Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, February 1885

by Various

On the other hand, if he were more real in what was addressed to his particular audience than pulpit-preachers often are, he resorted once more, with his usual hardened indifference to the meaning of words and the principles of true literature, to that practice of debasing the coinage of religious language, and using great sayings in a new and washed-out sense of his own, of which pulpit-preachers are seldom guilty. This practice of Mr. Arnold’s is the only great set-off against the brilliant services he has rendered to English literature, but it is one which we should not find it easy to condemn too strongly. Every one knows how, in various books of his, Mr. Arnold has tried to “verify” the teaching of the Bible, while depriving the name of God of all personal meaning; to verify the Gospel of Christ, while denying that Christ had any message to us from a world beyond our own; and even,—wildest enterprise of all,—so to rationalise the strictly theological language of St. John as to rob it of all its theological significance. Well, we do not charge this offence on Mr. Arnold as in any sense whatever an attempt to play fast-and-loose with words; for he has again and again confessed to all the world, with the explicitness and vigor which are natural to him, the precise drift of his enterprise. But we do charge it on Mr. Arnold as in the highest possible sense a great literary misdemeanor, that he has lent his high authority to the attempt to give to a great literature a pallid, faded, and artificial complexion, though, with his view of it, his duty obviously was to declare boldly that that literature teaches what is, in his opinion, false and superstitious, and deserves our admiration only as representing a singularly grand, though obsolete, stage in man’s development. Mr. Arnold is as frank and honest as the day. But frank and honest as he is, his authority is not the less lent to a non-natural rendering of Scripture infinitely more intolerable than that non-natural interpretation of the Thirty-nine Articles which once brought down the wrath of the world of Protestants on the author of “Tract 90.” In this Whitechapel lecture Mr. Arnold tells his hearers that in the “preternatural and miraculous aspect” which the popular Christianity assumes Christianity is not solid or verifiable, but that there is another aspect of Christianity which is solid and verifiable, which aspect of it makes no appeal to a preternatural [i. e., supernatural] world at all. Then he goes on, after eulogising Mr. Watts’s pictures,—of one of which a great mosaic has been set up in Whitechapel as a memorial of Mr. Barnett’s noble work there,—to remark that good as it is to bring home to “the less refined classes” the significance of Art and Beauty, it is none the less true that “whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again,” and to suggest, of course, by implication, that there is a living water springing up to everlasting life, of which he who drinks shall never thirst. Then he proceeds thus:—

“No doubt the social sympathies, the feeling for Beauty, the pleasure of Art, if left merely by themselves, if untouched by what is the deepest thing in human life—religion—are apt to become ineffectual and superficial. The art which Mr. Barnett has done his best to make known to the people here, the art of men like Mr. Watts, the art manifested in works such as that which has just now been unveiled upon the walls of St. Jude’s Church, has a deep and powerful connection with religion. You have seen the mosaic, and have read, perhaps, the scroll which is attached to it. There is the figure of Time, a strong young man, full of hope, energy, daring, and adventure, moving on to take possession of life; and opposite to him there is that beautiful figure of Death, representing the breakings-off, the cuttings short, the baffling disappointments, the heart-piercing separations from which the fullest life and the most fiery energy cannot exempt us. Look at that strong and bold young man, that mournful figure must go hand in hand with him for ever. And those two figures, let us admit if you like, belong to Art. But who is that third figure whose scale weighs deserts, and who carries a sword of fire? We are told again by the text printed on the scroll, ‘The Eternal [the scroll, however, has ‘the Lord’] is a God of Judgment; blessed are they that wait for him.’ It is the figure of Judgment, and that figure, I say, belongs to religion. The text which explains the figure is taken from one of the Hebrew Prophets; but an even more striking text is furnished us from that saying of the Founder of Christianity when he was about to leave the world, and to leave behind him his Disciples, who, so long as he lived, had him always to cling to, and to do all their thinking for them. He told them that when he was gone they should find a new source of thought and feeling opening itself within them, and that this new source of thought and feeling should be a comforter to them, and that it should convince, he said, the world of many things. Amongst other things, he said, it should convince the world that Judgment comes, and that the Prince of this world is judged. That is a text which we shall do well to lay to heart, considering it with and alongside that text from the Prophet. More and more it is becoming manifest that the Prince of this world is really judged, that that Prince who is the perpetual ideal of selfishly possessing and enjoying, and of the worlds fashioned under the inspiration of this ideal, is judged. One world and another have gone to pieces because they were fashioned under the inspiration of this ideal, and that is a consoling and edifying thought.”

