MATTHEW ARNOLD (1822-88), eldest son in a family of nine children, was born in the little village of Lalcham on the Thames. His father, Thomas Arnold, was soon to become Headmaster of Rugby School and a growing force in educa- tional and religious affairs until his early death, in 1842, at the height of his powers; his mother, Mary Penrose, later followed Matthew's career with an intelligent interest until her death in 1876. In 1836 Matthew spent a year at Win- chester, his father's old school, before entering Rugby, where Thomas Arnold's rigorous reforms were now attracting wide attention and exerting an influence upon upper class educa- tion throughout the country. There Matthew wrote the prize poem Alaric at Rome, and he won an open scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, where he went in 1841. At Oxford he received the Newdigate Poetry Prize for Cromwell, and in 1845, a year after graduating with a second-class degree, he was elected to a fellowship in Oriel College.
In 1847 Arnold entered for a period of two years a more worldly life than Oxford could offer: he became private Secretary to Lord Lansdowne, who as President of the Privy Council included among his duties, in embryonic form, those now belonging to the post of Minister of Education. Arnold evidently enjoyed London life, the excitement of politics and society, and the opportunities for travel. He had earlier made several trips to the Continent. Then in 1848 he spent his holidays in Switzerland where it appears that he met, fell in love with, but parted from the young Frenchwoman who appears as 'Marguerite' in a number of his poems. In 1850 he met Frances Lucy Wightman, daughter of a prominent English judge, and in 1851 he married her. In order to suppon a wife he made a decision of the greatest importance to his future as a writer: he accepted from Lord Lansdowne a appointment as Inspector of Schools, a position in which he was to continue for thirty-five years until his retirement in 1886. His writing was thereafter to be the product of hours won from this constant and onerous employment. As Inspector he travelled widely throughout England, gaining a considerable first-hand experience of social and educational conditions, and he was asked to serve on commissions investigating educational practice on the Continent. Work which began as a burdensome necessity for making a living became an invaluable source of knowledge and a significant vocation. Out of it came not only The Popular Education of France (1861), A French Eton (1864) and other works devoted specifically to educational questions, but much of the basis for his social criticism. an
In 1857 Arnold was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford, a considerable tribute to his growing reputation as a poet. His first two volumes of verse, The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems (1849) and Empedocles on Ema and Other Poems (1853). had received little attention, but Poems (1853) with its forceful and provocative Preface (see p. 168), and Poems, Second Series (1855), which together reprinted many of the earlier works, were more widely discussed, and won him an audience among discriminating readers of poetry. Arnold's two five-year terms as Professor of Poetry (1857-67) drew from him or encouraged the writing of those widely diversified essays in literary criticism (the professorship entailed three lectures a year) which made him the foremost English literary critic of his day: On Translating Homer (1861), Essays in Criticism (1865). and On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867). These years, however, also saw the virtual end of his career as a poet. In 1858 he published Merope, A Tragedy, an exercise in the manner of Greek tragedy, and then, after New Poems (1867). itself a collection of somewhat earlier work, he turned his talents almost exclusively to social and religious. criticism.
His chief work of social criticism, Culture and Anarchy (1869), is a classical example of a critical intelligence ranging widely and sensitively over the essential life of the age. It is central to Arnold's writing in that it draws together the cultural concerns of the poet and literary critic and the moral. and spiritual preoccupations of the religious controversialist in a full-scale analysis of the condition of mid-Victorian England. For almost a decade thereafter Arnold devoted much of his time to religious questions, endeavouring to restate the traditional beliefs and public functions of the Church of England in terms which could not be undermined by the new discoveries of science and scientific criticism of Scripture: Literature and Dogma appeared in 1873, God and the Bible in 1875, and Last Essays on Church and Religion in 1877. In 1883, now one of the most respected of English men of letters, Arnold toured the United States delivering the lectures published as Discourses in America (1885). In the year of his death he collected the later literary essays which were pub- lished posthumously as Essays in Criticism, Second Series. He died suddenly, like his father, from a heart attack, in Liverpool on 15 April 1888, and was buried in Laleham Churchyard.¹
