MATTHEW ARNOLD AND WALTER PATER: LITERATURE AS RELIGION. By Sam Sackett

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1 MATTHEW ARNOLD AND WALTER PATER: LITERATURE AS RELIGION By Sam Sackett Both Arnold and Pater represent a response to literature which was affected by the impact of Darwinian biology on English thought, demonstrates the victory of Longinianism in the criticism of poetry, and reflects the historicism of Taine. The immediate impact of Darwin on his contemporaries was to make them question the received interpretation of religion, for if the account of the creation in the Book of Genesis was demonstrably wrong, as it is, then the question of how much else in the Bible was capable of acceptance was re-opened as it had not been since the days of Copernicus. This earlier confrontation of science and religion, and indeed a general willingness to make religion subservient to reason by trying to find rational explanations for Biblical miracles, had led ultimately to the latitudinarianism of Archbishop Tillotson, which was still alive in the generation preceding Darwin. Arnold s father, Thomas Arnold, was indeed a leader in what had come to be known as the Broad Church movement. But for Arnold and Pater even this pale shadow of what Christianity had once been was denied by Darwin. No wonder that Arnold heard the melancholy, long, withdrawing roar of the Sea of Faith as it retreated to the breath / Of the night-wind down the vast edges drear / And naked shingles of the world ; no wonder that he found that the world, which seems / To lie before us like a land of dreams, /... Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.... Faced with this dreary world, in which the only certitude which could be found lay in the faith which two people found in each other and even between them lay The unplumb d, salt, estranging sea both Arnold and Pater turned to literature as a substitute for religion; their concept of literature was one which was conditioned by the Longinianism which had dominated the Western European tradition since the time of Coleridge; and they were both impressed by the historical approach of Taine. Beginning in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, the basic idea of the Greek critic Longinus that the test of great literature was not its adherence to a predetermined set of standards but its emotional impact on the reader had become more and more important in English literary thought until by the early nineteenth century it was so widely accepted that it is hard to find a dissenter. In the latter half of that century the French critic Hyppolite Taine applied logical positivism to the history of literature and gave historicism an impetus that still remains in the organization of university literature courses. Both Arnold and Pater were influenced by these developments. This much the two have in common. The nature of their use of literature as a 1

2 surrogate for religion, of the Longinian standards they inherited from the generation preceding them, and of historicism, however, are all different, and consequently from this point onward it will be convenient to treat them separately. Arnold. Let us begin with Arnold by examining what he had to say about criticism itself. In his essay The Function of Criticism at the Present Time (1864) he wrote: The mass of mankind will never have any ardent zeal for seeing things as they are; very inadequate ideas will always satisfy them. On these inadequate ideas reposes, and must repose, the general practice of the world. That is as much as saying that whoever sets himself to see things as they are will find himself one of a very small circle; but it is only by this small circle resolutely doing its own work that adequate ideas will ever get current at all. This small circle, of course, is the critics; and Arnold thus discriminates between the critic and the practical man. The practical man, Arnold argues, is content with these inadequate ideas because in the world in which he deals, they work. To take a more contemporary example than any Arnold gives, it may not be a very adequate idea to say that washing with a certain laundry soap is like washing with sunshine; but it sells soap. The critic may object that there is no evidence that sunshine is a cleansing agent and that if the assumption on which the commercial is based is correct, the best thing to do with your dirty clothes is not to wash them at all but spread them out in the back yard where the sun can shine on them; but for both the advertising copywriter and the housewife this objection is too fine-drawn to be practical. Both are used to dealing with ideas on about this level of adequacy, and if the critic attempts to introduce more refined ideas, neither will understand him. The most significant difference is that both the advertising copywriter and the housewife are interested, in the sense that both have a stake in the idea. The copywriter wants to sell his brand of soap, and the housewife wants to have the cleanest possible wash. Thus they both apply the pragmatic test to the communication. For both copywriter and housewife, abstract truth is irrelevant; the critic, on the other hand, is concerned with truth as an abstraction. Such considerations bring Arnold to a definition of criticism as a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world, and thus to establish a current of fresh and true ideas. Does not the critic judge, then? Yes, but before he can judge he must learn the best that it known and thought in the world, so that he can use it as a touchstone the term will be discussed later to evaluate what he is judging. Arnold is here erecting a kind of intellectual structure which can be used to take 2

