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Page 25
Yet, to any one whom the gods have made in the very slightest degree
critical, it is one of the most fascinating (if sometimes also one of
the most provoking) of books; and the fascination and provocation
should surely have been felt even by others. As always with the
author, there is nothing easier than to pick holes in it: in fact, on
his own principles, one is simply bound to pick holes. He evidently
enjoyed himself very much in the _Preface:_ but it may be doubted
whether the severe Goddess of Taste can have altogether smiled on his
enjoyment. He is superciliously bland to the unlucky and no doubt
rather unwise Mr Wright (_v. supra_): he tells the _Guardian_ in a
periphrasis that it is dull, and "Presbyter Anglicanus" that he is
born of Hyrcanian tigers, and the editor of the _Saturday Review_ that
he is a late and embarrassed convert to the Philistines. He introduces
not merely Mr Spurgeon, a Philistine of some substance and memory, but
hapless forgotten shadows like "Mr Clay," "Mr Diffanger," "Inspector
Tanner," "Professor Pepper" to the contempt of the world. And then,
when we are beginning to find all this laughter rather
"thorn-crackling" and a little forced, the thing ends with the famous
and magnificent _epiphonema_ (as they would have said in the old days)
to Oxford, which must for ever conciliate all sons of hers and all
gracious outsiders to its author, just as it turns generation after
generation of her enemies sick with an agonised grin.
So, again, one may marvel, and almost grow angry, at the whim which
made Mr Arnold waste two whole essays on an amiable and interesting
person like Eug�nie de Gu�rin and a mere nobody like her brother. They
are very pretty essays in themselves; but then (as Mr Arnold has
taught us), "all depends on the subject," and the subjects here are so
exceedingly unimportant! Besides, as he himself almost openly
confessed, and as everybody admits now, he really did not understand
French poetry at all. When we come to "Keats and Gu�rin," there is
nothing for it but to take refuge in Byron's
"_Such_ names coupled!"
and pass with averted face. Seventy-two mortal pages of Matthew
Arnold's, at his very best time, wasted on a brother and sister who
happened to be taken up by Sainte-Beuve!
But the rest of the book is entirely free from liability to any such
criticism as this. To some criticism--even to a good deal--it is
beyond doubt exposed. The first and most famous paper--the general
manifesto, as the earlier _Preface_ to the _Poems_ is the
special one, of its author's literary creed--on _The Function of
Criticism at the Present Time_ must indeed underlie much the same
objections as those that have been made to the introduction. Here is
the celebrated passage about "Wragg is in custody," the text of which,
though no doubt painful in subject and inurbane in phraseology, is
really a rather slender basis on which to draw up an indictment
against a nation. Here is the astounding--the, if serious, almost
preternatural--statement that "not very much of current English
literature comes into this best that is known and thought in the
world. Not very much I fear: certainly less than of the current
literature of France and Germany." And this was 1865, when the Germans
had had no great poet but Heine for a generation, nor any great poets
but Goethe and Heine for some five hundred years, no great
prose-writer but Heine (unless you call Goethe one), and were not
going to have any! It was 1865, when all the great French writers,
themselves of but some thirty years' standing, were dying off, not to
be succeeded! 1865, when for seventy years England had not lacked, and
for nearly thirty more was not to lack, poets and prose-writers of the
first order by the dozen and almost the score! Here, too, is the
marvellous companion-statement that in the England of the first
quarter of the century was "no national glow of life." It was the
chill of death, I suppose, which made the nation fasten on the throat
of the world and choke it into submission during a twenty years'
struggle.
But these things are only Mr Arnold's way. I have never been able to
satisfy myself whether they were deliberate paradoxes, or sincere and
rather pathetic paralogisms. For instance, did he really think that
the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, an organ of "dukes, dunces, and
_d�votes_," as it used to be called even in those days by the
wicked knowing ones, a nursing mother of Academies certainly, and a
most respectable periodical in all ways--that this good _Revue_
actually "had for its main function to understand and utter the best
that is known and thought in the world," absolutely existed as an
organ for "the free play of mind"? I should be disposed to think that
the truer explanation of such things is that they were neither quite
paradoxes nor quite paralogisms; but the offspring of an innocent
willingness to believe what he wished, and of an almost equally
innocent desire to provoke the adversary. Unless (as unluckily they
sometimes are) they be taken at the foot of the letter, they can do no
harm, and their very piquancy helps the rest to do a great deal of
good.
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