DOI Artikel:
Waugh, Arthur: Reticence in literature
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.20196#0207
Reticence in Literature
By Arthur Waugh
T TS never spoke out. Upon these four words, gathered by
J-J- 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 wonderfrom its smallest fragment, a
füll, complete, and intimate picture of the poet Thomas Gray. He
never spoke out. Here, we are told, lies the secret of Gray's limita-
tion 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 füll utterance, the possibilities of his genius were never ful-
filled ; 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
reticence
By Arthur Waugh
T TS never spoke out. Upon these four words, gathered by
J-J- 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 wonderfrom its smallest fragment, a
füll, complete, and intimate picture of the poet Thomas Gray. He
never spoke out. Here, we are told, lies the secret of Gray's limita-
tion 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 füll utterance, the possibilities of his genius were never ful-
filled ; 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
reticence