Much to Remember

Matthew Arnold on Cromwell

Cromwell by Matthew Arnold

In the nineteenth century, there was a great vogue — not afterwards repeated — for longish poems on biographical subjects. This was the age of the growing of printed culture to include great collections of portraits of famous men. It’s the time of vast uniform editions of biographical writings about the governors-general of India; an age of series depicting former kings and ministers. This was a biographical revolution which touched fiction as well as fact. And poetry as well as prose.

Cromwell, dead long enough by then to be a great man and not only a traitor, denounced by his successors, was one of those historical men given this new treatment. His actions were interesting; his psychology, even more so. And so writers in all genres, of all persuasions, sought to supply the goods. Plays about his life, revisionist biographies in three and four volumes. Works of philosophy, imaginary dialogues with Cromwell a character. Ballads and broadsides and popular song. A great deal of coverage, in one way or other.

This long poem, a prize-winner, is Matthew Arnold’s undergraduate bid to make sense of a great and enigmatic life. His chosen device is recreating a kind of deathbed vision, a deathbed vision experienced by Cromwell amid the storms that, according to the chroniclers at least, really did accompany the end of the Lord Protector’s life.

As is traditional in these affairs, Arnold refers to childhood first. The sweet embrace of family and home, the fields and the streets. Arnold seems to believe that Cromwell did not emerge from Huntingdonshire until he was in his forties, that the place was his whole world long after youth had fled. Or so it seems from the confused and swirling visions that assails his character.

Whose face is it he sees? is it that of the late King Charles? Arnold is here alluding to a romantic myth — with of course less than zero historical foundation — that Cromwell and the future king were boyhood friends. Something, of course, that could never have happened; would never have happened in any world ruled by men.

Is that the face of a boyhood companion? Ah, but look. Look at that face. Is not the face now old, and lined, and tired? How different is it from the face of a fortunate child.

And yet, as Cromwell beholds it, the face is not that of the king — the head he had struck off — but instead his own. Such things are the province of visions.

This poem, despite its fair length for a single lyric, is dismissive, even referential, when alluding to great historical figures or moments of history. We have Cromwell talking in a single line of Naseby, in a single phrase about Archbishop Laud, of Falkland and of others. These people are thrown aside, almost forgotten, in what Arnold tries to present as a great flood of memory, of indistinct impressions.

We are not given, for instance, the wild movements of drapery or the strange play of sun- or starlight on the walls, as sometimes poets of imagination like to place around their dying characters. But all happens too fast, is woozily imprecise, to be sane and fluid and legible.

We have diversions: Arnold refers to the seizure of some ships that Cromwell, as Lord Protector, apparently authorised. In the notes, he alludes to the failures and muddleheadedness of some of Cromwell’s last speeches — and contrasts them with the formal, almost metrical prayer the Lord Protector is said to have spoken at the approach of his death.

What does Arnold conclude about Cromwell? He does not conclude, as students are said to do when writing reports for geography at school, that a given country is ‘a land of contrasts’ — but he does not go far from it. What was Cromwell but an enigma? A man whose personality changed often and without warning. A grave, solemn man, a soldier, a man capable of rages; a man who behaved with surprisingly limited inhibition on occasion — who behaved into his mature years, sometimes, like a schoolboy.

A man hard enough to pin down, to write a poem about.

What’s the secret? What does Arnold consider the key to the personality of his subject? The Huntingdonshire of the long-ago? The civil war, an event that separated families, towns, counties, the country, and made all mad with violent passions, superstition and what later men would pejoratively call enthusiasm?

This does not seem to be Arnold’s point. He makes some reference, as all poets of that age must, to the ending of a life — to the giving up of life’s struggles and cares. To the extent that, after the end and the deaths of all who took part, all the animation of existence, and the trials of entire eras, become unreachable and distant. To Arnold, and doubly so to those of us a century and a half after him, the life of Cromwell is a succession of names. It’s beyond us, far beyond mortal knowledge.

But that alone is not his point. It is that, in the final hours and in the final moments, a great man who did much, whose life — like all lives — moved from joyous innocence into bitter experience, has much to think about, much to be attacked by, much to remember.