THE LAST DECADE.
It would be unhistorical to assert, and unphilosophical to assume,
that in the change or reversion noted at the end of the last chapter,
Mr Arnold had any consciousness of relinquishment, still more to hint
any definite sense of failure on his part. He would probably have said
(if any one had been impertinent enough to ask, and he had
condescended to reply) that he had said his say, had shot his bolt,
and might leave them to produce their effect. But that there was, if
no repentance, a certain disgust, I cannot but believe. He must have
seen--he almost acknowledges that he saw--that the work which he at
least thought was conservative was being utilised by others in a
purely destructive spirit; he must have found himself in very
unwelcome alliances; and (which is worst of all to a delicate and
sensitive spirit) he must constantly have found fools dotting his
_i_'s and emphasising his innuendoes in their own clumsy and
Philistine fashion. At any rate, it is purely historical to say that
he did henceforward almost entirely change his main line of operation
as to religious matters, and that though, as has been shown, he
persisted, not too fortunately, in politics, his method of discussion
in that likewise was altered. As we heard no more of the three Lord
Shaftesburys, so Bottles and his unwelcome society were permitted to
remain unchronicled. In the latter department seriousness came upon Mr
Arnold; in the former, if not a total, yet a general and certainly
most welcome silence.
Most welcome: for he was voiceful enough on other and his proper
subjects. "Falkland," which followed "A French Critic on Milton," in
March in the _Fortnightly_, and "George Sand," which followed it,
as has been said, in June in the _Nineteenth Century_, somewhat
deserved the title (_Mixed Essays_) of the volume in which they
were two years later reprinted. But the last essay of the year 1877,
that on Mr Stopford Brooke's _Primer_, was, like the "French
Critic," and even more than that, pure literature. "A French Critic on
Goethe," which appeared in the _Quarterly Review_ for January
1878, followed next. The other pieces of this year, which also, with
one exception, appeared in _Mixed Essays_, were, with that
exception, evidences of a slight but venial relapse, or let us say of
convalescence not yet quite turned into health. "Equality"
(_Fortnightly_, March 1878), "Irish Catholicism and British
Liberalism" (_Fortnightly_, July 1878), and "Porro Unum est
Necessarium" (_Fortnightly_, November 1878), were, if not of "the
utmost last provincial band," yet not of the pure Quirites, the
genuine citizens of the sacred city of Mr Arnold's thought: and he
seceded from this latter in not a few of those estimable but
unimportant Irish essays which have been noticed in the last chapter.
But the literary contents of _Mixed Essays_ are very interesting,
and the Johnson paper (really a preface to the six selected lives,
which he edited for Messrs Macmillan in 1878) is a most excellent
piece of work. His selection of the Lives is perhaps not quite
unerring. For he ought surely to have given the "Cowley," with its
(from his own point of view) invaluable _point de repère_ in the
estimate of the "metaphysicals." And he might have missed the "Swift,"
which, though extremely interesting as a personal study from its
mixture of prejudice and constraint, its willingness to wound, and
yet--not its fear but--its honest compunction at striking, is, for the
purpose of the volume, misplaced. But he had a right to give what he
chose: and his preface has points of the very highest value. The
opening passage about the _point de repère_ itself, the fixed
halting-place to which we can always resort for fresh starts, fresh
calculations, is one of the great critical _loci_ of the world,
and especially involves the main contribution of the nineteenth
century to criticism if not to literature altogether. We may exalt,
without very much doubt or dread, the positive achievements of the
century of Tennyson and Browning, of Carlyle and Thackeray, of Heine
and Hugo. But we have seen such strange revolutions in this respect
that it may not do to be too confident. The glory of which no man can
deprive our poor dying _siècle_ is that not one, of all the
others since history began, has taken such pains to understand those
before it, has, in other words, so discovered and so utilised the
value of _points de repère_. It may be that this value is, except
in the rarest cases, all that a critic can ever pretend to--that he
may be happy if, as few do, he reaches this. But in the formulation of
the idea (for he did much more than merely borrow it from the French)
Mr Arnold showed his genius, his faculty of putting
"What oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed."
And when a man does this in prose or in verse, in criticism or in
creation, he has his reward--a reward that no man can take away, even
if any one were disposed to try.
As a whole, _Mixed Essays_ itself, which followed _Last Essays
on Church and Religion_ at an interval of two years, is an almost
immeasurably livelier book than its predecessor, and to some judgments
at least seems to excel that predecessor in solid value as much as in
the graces. "Mixed" is perhaps not a strictly accurate title, for the
volume consists of two halves, the contents of each of which are
homogeneous enough, but which have next to nothing to do with each
other. But even in the non-literary essays we are out of "The
Wilderness" in its worst sense. Most of the essays had, as has just
been shown, appeared in different periodicals, while "Equality" was
also delivered as a lecture during the years 1877 and 1878. The
exception was the paper called "Democracy," which he reprinted from
his first work on Foreign Schools in 1861, where it had appeared as an
Introduction. The juxtaposition is by no means uninteresting or
uninstructive, though perhaps it is not entirely favourable to the
idea of Mr Arnold's development as a _zoon politicon_. It has
been said before that his earliest political writing is a good deal
less fantastic and more sane than that of his middle period, and
though "the last of life for which the first was made" was now
restoring to him much of his power in this direction, yet he was
always much joined to idols in matters political. In grasp "Democracy"
does not quite come up to its rather ambitious title; and a moment's
thought will show why. In 1861 Democracy was a very academic subject.
All projects for further Parliamentary Reform had failed utterly in
England; and nobody dreamt of what the next five or six years would
bring. In France there was what looked like a crushing military
despotism: in other Continental countries the repression which had
followed the outbreaks of 1848-49 was only just being relaxed, or not
relaxed at all. American democracy had not had its second baptism of
Civil War. The favourite fancies about the respective _ethos_ of
aristocracy, of the middle-class, and of the lower do indeed appear,
but for the most part Mr Arnold confines himself to the simple
question of State interference, for which in his own subject of
education he was so anxious, and which he would gladly have seen
extended. It has been more than once remarked already that he may
justly be regarded as a politician of more seriousness than he has
here been represented as possessing, if espousing the cause of the
things which actually happen is taken as the criterion. For State
interference has grown and is growing every day. But then it may be
held--and as a matter of principle he would not himself have contested
it--that a man's politics should be directed, not by what he thinks
will happen, but by what he thinks ought to happen. And some of us,
while not in love by any means with the middle-class Liberal ideas of
1830-1860, think that the saving grace of that day that is dead was
precisely its objection to State interference.
