SOURCE: “Matthew Arnold and Marcus Aurelius,” in Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Vol. III, No. 1, Winter, 1963, pp. 555-66.

[In the following essay, Ebel critiques an essay on Aurelius written by Matthew Arnold, finding it ambiguous, full of shifts and twists, but clearly revealing Arnold's sense of affinity with Aurelius.]

In 1863 Matthew Arnold had, in his own later words, “been thinking much of Marcus Aurelius and his times.”¹ One result of his thinking was an essay entitled “Marcus Aurelius”—a review of George Long's rendering of the Meditations. A careful examination of this essay indicates how deeply involved Arnold in fact became with the Stoic Emperor and his times and how central this involvement was in the development of his thought.

I.

Arnold's essay begins with a defense of “Christian morality” against certain strictures of John Stuart Mill, who had compared it unfavorably, in On Liberty, to “the best morality of the ancients.” No, Arnold insists, “Christian morality has not failed to supply to human life” the aids characteristic of all “systems of morality.” Indeed, “it has supplied them far more abundantly than most of its critics imagine,” and even the Imitation of Christ is “full of passages”—“moral precepts, and moral precepts of the best kind”—which “are equal to the best ever furnished by the great masters of morals—Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius.”² And Arnold goes on:

But moral rules, apprehended as ideas first, and then rigorously followed as laws, are, and must be, for the sage only. The mass of mankind have neither force of intellect enough to apprehend them clearly as ideas, nor force of character enough to follow them strictly as laws. The mass of mankind can be carried along a course full of hardship for the natural man, can be borne over the thousand impediments of the narrow way, only by the tide of a joyful and bounding emotion. It is impossible to rise from reading Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius without a sense of constraint and melancholy, without feeling that the burden laid upon man is well-nigh greater than he can bear. Honour to the sages who have felt this, and yet have borne it! Yet even for the sage this sense of labour and sorrow in his march towards the goal constitutes a relative inferiority; the noblest souls of whatever creed, the pagan Empedocles as well as the Christian Paul, have insisted on the necessity of an inspiration, a living emotion, to make moral action perfect; an obscure indication of this necessity is the one drop of truth in the ocean of verbiage with which the controversy on justification by faith has flooded the world. But, for the ordinary man, this sense of labour and sorrow constitutes an absolute disqualification; it paralyses him; under the weight of it, he cannot make way towards the goal at all. The paramount virtue of religion is that it has lighted up morality; that it has supplied the emotion and inspiration needful for carrying the sage along the narrow way perfectly, for carrying the ordinary man along it at all.

(p. 2)

Indeed, the man who rises from his Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius with “a sense of constraint and melancholy, [a] feeling that the burden laid upon man is well-nigh greater than he can bear,” is experiencing almost precisely the emotions that Arnold, a decade earlier, had feared “Empedocles on Etna” would inspire in its readers: “the suffering [that] finds no vent in action; in which a continuous state of mental distress is prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope, or resistance; in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done.”³ But even more significantly, Arnold's phrase concerning “the tide of a joyful and bounding emotion,” with its key word “joy,”⁴ carries us forward, first, to Arnold's poem of mission and duty, “Obermann Once More”:

And yet men have such need of joy!
And joy whose grounds are true;
And joy that should all hearts employ
As when the past was new.(5)

—and then (coming, as it does, in conjunction with “the pagan Empedocles” and “the Christian Paul,” and with Arnold's tangential dismissal of the controversy over justification by faith) to St. Paul and Protestantism, and Arnold's “religious” works of the 1870's. I believe we are justified in suspecting, even at this point, that Arnold is sounding the central chords of his thought.

Arnold goes on in his essay:

Even the religions with most dross in them have something of this virtue; but the Christian religion manifests it with unexampled splendour. “Lead me, Zeus and Providence,” says the prayer of Epictetus, “whithersoever I am appointed to go; I will follow without wavering; even though I turn coward and shrink, I shall have to follow all the same.” The fortitude of that is for the strong, for the few; even for them, the spiritual atmosphere with which it surrounds them is bleak and grey. But [in words of the Old and New Testaments there is] the ray of sunshine … the glow of a divine warmth; the austerity of the sage melts away under it, the paralysis of the weak is healed; he who is vivified by it renews his strength; “all things are possible to Him [sic];” “he is a new creature.”

