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

we may take rather serious objections. That it has merits not affected by these objections need hardly be said; indeed I think it would not be foolish to say that it is - or was - even the superior of the Homer in comparative and indirect importance. In that Mr Arnold had but, at the best, roused men to enter upon new ways of dealing with old and familiar matter; in this he was leading them to conquest of new realms. Now, as we have seen, it was exactly this exploration, this expansion, of which English was then in most need, just as it is now perhaps in most need of concentration and retreat upon the older acquisitions.

So far so good; but if we go farther, we do not at first fare better. It would be grossly unjust to charge Mr Arnold with all the nonsense which has since been talked about Celtic Renascences; but I fear we cannot write all that nonsense off his account. In particular, he set an example, which has in this and other matters been far too widely followed, of speaking without sufficient knowledge of fact. It cannot be too peremptorily laid down that the literary equivalent of a "revoke" - the literary act after which, if he does it on purpose, you must not play with a man - is speaking of authors and books which he has not read and cannot read in the original, while he leaves you ignorant of his ignorance. This Mr Arnold never committed, and could never have committed. But short of it, and while escaping its penalty, a man may err by speaking too freely even of what he confesses that he does not know; and of this minor and less discreditable sin, I own (acknowledging most frankly that I know even less of the originals than he did), I think Mr Arnold was here guilty.

Exactly how much Gaelic, Irish, or Welsh Mr Arnold knew at first-hand, I cannot say: he frankly enough confesses that his knowledge was very closely limited. But what is really surprising, is that he does not seem to have taken much trouble to extend it at second-hand. A very few Welsh triads and scraps of Irish are all that, even in translation, he seems to have consulted: he never, I think, names Dafydd ap Gwilym, usually put forward as the greatest of Celtic poets; and in the main his citations are derived either from Ossian ("this do seem going far," as an American poetess observes), or else from the Mabinogion , where some of the articles are positively known to be late translations of French-English originals, and the others are very uncertain. You really cannot found any safe literary generalisations on so very small a basis of such very shaky matter. In fact, Mr Arnold's argument for the presence of "Celtic magic," &c., in Celtic poetry comes to something like this. "There is a quality of magic in Shakespeare, Keats, &c.; this magic must be Celtic: therefore it must be in Celtic poetry." Fill up the double enthymeme who list, I am not going to endeavour to do so. I shall only say that two sentences give the key-note of the book as argument. "Rhyme itself, all the weight of evidence tends to show, came into our poetry from the Celts." Now to some of us all the weight of evidence tends to show that it came from the Latins. "Our only first-rate body of contemporary poetry is the German." Now at the time (1867), for more than thirty years, Germany had not had a single poet of the first or the second class except Heine, who, as Mr Arnold himself very truly says, was not a German but a Jew.

But once more, what we go to Mr Matthew Arnold for is not fact, it is not argument, it is not even learning. It is phrase, attitude, style, that by which, as he says admirably in this very book, "what a man has to say is recast and heightened in such a manner as to add dignity and distinction to it." It is the new critical attitude, the appreciation of literary beauty in and for itself, the sense of "the word," the power of discerning and the power of reflecting charm, the method not more different from the wooden deduction of the old school of critics than from the merely unenlightened and Philistine commonness of the reviewers, his earlier contemporaries, or from the aimless "I like that" and "I don't like this" which does duty now, and did then, and has done always, for criticism itself. True, Mr Arnold himself might be wilful, capricious, haphazard; true, he might often be absolutely unable to give any real reason for the faith that was in him; true, he sometimes might have known more than he did know about his subject. But in all these points he saved himself: in his wilfulness, by the grace and charm that sometimes attend caprice; in his want of reason, by his genuineness of faith itself; in his occasional lack of the fullest knowledge, by the admirable use - not merely display - which he made of what knowledge he had. There may be hardly a page of the two books of his lectures in which it is not possible to find some opportunity for disagreement - sometimes pretty grave disagreement; but I am sure that no two more valuable books, in their kind and subject, to their country and time, have been ever issued from the press.

