Overcoming Matthew Arnold: Ethics in Culture and Criticism [1 ed.] 1409426513, 9781409426516

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Overcoming Matthew Arnold Ethics in Culture and Criticism

James Walter Caufield

Overcoming Matthew Arnold

Opening the way for a reexamination of Matthew Arnold’s unique contributions to ethical criticism, James Walter Caufield emphasizes the central role of philosophical pessimism in Arnold’s master tropes of “culture” and “conduct.” Caufield uses Arnold’s ethics as a lens through which to view key literary and cultural movements of the past 150 years, demonstrating that Arnoldian conduct is grounded in a Victorian ethic of “renouncement,” a form of altruism that wholly informs both Arnold’s poetry and prose and sets him apart from the many nineteenth-century public moralists. Arnold’s thought is situated within a cultural and philosophical context that shows the continuing relevance of “renouncement” to much contemporary ethical reflection, from the political kenosis of Giorgio Agamben and the pensiero debole of Gianni Vattimo, to the ethical criticism of Wayne C. Booth and Martha Nausbaum. In refocusing attention on Arnold’s place within the broad history of critical and social thought, Caufield returns the poet and critic to his proper place as a founding father of modern cultural criticism.

To Lib and Walt

Overcoming Matthew Arnold Ethics in Culture and Criticism

James Walter Caufield University of California, Los Angeles, USA

First published 2012 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © James Walter Caufield 2012 James Walter Caufield has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Caufield, James Walter. Overcoming Matthew Arnold: ethics in culture and criticism. 1. Arnold, Matthew, 1822–1888 – Criticism and interpretation. 2. Arnold, Matthew, 1822–1888 – Ethics. 3. Criticism – Moral and ethical aspects – Great Britain – History – 19th century. 4. Criticism – Moral and ethical aspects. I. Title 828.8’09–dc23 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Caufield, James Walter. Overcoming Matthew Arnold: ethics in culture and criticism / by James Walter Caufield. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Arnold, Matthew, 1822–1888—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PR4024.C38 2012 821’.8—dc23 ISBN: 9781409426516 (hbk) ISBN: 9781315599281 (ebk)

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Contents 1

Culture and Conduct: Politics, Pessimism, and the Function of Matthew Arnold  

1

2

The Buried Life: Cultural Politics and the Renunciation of Arnold  

29

3

Poetry is the Reality: Arnoldian Culture Tackles the Athletes of Logic  

61

4

Culture Hates Hatred: Critical Antihumanism and the Fate of Arnold  

85

5

To the Wise, Foolish; to the World, Weak: The Reception of Arnoldian Pessimism  

125

6

Less than Joy and More than Resignation: Arnold’s Method of Ethical Exemplarity  

159

Bibliography   Index  

203 227

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Chapter 1

Culture and Conduct: Politics, Pessimism, and the Function of Matthew Arnold Great is the power of steady misrepresentation. —Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

Matthew Arnold famously opens Culture and Anarchy (1869) by describing himself as “a Liberal tempered by experience, reflection, and renouncement.”1 His final term, renouncement, serves as the focal point for this book. By revisiting Arnold’s work with the aim of inspecting this long-neglected first principle of his ethics, I hope to let, as he would say, “a stream of fresh thought play freely about our stock notions and habits” of thinking about Arnold’s thinking (CPW 5.187). My purpose is neither to correct prior misreadings of Arnold—although that painful duty naturally finds some small place here—nor to presume to offer some truer or purer understanding of his thought, as if in prelude to a great instauration of Arnoldian poetics or politics. Instead, I try to engage his thought from a position that is not always already locked into the now rather threadbare culture-versus-politics debate that has prevailed for some three decades and has kept Arnold narrowly bound within a hermeneutic scheme that is largely unexamined and taken for granted. The recalibrated perspective that I develop here permits, in the first place, a cross-grained reading of more than 150 years of Arnold criticism, beginning with his own Victorian and Edwardian contemporaries and near-contemporaries, who sometimes deem him a rather selfish and weak-minded poseur. My approach also sheds new light on the views of Arnold’s interwar critics, such as T. S. Eliot, who claims that Arnold “skilfully initiated” a “degradation of philosophy and religion” in an effort to “divorce Religion from thought,”2 on the soixante-huitards of the British New Left, who denounce his high-culture elitism and bourgeois-hegemonic machinations, and on more recent theorists of postcolonialism and cultural studies, who indict Arnold’s Eurocentrism and racism. Disparate as these critical lines are, they converge in curious ways when viewed through an Arnoldian objective Culture and Anarchy, ed. R. H. Super, The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, vol. 5 (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1965) 88. Further quotations from Arnold’s published prose come from the Super edition and are hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as CPW and by volume and page number. 2 T. S. Eliot, “Arnold and Pater,” Selected Essays of T. S. Eliot (New York: Harcourt, 1950) 388, 385. 1

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of “renouncement,” and they show that a polemical engagement with Arnold’s thought often evokes a rhetorical double move: the elision of renunciation by means of denunciation. Focusing on Arnold through his own optic also reveals some unexpected points of connection between his ideas and various issues of current interest in literary theory and ethical philosophy—particularly with questions of altruism, impersonality, disinterestedness, universality, cosmopolitanism, and the like. This unknown yet uncanny kinship with Arnoldian “renouncement” is discernible, for example, in the other-centered ethics of Emmanuel Lévinas, the political ontology of Giorgio Agamben, the intellectual humanism of Wolf Lepenies, the “ethical criticism” of Martha Nussbaum and Wayne C. Booth, the “impersonality” and “cultivated distance” of Sharon Cameron and Amanda Anderson, the “postcolonial melancholy” of Paul Gilroy, and elsewhere.3 Arnold’s ethical ideas deserve a renewed effort of recontextualization today, I believe, precisely for the sake of this broad relevance, which seems hitherto to have been either overlooked, ignored, or deliberately obscured. One of Arnold’s more evenhanded critics, F. R. Leavis, observes that he “is not easy to do justice to,” and the reason seems to spring, Leavis says, from a habit of “taking critical stock at a remove from the actual reading” of Arnold.4 By taking critical stock from Arnold’s own notion of “renouncement,” the present study seeks to do justice to this master trope of all his work and the fixed center around which the entire constellation of his writings turns. Like Leavis, cultural critic Raymond Williams also seems to take a fair measure of Arnold, calling him a “great and important figure in nineteenth-century thought” and closing his remarks in Culture and Society (1958) on this monitory note: “We shall, if we are wise, continue to listen to [Arnold], and, when the time comes to reply, we can hardly speak better than in his own best spirit.”5 In the chapters that See, for example, Emmanuel Lévinas, Humanism of the Other, trans. Nidra Poller (Urbana; Chicago: U of Illinois P, 2006); Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005); Wolf Lepenies, Qu’est-ce qu’un Intellectuel Européen? Les Intellectuels et la Politique de l’Esprit dans l’Histoire Européenne (Paris: Seuil, 2007); Martha Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston: Beacon, 1995) and “Exactly and Responsibly: A Defense of Ethical Criticism,” Philosophy and Literature 22.2 (1998): 343–65; Wayne C. Booth, “Why Banning Ethical Criticism Is a Serious Mistake,” Philosophy and Literature 22.2 (1998): 366–93; Sharon Cameron, Impersonality: Seven Essays (Chicago; London: U of Chicago P, 2007); Amanda Anderson, The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanisms and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton; Oxford: Princeton UP, 2001) and The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Culture of Theory (Princeton; Oxford: Princeton UP, 2006); Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2000) and Postcolonial Melancholy (London; New York: Routledge, 2006). 4 “Introduction,” On Bentham and Coleridge, by John Stuart Mill (New York: Harper, 1962) 36; “Arnold as Critic,” Scrutiny 7.3 (Dec. 1938): 322. 5 Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (London: Chatto, 1958) 128. 3

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follow, I aim less to reply to Arnold than to gauge just how far “his own best spirit” is animated by an ideal that in some ways seems as outmoded today as monocles and lambchop sideburns: the ideal of a self-effacing subjectivity that is capable of grounding a literary-critical, political and, not least important, ethical praxis. Eliot’s nutshell version of Arnold’s thought offers a handy mnemonic with which to frame the discussion and one that also assists toward a first approximation of the question: “Culture and Conduct are the first things, we are told,” since both “were important for [Arnold’s] own time,” but “his Culture survives better than his Conduct,” Eliot says, “because it can better survive vagueness of definition.”6 This point might be even truer today than when first put in the 1930s. Like the religious writings in which it is embedded, Arnold’s “Conduct” is now almost wholly forgotten by readers, while his “Culture,” in spite of (perhaps because of) its cloudiness, still figures, at least latently and in various inflections, in much contemporary “culture talk,” from the thin-lipped and querulous defenses of GreatBooks culture to the thick descriptions—and sometimes “deforming intellectual consequences”—of academic cultural studies.7 Arnold remains a shadowy presence in the discourse of culture, if only as a foil for the left, a kind of stage villain whose advancement of “Culture” must be ritually unmasked and denounced as one of the dangerously seductive ideological mystifications of bourgeois hegemony. The polemical staying power of this left-critical version of “Culture” is still notable, for instance, in the “cultural politics”-versus-“cultural criticism” debate of Stefan Collini and Francis Mulhern that enlivened the pages of the New Left Review from 2001 to 2004.8 Although the ideological stakes in play for these modern thinkers, the political valences, and the terminological and theoretical sophistication of their “culture talk” all mark significant differences from the discourse of Arnold’s day, Collini and Mulhern nevertheless occupy positions that are structurally almost indistinguishable from those held in the 1860s by Arnold and, say, James “Arnold and Pater” 382, 383. For “culture talk,” see Stefan Collini, “Culture Talk,” New Left Review 7 (Jan.–Feb.

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2001): 43–53. For the “deforming intellectual consequences” of cultural studies, see Francis Mulhern, “What Is Cultural Criticism?” New Left Review 23 (Sept.–Oct. 2003): 37. Mulhern elsewhere regrets that what is missing from the “richly resourced cultural studies radicalism of the nineties, is committed, systematic theoretical and moral resistance to the dominant cultures of capital.” Mulhern, “A Welfare Culture?: Hoggart and Williams in the Fifties,” The Present Lasts a Long Time: Essays in Cultural Politics (Cork, Ireland: Cork UP, 1998) 132. See also Collini, “Grievance Studies: How Not to Do Cultural Criticism,” English Pasts: Essays in History and Culture (Oxford; New York: Oxford UP, 1999) 252–68. 8 See Mulhern, Culture/Metaculture (London; New York: Routledge, 2000); Collini, “Culture Talk” 43–53; Mulhern, “Beyond Metaculture,” New Left Review 16 (July–Aug. 2002): 86–104; Collini, “Defending Cultural Criticism,” New Left Review 18 (Nov.–Dec. 2002): 73–97; Mulhern, “What Is Cultural Criticism?” 35–49; Collini, “On Variousness; and on Persuasion,” New Left Review 27 (May–June 2004): 65–97. Collini further extends some of his positions in Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006) and Common Reading: Critics, Historians, Publics (Oxford; New York: Oxford UP, 2008).

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Overcoming Matthew Arnold

Fitzjames Stephen or Henry Sidgwick, two of his most dogged critics. At the same time, engagés scholars such as Terry Eagleton and Edward W. Said also people their academic interventions with rather tendentious accounts of Arnoldian “Culture,” a kind of all-purpose bogey that illustrates Collini’s claim that “Arnold, or a convenient parody of what he is supposed to have stood for, has been the target of some unusually violent criticism” in recent decades.9 The present study examines several such critical constructions in some detail, but by far the greater weight here falls on the “Conduct” side of the scale, the neglect of which has served to render Arnold’s “Culture” yet more obscure. The basic movement of this book places Arnold’s ethics—essentially his first principle of conduct, “renouncement”—in dialogue with important trends in modern religious and philosophical thought, and it does so by shifting the current critical focus away from the “Arnoldian problematic” of culture, as Mulhern terms it,10 and toward another, specifically ethical problematic that grounds all of Arnold’s work and that belongs to the long-obscured nineteenth-century tradition of philosophical pessimism. Pessimism might initially strike readers as a rather forbidding notion to bring to bear upon Arnold, the prophet of culture and apostle of sweetness and light, but characterizing him as a philosophical pessimist neither disserves his reputation nor renders his ethical thought idiosyncratic in its Victorian context or irrelevant today. Rightly read, Arnoldian pessimism actually forms a perfectly logical imbrication with what historian Richard Bellamy calls the broadly Gladstonian effort “to transform the Liberal Party into a vehicle of political moralism.”11 The pessimistic bent of Arnold’s thought plainly marks him as the chief representative of this important trend in nineteenth-century ethics, although the trend has attracted surprisingly little notice among Arnold scholars and students of intellectual history. One recent (and rare) treatment of philosophical pessimism comes from political theorist Joshua Foa Dienstag, whose Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit (2006) trenchantly analyzes this occluded ethical and literary tradition and laments the “suppression and dismissal of pessimism that has taken place in the last hundred years.”12 Dienstag shrewdly notes that the very notion “has become so despised in our culture that the word ‘pessimist’ can be used today as a term of political or intellectual abuse,” and it is “enough to label an idea (or a person) ‘pessimistic’ in 9 Stefan Collini, Arnold (Oxford; New York: Oxford UP, 1988) 3. Collini’s claim seems still to apply. See, for instance, Terry Eagleton, The Idea of Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000) 11–12, 32, 40–41 and After Theory (New York: Basic, 2003) 82, 84, 154; Edward W. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia UP, 2004) 22, 33, and passim. 10 “Beyond Metaculture” 100. 11 “T. H. Green and the Morality of Victorian Liberalism,” Victorian Liberalism: Nineteenth-Century Political Thought and Practice, ed. Richard Bellamy (London; New York: Routledge, 1990) 132. 12 Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit (Princeton; London: Princeton UP, 2006) xii.

