Matthew Arnold

“ Matthew Arnold, who is loved as a poet by so many of us, and justly loved; whom we do not read continuously as we read the greater poets, but who suits us so well in certain circumstances of the inner life; who, in them, reflects and strengthens us; whose poetry, always unimitative and underived, rose clear out of his own soul; who stood alone with an ill-hidden scorn for other English poetry in his eyes—was worthy of more acceptance as a poet than he received in his lifetime, and has his own distinct chair in the general assembly and church of the first-born of England. ”

“ ARNOLD THE POET
[p.xvi]
Matthew Arnold was essentially a man of the intellect. No other author of modern times, perhaps no other English author of any time, appeals so directly as he to the educated classes. Even a cursory reading of his pages, prose or verse, reveals the scholar and the critic. He is always thinking, always brilliant, never lacks for a word or phrase; and on the whole, his judgments are good. Between his prose and verse, however, there is a marked difference, both in tone and spiritual quality. True, each possesses the note of a lofty, though stoical courage ”

“ Matthew Arnold, poet and critic, was born in the village of Laleham, Middlesex County, England, December 24, 1822. He was the son of Dr. Thomas Arnold, best remembered as the great Head Master at Rugby and in later years distinguished also as a historian of Rome, and of Mary Penrose Arnold, a woman of remarkable character and intellect.
Devoid of stirring incident, and, on the whole, free from the eccentricities so common to men of genius, the story of Arnold's life is soon told. As a boy he lived the life of the normal English lad, with its healthy routine of task and play. ”

“ Matthew Arnold is one of the poets who have what might be called "the power of Liberation." He liberates us from the hot fevers of our lusts. He liberates us from our worldliness, our perversions, our mad preoccupations. He reduces things to their simple elements and gives us back air and water and land and sea. And he does this without demanding from us any unusual strain. We have no need to plunge into Dionysian ecstacies, or cry aloud after "cosmic emotion." ”

“ As we read we are not carried back by the reflection, 'so men once thought,' but rather forward along the paths, dim and perilous it may be, but still the paths mankind is destined to tread. Truthful, sober, severe, with a capacity for deep, if placid, enjoyment of the pageant of the world, and a quick eye for its varied sights and an eager ear for its delightful sounds, Matthew Arnold is a poet whose limitations we may admit without denying his right. ”

“ Matthew Arnold shortly before his death he said, with a touch of pathos, "You are a fortunate man. The young men read you; they no longer read me. And you have invented phrases which every one quotes—such as 'Philistinism' and 'Sweetness and Light.'" It was a characteristic compliment, for he dearly loved a good phrase. From the necessities of his position as a fighting politician, his own best performances in that line were sarcasms; and indeed sarcasm was the gift in which from first to last, in public and in private, in writing and in speaking, he peculiarly excelled. ”

“ Matthew Arnold, the philosopher, the politician, the theologian, does not need prolonged notice, inasmuch as he was anxious to disclaim any title to be ranked as any one of the three. But he entered into many a keen debate on philosophy, politics, and religion; and, whilst disavowing for himself any kind of system of belief, he sate in judgment on the beliefs of others, and assured us that the mission of Culture was to be supreme Court of Appeal for all the brutalities of the vulgar, and all the immaturities of the ignorant. ”

“ In this connection, it is interesting to remember that of modern men of genius Matthew Arnold's favorite was John Henry Newman. Many will recall the noble and characteristic sentences which open the lecture on Emerson; wherein, recalling the days when he was an undergraduate at Oxford, Arnold declares, "Voices were in the air there which haunt my memory still," "Happy the man who in that susceptible season of youth hears such voices! They are a possession to him forever." ”

“ The changes in taste, in feeling, in the general attitude towards the fundamental problems of religion, of society, and of politics, have been enormous, and in all of them, except, perhaps, the last, Matthew Arnold has been an abiding influence. We shall never, perhaps, fully appreciate the way in which he softened the asperities of the conflicts which raged round him by his imperturbable good humour, and even by the mannerisms which diverted the stress of feeling. The solvent of his criticism was diluted to the exact strength where it could effect its purpose while giving least pain. ”

“ To say this is not in the least to disparage Arnold. “A man is more like the age in which he lives,” says the Chinese aphorism, “than he is like his own father and mother,” and Arnold’s polemical writings alone are sufficient to show that the waters of life he drank were from fountains distilled, seven times distilled, at the topmost slope of 19th-century civilization. Mr George Meredith’s “Old Chartist” exhibits far more of the temper of acceptance than does any poem by Matthew Arnold.
His most famous critical dictum is that poetry is a “criticism of life.” ”

“ Matthew Arnold’s was not one of the exceptions. It is very much better than most school prize poems: it shows the critical and scholarly character of the writer with very fair foreshadowing; but it does not fore-shadow his poetry in the very least. It is quite free from the usual formal faults of a boy’s verse, except some evidences of a deficient ear, especially for rhyme (“full” and “beautiful,” “palaces” and “days”) . It manages a rather difficult metre (the sixain rhymed ababcc and ending with an Alexandrine) without too much of the monotony which is its special danger. ”

“ When, therefore, Matthew Arnold came to America in the autumn of 1883 expressly to lecture on Emerson, as a writer and thinker, there was great expectation on both sides, and both were equally disappointed. His friends who knew that he liked Emerson, thought he had found too much fault with him, and the other party considered he had praised him too highly.
Few men have ever done so much good in England as Matthew Arnold. Somewhere about the year 1830 Goethe remarked, that Englishmen, as such, were without reflection; party politics and the interests of trade interfered to prevent it ”

