Chapter III: English Criticism—1860-1900 (1)

MATTHEW ARNOLD: ONE OF THE GREATER CRITICS—HIS POSITION DEFINED EARLY—
THE ‘PREFACE’ OF 1853—ANALYSIS OF IT, AND INTERIM SUMMARY OF ITS
GIST—CONTRAST WITH DRYDEN—CHAIR-WORK AT OXFORD, AND CONTRIBUTIONS TO
PERIODICALS—‘ON TRANSLATING HOMER’—“THE GRAND STYLE”—DISCUSSION OF
IT—THE STUDY OF CELTIC LITERATURE—ITS ASSUMPTIONS—THE ‘ESSAYS’:
THEIR CASE FOR CRITICISM—THEIR EXAMPLES THEREOF—THE LATEST WORK—THE
INTRODUCTION TO WARD’S ‘ENGLISH POETS’—“CRITICISM OF LIFE”—POETIC
SUBJECT OR POETIC MOMENT—ARNOLD’S ACCOMPLISHMENT AND POSITION AS A
CRITIC—THE CARLYLIANS—KINGSLEY—FROUDE—MR RUSKIN—G. H. LEWES—HIS
‘PRINCIPLES OF SUCCESS IN LITERATURE’—HIS ‘INNER LIFE OF ART’—
BAGEHOT—R. H. HUTTON—HIS EVASIONS OF LITERARY CRITICISM—PATER—HIS
FRANK HEDONISM—HIS “POLYTECHNY” AND HIS STYLE—HIS FORMULATION OF THE
NEW CRITICAL ATTITUDE—‘THE RENAISSANCE’—OBJECTIONS TO ITS PROCESS—
IMPORTANCE OF ‘MARIUS THE EPICUREAN’—‘APPRECIATIONS’ AND THE
“GUARDIAN” ESSAYS—UNIVERSALITY OF HIS METHOD—MR J. A. SYMONDS—
THOMSON (“B. V.”)—WILLIAM MINTO—HIS BOOKS ON ENGLISH PROSE AND
POETRY—H. D. TRAILL—HIS CRITICAL STRENGTH—ON STERNE AND COLERIDGE—
ESSAYS ON FICTION—“THE FUTURE OF HUMOUR”—OTHERS: MANSEL, VENABLES,
STEPHEN, LORD HOUGHTON, PATTISON, CHURCH, ETC.—PATMORE—MR EDMUND
GURNEY—‘THE POWER OF SOUND’—‘TERTIUM QUID.’

[Sidenote: _Matthew Arnold: one of the greater critics._]

In coming to Mr Matthew Arnold we come again, but for the last time, to one of our chiefs of the greater clans of criticism. _Vixere fortes post_ Mr Arnold; let us hope that _vivunt_. We have heard, more or less vaguely, of new schools of criticism since, in more countries than one or two, and an amiable enthusiasm has declared that the new gospels are real gospels, far truer and better than any previously known. I am not myself, by any means, in general agreement—I am often in very particular disagreement—with Mr Arnold’s critical canons, and (less often) with his individual judgments. But as I rest on my oars, and look back over European criticism for the eighty years which have passed since his birth, I cannot find one critic, born since that time, who can be ranked above or even with him in general critical quality and accomplishment. And, extending the view further over the vast expanse down which we have already travelled, though I certainly find greater critics—critics very much greater in originality, greater in catholicity, perhaps greater in felicity of individual utterance—I yet find that he is of their race and lineage, free of their company, one of them, not to be scanted of any sizings that have been, by however unworthy a manciple, allotted to them here.

[Sidenote: _His position defined early._]

We have seen that of these greater critics some have, at this or that period of their career, launched a kind of manifesto or confession, of which their other critical work is but, as it were, the application and amplification: while others have never done this, but have built up their critical temple, adding wing to wing and storey to storey, not seldom even deserting or ruining the earlier constructions. Mr Arnold, in practice as in principle, belonged to the first class, and he launched his own manifesto about as early as any man can be capable of forming a critical judgment which is not a mere adaptation of some one else’s, or (a thing really quite as unoriginal) a flying-in-the-face of some one else’s, or a mere spurt and splash of youthful self-sufficiency. You can be a bishop and a critic at thirty—not before (by wise external rule) in the former case; hardly before, according to laws of nature which man has unwisely omitted to codify for himself, in the latter. Mr Arnold was a little over thirty when, collecting such things as he chose to collect out of his earlier volumes of Poetry, and adding much to them, he published the collection with a Preface in October 1853. I doubt whether he ever wrote better, either in sense or in style; and I am quite sure that, while some of the defects of his criticism, as it was to be, appear quite clearly in the paper, all the pith and moment of that criticism appear in germ and principle likewise.

[Sidenote: _The_ Preface _of 1853_.]

In the interesting and important “Advertisement” which, eight months later, he prefixed to the second edition of this book, Mr Arnold himself summed up the lessons of the _Preface_, which followed it, under two main heads,—the insistence on the importance of the subject—the “great action”; and the further insistence on study of the ancients, with the specified object of correcting the great vice of our modern, and especially English, intellect—that it “is fantastic, and wants sanity.” He thus, to some extent, justified the erection of these into his two first and great commandments—the table-headings, if not the full contents, of his creed and law. But, for our purpose, we must analyse the Preface itself rather more closely.

It opens with an account of the reasons which led the author to exclude _Empedocles_, not because the subject was “a Sicilian Greek,” but from a consideration of the situation itself. This he condemns in a passage which contains a very great amount of critical truth, which is quite admirably expressed, and which really adds one to the not extensive list of critical axioms of the first class. Even here one may venture to doubt whether the supreme poet will not vindicate his omnipotence in treating _poeticamente_. But if the sentence were so qualified as to warn the poet that he will _hardly_ succeed, it would be absolutely invulnerable or impregnable.

[Sidenote: _Analysis of it,_]

But why, he asks, does he dwell on this unimportant and private matter? Because he wishes particularly to disclaim any deference to the objection referred to above as to the choice of _ancient_ subjects: to which he might have added (as the careful reader of the whole piece will soon perceive), because insistence on the character of the Subject was his critical being’s very end and aim. In effect, he uses both these battle-horses in his assault upon the opposite doctrine that the poet must “leave the exhausted past and fix his attention on the present.”[962] It is needless to say that over his immediate antagonists he is completely victorious. Whatever the origin of the ignoble and inept fallacy concerned, this particular form of it was part of the special mid-nineteenth century heresy of “progress.” But whether he unhorses and “baffles” it in the right way may be another question. _His_ way is to dwell once more, and with something already of the famous Arnoldian iteration, on the paramount importance of the “action,” on the vanity of the supposition that superior treatment will make up for subjective inferiority. And he then exposes himself dangerously by postulating the superior interest of “Achilles, Prometheus, Clytemnestra, Dido,” to the personages of any modern poem, and, perhaps still more dangerously, by selecting as his modern poems _Hermann and Dorothea_, _Childe Harold_, _Jocelyn_ [!!!], and _The Excursion_. He may be said here to lose a stirrup at least: but on the whole he certainly establishes the point—too clear to need establishment—that the _date_ of an action signifies nothing. While if the further statement that the action itself is all-important is disputable, it is his doctrine and hypothesis.

He is consistent with this doctrine when he goes on to argue that “the Greeks understood it far more clearly than we do”—that “they regarded the whole, we the parts”—that, while they kept the action uppermost, we prefer the expression. Not that they neglected expression—“on the contrary, they were ... the masters of the _grand style_.” Where they did not indulge in this, where they were bald or trivial, it was merely to let the majesty of the action stand forth without a veil. “Their theory and practice alike, the admirable treatise of Aristotle and the unrivalled works of their poets, exclaim with a thousand tongues, ‘All depends upon the subject. Choose a fitting action, penetrate yourself with the feeling of its situations; this done, everything else will follow.’”[963]

As a necessary consequence, they were “rigidly exacting” as to construction: _we_ believe in “the brilliant things that arise under the poet’s pen as he goes along.” We refuse to ask for a “total impression”: instead of requiring that the poet shall as far as possible efface himself, we even lay it down that “a true allegory of the state of one’s own mind in a representative history is perhaps the highest thing one can attempt in the way of poetry.” Against this Mr Arnold pronounces _Faust_—though the work of “the greatest poet of modern times, the greatest critic of all times”[964]—defective, because it is something like this. Next he deplores the want of a guide for a young writer, “a voice to prescribe to him the aim he should keep in view”—and, in default of it, insists once more on models.

The foremost of these models for the English writer is, of course, Shakespeare, of whom Mr Arnold speaks with becoming reverence, and of whom he had earned the right to speak by his magnificent sonnet years earlier. But his attitude towards Shakespeare, as a literary Bible, is guarded. Shakespeare chose subjects “than which the world could afford no better”; but his expression was _too_ good—too “eminent and unrivalled,” too fixing and seductive to the attention, so to draw it away from those other things which were “his excellences _as a poet_.”[965] In leading writers to forget this, Shakespeare has done positive harm, and Keats’s _Pot of Basil_ is taken as an instance, whence the critic diverges to a long condemnation of this great but erring bard’s “difficulty” of language, and returns to the doctrine that he is _not_ safe as a model. The ancients are: though even in them there is something narrow, something local and temporary. But there is so much that is not, and that is an antidote to modern banes, that we cannot too much cling to them as models. These, he adds at some length, the present age needs morally as much as artistically. He has himself tried, in the poems he is issuing, to obey his own doctrines: and he ends with the famous peroration imploring respect for Art, and pleading for the observance and preservation of “the wholesome regulative laws of Poetry,” lest they be “condemned and cancelled by the influence of their eternal enemy, Caprice.”

[Sidenote: _and interim summary of its gist._]

Comment on this, beyond the remarks already made, had best be postponed till we can consider Mr Arnold’s criticism as a whole. [Sidenote: _Contrast with Dryden._]But to one thing we should draw attention, and that is, that here is a critic who knows what he means, and who means something not, directly, or as a whole, meant, or at least said, by any earlier critic. That “all depends on the subject” had been said often enough before: but it had not been said by any one who had the whole of literature before him, and the tendency—for half a century distinctly, for a full century more or less—had been to unsay or gainsay it. Further, the critic has combined with the older Neo-classic adoration of the “fable” something perhaps traceable, as hinted above, to the Wordsworthian horror of poetic diction, a sort of cult of baldness instead of beauty, and a distrust, if not horror, of “expression.” In fact, though I do not believe that he in the least knew it, he is taking up a position of direct and, as it were, designed antagonism to Dryden’s, in that remarkable preface to _An Evening’s Love_, one of those in which he comes closest to the Spaniards, where he says plumply “the story is the least part,” and declares that the important part is the workmanship—that _this_ is the _poiesis_. It is hardly possible to state the “dependence”—in the old duelling sense—of the great quarrel of Poetics, and almost of Criticism, more clearly than is done in these two _Prefaces_ by these two great poet-critics of the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries in England.

