^•i'..\ Ati'-i piE'ru.'
3 1822 00341 0156
PR
^023
.P3
1902a
A
A
2
9
2
9
3
1
3
i/ewjTr OF I
N OICQO V
UNIVERSITY OF CA IFORNIA SAN DIEGO
3 1822 00341 0156 . ,/
^
ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS
EDITED Br JOHN MORLEY
MATTHEIF ARNOLD
-s-
•The
1
ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS
MATTHEW ARNOLD
BY
HERBERT \V. PAUL
THE NL^CMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd.
1902
Mi7 ri^!iti rfifrTfd
Copyright, 1902,
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped July, 1902.
Norfaool) ^rtss
J. S. Gushing & Co. - Berwick & Smith
Norwood Mas9. U.S.A.
PREFATORY NOTE
The only authority for the events of Matthew Arnold's
life, besides Mr. Richard Garnett's excellent article
in the Dictionary of ]\^ational Biography, is the collec-
tion of his letters in two volumes, edited by Mr. George
Eussell (Macmillan, 1895). Sir Joshua Fitch's account
of ^Mr. Arnold's public services as Inspector of Schools
in the seventh volume of Great Educators (Heinemann)
is admirably clear, and Islv. Burnett Smart's Bibli-
ography (The Dryden Press, 1892) cannot be over-
praised. Professor Saintsbury's lively and learned
study in ]\[essrs. Blackwood's Modern English Write7'S
(1899) is rather unsympathetic on the theological and
political side, but full of interest and suggestion. I
have sometimes owed most to Mv. Saintsbury when
I have been least able to agree with him.
H. W. P.
CONTENTS
ClLVrTER I
PAGK
ISTRODCCTORY 1
f 11 A ITER 11
RiGBT AM) Oxford ....
CHAPTER III
P^\RLY Poems 16
CHAPTER IV
Work and Pi^ktuy ........ 30
CHAPTER V
TiiF, Oxford Cii.vm ........ 61
CHAPTER VI
Essays in Criticism 72
CHAPTER VII
TiiF, End of the I'iiofessorship ..... 91
CHAPTER VIII
The Xeir I'orms 01)
vii
viii PREFACE
CHAPTER IX
PAGE
Education 106
CHAPTER X
Mk. Arnold's Philosophy 113
CHAPTER XI
Mr. Arnold's Theology 130
CHAPTER XII
Mr. Arnold's Politics ....... 145
CHAPTER XIII
The Aftermath 159
CHAPTER XIV
Conclusion 170
Index 179
MATTHEW ARNOLD
MATTHEW ARNOLD
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTOET
The fourteen years which have elapsed since jNIatthew
Arnold's death have added greatly to the number of
his readers, especially the readers of his poems. No
poet of modern times, perhaps no English poet of any
time, appeals so directly and so exclusively to the cul-
tivated taste of the educated classes. To say that a
classical education was necessary for understanding
him would perhaps be to go too far. But a capacity
for appreciating form and style, the charm of rhythm
and the beauty of words, is undoubtedly essential.
It may be said of Mr. Arnold with truth, and it is his
chief praise, that the more widely mental culture
spreads, the higher his fame will be. He was not,
indeed, a profound thinker. He did not illuminate,
like Wordsworth, with a single flash, the abysses of
man's nature, and the inmost recesses of the human
soul. He was not, as Plato was, a spectator of all
time and all existence. His aim was, as he said of
Sophocles, to see life steadily, and see it whole. But
he saw it as a scholar and a man of letters. He
interpreted greater minds than his own. Ho almost
fulfilled his ideal. He knew, so far at least as the
B 1
2 MATTHEW ARNOLD [chap.
Western world is concerned, the best that had been
, said and thought in all ages. Next to Milton, he was
; the most learned of English poets.
How far Matthew Arnold will suffer from having
been too much the child of his own age, it is as yet
too soon to say. The " Zeit-Geist " has its limitations.
It is the spirit of wisdom, not the spirit of a day, that
is justified of all her children. " Thyrsis " is a very
beautiful poem, not much less beautiful than ''Ado-
nais," though very unlike it. But Clough was not
Keats. Keats is near to every one of us, while Clough
is already far away. To Mr. Arnold, however, Clough
was not merely a personal friend. He was the embodi-
ment of Oxford in the thirties and forties, of a special
type now rare, if not extinct. Matthew Arnold's
passionate love of Oxford has inspired some of his
noblest verse, and some of his most musical prose.
