Matthew Arnold
born Dec. 24, 1822, Laleham, Middlesex,
Eng.
died April 15, 1888, Liverpool
English Victorian poet and literary and
social critic, noted especially for his
classical attacks on the contemporary tastes
and manners of the “Barbarians” (the
aristocracy), the “Philistines” (the
commercial middle class), and the
“Populace.” He became the apostle of
“culture” in such works as Culture and
Anarchy (1869).
Life.
Matthew was the eldest son of the
renowned Thomas Arnold, who was appointed
headmaster of Rugby School in 1828. Matthew
entered Rugby (1837) and then attended
Oxford as a scholar of Balliol College;
there he won the Newdigate Prize with his
poem Cromwell (1843) and was graduated with
second-class honours in 1844. For Oxford
Arnold retained an impassioned affection.
His Oxford was the Oxford of John Henry
Newman—of Newman just about to be received
into the Roman Catholic Church; and although
Arnold’s own religious thought, like his
father’s, was strongly liberal, Oxford and
Newman always remained for him joint symbols
of spiritual beauty and culture.
In 1847 Arnold became private secretary
to Lord Lansdowne, who occupied a high
Cabinet post during Lord John Russell’s
Liberal ministries. And in 1851, in order to
secure the income needed for his marriage
(June 1851) with Frances Lucy Wightman, he
accepted from Lansdowne an appointment as
inspector of schools. This was to be his
routine occupation until within two years of
his death. He engaged in incessant
travelling throughout the British provinces
and also several times was sent by the
government to inquire into the state of
education in France, Germany, Holland, and
Switzerland. Two of his reports on schools
abroad were reprinted as books, and his
annual reports on schools at home attracted
wide attention, written, as they were, in
Arnold’s own urbane and civilized prose.
Poetic achievement.
The work that gives Arnold his high
place in the history of literature and the
history of ideas was all accomplished in the
time he could spare from his official
duties. His first volume of verse was The
Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems. By A.
(1849); this was followed (in 1852) by
another under the same initial: Empedocles
on Etna, and Other Poems. In 1853 appeared
the first volume of poems published under
his own name; it consisted partly of poems
selected from the earlier volumes and also
contained the well-known preface explaining
(among other things) why Empedocles was
excluded from the selection: it was a
dramatic poem “in which the suffering finds
no vent in action,” in which there is
“everything to be endured, nothing to be
done.” This preface foreshadows his later
criticism in its insistence upon the classic
virtues of unity, impersonality,
universality, and architectonic power and
upon the value of the classical masterpieces
as models for “an age of spiritual
discomfort”—an age “wanting in moral
grandeur.” Other editions followed, and
Merope, Arnold’s classical tragedy, appeared
in 1858, and New Poems in 1867. After that
date, though there were further editions,
Arnold wrote little additional verse.
Not much of Arnold’s verse will stand the
test of his own criteria; far from being
classically poised, impersonal, serene, and
grand, it is often intimate, personal, full
of romantic regret, sentimental pessimism,
and nostalgia. As a public and social
character and as a prose writer, Arnold was
sunny, debonair, and sanguine; but beneath
ran the current of his buried life, and of
this much of his poetry is the echo:
From the soul’s subterranean depth
upborne
As from an infinitely distant land,
Come airs, and floating echoes, and
convey
A melancholy into all our day.
“I am past thirty,” he wrote a friend in
1853, “and three parts iced over.” The
impulse to write poetry came typically when
A bolt is shot back somewhere in the
breast,
And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again.
Though he was “never quite benumb’d by
the world’s sway,” these hours of insight
became more and more rare, and the stirrings
of buried feeling were associated with moods
of regret for lost youth, regret for the
freshness of the early world, moods of
self-pity, moods of longing for
The hills where his life rose
And the sea where it goes.