"Equality," which follows, and which starts what might be called at
the time of the book its contemporary interest, is much more
far-reaching and of greater curiosity; indeed, it may perhaps be held
to be the most curious, in a certain sense, of all its author's
writings, and to give, in a not fully satisfactory but suggestive
fashion, a key to his complex character which is supplied by no other
of his essays. That there was (in no silly or derogatory sense of an
often absurdly used word) a slightly un-English side to that
character, few acute judges would deny. But its results, in the
greater part of the works, are so diffused, and, as it were,
subterranean, that they are difficult to extract and concentrate. Here
we seem to get the spirit much nearer proof. For the Equality which Mr
Arnold here champions is not English but French equality; not
political and judicial equality before the law, but social equality
enforced by the law. He himself admits, and perhaps even a little
exaggerates, his attitude of _Athanasius contra mundum_ in this
respect, amassing with relish expressions, in the sense opposite to
his own, from such representative and yet essentially diverse
authorities as Lord Beaconsfield, Mr Gladstone, Sir Erskine May, Mr
Froude, and Mr Lowe. Against them he arrays Menander and George
Sand--a counter-championship not itself suggestive of Equality. This
may be "only his fun"--a famous utterance which it is never more
necessary to keep in mind than when speaking or writing of Mr Arnold,
for his fun, such as it was, was pervading, and occasionally rather
cryptic. But the bulk of the paper is perfectly serious. Social
equality, and its compulsory establishment by a law against free
bequest or by public opinion, these are his themes. He asserts that
the Continent is in favour of them; that the English colonies,
_ci-devant_ and actual, are in favour of them; that the Greeks were in
favour of them; that the Bible is in favour of them. He cites Mr
Hamerton as to the virtues of the French peasant. He renews his old
tilt at the manners of the English lower-middle class, at Messrs Moody
and Sankey, at the great "Jingo" song of twenty years ago (as to
which, by the way, a modern Fletcher of Saltoun might have something
to say to-day), at the Puritans, at Mr Goldwin Smith, at many things
and many persons.
I feel that history has given me at the moment rather an unfair
advantage over Mr Arnold here. One could always pick plenty of holes
in "Equality," could suggest that the Greeks did not make such a very
good thing of it with their equality (which included slavery); that
the Biblical point is far from past argument; that M. Zola, for
instance, supplies an interesting commentary on Mr Hamerton's
rose-coloured pictures of the French peasantry; that whatever Mr
Arnold's own lot may have been, others who have lived in small French
towns with the _commis voyageur_ have not found his manners so
greatly superior to those of the English bagman. But just at this
moment, and, in fact, in an increasing degree ever since Mr Arnold
wrote, the glorification of France has become difficult or impossible.
Sir Erskine May, it seems, had warned him in vain about the political
effect of French Equality even at that time: but one need not confine
oneself to politics. At the end of the nineteenth century France has
enjoyed the blessings of social equality, enforced by compulsory
division of estates, for a hundred years and more. Perhaps equality
has nothing to do with the decadence of her literature, with that
state of morals which Mr Arnold himself deplored with almost Puritan
emphasis, with the state of religion which he holds up as an awful
example, fit to warn England to flee to the refuge of his own
undogmatic _Nephelococcygia_, with the ineffable scandals of
Panama and the Dreyfus case, with the mixture of blind illucidity and
febrile passion which characterises the French press. Only, what is
left? Where are the improvements due to this great influence? They
are, according to Mr Arnold, in the amiable dignity of the French
peasant and the polished refinement of the French middle-class.
Frankly, one may prefer Hodge and Bottles.
"Irish Catholicism and British Liberalism" has less actuality, and,
moreover, it belongs to a group of which enough has been said in
reference to the _Irish Essays_. But "Porro Unum est Necessarium"
possesses not merely an accidental but a real claim to fresh
attention, not merely at the moment when there is at last some chance
of the dream of Mr Arnold's life, the interference of the State in
English secondary education, being realised, but because it is one of
the expressions of that dream which was in his life so important. It
consists partly of statistics and partly of a moan over the fact that,
in the heat and heyday of Mr Gladstone's _levée en masse_ against
the Tory Government of 1874-80, the Liberal programme contained
nothing about this darling object. And the superiority of France is
trotted out again; but it would be cruel to insist any more. Yet at
last Mr Arnold becomes practical, and contends for pretty much the
substance of present Secondary Education Reform schemes--limited
inspection, qualification of masters, leaving certificates, &c. "It do
not over-stimulate," to quote an author to whom Mr Arnold was shortly
to devote much attention; but we leave the political or semi-political
batch in considerably greater charity with the author than his prose
volumes for years past had rendered possible.
No reserves, no allowances of the least importance are necessary in
dealing with the rest of the volume. I do not think it fanciful to
discern a sort of involuntary or rather unconscious "Ouf!" of relief
in the first, the "Guide to English Literature," on the subject, as
has been said, of Mr Stopford Brooke's always excellent and then novel
_Primer_. A tribute to duty is, indeed, paid at starting: we are told
sternly that we must not laugh (as it is to be feared too many of us
did and do) at the famous boast of the French Minister, as to all the
boys in France learning the same lesson at the same hour. For this was
the result of State interference: and all the works of State
interference are blessing and blessed. But, this due rite paid, Mr
Arnold gives himself up to enjoyment, laudation, and a few
good-natured and, for the most part, extremely judicious proposals for
making the good better still. Even if this last characteristic were
not present, it would be unjust to call the article a puff. Besides,
are puffs so wholly bad? A man may be not very fond of sweets, and yet
think a good puff now and then, a puff with its three corners just hot
from the oven, full of jam, light, artistically frothed, to be a very
pleasing thing. And, as I have said, Mr Arnold's review is much more
than a puff. Once, indeed, there is even a hypercriticism, due to that
slight want of familiarity with literary history proper which has been
noticed more than once. Mr Arnold finds fault with Mr Brooke for
adopting, as one of his chapter divisions, "from the Restoration to
George III." He objects to this that "George III. has nothing to do
with literature," and suggests "to the Death of Pope and Swift." This
is a curious mistake, of a kind which lesser critics have often
repeated. Perhaps George III. _had_ nothing to do with literature; but
his accession immediately preceded, and may even, as the beginning of
a pure English _régime_, have done something to produce, numerous
appearances of the Romantic revival--Percy's _Reliques_, Hurd's
_Essays_, Macpherson's _Ossian_, _The Castle of Otranto_, and others.
The deaths of Pope and Swift have no such synchronism. They mark,
indeed, the disappearance of the strongest men of the old school, but
not the appearance of even the weakest and most infantine of the new.
Still this, though interesting in itself, is a trifle, and the whole
paper, short as it is, is a sort of _Nunc Dimittis_ in a new sense, a
hymn of praise for dismissal, not from but to work--to the singer's
proper function, from which he has been long divorced.
"Falkland," which follows, is less purely literary, but yet closely
connected with literature. One thinks with some ruth of its original
text, which was a discourse on Falkland by that modern Lucius Gary,
the late Lord Carnarvon--the most curious and pathetic instance of a
man of the nineteenth century speaking of one who was almost his exact
prototype, in virtues and graces as in weaknesses and disabilities of
temperament, during the seventeenth. It would, of course, have been
indecent for Mr Arnold to bring this parallel out, writing as he did
in his own name and at the moment, and I do not find any reference to
it in the _Letters_; but I can remember how strongly it was felt
at the time. His own interest in Falkland as the martyr of Sweetness
and Light, of lucidity of mind and largeness of temper, was most
natural, and its sources most obvious. It would be cruel, and is quite
unnecessary, to insist on the too certain fact that, in this instance
at any rate, these excellent qualities were accompanied by a distinct
weakness of will, by a mania for sitting between two stools, and by
that--it may be lovable, it may be even estimable--incapacity to
think, to speak, to behave like a man of this world, which besets the
conscientious idealist who is not a fanatic. On the contrary, let us
not grudge Mr Arnold a hero so congenial to himself, and so little
repulsive to any of us. He could not have had a better subject; nor
can Falkland ever hope for a _vates_ better consecrated, by
taste, temper, and ability, to sing his praises.
