convinced that he was wrong, but he never lost his temper, and in the
most patronising way he would generally end by: “Yes, yes! my good
fellow, you are quite right, but, you see, my view of the matter is
different, and I have little doubt it is the true one!” This went so far
that even the simplest facts failed to produce any impression on him. He
had fallen in love with Émile Burnouf’s attractive but not very
scholar-like and trustworthy “Science de la Religion.” I believe that at
first he had mistaken Émile for Eugène Burnouf, a mistake which has been
committed by other people besides him. But, afterwards, when he had
perceived the difference between the two, he was not at all abashed.
Nay, he was betrayed into a new mistake, and spoke of Émile as the son
of Eugène. I told him that Eugène, the great Oriental scholar—one of the
greatest that France has ever produced, and that is saying a great
deal—had no son at all, and that he ought to correct his misstatement.
“Yes, yes,” he said, in his most good-humoured way, “but you know how
they manage these things in France. Émile was really a natural son of
the great scholar, and they call that a nephew.” This I stoutly denied,
for never was a more irreproachable _père de famille_ than my friend and
master Eugène Burnouf. But in spite of all remonstrances, Émile remained
with Arnold the son of Eugène; “For, you see, my good fellow, I know the
French, and that is my view of the matter!” If that happened in the
green wood, what would happen in the dry!
We had a long-standing feud about poetry. To me the difference between
poetry and prose was one of form only. I always held that the same
things that are said in prose could be said in poetry, and _vice versâ_,
and I often quoted Goethe’s saying that the best test of poetry was
whether it would bear translation into prose or into a foreign language.
To all that, even to Goethe’s words, Arnold demurred. Poetry to him was
a thing by itself, “not an art like other arts,” but, as he grandly
called it, “genius.”
He once had a great triumph over me. An American gentleman, who brought
out a “Collection of the Portraits of the Hundred Greatest Men,” divided
them into eight classes, and the first class was assigned to poetry, the
second to art, the third to religion, the fourth to philosophy, the
fifth to history, the sixth to science, the seventh to politics, the
eighth to industry. Arnold was asked to write the introduction to the
first volume, H. Taine to the second, myself and Renan to the third,
Noah Porter to the fourth, Dean Stanley to the fifth, Helmholtz to the
sixth, Froude to the seventh, John Fiske to the eighth.
I do not know whether Arnold had anything to do with suggesting this
division of _Omne Scibile_ into eight classes; anyhow, he did not allow
the opportunity to pass to assert the superiority of poetry over every
other branch of man’s intellectual activity. “The men,” he began, “who
are the flower and glory of our race are to pass here before us, the
highest manifestations, whether on this line or that, of the force which
stirs in every one of us—the chief poets, religious founders,
philosophers, historians, scholars, orators, warriors, statesmen,
voyagers, leaders in mechanical invention and industry, who have
appeared among mankind. And the poets are to pass first. Why? Because,
of the various modes of manifestation through which the human spirit
pours its force, theirs is the most adequate and happy.”
This is the well-known _ore rotundo_ and _spiritu profundo_ style of
Arnold. But might we not ask, _Adequate_ to what? _Happy_ in what?
Arnold himself answers a little farther on: “No man can fully draw out
the reasons why the human spirit feels itself able to attain to a more
adequate and satisfying expression in poetry than in any other of its
modes of activity.” Yet he continues to call this a primordial and
incontestable fact; and how could we poor mortals venture to contest a
primordial and incontestable fact? And then, limiting the question “to
us for to-day,” he says, “Surely it is its solidity that accounts to us
for the superiority of poetry.” How he would have railed if any of his
Philistines had ventured to recognise the true superiority of poetry in
its solidity!
