of England’s societal malaise in even greater detail. Having all but abandoned poetry after the 1850’s, he devoted the last thirty years of his life to prose criticism. His essays addressed four general areas: education, religion, literature, and society. His writings on education dealt with contemporary issues and are of interest primarily to historians concerned with curricula in English and Continental schools of the nineteenth century. On religious issues, Arnold produced four books:St. Paul and Protestantism, with an Introduction on Puritanism and the Church of England (1870), Literature and Dogma (1873), God and the Bible (1875), and Last Essays on Church and Religion (1877). All are responses to the various religious controversies that swept through Great Britain in the latter half of the nineteenth century, which were spurred in part by the ferment caused by the Oxford Movement and the evolution theories of Darwin.

Of much greater interest to posterity than Arnold’s writings on education and religion have been his critical examinations of society. In Culture and Anarchy and Friendship’s Garland (1871), he expresses his growing concern with the suspect values of a Victorian middle class. This middle class, which he termed “Philistines,” was, in Arnold’s view, puritanical, inflexible, and selfishly individualistic. In short, it was wholly unprepared to confront the problems inherent in the combination of a growing industrialism, an expanding population, and an increasing and clamorous call for widespread democracy. To transform society, it would be necessary to eliminate the classes that divide it, an objective to be achieved through universal education. Central to this universal education would be the promotion and encouragement of culture.

The pursuit of culture is understandably at the center of his literary criticism. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his Essays in Criticism. It is in the first essay, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” that Arnold offers most succinctly his critical manifesto. Criticism, as he defines it, is “a disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.” It is this awareness, he further states—which the critic discerns and shares with the reader who pursues culture—that will nourish humanity “in growth toward perfection.”

“Dover Beach”

First published: 1867 (collected in New Poems, 1867)

Type of work: Poem

As traditional beliefs are undermined by nineteenth century “progress,” even the aesthetic verities of Love and Beauty are overwhelmed by doubt and despair.

“Dover Beach” is a brief, dramatic monologue generally recognized as Arnold’s best—and most widely known—poem. It begins with an opening stanza that is indisputably one of the finest examples of lyric poetry in the English language. The topography of the nocturnal setting is a combination of hushed tranquillity and rich sensory detail. It is the world as it appears to the innocent eye gazing on nature: peaceful, harmonious, suffused with quiet joy. The beacon light on the coast of Calais, the moon on the calm evening waters of the channel, and the sweet scent of the night air all suggest a hushed and gentle world of silent beauty. The final line of the stanza, however, introduces a discordant note, as the perpetual movement of the waves suggests to the speaker not serenity but “the eternal note of sadness.”

The melancholy strain induces in the second stanza an image in the mind of the speaker: Sophocles, the Greek tragedian, creator of Oidipous Tyrannos (c. 429 b.c.e.; Oedipus Tyrannus, 1715) and Antigone (441 b.c.e.; Antigone, 1729) standing in the darkness by the Aegean Sea more than two thousand years ago. The ancient master of tragedy hears in the eternal flux of the waves the same dark note, “the turbid ebb and flow/ Of human misery.” Thus, the speaker, like Sophocles before him, perceives life as tragedy; suffering and misery are inextricable elements of existence. Beauty, joy, and calm are ephemeral and illusory. The speaker’s pessimistic perspective on the human condition, expressed in stanzas two, three, and four, undercuts and effectively negates the positive, tranquil beauty of the opening stanza; the reality subsumes the misleading appearance. In the third stanza, Arnold introduces the metaphor of the “Sea of Faith,” the once abundant tide in the affairs of humanity that has slowly withdrawn from the modern world. Darwinism and Tractarianism in Arnold’s nineteenth century England brought science into full and successful conflict with religion. “Its melancholy, long withdrawing roar” suggested to Arnold the death throes of the Christian era. The Sophoclean tragic awareness of fate and painful existence had for centuries been displaced by the pure and simple faith of the Christian era, a temporary compensation promising respite from an existence that is ultimately tragic.

The fourth and final stanza of “Dover Beach” is extremely pessimistic. Its grim view of reality, its negativity, its underlying desperate anguish are in marked contrast to the joy and innocent beauty of the first stanza. Love, the poet suggests, is the one final truth, the last fragile human resource. Yet here, as the world is swallowed by darkness, it promises only momentary solace, not joy or salvation for the world. The world, according to the speaker, “seems/ To lie before us like a land of dreams,” offering at least an appearance that seems “So various, so beautiful, so new,” but it is deceptive, a world of wishful thinking. It is shadow without substance, offering neither comfort nor consolation. In this harsh existence, there is “neither joy, nor love, nor light,/ Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.”