I do not think that there is any published evidence of the time or of the circumstances at and in which Mr Arnold began contributing critical articles to periodicals. [Sidenote: _Chair-work at Oxford, and contributions to periodicals._] But his appointment (which must have been, at any rate to some extent, due to the _Preface_ as well as to the _Poems_) to the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford in 1857 gave him a strong stimulus towards the development of his critical powers in reasoned form; while shortly afterwards, the remarkable developments of the press towards the end of the ’Fifties, which began by the institution of _Macmillan’s_ and the _Cornhill Magazine_, and continued through the establishment of a strongly literary and critical daily newspaper in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, to the multiplication of monthly reviews proper in the _Fortnightly_, _Contemporary_, and _Nineteenth Century_, supplied him with opportunities of communicating these studies to a public larger than his Oxford audience, and with a profitable and convenient intermediate stage between the lecture and the book. He was, however, always rather scrupulous about permitting his utterances the “third reading”: and some of them (notably his Inaugural Address at Oxford) have still to be sought in the catacombs. But the matter of more than a decade’s production, by which he chose to stand, is included in the three well-known volumes, _On Translating Homer_ and _The Study of Celtic Literature_ for the Oxford Lectures, and the famous _Essays in Criticism_ for the more miscellaneous work, the last, however, being rounded off and worked up into a whole by its Preface, and by its two opening pieces, _The Function of Criticism in the Present Time_ and _The Influence of Academies_.

In these three books the expression of critical attitude, displayed, as we have said, unmistakably in the _Preface_ of 1853, is not only developed and varied into something as nearly approaching to a _Summa Criticismi_ as was in Mr Arnold’s not excessively systematic way, but furnished and illustrated by an extraordinarily interesting and sufficiently diversified body of critical applications in particular. Yet there is no divergence from the lines marked out in the Preface, nor is there to be found any such divergence—if divergence imply the least contradiction or inconsistency—in the work of the last decade of his life, when he had dropped his ill-omened guerilla against dogma and miracles, and had returned to the Muses. He is as much a typical example of a critic consistent in consistency as Dryden is of one consistent in inconsistency: and it naturally requires less intelligence to comprehend him than appears to be the case in the other instance. In fact, he could never be misunderstood in general: though his extreme wilfulness, and his contempt of history, sometimes made him a little bewildering to the plain man in detail.

[Sidenote: On Translating Homer.]

In discussing the first, and indeed all, of these, it is, of course, important to keep what is suitable for a History of Criticism apart from what would be suitable only for a monograph on Mr Arnold. Yet the idiosyncrasies of the greater critics are as much the subject of such a general history as their more abstract doctrines. We see, then, here something which was not difficult to discern, even in the more frugal and guarded expression of the _Preface_, and which, no doubt, is to some extent fostered and intensified by that freedom from the check of immediate contradiction or criticism which some have unkindly called the dangerous prerogative of preachers and professors. This something is the Arnoldian confidence—that quality which Mr Hutton, perhaps rather kindly, took for “sureness,” and which, though strangely different in tone, is not so very different in actual nature from the other “sureness” (with a prefix) of Lord Macaulay. We may think that this confidence is certainly strengthened, and perhaps to some extent caused, by a habit of turning the blind eye on subjects of which the critic does not know very much, and inspecting very cursorily those which he does not much like. But we shall see that, right or wrong, partial or impartial, capricious or systematic as he may be, Mr Arnold applies himself to the actual appreciation of actual literature, and to the giving of reasons for his appreciation, in a way new, delightful, invaluable.

[Sidenote: “_The grand style._”]

The really important part or feature of the tractate for us is its famous handling of “the Grand Style.” He had used this phrase, italicising it, in the _Preface_ itself, had declared that the ancients were its “unapproached masters,” but he had not said much about it or attempted to define it. Here he makes it almost his chief battle-charger—presenting Homer, Dante, and Milton as the greatest masters of it, if not the only sure ones, denying any _regular_ possession of it to Shakespeare, and going far to deny most other poets, from Tennyson down to Young, the possession of it at all. It was impossible that this enigmatic critical phrase, applied so provocatively, should not itself draw the fire of critics. He could not but reply to this in his “Last Words,” but he had to make something of a confession and avoidance, with much sorrow, perhaps not without a very little anger. For those who asked “What _is_ the Grand Style?” mockingly, he had no answer: they were to “die in their sins.” To those who asked with sincerity, he vouchsafed the answer that the grand style “arises in poetry when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or severity a serious subject.” Let us, with as much simplicity, severity, and seriousness as may be, treat both the expression and the definition.

[Sidenote: _Discussion of it._]

The expression itself—the origin of which, like that of some others in our special lexicon, is to be found in the criticism not of literature, but of Art in the limited sense, and which was, I think, first made current in English by Sir Joshua Reynolds—is of course a vague one, and we must walk warily among its associations and suggestions. At one end it suggests, with advantage to itself and to us honest inquirers, the ὕψος of Longinus. At the other, it has perhaps a rather damaging suggestion of the French _style noble_, and a still more dangerous echo-hint of “grand_iose_.” And Mr Arnold himself once (_Preface_, ed. 1853, p. xix) uses “grandiose”, as we saw that the Latins and the French have sometimes done, as equivalent to “grand”. Coming, then, unsatisfied by these vaguenesses, to the definition, we shall perhaps think it permissible to strike out the first two members, as in the former case almost self-confessedly, in the second quite, superfluous. That the Grand Style in poetry will only arise when the stylist is poetically gifted scarcely requires even enunciation: that the nature which produces the grand style must be _pro tanto_ and _pro hac vice_ “noble,” is also sun-clear. Something of the Longinian circularity in one point[966] seems to have infected Mr Arnold here. But with the rest of the definition preliminary and _prima facie_ inquiry has no fault to find. Let us take it that the Grand Style in poetry is the treatment of a serious subject with simplicity or severity. Even to this a fresh demurrer arises, which may be partly, but cannot be wholly, overruled. Why this antithesis, this mutual exclusion, between “simplicity” and “severity”? “Severe simplicity” is a common, and is generally thought a just, phrase: at any rate, the two things are closely related. We may note this only—adding in Mr Arnold’s favour that his special attribution of simplicity to Homer and severity to Milton would seem to indicate that by the latter word he means “gorgeousness _severely restrained_.”