Prose may be solid, it may be dense, massive, lumpish, concrete, and all
the rest, but poetry is generally prized for its being subtle, light,
ideal, air-drawn, fairy-like, or made of such stuff as dreams are made
of. However, let that pass. Let poetry be solid, for who knows what
sense Arnold may have assigned to solid? He next falls back on his great
master Goethe, and quotes a passage which I have not been able to find,
but the bearing of which must depend very much on the context in which
it occurs. Goethe, we are told, said in one of his many moods: “I deny
poetry to be an art. Neither is it a science. Poetry is to be called
neither art nor science, but genius.” Who would venture to differ from
Goethe when he defines what poetry is? But does he define it? He simply
says that it is not art or science. In this one may agree, if only art
and science are defined first. No one I think has ever maintained that
poetry was science, but no one would deny that poetry was a product of
art, if only in the sense of the _Ars poetica_ of Horace, or the
_Dichtkunst_ of Goethe. But if we ask what can be meant by saying that
poetry is genius, Goethe would probably say that what he meant was that
poetry was the product of genius, the German _Genie_. Goethe, therefore,
meant no more than that poetry requires, in the poet, originality and
spontaneity of thought; and this, though it would require some
limitation, no one surely would feel inclined to deny, though even the
authority of Goethe would hardly suffice to deprive the decipherer of an
inscription, the painter of the “Last Supper,” or the discoverer of the
bacilli of a claim to that divine light which we call genius.
Arnold then goes on to say that poetry gives the idea, but it gives it
touched with beauty, heightened by emotion. Would not Arnold have
allowed that the language of Isaiah, and even some of the dialogues of
Plato, were touched with beauty and heightened by emotion though they
are in prose? I think he himself speaks somewhere of a poetic prose.
Where, then, is the true difference between the creations of Isaiah and
of Browning, between the eloquence of Plato and of Wordsworth?
Arnold has one more trump card to play in order to win for poetry that
superiority over all the other manifestations of the forces of the human
spirit which he claims again and again. I have always been a sincere
admirer of Arnold’s poetry, still I think there is more massive force in
some of his prose than in many of his poems; nay, I believe he has left
a much deeper and more lasting impression on what he likes to call the
_Zeitgeist_ through his essays than through his tragedies. What then is
his last card, his last proof of the superiority of poetry? Poetry, he
argues, has more stability than anything else, and mankind finds in it a
surer stay than in art, in philosophy, or religion. “Compare,” he says,
“the stability of Shakespeare with that of the Thirty-nine Articles.”
Poor Thirty-nine Articles! Did they ever claim to contain poetry, or
even religion? Were they ever meant to be more than a dry abstract of
theological dogmas? Surely they never challenged comparison with
Shakespeare. They are an index, a table of contents, they were a
business-like agreement, if you like, between different parties in the
Church of England. But to ask whether they will stand longer than
Shakespeare is very much like asking whether the Treaty of Paris will
last longer than Victor Hugo. There is stay in poetry provided that the
prose which underlies it is lasting, or everlasting; there is no stay in
it if it is mere froth and rhyme. Arnold always liked to fall back on
Goethe. “What a series of philosophic systems has Germany seen since the
birth of Goethe,” he says, “and what sort of stay is any one of them
compared with the poetry of Germany’s _one_ great poet?” Is Goethe’s
poetry really so sure a stay as the philosophies of Germany; nay, would
there be any stay in it at all without the support of that philosophy
which Goethe drank in, whether from the vintage of Spinoza or from the
more recent _crues_ of Kant and Fichte? Goethe’s name, no doubt, is
always a pillar of strength, but there is even now a very great part of
Goethe’s “Collected Works” in thirty volumes that is no longer a stay,
but is _passé_, and seldom read by any one, except by the historian.
Poetry may act as a powerful preservative, and it is wonderful how much
pleasure we may derive from thought mummified in verse. But in the end
it is thought in its ever-changing life that forms the real stay, and it
matters little whether that thought speaks to us in marble, or in music,
in hexameters, in blank verse, or even in prose. Poetry in itself is no
protection against folly and feebleness. There is in the world a small
amount of good, and an immense amount of bad poetry. The former, we may
hope, will last, and will serve as a stay to all who care for the music
of thought and the harmony of language; the twaddle, sometimes much
admired in its time (and there is plenty of it in Goethe also), will, we
hope, fade away from the memory of man, and serve as a lesson to poets
who imagine that they may safely say in rhythm and rhyme what they would
be thoroughly ashamed to say in simple prose. Nor is the so-called stay
or immortality of poetry of much consequence. To have benefited millions
of his own age, ought surely to satisfy any poet, even if no one reads
his poems, or translations of them, a thousand years hence.