Then we are back again in pure literature, with the two notable
_Quarterly_ articles, already glanced at, on M. Scherer as "A
French Critic on Milton" and "A French Critic on Goethe." There was a
very strong sympathy, creditable to both, between the two. M. Scherer
went further than Mr Arnold in the negative character of his views on
religion; but they agreed as to dogma. His literary criticism was
somewhat harder and drier than Mr Arnold's; but the two agreed in
acuteness, lucidity, and a wide, if not quite a thoroughgoing, use of
the comparative method. Both were absolutely at one in their
uncompromising exaltation of "conduct." So that Mr Arnold was writing
quite _con amore_ when he took up his pen to recommend M. Scherer
to the British public, which mostly knew him not at that time.
But he did not begin directly with his main subject. He had always, as
we have seen, had a particular grudge at Macaulay, who indeed
represented in many ways the tendencies which Mr Arnold was born to
oppose. Now just at this time certain younger critics, while by no
means championing Macaulay generally, had raised pretty loud and
repeated protests against Mr Arnold's exaggerated depreciation of the
_Lays_ as "pinchbeck"; and I am rather disposed to think that he
took this opportunity for a sort of sally in flank. He fastens on one
of Macaulay's weakest points, a point the weakness of which was
admitted by Macaulay himself--the "gaudily and ungracefully
ornamented" (as its author calls it) _Essay on Milton_. And he
points out, with truth enough, that its "gaudy and ungraceful
ornament" is by no means its only fault--that it is bad as criticism,
that it shows no clear grasp of Milton's real merits, that it ignores
his faults, that it attributes to him qualities which were the very
reverse of his real qualities. He next deals slighter but still
telling blows at Addison, defends Johnson, in passing, as only
negatively deficient in the necessary qualifications, not positively
conventional like Addison, or rhetorical like Macaulay, and then with
a turn, itself excellently rhetorical in the good sense, passes to M.
Scherer's own dealings with the subject. Thenceforward he rather
effaces himself, and chiefly abstracts and summarises the "French
Critic's" deliverances, laying special stress on the encomiums given
to Milton's style. The piece is one of his most artfully constructed;
and I do not anywhere know a better example of ingenious and
attractive introduction of a friend, as we may call it, to a new
society.
The method is not very different in "A French Critic on Goethe,"
though Carlyle, the English "awful example" selected for contrast, is
less maltreated than Macaulay, and shares the disadvantageous part
with Lewes, and with divers German critics. On the whole, this essay,
good as it is, seems to me less effective than the other; perhaps
because Mr Arnold is in less accord with his author, and even seems to
be in two minds about that author's subject--about Goethe himself.
Earlier, as we have partly seen, he had, both in prose and in verse,
spoken with praise--for him altogether extraordinary, if not
positively extravagant--of Goethe; he now seems a little doubtful, and
asks rather wistfully for "the just judgment of forty years," the calm
revised estimate of the Age of Wisdom. But M. Scherer's estimate is in
parts lower than he can bring himself to admit; and this turns the
final passages of the essay into a rather unsatisfactory chain of "I
agree with this," "I do not agree with that." But the paper retains
the great merit which has been assigned to its predecessor as a piece
of ushering; and that, we must remember, was what it was designed to
be.
In "George Sand," which completes the volume, we have Mr Arnold no
longer as harbinger of another, but in the character, in which after
all he is most welcome, of speaker on his own account. His estimate of
this prolific _amuseuse_ will probably in the long-run seem
excessive to the majority of catholic and comparative critics; nor is
it at all difficult to account for the excess. Mr Arnold belonged
exactly to the generation to which in England, even more than in
France, George Sand came as a soothing and sympathetic exponent of
personal sorrows. Even the works of her "storm-and-stress" period were
not too far behind them; and her later calmer productions seem to have
had, at least for some natures among the "discouraged generation of
1850" (to which, as we have said, Mr Arnold himself by his first
publications belonged), something of that healing power which he has
assigned, in larger measure and with greater truth, to Wordsworth. A
man is never to be blamed for a certain generous overvaluation of
those who have thus succoured him; it would be as just to blame him
for thinking his mother more beautiful, his father wiser than they
actually were. And Mr Arnold's obituary here has a great deal of
charm. The personal and biographical part is done with admirable
taste, not a grain too much or too little of that _moi_ so
_haïssable_ in excess, so piquant as a mere seasoning, being
introduced: and the panegyric is skilful in the extreme. To be sure,
Mr Hamerton reappears, and Mr Arnold joins in the chorus of delight
because the French peasant no longer takes off his hat. Alas! there is
no need to go to the country of _La Terre_ to discover this sign
of moral elevation. But the delusion itself is only another proof of
Mr Arnold's constancy to his early ideas. And looking back on the
whole volume, one is almost tempted to say that, barring the first
_Essays in Criticism_ itself, he had written no better book.
Before very long the skill in selecting and editing which had been
first applied to Johnson's _Lives_ found extended opportunities.
Mr Arnold had much earlier, in the _Essays in Criticism_,
expressed a wish that the practice of introducing books by a critical
and biographical Essay, which had long been naturalised in France, and
had in former times not been unknown in England, should be revived
among us. His words had been heard even before he himself took up the
practice, and for about the usual time--your thirty years is as a
matter of fact your generation--it flourished and prospered, not let
us hope to the great detriment of readers, and certainly to the modest
advantage of the public man when vexed by want of pence. Nor can it
exactly be said to have ceased--though for some years grumbles have
been uttered. "Why," says one haughty critic,--"why mar a beautiful
edition of So-and-so's works by incorporating with them this or that
man's estimate of their value?" "The publishers," says an inspired
_communiqué_, "are beginning to recognise that the public has no
need of such things in the case of works of established repute, of
which there is nothing new to be said." No doubt both these are
genuine utterances: no doubt the haughty critic would have steadily
refused to "mar" the book by _his_ estimate if he had been asked
to do so; no doubt the particular firm of publishers were not in the
least influenced by a desire to save the ten, twenty, fifty, or a
hundred guineas which this or that man might have demanded for saying
nothing new.
But Mr Arnold did not agree with these severe folk. He thought--and
not a few good wits have thought with him--not only that these
Introductions are an opportunity for men like himself, with original
gifts of thought and style, to display these gifts, but that the
mighty public, for all its knowledge of everything that has been
thought and said about everybody, might find something new to it even
in the observations of lesser folk. As a matter of fact, of course,
and neither to talk nor to quote nonsense, the utility of such
Introductions, even if moderately well done, is unmistakable. Not one
in a thousand of the probable readers of any book has all the
information which even a fairly competent introducer will put before
him; not one in a hundred knows the previous estimates of the author;
not many possess that acquaintance with his whole work which it is
part of the business of the introducer to acquire, and adjust for the
better understanding of the particular book. Of course, if an
Introduction is imperfectly furnished with fact and thought and
reading--if it is desultory, in bad taste, and so forth--it had better
not be there. But this is only saying that a bad Introduction is a bad
thing, which does not get us much beyond the intellectual edification
of the niece of Gorboduc. Unless the introducer is a boggler, the
Introduction will probably do good to those who want it and can be
neglected by those who don't; while in the rarer and better cases it
will itself acquire, or even possess from the first, that very value
as a _point de repère_ which Mr Arnold had discussed. It will be
good relatively and good in itself,--a contribution at once to the
literature of knowledge and to the literature of power.
