Matthew Arnold Part 3

And yet, in gleams of happier insight, he saw the man who "flagged not in this earthly strife,"

His soul well-knit, and all his battles won,

mount, though hardly, to eternal life. And, as he mused over his father's grave, the conviction forced itself upon his mind that somewhere in the "labour-house of being" there still was employment for that father's strength, "zealous, beneficent, firm."

Here indeed is the more cheerful aspect of his "criticism of life." Such happiness as man is capable of enjoying is conditioned by a frank recognition of his weaknesses and limitations; but it requires also for its fulfilment the sedulous and dutiful employment of such powers and opportunities as he has.

First and foremost, he must realize the "majestic unity" of his nature, and not attempt by morbid introspection to dissect himself into

Affections, Instincts, Principles, and Powers, Impulse and Reason, Freedom and Control.

Then he must learn that

To its own impulse every action stirs.

He must live by his own light, and let earth live by hers. The forces of nature are to be in this respect his teachers--

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.

But, though he is to learn from Nature and love Nature and enjoy Nature, he is to remember that she

never was the friend of _one_, Nor promised love she could not give;

and so he is not to expect too much from her, or demand impossible boons. Still less is he to be content with feeling himself "in harmony"

with her; for

Man covets all which Nature has, but more.

That "more" is Conscience and the Moral Sense.

Man must begin, know this, where Nature ends; Nature and man can never be fast friends.

And this brings us to the idea of Duty as set forth in his poems, and Duty resolves itself into three main elements: Truth--Work--Love. Truth comes first. Man's prime duty is to know things as they are. Truth can only be attained by light, and light he must cultivate, he must worship.

Arnold's highest praise for a lost friend is that he was "a child of light"; that he had "truth without alloy,"

And joy in light, and power to spread the joy.

The saddest part of that friend's death is the fear that it may bring,

After light's term, a term of cecity:

the best hope for the future, that light will return and banish the follies, sophistries, delusions, which have acc.u.mulated in the darkness.

"Lucidity of soul" may be--nay, must be, "sad"; but it is not less imperative. And the truth which light reveals must not only be sought earnestly and cherished carefully, but even, when the cause demands it, championed strenuously. The voices of conflict, the joy of battle, the "garments rolled in blood," the "burning and fuel of fire" have little place in Arnold's poetry. But once at any rate he bursts into a strain so pa.s.sionate, so combatant, that it is difficult for a disciple to recognize his voice; and then the motive is a summons to a last charge for Truth and Light--

They out-talk'd thee, hiss'd thee, tore thee?

Better men fared thus before thee; Fired their ringing shot and pa.s.s'd, Hotly charged--and sank at last.

Charge once more, then, and be dumb!

Let the victors, when they come, When the forts of folly fall, Find thy body by the wall!

But the note of battle, even for what he holds dearest and most sacred, is not a familiar note in his poetry. He had no natural love of

the throng'd field where winning comes by strife.

His criticism of life sets a higher value on work than on fighting.

"Toil unsevered from tranquillity," "Labour, accomplish'd in repose"--is his ideal of happiness and duty.

Even the Duke of Wellington--surely an unpromising subject for poetic eulogy--is praised because he was a worker,

Laborious, persevering, serious, firm.

Nature, again, is called in to teach us the secret of successful labour.

Her forces are incessantly at work, and in that work they are entirely concentrated--

Bounded by themselves, and unregardful In what state G.o.d's other works may be, In their own tasks all their powers pouring, These attain the mighty life you see.

But those who had the happiness of knowing Arnold in the flesh will feel that they never so clearly recognize his natural voice as when, by his criticism of life, he is inculcating the great law of Love. Even in the swirl of Revolution he clings to his fixed idea of love as duty. After discussing the rise and fall of dynasties, the crimes of diplomacy, the characteristic defects of rival nations, and all the stirring topics of the time, he abruptly concludes his criticism with an appeal to Love.

"Be kind to the neighbours--'this is all we can.'"

And as in his prose, so in his poetry. Love, even in arrest of formal justice, is the motive of _The Sick King in Bokhara_; love, that wipes out sin, of _Saint Brandan_--

That germ of kindness, in the womb Of mercy caught, did not expire; Outlives my guilt, outlives my doom, And friends me in the pit of fire.