(pp. 2-3).

Arnold has by now introduced two systems of personification, from both of which he himself remains aloof. On the one hand we have “the mass of mankind,” “the ordinary man,” “the weak”; on the other, we have “the sage,” “the noblest souls of whatever creed,” “the strong,” “the few.” And Arnold's apparently dispassionate arrangement of these two categories of mankind is the basis for his similarly aloof contraposition of pagan and Christian morality (with the palm awarded to the latter). This aloofness gains interest when we notice an inconsistency: Marcus Aurelius has dropped altogether from the scene and Arnold is speaking, merely, of the “fortitude” of Epictetus and the “austerity of the sage”—contrasting this hard coldness to the “sunshine” and “glow” of Judæo-Christian religion. Yet earlier in the same paragraph Arnold has clearly bracketed Marcus Aurelius with Epictetus as one whose writings leave the reader with a “sense of constraint and melancholy,” and whose “sense of labour and sorrow in his march towards the goal constitutes a relative inferiority.” Our sense that the inconsistency is significant, that Arnold's aloofness is perhaps not so thoroughgoing after all, is soon confirmed. For Arnold now contrasts the “warmth” and “emotion” of a saying of Jesus to the colder rationality of a similar saying of Epictetus, and praises “Christian morality in general” for the way in which it propounds its maxims “with an inspiration which wonderfully catches the hearer and makes him act upon it,” and delivers some parenthetical remarks on John Stuart Mill (p. 3). Then suddenly, in what is syntactically but not logically the beginning of a new paragraph and section of his essay, he writes: “That which gives to the moral writings of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius their peculiar character and charm, is their being suffused and softened by something of this very sentiment whence Christian morality draws its best power” (p. 3). Were the writer anyone but Arnold we might be tempted to say that he has tried to escape, by stylistic hit-and-run tactics and devious paragraphing, from a comparison he is unable to carry through. In Arnold's writing, however—and to this Culture and Anarchy bears pre-eminent witness—the man himself is too deeply involved in his prose, too “committed,” for us to be certain that he is not also tricking himself.

II

In a discussion which for precision and fineness is reminiscent of the lectures On Translating Homer, Arnold now examines Long's translation (pp. 3-6). And he goes on to say:

The man whose thoughts Mr. Long has thus faithfully reproduced, is perhaps the most beautiful figure in history. He is one of those consoling and hope-inspiring marks, which stand for ever to remind our weak and easily discouraged race how high human goodness and perseverance have once been carried, and may be carried again. … Marcus Aurelius was the ruler of the grandest of empires; and he was one of the best of men. Besides him, history presents one or two other sovereigns eminent for their goodness, such as Saint Louis or Alfred. But Marcus Aurelius has, for us moderns, this great superiority in interest over Saint Louis or Alfred, that he lived and acted in a state of society modern by its essential characteristics, in an epoch akin to our own, in a brilliant centre of civilization. … Marcus Aurelius thus becomes for us a man like ourselves, a man in all things tempted as we are. … Neither Alfred nor Saint Louis can be morally and intellectually as near to us as Marcus Aurelius.

(pp. 6-7)

We are instantly alerted, here, by a profound shift in emphasis: the man from whose writings one could not rise “without a sense of constraint and melancholy” has become a “consoling and hope-inspiring” figure for a race whose weakness and discouragement is now apparently congenital, and not to be attributed to its choice of literature. But a shift of an even more significant kind has taken place. Whereas Arnold, in setting up the two systems of personification discussed above, used the third person singular and plural exclusively (“the mass of mankind,” “he,” “the ordinary man,” “the sage,” “the weak”), we are now confronted with one of these systems in the first person plural: “our weak and easily discouraged race,” “us moderns,” “an epoch akin to our own,” “a man like ourselves, a man in all things tempted as we are,” “as near to us as Marcus Aurelius.” Remembering Arnold's propensity for using a collective noun or pronoun when he really means something akin to “I,” we may suspect at this point, not that a crude substitution of the first person singular would bring out what Arnold “really means,” but simply that the shift is more than superficial: that Arnold has moved some steps closer to his subject not only in his formal argument (by declaring Marcus Aurelius a “modern”), but in the subtleties of feeling that underlie that argument.

