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

Peacock.

But Sainte-Beuve must not carry us too far from Mr Arnold, all important as was the influence of the one upon the other. It is enough to say that the new Professor of Poetry (who might be less appetisingly but more correctly called a Professor of Criticism) had long entertained the wish to attempt, and now had the means of effecting, a reform in English criticism, partly on Sainte-Beuve's own lines, partly on others which he had already made publicly known in his famous Preface, and in some later critical writings, and which he was for the rest of his life always unflinchingly to champion, sometimes rather disastrously to extend.

Still it has always been held that this chair is not merely a chair of criticism; and Mr Arnold lodged a poetical diploma-piece in the shape of Merope . This was avowedly written as a sort of professorial manifesto - a document to show what the only Professor of Poetry whom England allowed herself thought, in theory and practice, of at least dramatic poetry. It was, as was to be expected from the author's official position and his not widespread but well-grounded reputation, much less neglected than his earlier poetry had been. He even tells us that "it sells well"; but the reviewers were not pleased. The Athenæum review is "a choice specimen of style," and the Spectator "of argumentation"; the Saturday Review is only "deadly prosy," but none were exactly favourable till G.H. Lewes in
The Leader was "very gratifying." Private criticism was a little kinder. The present Archbishop of Canterbury (to whom, indeed, Mr Arnold had just given "a flaming testimonial for Rugby") read it "with astonishment at its goodness," a sentence which, it may be observed, is a little double-edged. Kingsley (whom the editor of the Letters good-naturedly but perhaps rather superfluously reintroduces to the British public as "author of The Saints' Tragedy and other poems") was "very handsome." Froude, though he begs the poet to "discontinue the line," was not uncomplimentary in other ways. His own conclusion, from reviews and letters together, is pretty plainly put in two sentences, that he "saw the book was not going to take as he wished," and that "she [Merope] is more calculated to inaugurate my professorship with dignity than to move deeply the present race of
humans ." Let us see what "she" is actually like.

It is rather curious that the story of Merope should have been so tempting as, to mention nothing else, Maffei's attempt in Italian, Voltaire's in French, and this of Mr Arnold's in English, show it to have been to modern admirers and would-be practitioners of the Classical drama: and the curiosity is of a tell-tale kind. For the fact is that the donnée is very much more of the Romantic than of the Classical description, and offers much greater conveniences to the Romantic than to the Classical practitioner. With minor variations, the story as generally dramatised is this. Merope, the widowed queen of the murdered Heraclid Cresphontes, has saved her youngest son from the murderer and usurper, Polyphontes, and sent him out of the country. When he has grown up, and has secretly returned to Messenia to take vengeance, Polyphontes is pressing Merope to let bygones be bygones and marry him, so as to reconcile the jarring parties in the State. Æpytus, the son, to facilitate his reception, represents himself as a messenger charged to bring the news of his own death; and Merope, hearing this and believing the messenger to be also the assassin, obtains access to the chamber where he is resting after his journey, and is about to murder her own sleeping son when he is saved by the inevitable anagnorisis . The party of Cresphontes is then secretly roused. Æpytus, at the sacrifice which the tyrant holds in honour of the news of his rival's death, snatches the sacrificial axe and kills Polyphontes himself, and all ends well.

There is, of course, a strong dramatic moment here; but I cannot think the plot by any means an ideal one for classical tragedy. At any rate the Aristotelian conditions - the real ones, not the fanciful distortions of sixteenth-seventeenth century criticism - are very ill satisfied. There is bloodshed, but there is no tragic bloodshed, as there would have been had Merope actually killed her son. The arresting and triumphant "grip" of the tragic misfortunes of Oedipus and Orestes, the combination of the course of fate and the [Greek: hamartia] of the individual, is totally absent. The wooing of Merope by Polyphontes is not so much preposterous as insignificant, though Voltaire, by a touch of modernism, has rescued it or half-rescued it from this most terrible of limbos. The right triumphs, no doubt; but who cares whether it does or not? And Mr Arnold, with the heroic obstinacy of the doctrinaire, has done nothing to help the effect of a scheme in itself sufficiently uninspiring to the modern reader. When he was at work upon the piece he had "thought and hoped" that it would have what Buddha called "the character of Fixity, that true sign of the law." A not unfriendly critic might have pointed out, with gloomy forebodings, that a sign of law is not necessarily a sign of poetry, and that, as a prophet of his own had laid it down, poetry should "transport" not "fix." At any rate, it is clear to any one who reads the book that the author was in a mood of deliberate provocation and exaggeration - not a favourable mood for art. The quiet grace of Sophocles is perhaps impossible to reproduce in English, but Mr Arnold's verse is more than quiet, it is positively tame. The dreary
tirades of Polyphontes and Merope, and their snip-snap
stichomythia , read equally ill in English. Mr Swinburne, who has succeeded where Mr Arnold failed, saw by a true intuition that, to equal the effect of the Greek chorus, full English lyric with rhyme and musical sweep was required. Mr Arnold himself, as might have been expected from his previous experiments in unrhymed Pindarics, has given us strophes and antistrophes most punctiliously equivalent in syllables; but sometimes with hardly any, and never with very much, vesture of poetry about them. It is absolutely preposterous to suppose that the effect on a Greek ear of a strophe even of Sophocles or Euripides, let alone the great Agamemnonian choruses, was anything like the effect on an English ear of such wooden stuff as this: -

