[In the following excerpt, Wimsatt provides the background for Arnold's emergence as the most important literary critic of his generation.]

Feeling and Image came through the eighteenth century, as we have seen, in close liaison, and they enjoyed at the dawn of the new era a high estate together. Feeling was somewhat indiscriminately treated as either something that welled up in the poet himself or (it made little difference) something that was discernible in the poem or in its images. Among the poetic genres, lyric had moved into the normative place. Or the broader and simpler concept of “poem” (or “poetry,” in the soul of the poet) was the norm—it mattered not what “order of composition” the poet elected. The notion of untutored, and hence genuine, utterance was not likely to be far absent from poetic discussion. Let us re-focus momentarily on the situation about 1795 by quoting a letter from a poetess, “The Swan of Lichfield,” Anna Seward.

Our very peasants show that the seeds of poetry exist in the rude soil of their minds. Awaken their passions or excite their wonder, and you will often hear them speaking in metaphor, which is the poetic essence.¹

Not that anybody said much directly against the classic fable, the story, the structural base of the long poem, but at the same time not much was urged in favor of that element.² Poetic theory had passed in the course of the centuries from a classic or Aristotelian focus on drama, through a heroic focus on epic (and then an implicit or hidden focus on satire and burlesque) to the romantic focus on lyric, the songlike personal expression, the feeling centered in the image. The romantic age as the age of lyric is a well enough recognized phenomenon—especially in England.

We have already observed certain lyrist features of the German high theorizing. In France during the 1820's occurred an incident in the history of dramatic literature which may perhaps be relevantly mentioned in this context. A classically regulated French drama, for reasons generated out of both revolutionary republicanism and Napoleonic and Bourbon conservatism, had kept up a show of authority for much longer than might now seem understandable in the general retrospect of merely literary history. The revolt came with Hugo's Preface to Cromwell, 1827, and with Hernani, his first acted play, 1830. This was, to be sure, not officially a lyric movement. But it introduced not only a new taste for enjambed Alexandrines, for a diction coextensive with greater areas of life, and for a juxtaposition of the grotesque with the sublime, but, in part to accommodate the latter ideal, a taste for a profusion of sub-plot and extra incident and for incidentally and lyrically developed characters. The movement was away from the tighter Aristotelian structure. If an audience expected to enjoy anything richer than the traditional pseudo-Racinian austerity, argued Hugo in his Preface to Cromwell, the new romantic poet would have to hold the stage for somewhat longer than two hours. He would need no less than the whole evening (all the time usually given to the farce and comic opera which came after the tragedy to relieve it). But such a poet would give a money's worth of character portrayal (an entire hero, with all his genius, beliefs, conflicting passions, tastes, habits, and the crowd of figures who mill around him) as well as the panorama of a whole struggling epoch (its customs, laws, manners, spirit, insights, superstitions, happenings, and people). A gigantic spectacle! (On conçoit qu'un pareil tableau sera gigantesque.) A stage crowded with figures of all sizes and shapes. (Il y aura foule dans le drame.)³ One conceives too that an art formed on the principle of a vast assemblage of diversely interesting parts will tend to promote a certain looseness of relationship among such parts and in the parts themselves a certain extravagance of local coloring.

“A poem of any length,” Coleridge had said, “neither can be, or ought to be, all poetry.”⁴ He was echoed about thirty years later by Poe in words which have become even better known: “I hold that a long poem does not exist. I maintain that the phrase, ‘a long poem,’ is simply a flat contradiction in terms.”⁵ A modern editor of Poe has paid him an accurate compliment in saying that this pronouncement was “essentially a demand that the poets of his time be themselves and admit that epic themes … did not in fact excite their poetic faculties.” “What really interested them were emotions of melancholy, nostalgia, puzzled yearning, and the like that could find their proper expression … in lyrics of moderate length.”⁶ In an earlier chapter we have noted J. S. Mill's inheritance of the associational doctrine of feeling—which in full theoretical consciousness he adopted as alternative to the utilitarian and scientific rigors of his early training. And so:

Lyric poetry, as it was the earliest kind, is also, if the view we are now taking of poetry be correct, more eminently and peculiarly poetry than any other: it is the poetry most natural to a really poetic temperament, and least capable of being successfully imitated by one not so endowed by nature.⁷

Mill distinguished [lyric] poetry from certain other and less intense kinds of emotive writing, novels and dramas, mere stories or imitations of life. These made an appeal to immature and shallow minds.⁸

A particularly instructive instance in the history of lyric feeling is that of John Henry Newman when he delivers his opinion in an early essay (1829) on no less a topic than Aristotle's Poetics.⁹ Newman's Evangelical background puts him comfortably in possession of the same attitudes that Mill had to arrive at by struggle. He observes that Aristotle admires Oedipus the King for its plot and structure. That is to say, Aristotle conceives a play as “an exhibition of ingenious workmanship.” But true poetry is spontaneous expression, the “free and unfettered effusion of genius.” Newman goes to Greek drama in order to “listen to harmonious and majestic language, to the voices of sorrow, joy, compassion, or religious emotion,—to the animated odes of the chorus.”

A word has a power to convey a world of information to the imagination, and to act as a spell upon the feelings; there is no need of sustained fiction, often no room for it.

