G. W. E. Russell - Matthew Arnold

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[Transcriber's note: The inconsistent use of quotation marks in the
original was retained in this etext.]

[Illustration: Matthew Arnold

_From a Photograph by Sarony_]

Literary Lives

MATTHEW ARNOLD

BY

G.W.E. RUSSELL

_ILLUSTRATED_

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1904

COPYRIGHT, 1904, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
Published, March, 1904

TROW DIRECTORY
PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY
NEW YORK

LITERARY LIVES

Edited by Robertson Nicoll, LL.D.

MATTHEW ARNOLD. By G.W.E. Russell.
CARDINAL NEWMAN. By William Barry, D.D.
MRS. GASKELL. By Flora Masson.
JOHN BUNYAN. By W. Hale White.
CHARLOTTE BRONTE. By Clement K. Shorter.
R.M. HUTTON. By W. Robertson Nicoll.
GOETHE. By Edward Dowden.
HAZLITT. By Louise Imogen Guiney.

Each Volume, Illustrated, $1.00, net

OFFERED TO

MATTHEW ARNOLD'S CHILDREN

WITH AFFECTIONATE REMEMBRANCE

"OF THAT UNRETURNING DAY"

"We see him wise, just, self-governed, tender, thankful, blameless,
yet with all this agitated, stretching out his arms for something
beyond--_tendentemque manus ripae ulterioris amore_."--_Essays in
Criticism_.

PREFACE

It may be thought that some apology is needed for the production of yet
another book about Matthew Arnold. If so, that apology is to be found in
the fact that nothing has yet been written which covers exactly the
ground assigned to me in the present volume.

It was Arnold's express wish that he should not be made the subject of a
Biography. This rendered it impossible to produce the sort of book by
which an eminent man is usually commemorated--at once a history of his
life, an estimate of his work, and an analysis of his character and
opinions. But though a Biography was forbidden, Arnold's family felt
sure that he would not have objected to the publication of a selection
from his correspondence; and it became my happy task to collect, and in
some sense to edit, the two volumes of his Letters which were published
in 1895. Yet in reality my functions were little more than those of the
collector and the annotator. Most of the Letters had been severely
edited before they came into my hands, and the process was repeated when
they were in proof.

A comparison of the letters addressed to Mr. John Morley and Mr. Wyndham
Slade with those addressed to the older members of the Arnold family
will suggest to a careful reader the nature and extent of the excisions
to which the bulk of the correspondence was subjected. The result was a
curious obscuration of some of Arnold's most characteristic
traits--such, for example, as his over-flowing gaiety, and his love of
what our fathers called Raillery. And, in even more important respects
than these, an erroneous impression was created by the suppression of
what was thought too personal for publication. Thus I remember to have
read, in some one's criticism of the Letters, that Mr. Arnold appeared
to have loved his parents, brothers, sisters, and children, but not to
have cared so much for his wife. To any one who knew the beauty of that
life-long honeymoon, the criticism is almost too absurd to write down.
And yet it not unfairly represents the impression created by a too
liberal use of the effacing pencil.

But still, the Letters, with all their editorial shortcomings (of which
I willingly take my full share) constitute the nearest approach to a
narrative of Arnold's life which can, consistently with his wishes, be
given to the world; and the ground so covered will not be retraversed
here. All that literary criticism can do for the honour of his prose and
verse has been done already: conscientiously by Mr. Saintsbury,
affectionately and sympathetically by Mr. Herbert Paul, and with varying
competence and skill by a host of minor critics. But in preparing this
book I have been careful not to re-read what more accomplished pens than
mine have written; for I wished my judgment to be, as far as possible,
unbiassed by previous verdicts.

I do not aim at a criticism of the verbal medium through which a great
Master uttered his heart and mind; but rather at a survey of the effect
which he produced on the thought and action of his age.

To the late Professor Palgrave, to Monsieur Fontanes, and to Miss Rose
Kingsley my thanks have been already paid for the use of some of
Arnold's letters which are published now for the first time. It may be
well to state that whenever, in the ensuing pages, passages are put in
inverted commas, they are quoted from Arnold, unless some other
authorship is indicated. Here and there I have borrowed from previous
writings of my own, grounding myself on the principle so well enounced
by Mr. John Morley--"that a man may once say a thing as he would have it
said, [Greek: dis de ouk endechetai]--he cannot say it twice."

G.W.E.R.

