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Title: Three studies in literature
Author: Lewis E. Gates
Release date: August 5, 2024 [eBook #74191]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: The Macmillan Company, 1899
Credits: Aaron Adrignola, Tim Lindell, Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THREE STUDIES IN LITERATURE ***
THREE STUDIES IN
LITERATURE
[Illustration: colophon]
THREE STUDIES IN
LITERATURE
BY
LEWIS E. GATES
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH IN HARVARD
UNIVERSITY
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.
1899
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1899,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith
Norwood Mass. U.S.A.
NOTE
These Studies were originally introductory essays in volumes of
selections from the prose writings of Jeffrey, Newman, and Arnold. The
essay on Jeffrey has been rewritten and expanded. My thanks are due to
Messrs. Ginn and Co. for the use of the essay on Jeffrey, and to Messrs.
Henry Holt and Co. for leave to reprint the essays on Newman and Arnold.
DECEMBER 15, 1898.
CONTENTS
PAGE
FRANCIS JEFFREY 1
I. Jeffrey’s Reputation 1
II. General Characteristics 6
III. Literary Criticism 12
IV. _The Edinburgh Review_ 41
V. The New Editorial Policy 46
VI. The New Literary Form 54
VII. Conclusion 59
NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 64
I. Newman’s Manner and its Critics 64
II. The Rhetorician 72
III. Methods 82
IV. Irony 88
V. Style 92
VI. Additional Characteristics 98
VII. Relation to his Times 108
MATTHEW ARNOLD 124
I. Arnold’s Manner 124
II. Criticism of Life 129
III. Theory of Culture 139
IV. Ethical Bias 151
V. Literary Criticism 163
VI. Appreciations 171
VII. Style 180
VIII. Relation to his Times 200
FRANCIS JEFFREY
I
Who now reads Jeffrey? Only those, it may be feared, who are intent on
some scholarly purpose or victims of sharp necessity. Yet in 1809
Jeffrey could boast that his articles in the _Edinburgh Review_ were
read by fifty thousand thinking people within a month after publication.
Jeffrey’s reputation as a critic has run through a picturesquely varied
course. During nearly the first half of the century he was, for many
eminently intelligent Englishmen, an all but infallible authority in
letters and whatever pertained to them. He was Horner’s and Sydney
Smith’s “King Jamfray”; he was for Macaulay “more nearly a universal
genius than any man of our time.” Even Carlyle declared no critic since
Jeffrey’s day “worth naming beside him.” And when that half-national
institution, the _Encyclopædia Britannica_, required in its columns a
discussion of the theory of art, Jeffrey it was who was called in as an
authority and wrote the article on “Beauty” that, down to 1875, stood as
representing authentic English opinion in matters of taste.
Even those who hated Jeffrey admitted his power. “Birds seldom sing,”
quoth Allan Cunningham, “when the kite is in the air, and bards dreaded
the Judge Jeffrey of our day as much as political offenders dreaded the
Judge Jeffreys of James the Second.” Talfourd, Lamb’s friend and editor,
asserted of Jeffrey that “with little imagination, little genuine wit,
and no clear view of any great and central principles of criticism, he
... continued to dazzle, to astonish, and occasionally to delight
multitudes of readers, and at one time to hold the temporary fate of
authors in his hands.”
By way of final testimony to the magnitude of Jeffrey’s fame, Macaulay
and Carlyle may be quoted at length in his praise. One of Macaulay’s
letters of 1828 deals wholly with his impressions of Jeffrey, at whose
home he had just been staying; the tone of the letter is that of unmixed
hero-worship; no details of the Scotch critic’s appearance or habits or
opinions are too slight to be sent to the Macaulay household in London.
“He has twenty faces almost as unlike each other as my father’s to Mr.
Wilberforce’s.... The mere outline of his face is insignificant. The
expression is everything; and such power and variety of expression I
never saw in any human countenance.... The flow of his kindness is quite
inexhaustible.... His conversation is very much like his countenance and
his voice, of immense variety.... He is a shrewd observer; and so
fastidious that I am not surprised at the awe in which many people seem
to stand when in his company.”[1] These are only a few of Macaulay’s
details and admiring comments. Nor did he outgrow this intense
admiration. In April, 1843, he writes to Macvey Napier that he has read
and reread Jeffrey’s old articles till he knows them by heart; and in
December, 1843, on the appearance of Jeffrey’s collected essays, he
expresses himself in almost unmeasured terms: “The variety and
versatility of Jeffrey’s mind seem to me more extraordinary than
ever.... I do not think that any one man except Jeffrey, nay that any
three men, could have produced such diversified excellence.... Take him
all in all, I think him more nearly an universal genius than any man of
our time.”[2]
Macaulay, however, may not be wholly beyond suspicion as a witness in
Jeffrey’s favour. He himself had much of Jeffrey’s dryness and
positiveness of nature, was temperamentally limited in many of the same
ways, and was, like Jeffrey, an ardent Whig of the Constitutional type;
for all these reasons he may be thought prejudiced. In Carlyle, on the
other hand, we have a witness who was as far as possible from sympathy
with Jeffrey’s neat little formulas in art and in politics, and who has
never been accused of registering unduly charitable opinions of even his
best friends. Yet of Jeffrey he says, “It is certain there has no Critic
appeared among us since who was worth naming beside him;--and his
influence, for good and for evil, in Literature and otherwise, has been
very great.... His _Edinburgh Review_ [was] a kind of Delphic Oracle,
and Voice of the Inspired, for great majorities of what is called the
‘Intelligent Public’; and himself regarded universally as a man of
consummate penetration, and the _facile princeps_ in the department he
had chosen to cultivate and practise.”[3]
How has it happened that Jeffrey’s lustre, once so brilliant, has paled
in our day into that of a fifth-rate luminary? Was his earlier
reputation wholly undeserved? Or is the “dumb forgetfulness” that has
overtaken him a real case of literary injustice? Probably Jeffrey is now
oftenest remembered for his unluckily haughty reprimand to Wordsworth,
“This will never do!”--a sentence which is popularly taken to be an
incontestable proof of critical incapacity. Yet as regards the artistic
worth of the _Excursion_, the poem against which Jeffrey was protesting,
judges are at present nearer in agreement with Jeffrey than with
Wordsworth. Ought not Jeffrey, the critic, then, to benefit somewhat
from the latter-day reaction against overweening Romanticism?
Doubtless, Jeffrey’s fate is in part merely an illustration of the
transiency of critical fame. Jeffrey, like Rymer and John Dennis, has
gone the deciduous way of all writers of literature about literature,
save the few who have been actually themselves, in their prose, creators
of beauty. Yet probably there is also something exceptional in Jeffrey’s
case,--in his earlier complete ascendency and in the later sorry
disinheriting that has overtaken him. Jeffrey’s reputation was really a
composite affair, due fully as much to the timely-happy establishment of
the _Edinburgh Review_ as to his own personal cleverness, great as that
was. On Jeffrey, the editor, was reflected all the shining success of
the first brilliant English _Review_. To understand, then, the waxing
and the waning of Jeffrey’s literary reputation, a somewhat careful
analysis will be needed not simply of his critical genius, but also of
the methods for making that genius effective which fortune offered him
and his own keen practical instincts worked out successfully. As for his
individual worth as a critic, the truth will be found to lie, as so
often happens, about midway between the eulogists and the cavillers.
Judged even by present standards, Jeffrey was a notably effective
critic; he made blunders not a few, but he was acute, entertaining, and
suggestive, even when he went astray; he excelled in rapid analysis, apt
illustration, and audacious satire. He developed critical method in two
very important directions, and seized upon and applied, with at least
partial success, two critical principles, hardly recognized in England
before his day, but thereafter more and more widely and fruitfully
employed. All these are points, however, that need to be minutely dealt
with and illustrated.
II
It was on Jeffrey’s versatility--the universality of his genius--that
Macaulay’s comments in 1843 laid special stress. That versatility
remains noteworthy for good or for ill to-day. No modern literary critic
would venture on the vast range of subjects that Jeffrey, even in the
seventy or eighty of his essays that he thought worth preserving, has
magisterially dealt with. His _Collected Essays_ are arranged under the
following seven headings: General Literature; History; Poetry;
Philosophy of the Mind, Metaphysics, and Jurisprudence; Prose Fiction;
General Politics; Miscellaneous. Under all these headings the works of
distinguished specialists are discussed, and the reviewer declaims and
dogmatizes like an expert, whether he be holding forth on philosophy to
Dugald Stewart or on politics and law to Jeremy Bentham, or on poetry to
Wordsworth or Scott. Such confident universality is nowadays sure to
suggest shallowness, and yet the fact remains that for twenty-five
years Jeffrey was able to write on this vast variety of topics so as to
command the thorough respect even of his opponents, and so as not simply
to avoid any scandalous misadventure through false information or inept
judgments (unless in the case of Wordsworth), but to rule almost
arbitrarily a great mass of public opinion in morals, in politics, and
in literary and artistic theory. To carry through successfully so
difficult a task is in itself a victory to be put to the credit of the
audacious Scotch critic, even though his work prove not in all cases of
permanent worth.
A rapid and pungent style and great adroitness and attractiveness in
exposition were doubtless largely responsible for Jeffrey’s constant
success with his public. But, in addition to these formal excellences,
Jeffrey was remarkably well equipped and well trained for the part of a
universal genius. Instinct had been beforehand with him and led him to
prepare himself during a good many years of faithful study for just the
part he was to play. When he had to choose a profession he decided for
the bar, and he was called as a barrister in 1796. But both before this
decision and during his actual legal studies, he read widely and
systematically by himself in general literature, political theory,
history, and philosophy; and during all this patient, private reading,
at Glasgow University, at Edinburgh, and afterwards at Oxford, he was
busy, with canny Scotch diligence, at note-books, in which facts and
ideas and theorizings were recorded and worked out. His mind was
conspicuously vivacious and alert,--swift to catch up and make its own
new knowledge, whether about books or life. This keenness of
intellectual scent was always characteristic of him. Even Matthew Arnold
has conceded to him one trait of the ideal critic--_curiosity_. A very
different commentator, Mrs. Carlyle, makes special mention, after a call
from him, of his “dark, penetrating” eyes, that “had been taking note of
most things in God’s universe.”
Besides the results of this patient self-discipline, and of this wide
ranging and swiftly appropriating intellectual interest, Jeffrey had, in
a very high degree, the barrister’s power of seizing, comprehending, and
controlling, quickly and surely, a vast mass of new facts. He could “get
up” an unfamiliar subject with unsurpassable readiness and completeness.
His mastery of his subject in a review-article seems often like the
successful barrister’s knowledge of his brief: he knows whatever he
needs to know to carry the matter in hand triumphantly through.
His way of unfolding a subject is always deft and delightful to follow.
He had a sure expository instinct. Point by point, the most complex
problem takes on, under his treatment, at least a specious simplicity,
and the most abstract theorem, alluring familiarity, and definiteness.
He is generous with illustrations and examples and mischievous in
giving them a satirical turn. Despite his Scotch bias towards
theorizing, he knows and “hugs” his facts, and his discussions always
keep close to experience.
His breadth of view is remarkable, if his work be compared with that of
eighteenth-century critics. Whatever the book or question under
discussion, Jeffrey lifts it into the region of general principles, and
is not content with formal judgments of literary worth or with random
comments on special points. He is really bent on setting up “a free play
of ideas” over the literature and the modes of life that he criticises,
and on orienting his readers as regards not simply the special work
under discussion, but the whole field of art or of study to which it
belongs. That his theories, at least in literary matters, were not
always searching or profound, that they will not, in sweep and
thoroughness, bear comparison with those, for example, of Coleridge, the
great system-weaver of the Romanticists, is undoubtedly true. Yet even
in literary theory Jeffrey, as will be presently shown, hit on some
notable truths; he partially comprehended and applied the historical
method for the study of literature; he worked out with Alison an
interpretation of beauty, which, though false in its emphasis and
distorted, recognized and illustrated with great acuteness one highly
important and comparatively neglected source of æsthetic emotion; and,
despite much mistaken ridicule of Romantic poetry and much
insensibility to its quintessential power and charm, he showed his
critical insight in his protests against certain radical defects alike
in the ethical and in the æsthetic theory of the Romanticists,--defects
which, as Jeffrey contended and as modern criticism admits, do much to
invalidate Romantic poetry, both as a criticism of life and as a
permanently invigorating imaginative stimulus. But even apart from the
absolute correctness or finality of Jeffrey’s theorizing, his practice
of raising criticism into the region of general principles and of
examining the material worth of books even more searchingly than their
barely formal qualities, was a renovating change in criticism, and at
once gave new consideration and dignity to the work of the critic. Mind
was at any rate fermenting in whatever Jeffrey wrote, and for the most
part the writing of earlier reviewers had been a barren waste of words.
Finally, Jeffrey’s style startled and challenged and terrified and
amused, and through its briskness and audacity, its swift sparkle and
gay bravado, its satire and banter, its impetuous fulness and unfailing
wealth of fact and illustration fairly captivated a public that was used
to the humdrum, conventional speech of penny-a-lining critics. There is
a fine vein of mischief in Jeffrey that leads continually to very
grateful ridicule of pedantry, dulness, and all kinds of absurdity.
Even the devoutest Wordsworthian will, if he be not an ingrained prig,
relish Jeffrey’s raillery at the expense of Wordsworth’s occasional
pompous ineptitude. And if Jeffrey’s vivacity still seems amusing, how
much more irresistible must his style have seemed before the days of
Hazlitt and Lamb and Macaulay and Carlyle. His dash and wit and audacity
were new in literary criticism, and for the time being seemed to the
public almost more than mortal.
Whether or no all these qualities of Jeffrey’s genius and style are
those of the ideal literary critic, they were fitted to gain him success
and renown as a brilliant, argumentative writer on literary topics. And,
in point of fact, this is what Jeffrey really was; he was a typically
well equipped and skilful middleman of ideas. He found an increasingly
large Liberal or Whig public anxious to have its beliefs expressed
plausibly, its feelings justified, and its taste made clear to itself
and gently improved. The Whig “sheep looked up,” and Jeffrey fed them.
He did much the same work in general literary, social, and political
theory that Macaulay did later in history. Macaulay’s historical essays,
also published in the _Edinburgh Review_, were, as Cotter Morison has
pointed out, “great historical cartoons,” specially adapted for the
popularization of history, and specially suited to the knowledge and
aspirations of an intelligent middle-class public. Jeffrey’s essays in
literature had much this same character and value. They interpreted the
freshest, most vital thought of the time, so far as possible in harmony
with Whig formulas, and judged it by Whig standards; they made happily
articulate Whig prejudices on all subjects, from the French Revolution
to Wordsworth’s peasant poetry. By their masterly exposition, their
incisive argument, and their wit, they entertained even those whom they
exasperated. Their success was prompt and unexampled.
III
It has already been hinted that the qualities of Jeffrey’s genius and
style, great as may have been their value for the work he accomplished,
are not, when judged from the modern point of view, altogether those of
the ideal literary critic. This is particularly true if appreciation be
included as a vital part of the critic’s task. Jeffrey rarely
_appreciates_ a piece of literature, interprets it imaginatively, lends
himself to its peculiar charm, and expresses this charm through
sympathetic symbolism. His readiness and his plausibility are not the
only points in which Jeffrey the critic suggests Jeffrey the advocate.
He has the defects as well as the merits of the lawyer in literature. He
is always for or against his author; he is always making points. The
intellectual interest preponderates in his critical work, and his
discussions often seem, particularly to a reader of modern
impressionistic criticism, hard, unsympathetic, searchingly analytical,
repellingly abstract and systematic. He is always on the watch; he never
lends himself confidingly to his author and takes passively and
gratefully the mood and the images his author suggests. He never loiters
or dreams. He is full of business and bustle, and perpetually distracts
his readers with his sense of the need of making definite progress. He
is one of those responsible folk who believe that
“Nothing of itself will come
But we must still be seeking.”
For delicate and subtle appreciation, then, of the best modern type it
is useless to look in Jeffrey’s essays.
Of course, historically, such criticism could hardly have been expected
in 1803. The critical tradition that Jeffrey fell heir to was that of
the dogmatists,--the tradition that came down from Ascham, the
pedagogue, through the hands of the would-be autocrats, Rymer and
Dennis, to Dr. Johnson. The theories of the dogmatists suffered many
changes, but remained nevertheless true to one fundamental principle:
the critic was to be accepted as an infallible judge in literature
because of his familiarity with certain models or certain abstract
rules, the imitation or the observance of which was essential to good
art. The dogmatic critic deemed himself lord of literature by a kind of
divine right. Ascham believed in the plenary artistic inspiration of the
Greek and Latin classics, and posed as the authentic interpreter of the
sacred literary word. The pseudo-classical critics, Rymer and Dennis,
based themselves also partly on authority, but even more upon reason;
they pretended to rule by the divine right of pure logic. Their implicit
postulate might be likened to Hobbes’s theory in politics; they
substantially held that the strongest must keep order in the
commonwealth, and that in the literary commonwealth this duty fell to
the intellectually strongest. Accordingly, these critics administered
justice magisterially in accordance with a strict code of laws; they had
laws for the epic poet, laws for the writer of comedy, laws for the
satirist, laws for the writer of tragedy; the author of every new piece
of literature was called up to the bar and reprimanded for the least
illegality. In short, the dogmatic critic regarded himself and was
generally regarded as able to apply absolute tests of merit to all
literary work, and as the final authority on all doubtful matters of
taste.
Now, Jeffrey was the inheritor of this tradition in criticism, and
naturally adopted at times its tyrannical tone and manner towards public
and authors. Yet, following his temperamental fondness for compromises,
for middle parties and mediating measures, Jeffrey never tried formally
to defend this old doctrine or represented himself as an absolute
lawgiver in literature. Nowhere does he lay down a complete set of
principles, like the rules of Bossu for epic poetry, or those of Rapin
for the drama, by which excellence in any form of literature may be
absolutely tested. Such a high-and-dry Tory theory of criticism does not
suggest itself to Jeffrey as tenable. He is a Whig in taste as in
politics, and desires in both spheres the supremacy of a chosen
aristocracy. In his essay on Scott’s _Lady of the Lake_ he declares the
standard of literary excellence to reside in “the taste of a few ...
persons, eminently qualified, by natural sensibility and long experience
and reflection, to perceive all beauties that really exist, as well as
to settle the relative value and importance of all the different sorts
of beauty.” Jeffrey regards himself as one of the choicest spirits of
this chosen aristocracy, and it is as the exponent of the best current
opinion that he speaks on all questions of taste.
It follows that, when Jeffrey is dealing with purely literary questions,
he is less argumentative than at other times, and that what has been
said of his viewing every subject in the light of general principles is
least applicable to his dogmatic essays on literature. When, for
example, he attacks _Wilhelm Meister_ or the _Excursion_, he does so
simply and frankly in terms of his temperament. Wordsworth’s mysticism
baffles him, and he condemns it; Goethe’s sordid realism and sentiment
offend his man-of-the-world taste and he anathematizes them. His custom
in such hostile criticisms is to let his own taste masquerade as that of
“the judicious observer” or “the modern public.” His faith in his own
personal equation is unquestioning and devout. Whatever fails to fall in
with his bias is a fair mark for his bitterest invective. Goethe’s
_Wilhelm Meister_, for example, is “sheer nonsense,” “ludicrously
unnatural,” full of “pure childishness or mere folly,” “vulgar and
obscure,” full of “absurdities and affectations.” These terms are, for
the most part, mere circumlocutions for Jeffrey’s dislike, mere
roundabout ways of saying that the book is not to his taste. As for
coming to an understanding with author or reader about the ends of prose
fiction or the best methods of reaching those ends, Jeffrey never thinks
of such an attempt. He simply takes up various passages and declares he
does not comprehend them, or does not fancy the subjects they treat of,
or does not like the author’s ideas or methods. He gives no reasons for
his likes or dislikes, but is content to express them emphatically and
picturesquely. This is, of course, dogmatism pure and simple, and a
dogmatism, too, more irritating than the dogmatism that argues, for it
seems more arbitrary and more challenging. Of this tone and method,
Coleridge complains in the twenty-first chapter of his _Biographia
Literaria_, when, in commenting on current critical literature, he
protests against “the substitution of assertion for argument” and
against “the frequency of arbitrary and sometimes petulant verdicts.”
But, irritating as is this pragmatic, unreasoning dogmatism, it is
nevertheless plainly a step forward from the view that makes the critic
absolute lawgiver in art. As the Whig position in politics is midway
between absolute monarchy and democracy, so what we may term the Whig
compromise in criticism stands midway between the tyranny of earlier
critics and our modern freedom. The mere recognition of the fact that
the critic speaks with authority only as representing a _coterie_, only
as interpreting public opinion, is plainly a change for the better. The
critic no longer regards himself as by divine right lord alike of public
and authors; he no longer measures literary success solely by
changeless, abstract formulas of excellence; he admits more or less
explicitly that the taste of living readers, not rules drawn from the
works of dead writers, must decide what in literature is good or bad. He
still, to be sure, limits arbitrarily the circle whose taste he regards
as a valid test; but it is plain that a new principle has implicitly
been accepted, and that the way is opened for the development and
recognition of all kinds of beauty and power the public may require.
Jeffrey himself, however, seems never to have suspected the conclusions
that might legitimately be drawn from the ideas that he was helping to
make current. He seems to have had no qualm of doubt touching his right
to dogmatize on the merits and defects of art as violently as a critic
of the older school. In theory, he held that all artistic excellence is
relative; but in practice, he never let this doctrine mitigate the
severity of his judgments. He asserts in his review of _Alison on Taste_
that “what a man feels distinctly to be beautiful, _is beautiful_ to
him”; and that so far as the individual is concerned all pleasure in art
is equally real and justifiable. Yet this doctrine seems never to have
paralyzed in the least his faith in the superior worth of his own kind
of pleasure; and he upbraids Wordsworth and Coleridge just as
indignantly for not ministering to that pleasure, as if he had some
abstract standard of poetic excellence, of which he could prove they
fell short.
When we try to define Jeffrey’s taste and to determine just what he
liked and disliked in literature, we find an odd combination of
sympathies and antipathies. Mr. Leslie Stephen has spoken of him as in
politics an eighteenth-century survival;[4] but this formula, apt as it
is for his politics, scarcely applies to his taste in literature. The
typical eighteenth-century man of letters was a pseudo-classicist; and
beyond the pseudo-classical point of view Jeffrey had passed, just as
certainly as he had never reached the Romantic point of view. Of Pope,
for example, he says: he is “much the best we think of the classical
Continental school; but he is not to be compared with the masters--nor
with the pupils--of that Old English one from which there had been so
lamentable an apostasy.” Addison he condemns for his “extreme caution,
timidity, and flatness,” and he declares that “the narrowness of his
range in poetical sentiment and diction, and the utter want either of
passion or of brilliancy, render it difficult to believe that he was
born under the same sun with Shakespeare.” These opinions are proof
patent of Jeffrey’s contempt for pseudo-classicism. Then, too, Jeffrey
is, as he himself boasts, almost superstitious in his reverence for
Shakespeare. More significant still is his admiration for other
Elizabethan dramatists, like Beaumont, Fletcher, Ford, and Webster. “Of
the old English dramatists,” he assures us in his essay on _Ford_, “it
may be said, in general, that they are more poetical, and more original
in their diction, than the dramatists of any other age or country. Their
scenes abound more in varied images, and gratuitous excursions of fancy.
Their illustrations and figures of speech are more borrowed from rural
life, and from the simple occupations or universal feelings of mankind.
They are not confined to a certain range of dignified expressions, nor
restricted to a particular assortment of imagery, beyond which it is
not lawful to look for embellishments.” Finally, he even commends
Coleridge’s great favourite, Jeremy Taylor, as enthusiastically as
Coleridge himself could do: “There is in any one of the prose folios of
Jeremy Taylor,” he asserts, “more fine fancy and original imagery--more
brilliant conceptions and glowing expressions--more new figures, and new
applications of old figures--more, in short, of the body and the soul of
poetry, than in all the odes and the epics that have since been produced
in Europe.”
Such judgments as these mark Jeffrey as, at any rate, not an
eighteenth-century survival; they must be duly borne in mind when a
formula is being sought for his literary taste. Fully as significant,
though in a different way, is the series of essays on the poet Crabbe.
If the praise of the Elizabethans seems to argue an almost Romantic bias
in Jeffrey and to suggest that after all his tastes are very like those
of Wordsworth and Coleridge, the Crabbe essays at once reveal his
antipathy to the men of the new age and show how far he is from even
being willing to allow its prophets to prophesy in peace and obscurity.
Throughout his praise of Crabbe, Jeffrey is by implication condemning
Wordsworth; nor does he confine himself to this roundabout method of
attacking Romanticism. In the very first essay on Crabbe (1807), he
turns aside from his subject to ridicule by name, “the Wordsworths, and
the Southeys, and Coleridges, and all that ambitious fraternity,” and
contrasts at great length Crabbe’s sanity with Wordsworth’s mysticism.
“Mr. Crabbe exhibits the common people of England pretty much as they
are”; whereas “Mr. Wordsworth and his associates ... introduce us to
beings whose existence was not previously suspected by the acutest
observers of nature; and excite an interest for them--where they do
excite any interest--more by an eloquent and refined analysis of their
own capricious feelings, than by any obvious or intelligible ground of
sympathy in their situation.” With Crabbe, Jeffrey feels he is on solid
ground, dealing with a man who sees life clearly and sensibly, as he
himself sees it; and in his enthusiastic praise of the minute fidelity
of Crabbe, of his uncompromising truth and realism, and of his freedom
from all meretricious effects, from affectation, and from absurd
mysticism, we have at once the measure of Jeffrey’s poetic sensibility
and the sure evidence of his inability to sympathize genuinely with “the
Lakers.”
Of course, for the classic passages expressing his impatience of the new
movement, we must go to the essays on Wordsworth’s _Excursion_ and
_White Doe_. Jeffrey’s objections to the Lakers fall under four heads:
First, the new poets are nonsensically mystical; secondly, they falsify
life by showing it through a distorting medium of personal emotion,
_i.e._ they are misleadingly subjective; thirdly, they are guilty of
grotesque bad taste in their democratic realism; fourthly, they are
pedantically earnest and serious in their treatment of art, and
inexcusably pretentious in their proclamation of a new gospel of life.
Mysticism, intense individuality of feeling, naturalism, and “high
seriousness,”--these were the qualities that in the new art particularly
exasperated Jeffrey; and inasmuch as these were the very qualities to
which, in the eyes of its devotees, the new art owed its special
potency, the division between Jeffrey and the Romanticists was
sufficiently deep and irreconcilable.
Wordsworth’s transcendentalism, his intense spiritual consciousness, his
inveterate fashion of apprehending all nature as instinct with spiritual
force and of converting “this whole Of suns and worlds and men” and “all
that it inherits” into a series of splendid imaginative symbols of moral
and spiritual truth,--these qualities of Wordsworth’s genius were for
his admirers among his most characteristic sources of power, and tended
to place him as an imaginative interpreter of life far above those
Elizabethan writers whom Jeffrey, too, in opposition to the eighteenth
century, pretended to reverence. But these were just the qualities in
Wordsworth’s genius that seemed to Jeffrey most reprehensible. After
quoting a typical passage where Wordsworth’s transcendentalism finds
free utterance, Jeffrey exclaims: “This is a fair sample of that
rapturous mysticism which eludes all comprehension, and fills the
despairing reader with painful giddiness and terror.” Jeffrey’s woe is
by no means feigned. We cannot doubt that his whole mental life was
perturbed by such of Wordsworth’s poems as the great _Ode_, and that it
was an act of self-preservation on his part to burst into indignant
ridicule and violent protest. To find a man of Wordsworth’s age and
literary experience deliberately penning such bewildering stanzas and
expressing such unintelligible emotions, shook for the moment Jeffrey’s
faith in his own little, well-ordered universe, and then, as he
recovered from his earthquake, escaped from its vapours, and felt secure
once more in the clear, every-day light of common sense, led him into
fierce invective against the cause of his momentary panic.