Newman's argument is a plenary participation in the Longinian double antithesis. The difference between plot and lyric passages is closely tied up with the difference between cold calculation on the part of the author and spontaneous effusion. Within a few years after his essay on poetry, Newman, moving along lines quite different from those of his literary criticism, had reached the opinion that the Evangelicals had landed Protestantism in a bondage to the “feelings.” “His many attacks on the Evangelical system,” observes a modern commentator, “are an attempt to rescue Evangelicals from a bondage he was willing to keep poets in.”¹⁰

Newman's friend John Keble, Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1831 to 1841, is a priestly poet and theorist whose Praelectiones Academicae, collected and published in 1844, turn on the same mistrust of “art,” “execution,” external medium, and plot construction, the same regard for the poet's spontaneous outburst of inmost feeling. The epigraph to his printed lectures is the image of the rhapsode and the magnetic ring from the Ion of Plato. Keble's emotivism invites a specially curious inspection in that it combines Aristotelian cathartic reminiscences with pre-Freudian intimations. He conceives poetry as an indirect strategy, an expression under “certain veils and disguises,” whereby sensitive distraught souls may without blame find release from suffering. “It is the function of Poetry to facilitate, yet without prejudice to modest reserve, the expression of glowing motion.”¹¹ The subtitle of his lectures is De Poeticae Vi Medica.

A distinct correlation with such minor but characteristic theorizing of the early Victorian era may be observed in the school of violently emotive and pseudo-Elizabethan dramatizing which erupted in the 1840's and was extinguished in the parody by W. E. Aytoun, Firmilian: A “Spasmodic” Tragedy, in 1854. Tennyson's Maud (1855), a “monodrama” of cloudy “madness,” swirling around an all but undescribed action, participates in the spasmodic phase of English poetry. Matthew Arnold's two earliest volumes of poems, in 1849 and 1852, were touched by the same spirit and suffered some disadvantage in competing with it.¹²

II

Arnold emerges suddenly, however, the most imposing figure in English mid-Victorian criticism, not as a part of the lyric-spasmodic movement, but in a brusque classical resistance to it. The Preface to his Poems of 1853,¹³ pitched in the high and confident tone of which he was to become increasingly master, announces the rationale of a valiant negative gesture, that of omitting from the volume of 1853 the long poem which gave the volume of 1852 its title, Empedocles on Aetna. Not because it is a poem on an ancient subject, says Arnold, though many may think this a sufficient reason. But because the dark emotions of the protagonist lead to no outcome. “Suffering finds no vent in action.” The situation is monotonous and morbid. (Empedocles, it will be remembered, concludes his suffering by jumping into Aetna.) It is an ancient story, but it exhibits a modern and merely emotive development. The historical figure Empedocles himself is not a good hero for a poem, not a great example of Greek thought and feeling.

Into the feelings of a man so situated there entered much that we are accustomed to consider as exclusively modern; … The calm, the cheerfulness, the disinterested objectivity have disappeared: the dialogue of the mind with itself has commenced; modern problems have presented themselves; we hear already the doubts, we witness the discouragement, of Hamlet and of Faust.

There is some wavering, some slithering of logic in Arnold's plea. In reaction against recent notions that “the poet must leave the exhausted past,”¹⁴ against “spasmodic” champions of “present import,” “interest,” and “novelty,” and no less against the whole contemporary concept of “an era of progress, an age commissioned to carry out the great ideas of industrial development and social amelioration,” Arnold wants to say that the “modernness or antiquity of an action … has nothing to do with its fitness for poetical representation.” “The date of an action … signifies nothing.” But it comes out pretty clearly before he is done that the great, “permanently” interesting actions, those that involve “permanent problems” and excite the “permanent passions,” are all or nearly all to be found in the grand mythic repertories with which Greek epic and tragic writers were concerned. These endure. The occurrences of modern life are transitory. They have an immediate interest, but it is meretricious.

The Greeks felt, no doubt, with their exquisite sagacity of taste, that an action of present times was too near them, too much mixed up with what was accidental and passing, to form a sufficiently grand, detached, and self-subsistent object for a tragic poem.

Arnold's Preface is an impressive exercise of hauteur at the expense of the thesis that literature has to be up to date.

But even more radically, the Preface is a countercheck quarrelsome to the prevailing lyric trend, a re-affirmation of the classic norm of the fable. The “theory and practice alike” of the ancients, the “admirable treatise of Aristotle, and the unrivalled works of their poets, exclaim with a thousand tongues”:

‘All depends upon the subject; choose a fitting action, penetrate yourself with the feeling of its situations; this done, everything else will follow.’

“They regarded the whole; we regard the parts. With them, the action predominated over the expression of it.” Hence the admirably severe style—the “grand style”—of the Greeks. And hence the dangerous influence on modern English poets of Shakespeare, a writer who had, along with his skill in managing “action,” “situation,” and “character,” a further great gift, which, alas! could and did lead even him “astray.” That was his power of “expression.” “Here has been the mischief.” Our modern poets, Keats and others, have been imitating the “attractive accessories,” the “richness of imagery,” not the central shaping power, the architecture.¹⁵

We have poems which seem to exist merely for the sake of single lines and passages; not for the sake of producing any total impression. We have critics who seem to direct their attention merely to detached expressions, to the language about the action, not to the action itself.¹⁶

III

The moderns, one might reflect, had been having it all their own way for nearly a century. It was time somebody spoke up for the ancients, even if in overbearing tones, with a kind of kid-gloved arrogance. Not since Lessing perhaps had so keenly whistling a blade been tried on the wind in the classic quarter. But a classicism which had passed through that century of German idealism and German romantic Hellenism was bound to show a profound difference in its commitments. As the Platonism of Sidney stands in relation to that of Shelley, so the Aristotelianism of Lessing to that of Arnold.

Arnold's essays published in the Cornhill and other magazines, during the years immediately after he became Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1857, and collected in 1865 as the first series of his Essays in Criticism show his classicism at perhaps its most level development, in the coolest and clearest light. He has gone to continental sources. One of these is the French Catholic, and conservative and Platonic penseur Joseph Joubert—a French Coleridge, as Arnold calls him, of less richness and power than the English Coleridge, but of more delicacy and penetration.

Clearness is so eminently one of the characteristics of truth, that often it even passes for truth itself.

Ignorance, which in matters of morals extenuates the crime, is itself, in matters of literature, a crime of the first order.

In literature the one aim of art is the beautiful.

