moral considerations, his treatment is apt, none the less, to reveal his
ethical bias. Again and again in his essays on poetry, for example, it
is the substance of poetry that he is chiefly anxious to handle, while
the form is left with incidental analysis. Wordsworth is the poet of joy
in widest commonalty spread--the poet whose criticism of life is most
sound and enduring and salutary. Shelley is a febrile creature,
insecure in his sense of worldly values, “a beautiful and ineffectual
angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.”[38] The essay on
_Heine_ helps us only mediately to an appreciation of the volatile
beauty of Heine’s songs, or to an intenser delight in the mere surface
play of hues and moods in his verse. From the essay on _George Sand_, to
be sure, we receive many vivid impressions of the emotional and
imaginative scope of French romance; for this essay was written _con
amore_ in the revivification of an early mood of devotion, and in an
unusually heightened style; the essay on _Emerson_ is the one study that
has in places somewhat of the same lyrical intensity and the same
vividness of realization. Yet even in the essay on _George Sand_, the
essayist is, on the whole, bent on revealing the temperament of the
woman rather in its decisive influence on her theories of life than in
its reaction upon her art as art. There is hardly a word of the Romance
as a definite literary form, of George Sand’s relation to earlier French
writers of fiction, or of her distinctive methods of work as a portrayer
of the great human spectacle. In short, literature as art, literary
forms as definite modes of artistic expression, the technique of the
literary craftsman, receive, for the most part, from Arnold, slight
attention.
Perhaps the one piece of work in which Arnold set himself, with some
thoroughness, to the discussion of a purely literary problem was his
series of lectures on _Translating Homer_. These lectures were produced,
before his sense of responsibility for the moral regeneration of the
Philistine had become importunate, and were addressed to an academic
audience. For these reasons, the treatment of literary topics is more
disinterested and less interrupted by practical considerations. Indeed,
as will be presently noted in illustration of another aspect of Arnold’s
work, these lectures contain very subtle and delicate appreciations,
show everywhere exquisite responsiveness to changing effects of style,
and enrich gratefully the vocabulary of impressionistic criticism.
Even in these exceptional lectures, however, Arnold’s ethical interest
asserts itself. In the course of them he gives an account of the grand
style in poetry,--of that poetic manner that seems to him to stand
highest in the scale of excellence; and he carefully notes as an
essential of this manner,--of this grand, style,--its moral power; “it
can form the character, ... is edifying, ... can refine the raw natural
man, ... can transmute him.”[39] This definition of the grand style will
be discussed presently in connection with Arnold’s general theory of
poetry; it is enough to note here that it illustrates the
inseparableness in Arnold’s mind between art and morals.
His description of poetry as a criticism of life has already been
mentioned. This doctrine is early implied in Arnold’s writings, for
example, in the passage just quoted from the lectures on _Translating
Homer_; it becomes more explicit in the _Last Words_, appended to these
lectures, where the critic asserts that “the noble and profound
application of ideas to life is the most essential part of poetic
greatness.”[40] It is elaborated in the essays on _Wordsworth_ (1879),
on the _Study of Poetry_ (1880), and on _Byron_ (1881). “It is
important, therefore,” the essay on _Wordsworth_ assures us, “to hold
fast to this: that poetry is at bottom a criticism of life; that the
greatness of a poet lies in his powerful and beautiful application of
ideas to life,--to the question: How to live.”[41] And in the essay on
the _Study of Poetry_ Arnold urges that “in poetry, as a criticism of
life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of
poetic truth and poetic beauty, the spirit of our race will find, ... as
time goes on and as other helps fail, its consolation and stay.”[42]
With this doctrine of the indissoluble connection between the highest
poetic excellence and essential nobleness of subject-matter probably
only the most irreconcilable advocates of art for art’s sake would
quarrel. So loyal an adherent of art as Walter Pater suggests a test of
poetic “greatness” substantially the same with Arnold’s. “It is on the
quality of the matter it informs or controls, its compass, its variety,
its alliance to great ends, or the depth of the note of revolt, or the
largeness of hope in it, that the greatness of literary art depends, as
_The Divine Comedy_, _Paradise Lost_, _Les Misérables_, _The English
Bible_, are great art.”[43] This may be taken as merely a different
phrasing of Arnold’s principle that “the greatness of a poet lies in his
powerful and beautiful application of ideas to life--to the question:
How to live.” Surely, then, we are not at liberty to press any objection
to Arnold’s general theory of poetry on the ground of its being, in its
essence, over-ethical.
