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

Year's Day gives us a melancholy prediction. If "I live to be eighty [ i.e. , in some three years from the present moment], I shall probably be the only person in England who reads anything but newspapers and scientific publications." Too gloomy a view, let us hope; yet with something in it. And a letter, a very little later, gives us interesting hints of his method in verse composition, which was to hunt a Dictionary (Richardson's) for good but unusual words - Theophile Gautier's way also, as it happens, though probably he did not know that.

These later letters contain so many references to living people that one has to be careful in quoting from them; but as regards himself, there is of course no such need of care. That self-ruthlessness which always prevented him from scamping work is amazingly illustrated in one of October 1882, which tells how he sat up till five in the morning rewriting a lecture he was to deliver in Liverpool, and got up at eight to start for the place of delivery. Let us hope that a champagne luncheon there - "chiefly doctors, but you know I like doctors" - revived him after the night and the journey. And two months later he makes pleasant allusion to "that demon Traill," in reference to a certain admirable parody of Poor Matthias . He had thought Mr Gladstone "hopelessly prejudiced against" him, and was proportionately surprised when in August 1883 he was offered by that Minister a pension of £250 for service to the poetry and literature of England. Few Civil List pensions have been so well deserved. But Mr Arnold, as most men of his quality would have been, was at once struck with the danger of evil constructions being put by the baser sort on the acceptance of an extra allowance from public funds by a man who already had a fair income from them, and a comfortable pension in the ordinary way to look forward to. Mr John Morley, however, and Lord Lingen, luckily succeeded in quieting his scruples, and only the very basest sort grumbled. The great advantage, of course, was that it enabled him to retire, as soon as his time was up, without too great loss of income.

A lecturing tour to America was already planned, and October 7, 1883 is the last date from Cobham, "New York" succeeding it without any; for Mr Arnold had the reprehensible and, in official persons, rare habit of very constantly omitting dates, though not places. The St Nicholas Club, "a delightful, poky, dark, exclusive little old club of the Dutch families," is the only place in which he finds peace. For, as one expected, the interviewers made life terrible. These American letters are interesting reading enough, but naturally tend to be little more than a replica of similar letters from other Englishmen who have done the same thing. As has been quite frankly admitted here, Mr Arnold never made any effort, and seldom seems to have been independently prompted, to write what are called "amusing" letters: he merely tells a plain tale of journeys, lectures, meals, persons, scenery, manners and customs, etc. Chicago seems to have vindicated its character for "character" by hospitably forcing him to eat dinner and supper "on end," and by describing him in its newspapers as "an elderly bird pecking at grapes on a trellis." The whole tour, including a visit to Canada, lasted nearly five months, and brought - not the profit which some people expected, but - a good sum, with wrinkles as to more if the experiment were repeated. And when he came back to England, the lectures were collected and printed.

In February 1885 we have, addressed to his eldest daughter, then married and living in America, a definition of "real civilisation" as the state "when the world does not begin till 8 P.M. and goes on from that till 1 A.M., not later." This is, though doubtless jestful, really a point de repère for the manners of the later nineteenth century as concerns a busy man who likes society. In the eighteenth, and earlier in the nineteenth, men as busy as Mr Arnold practically abstained from "the world" except quite rarely, while "the world" was not busy. The dachshunds come in for frequent mention.

On a Sunday in May of this year comes the warning of "a horrid pain across my chest," which, however, "Andrew Clark thinks [wrongly, alas!] to be not heart" but indigestion. The Discourses in America , for which their author had a great predilection, came out later. In August the pain is mentioned again; and the subsequent remark, "I was a little tired, but the cool champagne at dinner brought me round," is another ominous hint that it was not indigestion. Two of the most valuable of all the letters come in October, one saying, "I think Oxford is still, on the whole, the place in the world to which I am most attached" ["And so say all of us"]; the other, after some notice of the Corpus plate, telling how "I got out to Hinksey and up the hill to within sight of the Cumnor firs. I cannot describe the effect which this landscape always has upon me: the hillside with its valleys, and Oxford in the great Thames valley below." And this walk is again referred to later. He was pleased by a requisition that he should stand yet again for the Poetry Professorship, though of course he did not accede to it. And at the beginning of winter he had a foreign mission (his last) to Berlin, to get some information for the Government as to German school fees. He was much lionised, and seems to have enjoyed himself very much during his stay, the Crown Princess being specially gracious to him.

