LIFE FROM 1851-62--SECOND SERIES OF _POEMS_--_MEROPE_--_ON TRANSLATING
HOMER_.
We must now return a little and give some account of Mr Arnold's
actual life, from a period somewhat before that reached at the end of
the last chapter. The account need not be long, for the life, as has
been said, was not in the ordinary sense eventful; but it is
necessary, and can be in this chapter usefully interspersed with an
account of his work, which, for nine of the eleven years we shall
cover, was, though interesting, of much less interest than that of
those immediately before and those immediately succeeding.
One understands at least part of the reason for the gradual drying up
of his poetic vein from a sentence of his in a letter of 1858, when he
and his wife at last took a house in Chester Square: "It will be
something to unpack one's portmanteau for the first time since I was
married, nearly seven years ago." "Something," indeed; and one's only
wonder is how he, and still more Mrs Arnold (especially as they now
had three children), could have endured the other thing so long. There
is no direct information in the _Letters_ as to the reason of
this nomadic existence, the only headquarters of which appear to have
been the residence of Mrs Arnold's father, the judge, in Eaton Place,
with flights to friends' houses and to lodgings at the places of
inspection and others, especially Dover and Brighton. And guesswork is
nowhere more unprofitable than in cases where private matters of
income, taste, and other things are concerned. But it certainly would
appear, though I have no positive information on the subject, that in
the early days of State interference with education "My Lords" managed
matters with an equally sublime disregard of the comfort of their
officials and the probable efficiency of the system.[1]
Till I noticed the statement quoted opposite, I was quite unable to
construct any reasonable theory from such a passage as that in a
letter of December 1852[2] and from others which show us Mr Arnold in
Lincolnshire, in Shropshire, and in the eastern counties. Even with
the elucidation it seems a shockingly bad system. One doubts whether
it be worse for an inspector or for the school inspected by him, that
he should have no opportunity for food from breakfast to four o'clock,
when he staves off death by inviting disease in the shape of the
malefic bun; for him or for certain luckless pupil-teachers that,
after dinner, he should be "in for [them] till ten o'clock." With this
kind of thing when on duty, and no home when off it, a man must begin
to appreciate the Biblical passages about partridges, and the wings of
a dove, and so forth, most heartily and vividly long before seven
years are out, more particularly if he be a man so much given to
domesticity as was Matthew Arnold.
However, it was, no doubt, not so bad as it looks. They say the rack
is not, though probably no one would care to try. There were holidays;
there was a large circle of hospitable family friends, and strangers
were only too anxious to welcome (and perhaps to propitiate) Her
Majesty's Inspector. The agreeable anomalies of the British legal
system (which, let Dickens and other grumblers say what they like,
have made many good people happy and only a few miserable) allowed Mr
Arnold for many years to act (sometimes while simultaneously
inspecting) as his father-in-law's Marshal on circuit, with varied
company and scenery, little or nothing to do, a handsome fee for doing
it, and no worse rose-leaf in the bed than heavy dinners and hot port
wine, even this being alleviated by "the perpetual haunch of venison."
For the rest, there are some pleasing miscellaneous touches in the
letters for these years, and there is a certain liveliness of phrase
in them which disappears in the later. It is pleasant to find Mr
Arnold on his first visit to Cambridge (where, like a good
Wordsworthian, he wanted above all things to see the statue of Newton)
saying what all of us say, "I feel that the Middle Ages, and all their
poetry and impressiveness, are in Oxford and not here." In one letter
--written to his sister "K" (Mrs Forster) as his critical letters
usually are--we find three noteworthy criticisms on contemporaries,
all tinged with that slight want of cordial appreciation which
characterises his criticism of this kind throughout (except, perhaps,
in the case of Browning). The first is on Alexander Smith--it was the
time of the undue ascension of the _Life-Drama_ rocket before its
equally undue fall. "It can do me no good [an odd phrase] to be
irritated with that young man, who certainly has an extraordinary
faculty, although I think he is a phenomenon of a very dubious
character." The second, harsher but more definite, is on
_Villette_. "Why is _Villette_ disagreeable? Because the
writer's mind [it is worth remembering that he had met Charlotte
Brontë at Miss Martineau's] contains nothing but hunger, rebellion,
and rage, and therefore that is all she can in fact put into her book.
No fine writing can hide this thoroughly, and it will be fatal to her
in the long-run." The Fates were kinder: and Miss Brontë's mind did
contain something besides these ugly things. But it _was_ her
special weakness that her own thoughts and experiences were
insufficiently mingled and tempered by a wider knowledge of life and
literature. The third is on _My Novel_, which he says he has
"read with great pleasure, though Bulwer's nature is by no means a
perfect one either, which makes itself felt in his book; but his gush,
his better humour, his abundant materials, and his mellowed
constructive skill--all these are great things." One would give many
pages of the _Letters_ for that naïf admission that "gush" is "a
great thing."
