Matthew Arnold by George Saintsbury (parable of the sower read online .txt) 📕

PREFACE.


Mr. Matthew Arnold, like other good men of our times, disliked the idea of being made the subject of a regular biography; and the only official and authoritative sources of information as to the details of his life are the Letters published by his family, under the editorship of Mr G.W.E. Russell (2 vols., London, 1895)[1]. To these, therefore, it seems to be a duty to confine oneself, as far as such details are concerned, save as regards a very few additional facts which are public property. But very few more facts can really be wanted except by curiosity; for in the life of no recent person of distinction did things literary play so large a part as in Mr Arnold's: of no one could it be said with so much truth that, family affections and necessary avocations apart, he was totus in illis . And these things we have in abundance.[2] If the following pages seem to discuss them too minutely, it can only be pleaded that those to whom it seems so are hardly in sympathy with Matthew Arnold himself. And if the discussion seems to any one too often to take the form of a critical examination, let him remember Mr. Arnold's own words in comparing the treatment of Milton by Macaulay and by M. Scherer: -

"Whoever comes to the Essay on Milton with the desire to get at the real truth about Milton, whether as a man or a poet, will feel that the essay in nowise helps him. A reader who only wants rhetoric, a reader who wants a panegyric on Milton, a panegyric on the Puritans, will find what he wants. A reader who wants criticism will be disappointed."

I have endeavoured, in dealing with the master of all English critics in the latter half of the nineteenth century, to "help the reader who wants criticism."


FOOTNOTES:

[1] Mr Arthur Galton's Matthew Arnold (London, 1897) adds a few pleasant notes, chiefly about dachshunds.

[2] It is impossible, in dealing with them, to be too grateful to Mr. T. B. Smart's Bibliography of Matthew Arnold (London, 1892), a most craftsmanlike piece of work.


CONTENTS.


CHAP.

I. LIFE TILL MARRIAGE, AND WORK TILL THE
PUBLICATION OF THE POEMS OF 1853

II. LIFE FROM 1851-62 - SECOND SERIES OF
POEMS - MEROPE - ON TRANSLATING HOMER

III. A FRENCH ETON - ESSAYS IN CRITICISM -
CELTIC LITERATURE - NEW POEMS - LIFE FROM
1862 TO 1867

IV. IN THE WILDERNESS

V. THE LAST DECADE

VI. CONCLUSION


CHAPTER I.

LIFE TILL MARRIAGE, AND WORK TILL THE PUBLICATION OF THE POEMS OF 1853.


Even those who are by no means greedy of details as to the biography of authors, may without inconsistency regret that Matthew Arnold's
Letters do not begin till he was just five-and-twenty. And then they are not copious, telling us in particular next to nothing about his literary work (which is, later, their constant subject) till he was past thirty. We could spare schoolboy letters, which, though often interesting, are pretty identical, save when written by little prigs. But the letters of an undergraduate - especially when the person is Matthew Arnold, and the University the Oxford of the years 1841-45 - ought to be not a little symptomatic, not a little illuminative. We might have learnt from them something more than we know at present about the genesis and early stages of that not entirely comprehensible or classifiable form of Liberalism in matters political, ecclesiastical, and general which, with a kind of altered Voltairian touch, attended his Conservatism in literature. Moreover, it is a real loss that we have scarcely anything from his own pen about his poems before Sohrab and Rustum - that is to say, about the great majority of the best of them. By the time at which we have full and frequent commentaries on himself, he is a married man, a harnessed and hard-working inspector of schools, feeling himself too busy for poetry, not as yet tempted by promptings within or invitations from without to betake himself to critical prose in any quantity or variety. Indeed, by a not much more than allowable hyperbole, we may say that we start with the book of his poetry all but shut, and the book of his prose all but unopened.

We must therefore make what we can of the subject, and of course a great deal more is to be made in such a case of the work than of the life. The facts of the latter are but scanty. Matthew Arnold, as all the world knows, was the son - the eldest son - of the famous Dr (Thomas) Arnold, Head-master of Rugby, and Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, where he had earlier been a Fellow of Oriel. Dr Arnold survives in the general memory now chiefly by virtue of his head-mastership, which was really a remarkable one, whatever distinction it may owe to the loyalty of such a group of pupils as his son, Dean Stanley, Clough, "Tom Brown" Hughes, and others. But he was, if not positively great, a notable and influential person in many ways. As a historian he was alert and intelligent, though perhaps too much under the influence of that subtlest and most dangerous kind of "popular breeze" which persuades those on whom it blows that they are sailing not with but away from the vulgar. As a scholar he was ingenious, if not very erudite or deep. He was really a master, and has been thought by some good judges a great master, of that admirable late Georgian academic style of English prose, which is almost the equal of the greatest. But he was, if not exactly cupidus novarum rerum in Church and State, very ready to entertain them; he was curiously deficient in logic; and though the religious sense was strong in him, he held, and transmitted to his son, the heresy - the foundation of all heresies - that religion is something that you can "bespeak," that you can select and arrange to your own taste; that it is not "to take or to leave" at your peril and as it offers itself.

