Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold

Caricature from Punch, 1881: "Admit that Homer sometimes nods, That poets do write trash, Our Bard has written "Balder Dead," And also Balder-dash"

Family tree

Matthew Arnold (24 December 1822 – 15 April 1888) was an English poet and cultural critic, who worked as an inspector of schools. He was the son of Thomas Arnold, the famed headmaster of Rugby School.

Life and career

Matthew Arnold was born in Laleham, Middlesex in the year 1822. He was the second child (of nine) and eldest son born to Thomas Arnold and Mary Penrose Arnold. Reverend John Keble, who would become one of the leaders of the Oxford Movement, stood as godfather to Matthew. 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 at Rugby School.

In 1831, Arnold was tutored by his uncle, the Reverend John Buckland, at Laleham. In 1834, the Arnolds occupied a holiday home, Fox How, in the Lake District. William Wordsworth was a neighbor and close friend.

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. Arnold wrote verse for the manuscript Fox How Magazine produced by Matthew and his brother Thomas 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 Balliol College, Oxford. During his residence at Oxford, his friendship ripened with Arthur Hugh Clough, another graduate of Rugby who had been one of his father's favorites. He attended John Henry Newman's sermons at St. Mary's, but did not join the Oxford Movement. His father died suddenly of heart disease in 1842. Arnold's poem, "Cromwell," wins 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 Lord Lansdowne, Lord President of the Council. In 1849, he published his first book of poetry, The Strayed Reveller, which he soon withdrew. In 1850 Wordsworth died; Arnold published "Memorial Verses" in Fraser's Magazine.

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.

In 1852, Arnold published his second volume of poems, Empedocles on Etna, and Other Poems. In 1853, he published Poems. A New Edition, famously excluding "Empedocles on Etna," but adding new poems, "Sohrab and Rustum" and "The Scholar-Gipsy." In 1854, Poems. Second Series appeared; also a selection from his two earlier volumes, it included the new poem, "Balder Dead."

Arnold was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1857. He was the first to deliver his lectures in English rather than Latin. He was re-elected in 1862. On Translating Homer and the early thoughts that would become Culture and Anarchy 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. Self-published The Popular Education of France. The introduction was later published under the title "Democracy."

In 1865, Arnold published Essays in Criticism: First Series. Essays in Criticism: Second Series would not appear until November of 1888, shortly after his untimely death.

In 1866, he published "Thyrsis," 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 religion appeared in 1873.

In 1883 and 1884, Arnold toured the United States delivering lectures on education and Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1886, he retired from school inspection. Arnold died suddenly of heart failure in 1888.

Writings: Poetry and Prose

Arnold wrote during the Victorian period (1837–1901), and is sometimes called the third great Victorian poet, behind Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson and Robert Browning. Arnold himself was keenly aware of his place in poetry, and in an 1869 letter to his mother, discussed the merits of his work and his two more famous peers: "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 poetic sentiment than Tennyson, and less intellectual vigour and abundance than Browning. Yet because I have more perhaps 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."

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 "Tristram and Iseult"), published in 1852, had a similar fate.

Apart from poetry, he was best known as the author of several volumes of literary, social and 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 Baruch Spinoza and his father, Dr. Thomas Arnold, he rejected religious superstition, 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.” 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." He defined religion as "morality touched with emotion". 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." It seems likely by the context of this statement that he means himself to be counted amongst those who cannot part with Christianity even as they deal with it "sincerely".

His 1867 poem "Dover Beach", which depicted a nightmarish world from which the old religious verities have receded, expresses his view that human love is mankind’s only defence against the dark. It is sometimes held up as an early, if not the first, example of the modern sensibility. In a famous preface to a selection of the poems of William Wordsworth, 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.

Some consider Arnold to be the bridge between Romanticism and Modernism. His use of symbolic landscapes was typical of the Romantic era, while his skeptical and pessimistic perspective was typical of the Modern era. The rationalistic 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.

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 literary criticism through his Essays in Criticism (1865, 1888), which influence critics to this day. Arnold believed that rules for an objective approach in literary criticism existed, and argued that these rules should be followed by all critics. He believed in the necessity of objective rules of criticism as he thought that with the decline of religion, society would have no common cultural values, beliefs, and images and felt that the literature preferred by the lower and middle classes would corrupt what he considered the highest of art forms. 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, due to its crass nature. 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 poetry to remain disinterested from politics and other calls to action, and said that the appreciation should be of “the object as in itself it really is.” He also advocated close reading of the text as the ultimate means of comprehension.

Arnold's work as a critic begins with the "Preface to the Poems" which he issued in 1853 under his own name, including extracts from the earlier volumes along with "Sohrab and Rustum" and "The Scholar-Gipsy" but significantly omitting "Empedocles." In 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. He was still primarily a poet, however, and in 1855 appeared Poems, Second Series, among them "Balder Dead."

Criticism began to take first place with his appointment in 1857 to the professorship of poetry at Oxford, which he held for two successive terms of five years. 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.

In 1861 his lectures On Translating Homer 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 hexameters 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.

He was led on from literary criticism to a more general critique of the spirit of his age. Between 1867 and 1869 he wrote Culture and Anarchy, famous for the term he popularised for a section of the Victorian era population: "Philistines", a word which derives its modern cultural meaning (in English - the German-language usage was well established) from him.

Matthew Arnold "was indeed the most delightful of companions," writes 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." A familiar figure at the Athenaeum Club, 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.

A deeper inconsistency was caused by the "want of logic and thoroughness of thought" which J. M. Robertson noted in Modern Humanists. 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 — Goethe, Wordsworth, Sainte-Beuve, and yourself." Dr. Arnold must be added; the son's fundamental likeness to the father was early pointed out by Swinburne, and was later recently 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.

