Matthew Arnold's essay
on criticism fostered this anxiety, and yet I find in this work of his a
lack of easy French knowledge, such as his misunderstanding of the word
_brutalite_, which means no more, or little more, than roughness. Matthew
Arnold, by the way, knew so little of the French character as to be
altogether ignorant of French provincialism, French practical sense, and
French "convenience." "Convenience" is his dearest word of contempt,
"practical sense" his next dearest, and he throws them a score of times
in the teeth of the English. Strange is the irony of the truth. For he
bestows those withering words on the nation that has the fifty religions,
and attributes "ideas"--as the antithesis of "convenience" and "practical
sense"--to the nation that has the fifty sauces. And not for a moment
does he suspect himself of this blunder, so manifest as to be
disconcerting to his reader. One seems to hear an incurably English
accent in all this, which indeed is reported, by his acquaintance, of
Matthew Arnold's actual speaking of French. It is certain that he has
not the interest of familiarity with the language, but only the interest
of strangeness. Now, while we meet the effect of the French coat in our
seventeenth century, of the French light verse in our earlier eighteenth
century, and of French philosophy in our later, of the French revolution
in our Wordsworth, of the French painting in our nineteenth-century
studios, of French fiction--and the dregs are still running--in our
libraries, of French poetry in our Swinburne, of French criticism in our
Arnold, Tennyson shows the effect of nothing French whatever.
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