Of Mr Arnold's efforts in editing I may be permitted to neglect his
"intromittings" with Isaiah, for reasons already sufficiently given.
In more hopeful matter there are three examples which are not soon
likely to lose interest or value: the selection of his own poems, that
from Wordsworth, and that from Byron. To the first the English habits
of his own day did not permit him to prefix any extensive
Introduction, and though the principle is sound, one is almost sorry
for the application. Neither Wordsworth nor Coleridge would have had
any scruples in doing this, and while Mr Arnold had the sense of the
ludicrous which Wordsworth lacked, he was less subject to disastrous
divagations than Coleridge. Still, the 1853 Preface enables those who
have some slight power of expansion to fill in what is wanted from the
point of view of purpose; and the selection itself is quite excellent.
Almost the only things that, as a basis for a good knowledge of the
poet, one finds it necessary to subjoin, are the beautiful
_Resignation_, which Mr Humphry Ward had the good taste to
include in the appendix to his _English Poets_; and the curious,
characteristic, and not much short of admirable _Dream_, which in
the earlier issues formed part of _Switzerland_, and should never
have been excluded from it. It is probably the best selection by a
poet from his own works that has ever been issued, and this is saying
not a little. Nor does one like Mr Arnold less for his saying,
reported either by Mr Ward or Lord Coleridge, that he had rather have
given _all_ the poems.
As for the "Wordsworth" and the "Byron," they gain enormously by "this
man's estimate of them," and do not lose by "this man's" selection. I
have had occasion, not once or twice only, and for purposes not
invariably the same, to go through the Wordsworth book carefully, side
by side with the complete poems, in order to see whether anything has
necessarily to be added. I really do not know what has, unless it be a
few of the oases from the deserts of the _Excursion_, the
_Prelude_, and the then not published _Recluse_. Wordsworth's real
titles are put in once for all; the things by which he must stand or
fall are there. The professor, the very thorough-going student, the
literary historian, must go farther; the idle person with a love of
literature will; but nobody need.
And the Introduction (for after all we can all make our selections for
ourselves, with a very little trouble) is still more precious. I know
few critical essays which give me more pleasure in reading and
re-reading than this. Not that I agree with it by any means as a
whole; but he is in the mere "Pettys" of criticism (it is true not
many seem to get beyond) who judges a critical essay by his own
agreement with it. Mr Arnold puts Wordsworth, as a poet and an English
poet, far higher than I can put him. He is not so great a poet to my
thinking as Spenser or Shelley; if it were possible in these
competitions to allow weight for age, he is not as great a poet as
Keats; I am sure he is not a greater poet than Tennyson; I cannot give
him rank above Heine or Hugo, though the first may be sometimes
naughty and the second frequently silly or rhetorical; and when Mr
Arnold begins to reckon Molière in, I confess I am lost. When and
where did Molière write poetry? But these things do not matter; they
are the things on which reviewers exercise their "will it be
believed?" and on which critics agree to differ. We may include with
them the disparaging passage on Gautier (of whom I suspect Mr Arnold
knew little, and whom he was not quite fitted to judge had he known
more) and the exaltation of "life" and "conduct" and all the rest of
it. These are the colours of the regiment, the blazonry of the knight;
we take them with it and him, and having once said our say against
them, pass them as admitted.
But what is really precious is first the excellent criticism scattered
broadcast all over the essay, and secondly, the onslaught on the
Wordsworthians. They might perhaps retort with a _tu quoque_.
When Mr Arnold attacks these poor folk for saying that Wordsworth's
poetry is precious because its philosophy is sound, we remember a
certain Preface with its "all depends on the subject," and chuckle a
little, a very little. But Mr Arnold is right here. No philosophy, no
subject, will make poetry without poetical treatment, and the
consequence is that _The Excursion_ and _The Prelude_ are,
as wholes, not good poems at all. They contain, indeed, passages of
magnificent poetry. But how one longs, how, as one sees from this
essay, Mr Arnold longed, for some mercury-process which would simply
amalgamate the gold out of them and allow us to throw the dross down
any nearest cataract, or let it be blown away by any casual hurricane!
The Byron paper contains more disputable statements--indeed the
passage about Shelley, if it were quite serious, which may be doubted,
would almost disqualify Mr Arnold as a critic of poetry. But it is
hardly less interesting, and scarcely at all less valuable. In the
first place, it is a very great thing that a man should be able to
admire both Byron and Wordsworth. Of a mere Byronite, indeed, Mr
Arnold has even less than he has of a Wordsworthian pure and simple.
He makes the most damaging admissions; he has to fall back on Goethe
for comfort and confirmation; he is greatly disturbed by M. Scherer's
rough treatment of his subject. In no essay, I think, does he quote so
much from others, does he seem to feel it such a relief to find a
backer, a somebody to fight with on a side point, a somebody (for
instance Professor Nichol) to correct and gloss and digress upon while
complimenting him. Mr Arnold is obviously not at ease in this
Zion--which indeed is a Zion of an odd kind. Yet this very uneasiness
gives to the _Essay_ a glancing variety, a sort of animation and
excitement, which are not common things in critical prelections. Nor,
though one may think that Mr Arnold's general estimate of Byron is not
even half as sound as his general estimate of Wordsworth, does the
former appear to be in even the slightest degree insincere. Much as
there must have been in Byron's loose art, his voluble
inadequacy--nay, even in his choice of subject--that was repellent to
Mr Arnold: much more as there must have been in his unchastened
conduct, his flashy affectations, his lack of dignity, morality,
_tenue_ of every kind,--yet there were real links between them. Mr
Arnold saw in Byron an ally, if not an altogether admirable or
trustworthy ally, against the Philistine. He saw in him a link with
general European literature, a check and antidote to the merely
insular. Byron's undoubtedly "sincere and strong" dislike of the
extreme Romantic view of literature was not distasteful to Mr Arnold.
Indeed, in his own earlier poems there are not wanting Byronic touches
and echoes, not so easy to separate and put the finger on, as to see
and hear "confusedly." Lastly, he had, by that sort of reaction which
often exhibits itself in men of the study, an obvious admiration for
Force--the admiration which makes him in his letters praise France up
to 1870 and Germany after that date--and he thought he saw Force in
Byron. So that the _Essay_ is written with a stimulating mingle-mangle
of attraction and reluctance, of advocacy and admission. It is very
far indeed from being one of his best critically. You may, on his own
principles, "catch him out" in it a score of times. But it is a good
piece of special pleading, an excellent piece of writing, and one of
the very best and most consummate literary _causeries_ in
English.
In strict chronological order, a third example of these most
interesting and stimulating Prefaces should have been mentioned
between the "Wordsworth" and the "Byron"--the latter of which, indeed,
contains a reference to it. This is the famous Introduction to Mr T.H.
