Matthew Arnold

by abdo Wed Apr 06, 2011 3:46 pm

Matthew
Arnold

This
article is about the poet. For other uses, see Matthew
Arnold (disambiguation).

Matthew Arnold
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
Born	24 December 1822 (1822-12-24) [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
Died	15 April 1888 (1888-04-16) [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
Occupation	Her Majesty's Inspector of Schools
Nationality	British
Period	Victorian
Genres	Poetry; Literary, Social and Religious Criticism
Notable work(s)	"[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]", "[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]", "[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]", [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
Influences[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] · [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
Influenced[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] · [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Caricature
from [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], 1881: "Admit that Homer sometimes
nods, That poets do write trash, Our Bard has written "[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]," And
also Balder-dash"

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Family
tree

Matthew Arnold (24
December 1822 – 15 April 1888) was a [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] and [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] who
worked as an inspector of schools. He was the son of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], the famed
headmaster of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.],
and brother to both [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], literary professor, and William Delafield
Arnold, novelist and colonial administrator. Matthew Arnold has been
characterized as a [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], a type of writer who chastises and
instructs the reader on contemporary social issues.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

Early years

The Reverend [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], who would become
one of the leaders of the Oxford
Movement, stood as godfather to Matthew. "Thomas Arnold admired
Keble's 'hymns' in The
Christian Year, only reversing himself with exasperation when this old
friend became a Romeward-tending '[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]'
reactionary in the 1830s."^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]} In
1828, Arnold's
father was appointed Headmaster of Rugby School and his young family took up
residence, that year, in the Headmaster's house. In 1831, Arnold was tutored by his uncle, the Reverend
John Buckland, at Laleham, Middlesex. In 1834, the Arnolds
occupied a holiday home, Fox How, in the Lake District.
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
was a neighbor and close friend. Fox How then became the family home after Dr.
Arnold's untimely death in 1842.

In 1836, Arnold
was sent to Winchester
College, but in 1837 he returned to Rugby School
where he was enrolled in the fifth form. He moved to the sixth form in 1838 and
thus came under the direct tutelage of his father. He wrote verse for the
manuscript Fox How Magazine produced by Matthew and his brother Tom for the
family's enjoyment from 1838 to 1843. During his years as a Rugby
student, he won school prizes for English essay writing, and Latin and English
poetry. His prize poem, "Alaric at Rome,"
was printed at Rugby.

In 1841, he won an open
scholarship to [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], Oxford. During his residence at Oxford, his friendship ripened with [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.],
another graduate of Rugby who had been one of
his father's favourites. Arnold
attended John Henry
Newman's sermons at [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], but did not
join the Oxford Movement. His father died suddenly of heart disease in 1842. Arnold's poem
"Cromwell" won the 1843 Newdigate
prize. He graduated in the following year with a 2nd Class Honours degree
in "Greats."

In 1845, after a short
interlude of teaching at Rugby, he was elected Fellow of Oriel
College, Oxford.
In 1847, he became Private Secretary to [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], Lord
President of the Council. In 1849, he published his first book of poetry,
The Strayed Reveller. In 1850 Wordsworth died; Arnold published his "Memorial
Verses" on the older poet in Fraser's Magazine.

Marriage and a career

Wishing to marry, but unable
to support a family on the wages of a private secretary, Arnold sought the position of, and was
appointed, in April 1851, one of Her Majesty's Inspector of Schools. Two months
later, he married Frances Lucy, daughter of Sir William Wightman, Justice of
the Queen's Bench. The Arnolds had six children: Thomas (1852–1868); Trevenen
William (1853–1872); Richard Penrose (1855–1908), an inspector of factories;^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
Lucy Charlotte (1858–1934) who married Frederick W. Whitridge of New York, whom
she had met during Arnold's American lecture tour; Eleanore Mary Caroline
(1861–1936) married (1) Hon. Armine Wodehouse in 1889, (2) William Masefield,
Baron Sandhurst, in 1909; Basil Francis (1866–1868).

