Matthew Arnold

ast D

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

r, 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,

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 h

ught but ne'er so

cism or in creation, he has his reward-a reward that no

o the idea of Mr Arnold's development as a zoon politicon. It has been said before that his earliest political writing is a good deal less fantastic and more sane than that of his middle period, and though "the last of life for which the first was made" was now restoring to him much of his power in this direction, yet he was always much joined to idols in matters political. In grasp "Democracy" does not quite come up to its rather ambitious title; and a moment's thought will show why. In 1861 Democracy was a very academic subject. All projects for further Parliamentary Reform had failed utterly in England; and nobody dreamt of what the next five or six years would bring. In France there was what looked like a crushing military despotism: in other Continental countries the repression which had followed the outbreaks of 1848-49 was only just being relaxed, or not relaxed at all. American democracy had not had its second baptism of Civil War. The favourite fancies about the respecti

quality which Mr Arnold here champions is not English but French equality; not political and judicial equality before the law, but social equality enforced by the law. He himself admits, and perhaps even a little exaggerates, his attitude of Athanasius contra mundum in this respect, amassing with relish expressions, in the sense opposite to his own, from such representative and yet essentially diverse authorities as Lord Beaconsfield, Mr Gladstone, Sir Erskine May, Mr Froude, and Mr Lowe. Against them he arrays Menander and George Sand-a counter-championship not itself suggestive of Equality. This may be "only his fun"-a famous utterance which it is never more necessary to keep in mind than when speaking or writing of Mr Arnold, for his fun, such as it was, was pervadi

those of the English bagman. But just at this moment, and, in fact, in an increasing degree ever since Mr Arnold wrote, the glorification of France has become difficult or impossible. Sir Erskine May, it seems, had warned him in vain about the political effect of French Equality even at that time: but one need not confine oneself to politics. At the end of the nineteenth century France has enjoyed the blessings of social equality, enforced by compulsory division of estates, for a hundred years and more. Perhaps equality has nothing to do with the decadence of her literature, with that state of morals which

t because it is one of the expressions of that dream which was in his life so important. It consists partly of statistics and partly of a moan over the fact that, in the heat and heyday of Mr Gladstone's levée en masse against the Tory Government of 1874-80, the Liberal programme contained nothing about this darling object. And the superiority of France is trotted out again; but it would be cruel to insist any more. Yet at last Mr Arnold

judicious proposals for making the good better still. Even if this last characteristic were not present, it would be unjust to call the article a puff. Besides, are puffs so wholly bad? A man may be not very fond of sweets, and yet think a good puff now and then, a puff with its three corners just hot from the oven, full of jam, light, artistically frothed, to be a very pleasing thing. And, as I have said, Mr Arnold's review is much more than a puff. Once, indeed, there is even a hypercriticism, due to that slight want of familiarity with literary history proper which has been noticed more than once. Mr Arnold finds fault with Mr Brooke for adopting, as one of his chapter divisions, "from the Restoration to George III." He objects to this that "George III. has nothing to do with literature," and suggests "to the Death of Pope and Swift." This

this parallel out, writing as he did in his own name and at the moment, and I do not find any reference to it in the Letters; but I can remember how strongly it was felt at the time. His own interest in Falkland as the martyr of Sweetness and Light, of lucidity of mind and 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 distin

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,

e 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 necessar

or, 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 o

r 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

ears 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

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 th

leridge 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

k carefully, side by side with the complete poems, in order to see whether anything has necessarily to be added. I really do not know what has, unless it be a few of the oases from the deserts of the Excursion, the Prelude, and the then not published Recluse

him. He is not so great a poet to my thinking as Spenser or Shelley; if it were possible in these competitions to allow weight for age, he is not as great a poet as Keats; I am sure he is not a greater poet than Tennyson; I cannot give him rank above Heine or Hugo, though the first may be sometimes naughty and the second frequently silly or rhetorical; and when Mr Arnold begins to reckon Molière in, I confess I am lost. When and where did Molière write poetry? But these things do not matter; they

sound, we remember a certain Preface with its "all depends on the subject," and chuckle a little, a very little. But Mr Arnold is right here. No philosophy, no subject, will make poetry without poetical treatment, and the consequence is that The Excursion and The Prelude are, as wholes, not good poems at all

his Zion-which indeed is a Zion of an odd kind. Yet this very uneasiness gives to the Essay a glancing variety, a sort of animation and excitement, which are not common things in critical prelections. Nor, though one may think that Mr Arnold's general estimate of Byron is not even half as sound as his general estimate of Wordsworth, does the former appear to be in even the slightest degree insincere. Much as there must have been in Byron's loose art, his voluble inadequacy-nay, even in his choice of subject-that was repellent to Mr Arnold: much more as there must have been in his unchastened conduct, his flashy affectations, his lack of dignity, morality, tenue of every kind,-yet there were real links between them. Mr Arnold saw in Byron an ally, if not an altogether admirable or trustworthy ally, against the Philistine. He saw in him a link with general European literature, a check and antidote to the merely insular. Byron's

