It is easy to miss the especial grandeur of Matthew Arnold's work.
The airy persiflage of his prose--its reiterated lucidities--pleasing to
some, irritating to others, will have a place, but not a very important
place, in English Literature. Even those magical and penetrating
"aphorisms" with which he has held the door open to so many
religious and moral vistas tease us a little now, and--suggestive
enough in their hour--do not deepen and deepen upon the intellect
with the weight of "aphorisms" from Epictetus or Goethe.
The "stream of tendency that makes for righteousness" runs a little
shallow, and it has so many pebbles under its clear wave! That word
of his, "the Secret of Jesus," wears best of all. It was a happy
thought to use the word "secret"--a thought upon which those whose
religious creed binds them to "the method" rather than "the secret,"
may well ponder!
As a critic, too, though illuminating and reassuring, he is far from
clairvoyant. A quaint vein of pure, good-tempered, ethical
_Philistinism_ prevents his really entering the evasive souls of
Shelley or Keats or Heine. With Wordsworth or Byron he is
more at home. But he misses many subtleties, even in their
simple temperaments. He is no Proteus, no Wizard of critical
metempsychosis. For all his airy wit, he is "a plain, blunt man, who
loves his friend." In fact, when one compares him, as a sheer
illuminator of psychological twilights, to Walter Pater, one realizes
at once how easily a quite great man may "render himself stupid" by
sprinkling himself with the holy water of Fixed Principles!
No, it is neither of Arnold, the Theological Free-Lance, or of Arnold,
the Critic of Literature, that I want to speak, but of Arnold, the Poet.
Personally I hold the opinion that he was a greater poet than either
Tennyson or Browning. His philosophy is a far nobler, truer, and
more permanent thing than theirs, and there are passages and single
lines in his poetry which over-top, by enormous distances, anything
that they achieved.
You ask me what the Philosophy of Matthew Arnold was? It is easy
to answer that. It was the philosophy of all the very greatest among
mortal men! In his poetry he passes completely out of the region of
Theological argument, and his attitude to life is the attitude
of Sophocles and Virgil and Montaigne and Cervantes and
Shakespeare and Goethe. Those who read Matthew Arnold, and love
him, know that his intellectual tone is the tone of those great
classical writers, and his conclusions their conclusions.
He never mocks our pain with foolish, unfounded hopes and he
never permits mad despair to paralyse him. He takes life as it is, and,
as we all have to do, makes the best of its confusions. If we are here
"as on a darkling plain, swept by confused alarms of struggle and
flight, where ignorant armies clash by night," we can at least be
"true to one another."
One wonders sometimes if it be properly understood by energetic
teachers of youth that there is only one intellectual attitude towards
life, only one philosophy, only one ultimate mood. This is that mood
of "resignation," which, from Homer to Matthew Arnold, is alone
adapted, in the long run, to the taste of our days upon earth.
The real elements of our situation have not altered in the remotest
degree since Achilles dragged Hector round the walls of Troy.
Men and women still love and hate; still "enjoy the sun" and "live
light in the Spring"; still "advance true friends and beat back
dangerous foes"--and upon them the same Constellations look down;
and upon them the same winds blow; and upon them the same
Sphinx glides through the obscurity, with the same insoluble
Question.
Nothing has really changed. The "river of time" may pass through
various landscapes, but it is the same river, and, at the last, it brings
to us, as "the banks fade dimmer away" and "the stars come out"
"murmurs and scents" of the same infinite Sea. Yes, there is only
one Philosophy, as Disraeli said, jesting; and Matthew Arnold,
among the moderns, is the one who has been allowed to put it into
his poetry. For though, before the "Flamantia Moenia" of the world's
triple brass, we are fain to bow our heads inconsolably, there come
those moments when, a hand laid in ours, we think we know "the
hills whence our life flows"!
The flowing of the river of life--the washing of the waves of
life--how well one recalls, from Arnold's broken and not always musical
stanzas, references to that sound--to the sound so like the sound of
those real sea-tides that "Sophocles, long ago, heard in the
Aegaean," and listened, thinking of many things, as we listen and
think of many things today!
"For we are all like swimmers in the Sea,
Poised on the top of a huge wave of Fate,
And whether it will lift us to the land
Or whether it will bear us out to Sea,
Back out to Sea, to the dark gulfs of Death,
We know not--
Only the event will teach us, in its hour."
I sometimes think that a certain wonderful blending of realism and
magic in Matthew Arnold's poetry has received but scant justice.
In "The Forsaken Merman" for instance, there are many stanzas that
make you smell the salt-foam and imagine all that lies, hidden and
strange, down there upon the glittering sand. That line,
"Where great whales go sailing by
Round the world for ever and aye,"
has a liberating power that may often recur, when one is, God knows,
far enough from the spouting of any whale! And the whole poem
has a wistful, haunting beauty that never grows tedious.