Ward's _English Poets_, which, in that work and in the second
series of _Essays in Criticism_, where it subsequently appeared,
has perhaps had more readers than any other of its author's critical
papers. It contains, moreover, that still more famous definition of
poetry as "a criticism of life" which has been so often attacked and
has sometimes been defended. I own to having been, both at the time
and since, one of its most decided and irreconcilable assailants. Nor
do I think that Mr Arnold would have much relished the apology made, I
think, by Mr Leslie Stephen since his death, that its critics "mistake
an epigram for a philosophical definition." In the first place, the
epigrammatic quality is not clearly apparent; and in the second place,
an epigram would in the particular place have been anything but
appropriate, while a philosophical definition is exactly what was
wanted.
Mr Arnold himself never attempted any such defence. He pleaded, with
literal justice, that the phrase "a criticism of life" was only part
of his formula, which adds, "under the conditions fixed for such a
criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty." But this
does not make the matter much better, while it shows beyond
controversy that it _was_ a philosophical definition that he was
attempting. It merely takes us round in a circle, telling us that
poetry is poetical, that the archdeacon performs archidiaconal
functions. And while it is not more illuminative than that famous and
useful jest, it has the drawback of being positively delusive, which
the jest is not. Unless we are to assign some quite new meaning to
"criticism"--and the assignment of new meanings to the terms of an
explanation is the worst of all explanatory improprieties--poetry is
_not_ a criticism of life. It may be a passionate interpretation of
life--that has seemed to some not a bad attempt at the
unachievable,--a criticism it cannot be. Prose fiction may be and
should be such; drama may be and should be such; but not poetry. And
it is especially unfortunate that such poetry as answers best to the
term is exactly that poetry which Mr Arnold liked least. Dryden and
Pope have much good and true criticism of life: _The Vanity of Human
Wishes_ is magnificent criticism of life; but Mr Arnold has told us
that Dryden and Pope and Johnson are but "classics of our prose." That
there is criticism of life _in_ poetry is true; but then in poetry
there is everything.
It would also, no doubt, be possible to pick other holes in the paper.
The depreciation of the "historic estimate," instead of a simple hint
to correct it by the intrinsic, is certainly one. Another is a
distinct arbitrariness in the commendation or discommendation of the
examples selected. No one in his senses would put the _Chanson de
Roland_ on a level with the _Iliad_ as a whole; but some among those
people who happen to possess an equal acquaintance with Greek and Old
French will demur to Mr Arnold's assignment of an ineffably superior
poetical quality to one of the two passages he quotes over the other.
So yet again with the denial of "high seriousness" to Chaucer. One
feels disposed to enter and argue out a whole handful of not quite
contradictory pleas, such as "He _has_ high seriousness" (_vide_ the
"Temple of Mars," the beginning of the _Parliament of Fowls_, and many
other places): "Why should he have high seriousness?" (a most
effective demurrer); and "What _is_ high seriousness, except a fond
thing vainly invented for the nonce?"
But, as has so constantly to be said in reference to Mr Arnold, these
things do not matter. He must have his catchwords: and so "criticism
of life" and "high seriousness" are introduced at their and his peril.
He must have his maintenance of the great classics, and so he exposes
what I fear may be called no very extensive or accurate acquaintance
with Old French. He must impress on us that conduct is three-fourths
of life, and so he makes what even those who stop short of
_latreia_ in regard to Burns may well think mistakes about that
poet likewise. But all the spirit, all the tendency, of the
_Introduction_ is what it ought to be, and the plea for the
"real" estimate is as wholly right in principle as it is partly wrong
in application.
It is well borne out by the two interesting articles on Gray and Keats
which Mr Arnold contributed to the same work. In the former, and here
perhaps only, do we find him putting his shoulder to the work of
critical advocacy and sympathy with an absolutely whole heart. With
Wordsworth, with Byron, with Heine, he was on points more or fewer at
grave difference; though he affected to regard Goethe as a _magnus
Apollo_ of criticism and creation both, I think in his heart of
hearts there must have been some misgivings; and it is impossible that
he should not have known his fancy for people like the Guérins to be
mere _engouement_. Gray's case was different. The resemblances
between subject and critic were extraordinary. Mr Arnold is really an
industrious, sociable, and moderately cheerful Gray of the nineteenth
century; Gray an indolent, recluse, more melancholy Arnold of the
eighteenth. Again, the literary quality of the bard of the
_Elegy_ was exactly of the kind which stimulates critics most.
From Sainte-Beuve downwards the fraternity has, justly or unjustly,
been accused of a tendency to extol writers who are a little
problematical, who approach the second class, above the unquestioned
masters. And there was the yet further stimulus of redressing wrongs.
Gray, though a most scholarly poet, has always pleased the vulgar
rather than the critics, and he had the singular fate of being
dispraised both by Johnson and by Wordsworth. But in this paper of Mr
Arnold's the wheel came full circle. Everything that can possibly be
said for Gray--more than some of us would by any means indorse--is
here said for him: here he has provided an everlasting critical
harbour, into which he may retreat whensoever the popular or the
critical breeze turns adverse.
And the Keats, less disputable in its general estimate, is equally
good in itself, and specially interesting as a capital example of Mr
Arnold's polemic--_the_ capital example, indeed, if we except the
not wholly dissimilar but much later article on Shelley's _Life_.
He is rather unduly severe on the single letter of Keats which he
quotes; but that was his way, and it is after all only a justifiable
rhetorical _reculade_, with the intent to leap upon the maudlin
defenders of the poet as a sort of hero of M. Feydeau, and rend them.
The improvement of the mere fashion, as compared with the
fantasticalities of the _Friendship's Garland_ period, is simply
enormous. And the praise which follows is praise really in the grand
style--praise, the style and quality of which are positively rejoicing
to the heart from their combination of fervour and accuracy, from
their absolute fulfilment of the ideal of a word shockingly misused in
these latter days, the word Appreciation. The personal sympathy which
Mr Arnold evidently had with Gray neither makes nor mars here; all is
purely critical, purely literary. And yet higher praise has never been
given by any save the mere superlative-sloppers of the lower press,
nor juster criticism meted out by the veriest critical Rhadamanthus.
Of its scale and kind, this, I think, is the most perfect example of
Mr Arnold's critical power, and it is so late that it shows that power
to have been not merely far off exhaustion, but actually, like sound
old wine, certain to improve for years to come.
In the seven years that were left to him after the publication of the
_Byron_, Mr Arnold did not entirely confine himself to the
service of his only true mistress Literature. But he never fell again
so completely into the power of Duessa as he had fallen between 1867
and 1877. His infidelities were chiefly in the direction of politics,
not of religion or irreligion, and they were of a less gay and
frivolous character than those of a generally similar kind in earlier
dates. They were partly devoted to the change which has brought it
about, that, while during the third quarter of the century the
Conservatives were in power, though on three different occasions, yet
in each for absolutely insignificant terms, in the fourth Mr
Gladstone's tenure of office from 1880 to 1885 has been the only
period of real Liberal domination. But although he dealt with the
phenomenon from various points of view in such articles as "The Nadir
of Liberalism," the "Zenith of Conservatism," and so forth, it was
chiefly, as was natural at the time, in relation to Ireland that he
exercised his political pen, and enough has been said about these
Irish articles by anticipation above. _Discourses in America_,
the result of his lecturing tour to that country in 1883-84, and the
articles on Amiel, Tolstoi, and Shelley's Life, which represent his
very last stage of life, require more particular attention.
