George Saintsbury

“ And here, once more, the things receive precisely their right treatment, the treatment proportioned and adjusted at once to their own value and nature and to the use which their critic is intending to make of them. For it is one of the greatest literary excellences of the Essays in Criticism that, with rare exceptions, they bear a real relation to each other and to the whole—that they are not a bundle but an organism; a university, not a mob.
The subjects of the two last essays, Spinoza and Marcus Aurelius, may at first sight, and not at first sight only, seem oddly chosen. ”

“ And neither comparison is necessary, because the great fault of Literature and Dogma appears, not when it is considered as a piece of doubtful or not doubtful taste, but when it is regarded as a serious composition.
In the first place, the child-like fashion in which Mr Arnold swallowed the results of that very remarkable “science,” Biblical criticism, has always struck some readers with astonishment and a kind of terror. This new La Fontaine asking everybody, “Avez-vous lu Kuenen?” is a lesson more humbling to the pride of literature than almost any that can be found. ”

“ A not unfriendly critic might have pointed out, with gloomy forebodings, that a sign of law is not necessarily a sign of poetry, and that, as a prophet of his own had laid it down, poetry should “transport” not “fix.” At any rate, it is clear to any one who reads the book that the author was in a mood of deliberate provocation and exaggeration—not a favourable mood for art. The quiet grace of Sophocles is perhaps impossible to reproduce in English, but Mr Arnold’s verse is more than quiet, it is positively tame. ”

“ From the moment of its appearance to the present day, this piece has been an unceasing joy to all who love literature with a sane devotion. Its composition is excellent; it selects just the right points, dwells on them in just the right way, and drops them just when we have had enough. In mere style it yields to nothing of its author’s, and is conspicuously and quite triumphantly free from his repetitions and other mannerisms. No English writer—indeed one may say no writer at all—has ever tempered such a blend of quiet contempt with perfect good-humour and perfect good-breeding. ”

“ Nor can one help regretting that so long a time has been lost in putting before the public a cheap, complete, handy, and fairly handsome edition of the whole of Mr Arnold’s prose. There is no doubt at all that the existence of such an edition, even before his death, was part cause, and a large part of the cause, of the great and continued popularity of De Quincey; and it is a thousand pities that, before a generation arises which knows him not, Mr Arnold is not allowed the same chance. ”

“ The professor, the very thorough-going student, the literary historian, must go farther; the idle person with a love of literature will; but nobody need.
And the Introduction (for after all we can all make our selections for ourselves, with a very little trouble) is still more precious. I know few critical essays which give me more pleasure in reading and re-reading than this. Not that I agree with it by any means as a whole; but he is in the mere “Pettys” of criticism (it is true not many seem to get beyond) who judges a critical essay by his own agreement with it. ”

“ He might exercise one more freely at one time, one at another; but the author of the Preface of 1853 was a critic, and a ripe one, in his heyday of poetry, the author of Westminster Abbey was a poet in his mellowest autumn of criticism. ”

“ But just at this moment, and, in fact, in an increasing degree ever since Mr Arnold wrote, the glorification of France has become difficult or impossible. Sir Erskine May, it seems, had warned him in vain about the political effect of French Equality even at that time: but one need not confine oneself to politics. At the end of the nineteenth century France has enjoyed the blessings of social equality, enforced by compulsory division of estates, for a hundred years and more. ”

“ But between 1830 and 1860 the French had a very strong critical school indeed—a school whose scholars and masters showed the dæmonic, or at least prophetic, inspiration of Michelet, the milder and feebler but still inspiring enthusiasm of Quinet, the academic clearness and discipline of Villemain and Nisard, the Lucianic wit of Mérimée, the matchless appreciation of Gautier, and, above all, the great new critical idiosyncrasy of Sainte-Beuve. Between these men there were the widest possible differences, not merely of personal taste and genius, but of literary theory and practice. ”

