Matthew Arnold - George Saintsbury (best book club books .txt) 📗

could be made truest by making the three thirty.

The result is that he never wrote better. A little of the dignity of his earlier manner - when he simply followed that admirable older Oxford style, of which Newman was the greatest master and the last - is gone, but it has taken some stiffness with it. Some - indeed a good deal - of the piquancy of the later is not yet apparent; but its absence implies, and is more than compensated by, the concomitant absence of those airs and flings, those interludes as of an academic jester, in cap and gown and liripipe instead of motley, which have been charged, not quite unjustly, on the Arnold that we know best. There is hardly in English a better example of the blending and conciliation of the two modes of argumentative writing referred to in Bishop Kurd's acute observation, that if your first object is to convince, you cannot use a style too soft and insinuating; if you want to confute, the rougher and more unsparing the better. And the description and characterisation are quite excellent.

Between A French Eton and the second collection of Oxford Lectures came, in 1865, the famous Essays in Criticism , the first full and varied, and perhaps always the best, expression and illustration of the author's critical attitude, the detailed manifesto and exemplar of the new critical method, and so one of the epoch-making books of the later nineteenth century in English. It consisted, in the first edition, of a Preface (afterwards somewhat altered and toned down) and of nine essays (afterwards to be made ten by the addition of A Persian Passion-Play ). The two first of these were general, on The Function of Criticism at the Present Time and The Literary Influence of Academies , while the other seven dealt respectively with the two Guérins, Heine,
Pagan and Mediæval Religious Sentiment , Joubert, Spinoza, and Marcus Aurelius. I am afraid it must be taken as only too strong a confirmation of Mr Arnold's own belief as to the indifference of the English people to criticism that no second edition of this book was called for till four years were past, no third for ten, and no fourth for nearly twenty.

Yet, to any one whom the gods have made in the very slightest degree critical, it is one of the most fascinating (if sometimes also one of the most provoking) of books; and the fascination and provocation should surely have been felt even by others. As always with the author, there is nothing easier than to pick holes in it: in fact, on his own principles, one is simply bound to pick holes. He evidently enjoyed himself very much in the Preface: but it may be doubted whether the severe Goddess of Taste can have altogether smiled on his enjoyment. He is superciliously bland to the unlucky and no doubt rather unwise Mr Wright ( v. supra ): he tells the Guardian in a periphrasis that it is dull, and "Presbyter Anglicanus" that he is born of Hyrcanian tigers, and the editor of the Saturday Review that he is a late and embarrassed convert to the Philistines. He introduces not merely Mr Spurgeon, a Philistine of some substance and memory, but hapless forgotten shadows like "Mr Clay," "Mr Diffanger," "Inspector Tanner," "Professor Pepper" to the contempt of the world. And then, when we are beginning to find all this laughter rather "thorn-crackling" and a little forced, the thing ends with the famous and magnificent epiphonema (as they would have said in the old days) to Oxford, which must for ever conciliate all sons of hers and all gracious outsiders to its author, just as it turns generation after generation of her enemies sick with an agonised grin.

So, again, one may marvel, and almost grow angry, at the whim which made Mr Arnold waste two whole essays on an amiable and interesting person like Eugénie de Guérin and a mere nobody like her brother. They are very pretty essays in themselves; but then (as Mr Arnold has taught us), "all depends on the subject," and the subjects here are so exceedingly unimportant! Besides, as he himself almost openly confessed, and as everybody admits now, he really did not understand French poetry at all. When we come to "Keats and Guérin," there is nothing for it but to take refuge in Byron's

" Such names coupled!"

and pass with averted face. Seventy-two mortal pages of Matthew Arnold's, at his very best time, wasted on a brother and sister who happened to be taken up by Sainte-Beuve!

But the rest of the book is entirely free from liability to any such criticism as this. To some criticism - even to a good deal - it is beyond doubt exposed. The first and most famous paper - the general manifesto, as the earlier Preface to the Poems is the special one, of its author's literary creed - on The Function of Criticism at the Present Time must indeed underlie much the same objections as those that have been made to the introduction. Here is the celebrated passage about "Wragg is in custody," the text of which, though no doubt painful in subject and inurbane in phraseology, is really a rather slender basis on which to draw up an indictment against a nation. Here is the astounding - the, if serious, almost preternatural - statement that "not very much of current English literature comes into this best that is known and thought in the world. Not very much I fear: certainly less than of the current literature of France and Germany." And this was 1865, when the Germans had had no great poet but Heine for a generation, nor any great poets but Goethe and Heine for some five hundred years, no great prose-writer but Heine (unless you call Goethe one), and were not going to have any! It was 1865, when all the great French writers, themselves of but some thirty years' standing, were dying off, not to be succeeded! 1865, when for seventy years England had not lacked, and for nearly thirty more was not to lack, poets and prose-writers of the first order by the dozen and almost the score! Here, too, is the marvellous companion-statement that in the England of the first quarter of the century was "no national glow of life." It was the chill of death, I suppose, which made the nation fasten on the throat of the world and choke it into submission during a twenty years' struggle.

