Part 9

Still another kind of deformity arises when the intellect grows self-assertive and develops overweeningly. To this kind of distortion the modern man of science is specially prone; his exclusive study of material facts leads to crude, unregenerate strength of intellect, and leaves him careless of the value truth may have for the spirit and of its glimmering suggestions of beauty. Yes, and for the philosopher and the scholar, too, over-intellectualism has its peculiar dangers. The devotee of a system of thought is apt to lose touch with the real values of life, and in his exorbitant desire for unity and thoroughness of organization, to miss the free play of vital forces that gives to life its manifold charm, its infinite variety, and its ultimate reality. Bentham and Comte are examples of the evil effects of this rabid pursuit of system. “Culture is always assigning to system-makers and systems a smaller share in the bent of human destiny than their friends like.” As for the pedant, he is merely the miser of facts, who grows withered in hoarding the vain fragments of precious ore of whose use he has lost the sense. Men of all these various types offend through their fanatical devotion to truth; for, indeed, as some one has in recent years well said, the intellect is “but a _parvenu_,” and the other powers of life, despite the Napoleonic irresistibleness of the new-comer, have rights that deserve respect. Over-intellectualism, then, like the over-development of any other power, leads to disproportion and disorder.

Such being some of the partial ideals against which Arnold warns his readers, what account does he give of that perfect human type in all its integrity, in terms of which he criticises these aberrations or deformities? Perhaps Arnold felt that any attempt at an exact and systematic definition of this type would be somewhat grotesque and presumptuous; at any rate, he has avoided such an attempt. Still, he has recorded clearly, in many passages, his ideas as regards the powers in man that are essential to perfect humanity, and that must all be duly recognized and developed, if man is to attain in full scope what nature offers. A representative passage may be quoted from the lecture on _Literature and Science_: “When we set ourselves to enumerate the powers which go to the building up of human life, and say that they are the power of conduct, the power of intellect and knowledge, the power of beauty, and the power of social life and manners, he [Professor Huxley] can hardly deny that this scheme, though drawn in rough and plain lines enough, and not pretending to scientific exactness, does yet give a fairly true representation of the matter. Human nature is built up of these powers; we have the need for them all. When we have rightly met and adjusted the claims for them all, we shall then be in a fair way for getting soberness and righteousness with wisdom.”

These same ideas are presented, under a somewhat different aspect and with somewhat different terminology, in the first chapter of _Culture and Anarchy_: “The great aim of culture [is] the aim of setting ourselves to ascertain what perfection is and to make it prevail.” Culture seeks “the determination of this question through all the voices of human experience which have been heard upon it,--of art, science, poetry, philosophy, history, as well as of religion,--in order to give a greater fulness and certainty to its solution.... Religion says: _The Kingdom of God is within you_; and culture, in like manner, places human perfection in an _internal_ condition, in the growth and predominance of our humanity proper, as distinguished from our animality. It places it in the ever-increasing efficacy and in the general harmonious expansion of those gifts of thought and feeling which make the peculiar dignity, wealth, and happiness of human nature. As I have said on a former occasion: ‘It is in making endless additions to itself, in the endless expansion of its powers, in endless growth in wisdom and beauty, that the spirit of the human race finds its ideal. To reach this ideal, culture is an indispensable aid, and that is the true value of culture.’”

In such passages as these Arnold comes as near as he ever comes to defining the perfect human type. He does not profess to define it universally and in abstract terms, for indeed he “hates” abstractions almost as inveterately as Burke hated them. He does not even describe concretely for men of his own time and nation the precise equipoise of powers essential to perfection. Yet he names these powers, suggests the ends towards which they must by their joint working contribute, and illustrates, through examples, the evil effects of the preponderance or absence of one and another. Finally, in the course of his many discussions, he describes in detail the method by which the delicate adjustment of these rival powers may be secured in the typical man; suggests who is to be the judge of the conflicting claims of these powers, and indicates the process by which this judge may most persuasively lay his opinions before those whom he wishes to influence. The method for the attainment of the perfect type is _culture_; the censor of defective types and the judge of the rival claims of the coöperant powers is the _critic_; and the process by which this judge clarifies his own ideas and enforces his opinions on others is _criticism_.

