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Page 28
Between this remarkable book and the later ones of the same
_lustrum_, we may conveniently take up the thread of biography
proper where we last dropped it. The letters are fuller for this
period than perhaps for any other; but this very fulness makes it all
the more difficult to select incidents, never, perhaps, of the very
first importance, but vying with each other in the minor biographical
interests. A second fishing expedition to Viel Salm was attempted in
August 1862; but it did not escape the curse which seems to dog
attempts at repetition of the same pleasure. The river was hopelessly
low; the fish would not take; and the traveller came back in very
little more than "a day and a night and a morrow." By December
danger-signals are up in a letter to his mother, to the effect that
"it is intolerable absurdity to profess [who does?] to see
Christianity through the spectacles of a number of second- or
third-rate men who lived in Queen Elizabeth's time"--that time so
fertile in nothing but the second-rate and the third. But it is
followed a little later by the less disputable observation, "It is
difficult to make out exactly at what [F.D.] Maurice is driving;
perhaps he is always a little dim in his own mind" on that point.
The illuminations at the Prince of Wales's marriage, where like other
people he found "the crowd very good-humoured," are noted; and the
beginning of _Thyrsis_ where and while the fritillaries blow. But
from the literary point of view few letters are more interesting than
a short one to Sir Mountstuart (then Mr) Grant Duff, dated May 14,
1863, in which Mr Arnold declines an edition of Heine, the loan of
which was offered for his lecture--later the well-known essay. His
object, he says, "is not so much to give a literary history of Heine's
work as to mark his place in modern European letters, and the special
tendency and significance of what he did." He will, therefore, not
even read these things of Heine's that he has not read, but will take
the _Romancero_ alone for his text, with a few quotations from
elsewhere, With a mere passing indication of the fact that Matthew
Arnold here, like every good critic of this century, avowedly pursues
that plan of "placing" writers which some of his own admirers so
foolishly decry, I may observe that this is a _locus classicus_
for his own special kind of criticism. It is possible--I do not know
whether he did so--that Sir Mountstuart may, on receiving the letter,
have smiled and thought of "Mon si�ge est fait"; but I am sure he
would be the first to admit that the cases were different. I do not
myself think that Mr Arnold's strong point was that complete grasp of
a literary personality, and its place, which some critics aim at but
which few achieve. His impatience--here perhaps half implied and later
openly avowed--of the historic estimate in literature, would of itself
have made this process irksome to him. But on the lines of his own
special vocation as a critic it was not only irksome, it was
unnecessary. His function was to mark the special--perhaps it would be
safer to say _a_ special--tendency of his man, and to bring that
out with all his devices of ingenious reduplication, fascinating
rhetoric, and skilful parading of certain favourite axioms and general
principles. This function would not have been assisted--I think it
nearly certain that it would have been hampered and baulked--by that
attempt to find "the whole" which the Greek philosopher and poet so
sadly and so truly declares that few boast to find. It was a side, a
face, a phase of each man and writer, that he wished to bring out;
and, though he might sometimes exaggerate this, yet his exaggeration
was scarcely illegitimate. To bring out something he had to block out
much. If he had attempted to show the whole Goethe, the whole Heine,
the whole Homer or Shakespeare even, they would have been difficult if
not impossible to group and to compare in the fashion in which he
wished to deal with them.
And except on the sheer assumption, which is surely a fallacy, that
_suppressio veri_ is always and not only sometimes _suggestio
falsi_, I do not see that he exceeded a due licence in this matter,
while that he was wise in his generation there can be no doubt. He
wanted to influence the average Englishman, and he knew perfectly well
there is nothing the average Englishman dislikes so much as guarded
and elaborately conditioned statements. The immense popularity and
influence of Macaulay had been due to his hatred of half-lights, of
"perhapses"; and little as Mr Arnold liked Macaulay's fiddle, he was
wise enough to borrow his rosin, albeit in disguise. If a critic makes
too many provisos, if he "buts" too much, if he attempts to paint the
warts as well as the beauties, he will be accused of want of sympathy,
he will be taxed with timorousness and hedging, at best he will be
blamed for wire-drawn and hair-splitting argument. The preambles of
exposition, the conclusions of summing up, will often be considered
tedious or impertinent. The opposite plan of selecting a nail and
hitting that on the head till you have driven it home was, in fact, as
much Mr Arnold's as it was Macaulay's. The hammer-play of the first
was far more graceful and far less monotonous: yet it was hammer-play
all the same. But we must return to our _Letters_.
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