The method is not very different in “A French Critic on Goethe,” though Carlyle, the English “awful example” selected for contrast, is less maltreated than Macaulay, and shares the disadvantageous part with Lewes, and with divers German critics. On the whole, this essay, good as it is, seems to me less effective than the other; perhaps because Mr Arnold is in less accord with his author, and even seems to be in two minds about that author’s subject — about Goethe himself. Earlier, as we have partly seen, he had, both in prose and in verse, spoken with praise — for him altogether extraordinary, if not positively extravagant — of Goethe; he now seems a little doubtful, and asks rather wistfully for “the just judgment of forty years,” the calm revised estimate of the Age of Wisdom. But M. Scherer’s estimate is in parts lower than he can bring himself to admit; and this turns the final passages of the essay into a rather unsatisfactory chain of “I agree with this,” “I do not agree with that.” But the paper retains the great merit which has been assigned to its predecessor as a piece of ushering; and that, we must remember, was what it was designed to be.
In “George Sand,” which completes the volume, we have Mr Arnold no longer as harbinger of another, but in the character, in which after all he is most welcome, of speaker on his own account. His estimate of this prolific amuseuse will probably in the long-run seem excessive to the majority of catholic and comparative critics; nor is it at all difficult to account for the excess. Mr Arnold belonged exactly to the generation to which in England, even more than in France, George Sand came as a soothing and sympathetic exponent of personal sorrows. Even the works of her “storm-and-stress” period were not too far behind them; and her later calmer productions seem to have had, at least for some natures among the “discouraged generation of 1850” (to which, as we have said, Mr Arnold himself by his first publications belonged), something of that healing power which he has assigned, in larger measure and with greater truth, to Wordsworth. A man is never to be blamed for a certain generous overvaluation of those who have thus succoured him; it would be as just to blame him for thinking his mother more beautiful, his father wiser than they actually were. And Mr Arnold’s obituary here has a great deal of charm. The personal and biographical part is done with admirable taste, not a grain too much or too little of that moi so haïssable in excess, so piquant as a mere seasoning, being introduced: and the panegyric is skilful in the extreme. To be sure, Mr Hamerton reappears, and Mr Arnold joins in the chorus of delight because the French peasant no longer takes off his hat. Alas! there is no need to go to the country of La Terre to discover this sign of moral elevation. But the delusion itself is only another proof of Mr Arnold’s constancy to his early ideas. And looking back on the whole volume, one is almost tempted to say that, barring the first Essays in Criticism itself, he had written no better book.
Before very long the skill in selecting and editing which had been first applied to Johnson’s Lives found extended opportunities. Mr Arnold had much earlier, in the Essays in Criticism, expressed a wish that the practice of introducing books by a critical and biographical Essay, which had long been naturalised in France, and had in former times not been unknown in England, should be revived among us. His words had been heard even before he himself took up the practice, and for about the usual time — your thirty years is as a matter of fact your generation — it flourished and prospered, not let us hope to the great detriment of readers, and certainly to the modest advantage of the public man when vexed by want of pence. Nor can it exactly be said to have ceased — though for some years grumbles have been uttered. “Why,” says one haughty critic,— “why mar a beautiful edition of So-and-so’s works by incorporating with them this or that man’s estimate of their value?” “The publishers,” says an inspired communiqué, “are beginning to recognise that the public has no need of such things in the case of works of established repute, of which there is nothing new to be said.” No doubt both these are genuine utterances: no doubt the haughty critic would have steadily refused to “mar” the book by his estimate if he had been asked to do so; no doubt the particular firm of publishers were not in the least influenced by a desire to save the ten, twenty, fifty, or a hundred guineas which this or that man might have demanded for saying nothing new.
But Mr Arnold did not agree with these severe folk. He thought — and not a few good wits have thought with him — not only that these Introductions are an opportunity for men like himself, with original gifts of thought and style, to display these gifts, but that the mighty public, for all its knowledge of everything that has been thought and said about everybody, might find something new to it even in the observations of lesser folk. As a matter of fact, of course, and neither to talk nor to quote nonsense, the utility of such Introductions, even if moderately well done, is unmistakable. Not one in a thousand of the probable readers of any book has all the information which even a fairly competent introducer will put before him; not one in a hundred knows the previous estimates of the author; not many possess that acquaintance with his whole work which it is part of the business of the introducer to acquire, and adjust for the better understanding of the particular book. Of course, if an Introduction is imperfectly furnished with fact and thought and reading — if it is desultory, in bad taste, and so forth — it had better not be there. But this is only saying that a bad Introduction is a bad thing, which does not get us much beyond the intellectual edification of the niece of Gorboduc. Unless the introducer is a boggler, the Introduction will probably do good to those who want it and can be neglected by those who don’t; while in the rarer and better cases it will itself acquire, or even possess from the first, that very value as a point de repère which Mr Arnold had discussed. It will be good relatively and good in itself, — a contribution at once to the literature of knowledge and to the literature of power.
Of Mr Arnold’s efforts in editing I may be permitted to neglect his “intromittings” with Isaiah, for reasons already sufficiently given. In more hopeful matter there are three examples which are not soon likely to lose interest or value: the selection of his own poems, that from Wordsworth, and that from Byron. To the first the English habits of his own day did not permit him to prefix any extensive Introduction, and though the principle is sound, one is almost sorry for the application. Neither Wordsworth nor Coleridge would have had any scruples in doing this, and while Mr Arnold had the sense of the ludicrous which Wordsworth lacked, he was less subject to disastrous divagations than Coleridge. Still, the 1853 Preface enables those who have some slight power of expansion to fill in what is wanted from the point of view of purpose; and the selection itself is quite excellent. Almost the only things that, as a basis for a good knowledge of the poet, one finds it necessary to subjoin, are the beautiful Resignation, which Mr Humphry Ward had the good taste to include in the appendix to his English Poets; and the curious, characteristic, and not much short of admirable Dream, which in the earlier issues formed part of Switzerland, and should never have been excluded from it. It is probably the best selection by a poet from his own works that has ever been issued, and this is saying not a little. Nor does one like Mr Arnold less for his saying, reported either by Mr Ward or Lord Coleridge, that he had rather have given all the poems.
As for the “Wordsworth” and the “Byron,” they gain enormously by “this man’s estimate of them,” and do not lose by “this man’s” selection. I have had occasion, not once or twice only, and for purposes not invariably the same, to go through the Wordsworth book carefully, side by side with the complete poems, in order to see whether anything has necessarily to be added. I really do not know what has, unless it be a few of the oases from the deserts of the Excursion, the Prelude, and the then not published Recluse. Wordsworth’s real titles are put in once for all; the things by which he must stand or fall are there. The professor, the very thorough-going student, the literary historian, must go farther; the idle person with a love of literature will; but nobody need.
And the Introduction (
for after all we can all make our selections for ourselves, with a very little trouble) is still more precious. I know few critical essays which give me more pleasure in reading and re-reading than this. Not that I agree with it by any means as a whole; but he is in the mere “Pettys” of criticism (it is true not many seem to get beyond) who judges a critical essay by his own agreement with it. Mr Arnold puts Wordsworth, as a poet and an English poet, far higher than I can put him. He is not so great a poet to my thinking as Spenser or Shelley; if it were possible in these competitions to allow weight for age, he is not as great a poet as Keats; I am sure he is not a greater poet than Tennyson; I cannot give him rank above Heine or Hugo, though the first may be sometimes naughty and the second frequently silly or rhetorical; and when Mr Arnold begins to reckon Molière in, I confess I am lost. When and where did Molière write poetry? But these things do not matter; they are the things on which reviewers exercise their “will it be believed?” and on which critics agree to differ. We may include with them the disparaging passage on Gautier (of whom I suspect Mr Arnold knew little, and whom he was not quite fitted to judge had he known more) and the exaltation of “life” and “conduct” and all the rest of it. These are the colours of the regiment, the blazonry of the knight; we take them with it and him, and having once said our say against them, pass them as admitted.
