A GIFT IMPRISONED. The poetic life of Matthew Arnold. By Ian Hamilton. 241pp.
Bloomsbury. Pounds 18.99. - 0 7475 3671 6.
Matthew Arnold at odds with himself.
At several points in Ian Hamilton's recent collection of essays, The Trouble
with Money (1997), the lives of literary men are seen to break in two.
Reviewing a book about Louis MacNeice, Hamilton records that "when
(MacNeice) joined the BBC in 1940, at the age of thirty-three, he spoke of
his past life as 'dead'". Something comparable happened in 1915, when "Ford
Madox Hueffer became Ford Madox Ford - by deed poll. Around the same time,
at the age of forty-one, he enlisted for active service in the British Army."
A third piece, on Salman Rushdie, is prefaced: When I first discussed with
him the idea of a biographical essay, he said that he would co-operate,
provided that I did not pursue my researches beyond what was for him the
final day of his first life:
Valentine's Day, 1989 (the day after the passing of the Iranian fatwa, when,
like the expiring "Hueffer", Rushdie was forty-one).
The essay is called "The First Life of Salman Rushdie".
Beside these modern instances, the "double life" of Matthew Arnold
(1822-c 58; c 1858-88) is an established classic of the genre. The given
line is that, at some point in his mid-thirties, Arnold the poet perished,
and a prose Arnold (in Hamilton's unenthusiastic phrase, a "cultural
physician") arose to take his place. In his review for the TLS of
Nicholas Murray's full-scale bio-graphy (June 14, 1996), Nicholas Shrimpton
protested at the durability of this simplistic "binary picture";
he noted, for instance, that while Arnold's most celebrated single poem, "Dover
Beach", has been routinely linked to the poet's honeymoon in 1851,
there is no external evidence for the piece having been composed at any
stage before its first publication in 1867, deep into the purportedly "dead"
years. Yet it is precisely the discontinuity in Arnold's story that has
appealed to Hamilton; and in his stylish short study of the "poetic"
or "first" life, which takes its title from W. H. Auden's Freudian
reading ("He thrust his gift in prison till it died"), Arnold is
divided as never before. "I soon enough abandoned plans for a
cradle-to-grave Life", Hamilton's preface tells us, as if the latter
were a mountainous aim rather than the ordinary shape of such things; as if
the two lives were so distinct that one would naturally write a book about
one and pass over the other.
That his time on earth should include a metaphorical death - the short bloom
and ir-reversible withering of his poetry-writing - accords with Arnold's
acute, even exaggerated awareness of ageing and personal mortality. The
latter he got from his father. Matthew and his brothers and sisters grew up
under the kindly but demanding influence of "the most earnest man in
England"; the eldest son's reaction, as a young man, was to strike the
foppish pose of a "scented wit" (which, being put on, annoyed as
many as it charmed). But while Matthew was still an undergraduate at Balliol
College, Oxford, Dr Arnold, recently installed as Regius Professor of Modern
History at the University, collapsed and died of heart disease, like his own
father before him, at the age of only forty-six. Hereafter Matthew, who had
inherited the family abnormality, was aware that he in his turn could die at
any minute. His first substantial poem, "Mycerinus" (begun around
1843, when he was twenty), tells of a young Egyptian ruler who learns from
an oracle that he must die before his time.
Meanwhile, Arnold had to make a living. He had neither yet taken a job, nor
written anything of note, when, in 1845, he was cursing the lot of the poet
forced into uncongenial employment, quoting, in a letter, from Goethe's
Wilhelm Meister: And thus the poet is at once a teacher, a prophet, a friend
of gods and men. How! thou wouldst have him descend from his height to some
paltry occupation? He who is fashioned like the bird to hover round the
world, to nestle on the lofty summits, to feed on buds and fruits,
exchanging gaily one bough for another, he ought also to work at the plough
like an ox; like a dog to train himself to the harness and draught; or
perhaps, tied up in a chain, to guard a farmyard by his barking?
