IN THE WILDERNESS.
That the end of Mr Arnold's tenure of the Professorship of Poetry was
a most important epoch in his life is sufficiently evident. In the ten
years that came to an end then, he had, as two such extremely
competent judges as Mr Disraeli and Crabb Robinson in different ways
told him,[1] passed from comparative obscurity into something more
than comparative prominence. His chair had been for him a real
_cathedra_, and his deliverances from it had always assumed, and
had at length, to a great extent, achieved, real authority. In
criticism it was evident that if he had not revealed positively novel
aspects of truth, he had formulated and put on record aspects which
were presenting themselves to many, nay, most, of the best critical
minds of his day. His criticism had drawn his poetry with it, if not
into actual popularity, yet into something like attention. His
attempts to obtain some other employment less irksome, less absorbing,
and more profitable, had indeed been unsuccessful; but he was rising
in his own department, and his work, if still in part uncongenial and
decidedly laborious, appears to have been much less severe than in
earlier days. Partly this work itself, partly his writings, and partly
other causes had opened to him a very large circle of acquaintance,
which it was in his own power to extend or contract as he pleased. His
domestic life was perfectly happy, if his means were not very great:
and his now assured literary position made it easy for him to increase
these means, not indeed largely, but to a not despicable extent, by
writing. The question was, "What should he write?"
It is probably idle ever to wish that a man had done anything
different from that which he has done. Without being a rigid
Determinist, one may be pretty well convinced that the actual conduct
is the joint result of abilities, and of desires, and of opportunity
to exercise them, and that the man, had he really done otherwise,
would have been unsuccessful or unhappy or both. But I fear that if I
had been arbiter of Mr Arnold's fate at this moment I should have
arranged it differently. He should have given us more poems--the man
who, far later, wrote the magnificent _Westminster Abbey_ on such a
subject as Dean Stanley, had plenty more poetry in his sack. And in
prose he should have given us infinite essays, as many as De Quincey's
or as Sainte-Beuve's own, and more than Hazlitt's, of the kind of the
_Heine_ and the _Joubert_ earlier, of the _Wordsworth_ and the _Byron_
later. I can see no reason why, in the twenty-one years' lease of life
upon which he now entered, he should not have produced a volume a-year
of these,--there are more than enough subjects in the various
literatures that he knew; and though it is possible that in such
extended application his method might have proved monotonous, or his
range have seemed narrow, it is not likely. To complete the thing, I
should have given him, instead of his inspectorship, a headship at
Oxford, for which, it seems to me, he was admirably fitted. But _Dis
aliter visum_: at least it seemed otherwise good to Mr Arnold himself
as far as his literary employments were concerned, and the gods did
not interfere.
We have seen that he had, some years before, conceived the ambitious
idea of changing the mind of England on a good many points by no means
merely literary; and he seems, not altogether unnaturally, to have
thought that now was the time to apply seriously to that work. His
tenure of the Oxford chair had given him the public ear; and the
cessation of that tenure had removed any official seal of etiquette
which it might have laid on his own lips. A far less alert and acute
mind than his must have seen that the Reform troubles of 1866 and the
"leap in the dark" of 1867 were certain to bring about very great
changes indeed at home; and that the war of the first-named year meant
the alteration of many things abroad. He at least thought--and there
was some justification of a good many kinds for him in thinking--that
intellectual changes, of importance equal to the political, were
coming or come upon the world. And so for a time he seems to have
grown rather cold towards the Muses, his earliest and always his
truest loves. Social, political, and religious matters tempted him
away from literature; and for a matter of ten years it can hardly be
said that he had anything to do with her except to take her name in
vain in the title of by far his worst, as it was by far his most
popular, volume.
It has been hinted in a note on one of the early pages in this book
that the secret of this unfortunate twist is at least partly to be
found in the peculiar character of Mr Arnold's official employment.
For nearly twenty years he had been constantly thrown into contact
with the English Dissenters; and, far earlier than the time which we
have reached, they seem not only, in familiar phrase, to have "got
upon his nerves," but to have affected his brain. He saw all things in
Dissent--or, at least, in the middle-class Philistine Dissenter. His
Philistia is not in the least a true portrait of the average
middle-class household thirty or forty years ago; though, I daresay (I
have little direct knowledge), it is not an unfair one of the average
Dissenting middle-class household. The religion which Mr Arnold
attacks is not the religion of the Church of England at all, or only
of what was even then a decaying and uninfluential part of it, the
extremer and more intolerant sect of the Evangelicals. Once more, I
cannot from personal knowledge say whether this portrait was true of
Dissent, but I can believe it.
Now, to derive an idea of England from the English Dissenter is and
was absurd. Politically, indeed, he had only too much power between
1832 and 1866, from the tradition which made Liberal politicians fond
of petting him. Socially, intellectually, and to a great extent
religiously, he had next to no power at all. To take the average
manager of a "British" school as the average representative of the
British nation was the wildest and most mischievous of confusions. Yet
this practically was the basis of Mr Arnold's crusade between 1867 and
1877.
The First Blast of the Trumpet was, intentionally no doubt, the last
of the Oxford lectures, and for that very reason a rather gentle and
insinuating one. _Culture its Enemies_, which was the origin and
first part, so to say, of _Culture and Anarchy_, carried the
campaign begun in the _Essays in Criticism_ forward; but only in
the most cautious manner, a caution no doubt partly due to the fact of
the author's expressed, and very natural and proper, intention of
closing his professorial exercises with the _bocca dolce_. Still
this is at least conceivably due to the fact that the boldest
extension of the campaign itself had not definitely entered, or at
least possessed, the author's mind. A considerable time, indeed from
July 1867 to January 1868, passed before the publication of the
lecture as an article in the _Cornhill_ was followed up by the
series from the latter month to August, which bore the general title
of _Anarchy and Authority_, and completed the material of
_Culture and Anarchy_ itself. This, as a book, appeared in 1869.
It began, according to the author's favourite manner, which was
already passing into something like a mannerism, with a sort of
half-playful, half-serious battery against a living writer (in this
case Mr Frederic Harrison), and with a laudatory citation from a dead
one (in this case Bishop Wilson). Mr Harrison had blasphemed "the cant
about culture," and Mr Arnold protests that culture's only aim is in
the Bishop's words, "to make reason and the will of God prevail." In
the first chapter, famous thenceforward in English literature by its
title, borrowed from Swift, of "Sweetness and Light," we have the old
rallyings of the _Daily Telegraph_ and the _Nonconformist_.
Then the general view is laid down, and is developed in those that
follow, but still with more of a political than a religious bent, and
with the political bent itself chiefly limited to the social aspect.
"Doing as one Likes" scatters a mild rain of ridicule on this supposed
fetich of all classes in England; and then, the very famous, if not
perhaps very felicitous, nickname-classification of
"Barbarian-Philistine-Populace" is launched, defended, discussed in a
chapter to itself. To do Mr Arnold justice, the three classes are, if
not very philosophically defined, very impartially and amusingly
rallied, the rallier taking up that part of humble Philistine
conscious of his own weaknesses, which, till he made it slightly
tiresome by too long a run, was piquant enough. The fourth chapter,
"Hebraism and Hellenism," coasts the sands and rocks (on which, as it
seems to some, Mr Arnold was later to make shipwreck) very nearly in
the title and rather nearly in the contents, but still with a fairly
safe offing. The opposition might be put too bluntly by saying that
"Hellenism" represents to Mr Arnold the love of truth at any price,
and "Hebraism" the love of goodness at any price; but the actual
difference is not far from this, or from those of knowing and doing,
fear of stupidity and fear of sin, &c. We have the quotation from Mr
Carlyle about Socrates being "terribly at ease in Zion," the
promulgation of the word Renascence for Renaissauce, and so forth.
