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Page 56
The three last essays we have mentioned, apart from the pathetic and
adventitious interest which attaches to them as last, would be in any
case among the best of their author's, and their value is (at least,
as it seems to me) in an ascending scale. To care very much for that
on Count Tolstoi is not easy for those who are unfashionable enough
not to care very much for the eloquent Russian himself. Nothing is
satisfactory that one can only read in translations. But Mr Arnold, in
whom a certain perennial youthfulness was (as it often, if not always,
is in the chosen of the earth) one of his most amiable features, seems
to have conceived a new _engouement_ for this new and quaintly
flavoured Russian literature. Had he lived longer, he probably would
have sung us something in a cautionary strain; just as it can never be
sufficiently regretted that he did not live long enough to handle
Ibsenism. And it would have been very particularly pleasant to hear
him on those _Memoirs of a Mongol Minx_ (as they have been
profanely called), which are assigned to the great Marie Bashkirtseff;
or on those others of the learned She-Mathematician, who waited with a
friend on a gentleman and suggested that he should marry _one_ of
them, no matter which, and lead both about. But the mixture of
freshness, of passion, and of regard for conduct in Count Tolstoi
could not but appeal to him; and he has given us a very charming
_causerie_ on _Anna Karenina_, notable--like O'Rourke's
noble feast--to
"Those who were there
And those who were not,"--
to those who have read the book itself, and to those who have not yet
found time to read it.
I cannot plead much greater affection for the lucubrations of Amiel
than for Count Tolstoi's dealings with that odd compound of crudity
and rottenness, the Russian nature; but Mr Arnold's "Amiel" is
admirable. Never was there a more "gentlemanly correction," a more
delicate and good-humoured setting to rights, than that which he
administers to Amiel's two great panegyrists (who happened to be Mr
Arnold's own niece and Mr Arnold's own friend). On subjects like Maya
and the "great wheel" it would almost be impossible to conceive, and
certainly impossible to find, a happier commentator than Mr Arnold,
though perhaps in the regions of theology he had a private Maya, a
very Great Wheel, of his own. The firmness with which he rebukes the
maunderings of the Genevese hypochondriac--of whom some one once
unkindly remarked that he was not so much intoxicated with Idealism as
suffering from the subsequent headache--is equalled by the kindness of
the dealing; and the quiet decision with which he puts his fine
writing in its proper place is better still. Nobody could call Mr
Arnold a Philistine or one insensible to _finesse_, grace,
_sehnsucht_, the impalpable and intangible charm of melancholy
and of thought. And his comments on Amiel's loaded pathos and his
muddled meditation are therefore invaluable. Nor is he less happy or
less just in the praise which, though not the first, he was one of the
first to give to by far the strongest side of Amiel's talent, his
really remarkable power of literary criticism.
But the best wine was still kept for the very last. It will have been
observed in these brief sketches of his work that, since his return to
the fields of literature proper, Mr Arnold had drawn nearer to the
_causerie_ and farther from the abstract critical essay,--that he had
taken to that mixture of biography, abstract of work, and interspersed
critical comment which Sainte-Beuve, though he did not exactly invent
it, had perfected, and which somebody, I think, has recently described
as "intensely irritating." Well! well! pearls, as we all know, are
irritating to certain classes of consumers. He had from the first done
this well, he now did it consummately. That he took occasion, in the
paper on Shelley's life which appeared in the _Nineteenth Century_ for
January 1888, to repeat his pet heresy about Shelley's poetry, matters
nothing at all. It is an innocent defiance, and no attempt whatever is
made to support it by argument. The purpose of the essay is quite
different. Already, some years before, in his article on Keats, Mr
Arnold had dealt some pretty sharp blows both at the indiscretion of a
certain class of modern literary biographers, and at the pawing and
morbid sentimentality of the same persons or others. He had a new and
a better opportunity in the matter he was now handling, and he struck
more strongly, more repeatedly, and with truer aim than ever. From the
moment of its appearance to the present day, this piece has been an
unceasing joy to all who love literature with a sane devotion. Its
composition is excellent; it selects just the right points, dwells on
them in just the right way, and drops them just when we have had
enough. In mere style it yields to nothing of its author's, and is
conspicuously and quite triumphantly free from his repetitions and
other mannerisms. No English writer--indeed one may say no writer at
all--has ever tempered such a blend of quiet contempt with perfect
good-humour and perfect good-breeding. Dryden would have written with
an equally fatal serenity, but not so lightly; Voltaire with as much
lightness, but not nearly so much like a gentleman--which may also be
said Of Courier. Thackeray could not have helped a blaze of
indignation--honest and healthy, but possibly just
_plusquam_-artistic--at the unspeakable persons who think that by
blackening the unhappy Harriet they can whiten Shelley. And almost any
one would have been likely either to commit the complementary error of
being too severe on Shelley himself, or, if this were avoided, to
underlie the charge of being callous and unsympathetic. Every one of
these rocks, and others, Mr Arnold has avoided; and he has left us in
the piece one of the most perfect examples that exist of the English
essay on subjects connected with literature. In its own special
division of _causerie_ the thing is not only without a superior, it is
almost without a peer; its insinuated or passing literary comments are
usually as happy as its censure of vital matters, and even the
above-referred-to heresy itself gives it a certain piquancy. Ill
indeed was the fate that took its author away so soon after the
completion of this little masterpiece; yet he could not have desired
to leave the world with a better diploma-performance, lodged as an
example of his actual accomplishment.
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