SOURCE: Perkins, David. “Arnold and the Function of Literature.” ELH 18 (1951): 287-309.

[In the following essay, Perkins asserts that Arnold's value as a literary and cultural critic lies in his revitalization of essentially classical notions at a time when modern society was most in need of them.]

I

CULTURE AS PROCESS AND IDEAL

It is perhaps a platitude that man's study both of himself and of the world he lives in has become increasingly compartmentalized; and that diverse, specialized studies have each tended to exercise and develop one particular facet of the mind, often at the expense of others. On the other hand, the general development of man's mind and emotional character—the development, to use the classical term, of the “total man”—has traditionally stood out as the most challenging and fundamental aim of human culture; and it is this aim that inspired the ancient classical belief in the unique value of the humanities, The need for such a development of human nature has become more desperate during the past century. It is to the genuine credit of Matthew Arnold that, shrewdly assessing the complex conditions that were beginning to confront human beings during the later nineteenth century, he should have tried so courageously and persistently to bring back to the attention of thinking people the classical ideal of education and the place of literature in fulfilling this ideal. We are only now beginning to recognize his success; for his effect has been gradual and indirect rather than clear-cut and obvious. The purpose of this essay is not the complicated historical task of trying to trace out the influence of Arnold—an influence that has been cumulative and often labyrinthine. Instead, the purpose is to unify Arnold's principles, scattered as they often are through various writings; and to develop and interpret their ramifications in the light of the classical ideals to which he subscribed.

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Throughout Arnold's writings, both the basic starting-point and the ultimate ideal are to be found in his provocative and flexible conception of what constitutes human culture. Arnold's justification of the enormous importance of literature as a human pursuit, and his emphasis on evaluating and criticizing works of literature in the light of fundamental ends, are founded on this central, guiding concern: what constitutes human culture in its highest form, and what is most valuable in assisting man to attain it. (Culture, as Arnold interprets it, is the active employment of the total mind and personality in order, first of all, to discover the true purpose and goal of human life, and then to move actively towards this end. He believed that the aim of human life is to discover the ideal human character, man's “best self,” to use his phrase; and, in and through discovering this ideal, to form oneself in accordance with it. This activity and movement which comprises culture has, as its end, the growing or ripening into the ideal human character. Thus culture may be described as man shaping his best self.)

To say that culture is an active employment of the mind in attaining so comprehensive a purpose at once distinguishes the word from many of its generally accepted meanings, particularly at a time such as the present when, in practice if not always in theory, liberal education has been transformed into the passive memorizing of sheer fact and of what Whitehead calls “inert ideas.” For to load oneself with masses of undigested, unrelated, and hence not comprehended facts, is not to acquire culture. Neither the ability to list the paintings of Perugino, for example, nor the passive possession of any other body of knowledge, indicates the cultured personality. For culture, being a directed activity of mind, “consists,” as Arnold says, “in becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances.”¹ Information is to be valued to the degree that it nourishes and directs this process of becoming—“virtue consisting,” as Aristotle said, in actively “rejoicing, loving and hating aright.”² Arnold, in his ideal of human “perfection,” is elaborating the Greek belief that the human ideal is to be found in unique patterns, or paradeigma; for the Greeks believed that the shaping and developing of the mind and character is to be achieved through the deliberate imitation of a model. They were confident, as Werner Jaeger says, that “imitation … influences the character of the imitator. All imitation means changing one's soul—that is, abandoning its own form for the moment, and assimilating it to the character of the model.”³ But in accepting this premise, Arnold emphasized that the human ideal itself consists in a never-ending development or growth. In fact, he considered it “fatal” to have the “notion of possessing, even in the most precious words or standards, the one thing needful, of having in them, once for all, a full and sufficient measure of light to guide us, and of there being no duty left for us except to make our practice square exactly with them.”⁴ For, to begin with, if the model can be attained, there may always be limitations inherent in it; and one's development may be checked by these limitations. Arnold's suspicion of rigid systems of social organization would be an example of his fear lest limitations might disclose themselves in any system, and therefore make it undesirable as a permanent thing. If, on the other hand, the model is such that it cannot be attained, the imitator may despair, and even cease trying to approximate his model.

The process of development desired is one that is characterized by an increasing ability to “see things as they are,” and also to respond emotionally to this awareness. In discussing the habits of mind necessary, Arnold describes those that apply to the reaching for experience by the term “curiosity,” while he suggests those that permit an open receptivity to knowledge by the words “disinterestedness” and “flexibility.” “Curiosity,” as Arnold uses the term, may be loosely defined as an appetite for possessing true ideas about the nature of things. It is, as he says, “a desire after the things of the mind simply for their own sakes and for the pleasure of seeing them as they are …”⁵ The intellectually curious mind tends more and more to come to the truth about things, and this swelling knowledge insensibly but inevitably teaches and guides one's judgments in a truer direction. To “see things as they are,” however, implies more than a vision of the actual process and working of events. We may add that it implies an ability to perceive a thing in all of its possible relationships with other things. To see the entity, object, or event as it fits in with other things and is adjusted to them involves an ability to estimate value and proportion—to give due weight and importance to the thing as it exists and functions in its larger context. In other words, a true perception of events also includes a vision of the actual worth of what is being seen. “Curiosity” is therefore characterized by the urge to discover and relish whatever is best in the concrete world.