"Porro unum est necessarium," a favourite tag of Mr Arnold's, rather
holds up another side of the same lesson than continues it in a fresh
direction; and then "Our Liberal Practitioners" brings it closer to
politics, but (since the immediate subject is the Disestablishment of
the Irish Church) nearer also to the quicksands. Yet Mr Arnold still
keeps away from them; though from what followed it would seem that he
could only have done so by some such _tour de force_ as the
famous "clubhauling" in _Peter Simple_. Had _Culture and
Anarchy_ stood by itself, it would have been, though very far from
its author's masterpiece, an interesting document both in regard to
his own mental history and that of England during the third quarter of
the century, containing some of his best prose, and little, if any, of
his worst sense.
But your crusader--still more your anti-crusader--never stops, and Mr
Arnold was now pledged to this crusade or anti-crusade. In October
1869 he began, still in the _Cornhill_,--completing it by further
instalments in the same place later in the year, and publishing it in
1870,--the book called _St Paul and Protestantism_, where he
necessarily exchanges the mixed handling of _Culture and Anarchy_
for a dead-set at the religious side of his imaginary citadel of
Philistia. The point of at least ostensible connection--of real
departure--is taken from the "Hebraism and Hellenism" contrast of the
earlier book; and the same contrast is strongly urged throughout,
especially in the _coda_, "A Comment on Christmas." But this
contrast is gradually shaped into an onslaught on Puritanism, or
rather on its dogmatic side, for its appreciation of "conduct" of
morality is ever more and more eulogised. As regards the Church of
England herself, the attack is oblique; in fact, it is disclaimed, and
a sort of a Latitudinarian Union, with the Church for centre, and
dogma left out, is advocated. Another of our Arnoldian friends, the
"Zeit-Geist," makes his appearance, and it is more than hinted that
one of the most important operations of this spirit is the exploding
of miracles. The book is perfectly serious--its seriousness, indeed,
is quite evidently deliberate and laboured, so that the author does
not even fear to appear dull. But it is still admirably written, as
well as studiously moderate and reverent; no exception can be taken to
it on the score of taste, whatever may be taken on the score of
orthodoxy from the one side, where no doubt the author would hasten to
plead guilty, or on those of logic, history, and the needs of human
nature on the other, where no doubt his "not guilty" would be equally
emphatic.
The case is again altered, and very unfortunately altered, in the
next, the most popular and, as has been said, the most famous of the
series--its zenith at once and its nadir--_Literature and Dogma_.
A very much smaller part of this had appeared in magazine form;
indeed, the contents of _St Paul and Protestantism_ itself must
have seemed odd in that shape, and only strong sympathies on the part
of the editor could have obtained admission for any part of
_Literature and Dogma_. Much of it must have been written amid
the excitement of the French-Prussian War, when the English public was
athirst for "skits" of all sorts, and when Mr Arnold himself was "i'
the vein," being engaged in the composition of much of the matter of
_Friendship's Garland_. _St Paul and Protestantism_ had had
two editions in the same year (_Culture and Anarchy_, a far
better thing, waited six for its second), and altogether the state of
things was such as to invite any author to pursue the triumph and
partake the gale. And he might at first flatter himself that he had
caught the one and made cyclone-use of the other; for the book,
appearing at the end of 1872, with the date of 1873, passed through
three editions in that year, a fourth in 1874, and a fifth two years
later. It was thus by far Mr Arnold's most popular book; I repeat also
that it is quite his worst.
That it was in hopelessly bad taste here and there--in taste so bad
that Mr Arnold himself later cut out the most famous passage of the
book, to which accordingly we need here only allude--can be denied by
nobody except those persons who hold "good form" to be, as somebody or
other puts it, "an insular British delusion of the fifties and
sixties." But this excision of his and, I think, some others, besides
the "citations and illustrations" which he confesses to having
excluded from the popular edition, may give us the welcome leave to
deal very briefly with this side of the matter in other respects also.
We may pass over the fun which Mr Arnold had with Archbishop Thomson
(who, whatsoe'er the failings on his part, was at any rate a logician)
on the theory of causation; with the University of Cambridge about
_hominum divomque voluptas alma Venus_ (I have forgotten what was
the bearing of this joke, and it is probably not worth inquiring
into); with the Bishop of Gloucester about the Personality of God;
with the Athanasian Creed, and its "science got ruffled by fighting."
These things, as "form," class themselves; one mutters something well
known about _risu inepto_, and passes on. Such a tone on such a
subject can only be carried off completely by the gigantic strength of
Swift, though no doubt it is well enough in keeping with the merely
negative and destructive purpose of Voltaire. It would be cruel to
bring _Literature and Dogma_ into competition with _A Tale of a
Tub_; it would be more than unjust to bring it into comparison with
_Le Taureau blanc_. And neither comparison is necessary, because
the great fault of _Literature and Dogma_ appears, not when it is
considered as a piece of doubtful or not doubtful taste, but when it
is regarded as a serious composition.
In the first place, the child-like fashion in which Mr Arnold
swallowed the results of that very remarkable "science," Biblical
criticism, has always struck some readers with astonishment and a kind
of terror. This new La Fontaine asking everybody, "Avez-vous lu
Kuenen?" is a lesson more humbling to the pride of literature than
almost any that can be found. "The prophecy of the details of Peter's
death," we are told in _Literature and Dogma_, "is almost
certainly an addition after the event, _because it is not at all in
the manner of Jesus_." Observe that we have absolutely no details,
no evidence of any sort whatever, outside the Gospels for the "manner
of Jesus." It is not, as in some at least of the more risky exercises
of profane criticism in a similar field, as if we had some absolutely
or almost absolutely authenticated documents, and others to judge by
them. External evidence, except for the mere fact of Christ's
existence and death, we have none. So you must, by the inner light,
pick and choose out of the very same documents, resting on the very
same authority, what, according to your good pleasure, is "in the
manner of Jesus," and then black-mark the rest as being not so. Of
course, when Mr Arnold thus wrote, the method had not been pushed
_ad absurdum_, as it was later by his friend M. Renan in the
_Histoire d'Israël_, to the dismay and confusion of no less
intelligent and unorthodox a critic than his other friend, M. Scherer.
But it is more or less the method of all Biblical criticism of this
sort, and Mr Arnold follows it blindly.
Again, the chief bent of the book is to establish that "miracles do
not happen." Alas! it is Mr Arnold's unhappy lot that if miracles
_do_ happen his argument confessedly disappears, while even if
miracles do not happen it is, for his purpose, valueless. Like almost
all critics of his class recently, especially like Professor Huxley in
another division, he appears not to comprehend what, to the believers
in the supernatural, the supernatural means. He applies, as they all
apply, the tests of the natural, and says, "Now really, you know,
these tests are destructive." He says--he cannot prove--that miracles
do not happen now; his adversaries, if they were wise, would simply
answer, "_Après?_" Do any of them pretend to prescribe to their
God that His methods shall be always the same, or that those methods
shall stand the tests of the laboratory and the School of Charters?
that He shall give "a good title," like a man who is selling a house?
