MATTHEW ARNOLD

I

Admirers of Arnold’s prose find it well to admit frankly that his style has an unfortunate knack of exciting prejudice. Emerson has somewhere spoken of the unkind trick fate plays a man when it gives him a strut in his gait. Here and there in Arnold’s prose, there is just a trace—sometimes more than a trace—of such a strut. He condescends to his readers with a gracious elaborateness; he is at great pains to make them feel that they are his equals; he undervalues himself playfully; he assures us that “he is an unlearned bellettristic trifler”; he insists over and over again that “he is an unpretending writer, without a philosophy based on interdependent, subordinate, and coherent principles.” All this he does smilingly; but the smile seems to many on whom its favours fall, supercilious; and the playful under-valuation of self looks shrewdly like an affectation. He is very debonair,—this apologetic writer, very self-assured, at times even jaunty.

Stanch admirers of Arnold have always relished this strain in his style; they have enjoyed its delicate challenge, the nice duplicity of its innuendoes; they have found its insinuations and its covert, satirical humour infinitely entertaining and stimulating. Moreover, however seriously disposed they may be, however exacting of all the virtues from the author of their choice, they have been able to reconcile their enjoyment of Arnold with their serious inclinations, for they have been confident that these tricks of manner implied no essential or radical defect in Arnold’s humanity, no lack either of sincerity or of earnestness or of broad sympathy.

Such admirers and interpreters of Arnold have been amply justified of their confidence since the publication in 1895 of Arnold’s Letters. The Arnold of these letters is a man the essential integrity—wholeness—of whose nature is incontestable. His sincerity, kindliness, wide-ranging sympathy with all classes of men are unmistakably expressed on every page of his correspondence. We see him having to do with people widely diverse in their relations to him: with those close of kin, with chance friends, with many men of business or officials, with a wide circle of literary acquaintances, with workingmen, and with foreign savants. In all his intercourse the same sweet-tempered frankness and the same readiness of sympathy are manifest. There is never a trace of the duplicity or the treacherous irony that are to be found in much of his prose.

Moreover, the record that these Letters contain of close application to uncongenial tasks must have been a revelation to many readers who have had to rely upon books for their knowledge of literary men. Popular caricatures of Arnold had represented him as “a high priest of the kid-glove persuasion,” as an incorrigible dilettante, a literary fop idling his time away over poetry and recommending the parmaceti of culture as the sovereignest thing in nature for the inward bruises of the spirit. This conception of Arnold, if it has at all maintained itself, certainly cannot survive the revelations of the Letters. The truth is beyond cavil that he was among the most self-sacrificingly laborious men of his time.

For a long period of years Arnold held the post of inspector of schools. Day after day, and week after week, he gave up one of the finest of minds, one of the most sensitive of temperaments, one of the most delicate of literary organizations, to the drudgery of examining in its minutest details the work of the schools in such elementary subjects as mathematics and grammar. On January 7, 1863, he writes to his mother, “I am now at the work I dislike most in the world—looking over and marking examination papers. I was stopped last week by my eyes, and the last year or two these sixty papers a day of close handwriting to read have, I am sorry to say, much tried my eyes for the time.” Two years later he laments again: “I am being driven furious by seven hundred closely written grammar papers, which I have to look over.” During these years he was holding the Chair of Poetry at Oxford, and he had long since established his reputation as one of the foremost of the younger poets. Yet for a livelihood he was forced still to endure—and he endured them till within a few years of his death in 1888—the exactions of this wearing and exasperating drudgery. Moreover, despite occasional outbursts of impatience, he gave himself to the work freely, heartily, and effectively. He was sent on several occasions to the Continent to examine and report on foreign school systems; his reports on German and French education show immense diligence of investigation, a thorough grasp of detail, and patience and persistence in the acquisition of facts that in and for themselves must have been unattractive and unrewarding.

The record of this severe labour is to be found in Arnold’s Letters, and it must dispose once for all of any charge that he was a mere dilettante and coiner of phrases. Through a long period of years he was working diligently, wearisomely, in minutely practical ways, to better the educational system of England; he was persistently striving both to spread sounder ideals of elementary education and to make more effective the system actually in vogue. And thus, unpretentiously and laboriously, he was serving the cause of sweetness and light as well as through his somewhat debonair contributions to literature.

In another way his Letters have done much to reveal the innermost core of Arnold’s nature, and so, ultimately, to explain the genesis of his prose. They place it beyond doubt that in all he wrote Arnold had an underlying purpose, clearly apprehended and faithfully pursued. In 1867, in a letter to his mother, he says: “I more and more become conscious of having something to do and of a resolution to do it.... Whether one lives long or not, to be less and less personal in one’s desires and workings is the great matter.” In a letter of 1863 he had already written in much the same strain: “However, one cannot change English ideas as much as, if I live, I hope to change them, without saying imperturbably what one thinks, and making a good many people uncomfortable.” And in a letter of the same year he exclaims: “It is very animating to think that one at last has a chance of getting at the English public. Such a public as it is, and such a work as one wants to do with it.” A work to do! The phrase recalls Cardinal Newman and the well-known anecdote of his Sicilian illness, when through all the days of greatest danger he insisted that he should get well because he had a work to do in England. Despite Arnold’s difference in temperament from Newman and the widely dissimilar task he proposed to himself, he was no less in earnest than Newman, and no less convinced of the importance of his task.

The occasional supercilious jauntiness of Arnold’s style, then, need not trouble even the most conscientious of his admirers. To many of his readers it is in itself, as has been already suggested, delightfully stimulating. Others, the more conscientious folk and perhaps also the severer judges of literary quality, are bound to find it artistically a blemish; but they need not at any rate regard it as implying any radical defect in Arnold’s humanity or as the result of cheap cynicism or of inadequate sympathy. In point of fact, the true account of the matter seems rather to lie in the paradox that the apparent superciliousness of Arnold’s style comes from the very intensity of his moral earnestness, and that the imperfections of his manner are often the result of an over-conscientious desire to conciliate.

II

What, then, was Arnold’s controlling purpose in his prose-writing? What was the “work” that he “wanted to do with the English public”? In trying to find answers to these questions recourse will first be had to stray phrases in Arnold’s prose; these phrases will give incidental glimpses, from different points of view, of his central ideal; later, their fragmentary suggestions will be brought together into something like a comprehensive formula.

In the lectures on Celtic Literature Arnold points out, in closing, that it has been his aim to lead Englishmen to “reunite themselves with their better mind and with the world through science”; that he has sought to help them “conquer the hard unintelligence, which was just then their bane; to supple and reduce it by culture, by a growth in the variety, fulness, and sweetness of their spiritual life.” In the Preface to his first volume of Essays he explains that he is trying “to pull out a few more stops in that powerful, but at present somewhat narrow-toned organ, the modern Englishman.” In Culture and Anarchy he assures us that his object is to convince men of the value of “culture”; to incite them to the pursuit of “perfection”; to help “make reason and the will of God prevail.” And, again, in the same work he declares that he is striving to intensify throughout England “the impulse to the development of the whole man, to connecting and harmonizing all parts of him, perfecting all, leaving none to take their chance.”

These phrases give, often with capricious picturesqueness, hints of the prevailing intention with which Arnold writes. They may well be supplemented by a series of phrases in which, in similarly picturesque fashion, he finds fault with life as it actually exists in England, with the individual Englishman as he encounters him from day to day; these phrases, through their critical implications, also reveal the purpose that is always present in Arnold’s mind, when he addresses his countrymen. “Provinciality,” Arnold points out as a widely prevalent and injurious characteristic of English literature; it argues a lack of centrality, carelessness of ideal excellence, undue devotion to relatively unimportant matters. Again, “arbitrariness” and “eccentricity” are noticeable traits both of English literature and scholarship; Arnold finds them everywhere deforming Professor Newman’s interpretations of Homer, and he further comments on them as in varying degrees “the great defect of English intellect—the great blemish of English literature.” In religion he takes special exception to the “loss of totality” that results from sectarianism; this is the penalty, Arnold contends, that the Nonconformist pays for his hostility to the established church; in his pursuit of his own special enthusiasm the Nonconformist becomes, like Ephraim, “a wild ass alone by himself.”

From all these brief quotations this much at least is plain, that what Arnold is continually recommending is the complete development of the human type, and that what he is condemning is departure from some finely conceived ideal of human excellence—from some scheme of human nature in which all its powers have full and harmonious play. The various phrases that have been quoted, alike the positive and the negative ones, imply, as Arnold’s continual purpose in his prose-writings, the recommendation of this ideal of human excellence and the illustration of the evils that result from its neglect. Evidently, his imagination is haunted by some symmetrical scheme of character—by some exquisitely conceived pattern of perfection—wherein manners and knowledge, and passion and religion, all have their due value, and work together for righteousness. With this scheme in mind, he goes through the length and breadth of England, scanning each class of men he meets, and questioning how far its members conform to his type. And his continual purpose is to stir in the minds of his fellow-countrymen as keen a sense as may be of the value of this perfect type and of the dangers of disregarding it. The significance and the scope of this purpose will become clearer if we consider some of the imperfect ideals that Arnold finds operative in place of his absolute ideal, and note their misleading and depraving effects.

