SOURCE: “The Great Work of Criticism,” in Poetry in the Age of Democracy: The Literary Criticism of Matthew Arnold, University Press of Kansas, 1989, pp. 103-34.

[In the following essay, Schneider reviews the major themes in Arnold's Essays in Criticism, including the role of literary criticism, modernity, and the distinctive natures of poetry and prose.]

When Arnold collected the best of his articles for Essays in Criticism (1865), he wrote an introductory essay that in its general theory sought to explain his own recent criticism and to work out new answers to the old questions. “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” asserted once more his faith that the intellectual movements of the Enlightenment were returning to full vigor and that free inquiry in all branches of human knowledge was promising once more to sweep away the old and false ideas. In this essay, however, in setting out a theoretic basis for his criticism, Arnold no longer emphasized the power of criticism to destroy the encumbrances on human thought. Now he showed the power of criticism not only to discover or to recognize worthy ideas but also to preserve what was true or good in the past. Emphasizing the work that criticism was to perform, he also began to see criticism as an activity performed, not so much for a further end, social or aesthetic, but as an activity worthwhile in itself. In the “present time” to which Arnold was speaking in the essay, the revival of romanticism—with a renewed enthusiasm for creative genius and the power of the imagination, the poetic temperament, and the ordinary life—was met by the rigorous inquiry that Arnold had begun in the essays. What Arnold now tried to show was not only that the criticism or examination of these notions indicated the limits of poetry and criticism but also that the activity of criticism—in its broadest sense the examination of ideas and of life itself—is a productive work. Arnold now answered Wordsworth's claim for the superiority of poetry over criticism and Shairp's assertion that the new spirit of imagination had led to the great age of Romantic poetry. Arnold sets out to show the defects of this argument and to find a theoretical basis for his criticism of the Romantic poets in the earlier essays, which were collected in this volume and formed the bulk of his first major criticism. Arnold found his theoretical basis in ideas suggested by Aristotle's Ethics; he developed the notion of criticism as an activity, as in his essays on the Romantic poets he had turned to Aristotle for his analysis of the Romantic temperament and the provincial mind.

Arnold did not intend so much to show the deficiencies of the Romantics as poets as to show the inadequacy of their criticism, above all the danger of elevating the folk as the standard of taste and reason. Arnold's insistence on the function of criticism in finding the best that is thought and said was meant for the coming age of the people: the people were not, in his view, to be cheated by being handed ideas or poetry that were thought to be good enough for them. Arnold, it may be said, was offering a new declaration of the rights of humankind—the right to know the best that is thought and said. Arnold's declaration of an equality of such rights did not mean that Arnold naîvely supposed that the best was necessarily within the reach of all people. One must also keep in mind here his practical work for an improved public education. In practice, he tended to aim at an educated middle class rather than at the populace or at an aristocracy that was indifferent, or so he thought, to ideas. But there is nothing in Arnold's thought that assumed that the common people were by nature incapable of intelligent reflection and comprehension. Preceding Arnold's insistence on the work of criticism in finding and making known the best that is thought and said was his criticism of Homer, in which he had insisted that Homer was not a ballad poet and that the ballad poets were not Homer; Arnold's essay on the modern, in which he held that the contemporary was not always new or fresh, let alone the best; and his essay on the discoveries of Bishop Colenso, which was essentially naïve and uninformed Biblical criticism. Arnold's praise of the Romantic poets was reserved for Shelley and Byron, who neither lost their faith in the democratic revolution nor fell into a sentimental view of the folk.

In emphasizing criticism as work or activity, I should say at the outset that Arnold did not have in mind Carlyle's notion of work as duty or an economic or utilitarian view of work as useful labor. Arnold's emphasis was on the activity itself as the end, on the happiness found in the performance. Arnold insisted, in opposition to Emerson and Carlyle, that the end of human life was happiness, and he located happiness in performing an activity well. Moreover, Arnold, like Aristotle, was to find the highest human activity in thinking—theoria, or theoretical activity, and this aspect of Arnold's criticism explains his emphasis in these essays on ideas, on the best that is thought and said, and his lack of interest in judging the value of literary works—his eye was on the activity, on the question of whether the activity of criticism was one in which the critic might find the good life, or happiness—on what criticism does when it is done well. Although he thought about theoretical more than practical criticism, he did not neglect practical criticism, nor did he neglect the effect that criticism could have on society. He saw that the effect was not different from the activity but extended its scope—that is, made it possible for more, if not all, to share in the activity of knowing the best that was being thought and said.

In spite of Arnold's emphasis on thought in the activity of criticism—on judgment and theory—it would be wrong to think of Arnold's idea of literary criticism as severely “intellectualist,” a criticism that was rigorously logical or that relied on the application of unvarying principles. The “free play of mind” was the phrase that best indicated the kind of inquiry that criticism undertakes; the qualities of flexibility and “sweet reasonableness” that Arnold later would develop and define were necessary to the best criticism, the best that is written. Arnold's own critical essays did not offer a body of abstract ideas or principles; they were literary essays, nearer to art than to scientific treatises. At its best, Arnold's own criticism exemplified his own description of criticism as “ardent” and “flexible.” If one compares, for example, an essay by Arnold with one by Shairp on a similar theme, one can see how often Shairp fell back on critical abstractions, how often he relied on a numerical order of points in a way that is alien to art and how he made his way, in rather plodding fashion, through the life and works of his subjects. Arnold, on the other hand, conveyed always the sense of a curious mind that was observing and exploring the life and work of his subjects, a mind that was responding in various ways to what he saw, perceiving, ordering, and judging, not according to a plan, but as his subject led him to fresh and original ideas.

In inquiring into the function of criticism in the introductory essay, Arnold consciously set out on the kind of inquiry that Aristotle had undertaken in the Nicomachean Ethics. Thinking about the function of criticism, Arnold adapted for his own purpose certain terms and ideas from the Ethics. Arnold did not appeal to Aristotle as an authority, but he kept in mind Aristotle's discussion of the moral and intellectual virtues and the appeal to the “judicious” in determining the best. Arnold's inquiry into the activity of criticism, especially into the relation of criticism to creation, appears to go beyond the Ethics, but Arnold did begin with the idea of the activity that is proper to a human being, in order to find the correct place for criticism in the good life.

Throughout the essay, Arnold kept the emphasis on criticism as an activity. When Arnold spoke of the “function” of criticism, he was asking what the essential work (ergon) of criticism should be. By means of various synonyms for function, he kept before his readers this essential idea of criticism as an activity: thus “a critical effort” is “‘the endeavor, in all branches of knowledge, theology, philosophy, history, art, science, to see the object as in itself it really is’” (PW, [The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, Edited by R. H. Super. 11 vols. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960–77] 3:258, 261). Again, “a great critical effort is necessary for a creative epoch”: “Goethe's [poetry] was nourished by a great critical effort providing the true materials for it” (PW, 3:262; emphasis added). Arnold predicted that “a time of true creative activity” would come “when criticism has done its work” (PW, 3:269). By such words as function, effort, and endeavor, Arnold kept the focus on the work of criticism.

Although the idea of work or function was important to Aristotle, what is distinctive in his thought is energeia, activity—roughly, the performance of the work—as Clough said in The Bothie, to find and to do the ergon. For a human being, Aristotle concluded in his inquiry in the Ethics, the highest activity is contemplation, or theoretical activity: at the highest level, the level of arete or excellence, this is the good for mankind, and in this activity is to be found the greatest happiness.¹ While it is now generally agreed that by theoria Aristotle meant mathematics, physics, and metaphysics, earlier commentators in the nineteenth century included aesthetic and divine thought.² Arnold included in critical thought nearly all branches of knowledge; it is likely that Arnold at this point would have seen theoria as inclusive. Criticism, certainly, is a mode of inquiry that is not restricted to any discipline.

