imaginative glow are the essay on _George Sand_ and the discourse on
_Emerson_. In each case he was returning in the choice of his subject to
an earlier enthusiasm, and was reviving a mood that had for him a
certain romantic consecration. George Sand had opened for him, while he
was still at the University, a whole world of rich and half-fearful
imaginative experience; a world where he had delighted to follow through
glowing southern landscapes the journeyings of picturesquely rebellious
heroes and heroines, whose passionate declamation laid an irresistible
spell on his English fancy. Her love and portrayal of rustic nature had
also come to him as something graciously different from the sterner and
more moral or spiritual interpretation of rustic life to be found in
Wordsworth’s poems. Her personality, in all its passionate sincerity and
with its pathetically unrewarded aspirations, had imposed itself on
Arnold’s imagination both as this personality was revealed in her books
and as it was afterward encountered in actual life. All these early
feelings Arnold revives in a memorial essay written in 1877, one year
after George Sand’s death. From first to last the essay has a brooding
sincerity of tone, an unconsidering frankness, and an intensity and
colour of phrase that are noteworthy. The descriptions of nature, both
of the landscapes to be found in George Sand’s _romances_ and of those
in the midst of which she herself lived, have a luxuriance and
sensuousness of surface that Arnold rarely condescends to. The tone of
unguarded devotion may be represented by part of the concluding
paragraph of the essay: “It is silent, that eloquent voice! it is sunk,
that noble, that speaking head! We sum up, as we best can, what she said
to us, and we bid her adieu. From many hearts in many lands a troop of
tender and grateful regrets converge towards her humble churchyard in
Berry. Let them be joined by these words of sad homage from one of a
nation which she esteemed, and which knew her very little and very ill.”
There can be no question of the passionate sincerity and the poetic
beauty of this passage.
Comparable in atmosphere and tone to this essay on _George Sand_ is the
discourse on _Emerson_, in certain parts of which Arnold again has the
courage of his emotions. In the earlier paragraphs there is the same
revivification of a youthful mood as in the essay on _George Sand_.
There is also the same only half-restrained pulsation in the rhythm, an
emotional throb that at times almost produces an effect of metre. “Forty
years ago, when I was an undergraduate at Oxford, voices were in the air
there which haunt my memory still. Happy the man who in that susceptible
season of youth hears such voices! they are a possession to him
forever.” Of this discourse, however, only the introduction and the
conclusion are of this intense, self-communing passionateness; the
analysis of Emerson’s qualities as writer and thinker, that makes up
the greater part of the discourse, has Arnold’s usual colloquial,
self-consciously wary tone.
A fairly complete survey of the characteristics of Arnold’s style may
perhaps best be obtained by recognizing in his prose-writings four
distinct manners. First may be mentioned his least compromising,
severest, most exact style; it is most consistently present in the first
of the _Mixed Essays_, that on _Democracy_ (1861). The sentences are apt
to be long and periodic. The structure of the thought is defined by
means of painstakingly accurate articulations. Progress in the
discussion is systematic and is from time to time conscientiously noted.
The tone is earnest, almost anxious. A strenuous, systematic,
responsible style, we may call it. Somewhat mitigated in its severities,
somewhat less palpably official, it remains the style of Arnold’s
technical reports upon education and of great portions of his writings
on religious topics. It is, however, most adequately exhibited in the
essay on _Democracy_.
Simpler in tone, easier, more colloquial, more casual, is the style that
Arnold uses in his literary essays, in the uncontroversial parts of the
lectures on _Translating Homer_, and in _Culture and Anarchy_. This
style is characterized by its admirable union of ease, simplicity, and
strength; by the affability of its tone, an affability, however, that
never degenerates into over-familiarity or loses dignified restraint; by
its disregard of method, or of the more pretentious manifestations of
method; and by the delicate certainty with which, when at its best, it
takes the reader, despite its apparently casual movement, over the
essential aspects of the subject under discussion. This is really
Arnold’s most distinctive manner, and it will require, after his two
remaining manners have been briefly noted, some further analysis.
