This quotation is in Mr. Arnold"s own vein. His readers will have no difficulty in calling to mind numerous instances in which his dislike of everything not broadly based on the generally admitted facts of sane experience manifests itself. Though fond--perhaps exceptionally fond--of pretty things and sayings, he had a severe taste, and hated whatever struck him as being in the least degree sickly, or silly, or over-heated. No doubt he may often have considered that to be sickly or silly which in the opinion of others was pious and becoming. It may be that he was over-impatient of men"s flirtations with futurity. As his paper on Professor Dowden"s Life of Sh.e.l.ley shows, he disapproved of "irregular relations." He considered we were all married to plain Fact, and objected to our carrying on a flirtation with mystic maybe"s and calling it Religion. Had it been a man"s duty to believe in a specific revelation it would have been G.o.d"s duty to make that revelation credible. Such, at all events, would appear to have been the opinion of this remarkable man, who though he had even more than his share of an Oxonian"s reverence for the great Bishop of Durham, was unable to admit the force of the main argument of _The a.n.a.logy_. Mr. Arnold was indeed too fond of parading his inability for hard reasoning. I am not, he keeps saying, like the Archbishop of York, or the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol. There was affectation about this, for his professed inferiority did not prevent him from making it almost excruciatingly clear that in his opinion those gifted prelates were, whilst exercising their extraordinary powers, only beating the air, or in plainer words busily engaged in talking nonsense. But I must not wander from my point, which simply is that Arnold"s dislike of anything recondite or remote was intense, genuine, and characteristic.
He always a.s.serted himself to be a good Liberal. So in truth he was. A better Liberal than many a one whose claim to that t.i.tle it would be thought absurd to dispute. He did not indeed care very much about some of the articles of the Liberal creed as now professed. He had taken a great dislike to the Deceased Wife"s Sister Bill. He wished the Church and the State to continue to recognise each other. He had not that jealousy of State interference in England which used to be (it is so no longer) a note of political Liberalism. He sympathised with Italian national aspirations because he thought it wrong to expect a country with such a past as Italy to cast in her lot with Austria. He did not sympathise with Irish national aspirations because he thought Ireland ought to be willing to admit that she was relatively to England an inferior and less interesting country, and therefore one which had no moral claim for national inst.i.tutions. He may have been right or wrong on these points without affecting his claim to be considered a Liberal.
Liberalism is not a creed, but a frame of mind. Mr. Arnold"s frame of mind was Liberal. No living man is more deeply permeated with the grand doctrine of Equality than was he. He wished to see his countrymen and countrywomen all equal: Jack as good as his master, and Jack"s master as good as Jack; and neither taking claptrap. He had a hearty un-English dislike of anomalies and absurdities. He fully appreciated the French Revolution and was consequently a Democrat. He was not a democrat from irresistible impulse, or from love of mischief, or from hatred of priests, or like the average British workman from a not unnatural desire to get something on account of his share of the family inheritance--but all roads lead to Rome, and Mr. Arnold was a democrat from a sober and partly sorrowful conviction that no other form of government was possible. He was an Educationalist, and Education is the true Leveller. His almost pa.s.sionate cry for better middle-cla.s.s education arose from his annoyance at the exclusion of large numbers of this great cla.s.s from the best education the country afforded. It was a ticklish job telling this great, wealthy, middle cla.s.s--which according to the newspapers had made England what she is and what everybody else wishes to be--that it was, from an educational point of view, beneath contempt. "I hear with surprise," said Sir Thomas Bazley at Manchester, "that the education of our great middle cla.s.s requires improvement." But Mr. Arnold had courage. Indeed he carried one kind of courage to an heroic pitch. I mean the courage of repeating yourself over and over again. It is a sound forensic maxim: Tell a judge twice whatever you want him to hear. Tell a special jury thrice, and a common jury half-a-dozen times the view of a case you wish them to entertain. Mr.
