Matthew Arnold

d Series of Poems-Merop

be long, for the life, as has been said, was not in the ordinary sense eventful; but it is necessary, and can be in this chapter usefully interspersed with an account of his

hey now had three children), could have endured the other thing so long. There is no direct information in the Letters as to the reason of this nomadic existence, the only headquarters of which appear to have been the residence of Mrs Arnold's father, the judge, in Eaton Place, with flights to friends' houses and to lodgings at the places of inspection and others, especially Dover and Brighton. And gue

ts whether it be worse for an inspector or for the school inspected by him, that he should have no opportunity for food from breakfast to four o'clock, when he staves off death by inviting disease in the shape of the malefic bun; for him or for certain luckless pupil-teachers that, after dinner, he should be "in for [them] till

r Majesty's Inspector. The agreeable anomalies of the British legal system (which, let Dickens and other grumblers say what they like, have made many good people happy and only a few miserable) allowed Mr Arnold for many years to act (sometimes while simultaneously inspec

kind throughout (except, perhaps, in the case of Browning). The first is on Alexander Smith-it was the time of the undue ascension of the Life-Drama rocket before its equally undue fall. "It can do me no good [an odd phrase] to be irritated with that young man, who certainly has an extraordinary faculty, although I think he is a phenomenon of a very dubious character." The second, harsher but more definite, is on Villette. "Why is Villette disagreeable? Because the writer's mind [it is worth remembering that he had met Charlotte Bront? at Miss Martineau's] contains nothing but hunger, rebellion, and rage, and therefore that is all she can in fact put into her book. No fine writing can hide t

t, with that almost unconscious naturalness which is particularly noticeable in him, he is much dissatisfied with Oxford-thinks it (as we all do) terribly fallen off since his days. Perhaps the infusion of Dissenters' sons (it is just at the time of the first Commission in 1854) may brace its flaccid sinews, though the middle-class, he confesses, is abominably disagreeable. He sees a good deal of this poor middle-class in his inspecting tours, and decides elsewhere about the same time that "of all dull, stagnant, unedifying entourages, that of middle-class Dis

ear: Stagirius is called Desire, and the Stanzas in Memory of the Author of Obermann now become Obermann simply. Only two absolutely new poems, a longer and a shorter, appear: the first is Balder Dead, the second Separation, the added number of Faded Leaves. This is of no great value. Balder is interesting, though not extremely good. Its subject is connected with that of Gray's Descent of Odin, but handled much more full

e, with a practically invariable re-election for another five-there is at least the opportunity, which, since Mr Arnold's own time, has been generally taken, of maintaining and refreshing the distinction of the occupant of the chair. Before his time there had been a good many undistinguished professors, but Warton and Keble, in their different ways, must have adorned even a Chair of Poetry even in the University of Oxford. Above all, the entire (or almost entire) freedom of action left to the Professor should have, and in the case of Keble at least had already had, the most stimulating effect on minds capable of stimulation. For the Professor of Poetry at Oxford is neither, like some Professors, bound to the chariot-wheels of examinations and courses of set teaching, nor, like others, has he to feel that his best, his most original, efforts can have no interest, and hardly

they belonged was as a dominant phase at its height, and as a crescent was beginning to give place to another. Within a few years-in most cases within a few months-of Mr Arnold's installation, The Defence of Guenevere and FitzGerald's Omar Khayyam heralded fresh forms of poetry which have not been superseded yet; The Origin of Species and Essays and Reviews announced changed attitudes of th

t creation is falsified. But it most certainly is falsified here. The criticism of the great Romantic period of 1798-1830 was done for it by itself, and in some cases by its greatest practitioners, not by its immediate successors. The philosophic as well as poetical intuition of Coleridge; the marvellous if capricious sympathy and the more marvellous phrase of Lamb; the massive and masculine if not always quite trustworthy or well-governed intellect of Hazlitt, had left no likes behind. Two survivors of this great race, Leigh Hunt and De Quincey, were indeed critics, and no inconsiderable ones; but the natural force of both had long be

