Matthew Arnold

by George Saintsbury

In the Wilderness.

That the end of Mr Arnold’s tenure of the Professorship of Poetry was a most important epoch in his life is sufficiently evident. In the ten years that came to an end then, he had, as two such extremely competent judges as Mr Disraeli and Crabb Robinson in different ways told him,[13] passed from comparative obscurity into something more than comparative prominence. His chair had been for him a real cathedra, and his deliverances from it had always assumed, and had at length, to a great extent, achieved, real authority. In criticism it was evident that if he had not revealed positively novel aspects of truth, he had formulated and put on record aspects which were presenting themselves to many, nay, most, of the best critical minds of his day. His criticism had drawn his poetry with it, if not into actual popularity, yet into something like attention. His attempts to obtain some other employment less irksome, less absorbing, and more profitable, had indeed been unsuccessful; but he was rising in his own department, and his work, if still in part uncongenial and decidedly laborious, appears to have been much less severe than in earlier days. Partly this work itself, partly his writings, and partly other causes had opened to him a very large circle of acquaintance, which it was in his own power to extend or contract as he pleased. His domestic life was perfectly happy, if his means were not very great: and his now assured literary position made it easy for him to increase these means, not indeed largely, but to a not despicable extent, by writing. The question was, “What should he write?”

It is probably idle ever to wish that a man had done anything different from that which he has done. Without being a rigid Determinist, one may be pretty well convinced that the actual conduct is the joint result of abilities, and of desires, and of opportunity to exercise them, and that the man, had he really done otherwise, would have been unsuccessful or unhappy or both. But I fear that if I had been arbiter of Mr Arnold’s fate at this moment I should have arranged it differently. He should have given us more poems—the man who, far later, wrote the magnificent Westminster Abbey on such a subject as Dean Stanley, had plenty more poetry in his sack. And in prose he should have given us infinite essays, as many as De Quincey’s or as Sainte-Beuve’s own, and more than Hazlitt’s, of the kind of the Heine and the Joubert earlier, of the Wordsworth and the Byron later. I can see no reason why, in the twenty-one years’ lease of life upon which he now entered, he should not have produced a volume a-year of these,—there are more than enough subjects in the various literatures that he knew; and though it is possible that in such extended application his method might have proved monotonous, or his range have seemed narrow, it is not likely. To complete the thing, I should have given him, instead of his inspectorship, a headship at Oxford, for which, it seems to me, he was admirably fitted. But Dis aliter visum: at least it seemed otherwise good to Mr Arnold himself as far as his literary employments were concerned, and the gods did not interfere.

We have seen that he had, some years before, conceived the ambitious idea of changing the mind of England on a good many points by no means merely literary; and he seems, not altogether unnaturally, to have thought that now was the time to apply seriously to that work. His tenure of the Oxford chair had given him the public ear; and the cessation of that tenure had removed any official seal of etiquette which it might have laid on his own lips. A far less alert and acute mind than his must have seen that the Reform troubles of 1866 and the “leap in the dark” of 1867 were certain to bring about very great changes indeed at home; and that the war of the first-named year meant the alteration of many things abroad. He at least thought—and there was some justification of a good many kinds for him in thinking—that intellectual changes, of importance equal to the political, were coming or come upon the world. And so for a time he seems to have grown rather cold towards the Muses, his earliest and always his truest loves. Social, political, and religious matters tempted him away from literature; and for a matter of ten years it can hardly be said that he had anything to do with her except to take her name in vain in the title of by far his worst, as it was by far his most popular, volume.

It has been hinted in a note on one of the early pages in this book that the secret of this unfortunate twist is at least partly to be found in the peculiar character of Mr Arnold’s official employment. For nearly twenty years he had been constantly thrown into contact with the English Dissenters; and, far earlier than the time which we have reached, they seem not only, in familiar phrase, to have “got upon his nerves,” but to have affected his brain. He saw all things in Dissent—or, at least, in the middle-class Philistine Dissenter. His Philistia is not in the least a true portrait of the average middle-class household thirty or forty years ago; though, I daresay (I have little direct knowledge), it is not an unfair one of the average Dissenting middle-class household. The religion which Mr Arnold attacks is not the religion of the Church of England at all, or only of what was even then a decaying and uninfluential part of it, the extremer and more intolerant sect of the Evangelicals. Once more, I cannot from personal knowledge say whether this portrait was true of Dissent, but I can believe it.

Now, to derive an idea of England from the English Dissenter is and was absurd. Politically, indeed, he had only too much power between 1832 and 1866, from the tradition which made Liberal politicians fond of petting him. Socially, intellectually, and to a great extent religiously, he had next to no power at all. To take the average manager of a “British” school as the average representative of the British nation was the wildest and most mischievous of confusions. Yet this practically was the basis of Mr Arnold’s crusade between 1867 and 1877.

