.


THE STONES OF VENICE / 1329


the strength of them is given daily to be wasted into the fineness of a web, or


racked into the exactness of a line.


And, on the other hand, go forth again to gaze upon the old cathedral front,


where you have smiled so often at the fantastic2 ignorance of the old sculptors:


examine once more those ugly goblins, and formless monsters, and stern stat


ues, anatomiless3 and rigid; but do not mock at them, for they are signs of the


life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone; a freedom of thought,


and rank in scale of being, such as no laws, no charters, no charities can


secure; but which it must be the first aim of all Europe at this day to regain


for her children. Let me not be thought to speak wildly or extravagantly. It is verily this deg


radation of the operative into a machine, which, more than any other evil of


the times, is leading the mass of the nations everywhere into vain, incoherent,


destructive struggling for a freedom of which they cannot explain the nature


to themselves. Their universal outcry against wealth, and against nobility, is


not forced from them either by the pressure of famine, or the sting of mortified


pride. These do much, and have done much in all ages; but the foundations


of society were never yet shaken as they are at this day. It is not that men are


ill fed, but that they have no pleasure in the work by which they make their


bread, and therefore look to wealth as the only means of pleasure. It is not


that men are pained by the scorn of the upper classes, but they cannot endure


their own; for they feel that the kind of labor to which they are condemned is


verily a degrading one, and makes them less than men. Never had the upper


classes so much sympathy with the lower, or charity for them, as they have at


this day, and yet never were they so much hated by them: for, of old, the


separation between the noble and the poor was merely a wall built by law; now


it is a veritable difference in level of standing, a precipice between upper and


lower grounds in the field of humanity, and there is pestilential air at the


bottom of it. I know not if a day is ever to come when the nature of right


freedom will be understood, and when men will see that to obey another man,


to labor for him, yield reverence to him or to his place, is not slavery. It is


often the best kind of liberty�liberty from care. The man who says to one,


Go, and he goeth, and to another, Come, and he cometh,4 has, in most cases,


more sense of restraint and difficulty than the man who obeys him. The move


ments of the one are hindered by the burden on his shoulder; of the other, by


the bridle on his lips: there is no way by which the burden may be lightened;


but we need not suffer from the bridle if we do not champ at it. To yield


reverence to another, to hold ourselves and our lives at his disposal, is not


slavery; often, it is the noblest state in which a man can live in this world.


There is, indeed, a reverence which is servile, that is to say irrational or selfish:


but there is also noble reverence, that is to say, reasonable and loving; and a


man is never so noble as when he is reverent in this kind; nay, even if the


feeling pass the bounds of mere reason, so that it be loving, a man is raised


by it. Which had, in reality, most of the serf nature in him�the Irish peasant


who was lying in wait yesterday for his landlord, with his musket muzzle thrust


through the ragged hedge; or that old mountain servant, who, 200 years ago,


at Inverkeithing, gave up his own life and the lives of his seven sons for his


chief?5�as each fell, calling forth his brother to the death, "Another for Hec


2. Fanciful, imaginative. 5. An incident described in the preface to Sir Wal3. Devoid of anatomy (Ruskin's coinage). ter Scott's novel The Fair Maid of Perth (1828). 4. Matthew 8.9.


.


133 0 / JOHN RUSKIN


tor!" And therefore, in all ages and all countries, reverence has been paid and


sacrifice made by men to each other, not only without complaint, but rejoic


ingly; and famine, and peril, and sword, and all evil, and all shame, have been


borne willingly in the causes of masters and kings; for all these gifts of the


heart ennobled the men who gave not less than the men who received them,


and nature prompted, and God rewarded the sacrifice. But to feel their souls


withering within them, unthanked, to find their whole being sunk into an


unrecognized abyss, to be counted off into a heap of mechanism, numbered


with its wheels, and weighed with its hammer strokes�this nature bade not�


this God blesses not�this humanity for no long time is able to endure. We have much studied and much perfected, of late, the great civilized inven


tion of the division of labour; only we give it a false name. It is not, truly


speaking, the labour that is divided; but the men: Divided into mere segments


of men�broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that all the little


piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a


nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin, or the head of a nail.


Now it is a good and desirable thing, truly, to make many pins in a day; but if


we could only see with what crystal sand their points were polished�sand of


human soul, much to be magnified before it can be discerned for what it is�


we should think there might be some loss in it also. And the great cry that


rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace blast, is all


in very deed for this�that we manufacture everything there except men; we


blanch cotton, and strengthen steel, and refine sugar, and shape pottery; but


to brighten, to strengthen, to refine, or to form a single living spirit, never


enters into our estimate of advantages. And all the evil to which that cry is


urging our myriads can be met only in one way: not by teaching nor preaching,


for to teach them is but to show them their misery, and to preach to them, if


we do nothing more than preach, is to mock at it. It can be met only by a right


understanding, on the part of all classes, of what kinds of labour are good for


men, raising them, and making them happy; by a determined sacrifice of such


convenience, or beauty, or cheapness as is to be got only by the degradation


of the workman; and by equally determined demand for the products and


results of healthy and ennobling labour. And how, it will be asked, are these products to be recognized, and this


demand to be regulated? Easily: by the observance of three broad and simple


rules:


1. Never encourage the manufacture of any article not absolutely necessary, in the production of which Invention has no share.


2. Never demand an exact finish for its own sake, but only for some practical or noble end.


3. Never encourage imitation or copying of any kind, except for the sake of preserving record of great works. The second of these principles is the only one which directly rises out of


the consideration of our immediate subject; but I shall briefly explain the


meaning and extent of the first also, reserving the enforcement of the third


for another place.


1. Never encourage the manufacture of anything not necessary, in the production of which invention has no share.


For instance. Glass beads are utterly unnecessary, and there is no design or


thought employed in their manufacture. They are formed by first drawing out


the glass into rods; these rods are chopped up into fragments of the size of


.


THE STONES OF VENICE / 1331


beads by the human hand, and the fragments are then rounded in the furnace.


The men who chop up the rods sit at their work all day, their hands vibrating


with a perpetual and exquisitely timed palsy, and the beads dropping beneath


their vibration like hail. Neither they, nor the men who draw out the rods or


fuse the fragments, have the smallest occasion for the use of any single human


faculty; and every young lady, therefore, who buys glass beads is engaged in


the slave trade, and in a much more cruel one than that which we have so


long been endeavouring to put down.6 But glass cups and vessels may become the subjects of exquisite invention;


and if in buying these we pay for the invention, that is to say for the beautiful


form, or color, or engraving, and not for mere finish of execution, we are doing


good to humanity.


So, again, the cutting of precious stones, in all ordinary cases, requires little


exertion of any mental faculty; some tact and judgment in avoiding flaws, and


so on, but nothing to bring out the whole mind. Every person who wears cut


jewels merely for the sake of their value is, therefore, a slave driver.


But the working of the goldsmith, and the various designing of grouped


jewelry and enamel-work, may become the subject of the most noble human


intelligence. Therefore, money spent in the purchase of well-designed plate,


of precious engraved vases, cameos, or enamels, does good to humanity; and,


in work of this kind, jewels may be employed to heighten its splendor; and


their cutting is then a price paid for the attainment of a noble end, and thus


perfectly allowable. I shall perhaps press this law farther elsewhere, but our immediate concern


is chiefly with the second, namely, never to demand an exact finish, when it


does not lead to a noble end. For observe, I have only dwelt upon the rudeness


of Gothic, or any other kind of imperfectness, as admirable, where it was


impossible to get design or thought without it. If you are to have the thought


of a rough and untaught man, you must have it in a rough and untaught way;


but from an educated man, who can without effort express his thoughts in an


educated way, take the graceful expression, and be thankful. Only get the


thought, and do not silence the peasant because he cannot speak good gram


mar, or until you have taught him his grammar. Grammar and refinement are


good things, both, only be sure of the better thing first. And thus in art, delicate


finish is desirable from the greatest masters, and is always given by them. In


some places Michael Angelo, Leonardo, Phidias, Perugino, Turner7 all fin


ished with the most exquisite care; and the finish they give always leads to the


fuller accomplishment of their noble purposes. But lower men than these


cannot finish, for it requires consummate knowledge to finish consummately,


and then we must take their thoughts as they are able to give them. So the


rule is simple: Always look for invention first, and after that, for such execution


as will help the invention, and as the inventor is capable of without painful


effort, and no more. Above all, demand no refinement of execution where there


is no thought, for that is slaves' work, unredeemed. Rather choose rough work


than smooth work, so only that the practical purpose be answered, and never


6. Although the Atlantic slave trade had been out-da Vinci (1452�1519), Italian painter, sculptor, lawed early in the 18th century, transatlantic traf-and scientist; Phidias (born ca. 490 B.C.E.), an Athficking in African slaves continued until slavery enian often called the greatest Greek sculptor; was made illegal everywhere in the Americas. Perugino (Pietro di Cristoforo Vannucci, ca. 7. All notable artists: Michelangelo (1475-1564), 1450-1523); and J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851), Italian sculptor, painter, and architect; Leonardo British painter.


.


133 2 / JOHN RUSKIN


imagine there is reason to be proud of anything that may be accomplished by


patience and sandpaper.


I shall only give one example, which however will show the reader what I


mean, from the manufacture already alluded to, that of glass. Our modern


glass is exquisitely clear in its substance, true in its form, accurate in its cut


ting. We are proud of this. We ought to be ashamed of it. The old Venice glass


was muddy, inaccurate in all its forms, and clumsily cut, if at all. And the old


Venetian was justly proud of it. For there is this difference between the English


and Venetian workman, that the former thinks only of accurately matching


his patterns, and getting his curves perfectly true and his edges perfectly sharp,


and becomes a mere machine for rounding curves and sharpening edges, while


the old Venetian cared not a whit whether his edges were sharp or not, but


he invented a new design for every glass that he made, and never molded a


handle or a lip without a new fancy in it. And therefore, though some Venetian glass is ugly and clumsy enough, when made by clumsy and uninventive workmen, other Venetian glass is so lovely in its forms that no price is too great for it; and we never see the same form in it twice. Now you cannot have the finish and the varied form too. If the workman is thinking about his edges, he cannot be thinking of his design; if of his design, he cannot think of his edges. Choose whether you will pay for the lovely form or the perfect finish, and choose at the same moment whether you will make the worker a man or a grindstone. Nay, but the reader interrupts me�"If the workman can design beautifully,


I would not have him kept at the furnace. Let him be taken away and made a


gentleman, and have a studio, and design his glass there, and I will have it


blown and cut for him by common workmen, and so I will have my design and my finish too."


All ideas of this kind are founded upon two mistaken suppositions: the first, that one man's thoughts can be, or ought to be, executed by another man's hands; the second, that manual labor is a degradation, when it is governed by


intellect.


On a large scale, and in work determinable by line and rule, it is indeed


both possible and necessary that the thoughts of one man should be carried


out by the labor of others; in this sense I have already defined the best archi


tecture to be the expression of the mind of manhood by the hands of child


hood. But on a smaller scale, and in a design which cannot be mathematically


defined, one man's thoughts can never be expressed by another: and the dif


ference between the spirit of touch of the man who is inventing, and of the


man who is obeying directions, is often all the difference between a great and


a common work of art. How wide the separation is between original and sec


ondhand execution, I shall endeavor to show elsewhere; it is not so much to


our purpose here as to mark the other and more fatal error of despising manual


labor when governed by intellect; for it is no less fatal an error to despise it


when thus regulated by intellect, than to value it for its own sake. We are


always in these days endeavoring to separate the two; we want one man to be


always thinking, and another to be always working, and we call one a gentle


man, and the other an operative; whereas the workman ought often to be


thinking, and the thinker often to be working, and both should be gentlemen,


in the best sense. As it is, we make both ungentle, the one envying, the other


despising, his brother; and the mass of society is made up of morbid thinkers,


and miserable workers. Now it is only by labor that thought can be made


healthy, and only by thought that labor can be made happy, and the two cannot


.


THE STONES OF VENICE / 1333


be separated with impunity. It would be well if all of us were good handi


craftsmen in some kind, and the dishonor of manual labor done away with


altogether; so that though there should still be a trenchant distinction of race


between nobles and commoners, there should not, among the latter, be a


trenchant distinction of employment, as between idle and working men, or


between men of liberal and illiberal professions. All professions should be


liberal, and there should be less pride felt in peculiarity of employment, and


more in excellence of achievement. And yet more, in each several8 profession,


no master should be too proud to do its hardest work. The painter should grind


his own colours; the architect work in the mason's yard with his men; the


master manufacturer be himself a more skillful operative than any man in his


mills; and the distinction between one man and another be only in experience


and skill, and the authority and wealth which these must naturally and justly obtain.


I should be led far from the matter in hand, if I were to pursue this interesting subject. Enough, I trust, has been said to show the reader that the rudeness or imperfection which at first rendered the term "Gothic" one of reproach is indeed, when rightly understood, one of the most noble characters of Christian architecture, and not only a noble but an essential one. It seems a fantastic paradox, but it is nevertheless a most important truth, that no architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect. And this is easily demonstrable. For since the architect, whom we will suppose capable of doing all in perfection, cannot execute the whole with his own hands, he must either make slaves of his workmen in the old Greek, and present English fashion, and level his work to a slave's capacities, which is to degrade it; or else he must take his workmen as he finds them, and let them show their weaknesses together with their strength, which will involve the Gothic imperfection, but render the whole work as noble as the the intellect of the age can make it. But the principle may be stated more broadly still. I have confined the illus


tration of it to architecture, but I must not leave it as if true of architecture


only. Hitherto I have used the words imperfect and perfect merely to distin


guish between work grossly unskillful, and work executed with average pre


cision and science; and I have been pleading that any degree of unskillfulness


should be admitted, so only that the laborer's mind had room for expression.


But, accurately speaking, no good work whatever can be perfect, and the


demand for -perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art.


This for two reasons, both based on everlasting laws. The first, that no great


man ever stops working till he has reached his point of failure; that is to say,


his mind is always far in advance of his powers of execution, and the latter


will now and then give way in trying to follow it; besides that he will always


give to the inferior portions of his work only such inferior attention as they


require; and according to his greatness he becomes so accustomed to the


feeling of dissatisfaction with the best he can do, that in moments of lassitude


or anger with himself he will not care though the beholder be dissatisfied also.


I believe there has only been one man who would not acknowledge this neces


sity, and strove always to reach perfection, Leonardo; the end of his vain effort


being merely that he would take ten years to a picture, and leave it unfinished.


And therefore, if we are to have great men working at all, or less men doing


8. Different.


.


1334 / GEORGE ELIOT


their best, the work will be imperfect, however beautiful. Of human work none but what is bad can be perfect, in its own bad way.9


The second reason is that imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change. Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent. The foxglove blossom�a third part bud, a third part past, a third part in full bloom�is a type of the life of this world. And in all things that live there are certain irregularities and deficiencies which are not only signs of life, but sources of beauty. No human face is exactly the same in its lines on each side, no leaf perfect in its lobes, no branch in its symmetry. All admit irregularity as they imply change; and to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality. All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed, that the law of human life may be Effort, and the law of human judgment, Mercy.


Accept this then for a universal law, that neither architecture nor any other noble work of man can be good unless it be imperfect; and let us be prepared for the otherwise strange fact, which we shall discern clearly as we approach the period of the Renaissance, that the first cause of the fall of the arts of Europe was a relentless requirement of perfection, incapable alike either of being silenced by veneration for greatness, or softened into forgiveness of simplicity.


Thus far then of the Rudeness or Savageness, which is the first mental element of Gothic architecture. It is an element in many other healthy architectures also, as in Ryzantine and Romanesque; but true Gothic cannot exist without it.


1851-53


9. The Elgin marbles are supposed by many per-bas-reliefs of the frieze are roughly cut [Ruskin's sons to be "perfect." In the most important por-note]. Ruskin is referring to the collection of stattions they indeed approach perfection, but only ues and friezes brought from Athens to England by there. The draperies are unfinished, the hair and Lord Elgin, works that were considered models of wool of the animals are unfinished, and the entire perfect realism. GEORGE ELIOT


1819-1880


Like many English novelists (Charles Dickens being an exception) George Eliot came


to novel writing relatively late in life. She was forty when her first novel, Adam Bede


(1859), an immensely popular work, was published. The lives of her characters are,


therefore, viewed from the vantage point of maturity and extensive experience; and


this perspective is accentuated by her practice of setting her stories back in time to


the period of her own childhood, or even earlier. In most of her novels, she evokes a


preindustrial rural scene or the small-town life of the English Midlands, which she views with a combination of nostalgia and candid awareness of its limitations.


The place Eliot looks back on is usually the Warwickshire countryside. There, under her real name, Marian Evans, she spent her childhood at Arbury Farm, of


which her father, Robert Evans, was supervisor and land agent. The time was the


1820s and 1830s (1819, the year of her birth, was an annus mirabilis for the nine


.


