difficulty in calling to mind numerous instances in which his dislike of
everything not broadly based on the generally admitted facts of sane
experience manifests itself. Though fond--perhaps exceptionally
fond--of pretty things and sayings, he had a severe taste, and hated
whatever struck him as being in the least degree sickly, or silly, or
over-heated. No doubt he may often have considered that to be sickly or
silly which in the opinion of others was pious and becoming. It may be
that he was over-impatient of men's flirtations with futurity. As his
paper on Professor Dowden's Life of Shelley shows, he disapproved of
'irregular relations.' He considered we were all married to plain Fact,
and objected to our carrying on a flirtation with mystic maybe's and
calling it Religion. Had it been a man's duty to believe in a specific
revelation it would have been God's duty to make that revelation
credible. Such, at all events, would appear to have been the opinion of
this remarkable man, who though he had even more than his share of an
Oxonian's reverence for the great Bishop of Durham, was unable to admit
the force of the main argument of _The Analogy_. Mr. Arnold was indeed
too fond of parading his inability for hard reasoning. I am not, he
keeps saying, like the Archbishop of York, or the Bishop of Gloucester
and Bristol. There was affectation about this, for his professed
inferiority did not prevent him from making it almost excruciatingly
clear that in his opinion those gifted prelates were, whilst exercising
their extraordinary powers, only beating the air, or in plainer words
busily engaged in talking nonsense. But I must not wander from my point,
which simply is that Arnold's dislike of anything recondite or remote
was intense, genuine, and characteristic.
He always asserted himself to be a good Liberal. So in truth he was. A
better Liberal than many a one whose claim to that title it would be
thought absurd to dispute. He did not indeed care very much about some
of the articles of the Liberal creed as now professed. He had taken a
great dislike to the Deceased Wife's Sister Bill. He wished the Church
and the State to continue to recognise each other. He had not that
jealousy of State interference in England which used to be (it is so no
longer) a note of political Liberalism. He sympathised with Italian
national aspirations because he thought it wrong to expect a country
with such a past as Italy to cast in her lot with Austria. He did not
sympathise with Irish national aspirations because he thought Ireland
ought to be willing to admit that she was relatively to England an
inferior and less interesting country, and therefore one which had no
moral claim for national institutions. He may have been right or wrong
on these points without affecting his claim to be considered a Liberal.
Liberalism is not a creed, but a frame of mind. Mr. Arnold's frame of
mind was Liberal. No living man is more deeply permeated with the grand
doctrine of Equality than was he. He wished to see his countrymen and
countrywomen all equal: Jack as good as his master, and Jack's master as
good as Jack; and neither taking claptrap. He had a hearty un-English
dislike of anomalies and absurdities. He fully appreciated the French
Revolution and was consequently a Democrat. He was not a democrat from
irresistible impulse, or from love of mischief, or from hatred of
priests, or like the average British workman from a not unnatural
desire to get something on account of his share of the family
inheritance--but all roads lead to Rome, and Mr. Arnold was a democrat
from a sober and partly sorrowful conviction that no other form of
government was possible. He was an Educationalist, and Education is the
true Leveller. His almost passionate cry for better middle-class
education arose from his annoyance at the exclusion of large numbers of
this great class from the best education the country afforded. It was a
ticklish job telling this great, wealthy, middle class--which according
to the newspapers had made England what she is and what everybody else
wishes to be--that it was, from an educational point of view, beneath
contempt. 'I hear with surprise,' said Sir Thomas Bazley at Manchester,
'that the education of our great middle class requires improvement.' But
Mr. Arnold had courage. Indeed he carried one kind of courage to an
heroic pitch. I mean the courage of repeating yourself over and over
again. It is a sound forensic maxim: Tell a judge twice whatever you
want him to hear. Tell a special jury thrice, and a common jury
half-a-dozen times the view of a case you wish them to entertain. Mr.
Arnold treated the middle class as a common jury and hammered away at
them remorselessly and with the most unblushing iteration. They groaned
under him, they snorted, and they sniffed--but they listened, and, what
was more to the purpose, their children listened, and with filial
frankness told their heavy sires that Mr. Arnold was quite right, and
that their lives were dull, and hideous, and arid, even as he described
them as being. Mr. Arnold's work as a School Inspector gave him great
opportunities of going about amongst all classes of the people. Though
not exactly apostolic in manner or method, he had something to say both
to and of everybody. The aristocracy were polite and had ways he
admired, but they were impotent of ideas and had a dangerous tendency to
become studiously frivolous. Consequently the Future did not belong to
them. Get ideas and study gravity, was the substance of his discourse to
the Barbarians, as, with that trick of his of miscalling God's
creatures, he had the effrontery to dub our adorable nobility. But it
was the middle class upon whom fell the full weight of his discourse.
