Matthew Arnold (1) (1822–1888)

I found myself only vaguely interested in the first half of this slim collection of Arnold's verse, disappointing as I'd really enjoyed the first volume, but ... the second half!
"Empedocles on Etna" is a longish poem in dramatic form telling of the philosopher's final night, as supposed, entering into his thoughts on life, humans and the Gods. Empedocles is depressed, world-sick & contemplating suicide by throwing himself into the volcano. Two friends seek in vain to dissuade him, and it show more seems to me unlikely that Arnold's atheistic (agnostic, at least) sentiments were wholeheartedly embraced during the high Victorian era. Perhaps being placed in the mouth of a pagan, he got away with it.

While others of his poems felt like a slog to get through, "Empedocles" definitely rewarded my time. 5+🌟 for that poem, even if the other poems were no more than 3🌟. show less

I had heard others speak of this book as if it were a cult classic. Any wonder. There are so many things going on in this work. I am still trying to see where Matthew Arnold fits in with the likes of Edmund Burke, John Stuart Mill, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, and Herbert Spencer. He was a professor of poetry by profession, and his niece, Mrs Humphrey Ward, became a metonym for a conservative wowser. So he was hardly a John Stuart Mill, yet he was also rather short of being a Herbert show more Spencer. He seemed to be the reverse of a modern Australian Liberal (not liberal) - he did not support free trade but looked to the cultural elite, while remaining socially conservative. The brief introduction eludes to the lack of definitions in the work, and this is supported by a critique of the work by Henry Sidgwick entitled The Prophet of Culture (provided as an appendix). Indubitably, the two were friends, but with some rather major philosophical differences. There are extensive notes and these are important due to the number of then-contemporary social, political, cultural, and religious debates (as indicated by the list of important thinkers above) that would be lost on most modern readers (or me, at least). These are rather important to understanding the context but I suspect the different disciplinary groups did not necessarily cross paths in their intellectual outputs. For my own memory, it is useful to outline some of Arnold's key ideas. First, culture is the seeking (as opposed to achieving) perfection in the pursuit of reason and the will of God. The phrase "sweetness and light" is used by Arnold to refer to the pursuit of beauty (in the Hellenistic sense) and light as intellect. Sidgwick counters with "fire and strength" as being more important to improving society (referring, in particular, to religion). Arnold navigates two approaches to understanding culture (albeit somewhat difficult to articulate a precise definition of either) as Hebraising (referring to the Hebrew penchant for religious discipline) versus Hellenism (referring to the Ancient Greek aesthetic and penchant for reason). Arnold brings in the idea of class here (something completely overlooked by many modern works that assume the myth of egalitarianism in contemporary society is not a myth at all), and names the classes the Barbarians (the aristocracy), the Philistines (the middle class) and the Populace (the working class). Given the book was published in 1869, the "Populace" was still a few decades away from any formal political power, and class-based rioting was emerging as a problem for the likes of Burke (who had issues with the Lockean and Rousseauian conceptions of the social contract. Indeed, Arnold was a form of anti-Jacobin). Arnold was closer to Hobbesian support for a strong State, but tempered by the idea that representatives of each class should strive to represent their ideal best selves (as a class rather than individuals), and the idea of the State was to enable such striving for social and political perfection. There were a few snippets that drew lines where the State should and should not intervene, relating to Nonconformism and antidisestablishmentarianism (I always wanted to use that word - but I must qualify, it relates to then-contemporary debates over the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland [refer to the Irish Church Act 1869], rather than the Church of England - but I had to use the word!) rather than intervening to protect the poor (some Malthusian debate was definitely going on at this time in history). Nevertheless, Arnold was opposed to government "control for control's sake" (p. 170) over education policy, and preferred the Continental approaches to education that had clear strategic objectives rather than simply government control. Sidgwick puts some of this confusion to rest - he is by no means a fan of this particular piece of Arnold's work but empathises with his cause to strengthen society by increasing its culture. Here, Sidgwick's essay does a great service to Arnold's theme, and the two works together are important. Sidgwick (p. 172) surmises that Arnold "wishes for reconciliation of antagonisms" - be these Hebraism versus Hellenism, class differences, or culture and religion (or sweetness and light versus fire and strength) - in an effort to improve society. Without Sidgwick's contribution, it would be easy to miss Arnold's point. But that does not make the work of any less value. Some of these statements have been made by others (including the introduction), and Arnold's belief in the "law of perfection" reminds me of a scene from The Last Samurai where Tom Cruise narrates: "From the moment they wake they devote themselves to the perfection of whatever they pursue". This was a difficult read. Not like Sir Walter Scott's work where one can readily get bogged down in Gaelic dialogue, but because numerous reference to the notes (there are as many notes as pages) are necessary to understand the context, and there is so much jam-packed in this otherwise short essay, that it takes a while to sink in. While that should not diminish the importance of the work, if the attitude to difficult works today is anything to go by - where we are routinely told by lazy egoists (as opposed to egotists) if we cannot explain something to a three year-old child we don't understand it ourselves - then Arnold is amiss. But he was so close to being a futurist that this work ought to be more widely read, not as a cult classic (which arguably it deserves to be), but because we are reaching the culmination-point Arnold seemed to warn about,-
should we ever relegate "sweetness and light" to "fire and strength". show less