Having discussed the Emperor's account of his education (p. 8), Arnold indicates the extent to which Marcus Aurelius's contemporaries and successors recognized his unexampled goodness (pp. 8-9), and goes on to defend him on two counts: that “he persecuted the Christians, and he had for his son the vicious and brutal Commodus” (p. 9). Arnold begins his defense of Marcus Aurelius on the first of these counts with great firmness and certainty—his prose at this point moves with an almost Augustan tread—tracing those “prejudices” which made it impossible for “a Roman of Marcus Aurelius's time” to view early Christianity with the benefits of nineteenth-century hindsight, prejudices which make it absurd to imagine “Trajan, or Antoninus Pius, or Marcus Aurelius, fresh from the perusal of the Gospel, fully aware of the spirit and holiness of the Christian saints, ordering their extermination because they loved darkness rather than light” (p. 9).⁶ He goes so far as to suggest that the Christians may, to some extent, have brought the Emperor's persecution on themselves; that they really did have faults of their own,

faults especially likely to strike such an observer as Marcus Aurelius. … Who can doubt that among the professing Christians of the second century, as among the professing Christians of the nineteenth, there was plenty of folly, plenty of rabid nonsense, plenty of gross fanaticism; who will even venture of affirm, that, separated in great measure from the intellect and civilization of the world for one or two centuries, Christianity, wonderful as have been its fruits, had the development perfectly worthy of its inestimable germ?

(pp. 10-11)

What follows now is one of the most uncomfortable twists of thought in the essay. Continuing this line of argument through four more sentences, and bringing it to what is stylistically a strong and full conclusion, Arnold then proceeds, within the same paragraph, to answer himself in what is in effect another voice. I have marked with a double asterisk what seems to me to be the curious turning-point in the argument:

Who will venture to affirm, that, by the alliance of Christianity with the virtue and intelligence of men like the Antonines, of the best product of Greek and Roman civilisation, while Greek and Roman civilisation had yet life and power, Christianity and the world, as well as the Antonines themselves, would not have been gainers?⁷ That alliance was not to be; the Antonines lived and died with an utter misconception of Christianity; Christianity grew up in the Catacombs, not on the Palatine. Marcus Aurelius incurs no moral reproach by having authorised the punishment of the Christians; he does not thereby become in the least what we mean by a persecutor. ** One may concede that it was impossible for him to see Christianity as it really was;—as impossible as for even the moderate and sensible Fleury to see the Antonines as they really were;—one may concede that the point of view from which Christianity appeared something anti-civil and anti-social, which the State had the faculty to judge and the duty to suppress, was inevitably his. Still, however, it remains true that this sage, who made perfection his aim and reason his law, did Christianity an immense injustice, and rested in an idea of State-attributes which was illusive. And this is, in truth, characteristic of Marcus Aurelius, that he is blameless, yet, in a certain sense, unfortunate; in his character, beautiful as it is, there is something melancholy, circumscribed, and ineffectual.

(p.11)

Sensitized by Arnold's abrupt shift in tone, our ears should tingle at his mention of “the State” and perk at the phrase “an idea of State-attributes which was illusive.” If my own ear does not fail me, then the idea of Marcus Aurelius “rest[ing] in an idea of State-attributes which was illusive” is not quite apt here, seems to go beyond the matter, evidence, and argument at hand; and we have had a glimpse of Arnold's continuing (and here obtrusive) concern with a theme that will be central to Culture and Anarchy. The adjective “ineffectual” (on which Arnold will insist again in a moment) seems similarly intrusive. To say that in the Emperor's character there is something “melancholy” and “circumscribed” is to echo (without much further substantiation) the opening of the essay, in which Marcus Aurelius was bracketed with Epictetus. Even this is admissible, however, compared with Arnold's use of “ineffectual” to characterize the man who was the caretaker of the Roman Empire for nineteen years, who performed this task to the utmost of his considerable abilities, and who seemed to his contemporaries a virtual incarnation of goodness—unless we are to dissociate the man from his “character,” and say that the “character” could have effected what the man did not. In the end, the “certain sense” in which Marcus Aurelius is “unfortunate,” “melancholy,” “circumscribed,” and “ineffectual” is Arnold's own sense, and not that of the surface argument of his essay.

