BIOGRAPHICAL.

Otago Witness, Issue 1905, 25 May 1888, Page 14

BIOGRAPHICAL.

MATTHEW ARNOLD. " To try and approach truth on one Bide after another — not to strive or cry, nor to persist in pressing forward on any side with violence and self-will,— it is only thus, it seems to me, that mortals may hope to gain any vision of the mysterious goddess, whom we shall never see except in outline; but enly thus even in outline. He who will do nothing but fight impetuously towards her on his own one favourite particular line, is inevitably destined to run his head into the folds of the black robe in which she is wrapped." These words, written by Matthew Arnold in 1865, form no unsuitable keynote for a brief notice of his literary work. "To try and approach truth on one side after another" — this was the method which he invariably employed, and his success in pursuing it was one of the principle causes of his unique influence and reputation. Seme years ago the late Principal Shairp published in " Macmillan's Magazine " a poem, entitled "Balliol (Oxford) Scholars, 1840-43," in the course of which we read how One, wide-welcomed for a father's fame, Entered with free bold step that seemed to claim Fame for himself, nor on another lean. So full of power, yet blithe and debonair, Rallying his friends with pleasant banter gay ; Or half-a-dream chanting, with jaunty air, Great words of Goethe, catch of Beranger. We see the banter sparkle in his prose, But knew not then the undertone that flows So calmly sad through all his Btately lay. The influence exercised by Oxford upon Matthew Arnold's genius was an indelible one. The spell of " that sweet city with her dreaming spires " was upon him for life, and inspired SOME OF HIS FINEST PASSAGES IN PBOSE AND VERSE. Readers of " The Scholar Gipsy" and " Thyrsis" know how saturated those poems are with the special genius loci, and many a one " whose foot the Cumnor cowslips never trod" has gained from them a lasting appreciation of Oxford's charm. "Beautiful city!" he cries, "so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene ! " '• There are our young barbarians all at play." And yet, steeped in sentiment as she lies, spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the lost enchantments of the middle age, who will deny that Oxford, by her ineffable charm, keeps ever calling us nearer to the true goal of all of us : to the ideal, to perfection —to beauty, in a word, which is only truth seen from another side? — nearer, perhaps, than all the science of Tubingen. Adorable dreamer, whose heart has been so romantic ! who hast given thyself so prodigally, given thyself to sides and to heroes not mine, only never to the Philistines 1 home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties !" The half-polemical reference to the Philistines is perhaps in such a connection a little grating, but there can scarcely be any question as to the beauty of this passage ; and though Mr Arnold seldom gave rein to the prose-poetic mood, the mention of Oxford is responsible for a considerable proportion of the occasions upon which he did bo. Mr Arnold was only 26 when be published his first poems, yet the most striking characteristic of the very earliest is their complete maturity. There is nothing young about them, nothing pensuous, nothing frivolous. " Though young, intolerably severe," so Apollo is described in " Empe;<lock;H"; and these poems are throughout remarkable for philo.sophic severity of thought naturally wedded to classical severity of form. " Erapedocles " itself is a wonderful production for a man who had not reached his thirtieth year. Melancholy and affected disillusionment are not uncommon qualities in youthful poetry ; but " Empedocles" is not the work of assumed sadness or false cynicism : it is the work of one who has " travelled through great seas of thought alone." Into the mouth of the old world-weary philosopher Mr Arnold placed ALL THAT PASSION OF INTELLECTUAL RESTLESSNESS with which his own transitional generation was throbbing, and to which years after he gave eren more effectual and far more personal utterance in the "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse" and the last verses on the author of " Obermann." These pcems of unwilling doubt will always be looked upon as his most characteristic production ; he would seem to have felt this himself. "It always goes to my heart to find anyone taking specially to the ' Grande Chartreuse' and 'Obermann' poems." But Matthew Arnold was more than a philosophic poet, more than the poet of nineteenth-century scepticism. No doubt he was deeply affected by the inherent malady of the