"On one of the last Sundays in December, 1862, in the midst of a
dispirited city, and with a perplexed Senate and a beaten army as that
city's safeguards, Mr. Henry Ward Beecher asserted in the Puritan Church
in New York, that 'Generals were of no use; that God fought against the
North for upholding the slaves; that the time was come when wickedness
was to be "rooted out"; and, finally, that it was not only the province
of the preacher to condemn vice, but that he should "pluck it out by the
root," should "slay" wickedness, and that slavery and alcohol should be
put down by the arm of flesh and the sword of the preacher.'"
Now, frankly confessing that we have no knowledge whatever of the facts
in question and cannot therefore authoritatively deny a single
statement, we are yet willing, on "circumstantial evidence," to risk
both our intelligence and veracity by declaring our belief, first, that
Mr. Beecher did not say this in the Puritan Church, but in the Plymouth
Church; secondly, that it was not in New York, but in Brooklyn; and,
thirdly, that he never said it at all. We leave out of view the haze
which evidently beclouds this Gentle Brain regarding the location of the
Senate, and its prevailing impression that the Potomac flows nine times
around New York before it empties itself into Lake Pontchartrain.
We do not claim to display any superior learning in pointing out these
mistakes. We shall never set ourselves above our contemporaries for
corrections which--we will not say every school-boy, but--every
school-girl of ordinary literary aptitude is entirely competent to make.
There are many things which it is no credit to know, but a serious
discredit not to know; and when a man presumes to write a book, we have
at least a right to expect that he shall not stumble in the primer. The
Gentle Man claims to have been a student of English literature. He has
certainly been a very stupid or a very careless one. Indications are not
wanting that his proper seat is on both horns of the dilemma.
When he leaves other writers and has recourse to his own pen, matters
are but indifferently mended. The slovenliness of his style is
extraordinary. "Ought a gentleman," he quotes from Thackeray, "to be a
loyal son, a true husband, an honest father? Ought his life to be
decent, his bills to be paid, his tastes to be high and elegant, his
aims in life to be noble?" "Yes," responds the astute essayist, "he
should be all these, and somewhat more; and these all men can be, and
women, too." What is the English of this gibberish? "In Miss Thackeray's
excellent novel, the 'Story of Elizabeth,' there is a somewhat new point
in such books." He tells us that General Bluecher "had his
disappointments, no doubt, but turned them, like the oyster does the
speck of sand which annoys it, to a pearl,"--that in every state people
may be cheerful; "the lambs skip, birds sing and fly _joyously_, puppies
play, kittens are _full_ of _joyance_, the whole air _full_ of careering
and _rejoicing_ insects, _that every_where the good outbalances the bad,
and _that every_ evil _that there is_ has its compensating balm." And in
face of such slop-work he dares to speak of having "formed his style"!
And, stranger still, a book which indulges in these pranks has gone to a
third edition in the land of Addison and Macaulay! Moreover, our copy
belongs to this veritable third edition, whose preface informs us that
"the Essays have undergone a careful revision." What must have been the
glories of the first edition?
The style is not more hopelessly muddled than the sentiment. The man's
skull seems to be undergoing a perpetual house-cleaning. His
intellectual furniture is always at sixes and sevens. It would be very
strange, if so wide a rover and so indefatigable a collector should
never by any chance come back with some valuable specimens for his
cabinet; but the few curiosities displayed as his own property have so
very awkward an air in his wilderness of common pebbles, that we have a
deep inward conviction that they are stolen, though the theft may be an
unconscious one. Moreover, if he ever lights on a genuine gem, he cannot
keep his hands off it, but paws it over and over till it is as
lustreless as its companions. He seems to have an organic inaptitude for
combination. He lays a fact down and straightway forgets where he put
it, what it was for, or what manner of fact it was, and goes serenely on
with his argument as if no such fact existed. Some of his facts are of
such a nature that the pity is not that he occasionally forgets them,
but that he ever remembered them. To show that old truths are "now
proved to have been lies," he quotes,--
"Doubt that the stars are fire,
Doubt that the sun doth move,
Doubt truth to be a liar,
But never doubt I love,"
and adds this comment,--"Well, we know now that the sun does not move,
and that the stars are not fire; that the voices of the learned, who
held up these things as immutable truths, were unconsciously lying after
all." Yet any astronomical horn-book would have told our philosopher,
that, if one scientific theory is firmly founded on truth, it is that
the sun does move; and for the matter of the stars, it is as likely to
be fire as anything else. "William Penn," he says elsewhere, "is now
tainted, and Washington suspected." By whom? and of what?--will this new
historian inform us? "Great artists think differently, as witness
wondrous Giotto, the shepherd boy, and our own clever, but mediocre
Opie." A man may mistake a mediocre painter for a great artist and only
err in judgment, but that he should in the same breath proclaim him to
be both is a marvel of stultification. "All men are not born equal," he
