Chapter II. Life from 1851-62 — Second Series of Poems — Merope — On Translating Homer.
We must now return a little and give some account of Mr Arnold’s actual life, from a period somewhat before that reached at the end of the last chapter. The account need not be long, for the life, as has been said, was not in the ordinary sense eventful; but it is necessary, and can be in this chapter usefully interspersed with an account of his work, which, for nine of the eleven years we shall cover, was, though interesting, of much less interest than that of those immediately before and those immediately succeeding.
One understands at least part of the reason for the gradual drying up of his poetic vein from a sentence of his in a letter of 1858, when he and his wife at last took a house in Chester Square: “It will be something to unpack one’s portmanteau for the first time since I was married, nearly seven years ago.” “Something,” indeed; and one’s only wonder is how he, and still more Mrs Arnold (especially as they now had three children), could have endured the other thing so long. There is no direct information in the Letters as to the reason of this nomadic existence, the only headquarters of which appear to have been the residence of Mrs Arnold’s father, the judge, in Eaton Place, with flights to friends’ houses and to lodgings at the places of inspection and others, especially Dover and Brighton. And guesswork is nowhere more unprofitable than in cases where private matters of income, taste, and other things are concerned. But it certainly would appear, though I have no positive information on the subject, that in the early days of State interference with education “My Lords” managed matters with an equally sublime disregard of the comfort of their officials and the probable efficiency of the system.
Till I noticed the statement quoted opposite, I was quite unable to construct any reasonable theory from such a passage as that in a letter of December 1852 and from others which show us Mr Arnold in Lincolnshire, in Shropshire, and in the eastern counties. Even with the elucidation it seems a shockingly bad system. One doubts whether it be worse for an inspector or for the school inspected by him, that he should have no opportunity for food from breakfast to four o’clock, when he staves off death by inviting disease in the shape of the malefic bun; for him or for certain luckless pupil-teachers that, after dinner, he should be “in for [them] till ten o’clock.” With this kind of thing when on duty, and no home when off it, a man must begin to appreciate the Biblical passages about partridges, and the wings of a dove, and so forth, most heartily and vividly long before seven years are out, more particularly if he be a man so much given to domesticity as was Matthew Arnold.
However, it was, no doubt, not so bad as it looks. They say the rack is not, though probably no one would care to try. There were holidays; there was a large circle of hospitable family friends, and strangers were only too anxious to welcome (and perhaps to propitiate) Her Majesty’s Inspector. The agreeable anomalies of the British legal system (which, let Dickens and other grumblers say what they like, have made many good people happy and only a few miserable) allowed Mr Arnold for many years to act (sometimes while simultaneously inspecting) as his father-in-law’s Marshal on circuit, with varied company and scenery, little or nothing to do, a handsome fee for doing it, and no worse rose-leaf in the bed than heavy dinners and hot port wine, even this being alleviated by “the perpetual haunch of venison.”
For the rest, there are some pleasing miscellaneous touches in the letters for these years, and there is a certain liveliness of phrase in them which disappears in the later. It is pleasant to find Mr Arnold on his first visit to Cambridge (where, like a good Wordsworthian, he wanted above all things to see the statue of Newton) saying what all of us say, “I feel that the Middle Ages, and all their poetry and impressiveness, are in Oxford and not here.” In one letter — written to his sister “K” (Mrs Forster) as his critical letters usually are — we find three noteworthy criticisms on contemporaries, all tinged with that slight want of cordial appreciation which characterises his criticism of this kind throughout (except, perhaps, in the case of Browning). The first is on Alexander Smith — it was the time of the undue ascension of the Life-Drama rocket before its equally undue fall. “It can do me no good [an odd phrase] to be irritated with that young man, who certainly has an extraordinary faculty, although I think he is a phenomenon of a very dubious character.” The second, harsher but more definite, is on Villette. “Why is Villette disagreeable? Because the writer’s mind [it is worth remembering that he had met Charlotte Brontë at Miss Martineau’s] contains nothing but hunger, rebellion, and rage, and therefore that is all she can in fact put into her book. No fine writing can hide this thoroughly, and it will be fatal to her in the long-run.” The Fates were kinder: and Miss Brontë’s mind did contain something besides these ugly things. But it was her special weakness that her own thoughts and experiences were insufficiently mingled and tempered by a wider knowledge of life and literature. The third is on My Novel, which he says he has “read with great pleasure, though Bulwer’s nature is by no means a perfect one either, which makes itself felt in his book; but his gush, his better humour, his abundant materials, and his mellowed constructive skill — all these are great things.” One would give many pages of the Letters for that naïf admission that “gush” is “a great thing.”
