Northrop Frye and Matthew Arnold

fine words, but not brave words: he's badly frightened

Northrop Frye's marginal comment on Conclusion to Culture and Anarchy (204)

I have a strong affinity with Arnold when he says that culture is the ultimate authority in society

Northrop Frye, interview with David Cayley (116)

Matthew Arnold was a recurrent figure – if often only as a whipping boy – in the critical debates of the 1980s about deconstruction and other forms of poststructuralist criticism.¹ And, as evidenced by a recent discussion on the victoria listserv about the inaccessibility of some of his major works, he has not been very fashionable in literary studies at the beginning of the twenty-first century.² He was, however, a constant reference point for Northrop Frye in his thinking about education and culture.

What Frye's reputation will be in the future is similarly uncertain. Neither of these literary humanists fits comfortably within the dominant trends in English departments – with their focus on issues of gender and sexuality, postcoloniality, and other forms of identity. However, Arnold and Frye remain of deep relevance whenever one wants to reflect in general terms on the role of the humanities in higher education. While such reflection is perennial, the pressures prompting it vary through time. Today the main pressure on the humanities, and especially on the idea of liberal education, comes from the growing emphasis on vocational education, and the increasingly close relationship between the university and the private sector.³

Since the late 1990s, the debates in Canada about political correctness and the curriculum, the so-called 'culture wars,' have modulated into a discussion of the structure of the university and the nature of university education: it is interesting to see that one of the recent contributions to this discussion concludes with a chapter on Northrop Frye.⁴ Frye's popularity beyond the university, with the educated reading public, has given him a continuing role in Canadian culture, one reinforced by the vast ongoing University of Toronto Press edition of his Collected Works and by the number of international conferences devoted to Frye since his death in 1991, leading to several substantial collections of essays assessing his legacy and beginning to explore the vast quantity of his private writings – letters, notebooks and diaries, and marginalia – that is now available to scholars.⁵ Frye is now widely studied in China, suggesting that his work may play an important role in future East-West dialogue.⁶

When one thinks of Frye as literary critic, the Victorian period of English literature does not immediately spring to mind. One thinks of him first of all in relation to Spenser, to Shakespeare, to Milton, to Yeats, and of course pre-eminently to William Blake – that is, in relation to poets who are mythmakers, authors of romance and of biblical epic. However, though he did not have much interest in the realist novel, the major literary form of the Victorian period, Frye does refer with striking regularity to those writers of discursive prose who are sometimes called the 'Victorian sages,' for reasons made explicit at the beginning of an important essay of 1964:

The aspect of Victorian literature represented by such names as Carlyle, Mill, Newman, and Arnold seems to me one of the seminal developments in English culture, ranking with Shakespeare and Milton, if not in literary merit, at least in many other kinds of importance. This is mainly because of the extraordinary fertility and suggestiveness of the educational theories it was so largely concerned with.

('The Problem of Spiritual Authority in the Nineteenth Century,' 241)

My focus in this essay is the complex relationship between Frye's thought and that of Matthew Arnold, a figure of interest to Frye for many reasons. He was a poet as well as a critic, one of a series of poet-critics Frye often refers to (others would be Sidney, Shelley, Coleridge, Wilde, and Eliot). As a literary critic, Arnold powerfully influenced the academic discipline of English. Furthermore, Arnold was a critic whose influence, like Frye's, extended beyond the literary (indeed Culture and Anarchy is subtitled An Essay...