Arnold had in his youth been under the spell of romantic poetry; he had heard the echoes of “the puissant hail” of those “former men,” whose “voices were in all men’s ears.” Indeed, much of his poetry is essentially a beautiful threnody over the waning of romance, and in its tenor bears witness alike to the thoroughness with which he had been imbued with the spirit of the earlier idealists and to his inability to rest content with their relation to life and their accounts of it. It is the unreality of the idealists that dissatisfies Arnold, their visionary blindness to fact, their morbid distaste for the actual. Much as he delights in the poetry of Shelley and Coleridge, these qualities in their work seem to him unsound and injurious. Or, at other times, it is the capricious self-will of the Romanticists, their impotent isolation, their enormous egoism, that impress him as fatally wrong. Even in Wordsworth he is troubled by a semi-untruth and by the lack of a courageous acceptance of the conditions of human life. Wordsworth’s
“Eyes avert their ken
From half of human fate.”
Tempered, then, as Arnold was by a deep sense of the beauty and nobleness of romantic and idealistic poetry, finely touched as he was into sympathy with the whole range of delicate intuitions, quivering sensibilities, and half-mystical aspirations that this poetry called into play, he yet came to regard its underlying conceptions of life as inadequate and misleading, and to feel the need of supplementing them by a surer and saner relation to the conventional world of common sense. The Romanticists lamented that “the world is too much with us.” Arnold shared their dislike of the world of dull routine, their fear of the world that enslaves to petty cares; yet he came more and more to distinguish between this world and the great world of common experience, spread out generously in the lives of all men; more and more clearly he realized that the true land of romance is in this region of every-day fact, or else is a mere mirage; that “America is here or nowhere.”
Arnold, then, sought to correct the febrile unreality of the idealists by restoring to men a true sense of the actual values of life. In this attempt he had recourse to Hellenic conceptions with their sanity, their firm delight in the tangible and the visible, their regard for proportion and symmetry—and more particularly to the Hellenism of Goethe. Indeed, Goethe may justly be called Arnold’s master—the writer who had the largest share in determining the characteristic principles in his theory of life. Goethe’s formula for the ideal life—Im Ganzen, Guten Wahren, resolut zu leben—sums up in a phrase the plea for perfection, for totality, for wisely balanced self-culture, that Arnold makes in so many of his essays and books.
Allusions to Goethe abound in Arnold’s essays, and in one of his letters he speaks particularly of his close and extended reading of Goethe’s works.[61] His splendid poetic tributes to Goethe, in his Memorial Verses and Obermann, have given enduring expression to his admiration for Goethe’s sanity, insight, and serene courage. His frankest prose appreciation of Goethe occurs in A French Critic on Goethe, where he characterizes him as “the clearest, the largest, the most helpful thinker of modern times; ... in the width, depth, and richness of his criticism of life, by far our greatest modern man.”[62] It is precisely in this matter of the criticism of life that Arnold took Goethe for master. Goethe, as Arnold saw, had passed through the tempering experiences of Romanticism; he had rebelled against the limitations of actual life (in Werther, for example, and Goetz), and sought passionately for the realization of romantic dreams; and he had finally come to admit the futility of rebellion and to recognize the treacherous evasiveness of emotional ideals; he had learned the “Second Reverence, for things around.” He had found in self-development, in wise self-discipline for the good of society, the secret of successful living. Arnold’s gospel of culture is largely a translation of Goethe’s doctrine into the idiom of the later years of the century, and the minute adaptation of it to the special needs of Englishmen. There is in Arnold somewhat less sleek paganism than in Goethe—a somewhat more genuine spiritual quality. But the wise limitation of the scope of human endeavour to this world is the same with both; so, too, is the sane and uncomplaining acceptance of fact and the concentration of thought and effort on the pursuit of tangible ideals of human perfection. Goethe tempered by Wordsworth—this is not an unfair account of the derivation of Arnold’s ideal.
