An interview with Mr Disraeli at Aston Clinton, not, as one may suppose, without pleasant words, opens 1864. “It is only from politicians who have themselves felt the spell of literature that one gets these charming speeches,” he says, and they, not unnaturally, charmed him so much that he left his dressing-case and his umbrella behind him. But the anti-crusade is more and more declared. He “means to deliver the middle-class out of the hand of their Dissenting ministers,” and in the interval wants to know how “that beast of a word ‘waggonette’ is spelt?” The early summer was spent at Woodford, on the borders of Epping Forest, and the early autumn at Llandudno, where Welsh scenery and the poetry of the Celtic race “quite overpower” him. Alas! some other poetry did not, and when we find him in September thinking Enoch Arden “perhaps the best thing Tennyson has done,” we are not surprised to find this remarkable special appreciation followed by a general depreciation, which is quite in keeping. He is even tempted (and of course asked) to write a criticism of the Laureate, but justly replies, “How is that possible?”
From 1865 we get numerous notices of the notices of the Essays, and a pleasant and full account of a second official tour on the Continent, with special dwellings at most of the Western and Central European capitals. The tour lasted from April to November, and I have sometimes thought that it might, by itself, give a better idea of Mr Arnold as an epistoler than the Letters at large seem to have given. Early in 1866 we hear of the beginnings of the Friendship’s Garland series, though the occasion for that name did not come till afterwards. And he spent the summer of that year (as he did that of the next) in a farmhouse at West Humble, near Dorking, while he caught “a salmon” in the Deveron during September.
The occasion is perhaps a good one to say a few words on the relations between Mr Arnold and M. Renan, though the latter is not so prominent in the Continental letters as Sainte-Beuve and M. Scherer are. The author of the Vie de Jésus was a very slightly younger man than Mr Arnold (he was born in 1823), but in consequence of his having left the seminary and begun early to live by literary work, he was somewhat in advance of his English compeer in literary repute. His contributions to the Débats and the Revue des Deux Mondes began to be collected soon after 1850, and his first remarkable single book, Averroès et l’Averroisme, dates from that year. I do not know how early Mr Arnold became acquainted with his written work. But they actually met in 1859, during the business of the Foreign Education Commission, and there is a very remarkable passage in a letter to Mrs Forster on Christmas Eve of that year. He tells his sister of “Ernest Renan, a Frenchman I met in Paris,” and notes the considerable resemblance between their lines of endeavour, observing, however, that Renan is chiefly “trying to inculcate morality, in a high sense of the word, on the French,” while he is trying to inculcate intelligence on the English. After which he makes a long and enthusiastic reference to the essay, Sur la Poésie des Races Celtiques, the literary results of which we shall soon see. I do not know whether Mr Arnold ever expressed to his intimates — for the reference to M. Renan in “Numbers” is not quite explicit — what he thought of those later and very peculiar developments of “morality in a high sense of the word” which culminated in the Abbesse de Jouarre and other things. His sense of humour must have painfully suggested to him that his own familiar friend and pattern Frenchman had become one of the most conspicuous examples of that French lubricity which he himself denounced. But there was no danger of his imitating M. Renan in this respect. In others the following was quite unmistakable, and, I am bound to say, on the whole rather disastrous. In literary criticism Mr Arnold needed no teaching from M. Renan, and as his English training on one of its sides preserved him from the Frenchman’s sentimental hedonism, so on another it kept him from the wildest excesses of M. Renan’s critical reconstructions of sacred history. But he copied a great deal too much of his master’s dilettante attitude to religion as a whole, and, as we shall see, he adopted and carried a great deal further M. Renan’s (I am told) not particularly well-informed and (I am sure) very hazardous and fantastic ideas about Celtic literature. On the whole, the two were far too much alike to do each other any good. Exquisite even as M. Renan’s mere style is, it is exquisite by reason of sweetness, with a certain not quite white and slightly phosphorescent light, not by strength or by practical and masculine force. Now it was the latter qualities that Mr Arnold wanted; sweetness and light he could not want.
