by restoring to men a true sense of the actual values of life. In this
attempt he had recourse to Hellenic conceptions with their sanity, their
firm delight in the tangible and the visible, their regard for
proportion and symmetry--and more particularly to the Hellenism of
Goethe. Indeed, Goethe may justly be called Arnold’s master--the writer
who had the largest share in determining the characteristic principles
in his theory of life. Goethe’s formula for the ideal life--_Im Ganzen,
Guten Wahren, resolut zu leben_--sums up in a phrase the plea for
perfection, for totality, for wisely balanced self-culture, that Arnold
makes in so many of his essays and books.
Allusions to Goethe abound in Arnold’s essays, and in one of his letters
he speaks particularly of his close and extended reading of Goethe’s
works.[61] His splendid poetic tributes to Goethe, in his _Memorial
Verses_ and _Obermann_, have given enduring expression to his admiration
for Goethe’s sanity, insight, and serene courage. His frankest prose
appreciation of Goethe occurs in _A French Critic on Goethe_, where he
characterizes him as “the clearest, the largest, the most helpful
thinker of modern times; ... in the width, depth, and richness of his
criticism of life, by far our greatest modern man.”[62] It is precisely
in this matter of the criticism of life that Arnold took Goethe for
master. Goethe, as Arnold saw, had passed through the tempering
experiences of Romanticism; he had rebelled against the limitations of
actual life (in _Werther_, for example, and _Goetz_), and sought
passionately for the realization of romantic dreams; and he had finally
come to admit the futility of rebellion and to recognize the treacherous
evasiveness of emotional ideals; he had learned the “Second Reverence,
for things around.” He had found in self-development, in wise
self-discipline for the good of society, the secret of successful
living. Arnold’s gospel of culture is largely a translation of Goethe’s
doctrine into the idiom of the later years of the century, and the
minute adaptation of it to the special needs of Englishmen. There is in
Arnold somewhat less sleek paganism than in Goethe--a somewhat more
genuine spiritual quality. But the wise limitation of the scope of human
endeavour to this world is the same with both; so, too, is the sane and
uncomplaining acceptance of fact and the concentration of thought and
effort on the pursuit of tangible ideals of human perfection. Goethe
tempered by Wordsworth--this is not an unfair account of the derivation
of Arnold’s ideal.
From one point of view, then, Arnold may fairly enough be called the
special advocate of conventionality. He recommends and practises
conformity to the demands of conventional life. He has none of the pose
or the mannerisms of the seer or the bard; he is a frequenter of
drawing-rooms and a diner-out, and is fairly adept in the dialect and
mental idiom of the frivolously-minded. In all that he writes, “he
delivers himself,” as the heroine in Peacock’s novel urged Scythrop
(Shelley) to do, “like a man of this world.” He pretends to no
transcendental second sight and indulges in none of Carlyle’s
spinning-dervish jargon. He is never guilty of Ruskin’s occasional false
sentiment or falsetto rhetoric. The world that he lives in is the world
that exists in the minds and thoughts and feelings of the most sensible
and cultivated people who make up modern society; the world over which,
as its presiding genius, broods the haunting presence of Mr. George
Meredith’s Comic Spirit. It is “in this world” that “he has hope,” in
its ever greater refinement, in its ever greater comprehensiveness, in
its increasing ability to impose its standards on others. When he half
pleads for an English Academy--he never quite pleads for one--he does
this because of his desire for some organ by which, in art and
literature, the collective sense of the best minds in society assembled
may make itself effective. So, too, when he pleads for the Established
Church he does this for similar reasons; he is convinced that it offers
by far the best means for imposing widely upon the nation, as a standard
of religious experience, what is most spiritual in the lives and
aspirations of the greatest number of cultivated people. In many such
ways as these, then, Matthew Arnold’s kingdom is a kingdom of this
world.
And yet, after all, Arnold wears his worldliness with a very great
difference. If he be compared, for example, with other literary men of
the world,--with Francis Jeffrey or Lord Macaulay or Lockhart,--there is
at once obvious in him an all-pervasive quality that marks his temper as
far subtler and finer than theirs. His worldliness is a worldliness of
his own, compounded out of many exquisite simples. His faith in poetry
is intense and absolute. “The future of poetry,” he declares, “is
immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies,
our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay.” This
declaration contrasts strikingly with Macaulay’s pessimistic theory of
the essentially make-believe character of poetry--a theory that puts it
on a level with children’s games, and, like the still more puerile
theory of Herr Max Nordau, looks forward to its extinction as the race
reaches genuine maturity. Poetry always remains for Arnold the most
adequate and beautiful mode of speech possible to man; and this faith,
which runs implicitly through all his writing, is plainly the outcome of
a mood very different from that of the ordinary man of the world, and
is the expression of an emotional refinement and a spiritual
sensitiveness that are, at least in part, his abiding inheritance from
the Romanticists. This faith is the manifestation of the ideal element
in his nature, which, in spite of the plausible man-of-the-world aspect
and tone of much of his prose, makes itself felt even in his prose as
the inspirer of a kind of “divine unrest.”
