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

"Om-m-ject and sum-m-m-ject!" "om-m-ject and sum-m-m-ject," in short, as that famous flash of Thomas Carlyle's genius discovered and summarised Coleridge, and with Coleridge the whole nineteenth century. A screed of jargon - a patter of shibboleth - and that is all. Never a thought for this momentous question - "May you not possibly - indeed most probably - in attempting to remove what you choose to consider as the defects of these classes, remove also what you acknowledge to be their virtues - the governing faculty of the upper class, the conduct and moral health of the middle, the force and vigour of the lower?" A momentous question indeed, and one which, as some think, has got something of an answer since, and no comfortable one!

I must apologise, and I do, for anything that may appear too polemical in this chapter. But the circumstances of the case made it almost as impossible, as it would have been uninteresting, to be merely recitative and colourless; and Mr Arnold's own example gives ample licence. In particular, any one who has had actual and close knowledge of the actual progress of politics for many years may be pardoned for speaking with some decision on the practice of sitting at ease in Zion, and raying out curious observations on Barbarians and Eutrapelia and the character of Mr Quinion. We may have too little of such things in English politics - no doubt for a good many years before Mr Arnold's day we had too little of them. But too much, though a not unpopular, is a very clumsy and very unscientific antidote to too little; and in Mr Arnold's own handling of politics, I venture to think that there was too much of them by a very great deal.

It is very pleasant to turn from the literary results of this period, from the spectacle of Pegasus

"Stumbling in miry roads of alien art,"

and harnessing himself to all manner of unsuitable vehicles, to the private history of the decade. This, though sadly chequered by Mr Arnold's first domestic troubles, was on the whole prosperous, was somewhat less laborious than the earlier years, and was lightened by ever more of the social and public distractions, which no man entirely dislikes, and which - to a certain extent and in a certain way - Mr Arnold did not dislike at all. The changes of occupation and of literary aim by the termination of the professorship coincided, as such things have a habit of doing, with changes in place and circumstance. The Chester Square house grew too small for the children, and a move to Harrow was first meditated and then achieved. A very pleasant letter to his mother, in November 1867, tells how he was present at the farewell dinner to Dickens on his departure for America, how they wanted him (vainly) to come to the high table and speak, and how Lord Lytton finally brought him into his own speech. He adds that some one has given him "a magnificent box of four hundred Manilla cheroots" (he must surely have counted wrong, for they usually make these things in two-hundred-and-fifties or five-hundreds), welcome to hand on, though he did not smoke himself. In another he expresses the evangelical desire to "do Mr Swinburne some good."

But in January 1868 his baby-child Basil died; and the intense family affection, which was one of his strongest characteristics, suffered of course cruelly, as is recorded in a series of touching letters to his sister and mother. He fell and hurt himself at Cannon Street, too, but was comforted by his sister with a leading case about an illiterate man who fell into a reservoir through not reading a notice. The Harrow house became a reality at Lady Day, and at Midsummer he went to stay at Panshanger, and "heard the word 'Philistine' used a hundred times during dinner and 'Barbarian' nearly as often" (it must be remembered that the "Culture and Anarchy" articles were coming out now). This half-childish delight in such matters (like Mr Pendennis's "It's all in the papers, and my name too!") is one of the most fascinating things about him, and one of not a few, proving that, if there was some affectation, there was no dissimulation in his nature. Too many men, I fear, would have said nothing about them, or assumed a lofty disdain. In September he mentions to Mr Grant Duff a plan (which one only wishes he had carried out, letting all the "Dogma" series go [Greek: kat ouron] as it deserved) for "a sketch of Greek poetry, illustrated by extracts in harmonious prose." This would have been one of the few great literary histories of the world, and so Apollo kept it in his own lap. The winter repeated, far more heavily, the domestic blow of the spring, and Tom, his eldest son, who had always been delicate, died, aged sixteen only, at Harrow, where since the removal he had been at school. There is something about this in the
Letters ; but on the great principle of curæ leves , less, as we should expect, than about the baby's death.

In February next year Mr Arnold's double repute, as a practical and official "educationist" and as a man of letters, brought him the offer of the care of Prince Thomas of Savoy, son of the Duke of Genoa, and grandson of Victor Emmanuel, who was to attend Harrow School and board with the Arnolds. The charge, though honourable and, I suppose, profitable, might not have been entirely to the taste of everybody; but it seemed to Mr Arnold a new link with the Continent, and he welcomed it. The same year saw a visit to Knebworth, and a very interesting and by no means unsound criticism on that important event in the life of a poet, the issue of the first collected edition of his poems.[3] This was in two volumes, and is now rather precious. "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 perhaps more 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." One can only query whether poetry has anything to do with "modern development," and desiderate the addition to "sentiment" of "art." He seems to imply that Mr Gladstone personally prevented his appointment to a commissionership under the Endowed Schools Act. But the year ended with a complimentary reference from Mr Disraeli at Latimers about "Sweetness and Light."