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order to be allowed to dismiss it (or him) without further discussion as irrational, emotional, indefensible or, worst of all, unpatriotic.”13 As Chapters 3 and 4 show, Arnold’s thought is often dismissed in these very terms. Viewed critically, however, “[p]essimism is a philosophy of self-conduct,” as Dienstag rightly says, and this book demonstrates that Arnold’s “Conduct”—the “renouncement” at the heart of his pessimistic ethics—functions as the shadow side of his “Culture,” the locus of a complementary discursive formation that, though largely unseen and long unattended, deserves close scrutiny for the pronounced bias that it continually gives to “culture talk.” Of particular importance in historically situating Arnoldian “renouncement” and unpacking its ideological presuppositions is the philosophical pessimism of the German idealist Arthur Schopenhauer, whose ideas enjoyed a growing vogue in the 1860s and 1870s both in Britain and on the Continent.14 Schopenhauer’s ethics of compassion and his mystical theory of salvation through a transcendence of the will harmonize in crucial ways with the ethical altruism of many Christian theologians and moral philosophers of mid-Victorian Britain, an altruism that is the cardinal virtue within what Collini calls “the ‘dominant’ Victorian moral sensibility.”15 I argue that a kindred form of altruistic self-overcoming is also the singular ethical object of Arnold’s “Conduct,” and it strongly marks the rhetorical style of his prose, conditioning it in ways that often lead his contemporaries to mistake his style for a symptom of his unmanly inaptitude for logical thought. Arnold’s rhetorical strategy—basically, to edify and instruct readers and sweeten Ibid. ix, xii. For recent remarks on Schopenhauer’s mid-century influence, see Charles Taylor,

13 14

A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard UP, 2007) 346–7, 664; J. W. Burrow, The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 1848–1914 (New Haven: Yale UP, 2000) 28–9. See also Luisa Villa, “‘Desisting Resistance’: The Representation of Schopenhauerian Pessimism in Late-Nineteenth-Century Britain,” Resisting Alterities: Wilson Harris and Other Avatars of Otherness, ed. Marco Fazzini (Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2004) 115–31; Patrick Bridgwater, Anglo-German Interactions in the Literature of the 1890s (Oxford: Legenda, 1999) 186–210 and passim; Bryan Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon; New York: Oxford UP, 1997); David Wier, Decadence and the Making of Modernism (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P 1995) 45, 85; Tilottama Rajan, “Arthur Schopenhauer,” The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Michael Groden and Martin Kreiswirth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994) 657; Rudiger Safranski, Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy, trans. Ewald Osers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1990); Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989) 444; Patrick Bridgwater, Arthur Schopenhauer’s English Education (London: Routledge, 1988); Jean Pierrot, The Decadent Imagination 1880–1900, trans. Derek Coltman (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981) 5–6, 15; Rosemary Ashton, The German Idea: Four English Writers and the Reception of German Thought, 1800–1860 (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge UP, 1980); Roger L. Williams, The Horror of Life (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980) 237, 295, 307. 15 Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991) 63.

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the pill of “renouncement”—even (mis)leads some twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury critics to suppose that he deliberately seeks to prevent critical reflection and analysis altogether, as if he were darkening counsel not simply with a dim wit, as his Victorian and Edwardian readers sometimes complain, but in the service of the programmatic interests of an ideological state apparatus. The present study reviews many specimens of such hostile criticism. When taken in tandem with the positive exposition of “Culture” and “Conduct” offered here, they point toward the striking symmetry of sociological and psychological dimensions in Arnold’s thought. Just as Hellenism and Hebraism form the twin sides of the “Culture” medal, so the dialectical relation of culture to conduct structures the whole of Arnold’s thinking. Twentieth-century criticism generally neglects “Conduct” in favor of a prolonged focus on “Culture,” with its “too exclusive worship of fire, strength, earnestness, and action” (CPW 5.191), and now the predictable return of the repressed “Conduct” emerges, for instance, in the rise of identity politics, in such theoretical constructs as Judith Butler’s idea of “resignification,” or in the “narcissistic” tendency of cultural studies “to create its analytic object as a subject: to establish what is spoken of as the entity that speaks of it.”16 In an effort to restore approximate equipollency to these sides of Arnold’s thought, this book shows how his ethic of “renouncement” conjoins the self-abnegation of Christian altruism to the will-denial of Schopenhauerian pessimism. This moral amalgam, the first principle in all of Arnold’s work and the logical corollary of his philosophical pessimism, lies at the heart of Arnoldian “Conduct,” the ethical end of “renouncement” toward which the “experience” and “reflection” of Liberalism naturally lead. The place of “renouncement” in Arnold’s poetry is perhaps best illustrated by lines from the 1853 Oberman poem—“He only lives with the world’s life / Who hath renounced his own”17—but it appears equally clearly throughout his literary, sociopolitical, and religious prose as well, thus illustrating the crucial continuity in Arnold’s thought that criticism so often overlooks. For instance, renunciation figures in the Essays in Criticism (1865) as a prescription for critical “disinterestedness” and “detachment”; in Culture and Anarchy it evokes the “best self” to suppress one’s “ordinary self”; and the principle becomes, in Literature and Dogma (1873), the explicit “secret” of Jesus: “Renounce thyself ” (CPW 3.270, 274; 5.134–5; 6.298). Although self-renunciation quite plainly forms the common denominator in Arnold’s thinking, critics who weigh his influence and importance tend to minimize or even elide this central feature, even those critics who laud him, as Collini does, as “an unavoidable cultural reference point” and “an inescapable, if also oddly 16 On “resignification,” see Judith Butler, “Preface 1999,” Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) (New York; London: Routledge, 2006) xviii; on “narcissistic” cultural studies, see Mulhern, Culture/Metaculture 141, 156. 17 “Stanzas in Memory of the Author of ‘Oberman,’” The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. Kenneth Allott and Miriam Allott, 2nd ed. (London: Longmans, 1979) lines 103–4. Hereafter, “Oberman.” Further quotations from Arnold’s poetry come from the Allott edition and are hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by title and line number.

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nebulous, presence in modern intellectual life,” someone who “[i]ndisputably” wields “an immense, perhaps decisive, influence over our whole way of talking about ‘culture’” and who, “through his precept and example,” has “exercised an enduring and unrivalled influence over the place of criticism in our culture.”18 If an odd nebulosity does indeed shroud Arnold’s intellectual presence today, it can be attributed in part to a kind of gravitational effect produced by the long-suppressed notion of “renouncement,” this occluded principle of Arnoldian “Conduct” that seems to distort the discourse of culture rather as a black hole distorts local matter, by extending a rayless but irresistible power of attraction. In addition, the air of dreadful Victorian earnestness surrounding the idea of renunciation—as of pessimism— helps to explain the relatively meager critical interest hitherto attending it. Dienstag speculates that “the idea of pessimism is so threatening that people decline to consider it seriously because they are afraid of the effects such a consideration might produce,” and a similar logic might well apply to the critical consideration of renunciation.19 If noticed at all, “renouncement” is typically dismissed by critics as so much “Victorian ballast,” part of the lumber that gave Arnold his “moral stability” but of which we are now well rid.20 What Dienstag says of pessimism also applies to the notion of self-denial, which appears even to exert a power of positive repulsion, and it will be useful to dwell for a moment on a modern instance of this repulsive effect for the clues that it yields to the fate of Arnoldian “renouncement.” In Collini’s concise 1988 critical biography of Arnold, he notes the “constancy of polemical purpose” in Arnold’s criticism, and he rightly discerns “some of the deeper connections between his notion of culture and the ideal of criticism he had explored in his earlier works.”21 He also grasps that Arnold’s “writings on religion reveal the continuity of his preoccupations.”22 What Collini evidently sees but does not choose to pursue is the common thread—“renouncement”—that makes for this “constancy” and “continuity” and for the “deeper connections” that unite culture, criticism, and conduct in Arnold’s work. The present study seeks to reveal a thicker, richer intellectual texture in Arnold’s thought by following this darker thread for some distance, because if Collini ignores “renouncement,” he is certainly attentive to the other two elements in Arnold’s Liberalism: his “experience” and “reflection.” He even seeks to “draw attention to ‘reflection,’ because [Arnold’s] poems nearly always are, even if not explicitly, second-order reflections on the nature or meaning of certain kinds of experience, rather than expressions or records of the experience itself.”23 Arnold’s love poems are not really “about the experience of being in love. They are reflections upon how even this kind of experience … affords no real escape from the self and its oppressive 20 21 22 23 18 19

Arnold 3, 46. Dienstag, Pessimism ix. Williams, Culture and Society 172. Arnold 53, 86. Ibid. 95. Ibid. 27.

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sense of isolation.”24 To Collini, the “best of his lyrics and elegies” convey “the experience of reflective sadness”; and his “best poetry is reflection on loss, frustration, and sadness.”25 Admittedly, renouncement (in whatever form) is a word of far less common currency today than experience or reflection, so I would not wish to put Collini’s usage under undue pressure. At the same time, he admits his own “culpably indulgent” preference for the “more winning and cheerful Arnold” of the 1860s prose.26 But who can really blame him? Arnold’s poetry, thematically dominated as it is by a constant “reflection on loss, frustration, sadness,” and his “sombre” later prose essays of the 1870s and 1880s, with their “darker hues,” their “undertow of regret and wistfulness,” their burden of “weighty moral utterance” that stifles “the deftness and light play of irony, including self-irony, that made his earlier work so winning”—these shadier parts of Arnold’s corpus can be scanted on various grounds.27 Collini justifies his focus on the apparently brighter prose of the 1860s by positing “the deep but neglected truth that melancholy is inescapably self-important, whereas there is a relative impersonality about cheerfulness.”28 Arnold’s melancholy poetry is “inherently reflexive,” Collini says; it is “nearly always fundamentally about himself.” He finds something basically “egotistical” in Arnold’s “struggle to come to terms with the intensity of his dissatisfaction,” and to watch the “disconsolate Romantic trying to turn himself into the resolute Stoic” is to witness “a kind of self-indulgence” in “heroic egotism” that, apparently, latterday “manly fellows” do not much cotton to.29 After all, “genuine stoicism does not keep calling attention to its achievement in this way,” Collini claims.30 Grumble if you must, he seems to say, but “for God’s sake, man, keep your voice down.”31 Collini is certainly not the first of Arnold’s critics to fault him for histrionic egotism, unbecoming immodesty, and even downright selfishness (the last constituting the most grievous sin from the point of view of “the ‘dominant’ Victorian moral sensibility”). Compounding Arnold’s selfishness is his supposed superficiality. Echoing Eliot, Collini judges that Arnold’s work “does not really touch the extremes of human life: he can be pessimistic but he does not rise to the tragic; he can be joyful without ever reaching the sublime,” and while he knew “almost unbearably painful suffering” in his own life and never “underestimated its place in human life,” Arnold’s reflections on these experiences “did not find 26 27 28 29 24

Ibid. 31. Ibid. 26–7. Ibid. vii. Ibid. 84, 27, 45, 23, 67. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 43–4. For the ideology of Victorian “manly fellows,” see Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991) Chapter 3. 30 Arnold 44. 31 Absent Minds 169. 25

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unforgettable expression in his writing.”32 This defect is no cause for regret, however, because when Arnold’s shallowness is “[v]iewed from another angle”— presumably Collini’s own—“one can be grateful that these matters did not monopolize his attention, and that he does not try to force them to monopolize ours; it is hardly a complaint to observe that the characteristic tone of his best prose can have an almost Mozartian gaiety about it.”33 Collini’s standards, however, seem to grow somewhat opaque here: it is not quite clear whether Arnold’s “best prose” is the best because it is cheerful or cheerful because it is the best. Worth recalling is the letter from Arnold to his publisher in which he claims that the third installment of what later becomes God and the Bible (1875)—hardly his Così fan tutte of high spirits—contains “some of the best prose” he has ever written, although he modestly allows that “[n]o man can be trusted to judge his own things.”34 At any rate, Arnold’s “renouncement,” with its grim aura of ascetic rigor and self-mortifying discipline, seems to abide in a sphere apart from the “more winning and cheerful” parts of Arnold, at least for Collini, who arguably offers the most influential modern interpretation of Arnold. But surely not all pessimism is dreary (if “renouncement,” as I argue, be indeed grounded in pessimism), nor is all dreariness pessimistic. I offer this simply as a point of logic, not as one holding a brief for pessimism. The coincidence of melancholy and pessimism might be sufficiently frequent to suggest a relation of necessity. As this book demonstrates, while Arnold’s philosophical pessimism is certainly a constant throughout his oeuvre, his pessimism does not rule out true hilarity, the concrete examples of which Collini obviously relishes with the pleasure of a connoisseur. Nevertheless, Arnold grounds both his “Culture” and his “Conduct” squarely on “renouncement,” an ethic that he seems to derive from the compassionate and altruistic strain that is a common property of Buddhism, Stoicism, and Christian mysticism—the general ethical insight that the way to salvation lies in overcoming one’s egoistic attachment to the world.35 By thus turning critical Arnold 117. In Eliot’s view, “The vision of the horror and the glory was denied to Arnold, but he knew something of the boredom.” See Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London: Faber, 1933) 98–9. 33 Arnold 117. 34 Cecil Y. Lang, ed., The Letters of Matthew Arnold, 6 vols. (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1996–2001) 4.241. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as Letters and by volume and page numbers. 35 Arnold’s “renouncement” forms a striking isomorphism with Sigmund Freud’s conception of instinctual renunciation as the motor of civilization, a kinship that Mulhern, for instance, duly notes, although he shrugs off this implication of “Arnold’s moral-psychological notion of the best self” as just another programmatic expression of the “metacultural will to authority,” which in this case is doomed to assume the form that marks the limit of “Arnold’s imaginative horizon,” that is, the bourgeois state. See Mulhern, Culture/Metaculture 27–8; Mulhern, “What Is Cultural Criticism?” 41–2; Mulhern, “Beyond Metaculture” 86. See also Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, The Standard Edition of the Complete 32

