Week 07, Matthew Arnold

Notes on Matthew Arnold

“The Buried Life”

This poem brilliantly analyzes what Arnold posits as a universal need to look within, to trace the operations of our inner being and to express them in a language commensurate with that inner life. In other words, Arnold is writing about the very stuff of romantic expressivism. The first few stanzas make it clear that the poet is unable in the present instance to make the connection with another he later posits as being necessary to the insight he seeks. In spite of that, the poem is one of Arnold’s more optimistic efforts. A power he simply describes as “Fate” (30), has kept “The unregarded river of our life” from plain view to protect us from our own destructive frivolity, but this river of authentic being flows on nonetheless. The poet explains that no individual, looking only within, can truly gain access to the inner springs of life and thought. Acting on our own, we cannot know from whence we have come or where we are going; we cannot grasp the purpose of our lives. And we cannot, it almost goes without saying, express a purpose we are unable to apprehend. From lines 55-66, the speaker suggests that most of what we do is a kind of self-deception—what we do and say, that is, conceals far more than it reveals about what we really are inside. Society demands no less of a charade. Even so, the speaker is not downcast: there are those rare moments when the voice, the gaze, or the touch of a beloved person gives us access to our being in all its authenticity. Arnold casts the result of this rarity in Wordsworthian terms: “The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain, / And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know” (86-87). So it is possible on rare occasion, and with the help of another, really to look within and to express what we see there. Especially for a gloomy poet like Arnold, that is a cheerful thought, and it bears comparison to Wordsworth’s lines from “Tintern Abbey,” “with an eye made quiet by the power / Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, / We see into the life of things” (47-49). It is possible to achieve an epiphany of the self and to express the insight flowing from it. What is captured is not something static but rather dynamic and flowing, as the poem’s persistent river metaphor indicates. Some may find a note of hesitancy in the poem’s final lines, “And then he thinks he knows / The hills where his life rose, / And the sea where it goes” (96-98). But I don’t think the word “knows” connotes doubt in this case; the conjectural seeker may or may not know the last word about his origins or destination, but that seems less important than the knowledge of his present self the poem says can, in fact, be attained. We should not expect from Matthew Arnold a brash statement such as John Donne’s “She is all States, and all Princes, I; / Nothing else is.” What we get, instead, is a sort of quiet, wistful optimism in the midst of so many melancholy and contemplative utterances by this earnest mid-Victorian.

“ Dover Beach”

The poem opens with the description of a beautiful natural scene, a seascape. Apparently it is a clear night in patches because the speaker can see the nightlights of France across the English Channel . And he catches something eternal about humanity in the effects of natural process—Sophocles, the poet says, heard the same sound attentively long ago, the sound of pebbles tossing back and forth in the surf with the tide and the waves. (In the play referenced—Antigone—the Chorus speaks of something much harsher—the low moan that accompanies gale force winds as they beat against the seashore, a sound compared to the ruin and devastation of Thebes’s royal house thanks to the anger of the gods.) what our speaker hears is the melancholy retreat of simple religious faith, a retreat that leaves Western civilization all but naked. It is evident that Matthew Arnold does not draw the same sustenance from nature that Wordsworth, a poet he much admires, was able to draw. Both the natural and human world before him in prospect are described as beautiful illusions—sights that seem to promise certitude and intelligibility, a sense that there is meaning out there, that there is “a place for us.” But the speaker is unable to put his faith in anything he sees or hears. He remains disillusioned, I think, even though he tries to cheer himself and his lover with the injunction, “let us be true / To one another!” The world remains hostile, dreary, and violent. It makes no sense in itself, and the knowledge that we can at least temporarily make a genuine human connection with someone else, and thereby create the meaning we seek, does not satisfy the speaker. This poem might be described as what Meyer Abrams would call a Greater Romantic Lyric—it begins in meditation, goes on to analyze a spiritual problem, and attempts to offer an emotional resolution. The tenuousness of that resolution gives the poem its distinctive Arnoldian quality. The couple remain isolated from the world, withdrawn from the violence and confusion surrounding them. Religion no longer offers solace in such a situation, at least not for this particular Victorian couple.

“Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse”

As always, Matthew Arnold turns out to be a very poetical Eeyore. The young enthusiasts of science and progress that give the mid-Victorian period its characteristic feel are welcome to go about their cheerful way, and enter the bright world of striving and competition. They do not feel the death of Christianity, suggests the speaker, because they were not brought up deeply believing in the religion. Arnold’s melancholy is characteristic of many Victorian intellectuals with respect to the ancient religion that had shaped so many generations before them. I don’t suppose Arnold is addressing the scientific studies that proved devastating to the faith of many Victorians, although he writes at what we might call the “ground zero” of religious doubt—a time still before Charles Darwin’s fully developed evolutionary theory, but a time in which other scientists such as Sir Charles Lyell were confidently estimating the vast amounts of time necessary to the formation of the geological structures they examined and puzzling over the strangeness of the fossils they unearthed. I would put this point around the 1830s in the English context. No, Arnold’s “rigorous teachers” are the Enlightenment’s finest rationalists—philosophers who, as the Norton note says, subjected the tenets and texts of faith to the rigors of reason and historical inquiry. Arnold’s speaker can neither believe nor dismiss from his mind the desire to believe (or at least to find certitude and moral meaning). I think he feels special affinity with the monks who dwell in the monastery and cultivate their herb garden, faithfully and simply following the religion of beautiful sorrow, presumably oblivious to the unbelievers all around them in a changing world. All the same, he cannot enter the mindset that makes such a life possible. What is he doing at such a gloomy place (66)? he wants to know.

The romantic predecessors Byron and Shelley, as the speaker says, struck a defiant attitude towards what they considered the diminution of spirit in an increasingly “modern” world: they rejected traditional religious belief, but kept alive the passionate conviction that lies at the heart of faith. They believed in inspired utterance, in creative imagination, and in defying the oppressors who threatened to stamp out freedom of thought and action. They sought to remind us of what was truly enduring about us as human beings. But in the end they, too, passed, and the speaker, a true son of the romantics, is left wondering what good all that storming and stressing has done: after all, the people of the 1850’s are no less subject to the world’s cares as anyone in the romantics’ time. What good does describing and acting out our anguish in verse, no matter how fine it may be, do us? A latter-day Shelley would be no more apt to change the world than the original Shelley was. (A modern author, W. H. Auden, responds eloquently to this downcast notion when, in his 1939 elegy “In Memory of William Butler Yeats,” he writes, “ For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives / In the valley of its making where executives / Would never want to tamper, flows on south / From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, / Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, / A way of happening, a mouth.”

Well, Arnold’s speaker describes his own position as that of a man “Wandering between two worlds, one dead, / The other powerless to be born” (85-86). Where others may see a confident world re-forming itself in ever-new and exciting patterns, our speaker sees confusion and disarray—steeped in his desire for the moral and spiritual certitude of the past, and in the strivings of the romantic poets who preceded him, he feels himself a member of a tragic generation that can neither simply embrace the past nor smugly accept the present. But it is with the past that the speaker will dwell, however uncomfortably and equivocally: his place is with the contemplative and the reclusive, not with the proponents of modernity. Indeed, the concluding stanzas of the poem are clever and somewhat Tennysonian in their conjuring of colorful, bright medieval soldiering and hunting parties to describe a world of action and reality whose proponents would characterize as radically new. (See, in particular, “The Lady of Shalott.”) I suppose that in this poem, Arnold isn’t exactly writing the “poetry of action” he prescribes in his “Preface” to the Poems of 1853: his art is the kind that treats of problems it admits must remain insoluble because they are linked to the eternal, deep-down strivings and sorrows of humanity. In this sense, art (or, more broadly, culture), for Arnold , partly replaces religion, as so many critics have said.

