Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold

by Matthew Arnold

  Still it has always been held that this chair is not merely a chair of criticism; and Mr Arnold lodged a poetical diploma-piece in the shape of Merope. This was avowedly written as a sort of professorial manifesto — a document to show what the only Professor of Poetry whom England allowed herself thought, in theory and practice, of at least dramatic poetry. It was, as was to be expected from the author’s official position and his not widespread but well-grounded reputation, much less neglected than his earlier poetry had been. He even tells us that “it sells well”; but the reviewers were not pleased. The Athenæum review is “a choice specimen of style,” and the Spectator “of argumentation”; the Saturday Review is only “deadly prosy,” but none were exactly favourable till G.H. Lewes in The Leader was “very gratifying.” Private criticism was a little kinder. The present Archbishop of Canterbury (to whom, indeed, Mr Arnold had just given “a flaming testimonial for Rugby”) read it “with astonishment at its goodness,” a sentence which, it may be observed, is a little double-edged. Kingsley (whom the editor of the Letters good-naturedly but perhaps rather superfluously reintroduces to the British public as “author of The Saints’ Tragedy and other poems”) was “very handsome.” Froude, though he begs the poet to “discontinue the line,” was not uncomplimentary in other ways. His own conclusion, from reviews and letters together, is pretty plainly put in two sentences, that he “saw the book was not going to take as he wished,” and that “she [Merope] is more calculated to inaugurate my professorship with dignity than to move deeply the present race of humans.” Let us see what “she” is actually like.

  It is rather curious that the story of Merope should have been so tempting as, to mention nothing else, Maffei’s attempt in Italian, Voltaire’s in French, and this of Mr Arnold’s in English, show it to have been to modern admirers and would-be practitioners of the Classical drama: and the curiosity is of a tell-tale kind. For the fact is that the donnée is very much more of the Romantic than of the Classical description, and offers much greater conveniences to the Romantic than to the Classical practitioner. With minor variations, the story as generally dramatised is this. Merope, the widowed queen of the murdered Heraclid Cresphontes, has saved her youngest son from the murderer and usurper, Polyphontes, and sent him out of the country. When he has grown up, and has secretly returned to Messenia to take vengeance, Polyphontes is pressing Merope to let bygones be bygones and marry him, so as to reconcile the jarring parties in the State. Æpytus, the son, to facilitate his reception, represents himself as a messenger charged to bring the news of his own death; and Merope, hearing this and believing the messenger to be also the assassin, obtains access to the chamber where he is resting after his journey, and is about to murder her own sleeping son when he is saved by the inevitable anagnorisis. The party of Cresphontes is then secretly roused. Æpytus, at the sacrifice which the tyrant holds in honour of the news of his rival’s death, snatches the sacrificial axe and kills Polyphontes himself, and all ends well.

  There is, of course, a strong dramatic moment here; but I cannot think the plot by any means an ideal one for classical tragedy. At any rate the Aristotelian conditions — the real ones, not the fanciful distortions of sixteenth-seventeenth century criticism — are very ill satisfied. There is bloodshed, but there is no tragic bloodshed, as there would have been had Merope actually killed her son. The arresting and triumphant “grip” of the tragic misfortunes of Oedipus and Orestes, the combination of the course of fate and the ¼±Áį± of the individual, is totally absent. The wooing of Merope by Polyphontes is not so much preposterous as insignificant, though Voltaire, by a touch of modernism, has rescued it or half-rescued it from this most terrible of limbos. The right triumphs, no doubt; but who cares whether it does or not? And Mr Arnold, with the heroic obstinacy of the doctrinaire, has done nothing to help the effect of a scheme in itself sufficiently uninspiring to the modern reader. When he was at work upon the piece he had “thought and hoped” that it would have what Buddha called “the character of Fixity, that true sign of the law.” A not unfriendly critic might have pointed out, with gloomy forebodings, that a sign of law is not necessarily a sign of poetry, and that, as a prophet of his own had laid it down, poetry should “transport” not “fix.” At any rate, it is clear to any one who reads the book that the author was in a mood of deliberate provocation and exaggeration — not a favourable mood for art. The quiet grace of Sophocles is perhaps impossible to reproduce in English, but Mr Arnold’s verse is more than quiet, it is positively tame. The dreary tirades of Polyphontes and Merope, and their snip-snap stichomythia, read equally ill in English. Mr Swinburne, who has succeeded where Mr Arnold failed, saw by a true intuition that, to equal the effect of the Greek chorus, full English lyric with rhyme and musical sweep was required. Mr Arnold himself, as might have been expected from his previous experiments in unrhymed Pindarics, has given us strophes and antistrophes most punctiliously equivalent in syllables; but sometimes with hardly any, and never with very much, vesture of poetry about them. It is absolutely preposterous to suppose that the effect on a Greek ear of a strophe even of Sophocles or Euripides, let alone the great Agamemnonian choruses, was anything like the effect on an English ear of such wooden stuff as this: —