His sermons to them would fill a volume. Their great need was culture,
which he declared to be _a study of perfection_, the sentiment for
beauty and sweetness, the sentiment against hideousness and rawness. The
middle class, he protested, needed to know all the best things that have
been said and done in the world since it began, and to be thereby lifted
out of their holes and corners, private academies and chapels in side
streets, above their tenth-rate books and miserable preferences, into
the main stream of national existence. The lower orders he judged to be
a mere rabble, and thought it was as yet impossible to predict whether
or not they would hereafter display any aptitude for Ideas, or passion
for Perfection. But in the meantime he bade them learn to cohere, and to
read and write, and above all he conjured them not to imitate the middle
classes.
It is not easy to know everything about everybody, and it may be doubted
whether Mr. Arnold did not over-rate the degree of acquaintance with
his countrymen his peregrinations among them had conferred upon him. In
certain circles he was supposed to have made the completest possible
diagnosis of dissent, and was credited with being able, after five
minutes' conversation with any individual Nonconformist, unerringly to
assign him to his particular chapel, Independent, Baptist, Primitive
Methodist, Unitarian, or whatever else it might be, and this though they
had only been talking about the weather. To people who know nothing
about dissenters, Mr. Arnold might well seem to know everything.
However, he did know a great deal, and used his knowledge with great
cunning and effect, and a fine instinctive sense of the whereabouts of
the weakest points. Mr. Arnold's sense for equality and solidarity was
not impeded by any exclusive tastes or hobbies. Your collector, even
though it be but of butterflies, is rarely a democrat. One of Arnold's
favourite lines in Wordsworth was--
'Joy that is in widest commonalty spread.'
The collector's joys are not of that kind. Mr. Arnold was not, I
believe, a collector of anything. He certainly was not of books. I once
told him I had been reading a pamphlet, written by him in 1859, on the
Italian Question. He inquired how I came across it. I said I had picked
it up in a shop. 'Oh, yes,' said he, 'some old curiosity shop, I
suppose.' Nor was he joking. He seemed quite to suppose that old books,
and old clothes, and old chairs were huddled together for sale in the
same resort of the curious. He did not care about such things. The
prices given for the early editions of his own poems seemed to tease
him. His literary taste was broadly democratic. He had no mind for
fished-up authors, nor did he ever indulge in swaggering rhapsodies over
second-rate poets. The best was good enough for him. 'The best poetry'
was what he wanted, 'a clearer, deeper sense of the best in poetry, and
of the strength and joy to be drawn from it.' So he wrote in his general
introduction to Mr. Ward's _Selections from the English Poets_. The best
of everything for everybody. This was his gospel and his prayer.
Approaching Mr. Arnold's writings more nearly, it seems inevitable to
divide them into three classes. His poems, his theological excursions,
and his criticism, using the last word in a wide sense as including a
criticism of life and of politics as well as of books and style.
Of Mr. Arnold's poetry it is hard for anyone who has felt it to the full
during the most impressionable period of life to speak without emotion
overcoming reason.
'Hardly shall I tell my joys and sorrows,
Hopes and fears, belief and unbelieving.'
It is easy to admit, in general terms, its limitations. Mr. Arnold is
the last man in the world anybody would wish to shove out of his place.
A poet at all points, armed cap-a-pie against criticism, like Lord
Tennyson, he certainly was not. Nor had his verse any share of the
boundless vitality, the fierce pulsation so nobly characteristic of Mr.
Browning. But these admissions made, we decline to parley any further
with the enemy. We cast him behind us. Mr. Arnold, to those who cared
for him at all, was the most _useful_ poet of his day. He lived much
nearer us than poets of his distinction usually do. He was neither a
prophet nor a recluse. He lived neither above us, nor away from us.
There are two ways of being a recluse--a poet may live remote from men,
or he may live in a crowded street but remote from their thoughts. Mr.
