A Study in Paradox: Matthew Arnold's The Scholar-Gipsy

A STUDY IN PARADOX: MATTHEW ARNOLD'S THE SCHOLAR-GIPSY Helen E. Nebeker From the appearance of his first publication, The Strayed Reveler, in 1849, criticism of Matthew Arnold's poetry has been copious, vehement, general , particular, occasionally laudatory, often hostile, but always contradictory and generally incomplete. Approved of in his own time by only a few readers perceptive enough to understand the significance of his poetry, Arnold was beseiged by contemporary critics with the most contradictory of criticism. While the Times condemned him for dealing too much with modern themes, Fräsers castigated him for not dealing with modern themes. The North British Review was disappointed because Arnold displayed no sympathy with the modern age while Fraser's accused him of not even understanding the age with the result that he could not form some eternal lesson about its meaning. A reviewer for Blackwood questioned the purpose of Arnold's poetry by asking, "What would our friend be at? If he is a Tory, can't he find work enough in denouncing and exposing the lies of the League, and in taking up the cudgels for native industry? If he is a Whig, can't he be great upon sewerage, and the scheme of planting colonies in Connaught? ... If he is a Chartist, can't he say so? . . Z'1 And at the same time, another reviewer suggests that Arnold devote his "pure and brilliant imagination" to "energy and God, not to laziness and dreams." These criticisms reflected the mind of the time—a mind for which Arnold, despite his statement that he expressed the "main movement of mind" of his time, certainly did not speak. This was the voice of Victorian bourgeois enterprise , speaking out for modernity, progress, action, answers. Thus his own age saw in Arnold a "helpless, cheerless doubter" without purpose or revelation . Later criticism, more sensitively attuned to Arnold the man as well as to the undercurrents of the time which moulded him, has dealt more kindly with him personally and more perceptively with him poetically. Nevertheless , the critics in general have incorrectly—or perhaps incompletely— interpreted the "criticism of life" which Arnold would reveal. Nowhere is this misinterpretation of Arnold's view of life more obvious than in the modern critics' interpretation of The Scholar-Gipsy, first published in 1853. This is, in my opinion, the most misunderstood of all his poems, a misunderstanding rooted in an over-simplification of the poem and a consequent failure to examine the paradoxes it contains. Walter E. Houghton, criticizing the Victorian writers in general for their lack of a clearly defined purpose in life and censuring them for wallowing !Lionel Trilling, Matthew Arnold (New York, 1939), pp. 78-79. 55 56RMMLA BulletinJune 1971 in subjective emotionalism as a substitute for an ideal, uses The Scholar-Gipsy as a case in point.2 He says that in this poem Arnold purports to "offer á generation sick with fatigue and languid doubt" an image of one who has purpose, dedication, desire. But, he goes on to say, contrary to this dedicated ideal which Arnold envisions, the Scholar-Gipsy only drifts through the countryside immersed in beauty. He concludes that since Arnold—typical of the vitiated Victorian poets—cannot imagine "a particular goal that can cure the Victorian malaise," he cannot envision a goal for the Scholar-Gipsy. Thus his ideal becomes only a symbol of the Victorian poet—purposeless, drifting, reveling in sensuousness. In such terms, Houghton sums up the presently prevailing interpretations of this poem: that of the Scholar-Gipsy as a symbol of Arnold's ideal—one with aim, dedication, and vision—and that of the Scholar-Gipsy as a symbol of the typical Victorian poet who feels the need for ideals but, not finding them, turns to the enjoyment of subjective emotionalism , to sensuousness. In confuting these interpretations, which is essentially my purpose here, I shall begin by suggesting that Arnold did not intend to hold up to his own supposedly vitiated generation, in the person of the Scholar-Gipsy, a model for admiration and emulation. Rather he intended to use him to reveal some observable paradoxes of life which he then synthesized. Only when we understand...