Chapter XXXIV: Poets After Wordsworth (2)

the last line has a certain dissonance. His critical essays are of many various degrees of value. In his essay on "Swinburne's Tragedies" (1866, "Chastelard" and "Atalanta") he never seems to perceive the extraordinary and unprecedented merit of the lyrical measures, which are something better than "graceful, flowing, and generally simple in sentiment and phrase". In quite a different field the long essay on "Witchcraft" is rather antiquated, because we now know so much more about the psychology of the subject than was known when the essay was written. After philosophizing with Mr. E. B. Tylor on the origin of the belief in spirits, the critic honestly exclaims: "I am puzzled, I confess, to explain the appearance of the _first_ ghost, especially among men who thought death to be the end-all here below". That _is_ the puzzle, and Lucretius, who is quoted, could not solve it, nor had Mr. Lowell heard of "deferred telepathic impressions". This kind of topic allowed the author to bring in countless illustrations from his wide knowledge of all literatures, especially from the early mediaeval French, of which he was a votary before "Aucassin et Nicolete" and the heroic epics and sweet earliest lyrics were appreciated out of France. The essay on Rousseau contains the usual apologies which critics of English blood make for a man of genius whom at heart they do not like, while the criticism of Pope is true and just, but not specially original; and the paper on Milton (a review of a recent biography and edition) would be better if purged of comments on Professor Masson. The comments on Wordsworth are extremely amusing to non-Wordsworthians, for the Wordsworthian draws a decent veil over the poet's incredible treatment of "Helen of Kirkconnel".

And Bruce (as soon as he had slain
The Gordon), sailed away to Spain,
And fought with rage incessant,
Against the Moorish crescent,

using, no doubt, the javelin with which he had pinked Lochinvar. "In 'The Excursion' we are driven to the subterfuge of a French verdict of extenuating circumstances." It is not that Mr. Lowell judged Wordsworth by his feet of clay, but having once observed the absurdities of the bard of Rydal he did not know where to stop in treating a theme so diverting. To Dunbar he was absolutely ruthless: "whoso is national enough to like thistles may browse there to his heart's content". "I would rather have written that half stanza of Longfellow's in 'The Wreck of the Hesperus,' of 'the billow that swept her crew like icicles from her deck' than all Gawain Douglas's tedious enumeration of meteorological phenomena put together." Mr. Lowell was not a Scot, and was an attached friend of Professor Longfellow, whose half stanza is not of ravishing merit. This raid across the Border is made in an essay on Spenser, wherein Nash is said "to have far better claims than Swift to be called the English Rabelais". This is extremely severe on Rabelais! The undying youth of Mr. Lowell as of Matthew Arnold, may bear the blame of such freaks as theirs in criticism. Shelley's letters are not really of more merit than his lyrics, nor, if we are to call any one an English Rabelais, is Nash more worthy of the compliment than the author of "Gulliver"!

Matthew Arnold.

Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) was the son of the Rev. Thomas Arnold, the famous Head Master of Rugby, and author of a History of Rome. At Rugby and Balliol he gained the prize-poems; he was a Fellow of Oriel, where he did not reside long, marrying and becoming an Inspector of Schools in 1851. Melancholy as much of his poetry seems, he was known to his friends as "Glorious Mat," and, in his own words, he and his brother Thomas lived in Balliol as in a large country house. He was a great walker in Wordsworth's country and a keen trout-fisher. His first verses, signed A, "The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems," appeared in a slim volume in 1849; they have nothing of the amateur, and possess a note of their own, though the influence of Wordsworth is discernible. "He is the man for me," Arnold might have said, as Boileau did of Molière. Arnold did not think Tennyson _un esprit puissant_; indeed Wordsworth was the last of our poets whom he greatly admired, though he placed Byron (for other than Wordsworth's qualities) on the same eminence; and preferred Shelley's letters to his lyrics. Such were what most amateurs think the freaks of Arnold as a critic.

