_A FRENCH ETON_--_ESSAYS IN CRITICISM_--_CELTIC LITERATURE_--_NEW
POEMS_--LIFE FROM 1862 TO 1867.
The period of Mr Arnold's second tenure of the Poetry Chair, from 1862
to 1867, was much more fertile in remarkable books than that of his
first. It was during this time that he established himself at once as
the leader of English critics by his _Essays in Criticism_ (some
of which had first taken form as Oxford Lectures) and that he made his
last appearance with a considerable collection of _New Poems_. It
was during this, or immediately after its expiration, that he issued
his second collected book of lectures on _The Study of Celtic
Literature_; and it was then that he put in more popular, though
still in not extremely popular, forms the results of his
investigations into Continental education. It was during this time
also that his thoughts took the somewhat unfortunate twist towards the
mission of reforming his country, not merely in matters literary,
where he was excellently qualified for the apostolate, but in the much
more dubiously warranted function of political, "sociological," and
above all, ecclesiastical or anti-ecclesiastical gospeller. With all
these things we must now deal.
No one of Mr Arnold's books is more important, or more useful in
studying the evolution of his thought and style, than _A French
Eton_ (1864). Although he was advancing in middle-life when it was
written, and had evidently, as the phrase goes, "made up his bundle of
prejudices," he had not written, or at least published, very much
prose; his mannerisms had not hardened. And above all, he was but just
catching the public ear, and so was not tempted to assume the part of
Chesterfield-Socrates, which he played later, to the diversion of
some, to the real improvement of many, but a little to his own
disaster. He was very thoroughly acquainted with the facts of his
subject, which was not always the case later; and though his
assumptions--the insensibility of aristocracies to ideas, the
superiority of the French to the English in this respect, the failure
of the Anglican Church, and so forth--are already as questionable as
they are confident, he puts them with a certain modesty, a certain
[Greek: epieikeia], which was perhaps not always so obvious when he
came to preach that quality itself later. About the gist of the book
it is not necessary to say very much. He practically admits the
obvious and unanswerable objection that his _French Eton_,
whether we look for it at Toulouse or look for it at Sorèze, is very
French, but not at all Eton. He does not really attempt to meet the
more dangerous though less epigrammatic demurrer, "Do you _want_
schools to turn out products of this sort?" It was only indirectly his
fault, but it was a more or less direct consequence of his arguments,
that a process of making ducks and drakes of English grammar-school
endowments began, and was (chiefly in the "seventies") carried on,
with results, the mischievousness of which apparently has been known
and noted only by experts, and which they have chiefly kept to
themselves.
All this is already ancient history, and history not ancient enough to
be venerable. But the book as a book, and also as a document in the
case, has, and always will have, interest. "The cries and catchwords"
which Mr Arnold denounces, as men so often do denounce their own most
besetting temptations, have not yet quite mastered him; but they have
made a lodgment. The revolt--in itself quite justifiable, and even
admirable--from the complacent acceptance of English middle-class
thought, English post-Reform-Bill politics, English mid-century taste
and ethics and philosophy,--from everything, in short, of which
Macaulay was the equally accepted and representative eulogist and
exponent, is conspicuous. It is from foreign and almost hostile
sources that we must expect help. The State is to resume, or to
initiate, its guidance of a very large part, if not of the whole, of
the matters which popular thought, Liberal and Conservative alike,
then assigned to individual action or private combination. We have not
yet Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace labelled with their tickets
and furnished with their descriptions; but the three classes are
already sharply separated in Mr Arnold's mind, and we can see that
only in the Philistine who burns Dagon, and accepts circumcision and
culture fully, is there to be any salvation. The anti-clerical and
anti-theological animus is already strong; the attitude _dantis jura
Catonis_ is arranged; the _jura_ themselves, if not actually
graven and tabulated, can be seen coming with very little difficulty.
Above all, the singing-robes are pretty clearly laid aside; the
Scholar-Gipsy exercises no further spell; we have turned to prose and
(as we can best manage it) sense.
But _A French Eton_ is perhaps most interesting for its style. In
this respect it marks a stage, and a distinct one, between the
_Preface_ of 1853 and the later and better known works. More of a
_concio ad vulgus_ than the former, it shows a pretty obvious
endeavour to soften and popularise, without unduly vulgarising, the
academic tone of the earlier work. And it does not yet display those
"mincing graces" which were sometimes attributed (according to a very
friendly and most competent critic, "harshly, but justly") to the
later. The mannerisms, indeed, like the dogmatisms, are pretty clearly
imminent. Slightly exotic vocabulary--"habitude" "repartition," for
"habit," "distribution"--makes its appearance. That abhorrence of the
conjunction, which made Mr Arnold later give us rows of adjectives and
substantives, with never an "and" to string them together, is here.
But no one of these tricks, nor any other, is present in excess: there
is nothing that can justly be called falsetto; and in especial, though
some names of merely ephemeral interest are in evidence--Baines,
Roebuck, Miall, &c., Mr Arnold's well-known substitutes for Cleon and
Cinesias--there is nothing like the torrent of personal allusion in
_Friendship's Garland_. "Bottles" and his company are not yet
with us; the dose of _persiflage_ is rigorously kept down; the
author has not reached the stage when he seemed to hold sincerely the
principle so wickedly put by Mr Lewis Carroll, that
"What I tell you three times is true,"
and that the truth could be made truest by making the three thirty.
The result is that he never wrote better. A little of the dignity of
his earlier manner--when he simply followed that admirable older
Oxford style, of which Newman was the greatest master and the last--is
gone, but it has taken some stiffness with it. Some--indeed a good
deal--of the piquancy of the later is not yet apparent; but its
absence implies, and is more than compensated by, the concomitant
absence of those airs and flings, those interludes as of an academic
jester, in cap and gown and liripipe instead of motley, which have
been charged, not quite unjustly, on the Arnold that we know best.
There is hardly in English a better example of the blending and
conciliation of the two modes of argumentative writing referred to in
Bishop Kurd's acute observation, that if your first object is to
convince, you cannot use a style too soft and insinuating; if you want
to confute, the rougher and more unsparing the better. And the
description and characterisation are quite excellent.
Between _A French Eton_ and the second collection of Oxford
Lectures came, in 1865, the famous _Essays in Criticism_, the
first full and varied, and perhaps always the best, expression and
illustration of the author's critical attitude, the detailed manifesto
and exemplar of the new critical method, and so one of the
epoch-making books of the later nineteenth century in English. It
consisted, in the first edition, of a _Preface_ (afterwards
somewhat altered and toned down) and of nine essays (afterwards to be
made ten by the addition of _A Persian Passion-Play_). The two
first of these were general, on _The Function of Criticism at the
Present Time_ and _The Literary Influence of Academies_, while
the other seven dealt respectively with the two Guérins, Heine,
_Pagan and Mediæval Religious Sentiment_, Joubert, Spinoza, and
Marcus Aurelius. I am afraid it must be taken as only too strong a
confirmation of Mr Arnold's own belief as to the indifference of the
English people to criticism that no second edition of this book was
called for till four years were past, no third for ten, and no fourth
for nearly twenty.