III

We are now at the centre of Arnold’s theory of life and hold the key to his system of belief, so far as he had a system. His reasons for attaching to the work of the critic the importance he palpably attached to it are at once apparent. Criticism is the method by which the perfect type of human nature is at any moment to be apprehended and kept in uncontaminate clearness of outline before the popular imagination. The ideal critic is the man of nicest discernment in matters intellectual, moral, æsthetic, social; of perfect equipoise of powers; of delicately pervasive sympathy; of imaginative insight; who grasps comprehensively the whole life of his time; who feels its vital tendencies and is intimately aware of its most insistent preoccupations; who also keeps his orientation towards the unchanging norms of human endeavour; and who is thus able to note and set forth the imperfections in existing types of human nature and to urge persuasively a return in essential particulars to the normal type. The function of criticism, then, is the vindication of the ideal human type against perverting influences, and Arnold’s prose-writings will for the most part be found to have been inspired in one form or another by a single purpose: the correction of excess in some human activity and the restoration of that activity to its proper place among the powers that make up the ideal human type.

_Culture and Anarchy_ (1869) was the first of Arnold’s books to illustrate adequately this far-reaching conception of criticism. His special topic is, in this case, social conditions in England. Politicians, he urges, whose profession it is to deal with social questions, are engrossed in practical matters and biassed by party considerations; they lack the detachment and breadth of view to see the questions at issue in their true relations to abstract standards of right and wrong. They mistake means for ends, machinery for the results that machinery is meant to secure; they lose all sense of values and exalt temporary measures into matters of sacred import; finally, they come to that pass of ineptitude which Arnold symbolizes by the enthusiasm of Liberals over the measure to enable a man to marry his deceased wife’s sister. What is needed to correct these absurd misapprehensions is the free play of critical intelligence. The critic from his secure coign of vantage must examine social conditions dispassionately; he must determine what is essentially wrong in the inner lives of the various classes of men around him, and so reveal the real sources of those social evils which politicians are trying to remedy by external readjustments and temporary measures.

And this is just the task that Arnold undertakes in _Culture and Anarchy_. He sets himself to consider English society in its length and breadth with a view to discovering what is its essential constitution, what are the typical classes that enter into it, and what are the characteristics of these classes. So far as concerns classification he ultimately accepts, it is true, as adequate to his purpose, the traditional division of English society into upper, middle, and lower classes. But he then goes on to give an analysis of each of these classes that is novel, penetrating, in the highest degree stimulating. He takes a typical member of each class and describes him in detail, intellectually, morally, socially; he points out his sources of strength and his sources of weakness. He compares him as a type with the abstract ideal of human excellence, and notes wherein his powers “fall short or exceed.” He indicates the reaction upon the social and political life of the nation of these various defects and excesses, their inevitable influence in producing social misadjustment and friction. Finally, he urges that the one remedy that will correct these errant social types and bring them nearer to the perfect human type is culture, increase in _vital_ knowledge.

The details of Arnold’s application of this conception of culture as a remedy for the social evils of the time, every reader may follow out for himself in _Culture and Anarchy_. One point in Arnold’s conception, however, is to be noted forthwith; it is a crucial point in its influence on his theorizings. By culture Arnold means increase of knowledge; yes, but he means something more; culture is for Arnold not merely an intellectual matter. Culture is the best knowledge made operative and dynamic in life and character. Knowledge must be vitalized; it must be intimately conscious of the whole range of human interests; it must ultimately subserve the whole nature of man. Continually, then, as Arnold is pleading for the spread of ideas, for increase of light, for the acceptance on the part of his fellow-countrymen of new knowledge from the most diverse sources, he is as keenly alive as any one to the dangers of over-intellectualism. The undue development of the intellectual powers is as injurious to the individual as any other form of deviation from the perfect human type.

This distrust of over-intellectualism is the ultimate ground of Arnold’s hostility to the claims of Physical Science to primacy in modern education. His ideas on the relative educational value of the physical sciences and of the humanities are set forth in the well-known discourse on _Literature and Science_. Arnold is ready, no one is more ready, to accept the conclusions of science on all topics that fall within its range; whatever its authenticated spokesmen have to say upon man’s origin, his moral nature, his relations to his fellows, his place in the physical universe, his religions, his sacred books--all these utterances are to be received with entire loyalty as far as they can be shown to embody the results of expert scientific observation and thought. But for Arnold, the great importance of modern scientific truth does not for a moment make clear the superiority of the physical sciences over the humanities as a means of educational discipline. The study of the sciences tends merely to intellectual development, to the increase of mental power; the study of literature, on the other hand, trains a man emotionally and morally, develops his human sympathies, sensitizes him temperamentally, rouses his imagination, and elicits his sense of beauty. Science puts before the student the crude facts of nature, bids him accept them dispassionately, rid himself of all discolouring moods as he watches the play of physical force, and convert himself into pure intelligence; he is simply to observe, to analyze, to classify, and to systematize, and he is to go through these processes continually with facts that have no human quality, that come raw from the great whirl of the cosmic machine. As a discipline, then, for the ordinary man, the study of science tends not a whit towards humanization, towards refinement, towards temperamental regeneration; it tends only to develop an accurate trick of the senses, fine observation, crude intellectual strength. These powers are of very great importance; but they may also be trained in the study of literature, while at the same time the student, as Sir Philip Sidney long ago pointed out, is being led and drawn “to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls, made worse by their clay lodgings, can be capable of.” Arnold, then, with characteristic anxiety for the integrity of the human type, urges the superior worth to most young men of a literary rather than a scientific training. Literature nourishes the whole spirit of man; science ministers only to the intellect.