The New Poems make a volume of unusual importance in the history of poetical careers. Mr Arnold lived more than twenty years after the date of their publication; but his poetical production during that time filled no more than a few pages. At this date he was a man of forty-five - an age at which the poetical impulse has been supposed to run low, but perhaps with no sufficient reason. Poets of such very different types as Dryden and Tennyson have produced work equal to their best, if not actually their best, at that age and later. Mr Browning had, a few years before, produced what are perhaps his actually greatest volumes, Men and Women and Dramatis Personae , the one at forty-three, the other at fifty-two. According to Mr Arnold's own conception of poetry-making, as depending upon the subject and upon the just and artist-like exposition of that subject, no age should be too late.

Certainly this age was not too late with him. The contents all answered strictly enough to their title, except that Empedocles on Etna and some half-dozen of its companions were, at Mr Browning's request, reprinted from the almost unpublished volume of 1852, and that Thyrsis, St Brandan, A Southern Night , and the Grande Chartreuse had made magazine appearances. Again the moment was most important. When Mr Arnold had last made (omitting with an apology the "transient and embarrassed phantom" of Merope ) an appearance in 1855, the transition age of English nineteenth-century poetry was in full force. No one's place was safe but Tennyson's; and even his was denied by some, including Mr Arnold himself, who never got his eyes quite clear of scales in that matter. Browning, though he had handed in indisputable proofs, had not yet had them allowed; the Spasmodics had not disappeared; the great prae-Raphaelite school was but on the way. The critics knew not what to think; the vulgar thought (to the tune of myriad copies) of Tupper. Both classes, critic and public, rent Maud and neglected Men and Women: The Defence of Guenevere had not yet rung the matins - bell in the ears of the new generation.

Now things were all altered. The mixture of popularity and perfection in the Idylls and the Enoch Arden volume - the title poem and Aylmer's Field for some, The Voyage and Tithonus and In the Valley of Cauterets for others - had put Tennyson's place

"Beyond the arrows, shouts, and views of men."

The three-volume collection of Browning's Poems , and
Dramatis Personae which followed to clench it, had nearly, if not quite, done the same for him. The Defence of Guenevere and
The Life and Death of Jason, Atalanta, Chastelard , and most of all the Poems and Ballads , had launched an entirely new poetical school with almost unexampled pomp and promise on the world. The Spasmodics were forgotten, the Tupper cult had been nearly (not yet quite) laughed out of existence. That Mr Arnold's own poems had had any widely extended sale or reading could hardly be said; but they were read by those who were or were shortly to be themselves read. You had not to look far in any Oxford college (I cannot speak of Cambridge) before you found them on those undergraduate shelves which mean so much; while many who, from general distaste to poetry or from accident, knew them not, or hardly knew them, were familiar with their author's prose work, or at least knew him as one whom others knew.

The volume itself was well calculated to take advantage, to at least a moderate extent, of this conjunction of circumstance. At no time was the appeal of Mr Arnold's poetry of the most impetuous or peremptory order. And it might be contended that this collection contains nothing quite up to the very best things of the earlier poems, to the
Shakespeare sonnet, to The Scholar-Gipsy , to the Isolation stanzas. But with the majority of its readers it was sure rather to send them to these earlier things than to remind them thereof, and its own attractions were abundant, various, and strong.

In the poet himself there was perhaps a slight consciousness of "the silver age." The prefatory Stanzas , a title changed in the collected works to Persistency of Poetry , sound this note -

"Though the Muse be gone away,
Though she move not earth to-day,
Souls, erewhile who caught her word,
Ah! still harp on what they heard."

A confession perhaps a little dangerous, when the Muses were speaking in no uncertain tones not merely to juniors like Mr Morris and Mr Swinburne but to seniors like Tennyson and Browning. But the actual contents were more than reassuring. Of Empedocles it is not necessary to speak again: Thyrsis could not but charm. The famous line,

"And that sweet city with her dreaming spires,"

sets the key dangerously high; but it is kept by the magnificent address to the cuckoo,

"Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go?"

and the flower-piece that follows; by that other single masterpiece,

"The coronals of that forgotten time;"

by the more solemn splendour of the stanza beginning

"And long the way appears which seemed so short;"

by the Signal tree; and by the allegoric close with the reassertion of the Scholar. All these things stand by themselves, hold their sure and reserved place, even in the rush and crowd of the poetry of the sixties, the richest, perhaps, since the time from 1805 to 1822.

Saint Brandan , which follows, has pathos if not great power, and connects itself agreeably with those Celtic and mediæval studies which had just attracted and occupied Mr Arnold. The sonnets which form the next division might be variously judged. None of them equals the Shakespeare ; and one may legitimately hold the opinion