Yet, to any one whom the gods have made in the very slightest degree
critical, it is one of the most fascinating (if sometimes also one of
the most provoking) of books; and the fascination and provocation
should surely have been felt even by others. As always with the
author, there is nothing easier than to pick holes in it: in fact, on
his own principles, one is simply bound to pick holes. He evidently
enjoyed himself very much in the _Preface:_ but it may be doubted
whether the severe Goddess of Taste can have altogether smiled on his
enjoyment. He is superciliously bland to the unlucky and no doubt
rather unwise Mr Wright (_v. supra_): he tells the _Guardian_ in a
periphrasis that it is dull, and "Presbyter Anglicanus" that he is
born of Hyrcanian tigers, and the editor of the _Saturday Review_ that
he is a late and embarrassed convert to the Philistines. He introduces
not merely Mr Spurgeon, a Philistine of some substance and memory, but
hapless forgotten shadows like "Mr Clay," "Mr Diffanger," "Inspector
Tanner," "Professor Pepper" to the contempt of the world. And then,
when we are beginning to find all this laughter rather
"thorn-crackling" and a little forced, the thing ends with the famous
and magnificent _epiphonema_ (as they would have said in the old days)
to Oxford, which must for ever conciliate all sons of hers and all
gracious outsiders to its author, just as it turns generation after
generation of her enemies sick with an agonised grin.
So, again, one may marvel, and almost grow angry, at the whim which
made Mr Arnold waste two whole essays on an amiable and interesting
person like Eugénie de Guérin and a mere nobody like her brother. They
are very pretty essays in themselves; but then (as Mr Arnold has
taught us), "all depends on the subject," and the subjects here are so
exceedingly unimportant! Besides, as he himself almost openly
confessed, and as everybody admits now, he really did not understand
French poetry at all. When we come to "Keats and Guérin," there is
nothing for it but to take refuge in Byron's
"_Such_ names coupled!"
and pass with averted face. Seventy-two mortal pages of Matthew
Arnold's, at his very best time, wasted on a brother and sister who
happened to be taken up by Sainte-Beuve!
But the rest of the book is entirely free from liability to any such
criticism as this. To some criticism--even to a good deal--it is
beyond doubt exposed. The first and most famous paper--the general
manifesto, as the earlier _Preface_ to the _Poems_ is the
special one, of its author's literary creed--on _The Function of
Criticism at the Present Time_ must indeed underlie much the same
objections as those that have been made to the introduction. Here is
the celebrated passage about "Wragg is in custody," the text of which,
though no doubt painful in subject and inurbane in phraseology, is
really a rather slender basis on which to draw up an indictment
against a nation. Here is the astounding--the, if serious, almost
preternatural--statement that "not very much of current English
literature comes into this best that is known and thought in the
world. Not very much I fear: certainly less than of the current
literature of France and Germany." And this was 1865, when the Germans
had had no great poet but Heine for a generation, nor any great poets
but Goethe and Heine for some five hundred years, no great
prose-writer but Heine (unless you call Goethe one), and were not
going to have any! It was 1865, when all the great French writers,
themselves of but some thirty years' standing, were dying off, not to
be succeeded! 1865, when for seventy years England had not lacked, and
for nearly thirty more was not to lack, poets and prose-writers of the
first order by the dozen and almost the score! Here, too, is the
marvellous companion-statement that in the England of the first
quarter of the century was "no national glow of life." It was the
chill of death, I suppose, which made the nation fasten on the throat
of the world and choke it into submission during a twenty years'
struggle.
But these things are only Mr Arnold's way. I have never been able to
satisfy myself whether they were deliberate paradoxes, or sincere and
rather pathetic paralogisms. For instance, did he really think that
the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, an organ of "dukes, dunces, and
_dévotes_," as it used to be called even in those days by the
wicked knowing ones, a nursing mother of Academies certainly, and a
most respectable periodical in all ways--that this good _Revue_
actually "had for its main function to understand and utter the best
that is known and thought in the world," absolutely existed as an
organ for "the free play of mind"? I should be disposed to think that
the truer explanation of such things is that they were neither quite
paradoxes nor quite paralogisms; but the offspring of an innocent
willingness to believe what he wished, and of an almost equally
innocent desire to provoke the adversary. Unless (as unluckily they
sometimes are) they be taken at the foot of the letter, they can do no
harm, and their very piquancy helps the rest to do a great deal of
good.
For there can be no doubt that in the main contention of his
manifesto, as of his book, Mr Arnold was absolutely right. It was true
that England, save for spasmodic and very partial appearances of it in
a few of her great men of letters--Ben Jonson, Dryden, Addison,
Johnson--had been wonderfully deficient in criticism up to the end of
the eighteenth century; and that though in the early nineteenth she
had produced one great philosophical critic, another even greater on
the purely literary side, and a third of unique appreciative sympathy,
in Coleridge, Hazlitt, and Lamb, she had not followed these up, and
had, even in them, shown certain critical limitations. It was true
that though the Germans had little and the French nothing to teach us
in range, both had much to teach us in thoroughness, method,
_style_ of criticism. And it was truest of all (though Mr Arnold,
who did not like the historic estimate, would have admitted this with
a certain grudge) that the time imperatively demanded a thorough
"stock-taking" of our own literature in the light and with the help of
others.
Let _palma_--let the _maxima palma_--of criticism be given
to him in that he first fought for the creed of this literary
orthodoxy, and first exemplified (with whatever admixture of
will-worship of his own, with whatever quaint rites and ceremonies)
the carrying out of the cult. It is possible that his direct influence
may have been exaggerated; one of the most necessary, though not of
the most grateful, businesses of the literary historian is to point
out that with rare exceptions, and those almost wholly on the poetic
side, great men of letters rather show in a general, early, and
original fashion a common tendency than definitely lead an otherwise
sluggish multitude to the promised land. But no investigation has
deprived, or is at all likely to deprive, the _Essays in
Criticism_ of their place as an epoch-making book, as the manual of
a new and often independent, but, on the whole, like-minded, critical
movement in England.
Nor can the blow of the first essay be said to be ill followed up in
the second, the almost equally famous (perhaps the _more_ famous)
_Influence of Academies_. Of course here also, here as always,
you may make reservations. It is a very strong argument, an argument
stronger than any of Mr Arnold's, that the institutions of a nation,
if they are to last, if they are to do any good, must be in accordance
with the spirit of the nation; that if the French Academy has been
beneficial, it is because the French spirit is academic; and that if
(as we may fear, or hope, or believe, according to our different
principles) the English spirit is unacademic, an Academy would
probably be impotent and perhaps ridiculous in England. But we can
allow for this; and when we have allowed for it, once more Mr Arnold's
warnings are warnings on the right side, true, urgent, beneficial.
