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Page 20
"Three brothers roved the field,
And to two did Destiny
Give the thrones that they conquer'd,
But the third, what delays him
From his unattained crown?"
But Mr Arnold would say "This is your unchaste modern love for
passages and patches. Tell me how I managed this worthy action?" To
which the only answer can be, "Sir, the action is rather
uninteresting. Save at one moment you have not raised the interest
anywhere, and you have certainly not made the most of it there."
The fact is, that very few even of thorough-going Arnoldians have had,
or, except merely as "fighting a prize," could have had, much to say
for _Merope_. The author pleads that he only meant "to give people a
specimen of the world created by the Greek imagination." In the first
place, one really cannot help (with the opening speech of the
_Prometheus_, and the close of the _Eumenides_, and the whole of the
_Agamemnon_ in one's mind) saying that this is rather hard on the
Greeks. And in the second place, what a curious way of setting about
the object, when luckily specimens of the actual "world" so "created,"
not mere _pastiches_ and plaster models of them, are still to be had,
and of the very best! But the fact is, thirdly, that Mr Arnold, as all
men so often do, and as he not very seldom did, was clearly trying not
so much to extol one thing as to depreciate another. Probably in his
heart of hearts (which is generally a much wiser heart than that
according to which the mouth speaks and the pen writes) he knew his
failure. At any rate, he never attempted anything of the kind again,
and Merope, that queen of plaster, remains alone in his gallery, with,
as we see in other galleries, merely some _disjecta membra_--"Fragment
of an _Antigone_," "Fragment of a _Dejaneira_," grouped at her feet.
In the definitive edition indeed, she is not with these but with
_Empedocles on Etna_, a rather unlucky contrast. For _Empedocles_, if
very much less deliberately Greek than _Merope_, is very much better
poetry, and it is almost impossible that the comparison of the two
should not suggest to the reader that the attempt to be Greek is
exactly and precisely the cause of the failure to be poetical. Mr
Arnold had forgotten his master's words about the _oikeia hedone_. The
pleasure of Greek art is one thing--the pleasure of English poetry
another.
His inaugural lecture, "On the Modern Element in Literature," was
printed many years afterwards in _Macmillan's Magazine_ for February
1869; and this long hesitation seems to have been followed by an even
longer repentance, for the piece was never included in any one of his
volumes of essays. But the ten years of his professorship are,
according to the wise parsimony of the chair, amply represented by the
two famous little books--_On Translating Homer_, which, with its
supplementary "Last Words," appeared in 1861-62, and _On the Study of
Celtic Literature_, which appeared at the termination of his tenure in
1867. It may be questioned whether he ever did anything of more
influence than these books, this being due partly to the fashion of
their publication--which, in the latter case at least, applied the
triple shock of lecture at the greatest of English literary centres,
of magazine article, and of book--and partly to the fact that they
were about subjects in which a real or a factitious, a direct or an
indirect, interest was taken by almost every one. Every educated
person knew and cared something (or at least would not have liked to
be supposed not to care and know something) about Homer; very few
educated persons knew anything about Celtic literature. But in these
later lectures he put in a more popular and provocative form than that
of his _French Eton_ (see next chapter) that mixture of literary,
political, social, and miscellaneous critique of his countrymen for
which he was thenceforward best known; and which, if it brought down
some hard knocks from his adversaries, and perhaps was not altogether
a healthy mixture for himself, could at least not be charged by any
reasonable person with lack of piquancy and actuality.
Both books are, and, despite some drawbacks of personal and ephemeral
allusion, always will be, interesting; and both had, perhaps even more
than the _Essays in Criticism_ themselves, a stimulating effect
upon English men of letters which can hardly be overvalued. It may
indeed be said without paradox that they owe not a little of their
value to their faults; but they owe a great deal more to their merits.
The faults are apparent enough even in the first series, which falls
to be noticed in this chapter; yet it is really difficult to say when
a more important book of English criticism had appeared. Dryden's
_Essay of Dramatic Poesy_, Johnson's _Lives_ at their frequent best,
Coleridge's _Biographia Literaria_, are greater things; but hardly the
best of them was in its day more "important for _us_." To read even
the best of that immediately preceding criticism of which something
has been said above--nay, even to recur to Coleridge and Hazlitt and
Lamb--and then to take up _On Translating Homer_, is to pass to a
critic with a far fuller equipment, with a new method, with a style of
his own, and with an almost entirely novel conception of the whole art
of criticism. For the first time (even Coleridge with much wider
reading had not co-ordinated it from this point of view) we find the
two great ancient and the three or four great modern literatures of
Europe taken synoptically, used to illustrate and explain each other,
to point out each other's defects and throw up each other's merits.
Almost for the first time, too, we have ancient literature treated
more or less like modern--neither from the merely philological point
of view, nor with reference to the stock platitudes and traditions
about it. The critic is not afraid of doctrines and general
principles--in fact, he is rather too fond of them--but his object is
anything rather than mere arid deduction and codification. He has the
aesthetic sense as thoroughly as Hazlitt and Lamb, but without the
wilfulness of either, or at least with a different kind of wilfulness
from that of either. Finally, in one of the numerous ways in which he
shows that his subject is alive to him, he mixes it up with the
queerest personalities and sudden zigzags, with all manner of
digressions and side-flings. And last of all, he has that new style of
which we spoke--a style by no means devoid of affectation and even
trick, threatening, to experienced eyes, the disease of mannerism, but
attractive in its very provocations, almost wholly original, and
calculated, at least while it retains its freshness, to drive what is
said home into the reader's mind and to stick it there.
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