Matthew Arnold

Wilde

m it was evident that if he had not revealed positively novel aspects of truth, he had formulated and put on record aspects which were presenting themselves to many, nay, most, of the best critical minds of his day. His criticism had drawn his poetry with it, if not into actual popularity, yet into something like attention. His attempts to obtain some other employment less irksome, less absorbing, and more profitable, had indeed been unsuccessful; but he was rising in his own department, and his work, if still in part uncongenial a

ems-the man who, far later, wrote the magnificent Westminster Abbey on such a subject as Dean Stanley, had plenty more poetry in his sack. And in prose he should have given us infinite essays, as many as De Quincey's or as Sainte-Beuve's own, and more than Hazlitt's, of the kind of the Heine and the Joubert earlier, of the Wordsworth and the Byron later. I can see no reason why, in the twenty-one years' lease of life upon which he now entered, he should not have produced a volume a-year of these,-there are more tha

n his own lips. A far less alert and acute mind than his must have seen that the Reform troubles of 1866 and the "leap in the dark" of 1867 were certain to bring about very great changes indeed at home; and that the war of the first-named year meant the alteration of many things abroad. He at least thought-and there was some justification of a good many kinds for him in thinking-that intellectual changes, of importance equal to t

, in familiar phrase, to have "got upon his nerves," but to have affected his brain. He saw all things in Dissent-or, at least, in the middle-class Philistine Dissenter. His Philistia is not in the least a true portrait of the average middle-class household thirty or forty years ago; though, I daresay (I have little direct knowledge), it is not an unfair one of the ave

beral politicians fond of petting him. Socially, intellectually, and to a great extent religiously, he had next to no power at all. To take the average manager of a "British" school a

ner, a caution no doubt partly due to the fact of the author's expressed, and very natural and proper, intention of closing his professorial exercises with the bocca dolce. Still this is at least conceivably due to the fact that the boldest extension of the campaign itself had not definitely entered, or at least possessed, the author's mind.

Wilson). Mr Harrison had blasphemed "the cant about culture," and Mr Arnold protests that culture's only aim is in the Bishop's words, "to make reason and the will of God prevail." In the first chapter, famous thenceforward in English literature by its title, borrowed from Swift, of "Sweetn

to make shipwreck) very nearly in the title and rather nearly in the contents, but still with a fairly safe offing. The opposition might be put too bluntly by saying that "Hellenism" represents to Mr Arnold the love of truth at any price, and "Hebraism" the love of goodness at any price; but the actual difference is not far from this, or from those of knowing and doing, fear of stupidity and fear of sin, &c. We have the quotation from Mr Carlyle about Socrates being "terribly at ease in Zion," the promulgation of the word Renascence for Renaissauce, and so forth. "Porro unum est necessarium," a favourite tag of Mr Arnold's, rather holds up another side of the same lesson than continues

d the same contrast is strongly urged throughout, especially in the coda, "A Comment on Christmas." But this contrast is gradually shaped into an onslaught on Puritanism, or rather on its dogmatic side, for its appreciation of "conduct" of morality is ever more and more eulogised. As regards the Church of England herself, the attack is oblique; in fact, it is disclaimed, and a sort of a Latitudinarian Union, with the Church for centre, and dogma left out, is advocated. Another of our Arnoldian friends, the "Zeit-Geist," makes his appearance, and it is more than hinted that one of the most importa

art of Literature and Dogma. Much of it must have been written amid the excitement of the French-Prussian War, when the English public was athirst for "skits" of all sorts, and when Mr Arnold himself was "i' the vein," being engaged in the composition of much of the matter of Friendship's Garland. St Paul and Protestantism had had two editions in the same year (Culture and Anarchy, a far better thing, waited six for its second), and altogethe

respects also. We may pass over the fun which Mr Arnold had with Archbishop Thomson (who, whatsoe'er the failings on his part, was at any rate a logician) on the theory of causation; with the University of Cambridge about hominum divomque voluptas alma Venus (I have forgotten what was the bearing of this joke, and it is probably not worth inquiring into); with the Bishop of Gloucester about the Personality of God; with the Athanasian Creed, and its "science got ruffled by fighting." These things, as "form," class themselves; one mutters something well known about risu inepto, and passes