One such partial ideal is the worship of the excessively practical and the relentlessly utilitarian as the only things in life worth while. England is a prevailingly practical nation, and our age is a prevailingly practical age; the unregenerate product of this nation and age is the Philistine, and against the Philistine Arnold never wearies of inveighing. The Philistine is the swaggering enemy of the children of light, of the chosen people, of those who love art and ideas disinterestedly. The Philistine cares solely for business, for developing the material resources of the country, for starting companies, building bridges, making railways, and establishing plants. The machinery of life—its material organization—monopolizes all his attention. He judges of life by the outside, and is careless of the things of the spirit. The Philistine may, of course, be religious; but his religion is as materialistic as his every-day existence; his heaven is a triumph of engineering skill, and his ideal of future bliss is, in Sydney Smith’s phrase, to eat “pâtés de foie gras to the sound of trumpets.” Against men of this class Arnold cannot show himself too cynically severe. They are pitiful distortions; the practical instincts have usurped, and have destroyed the symmetry and integrity of the human type. The senses and the will to live are monopolizing and determine all the man’s energy toward utilitarian ends. The power of beauty, the power of intellect and knowledge, the power of social manners, are atrophied. Society is in serious danger unless men of this class can be touched with a sense of their shortcomings; made aware of the larger values of life; made pervious to ideas; brought to recognize the importance of the things of the mind and the spirit.

Another partial ideal, the prevalence of which Arnold laments, is the narrowly and unintelligently religious ideal. The middle-class Englishman is, according to Arnold, a natural “Hebraist”; his whole energy is spent, when he is at his best, in the struggle to obey certain traditional rules of morality. In the origin of these rules, or in the question as to whether or no they be founded in right reason, he has little or no interest. In general, he is careless or contemptuous of speculation and of whatever savours of philosophy. He is intent upon the fulfilment of a conventional code of duty. Conduct, narrowly conceived, is his only concern in life. Beauty has no charm for him; art, no meaning. The free play of mind in the disinterested pursuit of truth seems waste of energy or even vicious self-assertion. All the bright irresponsibility, the sparkling delight in life and in thought for their own sakes, that are characteristic of what Arnold calls the “Hellenistic” temper—its burning eagerness to know, its strenuous will to be sure that its truth is really truth—all these qualities and instincts seem to the Hebraist abnormal, pagan, altogether evil. The Puritanism of the seventeenth century was the almost unrestricted expression of the Hebraistic temper, and from the conceptions of life that were then wrought out the middle classes in England have never wholly escaped. The Puritans looked out upon life with a narrow vision, recognized only a few of its varied interests, and provided for the needs of only a part of man’s nature. Yet their theories and conceptions of life—theories and conceptions that were limited in the first place by the age in which they originated, and in the second place by a Hebraistic lack of sensitiveness to the manifold charm of beauty and knowledge—these limited theories and conceptions have imposed themselves constrainingly on many generations of Englishmen. To-day they remain, in all their narrowness and with an ever-increasing disproportion to existing conditions, the most influential guiding principles of large masses of men. Such men spend their lives in a round of petty religious meetings and employments. They think all truth is summed up in their little cut-and-dried Biblical interpretations. New truth is uninteresting or dangerous. Art distracts from religion, and is a siren against whose seductive chanting the discreet religious Ulysses seals his ears. To Arnold this whole view of life seems sadly mistaken, and the men who hold it seem fantastic distortions of the authentic human type. The absurdities and the dangers of the unrestricted Hebraistic ideal he satirizes or laments in Culture and Anarchy, in Literature and Dogma, in God and the Bible, and in St. Paul and Protestantism.

Still another kind of deformity arises when the intellect grows self-assertive and develops overweeningly. To this kind of distortion the modern man of science is specially prone; his exclusive study of material facts leads to crude, unregenerate strength of intellect, and leaves him careless of the value truth may have for the spirit and of its glimmering suggestions of beauty. Yes, and for the philosopher and the scholar, too, over-intellectualism has its peculiar dangers. The devotee of a system of thought is apt to lose touch with the real values of life, and in his exorbitant desire for unity and thoroughness of organization, to miss the free play of vital forces that gives to life its manifold charm, its infinite variety, and its ultimate reality. Bentham and Comte are examples of the evil effects of this rabid pursuit of system. “Culture is always assigning to system-makers and systems a smaller share in the bent of human destiny than their friends like.” As for the pedant, he is merely the miser of facts, who grows withered in hoarding the vain fragments of precious ore of whose use he has lost the sense. Men of all these various types offend through their fanatical devotion to truth; for, indeed, as some one has in recent years well said, the intellect is “but a parvenu,” and the other powers of life, despite the Napoleonic irresistibleness of the new-comer, have rights that deserve respect. Over-intellectualism, then, like the over-development of any other power, leads to disproportion and disorder.

Such being some of the partial ideals against which Arnold warns his readers, what account does he give of that perfect human type in all its integrity, in terms of which he criticises these aberrations or deformities? Perhaps Arnold felt that any attempt at an exact and systematic definition of this type would be somewhat grotesque and presumptuous; at any rate, he has avoided such an attempt. Still, he has recorded clearly, in many passages, his ideas as regards the powers in man that are essential to perfect humanity, and that must all be duly recognized and developed, if man is to attain in full scope what nature offers. A representative passage may be quoted from the lecture on Literature and Science: “When we set ourselves to enumerate the powers which go to the building up of human life, and say that they are the power of conduct, the power of intellect and knowledge, the power of beauty, and the power of social life and manners, he [Professor Huxley] can hardly deny that this scheme, though drawn in rough and plain lines enough, and not pretending to scientific exactness, does yet give a fairly true representation of the matter. Human nature is built up of these powers; we have the need for them all. When we have rightly met and adjusted the claims for them all, we shall then be in a fair way for getting soberness and righteousness with wisdom.”

These same ideas are presented, under a somewhat different aspect and with somewhat different terminology, in the first chapter of Culture and Anarchy: “The great aim of culture [is] the aim of setting ourselves to ascertain what perfection is and to make it prevail.” Culture seeks “the determination of this question through all the voices of human experience which have been heard upon it,—of art, science, poetry, philosophy, history, as well as of religion,—in order to give a greater fulness and certainty to its solution.... Religion says: The Kingdom of God is within you; and culture, in like manner, places human perfection in an internal condition, in the growth and predominance of our humanity proper, as distinguished from our animality. It places it in the ever-increasing efficacy and in the general harmonious expansion of those gifts of thought and feeling which make the peculiar dignity, wealth, and happiness of human nature. As I have said on a former occasion: ‘It is in making endless additions to itself, in the endless expansion of its powers, in endless growth in wisdom and beauty, that the spirit of the human race finds its ideal. To reach this ideal, culture is an indispensable aid, and that is the true value of culture.’”

In such passages as these Arnold comes as near as he ever comes to defining the perfect human type. He does not profess to define it universally and in abstract terms, for indeed he “hates” abstractions almost as inveterately as Burke hated them. He does not even describe concretely for men of his own time and nation the precise equipoise of powers essential to perfection. Yet he names these powers, suggests the ends towards which they must by their joint working contribute, and illustrates, through examples, the evil effects of the preponderance or absence of one and another. Finally, in the course of his many discussions, he describes in detail the method by which the delicate adjustment of these rival powers may be secured in the typical man; suggests who is to be the judge of the conflicting claims of these powers, and indicates the process by which this judge may most persuasively lay his opinions before those whom he wishes to influence. The method for the attainment of the perfect type is culture; the censor of defective types and the judge of the rival claims of the coöperant powers is the critic; and the process by which this judge clarifies his own ideas and enforces his opinions on others is criticism.

III

We are now at the centre of Arnold’s theory of life and hold the key to his system of belief, so far as he had a system. His reasons for attaching to the work of the critic the importance he palpably attached to it are at once apparent. Criticism is the method by which the perfect type of human nature is at any moment to be apprehended and kept in uncontaminate clearness of outline before the popular imagination. The ideal critic is the man of nicest discernment in matters intellectual, moral, æsthetic, social; of perfect equipoise of powers; of delicately pervasive sympathy; of imaginative insight; who grasps comprehensively the whole life of his time; who feels its vital tendencies and is intimately aware of its most insistent preoccupations; who also keeps his orientation towards the unchanging norms of human endeavour; and who is thus able to note and set forth the imperfections in existing types of human nature and to urge persuasively a return in essential particulars to the normal type. The function of criticism, then, is the vindication of the ideal human type against perverting influences, and Arnold’s prose-writings will for the most part be found to have been inspired in one form or another by a single purpose: the correction of excess in some human activity and the restoration of that activity to its proper place among the powers that make up the ideal human type.

Culture and Anarchy (1869) was the first of Arnold’s books to illustrate adequately this far-reaching conception of criticism. His special topic is, in this case, social conditions in England. Politicians, he urges, whose profession it is to deal with social questions, are engrossed in practical matters and biassed by party considerations; they lack the detachment and breadth of view to see the questions at issue in their true relations to abstract standards of right and wrong. They mistake means for ends, machinery for the results that machinery is meant to secure; they lose all sense of values and exalt temporary measures into matters of sacred import; finally, they come to that pass of ineptitude which Arnold symbolizes by the enthusiasm of Liberals over the measure to enable a man to marry his deceased wife’s sister. What is needed to correct these absurd misapprehensions is the free play of critical intelligence. The critic from his secure coign of vantage must examine social conditions dispassionately; he must determine what is essentially wrong in the inner lives of the various classes of men around him, and so reveal the real sources of those social evils which politicians are trying to remedy by external readjustments and temporary measures.