ared, has perhaps had more readers than any other of its author's critical papers. It contains, moreover, that still more famous definition of poetry as "a criticism of life" which has been so often attacked and has sometimes been defended. I own to having been, both at the time and since, one of its most decided and irreconcilable assailants. Nor do I think that Mr Arnold would h

diaconal functions. And while it is not more illuminative than that famous and useful jest, it has the drawback of being positively delusive, which the jest is not. Unless we are to assign some quite new meaning to "criticism"-and the assignment of new meanings to the terms of an explanation is the worst of all explanatory improprieties-poetry is not a criticism of life. It may be a passionate interpretation of life-that has seemed to some not a bad attempt at the unachievable,-a criticism it cannot be. Prose

a level with the Iliad as a whole; but some among those people who happen to possess an equal acquaintance with Greek and Old French will demur to Mr Arnold's assignment of an ineffably superior poetical quality to one of the two passages he quotes over the other. So yet again with the denial of "high seriousness" to Chaucer. One feels disposed t

reat classics, and so he exposes what I fear may be called no very extensive or accurate acquaintance with Old French. He must impress on us that conduct is three-fourths of life, and so he makes what even those who stop short of latreia in regard

ple like the Guérins to be mere engouement. Gray's case was different. The resemblances between subject and critic were extraordinary. Mr Arnold is really an industrious, sociable, and moderately cheerful Gray of the nineteenth century; Gray an indolent, recluse, more melancholy Arnold of the eighteenth. Again, the literary quality of the bard of the Elegy was exactly of the kind which stimulates critics most. From Sainte-Beuve downwards the fraternity has, justly or unjustly, been accused of a tendency to extol writers who are a little problematical, who approach the second clas

eau, and rend them. The improvement of the mere fashion, as compared with the fantasticalities of the Friendship's Garland period, is simply enormous. And the praise which follows is praise really in the grand style-praise, the style and quality of which are positively rejoicing to the heart from their combination of fervour and accuracy, from their absolute fulfilment of the ideal of a word shockingly misused in these latter days, the word Appreciation. The personal sympathy which Mr Arnold evidently had

rlier dates. They were partly devoted to the change which has brought it about, that, while during the third quarter of the century the Conservatives were in power, though on three different occasions, yet in each for absolutely insignificant terms, in the fourth Mr Gladstone's tenure of office from 1880 to 1885 has been the only period of real Liberal domination. But although he dealt with the phenomenon from various points of view in such articles as "The N

ic distinction. In his days of comparative obscurity, or in some position of "greater freedom and less responsibility," even when he ceases to be obscure, a man deals faithfully, but perhaps a little flippantly, with this or that person, thing, nation, subject, doctrine. Afterwards he is brought into a relation with the person or nation, into a position as regards the thing, subject, or doctrine, which necessitates, if not exactly a distinct recantation in the humilia

racy, which must ever be uppermost-or as nethermost not less important-in a republic; and dealt with it after the more moderate, not the extremer form, of that combination of literature and politics which Mr Arnold had always affected. "Literature and Science," the middle discourse, attacked a question which, so far as the nationality of his audience was concerned, had nothing burning about it, which the lecturer was singularly well qualified to treat from the one

itious, and, as its author would say, most "nobly serious" of the three. There are quite admirable things in "Numbers"; and the descant on the worship of the great goddess Aselgeia, and its effect upon France, is not only nobly serious from the point of view of morality, but is one of Mr Arnold's best claims to the title of a political philosopher, and even of a political prophet. But it is less easy to say that this passage appears to be either specially in place or well composed with its companions. Perhaps the same is true of the earlier part, and its extensive dealings with Isaiah and Plato. As regards the prophet, it is pretty certain that of Mr Arnold's hearers, the larger number did not care to hav

but here he jars less than usual. As for Emerson himself, some readers have liked Emerson better than Carlyle at first, but have found that Carlyle "wears" a great deal better than Emerson. It seems to have been the other way with Mr Arnold; yet he is not uncritical about Emerson himself. On Emerson's poetry he is even, as on his own principles he was, perhaps, bound to be, rather hypercritical. Most of it, no doubt, is not poetry at all; but it has "once in a hundred years," as Mr O'Shaughnessy sang, the blossoming of the aloe, the star-shower of poetic meteors. And while, with all reverence, one is

