Arnold’s accomplishment and position as a critic.
Nevertheless, as has been said so often, the side which a man may have taken in the everlasting and irreconcilable critical battle of judges by the arrangement, and judges by the result, hardly affects his place in Criticism as it should be allotted by a final Court of Appeal. How does he express for himself, and how does he promote in others, the intelligent appreciation, the conscious enjoyment of literature? That is the question: and few critics can meet this question more triumphantly than Mr Arnold. Like others, he can but give what he has. If you ask him for a clear, complete, resumed, and reasoned grasp of a man’s accomplishment—for a definite placing of him in the literary atlas—he will not have much answer to give you. He does not pretend, and has never pretended, to give any. A certain want of logical and methodical aptitude, which may be suspected, a dislike of reading matter that did not interest him, which is pretty clear, and that dread and distrust of the “historic estimate,” which he openly proclaimed, would have made this impossible. But we were warned at the very outset not to go to him for it. And for acute, sensitive, inspired, and inspiring remarks on the man, or the work, or this and that part of work and man—attractively expressed, ingeniously co-ordinated, and redeemed from mere desultoriness by the constant presence of the general critical creed—no critic is his superior.
Nor are these his only “proofs”—his only “pieces in hand.” He may be said—imperfectly Romantic, or even anti-Romantic, as he was—to have been the very first critic to urge the importance, the necessity, of that comparative criticism of different literatures, the half-blind working of which had helped to create, if it had not actually created, the Romantic movement. In England he was absolutely the first to do this systematically, and with something like—though not with complete—impartiality. The knowledge of Spanish and Italian poetry and romance, long very common with us, had died down in the first half of the nineteenth century, and had not been much used for critical purposes while it lasted. The engouement for French, of the late seventeenth and eighteenth, had reacted itself—in men as different as Coleridge, Landor, and De Quincey—into a depreciation which, if not “violently absurd,” as Mr Arnold translates Rémusat’s term of saugrenu applied to it, was certainly either crassly ignorant or violently unjust. German had, it is true, been exalted on the ruins of the popularity of the three Romance literatures; but it had been worshipped scarcely according to knowledge: and of the whole mediæval literature of Europe there was hardly any general critical appreciation. Mr Arnold himself, in fact, was still too much in the gall of bitterness here. It was imperative, if the Romantic and “result-judging” criticism was not to become a mere wilderness of ill-founded and partial individualisms, that this comparison should be established. It was equally imperative that it should be established, if Mr Arnold’s own “neotato-classicism,” as we have called it, was not to wizen and ossify like Neo-classicism itself. He was its first preacher with us: and there had not, to my knowledge, been any such definite preacher of it abroad, though the practice of Germany had implied and justified it from the first. And he was one of its most accomplished practitioners,—Lessing not being equal to him in charm, and Sainte-Beuve a little his inferior in passion for the best things.
Yet another watch-word of his, sovereign for the time and new in most countries, which he constantly repeated (if, being human, he did not always fully observe it himself), was the caution against confounding literary and non-literary judgment. No one rejected the exaggeration of “Art for Art’s sake only” more unhesitatingly; but no one oftener repeated the caution against letting the idols of the nation, the sect, the party interfere with the free play of Art herself, and of critical judgment on Art.
His services, therefore, to English Criticism, whether as a “preceptist” or as an actual craftsman, cannot possibly be overestimated. In the first respect he was, if not the absolute reformer,—these things, and all things, reform themselves under the guidance of the Gods and the Destinies, not of men,—the leader in reform, of the slovenly and disorganised condition into which Romantic criticism had fallen. In the second, the things which he had not, as well as those which he had, combined to give him a place among the very first. He had not the sublime and ever new-inspired inconsistency of Dryden. Dryden, in Mr Arnold’s place, might have begun by cursing Shelley a little, but would have ended by blessing him all but wholly. He had not the robustness of Johnson; the supreme critical “reason” (as against understanding) of Coleridge; scarcely the exquisite, if fitful, appreciation of Lamb, or the full-blooded and passionate appreciation of Hazlitt. But he had an exacter knowledge than Dryden’s; the fineness of his judgment shows finer beside Johnson’s bluntness; he could not wool-gather like Coleridge; his range was far wider than Lamb’s; his scholarship and his delicacy alike give him an advantage over Hazlitt. Systematic without being hidebound; well-read (if not exactly learned) without pedantry; delicate and subtle, without weakness or dilettanteism; catholic without eclecticism; enthusiastic without indiscriminateness,—Mr Arnold is one of the best and most precious of teachers on his own side. And when, at those moments which are, but should not be, rare, the Goddess of Criticism descends, like Cambina and her lion-team, into the lists, and with her Nepenthe makes men forget sides and sects in a common love of literature, then he is one of the best and most precious of critics.
Mr Arnold’s criticism continued to be fresh and lively, without a touch of senility, or of failure to adapt itself to new conditions, till the day of his death: and when that evil day came, the nineteenth century had little more than a decade to run. On the other hand, though almost all his juniors were more or less affected by him, it cannot be exactly said that he founded any definite school, or started any by reaction from himself. The most remarkable approach to such a school that has been made since was made by Mr Pater, quite fifteen years before Mr Arnold died. No very special necessities of method, therefore, impose themselves upon us in regard to the classification of our remaining subjects in the English division: and we shall be safe in adopting a rough chronological order, taking first three very remarkable persons who—though contemporaries of Arnold—show in criticism as in other literature the influence of Carlyle.
The Carlylians.
The increasing disinclination to take the standpoint of pure literary criticism which we noticed in the master, and which characterised the second quarter of the century, naturally and inevitably reproduced itself in the three most brilliant of his disciples—Ruskin, Froude, and Kingsley—with interesting variants and developments according to the idiosyncrasy of the individual. There was, indeed, in them something which can hardly be said to have been in Carlyle at all—a weakness which his internal fire burnt out of him. This weakness, formulated most happily by an erratic person of genius whom I have alternately resolved to admit and decided to exclude here—Thomas Love Peacock,—is the principle that you “must take pleasure in the thing represented, before you can derive any from the representation.”[[970]] Incidentally and indirectly, no doubt, omnes eodem cogimur; or at least there are very few who escape the suck of the whirlpool. But the declaration and formal acceptance of the principle is comparatively modern: and it is one of the worst inheritances of that Patristic attitude which we dwelt upon long ago.[[971]] It is indeed closely connected with the doctrine that “all depends upon the subject”: but the Greeks were too deeply penetrated with æsthetic feeling to admit it openly, and, from the earliest times, philosophised on the attraction of repulsive subjects. It is indirectly excluded, likewise, by the stricter kinds of Neo-classic rule-criticism, which saw nothing to disapprove in such poems as the Syphilis. But it has, like other dubious spirits, been let loose by “the Anarchy.” That you may and should “like what you like” is open to the twist of its correlative—that you may dislike what you choose to dislike.