And this is just the task that Arnold undertakes in Culture and Anarchy. He sets himself to consider English society in its length and breadth with a view to discovering what is its essential constitution, what are the typical classes that enter into it, and what are the characteristics of these classes. So far as concerns classification he ultimately accepts, it is true, as adequate to his purpose, the traditional division of English society into upper, middle, and lower classes. But he then goes on to give an analysis of each of these classes that is novel, penetrating, in the highest degree stimulating. He takes a typical member of each class and describes him in detail, intellectually, morally, socially; he points out his sources of strength and his sources of weakness. He compares him as a type with the abstract ideal of human excellence, and notes wherein his powers “fall short or exceed.” He indicates the reaction upon the social and political life of the nation of these various defects and excesses, their inevitable influence in producing social misadjustment and friction. Finally, he urges that the one remedy that will correct these errant social types and bring them nearer to the perfect human type is culture, increase in vital knowledge.

The details of Arnold’s application of this conception of culture as a remedy for the social evils of the time, every reader may follow out for himself in Culture and Anarchy. One point in Arnold’s conception, however, is to be noted forthwith; it is a crucial point in its influence on his theorizings. By culture Arnold means increase of knowledge; yes, but he means something more; culture is for Arnold not merely an intellectual matter. Culture is the best knowledge made operative and dynamic in life and character. Knowledge must be vitalized; it must be intimately conscious of the whole range of human interests; it must ultimately subserve the whole nature of man. Continually, then, as Arnold is pleading for the spread of ideas, for increase of light, for the acceptance on the part of his fellow-countrymen of new knowledge from the most diverse sources, he is as keenly alive as any one to the dangers of over-intellectualism. The undue development of the intellectual powers is as injurious to the individual as any other form of deviation from the perfect human type.

This distrust of over-intellectualism is the ultimate ground of Arnold’s hostility to the claims of Physical Science to primacy in modern education. His ideas on the relative educational value of the physical sciences and of the humanities are set forth in the well-known discourse on Literature and Science. Arnold is ready, no one is more ready, to accept the conclusions of science on all topics that fall within its range; whatever its authenticated spokesmen have to say upon man’s origin, his moral nature, his relations to his fellows, his place in the physical universe, his religions, his sacred books—all these utterances are to be received with entire loyalty as far as they can be shown to embody the results of expert scientific observation and thought. But for Arnold, the great importance of modern scientific truth does not for a moment make clear the superiority of the physical sciences over the humanities as a means of educational discipline. The study of the sciences tends merely to intellectual development, to the increase of mental power; the study of literature, on the other hand, trains a man emotionally and morally, develops his human sympathies, sensitizes him temperamentally, rouses his imagination, and elicits his sense of beauty. Science puts before the student the crude facts of nature, bids him accept them dispassionately, rid himself of all discolouring moods as he watches the play of physical force, and convert himself into pure intelligence; he is simply to observe, to analyze, to classify, and to systematize, and he is to go through these processes continually with facts that have no human quality, that come raw from the great whirl of the cosmic machine. As a discipline, then, for the ordinary man, the study of science tends not a whit towards humanization, towards refinement, towards temperamental regeneration; it tends only to develop an accurate trick of the senses, fine observation, crude intellectual strength. These powers are of very great importance; but they may also be trained in the study of literature, while at the same time the student, as Sir Philip Sidney long ago pointed out, is being led and drawn “to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls, made worse by their clay lodgings, can be capable of.” Arnold, then, with characteristic anxiety for the integrity of the human type, urges the superior worth to most young men of a literary rather than a scientific training. Literature nourishes the whole spirit of man; science ministers only to the intellect.

The same insistent desire that culture be vital is at the root of Arnold’s discomfort in the presence of German scholarship. For the thoroughness and the disinterestedness of this scholarship he has great respect; but he cannot endure its trick of losing itself in the letter, its “pedantry, slowness,” its way of “fumbling” after truth, its “ineffectiveness.”[33] “In the German mind,” he exclaims in Literature and Dogma, “as in the German language, there does seem to be something splay, something blunt-edged, unhandy, infelicitous,—some positive want of straightforward, sure perception.”[34] Of scholarship of this splay variety, that comes from exaggerated intellectuality and from lack of a delicate temperament and of nice perceptions, Arnold is intolerant. Such scholarship he finds working its customary mischief in Professor Francis Newman’s translation of Homer, and, accordingly, he gives large parts of the lectures on Translating Homer to the illustration of its shortcomings and maladroitness; he is bent on showing how inadequate is great learning alone to cope with any nice literary problem. Newman’s philological knowledge of Greek and of Homer is beyond dispute, but his taste may be judged from his assertion that Homer’s verse, if we could hear the living Homer, would affect us “like an elegant and simple melody from an African of the Gold Coast.”[35] The remedy for such inept scholarship lies in culture, in the vitalization of knowledge. The scholar must not be a mere knower; all his powers must be harmoniously developed.

A last illustration of Arnold’s insistence that knowledge be vital may be drawn from his writings on religion and theology. Again criticism and culture are the passwords that open the way to a new and better order of things. Formulas, Arnold urges, have fastened themselves constrainingly upon the English religious mind. Traditional interpretations of the Bible have come to be received as beyond cavil. These interpretations are really human inventions—the product of the ingenious thinking of theologians like Calvin and Luther. Yet they have so authenticated themselves that for most readers to-day the Bible means solely what it meant for the exacerbated theological mind of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. If religion is to be vital, if knowledge of the Bible is to be genuine and real, there must be a critical examination of what this book means for the disinterested intelligence of to-day; the Bible, as literature, must be interpreted anew, sympathetically and imaginatively; the moral inspiration the Bible has to offer, even to men who are rigidly insistent on scientific habits of thought and standards of historical truth, must be disengaged from what is unverifiable and transitory, and made real and persuasive. “I write,” Arnold declares, “to convince the lover of religion that by following habits of intellectual seriousness he need not, so far as religion is concerned, lose anything. Taking the Old Testament as Israel’s magnificent establishment of the theme, Righteousness is salvation! taking the New as the perfect elucidation by Jesus of what righteousness is and how salvation is won, I do not fear comparing even the power over the soul and imagination of the Bible, taken in this sense,—a sense which is at the same time solid,—with the like power in the old materialistic and miraculous sense for the Bible, which is not.”[36] This definition of what Arnold hopes to do for the Bible may be supplemented by a description of the method in which culture works towards the ends desired: “Difficult, certainly, is the right reading of the Bible, and true culture, too, is difficult. For true culture implies not only knowledge, but right tact and justness of judgment, forming themselves by and with knowledge; without this tact it is not true culture. Difficult, however, as culture is, it is necessary. For, after all, the Bible is not a talisman, to be taken and used literally; neither is any existing church a talisman, whatever pretensions of the sort it may make, for giving the right interpretation of the Bible. Only true culture can give us this interpretation; so that if conduct is, as it is, inextricably bound up with the Bible and the right interpretation of it, then the importance of culture becomes unspeakable. For if conduct is necessary (and there is nothing so necessary), culture is necessary.”[37]

In all these various ways, then, that have been illustrated, culture is a specific against the ills that society is heir to. Culture is vital knowledge, and the critic is its fosterer and guardian; culture and criticism work together for the preservation of the integrity of the human type against all the disasters that threaten it from the storm and stress of modern life. Politics, religion, scholarship, science, each has its special danger for the individual; each seizes upon him, subdues him relentlessly to the need of the moment and the requirements of some particular function, and converts him often into a mere distorted fragment of humanity. Against this tyranny of the moment, against the specializing and materializing trend of modern life, criticism offers a powerful safeguard. Criticism is ever concerned with archetypal excellence, is continually disengaging, with fine discrimination, what is transitory and accidental from what is permanent and essential in all that man busies himself about, and is thus perpetually helping every individual to the apprehension of his “best self,” to the development of what is real and absolute and the elimination of what is false or deforming. And in doing all this the critic acts as the appreciator of life; he is not the abstract thinker. He apprehends the ideal intuitively; he reaches it by the help of the feelings and the imagination and a species of exquisite tact, not through a series of syllogisms; he is really a poet, rather than a philosopher.

This conception of the nature and functions of criticism makes intelligible and justifies a phrase of Arnold’s that has often been impugned—his description of poetry as a criticism of life. To this account of poetry it has been objected that criticism is an intellectual process, while poetry is primarily an affair of the imagination and the heart; and that to regard poetry as a criticism of life is to take a view of poetry that tends to convert it into mere rhetorical moralizing—the decorative expression in rhythmical language of abstract truth about life. This misinterpretation of Arnold’s meaning becomes impossible, if the foregoing theory of criticism be borne in mind. Criticism is the determination and the representation of the archetypal, of the ideal. Moreover, it is not a determination of the archetypal formally and theoretically, through speculation or the enumeration of abstract qualities; Arnold’s disinclination for abstractions has been repeatedly noted. The process to be used in criticism is a vital process of appreciation, in which the critic, sensitive to the whole value of human life, to the appeal of art and of conduct and of manners as well as of abstract truth, feels his way to a synthetic grasp upon what is ideally best, and portrays this concretely and persuasively for the popular imagination. Such an appreciator of life, if he produce beauty in verse, if he embody his vision of the ideal in metre, will be a poet. In other words, the poet is the appreciator of human life who sees in it most sensitively, inclusively, and penetratingly what is archetypal, and evokes his vision before others through rhythm and rhyme. In this sense poetry can hardly be denied to be a criticism of life; it is the winning portrayal of the ideal of human life as this ideal shapes itself in the mind of the poet. Such a criticism of life Dante gives, a determination and portrayal of what is ideally best in life according to mediæval conceptions; a representation of life in its integrity with a due adjustment of the claims of all the powers that enter into it—friendship, ambition, patriotism, loyalty, religion, artistic ardour, love. Such a criticism of life Shakespeare incidentally gives in terms of the full scope of Elizabethan experience in England, with due imaginative setting forth of the splendid vistas of possible achievement and unlimited development that the new knowledge and the discoveries of the Renaissance had opened. In short, the great poet is the typically sensitive, penetrative, and suggestive appreciator of life,—who calls to his aid, to make his appreciation as resonant and persuasive as possible, as potent as possible over men’s minds and hearts, all the emotional and imaginative resources of language,—rhythm, figures, allegory, symbolism,—whatever will enable him to impose his appreciation of life upon others and to insinuate into their souls his sense of the relative values of human acts and characters and passions; whatever will help him to make more overweeningly beautiful and insistently eloquent his vision of truth and beauty. In this sense the poet is the limiting ideal of the appreciative critic, and poetry is the ultimate criticism of life—the finest portrayal each age can attain to of what seems to it in life most significant and delightful.

