BOOKS.

MATTHEW ARNOLD'S ESSAYS.*

MR. ARNOLD has few equals amongst the living writers of English prose ;—perhaps but one, whose style he has himself taken occasion to appreciate with his usual delicate insight, and no doubt without any suspicioa that in pronouncing his eulogy upon it he was in reality also pronouncing the eulogy of his own,—we mean Dr. Newman. Yet the likeness is too striking to be overlooked by any who feel keenly the impression which the form, apart from the substance, of thought makes upon the mind of a reader. It may be thought that the resemblance is only such as deep draughts of the culture of Oxford received into sensitive and poetical natures would be sure to produce. But there is more resemblance than this would explain. The light and flexible precision of thought, the luminous line which every sentence seems to present without any use of high colour, the dislike of eccentricity and, as Mr. Arnold well terms it in relation to Dr. Newman, the " urbanity " leas minimeque per tinaz of their most trenchant judgments, the happy power of striking a clear key-note for every separate may or lecture in which there is neither obscurity nor exag- geration, the easy play of the preparing intelligence, the severe edge of imperturbable dogma beneath, all mark a closer ap- proach in the manner of presenting thought to the public than any community of culture could account for. True, there is in Mr. Arnold a slight tinge of consciousness, a faint in- tellectual elation which is entirely absent from Dr. Newman, and this for the very good reason that Mr. Arnold's dogmatic intellec- tualism is self-evolved, while Dr. Newman's dogmatic theology is taken up in the humility of self-abnegation. The leader of the in- tellectual ranks against the Philistinism of our century, must feel, and does feel, a deeper self-reliance than the leader who goes back to the Past almost expressly to avoid the semblance of setting up for himszlf, and whose deepest current of thought is disgust with nineteenth-century enlightenment and religious progress.' There is a deeper and wider nature—a more liberal nature—in spite of his reactionary creed, at the source of Dr. Newman's powers of ex- pression than of Mr. Arnold's equally beautiful, equally delicate, but much thinner genius ; but the resemblance is not to be mis- taken for a moment. Take, for example, the following sentence, which, till we discloie its predecessor, would be instantly identified by any critic familiar with modern literature as belonging to some one of Dr. Newman's numerous comments on the victory of divine weakness over human strength. "Of this quality the world is impatient ; it chafes against it, rails at it, insults it, hates it ; it ends by receiving its influence and undergoing its law." What is this quality? When we come to understand the passage, we see at once what is the difference in root between Dr. Newman's mind and Mr. Arnold's, and why there is so much of resemblance between their styles with such a world of thought between their principles. The passage from which we took the sentence. is one of Mr. Arnold's key-note passages, describing the characteristic powers of the new double star which has been recently discovered in the sky of French literature, Maurice and Eugenie de Guerin :— "She was very different from her brother; but she too, like him, had that in her which preserves a reputation. Her soul has the same characteristic quality as his talent,—distinction. Of this quality the world is impatient ; it chafes against it, rails at it, insults it, hates it; it ends by receiving its influence, and by undergoing its law. This quality at last inexorably corrects the world's blunders, and fixes the world's ideals. It procures that the popular poet shall not finally pass for a Pindar, nor the popular historian for a Tacitus, nor the popular preacher for a Bossuet. To the circle of spirits marked by this rare quality, Maurice and Eugenie de Guerin belong ; they will take their place in the sky which these inhabit, and shine close to one another, lucida sidera."

The last two words have more than critical felicity, they are the happy application of a poet to express the essence of such minds as

Essays in Criticism. By Matthew Arnold, Professor of Poetry in the University of Oxford. Loudon: Macmillan.

those of Maurice and Eugenie de Guerin. " Lucitla sidera" describe them as nothing else would, and reiterate, too, without repeating Mr. Arnold's key-note--the idea of distinction.' But that he should apply such language as this to purely intellectual 'distinction,' is, to use another of Dr. Newman's expressions, the characteristic note of his thought,—which aims consistently and permanently at establishing what we may call a school of intellectual conscience,— at answering the question "what ought we to prefer in intellectual things ?"—and not only at answering this question, but almost at trying to show that the intellectual discriminations of high culture are more certain, more capable of demonstration, more worthy of dogmatic elaboration, than even the moral discriminations. Thus in one of his essays, where he is contrasting the French width with the English limitation of mind, he says:—