Arnold often described his duties as a school
inspector as "drudgery," although "at other times he
acknowledged the benefit of regular work."^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
The inspectorship required him, at least at first, to travel constantly and
across much of England.
"Initially, Arnold was responsible for
inspecting Nonconformist schools across a broad swath of central England. He
spent many dreary hours during the 1850s in railway waiting-rooms and
small-town hotels, and longer hours still in listening to children reciting
their lessons and parents reciting their grievances. But that also meant that
he, among the first generation of the railway age, travelled across more of England than
any man of letters had ever done. Although his duties were later confined to a
smaller area, Arnold knew the society of
provincial England
better than most of the metropolitan authors and politicians of the day."^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

Literary career

In 1852, Arnold published his second volume of poems, Empedocles
on Etna, and Other Poems. In 1853, he published Poems: A New Edition,
a selection from the two earlier volumes famously excluding Empedocles on
Etna, but adding new poems, [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
and The Scholar
Gipsy. In 1854, Poems: Second Series appeared; also a selection,
it included the new poem, Balder
Dead.

Arnold
was elected [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] at Oxford in 1857. He was the first to deliver
his lectures in English rather than Latin. He was re-elected in 1862. [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
(1861) and the initial thoughts that Arnold
would transform into [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
were among the fruits of the Oxford
lectures. In 1859, he conducted the first of three trips to the continent at
the behest of parliament to study European educational practices. He
self-published The Popular Education of France (1861), the introduction
to which was later published under the title Democracy (1879).^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

In 1865, Arnold published Essays in Criticism:
First Series. Essays in Criticism: Second Series would not appear
until November 1888, shortly after his untimely death. In 1866, he published [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], his elegy to
Clough who had died in 1861. Culture and Anarchy, Arnold's major work in social criticism (and
one of the few pieces of his prose work currently in print) was published in
1869. Literature and Dogma, Arnold's
major work in religious criticism appeared in 1873. In 1883 and 1884, Arnold toured the United States delivering lectures
on education, democracy and [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].

In 1886, he retired from
school inspection and made another trip to America. Arnold
died suddenly in 1888 of heart failure, when running to meet a tram that would
have taken him to the Liverpool Landing Stage to see his daughter, who was
visiting from the United
States where she had moved after marrying an
American.

Arnold's character

Matthew Arnold "was
indeed the most delightful of companions," wrote G. W. E. Russell in Portraits
of the Seventies; "a man of the world entirely free from worldliness
and a man of letters without the faintest trace of pedantry."^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]} A
familiar figure at the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], a frequent diner-out and
guest at great country houses, fond of fishing and shooting, a lively
conversationalist, affecting a combination of foppishness and Olympian
grandeur, he read constantly, widely, and deeply, and in the intervals of
supporting himself and his family by the quiet drudgery of school inspecting,
filled notebook after notebook with meditations of an almost monastic tone. In
his writings, he often baffled and sometimes annoyed his contemporaries by the
apparent contradiction between his urbane, even frivolous manner in
controversy, and the "high seriousness" of his critical views and the
melancholy, almost plaintive note of much of his poetry. "A voice poking
fun in the wilderness" was T. H. Warren's description of him.

Poetry

Arnold is sometimes called the third great
Victorian poet, along with [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
and [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]} Arnold was keenly aware
of his place in poetry. In an 1869 letter to his mother, he wrote:

“

My poems represent, on the
whole, the main movement of mind of the last quarter of a century, and thus
they will probably have their day as people become conscious to themselves of
what that movement of mind is, and interested in the literary productions
which reflect it. It might be fairly urged that I have less poetical
sentiment than Tennyson and less intellectual vigour and abundance than
Browning; yet because I have perhaps more of a fusion of the two than either
of them, and have more regularly applied that fusion to the main line of
modern development, I am likely enough to have my turn as they have had
theirs."^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

”