A further necessary quality of mind is what Arnold calls “disinterestedness.” The term applies to the “free play of consciousness”⁶ on whatever it meets:—a free play of mind not obstructed by an undue concern for immediate practical ends. Arnold, of course, was far from indifferent to practical aims; much of his life was devoted to working for them. He wished to emphasize, however, that a realistic and total understanding of man's experience is man's primary purpose; and that such a grasp or understanding is, in fact, indispensable as a basis in order to effect any worth-while and lasting reform. To think almost entirely in terms of immediate practical activity, even the practical activity of shaping society, may give us a confined and myopic view, whereas an unhampered play of mind would disclose a far larger range of potentialities. No one immediate, practical aim should so take precedence as to block the freest possible “play of consciousness.” But a developing awareness of reality may also be inhibited by other habits of mind besides an undue concern with immediate, practical ends. Calcified opinions, pre-conceptions that have hardened into prejudices and operate in the mind as psychological blocks, or an iron frame of reference for evaluating, ordering, and stratifying experience, may impede the desired progress or growth. Hence the need for “flexibility”—to “be indeed the ‘ondoyant et divers,’ the undulating and diverse being of Montaigne.”⁷ This ideal of flexibility, as Arnold understands it, finds eloquent expression in his essays On Translating Homer, and especially in his “Speech at Eton,” where he holds up the “happy and gracious flexibility” of the Athenian mind as an ideal for which to strive—a flexibility characterized by “Lucidity of thought, clearness and propriety of language, freedom from prejudice and freedom from stiffness, openness of mind.”⁸ We may use our opinions as a basis for action, but must not cling to them as a refuge. When, by acquiring new knowledge or a more informed awareness, we find our opinions inadequate, we should actively look for more adequate premises and values. To do so is to enlarge the range of our curiosity, and to be more openly receptive to new ideas about experience.

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Culture, or the process of man shaping his “best self,” thus involves, first of all, an activity of mind that is “curious,” “disinterested,” and “flexibile”—an activity of mind that is open to reality in every way possible, and that seeks, in Lear's phrase, to “see how this world goes.” But merely to see the truth is not enough. We must take this perception into ourselves. We must dwell on it, and make it a part of our habitual response. We must not only “say as a matter of words” but must really “perceive and feel that it is so.”⁹ It is only thus that awareness of the truth will inform and direct us as living, active beings. We must, in short, add Gloucester's reply to Lear: “I see it feelingly.”

For the attainment of culture—man developing into his “best self”—includes not only a progressive growth in realizing or knowing what is best in the world about us. It also implies the ability to feel and act in accordance with this awareness. We should love what is good, desire to assimilate it, and attempt, in our own character and actions, to manifest and exemplify it concretely. Knowledge, in other words, finds its consummation or completion in active fulfillment, or, in Aristotle's definition of virtue, in actively “rejoicing, loving, and hating aright.” In order to be able to fulfill his potentiality, therefore, the human being must be capable of quick, vigorous, and full emotion. Although the emotion must be directed by reason, yet reason is powerless except as it is sustained and completed by feeling. Our emotional nature, however, must be illuminated, led, and informed by our intelligence, by as full a mental awareness of value as possible. We must, therefore, deliberately arouse or bridle our desires in accordance with the true worth of the object so far as we can descry it. We have only, as Pythagoras said, to “Pitch upon that course of life which is most excellent, and custom will render it the most delightful.” Or, as Arnold puts it, the “application of emotion to morality”—the application of feeling to what we recognize as valuable—is the same process by which we come to feel much about any matter whatever: that is, “By dwelling upon it, by staying our thoughts upon it, by having it perpetually in our mind.”¹⁰ It is by directing our desires in this way, by assimilating ourselves actively with what we have described as good and valuable, that we become really free. For in doing so, we free our emotional nature from being the slave, the conditioned reflex, of chance custom or casual association. And this freedom is attained by deliberately “raising oneself out of the flux of things … by concentrating oneself, making order in the chaos of one's impressions, by attending to one impression rather than the other.”¹¹ The standpoint is similar to Whitehead's belief that “The emergence of some actual value depends upon limitation which excludes neutralizing cross-lights.”¹² To concentrate and direct one's desires to whatever is good or valuable in the concrete world—as distinguished from repressing or destroying desire—heightens and intensifies one's awareness of the valued object, while at the same time it integrates the individual, uniting all of his various facets of responding,—feeling or desire with reason or insight,—and thus gives him serenity.

