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Page 52
Of Mr Arnold's efforts in editing I may be permitted to neglect his
"intromittings" with Isaiah, for reasons already sufficiently given.
In more hopeful matter there are three examples which are not soon
likely to lose interest or value: the selection of his own poems, that
from Wordsworth, and that from Byron. To the first the English habits
of his own day did not permit him to prefix any extensive
Introduction, and though the principle is sound, one is almost sorry
for the application. Neither Wordsworth nor Coleridge would have had
any scruples in doing this, and while Mr Arnold had the sense of the
ludicrous which Wordsworth lacked, he was less subject to disastrous
divagations than Coleridge. Still, the 1853 Preface enables those who
have some slight power of expansion to fill in what is wanted from the
point of view of purpose; and the selection itself is quite excellent.
Almost the only things that, as a basis for a good knowledge of the
poet, one finds it necessary to subjoin, are the beautiful
_Resignation_, which Mr Humphry Ward had the good taste to
include in the appendix to his _English Poets_; and the curious,
characteristic, and not much short of admirable _Dream_, which in
the earlier issues formed part of _Switzerland_, and should never
have been excluded from it. It is probably the best selection by a
poet from his own works that has ever been issued, and this is saying
not a little. Nor does one like Mr Arnold less for his saying,
reported either by Mr Ward or Lord Coleridge, that he had rather have
given _all_ the poems.
As for the "Wordsworth" and the "Byron," they gain enormously by "this
man's estimate of them," and do not lose by "this man's" selection. I
have had occasion, not once or twice only, and for purposes not
invariably the same, to go through the Wordsworth book carefully, side
by side with the complete poems, in order to see whether anything has
necessarily to be added. I really do not know what has, unless it be a
few of the oases from the deserts of the _Excursion_, the
_Prelude_, and the then not published _Recluse_. Wordsworth's real
titles are put in once for all; the things by which he must stand or
fall are there. The professor, the very thorough-going student, the
literary historian, must go farther; the idle person with a love of
literature will; but nobody need.
And the Introduction (for after all we can all make our selections for
ourselves, with a very little trouble) is still more precious. I know
few critical essays which give me more pleasure in reading and
re-reading than this. Not that I agree with it by any means as a
whole; but he is in the mere "Pettys" of criticism (it is true not
many seem to get beyond) who judges a critical essay by his own
agreement with it. Mr Arnold puts Wordsworth, as a poet and an English
poet, far higher than I can put him. He is not so great a poet to my
thinking as Spenser or Shelley; if it were possible in these
competitions to allow weight for age, he is not as great a poet as
Keats; I am sure he is not a greater poet than Tennyson; I cannot give
him rank above Heine or Hugo, though the first may be sometimes
naughty and the second frequently silly or rhetorical; and when Mr
Arnold begins to reckon Moli�re in, I confess I am lost. When and
where did Moli�re write poetry? But these things do not matter; they
are the things on which reviewers exercise their "will it be
believed?" and on which critics agree to differ. We may include with
them the disparaging passage on Gautier (of whom I suspect Mr Arnold
knew little, and whom he was not quite fitted to judge had he known
more) and the exaltation of "life" and "conduct" and all the rest of
it. These are the colours of the regiment, the blazonry of the knight;
we take them with it and him, and having once said our say against
them, pass them as admitted.
But what is really precious is first the excellent criticism scattered
broadcast all over the essay, and secondly, the onslaught on the
Wordsworthians. They might perhaps retort with a _tu quoque_.
When Mr Arnold attacks these poor folk for saying that Wordsworth's
poetry is precious because its philosophy is sound, we remember a
certain Preface with its "all depends on the subject," and chuckle a
little, a very little. But Mr Arnold is right here. No philosophy, no
subject, will make poetry without poetical treatment, and the
consequence is that _The Excursion_ and _The Prelude_ are,
as wholes, not good poems at all. They contain, indeed, passages of
magnificent poetry. But how one longs, how, as one sees from this
essay, Mr Arnold longed, for some mercury-process which would simply
amalgamate the gold out of them and allow us to throw the dross down
any nearest cataract, or let it be blown away by any casual hurricane!
The Byron paper contains more disputable statements--indeed the
passage about Shelley, if it were quite serious, which may be doubted,
would almost disqualify Mr Arnold as a critic of poetry. But it is
hardly less interesting, and scarcely at all less valuable. In the
first place, it is a very great thing that a man should be able to
admire both Byron and Wordsworth. Of a mere Byronite, indeed, Mr
Arnold has even less than he has of a Wordsworthian pure and simple.
He makes the most damaging admissions; he has to fall back on Goethe
for comfort and confirmation; he is greatly disturbed by M. Scherer's
rough treatment of his subject. In no essay, I think, does he quote so
much from others, does he seem to feel it such a relief to find a
backer, a somebody to fight with on a side point, a somebody (for
instance Professor Nichol) to correct and gloss and digress upon while
complimenting him. Mr Arnold is obviously not at ease in this
Zion--which indeed is a Zion of an odd kind. Yet this very uneasiness
gives to the _Essay_ a glancing variety, a sort of animation and
excitement, which are not common things in critical prelections. Nor,
though one may think that Mr Arnold's general estimate of Byron is not
even half as sound as his general estimate of Wordsworth, does the
former appear to be in even the slightest degree insincere. Much as
there must have been in Byron's loose art, his voluble
inadequacy--nay, even in his choice of subject--that was repellent to
Mr Arnold: much more as there must have been in his unchastened
conduct, his flashy affectations, his lack of dignity, morality,
_tenue_ of every kind,--yet there were real links between them. Mr
Arnold saw in Byron an ally, if not an altogether admirable or
trustworthy ally, against the Philistine. He saw in him a link with
general European literature, a check and antidote to the merely
insular. Byron's undoubtedly "sincere and strong" dislike of the
extreme Romantic view of literature was not distasteful to Mr Arnold.
Indeed, in his own earlier poems there are not wanting Byronic touches
and echoes, not so easy to separate and put the finger on, as to see
and hear "confusedly." Lastly, he had, by that sort of reaction which
often exhibits itself in men of the study, an obvious admiration for
Force--the admiration which makes him in his letters praise France up
to 1870 and Germany after that date--and he thought he saw Force in
Byron. So that the _Essay_ is written with a stimulating mingle-mangle
of attraction and reluctance, of advocacy and admission. It is very
far indeed from being one of his best critically. You may, on his own
principles, "catch him out" in it a score of times. But it is a good
piece of special pleading, an excellent piece of writing, and one of
the very best and most consummate literary _causeries_ in
English.
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