or even moderately present,
+sometimes even in spite of their intrusion, Mr Arnold's style was of a
+curiously fascinating character. I have often thought that, in the
+good sense of that unlucky word "genteel," this style deserves it far
+more than the style either of Shaftesbury or of Temple; while in its
+different and nineteenth-century way, it is as much a model of the
+"middle" style, neither very plain nor very ornate, but "elegant," as
+Addison's own. Yet it is observable that all the three writers just
+mentioned keep their place, except with deliberate students of the
+subject, rather by courtesy or prescription than by actual conviction
+and relish on the part of readers: and it is possible that something
+of the same kind may happen in Mr Arnold's case also, when his claims
+come to be considered by other generations from the merely formal
+point of view. Nor can those claims be said to be very securely based
+in respect of matter. It is impossible to believe that posterity will
+trouble itself about the dreary apologetics of undogmatism on which he
+wasted so much precious time and energy; they will have been arranged
+by the Prince's governor on the shelves, with Hobbes's mathematics and
+Southey's political essays. "But the criticism," it will be said,
+"_that_ ought to endure." No doubt from some points of view it ought,
+but will it? So long, or as soon, as English literature is
+intelligently taught in universities, it is sure of its place in any
+decently arranged course of Higher Rhetoric; so long, or as soon, as
+critics consider themselves bound to study the history and documents
+of their business, it will be read by them. But what hold does this
+give it? Certainly not a stronger hold than that of Dryden's _Essay of
+Dramatic Poesy_, which, though some of us may know it by heart, can
+scarcely be said to be a commonly read classic.
+
+The fact is--and no one knew this fact more thoroughly, or would have
+acknowledged it more frankly, than Mr Arnold himself--that criticism
+has, of all literature that is really literature, the most precarious
+existence. Each generation likes, and is hardly wrong in liking, to
+create for itself in this province, to which creation is so scornfully
+denied by some; and old critics are to all but experts (and apparently
+to some of them) as useless as old moons. Nor can one help regretting
+that so long a time has been lost in putting before the public a
+cheap, complete, handy, and fairly handsome edition of the whole of Mr
+Arnold's prose. There is no doubt at all that the existence of such an
+edition, even before his death, was part cause, and a large part of
+the cause, of the great and continued popularity of De Quincey; and it
+is a thousand pities that, before a generation arises which knows him
+not, Mr Arnold is not allowed the same chance. As it is, not a little
+of his work has never been reprinted at all; some of the rest is
+difficult of access, and what there is exists in numerous volumes of
+different forms, some cheap, some dear, the whole cumbersome. And if
+his prose work seems to me inferior to his poetical in absolute and
+perennial value, its value is still very great. Not so much English
+prose has that character of grace, of elegance, which has been
+vindicated for this, that we can afford to lay aside or to forget such
+consummate examples of it. Academic urbanity is not so universal a
+feature of our race--the constant endeavour at least to "live by the
+law of the _peras_," to observe lucidity, to shun exaggeration,
+is scarcely so endemic. Let it be added, too, that if not as the sole,
+yet as the chief, herald and champion of the new criticism, as a
+front-fighter in the revolutions of literary view which have
+distinguished the latter half of the nineteenth century in England, Mr
+Arnold will be forgotten or neglected at the peril of the generations
+and the individuals that forget or neglect him.
+
+Little need be added about the loss of actual artistic pleasure which
+such neglect must bring. Mr Arnold may never, in prose, be read with
+quite the same keenness of delight with which we read him in poetry;
+but he will yield delight more surely. His manner, except in his rare
+"thorn-crackling" moments, and sometimes even then, will carry off
+even the less agreeable matter; with matter at all agreeable, it has a
+hardly to be exaggerated charm.
+
+But it is in his general literary position that Mr Arnold's strongest
+title to eminence consists. There have certainly been greater poets in
+English: I think there have been greater critics. But as poet and
+critic combined, no one but Dryden and Coleridge can be for a moment
+placed beside him: the fate of the false Florimel must await all
+others who dare that adventure. And if he must yield--yield by a long
+way--to Dryden in strength and easy command of whatsoever craft he
+tried, to Coleridge in depth and range and philosophical grasp, yet he
+has his revenges. Beside his delicacy and his cosmopolitan
+accomplishment, Dryden is blunt and unscholarly; beside his directness
+of aim, if not always of achievement, his clearness of vision, his
+almost business-like adjustment of effort to result, the vagueness and
+desultoriness of Coleridge look looser and, in the literary sense,
+more disreputable than ever. Here was a man who could not only
+criticise but create; who, though he may sometimes, like others, have
+convicted his preaching of falsity by his practice, and his practice
+of sin by his preaching, yet could in the main make practice and
+preaching fit together. Here was a critic against whom the foolish
+charge, "You can break, but you cannot make," was confessedly
+impossible--a poet who knew not only the rule of thumb, but the rule
+of the uttermost art. In him the corruption of the poet had not been
+the generation of the critic, as his great predecessor in the two
+arts, himself secure and supreme in both, had scornfully said. Both
+faculties had always existed, and did always exist, side by side in
+him. He might exercise one more freely at one time, one at another;
+but the author of the _Preface_ of 1853 was a critic, and a ripe
+one, in his heyday of poetry, the author of _Westminster Abbey_
+was a poet in his mellowest autumn of criticism.