age, but he was also keenly susceptible of those eternal elements of beauty and humanity without an appreciation of which no man can really be a poet. He had a deep strain of thoughtful, though halfByrouic fientimcutalisro, and as ou elegiac po;»t lie bkuuls in the vevy first rank. His feeling for Nature was of uhnfc loving and particular order which might be expected from a man of genius who had safe, in no merely figurative sense, at the feet of Wordsworth. He could command the Greek sweetness no less well than the Greek sternness. Of this, readers of " Thyrsis " and " A Southern Night," of " Resignation " and the poems connected with Switzerland, will hardly need reminding. He excelled, too, as a narrative poet. " Sohrab and Rustum " is a noble work not unworthy of comparison with Tennyson's " Morte d' Arthur," the closing lines (commencing "But the majestic river floated on") being unsurpassable for sonorous melody and concentrated power. Who, again, that has read " Obermann once more" can forget the picture of Rome's degraded civilisation before the birth of Christianity? In his cool hall, with haggard eyeß, The Eoman noble lay; He drove abroad m furious guise Along the Appian way. He made a feast : drank fierce and fash. And crowned his hair with flowers : No easier and no quicker passed The impracticable hours. Parhaps, however, the poem most widely known is the beautiful and pathetic " Forsaken Merman" — a poem, as Mr Swinburne says in his splended eulogy of it, "good alike for men and children." As a sonnet writer he has been called "unfinished," but the noble if rugged symmetry with which he executed this kind of verse will be preferable in the eyes of many to the occasionally nauseous sweetness of the modern school. Tho following is a fair specimen of the sonnets : it is entitled ♦* Immortality." *• Foil'd by our fellow men : depress'd, outworn : We leave the brutal world to take its way ; And, " Patience 1 in another life," we say, •« The world shall be thrust down, and we up-borne." And will not, then, the immortal armies scorn The world's poor routed leavings ? or will they, Who fail'd under the heat of this life's day, Support the fervours of the heavenly morn? No, no ! the energy of life may be Kept on atter the grave, but not begun ; And he >vho flagg'd not in the earthly strife, From atr.-:,gth to strength advancing— only he— His soul well-knit), and nil his battles won — founts, and that hardly, to eternal life."

Bnt Mr Arnold made no real advance in poetry. His earliest execution was of a very high order, and it is well that it was so ; for beyond the excellence of his first j poetic accomplishment it is doubtful if he ever ' attained. It was recently said of Keats by an acute critic that "between his later and his earlier poetry the gulf, as regards artistic judgment, is so vast that; the accurate chronology of every verse of his is of the very last importance to the critic who would trace the growth of his unique genius." No importance of this kind exists in Matthew Arnold's case. HIS INCREASE OF REFUTATION in this department was the result, not of his own advance, bat of a wiser and more thorough appreciation of his work on the part of his readers. Indeed, as time went on it must be confessed that his inspiration flagged. What he still published in verse was almost always' good — the only real failure we can call to mind being the rather forced elegy on Dean Stanley ; bat a poem from him was, for the last 20 years, a rare event. The world, perhaps, was "too much with him " for the old abstracted meditation ; he was all too busy to find time for the " shepherd's pipe and holiday." Needs must I lose them ; needs, with heavy heart, Into the world and wave of men depart. A want of inclination and leisure would seem to have been the cause of his later poetic silence ; not a want of power, for the verses published a very few years back on his dog " Geist"— Geist with That liquid melancholy eye, From whose pathetic soulfed springs Seemed surging the Virgilian cry — The sense of tears in mortal things :) have all the rich f ulnesß of the old strain ; while the very last verses of all — on the death of another favonrite dog, printed in the "Fortnightly" for last July— show the same pathetic power, joined to a light, half -humorous touch which in poetry the author had not previously displayed. To readers of Matthew Arnold's prose, that light and sprightly, sometimes almost jaunty, touch is familiar enough. Putting aside certain Bimilar grooves of thought, there is little kinship between the verso and the prose. From the one we get severity, and pathos, and an exquisite", though at