Matthew Arnold

by George Saintsbury

“Such names coupled!”

and pass with averted face. Seventy-two mortal pages of Matthew Arnold’s, at his very best time, wasted on a brother and sister who happened to be taken up by Sainte-Beuve!

But the rest of the book is entirely free from liability to any such criticism as this. To some criticism—even to a good deal—it is beyond doubt exposed. The first and most famous paper—the general manifesto, as the earlier Preface to the Poems is the special one, of its author’s literary creed—on The Function of Criticism at the Present Time must indeed underlie much the same objections as those that have been made to the introduction. Here is the celebrated passage about “Wragg is in custody,” the text of which, though no doubt painful in subject and inurbane in phraseology, is really a rather slender basis on which to draw up an indictment against a nation. Here is the astounding—the, if serious, almost preternatural—statement that “not very much of current English literature comes into this best that is known and thought in the world. Not very much I fear: certainly less than of the current literature of France and Germany.” And this was 1865, when the Germans had had no great poet but Heine for a generation, nor any great poets but Goethe and Heine for some five hundred years, no great prose-writer but Heine (unless you call Goethe one), and were not going to have any! It was 1865, when all the great French writers, themselves of but some thirty years’ standing, were dying off, not to be succeeded! 1865, when for seventy years England had not lacked, and for nearly thirty more was not to lack, poets and prose-writers of the first order by the dozen and almost the score! Here, too, is the marvellous companion-statement that in the England of the first quarter of the century was “no national glow of life.” It was the chill of death, I suppose, which made the nation fasten on the throat of the world and choke it into submission during a twenty years’ struggle.

But these things are only Mr Arnold’s way. I have never been able to satisfy myself whether they were deliberate paradoxes, or sincere and rather pathetic paralogisms. For instance, did he really think that the Revue des Deux Mondes, an organ of “dukes, dunces, and dévotes,” as it used to be called even in those days by the wicked knowing ones, a nursing mother of Academies certainly, and a most respectable periodical in all ways—that this good Revue actually “had for its main function to understand and utter the best that is known and thought in the world,” absolutely existed as an organ for “the free play of mind”? I should be disposed to think that the truer explanation of such things is that they were neither quite paradoxes nor quite paralogisms; but the offspring of an innocent willingness to believe what he wished, and of an almost equally innocent desire to provoke the adversary. Unless (as unluckily they sometimes are) they be taken at the foot of the letter, they can do no harm, and their very piquancy helps the rest to do a great deal of good.

For there can be no doubt that in the main contention of his manifesto, as of his book, Mr Arnold was absolutely right. It was true that England, save for spasmodic and very partial appearances of it in a few of her great men of letters—Ben Jonson, Dryden, Addison, Johnson—had been wonderfully deficient in criticism up to the end of the eighteenth century; and that though in the early nineteenth she had produced one great philosophical critic, another even greater on the purely literary side, and a third of unique appreciative sympathy, in Coleridge, Hazlitt, and Lamb, she had not followed these up, and had, even in them, shown certain critical limitations. It was true that though the Germans had little and the French nothing to teach us in range, both had much to teach us in thoroughness, method, style of criticism. And it was truest of all (though Mr Arnold, who did not like the historic estimate, would have admitted this with a certain grudge) that the time imperatively demanded a thorough “stock-taking” of our own literature in the light and with the help of others.

Let palma—let the maxima palma—of criticism be given to him in that he first fought for the creed of this literary orthodoxy, and first exemplified (with whatever admixture of will-worship of his own, with whatever quaint rites and ceremonies) the carrying out of the cult. It is possible that his direct influence may have been exaggerated; one of the most necessary, though not of the most grateful, businesses of the literary historian is to point out that with rare exceptions, and those almost wholly on the poetic side, great men of letters rather show in a general, early, and original fashion a common tendency than definitely lead an otherwise sluggish multitude to the promised land. But no investigation has deprived, or is at all likely to deprive, the Essays in Criticism of their place as an epoch-making book, as the manual of a new and often independent, but, on the whole, like-minded, critical movement in England.