" 1789 asked of a thing, Is it rational ? 1642 asked of a thing, Is it legal? or, when it went furthest, Is it according to conscience? This is the English fashion ; a fashion to be treated, within its own sphere, with the highest respect ; for its success, within its own sphere, has been prodigious. But what is law in one place, is not law in another ; what is law here to-day, is not law even here to-morrow ; and as for conscience, what is binding on one man's conscience is not binding on another's ; the old woman who threw her stool at the head of the surpliced minister in St. Giles's Church at Edinburgh obeyed an impulse to which millions of the human race may be permitted to remain strangers. But the prescriptions of reason are absolute, unchang- ing, of universal validity."

If we were discussing Mr. Arnold's doctrine we might point out the unfairness of contrasting the dictate of an uncultivated conscience with the dictate of a cultivated reason, —but we are not. discussing it, only trying to show the root of Mr. Arnold's dog- matism, and the point at which that finest expression of literary character, his prose style, diverges from the prose style of Dr. New- man. But there is another resemblance not quite so close as that of the luminous, urbane, delicately expressed dogmatism, but still remarkable, in the style of Mr. Arnold's and Dr. Newman's irony, both of which tend to run into caricature. Mr. Arnold, laughing at spick and span "religions of the future," says, not without real humour,—

" These works often have much ability ; they often spring out of sincere convictions, and a sincere wish to do good ; and they sometimes, perhaps, do good. Their fault is (if I may be permitted to say so) one which they have in common with the British College of Health, in the New Road. Every one knows the British College of Health ; it is that building with the lion and the statue of the Goddess Hygeia before it ; at least, I am sure about the lion, though I am not absolutely certain about the Goddess Hygeia. This building does credit, perhaps, to the resources of Dr. Morrison and his disciples ; but it falls a good deal short. of one's idea of what a British College of Health ought to be. Di_ England, where we hate public interference and love individual enter- prise, we have a whole crop of places like the British College of Health; the grand name without the grand thing. Unluckily, creditable to individual enterprise as they are, they tend to impair our taste by making us forget what more grandiose, noble, or beautiful character properly belongs to a public institution. The same may be said of the religions of the future of Miss Cobbe and others."

Which reminds one strongly of many of the ironical passages in Dr. Newman's lectures to Anglicans ;—take this, for example, almost at random :— " The idea, then, of the so-called Anglo-Catholic divines was simply and absolutely submission to an external authority; to it they appealed, to it they betook themselves ; there they found a haven of rest; thence they looked out upon the troubled surge of human opinion, and upon the crazy vessels which were labouring, without chart or compass, upon it. Judge, then, of their dismay when, according to the Arabian tale, on their striking their anchors into the supposed soil, lighting their fires on it, and fixing in it the poles of their tents, suddenly their island began to move, to heave, to splash, to frisk to and fro, to dive, and at last to swim away, spouting out inhospitable jets of water upon the credulous mariners who had made it their home."

And from both writers we could produce passages in which the reins, always kept upon their thought, are abandoned to their sense of the ludicrous, and the usual dignity of their style is lost in the extravagance of their caricature. Of such passages there are two or three not without some fun in the amusing preface to this little volume, as, for example, the following ironical criticism on the Philistines of the press :—

