self-assertive and develops overweeningly. To this kind of distortion
the modern man of science is specially prone; his exclusive study of
material facts leads to crude, unregenerate strength of intellect, and
leaves him careless of the value truth may have for the spirit and of
its glimmering suggestions of beauty. Yes, and for the philosopher and
the scholar, too, over-intellectualism has its peculiar dangers. The
devotee of a system of thought is apt to lose touch with the real values
of life, and in his exorbitant desire for unity and thoroughness of
organization, to miss the free play of vital forces that gives to life
its manifold charm, its infinite variety, and its ultimate reality.
Bentham and Comte are examples of the evil effects of this rabid pursuit
of system. “Culture is always assigning to system-makers and systems a
smaller share in the bent of human destiny than their friends like.” As
for the pedant, he is merely the miser of facts, who grows withered in
hoarding the vain fragments of precious ore of whose use he has lost the
sense. Men of all these various types offend through their fanatical
devotion to truth; for, indeed, as some one has in recent years well
said, the intellect is “but a _parvenu_,” and the other powers of life,
despite the Napoleonic irresistibleness of the new-comer, have rights
that deserve respect. Over-intellectualism, then, like the
over-development of any other power, leads to disproportion and
disorder.
Such being some of the partial ideals against which Arnold warns his
readers, what account does he give of that perfect human type in all its
integrity, in terms of which he criticises these aberrations or
deformities? Perhaps Arnold felt that any attempt at an exact and
systematic definition of this type would be somewhat grotesque and
presumptuous; at any rate, he has avoided such an attempt. Still, he has
recorded clearly, in many passages, his ideas as regards the powers in
man that are essential to perfect humanity, and that must all be duly
recognized and developed, if man is to attain in full scope what nature
offers. A representative passage may be quoted from the lecture on
_Literature and Science_: “When we set ourselves to enumerate the powers
which go to the building up of human life, and say that they are the
power of conduct, the power of intellect and knowledge, the power of
beauty, and the power of social life and manners, he [Professor Huxley]
can hardly deny that this scheme, though drawn in rough and plain lines
enough, and not pretending to scientific exactness, does yet give a
fairly true representation of the matter. Human nature is built up of
these powers; we have the need for them all. When we have rightly met
and adjusted the claims for them all, we shall then be in a fair way for
getting soberness and righteousness with wisdom.”
These same ideas are presented, under a somewhat different aspect and
with somewhat different terminology, in the first chapter of _Culture
and Anarchy_: “The great aim of culture [is] the aim of setting
ourselves to ascertain what perfection is and to make it prevail.”
Culture seeks “the determination of this question through all the voices
of human experience which have been heard upon it,--of art, science,
poetry, philosophy, history, as well as of religion,--in order to give a
greater fulness and certainty to its solution.... Religion says: _The
Kingdom of God is within you_; and culture, in like manner, places human
perfection in an _internal_ condition, in the growth and predominance of
our humanity proper, as distinguished from our animality. It places it
in the ever-increasing efficacy and in the general harmonious expansion
of those gifts of thought and feeling which make the peculiar dignity,
wealth, and happiness of human nature. As I have said on a former
occasion: ‘It is in making endless additions to itself, in the endless
expansion of its powers, in endless growth in wisdom and beauty, that
the spirit of the human race finds its ideal. To reach this ideal,
culture is an indispensable aid, and that is the true value of
culture.’”
In such passages as these Arnold comes as near as he ever comes to
defining the perfect human type. He does not profess to define it
universally and in abstract terms, for indeed he “hates” abstractions
almost as inveterately as Burke hated them. He does not even describe
concretely for men of his own time and nation the precise equipoise of
powers essential to perfection. Yet he names these powers, suggests the
ends towards which they must by their joint working contribute, and
illustrates, through examples, the evil effects of the preponderance or
absence of one and another. Finally, in the course of his many
discussions, he describes in detail the method by which the delicate
adjustment of these rival powers may be secured in the typical man;
suggests who is to be the judge of the conflicting claims of these
powers, and indicates the process by which this judge may most
persuasively lay his opinions before those whom he wishes to influence.
