The same insistent desire that culture be vital is at the root of Arnold’s discomfort in the presence of German scholarship. For the thoroughness and the disinterestedness of this scholarship he has great respect; but he cannot endure its trick of losing itself in the letter, its “pedantry, slowness,” its way of “fumbling” after truth, its “ineffectiveness.”[33] “In the German mind,” he exclaims in Literature and Dogma, “as in the German language, there does seem to be something splay, something blunt-edged, unhandy, infelicitous,—some positive want of straightforward, sure perception.”[34] Of scholarship of this splay variety, that comes from exaggerated intellectuality and from lack of a delicate temperament and of nice perceptions, Arnold is intolerant. Such scholarship he finds working its customary mischief in Professor Francis Newman’s translation of Homer, and, accordingly, he gives large parts of the lectures on Translating Homer to the illustration of its shortcomings and maladroitness; he is bent on showing how inadequate is great learning alone to cope with any nice literary problem. Newman’s philological knowledge of Greek and of Homer is beyond dispute, but his taste may be judged from his assertion that Homer’s verse, if we could hear the living Homer, would affect us “like an elegant and simple melody from an African of the Gold Coast.”[35] The remedy for such inept scholarship lies in culture, in the vitalization of knowledge. The scholar must not be a mere knower; all his powers must be harmoniously developed.
A last illustration of Arnold’s insistence that knowledge be vital may be drawn from his writings on religion and theology. Again criticism and culture are the passwords that open the way to a new and better order of things. Formulas, Arnold urges, have fastened themselves constrainingly upon the English religious mind. Traditional interpretations of the Bible have come to be received as beyond cavil. These interpretations are really human inventions—the product of the ingenious thinking of theologians like Calvin and Luther. Yet they have so authenticated themselves that for most readers to-day the Bible means solely what it meant for the exacerbated theological mind of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. If religion is to be vital, if knowledge of the Bible is to be genuine and real, there must be a critical examination of what this book means for the disinterested intelligence of to-day; the Bible, as literature, must be interpreted anew, sympathetically and imaginatively; the moral inspiration the Bible has to offer, even to men who are rigidly insistent on scientific habits of thought and standards of historical truth, must be disengaged from what is unverifiable and transitory, and made real and persuasive. “I write,” Arnold declares, “to convince the lover of religion that by following habits of intellectual seriousness he need not, so far as religion is concerned, lose anything. Taking the Old Testament as Israel’s magnificent establishment of the theme, Righteousness is salvation! taking the New as the perfect elucidation by Jesus of what righteousness is and how salvation is won, I do not fear comparing even the power over the soul and imagination of the Bible, taken in this sense,—a sense which is at the same time solid,—with the like power in the old materialistic and miraculous sense for the Bible, which is not.”[36] This definition of what Arnold hopes to do for the Bible may be supplemented by a description of the method in which culture works towards the ends desired: “Difficult, certainly, is the right reading of the Bible, and true culture, too, is difficult. For true culture implies not only knowledge, but right tact and justness of judgment, forming themselves by and with knowledge; without this tact it is not true culture. Difficult, however, as culture is, it is necessary. For, after all, the Bible is not a talisman, to be taken and used literally; neither is any existing church a talisman, whatever pretensions of the sort it may make, for giving the right interpretation of the Bible. Only true culture can give us this interpretation; so that if conduct is, as it is, inextricably bound up with the Bible and the right interpretation of it, then the importance of culture becomes unspeakable. For if conduct is necessary (and there is nothing so necessary), culture is necessary.”[37]
In all these various ways, then, that have been illustrated, culture is a specific against the ills that society is heir to. Culture is vital knowledge, and the critic is its fosterer and guardian; culture and criticism work together for the preservation of the integrity of the human type against all the disasters that threaten it from the storm and stress of modern life. Politics, religion, scholarship, science, each has its special danger for the individual; each seizes upon him, subdues him relentlessly to the need of the moment and the requirements of some particular function, and converts him often into a mere distorted fragment of humanity. Against this tyranny of the moment, against the specializing and materializing trend of modern life, criticism offers a powerful safeguard. Criticism is ever concerned with archetypal excellence, is continually disengaging, with fine discrimination, what is transitory and accidental from what is permanent and essential in all that man busies himself about, and is thus perpetually helping every individual to the apprehension of his “best self,” to the development of what is real and absolute and the elimination of what is false or deforming. And in doing all this the critic acts as the appreciator of life; he is not the abstract thinker. He apprehends the ideal intuitively; he reaches it by the help of the feelings and the imagination and a species of exquisite tact, not through a series of syllogisms; he is really a poet, rather than a philosopher.