Arnold’s third style is most apt to appear in controversial writings or
in his treatment of subjects where he is particularly aware of his
enemy, or particularly bent on getting a hearing from the inattentive
through cleverly malicious satire, or particularly desirous of carrying
things off with a nonchalant air. It appears in the controversial parts
of the lectures on _Translating Homer_, in many chapters of _Culture and
Anarchy_, and runs throughout _Friendship’s Garland_. Its peculiarly
rasping effect upon many readers has already been described. It is
responsible for much of the prejudice against Arnold’s prose.
Arnold’s fourth style--intimate, rich in colour, intense in feeling,
almost lyrical in tone--is the style that has just been noted as
appearing in the essays on _George Sand_ and on _Emerson_. There are not
many passages in Arnold’s prose where this style has its way with him.
But these passages are so individual, and seem to reveal Arnold with
such novelty and truth, that the style that pervades them deserves to be
put by itself.
The style usually taken as characteristically Arnold’s is that here
classed as his second, with a generous admixture of the third. Many of
the qualities of this style have already been suggested as illustrative
of certain aspects of Arnold’s temperament or habits of thought. Various
important points, however, still remain to be appreciated.
Colloquial in its rhythms and its idiom this style surely is. It is fond
of assenting to its own propositions; “well” and “yes” often begin its
sentences--signs of its casual and tentative mode of advance. Arnold’s
frequent use of “well” and “yes” and neglect of the anxiously
demonstrative “now,” at the opening of his sentences, mark unmistakably
the unrigorousness of his method. An easily negligent treatment of the
sentence, too, is often noticeable; a subject is left suspended while
phrase follows phrase, or even while clause follows clause, until, quite
as in ordinary talk, the subject must be repeated, the beginning of the
sentence must be brought freshly to mind. Often Arnold ends a sentence
and begins the next with the same word or phrase; this trick is better
suited to talk than to formal discourse. Indeed, Arnold permits himself
not a few of the inaccuracies of every-day speech. He uses the cleft
infinitive; he introduces relative clauses with superfluous “and” or
“but”; he confuses the present participle with the verbal noun and
speaks, for example, of “the creating a current”; and he usually “tries
and does” a thing instead of “trying to do” it. Finally, his prose
abounds in exclamations and in italicized words or phrases, and so takes
on much of the movement and rhythm of talk, as in the following passage:
“But the gloomy, oppressive dream is now over. ‘_Let us return to
Nature!_’ And all the world salutes with pride and joy the Renascence,
and prays to Heaven: ‘Oh, that _Ishmael_ might live before thee!’ Surely
the future belongs to this brilliant newcomer, with his animating maxim:
_Let us return to Nature!_ Ah, what pitfalls are in that word _Nature_!
Let us return to art and science, which are a part of Nature; yes. Let
us return to a proper conception of righteousness, to a true sense of
the method and secret of Jesus, which have been all denaturalized; yes.
But, ‘Let us return to _Nature_!’--do you mean that we are to give full
swing to our inclinations?”[59] The colloquial character of these
exclamations and the search, through the use of italics, for stress like
the accent of speech are unmistakable.
Arnold’s fundamental reason, conscious or unconscious, for the adoption
of this colloquial tone and manner, may probably be found in the account
of the ultimate purpose of all his writing, given near the close of
_Culture and Anarchy_; he aims, not to inculcate an absolutely
determinate system of truth, but to stir his readers into the keenest
possible self-questioning over the worth of their stock ideas.
“Socrates has drunk his hemlock and is dead; but in his own breast does
not every man carry about with him a possible Socrates, in that power of
disinterested play of consciousness upon his stock notions and habits,
of which this wise and admirable man gave all through his lifetime the
great example, and which was the secret of his incomparable influence?
And he who leads men to call forth and exercise in themselves this
power, and who busily calls it forth and exercises it in himself, is at
the present moment, perhaps, as Socrates was in his time, more in
concert with the vital working of men’s minds, and more effectually
significant, than any House of Commons’ orator, or practical operator in
politics.”[60] This dialectical habit of mind is, Arnold believes, best
induced and stimulated by the free colloquial manner of writing that he
usually adopts.
In the choice of words, however, Arnold is not noticeably colloquial.