The method for the attainment of the perfect type is _culture_; the
censor of defective types and the judge of the rival claims of the
coöperant powers is the _critic_; and the process by which this judge
clarifies his own ideas and enforces his opinions on others is
_criticism_.
III
We are now at the centre of Arnold’s theory of life and hold the key to
his system of belief, so far as he had a system. His reasons for
attaching to the work of the critic the importance he palpably attached
to it are at once apparent. Criticism is the method by which the perfect
type of human nature is at any moment to be apprehended and kept in
uncontaminate clearness of outline before the popular imagination. The
ideal critic is the man of nicest discernment in matters intellectual,
moral, æsthetic, social; of perfect equipoise of powers; of delicately
pervasive sympathy; of imaginative insight; who grasps comprehensively
the whole life of his time; who feels its vital tendencies and is
intimately aware of its most insistent preoccupations; who also keeps
his orientation towards the unchanging norms of human endeavour; and who
is thus able to note and set forth the imperfections in existing types
of human nature and to urge persuasively a return in essential
particulars to the normal type. The function of criticism, then, is the
vindication of the ideal human type against perverting influences, and
Arnold’s prose-writings will for the most part be found to have been
inspired in one form or another by a single purpose: the correction of
excess in some human activity and the restoration of that activity to
its proper place among the powers that make up the ideal human type.
_Culture and Anarchy_ (1869) was the first of Arnold’s books to
illustrate adequately this far-reaching conception of criticism. His
special topic is, in this case, social conditions in England.
Politicians, he urges, whose profession it is to deal with social
questions, are engrossed in practical matters and biassed by party
considerations; they lack the detachment and breadth of view to see the
questions at issue in their true relations to abstract standards of
right and wrong. They mistake means for ends, machinery for the results
that machinery is meant to secure; they lose all sense of values and
exalt temporary measures into matters of sacred import; finally, they
come to that pass of ineptitude which Arnold symbolizes by the
enthusiasm of Liberals over the measure to enable a man to marry his
deceased wife’s sister. What is needed to correct these absurd
misapprehensions is the free play of critical intelligence. The critic
from his secure coign of vantage must examine social conditions
dispassionately; he must determine what is essentially wrong in the
inner lives of the various classes of men around him, and so reveal the
real sources of those social evils which politicians are trying to
remedy by external readjustments and temporary measures.
And this is just the task that Arnold undertakes in _Culture and
Anarchy_. He sets himself to consider English society in its length and
breadth with a view to discovering what is its essential constitution,
what are the typical classes that enter into it, and what are the
characteristics of these classes. So far as concerns classification he
ultimately accepts, it is true, as adequate to his purpose, the
traditional division of English society into upper, middle, and lower
classes. But he then goes on to give an analysis of each of these
classes that is novel, penetrating, in the highest degree stimulating.
He takes a typical member of each class and describes him in detail,
intellectually, morally, socially; he points out his sources of
strength and his sources of weakness. He compares him as a type with the
abstract ideal of human excellence, and notes wherein his powers “fall
short or exceed.” He indicates the reaction upon the social and
political life of the nation of these various defects and excesses,
their inevitable influence in producing social misadjustment and
friction. Finally, he urges that the one remedy that will correct these
errant social types and bring them nearer to the perfect human type is
culture, increase in _vital_ knowledge.
The details of Arnold’s application of this conception of culture as a
remedy for the social evils of the time, every reader may follow out for
himself in _Culture and Anarchy_. One point in Arnold’s conception,
however, is to be noted forthwith; it is a crucial point in its
influence on his theorizings. By culture Arnold means increase of
knowledge; yes, but he means something more; culture is for Arnold not
merely an intellectual matter. Culture is the best knowledge made
operative and dynamic in life and character. Knowledge must be
vitalized; it must be intimately conscious of the whole range of human
interests; it must ultimately subserve the whole nature of man.