A little later (May 1853), all his spare time is being spent on a
poem, which he thinks by far the best thing he has yet done, to wit,
_Sohrab and Rustum_. And he "never felt so sure of himself or so
really and truly at ease as to criticism." He stays in barracks at the
depot of the 17th Lancers with a brother-in-law, and we regret to find
that "Death or Glory" manners do not please him. The instance is a
cornet spinning his rings on the table after dinner. "College does
civilise a boy," he ejaculates, which is true--always providing that
it is a good college. Yet, with that almost unconscious naturalness
which is particularly noticeable in him, he is much dissatisfied with
Oxford--thinks it (as we all do) terribly fallen off since _his_
days. Perhaps the infusion of Dissenters' sons (it is just at the time
of the first Commission in 1854) may brace its flaccid sinews, though
the middle-class, he confesses, is abominably disagreeable. He sees a
good deal of this poor middle-class in his inspecting tours, and
decides elsewhere about the same time that "of all dull, stagnant,
unedifying _entourages_, that of middle-class Dissent is the
stupidest." It is sad to find that he thinks women utterly unfit for
teachers and lecturers; but Girton and Lady Margaret's may take
comfort, it is "no natural incapacity, but the fault of their
bringing-up." With regard to his second series of _Poems_ (_v.
infra_) he thinks _Balder_ will "consolidate the peculiar sort
of reputation he got by _Sohrab and Rustum_;" and a little later,
in April 1856, we have his own opinion of himself as a poet, whose
charm is "literalness and simplicity." Mr Ruskin is also treated--with
less appreciation than one could wish.
The second series just mentioned was issued in 1855, a second edition
of the first having been called for the year before. It contained,
like its predecessor, such of his earlier work as he chose to
republish and had not yet republished, chiefly from the
_Empedocles_ volume. But _Empedocles_ itself was only
represented by some scraps, mainly grouped as _The Harp-Player on
Etna. Faded Leaves_, grouped with an addition, here appear:
_Stagirius_ is called _Desire_, and the _Stanzas in Memory
of the Author of Obermann_ now become _Obermann_ simply. Only
two absolutely new poems, a longer and a shorter, appear: the first is
_Balder Dead_, the second _Separation_, the added number of
_Faded Leaves_. This is of no great value. _Balder_ is interesting,
though not extremely good. Its subject is connected with that of
Gray's _Descent of Odin_, but handled much more fully, and in
blank-verse narrative instead of ballad form. The story, like most of
those in Norse mythology, has great capabilities; but it may be
questioned whether the Greek-Miltonic chastened style which the poet
affects is well calculated to bring them out. The death of Nanna, and
the blind fratricide Hoder, are touchingly done, and Hermod's ride to
Hela's realm is stately. But as a whole the thing is rather dim and
tame.
Mr Arnold's election to the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford (May
1857) was a really notable event, not merely in his own career, but to
some, and no small, extent in the history of English literature during
the nineteenth century. The post is of no great value. I remember the
late Sir Francis Doyle, who was Commissioner of Customs as well as
Professor, saying to me once with a humorous melancholy, "Ah! Eau de
Cologne pays _much_ better than Poetry!" But its duties are far
from heavy, and can be adjusted pretty much as the holder pleases. And
as a position it is unique. It is, though not of extreme antiquity,
the oldest purely literary Professorship in the British Isles; and it
remained, till long after Mr Arnold's time, the only one of the kind
in the two great English Universities. In consequence partly of the
regulation that it can be held for ten years only--nominally five,
with a practically invariable re-election for another five--there is
at least the opportunity, which, since Mr Arnold's own time, has been
generally taken, of maintaining and refreshing the distinction of the
occupant of the chair. Before his time there had been a good many
undistinguished professors, but Warton and Keble, in their different
ways, must have adorned even a Chair of Poetry even in the University
of Oxford. Above all, the entire (or almost entire) freedom of action
left to the Professor should have, and in the case of Keble at least
had already had, the most stimulating effect on minds capable of
stimulation. For the Professor of Poetry at Oxford is neither, like
some Professors, bound to the chariot-wheels of examinations and
courses of set teaching, nor, like others, has he to feel that his
best, his most original, efforts can have no interest, and hardly any
meaning, for all but a small circle of experts. His field is
illimitable; his expatiation in it is practically untrammelled. It is
open to all; full of flowers and fruits that all can enjoy; and it
only depends on his own choice and his own literary and intellectual
powers whether his prelections shall take actual rank as literature
with the very best of that other literature, with the whole of which,
by custom, as an extension from poetry, he is at liberty to deal. In
the first century of the chair the custom of delivering these
Prelections in Latin had been a slight hamper--indeed to this day it
prevents the admirable work of Keble from being known as it should be
known. But this was now removed, and Mr Arnold, whose reputation (it
could hardly be called fame as yet) was already great with the knowing
ones, had not merely Oxford but the English reading world as audience.