In fact, Arnold's first appointment was in all respects advantageous. In
1847, through family connections, he was installed as Private Secretary to
Lord Lansdowne, then President of the Council and a considerable private
patron of the arts: a stimulating and socially enhancing position, with a
salary of Pounds 300 a year, and one which was ideally suited for the
trying-out of poetry as a vocation. Measured by the out-put of verses, these
were prolific years. What brought them to an end was a compulsion, suddenly
overwhelming other considerations, towards marriage.
Hamilton has little to add to the baseless heap of speculation on the identity
of "Marguerite", the blue-eyed muse Arnold encountered in
Switzerland in September 1848, and with whom he suffered an embittering
reunion twelve months later. But he notes suggestively how soon after
Arnold's rebound from the Alps he is determinedly pursuing his bride-to-be -
so soon, indeed, that her eyes blend with Marguerite's in a composite love
poem - "eyes too expressive to be blue / Too lovely to be grey" ("On
the Rhine"). "Flu" Wightman, the daughter of a pious, High
Anglican and Tory judge, had grey eyes and parental expectations beyond
Pounds 300 a year. Arnold married her in June 1851. By October, he was at
work as an Inspector of Schools, on a salary of Pounds 700.
As Hamilton puts it, this was to exchange a life of friendships, parties,
grand houses, art and leisure for hard slog, "shabbily provincial
stop-offs" and well-mannered weekends at the Wightmans' house in Eaton
Place. Of course, grind is relative, and Arnold's new lot permitted him -
less than eighteen months into the job and the marriage - to make a "solemn
vow" with his wife "to spend at least seven weeks abroad next year".
But Arnold's habitual moaning suddenly had a focus, and his anxieties about
poetry were submerged beneath an "avalanche" of "paperwork"
and concrete excuses. His marriage was soon favoured with children, who
turned his home into a "howling wilderness". If Arnold could
observe, before he was thirty years old, that "a great career (in
literature) is barely possible any longer", he had made certain choices
that suggest an unconscious desire to be delivered from the possibility.
But the central thesis of A Gift Imprisoned is that Arnold's best qualities as
a poet are those he valued least, so that his principles fought an
intermittent fruitless battle against his practice. He diagnosed the age as
needing the kind of poems he couldn't really write; by the same token, in
Hamilton's words, he was driven to "repudiate . . . those elements
which urged him towards poetry in the first place". He strained (and
much of his verse shows the strain) against the accusation of
self-absorption, "against the modern English habit (too much encouraged
by Wordsworth) of using poetry as a channel for thinking aloud, instead of
making anything"; in "Resignation" (finished in 1847) we are
told that the poet "does not say I am alone", but sees "That
general life, which does not cease". Hence the unsuitable device of the
first person plural in subsequent poems: "We mortal millions live alone"
("To Marguerite - Continued"). His first collection, The Strayed
Reveller and Other Poems (1847), is a casebook of authorial anxieties, and
the volume's lukewarm reception only left him more defiantly at odds with
himself: "(Campbell) Shairp urges me to speak more from myself: which I
less and less have the inclination to do . . . ." He was in no less of
a muddle by 1852, when he published Empedocles on Etna and Other Poems, only
to withdraw it six months later on the grounds that it was "monotonous".
A further reshaping of the oeuvre, Poems (1853), published when Arnold was
thirty, was intended to project a purposeful new image of the poet. The
intense, subjective poems of youth were excluded. The book was centred on
the heroic narrative "Sohrab and Rustum" (slighted here as "Homer
for beginners" and an "adventure in maturity") and introduced
by the neo-classical prescriptions of the famous "Preface" - a "wan
prospectus", in Hamilton's enjoyable phrase. Poems (1853) was reviewed
in the Daily News by Arnold's friend and admirer Harriet Martineau. This is
the review for which Hamilton's narrative has been waiting, the implied
answer to his question, "Was he, so to speak, a natural?": He was
not born a poet, and therefore never can be one.
Many claim the rank; few show claims as plausible as his, because of the
superiority of his general talents and culture; but his claims also want the
genuine stamp.