Hardly less impatient is Jeffrey of Wordsworth’s subjectivity than of
his mysticism. Why cannot Wordsworth feel about life as other people
feel about it, as any well-bred, cultivated man of the world feels about
it? When such a man sees a poor old peasant gathering leeches in a pool,
he pulls out his purse, gives him a shilling, and walks on, speculating
about the state of the poor law; Wordsworth, on the contrary, bursts
into a strange fit of raving about Chatterton and Burns, and “mighty
poets in their misery dead,” and then in some mysterious fashion
converts the peasant’s stolidity into a defence against these gloomy
thoughts. This way of treating the peasant seems to Jeffrey utterly
unjustifiable, both because of its grotesque mysticism, and because it
thrusts a personal _motif_ discourteously into the face of the public
and falsifies ludicrously the peasant’s character and life. Wordsworth
has no right, Jeffrey insists, to treat the peasant merely as the symbol
of his own peculiar mood. Here, as in his protest against Wordsworth’s
mysticism, Jeffrey pleads for common sense and the commonplace; he is
the type of what Lamb calls “the Caledonian intellect,” which rejects
scornfully ideas that cannot be adequately expressed in good plain
terms, and grasped “by twelve men on a jury.”
Crabbe’s superiority to the Lakers lies for Jeffrey chiefly in the fact
that he has no idiosyncrasies, though he has many mannerisms; he
expresses no new theories and no peculiar emotions in his portrayal of
common life. Hence his choice of vulgar subjects is endurable--even
highly commendable. His peasants are the well-known peasants of
every-day England, with whose hard lot it behoves an enlightened Whig to
sympathize--from a distance. But a realism that, like Wordsworth’s,
professes to find in these poor peasants the deepest spiritual insight
and the purest springs of moral life, is simply for Jeffrey grotesque in
its maladroitness and confusion of values. Sydney Smith used to say, “If
I am doomed to be a slave at all, I would rather be the slave of a king
than a cobbler.” And this same prejudice against any topsy-turvy
reassignment of values was largely responsible for Jeffrey’s dislike of
Wordsworth’s peasants and of his treatment of common life. If peasants
keep their places, as Crabbe’s peasants do, they may perfectly well be
brought into the precincts of poetry; but to exalt them into types of
moral virtue and into heavenly messengers of divine truth, is to “make
tyrants of cobblers.” Jacobinism in art, as in politics, is to Jeffrey
detestable.
In fact, all the pretensions of the new school to illustrate by its art
a new gospel of life were intensely disagreeable to Jeffrey. As long as
Romanticism seemed chiefly decorative, as in Scott or Keats, Jeffrey
could tolerate it or even delight in it. But the moment it began,
whether in Byron or Wordsworth, to take itself seriously, and to
struggle to express new moral and spiritual ideals, Jeffrey protested.
Just here lies the key to what some critics have found a rather
perplexing problem,--the reasons for the varying degrees of Jeffrey’s
sympathy with the poets of his day. Let the poet remain a mere master of
the revels, or a mere magician calling up by his incantations in verse a
gorgeous phantasmagoria of sights and sounds for the delectation of idle
readers, and Jeffrey will consent to admire him and will commend his
fertility of invention, his wealth of imagination, his “rich lights of
fancy,” and “his flowers of poetry.” Keats’s luxuriant pictures of Greek
life in _Endymion_, Jeffrey finds irresistible in the “intoxication of
their sweetness” and in “the enchantments which they so lavishly
present.” Moore and Campbell, he regards as the most admirable of the
Romanticists, and their works as the very best of the somewhat
extravagant modern school. Writing in 1829, he arranges recent poets in
the following order, according to the probable duration of their fame:
“The tuneful quartos of Southey are already little better than
lumber:--and the rich melodies of Keats and Shelley,--and the
fantastical emphasis of Wordsworth,--and the plebeian pathos of Crabbe,
are melting fast from the field of our view. The novels of Scott have
put out his poetry. Even the splendid strains of Moore are fading into
distance and dimness ... and the blazing star of Byron himself is
receding from its place of pride.... The two who have the longest
withstood this rapid withering of the laurel ... are Rogers and
Campbell; neither of them, it may be remarked, voluminous writers, and
both distinguished rather for the fine taste and consummate elegance of
their writings, than for that fiery passion, and disdainful vehemence,
which seemed for a time to be so much more in favour with the public.”
Now a glance at Jeffrey’s list of poets makes it clear that those for
whom he prophesies lasting fame are either pseudo-classicists or
decorative Romanticists, and that those whose day he declares to be over
are for the most part poets whose Romanticism was a vital principle.
Rogers is, of course, a genuine representative of the pseudo-classical
tradition, with all its devotion to form, its self-restraint, its
poverty of imagination, and its distrust of passion. Moore, whom Jeffrey
places late in his list of fading luminaries, and Campbell, whom he
finds most nearly unchanging in lustre, are both in a way Romanticists;
but they are alike in seeking chiefly for decorative effects and in not
taking their art too seriously. So long, then, as the fire and the heat
of Romanticism spent themselves merely in giving imaginative splendour
to style, Jeffrey could tolerate the movement, and could even regard it
with favour, as a return to that power and fervour and wild beauty that
he had taught himself to admire in Elizabethan poetry. But the moment
the new energy was suffered to penetrate life itself and to convert the
conventional world of dead fact, through the vitalizing power of
passion, into a genuinely new poetic material, then Jeffrey stood aghast
at what seemed to him a return to chaos. Byron with his fiery bursts of
selfish passion, Wordsworth with his steadily glowing consciousness of
the infinite, and Shelley with his “white heat of transcendentalism,”
were all alike for Jeffrey portentously dangerous forces and unhealthy
phenomena.
For the most part, in his attacks upon Romantic poetry, Jeffrey indulges
in little philosophizing; he is content with wit, satire, epigram, and
clever self-assertion. And yet, in the last analysis, there is a vital
connection between his rejection of Romanticism and his abstract
theorizings on beauty,--small pains as he has taken to bring out this
obscure relationship. A complete account of his temperament and taste
ought to show how the same instincts that led to his hostility to
Wordsworth and Coleridge expressed themselves formally, and tried to
justify themselves, through the theory of Beauty which he worked out
with Alison’s help.
According to Jeffrey’s account of the matter, a beautiful object owes
its beauty to its power to call up in the observer latent past
experiences of pleasure and pain. These little fragments of past joy and
sorrow gather closely round the object and blend in a kind of blurred
halo of delight which we call beauty. Suppose that an observer looks out
upon a luxuriant country landscape; the winding road calls back to him
(though without his conscious recognition of the fact) leisurely
afternoon drives; the green meadows suggest (again obscurely) past
sympathy with shepherds and grazing flocks and rustic prosperity; the
cottages surreptitiously wake memories of home joys and content about
the hearthstone. And so the imagination garners out of the summer
landscape a myriad evanescent associations with past life, which, too
slight and swift to be detected separately by thought, nevertheless
unite like the harmonics of a musical note to produce the peculiar
character that we call beauty. This being the nature of beauty, it
follows that every individual’s past will limit and create for him his
beauty in the present; his foregone pleasures and pains will alone make
possible those echoes of intense feeling which in the present combine
into the single chord of beauty. According to every man’s past, then, is
his present sense of beauty; and as no two men have the same past, no
two men can have the same perceptions of beauty in the present.
Jeffrey accepts unhesitatingly the conclusions involved in this
doctrine, and asserts that beauty is wholly relative; that whatever
seems to a man beautiful is for him beautiful; and that no sensible
debate is possible over the legitimacy of the beauty that a man’s
special temperament manufactures. So long as a man confines himself to
_enjoying_ beauty, he remains beyond criticism in the magic region of
his own private experience. But the moment he offers himself as a
creator or interpreter of beauty for others, he must take into account
the scope and nature of common experience and try to appeal
imaginatively to associations which are likely to be in the hearts of
all. This is precisely, Jeffrey once or twice implies, what Romanticists
like Wordsworth and Coleridge failed to do. They tried to impose on the
public their own curiously whimsical associations of pleasure and pain;
they were incredibly presumptuous in their belief that their own quaint,
country-side blisses and sorrows and their own droll exaltations and
despairs over peddlers and beggars and leech-gatherers must have
universal value for mankind. Here for Jeffrey lay the wilful and
colossal egotism of Romantic art; and once more we find him posing as
the foe of idiosyncrasy and arbitrary whim, and as the representative of
a cultivated aristocracy of intelligence and social experience and
taste, who, after all, have something like a common fund of feelings and
associations on which art can draw.
As for the actual worth of Jeffrey’s theory of beauty, its fault lies in
trying to stretch into a universal formula what is really only a partial
explanation of the facts. The beauty that Jeffrey lays stress on--the
kind of beauty that comes from the suggestiveness of objects--is duly
recognized nowadays under the name of beauty of _expression_. The
possible origin of beauty through association of ideas had not been
thoroughly considered before the days of Jeffrey and Alison, and their
work was therefore new and historically important. But beside beauty
that comes from this source,--beside beauty of expression,--there are
beauty of form and beauty of material; neither of these is recognized by
Jeffrey as an independent variety, and examples of each he tries, with
really heroic ingenuity, to reduce to beauty of expression. The beauty
of a Greek temple is explained as depending solely on a swift,
unconscious recognition of the stability, costliness, splendour, and
antiquity of the structure. The beauty of special colours or of chords
of music is derived, not at all from the intrinsic quality of the
sensations,--the hue or the musical sound,--but wholly from subtle
associations with past pleasure and pain. Thus Jeffrey’s theory becomes
distorted and misleading in spite of the truthfulness of much of his
observation and the real subtlety and acuteness of many of his
interpretations. The quintessential in art, the pleasure that art gives
through pure form and the inexplicable ministry of sensation, Jeffrey is
least sensitive to, and is continually looking askance at and trying to
forget or to account for as merely disguised human sympathy.
Besides the light it throws on Jeffrey’s quarrel with Romanticism, his
theory of beauty is of special significance because it emphasizes the
genuineness and intensity of his ethical interest. All artistic pleasure
is for Jeffrey merely human sympathy in masquerade--past love for one’s
fellows, delicately revived in the music of art. The only man, then, who
can have a wide range of artistic pleasure is he who in the past has
shared generously in the lives of his comrades. Holding this theory of
art, Jeffrey in his literary criticism naturally laid great stress on
the ethical qualities of books and authors. Accordingly, in the preface
to his _Collected Essays_, Jeffrey claims special credit for his
frequent use of the ethical point of view. “If I might be permitted
farther, to state, in what particular department, and generally, on
account of what, I should most wish to claim a share of those merits, I
should certainly say, that it was by having constantly endeavoured to
combine Ethical precepts with Literary Criticism, and earnestly sought
to impress my readers with a sense, both of the close connection between
sound intellectual attainments and the higher elements of duty and
enjoyment; and of the just and ultimate subordination of the former to
the latter. The praise, in short, to which I aspire, and to merit which
I am conscious that my efforts were most constantly directed, is, that I
have, more uniformly and earnestly than any preceding critic, made the
Moral tendencies of the works under consideration a leading subject of
discussion.”
This “proud claim,” as Jeffrey calls it, seems amply justified when we
compare Jeffrey’s essays either with the critical essays in the earlier
Reviews, or with the more formal and elaborate critical essays of the
eighteenth century. Even Dr. Johnson with all his didacticism had little
notion of extracting from a piece of literature the subtle spirit of
good or of evil by which it draws men this way or that way in conduct.
An obvious infringement of good morals in speech or in plot he was sure
to condemn, and a formal inculcation of moral truth he was sure to
recognize and approve. But neither in Johnson, nor anywhere else before
Jeffrey, do we find a critic constantly attempting to detect and define
the moral atmosphere that pervades the whole work of an author, and to
determine the relation between this moral atmosphere and the author’s
personality as man and as artist. To have perceived the value of this
ethical criticism, to have practised it skilfully, and to have fostered
a taste for it, these are true claims to distinction; and Jeffrey’s
services in these directions have been too often forgotten. The greater
breadth of view of later critics and their surer appreciation of ethical
values should not be allowed to deprive Jeffrey of his honour as a
pioneer in ethical criticism.
For still another innovation in critical methods, Jeffrey was at least
partly responsible. He was among the earliest English critics to see the
importance for the study of literature of the historical point of view
and to take into close account, in the study of an author or of a whole
literature, the social environment. Not that Jeffrey was one of the
original minds who first conceived of the historical method of study in
its application to art, and worked out for themselves conceptions of
literature as a growth and development and as dependent upon the spirit
of the age and upon social conditions. Jeffrey, it can hardly be
doubted, was merely a clever borrower. Long before his day, the
principles underlying the historical conception of literature had been
worked out in Germany, and had been applied by Herder and Goethe, and
their disciples, for the solution of problems in criticism. Of this
German theorizing Jeffrey can hardly have had direct knowledge. But to
Madame de Staël, who was an adept in German speculation, Jeffrey
probably owed much,--both to her teaching and to her example. Her _De la
littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales_
had appeared in France in 1800, and her _De l’Allemagne_, a study of
German life and literature conceived throughout in strict harmony with
the principles of the historical method, was published in 1810. Now it
is in 1811 that an unmistakable broadening of method may be discerned in
Jeffrey’s literary criticism. His essay on Ford’s _Dramatic Works_
(August, 1811) is remarkable for its rapid survey of the whole
development of English literature, its brilliant generalizations as
regards the characteristics of such definite periods as that of the
Restoration, and its fairly successful attempts to account for these
characteristics as the outcome in each case of the social conditions of
the time. Before 1811, or at any rate before 1810, Jeffrey never gets,
in his study of an author, beyond the biographical point of view. He may
consider psychological questions,--the characteristics of an author’s
mind that have impressed themselves on his book, or the nature of the
public taste to which literature of a certain kind caters. But the
sociological origin of a literary school or a writer has not before that
time troubled Jeffrey. After the _Ford_ essay the historical and the
sociological points of view are used rather frequently, though it must
be admitted with uncertain success and not with entire loyalty.
Perhaps Jeffrey’s most interesting actual discussion of the historical
method occurs in the introduction to his essay on _Wilhelm Meister_,
written in 1825. In this introduction he tries to classify the
influences that mould literature and guide its development, and his
formulas are curiously suggestive of the much later and rather famous
theorizing of the French critic, Taine. Jeffrey does not recognize
race--the first of Taine’s forces; “human nature,” Jeffrey asserts, “is
everywhere fundamentally the same.” But for Taine’s two other sets of
forces which he groups under the names _moment_ and _milieu_, close
equivalents may be found in Jeffrey’s formulas. “The circumstances,” he
asserts, “which have distinguished [literature] into so many local
varieties ... may be divided into two great classes,--the one embracing
all that relates to the newness or antiquity of the society to which
they belong, or, in other words, to the stage which any particular
nation has attained in that progress from rudeness to refinement, in
which all are engaged; the other comprehending what may be termed the
accidental causes by which the character and condition of communities
may be affected; such as their government, their relative position as to
power and civilization to neighbouring countries, their prevailing
occupations, determined in some degree by the capabilities of their
soil and climate.” Of these principles, Jeffrey goes on through a
half-dozen paragraphs to make more special application; he describes
certain kinds of literature, or certain characteristics of literature,
that are apt to correspond to certain stages of civilization; he
considers hastily some of the qualities impressed upon literature by
different sorts of political institutions. All this general discussion,
though decidedly in the air, is true and suggestive; it shows that by
1825 Jeffrey had a good deal of insight into the general theory of the
dependence of literature on society. It must not be forgotten, however,
in estimating Jeffrey’s originality, that even in England Coleridge and
Hazlitt had, for a good many years before the date of this _Wilhelm
Meister_ essay, been applying the historical method with insight and
power for the explanation of literary problems.
In point of fact, Jeffrey is usually much more impressive when he talks
abstractly about the historical method than when he tries to apply it
specifically. He is specially apt to be unhistorical when he treats of
the beginnings either of literature or of institutions. He lacked the
knowledge of facts which alone could render possible a fruitful
historical conception. His construction of early periods is always _a
priori_ in terms of a cheap psychology. His account, in the essay on
_Leckie_, of the origin of government, should be compared with his
description of the earliest attempts at poetic composition. In both
cases he has a great deal to say about what “it was natural” for the
earliest experimenters in each kind of work to aim at and to effect, and
substantially nothing to say of the actual facts as determined by
investigation. Moreover, these earliest experimenters are for Jeffrey
marvellously like eighteenth-century _connoisseurs_, confronting
consciously, and trying to solve reflectively, intricate problems in art
or in politics. This view is, of course, unhistorical, and illustrates
the difficulty Jeffrey had in escaping from old ways of thought.
Finally, Jeffrey never applies the historical method successfully to the
study of any contemporary piece of literature. In the essay on _Wilhelm
Meister_, for example, the general account of the principles that
underlie historical criticism is fluent and clear; but the change is
abrupt and disastrous when Jeffrey turns to the particular discussion of
Goethe’s novels. Far from being historical or scientific, or trying to
trace out in Goethe’s work the significant forces that were shaping
contemporary German life, Jeffrey merely gives himself over to railing
at whatever jars on his personal taste. In short, half the essay is
scientific and half purely dogmatic, and the two halves have scarcely
any logical connection. Sad to say, Jeffrey nearly always bungled or
faltered like this when trying to use the historical method,
particularly when trying to interpret the literature of his own time.
Other instances of his shortsightedness or clumsiness are to be found in
his treatment of Byron and Wordsworth. He missed entirely the meaning of
Byron’s savage revolt against the conventionalism of eighteenth-century
moral ideals, and he was equally unable to understand Wordsworth’s high
conservatism. Perhaps the most damaging accusation that can be brought
against Jeffrey, as a critic, is inability to read and interpret the age
in which he lived.
Jeffrey’s imperfect grasp of the historical method is shown in one other
way: he never realized that there was any conflict between his work as a
dogmatic critic and his work as a scientific student of literature, or
had a premonition of the blighting effect that the spread of historical
conceptions of literature was ultimately to have on the prestige of the
dogmatic critic. More and more, since Jeffrey’s day, criticism has
concerned itself with the scientific explanation and the interpretation
of literature; less and less has it posed as the ultimate science of
right thinking and right doing in literary art. This change has been
brought about partly by the Romantic movement with its fostering of
individualism in art, and partly through the development of historical
conceptions in all departments of thought. Both these forces were in
full play during Jeffrey’s life, and of neither did he at all measure
the scope or significance.
Regarded, then, from a modern point of view, Jeffrey, as a literary
critic, takes shape somewhat as follows: As an appreciator he is sadly
to seek, owing largely to over-intellectualism and disputatiousness. As
a dogmatic critic he is even yet thoroughly readable because of his
dashing style, his deft and ready handling, his shrewd common sense, and
his sincerity; he expressed brilliantly the tastes and antipathies of a
large circle of cultivated people of considerable social distinction,
who, while not peculiarly artistic or literary, read widely and
intelligently, and felt keenly and delicately, though within a somewhat
limited range. Even in his dogmatic criticism, however, his faults are
obvious; his dogmatism is peremptory; his tone, often bitter; and his
prejudices are as scarlet. On the other hand, for giving a strong
ethical trend to literary criticism, he deserves all honour. His social
sympathies were intense and alert; they fixed the character of his whole
theory of beauty, and continually expressed themselves in his comments
upon books and authors. Through his persistently ethical interpretations
of literature, he really enlarged the borders of literary criticism. As
for his historical criticism, it cannot be said to have much permanent
value. Into the general theory on which the use of the historical method
rests, Jeffrey shows considerable insight; but he was by nature and by
training a dogmatist, not a scientific student of fact. Though his
theorizings led him to believe speculatively in the relativity of
beauty, and though he recognized abstractly that literature must vary
from age to age as the time-spirit varies, yet he rarely let these
convictions affect his tone or method in the treatment of literature; he
is as round and intolerant in his blame of Addison or Pope as if he had
never been within seeing distance of the historical point of view. In
short, the disinterestedness of science was foreign to Jeffrey’s nature;
he was primarily and distinctively, not an investigator or interpreter,
but a censor bent on praise or blame.
These very characteristics of his criticism, however, were of a kind to
bring Jeffrey, in 1803, great glory. With some disguise until 1809, when
the Tory _Quarterly Review_ was founded, undisguisedly thereafter,
Jeffrey was the great Whig champion in all that pertained to letters.
From a partisan critic, audacious and brilliant dogmatism was just what
was sure to win the widest hearing. Moreover, in accounting for
Jeffrey’s enormous popularity, the trashiness and insipidity of earlier
review-writing must be kept in mind. Reviewing had been the pet
occupation of Grub street; penny-a-liners had impressed upon criticism
all their own unloveliness and feebleness; review articles seemed to
issue from under-fed, torpid brains and anæmic bodies. Jeffrey’s
reviewing was the very incarnation of health, vigour, and prosperity.
Finally, Jeffrey profited in name and fame more than it is easy now to
compute from the happy opportuneness of a new literary form, a literary
form that was made possible through the establishment of the _Edinburgh
Review_. This Review differed in many of its business arrangements and
in its mode of publication from preceding Reviews; it was established in
accordance with a new conception of the scope of review-writing, and of
the relation of reviewers to the public. As the result of this new
conception and these new relations, literary criticism, which had
hitherto been merely more or less ingenious talk about technical
matters, was transformed into the earnest and vigorous discussion of
literature as the expression of all that was significant and absorbing
in the life of the time. And as still further results of the new policy,
reviewing and reviewers came into hitherto unknown honour; the
_Edinburgh Review_ was adored or was hated and feared throughout the
length and breadth of the land, and Jeffrey was universally regarded as
demonic in his versatility, brilliancy, penetration, and vigour. Much of
Jeffrey’s great prestige as a critic must be set down as due to his
having long stood as the visible symbol of the success of the new style
of reviewing.
IV
The story of the foundation of the _Edinburgh Review_ has been told so
often as hardly to bear repeating. Enough of the facts, however, must
be gone over again to make clear the change that the new periodical
wrought in reviewing and in the relations between critics and the
public.
The classical account of the origin of the _Review_ is Sydney Smith’s
and is to be found in the Preface to his collected _Works_; it has been
reproduced in Lord Cockburn’s _Life of Jeffrey_[5] and in the _Life and
Times of Lord Brougham_.[6] With his usual crabbedness Brougham disputes
a few minor details, but he leaves the substantial accuracy of
“Sydney’s” story unimpeached.
The idea of the new _Review_ was Sydney Smith’s. The most important
conspirators were Sydney, Jeffrey, Francis Horner, and Brougham. The
plot was discussed and matured in Jeffrey’s house in Buccleuch Place,
Edinburgh. Sydney Smith’s famous proposal of a motto, _Tenui musam
meditamur avena_, “We cultivate literature on a little oatmeal,” was
rejected; the “sage Horner’s” suggestion was adopted,--a line from
Publius Syrus, _Judex damnatur cum nocens absolvitur_, which foretold
the righteous severity of tone that was to characterize the _Review_.
The first number was to have appeared in June, 1802, but, owing to
dilatory contributors and Jeffrey’s faintheartedness, was seriously
delayed; it finally appeared in October, 1802, under the supervision of
Sydney Smith. After the publication of the first number Jeffrey was
formally appointed editor, and, with some hesitation, accepted the post.
The success of the _Review_ was from the start beyond all expectation.
“The effect,” says Lord Cockburn, “was electrical. And instead of
expiring, as many wished, in their first effort, the force of the shock
was increased on each subsequent discharge. It is impossible for those
who did not live at the time, and in the heart of the scene, to feel, or
almost to understand the impression made by the new luminary, or the
anxieties with which its motions were observed.” Lord Brougham’s account
of the matter is no less emphatic. “The success was far beyond any of
our expectations. It was so great that Jeffrey was utterly dumbfounded,
for he had predicted for our journal the fate of the original _Edinburgh
Review_, which, born in 1755, died in 1756, having produced only two
numbers! The truth is, the most sanguine among us, even Smith himself,
could not have foreseen the greatness of the first triumph, any more
than we could have imagined the long and successful career the _Review_
was afterwards to run, or the vast reforms and improvements in all our
institutions, social as well as political, it was destined to effect.”
The subscription list of the _Review_ grew within six years from 1750 to
9000; and by 1813 it numbered more than 12,000. The importance of these
figures will be better understood when the reader recollects that in
1816 the London _Times_ sold only 8000 copies daily. Moreover, it should
be remembered that one copy of a magazine went much further then than it
goes now, and did service in more than a single household. In 1809
Jeffrey boasted that the _Review_ was read by 50,000 thinking people
within a month after it was printed; doubtless this was a perfectly
sound estimate.
Various causes have been suggested as contributing to the instant and
phenomenal success of the _Review_,--the puzzling anonymity of its
articles, its magisterial tone, the audacity of its attacks, what Horner
calls its “scurrility,” the novelty of its Scotch origin. All these
causes doubtless had their influence. More important still, however,
were the wit, the knowledge, and the originality of the brilliant
contributors that Jeffrey rallied round him. Writing to his brother in
July, 1803, Jeffrey thus describes his fellow-workers: “I do not think
you know any of my associates. There is the sage Horner, however, whom
you have seen, and who has gone to the English bar with the resolution
of being Lord Chancellor; Brougham, a great mathematician, who has just
published a book upon the Colonial Policy of Europe, which all you
Americans should read; Rev. Sydney Smith and P. Elmsley, two Oxonian
priests, full of jokes and erudition; my excellent little Sanscrit
Hamilton, who is also in the hands of Bonaparte at Fontainebleau; Thomas
Thomson and John Murray, two ingenious advocates; and some dozen of
occasional contributors, among whom the most illustrious, I think, are
young Watt of Birmingham and Davy of the Royal Institution.”[7] Many of
these names are now forgotten, but those of Sydney Smith, Brougham,
Horner, and Davy speak for themselves and are guarantees of brilliancy
of style, originality of treatment, and vigorous thought.
The editor and the contributors, then, must receive their full share of
credit for the success of the new _Review_; but their ability alone can
hardly account for a success that converted the “blue and yellow” into a
national institution. To explain a success so permanent and
far-reaching, we must look beyond editor and contributors and consider
the relation of the _Review_ to its social environment. The _Edinburgh
Review_ came into being in answer to a popular need; it developed a new
literary form to meet this need; and its business arrangements were such
as enabled the cleverest and most suggestive writers to adapt their work
to the requirements of the reading public more readily and more
effectively than ever before. The meaning of these assertions will grow
clearer as we consider the difference between the _Edinburgh Review_ and
earlier English Reviews.
V
Prior to 1802 there were two standard Reviews in Great Britain,--the
_Monthly Review_ and the _Critical Review_. Minor Reviews there had been
in plenty, of longer or shorter life; but these two periodicals had
pushed beyond their competitors and were regarded as the best of their
kind. The _Monthly Review_ had been founded in 1749 by Ralph Griffiths,
a bookseller; it was Whig in politics and Low Church in religion. Its
rival, the _Critical Review_, of which Smollett was for many years
editor, had been founded in 1756, and was Tory and High Church. These
Reviews were alike in form and in ostensible aim; they were published
monthly, were made up of unsigned articles of moderate length, and
professed to give competent accounts of the qualities of all new books.
But though thus apparently worthy predecessors of the great Reviews with
which nineteenth-century readers are familiar, they were really quite
unlike them in general policy, in scope and style, and in influence.
They were merely booksellers’ organs, under the strict supervision of
booksellers, and often edited by booksellers. They were used
persistently and systematically, though, of course, discreetly, to
further the bookseller’s business schemes, to quicken the sale in case
of a slow market, and to damage the publications of rivals. They were
written for the most part by drudges and penny-a-liners, who worked
under the orders of the bookseller like slaves under the lash of the
slave-driver. These characteristics of the older Reviews may be best
illustrated by a brief account of the methods in accordance with which
Griffiths, the editor of the _Monthly_, conducted his _Review_, and by
some choice anecdotes of his treatment of subordinates.