Arnold treated the middle cla.s.s as a common jury and hammered away at them remorselessly and with the most unblushing iteration. They groaned under him, they snorted, and they sniffed--but they listened, and, what was more to the purpose, their children listened, and with filial frankness told their heavy sires that Mr. Arnold was quite right, and that their lives were dull, and hideous, and arid, even as he described them as being. Mr. Arnold"s work as a School Inspector gave him great opportunities of going about amongst all cla.s.ses of the people. Though not exactly apostolic in manner or method, he had something to say both to and of everybody. The aristocracy were polite and had ways he admired, but they were impotent of ideas and had a dangerous tendency to become studiously frivolous. Consequently the Future did not belong to them. Get ideas and study gravity, was the substance of his discourse to the Barbarians, as, with that trick of his of miscalling G.o.d"s creatures, he had the effrontery to dub our adorable n.o.bility. But it was the middle cla.s.s upon whom fell the full weight of his discourse.
His sermons to them would fill a volume. Their great need was culture, which he declared to be _a study of perfection_, the sentiment for beauty and sweetness, the sentiment against hideousness and rawness. The middle cla.s.s, he protested, needed to know all the best things that have been said and done in the world since it began, and to be thereby lifted out of their holes and corners, private academies and chapels in side streets, above their tenth-rate books and miserable preferences, into the main stream of national existence. The lower orders he judged to be a mere rabble, and thought it was as yet impossible to predict whether or not they would hereafter display any apt.i.tude for Ideas, or pa.s.sion for Perfection. But in the meantime he bade them learn to cohere, and to read and write, and above all he conjured them not to imitate the middle cla.s.ses.
It is not easy to know everything about everybody, and it may be doubted whether Mr. Arnold did not over-rate the degree of acquaintance with his countrymen his peregrinations among them had conferred upon him. In certain circles he was supposed to have made the completest possible diagnosis of dissent, and was credited with being able, after five minutes" conversation with any individual Nonconformist, unerringly to a.s.sign him to his particular chapel, Independent, Baptist, Primitive Methodist, Unitarian, or whatever else it might be, and this though they had only been talking about the weather. To people who know nothing about dissenters, Mr. Arnold might well seem to know everything.
However, he did know a great deal, and used his knowledge with great cunning and effect, and a fine instinctive sense of the whereabouts of the weakest points. Mr. Arnold"s sense for equality and solidarity was not impeded by any exclusive tastes or hobbies. Your collector, even though it be but of b.u.t.terflies, is rarely a democrat. One of Arnold"s favourite lines in Wordsworth was--
"Joy that is in widest commonalty spread."
The collector"s joys are not of that kind. Mr. Arnold was not, I believe, a collector of anything. He certainly was not of books. I once told him I had been reading a pamphlet, written by him in 1859, on the Italian Question. He inquired how I came across it. I said I had picked it up in a shop. "Oh, yes," said he, "some old curiosity shop, I suppose." Nor was he joking. He seemed quite to suppose that old books, and old clothes, and old chairs were huddled together for sale in the same resort of the curious. He did not care about such things. The prices given for the early editions of his own poems seemed to tease him. His literary taste was broadly democratic. He had no mind for fished-up authors, nor did he ever indulge in swaggering rhapsodies over second-rate poets. The best was good enough for him. "The best poetry"
was what he wanted, "a clearer, deeper sense of the best in poetry, and of the strength and joy to be drawn from it." So he wrote in his general introduction to Mr. Ward"s _Selections from the English Poets_. The best of everything for everybody. This was his gospel and his prayer.
Approaching Mr. Arnold"s writings more nearly, it seems inevitable to divide them into three cla.s.ses. His poems, his theological excursions, and his criticism, using the last word in a wide sense as including a criticism of life and of politics as well as of books and style.
Of Mr. Arnold"s poetry it is hard for anyone who has felt it to the full during the most impressionable period of life to speak without emotion overcoming reason.
"Hardly shall I tell my joys and sorrows, Hopes and fears, belief and unbelieving."
It is easy to admit, in general terms, its limitations. Mr. Arnold is the last man in the world anybody would wish to shove out of his place.
