Part 8

Thackeray from his treasures of wit and sarcasm poured out anecdote after anecdote; he used plenty of vinegar and cayenne pepper, but there was always a flavour of kindliness and good-nature, even in his most cutting remarks. I saw more of him when he came to Oxford to lecture on the Four Georges, and when he stood for Parliament and was defeated by Cardwell and Charles Neate. After one of his lectures, when I expressed my delight with his brilliant success, “Wait, wait,” he said, “the time will come when you will lecture at Oxford.” At that time my English was still very crumbly; there was no idea of my staying on in England, still less of my ever becoming a professor at Oxford.

Thackeray’s novels were a great delight to me then, and some have remained so for life. Still, there is a fashion in all things, in literature quite as much as in music, and when lately reading “The Newcomes” I was surprised at the meagreness of the dialogue, the very dialogues for which we felt so impatient from month to month when the book first came out in numbers. Still one always recognises in Thackeray the powerful artist, who, like a Japanese painter, will with a few lines place a living man or woman before you, never to be forgotten.

I am sorry I missed seeing and knowing more of Charles Dickens. I met him in my very early days with a friend of mine at some tavern in the Strand, but did not see him again till quite at the end of his career, when he was giving readings from his novels, and knew how to make his audiences either weep or laugh. Still I am glad to have seen him in the flesh, both as a young and as an old man. However wide apart our interests in life might be, no one who had read his novels could look on Dickens as a stranger. He knew the heart of man to the very core, and could draw a picture of human suffering with a more loving hand than any other English writer. He also possessed now and then the grand style, and even in his pictures of still life the hand of the master can always be perceived. He must have shed many a tear over the deathbed of poor Joe; he must have chuckled and shouted over Mr. Winkle and Mr. Tupman going out partridge shooting. Perhaps to our taste, as it now is, some of his characters are too sentimental and simpering, but there are few writers now who could create his child-wife. It always seemed to me very strange that my friend Stanley, though he received Dickens among the great ones of Westminster Abbey, could not, as he confessed to me, take any pleasure in his works.

But though I could not spend much time in London and cultivate my literary acquaintances there, Oxford itself was not without interesting poets. After all, whatever talent England possesses is filtered generally either through Oxford or Cambridge, and those who have eyes to see may often watch some of the most important chapters in the growth of poetical genius among the young undergraduates. I watched Clough before the world knew him, I knew Matthew Arnold during many years of his early life, and having had the honour of examining Swinburne I was not surprised at his marvellous performances in later years. He was even then a true artist, a commander of legions of words, who might become an imperator at any time. Clough was a most fascinating character, thoroughly genuine, but so oppressed with the problems of life that it was difficult ever to get a smile out of him; and if one did, his round ruddy face with the deep heavy eyes seemed really to suffer from the contortions of laughter. He took life very seriously, and made greater sacrifices to his convictions than the world ever suspected. He was poor, but from conscientious scruples gave up his fellowship, and was driven at last to go to America to make himself independent without giving up the independence of his mind. With a little more sunshine above him and around him he might have grown to a very considerable height, but there was always a heavy weight on him, that seemed to render every utterance and every poem a struggle.

His poems are better known and loved in America, I believe, than in England, but in England also they still have their friends, and in the history of the religious or rather theological struggles of 1840–50 Clough’s figure will always be recognised as one of the most characteristic and the most pleasing. I had once the misfortune to give him great pain. I saw him at Oxford with a young lady, and I was told that he was engaged to her. Delighted as I was at this prospect of a happy issue out of all his troubles, I wrote to him to congratulate him, when a most miserable answer came, telling me that it all was hopeless, and that I ought not to have noticed what was going on.

However, it came right in the end, only there were some years of patient struggle to be gone through first; and who is not grateful in the end for such years passed on Pisgah, if only Jordan is crossed at last?

Another poet whom I knew at Oxford as an undergraduate, and whom I watched and admired to the end of his life, was Matthew Arnold. He was beautiful as a young man, strong and manly, yet full of dreams and schemes. His Olympian manners began even at Oxford; there was no harm in them, they were natural, not put on. The very sound of his voice and the wave of his arm were Jovelike. He grappled with the same problems as Clough, but they never got the better of him, or rather he never got the worse of them. Goethe helped him to soar where others toiled and sighed and were sinking under their self-imposed burdens. Even though his later life was enough to dishearten a poet, he laughed at his being _Pegasus im Joche_. Sometimes at public dinners, when he saw himself surrounded by his contemporaries, most of them judges, bishops, and ministers, he would groan over the drudgery he had to go through every day of his life in examining dirty schoolboys and schoolgirls. But he saw the fun of it, and laughed. What a pity it was that his friends, and he had many, could find no better place for him. Most of his contemporaries, many of them far inferior to him, rose to high positions in Church and State, he remained to the end an examiner of elementary schools. Of course it may be said that, like so many of his literary friends, he might have written novels and thus eked out a living by pot-boilers, as they are called, of various kinds. But there was something noble and refined in him which restrained his pen from such work. Whatever he gave to the world was to be perfect, as perfect as he could make it, and he did not think that he possessed a talent for novels. His saying “No Arnold can ever write a novel” is well known, but it has been splendidly falsified of late by his own niece. He had to go to America on a lecturing tour to earn some money he stood in need of, though he felt it as a _dira necessitas_, nay, as a dire indignity. It is true he had good precedents, but evidently his showman was not the best he could have chosen, nor was Arnold himself very strong as a lecturer. England has not got from him all that she had a right to expect, but whatever he has left has a finish that will long keep it safe from the corrosive wear and tear of time.

When later in life Arnold took to theological studies, he showed, no doubt, a very clear insight and a perfect independence of judgment, but he had only a few spare hours for work which in order to be properly done would have required a lifetime. Yet what he wrote produced an effect, in England at least, more lasting than many a learned volume, and he was allowed to say things that would have given deep offence if coming from other lips. His famous saying about the three Lord Shaftesburys has been judged very differently by different writers. As a mere matter of taste it may seem that Arnold’s illustration of what he took to be the common conception of the Trinity among his Philistine friends was objectionable. Let us hope that it was not even true.

But Arnold’s intention was clear enough. He argued chiefly against those who had called the Roman Catholic doctrine of the Mass “_a degrading superstition_.” He tells them they ought to discover in it what the historian alone, or what Arnold means by a man of culture, can discover; namely, the original intention of the faithful in thus interpreting the words of Christ (St. John, vii., 53): “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink His blood, ye have no life in you.” It was in protesting against this narrowness that he reminded his Protestant friends of the weak joints in their own armour, particularly their too literal acceptation of the doctrine of the Trinity.[8] And I doubt whether he was altogether wrong when he charged them with speaking of the Father as a mere individual, or, as he expressed it, a sort of infinitely magnified and improved Lord Shaftesbury with a race of vile offenders to deal with, whom his natural goodness would incline him to let off, only his sense of justice would not allow it. And is it not true that many who speak of Christ as the Son of God take “son” in its common literal sense, or, as Arnold expressed it, imagine “a younger Lord Shaftesbury, on the scale of his father and very dear to him, who might live in grandeur and splendour if he liked, but who preferred to leave his home to go and live among the race of offenders, and to be put to an ignominious death, on the condition that his merits should be counted against their demerits, and that his father’s goodness should be restrained no longer from taking effect, but any offender should be admitted to the benefit of it, simply on pleading the satisfaction made by the son”? Finally, when he points out the extremely vague conception of the Holy Ghost as a person and as an individual, does he really exaggerate so very much when he says that He is with many no more than “a third Lord Shaftesbury, still on the same high scale, who keeps very much in the background and works in a very occult manner, but very efficaciously nevertheless, and who is busy in applying everywhere the benefits of the son’s satisfaction and the father’s goodness?” Nay, even when he goes on to say that this is precisely the Protestant story of justification, what he wants to impress on his Protestant readers is surely no more than this, that from his point of view there is nothing actually degrading in their very narrow view, as little as in the common Roman Catholic view of the Mass. What he means is no more than that both views as held by the many are grotesquely literal and unintelligent.

People who hold such views would be ready to tell you, he says, “the exact hangings in the Trinity’s council chamber.” But, with all that he is anxious to show that not only was the original intention both of Roman and English Catholics good, but that even in its mistaken application it may help towards righteousness. In trying to impress this view both on Protestants and Roman Catholics, Arnold certainly used language which must have pained particularly those who felt that the picture was not altogether untrue. However, his friends, and among them many high ecclesiastics, forgave him. Stanley, I know, admired his theological writings very much. Many of his critics fully agreed with what Arnold said, only they would have said it in a different way. There is a kind of cocaine style which is used by many able critics and reformers. It cuts deep into the flesh, and yet the patient remains insensible to pain. “You can say anything in English,” Arthur Helps once said to me, “only you must know how to say it.” Arnold, like Carlyle and others, preferred the old style of surgery. They thought that pain was good in certain operations, and helped to accelerate a healthy reaction.

The only fault that one may find with Arnold, is that he did not himself try to restore the original and true conception of the Trinity to that clear and intelligible form which he as an historian and a man of culture could have brought out better than any one else. The original intention of the Lord’s Supper, or the Mass, can easily be learnt, as Arnold has shown, from the very words of the Bible (St. Luke, xxii., 20): “The cup is the new testament in my blood.” But the doctrine of the Trinity requires a far more searching historical study. As the very name of Trinity is a later invention, and absent from the New Testament, it requires a thorough study of Greek, more particularly of Alexandrian philosophy, to understand its origin, for it is from Greek philosophy that the idea of the Word, the Logos, was taken by some of the early Fathers of the Church.