To accustom mankind to pleasures which depend neither upon the bodily appetites nor upon money, by giving them a taste for the things of the mind, seems to me, in fact, the one proper fruit which nature has meant our literary productions to have.

Another is the German Jewish poet, self-exiled in France, arch-ironist and anti-romantic, Heinrich Heine, from whom Arnold takes up the weapons of a “life and death battle” against the Philistine. Arnold's hard-hitting repetitions succeeded in establishing this piece of German student lingo as the right name for the British middle-brow enemy of the noble and lovely.

Philistinism!—we have not the expression in English. Perhaps we have not the word because we have so much of the thing. At Soli, I imagine, they did not talk of solecisms; and here, at the very headquarters of Goliath, nobody talks of Philistinism.¹⁷

Arnold displays a fine scorn for British homebred humour and parochial complacency. He assumes the same kind of anti-domestic and classical superiority of taste as we have witnessed already in the comic theory of George Meredith. It is true that he has a great interest in the national spirit, and, like fashionable thinkers on the continent (Taine and others) to whom we shall allude in later chapters, he believes in the race, the milieu, and the moment, in short, in the cultural determination of literature.

For a literary masterpiece, two powers must concur, the power of the man, and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment.¹⁸

But Arnold reverses the revolutionary and sociological emphasis of the continental thinkers. With him it is not as if the march of the historical process were bound to be working into something superior or more real. Just the opposite. The English spirit he is so much interested to define is a mixed potential in the blood and in the culture,¹⁹ capable of being very badly developed in a bad modern age. In his inaugural lecture at Oxford, delivered in 1857 and entitled The Modern Element in Literature, Arnold appears as a strenuous champion of cultural classicism. He enjoys a high degree of confidence that the age of Sir Walter Raleigh in England was but poorly lighted, infested with footpads, over-dressed, and, compared with the age of Thucydides in Athens, naively incompetent to write history. (Distinct, though transvalued, reminiscences of the Peacockian frame of mind are to be noted in his remarks on the deficiencies of Roman literature—the Lucretian depression and ennui, the Virgilian “sweet, touching sadness,” the Horatian want of “seriousness.”) The progressive vulgarization of English middle-class culture since the Elizabethan age is a theme to which Arnold never tires of returning.

… this paragraph on which I stumbled in a newspaper … : “A shocking child murder has just been committed at Nottingham. A girl named Wragg left her workhouse there on Saturday morning with her young illegitimate child. The child was soon afterwards found dead on Mapperly Hills, having been strangled. Wragg is in custody.”

Nothing but that … how eloquent, how suggestive are those few lines! “Our old Anglo-Saxon breed, the best in the whole world!”—how much that is harsh and ill-favoured there is in this best! Wragg! If we are to talk of ideal perfection, of “the best in the whole world,” has any one reflected what a touch of grossness in our race, what an original shortcoming in the more delicate spiritual perceptions, is shown by the natural growth amongst us of such hideous names. Higginbottom, Stiggins, Bugg!²⁰

Among the essays of the 1862 collection, the continental orientation of Arnold's critique stands out nowhere more remarkably than in The Literary Influence of Academies. Arnold here throws backward a last glance in the English tradition of wistful regard for the French and Italian academies. The proposals for reducing, refining, and “ascertaining” the Augustan language, the plans for legislative authority and for dictionaries, which appear from the time of the Royal Society on (in essays by Defoe, Addison, Swift, and numerous smaller busybodies and grammarians), had continued up to and even after the time of the greatest English effort to accomplish such dreams, the Dictionary of Samuel Johnson published in 1755.²¹ But Johnson himself in his Preface had growled out something about the establishment of an academy …

which I, who can never wish to see dependence multiplied, hope the spirit of English liberty will hinder or destroy.

And he had followed this up with equally heavy lunges in his Life of Swift (“… an academy; the decrees of which every man would be willing, and many would have been proud to disobey”) and in his Life of Roscommon (“In this country an academy could be expected to do but little. … We live in an age in which it is a kind of public sport to refuse all respect that cannot be enforced. The edicts of an English Academy would probably be read by many, only that they might be sure to disobey them”).²² The idea of a legislated norm of correct linguistic usage was never at home in England. The great Oxford dictionary actually conceived and begun during Arnold's lifetime was a project of a far different order, part of the empirical and investigative spirit of the age. The authority which it sought to establish was strictly a historical authority. But Arnold enjoyed a tall and successful aloofness from the historicizing spirit of his times. He broadcast his criticism with a suave assurance that made him seem anything but a gauntly anachronistic and mistaken prophet. “Dryden and Pope,” he was to say in one of his later and most notorious pronouncements, “were classics of our prose.” It would have been difficult for an Englishman of Arnold's time to participate more fully in the English Augustan spirit than Arnold does in his Literary Influence of Academies and Function of Criticism in the Present Time. Yet he did this with a difference. Swift in his Proposal to Lord Oxford (“Swift's petty proposal,” Johnson called it) and in other essays on the theme had managed to sound no better than the sharp schoolmaster, a sensible, salutary, birch-rod influence, grammatical, philological, precisian. Arnold elevated the academy for which the Augustans had yearned into a vantage point of Olympian vision, a regulator of culture in the lofty creative sense which the German philosophy had by this time made plausible. In place of the Germanic and Carlylean throb of lyric freedom, it is true that he wanted the serenely normative and tempering light from classic France. He spoke of a “sensitiveness of intelligence” which is ready to defer to “authority.”²³ But the nature of that authority! Without being very precise about it, he made it sound like a very wise and ultimate thing, something which in other essays he called “culture” and put even higher than religion.