This, with such additional and applied lights as are provided by Mr Arnold’s denunciation of _affectation_ as fatal to the Grand Style, will give us some idea of what he wished to mean by the phrase. It is, in fact, a fresh formulation of the Classical restraint, definiteness, proportion, form, against the Romantic vague, the Romantic fantasy. This had been the lesson of the Preface, given after the preceptist manner. It is now the applied, illustrated, appreciative lesson of the _Lectures_. It is a doctrine like another: and, in its special form and plan, an easily comprehensible reaction from a reaction—in fact, the inevitable ebb after the equally inevitable flow. But when we begin to examine it (especially in comparison with its Longinian original) as a matter of theory, and with its own illustrations as a matter of practice, doubts and difficulties come thick upon us, and we may even feel under a sad necessity of “dying in our sins,” just as Mr Carlyle thought that, at a certain period of his career, Ignatius Loyola “ought to have made up his mind to be damned.”

To take the last first, it is difficult, on examining Mr Arnold’s instances and his comments, in the most impartial and judicial manner possible, to resist the conclusion that his definition only really fits Dante, and that it was originally derived from the study of him. To that fixed star of first magnitude in poetry it _does_ apply as true, as nothing but true, and perhaps even as the whole truth. Nobility, quintessential poetry, simplicity in at least some senses, severity and seriousness in almost all,—who will deny these things to the _Commedia_? But it is very difficult to think that it applies, in anything like the same coequal and coextensive fashion, to either Homer or Milton. There are points in which Homer touches Dante; there are points in which Dante touches Milton; but they are not the same points. It may, further, be very much doubted whether Mr Arnold has not greatly exaggerated both Homer’s universal “simplicity” and his universal “seriousness.” The ancients were certainly against him on the latter point. While one may feel not so much doubt as certainty that the application of “severity” to Milton—unless it means simply the absence of geniality and humour—is still more rash.

But when we look back to Longinus we shall find at least a hint of a much more serious defect than this. Why this unnecessary asceticism and grudging in the connotation of grandeur? why this tell-tale and self-accusing limitation further to a bare three poets, two of them, indeed, of the very greatest? Mr Arnold himself feels the difficulty presented by Shakespeare so strongly that he has to make, as it were, uncovenanted grand-style mercies for him. But that is only because you have simply to open almost any two pages out of three in Shakespeare, and the grand style smites you in the face, as God’s glory smote St Stephen. _We_ can afford, which shows our strength, to leave Shakespeare alone. Longinus of old has no such damaging fencing of the table of _his_ Grand Style. The Greeks, it is known, thought little of Love as a subject: yet he admitted the sublimity of Sappho. And if he objected to the πλεκτάνην χειμάρροον of Æschylus, it was only because he thought it went too far. How much wiser is it, instead of fixing such arbitrary limits, to recognise that the Grand Style has infinite manifestations; that it may be found in poets who have it seldom as well as in those who have it often; that Herrick has it with

“In this world—the Isle of Dreams”;

that Tennyson has it again and again; that Goethe has it in the final octet of _Faust_; that Heine and Hugo, and hundreds of others, down to quite minor poets in their one moment of rapturous union with the Muse, have it. How much wiser to recognise further that it is not limited to the simple or severe: whether it is to the serious is another question. For my part, I will not loose the fragile boat or incur the danger of the roof,—speaking in a Pickwickian-Horatian manner,—with any one who denies the grand style to Donne or to Dryden, to Spenser or to Shelley. The grand is the transcendent: and it is blasphemy against the Spirit of Poetry to limit the fashions and the conditions of transcendence.

[Sidenote: _The Study of Celtic Literature._]

The other “chair”-book, _The Study of Celtic Literature_, is tempting in promise, but disappointing in performance. This is due partly to the fact that great—perhaps the greater—part of it is not occupied with literary criticism at all, but with that curious blend of matter— literary, political, theological, ethical, and social—to the manufacture of which Mr Arnold was more and more turning his attention. And when it becomes literary, we find other difficulties. In the _Preface_ itself, and in the _Homer_, Mr Arnold had sometimes been unjust or unsatisfactory on what he did not know or did not like—Mediæval literature, the Ballad, &c.,—but his remarks and his theories had been, in the main, solidly based upon what he did know thoroughly and did appreciate—the Classics, Dante, Milton, Wordsworth. Here not Pallas, I think, but some anti-Pallas, has “invented a new thing.” Whether Mr Arnold knew directly, and at first-hand, _any_ Welsh, Breton, Cornish, Irish, or Scotch Gaelic, I do not know.[967] He certainly disclaims anything like extensive or accurate knowledge, and it is noticeable that (I think invariably) he quotes from translations, and only a few well-known translations. Moreover he, with his usual dislike and distrust of the historic method, fences with, or puts off, the inquiry what the dates of the _actual_ specimens which we possess of this literature may be. Yet he proceeds to pick out (as if directly acquainted with the literatures themselves, at dates which make the matter certain) divers characteristics of “melancholy,” “natural magic,” &c., in Celtic literature, and then, unhesitatingly and without proof of any kind, to assign the presence of these qualities, in writers like Shakespeare and Keats, where we have not the faintest evidence of Celtic _blood_, to “Celtic” influence.

