Arnold, Matthew

Arnold, Matthew (1822–88), eldest son of Thomas Arnold, was educated at Rugby, Winchester, and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he formed a close friendship with Clough, and won the Newdigate prize with a poem on Cromwell. He became a fellow of Oriel College. In 1851 he became an inspector of schools, in which capacity he served for 35 years. His first volume of poems, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (by ‘A’, 1849), contains ‘The Forsaken Merman’, ‘The Sick King in Bokhara’, and sonnets written at Balliol, including ‘Shakespeare’. In 1851 he married Fanny Lucy Wightman; part of ‘Dover Beach’ (1867) dates from his honeymoon. Empedocles on Etna, and Other Poems (1852) contained ‘Tristram and Iseult’ and some of the ‘Marguerite’ poems, including ‘Yes! in the sea of life enisled’. In 1853 appeared a volume of poems containing extracts from earlier books, and ‘Sohrab and Rustum’, ‘The Scholar-Gipsy’, ‘Memorial Verses to Wordsworth’, and ‘Stanzas in Memory of the Author of “Obermann”’, which show how profoundly Arnold had been affected by Senancour's novel. Poems, Second Series, including ‘Balder Dead’ appeared in 1855; Merope, a Tragedy in 1858; and New Poems, including ‘Thyrsis’, ‘Rugby Chapel’, and ‘Heine's Grave’, in 1867.

In his maturity Arnold turned increasingly to prose, writing essays on literary, educational, and social topics that established him as the leading critic of the day and which greatly influenced writers as diverse as Max Weber, T. S. Eliot, Leavis, and R. Williams. His lectures on translating Homer, with his definition of ‘the grand style’ (delivered in 1860, while he was professor of poetry at Oxford) were published in 1861; Essays in Criticism (First Series) in 1865 (Second Series, 1888); On the Study of Celtic Literature in 1867; Culture and Anarchy in 1869; Friendship's Garland in 1871; Literature and Dogma, a study of the interpretation of the Bible, in 1873. In these and other works, Arnold sharply criticized the provincialism, Philistinism, sectarianism, and utilitarian materialism of English life and culture, and argued that England needed more intellectual curiosity, more ideas, and a more comparative, European outlook.

Special reference is due to Arnold's attempts to secure the improvement of education, particularly secondary education, in England. In 1859 and 1865 he visited the Continent to study educational systems, and produced reports arguing that England badly needed more educational organization and could learn much from European models.