“ Unless we are to assign some quite new meaning to “criticism”—and the assignment of new meanings to the terms of an explanation is the worst of all explanatory improprieties—poetry is not a criticism of life. It may be a passionate interpretation of life—that has seemed to some not a bad attempt at the unachievable,—a criticism it cannot be. ”

“ It would be cruel, and is quite unnecessary, to insist on the too certain fact that, in this instance at any rate, these excellent qualities were accompanied by a distinct weakness of will, by a mania for sitting between two stools, and by that—it may be lovable, it may be even estimable—incapacity to think, to speak, to behave like a man of this world, which besets the conscientious idealist who is not a fanatic. On the contrary, let us not grudge Mr Arnold a hero so congenial to himself, and so little repulsive to any of us. ”

“ The improvement of the mere fashion, as compared with the fantasticalities of the Friendship’s Garland period, is simply enormous. And the praise which follows is praise really in the grand style—praise, the style and quality of which are positively rejoicing to the heart from their combination of fervour and accuracy, from their absolute fulfilment of the ideal of a word shockingly misused in these latter days, the word Appreciation. The personal sympathy which Mr Arnold evidently had with Gray neither makes nor mars here; all is purely critical, purely literary. ”

“ To care very much for that on Count Tolstoi is not easy for those who are unfashionable enough not to care very much for the eloquent Russian himself. Nothing is satisfactory that one can only read in translations. But Mr Arnold, in whom a certain perennial youthfulness was (as it often, if not always, is in the chosen of the earth) one of his most amiable features, seems to have conceived a new engouement for this new and quaintly flavoured Russian literature. ”

“ Mr Arnold showed his genius, his faculty of putting
“What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed.”
And when a man does this in prose or in verse, in criticism or in creation, he has his reward—a reward that no man can take away, even if any one were disposed to try.
As a whole, Mixed Essays itself, which followed Last Essays on Church and Religion at an interval of two years, is an almost immeasurably livelier book than its predecessor, and to some judgments at least seems to excel that predecessor in solid value as much as in the graces. ”

“ Prose fiction may be and should be such; drama may be and should be such; but not poetry. And it is especially unfortunate that such poetry as answers best to the term is exactly that poetry which Mr Arnold liked least. Dryden and Pope have much good and true criticism of life: The Vanity of Human Wishes is magnificent criticism of life; but Mr Arnold has told us that Dryden and Pope and Johnson are but “classics of our prose.” That there is criticism of life in poetry is true; but then in poetry there is everything. ”

“ Has any of my readers many—or any—correspondents like Scott or like Southey, like Lamb or like FitzGerald, like Madame de Sévigné or like Lady Mary? He is lucky if he has. Indeed, the simplicity of the Letters is the very surest evidence of a real simplicity in the nature. In the so-called best letter-writers it may be shrewdly suspected that this simplicity is, with rare exceptions, absent. Scott had it; but then Scott’s genius as a novelist overflowed into his letters, as did Southey’s talent of universal writing, and Lamb’s unalterable quintessence of quaintness. ”

“ This “Liberal of the future,” as Mr Arnold styles himself, begins, with orthodoxy if not with philosophy, by warning the Tories off entirely. “They cannot really profit the nation, or give it what it needs.” Perhaps; but suppose we ask for a little reason, just a ghost of a premiss or two for this extensive conclusion? There is no voice, neither any that answers. And then, the Tories dismissed with a wave to all but temporary oblivion (they are to be allowed, it seems, to appear from time to time to chasten Liberalism) , our prophet turns to Liberalism itself. ”

“ The blank-verse tail-piece is finer still in execution; it is, with the still finer companion-coda of Sohrab and Rustum, the author’s masterpiece in the kind, and it is, like that, an early and consummate example of Mr Arnold’s favourite device of finishing without a finish, of “playing out the audience,” so to speak, with something healing and reconciling, description, simile, what not, to relieve the strain of his generally sad philosophy and his often melancholy themes.
One may less admire, despite its famous and often-quoted line ”

