By PROF. A. B. HYDE, D.D.
A man of letters, eminent in England, deserves, on visiting these shores,
our brotherly attention. Nothing so holds us in fellowship with the
people of “the little mother-land” as our reading their literature, and
their reading ours, without translation. Their writers and speakers
are thus our true kinsfolk, nearer to us than French or German can be.
Mr. Arnold, known well rather than widely, has position among English
thinkers of our day, such as demands for the readers of THE CHAUTAUQUAN
a reasonable understanding of him and his work. His essays and addresses
are published in seven volumes by MacMillan & Co. His poems, in two or
three volumes, are had from the same house. He came to this country
partly to visit and partly to deliver a few lectures. Mr. Arnold was born
at Christmas of 1822, in Laleham, where his father was privately fitting
students for the universities. His father, Thomas Arnold, eminent as
clergyman and historian, is still more famed as teacher. At Rugby school
his pupils loved and honored him. He understood the good and evil of
English boys, and with wonderful skill he trained them in sound learning,
and moulded them to pure and generous character. Gaining from him the
tone of manly sentiment, many of his “Tom Browns” have been blessings to
their generation.
Matthew was his eldest son. Another, Delafield Arnold, early worn out
in the educational work of India, was buried on his homeward voyage, at
Gibraltar, while his devoted wife went to a grave under the solemn shadow
of the Himalayas.
In Matthew’s boyhood the family home was fixed at Fox How, near the abode
of the poet Wordsworth. Here in his vacations the father studied, and
Matthew could see Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth, the “Lake Poets.”
To Fox How, haunt of the muses, a crowd of distinguished visitors made
streaming pilgrimage, and here the lad who early “seemed no vulgar boy,”
could absorb the deep things of reason and the sweet things of song. He
deeply revered these men under whose shadow he sat as a boyish listener.
Of his father he says: “We rested till then in thy shade, as under the
boughs of an oak. Toil and dejection have tried thy spirit, of that we
say nothing. To us thou wast still cheerful and helpful and firm.”
After Wordsworth’s death he says of the dear and venerable man to whom
his eyes in young weariness had often turned for refreshment:
“He spake and loosed our heart in tears,
Our youth returned, for there was shed
On spirits that had long been dead,
The freshness of the early world.”
In 1840, having prepared under his father, he was elected a scholar at
Baliol College, Oxford, and four years later he gained a prize for an
English poem. The next year he was made a Fellow of Oriel College. In
1846 he became private secretary of Lord Lansdowne, and so remained
for several years. He also—after his marriage, in 1851, with Frances
Wightman, daughter of an eminent jurist—served as Her Majesty’s Inspector
of British schools. In 1857 he was with sharp competition chosen
Professor of Poetry at Oxford. The term of office is ten years. Finding
himself in later years growing alien from poetic composition (“these lips
but rarely frame them now”), he allowed the place to pass to Principal
Shairp, a man more distinguished as a critic than a producer of poetry.
Mr. Arnold still gives an occasional poem, oftenest on simple themes,
as the death of his terrier, “Geist,” or his canary, “Matthias.” His
“Westminster Abbey,” on the death of Dean Stanley, is grand as an anthem.
He is now heard chiefly in essays, critical and æsthetic, and educational
or other addresses. He is of noble presence and kindly, earnest face,
over which his rich, full hair, now sable-silvered, parts and clusters.
He is no orator, speaking low and slowly, but the charm of his personal
appearance, the beauty of his thought, the clear incisive force of his
silvery rhetoric make him to cultivated audiences ever welcome. Take
him for all in all, he is so felt to-day and sure to be so read and
felt hereafter, that some study of him as thinker and poet may be both
instructive and entertaining.
Of his lectures in this country the best was on Emerson, whom he prized
as “the friend and aid of those who wished to live in the spirit.”
His first stir of thought was from Wordsworth, not young Wordsworth, the
flush “high-priest of man and nature and of human life,” but from the
venerable laureate, when his utterances began to have “the sweetness, the
gravity, the beauty, the languor of death.” The lofty energy which Arnold
inherited from his father was seriously impaired by the contemplative
egotism of his father’s friend. At the time when impressions deep and
lasting were easily made on his young mind, Goethe, critic and artist
of many generations, went to his grave. “Knowest thou,” says Carlyle,
“no prophet even in the vesture, environment and dialect of this age?
I know him and name him Goethe. In him man’s life begins again to be
divine.” Goethe had at first held the principles of Rousseau. Later he
announced with the serenity of a Brahmin and the authority of a Delphic
oracle, that the chief end of man is “to cultivate his own spirit.”
This utterance fell like a gospel on Arnold’s ear. He began to expound
and enforce it, striving to engraft it on literary society and to embody
it in the English national life. To him we owe that sense of the word
“culture” which is so hard to state, and other terms and phrases, as
“perfection, sweetness and light,” “harmonious development,” and the
like. A better English pleader for the new “development” could hardly
have been found. Clear and graceful in statement, gentle under criticism,
patient under reproof and witty in reply, his one defect is in not doing
what both the sacred and the profane oracles enjoin as the first thing in
culture—to understand himself. Let us trace his ideas and doctrines in
politics, in education, in religion, and in poetry.
His view of the human race is that we are utterly separate, “enisled,”
each forever by himself as in “the unplumbed, salt, estranging sea.”
“Yes, in the sea of life enisled,
With echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless, watery wild,
We mortal millions live _alone_.”