On a personal note, I find this poem’s analysis of the argument between old faiths and new convictions relevant today because I keep coming across modern versions of the argument. Take, for example, the confidence and even brazenness of today’s ultra-rationalists and militant atheists, authors such as Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens: they are quite certain that no deity need be considered, and dismiss religion as what Freud suggested it was: an adult fairy tale to stave off primal anxieties. I’m not a believer myself, at least not in any orthodox way—I suppose I’m closest to Buddhism because I like its respect for all forms of life, its refusal to indulge humans in their self-importance and disregard for their fellow creatures. But I don’t really go for the specific metaphysics of any religion, and I don’t attend a church. So why don’t I like the arguments set forth by the new atheists? Well, because I find their faith in reason naïve—reason is a fine thing, but we have often used it as a tool of injustice and rapaciousness. Some men of the Enlightenment thought we should worship reason, and in Arnold’s own century, Auguste Comte (1798-1857) promulgated a “religion of humanity.” Neither of these gestures seems to have worked out very well. Surely the realm of emotion is at least as important as that of reason and calculation. Deep passion can, of course, lead people to do dreadful things to one another, and religion can be used by the narrow-minded as a club with which to slaughter those who differ from them. But so can “reason” (which I ought to define for clarity’s sake as something like “intelligence in use”: applying the scientific method to a given problem, and so forth) which we all too often wield as an instrument more deadly than the tooth of a tiger or a shark. Bold confidence in the self-sufficiency of reason and science seems to me foolish. We have come uncomfortably close to ruining the planet with our much-vaunted intelligence; evidently, intelligence is not the same thing as wisdom. To say that you do not literally believe in any one metaphysical system is not necessarily to dismiss the aspirations towards which such a system points. I am unwilling to jettison or disrespect the quest for a kind of wisdom that reason and scientific inquiry seem incapable of addressing on their own, at least given our present circumstances.

General Notes on Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold actively resists what John Stuart Mill the Utilitarian philosopher had called the “hostile and dreaded censorship” of middle-class ascendancy: the smug self-satisfaction exhibited by average English citizens in their own unexamined views and values. Arnold insists that we need to promote culture and criticism as a means of combating such censorious mediocrity. He counsels intellectuals and thoughtful people generally to step away from politics and social controversy, wherein ideas are bought, sold, and bandied about with more concern for their effects on the balance of power than for their inherent truth. Ideas, Arnold says, should be examined in a “disinterested” manner—that is, in a calm and reasonably objective way, with no regard for one’s own personal biases or for the biases of the social and political groups that may claim one’s allegiance. Arnold’s emphasis is that of a man imbued with the “dare to know” ethos of the Enlightenment as well as with a classical drive towards self-development and self-perfection. Against the increasingly powerful middle-class utilitarian notion that life is all about chasing after pleasure and material comfort, Arnold asserts (as did J. S. Mill himself) that “doing as one likes” is hardly an adequate description of life’s goal; it is of great consequence what things give us pleasure, and the sources we should favor, he thinks, will come to us by way of sound education and self-cultivation, without which we are brutes. Many have pointed out Arnold’s flaws as a thinker—his fondness for repeating himself, his reliance on certain privileged cultural texts (often Greek classics) as irreducible “touchstones” of excellence, and even a certain strain of ivory-tower elitism. But Arnold surely deserves respect for his persistent support of Enlightenment integrity. We seldom seem to realize how fragile our humanity is—a quick scan of the daily papers, with their relentless recountings of twenty-first century brutality, ignorance, intolerance and persecution worthy of the Dark Ages, should convince any rational person that our best tendencies and highest potential must be constantly encouraged and guarded, not taken for granted and left at the mercy of “time and chance.” The Victorians were sometimes too willing to believe in facile assurances about the progress of humanity, but Arnold’s writings show him to be remarkably self-reflective about the pitfalls of such assumptions. At times, what Arnold calls “culture” seems little short of a miracle, given the conditions within which it must develop.

Finally, Arnold addresses some very modern problems—first, the status of art and culture in relation to economic and class arrangements. We find in him both a strong instance of what’s sometimes called the paradox of Anglo-American humanism: while he insists on the great value of humanistic study, he feels compelled to divorce that study from the immediate flow of worldly affairs. As Milton might say, “they also serve who only stand and wait”—and who only “read, study, and observe.” Or to state the dilemma more crudely, culture and criticism can only help us by not promising to help us, at least for the present. The paradox consists in defending the arts and criticism while simultaneously rejecting the suggestion that they should be immediately useful on a broad social scale. Second, Arnold offers a worthwhile examination of the relationship between art and criticism—a concern of much interest to theoreticians today.

