SOURCE: “The Function of Matthew Arnold at the Present Time,” in College English, Vol. 56, No. 7, November, 1994, pp. 749-65.

[In the following essay, Peltason contests the characterization of Arnold as a cultural conservative and emphasizes his continued significance as a literary theorist.]

In recent debates about cultural politics, Matthew Arnold's name regularly appears as a kind of shorthand for a familiar and long discredited form of cultural conservatism. Sometimes it is not Arnold's name, but just a phrase, “the best that is known and thought” or “sweetness and light,” quoted without attribution and taken to represent an uncritical endorsement of received cultural values and a passive receptivity to accredited masterpieces. My project in this essay is to show how and why Arnold should be recuperated, indeed to show how insistently he is still with us. More broadly, I wish to illustrate the dangers of literary and cultural misunderstanding that arise when a major literary figure is invoked in the culture wars, but not actually read with precision and care.

In addition to the enemies who put him to such uses, Arnold has had a full complement of the friends who makes enemies superfluous. Champions like William Bennett and Lynne Cheney have invoked Arnold as a fellow savior of the humanities and joined his least discriminating detractors in writing as if there were one orthodoxy to restore (or to ridicule), a blandly affirming humanism of which Arnold and Robert Maynard Hutchins, Lionel Trilling and F. R. Leavis, were equally and similarly representative. Not that Arnold's writings fail to cooperate in such acts of appropriation. When Arnold writes in “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” that “the elements with which the creative power works are ideas; the best ideas on every matter which literature touches, current at the time” (CPW 3:260), he seems to stand in need of a first course in formalism. What are these “ideas” that are the building blocks of the Iliad and King Lear, Paradise Lost and Anna Karenina, and in what form did they exist before their embodiment in the language of these texts? Are they the same ideas that will restore us to the prelapsarian cultural health of some other time and place, and, if so, why will nobody say what they are?

A further charge against Arnold, but also the first item to offer in his defense, is that he devotes very little space to answering these questions or others like them, which inquire about “the best that has been known and thought” as if that best were the separable and summarizable content of a row of great books. The apparent essentialism of Arnold's position, with its reference to the fixed nature of the object “in itself” and its occasional stress upon the “ideas” that literary works hold in readiness for the qualified reader, is belied and counterbalanced by another emphasis in his writings, on process and on particularity: “Not a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it” (5:94). The modern cant of “personal growth” taints for us this remark from Culture and Anarchy, a remark that itself threatens to freeze into a slogan, a phrase to have and to rest in, rather than an act of the writer's and the reader's mind. But Arnold does live and write by this slogan and everywhere stresses “the deed of writing,” to borrow a phrase from Thoreau to which Richard Poirier has recently drawn attention (3-66). Just the title of Arnold's greatest essay ought to make clear that his interest is not in what things timelessly and essentially are, but in how they work for us here and now. Indeed, one measure of the influence of “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” is the extraordinary number of times that its title has been copied or appropriated by later essayists inquiring into the function not just of criticism, but of a host of other activities and institutions.

This emphasis on “function” brings with it a correspondent stress on activity, and the nearest and most insistent activity under observation in Arnold's prose writings is the activity of criticism itself. Another persistent charge against Arnold is that he assigns to criticism too modest and secondary a role. But if we recognize the continuity between his creative and his critical writing and respond fully to the performative and evocative powers of his criticism, we will not linger long with this error. Wendell Harris's impatient remark is to the point here: “One would feel it unnecessary to rehearse the evidence that Arnold neither sharply divided criticism from creativity nor conceived criticism to be simply a commentary on literature if such skewed readings of Arnold by eminent critics were not so prevalent” (120). In spite of his notorious unresponsiveness to the great fiction of his time, Arnold is among the most influential advocates and, in his prose writings, one of the distinguished practitioners of Victorian realism—realism as it is redefined by the idiosyncratic practice of such diverse writers as Carlyle, Dickens, Ruskin, Trollope, and Eliot. Of the many mottos and keywords with which Arnold is associated—“the best that is known and thought in the world,” “to make reason and the will of God prevail,” “sweetness and light”—the ones that still matter and persuade are those clustered around his central statement of the function of criticism, “to see the object as in itself it really is.” This realist injunction, for all its susceptibility to deconstruction and demystification, has hardly been dislodged by any competing formula. It is hard to find an interpreter of texts or events who does not at some point ground his or her authority in the claim to have gotten things right. Even when the claim is downgraded to one of provisional rightness, a standard of accuracy has been invoked. And Arnold, from his side, makes more provision for the flux and contingency of judgment than is generally acknowledged.

