# Literary studies by Joseph Jacobs/Matthew Arnold

MATTHEW ARNOLD
April 15, 1888
MATTHEW ARNOLD
HE terribly sudden death of Matthew Arnold has deprived England of an intellectual force of a high order. A striking and influential individuality is lost to English thought and letters. Matthew Arnold was the poet and critic of the age of transition which separates so widely the England of to-day from the England of the Reform Bill, or, to come down even later, from the England of the Great Exhibition. The changes in taste, in feeling, in the general attitude towards the fundamental problems of religion, of society, and of politics, have been enormous, and in all of them, except, perhaps, the last, Matthew Arnold has been an abiding influence. We shall never, perhaps, fully appreciate the way in which he softened the asperities of the conflicts which raged round him by his imperturbable good humour, and even by the mannerisms which diverted the stress of feeling. The solvent of his criticism was diluted to the exact strength where it ​could effect its purpose while giving least pain.
He began life as a poet, and in a measure remained one always, if we can divorce the poet from the technique of his art. His was a poetic force, a uniform recognition of the permanent power and reality of the ideal element in human character. His appeal was always to that, whether he were discussing Heine or Tolstoi, Irish affairs or Board schools. So far he was a poetic force in English thought and affairs. But in things specifically poetic he touched his readers less than any other Victorian poet of the first rank. Yet he is among the masters, his diction is unrivalled for purity and dignity, he strikes his notes with no faltering hand. Why then, is he not impressive? Because his problems and his moods are not poetic problems or poetic moods. Intellectual doubt has found its voice in Matthew Arnold's most sincere utterances, and doubt can never touch a wide circle. Obermann Once More or The Scholar Gypsy will answer to some moods of some men as few poems answer to the inmost depths. But the moods are rare among men, and the appeal of the poems must be as rare. Strangely enough, while Matthew Arnold deals most powerfully with one aspect of the inward conflict, he has been almost equally ​successful in the most objective form of poems, the heroic narrative. When he was urging with all his command of paradox that the English hexameter—the existence of which still remains to be proved—was the best medium into which to translate Homer, he himself was giving in his Sohrab and Rustum the nearest analogue in English to the rapidity of action, plainness of thought, plainness of diction, and the nobleness of Homer. Yet even here we felt that something was wanting, as we feel in almost all attempts at reproduction of the Romance temper: it is not sincere, and cannot, therefore, be great. Where Matthew Arnold is sincere in his poetic work is when he gives expression to his 'yearning for the light,' and summons the spirit of renunciation to support him through the days of gloom.
These moods he reserved for expression in verse. In prose no one is less gloomy than he. If we might define him as a happy Heine, we should give the best point of view from which to survey his prose work, his criticism of life that underlies and involves all his criticism of books, of faiths, and of institutions. Like the German poet, he was armed with all the culture of his time—science does not count in such matters—and like him he played off the one side of his nature against ​the other. But the circumstances of his life saved him from the bitterness of Heine, while they intensified that tendency to good-humoured tolerance which gave to his work much power in some directions and robbed it of much in others.
It is usual to speak of Matthew Arnold as having revolutionised English criticism, by which is usually meant book-criticism. As a matter of fact he did very little in the way of 'judging' books, and what he did in this way was by no means always instructive or trustworthy. His celebrated slip about Shelley's letters, the selections he made from Byron, may be recalled as instances of uncertain vision or imperfect appreciation. In introducing the methods of Sainte-Beuve into England, he transferred the interest in criticism from the books to the man. What he did in criticism was to introduce the causerie, and with it the personal element. Instead of the 'we' of the older régime, the critic, even if he use the plural pronoun, professes to give no more than the manner in which a new work strikes his individuality. If this method has been the cause or occasion of much affectation in contemporary criticism, it has raised criticism into the sphere of literary art by giving it the personal element. The personality of Matthew Arnold was, with all its affectations and ​mannerisms, so attractive that a causerie with him charmed not so much by adding to our information about the author or his book, as because it added to our knowledge of Matthew Arnold.
