Matthew Arnold | Page 4

George W.E. Russell
love and reverence for the continuous life of the physical
universe may remind us that Arnold's teaching about humanity, subtle
and searching as it is, has done less to endear him to many of his
disciples, than his feeling for Nature. His is the kind of Nature-worship
which takes nothing at second-hand. He paid "the Mighty Mother" the
only homage which is worthy of her acceptance, a minute and dutiful
study of her moods and methods. He placed himself as a reverent
learner at her feet before he presumed to go forth to the world as an
exponent of her teaching. It is this exactness of observation which
makes his touches of local colouring so vivid and so true. This gives its
winning charm to his landscape-painting, whether the scene is laid in
Kensington Gardens, or the Alps, or the valley of the Thames. This fills
The Scholar-Gipsy, and Thyrsis, and Obermann, and The Forsaken
Merman with flawless gems of natural description, and felicities of
phrase which haunt the grateful memory.
In brief, it seems to me that he was not a great poet, for he lacked the
gifts which sway the multitude, and compel the attention of mankind.
But he was a true poet, rich in those qualities which make the loved and

trusted teacher of a chosen few--as he himself would have said, of "the
Remnant." Often in point of beauty and effectiveness, always in his
purity and elevation, he is worthy to be associated with the noblest
names of all. Alone among his contemporaries, we can venture to say
of him that he was not only of the school, but of the lineage, of
Wordsworth. His own judgment on his place among the modern poets
was thus given in a letter of 1869: "My poems represent, on the whole,
the main movement of mind of the last quarter of a century, and thus
they will probably have their day as people become conscious to
themselves of what that movement of mind is, and interested in the
literary productions which reflect it. It might be fairly urged that I have
less poetic sentiment than Tennyson, and less intellectual vigour and
abundance than Browning. Yet because I have more perhaps of a fusion
of the two than either of them, and have more regularly applied that
fusion to the main line of modern development, I am likely enough to
have my turn, as they have had theirs."
When we come to consider him as a prose-writer, cautions and
qualifications are much less necessary. Whatever may be thought of the
substance of his writings, it surely must be admitted that he was a great
master of style. And his style was altogether his own. In the last year of
his life he said to the present writer: "People think I can teach them
style. What stuff it all is! Have something to say, and say it as clearly
as you can. That is the only secret of style."
Clearness is indeed his own most conspicuous note, and to clearness he
added singular grace, great skill in phrase-making, great aptitude for
beautiful description, perfect naturalness, absolute ease. The very faults
which the lovers of a more pompous rhetoric profess to detect in his
writing are the easy-going fashions of a man who wrote as he talked.
The members of a college which produced Cardinal Newman, Dean
Church, and Matthew Arnold are not without some justification when
they boast of "the Oriel style."
But style, though a great delight and a great power, is not everything,
and we must not found our claim for him as a prose-writer on style
alone. His style was the worthy and the suitable vehicle of much of the

very best criticism which English literature contains. We take the
whole mass of his critical writing, from the Lectures on Homer and the
Essays in Criticism down to the Preface to Wordsworth and the
Discourse on Milton; and we ask, Is there anything better?
When he wrote as a critic of books, his taste, his temper, his judgment
were pretty nearly infallible. He combined a loyal and reasonable
submission to literary authority with a free and even daring use of
private judgment. His admiration for the acknowledged masters of
human utterance--Homer, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Milton,
Goethe--was genuine and enthusiastic, and incomparably better
informed than that of some more conventional critics. Yet this cordial
submission to recognized authority, this honest loyalty to established
reputation, did not blind him to defects, did not seduce him into
indiscriminate praise, did not deter him from exposing the tendency to
verbiage in Burke and Jeremy Taylor, the excessive blankness of much
of Wordsworth's blank verse, the undercurrent of mediocrity in
Macaulay, the absurdities of Ruskin's etymology. And, as in great
matters, so in small. Whatever literary
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