From a review of Matthew Arnold’s “Letters” in the National Review.
IT is scarcely too much to say that, in his very earliest verse, Matthew Arnold frowned rather than smiled—frowned as a teacher might frown who thinks he has discovered everything is going amiss in the school it is his mission to instruct. His first poem is a lament over “a thousand discords,” “man’s fitful uproar,” “our vain turmoil,” and “noisy schemes.” We turn the page to read that there are “bad days,” that “we ask and ask, while Shakespeare smiles and is free,” and that it has become “a monotonous, dead, unprofitable world.” That these utterances were perfectly sincere, and no mere metrical affectation, who can doubt that is acquainted with the general body of Matthew Arnold’s poetry? Here, for instance, are some notable but strictly representative passages, mostly written while he was still a young man:—
| “But we, brought forth and reared in hours | |
| Of change, alarm, surprise— | |
| What shelter to grow ripe is ours? | |
| What leisure to grow wise? | |
| “Like children bathing on the shore, | |
| Buried a wave beneath, | |
| The second wave succeeds before | |
| We have had time to breathe. | |
| “Too fast we live, too much are tried, | |
| Too harassed, to attain | |
| Wordsworth’s sweet calm, or Goethe’s wide | |
| And luminous view to gain.” | |
| “Ah? two desires toss about | |
| The poet’s feverish blood. | |
| One drives him to the world without, | |
| And one to solitude. | |
| “He who hath watched, not shared, the strife, | |
| Knows how the day hath gone. | |
| He only lives with the world’s life | |
| Who hath renounced his own!” | |
—The same. | |
| “Wandering between two worlds, one dead, | |
| The other powerless to be born, | |
| With nowhere yet to rest my head, | |
| Like these, on earth I wait forlorn: | |
| Their faith, my tears, the world deride, | |
| I come to shed them at your side. | |
| “There yet perhaps may dawn an age, | |
| More fortunate, alas! than we, | |
| Which without hardness will be sage, | |
| And gay without frivolity. | |
| Sons of the world, O haste those years; | |
| But, till they rise, allow our tears.” | |
| “Your creeds are dead, your rites are dead, | |
| Your social order too,” |
| “But now the old is out of date, | |
| The new is not yet born, | |
| And who can be alone elate, | |
| While the world lies forlorn?” |
Nor is it only in poems whose subject, it might perhaps be urged, not unnaturally leads to the expression of such sentiments, that we meet with this lament over the unfavorable conditions and character of the age. After several stanzas of tranquil idyllic beauty in the lovely poem, “The Scholar Gipsy,” he breaks forth once more into the old note of condemnation and regret:—
| “O born in days when wits were fresh and clear, | |
| And life ran gayly as the sparkling Thames, | |
| Before this strange disease of modern life, | |
| With its sick hurry, its divided aims, | |
| Its heads o’ertaxed, its palsied hearts, was rife. | |
| Fly hence, our contact fear!” |
This is only half a stanza, and there are ten whole ones—in fact almost half of the poem—in the same sad key. The memorial verses on Wordsworth reiterate a kindred conclusion; and, even in such a poem as “A Southern Night,” we are again admonished that
| “We see all sights from pole to pole, | |
| And glance, and nod, and bustle by, | |
| And never once possess one soul | |
| Before we die.” |
Surely it would not be difficult to show that, as a criticism of life, the foregoing verses are scarcely just, since there were quite as many “hours of change, surprise, alarm,” in the time of Shakespeare as in our own, and no more “shelter to grow ripe,” or “leisure to grow wise,” then than now. Tranquillity is attainable in any age by the truly wise; and can there ever have been a time when “the poet’s feverish blood” was not “tossed about by two desires”?
It was not, however, in order to comment on their drift that the foregoing passages have been cited, but, rather, to show, firstly, that the ethical element in them predominates conspicuously over the emotional element; and, secondly, that, when they were written, the author was too young, and as yet too imperfect a master of the instrument he was using, to strike so high a note quite successfully. There is something almost unnatural in a young writer’s ideal being tranquillity; nor is serenity the gift a kind fairy would hang on the cradle of one of its favorites. Rather is it the crown of mature days whose combats are over, and when the more personal passions have subsided. A cloudless April bodes no good to the husbandman; and a tranquil youth, were such possible, would be the worst conceivable apprenticeship for a poet. The infantum voces flentes in limine primo, the young bewildered voices wailing on the threshold of existence, represent what we conceive, and what we know, of the early utterances of poets who afterward attained ripeness and serenity. It is Goethe himself, whose serenity Matthew Arnold so much admired, but who had hardly attained, or was even in pursuit of it, when he wrote “The Sorrows of Werther” or “Götz von Berlichingen,” that observes: “No youth can be a teacher.” The business of the young poet is not to teach, but to learn: to learn in suffering, in suffering rightly and largely understood, what he may afterward teach in song.