This is both lucky and appropriate, since so many of Arnold's own judgments now seem limited and idiosyncratic. Even those writers who think of themselves as Arnoldians hardly defend many of his likes and dislikes, and, in fact, read him more for the flux and contingency—for the companionship of a distinctive and vividly rendered personality—than for the judgments. But this division of faculties is itself misleading, since one of the lessons to be learned from Arnold's writings is that personality and judgment are inseparable. Judgment, for Arnold, is an activity of the whole person, the source of a pleasure that differs in degree, but not in kind, from the pleasures of creation. The making of judgments, and thus the practice of criticism, springs from “a curiosity,—a desire after the things of the mind simply for their own sakes and for the pleasure of seeing them as they are,—which is in an intelligent being, natural and laudable” (5:91). Kindred passages to this one from Culture and Anarchy appear throughout Arnold's writings, asserting both the primacy of this pleasure and its availability to all intelligent beings. In this significant and characteristic passage from his essay on “Maurice de Guerin,” he describes “the grand power of poetry” in a vocabulary that stresses the continuity between creation and the activities of the critically alert mind of any “intelligent being”:

The grand power of poetry is its interpretative power; by which I mean, not a power of drawing out in black and white an explanation of the mystery of the universe, but the power of so dealing with things as to awaken in us a wonderfully full, new, and intimate sense of them, and of our relations with them. When this sense is awakened in us, as to objects without us, we feel ourselves to be in contact with the essential nature of those objects, to be no longer bewildered and oppressed by them, but to have their secret, and to be in harmony with them; and this feeling calms and satisfies us as no other can.

(3:12-13)

For a twentieth-century analogue to this remarkable passage we can turn to Edmund Wilson, writing on “The Historical Interpretation of Literature” in The Triple Thinkers: “The writer who is to be anything more than an echo of his predecessors must always find expression for something which has never yet been expressed, must master a new set of phenomena which has never yet been mastered. With each such victory of the human intellect, whether in history, in philosophy, or in poetry, we experience a deep satisfaction: we have been cured of some ache of disorder, relieved of some oppressive burden of uncomprehended events” (270). Wilson has begun this paragraph trying to describe the greatness of great art, but in the course of it, and in the last two clauses especially, he has come to a succinct formulation of his own ambitions as a critic. In Arnold's passage, too, the critic's task and the creator's are merged, and it would require only a few substitutions to make his passage a central statement on the interpretive powers of criticism.

Perhaps this is why the passage stands out as one of Arnold's finest on the powers of poetry. More often, when Arnold describes what great art should do or be, he is maddeningly, culpably vague. The accent of “high seriousness,” the capacity to produce “Joy”—these are not useful criteria and they tell us little about the writing of the last few centuries that readers have most valued. Arnold was so strikingly wrong about the coming age of creation that it can be hard to see why he is now more than a footnote in cultural history, a figure on the margins of Victorian discourse pointing off to a promised land that nobody, in fact, entered. But when he describes the functions of criticism, he is exemplary and current, a champion of the artistic virtues of which he is elsewhere so suspicious, and thus a kindred spirit to the Victorian poets and novelists he depreciates or ignores.

Arnold's best criticism is at once a succession of exact judgments and observations and an allegory of the critic's own mind. This combination evaporates the opposition between “subjective” and “objective” on which Arnold's criticism at first seems to depend and unites him with the Victorian modernism he aims to deplore, a modernism for which “realism” is an inevitable, if also an inadequate, label. I understand that this reading of Arnold will hardly satisfy those Marxist and historicist detractors for whom the tradition of Victorian realism is more notable for its bankruptcy than for its greatness. But a return to Arnold's texts may nevertheless clarify the terms of disagreement between the liberal tradition and the varieties of historicism now ascendant, by separating out the genuinely liberal strain in Arnold's writing from the reactionary misjudgments of which Arnold himself is occasionally guilty and the reactionary uses to which his grander pronouncements are regularly put.

The distinguishing marks of this Victorian realism are at once an attention to sensuous particulars and a fidelity to the particulars of the writer's own personality, a realism of the outer and the inner worlds together. It happens again and again in Arnold's writings that the critic's interest in things as they really are reveals itself suddenly as an interest in the workings of the critic's own mind and spirit. In Culture and Anarchy, for instance, Arnold first establishes the need for a principle of cultural authority and then turns to locate that authority in a “best self.” The first cultural imperative—“to make reason and the will of God prevail” (5:91)—gives way gradually, in the course of argument, to a second: “The great thing … is to find our best self, and to seek to affirm nothing but that” (5:135). Something similar happens in “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” which begins and ends by suggesting that the function of criticism is to prepare the way for a new age of creation by propagating “the best that has been known and thought,” but which asserts along the way that the truer function of criticism is to afford the critic the sure pleasures and the enhanced life of this knowing.

This stress on the personal and the particular seems a reversal of the inaugural movement of Arnold's criticism. In his first prose work of any significance, the Preface to the 1853 edition of his poems, Arnold begins by alluding to the common human pleasure in mimesis, in representations that are “particular, precise, and firm” (1:2). But the burden of his argument is to suggest that though those were good qualities and good words, he will offer us better. In this new hierarchy of literary values, vividness of representation is a necessary, but not a sufficient, accomplishment, and it is one of the signal failures of modern literature and criticism to believe otherwise. In the lost land of cultural and personal health that Arnold beckons us to return to, literature is concerned less with externals than with essentials, less with “ingenious expression” than with clearly delineated actions. It seeks to offer its readers not just the shock of recognition that an accurate and detailed representation can give, but the cleansing joy that is produced by the representation of a great action.