"Three brothers roved the field,
And to two did Destiny
Give the thrones that they conquer'd,
But the third, what delays him
From his unattained crown?"

But Mr Arnold would say "This is your unchaste modern love for passages and patches. Tell me how I managed this worthy action?" To which the only answer can be, "Sir, the action is rather uninteresting. Save at one moment you have not raised the interest anywhere, and you have certainly not made the most of it there."

The fact is, that very few even of thorough-going Arnoldians have had, or, except merely as "fighting a prize," could have had, much to say for Merope . The author pleads that he only meant "to give people a specimen of the world created by the Greek imagination." In the first place, one really cannot help (with the opening speech of the
Prometheus , and the close of the Eumenides , and the whole of the
Agamemnon in one's mind) saying that this is rather hard on the Greeks. And in the second place, what a curious way of setting about the object, when luckily specimens of the actual "world" so "created," not mere pastiches and plaster models of them, are still to be had, and of the very best! But the fact is, thirdly, that Mr Arnold, as all men so often do, and as he not very seldom did, was clearly trying not so much to extol one thing as to depreciate another. Probably in his heart of hearts (which is generally a much wiser heart than that according to which the mouth speaks and the pen writes) he knew his failure. At any rate, he never attempted anything of the kind again, and Merope, that queen of plaster, remains alone in his gallery, with, as we see in other galleries, merely some disjecta membra - "Fragment of an Antigone ," "Fragment of a Dejaneira ," grouped at her feet. In the definitive edition indeed, she is not with these but with
Empedocles on Etna , a rather unlucky contrast. For Empedocles , if very much less deliberately Greek than Merope , is very much better poetry, and it is almost impossible that the comparison of the two should not suggest to the reader that the attempt to be Greek is exactly and precisely the cause of the failure to be poetical. Mr Arnold had forgotten his master's words about the oikeia hedone . The pleasure of Greek art is one thing - the pleasure of English poetry another.

His inaugural lecture, "On the Modern Element in Literature," was printed many years afterwards in Macmillan's Magazine for February 1869; and this long hesitation seems to have been followed by an even longer repentance, for the piece was never included in any one of his volumes of essays. But the ten years of his professorship are, according to the wise parsimony of the chair, amply represented by the two famous little books - On Translating Homer , which, with its supplementary "Last Words," appeared in 1861-62, and On the Study of Celtic Literature , which appeared at the termination of his tenure in 1867. It may be questioned whether he ever did anything of more influence than these books, this being due partly to the fashion of their publication - which, in the latter case at least, applied the triple shock of lecture at the greatest of English literary centres, of magazine article, and of book - and partly to the fact that they were about subjects in which a real or a factitious, a direct or an indirect, interest was taken by almost every one. Every educated person knew and cared something (or at least would not have liked to be supposed not to care and know something) about Homer; very few educated persons knew anything about Celtic literature. But in these later lectures he put in a more popular and provocative form than that of his French Eton (see next chapter) that mixture of literary, political, social, and miscellaneous critique of his countrymen for which he was thenceforward best known; and which, if it brought down some hard knocks from his adversaries, and perhaps was not altogether a healthy mixture for himself, could at least not be charged by any reasonable person with lack of piquancy and actuality.

Both books are, and, despite some drawbacks of personal and ephemeral allusion, always will be, interesting; and both had, perhaps even more than the Essays in Criticism themselves, a stimulating effect upon English men of letters which can hardly be overvalued. It may indeed be said without paradox that they owe not a little of their value to their faults; but they owe a great deal more to their merits.

The faults are apparent enough even in the first series, which falls to be noticed in this chapter; yet it is really difficult to say when a more important book of English criticism had appeared. Dryden's
Essay of Dramatic Poesy , Johnson's Lives at their frequent best, Coleridge's