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

did so - that Sir Mountstuart may, on receiving the letter, have smiled and thought of "Mon siége est fait"; but I am sure he would be the first to admit that the cases were different. I do not myself think that Mr Arnold's strong point was that complete grasp of a literary personality, and its place, which some critics aim at but which few achieve. His impatience - here perhaps half implied and later openly avowed - of the historic estimate in literature, would of itself have made this process irksome to him. But on the lines of his own special vocation as a critic it was not only irksome, it was unnecessary. His function was to mark the special - perhaps it would be safer to say a special - tendency of his man, and to bring that out with all his devices of ingenious reduplication, fascinating rhetoric, and skilful parading of certain favourite axioms and general principles. This function would not have been assisted - I think it nearly certain that it would have been hampered and baulked - by that attempt to find "the whole" which the Greek philosopher and poet so sadly and so truly declares that few boast to find. It was a side, a face, a phase of each man and writer, that he wished to bring out; and, though he might sometimes exaggerate this, yet his exaggeration was scarcely illegitimate. To bring out something he had to block out much. If he had attempted to show the whole Goethe, the whole Heine, the whole Homer or Shakespeare even, they would have been difficult if not impossible to group and to compare in the fashion in which he wished to deal with them.

And except on the sheer assumption, which is surely a fallacy, that
suppressio veri is always and not only sometimes suggestio falsi , I do not see that he exceeded a due licence in this matter, while that he was wise in his generation there can be no doubt. He wanted to influence the average Englishman, and he knew perfectly well there is nothing the average Englishman dislikes so much as guarded and elaborately conditioned statements. The immense popularity and influence of Macaulay had been due to his hatred of half-lights, of "perhapses"; and little as Mr Arnold liked Macaulay's fiddle, he was wise enough to borrow his rosin, albeit in disguise. If a critic makes too many provisos, if he "buts" too much, if he attempts to paint the warts as well as the beauties, he will be accused of want of sympathy, he will be taxed with timorousness and hedging, at best he will be blamed for wire-drawn and hair-splitting argument. The preambles of exposition, the conclusions of summing up, will often be considered tedious or impertinent. The opposite plan of selecting a nail and hitting that on the head till you have driven it home was, in fact, as much Mr Arnold's as it was Macaulay's. The hammer-play of the first was far more graceful and far less monotonous: yet it was hammer-play all the same. But we must return to our Letters .

A dinner with Lord Houghton - "all the advanced Liberals in religion and politics, and a Cingalese in full costume" - a visit to Cambridge and a stroll to Grantchester, notice of about the first elaborate appreciation of his critical work which had appeared in England, the article by the late Mr S.H. Reynolds in the Westminster Review for October 1863, visits to the Rothschilds at Aston Clinton and Mentmore, and interesting notices of the composition of the
Joubert , the French Eton , &c., fill up the year. The death of Thackeray extracts one of those criticisms of his great contemporaries which act as little douches from time to time, in the words, "I cannot say that I thoroughly liked him, though we were on friendly terms: and he was not to my mind a great writer." But the personal reflections which follow are of value. He finds "the sudden cessation of so vigorous an existence very sobering. To-day I am forty-one; the middle of life in any case, and for me perhaps much more than the middle. I have ripened and am ripening so slowly that I should be glad of as much time as possible. Yet I can feel, I rejoice to say, an inward spring which seems more and more to gain strength and to promise to resist outward shocks, if they must come, however rough. But of this inward spring one must not talk [it is only to his mother that he writes this] for it does not like being talked about, and threatens to depart if one will not leave it in mystery."

An interview with Mr Disraeli at Aston Clinton, not, as one may suppose, without pleasant words, opens 1864. "It is only from politicians who have themselves felt the spell of literature that one gets these charming speeches," he says, and they, not unnaturally, charmed him so much that he left his dressing-case and his umbrella behind him. But the anti-crusade is more and more declared. He "means to deliver the middle-class out of the hand of their Dissenting ministers," and in the interval wants to know how "that beast of a word 'waggonette' is spelt?" The early summer was spent at Woodford, on the borders of Epping Forest, and the early autumn at Llandudno, where Welsh scenery and the poetry of the Celtic race "quite overpower" him. Alas! some other poetry did not, and when we find him in September thinking Enoch Arden "perhaps the best thing Tennyson has done," we are not surprised to find this remarkable special appreciation followed by a general depreciation, which is quite in keeping. He is even tempted (and of course asked) to write a criticism of the Laureate, but justly replies, "How is that possible?"

