Page images
PDF
EPUB

That is beautiful and beautifully put. It stands out embedded like a boulder amid layers of recent clay. But, again, the glory of a really great man surely is that he adds a new and fresh light to the best that we each of us has; that he sees further over the confines of that realm of the infinite on the borders of which we each so waveringly walk. With such light Carlyle is luminous: -"Not what I Have but what I Do is my Kingdom" "Love is a discerning of the Infinite in the Finite, of the Idea made Real"-"Into a Thought, nay into an action [Feeling], must be wrought"-"To Peace, in this vortex of existence, can the Son of Time not pretend"-"Make thy claim of wages a zero; thou hast the world under thy feet »"The Situation that has not its Duty, its Ideal, was never yet occupied by man". "Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it, in God's name » – "From God to God." So Emerson: — "You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong". "You must pay at last your own debt ""Do the thing and you shall have the power" "A great man is always willing to be little "-"We gain the strength of the temptation that we resist » -"Trust thyself" - "Life only avails, not the having lived" - "Insist on yourself" "Nothing can bring you peace but yourself" — "All high beauty has a moral element in it"-"The spirit only can teach "—"Every man's work is his lifepreserver" — "Work is victory" - "Of immortality, the soul, when well employed, is incurious." With such flashes of light of both Carlyle and Emerson the writings are irradiated. And not with flashes only; often with long steady glows (I have refrained from citing longer passages), and always throughout are they suffused with it, whatever the topic. The whole work of both "savours," in Emerson's fine phrase, "always of eternity." And it is because it thus savours that it will live; and it is because Arnold's does not that it will die.

Two of Arnold's bulkiest books are concerned, the one with that hopeless task of bringing the Bible "up to date »— a date which changes with every decade; the other with a long and labored refutation of ephemeral criticisms of the first. True, an "Essay Towards a Better Apprehension of the Bible" would certainly seem to treat of themes common and vital to

all Christendom. And so indeed it does; but the treatment is so narrow, the view is so shut in, the ground traversed is so exiguous, that it fails to satisfy the cravings of the human spirit. Even, I venture to say, to men of his own stamp, educated at Oxford, brought up within the pale of the Established Church, his apologetics will at no very distant date- even if that date has not already arrived - be of little avail. For Oxford is changing fast, and as to the Established Church, that, it seems to some of us, is changing faster still: but yesterday, with the strategy of High-Churchism, it was contending for stringent and undeviating orthodoxyas admirers of Pusey will admit; to-day, with the tactics of higher criticism, it is surrendering position after position to its progressive critics—as readers of “Lux Mundi" must allow. And as to men accustomed to the gusty invigorating gale of a Carlyle, the large free breeze of an Emerson I limit myself to these, his two contemporaries - how can these find any bracing oxygen in the little balmy airs of Arnold? What practical useful strength will such men derive from knowing that "the real germ of religious consciousness out of which sprang Israel's name for God was a consciousness of the not ourselves which makes for righteousness"? from knowing that "God" should be translated "stream of tendency" and "Holy Spirit," "Muse of Righteousness"? from knowing that "for apprehending the God of the Bible rightly and not wrongly, letters, which so many people disparage, and what we call, in general, culture, seems to be necessary"? How strange an assertion is that! It is the assertion of a highly cultured ex-professor of poetry in the University of Oxford Well, Oxford is not culture's Mecca. Culture has no Mecca.

[ocr errors]

Secondly, Arnold's prose will die because of its possession of that very fault against which he was all his life lifting up his voice, the fault of provincialism. There is a provincialism of the educated as there is a provincialism of the rude. This Arnold possessed. He spent his life in calling attention to the mote in his brother's eye, and all the while had, perhaps not a beam, but a similar mote in his

own.