Arnold went on to connect thought or inquiry with disinterestedness. Criticism, he said, follows “the law of its own nature, which is to be a free play of mind on all subjects which it touches” (PW, 3:270), and the definition of criticism at which Arnold ultimately arrived is that criticism is “a disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world” (PW, 3:283). To what extent Aristotle's idea of energeia implied either what Arnold called “a free play of mind” or disinterestedness is a question. Alexander Grant, in a note on individuality, saw in energeia “a sense of life and free action,” and later he used the phrase “play of mind” in commenting on energeia.³ Arnold made a similar connection when he said that criticism requires a “disinterested love of a free play of the mind on all subjects, for its own sake” (PW, 3:268). In saying that the activity is pursued for its own sake, Arnold was keeping in mind what Aristotle had said on theoretical activity: “And this activity alone would seem to be loved for its own sake; for nothing arises from it apart from the contemplating, while from practical activities we gain more or less apart from the action” (NE, x.7.1177b1-4, trans. Ross). Arnold also defined the proper end of criticism as being essentially theoretical, “to create a current of true and fresh ideas” (PW, 3:270). In this respect, criticism has no end beyond itself. Arnold was here especially concerned to show that criticism does not aim at the practical application of the ideas that it examines but that it belongs in the “pure intellectual sphere” (PW, 3:271). As a theoretical activity, criticism cannot leave the intellectual sphere for practical action without becoming another kind of activity; otherwise it would cease to be free, and it would no longer be disinterested.

When Arnold asserted that criticism has the end of “creating a current of true and fresh ideas,” he indicated still the activity of criticism as he had defined it, and the result or product of criticism is more or less the same as the activity. When, however, Arnold said that criticism provides the materials for poetry, he seems to have been saying that criticism exists, not for itself, but for the sake of poetry. When he spoke earlier about the effect of a current of ideas, he seems to have been suggesting a further end, for, according to Arnold, as criticism does its work, ideas stimulate in society “a stir and growth,” and out of this growth develop “the creative epochs of literature” (PW, 3:261). Certainly, Arnold wanted to argue that criticism has an effect, and indeed his apology for criticism depends largely on the argument that criticism does have this particular effect.⁴ One may suggest, however, that criticism may have an effect without aiming at any end beyond its own activity—the disinterested endeavor to know the best that is thought and said. Thus, so far as criticism is an intellectual activity, it is free.

Clearly, Arnold was trying to include the work of the critic in theoretical activity. Therefore he distinguished between theory and practical criticism, again following Aristotle's distinctions. Indeed, Arnold's idea that criticism is knowing and communicating the best that is thought and said takes no account of what is considered the usual business of criticism, as Arnold recognized: criticism as the “mere judgment and application of principles,” whether to literary works of other kinds of work, is, he said, not “the most satisfactory work to the critic” (PW, 3:283). But here, too, Arnold turned to Aristotle. The literary criticism that sorts out the good from the bad depends, Arnold thought, on what Aristotle called phronesis, now generally translated as “practical wisdom,” but what Arnold called “judgment.” As Arnold had said in On Translating Homer, after quoting the passage from the Ethics, “‘As the judicious would determine’—that is a test to which every one professes himself willing to submit his works” (PW, 1:99).⁵ Arnold referred such questions to the instructed human reason.

As a young poet struggling for self-discipline, Arnold had hoped to get some measure of judgment; now, Arnold, in his analysis of such poets as Maurice de Guérin and Keats, argued essentially that the nature poets lack practical wisdom and, unable to keep in bounds either their emotions or their fancies, fall into melancholy. Nature poets, Arnold theorized, have a certain temperament which is related to “a faculty of naturalistic, not of moral interpretation”; such poets have “an extraordinary delicacy of organization and susceptibility to impressions” (PW, 3:30). Arnold moreover saw an opposition between this temperament and moral activity: “Assuredly it is not in this temperament that the active virtues have their rise” (PW, 3:32). In this analysis Arnold drew on Aristotle's discussion of melancholy, on the melancholics who are among those who lack practical wisdom: “It is keen and excitable people [melancholics] that suffer especially from the impetuous form of incontinence; for the former by reason of their quickness and the latter by reason of the violence of their passions do not await the argument, because they are apt to follow their imagination.”⁶ That this passage was considered a locus for the theory of melancholy is indicated by Grant's comment on Aristotle's treatment of melancholy; Grant showed that the classical account attributed melancholy to an excess of passion, and he cited Tennyson's Maud: “‘The passionate heart of the poet is whirl’d into folly and vice.”⁷ What the melancholics lack is judgment, and Arnold found that the nature poets and the critics alike could fall into this Greek kind of melancholy—a passionate and impetuous excitability.

In the essay on academies, Arnold pointed out that the absence of a high standard is evident in what he called provinciality; the provincials are also those who lack judgment; they are indeed melancholics: “The provincial spirit … exaggerates the value of its ideas for want of a high standard at hand by which to try them. Or rather, for want of such a standard, it gives one idea too much prominence at the expense of others; it orders its ideas amiss; it is hurried away by fancies; it likes and dislikes too passionately, too exclusively” (PW, 3:249). Thus Aristotle's melancholics, Arnold's nature poets, and Arnold's provincial critics have these characteristics in common: they are too passionate, they follow their fancies, they are impetuous, they cannot order their ideas—they lack, in short, judgment. Judgment is also what the practical critic must have; and literary work, in Arnold's theory, is to be referred to the judicious critic.

Neither Aristotle's phronimos nor Arnold's critic are, perhaps, entirely satisfactory solutions to the way in which the good or the best is to be determined. Grant pointed out that Aristotle's ethics was saved from relativism by the concept of the phronimos, as his idea of justice is by the epieikes or the equitable man (1857 ed., 2:118, 4th ed., 2:91). Arnold would continue to think about the question in “The Study of Poetry,” but his solution would remain much the same—the standard found in human reason and experience, practically, in a critic.

In saying that in discovery of fresh knowledge lies “the sense of creative activity” (PW, 3:283), Arnold addressed another question—the relative importance of critical and creative activity. He began the essay on the function of criticism by acknowledging the Romantic claim of the superiority of genius, creative genius, or original genius. Arnold offered the Romantic claim, however, in the form of the classical definition, putting “creative power” in the place of theoretical activity as the proper activity for humankind. Whether Arnold meant to raise creative power to the level of theoria or whether he meant ironically to note the magnitude of the Romantic claim are questions that can best be answered by noting first that all such questions are subordinate to the main question—namely, whether criticism can be as important as poetry or even whether it is in some ways the same kind of activity.

Arnold began by answering Wordsworth's assertion that poetry is of higher worth than literary criticism. It is evident, however, that Arnold had in mind not only Wordsworth but also current revivals of Romantic thought and criticism, particularly those of Shairp. Arnold said in this essay that it was Shairp's essay on Wordsworth that had drawn his own attention once more to Wordsworth; and while there may be some truth in this, it is more important to see that Shairp had attacked some of the major positions that Arnold had taken. Shairp had begun by tracing the operation of the “new birth of imagination” in Europe and its flowering in the English Romantic poets.⁸ Shairp's emphasis on the new spirit of imagination was exactly the opposite of Arnold's emphasis on the new critical spirit in “On the Modern Element in Literature” and such later essays as “Heinrich Heine.”