And he had it at a peculiarly important time, to the importance of
which he himself, in this very position, was not the least
contributor. Although the greatest writers of the second period of the
century--Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle, Thackeray--had, in all cases but
the last, a long, and in the two first a very long and a wonderfully
fruitful career still before them, yet the phase to which they
belonged was as a dominant phase at its height, and as a crescent was
beginning to give place to another. Within a few years--in most cases
within a few months--of Mr Arnold's installation, _The Defence of
Guenevere_ and FitzGerald's _Omar Khayyam_ heralded fresh
forms of poetry which have not been superseded yet; _The Origin of
Species_ and _Essays and Reviews_ announced changed attitudes
of thought; the death of Macaulay removed the last writer who, modern
as he was in some ways, and popular, united popularity with a
distinctly eighteenth-century tone and tradition; the death of Leigh
Hunt removed the last save Landor (always and in all things an
outsider) of the great Romantic generation of the first third of the
century; _The Ordeal of Richard Feverel_ started a new kind of
novel.
The division which Mr Arnold, both by office and taste, was called to
lead in this newly levied army, was not far from being the most
important of all; and it was certainly that of all which required the
most thorough reformation of staff, _morale_,[3] and tactics. The
English literary criticism of 1830-1860, speaking in round numbers, is
curiously and to this day rather unintelligibly bad. There is, no
doubt, no set of matters in which it is less safe to generalise than
in matters literary, and this is by no means the only instance in
which the seemingly natural anticipation that a period of great
criticism will follow a period of great creation is falsified. But it
most certainly is falsified here. The criticism of the great Romantic
period of 1798-1830 was done for it by itself, and in some cases by
its greatest practitioners, not by its immediate successors. The
philosophic as well as poetical intuition of Coleridge; the marvellous
if capricious sympathy and the more marvellous phrase of Lamb; the
massive and masculine if not always quite trustworthy or well-governed
intellect of Hazlitt, had left no likes behind. Two survivors of this
great race, Leigh Hunt and De Quincey, were indeed critics, and no
inconsiderable ones; but the natural force of both had long been much
abated, and both had been not so much critics as essayists; the
tendency of Hunt to flowery sentimentality or familiar chat, and that
of De Quincey to incessant divergences of "rigmarole," being
formidable enemies to real critical competence. The greatest prosemen
--not novelists--of the generation now closing, Carlyle and Macaulay,
were indeed both considerable critics. But the shadow of death in the
one case, the "shadow of Frederick" in the other, had cut short their
critical careers: and presumptuous as the statement may seem, it may
be questioned whether either had been a great critic--in criticism
pure and simple--of literature.
What is almost more important is that the _average_ literary
criticism of William IV.'s reign and of the first twenty years of her
present Majesty's was exceedingly bad. At one side, of course, the
work of men like Thackeray, who were men of genius but not critics by
profession, or in some respects by equipment, escapes this verdict. At
the other were men (very few of them indeed) like Lockhart, who had
admirable critical qualifications, but had allowed certain theories
and predilections to harden and ossify within them, and who in some
cases had not outgrown the rough uncivil ways of the great
revolutionary struggle. Between these the average critic, if not quite
so ignorant of literature as a certain proportion of the immensely
larger body of reviewers to-day, was certainly even more blind to its
general principles. Such critical work as that of Phillips, long a
favourite pen on the _Times_, and enjoying (I do not know with
how much justice) the repute of being the person whom Thackeray's
_Thunder and Small Beer_ has gibbeted for ever, excites amazement
nowadays at its bland but evidently sincere ignoring of the very
rudiments of criticism. I do not know that even in the most
interesting remains of George Brimley (who, had fate spared him, might
have grown into a great as he already was a good critic) we may not
trace something of the same hopeless amateurishness, the same
uncertainty and "wobbling" between the expression of unconnected and
unargued likes and dislikes concerning the matter of the piece, and
real critical considerations on its merits or demerits of scheme and
form.
Not for the first time help came to us Trojans _Graia ab urbe_.
Of the general merits of French literary criticism it is possible to
entertain a somewhat lower idea than that which (in consequence of the
very circumstances with which we are now dealing) it has been for many
years fashionable in England to hold. But between 1830 and 1860 the
French had a very strong critical school indeed--a school whose
scholars and masters showed the dæmonic, or at least prophetic,
inspiration of Michelet, the milder and feebler but still inspiring
enthusiasm of Quinet, the academic clearness and discipline of
Villemain and Nisard, the Lucianic wit of Mérimée, the matchless
appreciation of Gautier, and, above all, the great new critical
idiosyncrasy of Sainte-Beuve. Between these men there were the widest
possible differences, not merely of personal taste and genius, but of
literary theory and practice. But where they all differed quite
infinitely from the lower class of English critics, and favourably
from all but the highest in their happiest moments, was in a singular
mixture of scholarship and appreciation. Even the most Romantic of
them usually tried to compare the subject with its likes in his own
and even, to some extent, in other literatures; even the most
Classical acknowledged, to some extent, that it was his duty to
appreciate, to understand, to grasp the case of the victim before
ordering him off to execution.
