Matthew Arnold and the Elizabethans

MATTHEW ARNOLD AND THE ELIZABETHANS E. K. BROWN N OTHING is more peculiar in the criticism of Matthew Arnold than the rarity and the brevity of his references to his English contemporaries. "How astonishing it would be", exclai1ns Mr. T. S. Eliot "if a man like Arnold had concerned himself with the art of the novel, had co1npared Thackeray with Flaubert, had analysed the work of Dickens, had shown his contemporaries exactly why the author of Amos Barton is a more serious writer than Dickens, and, why the author of La Chartreuse de Parme is more serious than either?"1 It would not be in the least astonishing: the usual way to a critical reputation, the way followed by Sainte-Beuve and by Taine and by Hazlitt~ is in large part, at least, by illuminating analysis and appraisal of contemporary books. Matthew Arnold was so far from following this way that his only significant allusion to Dickens is in the course of an argument about Irish education and his only consideration of Tennyson and Clough is in a consideration of the style and metre proper to a translation of Homer. He speaks of his contemporaries only in passing, touches only upon an aspect or two of their work, leaves us in doubt of the estimate he would place upon. them. Arnold's silence was no accident,-it was imposed upon him by his definition of criticism as "a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world". "How much of current English literature " he inquires, "comes into this 'best that is known lThe Sacred Wood> p. xi. 333 THE UNIVERSITY OF ·TORONTO QUARTERLY and thought in the world'?" And he makes haste to answer: "Not very much, I fear." To a much greater extent than with most other critics, Matthew Arnold's reputation rests upon his reconsideration of the major writers of .the past, upon his efforts to secure more readers for the1n, and upon the guidance he gives such readers to a vivid and correct apprehension of what those writers stand for and are worth. From an English critic bent upon putting ((the best that is known and thought" before his contemporaries , one would naturally expect a special preoccupation with the Elizabethans; and it is among the riddles of Arnold's criticism that no such preoccupation and regard is to be found in it. Stuart Sherman, a careful student of Elizabethan drama, was, I think, the first to draw attention to Arnold's neglect of the. Elizabethans. He writes: cc Any student of the Elizabethan drama will undertake to revise and improve the 'roll of our chief poetical names, besides Shakespeare and Milton, from the age of Elizabeth downwards', which Arnold give? in his essay on Wordsworth: 'Spenser, Dryden, Pope, Gray, Goldsmith, Cowper, Burns, Coleridge, Scott, Campbell, Moore, Byron, Shelley, Keats' (and Wordsworth). What? one exclaims, Tom Moore a greater poetical glory than Janson, Campbell a greater poetical glory than MarJowe, Goldsmith a greater poetical glory than Webster, Cowper or Scott a grea~er poetical glory than Beaumont and Fletcher! Arnold speaks elsewhere, to be sure, of the Elizabethan as a great poetical age, but this roll of honour, with its amazing predominance of men whose works fall after 17so, is pretty conclusive evidence that he was not intimately acquainted with it. One is almost 334 MATTHEW ARNOLD tempted tQ suggest that, in 'getting up' the period, he selected Spenser and Shakespeare as its best representatives and let the rest go.''2 There Stuart Sherman left the 1natter, at what is a point of departure rather than of arrival. We must discover. hov.; much Arnold knew of the Elizabethans and why it was they failed to satisfy his aesthetic sense. That they did not interest hi1n is plain. He turned his back upon two admirable opportunities to consider them, one in his review of Stopford Brooke's A Primer of English Literature, another in his conspectus of English poetry in the introduction to Humphry Ward's English Poets. In the .first instance the only Elizabethan, apart . from Shakespeare, to whom Arnold refers, is Spenser; and all that is said of him is...