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

that the sonnet was not specially Mr Arnold's form. Its greatest examples have always been reached by the reflex, the almost combative, action of intense poetic feeling - Shakespeare's, Milton's, Wordsworth's, Rossetti's - and intensity was not Mr Arnold's characteristic. Yet
Austerity of Poetry, East London , and Monica's Last Prayer must always stand so high in the second class that it is hardly critical weakness to allow them the first. And then the tide rises. Calais Sands may not be more than very pretty, but it is that, and Dover Beach is very much more. Mr Arnold's theological prepossessions and assumptions may appear in it, and it may be unfortunately weak as an argument, for except the flood itself nothing is so certain a testimony to the flood as the ebb. But the order, the purpose, the argument, the subject, matter little to poetry. The expression, the thing that is not the subject, the tendency outside the subject, which makes for poetry, are here, and almost of the very best. Here you have that passionate interpretation of life, which is so different a thing from the criticism of it; that marvellous pictorial effect to which the art of line and colour itself is commonplace and banal , and which prose literature never attains except by a tour de force ; that almost more marvellous accompaniment of vowel and consonant music, independent of the sense but reinforcing it, which is the glory of English poetry among all, and of nineteenth-century poetry among all English, poetries. As is the case with most Englishmen, the sea usually inspired Mr Arnold - it is as natural to great English poets to leave the echo of the very word ringing at the close of their verse as it was to Dante to end with "stars." But it has not often inspired any poet so well as this, nor anywhere this poet better than here. If at any time a critic may without fatuity utter judgment with some confidence, it is where he disagrees with the sentiment and admires the poem; and for my part I find in Dover Beach , even without the
Merman , without the Scholar-Gipsy , without Isolation , a document which I could be content to indorse "Poetry, sans phrase ."

The Terrace at Berne has been already dealt with, but that mood for epicede, which was so frequent in Mr Arnold, finds in the Carnac stanzas adequate, and in A Southern Night consummate, expression.
The Fragment of Chorus of a Dejaneira , written long before, but now first published, has the usual faults of Mr Arnold's rhymeless verse. It is really quite impossible, when one reads such stuff as -

"Thither in your adversity
Do you betake yourselves for light,
But strangely misinterpret all you hear.
For you will not put on
New hearts with the inquirer's holy robe
And purged considerate minds" -

not to ask what, poetically speaking, is the difference between this and the following -

"To college in the pursuit of duly
Did I betake myself for lecture;
But very soon I got extremely wet,
For I had not put on
The stout ulster appropriate to Britain,
And my umbrella was at home."

But Palladium , if not magnificent, is reconciling, the Shakespearian
Youth's Agitations beautiful, and Growing Old delightful, not without a touch of terror. It is the reply, the verneinung , to Browning's magnificent Rabbi ben Ezra , and one has almost to fly to that stronghold in order to resist its chilling influence. But it is poetry for all that, and whatever there is in it of weakness is redeemed, though not quite so poetically, by The Last Word . The
Lines written in Kensington Gardens (which had appeared with
Empedocles , but were missed above) may be half saddened, half endeared to some by their own remembrance of the "black-crowned red-boled" giants there celebrated - trees long since killed by London smoke, as the good-natured say, as others, by the idiotic tidiness of the gardeners, who swept the needles up and left the roots without natural comfort and protection. And then, after lesser things, the interesting, if not intensely poetical, Epilogue to Lessing's Laocoon leads us to one of the most remarkable of all Mr Arnold's poems, Bacchanalia, or the New Age . The word remarkable has been used advisedly. Bacchanalia , though it has poignant and exquisite poetic moments, is not one of the most specially poetical of its author's pieces. But it is certainly his only considerable piece of that really poetic humour which is so rare and delightful a thing. And, like all poetic humour, it oscillates between cynicism and passion almost bewilderingly. For a little more of this what pages and pages of jocularity about Bottles and the Rev. Esau Hittall would we not have given! what volumes of polemic with the Guardian and amateur discussions of the Gospel of St John! In the first place, note the metrical structure, the sober level octosyllables of the overture changing suddenly to a dance-measure which, for a wonder in English, almost keeps the true dactylic movement. How effective is the rhetorical iteration of

"The famous orators have shone,
The famous poets sung and gone,"

and so on for nearly half a score of lines! How perfect the sad contrast of the refrain -

" Ah! so the quiet was!
So was the hush! "

how justly set and felicitously worded the rural picture of the opening! how riotous the famous irruption of the New Agers! how adequate the quiet-moral of the end, that the Past is as the Present, and more also! And then he went and wrote about Bottles!

