A fairly complete survey of the characteristics of Arnold’s style may perhaps best be obtained by recognizing in his prose-writings four distinct manners. First may be mentioned his least compromising, severest, most exact style; it is most consistently present in the first of the Mixed Essays, that on Democracy (1861). The sentences are apt to be long and periodic. The structure of the thought is defined by means of painstakingly accurate articulations. Progress in the discussion is systematic and is from time to time conscientiously noted. The tone is earnest, almost anxious. A strenuous, systematic, responsible style, we may call it. Somewhat mitigated in its severities, somewhat less palpably official, it remains the style of Arnold’s technical reports upon education and of great portions of his writings on religious topics. It is, however, most adequately exhibited in the essay on Democracy.
Simpler in tone, easier, more colloquial, more casual, is the style that Arnold uses in his literary essays, in the uncontroversial parts of the lectures on Translating Homer, and in Culture and Anarchy. This style is characterized by its admirable union of ease, simplicity, and strength; by the affability of its tone, an affability, however, that never degenerates into over-familiarity or loses dignified restraint; by its disregard of method, or of the more pretentious manifestations of method; and by the delicate certainty with which, when at its best, it takes the reader, despite its apparently casual movement, over the essential aspects of the subject under discussion. This is really Arnold’s most distinctive manner, and it will require, after his two remaining manners have been briefly noted, some further analysis.
Arnold’s third style is most apt to appear in controversial writings or in his treatment of subjects where he is particularly aware of his enemy, or particularly bent on getting a hearing from the inattentive through cleverly malicious satire, or particularly desirous of carrying things off with a nonchalant air. It appears in the controversial parts of the lectures on Translating Homer, in many chapters of Culture and Anarchy, and runs throughout Friendship’s Garland. Its peculiarly rasping effect upon many readers has already been described. It is responsible for much of the prejudice against Arnold’s prose.
Arnold’s fourth style—intimate, rich in colour, intense in feeling, almost lyrical in tone—is the style that has just been noted as appearing in the essays on George Sand and on Emerson. There are not many passages in Arnold’s prose where this style has its way with him. But these passages are so individual, and seem to reveal Arnold with such novelty and truth, that the style that pervades them deserves to be put by itself.
The style usually taken as characteristically Arnold’s is that here classed as his second, with a generous admixture of the third. Many of the qualities of this style have already been suggested as illustrative of certain aspects of Arnold’s temperament or habits of thought. Various important points, however, still remain to be appreciated.
Colloquial in its rhythms and its idiom this style surely is. It is fond of assenting to its own propositions; “well” and “yes” often begin its sentences—signs of its casual and tentative mode of advance. Arnold’s frequent use of “well” and “yes” and neglect of the anxiously demonstrative “now,” at the opening of his sentences, mark unmistakably the unrigorousness of his method. An easily negligent treatment of the sentence, too, is often noticeable; a subject is left suspended while phrase follows phrase, or even while clause follows clause, until, quite as in ordinary talk, the subject must be repeated, the beginning of the sentence must be brought freshly to mind. Often Arnold ends a sentence and begins the next with the same word or phrase; this trick is better suited to talk than to formal discourse. Indeed, Arnold permits himself not a few of the inaccuracies of every-day speech. He uses the cleft infinitive; he introduces relative clauses with superfluous “and” or “but”; he confuses the present participle with the verbal noun and speaks, for example, of “the creating a current”; and he usually “tries and does” a thing instead of “trying to do” it. Finally, his prose abounds in exclamations and in italicized words or phrases, and so takes on much of the movement and rhythm of talk, as in the following passage: “But the gloomy, oppressive dream is now over. ‘Let us return to Nature!’ And all the world salutes with pride and joy the Renascence, and prays to Heaven: ‘Oh, that Ishmael might live before thee!’ Surely the future belongs to this brilliant newcomer, with his animating maxim: Let us return to Nature! Ah, what pitfalls are in that word Nature! Let us return to art and science, which are a part of Nature; yes. Let us return to a proper conception of righteousness, to a true sense of the method and secret of Jesus, which have been all denaturalized; yes. But, ‘Let us return to Nature!’—do you mean that we are to give full swing to our inclinations?”[59] The colloquial character of these exclamations and the search, through the use of italics, for stress like the accent of speech are unmistakable.
Arnold’s fundamental reason, conscious or unconscious, for the adoption of this colloquial tone and manner, may probably be found in the account of the ultimate purpose of all his writing, given near the close of Culture and Anarchy; he aims, not to inculcate an absolutely determinate system of truth, but to stir his readers into the keenest possible self-questioning over the worth of their stock ideas. “Socrates has drunk his hemlock and is dead; but in his own breast does not every man carry about with him a possible Socrates, in that power of disinterested play of consciousness upon his stock notions and habits, of which this wise and admirable man gave all through his lifetime the great example, and which was the secret of his incomparable influence? And he who leads men to call forth and exercise in themselves this power, and who busily calls it forth and exercises it in himself, is at the present moment, perhaps, as Socrates was in his time, more in concert with the vital working of men’s minds, and more effectually significant, than any House of Commons’ orator, or practical operator in politics.”[60] This dialectical habit of mind is, Arnold believes, best induced and stimulated by the free colloquial manner of writing that he usually adopts.
In the choice of words, however, Arnold is not noticeably colloquial. Less often in Arnold than in Newman is a familiar phrase caught audaciously from common speech and set with a sure sense of fitness and a vivifying effect in the midst of more formal expressions. His style, though idiomatic, stops short of the vocabulary of every day; it is nice—instinctively edited. Certain words are favourites with him, and, as is so often the case with the literary temperament, reveal special preoccupations. Such words are lucidity, urbanity, amenity, fluid (as an epithet for style), vital, puissant.
Arnold is never afraid of repeating a word or a phrase, hardly enough afraid of this. His trick of ending one sentence and beginning the next with the same set of words has already been noted. At times, his repetitions seem due to his attempt to write down to his public; he will not confuse them by making them grasp the same idea twice through two different forms of speech. Often, his repetitions come palpably from sheer fondness for his own happy phraseology. His description of Shelley as “a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain,” pleases him so well that he carries it over entire from one essay to another; even a whole page of his writing is sometimes so transferred.
And indeed iteration and reiteration of single phrases or forms of words is a mannerism with Arnold, and at times proves one of his most effective means both for stamping his own ideas on the mind of the public and for ridiculing his opponents. Many of his positive formulas have become part and parcel of the modern literary man’s equipment. His account of poetry as “a criticism of life”; his plea for “high seriousness” as essential to a classic; his pleasant substitute for the old English word God—“the not ourselves which makes for righteousness”; “lucidity of mind”; “natural magic” in the poetic treatment of nature; “the grand style” in poetry; these phrases of his have passed into the literary consciousness and carried with them at least a superficial recognition of many of his ideas.