Chapter VII

When we turn to consider Arnold’s literary style, we are forced to admit that this, too, has suffered from the strenuousness of his moral purpose; it has been unduly sophisticated, here and there, because of his desire to charm “the wild beast of Philistinism.” To this purpose and this desire is owing, at least in part, that falsetto note--that half-querulous, half-supercilious artificiality of tone--which is now and then to be heard in his writing. To exaggerate the extent to which this note is audible would doubtless be easy; an unprejudiced reader will find long continuous passages of even Arnold’s most elaborately designed writing free from any trace of undue self-consciousness or of gentle condescension. And yet it is undeniable that when, apart from his _Letters_, Arnold’s prose, as a whole, is compared with that of such a writer, for example, as Cardinal Newman, there is in Arnold’s style, as the ear listens for the quality of the bell-metal, not quite the same beautifully clear and sincere resonance. There seems to be, now and then, some unhappy warring of elements, some ill-adjustment of over-tones, a trace of some flaw in mixing or casting.

Are not these defects in Arnold’s style due to his somewhat self-conscious attempt to fascinate a recalcitrant public? Is it not the assumption of a manner that jars on us often in Arnold’s less happy moments? Has he not the pose of the man who overdoes bravado with the hope of getting cleverly through a pass which he feels a bit trying to his nerves? Arnold has a keen consciousness of the very stupid beast of Philistinism lying in wait for him; and in the stress of the moment he is guilty of a little exaggeration of manner; he is just a shade unnatural in his flippancy; he treads his measure with an unduly mincing flourish.

Arnold’s habit of half-mocking self-depreciation and of insincere apology for supposititious personal shortcomings has already been mentioned; to his controversial writings, particularly, it gives often a raspingly supercilious tone. He insists with mock humbleness that he is a “mere bellettristic trifler”; that he has no “system of philosophy with principles coherent, interdependent, subordinate, and derivative” to help him in the discussion of abstract questions. He assures us that he is merely “a feeble unit” of the “English middle class”; he deprecates being called a professor because it is a title he shares “with so many distinguished men--Professor Pepper, Professor Anderson, Professor Frickel, and others--who adorn it,” he feels, much more than he does. These mock apologies are always amusing and yet a bit exasperating too. Why should Arnold regard it, we ask ourselves, as such a relishing joke--the possibility that he has a defect? The implication of almost arrogant self-satisfaction is troublesomely present to us. Such passages certainly suggest that Arnold had an ingrained contempt for the “beast” he was charming.

Yet, when all is said, much of this supercilious satire is irresistibly droll, and refuses to be gainsaid. One of his most effective modes of ridiculing his opponents is through conjuring up imaginary scenes in which some ludicrous aspect of his opponent’s case or character is thrown into diverting prominence. Is it the pompous, arrogant self-satisfaction of the prosperous middle-class tradesman that Arnold wishes to satirize? And more particularly is it the futility of the _Saturday Review_ in holding up Benthamism--the systematic recognition of such a smug man’s ideal of selfish happiness--as the true moral ideal? Arnold represents himself as travelling on a suburban railway on which a murder has recently been committed, and as falling into chat with the middle-class frequenters of this route. The demoralization of these worthy folk, Arnold assures us, was “something bewildering.” “Myself a transcendentalist (as the _Saturday Review_ knows), I escaped the infection; and, day after day, I used to ply my agitated fellow-travellers with all the consolations which my transcendentalism would naturally suggest to me. I reminded them how Cæsar refused to take precautions against assassination, because life was not worth having at the price of an ignoble solicitude for it. I reminded them what insignificant atoms we all are in the life of the world. ‘Suppose the worst to happen,’ I said, addressing a portly jeweller from Cheapside; ‘suppose even yourself to be the victim; _il n’y a pas d’homme nécessaire_. We should miss you for a day or two upon the Woodford Branch; but the great mundane movement would still go on, the gravel walks of your villa would still be rolled, dividends would still be paid at the Bank, omnibuses would still run, there would still be the old crush at the corner of Fenchurch Street.’ All was of no avail. Nothing could moderate in the bosom of the great English middle class, their passionate, absorbing, almost bloodthirsty clinging to life.” This is, of course, “admirable fooling”; and equally, of course, the little imaginary scene serves perfectly the purposes of Arnold’s argument and turns into ridicule the narrowness and overweening self-importance of the smug tradesman.