This conception of the nature and functions of criticism makes intelligible and justifies a phrase of Arnold’s that has often been impugned—his description of poetry as a criticism of life. To this account of poetry it has been objected that criticism is an intellectual process, while poetry is primarily an affair of the imagination and the heart; and that to regard poetry as a criticism of life is to take a view of poetry that tends to convert it into mere rhetorical moralizing—the decorative expression in rhythmical language of abstract truth about life. This misinterpretation of Arnold’s meaning becomes impossible, if the foregoing theory of criticism be borne in mind. Criticism is the determination and the representation of the archetypal, of the ideal. Moreover, it is not a determination of the archetypal formally and theoretically, through speculation or the enumeration of abstract qualities; Arnold’s disinclination for abstractions has been repeatedly noted. The process to be used in criticism is a vital process of appreciation, in which the critic, sensitive to the whole value of human life, to the appeal of art and of conduct and of manners as well as of abstract truth, feels his way to a synthetic grasp upon what is ideally best, and portrays this concretely and persuasively for the popular imagination. Such an appreciator of life, if he produce beauty in verse, if he embody his vision of the ideal in metre, will be a poet. In other words, the poet is the appreciator of human life who sees in it most sensitively, inclusively, and penetratingly what is archetypal, and evokes his vision before others through rhythm and rhyme. In this sense poetry can hardly be denied to be a criticism of life; it is the winning portrayal of the ideal of human life as this ideal shapes itself in the mind of the poet. Such a criticism of life Dante gives, a determination and portrayal of what is ideally best in life according to mediæval conceptions; a representation of life in its integrity with a due adjustment of the claims of all the powers that enter into it—friendship, ambition, patriotism, loyalty, religion, artistic ardour, love. Such a criticism of life Shakespeare incidentally gives in terms of the full scope of Elizabethan experience in England, with due imaginative setting forth of the splendid vistas of possible achievement and unlimited development that the new knowledge and the discoveries of the Renaissance had opened. In short, the great poet is the typically sensitive, penetrative, and suggestive appreciator of life,—who calls to his aid, to make his appreciation as resonant and persuasive as possible, as potent as possible over men’s minds and hearts, all the emotional and imaginative resources of language,—rhythm, figures, allegory, symbolism,—whatever will enable him to impose his appreciation of life upon others and to insinuate into their souls his sense of the relative values of human acts and characters and passions; whatever will help him to make more overweeningly beautiful and insistently eloquent his vision of truth and beauty. In this sense the poet is the limiting ideal of the appreciative critic, and poetry is the ultimate criticism of life—the finest portrayal each age can attain to of what seems to it in life most significant and delightful.
[IV]
The purpose with which Arnold writes is now fairly apparent. His aim is to shape in happy fashion the lives of his fellows; to free them from the bonds that the struggle for existence imposes upon them; to enlarge their horizons, to enrich them spiritually, and to call all that is best within them into as vivid play as possible. When we turn to Arnold’s literary criticism we shall find this purpose no less paramount.
A glance through the volumes of Arnold’s essays renders it clear that his selection of a poet or a prose-writer for discussion was usually made with a view to putting before English readers some desirable trait of character for their imitation, some temperamental excellence that they are lacking in, some mode of belief that they neglect, some habit of thought that they need to cultivate. Joubert is studied and portrayed because of his single-hearted love of light, the purity of his disinterested devotion to truth, the fine distinction of his thought, and the freedom of his spirit from the sordid stains of worldly life. Heine is a typical leader in the war of emancipation, the arch-enemy of Philistinism, and the light-hearted, indomitable, foe of prejudice and cant. Maurice and Eugénie de Guérin are winning examples of the spiritual distinction that modern Romanism can induce in timely-happy souls. Scherer, whose critiques upon Milton and Goethe are painstakingly reproduced in the Mixed Essays, represents French critical intelligence in its best play—acute, yet comprehensive; exacting, yet sympathetic; regardful of nuances and delicately refining, and yet virile and constructive. Of the importance for modern England of emphasis on all these qualities of mind and heart, Arnold was securely convinced.
Moreover, even when his choice of subject is determined by other than moral considerations, his treatment is apt, none the less, to reveal his ethical bias. Again and again in his essays on poetry, for example, it is the substance of poetry that he is chiefly anxious to handle, while the form is left with incidental analysis. Wordsworth is the poet of joy in widest commonalty spread—the poet whose criticism of life is most sound and enduring and salutary. Shelley is a febrile creature, insecure in his sense of worldly values, “a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.”[38] The essay on Heine helps us only mediately to an appreciation of the volatile beauty of Heine’s songs, or to an intenser delight in the mere surface play of hues and moods in his verse. From the essay on George Sand, to be sure, we receive many vivid impressions of the emotional and imaginative scope of French romance; for this essay was written con amore in the revivification of an early mood of devotion, and in an unusually heightened style; the essay on Emerson is the one study that has in places somewhat of the same lyrical intensity and the same vividness of realization. Yet even in the essay on George Sand, the essayist is, on the whole, bent on revealing the temperament of the woman rather in its decisive influence on her theories of life than in its reaction upon her art as art. There is hardly a word of the Romance as a definite literary form, of George Sand’s relation to earlier French writers of fiction, or of her distinctive methods of work as a portrayer of the great human spectacle. In short, literature as art, literary forms as definite modes of artistic expression, the technique of the literary craftsman, receive, for the most part, from Arnold, slight attention.
Perhaps the one piece of work in which Arnold set himself, with some thoroughness, to the discussion of a purely literary problem was his series of lectures on Translating Homer. These lectures were produced, before his sense of responsibility for the moral regeneration of the Philistine had become importunate, and were addressed to an academic audience. For these reasons, the treatment of literary topics is more disinterested and less interrupted by practical considerations. Indeed, as will be presently noted in illustration of another aspect of Arnold’s work, these lectures contain very subtle and delicate appreciations, show everywhere exquisite responsiveness to changing effects of style, and enrich gratefully the vocabulary of impressionistic criticism.
Even in these exceptional lectures, however, Arnold’s ethical interest asserts itself. In the course of them he gives an account of the grand style in poetry,—of that poetic manner that seems to him to stand highest in the scale of excellence; and he carefully notes as an essential of this manner,—of this grand, style,—its moral power; “it can form the character, ... is edifying, ... can refine the raw natural man, ... can transmute him.”[39] This definition of the grand style will be discussed presently in connection with Arnold’s general theory of poetry; it is enough to note here that it illustrates the inseparableness in Arnold’s mind between art and morals.