Because Arnold in “The Function of Criticism” was clarifying the theoretic basis of the earlier essays, he had to make a case for criticism. Thus Arnold, although he praised the essay on Wordsworth, actually set out to show that Shairp was mistaken in his estimate of the Romantic poets and in his view that the “new birth of imagination” alone could bring about a new age of poetry. Shairp had assumed that the Romantic imagination, as a kind of inspired intuition, was sufficient for great poetry. Arnold, although advancing no theory of the imagination, intended to show the necessity of criticism to poetry, to say that the poets, including Wordsworth, had failed because they did not know enough. In a subsequent essay, Shairp defended the polymath Coleridge against this charge but did not fully answer Arnold's arguments until his own Oxford lecture, “Criticism and Creation” (1878). In Plato's Ion, Shairp found authority for a theory that the poet is “inspired and possessed”: “Plato's few words on this in the Ion are worth all Aristotle's methodical treatise on Poetry.”⁹ Shairp went on to describe Plato's metaphor of the chain of rings suspended from a magnet, from which inspiration flashes out from the magnet—or the muse—to the poet, the actors, and the spectators. Shairp missed the irony in Plato's satire of the “inspired” or irrational poet and his audience. Shairp made explicit, correctly, what Arnold himself had not claimed—namely, that his criticism was based on Aristotle. Shairp, on the other hand, aligned himself with Plato, as Shairp understood the Ion, and asserted not only that creation was superior to criticism, because it had the spark of divine truth received by the inspired poet, but also that it was independent of criticism. Indeed, the so-called Arnoldian Concordat, which Geoffrey Hartman has found in “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” described the work of Shairp, rather than that of Arnold, insofar as this “concordat,” as Hartman has said, “assigns to criticism a specific, delimited sphere detached from the creative (which remains superior and the object of millenial hopes).”¹⁰ But it was Shairp, not Arnold, who separated criticism and creation and who argued most strongly for the supremacy of poetic creation. Arnold's problem, in “The Function of Criticism,” was, rather, to defend criticism against those who argued for the supremacy of poetry and to claim for criticism, at its best, a share in creative activity.

Arnold began the essay by agreeing that the creative power was higher than the critical power, ostensibly accepting the proposition offered by Wordsworth; but Arnold then looked for reasons why criticism might be considered a creative activity. First he took the high Romantic notion of creation, with its implications of inspiration, prophecy, and visionary power, and confined it within the Aristotelian formula for theoretical activity, putting “free creative power” in the place of theoria as the activity or energeia that leads to happiness: “It is undeniable that the exercise of a creative power, that a free creative activity, is the highest function of man; it is proved to be so by man's finding in it his true happiness” (PW, 3:260). Whatever Arnold intended to say in this passage, whether to go beyond Aristotle and to say that the proper activity for human kind is creative, not theoretical, or to extend theoria to include creative activity, he put the question in the Aristotelian form. In what follows, Arnold made the terms inclusive, when he said that creative power may be exercised in several ways. And he followed Aristotle in the emphasis on “well-doing,” when he said that creative power may be exercised in “well-doing … in learning, … even in criticising” (PW, 3:260). In adding well-doing to the list of creative activities, Arnold was showing that he understood that well-doing was not the same thing as doing good or even doing well but that the Greek eudaimonia or happiness carried the sense of living the life of a good person, or living a good life, in the sense that the person was performing an activity that was satisfying. Arnold thus seems to have included criticism among the other kinds of activities that belong to the general category that he called creative activity.

When Arnold said that the critic may have “the sense of exercising this free creative activity” (PW, 3:260), it should be made clear that by “sense” he was referring, not to an illusory sensation, but to something like an awareness. Aristotle had argued that pleasure in friendship lay not only in being engaged in an activity but in being aware that one is engaged in the activity. Grant extended this notion to make energeia not only the activity but also the consciousness of the activity; he saw consciousness as something like the inspired visionary moment of the Romantics.¹¹ Although Arnold was not thinking of the critic as a visionary, he acknowledged that the awareness of an activity was necessary if one were to be happy in performing it. So far, then, Arnold did claim that the critic could exercise free creative power; the question then became one of the limits or conditions under which this power may be exercised.

At the end of the essay, Arnold set up, not so much definite limits, as a scale in which criticism may share in creative activity and be “genuine” creation. Criticism could be creative, he said, when it was “sincere, simple, flexible, ardent, ever widening its knowledge”; then the critic could have “a joyful sense of creative activity” (PW, 3:285). Since Arnold had defined criticism as knowing the best that is thought and said, it would follow that such criticism was, as he said, “ever widening its knowledge” as was thus far creative. In the last paragraph of the essay, however, Arnold qualified what he had said earlier: “in full measure, the sense of creative activity belongs only to genuine creation” (PW, 3:285). Arnold did not, however, draw a clear boundary line between the two activities.

When Arnold spoke here of “genuine creation,” he was clearly referring to literary creation—more narrowly, poetry. Furthermore, Arnold distinguished between creative literary genius and philosophy and, significantly, did not assign to creation the discovery of new ideas:

… creative literary genius does not principally show itself in discovering new ideas, that is rather the business of the philosopher. The grand work of literary genius is a work of synthesis and exposition, not of analysis and discovery; its gift lies in the faculty of being happily inspired by a certain intellectual and spiritual atmosphere, by a certain order of ideas, when it finds itself in them; of dealing divinely with these ideas, presenting them in the most effective and attractive combinations,—making beautiful works with them, in short.

(PW, 3:260-61)

The work of literary genius is making a work of art, as Aristotle had made clear in the Poetics and as Arnold had argued earlier in his letters to Clough and in the 1853 Preface. Originality, so important to the Romantic idea of genius, does not figure in Arnold's definition; indeed, much of his criticism had insisted instead on the importance of tradition and imitation in poetry. Nor does the poet have the function of the seer or the philosopher; the materials of literary art, Arnold said, are ideas. But the creative literary genius does not discover ideas; the genius makes works of art with them. The philosopher does discover ideas, but it is not evident that Arnold was thinking of philosophic thought as belonging to what he called creative activity. Originality, then, was not for Arnold a defining characteristic of creativity. Creativity belonged, rather, to making, to “poetics” in the radical sense. Thus, if criticism was to aspire to being a creative activity, it must do so, not by approaching philosophy, but by becoming a work of art.

Whether creative activity included more than poetry and critical thought was another question; Arnold did not ordinarily speak of philosophy as being creative, but in the essays he did talk about the “inventive power” of science. In “The Literary Influence of Academies,” Arnold discussed energy and genius: “Genius is mainly an affair of energy, and poetry is mainly an affair of genius; … Again, the highest reach of science is, one may say, an inventive power, a faculty of divination, akin to the highest power exercised in poetry” (PW, 3:238). By energy, Arnold here was implying the ordinary meaning of power or force. Indeed, “inventive power” in Arnold's criticism was much the same as creative power, and Arnold used both in “The Function of Criticism” (PW, 3:259) and further equated energy with “creative force” (PW, 3:262).

If creative and inventive power are more or less synonymous, then Arnold thought that both the poet and the scientist were engaged in creative activity; he implied the same thing by attributing to both “the faculty of divination.” While we may more readily have opposed the poet to the scientist, Arnold tended to think of the scientist as one like Lucretius, who was also a poet.

As a critic, however, Arnold was engaged not so much in synthesis as in analysis, in sorting out the functions of the poet and the critic. In this essay, Arnold set the intellectual, including the critical, power below the genius of the poet and of the scientist. He acknowledged, in response to Wordsworth's ranking of criticism, the superiority of creative or inventive genius: “Everybody, too, would be willing to admit, as a general proposition, that the critical faculty is lower than the inventive” (PW, 3:259). Thus in “The Function of Criticism,” Arnold, although he was primarily arguing that the critic could have a sense of creative activity, separated the poet from the critic in that the poets had a power of “divination” and the critic had intellectual power. Arnold did not resolve the Romantic idea that creation is inspiration, which in some degree is suggested by “divination,” and the classical idea of poetry as art, a thing made.