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inquiry toward Arnold’s “Conduct” and away from his “Culture,” we stand to gain not only some purchase on Victorian pessimism but also a fresh perspective on Arnold’s style. Having tacitly posited “renouncement” as the ultimate aim of his rhetorical strategy, Arnold proceeds to use a touchstone rhetoric of exemplarity, a rhetoric of concrete representations—imitationes—that embody subjectivity in forms of ethical universality. Empedocles, Thyrsis, the Scholar-Gypsy, Oberman, Joubert, Heine, Falkland—these are among Arnold’s touchstones of conduct, the exempla illustrating his perennial precept of “renouncement.” This rhetorical style unfortunately proves a perennial irritant to Arnold’s critics, since his method of ethical exemplarity directly opposes the dominant discursive style of Victorian rhetoric, which Arnold describes as “the elaborate machine-work of my friends the logicians” (CPW 3.535). Once again, he applies his touchstone rhetoric equally to matters critical, political, and religious, using an eristic style that in turn leads his muscularly Christian contemporaries to conclude that this effeminate inspector of schools has hardly any power of argument. The inflexible forensic formalism of Arnold’s Victorian critics and their insistence on a corresponding argumentative rigor from him seem to offer an apt illustration of Robert Frost’s verse: “Except as a fellow handled an axe / They had no way of knowing a fool.”36 From a point of view that takes its critical stock from Arnold, however, and would judge him in his own terms, the ethical import of “renouncement”—particularly in its relation to the wider Victorian discourse of altruism—provides an interesting theoretical foothold for modern critics who seek, in the wake of sustained antiEnlightenment critique, to reclaim ground for the subjective embodiment of forms of universality. This reframing of Arnold’s rhetoric of exemplarity (including his own performative self-disappearing as poet) in terms of the pessimistic tradition proves especially fruitful when put in dialogue with the current ethical turn in literary and philosophical studies, with modern reflections on the citizen-subject of liberal and post-liberal democracy, and with the identity politics of contemporary cultural studies. In tracing the provenance of such Arnoldian conceptions as “Culture,” “Conduct,” the “State,” the “best self,” “necrosis,” and so forth, I draw on many of these current works as well as on older studies—both monographs on Arnold’s politics and broader inquiries into Victorian Liberalism—in order to cast a more even light on the full range of Arnold’s ideas and to demonstrate their remarkably tenacious (if largely unacknowledged) hold on the modern cultural, political, and ethical imaginary.37 Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey et al., vol. 21 (London: Hogarth and the Institute for Psycho-Analysis, 1953–1974) 64–125. 36 “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” The Poetry of Robert Frost: The Collected Poems, Complete and Unabridged, ed. Edward Connery Lathem (New York: Holt, 1969) lines 55–6. 37 The literature on Victorian Liberalism is immense. For a useful, if highly selective, sampling, see J. P. Parry, “Liberalism and Liberty,” Liberty and Authority in Victorian Britain, ed. Peter Mandler (Oxford; New York: Oxford UP, 2006) 71–100; Seamus Deane, Foreign Affections: Essays on Edmund Burke (Cork, Ireland: Cork UP, 2005); Daniel Malachuk, Perfection, the State, and Victorian Liberalism (New York; Basingstoke, Hants:

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Chapter 2 fleshes out the contours of the “Arnoldian problematic” as a contemporary academic idée reçue and of Arnold himself as a figure whose thought has by now become so familiar that hardly anyone bothers to read him attentively, apart from a dwindling remnant of old-school enthusiasts and a few zealous college Republicans. One might even suppose that a certain institutional convenience resides in avoiding too direct an engagement with the potentially countercultural, oppositional energies in Arnold’s thought, as if merely accepting as the received wisdom one of the readymade caricatures of Arnold were sufficient to refute him.38 Palgrave, 2005); Rande W. Kostal, A Jurisprudence of Power: Victorian Empire and the Rule of Law (Oxford; New York: Oxford UP, 2005); F. David Roberts, The Social Conscience of the Early Victorians (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002); Robert F. Haggard, The Persistence of Victorian Liberalism: The Politics of Social Reform in Britain, 1870–1900 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2001); H. Stuart Jones, Victorian Political Thought (Basingstoke, Hants: Palgrave, 2000); Pierre Manent, Modern Liberty and Its Discontents, ed. and trans. Daniel J. Mahoney and Paul Seaton (Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield, 1998); David Lloyd and Paul Thomas, Culture and the State (New York; London: Routledge, 1998); John Kekes, Against Liberalism (Ithaca; London: Cornell UP, 1997); Susan Pedersen and Peter Mandler, eds., After the Victorians: Private Conscience and Public Duty in Modern Britain, Essays in Memory of John Clive (New York; London: Routledge, 1994); J. P. Parry, The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (New Haven: Yale UP, 1993); Richard Bellamy, ed., Victorian Liberalism: Nineteenth-Century Political Thought and Practice (London; New York: Routledge, 1990); Pat Thane, “Government and Society in England and Wales, 1750–1914,” The Cambridge Social History of Britain, ed. F. M. L. Thompson, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990) 1–61; J. P. Parry, Democracy and Religion: Gladstone and the Liberal Party, 1867–1875 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986); Ellen Frankel Paul et al., eds., Marxism and Liberalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986); Michael J. Sandel, ed., Liberalism and Its Critics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984); Ian Bradley, The Optimists: Themes and Personalities in Victorian Liberalism (London; Boston: Faber, 1980); George Watson, Politics and Literature in Modern Britain (London: Macmillan, 1977); Christopher Harvie, The Lights of Liberalism: University Liberals and the Challenge of Democracy 1860–86 (London: Allen Lane, 1976). Still useful are F. J. C. Hearnshaw, The Social and Political Ideas of Some Representative Thinkers of the Victorian Age: A Series of Lectures Delivered at King’s College University of London during the Session 1931–32 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1983); Guido de Ruggerio, The History of European Liberalism, trans. R. G. Collingwood (1927) (Boston: Beacon, 1959). Most of Arnold’s critics discuss his politics to a greater or lesser extent. For monographs focusing specifically on Arnold’s political views, see Lesley Johnson, The Cultural Critics: From Matthew Arnold to Raymond Williams (London; Boston; Henley: Routledge, 1979) esp. Chapter 2; Fred G. Walcott, The Origins of Culture and Anarchy: Matthew Arnold and Popular Education in England (Toronto: Buffalo: U of Toronto P, 1970); Patrick McCarthy, Matthew Arnold and the Three Classes (New York: Columbia UP, 1964); W. F. Connell, The Educational Thought and Influence of Matthew Arnold (London: Routledge, 1950). 38 One critic aptly describes this process as the modern world’s “elaborately stepping over his corpse as a way of ritualizing its maturity.” See John P. Farrell, “Introduction: Matthew Arnold: The Writer as Touchstone,” Victorian Poetry 26.1–2 (spring–summer 1998): 4.

12

Overcoming Matthew Arnold

Even the apparent unlikelihood of such a supposition might itself be an index of his successful “steady misrepresentation.” At any rate, when scholars can casually refer to the “Arnoldian legacy” and the “broad Arnoldian tradition,” or can even claim that in the “Labour Leavisism” of Richard Hoggart “the post-war British Labour movement found its own Matthew Arnold,” the assurance with which these values are handled suggests that Arnold is a stable standard and known quantity of common intellectual currency and one to which comparable values can be pegged.39 Chapters 3 and 4 engage in a genealogical exposition of the key critical caricatures of Arnold that are first constructed by his Victorian contemporaries, caricatures that later prove serviceable in influential twentieth-century deployments of Arnold in the establishment (and disestablishment) of academic English studies. The discussion classifies these polemical versions of Arnold chronologically under five heads: the Victorian logicians, the Strachey-Eliot interlude, the moment of Scrutiny, the New Left turn, and the postcolonial Arnold. While these accounts in their time prove politically efficacious “as programme,” in Williams’s phrase,40 they invariably offer an image of Arnold that is purged of his pessimism and divorced from his constant ethical aim of “renouncement.” Chapters 3 and 4 thus explore the prehistory of the modern “Arnoldian problematic,” particularly as it engages with traditions of modern political thought. Reading Arnold’s politics through the lens of “renouncement” suggests, among other things, that he is not espousing that version of culture that many marxisant critics tend to attribute to him. Instead of an “ideal union of culture and the state” as the locus of transcendent authority, as Mulhern characterizes “the Arnoldian project,” Arnold’s politics of renunciation and his Liberalism of the future point instead toward the most radical expression of Williams’s “slow reach again for control”—that is, the reach for self-control, self-government.41 If the third and fourth chapters are largely negative, working to prune back the many strategic appropriations and caricatural reductions that obscure our view of Arnoldian ethics, then Chapters 5 and 6 frame a positive interpretation. The final chapters demonstrate the perdurance of pessimism in Arnold’s work by situating the well-known and readily recognized melancholy of the poetry in relation to the previously unacknowledged but continuous strain of pessimism in the prose, pausing occasionally to examine those critical reactions to Arnold that shed a useful light on his fixed object of “renouncement.” These chapters tie together the various strands of the Arnold critique—his illogical effeminacy and selfish indolence—emergent within the political and religious controversies that raged through the 1860s and 1870s, when Arnold’s unique rhetorical position decisively programs his opponents’ responses. The grounds of their disagreements with Arnold are remarkably similar, whether they are defenders of Christian 39 Collini, Arnold 110; Mulhern, “A Welfare Culture?” 119, 122. See also Mulhern, Culture/ Metaculture 54, 59–60. 40 Culture and Society 193. 41 Mulhern, “What Is Cultural Criticism?” 41; Williams, Culture and Society 295.

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doctrinal orthodoxies, such as the Edinburgh Review’s Henry Reeve and the Quarterly Review’s W. J. Courthope; advocates of the wholesale abandonment of these “Hebrew old-clothes,”42 such as the Cornhill Magazine’s Leslie Stephen and the scientific materialist W. K. Clifford; or pious conciliators and preachers of a liberalized social gospel, such as Frederick Denison Maurice or “The Seven against Christ” of Essays and Reviews (1860).43 By staking out a polemical position in the shadowy borderlands between the Two Cultures of Victorian England—or in the interstices of letters, science, and religion—Arnold manages to draw fire from partisans of all ideological camps, and while control over the darkling plane of social authority is surely no less contested today, contemporary discourse now seems to oscillate fixedly around a culture-and-politics polarity. Before moving to this genealogy of our modern critical conception of Arnold, however, some propaideutic stage setting is needed. Century of Dreadful Night In “The Study of Poetry” (1880), Arnold famously prophesies that “the spirit of our race will find, we have said, as time goes on and as other helps fail it, its consolation and stay” in poetry (CPW 9.163). Responding to this claim almost 50 years on, the critic J. M. Robertson first quotes “Dover Beach,” with its lugubrious litany of absence—a world with “neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain”—and then ejaculates incredulously: “Stay and consolation, quotha! If this be it, what theological pessimist ever missed it?”44 Although critics find Robertson occasionally rather obtuse in his criticism of Arnold,45 in this instance, at least, Robertson seems to make a very palpable hit. As previously mentioned, Arnold’s particular strain of pessimism seems to fall within the standard range of “technologies of the self,” from the self-effacement of Christian asceticism, to the ego-extirpation of Buddhist metaphysics, to the self-disciplinary rigors of Stoicism.46 42 Thomas Carlyle, Shooting Niagara: And After? (1851) vol. 30, The Works of Thomas Carlyle (London: Chapman and Hall, 1899) 30. 43 Reeve, Courthope, and Stephen are taken up below. For the other representative figures, see W. K. Clifford, Lectures and Essays, ed. Leslie Stephen and Frederick Pollock (London; New York: Macmillan, 1886); Frederick Denison Maurice, Theological Essays (Cambridge: Macmillan, 1853). The “Seven against Christ” were Frederick Temple, Rowland Williams, Baden Powell, Henry Bristow Wilson, C. W. Goodwin, Mark Pattison, and Benjamin Jowett. See Frederick Temple et al., Essays and Reviews (London: John W. Parker, 1860). 44 J. M. Robertson, Modern Humanists Reconsidered (London: Watts, 1927) 110. 45 F. R. Leavis, “Introduction,” On Bentham and Coleridge, by John Stuart Mill, ed. F. R. Leavis (New York: Harper, 1962) 37. 46 Foucault describes “technologies of the self” as “techniques that permit individuals to effect, by their own means, a certain number of operations on their own bodies, their own souls, their own thoughts, their own conduct, and this in a manner so as to transform