times slightly distrait, sentimentalism, combined with an iuvariable uncertainty of conviction ; from the other, flexibility, and banter, and a quite unsentimental clearsightedness, combined with an arch and confident dogmatism, Mr Arnold's critical pen treated A WIDB BANGE OF SUBJECTS. Poetry, general literature, politics, religion, social life — it was busy with them all. His first prose publications, as far as we know were the prefaces which he attached to his early volumes of poetry. These admirable disquisitions are stiU held by many to be among the most suggestive things he ever wrote ; they demonstrated, at any rate, that a new force had asserted itself in poetic criticism. Study the " sanity " of the Greeks — was the salient inculcation of the prefaces ; to what advantage the author himself had applied his doctrine was apparent in the contents. In 1857 came the appointment to the chair of Poetry at Oxford, and the decade during which |Mr Arnold held thatpost saw the execution of his most important literary work. These were the years of the Homer lectures (so full of penetrating criticism, despite the hexametrical anti-climax), of the " Essays in Criticism " (with the inimitablo preface), and of the "Study of Celtic Literature" (containing the subtle analysis of the differences between the Teutonic and the Celtic genius). Already the vivacious and combative sbrainb had appeared. They first displayed themselves in the rather audacious banter to which certain Homeric critics and translators were subjected. A number of "insularities" and pecularities of thought peculiar to the British nation were next freely touched, and Mr Arnold was by no means popular. It was felt — and rightly felt — that a certain tone of intellectual superciliousness pervaded his writings ; it was felt, too — and surely wrongly felt — that his Continental, if not cosmopolitan, habits of thought were an insult to the sturdy independence of the British mind. He was very freely criticised, but this only had the effect of quickening his satirical vein. He was A BOHN LITERARY ARCHER, and (to borrow one of his favourite phrases from Burke) his antagonist was always his helper. Travelling about, too, as a school inspector, he had unusual opportunities of noticing the foibles which offended him, and, though his sensitiveness was over-keen, there can be no doubt, we think, that his satirical work has done good. "Philistinism "—"" — " the note of provinciality," " middleclass vulgarity," " sweetness and light," " Hebraism and Hellenism " — the half-playful sermons for which such phrases as these served as texts have probably added not a little to the clarification of the ordinary Briton's mental atmosphere. They have assuredly added a great deal to the interest of contemporary literature. As years passed Mr Arnold became Jc«s personally satirical; less .suueificially in terestiug perhapi, bub more impreb&ive and more obviou&iy &erious. Obviously, we say, for the underlying seriousness of his nature was never hidden from unprejudiced minds — to say nothing of the evidence offered by his poetry. We shall not speak here of his religious writings ; their real worth can hardly be estimated yet ; it may be noticed, however, that he considered this the most important and valuable part of his prose work. He was fond also of assuming the role of a political mentor ; but this is hardly the branch of his achievement upon which his admirers care most to' dwell. His dissertations upon public affairs were hardly theoretic enough for the philosopher ; hardly practical enough for the politician. Assuredly, to borrow a phrase from Lord Beaconsfield, they did not " palpitate with actuality." Too much of his not superabundant leisure was devoted, of late years especially, to these political caueeries ; and the unfailing excellence of his literary essays only accentuated the regret that he did not keep more closely to the lines wherein he was an undisputed authority. Still, of all his critical work, it may be said (in his own words, quoted at the beginning of this article) that he tried " to approach truth on one side after another." Tho temper of his mind was invariably sound. A 8A 8 A WRITER OF ENGLISH PROSE Matthew Arnold at his best ranks very high. At that best not even Cardinal Newman is his superior. " Attic, chaste, and supple," such were the epithets felicitously chosen by Sir Frederick Leighton, at an academy banquet, to describe the excellencies of his critical style. But considerable limitations must be predicated. When chaffing Mr Frederic Harrison on his exuberant admiration for Comte, Mr Arnold spoke of tbe famous Posifcivist having "weighted himself for the race of life by taking up a grotesque old French pedant upou his shoulders," and of the satirist himself it may be said that he weighted himself for the race of literature by taking up a heap of affectations, mannerisms, and absolutely wilful tricks. Nor does the admission, that his admirers grew to look for and like these manifold idiosyncracies, alter the fact that such J faults do and will detiact from his reputation as an English stylist. His by no means uneff ective habits of deliberate reiteration, and of placing important points in parenthesis, were,