Of the play, or masque, or whatever it should be called, "Empedocles on Etna," his taste later rejected all but a few glorious passages; but again he relented, and admitted "Empedocles" within the canon of his works. He put forth a new volume of verse in 1855; "Merope," an imitation of the Greek tragedy, not of much merit, in 1858, and "New Poems" in 1867. The prefaces to "Empedocles" and "Merope" are good examples of his more sober style of criticism. Like his own Apollo he is "young but intolerably severe," and, like Milton, he freely used, as in "The Strayed Reveller," verse in short unrhymed measures. Though these are distasteful to some critics, others, in Arnold's and Milton's employment of them, find grace and harmony so delightful that they do not regret the absence of rhyme. Arnold's rhymed verse is in simple old-fashioned forms, in lyrics and in the beautiful stanzas of two of his most beautiful poems, where majesty and sweetness meet, "The Scholar Gipsy," and "Thyrsis," an elegy on A. H. Clough, the friend of his Oxford days.

Never has the scenery around Oxford been so nobly celebrated; he makes classical "the stripling Thames," "Bablock Hythe," "the warm green-muffled Cumnor hills," "the Fyfield tree," all the landscape through which Shelley wandered and left unsung. Thus Arnold has for Oxford men the same charm as Scott for Borderers; he is their own poet; and the pieces called "Switzerland" seem to recall a long vacation in the Alps. They are full of beauty in the descriptions of Nature and of Marguerite, a daughter of France, who seems to have inherited the charm of Manon Lescaut in the famous novel of the Abbé Prévost. For the rest, Arnold did not pen, or did not publish, sonnets to his mistress's eyebrow, and his lyrics reveal no more of his personality than his love of natural beauty, his delight in Nature, and a melancholy not unconnected with instability of religious belief; as in the flux and reflux of the sonorous lines in "Dover Beach," and "Yes, in the sea of life enisled". There are moments in youth (perhaps confined to Oxonians) when the grave charm of Arnold (as in the verses in the conclusion of "Sohrab and Rustum") seems the pearl highest of price in modern poetry. But in narrative, even in "Sohrab and Rustum" with its Homeric similes, still more in the narrative of "Tristram and Iseult," Arnold does not shine, and in "Merope" he certainly does not overstimulate. His "Forsaken Merman" is perhaps most admired by readers who are least delighted with the mass of his best poems, and least appreciative of "Requiescat," which is a worthy mate of the noblest "swallow flights of song" in the Greek Anthology, as hopeless and as beautiful as they. In his genius there was something Greek; there was nothing of frenzy and false excitement.

Arnold's criticism cannot always be termed "unaffected," and his manner and tone varied with the nature of the subject which he was discussing. It must be admitted that he "was not always wholly serious," and his banter, his "educated insolence" as Aristotle says, was apt rather to provoke than to convert people who differed from him, as to education, politics, social problems, or literature. But he had an unsurpassed skill in provoking discussion, and the public, which for long did not read him, became acquainted with his name, and his views through the newspapers. It is said that a meeting of persons connected with the Income Tax complained to him that his returns of his literary gains did not correspond with his immense literary reputation. He then, with his habitual urbanity, catechized his catechizers. Had any one of them ever bought or read a book of his? Not one could answer in the affirmative; "So there, you see," he remarked.