n some cases had not outgrown the rough uncivil ways of the great revolutionary struggle. Between these the average critic, if not quite so ignorant of literature as a certain proportion of the immensely larger body of reviewers to-day, was certainly even more blind to its general principles. Such critical work as that of Phillips, long a favourite pen on the Times, and enjoying (I do not know with how much justice) the repute of being the person whom Thackeray's Thunder and Small Beer has gibbeted for ever, excites amazement no

tion of Michelet, the milder and feebler but still inspiring enthusiasm of Quinet, the academic clearness and discipline of Villemain and Nisard, the Lucianic wit of Mérimée, the matchless appreciation of Gautier, and, above all, the great new critical idiosyncrasy of Sainte-Beuve. Between these men there were the widest possible differences, not merely of personal taste and genius, but of literary theory and practice. But where they all differed quite infinitely from th

together again, comparing, setting things in different lights and in different companies, to have much time for dithyrambs. And the preference of second-to first-class subjects, which has been also urged, is little more than the result of the fact that these processes are more telling, more intere

re correctly called a Professor of Criticism) had long entertained the wish to attempt, and now had the means of effecting, a reform in English criticism, partly on Sainte-Beuve's own lines, partly on others whic

ut the reviewers were not pleased. The Athen?um review is "a choice specimen of style," and the Spectator "of argumentation"; the Saturday Review is only "deadly prosy," but none were exactly favourable till G.H. Lewes in The Leader was "very gratifying." Private criticism was a little kinder. The present Archbishop of Canterbury (to whom, indeed, Mr Arnold had just given "a flaming testimonial for Rugby") read it "with astonishment at its goodness," a sentence which, it may be observed, is a little double-edged. Kingsley (whom the editor of the Letters good-nature

r. With minor variations, the story as generally dramatised is this. Merope, the widowed queen of the murdered Heraclid Cresphontes, has saved her youngest son from the murderer and usurper, Polyphontes, and sent him out of the country. When he has grown up, and has secretly returned to Messenia to take vengeance, Polyphontes is pressing Merope to let bygones be bygones and marry him, so as to reconcile the jarring parties in the State. ?pytus, the son, to facilitate his reception, represents himself as a

or not? And Mr Arnold, with the heroic obstinacy of the doctrinaire, has done nothing to help the effect of a scheme in itself sufficiently uninspiring to the modern reader. When he was at work upon the piece he had "thought and hoped" that it would have what Buddha called "the character of Fixity, that true sign of the law." A not unfriendly critic might have pointed out, with gloomy forebodings, that a sign of law is not necessarily a sign of poetry, and that, as a prophet of his own had laid it down, poetry should "transport" not "fix." At any rate, it is clear to any one who reads the book that the author was in a mood of deliberate provocation and exaggeration-not a favourable mood for art. The quiet grace of Sophocles is perhaps impossible to reproduce in English, but Mr Arnold's verse is more than quiet, i

thers rove

two did

ones that th

ird, what

unattaine

this worthy action?" To which the only answer can be, "Sir, the action is rather uninteresting. Save at o

t mere pastiches and plaster models of them, are still to be had, and of the very best! But the fact is, thirdly, that Mr Arnold, as all men so often do, and as he not very seldom did, was clearly trying not so much to extol one thing as to depreciate another. Probably in his heart of hearts (which is generally a much wiser heart than that according to which the mouth speaks and the pen writes) he knew his failure. At any rate, he never attempted anything of the kind again, and Merope, that queen of plaster, remains alone in his gallery, with, as we see in other galleries, merely some disjecta membra-"F

ermination of his tenure in 1867. It may be questioned whether he ever did anything of more influence than these books, this being due partly to the fashion of their publication-which, in the latter case at least, applied the triple shock of lecture at the greatest of English literary centres, of magazine article, and of book-and partly to the fact that they were about subjects in which a real or a factitious, a direct or an indirect, interest was taken by almost every one. Every educated person knew and cared something (or at least would not have liked to be supposed not t