But these things are only Mr Arnold's way. I have never been able to satisfy myself whether they were deliberate paradoxes, or sincere and rather pathetic paralogisms. For instance, did he really think that the Revue des Deux Mondes , an organ of "dukes, dunces, and
dévotes ," as it used to be called even in those days by the wicked knowing ones, a nursing mother of Academies certainly, and a most respectable periodical in all ways - that this good Revue actually "had for its main function to understand and utter the best that is known and thought in the world," absolutely existed as an organ for "the free play of mind"? I should be disposed to think that the truer explanation of such things is that they were neither quite paradoxes nor quite paralogisms; but the offspring of an innocent willingness to believe what he wished, and of an almost equally innocent desire to provoke the adversary. Unless (as unluckily they sometimes are) they be taken at the foot of the letter, they can do no harm, and their very piquancy helps the rest to do a great deal of good.

For there can be no doubt that in the main contention of his manifesto, as of his book, Mr Arnold was absolutely right. It was true that England, save for spasmodic and very partial appearances of it in a few of her great men of letters - Ben Jonson, Dryden, Addison, Johnson - had been wonderfully deficient in criticism up to the end of the eighteenth century; and that though in the early nineteenth she had produced one great philosophical critic, another even greater on the purely literary side, and a third of unique appreciative sympathy, in Coleridge, Hazlitt, and Lamb, she had not followed these up, and had, even in them, shown certain critical limitations. It was true that though the Germans had little and the French nothing to teach us in range, both had much to teach us in thoroughness, method,
style of criticism. And it was truest of all (though Mr Arnold, who did not like the historic estimate, would have admitted this with a certain grudge) that the time imperatively demanded a thorough "stock-taking" of our own literature in the light and with the help of others.

Let palma - let the maxima palma - of criticism be given to him in that he first fought for the creed of this literary orthodoxy, and first exemplified (with whatever admixture of will-worship of his own, with whatever quaint rites and ceremonies) the carrying out of the cult. It is possible that his direct influence may have been exaggerated; one of the most necessary, though not of the most grateful, businesses of the literary historian is to point out that with rare exceptions, and those almost wholly on the poetic side, great men of letters rather show in a general, early, and original fashion a common tendency than definitely lead an otherwise sluggish multitude to the promised land. But no investigation has deprived, or is at all likely to deprive, the Essays in Criticism of their place as an epoch-making book, as the manual of a new and often independent, but, on the whole, like-minded, critical movement in England.

Nor can the blow of the first essay be said to be ill followed up in the second, the almost equally famous (perhaps the more famous)
Influence of Academies . Of course here also, here as always, you may make reservations. It is a very strong argument, an argument stronger than any of Mr Arnold's, that the institutions of a nation, if they are to last, if they are to do any good, must be in accordance with the spirit of the nation; that if the French Academy has been beneficial, it is because the French spirit is academic; and that if (as we may fear, or hope, or believe, according to our different principles) the English spirit is unacademic, an Academy would probably be impotent and perhaps ridiculous in England. But we can allow for this; and when we have allowed for it, once more Mr Arnold's warnings are warnings on the right side, true, urgent, beneficial. There are still the minor difficulties. Even at the time, much less as was known of France in England then than now, there were those who opened their eyes first and then rubbed them at the assertion that "openness of mind and flexibility of intelligence" were the characteristics of the French people. But once more also, no matter! The central drift is right, and the central drift carries many excellent things with it, and may be allowed to wash away the less excellent. Mr Arnold is right on the average qualities of French prose; whether he is right about the "provinciality" of Jeremy Taylor as compared to Bossuet or not, he is right about "critical freaks," though, by the way - but it is perhaps unnecessary to finish that sentence. He is right about the style of Mr Palgrave and right about the style of Mr Kinglake;