There are still the minor difficulties. Even at the time, much less as
was known of France in England then than now, there were those who
opened their eyes first and then rubbed them at the assertion that
"openness of mind and flexibility of intelligence" were the
characteristics of the French people. But once more also, no matter!
The central drift is right, and the central drift carries many
excellent things with it, and may be allowed to wash away the less
excellent. Mr Arnold is right on the average qualities of French
prose; whether he is right about the "provinciality" of Jeremy Taylor
as compared to Bossuet or not, he is right about "critical freaks,"
though, by the way--but it is perhaps unnecessary to finish that
sentence. He is right about the style of Mr Palgrave and right about
the style of Mr Kinglake; and I do not know that I feel more
especially bound to pronounce him wrong about the ideas of Lord
Macaulay. But had he been as wrong in all these things as he was
right, the central drift would still be inestimable--the drift of
censure and contrast applied to English eccentricity, the argument
that this eccentricity, if it is not very good, is but too likely to
be very bad.
Yet it is perhaps in the illustrative essays that the author shows at
his best. Even in the Guérin pieces, annoyance at the waste of
first-rate power on tenth-rate people need not wholly blind us to the
grace of the exposition and to the charming eulogy of "distinction" at
the end. That, if Mr Arnold had known a little more about that French
Romantic School which he despised, he would have hardly assigned this
distinction to Maurice; and that Eugénie, though undoubtedly a "fair
soul," was in this not distinguished from hundreds and thousands of
other women, need not matter very much after all. And with the rest
there need be few allowances, or only amicable ones. One may doubt
whether Heine's charm is not mainly due to the very lawlessness, the
very contempt of "subject," the very quips and cranks and caprices
that Mr Arnold so sternly bans. But who shall deny the excellence and
the exquisiteness of this, the first English tribute of any real worth
to the greatest of German poets, to one of the great poets of the
world, to the poet who with Tennyson and Hugo completes the
representative trinity of European poets of the nineteenth century
proper? Very seldom (his applause of Gray, the only other instance, is
not quite on a par with this) does the critic so nearly approach
enthusiasm--not merely _engouement_ on the one side or serene
approval on the other. No matter that he pretends to admire Heine for
his "modern spirit" (why, _O Macarée_, as his friend Maurice de
Guérin might have said, should a modern spirit be better than an
ancient one, or what is either before the Eternal?) instead of for
what has been, conceitedly it may be, called the "tear-dew and
star-fire and rainbow-gold" of his phrase and verse. He felt this
magic at any rate. No matter that he applies the wrong comparison
instead of the right one, and depreciates French in order to exalt
German, instead of thanking Apollo for these two good different
things. The root of the matter is the right root, a discriminating
enthusiasm: and the flower of the matter is one of the most charming
critical essays in English. It is good, no doubt, to have made up
one's mind about Heine before reading Mr Arnold; but one almost envies
those who were led to that enchanted garden by so delightful an
interpreter.
Almost equally delightful, and with no touch of the sadness which must
always blend with any treatment of Heine, is the next essay, the pet,
I believe, of some very excellent judges, on "Pagan and Mediæval
Religious Sentiment," with its notable translation of Theocritus and
its contrast with St Francis. One feels, indeed, that Mr Arnold was
not quite so well equipped with knowledge on the one side as on the
other; indeed, he never was well read in mediæval literature. But his
thesis, as a thesis, is capable of defence; in the sternest times of
military etiquette he could not have been put to death on the charge
of holding out an untenable post; and he puts the different sides with
incomparable skill and charm. Mr Arnold glosses Pagan morals rather
doubtfully, but so skilfully; he rumples and blackens mediæval life
more than rather unfairly, but with such a light and masterly touch!
Different again, inferior perhaps, but certainly not in any hostile
sense inferior, is the "Joubert." It has been the fashion with some to
join this essay to the Guérin pieces as an instance of some
incorrigible twist in Mr Arnold's French estimates, of some inability
to admire the right things, even when he did admire I cannot agree
with them. Joubert, of course, has his own shortcomings as a
_pensée_-writer. He is _rococo_ beside La Bruyére, dilettante beside
La Rochefoucauld, shallow beside Pascal. There is at times, even if
you take him by himself, and without comparison, something thin and
amateurish and conventional about him. But this is by no means always
or very often the case; and his merits, very great in themselves, were
even greater for Mr Arnold's general purpose.
That subtle and sensitive genius did not go wrong when it selected
Joubert as an eminent example of those gifts of the French mind which
most commended themselves to itself--an exquisite _justesse_, an
alertness of spirit not shaking off rule and measure, above all, a
consummate propriety in the true and best, not the limited sense of
the word. Nor is it difficult to observe in the shy philosopher a
temperament which must have commended itself to Mr Arnold almost as
strongly as his literary quality, and very closely indeed connected
with that--the temperament of equity, of _epieikeia_, of freedom
from swagger and brag and self-assertion. And here, once more, the
things receive precisely their right treatment, the treatment
proportioned and adjusted at once to their own value and nature and to
the use which their critic is intending to make of them. For it is one
of the greatest literary excellences of the _Essays in Criticism_
that, with rare exceptions, they bear a real relation to each other
and to the whole--that they are not a bundle but an organism; a
university, not a mob.
The subjects of the two last essays, _Spinoza_ and _Marcus
Aurelius_, may at first sight, and not at first sight only, seem
oddly chosen. For although the conception of literature illustrated in
the earlier part of the book is certainly wide, and admits--nay,
insists upon, as it always did with Mr Arnold--considerations of
subject in general and of morals and religion in particular, yet it is
throughout one of literature as such. Now, we cannot say that the
interest of Spinoza or that of Marcus Aurelius, great as it is in both
cases, is wholly, or in the main, or even in any considerable part, a
literary interest. With Spinoza it is a philosophical-religious
interest, with Marcus Aurelius a moral-religious, almost purely. The
one may indeed illustrate that attempt to see things in a perfectly
white light which Mr Arnold thought so important in literature; the
other, that attention to conduct which he thought more important
still. But they illustrate these things in themselves, not in relation
to literature. They are less literary even than St Francis; far less
than the author of the _Imitation_.
