he is apt to be capricious in his treatment of it and to follow in his
subdivisions and classifications some external clue rather than logical
structure. In the essay on _Celtic Literature_ he discusses the various
ways of handling nature in poetry, and finds four such ways--the
conventional way, the faithful way, the Greek way, and the magical way.
The classification recommends itself through its superficial charm and
facility, yet rests on no psychological truth, or at any rate carries
with it, as Arnold treats it, no psychological suggestions; it gives no
swift insight into the origin in the poet’s mind and heart of these
different modes of conceiving of nature. Hence the classification, as
Arnold uses it, is merely a temporary makeshift for rather gracefully
grouping effects, not an analytic interpretation of these effects
through a reduction of them to their varying sources in thought and
feeling.
This may be taken as typical of Arnold’s critical methods. As we read
his essays we have little sense of making definite progress in the
comprehension of literature as an art among arts, as well as in the
appreciation of an individual author or poem. We are not being
intellectually oriented, as in reading the most stimulating critical
work; we are not getting an ever-surer sense of the points of the
compass. Essays, to have this orienting power, need not be continually
prating of theories and laws; they need not be rabidly scientific in
phrase or in method. But they must issue from a mind that has come to an
understanding with itself about the genesis of art in the genius of the
artist; about the laws that, when the utmost plea has been made for
freedom and caprice, regulate artistic production; about the history and
evolution of art forms; and about the relations of the arts among
themselves and to the other activities of life. It may fairly be doubted
if Arnold had ever wrought out for himself consistent conclusions on all
or most of these topics. Indeed, the mere mention of his name in
connection with such a formal list of topics suggests the kind of
mock-serious deprecatory paragraph with which the “unlearned
bellettristic trifler” was wont to reply to charges of dilettantism--a
paragraph sure to carry in its tail a stinging bit of sarcasm at the
expense of pedantry and unenlightened formalism. And yet, great as must
be every one’s respect for the thorough scholarship and widely varied
accomplishment that Arnold made so light of and carried off so easily,
the doubt must nevertheless remain whether a firmer grasp on theory, and
a more consistent habit of thinking out literary questions to their
principles, would not have invigorated his work as a critic and given it
greater permanence and richer suggestiveness.
VI
It is, then, as an appreciator of what may perhaps be called the
spiritual qualities of literature that Arnold is most distinctively a
furtherer of criticism. An appreciator of beauty,--of true beauty
wherever found,--that is what he would willingly be; and yet, as the
matter turns out, the beauty that he most surely enjoys and reveals has
invariably a spiritual aroma,--is the finer breath of intense spiritual
life. Or, if spiritual be too mystical a word to apply to Homer and
Goethe, perhaps Arnold should rather be termed an appreciator of such
beauty in literature as carries with it an inevitable suggestion of
elevation and nobleness of character in the author.
The importance of appreciation in criticism Arnold has described in one
of the _Mixed Essays_: “Admiration is salutary and formative; ... but
things admirable are sown wide, and are to be gathered here and gathered
there, not all in one place; and until we have gathered them wherever
they are to be found, we have not known the true salutariness and
formativeness of admiration. The quest is large; and occupation with the
unsound or half-sound, delight in the not good or less good, is a sore
let and hindrance to us. Release from such occupation and delight sets
us free for ranging farther, and for perfecting our sense of beauty. He
is the happy man, who, encumbering himself with the love of nothing
which is not beautiful, is able to embrace the greatest number of things
beautiful in his life.”[55]
On this disinterested quest, then, for the beautiful, Arnold in his
essays nominally fares forth. Yet certain limitations in his
appreciation, over and beyond his prevalent ethical interest, must at
once be noted. Music, painting, and sculpture have seemingly nothing to
say to him. In his _Letters_ there are only a few allusions to any of
these arts, and such as occur do not surpass in significance the
comments of the chance loiterer in foreign galleries or visitor of
concert rooms. In his essays there are none of the correlations between
the effects and methods of literature and those of kindred arts that may
do so much either to individualize or to illustrate the characteristics
of poetry. For Arnold, literature and poetry seem to make up the whole
range of art.