As the Messiah was a Semitic thought which the Jewish disciples of Christ saw realised in the Son of Man, the Word was an Aryan thought which the Greek disciples saw fulfilled in the Son of God. The history of the divine Dyas which preceded the Trias is clear enough, if only we are acquainted with the antecedents of Greek philosophy. Without that background it is a mere phantasm, and no wonder that in the minds of uneducated people it should have become what Arnold describes it,[9] father, son, and grandson, living together in the same house, or possibly in the clouds. To make people shrink back from such a conception is worth something, and Arnold has certainly achieved this, if only he has caused hundreds and thousands to say to themselves: “We never were so foolish or so narrow-minded as to believe in three Lord Shaftesburys.”

For some reason or other, however, the “three Lord Shaftesburys” have disappeared in the last edition of “Literature and Dogma” and have been replaced by “a Supernatural Man.” Froude, who was an intimate friend both of Arnold and of Sir James Stephen, told me that the latter had warned Arnold that the three Lord Shaftesburys were really actionable, and if Arnold hated anything it was a _fracas_. In the fifth edition they still remain, so that the change must have been made later on, when he prepared the cheap edition of his book. Anyhow, they are gone!

Arnold was a delightful man to argue with, not that he could easily be convinced that he was wrong, but he never lost his temper, and in the most patronising way he would generally end by: “Yes, yes! my good fellow, you are quite right, but, you see, my view of the matter is different, and I have little doubt it is the true one!” This went so far that even the simplest facts failed to produce any impression on him. He had fallen in love with Émile Burnouf’s attractive but not very scholar-like and trustworthy “Science de la Religion.” I believe that at first he had mistaken Émile for Eugène Burnouf, a mistake which has been committed by other people besides him. But, afterwards, when he had perceived the difference between the two, he was not at all abashed. Nay, he was betrayed into a new mistake, and spoke of Émile as the son of Eugène. I told him that Eugène, the great Oriental scholar—one of the greatest that France has ever produced, and that is saying a great deal—had no son at all, and that he ought to correct his misstatement. “Yes, yes,” he said, in his most good-humoured way, “but you know how they manage these things in France. Émile was really a natural son of the great scholar, and they call that a nephew.” This I stoutly denied, for never was a more irreproachable _père de famille_ than my friend and master Eugène Burnouf. But in spite of all remonstrances, Émile remained with Arnold the son of Eugène; “For, you see, my good fellow, I know the French, and that is my view of the matter!” If that happened in the green wood, what would happen in the dry!

We had a long-standing feud about poetry. To me the difference between poetry and prose was one of form only. I always held that the same things that are said in prose could be said in poetry, and _vice versâ_, and I often quoted Goethe’s saying that the best test of poetry was whether it would bear translation into prose or into a foreign language. To all that, even to Goethe’s words, Arnold demurred. Poetry to him was a thing by itself, “not an art like other arts,” but, as he grandly called it, “genius.”

He once had a great triumph over me. An American gentleman, who brought out a “Collection of the Portraits of the Hundred Greatest Men,” divided them into eight classes, and the first class was assigned to poetry, the second to art, the third to religion, the fourth to philosophy, the fifth to history, the sixth to science, the seventh to politics, the eighth to industry. Arnold was asked to write the introduction to the first volume, H. Taine to the second, myself and Renan to the third, Noah Porter to the fourth, Dean Stanley to the fifth, Helmholtz to the sixth, Froude to the seventh, John Fiske to the eighth.

I do not know whether Arnold had anything to do with suggesting this division of _Omne Scibile_ into eight classes; anyhow, he did not allow the opportunity to pass to assert the superiority of poetry over every other branch of man’s intellectual activity. “The men,” he began, “who are the flower and glory of our race are to pass here before us, the highest manifestations, whether on this line or that, of the force which stirs in every one of us—the chief poets, religious founders, philosophers, historians, scholars, orators, warriors, statesmen, voyagers, leaders in mechanical invention and industry, who have appeared among mankind. And the poets are to pass first. Why? Because, of the various modes of manifestation through which the human spirit pours its force, theirs is the most adequate and happy.”

This is the well-known _ore rotundo_ and _spiritu profundo_ style of Arnold. But might we not ask, _Adequate_ to what? _Happy_ in what? Arnold himself answers a little farther on: “No man can fully draw out the reasons why the human spirit feels itself able to attain to a more adequate and satisfying expression in poetry than in any other of its modes of activity.” Yet he continues to call this a primordial and incontestable fact; and how could we poor mortals venture to contest a primordial and incontestable fact? And then, limiting the question “to us for to-day,” he says, “Surely it is its solidity that accounts to us for the superiority of poetry.” How he would have railed if any of his Philistines had ventured to recognise the true superiority of poetry in its solidity!