From 1865 we get numerous notices of the notices of the Essays , and a pleasant and full account of a second official tour on the Continent, with special dwellings at most of the Western and Central European capitals. The tour lasted from April to November, and I have sometimes thought that it might, by itself, give a better idea of Mr Arnold as an epistoler than the Letters at large seem to have given. Early in 1866 we hear of the beginnings of the Friendship's Garland series, though the occasion for that name did not come till afterwards. And he spent the summer of that year (as he did that of the next) in a farmhouse at West Humble, near Dorking, while he caught " a salmon" in the Deveron during September.

The occasion is perhaps a good one to say a few words on the relations between Mr Arnold and M. Renan, though the latter is not so prominent in the Continental letters as Sainte-Beuve and M. Scherer are. The author of the Vie de Jésus was a very slightly younger man than Mr Arnold (he was born in 1823), but in consequence of his having left the seminary and begun early to live by literary work, he was somewhat in advance of his English compeer in literary repute. His contributions to the Débats and the Revue des Deux Mondes began to be collected soon after 1850, and his first remarkable single book, Averroès et l'Averroisme , dates from that year. I do not know how early Mr Arnold became acquainted with his written work. But they actually met in 1859, during the business of the Foreign Education Commission, and there is a very remarkable passage in a letter to Mrs Forster on Christmas Eve of that year. He tells his sister of "Ernest Renan, a Frenchman I met in Paris," and notes the considerable resemblance between their lines of endeavour, observing, however, that Renan is chiefly "trying to inculcate morality, in a high sense of the word, on the French," while he is trying to inculcate intelligence on the English. After which he makes a long and enthusiastic reference to the essay, Sur la Poésie des Races Celtiques , the literary results of which we shall soon see. I do not know whether Mr Arnold ever expressed to his intimates - for the reference to M. Renan in "Numbers" is not quite explicit - what he thought of those later and very peculiar developments of "morality in a high sense of the word" which culminated in the Abbesse de Jouarre and other things. His sense of humour must have painfully suggested to him that his own familiar friend and pattern Frenchman had become one of the most conspicuous examples of that French lubricity which he himself denounced. But there was no danger of his imitating M. Renan in this respect. In others the following was quite unmistakable, and, I am bound to say, on the whole rather disastrous. In literary criticism Mr Arnold needed no teaching from M. Renan, and as his English training on one of its sides preserved him from the Frenchman's sentimental hedonism, so on another it kept him from the wildest excesses of M. Renan's critical reconstructions of sacred history. But he copied a great deal too much of his master's dilettante attitude to religion as a whole, and, as we shall see, he adopted and carried a great deal further M. Renan's (I am told) not particularly well-informed and (I am sure) very hazardous and fantastic ideas about Celtic literature. On the whole, the two were far too much alike to do each other any good. Exquisite even as M. Renan's mere style is, it is exquisite by reason of sweetness, with a certain not quite white and slightly phosphorescent light, not by strength or by practical and masculine force. Now it was the latter qualities that Mr Arnold wanted; sweetness and light he could not want.

As the tenure of his Chair drew to a close, and as he began to loathe examination papers more and more (indeed I know no one to whom usus concinnat amorem in the case of these documents), he made some endeavours to obtain employment which might be, if not both more profitable and less onerous, at any rate one or the other. First he tried for a Charity Commissionership; then for the librarianship of the House of Commons. For the former post it may be permitted to think that his extremely strong - in fact partisan - opinions, both on education and on the Church of England, were a most serious disqualification; his appointment to the latter would have been an honour to the House and to England, and would have shown that sometimes at any rate the right man can find the right place. But he got neither. He delivered his last Oxford lecture in the summer term of 1867. I remember that there were strong undergraduate hopes that Mr Browning, who was an Honorary M.A., might be got to succeed him; but it was decided that the honorary qualification was insufficient, and I daresay there were other objections. Mr Arnold had a sort of "send-off" in the shape of two great dinners at Balliol and Merton, at which he and Mr Browning were the principal guests, and the close of his professorial career was further made memorable by the issue of the
Study of Celtic Literature in prose and the New Poems in verse, with Schools and Universities on the Continent to follow next year. Of these something must be said before this chapter is closed.

On the Study of Celtic Literature is the first book of his to which, as a whole, and from his own point of view,