IV

Yet an accent of uncertainty appears here and there in Arnold's account of relations between the reasonable classic norm and the individual, nonconformist claims which are likely to be made by poetry—and especially, it would appear, by modern poetry. He entertains a notion that poetry proceeds from a certain honest energy. The English have plenty of this, and hence they do write poetry; for the same reason they write a violent, Corinthian polemic prose; and they write as individuals. The French on the contrary have intelligence and something called “form,” and hence they write fine prose (not poetry—poetry has nothing to do with “form”), and they go beyond individual eccentricities, to produce not only prose but schools of prose.²⁴

Poetry also has affinities for “magic.” The concept takes the form of “natural magic,” or “Celtic magic,” in Arnold's retrospective expedition into 18th-century Celtomania, the lectures of 1865-1866 entitled On the Study of Celtic Literature. “Magic is the word to insist upon,—a magically vivid and near interpretation of nature.”²⁵ (In its insistence not only on magic but on melancholy, Arnold's pontification was to play a part in determining the color of the actual Celtic revival in Ireland a few decades later.)²⁶ In some contexts, “natural magic” is Arnold's rendering of the “object” (“nature,” the familiar landscape under the charm of moonlight) which stood on one side of the Coleridgean reconciliation of subject and object. The other half of the formula, the “subject,” the human and moral kind of meaning, something much more congenial to Arnold, he called “moral profundity.” Keats, Shakespeare's imperfect disciple, had an excess of natural magic, not enough moral profundity. Wordsworth had mainly moral profundity. Shakespeare had both qualities to the full.²⁷

Arnold's mixed regard for the major English poets of the preceding generation produced some of the most highly colored images which he has left us—Shelley a “beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain,”²⁸ Byron in the act of carrying across Europe “the pageant of his bleeding heart,”²⁹ Coleridge a “poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium,”³⁰ Keats's letters the “love letters of a surgeon's apprentice.”³¹ The reason for Arnold's dislike of these poets was partly biographical,³² and to that extent it was purely moral. He gives his most considered poetic reasons in the case of Byron: Byron had personality, talent, sincerity, strength, energy—but he lacked “matter,” that is, a serious moral meaning.³³

Arnold always has less difficulty in knowing what to admire in the classics. His Oxford lectures On Translating Homer, 1861, a disdainful reaction against the Teutonized, or Saxo-Norman,³⁴ translation by Francis William Newman, urge a conception of Homer as “eminently rapid,” “eminently plain and direct,” “eminently noble.”³⁵ The argument is ruled in large measure by a concept of calm objectivity that is closely consonant with the theme of the classic action defined in 1853. Homer composes “with his eye on the object.”³⁶ He thus participates in a virtue which the same lectures define as the main requirement (lacking in the eccentric English) of a good criticism—a “simple lucidity of mind,” a capacity “to see the object as in itself it really is.”³⁷

The concept of a loftily objective aim carries through Arnold's career into his last important general pronouncement on poetics, the essay entitled The Study of Poetry which appears as introduction to T. H. Ward's English Poets in 1880 and is reprinted as the first of the Essays in Criticism, Second Series, in 1888. The Aristotelian phrase philosophōteron kai spoudaioteron is cue for the Arnoldian phrase “truth and high seriousness,” expressing twin requirements of substance, failing in either of which a very good poet may fall far short of greatness. These requirements are found in the work of the few greatest poets, Homer, Dante, Milton, Shakespeare. Certain other ideas which appear in the essay of 1880 are taken up in the course of our next few pages.

V

“If he is not the greatest of English critics,” says H. W. Garrod, “his make-up of being so is in itself a piece of greatness; and not to enjoy it is a piece of stupidity.”³⁸ Fair enough. But if a further statement and summary of Arnold's position as developed by the end of his career be permitted a tone of moderate dissatisfaction, we would urge the following points.

1. His argument about Homer relies not only on an idea of dignified substance but rather heavily on another idea—one merely hinted in 1853—that of a classically objective style. Homer writes in the “grand style.” This phrase, used in the Preface of 1853 apropos of the Greeks in general and repeated during Arnold's later years in two essays on Milton, expresses a stylistic (and somewhat chastened) version of the 18th-century Michelangelesque sublime.³⁹ “I think it will be found,” he says in some Last Words on Translating Homer, “that the grand style arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject.”⁴⁰ A similar concern not only for “substance” or “matter” but for “style” or “manner” runs through the important essay of 1880.⁴¹ Both the substance and the style must have their “accent of high beauty, worth, and power.” In this complication of his theory beyond the simple demand for the “excellent” subject of the 1853 Preface, there is a gain in critical insight—and not necessarily any contradiction. Yet one of Arnold's most memorable new terms in this essay is “touchstones.” By this he means small pieces of poetry—“short passages, even single lines,” a line of Dante, of Chaucer, of Shakespeare, two lines of Milton—unmistakable examples of great poetry, such as a critic ought to carry about with him and apply as norms in the estimate of other poetry. This open appeal to the chunklet, the sample piece of precious stuff, is a rather startling shift toward the norm of style and away from the initial classic thesis of 1853 that the “action is all.” True, he says of his touchstone slightly misquoted from Chaucer (“O martyr souded in virginitee.”): “A single line, however, is too little if we have not the strain of Chaucer's verse well in our memory.” Still he is talking precisely about the “strain” of the verse. To make the touchstone test it would seem we do not have to know much if anything about the story of the little “clergeon.”
2. On the other hand, the lofty purpose, the grand unified exclusive norm for poetry, the monolithic seriousness, which Arnold proclaims in 1880, is a consistent enough development from the Preface of 1853, where the requirement of the grand action is completed by a disparaging reference to comedy and the “lighter kinds of poetry.” Comedy is good enough to take care of everyday materials, contemporary trifles. The “tragic poem,” the poem with a seriously useful meaning (pragmatic, Arnold actually calls it in 1853, taking the expression from Polybius) requires the antique heroic subject matter. In 1880 Arnold has a more extended opportunity to betray his views on the comic modes of poetry. And we find that Chaucer is a poet of surpassingly fine style (a “divine liquidness of diction,” a “divine fluidity of movement”) and even of superior substance, in one sense (in his “large, free, simple, clear yet kindly view of human life”), but not in the full sense. He has truth, in short, but he lacks “high and excellent seriousness.” Dryden and Pope, those two great “classics of our prose,” were not “men whose criticism of life has a high seriousness,” or even any “poetic largeness, freedom, insight, benignity.” The same low esteem of the Augustan mode works out in the patronizing estimate of Gray.⁴² The basic lack of sympathy with the comic produces the meanly anaphoristic emphasis that the trouble with Burns' poetry lies in “Scotch drink, Scotch religion, Scotch manners.” Burns' “genuine criticism of life” is merely “ironic.” Arnold's stomach for literature suffers limitations of delicacy. “No one can deny,” he says in the passage on Scotland, “that it is of advantage to a poet to deal with a beautiful world.” And the retort of the 20th-century poet seems highly relevant: “It is an advantage to mankind in general to live in a beautiful world. … But the essential advantage for a poet is … to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory.”⁴³
3. Despite a partial submission to the historistic trend of his age (his congratulation of Shakespeare, for instance, because he “applied freely in literature the then modern ideas”),⁴⁴ Arnold never seems to set a correct value on the formal principle of anachronism in poetry, the principle of rebirth in analogy and parody. The theoretical fault may be illustrated, ad hominem, in the Oxford Professor's cold fiasco Merope: A Tragedy, his most determined attempt as a poet to avail himself of one of those great classically permanent actions described in the Preface of 1853. The return to Messenia in that “period of transition from the heroic and fabulous to the human and historic age of Greece” is made in a spirit all too literal. The noted actress Helena Faucit tactfully shied away from Arnold's invitation to participate in this sort of thing. There were lessons in the metaphoric handling of the antique that Arnold had neglected to learn from Racine or Corneille, from Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, or from Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, the last of which one may be doubtful that he had ever read. The same kind of literal demand comes out in his theory of a Homeric translation (if not so flagrantly in the sample passages which he translates). Let the unhappy translator “not trust to his own judgment of his own work; he may be misled by individual caprices.”

