CONCLUSION.
The personal matters which usually, and more or less gracefully, fill
the beginning of the end of a biography, are perhaps superfluous in
the case of a man who died so recently, and who was so well known as
Mr Matthew Arnold. Moreover, if given at all, they should be given by
some one who knew him more intimately than did the present writer. He
was of a singularly agreeable presence, without being in the sense of
the painter's model exactly "handsome"; and in particular he could
boast a very pleasant and not in the least artificial smile. Some
artificiality of manner was sometimes attributed to him, I think
rather unjustly; but he certainly had "tricks and manners" of the kind
very natural to men of decided idiosyncrasy, unless they transcend all
mere trick, after the fashion which we know in Scott, which we are
sure of, without knowing, in Shakespeare. One of these Mr George
Russell glances at in the preface to the _Letters_, a passage
which I read with not a little amusement, because I could confirm it
from a memory of my only conversation with Mr Arnold. He had been
good-humouredly expostulating with me for overvaluing some French
poet. I forget at the distance of seventeen or eighteen years who it
was, but it was not Gautier. I replied in some such words as, "Well;
perhaps he is not very important in himself, but I think he is
'important _for us_,' if I may borrow that." So he looked at me
and said, "_I_ didn't write that anywhere, did I?" And when I
reminded him that he had told us how Sainte-Beuve said it of
Lamartine, he declared that he had quite forgotten it. Which might, or
might not, be Socratic.
But I should imagine that the complaints of his affectations in
ordinary society were as much exaggerated as I am sure that the
opposite complaints of the humdrum character of his letters are.
Somebody talks of the "wicked charm" which a popular epithet or
nickname possesses, and something of the sort seems to have hung about
"The Apostle of Culture," "The Prophet of Sweetness and Light," and
the rest. He only deserved his finical reputation inasmuch as he was
unduly given to the use of these catch-words, not because he in any
undue way affected to "look the part" or live up to them. And as for
the letters, it must be remembered that he was a very busy man, with
clerical work of the official kind enough to disgust a very
Scriblerus; that he had, so far as the published letters show us, no
very intimate friend, male or (still better) female, outside his own
family; and further, that the degeneration of the art of
letter-writing is not a mere phrase, it is a fact. Has any of my
readers many--or any--correspondents like Scott or like Southey, like
Lamb or like FitzGerald, like Madame de Sévigné or like Lady Mary? He
is lucky if he has. Indeed, the simplicity of the _Letters_ is
the very surest evidence of a real simplicity in the nature. In the
so-called best letter-writers it may be shrewdly suspected that this
simplicity is, with rare exceptions, absent. Scott had it; but then
Scott's genius as a novelist overflowed into his letters, as did
Southey's talent of universal writing, and Lamb's unalterable
quintessence of quaintness. But though I will allow no one to take
precedence of me as a champion of Madame de Sévigné, I do not think
that simplicity is exactly the note of that beautiful and gracious
person; it is certainly not that of our own Lady Mary, or of Horace
Walpole, or of Pope, or of Byron. Some of these, as we know, or
suspect with a strength equal to knowledge, write with at least a
sidelong glance at possible publication; some with a deliberate
intention of it; all, I think, with a sort of unconscious
consciousness of "how it will look" on paper. Of this in Mr Arnold's
letters there is absolutely no sign. Even when he writes to
comparative strangers, he never lays himself out for a "point" or a
phrase, rarely even for a joke. To his family (and it should be
remembered that the immense majority of the letters that we possess
are family letters) he is naturally more familiar, but the familiarity
does not bring with it any quips or gambols. Only in the very early
letters, and chiefly in those to Wyndham Slade, is there any
appearance of second thought, of "conceit," in the good sense. Later,
he seems to have been too much absorbed in his three functions of
official, critic, and poet to do more than shake hands by letter and
talk without effort.
