Arnold, Matthew

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ARNOLD, MATTHEW

ARNOLD, MATTHEW (1822–1888), English poet, critic, and polemical writer.

Matthew Arnold was born at Laleham, England, in 1822. His father, Dr. Thomas Arnold, was a teacher and clergyman who subsequently became famous as the reforming head master of Rugby School. Educated at Rugby and Balliol College, Oxford, Arnold became a fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, in 1845. This was a nonteaching post, which he combined, between 1847 and 1851, with a job as secretary to Lord Lansdowne (Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice), a senior cabinet minister in the Whig government of Lord John Russell. In 1851 he married and became an inspector of schools, rising to chief inspector in 1884 and retiring in 1886. He died in 1888.

poetry

Arnold's early verse was published in two anonymous volumes, The Strayed Reveller (1849) and Empedocles on Etna and Other Poems (1852). This was a poetry of ideas, some of it written in a pioneering prototype of modernist "free verse," in which Arnold reflects on the dilemmas created by the decline of traditional religious authority. The "modern" condition was "the dialogue of the mind with itself." In poems such as "The Forsaken Merman" and "Resignation" he considers hedonist and stoic alternatives to the established Christian ethic. In "Empedocles on Etna" he uses a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher as a parallel for his own experience of living in an era of transition from religious faith to anxious doubt.

Despite its intellectual stress, Arnold came to feel that this poetry was overly Romantic in its subjectivity and lack of formal control. In 1853 he replaced Empedocles on Etna with a volume simply entitled Poems—no longer anonymous, and equipped with a preface that argued for a new, post-Romantic poetics. Literature, he suggested, should address not the inner life of the author but external "actions." Literary texts should display "Architectonicè" or coherent form. If Arnold's attempts to embody these ideas in the brief epics "Sohrab and Rustum" (1853) and "Balder Dead" (1855) were not entirely successful, his theoretical contribution to a shift of taste from the Romantic enthusiasm for spontaneous and fragmentary expression to the late-nineteenth-century cult of form was considerable.

In 1857 Arnold became professor of poetry at Oxford, a part-time post that he occupied for ten years. In his inaugural lecture, "On the Modern Element in Literature," he added another criterion to his poetic theory—"adequacy," or the demand that a satisfactory poetry should reflect the most advanced thought of its era. His 1867 volume, New Poems, contains several poems that endeavor to meet this demand—most notably "Dover Beach."

criticism

In the 1860s Arnold began to publish his lectures and to contribute to the periodical press. In "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time" (printed in Essays in Criticism, 1865) he sets out his assumptions as a critic and suggests, by implication, how he wishes to reform English literary criticism. Previously criticism had been party political: the Whig Edinburgh Review dismissed the Tory William Wordsworth; the Tory Quarterly condemned John Keats for his association with the "Cockney School" of Whig and Radical writers. Inspired by the example of the French critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804–1869), Arnold recommended instead the values of "disinterestedness" and objectivity, or the endeavor "to see the object as in itself it really is."

In the twentieth century Arnold's aspiration to objectivity was sometimes dismissed as an illusion, and an overtly political literary criticism (Marxist, feminist, green, queer, or postcolonialist) reasserted itself. Arnold would have seen this development as reactionary. In "The Study of Poetry" (1880) he identifies two obstacles to a "real estimate" of a text: the "historic" fallacy (or the scholarly tendency to overvalue texts because they are old) and the "personal" fallacy, which overestimates writers on grounds of national, social, political, or sexual affinity. What we should seek is "high seriousness," whether or not we sympathize with the views of the author. One way to test this is the application of "touchstones"—a constant comparison with passages acknowledged to be of the highest quality.

Arnold's criticism is not, however, narrowly literary. In 1860, in the lectures published in On Translating Homer (1861), he identified critical objectivity as a necessary endeavor in "all branches of knowledge,—theology, philosophy, history, art, science." Accordingly, he himself published essays on other topics.

The underlying problem for his social writing is the advent of democracy. If every man is to have a vote, then every man needs to be educated—and Arnold had been struggling, since the 1840s, with the obstacles that religious sectarianism placed in the way of a compulsory school system. Culture and Anarchy (1869) addresses this difficulty. Religion cannot, in the absence of a common faith, provide the core values for a universal elementary education. Instead, Arnold proposes the secular value of "culture." His polemical manner is witty and pugnacious. British society is divided into "Barbarians" (the aristocracy), "Philistines" (the middle classes), and "Populace." Moral earnestness is characterized as "Hebraism," to which a counterbalance is required in the form of "Hellenism" or the "free play of mind on every object." But beneath the playful surface there is a recommendation that has been widely adopted as a basis for education in multicultural or postreligious human societies.

The playfulness reaches its peak in Friendship's Garland (1871), a witty sequel to Voltaire's Candide (1759) and Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus (1833–1834) that recommends German intellectual rigor to the unsystematic Anglo-Saxons. In Literature and Dogma (1873) Arnold turned, more seriously, to theology. His purpose was simultaneously to rescue religion from the Bible (that is, from the misreading of this poetic text as a series of falsifiably scientific statements) and to rescue the Bible from religion—stressing its literary value to retain it as part of the "culture" in an era of declining religious assent. Thomas Arnold had sought to invent a creed for a national church from which no citizen could feel excluded. Pushing this liberal theology to a controversial extreme, his son redefines religion as "morality touched with emotion" and God as "the something not ourselves which makes for righteousness."

Matthew Arnold has been attacked as a poet of limited range and a prose writer whose elegantly witty manner makes rigorous argument impossible. He is better understood as an author who works, distinctively, and in an ingenious combination of verse and prose, to unsettle assumptions and suggest new directions for literary and intellectual life.

See alsoCarlyle, Thomas; Education; Great Britain; Liberalism.