“ Seventy-two mortal pages of Matthew Arnold’s, at his very best time, wasted on a brother and sister who happened to be taken up by Sainte-Beuve!
But the rest of the book is entirely free from liability to any such criticism as this. To some criticism—even to a good deal—it is beyond doubt exposed. The first and most famous paper—the general manifesto, as the earlier Preface to the Poems is the special one, of its author’s literary creed—on The Function of Criticism at the Present Time must indeed underlie much the same objections as those that have been made to the introduction. ”

“ Matthew Arnold was one of the minds and men to whom he constantly reverted with pleasure. Every traveler was asked for the last news of him; and when an English professor connected with the same university as Arnold, whom Emerson had been invited to meet, was asked the inevitable question, and found to know nothing, Emerson turned away from him, and lost all interest in his conversation. ”

“ It must not be supposed, however, that Matthew Arnold could not endure to look upon the world as it is because of the high standard he had set up in Literature and in the Arts. In reality his was a wise and comprehensive view. He could enjoy men and things in practice even when he disapproved of them in theory. His inimitably delicate distinctions were drawn quite as much in favour of the weak as in support of the strong. ”

“ Where Matthew Arnold is sincere in his poetic work is when he gives expression to his 'yearning for the light,' and summons the spirit of renunciation to support him through the days of gloom.
These moods he reserved for expression in verse. In prose no one is less gloomy than he. If we might define him as a happy Heine, we should give the best point of view from which to survey his prose work, his criticism of life that underlies and involves all his criticism of books, of faiths, and of institutions. ”

“ The prose writings of Matthew Arnold may be classed under three heads. They are all critical in spirit. In the first division the criticism is of literature, in the second of theology, in the third of society. As regards their chronology, the literary criticism is mainly the product of the decade between 1860 and 1870, but from time to time all through his literary career Arnold wrote criticism. ”

“ Really all this shows too small a mind, too circumscribed an outlook on humanity, to qualify Matthew Arnold for a place among philosophers or national reformers. It is satisfactory to turn from him as politician and critic of the Bible, of literature, and of society, to his status as a poet, which, though really secondary to that as an educationist, he will naturally be most widely remembered by. ”

“ Almost alone amongst our poets since Milton, Arnold is never incoherent, spasmodic, careless, washy, or banal. He never flies up into a region where the sun melts his wings; he strikes no discords, and he never tries a mood for which he has no gift. He has more general insight into the intellectual world of our age, and he sees into it more deeply and more surely than any contemporary poet. He has a trained thirst for Nature; but his worship of Nature never weakens his reverence of Man, and his brooding over man's destiny. ”

“ Because his problems and his moods are not poetic problems or poetic moods. Intellectual doubt has found its voice in Matthew Arnold's most sincere utterances, and doubt can never touch a wide circle. Obermann Once More or The Scholar Gypsy will answer to some moods of some men as few poems answer to the inmost depths. But the moods are rare among men, and the appeal of the poems must be as rare. Strangely enough, while Matthew Arnold deals most powerfully with one aspect of the inward conflict, he has been almost equally successful in the most objective form of poems, the heroic narrative. ”

“ The right spirit is that which Matthew Arnold displays in one of his letters. He was writing at a time when his own literary fame was securely established, yet he said that the longer he lived the more grateful he was for his own success. He added that the more people he came to know, the more strongly he felt the comparative equality of human endowments, and the more clearly he perceived that the successful writer found rather than invented the telling phrase, the stimulating thought. That is a very rare attitude of mind, and it is as noble as it is rare. ”

“ CHAPTER II METHOD
The Matthew Arnold whom we know begins in 1848; and, when we first make his acquaintance, in his earliest letters to his mother and his eldest sister, he is already a Critic. He is only twenty-five years old, and he is writing in the year of Revolution. Thrones are going down with a crash all over Europe; the voices of triumphant freedom are in the air; the long-deferred millennium of peace and brotherhood seems to be just on the eve of realization. But, amid all this glorious hurly-burly, this "joy of eventful living," the young philosopher stands calm and unshaken ”

“ A recent writer, in speaking of these two sonnets, says, "There may be better poetry in the English language, but there are no better sermons." Whatever our differences of opinion, it must be admitted that Matthew Arnold was always, and clearly, on the side of religion, virtue, and the ideal. The last years of his life he devoted to the salvation of men from their doubts, and some he saved. ”

“ The reader will turn from the book with a distinct impression of Matthew Arnold as a person, and with a pretty clear concept of what he considered it necessary to believe regarding poetry, education, politics, and religion—if one would see life and see it whole. ”

“ Matthew Arnold received his preparatory education in his father’s school at Rugby, and his college training at Oxford. He was always a student and always active in educational work, as an inspector of schools, and for ten years as professor of poetry at Oxford. He twice visited the United States and both times lectured here. His criticisms of America and Americans were severe, for he saw predominant the spirit of money-getting, the thirst for material prosperity and the absence of spiritual interests. ”

“ Now Arnold had this gift in supreme degree, in a degree superior to Johnson or to Hallam. He made far fewer mistakes than they did. He made very few mistakes. The touchstone of the great critic is to make very few mistakes, and never to be carried off his balance by any pet aversion or pet affection of his own, not to be biassed so much as a hair's breadth by any salient merit or any irritating defect, and always to keep an eye well open to the true proportion of any single book in the great world of men and of affairs, and in the mighty realm of general literature. ”

“ In that respect the style was the man, and no man was so charming to his intimates as Matthew Arnold. It may be suspected that when we come to know the private lives of the men of letters of this, or rather of the preceding generation, few will leave so pleasant an impression, few will seem so livable with as he. ”