_Essays in Criticism_, first published in 1865, made him known to a
larger public than his poems or his delightful lectures on translating
Homer had succeeded in doing. He had the happy knack of starting
interesting subjects and saying all sorts of interesting things by the
way. There was the French Academy. Would it be a good thing to have an
English Academy? He started the question himself and answered it in the
negative. The public took it out of his mouth and proceeded to discuss
it for itself, always on the assumption that he had answered it in the
affirmative. But that is the way with the public. No sensible man minds
it. To set something going is the most anybody can hope to do in this
world. Where it will go to, and what sort of moss it will gather as it
goes, for despite the proverb there is nothing incompatible between moss
and motion, no one can say. In this volume, too, he struck the note, so
frequently and usefully repeated, of self-dissatisfaction. To make us
dissatisfied with ourselves, alive to our own inferiority, not absolute
but in important respects, to check the chorus, then so loud, of
self-approval of our majestic selves--to make us understand why nobody
who is not an Englishman wants to be one, this was another of the tasks
of this militant man. We all remember how _Wragg[6] is in custody_. The
papers on Heine and Spinoza and Marcus Aurelius were read with
eagerness, with an enjoyment, with a sense of widening horizons too rare
to be easily forgotten. They were light and graceful, but it would I
think be unjust to call them slender. They were not written for
specialists or even for students, but for ordinary men and women,
particularly for young men and women, who carried away with them from
the reading of _Essays in Criticism_ something they could not have found
anywhere else and which remained with them for the rest of their days,
namely, a way of looking at things. A perfectly safe critic Mr. Arnold
hardly was. Even in this volume he fusses too much about the De Guérins.
To some later judgments of his it would be unkind to refer. It was said
of the late Lord Justice Mellish by Lord Cairns that he went right
instinctively. That is, he did not flounder into truth. Mr. Arnold never
floundered, but he sometimes fell. A more delightful critic of
literature we have not had for long. What pleasant reading are his
_Lectures on Translating Homer_, which ought to be at once reprinted.
How full of good things! Not perhaps fit to be torn from their contexts,
or paraded in a commonplace book, but of the kind which give a reader
joy--which make literature tempting--which revive, even in dull
middle-age, something of the enthusiasm of the love-stricken boy. Then,
too, his _Study of Celtic Literature_. It does not matter much whether
you can bring yourself to believe in the _Eisteddfod_ or not. In fact
Mr. Arnold did not believe in it. He knew perfectly well that better
poetry is to be found every week in the poet's corner of every county
newspaper in England than is produced annually at the _Eisteddfod_. You
need not even share Mr. Arnold's opinion as to the inherent value of
Celtic Literature, though this is of course a grave question, worthy of
all consideration--but his _Study_ is good enough to be read for love.
It is full of charming criticism. Most critics are such savages--or if
they are not savages, they are full of fantasies, and are capable at any
moment of calling _Tom Jones_ dull, or Sydney Smith a bore. Mr. Arnold
was not a savage, and could no more have called _Tom Jones_ dull or
Sydney Smith a bore, than Homer heavy or Milton vulgar. He was no gloomy
specialist. He knew it took all sorts to make a world. He was alive to
life. Its great movement fascinated him, even as it had done Burke, even
as it did Cardinal Newman. He watched the rushing stream, the 'stir of
existence,' the good and the bad, the false and the true, with an
interest that never flagged. In his last words on translating Homer he
says: 'And thus false tendency as well as true, vain effort as well as
fruitful, go together to produce that great movement of life, to present
that immense and magic spectacle of human affairs, which from boyhood to
old age fascinates the gaze of every man of imagination, and which would
be his terror if it were not at the same time his delight.'
Mr. Arnold never succeeded in getting his countrymen to take him
seriously as a practical politician. He was regarded as an unauthorised
practitioner whose prescriptions no respectable chemist would consent to
make up. He had not the diploma of Parliament, nor was he able, like
the Secretary of an Early Closing Association, to assure any political
aspirant that he commanded enough votes to turn an election. When Mr.
John Morley took occasion after Mr. Arnold's death to refer to him in
Parliament, the name was received respectfully but coldly. And yet he
was eager about politics, and had much to say about political questions.