The highest critic is he who can most strip himself of his personal and national characteristics, can best view the object

of his criticism sub specie æternitatis, in the dry light of truth and beauty. It was because Goethe was such a critic that his criticism of "Hamlet"* made such a John Bull as Macaulay "wonder and despair." What John Bull, too, does not stand aghast at the very possibility of such a view being taken of Milton as that by Voltaire (little as one need agree with it) when he calls England's only epic poet "le sombre et fanatique Milton," and his poetical creations "ces imaginations dégoûtantes, affreuses, absurdes

ces facéties abominables"? Matthew Arnold himself endorses this assertion of the necessity of cosmopolitanism in the critic. "Criticism," he says, "real criticism, obeys an instinct to try to know the best that is known and thought in the world . . . without the intrusion of any other considerations whatever."+ "Culture," he says again, “disinterestedly seeking in its aim at perfection to see things as they really are." However, despite his own caution, his prose writings were not occupied with the best that is known and thought. They were not concerned with topics of world-wide human interest. What are the subjects of his books? "Literature and Dogma" is "an essay towards a better apprehension of the Bible"; but the apprehension he attempted to improve was that merely of a small section of Christianity at a particular point in its history. And even his attempt at improvement contains a provincialism within a provincialism, as it were, for it abounds in references and allusions to purely English and Anglican men and things, and these often of the most ephemeral character. On the heads of poor English Dissenters, the very appellation of whom out of England is scarcely knownsince there can be no Dissent where is no established Church-vial after vial of wrath is poured. It is most delicate wrath, of course, and most deftly poured out of most dainty vials, a refinement which is an additional jar to a cosmopolitan taste - much as a Londoner's too elaborate city wit would jar if turned against his country cousins. For example -"The frank unvarnished language of Mr. Miall at home," he says, "Mr. Miall speaking out of the abundance of his heart as a Dis

*«Wilhelm Meister," bk. v., ch. iv., et seq.

+ Essays in Criticism." First series, pp. 15, 16 (Ed. Boston, 1869).

"Culture and Anarchy," p. xlii.

senter of Dissenters." § Who, nineteen people out of twenty to-day will ask, is Mr. Miall? He descends to semi-sarcastic references to Messrs. Moody and Sankey, persons unheard of out of AngloSaxondom. "With us," he ironically says, "by all means we are encouraged to keep our natural taste for the bathos unimpaired." Was there no bathos in writing books on "Literature and Dogma," "God and the Bible,» «Culture and Anarchy," and in filling them with querulous faultfinding with Dissenters and Philistines? And certainly there is not a little provincial flippancy in saying that "It is a little unjust, perhaps, to attribute to the Divinity exclusively this philoprogenitiveness, which the British Philistine and the poorer classes of Irish may certainly claim to share with him," which is Matthew Arnold's way of pinking Mr. Robert Buchanan for a phrase perhaps somewhat inapt. "This, indeed," he says again, "is what makes the religious watchword of the British and Foreign School Society: The Bible, the whole Bible, and nothing but the Bible! (one must say it) so ingeniously absurd." T Where was the compelling necessity of thus publicly crucifying this. worthy little society? The Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian, the Rock, the Spectator, the Saturday Review and other English newspapers of the day, are quoted and confuted as if they were historical antiquities of universal fame. Exeter Hall is raised to the rank of the temple of Jupiter Ammon, to judge from the importance which iterated obloquy confers upon it. Private gentlemen unheard of outside their little spheres are mentioned as if all the world took note of the vagaries of English sectarianism. To say that God is "displeased and disserved by men uttering such doggerel hymns as » is to say a thing which, it seems to me, it was quite needless to say, especially in that way. Singers of such hymns might in all conscience be left in peace, as we leave street-preachers in peace. And truly bourgeois too was that much and deservedly criticised "fairy tale of the three Lord Shaftesburys." Nor was he ever tired of poking fun at such Anglican Bishops as differed from him, when a cosmopolitan critic would as soon think of poking fun at the Lama of

3" Literature and Dogma." Preface, p. xvi. ["Culture and Anarchy," p. 214.

q" Literature and Dogma." Preface, p. xxix.