[Sidenote: _Its assumptions._]

Now, we may or may not deplore this proceeding; but we must disallow it. It is both curious and instructive that the neglect of history which accompanied the prevalence of Neo-classicism, and with which, when it was dispelled, Neo-classicism itself faded, should reappear in company with this _neotato_-classicism, this attempt to reconstruct the classic faith, taking in something, but a carefully limited something, of Romanticism. But the fact is certain: and, as has been said, we must disallow the proceeding. Whether melancholy, and natural magic, and the vague do strongly and especially, if not exclusively, appear in Celtic poetry, I do not deny, because I do not know; that Mr Arnold’s evidence is not sufficient to establish their special if not exclusive prevalence, I deny, because I do know. That there is melancholy, natural magic, the vague in Shakespeare and in Keats, I admit, because I know; that Mr Arnold has any valid argument showing that their presence is due to Celtic influence, I do not admit, because I know that he has produced none. With bricks of ignorance and mortar of assumption you can build no critical house.

[Sidenote: _The_ Essays: _their case for Criticism_.]

In that central citadel or canon of the subject, _Essays in Criticism_, this contraband element, this theory divorced from history, makes its appearance but too often: it can and need only be said, for instance, that Mr Arnold’s estimate of the condition of French, and still more of German, literature in his own day, as compared with English, will not stand for five minutes the examination of any impartial judge, dates and books in hand. But the divorce is by no means so prominent—indeed most of the constituent essays were, if I mistake not, written before the Celtic Lectures were delivered. The book is so much the best known of Mr Arnold’s critical works—except perhaps the Preface to Mr Ward’s _Poets_— that no elaborate analysis of it here can be necessary. Its own Preface is defiantly vivacious—and Vivacity, as we are often reminded, is apt to play her sober friend Criticism something like the tricks that Madge Wildfire played to Jeanie Deans. But it contains, in the very last words of its famous epiphonema to Oxford, an admission (in the phrase “this Queen of Romance”) that Mr Arnold was anything but a classic _pur sang_. The two first Essays, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” and the “Influence of Academies,” take up, both in the vivacious and in the sober manner, the main line and strategy of the old _Preface_ itself. We may, not merely with generosity but with justice, “write off” the, as has been said, historically false parallels with France and Germany which the writer brings in to support his case. That case itself is perfectly solid and admissible. Those who are qualified to judge—not perhaps a large number—will admit, whether they are for it or against it, that no nonsuit is possible, and perhaps that no final decision for it or against is possible either, except to the satisfaction of mere individual taste and opinion.

The case is, that the remedy for the supposed or supposable deficiencies of English literature is Criticism—that the business of Criticism is to discover the ideas upon which creative literature must rest—that there is not enough “play of mind” in England—that Criticism again is the attempt “to know the best that is known and thought in the world”—that foreign literature is specially valuable, simply because it is likely to give that in which native literature is lacking. These are the doctrines of the First Essay, mingled with much political-social application and not a little banter. The second takes them up and applies them afresh in the direction of extolling the institution of Academies, and contrasting the effects of that influence on French critics and the absence of it in English, very much to the disadvantage of the latter, especially Mr Palgrave. For Mr Arnold had adopted early in his professorial career, and never gave up, the very dubious habit of enforcing his doctrine with “uses” of formally polite but extremely personal application.[968]

Now, this case or bundle of cases is, I have said, quite fairly and justly arguable. Even though I hope that great part of this volume and of the last will have shown that Mr Arnold was quite wrong as to the general inferiority of English criticism, he was (as I have, not far back, taken the pains to show also) not quite wrong about the general criticism of his own youth and early manhood—of the criticism which he himself came to reform. Nor was he wrong in thinking that there is in the uncultivated and unregenerate English mind a sort of rebelliousness to sound critical principles. Very much of his main contention is perfectly good and sound: nor could he have urged any two things more universally and everlastingly profitable than the charge never to neglect criticism, and the charge always to compare literatures of other countries, literatures of other times, literatures free from the political-religious-social _diathesis_ of the actual patient.

[Sidenote: _Their examples thereof._]

It is generally acknowledged that the influence of Sainte-Beuve was an “infortune of Mart” or of Saturn, when it induced Mr Arnold to take his two first examples of this comparative study from interesting but unimportant people like the Guérins. But except persons determined to cavil, and those of whom the Judicious Poet remarks—

“For what was there each cared no jot,
But all were wroth with what was not”—

every one will admit that the rest of the seven—the “Heine,” the “Pagan and Mediæval Religious Sentiment,” the “Joubert,” the “Spinoza,” and the “M. Aurelius”—form a pentad of critical excellence, and brilliancy, and instruction, which can nowhere be exceeded. I, at least, should find it hard to match the group in any other single volume of criticism. Idle that we may frequently smile or shake the head—that we must in some cases politely but peremptorily deny individual propositions! Unimportant that, perhaps even more by a certain natural perversity than by the usual and most uncritical tendency to depress something in order to exalt something else, English literature is, with special reference to the great generation of 1798-1834, unduly depreciated! These things every man can correct for himself. How many could make for themselves instances of comparative, appreciative, loosely but subtly judicial criticism as attractive, as stimulating, as graceful, as varied, and critically as excellent, being at the same time real examples of creative literature?

