The strangest of all these, the clearest proof in itself of flurry and sense of need, is exhibited in his summoning — of all wonderful things — of Comparative Philology to the rescue of Literature. To rebut the criticism on his denial of a Personal God, he takes refuge in the ethnological meaning of Deus, which, it seems, is “Shining.” The poor plain mind, already staggered by Mr Arnold’s private revelations as to what did not happen 6000 years ago (or earlier) in the garden of Eden, quite succumbs before this privilegium of omniscience. One had thought that the results of philology and etymology of this sort were extremely ingenious guesses, to be admitted in so far as they do not conflict with facts, and till the next guess comes, but nothing more. Lo! they are quoted as if they were on a par with “two and two make four,” or the law of Excluded Middle. We may not take Moses and the prophets without proof, but Curtius and Professor Max Müller may speak, and we must but hear. And later, when Mr Arnold is trying to cope with Descartes, he flies for refuge to “the roots as, bhu, and sta.”
One is tempted rather to laugh at this; but on some sides it is very serious. That no God of any religion can be more of a mere hypothesis than as, bhu, and sta, never seems to have occurred to Mr Arnold for one moment, nor that he was cutting the throat of his own argument. We must not, however, fall into his own mistake and quadruplicate to his duply. It may be sufficient to say that the long defence of the Fourth Gospel which this book contains is one of the oddest things in all literature. What, on Mr Arnold’s principles, it matters whether the Fourth Gospel was written in the first century, the fourth, or the fourteenth, it is impossible for the poor plain mind to see. He will not have it as revelation, and as anything else its date is quite immaterial.
The fact is that this severe censor of “learned pseudo — science mixed with popular legend,” as he terms theology, appears to have no idea of the value of evidence whatever. The traditional history of the Bible is not even to be considered; but a conjectural reconstruction of it by a Dutch critic, without in the older cases one jot or tittle of evidence outside the covers of the Bible itself, deserves every respect, if not reverent acceptance en bloc. Miracles are fictions, and the scenes in the garden of Eden and at the Sepulchre never happened; but as, bhu, and sta are very solemn facts, and you can find out all about the Divinity, because the word Deus means (not “has been guessed to mean,” but means) “Shining.” That Shakespeare knew everything is much more certain than that miracles do not happen; and he certainly knew Mr Arnold’s case if not Mr Arnold, when he introduced a certain main episode in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. To frown on Oberon and caress Bottom is venial compared with the dismissal of the Bible as popular legend, and the implicit belief in as, bhu, and sta.
A wilfully hostile historian of Mr Arnold could not dwell too long on these unfortunate books, for the handles they present are infinite; but for my part I shall take leave to say little more about them. To ask, in the common phrase, whether they did any harm would be to beg the question in their own manner; to ask whether they produced any effect would lead us too far. They certainly expressed a prevalent tendency. Most fortunately Mr Arnold was allowed another ten years and more wherein to escape from the wilderness which yielded these Dead Sea fruits, and to till his proper garden once more. Yet we have not quite done with the other fruits themselves.
The actual finale, Last Essays on Church and Religion, was still less popular, was indeed the least popular of all his works, seeing that, as has been said above, it has never been reprinted. It is easy to understand this, for it is perhaps the only one of his books which can be definitely called dull. The apologetic tone noticeable in God and the Bible continues, but the apology is illustrated and maintained in an even less attractive manner. The Preface is perhaps the least dead part of the book; but its line of argument shares, and perhaps even exaggerates, the controversial infelicity of this unfortunate series. Mr Arnold deals in it at some length with the comments of two foreign critics, M. Challemel-Lacour and Signor de Gubernatis, on Literature and Dogma, bringing out (what surely could have been no news to any but very ill-educated Englishmen) the fact of their surprise, not at his taking the Bible with so little seriousness, but at his taking it with any seriousness at all. And he seems never even to dream of the obvious retort: “Certainly. These men are at any rate ‘thorough’; they are not dilettante dalliers between two opinions. They have got far beyond your half-way house and have arrived at their destination. We have no desire to arrive at the destination, and therefore, if you will excuse us, we decline to visit the half-way house.” It is less surprising that he did not see the force of the objections of another critic, M. Maurice Vernes, to the equally illogical and unhistorical plan of arbitrarily selecting this utterance as that of “Jesus,” and another, given by the same authority, as not that of “Jesus.” A man, who was sensible of this paralogism, could never take Mr Arnold’s views on Church and Religion at all.
