A Writer's Notebook (24 page)

He felt like a man in a deep chasm who sees at midday the stars which those that live in daylight cannot perceive.

It seemed to himself that his burning thirst could be assuaged by nothing less than the collected force of all the currents which make up life.

A sound and well-advised judgment.

The Canon. He avoided all religious questions, almost as though they were improprieties; but when pressed, spoke in a tentative, deprecatory way. He was always saying that evolution must take place in religion as in everything else. He took his stand on the boundary line between knowledge and ignorance. “Here human reason can go no further,” he said, and straightway proceeded to appropriate that dark and undiscovered country. But when science, like a tongue of the sea, forced its way in and showed that the reason of man was at home in yet another region, he fell back quickly. Like a defeated general who colours his despatches, he called his reverse a tactical move to the rear. He put his faith in the unknowable. He staked his all upon the limitations of reason, but, like a spendthrift watching the usurer gather his estate acre by acre, he watched the progress of science with difficultly concealed anxiety.

He read from his lectern, knowing that part of his congregation accepted them as literally true, while part took them as manifestly false, passages of the Bible which he himself knew were legends which no sensible man could believe. Sometimes doubts assailed him with regard to his justification for so doing, but mentally he shrugged his shoulders. “After all,” he said, “it's good that the ignorant should believe these things. It's always dangerous to tamper with people's beliefs.” Sometimes, however, he went so far as to arrange that his curate should read what he himself could scarcely bring himself to. He preferred his curates rather stupid.

When he flew into a passion he called it righteous anger; and when someone did a thing he didn't like he called his own state of mind virtuous indignation.

Matthew Arnold's style. It is an admirable instrument for the presentation of thought. It is clear, simple and precise. It runs like a smooth, limpid river—with almost too tranquil a stream. If style resembles the clothes of a well-dressed man, which attract no attention, but when by chance examined are found seemly, then Arnold's style is perfect. It is never obtrusive, never by a vivid phrase or a picturesque epithet distracts attention from the matter; but when one scrutinises it, one discovers how carefully balanced are the sentences, how harmonious, graceful and elegant is the rhythm. One perceives the felicity with which the words are put together and is a little astonished that so great an effect can be obtained by the use of words which are quite homely and in common use. Arnold gives distinction to everything he touches. His style reminds one of a very well-bred and cultured lady, somewhat advanced in years so that the passions of life are more than half forgotten, and of such exquisite manners as to suggest a bygone day, yet with humour and vivacity such that the thought never occurs to one that she belongs to an older generation. But this style, so well suited to irony and wit, to
exposition, so apt for pointing out the weakness of an argument, makes tremendous demands upon the matter. It discovers weakness of reasoning or commonplace of thought without pity; it has then a sort of ghastly bareness which is disconcerting. It is a method rather than an art. No one more than I can realise what immense labour it must have needed to acquire that mellifluous cold brilliance. It is a platitude that simplicity is the latest acquired of all qualities, and one can see sometimes in passages of Matthew Arnold traces of the constant effort, of the constraint he must have put upon himself, before the fashion of writing he had adopted became a habit. I do not mean by this any disparagement; but I cannot help thinking that after the long toil necessary to attain it, Arnold's style was almost automatic. We know that Pater's never became so; and indeed it is obvious that the picturesqueness, the wealth of imagery, the varied metaphors by which he got his effects required constant invention. But in all these Arnold's style is lacking; his vocabulary is small and his turns of phrase constantly recur; the simplicity he aimed at allowed little scope to the imagination. Whatever he writes about, his style is the same. And it is to this, perhaps, as much as to his classicism, that is due the frequent reproach of impersonality. But to me Arnold's style is just as personal as that of Pater or of Carlyle. Indeed it seems to express very clearly his character, slightly feminine, pettish, a little magisterial, cold, but redeemed by a wonderful grace, agility of thought and unfailing elegance.

I'm glad I don't believe in God. When I look at the misery of the world and its bitterness I think that no belief can be more ignoble.

An interesting question is whether more than a certain degree of civilisation is not harmful to the race. In antiquity
degeneration has invariably followed upon a high state of culture; and the history of ancient times is a history of the decline and fall of one great nation after another. The explanation appears to be that more than a certain amount of civilisation renders the nation unfit for the struggle of life; and its people are conquered by others, hardier and more courageous, who have attained to no such exquisiteness of cultivation. Just as the Greeks were destroyed by the barbarous power of Rome, France, cultivated, highly civilised, refined and sensitive, was defeated by the rough and brutal might of Germany. The artist is overthrown by the philistine and the man of culture ousted by the boor. The conclusion appears to be that coarseness of taste and want of delicacy are advantageous rather than the reverse.

Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders have the same pre-eminence over the English that the Scotch have long been observed to have. Bred under harder conditions, so that natural selection has greater play, they are better adapted to the struggle for life than are the members of the older civilisation. They look upon existence with a less analytic eye, their grosser instincts are more powerful; less civilised than we, less concerned with the graces of life, they are more robust. Their morality, their view of life is directed (unconsciously, of course) to the good of the race rather than to the benefit of the individual; they produce fewer men of mark, but on the other hand their race-character is stronger and more distinctive.