Page-by-Page Notes on Matthew Arnold’s “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time”

1385-86/807-08. Arnold admits that art is, as Wordsworth claims, higher than criticism in the vulgar sense of essays that explicate poetry and so forth. But on page 808, Arnold, who distrusts romantic pretensions to priestly status, insinuates that Wordsworth’s near-dismissal of the lower, critical activity amounts to something like “primitivist elitism.” It won’t do, he suggests, to exalt imagination and creativity at the expense of critical reflection as if there were no vital relationship between the two.

1386/808. The second thing to keep in mind here is Arnold’s “man and moment” argument: art expresses ideas taken from a given society’s critical reflection; art may arrange those ideas into a beautiful and memorable synthesis, but the critical power must provide or “discover” the material first. Art is not mere expression of fleeting emotions—it involves intellect and thought. This is a position one finds in notable future critics: Oscar Wilde, T. S. Eliot, and others.) Art should not limit itself to the individual artist’s problems or spiritual struggles—the kind of genetic concern Arnold readily admits is too easily found in his own latter-day romantic poetry. Rather, it should work towards giving us universal models for action. It’s worth recalling that Arnold had long since condemned one of his most substantial poems (“Empedocles on Aetna”) because it failed in that regard. Artists should be inspired by the culture around them, not merely by their own existential desperation or emotional distress.

1386-87/808-09. To continue the above thoughts, if the necessary vital, freewheeling cultural conditions be lacking—if Shakespeare does not have his vibrant city of London, or Sophocles doesn’t have glorious Athens in its heyday (so that he can write about Apollonian calm and objectivity leading to action), then “the critical power” is required for the moment. “Make straight the way of the Lord!”—Arnold here plays the prophet or John the Baptist figure even as he accepts that the art of his own time is not organically related to the goings-on of English society. If that is the case in the 1800s, then Victorians need genuine criticism to help create the healthy environment that would make broadly appealing art possible. Sometimes you have to be an elitist of sorts to be a person of the people in the long run. Criticism should serve as a bridge to eventual practice. In Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, Friedrich von Schiller had already offered a statement about the artist’s need to make a strategic withdrawal from the fray of life that sounds much like the precursor of Arnold’s, so the English author is following the best tradition of German thought in this regard.

1387/810-11. Reading books is not a replacement for a vital national or international culture, but engagement with past authors at least makes such a culture imaginable for the critic or the artist. For Arnold , culture transcends the immediate social and political context. “True” ideas can be true forever, always out there as touchstones for us. But our times may make us unable to appreciate them—at least, most people will be out of touch. What is a touchstone? Well, here is Wikipedia’s short definition: “a small tablet of dark stone such as fieldstone, slate or lydite, used for assaying precious metal alloys. It has a finely grained surface on which soft metals leave a visible trace.”

1388-91/811-13. In his book Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke opposed the French radicals who made the Revolution of 1789. Arnold agrees with Burke that the revolutionaries tried to impose an extreme, artificial set of abstract universal ideals upon a people who were not yet mature enough to live by them. The French tried to go too far too fast, and did not respect the fact that social codes and institutions evolve slowly and organically, not overnight and as if my the imposition of a pattern from above. Therefore, the radicals’ glorious ideals led to an “epoch of concentration”—i.e. to a series of reactionary measures against anyone interested in liberty. Burke believed in slow growth leading to inevitable progress without loss of order, and Arnold apparently subscribes to that prescription for sustainable progress.

