48. Hugh Kingsmill, Matthew Arnold
I am beginning to wonder whether biography, in our own time, may not replace the novel as the dominant form – the literary centre of this age towards which writers gravitate as inevitably as they gravitated to allegory in the later Middle Ages or to drama in the reign of James I. What has been illustrated by a few men of genius has always this tendency to attract literary ‘casuals’ who imagine that they have thus found the secret.
The occasion of these remarks is Mr Hugh Kingsmill's Matthew Arnold. Mr Kingsmill, after an introduction in which we are shown ‘Frank Harris . . . brooding over ladies’ underwear at the editorial desk’ (a few lines lower down ‘Murry suddenly looked very old’) proceeds to disassociate himself from the contemporary reaction in favour of the Victorians. He dislikes most heartily the period he has chosen to write about.
Oddly enough he dislikes Arnold just as heartily. ‘I am aware’, he writes, ‘that so far neither Matt. nor I have found each other congenial companions’. For one thing Matthew Arnold was not added ‘to the list of George Sand's victims’, and though Mr Kingsmill tries to notice this oversight ‘without wasting regrets’, he never really forgives him. Again, Matthew Arnold wrote Sohrab ‘with hardly a hint of any relation between Thomas and Matthew Arnold on the one hand, and Rustum and Sohrab on the other . . . any conscious or unconscious recognition on Arnold's part of the likeness between his fate and Sohrab's’. This, to Mr Kingsmill, is most intolerable and not to be endured.
If after two hundred odd pages of this sort of stuff the reader is tempted to ask why Mr Kingsmill, hating Arnold, hating the Nineteenth Century, and hating poetry, has found it necessary to write the life of Arnold, he will find his answer in a cautionary tale on page 54. Mr Kingsmill knows a man who read David Copperfield without investigating the private life of Dickens; so naturally when he had seen Micawber shipped off to Australia – and not knowing that Dickens didn't get on with his wife – he shipped his own son off to Australia where the young man didn't do half so well as Micawber. So that's what you get if you don't study biography. The blurb on the inside of the jacket justly remarks that Mr Kingsmill writes ‘with unusual courage’.