Nicholas Murray tells his story well, in readable workmanlike prose, giving a particularly good account of Matthew Arnold’s career as an inspector of schools. It is salutary to be reminded, in the words of the London Times obituary, that for thirty-five years the author of Culture and Anarchy (1869) earned his living by performing “the task of examining national schoolchildren in spelling, the rules of arithmetic, and plain sewing.” (What a great Beerbohm cartoon that would have made—“Mr. Arnold Drops a Stitch.”) For every thousand people who have read “Dover Beach” there must be only one who has read Schools and Universities on the Continent.

I am not that one, but Mr. Murray is, and his discussion of Arnold’s educational thinking, so tellingly different in scope and emphasis from the revolution wrought by his father at Rugby, is very valuable. He did not fuss about the minutiae of the curriculum, but wanted a happy environment for the children, stimulating teaching, and recognition of the difficulties under which schoolteachers labored. With disinterested determination he campaigned against the scheme of payment by results for teachers, which his employers officially supported and which bids fair to return to the English educational scene today. All his better-known work was fitted in between journeys up and down the country, visits, reports, marking, and making fact-finding trips abroad. Mr. Murray remarks, “He is the patron saint of those who have struggled to do serious intellectual work at the same time as holding down a conventional job.” This perhaps slights the educational profession, at least as represented by its best practitioners, but the general point is valid.

What Mr. Murray does not do is to engage critically with Arnold’s abilities as poet and polemicist. He takes for granted that Arnold is a significant thinker and creative artist. He frequently refers disapprovingly to T. S. Eliot’s disparaging verdicts that Arnold was “rather a propagandist for criticism than a critic” or that “in philosophy and theology he was an undergraduate; in religion a Philistine.” Eliot was not, however, self-evidently wrong. Arnold was a good coiner of catch phrases (sweetness and light, Hebraism and Hellenism) but these turn out on examination to be merely verbal arrangements; his capacity for conceptual thinking was severely restricted. The satiric parts of Culture and Anarchy are successful, but when Arnold comes to offer his own prescription, we get little beyond moral uplift and the repetition of his mantras. His own culture remained narrowly book-bound and he never showed any interest in music or the visual arts.

Moreover, Arnold felt able to write his lectures On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867) without knowing any of that literature in the original, and, indeed, declared elsewhere that “the sooner the Welsh language disappears, the better,” evincing a total blankness to the importance of national culture. Would he not have condemned this as provincialism in another writer? Again, his contempt for the nonconformist ethos—whether he was, as Mr. Murray insists, well-informed about it, or not—looks absurd when set against the testimony of writers such as George Eliot, Beatrice Webb, or D. H. Lawrence. They inhabited the world of tea-meetings and chapel services which Arnold found so vulgar, yet anyone who turns up the relevant biographies and autobiographies and discovers what they had read by their early twenties will not hastily convict them of intellectual or cultural myopia.

Arnold’s critical essays retain some value. “On the Modern Element in Literature,” “The Function of Criticism,” and “The Study of Poetry” are important manifestos on which Eliot, despite his strictures, leaned heavily. Several of Arnold’s formulations are classical, for instance his detection, in “The Study of Poetry,” of the personal and historic fallacies, or his argument in “The Function of Criticism” that criticism “tends to establish an order of ideas, if not absolutely true, yet true by comparison with the order it displaces”—Eliot added nothing to this idea by rephrasing it, without acknowledgment, in “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” On individual writers he was less sure. His essays on the Romantics still have much to offer—although his undervaluing of Keats is a blemish, especially when one realizes how much “The Scholar Gypsy” and “Thyrsis” are virtual centos from Keats’s works. His insistence on the European dimension of literature is fresh and invigorating. Yet it remains inexcusable that he could judge Chaucer to have lacked “high seriousness” and to be “not one of the great classics” compared to Dante (another tip for Eliot). On the contrary, it is Chaucer and Dante who are European, while Arnold remains imperviously English.

