Matthew Arnold, George Saintsbury [best fiction novels TXT] 📗

forward; but only in the most cautious manner, a caution no doubt partly due to the fact of the author's expressed, and very natural and proper, intention of closing his professorial exercises with the bocca dolce . Still this is at least conceivably due to the fact that the boldest extension of the campaign itself had not definitely entered, or at least possessed, the author's mind. A considerable time, indeed from July 1867 to January 1868, passed before the publication of the lecture as an article in the Cornhill was followed up by the series from the latter month to August, which bore the general title of Anarchy and Authority , and completed the material of
Culture and Anarchy itself. This, as a book, appeared in 1869.

It began, according to the author's favourite manner, which was already passing into something like a mannerism, with a sort of half-playful, half-serious battery against a living writer (in this case Mr Frederic Harrison), and with a laudatory citation from a dead one (in this case Bishop Wilson). Mr Harrison had blasphemed "the cant about culture," and Mr Arnold protests that culture's only aim is in the Bishop's words, "to make reason and the will of God prevail." In the first chapter, famous thenceforward in English literature by its title, borrowed from Swift, of "Sweetness and Light," we have the old rallyings of the Daily Telegraph and the Nonconformist . Then the general view is laid down, and is developed in those that follow, but still with more of a political than a religious bent, and with the political bent itself chiefly limited to the social aspect.

"Doing as one Likes" scatters a mild rain of ridicule on this supposed fetich of all classes in England; and then, the very famous, if not perhaps very felicitous, nickname-classification of "Barbarian-Philistine-Populace" is launched, defended, discussed in a chapter to itself. To do Mr Arnold justice, the three classes are, if not very philosophically defined, very impartially and amusingly rallied, the rallier taking up that part of humble Philistine conscious of his own weaknesses, which, till he made it slightly tiresome by too long a run, was piquant enough. The fourth chapter, "Hebraism and Hellenism," coasts the sands and rocks (on which, as it seems to some, Mr Arnold was later to make shipwreck) very nearly in the title and rather nearly in the contents, but still with a fairly safe offing. The opposition might be put too bluntly by saying that "Hellenism" represents to Mr Arnold the love of truth at any price, and "Hebraism" the love of goodness at any price; but the actual difference is not far from this, or from those of knowing and doing, fear of stupidity and fear of sin, &c. We have the quotation from Mr Carlyle about Socrates being "terribly at ease in Zion," the promulgation of the word Renascence for Renaissauce, and so forth. "Porro unum est necessarium," a favourite tag of Mr Arnold's, rather holds up another side of the same lesson than continues it in a fresh direction; and then "Our Liberal Practitioners" brings it closer to politics, but (since the immediate subject is the Disestablishment of the Irish Church) nearer also to the quicksands. Yet Mr Arnold still keeps away from them; though from what followed it would seem that he could only have done so by some such tour de force as the famous "clubhauling" in Peter Simple . Had Culture and Anarchy stood by itself, it would have been, though very far from its author's masterpiece, an interesting document both in regard to his own mental history and that of England during the third quarter of the century, containing some of his best prose, and little, if any, of his worst sense.

But your crusader - still more your anti-crusader - never stops, and Mr Arnold was now pledged to this crusade or anti-crusade. In October 1869 he began, still in the Cornhill , - completing it by further instalments in the same place later in the year, and publishing it in 1870, - the book called St Paul and Protestantism , where he necessarily exchanges the mixed handling of Culture and Anarchy for a dead-set at the religious side of his imaginary citadel of Philistia. The point of at least ostensible connection - of real departure - is taken from the "Hebraism and Hellenism" contrast of the earlier book; and the same contrast is strongly urged throughout, especially in the coda , "A Comment on Christmas." But this contrast is gradually shaped into an onslaught on Puritanism, or rather on its dogmatic side, for its appreciation of "conduct" of morality is ever more and more eulogised. As regards the Church of England herself, the attack is oblique; in fact, it is disclaimed, and a sort of a Latitudinarian Union, with the Church for centre, and dogma left out, is advocated. Another of our Arnoldian friends, the "Zeit-Geist," makes his appearance, and it is more than hinted that one of the most important operations of this spirit is the exploding of miracles. The book is perfectly serious - its seriousness, indeed, is quite evidently deliberate and laboured, so that the author does not even fear to appear dull. But it is still admirably written, as well as studiously moderate and reverent; no exception can be taken to it on the score of taste, whatever may be taken on the score of orthodoxy from the one side, where no doubt the author would hasten to plead guilty, or on those of logic, history, and the needs of human nature on the other, where no doubt his "not guilty" would be equally emphatic.

