Matthew Arnold as a Critic of His Age

Introduction:
Matthew Arnold was both a distinguished poet and prose writer of the Victorian
era. He wrote on varied topics such as literature, education, politics, and religion. But
whatever topic he handled, his approach was always critical and more often than not,
constructive. The same critical attitude is discernible in much of his poetry also.
As lago said of himself Arnold, too. is "nothing if not critical." All of his critical work, it
may be pointed out. is of a piece. Criticism, whether literary or social or political or
educational, performs, according to Arnold, the same function and demands the same
qualities of intelligence, discrimination, knowledge, and disinterestedness. Criticism is
nothing if it is not related to life. Life is the main thing. So Arnold's 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. He himself defines criticism as "the
endeavour, in all branches of knowledge, theology, philosophy, history, art, science, to
see the object as in itself it really is." Thus criticism with Arnold is a definite kind of
approach to life. J. D. Jump observes: "Writing on literature, education, politics and
religion, he tries to encourage a free play of the mind upon the material before it and so
to help its readers to get rid of any stock notions and pieces of mental petrifaction which
may be hampering their thought." In other words. Arnold stood for the annihilation of
all tyrannical dogmas, prejudices, and orthodox notions. That there was a pressing need
for such a campaign in England cannot be gainsaid. "Matthew Arnold," to quote Hugh
Walker, 'inherited the teacher's instinct, and he was profoundly influenced by his sense
of what his country needed. To be useful to England was always one of his greatest
ambitions; and he knew that England was always one of his greatest ambitions; and he
knew that the way to be useful was to supply that wherein England was deficient.'
Obviously it was the rational and dispassionate appraisal of the life "wherein England
was deficient." And that explains his donning of the mantle of a critic
The Bearing of Arnold's Literary Criticism on Life and Society:
As a critic Arnold is best known as a literary critic. But his literary criticism has a
close bearing on society and life in general. He was extremely impatient of the slogan
"Art for Art's Sake" which was raised by the Pre-Raphaelites, aesthetes, and some other
nondescript groups. Consequently, his literary criticism is submerged in the criticism of
society. According to him, "poetry is a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for
such a criticism." Criticism, according to him, should be "sincere, simple, flexible,
ardent, ever widening its knowledge." In his own literary and critical essays he is often
led to specifically social criticism. In his lectures on Homer, for instance, he expatiates
upon the frailty of intellectual conscience among his countrymen. Likewise, in "The
Function of Criticism at the Present Times" he points out the absurdity of numerous
false notions which have a free play in England owing to the absence or weakness of
such intellectual conscience. In a word, Arnold is a critic of his age even while he is
engaged, apparently, in literary criticism.

Social Criticism in Arnold's Poetry:

Arnold's oft-quoted remark that poetry is, or should be, "a criticism of life" has
provided a juicy bone for numerous critics to gnaw at. Most critics have, however,
spurned it as a frivolous truism. Thus George Saintsbury dismisses it as such, because as
he observes in A History of English Criticism, "all literature is the application of ideas to
life: and to say that poetry is the application of ideas to life, under the conditions fixed
for poetry is simply a vain repetition." Likewise, T. S. Eliot (in The Use of Poetry and the
Use of Criticism) observes that Arnold's dictum about poetry makes no sense. He holds
that life is an awful mystery and we cannot criticise it properly; it can only be done just
vaguely. However, J. D. Jump makes bold attempts to defend Arnold. "A good deal of
nonsense," observes he, "has been written about this phrase ("a criticism of life") by
commentators who were so impatient to reject it that they could not wait to understand
it...It would be difficult to find fault with this as an account of the ideal attitude of a
poet, or other creative artist, towards his experience."
How far and in what way is Arnold's own poetry "a criticism of life"? Hugh
Walker answers this question in the following words:
"His much-condemned definition of poetry as 'a criticism of life' is at least true of
his own poetry. Even in the literary sense, there is a surprising quantity of wise criticism
in his verse...But Arnold's verse is critical in a far deeper sense than this. In all his
deepest poems, in Thyrsis and The Scholar Gipsy, in Resignation, in the Obermann
poems, in^4 Southern Night, Arnold is passing judgment on the life of his age, the life of
his country, the lives of individual men. In the last-named poem the fate of his brother,
dying in exile in the attempt to return to the country of his birth, becomes the text for a
sermon on the restless energy of the English and on the 'strange irony of fate' which
preserves for the members of such a race graves so peaceful as theirs by 'those hoary
Indian hills' and 'this gracious Midland sea.'
"In all this Arnold is quite consistent with himself. Holding that what Europe in
this generation principally needed was criticism he gave this criticism in verse as well as
in prose..."
Quite often Arnold's criticism of life in his poetry does not go beyond the
expression of a sense of resignation. Such a criticism is definitely negative. If Keats
escapes from life, Arnold resigns himself to it. Life with him is not something to be
enjoyed, but something to be suffered. Resignation to life is also of two kinds: one
escapist, and the other Stoic. In the Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse the
resignation is of the first kind. Sick of the fury, fret, and fever of life, the poet appeals to
the monastic cloister to take him into its fold.
On, hide me in your gloom profound,
Ye solemn seats of holy pain!
Take me, cowl forms, and fence me round,
Till I possess my soul again.
This desire to "possess my soul again" is a recurring feature of Arnold's poetic
expression. His most insistent counsel to the people is to "possess their souls." He felt
that with the relentless and catastrophic advance of the materialistic values in his age