Continually, then, as Arnold is pleading for the spread of ideas, for
increase of light, for the acceptance on the part of his
fellow-countrymen of new knowledge from the most diverse sources, he is
as keenly alive as any one to the dangers of over-intellectualism. The
undue development of the intellectual powers is as injurious to the
individual as any other form of deviation from the perfect human type.
This distrust of over-intellectualism is the ultimate ground of Arnold’s
hostility to the claims of Physical Science to primacy in modern
education. His ideas on the relative educational value of the physical
sciences and of the humanities are set forth in the well-known discourse
on _Literature and Science_. Arnold is ready, no one is more ready, to
accept the conclusions of science on all topics that fall within its
range; whatever its authenticated spokesmen have to say upon man’s
origin, his moral nature, his relations to his fellows, his place in the
physical universe, his religions, his sacred books--all these utterances
are to be received with entire loyalty as far as they can be shown to
embody the results of expert scientific observation and thought. But for
Arnold, the great importance of modern scientific truth does not for a
moment make clear the superiority of the physical sciences over the
humanities as a means of educational discipline. The study of the
sciences tends merely to intellectual development, to the increase of
mental power; the study of literature, on the other hand, trains a man
emotionally and morally, develops his human sympathies, sensitizes him
temperamentally, rouses his imagination, and elicits his sense of
beauty. Science puts before the student the crude facts of nature, bids
him accept them dispassionately, rid himself of all discolouring moods
as he watches the play of physical force, and convert himself into pure
intelligence; he is simply to observe, to analyze, to classify, and to
systematize, and he is to go through these processes continually with
facts that have no human quality, that come raw from the great whirl of
the cosmic machine. As a discipline, then, for the ordinary man, the
study of science tends not a whit towards humanization, towards
refinement, towards temperamental regeneration; it tends only to develop
an accurate trick of the senses, fine observation, crude intellectual
strength. These powers are of very great importance; but they may also
be trained in the study of literature, while at the same time the
student, as Sir Philip Sidney long ago pointed out, is being led and
drawn “to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls, made worse by
their clay lodgings, can be capable of.” Arnold, then, with
characteristic anxiety for the integrity of the human type, urges the
superior worth to most young men of a literary rather than a scientific
training. Literature nourishes the whole spirit of man; science
ministers only to the intellect.
The same insistent desire that culture be vital is at the root of
Arnold’s discomfort in the presence of German scholarship. For the
thoroughness and the disinterestedness of this scholarship he has great
respect; but he cannot endure its trick of losing itself in the letter,
its “pedantry, slowness,” its way of “fumbling” after truth, its
“ineffectiveness.”[33] “In the German mind,” he exclaims in _Literature
and Dogma_, “as in the German language, there does seem to be something
splay, something blunt-edged, unhandy, infelicitous,--some positive want
of straightforward, sure perception.”[34] Of scholarship of this splay
variety, that comes from exaggerated intellectuality and from lack of a
delicate temperament and of nice perceptions, Arnold is intolerant. Such
scholarship he finds working its customary mischief in Professor Francis
Newman’s translation of Homer, and, accordingly, he gives large parts of
the lectures on _Translating Homer_ to the illustration of its
shortcomings and maladroitness; he is bent on showing how inadequate is
great learning alone to cope with any nice literary problem. Newman’s
philological knowledge of Greek and of Homer is beyond dispute, but his
taste may be judged from his assertion that Homer’s verse, if we could
hear the living Homer, would affect us “like an elegant and simple
melody from an African of the Gold Coast.”[35] The remedy for such inept
scholarship lies in culture, in the vitalization of knowledge. The
scholar must not be a mere knower; all his powers must be harmoniously
developed.