Let him ask how his work affects those who both know Greek and can appreciate poetry; whether to read it gives the Provost of Eton, or Professor Thompson of Cambridge, or Professor Jowett here at Oxford, at all the same feeling which to read the original gives them. I consider that when Bentley said of Pope's translation, “It was a pretty poem, but must not be called Homer,” the work, in spite of all its power and attractiveness, was judged.⁴⁵

1. Here again there were lessons of the neo-classic age which Arnold might have read more tolerantly. What Ascham in The Scholemaster, what Dryden in his Prefaces to Ovid and the Sylvae, said about “metaphrase,” “paraphrase,” “imitation,” might not have provided Arnold with a ready-made and sufficient view. The older school of translation, like Arnold, was looking for a certain spirit, a certain “feeling.” But in the freedom of their practice, verging on “imitation,” lay an insight, or perhaps merely a habit derived from live classical studies, which was foreign to the age of Arnold. Arnold's arguments about translation (his stern rejection of Newman's effort in search of an idiom) illustrate the growth of the historical sense in his era but also the limitations of that sense as the age applied it to poetry. He was running parallel to the more or less well informed archeologizing of the Shakesperian stage which had begun in the time of Macready.
2. Another 20th-century critic has spoken of Arnold's essays as “higher pamphleteering,”⁴⁶ and yet another has called Arnold “rather a propagandist for criticism than a critic.”⁴⁷ Very simply, very characteristically, and very repetitiously, Arnold spent his career in hammering the thesis that poetry is a “criticism of life.” This led to a spectacular involvement in some of the difficulties that have always appeared for didactic theory. In the essay on The Function of Criticism at the Present Time, that function is described as the promotion of a lively circulation of the best ideas yet available to humanity,⁴⁸ and hence the production of a climate in which poetry can thrive. One “criticism” provides the set-up and encouragement for another “criticism,” and the embarrassment of equating poetry with some kind of quasi-philosophic discipline is greatly accentuated. One recent authority⁴⁹ on Arnold's thought has interpreted his whole career as a tension between the impulse of detachment and that of practical application, between the Professor of Poetry and the Inspector of Schools. Arnold is frequently aware of the difficulty and attempts to qualify the phrase “criticism of life” as he applies it to poetry. He introduces into the predicate of his definition of “poetry” a safety device of circularity, a kind of short-circuit fuse. A tabular arrangement of the most definite avowals in several of his essays will show the dilemma.

The end and aim of all literature is … a criticism of life.

—Joubert, 1864 (First Series, p. 303)

Poetry is at bottom a criticism of life.

—Wordsworth, 1879 (Second Series, p. 143)

Poetry [is] a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.

—The Study of Poetry, 1880 (Second Series, p. 5; cf. p. 48)

I have seen it said that I allege poetry to have for its characteristic this: that it is a criticism of life; and that I make it to be thereby distinguished from prose, which is something else. So far from it, that when I first used this expression, a criticism of life, now many years ago, it was to literature in general that I applied it, and not to poetry in especial. ‘The end and aim of all literature,’ I said, ‘is, if one considers it attentively, nothing but that; a criticism of life.’ And so it surely is; the main end and aim of all our utterance, whether in prose or in verse, is surely a criticism of life. We are not brought much on our way, I admit, towards an adequate definition of poetry as distinguished from prose by that truth; still a truth it is, and poetry can never prosper if it is forgotten. In poetry, however, the criticism of life has to be made conformably to the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.⁵⁰

—Byron, 1881 (Second Series, pp. 186-7)

VI

Arnold's didacticism reaches its mature and accurate formulation in the sentence so often quoted from the opening of the 1880 Essay:

More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.