3 the place of religion. To the man of the Middle Ages, some of the distinctions which Arnold drew would have no meaning. He would have agreed, perhaps, that whoever sets himself to see things as they are will find himself one of a very small circle ; but he would have thought of such a person as a priest, not as a critic, and he would have felt that there was no impassable barrier between the clergy and the world of affairs, for clergymen were continually taking an important part in affairs. The man of the Middle Ages would have agreed also that the function of the priest was to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world ; but to him, as not to Arnold, the best that is known and thought in the world would have had a clear definition: it would have been a circumlocution for Christianity. The Medieval man would have agreed with Arnold s argument that the priest s function was to establish a current of... true ideas ; Arnold s additional requirement that these ideas should also be fresh would have been meaningless to him. Thus for Arnold literature takes the place of religion and the critic replaces the priest; but for Arnold there is no stable certainty. We should not therefore be surprised when we find that sixteen years later Arnold writes in The Study of Poetry that most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.... our religion, parading evidences such as those on which the popular mind relies now; our philosophy, pluming itself on its reasonings about causation and finite and infinite being; what are they but the shadows and dreams and false shows of knowledge? The day will come when we shall wonder at ourselves for having trusted in them, for having taken them seriously.... In the failure and collapse of religion, its functions will have to be taken over by something else; and, Arnold says just prior to the passage quoted, More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. How does poetry accomplish these goals? Let us first discover what Arnold means by poetry. Poetry, he says, is a criticism of life. This definition may well be related to a passage in the earlier essay on The Function of Criticism in which he says that a poet... ought to know life and the world before dealing with them in poetry; and life and the world being in modern times very complex things, the creation of a modern poet, to be worth much, implies a great critical effort behind it.... Thus the poet, as well as the critic, must be capable of seeing a thing for what it really is; and to place an emphasis on this quality of vision is to throw a spotlight on the difference between the way things seem and the way they really are. The world seems / To lie before us like a land of dreams, / So various, so beautiful, so new ; but to the eye of the poet, who as a true critic seems things as they really are, it is evident that the world Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.... Consequently it becomes the responsibility of the poet to criticize the world. 3

4 We may notice here that Arnold does not find poetry any more than Coleridge does in the form of the poem. While he does not make it clear, it is evident that he will accept as poetry any criticism of life, whether it be expressed in verse or in prose. The criticism of life may presumably manifest itself in a number of ways. The poet may call attention to the discrepancy between is and seems, as Arnold himself often did. The poet may expose reality in which a way as to emphasize its deviation from the ideal. The poet may criticize what is by following the path Sir Philip Sidney had laid out centuries before:... the poet... doth grow in effect another nature, in making things... better than Nature bringeth forth.... But in any event, the poet rejects and criticizes life as it is. It might seem that such a conception of its function would lead Arnold to find in poetry merely dissatisfaction and bitterness. Yet on the contrary, he claims to find in it strength and joy. Perhaps these qualities derive from the fact that poetry, in exposing the deviations of the real from the ideal, points us toward the ideal and holds it up to us as a goal; if this is what Arnold has in mind, his optimism is really less solidly grounded in reason and depends more on blind faith than the popular religion he disparages. Let us however in charity assume that he means no more than that people can get the same kind of reassurance from non-biblical literature that they can from Biblical. For centuries people have found reassurance and comfort in being able to quote passages of Scripture as a comment on what has happened to them. Let a man be set a task without what he feels are adequate materials to accomplish it, and he will derive some comfort from being able to allude to making bricks without straw. The mere fact of being able to cite the Bible on this occasion gives some kind of structure or order to his experience, it relates it to something else, it allows him to feel that his tribulations are not unique and that someone else has had the same trouble before him. And this in itself is a kind of consolation; it makes him feel better, and, because it makes him feel better, it may even help him to make his bricks without straw. Now, if this is all Arnold means by the consolation and stay which we get from poetry, then clearly the same kind of reassurance and comfort can come from non- Biblical literature. You are talking of your problems and a friend makes light of them; it helps you to quote Romeo and Juliet to him: He jests at scars, that never felt a wound. Or you see an eager fellow jump into a situation without examining it carefully and it gives you some satisfaction to be able to quote the Essay on Criticism : Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread. If this is what Arnold has in mind, then certainly non-biblical literature provides it; moreover, Biblical literature can continue to provide it, but only as literature, not as the Word of God. Turning then from religion to literature in our search for consolation, and indeed absorbing religion into literature by viewing the Bible as a secular work, it is, as Arnold says, necessary to come to a clear understanding of what the best poetry really is. And 4

