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Page 24
All this is already ancient history, and history not ancient enough to
be venerable. But the book as a book, and also as a document in the
case, has, and always will have, interest. "The cries and catchwords"
which Mr Arnold denounces, as men so often do denounce their own most
besetting temptations, have not yet quite mastered him; but they have
made a lodgment. The revolt--in itself quite justifiable, and even
admirable--from the complacent acceptance of English middle-class
thought, English post-Reform-Bill politics, English mid-century taste
and ethics and philosophy,--from everything, in short, of which
Macaulay was the equally accepted and representative eulogist and
exponent, is conspicuous. It is from foreign and almost hostile
sources that we must expect help. The State is to resume, or to
initiate, its guidance of a very large part, if not of the whole, of
the matters which popular thought, Liberal and Conservative alike,
then assigned to individual action or private combination. We have not
yet Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace labelled with their tickets
and furnished with their descriptions; but the three classes are
already sharply separated in Mr Arnold's mind, and we can see that
only in the Philistine who burns Dagon, and accepts circumcision and
culture fully, is there to be any salvation. The anti-clerical and
anti-theological animus is already strong; the attitude _dantis jura
Catonis_ is arranged; the _jura_ themselves, if not actually
graven and tabulated, can be seen coming with very little difficulty.
Above all, the singing-robes are pretty clearly laid aside; the
Scholar-Gipsy exercises no further spell; we have turned to prose and
(as we can best manage it) sense.
But _A French Eton_ is perhaps most interesting for its style. In
this respect it marks a stage, and a distinct one, between the
_Preface_ of 1853 and the later and better known works. More of a
_concio ad vulgus_ than the former, it shows a pretty obvious
endeavour to soften and popularise, without unduly vulgarising, the
academic tone of the earlier work. And it does not yet display those
"mincing graces" which were sometimes attributed (according to a very
friendly and most competent critic, "harshly, but justly") to the
later. The mannerisms, indeed, like the dogmatisms, are pretty clearly
imminent. Slightly exotic vocabulary--"habitude" "repartition," for
"habit," "distribution"--makes its appearance. That abhorrence of the
conjunction, which made Mr Arnold later give us rows of adjectives and
substantives, with never an "and" to string them together, is here.
But no one of these tricks, nor any other, is present in excess: there
is nothing that can justly be called falsetto; and in especial, though
some names of merely ephemeral interest are in evidence--Baines,
Roebuck, Miall, &c., Mr Arnold's well-known substitutes for Cleon and
Cinesias--there is nothing like the torrent of personal allusion in
_Friendship's Garland_. "Bottles" and his company are not yet
with us; the dose of _persiflage_ is rigorously kept down; the
author has not reached the stage when he seemed to hold sincerely the
principle so wickedly put by Mr Lewis Carroll, that
"What I tell you three times is true,"
and that the truth could be made truest by making the three thirty.
The result is that he never wrote better. A little of the dignity of
his earlier manner--when he simply followed that admirable older
Oxford style, of which Newman was the greatest master and the last--is
gone, but it has taken some stiffness with it. Some--indeed a good
deal--of the piquancy of the later is not yet apparent; but its
absence implies, and is more than compensated by, the concomitant
absence of those airs and flings, those interludes as of an academic
jester, in cap and gown and liripipe instead of motley, which have
been charged, not quite unjustly, on the Arnold that we know best.
There is hardly in English a better example of the blending and
conciliation of the two modes of argumentative writing referred to in
Bishop Kurd's acute observation, that if your first object is to
convince, you cannot use a style too soft and insinuating; if you want
to confute, the rougher and more unsparing the better. And the
description and characterisation are quite excellent.
Between _A French Eton_ and the second collection of Oxford
Lectures came, in 1865, the famous _Essays in Criticism_, the
first full and varied, and perhaps always the best, expression and
illustration of the author's critical attitude, the detailed manifesto
and exemplar of the new critical method, and so one of the
epoch-making books of the later nineteenth century in English. It
consisted, in the first edition, of a _Preface_ (afterwards
somewhat altered and toned down) and of nine essays (afterwards to be
made ten by the addition of _A Persian Passion-Play_). The two
first of these were general, on _The Function of Criticism at the
Present Time_ and _The Literary Influence of Academies_, while
the other seven dealt respectively with the two Gu�rins, Heine,
_Pagan and Medi�val Religious Sentiment_, Joubert, Spinoza, and
Marcus Aurelius. I am afraid it must be taken as only too strong a
confirmation of Mr Arnold's own belief as to the indifference of the
English people to criticism that no second edition of this book was
called for till four years were past, no third for ten, and no fourth
for nearly twenty.
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