But what is really precious is first the excellent criticism scattered broadcast all over the essay, and secondly, the onslaught on the Wordsworthians. They might perhaps retort with a tu quoque. When Mr Arnold attacks these poor folk for saying that Wordsworth’s poetry is precious because its philosophy is sound, we remember a certain Preface with its “all depends on the subject,” and chuckle a little, a very little. But Mr Arnold is right here. No philosophy, no subject, will make poetry without poetical treatment, and the consequence is that The Excursion and The Prelude are, as wholes, not good poems at all. They contain, indeed, passages of magnificent poetry. But how one longs, how, as one sees from this essay, Mr Arnold longed, for some mercury-process which would simply amalgamate the gold out of them and allow us to throw the dross down any nearest cataract, or let it be blown away by any casual hurricane!
The Byron paper contains more disputable statements — indeed the passage about Shelley, if it were quite serious, which may be doubted, would almost disqualify Mr Arnold as a critic of poetry. But it is hardly less interesting, and scarcely at all less valuable. In the first place, it is a very great thing that a man should be able to admire both Byron and Wordsworth. Of a mere Byronite, indeed, Mr Arnold has even less than he has of a Wordsworthian pure and simple. He makes the most damaging admissions; he has to fall back on Goethe for comfort and confirmation; he is greatly disturbed by M. Scherer’s rough treatment of his subject. In no essay, I think, does he quote so much from others, does he seem to feel it such a relief to find a backer, a somebody to fight with on a side point, a somebody (for instance Professor Nichol) to correct and gloss and digress upon while complimenting him. Mr Arnold is obviously not at ease in this Zion — which indeed is a Zion of an odd kind. Yet this very uneasiness gives to the Essay a glancing variety, a sort of animation and excitement, which are not common things in critical prelections. Nor, though one may think that Mr Arnold’s general estimate of Byron is not even half as sound as his general estimate of Wordsworth, does the former appear to be in even the slightest degree insincere. Much as there must have been in Byron’s loose art, his voluble inadequacy — nay, even in his choice of subject — that was repellent to Mr Arnold: much more as there must have been in his unchastened conduct, his flashy affectations, his lack of dignity, morality, tenue of every kind, — yet there were real links between them. Mr Arnold saw in Byron an ally, if not an altogether admirable or trustworthy ally, against the Philistine. He saw in him a link with general European literature, a check and antidote to the merely insular. Byron’s undoubtedly “sincere and strong” dislike of the extreme Romantic view of literature was not distasteful to Mr Arnold. Indeed, in his own earlier poems there are not wanting Byronic touches and echoes, not so easy to separate and put the finger on, as to see and hear “confusedly.” Lastly, he had, by that sort of reaction which often exhibits itself in men of the study, an obvious admiration for Force — the admiration which makes him in his letters praise France up to 1870 and Germany after that date — and he thought he saw Force in Byron. So that the Essay is written with a stimulating mingle-mangle of attraction and reluctance, of advocacy and admission. It is very far indeed from being one of his best critically. You may, on his own principles, “catch him out” in it a score of times. But it is a good piece of special pleading, an excellent piece of writing, and one of the very best and most consummate literary causeries in English.
In strict chronological order, a third example of these most interesting and stimulating Prefaces should have been mentioned between the “Wordsworth” and the “Byron” — the latter of which, indeed, contains a reference to it. This is the famous Introduction to Mr T.H. Ward’s English Poets, which, in that work and in the second series of Essays in Criticism, where it subsequently appeared, has perhaps had more readers than any other of its author’s critical papers. It contains, moreover, that still more famous definition of poetry as “a criticism of life” which has been so often attacked and has sometimes been defended. I own to having been, both at the time and since, one of its most decided and irreconcilable assailants. Nor do I think that Mr Arnold would have much relished the apology made, I think, by Mr Leslie Stephen since his death, that its critics “mistake an epigram for a philosophical definition.” In the first place, the epigrammatic quality is not clearly apparent; and in the second place, an epigram would in the particular place have been anything but appropriate, while a philosophical definition is exactly what was wanted.