Thibet. Even "revivalism" is not too paltry for the raillery of his pen; and over the petty squabbles between "the High Church rhinoceros," "the Evangelical hyena," and "the Catholic leviathan » how provincially felicitous are the nicknames!- he waxes most facetious. Listen, too, to such banter as "the eloquent and impetuous Chancellor of Oxford, who cannot away with a hazy amiability in religious matters"; "our political dissenter pluming himself on some irrational 'conscientious objections""; "that Bible miracles would stand sifting by a London special jury"; "alas, these poor people [the ancient Israelites] were not Archbishops of York"; § "in what we call provinciality they [the Nonconformists] abound"; "the God of this religion of the future [that is, of the political dissenters]

may be best conceived, perhaps, as a kind of tribal God of the Birmingham League. Not by any means a Dieu des Bonnes Gens, like the God of Béranger, a God who favors garrets, grisettes, gaiety, and champagne; but a Dieu des Quatre Libertés, the God of Free Trade, Free Church, Free Labor, and Free Land; with a new programme, therefore, and with Birmingham for his earthly headquarters instead of Shiloh or Jerusalem, but with the old turn still preserved for commanding to hew Agag in pieces, and with much even of the Biblical worship and language still retained; Mr. Jesse Collings and Mr. Chamberlain dancing before his ark, and Mr. Dale and Mr. George Dawson, in the Birmingham TownHall, offering up prayer and sacrifice." T How purely local, how parochial all this is! It is strange that this cultured critic should fail to see the provincialism of all this. To what can we compare this persiflage? If one were to taunt, in deliberately elegant and ironical language, far above his comprehension, some zealous misguided Salvation Army sergeant, a personage we pity but never deride, one would hardly be out-doing Arnold. Much, too, as he preached, and much as he thought he practiced, "sweet reasonableness," he deceived himself. Sweet reasonableness would have regarded more

* Literature and Dogma," p. 184. + Literature and Dogma,” p. 216. "Literature and Dogma," p. 130. 3" Literature and Dogma," p. 37. "Culture and Anarchy." Preface, p. xvi. "God and the Bible," p. 8.

placidly and tolerantly the crudities of protestantism and dissent. "Hole-andcorner forms of religion," he says, "inevitably favor provincialism." ** No doubt to the big bull-frog on the bank of a nice large pond the wretched little tadpoles in insignificant inlets of the same seem very hole-and-corner affairs. But is it not possible to conceive of creatures to whom even that bull-frog on the bank of that nice large pond seems just a little hole-and-corner? I think it is quite possible that to such big rana as Pope Leo XIII or the President of the Holy Synod Mr. Matthew Arnold and his "better apprehension of the Bible" may so seemthough, of course, they would be far too polite to say so.

Unknown to himself, Arnold saw so many things through myopic eyes that he actually posits a "law which appears to forbid the rearing, outside of national Churches, of men of the highest spiritual significance." His language is cautious and vague: he is careful to say "reared," and he throws the group of qualities he desires to identify into the misty expression "spiritual significance." But one is inclined to ask whether anyone could detect the nationality of the Church in which Tennyson was reared, or Coleridge, or Wordsworth, or Shelley, or Carlyle, or Emerson or indeed any single one of all the great spiritually significant men of this century. The very note of their spiritual significance is their catholicity of creed. As soon as we come upon a man in whose writings evidence of sectarianism is discernible, we come upon a man of lower rank and often because of that very defect. Who will deny that F. D. Maurice, Charles Kingsley, Pusey, and I will be so bold as to say even Newman, would have been more spiritually significant had they broken their ecclesiastical bonds? He goes even further. "Instead," he asserts, "of battling for his own private forms for expressing the inexpressible and defining the indefinable, a man [reared a member of a national Church] takes those which have commended themselves most to the religious life of his nation." How different from Emerson! Hear Emerson:

"Let me admonish you"- he is speaking, mind you, to divinity students-"let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone, to refuse the

**" Culture and Anarchy." Preface, p. xxi.
"Culture and Anarchy." Preface, p. xvii.
"Culture and Anarchy." Preface, p. xix.

good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil.» *

>>

Did it never occur to Arnold that to all but a narrow circle of national churchmen this incessant laudation of a national Church, and this flagellation of dissent from it, might become a little wearisome? It is as if, falling in with an "old boy," of our own school, ourselves meanwhile being "old boys » too, he should commence to assail our ear in the language of mature life with endless criminations of the puerilities and stupidities of the boys in that school. Such an "old boy," we take it, could the youngsters hear him, would be called by them worse than cultured, he would be called "cracked."

Were he not continually girding at Englishmen and English ways of viewing things, it would be hardly fair thus to pillory Arnold for his Anglicism. But he is so fond of upbraiding us for what he considers our faults, that it is well to show that he possesses the same peculiarities himself. He laughs at our narrowness, and is himself circumscribed.

"The Eng

lishman in general," he says, "believes point-blank, that for a thing to be an anomally is absolutely no objection to it whatever; " yet was anything more anomalous than his speculative and abstract semi-metaphysical, semi-poetical interpretation of the old Hebraic sacred literature his "Hebraism," his "stream of tendency," his "not ourselves," his "Muse of Righteousness," his "the Eternal" ? He lauds the Zeit-Geist, but his Zeit is that of his day and his Geist that of his nation. He scoffs at sectarianism, yet is unable to see any good in any sect save his own. He applauds the "grand style," and writes a flippant one. He touches on themes to the vast majority of his readers serious and sacred, and he touches them superciliously, almost jocosely.

Nor did Arnold's purely literary studies lead him into the highest planes. His introduction to Ward's "English Poets" is certainly high; but there he was in his element; he was dealing with poetry, and his feeling for poetry was always keen and accurate. But the men he singled out for study are not men of the first rank: the De Guérin, Amiel, Tolstoï, Joubert, Sénancour, Spinoza, Heine, General Grant these lived, if not in the byways of thought and action, at least not in the * "Works," vol. v., p. 121 (Ed. Boston, 1883).

highways. If he studies Homer, it is to descant on how best to translate him. Who, on the other hand, were the men with whom Carlyle dealt? Goethe, Cromwell, Frederick the Great, Burns, Schiller, Voltaire, Johnson, Scott. And if too he deals with Richter and Werner and Novalis, with Diderot and Mirabeau and Knox, how great he makes these to seem! And who are the men with whom Emerson dealt? Representative men»

Plato and Shakespeare, Napoleon and Montaigne, Goethe and Swedenborg. In his second series of "Essays in Criticism," Arnold certainly dealt with Milton, with Gray, Keats, Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley; but these essays were merely addresses, prefixes, pi efaces, or magazine articles, and one and all are tainted with the inadequacy inherent in these. True, too, he propped his mind, so he tells a friend,t on Homer, Sophocles, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius; and he everywhere shows keen sympathy and familiarity with the world's master-minds. Nevertheless, the deliberate studies of men which he gave to the world are of men not in the highways of thought and action.

Again, there is something in the very insistence and persistence of his advocacy of culture that impresses one as uncultured. Acquaintance with "the best that has been thought and known" is scarcely an adequate definition for that most subtle efflorescence of the human spirit. Culture is an organic growth, a spontaneous development, the product of birth, breeding, and education. Education alone will not confer culture, any more than will mere birth. Well, to occupy one's time in enforcing upon the masses the necessity of their "getting" culture, as if it were a thing to be got by attending the first Board school round the corner or entering the first university northwest of London, smacks just a little of that sort of attitude which by the late James Russell Lowell was termed "Anglicism." Doubtless there is an Anglicism that is highly laudable, a haughtiness, a doggedness, a stubbornness, a persistence, an inflexibility, born of self-confidence and confidence in the rightness and justice of the cause, that sort of Anglicism is splendid; and when its weapon is an ultimatum or the sword, it builds up an Empire splendid indeed. But to letters such Anglicism is not perhaps a help.