(“But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar. … And we are here as on a darkling plain …”) Arnold marks out a didactic function for poetry without any of the optimistic frenzy which buoyed the utterances of a Shelley or a Carlyle. He speaks with a level precision and a resolved firmness that make his prophecy all the more appalling. In the essays of broader cultural and quasi-religious scope which occupied his middle period, 1867-1877, especially in Culture and Anarchy, 1869, he had expounded in somewhat more detail the kind of new message—the “sweetness and light,” the blend of Hebraic spirituality and obedience with Hellenistic critical spirit—which it should be the aim of “culture” and of poetic education to propagate. Religion had once done a fairly good job, but religion now seemed to Arnold to reside mainly in religious “organizations,” and these were only “machinery.” The highest promotion of the sweet, clear inner life would now be the job of “culture.” The text would be the Greek classics.⁵¹

If we look at Arnold's most direct combat with science, a Cambridge lecture entitled Literature and Science, first printed in 1882, we discover the battle positions to be not so much different from those of the Peacock-Shelley incident. We see the names of the new generation of scientific bravos: Huxley, pronouncing a “funeral oration” on literary education at the opening of a college in Birmingham; Renan, Spencer, Darwin, and the liberal politician John Bright. A congress of elementary school teachers at Sheffield hears a proposal that the schools and the universities should come together on the common ground of natural science. On the ground of the dead languages, they can not. Arnold's rebuttal shares much with Shelley. It differs, however, in a more antiseptically confident tone, a quality of assurance that is even quasi-scientific. Arnold is on the stand to testify that literature is not, as Professor Huxley believes, merely belles lettres. Literature reaches out and begins with all knowledge, political, social, scientific—it is literally and inclusively “the best which has been thought and said in the world.” Literature will be up with the latest scientific data. It will face even Mr. Darwin's proposition that the human ancestor was “a hairy quadruped furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in his habits.” But literature (or the humane part of it, “humane letters”) will go beyond all mere “instrument” knowledge and all merely “natural” knowledge; it will grasp knowledge in relation with the human “sense for conduct,” the human “sense for beauty.” Shelley's Defense had said much (in richly emotive terms) about “emotion,” which was the efficient cause of moral action, even if it was not the faculty of moral definition. But there was no intimation in Shelley that ultimately there were not good enough grounds for the emotions of which he spoke. Arnold's more scientifically circumspect profession of faith does try to keep the tweezers between his truth-searching faculty and that highly desirable yet untruthful element of emotion.

The middle age could do without humane letters, as it could do without the study of nature, because its supposed knowledge was made to engage its emotions so powerfully. Grant that the supposed knowledge disappears, its power of being made to engage the emotions will of course disappear along with it—but the emotions will remain. Now if we find by experience that humane letters have an undeniable power of engaging the emotions, the importance of humane letters in man's training becomes not less, but greater, in proportion to the success of science in extirpating what it calls “medieval thinking.”⁵²

VII

Arnold was of course not the only voice of his kind to be heard during the long Victorian era. In America the ethical idealism of the New England litterateurs in the “classical” period, notably Emerson, is at least as traceable an influence as that of Arnold in the development of a “Genteel Tradition”⁵³ that has carried far into our own century. One of the most aesthetically acceptable—brilliantly cautious—statements of a moral perspective upon literature to appear during the whole period was that in the prefaces and other critical essays of Henry James. All art, he would say, is in basis moral. (He was speaking against Gautier's l'art pour l'art, and no less against the naturalism of Balzac.)⁵⁴ Both in art and in criticism, “the moral sense and the artistic sense lie very near together.” “In each of the parts there is something of each of the other parts.”⁵⁵

There is one point at which the moral sense and the artistic sense lie very near together; that is, in the light of the very obvious truth that the deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer. In proportion as that mind is rich and noble, will the novel, the picture, the statue, partake of the substance of beauty and truth. To be constituted of such elements is, to my vision, to have purpose enough. No good novel will ever proceed from a superficial mind; that seems to me an axiom which, for the artist of fiction, will cover all needful ground.⁵⁶

A medley of such voices was very friendly to the rise in academic America shortly after the turn of the century of a new humanistic and ethical school of criticism which, through the resounding efforts mainly of two champions, kept a hearing for about thirty years. It is true that Paul Elmer More in the Seventh volume (1910) of his long series of Shelburne Essays utters a lament for the deficiencies of a kind of “culture” which he tries to define by pairing Arnold with a much earlier English critic, the Deist Shaftesbury. “The fault,” he says, “lay not in any intrinsic want of efficiency in the critical spirit, nor in any want of moral earnestness.” “These men were lacking in another direction: they missed a philosophy which could bind together their moral and their aesthetic sense, a positive principle besides the negative force of ridicule and irony.” Thus they left criticism open to subjectivism, impressionism, and moral anarchy.⁵⁷ Here was a tightening of the belt—or a promise of sharper teeth for the ethical tradition. In More himself, humanism enjoyed an overt alliance with religion and so of course was not the pure Arnoldian critique of life. But in More's Harvard colleague Irving Babbitt, the concepts of “insight” into the Higher Will through literary symbol and a consequent “inner check” upon romantic emotive expansiveness and naturalistic descendentalism (“romanticism on all fours”) received a treatment which in the purity of its withdrawal from revealed religion⁵⁸ surpassed even the cultural dreams of Arnold. Babbitt's campaign in its negative phases, his attack on Rousseau, romanticism, and all that, is crowded with richly reported and bizarre incidents and luridly lit up with the flambeaux of his indignant rhetoric. His positive schemes, however, are more thinly delineated, his main illustrative appeals, to the drama of the Greeks, but sketchily intimated. Babbitt showed a heavy hand when late in his career he tried close dealing with an actual work of romantic English literature. His censure of Coleridge's imaginative control in The Ancient Mariner seems the all but fanatical result of a theory of literature that was not in fact literary. The twin detonations in 1930 of two anthologies, one for the new humanists and one against them, announced the end of a didactic critical movement which, adequately defined in Arnold's terms of 1880, had in the humanism of his successors moved no nearer to a distinct concern for literature.