IV

The purpose with which Arnold writes is now fairly apparent. His aim is to shape in happy fashion the lives of his fellows; to free them from the bonds that the struggle for existence imposes upon them; to enlarge their horizons, to enrich them spiritually, and to call all that is best within them into as vivid play as possible. When we turn to Arnold’s literary criticism we shall find this purpose no less paramount.

A glance through the volumes of Arnold’s essays renders it clear that his selection of a poet or a prose-writer for discussion was usually made with a view to putting before English readers some desirable trait of character for their imitation, some temperamental excellence that they are lacking in, some mode of belief that they neglect, some habit of thought that they need to cultivate. Joubert is studied and portrayed because of his single-hearted love of light, the purity of his disinterested devotion to truth, the fine distinction of his thought, and the freedom of his spirit from the sordid stains of worldly life. Heine is a typical leader in the war of emancipation, the arch-enemy of Philistinism, and the light-hearted, indomitable, foe of prejudice and cant. Maurice and Eugénie de Guérin are winning examples of the spiritual distinction that modern Romanism can induce in timely-happy souls. Scherer, whose critiques upon Milton and Goethe are painstakingly reproduced in the Mixed Essays, represents French critical intelligence in its best play—acute, yet comprehensive; exacting, yet sympathetic; regardful of nuances and delicately refining, and yet virile and constructive. Of the importance for modern England of emphasis on all these qualities of mind and heart, Arnold was securely convinced.

Moreover, even when his choice of subject is determined by other than moral considerations, his treatment is apt, none the less, to reveal his ethical bias. Again and again in his essays on poetry, for example, it is the substance of poetry that he is chiefly anxious to handle, while the form is left with incidental analysis. Wordsworth is the poet of joy in widest commonalty spread—the poet whose criticism of life is most sound and enduring and salutary. Shelley is a febrile creature, insecure in his sense of worldly values, “a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.”[38] The essay on Heine helps us only mediately to an appreciation of the volatile beauty of Heine’s songs, or to an intenser delight in the mere surface play of hues and moods in his verse. From the essay on George Sand, to be sure, we receive many vivid impressions of the emotional and imaginative scope of French romance; for this essay was written con amore in the revivification of an early mood of devotion, and in an unusually heightened style; the essay on Emerson is the one study that has in places somewhat of the same lyrical intensity and the same vividness of realization. Yet even in the essay on George Sand, the essayist is, on the whole, bent on revealing the temperament of the woman rather in its decisive influence on her theories of life than in its reaction upon her art as art. There is hardly a word of the Romance as a definite literary form, of George Sand’s relation to earlier French writers of fiction, or of her distinctive methods of work as a portrayer of the great human spectacle. In short, literature as art, literary forms as definite modes of artistic expression, the technique of the literary craftsman, receive, for the most part, from Arnold, slight attention.

Perhaps the one piece of work in which Arnold set himself, with some thoroughness, to the discussion of a purely literary problem was his series of lectures on Translating Homer. These lectures were produced, before his sense of responsibility for the moral regeneration of the Philistine had become importunate, and were addressed to an academic audience. For these reasons, the treatment of literary topics is more disinterested and less interrupted by practical considerations. Indeed, as will be presently noted in illustration of another aspect of Arnold’s work, these lectures contain very subtle and delicate appreciations, show everywhere exquisite responsiveness to changing effects of style, and enrich gratefully the vocabulary of impressionistic criticism.

Even in these exceptional lectures, however, Arnold’s ethical interest asserts itself. In the course of them he gives an account of the grand style in poetry,—of that poetic manner that seems to him to stand highest in the scale of excellence; and he carefully notes as an essential of this manner,—of this grand, style,—its moral power; “it can form the character, ... is edifying, ... can refine the raw natural man, ... can transmute him.”[39] This definition of the grand style will be discussed presently in connection with Arnold’s general theory of poetry; it is enough to note here that it illustrates the inseparableness in Arnold’s mind between art and morals.

His description of poetry as a criticism of life has already been mentioned. This doctrine is early implied in Arnold’s writings, for example, in the passage just quoted from the lectures on Translating Homer; it becomes more explicit in the Last Words, appended to these lectures, where the critic asserts that “the noble and profound application of ideas to life is the most essential part of poetic greatness.”[40] It is elaborated in the essays on Wordsworth (1879), on the Study of Poetry (1880), and on Byron (1881). “It is important, therefore,” the essay on Wordsworth assures us, “to hold fast to this: that poetry is at bottom a criticism of life; that the greatness of a poet lies in his powerful and beautiful application of ideas to life,—to the question: How to live.”[41] And in the essay on the Study of Poetry Arnold urges that “in poetry, as a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty, the spirit of our race will find, ... as time goes on and as other helps fail, its consolation and stay.”[42]

With this doctrine of the indissoluble connection between the highest poetic excellence and essential nobleness of subject-matter probably only the most irreconcilable advocates of art for art’s sake would quarrel. So loyal an adherent of art as Walter Pater suggests a test of poetic “greatness” substantially the same with Arnold’s. “It is on the quality of the matter it informs or controls, its compass, its variety, its alliance to great ends, or the depth of the note of revolt, or the largeness of hope in it, that the greatness of literary art depends, as The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, Les Misérables, The English Bible, are great art.”[43] This may be taken as merely a different phrasing of Arnold’s principle that “the greatness of a poet lies in his powerful and beautiful application of ideas to life—to the question: How to live.” Surely, then, we are not at liberty to press any objection to Arnold’s general theory of poetry on the ground of its being, in its essence, over-ethical.

There remains nevertheless the question of emphasis. In the application to special cases of this test of essential worth, either the critic may be constitutionally biassed in favour of a somewhat restricted range of definite ideas about life, or even when he is fairly hospitable towards various moral idioms, he may still be so intent upon making ethical distinctions as to fail to give their due to the purely artistic qualities of poetry. It is in this latter way that Arnold is most apt to offend. The emphasis in the discussions of Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Keats, Gray, and Milton is prevailingly on the ethical characteristics of each poet; and the reader carries away from an essay a vital conception of the play of moral energy and of spiritual passion in the poet’s verse rather than an impression of his peculiar adumbration of beauty, the characteristic rhythms of his imaginative movement, the delicate colour modulations on the surface of his image of life.

It must, however, be borne in mind that Arnold has specially admitted the incompleteness of his description of poetry as “a criticism of life”; this criticism, he has expressly added, must be made in conformity “to the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.” “The profound criticism of life” characteristic of “the few supreme masters” must exhibit itself “in indissoluble connection with the laws of poetic truth and beauty.”[44] Is there, then, to be found in Arnold any account of certain laws the observance of which secures poetic beauty and truth? Is there any description of the special ways in which poetic beauty and truth manifest themselves, of the formal characteristics to be found in poetry where poetic beauty and truth are present? Does Arnold either suggest the methods the poet must follow to attain these qualities, or classify the various subordinate effects through which poetic beauty and truth invariably reveal their presence? The most apposite parts of his writings to search for some declaration on these points are the lectures on Translating Homer, and the second series of his essays which deal chiefly with the study of poetry. Here, if anywhere, we ought to find a registration of beliefs as regards the precise nature and source of poetic beauty and truth.

