The faults, we said, both critical and non-critical, are certainly not lacking; and if they were not partly excused by the author’s avowedly militant position, might seem sometimes rather grave. Whatever may have been the want of taste, and even the want of sense, in the translation of F.W. Newman, it is almost sufficient to say that they were neither greater nor less than might have been expected from a person who, if the most scholarly of eccentrics, was also the most eccentric even of English scholars. It is difficult not to think that Mr Arnold makes too much of them and refers too frequently to them. Such “iteration” is literally “damnable”: it must be condemned as unfair, out of place, out of taste, and even not distantly approaching that lack of urbanity with which Mr Arnold was never tired of reproaching his countrymen. Another translator, Mr Wright, was indeed needlessly sensitive to Mr Arnold’s strictures; but these strictures themselves were needlessly severe. It is all very well for a reviewer, especially if he be young and anonymous, to tell a living writer that his book has “no reason for existing”; but chairs of literature are not maintained by universities that their occupants may, in relation to living persons, exercise the functions of young anonymous reviewers. It may indeed be doubted whether these occupants should, except in the most guarded way, touch living persons at all.
Critically too, as well as from the point of view of manners, the Lectures on Translating Homer are open to not a few criticisms. In the first place, the assumptions are enormous, and, in some cases at least, demonstrably baseless. One of Mr Arnold’s strongest points, for instance, not merely against Mr Newman but against Homeric translators generally, is concerned with the renderings of the Homeric compound adjectives, especially the stock ones—koruthaiolos, merops, and the rest. The originals, he is never weary of repeating, did not strike a Greek and do not strike a Greek scholar as out of the way; the English equivalents do so strike an English reader. Now as to the Greeks themselves, we know nothing: they have left us no positive information on the subject. But if (which is no doubt at least partly true) koruthaiolos and dolichoskion do not strike us, who have been familiar with Greek almost as long as we can remember, as out of the way, is that an argument? Most of us, I suppose, at about nine or ten years old, some no doubt a little or a good deal earlier, learnt these words as part of the ordinary Greek that was presented to us, just as much as kai and ara; but if we had learnt Greek as we learn English, beginning with quite ordinary words, would it be so? I think not; nor would it be so if people began Greek at a later and more critical stage of their education.
It is also true that the book is full of that exceedingly arbitrary and unproved assertion, of that rather fanciful terminology, of those sometimes questionable æsthetic obiter dicta, of which, from first to last, Mr Arnold was so prolific. When he talks about the mysterious “grand style,” and tells us that Milton can never be affected, we murmur, “De gustibus!” and add mentally, “Though Milton is the greatest of affected writers, Milton is, after Comus at least, never anything else!” When he tells us again that at that moment (1861) “English literature as a living intellectual instrument ranks after the literatures of France and Germany,” we remember that at the time France possessed perhaps only one writer, Victor Hugo, and Germany absolutely none, of the calibre of a dozen Englishmen—Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle, Thackeray, Dickens, and not a few others, from Landor to Mr Ruskin; that Germany, further, had scarcely one, though France had more than one or two, great writers of the second class: and we say, “Either your ‘living intellectual instrument’ is a juggle of words, or you really are neglecting fact.” Many—very many—similar retorts are possible; and the most hopeless variance of all must come when we arrive at Mr Arnold’s championship of that ungainly and sterile mule the English hexameter, and when we review the specimens of the animal that he turns out from his own stables for our inspection.
But it matters not. For all this, and very much more than all this, which may be passed over as unnecessary or improper, nothing like the book had, for positive critical quality, and still more for germinal influence, been seen by its generation, and nothing of the same quality and influence has been seen for more than a technical generation since. It would of course be uncritical in the last degree to take the change in English criticism which followed as wholly and directly Mr Arnold’s work. He was not even the voice crying in the wilderness: only one of many voices in a land ready at least to be eared and pathed. But he was the earliest of such voices, the clearest, most original, most potent; and a great deal of what followed was directly due to him.
The non-literary events of his life during this period were sufficiently varied if not very momentous. We have mentioned the domiciling in Chester Square, which took place in February 1858, perhaps on the strength of the additional income from Oxford. In the late summer of that year he went alone to Switzerland, and next spring, shortly after the New Year, received, to his very great joy, a roving commission to France, Belgium, Switzerland, and Piedmont, to report on elementary education. “Foreign life,” he says, with that perfect naturalness which makes the charm of his letters, “is still to me perfectly delightful and liberating in the last degree.” And he was duly “presented” at home, in order that he might be presentable abroad. But the first days of the actual sojourn (as we have them recorded in a letter to his mother of April 14) were saddened by that death of his brother William, which he has enshrined in verse.