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Overcoming Matthew Arnold

Albeit deep, these roots of pessimism come to prominence most conspicuously in the Victorian era in the philosophical framing they receive in Schopenhauer’s post-Kantian idealism. Compassion, altruism, selflessness—these are the ethical hallmarks of philosophical pessimism, at the heart of which lies the notion of “renouncement,” a principle that in Arnold assumes such guises as detachment, disinterestedness, impersonality, even Pauline necrosis. From the self-emptying of New Testament kenosis to the disciplinary rigors of the Augustinian and Benedictine rules—an ascetic tradition that embraces, basically, the whole cenobitic and eremitic monastic disciplines47—renunciation is essential to “the ‘dominant’ Victorian moral sensibility,” which, as Collini describes it, strongly tends “to look upon altruism as the heart of all moral virtue.”48 I argue that Arnold pushes this logic of Victorian altruism to its “extreme tendency” in “making it an obligation that all our actions should benefit others.”49 Victorian culture offers a ready model for imitation, which Arnold naturally uses: “To a world stricken with moral enervation Christianity offered its spectacle of an inspired self-sacrifice; to men who refused themselves nothing, it showed one who refused himself everything” (CPW 5.169). This paradox expresses the secret of Arnold’s conduct and culture. Refusing oneself everything is a painful prospect, as the Christian cross suggests. It seems fair to say that many of us, perhaps most of us, find the external world’s intractable resistance to our will a sufficient source of suffering without the need of imposing the further internal checks necessary to stifle our will altogether. Nevertheless, suffering is the primary datum on which the ethics of Schopenhauer’s philosophical pessimism turns. Suffering is the experience that, on reflection, leads to renunciation. In Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, to be is to suffer. The phenomenal world is nothing but the objectification of a transcendental will that in itself is a blind, ceaseless, insatiable craving. In his words, “incurable suffering and endless misery” are “essential to the phenomenon of the will,” and as “there is no ultimate aim of striving,” so “there is no measure or end of suffering.”50 Purely as a description of a state of affairs, Schopenhauer’s assessment is mirrored, surprisingly, by the 1914 edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia (apparently still the online standard): “It can hardly be disputed that the Christian view of life in itself is scarcely less pessimistic than that of Schopenhauer … and its pains are themselves, modify themselves, and to attain a certain state of perfection, happiness, purity, supernatural power.” See Michel Foucault, “Sexuality and Solitude,” Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (New York: New Press, 1997) 177. 47 For a broad discussion of this tradition, see Geoffrey Galt Harpham, The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism (Chicago; London: U of Chicago P, 1987) Chapter 1 and passim. 48 Public Moralists 63. 49 Ibid. 66. 50 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne, vol. 1 (New York: Dover, 1969) 411, 309. Further quotations from Schopenhauer’s chief work are hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as WWR and by volume and page number.

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regarded as essentially characteristic of its present condition.”51 The substance of this position reappears in a 1984 letter of Pope John Paul II, in which he says that “what we express by the word ‘suffering’ seems to be particularly essential to the nature of man… . Suffering seems to belong to man’s transcendence.”52 In this view, life necessarily entails pain; it is the donné of the world and is generally accepted as such by Buddhists, Christians, and philosophical pessimists alike. Where they differ, it seems, is not on the fact of human suffering but on its meaning, its value.53 At any rate, when Arnold calls himself “a Liberal tempered by experience, reflection, and renouncement,” he is simultaneously describing the via dolorosa of a pessimist (religious or philosophical) tempered by suffering, insight, and salvation. I am not claiming that Arnold read Schopenhauer and embraced his pessimistic metaphysics.54 After all, the tropes of suffering and self-sacrifice are the generic stuff of Christian and Classical rhetoric—“a graft of stoicism with Pauline Christianity,” as Jacques Derrida puts it55—and Arnold’s most immediate inspiration for “renouncement” might well be Thomas Carlyle, who is himself quoting Goethe when he says, in Sartor Resartus (1833): “Well did the Wisest of our time write: ‘It is only with Renunciation (Enstagen) that Life, properly speaking, can be said to begin.’”56 The hero of Sartor Resartus (whom Arnold fancies to be a kind of spiritual kinsman of his Arminius) is worth recalling in this respect. Having once glimpsed the world as a “vast, gloomy, solitary Golgotha, and Mill of Death,” Herr Teufelsdröckh is brought “to surrender, to renounce utterly, and say: Fly then, false shadows of Hope.”57 Later he wakes “to a new Heaven and a new Earth. The first preliminary moral Act, Annihilation of Self (Selbst-tödtung), Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 11 (New York: Appleton, 1914) s.v. “Pessimism.” John Paul II, “Salvifici Doloris,” 11 Feb. 1984, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1 May

51 52

2007 . 53 For some contemporary philosophical reflections on this point, see Emmanuel Lévinas, “Useless Suffering,” The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other, ed. Robert Bernasconi and David Wood, trans. Richard Cohen (London; New York: Routledge, 1988) 156–67; Bernard Williams, “Unbearable Suffering,” The Sense of the Past: Essays in the History of Philosophy (Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006) 331–7. 54 The question of Arnold’s direct knowledge of Schopenhauer’s philosophy is addressed in Chapter 6. 55 On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (London; New York: Routledge, 2001) 28. 56 Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh, The Works of Thomas Carlyle, vol. 1 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1896) 153. For Carlyle’s influence on Arnold, see Kathleen Tillotson, “Matthew Arnold and Carlyle,” Proceedings of the British Academy 42 (1956): 133–53; David J. DeLaura, “Arnold and Carlyle,” Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 79.1 (March 1964): 104–29; Ruth apRoberts, “Arnold and Natural Supernaturalism,” Matthew Arnold in His Time and Ours: Centenary Essays, ed. Clinton Machann and Forrest D. Burt. (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1988) 17–29. 57 Sartor Resartus 148–9, 150.

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had been happily accomplished,” and Carlyle’s hero of suffering now pursues a goal that is “HIGHER than Love of Happiness,” and he prays to be “broken with manifold merciful Afflictions” and to “thank … Destiny for these,” for “the Self … needed to be annihilated.”58 Arnold avoids these more flagrantly masochistic tropes, but he surely closes his Byron and opens his Goethe, as Carlyle advises, and along the way he also opens his Lucretius, Spinoza, Epictetus, and Bhagavad Gita—his Bible, of course, he never closes. When he finally comes to offer his own sage prescriptions for literature and dogma and for culture and authority, Arnold preaches a Victorian ethic of “renouncement” that bears the sublimated essence of philosophical pessimism: social salvation through self-denial.59 Like Carlyle, Arnold is doubtless aware that manifold afflictions and annihilation of the self have little mass appeal, and the market for hair shirts remains small in every age. Eliot claims in the 1930s that “[t]hought, study, mortification, sacrifice: it is such notions as these that should be impressed upon the young,” because “[y]outh is more likely to come to a difficult religion than to an easy one,” but the evidence of subsequent history does not bear out the validity of his claim.60 Williams dismisses “renouncement” with the rest of “the Victorian ballast which is Arnold’s stability,” and Mulhern reads Arnold’s “moral-psychological notion of the best self” as a subtle but predictable movement of “the metacultural will to authority” as it “strives to dissolve the political.”61 Collini’s view is more cheerful but ultimately equally dismissive: Arnold “manifestly preferred to loll on Parnassus than to crawl up Calvary,” he says, since Calvary (and the rigorous asceticism that its name implies) is “hardly the natural home of the dandy, even the reformed dandy turned cultural critic.”62 The imaginative sympathy that Collini so expertly brings to bear on the subjects of his literary portraits, often with the happiest results, in this case seems almost to slip into psychological projection, or at least his view of Arnold might be especially vulnerable to the sort of freeindirect hermeneutic that Mulhern applies to Collini in another context.63 If nothing else, these examples surely prove that Arnold’s “Culture” survives better than his “Conduct.” As Oscar Wilde said, “It takes a thoroughly selfish age, like our own, to deify self-sacrifice.”64 Ibid. 149, 153. Although this debt to Carlyle has long been noted, it has not previously received the

58 59

present emphasis. See Tillotson, “Matthew Arnold and Carlyle” 144–6; DeLaura, “Arnold and Carlyle” 105–6. 60 T. S. Eliot, “Thoughts after Lambeth” (1931), Selected Essays of T. S. Eliot (New York: Harcourt, 1950) 329. 61 Williams, Culture and Society 172; Mulhern, “What Is Cultural Criticism?” 42; “Beyond Metaculture” 86. 62 Arnold 84. 63 See Mulhern, “What Is Cultural Criticism?” 41. 64 “The Critic as Artist,” The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, vol. 5 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1923) 197.

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To tie these various strands together—selfishness, sacrifice, suffering, culture, conduct—and show how they constitute the basis of Arnold’s specifically philosophical pessimism, it is first necessary to isolate some of the supposed causes of a more general Victorian pessimism. If the third quarter of the nineteenth century is no longer widely seen as a one-dimensional “age of equipoise,” neither is it generally thought part of a century of dreadful night.65 While one or another topos of doubt, disorder, injustice, or unease—even disease—typically receives the passing notice of historians, no general survey of the nature and origin of the period’s pessimism has yet appeared, although mental culture in Britain after 1850 seems to have made an especially fertile ground for the rapid growth of the (Schopenhauerian) pessimism that took hold in the 1860s and 1870s and came gradually to darken many informed and intelligent assessments of the world. It is no small task to understand why this period of great and growing prosperity, of stunning scientific, technical, and industrial advancement, of triumphant liberalism and humanitarian amelioration should simultaneously foster a sense of despair in many minds.66 To critics like George Steiner, the Victorians—looked at from a post-Holocaust and post-Hiroshima perspective—did not know what true hopelessness is: “Not to have known about the inhuman potentialities of cultured man what we now know was a formidable privilege. In the generations from Voltaire to Arnold, absence of such knowledge was not innocence but rather an enabling program for civilization.”67 Steiner’s placement of Arnold as the liminal figure in this span of generations certainly suggests the poet’s importance as a prophet of pessimism, even if the philosophical grounds of his pessimism have gone so long unperceived. A contemporary of Arnold, the Rev. J. Radford Thomson, Nonconformist clergyman and author of a commentary on Romans and a life of Wyclif, pens a short tract in the 1880s in which he puzzles over the prevalence of Schopenhauer’s “Gospel of despair”: It is certainly singular that the very same Pessimism, which has prevailed so widely and so long in the East, should be revived in this nineteenth century among the most educated and advanced peoples of Europe. How is it to be 65 “One of the cardinal differences between the mid-Victorians and ourselves lies not in their optimism and our pessimism but in the much greater faith they had in the power of the human will.” See W. L. Burn, The Age of Equipoise: A Study of the Mid-Victorian Generation (New York: Norton, 1965) 21. 66 According to Basil Willey, the Victorians “on the whole believe, as we no longer can, that men were becoming less selfish, less unreasonable, and less bellicose; that free trade would promote international understanding and banish war; that science and education would banish error and superstition, and that in some not too distant future we would see ‘the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.’” See Willey, “Origins and Development of the Idea of Progress,” Ideas and Beliefs of the Victorians: An Historic Revaluation of the Victorian Age (New York: Dutton, 1966) 45. 67 In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes toward a Redefinition of Culture (New Haven: Yale UP, 1971) 80–81.

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Overcoming Matthew Arnold explained that an age of enlightenment, of widespread education, of unexampled material, mechanical, and scientific progress, of political energy, of social liberty, of missionary enterprise, should give birth to so strange a product? … in the nations of Western Europe there seems so much scope for activity, so much appreciation of mental power, so much room for progress, and so much stimulus to hope, that Pessimism seems altogether out of place.68

When one seeks the sources of Victorian pessimism, the usual suspects present themselves: the death of God and the rise of Darwin, the death of deference and the rise of mass political man, the death of organic communities of pastoral plenitude and the rise of dark Satanic mills ringing the Great Wen. The historian Eric Hobsbawm, taking a pan-European view, notes that the “intellectual history of the decades after 1875 is full of the sense of expectations not only disappointed … but somehow turning into their opposites,” and he detects a “very general crisis of accepted nineteenth-century ideas in this period.”69 He sees “a common denominator for the multiple aspects of this crisis, which affected virtually all branches of intellectual activity in varying degrees,” in the culturewide confrontation “after the 1870s with the unexpected, unpredicted, and often incomprehensible results of Progress.” Hobsbawm’s capitalization seems intended to personify this bewildering spirit of the age, as does the title of Jeffrey Paul von Arx’s important study: Progress and Pessimism (1985), a spirit that Mill described as early as 1831 as one animated by an “intellectual anarchy,” a time of “no established doctrines,” when “the world of opinions is a mere chaos.”70 It is “a fearful thing,” Mill says, to see human collectives “change their institutions while their minds are unsettled, without fixed principles, and unable to trust either themselves or other people,” groping the while through a “transitional condition, in which there are no persons to whom the mass of the uninstructed habitually defer, and in whom they trust for finding the right, and for pointing it out.”71 Testing the validity of these claims is no more within the scope of the present inquiry than is, accepting them provisionally, determining the depth and extent of this “very general crisis.” Whatever the facts of the matter, by the final quarter of century the purported mood is clearly discernible in the books produced by fashionable popularizers: Pessimism (1877), Is Life Worth Living? (1879), The Ultimatum of Pessimism (1882), and Aspects of Pessimism (1894).72 68 Modern Pessimism (London: Religious Tracts Society, [1880s?]) 9–10. See Raymond Tallis, Enemies of Hope: A Critique of Contemporary Pessimism (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999). 69 The Age of Empire: 1875–1914 (New York: Vintage, 1989) 257–8. 70 “The Spirit of the Age,” The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. John M. Robinson, vol. 22 (Toronto: Toronto UP, 1986) 233, 252. 71 Ibid. 245, 304. 72 James Sully, Pessimism: A History and a Criticism (1877) 2nd ed. (New York: Appleton, 1891); William Hurrell Mallock, Is Life Worth Living? (London: Chatto, 1879); James William Barlow, The Ultimatum of Pessimism: An Ethical Study (London:

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The mainstream of Victorian pessimism can be imagined as fed by several branches, each bearing its own categorical flood of events and ideas that swell the desperate mood. There are the cultural or political pessimists, for instance, whose antidemocratic imaginations foresee the imminent destruction of the social order as the inescapable outcome of the series of parliamentary reforms that began in 1832. Carlyle articulates this attitude most strenuously from the 1830s to the 1850s, and he is relieved in the 1860s and 1870s by a chorus of figures, such as Lord Acton, Sir Henry Maine, James Fitzjames Stephen, and W. J. Courthope. In investigating this tendency toward political pessimism within mid-Victorian Liberalism, von Arx tracks the intellectual development of four representative thinkers—John Morley, J. A. Froude, W. E. H. Lecky, and Leslie Stephen—figures usually judged to have moved from positions of buoyant reformism in the 1860s to a more or less pessimistic dudgeon, with the occasional reactionary spasm, by the closing decades of the century. Von Arx significantly revises this chronology by arguing that “the sixties and seventies was not a time of optimism and confidence among young radicals” and that consequently the “pessimism usually taken to characterize these intellectuals only later in their lives then requires an earlier dating and forms a continuum with political attitudes manifested quite soon after the passage of the Second Reform Act.”73 Without further following von Arx’s argument here, it suffices simply to register the claim that this brand of cultural or political pessimism, with its strong antidemocratic animus, does not appear to be a significant element in the genesis of Arnoldian “renouncement,” leaving for later chapters the burden of proving this negative claim. A second source of Victorian pessimism is often thought to derive from advances in the natural sciences. To many devout believers, science and religion are locked in a zero-sum game, and every advance on one side further undermines the grounds of faith on the other. Hence arise, in the words of F. H. Bradley, British Hegelian philosopher, “all the problems of the day—God, and personal God, immortality of the soul, the conflict of revelation and science, and who knows what beside?”74 Revealing a cosmos infinitely vaster and more indifferent to human interest than previously imagined, modern physics and astronomy bring forth notions like entropy, the heat death of the universe, which present an obvious challenge to the chiliasm of orthodox Christian soteriology. Geology likewise produces a fossil record that implies an earth far older than, and Darwinism postulates a mechanism for the human pedigree far different from, what the Genesis account provides. G. M. Young notes that the individual who finds himself thus “released from his own prison only Kegan, 1882); R. M. Wenley, Aspects of Pessimism (Edinburgh; London: William Blackwood, 1894). 73 von Arx, Progress and Pessimism: Religion, Politics, and History in Late Nineteenth Century Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1985) 5. See also Oliver Bennett, Cultural Pessimism: Narratives of Decline in the Postmodern World (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2001). 74 Ethical Studies (1876) (New York: G. E. Stechert, 1927) 280.

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to find himself alone in an indifferent universe” often succumbs to a Victorian “mode of pessimism [that] can be followed through [Arthur Hugh Clough’s] Dipsychus and Oberman down to bedrock in [James Thomson’s] City of Dreadful Night.”75 As orthodox Christianity loses its appeal as a coherent worldview to many educated minds, a great desire arises to find a new absolute, a substitute object of transcendent meaning in which faith could repose, and science with its remarkable power and prestige offers one possibility, hence the titanic efforts made to explore the mystical and metaphysical bases of physics, particularly apparent in the spirit-rappings of the Society for Psychical Research, the séances of the Theosophists, and the general search for physical evidence of an afterlife. To hearts and minds whom Madame Blavatsky fails to satisfy, however, another possible source of a serviceable absolute lies in the speculations of an emergent sociology, which in this era fosters various strains of nationalistic bloodmysticism, of La Terre et les morts, Blut und Boden and, in England, a cult of rural nostalgia that gathers strength through the century, though as Williams points out, such pastoral yearnings do not automatically issue in a critique of capitalism: “Some of the ‘rural’ virtues, in twentieth-century intellectual movements, leave the land to become the charter of explicit social reaction: [whether] in the defense of traditional property settlements, or in the offensive against democracy in the name of blood and soil.”76 Even the cultural pessimists take on some of this pseudo-scientific coloring, as seen in the alarmist elements of social Darwinism and the degeneration theories of Henry Maudsley, Benjamin Kidd and, later in the century, Max Nordau.77 One particular specimen of eugenicist jeremiad is worth quoting at length not only for the sake of its atmospherics but for the connection it posits between pessimism and degeneration. “‘La Névrose’ is now almost a religion,” the reviewer claims, “of which Schopenhauer is the father … Neurotics are those suffering from moral malaise,” a spiritual sickness that apparently calls for a culture-wide symptomology:

Victorian England: Portrait of an Age (London: Oxford UP, 1936) 76, 76n3. The Town and the City (New York; London: Oxford UP, 1973) 36. Williams’s point

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similarly obtains today, it seems, as the same tendency toward “defense” is exemplified by eco-friendly conservatives like British philosopher Roger Scruton, who claims that “[t]he landscape owes its beauty and its fertility to the fact that is it privately owned.” See Scruton, “A Conservative View of the Country,” A Countryside for All, ed. Michael Sissons (London: Vintage, 2001) 18. See also Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier, Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience (Edinburgh; San Francisco: AK Press, 1995). 77 See Henry Maudsley, The Physiology and Pathology of the Mind (New York: Appleton, 1867) and Body and Will: Being an Essay Concerning Will in Its Metaphysical, Physiological, and Pathological Aspects (New York: Appleton, 1884); Benjamin Kidd, Social Evolution (New York; London: Macmillan, 1894) and The Control of the Tropics (New York: Macmillan, 1898); Max Nordau, Degeneration (1893) 2nd ed., no trans. (New York: Howard Fertig, 1968).

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Neurosis democratizes, but far more truly does democracy neuroticize. Liberty and equality modify profoundly conditions and habits. Desires and ambitions are enormously expanded, and the type of Obermann, Werther, Manfred and René, has been followed by the type of Schopenhauer, Tourgeniew [sic], Tolstoi, Darwin, Mill, Spencer … Men are declassed, pleasures too easy—in a word, sensibilities are too distracted and will too enfeebled, and pessimism and nihilism are but the grand neuroses of our period. Children are too tenderly reared. The father, instead of being an object of silent respect, is the playmate, if not a slave of his child. Religion, politics, society, marriage, everything is an open question. Everything is criticized and, worst of all, analyzed… . This wretched neurosis of irresolution makes aboulia the dominant note of this castrated age … A great crisis is upon this age, and is to be met somewhat as Caro has suggested as follows: The illusion of liberty must be eradicated at every point; an absolute must be insisted upon in state, church, society, science, which no supersubtle analytic mind must be allowed to touch. The ideals and faith in something transcendent, abiding, and too mysterious for definition, must be cultivated, and a new education must arise, which will not teach more method than matter, and which will not culminate by teaching a philosophy which makes young men anxious about either the moral or the logical character of the universe, or the reality of their own ego or of the external world.78

Fair play hardly permits such a passage to be criticized or, worst of all, analyzed, but the pitch of its hysteria suggests the extremes to which the anxiety produced by the “very general crisis” of Progress could go.79 Finally, the utilitarian philosophy, handmaid to Victorian science, also feeds these anxieties as it comes first to supplement and then to supplant Christian ethics. As is well known, utilitarianism uses a felicific or hedonic calculus that permits (ideally) the quantitative evaluation of all actions, each action entailing a specific measure of pleasure or happiness, with the end at which utilitarian social ethics aims lying in the greatest happiness for the greatest number. This Benthamite formula might more truly be framed as a dolorific or algesic calculus, since the promotion of the greatest happiness can only be expressed positively and practically as a reduction in suffering. The bulk of the utilitarian social reforms seems to demonstrate this point.80 The evils of Victorian society are more [Anon.], “Les Nevroses et le Pessimisme,” American Journal of Psychology 3.1 (January 1890): 138. 79 To Elme Caro, “la révolte contre l’être est insensée, elle est le dernier terme de l’orgueil intellectuel et le plus stérile produit de l’infatuation métaphysique” [… the revolte against life is insane; it is the last word in intellectual pride and the most sterile product of metaphysical infatuation]. See Caro, Le Pessimisme au XIXe Siècle: Leopardi, Schopenhauer, Hartmann (Paris: Libraire Hachette, 1880) 274. 80 Much Liberal reform legislation reflects this negative sense of happiness, from the various Factory Acts (1801, 1819, 1831, 1833, 1847, 1850) to the Poor Law Amendment Act (1834), the Mines Act (1842), the second Poor Law Act (1847), the first Public Health Act (1848), Sanitary Law reform (1866), and the second Public Health Act (1875), and so forth. 78

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readily identified and treated than are any possible objects of positive joy, a fact that illustrates the accuracy of Schopenhauer’s fundamental claim that pain is the positive experience, happiness merely a negative notion denoting the absence of pain. In brief, Schopenhauer’s first principle holds that pain, suffering that includes all want, privation, need, in fact every wish or desire, is that which is positive and directly felt and experienced. On the other hand, the nature of satisfaction, enjoyment, and happiness consists solely in the removal of a privation, the stilling of a pain; and so these have a negative effect. Therefore, need and desire are the condition of every pleasure or enjoyment.81

John Selden, a member of the Tribe of Ben, expresses this commonsensical notion in English as early as the seventeenth century: “Pleasure is nothing else but the intermission of pain.” And the moral philosopher Martha Nussbaum makes the same point today: “Utilitarianism takes its start from the fact of common suffering and is, at its best, motivated by a wish to relieve pain.”82 In general, utilitarianism presumes that society is composed of rational egoists who can recognize and pursue their own self-interest, that is, their happiness. But one particular problem in utilitarian ethics continues to perplex its Victorian adherents: how to demonstrate that a rational agent should rationally sacrifice her personal happiness for the sake of the general happiness. The problem proves philosophically insurmountable for Henry Sidgwick, for instance, professor of moral philosophy at Cambridge University and the era’s most formidable utilitarian ethicist, and leads him to conclude his magisterial study of ethics with the frank admission that “the prolonged effort of the human intellect to frame a perfect ideal of rational conduct is seen to have been foredoomed to inevitable failure.”83 There is no question but that altruism, that is, the sacrifice of one’s personal self-interest to the larger social interest, is the righteous duty of every Christian (Victorian theologians still preferred to speak in terms of charity instead of altruism), but utilitarian philosophers like Sidgwick want a stand-alone proof that altruism is also the logical duty of every rational agent, and this he never can establish without having first to “borrow a fundamental and indispensable premiss from Theology,” an impasse that finally brings Sidgwick reluctantly to admit “that the inseparable connection between Utilitarian Duty and the greatest happiness of the individual who conforms to it, cannot be satisfactorily demonstrated on empirical grounds” alone.84 Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Basis of Morality, trans. E. F. J. Payne (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965) 146. 82 John Selden, Table Talk (London: E. Smith, 1689) 69; Martha Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston: Beacon, 1995) 66. 83 Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics (London: Macmillan, 1874) 473. 84 Ibid. 470, 467. For an exhaustive treatment of this moment in Victorian philosophy and Sidgwick’s place in it, see Bart Schultz, Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe, an Intellectual Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004). Collini notes the extent to which 81

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“Was there ever a programme more Schopenhauerian than this?” Since this book’s explanatory apparatus depends on a handful of moral and ethical concepts, such as renunciation, pessimism, altruism, and exemplarity, these must be given at least a minimal analytical edge if they are to serve a useful heuristic purpose, not least in order to minimize the risk of confusion and to preempt any unnecessary multiplication of terms. Aristotle’s ready standard is perennially worth recalling at the outset, according to which an educated mind should “expect that amount of exactness in each kind which the nature of the particular subject admits. It is equally unreasonable to accept merely probable conclusions from a mathematician and to demand strict demonstration from an orator.”85 Short of strict demonstration, then, and allowing a margin of play for the sake of argument, one might venture that in common parlance the word pessimism generally connotes a negative attitude toward life and the world, a sourish, glass-half-empty view of things that typifies (albeit questionably) the character of the killjoy, the wet blanket, the subject sans Prozac, and so on. In the ordinary view, pessimism is the skeleton at the feast, the grinning memento mori that qualifies the joys of the giddy throng. The word itself, in everyday usage, shares more or less ground with some of its near neighbors in the lexical field, such as skepticism, cynicism, and nihilism, although in philosophical discourse pessimism receives a more precise denotation.86 Even at the height of Schopenhauer’s British popularity in the 1870s and 1880s, however, when quite rigorous discussions of his philosophical pessimism are filling the journals of literature and philosophy, this garden-variety sense of the word proves tenacious, and it remains in most hands a more or less blunt analytical instrument even today.87 ethics for Arnold were much less a theoretical problem of understanding than a practical problem of conduct, a dilemma exactly opposite to Sidgwick’s. See Collini, Arnold 64, 107. 85 Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985) 4. 86 On the terminological slippage that typifies the topic, see Dienstag, Pessimism 4–5. 87 For the more notable Victorian treatments of Schopenhauer, see [John Oxenford], “Iconoclasm in German Philosophy,” Westminster Review 59 (Apr. 1853): 202–12; [F. H. Hedge], “Arthur Schopenhauer,” Christian Examiner 76.241 (Jan. 1864): 46–80; PaulArmand Challemel-Lacour, “Un Bouddhiste Contemporain en Allemagne,” Revue des Deux Mondes 86 (15 Mar. 1870): 296–332; David Asher, “Schopenhauer and Darwinism,” Journal of Anthropology 1.3 (Jan. 1871): 312–32; J. Frohschammer, “Optimism and Pessimism: Or the Problem of Evil, Part I,” Contemporary Review 18 (Aug.–Nov. 1871): 67–86; J. Frohschammer, “Optimism and Pessimism: Or the Problem of Evil, Part II,” Contemporary Review 19 (Dec. 1871–May 1872): 775–88; H. Lawrenny, “Arthur Schopenhauer,” Contemporary Review 21 (Dec. 1872–May 1873): 440–63; E. Gryzanovski, “Arthur Schopenhauer and His Pessimistic Philosophy,” North American Review 117 (July 1873): 37–81; William James, “German Pessimism” (1875) Collected Essays and Reviews (London: Longmans, 1920) 12–19; [Friedrich Harms], “Arthur Schopenhauer’s Philosophy,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 9.2 (Apr. 1875): 113–38; Helen Zimmern, Schopenhauer: His Life and Philosophy (1875) (London: Allen and Unwin, 1932); William Chatterton Coupland, “New Books,” Mind 1.2 (Apr. 1876): 294–8; Robert Adamson,