5 as he has already preceded I.A. Richards in finding literature a replacement for religion, he precedes him again in attempting to define the obstacles to just judgment of poetry. Arnold s categorization of these obstacles, however, is much less refined than Richards s, comprising only two the historical fallacy and the personal fallacy. Of the historical fallacy we shall treat later. In dealing with the personal fallacy Arnold has come face to face with the great problem of Longinian critics. For Arnold is Longinian; for him poetry resides in short passages, and the supreme test of a poem is how it makes him feel. Yet he recognizes that acceptance of feeling alone as the criterion for judgement may lead us astray: Our personal affinities, likings, and circumstances, have great power to sway our estimate of this or that poet s work, and to make us attach more importance to it as poetry than in itself it really possesses, because to us it is, or has been, of high importance. Surely this is true. How does Arnold propose to guard against this personal fallacy (and also the historical one)? By what has become known as the touchstone theory :... there can be no more useful help for discovering what poetry belongs to the class of the truly excellent, and can therefore do us most good, than to have always in one s mind lines and expressions of the great masters, and to apply them as a touchstone to other poetry. These touchstones are Arnold s device for objectifying his judgement. He does not demand of the passage he is judging that it resemble any of the touchstones in form or content; all he insists on is that it make him feel as powerfully as the touchstones make him feel. As examples, he provides eleven passages three from Homer, three from Dante, two from Shakespeare, and three from Milton only the last five of which are likely to be of any practical value to the modern reader. There are two defects in the touchstone theory which mark it as unfortunately incapable of operating as Arnold hoped it would. The first is that although Arnold intends the touchstones as a guard against excessive subjectivism of judgement, he has not provided for any objectification of the selection of the touchstones themselves. These are the eleven passages which have given him the esthetic emotion in the highest degree. A.E. Housman once said that he recognized poetry by reciting it while he was shaving; if his beard bristled, he knew it was good. Presumably these eleven passages have made Arnold s beard bristle. But what provision has he made for ensuring that they have made anyone else s? The second weakness in the theory is that it takes no account of the context in which the touchstone appears. There is nothing inherent in the five words, Look, my lord, it comes, to make anyone s beard bristle. But let the speaker of them be Horatio on the battlements of Elsinore, let the lord be Hamlet, and let the it be the ghost of Hamlet s father, and these five words, if they do not make our beards bristle, at least are fully capable of making our hackles rise. By overlooking the importance of the context, Arnold is guilty of finding the power of poetry in the words themselves, not in 5