  “Three brothers roved the field,

  And to two did Destiny

  Give the thrones that they conquer’d,

  But the third, what delays him

  From his unattained crown?”

  But Mr Arnold would say “This is your unchaste modern love for passages and patches. Tell me how I managed this worthy action?” To which the only answer can be, “Sir, the action is rather uninteresting. Save at one moment you have not raised the interest anywhere, and you have certainly not made the most of it there.”

  The fact is, that very few even of thorough-going Arnoldians have had, or, except merely as “fighting a prize,” could have had, much to say for Merope. The author pleads that he only meant “to give people a specimen of the world created by the Greek imagination.” In the first place, one really cannot help (with the opening speech of the Prometheus, and the close of the Eumenides, and the whole of the Agamemnon in one’s mind) saying that this is rather hard on the Greeks. And in the second place, what a curious way of setting about the object, when luckily specimens of the actual “world” so “created,” not mere pastiches and plaster models of them, are still to be had, and of the very best! But the fact is, thirdly, that Mr Arnold, as all men so often do, and as he not very seldom did, was clearly trying not so much to extol one thing as to depreciate another. Probably in his heart of hearts (which is generally a much wiser heart than that according to which the mouth speaks and the pen writes) he knew his failure. At any rate, he never attempted anything of the kind again, and Merope, that queen of plaster, remains alone in his gallery, with, as we see in other galleries, merely some disjecta membra— “Fragment of an Antigone,” “Fragment of a Dejaneira,” grouped at her feet. In the definitive edition indeed, she is not with these but with Empedocles on Etna, a rather unlucky contrast. For Empedocles, if very much less deliberately Greek than Merope, is very much better poetry, and it is almost impossible that the comparison of the two should not suggest to the reader that the attempt to be Greek is exactly and precisely the cause of the failure to be poetical. Mr Arnold had forgotten his master’s words about the oikeia hedone. The pleasure of Greek art is one thing — the pleasure of English poetry another.

  His inaugural lecture, “On the Modern Element in Literature,” was printed many years afterwards in Macmillan’s Magazine for February 1869; and this long hesitation seems to have been followed by an even longer repentance, for the piece was never included in any one of his volumes of essays. But the ten years of his professorship are, according to the wise parsimony of the chair, amply represented by the two famous little books — On Translating Homer, which, with its supplementary “Last Words,” appeared in 1861-62, and On the Study of Celtic Literature, which appeared at the
termination of his tenure in 1867. It may be questioned whether he ever did anything of more influence than these books, this being due partly to the fashion of their publication — which, in the latter case at least, applied the triple shock of lecture at the greatest of English literary centres, of magazine article, and of book — and partly to the fact that they were about subjects in which a real or a factitious, a direct or an indirect, interest was taken by almost every one. Every educated person knew and cared something (or at least would not have liked to be supposed not to care and know something) about Homer; very few educated persons knew anything about Celtic literature. But in these later lectures he put in a more popular and provocative form than that of his French Eton (see next chapter) that mixture of literary, political, social, and miscellaneous critique of his countrymen for which he was thenceforward best known; and which, if it brought down some hard knocks from his adversaries, and perhaps was not altogether a healthy mixture for himself, could at least not be charged by any reasonable person with lack of piquancy and actuality.

  Both books are, and, despite some drawbacks of personal and ephemeral allusion, always will be, interesting; and both had, perhaps even more than the Essays in Criticism themselves, a stimulating effect upon English men of letters which can hardly be overvalued. It may indeed be said without paradox that they owe not a little of their value to their faults; but they owe a great deal more to their merits.