Nor was he long in England on his return, though long enough to bring another mention of the chest pain, and an excellent definition of education - would there were no worse! - "Reading five pages of the Greek Anthology every day, and looking out all the words I do not know." In February 1886 he was back again investigating the Swiss and Bavarian school systems; and that amiable animal-worship of his receives a fresh evidence in the mention and mourning of the death of "dear Lola" (not Montès, but another; in short, a pony), with a sigh for "a mèche of her hair." The journey was finished by way of France towards the end of March. At Hamburg Mr Arnold was "really [and very creditably] glad to have had the opportunity of calling a man Your Magnificence," that being, it seems, the proper official style in addressing the burgomaster. And May took him back to America, to see his married daughter and divers old friends. He remained there till the beginning of September, improving, as he thought, in health, but meeting towards the close an awkward bathing accident, which involved no risk of drowning, but gave him a shock that was followed by a week or two of troublesome attacks of pain across the chest. There is very much in the letters of the time about the political crisis of 1886. His retirement from official work came in November, and the letters are fuller than ever of delight in the Cobham landscape.

But the warnings grew more frequent, and we know that long before this he had had no delusions about their nature. Indeed, it is doubtful whether he had ever had any, considering the fact of the malady, which had, as he says in a singularly manly and dignified commentatio mortis dated January 29, 1887, struck down his father and grandfather in middle life long before they came to his present age. He "refuses every invitation to lecture or make addresses." The letters of 1887, too, are very few, and contain little of interest, except an indication of a visit to Fox How; while much the same may be said of those, also few, from the early months of 1888. The last of all contains a reference to Robert Elsmere . Five days later, on April 15, a sudden exertion, it seems, brought on the fatal attack, and he died. He had outlived his grand climacteric of sixty-three (which he had thought would be "the end as well as the climax") by two years and three months.


CHAPTER VI.

CONCLUSION.


The personal matters which usually, and more or less gracefully, fill the beginning of the end of a biography, are perhaps superfluous in the case of a man who died so recently, and who was so well known as Mr Matthew Arnold. Moreover, if given at all, they should be given by some one who knew him more intimately than did the present writer. He was of a singularly agreeable presence, without being in the sense of the painter's model exactly "handsome"; and in particular he could boast a very pleasant and not in the least artificial smile. Some artificiality of manner was sometimes attributed to him, I think rather unjustly; but he certainly had "tricks and manners" of the kind very natural to men of decided idiosyncrasy, unless they transcend all mere trick, after the fashion which we know in Scott, which we are sure of, without knowing, in Shakespeare. One of these Mr George Russell glances at in the preface to the Letters , a passage which I read with not a little amusement, because I could confirm it from a memory of my only conversation with Mr Arnold. He had been good-humouredly expostulating with me for overvaluing some French poet. I forget at the distance of seventeen or eighteen years who it was, but it was not Gautier. I replied in some such words as, "Well; perhaps he is not very important in himself, but I think he is 'important for us ,' if I may borrow that." So he looked at me and said, " I didn't write that anywhere, did I?" And when I reminded him that he had told us how Sainte-Beuve said it of Lamartine, he declared that he had quite forgotten it. Which might, or might not, be Socratic.

But I should imagine that the complaints of his affectations in ordinary society were as much exaggerated as I am sure that the opposite complaints of the humdrum character of his letters are. Somebody talks of the "wicked charm" which a popular epithet or nickname possesses, and something of the sort seems to have hung about "The Apostle of Culture," "The Prophet of Sweetness and Light," and the rest. He only deserved his finical reputation inasmuch as he was unduly given to the use of these catch-words, not because he in any undue way affected to "look the part" or live up to them. And as for the letters, it must be remembered that he was a very busy man, with clerical work of the official kind enough to disgust a very Scriblerus; that he had, so far as the published letters show us, no very intimate friend, male or (still better) female, outside his own family; and further, that the degeneration of the art of letter-writing is not a mere phrase, it is a fact. Has any of my readers many - or any - correspondents like Scott or like Southey, like Lamb or like FitzGerald, like Madame de Sévigné or like Lady Mary? He is lucky if he has. Indeed, the simplicity of the Letters is the very surest evidence of a real simplicity in the nature. In the so-called best letter-writers it may be shrewdly suspected that this simplicity is, with rare exceptions, absent. Scott had it; but then Scott's genius as a novelist overflowed into his letters, as did Southey's talent of universal writing,