THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

moralism and it attempts to establish the nature of a broad and all-embracing notion of culture. The influence and the
intellectual discipline of his remarkable father Thomas Arnold, the eminent headmaster of Rugby school in the 1820s
and 1830s and the godfather of Victorian earnestness, can be felt throughout. Dr Arnold had reformed his school by
means of a hierarchical system of moral responsibilities and by fostering in his pupils an awareness of mutual
obligations and the promptings of hyperactive consciences. His system had produced a generation of restless, socially
conscious boys forced into adult decision-making before their proper time and often exhausted by the process. Few,
however, felt able to express a disillusion with the head-masterly influence of Arnold, as the lasting popular success of
the boys’ story Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857), written by one of his less than star pupils, Thomas Hughes (1822-
96), serves to suggest. Dr Arnold’s boys were induced to take upon themselves the weight of a life-long struggle
between truth and falsehood and between Christian independence and the atheistic tyranny of the mob.
Culture and Anarchy playfully divides English society into three constituent classes: a ‘Barbarian’ aristocracy, a
‘Philistine’ bourgeoisie and an unlettered ‘Populace’. None of these classes either sympathizes with, or upholds, a
truly refined high culture which could withstand further decay in the political and religious order. Arnold selectively
cites ideas from the European cultural tradition in order to determine the nature of a new social and moral cement
which could serve to bond classes together and also provide a fulfilling spiritual ethos capable of superseding
sectarian religion. The narrow strictures of an inherited ‘Hebraism’, particularly in the Puritan culture of English
religious Nonconformity, needed the balance of the softer and sweeter arts of the ancient Greeks in order to shape a
more tolerant and fluent civilization which could do away with classes, sects, and élites. The book’s satire is
particularly barbed in its attack on the shortcomings of the pragmatic, anti-idealistic English present; its vision of the
future offers an escape into a bright world which has abolished the tyranny of the low-brow. The spirit of universal
enlightenment and of personal integrity could, Arnold held, transform mass democracy. Nevertheless, his argument
suggests an earnest authoritarianism which both despises and suspects popular culture. It lays down rules and claims
that it offers freedom; it enforces peace by effectively suppressing the inconvenient and the disruptive.
Arnold recoils from vulgarity throughout his prose works (he complains, for example, that the problem with the
English Romantic poets lay in their provinciality and lack of wide reading). Nevertheless, his essays on Wordsworth,
Shelley, and Keats are models of their kind, probing and illuminating and defending their subjects even when Arnold
himself seems more inclined to diminish them. His criticism of the culture and the institutions of his time emerges
both from a professional interest in education (he was appointed an inspector of schools by the government in 1851
and worked hard
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at the job for some thirty-five years) and from his own practice as a poet and as a student of the European poetic
tradition. He tends to hold up the intellectual, philosophical, and educational enterprise of France and Germany to the
decided detriment of a mentally foggy England. More significantly, he fatally ignores the real energy of the literature
of his English contemporaries. He rarely mentions the poetry of Tennyson and Browning, he glances narrowly and
unhelpfully at that of his friend Clough, and he generally implies that Dickens’s novels are little more than classics of
philistinism.
‘The true basis for the creative power’s exercise’, Arnold noted in his essay ‘The Function of Criticism at the
present Time’, was the fact that a poet lived ‘in a current of ideas in the highest degree animating and nourishing’ to
his creativity. At such epochs, he added, society was ‘in the fullest measure, permeated by fresh thought, intelligent
and alive’. Arnold held that his own age manifestly demonstrated that English society lacked the proper degree of
intellectual permeation, or rather that its confusions and uncertainties militated against the achievement of an
expressive modern poetry. His own five volumes of verse, published between 1848 and 1867, explore many of the
negatives that he saw in the culture around him. The upright, God-centred struggle for truth of Dr Arnold celebrated
in the poem ‘Rugby Chapel’ (1857, published 1867) still holds meaning in the ‘hideous, and arid, and vile’ modern
world, but both the headmaster and God seem since to have withdrawn into silence. If his criticism seeks to counter
negatives, his poetry embraces them, worries over them, and attempts to redirect them towards some glimmer of
progressive hope. Arnold was well aware of a discrepancy between what he felt he had to say and what he aspired to
express as a poet. His longest poem, Empedocles on Etna, first published in 1852, quickly struck him as too imbued
with ‘modern feeling’ (despite its classical subject), too expressive of ‘depression and overtension of mind’. He
suppressed the poem a year later and apologized for its absence from a new edition of the poems in a long self
defensive Preface. He did not reprint it until 1867 when both the spirit of the age and the decline of his inspiration
seemed to justify its reappearance in print.
Arnold’s 1853 Preface to a sequence of poems, some new, some reprinted, some altered, argues that Empedocles
had failed to ‘inspirit and rejoice’ its readers. As if in response, the volume included one of Arnold’s most resolvedly
‘joyful’ longer poems, ‘The Scholar Gipsy’, a poem which celebrates the twin freedoms of an Oxford student’s escape
from routine and a poet’s attempt to escape into a history unburdened by present confusions and uncertainties: