Matthew Arnold Part 4

There is no need to describe in greater detail the two Prefaces, which can be read, among rather incongruous surroundings, in the volume called _Irish Essays, and Others_. But they are worth noting, because in them, at the age of thirty, he first displayed the peculiar temper in literary criticism which so conspicuously marked him to the end; and that temper happily infected the critical writing of a whole generation; until the Iron Age returned, and the bludgeon was taken down from its shelf, and the scalping-knife refurbished.

In his critical temper, lucidity, courage, and serenity were equally blended. In his criticism of books, as in his criticism of life, he aimed first at Lucidity--at that clear light, uncoloured by prepossession, which should enable him to see things as they really are.

In a word, he judged for himself; and, however much his judgment might run counter to prejudice or tradition, he dared to enounce it and persist in it. He spoke with proper contempt of the "tenth-rate critics, for whom any violent shock to the public taste would be a temerity not to be risked"; but that temerity he himself had in rich abundance. Homer and Sophocles are the only poets of whom, if my memory serves me, he never wrote a disparaging word. Shakespeare is, and rightly, an object of national worship; yet Arnold ventured to point out his "over-curiousness of expression"; and, where he writes--

Till that Bellona's bridegroom, lapped in proof, Confronted him with self-comparisons,

Arnold dared to say that the writing was "detestable."

Macaulay is, perhaps less rightly, another object of national worship; yet Arnold denounced the "confident shallowness which makes him so admired by public speakers and leading-article writers, and so intolerable to all searchers for truth"; and frankly avowed that to his mind "a man's power to detect the ring of false metal in the _Lays of Ancient Rome_ was a good measure of his fitness to give an opinion about poetical matters at all." According to Macaulay, Burke was "the greatest man since Shakespeare." Arnold admired Burke, revered him, paid him the highest compliment by trying to apply his ideas to actual life; but, when Burke urged his great arguments by obstetrical and pathological ill.u.s.trations, Arnold was ready to denounce his extravagances, his capriciousness, his lapses from good taste.

The same perfectly courageous criticism, qualifying generous admiration, he applied in turn to Jeremy Taylor and Addison, to Milton, and Pope, and Gray, and Keats, and Sh.e.l.ley, and Scott--to all the princ.i.p.al luminaries of our literary heaven. He went all lengths with Mr.

Swinburne in praising Byron's "sincerity and strength," but he qualified the praise: "Our soul had _felt_ him like the thunder's roll," but "he taught us little." Devout Wordsworthian as he is, he does not shrink from saying that much of Wordsworth's work is "quite uninspired, flat and dull," and sets himself to the task of "relieving him from a great deal of the poetical baggage which now enc.u.mbers him."

And so Lucidity, which reveals the Truth, enounces its decisions with absolute courage; and to Lucidity and Courage is added the crowning grace of Serenity. However much the subject of his study may offend his taste or sin against his judgment, he never loses his temper with the author whom he is criticising. He never bludgeons or scalps or scarifies; but serenely indicates, with the calm gesture of a superior authority, the defects and blots which mar perfection, but which the unthinking mult.i.tude ignores, or, at worst, admires.

The years 1860 and 1861 mark an important stage in the development of his critical method. He was now Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and he delivered from the professorial chair his famous lectures _On Translating Homer_, to which in 1862 he added his "Last Words." As much as anything which he ever wrote, these lectures have a chance of living and being enjoyed when we are dust. For Homer is immortal, and he who interprets Homer to Englishmen may hope at least for a longer life than most of us.

Few are those who can still recall the graceful figure in its silken gown; the gracious address, the slightly supercilious smile, of the _Milton jeune et voyageant_,[5] just returned from contact with all that was best in French culture to instruct and astonish his own university; few who can still catch the cadence of the opening sentence: "It has more than once been suggested to me that I should translate Homer"; few that heard the fine tribute of the aged scholar,[6] who, as the young lecturer closed a later discourse, murmured to himself, "The Angel ended."

With his characteristic trick of humorous mock-humility, Arnold wrote to a friendly reviewer who praised these lectures on translating Homer: "I am glad any influential person should call attention to the fact that there was some criticism in the three lectures; most people seem to have gathered nothing from them except that I abused F.W. Newman, and liked English hexameters."