Now, when we know, as Mr. Arnold wishes us all to know, that to him “the Eternal” means nothing more than that “stream of tendency, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness,” that “Judgment” means nothing but the ultimate defeat which may await those who set themselves against this stream of tendency, if the stream of tendency be really as potent and as lasting as the Jews believed God to be, we do not think that the consoling character of this text will be keenly felt by impartial minds. Further, we should remember that according to Mr. Arnold, when Christ told his disciples that the Comforter should “reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment; of sin because they believed not on me, of righteousness because I go to the Father, and ye see me no more; of judgment because the prince of this world is judged,” we should understand this as importing, to those at least who agree with Mr. Arnold, only that, for some unknown reason, a new wave of feeling would follow Christ’s death, which would give mankind a new sense of their unworthiness, a new vision of Christ’s holiness, and a new confidence in the power of that “stream of tendency, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness,” in which Christ’s own personality would then be merged; and further, that this powerful stream of tendency would probably sweep away all institutions not tending to righteousness but opposing an obstacle to that tendency. Well, all we can say is that, in watering-down in this way the language of the Bible, Mr. Arnold, if he is doing nothing else, is doing what lies in his power to extinguish the distinctive significance of a great literature. The whole power of that literature depends from beginning to end on the faith in a Divine Being who holds the universe in his hand, whose will nothing can resist, who inspires the good, who punishes the evil, who judges kingdoms as he judges the hearts of men, and whose mind manifested in Christ promised to Christ’s disciples that which his power alone availed to fulfil. To substitute for a faith such as this, a belief—to our minds the wildest in the world, and the least verifiable—that “a stream of tendency” effects all that the prophets ascribed to God, or, at least so much of it as ever will be effected at all, and that Christ, by virtue merely of his complete identification with this stream of tendency, is accomplishing posthumously, without help from either Father, Son, or Spirit, all that he could have expected to accomplish through the personal agency of God, is to extract the kernel from the shell, and to ask us to accept the empty husk for the living grain. We are not reproaching Mr. Arnold for his scepticism. We are reproaching him as a literary man for trying to give currency in a debased form to language of which the whole power depends on its being used honestly in the original sense. “The Eternal” means one thing when it means the everlasting and supreme thought and will and life; it is an expression utterly blank and dead when it means nothing but a select “stream of tendency” which is assumed, for no particular reason, to be constant, permanent, and victorious. “Living water” means one thing when it means the living stream of God’s influence; it has no salvation in it at all when it means only that which is the purest of the many tendencies in human life. The shadow of judgment means one thing when it is cast by the will of the supreme righteousness; it has no solemnity in it when it expresses only the sanguine anticipation of human virtue. There is no reason on earth why Mr. Arnold should not water-down the teaching of the Bible to his own view of its residual meaning; but then, in the name of sincere literature, let him find his own language for it, and not dress up this feeble and superficial hopefulness of the nineteenth century in words which are undoubtedly stamped with an ardor and a peace for which his teaching can give us no sort of justification. “Solidity and verification,” indeed! Never was there a doctrine with less bottom in it and less pretence of verification than his; but be that as it may, he must know, as well as we know, that his doctrine is as different from the doctrine of the Bible as the shadow is different from the substance. Has Mr. Arnold lately read Dr. Newman’s great Oxford sermon on “Unreal Words”? If not, we wish he would refer to it again, and remember the warning addressed to those who “use great words and imitate the sentences of others,” and who “fancy that those whom they imitate had as little meaning as themselves,” or “perhaps contrive to think that they themselves have a meaning adequate to their words.” It is to us impossible to believe that Mr. Arnold should have indulged such an illusion. He knows too well the difference between the great faith which spoke in prophet and apostle, and the feeble faith which absorbs a drop or two of grateful moisture from a “stream of tendency” on the banks of which it weakly lingers. Mr. Arnold is really putting Literature,—of which he is so great a master,—to shame, when he travesties the language of the prophets, and the evangelists, and of our Lord himself, by using it to express the dwarfed convictions and withered hopes of modern rationalists who love to repeat the great words of the Bible, after they have given up the strong meaning of them as fanatical superstitions. Mr. Arnold’s readings of Scriptures are the spiritual assignats of English faith.—Spectator.

AUTHORS AS SUPPRESSORS OF THEIR BOOKS.

BY W. H. OLDING, LL.B.

Alike in the annals of forgery—State forgery of “real” evidence—and in the annals of the British drama, “The Golden Rump” has a history very well known. It was a farce, the representation of which was made the excuse for the passing of the Act whereunder the licensing of theatrical performances was established. At the same time it was a farce which those in power had directly induced its author to compose. That there was no one to imagine or tolerate a play sufficiently rampant to justify the proposal to fetter, which Party Government imagined it well to execute—that this was believed, becomes a testimony to the potency of customary self-regulation. Now conversely, and carrying the analogy to all branches of literature, it may be asserted that the suppression of books by authors themselves is likely to be comparatively frequent just in those countries in which the State does not much concern itself with suppression by its authority. If this analogy have force it must, to Englishmen, be peculiarly gratifying—though the elements of restraint have prevailed in our history to an extent far beyond general belief—at a time when Dr. Reusch’s excellent Index of books prohibited by the authority of Pope, Archbishop, or Continental University is extracting from the competent critics of all countries the homage which untiring assiduity, monumental learning, and rich moderation compel.