“ If a critic makes too many provisos, if he “buts” too much, if he attempts to paint the warts as well as the beauties, he will be accused of want of sympathy, he will be taxed with timorousness and hedging, at best he will be blamed for wire-drawn and hair-splitting argument. The preambles of exposition, the conclusions of summing up, will often be considered tedious or impertinent. The opposite plan of selecting a nail and hitting that on the head till you have driven it home was, in fact, as much Mr Arnold’s as it was Macaulay’s. ”

“ Let it be added, too, that if not as the sole, yet as the chief, herald and champion of the new criticism, as a front-fighter in the revolutions of literary view which have distinguished the latter half of the nineteenth century in England, Mr Arnold will be forgotten or neglected at the peril of the generations and the individuals that forget or neglect him.
Little need be added about the loss of actual artistic pleasure which such neglect must bring. Mr Arnold may never, in prose, be read with quite the same keenness of delight with which we read him in poetry ”

“ But this is only saying that a bad Introduction is a bad thing, which does not get us much beyond the intellectual edification of the niece of Gorboduc. Unless the introducer is a boggler, the Introduction will probably do good to those who want it and can be neglected by those who don’t; while in the rarer and better cases it will itself acquire, or even possess from the first, that very value as a point de repère which Mr Arnold had discussed. It will be good relatively and good in itself,—a contribution at once to the literature of knowledge and to the literature of power. ”

“ It is true, indeed,—it is an arch-truth which has been too rarely recognised,—that something like complete idleness, or at any rate complete freedom from regular mental occupation, is necessary to the man who is to do poetic work great in quality and in quantity at once. The hardest occupation—and Mr Arnold’s, though hard, was not exactly that—will indeed leave a man sufficient time, so far as mere time is concerned, to turn out as much verse as the most fertile of poets has ever produced. ”

“ Almost for the first time, too, we have ancient literature treated more or less like modern—neither from the merely philological point of view, nor with reference to the stock platitudes and traditions about it. The critic is not afraid of doctrines and general principles—in fact, he is rather too fond of them—but his object is anything rather than mere arid deduction and codification. He has the aesthetic sense as thoroughly as Hazlitt and Lamb, but without the wilfulness of either, or at least with a different kind of wilfulness from that of either. ”

“ One could always pick plenty of holes in “Equality,” could suggest that the Greeks did not make such a very good thing of it with their equality (which included slavery) ; that the Biblical point is far from past argument; that M. Zola, for instance, supplies an interesting commentary on Mr Hamerton’s rose-coloured pictures of the French peasantry; that whatever Mr Arnold’s own lot may have been, others who have lived in small French towns with the commis voyageur have not found his manners so greatly superior to those of the English bagman. ”

“ His manner, except in his rare “thorn-crackling” moments, and sometimes even then, will carry off even the less agreeable matter; with matter at all agreeable, it has a hardly to be exaggerated charm.
But it is in his general literary position that Mr Arnold’s strongest title to eminence consists. There have certainly been greater poets in English: I think there have been greater critics. But as poet and critic combined, no one but Dryden and Coleridge can be for a moment placed beside him: the fate of the false Florimel must await all others who dare that adventure. ”

“ When Mr Arnold attacks these poor folk for saying that Wordsworth’s poetry is precious because its philosophy is sound, we remember a certain Preface with its “all depends on the subject,” and chuckle a little, a very little. But Mr Arnold is right here. No philosophy, no subject, will make poetry without poetical treatment, and the consequence is that The Excursion and The Prelude are, as wholes, not good poems at all. They contain, indeed, passages of magnificent poetry. ”

“ For the Professor of Poetry at Oxford is neither, like some Professors, bound to the chariot-wheels of examinations and courses of set teaching, nor, like others, has he to feel that his best, his most original, efforts can have no interest, and hardly any meaning, for all but a small circle of experts. ”