Denn wer den Besten seiner Zeit genug
Gethan, der hat gelebt für alle Zeiten.[10]
It is strange to go over the old ground when he with whom one travelled
over it in former times is no more present to answer and to hold his own
view against the world. There certainly was a great charm in Arnold,
even though he could be very patronising. But there was in all he said a
kind of understood though seldom expressed sadness, as if to say, “It
will soon be all over, don’t let us get angry; we are all very good
fellows,” etc. He knew for years that though he was strong and looked
very young for his age, the thread of his life might snap at any moment.
And so it did—_felix opportunitate mortis_. Not long before his death he
met Browning on the steps of the Athenæum. He felt ill, and in taking
leave of Browning he hinted that they might never meet again. Browning
was profuse in his protestations, and Arnold, on turning away, said in
his airy way: “Now, one promise, Browning: please, not more than ten
lines.” Browning understood, and went away with a solemn smile.
Arnold was most brilliant as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, from 1857 to
1867. He took great pains in writing and delivering his lectures. He
looked well and spoke well. Some of his lectures were masterpieces, and
he set a good example which was followed by Sir Francis Doyle, 1867–77,
well known by his happy occasional poems, then by John Shairp from 1877
to his death, and lastly by Francis Palgrave from 1885–95. The best of
Arnold’s lectures were published as essays; Shairp’s lectures appeared
after his death, and have retained their popularity, particularly in
America. Palgrave’s lectures, we may hope, will soon appear. They were
full of most valuable information, and would prove very useful to many
as a book of reference. I have known no one better informed on English
poetry than my friend Palgrave. His “Golden Treasury” bears evidence of
his wide reading, and his ripe judgment in selecting the best specimens
of English lyric poetry. One had but to touch on any subject in the
history of English literature, or to ask him a question, and there was
always an abundance of most valuable information to be got from him. I
owe him a great deal, particularly in my early Oxford days. For it was
he who revised my first attempts at writing in English, and gave me good
advice for the rest of my journey, more particularly as to what to
avoid. He is now one of the very few friends left who remember my first
appearance in Oxford in 1846, and who were chiefly instrumental in
retaining my services for a University which has proved a true Alma
Mater to me during all my life. Grant (Sir Alexander), Sellar, Froude,
Sandars, Morier, Neate, Johnson (Manuel), Church, Jowett, all are gone
before me.
Here are some old verses of his which I find in my album:—
An English welcome to an English shore
Such as we could, some four years since we gave thee,
Not knowing what the Fates reserved in store
Or that our land among our sons would have thee;
But now thou art endenizen’d awhile
Almost we fear our welcome to renew:[11]
Lest what we seemed to promise, should beguile,
When all we are is open to thy view.
But yet if aught of what we fondly boast—
True-hearted warmth of Friendship, frank and free,
Survive yet in this island-circling coast,
We need not fear again to welcome thee:—
So may we, blessing thee, ourselves be blest,
And prove not all unworthy of our guest.
What happy days, what happy evenings we spent together lang syne! How
patient they all were with their German guest when he first tried in his
broken English to take part in their lively and sparkling conversations.
Having once been received in that delightful circle, it was easy to make
more acquaintances among their friends who lived at Oxford, or who from
time to time came to visit them at Oxford. It was thus that I first came
to know Ruskin, Tennyson, Browning, and others.
Ruskin often came to spend a few days with his old friends, and
uncompromising and severe as he could be when he wielded his pen, he was
always most charming in conversation. He never, when he was with his
friends, claimed the right of speaking with authority, even on his own
special subjects, as he might well have done. It seemed to be his pen
that made him say bitter things. He must have been sorry himself for the
severe censure he passed in his earlier years on men whose honest
labour, if nothing else, ought to have protected them against such cruel
onslaughts. Grote’s style may not be the very best for an historian, but
in his _Quellenstudium_ he was surely most conscientious. Yet this is
what Ruskin wrote of him: “There is probably no commercial establishment
between Charing Cross and the Bank, whose head clerk could not have
written a better History of Greece, if he had the vanity to waste his
time on it.” Of Gibbon’s classical work he spoke with even greater
contempt. “Gibbon’s is the worst English ever written by an educated
Englishman. Having no imagination and little logic, he is alike
incapable either of picturesqueness or wit, his epithets are malicious
without point, sonorous without weight, and have no office but to make a
flat sentence turgid.” I feel sure that Ruskin, such as I knew him in
later years, would have wished these sentences unwritten.
