The Essays: their case for Criticism.
In that central citadel or canon of the subject, Essays in Criticism, this contraband element, this theory divorced from history, makes its appearance but too often: it can and need only be said, for instance, that Mr Arnold’s estimate of the condition of French, and still more of German, literature in his own day, as compared with English, will not stand for five minutes the examination of any impartial judge, dates and books in hand. But the divorce is by no means so prominent—indeed most of the constituent essays were, if I mistake not, written before the Celtic Lectures were delivered. The book is so much the best known of Mr Arnold’s critical works—except perhaps the Preface to Mr Ward’s Poets—that no elaborate analysis of it here can be necessary. Its own Preface is defiantly vivacious—and Vivacity, as we are often reminded, is apt to play her sober friend Criticism something like the tricks that Madge Wildfire played to Jeanie Deans. But it contains, in the very last words of its famous epiphonema to Oxford, an admission (in the phrase “this Queen of Romance”) that Mr Arnold was anything but a classic pur sang. The two first Essays, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” and the “Influence of Academies,” take up, both in the vivacious and in the sober manner, the main line and strategy of the old Preface itself. We may, not merely with generosity but with justice, “write off” the, as has been said, historically false parallels with France and Germany which the writer brings in to support his case. That case itself is perfectly solid and admissible. Those who are qualified to judge—not perhaps a large number—will admit, whether they are for it or against it, that no nonsuit is possible, and perhaps that no final decision for it or against is possible either, except to the satisfaction of mere individual taste and opinion.
The case is, that the remedy for the supposed or supposable deficiencies of English literature is Criticism—that the business of Criticism is to discover the ideas upon which creative literature must rest—that there is not enough “play of mind” in England—that Criticism again is the attempt “to know the best that is known and thought in the world”—that foreign literature is specially valuable, simply because it is likely to give that in which native literature is lacking. These are the doctrines of the First Essay, mingled with much political-social application and not a little banter. The second takes them up and applies them afresh in the direction of extolling the institution of Academies, and contrasting the effects of that influence on French critics and the absence of it in English, very much to the disadvantage of the latter, especially Mr Palgrave. For Mr Arnold had adopted early in his professorial career, and never gave up, the very dubious habit of enforcing his doctrine with “uses” of formally polite but extremely personal application.[[968]]
Now, this case or bundle of cases is, I have said, quite fairly and justly arguable. Even though I hope that great part of this volume and of the last will have shown that Mr Arnold was quite wrong as to the general inferiority of English criticism, he was (as I have, not far back, taken the pains to show also) not quite wrong about the general criticism of his own youth and early manhood—of the criticism which he himself came to reform. Nor was he wrong in thinking that there is in the uncultivated and unregenerate English mind a sort of rebelliousness to sound critical principles. Very much of his main contention is perfectly good and sound: nor could he have urged any two things more universally and everlastingly profitable than the charge never to neglect criticism, and the charge always to compare literatures of other countries, literatures of other times, literatures free from the political-religious-social diathesis of the actual patient.
Their examples thereof.
It is generally acknowledged that the influence of Sainte-Beuve was an “infortune of Mart” or of Saturn, when it induced Mr Arnold to take his two first examples of this comparative study from interesting but unimportant people like the Guérins. But except persons determined to cavil, and those of whom the Judicious Poet remarks—
“For what was there each cared no jot,
But all were wroth with what was not”—
every one will admit that the rest of the seven—the “Heine,” the “Pagan and Mediæval Religious Sentiment,” the “Joubert,” the “Spinoza,” and the “M. Aurelius”—form a pentad of critical excellence, and brilliancy, and instruction, which can nowhere be exceeded. I, at least, should find it hard to match the group in any other single volume of criticism. Idle that we may frequently smile or shake the head—that we must in some cases politely but peremptorily deny individual propositions! Unimportant that, perhaps even more by a certain natural perversity than by the usual and most uncritical tendency to depress something in order to exalt something else, English literature is, with special reference to the great generation of 1798-1834, unduly depreciated! These things every man can correct for himself. How many could make for themselves instances of comparative, appreciative, loosely but subtly judicial criticism as attractive, as stimulating, as graceful, as varied, and critically as excellent, being at the same time real examples of creative literature?