Mr Arnold himself never attempted any such defence. He pleaded, with literal justice, that the phrase “a criticism of life” was only part of his formula, which adds, “under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.” But this does not make the matter much better, while it shows beyond controversy that it was a philosophical definition that he was attempting. It merely takes us round in a circle, telling us that poetry is poetical, that the archdeacon performs archidiaconal functions. And while it is not more illuminative than that famous and useful jest, it has the drawback of being positively delusive, which the jest is not. Unless we are to assign some quite new meaning to “criticism” — and the assignment of new meanings to the terms of an explanation is the worst of all explanatory improprieties — poetry is not a criticism of life. It may be a passionate interpretation of life — that has seemed to some not a bad attempt at the unachievable, — a criticism it cannot be. Prose fiction may be and should be such; drama may be and should be such; but not poetry. And it is especially unfortunate that such poetry as answers best to the term is exactly that poetry which Mr Arnold liked least. Dryden and Pope have much good and true criticism of life: The Vanity of Human Wishes is magnificent criticism of life; but Mr Arnold has told us that Dryden and Pope and Johnson are but “classics of our prose.” That there is criticism of life in poetry is true; but then in poetry there is everything.
It would also, no doubt, be possible to pick other holes in the paper. The depreciation of the “historic estimate,” instead of a simple hint to correct it by the intrinsic, is certainly one. Another is a distinct arbitrariness in the commendation or discommendation of the examples selected. No one in his senses would put the Chanson de Roland on a level with the Iliad as a whole; but some among those people who happen to possess an equal acquaintance with Greek and Old French will demur to Mr Arnold’s assignment of an ineffably superior poetical quality to one of the two passages he quotes over the other. So yet again with the denial of “high seriousness” to Chaucer. One feels disposed to enter and argue out a whole handful of not quite contradictory pleas, such as “He has high seriousness” (vide the “Temple of M
ars,” the beginning of the Parliament of Fowls, and many other places): “Why should he have high seriousness?” (a most effective demurrer); and “What is high seriousness, except a fond thing vainly invented for the nonce?”
But, as has so constantly to be said in reference to Mr Arnold, these things do not matter. He must have his catchwords: and so “criticism of life” and “high seriousness” are introduced at their and his peril. He must have his maintenance of the great classics, and so he exposes what I fear may be called no very extensive or accurate acquaintance with Old French. He must impress on us that conduct is three-fourths of life, and so he makes what even those who stop short of latreia in regard to Burns may well think mistakes about that poet likewise. But all the spirit, all the tendency, of the Introduction is what it ought to be, and the plea for the “real” estimate is as wholly right in principle as it is partly wrong in application.
It is well borne out by the two interesting articles on Gray and Keats which Mr Arnold contributed to the same work. In the former, and here perhaps only, do we find him putting his shoulder to the work of critical advocacy and sympathy with an absolutely whole heart. With Wordsworth, with Byron, with Heine, he was on points more or fewer at grave difference; though he affected to regard Goethe as a magnus Apollo of criticism and creation both, I think in his heart of hearts there must have been some misgivings; and it is impossible that he should not have known his fancy for people like the Guérins to be mere engouement. Gray’s case was different. The resemblances between subject and critic were extraordinary. Mr Arnold is really an industrious, sociable, and moderately cheerful Gray of the nineteenth century; Gray an indolent, recluse, more melancholy Arnold of the eighteenth. Again, the literary quality of the bard of the Elegy was exactly of the kind which stimulates critics most. From Sainte-Beuve downwards the fraternity has, justly or unjustly, been accused of a tendency to extol writers who are a little problematical, who approach the second class, above the unquestioned masters. And there was the yet further stimulus of redressing wrongs. Gray, though a most scholarly poet, has always pleased the vulgar rather than the critics, and he had the singular fate of being dispraised both by Johnson and by Wordsworth. But in this paper of Mr Arnold’s the wheel came full circle. Everything that can possibly be said for Gray — more than some of us would by any means indorse — is here said for him: here he has provided an everlasting critical harbour, into which he may retreat whensoever the popular or the critical breeze turns adverse.
Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold Page 123