GEORGE ELIOT / 1335


teenth century, for in the same year were born John Ruskin, Herman Melville, Walt


Whitman, and Queen Victoria). During these decades Evans read widely in and out


of school and was also strongly affected by Evangelicism; she even advocated, at one


point in her girlhood, giving up novelists such as Sir Walter Scott (who was later to


influence her own novel writing) on the grounds that fiction was frivolous and time


wasting. Her mother's death led to her leaving school at sixteen, and in the next four


or five years she seems to have experienced bouts of depression and self-doubt. In a


letter of 1871, looking back to the period, she likened her state of mind to that of


Mary Wollstonecraft at the time of the earlier writer's attempted suicide: "Hopeless


ness has been to me, all through my life, but especially in the painful years of my


youth, the chief source of wasted energy with all the consequent bitterness of regret.


Remember, it has happened to many to be glad they did not commit suicide, though


they once ran for the final leap, or as Mary Wollstonecraft did, wetted their garments


well in the rain hoping to sink the better when they plunged." At the age of twenty-one Evans moved with her father to the town of Coventry,


and in this new setting her intellectual horizons were extensively widened. As the


result of her association with a group of freethinking intellectuals, and her own stud


ies of theology, she reluctantly decided that she could no longer believe in the Chris


tian religion. Her decision created a painful break with her father, finally resolved


when she agreed to observe the formality of attending church with him and he agreed,


tacitly at least, that while there she could think what she liked. These preoccupations with theological issues led to her first book, a translation in


1846 of The Life of Jesus by D. F. Strauss, one of the leading figures of the Higher


Criticism in Germany. This criticism was the work of a group of scholars dedicated


to testing the historical authenticity of biblical narratives in the light of modern meth


ods of research. For the rest of her life, Evans continued to read extensively in English


and Continental philosophy; and when she moved to London in 1851, after her


father's death, her impressive intellectual credentials led to her appointment as an


assistant editor of the Westminster Review, a learned journal formerly edited by John


Stuart Mill. In the years in which she served as editor, she wrote a number of essays,


including "Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft" and "Silly Novels by Lady Nov


elists," which she contributed to various periodicals in addition to the Westminster


Review. Her work at the Review brought her into contact with many important writers and


thinkers. Among them was George Henry Lewes, a brilliant critic of literature and


philosophy, with whom she fell in love. Lewes, a married man and father of three


children, could not obtain a divorce. Evans therefore elected to live with him as a


common-law wife, and what they called their "marriage" lasted happily until his death


in 1878. In the last year of her life, she married an admirer and friend, J. W. Cross,


who became her biographer. Her earlier decision to live with Lewes was painfully made: "Light and easily broken


ties are what I neither desire theoretically nor could live for practically. Women who


are satisfied with such ties do not act as I have done�they obtain what they desire


and are still invited to dinner." Mrs. Lewes, as she called herself, was not invited to


dinner; instead, those who wanted to see her had themselves to seek her company at


the house that she shared with Lewes, where she received visitors on Sunday after


noons. These Sunday afternoons became legendary occasions, over which she pre


sided almost like a sibyl. However, her decision to live with Lewes cost her a number


of social and family ties, including her relationship with her brother, Isaac, to whom


she had been deeply attached since childhood. Isaac never spoke to her again after


her elopement. It is reasonable to conjecture that this experience affects the stress,


in all of her novels, on incidents involving choice. All of her characters are tested by


situations in which they must choose, and the choices, as in The Mill on the Floss


(1860), are often agonizingly painful. Although she had occasionally tried her hand at fiction earlier in life, it was only


.


1336 / GEORGE ELIOT


after her relationship with Lewes became established that she turned her full atten


tion to this form. Scenes from Clerical Life appeared in magazine installments in 1857


under the pen name that misled most of her readers (Dickens excepted) into believing


the author to be a man�a "university man," it was commonly said, to Eliot's amuse


ment and satisfaction. This work was followed by seven full-length novels in the 1860s


and 1870s, most of which repeated the success of Adam Bede with the Victorian


reading public and which, after a period of being out of favor in the early twentieth


century, are now once more deeply admired by readers and critics. Virginia Woolf


praised Middlemarch (1871�72) as "one of the few English novels written for grown-


up people," and later readers have found a similar maturity combined with a powerful


creative energy in other novels by Eliot such as The Mill on the Floss and Daniel


Deronda (1876).


When Eliot began writing fiction, she and Lewes were reading to each other the novels of Jane Austen. Eliot's fiction owes much to Austen's with its concern with provincial society, its satire of human motives, its focus on courtship. But Eliot brings to these subjects a philosophical and psychological depth very different in character from that of the novel of manners. Eliot's fiction typically combines expansive philosophic meditation with an acute dissection of her characters' motives and feelings. In a famous passage from Middlemarch, Eliot compares herself with the great


eighteenth-century novelist Henry Fielding: A great historian, as he insisted on calling himself, who had the happiness to


be dead a hundred and twenty years ago, and so to take his place among the


colossi whose huge legs our living pettiness is observed to walk under, glories in


his copious remarks and digressions as the least imitable part of his work. . . .


But Fielding lived when the days were longer. . . . We belated historians must


not linger after his example; I at least have so much to do in unravelling certain


human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light


I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed


over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe. Despite her ironic disclaimer Eliot too prides herself on her remarks and digressions�


as this passage, itself a digression, suggests. As a "belated historian," however, she


focuses on the intersection of a few human lives at a particular time and place in her


country's history. She frequently likened herself not only to a historian but to a sci


entist who, with a microscope, observes and analyzes the tangled web of character


and circumstance that determines human history. As both comparisons imply, Eliot


strives to present her fiction as a mirror that reflects without distortion our experience


of life. But her insistence on art's transparency is often troubled both by her con


sciousness of its fictions and by her sense of the way in which the egoism we all share


distorts our perceptions. Hence she portrays this egoism with a combination of acuity


and compassion. It is this distinctive compounding of realism and sympathy that


makes her, according to the French critic Ferdinand Brunetiere, a better realist than


her famous French contemporary Gustave Flaubert, author of Madame Bovary


(1857). Often compared with Leo Tolstoy, she is, perhaps, the greatest English realist. Eliot's definition of herself as a historian leads us to expect her novels to offer


considerable insight into contemporary issues. The Woman Question, as her essay


"Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft" suggests, held particular interest for her.


She typically chooses for her heroine a young woman, like Maggie Tulliver of The


Mill on the Floss or Dorothea Brooke of Middlemarch, with a powerful imagination


and a yearning to be more than her society allows her to be. The prelude to Middle-


march speaks of the modern-day Saint Teresa, with the ardor and vision to found a


religious order, caught at a historical moment that gives no outlet for her ambition.


In her portrayal of the frustrations and yearnings of such a heroine, Eliot seems


sympathetic to a feminist point of view. Yet her stress on the values of loyalty to one's


past; of adherence to duty, despite personal desire; and of what William Wordsworth


.


MARGARET FULLER AND MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT / 133 7


calls "little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love" suggests that her


attitude toward the Woman Question is complex.


George Eliot wrote, "My function is that of the aesthetic not the doctrinal teacher."


The largeness of vision through which Eliot enters into the consciousness of all her


characters makes the perspective of her novels on many issues a complex one, for it


is finally issues as they are refracted through the lens of human character that interest


her.


Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft1


The dearth of new books just now gives us time to recur to less recent ones which we have hitherto noticed but slightly; and among these we choose the late edition of Margaret Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century, because we think it has been unduly thrust into the background by less comprehensive and candid productions on the same subject. Notwithstanding certain defects of taste and a sort of vague spiritualism and grandiloquence which belong to all but the very best American writers, the book is a valuable one; it has the enthusiasm of a noble and sympathetic nature, with the moderation and breadth and large allowance of a vigorous and cultivated understanding. There is no exaggeration of woman's moral excellence or intellectual capabilities; no injudicious insistence on her fitness for this or that function hitherto engrossed by men; but a calm plea for the removal of unjust laws and artificial restrictions, so that the possibilities of her nature may have room for full development, a wisely stated demand to disencumber her of the


Parasitic forms


That seem to keep her up, but drag her down�


And leave her field to burgeon and to bloom


From all within her, make herself her own


To give or keep, to live and learn and be


All that not harms distinctive womanhood.2 It is interesting to compare this essay of Margaret Fuller's published in its


earliest form in 1843,3 with a work on the position of woman, written between


sixty and seventy years ago�we mean Mary Wollstonecraft's Rights of Woman.


The latter work was not continued beyond the first volume; but so far as this


carries the subject, the comparison, at least in relation to strong sense and


I. Published in The Leader in 1855, this essay is admitted to a common fund of ideas, to common a retrospective book review of two important fem-objects of interest with men; and this must ever inist publications�A Vindication of the Rights of be the essential condition at once of true wom- Woman (1792), by Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-anly culture and of true social well-being. . . . 1797), and Woman in the Nineteenth Century Let the whole field of reality be laid open to (1855; published originally as lite Great Lawsuit, woman as well as to man, and then that which 1843) by Margaret Fuller (1 810-1850), an Amer-is peculiar in the mental modification, instead of ican essayist and editor whom Eliot warmly being, as it is now, a source of discord and repuladmired. sion between the sexes, will be found to be a As Barbara Hardy notes, despite "her generous necessarv complement to the truth and beautv sympathy with Victorian feminism," George Eliot of life. "played no active part in the movement." Eliot


2. Tennyson's The Princess 7.253�58. As noted by seems to have shared the view of women's relation


Thomas Pinney, the quotation, slightly inaccurate,


to men expressed by the Prince in Alfred, Lord


is from the unrevised 1847 text of the poem. See


Tennyson's 77ie Princess (1847), whose speeches


the passage containing these lines ["The woman's


she cites in this essay. As she herself wrote in i 854


cause is man's"], p. 1136.


in another essay, "Women in France":


3. I.e., the original version published in The Dial; Women became superior in France by being it was revised and expanded in 1855.


.


1 338 / GEORGE ELIOT


loftiness of moral tone, is not at all disadvantageous to the woman of the last


century. There is in some quarters a vague prejudice against the Rights of


Woman as in some way or other a reprehensible book, but readers who go to


it with this impression will be surprised to find it eminently serious, severely


moral, and withal rather heavy�the true reason, perhaps, that no edition has


been published since 1796, and that it is now rather scarce. There are several


points of resemblance, as well as of striking difference, between the two books.


A strong understanding is present in both; but Margaret Fuller's mind was like


some regions of her own American continent, where you are constantly step


ping from the sunny "clearings" into the mysterious twilight of the tangled


forest�she often passes in one breath from forcible reasoning to dreamy


vagueness; moreover, her unusually varied culture gives her great command


of illustration. Mary Wollstonecraft, on the other hand, is nothing if not


rational; she has no erudition, and her grave pages are lit up by no ray of fancy.


In both writers we discern, under the brave bearing of a strong and truthful


nature, the beating of a loving woman's heart, which teaches them not to


undervalue the smallest offices of domestic care or kindliness. But Margaret


Fuller, with all her passionate sensibility, is more of the literary woman, who


would not have been satisfied without intellectual production; Mary Woll


stonecraft, we imagine, wrote not at all for writing's sake, but from the pressure


of other motives. So far as the difference of date allows, there is a striking


coincidence in their trains of thought; indeed, every important idea in the


Rights of Woman, except the combination of home education with a common


day-school for boys and girls, reappears in Margaret Fuller's essay. One point on which they both write forcibly is the fact that, while men have


a horror of such faculty or culture in the other sex as tends to place it on a


level with their own, they are really in a state of subjection to ignorant and


feeble-minded women. Margaret Fuller says: Wherever man is sufficiently raised above extreme poverty or brutal


stupidity, to care for the comforts of the fireside, or the bloom and orna


ment of life, woman has always power enough, if she chooses to exert it,


and is usually disposed to do so, in proportion to her ignorance and child


ish vanity. Unacquainted with the importance of life and its purposes,


trained to a selfish coquetry and love of petty power, she does not look


beyond the pleasure of making herself felt at the moment, and govern


ments are shaken and commerce broken up to gratify the pique of a female


favorite. The English shopkeeper's wife does not vote, but it is for her


interest that the politician canvasses by the coarsest flattery. Again: All wives, bad or good, loved or unloved, inevitably influence their hus


bands from the power their position not merely gives, but necessitates of


coloring evidence and infusing feelings in hours when the�patient, shall


I call him?�is off his guard. Hear now what Mary Wollstonecraft says on the same subject: Women have been allowed to remain in ignorance and slavish depen


dence many, very many years, and still we hear of nothing but their fond


ness of pleasure and sway, their preference of rakes and soldiers, their


childish attachment to toys, and the vanity that makes them value accom


.


MARGARET FULLER AND MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT / 133 9


plishments more than virtues. History brings forward a fearful catalogue


of the crimes which their cunning has produced, when the weak slaves


have had sufficient address to overreach their masters. . . . When,


therefore, I call women slaves, I mean in a political and civil sense; for


indirectly they obtain too much power, and are debased by their exertions


to obtain illicit sway. . . . The libertinism, and even the virtues of superior


men, will always give women of some description great power over them;


and these weak women, under the influence of childish passions and self


ish vanity, will throw a false light over the objects which the very men view


with their eyes who ought to enlighten their judgment. Men of fancy, and


those sanguine characters who mostly hold the helm of human affairs in


general, relax in the society of women; and surely I need not cite to the


most superficial reader of history the numerous examples of vice and


oppression which the private intrigues of female favorites have produced;


not to dwell on the mischief that naturally arises from the blundering


interposition of well-meaning folly. For in the transactions of business it is


much better to have to deal with a knave than a fool, because a knave


adheres to some plan, and any plan of reason may be seen through sooner


than a sudden flight of folly. The power which vile and foolish women have


had over wise men who possessed sensibility is notorious. There is a notion commonly entertained among men that an instructed


woman, capable of having opinions, is likely to prove an unpracticable yoke-


fellow, always pulling one way when her husband wants to go the other, orac


ular in tone, and prone to give curtain lectures4 on metaphysics. But surely,


so far as obstinacy is concerned, your unreasoning animal is the most unman


ageable of creatures, where you are not allowed to settle the question by a


cudgel, a whip and bridle, or even a string to the leg. For our own parts, we


see no consistent or commodious medium between the old plan of corporal


discipline and that thorough education of women which will make them


rational beings in the highest sense of the word. Wherever weakness is not


harshly controlled it must govern, as you may see when a strong man holds a


little child by the hand, how he is pulled hither and thither, and wearied in


his walk by his submission to the whims and feeble movements of his com


panion. A really cultured woman, like a really cultured man, will be ready to


yield in trifles. So far as we see, there is no indissoluble connection between


infirmity of logic and infirmity of will, and a woman quite innocent of an


opinion in philosophy, is as likely as not to have an indomitable opinion about


the kitchen. As to airs of superiority, no woman ever had them in consequence


of true culture, but only because her culture was shallow or unreal, only as a


result of what Mrs. Malaprop well calls "the ineffectual qualities in a


woman"'�mere acquisitions carried about, and not knowledge thoroughly


assimilated so as to enter into the growth of the character. To return to Margaret Fuller, some of the best things she says are on the


folly of absolute definitions of woman's nature and absolute demarcations of


woman's mission. "Nature," she says, "seems to delight in varying the arrange


ments, as if to show that she will be fettered by no rule; and we must admit


4. See Douglas Jerrold's comic sketches of a wife 3.2. In response to compliments about her "intelwho delivers nightly lectures to her husband from lectual accomplishments," Mrs. Malaprop�famed behind their bed curtains, Mrs. Caitdle's Curtain for her mistaken use of words�exclaims: "Ah! few Lectures (1846). gentlemen, nowadays, know how to value the inef5. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The Rivals (1775), fectual qualities in a woman!"


.


1340 / GEORGE ELIOT


the same varieties that she admits." Again: "If nature is never bound down,


nor the voice of inspiration stifled, that is enough. We are pleased that women


should write and speak, if they feel need of it, from having something to tell;


but silence for ages would be no misfortune, if that silence be from divine


command, and not from man's tradition." And here is a passage, the beginning


of which has been often quoted: If you ask me what offices they [women] may fill, I reply�any. I do not


care what case you put; let them be sea-captains if you will. I do not doubt


there are women well fitted for such an office, and, if so, I should be as


glad as to welcome the Maid of Saragossa, or the Maid of Missolonghi,


or the Suliote heroine, or Emily Plater.6 I think women need, especially


at this juncture, a much greater range of occupation than they have, to


rouse their latent powers. .. . In families that I know, some little girls like


to saw wood, others to use carpenter's tools. Where these tastes are


indulged, cheerfulness and good-humor are promoted. Where they are


forbidden, because "such things are not proper for girls," they grow sullen


and mischievous. Fourier had observed these wants of women, as no one


can fail to do who watches the desires of little girls, or knows the ennui


that haunts grown women, except where they make to themselves a serene


little world by art of some kind. He, therefore, in proposing a great variety


of employments, in manufactures or the care of plants and animals, allows


for one-third of women as likely to have a taste for masculine pursuits,


one-third of men for feminine.7 .. . I have no doubt, however, that a large


proportion of women would give themselves to the same employments as


now, because there are circumstances that must lead them. Mothers will


delight to make the nest soft and warm. Nature would take care of that;


no need to clip the wings of any bird that wants to soar and sing, or finds


in itself the strength of pinion for a migratory flight unusual to its kind.