Well, if we cannot have revolution, what will be our agent of change? Certainly not radical politics or radical art in alliance with it. Instead, a shaping force is needed. That force would be criticism, which engages with a realm of culture not to be identified with “public opinion.” Karl Marx and Matthew Arnold would disagree on nearly everything, but not on the notion that ideology consists in treating as natural and eternal the hobby horses most beneficial to oneself and one’s political, economic, or social group. To borrow a line from Alexander Pope, “whatever is, is right.” Of course, Marx would say that Arnold’s promotion of disinterestedness amounts to ideology, to fiddling while Rome burns: disinterestedness, he would no doubt suggest, is even more saturated with ideological presumption than honest-to-goodness bias. Why should intellectuals not use their skills to improve the lot of the common man and woman? We might say that Burke and Arnold would be willing to sign off on decades of injustice and repression so long as their slow, organic, “inevitable” progress seems sure to result. Arnold thinks “force” can prepare the way for right—perhaps, if you take as your model enlightenment monarchy or bureaucracy. But force quickly becomes its own reason, doesn’t it? George Orwell’s 1984 and the nightmare bureaucracy-world of Franz Kafka make that point well.

1393-94/816-17. Critics must be willing to step back from politics and live by ideas, sifting the excellence of those ideas in their universal dimension. Failure to do so, says Arnold, has kept England back with regard to “its best spiritual work” (1393). Arnold holds a developmental, organic conception of humanity, like the German authors he has been reading—Wilhelm von Humboldt, Friedrich von Schiller, and Goethe in particular. Our purpose is to develop as human beings, to develop our full individuality and not merely what pertains to our bourgeois desire to accumulate things and satisfy ourselves. (The moral condemnation implied here can be found much earlier—see Shakespeare’s sonnet line “the expense of spirit in a waste of shame is lust in action”; we are capable of fine things, but are continually attracted to baser pleasures and crass materialism.) This development must take place within a vibrant society that encourages self-discovery. Criticism’s burden at present is to keep open a space for the free play of the mind, for the pure entertainment of ideas for the sake of ideas, until the right kind of social and political environment can become established. Some would say that bourgeois democracy promotes only property and pleasure, not self-improvement or excellence of achievement, for the most part. The mind needs what von Humboldt calls “freedom and variety of situations,” so if the disinterested critic can encourage that understanding, he or she is perhaps already serving the community. To steal a line from one of Milton’s sonnets, “They also serve who only stand and wait.” As Arnold sees the matter, a society capable of naming someone as unattractive and indistinct as “Wragg” and then writing “Wragg is in custody” (1394) when the person commits some atrocity isn’t where it needs to be, whatever the triumphalist Adderley and Roebuck might say.

1395-96/817-19. Arnold’s claim about “the mass of mankind” never really feeling the lack of adequate ideas may seem aloof and even elitist. Some would say he makes apolitical thinking too much of a virtue, and permanently divorces art and criticism, the realm of thought, from “the general practice of the world.” This would be a sad admission or concession to make for a man who takes as his ideal ancient Greece and Shakespeare’s England , where, supposedly, art and life were vitally connected. Ultimately, Arnold surely wants us to believe that thought, whether art or criticism in the broadest sense, must resist commodification and the vulgar interests of class and party politics. But the question is, does this non-political stance amount merely to a bourgeois liberal laissez-faire viewpoint on current affairs? Is it a virtue to consider one’s thought ideology-free, to think one has stepped outside the Plato-realm of worldly illusion in order to arrive at the truth? Arnold seems to agree with Friedrich von Schiller that the civilization-process alienates sophisticated thought from ordinary affairs and people, in which case the artist and the critic may for a long time be viewed as mandarins or distant philosopher kings.

Arnold recognizes that ideas are being used as brickbats for narrow, selfish, cynical political and economic interests. To be fair, he offers his own conception of the kind of state that would be better than either aristocracy-saturated Toryism or laissez-faire middle-class rule or working-class radical socialism. Arnold’s state would be like a big critic—free of all narrow interest. But his trickle-down or slow-spread theory of cultural improvement is not entirely satisfying as an answer if we are asking how to get there from here. The class system he opposes generates an overwhelming imperative for people not to think for themselves, so while removing oneself from the fray is a noble ideal, it may not produce the results Arnold hopes it will.