Certainly Arnold did not find a solution in imaginative reason, a phrase that he used at the end of the essay on “Pagan and Medieval Religious Sentiment” (1864). Some have found a key to Arnold's poetry and even to his criticism in the phrase; others have looked for the origins of the phrase.¹² In this essay, Arnold used “imaginative reason” to suggest his idea of Hellenism, the particular quality of Greek thought that would renew the “modern spirit” in the nineteenth century:

But the main element of the modern spirit's life is neither the senses and understanding, nor the heart and imagination; it is the imaginative reason. And there is a century in Greek life,—the century preceding the Peloponnesian War, from about the year 530 to the year 430 b.c.,—in which poetry made, it seems to me, the noblest, the most successful effort she has ever made as the priestess of the imaginative reason, of the elements by which the modern spirit, if it would live right, has chiefly to live.

(PW, 3:230)

The limits of meaning that Arnold assigned to “imaginative reason” are suggested when he went on to say that “no other poets, who have so well satisfied the thinking-power, have so well satisfied the religious sense” (PW, 3:231). Arnold's “thinking-power” seems to be close to scientific, logical, or analytic reason, and what satisfies the “religious sense” is most likely to have to do with intuition, or what Arnold called “divination” (which both poets and scientists have).

Certainly, in the two lectures, which were given three months apart, Arnold was clearly thinking about the connection between knowledge and intuition and between imagination and reason. It is even possible that Arnold was again following Aristotle and that “imaginative reason” corresponded to sophia (wisdom), which combines scientific knowledge (episteme) and intuitive reason (nous) (NE 1139a15-20).¹³ Arnold took his illustration of “imaginative reason” from Sophocles' chorus on divine law in Oedipus Tyrannos. Arnold had used Sophocles as the ideal poet from the 1853 Preface to the essay on “Pagan and Medieval Religious Sentiment” and had seen Sophocles as the ideal poet of the age of Pericles. Arnold had seen in the age of Pericles the critical spirit in 1857; now he saw in it imaginative reason; and in 1868 he would see in the age the great example of creative activity. Either the shifting emphasis marks only Arnold's particular concern at the moment, or else these terms are closely related in his thought and there is a close connection between the critical spirit and imaginative reason.

At this point in the development of his criticism, Arnold was arguing for the importance of criticism, of the “critical spirit,” which he made the chief characteristic of a modern age. Because throughout the Essays in Criticism, Arnold was arguing for the revival of a critical method in dealing with ideas, the emphasis in the phrase “imaginative reason” surely has to be kept on reason; it may even be a synthesis of two kinds of reason, as in Aristotle—intuition and scientific knowledge. One may follow Grant in noting that Aristotle had no theory of the imagination (1857 ed., 2:255, on VI. 4 and 5). But this, too, is evidence that Arnold was identifying a kind of reason.

In any case, Arnold was answering Shairp's claims for the imagination—namely, that imagination can bring about a new age; not imagination, Arnold replied, but imaginative reason. It will be useful, in exploring further the sense of the term, to place it in the context of the writing of the Balliol scholars. Grant said that “with Plato, philosophy was a higher kind of poetry, in which reason and imagination both found their scope” (1857 ed., 1:89). Conceivably Grant was influenced on this point by Jowett, but clearly it was a standard reading of Plato. According to Müller's literary history, which Arnold had consulted on Greek drama, “In Plato the powers of the imagination were just as conspicuous as those of reasoning and reflexion; he had all the chief characteristics of a poet, especially of a dramatic poet.”¹⁴ On the side of science and poetry, Lucretius also had a claim to imaginative reason.

Sellar, in his discussion of Lucretius in The Roman Poets of the Republic (1863) spoke about the imaginative power of Lucretius in the invocation to Venus, in the association of Venus and Mars, which achieved “a symbolical representation of the philosophical idea of Nature, as creating and sustaining the harmonious process of life, by destruction and dissolution in union with a productive and restoring principle.”¹⁵ Lucretius, through his “conception of Nature,” was able, Sellar thought, to bring his “abstract philosophical system” into “complete harmony with his poetical feelings and his moral convictions. … The contemplation of Nature satisfies the imagination of Lucretius by her aspects of power and life, order, immensity, and beauty”; Sellar also said that there was a difference between what the understanding (or analytical reason) and the “higher speculative faculty” could see:

Though the mechanical view of the universe may be accepted by the understanding, it has never been acquiesced in by the higher speculative faculty which combines the feeling of the imagination with the insight of the reason. The imagination, which recognizes the presence of infinite life and harmony in the world, rises to the recognition of a creative and governing Power, which it cannot help endowing with consciousness and will.

(Roman Poets, pp. 279-80)

Although Sellar did not use the term “imaginative reason” here—instead he used the “higher speculative faculty”—in some ways he was very close to Arnold in the distinctions that he made; the “higher speculative faculty” was separated from the understanding, or analytical reason; this faculty combined imagination and reason; and it was in some sense a faculty of “divination” which satisfied the religious sense, to use Arnold's terms, in the contemplation of Nature.

It is another question whether Arnold meant that to associate poetical feeling or feeling with imagination and insight with reason, as Sellar did, is to achieve imaginative reason. Arnold had read Sellar's Roman Poets of the Republic, because he had been asked to recommend Sellar for the professorship of Latin at Edinburgh.¹⁶ Both men may, however, have been drawing from a shared knowledge of the group.

Certainly Sellar later attributed to Lucretius the quality of imaginative reason when, in comparing Vergil to Lucretius, he described the analogies of Lucretius: “The apprehension of these analogies between great things in different spheres proceeds from the inventive and intellectual faculty in the imagination,—that by which intuitions of vast discoveries are obtained before observation of reason can verify them.”¹⁷ Here Sellar clearly was connecting what he called “the faculty of imaginative reason” to the “inventive faculty,” as it seems that Arnold may have done, and to “intuition”; Sellar distinguished between “imaginative reason” and the analytic reason connected with “observation.” Even more clearly, Sellar thought of several kinds of reason—imaginative, scientific, inventive, intuitive—and connected “imaginative reason” to what would nowadays be called the creative imagination, as the faculty by which, through metaphor and symbol, scientific theories are grasped before they can be described and proved by scientific method. Sellar's linking of the poet and the scientist is very close to what Arnold had done in “The Literary Influence of Academies,” as we have seen, in assigning to the scientist “an inventive power, a faculty of divination, akin to the highest power exercised in poetry” (PW, 3:238). Yet Arnold's discussion of the great Romantic concepts of the creative imagination, original genius, and inspiration was, like Sellar's, grounded in Aristotelian ideas of reason and was illustrated by the example, not of Wordsworth, but of Lucretius.

The principal idea in Arnold's theory of creation was not that criticism is creative but that the critic knows the best that is thought and said and that he makes this known. Further, given the idea that criticism is an activity, the critic, the poet, and the reader may share in the activity, so that the kind of happiness to be found in the discovery of new ideas or in theoretical activity is open to everybody. Practically, in his own criticism, Arnold illustrated how ideas were to be shared, not so much by the rigor of his arguments or the difficulty of his exposition as by the grace of his prose. Arnold used all the art of his magnificent prose—which is supple, ingenious, witty, graceful—to elucidate the kinds of questions that Shairp, in his somewhat heavy-handed way, made abstract, or “philosophical.” Arnold was vivid, particular, varied, interesting; he seems lightweight, but he touches difficult problems with his clarifying intellect. Again, practically, the subjects that Arnold touched upon in these essays were not exclusively literary; they further draw attention to writers who were distinguished for their literary as well as for their social importance. The list of writers has caused some to question Arnold's own judgment: Are these the best that have written in modern Europe? But that was not Arnold's intention; others could write on Goethe, Kant, Voltaire; on Shakespeare and Milton; on Lucretius and Thucydides; on Sophocles and Plato. Arnold, in these essays, turned to the little-known writers or to those who had lived ordinary lives. Thus he wrote about the brother and sister Maurice and Eugénie de Guérin, about Joseph Joubert, about Marcus Aurelius, but also about Epictetus. In other essays he wrote about those who had taken up the cause of the people, such as Heinrich Heine; and in an essay on a classical writer, not about Sophocles but about Theocritus, not so much about Theocritus as about the ordinary people of the Hellenistic age. Further, his subjects included not only these particular writers but also the common subjects—of nature, man, and society; of the nature poets; of the French Revolution; even of the ordinary life of ancient Rome. This is not to say that Arnold had now accepted the criticism of his friends and turned his prose to the illumination of ordinary life in modern times. Rather, his intention was to show the deficiency of the contemporary, the mistake of relying upon the inspired but uninstructed imagination; he showed that the critical intelligence is needed everywhere.