In the practice of Sainte-Beuve himself, these two acknowledgments of
the duty of the critic embraced each other in the happiest union. The
want of enthusiasm which has been sometimes rather sillily charged
against him, comes in reality to no more than this--that he is too
busy in analysing, putting together again, comparing, setting things
in different lights and in different companies, to have much time for
dithyrambs. And the preference of second-to first-class subjects,
which has been also urged, is little more than the result of the fact
that these processes are more telling, more interesting, and more
needed in the case of the former than in the case of the latter.
Homer, Æschylus, Lucretius, Dante, Shakespeare will always make their
own way with all fit readers sooner or later: it is not so with
Meleager or Macrobius or Marmontel, with William Langland or with
Thomas Love Peacock.
But Sainte-Beuve must not carry us too far from Mr Arnold, all
important as was the influence of the one upon the other. It is enough
to say that the new Professor of Poetry (who might be less
appetisingly but more correctly called a Professor of Criticism) had
long entertained the wish to attempt, and now had the means of
effecting, a reform in English criticism, partly on Sainte-Beuve's own
lines, partly on others which he had already made publicly known in
his famous Preface, and in some later critical writings, and which he
was for the rest of his life always unflinchingly to champion,
sometimes rather disastrously to extend.
Still it has always been held that this chair is not _merely_ a
chair of criticism; and Mr Arnold lodged a poetical diploma-piece in
the shape of _Merope_. This was avowedly written as a sort of
professorial manifesto--a document to show what the only Professor of
Poetry whom England allowed herself thought, in theory and practice,
of at least dramatic poetry. It was, as was to be expected from the
author's official position and his not widespread but well-grounded
reputation, much less neglected than his earlier poetry had been. He
even tells us that "it sells well"; but the reviewers were not
pleased. The _Athenæum_ review is "a choice specimen of style,"
and the _Spectator_ "of argumentation"; the _Saturday Review_ is only
"deadly prosy," but none were exactly favourable till G.H. Lewes in
_The Leader_ was "very gratifying." Private criticism was a little
kinder. The present Archbishop of Canterbury (to whom, indeed, Mr
Arnold had just given "a flaming testimonial for Rugby") read it "with
astonishment at its goodness," a sentence which, it may be observed,
is a little double-edged. Kingsley (whom the editor of the _Letters_
good-naturedly but perhaps rather superfluously reintroduces to the
British public as "author of _The Saints' Tragedy_ and other poems")
was "very handsome." Froude, though he begs the poet to "discontinue
the line," was not uncomplimentary in other ways. His own conclusion,
from reviews and letters together, is pretty plainly put in two
sentences, that he "saw the book was not going to take as he wished,"
and that "she [Merope] is more calculated to inaugurate my
professorship with dignity than to move deeply the present race of
_humans_." Let us see what "she" is actually like.
It is rather curious that the story of Merope should have been so
tempting as, to mention nothing else, Maffei's attempt in Italian,
Voltaire's in French, and this of Mr Arnold's in English, show it to
have been to modern admirers and would-be practitioners of the
Classical drama: and the curiosity is of a tell-tale kind. For the
fact is that the _donnée_ is very much more of the Romantic than of
the Classical description, and offers much greater conveniences to the
Romantic than to the Classical practitioner. With minor variations,
the story as generally dramatised is this. Merope, the widowed queen
of the murdered Heraclid Cresphontes, has saved her youngest son from
the murderer and usurper, Polyphontes, and sent him out of the
country. When he has grown up, and has secretly returned to Messenia
to take vengeance, Polyphontes is pressing Merope to let bygones be
bygones and marry him, so as to reconcile the jarring parties in the
State. Æpytus, the son, to facilitate his reception, represents
himself as a messenger charged to bring the news of his own death; and
Merope, hearing this and believing the messenger to be also the
assassin, obtains access to the chamber where he is resting after his
journey, and is about to murder her own sleeping son when he is saved
by the inevitable _anagnorisis_. The party of Cresphontes is then
secretly roused. Æpytus, at the sacrifice which the tyrant holds in
honour of the news of his rival's death, snatches the sacrificial axe
and kills Polyphontes himself, and all ends well.