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This usage appears no less protean among the general run of scholars. For instance, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin finds John Stuart Mill “on the whole a pessimistic man,” and the historian Crane Brinton thinks him “very far from an optimistic view of human nature,” but the critic Jerome Buckley praises Mill’s “earnest optimism,” and the journalist Max Lerner sees a “basic optimism” in Mill’s effort “to dispose of the tragic.”88 The archconservative historian Maurice Cowling—himself once numbered by Margaret Thatcher among the unwelcome Tory “pessimists”89—claims that “optimism was primary” in the thought of the Victorian historian W. E. H. Lecky, while the Jesuit historian von Arx anatomizes Lecky’s “pessimistic view of culture and politics.”90 G. M. Trevelyan calls “Schopenhauer’s Philosophy,” Mind 1.4 (Oct. 1876): 491–508; Francis Hueffer, “Arthur Schopenhauer,” Fortnightly Review 20 (Nov. 1876): 773–92; Francis Hueffer, “The Literary Aspects of Schopenhauer’s Work,” New Quarterly Magazine 8 (July 1877): 352–78; James Sully, Pessimism: A History and a Criticism (1877) 2nd ed. (New York: Appleton, 1891); Edwin Wallace, “Science,” rev. of Pessimism: A History and a Criticism, by James Sully, Academy 12 (28 July 1877): 94–5; James Sully, “Pessimism,” Academy 12 (4 Aug. 1877): 117–18; Alexander Bain, rev. of Pessimism: A History and a Criticism, by James Sully, Mind 2.8 (Oct. 1877): 558–65; Wilhelm Wundt, “Philosophy in Germany,” Mind 2.8 (Oct. 1877): 493–518; Charles Waldstein, “The Social Origins of Nihilism and Pessimism in Germany,” Nineteenth Century (June 1878): 1120–32; Samuel Osgood, “Pessimism in the Nineteenth Century,” North American Review 127 (July–Dec. 1878): 456–75; [John Tulloch], “Pessimism,” Edinburgh Review 149.306 (Apr. 1879): 500–533; Francis Bowen, “Malthusianism, Darwinism and Pessimism,” North American Review 129 (July–Dec. 1879): 447–72; Goldwin Smith, “Pessimism,” Atlantic Monthly 45 (Feb. 1880): 195–214; Richard John Lloyd, Pessimism: A Study in Contemporary Sociology (Liverpool: Henry Young, 1880); Elme Caro, Le Pessimisme as XIXe Siècle: Leopardi, Schopenhauer, Hartmann (Paris: Libraire Hachette, 1880); James William Barlow, The Ultimatum of Pessimism: An Ethical Study (London: Kegan, 1882); Ellen M. Mitchell, “The Philosophy of Pessimism,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 20.2 (Apr. 1886): 187–94; Josiah Royce, “Philosophical Questions of the Day,” rev. of Philosophische Fragen der Gegenwart, by Edward von Hartmann, Science 7.170 (7 May 1886): 426; F. Brunetière, “La Philosophie de Schopenhauer,” Revue des Deux Mondes 77.9 (Sept.–Oct. 1886): 694–706; William Wallace, rev. of Outlines of the History of Ethics, by Henry Sidgwick, Mind 11.44 (Oct. 1886): 570–77; Agnes Repplier, “Some aspects of Pessimism,” Atlantic Monthly 60 (Dec. 1887): 756–66; William Chatterton Coupland, The Gain of Life (London: Fisher Unwin, 1890). 88 Isaiah Berlin, “John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life,” Mill: The Spirit of the Age, On Liberty, The Subjection of Women, ed. Alan Ryan (New York: Norton, 1997) 273; Crane Brinton, English Political Thought in the 19th Century (New York: Harper, 1962) 91; Vincent Buckley, Poetry and Morality: Studies on the Criticism of Matthew Arnold, T. S. Eliot, and F. R. Leavis (London: Chatto, 1959) 189; Max Lerner, ed., “Introduction,” The Essential Works of John Stuart Mill (New York: Bantam, 1961) xxv. 89 Thatcher qtd. in Peter Ghosh, “Towards the Verdict of History: Mr. Cowling’s Doctrine,” Public and Private Doctrine: Essays in British History Presented to Maurice Cowling, ed. Michael Bentley (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge UP, 1993) 288n78. 90 Maurice Cowling, Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England, vol. 3, Accommodations (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge UP, 2001) 172; Jeffrey Paul von Arx,

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William E. Gladstone “at once the most optimistic and the most Christian of statesmen,” and Ian Bradley similarly judges “Gladstonian optimism” to be “allpervasive,” even as the Grand Old Man’s biographer Roy Jenkins says Gladstone and John Henry Newman are “both essentially religious pessimists,” each with “a pervading sense of human sin, and his own special contribution to it.”91 Finally, New Left doyen Perry Anderson judges that the “major monuments” of the Western Marxist tradition are “in one way or another, secretly or openly, all affected by a deep historical pessimism,” while his comrade in arms Robin Blackburn finds an “instinctive pessimism” in the “systematic complacency of bourgeois social science” in Britain, where the “prevailing ideology” that “consistently defends the existing arrangements of the capitalist world” is “systematically pessimistic.”92 Given this terminological imprecision, pessimism must plainly be set within some manageable conceptual bounds if it is to bear any explanatory weight in the present study. As indicated, the lexical slipperiness of pessimism is by no means confined to twentieth-century thinkers. J. Radford Thomson, for example—doubtless a regular reader of the British Banner (CPW 5.148)—numbers Schopenhauer’s “Gospel of despair” among “the great forces of our age” and one that is “received by multitudes among the educated classes.”93 Thomson claims that “much of the skeptical and cynical writing of our day, to be met with in our reviews and magazines, is simply saturated with Pessimism,” and we “meet with manifestations of the pessimistic spirit in a cynical style of conversation not uncommon among educated men of a certain temperament, and in the skeptical, hopeless tone of very much of modern literature.”94 In light of Thomson’s language and that of the twentieth-century Victorianists cited above, Dienstag’s preliminary demand, that pessimism be “distinguished from such traditions, or pseudotraditions, as nihilism, skepticism, and cynicism, with which it is too often willingly confused,” applies with equal force to the present discussion.95 These examples might also seem to justify Williams’s claim that binaries like optimism and pessimism merely offer “yet another pair of limiting alternatives, Progress and Pessimism: Religion, Politics, and History in Late Nineteenth Century Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1985) 3. 91 G. M. Trevelyan, The Recreations of an Historian (London; New York: T. Nelson, 1919) 224; Ian Bradley, The Optimists: Themes and Personalities in Victorian Liberalism (London; Boston: Faber, 1980) 14, 15; Roy Jenkins, Gladstone: A Biography (New York: Random, 1997) 75. See also G. M. Trevelyan, “Macaulay and the Sense of Optimism,” Ideas and Beliefs of the Victorians: An Historic Revaluation of the Victorian Age (New York: Dutton, 1966) 46–52. 92 Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (London: Verso, 1998) 76; Robin Blackburn, “A Brief Guide to Bourgeois Ideology,” Student Power: Problems, Diagnosis, Action, ed. Alexander Cockburn and Robin Blackburn (Harmondsworth, Middlesex; Baltimore: Penguin, 1969) 163–4. 93 Modern Pessimism 10. 94 Ibid. 12, 6, emphasis added. 95 Pessimism xiii.

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which any adequate thinking about culture will find irrelevant” (Classic and Romantic further illustrate his argument).96 He says that neither the optimistic nor the pessimistic “version of man takes its origin from a view of man in society, man within a culture; both are based on speculation about his isolated, pre-social condition.”97 In fact, Williams deems both ideas to be “pre-cultural” concepts and “pseudo-categories” of analysis because they entail “the acceptance, as fact, of an ultimate, essential condition of man: a nature which underlies, and precedes, his actual manifestation in particular circumstances.”98 One can, he says, import “a spirit of humane optimism or tragic pessimism” into one’s explanation of the world, “but as little more than a posture. As interpretation any such attitude may be important, but as programme any is irrelevant.” The mobilizing concept par excellence in Williams’s programmatic critique is “the idea of culture,” of course, which is deployed, he says, by his lineup of nineteenth-century critics of “the bourgeois idea of society” as part of “a necessary reaction” to “a general and major change in the conditions of our common life.”99 The “basic element” in the idea of culture is “its effort at total qualitative assessment,” Williams says, which demands the “pulling down” of pseudo-categories and the “acceptance of actual experience,” the “commitment to a real situation from which by no effort of abstraction we can escape.”100 It is worth noting that the essentializing move that Williams denies to a “total qualitative assessment” like pessimism seems here to return in the service of the “actual” and “real” basis of “particular circumstances.” Culture nevertheless remains a vexed idea for Williams, and as the recent Mulhern-Collini exchange illustrates, über-concepts like “culture,” “society,” “politics,” and “criticism” still mark highly contested terrain within the conceptual topology of contemporary discourse, carrying ideological charges that even scare quotes scarcely contain. Pessimism seems to share with these the typical synoptic or totalizing ambition of all master-tropes of grand narratives, but pessimism’s distinction lies precisely in its normative value, its bearing “as interpretation,” in Williams’s sense. It has none of the descriptive-anthropological pretenses of culture or society, and this is its value within Arnold’s thought. If “culture” describes “a whole way of life”—to cite Williams’s usual definition, drawn from Eliot101—then pessimism passes judgment on this “whole way” with its own “total qualitative assessment.” Like poetry to Arnold, pessimism is a criticism of life, an impersonal moral evaluation of the whole, accomplished, in its philosophical variant, via a transcendental aesthetic and ontological critique. At its simplest, the logic of pessimism claims that life, honestly assessed, operates at a loss. The game 98 99

Culture and Society 193. Ibid. 192. Ibid. 192, 193. Ibid. 328, 295. 100 Ibid. 295, 193. 101 Ibid. xvi, 232. See T. S. Eliot, “Notes toward a Definition of Culture,” Christianity and Culture (New York; London: Harcourt, 1976) 103. 96 97

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isn’t worth the candle. The claim is familiar enough, from Job to Ecclesiastes and from Sophocles to Herodotus. Byron sounds the note in English: Count o’er the joys thine hours have seen, Count o’er thy days from anguish free, And know, whatever thou hast been, ’Tis something better not to be.102

Byron’s song reprises the wisdom of Silenus: “[W]hy do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is—to die soon.”103 Pessimism, in both its philosophical and quotidian senses, bears this basic insight. The introductory discussion of pessimism naturally dovetails with the other key concept in this book: altruism. Like pessimism, altruism also has a history and a set of meanings that are crucial to an adequate understanding of its use in the nineteenth century and its place in Arnold’s work. At the same time, the task of teasing out the altruism in Arnold’s thought with the help of pessimism might seem a bit like explaining the obvious in terms of the obscure. For one thing, altruism has a conceptual currency in contemporary discourse that pessimism surely lacks. Philosophy, economics, evolutionary biology, game theory—all of these fields see altruism at play today. The term itself—for all its ugliness, otherism is a literal translation—derives from the Positivist lexicon of the French sociologist August Comte, and altruism gained currency in English in the 1850s with Richard Congreve’s translations of Comte and the popularization of his doctrines by thinkers such as Harriett Martineau, George Henry Lewes, and others. Altruism still serves ethical philosophers much as caritas serves Christian theologians, signifying the chief ethical or theological virtue. The reverse of the altruism medal is egoism, and the selfish pleasure that the ego forgoes in selflessly serving the other is the ethical thrust in the moral economy of altruism. In this zero-sum conception of conduct, doing unto others logically entails not doing unto oneself, and thus renunciation is essential to the concept.104 As an ethical imperative in its nineteenth-century context, altruism reflects the “obsessive antipathy to selfishness” of most Victorian moralists.105 The growing popular interest in Schopenhauer’s philosophy elicits increasingly sharp 102 “Euthanasia,” The Poems and Dramas of Lord Byron (New York; Boston: Crowell, 1884) lines 33–6. For an excellent survey, see Ralph Hinsdale Goodale, “Schopenhauer and Pessimism in Nineteenth Century English Literature,” PMLA 47.1 (Mar. 1932): 241–61. 103 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, or Hellenism and Pessimism (1872) trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage, 1967) 42. 104 For still-relevant discussions of altruism, see Thomas Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978) and The View from Nowhere (New York; Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986). 105 Collini, Public Moralists 65.