Griffiths was originally a bookseller; and, though he was able later to
retire from this business and to devote himself wholly to the management
of his _Review_, he retained still the instincts of a petty tradesman,
and kept his eye on the state of the market like a skilful seller of
perishable wares. Of scholarship, of genuine taste, and literary ability
he had next to nothing; but he had shrewd common sense, sound business
instincts, tact in dealing with men, readiness to bully or to fawn as
might be needful, and unlimited patience in scheming for the commercial
success of his venture.
His dealings with Goldsmith between 1755 and 1765, and with William
Taylor of Norwich between 1790 and 1800, illustrate his narrow policy in
the conduct of the _Monthly_ and his tyranny towards contributors.
Goldsmith, he by turns bullied and bribed according as poor Goldsmith
was more or less in need of money. On one occasion he became Goldsmith’s
security with his tailor for a new suit of clothes on condition that
Goldsmith at once write four articles for the _Review_; these articles
were turned out to order, and appeared in December, 1758. On Goldsmith’s
failing to pay his tailor’s bill in the specified time, Griffiths
demanded the return of the suit and also of the books; and when he found
that Goldsmith had pawned the books, he wrote him abusively, terming him
sharper and villain, and threatening him with jail. In 1759, on the
appearance of Goldsmith’s first book, Griffiths ordered one of his
hacks, the notorious Kenrick, to ridicule the work, and to make a
personal attack on the author. These orders were faithfully carried out
in the next number of the _Monthly Review_.[8]
With William Taylor of Norwich Griffiths took a very different tone.
Taylor was one of the few men of breeding and of parts who, before 1802,
condescended to write for Reviews, and he was moreover for many years
the great English authority on German literature. For these reasons,
Griffiths always used him with the utmost tenderness, and, even when
giving him orders or refusing his articles, took a flattering tone of
deference and admiration. On one occasion Taylor demanded an increase of
pay; Griffiths’s answer gives a very instructive glimpse of the
relations between the bookseller-editor and his hack-writers. The
“gratuity” for review work, Griffiths assures Taylor, had been settled
fifty years before at two guineas a sheet of sixteen printed pages, “a
sum not then deemed altogether puny,” and in the case of most writers
had since remained unchanged, although there had been certain “allowed
exceptions in favour of the most difficult branches of the business.”
These exceptions, however, had tended to cause much jealousy and
heart-burning among the contributors; for “it could not be expected that
those labourers in the vineyard, who customarily executed the less
difficult branches of the culture, would ever be cordially convinced
that _their_ merits and importance were inferior to any.” After these
laborious explanations Griffiths agrees to raise Taylor’s compensation
to three guineas per sheet of sixteen printed pages, though he expressly
points out that by so doing he risks “exciting jealousy in the corps,
similar, perhaps, to what happened among the vine-dressers, Matt., chap.
xx.” “If objections arise,” he shrewdly continues, “we must resort for
consolation to a list of candidates for the next vacancy, for in the
literary harvest there is never any want of reapers.”[9] Griffiths’s
slave-driving propensities show clearly through the thin disguise of
politic words. Plainly he feels himself absolute master of the minds and
wills of an indefinite number of penny-a-liners; and it is on these
penny-a-liners that he resolves to depend for the great mass of his
articles.
The evil influence of the publisher’s despotism ran through the _Review_
and vitiated all its judgments. The editor-publisher prescribed to his
hacks what treatment a book should receive. Sometimes this was with a
view to the market. “I send also the _Horæ Bibilicæ_ at a venture,”
writes Griffiths to Taylor, “... it signifies not much whether we notice
it or not, as it is not _on sale_.”[10] The italics are Griffiths’s own.
Sometimes, the publisher-editor merely wanted to favour a friend or
injure an enemy. Griffiths’s dictation in the case of Goldsmith’s first
book has already been noted. On another occasion Griffiths sent a copy
of Murphy’s _Tacitus_ to Taylor with the following significant
suggestion: “One thing I have to mention, _entre nous_, that Mr. M. is
_one of us_, and that it is a rule in our society for the members to
behave with due decorum toward each other, whenever they appear at their
own bar as _authors_, out of their own critical province. If a kingdom
(like poor France at present) be divided against itself, ‘how shall that
kingdom stand’?”[11] If Griffiths ventured on this dictation with a man
of Taylor’s standing and independence, his tyranny over his regular
dependents must have been complete and relentless.
As a result, review-writing became purely hackwork. The reviewer had no
voice of his own in his criticism; what little individuality he might,
in his feebleness, have put into his work, had he been left to himself,
disappeared under the eye of his taskmaster. He became a mere machine,
praising and blaming perfunctorily and conventionally, at the bidding of
the editor-publisher. Mawkish adulation or random abuse became the
staple of critical articles; and in neither kind of work did the critic
rise above the dead level of hopeless mediocrity.
A final result of this whole system of review-managing and hack-writing
was unwillingness on the part of men of position to have anything to do
with review-writing. If a man criticised books in a Review, he felt that
he was putting himself on a level with Kenrick, Griffiths’s notorious
hireling, who had been imprisoned for libel, with Kit Smart, who had
bound himself to a bookseller for ninety-nine years, and with other like
wretches. William Taylor of Norwich was one of the few gentlemen who,
before 1802, ventured to write for Reviews.
With the establishment of the _Edinburgh Review_ all this was changed.
The prime principle of the new _Review_ was independence of booksellers.
The plan was not a bookseller’s scheme, but was the outcome of the
ambitious fervour of half a dozen young adventurers in law, literature,
and politics. From the start the bookseller was a “mere instrument,” as
Brougham specially notes. The management of the _Review_ was at first in
the hands of Sydney Smith. When he set out for London his last words to
the publisher, Constable, were, “If you will give £200 per annum to
your editor and ten guineas a sheet, you will soon have the best Review
in Europe.” Accordingly, the editorship was at once offered to Jeffrey,
at even a higher salary, £300, than Sydney Smith had named. Jeffrey
hesitated because of “the risk of general degradation.” But he found the
£300 “a monstrous bribe”; moreover, the other contributors were all
planning to take their ten guineas a sheet; accordingly, after many
qualms, he swallowed his scruples and became a paid editor. “The
publication,” he wrote to his brother, in July, 1803, “is in the highest
degree respectable as yet, as there are none but gentlemen connected
with it. If it ever sink into the ordinary bookseller’s journal, I have
done with it.”
So began Jeffrey’s “reign” of twenty-six years; and so ended the
despotism of booksellers. Henceforth the editor, not the publisher, was
master. It was Jeffrey who decided what books should be handled, or
rather what subjects should be discussed; it was Jeffrey who determined
the price to be paid for each article,--“I had,” he declares, “an
unlimited discretion in this respect”; it was Jeffrey who pleaded with
the dilatory, mollified the refractory, and reached out here and there
after new contributors; in short, it was Jeffrey who shaped the policy
of the _Review_ and impressed on it its distinctive character.
But there were several other hardly less important points in which the
business policy of the _Edinburgh_ was a new departure. The pay for
reviewing was greatly increased. The old price had been two guineas a
sheet of sixteen printed pages; the _Edinburgh Review_, after the first
three numbers, paid ten guineas a sheet, and very soon sixteen guineas.
Moreover, this was the minimum rate; over two-thirds of the articles
were, according to Jeffrey, “paid much higher, averaging from twenty to
twenty-five guineas a sheet on the whole number.”
Again, every contributor was forced to take pay; no contributor, however
nice his honour, was suffered to refuse. This regulation was of the
utmost importance; the rule salved the consciences of many brilliant
young professional men, who were glad of pay, but ashamed to write for
it, and afraid of being dubbed penny-a-liners. By Jeffrey’s clever
arrangement they could write for fame or for simple amusement, and then
have money “thrust upon them.” With high prices and enforced
compensation the new _Review_ at once drew into its service men of a
totally different stamp from the old hack-writers.
Finally, the _Edinburgh_ was published quarterly, whereas the old
Reviews were published monthly. This change was for two reasons
important: in the first place, writers had more time in which to prepare
their articles and led less of a hand-to-mouth life intellectually; and,
in the second place, the _Review_ made no attempt to notice all
publications, and chose for discussion only books of real significance.
Coleridge particularly commends this part of the policy of the _Review_:
“It has a claim upon the gratitude of the literary republic, and,
indeed, of the reading public at large, for having originated the scheme
of reviewing those books only, which are susceptible and deserving of
argumentative criticism.”[12]
VI
These, then, were the principal points in which the organization and
policy of the _Edinburgh Review_ contrasted with those of its
predecessors; and the influence of these changes on the tone and spirit
of the articles in the new _Review_ can hardly be exaggerated. The
_Edinburgh Review_ was not a catch-all for waste information; it was an
organ of thought, a busy intellectual centre, from which the newest
ideas were sent out in a perpetual stream through the minds of
sympathetic readers. The _Review_ had opinions of its own on all public
questions. In politics, it advocated the principles of the
Constitutional Whigs, at first in a nonpartisan spirit, after 1808,
fiercely and aggressively; it pleaded for reform of the representation,
for Catholic emancipation, for a wise recognition of the just discontent
of the lower classes, and for judicious measures to allay this
discontent without violent Constitutional changes. In social matters,
it urged reforms of all kinds, the repeal of the game-laws, the
improvement of prisons, the protection of chimney-sweeps and other
social unfortunates. In religion, it argued for toleration. In
education, it attacked pedantry and tradition, ridiculed the narrowness
of university ideals, and contended for the adoption of practical
methods and utilitarian aims. In all these departments it criticised the
existing order of things, always brilliantly and suggestively, and
sometimes fiercely and radically, and stirred the public into a keener
consciousness and more intelligent appreciation of the questions of the
hour, social, political, and religious.
Now it is plain that, to accomplish all this, writers would find it
necessary to go far outside of the old limits of book-reviewing, and to
make their articles express their own independent ideas on various
important topics, rather than simply their critical opinions of the
merits of new publications. And this is precisely what happened. A
book-review became in most cases merely a mask for the writer’s own
ideas on some burning question of the hour. In other words, the
establishment of the _Edinburgh Review_ really led to the evolution of a
new literary form; the old-fashioned review-article was converted into a
brief argumentative essay discussing some living topic, political or
social, in the light of the very latest ideas. This kind of essay had
been unknown in the eighteenth century, and was developed at the
opening of the nineteenth century in response to the needs of the
moment.
Nor was this change in the nature of the review-article unremarked at
the time; Hazlitt noted it, and with his usual sourness protested
against it. “If [the critic] recurs,” he says, “to the stipulated
subject in the end, it is not till after he has exhausted his budget of
general knowledge; and he establishes his own claims first in an
elaborate inaugural dissertation _de omni scibili et quibusdam aliis_,
before he deigns to bring forward the pretensions of the original
candidate for praise, who is only the second figure in the piece. We may
sometimes see articles of this sort, in which no allusion whatever is
made to the work under sentence of death, after the first announcement
of the title-page.”[13] Coleridge, on the other hand, approved of the
change, and commended the “plan of supplying the vacant place of the
trash or mediocrity wisely left to sink into oblivion by their own
weight, with original essays on the most interesting subjects of the
time, religious or political; in which the titles of the books or
pamphlets prefixed furnish only the name and occasion of the
disquisition.”[14] The reviewers themselves recognized, of course, the
change they were working, though they did not altogether realize its
significance. In 1807, Horner writes Jeffrey, “Have you any good
subjects in view for your nineteenth? There are two I wish you,
_yourself_, would undertake, if you can pick up books that would admit
of them.”[15] This quotation illustrates the fact that the important
question in the minds of the reviewers was always, not “What new books
have appeared?” but “What topics just now have the greatest actuality
and are best worth discussing?”
This, then, was largely the cause of the success of the _Review_: it
offered, in its articles, a literary form by means of which the most
active and original minds could at once come into communication with
“the intelligent public” on all vital topics; it made the best thought
and the newest knowledge more readily available than ever before for
readers who were every day becoming more alive to their value.
The times were plainly favourable. The French Revolution had stirred
men’s imaginations as they had not been stirred for a century, and had
shaken portentously in all directions the foundations of belief.
Traditions in politics, in social organization, in religion, were
violently assailed by men like Godwin, Horne Tooke, and Holcroft, and
loyally defended by enthusiastic conservatives. The fever of Romanticism
was already making itself felt and was quickening men’s hearts to new
passions and firing their imaginations with new visions of possible
bliss. The air was full of questions and doubts, of eager forecasts,
and of ominous warnings. All this ferment of life and feeling demanded
freer utterance than could be found through old literary forms and with
old methods of publication.
Moreover, the increasing importance of the middle class and the spread
of popular education were favourable to the development of the new
literary form. The number of men who read and thought for themselves had
been rapidly growing. These men were not scholars or deep thinkers, and
had no leisure to puzzle out learned treatises. They were overworked
professional men or business men, who were alive to the questions of the
hour, who had thought over them and discussed them wherever and whenever
they could, and who were anxious for guidance from “men of light and
leading.” The essays of the new _Review_ gave them just what they
wanted,--brief, clear, yet original and suggestive, dissertations by the
best-trained minds on the most important current topics.
These, then, are some of the causes, over and beyond Jeffrey’s editorial
skill, and the brilliancy and originality of his co-workers, that led to
the unprecedented success of the _Edinburgh Review_. Their importance
and their significance are shown by the fact that within a few years
several other Reviews were founded on precisely the same plan with the
_Edinburgh_, and soon rivalled it in popular favour. In 1809 the Tory
_Quarterly Review_ was started with William Gifford as editor, and
Scott, Southey, Canning, Ellis, and Croker among its contributors. In
1820 the _Retrospective Review_ was established, and in 1824 the
_Westminster Review_, the organ of the Radicals; Bentham was its patron,
Bowring its editor, and James Mill and John Stuart Mill were constant
contributors. These Reviews were all quarterlies, and in the details of
their organization were modelled after the famous _Edinburgh_. They all
found a ready welcome, and, with the exception of the _Retrospective_,
have continued to thrive down to our own day.
VII
The bearing of all this upon the history of Jeffrey’s literary
reputation must be fairly obvious. Jeffrey profited from the conspiracy
of a great many fortunate circumstances, and for a series of years
enjoyed, as dictator of the policy of the _Edinburgh Review_, a
reputation as critic that was really far beyond what his intrinsic merit
justified. Leigh Hunt and Lamb were much more delicate and imaginative
appreciators of literature than Jeffrey; Hazlitt, despite his
waywardness and arrogance, was a subtler and more stimulating literary
interpreter. Coleridge was incomparably Jeffrey’s superior in
penetrating insight, in learning and scholarship, in philosophic scope,
and in refinement and sureness of taste. Yet Jeffrey, by dint of his
cleverness, versatility, brilliancy, readiness of resource, and, above
all, because of his commanding position as the director of the new Whig
_Review_, outstripped all these competitors and imposed himself on
public opinion as the typically infallible critic of his day and
generation. His personal charm, too, worked in his favour; his Whig
following was enthusiastically loyal. Everything tended to increase, for
the time being, his fame as a literary autocrat.
The later reaction, which has so nearly consigned Jeffrey to the region
of unread authors, was in its turn extreme, and yet followed naturally.
Wordsworth and Coleridge, whom Jeffrey had assailed persistently till he
had become in the public mind the representative foe of Romanticism, had
won their cause, and been received by wider and wider circles of the
most cultivated and discerning readers as among the foremost poets of
their age. Jeffrey, their arch-enemy, suffered correspondingly in public
esteem. Time seemed to have proved him wrong in one of his most
strenuously asserted prejudices. Moreover, this particular defeat was
merely one special instance of the evil effect that far-reaching
influences were having upon Jeffrey’s reputation. His modes of
conceiving life were being outgrown. His genial, man-of-the-world wisdom
and somewhat narrow range of feeling seemed more and more
unsatisfactory, as the public gradually made their own the deeper
spiritual experience of idealistic poets, like Shelley, and of
transcendental prose-writers, like Carlyle. Jeffrey’s dry
intellectuality and his shallow associational psychology seemed unequal
to the vital problems in art and in ethics that the new age was
canvassing. Moreover, his autocratic style and omniscient air had been
caught up by all the quarterly Reviews, and no longer served to
distinguish him; the methods and the tone of the _Edinburgh_ were copied
far and wide, and the critics of the new generation were quite a match
for Jeffrey in gay, domineering assurance and in easy, swift
omniscience. Jeffrey had trained many followers into his own likeness;
or, at any rate, the methods and the tone that he had hit upon
“survived” and had been universally received as fit.
Finally, Jeffrey’s essays, even at their best, had many of the qualities
of “occasional” writing, and too often seemed merely meant for the
moment; the trail of the periodical was over them all. Their very
rapidity, sparkle, and plausibility gave them an air of perishableness;
they seemed clever and entertaining improvisations. Work of this sort
could hardly hope to maintain itself permanently in public favour. Nor
was the collection of his essays, that Jeffrey saw fit to publish in
1843, of a sort to make a stand against the general indifference that
was clouding his fame. Two thousand pages of improvised comments on all
manner of topics, from the _Memoirs of Baber_ to Dugald Stewart’s
_Philosophical Essays_, could scarcely be expected to secure a fixed
place for themselves in the affections of large masses of readers. A far
smaller volume, that should have included only the essays, or portions
of essays, that were best wrought in style, most vigorously thought out,
and contained the most characteristic and final of Jeffrey’s opinions,
would have been more likely--except in so far as Jeffrey based his
claims on his versatility--to have insured him permanent remembrance as
critic and prose-writer.
The reaction, then, against Jeffrey was necessary and, in some degree,
just. Yet, now that the air is cleared of Romantic prejudices, Jeffrey’s
real services to the causes both of criticism and of sound literature
may be more accurately perceived and defined. Not for a moment can the
student who aims at genuine insight into the history of literature and
of literary opinion during the first quarter of our century afford to
disregard Jeffrey and his _Edinburgh Review_ Essays, or to pass him by
with a phrase as a mere unsuccessful opponent of Wordsworth and
Coleridge. Jeffrey influenced public opinion decisively and beneficially
on a vast range of subjects. He broadened the methods of literary
criticism and won for it new points of view and new fields. He put the
relations between critic and public on a sounder basis, and raised the
profession of literary criticism into an honourable calling. Finally, he
developed English style, added to its swiftness of play and brilliant
serviceableness, and prepared the way for the dazzlingly effective, if
somewhat mechanical, technique of Macaulay. All these good works are
nowadays too often forgotten; and on the injustice of such neglect one
cannot comment more aptly than through the quotation of Jeffrey’s own
famous phrase--“This will never do.”
NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER
I
In these “uncanonical times,” it may seem somewhat grotesque to go for
information about an author’s style to his patron saint. Yet no surer
way exists for gaining an insight into the peculiar charm of Cardinal
Newman’s writings than through an appeal to St. Philip Neri, the founder
of the Congregation of the Oratory, whom Newman chose for his “own
special Father and Patron.” In at least two of his discourses, or
essays, Newman has analyzed the character and peculiar influence of St.
Philip Neri. “Whatever was exact and systematic,” Newman tells us,
“pleased him not; he put from him monastic rule and authoritative
speech, as David refused the armour of his king. No; he would be but an
ordinary individual priest as others; and his weapons should be but
unaffected humility and unpretending love. All he did was to be done by
the light, and fervour, and convincing eloquence of his personal
character and his easy conversation.” In another essay, Newman describes
St. Philip’s distrust of “the severity of the Regular” as a means for
the control of those whom he sought to subjugate. “Influence,” adroit
intimacy, winning intercourse, these were the means by which St. Philip
preferred to work on those about him.
Newman’s loving regard for these traits of St. Philip’s genius is a
revelation of some of the deepest instincts of his nature,--instincts
which must at once be brought into view in any attempt to appreciate his
style as a writer of prose. A peculiar personal charm is impressed on
all the most characteristic of Newman’s prose-writings,--on whatever he
wrote after he had, as an artist, found himself and realized his
essential genius. Abstract as his subject may be, he gives it some
colour of life and some of the beauty and grace of friendly discourse.
Every one knows what charm there is in the talk of a man of the world
who puts before his listeners, in picturesque phrases, the variable
incidents of actual life as he himself has encountered them. The whim,
the personal idiom, the glancing humour, the concrete image, the
vivacious disorderliness, the skilful dealing at first hand with glowing
human experience, give to talk of this sort a peculiarly winning
quality. And the style that in literature mimics afar the colloquial
rhythms and the idiom of such familiar talk has also, its peculiar
charm. The writer seems to escape from the blank region of authorship,
to realize himself before the reader as a friendly face and form, and to
communicate himself through the hundred and one subtle signs of eye and
voice and gesture and smile that give to actual human intercourse its
delight and stimulating power. The extreme form of this colloquial
style, where an author is merely amiably garrulous, is not to be found
in Newman’s writings; Newman’s temper was, after all, too academic for
this, and his subjects were too abstract and difficult. Rarely, however,
have topics as speculative as are many of Newman’s been treated with so
much of the wayward charm and pliant grace of friendly discourse as
Newman reaches. His style, at its best, has the urbanity, the
affability, the winning adroitness, even the half-careless desultoriness
of the familiar talk of a man of the world with his fellows.
Yet it is not this colloquial grace by itself that gives to Newman’s
discussions of abstract topics their peculiar distinction; it is rather
his reconciliation of the charm of colloquial freedom with the demands
of logical method and thoroughness of treatment. Garrulity to no purpose
is usually easy enough. But the peculiarity of Newman’s style and method
is that, with all their apparent casualness, they lead the reader to a
complete and essentially logical command of the topic under discussion.
When he chose, Newman was absolute master of the severe beauty of
rational discourse,--of the beauty of that kind of discourse that
disdains to follow any associations save those of logic,--discusses with
fine economic precision just the aspects of truth that right reason
detects as essential to the question in hand, and is everywhere formally
correct, systematic, and dignified. His earliest work is often austerely
wrought in accordance with this ideal. Ultimately, however, the
essential charm that made him so winning in personal intercourse passed
over into his prose, and conveyed into it the warmth, and elasticity,
and colour of life. Yet this change involved no real sacrifice of
structure or loss of firmness in the texture of his thought. And for the
trained student of literary method much of the surpassing charm of
Newman’s work is due to the possibility of finding in it, on analysis, a
continual victorious union of logical strenuousness with the grace and
ease and charm of a colloquial manner and idiom. This victory is so
easily won as to seem something by the way; but the student and analyst
knows that it is the result of rare tact, finely disciplined instinct,
exquisite rhetorical insight and foresight, and extraordinary
luminousness and largeness of thought.
The very perfection of Newman’s rhetorical manner has exposed him to
some unpleasant charges of insincerity. It is not strange that in the
midst of a people like the English, who are perhaps somewhat affectedly
straightforward and pretentiously downright, Newman should, now and
then, have suffered for his adroitness and grace. The bluff, impetuous
man is proverbially ready to interpret subtlety as duplicity, and to
rebuke reticence and indirectness as deceit and hypocrisy. Prejudice of
this sort was probably the real cause of Canon Kingsley’s famous attack
upon Newman. He had an instinctive dislike of Newman’s sinuousness and
suppleness, and, without pausing to analyze very carefully, he spoke out
fiercely against Newman’s whole work as containing a special variety of
ecclesiastical hypocrisy. The charge was the more plausible inasmuch as
there is unquestionably a certain debased ecclesiastical manner whose
cheaply insinuating suavity might, by hasty observers, be confused with
Newman’s bearing and style. Yet the injustice of this confusion and the
unfairness of Kingsley’s charges become plain after a moment’s analysis.
In spite of Newman’s ease and affability, a fair-minded reader feels,
throughout his writings, when he stops to consider, an underlying
suggestion of uncompromising strength and unwavering conviction. He is
sure that the author is really revealing himself frankly and
unreservedly, notwithstanding his apparent self-effacement, and that he
is imposing his own conclusions, persuasively and constrainingly.
Moreover, the reader is sure that, however adroitly Newman may be
developing his thesis, with an eye to the skilful manipulation of his
readers’ prejudices, he would at any moment give a point-blank answer to
a point-blank question. There is never any real doubt of Newman’s
courage and manly English temper, or of his readiness to meet an
opponent fairly on the grounds of debate. In the last analysis, it is
this fundamental sincerity of tone and this all-pervasive, but
unobtrusive self-assertion that preserve Newman’s style from the undue
flexibility and the insincerity of the debased ecclesiastical style,
just as his unfailing good taste preserves him from its cheap suavity or
unctuousness.
But Newman’s adroitness and rhetorical skill have exposed him to charges
of still another kind, charges that concern the very substance of his
thought and intellectual life, and charges that have been urged with
much greater dialectical skill than Canon Kingsley could attain to. In a
general examination of Newman’s theories, Mr. E. A. Abbott[16] has
accused him of systematically doctoring truth, and of having elaborated,
though perhaps unconsciously, various ingenious methods for inveigling
unsuspecting readers into the acceptance of doubtful propositions,
methods for which Mr. Abbott has devised satirical names, the Art of
Lubrication, the Art of Oscillation, the Art of Assimilation. He does
not assert that Newman consciously palters with truth, or tries to make
the worse appear the better reason. But he urges that Newman was
constitutionally fonder of other things than of truth, that he desired,
with an over-mastering strength, to establish certain conclusions, and
that he persuaded himself of their correctness by a series of manœuvres
which really involved insincere logic.
Here, again, the charges that are made against Newman seem the result of
prejudice and temperamental hostility on the part of his critic. Mr.
Abbott is a bit of a formalist, a Caledonian intellect, a thorough-going
positivist, a thinker for whom the only truth that exists is truth that
can be scientifically verified. He is quite unable to comprehend, or, at
any rate, to tolerate, Newman’s mental constitution and his resulting
methods of conceiving of life and relating himself to its facts. Truth
is to Newman a much subtler matter, a much more elusive substance, than
it is to the positivist, to the mere intellectual dealer in facts and in
figures; it cannot be packed into syllogisms as pills are packed into a
box; it cannot be conveyed into the human system with the simple
directness which the Laputa wiseacre aimed at who was for teaching his
pupils geometry by feeding them on paper duly inscribed with geometrical
figures. Moreover, language is an infinitely treacherous medium; words
are so “false,” so capable of endless change, that one is “loath to
prove reason with them.” Readers, too, are widely diverse, and are open
to countless other appeals than that of sheer logic. Because of such
considerations as these, Newman is continually studious of effect in his
writings; he is intensely conscious of his audience; and he is always
striving to win a way for his convictions, and aiming to insinuate them
into the minds and hearts of his hearers by gently persuasive means.
But all this by no means implies any real carelessness of truth on
Newman’s part, or any sacrifice of truth to expediency. Truth is
difficult of attainment, and hard to transmit; all the more strenuously
does Newman set himself to trace it out in its obscurity and remoteness,
and to reveal it in all its intricacies. Moreover, subtle and elusive as
it may be, it is nevertheless something tangible and describable and
defensible; something, furthermore, of the acquisition of which Newman
can give a very definite account; something as far as possible from mere
misty sentiment, and something, furthermore, to be strenuously asserted
and defended.
Sympathetic and patient readers of Newman, then, can hardly doubt his
essential mental integrity or his courage and readiness to be frank,
even in those passages or in those works where the search for the
subtlest shades of truth, or the desire to avoid clashing needlessly on
prejudice, or the wish to win a favourable hearing, takes the author
most indirectly and tortuously towards his end. It is his underlying
manliness of mind and frank readiness to give an account of himself that
prevent Newman’s prevailing subtlety, adroitness, and suavity from
leaving on the mind of an unprejudiced reader any impression of
timorousness or disingenuousness.
