That “innocent article,” written in 1888, shows exactly the same balanced tone and temper — the same critical attitude towards things with which in the main he sympathizes — as the letters of 1848.
And what is true of the beginning and the end is true of the long tract which lay between. From first to last he was a Critic — a calm and impartial judge, a serene distributer of praise and blame — never a zealot, never a prophet, never an advocate, never a dealer in that “blague and mob-pleasing” of which he truly said that it “is a real talent and tempts many men to apostasy.”
For some forty years he taught his fellow-men, and all his teaching was conveyed through the critical medium. He never dogmatized, preached, or laid down the law. Some great masters have taught by passionate glorification of favourite personalities or ideals, passionate denunciation of what they disliked or despised. Not such was Arnold’s method; he himself described it, most happily, as “sinuous, easy, unpolemical.” By his free yet courteous handling of subjects the most august and conventions the most respectable, he won to his side a band of disciples who had been repelled by the brutality and cocksureness of more boisterous teachers. He was as temperate in eulogy as in condemnation; he could hint a virtue and hesitate a liking.
It happens, as we have just seen, that his earliest and latest criticisms were criticisms of Institutions, and a great part of his critical writing deals with similar topics; but these will be more conveniently considered when we come to estimate his effect on Society and Politics. That effect will perhaps be found to have been more considerable than his contemporaries imagined; for, though it became a convention to praise his literary performances and judgments, it was no less a convention to dismiss as visionary and absurd whatever he wrote about the State and the Community.
But in the meantime we must say a word about his critical method when applied to Life, and when applied to Books. When one speaks of criticism, one is generally thinking of prose. But, when we speak of Arnold’s criticism, it is necessary to widen the scope of one’s observation; for he was never more essentially the critic than when he concealed the true character of his method in the guise of poetry. Even if we decline to accept his strange judgment that all poetry “is at bottom a criticism of life,” still we must perceive that, as a matter of fact, many of his own poems are as essentially critical as his Essays or his Lectures.
We all remember that he poked fun at those misguided Wordsworthians who seek to glorify their master by claiming for him an “ethical system as distinctive and capable of exposition as Bishop Butler’s,” and “a scientific system of thought.” But surely we find in his own poetry a sustained doctrine of self-mastery, duty, and pursuit of truth, which is essentially ethical, and, in its form, as nearly “scientific” and systematic as the nature of poetry permits. And this doctrine is conveyed, not by positive, hortatory, or didactic methods, but by Criticism — the calm praise of what commends itself to his judgment, the gentle but decisive rebuke of whatever offends or darkens or misleads. Of him it may be truly said, as he said of Goethe, that
He took the suffering human race, He read each wound, each weakness clear; And struck his finger on the place, And said: Thou ailest here, and here.
His deepest conviction about “the suffering human race” would seem to have been that its worst miseries arise from a too exalted estimate of its capacities. Men are perpetually disappointed and disillusioned because they expect too much from human life and human nature, and persuade themselves that their experience, here and hereafter, will be, not what they have any reasonable grounds for expecting, but what they imagine or desire. The true philosophy is that which
Neither makes man too much a god, Nor God too much a man.
Wordsworth thought it a boon to “feel that we are greater than we know”: Arnold thought it a misfortune. Wordsworth drew from the shadowy impressions of the past the most splendid intimations of the future. Against such vain imaginings Arnold set, in prose, the “inexorable sentence” in which Butler warned us to eschew pleasant self-deception; and, in verse, the persistent question —
Say, what blinds us, that we claim the glory Of possessing powers not our share?
He rebuked
Wishes unworthy of a man full-grown.
He taught that there are
Joys which were not for our use designed.
He warned discontented youth not to expect greater happiness from advancing years, because
one thing only has been lent To youth and age in common — discontent.
Friendship is a broken reed, for
Our vaunted life is one long funeral,
and even Hope is buried with the “faces that smiled and fled.”
Death, at least in some of its aspects, seemed to him the
Stern law of every mortal lot, Which man, proud man, finds hard to bear; And builds himself I know not what Of second life I know not where.
And yet, in gleams of happier insight, he saw the man who “flagged not in this earthly strife,”
His soul well-knit, and all his battles won,
mount, though hardly, to eternal life. And, as he mused over his father’s grave, the conviction forced itself upon his mind that somewhere in the “labour-house of being” there still was employment for that father’s strength, “zealous, beneficent, firm.”
Here indeed is the more cheerful aspect of his “criticism of life.” Such happiness as man is capable of enjoying is conditioned by a frank recognition of his weaknesses and limitations; but it requires also for its fulfilment the sedulous and dutiful employment of such powers and opportunities as he has.
First and foremost, he must realize the “majestic unity” of his nature, and not attempt by morbid introspection to dissect himself into
Affections, Instincts, Principles, and Powers, Impulse and Reason, Freedom and Control.
Then he must learn that
To its own impulse every action stirs.