All Oxford men know, or used to know, the exquisite
sentences about the beautiful city with her dreaming
towers, breathing the last enchantment of the middle
age. It was the unreformed Oxford which Matthew
Arnold knew, and he represented the high-water mark
of what it could do. The " grand old fortifying classi-
cal curriculum " at which he laughed, and in which he
believed, was seen at its best in the Oxford of those
days. There was no " specialising." There were
classics, and there were mathematics, and there was
the river, and there was Headington Hill with Shot-
over beyond it. If that did not satisfy a man, he
must have been hard to please. At any rate, he was
not entitled to take a degree in Tamil, with a school
and examiners all to himself.
Education was the business of Matthew Arnold's
I.] DsTRODUCTORY 3
life. He understood it in the broadest sense. There
was nothing narrow, technical, or pedantic about his
scholarship or his criticism. But in the proper sense
of a much abused term his work is academic. It is
steeped in, one might say saturated with, culture. It
was written by a scholar for scholars, and only scholars
can fully appreciate it. I\Iatthew Arnold fulhlled the
precept of Horace. He turned over his Greek models
by day and by night. He brought everything to the
classical touchstone. Whatever was not Greek was
barbarian. ''Except," Avrote Sir Henry Maine, in a
moment of rare enthusiasm, "except the blind forces
of nature, nothing moves in this world which is not
Greek in its origin." Such was substantially Mr.
Arnold's creed, though as his father's son he recog-
nised that Hebraism entered with Hellenism into the
structure of the Christian Church.
Yet both as a poet and as a critic Matthew Arnold
was essentially a man of his time. He was singularly
receptive of ideas, even when they were ephemeral.
He loved to dabble in politics, but the best parts of
his political writings are the quotations from Burke.
He did more than dabble in theology. He took the
doctors of the Tubingen school for apostles, and
treated a phase of Biblical speculation as if it were
permanent truth. He had no sympathy with dry and
minute criticism of detail, like Bishop Colenso's. He
addicted himself to Ewald and to Eenan. He threw
himself into the Liberal reaction against Tractarian-
ism, whose attitude to the Great First Cause has been
described by a satirist in the memorable line —
" Philosophy is lenient ; he may go."
4 MATTHEW ARNOLD [chap.
Matthew Arnold's literary criticism, once regarded
by young enthusiasts as a revelation, has long since
taken a secure place in English letters. Like his
poetry, unlike his theology and his politics, it has
original and intrinsic value. It is penetrating as well
^ as brilliant, conscientious as well as imaginative.
Matthew Arnold may be said to have done for
literature almost what Ruskin did for art. He re-
minded, or informed, the British public that criticism
was a serious thing ; that good criticism was just as
important as good authorship ; that it was not a
question of individual taste, but partly of received
- authority, and partly of trained judgment. His own
masters, besides the old Greeks, were chiefly Goethe
and Sainte-Beuve. But few critics have been so thor-
oughly original, and still fewer have had so large a
share of the " daemonic " faculty, the faculty which
awakens intelligent enthusiasm in others. Essays in
Criticism is one of the indispensable books. Not to
have read it is to be ignorant of a great intellectual
event.
In his double character of poet and critic, Matthew
Arnold may be called our English Goethe. This is
not to put the two men on a level ; for, of course, one
could not without absurdity talk of Goethe as a Ger-
man Arnold. Goethe is one of the world's poets.
Matthew Arnold is little known to those who do not
speak the English tongue. But among them his repu-
tation widens, and will widen, as knowledge and the
love of books spread through all classes of society.
To all who care for things of the mind his work must
ever be dear. Something of his own radiant and sym-
pathetic personality pervades all his writings, except
1.] INTRODUCTORY 6
perhaps when he is dealing with Dissenters. It
would have been well if he had applied the critical
pruuing-knife to the exuberant mannerism which
sometimes disfigures his style. The repetition of
pet phrases is a literary vice. But Matthew Arnold
is more than strong enough to live in spite of his
faults. His best poetry, and his best prose, are
among the choicest legacies bequeathed by the nine-
teenth century to the twentieth. If they belong to
an age, they are the glory of it, for they show what
golden ore it could extract, and hand down to the
future, from the buried accumulations of the past.
CHAPTER II
. g. . ' RUGBY AND OXFORD
Matthew Arnold was born at Laleham, near Staines,
in the county of jMiddlesex, on Ch.ristmas Eve, 1822.
: Laleliam is situated on the Thames, for which from his
earliest years he had a passionate love. His father,
Dr. Arnold of Eugby, the famous schoolmaster, had
nine children, of whom Matthew was the eldest son.
Mr. Thomas Arnold, however, did not become Dr.