We may interpret Arnold's point of view, then, by saying that, in the truly cultured personality, emotion and value-judgment would be indissolubly fused together. There would be no quarrel between desire and intelligence. For desire would follow, carry out, and complete intelligence by intensifying rational awareness. Value judgments, moreover, would then be felt as an emotion, applied instantaneously, and, in a new experience, would immediately inform our emotional reactions. One would, in short, immediately love what one knew to be good. And this integration of desire and intelligence, this union of all the facets of human response in moving towards the same object and the same end, constitutes the harmony, “beauty,” or, in another term of Arnold's, the “sweetness” of human character. Awareness, intelligence, or “light” is not effective, is not fulfilled, if it is crossed, rather than completed, by emotional desire. The growing and developing that comprises culture must be a progress in felt awareness. Hence “the Greek word εὐϕνία, a finely tempered nature, gives exactly the notion of perfection as culture brings us to conceive it”: it is a perfection characterized by an “harmonious expansion of all the powers which make the beauty and worth of human nature …”¹³

II

LITERATURE AND THE INTERPRETATION OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE

If man's primary aim is to exemplify in himself the ideal that culture suggests, his activities should be valued to the extent that they contribute to this end. It is on this basis that the Greeks had founded their justification of the humanities in general, and of the arts in particular. For because of its ability to awaken and develop man's total capacity for reacting—emotional as well as intellectual—the Greeks believed that art possesses a unique power to form the human mind and character. On this classical conviction Arnold bases his own confidence in the humanities, especially poetry, as the most effective means of informing and developing what he, in common with classical writers, called the “whole man”—that is, man as a total process of desiring, feeling, and thinking—towards the end of seeing “things as in themselves they really are” and reacting accordingly.

As the material or subject-matter of an area of activity becomes effective in communicating the actual nature of events—effective, for example, by the range and diversity of the experiences it deals with, or by closely approximating the fluidity and concreteness of life itself, or by its highlighting of what is significant and valuable in life,—to the extent that an area of human activity does this, it becomes desirable and profitable in ultimate terms. Now poetry, as Arnold said, “is nothing less than the most perfect speech of man, that in which he comes nearest to being able to utter the truth.” Poetry—considered as the totality of poems written—can deal with an immense range and diversity of human experience. Indeed, its range is potentially as broad as that of human speech itself. For poetry, at its best, is “simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.”¹⁴ Ideally speaking, therefore, the possible range of poetry is almost as wide as that of human experience. Whatever can be expressed through words, in fact, is raw material for poetry. And even what cannot be easily articulated in ordinary speech is also there, as a challenge, for poetry to try—through metaphor, nuance, or suggestion—to communicate. Through poetry, one may possibly attain a familiarity with even the most intangible subjects, as for example, the moods, character, and reach of the human mind. For “by knowing letters,” as Arnold says, “we become acquainted not only with the history, but also with the scope and powers of the instruments men employ in thinking and speaking.”¹⁵

This standpoint may be carried even further by adding that, as qualities or characteristics become increasingly fluid and elusive to the ordinary, rigid categories of logical formulae or of straight-forward description, poetry—by trying to seize and suggest these qualities through analogy—begins to rise even more highly in value as a mode of catching and transcribing the human awareness and feeling of things. Finally, the range and diversity possible to poetry are also indicated by the most casual historical survey of what it has included as its subject-matter. In the drama, epic, lyric, satire, and many other forms, poetry has presented human experiences—as well as human reactions to experience—in all their complexity and diversity. It is able to comprehend both the wrath of Achilles and the humility of a chastened Lear, to communicate Wordsworth's reactions to a rainbow and John Donne's fear of his approaching damnation.

In treating its wide range of subject-matter, however, poetry does not merely repeat or mirror the multiplicity of detail we ordinarily encounter. Instead it can select and arrange its material in such a way that the general pattern, meaning, and significance potentially in it are drawn out and emphasized. Accordingly, poetry, as Aristotle had said, “is a more philosophical and higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular.”¹⁶ For history (except as it rises into philosophical or poetic interpretation) tends, if it renders a strict account, to present the chaotic and formless sequence of events in the order that they actually occurred. As Sir Philip Sidney remarked, in speaking of the historian as contrasted with the poet, “Many times he must tell events, whereof he can yield no cause.”¹⁷ But the drama, once its original conventions have been established, tries to draw out the form, the end-result, the meaning of the action it is showing. It therefore selects or omits detail, rearranges chronology, and treats each part as it contributes to the final point or consummation. The “soul” or “form” of the drama, as Aristotle observed, consists in its internal coherence and interconnection of plot, by which it seeks to clarify the cause and effect relationship between events, and to indicate the significance, the universal applicability, of what has occurred. Poetry, then, may join with history in setting forth what does happen; but at its best its potential range is wider because, not being chained to their actual detail and sequence, it has more freedom, as Sir Philip Sidney said, in showing the probable outcome of events and in interpreting them.

