Visions and Revisions by John Cowper Powys

Author:John Cowper Powys
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: British Literature, Essays, Literary Criticism, Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780912568133
Publisher: Dodo Press
Published: 1915-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

MATTHEW ARNOLD

It is easy to miss the especial grandeur of Matthew Arnold's work. The airy persiflage of his prose—its reiterated lucidities—pleasing to some, irritating to others, will have a place, but not a very important place, in English Literature. Even those magical and penetrating "aphorisms" with which he has held the door open to so many religious and moral vistas tease us a little now, and—suggestive enough in their hour—do not deepen and deepen upon the intellect with the weight of "aphorisms" from Epictetus or Goethe.

The "stream of tendency that makes for righteousness" runs a little shallow, and it has so many pebbles under its clear wave! That word of his, "the Secret of Jesus," wears best of all. It was a happy thought to use the word "secret"—a thought upon which those whose religious creed binds them to "the method" rather than "the secret," may well ponder!

As a critic, too, though illuminating and reassuring, he is far from clairvoyant. A quaint vein of pure, good-tempered, ethical Philistinism prevents his really entering the evasive souls of Shelley or Keats or Heine. With Wordsworth or Byron he is more at home. But he misses many subtleties, even in their simple temperaments. He is no Proteus, no Wizard of critical metempsychosis. For all his airy wit, he is "a plain, blunt man, who loves his friend." In fact, when one compares him, as a sheer illuminator of psychological twilights, to Walter Pater, one realizes at once how easily a quite great man may "render himself stupid" by sprinkling himself with the holy water of Fixed Principles!

No, it is neither of Arnold, the Theological Free-Lance, or of Arnold, the Critic of Literature, that I want to speak, but of Arnold, the Poet.

Personally I hold the opinion that he was a greater poet than either Tennyson or Browning. His philosophy is a far nobler, truer, and more permanent thing than theirs, and there are passages and single lines in his poetry which over-top, by enormous distances, anything that they achieved.

You ask me what the Philosophy of Matthew Arnold was? It is easy to answer that. It was the philosophy of all the very greatest among mortal men! In his poetry he passes completely out of the region of Theological argument, and his attitude to life is the attitude of Sophocles and Virgil and Montaigne and Cervantes and Shakespeare and Goethe. Those who read Matthew Arnold, and love him, know that his intellectual tone is the tone of those great classical writers, and his conclusions their conclusions.

He never mocks our pain with foolish, unfounded hopes and he never permits mad despair to paralyse him. He takes life as it is, and, as we all have to do, makes the best of its confusions. If we are here "as on a darkling plain, swept by confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night," we can at least be "true to one another."

One wonders sometimes if it be properly understood by energetic teachers

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