Introduction
Why bother with Arnold?
Dr Martin Corner
Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) was, until at least the middle of the twentieth century,
very much at the centre of talk about literature and the wider domain of culture. He
was the central figure in a line of literary and social critics that extended from
Thomas Carlyle in the 1820s through Ruskin, Mill and T. S Eliot to Orwell, C. P.
Snow and F. R. Leavis in the 1960s. Though largely unspoken and unnoticed, his
ideas on education, with John Henry Newman’s, were normative for the
understanding of the place of higher education in national life.
Almost nothing of that holds today.
From the 1970s, cultural and literary theory came to be dominated by continental
thinkers such as Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida and Julia
Kristeva. Alongside those figures, the English tradition began to look unrigorous,
philosophically naïve, excessively personal and even journalistic. Increasingly the
lineage of home-grown critics began to seem of its time only, historically significant
but without continuing relevance.
So why bother with Arnold?
Well, he was a poet as well as a critic, and though his poetry dried up relatively early
(he wrote little of interest after his thirtieth birthday) he still stands as an important
voice in the poetry of his time, and one or two of his poems (chiefly Dover Beach)
continue to have some contemporary currency. His poetry catches the dilemmas of
modernity better than either that of Tennyson or Browning, for all their agonising over
questions of faith.
In that respect Arnold stands closer to us, because, like most in subsequent
generations, he does not seem to have undergone the classic Victorian crisis of
belief, even if the question of religion remained an important issue for him.
More broadly, though, it is around the challenges of modernity that Arnold still has
interest. He realised from an early age (certainly from his twenties) that the world
had changed deeply and radically and that there was no going back. He felt himself
to be suspended between two worlds, ‘one dead, the other powerless to be born’
(Stanzas from The Grande Chartreuse, 1853). The future was in suspense; that it
would be unlike the past he knew, but precisely how and in what ways it was to be
engaged he could only gropingly suggest.
It is in this questioning and proposing that Arnold remains an important figure,
because many of the problems that he recognised are still problems for us; often still
pressing problems and no nearer resolution than in his day. He is concerned with
how we find identity in a world where traditional identifiers, such as religion and birth,
have lost their power.
He raises the question of culture in its modern sense: how does it support society,
and what are its politics in a society divided by taste, education and experience? He
is exercised by the reality of class division and the mutual incomprehension and
political instability that it creates. He is concerned that current patterns of education
fail their recipients and reinforce the divisions that they ought to heal. And he worries
about what will replace religion as the moral centre of society as Christianity, in its
traditional forms, more and more falls away.
Some of the answers that Arnold gives to these questions are good and worth
recalling; some are not. But the important thing is that we are listening to a
profoundly intelligent voice, standing on the threshold of our world, the world that we
take as normality, and identifying and assessing the issues.
The fact that he is on the threshold is important, because it saves him from a
wearied over-familiarity with the problems: behind him are none of the generations of
utopianism and nihilism that have become the backdrop to our present. So, old as he
is, Arnold can often be a fresh eye, help us to see more plainly what the problems
are, help us better to assess our own dealing with them.
Arnold has great range—poetry, culture, society, politics, education, morality,
religion. But his starting point is personal, even existential; and for that reason a
good entry point is his poem of 1853, ‘The Scholar Gipsy.’ Let’s look at that first.
Anthology of key texts
Willing one thing: The Scholar Gipsy
The full text of this poem is available on the Poetry Foundation website, at
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/43606
Please read it through first.
Matthew Arnold was something of a verse prodigy; he wrote and won prizes for his
poetry both at school (Rugby, under his father, the famous headmaster Thomas
Arnold) and at Oxford. The later 1840s, when he was in his mid and late twenties,
were his most productive period, and the subject of this poem, which he did not
complete until 1853, was in his mind for at least seven years before that, from about
the time that he left Oxford in 1844. This is the poem of a young man taking stock of
the world that he is destined to inhabit.
Formally, the poem draws on the model of the romantic ode as established by Keats
and Shelley; in its pastoral lushness it particularly echoes the Keats of Ode to a
Nightingale and Ode to Autumn.
The story that Arnold builds his poem around come from the 17th century: an old
Oxford tale of a young man who is forced to abandon his studies because of poverty
and goes off to join a group of gipsies in the surrounding countryside. He discovers
some secret or ‘mystery’ of their lives, and when some of his former fellow students
happen to meet him, he tells them that he intends to stay with the gipsies until he
has fully understood their secret wisdom.
Arnold elaborates the story by making this scholar-gipsy immortal; he imagines him
still there two hundred years later in the countryside of Oxfordshire and Berkshire,
still pursuing his truth as the world around him changes irrevocably. The poem is in
part an elegy for an England that was passing away under the impact of the
industrial revolution (the 1840s was the great decade of railway building), and in part
Arnold’s elegy for his own youth and his student days, as he enters the larger world
of public duty (he became one of the first of Her Majesty’s Inspectors of schools—
HMIs—in 1852, a post he held until 1886).