1396-97/823. Arnold’s defense of critical autonomy is that it will serve society by helping to create the conditions necessary for a healthy, vibrant intellectual life and a more just form of government, one free of petty class interests. Arnold links his free-thinking critic to a fair-minded, disinterested state. Ultimately, then, his cultural and literary theory lays claim to broader social significance. It would be worth considering the extent to which today’s “public intellectuals” are speaking and writing in the vein of Arnold’s higher critic, and to what extent they play against his prescription for disinterestedness: Consider, for example, the late Susan Sontag and Edward Said, or Stanley Fish, who writes a regular column for the New York Times. Jacques Derrida also seems to have partly played the role of an European public intellectual, at least towards the end of his life. Cultural Studies Professor Cornel West certainly qualifies as a public intellectual—like Fish and some of the others mentioned, he is an academic who writes erudite books and articles, but he also shows up regularly on television talk shows and engages with much broader, more or less non-academic audiences.

Editions: Greenblatt, Stephen, et al., eds. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume E: The Victorian Age. 8th ed. New York: Norton, 2005. ISBN-13: 978-0393927214. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York : Norton, 2001. ISBN 0393974294.

Preface To Poems (1853)

Overview: Evidently, Matthew Arnold believes that the romantics, as some wag said about Thomas Carlyle, “led us into the wilderness and left us there.” Arnold seeks a balance between poetic form and expression; art should be oriented towards action, he believes, and it should not wallow in Hamlet-like, self-centered anguish or luxuriate in fine phrases and images. That kind of self-indulgence, he believes, has been the tendency since the early modern period. Shakespeare is wonderful, but Matthew Arnold doesn’t advocate taking him as your model if you want to be a writer. Modernity is a threat since it leads us away from what is permanent in us, and away from a unified sensibility and coherent outlook. The Greeks, according to Arnold, are the best artistic models because they can help us fight modernity’s worst aspects: its threat of incoherence and its predilection for the part over the whole, its penchant for selfishness over what benefits the individual most genuinely and serves the community as well. The Greeks offer clarity, rigor, simplicity, and a balanced perspective on life. Like so many Victorian sages and culture critics, Arnold reasserts humanity’s need for some principle of excellence by which to think and live.

1375. “The dialogue of the mind with itself has commenced,” says Arnold . This dialogue cannot be wished away, but he is concerned about its negative effects on consciousness. Complexity is part of modern life, and the question is how to deal with it. Arnold declares himself against any representation that is, as he says, “vaguely conceived and loosely drawn.” We demand accuracy and precision in art; we demand that it should “add to our knowledge.” Or at least, that is what Arnold says we should demand of it; only if this is done, he implies, will it do what it really ought: “inspirit and rejoice the reader.” As always, Arnold draws much from German enlightenment and romantic authors—his descriptions, as he makes clear, are derived from Friedrich von Schiller, a great disciple of Immanuel Kant. The passage he cites is followed by The claim that the best art facilitates the free play of all the mind’s powers: “Der höchste Genuß aber ist die Freiheit des Gemüthes in dem lebendigen Spiel aller seiner Kräfte.”

Unfortunately, in his view, this sort of spirit-expanding free play is exactly what much modern art does not encourage. Instead, modern poetry gives us representations “in which the suffering finds no vent in action; in which a continuous state of mental distress is prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope, or resistance; in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done.” This sort of artistic representation is not tragic in the high classical sense; it is not uplifting but is, he says, merely “painful.” The bottom line is that art should not give in to or merely reflect a particular era’s worst tendencies; it should challenge them, and generate a counter-balancing effect.