There remains nevertheless the question of emphasis. In the application
to special cases of this test of essential worth, either the critic may
be constitutionally biassed in favour of a somewhat restricted range of
definite ideas about life, or even when he is fairly hospitable towards
various moral idioms, he may still be so intent upon making ethical
distinctions as to fail to give their due to the purely artistic
qualities of poetry. It is in this latter way that Arnold is most apt to
offend. The emphasis in the discussions of Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron,
Keats, Gray, and Milton is prevailingly on the ethical characteristics
of each poet; and the reader carries away from an essay a vital
conception of the play of moral energy and of spiritual passion in the
poet’s verse rather than an impression of his peculiar adumbration of
beauty, the characteristic rhythms of his imaginative movement, the
delicate colour modulations on the surface of his image of life.
It must, however, be borne in mind that Arnold has specially admitted
the incompleteness of his description of poetry as “a criticism of
life”; this criticism, he has expressly added, must be made in
conformity “to the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.” “The
profound criticism of life” characteristic of “the few supreme masters”
must exhibit itself “in indissoluble connection with the laws of poetic
truth and beauty.”[44] Is there, then, to be found in Arnold any account
of certain laws the observance of which secures poetic beauty and truth?
Is there any description of the special ways in which poetic beauty and
truth manifest themselves, of the formal characteristics to be found in
poetry where poetic beauty and truth are present? Does Arnold either
suggest the methods the poet must follow to attain these qualities, or
classify the various subordinate effects through which poetic beauty and
truth invariably reveal their presence? The most apposite parts of his
writings to search for some declaration on these points are the
lectures on _Translating Homer_, and the second series of his essays
which deal chiefly with the study of poetry. Here, if anywhere, we ought
to find a registration of beliefs as regards the precise nature and
source of poetic beauty and truth.
And indeed throughout all these writings, which run through a
considerable period of time, Arnold makes fairly consistent use of a
half-dozen categories for his analyses of poetic effects. These
categories are substance and matter, style and manner, diction and
movement. Of the substance of really great poetry we learn repeatedly
that it must be made up of ideas of profound significance “on man, on
nature, and on human life.”[45] This is, however, merely the
prescription already so often noted that poetry, to reach the highest
excellence, must contain a penetrating and ennobling criticism of life.
In the essay on _Byron_, however, there is something formally added to
this requisition of “truth and seriousness of substance and matter”;
besides these, “felicity and perfection of diction and manner, as these
are exhibited in the best poets, are what constitute a criticism of life
made in conformity with the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.”[46]
There must then be felicity and perfection of diction and manner in
poetry of the highest order; these terms are somewhat vague, but serve
at least to guide us on our analytic way. In the essay on the _Study of
Poetry_, there is still farther progress made in the description of
poetic excellence. “To the style and manner of the best poetry, their
special character, their accent is given by their diction, and, even yet
more, by their movement. And though we distinguish between the two
characters, the two accents, of superiority” (_i.e._ between the
superiority that comes from substance and the superiority that comes
from style), “yet they are nevertheless vitally connected one with the
other. The superior character of truth and seriousness, in the matter
and substance of the best poetry, is inseparable from the superiority of
diction and movement marking its style and manner. The two superiorities
are closely related, and are in steadfast proportion one to the other.
So far as high poetic truth and seriousness are wanting to a poet’s
matter and substance, so far also, we may be sure, will a high poetic
stamp of diction and movement be wanting to his style and manner.”[47]
Now that there is this intimate and necessary union between a poet’s
mode of conceiving life and his manner of poetic expression, is hardly
disputable. The image of life in a poet’s mind is simply the outside
world transformed by the complex of sensations and thoughts and emotions
peculiar to the poet; and this image inevitably frames for itself a
visible and audible expression that delicately utters its individual
character--distils that character subtly through word and sentence,
rhythm and metaphor, image and figure of speech, and through their
integration into a vital work of art. Moreover, the poet’s style is
itself in general the product of the same personality which determines
his image of life, and must therefore be, like his image of life,
delicately striated with the markings of his play of thought and feeling
and fancy. The close correspondence, then, between the poet’s
subject-matter and his manner or style is indubitable. The part of
Arnold’s conclusion or the point in his method that is regrettable is
the exclusive stress that he throws on this dependence of style upon
worth of substance. He converts style into a mere function of the moral
quality of a poet’s thought about life, and fails to furnish any
delicately studied categories for the appreciation of poetic style apart
from its moral implications.
Take, for example, the judgments passed in the _Study of Poetry_ upon
various poets; in every instance the estimate of the poet’s style turns
upon the quality of his thought about life. Is it Chaucer whose right to
be ranked as a classic is mooted? He cannot be ranked as a classic
because “the substance of” his poetry has not “high seriousness.”[48] Is
it Burns whose relative rank is being fixed? Burns through lack of
“absolute sincerity” falls short of “high seriousness,” and, hence, is
not to be placed among the classics. And thus continually with Arnold,
effects of style are merged in moral qualities, and the reader gains
little insight into the refinements of poetical manner except as these
derive directly from the poet’s moral consciousness. The categories of
style and manner, diction and movement, are everywhere subordinated to
the categories of substance and matter, are treated as almost wholly
derivative. “Felicity and perfection of diction and manner,” wherever
they are admittedly present, are usually explained as the direct result
of the poet’s lofty conception of life. Such a treatment of questions of
style does not further us much on our way to a knowledge of the “laws of
poetic beauty and poetic truth.”