CHRISTMAS, 1903.

CONTENTS

PAGE

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION 1

CHAPTER II

METHOD 17

CHAPTER III

EDUCATION 48

CHAPTER IV

SOCIETY 111

CHAPTER V

CONDUCT 172

CHAPTER VI

THEOLOGY 210

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Matthew Arnold, 1884 _Frontispiece_

FACING PAGE

Laleham Ferry 16

Thomas Arnold, D.D. 32

Laleham Church 48

Fox How, Ambleside 64

The House at Laleham, where Matthew Arnold first
went to School 80

Rugby School 96

Balliol College, Oxford 112

Fisher's Buildings, Balliol College 128

Oriel College, Oxford 144

Matthew Arnold, 1869 160

Pains Hill Cottage, Cobham, Surrey 176

The Union Rooms, Oxford 192

Matthew Arnold, 1880, from the Painting by
G.F. Watts, R.A. 208

Pains Hill Cottage, Cobham, from the Lawn 224

Matthew Arnold, 1884 240

Matthew Arnold's Grave at Laleham 256

MATTHEW ARNOLD

_Eldest son of Thomas Arnold, D.D., and Mary Penrose_

Born 1822

Entered Winchester College 1836

Transferred to Rugby School 1837

Scholar of Balliol 1840

Entered Balliol College 1841

Newdigate Prizeman 1843

B.A. 1844

Fellow of Oriel 1845

Private Secretary to Lord Lansdowne 1847

Inspector of Schools 1851

Married Frances Lucy Wightman 1851

Professor of Poetry at Oxford 1857

D.C.L. 1870

Resigned Inspectorship 1886

Died 1888

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

This book is intended to deal with substance rather than with form. But,
in estimating the work of a teacher who taught exclusively with the pen,
it would be perverse to disregard entirely the qualities of the writing
which so penetrated and coloured the intellectual life of the Victorian
age. Some cursory estimate of Arnold's powers in prose and verse must
therefore be attempted, before we pass on to consider the practical
effect which those powers enabled him to produce.

And here it behoves a loyal and grateful disciple to guard himself
sedulously against the peril of overstatement. For to the unerring
taste, the sane and sober judgment, of the Master, unrestrained and
inappropriate praise would have been peculiarly distressing.

This caution applies with special force to our estimate of his rank in
poetry. That he was a poet, the most exacting, the most paradoxical
criticism will hardly deny; but there is urgent need for moderation and
self-control when we come to consider his place among the poets. Are we
to call him a great poet? The answer must be carefully pondered.

In the first place, he did not write very much. The total body of his
poetry is small. He wrote in the rare leisure-hours of an exacting
profession, and he wrote only in the early part of his life. In later
years he seemed to feel that the "ancient fount of inspiration"[1] was
dry. He had delivered his message to his generation, and wisely avoided
last words. Then it seems indisputable that he wrote with difficulty.
His poetry has little ease, fluency, or spontaneous movement. In every
line it bears traces of the laborious file. He had the poet's heart and
mind, but they did not readily express themselves in the poetic medium.
He longed for poetic utterance, as his only adequate vent, and sought it
earnestly with tears. Often he achieved it, but not seldom he left the
impression of frustrated and disappointing effort, rather than of easy
mastery and sure attainment.

Again, if we bear in mind Milton's threefold canon, we must admit that
his poetry lacks three great elements of power. He is not Simple,
Sensuous, or Passionate. He is too essentially modern to be really
simple. He is the product of a high-strung civilization, and all its
complicated crosscurrents of thought and feeling stir and perplex his
verse. Simplicity of style indeed he constantly aims at, and, by the aid
of a fastidious culture, secures. But his simplicity is, to use the
distinction which he himself imported from France, rather akin to
_simplesse_ than to _simplicite_--to the elaborated and artificial
semblance than to the genuine quality. He is not sensuous except in so
far as the most refined and delicate appreciation of nature in all her
forms and phases can be said to constitute a sensuous enjoyment. And
then, again, he is pre-eminently not passionate. He is calm, balanced,
self-controlled, sane, austere. The very qualities which are his
characteristic glory make passion impossible.