But when we leave the Preface, even such faint liveliness as this deserts us. The text contains four (or five, the second being divided into two parts) essays, lectures, or papers, A Psychological Parallel, Bishop Butler and the Zeit-Geist, The Church of England, and A Last Word on the Burials Bill. All had appeared in Macmillan’s Magazine or the Contemporary Review during 1876, while Bishop Butler had been delivered as two lectures at Edinburgh, and The Church of England as an address to the London Clergy at Sion College, during the spring of that year.
Over all there is a curious constraint, the evidence of a mood not very difficult to analyse, and in the analysis of which lies almost all the satisfaction or edification to be got out of the book. The writer, though by no means abandoning his own point of view, and even flattering himself that some modus vivendi is about to be established between himself and the more moderate supporters of the Church and of religion, betrays not merely the well-known self-excusing and self-accusing tone, but odd flashes of discontent and weariness — nay, even a fretfulness such as might have been that of a Moses at Rephidim who could not bring water out of the rock. A Psychological Parallel is an attempt to buttress the apologia by referring to Sir Matthew Hale’s views on witchcraft, to Smith, the Cambridge Platonist and Latitudinarian, and to the Book of Enoch (of which, by the way, it is a pity that Mr Arnold did not live to see Mr Charles’s excellent translation, since he desiderated a good one). Of course the argument is sun-clear. If Hale was mistaken about witchcraft, St Paul may have been mistaken about the Resurrection. Expressions attributed to Christ occur in the Book of Enoch, therefore they are not original and divine, &c., &c. And it would be out of place to attempt any reply to this argument, the reply being in each case as sun-clear as the argument itself. No believer in supernatural religion that I ever met considered Sir Matthew Hale to have been inspired; and no believer in the divinity of Christ can fail to hold that His adoption of words (if He did adopt them) makes them His.
The gist of the Butler lectures is considerably less clear, and, if only for that reason, it cannot be succinctly stated or answered. In particular, it requires rather careful “collection” in order to discover what our friend the Zeit-Geist has to do in this galley. I should imagine that, though an Edinburgh audience is by no means alarmed at philosophy, the majority, perhaps the enormous majority, of Mr Arnold’s hearers must have had a singularly dim idea as to his exact drift. Indeed I cannot say that after reading the piece when it first appeared, and again, twenty years later, for the purposes of this book, I have any very distinct notion of that drift myself. If it merely means that Butler, being an eighteenth-century person, was afflicted with the eighteenth-century limitations by the Zeit-Geist, eighty-six pages, and an imposing German compound at the head of every other one of them, seem a good deal for telling us this. If it is a sort of indirect attack upon — an oblique demurrer to — Butler’s constructive-aggressive orthodoxy in psychology and religion, one is bound to say with all politeness, first, that it is a case of impar congressus, and secondly, that the adventurous knight d
oes not give himself a fair chance. It will take more than eighty-six not very large pages, and a German word at the top of the alternate ones, to do that! In the opening sketch of Butler himself Mr Arnold could not but be agreeable and even delightful. It gives us, indeed, most pleasant promise of work in this same good kind soon to follow; but for the rest we grope till we find, after some seventy-three of the eighty-six, that what Mr Arnold wanted to say is that Butler did not handle, and could not then have handled, miracles and the fulfilment of prophecy satisfactorily. Butler, like St Paul, is undoubtedly inconvenient for those who believe that miracles do not happen, and that prophecies were either not made or not fulfilled. So he must be got rid of. But whether he is got rid of, — whether Mr Arnold and the Zeit-Geist have put him on the shelf as a venerable but antiquated object, — that is another question.
