Three studies in literature

by Lewis E. Gates

It is, then, as an appreciator of what may perhaps be called the spiritual qualities of literature that Arnold is most distinctively a furtherer of criticism. An appreciator of beauty,—of true beauty wherever found,—that is what he would willingly be; and yet, as the matter turns out, the beauty that he most surely enjoys and reveals has invariably a spiritual aroma,—is the finer breath of intense spiritual life. Or, if spiritual be too mystical a word to apply to Homer and Goethe, perhaps Arnold should rather be termed an appreciator of such beauty in literature as carries with it an inevitable suggestion of elevation and nobleness of character in the author.

The importance of appreciation in criticism Arnold has described in one of the Mixed Essays: “Admiration is salutary and formative; ... but things admirable are sown wide, and are to be gathered here and gathered there, not all in one place; and until we have gathered them wherever they are to be found, we have not known the true salutariness and formativeness of admiration. The quest is large; and occupation with the unsound or half-sound, delight in the not good or less good, is a sore let and hindrance to us. Release from such occupation and delight sets us free for ranging farther, and for perfecting our sense of beauty. He is the happy man, who, encumbering himself with the love of nothing which is not beautiful, is able to embrace the greatest number of things beautiful in his life.”[55]

On this disinterested quest, then, for the beautiful, Arnold in his essays nominally fares forth. Yet certain limitations in his appreciation, over and beyond his prevalent ethical interest, must at once be noted. Music, painting, and sculpture have seemingly nothing to say to him. In his Letters there are only a few allusions to any of these arts, and such as occur do not surpass in significance the comments of the chance loiterer in foreign galleries or visitor of concert rooms. In his essays there are none of the correlations between the effects and methods of literature and those of kindred arts that may do so much either to individualize or to illustrate the characteristics of poetry. For Arnold, literature and poetry seem to make up the whole range of art.

Within these limits, however,—the limits imposed by preoccupation with conduct and by carelessness of all arts except literature,—Arnold has been a prevailing revealer of beauty. Not his most hostile critic can question the delicacy of his perception, so far as he allows his perception free play. On the need of nice and ever nicer discriminations in the apprehension of the shifting values of literature, he has himself often insisted. Critics who let their likes and dislikes assert themselves turbulently, to the destruction of fine distinctions, always fall under Arnold’s condemnation. “When Mr. Palgrave dislikes a thing, he feels no pressure constraining him, either to try his dislike closely or to express it moderately; he does not mince matters, he gives his dislike all its own way.... He dislikes the architecture of the Rue Rivoli, and he puts it on the level with the architecture of Belgravia and Gower Street; he lumps them all together in one condemnation; he loses sight of the shade, the distinction which is here everything.” For a similar blurring of impressions, Professor Newman is taken to task, though in Newman’s case the faulty appreciations are due to a different cause: “Like all learned men, accustomed to desire definite rules, he draws his conclusions too absolutely; he wants to include too much under his rules; he does not quite perceive that in poetical criticism the shade, the fine distinction, is everything; and that, when he has once missed this, in all he says he is in truth but beating the air.” Here, again, what Arnold pleads for is temperamental sensitiveness, delicacy of perception. To appreciate literature more and more sensitively in terms of “an undulating and diverse temperament,” this is the ideal that he puts before literary criticism.

His own appreciations of poetry are probably richest, most discriminating, and most disinterested in the lectures on Translating Homer. The imaginative tact is unfailing with which he renders the contour and the subject-qualities of the various poems that he comments on; and equally noteworthy is the divining instinct with which he captures the spirit of each poet and sets it before us with a phrase or a symbol. The “inversion and pregnant conciseness” of Milton’s style, its “laborious and condensed fulness”; the plainspokenness, freshness, vigorousness, and yet fancifulness and curious complexity of Chapman’s style; Spenser’s “sweet and easy slipping movement”; Scott’s “bastard epic style”; the “one continual falsetto” of Macaulay’s “pinchbeck Roman Ballads,”—all these characterizations are delicately sure in their phrasing and suggestion, and are the clearer because the various styles are made to stand in continual contrast with Homer’s style, the rapidity, directness, simplicity, and nobleness of which Arnold keeps ever present in our consciousness. Incidentally, too, such suggestive discriminations as that between simplesse and simplicité, the “semblance” of simplicity and the “real quality,” are wrought out for the reader as the critic goes on with his pursuit of the essential qualities of Homeric thought and diction. To read these lectures is a thoroughly tempering process; a process that renders the mind and imagination permanently finer in texture, more elastic, more sensitively sure in tone, and subtly responsive to the demands of good art.

