Critics Corner 8: Mathew Arnold

The two works of Mathew Arnold [1822-1888) considered here are "The Functions of Criticism at the Present Time" [1864] and "The Study of Poetry" [1880].


I read Culture and Anarchy out of my mother's library years ago. I have little doubt that my 19th century  bourgeois ancestors considered him a wonderful authority or at least an ally  in the great liberal project of expanding the benefits of public education in both England and America (Arnold was an inspector of schools).  Some of Arnold's thoughts on criticism ought to be weighed in light of the fierce sectarianism and party partisanship which characterized the fight to establish public education in the United  Kingdom.

"It is of  the last importance (meaning the first) that English criticism should clearly discern what rule for its course, in order to avail itself of the field now opening to it, and to produce fruit for the future.The rule may be summed up in one word, - disinterestedness. And how is criticism to show disinterestedness? By keeping aloof from practice, by resolutely following the law of its own nature, which is to be a free play of the mind on all subjects it touches; by steadily refusing to lend itself to any of those ulterior, political, practical considerations about ideas which plenty of people will be sure to attach to them, which perhaps ought often to be attached to them, which in this country at any rate are certain to be attached to them quite sufficiently, but which criticism  really has nothing to do with. Its business is, as I have said, simply to know the best that is known and thought in the world, and by in its turn making this known, to create a current of true and fresh ideas."

The statement clearly reflects the notion of an Ivory Tower, or a specifically academic mission ( as it is sometimes said about some question: "It is an academic one so don't get  too excited'). Perhaps more so than the ontological 'disinterestedness' of the 'Kantian" sense. To get public education you have to assure people that what goes on there will be 'neutral' to some effective degree, not just a vehicle for promoting the views of, as we say today, 'special interests'. Of course even now, more than a hundred years after the Education Acts, 'the public' always suspects that some political agenda in being pursued in schools, or, even contrarily express the thought that 'academic pressure' in itself is a bad thing, imposing  undue 'emotional burdens' on the spontaneous currents of their children's development.


  The example he gives of Edmund Burke gets closer than Kant to what Arnold had on his mind.

"Burke is so great  because, almost alone in England, he brings thought to bear upon politics, he saturates politics with thought; it is his accident that his ideas were at the service of an epoch of concentration, not an epoch of expansion; it is his characteristic that he so lived by ideas, and had such a source of them welling up within him, that he could float, even in an epoch of concentration and English Tory politics, with them. It does not hurt him that Dr. Price and the Liberals were enraged with him; it does not even hurt him that George the Third and the Tories were enchanted with him. His greatness is that he lived in a world which neither English Liberalism nor English Toryism is apt to enter, - the world of ideas, not the world of catchwords and party habits. So far is it being from really true of him that he 'to party gave up what was meant for mankind," that at the very end of his fierce struggle with the French Revolution, after all his invective against its false pretensions, hollowness, and madness, with his sincere conviction of its mischievousness, he can close with a memorandum on the best means of combating it, some of the last pages he ever wrote, the "Thoughts on French Affairs in December 1791, -with these striking words :

The evil is stated, in my opinion, as it exists. The remedy must be where power, wisdom, and information, I hope, are more united with good intentions than they can be with me. I have done with the subject, I believe, forever. Itu has given me many anxious moments for the last two years. If a great change is made in human affairs, the minds of men will be fitted to it; the general opinion and feelings will draw that way. Every fear, every hope will forward it; and then they who persist in opposing this mighty current in human affairs, will appear rather to resist the decrees of Providence itself, than the mere designs of men. They will not be resolute and firm, but perverse and obstinate.

This  is what I call living by ideas; when one side of the question has long had your earnest support, when all your feelings are engaged, when you hear all around you no language but one, when your party talks this language like a steam engine and can imagine no other, - still be able to think, still to be irresistibly carried, if so be it, by the current of thought to the opposite side of the question, and, like Balaam, to be unable to speak anything but what the Lord has put into your mouth. I know nothing more striking, and  must add that I know nothing more un-English."

For all that, in the rest of the essay, Arnold overstates the distance between the normal course of practical affairs and free play of the mind.

"What then is the duty of criticism here? To take the practical point of view, to applaud the liberal movement and all its works- the British College of Health or its New Road religions of the future, - for their general utility's sake? By no means; but to be perpetually dissatisfied with these works, while they perpetually  fall short of a high and perfect ideal.  . . I have wished, above all, to the attitude which criticism should adopt towards everything; on its right tone and temper of mind. . . I am bound by my own disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world."

These are just general statement more suggestive than definitive of the functions of criticism. He sets himself up as a kind of arbiter of 'true criticism, tone, temper, play of mind and proper interest.' without putting his fingers too close on it.  But for all that, as early as 1864, Arnold forms in his mind the idea of a European Union:

"After all, the criticism I am really concerned with, the criticism which alone can help us most for the future, the criticism which, when so much stress is laid on the importance of criticism which, throughout Europe, is at the present day meant, when so much stress is laid on the importance of criticism and the critical spirit, is a criticism which regards Europe as being, for intellectual and spiritual purposes, one great confederation, bound to joint action and working to a common result. . ."  That is, I suppose, a more advanced  confederation than what already existed in Arnold's day with respect to banks, large commercial enterprises and student exchanges.

In "The Study of Poetry"  Arnold writes, repeating himself on numerous occasions without adding much analytic clarity:

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"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 out estimate of what we read. But this real estimate , the only true one, is liable to be superseded, if we are not watchful, by two other kinds of estimate, the historical estimate and the personal estimate. . .  natural fallacies (as he calls them.)"

What the real estimate might be, however, Arnold admits that "It is much better simply to have recourse to concrete examples." On the historical estimate  he thinks the albeit lively and accomplished critic M. Charles d'Hericault, editor of Clement Merot, goes too far when he says that "the cloud of glory playing round a classic is a mist as dangerous to the future of a literature as it is intolerable for history. It hinders us from seeing more than a single point, the culminating and exceptional point; the summary, fictitious and arbitrary, of a thought and of a work. It substitutes a halo for a physiognomy, it puts a statue where there once was a man, and, hiding from us all trace of labor, the attempts, the weaknesses, the failures, it claims not study but veneration; it does not show us how the thing is done, it imposes upon us a model. Above all, for the historian this creation of classical personages is inadmissible; for it withdraws the poet from his time, from his proper life, it breaks historical relationships, it blinds criticism by conventional admiration, and renders the investigation of literary origins unacceptable. It gives us a human personage no longer, but a God seated immovable amidst His perfect work, like Jupiter on Olympus; and it will hardly be possible for a young student, to whom such work is exhibited at such a distance from him, to believe that it did not issue ready made from that divine head."

"There can be no more useful help for discovering what poetry belongs to the class of the truly excellent, and can therefore do us the most good, than to have always in one's mind lines and expressions of the great masters," Arnold concludes his rebuttal.