Matthew Arnold

by George Saintsbury

to those who have read the book itself, and to those who have not yet found time to read it.

I cannot plead much greater affection for the lucubrations of Amiel than for Count Tolstoi’s dealings with that odd compound of crudity and rottenness, the Russian nature; but Mr Arnold’s “Amiel” is admirable. Never was there a more “gentlemanly correction,” a more delicate and good-humoured setting to rights, than that which he administers to Amiel’s two great panegyrists (who happened to be Mr Arnold’s own niece and Mr Arnold’s own friend). On subjects like Maya and the “great wheel” it would almost be impossible to conceive, and certainly impossible to find, a happier commentator than Mr Arnold, though perhaps in the regions of theology he had a private Maya, a very Great Wheel, of his own. The firmness with which he rebukes the maunderings of the Genevese hypochondriac—of whom some one once unkindly remarked that he was not so much intoxicated with Idealism as suffering from the subsequent headache—is equalled by the kindness of the dealing; and the quiet decision with which he puts his fine writing in its proper place is better still. Nobody could call Mr Arnold a Philistine or one insensible to finesse, grace, sehnsucht, the impalpable and intangible charm of melancholy and of thought. And his comments on Amiel’s loaded pathos and his muddled meditation are therefore invaluable. Nor is he less happy or less just in the praise which, though not the first, he was one of the first to give to by far the strongest side of Amiel’s talent, his really remarkable power of literary criticism.

But the best wine was still kept for the very last. It will have been observed in these brief sketches of his work that, since his return to the fields of literature proper, Mr Arnold had drawn nearer to the causerie and farther from the abstract critical essay,—that he had taken to that mixture of biography, abstract of work, and interspersed critical comment which Sainte-Beuve, though he did not exactly invent it, had perfected, and which somebody, I think, has recently described as “intensely irritating.” Well! well! pearls, as we all know, are irritating to certain classes of consumers. He had from the first done this well, he now did it consummately. That he took occasion, in the paper on Shelley’s life which appeared in the Nineteenth Century for January 1888, to repeat his pet heresy about Shelley’s poetry, matters nothing at all. It is an innocent defiance, and no attempt whatever is made to support it by argument. The purpose of the essay is quite different. Already, some years before, in his article on Keats, Mr Arnold had dealt some pretty sharp blows both at the indiscretion of a certain class of modern literary biographers, and at the pawing and morbid sentimentality of the same persons or others. He had a new and a better opportunity in the matter he was now handling, and he struck more strongly, more repeatedly, and with truer aim than ever. From the moment of its appearance to the present day, this piece has been an unceasing joy to all who love literature with a sane devotion. Its composition is excellent; it selects just the right points, dwells on them in just the right way, and drops them just when we have had enough. In mere style it yields to nothing of its author’s, and is conspicuously and quite triumphantly free from his repetitions and other mannerisms. No English writer—indeed one may say no writer at all—has ever tempered such a blend of quiet contempt with perfect good-humour and perfect good-breeding. Dryden would have written with an equally fatal serenity, but not so lightly; Voltaire with as much lightness, but not nearly so much like a gentleman—which may also be said Of Courier. Thackeray could not have helped a blaze of indignation—honest and healthy, but possibly just plusquam-artistic—at the unspeakable persons who think that by blackening the unhappy Harriet they can whiten Shelley. And almost any one would have been likely either to commit the complementary error of being too severe on Shelley himself, or, if this were avoided, to underlie the charge of being callous and unsympathetic. Every one of these rocks, and others, Mr Arnold has avoided; and he has left us in the piece one of the most perfect examples that exist of the English essay on subjects connected with literature. In its own special division of causerie the thing is not only without a superior, it is almost without a peer; its insinuated or passing literary comments are usually as happy as its censure of vital matters, and even the above-referred-to heresy itself gives it a certain piquancy. Ill indeed was the fate that took its author away so soon after the completion of this little masterpiece; yet he could not have desired to leave the world with a better diploma-performance, lodged as an example of his actual accomplishment.