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] regards
this as "an exceptionally frank, but not unjust, self-assessment."
"Arnold's poetry continues to have scholarly attention lavished upon it,
in part because it seems to furnish such striking evidence for several central
aspects of the intellectual history of the nineteenth century, especially the
corrosion of 'Faith' by 'Doubt'. No poet, presumably, would wish to be summoned
by later ages merely as an historical witness, but the sheer
intellectual grasp of Arnold's
verse renders it peculiarly liable to this treatment."^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

Harold Bloom echoes Arnold's self reference in his introduction (as series
editor) to the Modern Critical Views volume on Arnold:
"Arnold
got into his poetry what Tennyson and Browning scarcely needed (but absorbed
anyway), the main march of mind of his time." Of his poetry, Bloom says,
"Whatever his achievement as a critic of literature, society, or religion,
his work as a poet may not merit the reputation it has continued to hold in the
twentieth century. Arnold
is, at his best, a very good but highly derivative poet.... As with Tennyson,
Hopkins, and Rossetti, Arnold's dominant precursor was Keats, but this is an
unhappy puzzle, since Arnold (unlike the others) professed not to admire Keats
greatly, while writing his own elegiac poems in a diction, meter, imagistic
procedure, that are embarrassingly close to Keats."^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

Sir Edmund Chambers noted,
however, that "in a comparison between the best works of Matthew Arnold
and that of his six greatest contemporaries... the proportion of work which
endures is greater in the case of Matthew Arnold than in any one of them."^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
Chambers judged Arnold's poetic vision by "its simplicity, lucidity, and
straightforwardness; its literalness...; the sparing use of aureate words, or
of far-fetched words, which are all the more effective when they come; the
avoidance of inversions, and the general directness of syntax, which gives full
value to the delicacies of a varied rhythm, and makes it, of all verse that I
know, the easiest to read aloud."^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

He has a primary school named
after him in Liverpool, where he died, and secondary schools named after him in
Oxford and Staines.

His literary career — leaving
out the two prize poems — had begun in 1849 with the publication of The
Strayed Reveller and Other Poems by A., which attracted little notice —
although it contained perhaps Arnold's most purely poetical poem "The
Forsaken Merman" — and was soon withdrawn. Empedocles on Etna and Other
Poems (among them "[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]"),
published in 1852, had a similar fate. In 1858 he brought out his tragedy of
"Merope," calculated, he wrote to a friend, "rather to
inaugurate my Professorship with dignity than to move deeply the present race
of humans," and chiefly remarkable for some experiments in unusual — and
unsuccessful — metres.

His 1867 poem "[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]" depicted
a nightmarish world from which the old religious verities have receded. It is
sometimes held up as an early, if not the first, example of the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]. In a
famous preface to a selection of the poems of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], Arnold identified
himself, a little ironically, as a "Wordsworthian." The influence of
Wordsworth, both in ideas and in diction, is unmistakable in Arnold's best poetry. Arnold's
poem, "Dover
Beach" appears in
Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit
451 and is also featured prominently in [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] by [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]. It has also been
quoted or alluded to in a variety of other contexts (see [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]).

Some consider Arnold to be the bridge
between [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] and [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]. His use of
symbolic landscapes was typical of the Romantic era, while his skeptical and
pessimistic perspective was typical of the Modern era. The [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
tendency of certain of his writings gave offence to many readers, and the
sufficiency of his equipment in scholarship for dealing with some of the
subjects which he handled was called in question, but he undoubtedly exercised
a stimulating influence on his time. His writings are characterised by the
finest culture, high purpose, sincerity, and a style of great distinction, and
much of his poetry has an exquisite and subtle beauty, though here also it has
been doubted whether high
culture and wide knowledge of poetry did not sometimes take the place of
true poetic fire. Henry
James wrote that Matthew Arnold's poetry will appeal to those who
"like their pleasures rare" and who like to hear the poet
"taking breath."

