Some Biographical Studies

BOOKS NEW AND OLD.

IT was Matthew Arnold’s stated wish that he should not be made the subject of a biography, and occasion for totally disregarding his preference has not yet arisen. Sensitive men naturally shrink from the possibility of post-mortem exposure. They do not make a point of being thrust into the ground and forgotten ; but they wish to be disposed of decently, and, so far as private life is concerned, to be disposed of wholly. It is good to be immortal in one’s greatness, but it is not good that one’s frail mortality, however comely, should lie embalmed under the general eye. Yet the curiosity of the world in these matters is not altogether idle ; it is founded on a sturdy belief, favorably reported upon by experience, that the facts of private life do really throw light upon the facts of public achievement. A great man cannot quite will himself away privately, for the world knows itself to be his rightful legatee, and is pretty sure to come to its own sooner or later. We may yet be given the last detail about Arnold.

I.

His published letters were deprived of their more intimate touches under the strict censorship of his family. Their editor, deploring the fact that such treatment of them seemed necessary, yet considers them “ the nearest approach to a narrative of Arnold’s life which can, consistently with his wishes, be given to the world.” In his present book ¹ Mr. Russell makes no attempt to supplement the personal information which the letters afforded. Nor is it his purpose to offer a fresh estimate of Arnold’s work from the purely literary point of view. “ I do not aim,” he prefaces, “ at a criticism of the verbal medium through which a great master uttered his heart and mind, but rather at a survey of the effect which he produced on the thought and action of his age.” The ensuing study is admirable for its scrupulous moderation, its breadth, its directness, — its fitness to be called criticism in Arnold’s sense of the word. Its historical method is consistent with the adopted attitude toward Arnold as a man of the hour. It considers the kind and the extent of authority which Arnold came to exercise as a critic of national life. It does not claim infallibility for his specific judgments. On the contrary, Mr. Russell is careful to suggest the fallacy or incompletion of many of the critic’s theories. He notes that Arnold’s politics were “rather fantastic ; ” that his theories of educational reform stopped short of the public school and the university ; and that his objections to generally received dogmas were, for the most part, based upon dogmas of his own. But these, we are shown, are matters of comparatively little moment. Arnold’s service was to present to his generation certain ideals of culture, certain principles of conduct. He suggested a point of view from which others in common with him might have, not a certainty, but a fairest possible chance, of discernment. There is hardly a more invidious office than that of the critic of national life. He must find some ideal ground of vantage; he must keep aloof upon it; he must be meek and fearless ; and for reward the majority will charge him with bias, or fastidiousness, or addiction to theory. What, in the face of such difficulties, Arnold accomplished as advocate of conduct through culture is Mr. Russell’s theme. Belief in the perfectibility of human conduct is, indeed, the first article in Arnold’s creed. For his own generation, culture was the specific instrument which he found it well to recommend, but he never ceased to declare that conduct was three fourths of life. It is accordingly in the chapters on Society and Conduct that we find the best substance of the present study.

In the end Mr. Russell does not resist the impulse to insert a sketch of Arnold’s intimate personality ; a sketch worth the attention of those who, puzzled by Arnold’s ironies or niceties, imagine him to have been a cold or supercilious person : “ ‘ Never,’ as Mr. John Morley said, ‘ shall we know again so blithe and friendly a spirit.’ As we think of him, the endearing traits come crowding on the memory, — his gracious presence, his joy in fresh air and bodily exercise, his merry interest in his friends’ concerns, his love of children, his kindness to animals, his absolute freedom from bitterness, rancor, or envy ; his unstinted admiration of beauty or cleverness.” . . .

