A doubtful head for heights
William Scammell
A GIFT IMPRISONED by Ian Hamilton Bloomsbury, £17.99, pp. 242 AM/ Who was the 'much-pondered Marguerite', subject of Arnold's early love poems? How did Matt cope with that mother and father of all headmasters, Dr Arnold of Rugby? What was his attitude to his own gifts? 'Why did he abandon the poetic life and settle for three decades of drudgery as an inspector of elementary schools?' Did he have 'insufficient faith in his own talent', or was it 'the fear of being ... second-rate?'
Thus Ian Hamilton, famous for having only ever published one book of poems (lyric and elegiac, like Arnold's), famous too as a critic who likes to be fierce but fair, cutting through the age's self- deceptions and suggesting how it might pull its poetic socks up. Arnold took to schools inspection, Hamilton to journalism and biography, inspecting the entrails of other writers. It's safe to assume that there is some degree of identification or transfer- ence going on here between author and subject.
I'm not so sure about that 'drudgery' indicted above, and its implications for the poets. Hopkins drudged as a priest in Liverpool and elsewhere; Keats had no option but to bloody his hands as a cut- price sawbones; Eliot undertook po-faced drudgery in Lloyds bank; Frost tried to be a farmer, so did Bums; Clare was a com- mon labourer; Owen and Rosenberg shoul- dered arms. It didn't seem to stop them getting what had to be done done. Modern poets do their bit in journalism, or universi- ties, or odd-jobbing. Provided it's not back- breaking, work and 'creativity' are not antithetical; quite the contrary. And the evidence about how hard Arnold worked doesn't always point to an exhausting work- load. According to Nicholas Murray's recent biography he lived mostly like a gent, loved his London club, enjoyed his lecture tours at home and abroad, made a great deal of money out of his polemical prose, and usually found time to read and write whatever he wanted to — though it's true that the inspecting and travelling sometimes found him putting in 12-hour days; true, too, that this describes the more settled and prosperous middle age of his career. Later on he compared himself whimsically with Emma's Mr Woodhouse, which doesn't suggest that he ever thought of himself as a workhorse.
Hamilton runs through the early life with his usual, slightly sardonic panache, brings Dr Arnold vividly to life (We some- times feared that the Lake District should really be classed as a temptation'), and exercises his nous on Arnold's poems and attitudes to life. How deep was the young man's dandyism? Should he take up or escape from his father's burdensome legacy of doing good? Hamilton suggests that all his early poems are reflexive and self- questioning. 'What kind of poet should I be? Do real poets ask themselves such questions .. . What — these days — is poetry for?' Hence the strenuous classicising, the longing for epic and true seriousness. Yet the poems themselves suggest that his gift was for lyric, and for what Coleridge called the 'conversation poem', of which 'Dover Beach' might be said to be a fine example. Like Murray before him, Hamilton says almost nothing about this remarkable fusion of Arnold's gifts, beyond remarking that it is a masterpiece; nor does he make any comparisons between Arnold's verse and his friend Clough's, who exemplifies many of the same strains that Arnold was under, and whose poetry is a fascinating and neglected — solution to their mutual aesthetic and moral problems. Arnold stuck to iambics and the great tradition, as he conceived it; Clough went off into outlandish hexameters and married them to a breezy, subversive collo- quialism which sneaked up on Victorian values from behind and left them speech- less.
It was, famously, an age of anxiety, with its own particular descant on woe. Arnold oscillated between a whimsical valetudinar- ianism CI am past 30 and three parts iced over'), dandyism, and what you might call the Cyril Connolly syndrome: It is a sad thing to see a man who has been frittered away piecemeal by petty distrac- tions, and who has never done his best. But it is still sadder to see a man who has done his best, who has reached his utmost limits and finds his work a failure, and himself far less than he had imagined himself.
This is from a prose fragment on Lucretius, but it has personal resonance too.
For Arnold, in 1856-7 [adds Hamilton], this was not a line of thinking that he dared pursue. It was, he feared, no longer safe for him to dwell for long on 'pangs which place the mind in hell': pangs, finally, of second-rateness, or the fear of second-rate- ness.
In his final period he came to think that the 'aesthetic mood' and the 'religious mood' were not opposed to each other at all: they belonged 'eternally ... to the deep- est being of man, the ground of all joy and greatness for him'.
Few people write better about poetry than Hamilton, without pomposity or jar- gon, animated by a practitioner's eye for what does and doesn't cut it. Yet this is a mixed performance, one which begins well but ravels out into dutifulness, sounding as though it would rather have been a sub- stantial essay than a book. Hamilton is pretty well silent about the pervasive influ- ence of Wordsworth, and the lesser influ- ence of Keats and of Milton, though good on the Dorothy-like closeness of his elder sister Jane. What poetry is for is poetry. What criticism is for is to show us things we hadn't seen or properly understood before. In cleaving largely to biography, and by extension a sort of symbolic autobiography, Hamilton has only half answered the ques- tions he buttonholes us with so engagingly in his preface.
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