It cannot therefore but be suspected that in including them Mr Arnold,
unconsciously perhaps, but more probably with some consciousness, was
feeling his way towards that wide extension of the province of the
critic, that resurrection of the general Socratic attitude, which he
afterwards adventured. But it cannot be said that his experiments are
on this particular occasion in any way disastrous. With both his
subjects he had the very strongest sympathy--with Spinoza (as already
with Heine) as a remarkable example of the Hebraic spirit and genius,
rebellious to or transcending the usual limitations of Hebraism; with
Marcus Aurelius as an example of that non-Christian morality and
religiosity which also had so strong an attraction for him. There is
no trace in either essay of the disquieting and almost dismaying
jocularity which was later to invade his discussion of such things: we
are still far from Bottles; the three Lord Shaftesburys relieve us by
not even threatening to appear. And accordingly the two essays add in
no small degree, though somewhat after the fashion of an appendix or
belated episode, to the charm of the book. They have an unction which
never, as it so often does in the case of Mr Arnold's dangerous master
and model Renan, degenerates into unctuosity; they are nobly serious,
but without being in the least dull; they contain some exceedingly
just and at the same time perfectly urbane criticism of the ordinary
reviewing kind, and though they are not without instances of the
author's by-blows of slightly unproved opinion, yet these are by no
means eminent in them, and are not of a provocative nature. And I do
not think it fanciful to suppose that the note of grave if
unclassified piety, of reconciliation and resignation, with which they
close the book, was intended--that it was a deliberate "evening
voluntary" to play out of church the assistants at a most remarkable
function--such a function as criticism in English had not celebrated
before, such as, I think, it may without unfairness be said has not
been repeated since. _Essays in Criticism_, let us repeat, is a
book which is classed and placed, and it will remain in that class and
place: the fresh wreaths and the fresh mud, that may be in turn
unfitly thrown upon it, will affect neither.
Between this remarkable book and the later ones of the same
_lustrum_, we may conveniently take up the thread of biography
proper where we last dropped it. The letters are fuller for this
period than perhaps for any other; but this very fulness makes it all
the more difficult to select incidents, never, perhaps, of the very
first importance, but vying with each other in the minor biographical
interests. A second fishing expedition to Viel Salm was attempted in
August 1862; but it did not escape the curse which seems to dog
attempts at repetition of the same pleasure. The river was hopelessly
low; the fish would not take; and the traveller came back in very
little more than "a day and a night and a morrow." By December
danger-signals are up in a letter to his mother, to the effect that
"it is intolerable absurdity to profess [who does?] to see
Christianity through the spectacles of a number of second- or
third-rate men who lived in Queen Elizabeth's time"--that time so
fertile in nothing but the second-rate and the third. But it is
followed a little later by the less disputable observation, "It is
difficult to make out exactly at what [F.D.] Maurice is driving;
perhaps he is always a little dim in his own mind" on that point.
The illuminations at the Prince of Wales's marriage, where like other
people he found "the crowd very good-humoured," are noted; and the
beginning of _Thyrsis_ where and while the fritillaries blow. But
from the literary point of view few letters are more interesting than
a short one to Sir Mountstuart (then Mr) Grant Duff, dated May 14,
1863, in which Mr Arnold declines an edition of Heine, the loan of
which was offered for his lecture--later the well-known essay. His
object, he says, "is not so much to give a literary history of Heine's
work as to mark his place in modern European letters, and the special
tendency and significance of what he did." He will, therefore, not
even read these things of Heine's that he has not read, but will take
the _Romancero_ alone for his text, with a few quotations from
elsewhere, With a mere passing indication of the fact that Matthew
Arnold here, like every good critic of this century, avowedly pursues
that plan of "placing" writers which some of his own admirers so
foolishly decry, I may observe that this is a _locus classicus_
for his own special kind of criticism. It is possible--I do not know
whether he did so--that Sir Mountstuart may, on receiving the letter,
have smiled and thought of "Mon siége est fait"; but I am sure he
would be the first to admit that the cases were different. I do not
myself think that Mr Arnold's strong point was that complete grasp of
a literary personality, and its place, which some critics aim at but
which few achieve. His impatience--here perhaps half implied and later
openly avowed--of the historic estimate in literature, would of itself
have made this process irksome to him. But on the lines of his own
special vocation as a critic it was not only irksome, it was
unnecessary. His function was to mark the special--perhaps it would be
safer to say _a_ special--tendency of his man, and to bring that
out with all his devices of ingenious reduplication, fascinating
rhetoric, and skilful parading of certain favourite axioms and general
principles. This function would not have been assisted--I think it
nearly certain that it would have been hampered and baulked--by that
attempt to find "the whole" which the Greek philosopher and poet so
sadly and so truly declares that few boast to find. It was a side, a
face, a phase of each man and writer, that he wished to bring out;
and, though he might sometimes exaggerate this, yet his exaggeration
was scarcely illegitimate. To bring out something he had to block out
much. If he had attempted to show the whole Goethe, the whole Heine,
the whole Homer or Shakespeare even, they would have been difficult if
not impossible to group and to compare in the fashion in which he
wished to deal with them.
And except on the sheer assumption, which is surely a fallacy, that
_suppressio veri_ is always and not only sometimes _suggestio
falsi_, I do not see that he exceeded a due licence in this matter,
while that he was wise in his generation there can be no doubt. He
wanted to influence the average Englishman, and he knew perfectly well
there is nothing the average Englishman dislikes so much as guarded
and elaborately conditioned statements. The immense popularity and
influence of Macaulay had been due to his hatred of half-lights, of
"perhapses"; and little as Mr Arnold liked Macaulay's fiddle, he was
wise enough to borrow his rosin, albeit in disguise. If a critic makes
too many provisos, if he "buts" too much, if he attempts to paint the
warts as well as the beauties, he will be accused of want of sympathy,
he will be taxed with timorousness and hedging, at best he will be
blamed for wire-drawn and hair-splitting argument. The preambles of
exposition, the conclusions of summing up, will often be considered
tedious or impertinent. The opposite plan of selecting a nail and
hitting that on the head till you have driven it home was, in fact, as
much Mr Arnold's as it was Macaulay's. The hammer-play of the first
was far more graceful and far less monotonous: yet it was hammer-play
all the same. But we must return to our _Letters_.
A dinner with Lord Houghton--"all the advanced Liberals in religion
and politics, and a Cingalese in full costume"--a visit to Cambridge
and a stroll to Grantchester, notice of about the first elaborate
appreciation of his critical work which had appeared in England, the
article by the late Mr S.H. Reynolds in the _Westminster Review_
for October 1863, visits to the Rothschilds at Aston Clinton and
Mentmore, and interesting notices of the composition of the
_Joubert_, the _French Eton_, &c., fill up the year. The
death of Thackeray extracts one of those criticisms of his great
contemporaries which act as little douches from time to time, in the
words, "I cannot say that I thoroughly liked him, though we were on
friendly terms: and he was not to my mind a great writer." But the
personal reflections which follow are of value. He finds "the sudden
cessation of so vigorous an existence very sobering. To-day I am
forty-one; the middle of life in any case, and for me perhaps much
more than the middle. I have ripened and am ripening so slowly that I
should be glad of as much time as possible. Yet I can feel, I rejoice
to say, an inward spring which seems more and more to gain strength
and to promise to resist outward shocks, if they must come, however
rough. But of this inward spring one must not talk [it is only to his
mother that he writes this] for it does not like being talked about,
and threatens to depart if one will not leave it in mystery."