Some at least would rather not; they would feel appallingly little
interest in a Divinity after this sworn-attorney and
chartered-accountant fashion, who must produce vouchers for all His
acts. And further (to speak with reverence), the Divinity whom they
_do_ worship would be likely to answer Mr Arnold in the words of
a prophet of Mr Arnold's own--
"Du gleichst dem Geist den du begreifst,
Nicht Mir!"
But this is not all. There is not only begging of the question but
ignoring of the issue. _Literature and Dogma_, to do it strict
justice, is certainly not, in intention at any rate, a destructive
book. It is meant, and meant very seriously, to be constructive--to
provide a substitute for the effete religion of Hooker and Wilson, of
Laud and Pusey, as well as for that of Baxter and Wesley and Mr Miall.
This new religion is to have for its Jachin Literature--that is to
say, a delicate æsthetic appreciation of all that is beautiful in
Christianity and out of it; and for its Boaz Conduct--that is to say,
a morality at least as rigid as that of the purest Judaism, though
more amiable. If dogma is to be banished, so is anything like licence;
and in the very book itself Mr Arnold formulated, against his once
(and still partly) beloved France, something like that denunciation of
her worship of Lubricity which he afterwards put more plainly still.
Even Hellenism, the lauded Hellenism, is told to mend its ways (indeed
there was need for it), and the Literature-without-Dogmatist will have
to behave himself with an almost Pharisaic correctness, though in
point of belief he is to be piously Sadducee.
Now this is all very pretty and very creditable, but it will not work.
The goods, to use the vulgar but precise formula of English law, "are
not of the nature and quality demanded by the purchaser." Nobody wants
a religion of that sort. Conduct is good; poetic appreciation is
perhaps better, though not for the general. But then religion happens
to be something different from either, though no doubt closely
connected with both. Mr Arnold does not exactly offer us a stone for
bread, but he does, like the benevolent French princess in the story,
offer us pie-crust. Pie-crust is a good thing; it is a close
connection of bread; but it will not do for a substitute, and, in
addition, it is much more difficult for the general to obtain.
Moreover, there is a serious, a historical, difficulty about Conduct
_plus_ poetic appreciation, but _minus_ what we call religion. Mr
Arnold, in a stately sonnet, has told us that Sophocles was his ideal
as a life-philosopher who was also a poet. He knew, presumably, the
stories told about Sophocles in Athenæus, and though these might be
idle scandal, he knew far too much not to be aware that there is
nothing intrinsically impossible about them. It would have been rather
interesting to hear him fully on this subject. But he was too busy
with expatiating on the sweet reasonableness of Jesus and "the
_Aberglaube_ of the Second Advent" to trouble himself with awkward
matters of this kind at the moment.
It may be suspected, however, that he did trouble himself with them,
or with something like them, afterwards. The book--a deliberate
provocation--naturally found plenty of respondents, though I do not
remember that any one smashed it, as, for instance, Dean Mansel could
have done if he had been alive, or as Cardinal Newman could, had he
been still in the fold. Mr Arnold was perhaps not less really
disquieted by its comparative popularity. For he had quite enough of
Phocion in him to feel, if not to say, that he must have said
something at least ambiguous, when the multitude applauded. At any
rate, though the ill-omened series did not cease, nothing further
appeared in it which showed the tone of _Literature and Dogma_.
Indeed, of the concluding volumes, _God and the Bible_ and
_Last Essays on Church and Religion_, the first is an elaborate
and rather anxious apology, and the second a collection of diverse and
comparatively "anodyne" essays. It is significant--as showing how much
of the success of _Literature and Dogma_ had been a success of
scandal--that neither of these volumes enjoyed the least popularity.
_God and the Bible_ was never reprinted till the popular edition
of the series thus far in 1884; and _Last Essays_ was never
reprinted at all, or had not been up to the date of the invaluable
_Bibliography_ of the works. Indeed the copies now, 1899, on sale
appear to be of the first edition. This cool reception does not
discredit either Barbarians or Philistines or Populace. There are good
things in the _Last Essays_ (to which we shall return), but the
general effect of them is that of a man who is withdrawing from a
foray, not exactly beaten, but unsuccessful and disgusted, and is
trying to cover his retreat by alarums and excursions.
_God and the Bible_ tells much the same tale. It originally
appeared by instalments in the _Contemporary Review_, where it
must have been something of a choke-pear even for the readers of that
then young and thoughtful periodical. Unless the replier has the
vigour of Swift, or at least of Bentley, the adroitness in fence of
Pascal, or at least of Voltaire, "replies, duplies, quadruplies" are
apt to be wofully tedious reading, and Mr Arnold was rather a
_veles_ than a _triarius_ of controversy. He could harass,
but he did not himself stand harassing very well; and here he was not
merely the object of attacks from all sides, but was most uneasily
conscious that, in some cases at least, he did not wish his enemies to
destroy each other. He had absolutely no sympathy with the rabid
anti-Christianity of Clifford, very little with the mere agnosticism
of Huxley; he wanted to be allowed to take just so much Biblical
criticism as suited him and no more. He wished to prove, in his own
remarkable way, the truth and necessity of Christianity, and to this
wish the contradictions of sinners were too manifold. One must be
stony-hearted not to feel some pity for him, as, just when he thinks
he has evaded an orthodox brick, the tile of a disbeliever in the
Fourth Gospel whizzes at him; or as, while he is trying to patch up
his romantic reconstructions of imaginary Jewish history and religion,
the push of some aggressive reviewer bids him make good his challenge
to metaphysical theologians. But this interest is only passing.
In the Preface there is indeed some of the old attempt at liveliness.
Professor Clifford himself, then dead, is disposed of with a not
ungraceful mixture of pity and satire; Messrs Moody and Sankey are not
unpleasantly rallied; Satan and Tisiphone, Mr Ruskin and Sir Robert
Phillimore, once more remind one of the groves of Blarney or the more
doubtful chorus in the _Anti-Jacobin_. But the apologist is not
really light-hearted: he cannot keep the more solemn part of his
apologia out of the Preface itself, and assures us that the story of
Adam's fall "is all a legend. It never really happened, any of it."
Again one asks Mr Arnold, as seriously as possible, "How _do_ you
know that? On your own calculus, with your own estimate of evidence,
how is it possible for you to know that? You may, on your principles,
say that you are insufficiently persuaded that it _did_ happen;
but how can you, without preternatural revelation (the very thing you
will not admit) say that it did _not?_ Surely there is some want
of intellectual seriousness in thus lightly ignoring every rule of law
and logic, of history and of common-sense?"
But the embarrassment thus revealed naturally shows itself even more
in the book itself, notwithstanding the fact that Mr Arnold expressly
declines to reply to those who have attacked _Literature and
Dogma_ as anti-Christian and irreligious. Not even by summarily
banishing this not inconsiderable host can he face the rest
comfortably: and he has to resort to the strangest reasons of defence,
to the most eccentric invitation of reinforcements from afar.