It chances that another study of Arnold has just appeared,² which is undertaken in a similar spirit. It has, that is, more to say of the public censor than of the man or the man of letters. Mr. Dawson, however, is concerned with what Arnold means to the present and the future rather than to the past. He wishes, moreover, “ to give unity to Arnold’s ideas and theories, to his admonitions and warnings. For the Voice still cries, and it cries in the wilderness.” The author’s treatment of this theme possesses unity, but not proportion. More than half his space is given to the discussion of Arnold’s theological writings, though the critic expressly states his belief that they are “ on the whole the least necessary and the least serviceable part of his literary work.” These chapters might well have made a book by themselves ; they bulk too large in a study of Arnold’s total effectiveness. Mr. Dawson’s style is not obscure, but stiff and unwieldy. His habit of very full quotation makes of the book a kind of ordered thesaurus of Arnold’s best passages. But it is more than this, for if the writer has no novel interpretation to offer, he has a serviceable one. “If,” he says, “ one were to attempt to summarize in a single phrase the ideal which Arnold sought to realize, and in a rare degree succeeded in realizing, that phrase would be ' the balance of life.’ . . . The man who confessed that the best his intellect knew was drawn from the thought of pagan antiquity, yet nursed in his breast a moral code as stern and austere as that of Hebrew prophet.”

II.

What Arnold was to the prophecy of conduct, Newman was to the prophecy of faith. To Arnold religion was “ morality touched by emotion ; ” to Newman it was “ an assertion of what we are to believe ... a message, a history, or a vision.” Moreover, by Newman’s creed, conduct “ flows not from inferences, but from impressions, — not from reasonings, but from Faith.” In his Oxford days, Arnold himself came under the influence of tbe great mystic, and remembered the experience with tenderness, as the well-known passage in the address on Emerson attests : “ Who could resist the charm of that spiritual apparition, gliding in the dim afternoon light through the aisles of St. Mary’s, rising into the pulpit, and then, in the most entrancing of voices, breaking the silence with words and thoughts which were a religious music — subtle, sweet, mournful ? I seem to hear him still.” But Arnold had no sympathy with the step which gave supreme expression to Newman’s inner life : “ He has adopted for the doubts and difficulties which beset men’s minds to-day a solution which, to speak frankly, is impossible.”

Newman’s present biographer is not inclined to dispose so summarily of that career. His interpretation of it³ is an achievement of rare sympathy and skill. He discerns at the base of Newman’s character “ a marvelous sensibility, without which he could never have thrown himself into minds unlike his own, or have acquired the exquisite delicacy of touch that renders thought as if it were the painter’s landscape spread out before him in light and shade. . . . Imagination, with Newman, was reason, as with Carlyle, Wordsworth, Goethe, and Shakespeare, — not the bare mechanical process that grinds out conclusions from letters of the alphabet, in what is at best a luminous void, but the swift, sudden grasp of an explorer, making his way from crag to crag, under him the raging sea, above him sure ground and deliverance.” To such a sense Culture, with all its claims, could not offer a straight road toward perfection ; the only safety lay in the message of Revelation. It is plain that Arnold could not quite forgive the cardinal’s indifference to “ the Zeitgeist,” that object of his own almost superstitious reverence. Newman’s reverence was for the Eternal Spirit, and for the institution which he took to be its earthly embodiment. Dr. Barry’s book reinforces one’s conviction that Newman was not only the purest product of a remarkable reactionary movement, but a true prophet of the immemorial and the unseen.

One notes that in literary theory and practice these two sons of Oxford had not a little in common. Both, regarding literature as a means rather than an end, worked through it, not for it. “ People think I can teach them style,” said Arnold. “ What stuff it all is! Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style.” — “ Can they really think,” writes Newman, “ that Homer, or Pindar, or Shakespeare, or Dryden, or Walter Scott were accustomed to aim at style for its own sake, instead of being inspired with their subject, and pouring forth beautiful words because they had beautiful thoughts ? This is surely too great a paradox to be borne. . . . The artist has his great or rich visions before him; and his only aim is to bring out what he thinks or what he feels in a way adequate to the thing spoken of, and appropriate to the speaker.”

It promises much that the two books by Mr. Russell and Dr. Barry should be the first numbers of a new biographical series. The scale is a trifle larger than that of the English Men of Letters Series, and the volumes are considerably larger. The numerous portraits inserted do not appear to augment sensibly the value of the text.

III.