Matthew Arnold is a true classical poet. It is strictly in accordance
with the authentic tradition to introduce those touches of light,
quaint, playful, airy realism into the most solemn poetry. It is what
Virgil, Catullus, Theocritus, Milton, Landor, all did. Some persons
grow angry with him for a certain tone of half-gay, half-sad, allusive
tenderness, when he speaks of Oxford and the country round Oxford.
I do not think there is anything unpleasing in this. So did Catullus
talk of Sirmio; Horace of his Farm; Milton of "Deva's wizard-stream";
Landor of Sorrento and Amalfi.
It is all of a piece with the "resignation" of a philosophy which does
not expect that this or that change of dwelling will ease our pain; of
a philosophy that naturally loves to linger over familiar well-sides
and roadways and meadow-paths and hillsides, over the places
where we went together, when we "still had Thyrsis."
The direct Nature-poetry of Matthew Arnold, touching us with the
true classic touch, and yet with something, I know not what, of more
wistful tenderness added, is a great refreshment after the pseudo-magic,
so vague and unsatisfying, of so much modern verse.
"It matters not. Light-comer he has flown!
But we shall have him in the sweet spring days,
With whitening hedges and uncrumpling fern,
And blue-bells trembling by the forest ways,
And scent of hay new-mown--"
Or that description of the later season:
"Too quick despairer! Wherefore wilt thou go?
Soon will the high Midsummer pomps come on,
Soon shall we have gold-dusted Snapdragon,
Sweet-William with his homely cottage-smell,
And Stocks, in fragrant blow.
Roses that down the alleys shine afar,
And open Jasmin-muffled lattices,
And groups under the dreaming garden-trees,
And the pale Moon and the white Evening-Star."
True to the "only philosophy," Matthew Arnold is content to
indicate how for each one of us the real drama of life goes on with a
certain quite natural, quite homely, quite quiet background of the
strip of earth where we first loved and dreamed, and were happy,
and were sad, and knew loss and regret, and the limits of man's
power to change his fate.
There is a large and noble calm about the poetry of this writer which
has the effect upon one of the falling of cool water into a dark,
fern-fringed cave. He strips away lightly, delicately, gently, all the
trappings of our feverish worldliness, our vanity and ambition, and
lifts open, at one touch, the great moon-bathed windows that look
out upon the line of white foam--and the patient sands.
And never is this calm deeper than when he refers to Death. "For
there" he says, speaking of that Cemetery at Firenze where his
Thyrsis lies;
"For there thine earth-forgetting eyelids keep
The morningless and unawakening sleep,
Under the flowery Oleanders pale--"
Sometimes, as in his "Tristram and Iseult," he is permitted little
touches of a startling and penetrating beauty; such as, returning to
one's memory and lips, in very dusty and arid places, bring all the
tears of half-forgotten romance back again to us and restore to us the
despair that is dearer than hope!
Those lines, for instance, when Tristram, dying in his fire-lit,
tapestried room, tended by the pale Iseult of Brittany, knows that his
death-longing is fulfilled, and that she, his "other" Iseult, has come
to him at last--have they not the very echo in them of what such
weariness feels when, only not too late, the impossible happens?
Little he cares for the rain beating on the roof, or the moan of the
wind in the chimney, or the shadows on that tapestried wall! He
listens--his heart almost stops.
"What voices are those in the still night air?
What lights in the court? What steps on the stair?"
One wonders if the reader, too, knows and loves, that strange
fragmentary unrhymed poem, called "the Strayed Reveller," with its
vision of Circe and the sleeping boy-faun, and the wave-tossed
Wanderer, and its background of "fitful earth-murmurs" and
"dreaming woods"--Strangely down, upon the weary child, smiles
the great enchantress, seeing the wine stains on his white skin, and
the berries in his hair. The thing is slight enough; but in its coolness,
and calmness, and sad delicate beauty, it makes one pause and grow
silent, as in the long hushed galleries of the Vatican one pauses and
grows silent before some little known, scarcely-catalogued Greek
Vase. The spirit of life and youth is there--immortal and tender--yet
there too is the shadow of that pitiful "in vain," with which the
brevity of such beauty, arrested only in chilly marble, mocks us as
we pass!
It is life--but life at a distance--Life refined, winnowed, sifted,
purged. "Yet, O Prince, what labour! O Prince, what pain!" The
world is perhaps tired of hearing from the mouths of its great lonely
exiles the warning to youth "to sink unto its own soul," and let the
mad throngs clamour by, with their beckoning idols, and treacherous
pleading. But never has this unregarded hand been laid so gently
upon us as in the poem called "Self-Dependence."
