Matthew Arnold and Sainte-Beuve

Extract

In a letter to Cardinal Newman, written when he was fifty years old, Matthew Arnold mentions four people from whom he is conscious of having learnt—Goethe, Wordsworth, Sainte-Beuve, and Newman himself. Arnold goes on to explain that he does not mean merely receiving a strong impression but actually acquiring “habits, methods, ruling ideas, which are constantly with me.” Much as he admired Newman, Goethe, and Wordsworth, Arnold's literary fame owes more to Sainte-Beuve than to any other one man. The two volumes of Essays in Criticism, which contain Arnold's most interesting and enduring prose, are a lasting monument to the force of Sainte-Beuve's ideas. Posterity would gladly exchange Arnold's attempts to rationalize religion for a few more volumes of literary essays, but unfortunately, much as he admired Sainte-Beuve, he was too much of an Englishman to follow in Sainte-Beuve's footsteps. Sir Walter Raleigh used to maintain that Arnold was thoroughly unEnglish in his tastes and that he invariably condemned everything that was characteristically British. If that were true he would not have yearned for England as he did whenever he went abroad. Arnold had an unerring eye for national defects, but no man could care more deeply for the welfare of his country. Beneath the gay exterior of the man of the world Arnold was serious to the extent of didacticism. In the letters to his mother he is continually saying that he thinks such and such an article “will do good.” Sainte-Beuve never spared himself in the Causeries du Lundi, but he probably worried more about giving a faithful portrait than about “doing good.”