II
In what has been said of Newman’s realization of the elusive nature of
truth and of the great difficulty of securing a welcome for it in the
minds and hearts of the mass of men lies the key to what is most
distinctive in his methods. He was a great rhetorician, and whatever he
produced shows evidence, on analysis, of having been constructed with
the utmost niceness of instinct and deftness of hand. He himself frankly
admitted his rhetorical bent. Writing to Hurrell Froude in 1836, about
the management of the Tractarian agitation, he says, “You and Keble are
the philosophers, and I the rhetorician.”[17] And in a somewhat earlier
letter he speaks of his aptitude for rhetoric in even stronger terms: “I
have a vivid perception of the consequences of certain admitted
principles, have a considerable intellectual capacity of drawing them
out, have the refinement to admire them, and a rhetorical or histrionic
power to represent them.”[18]
This rhetorical skill was partly natural and instinctive, and partly the
result of training. From his earliest years as a student, Newman had
been conspicuous for the subtlety and flexibility of his intelligence,
for his readiness in assuming for speculative purposes the most diverse
points of view, and for his insight into temperaments and his
comprehension of their modifying action on the white light of truth.
With this admirable equipment for effective rhetorical work, he came
directly under the influence, in Oriel College, of two exceptionally
great rhetoricians, Dr. Copleston, for many years Provost of Oriel, and
Whately, one of its most influential Fellows. Copleston was a famous
controversialist and dialectician, who had long been regarded as the
chief champion of the University against the attacks of outsiders. His
_Advice to a Young Reviewer with a Specimen of the Art_ (1807), had
turned into ridicule the airs and pretensions of the young Edinburgh
reviewers and had led them into severe strictures on University methods,
against which attacks, however, Dr. Copleston had vigorously defended
Oxford in various publications, to the satisfaction of all University
men. He was the Provost of Oriel during the first year of Newman’s
residence there, and suggestions of the influence of his ideas and
methods are to be found throughout the early pages of the _Apologia_ and
the _Autobiographical Memoir_. Still more decisive, however, was the
influence of a yet more famous rhetorician, Dr. Whately, whose lectures
on logic and on rhetoric remained almost down to the present day
standard text-books in those subjects. Whately was also renowned as a
controversialist, and his _Historic Doubts relative to Napoleon
Buonaparte_ was perhaps the cleverest and most famous piece of ironical
argumentation produced in England during the first quarter of the
century. Newman, for several of his most impressionable years, was
intimately associated with Whately. “He emphatically opened my mind,”
Newman says in the _Apologia_, “and taught me to think and to use my
reason.” Under the influence of these two masters of rhetoric and
redoubtable controversialists Newman’s natural aptitude for rhetorical
methods was encouraged and fostered, so that he became a perfect adept
in all the arts of exposition and argumentation and persuasion.
Whatever work of Newman’s, then, we take up, we may be sure that its
construction will repay careful analysis. In trying to present any set
of truths, Newman was consciously confronting a delicate psychological
problem; he was aware of the elements that entered into the problem; he
knew what special difficulties he had to face because of the special
nature of the truth he was dealing with,--its abstractness, or
complexity, or novelty. He had measured, also, the precise degree of
resistance he must expect because of the peculiar prejudices or
preoccupations of his readers. And the shape which his discussion
finally took--the particular methods that he followed--were the result
of a deliberate adaptation of means to ends; they were the methods that
his trained rhetorical instinct and his insight into the truth he was
handling and into the temperaments and intelligences he was to address
himself to dictated as most likely to persuade.
Although ordinarily Newman does not explain the method he follows or
comment on the difficulties of his problem, he has, in his _Apologia_,
departed from this rule, and taken his readers into his confidence. In
the first thirty pages of this self-justificatory piece of writing, he
sets forth minutely the prejudices against which he must make his way,
considers various possible modes of overcoming these prejudices, notes
the precise reasons that finally lead him to the actual plan he chooses,
and is entirely explicit as to the elaborate design that underlies and
controls the seeming desultoriness of his whole discussion.
The problem which in this case confronted Newman was briefly as follows.
He had been charged by Kingsley with teaching “lying on system.” He had
protested against the charge and had obtained a half-hearted apology.
Later, however, the charge had been reiterated more formally, and with
the added taunt that as Newman recommended systematic dissimulation no
one could be expected to accept his self-exculpating word. These charges
fell in, as Newman recognized, first, with the general trend of British
prejudice against Roman Catholics, and, secondly, with the particular
prejudice against Newman himself that sprang from his early attempts to
make the Anglican Church more Catholic, and his subsequent secession to
Rome. How, then, was Newman to persuade the public of Kingsley’s
injustice and his own innocence? He saw at once that to deal with each
separate charge would be mere waste of time; to prove that in a special
case he had not lied or recommended lying would carry him no whit
towards his end, as long as contemptuous distrust remained the dominant
mood of the British mind towards himself and his party. First of all, he
must conquer this mood; he must overthrow the presumption against him,
and win for his cause at least such an unbiassed hearing as is accorded
to the ordinary man upon trial whose record has been hitherto clean;
then he might hope to secure for his particular denials a universal
scope. The method that he chose in order to win his readers was
admirably conceived. He would put himself vitally and almost
dramatically before them; he would bring them within the actual sound of
his voice and the glance of his eye; he would let them follow him
through the long course of his years as student, tutor, preacher, and
leader, and come to know him as intimately as those few friends had
known him with whom he had lived most freely. Then, he would ask his
readers, when he had put his personality before them in its many
shifting, but continuous aspects, and with all the intense
persuasiveness of a dramatic portrayal, whether they were ready to
believe of the man they had thus watched through the round of his duties
that he was a liar. Of the peculiar power which Newman could count on
exerting in thus appealing to his personal charm he was, of course,
unable to speak in his Preface. In truth, however, he was having
recourse to an influence which had always been potent whenever it had
had a chance to make itself felt. Throughout his life at Oxford it was
true of his relations to others that “friends unasked, unhoped” had
“come,”--all men who met him falling almost inevitably under the sway of
his winning and commanding personality. Newman was, therefore, well
advised when he resolved to reveal himself to the world and to trust to
the conciliating effect of this self-revelation to prepare for his
specific denial of Kingsley’s charges.
In accordance with this purpose and plan, the _Apologia pro Vita Sua_,
or History of his Religious Opinions, was written; and for these reasons
his answer to certain definite charges of equivocation and systematic
and elaborate misrepresentation was so shaped as to include in its scope
the story of his whole life. Of the 384 pages of the original edition of
the _Apologia_, only the last 93 pages are devoted to the actual
refutation of Kingsley’s charges; the 238 pages that precede are merely
persuasive, and simply prepare the way for the final defence. Probably
in no other piece of writing is the actual demonstration so curiously
small in proportion to the means that are taken to make the logic
effective. Of course, it may be urged in reply to this view of the
construction of the _Apologia_, that to look at the book as purely a
reply to Kingsley, is to judge it from an arbitrary and artificial point
of view, and hence to distort it inevitably and throw its parts out of
proportion; that the real aim of the book was simply and sincerely
autobiographic, and that, regarding the book as frank autobiography, the
critic need find nothing strange in the proportioning of its parts. In
answer to this objection, it should be noted that the last pages of the
book deal directly and argumentatively with “Mr. Kingsley’s
accusations”; that the transition in Part VII. from the history of
Newman’s opinions to the discussion of the theory of truth-telling is
almost imperceptible; and, finally, that Newman himself has declared in
the early pages of the book that the sole reason for his
self-revelations is his wish to clear away misconceptions, to win once
again the confidence of that English public that had long been
distrustful of him, and to make widely effective his refutation of
Kingsley’s charges. The book, then, is fairly to be described as an
enormously elaborate and ingenious piece of special pleading to prepare
the way for a few syllogisms that have now become grotesquely
insignificant.
It has been worth while to lay great stress on this disproportion
between persuasion and demonstration in the _Apologia_, because this
disproportion illustrates, with almost the over-emphasis of caricature,
certain of Newman’s fundamental beliefs and resulting tricks of method.
First and foremost, it illustrates the slight esteem in which he held
the formal logic of the schools and syllogistic demonstrations. Not that
he failed to recognize the value of analysis and logical demonstration
as verifying processes; but he unhesitatingly subordinated these
processes to those by which truth is originally won, and to those also
by which truth is persuasively inculcated.
In a sermon on _Implicit and Explicit Reason_, he distinguishes with
great elaborateness between the method by which the mind makes its way
almost intuitively to the possession of a new truth, or set of truths,
and the subsequent analysis by which it takes account of this
half-instinctive original process and renders the moments of the process
self-conscious and articulate. His description of the intellect
delicately and swiftly feeling its way towards truth may well be quoted
entire: “The mind ranges to and fro, and spreads out and advances
forward with a quickness which has become a proverb, and a subtlety and
versatility which baffle investigation. It passes on from point to
point, gaining one by some indication; another on a probability; then
availing itself of an association; then falling back on some received
law; next seizing on testimony; then committing itself to some popular
impression, or some inward instinct, or some obscure memory; and thus it
makes progress not unlike a clamberer on a steep cliff, who, by quick
eye, prompt hand, and firm foot, ascends, how, he knows not himself, by
personal endowments and by practice, rather than by rule, leaving no
track behind him, and unable to teach another. It is not too much to say
that the stepping by which great geniuses scale the mountain of truth is
as unsafe and precarious to men in general as the ascent of a skilful
mountaineer up a literal crag. It is a way which they alone can take;
and its justification lies alone in their success. And such mainly is
the way in which all men, gifted or not gifted, commonly reason--not by
rule, but by an inward faculty. Reasoning, then, or the exercise of
reason, is a living, spontaneous energy within us, not an art.”[19]
But not only is syllogistic reasoning not the original process by which
truth is attained; it is in no way essential to the validity or
completeness of the process. “Clearness in argument certainly is not
indispensable to reasoning well. Accuracy in stating doctrines or
principles is not essential to feeling and acting upon them. The
exercise of analysis is not necessary to the integrity of the process
analyzed. The process of reasoning is complete in itself, and
independent.”[20]
Finally, logical demonstration has relatively little value as a means of
winning a hearing for new truth, of securing its entrance into the
popular consciousness, and of giving it a place among the determining
powers of life. “Logic makes but a sorry rhetoric with the multitude;
first shoot round corners, and you may not despair of converting by a
syllogism.” Men must be inveigled into the acceptance of truth; they
cannot be driven to accept it at the point of the syllogism. “The heart
is commonly reached, not through the reason, but through the
imagination, by means of direct impressions, by the testimony of facts
and events, by history, by description. People influence us, voices melt
us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us.”
The application of all this,--particularly of what Newman says touching
the persuasiveness of a personal appeal,--to the whole method of the
_Apologia_ hardly needs pointing out. The work is, from first to last,
intensely personal in its tone and matter, persuasive because of its
concreteness, its dramatic vividness, the modulations of the speaker’s
voice, the sincerity and dignity of his look and bearing. Logic, of
course, gives coherence to the discussions. The processes of thought by
which Newman moved from point to point in his theological development
are consistently set forth; but the convincing quality of the book comes
from its embodiment of a life, not from its systematization of a theory.
In accordance with this general character of the book is its tone
throughout; its style is the perfection of informality and easy
colloquialism. Now and then, in describing his ideas on specially
complicated questions, Newman makes use of numbered propositions, and
proceeds, for the time being, with the precaution and precision of the
dialectician. But, for the most part, he is as unconstrained and
apparently fortuitous in his presentation of ideas as if he were merely
emulating Montaigne in confidential self-revelation, and were guided by
no controversial purpose. Perhaps no writer has surpassed, or even
equalled, Newman in combining apparent desultoriness of treatment with
real definiteness of purpose and clairvoyance of method.
III
Another admirable example of Newman’s least formal, and most
characteristic, method may be found in his series of papers on the _Rise
and Progress of Universities_. Here, again, there is apparent
desultoriness, or, at most, a careless following of historical sequence.
One after another, with what seems like a haphazard choice, Newman
describes a half-dozen of the most famous universities of the past,
explains popularly their organization, methods, and aims, entertaining
the reader meanwhile with such superlative pieces of rhetoric as the
description of Attica and Athens, and with such dramatic episodes as
that of Abelard. Yet underneath this apparent caprice runs the
controlling purpose of putting the reader in possession, through
concrete illustrations, of the complete idea of a typically effective
university. Each special school that Newman describes illustrates some
essential attribute of the ideal school; and incidentally the reader,
who is all the time beguiled, from chapter to chapter, by Newman’s
picturesque detail, takes into his mind the various features, and
ultimately the complete image, of the perfect type.
In the series of _Discourses on the Idea of a University_, Newman’s
method is more formal and his tone more controversial. Newman was this
time addressing a distinctly scholarly audience, and was treating of a
series of abstract topics, on which he was called to pronounce in his
character of probable vice-chancellor of the proposed university.
Accordingly, throughout these _Discourses_ he is consistently academic
in tone and manner, and formal and elaborate in method. He lays out his
work with somewhat mechanical precision; he sketches his plan strictly
beforehand; he defines terms and refines upon possible meanings, and
guards at each step against misinterpretations; he pauses often to come
to an understanding with his hearers about the progress already made,
and to consider what line of advance severe logical method next
dictates. In all these ways, he is deliberate, explicit, and
demonstrative. Yet despite this strenuous regard for system and method,
not even here does Newman become crabbedly scholastic or pedantically
over-formal; the result of his strenuousness is, rather, a finely
conscientious circumspection of demeanour and an academic dignity of
bearing. There is something irresistibly impressive in the perfect poise
with which he moves through the intricacies of the many abstractions
that his subject involves. He exhibits each aspect of his subject in
just the right perspective and with just the requisite minuteness of
detail; he leads us unerringly from each point of view to that which
most naturally follows; he keeps us always aware of the relation of each
aspect to the total sum of truth he is trying to help us to grasp; and
so, little by little, he secures for us that perfect command of an
intellectual region, in its concrete facts and in its abstract
relations, which exposition aims to make possible. These _Discourses_
are as fine an example as exists in English of the union of strict
method with charm of style in the treatment of an abstract topic.
In the _Development of Christian Doctrine_ and the _Grammar of Assent_
the severity of Newman’s method is somewhat greater, as is but natural
in strictly scientific treatises. Yet even in these abstract discussions
his style retains an inalienable charm, due to the luminousness of the
atmosphere, the wide-ranging command of illustrations, the unobtrusively
tropical phrasing, and the steady harmonious sweep of the periods. Few
books on equally abstract topics are as easy reading.
Newman’s methods as a controversialist may advantageously be studied in
his _Present Position of Catholics in England_,--a work that contains
some of his most ingenious and caustic irony. In plan and construction,
these discourses illustrate once more Newman’s consummate skill in
adapting his method to the matter in hand. His purpose in this case is
to right the Roman Catholic Church with the English nation, to exhibit
the Roman Catholics as he knows them to be, a conscientious, honourable,
patriotic body of men, and to put an end once for all, if possible, to
the long tradition of calumny that has persecuted them. Such is his
problem. He sets about its solution characteristically. He does not
undertake to demonstrate the truth of Roman Catholic doctrines, or, by
direct evidence and argument, to refute the wild charges of hypocrisy
and corruption which Protestants are habitually making against Roman
Catholics. His methods are much subtler than these and also much more
comprehensive and final. He sets himself to analyze Protestant
prejudice, and to destroy it by resolving it into its elements. He takes
it up historically, and exhibits its origin in an atmosphere of intense
partisan conflict, and its development in the midst of peculiarly
favourable intellectual and moral conditions; he shows that it is
political in its origin and has been inwrought into the very fibre of
English national life: “English Protestantism is the religion of the
throne; it is represented, realized, taught, transmitted in the
succession of monarchs and an hereditary aristocracy. It is religion
grafted upon loyalty; and its strength is not in argument, not in fact,
not in the unanswerable controversialist, not in an apostolic
succession, not in sanction of Scripture--but in a royal road to faith,
in backing up a King whom men see, against a Pope whom they do not see.
The devolution of its crown is the tradition of its creed; and to doubt
its truth is to be disloyal towards its Sovereign. Kings are an
Englishman’s saints and doctors; he likes somebody or something at which
he can cry, ‘huzzah,’ and throw up his hat.”
To hate a “Romanist,” then, is as natural for John Bull as to hate a
Frenchman, and to libel him is a matter of patriotism. The Englishman’s
romantic imagination has for generations been spinning myths of Catholic
misdoing to satisfy these deep instinctive animosities. Moreover, many
other typical English qualities, in addition to loyalty and patriotism,
have contributed to foster and develop this Protestant prejudice. Such
are the controlling practical interests of the middle-class English,
their content with compromise-working schemes, and their contempt for
abstractions and subtleties; their shuddering dislike of innovation;
their well-meaning obstinacy in ignorance, and their heroic adherence to
familiar, though undeniable error; their insularity; their hatred of
foreigners in general, and their frenzied fear of the Pope in
particular. With unfailing adroitness of suggestion, Newman makes clear
how these national traits, and many others closely related to them, have
coöperated to originate and develop Protestant hatred of Roman
Catholicism. His mastery of the details of social life and of motives of
action is in this discussion of English history and contemporary life
specially conspicuous. Every phase of peculiarly English thought and
feeling is present to him; every intricacy of the curiously subterranean
British national temperament is traced out. And the result is that
prejudice is explained out of existence. The intense hostility that
seems so primitive an instinct as to justify itself like the belief in
God or in an outer world, is resolved into the expression of a vast mass
of petty, and often discreditable instincts, and so loses all its
validity in losing its apparent primitiveness and mystery.
Such is the general plan and scope of Newman’s attack on Protestant
prejudice; in carrying out the plan and making his attack brilliantly
effective, he shows inexhaustible ingenuity and unwearied invention. He
uses fables, allegories, and elaborate pieces of irony; he develops an
unending series of picturesque illustrations of Protestant prejudice,
drawn from all sources, past and present; he sets curious traps for this
prejudice, catches it at unawares, and shows it up to his readers in
guises they can hardly defend; he plays skilfully upon the instincts
that lie at its root, and by clever manipulation makes them declare
themselves in a twinkling in favour of some aspect of Roman Catholicism.
In short, he uses all the rhetorical devices of which he is master to
win a hearing from the half-hostile, to beguile the unwilling, to amuse
the captious, and, finally, to insinuate into the minds of his readers
an all-permeating mood of contempt for Protestant narrowness and
bigotry, and of open-minded appreciation of the merits of Roman
Catholics.
IV
For still another reason the lectures on the _Present Position of
Catholics_ are specially interesting to a student of Newman’s methods;
they illustrate exceptionally well his skill in the use of irony. To the
genuine rhetorician there is something specially attractive in the
duplicity of irony, because of the opportunity it offers of playing with
points of view, of juggling with phrases, of showing virtuosity in the
manipulation of both thoughts and words. Newman was too much of a
rhetorician not to feel this fascination. Moreover, he had learned from
his study of Copleston and Whately the possibilities of irony as a
controversial weapon. Copleston’s _Advice to a Young Reviewer_, and
Whately’s _Historic Doubts relative to Napoleon Buonaparte_ were typical
specimens of academic irony, where, with impressive dignity and suavity
and the most plausible simplicity and candour, the writers, while
seemingly advocating a certain policy, or theory, or set of conclusions,
were really sneering throughout at a somewhat similar policy or
theory--that of their opponents--and laying it open to helpless
ridicule.
One of the most noteworthy characteristics of Newman’s irony--and in
this point his irony resembled that of his masters--was its positive
argumentative value. Often an elaborate piece of irony is chiefly
destructive; it turns cleverly into ridicule the general attitude of
mind of the writer’s opponents, but makes no attempt to supply a
substitute for the faith it destroys. Swift’s irony is usually of this
character. It is intensely ill-natured, even savage, and is so
extravagant that it sometimes defeats its own end as argument. Its
hauteur and bitterness produce a reaction in the mind of the reader, and
force him to distrust the judgment and sanity of a man who can be so
inveterately and fiercely insolent. Its indictment is so sweeping and
its mood so cynical, that the reader, though he is bullied out of any
regard for the ideas that Swift attacks, is repelled from Swift himself,
and made to hate his notions as much as he despises those of Swift’s
opponents. Moreover, full of duplicity and innuendo as it is, its
innuendoes are often merely disguised sneers, and not suggestions of
genuinely valid reasons why the opinions or prejudices which the writer
is assailing should be abandoned. In the _Modest Proposal_ and the
_Argument against Abolishing Christianity_, for example, the irony
reduces to one long sneer at the prejudice, the selfishness, and the
cruelty of Yahoo human nature; there is very little positive argument in
behalf of the oppressed Irish on the one hand, or in favour of
Christianity on the other.
Newman’s irony, on the contrary, is subtle, intellectual, and
suggestive. It is positive in its insinuation of actual reasons for
abandoning prejudice against Roman Catholics; it is tirelessly adroit,
and adjusts itself delicately to every part of the opposing argument; it
is suggestive of new ideas, and not only makes the reader see the
absurdity of some time-worn prejudice, but hints at its explanation and
is ready with a new opinion to take its place. In tone, too, it is very
different from Swift’s irony; it is not enraged and blindly savage, but
more like the best French irony--self-possessed, suave, and oblique.
Newman addresses himself with unfailing skill to the prejudices of those
whom he is trying to move, and carries his readers with him in a way
that Swift was too contemptuous to aim at. Newman’s irony wins the
wavering, while it routs the hostile. This is the double task it
proposes to itself.
An example of his irony at its best may be found in the amusing piece of
declamation against the British Constitution and John Bullism which
Newman puts into the mouth of a Russian count. The passage occurs in a
lecture on the _Present Position of Catholics_, which was delivered just
before the war with Russia, when English jealousy of Russia and contempt
for Russian prejudice and ignorance were most intense. It was, of
course, on these feelings of jealousy and contempt that Newman skilfully
played when he represented the Russian count as grotesquely
misinterpreting the British Constitution and _Blackstone’s
Commentaries_, and as charging them with irreligion and blasphemy. His
satirical portrayal of the Russian and the clever manipulation by which
he forces the count to exhibit his stores of ungentle dulness and his
stock of malignant prejudice delighted every ordinary British reader,
and threw him into a pleasant glow of self-satisfaction, and of sympathy
with the author; now this was the very mood, as Newman was well aware,
in which, if ever, the anti-Catholic reader might be led to question
with himself whether, after all, he was perfectly informed about Roman
Catholicism, or whether he did not, like the Russian count, take most of
his knowledge at second-hand and inherit most of his prejudice.
Throughout this passage the ingenuity is conspicuous with which Newman
makes use of English dislike of Russia and loyalty to Queen and
Constitution; the passage everywhere exemplifies the adroitness, the
flexibility, the persuasiveness, and the far-reaching calculation of
Newman’s irony.
Indeed, this elaborateness and self-consciousness, and deliberateness
of aim, are perhaps, at times, limitations on the success of his irony;
it is somewhat too cleverly planned and a trifle over-elaborate. In
these respects it contrasts disadvantageously with French irony, which,
at its best, is so delightfully by the way, so airily unexpected, so
accidental, and yet so dextrously fatal. It would be an instructive
study in literary method to compare Newman’s ironical defence of Roman
Catholicism in the passage already referred to with Montesquieu’s
ironical attack upon the same system in the _Lettres Persanes_.
V
When we turn from Newman’s methods to his style in the narrower meaning
of the term, we still find careful elaboration and ingenious calculation
of effect, although here, again, the conscientious workmanship becomes
evident only on reflection, and the general impression is that of easy
and instinctive mastery. Nevertheless, Newman wrought out all that he
wrote, with much patient recasting and revising. “It is simply the
fact,” he tells a friend in one of his letters, “that I have been
obliged to take great pains with everything I have written, and I often
write chapters over and over again, besides innumerable corrections and
interlinear additions.... I think I have never written for writing’s
sake; but my one and single desire and aim has been to do what is so
difficult: viz., to express clearly and exactly my meaning; this has
been the motive principle of all my corrections and rewritings.”[21]
It is perhaps this sincerity of aim and this sacrifice of the decorative
impulse in the strenuous search for adequacy of expression that keep out
of Newman’s writing every trace of artificiality. Sophisticated as is
his style, it is never mannered. There is no pretence, no flourish, no
exhibition of rhetorical resources for their own sake. The most
impressive and the most richly imaginative passages in his prose come in
because he is betrayed into them in his conscientious pursuit of all the
aspects of the truth he is illustrating. Moreover, they are curiously
congruous in tone with the most colloquial parts of his writing. There
is no sudden jar perceptible when, in the midst of his ordinary
discourse, one chances upon these passages of essential beauty; perfect
continuity of texture is characteristic of his work. This perfect
continuity of texture illustrates both the all-pervasive fineness and
nobleness of Newman’s temper, which constantly holds the elements of
moral and spiritual beauty in solution, and which imprints a certain
distinction upon even the commonplace, and also the flexibility and
elasticity of his style, which enables him with such perfect gradation
of effect to change imperceptibly from the lofty to the common. An
admirable example of this exquisite gradation of values and continuity
of texture may be found in the third chapter of Newman’s _Rise and
Progress of Universities_, where he describes Athens and the region
round about as the ideal site for a university. Alike in the earlier
paragraphs that are merely expository, and in the later ones that
portray the beauty of Attica, his style is simple and easily colloquial;
and when from the splendid imaginative picture that his descriptive
sentences call up, he turns again suddenly to exposition, the transition
causes no perceptible jar. The same flexibility and smoothness of style
is exemplified in a passage in the third of the discourses on
_University Teaching_, where he defines his conception of the Science of
Theology. In this passage, the change from a scientific explanation of
the duties of the theologian to the almost impassioned eloquence of the
ascription of goodness and might to the Deity is effected with no shock
or sense of discontinuity.
In its freedom from artificiality and in its perfect sincerity, Newman’s
style contrasts noticeably with the style of a great rhetorician from
whom he nevertheless took many hints--De Quincey. Of his careful study
of De Quincey’s style there can be no question. In the passage on the
Deity, to which reference has just been made, there are unmistakable
reminiscences of De Quincey in the iteration of emphasis on an important
word, in the frequent use of inversions, in the rise and fall of the
periods, and, indeed, in the subtle rhythmic effects throughout. The
piece of writing, however, where the likeness to De Quincey and the
imitation of his manner and music are most evident is the sermon on the
_Fitness of the Glories of Mary_,--that piece of Newman’s prose, it
should be noted, which is least defensible against the charge of
artificiality and undue ornateness. A passage near the close of the
sermon best illustrates the points in question: “And therefore she died
in private. It became Him, who died for the world, to die in the world’s
sight; it became the Great Sacrifice to be lifted up on high, as a light
that could not be hid. But she, the Lily of Eden, who had always dwelt
out of the sight of man, fittingly did she die in the garden’s shade,
and amid the sweet flowers in which she had lived. Her departure made no
noise in the world. The Church went about her common duties, preaching,
converting, suffering. There were persecutions, there was fleeing from
place to place, there were martyrs, there were triumphs. At length the
rumour spread abroad that the Mother of God was no longer upon earth.
Pilgrims went to and fro; they sought for her relics, but they found
them not; did she die at Ephesus? or did she die at Jerusalem? reports
varied; but her tomb could not be pointed out, or if it was found, it
was open; and instead of her pure and fragrant body, there was a growth
of lilies from the earth which she had touched. So inquirers went home
marvelling, and waiting for further light.”[22]
Though the cadences of Newman’s prose are rarely as marked as here, a
subtle musical beauty runs elusively through it all. Not that there is
any of the sing-song of pseudo-poetic prose. The cadences are always
wide-ranging and delicately shifting, with none of the halting iteration
and feeble sameness of half-metrical work. Moreover, the rhythms, subtly
pervasive as they are, and even symbolic of the mood of the passage as
they often prove to be, never compel direct recognition, but act merely
as a mass of undistinguished under-and over-tones like those which give
to a human voice depth and tenderness and suggestiveness.
