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Page 27
Almost equally delightful, and with no touch of the sadness which must
always blend with any treatment of Heine, is the next essay, the pet,
I believe, of some very excellent judges, on "Pagan and Medi�val
Religious Sentiment," with its notable translation of Theocritus and
its contrast with St Francis. One feels, indeed, that Mr Arnold was
not quite so well equipped with knowledge on the one side as on the
other; indeed, he never was well read in medi�val literature. But his
thesis, as a thesis, is capable of defence; in the sternest times of
military etiquette he could not have been put to death on the charge
of holding out an untenable post; and he puts the different sides with
incomparable skill and charm. Mr Arnold glosses Pagan morals rather
doubtfully, but so skilfully; he rumples and blackens medi�val life
more than rather unfairly, but with such a light and masterly touch!
Different again, inferior perhaps, but certainly not in any hostile
sense inferior, is the "Joubert." It has been the fashion with some to
join this essay to the Gu�rin pieces as an instance of some
incorrigible twist in Mr Arnold's French estimates, of some inability
to admire the right things, even when he did admire I cannot agree
with them. Joubert, of course, has his own shortcomings as a
_pens�e_-writer. He is _rococo_ beside La Bruy�re, dilettante beside
La Rochefoucauld, shallow beside Pascal. There is at times, even if
you take him by himself, and without comparison, something thin and
amateurish and conventional about him. But this is by no means always
or very often the case; and his merits, very great in themselves, were
even greater for Mr Arnold's general purpose.
That subtle and sensitive genius did not go wrong when it selected
Joubert as an eminent example of those gifts of the French mind which
most commended themselves to itself--an exquisite _justesse_, an
alertness of spirit not shaking off rule and measure, above all, a
consummate propriety in the true and best, not the limited sense of
the word. Nor is it difficult to observe in the shy philosopher a
temperament which must have commended itself to Mr Arnold almost as
strongly as his literary quality, and very closely indeed connected
with that--the temperament of equity, of _epieikeia_, of freedom
from swagger and brag and self-assertion. And here, once more, the
things receive precisely their right treatment, the treatment
proportioned and adjusted at once to their own value and nature and to
the use which their critic is intending to make of them. For it is one
of the greatest literary excellences of the _Essays in Criticism_
that, with rare exceptions, they bear a real relation to each other
and to the whole--that they are not a bundle but an organism; a
university, not a mob.
The subjects of the two last essays, _Spinoza_ and _Marcus
Aurelius_, may at first sight, and not at first sight only, seem
oddly chosen. For although the conception of literature illustrated in
the earlier part of the book is certainly wide, and admits--nay,
insists upon, as it always did with Mr Arnold--considerations of
subject in general and of morals and religion in particular, yet it is
throughout one of literature as such. Now, we cannot say that the
interest of Spinoza or that of Marcus Aurelius, great as it is in both
cases, is wholly, or in the main, or even in any considerable part, a
literary interest. With Spinoza it is a philosophical-religious
interest, with Marcus Aurelius a moral-religious, almost purely. The
one may indeed illustrate that attempt to see things in a perfectly
white light which Mr Arnold thought so important in literature; the
other, that attention to conduct which he thought more important
still. But they illustrate these things in themselves, not in relation
to literature. They are less literary even than St Francis; far less
than the author of the _Imitation_.
It cannot therefore but be suspected that in including them Mr Arnold,
unconsciously perhaps, but more probably with some consciousness, was
feeling his way towards that wide extension of the province of the
critic, that resurrection of the general Socratic attitude, which he
afterwards adventured. But it cannot be said that his experiments are
on this particular occasion in any way disastrous. With both his
subjects he had the very strongest sympathy--with Spinoza (as already
with Heine) as a remarkable example of the Hebraic spirit and genius,
rebellious to or transcending the usual limitations of Hebraism; with
Marcus Aurelius as an example of that non-Christian morality and
religiosity which also had so strong an attraction for him. There is
no trace in either essay of the disquieting and almost dismaying
jocularity which was later to invade his discussion of such things: we
are still far from Bottles; the three Lord Shaftesburys relieve us by
not even threatening to appear. And accordingly the two essays add in
no small degree, though somewhat after the fashion of an appendix or
belated episode, to the charm of the book. They have an unction which
never, as it so often does in the case of Mr Arnold's dangerous master
and model Renan, degenerates into unctuosity; they are nobly serious,
but without being in the least dull; they contain some exceedingly
just and at the same time perfectly urbane criticism of the ordinary
reviewing kind, and though they are not without instances of the
author's by-blows of slightly unproved opinion, yet these are by no
means eminent in them, and are not of a provocative nature. And I do
not think it fanciful to suppose that the note of grave if
unclassified piety, of reconciliation and resignation, with which they
close the book, was intended--that it was a deliberate "evening
voluntary" to play out of church the assistants at a most remarkable
function--such a function as criticism in English had not celebrated
before, such as, I think, it may without unfairness be said has not
been repeated since. _Essays in Criticism_, let us repeat, is a
book which is classed and placed, and it will remain in that class and
place: the fresh wreaths and the fresh mud, that may be in turn
unfitly thrown upon it, will affect neither.
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