Although the essays that Arnold collected for Essays in Criticism do not deal directly with democracy, Arnold had once intended to include his essay “Democracy” (1861) in the collection. Certainly, the theme winds in and out of the essays as a connecting thread. So far as there is any visible plan for the whole, it is in the idea of the modern which was the subject of the lectures from about 1857 to 1863, an idea that is certainly attached to Arnold's idea of democracy. Although the chronological order shows to some extent the development of Arnold's aesthetic ideas (as we have seen), the arrangement of the essays in the collection, beginning with “The Literary Influence of Academies” and ending with “Marcus Aurelius,” shows how Arnold presented his theme of poetry in a democratic age. Arnold was here concerned with the question, which is central for literature in a democracy, of how to keep to a high standard of art yet reach the many. Thus, Arnold began with an examination of an academy in a democratic society and ended with the emperor who, although he thought about the idea of a democracy, attempted to crush the “new spirit” of his own time.

The first essay, “The Literary Influence of Academies,” takes up the question of setting a high standard for a national literature. At first glance, Arnold seems to have set aside his essay “Democracy” and declared instead for an authoritarian society or at least for a society of artists ruled by a national academy, a high tribunal of artists. An academy, Arnold suggested, is not necessarily inconsistent with a democratic society, and he pointed out that the French Academy had continued to exercise a beneficial influence on the national literature of a people who possessed some of the characteristics of the ancient Athenians, “openness of mind and flexibility of intelligence” (PW, 3:233-35, 237).¹⁸ These qualities of mind are especially necessary in a democracy, as Arnold pointed out in the essay “Democracy”: “democracy has readiness for new ideas, and ardour for what ideas it possesses”; but ancient Athens was also the model for a great popular culture: “the spectacle of ancient Athens has such profound interest for a rational man [because] it is the spectacle of the culture of a people” (PW, 2:25).¹⁹ As Arnold said, “It was the many who relished those arts, who were not satisfied with less than those monuments” (PW, 2:25). Although Arnold did not always use the terms democracy and people as synonymous and although he sometimes meant by democracy the lower classes, here by people he clearly meant both the middle and the lower classes of Athens. Thus, Arnold found no inherent conflict between a democratic society and a high standard of art or literature.

Thus, in looking at the French Academy, Arnold considered whether an academy could work in a modern democratic society. Arnold began by showing the difficulty of the critic in England, who must speak from “the critic's isolated position.” Citing as an example Palgrave's Handbook to the Fine Arts Collection of the International Exhibition of 1862, Arnold noted that Palgrave had adopted a style that was intended to reach the multitude:

Mr. Palgrave … feels himself to be speaking before a promiscuous multitude, with the few good judges so scattered through it as to be powerless; therefore, he has no calm confidence and no self-control; he relies on the strength of his lungs; he knows that big words impose on the mob, and that, even if he is outrageous, most of his audience are apt to be a great deal more so.

(PW, 3:254-55)

There are other ways to reach the multitudes, Arnold implied, than by impressing them with big words. An academy that enforces a high standard in intellectual work, as Arnold thought the French Academy did, encourages good prose, prose without the note of “provinciality” that is the mark of the lonely critic speaking to the crowd. Arnold's ideal was of a classical prose: “the problem is to express new and profound ideas in a perfectly sound and classical style” (PW, 3:247-48). But as Arnold showed in a complex argument, this was true for prose, for intellectual work, but not for poetry.

Poetry—and here Arnold was true to his earliest critical principles—required freedom, the free activity of genius: “And what that energy, which is the life of genius, above everything demands and insists upon, is freedom; entire independence of all authority, prescription, and routine,—the fullest room to expand as it will.” And this energy, “the life of genius,” which naturally resists authority, also reaches “splendid heights in poetry and science” (PW, 3:238). Thus, poetry and science require freedom; prose, an intellectual work that depends upon flexibility and quickness of mind, profits from the authority both of a form and of an academy (although even the best poetry requires the structure of form). Arnold, with an unexpected chauvinism in a critic who had deplored provinciality, declared that the English were greater in poetry than were the French. His problem then became whether democracy would in fact nourish poetry. If freedom or liberty was necessary to poetry and to the free activity of genius, then the question was whether democracy would allow such freedom or whether democracy (as John Stuart Mill later thought) would restrict individual liberty or stifle individual genius. Arnold had already examined this question in “Democracy,” where he had argued that political freedom could be established as well by an aristocracy as by a democracy; here Arnold was thinking about the English barons (PW, 2:7-8). Arnold argued that what democracy certainly established was social freedom: “Social freedom,—equality,—that is rather the field of the conquests of democracy” (PW, 2:8). The effect of living amidst a society of equals was liberating:

Can it be denied, that to live in a society of equals tends in general to make a man's spirits expand, and his faculties work easily and actively; while, to live in a society of superiors, although it may occasionally be a very good discipline, yet in general tends to tame the spirits and to make the play of the faculties less secure and active?

(PW, 2:8)

Arnold, following Alexis de Tocqueville, thought that equality in France had “given to the lower classes, to the body of the common people, a self-respect, an enlargement of spirit, a consciousness of counting for something in their country's action, which has raised them in the scale of humanity” (PW, 2:9). Still, Arnold was not sure about the changes that would take place as the English lower class became part of a democratic society. The class, which Arnold saw as remarkable for individualism and self-reliance, would give up something to a sense of community or cooperation, though it would gain, as others had, an increased self-respect through belonging to a class that would now have greater importance and through losing a sense of deference to superiors. Certainly, Arnold concluded that although an academy had worked well in France, it would not work so well in England, and it would not encourage poetry, which indeed required individual freedom. Arnold did not, in this essay, answer the question of how one can assure, without an academy, a high standard of art and literature in a democratic society.

Nonetheless, the example of the French Academy, which is set before us in the first essay, is followed by essays on French writers of the nineteenth century. Arnold's two essays on Maurice de Guérin and Eugénie de Guérin serve as examples of the influence of the French Academy; they also illustrate the distinction achieved by almost-ordinary writers working in minor forms—the journal and the letter. Arnold's further purpose was to make these two authors known to English readers through his own lively and vivid translations and through quoting at length from their works. Arnold, then, was making known to the common reader the works of two rather ordinary writers, but ones who were working in a country in which a high standard prevailed. Indeed, commenting on Maurice de Guérin's sure taste in his reading, Arnold observed, “His literary tact is beautifully fine and true” (PW, 3:20).²⁰ Although what now seems most interesting about Arnold's criticism is the comparison to Keats and the analysis of the romantic or poetic sensibility, in the context of the democratic society one must keep in mind that the Tory reviewers had attacked Keats as an apothecary who was trying to be a poet. Arnold's criticism was disinterested. Like the Romantics, Arnold said, Maurice de Guérin withdrew from society to contemplate Nature: “So he lived like a man possessed; with his eye not on his own career, not on the public, not on fame, but on the Isis whose veil he had uplifted” (PW, 3:34). Yet Guérin had held to a high standard, because of “his passion for perfection, his disdain for all poetical work not perfectly adequate and felicitous” (PW, 3:35). Through his style, Maurice de Guérin had achieved distinction: “The magic of expression, to which by the force of this passion he won his way, will make the name of Maurice de Guérin remembered in literature” (PW, 3:35).