The strangest of all these, the clearest proof in itself of flurry and
sense of need, is exhibited in his summoning--of all wonderful things
--of Comparative Philology to the rescue of Literature. To rebut the
criticism on his denial of a Personal God, he takes refuge in the
ethnological meaning of Deus, which, it seems, is "Shining." The poor
plain mind, already staggered by Mr Arnold's private revelations as to
what did _not_ happen 6000 years ago (or earlier) in the garden
of Eden, quite succumbs before this privilegium of omniscience. One
had thought that the results of philology and etymology of this sort
were extremely ingenious guesses, to be admitted in so far as they do
not conflict with facts, and till the next guess comes, but nothing
more. Lo! they are quoted as if they were on a par with "two and two
make four," or the law of Excluded Middle. We may not take Moses and
the prophets without proof, but Curtius and Professor Max Müller may
speak, and we must but hear. And later, when Mr Arnold is trying to
cope with Descartes, he flies for refuge to "the roots _as_, _bhu_,
and _sta_."
One is tempted rather to laugh at this; but on some sides it is very
serious. That no God of any religion can be more of a mere hypothesis
than _as_, _bhu_, and _sta_, never seems to have occurred to
Mr Arnold for one moment, nor that he was cutting the throat of his
own argument. We must not, however, fall into his own mistake and
quadruplicate to his duply. It may be sufficient to say that the long
defence of the Fourth Gospel which this book contains is one of the
oddest things in all literature. What, on Mr Arnold's principles, it
matters whether the Fourth Gospel was written in the first century,
the fourth, or the fourteenth, it is impossible for the poor plain
mind to see. He will not have it as revelation, and as anything else
its date is quite immaterial.
The fact is that this severe censor of "learned pseudo--science mixed
with popular legend," as he terms theology, appears to have no idea of
the value of evidence whatever. The traditional history of the Bible
is not even to be considered; but a conjectural reconstruction of it
by a Dutch critic, without in the older cases one jot or tittle of
evidence outside the covers of the Bible itself, deserves every
respect, if not reverent acceptance _en bloc_. Miracles are
fictions, and the scenes in the garden of Eden and at the Sepulchre
never happened; but _as_, _bhu_, and _sta_ are very solemn
facts, and you can find out all about the Divinity, because the word
Deus means (not "has been guessed to mean," but _means_)
"Shining." That Shakespeare knew everything is much more certain than
that miracles do not happen; and he certainly knew Mr Arnold's case if
not Mr Arnold, when he introduced a certain main episode in _A
Midsummer Night's Dream_. To frown on Oberon and caress Bottom is
venial compared with the dismissal of the Bible as popular legend, and
the implicit belief in _as_, _bhu_, and _sta_.
A wilfully hostile historian of Mr Arnold could not dwell too long on
these unfortunate books, for the handles they present are infinite;
but for my part I shall take leave to say little more about them. To
ask, in the common phrase, whether they did any harm would be to beg
the question in their own manner; to ask whether they produced any
effect would lead us too far. They certainly expressed a prevalent
tendency. Most fortunately Mr Arnold was allowed another ten years and
more wherein to escape from the wilderness which yielded these Dead
Sea fruits, and to till his proper garden once more. Yet we have not
quite done with the other fruits themselves.
The actual finale, _Last Essays on Church_ and _Religion_,
was still less popular, was indeed the least popular of all his works,
seeing that, as has been said above, it has never been reprinted. It
is easy to understand this, for it is perhaps the only one of his
books which can be definitely called dull. The apologetic tone
noticeable in _God and the Bible_ continues, but the apology is
illustrated and maintained in an even less attractive manner. The
Preface is perhaps the least dead part of the book; but its line of
argument shares, and perhaps even exaggerates, the controversial
infelicity of this unfortunate series. Mr Arnold deals in it at some
length with the comments of two foreign critics, M. Challemel-Lacour
and Signor de Gubernatis, on _Literature and Dogma_, bringing out
(what surely could have been no news to any but very ill-educated
Englishmen) the fact of their surprise, not at his taking the Bible
with so little seriousness, but at his taking it with any seriousness
at all. And he seems never even to dream of the obvious retort:
"Certainly. These men are at any rate 'thorough'; they are not
dilettante dalliers between two opinions. They have got far beyond
your half-way house and have arrived at their destination. We have no
desire to arrive at the destination, and therefore, if you will excuse
us, we decline to visit the half-way house." It is less surprising
that he did not see the force of the objections of another critic, M.
Maurice Vernes, to the equally illogical and unhistorical plan of
arbitrarily selecting this utterance as that of "Jesus," and another,
given by the same authority, as not that of "Jesus." A man, who was
sensible of this paralogism, could never take Mr Arnold's views on
Church and Religion at all.
But when we leave the Preface, even such faint liveliness as this
deserts us. The text contains four (or five, the second being divided
into two parts) essays, lectures, or papers, _A Psychological
Parallel_, _Bishop Butler and the Zeit-Geist_, The Church of England_,
and _A Last Word on the Burials Bill_. All had appeared in
_Macmillan's Magazine_ or the _Contemporary Review_ during
1876, while _Bishop Butler_ had been delivered as two lectures at
Edinburgh, and _The Church of England_ as an address to the
London Clergy at Sion College, during the spring of that year.
Over all there is a curious constraint, the evidence of a mood not
very difficult to analyse, and in the analysis of which lies almost
all the satisfaction or edification to be got out of the book. The
writer, though by no means abandoning his own point of view, and even
flattering himself that some _modus vivendi_ is about to be
established between himself and the more moderate supporters of the
Church and of religion, betrays not merely the well-known
self-excusing and self-accusing tone, but odd flashes of discontent
and weariness--nay, even a fretfulness such as might have been that of
a Moses at Rephidim who could not bring water out of the rock. _A
Psychological Parallel_ is an attempt to buttress the apologia by
referring to Sir Matthew Hale's views on witchcraft, to Smith, the
Cambridge Platonist and Latitudinarian, and to the _Book of
Enoch_ (of which, by the way, it is a pity that Mr Arnold did not
live to see Mr Charles's excellent translation, since he desiderated a
good one). Of course the argument is sun-clear. If Hale was mistaken
about witchcraft, St Paul may have been mistaken about the
Resurrection. Expressions attributed to Christ occur in the _Book of
Enoch_, therefore they are not original and divine, &c., &c. And it
would be out of place to attempt any reply to this argument, the reply
being in each case as sun-clear as the argument itself. No believer in
supernatural religion that I ever met considered Sir Matthew Hale to
have been inspired; and no believer in the divinity of Christ can fail
to hold that His adoption of words (if He did adopt them) makes them
His.