says, presumptuously dabbling in politics and drawing his feeble bow
against the Declaration of Independence,--"all men are not equally wise,
gifted, clever, strong, handsome, or tall. The brains of one nation and
the brains of one man are superior in weight, form, and activity to the
brains of another nation or another man." "The framers of the celebrated
American Declaration knew just as well as we do that they were preaching
a doctrine of romantic falsehood." A moment or two after this fine
philosophical distinction and this courteous and eminently Gentle
assertion,--but quite long enough for him to have forgotten both,--he
makes another affirmation, that equality exists "in the grave and in the
church." How, then? Are men equally wise, gifted, clever, strong,
handsome, or tall in church? "A hundred years after death we may weigh
the dust of the greatest hero, and it is no more than that of the
poorest beggar; and the name that remains is as light and useless as the
dust." But if the great hero were very strong and tall and the poor
beggar a feeble dwarf, the dust of the one would be appreciably more
than that of the other, And what means this Daniel come to judgment by
teaching that a hero's name is light and useless? We had supposed it was
agreed among all civilized people that a nation's heroic memories are
her most priceless possessions. We ask the question simply as a
rhetorical one. We are perfectly aware that the author means nothing. He
seldom does mean anything. And if he did, he is the last person to whom
we should apply for any exact definition of his meaning. He uses words
with very little comprehension of their ordinary meaning; of the
delicacy or the force of language he has no sort of conception. He
grasps at the skirts of any notion that flutters through his disorderly
mind, fastens to it the word that comes first to hand, and sets it
fluttering again. Juxtaposition is his all-sufficient substitute for
connection, and "a moment's time, a point of space," between two
statements is fatal to his arguments. "We all differ. _Therefore_," is
his extraordinary inference, "every individual should live, not for
himself, but to be valuable to others; _for_," and here we turn another
of his inexplicable corners, "it would be sheer midsummer madness to
preach up that all are equally valuable." Consequently we embark on his
sentences, paragraphs, and chapters in entire ignorance of the point
where they will land us. He takes Mr. Helps to task for bowing the knee
to the Moloch of success in writing Mr. Stephenson's life, accuses Mr.
Stephenson of borrowing and purloining ideas, yet himself constantly
holds him up to admiration as a hero. The putting down of the
Slaveholders' Rebellion is to him a mere "blundering into slaughter";
but the Crimean War "showed that heroism is not yet extinct in high
life"; and in the Indian Mutinies, we, the English, "were attacked,
undermined, betrayed," and that rebellion was quelled with "courage,
skill in arms, anything you will, or all things combined, and God's
blessing chief of all, which enabled us to preserve a mighty empire." Of
these "high people" he advises us to "adopt the polish, suavity, and
politeness, one towards another, which, with few exceptions, they all
have," only two pages after he has illustrated "vulgar curiosity in high
life" by telling us how, "at an entertainment given by the Prince and
Princess of Wales, to which, of course, only the very cream of the cream
of society was admitted, there was such a pushing and struggling to see
the Princess ... that a bust of the Princess Royal was thrown from its
pedestal and damaged, and the pedestal upset; the ladies, in their
eagerness to view the Princess, coolly took advantage of the overthrown
pillar by standing on it." In one place he testifies that "the majority
of men's wives in the upper and middle classes fall far short of that
which is required of a good wife. They are not made by love, but by the
chance of a good match. They are the products of worldly prudence, not
of a noble passion.... The consequence is, that after the first novelty
has passed away, the chain begins to rub and the collar to gall." A
little later in the same essay he gives an ideal wife, and says,--"It is
not too much to say that the great majority of wives equal this ideal."
"By far the larger portion of marriages are happy ones ... and ... of
men's wives we still can write ... 'her voice is sweet music, her smiles
his brightest day,' &c., &c." "Women," he says, "differ from men in this
respect. They all, very properly, look forward to marriage." So, we
suppose, men do not look forward to marriage; or if they do, it is
improperly. "Nay, the great majority [of women], even in our factitious
state of society, are utterly dependent upon it." That is, if society
were not factitious, every woman, without exception, would be utterly
dependent upon marriage for a living. "The majority of girls are looking
forward to be married at an early age, and are in despair of being left
old maids when they are twenty-one." As usual, he means the contrary of
what he says,--not that girls hope to be old maids till they are
twenty-one and then settle down into the certainty that they must become
wives, but that they hope to be wives and are in despair at being old
maids by the time they are twenty-one. The difficult task of evolving
his meaning from his words is, to be sure, entirely a work of
supererogation on our part, as the statement he means and the statement
he makes are usually alike baseless. But we choose to free him from the
meshes in which he has entangled himself and give him a chance to run
for his life.
