Arnold

“ When we are in, you will follow me, Sergeant; I know the placing of the furniture and where the bed stands. The word is silence, absolute; once awakened, Arnold will fight—no man more desperately. But you know this as well as I. At the bedside you will fall upon him and bind him, trusting to me to keep him quiet with the rapier point. ”

“ Arnold had seemed to be unusually bright and full of fun. At about nine o’clock, he had gone into the library to write to the boys; and he had been away from the room for more than two hours, before they wondered at his absence. Then Mrs. Arnold went in to speak to him, only to find that he had left them, never to come back to his pleasant earthly home. He sat there, leaning back in his chair, as one fallen asleep, with a quiet smile on his genial face which had so rarely known a frown. ”

“ The moment Arnold caught the whispered hint, he was impatient to share the glory which such an expedition, if successful, would be certain to bring. So that as soon as he arrived at Cambridge with his handsomely uniformed company, he laid the plan before the Massachusetts Committee of Safety, as if it were altogether original with himself; and went on to show them how easy it would be to carry it out. He set forth his design with all the enthusiasm of his easily moved nature. ”

“ Arnold's true nature was hard to judge, for circumstances had conspired to spoil him from the cradle. A comely child, he had been allowed to carry the knickerbocker period of tossing curls and gratified whims far into his teens, and the discovery that her darling was a man, and no longer a painted picture to be gazed at and displayed, had come upon his mother suddenly, like an unforeseen catastrophe. ”

“ Arnold was selected to be the conductor of this expedition, and he received from Washington a commission of colonel in the Continental service. The enterprise was bold and perilous, encompassed with untried difficulties, and not less hazardous in its execution, than uncertain as to its results. These features, repelling as they were in themselves, appeared attractive in the eyes of a man, whose aliment was glory, and whose spirit was sanguine, restless, and daring. ”

“ Arnold produced a very different effect, A minority of susceptible and serious youths fell completely under his sway, responded like wax to the pressure of his influence, and moulded their whole lives with passionate reverence upon the teaching of their adored master. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Arnold during his stay with the British army in Philadelphia, and before her marriage, he made use of so fortunate a circumstance to cover his correspondence now with her husband. It was not, however, what a man with the highest and most delicate sense of honor would have permitted himself to do. Mrs. Arnold afterwards rested under the stigma of being privy to the nature of this correspondence; but there is nothing to show that it was more than an unfounded suspicion. Had André been alive, he would have set the matter right with a word. ”

“ None, save your husband, knows so well as I what a largesse of sympathy, admiration, remembrance, the genius of Arnold and the heart of Arnold have obtained from you. That I, who—if only for my waste of the last few years—am not worthy to kneel by his grave, should have you strive to lift me has unsealed the fountains of my aging eyes. ”

“ To realize the subtle and high quality of Arnold’s genius, one has but to compare him with men of science or with rationalists pure and simple,—with men like Professor Huxley, Darwin, or Bentham. Their carefulness for truth, their intellectual strength, their vast services to mankind, are acknowledged even by their opponents. Yet Arnold has a far wider range of sensibilities than any one of them; life plays upon him in far richer and more various ways ”

“ Where fair-ones frequented their praise to yield—
To him who won the honors of the field—
There Arnold found himself, and bore away
Full oft the prizes of the gamesome day.
But he, withal those pleasures at command,
Could not forget the home of Hollybrand;
And nightly visions oft recall’d the spot;
As oft, in dreams, he saw the little cot,
Wherein he trusted there did still remain
Whom he would call (and hoped) his “virgin Jane.” XVI.
It happen’d now, when fifteen years had flown,
That Arnold’s parents, both were—dead and gone! ”

“ Arnold I saw only once or twice, and scarcely gave him a second thought; and as for Champe, whom I might easily have hunted out now since he was probably hanging about the door, I had forgotten the worthy sergeant-major’s existence. So selfish and single-eyed is a great love aroused and well convinced that it has lost its all. ”

“ For the first time this view of nature enters into English poetry with Arnold. He sees the loveliness of her doings, but he also sees their terror and dreadfulness and their relentlessness. But what in his poetry he chiefly sees is the peace of nature's obedience to law, and the everlasting youth of her unchanging life. ”

“ Arnold's free play of thought implies the process by which he hoped to achieve liberation for himself. Be yourself cultured, and your eyes will be opened to the ugliness of the Philistines. To be cultured, widen your intellectual horizon, and steep yourself in the best thought of all ages and all civilised men. If Arnold trusted a little too much to the aesthetic perceptions thus generated, he succeeded, I think, in reaching a position from which he both discerned and portrayed most clearly some palpable blots. ”

“ Drew his cloak round her, lest the dew should fall
Upon her fragile beauty. They were gone—
And Arnold threw him on the turf, which still
Retained the pressure of her fairy feet—
Then started wildly from the ground, and fled
As life and death were on his speed. His towers
Were but a little distant from the sea;
And ere the morning broke, Arnold was tossed
Far over the blue wave. He did not go,
As the young warrior goes, with hope and pride,
As he once went ”

“ In short, Arnold brings to bear upon the present a finer spiritual appreciation than the mere man of the world or the mere man of science—a larger accumulation of imaginative experience. Through this temperamental scope and refinement he is able, while accepting conventional and actual life, to redeem it in some measure from its routine and its commonplace character, and to import into it beauty and meaning and good from beyond the range of science or positive truth. ”

“ Arnold is seen at his best; he fairly forces himself into the very front ranks. In form almost equal to Shelley, or at any rate not so very far behind him, whilst of course in reality, in wholesome thought, in the pleasures that are afforded by thinking, it is of incomparable excellence.
We die as we do, not as we would. Yet on reading again Mr. Arnold's Wish, we feel that the manner of his death was much to his mind. ”