The essay on the Study of Poetry, which was written as preface to Ward’s English Poets, is also rich in appreciation, and at times almost as disinterested as the lectures on Homer; yet perhaps never quite so disinterested. For in the Study of Poetry Arnold is persistently aware of his conception of “the grand style” and bent on winning his readers to make it their own. Only poets who attain this grand style deserve to be “classics,” and the continual insistence on the note of “high seriousness”—its presence or absence—becomes rather wearisome. Moreover, Arnold’s preoccupation with this ultimate manner and quality tends to limit the freedom and delicate truth of his appreciations of other manners and minor qualities. At times, one is tempted to charge Arnold with some of the unresponsiveness of temperament that he ascribes to systematic critics, and to find even Arnold himself under the perilous sway of a fixed idea. Yet, when all is said, the Study of Poetry is full of fine things, and does much to widen the range of appreciation, and, at the same time, to make appreciation more certain. “The liquid diction, the fluid movement of Chaucer, his large, free, sound representation of things”; Burns’s “touches of piercing, sometimes almost intolerable, pathos,” his “archness,” too, and his “soundness”; Shelley, “that beautiful spirit building his many-coloured haze of words and images ‘Pinnacled dim in the intense inane’”; these, and other interpretations like them, are easily adequate and carry the qualities of each poet readily into the minds and imaginations of sympathetic readers. Appreciation is much the richer for this essay on the Study of Poetry.

Nor must Arnold’s suggestive appreciations of prose style be forgotten. Several of them have passed into standard accounts of clearly recognized varieties of prose diction. Arnold’s phrasing of the matter has made all sensitive English readers permanently more sensitive to “the warm glow, blithe movement, and soft pliancy of life” of the Attic style, and also permanently more hostile to “the over-heavy richness and encumbered gait” of the Asiatic style. Equally good is his account of the Corinthian style: “It has glitter without warmth, rapidity without ease, effectiveness without charm. Its characteristic is that it has no soul; all it exists for, is to get its ends, to make its points, to damage its adversaries, to be admired, to triumph. A style so bent on effect at the expense of soul, simplicity, and delicacy; a style so little studious of the charm of the great models; so far from classic truth and grace, must surely be said to have the note of provinciality.”[56] “Middle-class Macaulayese” is his name for Hepworth Dixon’s style; a style which he evidently regards as likely to gain favour and establish itself. “I call it Macaulayese ... because it has the same internal and external characteristics as Macaulay’s style; the external characteristic being a hard, metallic movement with nothing of the soft play of life, and the internal characteristic being a perpetual semblance of hitting the right nail on the head without the reality. And I call it middle-class Macaulayese, because it has these faults without the compensation of great studies and of conversance with great affairs, by which Macaulay partly redeemed them.”[57] It will, of course, be noted that these latter appreciations deal for the most part with divergences from the beautiful in style, but they none the less quicken and refine the æsthetic sense.

Finally, throughout the two series of miscellaneous essays there is, in the midst of much business with ethical matters, an often-recurring free play of imagination in the interests, solely and simply, of beauty. Many are the happy windfalls these essays offer of delicate interpretation both of poetic effect and of creative movement, and many are the memorable phrases and symbols by which incidentally the essential quality of a poet or prose-writer is securely lodged in the reader’s consciousness.

And yet, wide ranging and delicately sensitive as are Arnold’s appreciations, the feeling will assert itself, in a final survey of his work in literary criticism, that he nearly always has designs on his readers and that appreciation is a means to an end. The end in view is the exorcism of the spirit of Philistinism. Arnold’s conscience is haunted by this hideous apparition as Luther’s was by the devil, and he is all the time metaphorically throwing his inkstand at the spectre. Or, to put the matter in another way, his one dominating wish is to help modern Englishmen to “conquer the hard unintelligence” which is “their bane; to supple and reduce it by culture, by a growth in the variety, fulness, and sweetness of their spiritual life”; and the appreciative interpretation of literature to as wide a circle of readers as possible seems to him one of the surest ways of thus educing in his fellow-countrymen new spiritual qualities. It must not be forgotten that Matthew Arnold was the son of Thomas Arnold, master of Rugby; there is in him a hereditary pedagogic bias—an inevitable trend towards moral suasion. The pedagogic spirit has suffered a sea-change into something rich and strange, and yet traces of its origin linger about it. Criticism with Arnold is rarely, if ever, irresponsible; it is our schoolmaster to bring us to culture.

In a letter of 1863 Arnold speaks of the great transformation which “in this concluding half of the century the English spirit is destined to undergo.” “I shall do,” he adds, “what I can for this movement in literature; freer perhaps in that sphere than I could be in any other, but with the risk always before me, if I cannot charm the wild beast of Philistinism while I am trying to convert him, of being torn in pieces by him.”[58] In charming the wild beast Arnold ultimately succeeded; and yet there is a sense in which he fell a victim to his very success. The presence of the beast, and the necessity of fluting to him debonairly and winningly, fastened themselves on Arnold’s imagination, and subdued him to a comparatively narrow range of subjects and set of interests. From the point of view, at least, of what is desirable in appreciative criticism, Arnold was injured by his sense of responsibility; he lacks the detachment and the delicate mobility that are the redeeming traits of modern dilettantism.