Hamilton's own estimate of the poetry is lower than the reader of his book
might have expected. He likes "Dover Beach", "The Buried Life",
"Empedocles on Etna", "The Scholar Gipsy" and some of
the "Marguerite" poems; not that he trumpets their qualities here,
but he spares them from the gentle cynicism with which in general he
approaches the verse. He is economically sharp about the "Greek drapery"
of Merope, the mock-Hellenic verse play on which Arnold laboured in the
mid-1850s - "so diligent, so well-intentioned and so wrong" - and
catches in a phrase the "chin-forward, missionary striving" of
later poems like "Obermann Once More". But his treatment of Balder
Dead (1855), a stiff piece of Norse Homeric, points out how - in a
half-dozen similes which seem to have intruded from eighteenth-century
English pastoral - a native poetry could poke through the frigid designs of
Arnold's "maturity":
And as a spray of honeysuckle flowers
Brushes across a tired traveller's face
Who shuffles through the deep dew-moistened dust,
On a May evening, in the darkened lanes,
And starts him, that he thinks a ghost went by -
So Hoder brushed by Hermod's side . . . .
Ironically, Hamilton considers "Growing Old" (1867) to be one of the
few later poems to recapture the "distressed and unaffected eloquence"
of the best early poetry.
It is – last stage of all –
When we are frozen up within, and quite
The phantom of ourselves,
To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost
Which blamed the living man.
"Growing Old" recalls those strange letters, written in the cool
late phase of their friendship, to Arthur Hugh Clough, in which the young
Arnold had lamented lost youth; one, written in 1852, when he was newly
married and about to become a father for the first time: "How life
rushes away – and youth. One has dawdled and scrupled and fiddle-faddled –
and it is all over"; and another, a few months later, to the same
recipient: "I am past thirty and three parts iced over."
Hamilton's study culminates in 1858, when, in an unhappy and opaque letter to
his sister Jane, Arnold seems to announce his resignation from poetry: "to
attain or approach perfection in the region of thought and feeling, and to
write with this perfection of form, demands . . . an actual tearing of
oneself to pieces, which one does not readily consent to . . . unless one
can devote one's whole life to poetry." The few remaining pages of A
Gift Imprisoned assemble further full stops and funereal reflections. Arnold
at forty considers how The twenty years from 20 to 40 seemed all life to me
then – the very heart of one's time here, the period within which all that
was interesting and successful and decisive in one's life was to fall. And
now, at 40, how undecided and unfinished and immature everthing seems still
– and will seem so, I suppose, to the end.
Arnold's "Second Life" ("so to call it"), his prose
incarnation, was to last more than two decades, until his fatal heart attack
in 1888. But, for Hamilton, "the poetic life" ends with the
Athenaeum's "obituary notice", its review of the two-volume
Collected Poems of 1869: "The poet is dead; we have lost a poet . . .
aged before his time." This was printed when Arnold was forty-six - the
age at which his father had died.
This father-and-son symmetry is insisted on with untypical emphasis in the
last two paragraphs of the book. Here, as occasionally elsewhere, there
seems to be a private resonance for this partial biographer in Arnold's
story. It may be relevant that Hamilton's own "poetic life" has
not proved as full as once seemed likely. His first book, The Visit (1970),
formed the core of Fifty Poems, eighteen years on; the pamphlet Steps (1997;
18pp. Manaccan: Cargo. Pounds 9. 1 889980 04 0) is the only verse he has
published since. His energies have been directed instead into biography and
literary journalism.
But the company of those in whom the poet has died before the man has many
distinguished members. Their patron saint is S. T. Coleridge. Having "given
up" poetry once already, in 1800, "being convinced that I never
had the essentials of poetic Genius, and that I mistook a strong desire for
original power", Coleridge embarked on a journey to Malta in the spring
of 1804, at the age of thirty-two, in the hope of resuscitating his poetic
self. In transit, he completed the beautiful prose gloss to The Ancient
Mariner; but he disembarked with the knowledge that his vocation had escaped
him, and was resigned from that day to remaking himself in prose. He liked
subsequently to quote these words from the Epistles of Petrarch:
With age all things are gradually consumed, and in living we die and are
snatched away while we are still here.
In that passing I shall not seem myself: another brow, other habits, a new
form of mind, another voice sounding.
Mick Imlah is co-editor of the forthcoming New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse.
