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Page 59
CHAPTER VI.
CONCLUSION.
The personal matters which usually, and more or less gracefully, fill
the beginning of the end of a biography, are perhaps superfluous in
the case of a man who died so recently, and who was so well known as
Mr Matthew Arnold. Moreover, if given at all, they should be given by
some one who knew him more intimately than did the present writer. He
was of a singularly agreeable presence, without being in the sense of
the painter's model exactly "handsome"; and in particular he could
boast a very pleasant and not in the least artificial smile. Some
artificiality of manner was sometimes attributed to him, I think
rather unjustly; but he certainly had "tricks and manners" of the kind
very natural to men of decided idiosyncrasy, unless they transcend all
mere trick, after the fashion which we know in Scott, which we are
sure of, without knowing, in Shakespeare. One of these Mr George
Russell glances at in the preface to the _Letters_, a passage
which I read with not a little amusement, because I could confirm it
from a memory of my only conversation with Mr Arnold. He had been
good-humouredly expostulating with me for overvaluing some French
poet. I forget at the distance of seventeen or eighteen years who it
was, but it was not Gautier. I replied in some such words as, "Well;
perhaps he is not very important in himself, but I think he is
'important _for us_,' if I may borrow that." So he looked at me
and said, "_I_ didn't write that anywhere, did I?" And when I
reminded him that he had told us how Sainte-Beuve said it of
Lamartine, he declared that he had quite forgotten it. Which might, or
might not, be Socratic.
But I should imagine that the complaints of his affectations in
ordinary society were as much exaggerated as I am sure that the
opposite complaints of the humdrum character of his letters are.
Somebody talks of the "wicked charm" which a popular epithet or
nickname possesses, and something of the sort seems to have hung about
"The Apostle of Culture," "The Prophet of Sweetness and Light," and
the rest. He only deserved his finical reputation inasmuch as he was
unduly given to the use of these catch-words, not because he in any
undue way affected to "look the part" or live up to them. And as for
the letters, it must be remembered that he was a very busy man, with
clerical work of the official kind enough to disgust a very
Scriblerus; that he had, so far as the published letters show us, no
very intimate friend, male or (still better) female, outside his own
family; and further, that the degeneration of the art of
letter-writing is not a mere phrase, it is a fact. Has any of my
readers many--or any--correspondents like Scott or like Southey, like
Lamb or like FitzGerald, like Madame de S�vign� or like Lady Mary? He
is lucky if he has. Indeed, the simplicity of the _Letters_ is
the very surest evidence of a real simplicity in the nature. In the
so-called best letter-writers it may be shrewdly suspected that this
simplicity is, with rare exceptions, absent. Scott had it; but then
Scott's genius as a novelist overflowed into his letters, as did
Southey's talent of universal writing, and Lamb's unalterable
quintessence of quaintness. But though I will allow no one to take
precedence of me as a champion of Madame de S�vign�, I do not think
that simplicity is exactly the note of that beautiful and gracious
person; it is certainly not that of our own Lady Mary, or of Horace
Walpole, or of Pope, or of Byron. Some of these, as we know, or
suspect with a strength equal to knowledge, write with at least a
sidelong glance at possible publication; some with a deliberate
intention of it; all, I think, with a sort of unconscious
consciousness of "how it will look" on paper. Of this in Mr Arnold's
letters there is absolutely no sign. Even when he writes to
comparative strangers, he never lays himself out for a "point" or a
phrase, rarely even for a joke. To his family (and it should be
remembered that the immense majority of the letters that we possess
are family letters) he is naturally more familiar, but the familiarity
does not bring with it any quips or gambols. Only in the very early
letters, and chiefly in those to Wyndham Slade, is there any
appearance of second thought, of "conceit," in the good sense. Later,
he seems to have been too much absorbed in his three functions of
official, critic, and poet to do more than shake hands by letter and
talk without effort.
But if he, as the phrase is, "put himself out" little as to
letter-writing, it was by no means the same in those other functions
which have been just referred to. In later years (it is Mr Humphry
Ward, I think, who is our sufficient authority for it) poetry was but
occasional amusement and solace to him, prose his regular avocation
from task-work; and there is abundant evidence that, willingly or
unwillingly, he never allowed either to usurp the place of the
vocation which he had accepted. Not everybody, perhaps, is so
scrupulous. It is not an absolutely unknown thing to hear men boast of
getting through their work somehow or other, that they may devote
themselves to _parerga_ which they like, and which they are
pleased to consider more dignified, more important, nearer the chief
end of man. And from the extremely common assumption that other
people, whether they confess this or not, act upon it, one may at
least not uncharitably suppose that a much larger number would so act
if they dared, or had the opportunity. This was not Mr Arnold's
conception of the relations of the hired labourer and the labour which
gains him his hire. Not only does he seem to have performed his actual
inspecting duties with that exact punctiliousness which in such cases
is much better than zeal, but he did not grudge the expenditure of his
art on the requirements, and not the strict requirements only, of his
craft. The unfitness of poets for business has been often enough
proved to be a mere fond thing vainly invented; but it was never
better disproved than in this particular instance.
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