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3. Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)
 Life
Matthew Arnold, poet and critic, was the eldest son of Dr. Thomas Arnold who
was a famous Protestant clergyman of the liberal church, the well-known head
teacher of Rugby School and a notable educationalist and reformer in the
1920s and 30s. Matthew was much influenced by his father in his childhood
and youth. In 1844, after completing his undergraduate degree at Oxford, he
returned to Rugby as a teacher of classics. After marrying in 1851, Arnold
began work as a government school inspector, a grueling position that
nonetheless afforded him the opportunity to travel throughout Britain and
the Continent. Throughout his thirty-five years in this position Arnold
developed an interest in education, an interest that fed into both his
critical works and his poetry. In his spare time, he took up literary
creation. In 1857, he was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford and held the
position for ten years.
The literary career of Arnold can be divided into two
phases. In the first phase until 1867, he was generally considered as a
poet, publishing collections of poems, such as The Strayed Reveller
(1849), Empedocles on Etna (1852), Poems (1853), Merope, A Tragedy
(1858), Thyrsis (1860) and New Poems (1867). Dissatisfied with
his products and also disappointed by public criticisms, he stopped writing
poems after 1867 and turned to literary criticism. As a critic, he published
Essays in Criticism (1865), Essays in Criticism, Second Series
(1888), Culture and Anarchy (1869) and Literature and Dogma
(1873). His ideas greatly reflect the predominant values of the Victorian
era.
Arnold's arguments, for a renewed religious faith and
an adoption of classical aesthetics and morals, are particularly
representative of the mainstream Victorian intellectual concerns. His
approach—his gentlemanly and subtle style—to these issues, however,
established criticism as an art form, and has influenced almost every major
English critic since, including T. S. Eliot,
Lionel Trilling, and
Harold Bloom. Though
perhaps less obvious, the tremendous influence of his poetry, which
addresses the poet's most innermost feelings with complete transparency, can
easily be seen in writers as different from each other as W. B. Yeats, James
Wright, and
Sylvia Plath.
In 1883 Arnold made several trips abroad to
report on continental education. These reports were later published in book
form, and together with his ordinary reports as a school inspector had an
important effect on English education. The same year, Arnold also made a
lecturing tour in the United States, giving three lectures on “Numbers,”
“Literature and Science,” and “Emerson,” which were afterwards published as
Discourses in America -- the book, he told George Russell, later his
biographer and editor of his Letters, by which, of all his prose
writings, he should most wish to be remembered. He crossed the Atlantic
again in 1886 on a visit to his daughter who had married an American. When
she returned the visit in 1888, he went to Liverpool to meet her, and there,
while running to catch a tramcar, suddenly died.
Poems
The dominant note in Arnold’s poems is a sense of
loss, doubt and melancholy. One of such poems is “Dover Beach”. At the
beginning, the quietness of the beach was described in a leisurely rhythm:
The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranguil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
However, the rhythm in the following three stanzas
turned to be faster in conformity with the anxiety of the poet. Finally, the
poem ended in imperfect rhyming to reveal the confusion of his mind
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! For the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
The poem reflected Arnold’s melancholy in an age
of transition. He could not comfort himself by any religious thought and
thus became depressed. This mood of sadness could only be mitigated in love.
His poem “Shakespeare” was written in the form of
Petrarach’s sonnet and expressed his view on poetic creation. His memorable
longer poems included “Sohrab and Rustum”, “The Scholar Gipsy” and
“Thyrsis”. “Thyrsis” was an elegy addressed to his close friend at Oxford,
Arthur Hugh Clough. The lyrical beauty of this sonnet reflected the
classical and pastoral tradition of English poetry. Although not so
successful as Tennyson and Browning, Arnold was an important Victorian poet
without question.
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