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Page 31
But once more, what we go to Mr Matthew Arnold for is not fact, it is
not argument, it is not even learning. It is phrase, attitude, style,
that by which, as he says admirably in this very book, "what a man has
to say is recast and heightened in such a manner as to add dignity and
distinction to it." It is the new critical attitude, the appreciation
of literary beauty in and for itself, the sense of "the word," the
power of discerning and the power of reflecting charm, the method not
more different from the wooden deduction of the old school of critics
than from the merely unenlightened and Philistine commonness of the
reviewers, his earlier contemporaries, or from the aimless "I like
that" and "I don't like this" which does duty now, and did then, and
has done always, for criticism itself. True, Mr Arnold himself might
be wilful, capricious, haphazard; true, he might often be absolutely
unable to give any real reason for the faith that was in him; true, he
sometimes might have known more than he did know about his subject.
But in all these points he saved himself: in his wilfulness, by the
grace and charm that sometimes attend caprice; in his want of reason,
by his genuineness of faith itself; in his occasional lack of the
fullest knowledge, by the admirable use--not merely display--which he
made of what knowledge he had. There may be hardly a page of the two
books of his lectures in which it is not possible to find some
opportunity for disagreement--sometimes pretty grave disagreement; but
I am sure that no two more valuable books, in their kind and subject,
to their country and time, have been ever issued from the press.
The _New Poems_ make a volume of unusual importance in the
history of poetical careers. Mr Arnold lived more than twenty years
after the date of their publication; but his poetical production
during that time filled no more than a few pages. At this date he was
a man of forty-five--an age at which the poetical impulse has been
supposed to run low, but perhaps with no sufficient reason. Poets of
such very different types as Dryden and Tennyson have produced work
equal to their best, if not actually their best, at that age and
later. Mr Browning had, a few years before, produced what are perhaps
his actually greatest volumes, _Men and Women_ and _Dramatis
Personae_, the one at forty-three, the other at fifty-two.
According to Mr Arnold's own conception of poetry-making, as depending
upon the subject and upon the just and artist-like exposition of that
subject, no age should be too late.
Certainly this age was not too late with him. The contents all
answered strictly enough to their title, except that _Empedocles on
Etna_ and some half-dozen of its companions were, at Mr Browning's
request, reprinted from the almost unpublished volume of 1852, and
that _Thyrsis, St Brandan, A Southern Night_, and the _Grande
Chartreuse_ had made magazine appearances. Again the moment was
most important. When Mr Arnold had last made (omitting with an apology
the "transient and embarrassed phantom" of _Merope_) an
appearance in 1855, the transition age of English nineteenth-century
poetry was in full force. No one's place was safe but Tennyson's; and
even his was denied by some, including Mr Arnold himself, who never
got his eyes quite clear of scales in that matter. Browning, though he
had handed in indisputable proofs, had not yet had them allowed; the
Spasmodics had not disappeared; the great prae-Raphaelite school was
but on the way. The critics knew not what to think; the vulgar thought
(to the tune of myriad copies) of Tupper. Both classes, critic and
public, rent _Maud_ and neglected _Men and Women: The Defence
of Guenevere_ had not yet rung the matins--bell in the ears of the
new generation.
Now things were all altered. The mixture of popularity and perfection
in the _Idylls_ and the _Enoch Arden_ volume--the title poem
and _Aylmer's Field_ for some, _The Voyage_ and _Tithonus_ and _In the
Valley of Cauterets_ for others--had put Tennyson's place
"Beyond the arrows, shouts, and views of men."
The three-volume collection of Browning's _Poems_, and
_Dramatis Personae_ which followed to clench it, had nearly, if
not quite, done the same for him. _The Defence of Guenevere_ and
_The Life and Death of Jason, Atalanta, Chastelard_, and most of
all the _Poems and Ballads_, had launched an entirely new
poetical school with almost unexampled pomp and promise on the world.
The Spasmodics were forgotten, the Tupper cult had been nearly (not
yet quite) laughed out of existence. That Mr Arnold's own poems had
had any widely extended sale or reading could hardly be said; but they
were read by those who were or were shortly to be themselves read. You
had not to look far in any Oxford college (I cannot speak of
Cambridge) before you found them on those undergraduate shelves which
mean so much; while many who, from general distaste to poetry or from
accident, knew them not, or hardly knew them, were familiar with their
author's prose work, or at least knew him as one whom others knew.
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