The Preface is a peculiar and contradictory performance, in which Arnold feelingly praises the qualities of mind and art that he has set out to rate as insufficient and describes only from a distance that art that he admires and recommends. “The modern dialogue of the mind with itself”; “an allegory of the state of the poet's own mind”—these memorable terms of dismissal, the second a quotation from David Masson, describe Arnold's own poetry well, as many readers have noticed and as Arnold himself acknowledges in casting the Preface as an explanation of his decision not to reprint “Empedocles on Etna.” But these phrases also describe the Preface itself, which is studded with ingenious turns of phrase throughout the changeable and hard-to-follow course of its argument. Poor history and worse prophecy, the Preface nevertheless presents a tempting allegory of the state of Arnold's own mind, with its troublous turns and confusions, its yearning after a phantom objectivity. Turning from poetry to prose, Arnold does not turn from the inner world to the outer, from subjective to objective, but rather finds in his prose a more satisfactory mode of refusing these easy divisions and of coming to life in language.

The Preface strikingly begins Arnold's new career as a writer of prose, but if he had stopped with that essay, we would not now trouble to reclaim its confusions. Over the next ten years, in the lectures “On Translating Homer,” and then, triumphantly, in 1864, in “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” Arnold emerged fully as a critic. The latter essay begins with the central and celebrated assertion that the object of criticism is “to see the object as in itself it really is.” The assertion is typical in its over-insistence, an exhortation “to see the object” that has built by accretion—“to see the object as it is,” “as it really is,” “as in itself it really is”—to its final form, a symptom that rhetoric, rather than logic, is the chosen mode of persuasion. Everyone has noticed Arnold's habit of repetition. The redundancies of this famous phrase constitute a kind of conceptual repetition. And the phrase is a repetition in another typically Arnoldian sense because it is a self-quotation, from the essay “On Translating Homer.” Here as elsewhere, Arnold's self-quotations are more than an evidence of self-regard. He makes up for the perceived poverty of the modern tradition by constituting a tradition in himself, a vocabulary of handed-down words and values that are established as cultural presences if only by their ubiquity. Whether we meet such tag phrases as “the best that has been known and thought in the world” or “the disinterested free play of the mind” as old friends or old irritants, they have been established as points of reference.

To say this is to acknowledge the ways in which Arnold's criticism constitutes less a window on the world than a world in itself, an enclosed and unique space. It is both at once, of course, and in “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” as elsewhere in his writings, Arnold shifts without commentary from a vocabulary of objectivity to one of inwardness. For all his emphasis on attending to the object, Arnold speaks often of the purely intransitive pleasures of clear-sightedness. As in the passage from “Maurice de Guerin” above, Arnold holds that certain acts of the mind are self-evidently valuable. When he speaks of the “disinterested love of a free play of the mind on all subjects, for its own sake” (3:268), we notice first about this oddly over-packed phrase that the play of the mind is valued for its own sake rather than for the sake of the subjects, and then that the object of “disinterested love” is the mind's own activity.

In the Preface, Arnold established “joy” as a key term, quoting and endorsing Schiller's assertion that “all Art is dedicated to Joy,” and proposing a test for great art that seemed more theological than aesthetic or psychological. Arnold's puzzling and irritating assertion in “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” that the Romantic poets “did not know enough” makes a kind of sense only in the context of this emphasis upon joy. What Arnold misses in the Romantics is the secure basis for affirmation that he quests after throughout his writings on religion, the “joy whose grounds are true,” in the quotable phrase from the late poem “Obermann Once More.” In such works as Literature and Dogma, however, Arnold's religious faith remains a matter of assertion and hopefulness, a joy whose ground is joy, as one might call it to expose its failure of logic and argument or, to assert its failure as rhetoric, a joy that is willed and recommended rather than felt or communicated.

The great accomplishment of “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” is to substitute for this unconvinced and unconvincing rhetoric of “joy” a rhetoric of pleasure that has behind it the weight of Arnold's own evident pleasure in observing and writing. The function of criticism, for the first few pages of the essay, is to prepare the way for a great renaissance of creation, creation that will be nourished and animated by the unspecified ideas that the critic will make current, ideas that Wordsworth and Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Byron apparently did not have enough of. But Arnold's own current of thought in this essay shifts quickly from the Romantics to the French Revolution to Edmund Burke and then to the unhealthy climate of opinion and expression in mid-Victorian Britain. The free play of his mind leaves behind the sharper division between creation and criticism and, along with it, the sense that literature is the uniquely fit object of criticism. For the rest of the essay, criticism is not the handmaiden of artistic creation, but a mode of living. The function of criticism is at once to perform a very broadly defined cultural service and to offer to the critic, in the fullest measure possible, “the great happiness and the great proof of being alive” (3:285).