But if he, as the phrase is, "put himself out" little as to
letter-writing, it was by no means the same in those other functions
which have been just referred to. In later years (it is Mr Humphry
Ward, I think, who is our sufficient authority for it) poetry was but
occasional amusement and solace to him, prose his regular avocation
from task-work; and there is abundant evidence that, willingly or
unwillingly, he never allowed either to usurp the place of the
vocation which he had accepted. Not everybody, perhaps, is so
scrupulous. It is not an absolutely unknown thing to hear men boast of
getting through their work somehow or other, that they may devote
themselves to _parerga_ which they like, and which they are
pleased to consider more dignified, more important, nearer the chief
end of man. And from the extremely common assumption that other
people, whether they confess this or not, act upon it, one may at
least not uncharitably suppose that a much larger number would so act
if they dared, or had the opportunity. This was not Mr Arnold's
conception of the relations of the hired labourer and the labour which
gains him his hire. Not only does he seem to have performed his actual
inspecting duties with that exact punctiliousness which in such cases
is much better than zeal, but he did not grudge the expenditure of his
art on the requirements, and not the strict requirements only, of his
craft. The unfitness of poets for business has been often enough
proved to be a mere fond thing vainly invented; but it was never
better disproved than in this particular instance.
Of the manner in which he had discharged these duties, some idea may
be formed from the volume of _Reports_ which was edited, the year
after his death, by Sir Francis Sandford. It would really be difficult
to imagine a better display of that "sweet reasonableness," the
frequency of which phrase on a man's lips does not invariably imply
the presence of the corresponding thing in his conduct. It would be
impossible for the most plodding inspector, who never dared commit a
sonnet or an essay, to deal with his subject in a way showing better
acquaintance with it, more interest in it, or more business-like
abstinence from fads, and flights, and flings. Faint and far-off
suggestions of the biographer of Arminius may, indeed, by a very
sensitive reader, be discovered in the slightly eccentric suggestion
that the Latin of the Vulgate (of which Mr Arnold himself was justly
fond) should be taught in primary schools, and in the rather perverse
coupling of "Scott and Mrs Hemans." But these are absolutely the only
approaches to naughtiness in the whole volume. It is a real misfortune
that the nature of the subject should make readers of the book
unlikely to be ever numerous; for it supplies a side of its author's
character nowhere else (except in glimpses) provided by his extant
work. It may even be doubted, by those who have read it, whether
"cutting blocks with a razor" is such a Gothamite proceeding as it is
sometimes held to be. For in this case the blocks are chopped as well
as the homeliest bill-hook could do it; and we know that the razor was
none the blunter. At any rate, the ethical document is one of the
highest value, and very fit, indeed, to be recommended to the
attention of young gentlemen of genius who think it the business of
the State to provide for them, and not to require any dismal drudgery
from them in return.
But the importance of Mr Arnold to English history and English
literature has, of course, little or nothing to do with his official
work. The faithful performance of that work is important to his
character; and the character of the work itself colours very
importantly, and, as we have seen, not perhaps always to unmitigated
advantage, the nature of his performances as a man of letters. But it
is as a man of letters, as a poet, as a critic, and perhaps most of
all as both combined, that he ranks for history and for the world.
A detailed examination of his poetic performance has been attempted in
the earlier pages of this little book, as well as some general remarks
upon it; but we may well find room here for something more general
still. That the poet is as much above the prose-writer in rank as he
is admittedly of an older creation, has always been held; and here, as
elsewhere, I am not careful to attempt innovation. In fact, though it
may seem unkind to say so, it may be suspected that nobody has ever
tried to elevate the function of the prose-writer above that of the
poet, unless he thought he could write great prose and knew he could
not write great poetry. But in another order of estimate than this, Mr
Arnold's poetic work may seem of greater value than his prose, always
admirable and sometimes consummate as the latter is, if we take each
at its best.
At its best--and this is how, though he would himself seem to have
sometimes felt inclined to dispute the fact, we must reckon a poet.