And indeed throughout all these writings, which run through a considerable period of time, Arnold makes fairly consistent use of a half-dozen categories for his analyses of poetic effects. These categories are substance and matter, style and manner, diction and movement. Of the substance of really great poetry we learn repeatedly that it must be made up of ideas of profound significance “on man, on nature, and on human life.”[45] This is, however, merely the prescription already so often noted that poetry, to reach the highest excellence, must contain a penetrating and ennobling criticism of life. In the essay on Byron, however, there is something formally added to this requisition of “truth and seriousness of substance and matter”; besides these, “felicity and perfection of diction and manner, as these are exhibited in the best poets, are what constitute a criticism of life made in conformity with the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.”[46] There must then be felicity and perfection of diction and manner in poetry of the highest order; these terms are somewhat vague, but serve at least to guide us on our analytic way. In the essay on the Study of Poetry, there is still farther progress made in the description of poetic excellence. “To the style and manner of the best poetry, their special character, their accent is given by their diction, and, even yet more, by their movement. And though we distinguish between the two characters, the two accents, of superiority” (i.e. between the superiority that comes from substance and the superiority that comes from style), “yet they are nevertheless vitally connected one with the other. The superior character of truth and seriousness, in the matter and substance of the best poetry, is inseparable from the superiority of diction and movement marking its style and manner. The two superiorities are closely related, and are in steadfast proportion one to the other. So far as high poetic truth and seriousness are wanting to a poet’s matter and substance, so far also, we may be sure, will a high poetic stamp of diction and movement be wanting to his style and manner.”[47]

Now that there is this intimate and necessary union between a poet’s mode of conceiving life and his manner of poetic expression, is hardly disputable. The image of life in a poet’s mind is simply the outside world transformed by the complex of sensations and thoughts and emotions peculiar to the poet; and this image inevitably frames for itself a visible and audible expression that delicately utters its individual character—distils that character subtly through word and sentence, rhythm and metaphor, image and figure of speech, and through their integration into a vital work of art. Moreover, the poet’s style is itself in general the product of the same personality which determines his image of life, and must therefore be, like his image of life, delicately striated with the markings of his play of thought and feeling and fancy. The close correspondence, then, between the poet’s subject-matter and his manner or style is indubitable. The part of Arnold’s conclusion or the point in his method that is regrettable is the exclusive stress that he throws on this dependence of style upon worth of substance. He converts style into a mere function of the moral quality of a poet’s thought about life, and fails to furnish any delicately studied categories for the appreciation of poetic style apart from its moral implications.

Take, for example, the judgments passed in the Study of Poetry upon various poets; in every instance the estimate of the poet’s style turns upon the quality of his thought about life. Is it Chaucer whose right to be ranked as a classic is mooted? He cannot be ranked as a classic because “the substance of” his poetry has not “high seriousness.”[48] Is it Burns whose relative rank is being fixed? Burns through lack of “absolute sincerity” falls short of “high seriousness,” and, hence, is not to be placed among the classics. And thus continually with Arnold, effects of style are merged in moral qualities, and the reader gains little insight into the refinements of poetical manner except as these derive directly from the poet’s moral consciousness. The categories of style and manner, diction and movement, are everywhere subordinated to the categories of substance and matter, are treated as almost wholly derivative. “Felicity and perfection of diction and manner,” wherever they are admittedly present, are usually explained as the direct result of the poet’s lofty conception of life. Such a treatment of questions of style does not further us much on our way to a knowledge of the “laws of poetic beauty and poetic truth.”

Doubtless somewhat more disinterested analyses of style may be found in the lectures on Translating Homer. These discussions do not reach very definite conclusions, but they at least consider poetic excellence as for the moment dependent on something else than the moral mood of the poet. For example, the grand style is analyzed into two varieties, the grand style in severity and the grand style in simplicity. Each of these styles is described and illustrated so that it enters into the reader’s imagination and increases his sensitiveness to poetic excellence. Somewhat later in the lectures, the distinction between real simplicity in poetic style and sophisticated simplicity is drawn with exquisite delicacy of appreciation. Throughout these passages, there is an effort to deal directly with artistic effects for their own sake and apart from their significance as expressive of ethos. Yet even here Arnold’s ethical bias reveals itself in a tendency, while he is describing the moods back of these artistic qualities, to use words that have moral implications, and that suggest the issue of such moods in conduct. Self-restraint, proud gravity, are among the moods that are found back of the grand style in severity; over-refinement, super-subtle sophistication, account for Tennyson’s simplesse.

To bring together, then, the results of this somewhat protracted analysis: Arnold ostensibly admits that poetry, to be of the highest excellence, must, in addition to containing a criticism of life of profound significance, conform to the laws of poetic beauty and truth. He accepts as necessary categories, for the appreciation of poetical excellence, style and manner, diction and movement. Yet his most important general assertion about these latter purely formal determinations of poetry is that they are inseparably connected with substance and matter; similarly, whenever he discusses artistic effects, he is apt to find them interesting simply as serving to interpret the artist’s prevailing mood towards life; and even where, as is at times doubtless the case, he escapes for the moment from his ethical interest and appreciates with imaginative delicacy the individual quality of a poem or a poet’s style, he is nearly always found sooner or later explaining this quality as originating in the poet’s peculiar ethos. As for any systematic or even incidental study of “the laws of poetic beauty and truth,” we search for it through his pages in vain.

V

But it would be wrong in characterizing Arnold’s essays to attribute their lack of theorizing about questions of art solely to his preoccupation with conduct. For theory in general and for abstractions in general,—for all sorts of philosophizing,—Arnold openly professes his dislike. “Perhaps we shall one day learn,” he says, in his essay on Wordsworth, “to make this proposition general, and to say: Poetry is the reality, philosophy the illusion.” Distrust of the abstract and of the purely theoretical shows itself throughout his literary criticism and determines many of its characteristics.

His hostility to systems and to system-makers has already been pointed out; this hostility admits of no exception in favour of the systematic critic. “There is the judgment of ignorance, the judgment of incompatibility, the judgment of envy and jealousy. Finally, there is the systematic judgment, and this judgment is the most worthless of all.... Its author has not really his eye upon the professed object of his criticism at all, but upon something else which he wants to prove by means of that object. He neither really tells us, therefore, anything about the object, nor anything about his own ignorance of the object. He never fairly looks at it; he is looking at something else.”[49] This hypnotizing effect that a preconceived theory exerts on a critic, is Arnold’s first reason for objecting to systematic criticism; the critic with a theory is bound to find what he goes in search of, and nothing else. He goes out—to change somewhat one of Arnold’s own figures—like Saul, the son of Kish, in search of his father’s asses; and he comes back with the authentic animals instead of the traditional windfall of a kingdom.

Nor is preoccupation with a pet theory the sole incapacity that Arnold finds in the systematic critic; such a critic is almost sure to be over-intellectualized, a victim of abstractions and definitions, dependent for his judgments on conceptions, and lacking in temperamental sensitiveness to the appeal of literature as art. He is merely a triangulator of the landscape of literature, and moves resolutely in his process of triangulation from one fixed point to another; he finds significant only such parts of his literary experience as he can sum up in a definite abstract formula at some one of these arbitrary halting-places; his ultimate opinion of the ground he covers is merely the sum total of a comparatively small number of such abstract expressions. To the manifold wealth of the landscape in colour, in light, in shade, and in poetic suggestiveness, the system-monger, the theoretical critic, has all the time been blind.

Knowledge, too, even though it be not severely systematized, may interfere with the free play of critical intelligence. An oversupply of unvitalized facts or ideas, even though these facts or ideas be not organized into an importunate theory, may prove disastrous to the critic. This danger Arnold has amusingly set forth in his Last Words on Homeric translation: “Much as Mr. Newman was mistaken when he talked of my rancour, he is entirely right when he talks of my ignorance. And yet, perverse as it seems to say so, I sometimes find myself wishing, when dealing with these matters of poetical criticism, that my ignorance were even greater than it is. To handle these matters properly, there is needed a poise so perfect that the least overweight in any direction tends to destroy the balance. Temper destroys it, a crotchet destroys it, even erudition may destroy it. To press to the sense of the thing with which one is dealing, not to go off on some collateral issue about the thing, is the hardest matter in the world. The ‘thing itself’ with which one is here dealing—the critical perception of poetic truth—is of all things the most volatile, elusive, and evanescent; by even pressing too impetuously after it, one runs the risk of losing it. The critic of poetry should have the finest tact, the nicest moderation, the most free, flexible, and elastic spirit imaginable; he should be, indeed, the ‘ondoyant et divers,’ the undulating and diverse being of Montaigne. The less he can deal with his object simply and freely, the more things he has to take into account in dealing with it,—the more, in short, he has to encumber himself,—so much the greater force of spirit he needs to retain his elasticity. But one cannot exactly have this greater force by wishing for it; so, for the force of spirit one has, the load put upon it is often heavier than it will well bear. The late Duke of Wellington said of a certain peer that ‘it was a great pity his education had been so far too much for his abilities.’ In like manner one often sees erudition out of all proportion to its owner’s critical faculty. Little as I know, therefore, I am always apprehensive, in dealing with poetry, lest even that little should prove too much for my abilities.”[50]

Discreet ignorance, then, is Arnold’s counsel of perfection to the would-be critic. And, accordingly, he himself is desultory from conscientious motives and unsystematic by fixed rule. There are two passages in his writings where he explains confidentially his methods and his reasons for choosing them. The first occurs in a letter of 1864: “My sinuous, easy, unpolemical mode of proceeding has been adopted by me, first, because I really think it the best way of proceeding, if one wants to get at, and keep with, truth; secondly, because I am convinced only by a literary form of this kind being given to them can ideas such as mine ever gain any access in a country such as ours.”[51] The second passage occurs in the Preface to his first series of Essays in Criticism (1865): “Indeed, it is not in my nature—some of my critics would rather say not in my power—to dispute on behalf of any opinion, even my own, very obstinately. To try and approach truth on one side after another, not to strive or cry, not to persist in pressing forward, on any one side, with violence and self-will, it is only thus, it seems to me, that mortals may hope to gain any vision of the mysterious goddess, whom we shall never see except in outline. He who will do nothing but fight impetuously towards her, on his own one favourite particular line, is inevitably destined to run his head into the folds of the black robe in which she is wrapped.”[52]

Such, then, is Arnold’s ideal of critical method. The critic is not to move from logical point to point as, for example, Francis Jeffrey was wont, in his essays, to move, with an advocate’s devotion to system and desire to make good some definite conclusion. Rather he is to give rein to his temperament; he is to make use of intuitions, imaginations, hints that touch the heart, as well as abstract principles, syllogisms, and arguments; and so he is to reach out tentatively through all his powers after truth if haply he may find her; in the hope that thus, keeping close to the concrete aspects of his subject, he may win to an ever more inclusive and intimate command of its surface and configurations. The type of mind most apt for this kind of critical work is the “free, flexible, and elastic spirit,” described in the passage just quoted from the Last Words; the “undulating and diverse being of Montaigne.”