The First Blast of the Trumpet was, intentionally no doubt, the last of the Oxford lectures, and for that very reason a rather gentle and insinuating one. Culture its Enemies, which was the origin and first part, so to say, of Culture and Anarchy, carried the campaign begun in the Essays in Criticism forward; but only in the most cautious manner, a caution no doubt partly due to the fact of the author’s expressed, and very natural and proper, intention of closing his professorial exercises with the bocca dolce. Still this is at least conceivably due to the fact that the boldest extension of the campaign itself had not definitely entered, or at least possessed, the author’s mind. A considerable time, indeed from July 1867 to January 1868, passed before the publication of the lecture as an article in the Cornhill was followed up by the series from the latter month to August, which bore the general title of Anarchy and Authority, and completed the material of Culture and Anarchy itself. This, as a book, appeared in 1869.

It began, according to the author’s favourite manner, which was already passing into something like a mannerism, with a sort of half-playful, half-serious battery against a living writer (in this case Mr Frederic Harrison), and with a laudatory citation from a dead one (in this case Bishop Wilson). Mr Harrison had blasphemed “the cant about culture,” and Mr Arnold protests that culture’s only aim is in the Bishop’s words, “to make reason and the will of God prevail.” In the first chapter, famous thenceforward in English literature by its title, borrowed from Swift, of “Sweetness and Light,” we have the old rallyings of the Daily Telegraph and the Nonconformist. Then the general view is laid down, and is developed in those that follow, but still with more of a political than a religious bent, and with the political bent itself chiefly limited to the social aspect.

“Doing as one Likes” scatters a mild rain of ridicule on this supposed fetich of all classes in England; and then, the very famous, if not perhaps very felicitous, nickname-classification of “Barbarian-Philistine-Populace” is launched, defended, discussed in a chapter to itself. To do Mr Arnold justice, the three classes are, if not very philosophically defined, very impartially and amusingly rallied, the rallier taking up that part of humble Philistine conscious of his own weaknesses, which, till he made it slightly tiresome by too long a run, was piquant enough. The fourth chapter, “Hebraism and Hellenism,” coasts the sands and rocks (on which, as it seems to some, Mr Arnold was later to make shipwreck) very nearly in the title and rather nearly in the contents, but still with a fairly safe offing. The opposition might be put too bluntly by saying that “Hellenism” represents to Mr Arnold the love of truth at any price, and “Hebraism” the love of goodness at any price; but the actual difference is not far from this, or from those of knowing and doing, fear of stupidity and fear of sin, &c. We have the quotation from Mr Carlyle about Socrates being “terribly at ease in Zion,” the promulgation of the word Renascence for Renaissauce, and so forth. “Porro unum est necessarium,” a favourite tag of Mr Arnold’s, rather holds up another side of the same lesson than continues it in a fresh direction; and then “Our Liberal Practitioners” brings it closer to politics, but (since the immediate subject is the Disestablishment of the Irish Church) nearer also to the quicksands. Yet Mr Arnold still keeps away from them; though from what followed it would seem that he could only have done so by some such tour de force as the famous ”clubhauling“ in Peter Simple. Had Culture and Anarchy stood by itself, it would have been, though very far from its author’s masterpiece, an interesting document both in regard to his own mental history and that of England during the third quarter of the century, containing some of his best prose, and little, if any, of his worst sense.

But your crusader—still more your anti-crusader—never stops, and Mr Arnold was now pledged to this crusade or anti-crusade. In October 1869 he began, still in the Cornhill,—completing it by further instalments in the same place later in the year, and publishing it in 1870,—the book called St Paul and Protestantism, where he necessarily exchanges the mixed handling of Culture and Anarchy for a dead-set at the religious side of his imaginary citadel of Philistia. The point of at least ostensible connection—of real departure—is taken from the ”Hebraism and Hellenism“ contrast of the earlier book; and the same contrast is strongly urged throughout, especially in the coda, “A Comment on Christmas.” But this contrast is gradually shaped into an onslaught on Puritanism, or rather on its dogmatic side, for its appreciation of “conduct” of morality is ever more and more eulogised. As regards the Church of England herself, the attack is oblique; in fact, it is disclaimed, and a sort of a Latitudinarian Union, with the Church for centre, and dogma left out, is advocated. Another of our Arnoldian friends, the “Zeit-Geist,” makes his appearance, and it is more than hinted that one of the most important operations of this spirit is the exploding of miracles. The book is perfectly serious—its seriousness, indeed, is quite evidently deliberate and laboured, so that the author does not even fear to appear dull. But it is still admirably written, as well as studiously moderate and reverent; no exception can be taken to it on the score of taste, whatever may be taken on the score of orthodoxy from the one side, where no doubt the author would hasten to plead guilty, or on those of logic, history, and the needs of human nature on the other, where no doubt his “not guilty” would be equally emphatic.