  The faults are apparent enough even in the first series, which falls to be noticed in this chapter; yet it is really difficult to say when a more important book of English criticism had appeared. Dryden’s Essay of Dramatic Poesy, Johnson’s Lives at their frequent best, Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, are greater things; but hardly the best of them was in its day more “important for us.” To read even the best of that immediately preceding criticism of which something has been said above — nay, even to recur to Coleridge and Hazlitt and Lamb — and then to take up On Translating Homer, is to pass to a critic with a far fuller equipment, with a new method, with a style of his own, and with an almost entirely novel conception of the whole art of criticism. For the first time (even Coleridge with much wider reading had not co-ordinated it from this point of view) we find the two great ancient and the three or four great modern literatures of Europe taken synoptically, used to illustrate and explain each other, to point out each other’s defects and throw up each other’s merits. Almost for the first time, too, we have ancient literature treated more or less like modern — neither from the merely philological point of view, nor with reference to the stock platitudes and traditions about it. The critic is not afraid of doctrines and general principles — in fact, he is rather too fond of them — but his object is anything rather than mere arid deduction and codification. He has the aesthetic sense as thoroughly as Hazlitt and Lamb, but without the wilfulness of either, or at least with a different kind of wilfulness from that of either. Finally, in one of the numerous ways in which he shows that his subject is alive to him, he mixes it up with the queerest personalities and sudden zigzags, with all manner of digressions and side-flings. And last of all, he has that new style of which we spoke — a style by no means devoid of affectation and even trick, threatening, to experienced eyes, the disease of mannerism, but attractive in its very provocations, almost wholly original, and calculated, at least while it retains its freshness, to drive what is said home into the reader’s mind and to stick it there.

  The faults, we said, both critical and non-critical, are certainly not lacking; and if they were not partly excused by the author’s avowedly militant position, might seem sometimes rather grave. Whatever may have been the want of taste, and even the want of sense, in the translation of F.W. Newman, it is almost sufficient to say that they were neither greater nor less than might have been expected from a person who, if the most scholarly of eccentrics, was also the most eccentric even of English scholars. It is difficult not to think that Mr Arnold makes too much of them and refers too frequently to them. Such “iteration” is literally “damnable”: it must be condemned as unfair, out of place, out of taste, and even not distantly approaching that lack of urbanity with which Mr Arnold was never tired of reproaching his countrymen. Another translator, Mr Wright, was indeed needlessly sensitive to Mr Arnold’s strictures; but these strictures themselves were needlessly severe. It is all very well for a reviewer, especially if he be young and anonymous, to tell a living writer that his book has “no reason for existing”; but chairs of literature are not maintained by universities that their occupants may, in relation to living persons, exercise the functions of young anonymous reviewers. It may indeed be doubted whether these occupants should, except in the most guarded way, touch living persons at all.

  Critically too, as well as from the point of view of manners, the Lectures on Translating Homer are open to not a few criticisms. In the first place, the assumptions are enormous, and, in some cases at least, demonstrably baseless. One of Mr Arnold’s strongest points, for instance, not merely against Mr Newman but against Homeric translators generally, is concerned with the renderings of the Homeric compound adjectives, especially the stock ones — koruthaiolos, merops, and the rest. The originals, he is never weary of repeating, did not strike a Greek and do not strike a Greek scholar as out of the way; the English equivalents do so strike an English reader. Now as to the Greeks themselves, we know nothing: they have left us no positive information on the subject. But if (which is no doubt at least partly true) koruthaiolos and dolichoskion do not strike us, who have been familiar with Greek almost as long as we can remember, as out of the way, is that an argument? Most of us, I suppose, at about nine or ten years old, some no doubt a little or a good deal earlier, learnt these words as part of the ordinary Greek that was presented to us, just as much as kai and ara; but if we had learnt Greek as we learn English, beginning with quite ordinary words, would it be so? I think not; nor would it be so if people began Greek at a later and more critical stage of their education.