The _Discourses in America_, two of them specially written, and
the other, originally a Cambridge "Rede" discourse, recast for the
Western Hemisphere, must always rank with the most curious and
interesting of Mr Arnold's works: but the very circumstances of their
composition and delivery made it improbable, if not impossible, that
they should form one of his best. These circumstances were of a kind
which reproduces itself frequently in the careers of all men of any
public distinction. In his days of comparative obscurity, or in some
position of "greater freedom and less responsibility," even when he
ceases to be obscure, a man deals faithfully, but perhaps a little
flippantly, with this or that person, thing, nation, subject,
doctrine. Afterwards he is brought into a relation with the person or
nation, into a position as regards the thing, subject, or doctrine,
which necessitates, if not exactly a distinct recantation in the
humiliating sense attached to the Latin, yet a more or less graceful
and ingenious palinode in the more honourable one which we allow to
the Greek equivalent and original. Mr Arnold could never be lacking in
grace or in ingenuity; but he certainly had, in his earlier work,
allowed it to be perfectly visible that the world of American
politics, American manners, American institutions and ways generally,
was not in his eyes by any means a world all of sweetness or all of
light.
His sense of the ludicrous, and his sense of art, alike precluded even
the idea of a clumsy apology, and though, as was to be expected, the
folk of the baser sort who exist everywhere may not have been pleased
with his Discourses, the people of the United States generally did not
owe him or show him any grudge for being frank and consistent as well
as polite. The subjects were selected and grouped with great skill.
"Numbers" dealt with the burning question of democracy, which must
ever be uppermost--or as nethermost not less important--in a republic;
and dealt with it after the more moderate, not the extremer form, of
that combination of literature and politics which Mr Arnold had always
affected. "Literature and Science," the middle discourse, attacked a
question which, so far as the nationality of his audience was
concerned, had nothing burning about it, which the lecturer was
singularly well qualified to treat from the one side, and which is
likely to retain its actuality and its moment for many a day and year,
perhaps many a century. "Emerson," the last, descended from
generalities to the consideration of a particular subject, at once
specially American and specially literary. It would have been hard
indeed to exhibit better composition in the grouping of the subjects
as regards their classes, and criticism may be defied to find better
examples of each class than those actually taken.
It is not clear that quite such high praise can be given to the
execution, and the reason is plain: it was in the execution, not in
the composition and scheme, that the hard practical difficulties of
the task came in. Long harnessed official as he was, and preacher as
he was, in his critical character, of Law, Order, Restraint, Mr Arnold
was both too much of an Englishman and too much of a genius not to be
ill to ride with the curb. And, save perhaps in "Literature and
Science" (which was not at first written for an American audience at
all), the pressure of the curb--I had almost said of the twitch--is
too often evident, or at least suggested. This especially applies to
the first, the longest, the most ambitious, and, as its author would
say, most "nobly serious" of the three. There are quite admirable
things in "Numbers"; and the descant on the worship of the great
goddess Aselgeia, and its effect upon France, is not only nobly
serious from the point of view of morality, but is one of Mr Arnold's
best claims to the title of a political philosopher, and even of a
political prophet. But it is less easy to say that this passage
appears to be either specially in place or well composed with its
companions. Perhaps the same is true of the earlier part, and its
extensive dealings with Isaiah and Plato. As regards the prophet, it
is pretty certain that of Mr Arnold's hearers, the larger number did
not care to have Isaiah spoken about in that particular manner, while
some at least of the rest did not care to have him spoken about at
all. Of the philosopher, it is equally safe to say that the great
majority knew very little, and that of the small minority, some must
have had obstinate questionings connected with the appearance of Plato
as an authority on the moral health of nations, and with the
application of Mr Arnold's own very true and very noble doctrine about
Aselgeia. In fact, although the lecture is the most thoughtful, the
most serious in part, the most forcible, and the truest of all Mr
Arnold's political or social discourses, yet it shares with all of
them the reproach of a touch of desultory dilettantism.
The others, at least equally interesting in parts, are much better as
wholes. The opening of the "Emerson," with its fond reminiscence of
Oxford, is in a vein which Mr Arnold did not often work, but which
always yielded him gold. In the words about Newman, one seems to
recognise very much more than meets the ear--an explanation of much in
the Arnoldian gospel, on something like the principle of revulsion, of
soured love, which accounts for still more in the careers of his
contemporaries, Mr Pattison and Mr Froude. He is less happy on
Carlyle--he never was very happy on Carlyle, and for obvious
reasons--but here he jars less than usual. As for Emerson himself,
some readers have liked Emerson better than Carlyle at first, but have
found that Carlyle "wears" a great deal better than Emerson. It seems
to have been the other way with Mr Arnold; yet he is not uncritical
about Emerson himself. On Emerson's poetry he is even, as on his own
principles he was, perhaps, bound to be, rather hypercritical. Most of
it, no doubt, is not poetry at all; but it has "once in a hundred
years," as Mr O'Shaughnessy sang, the blossoming of the aloe, the
star-shower of poetic meteors. And while, with all reverence, one is
bound to say that his denying the title of "great writer" to Carlyle
is merely absurd--is one of those caprices which somebody once told us
are the eternal foes of art--he is not unjust in denying that title to
Emerson. But after justifying his policy of not "cracking up" by still
further denying his subject the title of a great philosophic thinker,
he proceeds to find a pedestal for him at last as a friend and leader
of those who would "live in the spirit." With such a judgment one has
no fault to find, because it must be in all cases an almost purely
personal one. To some Gautier, with his doctrine of
"Sculpte, lime, cisèle,"
as the great commandment of the creative artist, has been a friend and
leader in the life of the spirit: to Mr Arnold he was only a sort of
unspiritual innkeeper. To Mr Arnold, Maurice de Guérin, with his
second-hand Quinetism, was a friend and leader in the life of the
spirit; others scarcely find him so. "This is this to thee and that to
me."
The third (strictly the middle) piece fortunately requires no
allowances, and suffers from no drawbacks. "Literature and Science" is
an apology for a liberal education, and for a rationally ordered
hierarchy of human study, which it would be almost impossible to
improve, and respecting which it is difficult to think that it can
ever grow obsolete. Not only was Mr Arnold here on his own ground, but
he was fighting for his true mistress, with the lance and sword and
shield that he had proved. And the result is like that, of the
fortunate fights of romance: he thrusts his antagonists straight over
the crupper, he sends them rolling on the ground, and clutching its
sand with their fingers. Even Mr Huxley, stoutest and best of all the
Paynim knights, never succeeded in wiping off this defeat; and it is
tolerably certain that no one else will. The language of the piece is
unusually lacking in ornateness or fanciful digression; but the logic
is the strongest that Mr Arnold ever brought to bear.