The same insistent desire that culture be vital is at the root of Arnold’s discomfort in the presence of German scholarship. For the thoroughness and the disinterestedness of this scholarship he has great respect; but he cannot endure its trick of losing itself in the letter, its “pedantry, slowness,” its way of “fumbling” after truth, its “ineffectiveness.”[33] “In the German mind,” he exclaims in _Literature and Dogma_, “as in the German language, there does seem to be something splay, something blunt-edged, unhandy, infelicitous,--some positive want of straightforward, sure perception.”[34] Of scholarship of this splay variety, that comes from exaggerated intellectuality and from lack of a delicate temperament and of nice perceptions, Arnold is intolerant. Such scholarship he finds working its customary mischief in Professor Francis Newman’s translation of Homer, and, accordingly, he gives large parts of the lectures on _Translating Homer_ to the illustration of its shortcomings and maladroitness; he is bent on showing how inadequate is great learning alone to cope with any nice literary problem. Newman’s philological knowledge of Greek and of Homer is beyond dispute, but his taste may be judged from his assertion that Homer’s verse, if we could hear the living Homer, would affect us “like an elegant and simple melody from an African of the Gold Coast.”[35] The remedy for such inept scholarship lies in culture, in the vitalization of knowledge. The scholar must not be a mere knower; all his powers must be harmoniously developed.

A last illustration of Arnold’s insistence that knowledge be vital may be drawn from his writings on religion and theology. Again criticism and culture are the passwords that open the way to a new and better order of things. Formulas, Arnold urges, have fastened themselves constrainingly upon the English religious mind. Traditional interpretations of the Bible have come to be received as beyond cavil. These interpretations are really human inventions--the product of the ingenious thinking of theologians like Calvin and Luther. Yet they have so authenticated themselves that for most readers to-day the Bible means solely what it meant for the exacerbated theological mind of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. If religion is to be vital, if knowledge of the Bible is to be genuine and real, there must be a critical examination of what this book means for the disinterested intelligence of to-day; the Bible, as literature, must be interpreted anew, sympathetically and imaginatively; the moral inspiration the Bible has to offer, even to men who are rigidly insistent on scientific habits of thought and standards of historical truth, must be disengaged from what is unverifiable and transitory, and made real and persuasive. “I write,” Arnold declares, “to convince the lover of religion that by following habits of intellectual seriousness he need not, so far as religion is concerned, lose anything. Taking the Old Testament as Israel’s magnificent establishment of the theme, _Righteousness is salvation!_ taking the New as the perfect elucidation by Jesus of what righteousness is and how salvation is won, I do not fear comparing even the power over the soul and imagination of the Bible, taken in this sense,--a sense which is at the same time solid,--with the like power in the old materialistic and miraculous sense for the Bible, which is not.”[36] This definition of what Arnold hopes to do for the Bible may be supplemented by a description of the method in which culture works towards the ends desired: “Difficult, certainly, is the right reading of the Bible, and true culture, too, is difficult. For true culture implies not only knowledge, but right tact and justness of judgment, forming themselves by and with knowledge; without this tact it is not true culture. Difficult, however, as culture is, it is necessary. For, after all, the Bible is _not_ a talisman, to be taken and used literally; neither is any existing church a talisman, whatever pretensions of the sort it may make, for giving the right interpretation of the Bible. Only true culture can give us this interpretation; so that if conduct is, as it is, inextricably bound up with the Bible and the right interpretation of it, then the importance of culture becomes unspeakable. For if conduct is necessary (and there is nothing so necessary), culture is necessary.”[37]

In all these various ways, then, that have been illustrated, culture is a specific against the ills that society is heir to. Culture is vital knowledge, and the critic is its fosterer and guardian; culture and criticism work together for the preservation of the integrity of the human type against all the disasters that threaten it from the storm and stress of modern life. Politics, religion, scholarship, science, each has its special danger for the individual; each seizes upon him, subdues him relentlessly to the need of the moment and the requirements of some particular function, and converts him often into a mere distorted fragment of humanity. Against this tyranny of the moment, against the specializing and materializing trend of modern life, criticism offers a powerful safeguard. Criticism is ever concerned with archetypal excellence, is continually disengaging, with fine discrimination, what is transitory and accidental from what is permanent and essential in all that man busies himself about, and is thus perpetually helping every individual to the apprehension of his “best self,” to the development of what is real and absolute and the elimination of what is false or deforming. And in doing all this the critic acts as the appreciator of life; he is not the abstract thinker. He apprehends the ideal intuitively; he reaches it by the help of the feelings and the imagination and a species of exquisite tact, not through a series of syllogisms; he is really a poet, rather than a philosopher.