Arnold did neither, and consequently his verse tells and tingles. None
of it is thrown away. His readers feel that he bore the same yoke as
themselves. Theirs is a common bondage with his. Beautiful, surpassingly
beautiful some of Mr. Arnold's poetry is, but we seize upon the
_thought_ first and delight in the _form_ afterwards. No doubt the form
is an extraordinary comfort, for the thoughts are often, as thoughts so
widely spread could not fail to be, the very thoughts that are too
frequently expressed rudely, crudely, indelicately. To open Mr. Arnold's
poems is to escape from a heated atmosphere and a company not wholly
free from offence even though composed of those who share our
opinions--from loud-mouthed random talking men into a well-shaded
retreat which seems able to impart, even to our feverish persuasions
and crude conclusions, something of the coolness of falling water,
something of the music of rustling trees. This union of thought,
substantive thought, with beauty of form--of strength with elegance, is
rare. I doubt very much whether Mr. Arnold ever realised the devotedness
his verse inspired in the minds of thousands of his countrymen and
countrywomen, both in the old world and the new. He is not a bulky poet.
Three volumes contain him. But hardly a page can be opened without the
eye lighting on verse which at one time or another has been, either to
you or to someone dear to you, strength or joy. _The Buried Life_, _A
Southern Night_, _Dover Beach_, _A Wanderer is Man from his Birth_,
_Rugby Chapel_, _Resignation_. How easy to prolong the list, and what a
list it is! Their very names are dear to us even as are the names of
Mother Churches and Holy Places to the Votaries of the old Religion. I
read the other day in the _Spectator_ newspaper, an assertion that Mr.
Arnold's poetry had never consoled anybody. A falser statement was never
made innocently. It may never have consoled the writer in the
_Spectator_, but because the stomach of a dram-drinker rejects cold
water is no kind of reason for a sober man abandoning his morning
tumbler of the pure element. Mr. Arnold's poetry has been found full of
consolation. It would be strange if it had not been. It is
'No stretched metre of an antique song,'
but quick and to the point. There are finer sonnets in the English
language than the two following, but there are no better sermons. And if
it be said that sermons may be found in stones, but ought not to be in
sonnets, I fall back upon the fact which Mr. Arnold himself so
cheerfully admitted, that the middle classes, who in England, at all
events, are Mr. Arnold's chief readers, are serious, and love sermons.
Some day perhaps they will be content with metrical exercises, ballades,
and roundels.
'EAST LONDON
''Twas August, and the fierce sun overhead
Smote on the squalid streets of Bethnal Green,
And the pale weaver, through his windows seen
In Spitalfields, look'd thrice dispirited.
'I met a preacher there I knew, and said:
"Ill and o'erwork'd, how fare you in this scene?"
"Bravely!" said he; "for I of late have been
Much cheer'd with thoughts of Christ, _the living bread_."
'O human soul! as long as thou canst so
Set up a mark of everlasting light,
Above the howling senses' ebb and flow,
To cheer thee, and to right thee if thou roam--
Not with lost toil thou labourest through the night!
Thou mak'st the heaven thou hop'st indeed thy home.'
'THE BETTER PART
'Long fed on boundless hopes, O race of man,
How angrily thou spurn'st all simpler fare!
"Christ," some one says, "was human as we are;
No judge eyes us from Heaven, our sin to scan;
'"We live no more, when we have done our span."--
"Well, then, for Christ," thou answerest, "who can care?
From Sin, which Heaven records not, why forbear?
Live we like brutes our life without a plan!"
'So answerest thou; but why not rather say:
"Hath man no second life?--_Pitch this one high!_
Sits there no judge in Heaven, our sin to see?
'"_More strictly, then, the inward judge obey!_
Was Christ a man like us?--_Ah! let us try
If we then, too, can be such men as he!_"'
Mr. Arnold's love of nature, and poetic treatment of nature, was to many
a vexed soul a great joy and an intense relief. Mr. Arnold was a
genuine Wordsworthian--being able to read everything Wordsworth ever
wrote except _Vaudracour and Julia_. The influence of Wordsworth upon
him was immense, but he was enabled, by the order of his mind, to reject
with the heartiest goodwill the cloudy pantheism which robs so much of
Wordsworth's best verse of the heightened charm of reality, for, after
all, poetry, like religion, must be true, or it is nothing. This strong
aversion to the unreal also prevented Mr. Arnold, despite his love of
the classical forms, from a nonsensical neo-paganism. His was a manlier
attitude. He had no desire to keep tugging at the dry breasts of an
outworn creed, nor any disposition to go down on his knees, or _hunkers_
as the Scotch more humorously call them, before plaster casts of Venus,
or even of 'Proteus rising from the sea.' There was something very
refreshing about this. In the long run even a gloomy truth is better
company than a cheerful falsehood. The perpetual strain of living down
to a lie, the depressing atmosphere of a circumscribed intelligence
tell upon the system, and the cheerful falsehood soon begins to look
puffy and dissipated.
