Reticence in Literature
HE never spoke out. Upon these four words, gathered by chance from a private letter, Matthew Arnold, with that super-subtle ingenuity which loved to take the word and play upon it and make it of innumerable colours, has constructed, as one may conjecture some antediluvian wonder from its smallest fragment, a full, complete, and intimate picture of the poet Thomas Gray. He never spoke out. Here, we are told, lies the secret of Gray's limitation as much in life as in literature: so sensitive was he in private life, so modest in public, that the thoughts that arose in him never got full utterance, the possibilities of his genius were never fulfilled; and we, in our turn, are left the poorer for that nervous delicacy which has proved the bane of the poet, living and dead alike. It is a singularly characteristic essay—this paper on Gray, showing the writer's logical talent at once in its strongest and its weakest capacities, and a complete study of Arnold's method might well, I think, be founded upon its thirty pages. But in the present instance I have recurred to that recurring phrase, He never spoke out, not to discuss Matthew Arnold's estimate of Gray, nor, indeed, to consider Gray's relation to his age; but merely to point out, what the turn of Arnold's argument did not require him to consider, namely, the extraordinarily un-English aspect of this