"Yes, the world will soon be the Philistines'; • and then, with every voice not of thunder silenced, and the whole earth filled and ennobled every morning by the magnificent roaring of the young lions of the Daily Telegraph, we shall all yawn in one another's faces with the dis- mallest, the most unimpeachable gravity. No more vivacity then! my hexameters, and dogmatism and scoffs at the Divorce Court, will all have been put down ; I shall be quite crest-fallen. But does Mr. Wright imagine that there will be any more place, in that world, for his heroic blank-verse Homer than for my paradoxes ? If he does, he deceives himself, and knows little of the Palatine Library of the future:- A plain edifice, like the British College of Health enlarged : inside, a light, bleak room, with a few statnes • Dagen in the centre, with our English Caabah, or Palladium of enlightenment, the hare's stomach ; around, a few leading friends of humanity or fathers of British philo- sophy ;—Goliath, tho great Bentham, Presbyter Anglicanus our intellectual deliverer Mr. James Clay, and. . . yes ! with the embarrassed air of a late convert, the editor of the Saturday Review. Many a shrewd nip has he in old days given to the Philistines, this editor; many a bad half-hour has he made them pass ; but in his old age he has mended his courses, and declares that his heart has always been in the right place, and that he is at bottom, however appearances may have been against him, staunch for Goliath and 'the most logical nation in the whole world.' Then, for the book-shelves. There will be found on them a monograph by Mr. Lowe on the literature of the ancient Scythians, to revenge them for the iniquitous neglect with which the Greeks treated them ; there will be Demosthenes, because he was like Mr. Spurgeon : but, else, from all the lumber of antiquity they will be free. Everything they contain will be modern, intelligible, improving ; Joyce's Scientific Dialogues, Old Humphrey, Bentham's Deontolate2itelse Dorrit, Mangnall's Questions, The Wide Wale World', lffonger's Beecher's Sermons ;—a library, in short, the fruit of a happy marriage between the profound philosophic reflection of Mr. Clay, and the healthy natural taste of Inspector Tanner."

Is there not, as Mr. Arnold says of a great contemporary writer, just a grain of fatuity—" of that failure in good sense which comes

from too warm a self-satisfaction,"—in this? It reminds us of

some of the passages in Dr. Newman's lectures on Catholicism, where the great theologian's contempt for the prejudices of the limited Protestant Philistine, bursts the bounds of irony and passes into broad farce. This tendency to lose hold of the reins where they are delineating not what they think worthy of answer, but what they think worthy only of scorn, is an incident of the dogmatic temper when it attempts to dramatize imbecility. As Mr. Arnold's dogmatism is based less on deep conviction and more upon taste and insight than Dr. Newman's, the resulting style has in it more flavour of personality, more that is arbitrary and despotic, more that seems to rest on the mood, less that rests upon the unalterable conviction of the writer. Hence it chafes its victims more with a false semblance of superciliousness, though it is not more caustic in itself.

The point where Mr. Arnold's prose style branches off from Dr. Newman's is the point where a purely intellectual imagination

branches off from a moral and spiritual imagination. Mr. Arnold quotes from Goethe that to act is so easy, while it is so hard to think truly, and the whole colour of his style transmits, if we may so speak, the impulse or effort to think apart from the disturbing influence of action. This thins the whole imaginative sphere of his mind, and even his poetry is written in the intellectual plane, and strives to crystallize its thought wholly in that plane, without permitting the perturbations of practical life to influence it there. This is manifest everywhere on the very surface of Mr. Arnold's writings, both in prose and verse, and we take it to exercise, on the whole, whether it be due to original genius or to deliberate purpose, a clarifying, but not an enlarging influence on his criticism. What he does see is exquisitely distinctly defined, but he excludes so much of which he cannot clearly define the influence, that many of his criticisms are thin. Dr. Newman's secret axiom that those thoughts must be true which are necessary for the highest actions, is the root no doubt of much that is strained in his dogma, but is also the incitement to a far broader imaginative school of thought. He tries to enter into the whole nature of man first, and to deduce thence the highest intellectual dogma that is adequate to guide him. Mr. Arnold

stands apart observing serenely on the intellectual plane all that goes on outside it, and exaggerating rather than attempting to bridge over the chasm between life and thought. Hence his imagi- native criticism, always clear, almost always true, very generally striking, gives us too often the sense of something thin and super- ficial. His essay on Heine, for instance, almost limits itself to the relation between Heine and Philistinism,—an important element no doubt in the life of the man, but by no means the key-note of the poet's greatness. Hence, too, Mr. Arnold's curious preference of the more perfect but shallow and slightly weak relaxed beauty of Maurice de Guerin to the deeper weight of poetic profundity and humour in his sister. Hence, again, his strong preference for the poetry of Keats, with its soft, wax-like impressibility to external nature, to the far more various and far stronger flight of Shelley's idealism. Mr. Arnold dil ttes on two kinds of poetry which he calls the poetry of 'natural magic' and the poetry of 'moral pro- fundity,' and says, with what seems to us a strangely narrow judgment :--