'THE YOUTH OF NATURE.
'For, oh! is it you, is it you,
Moonlight, and shadow, and lake,
And mountains, that fill us with joy,
Or the poet who sings you so well?
. . . . . . .
. . . . . . .
More than the singer are these
. . . . . . .
. . . . . . .
Yourselves and your fellows ye know not; and me,
The mateless, the one, will ye know?
Will ye scan me, and read me, and tell
Of the thoughts that ferment in my breast,
My longing, my sadness, my joy?
Will ye claim for your great ones the gift
To have rendered the gleam of my skies,
To have echoed the moan of my seas,
Uttered the voice of my hills?
When your great ones depart, will ye say:
_All things have suffered a loss,
Nature is hid in their grave?_
Race after race, man after man,
Have thought that my secret was theirs,
Have dream'd that I lived but for them,
That they were my glory and joy.
They are dust, they are changed, they are gone!
I remain.'
When a poet is dead we turn to his verse with quickened feelings. He
rests from his labours. We still
'Stem across the sea of life by night,'
and the voice, once the voice of the living, of one who stood by our
side, has for a while an unfamiliar accent, coming to us as it does no
longer from our friendly earth but from the strange cold caverns of
death.
'Joy comes and goes, hope ebbs and flows
Like the wave,
Change doth unknit the tranquil strength of men.
Love lends life a little grace,
A few sad smiles; and then,
Both are laid in one cold place,
In the grave.
'Dreams dawn and fly, friends smile and die
Like spring flowers;
Our vaunted life is one long funeral.
Men dig graves with bitter tears
For their dead hopes; and all,
Mazed with doubts and sick with fears,
Count the hours.
'We count the hours! These dreams of ours,
False and hollow,
Do we go hence and find they are not dead?
Joys we dimly apprehend,
Faces that smiled and fled,
Hopes born here, and born to end,
Shall we follow?'
In a poem like this Mr. Arnold is seen at his best; he fairly forces
himself into the very front ranks. In form almost equal to Shelley, or
at any rate not so very far behind him, whilst of course in reality, in
wholesome thought, in the pleasures that are afforded by thinking, it is
of incomparable excellence.
We die as we do, not as we would. Yet on reading again Mr. Arnold's
_Wish_, we feel that the manner of his death was much to his mind.
'A WISH.
'I ask not that my bed of death
From bands of greedy heirs be free:
For these besiege the latest breath
Of fortune's favoured sons, not me.
'I ask not each kind soul to keep
Tearless, when of my death he hears.
Let those who will, if any--weep!
There are worse plagues on earth than tears.
'I ask but that my death may find
The freedom to my life denied;
Ask but the folly of mankind
Then--then at last to quit my side.
'Spare me the whispering, crowded room,
The friends who come, and gape, and go;
The ceremonious air of gloom--
All, which makes death a hideous show!
'Nor bring to see me cease to live
Some doctor full of phrase and fame
To shake his sapient head and give
The ill he cannot cure a name.
'Nor fetch to take the accustom'd toll
Of the poor sinner bound for death
His brother-doctor of the soul
To canvass with official breath
'The future and its viewless things--
That undiscover'd mystery
Which one who feels death's winnowing wings
Must needs read clearer, sure, than he!
'Bring none of these; but let me be
While all around in silence lies,
Moved to the window near, and see
Once more before my dying eyes,
'Bathed in the sacred dews of morn
The wide aerial landscape spread--
The world which was ere I was born,
The world which lasts when I am dead.
'Which never was the friend of _one_,
Nor promised love it could not give,
But lit for all its generous sun
And lived itself and made us live.
'Then let me gaze--till I become
In soul, with what I gaze on, wed!
To feel the universe my home;
To have before my mind--instead
'Of the sick room, the mortal strife,
The turmoil for a little breath--
The pure eternal course of life,
Not human combatings with death!