He was really the most tolerant and agreeable man in society. He could
discover beauty where no one else could see it, and make allowance where
others saw no excuse. I remember him as diffident as a young girl, full
of questions, and grateful for any information. Even on art topics I
have watched him listening almost deferentially to others who laid down
the law in his presence. His voice was always most winning, and his
language simply perfect. He was one of the few Englishmen I knew who,
instead of tumbling out their sentences like so many portmanteau, bags,
rugs, and hat-boxes from an open railway van, seemed to take a real
delight in building up their sentences, even in familiar conversation,
so as to make each deliverance a work of art. Later in life that even
temperament may have become somewhat changed. He had suffered much, and
one saw that his wounds had not quite healed. His public lectures as
Professor of Fine Art were most attractive, and extremely popular at
first. But they were evidently too much for him, and on the advice of
his medical friends he had at last to cease from lecturing altogether.
Several times his brain had been a very serious trouble to him. People
forget that, as we want good eyes for seeing, and good ears for hearing,
we want a strong, sound brain for lecturing.
I have seen much of such brain troubles among my friends, and who can
account for them? It is not the brain that thinks, nor do we think by
means of our brain; but we cannot think without our brain, and the
slightest lesion of our brain in any one of its wonderful convolutions
is as bad as a shot in the eye.
If ever there was an active, powerful brain, it was Ruskin’s. No doubt
he worked very hard, but I doubt whether hard work by itself can ever
upset a healthy brain. I believe it rather strengthens than weakens it,
as exercise strengthens the muscles of our body. His was, no doubt, a
very sensitive nature, and an overwrought sensitiveness is much more
likely to cause mischief than steady intellectual effort. And what a
beautiful mind his was, and what lessons of beauty he has taught us all.
At the same time, he could not bear anything unbeautiful; and anything
low or ignoble in men revolted him and made him thoroughly unhappy. I
remember once taking Emerson to lunch with him, in his rooms in Corpus
Christi College. Emerson was an old friend of his, and in many respects
a cognate soul. But some quite indifferent subject turned up, a heated
discussion ensued, and Ruskin was so upset that he had to quit the room
and leave us alone. Emerson was most unhappy, and did all he could to
make peace, but he had to leave without a reconciliation.
It is very difficult to make allowance for these gradual failures of
brain power.
Again and again I have seen such cases at Oxford, where men were clearly
no longer themselves, and yet had to be treated as if they were; nay,
continue to exercise their old influence till at last the crash came,
and one began to understand what had seemed so strange, and more than
strange, in their behaviour. I believe there are as many degrees of
insanity as there are of shortsightedness and deafness, and the line
that divides sanity from insanity is often very small. I have had to
watch the waverings of this line in several cases, and it is enough to
upset one’s own equilibrium to have to deal with a friend who to-day is
quite like himself and quite like ourselves, and the next day a raving
lunatic. My predecessor at Oxford, Dr. Trithen, half Russian, half Swiss
by birth, and a man of extraordinary gifts and wonderfully attractive,
went slowly out of his mind and had at last to be sent to an asylum. But
even then he wrote the most reasonable and touching letters to me on all
sorts of subjects, though when I went to see him he was quite
unapproachable. Fortunately he died soon after from brain disease, but
who could say what was the cause of it? Nothing remains of him but the
edition of a Sanskrit play, the Vîracharitra.
But his knowledge of Sanskrit and all sorts of languages, his peculiar
power of mimicry in imitating the exact pronunciation of different
dialects, and his knack of copying Oriental MSS. so that one could
hardly tell the difference between the original and the copy were quite
amazing. He might have grown to be another Mezzofanti if the fates had
not been against him. He was the very type of a fascinating Russian,
full of kindness and courtesy, sparkling in conversation, always ready
to help others and most careless about himself; but there always was an
expression in his coruscating eyes which spoke of danger, and foreboded
the tragedy which finished his young and promising life.
Painful as these intellectual breakdowns are, they are not half so
painful as when we see in our friends what is at first called mere
wrongheadedness, but is apt to lead to a complete deterioration of moral
fibre, and in the end to an apparent inability to distinguish between
right and wrong, between truth and falsehood. In the former case we know
that a slight lesion in one of the ganglion cells or nerve-fibres of the
brain is sufficient to account for any disturbance in the intellectual
clock-work. The man himself remains the same, though at times hidden
from us, as it were, by a veil, and we feel towards him the same
sorrowful sympathy which we feel towards a man who has lost the use of
his eyes or his legs, who cannot see or cannot walk. We know that the
instruments are at fault, not the operator. But it is very difficult to
make the same allowance in cases of moral deterioration. Here
instruments and operator seem to be the same, though, for all we know,
here too the brain may be more at fault than the heart. A well-known
oculist maintained that the peculiarities, or what he called the
distortions, in Turner’s latest pictures were due to a malformation in
the muscles of his eyes. He actually invented some spectacles by which
everything that seemed ill-proportioned in Turner’s latest productions
came right if looked at through these corrective lenses. May not what we
call shortsightedness, conceit, vanity, envy, hatred and malice—all, as
it seems, without rhyme or reason—be due in the beginning to some
weakness or dimness of sight that might have been corrected, if treated
in time, by those who are nearest and dearest to the sufferer? This may
seem a dangerous view of moral responsibility; but, if so, it can be
dangerous to the sufferer only, not to those who ought to sympathise,
_i.e._ to feel and suffer, with him. To me it has proved a solution of
many difficulties during a long and varied intercourse with men and
women; the only difficulty is how to make these invalids harmless to
themselves.
Ruskin’s influence among the undergraduates at Oxford was most
extraordinary. He could persuade the young Christ Church men to take
spade and wheelbarrow and help him to make a road which he thought would
prove useful to a village near Oxford. No other professor could have
achieved that. The road was made, but was also soon washed away, and, of
course, Ruskin was laughed at, though the labour undergone by his pupils
did them no doubt a great deal of good, even though it did not benefit
the inhabitants of the village for any length of time. It was sad to see
Ruskin leave Oxford estranged from many of his friends, dissatisfied
with his work, which nevertheless was most valuable and highly
appreciated by young and old, perhaps by the young even more than by the
old. His spirit still dwells in the body, and if any one may look back
with pride and satisfaction upon the work which he has achieved it is
surely Ruskin.
Another though less frequent visitor to Oxford was Tennyson. His first
visit to our house was rather alarming. We lived in a small house in
High Street, nearly opposite Magdalen College, and our establishment was
not calculated to receive sudden guests, particularly a Poet Laureate.
He stepped in one day during the long vacation, when Oxford was almost
empty. Wishing to show the great man all civility, we asked him to
dinner that night and breakfast the next morning. At that time almost
all the shops were in the market, which closed at one o’clock. My wife,
a young housekeeper, did her best for our honoured guest. He was known
to be a gourmand, and at dinner he was evidently put out when he found
the sauce with the salmon was not the one he preferred. He was pleased,
however, with the wing of a chicken, and said it was the only advantage
he got from being Poet Laureate, that he generally received the
liver-wing of a chicken. The next morning at breakfast we had rather
plumed ourselves on having been able to get a dish of cutlets, and were
not a little surprised when our guest arrived to see him whip off the
cover of the hot dish, and to hear the exclamation: “Mutton chops! the
staple of every bad inn in England.” However, these were but minor
matters, though not without importance at the time in the eyes of a
young wife to whom Tennyson had been like one of the Immortals. He was
simply delightful and full of inquiries about the East, more
particularly about Indian poetry, and I believe that it was then that I
told him that there was no rhyme in Sanskrit poetry, and ventured to ask
him why there should be in English. He was not so offended as Samuel
Johnson seems to have been when asked the same question. The old bear
would probably have answered my question by, “You are a great fool, sir;
use your own judgment,” while Tennyson gave the very sensible answer
that rhyme assisted the memory.