Arnold carries his thought into the subsequent paragraph (pp. 11-12), which constitutes his defense of Marcus Aurelius “for having such a son as Commodus.” Here we notice the uncomfortable movement of successive sentences begun with “But” and “Still” (a paragraph later this movement is complicated even further with an initial “Yet”), the generally choppy and hesitant movement of the prose, the mechanical use of conjunctions and prepositions. The paragraph concludes:

Still one cannot help wishing that the example of Marcus Aurelius could have availed more with his only son; one cannot but think that with such virtue as his there should go, too, the ardour which removes mountains, and that the ardour which removes mountains might have even won Commodus; the world ineffectual again rises to one's mind; Marcus Aurelius saved his own soul by righteousness, and he could do no more. Happy they, who can do this! but still happier, who can do more!

(pp. 11-12)

—and once again, the adjective “ineffectual” does not rise to the mind with quite the buoyancy Arnold attributes to it. Here, too, there is an undercurrent of thought and feeling at work, whose tendencies become even more evident when Arnold's argument once again turns upon itself: “Yet, when one passes from his outward to his inward life, when one turns over the pages of his Meditations … all disposition to carp and cavil dies away, and one is overpowered by the charm of a character of such purity, delicacy, and virtue” (p. 12).

Thus the sense of “constraint and melancholy” which Arnold first applied to the writings of Marcus Aurelius, and which he then shifted to the Emperor's “character” (though the Meditations are our only evidence for the inner workings of that character) and “substantiated” with biographical evidence, is here, at last, segregated from the writings altogether!

III

Arnold now works out, once more, a thought which strikingly prefigures his “religious” writings,⁸ and then embarks on a major attempt at pulling together the increasingly ambiguous strands of his essay. He picks up the imagery of “light” and “sunshine” which has played over his essay like a metaphor seeking its métier,⁹ and codifies it thus:

I have said that it is by its accent of emotion that the morality of Marcus Aurelius acquires a special character, and reminds one of Christian morality. The sentences of Seneca are stimulating to the intellect; the sentences of Epictetus are fortifying to the character; the sentences of Marcus Aurelius find their way to the soul. I have said that religious emotion has the power to light up morality; the emotion of Marcus Aurelius does not quite light up his morality, but it suffuses it; it has not power to melt the clouds of effort and austerity quite away, but it shines through them and glorifies them; it is a spirit, not so much of gladness and elation, as of gentleness and sweetness; a delicate and tender sentiment, which is less than joy and more than resignation. He says that in his youth he learned from Maximus, one of his teachers, “cheerfulness in all circumstances as well as in illness; and a just admixture in the moral character of sweetness and dignity;” and it is this very admixture of sweetness with his dignity, which makes him so beautiful a moralist.

(pp. 13-14)¹⁰

Arnold has now elaborated and juxtaposed the two elements of the central metaphor of Culture and Anarchy: sweetness and light. In Culture and Anarchy the metaphor will be closely associated with Hellenism—“Hellenism, and human life in the hands of Hellenism … are full of what we call sweetness and light”¹¹—encountering, and striving to pierce, clouds of darkness and confusion. And the genesis of the metaphor here gains interest when, elsewhere in Arnold's essay, we find something very like the Hellenism of Culture and Anarchy. Having stressed the “modernity” of Marcus Aurelius and his times (a theme first touched upon in the 1857 lecture “On the Modern Element in Literature”),¹² Arnold goes on to say, in a passage which I have hitherto only paraphrased: “The vices and foibles of the Greek sophist or rhetorician, the Græculus esuriens, are in everybody's mind; but he who reads Marcus Aurelius's account of his Greek teachers and masters, will understand how it is that in spite of the vices and foibles of individual Græculi, the education of the human race owes to Greece a debt which can never be overrated” (p.8). In a rudimentary form, we have here the idea of Hellenism working in the best endeavors of Roman culture, much as Arnold will soon see it striving even in the deleteriously Hebraized culture of nineteenth-century England. Sweetness, light, and Hellenism: to adapt a term from Shakespeare studies, there is a potential cluster of metaphors in this essay whose coupling is soon to take place.