Arnold closes the poem with the famous lines that suggest the very nadir of human existence; few poems have equaled its concise, sensitive note of poignant despair. Humanity stands on the brink of chaos, surrounded in encroaching darkness by destructive forces and unable to distinguish friend from foe. The concluding image of the night battle suggests quite clearly the mood of the times among those who shared Arnold’s intellectual temperament, and it is one with which they were quite familiar. Thucydides’ Historia tou Peloponnesiacou polemou (431-404 b.c.e.; History of the Peloponnesian War, 1550) describes the night battle of Epipolae between the Athenians and the Syracusans. Dr. Thomas Arnold, Matthew’s father, had published a three-volume translation of Thucydides’ text in 1835; it was a favorite text at Rugby. Another ancillary source was John Henry Newman, who, in 1843, published a sermon, “Faith and Reason, Contrasted as Habits of Mind,” in which he alludes to the growing religious controversy of the time, describing it as “a sort of night battle, where each fights for himself, and friend and foe stand together.”

“The Scholar-Gipsy”

First published: 1853 (collected in Poems, 1853)

Type of work: Poem

An Oxford student resists the increasingly materialistic emphasis of traditional university education, seeking instead inherent truths in the beauty of nature and in intellectual idealism.

For the central premise of “The Scholar-Gipsy,” Arnold draws upon a legend of the area surrounding the university city of Oxford. The legend tells of a wandering scholar who rejects the material world of the academy to pursue a vague and idealistic objective. Arnold uses this story as a metaphor for his indictment of a world that is obsessed with materialism and individual advancement but is largely indifferent to culture and the pursuit of the ideal. In 1844, Arnold had purchased a copy of Joseph Glanvill’s The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661). Glanvill’s book recounts the tale of an Oxford student who, with neither patron nor independent financial means, was forced to discontinue his studies and to make his way in the world. Increasing poverty leads him to join a band of roving gypsies, with whom he begins a new and very different education. From these vagabonds, who roam at will following rules and traditions that in no way answer to the world of “preferment,” he discovers the power of the imagination stimulated by nature. Gradually he rejects the world of humanity and materialism. As the years become centuries, the increasingly mysterious scholar-gipsy continues his quest, a solitary figure always seen at a distance, carefully avoiding any contact with the corruption of modern civilization.

“The Scholar-Gipsy,” with its bucolic setting, has many of the characteristics of the traditional pastoral elegy. These characteristics are clearly apparent in the first stanza. As, for example, John Milton does in “Lycidas” (1638), Arnold addresses the young poet, casting him in the role of the shepherd who has abandoned the “quest,” the pursuit of the ideal, to go forth into the world of political change and turmoil. In 1848, Arnold’s close friend, the poet Arthur Hugh Clough, left his post at Oxford in order to become more directly involved in the revolutionary social changes that were then restructuring all of European society. In the first stanza, the speaker calls upon the poet-shepherd to return, when the turmoil has settled, from leading the “sheep” of restless England. Return, he importunes the shepherd-poet, when “the fields are still,/ And the tired men and dogs all gone to rest.” The speaker (Arnold) and his fellow poet will remain behind, in the natural setting, away from the din of the city. The third stanza is almost purely descriptive. It presents the speaker reclining amid the beauties of nature, which Arnold renders with true Keatsian sensuosity.

In the fourth through the seventh stanzas, Arnold relates the legend of the scholar-gipsy, drawn from “Glanvill’s book.” The secrets of the “gipsy-crew,” the ultimate truth to be drawn from nature, remain elusive, the wandering scholar tells some former fellow students whom he encounters in the early days of his quest. When he has fully discovered that truth, he will impart it to the world; the skill to do that, however, “needs heaven-sent moments,” divine or noumenal inspiration that lies beyond the knowledge and intellectual skills that one might develop at Oxford.

After the encounter with his former fellow students, the scholar-gipsy becomes a ghostly figure. He is occasionally sighted, but as one draws close he disappears, becoming, as the years pass, more an enduring illusion than a tangible reality. Gradually, only those who inhabit the country, those associated with the outdoors and the rural life beyond the civilization of cities, see the scholar-gipsy.