The three last essays we have mentioned, apart from the pathetic and
adventitious interest which attaches to them as last, would be in any
case among the best of their author's, and their value is (at least,
as it seems to me) in an ascending scale. To care very much for that
on Count Tolstoi is not easy for those who are unfashionable enough
not to care very much for the eloquent Russian himself. Nothing is
satisfactory that one can only read in translations. But Mr Arnold, in
whom a certain perennial youthfulness was (as it often, if not always,
is in the chosen of the earth) one of his most amiable features, seems
to have conceived a new _engouement_ for this new and quaintly
flavoured Russian literature. Had he lived longer, he probably would
have sung us something in a cautionary strain; just as it can never be
sufficiently regretted that he did not live long enough to handle
Ibsenism. And it would have been very particularly pleasant to hear
him on those _Memoirs of a Mongol Minx_ (as they have been
profanely called), which are assigned to the great Marie Bashkirtseff;
or on those others of the learned She-Mathematician, who waited with a
friend on a gentleman and suggested that he should marry _one_ of
them, no matter which, and lead both about. But the mixture of
freshness, of passion, and of regard for conduct in Count Tolstoi
could not but appeal to him; and he has given us a very charming
_causerie_ on _Anna Karenina_, notable--like O'Rourke's
noble feast--to
"Those who were there
And those who were not,"--
to those who have read the book itself, and to those who have not yet
found time to read it.
I cannot plead much greater affection for the lucubrations of Amiel
than for Count Tolstoi's dealings with that odd compound of crudity
and rottenness, the Russian nature; but Mr Arnold's "Amiel" is
admirable. Never was there a more "gentlemanly correction," a more
delicate and good-humoured setting to rights, than that which he
administers to Amiel's two great panegyrists (who happened to be Mr
Arnold's own niece and Mr Arnold's own friend). On subjects like Maya
and the "great wheel" it would almost be impossible to conceive, and
certainly impossible to find, a happier commentator than Mr Arnold,
though perhaps in the regions of theology he had a private Maya, a
very Great Wheel, of his own. The firmness with which he rebukes the
maunderings of the Genevese hypochondriac--of whom some one once
unkindly remarked that he was not so much intoxicated with Idealism as
suffering from the subsequent headache--is equalled by the kindness of
the dealing; and the quiet decision with which he puts his fine
writing in its proper place is better still. Nobody could call Mr
Arnold a Philistine or one insensible to _finesse_, grace,
_sehnsucht_, the impalpable and intangible charm of melancholy
and of thought. And his comments on Amiel's loaded pathos and his
muddled meditation are therefore invaluable. Nor is he less happy or
less just in the praise which, though not the first, he was one of the
first to give to by far the strongest side of Amiel's talent, his
really remarkable power of literary criticism.
But the best wine was still kept for the very last. It will have been
observed in these brief sketches of his work that, since his return to
the fields of literature proper, Mr Arnold had drawn nearer to the
_causerie_ and farther from the abstract critical essay,--that he had
taken to that mixture of biography, abstract of work, and interspersed
critical comment which Sainte-Beuve, though he did not exactly invent
it, had perfected, and which somebody, I think, has recently described
as "intensely irritating." Well! well! pearls, as we all know, are
irritating to certain classes of consumers. He had from the first done
this well, he now did it consummately. That he took occasion, in the
paper on Shelley's life which appeared in the _Nineteenth Century_ for
January 1888, to repeat his pet heresy about Shelley's poetry, matters
nothing at all. It is an innocent defiance, and no attempt whatever is
made to support it by argument. The purpose of the essay is quite
different. Already, some years before, in his article on Keats, Mr
Arnold had dealt some pretty sharp blows both at the indiscretion of a
certain class of modern literary biographers, and at the pawing and
morbid sentimentality of the same persons or others. He had a new and
a better opportunity in the matter he was now handling, and he struck
more strongly, more repeatedly, and with truer aim than ever. From the
moment of its appearance to the present day, this piece has been an
unceasing joy to all who love literature with a sane devotion. Its
composition is excellent; it selects just the right points, dwells on
them in just the right way, and drops them just when we have had
enough. In mere style it yields to nothing of its author's, and is
conspicuously and quite triumphantly free from his repetitions and
other mannerisms. No English writer--indeed one may say no writer at
all--has ever tempered such a blend of quiet contempt with perfect
good-humour and perfect good-breeding. Dryden would have written with
an equally fatal serenity, but not so lightly; Voltaire with as much
lightness, but not nearly so much like a gentleman--which may also be
said Of Courier. Thackeray could not have helped a blaze of
indignation--honest and healthy, but possibly just
_plusquam_-artistic--at the unspeakable persons who think that by
blackening the unhappy Harriet they can whiten Shelley. And almost any
one would have been likely either to commit the complementary error of
being too severe on Shelley himself, or, if this were avoided, to
underlie the charge of being callous and unsympathetic. Every one of
these rocks, and others, Mr Arnold has avoided; and he has left us in
the piece one of the most perfect examples that exist of the English
essay on subjects connected with literature. In its own special
division of _causerie_ the thing is not only without a superior, it is
almost without a peer; its insinuated or passing literary comments are
usually as happy as its censure of vital matters, and even the
above-referred-to heresy itself gives it a certain piquancy. Ill
indeed was the fate that took its author away so soon after the
completion of this little masterpiece; yet he could not have desired
to leave the world with a better diploma-performance, lodged as an
example of his actual accomplishment.
We must now return, for the last time unfortunately, to the narrative
of biographical events. December 1877 furnishes, in some letters to
his sister, evidence that he was increasingly "spread" (as the French
say quaintly) by notices of parties and persons--Mr Disraeli and Mr
Gladstone, Mr Huxley and Mr Ruskin. One is glad to hear of the
last-named that the writer "is getting to like him "--the passages on
the author of _Modern Painters_ in the earlier letters are
certainly not enthusiastic--and that "he gains much by his fancy being
forbidden to range through the world of coloured cravats." This
beneficial effect of evening dress is not limited to Mr Ruskin, and is
so well expressed that one only wishes Mr Arnold had let his own fancy
range more freely in such epistolary criticisms of life. We hear that
Mr J.R. Green "likes the Reformation and Puritanism less the more he
looks into them," again a not uncommon experience--and that Mr
Stopford Brooke is deriving much edification from the review of his
_Primer_. The next year continues the series of letters to M.
Fontanes, and gives a pleasant phrase in one to another sister, Mrs
Cropper. "My poems have had no better friends in their early and needy
days than my own sisters"--wherein Mr Arnold unconsciously quotes
_Goblin Market_, "there is no friend like a sister." Later, Mr
Freeman is dashed off, _a la maniere noire_, as "an ardent,
learned, and honest man, but a ferocious pedant." 1879 yields a letter
to Miss Arnold, expressing the intention to send the Wordsworth book
of selections to M. Scherer, and beg him to review it, which request
resulted in one of the very best, perhaps _the_ very best, of
that critic's essays in English Literature. Mr Arnold is distressed
later at Renan's taking Victor Hugo's poetry so prodigiously _au
serieux_, just as some of us have been, if not distressed, yet
mildly astonished, at Mr Arnold for not taking it, with all its
faults, half seriously enough. Geist, the dachshund, appears
agreeably, with many other birds and beasts, in a May letter of this
year, and botany reinforces zoology in a later one to Mr Grant Duff.