In a similar way, poetry is able to include as its subject-matter the character and human significance of the “great results of the modern scientific study,”¹⁸ together with the fruits of other studies. It can be said, in other words, to comprehend what is most important in the results, the insights, gained from them. Hence Arnold quotes Wordsworth who “finely and truly calls poetry ‘the breadth and finer spirit of all knowledge.’” In thus treating ideas culled from different areas of activity, poetry tends to enlarge, round out, and “complete” human knowledge in a way that an exclusive devotion to more restricted fields cannot do. Hence “the student of the natural sciences only,” or of other specialized studies only, “will probably be unsatisfied, or at any rate incomplete, and even more incomplete than the student of humane letters only.”¹⁹

Moreover, the subject-matter of poetry is characterized not only by range and diversity but also by its vivid concreteness. It does not construct abstractions from life and proceed to manipulate them. Arnold is far from explicit on this point. But we may interpret his isolated statements about the subject-matter of poetry by reminding ourselves of Aristotle's belief that poetry, at its best, “imitates” the actual form and functioning of concrete experience, while at the same time drawing out from this concrete experience the general import. It expresses, as Arnold said, “with magical felicity the physiognomy and movement of the outward world.” It awakens “in us a wonderfully full, new, and intimate sense” of things as they are, so that “we feel ourselves to be in contact with the essential nature of those objects.”²⁰ At the same time that it presents the concrete, it also draws out and illuminates the universal import emerging from the actual experience. It thus, to use Whitehead's phrase, shows “concrete fact with a high light thrown on what is relevant to its preciousness.”²¹ In other words, poetry deals not only with the actual details of life, as history does; not only with ideas, as do the various branches of philosophy. But, in its highest function, poetry is capable of relating ideas to concrete life, of showing them as they are rooted in experience, and depicting them in the living process of their applicability. Arnold criticizes “didactic” poetry, for example, because, although it expresses ideas, its ideas are not anchored in concrete life. To compose openly “moral and didactic poems … brings us but a very little way in poetry.”²² Hence he disparages such a passage as this from Wordsworth:

                                                                                          One adequate support
For the calamities of mortal life
Exists, one only;—an assured belief
That the procession of our fate, howe'er
Sad or disturb'd, is ordered by a Being
Of infinite benevolence and power …

The passage is too abstract. Its ideas are not fused with concrete circumstance. On the other hand a poetry which bases its appeal only on sensuous delight, a poetry which interprets only what Arnold calls “the natural world,” no matter how concrete that poetry may be, does not achieve the highest excellence. For poetry is not only the “interpretess of the natural world”; it must also be “the interpretess of the moral world.”²³

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Poetry, then, may be said to have an almost unrivalled area of experience open before it and ready to exploit. Furthermore, it can communicate that experience in such a way as to enable the reader to react to objects and events as they actually exist in the concrete world. Also poetry has the power of suggesting or indicating the universal import or significance of that experience. To study poetry, then, is a vital way of deepening the experience of living. And by enlarging and deepening the content of one's experience, the material or subject-matter of poetry may be said to have a moral significance. For poetry, unless it is merely formalistic, necessarily occupies itself with human experiences and human reactions to experience. Its subject is “that great and inexhaustible word life.”²⁴ Furthermore, as we have noted, the best poetry brings out and emphasizes the actual value and worth of this experience. Thus by implication poetry treats the “question, how to live,” and therefore assumes an important moral significance. Moreover, poetry corresponds to human experience by presenting its moral evaluation not as an abstraction but as a vital process of reacting to concrete objects and situations. In the drama, certain aspects of character, for example, emerge as good and valuable in the actual interplay of circumstance and event, while lyric poetry may emphasize and hence evaluate experiences which the poet feels significant. Poetry thus contributes and ministers to the ideal of culture as an active process of responding, not to abstractions, but to the concrete situations which, in actual life, we must deal with and evaluate.

We may also remind ourselves that the experiences conveyed through poetry are necessarily unified and—if the poem is successful—harmonized in the light of the poet's intention or point of view. In other words, poetry offers a unified rendition of things so that they constitute a significant experience. For a human experience becomes genuine and meaningful as it is known and felt as a unit. We view something as an experience when the various parts that make it up are all fused together, are all blended or melted into a whole, each part taking on significance because it fits organically into a central, emerging import, instead of existing as an isolated fragment. So, in a successful work of art, there is a blending together of all the parts towards an emerging point or import—into symmetry of form, unity of design or plot, into a focal consummation. There are, in fact, a continuity and completeness in that fusing together of different impressions, thoughts, and feelings that jell into what we call an experience. The synthesizing and harmonizing of diverse elements into something that is itself a more meaningful and penetrating experience constitutes the main beauty of a poem. Furthermore, a landscape, for example, becomes beautiful only when the mind can discover order and harmony in its colors and forms. Beauty in a work of art, in external nature, in a person, is the shaping or centralizing of matter into form, the ordering of experience into an harmonious unity. It consists, as Coleridge said, in “the unity of the manifold, the coalescence of the diverse.”²⁵ It is perhaps in this way that one may interpret and ramify Arnold's remark that “The grand work of literary genius is a work of synthesis and exposition.”²⁶