In stanzas 10 through 13, Arnold traces the scholar’s gradual integration with nature through the passage of seasons. The country people who encounter him at different times and in different places throughout the year remark upon his “figure spare,” his “dark vague eyes and soft abstracted air.” The scholar, on his singular mission, has forsaken the world of humanity and is gradually fading from humanity into the countryside that he inhabits. He seeks an ultimate truth that lies somewhere beyond the confines of university walls and the politics of modern society.

The scholar-gipsy’s quest is presumably the same pursuit of the ideal that was so much a part of Romantic poetry in the early nineteenth century. While John Keats and William Wordsworth had a very pronounced influence on Arnold, the influence of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Samuel Taylor Coleridge should not be discounted. An important common element among these early nineteenth century poets was the concept of the division between the real and the ideal, between the tangible world of sensory phenomena and the noumenal, “ideal” world. The Romantic poet seeks to transcend the distractions, the demands, the profound limitations of the world “enclosed by the senses five,” as William Blake termed it. He or she seeks to encounter, through the powers of the imagination, the world of synthesis, harmony, unity, and ultimate truth in a world that is also beyond the limits of time and space. It is that transcendent condition, according to Wordsworth, when the poet is able to see “into the life of things,” to perceive what Wordsworth calls “the hour/ Of Splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower.” For the Romantics, the quest was continually interrupted by the demands of the material world. The poet inevitably plummets back to reality, falling, as Shelley said, “upon the thorns of life.”

Arnold’s pantheistic wandering scholar pursues the moment of Romantic inspiration and insight, waiting, as Arnold says in stanzas 12 and 18, for “the spark from heaven.” In stanzas 15 through 17, Arnold praises the scholar-gipsy’s single-mindedness, his pursuit of “one aim, one business, one desire.” The legend has become the symbol for fidelity in the pursuit of a higher reality. The scholar-gipsy has not felt “the lapse of hours” but has become, like Keats’s Grecian urn, “exempt from age.”

In stanzas 20 through 23, Arnold characteristically gives full vent to his pessimistic view of the modern world. Life is “the long unhappy dream,” one that individuals “wish . . . would end.” Similar to the mood at the conclusion of “Dover Beach,” this poem sees the mid-nineteenth century as a time when individuals “waive all claim to bliss, and try to bear.” The aversion intensifies to the point where modern life is a contagious miasma, a veritable plague. The scholar-gipsy is right to avoid all social contact, to avoid “this strange disease of modern life/ With its sick hurry, its divided aims.” He is warned to fly “our feverish contact,” to save himself from the “infection of our mental strife.” Not to heed this warning would mean that “thy glad perennial youth would fade,/ Fade, and grow old at last, and die like ours.”

“The Scholar-Gipsy” effectively blends the Romantic sensibility of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries with the Victorian reaction to the rapid growth of industrialism. It is one of Arnold’s many poetic commentaries on a time when the “machinery” of the mind threatened the annihilation of both the soul and the artistically creative imagination.

Culture and Anarchy

First published: 1869

Type of work: Essays

As widespread democratic reform follows technological progress and a growing emphasis on materialism, Arnold addresses the potential danger in the loss of traditional cultural values.

Culture and Anarchy, Arnold’s masterpiece of social criticism, was the direct result of the turbulence leading up to the second reform bill of 1867. The book comprises six essays, which were published serially in the Cornhill Magazine between 1867 and 1868 under the title “Anarchy and Authority.” At the time that Arnold was preparing these essays, anarchy in English society was very much in ascendancy. From 1866 through 1868, there were a variety of social disturbances: riots in Trafalgar Square, Fenian and trade union demonstrations, anti-Catholic rallies, and suffrage protests in the industrial cities of Birmingham and Wolverhampton.

There was a rising tide of anarchy in England, and for Arnold it seemed that the entire country was in a general state of decline. Chief among the faults leading to this condition was an appalling smugness and insularity in the English character. As Arnold saw it, the typical English citizen was narrow and circumspect in the appreciation of the higher qualities and virtues of life. The cities in which he or she lived and worked expressed no beauty in their architecture; they were sprawling, industrial conglomerations. People were smug and cantankerous, loud in their assertions of individualism and personal liberty and adamant in their dislike of centralized authority, church or state. They were, however, obsequious in their respect for size and numbers in the burgeoning British empire and in their acquiescence to the “machinery” of its ever-expanding bureaucracies. Arnold’s “typical” English citizen worshiped the materialism that generally determined societal values, but in religious matters he or she emphasized the “protest” in Protestantism and generally abhorred centralized spiritual authority. The English citizen was puritanical and inflexible.

