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

the best intellectual training in the world. When they are divided, it may be feared that law becomes a mere technicality, if not a mere bread-study, and that history is at once thin and vague.

But Clio must have made interest with Nemesis; for, but a page or two afterwards, this disregard of history leads Mr Arnold into a very odd blunder. His French friend, M. Fontanès, had thought of writing about Godwin, but Mr Arnold dissuades him. "Godwin," he says, "est intéressant, mais il n'est pas une source; des courants actuels qui nous portent, aucun ne vient de lui." Godwin is the high priest of Anarchism; he is our first Socialist philosopher, he advocated no marriage, woman's rights, the abolition of religion. And dans nos courants actuels rien ne vient de lui! This was early in 1876, and later in the same year we have from him the singular judgment that George Sand, just dead, was "the greatest spirit in our European world from the time that Goethe departed." The chronicle may be appropriately closed for the time by mentioning that in the spring of 1877 Mr Arnold was approached with a view to his standing once more for the Poetry Chair, and declined. The invitation, however, was a sort of summons to him to go back to his proper work, and in effect, though doubtless not in intention, he had already obeyed it. "A French Critic on Milton," published in January 1877, is the first literary article of any importance that his bibliography records for the whole decade which we have surveyed in this chapter.

Note. - It is particularly unlucky that the Prose Passages , which the author selected from his works and published in 1879, did not appear later. It is almost sufficient to say that less than one-fourth of their contents is devoted to literature, all the rest to the "Dead Sea fruit." I have therefore said nothing about the book in the text. It is, however, a useful though incomplete and one-sided chrestomathy of Mr Arnold's style from the formal point of view, illustrating both his minor devices of phrase and the ingenious
ordonnance of his paragraphs in building up thought and statement.


FOOTNOTES:

[1] Mr Disraeli's words (in 1864) have been referred to above (p. 100). They were actually: "At that time [when they had met at Lord Houghton's some seven or eight years earlier] ... you yourself were little known. Now you are well known. You have made a reputation, but you will go further yet. You have a great future before you, and you deserve it." Crabb Robinson was a much older acquaintance, and is credited, I believe, with the remark far earlier, that "he shouldn't
dare to be intimate" with so clever a young man as Matthew Arnold. Very shortly before his death in February 1867, he had met Mr Arnold in the Athenæum, and asked "which of all my books I should myself name as the one that had got me my great reputation. I said I had not a great reputation, upon which he answered: 'Then it is some other Matthew Arnold who writes the books.'" The passage, which contains an odd prophecy of the speaker's own death, and an interesting indication that Mr Arnold rightly considered the
Essays to be "the book that got him his reputation," will be found in Letters , i. 351.

[2] Of the remaining contents, the Prefaces of 1853-5 are invaluable, at least the first is, but this has been already noticed. Of The French Play in London , I am, perhaps, no good judge, as I take little interest in the acted drama. It is much occupied with the inferiority of French poetry, and especially of the poetry of Hugo; the inferiority of English civilisation, especially of the middle class. There are good things in it, but they are better said elsewhere. The rest needs no notice.

[3] A note on the contents of this and the subsequent collected editions may not be unwelcome; for, as was always the case with him, he varied them not a little. This first collection was advertised as comprehending "the First and Second Series of the Author's Poems and the New Poems," but as a matter of fact half-a-dozen pieces - including things as interesting as A Dream and Stagirius - are omitted, though the fine In Utrumque Paratus reappears for the first time as a consolation. As reprinted in 1877, this collection dropped The Church of Brou except the third part, and recovered not only
Stagirius and others but The New Sirens , besides giving, for the first time in book-form, Haworth Churchyard , printed twenty-two years before in Fraser . A further reprint in 1881 restored the whole
Church of Brou and A Dream , and gave two or three small additions, especially Geist's Grave . The three-volume edition of 1885 also republished Merope for the first time, and added Westminster Abbey and Poor Matthias . The one -volume edition of 1890 reproduced all this, adding Horatian Echo and Kaiser Dead ; it is complete save for the two prize poems, and six or seven smaller pieces.

[4] "I do not like the course for the History School at all; nothing but read, read, read, endless histories in English, many of them by quite second-rate men; nothing to form the mind as reading really great authors forms it, or even to exercise it as learning a new language, or mathematics, or one of the natural sciences exercises it."


CHAPTER V.


THE LAST DECADE.