The celebrated account of Burke's “return upon himself” provides an important instance of this shift of attention. Arnold has praised Burke's undeflectable clarity of vision—“disinterestedness” is the key term just about to enter the essay—and he cites a passage in which Burke recognizes and accepts the inevitability of “a great change in human affairs” brought about by the French Revolution, a change that Burke has long deprecated. Leaving aside the question of whether “disinterestedness” is the right word for this recognition—it would seem a better instance of disinterestedness if Burke saw something good about the change as well as something inevitable—we can observe that Arnold has offered in evidence, as “one of the finest things in English literature,” a triumph of critical vision, a triumph, furthermore, that relocates the space of criticism within the experience of the critic. Burke's accuracy of observation has its cultural and political value, but it is first and unarguably, for Arnold, an intrinsic good, an exercise of human faculties both pleasurable and valuable in itself.

This intrinsic good leads on to other goods, and criticism serves the cause of cultural and personal hygiene at once. The “best spiritual work” of criticism “is to keep man from a self-satisfaction which is retarding and vulgarising” (3:271), beginning the work of cultural reform from within. This language of inwardness suggests Arnold's affinity with another of his contemporaries, Walter Pater, who begins his Studies in the Renaissance by substituting the critic's own impression for the object in itself as the primary datum of criticism. Arnold has already taken several steps in Pater's direction in his account of the right operation of critical judgment: “Here the great safeguard is never to let oneself become abstract, always to retain an intimate and lively consciousness of the truth of what one is saying, and, the moment this fails us, to be sure that something is wrong” (3:283). If judgment is not quite, on this account, a mode of introspection, it does depend on introspection for its self-assurance, as if the critic's relations with consciousness were more trustworthy, or at least more testable, than relations with the object.

In his distrust of the habitual, his endorsement of criticism as both an antidote for complacency and a form of quickened consciousness, Arnold is even closer to Pater and, curiously, anticipates the definition of “success in life” Pater offers in the “Conclusion” to Studies in the Renaissance. Arnold's repeated injunctions to the critic to avoid abstraction, to remain vigilant, “perpetually dissatisfied” and thus alive, constitute his own version of the hard gem-like flame. At times in the essay, the critic's own hunger after life seems the first motive for criticism. Arnold anticipates Pater in this, and also echoes the triumphantly frustrated questers of Victorian poetry, figures like Childe Roland and Tennyson's Ulysses who are animated and drawn forward by the foreknowledge of failure. Like Browning and Tennyson in their greatest and most characteristic lyrics, Arnold writes in celebration of a perpetual striving and as if a yearning after perfection were itself a form of accomplishment and of enhanced life. This strain in the essay comes to a climax in its poignant and yet excited conclusion. Conceding the promised land to poets, Arnold nevertheless claims for criticism a stylistic freedom essayed by few modern critics:

In an epoch like those [of Aeschylus and Shakespeare] is, no doubt, the true life of literature; there is the promised land, towards which criticism can only beckon. That promised land it will not be ours to enter, and we shall die in the wilderness: but to have desired to enter it, to have saluted it from afar, is already, perhaps, the best distinction among contemporaries; it will certainly be the best title to esteem with posterity.

(3:285)

In sentences like these Arnold both describes and occupies the imaginative space of the post-Romantic writer. Absorbing the energies and the concerns of his own poetry, as well as that of his contemporaries, Arnold's prose tries to find a function not just for criticism, but for the imagination itself in a time of limited possibilities. This is projection, of course, and the limitations that Arnold perceived were at least partly his own, at a time when Tennyson and Browning and the great mid-century novelists were working out their own forms of fidelity to Victorian circumstance. Arnold was of their party without always knowing it, and he works out in his criticism a necessary defense of the Victorian imagination, of a collectedness that can be misconstrued as retreat, but that is actually the condition of genuinely engaged observation. In the following passage for instance, Arnold borrows the vocabulary of “The Buried Life” to assert that the critic serves others by serving himself:

The rush and roar of practical life will always have a dizzying and attracting effect upon the most collected spectator, and tend to draw him into its vortex; most of all will this be the case where that life is so powerful as it is in England. But it is only by remaining collected, and refusing to lend himself to the point of view of the practical man, that the critic can do the practical man any service; and it is only by the greatest sincerity in pursuing his own course, and by at last convincing even the practical man of his sincerity, that he can escape misunderstandings which perpetually threaten him.