It follows from this isolation (which is in one sense true) that no man
can be his brother’s keeper. A strong-lunged islander can _call_ to his
fellow, but nothing more. With this view of the “environment” the first
duty ever to be taught and ever rehearsed is _endurance_. Patience under
an order of things that “man did not make and can not mar,” is a teaching
traceable through all his poetry and prose. Then comes in many a pleasing
form the lesson of “self-centering.”
“With joy the stars perform their shining,
And the sea its long, moon-silvered roll;
Why? self-poised they live, nor pine with noting
All the fever of some differing soul.
Bounded by themselves and unregarding
In what state God’s other works may be
In their own tasks all their powers pouring,
These attain the mighty life you see.”
In the “hopeless tangle of our age,” to which he is keenly alive, and
to explore which is a task of misery and distress, “alone, self-poised,
henceforward man must labor.” “No man can save his brother’s soul, nor
pay his brother’s debt.” As man is thus set apart from his fellow,
“self-culture,” “self-perfecting” are his duty and his chief concern.
By culture Mr. Arnold means the development of every capacity and power
enfolded within us, and the adapting of ourselves perfectly to the
island, larger or smaller, of our Crusoe life. This culture is gained not
by unions, coöperations, or harangues “with tremendous cheers.” It is of
one’s self and for one’s self, save as the wind may waft the odors of one
“islet” to another. Culture must come by patient personal effort. Here
Mr. Arnold looks back longingly to feudal times, and even beyond. The
evil communications of the present corrupt good manners. He seems to say
“_any_ former times are better than these,” and to
“Pine for force
A ghost of time to raise,
As if he thus might stop the course
Of these appointed nays.”
Such a doctrine can never come well into politics. It is too
remote—unsystematic, not to say fastidious. Pure as Arnold’s motives
are known to be, he is too dainty to serve in a party, even that of Mr.
Gladstone. He scouts “equality,” and prefers benevolence to democracy.
As a result, the “sweetness and light” shed from his “islet” is little
regarded by the masses, being about as effective as an aurora borealis.
_Punch_ sums up Arnold’s discourses to the laboring classes—and all other
classes:
To Matthew Arnold hark
With both ears all avidity!
That Matthew—a man of mark—
Says “Cultivate Lucidity!”
In education Mr. Arnold’s efforts have been steady and sincere. To him,
among others, is due the successful entrance of young women in England
upon higher study, so that Cambridge and Oxford are now beset by troops
of young ladies who must some day effect entrance. He inherits from his
father an educational zeal. His pleadings for literature in courses
of study as against the exclusive pursuit of physical science and the
“practical” branches, has been earnest and eloquent. He holds that, to
know ourselves and the world, we must know the best that has been thought
and said in the world. The study of belles-letters may be so conducted
as to yield only a smattering of benefit, but it may be made a very
serious and critical search after truth. What has been done by civilized
nations, and what manner of people they were, is as well worth knowing as
chemistry or geology.
Examining a young man on the meaning of “Canst thou not minister to a
mind diseased?” he received as explanation, “Can you not wait upon the
lunatic?” He asks whether to know the products of the combustion of wax
is better than to understand Shakspere? He is sure that man’s need of
beauty in truth, and of acquaintance with the general human mind demands
the study of literature, and that for this study the best of all is the
Greek.
Few will question, most teachers will accept, his educational doctrines.
Mr. Arnold explains that to attain perfect culture, we must be perfectly
religious, and for this, we must properly understand the Bible. This
brings us to look at his darkened side. He is an _evolutionist_ in
religion; that is, he holds that as the ages roll on, new religions
unfold in newness of vigor and meaning, while the old decay and
disappear. He tells us that to-day poetry is the true religion. In our
time “every creed is shaken, every dogma questioned, every tradition
dissolving.” “The strongest part of our religion to-day is its
unconscious poetry, for poetry attaches its emotion to the _idea_, and
all else is illusion.” Poetry has the highest truth, and the highest
seriousness.
“Be ye perfect,” said the Great Teacher, and this, says Mr. Arnold, is a
harmonious development of all sides of our humanity; a thing not found
in our broken world. Therefore he calls the orthodox belief a failure;
the working classes will have nothing to say to it. He will fix it for
them. He takes out of it all its facts and leaves only its tone and its
ideas—its poetry. The scheme of Christianity has never been understood
until now a select few have grasped it.
“There is an enduring power, not ourselves, which makes for
righteousness”—that is his cloudy piety. The “method” and “secret” of
Jesus were commendable; the “method” was repentance, the “secret” was
peace; but the Christian religion rests on the assumption of a Personal
Ruler, “this cannot be verified.” Even the resurrection St. Paul poorly
understood. It is in fact “rising to that harmonious conformity with the
real and the eternal which is life and peace until it becomes glory.”
Even the doctrine of the Trinity Mr. Arnold can speak of as “a fairy-tale
of the three Lord Shaftburys,” a phrase that Ingersoll might quote. One
can see—and it is a sad sight—how his religious views have been spoiled
by a vain philosophy. How reassuring to know that Mr. Moody, preaching
Jesus and the Resurrection at Oxford, in Arnold’s sight, found the
working classes (and others) glad to hear. Where he had said,
Resolve to be thyself! And know that he
Who finds himself, loses his misery.
Many are learning “Deny thyself” and in finding the Savior, losing their
misery.
This gifted disbeliever has longings that he cannot quite conceal. He
does not believe Jesus divine, yet he seems to yearn for faith in him,
such as his father had, and such as was easy when
Men called from chamber, church and tent,
And Christ was by to save.