The gist of the Butler lectures is considerably less clear, and, if
only for that reason, it cannot be succinctly stated or answered. In
particular, it requires rather careful "collection" in order to
discover what our friend the Zeit-Geist has to do in this galley. I
should imagine that, though an Edinburgh audience is by no means
alarmed at philosophy, the majority, perhaps the enormous majority, of
Mr Arnold's hearers must have had a singularly dim idea as to his
exact drift. Indeed I cannot say that after reading the piece when it
first appeared, and again, twenty years later, for the purposes of
this book, I have any very distinct notion of that drift myself. If it
merely means that Butler, being an eighteenth-century person, was
afflicted with the eighteenth-century limitations by the Zeit-Geist,
eighty-six pages, and an imposing German compound at the head of every
other one of them, seem a good deal for telling us this. If it is a
sort of indirect attack upon--an oblique demurrer to--Butler's
constructive-aggressive orthodoxy in psychology and religion, one is
bound to say with all politeness, first, that it is a case of _impar
congressus_, and secondly, that the adventurous knight does not
give himself a fair chance. It will take more than eighty-six not very
large pages, and a German word at the top of the alternate ones, to do
that! In the opening sketch of Butler himself Mr Arnold could not but
be agreeable and even delightful. It gives us, indeed, most pleasant
promise of work in this same good kind soon to follow; but for the
rest we grope till we find, after some seventy-three of the
eighty-six, that what Mr Arnold wanted to say is that Butler did not
handle, and could not then have handled, miracles and the fulfilment
of prophecy satisfactorily. Butler, like St Paul, is undoubtedly
inconvenient for those who believe that miracles do not happen, and
that prophecies were either not made or not fulfilled. So he must be
got rid of. But whether he is got rid of,--whether Mr Arnold and the
Zeit-Geist have put him on the shelf as a venerable but antiquated
object,--that is another question.
The two remaining essays show us Mr Arnold, in his character of at
least would-be practical statesman, dealing no longer with points of
doctrine but with the affairs of the Church as a political body. The
circumstances of the first--the address delivered at Sion College--had
a certain piquancy: whether they had also sweet reasonableness and an
entire accordance with the fitness of things is a question no doubt
capable of being debated. Me the situation strikes, I must confess, as
a little grotesque. The layman in the wide sense, the amateur, always
occupies a rather equivocal position when he addresses experts and the
profession; but his position is never so equivocal as when he doubles
the part of non-expert with that of candid friend. How Mr Arnold
succeeded in this exceedingly delicate attempt I do not propose to
examine at any length. He thought himself that he had "sufficiently
marked the way in which the new world was to be reached." Paths to new
worlds are always interesting, but in reading, or rather re-reading,
the sailing directions of this Columbus twenty years after date, one
may be a little disappointed. The sum appears to be a somewhat
Tootsian declaration that things of general are of no consequence. The
Church is better than Dissent; at least she would be so if she dropped
all her dogma, the greater part of her superstitions about the rights
of property and "my duty to my neighbour," and as much as possible of
the barriers which separate her from Dissent itself. A most moderate
eirenicon. Still less need be said of the Burials Bill paper, which is
a sort of appendix or corollary to the Sion speech, at the end of
which the subject had been referred to. The particular question, in
this phase of it, has long ceased to burn, and one need not disturb
the ashes.
We must now turn to the incursions of this time into politics, which,
if not much happier, were more amusing. The chief monument of them is
the long unreprinted _Friendship's Garland_, which has always had
some fervent devotees, and is very characteristic. It so happened that
the period when _Essays in Criticism_, combined with his Oxford
Lectures, introduced Mr Arnold to the public, was the period of the
first years of the _Pall Mall Gazette_, when that brilliant
periodical, with the help of many of the original staff of the
_Saturday Review_, and others, was renewing for the sixties the
sensation of a new kind of journalism, which the _Saturday_
itself had given to the fifties, while its form and daily appearance
gave it even greater opportunities. As early as the summer of 1866,
during the agitation into which the public mind had been thrown by the
astounding rapidity and thoroughness of the Prussian successes in the
Seven Weeks' War, Mr Arnold had begun a series of letters, couched in
the style of _persiflage_, which Kinglake had introduced, or
reintroduced, twenty years earlier in _Eothen_, and which the
_Saturday_ had taken up and widely developed. He also took not a
few hints from Carlyle in _Sartor_ and the _Latterday
Pamphlets_. And for some years at intervals, with the help of a
troupe of imaginary correspondents and _comparses_--Arminius von
Thundertentronckh, Adolescens Leo of the _Daily Telegraph_, the
Bottles family of wealthy Dissenters, with cravings for their deceased
wife's sisters, as well as a large number of more or less celebrated
personages of the day, introduced in their proper persons, and by
their proper names--he instructed England on its own weakness, folly,
and vulgarity, on the wisdom and strength of the Germans, on the
importance of _Geist_ and ideas, &c., &c. The author brought
himself in by name as a simple inhabitant of Grub Street, victimised,
bullied, or compassionately looked down upon by everybody; and by this
well-known device took licence for pretty familiar treatment of other
people. When the greater crash of 1870 came, and the intelligent
British mind was more puzzled, yet more _Prusso-mimic_, than
ever, he supplemented these letters, framed or bound them up, as it
were, with a moving account of the death of Arminius before Paris, and
launched the whole as a book.
The letters had been much laughed over; but I do not think the book
was very widely bought--at any rate, its very high price during the
time in which it was out of print shows that no large number was
printed. Perhaps this cold welcome was not altogether so discreditable
to the British public as it would have been, had its sole cause been
the undoubted but unpalatable truths told by the writer. Either, as
some say, because of its thick-hidedness, or, as others, because of
its arrogant self-sufficiency, the British public has never resented
these much. But, in the first place, the thing was a falsetto. Mr
Arnold had plenty of wit but not much humour; and after a time one
feels that Bottles and Leo & Co. may be, as Dousterswivel says, "very
witty and comedy," but that we should not be altogether sorry if they
would _go_. Further, the direct personalities--the worst
instances concerned Lord Elcho, Mr Frederic Harrison, and the late Mr
Sala--struck, and strike, some people as being not precisely in good
taste. The constant allusions and references to minor and ephemeral
things and persons were not of course then unintelligible, but they
were even then teasing, In all these points, if _Friendship's
Garland_ be compared, I will once more not say with _A Tale of a
Tub_, but even with the _History of John Bull_, its weakness
will come out rather strongly.
But this was not all. It was quite evident--and it was no shame and no
disadvantage to him--that the jester was endeavouring to urge a very
serious earnest behind, and by means of, his jest; that he was no mere
railer, or caviller, or even satirist, but a convinced reformer and
apostle. Yet when we try to get at his programme--at his gospel--there
is no vestige of anything tangible about either. Not very many
impartial persons could possibly accept Mr Arnold's favourite
doctrine, that the salvation of the people lies in state-provided
middle-class schools; and this was specially difficult in 1871, if
they remembered how some few years before Mr Arnold had been extolling
the state-provided middle-class schools of France. While, for the
rest, a man might be (as many men were) thoroughly dissatisfied with
the part England had played abroad in Italy, in the American Civil
War, in Denmark, in the war of 1866, in the war of 1870, and at home
from 1845 onwards, and yet not be able for the life of him to discover
any way of safety in _Friendship's Garland_.
