|
Main
- books.jibble.org
My Books
- IRC Hacks
Misc. Articles
- Meaning of Jibble
- M4 Su Doku
- Computer Scrapbooking
- Setting up Java
- Bootable Java
- Cookies in Java
- Dynamic Graphs
- Social Shakespeare
External Links
- Paul Mutton
- Jibble Photo Gallery
- Jibble Forums
- Google Landmarks
- Jibble Shop
- Free Books
- Intershot Ltd
|
books.jibble.org
Previous Page
| Next Page
Page 29
A dinner with Lord Houghton--"all the advanced Liberals in religion
and politics, and a Cingalese in full costume"--a visit to Cambridge
and a stroll to Grantchester, notice of about the first elaborate
appreciation of his critical work which had appeared in England, the
article by the late Mr S.H. Reynolds in the _Westminster Review_
for October 1863, visits to the Rothschilds at Aston Clinton and
Mentmore, and interesting notices of the composition of the
_Joubert_, the _French Eton_, &c., fill up the year. The
death of Thackeray extracts one of those criticisms of his great
contemporaries which act as little douches from time to time, in the
words, "I cannot say that I thoroughly liked him, though we were on
friendly terms: and he was not to my mind a great writer." But the
personal reflections which follow are of value. He finds "the sudden
cessation of so vigorous an existence very sobering. To-day I am
forty-one; the middle of life in any case, and for me perhaps much
more than the middle. I have ripened and am ripening so slowly that I
should be glad of as much time as possible. Yet I can feel, I rejoice
to say, an inward spring which seems more and more to gain strength
and to promise to resist outward shocks, if they must come, however
rough. But of this inward spring one must not talk [it is only to his
mother that he writes this] for it does not like being talked about,
and threatens to depart if one will not leave it in mystery."
An interview with Mr Disraeli at Aston Clinton, not, as one may
suppose, without pleasant words, opens 1864. "It is only from
politicians who have themselves felt the spell of literature that one
gets these charming speeches," he says, and they, not unnaturally,
charmed him so much that he left his dressing-case and his umbrella
behind him. But the anti-crusade is more and more declared. He "means
to deliver the middle-class out of the hand of their Dissenting
ministers," and in the interval wants to know how "that beast of a
word 'waggonette' is spelt?" The early summer was spent at Woodford,
on the borders of Epping Forest, and the early autumn at Llandudno,
where Welsh scenery and the poetry of the Celtic race "quite
overpower" him. Alas! some other poetry did not, and when we find him
in September thinking _Enoch Arden_ "perhaps the best thing
Tennyson has done," we are not surprised to find this remarkable
special appreciation followed by a general depreciation, which is
quite in keeping. He is even tempted (and of course asked) to write a
criticism of the Laureate, but justly replies, "How is that possible?"
From 1865 we get numerous notices of the notices of the _Essays_,
and a pleasant and full account of a second official tour on the
Continent, with special dwellings at most of the Western and Central
European capitals. The tour lasted from April to November, and I have
sometimes thought that it might, by itself, give a better idea of Mr
Arnold as an epistoler than the _Letters_ at large seem to have
given. Early in 1866 we hear of the beginnings of the _Friendship's
Garland_ series, though the occasion for that name did not come
till afterwards. And he spent the summer of that year (as he did that
of the next) in a farmhouse at West Humble, near Dorking, while he
caught "_a_ salmon" in the Deveron during September.
The occasion is perhaps a good one to say a few words on the relations
between Mr Arnold and M. Renan, though the latter is not so prominent
in the Continental letters as Sainte-Beuve and M. Scherer are. The
author of the _Vie de J�sus_ was a very slightly younger man than
Mr Arnold (he was born in 1823), but in consequence of his having left
the seminary and begun early to live by literary work, he was somewhat
in advance of his English compeer in literary repute. His
contributions to the _D�bats_ and the _Revue des Deux Mondes_
began to be collected soon after 1850, and his first remarkable single
book, _Averro�s et l'Averroisme_, dates from that year. I do not
know how early Mr Arnold became acquainted with his written work. But
they actually met in 1859, during the business of the Foreign
Education Commission, and there is a very remarkable passage in a
letter to Mrs Forster on Christmas Eve of that year. He tells his
sister of "Ernest Renan, a Frenchman I met in Paris," and notes the
considerable resemblance between their lines of endeavour, observing,
however, that Renan is chiefly "trying to inculcate morality, in a
high sense of the word, on the French," while _he_ is trying to
inculcate intelligence on the English. After which he makes a long and
enthusiastic reference to the essay, _Sur la Po�sie des Races
Celtiques_, the literary results of which we shall soon see. I do
not know whether Mr Arnold ever expressed to his intimates--for the
reference to M. Renan in "Numbers" is not quite explicit--what he
thought of those later and very peculiar developments of "morality in
a high sense of the word" which culminated in the _Abbesse de
Jouarre_ and other things. His sense of humour must have painfully
suggested to him that his own familiar friend and pattern Frenchman
had become one of the most conspicuous examples of that French
lubricity which he himself denounced. But there was no danger of his
imitating M. Renan in this respect. In others the following was quite
unmistakable, and, I am bound to say, on the whole rather disastrous.
In literary criticism Mr Arnold needed no teaching from M. Renan, and
as his English training on one of its sides preserved him from the
Frenchman's sentimental hedonism, so on another it kept him from the
wildest excesses of M. Renan's critical reconstructions of sacred
history. But he copied a great deal too much of his master's
dilettante attitude to religion as a whole, and, as we shall see, he
adopted and carried a great deal further M. Renan's (I am told) not
particularly well-informed and (I am sure) very hazardous and
fantastic ideas about Celtic literature. On the whole, the two were
far too much alike to do each other any good. Exquisite even as M.
Renan's mere style is, it is exquisite by reason of sweetness, with a
certain not quite white and slightly phosphorescent light, not by
strength or by practical and masculine force. Now it was the latter
qualities that Mr Arnold wanted; sweetness and light he could not
want.
Previous Page
| Next Page
|
|