A last illustration of Arnold’s insistence that knowledge be vital may
be drawn from his writings on religion and theology. Again criticism and
culture are the passwords that open the way to a new and better order of
things. Formulas, Arnold urges, have fastened themselves constrainingly
upon the English religious mind. Traditional interpretations of the
Bible have come to be received as beyond cavil. These interpretations
are really human inventions--the product of the ingenious thinking of
theologians like Calvin and Luther. Yet they have so authenticated
themselves that for most readers to-day the Bible means solely what it
meant for the exacerbated theological mind of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. If religion is to be vital, if knowledge of the
Bible is to be genuine and real, there must be a critical examination of
what this book means for the disinterested intelligence of to-day; the
Bible, as literature, must be interpreted anew, sympathetically and
imaginatively; the moral inspiration the Bible has to offer, even to men
who are rigidly insistent on scientific habits of thought and standards
of historical truth, must be disengaged from what is unverifiable and
transitory, and made real and persuasive. “I write,” Arnold declares,
“to convince the lover of religion that by following habits of
intellectual seriousness he need not, so far as religion is concerned,
lose anything. Taking the Old Testament as Israel’s magnificent
establishment of the theme, _Righteousness is salvation!_ taking the New
as the perfect elucidation by Jesus of what righteousness is and how
salvation is won, I do not fear comparing even the power over the soul
and imagination of the Bible, taken in this sense,--a sense which is at
the same time solid,--with the like power in the old materialistic and
miraculous sense for the Bible, which is not.”[36] This definition of
what Arnold hopes to do for the Bible may be supplemented by a
description of the method in which culture works towards the ends
desired: “Difficult, certainly, is the right reading of the Bible, and
true culture, too, is difficult. For true culture implies not only
knowledge, but right tact and justness of judgment, forming themselves
by and with knowledge; without this tact it is not true culture.
Difficult, however, as culture is, it is necessary. For, after all, the
Bible is _not_ a talisman, to be taken and used literally; neither is
any existing church a talisman, whatever pretensions of the sort it may
make, for giving the right interpretation of the Bible. Only true
culture can give us this interpretation; so that if conduct is, as it
is, inextricably bound up with the Bible and the right interpretation of
it, then the importance of culture becomes unspeakable. For if conduct
is necessary (and there is nothing so necessary), culture is
necessary.”[37]
In all these various ways, then, that have been illustrated, culture is
a specific against the ills that society is heir to. Culture is vital
knowledge, and the critic is its fosterer and guardian; culture and
criticism work together for the preservation of the integrity of the
human type against all the disasters that threaten it from the storm and
stress of modern life. Politics, religion, scholarship, science, each
has its special danger for the individual; each seizes upon him, subdues
him relentlessly to the need of the moment and the requirements of some
particular function, and converts him often into a mere distorted
fragment of humanity. Against this tyranny of the moment, against the
specializing and materializing trend of modern life, criticism offers a
powerful safeguard. Criticism is ever concerned with archetypal
excellence, is continually disengaging, with fine discrimination, what
is transitory and accidental from what is permanent and essential in all
that man busies himself about, and is thus perpetually helping every
individual to the apprehension of his “best self,” to the development of
what is real and absolute and the elimination of what is false or
deforming. And in doing all this the critic acts as the appreciator of
life; he is not the abstract thinker. He apprehends the ideal
intuitively; he reaches it by the help of the feelings and the
imagination and a species of exquisite tact, not through a series of
syllogisms; he is really a poet, rather than a philosopher.
This conception of the nature and functions of criticism makes
intelligible and justifies a phrase of Arnold’s that has often been
impugned--his description of poetry as a criticism of life. To this
account of poetry it has been objected that criticism is an intellectual
process, while poetry is primarily an affair of the imagination and the
heart; and that to regard poetry as a criticism of life is to take a
view of poetry that tends to convert it into mere rhetorical
moralizing--the decorative expression in rhythmical language of abstract
truth about life. This misinterpretation of Arnold’s meaning becomes
impossible, if the foregoing theory of criticism be borne in mind.
