We can thus understand the seeming eccentricity, sometimes, of Arnold’s choice of subjects, and also the superficial appearance of negation in his criticism. It is only superficial; the essence of the criticism is always sympathy, agreement rather than difference, the recognition of merit in preference to censure for defects. Carlyle had already placed criticism on the basis of sympathy, but it was shown in a different way. Carlyle had a large share of the dramatic faculty, and an intense interest in the individual soul. Arnold’s genius was social, but not dramatic. He had no such mastery as Carlyle of the springs of individual character; but he set himself to understand the society in which the man lived, to grasp his idea, to look at things from his point of view, and so to explain what otherwise would be inexplicable. It is the fruitfulness of Arnold’s method that has made the reading of the Essays in Criticism an epoch in the lives of many men who have now reached middle life.
Equally high praise must be accorded to the temper of this criticism. No writer was ever more uniformly urbane than Arnold. ‘The great thing is,’ says he, ‘to write without a particle of vice or malice;’ and he never forgets his own precept. He often gave rise to controversy, and was sometimes the object of vituperation; but, though he could write with cutting irony, the controversy was never on his side embittered, and he never replied in kind to the vituperation.
In his criticism Arnold laid little stress on rules, and those he did appeal to were wide and elastic. The one thing he greatly insisted upon was the necessity of unity of impression. No work of art could be called great that did not produce a deep and abiding impression as a whole, and not merely in its parts. In the details of criticism he trusted to no rules, but rather to a taste saturated with ‘the best of what has been thought and said.’ His sentiment is expressed in the well-known essay on the study of poetry, introductory to Ward’s English Poets. ‘There can be no more useful help,’ says he, ‘for discovering what poetry belongs to the class of the truly excellent, and can therefore do us most good, than to have always in one’s mind lines and expressions of the great masters, and to apply them as a touchstone to other poetry.’ He followed in practice his own precept, and determined to finish up with Shakespeare’s King Lear, before writing this very essay, in order to have a proper taste in his mind while he was at work.
The rest of Arnold’s works in prose are conceived in the same frame of mind, but deal with matter less tractable to the author. The social essays are of high quality. Arnold’s campaign against Philistinism, his insistence on lucidity, not in literature alone but in all the relations of life, his championship of urbanity, his polemic against narrow sectarianism, whether religious, or social, or political—all this is important as well as interesting. The playfulness of Arnold’s habitual mode of expression helped to conceal the real earnestness of his purpose. But in all this he had very much at heart the improvement of his countrymen. He was by nature and instinct a teacher; and, though he was too much an artist to obtrude it or let it spoil his work, there was a didactic purpose under nearly all he wrote, verse as well as prose. For this he sacrificed popularity. Knowing well that to say what is agreeable is a surer and easier road to favour than to say what is helpful, he yet chose the latter course.
The same purpose animates likewise Arnold’s theological writings; but in this case the want of special equipment is more serious. It is unwise of anyone, without long years of special training, to undertake biblical criticism. The opinion of a great Hebraist as to the facts about the book of Isaiah is valuable; the opinion of anyone else is that of an amateur. The motive which animated Arnold however is easily understood, and for certain purposes his judgment is quite as worthy of respect as that of the most accomplished theologian. Arnold’s position was peculiar. While retaining a great deal of religious sentiment he had thrown aside entirely the positive dogmas of religion. He was strongly attached to the religion of the Bible, Old Testament as well as New; and just because of this attachment he wished to remove the crumbling foundation of theological systems and find a safer basis for it. ‘Our popular religion at present conceives the birth, ministry, and death of Christ, as altogether steeped in prodigy, brimful of miracle;—and miracles do not happen.’ Arnold’s object was to set free Christianity, which had hardened in the mistaken fact, and to establish it on the living idea. Undoubtedly he was well qualified to form opinions on these fundamental questions. Neither the clergy, nor the churches, nor specialists in biblical lore, have any monopoly here, or any peculiar right to respect. The ultimate questions of religion are to be settled by a review of the whole of life, for which every man has his own special advantages as well as his own special limitations.
Arnold’s style, in prose as in poetry, is one of the elements of his power. Though not free from mannerisms, it is easy, harmonious, scholarly and scrupulously pure. He is content to write about plain things in a plain manner. His great charm is the constant play of wit and humour, of irony and satire, over his prose. The wit and irony are, as a rule, lambent rather than piercing, but they are sometimes exceedingly keen. Occasionally he rises to a high pitch of eloquence. There are few passages of English prose more memorable than the celebrated apostrophe to Oxford, the ‘home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties.’ Yet even there, when his feelings are most highly strung, the comic touch comes in: ‘There are our young barbarians, all at play.’ Arnold smiles at himself as he smiles at others, and by doing so takes all offence from his wit.
Dr. John Brown
(1810-1882).
William Brighty Rands
(1823-1882).
Two minor names, those of Dr. John Brown and William Brighty Rands, are, perhaps, best included among the critics. The former is most widely known as the author of Rab and his Friends, a piece not easily surpassed for mingled pathos and humour. Brown wrote a style of very high merit. In the miscellaneous collection of his writings, which he entitled Horæ Subsecivæ, there is much to remind the reader of Lamb. Yet he was guiltless of imitation, and the resemblance exists because he had the same fine humour and the same sensitiveness of perception as the earlier writer. No one has written better than Brown about dogs; and his comprehension of them and his power of depicting them are seen even better in Our Dogs than in the famous essay on Rab, where the human figures divide the interest with the great mastiff. Brown’s critical papers are few, but they show that he knew how to get at the heart of his subject.
Rands is a man much less known than he deserves to be. He wrote on many subjects, but generally under assumed names. His children’s verse in Lilliput Levee (1864) is very good, and his opinions on ‘life and philosophy’ in Henry Holbeach (1865) are still better. This book is thoughtful, acute in criticism, and enriched with not a few memorable sayings. Perhaps the best essay in it is that on Cavaliers and Roundheads, where the description of the Tory or Cavalier mind, with no opinions, only dogmas, and a genial superstition which answers the purpose of religion, is admirable; and in another essay there is an even more delicious description of the minister of the Little Meeting, ‘his heart amply supplied with the milk of human kindness, and his creed blazing with damnation.’ Rich as English literature is, it is sensibly impoverished when work of this quality is forgotten.
The present period has been fruitful also in departments of scholarship cognate to literary criticism. Among scholars in the old sense of the term the most distinguished were John Conington at Oxford and H. A. J. Munro at Cambridge. The former had the more versatile literary gift, but the latter was far more ‘high built’ in learning, and his edition of Lucretius is admittedly one of the triumphs of English classical culture. In the same sphere the great statesman, W. E. Gladstone, deserves mention, less perhaps for the positive value of his Juventus Mundi and Homeric studies, than for the extraordinary energy which made such work possible amidst the distractions of party politics. More characteristic of the age has been the development of Anglo-Saxon and Middle English lore. Benjamin Thorpe and Joseph Bosworth both did valuable work in this sphere. The former edited Caedmon in 1832, and in the course of his long life supervised editions of nearly all the more important remains of Anglo-Saxon literature. Bosworth’s name is identified with the Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, which, though now philologically rather antiquated, was in its time a bold undertaking. Sir Frederick Madden, a somewhat younger man, performed for a later period the work Thorpe did for the beginning of our literature. The accomplished Richard Chenevix Trench, for twenty years Archbishop of Dublin, was not only an agreeable poet, but did great service to the study of the English language. His Study of Words and English Past and Present have done more to popularise philology than, probably, any other books we possess.