Essays in Criticism. By Matthew Arnold. Boston: Ticknor & Fields.
A more satisfactory volume of English prose than this has not come into our hands since the first appearance of the famous "Essays and Reviews." Differing widely from that collection in kind and scope, it yet belongs in the main to the same school of liberal thought in which England has made of late such rapid strides.
As a poet, Matthew Arnold had been known among us for a decade or more of years, and, though not celebrated with the wide popularity of Tennyson, had been as cordially cherished as the Laureate himself by all who valued in poetry the indications of profound intellectual experience as well as the singer's native gift. Those who are most familiar with the verses of the Oxford Professor will be least surprised with the critical insight and judicial wisdom of these Essays. For, independently of any question of natural affinity or natural incompatibility between the functions of bard and critic, there is that in Mr. Arnold's poetry which makes the fortune of the essayist,—an intense subjectiveness united to an analytic subtilty, which would mar the beauty of his verse, as it certainly does that of Mr. Browning, were it not compensated by a depth and truth of poetic feeling, in which Arnold far excels Browning, and has no superior among recent English poets. Some of his poems are critical essays, without losing the distinctive character of poetry; and some of his best criticisms are done in verse. What better, for example, than the sentence on Byron in "Memorial Verses"?
"He taught us little: but our soul
Had felt him like the thunder's roll.
With shivering heart the strife we saw
Of Passion with Eternal Law;
And yet with reverential awe
We watched the fount of fiery life
Which served for that Titanic strife."
Or that on Goethe in "Obermann"?
"For he pursued a lonely road,
His eye on Nature's plan,—
Neither made man too much a God,
Nor God too much a man."
Of living Englishmen, it seems to us that Matthew Arnold combines in the highest degree great wealth of literary culture with the deepest thoughtfulness. This makes the charm of the present volume. Also, to his honor be it said,—and let due commendation be given to that trait,—he is of modern English essayists the least dogmatic. With fixed principles of art and very decided views of his own he combines a tolerance and a flexibility of mind which are very un-English. He is the least insular of his countrymen. It cannot be said of him, as he himself has said of Carlyle, that, with all his genius, he "has for the functions of the critic a little too much of the self-will and eccentricities of a genuine son of Great Britain." And yet, un-British as he is in these respects, Arnold, in one thing, is more national far than Carlyle,—in the manner, namely, in which he chooses to express his thought. Though deeply conversant with German literature, (as he is with French,) he has not suffered himself to be bitten with the Teutomania which infects so unpleasantly the diction of his self-willed countryman,—making his sentences seem like translations from Jean Paul, rather than utterances conceived in an English mind. He unites cosmopolitan liberality with English self-possession.
As a stylist, he is singularly inartificial. Would that our American writers might take a lesson from Arnold's prose, and correct their ambitious rhetoric, affected quaintness, and other varieties of fine writing, by this pure, simple, honest English. The peculiarity of his style, we should say, is its freedom from peculiarity. It is the style of a cultivated, thoughtful man, without the pedantry and mannerism which thoughtful and cultivated men so often contract. Easy, almost careless in its movement, but far from careless in its choice of words, it is neither bookish nor vulgarly colloquial, but maintains a just mean between elaborateness and rudeness. In our young days Macaulay was considered the model writer, and Ruskin has been thought to occupy that place in these latter years; but Macaulay is tumid, and even Ruskin stilted and stiff, in comparison with Matthew Arnold.
For the matter, here are fourteen essays, including the three lectures, "On translating Homer," and the "Last Words," not ponderously and oppressively learned, and not abstrusely and obtrusively philosophical, but as full of wisdom and intellectual stimulus and graceful humor as any we know, and more tolerant and liberal than most,—together with a preface as entertaining as any of the essays. So healthy and nourishing a book, in the way of literary essays, has not for a long while appeared among us. We are far from assenting to all of Professor Arnold's positions. We altogether repudiate the statement, that "on Heine, of all German authors who have survived Goethe, incomparably the largest portion of Goethe's mantle fell"; nor can we adopt all his criticisms and views on the Homeric question; nevertheless, we can with the utmost confidence recommend this volume to the literary men of America to whom the author is yet unknown, or known only by name.