MATTHEW ARNOLD. MATTHEW ARNOLD, eldest son of Dr. Thomas Arnold of Rugby, was born in 1822. He was educated at Winchester, Rugby and Oxford. Like his friend Clough, Arnold was elected a Fellow of Oriel College, but resigned this position within two years. His Strayed Reveller and Other Poems, published in 1848, show Hellenic form and Wordsworthian sentiment. In 1851 he was appointed a Government Inspector of Schools; in this occupation he spent more than thirty years of his life and rendered good service in elevating the tone of primary and secondary education in England. His unsparing criticism of the vulgarity and sordidness of middle-class life earned him the desirable hatred of the Philistines, to whom he never grew weary of preaching their crying need for Culture, for Sweetness and for Light. From 1857-1867 he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford; his Essays (published under various titles) set a new standard for Criticism in England as Sainte-Beuve had already done for France. His numerous theological writings attempt to supply a оù σr for those who feel the ground of old beliefs cut from under them by the sharp-dividing spade of Science; his limitations as a political philosopher may be illustrated by noting that the most interesting thing in his Irish Essays is the little critique on The French Play in London. In 1883 and 1886 he visited our country: in his Civilization in the United States he did not hesitate to tell us some unpleasant but wholesome truths about ourselves. His Complete Poems were collected in 1885; by these his memory will be preserved, more effectually perhaps than even by his literary criticism. His death (1888) was sudden, thus fulfilling almost literally the desire he had expressed in his poem, A Wish: I ask not that my bed of death From bands of greedy heirs be free; Of fortune's favored sons, not me. Spare me the whispering, crowded room, The friends who come, and gape, and go; All which makes death a hideous show! Nor bring, to see me cease to live To shake his sapient head, and give The ill he cannot cure a name. Bring none of these; but let me be, Bathed in the sacred dews of morn The wide aërial landscape spread, — There let me gaze till I become In soul, with what I gaze on, wed! Thus feeling, gazing, might I grow To work or wait elsewhere or here! BIBLIOGRAPHY. LIFE AND TIMES. For biographical articles, see Poole's Index under the year of Mr. Arnold's death (1888). Most easily accessible to American readers are the article on p. 41 of Appleton's Annual Cyclopædia for 1888 and the article by Augustine Birrell in Scribner's Magazine, November, 1888 (reprinted with additions in his Res Judicate). For the History, see McCarthy's History of our Own Times: Cap. xli.-lxvii. and Appendix (1859-1886). CRITICISM. -Clough: Review of Some Poems by Alexander Smith and Matthew Arnold (N. A. Review, July, 1853. Reprinted in the Prose Remains.) Interesting chiefly on account of the close personal relations of Clough and Arnold. Condemns the Empedocles (a judgment in which the author concurred) and the general 'poetic dubiousness' of the poet's tone. Perhaps to this frank and just criticism is due, in part, the clearer form and firmer treatment of Arnold's later verse. Hutton: Essays in Literary Criticism; The Poetry of Matthew Arnold. Points out how the poet recognizes (with Goethe) the spiritual unrest of the day, and how (with Wordsworth) he finds, in the contemplation of Nature, calm for this unrest; decides that his power of expression lies in a certain ‘delicate simplicity of taste,' and in a nobly rhetorical cast of thought. (This fine essay is a long and thought-compelling piece of exposition, which no summary can represent even faintly). Swinburne: Essays and Studies; Matthew Arnold's New Poems. This Essay was (fortunately) written before the Shelley-Byron-Arnold-Swinburne controversy; it does full justice-more than justice to the form of Arnold's verse, abounding in such exaggerated (and awkwardly expressed) sentiments as this: No poem in any language can be more perfect [than Thyrsis] as a model of style, unsurpassable certainly, it may be unattainable.' This essay also condemns unrimed lyrics and English hexameters; it criticises with just severity Arnold's limited appreciation of the great French poets. Birrell: Res Judicate; Matthew Arnold. For popular reading, a pleasant résumé of Arnold as poet, theologian and critic. I-30. cotes = THE SCHOLAR-GIPSY. sheep-folds. The line in which this word occurs is evidently a reminiscence of Comus, 344: The folded flocks, penned in their wattled cotes. cruse. For cross; recross: infinitives depending upon seen. the story with which this word is commonly associated, see I. Kings xvii. 8-16. Oxford's towers. Though a severe critic of the religious faith which Oxford represents, Mr. Arnold never freed himself 'so nor wished to free himself - from the spell which Oxford must exercise over poetic minds. 