The difference would be that all need not be constrained to employments


for which some are unfit. Apropos of the same subject, we find Mary Wollstonecraft offering a sug


gestion which the women of the United States have already begun to carry


out. She says: Women, in particular, all want to be ladies, which is simply to have


nothing to do, but listlessly to go they scarcely care where, for they cannot


tell what. But what have women to do in society? I may be asked, but to


loiter with easy grace; surely you would not condemn them all to suckle


fools and chronicle small beer.8 No. Women might certainly study the art


of healing, and be-physicians as well as nurses. . . . Business of various kinds


they might likewise pursue, if they were educated in a more orderly man


ner. . . . Women would not then marry for a support, as men accept of


places under government, and neglect the implied duties.


6. A Polish patriot who became a captain in com-heroine": probably Moscha, who led a band of mand of a company in the insurgent army fighting three hundred women to rout the Turks during the the Russians in 1831. "Maid of Saragossa": Maria siege of Souli, in Albania, in 1803. Agustin, who fought against the French at the 7. Charles Fourier (1772�1837), in his Utopian siege of Saragossa, in Spain, in 1808 (see Byron, treatise The New Industrial World (1829-30), Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, 1812, 1.54-56). "Maid develops these theories in his discussion of "the of Missolonghi": an unidentified Greek, who must Little Hordes." have made some heroic exploit during the Turkish 8. Iago on the role of women; Shakespeare's Othsieges of that town in 1822 or 1826. "The Suliote ello!.1.162.


.


MARGARET FULLER AND MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT / 1341


Men pay a heavy price for their reluctance to encourage self-help and inde


pendent resources in women. The precious meridian years of many a man of


genius have to be spent in the toil of routine, that an "establishment" may be


kept up for a woman who can understand none of his secret yearnings,9 who


is fit for nothing but to sit in her drawing-room like a doll-Madonna in her


shrine. No matter. Anything is more endurable than to change our established


formulae about women, or to run the risk of looking up to our wives instead


of looking down on them. Sit divus, dummodo non sit vivus (let him be a god,


provided he be not living), said the Roman magnates of Romulus;1 and so men


say of women, let them be idols, useless absorbents of previous things, pro


vided we are not obliged to admit them to be strictly fellow-beings, to be


treated, one and all, with justice and sober reverence. On one side we hear that woman's position can never be improved until


women themselves are better; and, on the other, that women can never


become better until their position is improved�until the laws are made more


just, and a wider field opened to feminine activity. But we constantly hear the


same difficulty stated about the human race in general. There is a perpetual


action and reaction between individuals and institutions; we must try and


mend both by little and little�the only way in which human things can be


mended. Unfortunately, many over-zealous champions of women assert their


actual equality with men�nay, even their moral superiority to men�as a


ground for their release from oppressive laws and restrictions. They lose


strength immensely by this false position. If it were true, then there would be


a case in which slavery and ignorance nourished virtue, and so far we should


have an argument for the continuance of bondage. Rut we want freedom and


culture for woman, because subjection and ignorance have debased her, and


with her, Man; for� If she be small, slight-natured, miserable,


How shall men grow?2 Both Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft have too much sagacity to


fall into this sentimental exaggeration. Their ardent hopes of what women may


become do not prevent them from seeing and painting women as they are. On


the relative moral excellence of men and women Mary Wollstonecraft speaks


with the most decision: Women are supposed to possess more sensibility, and even humanity,


than men, and their strong attachments and instantaneous emotions of


compassion are given as proofs; but the clinging affection of ignorance


has seldom anything noble in it, and may mostly be resolved into selfish


ness, as well as the affection of children and brutes. I have known many


weak women whose sensibility was entirely engrossed by their husbands;


and as for their humanity, it was very faint indeed, or rather it was only a


transient emotion of compassion. Humanity does not consist "in a squea


mish ear," says an eminent orator.3 "It belongs to the mind as well as to


the nerves." But this kind of exclusive affection, though it degrades the


individual, should not be brought forward as a proof of the inferiority of


9. Cf. Eliot's fictional representation of such a sit-made on a proposal to have a man deified. Romuation in her account of Dr. Lvdgate's married life ulus: legendary founder of Rome; after his death in Middlemarch (1871-72). he was worshipped by the Romans as a god. 1. Cf. Historia Augusta (ca. 4th century C.E.), Life 2. Tennvson's The Princess 7.249�SO. of Geta 2, in which the same cynical comment is 3. Perhaps Edmund Burke (1729-1797).


.


1342 / GEORGE ELIOT


the sex, because it is the natural consequence of confined views; for even


women of superior sense, having their attention turned to little employ


ments and private plans, rarely rise to heroism, unless when spurred on


by love! and love, as an heroic passion, like genius, appears but once in


an age. I therefore agree with the moralist who asserts "that women have


seldom so much generosity as men"; and that their narrow affections, to


which justice and humanity are often sacrificed, render the sex apparently


inferior, especially as they are commonly inspired by men; but I contend


that the heart would expand as the understanding gained strength, if


women were not depressed4 from their cradles. We had marked several other passages of Margaret Fuller's for extract, but


as we do not aim at an exhaustive treatment of our subject, and are only


touching a few of its points, we have, perhaps, already claimed as much of the


reader's attention as he will be willing to give to such desultory material.


1855


From Silly Novels by Lady Novelists1


Silly Novels by Lady Novelists are a genus with many species, determined


by the particular quality of silliness that predominates in them�the frothy,


the prosy, the pious, or the pedantic. But it is a mixture of all these�a com


posite order of feminine fatuity, that produces the largest class of such novels,


which we shall distinguish as the mind-and-millinery species. The heroine is


usually an heiress, probably a peeress in her own right, with perhaps a vicious


baronet, an amiable duke, and an irresistible younger son of a marquis as lovers


in the foreground, a clergyman and a poet sighing for her in the middle dis


tance, and a crowd of undefined adorers dimly indicated beyond. Her eyes and


her wit are both dazzfing; her nose and her morals are alike free from any


tendency to irregularity; she has a superb contralto and a superb intellect; she


is perfectly well-dressed and perfectly religious; she dances like a sylph, and


reads the Bible in the original tongues. Or it may be that the heroine is not


an heiress�that rank and wealth are the only things in which she is deficient;


but she infallibly gets into high society, she has the triumph of refusing many


matches and securing the best, and she wears some family jewels or other as


a sort of crown of righteousness at the end. Rakish men either bite their lips


in impotent confusion at her repartees, or are touched to penitence by her


reproofs, which, on appropriate occasions, rise to a lofty strain of rhetoric;


indeed, there is a general propensity in her to make speeches, and to rhap


sodize at some length when she retires to her bedroom. In her recorded con


versations she is amazingly eloquent, and in her unrecorded conversations,


amazingly witty. She is understood to have a depth of insight that looks


through and through the shallow theories of philosophers, and her superior


instincts are a sort of dial by which men have only to set their clocks and


watches, and all will go well. The men play a very subordinate part by her side.


4. Repressed, kept down. Eliot's ideas about fiction at the time she was 1. Published anonymously in the Westminster beginning her first story, "The Sad Fortunes of the Rei'ieiv, this review essay, satirizing a number of Rev. Amos Barton." contemporary novels, provides a good indication of


.


SILLY NOVELS BY LADY NOVELISTS / 134 3


You are consoled now and then by a hint that they have affairs, which keeps


you in mind that the working-day business of the world is somehow being


carried on, but ostensibly the final cause of their existence is that they may


accompany the heroine on her "starring" expedition through life. They see her


at a ball, and are dazzled; at a flower-show, and they are fascinated; on a riding


excursion, and they are witched2 by her noble horsemanship; at church, and


they are awed by the sweet solemnity of her demeanour. She is the ideal


woman in feelings, faculties, and flounces. For all this, she as often as not


marries the wrong person to begin with, and she suffers terribly from the plots


and intrigues of the vicious baronet; but even death has a soft place in his


heart for such a paragon, and remedies all mistakes for her just at the right


moment. The vicious baronet is sure to be killed in a duel, and the tedious


husband dies in his bed requesting his wife, as a particular favour to him, to


marry the man she loves best, and having already dispatched a note to the


lover informing him of the comfortable arrangement. Before matters arrive at


this desirable issue our feelings are tried by seeing the noble, lovely, and gifted


heroine pass through many mauvais3 moments, but we have the satisfaction


of knowing that her sorrows are wept into embroidered pocket-handkerchiefs,


that her fainting form reclines on the very best upholstery, and that whatever


vicissitudes she may undergo, from being dashed out of her carriage to having


her head shaved in a fever, she comes out of them all with a complexion more


blooming and locks more redundant4 than ever. We may remark, by the way, that we have been relieved from a serious


scruple by discovering that silly novels by lady novelists rarely introduce us


into any other than very lofty and fashionable society. We had imagined that


destitute women turned novelists, as they turned governesses, because they


had no other "lady-like" means of getting their bread. On this supposition,


vacillating syntax and improbable incident had a certain pathos for us, like the


extremely supererogatory pincushions and ill-devised nightcaps that are


offered for sale by a blind man. We felt the commodity to be a nuisance, but


we were glad to think that the money went to relieve the necessitous, and we


pictured to ourselves lonely women struggling for a maintenance, or wives and


daughters devoting themselves to the production of "copy" out of pure hero


ism,�perhaps to pay their husband's debts, or to purchase luxuries for a sick


father. Under these impressions we shrank from criticising a lady's novel: her


English might be faulty, but, we said to ourselves, her motives are irreproach


able; her imagination may be uninventive, but her patience is untiring. Empty


writing was excused by an empty stomach, and twaddle was consecrated by


tears. But no! This theory of ours, like many other pretty theories, has had to


give way before observation. Women's silly novels, we are now convinced, are


written under totally different circumstances. The fair writers have evidently


never talked to a tradesman except from a carriage window; they have no


notion of the working-classes except as "dependents;" they think five hundred


a-year a miserable pittance; Belgravia5 and "baronial halls" are their primary


truths; and they have no idea of feeling interest in any man who is not at least


a great landed proprietor, if not a prime minister. It is clear that they write in


elegant boudoirs, with violet-colored ink and a ruby pen; that they must be


2. Bewitched. year": at this date an annual income of .500 would 3. Bad (French). support a modest middle-class household with one 4. Abundant. or two servants. 5. A wealthy district of London. "Five hundred a


.


1344 / GEORGE ELIOT


entirely indifferent to publishers' accounts, and inexperienced in every form


of poverty except poverty of brains. It is true that we are constantly struck with


the want of verisimilitude in their representations of the high society in which


they seem to live; but then they betray no closer acquaintance with any other


form of life. If their peers and peeresses are improbable, their literary men,


tradespeople, and cottagers are impossible; and their intellect seems to have


the peculiar impartiality of reproducing both what they have seen and heard,


and what they have not seen and heard, with equal unfaithfulness.


$ $ #


Writers of the mind-and-millinery school are remarkably unanimous in their


choice of diction. In their novels, there is usually a lady or gentleman who is


more or less of a upas tree:6 the lover has a manly breast; minds are redolent


of various things; hearts are hollow; events are utilized; friends are consigned


to the tomb; infancy is an engaging period; the sun is a luminary that goes to


his western couch, or gathers the rain-drops into his refulgent bosom; life is


a melancholy boon; Albion and Scotia7 are conversational epithets. There is a


striking resemblance, too, in the character of their moral comments, such, for


instance, as that "It is a fact, no less true than melancholy, that all people,


more or less, richer or poorer, are swayed by bad example;" that "Books, how


ever trivial, contain some subjects from which useful information may be


drawn;" that "Vice can too often borrow the language of virtue;" that "Merit


and nobility of nature must exist, to be accepted, for clamour and pretension


cannot impose upon those too well read in human nature to be easily deceived;


" and that, "In order to forgive, we must have been injured." There is, doubt


less, a class of readers to whom these remarks appear peculiarly pointed and


pungent; for we often find them doubly and trebly scored with the pencil, and


delicate hands giving in their determined adhesion to these hardy novelties by


a distinct tres vrai,8 emphasized by many notes of exclamation. The colloquial


style of these novels is often marked by much ingenious inversion, and a care


ful avoidance of such cheap phraseology as can be heard every day. Angry


young gentlemen exclaim�" 'Tis ever thus, methinks;" and in the half-hour


before dinner a young lady informs her next neighbour that the first day she


read Shakspeare she "stole away into the park, and beneath the shadow of the


greenwood tree, devoured with rapture the inspired page of the great magi


cian." But the most remarkable efforts of the mind-and-millinery writers lie in


their philosophic reflections. The authoress of "Laura Gay,"9 for example,


having married her hero and heroine, improves the event by observing that "if


those sceptics, whose eyes have so long gazed on matter that they can no longer


see aught else in man, could once enter with heart and soul into such bliss as


this, they would come to say that the soul of man and the polypus' are not of


common origin, or of the same texture." Lady novelists, it appears, can see


something else besides matter; they are not limited to phenomena, but can


relieve their eyesight by occasional glimpses of the noumenon,2 and are,


therefore, naturally better able than any one else to confound sceptics, even


of that remarkable, but to us unknown school, which maintains that the soul


of man is of the same texture as the polypus.


6. A Javanese tree from which an arrow poison is 9. The 1856 novel Eliot has just satirized in the derived; here a figurative cliche meaning "a poi-preceding section. sonous influence." 1. Polyp. 7. Poetic cliches for England and Scotland, 2. An object of purely rational, as opposed to senrespectively. sual, perception (the latter being a phenomenon). 8. Very true (French).


.


SILLY NOVELS BY LADY NOVELISTS / 134 5


The most pitiable of all silly novels by lady novelists are what we may call


the oracular species�novels intended to expound the writer's religious, phil


osophical, or moral theories. There seems to be a notion abroad among


women, rather akin to the superstition that the speech and actions of idiots


are inspired, and that the human being most entirely exhausted of common


sense is the fittest vehicle of revelation. To judge from their writings, there are


certain ladies who think that an amazing ignorance, both of science and of


life, is the best possible qualification for forming an opinion on the knottiest


moral and speculative questions. Apparently, their recipe for solving all such


difficulties is something like this:�Take a woman's head, stuff it with a smat


tering of philosophy and literature chopped small, and with false notions of


society baked hard, let it hang over a desk a few hours every day, and serve up


hot in feeble English, when not required. You will rarely meet with a lady


novelist of the oracular class who is diffident of her ability to decide on the


ological questions,�who has any suspicion that she is not capable of discrim


inating with the nicest accuracy between the good and evil in all church


parties,�who does not see precisely how it is that men have gone wrong


hitherto,�and pity philosophers in general that they have not had the


opportunity of consulting her. Great writers, who have modestly contented


themselves with putting their experience into fiction, and have thought it quite


a sufficient task to exhibit men and things as they are, she sighs over as deplor


ably deficient in the application of their powers. "They have solved no great


questions"�and she is ready to remedy their omission by setting before you


a complete theory of life and manual of divinity, in a love story, where ladies


and gentlemen of good family go through genteel vicissitudes, to the utter


confusion of Deists, Puseyites,3 and ultra-Protestants, and to the perfect estab


lishment of that particular view of Christianity which either condenses itself


into a sentence of small caps, or explodes into a cluster of stars on the three


hundred and thirtieth page. It is true, the ladies and gentlemen will probably


seem to you remarkably little like any you have had the fortune or misfortune


to meet with, for, as a general rule, the ability of a lady novelist to describe


actual life and her fellow-men, is in inverse proportion to her confident elo


quence about God and the other world, and the means by which she usually


chooses to conduct you to true ideas of the invisible is a totally false picture


of the visible.


The epithet "silly" may seem impertinent, applied to a novel which indicates


so much reading and intellectual activity as "The Enigma;"4 but we use this


epithet advisedly. If, as the world has long agreed, a very great amount of


instruction will not make a wise man, still less will a very mediocre amount of


instruction make a wise woman. And the most mischievous form of feminine


silliness is the literary form, because it tends to confirm the popular prejudice


against the more solid education of women. When men see girls wasting their


time in consultations about bonnets and ball dresses, and in giggling or sen


timental love-confidences, or middle-aged women mismanaging their children,


and solacing themselves with acrid gossip, they can hardly help saying, "For


Heaven's sake, let girls be better educated; let them have some better objects


3. Protestants who believed in the importance of was completely beyond human experience. liturgical sacraments (following Edward Pusey, 4. The 1856 novel Eliot has just satirized in the 1800-1882). "Deists": Protestants who believed in preceding section. a personal God who created the universe but who


.