His criticism of books, we have said, was a criticism of life, and here his work touched the deepest problems of his time, problems social and problems theological. We all know his method of exposition. A view being taken, a phrase, more or less felicitous, is selected to express the view, and henceforth the changes are rung upon the phrase till the dullest of readers cannot fail to grasp the particular view which it was desired to impress on him. The trick of iteration, exasperating as it was, effected its purpose, and the formulæ 'sweetness and light,' 'criticism of life.' 'barbarians, Philistines, and populace,' 'the need of expression, the need of manners, the need of intellect, the need of beauty, and the need of conduct,' have bitten the more deeply into the contemporary consciousness because they were formulæ, and could be easily recalled. This effect was mainly mechanical; not so the discussions which led up to them, were summarised in them, or were deduced from them. Therein Arnold showed his powers of social analysis, and his powers were great. His summary of 'needs' given above ​is a remarkable description of man as a social being. Again, the cultus of 'culture,' to which he gave the vogue, was in his hands something precise. Civilisation is a big thing to analyse or to talk about, yet we felt, when he was talking about it, that it was something real and definite that he was discussing, and not the vague abstractions of the sophist.
This power of analysis showed itself in the series of theological studies beginning with Literature and Dogma. As regards his own solution of the religious problem, if solution it can be called, little need here be said. His very formula, purposely vague and indefinite as it was, is its own condemnation. But it has not been sufficiently recognised how the introduction of his literary tone, his many-sidedness, and the gentle irony with which he treated all extremes helped to prevent an explosion of theological or anti-theological polemics. Mr. Morley has recently been confessing that the tone of the Fortnightly was needlessly aggressive. But for Matthew Arnold's intervention the struggle would have been à outrance. He brought into it the spirit of an 'honest broker,' and had effect with both parties, because each felt that he was in sympathy with its best self.
Yes, that is even so with the Philistines and the Nonconformists. Amid all his wit—or ​rather because his wit was so mild and free from caustic—the Puritan part of the nation felt that he too was on the side of the angels. He was so respectable, after all. Herein comes the great difference between him and Heine, who was not respectable at all; and Renan, who always shows a hankering after the life of les gais. But Matthew Arnold was intensely sensitive and scrupulous in this regard, almost to the point of Podsnappery. Therefore the British public would allow him a hearing on the problems of life.
There was no affectation in all this. The Puritan in him came near the self-restraint of his father's Romans, or the artistic balance of life which he respected in the best Greeks. He was too much at ease in Zion to be of the stuff of which prophets are made, yet there was something in him akin to the spirit of the old prophets. Hence it was that he was so influential with the Philistines; he was in a measure of them, though he saw their faults and narrownesses. Half humorously he recognised this in one of his books, and there can be little doubt of its truth and of its influence. Because he was of them, the Philistines, i.e. Nonconformists and Low Churchmen, listened to him, with the result that the Low Church is no more; and Nonconformity is Broad Church.
​We have laid stress on the theological activity of Arnold because its importance is apt to be obscured by the fact that his particular way of putting his solution of theological difficulties is not likely to gain disciples. But for all that, the discussions have had as much effect on English theology as anything of the past quarter of a century, and he himself was in the right in laying stress upon his theological activity and its results as the most influential and most abiding part of his work.
A word or two may here be added on his general attitude towards politics. His appeal for detachment from party politics is part of a general tendency which seems to be dissevering everywhere the thinking part of the nations from active share in the politics of the democracy. The formation of a party of Independents, advocated by Mr. Lowell in the United States, is an instance of what we mean. By adopting this attitude Matthew Arnold showed less than his usual insight and sagacity. His influence in this direction cannot be said to have been for good.
He that is gone would not have been satisfied with any estimate of his life-work which did not take account of his strivings for educational reform, especially as regards middleclass schools. In English social arrangements he saw one great blot, the separation of classes ​which could be traced to school-days, and he argued, justly enough, that it would never cease till the enormous difference in the tone of boys' schools for the upper classes and of boys' schools for the middle classes was done away with. It cannot be said that his insistence on this point was effectual, though the improved tone of schools for middle-class girls may possibly be connected with it. But there can be little doubt of the brilliant suggestiveness of many of his interesting reports on education, which we trust will be now brought together in book form. Rarely have Blue-books been made so enjoyable as those which contained Matthew Arnold's racy comments on things in general, and school things in particular.
