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Matthew Arnold and the Poetics of Belief: Some Implications of Literature and Dogma
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 August 2011
Extract
Although Matthew Arnold, in his disquisitions on faith and belief, never used the word “myth” as literary criticism defines it today, yet his whole approach to the spiritual crisis of modern times derives from an implicit assumption that man cannot live without myths. In “On the Modern Element in Literature,” he voiced man's need of an adequate intelligence of his situation. To comprehend the collective life of humanity, past and present, in all its complex interrelatedness—such is, to Arnold, the essence of moral and intellectual deliverance, the necessity for an age of “multitudinous” facts.
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- Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1964
References
1 I concentrate on Literature and Dogma (New York, 1883) as the principal document, alluding to other works when called for.
2 Literature and Dogma, p. 116, hereinafter abbreviated LD.
3 “… this strange disease of modern life/With its sick hurry, its divided aims”; see Kenneth Allott, Matthew Arnold (London, 1955), p. 25.
4 Schorer, Mark, “The Necessity of Myth,” in Myth and Myth-Making, ed. Murray, H. A. (New York, 1960), p. 356.Google Scholar
5 LD, p. 69.
6 Ibid., p. 70.
7 Ibid., p. xiii.
8 Herbert Read, The Forms of Things Unknown (London, 1960), p. 120. In this connection, Arnold also speculates on God as some sort of patriarchal figure — thus anticipating Freud?
9 Ibid., p. 121, quoting Cassirer. See T. S. Eliot on the function of the auditory imagination, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London, 1933), pp. 118–19.
10 Apart from scientific discourse, there can be no precise fixation of meanings in literature considered as the free disposition of meanings; cf. I. A. Richards, Speculative Instruments (Chicago, 1960), pp. 148f.
11 See Ransom, John Crowe, “Poetry as Primitive Language,” in The Writer and His Craft, ed. Cowden, R. (Michigan, 1954), pp. 146–59.Google Scholar
12 G. W. Allport, The Individual and His Religion (New York, 1957), p. 134.
13 LD, p. 97.
14 Saint Paul and Protestantism (New York, 1924), p. 60.
15 Cf. I. A. Richards, quoting Coleridge, in Coleridge on Imagination (Indiana, 1960), p. 150. See also Biographia Literaria, ed. E. Rhys (London, 1910), Chap. XIV, p. 166: “The poet diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends and fuses the powers and affections ‘each into each, by that synthetic and magical power to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination.’” In the context of Arnold's thinking, “happiness” signifies the balance suggested by the phrase “imaginative reason.” Only by being able to induce balance can “righteousness” prevail as a moral directive.
16 LD, p. 22.
17 Ibid., pp. 81–2.
18 Ibid., pp. 34, 36.
19 Richards, I. A., “Science and Poetry,” in Criticism, ed. Schorer, Mark et al. (New York, 1948), p. 518Google Scholar. Trilling, L. writes: “If organized religion is pseudostatement, ritual is indeed its very essence; and style is the very essence of ritual,” in Matthew Arnold (New York, 1949), p. 361.Google Scholar
20 I. A. Richards, “Science and Poetry,” p. 510.
21 I. A. Richards et al., The Foundation of Aesthetics (New York, 1925), pp. 75–6.
22 LD, p. 102.
23 E. D. H. Johnson, The Alien Vision of Victorian Poetry (Princeton, 1952), pp. 157ft.
24 See LD, pp. 38–9.
25 An archetype is a primordial image which penetrates the individual consciousness and plumbs the collective unconscious beneath it, the racial past, or the prelogical mentality. Cf. Maud Bodkin, Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (New York, 1958), Chapters I and II; see also René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (New York, 1956), p. 182.
26 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Self and the Dramas of History (New York, 1955), p. 98.
27 LD, p. 293.
28 Herbert Read, Icon and Idea (Cambridge, Mass., 1955), pp. 17f., 94.
29 Matthew Arnold, Essays, ed. F. Neiman (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), p. 7.
30 Ibid. There is a striking affinity between Arnold's formulation and Coleridge's description of the poetic imagination in Chapter XIV of Biographia Literaria.
31 LD, pp. 76–7.
32 Cf. Essays, ed. F. Neiman, p. 238.
33 Rudolf Bultmann et al., Kerygma and Myth (New York, 196I), pp. 10f.; [Kerygma und Mythos, I (Hamburg, 1948), p. 25].
34 LD, p. 340.
35 Bultmann, p. 3; [pp. 16f.]. Curiously enough, Arnold anticipated the propositions of Bultmann and Karl Jaspers in the main theme of Literature and Dogma. Nobody so far has investigated the implications of Arnold's ideas on religion in relation with Bultmann's theory of religion without myth.
36 LD.p. 129.
37 Ibid., p. 76.
38 Essays, p. 239.
39 Richards, “Science and Poetry,” p. 522.
40 Ibid., p. 228.
41 On the cathartic function of myths, R. Chase writes: “I suggest that myth is the repository of repressed wishes and that part of the magic power of myth stems from its ability to furnish ‘recognition scenes’ in which we have the thrilling experience of coming face to face with a disinherited part of ourselves,” in Quest for Myth (Baton Rouge, 1949), p. 101.
42 LD, pp. 30, 37.
43 The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York, 1903), p. 517.
44 For a contemporary appraisal of Arnold's modernism, see Baker, Joseph, “Our New Hellenic Renaissance,” in The Reinterpretation of Victorian Literature (Princeton, 1950), pp. 207–36.Google Scholar
45 To be sure, Arnold, with his singular method of persuasion, argued for no doctrine at all. His value lies in exemplifying a certain tone of mind, a largeness of temper, an intellectual urbanity. See John Holloway, The Victorian Sage (London, 1953), p. 203.
46 Quoted in Howard F. Lowry, Matthew Arnold and the Modern Spirit (Princeton, 1941), p. 19; also LD, pp. 21–2.
47 Cf. Trilling, p. 351: “if (Arnold) banished dogma, he defended myth, cult and rite.”