His "Lectures on Translating Homer," delivered at Oxford when he was Professor of Poetry (1857-1867) are not only admirable expositions of Homeric art, and "the grand style," but rich in his peculiar vein of lofty irony and academic "chaff"--of a translator who did the "Iliad" into the metre of "Yankee Doodle". He advocated the use of English hexameters--which, indeed, would be excellent, if any one could write readable hexameters. His "Essays in Criticism" (1865) pleaded vainly for an Academy on the French model, for "ideas," and for culture, a term caught at and misapplied by feebler folk. His remarks on two unessential French writers illustrated his inability to appreciate the poetry as compared with the prose of France. He conceived, however, "of the whole group of civilized nations as being, for intellectual purposes, one great confederation... whose members have a due knowledge both of the past, out of which they all proceed, and of one another". He had the knowledge, though appreciation did not always accompany it, while the French, he complained, were almost wholly ignorant of his favourite Wordsworth. Yet, much as he rejoiced in Wordsworth's "criticism of life" (a favourite phrase), he admitted that, save in 1798-1808, the poet was devoid of inspiration, though "a great and powerful body of work remains," when the dross is cleared away. Generally, Arnold had a trick of taking a single line or two, perhaps of the worst, from a poet, using this inferior brick as a sample of the building, and contrasting it with specimens superlatively excellent from poets whom he wanted to extol. Thus he contrasted Théophile Gautier with Wordsworth, taking Théo as an inn on the road, and Wordsworth as a home eternal in the heavens. But surely we may tarry at an inn on our way and enjoy ourselves, though perhaps only one human being has seriously exclaimed: "I place Théophile only after Shakespeare". In this case the trick of setting a verse from Gautier beside a verse from Wordsworth was not played. After the appreciation of Wordsworth it is curious to find Arnold speaking of Molière as "altogether a larger and more splendid luminary in the poetical heaven" than the Bard of Rydal, because the two authors are not in any way comparable with each other. The "high seriousness" in which Wordsworth is pre-eminent was indeed familiar to the comic author called "_le Contemplateur_," but the nature of his art did not permit him to hint at the existence of this quality, except in irony; while Lucretius, not, as in Wordsworth's case, Plato, was his favourite philosopher.

Arnold's eager curiosity led him into fields of which he had no first-hand knowledge, as in his delightful book on "The Study of Celtic Literature". We cannot assign all "natural magic" in poetry to the Celtic strain of blood in the population, and the peculiar wistfulness of old Gaelic and Welsh poetry may be found in Greek, Finnish, and even savage poetry. Though the book led others into much senseless writing, it is in itself full of revelations of beauty. Arnold was no Orientalist, and had no special knowledge of New Testament Greek, nor of the comparative study of religions. These defects, with surprising errors in taste, prevent his "St. Paul and Protestantism," "God and the Bible," and "Literature and Dogma" from reaching a high level in their way. But Arnold wrote beautiful prose, and wrote with that high sense of critical superiority which was his own, as it had been Dryden's. Both occasionally surprise, or even shock, by their idiosyncrasies, as do Dr. Johnson and Hazlitt; but they all delight and excite and instruct.

GENERAL WRITERS.

To the various and voluminous works of Mr. Ruskin, corresponding to every facet of his singular intellect and character, justice cannot possibly be done within our space. The son of a rich wine-merchant of Scottish extraction, he was born and bred among books and works of art, and, without attending any public school, entered Christ Church as a gentleman commoner. He won the Newdigate prize poem, and in 1843 published the first volume of his "Modern Painters". His primary object was to assert the supremacy of Turner, which involved him in a comparative study of art, modern, mediaeval and classical, and of the intellectual, literary, social, and moral conditions of the societies in which the art, in each case, arose. He had also to observe Nature accurately, from the contour of the Alps to the development of the forms of trees, and, indeed, of "the meanest flower that blows". He drew excellently, and many of the copious and beautiful illustrations are from his own pencil. His own opinions, which, as he confessed, varied greatly at different times, were constantly exhibited, and he wrote in a style as highly pitched and coloured as that of De Quincey. The effect of the whole, at least on young readers, was immensely exciting and inspiriting, whatever the topic might be on which he expressed himself. His was the prose of a man who was almost a poet, but his verses proved to the world, as they must have done to himself, that formal poetry was not his forte. In art his affections were with _les primitifs_, the artists, holy and humble men of heart, before the Revival of learning, before Raphael; and he was actually fierce over Claude and Salvator Rosa. "The Seven Lamps of Architecture" (1849) and "The Stones of Venice" (1852) continued the teaching of "Modern Painters". In his "Academy Notes" his attitude was thus described by a painter in "Punch".

I sits and paints,
Hears no complaints,
I sells before I'm dry;
Comes savage Ruskin,
Puts his tusk in--
And nobody will buy.