In his Preface to his first series of essays Arnold playfully takes to
himself the name transcendentalist. To the stricter sect of the
transcendentalists he can hardly pretend to belong. He certainly has
none of their delight in envisaging mystery; none of their morbid relish
for an “_O altitudo!_” provided only the altitude be wrapped in clouds.
He believes, to be sure, in a “power not ourselves that makes for
righteousness”; but his interest in this power and his comments upon it
confine themselves almost wholly to its plain and palpable influence
upon human conduct. Even in his poetry he can hardly be rated as more
than a transcendentalist _manqué_; and in his prose he is never so aware
of the unseen as in his poetry.
Yet, whether or no he be strictly a transcendentalist, Arnold is, in
Disraeli’s famous phrase, “on the-side of the angels”; he is a
persistent and ingenious opponent of purely materialistic or utilitarian
conceptions of life. “The kingdom of God is within you”; this is a
cardinal point in the doctrine of Culture. The highest good, that for
which every man should continually be striving, is an _inner state_ of
perfection; material prosperity, political enactments, religious
organizations--all these things are to be judged solely according to
their furtherance of the spiritual well-being of the individual; they
are all mere _machinery_--more or less ingenious means for giving to
every man a chance to make the most of his life. The true “ideal of
human perfection” is “an inward spiritual activity, having for its
characters increased sweetness, increased light, increased life,
increased sympathy.” Arnold’s worldliness, then, is a worldliness that
holds many of the elements of idealism in solution, that has none of the
cynical acquiescence of unmitigated worldliness, that throughout all its
range shows the gentle urgency of a fine discontent with fact.
To realize the subtle and high quality of Arnold’s genius, one has but
to compare him with men of science or with rationalists pure and
simple,--with men like Professor Huxley, Darwin, or Bentham. Their
carefulness for truth, their intellectual strength, their vast services
to mankind, are acknowledged even by their opponents. Yet Arnold has a
far wider range of sensibilities than any one of them; life plays upon
him in far richer and more various ways; it touches him into response
through associations that have a more distinctively human character,
and that have a deeper and a warmer colour of emotion drawn out of the
past of the race. In short, Arnold brings to bear upon the present a
finer spiritual appreciation than the mere man of the world or the mere
man of science--a larger accumulation of imaginative experience. Through
this temperamental scope and refinement he is able, while accepting
conventional and actual life, to redeem it in some measure from its
routine and its commonplace character, and to import into it beauty and
meaning and good from beyond the range of science or positive truth. All
this comes from the fact that, despite his worldly conformity, he has
the romantic ferment in his blood. If his conformity be compared with
that of the eighteenth century,--with the worldliness of Swift or
Addison,--the transformation wrought by romantic influences is
appreciable in all its scope and meaning.
Finally, Arnold makes of life an art rather than a science, and commits
the conduct of it to an exquisite tact, rather than to reason or
demonstration. The imaginative assimilation of all the best experience
of the past--this he regards as the right training to develop true tact
for the discernment of good and evil in all practical matters, where
probability must be the guide of life. We are at once reminded of
Newman’s Illative Sense, which was also an intuitive faculty for the
dextrous apprehension of truth through the aid of the feelings and the
imagination. But Arnold’s new Sense comes much nearer than Newman’s to
being a genuinely sublimated _Common_ Sense. Arnold’s own _flair_ in
matters of art and life was astonishingly keen, and yet he would have
been the last to exalt it as unerring. His faith is ultimately in the
best instincts of the so-called _remnant_--in the collective sense of
the most cultivated, most delicately perceptive, most spiritually-minded
people of the world. Through the combined intuitions of such men
sincerely aiming at perfection, truth in all that pertains to the
conduct of life will be more and more nearly won. Because of this faith
of his in sublimated worldly wisdom, Arnold, unlike Newman, is in
sympathy with the _Zeitgeist_ of a democratic age.
And, indeed, here seems to rest Arnold’s really most permanent claim to
gratitude and honour. He accepts--with some sadness, it is true, and yet
genuinely and generously--the modern age, with its scientific bias and
its worldly preoccupations; humanist as he is, half-romantic lover of an
elder time, he yet masters his regret over what is disappearing and
welcomes the present loyally. Believing, however, in the continuity of
human experience, and, above all, in the transcendent worth to mankind
of its spiritual acquisitions, won largely through the past domination
of Christian ideals, he devotes himself to preserving the quintessence
of this ideal life of former generations and insinuating it into the
hearts and imaginations of men of a ruder age. He converts himself into
a patient, courageous mediator between the old and the new. Herein he
contrasts with Newman on the one hand, and with modern devotees of
æstheticism on the other hand. Newman, whose delicately spiritual
temperament was subdued even more deeply than Arnold’s to Romanticism,
shrunk before the immediacy and apparent anarchy of modern life, and
sought to realize his spiritual ideals through the aid of mediæval
formulas and a return to mediæval conceptions and standards of truth.