Another instance of Arnold’s ability to conjure up fancifully a scene of satirical import may be adduced from the first chapter of _Culture and Anarchy_. Arnold has been ridiculing the worship of mere “bodily health and vigour” as ends in themselves. “Why, one has heard people,” he exclaims, “fresh from reading certain articles of the _Times_ on the Registrar General’s returns of marriages and births in this country, who would talk of our large English families in quite a solemn strain, as if they had something in itself, beautiful, elevating, and meritorious in them; as if the British Philistine would have only to present himself before the Great Judge with his twelve children, in order to be received among the sheep as a matter of right!”

It is a fact worth remarking that in his prose Arnold’s imagination seems naturally to call up and visualize only such scenes as those that have just been quoted--scenes that are satirically and even maliciously suggestive; scenes, on the other hand, that have the limpid light and the winning quality of many in Cardinal Newman’s writings--scenes that rest the eye and commend themselves simply and graciously to the heart--are in Arnold’s prose rarely, if ever, to be found. This seems the less easy to explain inasmuch as his poetry, though of course not exceptionally rich in colour, nevertheless shows everywhere a delicately sure sense of the surface of life. Nor is it only the large sweep of the earth-areas or the diversified play of the human spectacle that is absent from Arnold’s prose; his imagination does not even make itself exceptionally felt through concrete phrasing or warmth of colouring; his style is usually intellectual almost to the point of wanness, and has rarely any of the heightened quality of so-called poetic prose. In point of fact, this conventional restraint in Arnold’s style, this careful adherence to the mood of prose, is a very significant matter; it distinguishes Arnold both as writer and as critic of life from such men as Carlyle and Mr. Ruskin. The meaning of this quietly conventional manner will be later considered in the discussion of Arnold’s relation to his age.

The two pieces of writing where Arnold’s style has most fervour and imaginative glow are the essay on _George Sand_ and the discourse on _Emerson_. In each case he was returning in the choice of his subject to an earlier enthusiasm, and was reviving a mood that had for him a certain romantic consecration. George Sand had opened for him, while he was still at the University, a whole world of rich and half-fearful imaginative experience; a world where he had delighted to follow through glowing southern landscapes the journeyings of picturesquely rebellious heroes and heroines, whose passionate declamation laid an irresistible spell on his English fancy. Her love and portrayal of rustic nature had also come to him as something graciously different from the sterner and more moral or spiritual interpretation of rustic life to be found in Wordsworth’s poems. Her personality, in all its passionate sincerity and with its pathetically unrewarded aspirations, had imposed itself on Arnold’s imagination both as this personality was revealed in her books and as it was afterward encountered in actual life. All these early feelings Arnold revives in a memorial essay written in 1877, one year after George Sand’s death. From first to last the essay has a brooding sincerity of tone, an unconsidering frankness, and an intensity and colour of phrase that are noteworthy. The descriptions of nature, both of the landscapes to be found in George Sand’s _romances_ and of those in the midst of which she herself lived, have a luxuriance and sensuousness of surface that Arnold rarely condescends to. The tone of unguarded devotion may be represented by part of the concluding paragraph of the essay: “It is silent, that eloquent voice! it is sunk, that noble, that speaking head! We sum up, as we best can, what she said to us, and we bid her adieu. From many hearts in many lands a troop of tender and grateful regrets converge towards her humble churchyard in Berry. Let them be joined by these words of sad homage from one of a nation which she esteemed, and which knew her very little and very ill.” There can be no question of the passionate sincerity and the poetic beauty of this passage.