Criticism is the determination and the representation of the archetypal,
of the ideal. Moreover, it is not a determination of the archetypal
formally and theoretically, through speculation or the enumeration of
abstract qualities; Arnold’s disinclination for abstractions has been
repeatedly noted. The process to be used in criticism is a vital process
of appreciation, in which the critic, sensitive to the whole value of
human life, to the appeal of art and of conduct and of manners as well
as of abstract truth, feels his way to a synthetic grasp upon what is
ideally best, and portrays this concretely and persuasively for the
popular imagination. Such an appreciator of life, if he produce beauty
in verse, if he embody his vision of the ideal in metre, will be a poet.
In other words, the poet is the appreciator of human life who sees in it
most sensitively, inclusively, and penetratingly what is archetypal, and
evokes his vision before others through rhythm and rhyme. In this sense
poetry can hardly be denied to be a criticism of life; it is the winning
portrayal of the ideal of human life as this ideal shapes itself in the
mind of the poet. Such a criticism of life Dante gives, a determination
and portrayal of what is ideally best in life according to mediæval
conceptions; a representation of life in its integrity with a due
adjustment of the claims of all the powers that enter into
it--friendship, ambition, patriotism, loyalty, religion, artistic
ardour, love. Such a criticism of life Shakespeare incidentally gives in
terms of the full scope of Elizabethan experience in England, with due
imaginative setting forth of the splendid vistas of possible achievement
and unlimited development that the new knowledge and the discoveries of
the Renaissance had opened. In short, the great poet is the typically
sensitive, penetrative, and suggestive appreciator of life,--who calls
to his aid, to make his appreciation as resonant and persuasive as
possible, as potent as possible over men’s minds and hearts, all the
emotional and imaginative resources of language,--rhythm, figures,
allegory, symbolism,--whatever will enable him to impose his
appreciation of life upon others and to insinuate into their souls his
sense of the relative values of human acts and characters and passions;
whatever will help him to make more overweeningly beautiful and
insistently eloquent his vision of truth and beauty. In this sense the
poet is the limiting ideal of the appreciative critic, and poetry is the
ultimate criticism of life--the finest portrayal each age can attain to
of what seems to it in life most significant and delightful.
IV
The purpose with which Arnold writes is now fairly apparent. His aim is
to shape in happy fashion the lives of his fellows; to free them from
the bonds that the struggle for existence imposes upon them; to enlarge
their horizons, to enrich them spiritually, and to call all that is best
within them into as vivid play as possible. When we turn to Arnold’s
literary criticism we shall find this purpose no less paramount.
A glance through the volumes of Arnold’s essays renders it clear that
his selection of a poet or a prose-writer for discussion was usually
made with a view to putting before English readers some desirable trait
of character for their imitation, some temperamental excellence that
they are lacking in, some mode of belief that they neglect, some habit
of thought that they need to cultivate. Joubert is studied and portrayed
because of his single-hearted love of light, the purity of his
disinterested devotion to truth, the fine distinction of his thought,
and the freedom of his spirit from the sordid stains of worldly life.
Heine is a typical leader in the war of emancipation, the arch-enemy of
Philistinism, and the light-hearted, indomitable, foe of prejudice and
cant. Maurice and Eugénie de Guérin are winning examples of the
spiritual distinction that modern Romanism can induce in timely-happy
souls. Scherer, whose critiques upon Milton and Goethe are painstakingly
reproduced in the _Mixed Essays_, represents French critical
intelligence in its best play--acute, yet comprehensive; exacting, yet
sympathetic; regardful of _nuances_ and delicately refining, and yet
virile and constructive. Of the importance for modern England of
emphasis on all these qualities of mind and heart, Arnold was securely
convinced.