From one point of view, then, Arnold may fairly enough be called the special advocate of conventionality. He recommends and practises conformity to the demands of conventional life. He has none of the pose or the mannerisms of the seer or the bard; he is a frequenter of drawing-rooms and a diner-out, and is fairly adept in the dialect and mental idiom of the frivolously-minded. In all that he writes, “he delivers himself,” as the heroine in Peacock’s novel urged Scythrop (Shelley) to do, “like a man of this world.” He pretends to no transcendental second sight and indulges in none of Carlyle’s spinning-dervish jargon. He is never guilty of Ruskin’s occasional false sentiment or falsetto rhetoric. The world that he lives in is the world that exists in the minds and thoughts and feelings of the most sensible and cultivated people who make up modern society; the world over which, as its presiding genius, broods the haunting presence of Mr. George Meredith’s Comic Spirit. It is “in this world” that “he has hope,” in its ever greater refinement, in its ever greater comprehensiveness, in its increasing ability to impose its standards on others. When he half pleads for an English Academy—he never quite pleads for one—he does this because of his desire for some organ by which, in art and literature, the collective sense of the best minds in society assembled may make itself effective. So, too, when he pleads for the Established Church he does this for similar reasons; he is convinced that it offers by far the best means for imposing widely upon the nation, as a standard of religious experience, what is most spiritual in the lives and aspirations of the greatest number of cultivated people. In many such ways as these, then, Matthew Arnold’s kingdom is a kingdom of this world.
And yet, after all, Arnold wears his worldliness with a very great difference. If he be compared, for example, with other literary men of the world,—with Francis Jeffrey or Lord Macaulay or Lockhart,—there is at once obvious in him an all-pervasive quality that marks his temper as far subtler and finer than theirs. His worldliness is a worldliness of his own, compounded out of many exquisite simples. His faith in poetry is intense and absolute. “The future of poetry,” he declares, “is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay.” This declaration contrasts strikingly with Macaulay’s pessimistic theory of the essentially make-believe character of poetry—a theory that puts it on a level with children’s games, and, like the still more puerile theory of Herr Max Nordau, looks forward to its extinction as the race reaches genuine maturity. Poetry always remains for Arnold the most adequate and beautiful mode of speech possible to man; and this faith, which runs implicitly through all his writing, is plainly the outcome of a mood very different from that of the ordinary man of the world, and is the expression of an emotional refinement and a spiritual sensitiveness that are, at least in part, his abiding inheritance from the Romanticists. This faith is the manifestation of the ideal element in his nature, which, in spite of the plausible man-of-the-world aspect and tone of much of his prose, makes itself felt even in his prose as the inspirer of a kind of “divine unrest.”
In his Preface to his first series of essays Arnold playfully takes to himself the name transcendentalist. To the stricter sect of the transcendentalists he can hardly pretend to belong. He certainly has none of their delight in envisaging mystery; none of their morbid relish for an “O altitudo!” provided only the altitude be wrapped in clouds. He believes, to be sure, in a “power not ourselves that makes for righteousness”; but his interest in this power and his comments upon it confine themselves almost wholly to its plain and palpable influence upon human conduct. Even in his poetry he can hardly be rated as more than a transcendentalist manqué; and in his prose he is never so aware of the unseen as in his poetry.
Yet, whether or no he be strictly a transcendentalist, Arnold is, in Disraeli’s famous phrase, “on the-side of the angels”; he is a persistent and ingenious opponent of purely materialistic or utilitarian conceptions of life. “The kingdom of God is within you”; this is a cardinal point in the doctrine of Culture. The highest good, that for which every man should continually be striving, is an inner state of perfection; material prosperity, political enactments, religious organizations—all these things are to be judged solely according to their furtherance of the spiritual well-being of the individual; they are all mere machinery—more or less ingenious means for giving to every man a chance to make the most of his life. The true “ideal of human perfection” is “an inward spiritual activity, having for its characters increased sweetness, increased light, increased life, increased sympathy.” Arnold’s worldliness, then, is a worldliness that holds many of the elements of idealism in solution, that has none of the cynical acquiescence of unmitigated worldliness, that throughout all its range shows the gentle urgency of a fine discontent with fact.
To realize the subtle and high quality of Arnold’s genius, one has but to compare him with men of science or with rationalists pure and simple,—with men like Professor Huxley, Darwin, or Bentham. Their carefulness for truth, their intellectual strength, their vast services to mankind, are acknowledged even by their opponents. Yet Arnold has a far wider range of sensibilities than any one of them; life plays upon him in far richer and more various ways; it touches him into response through associations that have a more distinctively human character, and that have a deeper and a warmer colour of emotion drawn out of the past of the race. In short, Arnold brings to bear upon the present a finer spiritual appreciation than the mere man of the world or the mere man of science—a larger accumulation of imaginative experience. Through this temperamental scope and refinement he is able, while accepting conventional and actual life, to redeem it in some measure from its routine and its commonplace character, and to import into it beauty and meaning and good from beyond the range of science or positive truth. All this comes from the fact that, despite his worldly conformity, he has the romantic ferment in his blood. If his conformity be compared with that of the eighteenth century,—with the worldliness of Swift or Addison,—the transformation wrought by romantic influences is appreciable in all its scope and meaning.