This, I think, is the first thing that strikes one in reading, even with sincere sympathy and admiration, Matthew Arnold’s verse. What strikes one next is that this premature craving for tranquillity, this too precocious reasoning and moralizing tendency, hampered him, as yet necessarily a novice, in the use of his instrument. “Buried a wave beneath” is an awkward inversion, and “Goethe’s wide and luminous view to gain” is yet more open to criticism. In “Ah! two desires toss about,” a syllable seems to be lacking. In the couplet, “Sons of the world, O haste those years; But, till they rise, allow our tears”; neither the word “haste” nor the word “rise” seems to be quite the word that is wanted.
It would be invidious, and it is nowise necessary, to insist on this point; and, if allusion has been made to it, it was only in order to show that imperfect mastery over his instrument arose from the too early ripening of his powers, from the premature introduction into his verse of reflection and philosophy, and from his having, so to speak, essayed to soar a very considerable height before he had quite learned to fly. Whether this defect would have been in time repaired, had he so shaped his life that he could have responded at once to any visitings from the Muse that might happily befall him, who can say? But, as we have seen, and as everybody will perceive who reads the entire series of “Letters,” his life was shaped in an entirely different manner, and for a time he seemed to imagine that he could “take up” poetry, or “leave it alone,” just as it suited him. One of the impressions left on the mind by the “Letters” is, not only that he was continually dining out and continually paying visits, but that he was perpetually on the move. It will perhaps be said that as an inspector of schools he could hardly be stationary, and that is true. But had he jealously and, so to speak, savagely reserved for stationariness, or at least for solitude, all the time that remained over from the performance of his official duties, he would at least have given a better chance to that part of his nature which appertained distinctively to the poet. As it was, this part of him was gradually subordinated and finally sacrificed to prose controversy and to social amenities. And so it came to pass that at length he was urged to write more poetry by Mr. Mundella.
There is a highly suggestive sentence in one of the “Letters,” which runs thus: “Perfection in the region of the highest poetry demands a tearing of oneself to pieces, which men do not readily consent to, unless driven by their dæmon to do so.” There, surely, we have the explanation of which we are in search, in eight words. Though he has left works in verse that will not die, “Thyrsis,” “The Scholar Gipsy,” “Obermann Once More,” etc., still at no time of his life did Matthew Arnold “tear himself to pieces.” He preferred to cultivate tranquillity. He wrote some most beautiful poetry, but was not driven by his dæmon to do so, and at length ceased to write poetry altogether.
Little or nothing has been said here concerning Matthew Arnold, the writer of refined and exquisite prose, the acute literary critic, the forcible yet urbane controversialist, the zealous spiritual teacher, the untiring advocate of sweetness and light, the moralist whose utterances were all inspired by high seriousness. But, to point out what a man has done in one domain of mental energy, and to forget altogether what he did in other domains, is to do him great injustice. Yet is not this what nearly all of us do to those writers who have worked for us with a generous versatility? We lay stress on that portion of his work in which we ourselves, in our narrowness, and with our limitations, alone are interested, and pass over the rest. We insist on his poetry and ignore his prose, or we extol the prose and forget the poetry; or, perhaps, we remember his idyls because we happen to like these best since they are just suited to our capacity and comprehension, and treat as nonexistent, or as of no importance, longer and nobler poems, because these are caviare to us. Let us not do that injustice to Matthew Arnold. If his poems had been his sole contribution to the good of his fellow-creatures, he would still have deserved to be kept in eternal remembrance by them. Had he written no verse, but only the literary, the religious, and the spiritual criticism he has left behind him, he would still have merited immunity from oblivion. But he wrote both verse and prose, beautiful verse, delightful prose, and did so much beside, as a servant of the State, as a friend of education, as a champion of whatever he thought for the benefit of the human race. It would scarcely be an exaggeration to say of him:—
| “… omne immensum peragravit mente animoque.” |
But higher praise still has surely to be bestowed on Matthew Arnold. He was a man of rare gifts. But he was likewise a model son, a model husband, a model citizen. Genius, though not an every-day phenomenon, is, I suppose, as frequent in these days as in others; and, perhaps, there never was before so much cleverness as is now to be observed in almost every walk of life. But character—character that shows itself in filial piety, in conjugal tenderness, in good and conscientious citizenship—is perhaps not too conspicuous, especially in persons exceptionally endowed. One looks in vain for a serious blemish in Matthew Arnold’s character. It has been said, surely with truth:—
| “Not all the noblest songs are worth | |
| One noble deed.” |
But, in his case, there is no antithesis between teaching and example. He wrote beautiful songs; and his life, as these “Letters” show, was one long noble deed.