6 the interaction between the words and their surrounding context, both verbal and nonverbal. In this way he fails to realize that someone could dutifully memorize the passage from Hamlet which he includes among his eleven touchstones If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, Absent thee from felicity awhile, And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain To tell my story.... yet might never get any emotion from it at all, let alone use that emotion to measure the emotions from other passages. Reluctantly, Arnold makes another effort to objectify his poetic test by trying to define the qualities which imbue his touchstones; he finds these qualities in the matter and in the manner. For the matter, Arnold insists that poetry must have high seriousness ; for the manner, it must have excellence in diction and movement. Arnold anticipates the New Criticism, which holds that form and content are inseparable, by asserting that matter and manner are inextricably intertwined. Perhaps the most damaging comment which can be made about this hesitant approach to conceptualizing his emotional response to poetry is to point out that it barred Arnold from the full enjoyment of Chaucer and Burns, whom he found not serious enough, and it led him to conclude that the authors of Absalom and Achitophel and The Rape of the Lock are not classics of our poetry, they are classics of our prose. A concept of poetry which would prevent a reader from reveling in Chaucer, Dryden, and Pope is probably too restrictive to be of much value. And when we add to this the fact that Arnold estimated Gray as the poetical classic even though the scantiest and frailest of classics of the century which included not only Pope but also Burns and Blake, it must be said that a concept of poetry which leads to so idiosyncratic a judgement must be deeply flawed. We have yet to consider Arnold as a follower of Taine, who gave impetus to the development of historical criticism. Arnold was not a historian; the little history of English poetry which appears at the end of The Study of Poetry which was originally the introduction to a five-volume anthology of English poetry compiled by another is remarkable for its freedom from any conception that one poet influences another. Only the chronological arrangement allows us to dignify it with the name of history. On the other hand, Arnold had a firm theoretical grasp of some elements of Taine s system. In The Function of Criticism at the Present Time he presents us with the argument that for the creation of a master-work of literature two powers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment that is, that for the creation of a great literary epoch there must be a climate of ideas (what he elsewhere calls the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the time) which the genius can utilize. This theoretical 6

7 grasp of historicism serves Arnold well in his comprehension of the fact that The course of development of a nation s language, thought, and poetry, is profoundly interesting; and by regarding a poet s work as a stage in this course of development we may easily bring ourselves to make it of more importance as poetry than in itself it really is, we may come to use a language of quite exaggerated praise in criticizing it; in short, to over-rate it. This was what Arnold called the historical fallacy. And thus he predicted one of the grave dangers into which historical criticism has fallen in the century since he wrote those words. Pater. For Pater, as for Arnold, religion had lost its power to order life; and for him, as for Arnold, it was in art that the replacement for religion was to be found. But Pater was not content with merely finding in art a criticism of life which would give consolation to man; in art Pater found a whole purpose for existence. In an unstable, shifting world, which became even more unstable the moment you tried to hold it in your mind and examine it, where was stability to be found? In experience alone. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. Life, as Pater pointed out, is short: we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more.... our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Yet each one of us can have only a limited number of experiences, and, moreover, these experiences are in themselves fleeting and irrecoverable; each of them is gone while we try to apprehend it. What we need, then, are vicarious experiences. Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive for us, for that moment only. Yet we cannot be in all these places at once, we cannot absorb all these impressions at once. What we need to do is graft others experiences onto our own, so as to get as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Through art we can be with Keats at the moment when he looks at an urn among the Elgin marbles and sees into the relationship between eternal art and mutable life. A moment later we can be with Shakespeare, sharing with him the emotions of Othello as he realizes not only the horror but also the foolishness of what he has done and realizes that the foolishness makes the horror more horrible. Through art to which, moreover, we can turn again and again, recovering these moments as we cannot recover those of our own experience we can crowd our lives with experience, we can burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, we can maintain this ecstasy, the maintenance of which Pater says is success in life. It is not necessary to agree with Pater s estimate of what constitutes success in 7