It would be unhistorical to assert, and unphilosophical to assume, that in the change or reversion noted at the end of the last chapter, Mr Arnold had any consciousness of relinquishment, still more to hint any definite sense of failure on his part. He would probably have said (if any one had been impertinent enough to ask, and he had condescended to reply) that he had said his say, had shot his bolt, and might leave them to produce their effect. But that there was, if no repentance, a certain disgust, I cannot but believe. He must have seen - he almost acknowledges that he saw - that the work which he at least thought was conservative was being utilised by others in a purely destructive spirit; he must have found himself in very unwelcome alliances; and (which is worst of all to a delicate and sensitive spirit) he must constantly have found fools dotting his
i 's and emphasising his innuendoes in their own clumsy and Philistine fashion. At any rate, it is purely historical to say that he did henceforward almost entirely change his main line of operation as to religious matters, and that though, as has been shown, he persisted, not too fortunately, in politics, his method of discussion in that likewise was altered. As we heard no more of the three Lord Shaftesburys, so Bottles and his unwelcome society were permitted to remain unchronicled. In the latter department seriousness came upon Mr Arnold; in the former, if not a total, yet a general and certainly most welcome silence.

Most welcome: for he was voiceful enough on other and his proper subjects. "Falkland," which followed "A French Critic on Milton," in March in the Fortnightly , and "George Sand," which followed it, as has been said, in June in the Nineteenth Century , somewhat deserved the title ( Mixed Essays ) of the volume in which they were two years later reprinted. But the last essay of the year 1877, that on Mr Stopford Brooke's Primer , was, like the "French Critic," and even more than that, pure literature. "A French Critic on Goethe," which appeared in the Quarterly Review for January 1878, followed next. The other pieces of this year, which also, with one exception, appeared in Mixed Essays , were, with that exception, evidences of a slight but venial relapse, or let us say of convalescence not yet quite turned into health. "Equality" ( Fortnightly , March 1878), "Irish Catholicism and British Liberalism" ( Fortnightly , July 1878), and "Porro Unum est Necessarium" ( Fortnightly , November 1878), were, if not of "the utmost last provincial band," yet not of the pure Quirites, the genuine citizens of the sacred city of Mr Arnold's thought: and he seceded from this latter in not a few of those estimable but unimportant Irish essays which have been noticed in the last chapter.

But the literary contents of Mixed Essays are very interesting, and the Johnson paper (really a preface to the six selected lives, which he edited for Messrs Macmillan in 1878) is a most excellent piece of work. His selection of the Lives is perhaps not quite unerring. For he ought surely to have given the "Cowley," with its (from his own point of view) invaluable point de repère in the estimate of the "metaphysicals." And he might have missed the "Swift," which, though extremely interesting as a personal study from its mixture of prejudice and constraint, its willingness to wound, and yet - not its fear but - its honest compunction at striking, is, for the purpose of the volume, misplaced. But he had a right to give what he chose: and his preface has points of the very highest value. The opening passage about the point de repère itself, the fixed halting-place to which we can always resort for fresh starts, fresh calculations, is one of the great critical loci of the world, and especially involves the main contribution of the nineteenth century to criticism if not to literature altogether. We may exalt, without very much doubt or dread, the positive achievements of the century of Tennyson and Browning, of Carlyle and Thackeray, of Heine and Hugo. But we have seen such strange revolutions in this respect that it may not do to be too confident. The glory of which no man can deprive our poor dying siècle is that not one, of all the others since history began, has taken such pains to understand those before it, has, in other words, so discovered and so utilised the value of points de repère . It may be that this value is, except in the rarest cases, all that a critic can ever pretend to - that he may be happy if, as few do, he reaches this. But in the formulation of the idea (for he did much more than merely borrow it from the French) Mr Arnold showed his genius, his faculty of putting

"What oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed."

And when a man does this in prose or in verse, in criticism or in creation, he has his reward - a reward that no man can take away, even if any one were disposed to try.

As a whole, Mixed Essays itself, which followed Last Essays on Church and Religion at an interval of two years, is an almost immeasurably livelier book than its predecessor, and to some judgments at least seems to excel that predecessor in solid value as much as in the graces. "Mixed" is perhaps not a strictly accurate title, for the volume consists of two halves, the contents of each of which are homogeneous enough, but which have next to nothing to do with each other. But even in the non-literary essays we are out of "The Wilderness" in its worst sense. Most of the essays had, as has just been shown,