'Beautiful city!' he writes; 1 venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene! 'There are our young barbarians, all at play! And yet, steeped in sentiment as she lies, spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age, who will deny that Oxford, by her ineffable charm, keeps ever calling us near to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection, to beauty, in a word, which is only truth seen from another side? nearer, perhaps, than all the science of Tübingen. Adorable dreamer, whose heart has been so romantic! who hast given thyself so prodigally, given thyself to sides and to heroes not mine, only never to the Philistines! home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties! what example could ever keep down the Philistine in ourselves, what teacher could ever so save us from that bondage to which we are all prone, that bondage which Goethe, in those incomparable lines on the death of Schiller, makes it his friend's highest praise (and nobly did Schiller deserve the praise) to have left miles out of sight behind him; — the bondage of was uns alle bändigt, das Gemeine?' 31-70. Glanvil. 'There was very lately a lad in the University of Oxford, who was by his poverty forced to leave his studies there; and at last to join himself to a company of vagabond gypsies. Among these extravagant people, by the insinuating subtilty of his 1 Preface to the Essays in Criticism, First Series. carriage, he quickly got so much of their love and esteem as that they discovered to him their mystery. After he had been a pretty while exercised in the trade, there chanced to ride by a couple of scholars, who had formerly been of his acquaintance. They quickly spied out their old friend among the gypsies; and he gave them an account of the necessity which drove him to that kind of life, and told them that the people he went with were not such impostors as they were taken for, but that they had a traditional kind of learning among them, and could do wonders by the power of imagination, their fancy binding that of others; that himself had learned much of their art, and when he had compassed the whole secret, he intended, he said, to leave their company, and give the world an account of what he had learned.' - Glanvil's Vanity of Dogmatizing, 1661. 71-130. Mr. Arnold's theory of an ethical standard as the best test for poetry receives no help from his practice in these lines. Mr. Courthope is quick to see this, and pertinently questions: 16 will Mr. Arnold ever persuade any reader of average sensibility that what ought to be enjoyed in the Scholar-Gipsy is rather the moral of the poem, than the beautiful and affecting images of the Oxfordshire landscape with which the poet has surrounded the story? Never!' Christ-Church (129): the largest college of the University. The chapel of Christ-Church is also the cathedral of the diocese of Oxford. 131-140. yew-tree. The yew is commonly planted in English grave-yards. It grows slowly, lives long, and has thick dark foliage. With this line compare Wordsworth's splendid poem, Yew-Trees, no portion of which can be torn from its context without irreparable loss. 141-170. This note of lassitude is struck often - perhaps too often - in Arnold's poems. See the Stanzas in Memory of the Author of Obermann. For the author's less desponding mood, see his Rugby Chapel. teen (147) grief, sorrow; from the Old English 'teóna' injury. Line 165 = Which many attempts and many failures bring. 171-180. it, in line 180, refers to spark from heaven in line 171. 181-190. This seems to fit Carlyle as well as any one, but it is probably intended for a type rather than for an individual. 191-230. Averse as Dido. In vain he thus attempts her mind to move 1 The Liberal Movement in English Literature, Essay I. Disdainfully she looked, then turning round For the entire episode, see Æneid vi. 450–476. (Dryden's Translation.) 231-250. Notice the force of this elaborate and exquisitely sustained image; how the mind is carried back from these turbid days of sick unrest to the clear dawn of a fresh and healthy civilization. For another example of a poem that closes with a figure not less beautiful and not less ennobling, see Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum. THE FORSAKEN MERMAN. The title of this poem inevitably brings to mind Tennyson's two poems, The Merman and The Mermaid. A comparison will show that, in this instance at least, the Oxford poet has touched his subject not less melodiously and with finer and deeper feeling. Margaret will not listen to her Children's voices wild with pain; dearer to her is the selfish desire to save her own soul than is the light in the eyes of her little Mermaiden, dearer than the love of the king of the sea who yearns for her with sorrow-laden heart. Here is there an infinite tenderness and an infinite tragedy. |