'Thus feeling, gazing, let me grow
Composed, refresh'd, ennobled, clear--
Then willing let my spirit go
To work or wait, elsewhere or here!'
To turn from Arnold's poetry to his theological writings--if so grim a
name can be given to these productions--from _Rugby Chapel_ to
_Literature and Dogma_, from _Obermann_ to _God and the Bible_, from
_Empedocles on Etna_ to _St. Paul and Protestantism_, is to descend from
the lofty table-lands,
'From the dragon-warder'd fountains
Where the springs of knowledge are,
From the watchers on the mountains
And the bright and morning star,'
to the dusty highroad. It cannot, I think, be asserted that either the
plan or the style of these books was in keeping with their subjects. It
was characteristic of Mr. Arnold, and like his practical turn of mind,
to begin _Literature and Dogma_ in the _Cornhill Magazine_. A book
rarely shakes off the first draft--_Literature and Dogma_ never did. It
is full of repetitions and wearisome recapitulations, well enough in a
magazine where each issue is sure to be read by many who will never see
another number, but which disfigure a book. The style is likewise too
jaunty. Bantering the Trinity is not yet a recognised English pastime.
Bishop-baiting is, but this notwithstanding, most readers of _Literature
and Dogma_ grew tired of the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol and of his
alleged desire to do something for the honour of the Godhead, long
before Mr. Arnold showed any signs of weariness. But making all these
abatements, and fully admitting that _Literature and Dogma_ is not
likely to prove permanently interesting to the English reader, it must
be pronounced a most valuable and useful book, and one to which the
professional critics and philosophers never did justice. The object of
_Literature and Dogma_ was no less than the restoration of the use of
the Bible to the sceptical laity. It was a noble object, and it was in a
great measure, as thousands of quiet people could testify, attained. It
was not a philosophical treatise. In its own way it was the same kind of
thing as many of Cardinal Newman's writings. It started with an
assumption, namely, that it is impossible to believe in the miracles
recorded in the Old and New Testaments. There is no laborious attempt to
distinguish between one miracle and another, or to lighten the burden of
faith in any particular. Nor is any serious attempt made to disprove
miracles. Mr. Arnold did not write for those who find no difficulty in
believing in the first chapter of St. Luke's gospel, or the sixteenth
chapter of St. Mark's, but for those who simply cannot believe a word of
either the one chapter or the other. Mr. Arnold knew well that this
inability to believe is apt to generate in the mind of the unbeliever an
almost physical repulsion to open books which are full of supernatural
events. Mr. Arnold knew this and lamented it. His own love of the Bible
was genuine and intense. He could read even Jeremiah and Habakkuk. As he
loved Homer with one side of him, so he loved the Bible with the other.
He saw how men were crippled and maimed through growing up in ignorance
of it, and living all the days of their lives outside its influence. He
longed to restore it to them, to satisfy them that its place in the
mind of man--that its educational and moral power was not due to the
miracles it records nor to the dogmas that Catholics have developed or
Calvanists extracted from its pages, but to its literary excellence and
to the glow and enthusiasm it has shed over conduct, self-sacrifice,
humanity, and holy living. It was at all events a worthy object and a
most courageous task. It exposed him to a heavy cross-fire. The Orthodox
fell upon his book and abused it, unrestrainedly abused it for its
familiar handling of their sacred books. They almost grudged Mr. Arnold
his great acquaintance with the Bible, just as an Englishman might be
annoyed at finding Moltke acquainted with all the roads from Dover to
London. This feeling was natural, and on the whole I think it creditable
to the orthodox party that a book so needlessly pain-giving as
_Literature and Dogma_ did not goad them into any personal abuse of its
author. But they could not away with the book. Nor did the philosophical
sceptic like it much better. The philosophical sceptic is too apt to
hate the Bible, even as the devil was reported to hate holy water. Its
spirit condemns him. Its devout, heart-stirring, noble language creates
an atmosphere which is deadly for pragmatic egotism. To make men once
more careful students of the Bible was to deal a blow at materialism,
and consequently was not easily forgiven. 'Why can't you leave the Bible
alone?' they grumbled--'What have we to do with it?' But Pharisees and
Sadducees do not exhaust mankind, and Mr. Arnold's contributions to the
religious controversies of his time were very far from the barren things
that are most contributions, and indeed most controversies on such
subjects. I believe I am right when I say that he induced a very large
number of persons to take up again and make a daily study of the books
both of the Old and the New Testament.