An interview with Mr Disraeli at Aston Clinton, not, as one may
suppose, without pleasant words, opens 1864. "It is only from
politicians who have themselves felt the spell of literature that one
gets these charming speeches," he says, and they, not unnaturally,
charmed him so much that he left his dressing-case and his umbrella
behind him. But the anti-crusade is more and more declared. He "means
to deliver the middle-class out of the hand of their Dissenting
ministers," and in the interval wants to know how "that beast of a
word 'waggonette' is spelt?" The early summer was spent at Woodford,
on the borders of Epping Forest, and the early autumn at Llandudno,
where Welsh scenery and the poetry of the Celtic race "quite
overpower" him. Alas! some other poetry did not, and when we find him
in September thinking _Enoch Arden_ "perhaps the best thing
Tennyson has done," we are not surprised to find this remarkable
special appreciation followed by a general depreciation, which is
quite in keeping. He is even tempted (and of course asked) to write a
criticism of the Laureate, but justly replies, "How is that possible?"
From 1865 we get numerous notices of the notices of the _Essays_,
and a pleasant and full account of a second official tour on the
Continent, with special dwellings at most of the Western and Central
European capitals. The tour lasted from April to November, and I have
sometimes thought that it might, by itself, give a better idea of Mr
Arnold as an epistoler than the _Letters_ at large seem to have
given. Early in 1866 we hear of the beginnings of the _Friendship's
Garland_ series, though the occasion for that name did not come
till afterwards. And he spent the summer of that year (as he did that
of the next) in a farmhouse at West Humble, near Dorking, while he
caught "_a_ salmon" in the Deveron during September.
The occasion is perhaps a good one to say a few words on the relations
between Mr Arnold and M. Renan, though the latter is not so prominent
in the Continental letters as Sainte-Beuve and M. Scherer are. The
author of the _Vie de Jésus_ was a very slightly younger man than
Mr Arnold (he was born in 1823), but in consequence of his having left
the seminary and begun early to live by literary work, he was somewhat
in advance of his English compeer in literary repute. His
contributions to the _Débats_ and the _Revue des Deux Mondes_
began to be collected soon after 1850, and his first remarkable single
book, _Averroès et l'Averroisme_, dates from that year. I do not
know how early Mr Arnold became acquainted with his written work. But
they actually met in 1859, during the business of the Foreign
Education Commission, and there is a very remarkable passage in a
letter to Mrs Forster on Christmas Eve of that year. He tells his
sister of "Ernest Renan, a Frenchman I met in Paris," and notes the
considerable resemblance between their lines of endeavour, observing,
however, that Renan is chiefly "trying to inculcate morality, in a
high sense of the word, on the French," while _he_ is trying to
inculcate intelligence on the English. After which he makes a long and
enthusiastic reference to the essay, _Sur la Poésie des Races
Celtiques_, the literary results of which we shall soon see. I do
not know whether Mr Arnold ever expressed to his intimates--for the
reference to M. Renan in "Numbers" is not quite explicit--what he
thought of those later and very peculiar developments of "morality in
a high sense of the word" which culminated in the _Abbesse de
Jouarre_ and other things. His sense of humour must have painfully
suggested to him that his own familiar friend and pattern Frenchman
had become one of the most conspicuous examples of that French
lubricity which he himself denounced. But there was no danger of his
imitating M. Renan in this respect. In others the following was quite
unmistakable, and, I am bound to say, on the whole rather disastrous.
In literary criticism Mr Arnold needed no teaching from M. Renan, and
as his English training on one of its sides preserved him from the
Frenchman's sentimental hedonism, so on another it kept him from the
wildest excesses of M. Renan's critical reconstructions of sacred
history. But he copied a great deal too much of his master's
dilettante attitude to religion as a whole, and, as we shall see, he
adopted and carried a great deal further M. Renan's (I am told) not
particularly well-informed and (I am sure) very hazardous and
fantastic ideas about Celtic literature. On the whole, the two were
far too much alike to do each other any good. Exquisite even as M.
Renan's mere style is, it is exquisite by reason of sweetness, with a
certain not quite white and slightly phosphorescent light, not by
strength or by practical and masculine force. Now it was the latter
qualities that Mr Arnold wanted; sweetness and light he could not
want.
As the tenure of his Chair drew to a close, and as he began to loathe
examination papers more and more (indeed I know no one to whom _usus
concinnat amorem_ in the case of these documents), he made some
endeavours to obtain employment which might be, if not both more
profitable and less onerous, at any rate one or the other. First he
tried for a Charity Commissionership; then for the librarianship of
the House of Commons. For the former post it may be permitted to think
that his extremely strong--in fact partisan--opinions, both on
education and on the Church of England, were a most serious
disqualification; his appointment to the latter would have been an
honour to the House and to England, and would have shown that
sometimes at any rate the right man can find the right place. But he
got neither. He delivered his last Oxford lecture in the summer term
of 1867. I remember that there were strong undergraduate hopes that Mr
Browning, who was an Honorary M.A., might be got to succeed him; but
it was decided that the honorary qualification was insufficient, and I
daresay there were other objections. Mr Arnold had a sort of
"send-off" in the shape of two great dinners at Balliol and Merton, at
which he and Mr Browning were the principal guests, and the close of
his professorial career was further made memorable by the issue of the
_Study of Celtic Literature_ in prose and the _New Poems_ in verse,
with _Schools and Universities on the Continent_ to follow next year.
Of these something must be said before this chapter is closed.
_On the Study of Celtic Literature_ is the first book of his to
which, as a whole, and from his own point of view, we may take rather
serious objections. That it has merits not affected by these
objections need hardly be said; indeed I think it would not be foolish
to say that it is--or was--even the superior of the _Homer_ in
comparative and indirect importance. In that Mr Arnold had but, at the
best, roused men to enter upon new ways of dealing with old and
familiar matter; in this he was leading them to conquest of new
realms. Now, as we have seen, it was exactly this exploration, this
expansion, of which English was then in most need, just as it is now
perhaps in most need of concentration and retreat upon the older
acquisitions.
So far so good; but if we go farther, we do not at first fare better.
It would be grossly unjust to charge Mr Arnold with all the nonsense
which has since been talked about Celtic Renascences; but I fear we
cannot write all that nonsense off his account. In particular, he set
an example, which has in this and other matters been far too widely
followed, of speaking without sufficient knowledge of fact. It cannot
be too peremptorily laid down that the literary equivalent of a
"revoke"--the literary act after which, if he does it on purpose, you
must not play with a man--is speaking of authors and books which he
has not read and cannot read in the original, while he leaves you
ignorant of his ignorance. _This_ Mr Arnold never committed, and
could never have committed. But short of it, and while escaping its
penalty, a man may err by speaking too freely even of what he
confesses that he does not know; and of this minor and less
discreditable sin, I own (acknowledging most frankly that I know even
less of the _originals_ than he did), I think Mr Arnold was here
guilty.
