Part 10

Moreover, even when his choice of subject is determined by other than moral considerations, his treatment is apt, none the less, to reveal his ethical bias. Again and again in his essays on poetry, for example, it is the substance of poetry that he is chiefly anxious to handle, while the form is left with incidental analysis. Wordsworth is the poet of joy in widest commonalty spread--the poet whose criticism of life is most sound and enduring and salutary. Shelley is a febrile creature, insecure in his sense of worldly values, “a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.”[38] The essay on _Heine_ helps us only mediately to an appreciation of the volatile beauty of Heine’s songs, or to an intenser delight in the mere surface play of hues and moods in his verse. From the essay on _George Sand_, to be sure, we receive many vivid impressions of the emotional and imaginative scope of French romance; for this essay was written _con amore_ in the revivification of an early mood of devotion, and in an unusually heightened style; the essay on _Emerson_ is the one study that has in places somewhat of the same lyrical intensity and the same vividness of realization. Yet even in the essay on _George Sand_, the essayist is, on the whole, bent on revealing the temperament of the woman rather in its decisive influence on her theories of life than in its reaction upon her art as art. There is hardly a word of the Romance as a definite literary form, of George Sand’s relation to earlier French writers of fiction, or of her distinctive methods of work as a portrayer of the great human spectacle. In short, literature as art, literary forms as definite modes of artistic expression, the technique of the literary craftsman, receive, for the most part, from Arnold, slight attention.

Perhaps the one piece of work in which Arnold set himself, with some thoroughness, to the discussion of a purely literary problem was his series of lectures on _Translating Homer_. These lectures were produced, before his sense of responsibility for the moral regeneration of the Philistine had become importunate, and were addressed to an academic audience. For these reasons, the treatment of literary topics is more disinterested and less interrupted by practical considerations. Indeed, as will be presently noted in illustration of another aspect of Arnold’s work, these lectures contain very subtle and delicate appreciations, show everywhere exquisite responsiveness to changing effects of style, and enrich gratefully the vocabulary of impressionistic criticism.

Even in these exceptional lectures, however, Arnold’s ethical interest asserts itself. In the course of them he gives an account of the grand style in poetry,--of that poetic manner that seems to him to stand highest in the scale of excellence; and he carefully notes as an essential of this manner,--of this grand, style,--its moral power; “it can form the character, ... is edifying, ... can refine the raw natural man, ... can transmute him.”[39] This definition of the grand style will be discussed presently in connection with Arnold’s general theory of poetry; it is enough to note here that it illustrates the inseparableness in Arnold’s mind between art and morals.

His description of poetry as a criticism of life has already been mentioned. This doctrine is early implied in Arnold’s writings, for example, in the passage just quoted from the lectures on _Translating Homer_; it becomes more explicit in the _Last Words_, appended to these lectures, where the critic asserts that “the noble and profound application of ideas to life is the most essential part of poetic greatness.”[40] It is elaborated in the essays on _Wordsworth_ (1879), on the _Study of Poetry_ (1880), and on _Byron_ (1881). “It is important, therefore,” the essay on _Wordsworth_ assures us, “to hold fast to this: that poetry is at bottom a criticism of life; that the greatness of a poet lies in his powerful and beautiful application of ideas to life,--to the question: How to live.”[41] And in the essay on the _Study of Poetry_ Arnold urges that “in poetry, as a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty, the spirit of our race will find, ... as time goes on and as other helps fail, its consolation and stay.”[42]

With this doctrine of the indissoluble connection between the highest poetic excellence and essential nobleness of subject-matter probably only the most irreconcilable advocates of art for art’s sake would quarrel. So loyal an adherent of art as Walter Pater suggests a test of poetic “greatness” substantially the same with Arnold’s. “It is on the quality of the matter it informs or controls, its compass, its variety, its alliance to great ends, or the depth of the note of revolt, or the largeness of hope in it, that the greatness of literary art depends, as _The Divine Comedy_, _Paradise Lost_, _Les Misérables_, _The English Bible_, are great art.”[43] This may be taken as merely a different phrasing of Arnold’s principle that “the greatness of a poet lies in his powerful and beautiful application of ideas to life--to the question: How to live.” Surely, then, we are not at liberty to press any objection to Arnold’s general theory of poetry on the ground of its being, in its essence, over-ethical.