Poetry, then, ideally aims to bring into a more vital focus the order and harmony that may underly our experience, so that the particular elements that comprise the experience are seen as members of the larger context which is the total experience. Each element is thus seen in its value and relative significance for the larger context, and is given its due proportion and weight, and thus harmonized into the whole. And this is done to the degree that poetry wisely, sensitively, and imaginatively evaluates the elements of experience, reduces them to their proper harmony, their proper order of importance—in other words, to the degree that its arrangement corresponds with the real order, importance, and proportion potentially found in concrete life. Sentimental poetry, for example, attributes a false or excessive value to an experience. But in the best poetry, it should be repeated, the poetic order emphasizes and conforms with the actual order. This harmony, corresponding with reality, is, then, the beauty of the poem, so that “to see things in their beauty is to see things in their truth”; or, as Arnold elsewhere put it, beauty “is only truth seen from another side”:²⁷ it is truth sensed in a massive, completed, unified experience. Finally, by relating and harmonizing its materials, including ideas, into a unified experience, poetry enables us to possess these materials and ideas in a utilizable form—in such a form that they can be “applied to life.” For poetry can throw experience and ideas into fresh combinations. It can present, that is, the same experience or reaction as it rises from or applies to different circumstances, just as in actual life we must apply our knowledge, not to abstract propositions, but to concrete, shifting, and varying circumstances. Poetry, in other words, relates “our knowledge to our sense for conduct.”

III

LITERATURE AND THE FORMATIVE DEVELOPING OF HUMAN NATURE

If the aim is to act in accordance with an end, one must first feel and be in accordance with it. The necessary “motive-power” to be and feel thus can be secured, as Arnold recognized, only through the “elemental power of sympathy and emotion.” On the other hand, emotion is blind and meaningless except as “reason” gives it “a clue for directing its exertion.” The passions of man, left to themselves, “can produce only confusion and misery.” They must be informed: “these multitudinous, swarming, eager, and incessant impulses,” must be brought “into obedience to the central tendency.”²⁸ For Arnold shares the classical conviction, as he states, that “man's first impulses,” far from being his “natural” self, are usually opposed to “the real law of his being.” The “real law,” the true nature and form, is that which only the fullest and most unobstructed development would permit: a rounded, harmonious development of the “total man.” To develop, therefore, and inform the emotional resources and desires of man,—the areas of response from which man's motivations and actions derive their propelling force—is of the highest value in attaining that way of reacting, desiring, and evaluating that constitutes “culture.” And it is an end that cannot be too strongly held before the mind at the present day, when analytic inquiry is developed in one direction and man's emotional nature is either shut off, compartmentalized, or allowed to develop as mere chance happens to dictate. Now, the very concreteness of the subject matter of poetry provides a vivid appeal to emotion. Feeling or desire is not usually caught up by abstractions, but must move towards a concretely existing object. Furthermore, there are certain objects or events which are able, more than others, to evoke a sustained emotion or concern; and poetry, at its best, tends to exploit those situations which most universally do so. Hence, as Arnold says, those “actions are the most excellent” as subjects for poetry “which most powerfully appeal to the great primary human affections: to those elementary feelings which subsist permanently in the race, and which are independent of time.”²⁹

Although the subject matter of poetry may possess emotional appeal, it is particularly by the power of its style that poetry calls forth and guides the feelings. Now Arnold does not analyze in explicit terms the effect of style. But he does speak of style, in a suggestive phrase, as the effective “kneading, heightening, and recasting” of material.³⁰ One may carry the implications of this phrase further by defining style as the economical and imaginative bending or shaping of material to achieve a significant end—an end that emerges organically through and by means of the materials. In poetry, the most usual purpose and result of style is to arouse emotional response. Such aspects of poetic style, for example, as rhetorical structure, rhythm or meter, and imagery have this effect. But also, by the working of poetic style, an activity of mind is induced in the reader so that he himself actually participates in the experiences which are the subject matter of poetry. The use of symbols and suggestiveness would be examples of qualities of poetic style which tend to encourage and arouse this participation.

Style, then, the mere arrangement of the material, “that peculiar kneading, heightening, and recasting” of whatever the artist works with, can by itself arouse emotion. We find the clearest example of this in the case of music; for here the material by itself, and in disconnection,—that is, isolated or separate sounds,—has virtually no significance and cannot usually by itself cause meaningful emotion. But when its material has been “kneaded” or arranged into form, as, for example, into the form of a fugue, music becomes capable of arousing intense emotion. So also in poetry the mere arrangement of its material—through suggestion of phrase, metaphoric analogy, and metrical sound,—is capable of moving us. The rhetorical structure of a poem can, in some cases, almost by itself stir the emotions. By rhetorical structure is meant the arrangement of its ideas, the fitting of clause to clause, and of sentence to sentence. Another aspect of poetic style which may be mentioned would be rhythm or meter. This also, considered in disconnection, is capable of arousing emotion, as is shown by the effect of a throbbing drum. In good poetry rhythm or meter joins in with other qualities of style in contributing to the emotional impact of the poem. “As far as meter acts in and for itself,” as Coleridge said, “it tends to increase the vivacity and susceptibility both of the general feelings and of the attention.”³¹ Meter, that is, sets up repeating patterns of emphasis which leave the reader in a continuing state of expectation. But meter also assists in steadying the flow of emotion: it gives, Arnold felt, a unifying “precision and emphasis,” permitting the “thought and emotion [to] swell higher and higher without overflowing their boundaries.” It thus contributes to that “certain pressure of emotion,” that “ever-surging, yet bridled, excitement” which gives effective power to poetic style.³² Another aspect of poetic style would be imagery; and this, too, although it also fulfills many other functions in poetry, can contribute to the emotional impact of a poem. Whether by nature, by education, or by convention, emotion, in some kind or degree, is attached to almost every concrete fact with which we are familiar. In good poetry, concrete facts, images, are, often sub-consciously, selected and used for the emotion usually attached to them, and, in the form of the poem, they are connected with other images, with the general subject, and with all that goes into the poem.