Doubtless somewhat more disinterested analyses of style may be found in
the lectures on _Translating Homer_. These discussions do not reach very
definite conclusions, but they at least consider poetic excellence as
for the moment dependent on something else than the moral mood of the
poet. For example, the grand style is analyzed into two varieties, the
grand style in severity and the grand style in simplicity. Each of these
styles is described and illustrated so that it enters into the reader’s
imagination and increases his sensitiveness to poetic excellence.
Somewhat later in the lectures, the distinction between real simplicity
in poetic style and sophisticated simplicity is drawn with exquisite
delicacy of appreciation. Throughout these passages, there is an effort
to deal directly with artistic effects for their own sake and apart from
their significance as expressive of _ethos_. Yet even here Arnold’s
ethical bias reveals itself in a tendency, while he is describing the
moods back of these artistic qualities, to use words that have moral
implications, and that suggest the issue of such moods in conduct.
Self-restraint, proud gravity, are among the moods that are found back
of the grand style in severity; over-refinement, super-subtle
sophistication, account for Tennyson’s _simplesse_.
To bring together, then, the results of this somewhat protracted
analysis: Arnold ostensibly admits that poetry, to be of the highest
excellence, must, in addition to containing a criticism of life of
profound significance, conform to the laws of poetic beauty and truth.
He accepts as necessary categories, for the appreciation of poetical
excellence, style and manner, diction and movement. Yet his most
important general assertion about these latter purely formal
determinations of poetry is that they are inseparably connected with
substance and matter; similarly, whenever he discusses artistic effects,
he is apt to find them interesting simply as serving to interpret the
artist’s prevailing mood towards life; and even where, as is at times
doubtless the case, he escapes for the moment from his ethical interest
and appreciates with imaginative delicacy the individual quality of a
poem or a poet’s style, he is nearly always found sooner or later
explaining this quality as originating in the poet’s peculiar _ethos_.
As for any systematic or even incidental study of “the laws of poetic
beauty and truth,” we search for it through his pages in vain.
V
But it would be wrong in characterizing Arnold’s essays to attribute
their lack of theorizing about questions of art solely to his
preoccupation with conduct. For theory in general and for abstractions
in general,--for all sorts of philosophizing,--Arnold openly professes
his dislike. “Perhaps we shall one day learn,” he says, in his essay on
_Wordsworth_, “to make this proposition general, and to say: Poetry is
the reality, philosophy the illusion.” Distrust of the abstract and of
the purely theoretical shows itself throughout his literary criticism
and determines many of its characteristics.
His hostility to systems and to system-makers has already been pointed
out; this hostility admits of no exception in favour of the systematic
critic. “There is the judgment of ignorance, the judgment of
incompatibility, the judgment of envy and jealousy. Finally, there is
the systematic judgment, and this judgment is the most worthless of
all.... Its author has not really his eye upon the professed object of
his criticism at all, but upon something else which he wants to prove by
means of that object. He neither really tells us, therefore, anything
about the object, nor anything about his own ignorance of the object. He
never fairly looks at it; he is looking at something else.”[49] This
hypnotizing effect that a preconceived theory exerts on a critic, is
Arnold’s first reason for objecting to systematic criticism; the critic
with a theory is bound to find what he goes in search of, and nothing
else. He goes out--to change somewhat one of Arnold’s own figures--like
Saul, the son of Kish, in search of his father’s asses; and he comes
back with the authentic animals instead of the traditional windfall of a
kingdom.
Nor is preoccupation with a pet theory the sole incapacity that Arnold
finds in the systematic critic; such a critic is almost sure to be
over-intellectualized, a victim of abstractions and definitions,
dependent for his judgments on conceptions, and lacking in temperamental
sensitiveness to the appeal of literature as art. He is merely a
triangulator of the landscape of literature, and moves resolutely in his
process of triangulation from one fixed point to another; he finds
significant only such parts of his literary experience as he can sum up
in a definite abstract formula at some one of these arbitrary
halting-places; his ultimate opinion of the ground he covers is merely
the sum total of a comparatively small number of such abstract
expressions. To the manifold wealth of the landscape in colour, in
light, in shade, and in poetic suggestiveness, the system-monger, the
theoretical critic, has all the time been blind.
