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Page 35
And we must remember that this appearance of Mr Arnold as the mild and
ingenious tamer of the ferocious manners of Britons coincided with far
wider and more remarkable innovations. This was the time, at home, of
the second Parliamentary Reform, which did at least as much to
infringe the authority of his enemy the Philistine, as the first had
done to break the power of the half-dreaded, half-courted Barbarian.
This was the time when, abroad, the long-disguised and disorganised
power of Germany was to rearrange the map of Europe, and to bring
about a considerable rearrangement of Mr Arnold's own ideas as to the
respective greatness of foreign nations. And finally the walls of
another stronghold of British Philistia, its intense and apparently
impregnable self-satisfaction with Free-trade and cheap money and so
forth, were tottering and crumbling. A blast against them--indeed a
series of blasts from _Chartism_ to the _Latter-day
Pamphlets_--had been blown long before by Carlyle, in very
different tones from Mr Arnold's. They had lost their stoutest
champion and their most eloquent panegyrist in Macaulay. But Sadowa
and household suffrage gave the final summons, if not the final shake.
Mr Arnold had done his best to co-operate; but his object, to do him
justice, was to be rather a raiser of the walls of Thebes than an
over-thrower of those of Jericho, or even of Ashdod. He set about, in
all seriousness, to clear away the rubbish and begin the
re-edification; unluckily, in but too many cases, with dubious
judgment, and by straying into quarters where he had no vocation. But
he never entirely neglected his real business and his real vocation,
and fortunately he returned to them almost entirely before it was too
late.
CHAPTER IV.
IN THE WILDERNESS.
That the end of Mr Arnold's tenure of the Professorship of Poetry was
a most important epoch in his life is sufficiently evident. In the ten
years that came to an end then, he had, as two such extremely
competent judges as Mr Disraeli and Crabb Robinson in different ways
told him,[1] passed from comparative obscurity into something more
than comparative prominence. His chair had been for him a real
_cathedra_, and his deliverances from it had always assumed, and
had at length, to a great extent, achieved, real authority. In
criticism it was evident that if he had not revealed positively novel
aspects of truth, he had formulated and put on record aspects which
were presenting themselves to many, nay, most, of the best critical
minds of his day. His criticism had drawn his poetry with it, if not
into actual popularity, yet into something like attention. His
attempts to obtain some other employment less irksome, less absorbing,
and more profitable, had indeed been unsuccessful; but he was rising
in his own department, and his work, if still in part uncongenial and
decidedly laborious, appears to have been much less severe than in
earlier days. Partly this work itself, partly his writings, and partly
other causes had opened to him a very large circle of acquaintance,
which it was in his own power to extend or contract as he pleased. His
domestic life was perfectly happy, if his means were not very great:
and his now assured literary position made it easy for him to increase
these means, not indeed largely, but to a not despicable extent, by
writing. The question was, "What should he write?"
It is probably idle ever to wish that a man had done anything
different from that which he has done. Without being a rigid
Determinist, one may be pretty well convinced that the actual conduct
is the joint result of abilities, and of desires, and of opportunity
to exercise them, and that the man, had he really done otherwise,
would have been unsuccessful or unhappy or both. But I fear that if I
had been arbiter of Mr Arnold's fate at this moment I should have
arranged it differently. He should have given us more poems--the man
who, far later, wrote the magnificent _Westminster Abbey_ on such a
subject as Dean Stanley, had plenty more poetry in his sack. And in
prose he should have given us infinite essays, as many as De Quincey's
or as Sainte-Beuve's own, and more than Hazlitt's, of the kind of the
_Heine_ and the _Joubert_ earlier, of the _Wordsworth_ and the _Byron_
later. I can see no reason why, in the twenty-one years' lease of life
upon which he now entered, he should not have produced a volume a-year
of these,--there are more than enough subjects in the various
literatures that he knew; and though it is possible that in such
extended application his method might have proved monotonous, or his
range have seemed narrow, it is not likely. To complete the thing, I
should have given him, instead of his inspectorship, a headship at
Oxford, for which, it seems to me, he was admirably fitted. But _Dis
aliter visum_: at least it seemed otherwise good to Mr Arnold himself
as far as his literary employments were concerned, and the gods did
not interfere.
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