_The Neckan_ and _The Forsaken Merman_ tell the tale of contemptuous unkindness and its enduring poison. _A Picture at Newstead_ depicts the inexpiable evils wrought by violent wrong. _Poor Matthias_ tells in a parable the cruelty, not less real because unconscious, of imperfect sympathy--

Human longings, human fears, Miss our eyes and miss our ears.

Little helping, wounding much, Dull of heart, and hard of touch, Brother man's despairing sign Who may trust us to divine?

In _Geist's Grave_, the "loving heart," the "patient soul" of the dog-friend are made to "read their homily to man"; and the theme of the homily is still the same: the preciousness of the love which outlives the grave. But nowhere perhaps is his doctrine about the true divinity of love so exquisitely expressed as in _The Good Shepherd with the Kid_--

_He saves the sheep, the goats He doth not save._ So rang Tertullian's sentence . . .

. . . . . But she sigh'd, The infant Church! Of love she felt the tide Stream on her from her Lord's yet recent grave.

And then she smiled; and in the Catacombs, With eye suffused but heart inspired true, On those walls subterranean, where she hid Her head 'mid ignominy, death, and tombs, She the Good Shepherd's hasty image drew-- And on His shoulders not a lamb, a kid.

So much, then, for his Criticism of Life, as applied in and through his poems. It is not easy to estimate, even approximately, the effect produced by a loved and gifted poet, who for thirty years taught an audience, fit though few, that the main concerns of human life were Truth, Work, and Love. Those "two n.o.blest of things, Sweetness and Light" (though heaven only knows what they meant to Swift), meant to him Love and Truth; and to these he added the third great ideal, Work--patient, persistent, undaunted effort for what a man genuinely believes to be high and beneficent ends. Such a "Criticism of Life," we must all admit, is not unworthy of one who seeks to teach his fellow-men; even though some may doubt whether poetry is the medium best fitted for conveying it.

We must now turn our attention to his performances in the field of literary criticism; and we begin in the year 1853. He had won the prize for an English poem at Rugby, and again at Oxford. In 1849 he had published without his name, and had recalled, a thin volume, called _The Strayed Reveller, and other Poems_. He had done the same with _Empedocles on Etna, and other Poems_ in 1852. The best contents of these two volumes were combined in _Poems_, 1853, and to this book he gave a Preface, which was his first essay in Literary Criticism. In this essay he enounces a certain doctrine of poetry, and, true to his lifelong practice, he enounces it mainly by criticism of what other people had said. A favourite cry of the time was that Poetry, to be vital and interesting, must "leave the exhausted past, and draw its subjects from matters of present import." It was the favourite theory of Middle Cla.s.s Liberalism. The _Spectator_ uttered it with characteristic gravity; Kingsley taught it obliquely in _Alton Locke_. Arnold a.s.sailed it as "completely false," as "having a philosophical form and air, but no real basis in fact." In a.s.sailing it, he justified his constant recourse to Antiquity for subject and method; he exalted Achilles, Prometheus, Clytemnestra, and Dido as eternally interesting; he a.s.serted that the most famous poems of the nineteenth century "left the reader cold in comparison with the effect produced upon him by the latter books of the _Iliad_, by the _Oresteia_, or by the episode of Dido." He glorified the Greeks as the "unapproached masters of the _grand style_."

He even ventured to doubt whether the influence of Shakespeare, "the greatest, perhaps, of all poetical names," had been wholly advantageous to the writers of poetry. He weighed Keats in the balance against Sophocles and found him wanting.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Thomas Arnold, D.D.

Head Master of Rugby, and father of Matthew Arnold

_From the Painting in Oriel College_

_Photo H.W. Taunt_]

Of course, this criticism, so hostile to the current cant of the moment, was endlessly misinterpreted and misunderstood. He thus explained his doctrine in a Preface to a Second Edition of his Poems: "It has been said that I wish to limit the poet, in his choice of subjects, to the period of Greek and Roman antiquity; but it is not so. I only counsel him to choose for his subjects great actions, without regarding to what time they belong." A few years later he wrote to a friend (in a letter hitherto unpublished): "The modern world is the widest and richest material ever offered to the artist; but the moulding and representing power of the artist is not, or has not yet become (in my opinion), commensurate with his material, his _mundus representandus_. This adequacy of the artist to his world, this command of the latter by him, seems to me to be what const.i.tutes a first-cla.s.s poetic epoch, and to distinguish it from such an epoch as our own; in this sense, the Homeric and Elizabethan poetry seems to me of a superior cla.s.s to ours, though the world represented by it was far less full and significant."