1 Most of the available biographical information is drawn together in E. K. Chambers' Matthew Arnold (1947).
IDEAS AND BELIEFS
"Of all decades in our history', the historian G. M. Young has said, a wise man would choose the eighteen-fifties to be young in. But Matthew Arnold was twenty-eight in 1850, and a year before he had written to his friend and fellow poet Arthur Hugh Clough in rather different terms about that same era: 'My dearest Clough these are damned times- everything is against one-the height to which knowledge is come, the spread of luxury, our physical enervation, the absence of great natures, the unavoidable contact with millions of small ones, newspapers, cities, light profligate friends, moral desperadoes like Carlyle, our own selves, and the sickening consciousness of our difficulties....' In one further remark to Clough, Arnold summed up his judgement against the age in what must have been, for the two young poets, the final and most devastating form: 'Reflect too, as I cannot but do here more and more, in spite of all the nonsense some people talk, how deeply unpoetical the age and all one's surroundings are. Not un profound, not ungrand, not unmoving:-but un- poetical.'1
It could undoubtedly have been an exciting age in which to live, that middle stage in what Raymond Williams has called 'the long revolution. It was above all an age for the dor for the politician-men like Gladstone, Palmerston, and Disraeli have rarely been equalled in colourful politics or in statesmanship; for the reformer-out of its terrible evils the Victorian era reached new heights of humanitarian real, public conscience, and social enlightenment; for the prosper ous merchant and manufacturer, who made Great Britain
1 Published collections of Arnold's letters are listed in the Bibliography.
the workshop of the world; for the explorer, colonist, and
empire-builder, who carried British power and British
culture around the globe. The revolution was largely peaceful
but none the less real-a vast tangled movement, its main elements the triumph of technology and industrialization, the growth of democracy, and the spread of popular education through schooling and the new communications systems, which was rapidly ushering in the modern world as we know it. How could all this be unpoetical? The answer lies in the fact that the once spacious realms of the imagination and spirit were felt by some to be dwindling at the same time that new possibilities for material and social life were being developed. John Stuart Mill explained this contradiction as the result of two opposing traditions or currents of thought at war with each other, traditions based on opposed types of mind and conceptions of man and society, and best represented by 'the two great seminal minds of England in their age', Jeremy Bentham and S. T. Coleridge. The effect of the Coleridgean tradition, in which the Romantic poets and the German philosophers in the Kantian school shared, was to sustain or revive faith in the innate, intuitive and creative powers of the human mind. It offered assurances that 'the seeds of godlike power are in us still', to quote from Arnold's sonnet 'Written in Emerson's Essays'; this was nourishment indeed for aesthetic and religious man alike. But Bentham and his followers were empiricists: they considered the human mind to be the product of its experiences, and its private and social functions to be amenable to common-sense analysis, explanation, measurement, and improvement. It was the activity of a Martha, not the contemplation of a Mary, that the nineteenth century needed. Antiquated laws and irrational institutions
1 See Mill on Bentham and Coleridge (1959), edited with an introduction by F. R. Leavis
had to be swept by the stiff broom of practical intelligence, and every human activity required testing by the radical questions, Is it useful? Does it serve the greatest happiness of the greatest number? The virtues of this fresh approach, especially in the social context of nineteenth-century England, are obvious. But the spirit of Bentham was profoundly unpoetical, and it seemed to be spreading its influence everywhere in mid- Victorian England.
Nineteenth-century science was working in the same cause In its applied aspects (the development of technology) and in its exploration of the unknown (the age of the universe, the origin of species, the descent of man), science was making immense strides in improving the human lot and in nourish ing man's curiosity about nature and himself. But in seeking to find the natural laws of all things, science cast doubt on the authenticity of the Bible, on the active intervention of divine forces or of a personal God in history, and on the intuitive powers of men. On the material side, along with the wonders of technological advance and the advent of modern com- munications went the incredible ugliness and squalor of the great new industrial centres, with their brutalized poor huddled together, uprooted from the natural life of the countryside and the civilizing traditions of village and country communities: cities is all Arnold need say in his list of con- temporary evils for his friend Clough to understand.
