MATTHEW ARNOLD.

Dominion, Volume 1, Issue 241, 4 July 1908, Page 12

MATTHEW ARNOLD.

■ The assertion that/to bo a great critic of pootry ..disqualifies a writer' from being a great poet appears, at first sight 0110 of the absurdest of; paradoses. It seems tantamount to saying that a thorough'knowledge of . thermo-dynamics would disqualify an engineer 'from driving a locomotivo, or an acquaintance frith.'astronomy',- mako a sailor useless as a navigator. , But engine-driving and navigation aro affairs of acquired knowlodge, and can ohly rbe improved by any : addition, of.sound and relevant information. The poet 'is; more: locomotivo than driver, more ship than .navigator; ho is an intellectual centaur, in whom the gnomic or elemental nature is only led, and is not inspired ■or nourished, by tho purely intellectual sido. The paradox; with which we set out seems loss absurd, seems, indeed, quite 'reasonable,- when 'it? is -.considered as-tanta-mount to saying that a very profound knowledge of anatomy and physiology would most probably disqualify : a'man from being a great athlete. A superb unconsciousness ='distinguishes the supremest manifestations both 'of body and of mind; Wordsworth has been quoted as an instance of'great poetio genius become self-conscious. But where Wordsworth' was .self-conscious' Ho was hopelessly pedestrian; his highest flights were as far beyond tho reach of calculation as of imitation.

It is. impossible to;believe that this was nnappareiit .to Wordsworth's most enlightened .critic, Matthew Arnold; yet Arnold himsolf, in his own poetry, proceeded deliberately along' definite lines, to a more uniformly successful issue than it : .is true';'but far seldomer, also,'if at all, to anything like Wordsworth's inevitable greatness. Arnold's well-known poetical creed is' tho; expression of his .own poetical limitations. His 'artistic impulses wore a love of natural beauty—of a pictorial, 'and, indeed, somewhat decorativo sort-—and ,an ■unsoouscious desire .to repeat and':combined tho highest cxcelleiices of Wordsworth and ! Goethe.,.. But. a-poet must have a subject. A great poet, finds his subject in himself, either as an individual or as tho mirror and echo of mankind; and his immediate inspiration .is as spontaneous and elemental as tho crow of a baby, or tho shout of a warrior. ■The- baby,tho warrior, tho poet, do not criticise life, they express it: a great ■ poem is no more a criticism of life than a roso. is a criticism of a rose-bush; or the rose's perfume a criticism of tho roso. But. Arnold was, neither elementally joyous nor;.elementally, wretched, His life was of tho brain rather than of the soul or the body, and his metrical gifts and accomplishments' wero pressed; into the sorvico of the great forces of belief and scepticism, resignation,: and despair, that, wrestled within him during tho whole period of his poetio activity:'-' Thus/fwith Arnold himself, poetry was mainly ; a-criticism of lifo. It is an open-: question, however,' whether tho real interest and yaluo.of the various fragments of his intellectual: and theological Iliad do not reside* m'oro in tho pictorial setting than in the doings of tho philosophical ideas which are tho usual protagonists. : Most of Arnold's readers .will agreo that ho is greatest, most pleasing, _ most likely to livo, just where, as in "Mycorinus," "Dover Beach," "The Strayed Reveller," "Tho Scholar . Gipsy,"; .or "The. Forsaken Merman," tho , thin philosophical thread is 'hidden or washed away by . a full stream of limpid languago and pure description. And this judgment romains unaffected by the consideration that Arnold's finest poems woro tho outcome of moments in which tho mental conflict, by its very aoutoness, passed into the poetio region of ,the. spiritually elemental. That very intellectual intensity by which Arnold wrought violence on tho kingdom of poetry, and took by storm a place in tho lower hierarchy of song, won him easily tho throne of British criticism. Wo can imagino no task more subtly difficult than an enumeration of tho qualities'in right of which Arnold holds tho sceptre of criticism.' First among thorn, as including all the rest, wo should place his intellectual honesty, a quality so common in Germany and France as to be barely, worth mentioning, but. in our own country, to our shame bo it spoken, so rare that its existence in Arnold made him' seem like .

some pigeon, from tho myrrhy lands Rapt by tho whirlblast to fierce Scytliian strands, ' Whcro breed tho swallows.

Tho lack of this intellectual honesty, of this ability to bring a question out of tho shadows and entanglements of party, creed, specialism, or so-callod practical issuos, into tho light and freedom of pure philosophical truth,- ia .naiafulJx evident to-iiax in the.

paucity, for example, of authoritativo British studies of tho great problem of communism, a question which most British writers seem to discuss with their hands on thoir own or their neighbours' purses, but which in, tho best Continental reviews is treated with tho same disp.assionato impartiality that Darwin brought, to the study of tho evolutionary hypothesis. It is much to bo regretted that wo have not an Arnold alivo among us to shod on this and other voxed questions tho clear intolloctual light wherewith ho illumined tho dark places of philosophy, politics, and education in tho seventies and eighties of last century. Nevor was a critic so highly prejudiced—in favour of truth; never was a Briton so patriotic —for he dared to fjivo thoir right names to tho tumours of pride, hypocrisy, ignorance, and self-deception, which his countrymen mistook for muscular developments of character. His influenco was perhaps not so marked as Carlylo's, but it was more highly corrective; for whereas Carlyle often aggravated certain national inconsequences, Arnold plod fearlessly for that intellectual emancipation whose claims, in the rush of party politics and tho sordid scuffle of trading interests, had been not not only overlooked but swept contemptuously asido. If, to-day. tho aristocracy is less proudly barbarian, tho middle class less hopelessly Philistine, than they wcro thirty years ago, wo owo it to Matthew Arnold, And if, on the other hand, the leopard has not changed his spots, nor the Ethiopian his skin, it is mainlv for want of a proper application of the Arnoldian scrubbing-brush.— "Glasgow Horald."