(3:274-75)

Misunderstandings still threaten, and this passage has been read by many as a counsel of retreat. After being scorned by one academic generation as a naïve objectivist, Arnold is scorned now by another as an accomplice in the aestheticist denial of history. But even a quick survey of Arnold's topics of discussion and his range of contemporary reference ought to give pause to modern critics whose writings are far less conversant with the events of contemporary public life than his. (And this is to say nothing of his daily descent into the material as a traveling, composition-grading, report-writing school inspector.) If Arnold sometimes deserves to be called Mr. Kidglove Cocksure, as in his distastefully fastidious distaste for Keats's love letters or Coleridge's private life (in his essay in “Joubert”), it needs to be said that he is being judged by his own standards and found guilty of a betrayal of his own best self, a contamination of judgment by local interests and private needs. When Raymond Williams, always a shrewd and respectful reader of Arnold, faults him in a late interview for his sensationalized and prejudiced account of the Hyde Park riots in Culture and Anarchy, he is accusing Arnold, and very persuasively, of a failure of disinterestedness (406-7).

But Arnold's misjudgments are not a principled retreat from the world. He wanted to make a difference, he spoke out directly on public affairs, and he would not have been shocked or undone to hear from a Marxist critic that he was a partisan for non-partisanship, a highly interested champion of disinterestedness. That he was a reactionary, a defender of vested material interests, he would have disputed, and both his overtly political judgments and the political consequences of his cultural judgments are available topics for debate. But it won’t do simply to dismiss disinterestedness as a bourgeois fantasy or to declare, as Robert von Hallberg does, that “the Arnoldian notion that criticism or even poetry is ever disinterested is now fully discredited in American academic circles” (2). It is hard to know whether the putatively Arnoldian notion here is that critics have no vested interests or that they can ever be judged to have transcended them. In either case, such confident assertions are as magisterally self-assured as any of Arnold's that they intend to rebuke. And they fail to explain by what means critics can first come to know their interests and their allegiances, if not by some effort at disinterested judgment. To think that “disinterested” is simply a synonym for “a member of my party” is to accept consignment to a windowless prison far more confining than the Palace of Art.

If much of Arnold's poetry remains stuck in a mode of defeated Romanticism, his prose is more resourceful, and in his account of the contemporary language of politics Arnold avails himself of another tradition than that of Romantic interiority. The example of Burke suggests that the critic's experience may be personal without being private or claustrophobic and that the collected observer is not therefore disengaged. Arnold's distrust of the practical, which may at first seem to ally him only with Pater and Wilde, starts from this praise of Burke and also allies him, somewhat unexpectedly, with another commentator who will not be accused of a retreat into aestheticism, John Stuart Mill.

In his 1840 essay, “Coleridge,” written to complement the critique of his mentor, Jeremy Bentham, that he had published in 1838, Mill describes that unlikely pair as “the men who, in their age and country, did most to enforce, by precept and example, the necessity of a philosophy” and remarks “the insufficiency for practical purposes of what the mere practical man calls experience” (120-21). One of the signal failings of the practical man, for Arnold, is his disinclination to subordinate his practical interests to the demands of disinterested judgment. And John Stuart Mill, in spite of the failure of respect for religion that Arnold could never excuse or overlook, ought to have represented to Arnold a model of disinterestedness. In his care to discover the strengths and the true value of opposing points of view, in his avowal in the essay on Coleridge that “‘Lord, enlighten thou our enemies,’ should be the prayer of every true Reformer” (163), in the strength and clarity of mind that carried him, in his Autobiography, through one of the great returns upon the self in Victorian literature, Mill largely succeeded in earning the trust of “the practical man” that Arnold saw as the reward of criticism rightly practiced. And not just of his contemporaries. When Charles Peirce sets out to criticize Mill's logic, he stops to acknowledge the “natural candour” that made Mill a reliable observer even where he was a faulty logician (219).

Edward Alexander presents a comprehensive examination of the relationship between these two writers in his book, Matthew Arnold and John Stuart Mill, and he quotes a passage in which Arnold praises Mill as “a singularly, acute, ardent, and interesting man,” a praise earned largely by the fact that Mill “was capable of following lights that led him away from [his] regular doctrine of philosophical radicalism” (31). I would stress particularly this shared interest in disinterestedness, a shared sense that clarity of vision and judgment is both rare and indispensable, the only foundation of all reasoning and reform. Both Arnold and Mill reserve special praise for the moral and cognitive heroism that can see and hear the truth even amidst the smoke and clamor of received and unexamined opinion. This is at the heart of Arnold's praise of Burke and of his counsel of collectedness. It is also the great positive accomplishment of Bentham to which Mill turns with pleasure after a clear-eyed accounting of his limitations. The subject is the chaos of the English legal system:

It may be fancied by some people that Bentham did an easy thing in merely calling all this absurd, and proving it to be so. But he began the contest a young man, and he had grown old before he had any followers. History will one day refuse to give credit to the intensity of the superstition which, till very lately, protected this mischievous mess from examination or doubt—passed off the charming representations of Blackstone for a just estimate of the English law, and proclaimed the shame of human reason to be the perfection of it.

(103)

Casting Bentham as the brave boy in “The Emperor's New Clothes,” Mill not only does honor to his mentor, but describes the critical vantage that Dickens will occupy in the great public satires of Bleak House and Little Dorrit. In the last sentence of this extract, Mill's language acquires a Dickensian force. And the founding notion—that prejudice and habit operate with such force that the clear-sighted will often be accused of fantastic exaggeration—underlies Dickens's whole project and method. “When people say Dickens exaggerates,” says Santayana, “it seems to me they can have no eyes and no ears. They probably have only notions of what things and people are; they accept them conventionally, at their diplomatic value” (65).