Prose may be solid, it may be dense, massive, lumpish, concrete, and all the rest, but poetry is generally prized for its being subtle, light, ideal, air-drawn, fairy-like, or made of such stuff as dreams are made of. However, let that pass. Let poetry be solid, for who knows what sense Arnold may have assigned to solid? He next falls back on his great master Goethe, and quotes a passage which I have not been able to find, but the bearing of which must depend very much on the context in which it occurs. Goethe, we are told, said in one of his many moods: “I deny poetry to be an art. Neither is it a science. Poetry is to be called neither art nor science, but genius.” Who would venture to differ from Goethe when he defines what poetry is? But does he define it? He simply says that it is not art or science. In this one may agree, if only art and science are defined first. No one I think has ever maintained that poetry was science, but no one would deny that poetry was a product of art, if only in the sense of the _Ars poetica_ of Horace, or the _Dichtkunst_ of Goethe. But if we ask what can be meant by saying that poetry is genius, Goethe would probably say that what he meant was that poetry was the product of genius, the German _Genie_. Goethe, therefore, meant no more than that poetry requires, in the poet, originality and spontaneity of thought; and this, though it would require some limitation, no one surely would feel inclined to deny, though even the authority of Goethe would hardly suffice to deprive the decipherer of an inscription, the painter of the “Last Supper,” or the discoverer of the bacilli of a claim to that divine light which we call genius.

Arnold then goes on to say that poetry gives the idea, but it gives it touched with beauty, heightened by emotion. Would not Arnold have allowed that the language of Isaiah, and even some of the dialogues of Plato, were touched with beauty and heightened by emotion though they are in prose? I think he himself speaks somewhere of a poetic prose. Where, then, is the true difference between the creations of Isaiah and of Browning, between the eloquence of Plato and of Wordsworth?

Arnold has one more trump card to play in order to win for poetry that superiority over all the other manifestations of the forces of the human spirit which he claims again and again. I have always been a sincere admirer of Arnold’s poetry, still I think there is more massive force in some of his prose than in many of his poems; nay, I believe he has left a much deeper and more lasting impression on what he likes to call the _Zeitgeist_ through his essays than through his tragedies. What then is his last card, his last proof of the superiority of poetry? Poetry, he argues, has more stability than anything else, and mankind finds in it a surer stay than in art, in philosophy, or religion. “Compare,” he says, “the stability of Shakespeare with that of the Thirty-nine Articles.”

Poor Thirty-nine Articles! Did they ever claim to contain poetry, or even religion? Were they ever meant to be more than a dry abstract of theological dogmas? Surely they never challenged comparison with Shakespeare. They are an index, a table of contents, they were a business-like agreement, if you like, between different parties in the Church of England. But to ask whether they will stand longer than Shakespeare is very much like asking whether the Treaty of Paris will last longer than Victor Hugo. There is stay in poetry provided that the prose which underlies it is lasting, or everlasting; there is no stay in it if it is mere froth and rhyme. Arnold always liked to fall back on Goethe. “What a series of philosophic systems has Germany seen since the birth of Goethe,” he says, “and what sort of stay is any one of them compared with the poetry of Germany’s _one_ great poet?” Is Goethe’s poetry really so sure a stay as the philosophies of Germany; nay, would there be any stay in it at all without the support of that philosophy which Goethe drank in, whether from the vintage of Spinoza or from the more recent _crues_ of Kant and Fichte? Goethe’s name, no doubt, is always a pillar of strength, but there is even now a very great part of Goethe’s “Collected Works” in thirty volumes that is no longer a stay, but is _passé_, and seldom read by any one, except by the historian. Poetry may act as a powerful preservative, and it is wonderful how much pleasure we may derive from thought mummified in verse. But in the end it is thought in its ever-changing life that forms the real stay, and it matters little whether that thought speaks to us in marble, or in music, in hexameters, in blank verse, or even in prose. Poetry in itself is no protection against folly and feebleness. There is in the world a small amount of good, and an immense amount of bad poetry. The former, we may hope, will last, and will serve as a stay to all who care for the music of thought and the harmony of language; the twaddle, sometimes much admired in its time (and there is plenty of it in Goethe also), will, we hope, fade away from the memory of man, and serve as a lesson to poets who imagine that they may safely say in rhythm and rhyme what they would be thoroughly ashamed to say in simple prose. Nor is the so-called stay or immortality of poetry of much consequence. To have benefited millions of his own age, ought surely to satisfy any poet, even if no one reads his poems, or translations of them, a thousand years hence.

Denn wer den Besten seiner Zeit genug Gethan, der hat gelebt für alle Zeiten.[10]