Arnold's drawing-together of his metaphor serves to introduce a virtual prose poem in which he hymns his subject: “gentleness … sweetness … a delicate and tender sentiment … sweetness … beautiful … a delicate penetration … a sympathetic tenderness …” (p.14); a few lines further on we learn that “it is when his strain passes to directly moral subjects that his delicacy and sweetness lend to it the greatest charm” (p.14); and a quotation is introduced with an admonition to “those who can feel the beauty of spiritual refinement” (p.14). If this, too, seems to go somewhat beyond the matter at hand, if Arnold seems to sweep away with unpremeditated passion the perilous structure of qualification and counter-qualification he has erected, with its irreconcilable ambiguities, we will not at this point be surprised.

IV

The conclusion of Arnold's essay is in sight. Having illustrated his subject's “sweetness” and “resolute thankfulness” with a number of passages from the Meditations (pp.15-16), as well as his striving after a character he wished to attain, his “sense of shortcoming” (pp.16-17), and his compensatory lack of illusion concerning “the spectacle afforded to him by his fellow-creatures” (p.18), Arnold enters upon a finale which again has many of the elements of a prose poem. Here Marcus Aurelius emerges as “the especial friend and comforter of all those scrupulous and difficult, yet pure and upward-striving souls, in those ages most especially, that walk by sight not by faith, that have no open vision; he cannot give such souls, perhaps, all they yearn for, but he gives them much; and what he gives them, they can receive” (pp.18-19). And Arnold's argument undergoes a final reversal:

Yet no: it is not on this account that such souls love him most; it is rather because of the emotion which gives his voice so touching an accent, it is because he, too, yearns as they do for something unattained by him. What an affinity for Christianity had this persecutor of the Christians! the effusion of Christianity, its relieving tears, its happy self-sacrifice, were the very element, one feels, for which his spirit longed; they were near him, he touched them, he passed them by.

(p.19)

Arnold's conclusion is as memorable, as magnificently poised, as that of the Preface to the first Essays in Criticism: “We see him wise, just, self-governed, tender, thankful, blameless; yet, with all this, agitated, stretching out his arms for something beyond,—tendentemque manus ripæ ulterioris amore” (p.19).—Yet it is not Marcus Aurelius who stretches his arms, who “yearns,” but the “souls” who live “in those ages … that walk by sight not by faith,” who love him because they feel that “he, too, yearns as they do for something unattained by him”; it is not Marcus Aurelius who “yearns” but Arnold himself, the Arnold of “Dover Beach” and “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse,” the Arnold of “Obermann Once More” (with its flat, weak, and unconvincing ending), the Arnold who, within a few years, will undertake the mission of imbuing the world with a joy which he himself cannot feel. And Arnold's sense of affinity with Marcus Aurelius is at the heart of the ambiguous and revealing essay occasioned by Mr. Long's translation from the Greek.¹³

Notes

1. Matthew Arnold, “Pagan and Christian Religious Sentiment,” The Cornhill Magazine, IX (April, 1864), 424.

2. Matthew Arnold, “Marcus Aurelius,” The Victoria Magazine, II (November, 1863), 2. Hereafter, page-references to this essay are given in parentheses in the body of my text.

3. The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super, Vol. I: On the Classical Tradition (Ann Arbor, 1960), 2-3.

4. “Joy” recurs again, with great significance for Arnold's development, in his essay “Pagan and Christian Religious Sentiment,” p. 434: “That is where the sentiment of a religion of sorrow has such a vast advantage over the sentiment of a religion of pleasure, in its power to be a general, popular, religious sentiment, a stay for the mass of mankind, whose lives are full of hardship. It really succeeds in conveying far more joy, far more of what the mass of mankind are so much without, than its rival.”

5. Matthew Arnold, New Poems (London, 1867), p. 234. The immediately preceding stanza (“The millions suffer still, and grieve, And what can helpers heal With old-world cures men half believe For woes they wholly feel?”), together with this one, should be compared with the sentences I have quoted from “Pagan and Christian Religious Sentiment,” note 4.