His is not poetry of the absolutely trustworthy kind. It is not like
that of Shelley or of Keats, who, when their period of mere juvenility
is past, simply cannot help writing poetry; nor is it, on the other
hand, like that of Wordsworth, who flies and flounders with an
incalculable and apparently irresponsible alternation. It is
rather--though I should rank it far higher, on all but the historic
estimate, than Gray's--like that of Gray. The poet has in him a vein,
or, if the metaphor be preferred, a spring, of the most real and
rarest poetry. But the vein is constantly broken by faults, and never
very thick; the spring is intermittent, and runs at times by drops
only. There is always, as it were, an effort to get it to yield
freely, to run clear and constant. And--again as in the case of
Gray--the poet subjects himself to a further disability by all manner
of artificial restrictions, struggles to comply with this or that
system, theories, formulas, tricks. He will not "indulge his genius."
And so it is but rarely that we get things like the _Scholar-Gipsy_,
like the _Forsaken Merman_, like the second _Isolation_; and when we
do get such things there is sometimes, as in the case of the
peroration to _Sohrab and Rustum_, and perhaps the splendid
opening of _Westminster Abbey_ and _Thyrsis_, a certain
sense of parade, of the elaborate assumption of the singing-robe.
There is too seldom the sensation which Coleridge unconsciously
suggested in the poem that heralded the poetry of the nineteenth
century. We do not feel that
"The fair breeze blew, the while foam flew,
The furrow followed free"--
that
"We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea;"
but that a mighty launch of elaborate preparation is taking place,
that we are pleased and orderly spectators standing round, and that
the ship is gliding in due manner, but with no rush or burst, into the
sea of poetry. While elsewhere there may be even the sense of effort
and preparation without the success.
But, once more, a poet is to be judged first by his best things, and
secondly by a certain _aura_ or atmosphere, by a nameless,
intangible, but sensible quality, which, now nearer and fuller, now
farther and fainter, is over his work throughout. In both respects Mr
Arnold passes the test. The things mentioned above and others, even
many others, are the right things. They do not need the help of that
rotten reed, the subject, to warrant and support them; we know that
they are in accordance with the great masters, but we do not care
whether they are or not. They sound the poetic note; they give the
poetic flash and iridescence; they cause the poetic intoxication. Even
in things not by any means of the best as wholes, you may follow that
gleam safely. The exquisite revulsion of the undertone in
_Bacchanalia_--
"Ah! so the silence was,
So was the hush;"
the honey-dropping trochees of the _New Sirens_; the description
of the poet in _Resignation_; the outburst--
"What voices are these on the clear night air?"
of _Tristram and Iseult_; the melancholy meditation of _A
Summer Night_ and _Dover Beach_, with the plangent note so
cunningly yet so easily accommodated to the general tone and motive of
the piece,--these and a hundred other things fulfil all the
requirements of the true poetic criticism, which only marks, and only
asks for, the _differentia_ of poetry.
And this poetic moment--this (if one may use the words, about another
matter, of one who wrote no poetry, yet had more than all but three or
four poets), this "exolution, liquefaction, transformation, the kiss
of the spouse, and ingression into the divine shadow" which poetry and
poetry alone confers upon the fit readers of it--is never far off or
absent for long together in Mr Arnold's verse. His command of it is
indeed uncertain. But all over his work, from _The Strayed
Reveller_ to _Westminster Abbey_, it may happen at any minute,
and it does happen at many minutes. This is what makes a poet: not the
most judicious selection of subject, not the most studious
contemplation and, as far as he manages it, representation of the
grand style and the great masters. And this is what Mr Arnold has.
