The latest work.
We are fortunately dispensed here from inquiring into the causes, or judging the results, of that avocation from literature, or at least literary criticism, which held Mr Arnold for exactly ten years, from 1867 to 1877. Nor will it be necessary (though it would be pleasant) to discuss in detail all the contributions of the slightly longer period which was left him, from his return to his proper task in the spring of 1877 with the article on M. Scherer’s “Milton,” to his sudden and lamented death in the spring of 1888. Just before that death he had published an article on Shelley, which (for all the heresy glanced at below) is one of the very best things he ever did; little less can be said of the Milton-Scherer paper eleven years earlier, and whenever he touched literature (which was fairly often) during the interval, he was almost always at a very high level. A good deal, though not quite all, of the ebullience of something not quite unlike flippancy, which had characterised his middle period, had frothed and bubbled itself away; his general critical views had matured without altering; and their application to fresh subjects, if it sometimes (as very notably in the case of Shelley) brought out their weakness, brought out much more fully their value and charm. The article on Mr Stopford Brooke’s Primer of English Literature, the prefaces to the selected Lives of Johnson, to Wordsworth, to Byron, the papers in Mr Ward’s Poets on Gray and Keats (postponing for a moment the more important Introduction to that work as a whole), the literary part of the Discourses in America, and (though I should put this last quartette on a somewhat lower level) those on Mr Scherer’s Goethe, George Sand, Tolstoi, and Amiel, form a critical baggage, adding no doubt nothing (except in one case) to the critic’s general Gospel or theory, but exemplifying with delightful variety and charm his critical practice.
The Introduction to Ward’s English Poets.
The possible or actual exception, however, and the piece which contains it, require more individual notice. In the Introduction to Mr Ward’s book, Mr Arnold devised no one really new thing, but he gathered up and focussed his lights afresh, and endeavoured to provide his disciples with an apparently new definition of poetry. He drove first at two wrong estimates thereof, his dislike of the second of which—the “personal” estimate—had been practically proclaimed from the very first, and may be allowed to be to a great extent justified, while his dislike of the first—the “historic” estimate—had always been clear to sharp-eyed students, though it lacked an equal justification. In fact, it is little more than a formulation of Mr Arnold’s own impatience with the task—laborious enough, no doubt, and in parts ungrateful—of really mastering poetic, that is to say literary, history. Of course, mere age, mere priority, confers no interest of itself on anything. But to say—if we may avail ourselves of Gascoigne’s instance—that the first discoverable person who compared a girl’s lip to a cherry does not acquire for that now unpermissible comparison merit and interest, is not wise. To assume, on the other hand, some abstract standard of “high” poetry, below which time and relation will not give or enhance value, is still less wise. Portia, in a context of which Mr Arnold was justly fond, might have taught him that “nothing is good without respect,” and that no “respect” is to be arbitrarily barred.
“Criticism of Life.”
But even from the sweetest and wisest of doctors he would not, I fear, have taken the lesson. He is set to prove that we must only pay attention to “the best and principal things” as of old,—to class and mark these jealously, and to endeavour to discover their qualification. You must not praise the Chanson de Roland or any early French poetry very highly, but you may praise (as before) Homer, Milton, and Dante as much as you like. Chaucer, like Burns, Dryden, and Pope, like Shelley, has not “high seriousness.” And poetry is expressly defined as “a criticism of life, under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.”
It is important (though very difficult) to keep undue repetition out of such a book as this, and we shall therefore, in regard to “high seriousness,” merely refer the reader to what has been said above on the “grand style.” And we shall cut down criticism of the definition as much as possible, to return to it presently. The defence of it once made, as “not a definition but an epigram,” certainly lacks seriousness, whether high or low. The severest strictures made on Mr Arnold’s levity would not have been misplaced had he offered an epigram here. Nor need we dwell on the perhaps inevitable, but certainly undeniable, “circularity” of the formula. The jugulum at which to aim is the use of the word “criticism” at all. Either the word is employed in some private jargon, or it has no business here. Mr Arnold’s own gloss of the “application of ideas to life,” gives it perhaps the doubtful benefit of the first supposition: but, either in this way or in others, does it very little good. All literature is the application of ideas to life: and to say that poetry is the application of ideas to life, under the conditions fixed for poetry, is simply a vain repetition.