The Letters of Matthew Arnold to Clough

By LORD DAVID CECIL .

The Letters of Matthew Arnold to Clough* is a title to arouse great expectations in the mind of an appropriate reader. But in fact he is likely to be disappointed. For one thing, like many other distinguished authors, Arnold was not a good letter writer. He was a ceremonious, discreet sort of man, acutely anxious not to any anything that was in bad taste ; and, as such, incapable of that power of unselfconscious self- expression which is the essential of a good letter writer of the intimate kind. He cannot lay bare his soul like Cowper, his that Hs which make a great letter writer of the gossipy kind like Horace Walpole. Besides the correspondence is slight ; in sixteen years he only wrote Clough fifty-seven letters, none of them

.elin;liese:tosisopriugrlirits:ttephloatpiflarussmentioLonat::intiBerrstn.in sNmaoirl has. he\h'CITIOlinge them in a

manner beyond praise, explaining every allusion and illus- trating any point that can be so illustrated, with parallel passages from other portions of Arnold's writing, yet the correspondence remains a thing of bits and pieces. AU the same, the bits and pieces have their significance to one who can place them in their proper setting. A professed student of Arnold will fmd all of them interesting and some enthralling.

Perhaps there are not many such students. But there ought to be ; especially now. For Arnold does represent the only strain in nineteenth-century thought which is at all closely akin to the thought of our own day. Not that he was uu-Victorian. On the contrary his public spirit, his industry, his muddle-headedness, his blend of classical culture and Protestant morality, the conscientious solemnity with which he approaches birth, marriage, death or any other of the official " big scenes " in the drama of life—all these mark him as unmistakably Victorian as his whiskers and his lefty shirt-collars. But these are characteristics of manner rather than matter. And in however Victorian a manner Arnold may express his views, those views, when baldly stated, are characteristic rather of to-day. That universal condition of intellectual and moral chaos which so obsesses Mr. Aldons Huxley, say, or Mr. T. S. Eliot, did not begin, as one may be inclined to imagine, after 7900. Scientific advance and the industrial revolution had already induced it by 1810. But the typical thinker of 1840 approached it in a different spirit from ours. Strengthened still by the tradition he had inherited from his forefathers and heartened by the material prosperity of his country, he was eminently positive. Whether he was a pessimist like Carlyle, or an optimist like Macaulay, or a reformer like Ruskin, he was always partisan, constructive, brimful of agitated advice. But Arnold, like Mr. Huxley and Mr. Eliot, was calm, baffled and melancholy; he saw all sides of the problem, but he did not see his way out of it. He hated the present with its lack of faith, of order, of purpose ; but he accepted the new views in a way that made it impossible for him to recommend a return to the past. The emotion inspiring " The Scholar Gipsy," or " Dover Beach," and the moral Arnold draws from that emotion, are far more despondent than anything we find in the other great poets of his period. He cannot bring himself to trust the larger hope like Tennyson, or the louder high spirits like Browning, or

• The Letters of Matthew Arnold to Clough. Edited by Prof. Lowry. (Oxford University Press. 7s. ed.) even to retire; unhesitating and contemptuous into the temple of art like Rossetti.

. . . . . . . . . and we, Light half-believers of our casual creeds. Who never deeply felt, nor clearly will' d, Whose insight never has borne fruit in'deeds, Whose- vague resolves never have been fulfil:I'd; For whom each year we see

Breeds new beginnings, disappointments now ; Who hesitate and falter life away,

And lose to.racnrow the ground won to-day."

• - •

. . . . . . .

and we others pine.

And wish the long unhappy dream would end,

And waive all claim to bliss."

Here, more coherently phrased and in a smoother metre, is the identical message of the Waste Land. Like Mr. Eliot, Arnold faces the facts of his age and laments them. And in conse- quence, though from a purely aesthetic point of view it is impossible to put him above Tennyson or the Rossettis, yet he appeals to us at times, with a peculiar intimacy, as they can never do. Strange as it may seem to the conscientious young revolutionaries ;.-sho are our rising poets and little as they may like it, their revolutions are only revolutions in style. The substance of their poems is just the old substance of " The Scholar Gipsy."

. But Arnold, and it is here that he shows himself of his period, could not resign himself wholly to lyrical lamentation. In his prose railings he puts forward a policy for remedying the present discontents. Ile was by education and tempera- ment a scholar ; and it is a scholar's policy. Let the world educate itself better, he said, let it achieve a clearer and closer aPprehension of the great classical tradition, let it strive to be less fanatical, philistine, provincial. Then it might arrive at a condition of mind, in which it would be capable of estimating what is truly valuable in old and new, in which it could estab- lish a standard round which to construct a new and coherent system of belief and value, in art, in thought, in religion. Further, he draws on his own learning and experience to suggest the lines which he thinks this new system should follow.

He bad a charming ironical style, and an unfailing sense of construction. So that his prose works are always delightful reading. But they cannot be said to achieve their object. Arnold's ideas are too tentative, for one thing. A generation plunged in intellectual despair is not likely to listen much to a man whose chief proposal is that they should be better educated. They crave for faith, not information. Besides, such positive ideas as Arnold does put forward are muddled. He could not believe in Christian Theology, for example, though he enjoyed its ritual and approved its ,morality. .So he proposed shelving the theology and keeping the ritual and morality ; unconscious apparently of the fact that without theology the first was meaningless and the second uncon- vincing. The truth was that this deeper self whith we find expressed in his poetry saw no hope for the future. He only took up a more positive attitude because the conscience of his' period told him he ought to ; his views arose from no genuine experience. And so they have no genuine force. It is as a poet that he willlive ; it is for the light they throw on h') as a poet that these letters are chiefly interesting. In them it is-fascinat- ing to catch at times echoes of that intimacy and sensitiveness and depth of feeling which give their peculiar individuality to his grave stanzas. ,