This conception of the nature and functions of criticism makes intelligible and justifies a phrase of Arnold’s that has often been impugned--his description of poetry as a criticism of life. To this account of poetry it has been objected that criticism is an intellectual process, while poetry is primarily an affair of the imagination and the heart; and that to regard poetry as a criticism of life is to take a view of poetry that tends to convert it into mere rhetorical moralizing--the decorative expression in rhythmical language of abstract truth about life. This misinterpretation of Arnold’s meaning becomes impossible, if the foregoing theory of criticism be borne in mind. Criticism is the determination and the representation of the archetypal, of the ideal. Moreover, it is not a determination of the archetypal formally and theoretically, through speculation or the enumeration of abstract qualities; Arnold’s disinclination for abstractions has been repeatedly noted. The process to be used in criticism is a vital process of appreciation, in which the critic, sensitive to the whole value of human life, to the appeal of art and of conduct and of manners as well as of abstract truth, feels his way to a synthetic grasp upon what is ideally best, and portrays this concretely and persuasively for the popular imagination. Such an appreciator of life, if he produce beauty in verse, if he embody his vision of the ideal in metre, will be a poet. In other words, the poet is the appreciator of human life who sees in it most sensitively, inclusively, and penetratingly what is archetypal, and evokes his vision before others through rhythm and rhyme. In this sense poetry can hardly be denied to be a criticism of life; it is the winning portrayal of the ideal of human life as this ideal shapes itself in the mind of the poet. Such a criticism of life Dante gives, a determination and portrayal of what is ideally best in life according to mediæval conceptions; a representation of life in its integrity with a due adjustment of the claims of all the powers that enter into it--friendship, ambition, patriotism, loyalty, religion, artistic ardour, love. Such a criticism of life Shakespeare incidentally gives in terms of the full scope of Elizabethan experience in England, with due imaginative setting forth of the splendid vistas of possible achievement and unlimited development that the new knowledge and the discoveries of the Renaissance had opened. In short, the great poet is the typically sensitive, penetrative, and suggestive appreciator of life,--who calls to his aid, to make his appreciation as resonant and persuasive as possible, as potent as possible over men’s minds and hearts, all the emotional and imaginative resources of language,--rhythm, figures, allegory, symbolism,--whatever will enable him to impose his appreciation of life upon others and to insinuate into their souls his sense of the relative values of human acts and characters and passions; whatever will help him to make more overweeningly beautiful and insistently eloquent his vision of truth and beauty. In this sense the poet is the limiting ideal of the appreciative critic, and poetry is the ultimate criticism of life--the finest portrayal each age can attain to of what seems to it in life most significant and delightful.

IV

The purpose with which Arnold writes is now fairly apparent. His aim is to shape in happy fashion the lives of his fellows; to free them from the bonds that the struggle for existence imposes upon them; to enlarge their horizons, to enrich them spiritually, and to call all that is best within them into as vivid play as possible. When we turn to Arnold’s literary criticism we shall find this purpose no less paramount.

A glance through the volumes of Arnold’s essays renders it clear that his selection of a poet or a prose-writer for discussion was usually made with a view to putting before English readers some desirable trait of character for their imitation, some temperamental excellence that they are lacking in, some mode of belief that they neglect, some habit of thought that they need to cultivate. Joubert is studied and portrayed because of his single-hearted love of light, the purity of his disinterested devotion to truth, the fine distinction of his thought, and the freedom of his spirit from the sordid stains of worldly life. Heine is a typical leader in the war of emancipation, the arch-enemy of Philistinism, and the light-hearted, indomitable, foe of prejudice and cant. Maurice and Eugénie de Guérin are winning examples of the spiritual distinction that modern Romanism can induce in timely-happy souls. Scherer, whose critiques upon Milton and Goethe are painstakingly reproduced in the _Mixed Essays_, represents French critical intelligence in its best play--acute, yet comprehensive; exacting, yet sympathetic; regardful of _nuances_ and delicately refining, and yet virile and constructive. Of the importance for modern England of emphasis on all these qualities of mind and heart, Arnold was securely convinced.