Less often in Arnold than in Newman is a familiar phrase caught
audaciously from common speech and set with a sure sense of fitness and
a vivifying effect in the midst of more formal expressions. His style,
though idiomatic, stops short of the vocabulary of every day; it is
nice--instinctively edited. Certain words are favourites with him, and,
as is so often the case with the literary temperament, reveal special
preoccupations. Such words are _lucidity_, _urbanity_, _amenity_,
_fluid_ (as an epithet for style), _vital_, _puissant_.
Arnold is never afraid of repeating a word or a phrase, hardly enough
afraid of this. His trick of ending one sentence and beginning the next
with the same set of words has already been noted. At times, his
repetitions seem due to his attempt to write down to his public; he will
not confuse them by making them grasp the same idea twice through two
different forms of speech. Often, his repetitions come palpably from
sheer fondness for his own happy phraseology. His description of Shelley
as “a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous
wings in vain,” pleases him so well that he carries it over entire from
one essay to another; even a whole page of his writing is sometimes so
transferred.
And indeed iteration and reiteration of single phrases or forms of words
is a mannerism with Arnold, and at times proves one of his most
effective means both for stamping his own ideas on the mind of the
public and for ridiculing his opponents. Many of his positive formulas
have become part and parcel of the modern literary man’s equipment. His
account of poetry as “a criticism of life”; his plea for “high
seriousness” as essential to a classic; his pleasant substitute for the
old English word God--“the not ourselves which makes for righteousness”;
“lucidity of mind”; “natural magic” in the poetic treatment of nature;
“the grand style” in poetry; these phrases of his have passed into the
literary consciousness and carried with them at least a superficial
recognition of many of his ideas.
Iteration Arnold uses, too, as a weapon of ridicule. He isolates some
unluckily symbolic phrase of his opponent’s, points out its damaging
implications or its absurdity, and then repeats it pitilessly as an
ironical refrain. The phrase gains in grotesqueness at each
return--“sweetening and gathering sweetness evermore”--and, finally,
seems to the reader to contain the distilled quintessence of the
foolishness inherent in the view that Arnold ridicules. It is in this
way that in _Culture and Anarchy_ the agitation to “enable a man to
marry his deceased wife’s sister” becomes symbolic of all the absurd
fads of “liberal practitioners.” Similarly, when he is criticising the
cheap enthusiasm with which democratic politicians describe modern life,
Arnold culls from the account of a Nottingham child-murder the phrase,
“Wragg is in custody,” and adds it decoratively after every eulogy on
present social conditions. Or, again, the _Times_, at a certain
diplomatic crisis, exhorts the Government to set forth England’s claims
“with promptitude and energy”; and this grandiloquent, and, under the
circumstances, empty phrase becomes, as Arnold persistently rings its
changes, irresistibly droll as symbolic of cheap bluster. Whole
sentences are often reiterated by Arnold in this same satirical
fashion. Mr. Frederic Harrison, in the course of a somewhat atrabilious
criticism, had accused Arnold of being a mere dilettante and of having
“no philosophy with coherent, interdependent, subordinate, and
derivative principles.” This latter phrase, with its bristling array of
epithets, struck Arnold as delightfully redolent of pedantry; and, as
has already been noted, it recurs again and again in his writings in
passages of mock apology and ironical self-depreciation. Readers of
_Literature and Science_, too, will remember how amusingly Arnold plays
with “Mr. Darwin’s famous proposition that ‘our ancestor was a hairy
quadruped furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in
his habits.’” It should be noted that in all these cases the phrase that
is reiterated has a symbolic quality, and therefore, in addition to its
delicious absurdity, comes to possess a subtly argumentative value.
Akin to Arnold’s skilful use of reiteration is his ingenuity in the
invention of telling nicknames. On three classes of his
fellow-countrymen he has bestowed names that have become generally
current,--Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace. The Nonconformist,
because of his unyielding sectarianism, he compares to Ephraim, “a wild
ass alone by himself.” To Professor Huxley, who has been talking of “the
Levites of culture,” Arnold suggests that “the poor humanist is
sometimes apt to regard” men of science as the “Nebuchadnezzars” of
culture. _The Church and State Review_ Arnold dubs “the High Church
rhinoceros”; the _Record_ is “the Evangelical hyena.”
