Criticism, to be effective, requires also an adequate style.  In Arnold’s discussion of style, much stress is laid on its basis in character, and much upon the transparent quality of true style which allows that basic character to shine through.  Such words as “limpidness,” “simplicity,” “lucidity,” are favorites.  Clearness and effectiveness are the qualities that he most highly valued.  The latter he gained especially through the crystallization of his thought into certain telling phrases, such as “Philistinism,” “sweetness and light,” “the grand style,” etc.  That this habit was attended with dangers, that his readers were likely to get hold of his phrases and think that they had thereby mastered his thought, he realized.  Perhaps he hardly realized the danger to the coiner of apothegms himself, that of being content with a half truth when the whole truth cannot be conveniently crowded into narrow compass.  Herein lies, I think, the chief source of Arnold’s occasional failure to quite satisfy our sense of adequacy or of justice, as, for instance, in his celebrated handling of the four ways of regarding nature, or the passage in which he describes the sterner self of the working-class as liking “bawling, hustling, and smashing; the lighter self, beer.”

By emotionalism, however, he does not allow himself to be betrayed, and he does not indulge in rhythmical prose or rhapsody, though occasionally his writing has a truly poetical quality resulting from the quiet but deep feeling which rises in connection with a subject on which the mind has long brooded with affection, as in the tribute to Oxford at the beginning of the Essay on Emerson.  Sometimes, on the other hand, a certain pedagogic stiffness appears, as if the writer feared that the dullness of comprehension of his readers would not allow them to grasp even the simplest conceptions without a patient insistence on the literal fact.

One can by no means pass over Arnold’s humor in a discussion of his style, yet humor is certainly a secondary matter with him, in spite of the frequency of its appearance.  It is not much found in his more intimate and personal writing, his poetry and his familiar letters.  In such a book as Friendship’s Garland, where it is most in evidence, it is plainly a literary weapon deliberately assumed.  In fact, Arnold is almost too conscious of the value of humor in the gentle warfare in which he had enlisted.  Its most frequent form is that of playful satire; it is the product of keen wit and sane mind, and it is always directed toward some serious purpose, rarely, if ever, existing as an end in itself.

V

[Sidenote:  Literary Criticism]