There is, of course, a strong dramatic moment here; but I cannot think
the plot by any means an ideal one for classical tragedy. At any rate
the Aristotelian conditions--the real ones, not the fanciful
distortions of sixteenth-seventeenth century criticism--are very ill
satisfied. There is bloodshed, but there is no tragic bloodshed, as
there would have been had Merope actually killed her son. The
arresting and triumphant "grip" of the tragic misfortunes of Oedipus
and Orestes, the combination of the course of fate and the [Greek:
hamartia] of the individual, is totally absent. The wooing of Merope
by Polyphontes is not so much preposterous as insignificant, though
Voltaire, by a touch of modernism, has rescued it or half-rescued it
from this most terrible of limbos. The right triumphs, no doubt; but
who cares whether it does or not? And Mr Arnold, with the heroic
obstinacy of the doctrinaire, has done nothing to help the effect of a
scheme in itself sufficiently uninspiring to the modern reader. When
he was at work upon the piece he had "thought and hoped" that it would
have what Buddha called "the character of Fixity, that true sign of
the law." A not unfriendly critic might have pointed out, with gloomy
forebodings, that a sign of law is not necessarily a sign of poetry,
and that, as a prophet of his own had laid it down, poetry should
"transport" not "fix." At any rate, it is clear to any one who reads
the book that the author was in a mood of deliberate provocation and
exaggeration--not a favourable mood for art. The quiet grace of
Sophocles is perhaps impossible to reproduce in English, but Mr
Arnold's verse is more than quiet, it is positively tame. The dreary
_tirades_ of Polyphontes and Merope, and their snip-snap
_stichomythia_, read equally ill in English. Mr Swinburne, who has
succeeded where Mr Arnold failed, saw by a true intuition that, to
equal the effect of the Greek chorus, full English lyric with rhyme
and musical sweep was required. Mr Arnold himself, as might have been
expected from his previous experiments in unrhymed Pindarics, has
given us strophes and antistrophes most punctiliously equivalent in
syllables; but sometimes with hardly any, and never with very much,
vesture of poetry about them. It is absolutely preposterous to suppose
that the effect on a Greek ear of a strophe even of Sophocles or
Euripides, let alone the great Agamemnonian choruses, was anything
like the effect on an English ear of such wooden stuff as this:--
"Three brothers roved the field,
And to two did Destiny
Give the thrones that they conquer'd,
But the third, what delays him
From his unattained crown?"
But Mr Arnold would say "This is your unchaste modern love for
passages and patches. Tell me how I managed this worthy action?" To
which the only answer can be, "Sir, the action is rather
uninteresting. Save at one moment you have not raised the interest
anywhere, and you have certainly not made the most of it there."
The fact is, that very few even of thorough-going Arnoldians have had,
or, except merely as "fighting a prize," could have had, much to say
for _Merope_. The author pleads that he only meant "to give people a
specimen of the world created by the Greek imagination." In the first
place, one really cannot help (with the opening speech of the
_Prometheus_, and the close of the _Eumenides_, and the whole of the
_Agamemnon_ in one's mind) saying that this is rather hard on the
Greeks. And in the second place, what a curious way of setting about
the object, when luckily specimens of the actual "world" so "created,"
not mere _pastiches_ and plaster models of them, are still to be had,
and of the very best! But the fact is, thirdly, that Mr Arnold, as all
men so often do, and as he not very seldom did, was clearly trying not
so much to extol one thing as to depreciate another. Probably in his
heart of hearts (which is generally a much wiser heart than that
according to which the mouth speaks and the pen writes) he knew his
failure. At any rate, he never attempted anything of the kind again,
and Merope, that queen of plaster, remains alone in his gallery, with,
as we see in other galleries, merely some _disjecta membra_--"Fragment
of an _Antigone_," "Fragment of a _Dejaneira_," grouped at her feet.
In the definitive edition indeed, she is not with these but with
_Empedocles on Etna_, a rather unlucky contrast. For _Empedocles_, if
very much less deliberately Greek than _Merope_, is very much better
poetry, and it is almost impossible that the comparison of the two
should not suggest to the reader that the attempt to be Greek is
exactly and precisely the cause of the failure to be poetical. Mr
Arnold had forgotten his master's words about the _oikeia hedone_. The
pleasure of Greek art is one thing--the pleasure of English poetry
another.
His inaugural lecture, "On the Modern Element in Literature," was
printed many years afterwards in _Macmillan's Magazine_ for February
1869; and this long hesitation seems to have been followed by an even
longer repentance, for the piece was never included in any one of his
volumes of essays. But the ten years of his professorship are,
according to the wise parsimony of the chair, amply represented by the
two famous little books--_On Translating Homer_, which, with its
supplementary "Last Words," appeared in 1861-62, and _On the Study of
Celtic Literature_, which appeared at the termination of his tenure in
1867. It may be questioned whether he ever did anything of more
influence than these books, this being due partly to the fashion of
their publication--which, in the latter case at least, applied the
triple shock of lecture at the greatest of English literary centres,
of magazine article, and of book--and partly to the fact that they
were about subjects in which a real or a factitious, a direct or an
indirect, interest was taken by almost every one. Every educated
person knew and cared something (or at least would not have liked to
be supposed not to care and know something) about Homer; very few
educated persons knew anything about Celtic literature. But in these
later lectures he put in a more popular and provocative form than that
of his _French Eton_ (see next chapter) that mixture of literary,
political, social, and miscellaneous critique of his countrymen for
which he was thenceforward best known; and which, if it brought down
some hard knocks from his adversaries, and perhaps was not altogether
a healthy mixture for himself, could at least not be charged by any
reasonable person with lack of piquancy and actuality.