  It is also true that the book is full of that exceedingly arbitrary and unproved assertion, of that rather fanciful terminology, of those sometimes questionable æsthetic obiter dicta, of which, from first to last, Mr Arnold was so prolific. When he talks about the mysterious “grand style,” and tells us that Milton can never be affected, we murmur, “De gustibus!” and add mentally, “Though Milton is the greatest of affected writers, Milton is, after Comus at least, never anything else!” When he tells us again that at that moment (1861) “English literature as a living intellectual instrument ranks after the literatures of France and Germany,” we remember that at the time France possessed perhaps only one writer, Victor Hugo, and Germany absolutely none, of the calibre of a dozen Englishmen — Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle, Thackeray, Dickens, and not a few others, from Landor to Mr Ruskin; that Germany, further, had scarcely one, though France had more than one or two, great writers of the second class: and we say, “Either your ‘living intellectual instrument’ is a juggle of words, or you really are neglecting fact.” Many — very many — similar retorts are possible; and the most hopeless variance of all must come when we arrive at Mr Arnold’s championship of that ungainly and sterile mule the English hexameter, and when we review the specimens of the animal that he turns out from his own stables for our inspection.

  But it matters not. For all this, and very much more than all this, which may be passed over as unnecessary or improper, nothing like the book had, for positive critical quality, and still more for germinal influence, been seen by its generation, and nothing of the same quality and influence has been seen for more than a technical generation since. It would of course be uncritical in the last degree to take the change in English criticism which followed as wholly and directly Mr Arnold’s work. He was not even the voice crying in the wilderness: only one of many voices in a land ready at least to be eared and pathed. But he was the earliest of such voices, the clearest, most original, most potent; and a great deal of what followed was di
rectly due to him.

  The non-literary events of his life during this period were sufficiently varied if not very momentous. We have mentioned the domiciling in Chester Square, which took place in February 1858, perhaps on the strength of the additional income from Oxford. In the late summer of that year he went alone to Switzerland, and next spring, shortly after the New Year, received, to his very great joy, a roving commission to France, Belgium, Switzerland, and Piedmont, to report on elementary education. “Foreign life,” he says, with that perfect naturalness which makes the charm of his letters, “is still to me perfectly delightful and liberating in the last degree.” And he was duly “presented” at home, in order that he might be presentable abroad. But the first days of the actual sojourn (as we have them recorded in a letter to his mother of April 14) were saddened by that death of his brother William, which he has enshrined in verse.

  He had, however, plenty to distract him. France was all astir with the Austrian war, and it is impossible to read his expressions of half-awed admiration of French military and other greatness without rather mischievous amusement. He visited the Morbihan, which struck him as it must strike every one. Here he is pathetic over a promising but not performing dinner at Auray— “soup, Carnac oysters, shrimps, fricandeau of veal, breast of veal, and asparagus;” but “everything so detestable” that his dinner was bread and cheese. He must have been unlucky: the little Breton inns, at any rate a few years later than this, used, it is true, to be dirty to an extent appalling to an Englishman; but their provender was usually far from contemptible. There is more sense of Breton scenery in another letter a little later. Both here and, presently, in Gascony he notes truly enough “the incredible degree to which the Revolution has cleared the feudal ages out of the minds of the country people”; but if he reflected on the bad national effect of this breach with the past, he does not say so. By June 12 he is in Holland, and does not like it — weather, language, &c., all English in the worst sense, apparently without the Norman and Latin element which just saves us. And though he was a very short time in the Netherlands, he has to relieve his feelings by more abuse of them when he gets back to Paris — in fact, he speaks of Holland exactly as the typical Frenchman speaks of England, and is accordingly very funny to read. The two things that make Holland most interesting, history and art, were exactly those that appealed to Mr Arnold least. Then after a refreshing bath of Paris, he goes to Strasbourg, and Time — Time the Humourist as well as the Avenger and Consoler — makes him commit himself dreadfully. He “thinks there cannot be a moment’s doubt” that the French will beat the Prussians even far more completely and rapidly than they are beating the Austrians. Lord Cowley, it seems, “entirely shared” his conviction that “the French will always beat any number of Germans who come into the field against them, and never be beaten by any one but the English.” Let us hope that Jove, when he whistled half this prophecy down the wind, affirmed the rest of it! Switzerland comes next; and he is beginning to want very much to be back in England, partly “for the children, but partly also from affection for that foolish old country” — which paternal and patriotic desire was granted about the end of the month, though only for a short time, during which he wrote a pamphlet on the Italian question. Then “M. le Professeur Docteur Arnold, Directeur Général de toutes les Écoles de la Grande Bretagne,” returned to France for a time, saw Mérimée and George Sand and Renan, as well as a good deal of Sainte-Beuve, and was back again for good in the foolish old country at the end of the month.