In coming to Mr Matthew Arnold we come again, but for the last time, to one of our chiefs of the greater clans of criticism. Vixere fortes post Mr Arnold; let us hope that vivunt. We have heard, more or less vaguely, of new schools of criticism since, in more countries than one or two, and an amiable enthusiasm has declared that the new gospels are real gospels, far truer and better than any previously known. I am not myself, by any means, in general agreement—I am often in very particular disagreement—with Mr Arnold’s critical canons, and (less often) with his individual judgments. But as I rest on my oars, and look back over European criticism for the eighty years which have passed since his birth, I cannot find one critic, born since that time, who can be ranked above or even with him in general critical quality and accomplishment. And, extending the view further over the vast expanse down which we have already travelled, though I certainly find greater critics—critics very much greater in originality, greater in catholicity, perhaps greater in felicity of individual utterance—I yet find that he is of their race and lineage, free of their company, one of them, not to be scanted of any sizings that have been, by however unworthy a manciple, allotted to them here.
His position defined early.
We have seen that of these greater critics some have, at this or that period of their career, launched a kind of manifesto or confession, of which their other critical work is but, as it were, the application and amplification: while others have never done this, but have built up their critical temple, adding wing to wing and storey to storey, not seldom even deserting or ruining the earlier constructions. Mr Arnold, in practice as in principle, belonged to the first class, and he launched his own manifesto about as early as any man can be capable of forming a critical judgment which is not a mere adaptation of some one else’s, or (a thing really quite as unoriginal) a flying-in-the-face of some one else’s, or a mere spurt and splash of youthful self-sufficiency. You can be a bishop and a critic at thirty—not before (by wise external rule) in the former case; hardly before, according to laws of nature which man has unwisely omitted to codify for himself, in the latter. Mr Arnold was a little over thirty when, collecting such things as he chose to collect out of his earlier volumes of Poetry, and adding much to them, he published the collection with a Preface in October 1853. I doubt whether he ever wrote better, either in sense or in style; and I am quite sure that, while some of the defects of his criticism, as it was to be, appear quite clearly in the paper, all the pith and moment of that criticism appear in germ and principle likewise.
The Preface of 1853.
In the interesting and important “Advertisement” which, eight months later, he prefixed to the second edition of this book, Mr Arnold himself summed up the lessons of the Preface, which followed it, under two main heads,—the insistence on the importance of the subject—the “great action”; and the further insistence on study of the ancients, with the specified object of correcting the great vice of our modern, and especially English, intellect—that it “is fantastic, and wants sanity.” He thus, to some extent, justified the erection of these into his two first and great commandments—the table-headings, if not the full contents, of his creed and law. But, for our purpose, we must analyse the Preface itself rather more closely.
It opens with an account of the reasons which led the author to exclude Empedocles, not because the subject was “a Sicilian Greek,” but from a consideration of the situation itself. This he condemns in a passage which contains a very great amount of critical truth, which is quite admirably expressed, and which really adds one to the not extensive list of critical axioms of the first class. Even here one may venture to doubt whether the supreme poet will not vindicate his omnipotence in treating poeticamente. But if the sentence were so qualified as to warn the poet that he will hardly succeed, it would be absolutely invulnerable or impregnable.
Analysis of it,