Walter Theodore Watts-Dunton and Joshua Girling Fitch

“ What he seems to have meant is that poetry is the crowning fruit of a criticism of life; that just as the poet’s metrical effects are and must be the result of a thousand semiconscious generalizations upon the laws of cause and effect in metric art, so the beautiful things he says about life and the beautiful pictures he paints of life are the result of his generalizations upon life as he passes through it, and consequently that the value of his poetry consists in the beauty and the truth of his generalizations. ”

“ If our words are to have any meaning, if our judgments are to have any solidity, we must not heap that supreme praise upon poetry of an order immeasurably inferior.” He does not see that the two passages cannot properly be compared at all. In the one case the poet gives us a dramatic picture; in the other; a comment on a dramatic picture.
Perhaps, indeed, the place Arnold held and still holds as a critic is due more to his exquisite felicity in expressing his views than to the penetration of his criticism. Nothing can exceed the easy grace of his prose at the best. ”

“ To say this is not in the least to disparage Arnold. “A man is more like the age in which he lives,” says the Chinese aphorism, “than he is like his own father and mother,” and Arnold’s polemical writings alone are sufficient to show that the waters of life he drank were from fountains distilled, seven times distilled, at the topmost slope of 19th-century civilization. Mr George Meredith’s “Old Chartist” exhibits far more of the temper of acceptance than does any poem by Matthew Arnold.
His most famous critical dictum is that poetry is a “criticism of life.” ”

“ But so imperfect is the human mind that it can rarely apprehend or grasp simultaneously these two kinds of emphasis. While to the born prosateur the emphasis of sense comes first, and refuses to be more than partially conditioned by the emphasis of sound, to the born poet the emphasis of sound comes first, and sometimes will, even as in the case of Shelley, revolt against the tyranny of the emphasis of sense. ”

“ Beauty was their watchword, as it had been the watchword of their immediate predecessors—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and Byron. That this group of early 19th-century poets might be divided into two—those whose primary quest was physical beauty, and those whose primary quest was moral beauty—is no doubt true. Still, in so far as beauty was their quest they were all akin. And so with the Victorian group to which Arnold belonged. As to the position which he takes among them opinions must necessarily vary. On the whole, his place in the group will be below all the others. ”

“ But if the Greek temper expresses itself, as is generally supposed, in the sweet acceptance and melodious utterance of the beauty of the world as it is, accepting that beauty without inquiring as to what it means and as to whither it goes, it is difficult to see where in Arnold’s poetry this temper declares itself. ”

“ The reflections which come to a young Oxonian lying on the grass and longing to escape life’s fitful fever without shuffling off this mortal coil, are, no doubt, beautiful reflections beautifully expressed, but the temper they show is the very opposite of the Greek. ”

“ What they found was a broad-shouldered, manly—almost burly—Englishman with a fine countenance, bronzed by the open air of England, wrinkled apparently by the sun, wind-worn as an English skipper’s, open and frank as a fox-hunting squire’s—and yet a countenance whose finely chiselled features were as high-bred and as commanding as Wellington’s or Sir Charles Napier’s. ”

“ It is to bring home to the English people a conviction that education ought to be a national concern, that it should not be left entirely to local, or private, or irresponsible initiative, that the watchful jealousy so long shown by Liberals, and especially by Nonconformists, in regard to state action was a grave practical mistake, and that in an enlightened democracy, animated by a progressive spirit and noble and generous ideals, it was the part of wisdom to invoke the collective power of the state to give effect to those ideals. ”

“ The great attraction of the gypsies to Englishmen of a certain temperament is that they alone seem to feel the joyous acceptance of life which is supposed to be specially Greek. Hence it would have been but reasonable to look, if anywhere, for the expression of Arnold’s Greek temper in a poem which sets out to describe the feelings of the student who, according to Glanville’s story, left Oxford to wander over England with the Romanies. But instead of this we got the old fretting about the unsatisfactoriness of modern civilization. ”

“ Where in any individual the first of these impulses is stronger than usual, a complete academic training is a gain; but where the second of these impulses is the dominant one, the effect of the academic habit upon the mind at its most sensitive and most plastic period is apt to be crippling. In regard to Matthew Arnold, it would be a bold critic of his life and his writings who should attempt to say what his work would have been if his training had been different. In his judgments on Goethe, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley and Hugo, it may be seen how strong was his impulse to bow to authority. ”

“ In the individual no less than in the species the history of man’s development is the history of the struggle between the impulse to express original personal force and the impulse to make that force bow to the authority of custom. ”

“ In one of his own most charming critical essays he contrasts the poetry of Homer, which consists of “natural thoughts in natural words,” with the poetry of Tennyson, which consists of “distilled thoughts in distilled words.” “Distilled” is one of the happiest words to be found in poetical criticism, and may be used with equal aptitude in the criticism of life. To most people the waters of life come with all their natural qualities—sweet or bitter—undistilled. ”

“ But this is saying no more than is said in the line—
“Rien n’est beau que le vrai; le vrai seul est aimable”—
or in the still more famous lines—
To suppose that Arnold confounded the poet with the writer of pensées would be absurd. Yet having decided that poetry consists of generalizations on human life, in reading poetry he kept on the watch for those generalizations, and at last seemed to think that the less and not the more they are hidden behind the dramatic action, and the more unmistakably they are intruded as generalizations, the better. ”

“ When it is said that he was the son of the famous Dr Arnold of Rugby, and that Winchester, Rugby and Balliol College, Oxford, contributed their best towards his education, it seems superfluous to add that, in estimating Matthew Arnold and his work, training no less than original endowment has to be considered. A full academic training has its disadvantages as well as its gains. ”

“ But such lines should no doubt form the basis of the poem, and weaker lines—lines in which there is no such combination of the three kinds of emphasis—should be sparingly used, and never used for makeshift purposes. Now, neither by instinct nor by critical study was Arnold ever able to apprehend this law of prosody. If he does write a line of the first order, metrically speaking, he seems to do so by accident. Such weak lines as these are constantly occurring—
Much has been said about what is called the “Greek temper” of Matthew Arnold’s muse. ”