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

largeness of temper, was most natural, and its sources most obvious. It would be cruel, and is quite unnecessary, to insist on the too certain fact that, in this instance at any rate, these excellent qualities were accompanied by a distinct weakness of will, by a mania for sitting between two stools, and by that - it may be lovable, it may be even estimable - incapacity to think, to speak, to behave like a man of this world, which besets the conscientious idealist who is not a fanatic. On the contrary, let us not grudge Mr Arnold a hero so congenial to himself, and so little repulsive to any of us. He could not have had a better subject; nor can Falkland ever hope for a vates better consecrated, by taste, temper, and ability, to sing his praises.

Then we are back again in pure literature, with the two notable
Quarterly articles, already glanced at, on M. Scherer as "A French Critic on Milton" and "A French Critic on Goethe." There was a very strong sympathy, creditable to both, between the two. M. Scherer went further than Mr Arnold in the negative character of his views on religion; but they agreed as to dogma. His literary criticism was somewhat harder and drier than Mr Arnold's; but the two agreed in acuteness, lucidity, and a wide, if not quite a thoroughgoing, use of the comparative method. Both were absolutely at one in their uncompromising exaltation of "conduct." So that Mr Arnold was writing quite con amore when he took up his pen to recommend M. Scherer to the British public, which mostly knew him not at that time.

But he did not begin directly with his main subject. He had always, as we have seen, had a particular grudge at Macaulay, who indeed represented in many ways the tendencies which Mr Arnold was born to oppose. Now just at this time certain younger critics, while by no means championing Macaulay generally, had raised pretty loud and repeated protests against Mr Arnold's exaggerated depreciation of the
Lays as "pinchbeck"; and I am rather disposed to think that he took this opportunity for a sort of sally in flank. He fastens on one of Macaulay's weakest points, a point the weakness of which was admitted by Macaulay himself - the "gaudily and ungracefully ornamented" (as its author calls it) Essay on Milton . And he points out, with truth enough, that its "gaudy and ungraceful ornament" is by no means its only fault - that it is bad as criticism, that it shows no clear grasp of Milton's real merits, that it ignores his faults, that it attributes to him qualities which were the very reverse of his real qualities. He next deals slighter but still telling blows at Addison, defends Johnson, in passing, as only negatively deficient in the necessary qualifications, not positively conventional like Addison, or rhetorical like Macaulay, and then with a turn, itself excellently rhetorical in the good sense, passes to M. Scherer's own dealings with the subject. Thenceforward he rather effaces himself, and chiefly abstracts and summarises the "French Critic's" deliverances, laying special stress on the encomiums given to Milton's style. The piece is one of his most artfully constructed; and I do not anywhere know a better example of ingenious and attractive introduction of a friend, as we may call it, to a new society.

The method is not very different in "A French Critic on Goethe," though Carlyle, the English "awful example" selected for contrast, is less maltreated than Macaulay, and shares the disadvantageous part with Lewes, and with divers German critics. On the whole, this essay, good as it is, seems to me less effective than the other; perhaps because Mr Arnold is in less accord with his author, and even seems to be in two minds about that author's subject - about Goethe himself. Earlier, as we have partly seen, he had, both in prose and in verse, spoken with praise - for him altogether extraordinary, if not positively extravagant - of Goethe; he now seems a little doubtful, and asks rather wistfully for "the just judgment of forty years," the calm revised estimate of the Age of Wisdom. But M. Scherer's estimate is in parts lower than he can bring himself to admit; and this turns the final passages of the essay into a rather unsatisfactory chain of "I agree with this," "I do not agree with that." But the paper retains the great merit which has been assigned to its predecessor as a piece of ushering; and that, we must remember, was what it was designed to be.