Both books are, and, despite some drawbacks of personal and ephemeral
allusion, always will be, interesting; and both had, perhaps even more
than the _Essays in Criticism_ themselves, a stimulating effect
upon English men of letters which can hardly be overvalued. It may
indeed be said without paradox that they owe not a little of their
value to their faults; but they owe a great deal more to their merits.
The faults are apparent enough even in the first series, which falls
to be noticed in this chapter; yet it is really difficult to say when
a more important book of English criticism had appeared. Dryden's
_Essay of Dramatic Poesy_, Johnson's _Lives_ at their frequent best,
Coleridge's _Biographia Literaria_, are greater things; but hardly the
best of them was in its day more "important for _us_." To read even
the best of that immediately preceding criticism of which something
has been said above--nay, even to recur to Coleridge and Hazlitt and
Lamb--and then to take up _On Translating Homer_, is to pass to a
critic with a far fuller equipment, with a new method, with a style of
his own, and with an almost entirely novel conception of the whole art
of criticism. For the first time (even Coleridge with much wider
reading had not co-ordinated it from this point of view) we find the
two great ancient and the three or four great modern literatures of
Europe taken synoptically, used to illustrate and explain each other,
to point out each other's defects and throw up each other's merits.
Almost for the first time, too, we have ancient literature treated
more or less like modern--neither from the merely philological point
of view, nor with reference to the stock platitudes and traditions
about it. The critic is not afraid of doctrines and general
principles--in fact, he is rather too fond of them--but his object is
anything rather than mere arid deduction and codification. He has the
aesthetic sense as thoroughly as Hazlitt and Lamb, but without the
wilfulness of either, or at least with a different kind of wilfulness
from that of either. Finally, in one of the numerous ways in which he
shows that his subject is alive to him, he mixes it up with the
queerest personalities and sudden zigzags, with all manner of
digressions and side-flings. And last of all, he has that new style of
which we spoke--a style by no means devoid of affectation and even
trick, threatening, to experienced eyes, the disease of mannerism, but
attractive in its very provocations, almost wholly original, and
calculated, at least while it retains its freshness, to drive what is
said home into the reader's mind and to stick it there.
The faults, we said, both critical and non-critical, are certainly not
lacking; and if they were not partly excused by the author's avowedly
militant position, might seem sometimes rather grave. Whatever may
have been the want of taste, and even the want of sense, in the
translation of F. W. Newman, it is almost sufficient to say that they
were neither greater nor less than might have been expected from a
person who, if the most scholarly of eccentrics, was also the most
eccentric even of English scholars. It is difficult not to think that
Mr Arnold makes too much of them and refers too frequently to them.
Such "iteration" is literally "damnable": it must be condemned as
unfair, out of place, out of taste, and even not distantly approaching
that lack of urbanity with which Mr Arnold was never tired of
reproaching his countrymen. Another translator, Mr Wright, was indeed
needlessly sensitive to Mr Arnold's strictures; but these strictures
themselves were needlessly severe. It is all very well for a reviewer,
especially if he be young and anonymous, to tell a living writer that
his book has "no reason for existing"; but chairs of literature are
not maintained by universities that their occupants may, in relation
to living persons, exercise the functions of young anonymous
reviewers. It may indeed be doubted whether these occupants should,
except in the most guarded way, touch living persons at all.
Critically too, as well as from the point of view of manners, the
_Lectures on Translating Homer_ are open to not a few criticisms.
In the first place, the assumptions are enormous, and, in some cases
at least, demonstrably baseless. One of Mr Arnold's strongest points,
for instance, not merely against Mr Newman but against Homeric
translators generally, is concerned with the renderings of the Homeric
compound adjectives, especially the stock ones--_koruthaiolos_,
_merops_, and the rest. The originals, he is never weary of repeating,
did not strike a Greek and do not strike a Greek scholar as out of the
way; the English equivalents do so strike an English reader. Now as to
the Greeks themselves, we know nothing: they have left us no positive
information on the subject. But if (which is no doubt at least partly
true) _koruthaiolos_ and _dolichoskion_ do not strike us, who have
been familiar with Greek almost as long as we can remember, as out of
the way, is that an argument? Most of us, I suppose, at about nine or
ten years old, some no doubt a little or a good deal earlier, learnt
these words as part of the ordinary Greek that was presented to us,
just as much as _kai_ and _ara_; but if we had learnt Greek as we
learn English, beginning with quite ordinary words, would it be so? I
think not; nor would it be so if people began Greek at a later and
more critical stage of their education.