There remains nevertheless the question of emphasis. In the application to special cases of this test of essential worth, either the critic may be constitutionally biassed in favour of a somewhat restricted range of definite ideas about life, or even when he is fairly hospitable towards various moral idioms, he may still be so intent upon making ethical distinctions as to fail to give their due to the purely artistic qualities of poetry. It is in this latter way that Arnold is most apt to offend. The emphasis in the discussions of Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Keats, Gray, and Milton is prevailingly on the ethical characteristics of each poet; and the reader carries away from an essay a vital conception of the play of moral energy and of spiritual passion in the poet’s verse rather than an impression of his peculiar adumbration of beauty, the characteristic rhythms of his imaginative movement, the delicate colour modulations on the surface of his image of life.

It must, however, be borne in mind that Arnold has specially admitted the incompleteness of his description of poetry as “a criticism of life”; this criticism, he has expressly added, must be made in conformity “to the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.” “The profound criticism of life” characteristic of “the few supreme masters” must exhibit itself “in indissoluble connection with the laws of poetic truth and beauty.”[44] Is there, then, to be found in Arnold any account of certain laws the observance of which secures poetic beauty and truth? Is there any description of the special ways in which poetic beauty and truth manifest themselves, of the formal characteristics to be found in poetry where poetic beauty and truth are present? Does Arnold either suggest the methods the poet must follow to attain these qualities, or classify the various subordinate effects through which poetic beauty and truth invariably reveal their presence? The most apposite parts of his writings to search for some declaration on these points are the lectures on _Translating Homer_, and the second series of his essays which deal chiefly with the study of poetry. Here, if anywhere, we ought to find a registration of beliefs as regards the precise nature and source of poetic beauty and truth.

And indeed throughout all these writings, which run through a considerable period of time, Arnold makes fairly consistent use of a half-dozen categories for his analyses of poetic effects. These categories are substance and matter, style and manner, diction and movement. Of the substance of really great poetry we learn repeatedly that it must be made up of ideas of profound significance “on man, on nature, and on human life.”[45] This is, however, merely the prescription already so often noted that poetry, to reach the highest excellence, must contain a penetrating and ennobling criticism of life. In the essay on _Byron_, however, there is something formally added to this requisition of “truth and seriousness of substance and matter”; besides these, “felicity and perfection of diction and manner, as these are exhibited in the best poets, are what constitute a criticism of life made in conformity with the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.”[46] There must then be felicity and perfection of diction and manner in poetry of the highest order; these terms are somewhat vague, but serve at least to guide us on our analytic way. In the essay on the _Study of Poetry_, there is still farther progress made in the description of poetic excellence. “To the style and manner of the best poetry, their special character, their accent is given by their diction, and, even yet more, by their movement. And though we distinguish between the two characters, the two accents, of superiority” (_i.e._ between the superiority that comes from substance and the superiority that comes from style), “yet they are nevertheless vitally connected one with the other. The superior character of truth and seriousness, in the matter and substance of the best poetry, is inseparable from the superiority of diction and movement marking its style and manner. The two superiorities are closely related, and are in steadfast proportion one to the other. So far as high poetic truth and seriousness are wanting to a poet’s matter and substance, so far also, we may be sure, will a high poetic stamp of diction and movement be wanting to his style and manner.”[47]

Now that there is this intimate and necessary union between a poet’s mode of conceiving life and his manner of poetic expression, is hardly disputable. The image of life in a poet’s mind is simply the outside world transformed by the complex of sensations and thoughts and emotions peculiar to the poet; and this image inevitably frames for itself a visible and audible expression that delicately utters its individual character--distils that character subtly through word and sentence, rhythm and metaphor, image and figure of speech, and through their integration into a vital work of art. Moreover, the poet’s style is itself in general the product of the same personality which determines his image of life, and must therefore be, like his image of life, delicately striated with the markings of his play of thought and feeling and fancy. The close correspondence, then, between the poet’s subject-matter and his manner or style is indubitable. The part of Arnold’s conclusion or the point in his method that is regrettable is the exclusive stress that he throws on this dependence of style upon worth of substance. He converts style into a mere function of the moral quality of a poet’s thought about life, and fails to furnish any delicately studied categories for the appreciation of poetic style apart from its moral implications.

Take, for example, the judgments passed in the _Study of Poetry_ upon various poets; in every instance the estimate of the poet’s style turns upon the quality of his thought about life. Is it Chaucer whose right to be ranked as a classic is mooted? He cannot be ranked as a classic because “the substance of” his poetry has not “high seriousness.”[48] Is it Burns whose relative rank is being fixed? Burns through lack of “absolute sincerity” falls short of “high seriousness,” and, hence, is not to be placed among the classics. And thus continually with Arnold, effects of style are merged in moral qualities, and the reader gains little insight into the refinements of poetical manner except as these derive directly from the poet’s moral consciousness. The categories of style and manner, diction and movement, are everywhere subordinated to the categories of substance and matter, are treated as almost wholly derivative. “Felicity and perfection of diction and manner,” wherever they are admittedly present, are usually explained as the direct result of the poet’s lofty conception of life. Such a treatment of questions of style does not further us much on our way to a knowledge of the “laws of poetic beauty and poetic truth.”