Newman understood perfectly the symbolic value of rhythm and the
possibility of imposing upon a series of simple words, by delicately
sensitive adjustment, a power over the feelings and the imagination like
that of an incantation. Several of the passages already quoted or
referred to illustrate his instinctive adaptation of cadence to meaning
and tone; another passage, in which this same adaptation is exemplified,
occurs towards the close of the _Apologia_, where Newman describes the
apparent moral chaos in human history. For subtlety of modulation,
however, and symbolic suggestiveness, perhaps the tender leave-taking
with which the _Apologia_ concludes is the most beautiful piece of
prose that Newman has written: “I have closed this history of myself
with St. Philip’s name upon St. Philip’s feast-day; and having done so,
to whom can I more suitably offer it, as a memorial of affection and
gratitude, than to St. Philip’s sons, my dearest brothers of this House,
the Priests of the Birmingham Oratory, Ambrose St. John, Henry Austin
Mills, Henry Bittleston, Edward Caswall, William Paine Neville, and
Henry Ignatius Dudley Rider, who have been so faithful to me; who have
been so sensitive of my needs; who have been so indulgent to my
failings; who have carried me through so many trials; who have grudged
no sacrifice, if I have asked for it; who have been so cheerful under
discouragements of my causing; who have done so many good works, and let
me have the credit of them;--with whom I have lived so long, with whom I
hope to die.
“And to you especially, dear Ambrose St. John, whom God gave me, when He
took every one else away; who are the link between my old life and my
new; who have now for twenty-one years been so devoted to me, so
patient, so zealous, so tender; who have let me lean so hard upon you;
who have watched me so narrowly; who have never thought of yourself, if
I was in question.
“And in you I gather up and bear in memory those familiar, affectionate
companions and counsellors, who, in Oxford, were given to me, one after
another, to be my daily solace and relief; and all those others, of
great name and high example, who were my thorough friends, and showed me
true attachment in times long past; and also those many younger men,
whether I knew them or not, who have never been disloyal to me by word
or deed; and of all these, thus various in their relations to me, those
more especially who have since joined the Catholic Church.
“And I earnestly pray for this whole company, with a hope against hope,
that all of us, who once were so united, and so happy in our union, may
even now be brought at length, by the Power of the Divine Will, into One
Fold and under One Shepherd.”
VI
The careful gradation of values in Newman’s style and the far-reaching
sweep of his periods connect themselves closely with another of his
noteworthy characteristics--his breadth of handling. He manipulates with
perfect ease and precision vast masses of facts, and makes them all
contribute with unerring coöperation to the production of a single
effect. However minute his detail,--and his liking for concreteness
which will be presently illustrated often incites him to great
minuteness,--he is careful not to confuse his composition, destroy the
perspective, or lose sight of total effect. The largeness of his manner
and the certainty of his handling place him at once among really great
constructive artists.
Against this assertion it may be urged that in his fiction it is just
this breadth of effect and constructive skill that are most noticeably
lacking; that each of his novels, whatever its merits in places, is
unsuccessful as a whole, and leaves a blurred impression. This must at
once be granted. But, after all, it is in his theoretical, or moral, or
historical work that the real Newman is to be found; in such work he is
much more himself, much more thoroughly alive and efficient than in his
stories, which, though cleverly turned out, were, after all, things by
the way, were amateurish in execution, and never completely called forth
his strength. Moreover, even in his novels, we find occasionally the
integrating power of his imagination remarkably illustrated. The
description in _Callista_ of the invading and ravaging locusts is
admirably sure in its treatment of detail and even and impressive in
tone; the episode of Gurta’s madness is powerfully conceived, is swift
and sure in its action, and is developed with admirable subordination
and colouring of detail and regard to climax.
On the whole, however, it must be granted that in his fiction Newman’s
sense of total effect and his constructive skill are least conspicuous.
In his abstract discussions they never fail him. First and foremost,
they show themselves in the plan of each work as a whole. The treatment
is invariably symmetrical and exhaustive; part answers to part with the
precision and the delicacy of adjustment of a work of art. Each part is
conscious of the whole and has a vitally loyal relation to it, so that
the needs and purposes of the whole organism seem present as controlling
and centralizing instincts in every chapter, paragraph, and sentence.
In his use of elaborate illustrations for the sake of securing
concreteness and sensuous beauty, Newman shows this same integrating
power of imagination. In the long illustrations, which often take almost
the proportions of episodes in the epical progress of his argument or
exposition, the reader has no sense of bewilderment or uncertainty of
aim; the strength of Newman’s mind and purpose subdues his endlessly
diverse material, and compels it into artistic coherence and vital
unity; all details are coloured in harmony with the dominant tone of the
piece, and reënforce a predetermined mood. When a reader commits himself
to one of Newman’s discussions, he must resign himself to him body and
soul, and be prepared to live and move and have his being in the medium
of Newman’s thought, and, moreover, in the special range of thought, and
the special mood, that this particular discussion provokes. Perhaps this
omnipresence of Newman in the minutest details of each discussion
becomes ultimately to the careful student of his writing the most
convincing proof of the largeness of his mind, of the intensity of his
conception, and of the vigour and vitality of his imagination.
It may be urged that the copiousness of Newman at times becomes
wearisome; that he is over-liberal of both explanation and illustration;
and that his style, though never exuberant in ornament, is sometimes
annoyingly luminous, and blinds with excess of light. This is probably
the point in which Newman’s style is most open to attack. It is a
cloyingly explicit, rather than a stimulatingly suggestive, style; it
does almost too much for the reader, and is almost inconsiderately
generous. Yet these qualities of his style are so intimately connected
with its peculiar personal charm that they can hardly be censured. And
it may be noted that so strenuous an advocate of the austere style as
Walter Pater has instanced Newman’s _Idea of a University_ as an example
of “the perfect handling of a theory.”
One characteristic of the purely suggestive style is certainly to be
found in Newman’s writing,--great beauty and vigour of phrase. This fact
is the more noteworthy because a writer who, like Newman, is impressive
in the mass, and excels in securing breadth of effect, very often lacks
the ability to strike out memorable epigrams. A few quotations, brought
together at random, will show what point and terseness Newman could
command when he chose. “Ten thousand difficulties do not make a doubt.”
“Great things are done by devotion to one idea.” “Calculation never made
a hero.” “All aberrations are founded on, and have their life in, some
truth or other.” “Great acts take time.” “A book after all cannot make a
stand against the wild living intellect of man.” “To be converted in
partnership.” “It is not at all easy (humanly speaking) to wind up an
Englishman to a dogmatic level.” “Paper logic.” “One is not at all
pleased when poetry, or eloquence, or devotion is considered as if
chiefly intended to feed syllogisms.” “Here below to live is to change,
and to be perfect is to have changed often.” In terseness and
sententiousness these utterances could hardly be surpassed by the most
acrimonious searcher after epigram, though of course they have not the
glitter of paradox to which modern coiners of phrases aspire.
Of wit there is very little to be found in Newman’s writings; it is not
the natural expression of his temperament. Wit is too dryly
intellectual, too external and formal, too little vital, to suit
Newman’s mental habit. To the appeal of humour he was distinctly more
open. It is from the humorous incongruities of imaginary situations that
his irony secures its most persuasive effects. Moreover, whenever he is
not necessarily preoccupied with the tragically serious aspects of life
and of history, or forced by his subject-matter, and audience, into a
formally restrained manner and method, he has, in treating any topic,
that urbanity and half-playful kindliness that come from a large-minded
and almost tolerant recognition of the essential imperfections of life
and human nature. The mood of the man of the world, sweetened and
ennobled, and enriched by profound knowledge and deep feeling and
spiritual seriousness, gives to much of Newman’s work its most
distinctive note. When he is able to be thoroughly colloquial, this mood
and this tone can assert themselves most freely, and the result is a
style through which a gracious kindliness, which is never quite humour,
and which yet possesses all its elements, diffuses itself pervasively
and persuasively. Throughout the _Rise and Progress of Universities_
this tone is traceable, and, to take a specific example, it is largely
to its influence that the description of Athens, in the third chapter,
owes its peculiar charm. What can be more deliciously incongruous than
the agent of a London “mercantile firm” and the Acropolis? or more
curiously ill-mated than his standards of valuation and the qualities of
the Grecian landscape? Yet how little malicious is Newman’s use of this
incongruity or disproportion, and how unsuspiciously the “agent of a
London Company” ministers to the quiet amusement of the reader, and also
helps to heighten, by contrast, the effect of beauty and romance and
mystery that Newman is aiming at.
Several allusions have already been made to Newman’s liking for
concreteness, and in an earlier paragraph his distrust of the abstract
was described and illustrated at length. These predilections of his have
left their unmistakable mark on his style in ways more technical than
those that have thus far been noted. His vocabulary is, for a scholar,
exceptionally idiomatic and unliterary; the most ordinary and unparsable
turns of every-day speech are inwrought into the texture of his style.
In the _Apologia_ he speaks of himself in one place as having had “a
lounging, free-and-easy way of carrying things on,” and the phrase both
defines and illustrates one characteristic of his style. Idioms that
have the crude force of popular speech, the vitality without the
vulgarity of slang, abound in his writings. Of his increasingly clear
recognition, in 1839, of the weakness of the Anglican position, he says:
“The Via Media was an impossible idea; it was what I had called
‘standing on one leg.’” In describing his loss of control over his party
in 1840 he declares: “I never had a strong wrist, but at the very time
when it was most needed, the reins had broken in my hands.” Of the
ineradicableness of evil in human nature, he exclaims: “You do but play
a sort of ‘hunt the slipper,’ with the fault of our nature, till you go
to Christianity.” Illustrations of this idiomatic and homely phrasing
might be endlessly multiplied. Moreover, to the concreteness of
colloquial phrasing, Newman adds the concreteness of the specific word.
Other things being equal, he prefers the name of the species to that of
the genus, and the name of the class to that of the species; he is
always urged forward towards the individual and the actual; his mind
does not lag in the region of abstractions and formulas, but presses
past the general term, or abstraction, or law, to the image or the
example, and into the tangible, glowing, sensible world of fact. His
imagery, though never obtrusive, is almost lavishly present, and though
never purely decorative, is often very beautiful. It is so inevitable,
however, springs so organically from the thought and the mood of the
moment, that the reader accepts it unmindfully, and is conscious only of
grasping, easily and securely, the writer’s meaning. He must first look
back through the sentences and study the style in detail before he will
come to realize its continual, but decisive, divergence from the literal
and commonplace, and its essential freshness and distinction.
On occasion, of course, Newman uses elaborate figures; but commonly for
purposes of exposition or persuasion. In such cases the reader may well
note the thoroughness with which the figure adjusts itself to every turn
and phase of the thought, and the surprising omnipresence and
suggestiveness of the tropical phrasing. These qualities of Newman’s
style are illustrated in the following passage from the _Development of
Christian Doctrine_:--
“Whatever be the risk of corruption from intercourse with the world
around, such a risk must be encountered if a great idea is duly to be
understood, and much more if it is to be fully exhibited. It is elicited
and expanded by trial, and battles into perfection and supremacy. Nor
does it escape the collision of opinion even in its earlier years, nor
does it remain truer to itself, and with a better claim to be considered
one and the same, though externally protected from vicissitude and
change. It is indeed sometimes said that the stream is clearest near the
spring. Whatever use may fairly be made of this image, it does not apply
to the history of a philosophy or belief, which, on the contrary, is
more equable, and purer, and stronger, when its bed has become deep, and
broad, and full. It necessarily rises out of an existing state of
things, and for a time savours of the soil. Its vital element needs
disengaging from what is foreign and temporary, and is employed in
efforts after freedom which become more vigorous and hopeful as its
years increase. Its beginnings are no measure of its capabilities, nor
of its scope. At first no one knows what it is, or what it is worth. It
remains perhaps for a time quiescent; it tries, as it were, its limbs,
and proves the ground under it, and feels its way. From time to time, it
makes essays which fail, and are in consequence abandoned. It seems in
suspense which way to go; it wavers, and at length strikes out in one
definite direction. In time it enters upon strange territory; points of
controversy alter their bearing; parties rise and fall around it;
dangers and hopes appear in new relations; and old principles reappear
under new forms. It changes with them in order to remain the same. In a
higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and
to be perfect is to have changed often.”[23] The image of the river
pervades this passage throughout, and yet is never obtrusive and never
determines or even constrains the progress of the thought. The imagery
simply seems to insinuate the ideas into the reader’s mind with a
certain novelty of appeal and half-sensuous persuasiveness. Another
passage of much this kind has already been quoted, where Newman
describes the adventurous investigator scaling the crags of truth.[24]
Closely akin to this use of figures is Newman’s generous use of examples
and illustrations. Whatever be the principle he is discussing, he is not
content till he has realized it for the reader in tangible, visible
form, until he has given it the cogency and intensity of appeal that
only sensations or images possess. In all these ways, then, by his
idiomatic and colloquial phrasing, by his specific vocabulary, by his
delicately adroit use of metaphors, by his carefully elaborated imagery,
and by his wealth of examples and illustrations, Newman keeps
resolutely close to the concrete, and imparts everywhere to his style
warmth, vividness, colour, convincing actuality.
VII
It remains to suggest briefly Newman’s relation to what was most
characteristic in the thought and feeling of his times. Without any
attempt at a technical analysis of his doctrine or at a special study of
his theorizing in religion and philosophy, it will be possible to
connect him, by virtue of certain temperamental characteristics, and
certain prevailing modes of conceiving life, with what was most
distinctive in the literature of the early part of the century.
Interpreted most searchingly, his early Anglicanism and his later
Catholicism were peculiar expressions of that Romantic spirit which
realized itself with such splendour and power in the best and most vital
literature of his day and generation.
Perhaps the most general formula for the work of English literature
during the first quarter of the present century is the rediscovery and
vindication of the concrete. The special task of the eighteenth century
had been to order, and to systematize, and to name; its favourite
methods had been analysis and generalization. It asked for no new
experience; it sought only to master and reduce to formulas, and to find
convenient labels for what experience it already possessed. It was
perpetually in search of standards and canons; it was conventional
through and through; and its men felt secure from the ills of time only
when sheltered under some ingenious artificial construction of rule and
precedent. Whatever lay beyond the scope of their analysis and defied
their laws, they disliked and dreaded. The outlying regions of mystery
which hem life in on every side, are inaccessible to the intellect and
irreducible in terms of its laws, were strangely repellent to them, and
from such shadowy vistas they resolutely turned their eyes and fastened
them on the solid ground at their feet. The familiar bustle of the town,
the thronging streets of the city, the gay life of the drawing-room, and
coffee-house, and play-house; or the more exalted life of Parliament and
Court, the intrigues of State-chambers, the manœuvres of the
battle-field; the aspects of human activity, wherever collective man in
his social capacity goes through the orderly and comprehensible changes
of his ceaseless pursuit of worldly happiness and worldly success; these
were the subjects that for the men of the eighteenth century had
absorbing charm: in seeking to master this intricate play of forces, to
fathom the motives below it, to tabulate its experiences, to set up
standards to guide the individual successfully through the intricacies
of this commonplace, every-day world, they spent their utmost energy,
and to these tasks they instinctively limited themselves. In poetry, it
was a generalized view of life that they aimed at, a semi-philosophical
representation of man’s nature and actions. Pope, the typical poet of
the century, “stooped to truth and moralized his song.” Dr. Johnson, the
most authoritative critic of the century, taught that the poet should
“remark general properties and large appearances ... and must neglect
the minuter discriminations, which one may have remarked, and another
have neglected, or those characteristics which are alike obvious to
vigilance and carelessness.” In prose, the same moralizing and
generalizing tendencies prevailed, and found their most adequate and
thorough-going expression in the abstract and pretentiously latinized
style of Dr. Johnson.
Everywhere thought gave the law; the senses and the imagination were
kept jealously in subordination. The abstract, the typical, the
general--these were everywhere exalted at the expense of the image, the
specific experience, the vital fact. In religion, the same tendencies
showed themselves. Orthodoxy and Deism alike were mechanical in their
conception of Nature and of God. Both Free-thinkers and Apologists tried
to systematize religious experience, and to rationalize theology. In the
pursuit of historical evidences and of logical demonstrations of the
truth or falsity of religion, genuine religious emotion was almost
neglected, or was actually condemned. Enthusiasm was distrusted or
abhorred; an enthusiast was a madman. Intense feeling of all kinds was
regarded askance, and avoided as irrational, unsettling, prone to
disarrange systems, and to overturn standards, and burst the bonds of
formulas.
It was to this limited manner of living life and of conceiving of life
that the great movement which, for lack of a better name, may be called
the Romantic Movement, was to put an end. The Romanticists sought to
enrich life with new emotions, to conquer new fields of experience, to
come into imaginative touch with far distant times, to give its due to
the encompassing world of darkness and mystery, and even to pierce
through the darkness in the hope of finding, at the heart of the
mystery, a transcendental world of infinite beauty and eternal truth. A
keener sense of the value of life penetrated them and stirred them into
imaginative sympathy with much that had left the men of the eighteenth
century unmoved. They found in the naïve life of Nature and animals and
children picturesqueness and grace that were wanting in the
sophisticated life of the “town”; they delighted in the mysterious
chiaroscuro of the Middle Ages, in its rich blazonry of passion, and its
ever-changing spectacular magnificence; they looked forward with ardour
into the future, and dreamed dreams of the progress of man; they opened
their hearts to the influences of the spiritual world, and religion
became to them something more than respectability and morality. In
every way they endeavoured to give some new zest to life, to impart to
it some fine novel flavour, to attain to some exquisite new experience.
They sought this new experience imaginatively in the past, with Scott
and Southey; they sought it with fierce insistence in foreign lands,
following Byron, and in the wild exploitation of individual fancy and
caprice; they sought it with Coleridge and Wordsworth through the
revived sensitiveness of the spirit and its intuitions of a
transcendental world of absolute reality; they sought it with Shelley in
the regions of the vast inane.
Now it was in the midst of these restless conditions and under the
influence of all this new striving and aspiration that Newman’s youth
and most impressionable years of development were spent, and he took
colour and tone from his epoch to a degree that has often been
overlooked. His work, despite its reactionary character, indeed, partly
because of it, is a genuine expression of the Romantic spirit, and can
be understood only when thus interpreted and brought into relation with
the great tendencies of thought and feeling of the early part of our
century. Of his direct indebtedness to Scott, Wordsworth, and Coleridge,
he has himself made record in the _Apologia_[25]and in his
_Autobiographical Sketch_.[26] But far more important than the
influence of any single man was the penetrating and determining action
upon him of the Romantic atmosphere, overcharged as it was with intense
feeling and tingling with new thought. The results of this action may be
traced throughout his temperament and in all his work.
Mediævalism, as we have seen, was a distinctive note of the Romantic
spirit, and, certainly, Newman was intensely alive to the beauty and the
poetic charm of the life of the Middle Ages. One is sometimes tempted to
describe him as a great mediæval ecclesiastic astray in the nineteenth
century and heroically striving to remodel modern life in harmony with
his temperamental needs. His imagination was possessed with the Romantic
vision of the greatness of the mediæval Church,--of its splendour and
pomp and dignity, and of its power over the hearts and lives of its
members; and the Oxford movement was in its essence an attempt to
reconstruct the English Church in harmony with this Romantic ideal, to
rouse the Church to a vital realization of its own great traditions, and
to restore to it the prestige and the dominating position it had had in
the past. As Scott’s imagination was fascinated with the picturesque
paraphernalia of feudalism,--with its jousts, and courts of love, and
its coats of mail and buff-jerkins,--so Newman’s imagination was
captivated by the gorgeous ritual and ceremonial, the art and
architecture of mediæval Christianity, and found in them the symbols of
the spirit of mystery and awe which was for him the essentially
religious spirit, and of the mystical truths of which revealed religion
was made up. The Church, as Newman found it, was Erastian and worldly;
it was apt to regard itself as merely an ally of the State for the
maintenance of order and spread of morality; it was coldly rational in
belief and theology, and prosaic in its conception of religious truth
and of its own position and functions. Newman sought to revive in the
Church a mediæval faith in its own divine mission and the intense
spiritual consciousness of the Middle Ages; he aimed to restore to
religion its mystical character, to exalt the sacramental system as the
divinely appointed means for the salvation of souls, and to impose once
more on men’s imaginations the mighty spell of a hierarchical
organization, the direct representative of God in the world’s affairs.
Such was the mediæval ideal to which he devoted himself. Both he and
Scott substantially ruined themselves through their mediævalism. Scott’s
luckless attempt was to place his private and family life upon a feudal
basis and to give it mediæval colour and beauty; Newman undertook a much
nobler and more heroic, but more intrinsically hopeless task,--that of
recreating the whole English Church in harmony with mediæval
conceptions.
Before Newman, Keble had already conceived of the English Church in this
imaginative spirit. In one of his _Essays_, Newman describes how Keble
had made the Church “poetical,” had “kindled hearts towards it,” and by
“his happy magic” had thrown upon its ritual, offices, and servants a
glamour and beauty of which they had for many generations been devoid.
It was to the continuance and the furtherance of this process of
regeneration and transfiguration that Newman devoted the Tractarian
movement.
But the essentially Romantic character of the new movement comes out in
other ways than in its idealization of the Church. The relation of
Newman and of his friends to Nature was closely akin to that of the
Romanticists. Newman, like Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, found
Nature mysteriously beautiful and instinct with strange significance, a
divinely elaborated language whereby God speaks through symbols to the
human soul. Keble’s _Christian Year_ is full of this interpretation of
natural sights and sounds as images of spiritual truth, and with this
mystical conception of Nature Newman was in sympathy. Nature was for him
as rich in its spiritual suggestiveness, as for Wordsworth or Shelley,
and was as truly for him as for Carlyle or Goethe the visible garment of
God. But in interpreting the emotional value of Nature Newman had
recourse to a symbolism drawn ready-made from Christianity. The mystical
beauty of Nature, instead of calling up in his imagination a Platonic
ideal world, as with Shelley, or adumbrating the world of eternal
verity of German transcendentalism, as with Wordsworth and Coleridge,
suggested the presence and power of seraphs and angels. Of the angels he
says, “Every breath of air and ray of light and heat, every beautiful
prospect, is, as it were, the skirts of their garments, the waving of
the robes of those whose faces see God.” Again, he asks, “What would be
the thoughts of a man who, when examining a flower, or an herb, or a
pebble, or a ray of light, which he treats as something so beneath him
in the scale of existence, suddenly discovered that he was in the
presence of some powerful being who was hidden behind the visible things
he was inspecting,--who, though concealing his wise hand, was giving
them their beauty, grace, and perfection, as being God’s instrument for
the purpose,--nay, whose robe and ornaments those objects were, which he
was so eager to analyze?”[27]
Despite the somewhat conventional symbolism that pervades these
passages, the mystical mood in the contemplation of Nature that
underlies and suggests them is substantially the same that expresses
itself through other imagery in the Romantic poets. In his intense
sensitiveness, then, to the emotional value of the visible universe, and
in his interpretation of the beauty of hill and valley and mountain and
stream in terms of subjective emotion, Newman may justly be said to
have shared in the Romantic Return to Nature.
But in a still more important way, Newman’s work was expressive of the
Return to Nature. Under this term is to be included not merely the fresh
delight that the Romanticists felt in the splendour of the firmament and
the tender beauty or the sublimity of sea and land, but also their eager
recognition of the value of the instinctive, the spontaneous, the
_natural_ in life, as opposed to the artificial, the self-conscious, the
systematic, and the conventional. This recognition pervades all the
literature of the first quarter of our century, and, in fact, in one
form or another, is the characteristic note of what is most novel in the
thought and the life of the time. In this Return to Nature Newman
shared. For him, as for all the Romanticists, life itself is more than
what we think about life, experience is infinitely more significant than
our formulas for summing it up, and transcends them incalculably.
General terms are but the makeshifts of logic and can never cope with
the multiplicity and the intensity of sensation and feeling. Newman’s
elaborate justification of this indictment of logic is wrought out in
the _Grammar of Assent_ and in his Sermon on _Implicit and Explicit
Reason_.
Throughout these discourses he pleads for those vital processes of
thought and feeling and intuition which every man goes through for
himself in his acquisition of concrete truth, and which he can perhaps
describe in but a stammering and inconsequent fashion in the terms of
the schoolman’s logic. It is by these direct, spontaneous processes,
Newman urges, that men reach truth in whatever concrete matter they
apply themselves to, and the truth that they reach need be none the less
true because they have not the knack of setting forth syllogistically
their reasons for accepting it. In his rejection, then, of formal
demonstration as the sole method for attaining truth, in his recognition
of the limitations of logic, and in his deep conviction of the
surpassing importance of the spontaneous and instinctive in life Newman
was at one with the Romanticists, and in all these particulars he shared
in their Return to Nature.
This insistence of Newman’s on the vital character of truth is a point,
the importance of which cannot be exaggerated when the attempt is being
made to grasp what is essential in his psychology and his ways of
conceiving of life and of human nature. For him truth does not exist
primarily, as for the formalist, in the formulas or the theorems of
text-books, but in the minds and the hearts of living men. In these
minds and hearts truth grows and spreads in countless subtle ways. Its
appeal is through numberless other channels than those of the mind. Man
is for Newman primarily an agent,--an acting creature,--not an intellect
with merely accidental relations to an outer world. First and foremost
he is a doer, a bringer about of results, a realizer of hopes and
ambitions and ideals. He is a mass of instincts and impulses, of
prejudices and passions; and it is in response to these mighty and
ceaselessly operating springs of action that he makes his way through
the world and subdues it to himself. Truth, then, to commend itself to
such a being, must come not merely by way of the brain, but also by that
of the heart; it must not be a collection of abstract formulas, but must
be concrete and vital. If it be religious truth, it must not take the
form of logical demonstrations, but must be beautifully enshrined in the
symbols of an elaborate ritual, illustrated in the lives of saints and
doctors, authoritative and venerable in the creeds and liturgies of a
hierarchical organization, irresistibly cogent as inculcated by the
divinely appointed representatives of the Source of all Truth. In these
forms religious truth may be able to impose itself upon individuals, to
take complete possession of them, to master their minds and hearts, and
to rule their lives.
But what shall be the test of such truth? How shall the individual be
sure of its claims? How shall he choose between rival systems? Here,
again, Newman refuses to be content with the formal and the abstract,
and goes straight to life itself. In the search for a criterion of truth
he rejects purely intellectual tests, and has recourse to tests which
call into activity the whole of a man’s nature. It is the Illative
Sense that detects and distinguishes truth, and the Illative Sense is
simply the entire mind of the individual vigorously grasping concrete
facts with all their implications for the heart and for the imagination
and for conduct, and extracting their peculiar significance. This
process, by which the individual searches for and attains truth in
concrete matters, is admirably described in the passage quoted in the
second chapter of the present Study, where the truth-seeker’s progress
is likened to that of a mountain-climber scaling a crag. The whole
nature of a man must be put into play, if truth is to be won. The formal
logic of the schools falls short of life; its symbols are general terms,
colourless abstractions, from which all the palpitating warmth and
persuasiveness of real life have been carefully drained. Propositions
fashioned out of these colourless general terms cannot by any process of
syllogistic jugglery be made to comprehend the whole truth of a
religious system. They leave out inevitably what is most vital, and what
is therefore most intimate in its appeal to the individual,--to his
heart and practical instincts, and his imagination. “We proceed as far
indeed as we can, by the logic of language, but we are obliged to
supplement it by the more subtle and elastic logic of thought; for forms
by themselves prove nothing.”[28] “It is to the living mind that we
must look for the means of using correctly principles of whatever
kind.”[29] “In all of these separate actions of the intellect, the
individual is supreme and responsible to himself, nay, under
circumstances, may be justified in opposing himself to the judgment of
the whole world; though he uses rules to his great advantage, as far as
they go, and is in consequence bound to use them.”[30] Absolute “proof
can never be furnished to us by the logic of words, for as certitude is
of the mind, so is the act of inference which leads to it. Every one who
reasons is his own centre.”[31] The progress of the individual “is a
living growth, not a mechanism; and its instruments are mental acts, not
the formulas and contrivances of language.”[32]
The foregoing analysis has tended to illustrate the facts that Newman
aimed to make religion an intensely concrete, personal experience, and
to fill out the spiritual life with widely varying and richly beautiful
feeling; and that he also set himself everywhere, consciously and
directly, against the eighteenth century ideal, according to which
reason was the sole discoverer and arbiter of truth and regulator of
conduct. In these respects, Newman’s work was in perfect harmony with
that of the Romanticists. Like them he was pleading for the spontaneous,
for the emotions and the imagination, for what is most vital in life, in
opposition to the formalists, the systematizers, and the devotees of
logic.