He was a poet throughout, we have said, and he himself has defined a poet as a critic of life. Would that all poets were critics so genial! In that respect the style was the man, and no man was so charming to his intimates as Matthew Arnold. It may be suspected that when we come to know the private lives of the men of letters of this, or rather of the preceding generation, few will leave so pleasant an impression, few will seem so livable with as he. That easy temper which perhaps prevented him from giving his message in a more assured tone, or from ​giving a more assured message, made him a delightful companion. And a delightful companion he is, too, in his books, with their sub-acid egotisms, their easy flow of keen-sighted analysis; their sympathy with the ideal, and, above all, that determination to see things as in themselves they really are, which gives the virile strength that would otherwise be wanting. His books and he have done their work so well that they can never appeal to any later age with so much force as they have to this. But because they have had so direct an appeal to this, they must live as typical of our age and representative of it.
'DISCOURSES IN AMERICA'
VERY one will welcome another volume of causeries from the hand of our only English master in this branch of literature, Mr. Matthew Arnold. Notwithstanding the attempts of many would-be imitators, he alone possesses the lightness of touch, width of view, sanity of criticism, and individuality of style which are needed to give permanent value to what seems at first sight to be merely a form of the higher journalism. The combination of these qualities is rare enough to account for the influence possessed by the men in whom they occur. Mr. Matthew Arnold in England, M. Renan and M. Scherer in France, and Mr. Lowell in America, almost exhaust the list; and of all the masters of the causerie Mr. Matthew Arnold is in some respects the most influential in England, for reasons which may well engage our attention after we have made a few remarks on the present instalment of his work.
​This consists of only three discourses—the Rede Lecture adapted to American audiences and the specially American lectures on Numbers and Emerson. With the aid of wide margins and a liberal amount of 'fat,' as the printers call it, the text is doled out in pages of but nineteen lines each, and thus the three articles are successfully expanded into a booklet of over two hundred pages. Small as it is, the volume differs favourably from some of the recent republications of Mr. Arnold's utterances in that it contains only specimens of his best work, and we may perhaps add that in it he dismounts from his over-ridden hobby—State schools for the middle classes. Each of the three essays attracted attention when first delivered—readers will remember the ludicrous blunders made by the American reporters with the goddess Lubricity in Numbers—and they were as eagerly read when republished in magazines. Now collected in a volume, they will be as popular as any in the series in which they are published, and have a good chance of being revived in the far distant day when their copyright shall have run out—the most practical test that occurs to us to determine whether a book really belongs to English literature.
Much comment on essays so much commented on at the time of their appearance ​were perhaps needless. We may remark, however, that the lecture on literature and science has lost somewhat in its passage across the Atlantic. There was a peculiar aptitude in its delivery in the Senate House at Cambridge, where everything seems to be telling for science rather than literature. And there was a specially interesting passage in the original, now omitted, which dealt with the difference of the two universities—Oxford the home of great movements, Cambridge of great men. On the general merits of the great question—literature or science as training for life—Mr. Arnold is clearly on the right side, and even Professor Huxley scarcely attempts to deny this. But it is curious that Mr. Arnold omits to notice that there is a side of literary work which tends to give all, or nearly all, the educational advantages claimed for science. A work like Munro's Lucretius is in reality as scientific as Roscoe and Schorlemmer's Chemistry. In Germany both would be included under the comprehensive 'Wissenschaft.' Observation, induction, hypothesis, verification, quantitative analysis, and even to some extent experiment, are all applicable to Homer or the 'Nibelungenlied' as to the triassic strata. Indeed, a good case might be made out for showing that Mr. Arnold, in his discourse on Numbers, is simply applying the ​ordinary scientific law of error—the principle of deviations from an average so admirably applied in Mr. Galton's Hereditary Genius. His comfortable doctrine of the remnant is in reality based on a similar assumption, and much of it is seen to be untrustworthy when one remembers that the curve of error may take different forms, and the remnant be smaller though the numbers be larger. As a matter of fact, is it not the universal experience that the saving remnant, even in America, is small in proportion to the mass of self-seeking Philistinism? And if we turn to China or India, the doctrine of the remnant has very little comfort left for us. Opinions, too, might differ as to the extent to which the worship of the goddess Aselgeia is corrupting French culture. The success of a mediocre master like M. Ohnet, simply because he does not bow to the ruling goddess, is sufficient to show the strength of the protest against the worship of Lubricity.
