Frederic Harrison

“ Now Arnold had this gift in supreme degree, in a degree superior to Johnson or to Hallam. He made far fewer mistakes than they did. He made very few mistakes. The touchstone of the great critic is to make very few mistakes, and never to be carried off his balance by any pet aversion or pet affection of his own, not to be biassed so much as a hair's breadth by any salient merit or any irritating defect, and always to keep an eye well open to the true proportion of any single book in the great world of men and of affairs, and in the mighty realm of general literature. ”

“ What we find so perplexing is, that the Master, who, in judging poetry and literature, had most definite principles, clear-cut canons of judgment, and very strict tests of good and bad, doctrines which he was always ready to expound, and always able to teach others, no sooner passes into philosophy, into politics, into theology, than he disclaims any system, principles, or doctrines of any kind. 'Oh!' we hear him cry, 'I am no philosopher, no politician, no theologian. ”

“ If any one doubt if Arnold had a true imagination, apart from his gnomic moralities, let him consider the conclusion of The Church of Brou. The gallant Duke of Savoy, killed in a boar hunt, is buried by his young widow in a magnificent tomb in the memorial Church of Brou, and so soon as the work is completed, the broken-hearted Duchess dies and is laid beside him underneath their marble effigies. The poet stands beside the majestic and lonely monument, and he breaks forth:—
So sleep, for ever sleep, O marble Pair! ”

“ As a poet, Arnold was indeed our Matteo senza errore, but to be faultless is not to be of the highest rank, just as Andrea del Sarto in painting was not of the highest rank. And we must confess that in exuberance of fancy, in imagination, in glow and rush of life, in tumultuous passion, in dramatic pathos, Arnold cannot claim any high rank at all. ”

“ Had he been able like Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, to regard himself from first to last as a poet, to devote his whole life to poetry, to live the life 'of thought and of austerity within'—which he craved as poet, but did not achieve as a man—then he might have left us poems more varied, more fanciful, more musical, more joyous. ”

“ His poetry had the classical spirit in a very peculiar and rare degree, and we can have little doubt now, when so much of Arnold's prose work in criticism has been accepted as standard opinion, and so much of his prose work in controversy has lost its interest and savour, that it is his poetry which will be longest remembered, and there his finest vein was reached. It may be said that no poet in the roll of our literature, unless it be Milton, has been so truly saturated to the very bone with the classical genius. ”

“ Arnold is never prosaic, and almost never tedious: but the didactic poet cannot possibly hold the attention of the groundlings for long. Empedocles on Etna, published at the age of thirty-one, still remains his most characteristic piece of any length, and it is in some ways his high-water mark of achievement. It has various moods, lyrical, didactic, dramatic—rhyme, blank verse, monologue, and song—it has his philosophy of life, his passion for nature, his enthusiam for the undying memories of Greece. ”

“ He is insensitive to cacophonies that would have made Tennyson or Shelley 'gasp and stare.' No law of Apollo is more sacred than this: that he shall not attain the topmost crag of Parnassus who crams his mouth while singing with a handful of gritty consonants.
It is an ungracious task to point to the ugly features of poems that have unquestionably refined modulation and exquisite polish. But where Nature has withheld the ear for music, no labour and no art can supply the want. ”

“ Let us take together Arnold's summing up of all the qualities of Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Shelley, and we shall see with what a just but loving hand he distributes the alternate need of praise and blame. Amant altertia Camœnæ. But of all the Muses, she of criticism loves most the alternate modulation of soprano and basso.
Not that Arnold was invariably right, or that all his judgments are unassailable. His canons were always right; but it is not in mortals to apply them unerringly to men and to things. He seems somewhat inclined to undervalue Tennyson, of whom he speaks so little. ”

“ With all his intense enjoyment of Nature, and his acute observation of nature, it never ends there. One great lesson, he says, Nature is ever teaching, it is blown in every wind—the harmony of labour and of peace—ohne Hast, ohne Rast. Every natural sight and sound has its moral warning: a yellow primrose is not a primrose to him, and nothing more: it reveals the poet of the primrose. The ethical lesson of Nature, which is the uniform burden of Arnold's poetry, has been definitely summed up by him in the sonnet to a preacher who talked loosely of our 'harmony with Nature.' ”

“ We are most of us trying to get what of Culture we can master, to see things as they are, to know the best, to attain to some little measure of Sweetness and Light—and we can only regret that our great Master in all these things has carried his secret to the grave. ”

“ Not only is Arnold what Aristotle called ἐθικώτατος, a moralist in verse, but his moral philosophy of life and man is at once large, wise, and deep. He is abreast of the best modern thought, and he meets the great problems of destiny and what is now called the 'foundations of belief,' like a philosopher and not like a rhetorician, a sentimentalist, or a theologian. ”

“ Arnold committed one of the few extravagances of his whole life when he told us that poetry was 'the criticism of life,' that the function of criticism was 'to see all things as they really are in themselves'—the very thing Kant told us we could never do. ”