In February 1870 the famous Persian cat Atossa (now in the most comfortable lap of all the gods or goddesses, with Hodge and Bona Marietta and Hinse of Hinsfeldt) makes her first appearance; and in June Mr Arnold received the Oxford D.C.L. He set it down to "a young and original sort of man, Lord Salisbury, being Chancellor"; and Lord Salisbury himself afterwards told him that "no doubt he ought to have addressed him as 'vir dulcissime et lucidissime.'" But though he was much pleased by his reception, he thought Lord Salisbury "dangerous," as being unliterary, and only scientific and religious in his tastes.

In December he had an amusing and (as it ended well) not unsatisfactory experience of the ways of Income Tax Commissioners. These gentlemen acted on even vaguer principles than those on which they once assessed a poor dramatic amateur, who had by accident received £6 "author's rights" for a week, at £300 per annum, on the sound arithmetical argument that there are fifty (indeed, there are fifty-two) weeks in a year, and that fifty times six is three hundred. They put Mr Arnold's literary profits at £1000, and he had to expostulate in person before they would let him down to £200, though he pathetically explained that "he should have to write more articles than he ever had done" to prevent his being a loser even at that. About the catastrophe of the Année Terrible , his craze for "righteousness" makes him a very little Pecksniffian - one thinks of the Tower of Siloam. But it is pleasant to hear that, early in 1871, they are arranging for him "a perfect district, Westminster and a small rural part near Harrow." So one hopes that the days of posting from shire to shire and subsisting on buns were over. He is interested about Deutsch (the comet of a season for his famous Talmud articles), receives the Commandership of the Crown of Italy for his services to Prince Thomas, and is proposed for the Middlesex magistracy, but (to one's sorrow) declines. There is fishing at Chenies ( vide an admirable essay of Mr Froude's) in the early summer, a visit to Switzerland in the later, and in September "the pigs are grown very large and handsome, and experts advise their conversion into bacon." But Mrs Arnold "does not like the idea." Indeed this is the drawback of pig-keeping, which is otherwise a most fascinating pastime; but you can escape it, and unite pleasure with profit, by merely breeding the pigs and selling the litters young.

After this respite fate was again cruel. On February 16, 1872, Mr Arnold's second son died at Harrow, and again the reception of the blow and its effect are marked by lesser voicefulness in the grief. Yet one phrase, "I cannot write his name without stopping to look at it in stupefaction at his not being alive," is equal to volumes. The letters of this year are few, but in September begins a correspondence of some interest and duration with a French pastor, M. Fontanès. Nor does 1873 give much except description of a tour to Italy, while in May the Arnolds moved from Harrow, with its painful memories, to Cobham, which was Mr Arnold's home for the rest of his life. In September he "shoots worse than ever" ( vide Friendship's Garland ) in the famous preserves of Six Mile Bottom, and soon after his mother dies. But it is not given to all men not to be motherless till they themselves are fifty. And 1874 is again rather barren, even such yield as it gives being rather didactic and controversial, as for instance in a letter to his sister, who had apparently remonstrated with some vigour against the tone of
Literature and Dogma . A pleasant letter to Miss Kingsley on her father's death (1875) puts in good evidence against the charge of grudging appreciation of contemporaries which has often been brought against Mr Arnold, and which some unguarded expressions, rather injudiciously published in other letters, may seem to confirm.

Another in December contains an instance[4] of that dislike to history, which long before its publication careful students of his works had always noticed in him. The fact is, that to a man of ideas, as Mr Arnold would have liked to be called - a man of theories or of crotchets, as in extending order of unkindness people actually did call him - history must be an annoying study. The things that ought to happen do not happen, and the things that do happen have to be awkwardly explained away or hazardously ignored His almost pettish disgust for the historic estimate in literature itself may have either caused or been caused by this more general dislike, and the dislike itself explains the leniency with which he always regarded the sheer guess-work of the Biblical critics. But it is possible to sympathise with his disapproval of the divorce of History and Law, which used to be united in the Oxford schools. Together they made a discipline, inferior indeed, but only inferior, to that of the great school of
Literæ Humaniores ,