Within these limits, however,--the limits imposed by preoccupation with
conduct and by carelessness of all arts except literature,--Arnold has
been a prevailing revealer of beauty. Not his most hostile critic can
question the delicacy of his perception, so far as he allows his
perception free play. On the need of nice and ever nicer discriminations
in the apprehension of the shifting values of literature, he has himself
often insisted. Critics who let their likes and dislikes assert
themselves turbulently, to the destruction of fine distinctions, always
fall under Arnold’s condemnation. “When Mr. Palgrave dislikes a thing,
he feels no pressure constraining him, either to try his dislike closely
or to express it moderately; he does not mince matters, he gives his
dislike all its own way.... He dislikes the architecture of the Rue
Rivoli, and he puts it on the level with the architecture of Belgravia
and Gower Street; he lumps them all together in one condemnation; he
loses sight of the shade, the distinction which is here everything.” For
a similar blurring of impressions, Professor Newman is taken to task,
though in Newman’s case the faulty appreciations are due to a different
cause: “Like all learned men, accustomed to desire definite rules, he
draws his conclusions too absolutely; he wants to include too much under
his rules; he does not quite perceive that in poetical criticism the
shade, the fine distinction, is everything; and that, when he has once
missed this, in all he says he is in truth but beating the air.” Here,
again, what Arnold pleads for is temperamental sensitiveness, delicacy
of perception. To appreciate literature more and more sensitively in
terms of “an undulating and diverse temperament,” this is the ideal that
he puts before literary criticism.
His own appreciations of poetry are probably richest, most
discriminating, and most disinterested in the lectures on _Translating
Homer_. The imaginative tact is unfailing with which he renders the
contour and the subject-qualities of the various poems that he comments
on; and equally noteworthy is the divining instinct with which he
captures the spirit of each poet and sets it before us with a phrase or
a symbol. The “inversion and pregnant conciseness” of Milton’s style,
its “laborious and condensed fulness”; the plainspokenness, freshness,
vigorousness, and yet fancifulness and curious complexity of Chapman’s
style; Spenser’s “sweet and easy slipping movement”; Scott’s “bastard
epic style”; the “one continual falsetto” of Macaulay’s “pinchbeck
_Roman Ballads_,”--all these characterizations are delicately sure in
their phrasing and suggestion, and are the clearer because the various
styles are made to stand in continual contrast with Homer’s style, the
rapidity, directness, simplicity, and nobleness of which Arnold keeps
ever present in our consciousness. Incidentally, too, such suggestive
discriminations as that between _simplesse_ and _simplicité_, the
“semblance” of simplicity and the “real quality,” are wrought out for
the reader as the critic goes on with his pursuit of the essential
qualities of Homeric thought and diction. To read these lectures is a
thoroughly tempering process; a process that renders the mind and
imagination permanently finer in texture, more elastic, more sensitively
sure in tone, and subtly responsive to the demands of good art.
The essay on the _Study of Poetry_, which was written as preface to
Ward’s _English Poets_, is also rich in appreciation, and at times
almost as disinterested as the lectures on Homer; yet perhaps never
quite so disinterested. For in the _Study of Poetry_ Arnold is
persistently aware of his conception of “the grand style” and bent on
winning his readers to make it their own. Only poets who attain this
grand style deserve to be “classics,” and the continual insistence on
the note of “high seriousness”--its presence or absence--becomes rather
wearisome. Moreover, Arnold’s preoccupation with this ultimate manner
and quality tends to limit the freedom and delicate truth of his
appreciations of other manners and minor qualities. At times, one is
tempted to charge Arnold with some of the unresponsiveness of
temperament that he ascribes to systematic critics, and to find even
Arnold himself under the perilous sway of a fixed idea. Yet, when all is
said, the _Study of Poetry_ is full of fine things, and does much to
widen the range of appreciation, and, at the same time, to make
appreciation more certain. “The liquid diction, the fluid movement of
Chaucer, his large, free, sound representation of things”; Burns’s
“touches of piercing, sometimes almost intolerable, pathos,” his
“archness,” too, and his “soundness”; Shelley, “that beautiful spirit
building his many-coloured haze of words and images ‘Pinnacled dim in
the intense inane’”; these, and other interpretations like them, are
easily adequate and carry the qualities of each poet readily into the
minds and imaginations of sympathetic readers. Appreciation is much the
richer for this essay on the _Study of Poetry_.