[Sidenote: _The latest work._]

We are fortunately dispensed here from inquiring into the causes, or judging the results, of that avocation from literature, or at least literary criticism, which held Mr Arnold for exactly ten years, from 1867 to 1877. Nor will it be necessary (though it would be pleasant) to discuss in detail all the contributions of the slightly longer period which was left him, from his return to his proper task in the spring of 1877 with the article on M. Scherer’s “Milton,” to his sudden and lamented death in the spring of 1888. Just before that death he had published an article on Shelley, which (for all the heresy glanced at below) is one of the very best things he ever did; little less can be said of the Milton-Scherer paper eleven years earlier, and whenever he touched literature (which was fairly often) during the interval, he was almost always at a very high level. A good deal, though not quite all, of the ebullience of something not quite unlike flippancy, which had characterised his middle period, had frothed and bubbled itself away; his general critical views had matured without altering; and their application to fresh subjects, if it sometimes (as very notably in the case of Shelley) brought out their weakness, brought out much more fully their value and charm. The article on Mr Stopford Brooke’s _Primer of English Literature_, the prefaces to the selected Lives of Johnson, to Wordsworth, to Byron, the papers in Mr Ward’s _Poets_ on Gray and Keats (postponing for a moment the more important Introduction to that work as a whole), the literary part of the _Discourses in America_, and (though I should put this last quartette on a somewhat lower level) those on Mr Scherer’s Goethe, George Sand, Tolstoi, and Amiel, form a critical baggage, adding no doubt nothing (except in one case) to the critic’s general Gospel or theory, but exemplifying with delightful variety and charm his critical practice.

[Sidenote: _The Introduction to Ward’s_ English Poets.]

The possible or actual exception, however, and the piece which contains it, require more individual notice. In the Introduction to Mr Ward’s book, Mr Arnold devised no one really new thing, but he gathered up and focussed his lights afresh, and endeavoured to provide his disciples with an apparently new definition of poetry. He drove first at two wrong estimates thereof, his dislike of the second of which—the “personal” estimate—had been practically proclaimed from the very first, and may be allowed to be to a great extent justified, while his dislike of the first—the “historic” estimate—had always been clear to sharp-eyed students, though it lacked an equal justification. In fact, it is little more than a formulation of Mr Arnold’s own impatience with the task— laborious enough, no doubt, and in parts ungrateful—of really mastering poetic, that is to say literary, history. Of course, _mere_ age, _mere_ priority, confers no interest of itself on anything. But to say—if we may avail ourselves of Gascoigne’s instance—that the first discoverable person who compared a girl’s lip to a cherry does not acquire for that now unpermissible comparison merit and interest, is not wise. To assume, on the other hand, some abstract standard of “high” poetry, below which time and relation will not give or enhance value, is still less wise. Portia, in a context of which Mr Arnold was justly fond, might have taught him that “nothing is good _without respect_,” and that _no_ “respect” is to be arbitrarily barred.

[Sidenote: “_Criticism of Life._”]

But even from the sweetest and wisest of doctors he would not, I fear, have taken the lesson. He is set to prove that we must only pay attention to “the best and principal things” as of old,—to class and mark these jealously, and to endeavour to discover their qualification. You must not praise the _Chanson de Roland_ or any early French poetry very highly, but you may praise (as before) Homer, Milton, and Dante as much as you like. Chaucer, like Burns, Dryden, and Pope, like Shelley, has not “high seriousness.” And poetry is expressly defined as “a criticism of life, under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.”

It is important (though very difficult) to keep undue repetition out of such a book as this, and we shall therefore, in regard to “high seriousness,” merely refer the reader to what has been said above on the “grand style.” And we shall cut down criticism of the definition as much as possible, to return to it presently. The defence of it once made, as “not a definition but an epigram,” certainly lacks seriousness, whether high or low. The severest strictures made on Mr Arnold’s levity would not have been misplaced had he offered an epigram here. Nor need we dwell on the perhaps inevitable, but certainly undeniable, “circularity” of the formula. The _jugulum_ at which to aim is the use of the word “criticism” _at all_. Either the word is employed in some private jargon, or it has no business here. Mr Arnold’s own gloss of the “application of ideas to life,” gives it perhaps the doubtful benefit of the first supposition: but, either in this way or in others, does it very little good. _All_ literature is the application of ideas to life: and to say that poetry is the application of ideas to life, under the conditions fixed for poetry, is simply a vain repetition.

[Sidenote: _Poetic Subject or Poetic Moment._]

Yet insufficient, and to some moods almost _saugrenu_, as such a definition may seem at first sight, it is, calmly and critically considered, only a re-forming of the old line of battle. Once more, and for the last time formally, Mr Arnold is taking the field in favour of the doctrine of the Poetic _Subject_, as against what we may, perhaps, make a shift to call the “Doctrine of the Poetic _Moment_.” It is somewhat surprising that, although this antinomy has been visible throughout the whole long chain of documents which I have been endeavouring to exhibit in order, no one, so far as I know, has ever fully brought it out, at least on the one side. Mr Arnold—like all who agree with him, and all with whom he and they agree, or would have agreed, from Aristotle downwards—demands a subject of distinct and considerable magnitude, a disposition of no small elaborateness, a maintained and intense attitude, which is variously adumbrated by a large number of terms, down to “grand style” and “high seriousness.” The others, who have fought (we must confess most irregularly and confusedly as a rule) under the flag which Patrizzi, himself half or wholly unknowing, was the first to fly, go back, or forward, or aside to the _Poetic Moment_—to the sudden transcendence and transfiguration—by “treating poetically,” that is to say, by passionate interpretation, in articulate music—of _any_ idea or image, _any_ sensation or sentiment. They are perfectly ready to admit that he who has these moments most constantly and regularly under his command—he who can co-ordinate and arrange them most skilfully and most pleasingly—is the greatest poet, and that, on the other hand, one or two moments of poetry will hardly make a poet of any but infinitesimal and atomic greatness. But this is the difference of the poets, not of the poetry. Shakespeare is an infinitely great poet, and Langhorne an infinitesimally small one. Yet when Langhorne writes

“Where longs to fall that rifted spire
_As weary of the insulting air_,”[969]

he has in the italicised line a “poetic moment” which is, for its poetic quality, as free of the poetic Jerusalem as “We are such stuff,” or the dying words of Cleopatra. He has hit “what it was so easy to miss,” the passionate expression, in articulate music, unhit before, never to be poetically hit again save by accident, yet never to perish from the world of poetry. It is only a grain of gold (“fish-scale” gold, even, as the mining experts call their nearly impalpable specks), but it is gold: something that you can never degrade to silver, or copper, or pinchbeck.