Nor, to take with the _Garland_ for convenience sake _Irish
Essays_, 1882, the political book which closed this period with the
political book that opened it, do we find things much better, even
long after "the Wilderness" had been mostly left behind. There is
indeed less falsetto and less flippancy; perhaps Mr Arnold had
silently learnt a lesson, perhaps the opportunities of regular essays
in "three-decker" reviews--of a lay sermon to working men, of a speech
at the greatest public school in the world--discouraged the
playfulness which had seemed permissible in addressing a skittish
young evening newspaper. But the unpracticalness--not in the
Philistine but in the strictly scientific sense--is more glaring than
ever, and there are other faults with it. Great part of _An
Unregarded Irish Grievance_ is occupied by a long-drawn-out
comparison of England's behaviour to Ireland with that of Mr Murdstone
and his friend and manager Quinion to David Copperfield. In the first
place, one thinks wickedly of the gibe in _Friendship's Garland_
about "Mr Vernon Harcourt developing a system of unsectarian religion
from the life of Mr Pickwick." In the second, one asks on what
principles of literary art a comparison, not wholly improper as a mere
illustration in passing, can be worked to death and turned inside out
and upside down, for some twenty mortal pages.
And so in other places. Yet the worst faults are not in form but in
substance. Minor contradictions do not matter, though in a copy of the
book I have read there is a damaging comparison by some annotator
between Mr Arnold's description of English Government at p. 4 and his
rosy picture of education under Government at p. 107. This might
happen to anybody, and is not fatal. What is fatal is that this censor
of the "unideaed" has evidently himself no "ideas," no first
principles, in politics at all. That, play what tricks you will, all
possible politics come round either to the Rule of the One, the Rule
of the Few, or the Rule of the Many, and that the consequences of
these rules, differentiated a little but not materially by historical
and racial characteristics, are as constant as anything commonly
called scientific,--this never seems to have occurred to Mr Arnold at
all. He did not fully appreciate Thackeray, and Thackeray died too
soon to know very much of him. But I have always thought that, for a
criticism of life possessing prophetic genius, the Chevalier Strong's
wedding congratulations to Arthur Pendennis are almost uncanny as
regards the Matthæan gospel. "Nothing," said the Chevalier, when he
had established himself as agent to the Duke of Garbanzos, "is so
important to the welfare of the household as _Good Sherry_." And
so we find that the Irish question, like all others, will be solved by
the substitution of State-governed for private middle-class schools,
by the saturation of England with "ideas," by all our old friends.
The rest matches. Mr Arnold pooh-poohs the notion that Ireland, except
by force, will never be blended with England; it would be as sensible
to say this "of Scotland, Wales, or Cornwall." He was not, I think,
dead--he was certainly not dead long--when Wales actually did follow,
less formidably, of course, in the path of Ireland, beginning with the
Church, going on to the Land, and not distantly threatening the State.
As usual he goes to his books. He quotes Goethe--a great man of
letters, but perhaps the most pedantic of great men of letters except
Milton--to prove that "the English are pedants." He quotes Burke--the
unregenerate Irish Whig Burke, not the prophet whose tongue the French
Revolution had touched as it opened his eyes--to tell us what to do
with Ireland. But the main point in at least one of these essays, _The
Incompatibles_, is again connected with _David Copperfield_. I have
said that, from the merely literary point of view, the perpetual
ringing of the changes on Creakle, Murdstone, Quinion--Quinion,
Murdstone, Creakle--is inartistic and irritating. But from the
philosophical and political point of view it is far worse. No
Englishman with any sense of fact ever has taken, or could take,
Dickens's characters as normal types. They are always fantastic
exaggerations, full of genius occasionally, but as unlike actual
reality as those illustrations by Cruikshank which are their nearest
companions in the art of line. Of the three figures selected in
particular, Creakle is a caricature; Murdstone, though not exactly
that, is a repulsive exception; and Quinion is so mere a _comparse_ or
"super" that to base any generalisation on him is absurd. The dislike
of the British public to be "talked book to" may be healthy or
unhealthy; but if it takes no great heed of this kind of talking book,
small blame to it! The same hopeless, not to say the same wilful,
neglect of the practical appears throughout. Mr Arnold (to his credit
be it said) had no great hopes of the Land Bill of 1881. But his own
panaceas--a sort of Cadi-court for "bag-and-baggaging" bad landlords,
and the concurrent endowment of Catholicism--were, at least, no
better, and went, if it were possible, even more in the teeth of
history.
It may be worth while (taking the usual chronological licence for the
sake of logical coherence) to say a few words on the other political
and quasi-political pieces reprinted with _Irish Essays_--the address
to Ipswich working men, _Ecce Convertimur ad Gentes_, the Eton speech
on _Eutrapelia_, and the ambitious _Future of Liberalism_[2] The first
is a curious but not very important appeal to the lower class to
educate the middle, with episodic praises of "equality," "academies,"
and the like, as well as glances at a more extensive system of
"municipalisation," which, not to the satisfaction of everybody, has
come about since. The second contains some admirable remarks on
classical education, some still more admirable protests against
reading about the classics instead of reading the classics, and the
famous discourse on _Eutrapelia_, with its doctrine that "conduct is
three-fourths of life," its denunciation of "moral inadequacy," and
its really great indications of societies dying of the triumph of
Liberalism and Conservatism respectively. A discourse quite admirable
in intention, though if "heckling" had been in order on that occasion,
a sharp youth might have put Mr Arnold in some difficulty by asking
where the canons of "moral adequacy" are written.
But _The Future of Liberalism_, which the Elizabethans would have
called a "cooling-card" after the Liberal triumph of 1880, exhibits
its author's political quiddity most clearly. Much that he says is
perfectly true; much of it, whether true or not, is, as Mr Weller
observes, "wery pretty." But the old mistake recurs of playing on a
phrase _ad nauseam_--in this case a phrase of Cobbett's (one of
the greatest of phrase-makers, but also one of the chief of the
apostles of unreason) about "the principles of Pratt, the principles
of Yorke." It was, of course, a capital _argumentum ad invidiam_,
and Mr Arnold frankly adopted it. He compared himself to Cobbett--a
compliment, no doubt; but one which, I fear, Cobbett, who hated
nothing so much as a university man, would not have appreciated.
Cobbett thought of nothing but the agricultural labourer's "full
belly"--at least this is how he himself put it; and it would have
enforced Mr Arnold's argument and antithesis had he known or dared to
use it. Mr Arnold thought of nothing but the middle classes' empty
mind. The two parties, as represented by the rather small Lord Camden
and the rather great Lord Hardwicke, cared for neither of these
things--so "the principles of Pratt, the principles of Yorke" comes in
as a refrain. To the average Briton quotation is no more argument
than, on higher authority, is blank verse. Still it might do for
ornament, if not for argument,--might help the lesson and point it at
least. So we turn to the lesson itself. This "Liberal of the future,"
as Mr Arnold styles himself, begins, with orthodoxy if not with
philosophy, by warning the Tories off entirely. "They cannot really
profit the nation, or give it what it needs." Perhaps; but suppose we
ask for a little reason, just a ghost of a premiss or two for this
extensive conclusion? There is no voice, neither any that answers. And
then, the Tories dismissed with a wave to all but temporary oblivion
(they are to be allowed, it seems, to appear from time to time to
chasten Liberalism), our prophet turns to Liberalism itself. It ought
to promote "the humanisation of man in society," and it doesn't
promote this. Ah! what a blessed word is "humanisation," the very
equivalent, in syllables as in blessedness, of "Mesopotamia"! But when
for the considerable rest of the essay we try to find out what
humanisation _is_, why we find nothing but the old negative
impalpable gospel, that we must "_dis_materialise our upper
class, _dis_vulgarise our middle class, _dis_brutalise our
lower class." "Om-m-ject and sum-m-m-ject!" "om-m-ject and
sum-m-m-ject," in short, as that famous flash of Thomas Carlyle's
genius discovered and summarised Coleridge, and with Coleridge the
whole nineteenth century. A screed of jargon--a patter of
shibboleth--and that is all. Never a thought for this momentous
question--"May you not possibly--indeed most probably--in attempting
to remove what you choose to consider as the defects of these classes,
remove also what you acknowledge to be their virtues--the governing
faculty of the upper class, the conduct and moral health of the
middle, the force and vigour of the lower?" A momentous question
indeed, and one which, as some think, has _got_ something of an answer
since, and no comfortable one!