In the following points, then, Newman’s kinship with the Romanticists is
recognizable: in his imaginative sympathy with the past, in the range
and perspective of his historical consciousness, and in his devotion to
an ideal framed largely in accordance with a loving reverence for
mediæval life. His vein of mysticism, his imaginative sympathy with
Nature, his interpretation of Nature as symbolic of spiritual truth, his
rejection of reason as the guide of life, and his recognition of the
inadequacy of generalizations and formulas to the wealth of actual life
and to the intensity and variety of personal experience, are also
characteristics that mark his relation to the men of his period.
Finally, his very style in the narrowest meaning of the term also
classes Newman among Romantic writers. His debt to De Quincey has
already been noted. Though he is rarely, if ever, so ornate as De
Quincey, and though he perhaps never weaves his prose into such a
lustrous, shining surface through the continual use of sensations and
images as does De Quincey in his impassioned prose, yet the glowing
beauty, the picture-making power, the occasional imaginative splendour,
the elaborate swelling music of Newman’s writings, place him as a master
of prose in the same group with De Quincey, and Ruskin, and Carlyle, and
part him from Landor, or Macaulay, or Matthew Arnold. No prose can more
surely send quivering over the nerves a sense of the shadowing mystery
of life, than certain of Newman’s sermons, and passages here and there
in his _Apologia_ and in his _Essays_. Through the play, then, of his
imagination, its rhythms and beat of the wing, because of the ease with
which in a moment his prose can carry the reader into regions of
impassioned and mystical feeling, even because of the vital, intimate
warmth and colour of his phrasing,--qualities so different from the
hard, external glitter of Macaulay’s specific, but rhetorical
style,--Newman reveals his kinship with the great group of poets and
prose-writers who deepened and enriched the imaginative life of the
early part of our century. Ecclesiasticism and Academicism are
proverbially conservative powers. It may be for this reason that the new
spiritual forces of Romanticism did not renovate the Church through the
Oxford movement until a full generation after they had made almost
wholly their own the purely imaginative literature and life of the
English nation.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
I
Admirers of Arnold’s prose find it well to admit frankly that his style
has an unfortunate knack of exciting prejudice. Emerson has somewhere
spoken of the unkind trick fate plays a man when it gives him a strut in
his gait. Here and there in Arnold’s prose, there is just a
trace--sometimes more than a trace--of such a strut. He condescends to
his readers with a gracious elaborateness; he is at great pains to make
them feel that they are his equals; he undervalues himself playfully; he
assures us that “he is an unlearned bellettristic trifler”; he insists
over and over again that “he is an unpretending writer, without a
philosophy based on interdependent, subordinate, and coherent
principles.” All this he does smilingly; but the smile seems to many on
whom its favours fall, supercilious; and the playful under-valuation of
self looks shrewdly like an affectation. He is very debonair,--this
apologetic writer, very self-assured, at times even jaunty.
Stanch admirers of Arnold have always relished this strain in his style;
they have enjoyed its delicate challenge, the nice duplicity of its
innuendoes; they have found its insinuations and its covert, satirical
humour infinitely entertaining and stimulating. Moreover, however
seriously disposed they may be, however exacting of all the virtues from
the author of their choice, they have been able to reconcile their
enjoyment of Arnold with their serious inclinations, for they have been
confident that these tricks of manner implied no essential or radical
defect in Arnold’s humanity, no lack either of sincerity or of
earnestness or of broad sympathy.
Such admirers and interpreters of Arnold have been amply justified
of their confidence since the publication in 1895 of Arnold’s
_Letters_. The Arnold of these letters is a man the essential
integrity--_wholeness_--of whose nature is incontestable. His sincerity,
kindliness, wide-ranging sympathy with all classes of men are
unmistakably expressed on every page of his correspondence. We see him
having to do with people widely diverse in their relations to him: with
those close of kin, with chance friends, with many men of business or
officials, with a wide circle of literary acquaintances, with
workingmen, and with foreign _savants_. In all his intercourse the same
sweet-tempered frankness and the same readiness of sympathy are
manifest. There is never a trace of the duplicity or the treacherous
irony that are to be found in much of his prose.
Moreover, the record that these _Letters_ contain of close application
to uncongenial tasks must have been a revelation to many readers who
have had to rely upon books for their knowledge of literary men. Popular
caricatures of Arnold had represented him as “a high priest of the
kid-glove persuasion,” as an incorrigible dilettante, a literary fop
idling his time away over poetry and recommending the parmaceti of
culture as the sovereignest thing in nature for the inward bruises of
the spirit. This conception of Arnold, if it has at all maintained
itself, certainly cannot survive the revelations of the _Letters_. The
truth is beyond cavil that he was among the most self-sacrificingly
laborious men of his time.
For a long period of years Arnold held the post of inspector of schools.
Day after day, and week after week, he gave up one of the finest of
minds, one of the most sensitive of temperaments, one of the most
delicate of literary organizations, to the drudgery of examining in its
minutest details the work of the schools in such elementary subjects as
mathematics and grammar. On January 7, 1863, he writes to his mother, “I
am now at the work I dislike most in the world--looking over and marking
examination papers. I was stopped last week by my eyes, and the last
year or two these sixty papers a day of close handwriting to read have,
I am sorry to say, much tried my eyes for the time.” Two years later he
laments again: “I am being driven furious by seven hundred closely
written grammar papers, which I have to look over.” During these years
he was holding the Chair of Poetry at Oxford, and he had long since
established his reputation as one of the foremost of the younger poets.
Yet for a livelihood he was forced still to endure--and he endured them
till within a few years of his death in 1888--the exactions of this
wearing and exasperating drudgery. Moreover, despite occasional
outbursts of impatience, he gave himself to the work freely, heartily,
and effectively. He was sent on several occasions to the Continent to
examine and report on foreign school systems; his reports on German and
French education show immense diligence of investigation, a thorough
grasp of detail, and patience and persistence in the acquisition of
facts that in and for themselves must have been unattractive and
unrewarding.
The record of this severe labour is to be found in Arnold’s _Letters_,
and it must dispose once for all of any charge that he was a mere
dilettante and coiner of phrases. Through a long period of years he was
working diligently, wearisomely, in minutely practical ways, to better
the educational system of England; he was persistently striving both to
spread sounder ideals of elementary education and to make more effective
the system actually in vogue. And thus, unpretentiously and laboriously,
he was serving the cause of sweetness and light as well as through his
somewhat debonair contributions to literature.
In another way his _Letters_ have done much to reveal the innermost core
of Arnold’s nature, and so, ultimately, to explain the genesis of his
prose. They place it beyond doubt that in all he wrote Arnold had an
underlying purpose, clearly apprehended and faithfully pursued. In 1867,
in a letter to his mother, he says: “I more and more become conscious of
having something to do and of a resolution to do it.... Whether one
lives long or not, to be less and less _personal_ in one’s desires and
workings is the great matter.” In a letter of 1863 he had already
written in much the same strain: “However, one cannot change English
ideas as much as, if I live, I hope to change them, without saying
imperturbably what one thinks, and making a good many people
uncomfortable.” And in a letter of the same year he exclaims: “It is
very animating to think that one at last has a chance of _getting at_
the English public. Such a public as it is, and such a work as one wants
to do with it.” A work to do! The phrase recalls Cardinal Newman and the
well-known anecdote of his Sicilian illness, when through all the days
of greatest danger he insisted that he should get well because he had a
work to do in England. Despite Arnold’s difference in temperament from
Newman and the widely dissimilar task he proposed to himself, he was no
less in earnest than Newman, and no less convinced of the importance of
his task.
The occasional supercilious jauntiness of Arnold’s style, then, need not
trouble even the most conscientious of his admirers. To many of his
readers it is in itself, as has been already suggested, delightfully
stimulating. Others, the more conscientious folk and perhaps also the
severer judges of literary quality, are bound to find it artistically a
blemish; but they need not at any rate regard it as implying any radical
defect in Arnold’s humanity or as the result of cheap cynicism or of
inadequate sympathy. In point of fact, the true account of the matter
seems rather to lie in the paradox that the apparent superciliousness of
Arnold’s style comes from the very intensity of his moral earnestness,
and that the imperfections of his manner are often the result of an
over-conscientious desire to conciliate.
II
What, then, was Arnold’s controlling purpose in his prose-writing? What
was the “work” that he “wanted to do with the English public”? In trying
to find answers to these questions recourse will first be had to stray
phrases in Arnold’s prose; these phrases will give incidental glimpses,
from different points of view, of his central ideal; later, their
fragmentary suggestions will be brought together into something like a
comprehensive formula.
In the lectures on _Celtic Literature_ Arnold points out, in closing,
that it has been his aim to lead Englishmen to “reunite themselves with
their better mind and with the world through science”; that he has
sought to help them “conquer the hard unintelligence, which was just
then their bane; to supple and reduce it by culture, by a growth in the
variety, fulness, and sweetness of their spiritual life.” In the Preface
to his first volume of _Essays_ he explains that he is trying “to pull
out a few more stops in that powerful, but at present somewhat
narrow-toned organ, the modern Englishman.” In _Culture and Anarchy_ he
assures us that his object is to convince men of the value of “culture”;
to incite them to the pursuit of “perfection”; to help “make reason and
the will of God prevail.” And, again, in the same work he declares that
he is striving to intensify throughout England “the impulse to the
development of the whole man, to connecting and harmonizing all parts of
him, perfecting all, leaving none to take their chance.”
These phrases give, often with capricious picturesqueness, hints of the
prevailing intention with which Arnold writes. They may well be
supplemented by a series of phrases in which, in similarly picturesque
fashion, he finds fault with life as it actually exists in England, with
the individual Englishman as he encounters him from day to day; these
phrases, through their critical implications, also reveal the purpose
that is always present in Arnold’s mind, when he addresses his
countrymen. “Provinciality,” Arnold points out as a widely prevalent and
injurious characteristic of English literature; it argues a lack of
centrality, carelessness of ideal excellence, undue devotion to
relatively unimportant matters. Again, “arbitrariness” and
“eccentricity” are noticeable traits both of English literature and
scholarship; Arnold finds them everywhere deforming Professor Newman’s
interpretations of Homer, and he further comments on them as in varying
degrees “the great defect of English intellect--the great blemish of
English literature.” In religion he takes special exception to the “loss
of totality” that results from sectarianism; this is the penalty, Arnold
contends, that the Nonconformist pays for his hostility to the
established church; in his pursuit of his own special enthusiasm the
Nonconformist becomes, like Ephraim, “a wild ass alone by himself.”
From all these brief quotations this much at least is plain, that what
Arnold is continually recommending is the complete development of the
human type, and that what he is condemning is departure from some finely
conceived ideal of human excellence--from some scheme of human nature in
which all its powers have full and harmonious play. The various phrases
that have been quoted, alike the positive and the negative ones, imply,
as Arnold’s continual purpose in his prose-writings, the recommendation
of this ideal of human excellence and the illustration of the evils that
result from its neglect. Evidently, his imagination is haunted by some
symmetrical scheme of character--by some exquisitely conceived pattern
of perfection--wherein manners and knowledge, and passion and religion,
all have their due value, and work together for righteousness. With this
scheme in mind, he goes through the length and breadth of England,
scanning each class of men he meets, and questioning how far its members
conform to his type. And his continual purpose is to stir in the minds
of his fellow-countrymen as keen a sense as may be of the value of this
perfect type and of the dangers of disregarding it. The significance and
the scope of this purpose will become clearer if we consider some of the
imperfect ideals that Arnold finds operative in place of his absolute
ideal, and note their misleading and depraving effects.
One such partial ideal is the worship of the excessively practical and
the relentlessly utilitarian as the only things in life worth while.
England is a prevailingly practical nation, and our age is a
prevailingly practical age; the unregenerate product of this nation and
age is the Philistine, and against the Philistine Arnold never wearies
of inveighing. The Philistine is the swaggering enemy of the children
of light, of the chosen people, of those who love art and ideas
disinterestedly. The Philistine cares solely for business, for
developing the material resources of the country, for starting
companies, building bridges, making railways, and establishing plants.
The machinery of life--its material organization--monopolizes all his
attention. He judges of life by the outside, and is careless of the
things of the spirit. The Philistine may, of course, be religious; but
his religion is as materialistic as his every-day existence; his heaven
is a triumph of engineering skill, and his ideal of future bliss is, in
Sydney Smith’s phrase, to eat “_pâtés de foie gras_ to the sound of
trumpets.” Against men of this class Arnold cannot show himself too
cynically severe. They are pitiful distortions; the practical instincts
have usurped, and have destroyed the symmetry and integrity of the human
type. The senses and the will to live are monopolizing and determine all
the man’s energy toward utilitarian ends. The power of beauty, the power
of intellect and knowledge, the power of social manners, are atrophied.
Society is in serious danger unless men of this class can be touched
with a sense of their shortcomings; made aware of the larger values of
life; made pervious to ideas; brought to recognize the importance of the
things of the mind and the spirit.
Another partial ideal, the prevalence of which Arnold laments, is the
narrowly and unintelligently religious ideal. The middle-class
Englishman is, according to Arnold, a natural “Hebraist”; his whole
energy is spent, when he is at his best, in the struggle to obey certain
traditional rules of morality. In the origin of these rules, or in the
question as to whether or no they be founded in right reason, he has
little or no interest. In general, he is careless or contemptuous of
speculation and of whatever savours of philosophy. He is intent upon the
fulfilment of a conventional code of duty. _Conduct_, narrowly
conceived, is his only concern in life. Beauty has no charm for him;
art, no meaning. The free play of mind in the disinterested pursuit of
truth seems waste of energy or even vicious self-assertion. All the
bright irresponsibility, the sparkling delight in life and in thought
for their own sakes, that are characteristic of what Arnold calls the
“Hellenistic” temper--its burning eagerness to _know_, its strenuous
will to be _sure_ that its truth is really truth--all these qualities
and instincts seem to the Hebraist abnormal, pagan, altogether evil. The
Puritanism of the seventeenth century was the almost unrestricted
expression of the Hebraistic temper, and from the conceptions of life
that were then wrought out the middle classes in England have never
wholly escaped. The Puritans looked out upon life with a narrow vision,
recognized only a few of its varied interests, and provided for the
needs of only a part of man’s nature. Yet their theories and
conceptions of life--theories and conceptions that were limited in the
first place by the age in which they originated, and in the second place
by a Hebraistic lack of sensitiveness to the manifold charm of beauty
and knowledge--these limited theories and conceptions have imposed
themselves constrainingly on many generations of Englishmen. To-day they
remain, in all their narrowness and with an ever-increasing
disproportion to existing conditions, the most influential guiding
principles of large masses of men. Such men spend their lives in a round
of petty religious meetings and employments. They think all truth is
summed up in their little cut-and-dried Biblical interpretations. New
truth is uninteresting or dangerous. Art distracts from religion, and is
a siren against whose seductive chanting the discreet religious Ulysses
seals his ears. To Arnold this whole view of life seems sadly mistaken,
and the men who hold it seem fantastic distortions of the authentic
human type. The absurdities and the dangers of the unrestricted
Hebraistic ideal he satirizes or laments in _Culture and Anarchy_, in
_Literature and Dogma_, in _God and the Bible_, and in _St. Paul and
Protestantism_.
Still another kind of deformity arises when the intellect grows
self-assertive and develops overweeningly. To this kind of distortion
the modern man of science is specially prone; his exclusive study of
material facts leads to crude, unregenerate strength of intellect, and
leaves him careless of the value truth may have for the spirit and of
its glimmering suggestions of beauty. Yes, and for the philosopher and
the scholar, too, over-intellectualism has its peculiar dangers. The
devotee of a system of thought is apt to lose touch with the real values
of life, and in his exorbitant desire for unity and thoroughness of
organization, to miss the free play of vital forces that gives to life
its manifold charm, its infinite variety, and its ultimate reality.
Bentham and Comte are examples of the evil effects of this rabid pursuit
of system. “Culture is always assigning to system-makers and systems a
smaller share in the bent of human destiny than their friends like.” As
for the pedant, he is merely the miser of facts, who grows withered in
hoarding the vain fragments of precious ore of whose use he has lost the
sense. Men of all these various types offend through their fanatical
devotion to truth; for, indeed, as some one has in recent years well
said, the intellect is “but a _parvenu_,” and the other powers of life,
despite the Napoleonic irresistibleness of the new-comer, have rights
that deserve respect. Over-intellectualism, then, like the
over-development of any other power, leads to disproportion and
disorder.
Such being some of the partial ideals against which Arnold warns his
readers, what account does he give of that perfect human type in all its
integrity, in terms of which he criticises these aberrations or
deformities? Perhaps Arnold felt that any attempt at an exact and
systematic definition of this type would be somewhat grotesque and
presumptuous; at any rate, he has avoided such an attempt. Still, he has
recorded clearly, in many passages, his ideas as regards the powers in
man that are essential to perfect humanity, and that must all be duly
recognized and developed, if man is to attain in full scope what nature
offers. A representative passage may be quoted from the lecture on
_Literature and Science_: “When we set ourselves to enumerate the powers
which go to the building up of human life, and say that they are the
power of conduct, the power of intellect and knowledge, the power of
beauty, and the power of social life and manners, he [Professor Huxley]
can hardly deny that this scheme, though drawn in rough and plain lines
enough, and not pretending to scientific exactness, does yet give a
fairly true representation of the matter. Human nature is built up of
these powers; we have the need for them all. When we have rightly met
and adjusted the claims for them all, we shall then be in a fair way for
getting soberness and righteousness with wisdom.”
These same ideas are presented, under a somewhat different aspect and
with somewhat different terminology, in the first chapter of _Culture
and Anarchy_: “The great aim of culture [is] the aim of setting
ourselves to ascertain what perfection is and to make it prevail.”
Culture seeks “the determination of this question through all the voices
of human experience which have been heard upon it,--of art, science,
poetry, philosophy, history, as well as of religion,--in order to give a
greater fulness and certainty to its solution.... Religion says: _The
Kingdom of God is within you_; and culture, in like manner, places human
perfection in an _internal_ condition, in the growth and predominance of
our humanity proper, as distinguished from our animality. It places it
in the ever-increasing efficacy and in the general harmonious expansion
of those gifts of thought and feeling which make the peculiar dignity,
wealth, and happiness of human nature. As I have said on a former
occasion: ‘It is in making endless additions to itself, in the endless
expansion of its powers, in endless growth in wisdom and beauty, that
the spirit of the human race finds its ideal. To reach this ideal,
culture is an indispensable aid, and that is the true value of
culture.’”
In such passages as these Arnold comes as near as he ever comes to
defining the perfect human type. He does not profess to define it
universally and in abstract terms, for indeed he “hates” abstractions
almost as inveterately as Burke hated them. He does not even describe
concretely for men of his own time and nation the precise equipoise of
powers essential to perfection. Yet he names these powers, suggests the
ends towards which they must by their joint working contribute, and
illustrates, through examples, the evil effects of the preponderance or
absence of one and another. Finally, in the course of his many
discussions, he describes in detail the method by which the delicate
adjustment of these rival powers may be secured in the typical man;
suggests who is to be the judge of the conflicting claims of these
powers, and indicates the process by which this judge may most
persuasively lay his opinions before those whom he wishes to influence.
The method for the attainment of the perfect type is _culture_; the
censor of defective types and the judge of the rival claims of the
coöperant powers is the _critic_; and the process by which this judge
clarifies his own ideas and enforces his opinions on others is
_criticism_.
III
We are now at the centre of Arnold’s theory of life and hold the key to
his system of belief, so far as he had a system. His reasons for
attaching to the work of the critic the importance he palpably attached
to it are at once apparent. Criticism is the method by which the perfect
type of human nature is at any moment to be apprehended and kept in
uncontaminate clearness of outline before the popular imagination. The
ideal critic is the man of nicest discernment in matters intellectual,
moral, æsthetic, social; of perfect equipoise of powers; of delicately
pervasive sympathy; of imaginative insight; who grasps comprehensively
the whole life of his time; who feels its vital tendencies and is
intimately aware of its most insistent preoccupations; who also keeps
his orientation towards the unchanging norms of human endeavour; and who
is thus able to note and set forth the imperfections in existing types
of human nature and to urge persuasively a return in essential
particulars to the normal type. The function of criticism, then, is the
vindication of the ideal human type against perverting influences, and
Arnold’s prose-writings will for the most part be found to have been
inspired in one form or another by a single purpose: the correction of
excess in some human activity and the restoration of that activity to
its proper place among the powers that make up the ideal human type.
_Culture and Anarchy_ (1869) was the first of Arnold’s books to
illustrate adequately this far-reaching conception of criticism. His
special topic is, in this case, social conditions in England.
Politicians, he urges, whose profession it is to deal with social
questions, are engrossed in practical matters and biassed by party
considerations; they lack the detachment and breadth of view to see the
questions at issue in their true relations to abstract standards of
right and wrong. They mistake means for ends, machinery for the results
that machinery is meant to secure; they lose all sense of values and
exalt temporary measures into matters of sacred import; finally, they
come to that pass of ineptitude which Arnold symbolizes by the
enthusiasm of Liberals over the measure to enable a man to marry his
deceased wife’s sister. What is needed to correct these absurd
misapprehensions is the free play of critical intelligence. The critic
from his secure coign of vantage must examine social conditions
dispassionately; he must determine what is essentially wrong in the
inner lives of the various classes of men around him, and so reveal the
real sources of those social evils which politicians are trying to
remedy by external readjustments and temporary measures.
And this is just the task that Arnold undertakes in _Culture and
Anarchy_. He sets himself to consider English society in its length and
breadth with a view to discovering what is its essential constitution,
what are the typical classes that enter into it, and what are the
characteristics of these classes. So far as concerns classification he
ultimately accepts, it is true, as adequate to his purpose, the
traditional division of English society into upper, middle, and lower
classes. But he then goes on to give an analysis of each of these
classes that is novel, penetrating, in the highest degree stimulating.
He takes a typical member of each class and describes him in detail,
intellectually, morally, socially; he points out his sources of
strength and his sources of weakness. He compares him as a type with the
abstract ideal of human excellence, and notes wherein his powers “fall
short or exceed.” He indicates the reaction upon the social and
political life of the nation of these various defects and excesses,
their inevitable influence in producing social misadjustment and
friction. Finally, he urges that the one remedy that will correct these
errant social types and bring them nearer to the perfect human type is
culture, increase in _vital_ knowledge.
The details of Arnold’s application of this conception of culture as a
remedy for the social evils of the time, every reader may follow out for
himself in _Culture and Anarchy_. One point in Arnold’s conception,
however, is to be noted forthwith; it is a crucial point in its
influence on his theorizings. By culture Arnold means increase of
knowledge; yes, but he means something more; culture is for Arnold not
merely an intellectual matter. Culture is the best knowledge made
operative and dynamic in life and character. Knowledge must be
vitalized; it must be intimately conscious of the whole range of human
interests; it must ultimately subserve the whole nature of man.
Continually, then, as Arnold is pleading for the spread of ideas, for
increase of light, for the acceptance on the part of his
fellow-countrymen of new knowledge from the most diverse sources, he is
as keenly alive as any one to the dangers of over-intellectualism. The
undue development of the intellectual powers is as injurious to the
individual as any other form of deviation from the perfect human type.
This distrust of over-intellectualism is the ultimate ground of Arnold’s
hostility to the claims of Physical Science to primacy in modern
education. His ideas on the relative educational value of the physical
sciences and of the humanities are set forth in the well-known discourse
on _Literature and Science_. Arnold is ready, no one is more ready, to
accept the conclusions of science on all topics that fall within its
range; whatever its authenticated spokesmen have to say upon man’s
origin, his moral nature, his relations to his fellows, his place in the
physical universe, his religions, his sacred books--all these utterances
are to be received with entire loyalty as far as they can be shown to
embody the results of expert scientific observation and thought. But for
Arnold, the great importance of modern scientific truth does not for a
moment make clear the superiority of the physical sciences over the
humanities as a means of educational discipline. The study of the
sciences tends merely to intellectual development, to the increase of
mental power; the study of literature, on the other hand, trains a man
emotionally and morally, develops his human sympathies, sensitizes him
temperamentally, rouses his imagination, and elicits his sense of
beauty. Science puts before the student the crude facts of nature, bids
him accept them dispassionately, rid himself of all discolouring moods
as he watches the play of physical force, and convert himself into pure
intelligence; he is simply to observe, to analyze, to classify, and to
systematize, and he is to go through these processes continually with
facts that have no human quality, that come raw from the great whirl of
the cosmic machine. As a discipline, then, for the ordinary man, the
study of science tends not a whit towards humanization, towards
refinement, towards temperamental regeneration; it tends only to develop
an accurate trick of the senses, fine observation, crude intellectual
strength. These powers are of very great importance; but they may also
be trained in the study of literature, while at the same time the
student, as Sir Philip Sidney long ago pointed out, is being led and
drawn “to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls, made worse by
their clay lodgings, can be capable of.” Arnold, then, with
characteristic anxiety for the integrity of the human type, urges the
superior worth to most young men of a literary rather than a scientific
training. Literature nourishes the whole spirit of man; science
ministers only to the intellect.
The same insistent desire that culture be vital is at the root of
Arnold’s discomfort in the presence of German scholarship. For the
thoroughness and the disinterestedness of this scholarship he has great
respect; but he cannot endure its trick of losing itself in the letter,
its “pedantry, slowness,” its way of “fumbling” after truth, its
“ineffectiveness.”[33] “In the German mind,” he exclaims in _Literature
and Dogma_, “as in the German language, there does seem to be something
splay, something blunt-edged, unhandy, infelicitous,--some positive want
of straightforward, sure perception.”[34] Of scholarship of this splay
variety, that comes from exaggerated intellectuality and from lack of a
delicate temperament and of nice perceptions, Arnold is intolerant. Such
scholarship he finds working its customary mischief in Professor Francis
Newman’s translation of Homer, and, accordingly, he gives large parts of
the lectures on _Translating Homer_ to the illustration of its
shortcomings and maladroitness; he is bent on showing how inadequate is
great learning alone to cope with any nice literary problem. Newman’s
philological knowledge of Greek and of Homer is beyond dispute, but his
taste may be judged from his assertion that Homer’s verse, if we could
hear the living Homer, would affect us “like an elegant and simple
melody from an African of the Gold Coast.”[35] The remedy for such inept
scholarship lies in culture, in the vitalization of knowledge. The
scholar must not be a mere knower; all his powers must be harmoniously
developed.
A last illustration of Arnold’s insistence that knowledge be vital may
be drawn from his writings on religion and theology. Again criticism and
culture are the passwords that open the way to a new and better order of
things. Formulas, Arnold urges, have fastened themselves constrainingly
upon the English religious mind. Traditional interpretations of the
Bible have come to be received as beyond cavil. These interpretations
are really human inventions--the product of the ingenious thinking of
theologians like Calvin and Luther. Yet they have so authenticated
themselves that for most readers to-day the Bible means solely what it
meant for the exacerbated theological mind of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. If religion is to be vital, if knowledge of the
Bible is to be genuine and real, there must be a critical examination of
what this book means for the disinterested intelligence of to-day; the
Bible, as literature, must be interpreted anew, sympathetically and
imaginatively; the moral inspiration the Bible has to offer, even to men
who are rigidly insistent on scientific habits of thought and standards
of historical truth, must be disengaged from what is unverifiable and
transitory, and made real and persuasive. “I write,” Arnold declares,
“to convince the lover of religion that by following habits of
intellectual seriousness he need not, so far as religion is concerned,
lose anything. Taking the Old Testament as Israel’s magnificent
establishment of the theme, _Righteousness is salvation!_ taking the New
as the perfect elucidation by Jesus of what righteousness is and how
salvation is won, I do not fear comparing even the power over the soul
and imagination of the Bible, taken in this sense,--a sense which is at
the same time solid,--with the like power in the old materialistic and
miraculous sense for the Bible, which is not.”[36] This definition of
what Arnold hopes to do for the Bible may be supplemented by a
description of the method in which culture works towards the ends
desired: “Difficult, certainly, is the right reading of the Bible, and
true culture, too, is difficult. For true culture implies not only
knowledge, but right tact and justness of judgment, forming themselves
by and with knowledge; without this tact it is not true culture.