Another hindrance to his title as a great poet, is that he is not, and
never could be, a poet of the multitude. His verse lacks all popular
fibre. It is the delight of scholars, of philosophers, of men who live
by silent introspection or quiet communing with nature. But it is
altogether remote from the stir and stress of popular life and struggle.
Then, again, his tone is profoundly, though not morbidly, melancholy,
and this is fatal to popularity. As he himself said, "The life of the
people is such that in literature they require joy." But not only his
thought, his very style, is anti-popular. Much of his most elaborate
work is in blank verse, and that in itself is a heavy draw-back. Much
also is in exotic and unaccustomed metres, which to the great bulk of
English readers must always be more of a discipline than of a delight.
And, even when he wrote in our indigenous metres, his ear often played
him false. His rhymes are sometimes only true to the eye, and his lines
are over-crowded with jerking monosyllables. Let one glaring instance
suffice--

Calm not life's crown, though calm is well.

The sentiment is true and even profound; but the expression is surely
rugged and jolting to the last degree; and there are many lines nearly
as ineuphonious. Here are some samples, collected by that fastidious
critic, Mr. Frederic Harrison--

"The sandy spits, the shore-lock'd lakes."

"Could'st thou no better keep, O Abbey old?"

"The strange-scrawl'd rocks, the lonely sky."

These Mr. Harrison cites as proof that, "where Nature has withheld the
ear for music, no labour and no art can supply the want." And I think
that even a lover may add to the collection--

As the punt's rope chops round.

But, after all these deductions and qualifications have been made, it
remains true that Arnold was a poet, and that his poetic quality was
pure and rare. His musings "on Man, on Nature, and on Human Life,"[2]
are essentially and profoundly poetical. They have indeed a tragic
inspiration. He is deeply imbued by the sense that human existence, at
its best, is inadequate and disappointing. He feels, and submits to, its
incompleteness and its limitations. With stately resignation he accepts
the common fate, and turns a glance of calm disdain on all endeavours
after a spurious consolation. All round him he sees

Uno'erleap'd Mountains of Necessity,
Sparing us narrower margin than we deem.

He dismissed with a rather excessive contempt the idea that the dreams
of childhood may be intimations of immortality; and the inspiration
which poets of all ages have agreed to seek in the hope of endless
renovation, he found in the immediate contemplation of present good.
What his brother-poet called "self-reverence, self-knowledge,
self-control," are the keynotes of that portion of his poetry which
deals with the problems of human existence. When he handles these
themes, he speaks to the innermost consciousness of his hearers, telling
us what we know about ourselves, and have believed hidden from all
others, or else putting into words of perfect suitableness what we have
dimly felt, and have striven in vain to utter. It is then that, to use
his own word, he is most "interpretative." It is this quality which
makes such poems as _Youth's Agitations_, _Youth and Calm_,
_Self-dependence_, and _The Grande Chartreuse_ so precious a part of our
intellectual heritage.

In 1873 he wrote to his sister: "I have a curious letter from the State
of Maine in America, from a young man who wished to tell me that a
friend of his, lately dead, had been especially fond of my poem, _A
Wish_, and often had it read to him in his last illness. They were both
of a class too poor to buy books, and had met with the poem in a
newspaper."

It will be remembered that in _A Wish_, the poet, contemptuously
discarding the conventional consolations of a death-bed, entreats his
friends to place him at the open window, that he may see yet once
again--

Bathed in the sacred dews of morn
The wide aerial landscape spread--
The world which was ere I was born,
The world which lasts when I am dead;

Which never was the friend of _one_,
Nor promised love it could not give.
But lit for all its generous sun,
And lived itself, and made us live.

There let me gaze, till I become
In soul, with what I gaze on, wed!
To feel the universe my home;
To have before my mind--instead

Of the sick room, the mortal strife,
The turmoil for a little breath--
The pure eternal course of life,
Not human combatings with death!

Thus feeling, gazing, might I grow
Composed, refresh'd, ennobled, clear;
Then willing let my spirit go
To work or wait elsewhere or here!

This solemn love and reverence for the continuous life of the physical
universe may remind us that Arnold's teaching about humanity, subtle and
searching as it is, has done less to endear him to many of his
disciples, than his feeling for Nature. His is the kind of
Nature-worship which takes nothing at second-hand. He paid "the Mighty
Mother" the only homage which is worthy of her acceptance, a minute and
dutiful study of her moods and methods. He placed himself as a reverent
learner at her feet before he presumed to go forth to the world as an
exponent of her teaching. It is this exactness of observation which
makes his touches of local colouring so vivid and so true. This gives
its winning charm to his landscape-painting, whether the scene is laid
in Kensington Gardens, or the Alps, or the valley of the Thames. This
fills _The Scholar-Gipsy_, and _Thyrsis_, and _Obermann_, and _The
Forsaken Merman_ with flawless gems of natural description, and
felicities of phrase which haunt the grateful memory.