His work in these respects was far from futile. What he said was never
inept. It coloured men's thoughts, and contributed to the formation of
their opinions far more than even public meetings. His introduction to
his _Report on Popular Education in France_, published in 1861, is as
instructive a piece of writing as is to be found in any historical
disquisition of the last three decades. The paper on 'My Countrymen' in
that most amusing book _Friendship's Garland_ (which ought also to be at
once reprinted) is full of point.
* * * * *
But it is time to stop. It is only possible to stop where we began.
Matthew Arnold is dead. He would have been the last man to expect anyone
to grow hysterical over the circumstance, and the first to denounce any
strained emotion. _Il n'y a pas d'homme nécessaire._ No one ever grasped
this great, this comforting, this cooling, this self-destroying truth
more cordially than he did. As I write the words, I remember how he
employed them in his preface to the second edition of _Essays in
Criticism_, where he records a conversation, I doubt not an imaginary
one, between himself and a portly jeweller from Cheapside--his
fellow-traveller on the Woodford branch of the Great Eastern line. The
traveller was greatly perturbed in his mind by the murder then lately
perpetrated in a railway carriage by the notorious Müller. Mr. Arnold
plied him with consolation. 'Suppose the worst to happen,' I said,
'suppose even yourself to be the victim--_il n'y a pas d'homme
nécessaire_--we should miss you for a day or two on 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.'
And so it proves for all--for portly jewellers and lovely poets.
'The Pillar still broods o'er the fields
Which border Ennerdale Lake,
And Egremont sleeps by the sea--
Nature is fresh as of old,
Is lovely; a mortal is dead.'
II
Lord Byron's antipathies were, as a rule, founded on some sound human
basis, and it may well be that he was quite right for hating an author
who was all author and nothing else. He could not have hated Matthew
Arnold on that score, at all events, though perhaps he might have found
some other ground for gratifying a feeling very dear to his heart. Mr.
Arnold was many other things as well as a poet, so many other things
that we need sometimes to be reminded that he was a poet. He allowed
himself to be distracted in a variety of ways, he poured himself out in
many strifes; though not exactly eager, he was certainly active. He
discoursed on numberless themes, and was interested in many things of
the kind usually called 'topics.'
Personally, we cannot force ourselves to bewail his agility, this
leaping from bough to bough of the tree of talk and discussion. It
argues an interest in things, a wide-eyed curiosity. If you find
yourself in a village fair you do well to examine the booths, and when
you bring your purchases home, the domestic authority will be wise not
to scan too severely the trivial wares never meant to please a critical
taste or to last a lifetime. Mr. Arnold certainly brought home some very
queer things from his village fair, and was perhaps too fond of taking
them for the texts of his occasional discourses. But others must find
fault, we cannot. There is a pleasant ripple of life through Mr.
Arnold's prose writings. His judgments are human judgments. He did not
care for strange, out-of-the-way things; he had no odd tastes. He drank
wine, so he once said, because he liked it--good wine, that is. And it
was the same with poetry and books. He liked to understand what he
admired, and the longer it took him to understand anything the less
disposed he was to like it. Plain things suited him best. What he hated
most was the far-fetched. He had the greatest respect for Mr. Browning,
and was a sincere admirer of much of his poetry, but he never made the
faintest attempt to read any of the poet's later volumes. The reason
probably was that he could not be bothered. Hazlitt, in a fine passage
descriptive of the character of a scholar, says: 'Such a one lives all
his life in a dream of learning, and has never once had his sleep broken
by a real sense of things.' Mr. Arnold had a real sense of things. The
writings of such a man could hardly fail to be interesting, whatever
they might be about, even the burial of Dissenters or the cock of a
nobleman's hat.
But for all that we are of those who, when we name the name of Arnold,
mean neither the head-master of Rugby nor the author of _Culture and
Anarchy_ and _Literature and Dogma_, but the poet who sang, not, indeed,
with Wordsworth, 'The wonder and bloom of the world,' but a severer,
still more truthful strain, a life whose secret is not joy, but peace.