Knowledge, too, even though it be not severely systematized, may
interfere with the free play of critical intelligence. An oversupply of
unvitalized facts or ideas, even though these facts or ideas be not
organized into an importunate theory, may prove disastrous to the
critic. This danger Arnold has amusingly set forth in his _Last Words_
on Homeric translation: “Much as Mr. Newman was mistaken when he talked
of my rancour, he is entirely right when he talks of my ignorance. And
yet, perverse as it seems to say so, I sometimes find myself wishing,
when dealing with these matters of poetical criticism, that my ignorance
were even greater than it is. To handle these matters properly, there is
needed a poise so perfect that the least overweight in any direction
tends to destroy the balance. Temper destroys it, a crotchet destroys
it, even erudition may destroy it. To press to the sense of the thing
with which one is dealing, not to go off on some collateral issue about
the thing, is the hardest matter in the world. The ‘thing itself’ with
which one is here dealing--the critical perception of poetic truth--is
of all things the most volatile, elusive, and evanescent; by even
pressing too impetuously after it, one runs the risk of losing it. The
critic of poetry should have the finest tact, the nicest moderation, the
most free, flexible, and elastic spirit imaginable; he should be,
indeed, the ‘ondoyant et divers,’ the _undulating and diverse_ being of
Montaigne. The less he can deal with his object simply and freely, the
more things he has to take into account in dealing with it,--the more,
in short, he has to encumber himself,--so much the greater force of
spirit he needs to retain his elasticity. But one cannot exactly have
this greater force by wishing for it; so, for the force of spirit one
has, the load put upon it is often heavier than it will well bear. The
late Duke of Wellington said of a certain peer that ‘it was a great pity
his education had been so far too much for his abilities.’ In like
manner one often sees erudition out of all proportion to its owner’s
critical faculty. Little as I know, therefore, I am always apprehensive,
in dealing with poetry, lest even that little should prove too much for
my abilities.”[50]
Discreet ignorance, then, is Arnold’s counsel of perfection to the
would-be critic. And, accordingly, he himself is desultory from
conscientious motives and unsystematic by fixed rule. There are two
passages in his writings where he explains confidentially his methods
and his reasons for choosing them. The first occurs in a letter of 1864:
“My sinuous, easy, unpolemical mode of proceeding has been adopted by
me, first, because I really think it the best way of proceeding, if one
wants to get at, and keep with, truth; secondly, because I am convinced
only by a literary form of this kind being given to them can ideas such
as mine ever gain any access in a country such as ours.”[51] The second
passage occurs in the Preface to his first series of _Essays in
Criticism_ (1865): “Indeed, it is not in my nature--some of my critics
would rather say not in my power--to dispute on behalf of any opinion,
even my own, very obstinately. To try and approach truth on one side
after another, not to strive or cry, not to persist in pressing forward,
on any one side, with violence and self-will, it is only thus, it seems
to me, that mortals may hope to gain any vision of the mysterious
goddess, whom we shall never see except in outline. He who will do
nothing but fight impetuously towards her, on his own one favourite
particular line, is inevitably destined to run his head into the folds
of the black robe in which she is wrapped.”[52]
Such, then, is Arnold’s ideal of critical method. The critic is not to
move from logical point to point as, for example, Francis Jeffrey was
wont, in his essays, to move, with an advocate’s devotion to system and
desire to make good some definite conclusion. Rather he is to give rein
to his temperament; he is to make use of intuitions, imaginations, hints
that touch the heart, as well as abstract principles, syllogisms, and
arguments; and so he is to reach out tentatively through all his powers
after truth if haply he may find her; in the hope that thus, keeping
close to the concrete aspects of his subject, he may win to an ever more
inclusive and intimate command of its surface and configurations. The
type of mind most apt for this kind of critical work is the “free,
flexible, and elastic spirit,” described in the passage just quoted from
the _Last Words_; the “undulating and diverse being of Montaigne.”
A critic of this type will palpably concern himself slightly with
abstractions, with theorizings, with definitions. And, indeed, Arnold’s
unwillingness to define becomes at times almost ludicrous. “Nothing has
raised more questioning among my critics than these words--_noble, the
grand style_.... Alas! the grand style is the last matter in the world
for verbal definition to deal with adequately. One may say of it as is
said of faith: ‘One must feel it in order to know it.’”[53] Similarly in
the _Study of Poetry_, Arnold urges: “Critics give themselves great
labour to draw out what in the abstract constitutes the characters of a
high quality of poetry. It is much better to have recourse to concrete
examples.... If we are asked to define this mark and accent in the
abstract, our answer must be: No, for we should thereby be darkening the
question, not clearing it.” Again: “I may discuss what in the abstract
constitutes the grand style; but that sort of general discussion never
much helps our judgment of particular instances.”[54] These passages are
characteristic; rarely indeed does Arnold consent to commit himself to
the control of a definition. He prefers to convey into his readers’ mind
a living realization of the thing or the object he treats of rather than
to put before them its logically articulated outlines.