Matthew Arnold

icism-Celtic Literature-New

considerable collection of New Poems. It was during this, or immediately after its expiration, that he issued his second collected book of lectures on The Study of Celtic Literature; and it was then that he put in more popular, though still in not extremely popular, forms the results of his investigations into Continental education. It was during this time also th

ry thoroughly acquainted with the facts of his subject, which was not always the case later; and though his assumptions-the insensibility of aristocracies to ideas, the superiority of the French to the English in this respect, the failure of the Anglican Church, and so forth-are already as questionable as they are confident, he puts them with a certain modesty, a certain ?πιε?κεια, which was perhaps not always so obvious when he came to preach that quality itself later. About the gist of the book it is not necessary to say very much. He practically admits the obvious and unanswerable objection that his French Eto

ophy,-from everything, in short, of which Macaulay was the equally accepted and representative eulogist and exponent, is conspicuous. It is from foreign and almost hostile sources that we must expect help. The State is to resume, or to initiate, its guidance of a very large part, if not of the whole, of the matters which popular thought, Liberal and Conservative alike, then assigned to individual action or private combination. We have not yet Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace labelled with their tickets and furnished with their descriptions; but the three class

critic, "harshly, but justly") to the later. The mannerisms, indeed, like the dogmatisms, are pretty clearly imminent. Slightly exotic vocabulary-"habitude" "repartition," for "habit," "distribution"-makes its appearance. That abhorrence of the conjunction, which made Mr Arnold later give us rows of adjectives and substantives, with never an "and" to string them together, is here. But no one of these tricks, nor any other, is present in excess: there is nothing that can justly be

you three t

ld be made truest by m

ts absence implies, and is more than compensated by, the concomitant absence of those airs and flings, those interludes as of an academic jester, in cap and gown and liripipe instead of motley, which have been charged, not quite unjustly, on the Arnold that we know best. There is hardly in English a better example of the blendi

glish. It consisted, in the first edition, of a Preface (afterwards somewhat altered and toned down) and of nine essays (afterwards to be made ten by the addition of A Persian Passion-Play). The two first of these were general, on The Function of Criticism at the Present Time and The Literary Influence of Academies, while the other seven dealt respectively with the two

Goddess of Taste can have altogether smiled on his enjoyment. He is superciliously bland to the unlucky and no doubt rather unwise Mr Wright (v. supra): he tells the Guardian in a periphrasis that it is dull, and "Presbyter Anglicanus" that he is born of Hyrcanian tigers, and the editor of the Saturday Review that he is a late and embarrassed convert to the Philistines. He introduces not merely Mr Spurgeon, a Philistine of some substance and memory, but hapless forgotten shadows like

other. They are very pretty essays in themselves; but then (as Mr Arnold has taught us), "all depends on the subject," and the subjects here are so exceedingly unimportant! Besides, as he himself

ames co

atthew Arnold's, at his very best time, wasted on a broth

ather slender basis on which to draw up an indictment against a nation. Here is the astounding-the, if serious, almost preternatural-statement that "not very much of current English literature comes into this best that is known and thought in the world. Not very much I fear: certainly less than of the current literature of France and Germany." And this was 1865, when the Germans had had no great poet but Heine for a generation, nor any great poets but Goethe and Heine for some five hundred years, no great prose-writer but Heine (unless you call Goethe one), and were not going to have any! I

mother of Academies certainly, and a most respectable periodical in all ways-that this good Revue actually "had for its main function to understand and utter the best that is known and thought in the world," absolutely existed as an organ for "the free play of mind"? I should be disposed to think that the truer explanation of such things is that they we

that though in the early nineteenth she had produced one great philosophical critic, another even greater on the purely literary side, and a third of unique appreciative sympathy, in Coleridge, Hazlitt, and Lamb, she had not followed these up, and had, even in them, shown certain critical limitations. It was true that though the Germans had little and the Fre

ence may have been exaggerated; one of the most necessary, though not of the most grateful, businesses of the literary historian is to point out that with rare exceptions, and those almost wholly on the poetic side, great men of letters rather show in a general, early, and original fashion a common tendency t