Nor must Arnold’s suggestive appreciations of prose style be forgotten.
Several of them have passed into standard accounts of clearly recognized
varieties of prose diction. Arnold’s phrasing of the matter has made all
sensitive English readers permanently more sensitive to “the warm glow,
blithe movement, and soft pliancy of life” of the Attic style, and also
permanently more hostile to “the over-heavy richness and encumbered
gait” of the Asiatic style. Equally good is his account of the
Corinthian style: “It has glitter without warmth, rapidity without ease,
effectiveness without charm. Its characteristic is that it has no
_soul_; all it exists for, is to get its ends, to make its points, to
damage its adversaries, to be admired, to triumph. A style so bent on
effect at the expense of soul, simplicity, and delicacy; a style so
little studious of the charm of the great models; so far from classic
truth and grace, must surely be said to have the note of
provinciality.”[56] “Middle-class Macaulayese” is his name for Hepworth
Dixon’s style; a style which he evidently regards as likely to gain
favour and establish itself. “I call it Macaulayese ... because it has
the same internal and external characteristics as Macaulay’s style; the
external characteristic being a hard, metallic movement with nothing of
the soft play of life, and the internal characteristic being a perpetual
semblance of hitting the right nail on the head without the reality. And
I call it middle-class Macaulayese, because it has these faults without
the compensation of great studies and of conversance with great affairs,
by which Macaulay partly redeemed them.”[57] It will, of course, be
noted that these latter appreciations deal for the most part with
divergences from the beautiful in style, but they none the less quicken
and refine the æsthetic sense.
Finally, throughout the two series of miscellaneous essays there is, in
the midst of much business with ethical matters, an often-recurring free
play of imagination in the interests, solely and simply, of beauty. Many
are the happy windfalls these essays offer of delicate interpretation
both of poetic effect and of creative movement, and many are the
memorable phrases and symbols by which incidentally the essential
quality of a poet or prose-writer is securely lodged in the reader’s
consciousness.
And yet, wide ranging and delicately sensitive as are Arnold’s
appreciations, the feeling will assert itself, in a final survey of his
work in literary criticism, that he nearly always has designs on his
readers and that appreciation is a means to an end. The end in view is
the exorcism of the spirit of Philistinism. Arnold’s conscience is
haunted by this hideous apparition as Luther’s was by the devil, and he
is all the time metaphorically throwing his inkstand at the spectre. Or,
to put the matter in another way, his one dominating wish is to help
modern Englishmen to “conquer the hard unintelligence” which is “their
bane; to supple and reduce it by culture, by a growth in the variety,
fulness, and sweetness of their spiritual life”; and the appreciative
interpretation of literature to as wide a circle of readers as possible
seems to him one of the surest ways of thus educing in his
fellow-countrymen new spiritual qualities. It must not be forgotten that
Matthew Arnold was the son of Thomas Arnold, master of Rugby; there is
in him a hereditary pedagogic bias--an inevitable trend towards moral
suasion. The pedagogic spirit has suffered a sea-change into something
rich and strange, and yet traces of its origin linger about it.
Criticism with Arnold is rarely, if ever, irresponsible; it is our
schoolmaster to bring us to culture.
In a letter of 1863 Arnold speaks of the great transformation which “in
this concluding half of the century the English spirit is destined to
undergo.” “I shall do,” he adds, “what I can for this movement in
literature; freer perhaps in that sphere than I could be in any other,
but with the risk always before me, if I cannot charm the wild beast of
Philistinism while I am trying to convert him, of being torn in pieces
by him.”[58] In charming the wild beast Arnold ultimately succeeded; and
yet there is a sense in which he fell a victim to his very success. The
presence of the beast, and the necessity of fluting to him debonairly
and winningly, fastened themselves on Arnold’s imagination, and subdued
him to a comparatively narrow range of subjects and set of interests.