However, into the measurement of this comparative frequency, causes essentially enter. These, in England, as in other realms, have abounded. Now, of all the motives which have led authors to consign their compositions to the flames, one of the most frequent, if one of the least seductive, has been the ridicule and elaborate discouragement with which parents have received the knowledge of their offspring’s first essays. The feeling which prompts this is not one to be altogether blamed: it has its partial justification even in the distaste with which the recipient children lay open their treasure-house to those who in days of feebleness have guarded them. For there is, as Tom Tulliver felt, a “family repulsion which spoils the most sacred relations of our lives,” and which is only broken down by some community of art levelling with the sense of a universality wherein all distinction of discipleship is lost, or else by dire circumstance shattering into shapelessness beyond disguise. This, perhaps, rather than quicker sensitiveness, is why it is that young Mozart met response, but the little Burney girl did not. Only to Susanna, her sister, would Fanny breathe her secret, and anxious was she because her mother gained sufficient inkling to induce her periodically to tell the evils of a scribbling turn of mind. But, as with Petrarch centuries before, some time in her fifteenth year the promptings of obedience gained the day. “She resolved,” says Charlotte, her niece and editor, “to make an auto da fé of all her manuscripts, and, if possible, to throw away her pen. Seizing, therefore, an opportunity when Dr. and Mrs. Burney were from home, she made over to a bonfire in a paved play-court the whole stock of her compositions, while faithful Susanna stood by, weeping at the conflagration. Among the works thus immolated was one tale of considerable length, the ‘History of Caroline Evelyn,’ the mother of ‘Evelina.’”

As if further to justify the halting or rebuking posture which at first is apt to prove provocative of indignation, remarkable diffidence in maturer life has pushed its way into sight where early publications have been due to parental sympathy. The historian of Greece, Connop Thirlwall, Bishop of St. David’s, was taught Latin at the age of three: at four could “read Greek with an ease and fluency which astonished all who heard him,” and at seven began the composition of didactic homilies. Now to this precocity was allied a taste for verse, especially as shown in Dryden and in Pope; and the result was the issue of a work, edited and prefaced by the father, entitled “Primitiæ: or Essays and Poems on Various Subjects, Religious, Moral and Entertaining; by Connop Thirlwall, eleven years of age.” But not only did these effusions lead to no riper verse, but it is understood the Bishop disliked the little book, and by no means enjoyed seeing copies of it. That he went to the length of Thomas Lovell Beddoes we are not prepared to say. He, when a freshman at Oxford, first owned himself an author by sending to the press the “Improvisatore.” “Of this little memento of his weakness, as he used to consider it,” says his biographer, “Beddoes soon became thoroughly ashamed, and long before he left Oxford he suppressed the traces of its existence, carrying the war of extermination into the bookshelves of his acquaintance, where, as he chuckled to record, it was his wont to leave intact its externals (some gay binding perhaps of his own selection), but thoroughly eviscerated, every copy on which he could lay his hands.”

Gymnasiarch as well as poet, it was natural that Pehr Henrik Ling, the Swede, should do whatever he did with energy. Still, the burning of eleven volumes by the time the age of twenty-one was reached must be allowed to show as much vigor and striving after excellence in the language of the gods as in what has been humorously termed “the language of nudges.” Indeed, the author of the epic “Asar” does not seem to have thrown any work into general circulation until he arrived at thirty, and then only on the pressure offered by some friends, without his knowledge, having got up a subscription for the publication of one of his poems, when, says he, “I could not honorably refuse.” Yet there must have been much of interest in these now perished volumes, for not only had their author, early as school-days, experienced something of the bitterness of life—of a political life, which was shared by the people—in being driven from Wexio because he would not betray innocent youngsters who had been comrades, but in the wandering outcast career which for some years following he had strange and drear experience, which, acting on a nature poetic and passionate, can hardly but have expressed itself now in soothing verse, now in melancholy, but ever in rich and true. It could at least be wished, if but for the purpose of forwarding that life-resulting interchange of matter which men of science assure us ceaselessly proceeds, that some of those who compose under feeble inspiration, or under inspiration which has lost its fire with lapse of time and change of circumstance, and which, though a spiritless yeast, tempts to use as a ferment, would be as little sparing in their sacrifices, so that it should not be held up as a thing for boast, as we perceive it of late to have been in the case of the Rev. Dr. Tiffany, that some five hundred pages of sermons have been delivered to the irrevocable pyre.

There is the semblance of a common motive inducing men to destroy their early work, and give over the labor of their hands to consumption on approach of death. But in the latter case there is usually more concentration and intensity of purpose. The purpose unquestionably may have this added intensity merely in meanness; but there is also scope for more valorous self-judgment. The argument is clearly seized by Dugald Stewart thus:—