Standing on this high breezy ground, we are not disposed to concede
anything to the enemy, unless, indeed, it be one somewhat ill-defended
outpost connected with metre. The poet's ear might have been a little
nicer. Had it been so, he would have spared his readers an occasional
jar and a panegyric on Lord Byron's poetry. There are, we know, those
who regard this outpost we have so lightly abandoned as the citadel.
These rhyming gentry scout what Arnold called the terrible sentence
passed on a French poet--_il dit tout ce qu'il veut_, _mais
malheureusement il n'a rien à dire_. They see nothing terrible in a
sentence which does but condemn them to nakedness. Thought is
cumbersome. You skip best with nothing on. But the sober-minded English
people are not the countrymen of Milton and Cowper, of Crabbe and
Wordsworth, for nothing. They like poetry to be serious. We are fond of
sermons. We may quarrel with the vicar's five-and-twenty minutes, but we
let Carlyle go on for twice as many years, and until he had filled
thirty-four octavo volumes.
The fact is that, though Arnold was fond of girding at the Hebrew in us,
and used to quote his own Christian name with humorous resignation as
only an instance of the sort of thing he had to put up with, he was a
Puritan at heart, and would have been as ill at ease at a Greek festival
as Newman at a Spanish _auto da fé_.
What gives Arnold's verse its especial charm is his grave and manly
sincerity. He is a poet without artifice or sham. He does not pretend to
find all sorts of meanings in all sorts of things. He does not
manipulate the universe and present his readers with any bottled elixir.
This has been cast up against him as a reproach. His poetry, so we have
been told, has no consolation in it. Here is a doctor, it is said, who
makes up no drugs, a poet who does not proclaim that he sees God in the
avalanche or hears Him in the thunder. The world will not, so we are
assured, hang upon the lips of one who bids them not to be too sure that
the winds are wailing man's secret to the complaining sea, or that
nature is nothing but a theme for poets. These people may be right. In
any event it is unwise to prophesy. What will be, will be. Nobody can
wish to be proved wrong. It is best to be on the side of truth, whatever
the truth may be. The real atheism is to say, as men are found to do,
that they would sooner be convicted of error they think pleasing, than
have recognised an unwelcome truth a moment earlier than its final
demonstration, if, indeed, such a moment should ever arrive for souls so
craven. In the meantime, this much is plain, that there is no
consolation in non-coincidence with fact, and no sweetness which does
not chime with experience. Therefore, those who have derived consolation
from Mr. Arnold's noble verse may take comfort. Religion, after all,
observes Bishop Butler in his tremendous way, is nothing if it is not
true. The same may be said of the poetry of consolation.
The pleasure it is lawful to take in the truthfulness of Mr. Arnold's
poetry should not be allowed to lead his lovers into the pleasant paths
of exaggeration. The Muses dealt him out their gifts with a somewhat
niggardly hand. He had to cultivate his Sparta. No one of his admirers
can assert that in Arnold
'The force of energy is found,
And the sense rises on the wings of sound.'
He is no builder of the lofty rhyme. This he was well aware of. But
neither had he any ample measure of those 'winged fancies' which wander
at will through the pages of Apollo's favourite children. His strange
indifference to Shelley, his severity towards Keats, his lively sense of
the wantonness of Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, incline us to the
belief that he was not quite sensible of the advantages of a fruitful as
compared with a barren soil. His own crop took a good deal of raising,
and he was perhaps somewhat disposed to regard luxuriant growths with
disfavour.
But though severe and restricted, and without either grandeur or fancy,
Arnold's poetry is most companionable. It never teases you--there he has
the better of Shelley--or surfeits you--there he prevails over Keats. As
a poet, we would never dare or wish to class him with either Shelley or
Keats, but as a companion to slip in your pocket before starting to
spend the day amid
'The cheerful silence of the fells,'
you may search far before you find anything better than either of the
two volumes of Mr. Arnold's poems.
His own enjoyment of the open air is made plain in his poetry. It is no
borrowed rapture, no mere bookish man's clumsy joy in escaping from his
library, but an enjoyment as hearty and honest as Izaak Walton's. He has
a quick eye for things, and rests upon them with a quiet satisfaction.