Notes

1. Letters of Anna Seward (Edinburgh, 1811), III, 320, October 1, 1793, quoted by Norman Maclean, “From Action to Image: Theories of the Lyric in the Eighteenth Century,” in Crane, Critics and Criticism, p. 460.

2. Cf. Donald M. Foerster, “The Critical Attack upon the Epic in the English Romantic Movement,” PMLA, LXIX (1954), 432-47. “Thus, a writer in the Reflector elevates Ferdusi almost to Homer's level despite the fact that the Persian poet had paid little attention to those ‘minuter excellences’ of the epic, the fable and the three unities; and in the same breath that he says that Paradise Regained is really ‘a drama of primal simplicity’ and the Odyssey is not ‘a legitimate epic,’ Hallam calls it pure ‘pedantry’ to speak of the Orlando Furioso as a romance rather than an epic simply because it lacks a principal hero and a continuity of action. … A particular form was not often required; nor did an ‘epic’ seem to need a great action or a single action, a principal hero or a mighty hero, a race of gods or any other invisible agency. All that was demanded by many critics was a narrative thread which one could detect here and there in a poem of some length” (pp. 435-6).

3. Victor Hugo, “Préface de Cromwell” and “Hernani,” ed. John R. Effinger, Jr. (Chicago, 1900), pp. 98-9, near the end of the Préface.

4. Biographia Literaria, Chapter XIV (ed. Shawcross, II, 11).

5. The Poetic Principle, first paragraph.

6. W. H. Auden, Edgar Allan Poe, Selected Prose and Poetry (New York, 1950), p. xii.

7. “Thought in Poetry and its Varieties,” in Dissertations and Discussions (London, 1859), I, 85. First published in 1832. Cf. ante, p. 308.

8. Cf. Alba Warren, p. 71. Mill parallels Wordsworth's protest against “gross and violent stimulants,” the melodrama of storm-and-stress novels.

9. “Poetry with Reference to Aristotle's Poetics” appeared in the London Review, January, 1829. Cf. Alba Warren, pp. 35-45.

10. Geoffrey Tillotson, “Newman's Essay on Poetry,” in Perspectives of Criticism, ed. Harry Levin (Cambridge, Mass., 1950), pp. 161-195.

11. Keble's Lectures on Poetry 1832-1841, trans. E. K. Francis (Oxford, 1912), I, 19-24, 36. See Alba Warren, pp. 46-9; Meyer Abrams, pp. 145-8.

12. See Arthur Hugh Clough, in the North American Review, LXXVII (July, 1853), 4, anonymously reviewing Arnold's Strayed Reveler and Empedocles along with other volumes of verse including the Glasgow “mechanic” Alexander Smith's spasmodic Life Drama. Cf. Lionel Trilling, Matthew Arnold (New York, 1939), pp. 146 ff.

13. The volume appeared in October.

14. The complaint had been argued more picturesquely during the 17th-century quarrel of the ancients and the moderns. Cowley refers to “The cold-meats of the Ancients,” “the threadbare tales of Thebes and Troy” (Preface to Poems, 1656; cf. Atkins, II, 173). In our own century the theme is well known. “The more progressive modern poets … discard not only archaic diction but also shop-worn subjects of past history or legend, which have been through the centuries a treasure-trove for the second-rate” (Harriet Monroe, ed. The New Poetry, An Anthology, New York 1927, p. vi).

15. A year before Arnold's Preface of 1853, a lesser if more systematic theorist, Eneas S. Dallas, had published his Poetics: An Essay on Poetry, containing a discussion of drama which reveals far more starkly than Arnold's plausibly written argument some of the commitments of a pantomimic regard for the element of dramatic action. “For looking at dramatic speeches in their true light, as the means of imitating character and life, not as a means of as it were by slanting mirrors throwing opinions among an audience, and far less as a running commentary on the whole play, it will be seen that if they convey anything different in kind from what may be conveyed, however feebly, by dumb show, they swerve from dramatic fitness, or at least are more than dramatic.” Eneas S. Dallas, Poetics: An Essay on Poetry (1852), Book III, pp. 131-2. Cf. Alba Warren, pp. 137-8, and p. 139. Warren neatly locates the Dallas-Arnold fallacy under the rubric “assimilation of the drama to the visual arts.”

16. Arnold's tone becomes distinctly Augustan. “This over-curiousness of expression is indeed but the excessive employment of a wonderful gift—of the power of saying a thing in a happier way than any other man. Nevertheless, it is carried so far that one understands what M. Guizot meant, when he said that Shakespeare appears in his language to have tried all styles except that of simplicity. He has not the severe and scrupulous self-restraint of the ancients, partly no doubt, because he had a far less cultivated and exacting audience. … He is therefore a less safe model.” “Others abide our question. Thou art free.”

17. Heinrich Heine, in Essays in Criticism, First Series (London, 1902), p. 162. Cf. the last paragraph of Arnold's Preface to the First Series, the apostrophe to Oxford, “Adorable dreamer, whose heart has been so romantic! who hast given thyself so prodigally … only never to the Philistines”; and Joubert (First Series, p. 304), “the great apostle of the Philistines, Lord Macaulay.” As early as 1827 Carlyle was using the term “Philistine” in his essays, and in Sartor Resartus, 1831, appears “Philistinism.” See these words in The Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles.

18. The Function of Criticism at the Present Time (First Series, p. 4).

19. “If we had been all German, we might have had the science of Germany; if we had been all Celtic, we might have been popular and agreeable; if we had been all Latinised, we might have governed Ireland as the French govern Alsace, without getting ourselves detested. But now we have Germanism enough to make us Philistines, and Normanism enough to make us imperious, and Celtism enough to make us self-conscious and awkward; but German fidelity to Nature, and Latin precision and clear reason, and Celtic quick-wittedness and spirituality, we fall short of” (On the Study of Celtic Literature and on Translating Homer, New York, 1883, p. 132, On the Study of Celtic Literature, VI).