1346 / GEORGE ELIOT


of thought�some more solid occupations." But after a few hours' conversation


with an oracular literary woman, or a few hours' reading of her books, they


are likely enough to say, "After all, when a woman gets some knowledge,


see what use she makes of it! Her knowledge remains acquisition, instead of


passing into culture; instead of being subdued into modesty and simplicity by a


larger acquaintance with thought and fact, she has a feverish consciousness of


her attainments; she keeps a sort of mental pocket-mirror, and is continually


looking in it at her own 'intellectuality;' she spoils the taste of one's muffin by


questions of metaphysics; 'puts down' men at a dinner table with her superior


information; and seizes the opportunity of a soiree to catechise us on the vital


question of the relation between mind and matter. And then, look at her writ


ings! She mistakes vagueness for depth, bombast for eloquence, and affecta


tion for originality; she struts on one page, rolls her eyes on another, grimaces


in a third, and is hysterical in a fourth. She may have read many writings of


great men, and a few writings of great women; but she is as unable to discern


the difference between her own style and theirs as a Yorkshireman is to discern


the difference between his own English and a Londoner's: rhodomontade'


is the native accent of her intellect. No�the average nature of women is too


shallow and feeble a soil to bear much tillage; it is only fit for the very lightest


crops." It is true that the men who come to such a decision on such very superficial


and imperfect observation may not be among the wisest in the world; but we


have not now to contest their opinion�we are only pointing out how it is


unconsciously encouraged by many women who have volunteered themselves


as representatives of the feminine intellect. We do not believe that a man was


ever strengthened in such an opinion by associating with a woman of true


culture, whose mind had absorbed her knowledge instead of being absorbed


by it. A really cultured woman, like a really cultured man, is all the simpler


and the less obtrusive for her knowledge; it has made her see herself and her


opinions in something like just proportions; she does not make it a pedestal


from which she flatters herself that she commands a complete view of men


and things, but makes it a point of observation from which to form a right


estimate of herself. She neither spouts poetry nor quotes Cicero6 on slight


provocation; not because she thinks that a sacrifice must be made to the prej


udices of men, but because that mode of exhibiting her memory and Latinity


does not present itself to her as edifying or graceful. She does not write books


to confound philosophers, perhaps because she is able to write books that


delight them. In conversation she is the least formidable of women, because


she understands you, without wanting to make you aware that you can't under


stand her. She does not give you information, which is the raw material of


culture,�she gives you sympathy, which is its subtlest essence. A more numerous class of silly novels than the oracular, (which are generally


inspired by some form of High Church, or transcendental Christianity,) is


what we may call the white neck-cloth species, which represent the tone of


thought and feeling in the Evangelical party. This species is a kind of genteel


tract on a large scale, intended as a sort of medicinal sweetmeat for Low


Church young ladies; an Evangelical substitute for the fashionable novel, as


5. Inflated diction. It is assumed a Yorkshireman of a Londoner. cannot discern the difference between his north-6. Roman statesman and orator (106�43 B.C.E.), ern dialect and the putatively more refined speech and a staple of Latin instruction for centuries.


.


SILLY NOVELS BY LADY NOVELISTS / 134 7


the May Meetings7 are a substitute for the Opera. Even Quaker children, one


would think, can hardly have been denied the indulgence of a doll; but it must


be a doll dressed in a drab gown and a coal-scuttle bonnet�not a worldly doll,


in gauze and spangles. And there are no young ladies, we imagine,�unless


they belong to the Church of the United Brethren, in which people are married


without any love-making8�who can dispense with love stories. Thus, for


Evangelical young ladies there are Evangelical love stories, in which the vicis


situdes of the tender passion are sanctified by saving views of Regeneration


and the Atonement. These novels differ from the oracular ones, as a Low


Churchwoman often differs from a High Churchwoman: they are a little less


supercilious, and a great deal more ignorant, a little less correct in their syntax, and a great deal more vulgar.9 The Orlando1 of Evangelical literature is the young curate, looked at from


the point of view of the middle class, where cambric bands are understood to


have as thrilling an effect on the hearts of young ladies as epaulettes2 have in


the classes above and below it. In the ordinary type of these novels, the hero


is almost sure to be a young curate, frowned upon, perhaps, by worldly mam


mas, but carrying captive the hearts of their daughters, who can "never forget


that sermon;" tender glances are seized from the pulpit stairs instead of the


opera-box; tete-a-tetes are seasoned with quotations from Scripture, instead of


quotations from the poets; and questions as to the state of the heroine's affec


tions are mingled with anxieties as to the state of her soul. The young curate


always has a background of well-dressed and wealthy, if not fashionable soci


ety;�for Evangelical silliness is as snobbish as any other kind of silliness; and


the Evangelical lady novelist, while she explains to you the type of the scape


goat on one page, is ambitious on another to represent the manners and con


versation of aristocratic people. Her pictures of fashionable society are often


curious studies considered as efforts of the Evangelical imagination; but in


one particular the novels of the White Neck-cloth School are meritoriously


realistic,�their favourite hero, the Evangelical young curate is always rather


an insipid personage. $ S 3 But, perhaps, the least readable of silly women's novels, are the modern-


antique species, which unfold to us the domestic life of Jannes and Jambres,


the private love affairs of Sennacherib, or the mental struggles and ultimate


conversion of Demetrius the silversmith.3 From most silly novels we can at


least extract a laugh; but those of the modern antique school have a ponderous,


a leaden kind of fatuity, under which we groan. What can be more demon


strative of the inability of literary women to measure their own powers, than


their frequent assumption of a task which can only be justified by the rarest


concurrence of acquirement with genius? The finest effort to reanimate the


past is of course only approximative�is always more or less an infusion of the


modern spirit into the ancient form,�


7. The Church of England's Missionary Society's 3. In Acts 19.24�27 the maker of statues of the annual spring meetings. On the High and Low Roman goddess Diana who denounces Paul for Church, see "The Victorian Age" (p. 979). taking business away from him and his fellow 8. Courtship. craftsmen by converting people to Christianity. 9. Common. Jannes and Jambres were Egyptian magicians who 1. The romantic hero (in allusion to the hero of opposed Moses at Pharaoh's court (2 Timothy 3.8). Shakespeare's As You Like It). Sennacherib was an Assyrian king who ruled from 2. Attire characteristic of military men, as cambric 705 to 681 B.C.E. bands (white neck-clothes) are of the clergy.


.


1348 / GEORGE ELIOT


Was ihr den Geist der Zeiten heisst,


Das ist im Grund der Herren eigner Geist,


In dem die Zeiten sich bespiegeln.4 Admitting that genius which has familiarized itself with all the relics of an


ancient period can sometimes, by the force of its sympathetic divination,


restore the missing notes in the "music of humanity," and reconstruct the


fragments into a whole which will really bring the remote past nearer to us,


and interpret it to our duller apprehension,�this form of imaginative power


must always be among the very rarest, because it demands as much accurate


and minute knowledge as creative vigour. Yet we find ladies constantly choos


ing to make their mental mediocrity more conspicuous, by clothing it in a


masquerade of ancient names; by putting their feeble sentimentality into the


mouths of Roman vestals or Egyptian princesses, and attributing their rhetor


ical arguments to Jewish high-priests and Greek philosophers. * * *


"Be not a baker if your head be made of butter," says a homely proverb,


which, being interpreted, may mean, let no woman rush into print who is not


prepared for the consequences. We are aware that our remarks are in a very


different tone from that of the reviewers who, with a perennial recurrence of


precisely similar emotions, only paralleled, we imagine, in the experience of


monthly nurses,5 tell one lady novelist after another that they "hail" her pro


ductions "with delight." We are aware that the ladies at whom our criticism


is pointed are accustomed to be told, in the choicest phraseology of puffery,


that their pictures of life are brilliant, their characters well drawn, their style


fascinating, and their sentiments lofty. But if they are inclined to resent our


plainness of speech, we ask them to reflect for a moment on the chary praise,


and often captious blame, which their panegyrists give to writers whose works


are on the way to become classics. No sooner does a woman show that she


has genius or effective talent, than she receives the tribute of being moderately


praised and severely criticised. By a peculiar thermometric adjustment, when


a woman's talent is at zero, journalistic approbation is at the boiling pitch;


when she attains mediocrity, it is already at no more than summer heat; and


if ever she reaches excellence, critical enthusiasm drops to the freezing point.


Harriet Martineau, Currer Bell, and Mrs. Gaskell6 have been treated as cav


alierly as if they had been men. And every critic who forms a high estimate of


the share women may ultimately take in literature, will, on principle, abstain


from any exceptional indulgence towards the productions of literary women.


For it must be plain to every one who looks impartially and extensively into


feminine literature, that its greatest deficiencies are due hardly more to the


want of intellectual power than to the want of those moral qualities that con


tribute to literary excellence�patient diligence, a sense of the responsibility


involved in publication, and an appreciation of the sacredness of the writer's


art. In the majority of women's books you see that kind of facility which springs


from the absence of any high standard; that fertility in imbecile combination


or feeble imitation which a little self-criticism would check and reduce to


barrenness; just as with a total want of musical ear people will sing out of


4. What they eal! the spirit of the age / is at the women writers of the 19th century; Martineau base the gentlemen's own spirit, /in which the ages (1802�1876), a prolific author in a range of non- are reflected (German; Goethe's Faust I [1808], fiction genres; Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855), Naclit, lines 577-79). novelist (first published under the pseudonym 5. Women hired to look after mothers and babies Bell); and Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865), novel- in the first month after childbirth. ist. 6. Eliot names three of the foremost British


.


SILLY NOVELS BY LADY NOVELISTS / 1349


tune, while a degree more melodic sensibility would suffice to render them


silent. The foolish vanity of wishing to appear in print, instead of being coun


terbalanced by any consciousness of the intellectual or moral derogation


implied in futile authorship, seems to be encouraged by the extremely false


impression that to write at all is a proof of superiority in a woman. On this


ground, we believe that the average intellect of women is unfairly represented


by the mass of feminine literature, and that while the few women who write


well are very far above the ordinary intellectual level of their sex, the many


women who write ill are very far below it. So that, after all, the severer critics


are fulfilling a chivalrous duty in depriving the mere fact of feminine author


ship of any false prestige which may give it a delusive attraction, and in rec


ommending women of mediocre faculties�as at least a negative service they


can render their sex�to abstain from writing. The standing apology for women who become writers without any special


qualification is, that society shuts them out from other spheres of occupation.


Society is a very culpable entity, and has to answer for the manufacture of


many unwholesome commodities, from bad pickles to bad poetry. But society,


like "matter," and Her Majesty's Government, and other lofty abstractions, has


its share of excessive blame as well as excessive praise. Where there is one


woman who writes from necessity, we believe there are three women who write


from vanity; and, besides, there is something so antiseptic in the mere healthy


fact of working for one's bread, that the most trashy and rotten kind of femi


nine literature is not likely to have been produced under such circumstances.


"In all labour there is profit;"7 but ladies' silly novels, we imagine, are less the result of labour than of busy idleness. Happily, we are not dependent on argument to prove that Fiction is a department of literature in which women can, after their kind, fully equal men. A cluster of great names, both living and dead, rush to our memories in evidence that women can produce novels not only fine, but among the very finest;� novels, too, that have a precious speciality, lying quite apart from masculine aptitudes and experience. No educational restrictions can shut women out from the materials of fiction, and there is no species of art which is so free from rigid requirements. Like crystalline masses, it may take any form, and yet be beautiful; we have only to pour in the right elements�genuine observation, humour, and passion. But it is precisely this absence of rigid requirement which constitutes the fatal seduction of novel-writing to incompetent women. Ladies are not wont to be very grossly deceived as to their power of playing on the piano; here certain positive difficulties of execution have to be conquered, and incompetence inevitably breaks down. Every art which has its absolute technique is, to a certain extent, guarded from the intrusions of mere left-handed imbecility. But in novel-writing there are no barriers for incapacity to stumble against, no external criteria to prevent a writer from mistaking foolish facility for mastery. And so we have again and again the old story of La Fontaine's ass, who puts his nose to the flute, and, finding that he elicits some sound, exclaims, "Moi, aussi, je joue de la flute;"8�a fable which we commend, at parting, to the consideration of any feminine reader who is in danger of adding to the number of "silly novels by lady novelists."


1856 1856


7. Proverbs 14.23. 8. I also play the flute (French). Jean de La Fontaine (1621�1695), French author of beast fables.


.


1350


MATTHEW ARNOLD


1822-1888


How is a full and enjoyable life to be lived in a modern industrial society? This was


the recurrent topic in the poetry and prose of Matthew Arnold. In his poetry the


question itself is raised; in his prose some answers are attempted. "The misapprehen


siveness [wrongheadedness] of his age is exactly what a poet is sent to remedy," wrote


Robert Browning, and yet it is to Arnold's work, not Browning's, that the statement


seems more applicable. In response to rapid and potentially dislocating social


changes, Arnold strove to help his contemporaries achieve a richer intellectual and


emotional existence. Matthew Arnold was born in Laleham, a village in the valley of the Thames. It


seems appropriate that his childhood was spent near a river, for clear-flowing streams


were later to appear in his poems as symbols of serenity. At the age of six, Arnold was


moved to Rugby School, where his father, Dr. Thomas Arnold, had become head


master. As a clergyman Dr. Arnold was a leader of the liberal or Broad Church and


hence one of the principal opponents of John Henry Newman. As a headmaster he


became famous as an educational reformer, a teacher who instilled in his pupils an


earnest preoccupation with moral and social issues and also an awareness of the


connection between liberal studies and modern life. At Rugby his eldest son, Mat


thew, was directly exposed to the powerful force of the father's mind and character.


The son's attitude toward this force was a mixture of attraction and repulsion. That


he was permanently influenced by his father is evident in his poems and in his writings


on religion, education, and politics; but like many sons of clergymen, he made a


determined effort in his youth to be different. As a student at Oxford he behaved like


a dandy. Elegantly and colorfully dressed, alternately languid or merry in manner, he


refused to be serious and irritated more solemn undergraduate friends and acquain


tances with his irreverent jokes. "His manner displeases, from its seeming foppery,"


wrote Charlotte Bronte after talking with the young man in later years. "The shade


of Dr. Arnold," she added, "seemed to me to frown on his young representative." The


son of Dr. Arnold thus appeared to have no connection with Rugby School's standards


of earnestness. Even his studies did not seem to occupy him seriously. By a session


of cramming, he managed to earn second-class honors in his final examinations, a


near disaster that was redeemed by his election to a fellowship at Oriel College. Arnold's biographers usually dismiss his youthful frivolity of spirit as only a tem


porary pose or mask, but it permanently colored his prose style, brightening his most


serious criticism with geniality and wit. For most readers the jauntiness of his prose


is a virtue, though others find it offensive. Anyone suspicious of urbanity and irony


would applaud Walt Whitman's sour comment that Arnold is "one of the dudes [dan


dies, or city slickers] of literature." A more appropriate estimate of his manner is


provided by Arnold's own description of the French writer Charles-Augustin Sainte-


Beuve: "a critic of measure, not exuberant; of the centre, not provincial . . . with gay


and amiable temper, his manner as good as his matter�the 'critiquesouriant' [smiling


critic]." Unlike authors such as Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Thomas Carlyle who committed


themselves solely to their literary pursuits, Arnold confined his writing and reading


to his spare time. In 1847 he took the post of private secretary to Lord Lansdowne;


and in 1851, the year of his marriage, he became an inspector of schools, a demanding


and time-consuming position that he held for thirty-five years. Although his work as


an inspector may have reduced his output as a writer, it had several advantages. His


extensive traveling in England took him to the homes of the more ardently Protestant


middle classes, and when he criticized the dullness of middle-class life (as he often


did), his scorn was based on intimate knowledge. His position also led to travel on


the Continent to study the schools of Europe. As a critic of English education, he


.


MATTHEW ARNOLD / 135 1


was thus able to make helpful comparisons and to draw on a stock of fresh ideas in


the same way as in his literary criticism he used his familiarity with French, German,


Italian, and classical literatures to talk knowledgeably about the distinctive qualities


of English writers. Despite the monotony of much of his work as an inspector, Arnold


became convinced of its importance. It contributed to what he regarded as his cen


tury's most important need: the development of a satisfactory national system of


education. In 1849 Arnold published The Strayed Reveler, his first volume of poetry. Eight


years later, as a tribute to his poetic achievement, he was elected to the professorship


of poetry at Oxford, a part-time position that he held for ten years. Later, like Charles


Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray before him, Arnold toured America to


make money by lecturing. His lectures could leave audiences indifferent, but some


times they were highly acclaimed: thus the Washington Post reported that, following


a two-hour address in the U.S. capital, the African American leader Frederick Doug-


lass "moved that a tremendous vote of thanks be tendered to the speaker." A further


inducement for his two visits (in 1883 and 1886) was the opportunity of seeing his


daughter Lucy, who had married an American. In 1888 Arnold died of a sudden heart


attack. Arnold's career as a writer can be roughly divided into four periods. In the 1850s


most of his poems appeared; in the 1860s, literary criticism and social criticism; in


the 1870s, his religious and educational writings; and in the 1 880s, his second set of


essays in literary criticism.