Arnold's refusal of the merely practical point of view is intended not to deny the world, but to see it as it is. Among the many odd twists and turns of argument in “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” is one that takes Arnold into a brief discussion of “this charming institution,” the English Divorce Court, “an institution which perhaps has its practical conveniences, but which in the ideal sphere is so hideous” (3:281). For the reform of this institution Arnold looks forward to a time when criticism has done its work so well that it “may, in English literature be an objection to a proposition that it is absurd,” and thus a time when “it will in the English House of Commons be an objection to an institution that it is an anomaly” (3:282). The critic's task is not to say what form the divorce law should take, but to see and say clearly how the actual falls short of the ideal. When the actual, for all its absurdity, has come to seem natural and inevitable to one party, and when the merely practical persons of another party are bent on the quickest form of possible triumph, the difficult and necessary business of keeping the ideal in view falls to the critic. And here, to repeat a central assertion, “the great safeguard is never to let oneself become abstract, always to retain an intimate and lively consciousness of the truth of what one is saying, and, the moment this fails us, to be sure that something is wrong.”

Intimacy, liveliness, truth: and, by implication, concreteness. These form an alternative vocabulary of praise to the joy-talk of the Preface to Poems and a return to the language of “particularity, precision, and firmness.” Accuracy may be enough, after all, and so may be the full, intimate, and lively presentation of the critic's own mind and experience. The most memorable of the instances of concrete observation in “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” and an odd companion to its other tag phrases, is the newspaper fragment that Arnold seizes and repeats as an incantation: “Wragg is in custody.” He introduces this grim account of a poor girl from the workhouse, accused of murdering her illegitimate child, as an antidote to the “exuberant self-satisfaction” of contemporary political rhetoric. It’s a story that Arnold's poetry could not have accommodated (though Tennyson's might have—the world of “Rizpah” is not so remote), and Arnold draws in telling it upon the combined resources of realistic fiction and Carlylean declamation. He brings Wragg and the dismal Mapperley Hills before us in a few short strokes, and along with them the impoverished and coarsened sensibility that must grow accustomed to such stories in reporting them.

Any undistinguished novelist could have written the few, evocative sentences in which Wragg and her environs are described. But when these sentences are combined with the dithyrambs of Roebuck and Adderley, quoted and placed to such devastating effect, and then with Arnold's own commentary, returning over and again to the bass-note, “Wragg!” the result is a remarkable and powerful passage of criticism. Shaken free of context, the words of Roebuck and Adderley and of Wragg's anonymous chronicler acquire new force and are taken up together into a new structure of feeling:

And “our unrivalled happiness”;—what an element of grimness, bareness, and hideousness mixes with it and blurs it; the workhouse, the dismal Mapperley Hills,—how dismal those who have seen them will remember;—the gloom, the smoke, the cold, the strangled illegitimate child! “I ask you whether, the world over or in past history, there is anything like it?” Perhaps not, one is inclined to answer; but at any rate, in that case, the world is very much to be pitied. And the final touch,—short, bleak and inhuman: Wragg is in custody. The sex lost in the confusion of our unrivalled happiness; or (shall I say?) the superfluous Christian name lopped off by the straightforward vigour of our old Anglo-Saxon breed! There is profit for the spirit in such contrasts as this; criticism serves the cause of perfection by establishing them.

(3:273-74)

“Wragg is in custody.” The phrase serves Arnold as a kind of negative touchstone, a substance of known value to hold up against corrupted uses of language and to expose their true nature. He goes on to suggest that the reader might respond to any future hymns of national self-praise “only by murmuring under his breath, Wragg is in custody.” The phrase is offered as a talisman against canting falsehood, as if some political commentator in the course of the 1984 Presidential campaign had fixed in the public mind the image of one wretched homeless person, to be called up and contemplated at every repetition of the Reagan campaign's “Morning in America” TV-spot. But the same commentator, had he or she wished to act in the spirit of Arnoldian criticism, would have resisted every effort to incorporate the image into an answering Democratic advertisement. The testimony of the critic, though it might incidentally speak for one party or the other, must not abandon to party interest an obligation to bear witness that will outlast the election year. To focus upon the proximate goals of political success is to sacrifice credibility, and, more important, to let oneself become abstract, to submit one's statement to some other test than the intimate conviction of truthfulness. But to recognize this does not constitute either a claim or an ambition to political inconsequence.

It may seem a long way from Wragg to the “touchstones,” which appear by name in the late essay “The Study of Poetry,” and are among the most easily and often mocked of Arnold's critical devices. Few readers can have found these touchstones the handi-kit for critical evaluation that Arnold actually does seem to suggest that they are, and many readers have noted the circularity of the argument that produces them as grounds for judgment. But the touchstones are not dispensed with when their arbitrariness is exposed, and Arnold's use of them in “The Study of Poetry” is more interesting and defensible than our current epistemological sophistication may permit us to see.

