Matthew Arnold

From Philosopedia

Arnold, Matthew (24 December 1822 - 15 April 1888)

Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold was born in Laleham on the Thames. He graduated from Oxford in 1844. His father was Dr. Thomas Arnold, immortalized in Tom Brown’s Schooldays and in Lytton Strachey’s portrait in Eminent Victorians. He was an earnest administrator who headed the famous school of Rugby, and he stood for a profound Christian ethic.

Arnold parted ways with Christianity some time in his teens, on intellectual and ethical grounds, and became an agnostic.

In "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse," he later wrote:

Rigorous teachers seized my youth

And purged its faith, and trimm'd its fire

Show'd me the high, white star of Truth.

In 1851 he was appointed "Her Majesty's Inspector of Schools," an arduous responsibility he held for 35 years. His poem, "Empedocles on Etna," published only with the initial "A," appeared the following year. Religious critics censored sale of the book after only 50 were sold. Poems of Matthew Arnold was published in 1857, followed by other volumes.

Arnold served for a decade as professor of poetry at Oxford. In his 40s he largely turned from poetry to critical writing. His Essays in Criticism came out in 1865. Arnold's freethinking was clearly delineated in Culture and Anarchy (1869), Saint Paul and Protestantism (1870), Literature and Dogma (1873) and Last Essays on Church and Religion (1877). In the preface to God and the Bible (1875), he wrote,

• The personages of the Christian heaven and their conversations are no more matter of fact than the personages of the Greek Olympus and their conversations.

In his poem, "Dover Beach," he described "The Sea of Faith . . . Retreating." Although Arnold gently defined religion as "morality touched with emotion" and some detect a tinge of regret in his rejection of faith, he was an ardent critic of Christian doctrine and the Bible. "It is almost impossible to exaggerate the proneness of the human mind to take miracles as evidence, and to seek for miracles as evidence," he wrote in Literature and Dogma. "Miracles do not happen," he baldly wrote in the preface to the 1883 edition of Literature and Dogma.

Arnold's antipathy for what he considered the new middle classes’ unthinking materialism is illustrated by his view of the Atlantic telegraph, “that great rope with a Philistine at each end of it talking inutilities.” A deeply immersed classicist, he became professor of poetry at Oxford, where he claimed that the role of the critic was “simply to know the best that is known and thought in the world.” The Economist dubbed him a “staunch Liberal,” a “reactionary in some of his views,” and an “almost socialist in others. Any pomposity was tempered with a vivacity and sense of humour, and behind his superior airs was a modest and playful man, if somewhat egotistical.” Corliss Lamont has stated that “the agnostically inclined Matthew Arnold vigorously attacked religious superstition and upheld the idea that Jesus was not God but a great teacher and oracle of ‘sweet reasonableness.’ ” Although he liked Cardinal Newman’s sermons at Oxford, they did not persuade him. Lamont lauds Arnold’s minimal definition of God: “a Power not ourselves that makes for righteousness.” However, most humanists are averse to using the word “God,” relegating it to what believers generally mean by the term. Often amusing in the way he expressed his views, Arnold wrote about the settling of New England:

• Notwithstanding the mighty results of the Pilgrim Fathers’ voyage, they and their standard of perfection are rightly judged when we figure to ourselves Shakespeare or Virgil–souls in whom sweetness and light, and all that in human nature is most humane, were eminent–accompanying them on their voyage, and think what intolerable company Shakespeare and Virgil would have found them!

“All the biblical miracles will at last disappear with the progress of science,” he wrote. What Arnold looked forward to was a culture that would incorporate all the best that ever has been thought and said in the world, a goal much like that of contemporary teachers of the humanities. Arnold disbelieved in a future life and Christianity, but he remained a churchgoer. Religion he defined as “morality tinged with emotion.” God, he once defined, is “the stream of tendency by which all things seek to fulfill the law of their being.”

(See entries for Arthur Hugh Clough and D. H. Lawrence.)

{BDF; CE; CL; ER; FFRF; FUK; HAB; JM; JMR; JMRH; RAT; RE; The Economist, 20 July 1996; TSV; TYD}