1880 is at first less fertile, but gives an amusing account of a
semi-royal reception of Cardinal Newman at the Duke of Norfolk's in
May, and a very interesting series of letters from Pontresina in the
autumn. Fortunately for us Mrs Arnold was not with him, and we profit
by his letters to her. In one of them there is a very pleasing and
probably unconscious touch. "Rapallo [the Duchess of Genoa's husband]
smokes the whole evening: _but I think he has a good heart_." And
later still we have the curious and not uncharacteristic information
that he is reading _David Copperfield_ for the first time (whence
no doubt its undue predominance in a certain essay), and the
description of Burns as "a beast with splendid gleams," a view which
has been fully developed since. On February 21, 1881, there is another
interview, flattering as ever, with Lord Beaconsfield, and later he
tells M. Fontanes, "I never much liked Carlyle," which indeed we knew.
The same correspondent has the only references preserved to Dean
Stanley's death; but the magnificent verses which that death produced
make anything else superfluous. They appeared in the first number of
the _Nineteenth Century_ for 1882, when New Year's Day gives us a
melancholy prediction. If "I live to be eighty [_i.e._, in some
three years from the present moment], I shall probably be the only
person in England who reads anything but newspapers and scientific
publications." Too gloomy a view, let us hope; yet with something in
it. And a letter, a very little later, gives us interesting hints of
his method in verse composition, which was to hunt a Dictionary
(Richardson's) for good but unusual words--Theophile Gautier's way
also, as it happens, though probably he did not know that.
These later letters contain so many references to living people that
one has to be careful in quoting from them; but as regards himself,
there is of course no such need of care. That self-ruthlessness which
always prevented him from scamping work is amazingly illustrated in
one of October 1882, which tells how he sat up till five in the
morning rewriting a lecture he was to deliver in Liverpool, and got up
at eight to start for the place of delivery. Let us hope that a
champagne luncheon there--"chiefly doctors, but you know I like
doctors"--revived him after the night and the journey. And two months
later he makes pleasant allusion to "that demon Traill," in reference
to a certain admirable parody of _Poor Matthias_. He had thought
Mr Gladstone "hopelessly prejudiced against" him, and was
proportionately surprised when in August 1883 he was offered by that
Minister a pension of £250 for service to the poetry and literature of
England. Few Civil List pensions have been so well deserved. But Mr
Arnold, as most men of his quality would have been, was at once struck
with the danger of evil constructions being put by the baser sort on
the acceptance of an extra allowance from public funds by a man who
already had a fair income from them, and a comfortable pension in the
ordinary way to look forward to. Mr John Morley, however, and Lord
Lingen, luckily succeeded in quieting his scruples, and only the very
basest sort grumbled. The great advantage, of course, was that it
enabled him to retire, as soon as his time was up, without too great
loss of income.
A lecturing tour to America was already planned, and October 7, 1883
is the last date from Cobham, "New York" succeeding it without any;
for Mr Arnold had the reprehensible and, in official persons, rare
habit of very constantly omitting dates, though not places. The St
Nicholas Club, "a delightful, poky, dark, exclusive little old club of
the Dutch families," is the only place in which he finds peace. For,
as one expected, the interviewers made life terrible. These American
letters are interesting reading enough, but naturally tend to be
little more than a replica of similar letters from other Englishmen
who have done the same thing. As has been quite frankly admitted here,
Mr Arnold never made any effort, and seldom seems to have been
independently prompted, to write what are called "amusing" letters: he
merely tells a plain tale of journeys, lectures, meals, persons,
scenery, manners and customs, etc. Chicago seems to have vindicated
its character for "character" by hospitably forcing him to eat dinner
and supper "on end," and by describing him in its newspapers as "an
elderly bird pecking at grapes on a trellis." The whole tour,
including a visit to Canada, lasted nearly five months, and
brought--not the profit which some people expected, but--a good sum,
with wrinkles as to more if the experiment were repeated. And when he
came back to England, the lectures were collected and printed.
In February 1885 we have, addressed to his eldest daughter, then
married and living in America, a definition of "real civilisation" as
the state "when the world does not begin till 8 P.M. and goes on from
that till 1 A.M., not later." This is, though doubtless jestful,
really a _point de repère_ for the manners of the later
nineteenth century as concerns a busy man who likes society. In the
eighteenth, and earlier in the nineteenth, men as busy as Mr Arnold
practically abstained from "the world" except quite rarely, while "the
world" was not busy. The dachshunds come in for frequent mention.
On a Sunday in May of this year comes the warning of "a horrid pain
across my chest," which, however, "Andrew Clark thinks [wrongly,
alas!] to be not heart" but indigestion. The _Discourses in
America_, for which their author had a great predilection, came out
later. In August the pain is mentioned again; and the subsequent
remark, "I was a little tired, but the cool champagne at dinner
brought me round," is another ominous hint that it was _not_
indigestion. Two of the most valuable of all the letters come in
October, one saying, "I think Oxford is still, on the whole, the place
in the world to which I am most attached" ["And so say all of us"];
the other, after some notice of the Corpus plate, telling how "I got
out to Hinksey and up the hill to within sight of the Cumnor firs. I
cannot describe the effect which this landscape always has upon me:
the hillside with its valleys, and Oxford in the great Thames valley
below." And this walk is again referred to later. He was pleased by a
requisition that he should stand yet again for the Poetry
Professorship, though of course he did not accede to it. And at the
beginning of winter he had a foreign mission (his last) to Berlin, to
get some information for the Government as to German school fees. He
was much lionised, and seems to have enjoyed himself very much during
his stay, the Crown Princess being specially gracious to him.
Nor was he long in England on his return, though long enough to bring
another mention of the chest pain, and an excellent definition of
education--would there were no worse!--"Reading five pages of the
Greek Anthology every day, and looking out all the words I do not
know." In February 1886 he was back again investigating the Swiss and
Bavarian school systems; and that amiable animal-worship of his
receives a fresh evidence in the mention and mourning of the death of
"dear Lola" (not Montès, but another; in short, a pony), with a sigh
for "a _mèche_ of her hair." The journey was finished by way of
France towards the end of March. At Hamburg Mr Arnold was "really [and
very creditably] glad to have had the opportunity of calling a man
Your Magnificence," that being, it seems, the proper official style in
addressing the burgomaster. And May took him back to America, to see
his married daughter and divers old friends. He remained there till
the beginning of September, improving, as he thought, in health, but
meeting towards the close an awkward bathing accident, which involved
no risk of drowning, but gave him a shock that was followed by a week
or two of troublesome attacks of pain across the chest. There is very
much in the letters of the time about the political crisis of 1886.
His retirement from official work came in November, and the letters
are fuller than ever of delight in the Cobham landscape.
But the warnings grew more frequent, and we know that long before this
he had had no delusions about their nature. Indeed, it is doubtful
whether he had ever had any, considering the fact of the malady, which
had, as he says in a singularly manly and dignified _commentatio
mortis_ dated January 29, 1887, struck down his father and
grandfather in middle life long before they came to his present age.
He "refuses every invitation to lecture or make addresses." The
letters of 1887, too, are very few, and contain little of interest,
except an indication of a visit to Fox How; while much the same may be
said of those, also few, from the early months of 1888. The last of
all contains a reference to _Robert Elsmere_. Five days later, on
April 15, a sudden exertion, it seems, brought on the fatal attack,
and he died. He had outlived his grand climacteric of sixty-three
(which he had thought would be "the end as well as the climax") by two
years and three months.