Doubtless somewhat more disinterested analyses of style may be found in the lectures on _Translating Homer_. These discussions do not reach very definite conclusions, but they at least consider poetic excellence as for the moment dependent on something else than the moral mood of the poet. For example, the grand style is analyzed into two varieties, the grand style in severity and the grand style in simplicity. Each of these styles is described and illustrated so that it enters into the reader’s imagination and increases his sensitiveness to poetic excellence. Somewhat later in the lectures, the distinction between real simplicity in poetic style and sophisticated simplicity is drawn with exquisite delicacy of appreciation. Throughout these passages, there is an effort to deal directly with artistic effects for their own sake and apart from their significance as expressive of _ethos_. Yet even here Arnold’s ethical bias reveals itself in a tendency, while he is describing the moods back of these artistic qualities, to use words that have moral implications, and that suggest the issue of such moods in conduct. Self-restraint, proud gravity, are among the moods that are found back of the grand style in severity; over-refinement, super-subtle sophistication, account for Tennyson’s _simplesse_.

To bring together, then, the results of this somewhat protracted analysis: Arnold ostensibly admits that poetry, to be of the highest excellence, must, in addition to containing a criticism of life of profound significance, conform to the laws of poetic beauty and truth. He accepts as necessary categories, for the appreciation of poetical excellence, style and manner, diction and movement. Yet his most important general assertion about these latter purely formal determinations of poetry is that they are inseparably connected with substance and matter; similarly, whenever he discusses artistic effects, he is apt to find them interesting simply as serving to interpret the artist’s prevailing mood towards life; and even where, as is at times doubtless the case, he escapes for the moment from his ethical interest and appreciates with imaginative delicacy the individual quality of a poem or a poet’s style, he is nearly always found sooner or later explaining this quality as originating in the poet’s peculiar _ethos_. As for any systematic or even incidental study of “the laws of poetic beauty and truth,” we search for it through his pages in vain.

V

But it would be wrong in characterizing Arnold’s essays to attribute their lack of theorizing about questions of art solely to his preoccupation with conduct. For theory in general and for abstractions in general,--for all sorts of philosophizing,--Arnold openly professes his dislike. “Perhaps we shall one day learn,” he says, in his essay on _Wordsworth_, “to make this proposition general, and to say: Poetry is the reality, philosophy the illusion.” Distrust of the abstract and of the purely theoretical shows itself throughout his literary criticism and determines many of its characteristics.

His hostility to systems and to system-makers has already been pointed out; this hostility admits of no exception in favour of the systematic critic. “There is the judgment of ignorance, the judgment of incompatibility, the judgment of envy and jealousy. Finally, there is the systematic judgment, and this judgment is the most worthless of all.... Its author has not really his eye upon the professed object of his criticism at all, but upon something else which he wants to prove by means of that object. He neither really tells us, therefore, anything about the object, nor anything about his own ignorance of the object. He never fairly looks at it; he is looking at something else.”[49] This hypnotizing effect that a preconceived theory exerts on a critic, is Arnold’s first reason for objecting to systematic criticism; the critic with a theory is bound to find what he goes in search of, and nothing else. He goes out--to change somewhat one of Arnold’s own figures--like Saul, the son of Kish, in search of his father’s asses; and he comes back with the authentic animals instead of the traditional windfall of a kingdom.

Nor is preoccupation with a pet theory the sole incapacity that Arnold finds in the systematic critic; such a critic is almost sure to be over-intellectualized, a victim of abstractions and definitions, dependent for his judgments on conceptions, and lacking in temperamental sensitiveness to the appeal of literature as art. He is merely a triangulator of the landscape of literature, and moves resolutely in his process of triangulation from one fixed point to another; he finds significant only such parts of his literary experience as he can sum up in a definite abstract formula at some one of these arbitrary halting-places; his ultimate opinion of the ground he covers is merely the sum total of a comparatively small number of such abstract expressions. To the manifold wealth of the landscape in colour, in light, in shade, and in poetic suggestiveness, the system-monger, the theoretical critic, has all the time been blind.