As the tenure of his Chair drew to a close, and as he began to loathe examination papers more and more (indeed I know no one to whom usus concinnat amorem in the case of these documents), he made some endeavours to obtain employment which might be, if not both more profitable and less onerous, at any rate one or the other. First he tried for a Charity Commissionership; then for the librarianship of the House of Commons. For the former post it may be permitted to think that his extremely strong — in fact partisan — opinions, both on education and on the Church of England, were a most serious disqualification; his appointment to the latter would have been an honour to the House and to England, and would have shown that sometimes at any rate the right man can find the right place. But he got neither. He delivered his last Oxford lecture in the summer term of 1867. I remember that there were strong undergraduate hopes that Mr Browning, who was an Honorary M.A., might be got to succeed him; but it was decided that the honorary qualification was insufficient, and I daresay there were other objections. Mr Arnold had a sort of “send-off” in the shape of two great dinners at Balliol and Merton, at which he and Mr Browning were the principal guests, and the close of his professorial career was further made memorable by the issue of the Study of Celtic Literature in prose and the New Poems in verse, with Schools and Universities on the Continent to follow next year. Of these something must be said before this chapter is closed.
On the Study of Celtic Literature is the first book of his to which, as a whole, and from his own point of view, we may take rather serious objections. That it has merits not affected by these objections need hardly be said; indeed I think it would not be foolish to say that it is — or was — even the superior of the Homer in comparative and indirect importance. In that Mr Arnold had but, at the best, roused men to enter upon new ways of dealing with old and familiar matter; in this he was leading them to conquest of new realms. Now, as we have seen, it was exactly this exploration, this expansion, of which English was then in most need, just as it is now perhaps in most need of concentration and retreat upon the older acquisitions.
So far so good; but if we go farther, we do not at first fare better. It would be grossly unjust to charge Mr Arnold with all the nonsense which has since been talked about Celtic Renascences; but I fear we cannot write all that nonsense off his account. In particular, he set an example, which has in this and other matters been far too widely followed, of speaking without sufficient knowledge of fact. It cannot be too peremptorily laid down that the literary equivalent of a “revoke” — the literary act after which, if he does it on purpose, you must not play with a man — is speaking of authors and books which he has not read and cannot read in the original, while he leaves you ignorant of his ignorance. This Mr Arnold never committed, and could never have committed. But short of it, and while escaping its penalty, a man may err by speaking too freely even of what he confesses that he does not know; and of this minor and less discreditable sin, I own (acknowledging most frankly that I know even less of the originals than he did), I think Mr Arnold was here guilty.
Exactly how much Gaelic, Irish, or Welsh Mr Arnold knew at first-hand, I cannot say: he frankly enough confesses that his knowledge was very closely limited. But what is really surprising, is that he does not seem to have taken much trouble to extend it at second-hand. A very few Welsh triads and scraps of Irish are all that, even in translation, he seems to have consulted: he never, I think, names Dafydd ap Gwilym, usually put forward as the greatest of Celtic poets; and in the main his citations are derived either from Ossian (“this do seem going
far,” as an American poetess observes), or else from the Mabinogion, where some of the articles are positively known to be late translations of French-English originals, and the others are very uncertain. You really cannot found any safe literary generalisations on so very small a basis of such very shaky matter. In fact, Mr Arnold’s argument for the presence of “Celtic magic,” &c., in Celtic poetry comes to something like this. “There is a quality of magic in Shakespeare, Keats, &c.; this magic must be Celtic: therefore it must be in Celtic poetry.” Fill up the double enthymeme who list, I am not going to endeavour to do so. I shall only say that two sentences give the key-note of the book as argument. “Rhyme itself, all the weight of evidence tends to show, came into our poetry from the Celts.” Now to some of us all the weight of evidence tends to show that it came from the Latins. “Our only first-rate body of contemporary poetry is the German.” Now at the time (1867), for more than thirty years, Germany had not had a single poet of the first or the second class except Heine, who, as Mr Arnold himself very truly says, was not a German but a Jew.