20. The Function of Criticism at the Present Time (First Series, p. 23).

21. See Albert Baugh, A History of the English Language (New York, 1935), Chapter IX, “The Appeal to Authority 1650-1800”; Sterling A. Leonard, The Doctrine of Correctness in English Usage, 1700-1800 (Madison, 1929); Allen Walker Read, “Suggestions for an Academy in England in the Latter Half of the Eighteenth Century,” MP [Modern Philology], XXXVI (November, 1938), 145-56.

22. The passage on academies was added to the 1781 Life of Roscommon when Johnson constructed this by expanding a sketch published in the Gentleman's Magazine in 1748.

23. First Series, p. 49.

24. The Literary Influence of Academies (First Series, pp. 50-2).

25. On the Study of Celtic Literature and On Translating Homer (New York, 1883), On the Study of Celtic Literature, VI, p. 122; cf. pp. 102, 126, 128.

26. John V. Kelleher, “Matthew Arnold and the Celtic Revival,” in Perspectives of Criticism, ed. Harry Levin (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), pp. 197-227.

27. Keats (Second Series, p. 119). Cf. Maurice de Guérin (First Series, pp. 81-2).

28. Second Series, pp. 203, 252, in both Shelley and Byron.

29. Stanzas at the Grande Chartreuse.

30. Second Series, p. 203, again apropos of Byron.

31. Second Series, p. 103.

32. And especially in the case of Shelley. Arnold's distaste is a response to unsavory aspects of Shelley's life which had recently been both revealed and defended in Dowden's biography (Second Series, pp. 206 ff.).

33. Second Series, p. 193.

34. The 19th-century Teutonizing camp included such scholars as the Early English Text Society founders F. J. Furnivall and R. C. Trench, the historian E. A. Freeman and the poets William Barnes and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Macaulay's essay on Boswell's Johnson contains a good instance of the trend. Cf. Austin Warren, “Instress of Inscape,” in Gerard Manley Hopkins by the Kenyon Critics (Norfolk, 1945), pp. 82-6. For some 17th-century instances of Teutonizing and a protest against it, see Joseph Glanvill, An Essay Concerning Preaching, 1678, in Spingarn, Essays, II, 274.

35. On the Study of Celtic Literature and On Translating Homer (New York, 1883), p. 149.

36. Op. cit., p. 160. “Pope composes with his eye on the style.”

37. Op. cit. pp. 199-200. Arnold reiterates the phrase a few years later with heavy emphasis in the opening pages of his lecture on The Function of Criticism (First Series, pp. 1, 6). And Sophocles, it will be remembered, “saw life steadily, and saw it whole.”

38. Poetry and the Criticism of Life (Cambridge, Mass., 1931), p. 83.

39. Trilling, Matthew Arnold, p. 173, points out Arnold's familiarity with Reynolds' Discourses.

40. On the Study of Celtic Literature and On Translating Homer (New York, 1883), p. 265.

41. For an earlier gesture at a stylistic definition of poetry, see Heinrich Heine (Essays, First Series, p. 161): “Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.” Cf. later Wordsworth (Second Series, p. 128): “Poetry is nothing less than the most perfect speech of man, that in which he comes nearest to being able to utter the truth.”

42. F. R. Leavis, “Revaluations (XI): Arnold as Critic,” Scrutiny, VII (December, 1938), 319-32.

43. T. S. Eliot, Use of Poetry, p. 98. “The vision of the horror and the glory was denied to Arnold, but he knew something of the boredom.”

44. Heine (First Series, p. 176).

45. On the Study of Celtic Literature and on Translating Homer (New York, 1883), p. 144.

46. F. R. Leavis, Scrutiny, VII, 321.

47. T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood (London, 1920), p. 1.

48. Literary criticism is “a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world, and thus to establish a current of fresh and true ideas” (First Series, p. 37).

49. E. K. Brown, Matthew Arnold, A Study in Conflict (Chicago, 1938).

50. The essay on Wordsworth includes lengthy disavowals of anything like an approval of the doctrines expressed in Wordsworth's poetry.

51. Consult Sweetness and Light, the concluding Oxford lecture of 1867, which becomes the first chapter of Culture and Anarchy, 1869.

52. Literature and Science, in Four Essays on Life and Letters, ed. E. K. Brown (New York, 1947), pp. 109-10.

53. Cf. George Santayana, The Genteel Tradition at Bay (New York, 1931).

54. French Poets and Novelists (London, 1919), pp. 14, 31-56, 116, essays on Baudelaire, Gautier, Balzac; Notes on Novelists (New York, 1914), pp. 122, 126, on Balzac.

55. The Art of Fiction, in Partial Portraits (London, 1911), pp. 404-6, 392. Cf. Morris Roberts, Henry James's Criticism (Cambridge, Mass., 1929), p. 63.

56. Beginning of last paragraph of The Art of Fiction.

57. “Criticism,” in Shelburne Essays, Seventh Series (New York, 1910), pp. 223-4. Cf. Zabel, Literary Opinion in America, p. 30.

58. More defined Babbitt's kind of humanism as “the study and practice of the principles of human happiness uncomplicated by naturalistic dogmas on the one side and religious dogmas on the other” (On Being Human, Princeton, 1936, p. 18). Babbitt's parleying with Buddhism was a largely philosophic performance.

Sources

Meyer H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp. New York: Oxford University Press, 1953

J. W. H. Atkins, English Literary Criticism. I, The Medieval Phase. Cambridge: At the University Press, 1943; II, The Renascence. London: Methuen & Co. 1947; III, The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. London: Methuen & Co., 1951

———, Literary Criticism in Antiquity, vols. I and II. Cambridge: At the University Press, 1934

Ronald S. Crane et al., Critics and Criticism Ancient and Modern. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1952

T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1933

Alba H. Warren, Jr., English Poetic Theory, 1825-1865. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950