A History of English Literature

MATTHEW ARNOLD. Contemporary with Carlyle and Ruskin and fully worthy to
rank with them stands still a third great preacher of social and spiritual
regeneration, Matthew Arnold, whose personality and message, however, were
very different from theirs and who was also one of the chief Victorian
poets. Arnold was born in 1822, the son--and this is decidedly
significant--of the Dr. Thomas Arnold who later became the famous
headmaster of Rugby School and did more than any other man of the century
to elevate the tone of English school life. Matthew Arnold proceeded from
Rugby to Oxford (Balliol College), where he took the prize for original
poetry and distinguished himself as a student. This was the period of the
Oxford Movement, and Arnold was much impressed by Newman's fervor and
charm, but was already too rationalistic in thought to sympathize with his
views. After graduation Arnold taught Greek for a short time at Rugby and
then became private secretary to Lord Lansdoune, who was minister of public
instruction. Four years later, in 1851, Arnold was appointed an inspector
of schools, a position which he held almost to the end of his life and in
which he labored very hard and faithfully, partly at the expense of his
creative work. His life was marked by few striking outward events. His
marriage and home were happy. Up to 1867 his literary production consisted
chiefly of poetry, very carefully composed and very limited in amount, and
for two five-year terms, from 1857 to 1867, he held the Professorship of
Poetry at Oxford. At the expiration of his second term he did not seek for
reappointment, because he did not care to arouse the opposition of
Gladstone--then a power in public affairs--and stir up religious
controversy. His retirement from this position virtually marks the very
distinct change from the first to the second main period of his career. For
with deliberate self-sacrifice he now turned from poetry to prose essays,
because he felt that through the latter medium he could render what seemed
to him a more necessary public service. With characteristic
self-confidence, and obeying his inherited tendency to didacticism, he
appointed himself, in effect, a critic of English national life, beliefs,
and taste, and set out to instruct the public in matters of literature,
social relations, politics and religion. In many essays, published
separately or in periodicals, he persevered in this task until his death in
1888.
As a poet Arnold is generally admitted to rank among the Victorians next
after Tennyson and Browning. The criticism, partly true, that he was not
designed by Nature to be a poet but made himself one by hard work rests on
his intensely, and at the outset coldly, intellectual and moral
temperament. He himself, in modified Puritan spirit, defined poetry as a
criticism of life; his mind was philosophic; and in his own verse, inspired
by Greek poetry, by Goethe and Wordsworth, he realized his definition. In
his work, therefore, delicate melody and sensuous beauty were at first much
less conspicuous than a high moral sense, though after the first the
elements of external beauty greatly developed, often to the finest effect.
In form and spirit his poetry is one of the very best later reflections of
that of Greece, dominated by thought, dignified, and polished with the
utmost care. 'Sohrab and Rustum,' his most ambitious and greatest single
poem, is a very close and admirable imitation of 'The Iliad.' Yet, as the
almost intolerable pathos of 'Sohrab and Rustum' witnesses, Arnold is not
by any means deficient, any more than the Greek poets were, in emotion. He
affords, in fact, a striking example of classical form and spirit united
with the deep, self-conscious, meditative feeling of modern Romanticism.
In substance Arnold's poetry is the expression of his long and tragic
spiritual struggle. To him religion, understood as a reverent devotion to
Divine things, was the most important element in life, and his love of pure
truth was absolute; but he held that modern knowledge had entirely