But when we look back to Longinus we shall find at least a hint of a much more serious defect than this. Why this unnecessary asceticism and grudging in the connotation of grandeur? why this tell-tale and self-accusing limitation further to a bare three poets, two of them, indeed, of the very greatest? Mr Arnold himself feels the difficulty presented by Shakespeare so strongly that he has to make, as it were, uncovenanted grand-style mercies for him. But that is only because you have simply to open almost any two pages out of three in Shakespeare, and the grand style smites you in the face, as God’s glory smote St Stephen. We can afford, which shows our strength, to leave Shakespeare alone. Longinus of old has no such damaging fencing of the table of his Grand Style. The Greeks, it is known, thought little of Love as a subject: yet he admitted the sublimity of Sappho. And if he objected to the πλεκτάνην χειμάρροον of Æschylus, it was only because he thought it went too far. How much wiser is it, instead of fixing such arbitrary limits, to recognise that the Grand Style has infinite manifestations; that it may be found in poets who have it seldom as well as in those who have it often; that Herrick has it with
“In this world—the Isle of Dreams”;
that Tennyson has it again and again; that Goethe has it in the final octet of Faust; that Heine and Hugo, and hundreds of others, down to quite minor poets in their one moment of rapturous union with the Muse, have it. How much wiser to recognise further that it is not limited to the simple or severe: whether it is to the serious is another question. For my part, I will not loose the fragile boat or incur the danger of the roof,—speaking in a Pickwickian-Horatian manner,—with any one who denies the grand style to Donne or to Dryden, to Spenser or to Shelley. The grand is the transcendent: and it is blasphemy against the Spirit of Poetry to limit the fashions and the conditions of transcendence.
The Study of Celtic Literature.
The other “chair”-book, The Study of Celtic Literature, is tempting in promise, but disappointing in performance. This is due partly to the fact that great—perhaps the greater—part of it is not occupied with literary criticism at all, but with that curious blend of matter—literary, political, theological, ethical, and social—to the manufacture of which Mr Arnold was more and more turning his attention. And when it becomes literary, we find other difficulties. In the Preface itself, and in the Homer, Mr Arnold had sometimes been unjust or unsatisfactory on what he did not know or did not like—Mediæval literature, the Ballad, &c.,—but his remarks and his theories had been, in the main, solidly based upon what he did know thoroughly and did appreciate—the Classics, Dante, Milton, Wordsworth. Here not Pallas, I think, but some anti-Pallas, has “invented a new thing.” Whether Mr Arnold knew directly, and at first-hand, any Welsh, Breton, Cornish, Irish, or Scotch Gaelic, I do not know.[[967]] He certainly disclaims anything like extensive or accurate knowledge, and it is noticeable that (I think invariably) he quotes from translations, and only a few well-known translations. Moreover he, with his usual dislike and distrust of the historic method, fences with, or puts off, the inquiry what the dates of the actual specimens which we possess of this literature may be. Yet he proceeds to pick out (as if directly acquainted with the literatures themselves, at dates which make the matter certain) divers characteristics of “melancholy,” “natural magic,” &c., in Celtic literature, and then, unhesitatingly and without proof of any kind, to assign the presence of these qualities, in writers like Shakespeare and Keats, where we have not the faintest evidence of Celtic blood, to “Celtic” influence.
Its assumptions.
Now, we may or may not deplore this proceeding; but we must disallow it. It is both curious and instructive that the neglect of history which accompanied the prevalence of Neo-classicism, and with which, when it was dispelled, Neo-classicism itself faded, should reappear in company with this neotato-classicism, this attempt to reconstruct the classic faith, taking in something, but a carefully limited something, of Romanticism. But the fact is certain: and, as has been said, we must disallow the proceeding. Whether melancholy, and natural magic, and the vague do strongly and especially, if not exclusively, appear in Celtic poetry, I do not deny, because I do not know; that Mr Arnold’s evidence is not sufficient to establish their special if not exclusive prevalence, I deny, because I do know. That there is melancholy, natural magic, the vague in Shakespeare and in Keats, I admit, because I know; that Mr Arnold has any valid argument showing that their presence is due to Celtic influence, I do not admit, because I know that he has produced none. With bricks of ignorance and mortar of assumption you can build no critical house.