6. Here, as elsewhere in his essay, Arnold seems partly to be engaged in a wrestle with Mill's On Liberty—not the section directly critical of Christianity, but Mill's discussion of Marcus Aurelius as a supremely wise and good man who erred on the side of suppression. Thus, Mill had written in Chapter II of On Liberty (London, 1859), pp. 49-50: “Inasmuch then as the theology of Christianity did not appear to [Marcus Aurelius] true or of divine origin; inasmuch as this strange history of a crucified God was not credible to him, and a system which purported to rest entirely upon a foundation to him so wholly unbelievable, could not be foreseen by him to be that renovating agency which, after all abatements, it has in fact proved to be; the gentlest and most amiable of philosophers and rulers … authorized the persecution of Christianity.”

7. Compare Mill, On Liberty, p. 50: “It is a bitter thought, how different a thing the Christianity of the world might have been, if the Christian faith had been adopted as the religion of the empire under the auspices of Marcus Aurelius instead of those of Constantine.”

8. That “Christianity uses language very liable to be misunderstood when it seems to tell men to do good … that ‘their Father which seeth in secret may reward them openly.’ The motives of reward and punishment have come, from the misconception of language of this kind, to be strangely over-pressed by many Christian moralists, to the deterioration and disfigurement of Christianity” (p. 13). We are not too far, here, from the idea that St. Paul sometimes “Orientalizes,” and that Oriental metaphors can harden into dogma.

9. Systems of morality provide a powerful aid to human life “in its days of languor and gloom as well as in its days of sunshine and energy” (p. 1); the paramount virtue of religion is “that it has lighted up morality” (p. 2); the spiritual atmosphere with which the fortitude of the strong and the few surrounds them “is bleak and grey” (p. 2); and so forth.

10. But Arnold never becomes conscious of the unintended metaphorical continuity between his description of the spiritual effect of sentences from the Old and New Testaments—“the austerity of the sage melts away under it, the paralysis of the weak is healed; he who is vivified by it renews his strength” (p. 3)—and: “[Marcus Aurelius's] account of his education … is a refreshing and consoling picture, a priceless treasure …” (p. 8).

11. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. J. Dover Wilson (Cambridge, 1960), p. 134.

12. In this lecture Arnold had argued at length that “in the age of Pericles we have, in spite of its antiquity, a highly-developed, a modern, a deeply-interesting epoch.” Of the Roman world he concluded that we do not find in it “a commensurate literature,” or anything to match the “enduring interest of Greek literature, and, above all, of Greek poetry,” but that it too was “a highly modern, a deeply significant, an interesting period—a period more significant and more interesting, because fuller, than the great period of Greece” (The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, I, 28-37). A part of the letter Arnold wrote to his sister “K” from Nimes, on 22 May 1859 (Unpublished Letters of Matthew Arnold, ed. Arnold Whitridge [New Haven, 1923], pp. 44-45), offers a bridge between this lecture and “Marcus Aurelius”; and shows incidentally how dramatic a shift of conviction Arnold underwent before writing “Pagan and Christian Religious Sentiment.”

13. To F. W. H. Myers (1843-1901) must go the credit for first firmly amalgamating Arnold to the Stoic tradition. In his obituary essay “Matthew Arnold” (Fortnightly Review, N.S. XLIII [1888], 722-724) Myers insists that Arnold's excursion into religion was no “wanton divergence” but a bold attempt at “carrying over the prestige and beauty of both Old and New Testament into the Stoic camp. …” But Myers concludes that “by no arts, no flexibility, could he pour Christian wine into Stoic bottles; by no unction, no optimist temper, could he identify the religion of renunciation with the religion of hope.” It is in this essay that we find Myers's famous sentence: “[Arnold] has been treated as a flippant and illusory Christian, instead of as a specially devout and conservative Agnostic.” William Robbins, in The Ethical Idealism of Matthew Arnold (Toronto, 1959), p. 75, quotes this sentence as an “epigrammatic remark” which was “one of the shrewdest” tributes paid to Arnold after his death. But the “remark” is imbedded in a remarkably shrewd essay.