A critic of this type will palpably concern himself slightly with abstractions, with theorizings, with definitions. And, indeed, Arnold’s unwillingness to define becomes at times almost ludicrous. “Nothing has raised more questioning among my critics than these words—noble, the grand style.... Alas! the grand style is the last matter in the world for verbal definition to deal with adequately. One may say of it as is said of faith: ‘One must feel it in order to know it.’”[53] Similarly in the Study of Poetry, Arnold urges: “Critics give themselves great labour to draw out what in the abstract constitutes the characters of a high quality of poetry. It is much better to have recourse to concrete examples.... If we are asked to define this mark and accent in the abstract, our answer must be: No, for we should thereby be darkening the question, not clearing it.” Again: “I may discuss what in the abstract constitutes the grand style; but that sort of general discussion never much helps our judgment of particular instances.”[54] These passages are characteristic; rarely indeed does Arnold consent to commit himself to the control of a definition. He prefers to convey into his readers’ mind a living realization of the thing or the object he treats of rather than to put before them its logically articulated outlines.

Moreover, when he undertakes the abstract discussion of a general term, he is apt to be capricious in his treatment of it and to follow in his subdivisions and classifications some external clue rather than logical structure. In the essay on Celtic Literature he discusses the various ways of handling nature in poetry, and finds four such ways—the conventional way, the faithful way, the Greek way, and the magical way. The classification recommends itself through its superficial charm and facility, yet rests on no psychological truth, or at any rate carries with it, as Arnold treats it, no psychological suggestions; it gives no swift insight into the origin in the poet’s mind and heart of these different modes of conceiving of nature. Hence the classification, as Arnold uses it, is merely a temporary makeshift for rather gracefully grouping effects, not an analytic interpretation of these effects through a reduction of them to their varying sources in thought and feeling.

This may be taken as typical of Arnold’s critical methods. As we read his essays we have little sense of making definite progress in the comprehension of literature as an art among arts, as well as in the appreciation of an individual author or poem. We are not being intellectually oriented, as in reading the most stimulating critical work; we are not getting an ever-surer sense of the points of the compass. Essays, to have this orienting power, need not be continually prating of theories and laws; they need not be rabidly scientific in phrase or in method. But they must issue from a mind that has come to an understanding with itself about the genesis of art in the genius of the artist; about the laws that, when the utmost plea has been made for freedom and caprice, regulate artistic production; about the history and evolution of art forms; and about the relations of the arts among themselves and to the other activities of life. It may fairly be doubted if Arnold had ever wrought out for himself consistent conclusions on all or most of these topics. Indeed, the mere mention of his name in connection with such a formal list of topics suggests the kind of mock-serious deprecatory paragraph with which the “unlearned bellettristic trifler” was wont to reply to charges of dilettantism—a paragraph sure to carry in its tail a stinging bit of sarcasm at the expense of pedantry and unenlightened formalism. And yet, great as must be every one’s respect for the thorough scholarship and widely varied accomplishment that Arnold made so light of and carried off so easily, the doubt must nevertheless remain whether a firmer grasp on theory, and a more consistent habit of thinking out literary questions to their principles, would not have invigorated his work as a critic and given it greater permanence and richer suggestiveness.

VI

It is, then, as an appreciator of what may perhaps be called the spiritual qualities of literature that Arnold is most distinctively a furtherer of criticism. An appreciator of beauty,—of true beauty wherever found,—that is what he would willingly be; and yet, as the matter turns out, the beauty that he most surely enjoys and reveals has invariably a spiritual aroma,—is the finer breath of intense spiritual life. Or, if spiritual be too mystical a word to apply to Homer and Goethe, perhaps Arnold should rather be termed an appreciator of such beauty in literature as carries with it an inevitable suggestion of elevation and nobleness of character in the author.

The importance of appreciation in criticism Arnold has described in one of the Mixed Essays: “Admiration is salutary and formative; ... but things admirable are sown wide, and are to be gathered here and gathered there, not all in one place; and until we have gathered them wherever they are to be found, we have not known the true salutariness and formativeness of admiration. The quest is large; and occupation with the unsound or half-sound, delight in the not good or less good, is a sore let and hindrance to us. Release from such occupation and delight sets us free for ranging farther, and for perfecting our sense of beauty. He is the happy man, who, encumbering himself with the love of nothing which is not beautiful, is able to embrace the greatest number of things beautiful in his life.”[55]

On this disinterested quest, then, for the beautiful, Arnold in his essays nominally fares forth. Yet certain limitations in his appreciation, over and beyond his prevalent ethical interest, must at once be noted. Music, painting, and sculpture have seemingly nothing to say to him. In his Letters there are only a few allusions to any of these arts, and such as occur do not surpass in significance the comments of the chance loiterer in foreign galleries or visitor of concert rooms. In his essays there are none of the correlations between the effects and methods of literature and those of kindred arts that may do so much either to individualize or to illustrate the characteristics of poetry. For Arnold, literature and poetry seem to make up the whole range of art.

Within these limits, however,—the limits imposed by preoccupation with conduct and by carelessness of all arts except literature,—Arnold has been a prevailing revealer of beauty. Not his most hostile critic can question the delicacy of his perception, so far as he allows his perception free play. On the need of nice and ever nicer discriminations in the apprehension of the shifting values of literature, he has himself often insisted. Critics who let their likes and dislikes assert themselves turbulently, to the destruction of fine distinctions, always fall under Arnold’s condemnation. “When Mr. Palgrave dislikes a thing, he feels no pressure constraining him, either to try his dislike closely or to express it moderately; he does not mince matters, he gives his dislike all its own way.... He dislikes the architecture of the Rue Rivoli, and he puts it on the level with the architecture of Belgravia and Gower Street; he lumps them all together in one condemnation; he loses sight of the shade, the distinction which is here everything.” For a similar blurring of impressions, Professor Newman is taken to task, though in Newman’s case the faulty appreciations are due to a different cause: “Like all learned men, accustomed to desire definite rules, he draws his conclusions too absolutely; he wants to include too much under his rules; he does not quite perceive that in poetical criticism the shade, the fine distinction, is everything; and that, when he has once missed this, in all he says he is in truth but beating the air.” Here, again, what Arnold pleads for is temperamental sensitiveness, delicacy of perception. To appreciate literature more and more sensitively in terms of “an undulating and diverse temperament,” this is the ideal that he puts before literary criticism.

His own appreciations of poetry are probably richest, most discriminating, and most disinterested in the lectures on Translating Homer. The imaginative tact is unfailing with which he renders the contour and the subject-qualities of the various poems that he comments on; and equally noteworthy is the divining instinct with which he captures the spirit of each poet and sets it before us with a phrase or a symbol. The “inversion and pregnant conciseness” of Milton’s style, its “laborious and condensed fulness”; the plainspokenness, freshness, vigorousness, and yet fancifulness and curious complexity of Chapman’s style; Spenser’s “sweet and easy slipping movement”; Scott’s “bastard epic style”; the “one continual falsetto” of Macaulay’s “pinchbeck Roman Ballads,”—all these characterizations are delicately sure in their phrasing and suggestion, and are the clearer because the various styles are made to stand in continual contrast with Homer’s style, the rapidity, directness, simplicity, and nobleness of which Arnold keeps ever present in our consciousness. Incidentally, too, such suggestive discriminations as that between simplesse and simplicité, the “semblance” of simplicity and the “real quality,” are wrought out for the reader as the critic goes on with his pursuit of the essential qualities of Homeric thought and diction. To read these lectures is a thoroughly tempering process; a process that renders the mind and imagination permanently finer in texture, more elastic, more sensitively sure in tone, and subtly responsive to the demands of good art.

The essay on the Study of Poetry, which was written as preface to Ward’s English Poets, is also rich in appreciation, and at times almost as disinterested as the lectures on Homer; yet perhaps never quite so disinterested. For in the Study of Poetry Arnold is persistently aware of his conception of “the grand style” and bent on winning his readers to make it their own. Only poets who attain this grand style deserve to be “classics,” and the continual insistence on the note of “high seriousness”—its presence or absence—becomes rather wearisome. Moreover, Arnold’s preoccupation with this ultimate manner and quality tends to limit the freedom and delicate truth of his appreciations of other manners and minor qualities. At times, one is tempted to charge Arnold with some of the unresponsiveness of temperament that he ascribes to systematic critics, and to find even Arnold himself under the perilous sway of a fixed idea. Yet, when all is said, the Study of Poetry is full of fine things, and does much to widen the range of appreciation, and, at the same time, to make appreciation more certain. “The liquid diction, the fluid movement of Chaucer, his large, free, sound representation of things”; Burns’s “touches of piercing, sometimes almost intolerable, pathos,” his “archness,” too, and his “soundness”; Shelley, “that beautiful spirit building his many-coloured haze of words and images ‘Pinnacled dim in the intense inane’”; these, and other interpretations like them, are easily adequate and carry the qualities of each poet readily into the minds and imaginations of sympathetic readers. Appreciation is much the richer for this essay on the Study of Poetry.