The two remaining essays show us Mr Arnold, in his character of at least would-be practical statesman, dealing no longer with points of doctrine but with the affairs of the Church as a political body. The circumstances of the first — the address delivered at Sion College — had a certain piquancy: whether they had also sweet reasonableness and an entire accordance with the fitness of things is a question no doubt capable of being debated. Me the situation strikes, I must confess, as a little grotesque. The layman in the wide sense, the amateur, always occupies a rather equivocal position when he addresses experts and the profession; but his position is never so equivocal as when he doubles the part of non-expert with that of candid friend. How Mr Arnold succeeded in this exceedingly delicate attempt I do not propose to examine at any length. He thought himself that he had “sufficiently marked the way in which the new world was to be reached.” Paths to new worlds are always interesting, but in reading, or rather re-reading, the sailing directions of this Columbus twenty years after date, one may be a little disappointed. The sum appears to be a somewhat Tootsian declaration that things of general are of no consequence. The Church is better than Dissent; at least she would be so if she dropped all her dogma, the greater part of her superstitions about the rights of property and “my duty to my neighbour,” and as much as possible of the barriers which separate her from Dissent itself. A most moderate eirenicon. Still less need be said of the Burials Bill paper, which is a sort of appendix or corollary to the Sion speech, at the end of which the subject had been referred to. The particular question, in this phase of it, has long ceased to burn, and one need not disturb the ashes.
We must now turn to the incursions of this time into politics, which, if not much happier, were more amusing. The chief monument of them is the long unreprinted Friendship’s Garland, which has always had some fervent devotees, and is very characteristic. It so happened that the period when Essays in Criticism, combined with his Oxford Lectures, introduced Mr Arnold to the public, was the period of the first years of the Pall Mall Gazette, when that brilliant periodical, with the help of many of the original staff of the Saturday Review, and others, was renewing for the sixties the sensation of a new kind of journalism, which the Saturday itself had given to the fifties, while its form and daily appearance gave it even greater opportunities. As early as the summer of 1866, during the agitation into which the public mind had been thrown by the astounding rapidity and thoroughness of the Prussian successes in the Seven Weeks’ War, Mr Arnold had begun a series of letters, couched in the style of persiflage, which Kinglake had introduced, or reintroduced, twenty years earlier in Eothen, and which the Saturday had taken up and widely developed. He also took not a few hints from Carlyle in Sartor and the Latterday Pamphlets. And for some years at intervals, with the help of a troupe of imaginary correspondents and comparses — Arminius von Thundertentronckh, Adolescens Leo of the Daily Telegraph, the Bottles family of wealthy Dissenters, with cravings for their deceased wife’s sisters, as well as a large number of more or less celebrated personages of the day, introduced in their proper persons, and by their proper names — he instructed England on its own weakness, folly, and vulgarity, on the wisdom and strength of the Germans, on the importance of Geist and ideas, &c., &c. The author brought himself in by name as a simple inhabitant of Grub Street, victimised, bullied, or compassionately looked down upon by everybody; and by this well-known device took licence for pretty familiar treatment of other people. When the greater crash of 1870 came, and the intelligent British mind was more puzzled, yet more Prusso-mimic, than ever, he supplemented these letters, framed or bound them up, as it were, with a moving account of the death of Arminius before Paris, and launched the whole as a book.