In brief, it seems to me that he was not a great poet, for he lacked the
gifts which sway the multitude, and compel the attention of mankind. But
he was a true poet, rich in those qualities which make the loved and
trusted teacher of a chosen few--as he himself would have said, of "the
Remnant." Often in point of beauty and effectiveness, always in his
purity and elevation, he is worthy to be associated with the noblest
names of all. Alone among his contemporaries, we can venture to say of
him that he was not only of the school, but of the lineage, of
Wordsworth. His own judgment on his place among the modern poets was
thus given in a letter of 1869: "My poems represent, on the whole, the
main movement of mind of the last quarter of a century, and thus they
will probably have their day as people become conscious to themselves of
what that movement of mind is, and interested in the literary
productions which reflect it. It might be fairly urged that I have less
poetic sentiment than Tennyson, and less intellectual vigour and
abundance than Browning. Yet because I have more perhaps of a fusion of
the two than either of them, and have more regularly applied that fusion
to the main line of modern development, I am likely enough to have my
turn, as they have had theirs."

When we come to consider him as a prose-writer, cautions and
qualifications are much less necessary. Whatever may be thought of the
substance of his writings, it surely must be admitted that he was a
great master of style. And his style was altogether his own. In the last
year of his life he said to the present writer: "People think I can
teach them style. What stuff it all is! Have something to say, and say
it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style."

Clearness is indeed his own most conspicuous note, and to clearness he
added singular grace, great skill in phrase-making, great aptitude for
beautiful description, perfect naturalness, absolute ease. The very
faults which the lovers of a more pompous rhetoric profess to detect in
his writing are the easy-going fashions of a man who wrote as he talked.
The members of a college which produced Cardinal Newman, Dean Church,
and Matthew Arnold are not without some justification when they boast of
"the Oriel style."

But style, though a great delight and a great power, is not everything,
and we must not found our claim for him as a prose-writer on style
alone. His style was the worthy and the suitable vehicle of much of the
very best criticism which English literature contains. We take the whole
mass of his critical writing, from the _Lectures on Homer_ and the
_Essays in Criticism_ down to the Preface to Wordsworth and the
Discourse on Milton; and we ask, Is there anything better?

When he wrote as a critic of books, his taste, his temper, his judgment
were pretty nearly infallible. He combined a loyal and reasonable
submission to literary authority with a free and even daring use of
private judgment. His admiration for the acknowledged masters of human
utterance--Homer, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe--was genuine
and enthusiastic, and incomparably better informed than that of some
more conventional critics. Yet this cordial submission to recognized
authority, this honest loyalty to established reputation, did not blind
him to defects, did not seduce him into indiscriminate praise, did not
deter him from exposing the tendency to verbiage in Burke and Jeremy
Taylor, the excessive blankness of much of Wordsworth's blank verse, the
undercurrent of mediocrity in Macaulay, the absurdities of Ruskin's
etymology. And, as in great matters, so in small. Whatever literary
production was brought under his notice, his judgment was clear,
sympathetic, and independent. He had the readiest appreciation of true
excellence, a quick eye for minor merits of facility and method, a
severe intolerance of turgidity and inflation--of what he called
"desperate endeavours to render a platitude endurable by making it
pompous," and a lively horror of affectation and unreality. These, in
literature as in life, were in his eyes the unpardonable sins.

On the whole it may be said that, as a critic of books, he had in his
lifetime the reputation, the vogue, which he deserved. But his criticism
in other fields has hardly been appreciated at its proper value.
Certainly his politics were rather fantastic. They were influenced by
his father's fiery but limited Liberalism, by the abstract speculation
which flourishes perennially at Oxford, and by the cultivated Whiggery
which he imbibed as Lord Lansdowne's Private Secretary; and the result
often seemed wayward and whimsical. Of this he was himself in some
degree aware. At any rate he knew perfectly that his politics were
lightly esteemed by politicians, and, half jokingly, half seriously, he
used to account for the fact by that jealousy of an outsider's
interference, which is natural to all professional men. Yet he had the
keenest interest, not only in the deeper problems of politics, but also
in the routine and mechanism of the business. He enjoyed a good debate,
liked political society, and was interested in the personalities, the
trivialities, the individual and domestic ins-and-outs, which make so
large a part of political conversation.