Nor must Arnold’s suggestive appreciations of prose style be forgotten. Several of them have passed into standard accounts of clearly recognized varieties of prose diction. Arnold’s phrasing of the matter has made all sensitive English readers permanently more sensitive to “the warm glow, blithe movement, and soft pliancy of life” of the Attic style, and also permanently more hostile to “the over-heavy richness and encumbered gait” of the Asiatic style. Equally good is his account of the Corinthian style: “It has glitter without warmth, rapidity without ease, effectiveness without charm. Its characteristic is that it has no soul; all it exists for, is to get its ends, to make its points, to damage its adversaries, to be admired, to triumph. A style so bent on effect at the expense of soul, simplicity, and delicacy; a style so little studious of the charm of the great models; so far from classic truth and grace, must surely be said to have the note of provinciality.”[56] “Middle-class Macaulayese” is his name for Hepworth Dixon’s style; a style which he evidently regards as likely to gain favour and establish itself. “I call it Macaulayese ... because it has the same internal and external characteristics as Macaulay’s style; the external characteristic being a hard, metallic movement with nothing of the soft play of life, and the internal characteristic being a perpetual semblance of hitting the right nail on the head without the reality. And I call it middle-class Macaulayese, because it has these faults without the compensation of great studies and of conversance with great affairs, by which Macaulay partly redeemed them.”[57] It will, of course, be noted that these latter appreciations deal for the most part with divergences from the beautiful in style, but they none the less quicken and refine the æsthetic sense.

Finally, throughout the two series of miscellaneous essays there is, in the midst of much business with ethical matters, an often-recurring free play of imagination in the interests, solely and simply, of beauty. Many are the happy windfalls these essays offer of delicate interpretation both of poetic effect and of creative movement, and many are the memorable phrases and symbols by which incidentally the essential quality of a poet or prose-writer is securely lodged in the reader’s consciousness.

And yet, wide ranging and delicately sensitive as are Arnold’s appreciations, the feeling will assert itself, in a final survey of his work in literary criticism, that he nearly always has designs on his readers and that appreciation is a means to an end. The end in view is the exorcism of the spirit of Philistinism. Arnold’s conscience is haunted by this hideous apparition as Luther’s was by the devil, and he is all the time metaphorically throwing his inkstand at the spectre. Or, to put the matter in another way, his one dominating wish is to help modern Englishmen to “conquer the hard unintelligence” which is “their bane; to supple and reduce it by culture, by a growth in the variety, fulness, and sweetness of their spiritual life”; and the appreciative interpretation of literature to as wide a circle of readers as possible seems to him one of the surest ways of thus educing in his fellow-countrymen new spiritual qualities. It must not be forgotten that Matthew Arnold was the son of Thomas Arnold, master of Rugby; there is in him a hereditary pedagogic bias—an inevitable trend towards moral suasion. The pedagogic spirit has suffered a sea-change into something rich and strange, and yet traces of its origin linger about it. Criticism with Arnold is rarely, if ever, irresponsible; it is our schoolmaster to bring us to culture.

In a letter of 1863 Arnold speaks of the great transformation which “in this concluding half of the century the English spirit is destined to undergo.” “I shall do,” he adds, “what I can for this movement in literature; freer perhaps in that sphere than I could be in any other, but with the risk always before me, if I cannot charm the wild beast of Philistinism while I am trying to convert him, of being torn in pieces by him.”[58] In charming the wild beast Arnold ultimately succeeded; and yet there is a sense in which he fell a victim to his very success. The presence of the beast, and the necessity of fluting to him debonairly and winningly, fastened themselves on Arnold’s imagination, and subdued him to a comparatively narrow range of subjects and set of interests. From the point of view, at least, of what is desirable in appreciative criticism, Arnold was injured by his sense of responsibility; he lacks the detachment and the delicate mobility that are the redeeming traits of modern dilettantism.

If, then, we regard Arnold as a writer with a task to accomplish, with certain definite regenerative purposes to carry out, with a body of original ideas about the conduct of life to inculcate, we must conclude that he succeeded admirably in his work, followed out his ideas with persistence and temerity through many regions of human activity, and embodied them with unwearying ingenuity and persuasiveness in a wide range of discussions. If, on the other hand, we consider him solely as a literary critic, we are forced to admit that he is not the ideal literary critic; he is not the ideal literary critic because he is so much more, and because his interests lie so decisively outside of art. Nor is this opinion meant to imply an ultimate theory of art for art’s sake, or to suggest any limitation of criticism to mere impressionism or appreciation. Literature must be known historically and philosophically before it can be adequately appreciated; that is emphatically true. Art may or may not be justifiable solely as it is of service to society; that need not be debated. But, in any event, literary criticism, if it is to reach its utmost effectiveness, must regard works of art for the time being as self-justified integrations of beauty and truth, and so regarding them must record and interpret their power and their charm. And this temporary isolating process is just the process which Arnold very rarely, for the reasons that have been traced in detail, is willing or able to go through with.

VII

When we turn to consider Arnold’s literary style, we are forced to admit that this, too, has suffered from the strenuousness of his moral purpose; it has been unduly sophisticated, here and there, because of his desire to charm “the wild beast of Philistinism.” To this purpose and this desire is owing, at least in part, that falsetto note—that half-querulous, half-supercilious artificiality of tone—which is now and then to be heard in his writing. To exaggerate the extent to which this note is audible would doubtless be easy; an unprejudiced reader will find long continuous passages of even Arnold’s most elaborately designed writing free from any trace of undue self-consciousness or of gentle condescension. And yet it is undeniable that when, apart from his Letters, Arnold’s prose, as a whole, is compared with that of such a writer, for example, as Cardinal Newman, there is in Arnold’s style, as the ear listens for the quality of the bell-metal, not quite the same beautifully clear and sincere resonance. There seems to be, now and then, some unhappy warring of elements, some ill-adjustment of over-tones, a trace of some flaw in mixing or casting.

Are not these defects in Arnold’s style due to his somewhat self-conscious attempt to fascinate a recalcitrant public? Is it not the assumption of a manner that jars on us often in Arnold’s less happy moments? Has he not the pose of the man who overdoes bravado with the hope of getting cleverly through a pass which he feels a bit trying to his nerves? Arnold has a keen consciousness of the very stupid beast of Philistinism lying in wait for him; and in the stress of the moment he is guilty of a little exaggeration of manner; he is just a shade unnatural in his flippancy; he treads his measure with an unduly mincing flourish.

Arnold’s habit of half-mocking self-depreciation and of insincere apology for supposititious personal shortcomings has already been mentioned; to his controversial writings, particularly, it gives often a raspingly supercilious tone. He insists with mock humbleness that he is a “mere bellettristic trifler”; that he has no “system of philosophy with principles coherent, interdependent, subordinate, and derivative” to help him in the discussion of abstract questions. He assures us that he is merely “a feeble unit” of the “English middle class”; he deprecates being called a professor because it is a title he shares “with so many distinguished men—Professor Pepper, Professor Anderson, Professor Frickel, and others—who adorn it,” he feels, much more than he does. These mock apologies are always amusing and yet a bit exasperating too. Why should Arnold regard it, we ask ourselves, as such a relishing joke—the possibility that he has a defect? The implication of almost arrogant self-satisfaction is troublesomely present to us. Such passages certainly suggest that Arnold had an ingrained contempt for the “beast” he was charming.

Yet, when all is said, much of this supercilious satire is irresistibly droll, and refuses to be gainsaid. One of his most effective modes of ridiculing his opponents is through conjuring up imaginary scenes in which some ludicrous aspect of his opponent’s case or character is thrown into diverting prominence. Is it the pompous, arrogant self-satisfaction of the prosperous middle-class tradesman that Arnold wishes to satirize? And more particularly is it the futility of the Saturday Review in holding up Benthamism—the systematic recognition of such a smug man’s ideal of selfish happiness—as the true moral ideal? Arnold represents himself as travelling on a suburban railway on which a murder has recently been committed, and as falling into chat with the middle-class frequenters of this route. The demoralization of these worthy folk, Arnold assures us, was “something bewildering.” “Myself a transcendentalist (as the Saturday Review knows), I escaped the infection; and, day after day, I used to ply my agitated fellow-travellers with all the consolations which my transcendentalism would naturally suggest to me. I reminded them how Cæsar refused to take precautions against assassination, because life was not worth having at the price of an ignoble solicitude for it. I reminded them what insignificant atoms we all are in the life of the world. ‘Suppose the worst to happen,’ I said, addressing a portly jeweller from Cheapside; ‘suppose even yourself to be the victim; il n’y a pas d’homme nécessaire. We should miss you for a day or two upon the Woodford Branch; but the great mundane movement would still go on, the gravel walks of your villa would still be rolled, dividends would still be paid at the Bank, omnibuses would still run, there would still be the old crush at the corner of Fenchurch Street.’ All was of no avail. Nothing could moderate in the bosom of the great English middle class, their passionate, absorbing, almost bloodthirsty clinging to life.” This is, of course, “admirable fooling”; and equally, of course, the little imaginary scene serves perfectly the purposes of Arnold’s argument and turns into ridicule the narrowness and overweening self-importance of the smug tradesman.