Arnold, or go to Rugby, till 1828. In 1822 he was
taking private pupils, and forming the theories of
education which he afterwards carried out in a more
conspicuous field. His wife, born Mary Penrose, who
lived till 1873, having survived her husband more than
thirty years, was a woman of remarkable character and
intellect, with whom Matthew kept up to the day of
her death a mentally sympathetic as well as personally
affectionate correspondence. When the family re-
moved to Rugby, Matthew was five, but two years
afterwards he returned to Laleham as the pupil of his
uncle, the Reverend John Buckland. The country
round Rugby is, as Dr. Arnold used pathetically to
complain, among the dullest and ugliest in England.
As a contrast he took a house at Fox How, near
G-rasmere, on the Rotha, where he spent most of the
holidays with his wife and children. The eldest boy
6
CHAP. II.] RUGBY AND OXFORD 7
thus grew up under the shadow of Wordsworth, whose
brilliant and penetrating interpreter he was destined
to become. In August 1836, being then thirteen and
a half, ]\Iatthew was sent to Winchester, of which
Dr. Moberly, an elegant scholar, long afterwards
Bishop of Salisbury, had just been appointed head-
master. Dr. Arnold was himself a Wykehamist, and
had a high opinion of his old school. But after a
year, in August 1837, Matthew was removed from
Winchester to be under his father's eye in the school-
house at Rugby, where he remained until he went up
to Oxford in 1841.
Rugby under Arnold has been made familiar to
millions of readers by Tom Broicn''s School Days.
When Arnold was a candidate. Dr. Hawkins, the
Provost of Oriel, prophesied that if elected he would
revolutionise the public schools. He certainly revolu-
tionised Rugby. When he came there, it was little
more than an ordinary grammar school Avith boarders.
Wlien he died, it was one of the most famous and pop-
ular schools in England. The monitorial system was
not really his invention. He introduced it from Win-
chester. But he invested it with a moral significance
which had not previously belonged to it, and he
leavened the whole school by his own powerful person-
ality. As his accomplished biographer, Dean Stanley,
says, " Throughout, whether in the school itself, or in
its after effects, the one image that we have before us
is not Rugby, but Arnold." ^Matthew Arnold bore very
little resemblance to his stern Puritanical father.
Dr. Arnold was in deadly earnest about everything,
and was wholly devoid of humour. He was always
declaiming against the childishness of boys, which
8 MATTHEW ARNOLD [chap.
after all is not a bad thing, and better than the
premature mannishness which the monitorial system
encourages. But he was in his way a great man. He
had extraordinary force of character and strength of
will. He had a magnetic influence upon boys. He
was absolutely single-minded and sincere. His piety
was deep and genuine, quite without suspicion of cant
or conventionalism. His classical scholarship was not
only sound and thorough, but broad, robust, and
philosophical. As a teacher he stood high, as a
preacher higher. There have been few better writers
of English prose than Dr. Arnold, and it is perhaps his
high literary sense which was his most distinctive
bequest to his son. In a letter to his old pupil
Vaughan, afterwards Master of the Temple, Dr.
Arnold says: "There is an actual pleasure in contem-
plating so perfect a management of so perfect an
instrument as is exhibited in Plato's language, even if
the matter were as worthless as the words of Italian
music; whereas the sense is only less admirable in
many places than the language." But Thucydides was
of course his favourite author; and the general reader,
as distinguished from the philological student, can
have at this day no better guide to the greatest of all
historians than Dr. Arnold.
Dr. Arnold was, says Dean Stanley, "the elder
brother and playfellow of his children." In that fine
poem with the unfortunate metre, " Rugby Chapel,"
the son puts it rather differently : —
" If, in the paths of the world,
Stones might have wounded thy feet,
Toil or dejection have tried
Thy spirit, of that we say
n.] RUGBY AND OXFORD 9
Nothing ! To us thou wert still
Cht'Crful, and helpful, and firm.
Therefore to tiiee it was given
Many to save with thyself ;
And, at the end of tliy day,
O faithful shepherd ! to come,
Bringing thy sheep in thy hand."
The thought expressed in these lines, the idea of a
good man not content with saving his own soul, but
devoting himself also to the salvation of others, is
repeated in one of Matthew Arnold's most touching
letters to his mother many years after his father's
death. It was a singularly delightful trait in a most
endearing character, that Mr. Arnold always in writ-
ing to her dwelt upon what "Papa" would have
thought of things if he had been alive. Dr. Arnold
died in 1842; and he was, thought his son, the tirst
English clergyman who could speak as freely upon
religious subjects as if he had been a layman. He
was, however, strictly orthodox in all the essential
doctrines of the Christian faith. He was suspected of
heresy on no better grounds than his dislike of the
Oxford ]\rovement, which was strong, and his know-
ledge of German, which Avas thorough. He took the
Liberal side in the first Hampden controversy, but
the charges against Dr. Hampden completely broke
down. In politics he was a decided, though indepen-
dent Whig, and he wrote a pamphlet in favour of
Catholic Emancipation. Yet he held as firmly as Mr.