But, after all, Politics, in the technical sense, did not afford a
suitable field for his peculiar gifts. It was when he came to the
criticism of national life that the hand of the master was felt. In all
questions affecting national character and tendency, the development of
civilization, public manners, morals, habits, idiosyncrasies, the
influence of institutions, of education, of literature, his insight was
penetrating, his point of view perfectly original, and his judgment, if
not always sound, invariably suggestive. These qualities, among others,
gave to such books as _Essays in Criticism_, _Friendship's Garland_, and
_Culture and Anarchy_, an interest and a value quite independent of
their literary merit. And they are displayed in their most serious and
deliberate form, dissociated from all mere fun and vivacity, in his
_Discourses in America_. This, he told the present writer, was the book
by which, of all his prose-writings, he most desired to be remembered.
It was a curious and memorable choice.

Another point of great importance in his prosewriting is this; if he
had never written prose the world would never have known him as a
humorist. And that would have been an intellectual loss not easily
estimated. How pure, how delicate, yet how natural and spontaneous his
humour was, his friends and associates knew well; and--what is by no
means always the case--the humour of his writing was of exactly the same
tone and quality as the humour of his conversation. It lost nothing in
the process of transplantation. As he himself was fond of saying, he was
not a popular writer, and he was never less popular than in his humorous
vein. In his fun there is no grinning through a horse-collar, no
standing on one's head, none of the guffaws, and antics, and
"full-bodied gaiety of our English Cider-Cellar." But there is a keen
eye for subtle absurdity, a glance which unveils affectation and
penetrates bombast, the most delicate sense of incongruity, the
liveliest disrelish for all the moral and intellectual qualities which
constitute the Bore, and a vein of personal raillery as refined as it is
pungent. Sydney Smith spoke of Sir James Mackintosh as "abating and
dissolving pompous gentlemen with the most successful ridicule." The
words not inaptly describe Arnold's method of handling personal and
literary pretentiousness.

His praise as a phrase-maker is in all the Churches of literature. It
was his skill in this respect which elicited the liveliest compliments
from a transcendent performer in the same field. In 1881 he wrote to his
sister: "On Friday night I had a long talk with Lord Beaconsfield. He
ended by declaring that I was the only living Englishman who had become
a classic in his own lifetime. The fact is that what I have done in
establishing a number of current phrases, such as _Philistinism,
Sweetness and Light_, and all that is just the thing to strike him." In
1884 he wrote from America about his phrase, _The Remnant_--"That term
is going the round of the United States, and I understand what Dizzy
meant when he said that I had performed 'a great achievement in
launching phrases.'" But his wise epigrams and compendious sentences
about books and life, admirable in themselves, will hardly recall the
true man to the recollection of his friends so effectually as his sketch
of the English Academy, disturbed by a "flight of Corinthian leading
articles, and an irruption of Mr. G.A. Sala;" his comparison of Miss
Cobbe's new religion to the British College of Health; his parallel
between Phidias' statue of the Olympian Zeus and Coles'
truss-manufactory; Sir William Harcourt's attempt to "develop a system
of unsectarian religion from the Life of Mr. Pickwick;" the "portly
jeweller from Cheapside," with his "passionate, absorbing, almost
blood-thirsty clinging to life;" the grandiose war-correspondence of the
_Times_, and "old Russell's guns getting a little honey-combed;" Lord
Lumpington's subjection to "the grand, old, fortifying, classical
curriculum," and the "feat of mental gymnastics" by which he obtained
his degree; the Rev. Esau Hittall's "longs and shorts about the
Calydonian Boar, which were not bad;" the agitation of the Paris
Correspondent of the _Daily Telegraph_ on hearing the word "delicacy";
the "bold, bad men, the haunters of Social Science Congresses," who
declaim "a sweet union of philosophy and poetry" from Wordsworth on the
duty of the State towards education; the impecunious author "commercing
with the stars" in Grub Street, reading "the _Star_ for wisdom and
charity, the _Telegraph_ for taste and style," and looking for the
letter from the Literary Fund, "enclosing half-a-crown, the promise of
my dinner at Christmas, and the kind wishes of Lord Stanhope[3] for my
better success in authorship."

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