Exquisite spirituality was attained, but at the cost of what some have
called the Great Refusal. A like imperfect synthesis is characteristic
of the followers of art for art’s sake. They, too, give up common life
as irredeemably crass, as unmalleable, irreducible to terms of the
ideal. They turn for consolation to their own dreams, and frame for
themselves a House Beautiful, where they may let these dreams have their
way, “far from the world’s noise,” and “life’s confederate plea.”
Arnold, with a temperament perhaps as exacting as either of these other
temperaments, takes life as it offers itself and does his best with it.
He sees and feels its crudeness and disorderliness; but he has faith in
the instincts that civilized men have developed in common, and finds in
the working of these instincts the continuous, if irregular, realization
of the ideal.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] _Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay_, chap. 3.
[2] _Ibid._, chap. 9.
[3] Carlyle’s _Reminiscences_, II, 271.
[4] _Hours in a Library_, III, 176.
[5] Lord Cockburn’s _Life of Jeffrey_ (ed. Philadelphia, 1852), I, 101
ff.
[6] _The Life and Times of Lord Brougham_ (ed. New York, 1871), I, 176
ff.
[7] Lord Cockburn’s _Life of Jeffrey_, II, 64.
[8] Forster’s _Goldsmith_ (ed. London, 1848), p. 170.
[9] J. W. Robberd’s _Life of William Taylor_, I, 130-132.
[10] J. W. Robberd’s _Life of William Taylor_, I, 139.
[11] _Ibid._, I, 122.
[12] Coleridge, _Biographia Literaria_, chap. 21.
[13] Hazlitt’s _Table Talk_, 2d series, essay 6.
[14] Coleridge’s _Biographia Literaria_, chap. 21.
[15] _Memoirs and Correspondence of Horner_, I, 419.
[16] _Philomythus_, by E. A. Abbott, London, 1891.
[17] _Letters and Correspondence of J. H. Newman_, 1891, II, 156.
[18] _Ibid._, I, 416.
[19] _Oxford University Sermons_, ed. 1887, p. 257.
[20] _Ibid._, p. 259.
[21] _Letters_, II, 476.
[22] _Discourses to Mixed Congregations_, ed. 1892, p. 373.
[23] _Development of Christian Doctrine_, ed. 1891, pp. 39-40.
[24] See above, p. 79.
[25] _Apologia_, ed. 1890, p. 96.
[26] _Letters and Correspondence_, I, 18.
[27] _Apologia_, p. 28.
[28] _Grammar of Assent_, ed. 1889, p. 359.
[29] _Grammar of Assent_, ed. 1889, p. 360.
[30] _Ibid._, p. 353.
[31] _Ibid._, p. 345.
[32] _Ibid._, p. 350.
[33] _Celtic Literature_, p. 75.
[34] _Literature and Dogma_, p. xxi.
[35] _On Translating Homer_, p. 295.
[36] _God and the Bible_, p. xxxiv.
[37] _Literature and Dogma_, p. xxvii.
[38] This image may have been suggested by a sentence of Joubert’s:
“Plato loses himself in the void, but one sees the play of his wings,
one hears their rustle.... It is good to breathe his air, but not to
live upon him.” The translation is Arnold’s own. See his _Joubert_, in
_Essays in Criticism_, I, 294.
[39] _On Translating Homer_, ed. 1883, p. 197.
[40] _On Translating Homer_, ed. 1883, p. 295.
[41] _Essays_, ed. 1891, II, p. 143.
[42] _Ibid._, p. 5.
[43] Pater’s _Appreciations_, ed. 1890, p. 36.
[44] _Essays_, ed. 1891, II, pp. 186-187.
[45] _Essays_, ed. 1891, II, p. 141.
[46] _Ibid._, p. 187.
[47] _Essays_, ed. 1891, II, p. 22.
[48] _Essays_, ed. 1891, II, p. 33.
[49] _Mixed Essays_, ed. 1883, p. 209.
[50] _On Translating Homer_, p. 245.
[51] _Letters_, I, 282.
[52] _Essays_, ed. 1891, I, p. v.
[53] _On Translating Homer_, ed. 1883, p. 264.
[54] _On Translating Homer_, ed. 1883, p. 194.
[55] _Mixed Essays_, ed. 1883, p. 210.
[56] _Essays_, ed. 1891, I, p. 75.
[57] _Friendship’s Garland_, ed. 1883, p. 279.
[58] _Letters_, I, 240.
[59] _Literature and Dogma_, ed. 1893, p. 321.
[60] _Culture and Anarchy_, ed. 1883, p. 205.
[61] _Letters_, II, 165.
[62] _Mixed Essays_, pp. 233-234.
Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
into the precints=> into the precincts {pg 25}
more elusive susbtance=> more elusive substance {pg 70}