Favourites: “So some tempestuous morn in early June” from “Thyrsis”; “The Forsaken Merman” (“a ceiling of amber, a pavement of pearl”) and “Dover Beach”. Although I am a Christian, I have always found “Dover Beach” a deeply moving poem. Its main theme is the loss of faith in the nineteenth century, but the last lines are haunting: “Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain: And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, show more Where ignorant armies clash by night”. It certainly feels like that much of the time.... show less

Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy, the classic defense of high culture against the depredations of modernity, is a work that speaks to us directly, even intimately, a work that still sets a challenge.

When Culture and Anarchy first appeared in book form in 1869, Matthew Arnold was forty-six. He was best known as a poet - the most gifted of the generation immediately following Tennyson and Browning, the author of such renowned anthology pieces as "The Scholar Gipsy" and "Dover Beach." But show more by this time his poetic career was largely behind him, and he was to write very little further verse of much consequence. He had, however, acquired a formidable second reputation as a critic, based chiefly on the lectures he had delivered as professor of poetry at Oxford from 1857 to 1867, and more particularly on the selection of them published as Essays in Criticism (First Series) in 1865.

In their breadth, lucidity, and high standards, these essays marked Arnold as the most important English critic since William Hazlitt or even Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In the best of them - above all in the one entitled "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time" - he also ventured well beyond literary criticism proper into the region which a later generation would have called cultural criticism. He discussed the prevailing values of his society - its tone and its unthinking assumptions no less than its formal beliefs; and he was especially scathing about its philistinism (a term imported from Germany, which he was the first to put into widespread circulation) and its self-complacency.

Some things today would undoubtedly shock Arnold, as they must shock even the most adaptable Arnoldian. The modern world simply seems more given over to anarchy - more irredeemably anarchic - than anything Arnold could have imagined, and nowhere more so than in the realm of culture itself, and particularly in the scene of devastation presented by so much intellectual and academic life.

"And we are here as on a

darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms

of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash

by night". Matthew Arnold. Dover Beach.

Arnold's basic aim is to defend high culture as useful to society. He argues that it is the excellence of the citizens rather than the representativeness of their government that is essential to a healthy society and true progress. He rejects the argument that democratic institutions themselves tend to enlighten and educate--rather, they corrupt, by giving free rein to the aristocratic tendency toward unintellectual high-spirited barbarity, the middle-class tendency toward materialistic narrow-minded philistinism, and the lower-class tendency toward violence, sentiment, prejudice, and drink. The anarchy spawned by "doing as one likes' expresses itself in the darkling plain of willful dissent, religious and ethnic intolerance, spiritual emptiness, greed, intellectual relativism, and riot.

Accepting democracy as inevitable, and indeed necessary in the long run, Arnold brings culture to the rescue. What is culture? He describes it as a blending of the Hebraic impulse toward moral perfection and right action with the Hellenistic impulse toward clarity of thought and right reason. True culture blends sweetness (beauty and subtle decorum) with light (critical reflection). The cultured person, liberated from the self-deceptions of the flesh and the indolence of the aesthetic by the Hebraic element, and released from the "machinery" of economic interest and political power by the Hellenistic element, follows only reason and the will of God. Cultivated people manage to escape and become alienated from their inherited class and ethnic limitations into a wider, more humane universality, by means of some combination of natural potential and education. The health of a society depends on increasing by education the numbers of the cultured.

Arnold saw culture ("contact with the best which has been thought and said in the world" or "high culture"), as the crucial component of a healthy democratic state. show less