Iteration Arnold uses, too, as a weapon of ridicule. He isolates some unluckily symbolic phrase of his opponent’s, points out its damaging implications or its absurdity, and then repeats it pitilessly as an ironical refrain. The phrase gains in grotesqueness at each return—“sweetening and gathering sweetness evermore”—and, finally, seems to the reader to contain the distilled quintessence of the foolishness inherent in the view that Arnold ridicules. It is in this way that in Culture and Anarchy the agitation to “enable a man to marry his deceased wife’s sister” becomes symbolic of all the absurd fads of “liberal practitioners.” Similarly, when he is criticising the cheap enthusiasm with which democratic politicians describe modern life, Arnold culls from the account of a Nottingham child-murder the phrase, “Wragg is in custody,” and adds it decoratively after every eulogy on present social conditions. Or, again, the Times, at a certain diplomatic crisis, exhorts the Government to set forth England’s claims “with promptitude and energy”; and this grandiloquent, and, under the circumstances, empty phrase becomes, as Arnold persistently rings its changes, irresistibly droll as symbolic of cheap bluster. Whole sentences are often reiterated by Arnold in this same satirical fashion. Mr. Frederic Harrison, in the course of a somewhat atrabilious criticism, had accused Arnold of being a mere dilettante and of having “no philosophy with coherent, interdependent, subordinate, and derivative principles.” This latter phrase, with its bristling array of epithets, struck Arnold as delightfully redolent of pedantry; and, as has already been noted, it recurs again and again in his writings in passages of mock apology and ironical self-depreciation. Readers of Literature and Science, too, will remember how amusingly Arnold plays with “Mr. Darwin’s famous proposition that ‘our ancestor was a hairy quadruped furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in his habits.’” It should be noted that in all these cases the phrase that is reiterated has a symbolic quality, and therefore, in addition to its delicious absurdity, comes to possess a subtly argumentative value.
Akin to Arnold’s skilful use of reiteration is his ingenuity in the invention of telling nicknames. On three classes of his fellow-countrymen he has bestowed names that have become generally current,—Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace. The Nonconformist, because of his unyielding sectarianism, he compares to Ephraim, “a wild ass alone by himself.” To Professor Huxley, who has been talking of “the Levites of culture,” Arnold suggests that “the poor humanist is sometimes apt to regard” men of science as the “Nebuchadnezzars” of culture. The Church and State Review Arnold dubs “the High Church rhinoceros”; the Record is “the Evangelical hyena.”
It is interesting to note how often Arnold’s satire has a biblical turn. His mind is saturated with Bible history and his memory stored with biblical phraseology; moreover, allusions whether to the incidents or the language of the Bible are sure to be quickly caught by English readers; hence Arnold frequently gives point to his style through the use of scriptural phrases or illustrations. Many of the foregoing nicknames come from biblical sources. The lectures on Homer offer one admirable instance of Scripture quotation. Arnold has been urged to define the grand style. With his customary dislike of abstractions, he protests against the demand. “Alas! the grand style is the last matter in the world for verbal definition to deal with adequately. One may say of it as is said of faith: ‘One must feel it in order to know what it is.’ But, as of faith, so too we may say of nobleness, of the grand style: ‘Woe to those who know it not!’ yet this expression, though indefinable, has a charm; one is the better for considering it; bonum est, nos hic esse; nay, one loves to try to explain it, though one knows that one must speak imperfectly. For those, then, who ask the question, What is the grand style? with sincerity, I will try to make some answer, inadequate as it must be. For those who ask it mockingly I have no answer, except to repeat to them with compassionate sorrow, the Gospel words: Moriemini in peccatis vestris, Ye shall die in your sins.”
An interesting comment on this habit of Arnold’s of scriptural phrasing occurs in one of his letters: “The Bible,” he says, “is the only book well enough known to quote as the Greeks quoted Homer, sure that the quotation would go home to every reader, and it is quite astonishing how a Bible sentence clinches and sums up an argument. ‘Where the State’s treasure is bestowed,’ etc., for example, saved me at least half a column of disquisition.” A moment later he adds a charmingly characteristic explanation as regards his incidental use of Scripture texts: “I put it in the Vulgate Latin, as I always do when I am not earnestly serious.” This habit of “high seriousness” in such matters, it is to be feared he in some measure outgrew.