The truth is, as Arnold well understood, that each of the great formative forces of the Victorian Age had its construc tive side, and each its destructive side. Each could be celebrated as leading to a new peak of human achievement, and each could be condemned as a threat to the traditional structure and qualities of civilization. This was the complex world in which Arnold was young. But it would be wrong to imagine that because he called his age unpoetical he was anxious to hold
back the Spirit of the Times, any more than he was willing to join in the chorus of praise which was complacently singing its progress. It was exceedingly difficult to achieve clarity and balance in the midst of the bustling, rapidly changing con- temporary scene (the hopeless tangle of our age), but the effort had to be made or else one would be, as Arnold said to Clough, 'prevailed over by the world's multitudinousness'. The chief need of his day, as he saw it, was a genuinely critical spirit, and criticism for him was 'the endeavour, in all branches of knowledge,-theology, philosophy, history, art, science, to see the object as in itself it really is'. Criticism defined in this way is not possible for one who is totally immersed in the sphere of immediate action. Hence in his early years Arnold appeared at times to stand aloof from his age, to mock it with aristocratic airs (a very gentlemanly young man, with a slight tinge of the fop', Crabb Robinson called him), to resist its evils and its distractions by elevating the life of introspection, of love, of nature, to seek out 'quiet', 'calm', 'repose', 'peace-words that recur in the early poems. Hence his advocacy of poetic subjects drawn from earlier times, bringing in the ancient world to redress the balance of the new. Hence, too, his preoccupation in such poems as "The Buried Life' and 'The Future' with the problem of getting a clear view of his own nature, of moving along his proper 'line', of charting 'the hills where his life rose, / And the sea where it goes.'
As he grew older the effort to find himself and his sway in the tangled age was rewarded with increased confidence, energy, and sense of purpose. At the same time he came to see that in many respects he was his 'papa's son and his continua- tor', as he once called himself. Thomas Arnold has long since been recovered from the malicious obliquity of Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians (1918), and modern readers are to pay the respect that is due to the Rugby headmaster, chief moulder of nineteenth-century English Public School tradition, the short-lived Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, and the leader of the liberal or Broad Church movement, a man who energetically answered the contem- porary call to the service of humanity. The son's formal tribute to his father is the elegy 'Rugby Chapel', which cele- brates him as a somewhat intimidating Christian hero and guide to mankind, 'zealous, beneficent, firm'.
While Matthew Arnold the prose writer of tracts for the times received a considerable heritage from his father, the same cannot be said for the poet. Indeed some surprise was felt at the Arnold family producing a poet at all. Upon the publication of The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems (1849), Edward Quillinan, a friend of the family, wrote to Crabb Robinson: "To tell you the truth much as I do like the Arnolds, & more than like some of them, Jane & Her Mother for example, I never suspected there was any poetry in the family till I read M.A.'s.' But if the Arnold family was not the most obvious background for a poet, neither was it so austere and unsympathetic as critics of Thomas Arnold's moral seriousness would suppose. At their summer home, Fox How in the English Lake district, the large and lively family were able to enjoy frequently the pleasures of one of the most beautiful regions of England-the walk recorded in Arnold's 'Resignation' is a good illustration. There too they had the friendly society of the living embodiment of that region's poetical qualities, the ageing bard William Wordsworth, for whose poetry Matthew Arnold afterwards expressed the greatest love and admiration. At Rugby and at Fox How there was an element of seclusion in the family's way of life. "The more I see of the world', Matthew wrote to his mother in 1852, 'the more I feel thankful for the bringing up we had, so unworldly, so sound, so pure." With its piety, but also its gaiety and warmth, this upbringing was not at all like the dark, strife-ridden, and moody family atmosphere endured ten or fifteen years earlier in Lincolnshire by the future poet laureate, Alfred Tennyson. It is perhaps the friendliness and security of his early years that allowed Matthew Arnold to grow up with à a strong moral sense and an awareness of social responsibilities, certainly, but with less of that notoriously heightened and exacerbated conscience which proved the undoing of his closest friend and his father's prize pupil, Arthur Hugh Clough, whose childhood was virtually home- less and parentless.