in the manner of Jesus." Observe that we have absolutely no details, no evidence of any sort whatever, outside the Gospels for the "manner of Jesus." It is not, as in some at least of the more risky exercises of profane criticism in a similar field, as if we had some absolutely or almost absolutely authenticated documents, and others to judge by them. External evidence, except for the mere fact of Christ's existence and death, we have none. So you must, by the inner light, pick and choose out of the very same docum

upernatural means. He applies, as they all apply, the tests of the natural, and says, "Now really, you know, these tests are destructive." He says-he cannot prove-that miracles do not happen now; his adversaries, if they were wise, would simply answer, "Après?" Do any of them pretend to prescribe to their God that His methods shall be always the same, or that those methods shall stand the tests of the laboratory and the School

dem Geist den

ht

l. This new religion is to have for its Jachin Literature-that is to say, a delicate ?sthetic appreciation of all that is beautiful in Christianity and out of it; and for its Boaz Conduct-that is to say, a morality at least as rigid as that of the purest Judaism, though more amiable. If dogma is to be banished, so is anything like licence; and in the very book itself Mr Arnold formulated, against

read, but he does, like the benevolent French princess in the story, offer us pie-crust. Pie-crust is a good thing; it is a close connection of bread; but it will not do for a substitute, and, in addition, it is much more difficult for the general to obtain. Moreover, there is a serious, a historical, difficulty about Conduct plus poetic appreciation, but minus what we call religion. Mr Arnold, in a stately sonnet, has told us that Sophocles was his ideal as a life-philosophe

auded. At any rate, though the ill-omened series did not cease, nothing further appeared in it which showed the tone of Literature and Dogma. Indeed, of the concluding volumes, God and the Bible and Last Essays on Church and Religion, the first is an elaborate and rather anxious apology, and the second a collection of diverse and comparatively "anodyne" essays. It is significant-as showing how much of the success of Literature and Dogma had been a success of scandal-that neither of these volumes enjoyed the least popularity. God and the Bible was never reprinted till the popul

but he did not himself stand harassing very well; and here he was not merely the object of attacks from all sides, but was most uneasily conscious that, in some cases at least, he did not wish his enemies to destroy each other. He had absolutely no sympathy with the rabid anti-Christianity of Clifford, very little with the mere agnosticism of Huxley; he wanted to be allowed to take just so much Biblical criticism as suited him and no more. He wished to prove, in his own remarkable way, the truth and nec

acobin. But the apologist is not really light-hearted: he cannot keep the more solemn part of his apologia out of the Preface itself, and assures us that the story of Adam's fall "is all a legend. It never really happened, any of it." Again one asks Mr Arnold, as seriously as possible, "How do you know that? On your own calculus, with your own estimate of evidence, how i

reply to those who have attacked Literature and Dogma as anti-Christian and irreligious. Not even by summarily banishing this not inconsiderable host c

ggered by Mr Arnold's private revelations as to what did not happen 6000 years ago (or earlier) in the garden of Eden, quite succumbs before this privilegium of omniscience. One had thought that the results of philology and etymology of this sort were extremely ingenious guesses, to be admitted in so far as they do not conflict with facts, and till the next guess

f his own argument. We must not, however, fall into his own mistake and quadruplicate to his duply. It may be sufficient to say that the long defence of the Fourth Gospel which this book contains is one of the oddest things in all literature. What, on Mr A

he covers of the Bible itself, deserves every respect, if not reverent acceptance en bloc. Miracles are fictions, and the scenes in the garden of Eden and at the Sepulchre never happened; but as, bhu, and sta are very solemn facts, and you can find out all about the Divinity, because the word Deus means (not "has been guessed to mean," but means) "Shining." Tha

ommon phrase, whether they did any harm would be to beg the question in their own manner; to ask whether they produced any effect would lead us too far. They certainly expressed a prevalent tendency. Most fortunately Mr

felicity of this unfortunate series. Mr Arnold deals in it at some length with the comments of two foreign critics, M. Challemel-Lacour and Signor de Gubernatis, on Literature and Dogma, bringing out (what surely could have been no news to any but very ill-educated Englishmen) the fact of their surprise, not at his taking the Bible with so little seriousness, but at his taking it with any seriousness at all. And he seems never even to dream of the obvious retort: "Certainly. These men are at any rate 'thorough'; they are not dilettante dalliers between two opinions. They have got