But once more, what we go to Mr Matthew Arnold for is not fact, it is not argument, it is not even learning. It is phrase, attitude, style, that by which, as he says admirably in this very book, “what a man has to say is recast and heightened in such a manner as to add dignity and distinction to it.” It is the new critical attitude, the appreciation of literary beauty in and for itself, the sense of “the word,” the power of discerning and the power of reflecting charm, the method not more different from the wooden deduction of the old school of critics than from the merely unenlightened and Philistine commonness of the reviewers, his earlier contemporaries, or from the aimless “I like that” and “I don’t like this” which does duty now, and did then, and has done always, for criticism itself. True, Mr Arnold himself might be wilful, capricious, haphazard; true, he might often be absolutely unable to give any real reason for the faith that was in him; true, he sometimes might have known more than he did know about his subject. But in all these points he saved himself: in his wilfulness, by the grace and charm that sometimes attend caprice; in his want of reason, by his genuineness of faith itself; in his occasional lack of the fullest knowledge, by the admirable use — not merely display — which he made of what knowledge he had. There may be hardly a page of the two books of his lectures in which it is not possible to find some opportunity for disagreement — sometimes pretty grave disagreement; but I am sure that no two more valuable books, in their kind and subject, to their country and time, have been ever issued from the press.
The New Poems make a volume of unusual importance in the history of poetical careers. Mr Arnold lived more than twenty years after the date of their publication; but his poetical production during that time filled no more than a few pages. At this date he was a man of forty-five — an age at which the poetical impulse has been supposed to run low, but perhaps with no sufficient reason. Poets of such very different types as Dryden and Tennyson have produced work equal to their best, if not actually their best, at that age and later. Mr Browning had, a few years before, produced what are perhaps his actually greatest volumes, Men and Women and Dramatis Personae, the one at forty-three, the other at fifty-two. According to Mr Arnold’s own conception of poetry-making, as depending upon the subject and upon the just and artist-like exposition of that subject, no age should be too late.
Certainly this age was not too late with him. The contents all answered strictly enough to their title, except that Empedocles on Etna and some half-dozen of its companions were, at Mr Browning’s request, reprinted from the almost unpublished volume of 1852, and that Thyrsis, St Brandan, A Southern Night, and the Grande Chartreuse had made magazine appearances. Again the moment was most important. When Mr Arnold had last made (omitting with an apology the “transient and embarrassed phantom” of Merope) an appearance in 1855, the transition age of English nineteenth-century poetry was in full force. No one’s place was safe but Tennyson’s; and even his was denied by some, including Mr Arnold himself, who never got his eyes quite clear of scales in that matter. Browning, though he had handed in indisputable proofs, had not yet had them allowed; the Spasmodics had not disappeared; the great prae-Raphaelite school was but on the way. The critics knew not what to think; the vulgar thought (to the tune of myriad copies) of Tupper. Both classes, critic and public, rent Maud and neglected Men and Women: The Defence of Guenevere had not yet rung the matins — bell in the ears of the new generation.
Now things were all altered. The mixture of popularity and perfection in the Idylls and the Enoch Arden volume — the title poem and Aylmer’s Field for some, The Voyage and Tithonus and In the Valley of Cauterets for others — had put Tennyson’s place
“Beyond the arrows, shouts, and views of men.”
The three-volume collection of Browning’s Poems, and Dramatis Personae which followed to clench it, had nearly, if not quite, done the same for him. The Defence of Guenevere and The Life and Death of Jason, Atalanta, Chastelard, and most of all the Poems and Ballads, had launched an entirely new poetical school with almost unexampled pomp and promise on the world. The Spasmodics were forgotten, the Tupper cult had been nearly (not yet quite) laughed out of existence. That Mr Arnold’s own poems had had any widely extended sale or reading could hardly be said; but they were read by those who were or were shortly to be themselves read. You had not to look far in any Oxford college (I cannot speak of Cambridge) before you found them on those undergraduate shelves which mean so much; while many who, from general distaste to poetry or from accident, knew them not, or hardly knew them, were familiar with their author’s prose work, or at least knew him as one whom others knew.