It is also true that the book is full of that exceedingly arbitrary
and unproved assertion, of that rather fanciful terminology, of those
sometimes questionable æsthetic _obiter dicta_, of which, from
first to last, Mr Arnold was so prolific. When he talks about the
mysterious "grand style," and tells us that Milton can never be
affected, we murmur, "_De gustibus!_" and add mentally, "Though
Milton is the greatest of affected writers, Milton is, after
_Comus_ at least, never anything else!" When he tells us again
that at that moment (1861) "English literature as a living
intellectual instrument ranks after the literatures of France and
Germany," we remember that at the time France possessed perhaps only
one writer, Victor Hugo, and Germany absolutely none, of the calibre
of a dozen Englishmen--Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle, Thackeray,
Dickens, and not a few others, from Landor to Mr Ruskin; that Germany,
further, had scarcely one, though France had more than one or two,
great writers of the second class: and we say, "Either your 'living
intellectual instrument' is a juggle of words, or you really are
neglecting fact." Many--very many--similar retorts are possible; and
the most hopeless variance of all must come when we arrive at Mr
Arnold's championship of that ungainly and sterile mule the English
hexameter, and when we review the specimens of the animal that he
turns out from his own stables for our inspection.
But it matters not. For all this, and very much more than all this,
which may be passed over as unnecessary or improper, nothing like the
book had, for positive critical quality, and still more for germinal
influence, been seen by its generation, and nothing of the same
quality and influence has been seen for more than a technical
generation since. It would of course be uncritical in the last degree
to take the change in English criticism which followed as wholly and
directly Mr Arnold's work. He was not even the voice crying in the
wilderness: only one of many voices in a land ready at least to be
eared and pathed. But he was the earliest of such voices, the
clearest, most original, most potent; and a great deal of what
followed was directly due to him.
The non-literary events of his life during this period were
sufficiently varied if not very momentous. We have mentioned the
domiciling in Chester Square, which took place in February 1858,
perhaps on the strength of the additional income from Oxford. In the
late summer of that year he went alone to Switzerland, and next
spring, shortly after the New Year, received, to his very great joy, a
roving commission to France, Belgium, Switzerland, and Piedmont, to
report on elementary education. "Foreign life," he says, with that
perfect naturalness which makes the charm of his letters, "is still to
me perfectly delightful and liberating in the last degree." And he was
duly "presented" at home, in order that he might be presentable
abroad. But the first days of the actual sojourn (as we have them
recorded in a letter to his mother of April 14) were saddened by that
death of his brother William, which he has enshrined in verse.
He had, however, plenty to distract him. France was all astir with the
Austrian war, and it is impossible to read his expressions of
half-awed admiration of French military and other greatness without
rather mischievous amusement. He visited the Morbihan, which struck
him as it must strike every one. Here he is pathetic over a promising
but not performing dinner at Auray--"soup, Carnac oysters, shrimps,
_fricandeau_ of veal, breast of veal, and asparagus;" but
"everything so detestable" that his dinner was bread and cheese. He
must have been unlucky: the little Breton inns, at any rate a few
years later than this, used, it is true, to be dirty to an extent
appalling to an Englishman; but their provender was usually far from
contemptible. There is more sense of Breton scenery in another letter
a little later. Both here and, presently, in Gascony he notes truly
enough "the incredible degree to which the Revolution has cleared the
feudal ages out of the minds of the country people"; but if he
reflected on the bad national effect of this breach with the past, he
does not say so. By June 12 he is in Holland, and does not like
it--weather, language, &c., all English in the worst sense, apparently
without the Norman and Latin element which just saves us. And though
he was a very short time in the Netherlands, he has to relieve his
feelings by more abuse of them when he gets back to Paris--in fact, he
speaks of Holland exactly as the typical Frenchman speaks of England,
and is accordingly very funny to read. The two things that make
Holland most interesting, history and art, were exactly those that
appealed to Mr Arnold least. Then after a refreshing bath of Paris, he
goes to Strasbourg, and Time--Time the Humourist as well as the
Avenger and Consoler--makes him commit himself dreadfully. He "thinks
there cannot be a moment's doubt" that the French will beat the
Prussians even far more completely and rapidly than they are beating
the Austrians. Lord Cowley, it seems, "entirely shared" his conviction
that "the French will always beat any number of Germans who come into
the field against them, and never be beaten by any one but the
English." Let us hope that Jove, when he whistled half this prophecy
down the wind, affirmed the rest of it! Switzerland comes next; and he
is beginning to want very much to be back in England, partly "for the
children, but partly also from affection for that foolish old
country"--which paternal and patriotic desire was granted about the
end of the month, though only for a short time, during which he wrote
a pamphlet on the Italian question. Then "M. le Professeur Docteur
Arnold, Directeur Général de toutes les Écoles de la Grande Bretagne,"
returned to France for a time, saw Mérimée and George Sand and Renan,
as well as a good deal of Sainte-Beuve, and was back again for good in
the foolish old country at the end of the month.