I must apologise, and I do, for anything that may appear too polemical
in this chapter. But the circumstances of the case made it almost as
impossible, as it would have been uninteresting, to be merely
recitative and colourless; and Mr Arnold's own example gives ample
licence. In particular, any one who has had actual and close knowledge
of the actual progress of politics for many years may be pardoned for
speaking with some decision on the practice of sitting at ease in
Zion, and raying out curious observations on Barbarians and Eutrapelia
and the character of Mr Quinion. We may have too little of such things
in English politics--no doubt for a good many years before Mr Arnold's
day we _had_ too little of them. But too much, though a not
unpopular, is a very clumsy and very unscientific antidote to too
little; and in Mr Arnold's own handling of politics, I venture to
think that there was too much of them by a very great deal.
It is very pleasant to turn from the literary results of this period,
from the spectacle of Pegasus
"Stumbling in miry roads of alien art,"
and harnessing himself to all manner of unsuitable vehicles, to the
private history of the decade. This, though sadly chequered by Mr
Arnold's first domestic troubles, was on the whole prosperous, was
somewhat less laborious than the earlier years, and was lightened by
ever more of the social and public distractions, which no man entirely
dislikes, and which--to a certain extent and in a certain way--Mr
Arnold did not dislike at all. The changes of occupation and of
literary aim by the termination of the professorship coincided, as
such things have a habit of doing, with changes in place and
circumstance. The Chester Square house grew too small for the
children, and a move to Harrow was first meditated and then achieved.
A very pleasant letter to his mother, in November 1867, tells how he
was present at the farewell dinner to Dickens on his departure for
America, how they wanted him (vainly) to come to the high table and
speak, and how Lord Lytton finally brought him into his own speech. He
adds that some one has given him "a magnificent box of four hundred
Manilla cheroots" (he must surely have counted wrong, for they usually
make these things in two-hundred-and-fifties or five-hundreds),
welcome to hand on, though he did not smoke himself. In another he
expresses the evangelical desire to "do Mr Swinburne some good."
But in January 1868 his baby-child Basil died; and the intense family
affection, which was one of his strongest characteristics, suffered of
course cruelly, as is recorded in a series of touching letters to his
sister and mother. He fell and hurt himself at Cannon Street, too, but
was comforted by his sister with a leading case about an illiterate
man who fell into a reservoir through not reading a notice. The Harrow
house became a reality at Lady Day, and at Midsummer he went to stay
at Panshanger, and "heard the word 'Philistine' used a hundred times
during dinner and 'Barbarian' nearly as often" (it must be remembered
that the "Culture and Anarchy" articles were coming out now). This
half-childish delight in such matters (like Mr Pendennis's "It's all
in the papers, and my name too!") is one of the most fascinating
things about him, and one of not a few, proving that, if there was
some affectation, there was no dissimulation in his nature. Too many
men, I fear, would have said nothing about them, or assumed a lofty
disdain. In September he mentions to Mr Grant Duff a plan (which one
only wishes he had carried out, letting all the "Dogma" series go
[Greek: kat ouron] as it deserved) for "a sketch of Greek poetry,
illustrated by extracts in harmonious prose." This would have been one
of the few great literary histories of the world, and so Apollo kept
it in his own lap. The winter repeated, far more heavily, the domestic
blow of the spring, and Tom, his eldest son, who had always been
delicate, died, aged sixteen only, at Harrow, where since the removal
he had been at school. There is something about this in the
_Letters_; but on the great principle of _curæ leves_, less,
as we should expect, than about the baby's death.
In February next year Mr Arnold's double repute, as a practical and
official "educationist" and as a man of letters, brought him the offer
of the care of Prince Thomas of Savoy, son of the Duke of Genoa, and
grandson of Victor Emmanuel, who was to attend Harrow School and board
with the Arnolds. The charge, though honourable and, I suppose,
profitable, might not have been entirely to the taste of everybody;
but it seemed to Mr Arnold a new link with the Continent, and he
welcomed it. The same year saw a visit to Knebworth, and a very
interesting and by no means unsound criticism on that important event
in the life of a poet, the issue of the first collected edition of his
poems.[3] This was in two volumes, and is now rather precious. "It
might be fairly urged that I have less poetic sentiment than Tennyson,
and less intellectual vigour and abundance than Browning; yet because
I have perhaps more of a fusion of the two than either of them, and
have more regularly applied that fusion to the main line of modern
development, I am likely enough to have my turn." One can only query
whether poetry has anything to do with "modern development," and
desiderate the addition to "sentiment" of "art." He seems to imply
that Mr Gladstone personally prevented his appointment to a
commissionership under the Endowed Schools Act. But the year ended
with a complimentary reference from Mr Disraeli at Latimers about
"Sweetness and Light."
In February 1870 the famous Persian cat Atossa (now in the most
comfortable lap of all the gods or goddesses, with Hodge and Bona
Marietta and Hinse of Hinsfeldt) makes her first appearance; and in
June Mr Arnold received the Oxford D.C.L. He set it down to "a young
and original sort of man, Lord Salisbury, being Chancellor"; and Lord
Salisbury himself afterwards told him that "no doubt he ought to have
addressed him as 'vir dulcissime et lucidissime.'" But though he was
much pleased by his reception, he thought Lord Salisbury "dangerous,"
as being unliterary, and only scientific and religious in his tastes.
In December he had an amusing and (as it ended well) not
unsatisfactory experience of the ways of Income Tax Commissioners.
These gentlemen acted on even vaguer principles than those on which
they once assessed a poor dramatic amateur, who had by accident
received £6 "author's rights" for a week, at £300 per annum, on the
sound arithmetical argument that there are fifty (indeed, there are
fifty-two) weeks in a year, and that fifty times six is three hundred.
They put Mr Arnold's literary profits at £1000, and he had to
expostulate in person before they would let him down to £200, though
he pathetically explained that "he should have to write more articles
than he ever had done" to prevent his being a loser even at that.
About the catastrophe of the _Année Terrible_, his craze for
"righteousness" makes him a very little Pecksniffian--one thinks of
the Tower of Siloam. But it is pleasant to hear that, early in 1871,
they are arranging for him "a perfect district, Westminster and a
small rural part near Harrow." So one hopes that the days of posting
from shire to shire and subsisting on buns were over. He is interested
about Deutsch (the comet of a season for his famous Talmud articles),
receives the Commandership of the Crown of Italy for his services to
Prince Thomas, and is proposed for the Middlesex magistracy, but (to
one's sorrow) declines. There is fishing at Chenies (_vide_ an
admirable essay of Mr Froude's) in the early summer, a visit to
Switzerland in the later, and in September "the pigs are grown very
large and handsome, and experts advise their conversion into bacon."