Today Arnold is perhaps better known as a writer of prose than as a poet, although


individual poems such as "Dover Beach" (1867) continue to be widely popular. In his


own era his decision to spend hardly any time composing poetry after 1860 was


considered wrongheaded by some: "Tell Mat not to write any more of those prose


things like Literature and Dogma," Tennyson wrote in a letter, wishing that Arnold


would instead "give us something like his 'Thyrsis,' 'Scholar Gypsy,' or 'Forsaken


Merman.' " Others have felt that he made the right move: Arnold's poetry has been


criticized, in both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, on numerous grounds.


Some have disliked its excessive reliance on italics instead of on meter to emphasize


the meaning of a line, while others object to the prosy flatness of certain passages or,


conversely, to overelaborated similes in others. Yet despite these cavils, many readers


find much to cherish and admire. Given Arnold's sophistication as a writer, it is


perhaps surprising that his evocations of nature function so memorably in his poetry:


rather than simply providing a picturesque backdrop, the setting�seashore or river


or mountaintop�draws the poem's meaning together. In this respect, as in many


others, Arnold displays a debt to William Wordsworth, whose poetry he greatly


admired; but he also draws on his own bond with particular landscapes, especially


those associated with his youth and early adulthood. The stanzas of "The Scholar


Gypsy" (1853), for instance�suffused in a deep familiarity with the changing pat


terns of the rural scene, from the "frail-leafed, white anemone" and "dark bluebells


drenched with dews" of May to the "scarlet poppies" and "pale pink convolvulus" of


August�record with sensuous care the distinct seasons of the English countryside


and Arnold's nostalgic memories of the rambles of his Oxford days. Arnold's own verdict on the qualities of his poetry is interesting. In an 1869 letter


to his mother, he writes:


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


poetical sentiment than Tennyson, and less intellectual vigor and abundance


than Browning; yet, because I have perhaps more of a fusion of the two than


either of them, and have more regularly applied that fusion to the main line of


.


1 35 2 / MATTHEW ARNOLD


modern development, I am likely enough to have my turn, as they have had


theirs.


The emphasis in the letter on "movement of mind" suggests that Arnold's poetry and


prose should be studied together. Such an approach can be fruitful provided that it


does not obscure the important difference between Arnold the poet and Arnold the


critic. T. S. Eliot once said of his own writings that "in one's prose reflections one


may be legitimately occupied with ideals, whereas in the writing of verse, one can


deal only with actuality." Arnold's writings offer a nice verification of Eliot's seeming


paradox. As a poet he usually records his own experiences, his own feelings of lone


liness and isolation as a lover, his longing for a serenity that he cannot find, his


melancholy sense of the passing of youth (more than for many men, Arnold's thirtieth


birthday was an awe-inspiring landmark after which he felt, he said, "three parts iced


over"). Above all he records his despair in a universe in which humanity's role seemed


an incongruous as it was later to seem to Thomas Hardy. In a memorable passage of


his "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse" (1855), he describes himself as "Wander


ing between two worlds, one dead, / The other powerless to be born." And addressing


the representatives of a faith that seems to him dead, he cries: "Take me, cowled


forms, and fence me round, / Till I possess my soul again." As a poet, then, like T. S.


Eliot and W. H. Auden, Arnold provides a record of a troubled individual in a troubled


society. This was "actuality" as he experienced it�an actuality, like Eliot's and


Auden's, representative of his era. As a prose writer, a formulator of "ideals," he seeks


a different role�to be what Auden calls the "healer" of a diseased society, or as he


himself called Goethe, the "Physician of the iron age." And in this difference we have


a clue to answering the question of why Arnold virtually abandoned the writing of


poetry to move into criticism. One reason was his dissatisfaction with the kind of


poetry he was writing. In one of his fascinating letters to his friend Arthur Hugh Clough in the 1850s


(letters that provide the best insight we have into Arnold's mind and tastes), this note


of dissatisfaction is struck: "I am glad you like the Gypsy Scholar�but what does it


do for you? Homer animates�Shakespeare animates�in its poor way I think Sohrah


and Rustum animates�the Gypsy Scholar at best awakens a pleasing melancholy. But


this is not what we want." It is evident that early in his career Arnold had evolved a


theory of what poetry should do for its readers, a theory based, in part, on his impres


sion of what classical poetry had achieved. To help make life bearable, poetry, in


Arnold's view, must bring joy. As he says in the 1853 preface to his Poems, it must


"inspirit and rejoice the reader"; it must "convey a charm, and infuse delight." Such


a demand does not exclude tragic poetry but does exclude works "in which suffering


finds no vent in action; in which a continual state of mental distress is prolonged."


Of Charlotte Bronte's novel Villette (1853) he says witheringly: "The writer's mind


contains nothing but hunger, rebellion, and rage . . . No fine writing can hide this


thoroughly, and it will be fatal to her in the long run." Judged by such a standard,


most nineteenth-century poems, including his own long poem Empedocles on Etna


(1852), were unsatisfactory. And when Arnold tried to write poems that would meet


his own requirements�Sohrah and Rustum (1853) or Balder Dead (1855)�he felt


that something was lacking. By the late 1850s he thus found himself at a dead end.


Turning aside to literary criticism enabled him partially to escape the dilemma. In his


prose his melancholy and "morbid" personality was subordinated to the resolutely


cheerful and purposeful character he had created for himself by an effort of will. Arnold's two volumes of Essays in Criticism (1865, 1888) repeatedly show how


authors as different as Marcus Aurelius, Leo Tolstoy, Homer, and Wordsworth pro


vide the virtues he sought in his reading. Among these virtues was plainness of style.


Although he could on occasion recommend the richness of language of such poets


as John Keats or Tennyson�their "natural magic," as he called it�Arnold usually


preferred literature that was unadorned. And beyond stylistic excellences, the prin


.


MATTHEW ARNOLD / 135 3


cipal virtue he admired as a critic was the quality of "high seriousness." In a world in


which the role of formal religion appeared to be shrinking, Arnold increasingly empha


sized that the poet must be a serious thinker who could offer guidance to his readers.


This belief perhaps caused him to undervalue other qualities in literature: in "The


Study of Poetry" (1880), for instance, he displays little appreciation for Chaucer's


humor and chooses instead to castigate him for his lack of high seriousness. In "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time" (1864), Arnold makes clear


that he regarded good literary criticism, like literature itself, as a potent force in


producing what he conceived as a civilized society. From a close study of this essay


one could forecast the third stage of his career: his excursion into the criticism of


society that was to culminate in Culture and Anarchy (1869) and Friendship's Garland


(1871). Arnold's starting point as a critic of society is different from that of Carlyle and


John Ruskin. The older prophets attacked the Victorian middle classes on the grounds


of their materialism, their selfish indifference to the sufferings of the poor�their


immorality, in effect. Arnold argued instead that the "Philistines," as he called them,


were not so much wicked as ignorant, narrow-minded, and suffering from the dullness


of their private lives. This novel analysis was reinforced by Arnold's conviction that


the world of the future, both in England and in America, would be a middle-class


world and therefore would be dominated by a class inadequately equipped either to


lead or to enjoy civilized living. To establish this point Arnold employed cajolery, satire, and even quotations from


current newspapers with considerable effect. He also used memorable catch phrases


(such as "sweetness and light") that sometimes pose an obstacle to understanding the


complexities of his position. His view of civilization, for example, was pared down to


a four-point formula of the four "powers": conduct, intellect and knowledge, beauty,


and social life and manners. Applying this simple formula to a range of civilizations,


Arnold had a scale by which to judge the virtues as well as the inadequacies of dif


ferent countries. When he turned this instrument on his own country, he usually


awarded the Victorian middle classes an A in the first category (i.e., conduct) but a


failing grade in the other three categories. Unsurprisingly, he also had pronounced


opinions on what he viewed as the distinct national characters of different peoples:


a sample of this strain in Arnold's writing appears in the extract from his lectures On


the Study of Celtic Literature (1867) in "Empire and National Identity" (p. 1619). Arnold's relentless exposure of middle-class narrow-mindedness in his own country


eventually led him into the arena of religious controversy. As a critic of religious


institutions he was arguing, in effect, that just as the middle classes did not know


how to lead full lives, neither did they know how to read the Bible intelligently or


attend church intelligently. Of the Christian religion he remarked that there are two


things "that surely must be clear to anybody with eyes in his head. One is, that men


cannot do without it; the other that they cannot do with it as it is." His three full-


length studies of the Bible, including Literature and Dogma (1873), are thus best


considered a postscript to his social criticism. The Bible, to Arnold, was a great work


of literature like the Odyssey, and the Church of England was a great national insti


tution like Parliament. Both Bible and Church must be preserved not because his


torical Christianity was credible but because both, when properly understood, were


agents of what he called "culture"�they contributed to making humanity more


civilized. Culture is perhaps Arnold's most familiar catchwood, although what he meant by


it has sometimes been misunderstood. He used the term to capture the qualities of


an open-minded intelligence (as described in "The Function of Criticism")�a refusal


to take things on authority. In this respect Arnold appears close to T. H. Huxley and


J. S. Mill. But the word also connotes a full awareness of humanity's past and a capacity to enjoy the best works of art, literature, history, and philosophy that have


come down to us from that past. As a way of viewing life in all its aspects, including


.


135 4 / MATTHEW ARNOLD


the social, political, and religious, culture represents for Arnold the most effective


cure for the ills of a sick society. It is his principal prescription.


The attempt to define culture brings us to a final aspect of Arnold's career as a


critic: his writings on education, in which he sought to make cultural values, as he


said, "prevail." Most obviously these writings comprise his reply to Huxley (his admi


rably reasoned essay "Literature and Science," 1882) and his volumes of official


reports written as an inspector of schools. Less obviously, they comprise all his prose.


At their core is his belief that good education is the crucial need. Arnold was essen


tially a great teacher. He has the faults of a teacher�a tendency to repeat himself,


to lean too hard on formulaic phrases�and he displays something of the lectern


manner at times. He also has the great teacher's virtues, in particular the ability to


skillfully convey to us the conviction on which all his arguments are based. This


conviction is that the humanist tradition of which he is the expositor can enable the


individual man or woman to live life more fully and to change the course of society.


He believes that a democratic society can thrive only if its citizens become educated


in what he saw as the great Western tradition, "the best that is known and thought."


These values, which some readers find elitist, make Arnold both timely and contro


versial. Arnold fought for these values with the gloves on�kid gloves, his opponents


used to say�and he provided a lively exhibition of footwork that is a pleasure to


observe. Yet the gracefulness of the display should not obscure the fact that he lands


hard blows squarely on his opponents. Although his lifelong attacks against the inadequacies of Puritanism make Arnold


one of the most anti-Victorian figures of his age, behind his attacks is a characteris


tically Victorian assumption: that the Puritan middle classes can be changed, that


they are, as we would more clumsily say, educable. In 1852, writing to Clough on the


subject of equality (a political objective in which he believed by conviction if not by


instinct), Arnold observed: "I am more and more convinced that the world tends to


become more comfortable for the mass, and more uncomfortable for those of any


natural gift or distinction�and it is as well perhaps that it should be so�for hitherto


the gifted have astonished and delighted the world, but not trained or inspired or in


any real way changed it." Arnold's gifts as a poet and critic enabled him to do both:


to delight the world and to change it.


Isolation. To Marguerite1


We were apart; yet, day by day,


I bade my heart more constant be.


I bade it keep the world away,


And grow a home for only thee;


s Nor feared but thy love likewise grew,


Like mine, each day, more tried, more true.


The fault was grave! I might have known,


What far too soon, alas! I learned�


The heart can bind itself alone,


io And faith may oft be unreturned. Self-swayed our feelings ebb and swell�


Thou lov'st no more�Farewell! Farewell!


1. Addressed to a woman Arnold is reputed to have been Mary Claude, a woman Arnold knew in have met in Switzerland in the 1840s. It has been England at this same period who, though English, commonly assumed that she was French or Swiss; had connections with Germany and had translated but some recent biographies speculate she might German prose and verse.


.


T o MARGUERITE�CONTINUE D / 135 5 15Farewell!�and thou, thou lonely heart,2 Which never yet without remorse Even for a moment didst depart From thy remote and sphered course To haunt the place where passions reign� Back to thy solitude again! Back with the conscious thrill of shame 202530 Which Luna felt, that summer night, Flash through her pure immortal frame, When she forsook the starry height To hang over Endymion's sleep Upon the pine-grown Latmian steep.3 Yet she, chaste queen, had never proved How vain a thing is mortal love, Wandering in Heaven, far removed. But thou hast long had place to prove0This truth�to prove, and make thine own: "Thou hast been, shalt be, art, alone." test 35Or, if not quite alone, yet they Which touch thee are unmating things� Ocean and clouds and night and day; Lorn autumns and triumphant springs; And life, and others' joy and pain, And love, if love, of happier men. 40Of happier men�for they, at least, Have dreamed two human hearts might blend In one, and were through faith released From isolation without end Prolonged; nor knew, although not less Alone than thou, their loneliness. 1849 1857


To Marguerite�Continued


Yes! in the sea of life enisled,0 encircled


With echoing straits between us thrown,


Dotting the shoreless watery wild,


We mortal millions live alone.


5 The islands feel the enclasping flow,


And then their endless bounds they know.


But when the moon their hollows lights,


And they are swept by balms of spring,


And in their glens, on starry nights,


2. Presumably the speaker's heart, not Margue-fell in love with Endymion, a handsome shepherd rite's. whom she discovered asleep on Mount Latmos. 3. Luna (or Diana), virgin goddess of the moon,


.


135 6 / MATTHEW ARNOLD


10 The nightingales divinely sing;


And lovely notes, from shore to shore,


Across the sounds and channels pour�


Oh! then a longing like despair


Is to their farthest caverns sent;


15 For surely once, they feel, we were


Parts of a single continent!


Now round us spreads the watery plain�


Oh might our marges meet again!


Who ordered that their longing's fire


20 Should be, as soon as kindled, cooled?


Who renders vain their deep desire?�


A God, a God their severance ruled!


And bade betwixt their shores to be


The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea.


1849 1852


The Buried Life


Light flows our war of mocking words, and yet,


Behold, with tears mine eyes are wet!


I feel a nameless sadness o'er me roll.


Yes, yes, we know that we can jest,


5 We know, we know that we can smile!


But there's a something in this breast,


To which thy light words bring no rest,


And thy gay smiles no anodyne.


Give me thy hand, and hush awhile,


io And turn those limpid eyes on mine, And let me read there, love! thy inmost soul.


Alas! is even love too weak


To unlock the heart, and let it speak?


Are even lovers powerless to reveal


15 To one another what indeed they feel?


I knew the mass of men concealed


Their thoughts, for fear that if revealed


They would by other men be met


With blank indifference, or with blame reproved;


20 I knew they lived and moved Tricked0 in disguises, alien to the rest dressed lipOf men, and alien to themselves�and yet


The same heart beats in every human breast! But we, my love!�doth a like spell benumb


25 Our hearts, our voices?�must we too be dumb?


Ah! well for us, if even we,


Even for a moment, can get free


.


TH E BURIE D LIF E / 135 7 Our heart, and have our lips unchained; For that which seals them hath been deep-ordained! 303540 Fate, which foresaw How frivolous a baby man would be� By what distractions he would be possessed, How he would pour himself in every strife, And well-nigh change his own identity� That it might keep from his capricious play His genuine self, and force him to obey Even in his own despite his being's law, Bade through the deep recesses of our breast The unregarded river of our life Pursue with indiscernible flow its way; And that we should not see The buried stream, and seem to be Eddying at large in blind uncertainty, Though driving on with it eternally. 4550556065 But often, in the world's most crowded streets,1 But often, in the din of strife, There rises an unspeakable desire After the knowledge of our buried life; A thirst to spend our fire and restless force In tracking out our true, original course; A longing to inquire Into the mystery of this heart which beats So wild, so deep in us�to know Whence our lives come and where they go. And many a man in his own breast then delves, But deep enough, alas! none ever mines. And we have been on many thousand fines, And we have shown, on each, spirit and power; But hardly have we, for one little hour, Been on our own line, have we been ourselves� Hardly had skill to utter one of all The nameless feelings that course through our breast, But they course on forever unexpressed. And long we try in vain to speak and act Our hidden self, and what we say and do Is eloquent, is well�but 'tis not true! And then we will no more be racked 70With inward striving, and demand Of all the thousand nothings of the hour Their stupefying power; Ah yes, and they benumb us at our call! Yet still, from time to time, vague and forlorn, From the soul's subterranean depth upborne


1. This passage, like many others in Arnold's cities, I have owed to them, / In hours of wearipoetry, illustrates William Wordsworth's effect on ness, sensations sweet." Cf. also The Prelude his writings. In this instance cf. Wordsworth's (1850) 7.626: "How oft amid those overflowing "Tintern Abbey (1798), lines 25-27: "But oft, in streets . . ." lonely rooms, and 'mid the din / Of towns and


.