Another instance of Arnold’s ability to conjure up fancifully a scene of satirical import may be adduced from the first chapter of Culture and Anarchy. Arnold has been ridiculing the worship of mere “bodily health and vigour” as ends in themselves. “Why, one has heard people,” he exclaims, “fresh from reading certain articles of the Times on the Registrar General’s returns of marriages and births in this country, who would talk of our large English families in quite a solemn strain, as if they had something in itself, beautiful, elevating, and meritorious in them; as if the British Philistine would have only to present himself before the Great Judge with his twelve children, in order to be received among the sheep as a matter of right!”

It is a fact worth remarking that in his prose Arnold’s imagination seems naturally to call up and visualize only such scenes as those that have just been quoted—scenes that are satirically and even maliciously suggestive; scenes, on the other hand, that have the limpid light and the winning quality of many in Cardinal Newman’s writings—scenes that rest the eye and commend themselves simply and graciously to the heart—are in Arnold’s prose rarely, if ever, to be found. This seems the less easy to explain inasmuch as his poetry, though of course not exceptionally rich in colour, nevertheless shows everywhere a delicately sure sense of the surface of life. Nor is it only the large sweep of the earth-areas or the diversified play of the human spectacle that is absent from Arnold’s prose; his imagination does not even make itself exceptionally felt through concrete phrasing or warmth of colouring; his style is usually intellectual almost to the point of wanness, and has rarely any of the heightened quality of so-called poetic prose. In point of fact, this conventional restraint in Arnold’s style, this careful adherence to the mood of prose, is a very significant matter; it distinguishes Arnold both as writer and as critic of life from such men as Carlyle and Mr. Ruskin. The meaning of this quietly conventional manner will be later considered in the discussion of Arnold’s relation to his age.

The two pieces of writing where Arnold’s style has most fervour and imaginative glow are the essay on George Sand and the discourse on Emerson. In each case he was returning in the choice of his subject to an earlier enthusiasm, and was reviving a mood that had for him a certain romantic consecration. George Sand had opened for him, while he was still at the University, a whole world of rich and half-fearful imaginative experience; a world where he had delighted to follow through glowing southern landscapes the journeyings of picturesquely rebellious heroes and heroines, whose passionate declamation laid an irresistible spell on his English fancy. Her love and portrayal of rustic nature had also come to him as something graciously different from the sterner and more moral or spiritual interpretation of rustic life to be found in Wordsworth’s poems. Her personality, in all its passionate sincerity and with its pathetically unrewarded aspirations, had imposed itself on Arnold’s imagination both as this personality was revealed in her books and as it was afterward encountered in actual life. All these early feelings Arnold revives in a memorial essay written in 1877, one year after George Sand’s death. From first to last the essay has a brooding sincerity of tone, an unconsidering frankness, and an intensity and colour of phrase that are noteworthy. The descriptions of nature, both of the landscapes to be found in George Sand’s romances and of those in the midst of which she herself lived, have a luxuriance and sensuousness of surface that Arnold rarely condescends to. The tone of unguarded devotion may be represented by part of the concluding paragraph of the essay: “It is silent, that eloquent voice! it is sunk, that noble, that speaking head! We sum up, as we best can, what she said to us, and we bid her adieu. From many hearts in many lands a troop of tender and grateful regrets converge towards her humble churchyard in Berry. Let them be joined by these words of sad homage from one of a nation which she esteemed, and which knew her very little and very ill.” There can be no question of the passionate sincerity and the poetic beauty of this passage.

Comparable in atmosphere and tone to this essay on George Sand is the discourse on Emerson, in certain parts of which Arnold again has the courage of his emotions. In the earlier paragraphs there is the same revivification of a youthful mood as in the essay on George Sand. There is also the same only half-restrained pulsation in the rhythm, an emotional throb that at times almost produces an effect of metre. “Forty years ago, when I was an undergraduate at Oxford, voices were in the air there which haunt my memory still. Happy the man who in that susceptible season of youth hears such voices! they are a possession to him forever.” Of this discourse, however, only the introduction and the conclusion are of this intense, self-communing passionateness; the analysis of Emerson’s qualities as writer and thinker, that makes up the greater part of the discourse, has Arnold’s usual colloquial, self-consciously wary tone.

A fairly complete survey of the characteristics of Arnold’s style may perhaps best be obtained by recognizing in his prose-writings four distinct manners. First may be mentioned his least compromising, severest, most exact style; it is most consistently present in the first of the Mixed Essays, that on Democracy (1861). The sentences are apt to be long and periodic. The structure of the thought is defined by means of painstakingly accurate articulations. Progress in the discussion is systematic and is from time to time conscientiously noted. The tone is earnest, almost anxious. A strenuous, systematic, responsible style, we may call it. Somewhat mitigated in its severities, somewhat less palpably official, it remains the style of Arnold’s technical reports upon education and of great portions of his writings on religious topics. It is, however, most adequately exhibited in the essay on Democracy.

Simpler in tone, easier, more colloquial, more casual, is the style that Arnold uses in his literary essays, in the uncontroversial parts of the lectures on Translating Homer, and in Culture and Anarchy. This style is characterized by its admirable union of ease, simplicity, and strength; by the affability of its tone, an affability, however, that never degenerates into over-familiarity or loses dignified restraint; by its disregard of method, or of the more pretentious manifestations of method; and by the delicate certainty with which, when at its best, it takes the reader, despite its apparently casual movement, over the essential aspects of the subject under discussion. This is really Arnold’s most distinctive manner, and it will require, after his two remaining manners have been briefly noted, some further analysis.

Arnold’s third style is most apt to appear in controversial writings or in his treatment of subjects where he is particularly aware of his enemy, or particularly bent on getting a hearing from the inattentive through cleverly malicious satire, or particularly desirous of carrying things off with a nonchalant air. It appears in the controversial parts of the lectures on Translating Homer, in many chapters of Culture and Anarchy, and runs throughout Friendship’s Garland. Its peculiarly rasping effect upon many readers has already been described. It is responsible for much of the prejudice against Arnold’s prose.

Arnold’s fourth style—intimate, rich in colour, intense in feeling, almost lyrical in tone—is the style that has just been noted as appearing in the essays on George Sand and on Emerson. There are not many passages in Arnold’s prose where this style has its way with him. But these passages are so individual, and seem to reveal Arnold with such novelty and truth, that the style that pervades them deserves to be put by itself.

The style usually taken as characteristically Arnold’s is that here classed as his second, with a generous admixture of the third. Many of the qualities of this style have already been suggested as illustrative of certain aspects of Arnold’s temperament or habits of thought. Various important points, however, still remain to be appreciated.

Colloquial in its rhythms and its idiom this style surely is. It is fond of assenting to its own propositions; “well” and “yes” often begin its sentences—signs of its casual and tentative mode of advance. Arnold’s frequent use of “well” and “yes” and neglect of the anxiously demonstrative “now,” at the opening of his sentences, mark unmistakably the unrigorousness of his method. An easily negligent treatment of the sentence, too, is often noticeable; a subject is left suspended while phrase follows phrase, or even while clause follows clause, until, quite as in ordinary talk, the subject must be repeated, the beginning of the sentence must be brought freshly to mind. Often Arnold ends a sentence and begins the next with the same word or phrase; this trick is better suited to talk than to formal discourse. Indeed, Arnold permits himself not a few of the inaccuracies of every-day speech. He uses the cleft infinitive; he introduces relative clauses with superfluous “and” or “but”; he confuses the present participle with the verbal noun and speaks, for example, of “the creating a current”; and he usually “tries and does” a thing instead of “trying to do” it. Finally, his prose abounds in exclamations and in italicized words or phrases, and so takes on much of the movement and rhythm of talk, as in the following passage: “But the gloomy, oppressive dream is now over. ‘Let us return to Nature!’ And all the world salutes with pride and joy the Renascence, and prays to Heaven: ‘Oh, that Ishmael might live before thee!’ Surely the future belongs to this brilliant newcomer, with his animating maxim: Let us return to Nature! Ah, what pitfalls are in that word Nature! Let us return to art and science, which are a part of Nature; yes. Let us return to a proper conception of righteousness, to a true sense of the method and secret of Jesus, which have been all denaturalized; yes. But, ‘Let us return to Nature!’—do you mean that we are to give full swing to our inclinations?”[59] The colloquial character of these exclamations and the search, through the use of italics, for stress like the accent of speech are unmistakable.

Arnold’s fundamental reason, conscious or unconscious, for the adoption of this colloquial tone and manner, may probably be found in the account of the ultimate purpose of all his writing, given near the close of Culture and Anarchy; he aims, not to inculcate an absolutely determinate system of truth, but to stir his readers into the keenest possible self-questioning over the worth of their stock ideas. “Socrates has drunk his hemlock and is dead; but in his own breast does not every man carry about with him a possible Socrates, in that power of disinterested play of consciousness upon his stock notions and habits, of which this wise and admirable man gave all through his lifetime the great example, and which was the secret of his incomparable influence? And he who leads men to call forth and exercise in themselves this power, and who busily calls it forth and exercises it in himself, is at the present moment, perhaps, as Socrates was in his time, more in concert with the vital working of men’s minds, and more effectually significant, than any House of Commons’ orator, or practical operator in politics.”[60] This dialectical habit of mind is, Arnold believes, best induced and stimulated by the free colloquial manner of writing that he usually adopts.