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

him putting his shoulder to the work of critical advocacy and sympathy with an absolutely whole heart. With Wordsworth, with Byron, with Heine, he was on points more or fewer at grave difference; though he affected to regard Goethe as a magnus Apollo of criticism and creation both, I think in his heart of hearts there must have been some misgivings; and it is impossible that he should not have known his fancy for people like the Guérins to be mere engouement . Gray's case was different. The resemblances between subject and critic were extraordinary. Mr Arnold is really an industrious, sociable, and moderately cheerful Gray of the nineteenth century; Gray an indolent, recluse, more melancholy Arnold of the eighteenth. Again, the literary quality of the bard of the
Elegy was exactly of the kind which stimulates critics most. From Sainte-Beuve downwards the fraternity has, justly or unjustly, been accused of a tendency to extol writers who are a little problematical, who approach the second class, above the unquestioned masters. And there was the yet further stimulus of redressing wrongs. Gray, though a most scholarly poet, has always pleased the vulgar rather than the critics, and he had the singular fate of being dispraised both by Johnson and by Wordsworth. But in this paper of Mr Arnold's the wheel came full circle. Everything that can possibly be said for Gray - more than some of us would by any means indorse - is here said for him: here he has provided an everlasting critical harbour, into which he may retreat whensoever the popular or the critical breeze turns adverse.

And the Keats, less disputable in its general estimate, is equally good in itself, and specially interesting as a capital example of Mr Arnold's polemic - the capital example, indeed, if we except the not wholly dissimilar but much later article on Shelley's Life . He is rather unduly severe on the single letter of Keats which he quotes; but that was his way, and it is after all only a justifiable rhetorical reculade , with the intent to leap upon the maudlin defenders of the poet as a sort of hero of M. Feydeau, and rend them. The improvement of the mere fashion, as compared with the fantasticalities of the Friendship's Garland period, is simply enormous. And the praise which follows is praise really in the grand style - praise, the style and quality of which are positively rejoicing to the heart from their combination of fervour and accuracy, from their absolute fulfilment of the ideal of a word shockingly misused in these latter days, the word Appreciation. The personal sympathy which Mr Arnold evidently had with Gray neither makes nor mars here; all is purely critical, purely literary. And yet higher praise has never been given by any save the mere superlative-sloppers of the lower press, nor juster criticism meted out by the veriest critical Rhadamanthus. Of its scale and kind, this, I think, is the most perfect example of Mr Arnold's critical power, and it is so late that it shows that power to have been not merely far off exhaustion, but actually, like sound old wine, certain to improve for years to come.

In the seven years that were left to him after the publication of the
Byron , Mr Arnold did not entirely confine himself to the service of his only true mistress Literature. But he never fell again so completely into the power of Duessa as he had fallen between 1867 and 1877. His infidelities were chiefly in the direction of politics, not of religion or irreligion, and they were of a less gay and frivolous character than those of a generally similar kind in earlier dates. They were partly devoted to the change which has brought it about, that, while during the third quarter of the century the Conservatives were in power, though on three different occasions, yet in each for absolutely insignificant terms, in the fourth Mr Gladstone's tenure of office from 1880 to 1885 has been the only period of real Liberal domination. But although he dealt with the phenomenon from various points of view in such articles as "The Nadir of Liberalism," the "Zenith of Conservatism," and so forth, it was chiefly, as was natural at the time, in relation to Ireland that he exercised his political pen, and enough has been said about these Irish articles by anticipation above. Discourses in America , the result of his lecturing tour to that country in 1883-84, and the articles on Amiel, Tolstoi, and Shelley's Life, which represent his very last stage of life, require more particular attention.

The Discourses in America , two of them specially written, and the other, originally a Cambridge "Rede" discourse, recast for the Western Hemisphere, must always rank with the most curious and interesting of Mr Arnold's works: but the very circumstances of their composition and delivery made it improbable, if not impossible, that they should form one of his best. These circumstances were of a kind which reproduces itself frequently in the careers of all men of any public distinction. In his days of comparative obscurity, or in some position of "greater freedom and less responsibility," even when he ceases to be obscure, a man deals faithfully, but perhaps a little flippantly, with this or that person, thing, nation, subject, doctrine. Afterwards he is brought into a relation with the person or nation, into a position as regards the thing, subject, or doctrine, which necessitates, if not exactly a distinct recantation in the humiliating sense attached to the Latin, yet a more or less graceful and ingenious palinode in the more honourable one which we allow to the Greek equivalent and original. Mr Arnold could never be lacking in grace or in ingenuity; but he certainly had, in his earlier work, allowed it to be perfectly visible that the world of American politics, American manners, American institutions and ways generally, was not in his eyes by any means a world all of sweetness or all of light.