The mood of Arnold’s poetry tends to be of plaintive
reflection, and he is restrained in expressing emotion. He felt that poetry
should be the ‘criticism of life’ and express a philosophy. Arnold’s philosophy is that true happiness
comes from within, and that people should seek within themselves for good,
while being resigned in acceptance of outward things and avoiding the pointless
turmoil of the world. However, he argues that we should not live in the belief
that we shall one day inherit eternal bliss. If we are not happy on earth, we
should moderate our desires rather than live in dreams of something that may
never be attained. This philosophy is clearly expressed in such poems as "Dover Beach"
and in these lines from "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse":

Wandering between two worlds, one dead

The other powerless to be born,

With nowhere yet to rest my head

Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.

Arnold valued natural scenery for its peace
and permanence in contrast with the ceaseless change of human things. His
descriptions are often picturesque, and marked by striking similes. However, at
the same time he liked subdued colours, mist and moonlight. He seems to prefer
the ‘spent lights’ of the sea-depths in "The Forsaken Merman" to the
village life preferred by the merman’s lost wife.

In his poetry he derived not
only the subject matter of his narrative poems from various traditional or
literary sources but even much of the romantic melancholy of his earlier poems
from [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]'s
"Obermann". His greatest defects as a poet stem from his lack of ear
and his frequent failure to distinguish between poetry and prose.

The Poetical Works of
Matthew Arnold^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

Prose

Assessing the importance of Arnold's prose work in
1988, Stefan Collini stated, "for reasons to do with our own cultural
preoccupations as much as with the merits of his writing, the best of his prose
has a claim on us today that cannot be matched by his poetry."^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
"Certainly there may still be some readers who, vaguely recalling 'Dover Beach'
or '[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]'
from school anthologies, are surprised to find he 'also' wrote prose."^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

George Watson follows George
Saintsbury in dividing Arnold's career as a prose writer into three phases: 1)
early literary criticism that begins with his preface to the 1853 edition of
his poems and ends with the first series of Essays in Criticism (1865);
2) a prolonged middle period (overlapping the first and third phases)
characterized by social, political and religious writing (roughly 1860-1875);
3) a return to literary criticism with the selecting and editing of collections
of Wordsworth's and Byron's poetry and the second series of Essays in
Criticism.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
Both Watson and Saintsbury declare their preference for Arnold's literary criticism over his social
or religious criticism. More recent writers, such as Collini, have shown a
greater interest in his social writing,^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
while over the years a significant second tier of criticism has focused on Arnold's religious
writing.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
His writing on education has not drawn a significant critical endeavor
separable from the criticism of his social writings.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

Selections from the Prose
Work of Matthew Arnold^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

Literary criticism

Arnold's work as a literary critic began with
the 1853 "Preface to the Poems". In it, he attempted to explain his extreme
act of self-censorship in excluding the dramatic poem "Empedocles on
Etna". With its emphasis on the importance of subject in poetry, on
"clearness of arrangement, rigor of development, simplicity of style"
learned from the Greeks, and in the strong imprint of Goethe and Wordsworth,
may be observed nearly all the essential elements in his critical theory.
George Watson described the preface, written by the thirty-one year old Arnold, as "oddly
stiff and graceless when we think of the elegance of his later prose."^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

Criticism began to take first
place in Arnold's writing with his appointment
in 1857 to the professorship of poetry at Oxford,
which he held for two successive terms of five years. In 1861 his lectures [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
were published, to be followed in 1862 by Last Words on Translating Homer,
both volumes admirable in style and full of striking judgments and suggestive
remarks, but built on rather arbitrary assumptions and reaching no
well-established conclusions. Especially characteristic, both of his defects
and his qualities, are on the one hand, Arnold's unconvincing advocacy of
English [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
and his creation of a kind of literary absolute in the "grand style,"
and, on the other, his keen feeling of the need for a disinterested and
intelligent criticism in England.