In the poetic transmuting of experience into form by the power of style, poetry, as has been said, need not transcribe experience in its multiplicity of detail. Rather the poet is able to concentrate, condense, and refine concrete experience to its significant essence. In the form of poetry, he is able to synthesize and harmonize the distillation or tincture of experience—to offer, as Wordsworth said, “the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge.” In so doing, he sets up an activity of mind in the reader, leading him to draw out the full import of the poem by the active use of his own imagination. It is particularly by the use of such aspects of style as symbolism and suggestion that the poet is able to distill experience. By the use of a symbol, a poet concentrates a welter of concrete fact and ideas into a single form. In this way he increases the range of his poem. He finds himself able to include more of reality in it. At the same time, however, the meaning and effect of the symbol is lost unless the reader is able, by the working of what romantic critics called the “imagination,” to understand and give body to the symbol. In other words, the symbol takes on significance only to the extent that the reader actively exercises his mind upon it. In a similar way poetic suggestion may be said to induce an activity of mind. It is probably this quality to which Arnold refers when he speaks of what he calls “magic of style.” Poetic suggestion involves the use of the beginning of an idea or fact in order to call forth in the reader that idea or fact in its completeness. Suggestion enables the poet to concentrate experience without qualitatively reducing the amount of experience presented; for although only the vestige of an experience exists in the poem, yet through suggestion, the entire experience exists in the mind of the reader. For example when Lear cries, “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!” we have specifically in the poem only Lear's reaction to the storm; but, by suggestion, the complete storm is also presented—rain, thunder, and wind—in addition to Lear's reaction. A greater activity of mind is stimulated by this use of suggestion. The reader, by imaginatively relating Lear's reaction to the storm with his own past experience, re-creates the storm in his own mind. Arnold comes close to implying as much in briefly remarking that through “magic of style” the poet “inspires and enables his reader in some sort to create after him.”³³

The final result of this emotional arousal and induced activity of mind is a more effective communication of the subject-matter of poetry. For the arousal of emotion with reference to an object brings the reader to a more intense and complete awareness of that object than would otherwise be the case. Although communication is usually achieved through the reason and understanding, yet this transmitting may be blocked or interfered with if the desires and feelings are moving in contrary directions. But poetry, through securing the agreement of the feelings to what is being imparted, communicates by directing itself to man's total responding nature. In this sense, too, one may support Arnold's belief that “Letters will call out” our “being at more points,” and will make us “live more.” For if man's emotional nature, together with his other capacities (and the weakness of music is that it cannot directly engage much beyond emotion), is reacting to reality, that awareness will be more genuine and complete than it would be without emotion. Poetry, as John Dennis has said, “attains its final end, which is the reforming of the minds of men, by exciting passion. … All instruction whatever depends upon Passion.”³⁴

2

We are amply justified, therefore, in saying that, through Arnold, we are led back to the great classical conception of art as formative. This is a conception, moreover, to which we increasingly need to adhere as it becomes more difficult to remember that “culture,” as Whitehead says, is an “activity of mind.” For through its power of style, poetry, in its more effective form, is able to bring about a joining or assimilating of the mind of the reader with the action of the poem. Poetry, that is, exploits the natural and inherent tendency of the mind to identify and conform itself with whatever is held up before it,—the tendency which the Greeks called mimesis or imitation,—by bringing about an active participation in the subject matter or life of the poem. Poetry, that is, by its power of style, particularly by symbol and suggestion, awakens the mind to an active relating of what it is presently experiencing,—the particular poem,—with whatever is relevant in the past experience of the individual. Furthermore, by arousing emotion and directing it towards the subject matter of the poem, poetry leads us into an active assimilating with the life of the poem. It causes us to participate in what is happening in the poem. For feeling must have an object. We are not merely “angry,” but we are “angry with.” We do not merely “love,” but we “love something.” Thus emotion fulfills its potentiality, and completes itself, to the extent that it assimilates or unites with what is outside. But this participating is an activity of mind which has for its result a sympathetic re-creating or experiencing, on the part of the reader, of the subject matter of the poem. In bringing about this re-creating poetry communicates with impressive effect. For something can be said to be truly known only when the mind has acted upon it. Although the thought of other people may be the raw material of our ideas, and even, in a few circumstances, such as examinations, the immediate goal and end of our thinking, yet we do not actively possess an idea unless we have created or re-created it for ourselves. Similarly, we do not have an experience until we have felt it in ourselves. Poetry, by waking the mind to an active participating in the experience it is presenting, causes us to feel that experience in ourselves. In doing so it communicates with a directness and force which can not be attained by studies which do not call forth an active participation.