His sense of the ludicrous, and his sense of art, alike precluded even the idea of a clumsy apology, and though, as was to be expected, the folk of the baser sort who exist everywhere may not have been pleased with his Discourses, the people of the United States generally did not owe him or show him any grudge for being frank and consistent as well as polite. The subjects were selected and grouped with great skill. "Numbers" dealt with the burning question of democracy, which must ever be uppermost - or as nethermost not less important - in a republic; and dealt with it after the more moderate, not the extremer form, of that combination of literature and politics which Mr Arnold had always affected. "Literature and Science," the middle discourse, attacked a question which, so far as the nationality of his audience was concerned, had nothing burning about it, which the lecturer was singularly well qualified to treat from the one side, and which is likely to retain its actuality and its moment for many a day and year, perhaps many a century. "Emerson," the last, descended from generalities to the consideration of a particular subject, at once specially American and specially literary. It would have been hard indeed to exhibit better composition in the grouping of the subjects as regards their classes, and criticism may be defied to find better examples of each class than those actually taken.

It is not clear that quite such high praise can be given to the execution, and the reason is plain: it was in the execution, not in the composition and scheme, that the hard practical difficulties of the task came in. Long harnessed official as he was, and preacher as he was, in his critical character, of Law, Order, Restraint, Mr Arnold was both too much of an Englishman and too much of a genius not to be ill to ride with the curb. And, save perhaps in "Literature and Science" (which was not at first written for an American audience at all), the pressure of the curb - I had almost said of the twitch - is too often evident, or at least suggested. This especially applies to the first, the longest, the most ambitious, and, as its author would say, most "nobly serious" of the three. There are quite admirable things in "Numbers"; and the descant on the worship of the great goddess Aselgeia, and its effect upon France, is not only nobly serious from the point of view of morality, but is one of Mr Arnold's best claims to the title of a political philosopher, and even of a political prophet. But it is less easy to say that this passage appears to be either specially in place or well composed with its companions. Perhaps the same is true of the earlier part, and its extensive dealings with Isaiah and Plato. As regards the prophet, it is pretty certain that of Mr Arnold's hearers, the larger number did not care to have Isaiah spoken about in that particular manner, while some at least of the rest did not care to have him spoken about at all. Of the philosopher, it is equally safe to say that the great majority knew very little, and that of the small minority, some must have had obstinate questionings connected with the appearance of Plato as an authority on the moral health of nations, and with the application of Mr Arnold's own very true and very noble doctrine about Aselgeia. In fact, although the lecture is the most thoughtful, the most serious in part, the most forcible, and the truest of all Mr Arnold's political or social discourses, yet it shares with all of them the reproach of a touch of desultory dilettantism.

The others, at least equally interesting in parts, are much better as wholes. The opening of the "Emerson," with its fond reminiscence of Oxford, is in a vein which Mr Arnold did not often work, but which always yielded him gold. In the words about Newman, one seems to recognise very much more than meets the ear - an explanation of much in the Arnoldian gospel, on something like the principle of revulsion, of soured love, which accounts for still more in the careers of his contemporaries, Mr Pattison and Mr Froude. He is less happy on Carlyle - he never was very happy on Carlyle, and for obvious reasons - but here he jars less than usual. As for Emerson himself, some readers have liked Emerson better than Carlyle at first, but have found that Carlyle "wears" a great deal better than Emerson. It seems to have been the other way with Mr Arnold; yet he is not uncritical about Emerson himself. On Emerson's poetry he is even, as on his own principles he was, perhaps, bound to be, rather hypercritical. Most of it, no doubt, is not poetry at all; but it has "once in a hundred years," as Mr O'Shaughnessy sang, the blossoming of the aloe, the star-shower of poetic meteors. And while, with all reverence, one is bound to say that his denying the title of "great writer" to Carlyle is merely absurd - is one of those caprices which somebody once told us are the eternal foes of art - he is not unjust in denying that title to Emerson. But after justifying his policy of not "cracking up" by still further denying his subject the title of a great philosophic thinker, he proceeds to find a pedestal for him at last as a friend and leader of those who would "live in the spirit." With such a judgment one has no fault to find, because it must be in all cases an almost purely personal one. To some Gautier, with his