15 April: Boreham on Matthew Arnold

A Packet of Paradox
Our thoughts turn naturally today to Matthew Arnold. It was on the fifteenth of April that his career so suddenly closed. Arnold could have posed as a Greek philosopher. He looked the part, and all his life he acted it. We all seem to have seen him. His handsome and commanding figure, always immaculately attired; his erect and elegant bearing; his cultured and finely-chiselled face; his raven-black hair which never became grey; his clear, blue eye which seemed to penetrate your very soul; his soft, persuasive and yet half-melancholy voice—these are numbered among those familiar personal impressions which go so far towards endearing to us the classical figures of our literary history. Like Shakespeare and Johnson and Dickens and Stevenson, he is easily visualised. The name is mentioned, and, to the mind's eye, the man instantly appears.

But that is as far as familiarity can go. To most people Arnold is a packet of paradox, a bundle of contradictions, a baffling and insoluble enigma. He seems at pains to keep us at arm's length. We do not yield him our hearts as we yield them to Lamb, Burns, Byron, and a host of others. He strikes us as statuesque. He is cold, aloof, distant, and tantalisingly elusive. Just when we flatter ourselves that we have learned at last to understand him, he startles us and checks our shy approach by some contradictory quality which plunges us once more into uttermost bewilderment. It was his cruel fate to be everlastingly falling between two stools. He was too much of a visionary to be an acute and exact philosopher; yet too much of a philosopher to be a really frenzied and rapturous dreamer. He was too critical to be highly imaginative; yet too imaginative to be accurately and scientifically critical. He was too conservative to be a pioneer; yet too restless and adventurous to conform tamely to the ancient standards. He was too proud and too independent to imitate; yet too much saturated in the thought of the great masters to be arrestingly original. He spent most of his time in vigorously contradicting himself.

Heir To A Stately Tradition
The eldest son of Arnold of Rugby, the most famous and most venerated schoolmaster of all time, Matthew Arnold was the soul of sincerity; yet, by some weird irony of circumstance, he somehow led his contemporaries to suspect that he was perpetually posing. To his fine mind, anything that savoured of foppishness was utterly repugnant; yet many of his most intimate acquaintances thought him guilty of affectation. His monocle, exaggerated by the cartoonists, stressed this unfortunate impression. He came to be regarded as a superior person, a critical coxcomb, a literary dandy. He was painfully, almost pathetically, aware of the personal oddities and peculiarities that led to his being so regarded. In introducing his wife to a friend, he remarked: "You will like her, she has all my graces and none of my airs!" He knew to his cost that his airs neutralised the charm of his graces. People resented the way in which he seemed to be talking down at them, lecturing them, correcting them, instructing them, and, in a condescending way, assuming the style of one who is trying hard to bear with his inferiors.

It goes without saying that Arnold had too fine a mind and too choice a spirit to be as self-opinionated as he often appeared. Yet, since every man is responsible, not only for the character that he develops but for the general impression that his personality conveys, it is impossible to pronounce over Arnold an unqualified acquittal.

Simplicity Concealed By Complexity
Happily, the blemishes which disfigure his work appear only in his prose, and, after all, it is not by his prose that Arnold will be remembered. His memory is kept alive by his poems. The delicate and subtle beauty of many of his stanzas is incomparable. His verse reveals the classic calm of his own inscrutable self. Perhaps he would have written even greater poetry if he had not been a professor of poetry. There are some things that are best done unconsciously. It is difficult to look natural in a photographer's studio and to breathe regularly when asked so to do. The best poets knew very little about the technique of poesy. Arnold knew too much. His critical faculties impeded the prophetic fire. And yet, to borrow his own words, we feel that

A fever in these pages burns,
Beneath the calm they feign;
A wounded human
spirit turns
Here, on its bed of pain.

Like his illustrious father, and like his grandfather, he died very suddenly of heart failure. He had gone to Liverpool to meet his daughter on her return from America. The guest of his brother-in-law, Mr. Cropper, he went with the family, on the Sunday morning to hear the celebrated Dr. John Watson, better known as Ian Maclaren, at Sefton Park. Dr. Watson preached on The Shadow of the Cross and used an illustration borrowed from the records of the Riviera earthquake. In one village, he said, everything was overthrown but the huge wayside crucifix, and to it the people, feeling the very earth shuddering beneath their feet, rushed for shelter and protection. The service closed with the singing of "When I Survey the Wondrous Cross." As he came down to lunch half an hour later, a servant heard him crooning the words softly to himself. "Yes," he observed at table, after referring to the earthquake story and the hymn, "the Cross remains, and, in the straits of the soul, makes its ancient appeal." Coming from one whose soul was supposed to be as crystalline and cold as ice, and whose mind was regarded as exclusively analytical, and by no means emotional, the words arrested his hearers. He rose from the table, glanced at his watch, hurried out of the house, and, in running to catch a tram, collapsed and was gone. The record of that last hour of his memorable life is worth recalling whenever we attempt to weave the incongruous strands of his baffling personality into a harmonious web.

F W Boreham

Image: Matthew Arnold