To Mr Arnold this doctrine of the Poetic Moment, though he never seems to have quite realised it in its naked enormity (which, indeed, as I have said, has seldom been frankly, as here, unveiled), was from the first the Enemy. He attacked it, as we saw in his _Preface_, when he was young, and he fashions this _Introduction_ so as to guard against it in his age. Yet it is curious that in his practice he sometimes goes perilously near to it. On his own showing, I cannot quite see, though I can see it perfectly well on mine, why even such a magnificent line as

“In la sua volontade e nostra pace”

should not only prove Dante’s supremacy, but serve as an infallible touchstone for detecting the presence or absence of high poetic quality in other poetry. High poetic quality depends, we have been told, on the selection and arrangement of the subject. Dante, we know accidentally and from outside, _has_ that selection and arrangement. But suppose he had not? The line itself can tell us nothing about them.

[Sidenote: _Arnold’s accomplishment and position as a critic._]

Nevertheless, as has been said so often, the side which a man may have taken in the everlasting and irreconcilable critical battle of judges by the arrangement, and judges by the result, hardly affects his place in Criticism as it should be allotted by a final Court of Appeal. How does he express for himself, and how does he promote in others, the intelligent appreciation, the conscious enjoyment of literature? That is the question: and few critics can meet this question more triumphantly than Mr Arnold. Like others, he can but give what he has. If you ask him for a clear, complete, resumed, and reasoned grasp of a man’s accomplishment—for a definite placing of him in the literary atlas—he will not have much answer to give you. He does not pretend, and has never pretended, to give any. A certain want of logical and methodical aptitude, which may be suspected, a dislike of reading matter that did not interest him, which is pretty clear, and that dread and distrust of the “historic estimate,” which he openly proclaimed, would have made this impossible. But we were warned at the very outset not to go to him for it. And for acute, sensitive, inspired, and inspiring _remarks_ on the man, or the work, or this and that part of work and man—attractively expressed, ingeniously co-ordinated, and redeemed from mere desultoriness by the constant presence of the general critical creed—no critic is his superior.

Nor are these his only “proofs”—his only “pieces in hand.” He may be said—imperfectly Romantic, or even anti-Romantic, as he was—to have been the very first critic to urge the importance, the necessity, of that comparative criticism of different literatures, the half-blind working of which had helped to create, if it had not actually created, the Romantic movement. In England he was absolutely the first to do this systematically, and with something like—though not with complete— impartiality. The knowledge of Spanish and Italian poetry and romance, long very common with us, had died down in the first half of the nineteenth century, and had not been much used for critical purposes while it lasted. The _engouement_ for French, of the late seventeenth and eighteenth, had reacted itself—in men as different as Coleridge, Landor, and De Quincey—into a depreciation which, if not “violently absurd,” as Mr Arnold translates Rémusat’s term of _saugrenu_ applied to it, was certainly either crassly ignorant or violently unjust. German had, it is true, been exalted on the ruins of the popularity of the three Romance literatures; but it had been worshipped scarcely according to knowledge: and of the whole mediæval literature of Europe there was hardly any general critical appreciation. Mr Arnold himself, in fact, was still too much in the gall of bitterness here. It was imperative, if the Romantic and “result-judging” criticism was not to become a mere wilderness of ill-founded and partial individualisms, that this comparison should be established. It was equally imperative that it should be established, if Mr Arnold’s own “_neotato_-classicism,” as we have called it, was not to wizen and ossify like Neo-classicism itself. He was its first preacher with us: and there had not, to my knowledge, been any such definite preacher of it abroad, though the practice of Germany had implied and justified it from the first. And he was one of its most accomplished practitioners,—Lessing not being equal to him in charm, and Sainte-Beuve a little his inferior in passion for the best things.

Yet another watch-word of his, sovereign for the time and new in most countries, which he constantly repeated (if, being human, he did not always fully observe it himself), was the caution against confounding literary and non-literary judgment. No one rejected the exaggeration of “Art for Art’s sake _only_” more unhesitatingly; but no one oftener repeated the caution against letting the idols of the nation, the sect, the party interfere with the free play of Art herself, and of critical judgment on Art.

His services, therefore, to English Criticism, whether as a “preceptist” or as an actual craftsman, cannot possibly be overestimated. In the first respect he was, if not the absolute reformer,—these things, and all things, reform themselves under the guidance of the Gods and the Destinies, not of men,—the leader in reform, of the slovenly and disorganised condition into which Romantic criticism had fallen. In the second, the things which he had not, as well as those which he had, combined to give him a place among the very first. He had not the sublime and ever new-inspired inconsistency of Dryden. Dryden, in Mr Arnold’s place, might have begun by cursing Shelley a little, but would have ended by blessing him all but wholly. He had not the robustness of Johnson; the supreme critical “reason” (as against understanding) of Coleridge; scarcely the exquisite, if fitful, appreciation of Lamb, or the full-blooded and passionate appreciation of Hazlitt. But he had an exacter knowledge than Dryden’s; the fineness of his judgment shows finer beside Johnson’s bluntness; he could not wool-gather like Coleridge; his range was far wider than Lamb’s; his scholarship and his delicacy alike give him an advantage over Hazlitt. Systematic without being hidebound; well-read (if not exactly learned) without pedantry; delicate and subtle, without weakness or dilettanteism; catholic without eclecticism; enthusiastic without indiscriminateness,—Mr Arnold is one of the best and most precious of teachers on his own side. And when, at those moments which are, but should not be, rare, the Goddess of Criticism descends, like Cambina and her lion-team, into the lists, and with her Nepenthe makes men forget sides and sects in a common love of literature, then he is one of the best and most precious of critics.

