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Matthew Arnold and the Crisis of Classicism: An Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 September 2010
Extract
Reflecting on the extreme difficulty of the practice of literary criticism as it was invoked by the conception and composition of Literature and Dogma, Matthew Arnold wrote the following sentence: “It calls into play the highest requisites for the study of letters; – great and wide acquaintance with the history of the human mind, knowledge of the manner in which men have thought, of their way of using words and what they mean by them, delicacy of perception and quick tact, and, besides all these, a favourable moment and the ‘Zeitgeist.’” This sentence is a mirror, a language-metaphor, of Arnold's critical mind. Without verbal fanfare, with the utmost directness and simplicity of statement, it encompasses its subject in an original, relevant, and satisfying way. The “highest requisites” for the literary critic are adequate working hypotheses about the human mind – not a formal philosophy or theory of mind, but a set of working hypotheses, empirically acquired and tested and always subject to empirically justified revision, that are both practical and trustworthy; genuine sophistication in the subtleties of language, its nuances, conventions, and diplomacies – again not scientific or philosophical expertise, but a knowledge acquired through experience of historical usage and of the tendency of language to contract and expand itself and to alter its character and significance as it moves in and out of differing contexts; a sensibility diat is especially responsive to literary fact and moves with practiced ease and dependability among literary phenomena; that degree of self-awareness that recognizes the peculiar aptness and applicability of one's talents to the needs and possibilities of one's era. Add to these “highest requisites for the study of letters” only a very few of Arnold's methodological principles – concentration on the centrality of the subject or action to the way in which a piece of imaginative literature actually works, reliance on “inward evidence, direct evidence” rather than on “outward evidence, indirect evidence,” recognition that “poets receive their distinctive character, not from their subject, but from their application to that subject of the ideas …
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References
Notes
1. The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. Super, R. H. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968), VI (Dissent and Dogma), 276.Google Scholar
2. See, especially, the Preface to the First Edition of Poems (1853), Complete Prose Works, I (On the Classical Tradition), 1–15.
3. Literature and Dogma, Complete Prose Works, VI, 263–64.
4. On Translating Homer, Complete Prose Works, I, 210.
5. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980). My criticisms are of Jenkyns's treatment of the literary aspects of his subject. On the basis of these, I am deeply suspicious of his essential usefulness in other areas of culture - architecture, sculpture, painting, philosophy, sexual history, and so forth - but I would not be quite comfortable measuring his successes there.
6. “The Literary Influence of Academies,” in Essays in Criticism, First Series, Complete Prose Works, III (Lectures and Essays in Criticism), 232 and 257, the opening and closing paragraphs.
7. See, for example, “On the Modern Element in Literature,” Complete Prose Works, I, 28. Jenkyns's citation of the source is wrong.
8. “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” Complete Prose Works, III, 272–73.
9. “On the Modern Element in Literature,” Complete Prose Works, I, 28.
10. On Translating Homer, Complete Prose Works, I, 173.
11. Jenkyns's statement (p. 309) that “there are places [in Sohrab and Rustum] where the echoes of Homer seem to have been inserted for the sake of some commentator of the twenty-fifth century …” is so disproportionate and arbitrary as to merit the epithet schoolboyish.
12. In the Introduction to A Choice of Kipling's Verse (New York: Charles Scribner's, 1943), p. 7. Eliot's specific reference is to Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse, the mind of whose speaker he identifies with Arnold's own mind.Google Scholar
13. Preface to the first Edition of Poems (1853), Complete Prose Works, I, 8.
14. The phrase is from Hardy's Preface to The Dynasts.
15. In these remarks, I have followed Victor Brombert's review of the Flaubert letters, TLS, 30 Jan. 1981, p. 105.
16. The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. Allott, Kenneth, 2nd ed. rev. by Miriam Allott (London and New York: Longman, 1979), p. 208n. All references to Arnold's poems are to this edition.Google Scholar
17. Literature and Dogma, Complete Prose Works, vi, 275.
18. Preface to Second Edition of Poems (1854), Complete Prose Works, I, 16.
19. Preface to Wessex Poems and Other Verses, in The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, ed. Gibson, James (New York: Macmillan, 1976), p. [6].Google Scholar
20. Complete Poems, p. 558.
21. It would be grossly reductive, of course, to exaggerate the import of such an assertion, making it mechanical and exclusive. Hardy was absorbingly aware of the whole nineteenth-century poetic tradition, from Wordsworth and Shelley through Tennyson and Browning and Swinburne, and his mind retained significant deposits of them all. But the fact remains that, when he came to write, in the last decade of his life, the most important explanation and defense of his career as a poet, he repeatedly identified himself with “the authority” who had “affirmed to be what no good critic could deny as the poet's province, the application of ideas to life” (Complete Poems, p. 559).
22. See particularly Jamieson, William A., Arnold and the Romantics (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1958)Google Scholar; James, D. J., Matthew Arnold and the Decline of English Romanticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961)Google Scholar; Gottfried, Leon, Matthew Arnold and the Romantics (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, [1963]).Google Scholar
23. See Complete Prose Works, I, 38. Arnold's exact phrase is “this stronghold of the romantic school,” but the extrapolation seems justified by Arnold's conviction that the literature of a nation is the most trustworthy expression of its spiritual condition.
24. It is essential that one not romanticize the Romanticism or post-Romanticism that Arnold looked around and saw in the late 1840s, early 1850s. Indeed, if Romanticism is an archetypal state of mind rather than a subject-matter or a particular set of metaphors, it was a very unromantic Romanticism that he was faced with. Only in Newman was a relatively pure species of Romanticism organically at work, while the Brontës and Dickens were employing partial and derivate aspects of Romanticism, and Tennyson and Browning were struggling to transform a Romanticism that, though it had served their apprenticeships well enough, positively impeded their majorities. Otherwise, as Arnold saw it, even the truly grand but deeply fallible Romanticism of Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Keats had foundered on its faults - on the personal/poetic incoherence of Clough, the Spasmodic caprice of Alexander Smith, and the formlessness, sentimentality, subjectivity, and miscellaneous image-making and overabundant psychologizing of contemporary poetry generally.
25. Newman, John Henry, Apologia provita sua, ed. Culler, A. Dwight (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956), pp. 34 and 121, respectively.Google Scholar
26. “Briefwechsel zwischen Schiller und Goethe, vi, 230,” as noted in On Translating Homer, Complete Prose Works, I, 102.
27. On Translating Homer, Complete Prose Works, I, 140.
28. Hardy, Thomas, Jude the Obscure, ed. Page, Norman (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), p. 258 (Sixth Part, First Section).Google Scholar
29. Preface to Poems (1853), Complete Prose Works, I, 14.
30. Preface to Poems (1853), Complete Prose Works, I, 15.