But Mrs Arnold "does not like the idea." Indeed this is the drawback
of pig-keeping, which is otherwise a most fascinating pastime; but you
can escape it, and unite pleasure with profit, by merely breeding the
pigs and selling the litters young.
After this respite fate was again cruel. On February 16, 1872, Mr
Arnold's second son died at Harrow, and again the reception of the
blow and its effect are marked by lesser voicefulness in the grief.
Yet one phrase, "I cannot write his name without stopping to look at
it in stupefaction at his not being alive," is equal to volumes. The
letters of this year are few, but in September begins a correspondence
of some interest and duration with a French pastor, M. Fontanès. Nor
does 1873 give much except description of a tour to Italy, while in
May the Arnolds moved from Harrow, with its painful memories, to
Cobham, which was Mr Arnold's home for the rest of his life. In
September he "shoots worse than ever" (_vide_ _Friendship's
Garland_) in the famous preserves of Six Mile Bottom, and soon
after his mother dies. But it is not given to all men not to be
motherless till they themselves are fifty. And 1874 is again rather
barren, even such yield as it gives being rather didactic and
controversial, as for instance in a letter to his sister, who had
apparently remonstrated with some vigour against the tone of
_Literature and Dogma_. A pleasant letter to Miss Kingsley on her
father's death (1875) puts in good evidence against the charge of
grudging appreciation of contemporaries which has often been brought
against Mr Arnold, and which some unguarded expressions, rather
injudiciously published in other letters, may seem to confirm.
Another in December contains an instance[4] of that dislike to
history, which long before its publication careful students of his
works had always noticed in him. The fact is, that to a man of ideas,
as Mr Arnold would have liked to be called--a man of theories or of
crotchets, as in extending order of unkindness people actually did
call him--history must be an annoying study. The things that ought to
happen do not happen, and the things that do happen have to be
awkwardly explained away or hazardously ignored His almost pettish
disgust for the historic estimate in literature itself may have either
caused or been caused by this more general dislike, and the dislike
itself explains the leniency with which he always regarded the sheer
guess-work of the Biblical critics. But it is possible to sympathise
with his disapproval of the divorce of History and Law, which used to
be united in the Oxford schools. Together they made a discipline,
inferior indeed, but only inferior, to that of the great school of
_Literæ Humaniores_, the best intellectual training in the world.
When they are divided, it may be feared that law becomes a mere
technicality, if not a mere bread-study, and that history is at once
thin and vague.
But Clio must have made interest with Nemesis; for, but a page or two
afterwards, this disregard of history leads Mr Arnold into a very odd
blunder. His French friend, M. Fontanès, had thought of writing about
Godwin, but Mr Arnold dissuades him. "Godwin," he says, "est
intéressant, mais il n'est pas une source; des courants actuels qui
nous portent, aucun ne vient de lui." Godwin is the high priest of
Anarchism; he is our first Socialist philosopher, he advocated no
marriage, woman's rights, the abolition of religion. And _dans nos
courants actuels rien ne vient de lui!_ This was early in 1876, and
later in the same year we have from him the singular judgment that
George Sand, just dead, was "the greatest spirit in our European world
from the time that Goethe departed." The chronicle may be
appropriately closed for the time by mentioning that in the spring of
1877 Mr Arnold was approached with a view to his standing once more
for the Poetry Chair, and declined. The invitation, however, was a
sort of summons to him to go back to his proper work, and in effect,
though doubtless not in intention, he had already obeyed it. "A French
Critic on Milton," published in January 1877, is the first literary
article of any importance that his bibliography records for the whole
decade which we have surveyed in this chapter.
_Note._--It is particularly unlucky that the _Prose
Passages_, which the author selected from his works and published
in 1879, did not appear later. It is almost sufficient to say that
less than one-fourth of their contents is devoted to literature, all
the rest to the "Dead Sea fruit." I have therefore said nothing about
the book in the text. It is, however, a useful though incomplete and
one-sided chrestomathy of Mr Arnold's style from the formal point of
view, illustrating both his minor devices of phrase and the ingenious
_ordonnance_ of his paragraphs in building up thought and
statement.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Mr Disraeli's words (in 1864) have been referred to above (p.
100). They were actually: "At that time [when they had met at Lord
Houghton's some seven or eight years earlier] ... you yourself were
little known. Now you are well known. You have made a reputation, but
you will go further yet. You have a great future before you, and you
deserve it." Crabb Robinson was a much older acquaintance, and is
credited, I believe, with the remark far earlier, that "he shouldn't
_dare_ to be intimate" with so clever a young man as Matthew
Arnold. Very shortly before his death in February 1867, he had met Mr
Arnold in the Athenæum, and asked "which of all my books I should
myself name as the one that had got me my great reputation. I said I
had not a great reputation, upon which he answered: 'Then it is some
other Matthew Arnold who writes the books.'" The passage, which
contains an odd prophecy of the speaker's own death, and an
interesting indication that Mr Arnold rightly considered the
_Essays_ to be "the book that got him his reputation," will be
found in _Letters_, i. 351.
[2] Of the remaining contents, the _Prefaces_ of 1853-5 are
invaluable, at least the first is, but this has been already noticed.
Of _The French Play in London_, I am, perhaps, no good judge, as I
take little interest in the acted drama. It is much occupied with the
inferiority of French poetry, and especially of the poetry of Hugo;
the inferiority of English civilisation, especially of the middle
class. There are good things in it, but they are better said
elsewhere. The rest needs no notice.
[3] A note on the contents of this and the subsequent collected
editions may not be unwelcome; for, as was always the case with him,
he varied them not a little. This first collection was advertised as
comprehending "the First and Second Series of the Author's Poems and
the New Poems," but as a matter of fact half-a-dozen pieces--including
things as interesting as _A Dream_ and _Stagirius_--are omitted,
though the fine _In Utrumque Paratus_ reappears for the first time as
a consolation. As reprinted in 1877, this collection dropped _The
Church of Brou_ except the third part, and recovered not only
_Stagirius_ and others but _The New Sirens_, besides giving, for the
first time in book-form, _Haworth Churchyard_, printed twenty-two
years before in _Fraser_. A further reprint in 1881 restored the whole
_Church of Brou_ and _A Dream_, and gave two or three small additions,
especially _Geist's Grave_. The _three-volume_ edition of 1885 also
republished _Merope_ for the first time, and added _Westminster Abbey_
and _Poor Matthias_. The _one_-volume edition of 1890 reproduced all
this, adding _Horatian Echo_ and _Kaiser Dead_; it is complete save
for the two prize poems, and six or seven smaller pieces.
[4] "I do not like the course for the History School at all; nothing
but read, read, read, endless histories in English, many of them by
quite second-rate men; nothing to form the mind as reading really
great authors forms it, or even to exercise it as learning a new
language, or mathematics, or one of the natural sciences exercises
it."