From the point of view, at least, of what is desirable in appreciative
criticism, Arnold was injured by his sense of responsibility; he lacks
the detachment and the delicate mobility that are the redeeming traits
of modern dilettantism.
If, then, we regard Arnold as a writer with a task to accomplish, with
certain definite regenerative purposes to carry out, with a body of
original ideas about the conduct of life to inculcate, we must conclude
that he succeeded admirably in his work, followed out his ideas with
persistence and temerity through many regions of human activity, and
embodied them with unwearying ingenuity and persuasiveness in a wide
range of discussions. If, on the other hand, we consider him solely as a
literary critic, we are forced to admit that he is not the ideal
literary critic; he is not the ideal literary critic because he is so
much more, and because his interests lie so decisively outside of art.
Nor is this opinion meant to imply an ultimate theory of art for art’s
sake, or to suggest any limitation of criticism to mere impressionism or
appreciation. Literature must be known historically and philosophically
before it can be adequately appreciated; that is emphatically true. Art
may or may not be justifiable solely as it is of service to society;
that need not be debated. But, in any event, literary criticism, if it
is to reach its utmost effectiveness, must regard works of art for the
time being as self-justified integrations of beauty and truth, and so
regarding them must record and interpret their power and their charm.
And this temporary isolating process is just the process which Arnold
very rarely, for the reasons that have been traced in detail, is willing
or able to go through with.
VII
When we turn to consider Arnold’s literary style, we are forced to admit
that this, too, has suffered from the strenuousness of his moral
purpose; it has been unduly sophisticated, here and there, because of
his desire to charm “the wild beast of Philistinism.” To this purpose
and this desire is owing, at least in part, that falsetto note--that
half-querulous, half-supercilious artificiality of tone--which is now
and then to be heard in his writing. To exaggerate the extent to which
this note is audible would doubtless be easy; an unprejudiced reader
will find long continuous passages of even Arnold’s most elaborately
designed writing free from any trace of undue self-consciousness or of
gentle condescension. And yet it is undeniable that when, apart from his
_Letters_, Arnold’s prose, as a whole, is compared with that of such a
writer, for example, as Cardinal Newman, there is in Arnold’s style, as
the ear listens for the quality of the bell-metal, not quite the same
beautifully clear and sincere resonance. There seems to be, now and
then, some unhappy warring of elements, some ill-adjustment of
over-tones, a trace of some flaw in mixing or casting.
Are not these defects in Arnold’s style due to his somewhat
self-conscious attempt to fascinate a recalcitrant public? Is it not the
assumption of a manner that jars on us often in Arnold’s less happy
moments? Has he not the pose of the man who overdoes bravado with the
hope of getting cleverly through a pass which he feels a bit trying to
his nerves? Arnold has a keen consciousness of the very stupid beast of
Philistinism lying in wait for him; and in the stress of the moment he
is guilty of a little exaggeration of manner; he is just a shade
unnatural in his flippancy; he treads his measure with an unduly mincing
flourish.
Arnold’s habit of half-mocking self-depreciation and of insincere
apology for supposititious personal shortcomings has already been
mentioned; to his controversial writings, particularly, it gives often a
raspingly supercilious tone. He insists with mock humbleness that he is
a “mere bellettristic trifler”; that he has no “system of philosophy
with principles coherent, interdependent, subordinate, and derivative”
to help him in the discussion of abstract questions. He assures us that
he is merely “a feeble unit” of the “English middle class”; he
deprecates being called a professor because it is a title he shares
“with so many distinguished men--Professor Pepper, Professor Anderson,
Professor Frickel, and others--who adorn it,” he feels, much more than
he does. These mock apologies are always amusing and yet a bit
exasperating too. Why should Arnold regard it, we ask ourselves, as such
a relishing joke--the possibility that he has a defect? The implication
of almost arrogant self-satisfaction is troublesomely present to us.