Comparable in atmosphere and tone to this essay on _George Sand_ is the discourse on _Emerson_, in certain parts of which Arnold again has the courage of his emotions. In the earlier paragraphs there is the same revivification of a youthful mood as in the essay on _George Sand_. There is also the same only half-restrained pulsation in the rhythm, an emotional throb that at times almost produces an effect of metre. “Forty years ago, when I was an undergraduate at Oxford, voices were in the air there which haunt my memory still. Happy the man who in that susceptible season of youth hears such voices! they are a possession to him forever.” Of this discourse, however, only the introduction and the conclusion are of this intense, self-communing passionateness; the analysis of Emerson’s qualities as writer and thinker, that makes up the greater part of the discourse, has Arnold’s usual colloquial, self-consciously wary tone.

A fairly complete survey of the characteristics of Arnold’s style may perhaps best be obtained by recognizing in his prose-writings four distinct manners. First may be mentioned his least compromising, severest, most exact style; it is most consistently present in the first of the _Mixed Essays_, that on _Democracy_ (1861). The sentences are apt to be long and periodic. The structure of the thought is defined by means of painstakingly accurate articulations. Progress in the discussion is systematic and is from time to time conscientiously noted. The tone is earnest, almost anxious. A strenuous, systematic, responsible style, we may call it. Somewhat mitigated in its severities, somewhat less palpably official, it remains the style of Arnold’s technical reports upon education and of great portions of his writings on religious topics. It is, however, most adequately exhibited in the essay on _Democracy_.

Simpler in tone, easier, more colloquial, more casual, is the style that Arnold uses in his literary essays, in the uncontroversial parts of the lectures on _Translating Homer_, and in _Culture and Anarchy_. This style is characterized by its admirable union of ease, simplicity, and strength; by the affability of its tone, an affability, however, that never degenerates into over-familiarity or loses dignified restraint; by its disregard of method, or of the more pretentious manifestations of method; and by the delicate certainty with which, when at its best, it takes the reader, despite its apparently casual movement, over the essential aspects of the subject under discussion. This is really Arnold’s most distinctive manner, and it will require, after his two remaining manners have been briefly noted, some further analysis.

Arnold’s third style is most apt to appear in controversial writings or in his treatment of subjects where he is particularly aware of his enemy, or particularly bent on getting a hearing from the inattentive through cleverly malicious satire, or particularly desirous of carrying things off with a nonchalant air. It appears in the controversial parts of the lectures on _Translating Homer_, in many chapters of _Culture and Anarchy_, and runs throughout _Friendship’s Garland_. Its peculiarly rasping effect upon many readers has already been described. It is responsible for much of the prejudice against Arnold’s prose.

Arnold’s fourth style--intimate, rich in colour, intense in feeling, almost lyrical in tone--is the style that has just been noted as appearing in the essays on _George Sand_ and on _Emerson_. There are not many passages in Arnold’s prose where this style has its way with him. But these passages are so individual, and seem to reveal Arnold with such novelty and truth, that the style that pervades them deserves to be put by itself.

The style usually taken as characteristically Arnold’s is that here classed as his second, with a generous admixture of the third. Many of the qualities of this style have already been suggested as illustrative of certain aspects of Arnold’s temperament or habits of thought. Various important points, however, still remain to be appreciated.