Criticisms of criticism are the most melancholy reading in the world, and therefore no attempt will here be made to examine in detail the praise which in these lectures he poured upon the supreme exemplar of pure art, or the delicious ridicule with which he a.s.sailed the most respectable attempts to render Homer into English. For the praise, let one quotation suffice--"Homer's grandeur is not the mixed and turbid grandeur of the great poets of the North, of the authors of _Oth.e.l.lo_ and _Faust_; it is a perfect, a lovely grandeur. Certainly his poetry has all the energy and power of the poetry of our ruder climates; but it has, besides, the pure lines of an Ionian horizon, the liquid clearness of an Ionian sky."

On the ridicule, we must dwell a little more at length; for this was, in the modern slang, "a new departure" in his critical method. At the date when he published his lectures _On Translating Homer_, English criticism of literature was, and for some time had been, an extremely solemn business. Much of it had been exceedingly good, for it had been produced by Johnson and Coleridge, and De Quincey and Hazlitt. Much had been atrociously bad, resembling all too closely Mr. Girdle's pamphlet "in sixty-four pages, post octavo, on the character of the Nurse's deceased husband in _Romeo and Juliet_, with an enquiry whether he had really been a 'merry man' in his lifetime, or whether it was merely his widow's affectionate partiality that induced her so to report him."[7]

But, whether good or bad, criticism had been solemn. Even Arnold's first performances in the art had been as grave as Burke or Wordsworth. But in his lectures _On Translating Homer_ he added a new resource to his critical apparatus. He still pursued Lucidity, Courage, and Serenity; he still praised temperately and blamed humanely; but now he brought to the enforcement of his literary judgment the aid of a delicious playfulness.

Cardinal Newman was not ashamed to talk of "chucking" a thing off, or getting into a "sc.r.a.pe." So perhaps a humble disciple may be permitted to say that Arnold pointed his criticisms with "chaff."

This method of depreciating literary performances which one dislikes, of conveying dissent from literary doctrines which one considers erroneous, had fallen out of use in our literary criticism. It was least to be expected from a professorial chair in a venerable university--least of all from a professor not yet forty, who might have been expected to be weighed down and solemnized by the greatness of his function and the awfulness of his surroundings. Hence arose the simple and amusing wrath of pedestrian poets like Mr. Ichabod Wright, and ferocious pedants like Professor Francis Newman, and conventional worshippers of such idols as Scott and Macaulay, when they found him poking his seraphic fun at the notion that Homer's song was like "an elegant and simple melody from an African of the Gold Coast," or at lines so purely prosaic as--

All these thy anxious cares are also mine, Partner beloved;

or so eccentric as--

Nor liefly thee would I advance to man-enn.o.bling battle

or so painful as--

To every man upon this earth Death cometh soon or late.

This habit of enlisting playfulness in aid of literary judgment was carried a step further in _Essays in Criticism_, published in 1865. This book, of which Mr. Paul justly remarks that it was "a great intellectual event," was a collection of essays written in the years 1863 and 1864.

The original edition contained a preface dealing very skittishly with Bishop Colenso's biblical aberrations. The allusions to Colenso were wisely omitted from later editions, but the preface as it stands contains (besides the divinely-beautiful eulogy of Oxford) some of Arnold's most delightful humour. He never wrote anything better than his apology to the indignant Mr. Ichabod Wright; his disclaimer of the t.i.tle of Professor, "which I share with so many distinguished men--Professor Pepper, Professor Anderson, Professor Frickel"; his attempt to comfort the old gentleman who was afraid of being murdered, by reminding him that "il n'y a pas d'homme necessaire"; and in all these cases the humour subserves and advances a serious criticism of books or of life.