The volume itself was well calculated to take advantage, to at least a moderate extent, of this conjunction of circumstance. At no time was the appeal of Mr Arnold’s poetry of the most impetuous or peremptory order. And it might be contended that this collection contains nothing quite up to the very best things of the earlier poems, to the Shakespeare sonnet, to The Scholar-Gipsy, to the Isolation stanzas. But with the majority of its readers it was sure rather to send them to these earlier things than to remind them thereof, and its own attractions were abundant, various, and strong.
In the poet himself there was perhaps a slight consciousness of “the silver age.” The prefatory Stanzas, a title changed in the collected works to Persistency of Poetry, sound this note —
“Though the Muse be gone away,
Though she move not earth to-day,
Souls, erewhile who caught her word,
Ah! still harp on what they heard.”
A confession perhaps a little dangerous, when the Muses were speaking in no uncertain tones not merely to juniors like Mr Morris and Mr Swinburne but to seniors like Tennyson and Browning. But the actual contents were more than reassuring. Of Empedocles it is not necessary to speak again: Thyrsis could not but charm. The famous line,
“And that sweet city with her dreaming spires,”
sets the key dangerously high; but it is kept by the magnificent address to the cuckoo,
“Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go?”
and the flower-piece that follows; by that other single masterpiece,
“The coronals of that forgotten time;”
by the more solemn splendour of the stanza beginning
“And long the way appears which seemed so short;”
by the Signal tree; and by the allegoric close with the reassertion of the Scholar. All these things stand by themselves, hold their sure and reserved place, even in the rush and crowd of the poetry of the sixties, the richest, perhaps, since the time from 1805 to 1822.
Saint Brandan, which follows, has pathos if not great power, and connects itself agreeably with those Celtic and mediaeval studies which had just attracted and occupied Mr Arnold. The sonnets which form the next division might be variously judged. None of them equals the Shakespeare; and one may legitimately hold the opinion that the sonnet was not speci
ally Mr Arnold’s form. Its greatest examples have always been reached by the reflex, the almost combative, action of intense poetic feeling — Shakespeare’s, Milton’s, Wordsworth’s, Rossetti’s — and intensity was not Mr Arnold’s characteristic. Yet Austerity of Poetry, East London, and Monica’s Last Prayer must always stand so high in the second class that it is hardly critical weakness to allow them the first. And then the tide rises. Calais Sands may not be more than very pretty, but it is that, and Dover Beach is very much more. Mr Arnold’s theological prepossessions and assumptions may appear in it, and it may be unfortunately weak as an argument, for except the flood itself nothing is so certain a testimony to the flood as the ebb. But the order, the purpose, the argument, the subject, matter little to poetry. The expression, the thing that is not the subject, the tendency outside the subject, which makes for poetry, are here, and almost of the very best. Here you have that passionate interpretation of life, which is so different a thing from the criticism of it; that marvellous pictorial effect to which the art of line and colour itself is commonplace and banal, and which prose literature never attains except by a tour de force; that almost more marvellous accompaniment of vowel and consonant music, independent of the sense but reinforcing it, which is the glory of English poetry among all, and of nineteenth-century poetry among all English, poetries. As is the case with most Englishmen, the sea usually inspired Mr Arnold — it is as natural to great English poets to leave the echo of the very word ringing at the close of their verse as it was to Dante to end with “stars.” But it has not often inspired any poet so well as this, nor anywhere this poet better than here. If at any time a critic may without fatuity utter judgment with some confidence, it is where he disagrees with the sentiment and admires the poem; and for my part I find in Dover Beach, even without the Merman, without the Scholar-Gipsy, without Isolation, a document which I could be content to indorse “Poetry, sans phrase.”
Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold Page 117