Gladstone once held the theory of a Christian state,
and he consistently opposed the enfranchisement of
the Jews. In one respect he was far in advance of his
age. " Woe," he said, " to the generation which inhal)-
10 MATTHEW ARNOLD [chap.
its England wlien the coal-fields are exhausted, and the
National Debt has not been paid." Although he died
four years before the Kepeal of the Corn Laws, he was
a staunch advocate of free exchange. It is impossible
not to trace the influence of the father in the politics
of the son.
We have the authority of Matthew Arnold's oldest
and most intimate friend, Lord Coleridge, for the fact,
which might perhaps have been surmised, that between
father and son there was more affection than sympathy.
Dr. Arnold abhorred "mere cleverness," and humour
appeared to him a rather profane indiscretion. His
eldest son was excessively clever, and full of a gaiety
which he never at any time of life made the smallest
attempt to subdue. Lord Coleridge hints that there
were collisions between them, and one can partly
believe it. But he adds that when the doctor had
trouble, as even schoolmasters sometimes have, he
found comfort in the filial piety of one whose genius
he did not live to acknowledge. The only poem of
Matthew Arnold's which his father saw was ''Alaric
at Rome," recited in Eugby School on the 12th of June
1840. The motto from Childe Harold, prefixed to this
composition, prepares one for its character, which is
distinctly Byronic. It is not much above the ordinary
level of such things, and many men have written as
good verses when they were boys, who never came
within measurable distance of being poets. One
stanza, however, deserves to be quoted, because the
first two lines are the earliest example of a figure the
writer often afterwards employed : —
"Yes, there are stories registered on high,
Yes, there are stains time's fingers cannot hlot,
II.] RUGBY AND OXFORD 11
Deeds that shall live when they who did them, die ;
Thiugs that may cease, but never be forgot :
Yet some there are, their very lives would give
To be remember "d thus, and yet they cannot live."
The Last couplet is sadl}- wooden, and shows that the
young versitier had not got his stride. IMacauhiy is
almost the only man who has successfully imitated
without parodying Byron.
In this same year, 1840, Matthew Arnold won an '
open scholarship at Balliol, and in 1841 he Avent into
residence. Oxford was then in the full swing of the
Tractarian movement. Kewman had not yet retired
to Littlemore, and was still drawing crowded congrega-
tions at St. Mary's. The fascination of that extraor-
dinary man attracted minds so utterly dissimilar to
his own as ]\rark Pattison's and Anthony Froude's.
But upon Matthew Arnold he seems to have had no
effect whatever. Perhaps the influence of Dr. Arnold,
who regarded Newman as something very like Anti-
christ, was too strong. In 1841, just before the
Whigs went out of office. Lord Melbourne appointed
Dr. Arnold Regius Professor of History, and in De-
cember of that year, to a crowded audience, largely
comi)osed of old Rugbeians, he delivered his inaugural
lecture. In the following June he died, and his mem-
ory was consecrated by his early death. ^Matthew
Arnold's own temperament, however, though not
irreligiou.s, was utterly unclerical, and he never con-
templated, as most undergraduates not in easy cir-
cumstances at that time did, the possibility of taking
orders.
Except for a few venerable landmarks, and the
exaiiiin.'itioii in the school of Lileroi llumaniores, there
12 MATTHEW ARNOLD [chai-.
is little left now of the Oxford which Matthew Arnold
entered sixty years ago. Before the Commission of
1850 the University was in form what it had been in
the middle ages. All power was in the hands of the
Hebdomadal Board, and the Hebdomadal Board was
simply the Heads of Houses. The separate Colleges
kept strictly to themselves, there were no combined
lectures, and no unattached students. Every under-
graduate subscribed the Thirtj^-lSTine Articles, so that
only members of the Church of England could enter
the University.
Such, at least, was the theory, though of course in
practice religious tests exclude only the conscientious.
But a society confined to one ecclesiastical organisation
gave itself up to the vehemence of ecclesiastical dis-
putes. Nonconformity was not represented. Eome
proved a powerful attraction, and young men, as Pat-
tison puts it, spent the time that should have been
devoted to study in discussing which was the true
Church. At Balliol there was perhaps more intellec-
tual activity than at any other college. The scholar-
ships and fellowships, as was rare in those days, were
open. Dr. Jenkyns, the Master, though no great
scholar himself, was jealous for Balliol's intellectual
reputation, and had some at least of the qualities
which in a larger world are called statesmanship.