He must live by his own light, and let earth live by hers. The forces of nature are to be in this respect his teachers —
But with joy the stars perform their shining, And the sea its long moon-silvered roll; For self-poised they live, nor pine with noting All the fever of some differing soul.
But, though he is to learn from Nature and love Nature and enjoy Nature, he is to remember that she
never was the friend of one, Nor promised love she could not give;
and so he is not to expect too much from her, or demand impossible boons. Still less is he to be content with feeling himself “in harmony” with her; for
Man covets all which Nature has, but more.
That “more” is Conscience and the Moral Sense.
Man must begin, know this, where Nature ends; Nature and man can never be fast friends.
And this brings us to the idea of Duty as set forth in his poems, and Duty resolves itself into three main elements: Truth — Work — Love. Truth comes first. Man’s prime duty is to know things as they are. Truth can only be attained by light, and light he must cultivate, he must worship. Arnold’s highest praise for a lost friend is that he was “a child of light”; that he had “truth without alloy,”
And joy in light, and power to spread the joy.
The saddest part of that friend’s death is the fear that it may bring,
After light’s term, a term of cecity:
the best hope for the future, that light will return and banish the follies, sophistries, delusions, which have accumulated in the darkness. “Lucidity of soul” may be — nay, must be, “sad”; but it is not less imperative. And the truth which light reveals must not only be sought earnestly and cherished carefully, but even, when the cause demands it, championed strenuously. The voices of conflict, the joy of battle, the “garments rolled in blood,” the “burning and fuel of fire” have little place in Arnold’s poetry. But once at any rate he bursts into a strain so passionate, so combatant, that it is difficult for a disciple to recognize his voice; an
d then the motive is a summons to a last charge for Truth and Light —
They out-talk’d thee, hiss’d thee, tore thee? Better men fared thus before thee; Fired their ringing shot and pass’d, Hotly charged — and sank at last.
Charge once more, then, and be dumb! Let the victors, when they come, When the forts of folly fall, Find thy body by the wall!
But the note of battle, even for what he holds dearest and most sacred, is not a familiar note in his poetry. He had no natural love of
the throng’d field where winning comes by strife.
His criticism of life sets a higher value on work than on fighting. “Toil unsevered from tranquillity,” “Labour, accomplish’d in repose” — is his ideal of happiness and duty.
Even the Duke of Wellington — surely an unpromising subject for poetic eulogy — is praised because he was a worker,
Laborious, persevering, serious, firm.
Nature, again, is called in to teach us the secret of successful labour. Her forces are incessantly at work, and in that work they are entirely concentrated —
Bounded by themselves, and unregardful In what state God’s other works may be, In their own tasks all their powers pouring, These attain the mighty life you see.
But those who had the happiness of knowing Arnold in the flesh will feel that they never so clearly recognize his natural voice as when, by his criticism of life, he is inculcating the great law of Love. Even in the swirl of Revolution he clings to his fixed idea of love as duty. After discussing the rise and fall of dynasties, the crimes of diplomacy, the characteristic defects of rival nations, and all the stirring topics of the time, he abruptly concludes his criticism with an appeal to Love. “Be kind to the neighbours— ‘this is all we can.’”
And as in his prose, so in his poetry. Love, even in arrest of formal justice, is the motive of The Sick King in Bokhara; love, that wipes out sin, of Saint Brandan —
That germ of kindness, in the womb Of mercy caught, did not expire; Outlives my guilt, outlives my doom, And friends me in the pit of fire.
The Neckan and The Forsaken Merman tell the tale of contemptuous unkindness and its enduring poison. A Picture at Newstead depicts the inexpiable evils wrought by violent wrong. Poor Matthias tells in a parable the cruelty, not less real because unconscious, of imperfect sympathy —
Human longings, human fears, Miss our eyes and miss our ears. Little helping, wounding much, Dull of heart, and hard of touch, Brother man’s despairing sign Who may trust us to divine?
In Geist’s Grave, the “loving heart,” the “patient soul” of the dog-friend are made to “read their homily to man”; and the theme of the homily is still the same: the preciousness of the love which outlives the grave. But nowhere perhaps is his doctrine about the true divinity of love so exquisitely expressed as in The Good Shepherd with the Kid —
He saves the sheep, the goats He doth not save. So rang Tertullian’s sentence . . . . . . . . But she sigh’d, The infant Church! Of love she felt the tide
Stream on her from her Lord’s yet recent grave. And then she smiled; and in the Catacombs, With eye suffused but heart inspirèd true, On those walls subterranean, where she hid Her head ‘mid ignominy, death, and tombs, She the Good Shepherd’s hasty image drew — And on His shoulders not a lamb, a kid.