It is interesting to note how often Arnold’s satire has a biblical turn.
His mind is saturated with Bible history and his memory stored with
biblical phraseology; moreover, allusions whether to the incidents or
the language of the Bible are sure to be quickly caught by English
readers; hence Arnold frequently gives point to his style through the
use of scriptural phrases or illustrations. Many of the foregoing
nicknames come from biblical sources. The lectures on Homer offer one
admirable instance of Scripture quotation. Arnold has been urged to
define the grand style. With his customary dislike of abstractions, he
protests against the demand. “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 what it
is.’ But, as of faith, so too we may say of nobleness, of the grand
style: ‘Woe to those who know it not!’ yet this expression, though
indefinable, has a charm; one is the better for considering it; _bonum
est, nos hic esse_; nay, one loves to try to explain it, though one
knows that one must speak imperfectly. For those, then, who ask the
question, What is the grand style? with sincerity, I will try to make
some answer, inadequate as it must be. For those who ask it mockingly I
have no answer, except to repeat to them with compassionate sorrow, the
Gospel words: _Moriemini in peccatis vestris_, Ye shall die in your
sins.”
An interesting comment on this habit of Arnold’s of scriptural phrasing
occurs in one of his letters: “The Bible,” he says, “is the only book
well enough known to quote as the Greeks quoted Homer, sure that the
quotation would go home to every reader, and it is quite astonishing how
a Bible sentence clinches and sums up an argument. ‘Where the State’s
treasure is bestowed,’ etc., for example, saved me at least half a
column of disquisition.” A moment later he adds a charmingly
characteristic explanation as regards his incidental use of Scripture
texts: “I put it in the Vulgate Latin, as I always do when I am not
earnestly serious.” This habit of “high seriousness” in such matters, it
is to be feared he in some measure outgrew.
Arnold’s fine instinct in the choice of words has thus far been
illustrated chiefly as subservient to satire. In point of fact, however,
it is subject to no such limitation. Whatever his purpose, he has in a
high degree the faculty of putting words together with a delicate
congruity that gives them a permanent hold on the memory and
imagination. In this power of fashioning vital phrases he far surpasses
Newman, and indeed most recent writers except those who have developed
epigram and paradox into a meretricious manner. “A free play of the
mind”; “disinterestedness”; “a current of true and fresh ideas”; “the
note of provinciality”; “sweet reasonableness”; “the method of
inwardness”; “the secret of Jesus”; “the study of perfection”; “the
power of conduct, the power of intellect and knowledge, the power of
beauty, and the power of social life and manners”--how happily vital are
all these phrases! How perfectly integrated! Yet they are unelaborate
and almost obvious. Christianity is “the greatest and happiest stroke
ever yet made for human perfection.” “Burke saturates politics with
thought.” “Our august Constitution sometimes looks ... a colossal
machine for the manufacture of Philistines.” “English public life ...
that Thyestëan banquet of claptrap.” The Atlantic cable--“that great
rope, with a Philistine at each end of it talking inutilities.” These
sentences illustrate still further Arnold’s deftness of phrasing. But
with the last two or three we return to the ironical manner that has
already been exemplified.
In his use of figures Arnold is sparing; similes are few, metaphors by
no means frequent. It may be questioned whether it is ever the case with
Arnold, as with Newman, that a whole paragraph is subtly controlled in
its phrasing by the presence of a single figure in the author’s mind.
Simpler in this respect Arnold’s style probably is than even Newman’s;
its general inferiority to Newman’s style in point of simplicity is
owing to the infelicities of tone and manner that have already been
noted.
Illustrations, Arnold uses liberally and happily. He excels in drawing
them patly from current events and the daily prints. This increases both
the actuality of his discussion--its immediacy--and its appearance of
casualness, of being a pleasantly unconsidered trifle. For example, the
long and elaborate discussion, _Culture and Anarchy_, begins with an
allusion to a recent article in the _Quarterly Review_ on Sainte-Beuve.