The case is again altered, and very unfortunately altered, in the next, the most popular and, as has been said, the most famous of the series - its zenith at once and its nadir - Literature and Dogma . A very much smaller part of this had appeared in magazine form; indeed, the contents of St Paul and Protestantism itself must have seemed odd in that shape, and only strong sympathies on the part of the editor could have obtained admission for any part of
Literature and Dogma . Much of it must have been written amid the excitement of the French-Prussian War, when the English public was athirst for "skits" of all sorts, and when Mr Arnold himself was "i' the vein," being engaged in the composition of much of the matter of
Friendship's Garland . St Paul and Protestantism had had two editions in the same year ( Culture and Anarchy , a far better thing, waited six for its second), and altogether the state of things was such as to invite any author to pursue the triumph and partake the gale. And he might at first flatter himself that he had caught the one and made cyclone-use of the other; for the book, appearing at the end of 1872, with the date of 1873, passed through three editions in that year, a fourth in 1874, and a fifth two years later. It was thus by far Mr Arnold's most popular book; I repeat also that it is quite his worst.

That it was in hopelessly bad taste here and there - in taste so bad that Mr Arnold himself later cut out the most famous passage of the book, to which accordingly we need here only allude - can be denied by nobody except those persons who hold "good form" to be, as somebody or other puts it, "an insular British delusion of the fifties and sixties." But this excision of his and, I think, some others, besides the "citations and illustrations" which he confesses to having excluded from the popular edition, may give us the welcome leave to deal very briefly with this side of the matter in other respects also. We may pass over the fun which Mr Arnold had with Archbishop Thomson (who, whatsoe'er the failings on his part, was at any rate a logician) on the theory of causation; with the University of Cambridge about
hominum divomque voluptas alma Venus (I have forgotten what was the bearing of this joke, and it is probably not worth inquiring into); with the Bishop of Gloucester about the Personality of God; with the Athanasian Creed, and its "science got ruffled by fighting." These things, as "form," class themselves; one mutters something well known about risu inepto , and passes on. Such a tone on such a subject can only be carried off completely by the gigantic strength of Swift, though no doubt it is well enough in keeping with the merely negative and destructive purpose of Voltaire. It would be cruel to bring Literature and Dogma into competition with A Tale of a Tub ; it would be more than unjust to bring it into comparison with
Le Taureau blanc . And neither comparison is necessary, because the great fault of Literature and Dogma appears, not when it is considered as a piece of doubtful or not doubtful taste, but when it is regarded as a serious composition.

In the first place, the child-like fashion in which Mr Arnold swallowed the results of that very remarkable "science," Biblical criticism, has always struck some readers with astonishment and a kind of terror. This new La Fontaine asking everybody, "Avez-vous lu Kuenen?" is a lesson more humbling to the pride of literature than almost any that can be found. "The prophecy of the details of Peter's death," we are told in Literature and Dogma , "is almost certainly an addition after the event, because it is not at all in the manner of Jesus ." Observe that we have absolutely no details, no evidence of any sort whatever, outside the Gospels for the "manner of Jesus." It is not, as in some at least of the more risky exercises of profane criticism in a similar field, as if we had some absolutely or almost absolutely authenticated documents, and others to judge by them. External evidence, except for the mere fact of Christ's existence and death, we have none. So you must, by the inner light, pick and choose out of the very same documents, resting on the very same authority, what, according to your good pleasure, is "in the manner of Jesus," and then black-mark the rest as being not so. Of course, when Mr Arnold thus wrote, the method had not been pushed
ad absurdum , as it was later by his friend M. Renan in the
Histoire d'Israël , to the dismay and confusion of no less intelligent and unorthodox a critic than his other friend, M. Scherer. But it is more or less the method of all Biblical criticism of this sort, and Mr Arnold follows it blindly.

Again, the chief bent of the book is to establish that "miracles do not happen." Alas! it is Mr Arnold's unhappy lot that if miracles
do happen his argument confessedly disappears, while even if miracles do not happen it is, for his purpose, valueless. Like almost all critics of his class recently, especially like Professor Huxley in another division, he appears not to comprehend what, to the believers in the supernatural, the supernatural means. He applies, as they all apply, the tests of the natural, and says, "Now really, you know, these tests are destructive." He says - he cannot prove - that miracles do not happen now; his adversaries, if they were wise, would simply answer, " Après? " Do any of them pretend to prescribe to their God that His methods shall be always the same, or that those methods shall stand the tests of the laboratory and the