Arnold notoriously predicted, at the beginning of “The Study of Poetry,” that “most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.” In one sense he was right; one now finds theologians and philosophers who are keen to describe their disciplines in terms of metaphor, symbolism, or myth, and, of course, many literary critics are desperate to show that they are philosophers, too, if not theologians. Mr. Murray, however, defends the statement maladroitly. “At the end of the twentieth century,” he says, “it is in the contemplation of art and literature rather than in religion, that the most serious imaginative and intellectual experiences of the secular literati occur.” Apart from the unprovably sweeping nature of this assertion, and the number of questions begged by “most serious … experiences,” one would expect “secular” thinkers, by definition, to have little sympathy with religion, so that the point becomes a tautology.

Still, Mr. Murray’s confusions are as nothing compared to Arnold’s. St Paul and Protestantism (1870), Literature and Dogma (1873), and God and the Bible (1875) must be the most inept ventures by a layman into Biblical criticism and theology which appeared during the nineteenth century. Arnold assumed that, as a man of culture, he had the intellectual equipment to pronounce upon matters that tax even those trained in the relevant disciplines. This was a misjudgment of almost heroic proportions. As an Oxford undergraduate, Arnold had been typically impressed by Newman’s personal charm and style, while completely uninterested in the ideas of the Tractarian movement. His reaction to Phases of Faith, the painfully honest spiritual autobiography of Newman’s brother Francis, is simply crass: “One would think to read him that inquiries into articles, biblical inspiration etc. etc. were as much the natural functions of man as to eat and copulate.” If Francis Newman read Arnold’s books he would surely have laughed immoderately.

A man who, wholly seriously, could define God as “the stream of tendency by which all things seek to fulfill the law of their being” or “the Eternal not ourselves which makes for righteousness,” who could define religion as “morality touched with emotion,” or who could describe the Church of England as “a great national society for the promotion of what is commonly called goodness” without being embarrassed, not by the inadequacy of the description, but by its damning truth, is clearly out of his depth. (Nowadays he would be an Anglican bishop.) R. H. Hutton, an unjustly neglected Victorian critic, annihilated the first part of Literature and Dogma when it appeared in the Cornhill. Writing in The Spectator, he pointed out how Arnold strove to empty the concept of God of all personality: “Unless the ‘enduring power, not ourselves, that makes for Righteousness,’ does so from love of righteousness, it is worthy of no emotion at all, and if it does so from love of righteousness, then it is, so far, precisely what we mean by personal.”[1] There is a temptation to connect this need to make the deity impersonal with Arnold’s lifelong attempt to emancipate himself from the literal and metaphorical presence of his father—a struggle which finds thinly veiled expression in the poem “Sohrab and Rustum.” “Conduct,” Arnold claimed in an effort to elide religion and ethics, “is three-fourths of life”—which recalls Dr. Arnold’s statement of his priorities, when appointed headmaster of Rugby, as being to inculcate, in order, “1st, religious and moral principles; 2ndly, gentlemanly conduct; 3rd, intellectual ability.” A beady-eyed despot who, Thomas Mozley unforgettably said, “seemed to live in a jungle, where every moving of the reeds was fearfully significant,” he had given his crushing verdict on his son when the latter was still a schoolboy: “Matt does not know what it is to work because he so little knows what to think.”

Arnold could be crushing in his turn; his comment on his father’s death in 1842, that now the family had lost its “sole source of information,” is stunningly frigid. Yet Dr. Arnold was right; Matthew never did know what to think. That may sound cruel, but he says much the same in the crucial lines from “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse,” in which he describes himself as “Wandering between two worlds, one dead,/ The other powerless to be born.” R. H. Hutton remarked that this poem “expresses the melancholy of a mind preferring contemplation to action, and yet radically dissatisfied with the results of its own contemplation.” Arnold knew that this was so. In his inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, “On the Modern Element in Literature,” delivered in 1857, he smuggles in some autobiography in the guise of a comment on Lucretius:  

There is no peace, no cheerfulness for him either in the world from which he comes, or in the solitude to which he goes… . The world in its fullness and movement is too exciting a spectacle for his discomposed brain. He seems to feel the spectacle of it at once terrifying and alluring.