, lime,

ld he was only a sort of unspiritual innkeeper. To Mr Arnold, Maurice de Guérin, with his second-hand Quinetism, wa

grow obsolete. Not only was Mr Arnold here on his own ground, but he was fighting for his true mistress, with the lance and sword and shield that he had proved. And the result is like that, of the fortunate fights of romance: he thrusts his antagonists straight over the crupper, he sends them rolling on the ground, and clutching it

ain perennial youthfulness was (as it often, if not always, is in the chosen of the earth) one of his most amiable features, seems to have conceived a new engouement for this new and quaintly flavoured Russian literature. Had he lived longer, he probably would have sung us something in a cautionary strain; just as it can never be sufficiently regretted that he did not live long enough to handle Ibsenism. And it would have been very particularly pleasant to hear him on those Memoirs of a Mo

who wer

e who we

k itself, and to those who hav

st be impossible to conceive, and certainly impossible to find, a happier commentator than Mr Arnold, though perhaps in the regions of theology he had a private Maya, a very Great Wheel, of his own. The firmness with which he rebukes the maunderings of the Genevese hypochondriac-of whom some one once unkindly remarked that he was not so much intoxicated with Idealism as suffering from the subsequent headache-is equalled by the kindness of the dealing; and the quiet decision with which he puts his fi

retion of a certain class of modern literary biographers, and at the pawing and morbid sentimentality of the same persons or others. He had a new and a better opportunity in the matter he was now handling, and he struck more strongly, more repeatedly, and with truer aim than ever. From the moment of its appearance to the present day, this piece has been an unceasing joy to all who love literature with a sane devotion. Its composition is excellent; it selects just the right points, dwells on them in just the right way, and drops them just when we have had enough. In mere style it yields to nothing of its author's, and is conspicuously and quite triumphantly free from his repetitions and other mannerisms. No English writer-indeed one may say no writer at all-has ever tempered such a blend of quiet contempt with perfect good-humour and perfect good-breeding. Dryden would have written with an equally fatal serenity, but not so lightly; Voltaire with as much lightness, but not nearly so much like a gentleman-which may also be said Of Courier. Thackeray could not have helped a blaze of

es Mr Arnold had let his own fancy range more freely in such epistolary criticisms of life. We hear that Mr J.R. Green "likes the Reformation and Puritanism less the more he looks into them," again a not uncommon experience-and that Mr Stopford Brooke is deriving much edification from the review of his Primer. The next year continues the series of letters to M. Fontanes, and gives a pleasant phrase in one to another sister, Mrs Cropper. "My poems have had no better friends in their early and needy days than my own sisters"-wherein Mr Arnold unconsciously quotes Goblin Market, "there is no friend like a sister." Later, Mr Freeman is dashed off, a la maniere noire, as "an ardent, learned, and hones

for the first time (whence no doubt its undue predominance in a certain essay), and the description of Burns as "a beast with splendid gleams," a view which has been fully developed since. On February 21, 1881, there is another interview, flattering as ever, with Lord Beaconsfield, and later he tells M. Fontanes, "I never much liked Carlyle," which indeed we knew. The same correspondent has the only references preserved to Dean Stanley's death; but the magnificent verses which that death produced make anything else superfluous. They appeared in the first number of the Nin

u know I like doctors"-revived him after the night and the journey. And two months later he makes pleasant allusion to "that demon Traill," in reference to a certain admirable parody of Poor Matthias. He had thought Mr Gladstone "hopelessly prejudiced against" him, and was proportionately surprised when in August 1883 he was offered by that Minister a pension of ￡250 for service to the poetry and literature of England. Few Civil List pensions have been so well deserved. But Mr Arnold, as most men of his quality would

American letters are interesting reading enough, but naturally tend to be little more than a replica of similar letters from other Englishmen who have done the same thing. As has been quite frankly admitted here, Mr Arnold never made any effort, and seldom seems to have been independently prompted, to write what are called "amusing" letters: he merely tells a plain tale of journeys, lectures, meals, persons, scenery, manners and customs, etc. Chicago seems to have

n from that till 1 A.M., not later." This is, though doubtless jestful, really a point de repère for the manners of the later nineteenth century as concerns a busy man who likes society. In the eigh

of the most valuable of all the letters come in October, one saying, "I think Oxford is still, on the whole, the place in the world to which I am most attached" ["And so say all of us"]; the other, after some notice of the Corpus plate, telling how "I got out to Hinksey and up the hill to within sight of the Cumnor firs. I cannot describe the effect which this landscape always has upon me: the hillside with its valleys, and Oxford in the great Thames valley be

ear Lola" (not Montès, but another; in short, a pony), with a sigh for "a mèche of her hair." The journey was finished by way of France towards the end of March. At Hamburg Mr Arnold was "really [and very creditably] glad to have had the opportunity of calling a man Your Magnificence," that being, it seems, the proper official style in addressing the burgomaster. And May took him back to America, to see his married daughter and divers old friends. He remained there ti

ather and grandfather in middle life long before they came to his present age. He "refuses every invitation to lecture or make addresses." The letters of 1887, too, are very few, and contain little of interest, except an indication of a visit to Fox How; while much the same may be said of those, also few, from the early