Yet, though much of Arnold’s most
characteristic verse is in this vein of
soliloquy or intimate confession, he can
sometimes rise, as in “Sohrab and Rustum,”
to epic severity and impersonality; to lofty
meditation, as in “Dover Beach”; and to
sustained magnificence and richness, as in
“The Scholar Gipsy” and “Thyrsis”—where he
wields an intricate stanza form without a
stumble.
In 1857, assisted by the vote of his
godfather (and predecessor) John Keble,
Arnold was elected to the Oxford chair of
poetry, which he held for 10 years. It was
characteristic of him that he revolutionized
this professorship. The keynote was struck
in his inaugural lecture: “On the Modern
Element in Literature,” “modern” being taken
to mean not merely “contemporary” (for
Greece was “modern”), but the spirit that,
contemplating the vast and complex spectacle
of life, craves for moral and intellectual
“deliverance.” Several of the lectures were
afterward published as critical essays, but
the most substantial fruits of his
professorship were the three lectures On
Translating Homer (1861)—in which he
recommended Homer’s plainness and nobility
as medicine for the modern world, with its
“sick hurry and divided aims” and condemned
Francis Newman’s recent translation as
ignoble and eccentric—and the lectures On
the Study of Celtic Literature (1867), in
which, without much knowledge of his subject
or of anthropology, he used the Celtic
strain as a symbol of that which rejects the
despotism of the commonplace and the
utilitarian.
Arnold as critic.
It is said that when the poet in Arnold
died, the critic was born; and it is true
that from this time onward he turned almost
entirely to prose. Some of the leading ideas
and phrases were early put into currency in
Essays in Criticism (First Series, 1865;
Second Series, 1888) and Culture and
Anarchy. The first essay in the 1865 volume,
“The Function of Criticism at the Present
Time,” is an overture announcing briefly
most of the themes he developed more fully
in later work. It is at once evident that he
ascribes to “criticism” a scope and
importance hitherto undreamed of. The
function of criticism, in his sense, is “a
disinterested endeavour to learn and
propagate the best that is known and thought
in the world, and thus to establish a
current of fresh and true ideas.” It is in
fact a spirit that he is trying to foster,
the spirit of an awakened and informed
intelligence playing upon not “literature”
merely but theology, history, art, science,
sociology, and politics, and in every sphere
seeking “to see the object as in itself it
really is.”
In this critical effort, thought Arnold,
England lagged behind France and Germany,
and the English accordingly remained in a
backwater of provinciality and complacency.
Even the great Romantic poets, with all
their creative energy, suffered from the
want of it. The English literary critic must
know literatures other than his own and be
in touch with European standards. This last
line of thought Arnold develops in the
second essay, “The Literary Influence of
Academies,” in which he dwells upon “the
note of provinciality” in English
literature, caused by remoteness from a
“centre” of correct knowledge and correct
taste. To realize how much Arnold widened
the horizons of criticism requires only a
glance at the titles of some of the other
essays in Essays in Criticism (1865):
“Maurice de Guérin,” “Eugénie de Guérin,”
“Heinrich Heine,” “Joubert,” “Spinoza,”
“Marcus Aurelius”; in all these, as
increasingly in his later books, he is
“applying modern ideas to life” as well as
to letters and “bringing all things under
the point of view of the 19th century.”
The first essay in the 1888 volume, “The
Study of Poetry,” was originally published
as the general introduction to T.H. Ward’s
anthology, The English Poets (1880). It
contains many of the ideas for which Arnold
is best remembered. In an age of crumbling
creeds, poetry will have to replace
religion. More and more, we will “turn to
poetry to interpret life for us, to console
us, to sustain us.” Therefore we must know
how to distinguish the best poetry from the
inferior, the genuine from the counterfeit;
and to do this we must steep ourselves in
the work of the acknowledged masters, using
as “touchstones” passages exemplifying their
“high seriousness,” and their superiority of
diction and movement.