This limbo state, with intellect and emotions pulling in opposite ways resulting in a paralysis of will and searing frustration, is everywhere in Arnold’s temperament and poetry. His recurrent imagery of deep-welling rivers and his theme of the “buried life,” his patent identification with his own Empedocles as a dormant volcano, his late poem “Growing Old” with its grim evocation of the shrunken heart and the inner glacier, all point the same way. “I am past thirty, and three parts iced over,” he wrote to Clough in 1853, complaining of “congestion of the brain.” Is it too fanciful to connect these images with the angina which had killed his father at forty-seven and (he knew he had inherited it) was to kill him at sixty-six? Pondering Mr. Murray’s comment that Arnold was “kept in check by an efficient internal policing system,” one recalls Ransome, the cook in Conrad’s “The Shadow-Line,” who, “carrying a deadly enemy in his breast,” had “schooled himself into a systematic control of feelings and movements.” Was this the subconscious cause of all that insistence on balance and harmony, on the folly of rashness or intemperance, on the need to strive for “the central, the truly human point of view”? “Mr. Arnold,” Hutton remarked in his quietly devastating way, “only sees life steadily at the cost of seeing it whole.”

If Arnold the prose writer has been over-valued, Arnold the poet deserves another look. (Mr. Murray is at his least effective when dealing with the poetry, on which his comments are summary-descriptive rather than analytical.) Arnold wrote to his sister in 1858: “People do not understand what a temptation there is, if you cannot bear anything not very good, to transfer your operations to a region where form is everything.” With disarming frankness, Arnold admits that he has taken refuge in technique, knowing that the creative daring of genius is beyond him. His realistic estimate of himself, in a letter to his mother on the publication of his collected Poems (1869), compels agreement:

My poems represent, on the whole, the main movement of mind of the last quarter of a century… . It might fairly be urged that I have less poetical sentiment than Tennyson, and less intellectual vigour and abundance than Browning; yet, because I have perhaps more of a fusion of the two than either of them, and have more regularly applied that fusion to the main line of modern development, I am likely enough to have my turn, as they have had theirs.

All this might seem to justify Eliot’s verdict that Arnold is merely an accomplished academy poet. “Empedocles on Etna” he calls “one of the finest academic poems ever written.” But in that poem Arnold dramatizes the conflict of classicism and modernism—of which he was to write in “On the Modern Element in Literature”—with a power that lifts him above respectability. Mr. Murray says of the lecture that Arnold “was not content to permit the disorder of multiple impressions or diverse points of view.” This is not the case with the poem, in which the intellectual torment of Empedocles, which drives him to suicide in a last desperate attempt to revive his atrophied emotions by “becoming” the volcano, is juxtaposed with the world of lyrical harmony embodied in the songs of Callicles. When Empedocles laments that he is “a living man no more” but only “a devouring flame of thought … a naked, eternally restless mind,” and when he aspires to “glow like this mountain,” we hear Arnold’s own yearning: yet the poem closes, not with Empedocles’ self-immolation, the destruction which he believes is creation, but with Callicles’ song of the Olympian impassivity of Apollo and the Muses, who go serenely on, indifferent to his fate.

First hymn they the Father
Of all things; and then,
The rest of immortals,
The action of men.

The day in his hotness,
The strife with the palm;
The night in her silence,
The stars in their calm.

Initially we assume that Callicles is, as he claims, Empedocles’ comforter; but by the end of the poem we wonder whether he is not the insidious catalyst of the philosopher’s desperation. The poem is Arnold’s Bacchae, and ought to give pause to anyone wishing to relegate him to permanently minor status.

It was on April 15, 1888, that Arnold encountered what he had once brilliantly called, in a letter to Clough, “the deviceless darkness.” He was in Liverpool, awaiting the arrival of his daughter and her family from America. Walking to catch a train to the docks, he had a heart attack and fell in the street, outside the house of a doctor. He died within a few minutes. In the doctor’s opinion the attack had been precipitated by Arnold’s excitement at the imminent reunion. There is a distressing irony here, about which Mr. Murray is, as throughout, delicately respectful. He is as committed and articulate an advocate as Arnold could have hoped for; yet there are depths he does not sound. Despite domestic happiness and public renown, there is something haunting and unfulfilled about Arnold’s life which he seems to have predicted in “The Strayed Reveller”: “Such a price/ The Gods exact for song:/ To become what we sing.”

Notes
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The interested reader may be referred to an excellent collection edited by Robert Tener and Malcolm Woodfield, A Victorian Spectator: Uncollected Writings of R. H. Hutton (The Bristol Press, 1989). Go back to the text.

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