Next in importance to his art criticisms must be ranked Ruskin’s writings on social subjects. Here his interest has been keen and his energy great. Most of his special ideas have been denounced as Quixotic nonsense, and some of them, it must be added, deserve a description not much more flattering. Yet great is the merit of earnestness. Ruskin has always been fired by indignation against wrong and falsehood, and has always believed profoundly in the truth of his own gospel. He has had, both as a writer and as a man, the gift of fascination. Hence, even when his audience was scanty, it was enthusiastic; and few, whose ideas seem so unpractical, have succeeded in persuading so many to try them. The story of his inducing his Oxford pupils to engage in road-making is well known. The fact that the road was and is, as he laughingly admitted, one of the worst in the three kingdoms, does not weaken its testimony to his personal influence; though it may throw doubt on the wisdom of his guidance. In a similar spirit he founded the St. George’s Guild. This however was no mere by-work. It was the direct outcome of his writings on social questions, and it was more remotely connected with his teaching of art. It was connected with the latter through his conviction that only to a people living wholesome lives is sound art possible. It was connected with his social writings because his studies for them convinced him that mere writing would do little to cure the evils he saw. Hence in the Fors Clavigera in 1871 he launched the scheme of the St. George’s Guild. The idea was to restore happiness to England. ‘We will try,’ said he, ‘to make some small piece of English ground beautiful, peaceful, and fruitful. We will have no steam-engines upon it, and no railroads; we will have no untended and unthought of creatures on it; none wretched, but the sick; none idle, but the dead. We will have no liberty upon it, but instant obedience to known law and appointed persons; no equality upon it, but recognition of every betterness that we can find, and reprobation of every worseness.’ It is not surprising that plans so visionary have failed to regenerate society; it is surprising that men should have been willing to join in the effort to realise such a Utopia. The agricultural ventures of the Guild are an admitted failure; one or two of the efforts to plant village industries have had some measure of success, and seem capable of doing good within narrow limits.
Prominent among the faults of Ruskin’s social writings is a disregard of practically unalterable facts. Railways and steam-engines may not be objects of beauty, but until they find swifter means of locomotion and production men will use them. To regulate their use and to reform abuse would be the ideal of the practical social reformer. Denunciation and banishment are the cures which occur to Ruskin. Similar faults mark his extremely eccentric political economy; as for example his condemnation of interest on capital and his ascription of property ‘to whom proper.’ This would be attractive if we could only find some one to tell us infallibly, or with some approach to infallibility, to whom it is proper. Historically, the stronger man has generally proved the person ‘to whom proper.’ The condemnation of competition and the praise of co-operation are open to a similar objection. They ignore the facts of human nature. There is doubtless room for valuable work in promoting co-operation and in regulating competition; but no worse service could be done to the human race than to supplant the latter. Fortunately, no effort is more hopeless: it is like that sin which Macaulay declared would be unspeakably shocking if it could be committed, but which, happily, Providence had not put within the reach of fallen humanity.
Ruskin’s economic and social writings are certainly not to be valued for soundness of thought or for sobriety of judgment. They have however the beauty of style which characterises all his works, they are enriched with memorable sentences and weighty sayings, and they are inspired by a nobility of purpose which redeems even the most indefensible doctrine. Unworkable as his economic principles are, it is impossible to withhold admiration from the man who has so generously endeavoured to carry them out; and however numerous may be his crotchets, the laugh at them must be kindly when he has himself so genially led the laughter. It is moreover only just to say that, however unsound his own views may be, he was one of the first to point out the unsoundness of the old political economy. There is no answer to his contention that a science so abstract, a science which leaves out of account so many considerations essential to human welfare, has no right to pronounce authoritatively upon it. The modern economist would agree with Ruskin that we must reintroduce the factors eliminated before we can draw conclusions trustworthy for practice.
Matthew Arnold
(1822-1888).
Matthew Arnold rose into prominence as a critic somewhat later than Ruskin, and he did his work in a different sphere. He has the unusual distinction of being almost equally celebrated in prose and in poetry. There are numerous writers who have won a considerable, and some even a great reputation in both; but generally, as in the case of Scott, there is no difficulty in subordinating the one to the other. In Arnold’s case there is a difficulty, and though the prediction may be ventured that he will in the end take rank as a poet, he is probably best known at present as a writer of prose.
Matthew Arnold was educated at Winchester and Rugby. He went up to Balliol College, Oxford, in 1841, and won a fellowship at Oriel in 1845. In 1851 he became inspector of schools. Besides his ordinary routine work as inspector he discharged the important duty of visiting and reporting upon the schools and universities of France and Germany. From 1857 to 1867 he was professor of poetry at Oxford. In his later years he made two visits to America, where also he lectured. He afterwards published the addresses under the title of Discourses in America.
