Overcoming Matthew Arnold: Ethics in Culture and Criticism by James Walter Caufield (review)

In Overcoming Matthew Arnold James Walter Caufield offers readers an erudite and longoverdue defense of the critic and poet. Part polemic, part reception history, his book argues that Matthew Arnold’s work can only be fully understood through his philosophical pessimism: what Arnold himself called “renouncement” (qtd. in Caufield 4). Caufield draws our attention back to Arnold’s own emphasis on “conduct,” what Arnold called “three-fourths of life” (qtd. in Caufield 187). This study is breathtakingly comprehensive; it takes into account all of Arnold’s prose works, with a substantial look at his poetry, as well as Arnold’s contemporary critics and other voices informing his, particularly Arthur Schopenhauer’s. It takes in Arnold’s heirs, sympathizers, and detractors, including T. S. Eliot, Raymond Williams, Lionel Trilling, Edward Said, Chris Baldick, Francis Mulhern, and Stefan Collini.

Arnold has been a prominent target of criticism for a century and a half by now. As Caufield writes, “Arnold manages to draw fire from partisans of all philosophical camps” (13). In the nineteenth century, many writers—from doctrinaire Anglicans, to the Utilitarian James Fitzjames Stephen, to the Comtean Frederic Harrison—castigated Arnold for his lack of system and avoidance of abstraction and overarching theories. They dismissed him as weak-minded and effeminate. And in turn Arnold often (in Culture and Anarchy [1869] and Friendship’s Garland [1871]) pictured himself in their terms, though it seems, like most devotees of system, that they were deaf to his irony. Arnold preferred experiential and intuitive knowledge and outrightly distrusted system. As he writes in “A French Critic on Goethe” (1878), “the systematic judgment … is the most worthless of all” (qtd. in Caufield 122). Many modernist writers, including Lytton Strachey and Eliot, condescended to Arnold. Voices on the religious right, including Eliot, held him responsible for the disregard of religion, though Arnold was only taking into account movements that reached English shores quite late. On the Left, Baldick and Said have held him personally responsible for all the sins of the British. But, as Caufield astutely notices, Arnold-haters do not seem to have read all that much of him, and they certainly do not regard Arnold in his historical or intellectual contexts. It is easy for late twentieth-century writers to condemn Culture and Anarchy as mere snobbishness, but Arnold wrote it before Britain had universal education, a goal that he worked for all of his adult life and for which he should be given a great deal of credit: his enthusiasm for a shared education is also an enthusiasm for a free education for all, regardless of class. And especially oddly, the New Left and its heirs blame Arnold for the English literary canon, though, as Collini points out, he was skeptical of the academic study of English; his literary essays consistently try to open the English public up to European and classical literatures, especially to minor figures.

A great deal of the habitual dismissal of Arnold’s criticism is presentist, that is, it uses the criteria of the present to pass judgment on writers of the past, even when writers in their context were admirably devoted to unpopular and just causes. Arnold is merely a “stock stage-villain” (123). Baldick’s “strategic misrepresentation” of Arnold cherry-picks the author’s greatest hits (93). Vincent Pecora’s classification of Arnold as a racist derives from a fairly sophomoric reading of The Study of Celtic Literature (1867)—a document that admittedly exhibits a conflation of ethnicity and culture we now find absurd. Most importantly, Pecora’s critique fails to balance notions that were commonplace in the nineteenth century with the hostile reception of the work, which took Arnold to task for his sympathy with the Celts. Caufield argues that misreadings of Arnold can be corrected with more attention to Arnold’s ethic of renouncement, and he uses Arnold’s unread religious criticism to point out Arnold’s real sympathies. Literature and...