Culture & Anarchy. Arnold Matthew
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By his free yet courteous handling of subjects the most august and conventions the most respectable, he won to his side a band of disciples who had been repelled by the brutality and cocksureness of more boisterous teachers. He was as temperate in eulogy as in condemnation; he could hint a virtue and hesitate a liking.
It happens, as we have just seen, that his earliest and latest criticisms were criticisms of Institutions, and a great part of his critical writing deals with similar topics; but these will be more conveniently considered when we come to estimate his effect on Society and Politics. That effect will perhaps be found to have been more considerable than his contemporaries imagined; for, though it became a convention to praise his literary performances and judgments, it was no less a convention to dismiss as visionary and absurd whatever he wrote about the State and the Community.
But in the meantime we must say a word about his critical method when applied to Life, and when applied to Books. When one speaks of criticism, one is generally thinking of prose. But, when we speak of Arnold's criticism, it is necessary to widen the scope of one's observation; for he was never more essentially the critic than when he concealed the true character of his method in the guise of poetry. Even if we decline to accept his strange judgment that all poetry "is at bottom a criticism of life," still we must perceive that, as a matter of fact, many of his own poems are as essentially critical as his Essays or his Lectures.
We all remember that he poked fun at those misguided Wordsworthians who seek to glorify their master by claiming for him an "ethical system as distinctive and capable of exposition as Bishop Butler's," and "a scientific system of thought." But surely we find in his own poetry a sustained doctrine of self-mastery, duty, and pursuit of truth, which is essentially ethical, and, in its form, as nearly "scientific" and systematic as the nature of poetry permits. And this doctrine is conveyed, not by positive, hortatory, or didactic methods, but by Criticism—the calm praise of what commends itself to his judgment, the gentle but decisive rebuke of whatever offends or darkens or misleads. Of him it may be truly said, as he said of Goethe, that
He took the suffering human race,
He read each wound, each weakness clear;
And struck his finger on the place,
And said: Thou ailest here, and here.
His deepest conviction about "the suffering human race" would seem to have been that its worst miseries arise from a too exalted estimate of its capacities. Men are perpetually disappointed and disillusioned because they expect too much from human life and human nature, and persuade themselves that their experience, here and hereafter, will be, not what they have any reasonable grounds for expecting, but what they imagine or desire. The true philosophy is that which
Neither makes man too much a god,
Nor God too much a man.
Wordsworth thought it a boon to "feel that we are greater than we know": Arnold thought it a misfortune. Wordsworth drew from the shadowy impressions of the past the most splendid intimations of the future. Against such vain imaginings Arnold set, in prose, the "inexorable sentence" in which Butler warned us to eschew pleasant self-deception; and, in verse, the persistent question—
Say, what blinds us, that we claim the glory
Of possessing powers not our share?
He rebuked
Wishes unworthy of a man full-grown.
He taught that there are
Joys which were not for our use designed.
He warned discontented youth not to expect greater happiness from advancing years, because
one thing only has been lent
To youth and age in common—discontent.
Friendship is a broken reed, for
Our vaunted life is one long funeral,
and even Hope is buried with the "faces that smiled and fled."
Death, at least in some of its aspects, seemed to him the
Stern law of every mortal lot,
Which man, proud man, finds hard to bear;
And builds himself I know not what
Of second life I know not where.
And yet, in gleams of happier insight, he saw the man who "flagged not in this earthly strife,"
His soul well-knit, and all his battles won,
mount, though hardly, to eternal life. And, as he mused over his father's grave, the conviction forced itself upon his mind that somewhere in the "labour-house of being" there still was employment for that father's strength, "zealous, beneficent, firm."
Here indeed is the more cheerful aspect of his "criticism of life." Such happiness as man is capable of enjoying is conditioned by a frank recognition of his weaknesses and limitations; but it requires also for its fulfilment the sedulous and dutiful employment of such powers and opportunities as he has.
First and foremost, he must realize the "majestic unity" of his nature, and not attempt by morbid introspection to dissect himself into
Affections, Instincts, Principles, and Powers,
Impulse and Reason, Freedom and Control.
Then he must learn that
To its own impulse every action stirs.
He must live by his own light, and let earth live by hers. The forces of nature are to be in this respect his teachers—
But with joy the stars perform their shining,
And the sea its long moon-silvered roll;
For self-poised they live, nor pine with noting
All the fever of some differing soul.
But, though he is to learn from Nature and love Nature and enjoy Nature, he is to remember that she
never was the friend of one, Nor promised love she could not give;
and so he is not to expect too much from her, or demand impossible boons. Still less is he to be content with feeling himself "in harmony" with her; for
Man covets all which Nature has, but more.
That "more" is Conscience and the Moral Sense.
Man must begin, know this, where Nature ends;
Nature and man can never be fast friends.
And this brings us to the idea of Duty as set forth in his poems, and Duty resolves itself into three main elements: Truth—Work—Love. Truth comes first. Man's prime duty is to know things as they are. Truth can only be attained by light, and light he must cultivate, he must worship. Arnold's highest praise for a lost friend is that he was "a child of light"; that he had "truth without alloy,"
And joy in light, and power to spread the joy.
The saddest part of that friend's death is the fear that it may bring,
After light's term, a term of cecity:
the best hope for the future, that light will return and banish the follies, sophistries, delusions, which have accumulated in the darkness. "Lucidity of soul" may be—nay, must be, "sad"; but it is not less imperative. And the truth which light reveals must not only be sought earnestly and cherished carefully, but even, when the cause demands it, championed strenuously. The voices of conflict, the joy of battle, the "garments rolled in blood," the "burning and fuel of fire" have little place in Arnold's poetry. But once at any rate he bursts into a strain so passionate, so combatant, that it is difficult for a disciple to recognize his voice; and then the motive is a summons to a last charge for Truth and Light—
They out-talk'd thee, hiss'd thee, tore thee?
Better men fared thus before thee;
Fired their ringing shot and pass'd,
Hotly charged—and sank at last.
Charge