Exactly how much Gaelic, Irish, or Welsh Mr Arnold knew at first-hand,
I cannot say: he frankly enough confesses that his knowledge was very
closely limited. But what is really surprising, is that he does not
seem to have taken much trouble to extend it at second-hand. A very
few Welsh triads and scraps of Irish are all that, even in
translation, he seems to have consulted: he never, I think, names
Dafydd ap Gwilym, usually put forward as the greatest of Celtic poets;
and in the main his citations are derived either from _Ossian_
("this do seem going far," as an American poetess observes), or else
from the _Mabinogion_, where some of the articles are positively
known to be late translations of French-English originals, and the
others are very uncertain. You really cannot found any safe literary
generalisations on so very small a basis of such very shaky matter. In
fact, Mr Arnold's argument for the presence of "Celtic magic," &c., in
Celtic poetry comes to something like this. "There is a quality of
magic in Shakespeare, Keats, &c.; this magic must be Celtic: therefore
it must be in Celtic poetry." Fill up the double enthymeme who list, I
am not going to endeavour to do so. I shall only say that two
sentences give the key-note of the book as argument. "Rhyme itself,
all the weight of evidence tends to show, came into our poetry from
the Celts." Now to some of us all the weight of evidence tends to show
that it came from the Latins. "Our only first-rate body of
contemporary poetry is the German." Now at the time (1867), for more
than thirty years, Germany had not had a single poet of the first or
the second class except Heine, who, as Mr Arnold himself very truly
says, was not a German but a Jew.
But once more, what we go to Mr Matthew Arnold for is not fact, it is
not argument, it is not even learning. It is phrase, attitude, style,
that by which, as he says admirably in this very book, "what a man has
to say is recast and heightened in such a manner as to add dignity and
distinction to it." It is the new critical attitude, the appreciation
of literary beauty in and for itself, the sense of "the word," the
power of discerning and the power of reflecting charm, the method not
more different from the wooden deduction of the old school of critics
than from the merely unenlightened and Philistine commonness of the
reviewers, his earlier contemporaries, or from the aimless "I like
that" and "I don't like this" which does duty now, and did then, and
has done always, for criticism itself. True, Mr Arnold himself might
be wilful, capricious, haphazard; true, he might often be absolutely
unable to give any real reason for the faith that was in him; true, he
sometimes might have known more than he did know about his subject.
But in all these points he saved himself: in his wilfulness, by the
grace and charm that sometimes attend caprice; in his want of reason,
by his genuineness of faith itself; in his occasional lack of the
fullest knowledge, by the admirable use--not merely display--which he
made of what knowledge he had. There may be hardly a page of the two
books of his lectures in which it is not possible to find some
opportunity for disagreement--sometimes pretty grave disagreement; but
I am sure that no two more valuable books, in their kind and subject,
to their country and time, have been ever issued from the press.
The _New Poems_ make a volume of unusual importance in the
history of poetical careers. Mr Arnold lived more than twenty years
after the date of their publication; but his poetical production
during that time filled no more than a few pages. At this date he was
a man of forty-five--an age at which the poetical impulse has been
supposed to run low, but perhaps with no sufficient reason. Poets of
such very different types as Dryden and Tennyson have produced work
equal to their best, if not actually their best, at that age and
later. Mr Browning had, a few years before, produced what are perhaps
his actually greatest volumes, _Men and Women_ and _Dramatis
Personae_, the one at forty-three, the other at fifty-two.
According to Mr Arnold's own conception of poetry-making, as depending
upon the subject and upon the just and artist-like exposition of that
subject, no age should be too late.
Certainly this age was not too late with him. The contents all
answered strictly enough to their title, except that _Empedocles on
Etna_ and some half-dozen of its companions were, at Mr Browning's
request, reprinted from the almost unpublished volume of 1852, and
that _Thyrsis, St Brandan, A Southern Night_, and the _Grande
Chartreuse_ had made magazine appearances. Again the moment was
most important. When Mr Arnold had last made (omitting with an apology
the "transient and embarrassed phantom" of _Merope_) an
appearance in 1855, the transition age of English nineteenth-century
poetry was in full force. No one's place was safe but Tennyson's; and
even his was denied by some, including Mr Arnold himself, who never
got his eyes quite clear of scales in that matter. Browning, though he
had handed in indisputable proofs, had not yet had them allowed; the
Spasmodics had not disappeared; the great prae-Raphaelite school was
but on the way. The critics knew not what to think; the vulgar thought
(to the tune of myriad copies) of Tupper. Both classes, critic and
public, rent _Maud_ and neglected _Men and Women: The Defence
of Guenevere_ had not yet rung the matins--bell in the ears of the
new generation.
Now things were all altered. The mixture of popularity and perfection
in the _Idylls_ and the _Enoch Arden_ volume--the title poem
and _Aylmer's Field_ for some, _The Voyage_ and _Tithonus_ and _In the
Valley of Cauterets_ for others--had put Tennyson's place
"Beyond the arrows, shouts, and views of men."
The three-volume collection of Browning's _Poems_, and
_Dramatis Personae_ which followed to clench it, had nearly, if
not quite, done the same for him. _The Defence of Guenevere_ and
_The Life and Death of Jason, Atalanta, Chastelard_, and most of
all the _Poems and Ballads_, had launched an entirely new
poetical school with almost unexampled pomp and promise on the world.
The Spasmodics were forgotten, the Tupper cult had been nearly (not
yet quite) laughed out of existence. That Mr Arnold's own poems had
had any widely extended sale or reading could hardly be said; but they
were read by those who were or were shortly to be themselves read. You
had not to look far in any Oxford college (I cannot speak of
Cambridge) before you found them on those undergraduate shelves which
mean so much; while many who, from general distaste to poetry or from
accident, knew them not, or hardly knew them, were familiar with their
author's prose work, or at least knew him as one whom others knew.
The volume itself was well calculated to take advantage, to at least a
moderate extent, of this conjunction of circumstance. At no time was
the appeal of Mr Arnold's poetry of the most impetuous or peremptory
order. And it might be contended that this collection contains nothing
quite up to the very best things of the earlier poems, to the
_Shakespeare_ sonnet, to _The Scholar-Gipsy_, to the _Isolation_
stanzas. But with the majority of its readers it was sure rather to
send them to these earlier things than to remind them thereof, and its
own attractions were abundant, various, and strong.
In the poet himself there was perhaps a slight consciousness of "the
silver age." The prefatory _Stanzas_, a title changed in the
collected works to _Persistency of Poetry_, sound this note--
"Though the Muse be gone away,
Though she move not earth to-day,
Souls, erewhile who caught her word,
Ah! still harp on what they heard."