In "George Sand," which completes the volume, we have Mr Arnold no longer as harbinger of another, but in the character, in which after all he is most welcome, of speaker on his own account. His estimate of this prolific amuseuse will probably in the long-run seem excessive to the majority of catholic and comparative critics; nor is it at all difficult to account for the excess. Mr Arnold belonged exactly to the generation to which in England, even more than in France, George Sand came as a soothing and sympathetic exponent of personal sorrows. Even the works of her "storm-and-stress" period were not too far behind them; and her later calmer productions seem to have had, at least for some natures among the "discouraged generation of 1850" (to which, as we have said, Mr Arnold himself by his first publications belonged), something of that healing power which he has assigned, in larger measure and with greater truth, to Wordsworth. A man is never to be blamed for a certain generous overvaluation of those who have thus succoured him; it would be as just to blame him for thinking his mother more beautiful, his father wiser than they actually were. And Mr Arnold's obituary here has a great deal of charm. The personal and biographical part is done with admirable taste, not a grain too much or too little of that moi so
haïssable in excess, so piquant as a mere seasoning, being introduced: and the panegyric is skilful in the extreme. To be sure, Mr Hamerton reappears, and Mr Arnold joins in the chorus of delight because the French peasant no longer takes off his hat. Alas! there is no need to go to the country of La Terre to discover this sign of moral elevation. But the delusion itself is only another proof of Mr Arnold's constancy to his early ideas. And looking back on the whole volume, one is almost tempted to say that, barring the first
Essays in Criticism itself, he had written no better book.

Before very long the skill in selecting and editing which had been first applied to Johnson's Lives found extended opportunities. Mr Arnold had much earlier, in the Essays in Criticism , expressed a wish that the practice of introducing books by a critical and biographical Essay, which had long been naturalised in France, and had in former times not been unknown in England, should be revived among us. His words had been heard even before he himself took up the practice, and for about the usual time - your thirty years is as a matter of fact your generation - it flourished and prospered, not let us hope to the great detriment of readers, and certainly to the modest advantage of the public man when vexed by want of pence. Nor can it exactly be said to have ceased - though for some years grumbles have been uttered. "Why," says one haughty critic, - "why mar a beautiful edition of So-and-so's works by incorporating with them this or that man's estimate of their value?" "The publishers," says an inspired
communiqué , "are beginning to recognise that the public has no need of such things in the case of works of established repute, of which there is nothing new to be said." No doubt both these are genuine utterances: no doubt the haughty critic would have steadily refused to "mar" the book by his estimate if he had been asked to do so; no doubt the particular firm of publishers were not in the least influenced by a desire to save the ten, twenty, fifty, or a hundred guineas which this or that man might have demanded for saying nothing new.

But Mr Arnold did not agree with these severe folk. He thought - and not a few good wits have thought with him - not only that these Introductions are an opportunity for men like himself, with original gifts of thought and style, to display these gifts, but that the mighty public, for all its knowledge of everything that has been thought and said about everybody, might find something new to it even in the observations of lesser folk. As a matter of fact, of course, and neither to talk nor to quote nonsense, the utility of such Introductions, even if moderately well done, is unmistakable. Not one in a thousand of the probable readers of any book has all the information which even a fairly competent introducer will put before him; not one in a hundred knows the previous estimates of the author; not many possess that acquaintance with his whole work which it is part of the business of the introducer to acquire, and adjust for the better understanding of the particular book. Of course, if an Introduction is imperfectly furnished with fact and thought and reading - if it is desultory, in bad taste, and so forth - it had better not be there. But this is only saying that a bad Introduction is a bad thing, which does not get us much beyond the intellectual edification of the niece of Gorboduc. Unless the introducer is a boggler, the Introduction will probably do good to those who want it and can be neglected by those who don't; while in the rarer and better cases it will itself acquire, or even possess from the first, that very value as a point de repère which Mr Arnold had discussed. It will be good relatively and good in itself, - a contribution at once to the literature of knowledge and to the literature of power.

Of Mr Arnold's efforts in editing I may be permitted to neglect his "intromittings" with Isaiah, for reasons already sufficiently given. In more hopeful matter there are three examples which are not soon likely to lose interest or value: the selection of his own poems, that from Wordsworth, and that from Byron. To the first the English habits of his own day did not permit him to prefix any extensive Introduction, and though the principle is sound, one is almost sorry for the application. Neither Wordsworth nor Coleridge would have had any scruples in doing this, and while Mr Arnold had the sense of the ludicrous which Wordsworth lacked, he was less subject to disastrous divagations than Coleridge. Still, the 1853 Preface enables those who have some slight power of expansion to fill in what is wanted from the point of view of purpose; and the selection itself is quite excellent. Almost the only things that, as a basis for a good knowledge of the poet, one finds it necessary to subjoin, are the beautiful
Resignation , which Mr Humphry Ward had the good taste to include in the appendix to his English Poets ; and the curious, characteristic, and not much short of admirable Dream , which in the earlier issues formed part of Switzerland , and should never have been excluded from it. It is probably the best selection by a poet from his own works that has ever been issued, and this is saying not a little.