1376-77. Arnold insists that “The date of an action… signifies nothing.” There is no reason why we cannot derive as much pleasure and enlightenment from ancient works of art as from modern ones. This is no different from what many critics have said in their own way. Samuel Johnson, after all, wrote that the best art consists in “just representations of general nature” that have been highly esteemed for long periods of time, and he insisted that a painter should not “streak the leaves of the tulip” but should rather provide us with a general, universally recognizable representation. And Percy Bysshe Shelley, of course, writes in his “Defense Of Poetry” that poets write from a perspective beyond particular places or historical epochs. So the claim that art should deliver to us something of universal and eternal significance is nothing new. Arnold is asserting his neoclassical bent here: he derives from Aristotle’s Poetics the notion that literary art should be about “action,” about the construction of plot and story. Emotional expression is secondary to this imperative. As usual, Arnold is in dialogue with William Wordsworth, whose poetry he much admires but whose poetics he does not always agree with. We recall that Wordsworth, in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, said that expression was the prime consideration and that action should simply be made to suit the expression. For Wordsworth, poetry is mainly an expressive vehicle; for Arnold , such a prescription is liable to result in morbid, unbalanced poetry. Somewhat like Thomas Carlyle, Arnold is telling us, “Close thy Byron, open thy Goethe.” As for the moderns in comparison with the ancients, Arnold writes that “with us, attention is fixed mainly on the value of the separate thoughts and images which occur in the treatment of an action. They regarded the whole; we regard the parts. With them, the action predominated over the expression of it; with us, the expression predominates over the action.” It is action, not expression, that delivers to us a sense of an intelligible cosmos. Arnold is therefore very interested in the formal qualities and integrity of a given poem; he emphasizes craftsmanship over intensity of expression.

1378-79. At this point in his argument, Arnold offers some rather harsh words about his fellow critics. He says that they not only allow unhealthy practices, they promote “false aims.” Such critics, he says, are mostly interested in “detached expressions,” and are quite an interested in demanding a sense of the whole in any particular poem. They treat poetry like what we would call “sound bites.” But to treat words and indeed entire works of art this way is to divorce language or whatever medium we are dealing with from the realm of action. While Matthew Arnold is a great believer in the integrity and autonomy of art, he does not promote the idea that the composition of a literary work should amount to navel-gazing on the part of the artist. We do not, he insists, or rather we should not, favor a kind of art that amounts to “A true allegory of the state of one’s own mind.”

Also on this page, Arnold returns to the idea that a young writer must find suitable models. This advice obviously rejects the romantic idea that we can more or less dismiss our predecessors if we find them uncongenial and create something almost from nothing. What Arnold describes is not so much “the anxiety of influence” that, as Harold Bloom would say, caused romantic poets to struggle mightily against the overwhelming influence of John Milton. Rather, Arnold is pointing out that the sheer “multitude of voices counseling different things” threatens modern authors with a profound sense of incoherence when they most need clarity and balance. This is a prominent strain in Arnold’s thinking on art and culture more generally, and even on politics. I think we can understand him without too much trouble because we live in a time with an even larger “marketplace of ideas” from which we may choose. So many ideas, many of them utterly incompatible—how is one to choose amongst them? To use a contemporary phrase, Arnold suggests that modern humanity is beset by “information overload.”

1380-81. But what about Shakespeare as a model? Why not make the greatest of English literary artists our model? Well, Shakespeare’s gift of “abundant… and ingenious expression” may be remarkable, but it is not what we need. In Arnold’s view, Shakespeare was a bit too much in love with beautiful language and fine expression, so much so that it sometimes leads him away from sound construction and concentration on the actions with which his plays are concerned. Criticism on Shakespeare is punctuated by such gentle barbs—Ben Jonson essentially said he wished Shakespeare had had a good editor, that the man had “blotted out” more lines than he did. And Samuel Johnson lamented that the Bard was too fond of silly quibbles, too willing to let semi-obscene puns and the like mar the dignity and moral tenor of his dramas. I think what Arnold is getting at is that Shakespeare was a man of unparalleled artistry and genius who could give us both a complete action and fineness and intensity of expression, but when the other artists attempt to imitate his methods, the results fall short of the original’s mark. (By way of example, he mentions John Keats’s “Isabella, or the Pot of Basil.” It is a poem full of beautiful lines, Arnold suggests, but what is it really about?) Even so, I wouldn’t deny that Arnold is offering a pointed criticism: he says explicitly that Shakespeare’s “gift of expression… rather even leads him astray, degenerating sometimes into a fondness for curiosity of expression….” If this fondness proceeds too far, by implication, we will end up with a work of art that is more eccentric than universal in its appeal. He caps this argument with Guizot’s delicious quip that “Shakespeare appears in his language to have tried all styles except that of simplicity.” If we admire and emulate what is least worthy of such attention in Shakespeare, his art may please us, but it may not improve us or give us a holistic view of life; it may not contribute to our development as whole human beings.