The brilliancy and originality of his views on social questions appear
in such startling announcements as "Woman should be true to herself."
"Woman was created to be a wife and a mother." "The accomplished woman
in these days of general education is, however, a grand mistake." "Why
should lovely woman ever condescend to dabble in political economy? Can
a gentleman be a gentleman when logic requires the truth? Will dry
dissertation fill up the place of compliment and flowery talk? Will
agricultural measures,--Mill on Liberty,--Buckle on Civilization,--High,
Low, or Middle Church,--Pleiocene periods,--Hind's new comet, and the
division of labor, suffer us to enjoy life as we used, and to amuse
ourselves with the innocent prattle of ladies' tongues?" Rosy, posy,
pinky, honey, pepper_mint_, and sugar-plummy! "One part of management in
husbands lies in a judicious mixture of good-humor, attention, flattery,
and compliments." Here, helping him to his meaning, which he flounders
after in vain through a page of wish-wash, we may explain that he is not
speaking, as would naturally be supposed, of the manner in which
husbands manage wives, but, advancing in his usual crab-fashion, of the
manner in which wives manage husbands; nor by flattery let it be
imagined for a moment that he means flattery, but "an offered flower, a
birthday gift, a song when we are weary, a smile when we are sad, a look
which no eye but our own will see," in which, if truth is, as has been
said, "a fixed central sun," our comet must be considered in its
perihelion. And having thus set him on his feet again, let us see
whether he can stand by himself a tottering moment or two.
The preventive of these ill-assorted marriages (which for the greater
part are never made) is, if the young men "only chose by sense _or_
fancy, _or_ because they saw some good quality in a girl,--if they were
not all captivated by the face alone," (Query: What is being captivated
by a face but choosing by fancy? and what is choosing by sense but
choosing by some good quality?) "every Jill would have her Jack, and
pair off happily, like the lovers in a comedy." At the same time he
agrees with Swift that the reason why so many marriages are unhappy is
because young ladies spend their "time in making nets and not in making
cages."
We have said that the Gentle Man is dull even when he hates. It is true,
so far as he has anything to do with expressing his hatred; yet the time
for the publication of his dulness is so inaptly--or perhaps we should
rather say so aptly--chosen, that the incongruity awakens our sense of
the ridiculous, while a certain childlike confidingness with which he
credits any statement that makes against the objects of his dislike
comes nearer to amusing us than anything else in the book. America is
his _bete noir_. It points the moral of every sad tale. "Vulgarity,
hoydenishness, coarseness, and the contempt which accompanies these
qualities, are the effects of bad manner and manners. It may pervade a
whole nation, as it has done the Americans." What the particular "it" is
which pervades us, we cannot, and the Gentle Man, also, "true to
himself," cannot say; but there it is. A nation is exhorted to
politeness; for, "sitting with their legs over the chair-back of
another, carrying bowie-knives, cutting the furniture, and spitting in a
circle around them, are not only national faults, but absolutely sins
amongst Americans." Call a spade a spade, and speak not as in "America,
where they talk of the 'stands' of the tables, not daring to say 'legs';
and a young lady will be highly offended, if you dare to ask her to take
a leg of a fowl or a breast of a turkey. There the latter is called
'bosom'; and a mock modesty, which to us seems highly improper, has
altered some round dozen of good, sound English words, which our best
and purest girls use without so much as thinking upon them." Avoid
exaggeration, for in America "it produces a general decay of truth and a
boastful habit of exaggeration, for which the nation has grown famous,
and at which its best friends are truly grieved." (Oh!) ... "They have
asserted so long that they are the finest and best nation in the world,
and they have come out so poorly under trial, that, what with a
remembrance of the old story and the presence of the new, the English
thinker is completely puzzled.... So general was the falsification, that
the best men in the Northern States no longer credited a Government
despatch or a general's 'order';... and the sad state into which the
great nation has fallen has arisen from the spread of that vile disease,
a love of exaggeration." His profound political penetration is evinced
by the sagacious remark, that "America, the disciple of Lafayette (!)
and French doctrines, determined to propagate liberty by enslaving six
millions of brothers." His opinion of the character and career of our
late beloved President--a name almost too pure and now too sacred to be
mentioned here--is for once succinctly given,--"A cunning attorney sits
upon a chair he cannot fill, and is leading a party and country to
destruction." "With all his undoubted conceit and endurance, with his
keenness for praise and for being talked about, we doubt whether there
are many more miserable men in the world than President Abraham Lincoln.
