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Page 54
And the Keats, less disputable in its general estimate, is equally
good in itself, and specially interesting as a capital example of Mr
Arnold's polemic--_the_ capital example, indeed, if we except the
not wholly dissimilar but much later article on Shelley's _Life_.
He is rather unduly severe on the single letter of Keats which he
quotes; but that was his way, and it is after all only a justifiable
rhetorical _reculade_, with the intent to leap upon the maudlin
defenders of the poet as a sort of hero of M. Feydeau, and rend them.
The improvement of the mere fashion, as compared with the
fantasticalities of the _Friendship's Garland_ period, is simply
enormous. And the praise which follows is praise really in the grand
style--praise, the style and quality of which are positively rejoicing
to the heart from their combination of fervour and accuracy, from
their absolute fulfilment of the ideal of a word shockingly misused in
these latter days, the word Appreciation. The personal sympathy which
Mr Arnold evidently had with Gray neither makes nor mars here; all is
purely critical, purely literary. And yet higher praise has never been
given by any save the mere superlative-sloppers of the lower press,
nor juster criticism meted out by the veriest critical Rhadamanthus.
Of its scale and kind, this, I think, is the most perfect example of
Mr Arnold's critical power, and it is so late that it shows that power
to have been not merely far off exhaustion, but actually, like sound
old wine, certain to improve for years to come.
In the seven years that were left to him after the publication of the
_Byron_, Mr Arnold did not entirely confine himself to the
service of his only true mistress Literature. But he never fell again
so completely into the power of Duessa as he had fallen between 1867
and 1877. His infidelities were chiefly in the direction of politics,
not of religion or irreligion, and they were of a less gay and
frivolous character than those of a generally similar kind in earlier
dates. They were partly devoted to the change which has brought it
about, that, while during the third quarter of the century the
Conservatives were in power, though on three different occasions, yet
in each for absolutely insignificant terms, in the fourth Mr
Gladstone's tenure of office from 1880 to 1885 has been the only
period of real Liberal domination. But although he dealt with the
phenomenon from various points of view in such articles as "The Nadir
of Liberalism," the "Zenith of Conservatism," and so forth, it was
chiefly, as was natural at the time, in relation to Ireland that he
exercised his political pen, and enough has been said about these
Irish articles by anticipation above. _Discourses in America_,
the result of his lecturing tour to that country in 1883-84, and the
articles on Amiel, Tolstoi, and Shelley's Life, which represent his
very last stage of life, require more particular attention.
The _Discourses in America_, two of them specially written, and
the other, originally a Cambridge "Rede" discourse, recast for the
Western Hemisphere, must always rank with the most curious and
interesting of Mr Arnold's works: but the very circumstances of their
composition and delivery made it improbable, if not impossible, that
they should form one of his best. These circumstances were of a kind
which reproduces itself frequently in the careers of all men of any
public distinction. In his days of comparative obscurity, or in some
position of "greater freedom and less responsibility," even when he
ceases to be obscure, a man deals faithfully, but perhaps a little
flippantly, with this or that person, thing, nation, subject,
doctrine. Afterwards he is brought into a relation with the person or
nation, into a position as regards the thing, subject, or doctrine,
which necessitates, if not exactly a distinct recantation in the
humiliating sense attached to the Latin, yet a more or less graceful
and ingenious palinode in the more honourable one which we allow to
the Greek equivalent and original. Mr Arnold could never be lacking in
grace or in ingenuity; but he certainly had, in his earlier work,
allowed it to be perfectly visible that the world of American
politics, American manners, American institutions and ways generally,
was not in his eyes by any means a world all of sweetness or all of
light.
His sense of the ludicrous, and his sense of art, alike precluded even
the idea of a clumsy apology, and though, as was to be expected, the
folk of the baser sort who exist everywhere may not have been pleased
with his Discourses, the people of the United States generally did not
owe him or show him any grudge for being frank and consistent as well
as polite. The subjects were selected and grouped with great skill.
"Numbers" dealt with the burning question of democracy, which must
ever be uppermost--or as nethermost not less important--in a republic;
and dealt with it after the more moderate, not the extremer form, of
that combination of literature and politics which Mr Arnold had always
affected. "Literature and Science," the middle discourse, attacked a
question which, so far as the nationality of his audience was
concerned, had nothing burning about it, which the lecturer was
singularly well qualified to treat from the one side, and which is
likely to retain its actuality and its moment for many a day and year,
perhaps many a century. "Emerson," the last, descended from
generalities to the consideration of a particular subject, at once
specially American and specially literary. It would have been hard
indeed to exhibit better composition in the grouping of the subjects
as regards their classes, and criticism may be defied to find better
examples of each class than those actually taken.
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