A confession perhaps a little dangerous, when the Muses were speaking
in no uncertain tones not merely to juniors like Mr Morris and Mr
Swinburne but to seniors like Tennyson and Browning. But the actual
contents were more than reassuring. Of _Empedocles_ it is not
necessary to speak again: _Thyrsis_ could not but charm. The
famous line,
"And that sweet city with her dreaming spires,"
sets the key dangerously high; but it is kept by the magnificent
address to the cuckoo,
"Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go?"
and the flower-piece that follows; by that other single masterpiece,
"The coronals of that forgotten time;"
by the more solemn splendour of the stanza beginning
"And long the way appears which seemed so short;"
by the Signal tree; and by the allegoric close with the reassertion of
the Scholar. All these things stand by themselves, hold their sure and
reserved place, even in the rush and crowd of the poetry of the
sixties, the richest, perhaps, since the time from 1805 to 1822.
_Saint Brandan_, which follows, has pathos if not great power,
and connects itself agreeably with those Celtic and mediæval studies
which had just attracted and occupied Mr Arnold. The sonnets which
form the next division might be variously judged. None of them equals
the _Shakespeare_; and one may legitimately hold the opinion that
the sonnet was not specially Mr Arnold's form. Its greatest examples
have always been reached by the reflex, the almost combative, action
of intense poetic feeling--Shakespeare's, Milton's, Wordsworth's,
Rossetti's--and intensity was not Mr Arnold's characteristic. Yet
_Austerity of Poetry, East London_, and _Monica's Last Prayer_ must
always stand so high in the second class that it is hardly critical
weakness to allow them the first. And then the tide rises. _Calais
Sands_ may not be more than very pretty, but it is that, and _Dover
Beach_ is very much more. Mr Arnold's theological prepossessions and
assumptions may appear in it, and it may be unfortunately weak as an
argument, for except the flood itself nothing is so certain a
testimony to the flood as the ebb. But the order, the purpose, the
argument, the subject, matter little to poetry. The expression, the
thing that is _not_ the subject, the tendency outside the subject,
which makes for poetry, are here, and almost of the very best. Here
you have that passionate interpretation of life, which is so different
a thing from the criticism of it; that marvellous pictorial effect to
which the art of line and colour itself is commonplace and _banal_,
and which prose literature never attains except by a _tour de force_;
that almost more marvellous accompaniment of vowel and consonant
music, independent of the sense but reinforcing it, which is the glory
of English poetry among all, and of nineteenth-century poetry among
all English, poetries. As is the case with most Englishmen, the sea
usually inspired Mr Arnold--it is as natural to great English poets to
leave the echo of the very word ringing at the close of their verse as
it was to Dante to end with "stars." But it has not often inspired any
poet so well as this, nor anywhere this poet better than here. If at
any time a critic may without fatuity utter judgment with some
confidence, it is where he disagrees with the sentiment and admires
the poem; and for my part I find in _Dover Beach_, even without the
_Merman_, without the _Scholar-Gipsy_, without _Isolation_, a document
which I could be content to indorse "Poetry, _sans phrase_."
_The Terrace at Berne_ has been already dealt with, but that mood for
epicede, which was so frequent in Mr Arnold, finds in the _Carnac_
stanzas adequate, and in _A Southern Night_ consummate, expression.
_The Fragment of Chorus of a Dejaneira_, written long before, but now
first published, has the usual faults of Mr Arnold's rhymeless verse.
It is really quite impossible, when one reads such stuff as--
"Thither in your adversity
Do you betake yourselves for light,
But strangely misinterpret all you hear.
For you will not put on
New hearts with the inquirer's holy robe
And purged considerate minds"--
not to ask what, poetically speaking, is the difference between this
and the following--
"To college in the pursuit of duly
Did I betake myself for lecture;
But very soon I got extremely wet,
For I had not put on
The stout ulster appropriate to Britain,
And my umbrella was at home."
But _Palladium_, if not magnificent, is reconciling, the Shakespearian
_Youth's Agitations_ beautiful, and _Growing Old_ delightful, not
without a touch of terror. It is the reply, the _verneinung_, to
Browning's magnificent _Rabbi ben Ezra_, and one has almost to fly to
that stronghold in order to resist its chilling influence. But it is
poetry for all that, and whatever there is in it of weakness is
redeemed, though not quite so poetically, by _The Last Word_. The
_Lines written in Kensington Gardens_ (which had appeared with
_Empedocles_, but were missed above) may be half saddened, half
endeared to some by their own remembrance of the "black-crowned
red-boled" giants there celebrated--trees long since killed by London
smoke, as the good-natured say, as others, by the idiotic tidiness of
the gardeners, who swept the needles up and left the roots without
natural comfort and protection. And then, after lesser things, the
interesting, if not intensely poetical, _Epilogue to Lessing's
Laocoon_ leads us to one of the most remarkable of all Mr Arnold's
poems, _Bacchanalia, or the New Age_. The word remarkable has been
used advisedly. _Bacchanalia_, though it has poignant and exquisite
poetic moments, is not one of the most specially _poetical_ of its
author's pieces. But it is certainly his only considerable piece of
that really poetic humour which is so rare and delightful a thing.
And, like all poetic humour, it oscillates between cynicism and
passion almost bewilderingly. For a little more of this what pages and
pages of jocularity about Bottles and the Rev. Esau Hittall would we
not have given! what volumes of polemic with the _Guardian_ and
amateur discussions of the Gospel of St John! In the first place, note
the metrical structure, the sober level octosyllables of the overture
changing suddenly to a dance-measure which, for a wonder in English,
almost keeps the true dactylic movement. How effective is the
rhetorical iteration of
"The famous orators have shone,
The famous poets sung and gone,"
and so on for nearly half a score of lines! How perfect the sad
contrast of the refrain--
"_Ah! so the quiet was!
So was the hush!_"
how justly set and felicitously worded the rural picture of the
opening! how riotous the famous irruption of the New Agers! how
adequate the quiet-moral of the end, that the Past is as the Present,
and more also! And then he went and wrote about Bottles!
"Progress," with a splendid opening--
"The master stood upon the mount and taught--
He saw a fire in his disciples' eyes,"--
conducts us to two other fine, though rhymeless, dirges. In the first,
_Rugby Chapel_, the intensity of feeling is sufficient to carry off
the lack of lyrical accomplishment. The other is the still better
_Heine's Grave_, and contains the famous and slightly pusillanimous
lines about the "weary Titan," which are among the best known of their
author's, and form at once the motto and the stigma of mid-century
Liberal policy. And then the book is concluded by two other
elegies--in rhyme this time--_The Stanzas written at the Grande
Chartreuse_ and _Obermann once more_. They are, however, elegies of a
different kind, much more self-centred, and, indeed, little more than
fresh variations on "the note," as I ventured to call it before. Their
descriptive and autobiographic interest is great, and if poetry were a
criticism of life, there is plenty of that of them. The third
book--_Schools and Universities on the Continent_ (1868)--in which are
put the complete results of the second Continental exploration--is, I
suppose, much less known than the non-professional work, though
perhaps not quite so unknown as the earlier report on elementary
education. By far the larger part of it--the whole, indeed, except a
"General Conclusion" of some forty pages--is a reasoned account of the
actual state of matters in France, Italy, Germany, and Switzerland. It
is not exactly judicial; for the conclusion--perhaps the foregone
conclusion--obviously colours every page. But it is an excellent
example (as, indeed, is all its author's non-popular writing) of clear
and orderly exposition--never arranged _ad captandum_, but also never
"dry." Indeed there certainly are some tastes, and there may be many,
to which the style is a distinct relief after the less quiet and more
mannered graces of some of the rest.