1382-83. Most of all, Arnold recommends the classics, for their “unity and profoundness of moral impression.” Furthermore, he writes of the “steadying and composing effect upon . . . [the] judgment, not of literary works only, but of men and events in general” (1382) that stems from reading classical literature. Perhaps that’s partly why Alexander Pope said Virgil found that “to study Homer was to study Nature.” Arnold’s argument isn’t a diatribe against the modern world; he admits that “The present age makes great claims upon us” and that his classicists “wish neither to applaud nor to revile their age; they wish to know what it is, what it can give them, and whether this is what they want.” He concludes with the thought that progress is a threat mainly if it ignores what is best and most permanent about humanity; the “touchstone” of human nature must be retained amidst the Heraclitean flux of the modern world. His exhortation to fellow poets and readers is that they ought to “transmit to [future generations] the practice of poetry, with its boundaries and wholesome regulative laws,” even if his own generation is comprised mainly of dilettanti who find themselves unable to equal the ancients in their artistic brilliance or their power of thought and feeling. The argument he makes is paradoxical in that what he describes as permanent and natural in us seems to be threatened with extinction by the forces of modernity. As so often, we find a cultural critic dealing with the dilemma posed by the disjunction between broad social imperatives and individual needs and aspirations, and not finding any easy answers. But in his view, ancient art at least gives us some sense of the tranquility, nobility, and excellence of which we are capable.

General Notes on Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy

Like Carlyle, Matthew Arnold argues against what he sees as social chaos and disunity, but while Carlyle’s solution has to do with practical economics, Arnold’s has more to do with the intellectual sphere and with large matters of statecraft. While Carlyle decries the anarchic, brutal relation between alienated workers and their capitalist employers, Arnold is upset over the corollary of this economic struggle, the struggle for control of the state. Arnold pushes an aloof, classless state that will encourage the development of “the best self.” Freed from the passionate narrow-mindedness of the three great classes—the Barbarians (the aristocracy), the Philistines (the middle class—the capitalists), and the Populace (the working class)—Arnold’s State will serve as a grand clearing house for his favorite critical operations: “to propagate he best that has been known and thought in the world” and “to see the object as in itself it really is.” Arnold puts little faith in either “democracy” or the reforms suggested by his liberal acquaintances. His chapter title “Doing as One Likes” loudly bespeaks his disdain for England’s contented boastings about its intellectual and economic freedom. England , suggests Arnold , must choose between “Anarchy” and “Culture”; it can no ways have both. The country’s best hope, he says, lies in the disinterested “reading,” ‘studying,” and “observing” that his new State will encourage as a regimen for the best minds and future governors of England . In essence, Arnold seems to be calling for a strong central state run by an efficient, independent, well-educated bureaucracy. Culture—the disinterested (i.e. “objective”) pursuit of perfection—is Arnold’s answer to industrial chaos. The State, striving in accordance with “right reason” toward the full and balanced development of its citizenry, will at last allow Britain to take control of its affairs.

Arnold’s work fits within the broad scheme of liberal reformism and emphasis on education, and to that extent, Arnold is a philosopher of the “middle class.” (After all, theory is hardly the province of the nobility.) One might also say that Arnold is a representative of another separated field or class—the intelligentsia. The main question is whether or not Arnold’s commentary is practical. A good case can be made for him if we point out that his commentary deals with the effects of economic relations and the class system, even if it seems rather elitist in tone. But can there be such a thing as a “state above class”? Arnold is wary of raw democracy, and does not necessarily want to do away with the class system altogether. He remains aloof from Mill’s emphasis on liberty, perhaps suspecting that utilitarianism is always a philosophy of the middle class. He might say that Mill’s praise of liberty lacks the authority principle needed to carry the day, that Mill’s thought lacks direction and so fails to offer a way out of anarchy. But at the same time, Arnold doesn’t look to Carlyle’s “Captains of Industry” to solve England’s problems, so he keeps his distance from both lines of thought.