A little later (May 1853), all his spare time is being spent on a poem, which he thinks by far the best thing he has yet done, to wit, Sohrab and Rustum. And he “never felt so sure of himself or so really and truly at ease as to criticism.” He stays in barracks at the depot of the 17th Lancers with a brother-in-law, and we regret to find that “Death or Glory” manners do not please him. The instance is a cornet spinning his rings on the table after dinner. “College does civilise a boy,” he ejaculates, which is true — always providing that it is a good college. Yet, with that almost unconscious naturalness which is particularly noticeable in him, he is much dissatisfied with Oxford — thinks it (as we all do) terribly fallen off since his days. Perhaps the infusion of Dissenters’ sons (it is just at the time of the first Commission in 1854) may brace its flaccid sinews, though the middle-class, he confesses, is abominably disagreeable. He sees a good deal of this poor middle-class in his inspecting tours, and decides elsewhere about the same time that “of all dull, stagnant, unedifying entourages, that of middle-class Dissent is the stupidest.” It is sad to find that he thinks women utterly unfit for teachers and lecturers; but Girton and Lady Margaret’s may take comfort, it is “no natural incapacity, but the fault of their bringing-up.” With regard to his second series of Poems (v. infra) he thinks Balder will “consolidate the peculiar sort of reputation he got by Sohrab and Rustum;” and a little later, in April 1856, we have his own opinion of himself as a poet, whose charm is “literalness and simplicity.” Mr Ruskin is also treated — with less appreciation than one could wish.
The second series just mentioned was issued in 1855, a second edition of the first having been called for the year before. It contained, like its predecessor, such of his earlier work as he chose to republish and had not yet republished, chiefly from the Empedocles volume. But Empedocles itself was only represented by some scraps, mainly grouped as The Harp-Player on Etna. Faded Leaves, grouped with an addition, here appear: Stagirius is called Desire, and the Stanzas in Memory of the Author of Obermann now become Obermann simply. Only two absolutely new poems, a longer and a shorter, appear: the first is Balder Dead, the second Separation, the added number of Faded Leaves. This is of no great value. Balder is interesting, though not extremely good. Its subject is connected with that of Gray’s Descent of Odin, but handled much more fully, and in blank-verse narrative instead of ballad form. The story, like most of those in Norse mythology, has great capabilities; but it may be questioned whether the Greek-Miltonic chastened style which the poet affects is well calculated to bring them out. The death of Nanna, and the blind fratricide Hoder, are touchingly done, and Hermod’s ride to Hela’s realm is stately. But as a whole the thing is rather d
im and tame.
Mr Arnold’s election to the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford (May 1857) was a really notable event, not merely in his own career, but to some, and no small, extent in the history of English literature during the nineteenth century. The post is of no great value. I remember the late Sir Francis Doyle, who was Commissioner of Customs as well as Professor, saying to me once with a humorous melancholy, “Ah! Eau de Cologne pays much better than Poetry!” But its duties are far from heavy, and can be adjusted pretty much as the holder pleases. And as a position it is unique. It is, though not of extreme antiquity, the oldest purely literary Professorship in the British Isles; and it remained, till long after Mr Arnold’s time, the only one of the kind in the two great English Universities. In consequence partly of the regulation that it can be held for ten years only — nominally five, with a practically invariable re-election for another five — there is at least the opportunity, which, since Mr Arnold’s own time, has been generally taken, of maintaining and refreshing the distinction of the occupant of the chair. Before his time there had been a good many undistinguished professors, but Warton and Keble, in their different ways, must have adorned even a Chair of Poetry even in the University of Oxford. Above all, the entire (or almost entire) freedom of action left to the Professor should have, and in the case of Keble at least had already had, the most stimulating effect on minds capable of stimulation. For the Professor of Poetry at Oxford is neither, like some Professors, bound to the chariot-wheels of examinations and courses of set teaching, nor, like others, has he to feel that his best, his most original, efforts can have no interest, and hardly any meaning, for all but a small circle of experts. His field is illimitable; his expatiation in it is practically untrammelled. It is open to all; full of flowers and fruits that all can enjoy; and it only depends on his own choice and his own literary and intellectual powers whether his prelections shall take actual rank as literature with the very best of that other literature, with the whole of which, by custom, as an extension from poetry, he is at liberty to deal. In the first century of the chair the custom of delivering these Prelections in Latin had been a slight hamper — indeed to this day it prevents the admirable work of Keble from being known as it should be known. But this was now removed, and Mr Arnold, whose reputation (it could hardly be called fame as yet) was already great with the knowing ones, had not merely Oxford but the English reading world as audience.
And he had it at a peculiarly important time, to the importance of which he himself, in this very position, was not the least contributor. Although the greatest writers of the second period of the century — Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle, Thackeray — had, in all cases but the last, a long, and in the two first a very long and a wonderfully fruitful career still before them, yet the phase to which they belonged was as a dominant phase at its height, and as a crescent was beginning to give place to another. Within a few years — in most cases within a few months — of Mr Arnold’s installation, The Defence of Guenevere and FitzGerald’s Omar Khayyam heralded fresh forms of poetry which have not been superseded yet; The Origin of Species and Essays and Reviews announced changed attitudes of thought; the death of Macaulay removed the last writer who, modern as he was in some ways, and popular, united popularity with a distinctly eighteenth-century tone and tradition; the death of Leigh Hunt removed the last save Landor (always and in all things an outsider) of the great Romantic generation of the first third of the century; The Ordeal of Richard Feverel started a new kind of novel.