Although Arnold's poetry received only mixed reviews
and attention during his lifetime, his forays into literary criticism were more
successful. Arnold
is famous for introducing a methodology of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
somewhere between the historicist approach common to many critics at the time
and the personal essay; he often moved quickly and easily from literary
subjects to political and social issues. His Essays in Criticism (1865,
1888), remains a significant influence on critics to this day. In one of his
most famous essays on the topic, “The Study of Poetry”, Arnold wrote that, “Without poetry, our
science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for
religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry”. He considered the most
important criteria used to judge the value of a poem were “high truth” and
“high seriousness”. By this standard, Chaucer’s Canterbury
Tales did not merit Arnold’s
approval. Further, Arnold
thought the works that had been proven to possess both “high truth” and “high
seriousness”, such as those of Shakespeare and Milton, could be used as a basis
of comparison to determine the merit of other works of poetry. He also sought
for literary criticism to remain disinterested, and said that the appreciation
should be of “the object as in itself it really is."

Social criticism

He was led on from literary
criticism to a more general critique of the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].
Between 1867 and 1869 he wrote [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.],
famous for the term he popularised for the middle class of the English [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] population:
"[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]",
a word which derives its [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] (in English - the
German-language usage was well established) from him. Culture and Anarchy
is also famous for its popularization of the phrase "sweetness and
light," first coined by [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

Arnold's
"want of logic and thoroughness of thought" as noted by [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] in Modern
Humanists was an aspect of the inconsistency of which Arnold was accused.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
Few of his ideas were his own, and he failed to reconcile the conflicting
influences which moved him so strongly. "There are four people, in
especial," he once wrote to Cardinal
Newman, "from whom I am conscious of having learnt — a very different
thing from merely receiving a strong impression — learnt habits, methods,
ruling ideas, which are constantly with me; and the four are — [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.],
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.],
and yourself." Dr. Arnold must be added; the son's fundamental likeness to
the father was early pointed out by [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], and was later attested by
Matthew Arnold's grandson, Mr. Arnold Whitridge. Brought up in the tenets of
the Philistinism which, as a professed cosmopolitan and the Apostle of Culture
he attacked, he remained something of a Philistine to the end.

Journalistic criticism

In 1887, Arnold was credited with coining the phrase
"New Journalism", a term that went on to define an entire genre of
newspaper history, particularly Lord
Northcliffe's turn-of-the-century press empire. However, at the time, the
target of Arnold's
irritation was not [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], but the sensational journalism of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
editor, [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]} Arnold had enjoyed a long
and mutually beneficial association with the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
since its inception in 1865. As an occasional contributor, he had formed a
particular friendship with its first editor, [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
and a close acquaintance with its second, [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].
But he strongly disapproved of the muck-raking [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], and declared that, under Stead,
"the P.M.G., whatever may be its merits, is fast ceasing to be
literature."^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

Religious criticism

His religious views were
unusual for his time. Scholars of Arnold's works
disagree on the nature of Arnold's
personal religious beliefs. Under the influence of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] and his
father, Dr. Thomas Arnold, he rejected the superstitious elements in religion,
even while retaining a fascination for church rituals. Arnold seems to belong to a pragmatic middle
ground that is more concerned with the poetry of religion and its virtues and
values for society than with the existence of God.

He wrote in the preface of God
and the Bible in 1875 “The personages of the Christian heaven and their
conversations are no more matter of fact than the personages of the Greek
Olympus and their conversations.”^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
He also wrote in Literature and Dogma: "The word 'God' is used in
most cases as by no means a term of science or exact knowledge, but a term of
poetry and eloquence, a term thrown out, so to speak, as a not fully grasped
object of the speaker's consciousness — a literary term, in short; and mankind
mean different things by it as their consciousness differs."^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
He defined religion as "morality touched with emotion".^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

However, he also wrote in the
same book, "to pass from a Christianity relying on its miracles to a
Christianity relying on its natural truth is a great change. It can only be
brought about by those whose attachment to Christianity is such, that they cannot
part with it, and yet cannot but deal with it sincerely."^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}