That his prose, admirable as it always is in form and invaluable as it
often is in matter, is on the whole inferior to his verse, is by no
means a common opinion, though it was expressed by some good judges
both during his life and at the time of his death. As we have seen,
both from a chance indication in his own letters and from Mr Humphry
Ward's statement, he took very great pains with it; indeed, internal
evidence would be sufficient to establish this if we had no positive
external testimony whatsoever. He came at a fortunate time, when the
stately yet not pompous or over-elaborated model of the latest
Georgian prose, raised from early Georgian "drabness" by the efforts
of Johnson, Gibbon, and Burke, but not proceeding to the extremes of
any of the three, was still the academic standard; but when a certain
freedom on the one side, and a certain grace and colour on the other,
were being taken from the new experiments of nineteenth-century prose
proper. Whether he or his contemporary Mr Froude was the greatest
master of this particular blend is a question which no doubt had best
be answered by the individual taste of the competent. I should say
myself that Mr Froude at certain moments rose higher than Mr Arnold
ever did; nothing of the latter's can approach that magnificent
passage on the passing of the Middle Ages and on the church-bell sound
that memorises it. And Mr Froude was also free from the mannerisms, at
times amounting to very distinct affectation, to which, in his middle
period more especially, Mr Arnold succumbed. But he did not quite keep
his friend's high level of distinction and _tenue_. It was almost
impossible for Mr Arnold to be slipshod--I do not mean in the sense of
the composition books, which is mostly an unimportant sense, but in
one quite different; and he never, as Mr Froude sometimes did,
contented himself with correct but ordinary writing. If his defect was
mannerism, his quality was certain manner.
The most noticeable, the most easily imitated, and the most doubtful
of his mannerisms was, of course, the famous iteration, which was
probably at first natural, but which, as we see from the
_Letters_, he afterwards deliberately fostered and accentuated,
in order, as he thought, the better to get his new ideas into the
heads of what the type-writer sometimes calls the "Br_u_tish"
public. That it became at times extremely teasing is beyond argument,
and I should be rather afraid that Prince Posterity will be even more
teased by it than we are, because to him the ideas it enforces will
be, and will have been ever since he can remember, obvious and
common-place enough. But when this and some other peccadillos (on
which it is unnecessary to dwell, lest we imitate the
composition-books aforesaid) were absent or even moderately present,
sometimes even in spite of their intrusion, Mr Arnold's style was of a
curiously fascinating character. I have often thought that, in the
good sense of that unlucky word "genteel," this style deserves it far
more than the style either of Shaftesbury or of Temple; while in its
different and nineteenth-century way, it is as much a model of the
"middle" style, neither very plain nor very ornate, but "elegant," as
Addison's own. Yet it is observable that all the three writers just
mentioned keep their place, except with deliberate students of the
subject, rather by courtesy or prescription than by actual conviction
and relish on the part of readers: and it is possible that something
of the same kind may happen in Mr Arnold's case also, when his claims
come to be considered by other generations from the merely formal
point of view. Nor can those claims be said to be very securely based
in respect of matter. It is impossible to believe that posterity will
trouble itself about the dreary apologetics of undogmatism on which he
wasted so much precious time and energy; they will have been arranged
by the Prince's governor on the shelves, with Hobbes's mathematics and
Southey's political essays. "But the criticism," it will be said,
"_that_ ought to endure." No doubt from some points of view it ought,
but will it? So long, or as soon, as English literature is
intelligently taught in universities, it is sure of its place in any
decently arranged course of Higher Rhetoric; so long, or as soon, as
critics consider themselves bound to study the history and documents
of their business, it will be read by them. But what hold does this
give it? Certainly not a stronger hold than that of Dryden's _Essay of
Dramatic Poesy_, which, though some of us may know it by heart, can
scarcely be said to be a commonly read classic.
The fact is--and no one knew this fact more thoroughly, or would have
acknowledged it more frankly, than Mr Arnold himself--that criticism
has, of all literature that is really literature, the most precarious
existence. Each generation likes, and is hardly wrong in liking, to
create for itself in this province, to which creation is so scornfully
denied by some; and old critics are to all but experts (and apparently
to some of them) as useless as old moons. Nor can one help regretting
that so long a time has been lost in putting before the public a
cheap, complete, handy, and fairly handsome edition of the whole of Mr
Arnold's prose. There is no doubt at all that the existence of such an
edition, even before his death, was part cause, and a large part of
the cause, of the great and continued popularity of De Quincey; and it
is a thousand pities that, before a generation arises which knows him
not, Mr Arnold is not allowed the same chance. As it is, not a little
of his work has never been reprinted at all; some of the rest is
difficult of access, and what there is exists in numerous volumes of
different forms, some cheap, some dear, the whole cumbersome. And if
his prose work seems to me inferior to his poetical in absolute and
perennial value, its value is still very great. Not so much English
prose has that character of grace, of elegance, which has been
vindicated for this, that we can afford to lay aside or to forget such
consummate examples of it. Academic urbanity is not so universal a
feature of our race--the constant endeavour at least to "live by the
law of the _peras_," to observe lucidity, to shun exaggeration,
is scarcely so endemic. Let it be added, too, that if not as the sole,
yet as the chief, herald and champion of the new criticism, as a
front-fighter in the revolutions of literary view which have
distinguished the latter half of the nineteenth century in England, Mr
Arnold will be forgotten or neglected at the peril of the generations
and the individuals that forget or neglect him.