_Curiosity_ as a habit of mind had been somewhat disparaged in that
article, and it is through a colloquial examination of just what is
involved in commendable curiosity that Arnold is led to his analysis of
_culture_. Later in the same chapter, references occur to such sectarian
journals as the _Nonconformist_, and to current events as reported and
criticised in their columns. Even in essays dealing with purely literary
topics--in such an essay as that on _Eugénie de Guérin_--there is this
same actuality. “While I was reading the journal of Mlle. de Guérin,”
Arnold tells us, “there came into my hands the memoir and poems of a
young Englishwoman, Miss Emma Tatham”; and then he uses this memoir to
illustrate the contrasts between the poetic traditions of Roman
Catholicism and the somewhat sordid intellectual poetry of English
sectarian life. This closeness of relation between Arnold’s writing and
his daily experience is very noticeable, and increases the reader’s
sense of the novelty and genuineness and immediacy of what he reads; it
conduces to that impression of vitality that is, perhaps, in the last
analysis, the most characteristic impression the reader carries away
from Arnold’s writings.
VIII
And, indeed, the union in Arnold’s style of actuality with distinction
becomes a very significant matter when we turn to consider his precise
relation to his age, for it suggests what is perhaps the most striking
characteristic of his personality--his reconciliation of conventionality
with fineness of spiritual temper. In this reconciliation lies the
secret of Arnold’s relation to his romantic predecessors and to the men
of his own time. He accepts the actual, conventional life of the
every-day world frankly and fully, as the earlier idealists had never
quite done, and yet he retains a strain of other-worldliness inherited
from the dreamers of former generations. Arnold’s gospel of culture is
an attempt to import into actual life something of the fine spiritual
fervour of the Romanticists with none of the extravagance or the
remoteness from fact of those “madmen”--those idealists of an earlier
age.
Like the Romanticists, Arnold gives to the imagination and the emotions
the primacy in life; like the Romanticists he contends against
formalists, system-makers, and all devotees of abstractions. It is by an
exquisite tact, rather than by logic, that Arnold in all doubtful
matters decides between good and evil. He keeps to the concrete image;
he is an appreciator of life, not a deducer of formulas or a
demonstrator. He is continually concerned about what _ought_ to be; he
is not cynically or scientifically content with the knowledge of what
_is_. And yet, unlike the Romanticists, Arnold is _in_ the world, and
_of_ it; he has given heed to the world-spirit’s warning, “submit,
submit”; he has “learned the Second Reverence, for things around.” In
Arnold, imaginative literature returns from its romantic quest for the
Holy Grail and betakes itself half-humorously, and yet with now and then
traces of the old fervour, to the homely duties of every-day life.
Arnold had in his youth been under the spell of romantic poetry; he had
heard the echoes of “the puissant hail” of those “former men,” whose
“voices were in all men’s ears.” Indeed, much of his poetry is
essentially a beautiful threnody over the waning of romance, and in its
tenor bears witness alike to the thoroughness with which he had been
imbued with the spirit of the earlier idealists and to his inability to
rest content with their relation to life and their accounts of it. It is
the unreality of the idealists that dissatisfies Arnold, their visionary
blindness to fact, their morbid distaste for the actual. Much as he
delights in the poetry of Shelley and Coleridge, these qualities in
their work seem to him unsound and injurious. Or, at other times, it is
the capricious self-will of the Romanticists, their impotent isolation,
their enormous egoism, that impress him as fatally wrong. Even in
Wordsworth he is troubled by a semi-untruth and by the lack of a
courageous acceptance of the conditions of human life. Wordsworth’s
“Eyes avert their ken
From half of human fate.”
Tempered, then, as Arnold was by a deep sense of the beauty and
nobleness of romantic and idealistic poetry, finely touched as he was
into sympathy with the whole range of delicate intuitions, quivering
sensibilities, and half-mystical aspirations that this poetry called
into play, he yet came to regard its underlying conceptions of life as
inadequate and misleading, and to feel the need of supplementing them by
a surer and saner relation to the conventional world of common sense.
The Romanticists lamented that “the world is too much with us.” Arnold
shared their dislike of the world of dull routine, their fear of the
world that enslaves to petty cares; yet he came more and more to
distinguish between this world and the great world of common experience,
spread out generously in the lives of all men; more and more clearly he
realized that the true land of romance is in this region of every-day
fact, or else is a mere mirage; that “America is here or nowhere.”