As we have now seen him engaged in the duty of criticising others, it will not be out of place to cite in this connection, though they belong to other periods, some criticisms of himself. As far back as 1853, he had observed, with characteristic lucidity, that the great fault of his earlier poems was "the absence of charm." "Charm" was indeed the element in which they were deficient; but, as years advanced, charm was superadded to thought and feeling. In 1867, he said in a letter to his friend F.T. Palgrave: "Saint Beuve has written to me with great interest about the _Obermann poem_, which he is getting translated. Swinburne fairly took my breath away. I must say the general public praise me in the dubious style in which old Wordsworth used to praise Bernard Barton, James Montgomery, and suchlike; and the writers of poetry, on the other hand--Browning, Swinburne, Lytton--praise me as the general public praises its favourites. This is a curious reversal of the usual order of things. Perhaps it is from an exaggerated estimate of my own unpopularity and obscurity as a poet, but my first impulse is to be astonished at Swinburne's praising me, and to think it an act of generosity. Also he picks pa.s.sages which I myself should have picked, and which I have not seen other people pick."

In 1869, when the first Collected Edition of his poems was in the press, he wrote to Palgrave, who had suggested some alterations, this estimate of his own merits and defects,--

"I am really very much obliged to you for your letter. I think the printing has made too much progress to allow of dealing with any of the long things now; I have left 'Merope' aside entirely, but the rest I have reprinted. In a succeeding edition, however, I am not at all sure that I shall not leave out the second part of the 'Church of Brou.' With regard to the others, I think I shall let them stand--but often for other reasons than because of their intrinsic merit. For instance, I agree that in the 'Sick King in Bokhara' there is a flatness in parts; but then it was the first thing of mine dear old Clough thoroughly liked. Against 'Tristram,' too, many objections may fairly be urged; but then the subject is a very popular one, and many people will tell you they like it best of anything I have written. All this has to be taken into account. 'Balder' perhaps no one cares much for except myself; but I have always thought, though very likely I am wrong, that it has not had justice done to it; I consider that it has a natural _propriety_ of diction and rhythm which is what we all prize so much in Virgil, and which is not common in English poetry. For instance, Tennyson has in the _Idylls_ something dainty and _tourmente_ which excludes this natural propriety; and I have myself in 'Sohrab' something, not dainty, but _tourmente_ and Miltonically _ampoulle_, which excludes it.... We have enough Scandinavianism in our nature and history to make a short _conspectus_ of the Scandinavian mythology admissible. As to the shorter things, the 'Dream' I have struck out. 'One Lesson' I have re-written and banished from its pre-eminence as an introductory piece. 'To Marguerite' (I suppose you mean 'We were apart' and not 'Yes! in the sea') I had paused over, but my instinct was to strike it out, and now your suggestion comes to confirm this instinct, I shall act upon it. The same with 'Second Best.' It is quite true there is a horrid falsetto in some stanzas of the 'Gipsy Child'--it was a very youthful production. I have re-written those stanzas, but am not quite satisfied with the poem even now. 'Shakespeare' I have re-written. 'Cruikshank' I have re-t.i.tled, and re-arranged the 'World's Triumphs.' 'Morality' I stick to--and 'Palladium' also. 'Second Best' I strike out and will try to put in 'Modern Sappho' instead--though the metre is not right. In the 'Voice' the falsetto rages too furiously; I can do nothing with it; ditto in 'Stagirius,' which I have struck out. Some half-dozen other things I either have struck out, or think of striking out. 'Hush, not to me at this bitter departing' is one of them. The Preface I omit entirely. 'St. Brandan,' like 'Self-Deception,' is not a piece that at all satisfies me, but I shall let both of them stand."

In 1879 he wrote with reference to the edition of his poems in two volumes--

"In beginning with 'early poems' I followed, as I have done throughout, the chronological arrangement adopted in the last edition, an arrangement which is, on the whole, I think, the most satisfactory. The t.i.tle of 'early' implies an excuse for defective work of which I would not be supposed blind to the defects--such as the 'Gipsy Child,' which you suggest for exclusion; but something these early pieces have which later work has not, and many people--perhaps for what are truth faults in the poems--have liked them. You have been a good friend to my poems from the first, one of those whose approbation has been a real source of pleasure to me. There are things which I should like to do in poetry before I die, and of which lines and bits have long been done, in particular Lucretius, St. Alexius, and the journey of Achilles after death to the Island of Leuce; but we accomplish what we can, not what we will."