+ Poems," i., 2.

Arnold in reality lacked that very urbanity upon which evidently he plumed himself. Urbane he was in a certain sense, in the sense in which the nitid citizen is urbane when, as I have said, he rallies his suburban cousins. He was exclusive, too, both in his tastes and his sympathies; and "exclusiveness," as Emerson said, "is deadly." Lastly, he is not, in his own phrase, "tonic" enough. Even in his poems, that "hopefulness" which he praises Emerson for possessing so abundantly, and that "happiness" which he upbraids Carlyle for not possessing enough, are both sadly wanting. And it is surely doubtful if anything not tonic will live. Men are influenced by things positive, concrete, practical, applicable to their everyday lives. It is those who do what Cicero says Socrates did, bring down philosophy (and for "philosophy" we may to-day read "religion," for what was "philosophy" to the Stoic is to the Christian "religion"), it is the men who bring down philosophy to the business and bosoms of men, that influence men.

What, then, has hitherto made Arnold's name so great? Well, as I have said, Matthew Arnold was one of those rare men who are greater than their works. Despite his provinciality, his parochialism, despite a mode of enforcing a tenet or attacking a theory seemingly suited only for his country and his class, despite a limited horizon and a one-sided view,

though the very books in which his influence was embodied may perish, that influence will survive. He touched, too, on themes in his day much in men's minds. That rationalistic storm before which the Church now bows its head, but before which then it did its best to stand firm, was thought by some, and no doubt thought by himself, to have been turned aside by his "better apprehension" of the Bible. His works were by High Churchmen regarded as a sort of lightning-conductor through which the electric fluid passed safely over the sacred edificethough no doubt by Low Churchmen that lightning-conductor was thought to have been to that edifice most ineffectually affixed. He wrote, too, at a time when culture certainly was a desideratum, and when few people were found bold enough to assert the desirableness of that, then considered, highly un-British commodity. And he wrote in the most pellucid of prose, a prose not, it must be admitted, untainted by mannerism, but still most fascinating. And he was always simple, simple to the verge of faultiness; and simplicity always wins its way. Nevertheless, not timeliness of theme nor courage of opinion nor fascination of style will in themselves carry a man's work far beyond the age in which he lived. To do that his work must possess weightier things than these. Arnold's poetry may have them; his prose has not.

ARNOLD HAULTAIN.

A

PORTUGAL'S PLACE IN EUROPE

VERY interesting article, entitled "Holland's Place in Europe," appeared in SELF CULTURE for November. It contained one statement, however, which is hardly justified by the facts: "We believe in maintaining all the small states of Europe [excepting Portugal, which ought to coalesce with Spain], as being the freest, the best governed," etc. It is the words in brackets with which I cannot agree. They indicate, as appears to me, a misconception of actual conditions, and convey an implied injustice to Portugal.

First, as to area, Portugal is one of the largest of the small European states. Holland has only 12,648 square miles; Denmark, 14, 124; Greece, 25,041; Switzerland,

15,892; and Belgium, 11,372; while Portugal has 34,038 square miles, and is also second to Holland alone of these states in her colonial possessions, which include 592,706 square miles.

As regards population, Holland, exclusive of colonies, numbers 4,548,596 souls, as reported in 1895; Denmark, 2, 185, 159; Greece, 2,187,208; Switzerland, 2,918,608; Belgium, 6,093.798; and Portugal, 4,708,178.

Thus we see that in area Portugal stands first among these small states and second in population, while, as a colonial power, she holds a second place, in this respect more than doubling the colonial possessions left to Spain since the war of the latter with the United States. So far as

« PreviousContinue »