A poet at all points, armed cap-a-pie against criticism, like Lord Tennyson, he certainly was not. Nor had his verse any share of the boundless vitality, the fierce pulsation so n.o.bly characteristic of Mr.
Browning. But these admissions made, we decline to parley any further with the enemy. We cast him behind us. Mr. Arnold, to those who cared for him at all, was the most _useful_ poet of his day. He lived much nearer us than poets of his distinction usually do. He was neither a prophet nor a recluse. He lived neither above us, nor away from us.
There are two ways of being a recluse--a poet may live remote from men, or he may live in a crowded street but remote from their thoughts. Mr.
Arnold did neither, and consequently his verse tells and tingles. None of it is thrown away. His readers feel that he bore the same yoke as themselves. Theirs is a common bondage with his. Beautiful, surpa.s.singly beautiful some of Mr. Arnold"s poetry is, but we seize upon the _thought_ first and delight in the _form_ afterwards. No doubt the form is an extraordinary comfort, for the thoughts are often, as thoughts so widely spread could not fail to be, the very thoughts that are too frequently expressed rudely, crudely, indelicately. To open Mr. Arnold"s poems is to escape from a heated atmosphere and a company not wholly free from offence even though composed of those who share our opinions--from loud-mouthed random talking men into a well-shaded retreat which seems able to impart, even to our feverish persuasions and crude conclusions, something of the coolness of falling water, something of the music of rustling trees. This union of thought, substantive thought, with beauty of form--of strength with elegance, is rare. I doubt very much whether Mr. Arnold ever realised the devotedness his verse inspired in the minds of thousands of his countrymen and countrywomen, both in the old world and the new. He is not a bulky poet.
Three volumes contain him. But hardly a page can be opened without the eye lighting on verse which at one time or another has been, either to you or to someone dear to you, strength or joy. _The Buried Life_, _A Southern Night_, _Dover Beach_, _A Wanderer is Man from his Birth_, _Rugby Chapel_, _Resignation_. How easy to prolong the list, and what a list it is! Their very names are dear to us even as are the names of Mother Churches and Holy Places to the Votaries of the old Religion. I read the other day in the _Spectator_ newspaper, an a.s.sertion that Mr.
Arnold"s poetry had never consoled anybody. A falser statement was never made innocently. It may never have consoled the writer in the _Spectator_, but because the stomach of a dram-drinker rejects cold water is no kind of reason for a sober man abandoning his morning tumbler of the pure element. Mr. Arnold"s poetry has been found full of consolation. It would be strange if it had not been. It is
"No stretched metre of an antique song,"
but quick and to the point. There are finer sonnets in the English language than the two following, but there are no better sermons. And if it be said that sermons may be found in stones, but ought not to be in sonnets, I fall back upon the fact which Mr. Arnold himself so cheerfully admitted, that the middle cla.s.ses, who in England, at all events, are Mr. Arnold"s chief readers, are serious, and love sermons.
Some day perhaps they will be content with metrical exercises, ballades, and roundels.
"EAST LONDON
""Twas August, and the fierce sun overhead Smote on the squalid streets of Bethnal Green, And the pale weaver, through his windows seen In Spitalfields, look"d thrice dispirited.
"I met a preacher there I knew, and said: "Ill and o"erwork"d, how fare you in this scene?"
"Bravely!" said he; "for I of late have been Much cheer"d with thoughts of Christ, _the living bread_."
"O human soul! as long as thou canst so Set up a mark of everlasting light, Above the howling senses" ebb and flow, To cheer thee, and to right thee if thou roam-- Not with lost toil thou labourest through the night!
Thou mak"st the heaven thou hop"st indeed thy home."
"THE BETTER PART
"Long fed on boundless hopes, O race of man, How angrily thou spurn"st all simpler fare!
"Christ," some one says, "was human as we are; No judge eyes us from Heaven, our sin to scan;
""We live no more, when we have done our span."-- "Well, then, for Christ," thou answerest, "who can care?