“ It is difficult for the poor Philistine to grasp the notion that all this devotional sympathy with the Psalmists, Prophets, and Evangelists, this beautiful enthusiasm for 'the secret of Jesus' and the 'profound originality' of Paul, was possible to a man whose intellect rejected the belief that there was even any probable evidence for the personality of God, or for the celestial immortality of the soul, who flatly denied the existence of miracle, and treated the entire fabric of dogmatic theology as a figment. ”

“ Matthew Arnold, the philosopher, the politician, the theologian, does not need prolonged notice, inasmuch as he was anxious to disclaim any title to be ranked as any one of the three. But he entered into many a keen debate on philosophy, politics, and religion; and, whilst disavowing for himself any kind of system of belief, he sate in judgment on the beliefs of others, and assured us that the mission of Culture was to be supreme Court of Appeal for all the brutalities of the vulgar, and all the immaturities of the ignorant. ”

“ Of more than one hundred pieces, short or long, that Arnold has left, only a few here and there can be classed as poems of fancy, pure description, or frank surrender of the spirit to the sense of joy and of beauty. Whether he is walking in Hyde Park or lounging in Kensington Gardens, apostrophising a gipsy child, recalling old times in Rugby Chapel, mourning over a college friend, or a dead bird, or a pet dog, he always comes back to the dominant problems of human life. As he buries poor 'Geist,' he speculates on the future life of man ”

“ However superior in fancy and in melody, when Tennyson deals with the mysteries of philosophy, too often he descends into the vague commonplaces of hymnology, or the devotional rhapsodies of an ambitious curate denouncing the heresies of Darwin: And Browning, with all his mastery of dramatic psychology, has neither the philosophic training, nor the grasp of the ultimate problem of Man and his Environment which the instructed mind finds ever to the front with Arnold. ”

“ But for us,—who believe in right reason, in the duty and possibility of extricating and elevating of our best self, in the progress of humanity towards perfection,—for us the framework of society, that theatre on which this august drama has to unroll itself, is sacred; and whoever administers it, and however we may seek to remove them from their tenure of administration, yet while they administer, we steadily and with undivided heart support them in repressing anarachy and disorder; because without order there can be no society, and without society there can be no human perfection. ”

“ Though he has not left us an exhaustive review of our literature, as Sainte-Beuve has done for France; he has given us a group of short, lucid, suggestive canons of judgment, which serve as landmarks to an entire generation of critics.
The function of criticism—though not high and mighty as Arnold proclaimed it with superb assurance—is not so futile an art as the sixty-two minor poets and the 11,000 minor novelists are now wont to think it. ”

“ Indeed, since the very definition of Culture was 'to know the best that had ever been done and said,' to be 'a study of perfection,' 'to see things as they really are,' this Delphic priest of Culture was compelled to give us oracles about all the dark problems that harass the souls of philosophers, of politicians, and of theologians. ”

“ On the other hand, too much of what is now called criticism is the improvised chatter of a raw lad, portentously ignorant of the matter in hand. It is not the 'indolent reviewer' that we now suffer under, but the 'lightning reviewer,' the young man in a hurry with a Kodak, who finally disposes of a new work on the day of its publication. ”

“ It is thus so hard for any young person, for women, to become great in criticism; the young lack the wide experience; women lack the cool judicial temper; they are too sympathetic, unwilling to see the faults where they admire and love, or to see merits where they dislike, It is common enough to find those who are very sensitive to some rare charm, very acute to detect a subtle quality, or justly severe on some seductive failure. ”

“ The gnomic poets of Greece, though often cited for their maxims, were the least poetic of the Greek singers, and the least endowed with imagination. Aristotle calls Empedocles more 'the natural philosopher than the poet.' Solon indeed, with all his wisdom, can be as tedious as Wordsworth, and Theognis is usually prosaic. ”

“ It is his greatest poem: but the average reader finds it twelve hundred lines too long, too austere, too indecisive; and the poet himself withdrew it for years from a sense of its monotony of doubt and sadness, until he was encouraged by Browning to restore it to his collection.
The high merit of Arnold's verse is the uniform level of fine, if austere, thought, embodied in clear, apt, graceful, measured form. ”

“ If he cannot range himself under any of the known schemes, if he be neither intuitionist, experimentalist, or eclectic, if he incline neither to authority, nor to freedom, neither to revelation, nor to skepticism, nor to any of the ways of thinking that lie between any of these extremes—then he must have a brand-new, self-originated, dominant scheme of his own. ”

“ Culture whispers it to me, and I tell you; and only the Philistines, Anarchs, and Obscurantists object.' Now, it is obvious that no man can honestly dispose of all that lies inter apices of Philosophy, Politics, and Religion, unless he have some scheme of dominant ideas. ”

“ Arnold's current phrases still in circulation are more numerous than those of Disraeli, and are more simple and apt than Carlyle's. These ἒπεα πτερόεντα fly through the speech of cultivated men, pass current in the market-place; they are generative, efficient, and issue into act. ”