Arnold’s fine instinct in the choice of words has thus far been illustrated chiefly as subservient to satire. In point of fact, however, it is subject to no such limitation. Whatever his purpose, he has in a high degree the faculty of putting words together with a delicate congruity that gives them a permanent hold on the memory and imagination. In this power of fashioning vital phrases he far surpasses Newman, and indeed most recent writers except those who have developed epigram and paradox into a meretricious manner. “A free play of the mind”; “disinterestedness”; “a current of true and fresh ideas”; “the note of provinciality”; “sweet reasonableness”; “the method of inwardness”; “the secret of Jesus”; “the study of perfection”; “the power of conduct, the power of intellect and knowledge, the power of beauty, and the power of social life and manners”—how happily vital are all these phrases! How perfectly integrated! Yet they are unelaborate and almost obvious. Christianity is “the greatest and happiest stroke ever yet made for human perfection.” “Burke saturates politics with thought.” “Our august Constitution sometimes looks ... a colossal machine for the manufacture of Philistines.” “English public life ... that Thyestëan banquet of claptrap.” The Atlantic cable—“that great rope, with a Philistine at each end of it talking inutilities.” These sentences illustrate still further Arnold’s deftness of phrasing. But with the last two or three we return to the ironical manner that has already been exemplified.
In his use of figures Arnold is sparing; similes are few, metaphors by no means frequent. It may be questioned whether it is ever the case with Arnold, as with Newman, that a whole paragraph is subtly controlled in its phrasing by the presence of a single figure in the author’s mind. Simpler in this respect Arnold’s style probably is than even Newman’s; its general inferiority to Newman’s style in point of simplicity is owing to the infelicities of tone and manner that have already been noted.
Illustrations, Arnold uses liberally and happily. He excels in drawing them patly from current events and the daily prints. This increases both the actuality of his discussion—its immediacy—and its appearance of casualness, of being a pleasantly unconsidered trifle. For example, the long and elaborate discussion, Culture and Anarchy, begins with an allusion to a recent article in the Quarterly Review on Sainte-Beuve. Curiosity as a habit of mind had been somewhat disparaged in that article, and it is through a colloquial examination of just what is involved in commendable curiosity that Arnold is led to his analysis of culture. Later in the same chapter, references occur to such sectarian journals as the Nonconformist, and to current events as reported and criticised in their columns. Even in essays dealing with purely literary topics—in such an essay as that on Eugénie de Guérin—there is this same actuality. “While I was reading the journal of Mlle. de Guérin,” Arnold tells us, “there came into my hands the memoir and poems of a young Englishwoman, Miss Emma Tatham”; and then he uses this memoir to illustrate the contrasts between the poetic traditions of Roman Catholicism and the somewhat sordid intellectual poetry of English sectarian life. This closeness of relation between Arnold’s writing and his daily experience is very noticeable, and increases the reader’s sense of the novelty and genuineness and immediacy of what he reads; it conduces to that impression of vitality that is, perhaps, in the last analysis, the most characteristic impression the reader carries away from Arnold’s writings.
[VIII]
And, indeed, the union in Arnold’s style of actuality with distinction becomes a very significant matter when we turn to consider his precise relation to his age, for it suggests what is perhaps the most striking characteristic of his personality—his reconciliation of conventionality with fineness of spiritual temper. In this reconciliation lies the secret of Arnold’s relation to his romantic predecessors and to the men of his own time. He accepts the actual, conventional life of the every-day world frankly and fully, as the earlier idealists had never quite done, and yet he retains a strain of other-worldliness inherited from the dreamers of former generations. Arnold’s gospel of culture is an attempt to import into actual life something of the fine spiritual fervour of the Romanticists with none of the extravagance or the remoteness from fact of those “madmen”—those idealists of an earlier age.
Like the Romanticists, Arnold gives to the imagination and the emotions the primacy in life; like the Romanticists he contends against formalists, system-makers, and all devotees of abstractions. It is by an exquisite tact, rather than by logic, that Arnold in all doubtful matters decides between good and evil. He keeps to the concrete image; he is an appreciator of life, not a deducer of formulas or a demonstrator. He is continually concerned about what ought to be; he is not cynically or scientifically content with the knowledge of what is. And yet, unlike the Romanticists, Arnold is in the world, and of it; he has given heed to the world-spirit’s warning, “submit, submit”; he has “learned the Second Reverence, for things around.” In Arnold, imaginative literature returns from its romantic quest for the Holy Grail and betakes itself half-humorously, and yet with now and then traces of the old fervour, to the homely duties of every-day life.