But the deepest concern of the poem is existential. How does one shape a life in a
world where there are multiple understandings of human existence, all of them
subject to question? How does one avoid weariness and resignation in the face of
the sheer multiplicity of action, commitment and purpose that the modern world sets
before us? How do we avoid becoming, not one person, but a set of different
persons in the various engagements of our lives? His answer, as far as he has one,
is that life must be a commitment to some goal; like the scholar-gipsy, there has to
be some truth, some reality, at least some search, around which all of one’s being
centres.
Again Arnold’s modernity is apparent; this is, after all, the answer of existentialism,
one of the central philosophical movements of the 20th century. It is worth noticing
that at the time that Arnold was contemplating this poem, one of the founders of
existentialism, Søren Kierkegaard, was publishing his Purity of Heart is to Will One
Thing (1847). It is this commitment to willing one thing that Arnold seeks to evoke in
the figure of the scholar-gipsy.
All Arnold’s thinking, in his literary, cultural and religious criticism, is an attempt, not
perhaps finally successful, to deal with this problem; which is never more starkly set
out than in the following stanzas.
Arnold addresses the wandering scholar thus:But what! I dream! Two hundred years are flown
Since first thy story ran through Oxford halls,
And the grave Glanvil did the tale inscribe
That thou wert wander'd from the studious walls
To learn strange arts, and join a gipsy-tribe;
And thou from earth art gone
Long since, and in some quiet churchyard laid—
Some country-nook, where o'er thy unknown grave
Tall grasses and white flowering nettles wave,
Under a dark, red-fruited yew-tree's shade.
No, no, thou hast not felt the lapse of hours!
For what wears out the life of mortal men?
'Tis that from change to change their being rolls;
'Tis that repeated shocks, again, again,
Exhaust the energy of strongest souls
And numb the elastic powers.
Till having used our nerves with bliss and teen,
And tired upon a thousand schemes our wit,
To the just-pausing Genius we remit
Our worn-out life, and are - what we have been.
Thou hast not lived, why should'st thou perish, so?
Thou hadst one aim, one business, one desire;
Else wert thou long since number'd with the dead!
Else hadst thou spent, like other men, thy fire!
The generations of thy peers are fled,
And we ourselves shall go;
But thou possessest an immortal lot,
And we imagine thee exempt from age
And living as thou liv'st on Glanvil's page,
Because thou hadst - what we, alas! have not.
For early didst thou leave the world, with powers
Fresh, undiverted to the world without,
Firm to their mark, not spent on other things;
Free from the sick fatigue, the languid doubt,
Which much to have tried, in much been baffled, brings.
O life unlike to ours!
Who fluctuate idly without term or scope,
Of whom each strives, nor knows for what he strives,
And each half-lives a hundred different lives;
Who wait like thee, but not, like thee, in hope.
Thou waitest for the spark from heaven! and we,
Light half-believers of our casual creeds,
Who never deeply felt, nor clearly will'd,
Whose insight never has borne fruit in deeds,
Whose vague resolves never have been fulfill'd;
For whom each year we see
Breeds new beginnings, disappointments new;
Who hesitate and falter life away,
And lose to-morrow the ground won to-day—
Ah! do not we, wanderer! await it too?
Yes, we await it!—but it still delays,
And then we suffer! and amongst us one,
Who most has suffer'd, takes dejectedly
His seat upon the intellectual throne;
And all his store of sad experience he
Lays bare of wretched days;
Tells us his misery's birth and growth and signs,
And how the dying spark of hope was fed,
And how the breast was soothed, and how the head,
And all his hourly varied anodynes.
This for our wisest! and we others pine,
And wish the long unhappy dream would end,
And waive all claim to bliss, and try to bear;
With close-lipp'd patience for our only friend,
Sad patience, too near neighbour to despair.—
But none has hope like thine!
Thou through the fields and through the woods dost stray,
Roaming the country-side, a truant boy,
Nursing thy project in unclouded joy,
And every doubt long blown by time away.
O born in days when wits were fresh and clear,
And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames;
Before this strange disease of modern life,
With its sick hurry, its divided aims,
Its heads o'ertax'd, its palsied hearts, was rife—
Fly hence, our contact fear!
Still fly, plunge deeper in the bowering wood!
Averse, as Dido did with gesture stern
From her false friend's approach in Hades turn,
Wave us away, and keep thy solitude!
Still nursing the unconquerable hope,
Still clutching the inviolable shade,
With a free, onward impulse brushing through,
By night, the silver'd branches of the glade—
Far on the forest-skirts, where none pursue,
On some mild pastoral slope
Emerge, and resting on the moonlit pales
Freshen thy flowers as in former years
With dew, or listen with enchanted ears,
From the dark tingles, to the nightingales!
But fly our paths, our feverish contact fly!
For strong the infection of our mental strife,
Which, though it gives no bliss, yet spoils for rest;
And we should win thee from thy own fair life,
Like us distracted, and like us unblest.
Soon, soon thy cheer would die,
Thy hopes grow timorous, and unfix'd thy powers,
And thy clear aims be cross and shifting made;
And then thy glad perennial youth would fade,
Fade and grow old at last, and die like ours.