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 Senancour's "Obermann". His greatest defects as a poet stem from his lack of ear and his frequent failure to distinguish between poetry and prose. His significant if curious estimate of his own poems in 1869 was that they represented "on the whole, the main movement of mind of the last quarter of a century."

It is perhaps true, however, that as Sir Edmund Chambers says, "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." His poetry endures because of its directness, and the literal fidelity of his beautifully circumstantial description of nature, of scenes, and places, imbued with a kind of majestic sadness which takes the place of music. Alike in his poetry and in his prose, which supplies in charm of manner, breadth of subject-matter, and acuteness of individual judgment, what it lacks in system, a stimulating personality makes itself felt. He was chiefly valuable to his own age as its severest critic; to ours he represents its humanest aspirations.

Culture and Anarchy is also famous for its popularization of the phrase "sweetness and light," first coined by Jonathan Swift.

Blue plaque to Matthew Arnold, 2 Chester Square

Trivia

• Arnold's poem, "Dover Beach" appears in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 and is also featured prominently in Saturday by Ian McEwan. It has also been quoted or alluded to in a variety of other contexts (see Dover Beach).

• Arnold's son, Richard, is the subject of the 5th of Edward Elgar's Enigma Variations.

• An Oxford Elegy by Vaughan Williams, a piece for narrator, mixed chorus and small orchestra (1949), is based on extracts from The Scholar Gypsy and Thyrsis.

Bibliography

• Primary sources:

• G. W. E. Russell (editor), Letters of Matthew Arnold, 1849-88, 2 vols. (London and New York: Macmillan, 1895)

The letters that Russell published, seven years after their author's death, were heavily edited by Arnold's family.

• H. F. Lowry (editor), The Letters of Matthew Arnold to Arthur Hugh Clough (New York: Oxford University Press, 1932)
• Kenneth Allott (editor), The Poetry of Matthew Arnold (London and New York: Longman Norton, 1965)

Part of the "Annotated English Poets Series," Allott includes 145 poems (with fragments and juvenilia) all fully annotated. "Merope," Arnold's verse play, is, however, printed in a smaller font than that used for the other poems.

• R. H. Super (editor), The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold in elevn volumes (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1960-1977)
• Miriam Allott and Robert H. Super (editors), The Oxford Authors: Matthew Arnold (Oxford: Oxford university Press, 1986)

A strong selection from Miriam Allot, who had (silently) assisted her husband in editing the Longman Norton annotated edition of Arnold's poems, and Robert H. Super, who had, a decade prior, edited the eleven volume complete prose.

• Stefan Collini (editor), Culture and Anarchy and other writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) part of the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought series.

Collini's introduction attempts to show that "Culture and Anarchy, first published in 1869, has left a lasting impress upon subsequent debate about the relation between politics and culture" --Introduction, pg ix.

• Cecil Y. Lang (editor), The Letters of Matthew Arnold in six volumes (Charlottesville and London: The University Press of Virginia, 1996-2001)

• Biographical and Critical Lives:

• George Saintsbury, Matthew Arnold (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1899)
• Herbert W. Paul, Mathew Arnold (London: Macmillan, 1902)
• G. W. E. Russell, Matthew Arnold (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1904)
• Lionel Trilling, Matthew Arnold (New York: Norton, 1939) Trilling called his study a "biography of a mind."
• Park Honan, Matthew Arnold: A Life (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1981)

"Trilling's book challenged and delighted me but failed to take me close to Matthew Arnold's life. ... I decided in 1970 to write a definitive biography... Three-quarters of the biographical data in this book, I may say, has not appeared in a previous study of Arnold." --Preface, pgs. viii-ix.

• Nicholas Murray, A Life of Matthew Arnold (New York: St. Martin's, 1996)
• Ian Hamilton, A Gift Imprisoned: A Poetic Life of Matthew Arnold (London: Bloomsbury, 1998)

• Bibliography:

• T.B. Smart (1892), The Bibliography of Matthew Arnold (reprinted New York: Burt Franklin, 1968, Burt Franklin Bibliography and Reference Series #159)
• Laurence W. Mazzeno, Matthew Arnold: The Critical Legacy (Woodbridge: Camden House, 1999)

• Writings on Matthew Arnold or containing significant discussion of Arnold:

• Ruth apRoberts, Arnold and God (Berkley: University of California Press, 1983)
• Peter Barry, Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002)
• W. F. Connell, The Educational Thought and Influence of Matthew Arnold (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd, 1950)

One of the few book-length study of Arnold's educational thought.

• T. S. Eliot, "Matthew Arnold" in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1933)

This is Eliot's second essay on Matthew Arnold. The title of the series of lectures from which it derives echoes Arnold's essay, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (1864).

• Donald Stone, Communications with the Future: Matthew Arnold in Dialogue (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997)
• C. B. Tinker and H. F. Lowry, The Poetry of Matthew Arnold: A Commentary (New York: Oxford University Press, 1940)
• George Watson, "Matthew Arnold" in The Literary Critics: A Study of English Descriptive Criticism (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1962)

External links

• Works by Matthew Arnold at Project Gutenberg
• Poetry of Matthew Arnold at Poetseers
• Matthew Arnold, by G. W. E. Russell, at Project Gutenberg
• The Letters of Matthew Arnold Digital Edition, at the University of Virginia Press
• Profile page for Matthew Arnold on the Find-A-Grave web site
• Biography and Criticism of Matthew Arnold.
• Lesson plans for Dover Beach at Web English Teacher

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•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Cousin, John William (1910). A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature. London: J. M. Dent & Sons – via Wikisource.