more than the Essays in Criticism themselves, a stimulating effect upon English men of letters which can hardly be overvalued. It may

le art of criticism. For the first time (even Coleridge with much wider reading had not co-ordinated it from this point of view) we find the two great ancient and the three or four great modern literatures of Europe taken synoptically, used to illustrate and explain each other, to point out each other's defects and throw up each other's merits. Almost for the first time, too, we have ancient literature treated more or less like modern-neither from the merely philological point of view, nor with reference to the stock platitudes and traditions about it. The critic is not afraid of doctrines and general principles-in fact, he is rather too fond of them-but his object is anything rather than mere arid deduction and codification. He

st eccentric even of English scholars. It is difficult not to think that Mr Arnold makes too much of them and refers too frequently to them. Such "iteration" is literally "damnable": it must be condemned as unfair, out of place, out of taste, and even not distantly approaching that lack of urbanity with which Mr Arnold was never tired of reproaching his countrymen. Another translator, Mr Wright, was indeed needlessly sensitive to Mr Arnold's strictures; but these stri

merops, and the rest. The originals, he is never weary of repeating, did not strike a Greek and do not strike a Greek scholar as out of the way; the English equivalents do so strike an English reader. Now as to the Greeks themselves, we know nothing: they have left us no positive information on the subject. But if (which is no doubt at least partly true) koruthaiolos and dolichoskion do not strike us, who have been familiar with Greek almost as long as we can

nything else!" When he tells us again that at that moment (1861) "English literature as a living intellectual instrument ranks after the literatures of France and Germany," we remember that at the time France possessed perhaps only one writer, Victor Hugo, and Germany absolutely none, of the calibre of a dozen Englishmen-Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle, Thackeray, Dickens, and not a few others, from Landor to Mr Ruskin; that Germany, further, had scarcely one, though France

hing of the same quality and influence has been seen for more than a technical generation since. It would of course be uncritical in the last degree to take the change in English criticism which followed as wholly and directly Mr Arnold's work. He was no

d, and next spring, shortly after the New Year, received, to his very great joy, a roving commission to France, Belgium, Switzerland, and Piedmont, to report on elementary education. "Foreign life," he says, with that perfect naturalness which makes the charm of his letters, "is still to me perfectly delightfu

inds of the country people"; but if he reflected on the bad national effect of this breach with the past, he does not say so. By June 12 he is in Holland, and does not like it-weather, language, &c., all English in the worst sense, apparently without the Norman and Latin element which just saves us. And though he was a very short time in the Netherlands, he has to relieve his feelings by more abuse of them when he gets back to Paris-in fact, he speaks of Holland exactly as the typical Frenchman speaks of England, and is accordingly very funny to read. The two things that make Holland most interesting, history and art, were exactly those that appealed to Mr Arnold least. Then after a refreshing bath of Paris, he goes to Strasbourg, and Time-Time the Humourist as well as the Avenger and Consoler-makes him commit himself dreadfully. He "thinks there cannot be a moment's doubt" that the French will beat the Prussians even far more completely and rapidly

to his youngest child "in black velvet and red-and-white tartan, looking such a duck that it was hard to take one's eyes off him."[12] This letter, by the way, ends with an odd admission from the author of the remark quoted just now. He says of the Americans, "It seems as if few stocks could be trusted to grow up properly without having a priesthood and an aristocracy to act as thei

aying dangerous and double-edged, but true for all that. Then he "entangles himself in the study of accents"-it would be difficult to find any adventurer who has not entangled himself in that study-and groans over "a frightful parcel of grammar papers," which he only just "manages in time," apparently on the very unwholesome principle (though this was not the same batch) of doing twenty before going to bed when he comes in from a dinner-party at eleven o'clock. Colds, Brighton, praise from Sainte-Beuve, critical attacks in the English papers, and (not quite unprovoked) from F.W. Newman, reflections on the Age of Wisdom (forty), and a meeting with Thackeray, the Laureate of that age, diversify the history agreeably. Then we come to a dead, and now rather more than dull, controversy over the Revised Code, of which we need not say much. Officia