In the early winter of 1859-60 we find him a volunteer, commenting not
too happily on "the hideous English toadyism which invests lords and
great people with commands," a remark which seems to clench the
inference that he had not appreciated the effect of the Revolution
upon France. For nearly three parts of 1860 we have not a single
letter, except one in January pleasantly referring to his youngest
child "in black velvet and red-and-white tartan, looking such a duck
that it was hard to take one's eyes off him."[4] This letter, by the
way, ends with an odd admission from the author of the remark quoted
just now. He says of the Americans, "It seems as if few stocks could
be trusted to grow up properly without having a priesthood and an
aristocracy to act as their schoolmasters at some time or other of
their national existence." This is a confession. The gap, however, is
partly atoned for by a very pleasant batch in September from Viel Salm
in the Ardennes, where the whole family spent a short time, and where
the Director-General of all the schools in Great Britain had splendid
fishing, the hapless Ardennes trout being only accustomed to nets.
Then the interest returns to literature, and the lectures on
translating Homer, and Tennyson's "deficiency in intellectual power,"
and Mr Arnold's own interest in the Middle Ages, which may surprise
some folk. It seems that he has "a strong sense of the irrationality
of that period" and of "the utter folly of those who take it seriously
and play at restoring it." Still it has "poetically the greatest charm
and refreshment for me." One may perhaps be permitted to doubt whether
you can get much real poetical refreshment out of a thing which is
irrational and which you don't take seriously: the practice seems to
be not unlike that mediæval one of keeping fools for your delectation.
Nor can the observations on Tennyson be said to be quite just or quite
pleasant. But every age and every individual is unjust to his or its
immediate predecessor--a saying dangerous and double-edged, but true
for all that. Then he "entangles himself in the study of accents"--it
would be difficult to find any adventurer who has _not_ entangled
himself in that study--and groans over "a frightful parcel of grammar
papers," which he only just "manages in time," apparently on the very
unwholesome principle (though this was not the same batch) of doing
twenty before going to bed when he comes in from a dinner-party at
eleven o'clock. Colds, Brighton, praise from Sainte-Beuve, critical
attacks in the English papers, and (not quite unprovoked) from F.W.
Newman, reflections on the Age of Wisdom (forty), and a meeting with
Thackeray, the Laureate of that age, diversify the history agreeably.
Then we come to a dead, and now rather more than dull, controversy
over the Revised Code, of which we need not say much. Official
etiquette on such matters, especially in England, is very loose,
though he himself seems to have at one time thought it distantly
possible, though not likely, that he would be ejected for the part he
took. And his first five years' tenure of the Oxford Chair ends with
the delivery of the Creweian oration, as to the composition of which
he consoles himself (having heard both from the Vice-Chancellor and
others that there was to be "a great row") by reflecting that "it
doesn't much matter what he writes, as he shall not be heard." I do
not know whether the prediction was justified; but if so, the same
fate had, according to tradition, befallen his Newdigate some twenty
years earlier. In neither case can the "row" have had any personal
reference. Though his lectures were never largely attended by
undergraduates, he was always popular in Oxford.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The mystery is partly explained, in a fashion of no little
biographical importance, by the statement in Mr Arnold's first general
report for the year 1852, that his district included Lincoln,
Nottingham, Derby, Stafford, Salop, Hereford, Worcester, Warwick,
Leicester, Rutland and Northants, Gloucester, Monmouth, _all_
South Wales, most of North Wales, and some schools in the East and
West Ridings. This apparently impossible range had its monstrosity
reduced by the limitation of his inspectorship to Nonconformist
schools of other denominations than the Roman Catholic, especially
Wesleyan and the then powerful "British" schools. As the schools
multiplied the district was reduced, and at last he had Westminster
only; but the exclusion of Anglican and Roman Catholic schools
remained till 1870. And it is impossible not to connect the somewhat
exaggerated place which the Dissenters hold in his social and
political theories (as well as perhaps some of his views about the
"Philistine") with these associations of his. We must never forget
that for nearly twenty years Mr Arnold worked in the shadow, not of
Barchester Towers, but of Salem Chapel.
[2] "I have papers sent me to look over which will give me to the 20th
of January in _London_ without moving, then for a week to
_Huntingdonshire_ schools, then for another to London, ...and
then _Birmingham_ for a month."
[3] There are persons who would spell this _moral_; but I am not
writing French, and in English the practice of good writers from
Chesterfield downwards is my authority.
[4] The letters are full of pleasant child-worship, the best passage
of all being perhaps the dialogue between Tom and "Budge," at vol. i.
p. 56, with the five-year-old cynicism of the elder's reply, "Oh this
is _false_ Budge, this is all _false_!" to his infant brother's
protestations of affection.