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

Bottom is venial compared with the dismissal of the Bible as popular legend, and the implicit belief in as , bhu , and sta .

A wilfully hostile historian of Mr Arnold could not dwell too long on these unfortunate books, for the handles they present are infinite; but for my part I shall take leave to say little more about them. To ask, in the common phrase, whether they did any harm would be to beg the question in their own manner; to ask whether they produced any effect would lead us too far. They certainly expressed a prevalent tendency. Most fortunately Mr Arnold was allowed another ten years and more wherein to escape from the wilderness which yielded these Dead Sea fruits, and to till his proper garden once more. Yet we have not quite done with the other fruits themselves.

The actual finale, Last Essays on Church and Religion , was still less popular, was indeed the least popular of all his works, seeing that, as has been said above, it has never been reprinted. It is easy to understand this, for it is perhaps the only one of his books which can be definitely called dull. The apologetic tone noticeable in God and the Bible continues, but the apology is illustrated and maintained in an even less attractive manner. The Preface is perhaps the least dead part of the book; but its line of argument shares, and perhaps even exaggerates, the controversial infelicity of this unfortunate series. Mr Arnold deals in it at some length with the comments of two foreign critics, M. Challemel-Lacour and Signor de Gubernatis, on Literature and Dogma , bringing out (what surely could have been no news to any but very ill-educated Englishmen) the fact of their surprise, not at his taking the Bible with so little seriousness, but at his taking it with any seriousness at all. And he seems never even to dream of the obvious retort: "Certainly. These men are at any rate 'thorough'; they are not dilettante dalliers between two opinions. They have got far beyond your half-way house and have arrived at their destination. We have no desire to arrive at the destination, and therefore, if you will excuse us, we decline to visit the half-way house." It is less surprising that he did not see the force of the objections of another critic, M. Maurice Vernes, to the equally illogical and unhistorical plan of arbitrarily selecting this utterance as that of "Jesus," and another, given by the same authority, as not that of "Jesus." A man, who was sensible of this paralogism, could never take Mr Arnold's views on Church and Religion at all.

But when we leave the Preface, even such faint liveliness as this deserts us. The text contains four (or five, the second being divided into two parts) essays, lectures, or papers, A Psychological Parallel , Bishop Butler and the Zeit-Geist , The Church of England , and A Last Word on the Burials Bill . All had appeared in
Macmillan's Magazine or the Contemporary Review during 1876, while Bishop Butler had been delivered as two lectures at Edinburgh, and The Church of England as an address to the London Clergy at Sion College, during the spring of that year.

Over all there is a curious constraint, the evidence of a mood not very difficult to analyse, and in the analysis of which lies almost all the satisfaction or edification to be got out of the book. The writer, though by no means abandoning his own point of view, and even flattering himself that some modus vivendi is about to be established between himself and the more moderate supporters of the Church and of religion, betrays not merely the well-known self-excusing and self-accusing tone, but odd flashes of discontent and weariness - nay, even a fretfulness such as might have been that of a Moses at Rephidim who could not bring water out of the rock. A Psychological Parallel is an attempt to buttress the apologia by referring to Sir Matthew Hale's views on witchcraft, to Smith, the Cambridge Platonist and Latitudinarian, and to the Book of Enoch (of which, by the way, it is a pity that Mr Arnold did not live to see Mr Charles's excellent translation, since he desiderated a good one). Of course the argument is sun-clear. If Hale was mistaken about witchcraft, St Paul may have been mistaken about the Resurrection. Expressions attributed to Christ occur in the Book of Enoch , therefore they are not original and divine, &c., &c. And it would be out of place to attempt any reply to this argument, the reply being in each case as sun-clear as the argument itself. No believer in supernatural religion that I ever met considered Sir Matthew Hale to have been inspired; and no believer in the divinity of Christ can fail to hold that His adoption of words (if He did adopt them) makes them His.