The letters had been much laughed over; but I do not think the book was very widely bought — at any rate, its very high price during the time in which it was out of print shows that no large number was printed. Perhaps this cold welcome was not altogether so discreditable to the British public as it would have been, had its sole cause been the undoubted but unpalatable truths told by the writer. Either, as some say, because of its thick-hidedness, or, as others, because of its arrogant self-sufficiency, the British public has never resented these much. But, in the first place, the thing was a falsetto. Mr Arnold had plenty of wit but not much humour; and after a time one feels that Bottles and Leo & Co. may be, as Dousterswivel says, “very witty and comedy,” but that we should not be altogether sorry if they would go. Further, the direct personalities — the worst instances concerned Lord Elcho, Mr Frederic Harrison, and the late Mr Sala — struck, and strike, some people as being not precisely in good taste. The constant allusions and references to minor and ephemeral things and persons were not of course then unintelligible, but they were even then teasing, In all these points, if Friendship’s Garland be compared, I will once more not say with A Tale of a Tub, but even with the History of John Bull, its weakness will come out rather strongly.
But this was not all. It was quite evident — and it was no shame and no disadvantage to him — that the jester was endeavouring to urge a very serious earnest behind, and by means of, his jest; that he was no mere railer, or caviller, or even satirist, but a convinced reformer and apostle. Yet when we try to get at his programme — at his gospel — there is no vestige of anything tangible about either. Not very many impartial persons could possibly accept Mr Arnold’s favourite doctrine, that the salvation of the people lies in state-provided middle-class schools; and this was specially difficult in 1871, if they remembered how some few years before Mr Arnold had been extolling the state-provided middle-class schools of France. While, for the rest, a man might be (as many men were) thoroughly dissatisfied with the part England had played abroad in Italy, in the American Civil War, in Denmark, in the war of 1866, in the war of 1870, and at home from 1845 onwards, and yet not be able for the life of him to discover any way of safety in Friendship’s Garland.
Nor, to take with the Garland for convenience sake Irish Essays, 1882, the political book which closed this period with the political book that opened it, do we find things much better, even long after “the Wilderness” had been mostly left behind. There is indeed less falsetto and less flippancy; perhaps Mr Arnold had silently learnt a lesson, perhaps the opportunities of regular essays in “three-decker” reviews — of a lay sermon to working men, of a speech at the greatest public school in the world — discouraged the playfulness which had seemed permissible in addressing a skittish young evening newspaper. But the unpracticalness — not in the Philistine but in the strictly scientific sense — is more glaring than ever, and there are other faults with it. Great part of An Unregarded Irish Grievance is occupied by a long-drawn-out comparison of England’s behaviour to Ireland with that of Mr Murdstone and his friend and manager Quinion to David Copperfield. In the first place, one thinks wickedly of the gibe in Friendship’s Garland about “Mr Vernon Harcourt developing a system of unsectarian religion from the life of Mr Pickwick.” In the second, one asks on what principles of literary art a comparison, not wholly improper as a mere illustration in passing, can be worked to death and turned inside out and upside down, for some
twenty mortal pages.
And so in other places. Yet the worst faults are not in form but in substance. Minor contradictions do not matter, though in a copy of the book I have read there is a damaging comparison by some annotator between Mr Arnold’s description of English Government at p. 4 and his rosy picture of education under Government at p. 107. This might happen to anybody, and is not fatal. What is fatal is that this censor of the “unideaed” has evidently himself no “ideas,” no first principles, in politics at all. That, play what tricks you will, all possible politics come round either to the Rule of the One, the Rule of the Few, or the Rule of the Many, and that the consequences of these rules, differentiated a little but not materially by historical and racial characteristics, are as constant as anything commonly called scientific, — this never seems to have occurred to Mr Arnold at all. He did not fully appreciate Thackeray, and Thackeray died too soon to know very much of him. But I have always thought that, for a criticism of life possessing prophetic genius, the Chevalier Strong’s wedding congratulations to Arthur Pendennis are almost uncanny as regards the Matthæan gospel. “Nothing,” said the Chevalier, when he had established himself as agent to the Duke of Garbanzos, “is so important to the welfare of the household as Good Sherry.” And so we find that the Irish question, like all others, will be solved by the substitution of State-governed for private middle-class schools, by the saturation of England with “ideas,” by all our old friends.
Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold Page 120