Nor can the blow of the first essay be said to be ill followed up in the second, the almost equally famous (perhaps the more famous) Influence of Academies. Of course here also, here as always, you may make reservations. It is a very strong argument, an argument stronger than any of Mr Arnold’s, that the institutions of a nation, if they are to last, if they are to do any good, must be in accordance with the spirit of the nation; that if the French Academy has been beneficial, it is because the French spirit is academic; and that if (as we may fear, or hope, or believe, according to our different principles) the English spirit is unacademic, an Academy would probably be impotent and perhaps ridiculous in England. But we can allow for this; and when we have allowed for it, once more Mr Arnold’s warnings are warnings on the right side, true, urgent, beneficial. There are still the minor difficulties. Even at the time, much less as was known of France in England then than now, there were those who opened their eyes first and then rubbed them at the assertion that “openness of mind and flexibility of intelligence” were the characteristics of the French people. But once more also, no matter! The central drift is right, and the central drift carries many excellent things with it, and may be allowed to wash away the less excellent. Mr Arnold is right on the average qualities of French prose; whether he is right about the “provinciality” of Jeremy Taylor as compared to Bossuet or not, he is right about “critical freaks,” though, by the way—but it is perhaps unnecessary to finish that sentence. He is right about the style of Mr Palgrave and right about the style of Mr Kinglake; and I do not know that I feel more especially bound to pronounce him wrong about the ideas of Lord Macaulay. But had he been as wrong in all these things as he was right, the central drift would still be inestimable—the drift of censure and contrast applied to English eccentricity, the argument that this eccentricity, if it is not very good, is but too likely to be very bad.

Yet it is perhaps in the illustrative essays that the author shows at his best. Even in the Guérin pieces, annoyance at the waste of first-rate power on tenth-rate people need not wholly blind us to the grace of the exposition and to the charming eulogy of “distinction” at the end. That, if Mr Arnold had known a little more about that French Romantic School which he despised, he would have hardly assigned this distinction to Maurice; and that Eugénie, though undoubtedly a “fair soul,” was in this not distinguished from hundreds and thousands of other women, need not matter very much after all. And with the rest there need be few allowances, or only amicable ones. One may doubt whether Heine’s charm is not mainly due to the very lawlessness, the very contempt of “subject,” the very quips and cranks and caprices that Mr Arnold so sternly bans. But who shall deny the excellence and the exquisiteness of this, the first English tribute of any real worth to the greatest of German poets, to one of the great poets of the world, to the poet who with Tennyson and Hugo completes the representative trinity of European poets of the nineteenth century proper? Very seldom (his applause of Gray, the only other instance, is not quite on a par with this) does the critic so nearly approach enthusiasm—not merely engouement on the one side or serene approval on the other. No matter that he pretends to admire Heine for his “modern spirit” (why, O Macarée, as his friend Maurice de Guérin might have said, should a modern spirit be better than an ancient one, or what is either before the Eternal?) instead of for what has been, conceitedly it may be, called the “tear-dew and star-fire and rainbow-gold” of his phrase and verse. He felt this magic at any rate. No matter that he applies the wrong comparison instead of the right one, and depreciates French in order to exalt German, instead of thanking Apollo for these two good different things. The root of the matter is the right root, a discriminating enthusiasm: and the flower of the matter is one of the most charming critical essays in English. It is good, no doubt, to have made up one’s mind about Heine before reading Mr Arnold; but one almost envies those who were led to that enchanted garden by so delightful an interpreter.

Almost equally delightful, and with no touch of the sadness which must always blend with any treatment of Heine, is the next essay, the pet, I believe, of some very excellent judges, on “Pagan and Mediaeval Religious Sentiment,” with its notable translation of Theocritus and its contrast with St Francis. One feels, indeed, that Mr Arnold was not quite so well equipped with knowledge on the one side as on the other; indeed, he never was well read in mediæval literature. But his thesis, as a thesis, is capable of defence; in the sternest times of military etiquette he could not have been put to death on the charge of holding out an untenable post; and he puts the different sides with incomparable skill and charm. Mr Arnold glosses Pagan morals rather doubtfully, but so skilfully; he rumples and blackens mediæval life more than rather unfairly, but with such a light and masterly touch!

Different again, inferior perhaps, but certainly not in any hostile sense inferior, is the “Joubert.” It has been the fashion with some to join this essay to the Guérin pieces as an instance of some incorrigible twist in Mr Arnold’s French estimates, of some inability to admire the right things, even when he did admire I cannot agree with them. Joubert, of course, has his own shortcomings as a pensée-writer. He is rococo beside La Bruyére, dilettante beside La Rochefoucauld, shallow beside Pascal. There is at times, even if you take him by himself, and without comparison, something thin and amateurish and conventional about him. But this is by no means always or very often the case; and his merits, very great in themselves, were even greater for Mr Arnold’s general purpose.