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responses from pulpit and parsonage through the 1870s and 1880s, and these are frequently framed in terms of the supposed selfishness implicit in pessimism. Early notices of Schopenhauer, primarily found in journals of philosophy, are typically calm and methodical, assessing his ethics and metaphysics as yet another specimen of German system-building and treating him more as a curiosity than a threat. The Polish diplomat Ernst Gryzanovski, for example, notes in 1873 that Schopenhauer’s “ideas are so closely connected with modern thought and with the many open questions and unsolved problems of our days that they ought not to be overlooked by the present generations of thinkers.”106 As Schopenhauer’s fame and a fashionable pessimism grow, however, criticism becomes significantly more shrill and vituperative, particularly among the clergy. Unlike J. Radford Thomson, for instance, the clergyman Richard John Lloyd takes rather closer aim at the pessimists in the presidential address entitled “Pessimism” that he delivers before the Liverpool Institute Old Boys’ Society in 1878. Lloyd first assails some representative poet-pessimists, such as Arthur Hugh Clough, William Morris, and Robert Buchanan, before turning his attention to Arnold: Let us even go to the other pole of contemporary poetry, and seek what consolation we may find with the apostle of Culture, the dainty and serene Matthew Arnold. He will tell us that “there is no joy but calm,” he will advise us not to let ourselves be distracted with the burning questions of the day, but dwelling sedulously amid whatever has been best said or thought by the imperial intellects of the race, to feast on perennial Sweetness and bathe in unsullied Light. Was there ever a programme more Schopenhauerian than this? It is exactly the same story: life made tolerable by means of quietude and culture; the only difference is that Arnold finds it a little more than tolerable: but without them it is equally intolerable to both.107

Lloyd is one of the very few critics to connect Arnold directly with Schopenhauer, although the language he uses to characterize Arnold, with his dainty indolence and cultured quietude—in short, his selfishness—is replete with tropes that were already among the well-worn machinery of Arnold’s critics, to which this study now turns.

“Arthur Schopenhauer,” North American Review 117 (July 1873): 39. Richard John Lloyd, Pessimism: A Study in Contemporary Sociology (Liverpool:

106 107

Henry Young, 1880) 49.

Chapter 2

The Buried Life: Cultural Politics and the Renunciation of Arnold It is often said (and his tone, at times, lends unfortunate support) that Arnold recommends a merely selfish personal cultivation … But this, if Arnold has been read, can only be a deliberate misunderstanding. —Raymond Williams, Culture and Society

Anyone now studying the development of the academic discipline known as English literature is likely to find little point in reassessing the career and impact of Arnold. Since the 1980s in particular, a host of left-leaning critics—including Terry Eagleton, Edward W. Said, Francis Mulhern, Chris Baldick, and Robert J. C. Young—has erected the image of an elitist, authoritarian, and Eurocentric Arnold, the founding father of high-brow exclusivity and chief priest of cultural centrality. This image, the product of an all-but-incontestable critical consensus within the academy, is now generally accepted, even taken for granted, as the received wisdom on the left when it comes to Arnold. In reaction, a right-wing phalanx of self-appointed conservators of the Western cultural heritage—such as Allen Bloom, Gertrude Himmelfarb, William Bennett, Christopher Woodhead, and Lynne Cheney—deploys an almost identical image of Arnold in its own unashamedly elitist, authoritarian, and Eurocentric defense of Great Books canonicity, the inviolable core of texts that is thought to constitute “our” common culture. Taken together, these polarized partisans converge so forcefully on their shared image of Arnold that it has come to seem almost superfluous to talk about him in the academy, since we presumably already know all that we need to know (and that none too heartening) about the “Arnoldian project,” the “Arnoldian programme,” and the “Arnoldian problematic.”1 His “will to depoliticise” and “to divest poetry of politics” produced “a sustained attack on the place of reflective thought and analysis.”2 He “covered critical writing with the mantle of cultural authority and reactionary political quietism.”3 The ways he “knowingly and deliberately misrepresented the facts” in his sparring with contemporaries was Francis Mulhern, The Moment of Scrutiny (London: New Left Books, 1979) 19, 312; Mulhern, “Beyond Metaculture,” New Left Review 16 (July–Aug. 2002): 100. 2 Isobel Armstrong, “Arnoldian Repression: Two Forgotten Discourses of Culture,” News from Nowhere 5 (June 1988): 53. 3 Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1983) 28. 1

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“unscrupulous in a high degree” and showed “how little he cared for the ordinary decencies of debate,” but then the “love of truth was something he appears to have outlived early.”4 In sum, Arnold was an “anti-intellectual” who “found it convenient to prevaricate.”5 Apart from this rather specialized function of Arnold as a political shibboleth, however, he seems otherwise to occupy a quite minor place within the disciplinary sphere of English studies, where his “residual influence,” as Said puts it, is now “more or less negligible.”6 Specialists may still quibble over Arnold’s status in relation to the other high-Victorian poets, and ideologues are apt to chafe one another in weighing whether his ideas are more properly classified as liberal or conservative, but such pedantries seem unlikely to alter significantly his academic reputation as perhaps the deadest white European male of all. After shining on the first half of the twentieth century like some “high, white star of Truth” in the Anglo-American literary-critical firmament, a point toward which numberless undergraduate term papers and postgraduate theses aspired, Arnold gradually faded from view in the mid-1970s, and his “obnubilation” (as T. S. Eliot might say) is now more or less complete.7 He often fails to make the cut on today’s typical undergraduate literature syllabus in the United States—even in courses on the Victorian poets—and if the present trend continues, neither shall his place in the anthologies know him anymore.8 No Friends of Arnold Society or International George Watson, Politics and Literature in Modern Britain (London: Macmillan, 1977) 139, 143, 146. 5 Chris Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism, 1848––1932 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983) 49. 6 Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia UP, 2004) 33. 7 See Eliot, “The Function of Criticism,” Selected Essays of T. S. Eliot (New York: Harcourt, 1950) 14; Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Poetry to Criticism in England (London: Faber, 1933) 54. 8 Figures for The Norton Anthology of English Literature can perhaps be taken as representative in this regard. 4

Edition 1st (1962) 2nd (1968) 3rd (1974) 4th (1979) 5th (1986) 6th (1993) 7th (2000) 8th (2006)

Poems (pp.) 18 (28) 21 (40) 20 (36) 16 (31) 12 (32) 12 (30) 10 (28) 8 (19)

Essays (pp.) 8 (76) 9 (91) 9 (91) 9 (91) 9 (69) 9 (61) 7 (53) 7 (52)

Total pages 112 138 134 129 108 98 88 77

George H. Ford of the University of Rochester edited the “Victorian Age” section of the Norton through the fifth edition, after which Carol T. Christ of the University of California, Berkeley, became Ford’s coeditor for the sixth and the primary editor for the seventh. The eighth edition is coedited by Christ and Catherine Robson of the University of California,

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Arnold Association announces its annual meeting in the MLA convention program.9 No Arnold blogs or Arnold listservs cater to any Arnoldian niche markets.10 The heritage tourist finds “no separate public Arnold home, monument, or museum” in Cumberland, Surrey, Chester Square, or elsewhere.11 It seems fair to conclude, then, that as an object of academic interest in university English departments, Arnold has left the building. Or has he? The present study argues that the central tenet of Arnold’s thought— what he calls “renouncement”—in fact enjoys significant critical currency today, but it does so only as a kind of stealth Arnoldianism. It seems that Arnold the Davis. As the figures indicate, the space given to Arnold peaked in the second edition and has dwindled steadily since, the largest cuts occurring between the fourth and fifth and the seventh and eighth editions. See M. H. Abrams et al., eds., The Norton Anthology of English Literature (New York: Norton, 1962). Among the other school anthologies, Arnold gets 90 pages in the “Victorian Prose and Poetry” section that Lionel Trilling and Harold Bloom edited for the first edition of The Oxford Anthology of English Literature (1973), a selection that includes 14 poems and excerpts from four prose works. See Frank Kermode and John Hollander, eds., The Oxford Anthology of English Literature, vol. 2 (New York; Oxford: Oxford UP, 1973). By contrast, the “Victorian Age” section of The Longman Anthology of British Literature, edited by Heather Henderson and William Sharpe, devotes 63 pages to Arnold (23 pages to 14 poems and 38 pages to three prose excerpts). See David Damrosch, ed., The Longman Anthology of British Literature, vol. 2 (New York: Addison Wesley Longman, 1999). In The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Poetry and Poetic Theory, the section on Arnold’s work comprises 14 poems and two prose selections over 49 pages. See Thomas J. Collins and Vivienne J. Rundle, eds., The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Poetry and Poetic Theory (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 1990). 9 As of spring, 2007, there were 52 organizations allied or affiliated with the Modern Language Association, each of which is devoted to a particular author or, in some cases, brace of authors, such as the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association and the Keats-Shelley Association. Individual figures were Margaret Atwood, Simone de Beauvoir, Samuel Beckett, Boccaccio, Boethius, Bertolt Brecht, Lord Byron, Miguel de Cervantes, John Clare, Paul Claudel, Joseph Conrad, Dante, Charles Dickens, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, William Faulkner, Robert Frost, Margaret Fuller, Benito Galdós, André Gide, Ellen Glasgow, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Heinrich Heine, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, Henry James, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, D. H. Lawrence, Doris Lessing, Gottfried Lessing, Christopher Marlowe, Herman Melville, John Milton, William Morris, Vladimir Nabokov, Eugene O’Neill, Harold Pinter, Luigi Pirandello, Edgar Allen Poe, Ezra Pound, George Sand, Edmund Spenser, Wallace Stevens, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, William Carlos Williams, and Virginia Woolf. See “Allied and Affiliate Organizations,” PMLA 122.6 (Nov. 2007): 1901–1906. The argument from silence is never decisive, of course, and it is perhaps worth noting, in extenuation of the absent Arnold society, that other major Victorian poets, such as Tennyson and Browning, also lack MLA-affiliated or allied associations. 10 See J. Russell Perkin, “Northrop Frye and Matthew Arnold,” University of Toronto Quarterly 74.2 (summer 2005): 793n1. 11 William B. Thesing, “Matthew Arnold,” Victorian Poetry 26.4 (winter 1988): 436.

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renouncer has himself been almost wholly renounced. The scholarship certainly suggests as much, although the evidence for Arnold’s “waning standing” is mostly negative and appears, as Alan Grob points out, in the “dwindling number of articles” in the annual MLA bibliography and the “fewer and fewer pages” that Arnold occupies in the “major anthologies.”12 Clinton Machann similarly confirms that “published scholarship on Arnold has obviously declined” rather markedly “over the past three decades,” and since no critic lives on the pulses of Arnold studies quite as Machann does, his view can perhaps be taken as conclusive.13 The most recent sustained consideration of the Arnoldian legacy probably occurred in 1988, the centenary of his death, with a flurry of commemorative essays, a special double issue of Victorian Poetry, an all-Arnold number of News from Nowhere, and Collini’s critical biography.14 The journal The Arnoldian (originally published as the Arnold Newsletter), after 15 years spent serving “the community of Arnold scholars” and other “aficionados who were involved in the upsurge of Arnold studies in the early 1970s,” marked the centenary by reinventing itself as Nineteenth-Century Prose, a renunciation of Arnold that perhaps bears at least some symbolic value.15 Apart from small items in Notes and Queries or the Alan Grob, A Longing Like Despair: Arnold’s Poetry of Pessimism (Newark: U of Delaware P, 2002) 15. The late Professor Grob’s book has been of particular importance to the present study. 13 Clinton Machann, “Matthew Arnold,” Victorian Poetry 41.3 (fall 2003): 375; Clinton Machann, “Matthew Arnold,” Victorian Poetry 42.3 (fall 2004): 334. 14 For centenary essays, see Clinton Machann and Forrest D. Burt, eds., Matthew Arnold in His Time and Ours: Centenary Essays (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1988); Mirian Allott, ed., Matthew Arnold 1988: A Centennial View, vol. 41, Essays and Studies (London: John Murray, 1988). Also see, for example, Miriam Allott, “‘Both/and’ or ‘either/ or’?: Arnold’s Mind in Dialogue with Itself,” Arnoldian 15 (winter 1987–spring 1988): 1–13; Terry G. Harris, “Matthew Arnold, Bishop Joseph Butler, and the Foundation of Religious Faith,” Victorian Studies 31.2 (winter 1988): 189–208; Ira B. Nadel, “Textual Criticism and Non-Fictional Prose: The Case of Matthew Arnold,” University of Toronto Quarterly 58.2 (winter 1988): 263–74; Catherine A. Runcie, “Matthew Arnold’s Christ and the Unity of Culture and Religion,” Sydney Studies in English 14 (1988): 38–51; Saundra Segan Wheeler, “The Motive of Return in Matthew Arnold’s Writings,” Nineteenth-Century Prose 16.1 (winter 1988): 1–22. For special-issue journals, see Victorian Poetry 26 (1988) and News from Nowhere 5 (June 1988). For the biography, see Stefan Collini, Arnold (Oxford; New York: Oxford UP, 1988). Collini’s study was republished in A. Laurence Le Quesne, Victorian Thinkers: Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold, Morris (Oxford; New York: Oxford UP, 1993) 193–326 and in a Clarendon Press paperback edition (with “Afterword”) as Arnold: A Critical Portrait (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), the latter perhaps intended to generate crosssales complementing the simultaneous publication of Collini’s selection from Arnold’s prose. See Stefan Collini, ed., Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, by Matthew Arnold (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge UP, 1993). The 1994 biography has again been reissued by Oxford: see Stefan Collini, Arnold (Oxford; New York: Clarendon, 2008). 15 Lawrence W. Mazzeno, “Editor’s Page,” Arnoldian 15.2 (summer 1988): v; Lawrence W. Mazzeno, “Editor’s Notes,” Nineteenth-Century Prose 16.1 (winter 1988): ii. 12