Turning to Eugénie de Guérin, Arnold again showed what could be done in the minor forms of the journal and the letter by a woman who was like Blaise Pascal mainly in “the clearness and firmness of her intelligence, going straight and instinctively to the bottom of any matter she is dealing with” (PW, 3:89)²¹ The only essay in which Arnold dealt with the writing of a woman, he, much like the feminists of the present time, did not leave out of account “femininity” and the difference that this made to her writing. Unhappily, at least to those of us who are too Americanized or just plainly too American (as we have lately been reminded by an eminent historian) and who are looking for something like equality, the “difference” that Arnold saw lay mainly on the side of inferiority of talent. Thus, in natural description, Maurice reached the sublime but Eugénie only the picturesque; Eugénie suffered from an ennui that arose from her situation and thus differed from Pascal: “Pascal is a man, and the inexhaustible power and activity of his mind leave him no leisure for ennui. … Eugénie de Guérin is a woman, and longs for a state of firm happiness, for an affection in which she may repose” (PW, 3:89). Arnold found in Eugénie's prose “a feminine ease and grace, a flowing facility” (PW, 3:89). Arnold noted in Eugénie's journal a perennial concern of women, the conflict between “‘a life of household business’” and “this life of reading, thinking, and writing” (PW, 3:92, 93). Arnold noted her resolution to do her household tasks without complaining, to keep “in her proper sphere”; “‘I feel that I cannot go beyond my needlework and my spinning without going too far’” (PW, 3:94). As Arnold compared Maurice to the English Romantic Keats, so he might have compared Eugénie to the Romantic Emily Brontë, especially when he saw “something primitive, indomitable in her, which she governs, indeed, but which chafes, which revolts” (PW, 3:88). Instead, Arnold brought in for comparison the poet Emma Tatham, the better to make a point about the narrowness of Philistinism in England (PW, 3:97) and, by implication, the limits placed in such a society on the genius of women as well as men.

Arnold ended the essay by noting the quality of distinction in the work of Maurice and Eugénie de Guérin: “It procures that the popular poet shall not finally pass for a Pindar, nor the popular historian for a Tacitus, nor the popular preacher for a Bossuet” (PW, 3:106). Arnold's use of intrusive alliteration had a function here. As in a heroic couplet, it showed that he had assumed the role of the heroic satirist: the “popular poet” and the “preacher” are contrasted to Pindar and are measured against the great writers who set the standard. Thus, Arnold at the end brought his essay around to his central theme, the high standard set by criticism; at the same time he showed that distinction could be achieved by writers like the isolated brother and sister even in the minor forms.

The essay “Heinrich Heine” seems to stand at the center of the collection, announcing the central theme of the age of democracy and defining the task of literature in the new age. Certainly the idea of democracy is central: Heine was “a most effective soldier in the Liberation War of humanity” (PW, 3:107).²² The essay carried on Arnold's speculation about the modern, which he had begun in “On the Modern Element in Literature.” As there he had asserted that poetry must offer an adequate interpretation of life, so here he said that poetry in the “main current” must “apply modern ideas to life” (PW, 3:122). Although “modern ideas” may have a wide reference, as in the opening of “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” where all branches of knowledge were included, actually Arnold seems here to be thinking of political ideas, of democracy, literally “the liberation of humanity” by the ideas of 1789. Thus he said that Byron and Shelley, the great revolutionary poets, though they failed as artists, did apply “modern ideas” to life, whereas the other Romantic poets retreated from life—Wordsworth to “the inward life,” Scott to the feudalism of the past (PW, 3:121-22). It could not be said that either Coleridge or Wordsworth were not aware of modern philosophical ideas, but they did turn away from their early enthusiasm for democratic ideas.

Although Arnold denied that poetry aims at “direct political action” (PW, 3:118) and would develop in the later essays the principle of disinterestedness, still he continued to say that poetry must offer an “intellectual deliverance”—that is, an adequate interpretation of the age. Equally, the critic must “ascertain the master current in the literature of an epoch” (PW, 3:107). And in the modern times (whether past or present) both poets and critics were alive to what Arnold called the “modern spirit,” were aware that inherited institutions were not rational and no longer worked. True, as in the essay on the French Academy, Arnold noted the limits of living by reason: the English Revolution, which had been practical rather than theoretical and had made no appeal to reason or to principles, did gain for England a remarkable degree of liberty and prosperity (PW, 3:114). But the future, Arnold warned, would require something more. All of Arnold's talk about a modern spirit, about adequate interpretation of an age, about master-currents, really amounted to saying that this was the age of democracy or that it was coming and that it was the task of the critic to make ready for it.

The essay is the source of some remarkable and striking images, definitions, and epigrams of the sort that work well for a lecture but later prove to be more baffling than clarifying. There is the great metaphor about the prison of Puritanism: “the great English middle class … entered the prison of Puritanism, and had the key turned on its spirit there for two hundred years” (PW, 3:121). Although the image is striking, the history seems suspect. Some definitions are remarkable for their simplicity: “Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things, and hence its importance” (PW, 3:110). There are also firm pronouncements: “Direct political action is not the true function of literature” (PW, 3:118). There are sweeping profundities, as on the great religious poets: “These spirits reach the infinite, which is the true goal of all poetry and all art,—the Greek spirit by beauty, the Hebrew spirit by sublimity” (PW, 3:128). In effect, the essay aimed at a “thoroughly modern” criticism, with neat definitions and usable phrases such as “mainstream” and “main-currents” to supply critics and literary historians for another fifty years.

Yet the statements cannot be put together into a coherent theory. If poetry is saying things effectively, why may it not be used for propaganda or for direct political action? Or why should poetry reach for the infinite? And if it does so, then why are not Keats and Wordsworth the great poets of the Romantic age, rather than the Revolutionary poets Byron and Shelley? Arnold would return to each of these points in his later essays on the Romantic poets and would modify these definitions of poetry.

Here what gave Arnold the greatest difficulty was the practical or the political use of literature, especially of poetry. As in all of his essays on the “modern,” beginning with the lecture “On the Modern Element in Literature,” Arnold wanted to say that the modern lies, not in the contemporary or the new, but in a critical or a rational habit of mind. To some extent Arnold also wanted to say that a truly modern literature responds in some way to modern ideas; indeed it may offer a historical or a philosophical interpretation of events. Not until “The Study of Poetry” did Arnold successfully disentangle poetry from philosophy and from history. Because a democratic people had to respond to ideas, poetry had in some way to satisfy this need. Arnold tended at times to imply that a poetry of ideas was what democracy needed, yet he realized that poetry could not aim at direct political action.

In the following essays, the emphasis shifts from what might seem to be the necessity of the intellectual appeal of poetry to its emotional appeal, the question now being how poetry can reach and move the people. Strictly speaking, Arnold held to the idea that people in a fully developed democracy would be like the Athenians—that is, lively, open-minded, flexible, and demanding the very greatest art and poetry. Nevertheless, this remained an ideal to be attained in the future; and for the present, Arnold thought that the lower classes in England were nearer to the state of the populace in the late Hellenistic Age or the early Middle Ages. Thus, in the essay “Pagan and Medieval Religious Sentiment,” the question was how poetry in each age could reach the people.²³ Arnold's method was to compare a popular (religious) poem by Theocritus to a poem written by Saint Francis, choosing these as typical. Arnold offered the hymn to Adonis in the “Fifteenth Idyll” by Theocritus as “a representative religious poem of paganism” (PW, 3:216). Setting the hymn in the context of its audience—the chattering housewives—Arnold translated the idyll and the hymn and offered his own commentary. He contrasted the treatment of the Adonis story in the popular hymn to the symbolic treatment that would have been found in the Eleusinian mysteries: the hymn presents a “story as prepared for popular religious use, as presented to the multitude in a popular religious ceremony” (PW, 3:222). Arnold found that the poem made its appeal to the senses; it was not consoling but was wearying.