On August 11, 1820, Dr Arnold married Mary Penrose, and as he had devoted his teaching energies, which were early developed, not to school or university work, but to the taking of private pupils at Laleham on the Thames, between Staines and Chertsey, their eldest son was born there, on Christmas Eve, 1822. He was always enthusiastic about the Thames valley, though not more so than it deserves, and in his very earliest letter (January 2, 1848) we find record of a visit, when he found "the stream with the old volume, width, shine, rapid fulness, 'kempshott,'[1] and swans, unchanged and unequalled." He was only six years old when his father was elected to the head-mastership of Rugby; he was educated in his early years at his birthplace, where an uncle, the Rev. John Buckland, carried on the establishment, and at the age of fourteen he was sent to Winchester, his father's school. Here he only remained a year, and entered Rugby in August 1837. He remained there for four years, obtaining an open Balliol scholarship in 1840, though he did not go up till October 1841. In 1840 he had also gained the prize for poetry at Rugby itself with Alaric at Rome , a piece which was immediately printed, but never reprinted by its author, though it is now easily obtainable in the 1896 edition of those poems of his which fell out of copyright at the seven years after his death.

It is an observation seldom falsified, that such exercises, by poets of the higher class, display neither their special characteristics, nor any special characteristics at all. Matthew Arnold's was not one of the exceptions. It is very much better than most school prize poems: it shows the critical and scholarly character of the writer with very fair foreshadowing; but it does not fore-shadow his poetry in the very least. It is quite free from the usual formal faults of a boy's verse, except some evidences of a deficient ear, especially for rhyme ("full" and "beautiful," "palaces" and "days"). It manages a rather difficult metre (the sixain rhymed ababcc and ending with an Alexandrine) without too much of the monotony which is its special danger. And some of the tricks which the boy-poet has caught are interesting and abode with him, such as the anadiplosis -

"Yes, there are stories registered on high,
Yes, there are stains Time's fingers cannot blot";

in which kind he was to produce some years later the matchless

"Still nursing the unconquerable hope,
Still clutching the inviolable shade,"

of the Scholar-Gipsy . On the whole, the thing is correct but colourless; even its melancholy is probably mere Byronism, and has nothing directly to do with the later quality of Dover Beach and Poor Matthias .

Of Mr Arnold's undergraduate years we have unluckily but little authentic record, and, as has been said, not one letter. The most interesting evidence comes from Principal Shairp's well-known lines in
Balliol Scholars, 1840-1843 , written, or at least published, many years later, in 1873: -

"The one wide-welcomed for a father's fame,
Entered with free bold step that seemed to claim
Fame for himself, nor on another lean.

So full of power, yet blithe and debonair,
Rallying his friends with pleasant banter gay,
Or half a-dream chaunting with jaunty air
Great words of Goethe, catch of Béranger,
We see the banter sparkle in his prose,
But knew not then the undertone that flows
So calmly sad, through all his stately lay."[2]

Like some other persons of much distinction, and a great many of little or none, he "missed his first," in December 1844; and though he obtained, three months later, the consolation prize of a Fellowship (at Oriel, too), he made no post-graduate stay of any length at the university. The then very general, though even then not universal, necessity of taking orders before very long would probably in any case have sent him wandering; for it is clear from the first that his bent was hopelessly anti-clerical, and he was not merely too honest, but much too proud a man, to consent to be put in one of the priests' offices for a morsel of bread. It may well be doubted - though he felt and expressed not merely in splendid passages of prose and verse for public perusal, but in private letters quite towards the close of his life, that passionate attachment which Oxford more than any other place of the kind inspires - whether he would have been long at home there as a resident. For the place has at once a certain republicanism and a certain tyranny about its idea, which could not wholly suit the aspiring and restless spirit of the author of Switzerland . None of her sons is important to Oxford -