But the primary gain is not in the acquiring of this or that particular idea, insight, or attitude from poetry. It arises from the formative exercising and developing of our active ability to sympathize, to attain a heightened “susceptibility to impressions,” to use a phrase of Arnold's—a susceptibility that increases our ability to feel discriminatingly, to distinguish value and meaning—and hence moral worth—with more tact and vitality. We are thus better prepared for the actual need of living, which is to “see things as in themselves they really are,” when we are suddenly confronted with them, so that we are able to feel at once their import, and to be motivated accordingly. The most essential profit, then, is not in the particular “explanations” that poetry offers so much as a more sensitive and developed power of “dealing with things”—that active ability to estimate and react truly which comprises culture. One may in this way interpret Arnold's belief that poetry can give us a “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.”

Hence we may reassert as even more relevant to the present day Arnold's belief that the need for poetry—in the broadest sense of the word “poetry”—increases to the degree that the specialized dividing up of knowledge increases. Indeed, precisely this belief has been ardently restated in our own generation by one of the leading philosophers of science, Alfred North Whitehead. For particularized studies and sciences—unless they are “completed” by poetic realization, and thus related to “our sense for conduct” and our habitual feelings—do not “give us this intimate sense of objects as the interpretations of poetry give it; they appeal to a limited faculty, and not to the whole man.”³⁵ But the developing of the “whole man” is the primary educative aim. “Our only perfection is our totality.” The greatest need for the “modern spirit” is not the specialized development of “the senses and understanding, nor the heart and imagination; it is the imaginative reason.” Hence, without poetry, “Science”—or specialized and professionalized knowledge generally—will be “incomplete.”³⁶

3

Style in art, then, emerges or arises from the synthesizing of diverse objects, moral evaluations, ideas and feelings into an integrated unity or form which has impact and importance. By being related and harmonized, and hence by contributing to the total effect and import of the work of art, each separate part is seen to have a deeper significance and meaning than it would have as a mere isolated detail. As a result of this increased understanding, the mind is brought into a truer harmony with its objects, and acquires a mastery over them: “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.”³⁷ It is in this harmonious reconciliation of the mind with what it is experiencing and knowing that the truth acquires aesthetic value or beauty. This is the true serenity that Arnold describes as arising only after having made order out of our ideas, and it is a serenity which characterizes the cultured mind. Style, in other words, is the focussing—or, in Arnold's term, the “kneading”—of all the parts in order to achieve a meaningful consummation or end. It is form “bending” and developing the parts towards the whole; it is also form fulfilling itself because the economy and focal concentrating of parts contribute and lead directly to the emerging unity or form. And this “aesthetic sense,” as Whitehead says, “based on admiration for the direct attainment of a foreseen end, simply and without waste,” characterizes “style in art, style in literature, style in science, style in logic, style in practical execution.” Above all, it characterizes the successfully fulfilled human life. “It pervades the whole being. … Style is the ultimate morality of mind.”³⁸

Thus the human being may be said to manifest style to the extent that all the facets of his personality are harmoniously integrated, and complete each other by coöperating towards fundamental ends. Furthermore, that “style” which comprises the “ultimate morality of mind” becomes particularly desirable to the degree that it succeeds in including within its scope the fruits of diverse lines of activity. Human life develops from “instincts following diverse great lines, which may be conveniently designated as the lines of conduct, of intellect and knowledge, of beauty, of social life and manners. … But the final aim, of making our own and of harmoniously combining the powers to be reached on each and all of these great lines, is the ideal of human life.”³⁹ Finally, the human personality reveals “style” in its highest exemplification to the extent that all these powers are bent and “kneaded” to the achieving of final purposes. In this condition each separate element of the human character, through contributions to the whole, is able to take on an increased value and effect.

Thus, by the power of poetic style, we are drawn into participating in the activity and movement of the poem. From this participation we experience and ourselves re-create its harmonious resolution. Poetry, by the force of its style, can infiltrate a serenity and balance into the human character; for poetry has “a fortifying, and elevating, and quickening, and suggestive power, capable of wonderfully” satisfying “our need for beauty.”⁴⁰ In the reading of a poem, one finds, for the moment, that one is “making order in the chaos of one's impressions.” First of all, merely to express one's impressions is to begin to order them. For the impact of experience may be partially relieved by expression. Experience may affect one's inner responses in all kinds of ways which are not immediately apparent. These effects exist in us darkly; their relative importance is not clear. Expression—the use of words, for example, to type, label, and suggest the feelings we have acquired—lifts out these impressions or emotions into the daylight, so to speak. They can then (depending on the adequacy of the expression) be seen for what they are. Their relative importance and weight can be seen more clearly and with more perspective. Furthermore, in reacting to poetry we employ all the capabilities of human response, intellectual and emotional. Thus in poetry reason and feeling,—one might almost say man's total capacities for response,—can join and work together in experiencing the action of the poem. Furthermore they are not hinged together, so to speak, but rather intellectual realization is pervaded by emotion, and they are united in an indissoluble compound. One may illustrate this point by a liberal interpretation of Aristotle's theory of tragic katharsis. In the tragic drama, that is, the feelings of the observer are caught up in the action of the play, and merge with our intellectual awareness. Thus the emotions are lifted to a union with the mind. Whatever is merely personal or trivial falls from them. From this melting together of awareness and emotion, insight acquires greater compelling or motivating power, and the feelings obtain direction. By thus clearing the pipes, so to speak, between all the areas of human response, and by exercising the harmonious interworking of all the facets of human nature, poetry is able to insinuate into the human personality that style and serenity which arise from “the direct attainment of a foreseen end, simply and without waste.” In doing so, it encourages and leads to that “harmonious expansion of all the powers which make the beauty and worth of human nature. …”