135 8 / MATTHEW ARNOLD


As from an infinitely distant land,


75 Come airs, and floating echoes, and convey A melancholy into all our day.2 soOnly�but this is rare� When a beloved hand is laid in ours, When, jaded with the rush and glare Of the interminable hours, Our eyes can in another's eyes read clear, When our world-deafened ear 8590Is by the tones of a loved voice caressed� A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast, And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again. The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain, And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know. A man becomes aware of his life's flow, And hears its winding murmur; and he sees The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze. And there arrives a lull in the hot race Wherein he doth forever chase 95That flying and elusive shadow, rest. An air of coolness plays upon his face, And an unwonted calm pervades his breast. And then he thinks he knows The hills where his life rose, And the sea where it goes. 1852


Memorial Verses1


April 1850


Goethe in Weimar sleeps, and Greece,


Long since, saw Byron's struggle cease.


But one such death remained to come;


The last poetic voice is dumb�


5 We stand today by Wordsworth's tomb.


When Byron's eyes were shut in death,


We bowed our head and held our breath.


He taught us little; but our soul


Had felt him like the thunder's roll,


io With shivering heart the strife we saw


2. Cf. Wordworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immor-who died in Greece in 1 824, had affected Arnold tality" (1807), lines 149-5 I: "Those shadowy rec-profoundly in his youth, but later that strenuous ollections, / Which, be they what they may, / Are "Titanic" (line 14) poetry seemed to him less sat- yet the fountain light of all our day." isfactory, its value limited by its lack of serenity. 1. This elegy was written shortly after Wordsworth He gives his final verdict on Byron in his essay in had died in April 1850, at the age of eighty. Arnold Essays in Criticism: Second Series (1888). He had known the poet as a man and deeply admired regarded Goethe, who died in 1 832, as a great philhis writings�as is evident not only in this poem osophical poet and the most significant man of let- but in his late essay "Wordsworth" (1888). Byron, ters of the early 19th century.


.


MEMORIA L VERSE S / 135 9 Of passion with eternal law; And yet with reverential awe We watched the fount of fiery life Which served for that Titanic strife. 15202530 When Goethe's death was told, we said: Sunk, then, is Europe's sagest head. Physician of the iron age, Goethe has done his pilgrimage. He took the suffering human race, He read each wound, each weakness clear; And struck his finger on the place, And said: Tliou ailest here, and here! He looked on Europe's dying hour Of fitful dream and feverish power; His eye plunged down the weltering strife, The turmoil of expiring life� He said: The end is everywhere, Art still has truth, take refuge there! And he was happy, if to know Causes of things, and far below His feet to see the lurid flow Of terror, and insane distress, And headlong fate, be happiness. 3540And Wordsworth!�Ah, pale ghosts, rejoice! For never has such soothing voice Been to your shadowy world conveyed, Since erst,� at morn, some wandering shadeHeard the clear song of Orpheus2 come Through Hades, and the mournful gloom. Wordsworth has gone from us�and ye, Ah, may ye feel his voice as we! He too upon a wintry clime Had fallen�on this iron time formerly 4550Of doubts, disputes, distractions, fears. He found us when the age had bound Our souls in its benumbing round; He spoke, and loosed our heart in tears. He laid us as we lay at birth On the cool flowery lap of earth, Smiles broke from us and we had ease; The hills were round us, and the breeze Went o'er the sunlit fields again; Our foreheads felt the wind and rain. 55Our youth returned; for there was shed On spirits that had long been dead, Spirits dried up and closely furled, The freshness of the early world. Ah! since dark days still bring to light Man's prudence and man's fiery might,


2. By means of his beautiful music, the legendary Greek singer Orpheus won his way through Hades as he searched for his dead wife, Eurydice.


.


136 0 / MATTHEW ARNOLD


606570 Time may restore us in his course Goethe's sage mind and Byron's force; But where will Europe's latter hour Again find Wordsworth's healing power? Others will teach us how to dare, And against fear our breast to steel; Others will strengthen us to bear� But who, ah! who, will make us feel? The cloud of mortal destiny, Others will front it fearlessly� But who, like him, will put it by? Keep fresh the grass upon his grave O Rotha,3 with thy living wave! Sing him thy best! for few or none Hears thy voice right, now he is gone. 1850 1850


Lines Written in Kensington Gardens1


In this lone, open glade I lie,


Screened by deep boughs on either hand;


And at its end, to stay the eye,


Those black-crowned, red-boled pine trees stand! 5 Birds here make song, each bird has his,


Across the girdling city's hum.


How green under the boughs it is!


How thick the tremulous sheep-cries come!2


Sometimes a child will cross the glade


io To take his nurse his broken toy;


Sometimes a thrush flit overhead


Deep in her unknown day's employ.


Here at my feet what wonders pass,


What endless, active life is here!


15 What blowing daisies, fragrant grass!


An air-stirred forest, fresh and clear.


Scarce fresher is the mountain sod


Where the tired angler lies, stretched out,


And, eased of basket and of rod,


20 Counts his day's spoil, the spotted trout. In the huge world, which roars hard0 by, close


Be others happy if they can!


3. A river near Wordsworth's burial place. 2. Sheep sometimes grazed in London parks. 1. A park in the heart of London.


.


TH E SCHOLA R GYPS Y / 136 1 But in my helpless cradle I Was breathed on by the rural Pan.3 25 I, on men's impious uproar hurled, Think often, as I hear them rave, That peace has left the upper world And now keeps only in the grave. 30Yet here is peace forever new! When I who watch them am away, Still all things in this glade go through The changes of their quiet day. 35Then to their happy rest they pass! The flowers upclose, the birds are fed, The night comes down upon the grass, The child sleeps warmly in his bed. 40Calm soul of all things! make it mine To feel, amid the city's jar, That there abides a peace of thine, Man did not make, and cannot mar. The will to neither strive nor cry, The power to feel with others give! Calm, calm me more! nor let me die Before I have begun to live. 1852


The Scholar Gypsy The story of a seventeenth-century student who left


Oxford and joined a band of gypsies had made a strong impression on Arnold. In the


poem he wistfully imagines that the spirit of this scholar is still to be encountered in


the Cumner countryside near Oxford, having achieved immortality by a serene pursuit


of the secret of human existence. Like Keats's nightingale, the scholar has escaped


"the weariness, the fever, and the fret" of modern life. At the outset the poet addresses a shepherd who has been helping him in his search


for traces of the scholar. The shepherd is addressed as you. After line 61, with the


shift to thou and thy, the person addressed is the scholar, and the poet thereafter


sometimes uses the pronoun we to indicate he is speaking for all humanity of later


generations. About the setting Arnold wrote to his brother Tom on May 15, 1857: "You alone


of my brothers are associated with that life at Oxford, the freest and most delightful


part, perhaps, of my life, when with you and Clough and Walrond I shook off all the


bonds and formalities of the place, and enjoyed the spring of life and that unforgotten


Oxfordshire and Berkshire country. Do you remember a poem of mine called 'The


Scholar Gipsy'? It was meant to fix the remembrance of those delightful wanderings


of ours in the Cumner Hills." The passage from Joseph Glanvill's Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661) that inspired the


poem was included by Arnold as a note:


3. In Greek mythology the god of woods and pastures.


.


36 2 / MATTHEW ARNOLD


There was very lately a lad in the University of Oxford, who was by his poverty


forced to leave his studies there; and at last to join himself to a company of


vagabond gypsies. Among these extravagant people, by the insinuating subtilty


of his carriage, he quickly got so much of their love and esteem as that they


discovered to him their mystery. After he had been a pretty while exercised in


the trade, there chanced to ride by a couple of scholars, who had formerly been


of his acquaintance. They quickly spied out their old friend among the gypsies;


and he gave them an account of the necessity which drove him to that kind of


life, and told them that the people he went with were not such imposters as they


were taken for, but that they had a traditional kind of learning among them, and


could do wonders by the power of imagination, their fancy binding that of others:


that himself had learned much of their art, and when he had compassed the


whole secret, he intended, he said, to leave their company, and give the world


an account of what he had learned.


The Scholar Gypsy


Go, for they call you, shepherd, from the hill; Go, shepherd, and untie the wattled cotes!1


No longer leave thy wistful flock unfed,


Nor let thy bawling fellows rack their throats,


5 Nor the cropped herbage shoot another head.


But when the fields are still,


And the tired men and dogs all gone to rest,


And only the white sheep are sometimes seen


Cross and recross the strips of moon-blanched green,


io Come, shepherd, and again begin the quest!


Here, where the reaper was at work of late�


In this high field's dark corner, where he leaves His coat, his basket, and his earthen cruse,2 And in the sun all morning binds the sheaves,


is Then here, at noon, comes back his stores to use� Here will I sit and wait,


While to my ear from uplands far away The bleating of the folded0 flocks is borne, penned upWith distant cries of reapers in the corn3�


20 All the live murmur of a summer's day.


Screened is this nook o'er the high, half-reaped field,


And here till sundown, shepherd! will I be.


Through the thick corn the scarlet poppies peep,


And round green roots and yellowing stalks I see


25 Pale pink convolvulus in tendrils creep; And air-swept lindens yield


Their scent, and rustle down their perfumed showers


Of bloom on the bent grass where I am laid,


And bower me from the August sun with shade;


30 And the eye travels down to Oxford's towers.


Sheepfolds woven from sticks. 3. Grain or wheat. Pot or jug for carrying his drink.


.


THE SCHOLAR GYPSY / 1363


And near me on the grass lies Glanvill's book


Come, let me read the oft-read tale again!


The story of the Oxford scholar poor,


Of pregnant parts4 and quick inventive brain,


35 Who, tired of knocking at preferment's door,


One summer morn forsook


His friends, and went to learn the gypsy lore,


And roamed the world with that wild brotherhood,


And came, as most men deemed, to little good,


40 But came to Oxford and his friends no more. But once, years after, in the country lanes,


Two scholars, whom at college erst� he knew, long ago


Met him, and of his way of life inquired;


Whereat he answered, that the gypsy crew,


45 His mates, had arts to rule as they desired


The workings of men's brains,


And they can bind them to what thoughts they will.


"And I," he said, "the secret of their art,


When fully learned, will to the world impart;


50 But it needs heaven-sent moments for this skill." This said, he left them, and returned no more.�


But rumors hung about the countryside,


That the lost Scholar long was seen to stray,


Seen by rare glimpses, pensive and tongue-tied,


55 In hat of antique shape, and cloak of grey,


The same the gypsies wore.


Shepherds had met him on the Hurst5 in spring;


At some lone alehouse in the Berkshire moors,


On the warm ingle-bench, the smock-frocked boors6


60 Had found him seated at their entering, But, 'mid their drink and clatter, he would fly.


And 1 myself seem half to know thy looks,


And put the shepherds, wanderer! on thy trace;


And boys who in lone wheatfields scare the rooks7


65 I ask if thou hast passed their quiet place;


Or in my boat I lie


Moored to the cool bank in the summer heats,


'Mid wide grass meadows which the sunshine fills,


And watch the warm, green-muffled Cumner hills,


TO And wonder if thou haunt'st their shy retreats. For most, I know, thou lov'st retired ground!


Thee at the ferry Oxford riders blithe,


Returning home on summer nights, have met


Crossing the stripling Thames at Bab-lock-hithe,8


4. Of rich conception, many ideas. 7. Crows. 5. A hill near Oxford. All the place-names in the 8. Or Bablock Hythe (a hitlie or hythe is a landing poem (except those in the final two stanzas) refer place on a river). "The stripling Thames": the narto the countryside near Oxford. row upper reaches of the river before it broadens 6. Rustics. "Ingle-bench": fireside bench. out to its full width.


.


136 4 / MATTHEW ARNOLD


Trailing in the cool stream thy fingers wet,


As the punt's rope chops round;9


And leaning backward in a pensive dream,


And fostering in thy lap a heap of flowers


Plucked in shy fields and distant Wychwood bowers,


And thine eyes resting on the moonlit stream.


And then they land, and thou art seen no more!�


Maidens, who from the distant hamlets come


To dance around the Fyfield elm in May,


Oft through the darkening fields have seen thee roam,


Or cross a stile into the public way.


Oft thou hast given them store


Of flowers�the frail-leafed, white anemone,


Dark bluebells drenched with dews of summer eves,


And purple orchises with spotted leaves�


But none hath words she can report of thee.


And, above Godstow Bridge, when hay time's here


In June, and many a scythe in sunshine flames,


Men who through those wide fields of breezy grass


Where black-winged swallows haunt the glittering Thames,


To bathe in the abandoned lasher1 pass,


Have often passed thee near


Sitting upon the river bank o'ergrown;


Marked thine outlandish garb, thy figure spare,


Thy dark vague eyes, and soft abstracted air�


But, when they came from bathing, thou wast gone!


At some lone homestead in the Cumner hills,


Where at her open door the housewife darns,


Thou hast been seen, or hanging on a gate


To watch the threshers in the mossy barns.


Children, who early range these slopes and late


For cresses from the rills,


Have known thee eying, all an April day,


The springing pastures and the feeding kine;� cattle


And marked thee, when the stars come out and shine,


Through the long dewy grass move slow away.


In autumn, on the skirts of Bagley Wood�


Where most the gypsies by the turf-edged way


Pitch their smoked tents, and every bush you see


With scarlet patches tagged and shreds of grey,


Above the forest ground called Thessaly�


The blackbird, picking food,


Sees thee, nor stops his meal, nor fears at all;


So often has he known thee past him stray,


9. The scholar's flat-bottomed boat ("punt") is tied of the boat as it is stirred by the current of the river up by a rope at the riverbank near the ferry crossing causes the chopping sound of the rope in the like the speaker's boat (in the previous stanza), water. which was "moored to the cool bank." The motion 1. Water that spills over a dam or weir.


.


THE SCHOLAR GYPSY / 1365


Rapt, twirling in thy hand a withered spray,


120 And waiting for the spark from heaven to fall. And once, in winter, on the causeway chill


Where home through flooded fields foot-travelers go,


Have I not passed thee on the wooden bridge,


Wrapped in thy cloak and battling with the snow,


125 Thy face tow'rd Hinksey and its wintry ridge?


And thou hast climbed the hill,


And gained the white brow of the Cumner range;


Turned once to watch, while thick the snowflakes fall,


The line of festal light in Christ Church hall2� 130 Then sought thy straw in some sequestered grange.0 farmhouse


But what�I dream! Two hundred years are flown


Since first thy story ran through Oxford halls,


And the grave Glanvill did the tale inscribe


That thou wert wandered from the studious walls


135 To learn strange arts, and join a gypsy tribe; And thou from earth art gone


Long since, and in some quiet churchyard laid�


Some country nook, where o'er thy unknown grave


Tall grasses and white flowering nettles wave,


140 Under a dark, red-fruited yew tree's shade. �No, no, thou hast not felt the lapse of hours!


For what wears out the life of mortal men?


'Tis that from change to change their being rolls;


'Tis that repeated shocks, again, again,


145 Exhaust the energy of strongest souls


And numb the elastic powers.


Till having used our nerves with bliss and teen,� vexation And tired upon a thousand schemes our wit,


To the just-pausing Genius3 we remit


150 Our worn-out life, and are�what we have been. Thou hast not lived, why should'st thou perish, so?


Thou hadst one aim, one business, one desire;


Else wert thou long since numbered with the dead!


Else hadst thou spent, like other men, thy fire!


155 The generations of thy peers are fled,


And we ourselves shall go;


But thou possessest an immortal lot,


And we imagine thee exempt from age


And living as thou liv'st on Glanvill's page,


i6o Because thou hadst�what we, alas! have not. For early didst thou leave the world, with powers


Fresh, undiverted to the world without,


Firm to their mark, not spent on other things;


Free from the sick fatigue, the languid doubt,


2. The dining hail of this Oxford college. Roman mythology a genius was an attendant 3. Perhaps the spirit of the universe, which pauses spirit.) briefly to receive back the life given to us. (In


.


136 6 / MATTHEW ARNOLD


165 Which much to have tried, in much been baffled, brings.


O life unlike to ours!