Here, probably, Mr. Matthew Arnold would agree with us, the only difference of opinion being as to the extent of the evil. On this it may be remarked that it has been long existent without producing any widely apparent ill effects, and that it is in large measure counteracted by the intense family love of the Frenchman and the more robust ​life of the provinces. But we prefer not to parade differences where there is so much with which we can agree and from which we can learn. The analysis of the French character and its threefold strain—Gallic, Latin, and Germanic—recalls some of the best parts of the Celtic Literature. The admirable quotations from Newman, Carlyle, Goethe, and Emerson, in the opening passage of the essay on the last, together with the remarks on each author—often but a word, but what an instructive word!—exhibit Mr. Arnold at one of his best moments; as, indeed, the whole discourse on Emerson shows him to us in one of his happiest hours of inspiration, and might be selected as giving an admirable specimen of his peculiar qualities as a critic of letters and of life; or, as Mr. Arnold would say, it gives us his method and his secret.
There is an apt phrase—we believe, of Professor Huxley's—which exactly expresses the differentia of Mr. Arnold's studies: they are lay sermons. The object of the sermon may be assumed to be the moral regeneration of the hearers. This is clearly and avowedly the object of most of Mr. Arnold's utterances. Notice how he invariably picks out the favourite sin of his audience. At the Royal Institution, in the midst of the London season, he lectures on equality. At Cam​bridge he avers that with the majority of mankind a little of mathematics goes a long way, and that science cannot satisfy the soul of man. He crosses to America, and there he chooses as his special topic Numbers, preaching to the text, 'The majority are bad.' For every one will recognise that Mr. Arnold's lectures have the note of the sermon method in this at least, that they start from a text—it may be from the Bible, it may be from Menander—to which the discourse returns time after time, with a reiteration which some may find wearisome, but which clearly effects the purpose of impressing itself on the method.
His method, then, is that of the lay sermon. Would that clerical sermons were ever as good! His secret is his subacid reasonableness and his serious levity or frivolous seriousness. What strikes one in his criticisms of life even more than their penetration is their sanity and completeness. Many a controversial victory he has won in discussions about letters or life, or sometimes even in politics, by attending to the one question, What are the actual and complete facts of the case? He takes human nature all round, and sees how far a proposed remedy answers to all its needs. Herein he is really penetrated by the scientific spirit in its best aspect, and he has been no insufficient teacher of the higher anthropology. That in ​part is the secret of his influence. Men see that what he says tallies in the main with what they know,, and at the same time they are half attracted half repelled by the tone in which he says it. If we may so put it, he pretends not to be serious, and by the very pretence convinces one of his seriousness. It is, in fact, this seriousness, the conviction his words convey that his deepest concern is with the things of moral import, that gives such authority to his word among Englishmen. The things of conduct are, after all, what both he and they have most at heart, and they listen to him as he discourses on things of sweetness and light—now, alas! becoming rarer and rarer with him—because they know that in his hands they have intimate bearing on conduct. Hence Mr. Matthew Arnold may say things in a tone which would be censured in another. There is a passage in these discourses about M. Blowitz and the Eternal which, even in Mr. Arnold, is as near want of taste as it is possible to go. But one knows that Mr. Arnold, after all, is not really lacking in reverence, and so the lapse is overlooked. Reflecting on this, one cannot help thinking what a force Mr. Arnold would be if he dropped his cloak of levity. He has given a clever sermon on Gray; text: 'He never spoke out.' One feels that Mr. Arnold has never ​spoken out the faith that is in him. He began life as an Hellene of the Hellenes, and was as one of those who are at ease in Zion. He has gradually become more Hebraic than the Hebrews, but yet retains the easy manner of the sons of light. What a motive force he might be if he adapted his style to his matter! Mr. Arnold has some admirable words on Carlyle here in the pages before us. Carlyle is weighed in the balance and found wanting; but if we may deplore the want of sweetness in Carlyle, might we not regret its overabundance in Mr. Arnold's nature? His best friends might wish to see him—they would certainly be curious to see him—lose his temper for once in a way over some subject that deserves to rouse his ire.