The remaining essays, with the exception
of the last two (on Tolstoy and Amiel), all
deal with English poets: Milton, Gray,
Keats, Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley. All
contain memorable things, and all attempt a
serious and responsible assessment of each
poet’s “criticism of life” and his value as
food for the modern spirit. Arnold has been
taken to task for some of his judgments and
omissions: for his judgment that Dryden and
Pope were not “genuine” poets because they
composed in their wits instead of “in the
soul”; for calling Gray a “minor classic” in
an age of prose and spiritual bleakness; for
paying too much attention to the man behind
the poetry (Gray, Keats, Shelley); for
making no mention of Donne; and above all
for saying that poetry is “at bottom a
criticism of life.” On this last point it
should be remembered that he added “under
the conditions fixed. . .by the laws of
poetic truth and poetic beauty,” and that if
by “criticism” is understood (as Arnold
meant) “evaluation,” Arnold’s dictum is seen
to have wider significance than has been
sometimes supposed.
Culture and Anarchy is in some ways
Arnold’s most central work. It is an
expansion of his earlier attacks, in “The
Function of Criticism” and “Heinrich Heine,”
upon the smugness, philistinism, and mammon
worship of Victorian England. Culture, as
“the study of perfection,” is opposed to the
prevalent “anarchy” of a new democracy
without standards and without a sense of
direction. By “turning a stream of fresh
thought upon our stock notions and habits,”
culture seeks to make “reason and the will
of God prevail.”
Arnold’s classification of English
society into Barbarians (with their high
spirit, serenity, and distinguished manners
and their inaccessibility to ideas),
Philistines (the stronghold of religious
nonconformity, with plenty of energy and
morality but insufficient “sweetness and
light”), and Populace (still raw and blind)
is well known. Arnold saw in the Philistines
the key to the whole position; they were now
the most influential section of society;
their strength was the nation’s strength,
their crudeness its crudeness: Educate and
humanize the Philistines, therefore. Arnold
saw in the idea of “the State,” and not in
any one class of society, the true organ and
repository of the nation’s collective “best
self.” No summary can do justice to this
extraordinary book; it can still be read
with pure enjoyment, for it is written with
an inward poise, a serene detachment, and an
infusion of mental laughter, which make it a
masterpiece of ridicule as well as a
searching analysis of Victorian society. The
same is true of its unduly neglected sequel,
Friendship’s Garland (1871).
Religious writings.
Lastly Arnold turned to religion, the
constant preoccupation and true centre of
his whole life, and wrote St. Paul and
Protestantism (1870), Literature and Dogma
(1873), God and the Bible (1875), and Last
Essays on Church and Religion (1877). In
these books, Arnold really founded Anglican
“modernism.” Like all religious liberals, he
came under fire from two sides: from the
orthodox, who accused him of infidelity, of
turning God into a “stream of tendency” and
of substituting vague emotion for definite
belief; and from the infidels, for clinging
to the church and retaining certain
Christian beliefs of which he had undermined
the foundations. Arnold considered his
religious writings to be constructive and
conservative. Those who accused him of
destructiveness did not realize how far
historical and scientific criticism had
already riddled the old foundations; and
those who accused him of timidity failed to
see that he regarded religion as the highest
form of culture, the one indispensable
without which all secular education is in
vain. His attitude is best summed up in his
own words (from the preface to God and the
Bible): “At the present moment two things
about the Christian religion must surely be
clear to anybody with eyes in his head. One
is, that men cannot do without it; the
other, that they cannot do with it as it
is.” Convinced that much in popular religion
was “touched with the finger of death” and
convinced no less of the hopelessness of man
without religion, he sought to find for
religion a basis of “scientific fact” that
even the positive modern spirit must accept.
A reading of Arnold’s Note Books will
convince any reader of the depth of Arnold’s
spirituality and of the degree to which, in
his “buried life,” he disciplined himself in
constant devotion and self-forgetfulness.
Arnold died suddenly, of heart failure,
in the spring of 1888, at Liverpool and was
buried at Laleham, with the three sons whose
early loss had shadowed his life.
Basil Willey
Ed.