The nineteenth century underwent much stern discipline at the hands of its great men. There was Newman’s sword of the spirit for its infidelity, Arnold’s intellectual rapier for its Philistinism, and Carlyle’s inspired cudgel for its materialism. Perhaps the cudgel-play was relished least of all; the offender has certainly been sufficiently maltreated in effigy since the period of his offense. The ill-savor of the Froude affair seems to have lingered in the public nostril quite long enough. We may be grateful that the newly published letters ⁴ are not made an occasion of further controversy. These volumes are by way of sequel to Professor Norton’s collection ; and a large part of the letters here printed were chosen by him. One understands that a considerable mass of correspondence still remains, from which, doubtless, a further gleaning may some time be made. The quality of the present selection indicates no thinning of the strain, though it serves to confirm rather than to modify our impression of the writer. The continued flow of valetudinary data (hardly to be equaled unless in Mrs. Carlyle’s letters) we might be happier without ; it would be pleasant to think of that strong spirit as not always on the rack of physical anguish. But this is a price we must pay for our admission into the most intimate relations with him. A very large proportion of these letters are addressed to his wife, his mother, or his brother. Of the detailed chat about his plans and his work there is much, and none too much. Of general matter, as purely literary, as purely the fruit of his genius as anything which he wrote to be printed, there is a great deal. There are passages of unmerciful self-criticism, — a series of them, apropos of the French Revolution, might easily be collected. “ Heigho! ” he sighs when his task is half done. “ It seems as if I were enchanted [enchained ?] to this sad Book : peace in the world there will be none for me till I have it done. And then very generally it seems the miserablest mooncalf of a book ; full of Ziererei, affectation (do what I will) ; tumbling headforemost through all manner of established rules. And no money to be had for it ; and no value that I can count on of any kind: simply the blessedness of being done with it! ” As it is going through the press he says yet more sternly: " I find ’on a general view ’ that the Book is one of the savagest written for several centuries : it is a Book written by a wild man, a man disunited from the fellowship of the world he lives in ; looking King and beggar in the face with an indifference of brotherhood, an indifference of contempt, — that is really very extraordinary in a respectable country. ... A wild man; — pray God only it be aman ! And then buff away ; smite and spare not: the thing you can kill, I say always, deserves not to live.”

The letters yield many notable additions to the gallery of portraits which the world owes to Carlyle. Here is a sketch at first sight of the poet Rogers, of whom Carlyle later makes more than one gentle mention : “ A half-frozen old sardonic Whig-Gentleman : no hair at all, but one of the whitest bare scalps, blue eyes, shrewd, sad and cruel; toothless horse-shoe mouth drawn up to the very nose ; slow - croaking, sarcastic insight, perfect breeding ; state-rooms where you are welcomed even with flummery ; internally a Bluebeard’s chamber, where none but the proprietor enters ! ” And here is “ American Webster : ” “ A terrible, beetle-browed, mastiff-mouthed, yellow - skinned, broad - bottomed, grimtaciturn individual; with a pair of dullcruel-looking black eyes, and as much Parliamentary intellect and silent-rage in him, I think, as I have ever seen in any man.”

There are, moreover, innumerable passages expressing that mood of passionate quandary which characterizes so much of Carlyle’s work. “ Curious : there is a work which we here and now could best of all do ; that were the thing of things for us to set about doing. But alas, what is it ? A advises one thing, B another thing, C, still more resolutely, a third thing ! The whole Human Species actually or virtually advise all manner of things ; and our own vote, which were the soul of all votes, the word where all else are hearsays, lies deepburied, drowned in outer noises, too difficult to come at! ” On the whole, the earlier letters are of the greater interest, but readers who have really experienced Carlyle will value all of them.

IV.

