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Page 30
As the tenure of his Chair drew to a close, and as he began to loathe
examination papers more and more (indeed I know no one to whom _usus
concinnat amorem_ in the case of these documents), he made some
endeavours to obtain employment which might be, if not both more
profitable and less onerous, at any rate one or the other. First he
tried for a Charity Commissionership; then for the librarianship of
the House of Commons. For the former post it may be permitted to think
that his extremely strong--in fact partisan--opinions, both on
education and on the Church of England, were a most serious
disqualification; his appointment to the latter would have been an
honour to the House and to England, and would have shown that
sometimes at any rate the right man can find the right place. But he
got neither. He delivered his last Oxford lecture in the summer term
of 1867. I remember that there were strong undergraduate hopes that Mr
Browning, who was an Honorary M.A., might be got to succeed him; but
it was decided that the honorary qualification was insufficient, and I
daresay there were other objections. Mr Arnold had a sort of
"send-off" in the shape of two great dinners at Balliol and Merton, at
which he and Mr Browning were the principal guests, and the close of
his professorial career was further made memorable by the issue of the
_Study of Celtic Literature_ in prose and the _New Poems_ in verse,
with _Schools and Universities on the Continent_ to follow next year.
Of these something must be said before this chapter is closed.
_On the Study of Celtic Literature_ is the first book of his to
which, as a whole, and from his own point of view, we may take rather
serious objections. That it has merits not affected by these
objections need hardly be said; indeed I think it would not be foolish
to say that it is--or was--even the superior of the _Homer_ in
comparative and indirect importance. In that Mr Arnold had but, at the
best, roused men to enter upon new ways of dealing with old and
familiar matter; in this he was leading them to conquest of new
realms. Now, as we have seen, it was exactly this exploration, this
expansion, of which English was then in most need, just as it is now
perhaps in most need of concentration and retreat upon the older
acquisitions.
So far so good; but if we go farther, we do not at first fare better.
It would be grossly unjust to charge Mr Arnold with all the nonsense
which has since been talked about Celtic Renascences; but I fear we
cannot write all that nonsense off his account. In particular, he set
an example, which has in this and other matters been far too widely
followed, of speaking without sufficient knowledge of fact. It cannot
be too peremptorily laid down that the literary equivalent of a
"revoke"--the literary act after which, if he does it on purpose, you
must not play with a man--is speaking of authors and books which he
has not read and cannot read in the original, while he leaves you
ignorant of his ignorance. _This_ Mr Arnold never committed, and
could never have committed. But short of it, and while escaping its
penalty, a man may err by speaking too freely even of what he
confesses that he does not know; and of this minor and less
discreditable sin, I own (acknowledging most frankly that I know even
less of the _originals_ than he did), I think Mr Arnold was here
guilty.
Exactly how much Gaelic, Irish, or Welsh Mr Arnold knew at first-hand,
I cannot say: he frankly enough confesses that his knowledge was very
closely limited. But what is really surprising, is that he does not
seem to have taken much trouble to extend it at second-hand. A very
few Welsh triads and scraps of Irish are all that, even in
translation, he seems to have consulted: he never, I think, names
Dafydd ap Gwilym, usually put forward as the greatest of Celtic poets;
and in the main his citations are derived either from _Ossian_
("this do seem going far," as an American poetess observes), or else
from the _Mabinogion_, where some of the articles are positively
known to be late translations of French-English originals, and the
others are very uncertain. You really cannot found any safe literary
generalisations on so very small a basis of such very shaky matter. In
fact, Mr Arnold's argument for the presence of "Celtic magic," &c., in
Celtic poetry comes to something like this. "There is a quality of
magic in Shakespeare, Keats, &c.; this magic must be Celtic: therefore
it must be in Celtic poetry." Fill up the double enthymeme who list, I
am not going to endeavour to do so. I shall only say that two
sentences give the key-note of the book as argument. "Rhyme itself,
all the weight of evidence tends to show, came into our poetry from
the Celts." Now to some of us all the weight of evidence tends to show
that it came from the Latins. "Our only first-rate body of
contemporary poetry is the German." Now at the time (1867), for more
than thirty years, Germany had not had a single poet of the first or
the second class except Heine, who, as Mr Arnold himself very truly
says, was not a German but a Jew.
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