From Theocritus, Arnold turned to Saint Francis, the saint who “brought religion to the people”: “Poverty and suffering are the condition of the people, the multitude, the immense majority of mankind; and it was towards this people that his soul yearned” (PW, 3:223). Saint Francis's Canticle of the Sun was “designed for popular use” (PW, 3:224). Arnold found, however, that neither poem appealed to the whole human mind: “Now, the poetry of Theocritus's hymn is poetry treating the world according to the demand of the senses; the poetry of St. Francis's hymn is poetry treating the world according to the demand of the heart and imagination” (PW, 3:225). Nonetheless, the appeal to the heart was preferable to the appeal to the senses. Returning once more to Heine, the subject of an earlier essay, Arnold reflected now on what he saw as Heine's own religion of pleasure, a religion that gave no comfort to “the mass of mankind” (PW, 3:229). In contrast, Arnold now decided that “a religion of sorrow” had the power to reach the “many millions”; it had the “power to be a general, popular, religious sentiment, a stay for the mass of mankind, whose lives are full of hardship” (PW, 3:229-30). Not entirely satisfied with the idea of a religion of sorrow, Arnold reflected that Christianity was also a religion of joy, “drawing from the spiritual world a source of joy so abundant that it ran over upon the material world and transfigured it” (PW, 3:230). The appeal of such poetry as that by Saint Francis was, in any case, to the emotions, and this was an appeal that could be made to the “many millions.”

In a modern age, as in the Athenian age of Pericles or in an age of democracy, poetry must make yet another appeal, which Arnold here specified as the appeal to the “imaginative reason.” Beyond the popular poetry that speaks to the heart and the imagination, such as the Canticle of the Sun, or the poetry that speaks to the senses and the imagination, such as the hymn to Adonis, was the poetry of Simonides, Pindar, Aeschylus, and Sophocles, which speaks to the imaginative reason. Here Arnold tried to discover the appeal that popular poetry makes in a democratic age, to people such as the Athenians. Arnold did not, I think, try to offer a synthesis of the heart and the senses, the imagination and the understanding. Rather, he tried to define another faculty—the imaginative reason—a reason, as I have suggested, of the kind that poetry and science use in reaching for an analogy or a metaphor as a way of explaining an insight. He developed this idea in his next essay, on the French Academy. Such a poetry, which makes an appeal both to reason and to feeling, may be the best poetry for a democratic age.

In the following essay, “Joubert,” Arnold advanced another theory of the way in which poetry reaches the reader, using still the Romantic idea of creative genius: “And yet what is really precious and inspiring, in all that we get from literature, except this sense of an immediate contact with genius itself, and the stimulus towards what is true and excellent which we derive from it?” (PW, 3:183)²⁴ The idea of sharing, in a sense, the inspiration of the genius corresponds to Arnold's theory of the way in which an audience delights in the “high art” of the drama. To Aristotle's principle that all men desire to know, Arnold added the delight in novelty: “from what is new to us we in general learn most”—his argument for noticing a minor author. Arnold, near the end of the essay, defended his choice of Joubert. Arnold had asserted that “a criticism of life” was “the end and aim of all literature” (PW, 3:209). He went on to note the difference between the criticism of “men of ability” and that of “men of genius.” Here, again, is Arnold's defense of the “modern” as against the merely contemporary: his “modern” is what “is permanently acceptable to mankind”; it possesses “inherent truth” (PW, 3:209), in contrast to the ideas that make a great appeal in their time. “But the taste and ideas of one generation are not those of the next” (PW, 3:209)—and here Arnold sketched the energetic march of the leaders of the new generation as it sweeps away the old, saving the great men—the Homers and the Shakespeares—and those of their family—the Jouberts—protecting them from the destroying hordes that follow. Arnold commented on those who spoke to their age alone, “What a fate, … to be an oracle for one generation, and then of little or no account for ever” (PW, 3:211). Arnold's paradoxical definition of modern was an answer to those who held that the writer could only speak to his own age.

Although Arnold abandoned his series of lectures on the modern element before he wrote the essay “Joubert,” he had not abandoned the idea of the modern, which is central in “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.” Nor had Arnold changed in finding the “modern” in ancient Greece, whether in the “critical spirit,” in “imaginative reason,” or in a “criticism of life.” Rather, Arnold dramatized once more his defense of what he would later call the classic against Shairp and others who had declared that the classical poet was irrelevant to the Victorian world. Arnold's “modern” meant what is permanently true, whether this be an idea discovered in ancient Greece or in the nineteenth century. On the other hand, as he had said in the essay “On the Modern Element in Literature,” the historian or the poet must have an adequate understanding of his own age and of new ideas, which might include radically different ways of looking at the world.

In taking up the works of Marcus Aurelius, Arnold in fact considered the consequence of failing to grasp a radical “new spirit” in the history of the world. The essays of the Roman emperor had always had a popular appeal, and in translation, they continued to make an appeal to the common reader, like the essays of Epictetus. True, Arnold here expressed doubt that moral ideas as such could reach the many: “The mass of mankind have neither force of intellect enough to apprehend them clearly as ideas, nor force of character enough to follow them strictly as laws. The mass of mankind can be carried along a course full of hardship for the natural man, can be borne over the thousand impediments of the narrow way, only by the tide of a joyful and bounding emotion” (PW, 3:134).²⁵ Like religious poetry, moral discourse must appeal to emotion: and Arnold here included pagan with Christian, Empedocles with Paul, as those who “have insisted on the necessity of an inspiration, a joyful emotion, to make moral action perfect” (PW, 3:134). Once more, Arnold saw in religion the clue to reaching the multitude; here Arnold compared the wisdom of Epictetus and that of the Old Testament to the “warmth” of the New Testament. Again, it appears that Arnold had forgotten the “idea-moved” masses; he saw the multitudes as being nearer to those of the Middle Ages than to the Athenians of the Age of Pericles.

Yet, when Arnold took up the modernity of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, he saw him as “a man like ourselves, a man in all things tempted as we are” (PW, 3:140); indeed, Arnold made a strong case for seeing parallels between the age of Marcus Aurelius and the Victorian. Indeed, Arnold's interest lay in just this parallel. Discussing the mistakes for which the Roman emperor had been criticized, the worst being his persecution of the Christians, Arnold clearly kept before him the modern parallel. The new spirit in Rome at the time of Marcus Aurelius was Christianity, the new “dissolvent” of the old order: “It was inevitable that Christianity in the Roman world, like democracy in the modern world, like every new spirit with a similar mission assigned to it, should at its first appearance occasion an instinctive shrinking and repugnance in the world which it was to dissolve” (PW, 3:144). The modern sage, Arnold implied, must take warning from the example of Marcus Aurelius and therefore not impede the new spirit of democracy. Marcus Aurelius, according to Arnold's account, meditated on the idea of equality and freedom: “‘The idea of a polity in which there is the same law for all, a polity administered with regard to equal rights and equal freedom of speech, and the idea of a kingly government which respects most of all the freedom of the governed’” (PW, 3:147). Arnold saw Marcus Aurelius as the Roman emperor who could imagine equality and freedom in an ideal state yet who dealt with the new spirit of Christianity as others in later times would deal with the new spirit of democracy.