Mr Arnold’s criticism continued to be fresh and lively, without a touch of senility, or of failure to adapt itself to new conditions, till the day of his death: and when that evil day came, the nineteenth century had little more than a decade to run. On the other hand, though almost all his juniors were more or less affected by him, it cannot be exactly said that he founded any definite school, or started any by reaction from himself. The most remarkable approach to such a school that has been made since was made by Mr Pater, quite fifteen years before Mr Arnold died. No very special necessities of method, therefore, impose themselves upon us in regard to the classification of our remaining subjects in the English division: and we shall be safe in adopting a rough chronological order, taking first three very remarkable persons who—though contemporaries of Arnold—show in criticism as in other literature the influence of Carlyle.

[Sidenote: _The Carlylians._]

The increasing disinclination to take the standpoint of pure literary criticism which we noticed in the master, and which characterised the second quarter of the century, naturally and inevitably reproduced itself in the three most brilliant of his disciples—Ruskin, Froude, and Kingsley—with interesting variants and developments according to the idiosyncrasy of the individual. There was, indeed, in them something which can hardly be said to have been in Carlyle at all—a weakness which his internal fire burnt out of him. This weakness, formulated most happily by an erratic person of genius whom I have alternately resolved to admit and decided to exclude here—Thomas Love Peacock,—is the principle that you “must take pleasure in the thing represented, before you can derive any from the representation.”[970] Incidentally and indirectly, no doubt, _omnes eodem cogimur_; or at least there are very few who escape the suck of the whirlpool. But the declaration and formal acceptance of the principle is comparatively modern: and it is one of the worst inheritances of that Patristic attitude which we dwelt upon long ago.[971] It is indeed closely connected with the doctrine that “all depends upon the subject”: but the Greeks were too deeply penetrated with æsthetic feeling to admit it openly, and, from the earliest times, philosophised on the attraction of _repulsive_ subjects. It is indirectly excluded, likewise, by the stricter kinds of Neo-classic rule-criticism, which saw nothing to disapprove in such poems as the _Syphilis_. But it has, like other dubious spirits, been let loose by “the Anarchy.” That you may and should “like what you like” is open to the twist of its correlative—that you may _dis_like what _you choose to_ dislike.

[Sidenote: _Kingsley._]

At any rate, all these three distinguished persons showed the Carlylian-Peacockian will-worship in their different ways, to an extent which makes them, as critics, little more than extremely interesting curiosities. Kingsley, the least strong, intellectually speaking, of the three, shows it strongly enough. His saying (reported, I think, by the late Mr Kegan Paul), when one of his children asked who and what was Heine, “A bad man, my dear, a bad man,” is a specially interesting blend of the doctrine formulated by Peacock with the old Platonic-Patristic “the poet-is-a-_good man_” theory. Heine was not quite “a proper moral man” in his early years, certainly: though one might have thought that those later ones in the _Matraszen-Gruft_ would have atoned in the eyes of the sternest inquisitor. But “bad” would have been a harsh term for him at any time. Still, it emphasises the speaker’s inability to distinguish between morality and genius, between the man and the work. This inability was pretty universal with him, and it makes Kingsley’s own work as criticism almost wholly untrustworthy, though often very interesting and stimulating to readers who have the proper correctives and antidotes ready: it even (which is not so very common a thing) affects his praise nearly as much as his blame. You must be on your guard against it, when he extols _Euphues_ and the _Fool of Quality_[972] as much as when he depreciates Shelley.

[Sidenote: _Froude._]

There was less sentimental and ethical prejudice in Mr Froude than in his brother-in-law, but his political and, in a wide, not to say loose, sense philosophical, prejudices were even stronger, and he drew nearer to Carlyle than did either Kingsley or Ruskin in a certain want of _interest_ in literature as literature.[973]

[Sidenote: _Mr Ruskin._]

We reach, however, as every one will have anticipated, the furthest point of our “eccentric” in Mr Ruskin. His waywardness is indeed a point which needs no labouring, but it is never displayed more incalculably to the unwary, more calculably to those who have the clue in their hands, than in reference to his literary judgments. Injustice would be done to Rapin and Rymer if we did not give some of the enormous paradoxes and paralogisms to which he has committed himself in this way: but the very abundance of them is daunting, and fortunately his work is not so far from the hands of probable readers as the dustbin-catacombs where those poor old dead lie. “Indignation is a poetical feeling if excited by serious injury, but not if entertained on being cheated out of a small sum of money.” You may admire the budding of a flower, but not a display of fireworks. Contrast the famous exposure of the “pathetic fallacy” with Scott’s supposed freedom from it, and you will find some of the most exquisite _un_reasons in literature. The foam in Kingsley’s song must not be “cruel,” but the Greta may be “happy,” simply because Ruskin does not mind finding fault with Kingsley, but has sworn to find no fault with Scott—perhaps also because he, very justly, likes sea-foam. Squire Western is not “a character,” because Ruskin had determined that only persons “without a _fimetic_ taint” can create character, and Fielding had a fimetic taint. And dramatic poetry “despises external circumstance” because Scott did _not_ despise external circumstance, and explanation is wanted why he could not write a play. Whether, with the most delicious absurdity, he works out a parallel between a “fictile” Greek vase (which is also, one hears, “of the Madonna”) and “fiction,” or is very nearly going to worship a locomotive when it makes a nasty noise and convinces him of its diabolism, this same exquisite unreason is always at the helm. It very often, generally indeed, is committed in admiration of the right things; it is always delightful literature itself. But it never has the judicial quality, and therefore it is never Criticism.[974]

[Sidenote: _G. H. Lewes._]