+
+And yet he was something more than both these things, more than both
+of these at once. But for that unlucky divagation in the Wilderness,
+his life would have been the life of a man of letters only as far as
+choice went, with the duties of no dishonourable profession
+superadded. And even with the divagation it was mainly and really
+this. To find parallels for Mr Arnold in his unflinching devotion to
+literature we must, I fear, go elsewhere than to Dryden or to
+Coleridge, we must go to Johnson and Southey. And here again we may
+find something in him beyond both, in that he had an even nobler
+conception of Literature than either. That he would have put her even
+too high, would have assigned to her functions which she is unable to
+discharge, is true enough; but this is at least no vulgar error.
+Against ignoble neglect, against stolid misunderstanding, against
+mushroom rivalry, he championed her alike. And it was most certainly
+from no base motive. If he wanted an English Academy, I am quite sure
+it was not from any desire for a canary ribbon or a sixteen-pointed
+star. Yet, after Southey himself in the first half of the century, who
+has done so much for letters _qua_ letters as Mr Arnold in the
+second? His poems were never popular, and he tried no other of the
+popular departments of literature. But he wrote, and I think he could
+write, nothing that was not literature, in and by the fact that he was
+its writer. It has been observed of others in other kinds, that
+somehow or other, by merely living, by pursuing their own arts or
+crafts whatever they were, they raised those arts and crafts in
+dignity, they bestowed on them as it were a rank, a position. A few--a
+very few--at successive times have done this for literature in
+England, and Mr Arnold was perhaps the last who did it notably in
+ours. One cannot imagine him writing merely for money, for position,
+even for fame--for anything but the _devoir_ of the born and
+sworn servant of Apollo and Pallas. Such devotion need not, of course,
+forbid others of their servants to try his shield now and then with
+courteous arms or even at sharps--as he tried many. But it was so
+signal, so happy in its general results, so exactly what was required
+in and for England at the time, that recognition of it can never be
+frank enough, or cordial enough, or too much admiring. Whenever I
+think of Mr Arnold it is in those own words of his, which I have
+quoted already, and which I quoted to myself on the hill by Hinksey as
+I began this little book in the time of fritillaries--
+
+  "Still nursing the unconquerable hope,
+  Still clutching the inviolable shade"--
+
+the hope and shade that never desert, even if they flit before and
+above, the servants and the lovers of the humaner literature.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+_Alaric at Rome_, 4.
+
+_Bacchanalia, or the New Age_, 114.
+_Balder Dead_, 52, 53.
+_Byron, Poetry of_, ed. Arnold, 185.
+
+_Celtic Literature, On the Study of_, 66, 104 _et seq._
+_Church of Brou, The_, 38.
+_Consolation_, 28.
+_Cromwell_, 8, 9.
+_Culture and Anarchy_, 128 _et seq._
+
+_Discourses in America_, 195.
+_Dover Beach_, 112.
+
+_Empedocles on Etna_, 23.
+_Essays in Criticism_, 83 _et seq._, 123.
+_Eton, A French_, 79 _et seq._
+
+_Farewell, A_, 27.
+_Forsaken Merman, The_, 19.
+_French Eton, A_, 79 _et seq._
+_Friend, To a_, sonnet, 15.
+_Friendship's Garland_, 148.
+
+_God and the Bible_, 137.
+
+_Heine's Grave_, 115.
+_Homer, On Translating_, 66.
+
+_In Utrumque Paratus_, 20.
+_Irish Essays_, 151.
+_Isolation_, 31.
+
+Johnson's Lives of the Poets, ed. Arnold, 169.
+
+_Last Essays on Church and Religion_, 137, 142.
+_Letters_, 1, 15 _et seq._, 214.
+_Lines written by a Death-bed_, 32.
+_Literature and Dogma_, 131 _et seq._
+_Longing_, 30.
+
+_Marguerite, To_, 31.
+_Memorial Verses_, 26.
+_Merman, The Forsaken_, 19.
+_Merope_, 60.
+_Mixed Essays_, 168 _et seq._
+_Modern Sappho, The_, 17.
+_Mycerinus_, 13.
+
+_New Sirens, The_, 17.
+
+_Obermann_, 53.
+_On the Rhine_, 29.
+_On the Study of Celtic Literature_, 66, 104 _et seq._
+_On the Terrace at Berne_, 16.
+_On Translating Homer_, 66.
+
+_Preface_, the, to the 'Poems' of 1853. 33 _et seq._
+_Prose Passages_, 166.
+
+Renan, Arnold's relations with, 101.
+_Requiescat_, 39.
+_Resignation_, 20, 185.
+_Rugby Chapel_, 115.
+
+Sainte-Beuve, 59, 203.
+_Scholar-Gipsy, The_, 5, 40 _et seq._
+_Schools and Universities on the Continent_, 116.
+_Selected Poems_, 184.
+Shairp, Principal, lines on Arnold by, 5.
+_Shakespeare_, Sonnet to, 15.
+_Sick King in Bokhara_, 15.
+_Sohrab and Rustum_, 37, 51, 52.
+Southey, use of rhymeless metre by, 11.
+_St Brandan_, 111.
+_St Paul and Protestantism_, 130 _et seq._
+_Stagirius_, 19.
+_Strayed Reveller, The_, 10 _et seq._
+_Summer Night, A_, 26.
+_Switzerland_, 16.
+
+Tennyson, influence of, on Arnold, 19.
+_Thyrsis_, 111.
+_To Fausta_, 19.
+_To Marguerite_, 31.
+_To my Friends who Ridiculed a Tender Leave-taking_, 16, 27.
+_Tristram and Iseult_, 24, 25.
+
+_Voice, The_, 19.
+
+Ward's _English Poets_, Arnold's Introduction to, 189.
+_Westminster Abbey_, 207, 220, 228.
+_Wordsworth, Poems of_, ed. Arnold, 185.
+
+
+
+THE END.
+
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