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Page 63
But it is in his general literary position that Mr Arnold's strongest
title to eminence consists. There have certainly been greater poets in
English: I think there have been greater critics. But as poet and
critic combined, no one but Dryden and Coleridge can be for a moment
placed beside him: the fate of the false Florimel must await all
others who dare that adventure. And if he must yield--yield by a long
way--to Dryden in strength and easy command of whatsoever craft he
tried, to Coleridge in depth and range and philosophical grasp, yet he
has his revenges. Beside his delicacy and his cosmopolitan
accomplishment, Dryden is blunt and unscholarly; beside his directness
of aim, if not always of achievement, his clearness of vision, his
almost business-like adjustment of effort to result, the vagueness and
desultoriness of Coleridge look looser and, in the literary sense,
more disreputable than ever. Here was a man who could not only
criticise but create; who, though he may sometimes, like others, have
convicted his preaching of falsity by his practice, and his practice
of sin by his preaching, yet could in the main make practice and
preaching fit together. Here was a critic against whom the foolish
charge, "You can break, but you cannot make," was confessedly
impossible--a poet who knew not only the rule of thumb, but the rule
of the uttermost art. In him the corruption of the poet had not been
the generation of the critic, as his great predecessor in the two
arts, himself secure and supreme in both, had scornfully said. Both
faculties had always existed, and did always exist, side by side in
him. He might exercise one more freely at one time, one at another;
but the author of the _Preface_ of 1853 was a critic, and a ripe
one, in his heyday of poetry, the author of _Westminster Abbey_
was a poet in his mellowest autumn of criticism.
And yet he was something more than both these things, more than both
of these at once. But for that unlucky divagation in the Wilderness,
his life would have been the life of a man of letters only as far as
choice went, with the duties of no dishonourable profession
superadded. And even with the divagation it was mainly and really
this. To find parallels for Mr Arnold in his unflinching devotion to
literature we must, I fear, go elsewhere than to Dryden or to
Coleridge, we must go to Johnson and Southey. And here again we may
find something in him beyond both, in that he had an even nobler
conception of Literature than either. That he would have put her even
too high, would have assigned to her functions which she is unable to
discharge, is true enough; but this is at least no vulgar error.
Against ignoble neglect, against stolid misunderstanding, against
mushroom rivalry, he championed her alike. And it was most certainly
from no base motive. If he wanted an English Academy, I am quite sure
it was not from any desire for a canary ribbon or a sixteen-pointed
star. Yet, after Southey himself in the first half of the century, who
has done so much for letters _qu�_ letters as Mr Arnold in the
second? His poems were never popular, and he tried no other of the
popular departments of literature. But he wrote, and I think he could
write, nothing that was not literature, in and by the fact that he was
its writer. It has been observed of others in other kinds, that
somehow or other, by merely living, by pursuing their own arts or
crafts whatever they were, they raised those arts and crafts in
dignity, they bestowed on them as it were a rank, a position. A few--a
very few--at successive times have done this for literature in
England, and Mr Arnold was perhaps the last who did it notably in
ours. One cannot imagine him writing merely for money, for position,
even for fame--for anything but the _devoir_ of the born and
sworn servant of Apollo and Pallas. Such devotion need not, of course,
forbid others of their servants to try his shield now and then with
courteous arms or even at sharps--as he tried many. But it was so
signal, so happy in its general results, so exactly what was required
in and for England at the time, that recognition of it can never be
frank enough, or cordial enough, or too much admiring. Whenever I
think of Mr Arnold it is in those own words of his, which I have
quoted already, and which I quoted to myself on the hill by Hinksey as
I began this little book in the time of fritillaries--
"Still nursing the unconquerable hope,
Still clutching the inviolable shade"--
the hope and shade that never desert, even if they flit before and
above, the servants and the lovers of the humaner literature.
INDEX.
* * * * *
_Alaric at Rome_, 4.
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