We must now return, for the last time unfortunately, to the narrative of biographical events. December 1877 furnishes, in some letters to his sister, evidence that he was increasingly “spread” (as the French say quaintly) by notices of parties and persons—Mr Disraeli and Mr Gladstone, Mr Huxley and Mr Ruskin. One is glad to hear of the last-named that the writer “is getting to like him ”—the passages on the author of Modern Painters in the earlier letters are certainly not enthusiastic—and that “he gains much by his fancy being forbidden to range through the world of coloured cravats.” This beneficial effect of evening dress is not limited to Mr Ruskin, and is so well expressed that one only wishes Mr Arnold had let his own fancy range more freely in such epistolary criticisms of life. We hear that Mr J.R. Green “likes the Reformation and Puritanism less the more he looks into them,” again a not uncommon experience—and that Mr Stopford Brooke is deriving much edification from the review of his Primer. The next year continues the series of letters to M. Fontanes, and gives a pleasant phrase in one to another sister, Mrs Cropper. “My poems have had no better friends in their early and needy days than my own sisters”—wherein Mr Arnold unconsciously quotes Goblin Market, “there is no friend like a sister.” Later, Mr Freeman is dashed off, a la maniere noire, as “an ardent, learned, and honest man, but a ferocious pedant.” 1879 yields a letter to Miss Arnold, expressing the intention to send the Wordsworth book of selections to M. Scherer, and beg him to review it, which request resulted in one of the very best, perhaps the very best, of that critic’s essays in English Literature. Mr Arnold is distressed later at Renan’s taking Victor Hugo’s poetry so prodigiously au serieux, just as some of us have been, if not distressed, yet mildly astonished, at Mr Arnold for not taking it, with all its faults, half seriously enough. Geist, the dachshund, appears agreeably, with many other birds and beasts, in a May letter of this year, and botany reinforces zoology in a later one to Mr Grant Duff.

1880 is at first less fertile, but gives an amusing account of a semi-royal reception of Cardinal Newman at the Duke of Norfolk’s in May, and a very interesting series of letters from Pontresina in the autumn. Fortunately for us Mrs Arnold was not with him, and we profit by his letters to her. In one of them there is a very pleasing and probably unconscious touch. “Rapallo [the Duchess of Genoa’s husband] smokes the whole evening: but I think he has a good heart. And later still we have the curious and not uncharacteristic information that he is reading David Copperfield for the first time (whence no doubt its undue predominance in a certain essay), and the description of Burns as “a beast with splendid gleams,” a view which has been fully developed since. On February 21, 1881, there is another interview, flattering as ever, with Lord Beaconsfield, and later he tells M. Fontanes, “I never much liked Carlyle,” which indeed we knew. The same correspondent has the only references preserved to Dean Stanley’s death; but the magnificent verses which that death produced make anything else superfluous. They appeared in the first number of the Nineteenth Century for 1882, when New Year’s Day gives us a melancholy prediction. If “I live to be eighty [i.e., in some three years from the present moment], I shall probably be the only person in England who reads anything but newspapers and scientific publications.“ Too gloomy a view, let us hope; yet with something in it. And a letter, a very little later, gives us interesting hints of his method in verse composition, which was to hunt a Dictionary (Richardson’s) for good but unusual words—Theophile Gautier’s way also, as it happens, though probably he did not know that.

These later letters contain so many references to living people that one has to be careful in quoting from them; but as regards himself, there is of course no such need of care. That self-ruthlessness which always prevented him from scamping work is amazingly illustrated in one of October 1882, which tells how he sat up till five in the morning rewriting a lecture he was to deliver in Liverpool, and got up at eight to start for the place of delivery. Let us hope that a champagne luncheon there—“chiefly doctors, but you know I like doctors”—revived him after the night and the journey. And two months later he makes pleasant allusion to “that demon Traill,” in reference to a certain admirable parody of Poor Matthias. He had thought Mr Gladstone “hopelessly prejudiced against” him, and was proportionately surprised when in August 1883 he was offered by that Minister a pension of £250 for service to the poetry and literature of England. Few Civil List pensions have been so well deserved. But Mr Arnold, as most men of his quality would have been, was at once struck with the danger of evil constructions being put by the baser sort on the acceptance of an extra allowance from public funds by a man who already had a fair income from them, and a comfortable pension in the ordinary way to look forward to. Mr John Morley, however, and Lord Lingen, luckily succeeded in quieting his scruples, and only the very basest sort grumbled. The great advantage, of course, was that it enabled him to retire, as soon as his time was up, without too great loss of income.

