However, it came right in the end, only there were some years of patient struggle to be gone through first; and who is not grateful in the end for such years passed on Pisgah, if only Jordan is crossed at last?
Another poet whom I knew at Oxford as an undergraduate, and whom I watched and admired to the end of his life, was Matthew Arnold. He was beautiful as a young man, strong and manly, yet full of dreams and schemes. His Olympian manners began even at Oxford; there was no harm in them, they were natural, not put on. The very sound of his voice and the wave of his arm were Jovelike. He grappled with the same problems as Clough, but they never got the better of him, or rather he never got the worse of them. Goethe helped him to soar where others toiled and sighed and were sinking under their self-imposed burdens. Even though his later life was enough to dishearten a poet, he laughed at his being Pegasus im Joche. Sometimes at public dinners, when he saw himself surrounded by his contemporaries, most of them judges, bishops, and ministers, he would groan over the drudgery he had to go through every day of his life in examining dirty schoolboys and schoolgirls. But he saw the fun of it, and laughed. What a pity it was that his friends, and he had many, could find no better place for him. Most of his contemporaries, many of them far inferior to him, rose to high positions in Church and State, he remained to the end an examiner of elementary schools. Of course it may be said that, like so many of his literary friends, he might have written novels and thus eked out a living by pot-boilers, as they are called, of various kinds. But there was something noble and refined in him which restrained his pen from such work. Whatever he gave to the world was to be perfect, as perfect as he could make it, and he did not think that he possessed a talent for novels. His saying “No Arnold can ever write a novel” is well known, but it has been splendidly falsified of late by his own niece. He had to go to America on a lecturing tour to earn some money he stood in need of, though he felt it as a dira necessitas, nay, as a dire indignity. It is true he had good precedents, but evidently his showman was not the best he could have chosen, nor was Arnold himself very strong as a lecturer. England has not got from him all that she had a right to expect, but whatever he has left has a finish that will long keep it safe from the corrosive wear and tear of time.
When later in life Arnold took to theological studies, he showed, no doubt, a very clear insight and a perfect independence of judgment, but he had only a few spare hours for work which in order to be properly done would have required a lifetime. Yet what he wrote produced an effect, in England at least, more lasting than many a learned volume, and he was allowed to say things that would have given deep offence if coming from other lips. His famous saying about the three Lord Shaftesburys has been judged very differently by different writers. As a mere matter of taste it may seem that Arnold’s illustration of what he took to be the common conception of the Trinity among his Philistine friends was objectionable. Let us hope that it was not even true.
But Arnold’s intention was clear enough. He argued chiefly against those who had called the Roman Catholic doctrine of the Mass “a degrading superstition.” He tells them they ought to discover in it what the historian alone, or what Arnold means by a man of culture, can discover; namely, the original intention of the faithful in thus interpreting the words of Christ (St. John, vii., 53): “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink His blood, ye have no life in you.” It was in protesting against this narrowness that he reminded his Protestant friends of the weak joints in their own armour, particularly their too literal acceptation of the doctrine of the Trinity.[[8]] And I doubt whether he was altogether wrong when he charged them with speaking of the Father as a mere individual, or, as he expressed it, a sort of infinitely magnified and improved Lord Shaftesbury with a race of vile offenders to deal with, whom his natural goodness would incline him to let off, only his sense of justice would not allow it. And is it not true that many who speak of Christ as the Son of God take “son” in its common literal sense, or, as Arnold expressed it, imagine “a younger Lord Shaftesbury, on the scale of his father and very dear to him, who might live in grandeur and splendour if he liked, but who preferred to leave his home to go and live among the race of offenders, and to be put to an ignominious death, on the condition that his merits should be counted against their demerits, and that his father’s goodness should be restrained no longer from taking effect, but any offender should be admitted to the benefit of it, simply on pleading the satisfaction made by the son”? Finally, when he points out the extremely vague conception of the Holy Ghost as a person and as an individual, does he really exaggerate so very much when he says that He is with many no more than “a third Lord Shaftesbury, still on the same high scale, who keeps very much in the background and works in a very occult manner, but very efficaciously nevertheless, and who is busy in applying everywhere the benefits of the son’s satisfaction and the father’s goodness?” Nay, even when he goes on to say that this is precisely the Protestant story of justification, what he wants to impress on his Protestant readers is surely no more than this, that from his point of view there is nothing actually degrading in their very narrow view, as little as in the common Roman Catholic view of the Mass. What he means is no more than that both views as held by the many are grotesquely literal and unintelligent.
People who hold such views would be ready to tell you, he says, “the exact hangings in the Trinity’s council chamber.” But, with all that he is anxious to show that not only was the original intention both of Roman and English Catholics good, but that even in its mistaken application it may help towards righteousness. In trying to impress this view both on Protestants and Roman Catholics, Arnold certainly used language which must have pained particularly those who felt that the picture was not altogether untrue. However, his friends, and among them many high ecclesiastics, forgave him. Stanley, I know, admired his theological writings very much. Many of his critics fully agreed with what Arnold said, only they would have said it in a different way. There is a kind of cocaine style which is used by many able critics and reformers. It cuts deep into the flesh, and yet the patient remains insensible to pain. “You can say anything in English,” Arthur Helps once said to me, “only you must know how to say it.” Arnold, like Carlyle and others, preferred the old style of surgery. They thought that pain was good in certain operations, and helped to accelerate a healthy reaction.
The only fault that one may find with Arnold, is that he did not himself try to restore the original and true conception of the Trinity to that clear and intelligible form which he as an historian and a man of culture could have brought out better than any one else. The original intention of the Lord’s Supper, or the Mass, can easily be learnt, as Arnold has shown, from the very words of the Bible (St. Luke, xxii., 20): “The cup is the new testament in my blood.” But the doctrine of the Trinity requires a far more searching historical study. As the very name of Trinity is a later invention, and absent from the New Testament, it requires a thorough study of Greek, more particularly of Alexandrian philosophy, to understand its origin, for it is from Greek philosophy that the idea of the Word, the Logos, was taken by some of the early Fathers of the Church.
As the Messiah was a Semitic thought which the Jewish disciples of Christ saw realised in the Son of Man, the Word was an Aryan thought which the Greek disciples saw fulfilled in the Son of God. The history of the divine Dyas which preceded the Trias is clear enough, if only we are acquainted with the antecedents of Greek philosophy. Without that background it is a mere phantasm, and no wonder that in the minds of uneducated people it should have become what Arnold describes it,[[9]] father, son, and grandson, living together in the same house, or possibly in the clouds. To make people shrink back from such a conception is worth something, and Arnold has certainly achieved this, if only he has caused hundreds and thousands to say to themselves: “We never were so foolish or so narrow-minded as to believe in three Lord Shaftesburys.”
For some reason or other, however, the “three Lord Shaftesburys” have disappeared in the last edition of “Literature and Dogma” and have been replaced by “a Supernatural Man.” Froude, who was an intimate friend both of Arnold and of Sir James Stephen, told me that the latter had warned Arnold that the three Lord Shaftesburys were really actionable, and if Arnold hated anything it was a fracas. In the fifth edition they still remain, so that the change must have been made later on, when he prepared the cheap edition of his book. Anyhow, they are gone!
Arnold was a delightful man to argue with, not that he could easily be convinced that he was wrong, but he never lost his temper, and in the most patronising way he would generally end by: “Yes, yes! my good fellow, you are quite right, but, you see, my view of the matter is different, and I have little doubt it is the true one!” This went so far that even the simplest facts failed to produce any impression on him. He had fallen in love with Émile Burnouf’s attractive but not very scholar-like and trustworthy “Science de la Religion.” I believe that at first he had mistaken Émile for Eugène Burnouf, a mistake which has been committed by other people besides him. But, afterwards, when he had perceived the difference between the two, he was not at all abashed. Nay, he was betrayed into a new mistake, and spoke of Émile as the son of Eugène. I told him that Eugène, the great Oriental scholar—one of the greatest that France has ever produced, and that is saying a great deal—had no son at all, and that he ought to correct his misstatement. “Yes, yes,” he said, in his most good-humoured way, “but you know how they manage these things in France. Émile was really a natural son of the great scholar, and they call that a nephew.” This I stoutly denied, for never was a more irreproachable père de famille than my friend and master Eugène Burnouf. But in spite of all remonstrances, Émile remained with Arnold the son of Eugène; “For, you see, my good fellow, I know the French, and that is my view of the matter!” If that happened in the green wood, what would happen in the dry!
We had a long-standing feud about poetry. To me the difference between poetry and prose was one of form only. I always held that the same things that are said in prose could be said in poetry, and vice versâ, and I often quoted Goethe’s saying that the best test of poetry was whether it would bear translation into prose or into a foreign language. To all that, even to Goethe’s words, Arnold demurred. Poetry to him was a thing by itself, “not an art like other arts,” but, as he grandly called it, “genius.”