1 a mined by other than moral considerations, his treate ment is apt, none the less, to reveal his ethical bias. Again and again in his essays on poetry, for example, it is the substance of poetry that he is chiefly anxious to handle, while the form is left with incidental analysis. Wordsworth is the poet of joy in widest commonalty spread-the poet whose criticism of life is most sound and enduring and salutary. Shelley is a febrile creature, insecure in his sense of worldly values, beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain." The essay on Heine helps us only mediately to an appreciation of the volatile beauty of Heine's songs, or to an intenser delight in the mere surface play of hues and moods in his verse. From the essay on George Sand, to be sure, we receive many vivid impressions of the emotional and imaginative scope of French romance; for this essay was written con amore in the revivification of an early mood of devotion, and in an unusually heightened style; the essay on Emerson is the one study that has in places somewhat of the same lyrical intensity and the same vividness of realization. Yet even in the essay on George Sand, the essayist is on the whole bent on revealing the temperament of the woman rather in its decisive influence on her theories of life than in its reaction upon her art as art. There is hardly a word of the Romance as a definite literary form, of George 1 This famous image was probably suggested by a sentence of Joubert's: "Plato loses himself in the void, but one sees the play of his wings, one hears their rustle. It is good to breathe his air, but not to live upon him " The translation is Arnold's own. See his Joubert, in Essays in Criticism, i. 294 Sand's relation to earlier French writers of fiction, or of her distinctive methods of work as a portrayer of the great human spectacle. In short, literature as art, literary forms as definite modes of artistic expression, the technique of the literary craftsman receive for the most part from Arnold slight attention. Perhaps, the one piece of work in which Arnold set himself with some thoroughness to the discussion of a purely literary problem was his series of lectures on Translating Homer. These lectures were produced before his sense of responsilility for the moral regeneration of the Philistine had become importunate, and were addressed to an academic audience. For these reasons, the treatment of literary topics is more disinterested and less interrupted by practical considerations. Indeed, as will be presently noted in illustration of another aspect of Arnold's work, these lectures contain very subtle and delicate appreciations, show everywhere exquisite responsiveness to changing effects of style, and enrich gratefully the vocabulary of impressionistic criticism. Even in these exceptional lectures, however, Arnold's ethical interest asserts itself. In the course of them he gives an account of the grand style in poetry,-of that poetic manner that seems to him to stand highest in the scale of excellence; and he carefully notes as an essential of this manner,-of this grand style,-its moral power; "it can form the character, . . . is edifying, ... can refine the raw natural man can transmute him."1 This definition of the grand 'On Translating Homer, ed. 1883, p. 197. ... style will be discussed presently in connection with Arnold's general theory of poetry; it is enough to note here that it illustrates the inseparableness in Arnold's mind between art and morals. 991 His description of poetry as a criticism of life has already been mentioned. This doctrine is early implied in Arnold's writings, for example, in the passage just quoted from the lectures on Translating Homer; it becomes more explicit in the Last Words appended to these lectures, where the critic asserts. that "the noble and profound application of ideas to life is the most essential part of poetic greatness. It is elaborated in the essays on Wordsworth (1879), on the Study of Poetry (1880), and on Byron (1881). "It is important, therefore," the essay on Wordsworth assures us, to hold fast to this: that poetry is at bottom a criticism of life; that the greatness of a poet lies in his powerful and beautiful application of ideas to life, to the question: How to live." And in the essay on the Study of Poetry Arnold urges that "in poetry, as a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty, the spirit of our race will find . . . as time goes on and as other helps fail, its consolation and stay." " 2 With this doctrine of the indissoluble connection between the highest poetic excellence and essential nobleness of subject-matter probably only the most irreconcilable advocates of art for art's sake 1 On Translating Homer, ed. 1883, p. 295. 3 Essays, ii., ed. 1891, p. 5. would quarrel. So loyal an adherent of art as Walter Pater suggests a test of poetic "greatness" substantially the same with Arnold's. "It is on the quality of the matter it informs or controls, its compass, its variety, its alliance to great ends, or the depth of the note of revolt, or the largeness of hope in it, that the greatness of literary art depends, as The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, Les Misérables, The English Bible, are great art." This may be taken as merely a different phrasing of Arnold's principle that "the greatness of a poet lies in his powerful and beautiful application of ideas to life-to the question: How to live." Surely, then, we are not at liberty to press any objection to Arnold's general theory of poetry on the ground of its being over-ethical. 1 There remains nevertheless the question of emphasis. In the application to special cases of this test of essential worth either the critic may be constitutionally biassed in favor of a somewhat restricted range of definite ideas about life, or even when he is fairly hospitable toward various moral idioms, he may still be so intent upon making ethical distinctions as to fail to give their due to the purely artistic qualities of poetry. It is in this latter way that Arnold is most apt to offend. The emphasis in the discussions of Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Keats, Gray, and Milton is prevailingly on the ethical characteristics of each poet; and the reader carries away from an essay a vital conception of the play of moral energy and of spiritual passion in the poet's verse rather than an im 1 Pater's Appreciations, ed. 1890, p. 36. pression of his peculiar adumbration of beauty, the characteristic rhythms of his imaginative movement, the delicate color modulations on the surface of his image of life. It must, however, be borne in mind that Arnold has specially admitted the incompleteness of his description of poetry as a criticism of life"; this criticism, he has expressly added, must be made in conformity "to the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty." "The profound criticism of life" characteristic of "the few supreme masters" must exhibit itself "in indissoluble connection with the laws of poetic truth and beauty." Is there, then, any account to be found in Arnold of these laws observance of which secures poetic beauty and truth? Is there any description of the special ways in which poetic beauty and truth manifest themselves, of the formal characteristics to be found in poetry where poetic beauty and truth are present? Does Arnold either suggest the methods the poet must follow to attain these qualities or classify the various subordinate effects through which poetic beauty and truth invariably reveal their presence? The most apposite parts of his writings to search for some declaration on these points are the lectures on Translating Homer, and the second series of his essays which deal chiefly with the study of poetry. Here, if anywhere, we ought to find a registration of beliefs as regards the precise nature and source of poetic beauty and truth. And indeed throughout all these writings, which run 1 Essays, ii., ed. 1891, pp. 186–187. |