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Page 2
* * * * *
CHAPTER I.
LIFE TILL MARRIAGE, AND WORK TILL THE PUBLICATION OF THE _POEMS_
OF 1853.
Even those who are by no means greedy of details as to the biography
of authors, may without inconsistency regret that Matthew Arnold's
_Letters_ do not begin till he was just five-and-twenty. And then
they are not copious, telling us in particular next to nothing about
his literary work (which is, later, their constant subject) till he
was past thirty. We could spare schoolboy letters, which, though often
interesting, are pretty identical, save when written by little prigs.
But the letters of an undergraduate--especially when the person is
Matthew Arnold, and the University the Oxford of the years
1841-45--ought to be not a little symptomatic, not a little
illuminative. We might have learnt from them something more than we
know at present about the genesis and early stages of that not
entirely comprehensible or classifiable form of Liberalism in matters
political, ecclesiastical, and general which, with a kind of altered
Voltairian touch, attended his Conservatism in literature. Moreover,
it is a real loss that we have scarcely anything from his own pen
about his poems before _Sohrab and Rustum_--that is to say, about the
great majority of the best of them. By the time at which we have full
and frequent commentaries on himself, he is a married man, a harnessed
and hard-working inspector of schools, feeling himself too busy for
poetry, not as yet tempted by promptings within or invitations from
without to betake himself to critical prose in any quantity or
variety. Indeed, by a not much more than allowable hyperbole, we may
say that we start with the book of his poetry all but shut, and the
book of his prose all but unopened.
We must therefore make what we can of the subject, and of course a
great deal more is to be made in such a case of the work than of the
life. The facts of the latter are but scanty. Matthew Arnold, as all
the world knows, was the son--the eldest son--of the famous Dr
(Thomas) Arnold, Head-master of Rugby, and Regius Professor of Modern
History at Oxford, where he had earlier been a Fellow of Oriel. Dr
Arnold survives in the general memory now chiefly by virtue of his
head-mastership, which was really a remarkable one, whatever
distinction it may owe to the loyalty of such a group of pupils as his
son, Dean Stanley, Clough, "Tom Brown" Hughes, and others. But he was,
if not positively great, a notable and influential person in many
ways. As a historian he was alert and intelligent, though perhaps too
much under the influence of that subtlest and most dangerous kind of
"popular breeze" which persuades those on whom it blows that they are
sailing not with but away from the vulgar. As a scholar he was
ingenious, if not very erudite or deep. He was really a master, and
has been thought by some good judges a great master, of that admirable
late Georgian academic style of English prose, which is almost the
equal of the greatest. But he was, if not exactly _cupidus novarum
rerum_ in Church and State, very ready to entertain them; he was
curiously deficient in logic; and though the religious sense was
strong in him, he held, and transmitted to his son, the heresy--the
foundation of all heresies--that religion is something that you can
"bespeak," that you can select and arrange to your own taste; that it
is not "to take or to leave" at your peril and as it offers itself.
On August 11, 1820, Dr Arnold married Mary Penrose, and as he had
devoted his teaching energies, which were early developed, not to
school or university work, but to the taking of private pupils at
Laleham on the Thames, between Staines and Chertsey, their eldest son
was born there, on Christmas Eve, 1822. He was always enthusiastic
about the Thames valley, though not more so than it deserves, and in
his very earliest letter (January 2, 1848) we find record of a visit,
when he found "the stream with the old volume, width, shine, rapid
fulness, 'kempshott,'[1] and swans, unchanged and unequalled." He was
only six years old when his father was elected to the head-mastership
of Rugby; he was educated in his early years at his birthplace, where
an uncle, the Rev. John Buckland, carried on the establishment, and at
the age of fourteen he was sent to Winchester, his father's school.
Here he only remained a year, and entered Rugby in August 1837. He
remained there for four years, obtaining an open Balliol scholarship
in 1840, though he did not go up till October 1841. In 1840 he had
also gained the prize for poetry at Rugby itself with _Alaric at
Rome_, a piece which was immediately printed, but never reprinted
by its author, though it is now easily obtainable in the 1896 edition
of those poems of his which fell out of copyright at the seven years
after his death.
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