No need to give instances; they will occur to all. Sights and sounds
alike pleased him well. So obviously genuine, so real, though so quiet,
was his pleasure in our English lanes and dells, that it is still
difficult to realise that his feet can no longer stir the cowslips or
his ear hear the cuckoo's parting cry.
Amidst the melancholy of his verse, we detect deep human enjoyment and
an honest human endeavour to do the best he could whilst here below. The
best he could do was, in our opinion, his verse, and it is a comfort,
amidst the wreckage of life, to believe he made the most of his gift,
cultivating it wisely and well, and enriching man's life with some
sober, serious, and beautiful poetry. We are, indeed, glad to notice
that there is to be a new edition of Mr. Arnold's poems in one volume.
It will, we are afraid, be too stout for the pocket, but most of its
contents will be well worth lodgment in the head. This new edition will,
we have no doubt whatever, immensely increase the number of men and
women who own the charm of Arnold. The times are ripening for his
poetry, which is full of foretastes of the morrow. As we read we are not
carried back by the reflection, 'so men once thought,' but rather
forward along the paths, dim and perilous it may be, but still the paths
mankind is destined to tread. Truthful, sober, severe, with a capacity
for deep, if placid, enjoyment of the pageant of the world, and a quick
eye for its varied sights and an eager ear for its delightful sounds,
Matthew Arnold is a poet whose limitations we may admit without denying
his right. Our passion for him is a loyal passion for a most temperate
king. There is an effort on his brow, we must admit it. It would never
do to mistake his poetry for what he called the best, and which he was
ever urging upon a sluggish populace. It intellectualises far too much;
its method is a known method, not a magical one. But though effort may
be on his brow, it is a noble effort and has had a noble result.
'For most men in a brazen prison live,
Where in the sun's hot eye,
With heads bent o'er their toil, they languidly
Their lives to some unmeaning task-work give,
Dreaming of nought beyond their prison wall.
And as, year after year,
Fresh products of their barren labour fall
From their tired hands, and rest
Never yet comes more near,
Gloom settles slowly down over their breast;
And while they try to stem
The waves of mournful thought by which they are prest,
Death in their prison reaches them
Unfreed, having seen nothing, still unblest.'
Or if not a slave he is a madman, sailing where he will on the wild
ocean of life.
'And then the tempest strikes him, and between
The lightning bursts is seen
Only a driving wreck.
And the pale master on his spar-strewn deck,
With anguished face and flying hair,
Grasping the rudder hard,
Still bent to make some port he knows not where,
Still standing for some false impossible shore;
And sterner comes the roar
Of sea and wind, and through the deepening gloom
Fainter and fainter wreck and helmsman loom,
And he too disappears and comes no more.'
To be neither a rebel nor a slave is the burden of much of Mr. Arnold's
verse--his song we cannot call it. It will be long before men cease to
read their Arnold; even the rebel or the slave will occasionally find a
moment for so doing, and when he does it may be written of him:
'And then arrives a lull in the hot race
Wherein he doth for ever chase
That flying and illusive shadow Rest.
An air of coolness plays upon his face,
And an unwonted calm pervades his breast,
And then he thinks he knows
The hills where his life rose
And the sea where it goes.'
WILLIAM HAZLITT
For an author to fare better dead than alive is good proof of his
literary vivacity and charm. The rare merit of Hazlitt's writing was
recognised in his lifetime by good judges, but his fame was obscured by
the unpopularity of many of his opinions, and the venom he was too apt
to instil into his personal reminiscences. He was not a safe man to
confide in. He had a forked crest which he sometimes lifted. Because
they both wrote essays and were fond of the Elizabethans, it became the
fashion to link Hazlitt's name with Lamb's. To be compared with the
incomparable is hard fortune. Hazlitt suffered by the comparison, and
consequently his admirers, usually in those early days men of keen wits
and sharp tongues, grew angry, and infused into their just eulogiums too
much of Hazlitt's personal bitterness, and too little of his wide
literary sympathies.