Who fluctuate idly without term or scope,


Of whom each strives, nor knows for what he strives,


And each half4 lives a hundred different lives;


170 Who wait like thee, but not, like thee, in hope. Thou waitest for the spark from heaven! and we,


Light half-believers of our casual creeds, Who never deeply felt, nor clearly willed,


Whose insight never has borne fruit in deeds,


175 Whose vague resolves never have been fulfilled;


For whom each year we see


Breeds new beginnings, disappointments new;


Who hesitate and falter life away,


And lose tomorrow the ground won today�


iso Ah! do not we, wanderer! await it too? Yes, we await it!�but it still delays,


And then we suffer! and amongst us one,5


Who most has suffered, takes dejectedly


His seat upon the intellectual throne;


185 And all his store of sad experience he Lays bare of wretched days;


Tells us his misery's birth and growth and signs,


And how the dying spark of hope was fed,


And how the breast was soothed, and how the head,


190 And all his hourly varied anodynes. This for our wisest! and we others pine,


And wish the long unhappy dream would end,


And waive all claim to bliss, and try to bear;


With close-lipped patience for our only friend,


195 Sad patience, too near neighbor to despair� But none has hope like thine!


Thou through the fields and through the woods dost stray,


Roaming the countryside, a truant boy,


Nursing thy project in unclouded joy,


200 And every doubt long blown by time away. O born in days when wits were fresh and clear,


And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames;


Before this strange disease of modern life,


With its sick hurry, its divided aims,


205 Its heads o'ertaxed, its palsied hearts, was rife�


Fly hence, our contact fear!


Still fly, plunge deeper in the bowering wood!


Averse, as Dido did with gesture stern


From her false friend's approach in Hades turn,6


210 Wave us away, and keep thy solitude!


4. An adverb modifying "lives." 6. Dido committed suicide after her lover, Aeneas, 5. Probably Goethe, although possibly referring to deserted her. When he later encountered her in Tennyson, whose In Memoriam had appeared in Hades, she silently turned away from him (see Vir1850! gil's Aeneid, book 6).


.


THE SCHOLAR GYPSY / 1367


Still nursing the unconquerable hope,


Still clutching the inviolable shade,


With a free, onward impulse brushing through,


By night, the silvered branches of the glade�


215 Far on the forest skirts, where none pursue.


On some mild pastoral slope


Emerge, and resting on the moonlit pales


Freshen thy flowers as in former years


With dew, or listen with enchanted ears, 220 From the dark dingles,0 to the nightingales! small deep valleys


But fly our paths, our feverish contact fly!


For strong the infection of our mental strife,


Which, though it gives no bliss, yet spoils for rest;


And we should win thee from thy own fair life,


225 Like us distracted, and like us unblest.


Soon, soon thy cheer would die,


Thy hopes grow timorous, and unfixed thy powers,


And thy clear aims be cross and shifting made;


And then thy glad perennial youth would fade,


230 Fade, and grow old at last, and die like ours.


Then fly our greetings, fly our speech and smiles!


�As some grave Tyrian trader, from the sea,


Descried at sunrise an emerging prow


Lifting the cool-haired creepers stealthily,


235 The fringes of a southward-facing brow Among the Aegean isles;


And saw the merry Grecian coaster come,


Freighted with amber grapes, and Chian wine,


Green, bursting figs, and tunnies0 steeped in brine� tuna fish


240 And knew the intruders on his ancient home,


The young lighthearted masters of the waves�


And snatched his rudder, and shook out more sail;


And day and night held on indignantly


O'er the blue Midland waters with the gale,


245 Betwixt the Syrtes7 and soft Sicily, To where the Atlantic raves


Outside the western straits; and unbent sails


There, where down cloudy cliffs, through sheets of foam,


Shy traffickers, the dark tberians8 come;


250 And on the beach undid his corded bales.9


1853


7. Shoals off the coast of North Africa. his habitual trading ports in the Greek islands. Like 8. Dark inhabitants of Spain and Portugal� the Scholar Gypsy, when similarly intruded on by perhaps associated with gypsies. hearty extroverts, he resolves to flee and seek a less 9. The elaborate simile of the final two stanzas has competitive sphere of life. been variously interpreted. The trader from Tyre (a The reference (line 249) to the Iberians as " shy Phoenician city, on the coast of what is now Leb-traffickers" (traders) is explained by Kenneth Allott anon) is disconcerted to see a new business rival, as having been derived from Herodotus's History"the merry Grecian coaster," emerging from one of (4.196). Herodotus describes a distinctive method


.


136 8 / MATTHEW ARNOLD


Dover Beach


The sea is calm tonight.


The tide is full, the moon lies fair


Upon the straits�on the French coast the light


Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,


5 Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.


Come to the window, sweet is the night air!


Only, from the long line of spray


Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,


Listen! you hear the grating roar


io Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,


At their return, up the high strand,


Begin, and cease, and then again begin,


With tremulous cadence slow, and bring


The eternal note of sadness in.


is Sophocles long ago


Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought


Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow


Of human misery;1 we


Find also in the sound a thought,


20 Hearing it by this distant northern sea.


The Sea of Faith


Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore


Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.2


But now I only hear


25 Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,


Retreating, to the breath


Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear


And naked shingles3 of the world.


Ah, love, let us be true


30 To one another! for the world, which seems


To lie before us like a land of dreams,


So various, so beautiful, so new,


Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,


of selling goods established by merchants from instance of dishonesty .. . on either side." For the Carthage who used to sail through the Strait of solitary Tyrian trader such a procedure, with its Gibraltar to trade with the inhabitants of the coast avoidance of "contact" (line 221), would have been of West Africa. The Carthaginians would leave especially appropriate. bales of their merchandise on display along the 1. A reference to a chorus in Antigone that combeaches and, without having seen their prospective pares human sorrow to the sound of the waves customers, would return to their ships. The shy moving the sand beneath them (lines 585-91). natives would then come down from their inland 2. This difficult line means, in general, that at hiding places and set gold beside the bales they high tide the sea envelops the land closely. Its wished to buy. When the natives withdrew in their forces are "gathered" up (to use William Words- turn, the Carthaginians would return to the beach worth's term) like the "folds" of bright clothing and decide whether payments were adequate, a ("girdle") that have been compressed ("furled"). At process repeated until agreement was reached. On ebb tide, as the sea retreats, it is unfurled and the Atlantic coasts this method of bargaining per-spread out. It still surrounds the shoreline but not sisted into the 19th century. As William Beloe, a as an "enclasping flow" (as in "To Marguerite� translator of the ancient Greek historian, noted in Continued").


1844: "In this manner they transact their exchange 3. Beaches covered with pebbles. without seeing one another, or without the least


.


STANZA S FRO M TH E GRAND E CHARTREUS E / 136 9 35Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies4 clash by night. ca.1851 1867


Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse1


Through Alpine meadows soft-suffused


With rain, where thick the crocus blows,


Past the dark forges long disused,


The mule track from Saint Laurent goes.


5 The bridge is crossed, and slow we ride,


Through forest, up the mountainside.


The autumnal evening darkens round,


The wind is up, and drives the rain;


While, hark! far down, with strangled sound


io Doth the Dead Guier's2 stream complain,


Where that wet smoke, among the woods,


Over his boiling cauldron broods.


Swift rush the spectral vapors white


Past limestone scars0 with ragged pines, cliffs


15 Showing�then blotting from our sight!�


Halt�through the cloud-drift something shines!


High in the valley, wet and drear,


The huts of Courrerie appear.


Strike leftward! cries our guide; and higher


20 Mounts up the stony forest way.


At last the encircling trees retire;


Look! through the showery twilight grey


What pointed roofs are these advance?�


A palace of the Kings of France?


25 Approach, for what we seek is here!


Alight, and sparely sup, and wait


4. Perhaps alluding to conflicts in Arnold's own It was established in 1084 by Saint Bruno, founder time such as occurred during the revolutions of of the Carthusians (line 30), whose austere regi1848 in Europe, or at the Siege of Rome by the men of solitary contemplation, fasting, and reli- French in 1849 (the poem's date of composition is gious exercises (lines 37�44) had remained unknown, although generally assumed to be virtually unchanged for centuries. Arnold visited 1851). But the passage also refers back to another the site on September 7, 1851, accompanied by his battle, one that occurred more than two thousand bride. His account may be compared with that by years earlier when an Athenian army was attempt-William Wordsworth (Prelude [1850] 6.414-88), ing an invasion of Sicily at nighttime. As this "night who had made a similar visit in 1790. battle" was described by the ancient Greek histo-2. The Guiers Mort River flows down from the rian Thucydides in his History of the Pelopottnesian monastery and joins the Guiers Vif in the valley War (7.44). the invaders became confused by dark-below; in French, Mort and Vif mean "dead" and ness and slaughtered many of their own men. "alive," respectively. Wordsworth speaks of the two Hence "ignorant armies." rivers as "the sister streams of Life and Death." 1. A monastery situated high in the French Alps.


.


137 0 / MATTHEW ARNOLD


For rest in this outbuilding near;


Then cross the sward and reach that gate.


Knock; pass the wicket!0 Thou art come gate


so To the Carthusians' world-famed home. The silent courts, where night and day


Into their stone-carved basins cold


The splashing icy fountains play�


The humid corridors behold!


35 Where, ghostlike in the deepening night,


Cowled forms brush by in gleaming white. The chapel, where no organ's peal


Invests the stern and naked prayer�


With penitential cries they kneel


40 And wrestle; rising then, with bare


And white uplifted faces stand,


Passing the Host from hand to hand;3


Each takes, and then his visage wan


Is buried in his cowl once more.


45 The cells!�the suffering Son of Man


Upon the wall�the knee-worn floor�


And where they sleep, that wooden bed,


Which shall their coffin be, when dead!4


The library, where tract and tome


50 Not to feed priestly pride are there,


To hymn the conquering march of Rome,


Nor yet to amuse, as ours are!


They paint of souls the inner strife,


Their drops of blood, their death in life. 55 The garden, overgrown�yet mild,


See, fragrant herbs5 are flowering there!


Strong children of the Alpine wild


Whose culture is the brethren's care;


Of human tasks their only one,


so And cheerful works beneath the sun. Those halls, too, destined to contain


Each its own pilgrim-host of old,


From England, Germany, or Spain�


All are before me! I behold


65 The House, the Brotherhood austere!


�And what am I, that I am here?


3. Arnold, during his short visit, may not actually kneels rather than stands). have witnessed Mass in the monastery. During the 4. A Carthusian is buried on a wooden plank but service the consecrated wafer ("the Host") is not does not sleep in a coffin. passed from the hand of the officiating priest to 5. From which the liqueur Chartreuse is manuthe hands of the communicant (as is the practice factured. Sales of this liqueur provide the principal in Arnold's own Anglican Church) but is placed revenues for the monastery's upkeep. directly on the tongue of the communicant (who


.


STANZAS FROM THE GRANDE CHARTREUSE / 1371


For rigorous teachers seized my youth,


And purged its faith, and trimmed its fire,


Showed me the high, white star of Truth,


70 There bade me gaze, and there aspire.


Even now their whispers pierce the gloom:


What dost thou in this living tomb?


Forgive me, masters of the mind!6


At whose behest I long ago


75 So much unlearnt, so much resigned�


I come not here to be your foe!


I seek these anchorites, not in ruth,7


To curse and to deny your truth;


Not as their friend, or child, I speak!


so But as, on some far northern strand,


Thinking of his own Gods, a Greek


In pity and mournful awe might stand


Before some fallen Runic stone8�


For both were faiths, and both are gone. ss Wandering between two worlds, one dead,


The other powerless to be born,


With nowhere yet to rest my head,


Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.


Their faith, my tears, the world deride�


90 I come to shed them at their side. Oh, hide me in your gloom profound,


Ye solemn seats of holy pain!


Take me, cowled forms, and fence me round,


Till I possess my soul again;


95 Till free my thoughts before me roll,


Not chafed by hourly false control!


For the world cries your faith is now


But a dead time's exploded dream;


My melancholy, sciolists9 say,


IOO Is a passed mode, an outworn theme�


As if the world had ever had


A faith, or sciolists been sad!


Ah, if it be passed, take away,


At least, the restlessness, the pain;


105 Be man henceforth no more a prey


To these out-dated stings again!


6. Writers whose insistence on testing religious 8. A monument inscribed in Teutonic letters beliefs in the light of fact and reason persuaded (runes), emblematic of a Nordic religion that has Arnold that faith in Christianity (especially in the become extinct. The relic reminds the Greek that Roman Catholic or Anglo-Catholic forms) was no his own religion is likewise dying and will soon be longer tenable in the modern world. extinct (see "Preface" to Poems [1853], p. 1374). 7. Remorse for having adopted the rationalist view 9. Superficial-minded persons who pretend to of Christianity. know the answers to all questions.


.


137 2 / MATTHEW ARNOLD


The nobleness of grief is gone�


Ah, leave us not the fret alone!


But�if you' cannot give us ease�


no Last of the race of them who grieve


Here leave us to die out with these


Last of the people who believe!


Silent, while years engrave the brow;


Silent�the best are silent now.


115 Achilles2 ponders in his tent,


The kings of modern thought3 are dumb;


Silent they are, though not content,


And wait to see the future come.


They have the grief men had of yore,


120 But they contend and cry no more.


Our fathers4 watered with their tears


This sea of time whereon we sail,


Their voices were in all men's ears


Who passed within their puissant hail.


125 Still the same ocean round us raves, But we stand mute, and watch the waves.


For what availed it, all the noise


And outcry of the former men?�


Say, have their sons achieved more joys,


130 Say, is life lighter now than then? The sufferers died, they left their pain�


The pangs which tortured them remain.


What helps it now, that Byron bore,


With haughty scorn which mocked the smart,


135 Through Europe to the Aetolian shore5


The pageant of his bleeding heart?


That thousands counted every groan,


And Europe made his woe her own?


What boots0 it, Shelley! that the breeze avails HO Carried thy lovely wail away,


Musical through Italian trees


Which fringe thy soft blue Spezzian bay?6


Inheritors of thy distress


Have restless hearts one throb the less?


1. It is not clear whether the speaker has resumed 3. Variously but never satisfactorily identified as addressing his "rigorous teachers" (line 67) or (as John Henry' Newman or Thomas Carlyle (the latter would seem more likely) a combination of the sci-was said to have preached the gospel of silence in olists, who scorn the speaker's melancholy, and the forty volumes). Another advocate of stoical silence worldly, who scorn the faith of the monks. See his was the French poet Alfred de Vigny (1 797-1863). address to the "sons of the world" (lines 161�68). 4. Predecessors among the Romantic writers such 2. Until the death of Patroclus, he refused to par-as Byron. ticipate in the Trojan War; hence he is similar to 5. Region in Greece where Bvron died. modern intellectual leaders who refuse to speak 6. The Gulf of Spezia in Italy, where Percy Bysshe out about their frustrated sense of alienation. Shelley was drowned.


.


STANZAS FROM THE GRANDE CHARTREUSE / 137 3


145 Or are we easier, to have read, O Obermann!7 the sad, stern page,


Which tells us how thou hidd'st thy head


From the fierce tempest of thine age


In the lone brakes0 of Fontainebleau, thickets no Or chalets near the Alpine snow?


Ye slumber in your silent grave!


The world, which for an idle day


Grace to your mood of sadness gave, Long since hath flung her weeds0 away. mourning clothes 155 The eternal trifler8 breaks your spell;


But we�we learnt your lore too well! Years hence, perhaps, may dawn an age,


More fortunate, alas! than we,


Which without hardness will be sage,


160 And gay without frivolity. Sons of the world, oh, speed those years;


But, while we wait, allow our tears! Allow them! We admire with awe


The exulting thunder of your race;


165 You give the universe your law,


You triumph over time and space!


Your pride of life, your tireless powers,


We laud them, but they are not ours. We are like children reared in shade


i7o Beneath some old-world abbey wall,


Forgotten in a forest glade,


And secret from the eyes of all.


Deep, deep the greenwood round them waves,


Their abbey, and its close0 of graves! enclosure 175 But, where the road runs near the stream,


Oft through the trees they catch a glance


Of passing troops in the sun's beam�


Pennon, and plume, and flashing lance!


Forth to the world those soldiers fare,


i8o To life, to cities, and to war! And through the wood, another way,


Faint bugle notes from far are borne,


Where hunters gather, staghounds bay,


Round some fair forest-lodge at morn.


185 Gay dames are there, in sylvan green; Laughter and cries�those notes between!


7. Melancholy hero of Obermann (1804), a novel 8. The sciolist, as in line 99. by the French writer Etienne Senancour.


.


137 4 / MATTHEW ARNOLD


The banners flashing through the trees Make their blood dance and chain their eyes; That bugle music on the breeze


190 Arrests them with a charmed surprise. Banner by turns and bugle woo:


Ye shy recluses, follow too!