Ruskin was extolling and defending the work of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, including Rossetti--whom he knew well, and bought from gladly--Millais, Holman Hunt, and others less celebrated, with whom were joined William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. They went back to the art of the Middle Ages, often applying its minute study of detail to incidents in modern life. The value of Ruskin's theories of art is now, and has long been, disputed. Ruskin was not an "impressionist," and the libel action brought against him by Whistler, characteristically appealing to a British jury on a question of art, and receiving one farthing of damages, left the questions open to each impartial mind. Ruskin's socialistic theories, in "Unto This Last" have had infinitely more permanent and wide-reaching results than his æsthetics. But, be these right or wrong, his early works are of the highest and most varied interest, both in matter and expression. There never was a man more rich in pity, and more open-handed, whether it was his pictures and other objects of art, or his money that he lavishly bestowed. In the sixties and later he produced many small books with pretty symbolical titles, dealing with all things from personal confessions to social problems: he was Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford, where his lectures were crowded, and his "Fors Clavigera," an autobiography in numbers, came out in parts. It contains many examples of his style at its best, that is, at its simplest. One glorious passage gives a great Turneresque picture of a scene viewed from a certain bridge over Ettrick, whence, in fact, to mortal eyes no such prospect is visible! In "Fors" Ruskin wrote with great sympathy and affection about Sir Walter Scott.

In his later years and writings, the contradictions of his complicated character, and the effects of over-work, and too keen a vision of "the sad pageant of men's miseries," began to affect his work with eccentricity; and he sought retirement near Coniston Lake with his friends, Mr. and Mrs. Severn.

Of joy in widest commonalty spread,

of joy in art and Nature, he had made many thousands of people participators, for while others had written on art, none had done so with so much contagious enthusiasm, varied eloquence, and magnificent imagination. The rhythm of his style is almost as often invaded by blank verse, as in Dickens's case, and, according to R. L. Stevenson, an irruption of blank verse into prose is a symptom of great fatigue. In one short sentence of prose in Swinburne's essay on Lamb and Wither we read:--

Behind him and beneath we see....
The Hazlitts prattling at his heel,
The Dyces labouring in his wake.

Two other Oxford critics, Walter Horatio Pater (1839-1894) and John Addington Symonds (1840-1893) are so recently silent that they cannot here be critically estimated. Both were devoted to literature and art, classical, modern, and of the Renaissance. Both had their peculiar styles, that of Symonds very animated, but somewhat Corinthian; that of Pater remarkable for a kind of hieratic precision, and sedulous daintiness, and a vocabulary in which certain favourite terms occurred but too frequently. Symonds _sufflaminandus erat_; in his "History of the Renaissance in Italy" he is certainly unable to keep the stream of his learning and enthusiasm within its banks; while an impatient reader might demand a more rapid and less obviously self-conscious movement in the style of Pater. His first volume, "Studies in the History of the Renaissance" (1873), brought to young readers the same kind of pleasant surprise as "The Defence of Guenevere" or "Atalanta in Calydon". The essay on Coleridge, and the "little poem in prose" on the Monna Lisa of Leonardo, appeared to be new models of excellence. This book remains the most characteristic of the author, though he seems to have thought that his style verged perilously on that of poetry. He avoided this possible danger, without ceasing "still to be neat, still to be dressed," in his reflective novel of Roman life, "Marius the Epicurean" (1885), in which Marius is far from being an Epicurean in the vulgar sense of the word, but is rather the John Inglesant of the period. The book, like "Clarissa Harlowe," is not to be read so much for the story as for the delicate dreamy succession of the moods, and of the inclinations and half-beliefs of the hero, and for the pictures of the manners of the age. "Plato and Platonism" is a valuable study, and "Imaginary Portraits" shows more imagination in the designing of character than Marius. The reef which he and R. L. Stevenson did not always steer clear of was _préciosité_, over-anxious effort towards novelty and perfection of phrase.

[1] See "English Conspiracy and Dissent, 1660-1674," by Professor Wilbur C. Abbott, "American Historical Review," April, July, 1909.

[2] The Simpsons produced ministers in every generation from 1560 to 1730, when one of them fell into heresy.

[3] Vol. IV, p. 134, "To Whittier".

[4] Professor W. P. Trent.