“ This is Arnold playing with the obscure conceptions of Neoplatonism.
Again, he puts into two poems, the Youth of Nature and the Youth of Man, his contrast of the everlasting life of Nature with the decay and fleeting of our life. The beauty, charm, romance we feel in nature, are they, he asks, in nature or in the poet? In nature, he answers, and far more than in the poet; the singer is less than his theme. They were in the poet when he was conscious of the immeasurable glory of Nature's life. And what they were in him no pencil could ever paint, no verse could ever fully tell. ”

“ No such thing, Sir George. Arnold is a man of too much sense, and knows the world too well, to be so deceived. I have been told by my Lord V——, knows him perfectly, that nobody judges better when he is not blinded by his passions. All her professions must go for nothing when facts are against her. ’Tis plain she went off with another man, and to all appearances premeditately, as her maid and her riches bore her company. ’Tis also plain, by her own confession, that this man stands well with her. ”

“ Arnold, to those who cared for him at all, was the most useful poet of his day. He [Pg 193] lived much nearer us than poets of his distinction usually do. He was neither a prophet nor a recluse. He lived neither above us, nor away from us. There are two ways of being a recluse—a poet may live remote from men, or he may live in a crowded street but remote from their thoughts. Mr. Arnold did neither, and consequently his verse tells and tingles. ”

“ Since boldness is often the truest kind of caution, it was in my mind that I should snatch my chance to pass the sentry and so slip through the gap in the fence to join Arnold in the garden, trusting to my wit to frame a plausible excuse for the intrusion. Though for honor’s sake I had turned my back on the purpose of betraying our chief deserter, I meant to delay my own escape long enough to make sure that Champe was safely out of the way. ”

“ Arnold was never in any danger of losing his sense of moral evil. If the landscapes of Italy only served to remind him of it, how could he forget it among the boys at Rugby School? The daily sight of so many young creatures in the hands of the Evil One filled him with agitated grief. "When the spring and activity of youth," he wrote, "is altogether unsanctified by anything pure and elevated in its desires, it becomes a spectacle that is as dizzying and almost more morally distressing than the shouts and gambols of a set of lunatics." ”

“ West Point becomes your own.
André. Is there some house
Or tavern, where with more deliberate mind
We may o'erlook the papers, and make note
Of our exacter meanings?
Arnold. Close at hand,
The mansion of my agent, Joshua Smith.
André. Good, we'll go there. O Arnold, death is nothing;
Our lives are forfeit to our country's cause.
Which of us would not quit the world in peace
After some act that scaled the walls of time,
And stood on the rampart?
Arnold. Right, and bravely said! I've given my life
As many times as I have mounted horse
To reconnoitre—
André. ”

“ I ejaculated. “What a desperately narrow escape you have had, General Arnold!”
“I think so myself,” he observed quite coolly. And then, without a sign or a word of warning, he struck my slowly recovering self-possession the most treacherous back-blow it ever had. “Captain Page, I owe you something, as I have admitted. But you must be frank with me. The soldier who climbed the stair in the tavern last night was Sergeant Champe, and the door he entered was yours.”
If I ever have a son, I shall pray God to endow him with an alert brain, the choicest gift a man can have. ”

“ I could quote poem after poem which Arnold closes by some such buoyant digression: a buoyant digression intended to shake off the tone of melancholy, and to remind us that the world of imaginative life is still wide open to us.... This problem is insoluble, he seems to say, but insoluble or not, let us recall the pristine force of the [p.202] human spirit, and not forget that we have access to great resources still.... Arnold, exquisite as his poetry is, teaches us first to feel, and then to put by, the cloud of mortal destiny. But he does not teach us, as Wordsworth does, to bear it. ”

“ Every year it is being built into harmony. But we owe its beginnings, and we shall owe much of its beauty and of the peace of its aisles, to the wild creative turmoil which Arnold thought so evil, which filled him with trouble and dismay. ”

“ I belong, as I have said, to the prosaic class of mankind. We ought to catch at least something of Arnold's spirit, so far as to admit, at least, that the great problem is to reconcile unflinching loyalty to truth with tenderness 'infinite,' if possible, for the errors which are but a grasping after truth. If Arnold combined the two tendencies in a fashion of his own, he set a most valuable example, even to those who cannot think his method successful. ”

“ But, after all, my soldier caller did not put me under arrest when I was dressed and ready to go with him. On the contrary, he preceded me to Arnold’s house, and when I went in, took up his sentry stand before the entrance, pacing in step with Sir Henry Clinton’s man next door.
When I climbed the stair and met the man whose escapes of the night past might have been measured in thicknesses of a hair, the unreasoning terror gripped me again. ”

“ We shall not allude to the exquisite delight with which, after Arnold had taken his departure, Bertha listened to the warm and energetic praises of the old engraver concerning the wonderful talent of Arnold, who, in Pierre Raimond's estimation, was one of the most learned, scientific, intelligent individuals, it had ever been his lot to meet. ”

“ In his essay on Arnold, George E. Woodberry speaks of the poet's personality as revealed by his letters in the following beautiful manner: "Few who did not know Arnold could have been prepared for the revelation of a nature so true, so amiable, so dutiful. In every relation of private life he is shown to have been a man of exceptional constancy and plainness.... Every one must take delight in the mental association with Arnold in the scenes of his existence ... ”

“ It was comforting to know that our nobler enemies detested Arnold’s treachery, carrying their aversion to the extent of despising any one who wore his regimental colors. But, on the other hand, the slight had to pass through me on its way to hit the mark, and I was never good at paying penalties for another’s sins. ”