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

be denied; it may kill the poet if he cannot or will not give vent to it, but it will not be patient of repression - quietly content to appear now and then, even on such occasions as the deaths of a Clough and a Stanley. Nor is it against charity or liberality, while it is in the highest degree consonant with reason and criticism, to infer that Mr Arnold's poetic vein was not very full-blooded, that it was patient of refusal to indulge it, that his poetry, in nearly the happiest of his master's phrases, was not exactly "inevitable," despite the exquisiteness of its quality on occasion.

It is fortunate for the biographer that this earliest part of Mr Arnold's life is so fertile in poetry, for otherwise, in the dearth of information, it would be a terribly barren subject. The thirty years of life yield us hardly twenty pages of letters, of which the first, with its already cited sketch of Laleham, is perhaps the most interesting. At the Trafalgar Square riots of March 1848 the writer is convinced that "the hour of the hereditary peerage and eldest sonship and immense properties has struck"; sees "a wave of more than American vulgarity, moral, intellectual, and social, preparing to break over us"; and already holds that strange delusion of his that "the French are the most civilised of European peoples." He develops this on the strength of "the intelligence of their idea-moved classes" in a letter to his sister; meets Emerson in April; goes to a Chartist "convention," and has a pleasant legend for Miss Martineau that the late Lord Houghton "refused to be sworn in as a special constable, that he might be free to assume the post of President of the Republic at a moment's notice." He continues to despair of his country as hopelessly as the Tuxford waiter;[6] finds Bournemouth "a very stupid place" - which is distressing; it is a stupid place enough now, but it was not then: "a great moorland covered with furze and low pine coming down to the sea" could never be that - and meets Miss Brontë, "past thirty and plain, with expressive grey eyes though." The rest we must imagine.


FOOTNOTES:

[1] The editor glosses this variously spelt and etymologically puzzling word "landing-stage." But unless I mistake, a "kempshott," "campshed," or "campshedding" is not a landing-stage (though it helps to make one) so much as a river-wall of stakes and planks, put to guard the bank against floods, the wash of barges, &c.

[2] Glen Desseray and other Poems . By John Campbell Shairp, London, 1888. P. 218.

[3] This statement may seem too sweeping, especially as there is neither room nor occasion for justifying it fully. Let us only indicate, as among the heads of such a justification, the following sins of English criticism between 1840-1860, - the slow and reluctant acceptance even of Tennyson, even of Thackeray; the obstinate refusal to give Browning, even after Bells and Pomegranates , a fair hearing; the recalcitrance to Carlyle among the elder, and Mr Ruskin among the younger, innovators in prose; the rejection of a book of erratic genius like Lavengro ; the ignoring of work of such combined intrinsic beauty and historic importance as The Defence of Guenevere and FitzGerald's Omar Khayyam . For a sort of quintessence of literary Philistinism, see the advice of Richard Ford (himself no Philistine) to George Borrow, in Professor Knapp's
Life of the latter, i. 387.

[4] This "undertone," as Mr Shairp calls it.

[5] "What, then, are the situations, from the representation of which, though accurate, no poetical enjoyment can be derived? They are those in which the suffering finds no vent in action; in which a continuous state of mental distress is prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope, or resistance; in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done. In such situations there is inevitably something morbid, in the description of them something monotonous. When they occur in actual life, they are painful, not tragic; the representation of them in poetry is painful also."

[6] "The Tuxford waiter desponds exactly as you do." - Sydney Smith to Jeffrey .


CHAPTER II.

LIFE FROM 1851-62 - SECOND SERIES OF POEMS - MEROPE - ON TRANSLATING HOMER .


We must now return a little and give some account of Mr Arnold's actual life, from a period somewhat before that reached at the end of the last chapter. The account need not be long, for the life, as has been said, was not in the ordinary sense eventful; but it is necessary, and can be in this chapter usefully interspersed with an account of his work, which, for nine of the eleven years we shall cover, was, though interesting, of much less interest than that of those immediately before and those immediately succeeding.