Enough, perhaps, has now been said about his critical method; and, as this book proposes to deal with results, it is right to enquire into the effect of that method upon men who aspired to follow him, at whatever distance, in the path of criticism. The answer can be easily given. He taught us, first and foremost, to judge for ourselves; to take nothing at second hand; to bow the knee to no reputation, however high its pedestal in the Temple of Fame, unless we were satisfied of its right to stand where it was. Then he taught us to discriminate, even in what we loved best, between its excellences and its defects; to swallow nothing whole, but to chew the cud of disinterested meditation, and accept or reject, praise or blame, in accordance with our natural and deliberate taste. He taught us to love Beauty supremely, to ensue it, to be on the look out for it; and, when we found it--when we found what really and without convention satisfied our "sense for beauty"--to adore it, and, as far as we could, to imitate it. Contrariwise, he taught us to shun and eschew what was hideous, to make war upon it, and to be on our guard against its contaminating influence. And this teaching he applied alike to hideousness in character, sight, and sound--to "watchful jealousy"

and rancour and uncleanness; to the "dismal Mapperly Hills," and the "uncomeliness of Margate," the "squalid streets of Bethnal Green," and "Coles' Truss Manufactory standing where it ought not, on the finest site in Europe"; to such poetry as--

And scarcely had she begun to wash When she was aware of the grisly gash,

to such hymns as--

O happy place!

When shall I be My G.o.d with Thee, To see Thy face?

"What a touch of grossness!" he exclaimed, "what an original shortcoming in the more delicate spiritual perceptions, is shown by the natural growth amongst us of such hideous names--Higginbottom, Stiggins, Bugg!

In Ionia and Attica they were luckier in this respect than "the best race in the world"; by the Ilissus there was "no Wragg,[8] poor thing!"

Then he taught us to aim at sincerity in our intercourse with Nature.

Never to describe her as others saw her, never to pretend a knowledge of her which we did not possess, never to endow her with fanciful attributes of our own or other people's imagining, never to a.s.sume her sympathy with mortal lots, never to forget that she, like humanity, has her dark, her awful, her revengeful moods. He taught us not to be ashamed of our own sense of fun, our own faculty of laughter; but to let them play freely even round the objects of our reasoned reverence, just in the spirit of the teacher who said that no man really believed in his religion till he could venture to joke about it. Above all, he taught us, even when our feelings were most forcibly aroused, to be serene, courteous, and humane; never to scold, or storm, or bully; and to avoid like a pestilence such brutality as that of the _Sat.u.r.day Review_ when it said that something or another was "eminently worthy of a great nation," and to disparage it "eminently worthy of a great fool." He laid it down as a "precious truth" that one's effectiveness depends upon "the power of persuasion, of charm; that without this all fury, energy, reasoning power, acquirement, are thrown away and only render their owner more miserable."

In a word, he combined Light with Sweetness, and in the combination lies his abiding power.

[Footnote 4: "Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike."--_Pope_.]

[Footnote 5: He was so described by George Sand.]

[Footnote 6: Dr. Williams, President of Jesus College.]

[Footnote 7: _Nicholas Nickleby_.]

[Footnote 8: "A shocking child-murder has just been committed at Nottingham. A girl named Wragg left the workhouse there on Sat.u.r.day morning with her young illegitimate child. The child was soon afterwards found dead on Mapperly Hills, having been strangled. _Wragg is in custody._"]

CHAPTER III

EDUCATION

"Though I am a schoolmaster's son, I confess that school-teaching or school-inspecting is not the line of life I should naturally have chosen. I adopted it in order to marry a lady who is here to-night, and who feels your kindness as warmly and gratefully as I do. My wife and I had a wandering life of it at first. There were but three lay-inspectors for all England. My district went right across from Pembroke Dock to Great Yarmouth. We had no home. One of our children was born in a lodging at Derby, with a workhouse, if I recollect aright, behind and a penitentiary in front. But the _irksomeness_ of my new duties was what I felt most, and during the first year or so it was sometimes insupportable."

[Ill.u.s.tration: Laleham Church

As it was in Matthew Arnold's boyhood

_Photo H.W. Taunt_]

The name of Arnold is so inseparably connected with Education[9] that many of Matthew Arnold's friends were astonished by this frank confession, which he made in his address to the Westminster Teachers'