Whatever essentialist or ahistorical claims Arnold may seem to make merely by positing the existence of the touchstones, his use of them suggests that value and meaning are always differential. We come into full possession of texts and events, according to Arnold, only by placing them in relationship to what we know already, either by long experience or because this knowledge has imposed itself on us with the undeniable force of Wragg's fate. Wherever the touchstones appear, they are terms of comparison, and wherever Arnold sets himself to describe their value, the emphasis again is upon difference. “If we are thoroughly penetrated by their power,” he says of the touchstones, “we shall find that we have acquired a sense enabling us, whatever poetry may be laid before us, to feel the degree in which a high poetical quality is present or wanting there” (9:170).

Not the “high poetical quality” itself, but a feeling for the degree of its presence or absence. The peculiarity of this emphasis is even more striking in an earlier passage in the essay, before the notion of touchstones has been introduced. “But if [a poet] is a real classic … then the great thing for us is to feel and enjoy his work as deeply as ever we can, and to appreciate the wide difference between it and a work which has not the same high character. This is what is salutary, this is what is formative; this is the great benefit to be got from the study of poetry” (9:165). For this passage, which clearly asks to be read as central and summarizing, the reader's consciousness is the exclusive theater of operations—and the emphasis, again, is on feeling the difference between different orders of poetic accomplishment, as if value were realized only through difference, and as if the animating effects of true judgment were more important than any purely passive benefit to be drawn from a great work in isolation.

These passages return to the many in “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” that locate the value of criticism in the awakened consciousness of the critic. And they echo other, more unstable moments, where Arnold's language undergoes a similar slippage toward idealism. There is a strange sentence, for instance, in the essay on “Wordsworth,” so filled with images of holding fast and coming to rest, with the sense that Wordsworth's poetry offers a stay and a support to the reader. After describing the several forms of delusion that might draw us away from a true sense of what great poetry is, Arnold suggests “the best cure for our delusion,” which “is to let our minds rest upon that great and inexhaustible word life, until we learn to enter into its meaning” (9:46). It seems subversive, though maybe it should not where poetry is the topic, to remind readers so sharply that the only ground they are being offered to rest upon is a word. The invitation to enter into the meaning of “life” stands revealed suddenly as an encounter not with shepherds, or with rocks and stones and trees, or even with Wordsworth, but with a single word, meditated upon and told over.

And yet it is not one word, but many, that the readers of Arnold's “Wordsworth” are offered, in an essay that introduces that practical and substantial accomplishment of criticism, a selection of poems. The touchstones, too, are noteworthy not only for their arbitrariness but for the faith they express in practice over precept. At every turn in “The Study of Poetry,” precepts are obliged to retire before examples, and the final test is to see what works. The touchstone method is an homage to pragmatism, not because readers can take over Arnold's list of passages and set up shop with them, but because it recognizes, in gross terms, that this is how judgment works if it works at all. The circularity of Arnold's reasoning is not a logical mistake, but a recognition that judgment has to start somewhere, and that we start from where we are. Readers with no conscious affinity for Arnold nevertheless proceed by a version of these methods, illustrating by extract what a work under examination is capable of rising or falling to, measuring the value of new work by the internalized standards of other works read and admired. It is possible to set aside a great deal of Arnold's program in “The Study of Poetry,” and nearly all of his prophecies, and still find its condensed account of critical judgment truer to experience than those of any number of canon-busting exposés. More to the point, most of those same exposés, to the extent that they engage in literary interpretation and advocacy at all, can be shown to proceed by methods of demonstration and evaluation that are recognizably Arnoldian.

Late in his career, Arnold turned explicitly to the novel, to Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, and his essay on that novel affords him an opportunity for an impressive, if unacknowledged, return upon himself. The whole essay bears belated witness to the fact that literary greatness in the nineteenth century has taken a new and shaggy form. Arnold praises the practice of Tolstoy's fiction over his later philosophy, taking a position consistent with the essay on “Wordsworth” and “The Study of Poetry,” but also demonstrating his own readiness to respond to greatness where he finds it, even if it does not fit the literary-historical scheme that he has mapped out elsewhere in his writings. In one passage, he describes the greatness of Tolstoy's novel in terms that amount to a simple retraction of most of the argument of the Preface to Poems. “But the truth is we are not to take Anna Karenina as a work of art; we are to take it as a piece of life. A piece of life it is. The author has not invented and combined it, he has seen it; it has all happened before his inward eye, and it was in this wise that it happened” (11:285). A contemporary reader will notice first the lack of theoretical sophistication with which Arnold comes to rest upon that word “life” and sets it over against mere art. “History” now, rather than “life,” is the preferred honorific and the master term of invidious comparison. But Arnold's “life” functions rather differently, and the invocation of the “inward eye” makes it clear that he is distinguishing between two kinds of art. His homage to the “life” of Anna Karenina is noteworthy not just as a relatively early attempt to define the Tolstoyan, but as an abandonment of the classical standard of great ideas embodied in great actions. Arnold describes in this passage the characteristic method of contemporary literature, a realism for which the crucial distinction is located somewhere else than between realms presumptively within and without. And he confesses implicitly his indebtedness to another contemporary, John Ruskin, echoing closely this passage from Book 3 of Modern Painters:

All the great men see what they paint before they paint it,—see it in a perfectly passive manner,—cannot help seeing it if they would; whether in their mind's eye, or in bodily fact, does not matter; very often the mental vision is, I believe, in men of imagination, clearer than the bodily one; but vision it is, of one kind or another,—the whole scene, character, or incident passing before them as in second sight, whether they will or no, and requiring them to paint it as they see it … it being to them in its own kind and degree always a true vision or Apocalypse, and invariably accompanied in their hearts by a feeling correspondent to the words,—“Write the things which thou hast seen, and the things which are.”

(5:114)

Or, as Arnold had said in praising Burke: the true critic, like Balaam, must be “unable to speak anything but what the Lord has put in [his] mouth” (3:267-68).

Such inspired accuracy of vision is rare, and it is the sine qua non of literary greatness, its presence or absence rendering secondary the distinctions between criticism and creation, or between the mirror and the lamp. Even when the objects of description are one's own thoughts, it is no easy matter to get them down as they really are. Thirty years earlier, struggling to write out his feelings to Arthur Clough, Arnold had complained in a letter of the difficulty of plain statement: “One endeavors to write deliberately out what is one's mind, without any veils of flippancy levity metaphor or demi-mot, and one succeeds only in putting on the paper a string of dreary dead sentences that correspond to nothing in one's inmost heart or mind, and only represent themselves” (129-30). Sentences that only represent themselves: this might be a postmodernist complaint, or, more likely, a postmodernist boast, but it is closer in time and spirit to the modernist rebellion against poetic diction. A relevant passage for comparison is from Yeats's “Reveries over Childhood and Youth”: “I tried … to write out of my emotions exactly as they came to me in life, not changing them to make them more beautiful. … Yet when I re-read those early poems which gave me so much trouble, I find little but romantic convention, unconscious drama” (Autobiography 68-69). Both of these passages describe the young writer's struggle for a voice of his own. The point of placing Arnold at the scene of this struggle is not just to place his critical prose more clearly into the context of Victorian literature, but to underline the intimacy and continuity between Victorian and modern realisms, between the mysteriously difficult critical and novelistic project of seeing things as they are and the mysteriously difficult lyric project of saying things as they are.

I am not an Arnoldian, and there is much in his collected works that I cannot read with pleasure or agreement. But he is by no means the predictable and doctrine-mongering writer of many recent polemics, and reading him is a more varied and surprising experience than could be inferred from most recent accounts. In his effort to describe the awkward predicaments of modern literature and criticism, Arnold is exemplary and, in many ways, unsuperseded. He cannot establish for us the sure grounds of judgment that we might want, but perhaps he can cure us, if not of wanting them, then of thinking that we must have them in order to proceed. Here is a final passage, from Robert Garis writing about the ballets of George Balanchine: “There is something not merely subjective, something connected with our own survival, in trying to establish the identity of things that interest us, including works of art” (34). For those who cannot abandon the desire to get things right, even after the embarrassing acknowledgment that this rightness will always rest on the shaky, contested ground of private judgment, Arnold is the prose laureate of both our ambition and our embarrassment.

Works Cited

Alexander, Edward. Matthew Arnold and John Stuart Mill. New York: Columbia UP, 1965.

Arnold, Matthew. Collected Prose Works. 11 vols. Ed. R. H. Super. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1960-77.

———. The Letters of Matthew Arnold to Arthur Hugh Clough. Ed. H. F. Lowry. London: Oxford UP, 1983.

Garis, Robert. “The Dancer and the Dance; Balanchine: Change, Revival, and Survival.” Raritan 5 (1985): 1-34.

Harris, Wendell. “The Continuously Creative Function of Arnoldian Criticism.” Victorian Poetry 26 (1988): 117-34.

Mill, John Stuart. Essays on Ethics, Religion, and Society. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1969.

Peirce, Charles Sanders. Philosophical Writings of Peirce. Ed. Justus Buchler. New York: Dover P, 1955.

Poirier, Richard. The Renewal of Literature. New York: Random House, 1988.

Ruskin, John. The Works of John Ruskin. 39 vols. Ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. London: George Allen, 1903.

Santayana, George. Soliloquies in England. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1923.

von Hallberg, Robert. Politics and Poetic Value. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.

Williams, Raymond. Politics and Letters. London: New Left Books, 1979.

Wilson, Edmund. The Triple Thinkers. New York: Oxford UP, 1948.

Yeats, William Butler. The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats. New York: Macmillan, 1965.