chological Parallel, Bishop Butler and the Zeit-Geist, The Church of England, and A Last Word on the Burials Bill. All had appeared in Macmillan's Magazine or the Contemporary Review dur

ess-nay, even a fretfulness such as might have been that of a Moses at Rephidim who could not bring water out of the rock. A Psychological Parallel is an attempt to buttress the apologia by referring to Sir Matthew Hale's views on witchcraft, to Smith, the Cambridge Platonist and Latitudinarian, and to the Book of Enoch (of which, by the way, it is a pity that Mr Arnold did not live to see Mr Charles's excellent translation, since he desiderated a good one). Of course the argument is sun-clear. If Hale was mistaken about witchcr

an eighteenth-century person, was afflicted with the eighteenth-century limitations by the Zeit-Geist, eighty-six pages, and an imposing German compound at the head of every other one of them, seem a good deal for telling us this. If it is a sort of indirect attack upon-an oblique demurrer to-Butler's constructive-aggressive orthodoxy in psychology and religion, one is bound to say with all politeness, first, that it is a case of impar congressus, and secondly, that the adventurous knight does not give himself a fair chance. It will take more than eighty-six not very large pages, and a German word at the top of the alternate ones, to do that! In the opening sketch of Butler himself Mr Arnold could no

dresses experts and the profession; but his position is never so equivocal as when he doubles the part of non-expert with that of candid friend. How Mr Arnold succeeded in this exceedingly delicate attempt I do not propose to examine at any length. He thought himself that he had "sufficiently marked the way in which the new world was to be reached." Paths to new worlds are always interesting, but in reading, or rather re-reading, the sailing directions of this Columbus twenty years after date, one may be a little disappointed. The sum appears to be a somewhat Tootsian declaration that things o

r of 1866, during the agitation into which the public mind had been thrown by the astounding rapidity and thoroughness of the Prussian successes in the Seven Weeks' War, Mr Arnold had begun a series of letters, couched in the style of persiflage, which Kinglake had introduced, or reintroduced, twenty years earlier in Eothen, and which the Saturday had taken up and widely developed. He also took not a few hints from Carlyle in Sartor and the Latterday Pamphlets. And for some years at intervals, with the help of a troupe of imaginary correspondents and comparses-Arminius von Thundertentronckh, Adolescens Leo of the Daily Telegraph, the Bottles family of wealthy Dissenters, with cravings for their deceased wife's sisters, as well as a large number of more or less c

, as others, because of its arrogant self-sufficiency, the British public has never resented these much. But, in the first place, the thing was a falsetto. Mr Arnold had plenty of wit but not much humour; and after a time one feels that Bottles and Leo & Co. may be, as Dousterswivel says, "very witty and comedy," but that we should not be altogether sorry if they would go. Further, the direct personalities-the worst instances concerned Lord Elcho,

estige of anything tangible about either. Not very many impartial persons could possibly accept Mr Arnold's favourite doctrine, that the salvation of the people lies in state-provided middle-class schools; and this was specially difficult in 1871, if they remembered how some few years before Mr Arnold had been extolling the state-provided middle-class

speech at the greatest public school in the world-discouraged the playfulness which had seemed permissible in addressing a skittish young evening newspaper. But the unpracticalness-not in the Philistine but in the strictly scientific sense-is more glaring than ever, and there are other faults with it. Great part of An Unregarded Irish Grievance is occupied by a long-drawn-out comparison of England's behaviour to Ireland with that of Mr Murdstone a

t tricks you will, all possible politics come round either to the Rule of the One, the Rule of the Few, or the Rule of the Many, and that the consequences of these rules, differentiated a little but not materially by historical and racial characteristics, are as constant as anything commonly called scientific,-this never seems to have occurred to Mr Arnold at all. He did not fully appreciate Thackeray, and Thackeray died too soon to know very much of him. But I have always thought that, for a criticism of life po

ell us what to do with Ireland. But the main point in at least one of these essays, The Incompatibles, is again connected with David Copperfield. I have said that, from the merely literary point of view, the perpetual ringing of the changes on Creakle, Murdstone, Quinion-Quinion, Murdstone, Creakle-is inartistic and irritating. But from the philosophical and political point of view it is far worse. No Englishman with any sense of fact ever has taken, or could take, Dickens's characters as normal types. They are always fantastic exaggerations, full of genius occasionally, but as unlike actual reality as those illustrations by Cruikshank which are their nearest companions in the art of line. Of the three figures selected in particul