He had, however, plenty to distract him. France was all astir with the Austrian war, and it is impossible to read his expressions of half-awed admiration of French military and other greatness without rather mischievous amusement. He visited the Morbihan, which struck him as it must strike every one. Here he is pathetic over a promising but not performing dinner at Auray—“soup, Carnac oysters, shrimps, fricandeau of veal, breast of veal, and asparagus;” but “everything so detestable” that his dinner was bread and cheese. He must have been unlucky: the little Breton inns, at any rate a few years later than this, used, it is true, to be dirty to an extent appalling to an Englishman; but their provender was usually far from contemptible. There is more sense of Breton scenery in another letter a little later. Both here and, presently, in Gascony he notes truly enough “the incredible degree to which the Revolution has cleared the feudal ages out of the minds of the country people”; but if he reflected on the bad national effect of this breach with the past, he does not say so. By June 12 he is in Holland, and does not like it—weather, language, &c., all English in the worst sense, apparently without the Norman and Latin element which just saves us. And though he was a very short time in the Netherlands, he has to relieve his feelings by more abuse of them when he gets back to Paris—in fact, he speaks of Holland exactly as the typical Frenchman speaks of England, and is accordingly very funny to read. The two things that make Holland most interesting, history and art, were exactly those that appealed to Mr Arnold least. Then after a refreshing bath of Paris, he goes to Strasbourg, and Time—Time the Humourist as well as the Avenger and Consoler—makes him commit himself dreadfully. He “thinks there cannot be a moment’s doubt” that the French will beat the Prussians even far more completely and rapidly than they are beating the Austrians. Lord Cowley, it seems, “entirely shared” his conviction that “the French will always beat any number of Germans who come into the field against them, and never be beaten by any one but the English.” Let us hope that Jove, when he whistled half this prophecy down the wind, affirmed the rest of it! Switzerland comes next; and he is beginning to want very much to be back in England, partly “for the children, but partly also from affection for that foolish old country”—which paternal and patriotic desire was granted about the end of the month, though only for a short time, during which he wrote a pamphlet on the Italian question. Then “M. le Professeur Docteur Arnold, Directeur Général de toutes les Écoles de la Grande Bretagne,” returned to France for a time, saw Mérimée and George Sand and Renan, as well as a good deal of Sainte-Beuve, and was back again for good in the foolish old country at the end of the month.
In the early winter of 1859-60 we find him a volunteer, commenting not too happily on “the hideous English toadyism which invests lords and great people with commands,” a remark which seems to clench the inference that he had not appreciated the effect of the Revolution upon France. For nearly three parts of 1860 we have not a single letter, except one in January pleasantly referring to his youngest child “in black velvet and red-and-white tartan, looking such a duck that it was hard to take one’s eyes off him.”[12] This letter, by the way, ends with an odd admission from the author of the remark quoted just now. He says of the Americans, “It seems as if few stocks could be trusted to grow up properly without having a priesthood and an aristocracy to act as their schoolmasters at some time or other of their national existence.” This is a confession. The gap, however, is partly atoned for by a very pleasant batch in September from Viel Salm in the Ardennes, where the whole family spent a short time, and where the Director-General of all the schools in Great Britain had splendid fishing, the hapless Ardennes trout being only accustomed to nets.
Then the interest returns to literature, and the lectures on translating Homer, and Tennyson’s “deficiency in intellectual power,” and Mr Arnold’s own interest in the Middle Ages, which may surprise some folk. It seems that he has “a strong sense of the irrationality of that period” and of “the utter folly of those who take it seriously and play at restoring it.” Still it has “poetically the greatest charm and refreshment for me.” One may perhaps be permitted to doubt whether you can get much real poetical refreshment out of a thing which is irrational and which you don’t take seriously: the practice seems to be not unlike that mediæval one of keeping fools for your delectation. Nor can the observations on Tennyson be said to be quite just or quite pleasant. But every age and every individual is unjust to his or its immediate predecessor—a saying dangerous and double-edged, but true for all that. Then he “entangles himself in the study of accents”—it would be difficult to find any adventurer who has not entangled himself in that study—and groans over “a frightful parcel of grammar papers,” which he only just “manages in time,” apparently on the very unwholesome principle (though this was not the same batch) of doing twenty before going to bed when he comes in from a dinner-party at eleven o’clock. Colds, Brighton, praise from Sainte-Beuve, critical attacks in the English papers, and (not quite unprovoked) from F.W. Newman, reflections on the Age of Wisdom (forty), and a meeting with Thackeray, the Laureate of that age, diversify the history agreeably. Then we come to a dead, and now rather more than dull, controversy over the Revised Code, of which we need not say much. Official etiquette on such matters, especially in England, is very loose, though he himself seems to have at one time thought it distantly possible, though not likely, that he would be ejected for the part he took. And his first five years’ tenure of the Oxford Chair ends with the delivery of the Creweian oration, as to the composition of which he consoles himself (having heard both from the Vice-Chancellor and others that there was to be “a great row”) by reflecting that “it doesn’t much matter what he writes, as he shall not be heard.” I do not know whether the prediction was justified; but if so, the same fate had, according to tradition, befallen his Newdigate some twenty years earlier. In neither case can the “row” have had any personal reference. Though his lectures were never largely attended by undergraduates, he was always popular in Oxford.