"In Shelley there is not a balance of the two gifts, nor even a co- existence of them, but there is a passionate straining after them both, and this is what makes Shelley as a man so interesting. I will not now inquire how mut% Shelley achieves as a poet, but whatever he achieves, he in general fails to achieve natural magic in his expression ; in Mr. Palgrave's charming Treasury may be seen a gallery of his failures. Compare, for example, his Lines written on the Euganean Hills' with Keats's Ode to Autumn.' The latter piece renders nature, the former tries to render her. I will not deny, howev3r' that Shelley has natural magic in his rhythm ; walt I deny is thit he has it in his language. It always

seems to me that the right sphere for Shelley's genius was the sphere of music, not of poetry ; the medium of sounds he can master, but to master the more difficult medium of words he has neither intellectual force enough nor sanity enough."

Here Mr. Arnold seems to us to have carefully prepared a general definition of poetical excellence expressly in order to exclude a particular poet to whom his own somewhat special intellectual tastes does not incline him to do justice. We should not claim for Shelley to excel either in 'natural magic' or in moral profundity,' but we should claim for him to have given the most perfect poeti- cal expression to the yearnings of unsatisfied desire, to the sense of the "vide et niant" underlying all absorbing emotions, which has ever been given by an English poet. It seems to us simply false criticism to say that the lines on the Eng,anean hills "try to render nature" at all. The whole drift of the poem is missed in such an interpretation of it. Shelley endeavoured in that poem to give an expression to the transient relief which beauty of scenery and beauty of association will sometimes give to minds pierced, like his own, by an agony of thirst for beauty and truth.

"Many a green isle needs must be In the deep wide sea of misery,"

are his first words, and that key-note is struck again and again throughout the poem. If by natural magic' Mr. Arnold means magical power in delineating external nature, we think he is right in refusing to attribute it to Shelley. But if he means magic of expression for whatever essence of want, or yearning, or pain he sought to express, we doubt if any one ever possessed it in equal force. What does Mr. Arnold say of the lines concerning Venice in this very poem,—concerning Venice as Shelley then imagined her, desolate and a prey to the encroaching sea ?— " A less drear ruin then than now, With thy conquest-branded brow, Stooping to the slave of slaves From thy throne amongst the waves, Wilt thou be when the sea mew Flies, as once before he flew, O'er thine isles depopulate ; And all is in its ancient state Save where many a palace gate, With green sea flowers overgrown, Like a rock of Ocean's own Topples o'er the abandoned sea As the tides change sulleniy."

Those last few lines do not show,—perhaps nothing that Shelley ever wrote did show,—what Mr. Arnold means by sanity,— the command of a clear intellect over its own thoughts. But the agony of desire and the rapture of emotion do not specially require 'sanity' for their most perfect expression, and Mr. Arnold's intel- lectual criticism ignores a large part of the most perfect lyrical poetry when it excludes such poetry as this from a rank far higher than that of Keats, though not so high as that of Words- worth. The clear, int2llectual medium by which, in Mr. Arnold's estimate, all poets should work, is in truth the medium of a few. We can feel what it is that Mr. Arnold is repelled by in Shelley. Everywhere he loves measure in literature. He cannot bear that rampancy of insatiable, unmeasured longing with which the in- tellect stands on no terms. He worships Goethe for that steady and constant recognition of limitation which was the intellectual rather than the poetical side of his mind. He has no pity for that true English narrowness of view' (die add Britische Be- schrtinktheit) which arises from some arriere pensee of practical prejudice ; but he is a little inclined to a ' true French narrowness of view of his own, —the limitation which arises from no pre- judice, but from a deficiency in sympathies lying beyond the intellectual sphere. His favourites in literature are men whose intellects or perceptive powers are fuly commensurable with their genius,—whose "unction," where they have it, is shed upon us through clear, bright understandings. What Goethe called the dmmonic ' in himself,—which was even deeper in Heine than in Goethe,—he prefers to ignore,—yet it is often (as in Shelley) the essence of poetry.

Still these essays are full of brilliant and keen truth, like this, for instance, from the essay on Joubert in relation to the power poetry may have of exciting tears :—" True tears are those which are called forth by the beauty of poetry ; they must have as much admiration in them as sorrow." Of such exquisite criticisms as this there are not few in Mr. Arnold's essays. They are the ex- pressions of a fine, if of a somewhat too fastidiously intellectual criticism. They are essays that will live.