perhaps ridiculous in England. But we can allow for this; and when we have allowed for it, once more Mr Arnold's warnings are warnings on the right side, true, urgent, beneficial. There are still the minor difficulties. Even at the time, much less as was known of France in England then than now, there were those who opened their eyes first and then rubbed them at the assertion that "openness of mind and flexibility of intelligence" were the characteristics of the French people. But once more also, no matter! The central drift is right, and the central drift carries many excellent things with it, and may be allowed to wash away the less excellent. Mr Arnold is right on the average q

tempt of "subject," the very quips and cranks and caprices that Mr Arnold so sternly bans. But who shall deny the excellence and the exquisiteness of this, the first English tribute of any real worth to the greatest of German poets, to one of the great poets of the world, to the poet who with Tennyson and Hugo completes the representative trinity of European poets of the nineteenth century proper? Very seldom (his applause of Gray, the only other instance, is not quite on a par with this) does the critic so nearly approach enthusiasm-not merely engouement on the one side or serene approval on the other. No matter that he pretends to admire Heine for his "modern spirit" (why, O Macarée, as his friend Maurice de Guérin might have said, should a modern spi

rancis. One feels, indeed, that Mr Arnold was not quite so well equipped with knowledge on the one side as on the other; indeed, he never was well read in medi?val literature. But his thesis, as a thesis, is capable of defence; in the sternest times of military etiquette he could not have been put

ability to admire the right things, even when he did admire I cannot agree with them. Joubert, of course, has his own shortcomings as a pensée-writer. He is rococo beside La Bruyére, dilettante beside La Rochefoucauld, shallow beside Pascal. There is at times,

t to observe in the shy philosopher a temperament which must have commended itself to Mr Arnold almost as strongly as his literary quality, and very closely indeed connected with that-the temperament of equity, of epieikeia, of freedom from swagger and brag and self-assertion. And here, once more, the things receive precisely their right treatment, the treatme

particular, yet it is throughout one of literature as such. Now, we cannot say that the interest of Spinoza or that of Marcus Aurelius, great as it is in both cases, is wholly, or in the main, or even in any considerable part, a literary interest. With Spinoza it is a philosophical-religious interest, with Marcus Aurelius a moral-religious, almost purely. The one ma

e in either essay of the disquieting and almost dismaying jocularity which was later to invade his discussion of such things: we are still far from Bottles; the three Lord Shaftesburys relieve us by not even threatening to appear. And accordingly the two essays add in no small degree, though somewhat after the fashion of an appendix or belated episode, to the charm of the book. They have an unction which never, as it so often does in the case of Mr Arnold's dangerous master and model Renan, degenerates into unctuosity; they are nobly serious, but without being in the least dull; they contain some exceedingly just and at the same time perfectly urbane criticism of the ordinary reviewing kind, and though they are not without instances of the author's by-

fishing expedition to Viel Salm was attempted in August 1862; but it did not escape the curse which seems to dog attempts at repetition of the same pleasure. The river was hopelessly low; the fish would not take; and the traveller came back in very little more than "a day and a night and a morrow." By December danger-signals are up in a letter to his mother, to the effect that "it is intolerable absurdity to

tic of this century, avowedly pursues that plan of "placing" writers which some of his own admirers so foolishly decry, I may observe that this is a locus classicus for his own special kind of criticism. It is possible-I do not know whether he did so-that Sir Mountstuart may, on receiving the letter, have smiled and thought of "Mon siége est fait"; but I am sure he would be the first to admit that the cases were different. I do not myself think that Mr Arnold's strong point was that complete grasp of a literary personality, and its place, which some critics aim at but which few achieve. His impatience-here perhaps half implied and later openly avowed-of the historic estimate in literature, would of itself have made this process irksome to him. But on the lines of his own special vocation as a critic it was not only irksome, it was unnecessary. His function was to mark the special-perhaps it would

ense popularity and influence of Macaulay had been due to his hatred of half-lights, of "perhapses"; and little as Mr Arnold liked Macaulay's fiddle, he was wise enough to borrow his rosin, albeit in disguise. If a critic makes too many provisos, if he "buts" too much, if he attempts to paint the warts as well as the beauties, he will be accused of want of sympathy, he will be taxed with timorousness and hedging, at best he will be blamed for

c., fill up the year. The death of Thackeray extracts one of those criticisms of his great contemporaries which act as little douches from time to time, in the words, "I cannot say that I thoroughly liked him, though we were on friendly terms: and he was not to my mind a great writer." But the personal reflections which follow are of value. He finds "the sudden cessation of so vigorous an existence very sobering. To-day I am forty-one; the middle of life in any case, and for me pe

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!

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 se

derable 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 unmistakabl

san-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

uld 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

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

an 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 l

f 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 wilfulnes

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 pe

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

ls and the Enoch Arden volume-the title poem and Aylmer's Field for some, The Voy

ows, shouts, an

exampled 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 t

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 Iso

f "the silver age." The prefatory Stanzas, a title changed in

e Muse be

move not ea

ile who caug

arp on what

rs like Mr Morris and Mr Swinburne but to seniors like Tennyson and Browning. But the actual contents were more

city with her

; but it is kept by the magni

airer, wherefor

hat follows; by that o

s of that fo

n splendour of th

y appears which

ese things stand by themselves, hold their sure and reserved place, even in the rush and c

ery 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 v

stanzas adequate, and in A Southern Night consummate, expression. The Fragment of Chorus of a Dejaneira, written long before, but n

in your

ke yourselv

misinterpret

will n

th the inquir

considera

peaking, is the difference be

in the pur

ke myself

on I got ex

had no

ter appropria

brella wa

red-boled" giants there celebrated-trees long since killed by London smoke, as the good-natured say, as others, by the idiotic tidiness of the gardeners, who swept the needles up and left the roots without natural comfort and protection. And then, after lesser things, the interesting, if not intensely poetical, Epilogue to Lessing's Laocoon leads us to one of the most remarkable of all Mr Arnold's poems, Bacchanalia, or the New Age. The word remarkable has been used advisedly. Bacchanalia, though it has poignant and exquisite poetic moments, is not one of the most specially poetical of its author's pieces. But it is certainly his only con

s orators

poets sun

core of lines! How perfect th

the qu

s the

the famous irruption of the New Agers! how adequate the quiet-moral of the end, tha

with a splen

ood upon the m

in his disci

different kind, much more self-centred, and, indeed, little more than fresh variations on "the note," as I ventured to call it before. Their descriptive and autobiographic interest is great, and if poetry were a criticism of life, there is plenty of that of them. The third book-Schools and Universities on the Continent (1868)-in which are put the complete results of the second Continental exploration-is, I suppose, much less known than the non-professional work, though perhaps not quite so unknown as the earlier report on elementary education. By far the larger part of it-the whole, indee

undoubtedly be claimed for him-by those who see any force in the argument-that events have followed him. Education, both secondary and university in England, has to a large extent gone since on the lines he indicates; the threatened superiority of the German bagman has asserted itself even more and more; the "teaching of literature" has planted a terrible fixed foot in our schools and colleges. But perhaps the weight usually assigned to this kind of corroboration is rather imaginary. That a thing has happened does not prove that it ought to have happened, except on a theory of determinism, which puts "conduct" out of sight altogether. There are those who will still, in the vein of Mephistopheles-Akinetos, urge

ner Matteucci's absurd description of Oxford and Cambridge as hauts lyceés Now, in the first place, there is not one single word in this sentence, or in the context, or, so far as I remember, in the whole book, about the Honours system, which for very many years before 1868 had exalted the standard infinitely higher in the case of a very large proportion of men. And in the second place, there is not a word about the Scholarship system, which in the same way had for very many years provided an entrance standard actually higher-far higher in some ways-than the concluding examinations of the French baccalauréat. My own days at Oxford were from 1863 to 1868, the year of Mr Arnold's book. During that time there were always in the university some 400 men who had actually obtained sc

ly appreciated. He had, partly in obeying, and partly in working against his official superiors, acquired a distinct position as an educational reformer. He had become something of a figure in society. But, above all, he had proclaimed with undoubting authority, and had exemplified with remarkable and varied skill, a new or at least a very greatly altered kind of literary criticism. And this had already threatened incursions into domains from which men of letters as such had generally kept aloof, or which, if they had touched, they had touched not as men of letters. Something of Socra

ent of Mr Arnold's own ideas as to the respective greatness of foreign nations. And finally the walls of another stronghold of British Philistia, its intense and apparently impregnable self-satisfaction with Free-trade and cheap money and so forth, were tottering and crumbling. A blast against them-indeed a series of blasts from Chartism to the Latter-day Pamphlets-had been blown long before by Carlyle, in very different tones from Mr Arnold's. They had lost their stoutest champion and their most eloquent panegyrist in Macaulay. But Sadowa and household suffrage gave the