His Verse.
In every page of Arnold the poet there is something to return upon and to
admire. There are faults, and these of a kind this present age is ill-
disposed to condone. The rhymes are sometimes poor; the movement of the
verse is sometimes uncertain and sometimes slow; the rhythms are
obviously simple always; now and then the intention and effect are cold
even to austerity, are bald to uncomeliness. But then, how many of the
rarer qualities of art and inspiration are represented here, and here
alone in modern work! There is little of that delight in material for
material's sake which is held to be essential to the composition of a
great artist; there is none of that rapture of sound and motion and none
of that efflorescence of expression which are deemed inseparable from the
endowment of the true singer. For any of those excesses in technical
accomplishment, those ecstasies in the use of words, those effects of
sound which are so rich and strange as to impress the hearer with
something of their author's own emotion of creation--for any, indeed, of
the characteristic attributes of modern poetry--you shall turn to him in
vain. In matters of form this poet is no romantic but a classic to the
marrow. He adores his Shakespeare, but he will none of his Shakespeare's
fashions. For him the essentials are dignity of thought and sentiment
and distinction of manner and utterance. It is no aim of his to talk for
talking's sake, to express what is but half felt and half understood, to
embody vague emotions and nebulous fancies in language no amount of
richness can redeem from the reproach of being nebulous and vague. In
his scheme of art there is no place for excess, however magnificent and
Shakespearean--for exuberance, however overpowering and Hugoesque. Human
and interesting in themselves, the ideas apparelled in his verse are
completely apprehended; natural in themselves, the experiences he
pictures are intimately felt and thoroughly perceived. They have been
resolved into their elements by the operation of an almost Sophoclean
faculty of selection, and the effect of their presentation is akin to
that of a gallery of Greek marbles.
His Failure.
Other poets say anything--say everything that is in them. Browning lived
to realise the myth of the Inexhaustible Bottle; Mr. William Morris is
nothing: if not fluent and copious; Mr. Swinburne has a facility that
would seem impossible if it were not a living fact; even the Laureate is
sometimes prodigal of unimportant details, of touches insignificant and
superfluous, of words for words' sake, of cadences that have no reason of
being save themselves. Matthew Arnold alone says only what is worth
saying. In other words, he selects: from his matter whatever is
impertinent is eliminated and only what is vital is permitted to remain.
Sometimes he goes a little astray, and his application of the principle
on which Sophocles and Homer wrought results in failure. But in these
instances it will always be found, I think, that the effect is due not to
the principle nor the poet's application of it but to the poet himself,
who has exceeded his commission, and attempted more than is in him to
accomplish. The case is rare with Arnold, one of whose qualities--and by
no means the least Hellenic of them--was a fine consciousness of his
limitations. But that he failed, and failed considerably, it were idle
to deny. There is _Merope_ to bear witness to the fact; and of _Merope_
what is there to say? Evidently it is an imitation Greek play: an essay,
that is, in a form which ceased long since to have any active life, so
that the attempt to revive it--to create a soul under the ribs of very
musty death--is a blunder alike in sentiment and in art. As evidently
Arnold is no dramatist. Empedocles, the Strayed Reveller, even the
Forsaken Merman, all these are expressions of purely personal feeling--are
so many metamorphoses of Arnold. In _Merope_ there is no such basis of
reality. The poet was never on a level with his argument. He knew
little or nothing of his characters--of Merope or AEpytus or Polyphontes,
of Arcas or Laias or even the Messenger; at every step the ground is seen
shifting under his feet; he is comparatively void of matter, and his
application of the famous principle is labour lost. He is winnowing the
wind; he is washing not gold but water.
His Triumphs.
It is other-guess work with _Empedocles_, the _Dejaneira_ fragment,
_Sohrab and Rustum_, the _Philomela_, his better work in general, above
all with the unique and unapproached _Balder Dead_. To me this last
stands alone in modern art for simple majesty of conception, sober
directness and potency of expression, sustained dignity of thought and
sentiment and style, the complete presentation of whatever is essential,
the stern avoidance of whatever is merely decorative: indeed for every
Homeric quality save rhythmical vitality and rapidity of movement. Here,
for example, is something of that choice yet ample suggestiveness--the
only true realism because the only perfect ideal of realisation--for
which the similitudes of the 'Ionian father of his race' are
pre-eminently distinguished:--
'And as a spray of honeysuckle flowers
Brushes across a tired traveller's face
Who shuffles through the deep dew-moistened dust
On a May evening, in the darken'd lanes,
And starts him, that he thinks a ghost went by--
So Hoder brushed by Hermod's side.'
Here is Homer's direct and moving because most human and comprehensive
touch in narrative:--
'But from the hill of Lidskialf Odin rose,
The throne, from which his eye surveys the world;
And mounted Sleipner, and in darkness rode
To Asgard. And the stars came out in heaven,
High over Asgard, to light home the king.