O children, what do ye reply?� "Action and pleasure, will ye roam


195 Through these secluded dells to cry And call us?�but too late ye come! Too late for us your call ye blow, Whose bent� was taken long ago. natural inclination


"Long since we pace this shadowed nave;


200 We watch those yellow tapers shine, Emblems of hope over the grave, In the high altar's depth divine; The organ carries to our ear Its accents of another sphere.9


205 "Fenced early in this cloistral round Of reverie, of shade, of prayer, How should we grow in other ground? How can we flower in foreign air? �Pass, banners, pass, and bugles, cease;


210 And leave our desert to its peace!"


1852(?) 1855


Preface to Poems (1853)


In two small volumes of poems, published anonymously, one in 1849, the other in 1852, many of the poems which compose the present volume have already appeared. The rest are now published for the first time.


I have, in the present collection, omitted the poem from which the volume published in 1852 took its title.1 I have done so, not because the subject of it was a Sicilian Greek born between two and three thousand years ago, although many persons would think this a sufficient reason. Neither have I done so because I had, in my own opinion, failed in the delineation which I intended


9. The organ music is From the abbey in the greenwood (line 174), as contrasted with the monastery on the mountaintop in which there is no organ (line 37). 1. Empedocles on Etna, the long poem that supplied the title for Arnold's second collection of poems, portrays the disillusioned reflections of the Greek philosopher and scientist Empedocles and culminates in the speaker's suicide on Mount Etna in Sicily, in the 5th century B.C.E . Because of his dissatisfaction with what he calls the "morbid" tone of Empedocles on Etna, Arnold continued to exclude it from his volumes of poetry until 1867, when he reprinted it at the request, he said, "of a man of genius, whom it had the honor and good fortune to interest�Mr. Robert Browning." It should be noted that in the arguments developed in the preface against his own poem (and against 19th-century poetry in general), Arnold is exclusively concerned with narrative and dramatic poetry. The preface, as he remarked in 1854, "leaves . . . untouched the question, how far, and in what manner, the opinions there expressed respecting the choice of subjects apply to lyric poetry; that region of the poetical Held which is chiefly cultivated at present."


.


PREFACE TO POEMS (1853) / 1 379


to effect. I intended to delineate the feelings of one of the last of the Greek


religious philosophers, one of the family of Orpheus and Musaeus,2 having


survived his fellows, living on into a time when the habits of Greek thought


and feeling had begun fast to change, character to dwindle, the influence of


the Sophists3 to prevail. Into the feelings of a man so situated there entered


much that we are accustomed to consider as exclusively modern; how much,


the fragments of Empedocles4 himself which remain to us are sufficient at


least to indicate. What those who are familiar only with the great monuments


of early Greek genius suppose to be its exclusive characteristics, have disap


peared; the calm, the cheerfulness, the disinterested objectivity have disap


peared; the dialogue of the mind with itself has commenced; modern problems


have presented themselves, we hear already the doubts, we witness the dis


couragement, of Hamlet and of Faust.5 The representation of such a man's feelings must be interesting, if consis


tently drawn. We all naturally take pleasure, says Aristotle, in any imitation or


representation whatever;6 this is the basis of our love of poetry; and we take


pleasure in them, he adds, because all knowledge is naturally agreeable to us;


not to the philosopher only, but to mankind at large. Every representation


therefore which is consistently drawn may be supposed to be interesting, inas


much as it gratifies this natural interest in knowledge of all kinds. What is not


interesting is that which does not add to our knowledge of any kind; that which


is vaguely conceived and loosely drawn; a representation which is general,


indeterminate, and faint, instead of being particular, precise, and firm. Any accurate representation may therefore be expected to be interesting;


but, if the representation be a poetical one, more than this is demanded. It is


demanded, not only that it shall interest, but also that it shall inspirit and


rejoice the reader; that it shall convey a charm, and infuse delight. For the


muses, as Hesiod says, were born that they might be "a forgetfulness of evils,


and a truce from cares":7 and it is not enough that the poet should add to the


knowledge of men, it is required of him also that he should add to their hap


piness. "All art," says Schiller, "is dedicated to Joy, and there is no higher and


no more serious problem, than how to make men happy. The right art is that


alone, which creates the highest enjoyment."8 A poetical work, therefore, is not yet justified when it has been shown to be


an accurate, and therefore interesting representation; it has to be shown also


that it is a representation from which men can derive enjoyment. In presence


of the most tragic circumstances, represented in a work of Art, the feeling of


enjoyment, as is well known, may still subsist; the representation of the most


utter calamity, of the liveliest anguish, is not sufficient to destroy it; the more


tragic the situation, the deeper becomes the enjoyment; and the situation is


more tragic in proportion as it becomes more terrible.


What then are the situations, from the representation of which, though


2. Pupil of the poet and musician Orpheus. The many stories and folktales, and later the hero of latter was the legendary founder of the Orphic reli-the plays by Christopher Marlowe (1604) and gion that flourished in 6th-century B.C.E. Greece Goethe (1808-32). and later declined. 6. See Aristotle's Poetics, especially I, 2, 4, 7, 14. 3. Greek rhetoricians, often criticized because of 7. From Theogony 52�56, by the Greek poet their reputed emphasis on winning arguments Hesiod (ca. 700 B.C.E.). rather than on truth or knowledge. 8. J. C. F. von Schiller's "On the Use of the Cho4. Empedocles' writings (medical and scientific rus in Tragedy," prefatory essay to The Bride of treatises in verse) have survived only in fragments. Messina (1803). Schiller (1759-1805) was a 5. Johann Faustus (ca. 1480�ca. 1540), a German German poet, playwright, and critic; see Friedrich teacher and magician who became the subject of Schiller's Works (1903) 8.224.


.


137 6 / MATTHEW ARNOLD


accurate, no poetical enjoyment can be derived? They are those in which the


suffering finds no vent in action; in which a continuous state of mental distress


is prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope, or resistance; in which there is


everything to be endured, nothing to be done. In such situations there is inev


itably something morbid, in the description of them something monotonous.


When they occur in actual life, they are painful, not tragic; the representation


of them in poetry is painful also. To this class of situations, poetically faulty as it appears to me, that of


Empedocles, as I have endeavored to represent him, belongs; and I have


therefore excluded the poem from the present collection.


And why, it may be asked, have I entered into this explanation respecting a


matter so unimportant as the admission or exclusion of the poem in question?


I have done so, because I was anxious to avow that the sole reason for its


exclusion was that which has been stated above; and that it has not been


excluded in deference to the opinion which many critics of the present day


appear to entertain against subjects chosen from distant times and countries:


against the choice, in short, of any subjects but modern ones. "The poet," it is said, and by an intelligent critic, "the poet who would really


fix the public attention must leave the exhausted past, and draw his subjects


from matters of present import, and therefore both of interest and novelty."9


Now this view I believe to be completely false. It is worth examining, inas


much as it is a fair sample of a class of critical dicta everywhere current at the


present day, having a philosophical form and air, but no real basis in fact; and


which are calculated to vitiate the judgment of readers of poetry, while they


exert, so far as they are adopted, a misleading influence on the practice of


those who write it. What are the eternal objects of poetry, among all nations and at all times?


They are actions; human actions; possessing an inherent interest in them


selves, and which are to be communicated in an interesting manner by the art


of the poet.1 Vainly will the latter imagine that he has everything in his own


power; that he can make an intrinsically inferior action equally delightful with


a more excellent one by his treatment of it; he may indeed compel us to admire


his skill, but his work will possess, within itself, an incurable defect. The poet, then, has in the first place to select an excellent action; and what


actions are the most excellent? Those, certainly, which most powerfully appeal


to the great primary human affections: to those elementary feelings which


subsist permanently in the race, and which are independent of time. These


feelings are permanent and the same; that which interests them is permanent


and the same also. The modernness or antiquity of an action, therefore, has


nothing to do with its fitness for poetical representation; this depends upon


its inherent qualities. To the elementary part of our nature, to our passions,


that which is great and passionate is eternally interesting; and interesting


solely in proportion to its greatness and to its passion. A great human action


of a thousand years ago is more interesting to it than a smaller human action


of today, even though upon the representation of this last the most consum


mate skill may have been expended, and though it has the advantage of appeal


ing by its modern language, familiar manners, and contemporary allusions, to


all our transient feelings and interests. These, however, have no right to


9. In the Spectator of April 2nd, 1 853. The words "intelligent critic" was R. S. Rintoul, editor of the quoted were not used with reference to poems of Spectator. mine [Arnold's note]. According to Arnold, the 1. Cf. Aristotle's Poetics 6.


.


PREFACE TO POEMS (1853) / 1 379


demand of a poetical work that it shall satisfy them; their claims are to be


directed elsewhere. Poetical works belong to the domain of our permanent


passions; let them interest these, and the voice of all subordinate claims upon


them is at once silenced.


Achilles, Prometheus, Clytemnestra, Dido�what modern poem presents


personages as interesting, even to us moderns, as these personages of an


"exhausted past"? We have the domestic epic dealing with the details of mod


ern life which pass daily under our eyes;2 we have poems representing modern


personages in contact with the problems of modern life, moral, intellectual,


and social; these works have been produced by poets the most distinguished


of their nation and time; yet I fearlessly assert that Hermann and Dorothea,


Childe Harold, Jocelyn, The Excursion,3 leave the reader cold in comparison


with the effect produced upon him by the latter books of the Iliad, by the


Oresteia, or by the episode of Dido.4 And why is this? Simply because in the


three last-named cases the action is greater, the personages nobler, the situ


ations more intense: and this is the true basis of the interest in a poetical work,


and this alone. It may be urged, however, that past actions may be interesting in themselves,


but that they are not to be adopted by the modern poet, because it is impossible


for him to have them clearly present to his own mind, and he cannot therefore


feel them deeply, nor represent them forcibly. But this is not necessarily the


case. The externals of a past action, indeed, he cannot know with the precision


of a contemporary; but his business is with its essentials. The outward man of


Oedipus or of Macbeth, the houses in which they lived, the ceremonies of


their courts, he cannot accurately figure to himself; but neither do they essen


tially concern him. His business is with their inward man; with their feelings


and behavior in certain tragic situations, which engage their passions as men;


these have in them nothing local and casual; they are as accessible to the


modern poet as to a contemporary. The date of an action, then, signifies nothing: the action itself, its selection


and construction, this is what is all-important. This the Greeks understood far


more clearly than we do. The radical difference between their poetical theory


and ours consists, as it appears to me, in this: that, with them, the poetical


character of the action in itself, and the conduct of it, was the first consider


ation; with us, attention is fixed mainly on the value of the separate thoughts


and images which occur in the treatment of an action. They regarded the


whole; we regard the parts. With them, the action predominated over the


expression of it; with us, the expression predominates over the action. Not that


they failed in expression, or were inattentive to it; on the contrary, they are


the highest models of expression, the unapproached masters of the grand style:


but their expression is so excellent because it is so admirably kept in its right


degree of prominence; because it is so simple and so well subordinated;


because it draws its force directly from the pregnancy of the matter which it


conveys. For what reason was the Greek tragic poet confined to so limited a


range of subjects? Because there are so few actions which unite in themselves,


in the highest degree, the conditions of excellence: and it was not thought that


2. Perhaps alluding to poems such as Tennyson's William Wordsworth (1814), respectively. The Princess (1847) and Alexander Smith's Life 4. See Virgil's Aeneid, book 4. Oresteia: a trilogy Drama (1853) or to the modern novel. of plays by Aeschylus that tells the story of Aga3. Long poems hv Goethe (1797), Rvron (1818), memnon's murder by his wife, Clytemnestra, and Alphonse-Marie-Louis de Lamartine (1836), and the vengeance taken by their son, Orestes.


.


137 8 / MATTHEW ARNOLD


on any but an excellent subject could an excellent poem be constructed. A few


actions, therefore, eminently adapted for tragedy, maintained almost exclusive


possession of the Greek tragic stage; their significance appeared inexhaustible;


they were as permanent problems, perpetually offered to the genius of every


fresh poet. This too is the reason of what appears to us moderns a certain


baldness of expression in Greek tragedy; of the triviality with which we often


reproach the remarks of the chorus, where it takes part in the dialogue: that


the action itself, the situation of Orestes, or Merope, or Alcmaeon,5 was to


stand the central point of interest, unforgotten, absorbing, principal; that no


accessories were for a moment to distract the spectator's attention from this;


that the tone of the parts was to be perpetually kept down, in order not to


impair the grandiose effect of the whole. The terrible6 old mythic story on


which the drama was founded stood, before he entered the theater, traced in


its bare outlines upon the spectator's mind; it stood in his memory, as a group


of statuary, faintly seen, at the end of a long and dark vista: then came the


poet, embodying outlines, developing situations, not a word wasted, not a


sentiment capriciously thrown in: stroke upon stroke, the drama proceeded:


the light deepened upon the group; more and more it revealed itself to the


riveted gaze of the spectator: until at last, when the final words were spoken,


it stood before him in broad sunlight, a model of immortal beauty. This was what a Greek critic demanded; this was what a Greek poet endeav


ored to effect. It signified nothing to what time an action belonged; we do not


find that the Persae occupied a particularly high rank among the dramas of


Aeschylus, because it represented a matter of contemporary interest:7 this was


not what a cultivated Athenian required, he required that the permanent ele


ments of his nature should be moved; and dramas of which the action, though


taken from a long-distant mythic time, yet was calculated to accomplish this


in a higher degree than that of the Persae, stood higher in his estimation


accordingly. The Greeks felt, no doubt, with their exquisite sagacity of taste,


that an action of present times was too near them, too much mixed up with


what was accidental and passing, to form a sufficiently grand, detached, and


self-subsistent object for a tragic poem: such objects belonged to the domain


of the comic poet, and of the lighter kinds of poetry. For the more serious


kinds, for pragmatic poetry, to use an excellent expression of Polybius,8 they


were more difficult and severe in the range of subjects which they permitted.


Their theory and practice alike, the admirable treatise of Aristotle, and the


unrivaled works of their poets, exclaim with a thousand tongues�"All depends


upon the subject; choose a fitting action, penetrate yourself with the feeling


of its situations; this done, everything else will follow." But for all kinds of poetry alike there was one point on which they were


rigidly exacting; the adaptability of the subject to the kind of poetry selected,


and the careful construction of the poem.


How different a way of thinking from this is ours! We can hardly at the


present day understand what Menander9 meant when he told a man who


inquired as to the progress of his comedy that he had finished it, not having


5. The son of a legendary Greek hero, who, like 7. Aeschylus's Persians (472 B.C.E.) portrays the Orestes, avenged his father's death by killing his Greek victory over the Persian invaders, which had mother. He was the subject of several Greek plays occurred only a few years before the play was pro- now lost. Merope. queen of Messene in Greece, duced. appears in plays by Euripides and in Arnold's own 8. Greek historian (ca. 200-ca. 118 b.c.e.). play Merope (1858). 9. Greek writer of comedies (ca. 342�ca. 292 6. Terrifying, awe-inspiring. B.C.E.).


.


PREFACE TO POEMS (1853) / 1 379


yet written a single line, because he had constructed the action of it in his


mind. A modern critic would have assured him that the merit of his piece


depended on the brilliant things which arose under his pen as he went along.


We have poems which seem to exist merely for the sake of single lines and


passages; not for the sake of producing any total impression. We have critics


who seem to direct their attention merely to detached expressions, to the lan


guage about the action, not to the action itself, I verily think that the majority


of them do not in their hearts believe that there is such a thing as a total


impression to be derived from a poem at all, or to be demanded from a poet;


they think the term a commonplace of metaphysical criticism. They will permit


the poet to select any action he pleases, and to suffer that action to go as it


will, provided he gratifies them with occasional bursts of fine writing, and with


a shower of isolated thoughts and images. That is, they permit him to leave


their poetical sense ungratified, provided that he gratifies their rhetorical sense


and their curiosity. Of his neglecting to gratify these, there is little danger. He


needs rather to be warned against the danger of attempting to gratify these


alone; he needs rather to be perpetually reminded to prefer his action to every


thing else; so to treat this, as to permit its inherent excellences to develop


themselves, without interruption from the intrusion of his personal peculiar


ities; most fortunate, when he most entirely succeeds in effacing himself, and


in enabling a noble action to subsist as it did in nature. But the modern critic not only permits a false practice; he absolutely pre


scribes false aims.�"A true allegory of the state of one's own mind in a rep


resentative history," the poet is told, "is perhaps the highest thing that one can


attempt in the way of poetry."' And accordingly he attempts it. An allegory of


the state of one's own mind, the highest problem of an art which imitates


actions! No assuredly, it is not, it never can be so: no great poetical work has


ever been produced with such an aim. Faust itself, in which something of the


kind is attempted, wonderful passages as it contains, and in spite of the unsur


passed beauty of the scenes which relate to Margaret, Faust itself, judged as


a whole, and judged strictly as a poetical work, is defective: its illustrious


author, the greatest poet of modern times, the greatest critic of all times, would


have been the first to acknowledge it; he only defended his work, indeed, by


asserting it to be "something incommensurable."2 The confusion of the present times is great, the multitude of voices coun

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