Heaven forgive us--we cannot follow its high teaching--and yet we
too, we all, have felt that sort of thing, when standing at the prow of
a great ship we have watched the reflection of the stars in the
fast-divided water.
"Unaffrightened by the silence round them
Undistracted by the sights they see
These demand not that the world about them
Yield them love, amusement, sympathy.
But with joy the stars perform their shining
And the sea its long, moon-silvered roll;
For self-poised they live; nor pine with noting
All the fever of some differing soul."
The "one philosophy" is, as Matthew Arnold himself puts it,
"utrumque paratus," prepared for either event. Yet it leans, and how
should it not lean, in a world like this, to the sadder and the more
final. That vision of a godless universe, "rocking its obscure body to
and fro," in ghastly space, is a vision that refuses to pass away. "To
the children of chance," as my Catholic philosopher says, "chance
would seem intelligible."
But even if it be--if the whole confluent ocean of its experiences
be--unintelligible and without meaning; it remains that mortal men
must endure it, and comfort themselves with their "little pleasures."
The immoral cruelty of Fate has been well expressed by Matthew
Arnold in that poem called "Mycerinus," where the virtuous king
_does not_ receive his reward. He, for his part will revel and care
not. There may be nobler, there may be happier, ways of awaiting
the end--but whether "revelling" or "refraining," we are all waiting
the end. Waiting and listening, half-bitterly, half-eagerly, seems the
lot of man upon earth! And meanwhile that
--"Power, too great and strong
Even for the gods to conquer or beguile,
Sweeps earth and heaven and men and gods along
Like the broad volume of the insurgent Nile
And the great powers we serve, themselves must be
Slaves of a tyrannous Necessity--"
Matthew Arnold had--and it is a rare gift--in spite of his peaceful
domestic life and in spite of that "interlude" of the "Marguerite"
poems--a noble and a chaste soul. "Give me a clean heart, O God,
and renew a right spirit within me!" prayed the Psalmist. Well! this
friend of Thyrsis had "a clean heart" and "a right spirit"; and these
things, in this turbulent age, have their appeal! It was the purging of
this "hyssop" that made it possible for him even in the "Marguerite"
poems, to write as only those can write whose passion is more than
the craving of the flesh.
"Come to me in my dreams and then
In sleep I shall be well again--
For then the night will more than pay
The hopeless longing of the day!"
It was the same chastity of the senses that made it possible for him
to write those verses upon a young girl's death, which are so much
more beautiful--though _those_ are lovely too--than the ones Oscar
Wilde wrote on the same subject.
"Strew on her, roses, roses,
But never a spray of yew;
For in silence she reposes--
Ah! would that I did too!
Her cabined ample spirit
It fluttered and failed for breath.
Tonight it doth inherit
The vasty halls of death."
Matthew Arnold is one of the poets who have what might be called
"the power of Liberation." He liberates us from the hot fevers of our
lusts. He liberates us from our worldliness, our perversions, our mad
preoccupations. He reduces things to their simple elements and
gives us back air and water and land and sea. And he does this
without demanding from us any unusual strain. We have no need to
plunge into Dionysian ecstacies, or cry aloud after "cosmic
emotion."
We have no need to relinquish our common sense; or to dress or eat
or talk or dream, in any strange manner. It is enough if we remember
the fields where we were born. It is enough if we do not altogether
forget out of what quarter of the sky Orion rises; and where the
lord-star Jupiter has his place. It is enough if we are not quite
oblivious of the return of the Spring and the sprouting of the
first leaves.
From the poetry of Matthew Arnold it is possible to derive an art of
life which carries us back to the beginnings of the world's history.
He, the civilized Oxonian; he, domestic moralist; he, the airily
playful scholar, has yet the power of giving that _Epic solemnity_ to
our sleep and our waking; to our "going forth to our work arid our
labour until the evening"; to the passing of the seasons over us;
which is the ground and substance of all poetic imagination, and
which no change or progress, or discovery, can invade or spoil.
For it is the nature of poetry to heighten and to throw into relief
those eternal things in our common destiny which too soon get
overlaid--And some things only poetry can reach--Religion may
have small comfort for us when in the secret depths of our hearts we
endure a craving of which we may not speak, a sickening aching
longing for "the lips so sweetly forsworn." But poetry is waiting for
us, there also, with her Rosemary and her Rue. Not one human heart
but has its hidden shrine before which the professional ministrants
are fain to hold their peace. But even there, under the veiled Figure
itself, some poor poetic "Jongleur de Notre Dame" is permitted to
drop his monk's robe, and dance the dance that makes time and
space nothing!