One understands at least part of the reason for the gradual drying up of his poetic vein from a sentence of his in a letter of 1858, when he and his wife at last took a house in Chester Square: "It will be something to unpack one's portmanteau for the first time since I was married, nearly seven years ago." "Something," indeed; and one's only wonder is how he, and still more Mrs Arnold (especially as they now had three children), could have endured the other thing so long. There is no direct information in the Letters as to the reason of this nomadic existence, the only headquarters of which appear to have been the residence of Mrs Arnold's father, the judge, in Eaton Place, with flights to friends' houses and to lodgings at the places of inspection and others, especially Dover and Brighton. And guesswork is nowhere more unprofitable than in cases where private matters of income, taste, and other things are concerned. But it certainly would appear, though I have no positive information on the subject, that in the early days of State interference with education "My Lords" managed matters with an equally sublime disregard of the comfort of their officials and the probable efficiency of the system.[1]

Till I noticed the statement quoted opposite, I was quite unable to construct any reasonable theory from such a passage as that in a letter of December 1852[2] and from others which show us Mr Arnold in Lincolnshire, in Shropshire, and in the eastern counties. Even with the elucidation it seems a shockingly bad system. One doubts whether it be worse for an inspector or for the school inspected by him, that he should have no opportunity for food from breakfast to four o'clock, when he staves off death by inviting disease in the shape of the malefic bun; for him or for certain luckless pupil-teachers that, after dinner, he should be "in for [them] till ten o'clock." With this kind of thing when on duty, and no home when off it, a man must begin to appreciate the Biblical passages about partridges, and the wings of a dove, and so forth, most heartily and vividly long before seven years are out, more particularly if he be a man so much given to domesticity as was Matthew Arnold.

However, it was, no doubt, not so bad as it looks. They say the rack is not, though probably no one would care to try. There were holidays; there was a large circle of hospitable family friends, and strangers were only too anxious to welcome (and perhaps to propitiate) Her Majesty's Inspector. The agreeable anomalies of the British legal system (which, let Dickens and other grumblers say what they like, have made many good people happy and only a few miserable) allowed Mr Arnold for many years to act (sometimes while simultaneously inspecting) as his father-in-law's Marshal on circuit, with varied company and scenery, little or nothing to do, a handsome fee for doing it, and no worse rose-leaf in the bed than heavy dinners and hot port wine, even this being alleviated by "the perpetual haunch of venison."

For the rest, there are some pleasing miscellaneous touches in the letters for these years, and there is a certain liveliness of phrase in them which disappears in the later. It is pleasant to find Mr Arnold on his first visit to Cambridge (where, like a good Wordsworthian, he wanted above all things to see the statue of Newton) saying what all of us say, "I feel that the Middle Ages, and all their poetry and impressiveness, are in Oxford and not here." In one letter
- written to his sister "K" (Mrs Forster) as his critical letters usually are - we find three noteworthy criticisms on contemporaries, all tinged with that slight want of cordial appreciation which characterises his criticism of this kind throughout (except, perhaps, in the case of Browning). The first is on Alexander Smith - it was the time of the undue ascension of the Life-Drama rocket before its equally undue fall. "It can do me no good [an odd phrase] to be irritated with that young man, who certainly has an extraordinary faculty, although I think he is a phenomenon of a very dubious character." The second, harsher but more definite, is on
Villette . "Why is Villette disagreeable? Because the writer's mind [it is worth remembering that he had met Charlotte Brontë at Miss Martineau's] contains nothing but hunger, rebellion, and rage, and therefore that is all she can in fact put into her book. No fine writing can hide this thoroughly, and it will be fatal to her in the long-run." The Fates were kinder: and Miss Brontë's mind did contain something besides these ugly things. But it was her special weakness that her own thoughts and experiences were insufficiently mingled and tempered by a wider knowledge of life and literature. The third is on My Novel , which he says he has "read with great pleasure, though Bulwer's nature is by no means a perfect one either, which makes itself felt in his book; but his gush, his better humour, his abundant materials, and his mellowed constructive skill - all these are great things." One would give many pages of the Letters for that naïf admission that "gush" is "a great thing."

A little later (May 1853), all his spare time is being spent on a poem, which he thinks by far the best thing he has yet done, to wit,
Sohrab and Rustum . And he "never felt so sure of himself or so really and truly at ease as to criticism." He stays in barracks at the depot of the 17th Lancers with a brother-in-law, and we regret to find that "Death or Glory" manners do not please him. The instance is a cornet spinning his rings on the table after dinner. "College does civilise a boy," he ejaculates, which is true - always providing that it is a good college. Yet, with that almost unconscious naturalness which is particularly noticeable in him, he is much dissatisfied with Oxford - thinks it (as we all do) terribly fallen off since his days. Perhaps the infusion of Dissenters' sons (it is just at the time of the first Commission in 1854) may brace its flaccid sinews, though the middle-class, he confesses, is abominably disagreeable. He sees a good deal of this poor middle-class in his inspecting tours, and decides elsewhere about the same time that "of all dull, stagnant, unedifying entourages , that of middle-class Dissent is the stupidest." It is sad to find that he thinks women utterly unfit for teachers and lecturers; but Girton and Lady Margaret's may take comfort, it is "no natural incapacity, but the fault of their bringing-up." With