Such passages certainly suggest that Arnold had an ingrained contempt
for the “beast” he was charming.
Yet, when all is said, much of this supercilious satire is irresistibly
droll, and refuses to be gainsaid. One of his most effective modes of
ridiculing his opponents is through conjuring up imaginary scenes in
which some ludicrous aspect of his opponent’s case or character is
thrown into diverting prominence. Is it the pompous, arrogant
self-satisfaction of the prosperous middle-class tradesman that Arnold
wishes to satirize? And more particularly is it the futility of the
_Saturday Review_ in holding up Benthamism--the systematic recognition
of such a smug man’s ideal of selfish happiness--as the true moral
ideal? Arnold represents himself as travelling on a suburban railway on
which a murder has recently been committed, and as falling into chat
with the middle-class frequenters of this route. The demoralization of
these worthy folk, Arnold assures us, was “something bewildering.”
“Myself a transcendentalist (as the _Saturday Review_ knows), I escaped
the infection; and, day after day, I used to ply my agitated
fellow-travellers with all the consolations which my transcendentalism
would naturally suggest to me. I reminded them how Cæsar refused to take
precautions against assassination, because life was not worth having at
the price of an ignoble solicitude for it. I reminded them what
insignificant atoms we all are in the life of the world. ‘Suppose the
worst to happen,’ I said, addressing a portly jeweller from Cheapside;
‘suppose even yourself to be the victim; _il n’y a pas d’homme
nécessaire_. We should miss you for a day or two upon the Woodford
Branch; but the great mundane movement would still go on, the gravel
walks of your villa would still be rolled, dividends would still be paid
at the Bank, omnibuses would still run, there would still be the old
crush at the corner of Fenchurch Street.’ All was of no avail. Nothing
could moderate in the bosom of the great English middle class, their
passionate, absorbing, almost bloodthirsty clinging to life.” This is,
of course, “admirable fooling”; and equally, of course, the little
imaginary scene serves perfectly the purposes of Arnold’s argument and
turns into ridicule the narrowness and overweening self-importance of
the smug tradesman.
Another instance of Arnold’s ability to conjure up fancifully a scene of
satirical import may be adduced from the first chapter of _Culture and
Anarchy_. Arnold has been ridiculing the worship of mere “bodily health
and vigour” as ends in themselves. “Why, one has heard people,” he
exclaims, “fresh from reading certain articles of the _Times_ on the
Registrar General’s returns of marriages and births in this country, who
would talk of our large English families in quite a solemn strain, as if
they had something in itself, beautiful, elevating, and meritorious in
them; as if the British Philistine would have only to present himself
before the Great Judge with his twelve children, in order to be received
among the sheep as a matter of right!”
It is a fact worth remarking that in his prose Arnold’s imagination
seems naturally to call up and visualize only such scenes as those that
have just been quoted--scenes that are satirically and even maliciously
suggestive; scenes, on the other hand, that have the limpid light and
the winning quality of many in Cardinal Newman’s writings--scenes that
rest the eye and commend themselves simply and graciously to the
heart--are in Arnold’s prose rarely, if ever, to be found. This seems
the less easy to explain inasmuch as his poetry, though of course not
exceptionally rich in colour, nevertheless shows everywhere a delicately
sure sense of the surface of life. Nor is it only the large sweep of the
earth-areas or the diversified play of the human spectacle that is
absent from Arnold’s prose; his imagination does not even make itself
exceptionally felt through concrete phrasing or warmth of colouring; his
style is usually intellectual almost to the point of wanness, and has
rarely any of the heightened quality of so-called poetic prose. In point
of fact, this conventional restraint in Arnold’s style, this careful
adherence to the mood of prose, is a very significant matter; it
distinguishes Arnold both as writer and as critic of life from such men
as Carlyle and Mr. Ruskin. The meaning of this quietly conventional
manner will be later considered in the discussion of Arnold’s relation
to his age.