ddle, with episodic praises of "equality," "academies," and the like, as well as glances at a more extensive system of "municipalisation," which, not to the satisfaction of everybody, has come about since. The second contains some admirable remarks on classical education, some still more admirable protests against reading about the classics instead of reading the classics, and the famous discourse on Eutrapelia, with

esented by the rather small Lord Camden and the rather great Lord Hardwicke, cared for neither of these things-so "the principles of Pratt, the principles of Yorke" comes in as a refrain. To the average Briton quotation is no more argument than, on higher authority, is blank verse. Still it might do for ornament, if not for argument,-might help the lesson and point it at least. So we turn to the lesson itself. This "Liberal of the future," as Mr Arnold styles himself, begins, with orthodoxy if not with philosophy, by warning the Tories off entirely. "They cannot really profit the nation, or give it what it needs." Perhaps; but suppose we ask for a little reason, just a ghost of a premiss or two for this extensive conclusion? There is no voice, neither any that answers. And then, the Tories dismissed with a wave to all but temporary oblivion (they are to be allowed, it seems, to appear from time to time to chasten Liberalism), our prophet turns to Liberalism itself. It ought to promote "the humanisation of man in society," and it doesn't promote this. Ah! what a blesse

actual and close knowledge of the actual progress of politics for many years may be pardoned for speaking with some decision on the practice of sitting at ease in Zion, and raying out curious observations on Barbarians and Eutrapelia and the character of Mr Quinion. We may have too little of such things in Eng

the literary results of this peri

miry roads o

s of occupation and of literary aim by the termination of the professorship coincided, as such things have a habit of doing, with changes in place and circumstance. The Chester Square house grew too small for the children, and a move to Harrow was first meditated and then achieved. A very pleasant letter to his mother, in November 1867, tells how he was present at the farewell dinner to Dickens on his departure for America, how they wanted hi

arbarian' nearly as often" (it must be remembered that the "Culture and Anarchy" articles were coming out now). This half-childish delight in such matters (like Mr Pendennis's "It's all in the papers, and my name too!") is one of the most fascinating things about him, and one of not a few, proving that, if there was some affectation, there was no dissimulation in his nature. Too many men, I fear, would have said nothing about them, or assumed a lofty disdain. In September he mentions to Mr Grant Duff a plan (which one only wishes he had carried out, letting all the "Dogma"

omed it. The same year saw a visit to Knebworth, and a very interesting and by no means unsound criticism on that important event in the life of a poet, the issue of the first collected edition of his poems.[15] This was in two volumes, and is now rather precious. "It might be fairly urged that I have less poetic sentiment than Tennyson, and less intellectual vigour and abundance than Browning; yet because I have perhaps more of a fusion of the two than either of them, and ha

Arnold received the Oxford D.C.L. He set it down to "a young and original sort of man, Lord Salisbury, being Chancellor"; and Lord Salisbury himself afterwards told him that "no doubt he ought to have add

ined that "he should have to write more articles than he ever had done" to prevent his being a loser even at that. About the catastrophe of the Année Terrible, his craze for "righteousness" makes him a very little Pecksniffian-one thinks of the Tower of Siloam. But it is pleasant to hear that, early in 1871, they are arranging for him "a perfect district, Westminster and a small rural part near Harrow." So one hopes that the days of posting from shire to shire and subsisting on buns were over. He is interested about Deutsch (the comet of a season for his famous Talmud articles), receives the Commandership of

oes 1873 give much except description of a tour to Italy, while in May the Arnolds moved from Harrow, with its painful memories, to Cobham, which was Mr Arnold's home for the rest of his life. In September he "shoots worse than ever" (vide Friendship's Garland) in the famous preserves of Six Mile Bottom, and soon after his mother dies. But it is not given to all men not to be motherless till they themselves are fifty. And 1874 is again rather barren, even such yield as it giv

en do not happen, and the things that do happen have to be awkwardly explained away or hazardously ignored His almost pettish disgust for the historic estimate in literature itself may have either caused or been caused by this more general dislike, and the dislike itself explains the leniency with which he always regarded the sheer guess-work of the Biblical critics. But it is possible to sympathise with

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

rth 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-si