The division which Mr Arnold, both by office and taste, was called to lead in this newly levied army, was not far from being the most important of all; and it was certainly that of all which required the most thorough reformation of staff, morale, and tactics. The English literary criticism of 1830-1860, speaking in round numbers, is curiously and to this day rather unintelligibly bad. There is, no doubt, no set of matters in which it is less safe to generalise than in matters literary, and this is by no means the only instance in which the seemingly natural anticipation that a period of great criticism will follow a period of great creation is falsified. But it most certainly is falsified here. The criticism of the great Romantic period of 1798-1830 was done for it by itself, and in some cases by its greatest practitioners, not by its immediate successors. The philosophic as well as poetical intuition of Coleridge; the marvellous if capricious sympathy and the more marvellous phrase of Lamb; the massive and masculine if not always quite trustworthy or well-governed intellect of Hazlitt, had left no likes behind. Two survivors of this great race, Leigh Hunt and De Quincey, were indeed critics, and no inconsiderable ones; but the natural force of both had long been much abated, and both had been not so much critics as essayists; the tendency of Hunt to flowery sentimentality or familiar chat, and that of De Quincey to incessant divergences of “rigmarole,” being formidable enemies to real critical competence. The greatest prosemen — not novelists — of the generation now closing, Carlyle and Macaulay, were indeed both considerable critics. But the shadow of death in the one case, the “shadow of Frederick” in the other, had cut short their critical careers: and presumptuous as the statement may seem, it may be questioned whether either had been a great critic — in criticism pure and simple — of literature.
What is almost more important is that the average literary criticism of William IV.’s reign and of the first twenty years of her present Majesty’s was exceedingly bad. At one side, of course, the work of men like Thackeray, who were men of genius but not critics by profession, or in some respects by equipment, escapes this verdict. At the other were men (very few of them indeed) like Lockhart, who had admirable critical qualifications, but had allowed certain theories and predilections to harden and ossify within them, and who in some cases had not outgrown the rough uncivil ways of the great revolutionary struggle. Between these the average critic, if not quite so ignorant of literature as a certain proportion of the immensely larger body of reviewers to-day, was certainly even more blind to its general principles. Such critical work as that of Phillips, long a favourite pen on the Times, and enjoying (I do not know with how much justice) the repute of being the person whom Thackeray’s Thunder and Small Beer has gibbeted for ever, excites amazement nowadays at its bland but evidently sincere ignoring of the very rudiments of criticism. I do not know that even in the most interesting remains of George Brimley (who, had fate spared him, might have grown into a great as he already was a good critic) we may not trace something of the same hopeless amateurishness, the same uncertainty and “wobbling” between the expression of unconnected and unargued likes and dislikes concerning the matter of the piece, and real critical considerations on its merits or demerits of scheme and form.
Not for the first time help came to us Trojans Graia ab urbe. Of the general merits of French literary criticism it is possible to entertain a somewhat lower idea than that which (in consequence of the very circumstances with which we are now dealing) it has been for many years fashionable in England to hold. But between 1830 and 1860 the French had a very strong critical school indeed — a school whose scholars and masters showed the dæmonic, or at least prophetic, inspiration of Michelet, the milder and feebler but still inspiring enthusiasm of Quinet, the academic clearness and discipline of Villemain and Nisard, the Lucianic wit of Mérimée, the matchless appreciation of Gautier, and, above all, the great new critical idiosyncrasy of Sainte-Beuve. Between these men there were the widest possible differences, not merely of personal taste and genius, but of literary theory and practice. But where they all differed quite infinitely from the lower class of English critics, and favourably from all but the highest in their happiest moments, was in a singular mixture of scholarship and appreciation. Even the most Romantic of them usually tried to compare the subject with its likes in his own and even, to some extent, in other literatures; even the most Classical acknowledged, to some extent, that it was his duty to appreciate, to understand, to grasp the case of the victim before ordering him off to execution.
But Sainte-Beuve must not carry us too far from Mr Arnold, all important as was the influence of the one upon the other. It is enough to say that the new Professor of Poetry (who might be less appetisingly but more correctly called a Professor of Criticism) had long entertained the wish to attempt, and now had the means of effecting, a reform in English criticism, partly on Sainte-Beuve’s own lines, partly on others which he had already made publicly known in his famous Preface, and in some later critical writings, and which he was for the rest of his life always unflinchingly to champion, sometimes rather disastrously to extend.
Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold Page 113