Difficult, however, as culture is, it is necessary. For, after all, the
Bible is _not_ a talisman, to be taken and used literally; neither is
any existing church a talisman, whatever pretensions of the sort it may
make, for giving the right interpretation of the Bible. Only true
culture can give us this interpretation; so that if conduct is, as it
is, inextricably bound up with the Bible and the right interpretation of
it, then the importance of culture becomes unspeakable. For if conduct
is necessary (and there is nothing so necessary), culture is
necessary.”[37]
In all these various ways, then, that have been illustrated, culture is
a specific against the ills that society is heir to. Culture is vital
knowledge, and the critic is its fosterer and guardian; culture and
criticism work together for the preservation of the integrity of the
human type against all the disasters that threaten it from the storm and
stress of modern life. Politics, religion, scholarship, science, each
has its special danger for the individual; each seizes upon him, subdues
him relentlessly to the need of the moment and the requirements of some
particular function, and converts him often into a mere distorted
fragment of humanity. Against this tyranny of the moment, against the
specializing and materializing trend of modern life, criticism offers a
powerful safeguard. Criticism is ever concerned with archetypal
excellence, is continually disengaging, with fine discrimination, what
is transitory and accidental from what is permanent and essential in all
that man busies himself about, and is thus perpetually helping every
individual to the apprehension of his “best self,” to the development of
what is real and absolute and the elimination of what is false or
deforming. And in doing all this the critic acts as the appreciator of
life; he is not the abstract thinker. He apprehends the ideal
intuitively; he reaches it by the help of the feelings and the
imagination and a species of exquisite tact, not through a series of
syllogisms; he is really a poet, rather than a philosopher.
This conception of the nature and functions of criticism makes
intelligible and justifies a phrase of Arnold’s that has often been
impugned--his description of poetry as a criticism of life. To this
account of poetry it has been objected that criticism is an intellectual
process, while poetry is primarily an affair of the imagination and the
heart; and that to regard poetry as a criticism of life is to take a
view of poetry that tends to convert it into mere rhetorical
moralizing--the decorative expression in rhythmical language of abstract
truth about life. This misinterpretation of Arnold’s meaning becomes
impossible, if the foregoing theory of criticism be borne in mind.
Criticism is the determination and the representation of the archetypal,
of the ideal. Moreover, it is not a determination of the archetypal
formally and theoretically, through speculation or the enumeration of
abstract qualities; Arnold’s disinclination for abstractions has been
repeatedly noted. The process to be used in criticism is a vital process
of appreciation, in which the critic, sensitive to the whole value of
human life, to the appeal of art and of conduct and of manners as well
as of abstract truth, feels his way to a synthetic grasp upon what is
ideally best, and portrays this concretely and persuasively for the
popular imagination. Such an appreciator of life, if he produce beauty
in verse, if he embody his vision of the ideal in metre, will be a poet.
In other words, the poet is the appreciator of human life who sees in it
most sensitively, inclusively, and penetratingly what is archetypal, and
evokes his vision before others through rhythm and rhyme. In this sense
poetry can hardly be denied to be a criticism of life; it is the winning
portrayal of the ideal of human life as this ideal shapes itself in the
mind of the poet. Such a criticism of life Dante gives, a determination
and portrayal of what is ideally best in life according to mediæval
conceptions; a representation of life in its integrity with a due
adjustment of the claims of all the powers that enter into
it--friendship, ambition, patriotism, loyalty, religion, artistic
ardour, love. Such a criticism of life Shakespeare incidentally gives in
terms of the full scope of Elizabethan experience in England, with due
imaginative setting forth of the splendid vistas of possible achievement
and unlimited development that the new knowledge and the discoveries of
the Renaissance had opened. In short, the great poet is the typically
sensitive, penetrative, and suggestive appreciator of life,--who calls
to his aid, to make his appreciation as resonant and persuasive as
possible, as potent as possible over men’s minds and hearts, all the
emotional and imaginative resources of language,--rhythm, figures,
allegory, symbolism,--whatever will enable him to impose his
appreciation of life upon others and to insinuate into their souls his
sense of the relative values of human acts and characters and passions;
whatever will help him to make more overweeningly beautiful and
insistently eloquent his vision of truth and beauty. In this sense the
poet is the limiting ideal of the appreciative critic, and poetry is the
ultimate criticism of life--the finest portrayal each age can attain to
of what seems to it in life most significant and delightful.
IV
The purpose with which Arnold writes is now fairly apparent. His aim is
to shape in happy fashion the lives of his fellows; to free them from
the bonds that the struggle for existence imposes upon them; to enlarge
their horizons, to enrich them spiritually, and to call all that is best
within them into as vivid play as possible. When we turn to Arnold’s
literary criticism we shall find this purpose no less paramount.
A glance through the volumes of Arnold’s essays renders it clear that
his selection of a poet or a prose-writer for discussion was usually
made with a view to putting before English readers some desirable trait
of character for their imitation, some temperamental excellence that
they are lacking in, some mode of belief that they neglect, some habit
of thought that they need to cultivate. Joubert is studied and portrayed
because of his single-hearted love of light, the purity of his
disinterested devotion to truth, the fine distinction of his thought,
and the freedom of his spirit from the sordid stains of worldly life.
Heine is a typical leader in the war of emancipation, the arch-enemy of
Philistinism, and the light-hearted, indomitable, foe of prejudice and
cant. Maurice and Eugénie de Guérin are winning examples of the
spiritual distinction that modern Romanism can induce in timely-happy
souls. Scherer, whose critiques upon Milton and Goethe are painstakingly
reproduced in the _Mixed Essays_, represents French critical
intelligence in its best play--acute, yet comprehensive; exacting, yet
sympathetic; regardful of _nuances_ and delicately refining, and yet
virile and constructive. Of the importance for modern England of
emphasis on all these qualities of mind and heart, Arnold was securely
convinced.
Moreover, even when his choice of subject is determined by other than
moral considerations, his treatment is apt, none the less, to reveal his
ethical bias. Again and again in his essays on poetry, for example, it
is the substance of poetry that he is chiefly anxious to handle, while
the form is left with incidental analysis. Wordsworth is the poet of joy
in widest commonalty spread--the poet whose criticism of life is most
sound and enduring and salutary. Shelley is a febrile creature,
insecure in his sense of worldly values, “a beautiful and ineffectual
angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.”[38] The essay on
_Heine_ helps us only mediately to an appreciation of the volatile
beauty of Heine’s songs, or to an intenser delight in the mere surface
play of hues and moods in his verse. From the essay on _George Sand_, to
be sure, we receive many vivid impressions of the emotional and
imaginative scope of French romance; for this essay was written _con
amore_ in the revivification of an early mood of devotion, and in an
unusually heightened style; the essay on _Emerson_ is the one study that
has in places somewhat of the same lyrical intensity and the same
vividness of realization. Yet even in the essay on _George Sand_, the
essayist is, on the whole, bent on revealing the temperament of the
woman rather in its decisive influence on her theories of life than in
its reaction upon her art as art. There is hardly a word of the Romance
as a definite literary form, of George Sand’s relation to earlier French
writers of fiction, or of her distinctive methods of work as a portrayer
of the great human spectacle. In short, literature as art, literary
forms as definite modes of artistic expression, the technique of the
literary craftsman, receive, for the most part, from Arnold, slight
attention.
Perhaps the one piece of work in which Arnold set himself, with some
thoroughness, to the discussion of a purely literary problem was his
series of lectures on _Translating Homer_. These lectures were produced,
before his sense of responsibility for the moral regeneration of the
Philistine had become importunate, and were addressed to an academic
audience. For these reasons, the treatment of literary topics is more
disinterested and less interrupted by practical considerations. Indeed,
as will be presently noted in illustration of another aspect of Arnold’s
work, these lectures contain very subtle and delicate appreciations,
show everywhere exquisite responsiveness to changing effects of style,
and enrich gratefully the vocabulary of impressionistic criticism.
Even in these exceptional lectures, however, Arnold’s ethical interest
asserts itself. In the course of them he gives an account of the grand
style in poetry,--of that poetic manner that seems to him to stand
highest in the scale of excellence; and he carefully notes as an
essential of this manner,--of this grand, style,--its moral power; “it
can form the character, ... is edifying, ... can refine the raw natural
man, ... can transmute him.”[39] This definition of the grand style will
be discussed presently in connection with Arnold’s general theory of
poetry; it is enough to note here that it illustrates the
inseparableness in Arnold’s mind between art and morals.
His description of poetry as a criticism of life has already been
mentioned. This doctrine is early implied in Arnold’s writings, for
example, in the passage just quoted from the lectures on _Translating
Homer_; it becomes more explicit in the _Last Words_, appended to these
lectures, where the critic asserts that “the noble and profound
application of ideas to life is the most essential part of poetic
greatness.”[40] It is elaborated in the essays on _Wordsworth_ (1879),
on the _Study of Poetry_ (1880), and on _Byron_ (1881). “It is
important, therefore,” the essay on _Wordsworth_ assures us, “to hold
fast to this: that poetry is at bottom a criticism of life; that the
greatness of a poet lies in his powerful and beautiful application of
ideas to life,--to the question: How to live.”[41] And in the essay on
the _Study of Poetry_ Arnold urges that “in poetry, as a criticism of
life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of
poetic truth and poetic beauty, the spirit of our race will find, ... as
time goes on and as other helps fail, its consolation and stay.”[42]
With this doctrine of the indissoluble connection between the highest
poetic excellence and essential nobleness of subject-matter probably
only the most irreconcilable advocates of art for art’s sake would
quarrel. So loyal an adherent of art as Walter Pater suggests a test of
poetic “greatness” substantially the same with Arnold’s. “It is on the
quality of the matter it informs or controls, its compass, its variety,
its alliance to great ends, or the depth of the note of revolt, or the
largeness of hope in it, that the greatness of literary art depends, as
_The Divine Comedy_, _Paradise Lost_, _Les Misérables_, _The English
Bible_, are great art.”[43] This may be taken as merely a different
phrasing of Arnold’s principle that “the greatness of a poet lies in his
powerful and beautiful application of ideas to life--to the question:
How to live.” Surely, then, we are not at liberty to press any objection
to Arnold’s general theory of poetry on the ground of its being, in its
essence, over-ethical.
There remains nevertheless the question of emphasis. In the application
to special cases of this test of essential worth, either the critic may
be constitutionally biassed in favour of a somewhat restricted range of
definite ideas about life, or even when he is fairly hospitable towards
various moral idioms, he may still be so intent upon making ethical
distinctions as to fail to give their due to the purely artistic
qualities of poetry. It is in this latter way that Arnold is most apt to
offend. The emphasis in the discussions of Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron,
Keats, Gray, and Milton is prevailingly on the ethical characteristics
of each poet; and the reader carries away from an essay a vital
conception of the play of moral energy and of spiritual passion in the
poet’s verse rather than an impression of his peculiar adumbration of
beauty, the characteristic rhythms of his imaginative movement, the
delicate colour modulations on the surface of his image of life.
It must, however, be borne in mind that Arnold has specially admitted
the incompleteness of his description of poetry as “a criticism of
life”; this criticism, he has expressly added, must be made in
conformity “to the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.” “The
profound criticism of life” characteristic of “the few supreme masters”
must exhibit itself “in indissoluble connection with the laws of poetic
truth and beauty.”[44] Is there, then, to be found in Arnold any account
of certain laws the observance of which secures poetic beauty and truth?
Is there any description of the special ways in which poetic beauty and
truth manifest themselves, of the formal characteristics to be found in
poetry where poetic beauty and truth are present? Does Arnold either
suggest the methods the poet must follow to attain these qualities, or
classify the various subordinate effects through which poetic beauty and
truth invariably reveal their presence? The most apposite parts of his
writings to search for some declaration on these points are the
lectures on _Translating Homer_, and the second series of his essays
which deal chiefly with the study of poetry. Here, if anywhere, we ought
to find a registration of beliefs as regards the precise nature and
source of poetic beauty and truth.
And indeed throughout all these writings, which run through a
considerable period of time, Arnold makes fairly consistent use of a
half-dozen categories for his analyses of poetic effects. These
categories are substance and matter, style and manner, diction and
movement. Of the substance of really great poetry we learn repeatedly
that it must be made up of ideas of profound significance “on man, on
nature, and on human life.”[45] This is, however, merely the
prescription already so often noted that poetry, to reach the highest
excellence, must contain a penetrating and ennobling criticism of life.
In the essay on _Byron_, however, there is something formally added to
this requisition of “truth and seriousness of substance and matter”;
besides these, “felicity and perfection of diction and manner, as these
are exhibited in the best poets, are what constitute a criticism of life
made in conformity with the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.”[46]
There must then be felicity and perfection of diction and manner in
poetry of the highest order; these terms are somewhat vague, but serve
at least to guide us on our analytic way. In the essay on the _Study of
Poetry_, there is still farther progress made in the description of
poetic excellence. “To the style and manner of the best poetry, their
special character, their accent is given by their diction, and, even yet
more, by their movement. And though we distinguish between the two
characters, the two accents, of superiority” (_i.e._ between the
superiority that comes from substance and the superiority that comes
from style), “yet they are nevertheless vitally connected one with the
other. The superior character of truth and seriousness, in the matter
and substance of the best poetry, is inseparable from the superiority of
diction and movement marking its style and manner. The two superiorities
are closely related, and are in steadfast proportion one to the other.
So far as high poetic truth and seriousness are wanting to a poet’s
matter and substance, so far also, we may be sure, will a high poetic
stamp of diction and movement be wanting to his style and manner.”[47]
Now that there is this intimate and necessary union between a poet’s
mode of conceiving life and his manner of poetic expression, is hardly
disputable. The image of life in a poet’s mind is simply the outside
world transformed by the complex of sensations and thoughts and emotions
peculiar to the poet; and this image inevitably frames for itself a
visible and audible expression that delicately utters its individual
character--distils that character subtly through word and sentence,
rhythm and metaphor, image and figure of speech, and through their
integration into a vital work of art. Moreover, the poet’s style is
itself in general the product of the same personality which determines
his image of life, and must therefore be, like his image of life,
delicately striated with the markings of his play of thought and feeling
and fancy. The close correspondence, then, between the poet’s
subject-matter and his manner or style is indubitable. The part of
Arnold’s conclusion or the point in his method that is regrettable is
the exclusive stress that he throws on this dependence of style upon
worth of substance. He converts style into a mere function of the moral
quality of a poet’s thought about life, and fails to furnish any
delicately studied categories for the appreciation of poetic style apart
from its moral implications.
Take, for example, the judgments passed in the _Study of Poetry_ upon
various poets; in every instance the estimate of the poet’s style turns
upon the quality of his thought about life. Is it Chaucer whose right to
be ranked as a classic is mooted? He cannot be ranked as a classic
because “the substance of” his poetry has not “high seriousness.”[48] Is
it Burns whose relative rank is being fixed? Burns through lack of
“absolute sincerity” falls short of “high seriousness,” and, hence, is
not to be placed among the classics. And thus continually with Arnold,
effects of style are merged in moral qualities, and the reader gains
little insight into the refinements of poetical manner except as these
derive directly from the poet’s moral consciousness. The categories of
style and manner, diction and movement, are everywhere subordinated to
the categories of substance and matter, are treated as almost wholly
derivative. “Felicity and perfection of diction and manner,” wherever
they are admittedly present, are usually explained as the direct result
of the poet’s lofty conception of life. Such a treatment of questions of
style does not further us much on our way to a knowledge of the “laws of
poetic beauty and poetic truth.”
Doubtless somewhat more disinterested analyses of style may be found in
the lectures on _Translating Homer_. These discussions do not reach very
definite conclusions, but they at least consider poetic excellence as
for the moment dependent on something else than the moral mood of the
poet. For example, the grand style is analyzed into two varieties, the
grand style in severity and the grand style in simplicity. Each of these
styles is described and illustrated so that it enters into the reader’s
imagination and increases his sensitiveness to poetic excellence.
Somewhat later in the lectures, the distinction between real simplicity
in poetic style and sophisticated simplicity is drawn with exquisite
delicacy of appreciation. Throughout these passages, there is an effort
to deal directly with artistic effects for their own sake and apart from
their significance as expressive of _ethos_. Yet even here Arnold’s
ethical bias reveals itself in a tendency, while he is describing the
moods back of these artistic qualities, to use words that have moral
implications, and that suggest the issue of such moods in conduct.
Self-restraint, proud gravity, are among the moods that are found back
of the grand style in severity; over-refinement, super-subtle
sophistication, account for Tennyson’s _simplesse_.
To bring together, then, the results of this somewhat protracted
analysis: Arnold ostensibly admits that poetry, to be of the highest
excellence, must, in addition to containing a criticism of life of
profound significance, conform to the laws of poetic beauty and truth.
He accepts as necessary categories, for the appreciation of poetical
excellence, style and manner, diction and movement. Yet his most
important general assertion about these latter purely formal
determinations of poetry is that they are inseparably connected with
substance and matter; similarly, whenever he discusses artistic effects,
he is apt to find them interesting simply as serving to interpret the
artist’s prevailing mood towards life; and even where, as is at times
doubtless the case, he escapes for the moment from his ethical interest
and appreciates with imaginative delicacy the individual quality of a
poem or a poet’s style, he is nearly always found sooner or later
explaining this quality as originating in the poet’s peculiar _ethos_.
As for any systematic or even incidental study of “the laws of poetic
beauty and truth,” we search for it through his pages in vain.
V
But it would be wrong in characterizing Arnold’s essays to attribute
their lack of theorizing about questions of art solely to his
preoccupation with conduct. For theory in general and for abstractions
in general,--for all sorts of philosophizing,--Arnold openly professes
his dislike. “Perhaps we shall one day learn,” he says, in his essay on
_Wordsworth_, “to make this proposition general, and to say: Poetry is
the reality, philosophy the illusion.” Distrust of the abstract and of
the purely theoretical shows itself throughout his literary criticism
and determines many of its characteristics.
His hostility to systems and to system-makers has already been pointed
out; this hostility admits of no exception in favour of the systematic
critic. “There is the judgment of ignorance, the judgment of
incompatibility, the judgment of envy and jealousy. Finally, there is
the systematic judgment, and this judgment is the most worthless of
all.... Its author has not really his eye upon the professed object of
his criticism at all, but upon something else which he wants to prove by
means of that object. He neither really tells us, therefore, anything
about the object, nor anything about his own ignorance of the object. He
never fairly looks at it; he is looking at something else.”[49] This
hypnotizing effect that a preconceived theory exerts on a critic, is
Arnold’s first reason for objecting to systematic criticism; the critic
with a theory is bound to find what he goes in search of, and nothing
else. He goes out--to change somewhat one of Arnold’s own figures--like
Saul, the son of Kish, in search of his father’s asses; and he comes
back with the authentic animals instead of the traditional windfall of a
kingdom.
Nor is preoccupation with a pet theory the sole incapacity that Arnold
finds in the systematic critic; such a critic is almost sure to be
over-intellectualized, a victim of abstractions and definitions,
dependent for his judgments on conceptions, and lacking in temperamental
sensitiveness to the appeal of literature as art. He is merely a
triangulator of the landscape of literature, and moves resolutely in his
process of triangulation from one fixed point to another; he finds
significant only such parts of his literary experience as he can sum up
in a definite abstract formula at some one of these arbitrary
halting-places; his ultimate opinion of the ground he covers is merely
the sum total of a comparatively small number of such abstract
expressions. To the manifold wealth of the landscape in colour, in
light, in shade, and in poetic suggestiveness, the system-monger, the
theoretical critic, has all the time been blind.
Knowledge, too, even though it be not severely systematized, may
interfere with the free play of critical intelligence. An oversupply of
unvitalized facts or ideas, even though these facts or ideas be not
organized into an importunate theory, may prove disastrous to the
critic. This danger Arnold has amusingly set forth in his _Last Words_
on Homeric translation: “Much as Mr. Newman was mistaken when he talked
of my rancour, he is entirely right when he talks of my ignorance. And
yet, perverse as it seems to say so, I sometimes find myself wishing,
when dealing with these matters of poetical criticism, that my ignorance
were even greater than it is. To handle these matters properly, there is
needed a poise so perfect that the least overweight in any direction
tends to destroy the balance. Temper destroys it, a crotchet destroys
it, even erudition may destroy it. To press to the sense of the thing
with which one is dealing, not to go off on some collateral issue about
the thing, is the hardest matter in the world. The ‘thing itself’ with
which one is here dealing--the critical perception of poetic truth--is
of all things the most volatile, elusive, and evanescent; by even
pressing too impetuously after it, one runs the risk of losing it. The
critic of poetry should have the finest tact, the nicest moderation, the
most free, flexible, and elastic spirit imaginable; he should be,
indeed, the ‘ondoyant et divers,’ the _undulating and diverse_ being of
Montaigne. The less he can deal with his object simply and freely, the
more things he has to take into account in dealing with it,--the more,
in short, he has to encumber himself,--so much the greater force of
spirit he needs to retain his elasticity. But one cannot exactly have
this greater force by wishing for it; so, for the force of spirit one
has, the load put upon it is often heavier than it will well bear. The
late Duke of Wellington said of a certain peer that ‘it was a great pity
his education had been so far too much for his abilities.’ In like
manner one often sees erudition out of all proportion to its owner’s
critical faculty. Little as I know, therefore, I am always apprehensive,
in dealing with poetry, lest even that little should prove too much for
my abilities.”[50]
Discreet ignorance, then, is Arnold’s counsel of perfection to the
would-be critic. And, accordingly, he himself is desultory from
conscientious motives and unsystematic by fixed rule. There are two
passages in his writings where he explains confidentially his methods
and his reasons for choosing them. The first occurs in a letter of 1864:
“My sinuous, easy, unpolemical mode of proceeding has been adopted by
me, first, because I really think it the best way of proceeding, if one
wants to get at, and keep with, truth; secondly, because I am convinced
only by a literary form of this kind being given to them can ideas such
as mine ever gain any access in a country such as ours.”[51] The second
passage occurs in the Preface to his first series of _Essays in
Criticism_ (1865): “Indeed, it is not in my nature--some of my critics
would rather say not in my power--to dispute on behalf of any opinion,
even my own, very obstinately. To try and approach truth on one side
after another, not to strive or cry, not to persist in pressing forward,
on any one side, with violence and self-will, it is only thus, it seems
to me, that mortals may hope to gain any vision of the mysterious
goddess, whom we shall never see except in outline. He who will do
nothing but fight impetuously towards her, on his own one favourite
particular line, is inevitably destined to run his head into the folds
of the black robe in which she is wrapped.”[52]
Such, then, is Arnold’s ideal of critical method. The critic is not to
move from logical point to point as, for example, Francis Jeffrey was
wont, in his essays, to move, with an advocate’s devotion to system and
desire to make good some definite conclusion. Rather he is to give rein
to his temperament; he is to make use of intuitions, imaginations, hints
that touch the heart, as well as abstract principles, syllogisms, and
arguments; and so he is to reach out tentatively through all his powers
after truth if haply he may find her; in the hope that thus, keeping
close to the concrete aspects of his subject, he may win to an ever more
inclusive and intimate command of its surface and configurations. The
type of mind most apt for this kind of critical work is the “free,
flexible, and elastic spirit,” described in the passage just quoted from
the _Last Words_; the “undulating and diverse being of Montaigne.”
A critic of this type will palpably concern himself slightly with
abstractions, with theorizings, with definitions. And, indeed, Arnold’s
unwillingness to define becomes at times almost ludicrous. “Nothing has
raised more questioning among my critics than these words--_noble, the
grand style_.... 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 it.’”[53] Similarly in
the _Study of Poetry_, Arnold urges: “Critics give themselves great
labour to draw out what in the abstract constitutes the characters of a
high quality of poetry. It is much better to have recourse to concrete
examples.... If we are asked to define this mark and accent in the
abstract, our answer must be: No, for we should thereby be darkening the
question, not clearing it.” Again: “I may discuss what in the abstract
constitutes the grand style; but that sort of general discussion never
much helps our judgment of particular instances.”[54] These passages are
characteristic; rarely indeed does Arnold consent to commit himself to
the control of a definition. He prefers to convey into his readers’ mind
a living realization of the thing or the object he treats of rather than
to put before them its logically articulated outlines.
Moreover, when he undertakes the abstract discussion of a general term,
he is apt to be capricious in his treatment of it and to follow in his
subdivisions and classifications some external clue rather than logical
structure. In the essay on _Celtic Literature_ he discusses the various
ways of handling nature in poetry, and finds four such ways--the
conventional way, the faithful way, the Greek way, and the magical way.
The classification recommends itself through its superficial charm and
facility, yet rests on no psychological truth, or at any rate carries
with it, as Arnold treats it, no psychological suggestions; it gives no
swift insight into the origin in the poet’s mind and heart of these
different modes of conceiving of nature. Hence the classification, as
Arnold uses it, is merely a temporary makeshift for rather gracefully
grouping effects, not an analytic interpretation of these effects
through a reduction of them to their varying sources in thought and
feeling.
This may be taken as typical of Arnold’s critical methods. As we read
his essays we have little sense of making definite progress in the
comprehension of literature as an art among arts, as well as in the
appreciation of an individual author or poem. We are not being
intellectually oriented, as in reading the most stimulating critical
work; we are not getting an ever-surer sense of the points of the
compass. Essays, to have this orienting power, need not be continually
prating of theories and laws; they need not be rabidly scientific in
phrase or in method. But they must issue from a mind that has come to an
understanding with itself about the genesis of art in the genius of the
artist; about the laws that, when the utmost plea has been made for
freedom and caprice, regulate artistic production; about the history and
evolution of art forms; and about the relations of the arts among
themselves and to the other activities of life. It may fairly be doubted
if Arnold had ever wrought out for himself consistent conclusions on all
or most of these topics. Indeed, the mere mention of his name in
connection with such a formal list of topics suggests the kind of
mock-serious deprecatory paragraph with which the “unlearned
bellettristic trifler” was wont to reply to charges of dilettantism--a
paragraph sure to carry in its tail a stinging bit of sarcasm at the
expense of pedantry and unenlightened formalism. And yet, great as must
be every one’s respect for the thorough scholarship and widely varied
accomplishment that Arnold made so light of and carried off so easily,
the doubt must nevertheless remain whether a firmer grasp on theory, and
a more consistent habit of thinking out literary questions to their
principles, would not have invigorated his work as a critic and given it
greater permanence and richer suggestiveness.
VI
It is, then, as an appreciator of what may perhaps be called the
spiritual qualities of literature that Arnold is most distinctively a
furtherer of criticism. An appreciator of beauty,--of true beauty
wherever found,--that is what he would willingly be; and yet, as the
matter turns out, the beauty that he most surely enjoys and reveals has
invariably a spiritual aroma,--is the finer breath of intense spiritual
life. Or, if spiritual be too mystical a word to apply to Homer and
Goethe, perhaps Arnold should rather be termed an appreciator of such
beauty in literature as carries with it an inevitable suggestion of
elevation and nobleness of character in the author.