The character of the Victorian middle class, in Arnold’s view, was woefully inadequate to meet the problems it was currently facing, problems such as a rapidly increasing population, the unchecked rise of industrialism, and the continued spread of democracy. In addition to the middle class, which Arnold identified as “Philistines,” there were two other classes to be considered: the aristocracy, identifed as the “Barbarians,” and the lower classes, termed the “Populace.” All in varying degrees were in need of culture, which Arnold defines as the pursuit “of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all matters that most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world.” Culture is the means by which to achieve the general amelioration of English society and the general improvement of English character.

Central to the universal apprehending of “culture” are two elements that Arnold terms “Sweetness and Light,” the title of the first chapter of Culture and Anarchy. These terms, borrowed from Jonathan Swift’s “The Battle of the Books,” are rather vague and abstract, but they suggest an analogy to beauty and truth as they are used by Keats in “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” “Sweetness,” as Arnold uses it, is the apprehension and appreciation of beauty, the aesthetic dimension in human nature; “Light” is intelligence, brightened by open-mindedness, a full awareness of humankind’s past, and a concomitant capacity to enjoy and appreciate the best works of art, literature, history, and philosophy. They are linked entities, aided in their development within the individual by curiosity and disinterestedness, the essential impartiality that dispels prejudice.

The successful infusing of Sweetness and Light into the individual and general character also requires a coalescence and a balance of two elements that are integral to the history of Western civilization. Arnold terms these elements “Hebraism and Hellenism,” the title of chapter 4. Hebraism is the intellectual and spiritual heritage that is the basis of a Semitic and subsequently Judeo-Christian tradition. It is from the Hebraic influence that Western civilization derives a sense of duty, a work ethic, the value of self-control, and the importance of obedience to the will of God. This value of obedience is enforced by a strictness of conscience, a sense of imperfection rooted in a shared stigma of Original Sin. Hellenism, on the other hand, is an Indo-European rather than a Semitic heritage. Its worldview is largely the opposite of Hebraism. From Hellenism, humanity derives an open “philosophic” perspective, an ardor for thinking and knowing. It is characterized by a striving for an unclouded clarity of mind, an unimpeded play of thought among the questions of the universal order. It stresses a clear intelligence and a seeking to apprehend. In opposition to Hebraic strictness of conscience, Hellenism emphasizes a spontaneity of consciousness, a total intellectual and spiritual freedom in the pursuit of perfection. An inevitable collision, Arnold explains, occurred in the Renaissance, the period when Europe rediscovered Hellenic ideas and perspective. The result of this proximity and subsequent collision was the Hebraistic view that identified Hellenism with “moral indifference and lax rule of conduct.” Hellenism, from the Hebraic perspective, was associated with a loss of spiritual balance, a weakening of moral fiber. The reaction solidified into Puritanism, bringing an end, in the seventeenth century, to the Renaissance in Europe.

Arnold’s leaning in Culture and Anarchy is clearly toward Hellenism and away from the dominance of Hebraism; but he recognizes that the path to perfection, the theme and purpose of the book, is to be found in a coalescence of the two, an extracting of the best of both elements. Neither Hebraism nor Hellenism is a law of human development, but each is a contribution. He advocates a reintroduction of Hellenism to counteract the static inflexibility of Puritan influence in the English character. What is needed is a Hebraic-Hellenic central authority, the establishment of the state as an organ of society’s collective “best” self. This authority would be guided by Sweetness and Light and “right reason,” Western civilization’s Hellenic legacy. Such a central authority would check self-serving, solipsistic individualism, encourage culture, and eventually transform society.

It is important to recognize that Arnold does not offer Culture and Anarchy as an active blueprint for the reconstruction of society. He was, in the strictest sense of the word, apolitical. The book is intended as a spiritual awakening, but spiritual in a far broader context than a strict adherence to the “machinery” of organized religion. There is a better self that lies within collective humanity that Arnold urges his readers to rediscover. To avert anarchy, humankind must pursue culture, must keep as an essential objective the achieving of perfection. In such pursuit alone lies the eventual salvation of humanity and society.