Arnold and his criticism

Matthew Arnold (24 December 1822 – 15 April 1888) was an English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools. He was the son of Thomas Arnold, the famed headmaster of Rugby School, and brother to both Tom Arnold, literary professor, and William Delafield Arnold, novelist and colonial administrator.
During this time Arnold wrote the bulk of his most famous critical works, Essays in Criticism (1865) and Culture and Anarchy (1869), in which he sets forth ideas that greatly reflect the predominant values of the Victorian era.

1. Victorian era - The Victorian Era was characterized by an extended period of peace and strict codes of Social Conduct. It took place mainly during the reign of Queen Victoria from about 1837-1901 The Victorian Compromise was a combination of the  positive  and negative aspects of the Victorian Age: The expansion, great technology, communication and colonial empire ( Middle   Class ). Poverty, injustices, starvation, slums ( working class ).

2. Matthew Arnold 1822-1888 “The critical power is of lower rank than the creative. . . . It is undeniable that the exercise of a creative power, that a free creative activity, is the highest function of man . . . . The critical power . . . see[s] the object as in itself it really is. . . .” The Function of Criticism 1385-6

3. Quick BIO Born 24 December 1822 Laleham, Surrey, England Died 15 April 1888 (aged 65) Liverpool, England Occupation Her Majesty's Inspector of Schools Nationality British Period Victorian Genre Poetry; literary, social and religious criticism Spouse Frances Lucy

4. Matthew Arnold is the first critic who produced scientific conception of reading. Arnold initiated the formal criticism in poetry! Mathew Arnold, the most influential of the Victorian critic has been characterized by David Daiches as “the great modern critic ”.  Arnold deplored [found unacceptable] the lack of firm authority and centrality of excellence in the literature of their age and within their criticism each has sought to establish critical standards which would be valid independent of time and space.

5. Arnold fought against the romantic theory of criticism with its emphasis on the mind of the poet and the psychological patterns which prevail in the given work and stressed the need to see the esthetic object as a thing independent of the mind of its creator.  Arnold influenced not only T. S. Eliot but a number of other twentieth century critics among whom Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, F.R. Leavis and Lionel Triling stand out.

6.  In  THE STUDY OF POETRY  (1850) Matthew wrote: “More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will remain incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.” Poetry must have “high seriousness”; it must be “a criticism of life”; it must exhibit “the application of ideas to life.” All of this is asking a great deal of poetry, perhaps asking more than it is capable of accomplishing. To expect that poetry will take the place of religion—even of “what now passes for religion”—is to place upon the poet an intolerable burden. Yet the question of religion is one that goes straight to the center of Arnold’s poetry and of his intellectual and religious predicament.

7. Victorian criticism Art and Morality: Art for Life’s sake Carlyle and Ruskin: Moral view point should be the benchmark to judge the work of literature. Art should be for the betterment of life. Art and Aesthetic pleasure: art for Art’s sake Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde: Aesthetic and artistic delight should be the benchmark to judge the work of literature: Art should be for delight and pleasure of mankind.

8. Let’s dig down deep The Victorians provide the last major step in the advancement of English critical theory before its twentieth century establishment as a scientific and methodological discourse. It is also true to assume that Victorian criticism represents the transition to or culminates in modern literary theory and criticism. In the nineteenth century, the co-existence of different artistic and literary trends during one period leads to the separation of criticism from literary process. The separation of criticism from literary practice is also a result of the diversity of literary forms. But primarily the independence of criticism from literature is acquired by creative and critical writing confronting and falling under the influence of diversity and complexity of philosophical thought, social theories and scientific advances, where critics attempt to assimilate science to literary criticism.

9. The diversification of the critical systems in the Victorian Age is the result of the massive presence of different critical voices belonging to both professional critics, like John Ruskin, and writer-critics, like Walter Pater, Matthew Arnold and Henry James. Among others, they are critics focusing on art and/or literature as well as metacritics providing critical commentary on criticism.

10. The literature of the Victorian age (1837-1901) entered a new period after the romantic revival. The literature of this era was preceded by  Romanticism and was followed by modernism or realism. Hence, it can also be called a fusion of romantic and realistic style of writing. Though the Victorian Age produced two great poets Alfred Lord Tennyson   and Robert Browning, the age is also remarkable for the excellence of its prose . However, the contribution of Matthew Arnold should also not be forgotten!

11. Truth be told, Matthew Arnold   has often been called “ the forgotten Victorian ,” and it is certainly true that his poetry is much less read than that of his two great contemporaries, Tennyson and Browning  Their vast productivity tends, as it did a century ago, to overshadow his rather modest accomplishment. After the publication in 1867 of his  NEW POEMS , when he was only forty-five, Arnold wrote very little poetry. He turned more and more to prose, and his increasing fame as a critic of literature and of society soon drove his poetic achievement into the background, so that to modern readers he is familiar, if at all, only through a few standard anthology pieces, such as “ Dover Beach ” and “The Scholar-Gypsy”. Yet it has become almost a critical platitude to say that Arnold’s poetry, in its intellectual content, is much closer to the modern mind than is that of either Tennyson or Browning.

12. Arnold was quite aware of the limited audience to which his poetry appealed. To write poetry with the high quality of both content and craftsmanship that he demanded of himself was, he said, an “actual tearing of oneself to pieces”; moreover, his position as an inspector of schools did not allow him the time he needed for the writing of verse. He knew also that he lacked many of the qualities possessed by Tennyson and Browning that made them so widely popular; he did not have Browning’s intellectual vigor or Tennyson's musical skill. He was not capable of the strenuous affirmations of the later browning or of the final struggle to faith that Tennyson achieved in  In Memoriam . He had only the “gray elegiac mood,” and this was not calculated to make a writer popular in nineteenth century England or America. There were Browning societies everywhere in the English-speaking world, and Tennyson became a national institution. Arnold was ignored except by an intellectual elite.