The importance of appreciation in criticism Arnold has described in one
of the _Mixed Essays_: “Admiration is salutary and formative; ... but
things admirable are sown wide, and are to be gathered here and gathered
there, not all in one place; and until we have gathered them wherever
they are to be found, we have not known the true salutariness and
formativeness of admiration. The quest is large; and occupation with the
unsound or half-sound, delight in the not good or less good, is a sore
let and hindrance to us. Release from such occupation and delight sets
us free for ranging farther, and for perfecting our sense of beauty. He
is the happy man, who, encumbering himself with the love of nothing
which is not beautiful, is able to embrace the greatest number of things
beautiful in his life.”[55]
On this disinterested quest, then, for the beautiful, Arnold in his
essays nominally fares forth. Yet certain limitations in his
appreciation, over and beyond his prevalent ethical interest, must at
once be noted. Music, painting, and sculpture have seemingly nothing to
say to him. In his _Letters_ there are only a few allusions to any of
these arts, and such as occur do not surpass in significance the
comments of the chance loiterer in foreign galleries or visitor of
concert rooms. In his essays there are none of the correlations between
the effects and methods of literature and those of kindred arts that may
do so much either to individualize or to illustrate the characteristics
of poetry. For Arnold, literature and poetry seem to make up the whole
range of art.
Within these limits, however,--the limits imposed by preoccupation with
conduct and by carelessness of all arts except literature,--Arnold has
been a prevailing revealer of beauty. Not his most hostile critic can
question the delicacy of his perception, so far as he allows his
perception free play. On the need of nice and ever nicer discriminations
in the apprehension of the shifting values of literature, he has himself
often insisted. Critics who let their likes and dislikes assert
themselves turbulently, to the destruction of fine distinctions, always
fall under Arnold’s condemnation. “When Mr. Palgrave dislikes a thing,
he feels no pressure constraining him, either to try his dislike closely
or to express it moderately; he does not mince matters, he gives his
dislike all its own way.... He dislikes the architecture of the Rue
Rivoli, and he puts it on the level with the architecture of Belgravia
and Gower Street; he lumps them all together in one condemnation; he
loses sight of the shade, the distinction which is here everything.” For
a similar blurring of impressions, Professor Newman is taken to task,
though in Newman’s case the faulty appreciations are due to a different
cause: “Like all learned men, accustomed to desire definite rules, he
draws his conclusions too absolutely; he wants to include too much under
his rules; he does not quite perceive that in poetical criticism the
shade, the fine distinction, is everything; and that, when he has once
missed this, in all he says he is in truth but beating the air.” Here,
again, what Arnold pleads for is temperamental sensitiveness, delicacy
of perception. To appreciate literature more and more sensitively in
terms of “an undulating and diverse temperament,” this is the ideal that
he puts before literary criticism.
His own appreciations of poetry are probably richest, most
discriminating, and most disinterested in the lectures on _Translating
Homer_. The imaginative tact is unfailing with which he renders the
contour and the subject-qualities of the various poems that he comments
on; and equally noteworthy is the divining instinct with which he
captures the spirit of each poet and sets it before us with a phrase or
a symbol. The “inversion and pregnant conciseness” of Milton’s style,
its “laborious and condensed fulness”; the plainspokenness, freshness,
vigorousness, and yet fancifulness and curious complexity of Chapman’s
style; Spenser’s “sweet and easy slipping movement”; Scott’s “bastard
epic style”; the “one continual falsetto” of Macaulay’s “pinchbeck
_Roman Ballads_,”--all these characterizations are delicately sure in
their phrasing and suggestion, and are the clearer because the various
styles are made to stand in continual contrast with Homer’s style, the
rapidity, directness, simplicity, and nobleness of which Arnold keeps
ever present in our consciousness. Incidentally, too, such suggestive
discriminations as that between _simplesse_ and _simplicité_, the
“semblance” of simplicity and the “real quality,” are wrought out for
the reader as the critic goes on with his pursuit of the essential
qualities of Homeric thought and diction. To read these lectures is a
thoroughly tempering process; a process that renders the mind and
imagination permanently finer in texture, more elastic, more sensitively
sure in tone, and subtly responsive to the demands of good art.
The essay on the _Study of Poetry_, which was written as preface to
Ward’s _English Poets_, is also rich in appreciation, and at times
almost as disinterested as the lectures on Homer; yet perhaps never
quite so disinterested. For in the _Study of Poetry_ Arnold is
persistently aware of his conception of “the grand style” and bent on
winning his readers to make it their own. Only poets who attain this
grand style deserve to be “classics,” and the continual insistence on
the note of “high seriousness”--its presence or absence--becomes rather
wearisome. Moreover, Arnold’s preoccupation with this ultimate manner
and quality tends to limit the freedom and delicate truth of his
appreciations of other manners and minor qualities. At times, one is
tempted to charge Arnold with some of the unresponsiveness of
temperament that he ascribes to systematic critics, and to find even
Arnold himself under the perilous sway of a fixed idea. Yet, when all is
said, the _Study of Poetry_ is full of fine things, and does much to
widen the range of appreciation, and, at the same time, to make
appreciation more certain. “The liquid diction, the fluid movement of
Chaucer, his large, free, sound representation of things”; Burns’s
“touches of piercing, sometimes almost intolerable, pathos,” his
“archness,” too, and his “soundness”; Shelley, “that beautiful spirit
building his many-coloured haze of words and images ‘Pinnacled dim in
the intense inane’”; these, and other interpretations like them, are
easily adequate and carry the qualities of each poet readily into the
minds and imaginations of sympathetic readers. Appreciation is much the
richer for this essay on the _Study of Poetry_.
Nor must Arnold’s suggestive appreciations of prose style be forgotten.
Several of them have passed into standard accounts of clearly recognized
varieties of prose diction. Arnold’s phrasing of the matter has made all
sensitive English readers permanently more sensitive to “the warm glow,
blithe movement, and soft pliancy of life” of the Attic style, and also
permanently more hostile to “the over-heavy richness and encumbered
gait” of the Asiatic style. Equally good is his account of the
Corinthian style: “It has glitter without warmth, rapidity without ease,
effectiveness without charm. Its characteristic is that it has no
_soul_; all it exists for, is to get its ends, to make its points, to
damage its adversaries, to be admired, to triumph. A style so bent on
effect at the expense of soul, simplicity, and delicacy; a style so
little studious of the charm of the great models; so far from classic
truth and grace, must surely be said to have the note of
provinciality.”[56] “Middle-class Macaulayese” is his name for Hepworth
Dixon’s style; a style which he evidently regards as likely to gain
favour and establish itself. “I call it Macaulayese ... because it has
the same internal and external characteristics as Macaulay’s style; the
external characteristic being a hard, metallic movement with nothing of
the soft play of life, and the internal characteristic being a perpetual
semblance of hitting the right nail on the head without the reality. And
I call it middle-class Macaulayese, because it has these faults without
the compensation of great studies and of conversance with great affairs,
by which Macaulay partly redeemed them.”[57] It will, of course, be
noted that these latter appreciations deal for the most part with
divergences from the beautiful in style, but they none the less quicken
and refine the æsthetic sense.
Finally, throughout the two series of miscellaneous essays there is, in
the midst of much business with ethical matters, an often-recurring free
play of imagination in the interests, solely and simply, of beauty. Many
are the happy windfalls these essays offer of delicate interpretation
both of poetic effect and of creative movement, and many are the
memorable phrases and symbols by which incidentally the essential
quality of a poet or prose-writer is securely lodged in the reader’s
consciousness.
And yet, wide ranging and delicately sensitive as are Arnold’s
appreciations, the feeling will assert itself, in a final survey of his
work in literary criticism, that he nearly always has designs on his
readers and that appreciation is a means to an end. The end in view is
the exorcism of the spirit of Philistinism. Arnold’s conscience is
haunted by this hideous apparition as Luther’s was by the devil, and he
is all the time metaphorically throwing his inkstand at the spectre. Or,
to put the matter in another way, his one dominating wish is to help
modern Englishmen to “conquer the hard unintelligence” which is “their
bane; to supple and reduce it by culture, by a growth in the variety,
fulness, and sweetness of their spiritual life”; and the appreciative
interpretation of literature to as wide a circle of readers as possible
seems to him one of the surest ways of thus educing in his
fellow-countrymen new spiritual qualities. It must not be forgotten that
Matthew Arnold was the son of Thomas Arnold, master of Rugby; there is
in him a hereditary pedagogic bias--an inevitable trend towards moral
suasion. The pedagogic spirit has suffered a sea-change into something
rich and strange, and yet traces of its origin linger about it.
Criticism with Arnold is rarely, if ever, irresponsible; it is our
schoolmaster to bring us to culture.
In a letter of 1863 Arnold speaks of the great transformation which “in
this concluding half of the century the English spirit is destined to
undergo.” “I shall do,” he adds, “what I can for this movement in
literature; freer perhaps in that sphere than I could be in any other,
but with the risk always before me, if I cannot charm the wild beast of
Philistinism while I am trying to convert him, of being torn in pieces
by him.”[58] In charming the wild beast Arnold ultimately succeeded; and
yet there is a sense in which he fell a victim to his very success. The
presence of the beast, and the necessity of fluting to him debonairly
and winningly, fastened themselves on Arnold’s imagination, and subdued
him to a comparatively narrow range of subjects and set of interests.
From the point of view, at least, of what is desirable in appreciative
criticism, Arnold was injured by his sense of responsibility; he lacks
the detachment and the delicate mobility that are the redeeming traits
of modern dilettantism.
If, then, we regard Arnold as a writer with a task to accomplish, with
certain definite regenerative purposes to carry out, with a body of
original ideas about the conduct of life to inculcate, we must conclude
that he succeeded admirably in his work, followed out his ideas with
persistence and temerity through many regions of human activity, and
embodied them with unwearying ingenuity and persuasiveness in a wide
range of discussions. If, on the other hand, we consider him solely as a
literary critic, we are forced to admit that he is not the ideal
literary critic; he is not the ideal literary critic because he is so
much more, and because his interests lie so decisively outside of art.
Nor is this opinion meant to imply an ultimate theory of art for art’s
sake, or to suggest any limitation of criticism to mere impressionism or
appreciation. Literature must be known historically and philosophically
before it can be adequately appreciated; that is emphatically true. Art
may or may not be justifiable solely as it is of service to society;
that need not be debated. But, in any event, literary criticism, if it
is to reach its utmost effectiveness, must regard works of art for the
time being as self-justified integrations of beauty and truth, and so
regarding them must record and interpret their power and their charm.
And this temporary isolating process is just the process which Arnold
very rarely, for the reasons that have been traced in detail, is willing
or able to go through with.
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.
VIII
And, indeed, the union in Arnold’s style of actuality with distinction
becomes a very significant matter when we turn to consider his precise
relation to his age, for it suggests what is perhaps the most striking
characteristic of his personality--his reconciliation of conventionality
with fineness of spiritual temper. In this reconciliation lies the
secret of Arnold’s relation to his romantic predecessors and to the men
of his own time. He accepts the actual, conventional life of the
every-day world frankly and fully, as the earlier idealists had never
quite done, and yet he retains a strain of other-worldliness inherited
from the dreamers of former generations. Arnold’s gospel of culture is
an attempt to import into actual life something of the fine spiritual
fervour of the Romanticists with none of the extravagance or the
remoteness from fact of those “madmen”--those idealists of an earlier
age.
Like the Romanticists, Arnold gives to the imagination and the emotions
the primacy in life; like the Romanticists he contends against
formalists, system-makers, and all devotees of abstractions. It is by an
exquisite tact, rather than by logic, that Arnold in all doubtful
matters decides between good and evil. He keeps to the concrete image;
he is an appreciator of life, not a deducer of formulas or a
demonstrator. He is continually concerned about what _ought_ to be; he
is not cynically or scientifically content with the knowledge of what
_is_. And yet, unlike the Romanticists, Arnold is _in_ the world, and
_of_ it; he has given heed to the world-spirit’s warning, “submit,
submit”; he has “learned the Second Reverence, for things around.” In
Arnold, imaginative literature returns from its romantic quest for the
Holy Grail and betakes itself half-humorously, and yet with now and then
traces of the old fervour, to the homely duties of every-day life.
Arnold had in his youth been under the spell of romantic poetry; he had
heard the echoes of “the puissant hail” of those “former men,” whose
“voices were in all men’s ears.” Indeed, much of his poetry is
essentially a beautiful threnody over the waning of romance, and in its
tenor bears witness alike to the thoroughness with which he had been
imbued with the spirit of the earlier idealists and to his inability to
rest content with their relation to life and their accounts of it. It is
the unreality of the idealists that dissatisfies Arnold, their visionary
blindness to fact, their morbid distaste for the actual. Much as he
delights in the poetry of Shelley and Coleridge, these qualities in
their work seem to him unsound and injurious. Or, at other times, it is
the capricious self-will of the Romanticists, their impotent isolation,
their enormous egoism, that impress him as fatally wrong. Even in
Wordsworth he is troubled by a semi-untruth and by the lack of a
courageous acceptance of the conditions of human life. Wordsworth’s
“Eyes avert their ken
From half of human fate.”
Tempered, then, as Arnold was by a deep sense of the beauty and
nobleness of romantic and idealistic poetry, finely touched as he was
into sympathy with the whole range of delicate intuitions, quivering
sensibilities, and half-mystical aspirations that this poetry called
into play, he yet came to regard its underlying conceptions of life as
inadequate and misleading, and to feel the need of supplementing them by
a surer and saner relation to the conventional world of common sense.
The Romanticists lamented that “the world is too much with us.” Arnold
shared their dislike of the world of dull routine, their fear of the
world that enslaves to petty cares; yet he came more and more to
distinguish between this world and the great world of common experience,
spread out generously in the lives of all men; more and more clearly he
realized that the true land of romance is in this region of every-day
fact, or else is a mere mirage; that “America is here or nowhere.”
Arnold, then, sought to correct the febrile unreality of the idealists
by restoring to men a true sense of the actual values of life. In this
attempt he had recourse to Hellenic conceptions with their sanity, their
firm delight in the tangible and the visible, their regard for
proportion and symmetry--and more particularly to the Hellenism of
Goethe. Indeed, Goethe may justly be called Arnold’s master--the writer
who had the largest share in determining the characteristic principles
in his theory of life. Goethe’s formula for the ideal life--_Im Ganzen,
Guten Wahren, resolut zu leben_--sums up in a phrase the plea for
perfection, for totality, for wisely balanced self-culture, that Arnold
makes in so many of his essays and books.
Allusions to Goethe abound in Arnold’s essays, and in one of his letters
he speaks particularly of his close and extended reading of Goethe’s
works.[61] His splendid poetic tributes to Goethe, in his _Memorial
Verses_ and _Obermann_, have given enduring expression to his admiration
for Goethe’s sanity, insight, and serene courage. His frankest prose
appreciation of Goethe occurs in _A French Critic on Goethe_, where he
characterizes him as “the clearest, the largest, the most helpful
thinker of modern times; ... in the width, depth, and richness of his
criticism of life, by far our greatest modern man.”[62] It is precisely
in this matter of the criticism of life that Arnold took Goethe for
master. Goethe, as Arnold saw, had passed through the tempering
experiences of Romanticism; he had rebelled against the limitations of
actual life (in _Werther_, for example, and _Goetz_), and sought
passionately for the realization of romantic dreams; and he had finally
come to admit the futility of rebellion and to recognize the treacherous
evasiveness of emotional ideals; he had learned the “Second Reverence,
for things around.” He had found in self-development, in wise
self-discipline for the good of society, the secret of successful
living. Arnold’s gospel of culture is largely a translation of Goethe’s
doctrine into the idiom of the later years of the century, and the
minute adaptation of it to the special needs of Englishmen. There is in
Arnold somewhat less sleek paganism than in Goethe--a somewhat more
genuine spiritual quality. But the wise limitation of the scope of human
endeavour to this world is the same with both; so, too, is the sane and
uncomplaining acceptance of fact and the concentration of thought and
effort on the pursuit of tangible ideals of human perfection. Goethe
tempered by Wordsworth--this is not an unfair account of the derivation
of Arnold’s ideal.
From one point of view, then, Arnold may fairly enough be called the
special advocate of conventionality. He recommends and practises
conformity to the demands of conventional life. He has none of the pose
or the mannerisms of the seer or the bard; he is a frequenter of
drawing-rooms and a diner-out, and is fairly adept in the dialect and
mental idiom of the frivolously-minded. In all that he writes, “he
delivers himself,” as the heroine in Peacock’s novel urged Scythrop
(Shelley) to do, “like a man of this world.” He pretends to no
transcendental second sight and indulges in none of Carlyle’s
spinning-dervish jargon. He is never guilty of Ruskin’s occasional false
sentiment or falsetto rhetoric. The world that he lives in is the world
that exists in the minds and thoughts and feelings of the most sensible
and cultivated people who make up modern society; the world over which,
as its presiding genius, broods the haunting presence of Mr. George
Meredith’s Comic Spirit. It is “in this world” that “he has hope,” in
its ever greater refinement, in its ever greater comprehensiveness, in
its increasing ability to impose its standards on others. When he half
pleads for an English Academy--he never quite pleads for one--he does
this because of his desire for some organ by which, in art and
literature, the collective sense of the best minds in society assembled
may make itself effective. So, too, when he pleads for the Established
Church he does this for similar reasons; he is convinced that it offers
by far the best means for imposing widely upon the nation, as a standard
of religious experience, what is most spiritual in the lives and
aspirations of the greatest number of cultivated people. In many such
ways as these, then, Matthew Arnold’s kingdom is a kingdom of this
world.
And yet, after all, Arnold wears his worldliness with a very great
difference. If he be compared, for example, with other literary men of
the world,--with Francis Jeffrey or Lord Macaulay or Lockhart,--there is
at once obvious in him an all-pervasive quality that marks his temper as
far subtler and finer than theirs. His worldliness is a worldliness of
his own, compounded out of many exquisite simples. His faith in poetry
is intense and absolute. “The future of poetry,” he declares, “is
immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies,
our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay.” This
declaration contrasts strikingly with Macaulay’s pessimistic theory of
the essentially make-believe character of poetry--a theory that puts it
on a level with children’s games, and, like the still more puerile
theory of Herr Max Nordau, looks forward to its extinction as the race
reaches genuine maturity. Poetry always remains for Arnold the most
adequate and beautiful mode of speech possible to man; and this faith,
which runs implicitly through all his writing, is plainly the outcome of
a mood very different from that of the ordinary man of the world, and
is the expression of an emotional refinement and a spiritual
sensitiveness that are, at least in part, his abiding inheritance from
the Romanticists. This faith is the manifestation of the ideal element
in his nature, which, in spite of the plausible man-of-the-world aspect
and tone of much of his prose, makes itself felt even in his prose as
the inspirer of a kind of “divine unrest.”
In his Preface to his first series of essays Arnold playfully takes to
himself the name transcendentalist. To the stricter sect of the
transcendentalists he can hardly pretend to belong. He certainly has
none of their delight in envisaging mystery; none of their morbid relish
for an “_O altitudo!_” provided only the altitude be wrapped in clouds.
He believes, to be sure, in a “power not ourselves that makes for
righteousness”; but his interest in this power and his comments upon it
confine themselves almost wholly to its plain and palpable influence
upon human conduct. Even in his poetry he can hardly be rated as more
than a transcendentalist _manqué_; and in his prose he is never so aware
of the unseen as in his poetry.
Yet, whether or no he be strictly a transcendentalist, Arnold is, in
Disraeli’s famous phrase, “on the-side of the angels”; he is a
persistent and ingenious opponent of purely materialistic or utilitarian
conceptions of life. “The kingdom of God is within you”; this is a
cardinal point in the doctrine of Culture. The highest good, that for
which every man should continually be striving, is an _inner state_ of
perfection; material prosperity, political enactments, religious
organizations--all these things are to be judged solely according to
their furtherance of the spiritual well-being of the individual; they
are all mere _machinery_--more or less ingenious means for giving to
every man a chance to make the most of his life. The true “ideal of
human perfection” is “an inward spiritual activity, having for its
characters increased sweetness, increased light, increased life,
increased sympathy.” Arnold’s worldliness, then, is a worldliness that
holds many of the elements of idealism in solution, that has none of the
cynical acquiescence of unmitigated worldliness, that throughout all its
range shows the gentle urgency of a fine discontent with fact.
To realize the subtle and high quality of Arnold’s genius, one has but
to compare him with men of science or with rationalists pure and
simple,--with men like Professor Huxley, Darwin, or Bentham. Their
carefulness for truth, their intellectual strength, their vast services
to mankind, are acknowledged even by their opponents. Yet Arnold has a
far wider range of sensibilities than any one of them; life plays upon
him in far richer and more various ways; it touches him into response
through associations that have a more distinctively human character,
and that have a deeper and a warmer colour of emotion drawn out of the
past of the race. In short, Arnold brings to bear upon the present a
finer spiritual appreciation than the mere man of the world or the mere
man of science--a larger accumulation of imaginative experience. Through
this temperamental scope and refinement he is able, while accepting
conventional and actual life, to redeem it in some measure from its
routine and its commonplace character, and to import into it beauty and
meaning and good from beyond the range of science or positive truth. All
this comes from the fact that, despite his worldly conformity, he has
the romantic ferment in his blood. If his conformity be compared with
that of the eighteenth century,--with the worldliness of Swift or
Addison,--the transformation wrought by romantic influences is
appreciable in all its scope and meaning.
Finally, Arnold makes of life an art rather than a science, and commits
the conduct of it to an exquisite tact, rather than to reason or
demonstration. The imaginative assimilation of all the best experience
of the past--this he regards as the right training to develop true tact
for the discernment of good and evil in all practical matters, where
probability must be the guide of life. We are at once reminded of
Newman’s Illative Sense, which was also an intuitive faculty for the
dextrous apprehension of truth through the aid of the feelings and the
imagination. But Arnold’s new Sense comes much nearer than Newman’s to
being a genuinely sublimated _Common_ Sense. Arnold’s own _flair_ in
matters of art and life was astonishingly keen, and yet he would have
been the last to exalt it as unerring. His faith is ultimately in the
best instincts of the so-called _remnant_--in the collective sense of
the most cultivated, most delicately perceptive, most spiritually-minded
people of the world. Through the combined intuitions of such men
sincerely aiming at perfection, truth in all that pertains to the
conduct of life will be more and more nearly won. Because of this faith
of his in sublimated worldly wisdom, Arnold, unlike Newman, is in
sympathy with the _Zeitgeist_ of a democratic age.
And, indeed, here seems to rest Arnold’s really most permanent claim to
gratitude and honour. He accepts--with some sadness, it is true, and yet
genuinely and generously--the modern age, with its scientific bias and
its worldly preoccupations; humanist as he is, half-romantic lover of an
elder time, he yet masters his regret over what is disappearing and
welcomes the present loyally. Believing, however, in the continuity of
human experience, and, above all, in the transcendent worth to mankind
of its spiritual acquisitions, won largely through the past domination
of Christian ideals, he devotes himself to preserving the quintessence
of this ideal life of former generations and insinuating it into the
hearts and imaginations of men of a ruder age. He converts himself into
a patient, courageous mediator between the old and the new. Herein he
contrasts with Newman on the one hand, and with modern devotees of
æstheticism on the other hand. Newman, whose delicately spiritual
temperament was subdued even more deeply than Arnold’s to Romanticism,
shrunk before the immediacy and apparent anarchy of modern life, and
sought to realize his spiritual ideals through the aid of mediæval
formulas and a return to mediæval conceptions and standards of truth.
Exquisite spirituality was attained, but at the cost of what some have
called the Great Refusal. A like imperfect synthesis is characteristic
of the followers of art for art’s sake. They, too, give up common life
as irredeemably crass, as unmalleable, irreducible to terms of the
ideal. They turn for consolation to their own dreams, and frame for
themselves a House Beautiful, where they may let these dreams have their
way, “far from the world’s noise,” and “life’s confederate plea.”
Arnold, with a temperament perhaps as exacting as either of these other
temperaments, takes life as it offers itself and does his best with it.
He sees and feels its crudeness and disorderliness; but he has faith in
the instincts that civilized men have developed in common, and finds in
the working of these instincts the continuous, if irregular, realization
of the ideal.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] _Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay_, chap. 3.
[2] _Ibid._, chap. 9.
[3] Carlyle’s _Reminiscences_, II, 271.
[4] _Hours in a Library_, III, 176.
[5] Lord Cockburn’s _Life of Jeffrey_ (ed. Philadelphia, 1852), I, 101
ff.
[6] _The Life and Times of Lord Brougham_ (ed. New York, 1871), I, 176
ff.
[7] Lord Cockburn’s _Life of Jeffrey_, II, 64.
[8] Forster’s _Goldsmith_ (ed. London, 1848), p. 170.
[9] J. W. Robberd’s _Life of William Taylor_, I, 130-132.
[10] J. W. Robberd’s _Life of William Taylor_, I, 139.
[11] _Ibid._, I, 122.
[12] Coleridge, _Biographia Literaria_, chap. 21.
[13] Hazlitt’s _Table Talk_, 2d series, essay 6.
[14] Coleridge’s _Biographia Literaria_, chap. 21.
[15] _Memoirs and Correspondence of Horner_, I, 419.
[16] _Philomythus_, by E. A. Abbott, London, 1891.
[17] _Letters and Correspondence of J. H. Newman_, 1891, II, 156.
[18] _Ibid._, I, 416.
[19] _Oxford University Sermons_, ed. 1887, p. 257.
[20] _Ibid._, p. 259.
[21] _Letters_, II, 476.
[22] _Discourses to Mixed Congregations_, ed. 1892, p. 373.
[23] _Development of Christian Doctrine_, ed. 1891, pp. 39-40.
[24] See above, p. 79.
[25] _Apologia_, ed. 1890, p. 96.
[26] _Letters and Correspondence_, I, 18.
[27] _Apologia_, p. 28.
[28] _Grammar of Assent_, ed. 1889, p. 359.
[29] _Grammar of Assent_, ed. 1889, p. 360.
[30] _Ibid._, p. 353.
[31] _Ibid._, p. 345.
[32] _Ibid._, p. 350.
[33] _Celtic Literature_, p. 75.
[34] _Literature and Dogma_, p. xxi.
[35] _On Translating Homer_, p. 295.
[36] _God and the Bible_, p. xxxiv.
[37] _Literature and Dogma_, p. xxvii.
[38] This image may have been suggested by a sentence of Joubert’s:
“Plato loses himself in the void, but one sees the play of his wings,
one hears their rustle.... It is good to breathe his air, but not to
live upon him.” The translation is Arnold’s own. See his _Joubert_, in
_Essays in Criticism_, I, 294.
[39] _On Translating Homer_, ed. 1883, p. 197.
[40] _On Translating Homer_, ed. 1883, p. 295.
[41] _Essays_, ed. 1891, II, p. 143.
[42] _Ibid._, p. 5.
[43] Pater’s _Appreciations_, ed. 1890, p. 36.
[44] _Essays_, ed. 1891, II, pp. 186-187.
[45] _Essays_, ed. 1891, II, p. 141.
[46] _Ibid._, p. 187.
[47] _Essays_, ed. 1891, II, p. 22.
[48] _Essays_, ed. 1891, II, p. 33.
[49] _Mixed Essays_, ed. 1883, p. 209.
[50] _On Translating Homer_, p. 245.
[51] _Letters_, I, 282.
[52] _Essays_, ed. 1891, I, p. v.
[53] _On Translating Homer_, ed. 1883, p. 264.
[54] _On Translating Homer_, ed. 1883, p. 194.
[55] _Mixed Essays_, ed. 1883, p. 210.
[56] _Essays_, ed. 1891, I, p. 75.
[57] _Friendship’s Garland_, ed. 1883, p. 279.
[58] _Letters_, I, 240.
[59] _Literature and Dogma_, ed. 1893, p. 321.
[60] _Culture and Anarchy_, ed. 1883, p. 205.
[61] _Letters_, II, 165.
[62] _Mixed Essays_, pp. 233-234.
Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
into the precints=> into the precincts {pg 25}
more elusive susbtance=> more elusive substance {pg 70}
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