Clough is perhaps the best known example of the Victorian 'divided mind', and significantly it was in him that Arnold found an intellectual peer and a poetical companion, a relation of which Arnold shows only a part in his elegy 'Thyrsis'. Clough was the elder by two years, and was more- over morally and intellectually precocious as a boy under Thomas Arnold's imposing rule at Rugby. It was not until after Clough had gone to Balliol College, Oxford, attended by the strongest admiration and the highest hopes for a brilliant future, and Matthew Arnold had followed as a promising though less serious scholar several years later, that their friendship developed fully. For several years they met frequently in the course of university life, and shared their pleasure in that Berkshire and Oxfordshire countryside which is the setting of "The Scholar-Gipsy' and 'Thyrsis'.
On the surface no two Oxford undergraduates could have been less alike. The gay, bantering, light-hearted Amold, affected in manner and dress, his hair guiltless of English scissors, showed few outward signs of his father's moral gravity and so little scholarship as to court academic dis- aster. The scrupulous Clough carried with painful care the model Sixth Former's sense of responsibility into thoughtful adulthood, studious undergraduate life, and an Oriel Fellow ship, yearning all the while for moral and religious certainty or at least peace from self-questioning, and denied both. More deeply, however, the two had much in common. Clough could be a spirited and delightful companion when he wished, and to Arnold the description in his own sonnet "Austerity of Poetry' might well have been applied:
young, gay,
Radiant, adorn'd outside; a hidden ground Of thought and of austerity within.
Arnold's letters, which carry on the lively discussions and debates of their Oxford days, show him attacking in Clough many of the very weaknesses and tendencies he feared in himself. In particular they shared an almost morbid self- awareness (the sickening consciousness of our difficulties) which at its best brought them to a high pitch of honesty and insight-Arnold's letters are ruthlessly frank on all matters, personal, aesthetic, and social. At other times it dropped them into those moods of melancholy brooding and despair which Victorians attributed to the grievous and unsettling loss of belief in orthodox Christianity, the ebbing of the Sea of Faith which was once at the full', as Arnold wrote in 'Dover Beach', but was now retreating 'down the vast edges drear/ And naked shingles of the world."
In the face of advancing scepticism and secularism the Anglican Church sought to maintain its traditional position, embodied in the Thirty-nine Articles of essential doctrine (which college fellows as well as ministers of the Church were required to endorse). If liberal churchmen like Thomas Arnold were prepared to trim the ship of doctrine to modern times, conservatives like Newman and others in the Oxford
Movement saw the Church's salvation in a rigorous reassertion of its hallowed mysteries and dogmas. But Clough was among those who found the orthodox position and the Articles intellectually unacceptable, and his conscience forced him to resign his Oriel Fellowship. 'His piping took a troubled sound,' as Arnold tells us in the conventional pastoral language of "Thyrsis', 'Of storms that rage outside our happy grounds; /He could not wait their passing.
The best statement of Clough's predicament, deprived of the age-old faith of the Church and unable to think his way through to a new moral and spiritual security, is also the famous picture which Arnold gives of himself in 'Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse':
Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born...
But whereas Clough apparently could never resolve the problem or put it by, Arnold was from the beginning deter- mined not to be overcome. He recognized that, whatever else, a melancholy indulgence in continual self-questioning was dispiriting and unhealthy, and when in a letter he attacked Clough on this score he was no doubt fortifying himself as well:
You ask me in what I think or have thought you going wrong; in this: that you would never take your assiette as something deter- mined final and unchangeable for you and proceed to work away on the basis of that: but were always poking and patching and cobbling at the assiette itself-could never finally, as it seemed-'resolve to be thyself'.... You have I am convinced lost infinite time in this way