13. Matthew Arnold as a literary critic! Arnold was a stern and grave critic who put down certain ideologies of criticism and educated others how to criticize . According to him, criticism did not come from the branch of philosophy. It was not even a craft; it was a form of art, the art of judgment. He says that a critic should belong to no party whether intellectual, religious or political. He should learn to think objectively, he should demonstrate that this is better than that .

14. Criticism must be a ‘dissemination of ideas, an unprejudiced and impartial effort to study and spread the best that is known and thought in the world’, is what Matthew Arnold says in his essay- The Function of Criticism at the Present Time (1864).   Arnold says criticism is nothing if it is not related to life. So his criticism of literature, society, politics, and religion all tends towards being a criticism of life. So does his poetic activity. Thus criticism with Arnold denotes a comprehensive activity which embraces all the departments of life.  After Aristotle, Arnold was the only one who set rules about criticism. His input towards English criticism was phenomenal.  Matthew Arnold was the first critic to declare that people could be consoled, healed and changed by reading literature.

15. The Study of Poetry “THE FUTURE of poetry is immense, because in poetry, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay. There is not a creed which is not shaken. But for poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion to-day is its unconscious poetry .” Meaning: We should turn ourselves to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.

16. Poetry is the Criticism of Life Arnold asserts that literature, and especially poetry, is " Criticism of Life ". In poetry, this criticism of life must conform to the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty. Truth and seriousness of matter, felicity and perfection of diction and manner, as are exhibited in the best poets, are what constitutes a criticism of life.

17. Poetry interprets life Poetry, according to Arnold, interprets life in two ways: "Poetry is interpretative by having natural magic in it, and moral profundity". And to achieve this the poet must aim at high and excellent seriousness in all that he writes. This demand has two essential qualities. The first is the choice of excellent actions. The poet must choose those which most powerfully appeal to the great primary human feelings which subsist permanently in the race. The second essential is what Arnold calls the Grand Style - the perfection of form, choice of words, drawing its force directly from the matter which it conveys.

18. Touchstone Method His general principles was - the" Touchstone Method " – which introduced scientific objectivity to critical evaluation by providing comparison and analysis as the two primary tools for judging individual poets. Thus, Chaucer, Dryden, Pope, and Shelley fall short of the best, because they lack "high seriousness". Arnold's ideal poets are Homer and Sophocles in the ancient world, Dante and Milton, and among others, Goethe and Wordsworth. Arnold puts Wordsworth in the front rank not for his poetry but for his "criticism of life".

19. Fallacies of Real Estimate Arnold while giving his touchstone method makes reader aware about the fallacy in judgment. He says that historical fallacy and personal fallacy mars the real estimate of poetry. While expressing his views of the historic, the Personal, the Real; he writes that ‘… in reading poetry, a sense for the best, the really excellent, and of the strength and joy to be drawn from it, should be present in our minds and should govern our estimate of what we read. However this real estimate, the only true one, is liable to be superseded, if we are not watchful, by two other kinds of estimate, the historic estimate and the personal estimate , both of which are fallacious’.

20. On Chaucer Arnold praises Chaucer's excellent style and manner, but says that Chaucer cannot be called a classic since, unlike Homer, Virgil and Shakespeare, his poetry does not have the high poetic seriousness which Aristotle regards as a mark of its superiority over the other arts.

21. On Dryden and Pope Dryden has been regarded, by Arnold, as the glorious founder, and Pope as the splendid high priest, of the age of prose and reason, our indispensable 18th century. Their poetry was that of the builders of an age of prose and reason . Arnold says that Pope and Dryden are not poet classics, but the 'prose classics' of the 18th century.

22. On Thomas Gray As for poetry, he considers Gray to be the only classic of the 18th century. Gray constantly studied and enjoyed Greek poetry and thus inherited their poetic point of view and their application of poetry to life. But he is the 'scantiest, frailest classic ' since his output was small.

23. On Robert Burns Like Chaucer, Burns lacks high poetic seriousness, though his poems have poetic truth in diction and movement. Also like Chaucer, Burns possesses largeness, benignity, freedom and spontaneity. But instead of Chaucer's fluidity, we find in Burns a springing bounding energy. Chaucer's benignity deepens in Burns into a sense of sympathy for both human as well as non-human things, but Chaucer's world is richer and fairer than that of Burns. Sometimes Burns ' poetic genius is unmatched by anyone. He is even better than Goethe at times and he is unrivalled by anyone except Shakespeare.

24. On Shakespeare Praising Shakespeare, Arnold says 'In England there needs a miracle of genius like Shakespeare's to produce a balance of mind'. This is praise tempered by a critical sense. In a letter he writes. 'I keep saying Shakespeare, you are as obscure as life is'. In his sonnet On Shakespeare he says ; 'Others abide our question. Thou are free./ We ask and ask - Thou smilest and art still,/ Out- topping knowledge'.

25. Matthew Arnold's grave at All Saints' Church , Surrey

26. Works Cited Long, W.J. The History of English Literature http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/essay/237816 http://janetschlarbaum.us/author/admin/page/2/ http://www.superarticledirectory.com/Art/262944/306/The-Study-of-Poetry.html