Colloquial in its rhythms and its idiom this style surely is. It is fond of assenting to its own propositions; “well” and “yes” often begin its sentences--signs of its casual and tentative mode of advance. Arnold’s frequent use of “well” and “yes” and neglect of the anxiously demonstrative “now,” at the opening of his sentences, mark unmistakably the unrigorousness of his method. An easily negligent treatment of the sentence, too, is often noticeable; a subject is left suspended while phrase follows phrase, or even while clause follows clause, until, quite as in ordinary talk, the subject must be repeated, the beginning of the sentence must be brought freshly to mind. Often Arnold ends a sentence and begins the next with the same word or phrase; this trick is better suited to talk than to formal discourse. Indeed, Arnold permits himself not a few of the inaccuracies of every-day speech. He uses the cleft infinitive; he introduces relative clauses with superfluous “and” or “but”; he confuses the present participle with the verbal noun and speaks, for example, of “the creating a current”; and he usually “tries and does” a thing instead of “trying to do” it. Finally, his prose abounds in exclamations and in italicized words or phrases, and so takes on much of the movement and rhythm of talk, as in the following passage: “But the gloomy, oppressive dream is now over. ‘_Let us return to Nature!_’ And all the world salutes with pride and joy the Renascence, and prays to Heaven: ‘Oh, that _Ishmael_ might live before thee!’ Surely the future belongs to this brilliant newcomer, with his animating maxim: _Let us return to Nature!_ Ah, what pitfalls are in that word _Nature_! Let us return to art and science, which are a part of Nature; yes. Let us return to a proper conception of righteousness, to a true sense of the method and secret of Jesus, which have been all denaturalized; yes. But, ‘Let us return to _Nature_!’--do you mean that we are to give full swing to our inclinations?”[59] The colloquial character of these exclamations and the search, through the use of italics, for stress like the accent of speech are unmistakable.

Arnold’s fundamental reason, conscious or unconscious, for the adoption of this colloquial tone and manner, may probably be found in the account of the ultimate purpose of all his writing, given near the close of _Culture and Anarchy_; he aims, not to inculcate an absolutely determinate system of truth, but to stir his readers into the keenest possible self-questioning over the worth of their stock ideas. “Socrates has drunk his hemlock and is dead; but in his own breast does not every man carry about with him a possible Socrates, in that power of disinterested play of consciousness upon his stock notions and habits, of which this wise and admirable man gave all through his lifetime the great example, and which was the secret of his incomparable influence? And he who leads men to call forth and exercise in themselves this power, and who busily calls it forth and exercises it in himself, is at the present moment, perhaps, as Socrates was in his time, more in concert with the vital working of men’s minds, and more effectually significant, than any House of Commons’ orator, or practical operator in politics.”[60] This dialectical habit of mind is, Arnold believes, best induced and stimulated by the free colloquial manner of writing that he usually adopts.

In the choice of words, however, Arnold is not noticeably colloquial. Less often in Arnold than in Newman is a familiar phrase caught audaciously from common speech and set with a sure sense of fitness and a vivifying effect in the midst of more formal expressions. His style, though idiomatic, stops short of the vocabulary of every day; it is nice--instinctively edited. Certain words are favourites with him, and, as is so often the case with the literary temperament, reveal special preoccupations. Such words are _lucidity_, _urbanity_, _amenity_, _fluid_ (as an epithet for style), _vital_, _puissant_.

Arnold is never afraid of repeating a word or a phrase, hardly enough afraid of this. His trick of ending one sentence and beginning the next with the same set of words has already been noted. At times, his repetitions seem due to his attempt to write down to his public; he will not confuse them by making them grasp the same idea twice through two different forms of speech. Often, his repetitions come palpably from sheer fondness for his own happy phraseology. His description of Shelley as “a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain,” pleases him so well that he carries it over entire from one essay to another; even a whole page of his writing is sometimes so transferred.

And indeed iteration and reiteration of single phrases or forms of words is a mannerism with Arnold, and at times proves one of his most effective means both for stamping his own ideas on the mind of the public and for ridiculing his opponents. Many of his positive formulas have become part and parcel of the modern literary man’s equipment. His account of poetry as “a criticism of life”; his plea for “high seriousness” as essential to a classic; his pleasant substitute for the old English word God--“the not ourselves which makes for righteousness”; “lucidity of mind”; “natural magic” in the poetic treatment of nature; “the grand style” in poetry; these phrases of his have passed into the literary consciousness and carried with them at least a superficial recognition of many of his ideas.

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.