March 3rd, 1933
“The rise of the democracy to power in America and Europe is not, as has been hoped, to be a safeguard of peace and civilization. It is the rise of the uncivilized, whom no school education can suffice to provide with intelligence and reason. It looks as if the world were entering upon a new stage of experience, unlike anything heretofore, in which there must be a new discipline of suffering to fit men for the new conditions.”
I have quoted the foregoing words, partly because they are by Norton 2* and partly because they are not by Arnold. The first two sentences might well be Arnold’s. But the third – “a new stage of experience, unlike anything heretofore, in which there must be a new discipline of suffering”: these words are not only not Arnold’s, but we know at once that they could not have been written by him. Arnold hardly looks ahead to the new stage of experience; and though he speaks to us of discipline, it is the discipline of culture, not the discipline of suffering. Arnold represents a period of stasis; of relative and precarious stability, it is true, a brief halt in the endless march of humanity in some, or in any direction. Arnold is neither a reactionary nor a revolutionary; he marks a period of time, as do Dryden and Johnson before him.
Even if the delight we get from Arnold’s writings, prose and verse, be moderate, yet he is in some respects the most satisfactory man of letters of his age. You remember the famous judgement which he pronounced upon the poets of the epoch which I have just been considering; a judgement which, at its time, must have appeared startlingly independent. “The English poetry of the first quarter of this century,” he says in his essay on “The Function of Criticism,” “with plenty of energy, plenty of creative force, did not know enough.” 3 We should be right too, I think, if we added that Carlyle, Ruskin, Tennyson, Browning, with plenty of energy, plenty of creative force, had not enough wisdom. Their culture was not always well-rounded; their knowledge of the human soul was often partial and often shallow. Arnold was not a man of vast or exact scholarship, and he had neither walked in hell nor been rapt to heaven; but what he did know, of books and men, was in its way well-balanced and well-marshalled. After the prophetic frensies of the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, he seems to come to us saying: “This poetry is very fine, it is opulent and careless, it is sometimes profound, it is highly original; but you will never establish and maintain a tradition if you go on in this haphazard way. There are minor virtues which have flourished better at other times and in other countries: these you must give heed to, these you must apply, in your poetry, in your prose, in your conversation and your way of living; else you condemn yourselves to enjoy only fitful and transient bursts of literary brilliance, and you will never, as a people, a nation, a race, have a fully formed tradition and personality.” However well-nourished we may be on previous literature and previous culture, we cannot afford to neglect Arnold.
I have elsewhere tried to point out some of Arnold’s weaknesses when he ventured into departments of thought for which his mind was unsuited and ill-equipped. In philosophy and theology he was an undergraduate; in religion a Philistine. 4 It is a pleasanter task to define a man’s limitations within the field in which he is qualified; for there, the definition of limitation may be at the same time a precision of the writer’s excellences. Arnold’s poetry has little technical interest. It is academic poetry in the best sense; the best fruit which can issue from the promise shown by the prize-poem. 5 When he is not simply...