Little need be added about the loss of actual artistic pleasure which
such neglect must bring. Mr Arnold may never, in prose, be read with
quite the same keenness of delight with which we read him in poetry;
but he will yield delight more surely. His manner, except in his rare
"thorn-crackling" moments, and sometimes even then, will carry off
even the less agreeable matter; with matter at all agreeable, it has a
hardly to be exaggerated charm.
But it is in his general literary position that Mr Arnold's strongest
title to eminence consists. There have certainly been greater poets in
English: I think there have been greater critics. But as poet and
critic combined, no one but Dryden and Coleridge can be for a moment
placed beside him: the fate of the false Florimel must await all
others who dare that adventure. And if he must yield--yield by a long
way--to Dryden in strength and easy command of whatsoever craft he
tried, to Coleridge in depth and range and philosophical grasp, yet he
has his revenges. Beside his delicacy and his cosmopolitan
accomplishment, Dryden is blunt and unscholarly; beside his directness
of aim, if not always of achievement, his clearness of vision, his
almost business-like adjustment of effort to result, the vagueness and
desultoriness of Coleridge look looser and, in the literary sense,
more disreputable than ever. Here was a man who could not only
criticise but create; who, though he may sometimes, like others, have
convicted his preaching of falsity by his practice, and his practice
of sin by his preaching, yet could in the main make practice and
preaching fit together. Here was a critic against whom the foolish
charge, "You can break, but you cannot make," was confessedly
impossible--a poet who knew not only the rule of thumb, but the rule
of the uttermost art. In him the corruption of the poet had not been
the generation of the critic, as his great predecessor in the two
arts, himself secure and supreme in both, had scornfully said. Both
faculties had always existed, and did always exist, side by side in
him. He might exercise one more freely at one time, one at another;
but the author of the _Preface_ of 1853 was a critic, and a ripe
one, in his heyday of poetry, the author of _Westminster Abbey_
was a poet in his mellowest autumn of criticism.
And yet he was something more than both these things, more than both
of these at once. But for that unlucky divagation in the Wilderness,
his life would have been the life of a man of letters only as far as
choice went, with the duties of no dishonourable profession
superadded. And even with the divagation it was mainly and really
this. To find parallels for Mr Arnold in his unflinching devotion to
literature we must, I fear, go elsewhere than to Dryden or to
Coleridge, we must go to Johnson and Southey. And here again we may
find something in him beyond both, in that he had an even nobler
conception of Literature than either. That he would have put her even
too high, would have assigned to her functions which she is unable to
discharge, is true enough; but this is at least no vulgar error.
Against ignoble neglect, against stolid misunderstanding, against
mushroom rivalry, he championed her alike. And it was most certainly
from no base motive. If he wanted an English Academy, I am quite sure
it was not from any desire for a canary ribbon or a sixteen-pointed
star. Yet, after Southey himself in the first half of the century, who
has done so much for letters _quâ_ letters as Mr Arnold in the
second? His poems were never popular, and he tried no other of the
popular departments of literature. But he wrote, and I think he could
write, nothing that was not literature, in and by the fact that he was
its writer. It has been observed of others in other kinds, that
somehow or other, by merely living, by pursuing their own arts or
crafts whatever they were, they raised those arts and crafts in
dignity, they bestowed on them as it were a rank, a position. A few--a
very few--at successive times have done this for literature in
England, and Mr Arnold was perhaps the last who did it notably in
ours. One cannot imagine him writing merely for money, for position,
even for fame--for anything but the _devoir_ of the born and
sworn servant of Apollo and Pallas. Such devotion need not, of course,
forbid others of their servants to try his shield now and then with
courteous arms or even at sharps--as he tried many. But it was so
signal, so happy in its general results, so exactly what was required
in and for England at the time, that recognition of it can never be
frank enough, or cordial enough, or too much admiring. Whenever I
think of Mr Arnold it is in those own words of his, which I have
quoted already, and which I quoted to myself on the hill by Hinksey as
I began this little book in the time of fritillaries--
"Still nursing the unconquerable hope,
Still clutching the inviolable shade"--
the hope and shade that never desert, even if they flit before and
above, the servants and the lovers of the humaner literature.