8 life, or even to find life as basically unsatisfactory as he does, to feel that he has touched a profound insight about the nature of art and literature. Surely one of the great values of literature is that it adds the experiences of others to our own and that these experiences can become as real to us as do our own. The truth of Pater s observation here makes persuasive his conclusion that Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for art s sake, has most; for art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments sake. Certainly the alternatives he provides listlessness and a life of high passion are less wise. There may be, however, alternatives he has omitted, such as perhaps a life of service and concern, which may challenge the life of art for art s sake. Moreover, there is a danger to literature itself in Pater s point; as Walter Jackson Bate has pointed out, in trying to defend art s relevance to life, he has ironically actually made art more remote from life than its attackers had. Although Pater does not specifically apply this theory to the judgement of poetry, it is easy enough to do. The purpose of life, we may paraphrase him as saying, is to get in as many kicks as possible. Literature is valuable because it allows us to get more kicks than we otherwise would. The only conclusion to be drawn from the first two terms of this syllogism is that that literature is most valuable which provides us with the most numerous and most intense kicks. From this it is clear that Pater, like Arnold, is ultimately Longinian in his orientation to literature and to art. We may recall that the persistent problem of the Longinian critic is that he must avoid relativism and subjectivism by finding some way to objectify his judgements. How does Pater meet this problem? Interestingly enough, Pater meets the problem by refusing to meet it. He does not avoid relativism and subjectivism, and indeed it would be hard to find in his theory any basis on which he could even object to them. For if the purpose of literature is to provide the reader with kicks, then the value of any given literary work to me is that it provides me with kicks; and the question of whether it also provides you with kicks is of no consequence. Anything that adds to my experience is valuable to me, whether it is valuable to anyone else. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? If a given work of literature adds to our pulses, helps us to see them more fully, helps us to pass more swiftly from one to the next so that we are always where the action is, it is fulfilling its purpose, and there is no need to inquire about what it performs for other 8

9 people. With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch. What we have to do is to be for ever... courting new impressions.... The direction in which Pater leads, therefore, is a completely impressionistic criticism. Anatole France once defined criticism as the adventures of my soul among masterpieces ; and it is to this extremely subjective and relativistic impressionism that Pater s doctrines bring us. Yet, surprisingly enough, Pater was himself an art historian. He was not interested greatly in the theory of art history, as Arnold was; but he was a more competent historian than Arnold was, and indeed the single piece of criticism by which Pater is still known is the conclusion to his Studies in the History of the Renaissance, one of the half-dozen most important works of art history bequeathed us by the nineteenth century. Arnold and Pater. There is no question that of the two Arnold is the more important critic. The history of literary criticism in English over the past two centuries is the history of the line which defines itself by the names of Coleridge, Arnold, and Richards. Yet there are grave weaknesses in Arnold s criticism. His prophecy that literature would replace religion in men s lives has failed to come to pass; instead, religion has been replaced by politics, and literature as distinct from popular culture is probably even less central in the lives of most people than it was in his day. The touchstone theory is full of holes; what is true in it, that one can judge a work of literature better if one has something to which to compare it, can be found in Johnson s Preface to Shakespeare, and today it has value merely as a historical curiosity, much like a Stanley Steamer. Over the doctrine of high seriousness the most charitable thing to do is draw a curtain of silence. Yet while all Pater s criticism of importance can be printed on three and a half pages, while his doctrines lead to an irresponsible impressionism which makes literary discussion impossible, and while his attitude toward life itself is so negative as to be repellent with all these defects Pater has put his finger on a truth about literature perhaps more basic than anything that Arnold ever saw: that one of the real values of literature is that it provides us with vicarious experience. Moreover, because of the very fact that it is more subjective, Pater s style of criticism would lead to more flexibility than Arnold s and consequently to more hospitality to the new. Here is a little poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti: See it was like this when 9

10 we waltz into this place a couple of Papish cats is doing an Aztec two-step And I says Dad let s cut but then this dame comes up behind me see and says You and me could really exist Wow I says Only the next day she has bad teeth and really hates poetry My own personal response to this is that it is one of the finest poems of the century just past; it summarizes a whole experience, a universal experience, in a few lines that communicate the emotion rather than merely express it. I would feel that any system which cannot make room for it is by that much the poorer. It is hard to imagine Arnold finding a touchstone which would fit it; yet it is easy to visualize Pater nodding his head and saying, Yes, that puts me where the action is; that enlarges my experience by adding his to mine. Let me repeat that of the two Arnold is certainly the more important critic. The points I have made in Pater s favor are not intended to depress Arnold s reputation or to detract from an admiration for his real accomplishments. But they may lead us to pay Pater a more respectful attention than he customarily receives. 10