Opinions may differ more as to the value of the book as a lesson, or
as an argument. Mr Arnold had started with a strong belief in the
desirableness--indeed of the necessity--of State-control of the most
thoroughgoing kind in education; and he was not at all likely to miss
the opportunity of fetching new weapons from the very arsenals and
_places d'armes_ of that system. He was thoroughly convinced that
English ways generally, and especially the ways of English schools and
colleges, were wrong; and he had, of course, no difficulty in pointing
triumphantly to the fact that, if the institutions of Continental
countries differed in some ways from each other, they all differed in
nearly the same way from ours. It may undoubtedly be claimed for
him--by those who see any force in the argument--that events have
followed him. Education, both secondary and university in England,
_has_ to a large extent gone since on the lines he indicates; the
threatened superiority of the German bagman has asserted itself even
more and more; the "teaching of literature" has planted a terrible
fixed foot in our schools and colleges. But perhaps the weight usually
assigned to this kind of corroboration is rather imaginary. That a
thing has happened does not prove that it ought to have happened,
except on a theory of determinism, which puts "conduct" out of sight
altogether. There are those who will still, in the vein of
Mephistopheles-Akinetos, urge that the system which gave us the men
who pulled us out of the Indian Mutiny can stand comparison with the
system which gave France the authors of the _débâcle_; that the
successes of Germany over France in war have no necessary connection
with education, and those of Germany over England in commerce,
diplomacy, &c., still less. They will even go further--some of
them--and ask whether the Continental practices and the Arnoldian
principles do not necessitate divers terribly large and terribly
ill-based assumptions, as that all men are _educable_, that the value
of education is undiminished by its diffusion, that all, or at least
most, subjects are capable of being made educational instruments, and
a great many more.
On the other hand, they will cheerfully grant that Mr Arnold never
succumbed to that senseless belief in examination which has done, and
is doing, such infinite harm. But they will add to the debit side that
the account of English university studies which ends the book was even
at the time of writing so inaccurate as to be quite incomprehensible,
unless we suppose that Mr Arnold was thinking of the days of his own
youth, and not of those with complete accuracy. He says "the
examination for the degree of bachelor of arts, which we place at the
end of our three years' university course, is merely the
_Abiturienten-examen_ of Germany, the _épreuve du baccalauréat_ of
France, placed in both those countries at the entrance to university
studies"; and it is by this that he justifies Signer Matteucci's
absurd description of Oxford and Cambridge as _hauts lyceés_ Now, in
the first place, there is not one single word in this sentence, or in
the context, or, so far as I remember, in the whole book, about the
Honours system, which for very many years before 1868 had exalted the
standard infinitely higher in the case of a very large proportion of
men. And in the second place, there is not a word about the
Scholarship system, which in the same way had for very many years
provided an entrance standard actually higher--far higher in some
ways--than the _concluding_ examinations of the French _baccalauréat_.
My own days at Oxford were from 1863 to 1868, the year of Mr Arnold's
book. During that time there were always in the university some 400
men who had actually obtained scholarships on this standard; and a
very considerable number who had competed on it, and done fairly.
Whether Mr Arnold shared Mark Pattison's craze about the abolition of
the pass-man altogether, I do not know. But he ought to have known,
and I should think he must have known, that at the time of his writing
the mere and sheer pass-man--the man whose knowledge was represented
by the minimum of Smalls, Mods, and Greats--was, if not actually in a
minority,--in some colleges at least he was that--at any rate in a
pretty bare majority. With his love of interference and control, he
might have retorted that this did not matter, that the university
_permitted_ every one to stick to the minimum. But as a matter of fact
he suggests that it provided no alternative, no _maximum_ or _majus_
at all.
By the time that we have now reached, that of his giving up the
professorship, Mr Arnold's position was, for good and for evil, mostly
fixed. When he took up the duties of his chair he was, though by no
means a very young man and already the author of much remarkable work,
yet almost unknown out of Oxford and a small official circle in
London. He had now, at forty-five, not exactly popularity, but a very
considerable, and a very lively and growing, reputation. By far the
most and the best of his poetry was written; but it was only just
coming to be at all generally read or at all justly appreciated. He
had, partly in obeying, and partly in working against his official
superiors, acquired a distinct position as an educational reformer. He
had become something of a figure in society. But, above all, he had
proclaimed with undoubting authority, and had exemplified with
remarkable and varied skill, a new or at least a very greatly altered
kind of literary criticism. And this had already threatened incursions
into domains from which men of letters as such had generally kept
aloof, or which, if they had touched, they had touched not as men of
letters. Something of Socrates, something of Addison, something of
Johnson, mingled in Mr Arnold's presentation of himself as, if not
exactly an arbiter, at any rate a suggester of elegances in all
things, poetry and politics, prose and polite manners, public thought,
public morality, religion itself. These pretensions, if urged in a
less agreeable manner, would have been intolerable; they were not
universally tolerated as it was: but the gifts and graces of the
critic made them--so far--inoffensive, even rather fascinating, to all
save the least accommodating or the most clear-sighted, and to some
even of these.
And we must remember that this appearance of Mr Arnold as the mild and
ingenious tamer of the ferocious manners of Britons coincided with far
wider and more remarkable innovations. This was the time, at home, of
the second Parliamentary Reform, which did at least as much to
infringe the authority of his enemy the Philistine, as the first had
done to break the power of the half-dreaded, half-courted Barbarian.
This was the time when, abroad, the long-disguised and disorganised
power of Germany was to rearrange the map of Europe, and to bring
about a considerable rearrangement of Mr Arnold's own ideas as to the
respective greatness of foreign nations. And finally the walls of
another stronghold of British Philistia, its intense and apparently
impregnable self-satisfaction with Free-trade and cheap money and so
forth, were tottering and crumbling. A blast against them--indeed a
series of blasts from _Chartism_ to the _Latter-day
Pamphlets_--had been blown long before by Carlyle, in very
different tones from Mr Arnold's. They had lost their stoutest
champion and their most eloquent panegyrist in Macaulay. But Sadowa
and household suffrage gave the final summons, if not the final shake.
Mr Arnold had done his best to co-operate; but his object, to do him
justice, was to be rather a raiser of the walls of Thebes than an
over-thrower of those of Jericho, or even of Ashdod. He set about, in
all seriousness, to clear away the rubbish and begin the
re-edification; unluckily, in but too many cases, with dubious
judgment, and by straying into quarters where he had no vocation. But
he never entirely neglected his real business and his real vocation,
and fortunately he returned to them almost entirely before it was too
late.