The bitter, bitter tears which Louis XVI. ... shed because of his own
unfitness have been chronicled; but he, knowing his incompetence, was
born to the estate of king; the American President wriggled himself
forward into notoriety." "To an American, all the world seemed bound up
in his Boston or Philadelphia.... He could whip John Bull, and John Bull
could whip all the world. As, since that, he has been 'whipped into a
cocked hat' by his own relations, we hope some of the conceit has been
taken out of him." Yes, unhappy that we are, the secret is at last
revealed. We carry bowie-knives in our breast-pockets (venturing to
discard for once, under the protection of our Transatlantic Mentor, the
usual term of _bosom-pocket_). We dine off the stands of fowl. We have
come out poorly under trial, our finances are deranged, our country
bankrupt, our confidence in Government lost, and we have no loyalty,
because there is nothing to be loyal to. We are tossing on a sea of
anarchy, we are rushing on to ruin, we have been braggart in peace and
cowardly in war, and are at this moment whipped by our own relations
into such a cocked hat as was never before seen. We do not credit the
order to stop recruiting, and we have no belief in the evacuation of
Richmond. We are confident that Sherman is gasping in the last ditch,
that Jefferson Davis is dictator at Washington, and that General Grant
is flying in his wife's gown before the victorious legions of Lee.
In his preface, the writer of this book repels the charge of being like
Thackeray and Dickens. We can assure him, that, with an American public,
he may spare himself that trouble. He is not in the smallest danger of
being mistaken for either of those eminent writers. He is so entirely
unlike them that we do not for a moment suspect him of having attempted
to imitate them. We do not even reckon him their disciple, nor Bacon's,
nor Montaigne's, nor Steele's, nor any other's whose plan he professes
himself to have adopted; for a disciple is a learner, which the Gentle
Man seems never capable of becoming. Good and bad alike, he is a feeble
and confused echo of all men's notions, but the steadfast adherent of
none. The snob's soul within him bows down to the authority of great
men, yet he produces their great thoughts in disjointed and distorted
shape. He does not scruple to sneer where sneers are safe, blind to the
glaring fact that sneers are never safe for him. Bold behind his Tory
bulwarks, he warns boys against adopting Mr. Bright's opinions, and so
becoming "selfish, calculating, cold; as careless of true nobility of
purpose and of soul and as worshipful of material success as Mr. Bright
himself;" and he has his little fling at Tupper, in common with many
another literary drummer-boy who would earn a cheap reputation for valor
by attacking what his superiors have already demolished. We should scorn
to parry the puny thrust of this Liliputian at the noble name which
America delights to honor, or to repel the charge of coldness against
that great heart whose burst of anguish over the grave of his friend,
and our friend, and humanity's, awoke an answering sob in a thousand
homes of this Western World; but we beg to assure this fine old English
Gentle Man and scholar, that, reading these essays, we are ready to
pronounce Mr. Tupper a master of style and his philosophy a striking and
valuable treatise.
We really beg pardon of our readers for covering so much space with this
flummery. We intended to despatch it with a thrust or two; but when our
pen was once caught in the flimsy stuff, it was difficult to withdraw it
again without bringing away considerable portions of the tangle.
Moreover, a book of so much pretension is not to be as lightly passed by
as its humbler brethren. A book that comes to us in fair type and fine
paper, bearing the imprint of a well-known and highly respected
publishing house,--a book that invokes the first names in literature and
meddles with the higher laws of life, that takes on the airs of a censor
and pushes forward into the guild of genius, that by the assumption of
its tone and the broadcast scatteration--depend upon it, that is the
word--of its odds and ends of learning, or by what hocus-pocus we know
not, has attained to a third edition in a country proud of the accuracy
and elegance of its scholarship, and that now brings its brazen face to
our doors, seeking a welcome at the hearthstones which it has insulted,
is not to be dismissed with a simple "Not at home." We have chosen
rather to pillory the pretender, pelting him only with such missiles as
his own pockets furnished. We now discharge him from custody, bidding
him and all his kind bear in mind the assurance, that, while for English
genius, English wisdom, English truth, and English love, we have only
admiration and gratitude, the time has gone by for English charlatanry
to expect from our hands anything but the scourging it deserves.
