A R N OLD a pension of ,£250 was conferred on him in recognition of his literary merits. In the same year he went to the United States on a lecturing tour, and again in 1886, his subjects being “Emerson” and the “ Principles and Value of Numbers.” The success of these lectures, though they were admirable in matter and form, was marred by the lecturer’s lack of experience in delivery. It is sufficient, further, to say that Culture and Anarchy appeared in 1869; St Paul and Protestantism, 1870; Friendship’s Garland, 1871; Literature and Dogma, 1873 ; God and the Bible, 1875; Last Essays on Church and Pebellion, 1877; Mixed Essays, 1879 ; Irish Essays, 1882; and Discourses on America, 1885. Such essays as the first of these, embodying as they did Arnold’s views of theological and polemical subjects, attracted much attention at the time of their publication, owing to the state of the intellectual atmosphere at the moment; but it is doubtful, perhaps, whether they will be greatly considered in the near future. Many severe things have been said, and will be said, concerning the inadequacy of poets like Coleridge and Wordsworth when confronting subjects of a theological or philosophical kind. Wordsworth’s High Church Pantheism and Coleridge’s disquisitions on the Logos seem farther removed from the speculations of to-day than do the dreams of Lucretius. But these two great writers lived before the days of modern science. Arnold, living only a few years later, came at a transition period when the winds of tyrannous knowledge had blown off the protecting roof that had covered the centuries before, but when time and much labour were needed to build another roof of new materials—a period when it was impossible for the poet to enjoy either the quietism of High Church Pantheism in which Wordsworth had basked, or the sheltering protection of German metaphysics under which Coleridge had preached—a period, nevertheless, when the wonderful revelations of science were still too raw, too cold and hard, to satisfy the yearnings of the poetic, soul. Objectionable as Arnold’s rationalizing criticism was to contemporary orthodoxy, and questionable as was his equipment in point of theological learning, his spirituality of outlook and ethical purpose were not to be denied. Yet it is not Arnold’s views that have become current coin so much as his literary phrases—his craving for “ culture ” and “ sweetness and light,” his contempt for “ the dissidence of Dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion,” his “stream of tendency not ourselves making for righteousness,” his classification of “ Philistines and barbarians ”—and so forth. His death, at Liverpool, of heart failure, 15th April 1888, was sudden and quite unexpected. Arnold was a prominent figure in that great galaxy of Victorian poets who were working simultaneously—Tennyson, Browning, Rossetti, William Morris and Mr Swinburne—poets between whom there was at least this connecting link, that the quest of all of them was the oldfashioned poetical quest of the beautiful. Beauty was their watchword, as it had been the watchword of their often, and have exercised marked influence on subsequent changes and controversies. One great purpose underlies them all. 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. To this theme he constantly recurred in his essays, articles, and official reports. “ Porro unum est necessarium. One thing is needful; organize your secondary education.” This is an object not yet fully attained ; but the influence of his stimulating appeals to the intelligence and conscience of his countrymen, and the practical value of many of his detailed suggestions, are likely to be more and more fully recognized.
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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, our opinion is that his place in the group will be below all the others. The question as to whether he was primarily a poet or a prosateur has been often asked. If we were to try to answer that question here, we should have to examine his poetry in detail—we should have to inquire whether his primary impulse of expression was to seize upon the innate suggestive power of words, or whether his primary impulse was to rely upon the logical power of the sentence. In nobility of temper, in clearness of statement, and especially in descriptive power, he is beyond praise. But intellect, judgment, culture, and study of great poets may do much towards enabling a prose-writer to write what must needs be called good poetry. What they cannot enable him to do is to produce those magical effects which poets of the rarer kind can achieve by seizing that mysterious, suggestive power of words which is far beyond all mere statement. Notwithstanding the exquisite work that Arnold has left behind him, some critics have come to the conclusion that his primary impulse in expression was that of the poetically-minded prosateur rather than that of the born poet. And this has been said by some who nevertheless deeply admire poems like “The Scholar Gypsy,” “Thyrsis,” “The Forsaken Merman,” “ Dover Beach,” “ Heine’s Grave,” “ Rugby Chapel,” “ The Grande Chartreuse,” “ Sohrab and Rustum,” “ The Sick King in Bokhara,” “Tristram and Iseult,” &c. We need not go nearly so far as that. But it would seem that a man may show all the endowments of a poet save one, and that one the most essential—the instinctive mastery over metrical effects. In all literary expression there are two kinds of emphasis, the emphasis of sound and the emphasis of sense. Indeed the difference between those who have and those who have not the true rhythmic instinct is that, while the former have the innate faculty of making the emphasis of sound and the emphasis of sense meet and strengthen each other, the latter are without that faculty. 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 conies 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. Perhaps the very origin of the old quantitative metres was the desire to make these two kinds of emphasis meet in the same syllable. In manipulating their quantitative metrical system the Greeks had facilities for bringing one kind of emphasis into harmony with the other such #as are unknown to writers in accentuated metres. This accounts for the measureless superiority of Greek poetry in verbal melody as well as in general harmonic scheme to all the poetry of the modern world. In writers so diverse in many ways as Homer, iEschylus, Sophocles, Pindar, Sappho, the harmony between the emphasis of sound and the emphasis of sense is so complete that each of these kinds of emphasis seems always begetting, yet always born of the other. When in Europe the quantitative measures were superseded by the accentuated measures a reminiscence was naturally and inevitably left behind ! of the old system; and the result has been, in the English