The prose writings of Matthew Arnold may be classed under three heads. They are all critical in spirit. In the first division the criticism is of literature, in the second of theology, in the third of society. As regards their chronology, the literary criticism is mainly the product of the decade between 1860 and 1870, but from time to time all through his literary career Arnold wrote criticism. In theology the period of his greatest activity was from St. Paul and Protestantism (1870) to Last Essays on Church and Religion (1877). Social essays, including the educational writings under this head, are interspersed all through, but the period of greatest activity, as regards publication, was from the Mixed Essays (1879) to the Discourses in America (1885). In respect of merit these writings can also be classified with confidence. The literary essays are unquestionably the most valuable, the social essays rank next, while the theological works have the least permanent worth.
Arnold’s critical work may be said to begin in his poems, and these for the most part precede his prose writings. It may be doubted whether any English poet has written as much fine criticism in verse as Arnold. Besides the penetrating judgments on individual writers, like Goethe, Wordsworth and Heine, we have a discussion of the principles of art in the Epilogue to Lessing’s Laocoön and, throughout, a critical view of life as well as of literature. The volume of poems published in 1853 contained moreover a critical preface in prose, short but highly suggestive. When therefore Arnold was appointed Professor of Poetry at Oxford, he was already a critic of proved capacity, and he fully justified his appointment by the lectures On Translating Homer (1861), certainly the most valuable ever delivered from that chair. But most of Arnold’s critical work was originally written for periodicals; and the scattered essays, gathered up into volumes, are known to the world as the Essays in Criticism (1865) and the Essays in Criticism: Second Series (1888). These, with a few essays scattered through other volumes, constitute the body of Arnold’s critical work. What is its spirit and method?
To comprehend Arnold as a critic we must grasp his conception of culture. His aim is to know the best that has been thought and said in all ages and by all nations. No criticism was ever less negative. He sees indeed that the pointing out of deficiencies, indirectly if not directly, is an essential part of criticism, but it is not the end in view. Again, Arnold’s purpose is always practical. He was long regarded as a dreamer, a ‘superior person’ sitting on a solitary height and on the whole proud of the isolation. On the contrary, it was just because he was at heart essentially English, and therefore practical, that he acquired this reputation. Two of his favourite dogmas in criticism were the necessity of going back to and studying the classics, and the equally crying necessity of going beyond our own island and studying the mind of Europe. He was never content unless he brought English opinion to the test of foreign opinion. Hence his interest in knowing how Milton appears to a French critic. For a similar reason he frequently went to foreign writers for the subjects of his own criticism. In the first series of Essays in Criticism, the most characteristic and the most valuable, as a whole, of his critical writings, the subjects are principally foreign—the two de Guérins, Heine, Joubert, Marcus Aurelius. He turns to these, not because he thinks them better than the writers of his own country, but because he thinks more good will come, both to himself and to England, from an investigation of what is foreign and unfamiliar, than from an examination of writings illustrating our own merits and charged with our own defects. The impulse which determines his choice in criticism is revealed in his Letters. He condemned Carlyle in England and Gambetta in France, each for ‘carrying coals to Newcastle;’ Carlyle, because he preached earnestness to a nation that already had enough of it, but was not equally endowed with other good qualities; Gambetta, just because he evaporated in words and failed to teach that very earnestness to a nation that would have been all the better for more.
The same principle explains Arnold’s insistence on the study of the ancients. ‘They can help to cure us of what is ... the great vice of our intellect, manifesting itself in our incredible vagaries in literature, in art, in religion, in morals: namely, that it is fantastic, and wants sanity.’ It was for this reason that he dwelt on things distasteful to his countrymen, or to whomsoever he was addressing. He was eager to carry the coals of Newcastle where they were needed, the earnestness and practical sense of England to France, the lucidity of France and her love of ideas to England. This, combined no doubt with personal taste, accounts for his devotion to French literature. No one saw French weaknesses more clearly,—‘France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme.’ But irrespective of the relative merits of French and German writings, he thought the Germans a bad model for the English to follow, and the French a good one, because they, a race of Latin culture, differ from us more than another branch of the Teutonic stock can do. So too, in his eyes, the highest value of the classics is just that they present us with ideals unlike our own. ‘We can hardly at the present day understand what Menander meant when he told a man who inquired as to the progress of his comedy that he had finished it, not having yet written a single line, because he had constructed the action of it in his mind. A modern critic would have assured him that the merit of the piece depended on the brilliant things that arose under his pen as he went along.’ The width of the difference measures the value of the lesson to be learnt.