A lecturing tour to America was already planned, and October 7, 1883 is the last date from Cobham, “New York” succeeding it without any; for Mr Arnold had the reprehensible and, in official persons, rare habit of very constantly omitting dates, though not places. The St Nicholas Club, “a delightful, poky, dark, exclusive little old club of the Dutch families,” is the only place in which he finds peace. For, as one expected, the interviewers made life terrible. These American letters are interesting reading enough, but naturally tend to be little more than a replica of similar letters from other Englishmen who have done the same thing. As has been quite frankly admitted here, Mr Arnold never made any effort, and seldom seems to have been independently prompted, to write what are called “amusing” letters: he merely tells a plain tale of journeys, lectures, meals, persons, scenery, manners and customs, etc. Chicago seems to have vindicated its character for “character” by hospitably forcing him to eat dinner and supper “on end,” and by describing him in its newspapers as “an elderly bird pecking at grapes on a trellis.” The whole tour, including a visit to Canada, lasted nearly five months, and brought—not the profit which some people expected, but—a good sum, with wrinkles as to more if the experiment were repeated. And when he came back to England, the lectures were collected and printed.

In February 1885 we have, addressed to his eldest daughter, then married and living in America, a definition of “real civilisation” as the state “when the world does not begin till 8 P.M. and goes on from that till 1 A.M., not later.” This is, though doubtless jestful, really a point de repère for the manners of the later nineteenth century as concerns a busy man who likes society. In the eighteenth, and earlier in the nineteenth, men as busy as Mr Arnold practically abstained from “the world” except quite rarely, while “the world” was not busy. The dachshunds come in for frequent mention.

On a Sunday in May of this year comes the warning of “a horrid pain across my chest,” which, however, “Andrew Clark thinks [wrongly, alas!] to be not heart” but indigestion. The Discourses in America, for which their author had a great predilection, came out later. In August the pain is mentioned again; and the subsequent remark, “I was a little tired, but the cool champagne at dinner brought me round,” is another ominous hint that it was not indigestion. Two of the most valuable of all the letters come in October, one saying, “I think Oxford is still, on the whole, the place in the world to which I am most attached” [“And so say all of us”]; the other, after some notice of the Corpus plate, telling how “I got out to Hinksey and up the hill to within sight of the Cumnor firs. I cannot describe the effect which this landscape always has upon me: the hillside with its valleys, and Oxford in the great Thames valley below.” And this walk is again referred to later. He was pleased by a requisition that he should stand yet again for the Poetry Professorship, though of course he did not accede to it. And at the beginning of winter he had a foreign mission (his last) to Berlin, to get some information for the Government as to German school fees. He was much lionised, and seems to have enjoyed himself very much during his stay, the Crown Princess being specially gracious to him.

Nor was he long in England on his return, though long enough to bring another mention of the chest pain, and an excellent definition of education—would there were no worse!—“Reading five pages of the Greek Anthology every day, and looking out all the words I do not know.” In February 1886 he was back again investigating the Swiss and Bavarian school systems; and that amiable animal-worship of his receives a fresh evidence in the mention and mourning of the death of “dear Lola” (not Montès, but another; in short, a pony), with a sigh for “a mèche of her hair.” The journey was finished by way of France towards the end of March. At Hamburg Mr Arnold was “really [and very creditably] glad to have had the opportunity of calling a man Your Magnificence,” that being, it seems, the proper official style in addressing the burgomaster. And May took him back to America, to see his married daughter and divers old friends. He remained there till the beginning of September, improving, as he thought, in health, but meeting towards the close an awkward bathing accident, which involved no risk of drowning, but gave him a shock that was followed by a week or two of troublesome attacks of pain across the chest. There is very much in the letters of the time about the political crisis of 1886. His retirement from official work came in November, and the letters are fuller than ever of delight in the Cobham landscape.