The unique importance of Arnold is that he clung to this essentially classical standpoint, and renewed its relevance at a time when it had become almost meaningless. Living at the onset of the intense pressures that have come to characterize modern life, and sensing almost prophetically the complex problems that would continue to multiply, he tried—to a degree unequalled by any other writer of the nineteenth century—to reassert both the ultimate end of human culture and also the indispensable place of the humanities, especially literature, as the means of attaining this end. As such, he serves our age as a reminder and even, to some extent, as a sympathetic guide to the greatest of classical legacies. This legacy is the conviction that the aim of man is the formative and total development of what is best in him—the ability to conceive truth comprehensively, imaginatively, flexibly, to react vitally in accordance with it, and thus to attain that harmonious fulfillment of the “total man” in which, as Coleridge said, “to know is to resemble.”

Notes

1. “Sweetness and Light,” Culture and Anarchy (1883), p. 12.

2. Politics, VIII, 5, 15. Aristotle is speaking of the formative and educational value of music in harmonizing human feelings.

3. Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture (1939-1944), II, 223.

4. “Porro unum est Necessarium,” Culture and Anarchy, p. 139.

5. “Sweetness and Light,” Culture and Anarchy, p. 6.

6. “Conclusion,” Culture and Anarchy, p. 205. “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” Essays in Criticism, First Series, p. 16.

7. “On Translating Homer,” On The Study of Celtic Literature and on Translating Homer (1883), p. 245.

8. “A Speech at Eton,” Mixed Essays, Irish Essays, and Others (1883), p. 414.

9. “Sweetness and Light,” Culture and Anarchy, p. 16.

10. Literature and Dogma (1889), p. 21.

11. Ibid., p. 22.

12. Science and the Modern World (1929), p. 278.

13. “Sweetness and Light,” Culture and Anarchy, pp. 12, 18.

14. “Heinrich Heime,” Essays in Criticism, First Series, p. 161. Cf. Wordsworth, Essays in Criticism, Second Series, p. 128.

15. Literature and Dogma, pp. 46-47.

16. Poetics, IX.

17. Apology for Poetry (ed. Arber; 1868), p. 37.

18. “Literature and Science,” Discourses in America, p. 95.

19. Ibid., p. 126.

20. “Maurice de Guérin,” Essays in Criticism, First Series, pp. 81, 110.

21. Science and the Modern World, p. 286.

22. “Wordsworth,” Essays in Criticism, Second Series, p. 141.

23. “Maurice de Guérin,” Essays in Criticism, First Series, pp. 106-107.

24. “Wordsworth,” Essays in Criticism, Second Series, p. 144.

25. “On Poesy or Art,” Biographia Literaria (ed. Shawcross, Oxford, 1907), II, 257.

26. “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” Essays in Criticism, First Series, p. 5.

27. “John Keats,” Essays in Criticism, Second Series, p. 116; “Preface,” Essays in Criticism, First Series, p. xi.

28. St. Paul and Protestantism, Last Essays, pp. 40-41, 64. Cf. God and the Bible (1883), p. 131.

29. “Author's Preface, 1853,” The Poems of Matthew Arnold, with an Introduction By Sir A. T. Quiller-Couch (1913), p. 4.

30. “On the Study of Celtic Literature,” On the Study of Celtic Literature and On Translating Homer, p. 104.

31. Biographia Literaria (ed. cit.), II, 51.

32. “Preface to Merope,” The Poems of Matthew Arnold with an Introduction by Sir A. T. Quiller-Couch, p. 304; “On the Study of Celtic Literature,” On the Study of Celtic Literature and On Translating Homer, p. 104.

33. “Amiel,” Essays in Criticism, Second Series, p. 307.

34. “Grounds of Criticism in Poetry” (1704), in Critical Essays of The Eighteenth Century, 1700-1725 (ed. Durham, New Haven, 1915), pp. 147-148.

35. “Maurice de Guérin,” Essays in Criticism, First Series, p. 81-82. Cf. the final chapter (“Requisites for Social Progress”) in Whitehead's Science and the Modern World (1929), esp. pp. 281-291.

36. St. Paul and Protestantism, Last Essays, p. xxv; “Pagan and Mediaeval Religious Sentiment,” Essays in Criticism, First Series, pp. 220-221; “Study of Poetry,” Essays in Criticism, Second Series, pp. 2-3.

37. “Maurice de Guérin,” Essays in Criticism, First Series, p. 81.

38. Aims of Education and Other Essays (1929), p. 19.

39. “A Speech of Eton,” Mixed Essays, Irish Essays and Others, pp. 417-418.

40. “Literature and Science,” Discourses in America, p. 123.