Knowledge, too, even though it be not severely systematized, may interfere with the free play of critical intelligence. An oversupply of unvitalized facts or ideas, even though these facts or ideas be not organized into an importunate theory, may prove disastrous to the critic. This danger Arnold has amusingly set forth in his _Last Words_ on Homeric translation: “Much as Mr. Newman was mistaken when he talked of my rancour, he is entirely right when he talks of my ignorance. And yet, perverse as it seems to say so, I sometimes find myself wishing, when dealing with these matters of poetical criticism, that my ignorance were even greater than it is. To handle these matters properly, there is needed a poise so perfect that the least overweight in any direction tends to destroy the balance. Temper destroys it, a crotchet destroys it, even erudition may destroy it. To press to the sense of the thing with which one is dealing, not to go off on some collateral issue about the thing, is the hardest matter in the world. The ‘thing itself’ with which one is here dealing--the critical perception of poetic truth--is of all things the most volatile, elusive, and evanescent; by even pressing too impetuously after it, one runs the risk of losing it. The critic of poetry should have the finest tact, the nicest moderation, the most free, flexible, and elastic spirit imaginable; he should be, indeed, the ‘ondoyant et divers,’ the _undulating and diverse_ being of Montaigne. The less he can deal with his object simply and freely, the more things he has to take into account in dealing with it,--the more, in short, he has to encumber himself,--so much the greater force of spirit he needs to retain his elasticity. But one cannot exactly have this greater force by wishing for it; so, for the force of spirit one has, the load put upon it is often heavier than it will well bear. The late Duke of Wellington said of a certain peer that ‘it was a great pity his education had been so far too much for his abilities.’ In like manner one often sees erudition out of all proportion to its owner’s critical faculty. Little as I know, therefore, I am always apprehensive, in dealing with poetry, lest even that little should prove too much for my abilities.”[50]

Discreet ignorance, then, is Arnold’s counsel of perfection to the would-be critic. And, accordingly, he himself is desultory from conscientious motives and unsystematic by fixed rule. There are two passages in his writings where he explains confidentially his methods and his reasons for choosing them. The first occurs in a letter of 1864: “My sinuous, easy, unpolemical mode of proceeding has been adopted by me, first, because I really think it the best way of proceeding, if one wants to get at, and keep with, truth; secondly, because I am convinced only by a literary form of this kind being given to them can ideas such as mine ever gain any access in a country such as ours.”[51] The second passage occurs in the Preface to his first series of _Essays in Criticism_ (1865): “Indeed, it is not in my nature--some of my critics would rather say not in my power--to dispute on behalf of any opinion, even my own, very obstinately. To try and approach truth on one side after another, not to strive or cry, not to persist in pressing forward, on any one side, with violence and self-will, it is only thus, it seems to me, that mortals may hope to gain any vision of the mysterious goddess, whom we shall never see except in outline. He who will do nothing but fight impetuously towards her, on his own one favourite particular line, is inevitably destined to run his head into the folds of the black robe in which she is wrapped.”[52]

Such, then, is Arnold’s ideal of critical method. The critic is not to move from logical point to point as, for example, Francis Jeffrey was wont, in his essays, to move, with an advocate’s devotion to system and desire to make good some definite conclusion. Rather he is to give rein to his temperament; he is to make use of intuitions, imaginations, hints that touch the heart, as well as abstract principles, syllogisms, and arguments; and so he is to reach out tentatively through all his powers after truth if haply he may find her; in the hope that thus, keeping close to the concrete aspects of his subject, he may win to an ever more inclusive and intimate command of its surface and configurations. The type of mind most apt for this kind of critical work is the “free, flexible, and elastic spirit,” described in the passage just quoted from the _Last Words_; the “undulating and diverse being of Montaigne.”

A critic of this type will palpably concern himself slightly with abstractions, with theorizings, with definitions. And, indeed, Arnold’s unwillingness to define becomes at times almost ludicrous. “Nothing has raised more questioning among my critics than these words--_noble, the grand style_.... Alas! the grand style is the last matter in the world for verbal definition to deal with adequately. One may say of it as is said of faith: ‘One must feel it in order to know it.’”[53] Similarly in the _Study of Poetry_, Arnold urges: “Critics give themselves great labour to draw out what in the abstract constitutes the characters of a high quality of poetry. It is much better to have recourse to concrete examples.... If we are asked to define this mark and accent in the abstract, our answer must be: No, for we should thereby be darkening the question, not clearing it.” Again: “I may discuss what in the abstract constitutes the grand style; but that sort of general discussion never much helps our judgment of particular instances.”[54] These passages are characteristic; rarely indeed does Arnold consent to commit himself to the control of a definition. He prefers to convey into his readers’ mind a living realization of the thing or the object he treats of rather than to put before them its logically articulated outlines.