human beings had lost contact with their inner spirit which is the abode of all the higher
values of life.
The other kind of Arnoldian resignation is more assertive and valiant and much
less negative. It arises from a pessimistic insight into the arcanum of life. It is an
acceptance of the human predicament, arecognition and an adjustment to the fact that
duty is not usually attended by a meet reward. Duty is still to be performed and the
event left to God. We are ordained to spend life
In beating where we must not pass
And seeking what we shall not find.
Nature herself is resigned to the pain of existence:
Yet, Fausta, the mute turf we tread,
The solemn hills around us spread,
This stream which falls incessantly,
The strange, scrawl 'd rocks; the lonely sky,
If I might lend their life a voice,
Seem to bear rather than rejoice.
Science and Faith:
Like most other Victorian writers, Arnold expresses in his work the conflict
between science and faith which his age witnessed. The unprecedented development of
experimental science had come to shake the very foundations of Christianity by calling
into question Genesis and much else besides. Arnold felt that he was breathing in a kind
of spiritual vacuum. Like Janus he looked both ways. Neither like T. H. Huxley could he
align himself completely with the new mode of thinking (by turning an agnostic) nor
could he cling to the ruins of a crumbling order. Spiritual disturbance often manifesting
itself in despair was the natural outcome of such a predicament. Arnold found himself
shuttlecocking
between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born.
This desperate groping for something like a firm moral stance finds expression in
much of his most typical poetry. As Moody and Lovett maintain, Arnold's "prevailing
tone is one of doubt and half-despairing stoicism." Dover Beach is the finest
embodiment of Arnold's dominant mood. He refers to the crumbling of the religious
edifice:
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd;
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
He is keenly aware of the terrible confusion caused by the conflict between science and
faith, between advancing materialism and retreating Christianity:

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.
He compares modern civilization to Rachel:
Ah, not the radiant spirit of Greece alone
She hadone power, which made her breast its home!
In her, like us, there clash 'd contending powers,
Germany, France, Christ, Moses, Athens, Rome
The strife, the mixture in her soul are ours.
Her genius and her glory are her own.
What is, after all, the way out of his confusion!" In Arnold's opinion, "says Hugh
Walker, "that which the time demands above all things is the discovery of some shore,
not false or impossible, towards which to steer. We need some Columbus to guide us
over a trackless ocean to a new continent which he discerns, though we cannot. Our
misfortune is that we can find no such pilot. Goethe, the 'physician' of Europe's 'iron
age,' had laid his finger on the seat of the disease, but he failed to find a cure. Arnold
never conceived himself to be capable of succeeding where Goethe had failed. On the
contrary, he rather teaches that the problem had grown so complex that scarcely any
intellect could suffice for its solution. This feeling of almost insuperable difficulty is the
secret of Arnold's melancholy. It gives a sense of brooding pause, almost of the paralysis
of action, to his verse. It is the secret of his attraction for some minds, and of an
alienation amounting almost to repulsion between him and many others. It makes him,
in verse as well as in prose, critical rather than constructive."
"Culture and Anarchy":
Among Arnold's works dealing with social and political questions, the pride of
place must go to Culture and Anarchy (1869) which was obviously occasioned by the
mass agitations preceding the passage of the Reform Bill of 1869 which granted voting
rights to the working classes of towns and thus almost doubled the electorate. The
Victorian age is generally known to us as an age of peace and prosperity and most of all,
political stability (in spite of the numerous unsuccessful attempts made on the life of
Queen Victoria). But behind the imposing facade of order, Arnold perceived some
anarchic forces at work. Anarchy, according to him is essentially antonymous to culture.
When everybody is bent upon "doing as one likes", culture is in danger. What: makes for
culture? It is, in his words, a "view in which the love of our neighbours, the impulses
towards action, help, and beneficence, the desire for removing human error, clearing
human confusion and diminishing human misery, the noble aspiration to leave the
world better and happier than we found it-motives eminently such as are called socialcome in as parts of the ground of culture and the main and preeminent parts." Culture is
thus a social passion of doing good. And anarchy is its very negation. Arnold was

convinced of the progress of democracy, but he desired that the transition to democracy
should not be allowed to destroy the social edifice. He was against unchartered freedom
which allowed all to have their own ways. "The moment," writes he, "it is plainly put
before us that a man is asserting his personal liberty, we are half disarmed; because we
are believers in freedom and not in some dream of a right reason to which the assertion
of our freedom is to be subordinated." He supports a "firm state-power" to hold such
anarchic tendencies in check. The state should not be representative of any single class,
because all individual classes have been depraved by the contagion of materialism-the
higher classes have been materialised, the middle classes desensitised, and the lower
classes brutalised. Along with Culture and Anarchy may be mentioned here Friendship's
Garland (1871) in which is contained, according to Hugh Walker, "the very best of
Arnold's criticism on the social rather than the political side."
Educational Criticism:
A word in the end about Arnold's educational criticism. Arnold was an Inspector
of Schools and then the Professor of Poetry of Oxford. He was, naturally, interested in
educational reforms and wrote quite a few tracts in this connexion. Many of the reforms
which he advocated have since been implemented. Compton Rickett observes: "There
were no more liberal-minded, clear-sighted educational reformers in the Victorian era
than he and Thomas Henry Huxley."