But this period of obscurity is now over. No really good thing once come
into existence and remaining so is ever lost to the world. This is most
comfortable doctrine, and true, besides. In the long run the world's
taste is infallible. All it requires is time. How easy it is to give it
that! Is substantial injustice at this moment done to a single English
writer of prose or verse who died prior to the 1st of January, 1801? Is
there a single bad author of this same class who is now read? Both
questions may be truthfully answered by a joyful shout of, No! This fact
ought to make the most unpopular of living authors the sweetest-tempered
of men. The sight of your rival clinging to the cob he has purchased and
maintains out of the profits of the trashiest of novels should be
pleasant owing to the reflection that both rival and cob are trotting to
the same pit of oblivion.
But humorous as is the prospect of the coming occultation of personally
disagreeable authors, the final establishment of the fame of a dead one
is a nobler spectacle.
William Hazlitt had to take a thrashing from life. He took it standing
up like a man, not lying down like a cur; but take it he had to do. He
died on September 18, 1830, tired out, discomfited, defeated. Nobody
reviewing the facts of his life can say that it was well spent. There is
nothing in it of encouragement. He reaped what he sowed, and it proved a
sorry harvest. When he lay dying he wanted his mother brought to his
side, but she was at a great distance, and eighty-four years of age, and
could not come. Carlyle in his old age, grim, worn, and scornful, said
once, sorrowfully enough, 'What I want is a mother.' It is indeed an
excellent relationship.
But though Hazlitt got the worst of it in his personal encounter with
the universe, he nevertheless managed to fling down before he died what
will suffice to keep his name alive. You cannot kill merit. We are all
too busily engaged struggling with dulness, our own and other people's,
and with ennui; we are far too much surrounded by would-be wits and
abortive thinkers, ever to forget what a weapon against weariness lies
to our hand in the works of Hazlitt, who is as refreshing as cold
water, as grateful as shade.
His great charm consists in his hearty reality. Life may be a game, and
all its enjoyments counters, but Hazlitt, as we find him in his
writings--and there is now no need to look for him anywhere else--played
the game and dealt out the counters like a man bent on winning. He cared
greatly about many things. His admiration was not extravagant, but his
force is great; in fact, one may say of him as he said of John Cavanagh,
the famous fives player, 'His service was tremendous.' Indeed, Hazlitt's
whole description of Cavanagh's play reminds one of his own literary
method:
'His style of play was as remarkable as his power of execution. He had
no affectation, no trifling. He did not throw away the game to show off
an attitude or try an experiment. He was a fine, sensible, manly player,
who did what he could, but that was more than anyone else could even
affect to do. His blows were not undecided and ineffectual, lumbering
like Mr. Wordsworth's epic poetry, nor wavering like Mr. Coleridge's
lyric prose, nor short of the mark like Mr. Brougham's speeches, nor
wide of it like Mr. Canning's wit, nor foul like the _Quarterly_, nor
_let_ balls like the _Edinburgh Review_.'
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Brougham, Canning! was ever a fives player so
described before? What splendid reading it makes! but we quote it for
the purpose of applying its sense to Hazlitt himself. As Cavanagh
played, so Hazlitt wrote.
He is always interesting, and always writes about really interesting
things. His talk is of poets and players, of Shakespeare and Kean, of
Fielding and Scott, of Burke and Cobbett, of prize fights and Indian
jugglers. When he condescends to the abstract, his subjects bring an
appetite with them. The Shyness of Scholars, the Fear of Death, the
Identity of an Author with his Books, Effeminacy of Character, the
Conversation of Lords, On Reading New Books: the very titles make you
lick your lips.
Hazlitt may have been an unhappy man, but he was above the vile
affectation of pretending to see nothing in life. Had he not seen Mrs.
Siddons, had he not read Rousseau, had he not worshipped Titian in the
Louvre?
No English writer better pays the debt of gratitude always owing to
great poets, painters, and authors than Hazlitt; but his is a manly, not
a maudlin, gratitude. No other writer has such gusto as he. The glowing
passage in which he describes Titian's St. Peter Martyr almost recalls
the canvas uninjured from the flames which have since destroyed it. We
seem to see the landscape background, 'with that cold convent spire
rising in the distance amidst the blue sapphire mountains and the golden
sky.' His essay on Sir Walter Scott and the _Waverley Novels_ is the
very best that has ever been written on that magnificent subject.