Mr. Jowett, then a young Eellow, was beginning the
long career which will always be associated with the
name of Balliol. Of Dr. Arnold's old pupils at Balliol,
Stanley had become a Fellow of University, and
Clough a Fellow of Oriel. Among Matthew Arnold's
contemporaries his closest friends were John Duke
Coleridge, afterwards Lord Chief-Justice of England,
11.] RUGBY AND OXFORD 13
and John Campbell Shairp, afterwards Principal of the
United College, St. Andrew's. Shairp's lines about
]\[atthew Arnold are too hackneyed for quotation.
They describe the debonair gaiety with which all his
friends are familiar, and which he never lost. The
" home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unp()])u-
lar names, and impossible loyalties," was dearer to Mr.
Arnold than Kugby, or even Lalehani. For the country
round Oxford he had a passion, which found full vent
in "The Scholar Gipsy" and in "Thyrsis." For the
squabbles about Tract Number Ninety, and " Ideal
"Ward's " Degree, he did not care two straws. jNIax
Ml'iUer has described in his Autobiography the amaze-
ment which he, a young German, fresh from Leipzig
and Berlin, felt at the spectacle of religious disputes
having no intelligible connection with religion. JNIat-
thew Arnold's view of them was much the same as
^lax Midler's.
In the year after his father's death, 1843, jNIatthew
Arnold won theNewdigate with a poem on " Cromwell."
lie and Tennyson are exceptions to the rule that prizes
for poetry do not fall to poets. But " Cromwell *' is
even less remarkable than " Alaric at Rome." Written,
as all Newdigates must be, in heroic rhyme, it has flow
and smoothness of numbers without inspiration, or
even distinction of style. There is one obvious touch
of "Wordsworth, or, as some will have it, of Words-
worth's wife —
" Yet all high sounds that mountain children hear
Flash'd from thy soul upon thine inward ear."
But Wordsworth had as yet no reason to be proud of
his pupil. There is more promise of the future in the
14 MATTHEW ARNOLD [chap.
Rugby poem than in the Oxford one, and more of the
feeling for nature which was afterwards so conspicuous.
Matthew Arnold's published Letters unfortunately do
not date back to his Oxford days, which must have
been among the fullest and the most enjoyable of his
- full and happy life. We know from Lord Coleridge
that he belonged to " The Decade," a small debating
Society, where, as that great lover of argument says,
they " fought to the stumps of their intellects." Per-
haps the poet neglected the schools. At any rate, like
his friend Clough a few years before him, he was placed
in the second class at the final examination for Classical
- Honours. But this comparative failure was more than
redeemed, in his case as in dough's, by a Fellowship at
f Oriel, of which his father had also been a Fellow. He
â– was elected in 1845, when an Oriel Fellowship was still
I regarded as the most brilliant crown of an Oxford
career. Dr. Hawkins, the famous Provost, who brought
to the government of a college an ability greater than
has often been employed in the misgovernment of
kingdoms, would not allow a vacancy to be advertised.
If people, he said, wanted to know whether there was
a vacant Fellowship at Oriel, they might come and
ask. Certainly the College of Whately and Newman,
of Clough and Church, of Matthew Arnold and his
father, had good reason to be proud of its sons. But
it would not have suited Matthew Arnold to become a
College Don. He was essentially a man of the world,
loving society in its widest sense, a scholar by tempera-
ment and taste, but delighting to mix with all sorts
and conditions of his fellow-creatures. Although, like
most Oxford men of his generation, he had no scientific
bent or training, his interests were too many rather
II.] RUGBY AND OXFORD 15
than too few. Xanowness was never among his
faults. He was rather too apt to think that there was
no subject upon which an educated man is not compe-
tent to form an opinion. Perhaps the free life of
unreformed Oxford, Avith its lax discipline, its few
examinations, its ample leisure for social intercourse
of the best and highest kind, as of others with which
the biographer of Matthew Arnold has no concern,
fostered a tendency to diffusiveness, as well as a belief
that everything was open for discussion. As a critic
Matthew Arnold was not free from a dogmatism of his
own. But the chief lesson which he took away from
Oxford was the Platonic maxim, (Slos di-e^'e'rao-ros oi
I3lu)t6<;, — "life without the spirit of inquiry is not
worth living."
CHAPTER III
EAKLY POEMS
After taking his degree, which would have shocked