But fiercely Odin gallop'd, moved in heart;
And swift to Asgard, to the gate, he came.
And terribly the hoofs of Sleipner rang
Along the flinty floor of Asgard streets,
And the Gods trembled on their golden beds
Hearing the wrathful Father coming home--
For dread, for like a whirlwind Odin came.
And to Valhalla's gate he rode, and left
Sleipner; and Sleipner went to his own stall;
And in Valhalla Odin laid him down.'
And here--to have done with evidence of what is known to every one--here
is the Homeric mariner, large and majestic and impersonal, of recording
speech:--
'Bethink ye, Gods, is there no other way?--
Speak, were not this a way, a way for Gods?
If I, if Odin, clad in radiant arms,
Mounted on Sleipner, with the warrior Thor
Drawn in his car beside me, and my sons,
All the strong brood of Heaven, to swell my train,
Should make irruption into Hela's realm,
And set the fields of gloom ablaze with light,
And bring in triumph Balder back to Heaven?'
One has but to contrast such living work as this with the 'mouldering
realm' of _Merope_ to feel the difference with a sense of pain;
'For doleful are the ghosts, the troops of dead,
Whom Hela with austere control presides';
while this in its plain, heroic completeness is touched with a stately
life that is a presage of immortality. It is evident, indeed, that
Arnold wrote _Balder Dead_ in his most fortunate hour, and that _Merope_
is his one serious mistake in literature. For a genius thus peculiar and
introspective drama--the presentation of character through action--is
impossible; to a method thus reticent and severe drama--the expression of
emotion in action--is improper. 'Not here, O Apollo!' It is written
that none shall bind his brows with the twin laurels of epos and drama.
Shakespeare did not, nor could Homer; and how should Matthew Arnold?
His Prose.
He has opinions and the courage of them; he has assurance and he has
charm; he writes with an engaging clearness. It is very possible to
disagree with him; but it is difficult indeed to resist his many graces
of manner, and decline to be entertained and even interested by the
variety and quality of his matter. He was described as 'the most
un-English of Britons,' the most cosmopolitan of islanders; and you feel
as you read him that in truth his mind was French. He took pattern by
Goethe, and was impressed by Leopardi; he was judiciously classic, but
his romanticism was neither hidebound nor inhuman; he apprehended Heine
and Marcus Aurelius, Spinoza and Sainte-Beuve, Joubert and Maurice de
Guerin, Wordsworth and Pascal, Rachel and Sarah Bernhardt, Burke and
Arthur Clough, Eliza Cook and Homer; he was an authority on education,
poetry, civilisation, the _Song of Roland_, the love-letters of Keats,
the Genius of Bottles, the significance of _eutrapelos_ and _eutrapelia_.
In fact, we have every reason to be proud of him. For the present is a
noisy and affected age; it is given overmuch to clamorous devotion and
extravagant repudiation; there is an element of swagger in all its words
and ways; it has a distressing and immoral turn for publicity. Matthew
Arnold's function was to protest against its fashions by his own
intellectual practice, and now and then to take it to task and to call it
to order. He was not particularly original, but he had in an eminent
degree the formative capacity, the genius of shaping and developing,
which is a chief quality of the French mind and which is not so common
among us English as our kindest critics would have us believe. He would
take a handful of golden sentences--things wisely thought and finely said
by persons having authority--and spin them into an exquisite prelection;
so that his work with all the finish of art retains a something of the
freshness of those elemental truths on which it was his humour to dilate.
He was, that is to say, an artist in ethics as in speech, in culture as
in ambition. 'Il est donne,' says Sainte-Beuve, 'de nos jours, a un bien
petit nombre, meme parmi les plus delicats et ceux qui les apprecient le
mieux, de recueillir, d'ordonner sa vie selon ses admirations et selon
ses gouts, avec suite, avec noblesse.' That is true enough; but Arnold
was one of the few, and might 'se vanter d'etre reste fidele a soi-meme,
a son premier et a son plus beau passe.' He was always a man of culture
in the good sense of the word; he had many interests in life and art, and
his interests were sound and liberal; he was a good critic of both morals
and measures, both of society and of literature, because he was commonly
at the pains of understanding his matter before he began to speak about
it. It is therefore not surprising that the part he played was one of
considerable importance or that his influence was healthy in the main. He
was neither prophet nor pedagogue but a critic pure and simple. Too well
read to be violent, too nice in his discernment to be led astray beyond
recovery in any quest after strange gods, he told the age its faults and
suggested such remedies as the study of great men's work had suggested to
him. If his effect was little that was not his fault. He returned to
the charge with imperturbable good temper, and repeated his remarks--which
are often exasperating in effect--with a mixture of mischievousness and
charm, of superciliousness and sagacity, and a serene dexterity of
phrase, unique in modern letters.