From Sin, which Heaven records not, why forbear?
Live we like brutes our life without a plan!"
"So answerest thou; but why not rather say: "Hath man no second life?--_Pitch this one high!_ Sits there no judge in Heaven, our sin to see?
""_More strictly, then, the inward judge obey!_ Was Christ a man like us?--_Ah! let us try If we then, too, can be such men as he!_""
Mr. Arnold"s love of nature, and poetic treatment of nature, was to many a vexed soul a great joy and an intense relief. Mr. Arnold was a genuine Wordsworthian--being able to read everything Wordsworth ever wrote except _Vaudracour and Julia_. The influence of Wordsworth upon him was immense, but he was enabled, by the order of his mind, to reject with the heartiest goodwill the cloudy pantheism which robs so much of Wordsworth"s best verse of the heightened charm of reality, for, after all, poetry, like religion, must be true, or it is nothing. This strong aversion to the unreal also prevented Mr. Arnold, despite his love of the cla.s.sical forms, from a nonsensical neo-paganism. His was a manlier att.i.tude. He had no desire to keep tugging at the dry b.r.e.a.s.t.s of an outworn creed, nor any disposition to go down on his knees, or _hunkers_ as the Scotch more humorously call them, before plaster casts of Venus, or even of "Proteus rising from the sea." There was something very refreshing about this. In the long run even a gloomy truth is better company than a cheerful falsehood. The perpetual strain of living down to a lie, the depressing atmosphere of a circ.u.mscribed intelligence tell upon the system, and the cheerful falsehood soon begins to look puffy and dissipated.
"THE YOUTH OF NATURE.
"For, oh! is it you, is it you, Moonlight, and shadow, and lake, And mountains, that fill us with joy, Or the poet who sings you so well?
More than the singer are these . . . . . . .
Yourselves and your fellows ye know not; and me, The mateless, the one, will ye know?
Will ye scan me, and read me, and tell Of the thoughts that ferment in my breast, My longing, my sadness, my joy?
Will ye claim for your great ones the gift To have rendered the gleam of my skies, To have echoed the moan of my seas, Uttered the voice of my hills?
When your great ones depart, will ye say: _All things have suffered a loss, Nature is hid in their grave?_
Race after race, man after man, Have thought that my secret was theirs, Have dream"d that I lived but for them, That they were my glory and joy.
They are dust, they are changed, they are gone!
I remain."
When a poet is dead we turn to his verse with quickened feelings. He rests from his labours. We still
"Stem across the sea of life by night,"
and the voice, once the voice of the living, of one who stood by our side, has for a while an unfamiliar accent, coming to us as it does no longer from our friendly earth but from the strange cold caverns of death.
"Joy comes and goes, hope ebbs and flows Like the wave, Change doth unknit the tranquil strength of men.
Love lends life a little grace, A few sad smiles; and then, Both are laid in one cold place, In the grave.
"Dreams dawn and fly, friends smile and die Like spring flowers; Our vaunted life is one long funeral.
Men dig graves with bitter tears For their dead hopes; and all, Mazed with doubts and sick with fears, Count the hours.
"We count the hours! These dreams of ours, False and hollow, Do we go hence and find they are not dead?
Joys we dimly apprehend, Faces that smiled and fled, Hopes born here, and born to end, Shall we follow?"
In a poem like this Mr. Arnold is seen at his best; he fairly forces himself into the very front ranks. In form almost equal to Sh.e.l.ley, or at any rate not so very far behind him, whilst of course in reality, in wholesome thought, in the pleasures that are afforded by thinking, it is of incomparable excellence.
We die as we do, not as we would. Yet on reading again Mr. Arnold"s _Wish_, we feel that the manner of his death was much to his mind.
"A WISH.
"I ask not that my bed of death From bands of greedy heirs be free: For these besiege the latest breath Of fortune"s favoured sons, not me.
"I ask not each kind soul to keep Tearless, when of my death he hears.
Let those who will, if any--weep!