The gist of the Butler lectures is considerably less clear, and, if only for that reason, it cannot be succinctly stated or answered. In particular, it requires rather careful "collection" in order to discover what our friend the Zeit-Geist has to do in this galley. I should imagine that, though an Edinburgh audience is by no means alarmed at philosophy, the majority, perhaps the enormous majority, of Mr Arnold's hearers must have had a singularly dim idea as to his exact drift. Indeed I cannot say that after reading the piece when it first appeared, and again, twenty years later, for the purposes of this book, I have any very distinct notion of that drift myself. If it merely means that Butler, being an eighteenth-century person, was afflicted with the eighteenth-century limitations by the Zeit-Geist, eighty-six pages, and an imposing German compound at the head of every other one of them, seem a good deal for telling us this. If it is a sort of indirect attack upon - an oblique demurrer to - Butler's constructive-aggressive orthodoxy in psychology and religion, one is bound to say with all politeness, first, that it is a case of impar congressus , and secondly, that the adventurous knight does not give himself a fair chance. It will take more than eighty-six not very large pages, and a German word at the top of the alternate ones, to do that! In the opening sketch of Butler himself Mr Arnold could not but be agreeable and even delightful. It gives us, indeed, most pleasant promise of work in this same good kind soon to follow; but for the rest we grope till we find, after some seventy-three of the eighty-six, that what Mr Arnold wanted to say is that Butler did not handle, and could not then have handled, miracles and the fulfilment of prophecy satisfactorily. Butler, like St Paul, is undoubtedly inconvenient for those who believe that miracles do not happen, and that prophecies were either not made or not fulfilled. So he must be got rid of. But whether he is got rid of, - whether Mr Arnold and the Zeit-Geist have put him on the shelf as a venerable but antiquated object, - that is another question.

The two remaining essays show us Mr Arnold, in his character of at least would-be practical statesman, dealing no longer with points of doctrine but with the affairs of the Church as a political body. The circumstances of the first - the address delivered at Sion College - had a certain piquancy: whether they had also sweet reasonableness and an entire accordance with the fitness of things is a question no doubt capable of being debated. Me the situation strikes, I must confess, as a little grotesque. The layman in the wide sense, the amateur, always occupies a rather equivocal position when he addresses experts and the profession; but his position is never so equivocal as when he doubles the part of non-expert with that of candid friend. How Mr Arnold succeeded in this exceedingly delicate attempt I do not propose to examine at any length. He thought himself that he had "sufficiently marked the way in which the new world was to be reached." Paths to new worlds are always interesting, but in reading, or rather re-reading, the sailing directions of this Columbus twenty years after date, one may be a little disappointed. The sum appears to be a somewhat Tootsian declaration that things of general are of no consequence. The Church is better than Dissent; at least she would be so if she dropped all her dogma, the greater part of her superstitions about the rights of property and "my duty to my neighbour," and as much as possible of the barriers which separate her from Dissent itself. A most moderate eirenicon. Still less need be said of the Burials Bill paper, which is a sort of appendix or corollary to the Sion speech, at the end of which the subject had been referred to. The particular question, in this phase of it, has long ceased to burn, and one need not disturb the ashes.

We must now turn to the incursions of this time into politics, which, if not much happier, were more amusing. The chief monument of them is the long unreprinted Friendship's Garland , which has always had some fervent devotees, and is very characteristic. It so happened that the period when Essays in Criticism , combined with his Oxford Lectures, introduced Mr Arnold to the public, was the period of the first years of the Pall Mall Gazette , when that brilliant periodical, with the help of many of the original staff of the
Saturday Review , and others, was renewing for the sixties the sensation of a new kind of journalism, which the Saturday itself had given to the fifties, while its form and daily appearance gave it even greater opportunities. As early as the summer of 1866, during the agitation into which the public mind had been thrown by the astounding rapidity and thoroughness of the Prussian successes in the Seven Weeks' War, Mr Arnold had begun a series of letters, couched in the style of persiflage , which Kinglake had introduced, or reintroduced, twenty years earlier in Eothen , and which the
Saturday had taken up and widely developed. He also took not a few hints from Carlyle in Sartor and the Latterday Pamphlets . And for some years at intervals, with the help of a troupe of imaginary correspondents and comparses - Arminius von Thundertentronckh, Adolescens Leo of the Daily Telegraph , the Bottles family of wealthy Dissenters, with cravings for their deceased wife's sisters, as well as a large number of more or less celebrated personages of the day, introduced in their proper persons, and by their proper names - he instructed England on its own weakness, folly, and vulgarity, on the wisdom and strength of the Germans, on the importance of Geist and ideas, &c., &c. The author brought himself in by name as a simple inhabitant of Grub Street, victimised, bullied, or compassionately looked down upon by everybody; and by this well-known device took licence for pretty familiar treatment of other people. When the greater crash of 1870 came, and the intelligent British mind was more puzzled, yet more Prusso-mimic , than ever, he supplemented these letters, framed or bound them up, as it were, with a moving account of the death of Arminius before Paris, and launched the whole as a book.

The letters had been much laughed over; but I do not think the book was very widely bought - at any rate, its