As to whether the emperor in his own writing could move the reader, whether he could, like the Christian moralist, reach the emotions, Arnold finally said that the emperor could, although not so powerfully, with something “less than joy and more than resignation”; “the sentences of Marcus Aurelius find their way to the soul” (PW, 3:149). Although Marcus Aurelius was not a poet, Arnold did deal with the question of how literature reached the multitudes. Certainly in writing about the late Roman Empire, the age of Trajan, Arnold could see the division (as Sellar was to show) between the aristocrats and the populace in Rome. Marcus Aurelius, in suppressing a popular religion, could not cross this division—to the greater loss of Rome and to European civilization, which would have benefited from a Christianity that learned from Roman culture. This is the parallel, and this is the lesson: the Victorians had to recognize that the new spirit of democracy was inevitable, and in order to assist its development, they must make available the best of the old civilization. Thus, Arnold ended his collection of essays with the example of Rome, as he had begun it with the example of Greece in “Democracy.”

Notes

1. Ethica Nicomachea (cited in the text and notes as NE), ed. Ingram Bywater (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949), pp. 212-13; William David Ross, Aristotle, 5th ed. (1949; reprint, New York: Barnes & Noble, 1964), pp. 232-34; W. F. R. Hardie, Aristotle's Ethical Theory, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), pp. 336-57.

2. Ross, Aristotle, p. 234; Hardie, Aristotle's Ethical Theory, pp. 338-40, quoting J. Burnet, The Ethics of Aristotle (London: Methuen, 1900), p. 438. Hardie says: “It may be suggested, however, that some of Aristotle's reasons for commending theoretical activity, in contrast with practical and political pursuits, are applicable to artistic and aesthetic as well as to scientific interests” (p. 340).

3. Ethics of Aristotle, ed. Alexander Grant, 2 vols. (London: John W. Parker, 1857), 2:153; see also the 4th ed., 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1885), 2:335, hereafter cited as Ethics. See Frank M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981), pp. 326-27, 340-52. Turner sees Grant's work as a dividing point in studies of Aristotle during the nineteenth century. It seems evident to me that Arnold's reading of Aristotle in “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” belongs to the earlier interpretations, especially of “activity”; but the presence of Grant in the circle of the friends of Benjamin Jowett, who was so important to Arnold and his friends as a guide to Greek studies, cannot be ignored. I have found Grant's commentary on certain words to be a useful illustration of points that Arnold made in his criticism.

4. Peter Allan Dale, The Victorian Critic and the Idea of History: Carlyle, Arnold, Pater (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), pp. 10, 107-9.

5. See Ethics, 1857 ed., 2:83, 256-57.

6. NE 1150b25-28, p. 144; The Works of Aristotle, vol. 9, ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925).

7. Ethics, 4th ed., 2:223-24; The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Longman, 1969; reprint, New York: Norton, 1972), p. 1050.

8. John Campbell Shairp, “Wordsworth: The Man and the Poet,” in Studies in Poetry and Philosophy (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1872), pp. 1-4; this first appeared in North British Review 41 (Aug., 1864): 1-54.

9. John Campbell Shairp, “Criticism and Creation,” Aspects of Poetry, Being Lectures Delivered at Oxford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1881), pp. 49-53; this essay was first published in Macmillan's Magazine 38 (July, 1878): 246-56. On the Ion as satire see Gerald F. Else, Plato and Aristotle on Poetry, ed. Peter Burian (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), pp. 5-9.

10. Geoffrey Hartman, Criticism in the Wilderness (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980), p. 6.

11. NE 1170; see Ross's note; Turner, Greek Heritage, pp. 350-51; Ethics, 1857 ed., 1:193-94, 200-201.

12. David J. DeLaura, “Arnold's Imaginative Reason: The Oxford Sources and the Tradition,” Prose Studies 1 (1977): 7-18, “Imaginative Reason: A Further Note,” ibid., 2 (1979): 103-6, and “Imaginative Reason: Yet Again,” ibid., 188-89.

13. Ross, Aristotle, pp. 216-18; Hardie, Aristotle's Ethical Theory, pp. 345-57; on difficulties of nous in Aristotle's theory see Ethics, 1857 ed., 1:261-63 (“a union of reason and science”).

14. Karl Otfried Müller, A History of the Literature of Ancient Greece, trans. George Cornewall Lewis and John William Donaldson, 3 vols. (London: John W. Parker, 1858), 2:258.

15. William Young Sellar, The Roman Poets of the Republic (Edinburgh: Edmonston & Douglas, 1863), p. 279.

16. The Note-Books of Matthew Arnold, ed. Howard Foster Lowry, Karl Young, and Waldo Hilary Dunn (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), p. 571, July, 1863; William Bell Guthrie, “Matthew Arnold's Diaries: The Unpublished Items: A Transcription and Commentary” 4 vols. (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1957; Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, 1981), 2:402-4: Arnold entered “Sellar's Roman Poets” on July 23, 25, 27, 28, 29, and 30 and Aug. 4 and 5, 1863; on August 7 he wrote “finish Sellar's Roman Poets.” The letter that Arnold wrote to Shairp is included in E. M. (Eleanour Denniston) Sellar's Recollections and Impressions (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1907), pp. 164-65. Arnold wrote, “I have now read every word of it, some of it more than once, and with extreme satisfaction” (p. 164); on Lucretius, he wrote: “The delicacy and interestingness of the criticism in certain places I say little about, because these are chiefly shown in the chapters on Lucretius, most of which I had read and liked, as such criticism deserved to be liked, before”; Arnold thus indicated that he had read the essay on Lucretius in the Oxford Essays of 1855.

17. William Young Sellar, The Roman Poets of the Augustan Age: Virgil, 3d ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1908; reprint, New York: Biblo & Tannen, 1965), p. 240.

18. The lecture “The Influence of Academies on National Spirit and Literature” was given on June 4, 1864, and was revised for Cornhill. In chronological order, it thus immediately precedes “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” but in the order of the essays in the collection, Arnold placed it immediately after the introductory essay, in part to show a function of the “critic” ([The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, Edited by R. H. Super. 11 vols. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960–77. Cited in the text and notes as] PW, 3:463).

19. See Super's notes on PW, 2:331; the essay was composed as an introduction to The Popular Education of France (1861) and was considered in 1864 as part of the collection of Essays in Criticism.

20. The lecture “A Modern French Poet” was given on Nov. 15, 1862; it appeared in Fraser's Magazine in Jan., 1863 (See Super's notes on pp. 407-8).

21. The essay was first published in June, 1863, in Cornhill (see Super's notes PW, 3:428). “The French Academy voted a prize to her [Eugénie de Guérin's] posthumously published Journal” (ibid.). Eugénie de Guérin died in 1848.

22. Super notes that the lecture “The Modern Element in Romanticism” was not published; it was delivered on Mar. 26, 1863. The lecture “Heinrich Heine” was given on June 13 and was subsequently published in Cornhill (PW, 3:433).

23. PW, 3:215. The Oxford lecture “Pagan and Christian Religious Sentiment,” which was given on Mar. 5, 1864, was published in Cornhill in April (see Super's notes in PW, 3:458). Between this essay and the earlier one on Heine, Arnold had published “Marcus Aurelius,” “Spinoza and the Bible,” and “Joubert”; that is, he had given considerable thought to popular religion, as well as to Stoic morality, and to the emotional appeal of morality and religion.

24. The lecture “A French Coleridge” was delivered on Nov. 28, 1863, and was published in the National Review in Jan., 1864 (PW, 3:452).

25. The essay first appeared in Victoria Magazine in Nov., 1863; see Super's notes in PW, 3:440.