often pushed to a slightly absurd andcertainly inartistic extreme. Still, as has been Raid, at his best he was a great writer: the apostrophe to' Oxford, already quoted, is but one, of at least a hundred passages which might be cited to sup- ' port this judgment. Matthew Arnold's reputation has suffered not a little from at least two causes. In the first place, being v THE APOSTLE OF " CULTURE," he has been widely held responsible for the "mane vagaries of " culchaw." Nothing could be more unfair. Culture was with him a stern moral and intellectual effort. It was " a study of perfection by getting to know the best that has been thought and said in the world." There is not much intellectual foppishness about that ; yet how many intellectual fops have not scrupled to call Matthew Arnold master, and to take his name in vain as the author and justifier of their contemptible diletfcanteisms. In the second place, his insuperable FONDNESS FOE LITHKAEY CHAFF AND FUN, together with his tendency to dwell upon interesting side-issues, has laid him open to the charge, not exactly of insincerity, but at least of unseriousnesß. We have no space to enter into a detailed refutation of this not infrequent assertion, but we believe it cannot be sustained and that it is usually put forward only by those whose acquaintance with Mr Arnold's work is comparatively superficial. His love of a literary joke was an inherent bent, and had no counterpart in any carelessness as to the important subjects which he was wont to discuss. His moral standard, moreover, was as highly pitched in his prose as in his poetry. The writer of the following sentence was no unworthy son and pupil of Thomas Arnold :— " To walk 3taunchly by the best light one has, to be strict and sincere with oneself, not to be of the number of those who say and do not, to be in earnest : this is the discipline by which alone man is enabled to rescue his life from thraldom to the passing moment and to his bodily senses, to ennoble it, and to make it eternal." Bui even such objections as have justbeen mentioned became less frequent of recent years; Mr Arnold's work was getting better known, and known more widely. Long before his death England was proud of him. This was inevitable, for his production had in an especial degree the quality of distinction ; and " of this quality" (to quote his own true but, it must be confessed, rather ugly sentence) " the world is impatient : it chafes against it, rails at it, insults it, hates it. It ends by finally receiving its influence and undergoing its law." Really popular, however, Matthew Arnold's work could hardly ever be, and in the colonies we question if he is widely known. His poetry especially we believe to be little read here ; while his prose is perhaps too superfine, his philosophy too reactionary, and his mental tone too precious to suit the sturdy energy of colonial life. Those, however, who make acquaintance with his books will hardly regret having done so. All of us may learn something from him. "It is silent, that eloquent voice ! it is sunk, that living, that speaking head ! We sum up, as we best may, what he taught us, and we bid him adieu." They who for years have loved and admired Matthew Arnold's work find it hard to realise that never will they be charmed by new examples of that happy wit, that Athenian grace, that wise lucidity. He has gone "to work or wait elsewhere or here." Let us take leave of him in the perfect words which 40 years ago he addressed to his favourite Senancour, the author of " Obermann " : Andjihou art gone away from eurth, And place with those dost claim — rlher lhe children ot trie Secmid Birth, Whom Uie world could not tAine. And with that, small transfigured band, Whom mauy a iliffeient way Conducted to their common land, Thou learn'st to think as they. Christian and pagan, king and slave, Soldier and auchorite, Distinctions we esteem so grave, Are nothing in their sight. Th«y do not ask who pined unseen, Who was on action hnrl'd— Whose one bond is that all have been Unspotted from the world.