These letters complete what their editor calls the “ Epistolary Autobiography ” of Carlyle. Mr. Brown’s life of John Addington Symonds, which has recently been reprinted,⁵ was prepared by a modification of this method. Symonds’s Autobiography, like Carlyle’s Reminiscences, is tinged with the sombreness inherent in the recollections of most men who have passed their prime. Symonds himself said, “No autobiographical resumption of facts, after the lapse of twenty-five years, is equal in veracity to contemporary records.” Mr. Brown, sharing this opinion, effected a skillful composition of materials drawn from the autobiography, letters, diaries, and notebooks which on Symonds’s death came into his hands. Compilation is altogether too modest a word for the result, as the editor’s interpolated fragments of narrative and comment are by no means the least valuable parts of the whole. Symonds perhaps represented quite as distinct a type of Oxford culture as either Arnold or Newman. He had something of Arnold’s intellectual curiosity without his power of coming to conclusions, something of Newman’s religious aspiration without his faith. His ample means, his ill-health, his extreme impressionableness, united in exposing him to dilettanteism, but he weathered the exposure. He was not a genius, but his talent was of the first order, and he made the most of it, in the face of his various disabilities. He was painfully aware of his shortcomings of temperament and endowment ; the victim of an emotional skepticism which he looked upon with loathing, of a creative impotence which caused him the keenest chagrin : “ Why do I say, ' Lord, Lord,’ and do not ? Here is my essential weakness. I wish and cannot will. I feel intensely, I perceive quickly, sympathize with all I see, or hear, or read. To emulate things nobler than myself is my desire. But I cannot get beyond — create, originate, win Heaven by prayers and faith, have trust in God, and concentrate myself upon an end of action. Skepticism is my spirit.” A frock-coated Hamlet! one might exclaim, taking such passages as this overseriously. They represent Symonds at his worst; what he was at his best, the record of his friendships, of his joys, of his labors abundantly shows : not a great man, but certainly not an ineffectual man.

Another striking figure of the near past has been thrown into the foreground, for American readers, at least, by a biography of the hour.⁶ General Armstrong stood for much that was best in our mid-century phase, and it is good to have so careful a study of him as the present book affords. His was a character at quite the opposite pole from that of Symonds. He was essentially a man of action, alert, resolute, direct. He possessed abounding vitality, a reliable instinct for duty, a preference for rough tasks. His brief academic experience was interrupted by the war. Thenceforth it was his business to act, not to study. His mind did not lack soil for intellectual cultivation, but it was destined for a ruder tillage. From boyhood his impulse was to cast himself into the first breach, and, once in, to stay till there was no more work for him to do there. “ Missionary or pirate ” was his own boyish prophecy, and a missionary he turned out to be. He was not a man of one idea, but he was a man of one aim. To edit a Hawaiian newspaper, to lead his black regiment in a desperate charge at Gettysburg, to put up a new building at Hampton, — any one of these activities was capable of absorbing all his powers. Life was a struggle which he thoroughly enjoyed, and he was never beaten. Here is a brief expression of his creed, uttered at the very inception of the Hampton enterprise. He does not minimize the difficulties before him, but declines to take the possibility of failure into consideration : “ The enterprise is as full of bad possibilities as of good ones; most embarrassing conditions will occur from time to time ; all is experiment, but all is hopeful. . . . What can resist steady energetic pressure, the force of a single right idea pushed month after month in its natural development? . . . Few men comprehend the deep philosophy of one-man power.”

General Armstrong had a natural love of literature, and his small opportunity for reading caused him sincere regret. But he could not by any possibility have been satisfied with the life of a literary man. To stand aside and comment would have been the most irksome of tasks for him ; nor, to say truth, would his criticism have been worth much. His own path he knew. At thirty he writes cheerfully from Boston : “I have been over the ‘ Athens,’ but would n’t live here for anything. I am glad I’m on the outposts doing frontier duty and pioneer work, for the South is a heathen land, and Hampton is on the borders thereof. I see my whole nature calls me to the work that is done there — to lay foundations strong, and not do frescoes and fancy work.” In this spirit his lifework was done; he had no sense of personal virtue in it. “ Few men have had the chance that I have had,” he wrote toward the end. “ I never gave up or sacrificed anything in my life — have been, seemingly, guided in everything.”

The present biographical sketch of this strong man’s life is written by one of his daughters, with much simplicity and modesty; the record of a personality and a career well worth summarizing in print, though they have written themselves most effectively otherwise than in words.

H. W. Boynton.