INDEX.
* * * * *
_Alaric at Rome_, 4.
_Bacchanalia, or the New Age_, 114.
_Balder Dead_, 52, 53.
_Byron, Poetry of_, ed. Arnold, 185.
_Celtic Literature, On the Study of_, 66, 104 _et seq._
_Church of Brou, The_, 38.
_Consolation_, 28.
_Cromwell_, 8, 9.
_Culture and Anarchy_, 128 _et seq._
_Discourses in America_, 195.
_Dover Beach_, 112.
_Empedocles on Etna_, 23.
_Essays in Criticism_, 83 _et seq._, 123.
_Eton, A French_, 79 _et seq._
_Farewell, A_, 27.
_Forsaken Merman, The_, 19.
_French Eton, A_, 79 _et seq._
_Friend, To a_, sonnet, 15.
_Friendship's Garland_, 148.
_God and the Bible_, 137.
_Heine's Grave_, 115.
_Homer, On Translating_, 66.
_In Utrumque Paratus_, 20.
_Irish Essays_, 151.
_Isolation_, 31.
Johnson's Lives of the Poets, ed. Arnold, 169.
_Last Essays on Church and Religion_, 137, 142.
_Letters_, 1, 15 _et seq._, 214.
_Lines written by a Death-bed_, 32.
_Literature and Dogma_, 131 _et seq._
_Longing_, 30.
_Marguerite, To_, 31.
_Memorial Verses_, 26.
_Merman, The Forsaken_, 19.
_Merope_, 60.
_Mixed Essays_, 168 _et seq._
_Modern Sappho, The_, 17.
_Mycerinus_, 13.
_New Sirens, The_, 17.
_Obermann_, 53.
_On the Rhine_, 29.
_On the Study of Celtic Literature_, 66, 104 _et seq._
_On the Terrace at Berne_, 16.
_On Translating Homer_, 66.
_Preface_, the, to the 'Poems' of 1853. 33 _et seq._
_Prose Passages_, 166.
Renan, Arnold's relations with, 101.
_Requiescat_, 39.
_Resignation_, 20, 185.
_Rugby Chapel_, 115.
Sainte-Beuve, 59, 203.
_Scholar-Gipsy, The_, 5, 40 _et seq._
_Schools and Universities on the Continent_, 116.
_Selected Poems_, 184.
Shairp, Principal, lines on Arnold by, 5.
_Shakespeare_, Sonnet to, 15.
_Sick King in Bokhara_, 15.
_Sohrab and Rustum_, 37, 51, 52.
Southey, use of rhymeless metre by, 11.
_St Brandan_, 111.
_St Paul and Protestantism_, 130 _et seq._
_Stagirius_, 19.
_Strayed Reveller, The_, 10 _et seq._
_Summer Night, A_, 26.
_Switzerland_, 16.
Tennyson, influence of, on Arnold, 19.
_Thyrsis_, 111.
_To Fausta_, 19.
_To Marguerite_, 31.
_To my Friends who Ridiculed a Tender Leave-taking_, 16, 27.
_Tristram and Iseult_, 24, 25.
_Voice, The_, 19.
Ward's _English Poets_, Arnold's Introduction to, 189.
_Westminster Abbey_, 207, 220, 228.
_Wordsworth, Poems of_, ed. Arnold, 185.
THE END.
PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS.