Mr. Arnold's _Essays in Criticism_ come to American readers with a
reputation already made,--the reputation of a charming style, a great
deal of excellent feeling, and an almost equal amount of questionable
reasoning. It is for us either to confirm the verdict passed in the
author's own country, or to judge his work afresh. It is often the
fortune of English writers to find mitigation of sentence in the United
States.
The Essays contained in this volume are on purely literary subjects;
which is for us, by itself, a strong recommendation. English literature,
especially contemporary literature, is, compared with that of France and
Germany, very poor in collections of this sort. A great deal of
criticism is written, but little of it is kept; little of it is deemed
to contain any permanent application. Mr. Arnold will doubtless find in
this fact--if indeed he has not already signalized it--but another proof
of the inferiority of the English to the Continental school of
criticism, and point to it as a baleful effect of the narrow practical
spirit which animates, or, as he would probably say, paralyzes, the
former. But not only is his book attractive as a whole, from its
exclusively literary character; the subject of each essay is moreover
particularly interesting. The first paper is on the function of
Criticism at the present time; a question, if not more important,
perhaps more directly pertinent here than in England. The second,
discussing the literary influence of Academies, contains a great deal of
valuable observation and reflection in a small compass and under an
inadequate title. The other essays are upon the two De Guerins, Heinrich
Heine, Pagan and Mediaeval Religious Sentiment, Joubert, Spinoza, and
Marcus Aurelius. The first two articles are, to our mind, much the best;
the next in order of excellence is the paper on Joubert; while the
others, with the exception, perhaps, of that on Spinoza, are of about
equal merit.
Mr. Arnold's style has been praised at once too much and too little. Its
resources are decidedly limited; but if the word had not become so
cheap, we should nevertheless call it fascinating. This quality implies
no especial force; it rests in this case on the fact that, whether or
not you agree with the matter beneath it, the manner inspires you with a
personal affection for the author. It expresses great sensibility, and
at the same time great good-nature; it indicates a mind both susceptible
and healthy. With the former element alone it would savour of
affectation; with the latter, it would be coarse. As it stands, it
represents a spirit both sensitive and generous. We can best describe
it, perhaps, by the word sympathetic. It exhibits frankly, and without
detriment to its national character, a decided French influence. Mr.
Arnold is too wise to attempt to write French English; he probably knows
that a language can only be indirectly enriched; but as nationality is
eminently a matter of form, he knows too that he can really violate
nothing so long as he adheres to the English letter.
His Preface is a striking example of the intelligent amiability which
animates his style. His two leading Essays were, on their first
appearance, made the subject of much violent contention, their moral
being deemed little else than a wholesale schooling of the English press
by the French programme. Nothing could have better proved the justice of
Mr. Arnold's remarks upon the "provincial" character of the English
critical method than the reception which they provoked. He now
acknowledges this reception in a short introduction, which admirably
reconciles smoothness of temper with sharpness of wit. The taste of this
performance has been questioned; but wherever it may err, it is
assuredly not in being provincial; it is essentially civil. Mr. Arnold's
amiability is, in our eye, a strong proof of his wisdom. If he were a
few degrees more short-sighted, he might have less equanimity at his
command. Those who sympathise with him warmly will probably like him
best as he is; but with such as are only half his friends, this freedom
from party passion, from what is after all but a lawful professional
emotion, will argue against his sincerity.
For ourselves, we doubt not that Mr. Arnold possesses thoroughly what
the French call the courage of his opinions. When you lay down a
proposition which is forthwith controverted, it is of course optional
with you to take up the cudgels in its defence. If you are deeply
convinced of its truth, you will perhaps be content to leave it to take
care of itself; or, at all events, you will not go out of your way to
push its fortunes; for you will reflect that in the long run an opinion
often borrows credit from the forbearance of its patrons. In the long
run, we say; it will meanwhile cost you an occasional pang to see your
cherished theory turned into a football by the critics. A football is
not, as such, a very respectable object, and the more numerous the
players, the more ridiculous it becomes. Unless, therefore, you are very
confident of your ability to rescue it from the chaos of kicks, you will
best consult its interests by not mingling in the game. Such has been
Mr. Arnold's choice. His opponents say that he is too much of a poet to
be a critic; he is certainly too much of a poet to be a disputant. In
the Preface in question he has abstained from reiterating any of the
views put forth in the two offensive Essays; he has simply taken a
delicate literary vengeance upon his adversaries.
For Mr. Arnold's critical feeling and observation, used independently of
his judgment, we profess a keen relish. He has these qualities, at any
rate, of a good critic, whether or not he have the others,--the science
and the logic. It is hard to say whether the literary critic is more
called upon to understand or to feel. It is certain that he will
accomplish little unless he can feel acutely; although it is perhaps
equally certain that he will become weak the moment that he begins to
"work," as we may say, his natural sensibilities. The best critic is
probably he who leaves his feelings out of account, and relies upon
reason for success. If he actually possesses delicacy of feeling, his
work will be delicate without detriment to its solidity. The complaint
of Mr. Arnold's critics is that his arguments are too sentimental.
Whether this complaint is well founded, we shall hereafter inquire; let
us determine first what sentiment has done for him. It has given him, in
our opinion, his greatest charm and his greatest worth. Hundreds of
other critics have stronger heads; few, in England at least, have more
delicate perceptions. We regret that we have not the space to confirm
this assertion by extracts. We must refer the reader to the book
itself, where he will find on every page an illustration of our meaning.
He will find one, first of all, in the apostrophe to the University of
Oxford, at the close of the Preface,--"home of lost causes and forsaken
beliefs and unpopular names and impossible loyalties." This is doubtless
nothing but sentiment, but it seizes a shade of truth, and conveys it
with a directness which is not at the command of logical demonstration.
Such a process might readily prove, with the aid of a host of facts,
that the University is actually the abode of much retarding
conservatism; a fine critical instinct alone, and the measure of
audacity which accompanies such an instinct, could succeed in placing
her on the side of progress by boldly saluting her as the Queen of
Romance: romance being the deadly enemy of the commonplace; the
commonplace being the fast ally of Philistinism, and Philistinism the
heaviest drag upon the march of civilisation.
Mr. Arnold is very fond of quoting Goethe's eulogy upon Schiller, to the
effect that his friend's greatest glory was to have left so far behind
him _was uns alle baendigt, das Gemeine_, that bane of mankind, the
common. Exactly how much the inscrutable Goethe made of this fact, it is
hard at this day to determine; but it will seem to many readers that Mr.
Arnold makes too much of it. Perhaps he does, for himself; but for the
public in general he decidedly does not. One of the chief duties of
criticism is to exalt the importance of the ideal; and Goethe's speech
has a long career in prospect before we can say with the vulgar that it
is "played out." Its repeated occurrence in Mr. Arnold's pages is but
another instance of poetic feeling subserving the ends of criticism.
The famous comment upon the girl Wragg, over which the author's
opponents made so merry, we likewise owe--we do not hesitate to declare
it--to this same poetic feeling. Why cast discredit upon so valuable an
instrument of truth? Why not wait at least until it is used in the
service of error? The worst that can be said of the paragraph in
question is, that it is a great ado about nothing. All thanks, say we,
to the critic who will pick up such nothings as these; for if he
neglects them, they are blindly trodden under foot. They may not be
especially valuable, but they are for that very reason the critic's
particular care. Great truths take care of themselves; great truths are
carried aloft by philosophers and poets; the critic deals in
contributions to truth.
Another illustration of the nicety of Mr. Arnold's feeling is furnished
by his remarks upon the quality of _distinction_ as exhibited in Maurice
and Eugenie de Guerin, "that quality which at last inexorably corrects
the world's blunders and fixes the world's ideals, [which] procures that
the popular poet shall not pass for a Pindar, the popular historian for
a Tacitus, nor the popular preacher for a Bossuet." Another is offered
by his incidental remarks upon Coleridge, in the article on Joubert;
another, by the remarkable felicity with which he has translated Maurice
de Guerin's _Centaur_; and another, by the whole body of citations with
which, in his second Essay, he fortifies his proposition that the
establishment in England of an authority answering to the French Academy
would have arrested certain evil tendencies of English literature,--for
to nothing more offensive than this, as far as we can see, does this
argument amount.
In the first and most important of his Essays Mr. Arnold puts forth his
views upon the actual duty of criticism. They may be summed up as
follows. Criticism has no concern with the practical; its function is
simply to get at the best thought which is current,--to see things in
themselves as they are,--to be disinterested. Criticism can be
disinterested, says Mr. Arnold,
"by keeping from practice; by resolutely following the law of its
own nature, which is to be a free play of the mind on all subjects
which it touches, by steadily refusing to lend itself to any of
those ulterior political, practical considerations about ideas
which plenty of people will be sure to attach to them, which
perhaps ought often to be attached to them, which in this country,
at any rate, are certain to be attached to them, but which
criticism has really nothing to do with. Its business is simply to
know the best that is known and thought in the world, and, by in
its turn making this known, to create a current of true and fresh
ideas. Its business is to do this with inflexible honesty, with due
ability; but its business is to do no more, and to leave alone all
questions of practical consequences and applications,--questions
which will never fail to have due prominence given to them."
We used just now a word of which Mr. Arnold is very fond,--a word of
which the general reader may require an explanation, but which, when
explained, he will be likely to find indispensable; we mean the word
_Philistine_. The term is of German origin, and has no English synonyme.
"At Soli," remarks Mr. Arnold, "I imagined they did not talk of
solecisms; and here, at the very head-quarters of Goliath, nobody talks
of Philistinism." The word _epicier_, used by Mr. Arnold as a French
synonyme, is not so good as _bourgeois_, and to those who know that
_bourgeois_ means a citizen, and who reflect that a citizen is a person
seriously interested in the maintenance of order, the German term may
now assume a more special significance. An English review briefly
defines it by saying that "it applies to the fat-headed respectable
public in general." This definition must satisfy us here. The Philistine
portion of the English press, by which we mean the considerably larger
portion, received Mr. Arnold's novel programme of criticism with the
uncompromising disapprobation which was to be expected from a literary
body, the principle of whose influence, or indeed of whose being is its
subservience, through its various members, to certain political and
religious interests.
Mr. Arnold's general theory was offensive enough; but the conclusions
drawn by him from the fact that English practice has been so long and so
directly at variance with it, were such as to excite the strongest
animosity. Chief among these was the conclusion that this fact has
retarded the development and vulgarised the character of the English
mind, as compared with the French and the German mind. This rational
inference may be nothing but a poet's flight; but for ourselves, we
assent to it. It reaches us too. The facts collected by Mr. Arnold on
this point have long wanted a voice. It has long seemed to us that, as a
nation, the English are singularly incapable of large, of high, of
general views. They are indifferent to pure truth, to _la verite vraie_.
Their views are almost exclusively practical, and it is in the nature of
practical views to be narrow. They seldom indeed admit a fact but on
compulsion; they demand of an idea some better recommendation, some
longer pedigree, than that it is true. That this lack of spontaneity in
the English intellect is caused by the tendency of English criticism, or
that it is to be corrected by a diversion, or even by a complete
reversion, of this tendency, neither Mr. Arnold nor ourselves suppose,
nor do we look upon such a result as desirable. The part which Mr.
Arnold assigns to his reformed method of criticism is a purely tributary
part. Its indirect result will be to quicken the naturally irrational
action of the English mind; its direct result will be to furnish that
mind with a larger stock of ideas than it has enjoyed under the
time-honoured _regime_ of Whig and Tory, High-Church and Low-Church
organs.
We may here remark, that Mr. Arnold's statement of his principles is
open to some misinterpretation,--an accident against which he has,
perhaps, not sufficiently guarded it. For many persons the word
_practical_ is almost identical with the word _useful_, against which,
on the other hand, they erect the word _ornamental_. Persons who are
fond of regarding these two terms as irreconcilable, will have little
patience with Mr. Arnold's scheme of criticism. They will look upon it
as an organised preference of unprofitable speculation to common sense.
But the great beauty of the critical movement advocated by Mr. Arnold is
that in either direction its range of action is unlimited. It deals with
plain facts as well as with the most exalted fancies; but it deals with
them only for the sake of the truth which is in them, and not for _your_
sake, reader, and that of your party. It takes _high ground_, which is
the ground of theory. It does not busy itself with consequences, which
are all in all to you. Do not suppose that it for this reason pretends
to ignore or to undervalue consequences; on the contrary, it is because
it knows that consequences are inevitable that it leaves them alone. It
cannot do two things at once; it cannot serve two masters. Its business
is to make truth generally accessible, and not to apply it. It is only
on condition of having its hands free, that it can make truth generally
accessible. We said just now that its duty was, among other things, to
exalt, if possible, the importance of the ideal. We should perhaps have
said the intellectual; that is, of the principle of understanding
things. Its business is to urge the claims of all things to be
understood. If this is its function in England, as Mr. Arnold
represents, it seems to us that it is doubly its function in this
country. Here is no lack of votaries of the practical, of
experimentalists, of empirics. The tendencies of our civilisation are
certainly not such as foster a preponderance of morbid speculation. Our
national genius inclines yearly more and more to resolve itself into a
vast machine for sifting, in all things, the wheat from the chaff.
American society is so shrewd, that we may safely allow it to make
application of the truths of the study. Only let us keep it supplied
with the truths of the study, and not with the half-truths of the forum.
Let criticism take the stream of truth at its source, and then practice
can take it half-way down. When criticism takes it half-way down,
practice will come poorly off.
If we have not touched upon the faults of Mr. Arnold's volume, it is
because they are faults of detail, and because, when, as a whole, a book
commands our assent, we do not incline to quarrel with its parts. Some
of the parts in these Essays are weak, others are strong; but the
impression which they all combine to leave is one of such beauty as to
make us forget, not only their particular faults, but their particular
merits. If we were asked what is the particular merit of a given essay,
we should reply that it is a merit much less common at the present day
than is generally supposed,--the merit which pre-eminently characterises
Mr. Arnold's poems, the merit, namely, of having a _subject_. Each essay
is _about_ something. If a literary work now-a-days start with a certain
topic, that is all that is required of it; and yet it is a work of art
only on condition of ending with that topic, on condition of being
written, not from it, but to it. If the average modern essay or poem
were to wear its title at the close, and not at the beginning, we wonder
in how many cases the reader would fail to be surprised by it. A book
or an article is looked upon as a kind of Staubbach waterfall,
discharging itself into infinite space.
If we were questioned as to the merit of Mr. Arnold's book as a whole,
we should say that it lay in the fact that the author takes high ground.
The manner of his Essays is a model of what criticisms should be. The
foremost English critical journal, the Saturday Review, recently
disposed of a famous writer by saying, in a parenthesis, that he had
done nothing but write nonsense all his life. Mr. Arnold does not pass
judgment in parenthesis. He is too much of an artist to use leading
propositions for merely literary purposes. The consequence is, that he
says a few things in such a way as that almost in spite of ourselves we
remember them, instead of a number of things which we cannot for the
life of us remember. There are many things which we wish he had said
better. It is to be regretted, for instance, that, when Heine is for
once in a way seriously spoken of, he should not be spoken of more as
the great poet which he is, and which even in New England he will one
day be admitted to be, than with reference to the great moralist which
he is not, and which he never claimed to be. But here, as in other
places, Mr. Arnold's excellent spirit reconciles us with his
shortcomings. If he has not spoken of Heine exhaustively, he has at all
events spoken of him seriously, which for an Englishman is a good deal.
Mr. Arnold's supreme virtue is that he speaks of all things seriously,
or, in other words, that he is not offensively clever. The writers who
are willing to resign themselves to this obscure distinction are in our
opinion the only writers who understand their time. That Mr. Arnold
thoroughly understands his time we do not mean to say, for this is the
privilege of a very select few; but he is, at any rate, profoundly
conscious of his time. This fact was clearly apparent in his poems, and
it is even more apparent in these Essays. It gives them a peculiar
character of melancholy,--that melancholy which arises from the
spectacle of the old-fashioned instinct of enthusiasm in conflict (or at
all events in contact) with the modern desire to be fair,--the
melancholy of an age which not only has lost its _naivete_, but which
knows it has lost it.