_Essays in Criticism_. By MATTHEW ARNOLD. Boston: Ticknor &
Fields.
A more satisfactory volume of English prose than this has not come into
our hands since the first appearance of the famous "Essays and Reviews."
Differing widely from that collection in kind and scope, it yet belongs
in the main to the same school of liberal thought in which England has
made of late such rapid strides.
As a poet, Matthew Arnold had been known among us for a decade or more
of years, and, though not celebrated with the wide popularity of
Tennyson, had been as cordially cherished as the Laureate himself by all
who valued in poetry the indications of profound intellectual experience
as well as the singer's native gift. Those who are most familiar with
the verses of the Oxford Professor will be least surprised with the
critical insight and judicial wisdom of these Essays. For, independently
of any question of natural affinity or natural incompatibility between
the functions of bard and critic, there is that in Mr. Arnold's poetry
which makes the fortune of the essayist,--an intense subjectiveness
united to an analytic subtilty, which would mar the beauty of his verse,
as it certainly does that of Mr. Browning, were it not compensated by a
depth and truth of poetic feeling, in which Arnold far excels Browning,
and has no superior among recent English poets. Some of his poems are
critical essays, without losing the distinctive character of poetry; and
some of his best criticisms are done in verse. What better, for example,
than the sentence on Byron in "Memorial Verses"?
"He taught us little: but our soul
Had felt him like the thunder's roll.
With shivering heart the strife we saw
Of Passion with Eternal Law;
And yet with reverential awe
We watched the fount of fiery life
Which served for that Titanic strife."
Or that on Goethe in "Obermann"?
"For he pursued a lonely road,
His eye on Nature's plan,--
Neither made man too much a God,
Nor God too much a man."
Of living Englishmen, it seems to us that Matthew Arnold combines in the
highest degree great wealth of literary culture with the deepest
thoughtfulness. This makes the charm of the present volume. Also, to his
honor be it said,--and let due commendation be given to that trait,--he
is of modern English essayists the least dogmatic. With fixed
principles of art and very decided views of his own he combines a
tolerance and a flexibility of mind which are very un-English. He is the
least insular of his countrymen. It cannot be said of him, as he himself
has said of Carlyle, that, with all his genius, he "has for the
functions of the critic a little too much of the self-will and
eccentricities of a genuine son of Great Britain." And yet, un-British
as he is in these respects, Arnold, in one thing, is more national far
than Carlyle,--in the manner, namely, in which he chooses to express his
thought. Though deeply conversant with German literature, (as he is with
French,) he has not suffered himself to be bitten with the Teutomania
which infects so unpleasantly the diction of his self-willed
countryman,--making his sentences seem like translations from Jean Paul,
rather than utterances conceived in an English mind. He unites
cosmopolitan liberality with English self-possession.
As a stylist, he is singularly inartificial. Would that our American
writers might take a lesson from Arnold's prose, and correct their
ambitious rhetoric, affected quaintness, and other varieties of fine
writing, by this pure, simple, honest English. The peculiarity of his
style, we should say, is its freedom from peculiarity. It is the style
of a cultivated, thoughtful man, without the pedantry and mannerism
which thoughtful and cultivated men so often contract. Easy, almost
careless in its movement, but far from careless in its choice of words,
it is neither bookish nor vulgarly colloquial, but maintains a just mean
between elaborateness and rudeness. In our young days Macaulay was
considered the model writer, and Ruskin has been thought to occupy that
place in these latter years; but Macaulay is tumid, and even Ruskin
stilted and stiff, in comparison with Matthew Arnold.
For the matter, here are fourteen essays, including the three lectures,
"On translating Homer," and the "Last Words," not ponderously and
oppressively learned, and not abstrusely and obtrusively philosophical,
but as full of wisdom and intellectual stimulus and graceful humor as
any we know, and more tolerant and liberal than most,--together with a
preface as entertaining as any of the essays. So healthy and nourishing
a book, in the way of literary essays, has not for a long while appeared
among us. We are far from assenting to all of Professor Arnold's
positions. We altogether repudiate the statement, that "on Heine, of all
German authors who have survived Goethe, incomparably the largest
portion of Goethe's mantle fell"; nor can we adopt all his criticisms
and views on the Homeric question; nevertheless, we can with the utmost
confidence recommend this volume to the literary men of America to whom
the author is yet unknown, or known only by name.