Matthew Arnold, Dialectician
- Matthew Arnold, Dialectician
Professor of Humanities (Raymond College) and of English, University of the Pacific; author of The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Picturesque in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetic Theory (1957) and editor of Alexander Gerard: An Essay on Taste (1759) (1962)
notes
1. The judgement is Frederick Harrison’s, in his satirical “Culture: A Dialogue,” Fortnightly Review, November 1867. Arnold’s statements are taken from Culture and Anarchy, ed. J. Dover Wilson (Cambridge, 1957), 85, and from “My Countrymen,” in On the Study of Celtic Literature and Other Essays (Everyman ed.; London, n.d.), 194 (originally in Cornhill Magazine, February 1866). “Belletristic trifler” is from the lectures, On Translating Homer, 1861.
2. John M. Robertson, Modern Humanists (London, 1901), 166, 145, 149, 147.
3. George Saintsbury, Matthew Arnold (New York, 1899), 140, 152. “In the Wilderness” is the caption of Saintsbury’s chapter on the decade of 1867–1877, in which Arnold’s major essays in sociology and religion were published.
4. T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, 1917–1932 (New York, 1931), 346.
5. E. K. Brown, Matthew Arnold: A Study in Conflict (Chicago, 1948), 180, 182.
6. Stuart P. Sherman, Matthew Arnold: How to Know Him (Indianapolis, 1917).
7. God and the Bible, Popular edition (London, 1897), 26; ibid., 54; Literature and Dogma (New York, 1902), 350.
8. Matthew Arnold, 170.
9. Mixed Essays, Popular edition (London, 1903), v.
10. Ibid., vi.
11. Culture and Anarchy, 64 and 48.
12. Mixed Essays, viii–ix.
13. Ibid., ix.
14. Ibid., x.
15. From Arnold’s Introduction to The Hundred Greatest Men (London, 1879).
16. “Literature and Science,” in Discourses in America (London, 1889), 87.
17. Ibid., 88.
18. Ibid., 101–2.
19. Culture and Anarchy, 47; my italics.
20. Ibid., 64. The two impulses to culture can be found on pages 44–5.
21. Matthew Arnold (“English Men of Letters,” London, 1920), 115.
22. Culture and Anarchy, 150.
23. Ibid., 148; and Preface to Essays in Criticism (New York, A. E. Burt, n.d.), ix.
24. “Modern Dissent,” in St. Paul and Protestantism, Popular edition (London, 1900), 143. “Modern Dissent” was the Preface to “St. Paul and Protestantism” in 1870.
25. Culture and Anarchy, 206–7.
26. Culture and Anarchy, 72.
27. Ibid., 69. Again, “Of two disciplines laying their main stress, the one, on clear intelligence, the other, on firm obedience…the priority naturally belongs to that discipline which braces a all man’s moral powers, and founds for him an indispensable basis of character” (ibid., 137).
28. Ibid., 210.
29. Ibid., 105–6.
30. Ibid., 95.
31. See, e.g., Phacdo 68–9.
32. “Porro unum est necessarium,” in Mixed Essays, 177. This essay develops the theme of “Democracy” in the light of events in France and England during the intervening twenty years. The “system” is clear enough when Arnold declares that “our middle class rests satisfied with a defective type of religion, a narrow range of intellect and knowledge, a stunted sense of beauty, a low standard of manners” (ibid., 167).
33. “Democracy,” in Mixed Essays, 17.
34. Ibid., 38.
35. “Equality,” in Mixed Essays, 66–8.
36. As in so many of Arnold’s essays, the narrow problem—here the causes and consequences of the absence of an academy in England—is solved by merging it in a wider context of national character and powers of the soul The French Academy is a manifestation of conscience acting in the realms of intellect and beauty—just the fusion of powers which Arnold calls for.
37. Letters of Matthew Arnold, 1848–1888, ed. G. W. E. Russell (London, 1895), 1, 11–12. I do not consider that either Arnold’s published works or his letters afford grounds for thinking that there was great change either in his view of France or in his judgement of the relative weight of the four powers. His various opinions are sufficiently well reconciled by considering the subject he had in view, the audience he addressed, and the dialectical level on which he operated.
38. “Falkland,” in Mixed Essays, 236.
39. Robert Donovan, in “The Method of Arnold’s Essays in Criticism” (PMLA, LXXI...