So much, then, for his Criticism of Life, as applied in and through his poems. It is not easy to estimate, even approximately, the effect produced by a loved and gifted poet, who for thirty years taught an audience, fit though few, that the main concerns of human life were Truth, Work, and Love. Those “two noblest of things, Sweetness and Light” (though heaven only knows what they meant to Swift), meant to him Love and Truth; and to these he added the third great ideal, Work — patient, persistent, undaunted effort for what a man genuinely believes to be high and beneficent ends. Such a “Criticism of Life,” we must all admit, is not unworthy of one who seeks to teach his fellow-men; even though some may doubt whether poetry is the medium best fitted for conveying it.
We must now turn our attention to his performances in the field of literary criticism; and we begin in the year 1853. He had won the prize for an English poem at Rugby, and again at Oxford. In 1849 he had published without his name, and had recalled, a thin volume, called The Strayed Reveller, and other Poems. He had done the same with Empedocles on Etna, and other Poems in 1852. The best contents of these two volumes were combined in Poems, 1853, and to this book he gave a Preface, which was his first essay in Literary Criticism. In this essay he enounces a certain doctrine of poetry, and, true to his lifelong practice, he enounces it mainly by criticism of what other people had said. A favourite cry of the time was that Poetry, to be vital and interesting, must “leave the exhausted past, and draw its subjects from matters of present import.” It was the favourite theory of Middle Class Liberalism. The Spectator uttered it with characteristic gravity; Kingsley taught it obliquely in Alton Locke. Arnold assailed it as “completely false,” as “having a philosophical form and air, but no real basis in fact.” In assailing it, he justified his constant recourse to Antiquity for subject and method; he exalted Achilles, Prometheus, Clytemnestra, and Dido as eternally interesting; he asserted that the most famous poems of the nineteenth century “left the reader cold in comparison with the effect produced upon him by the latter books of the Iliad, by the Oresteia, or by the episode of Dido.” He glorified the Greeks as the “unapproached masters of the grand style.” He even ventured to doubt whether the influence of Shakespeare, “the greatest, perhaps, of all poetical names,” had been wholly advantageous to the writers of poetry. He weighed Keats in the balance against Sophocles and found him wanting.
Thomas Arnold, D.D.
Head Master of Rugby, and father of Matthew Arnold
From the Painting in Oriel College
Photo H.W. Taunt
Of course, this criticism, so hostile to the current cant of the moment, was endlessly misinterpreted and misunderstood. He thus explained his doctrine in a Preface to a Second Edition of his Poems: “It has been said that I wish to limit the poet, in his choice of subjects, to the period of Greek and Roman antiquity; but it is not so. I only counsel him to choose for his subjects great actions, without regarding to what time they belong.” A few years later he wrote to a friend (in a letter hitherto unpublished): “The modern world is the widest and richest material ever offered to the artist; but the moulding and representing power of the artist is not, or has not yet become (in my opinion), commensurate with his material, his mundus representandus. This adequacy of the artist to his world, this command of the latter by him, seems to me to be what constitutes a first-class poetic epoch, and to distinguish it from such an epoch as our own; in this sense, the Homeric and Elizabethan poetry seems to me of a superior class to ours, though the world represented by it was far less full and significant.”
There is no need to describe in greater detail the two Prefaces, which can be read, among rather incongruous surroundings, in the volume called Irish Essays, and Others. But they are worth noting, because in them, at the age of thirty, he first displayed the peculiar temper in literary criticism which so conspicuously marked him to the end; and that temper happily infected the critical writing of a whole generation; until the Iron Age returned, and the bludgeon was taken down from its shelf, and the scalping-knife refurbished.
In his critical temper, lucidity, courage, and serenity were equally blended. In his criticism of books, as in his criticism of life, he aimed first at Lucidity — at that clear light, uncoloured by prepossession, which should enable him to see things as they really are. In a word, he judged for himself; and, however much his judgment might run counter to prejudice or tradition, he dared to enounce it and persist in it. He spoke with proper contempt of the “tenth-rate critics, for whom any violent shock to the public taste would be a temerity not to be risked”; but that temerity he himself had in rich abundance. Homer and Sophocles are the only poets of whom, if my memory serves me, he
never wrote a disparaging word. Shakespeare is, and rightly, an object of national worship; yet Arnold ventured to point out his “over-curiousness of expression”; and, where he writes —
Till that Bellona’s bridegroom, lapped in proof, Confronted him with self-comparisons,
Arnold dared to say that the writing was “detestable.”
Macaulay is, perhaps less rightly, another object of national worship; yet Arnold denounced the “confident shallowness which makes him so admired by public speakers and leading-article writers, and so intolerable to all searchers for truth”; and frankly avowed that to his mind “a man’s power to detect the ring of false metal in the Lays of Ancient Rome was a good measure of his fitness to give an opinion about poetical matters at all.” According to Macaulay, Burke was “the greatest man since Shakespeare.” Arnold admired Burke, revered him, paid him the highest compliment by trying to apply his ideas to actual life; but, when Burke urged his great arguments by obstetrical and pathological illustrations, Arnold was ready to denounce his extravagances, his capriciousness, his lapses from good taste.
Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold Page 93