Major Works: Poetry: "The Forsaken Merman" (1849), "The Strayed Reveler" (1849), Empedocles on Etna (1852), "The Scholar-Gypsy" (1853), "Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse" (1855), "Thyrsis" (1866), "Dover Beach" (1867). Criticism: "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time" (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869).
Biographical Notes: Arnold's father, Thomas, was a famous preacher and educator, and his influence upon his more famous son was profound. Matthew Arnold was educated at good schools (including Rugby, where his father was headmaster), and he graduated from Oxford. During his college years, Arnold rebelled against the strict Victorian puritanism of his father: he dressed in outlandish clothes and acted the "dandy," he was a great practical joker and a lively wit, and he seemed to concern himself more with fun than schoolworkhe was something of a wild man for a brief spell. Unlike all the writers we've studied except Blake, Arnold wrote as a sidelinemost of his life he followed in his father's footsteps and worked hard for practical reform as an Inspector of Schools; for ten years he was also a professor of Literature. In the late 1850s Arnold became unsatisfied with the quality of his poetry; after 1857 he devoted his writings almost exclusively to prose: literary criticism, criticism of education, and social and religious commentary. Today it is debated whether Arnold is more important for his poetry or his criticismmost recently the advocates of his criticism appear to hold the field. Without doubt, Arnold is the single most important English critic in the latter half of the 19th century. In prose and poetry, Arnold is typically Victorian in his concern with the most pressing issues confronting his eraespecially the issue of individual fulfillment in an age of fading religious faith.
The divided self
Much of his poetry reflects a sense of internal division
within Arnold (similar to Tennyson). Though this division takes on many
shades, its essence is a dilemma of choosing between Romantic subjectivity and
delight in nature, and the more typically Victorian objective concern with the
changing social and moral world of 19th century England. Arnold felt drawn
to the opposing poles of Byronic rebellion in "poetic madness" and
"enslavement" to the "quiet desperation" of the world of
duty and routine. Some "shades" of this divided self resulted
in what Arnold called "the dialogue of the mind with itself":
Poetry vs. "utility"
On one side, Arnold longed for a life of sensuous and
passionate experience, of artistic contemplation; on the other, he thought he
should exert self-discipline and work hard at improving his world through social
or political achievement in objective intellectual analysis and criticism of
his world.
"Hellenism vs.
Hebraism"
Arnold recommends a balance of two opposing tendencies
that both seek human perfection or salvation, and both of which are essential
to a harmonious and enlightened culture: Hellenism involves cultivation
of the aesthetic and intellectual understanding of life, the life of the thinking
mind; Hebraism involves obligations of duty, self-control, and workof
puritan morality with its emphasis on active doing. The division within
Arnold's writing career reflects a progression from the Romantic to the Victorian
mode, in a sense, as he puts aside the personal expression of poetry to devote
himself to the more objective and philosophical non-fictional prose.
"Victorian melancholy"
Arnold's best poetry usually conveys a vivid sense of
personal depression, a sense of loss inherent in the passing of an old order
and its replacement by a new one. Recurrent themes progress through loss,
endurance, and recovery; death, sorrow, and rebirth. Part of Arnold's
dissatisfaction with his own poetry was that it didn't fit his belief that poetry
should act as religion does, soothing, inspiring, guiding, and improving its
readers. His poetry seemed to him too much caught up in the "depression
and ennui" which Arnold said was "the disease of the most modern societies."
Thematically "modern"
Arnold's melancholy arises from concerns which will find
further elaboration by many important writers in the 20th century: Arnold was
"a melancholy poet consumed by a sense of human futility. His poems
bewail the spiritual drift and metaphysical anguish of an age in which the Christian
tradition seemed increasingly remote from contemporary problems. He felt
acutely the collapse of traditional faith from the assaults of science, 'higher
criticism' of the Bible, and utilitarianism. A profound sense of loneliness
pervades his verse; the bonds between people and God and between people and
Nature have been shattered, leaving people in an indifferent cosmos of mechanical
laws. His poetry seeks for individual meaning and purpose amid isolation"
(Tollers). As we shall soon see, much modern literature reflects this
same loneliness, alienation, and frustration that accompanies an age in which
Faith is dead as a central and fundamental force in culture and society.
A la Wordsworth
Arnold was influenced by a number of Romantic poets,
Wordsworth perhaps most of all, as seen in the typically plain and direct "language
really used by men." Also in the vein of Wordsworth, Coleridge and
other Romantics is Arnold's misapprehensions about "the world," meaning
the bustle of city life in which "getting and spending" is paramount.
Whereas the Romantics generally condemn "the world" for taking people
away from nature, Arnold is more positively harsh in his condemnation of it"the
world" according to Arnold is an arid moral desert, a "Victorian wasteland."