"Progress," with a splendid opening -

"The master stood upon the mount and taught -
He saw a fire in his disciples' eyes," -

conducts us to two other fine, though rhymeless, dirges. In the first,
Rugby Chapel , the intensity of feeling is sufficient to carry off the lack of lyrical accomplishment. The other is the still better
Heine's Grave , and contains the famous and slightly pusillanimous lines about the "weary Titan," which are among the best known of their author's, and form at once the motto and the stigma of mid-century Liberal policy. And then the book is concluded by two other elegies - in rhyme this time - The Stanzas written at the Grande Chartreuse and Obermann once more . They are, however, elegies of a different kind, much more self-centred, and, indeed, little more than fresh variations on "the note," as I ventured to call it before. Their descriptive and autobiographic interest is great, and if poetry were a criticism of life, there is plenty of that of them. The third book - Schools and Universities on the Continent (1868) - in which are put the complete results of the second Continental exploration - is, I suppose, much less known than the non-professional work, though perhaps not quite so unknown as the earlier report on elementary education. By far the larger part of it - the whole, indeed, except a "General Conclusion" of some forty pages - is a reasoned account of the actual state of matters in France, Italy, Germany, and Switzerland. It is not exactly judicial; for the conclusion - perhaps the foregone conclusion - obviously colours every page. But it is an excellent example (as, indeed, is all its author's non-popular writing) of clear and orderly exposition - never arranged ad captandum , but also never "dry." Indeed there certainly are some tastes, and there may be many, to which the style is a distinct relief after the less quiet and more mannered graces of some of the rest.

Opinions may differ more as to the value of the book as a lesson, or as an argument. Mr Arnold had started with a strong belief in the desirableness - indeed of the necessity - of State-control of the most thoroughgoing kind in education; and he was not at all likely to miss the opportunity of fetching new weapons from the very arsenals and
places d'armes of that system. He was thoroughly convinced that English ways generally, and especially the ways of English schools and colleges, were wrong; and he had, of course, no difficulty in pointing triumphantly to the fact that, if the institutions of Continental countries differed in some ways from each other, they all differed in nearly the same way from ours. It may undoubtedly be claimed for him - by those who see any force in the argument - that events have followed him. Education, both secondary and university in England,
has to a large extent gone since on the lines he indicates; the threatened superiority of the German bagman has asserted itself even more and more; the "teaching of literature" has planted a terrible fixed foot in our schools and colleges. But perhaps the weight usually assigned to this kind of corroboration is rather imaginary. That a thing has happened does not prove that it ought to have happened, except on a theory of determinism, which puts "conduct" out of sight altogether. There are those who will still, in the vein of Mephistopheles-Akinetos, urge that the system which gave us the men who pulled us out of the Indian Mutiny can stand comparison with the system which gave France the authors of the débâcle ; that the successes of Germany over France in war have no necessary connection with education, and those of Germany over England in commerce, diplomacy, &c., still less. They will even go further - some of them - and ask whether the Continental practices and the Arnoldian principles do not necessitate divers terribly large and terribly ill-based assumptions, as that all men are educable , that the value of education is undiminished by its diffusion, that all, or at least most, subjects are capable of being made educational instruments, and a great many more.

On the other hand, they will cheerfully grant that Mr Arnold never succumbed to that senseless belief in examination which has done, and is doing, such infinite harm. But they will add to the debit side that the account of English university studies which ends the book was even at the time of writing so inaccurate as to be quite incomprehensible, unless we suppose that Mr Arnold was thinking of the days of his own youth, and not of those with complete accuracy. He says "the examination for the degree of bachelor of arts, which we place at the end of our three years' university course, is merely the
Abiturienten-examen of Germany, the épreuve du baccalauréat of France, placed in both those countries at the entrance to university studies"; and it is by this that he justifies Signer Matteucci's absurd description of Oxford and Cambridge as hauts lyceés Now, in the first place, there is not one single word in this sentence, or in the context, or, so far as I remember, in the whole book, about the Honours system, which for very many years before 1868 had exalted the standard infinitely higher in the case of a very large proportion of men. And in the second place, there is not a word about the Scholarship system, which in the same way had for very many years provided