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occasional odd volume that crops up, the once-steady stream of articles, chapters, dissertations, and monographs has largely run dry.16 These trends all suggest that what Lawrence W. Mazzeno took for an “upsurge” in Arnold studies in the early 1970s was, on a longer view, more truly a death throe. But naturally the evidence is not all on one side. Although Arnold had “become something of an embarrassment” by the early 1980s, Eugene Goodheart still allowed him an “abiding place in literary studies,” and James C. Livingston claimed in 1986 that “Arnold’s position as a commanding literary and social critic is secure.”17 Collini’s high praise, dating from the late 1980s, of the “unavoidable” and “inescapable” Arnold was noted in the previous chapter, and Grob still admitted in 2002 that “interest in Arnold has not wholly dissipated.”18 The mid-1990s, for instance, saw some significant publications, such as the first volume of Cecil Y. Lang’s monumental edition of Arnold’s collected letters, and two new editions of Culture and Anarchy (1869) appeared as well, one from Cambridge University Press, edited and introduced by Collini, the other from Yale University Press, accompanied by matching sets of critical essays from hardright conservatives Maurice Cowling and Samuel Lipman and soft-left liberals Steven Marcus and Gerald Graff.19 The polemical tone of the essays in the Yale edition further illustrates the chief cause of Arnold’s fall into desuetude: his embarrassing politics. In its gentler version, the left-liberal line claims that Arnold “has become a name for masked social elitism and political conservatism.”20 More harshly paraphrased, he is a “reactionary elitist,” the “most extreme version … of a repressive, patriarchal, authoritarian cultural/political force in the history of English and American society.”21 At best, Arnold figures as “a whipping boy whose conservative pronouncements on literature were antithetical to poststructuralist theories that refused to privilege works Arnold had deemed great.”22 Since the For a “somewhat impressionistic and imprecise” but not uninformative statistical survey of the publishing patterns, see Machann, “Matthew Arnold,” Victorian Poetry 41.3 (fall 2003): 375. 17 Eugene Goodheart, “The Function of Matthew Arnold,” Critical Inquiry 9 (Mar. 1983): 451–2; James C. Livingston, Matthew Arnold and Christianity: His Religious Prose Writings (Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1986) ix. 18 A Longing Like Despair 15. 19 The Letters of Matthew Arnold, ed. Cecil Y. Lang, 6 vols. (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1996–2001); Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge UP, 1993); Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. Samuel Lipman (New Haven; London: Yale UP, 1994). 20 Wendell V. Harris, “Interpretive Historicism: ‘Signs of the Times’ and Culture and Anarchy in Their Contexts,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 44.4 (Mar. 1990): 441. 21 Clinton Machann, The Essential Matthew Arnold: An Annotated Bibliography of Major Modern Studies (New York: G. K. Hall, 1993) ix. 22 Lawrence W. Mazzeno, Matthew Arnold: The Critical Legacy (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 1999) 89. Mazzeno claims that Arnold’s “strident approach to literary studies” and “his strident attempts to appear above partisanship” make him “the most 16

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culture wars have plainly left their stripes on Arnold’s reputation, it might be worth briefly recalling how his late-twentieth-century image as a New Criterion ideologue was constructed and deployed as a mobilizing concept by both the right and left—at the cost of his explicit ethical import. Collini identifies a crucial stage in the development of Arnold’s academic image: the vast post-World War II expansion and institutionalization of university English studies in the United States and United Kingdom, when “Arnold became retrospectively canonized as one of the presiding spirits of the new discipline.”23 Beginning in the late 1960s, according to Collini, “the traditional conception of this activity came in for hostile treatment from those committed to a more theoretical or more political form of criticism,” and Arnold was then “frequently singled out for abuse for his part in inscribing an ‘élitist’ and socially conservative notion of culture at the heart of the academic study of English.” This twist in Arnold’s posthumous career “threw up more than the usual crop of ironies,” Collini says. For instance, although he was himself the least academic of writers, Arnold had somehow come to emblazon the standards of an insular literary-critical academicism, and although he was skeptical about introducing English literature into the university curriculum, especially an English corpus taken in isolation from its classical and European sources and contexts, Arnold was now virtually synonymous with a rigid Anglophone canonicity and a byword for high-brow cultural authority. Collini indicates the serviceability of this caricatured image: But, despite the fact that he never confined his notion of “criticism” exclusively to literary criticism, just as the literature he recommended was not primarily English literature, Arnold has been identified, by both friend and foe, with a particular understanding of the nature and social importance of the subject known as “English.” More broadly, he has also remained a constant reference point in discussions about the nature and value of “culture” that have been such a prominent feature of public debate in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century.

Although strategic misappropriations of Arnold have a much older pedigree, as Chapters 3 and 4 show, Collini’s general point is accurate, because “both friend and foe”—the binary form is significant: you are either with us or with the Arnoldians— together share a particularly partial and politicized caricature of Arnold that elides the central, unifying thrust of his ethical project of “renouncement.” For instance, today’s social conservatives especially admire the law-and-order Arnold, manfully flinging rabble-rousers and, doubtless, same-sex unionists from the Tarpeian Rock, an Arnold of absolute truths, unambiguous standards, and a strident and popular Victorian Sage,” but stridency seems to be an incongruous description of this least shrill, least rancorous, and most ondoyant et divers of critical stylists. See Matthew Arnold: The Critical Legacy 99, 94, 138. 23 Stefan Collini, “Arnold, Matthew (1822–1888),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004) 26 Jan. 2007 .

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best self of individual initiative and personal responsibility. As Goodheart says, “It is not hard to see why Matthew Arnold has become the intellectual property of the neoconservatives: he stands or seems to stand for all the values denigrated by the cultural left: disinterestedness, aesthetic autonomy, authority.”24 Arnold has always been an odds-on favorite of William J. Bennett, former director of the National Endowment for the Humanities, who began his 1984 battle for a core curriculum by “[e]xpanding on a phrase from Matthew Arnold” and is still found in 2003 quoting “what Matthew Arnold called ‘the best that has been known and said.’”25 Former Second Lady Lynne Cheney, another former NEH head, is also an old-school Arnoldian—she wrote a 1970 dissertation on Kantianism in Arnold’s poetry—and his “residual influence” perhaps explains the sweetness and light that Cheney once brought to the board of Lockheed-Martin and that now animates her directorship of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA).26 The ACTA report for 2006, for example, entitled How Many Ward Churchills? ambitiously renews the campus monitoring of “politicized multiculturalist” agendas and the leftist advocates of “ideological intolerance and doctrinaire teaching,” a project that was initiated in the 1980s by higher-education watchdogs like Roger Kimball and Dinesh D’Souza.27 Today the quest for doctrinal purity in the academy is at the forefront of ACTA’s mission,28 and the organization’s outreach division is a group led by the conservative activist David Horowitz, Students for Academic Freedom, which “Arnold among the Neoconservatives,” CLIO 25:4 (summer 1996): 455. William J. Bennett, To Reclaim a Legacy: A Report on the Humanities in Higher

24 25

Education (Washington, D.C.: National Endowment for the Humanities, 1984) 3; William J. Bennett, “Foreword,” Becoming an Educated Person: Toward a Core Curriculum for College Students (Washington, D.C.: American Council of Trustees and Alumni, 2003) iv, 14 Mar. 2007 . 26 See Lynne Ann Vincent Cheney, “Matthew Arnold’s Possible Perfection: A Study of the Kantian Strain in Arnold’s Poetry,” diss., U of Wisconsin Madison, 1970, DAI-A 31/06 (1970): 2870, 15 Dec. 2007 . 27 How Many Ward Churchills? (Washington, D.C.: American Council of Trustees and Alumni, 2006) 30. See Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Higher Education (New York: Harper, 1990) and Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art (San Francisco: Encounter, 2004); Dinesh D’Souza, Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (New York: Free Press, 1991) and The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9-11 (New York: Doubleday, 2007). 28 ACTA reports include Shining the Light (2008), The Vanishing Shakespeare (2007), How Many Ward Churchills? (2006); Intellectual Diversity: Time for Action (2005); Politics in the Classroom (2004); The Hollow Core: Failure of the General Education Curriculum, A Fifty College Study (2004); Becoming an Educated Person: Toward a Core Curriculum for College Students (2003); Degraded Currency: The Problem of Grade Inflation (2003); Teachers Who Can: How Informed Trustees Can Ensure Teacher Quality (2003); We the People: A Resource Guide (2003); Can College Accreditation Live Up to Its Promise? (2002); Educating Teachers: The Best Minds Speak Out (2002); Restoring America’s Legacy (2002); Losing America’s Memory: Historical Illiteracy in the 21st Century (2000);

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sometimes fancies itself taking an Arnoldian cudgel to left-wing cant in a crusade to liberate the academy by means of its own brand of “intellectual diversity.”29 In Horowitz’s view, there are “50,000 professors” in U.S. colleges and universities “who are anti-American. They’re radicals. They identify with the terrorists. They think of them as freedom fighters. It’s a huge danger for the country.”30 To counter the ideological strength of this professorial fifth column, Horowitz empowers right-wing college students to appropriate “the language that the left has deployed so effectively in behalf of its own agendas,” thus producing charges that “radical professors” create a “hostile learning environment” for conservative students, that the university lacks “intellectual diversity” among faculty, that the conservative viewpoint is “under-represented” in the curriculum, that the university should be a more “diverse” and “inclusive” community, and so forth.31 These remarkably cynical rearguard efforts to reclaim the legacy of Western culture by means of a bumptious, aggressive, ostensibly Arnoldian humanism seem to confirm the liberal left in its assessment of Arnold’s conservatism. For instance, Said accounts for the martial Eurocentrism that now masquerades as humanism and intellectual diversity by describing cultural conservatives like Bennett and Bloom as “the falsifiers and reductivists, the fundamentalists and deniers, whose doctrines must be criticized for what they leave out, denigrate, demonize, and dehumanize on presumably humanistic grounds.”32 To Said, all such “nativist cultural traditions that pretend to authenticity and aboriginal priority can now be recognized as the great patently false and misleading fundamentalist ideology of the time.” He traces this Eurocentric fundamentalism backward from its latter-day epigones, the Cheneys, Bennetts, and Blooms, through its early- and mid-twentieth-century representatives—Eliot, Leavis, I. A. Richards, Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom—and thence to its ultimate or, rather, original source in Arnold, who supposedly gives reactionary humanism its most resilient The Intelligent Donor’s Guide to College Giving (1998); and The Shakespeare File: What English Majors Are Really Studying (1996). 29 David Horowitz, “Missing Diversity of America’s Campuses,” FrontPage Magazine 3 Sept. 2002, 15 Oct. 2007 . 30 Scarborough Country, MSNBC, 2 Mar. 2006, Media Matters for America, 15 Oct. 2007 . 31 David Horowitz, “The Campus Blacklist,” FrontPage Magazine 18 Apr. 2003, 15 Oct. 2007 . See also David Horowitz, Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes (Dallas, TX: Spence, 1999). It is a nice question whether the cynicism of these efforts exceeds their irony, since these are the same people for whom Ronald Reagan effectively gutted the FCC’s equal-time provisions in the 1980s. 32 Humanism and Democratic Criticism 47–8. See Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987); William J. Bennett, Our Children and Our Country: Improving America’s Schools and Affirming the Common Culture (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988).

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modern formulation. Eliot himself once proposed this same pedigree when he said that Arnold “is at least a forerunner of what is now called Humanism,” although “[h]ow far Arnold is responsible for the birth of Humanism would be difficult to say; we can at least say that it issues very naturally from his doctrine.”33 Perhaps no less difficult to say would be the precise degree of difference in meaning between Said’s and Eliot’s slippery term, humanism. The point here, again, is simply that the connection between Arnold and a socially and politically conservative humanism is largely taken for granted now by all sides in the culture wars. The left has worked assiduously to undermine and expose the neoconservative’s darling. The pretenses of Arnold’s mid-Victorian Liberalism have been systematically unmasked by Marxist scholars like Eagleton, Baldick, and others, who anatomize Arnold’s bourgeois-hegemonic machinations, while the racist and imperialist premises at the root of his authoritarian cultural politics have been thoroughly aired by postcolonial theorists like Said, Young, and others.34 The historian Martin J. Wiener even lays the blame for the “decline” of Britain’s “industrial spirit” and its “persistent economic retardation” on a country-house ethos of “pseudoaristocratic” and “gentrified” bourgeois cultural values that derives in no small part from Arnold.35 In poetry and criticism, the areas, if any, most properly called his specialties, the “instruments of Arnold’s time” already seemed “very antiquated” to Eliot in the early 1930s.36 Somewhat more recent judges describe Arnold’s “direct” critical influence as “minimal since the advent of the New Criticism” and deem his commentary far “too casual, too remote from the text to nourish a criticism devoted to close and systematic observation of individual works,” in this betraying the inherent limitations of his “pre-theoretical servitude to representation and the empirical work.”37 For all of these reasons, the residue of Arnoldian influence on the discipline of English literature appears to be just as Said describes it: “more or less negligible.” Perhaps one of these “more or less negligible” vestiges of Arnold’s critical influence is discernible in, for instance, the efforts of latter-day humanistic scholars who seek to salvage a place for “ethical criticism.”38 “Arnold and Pater,” Selected Essays of T. S. Eliot (New York: Harcourt, 1950) 384. See Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory

33 34

(London: Verso, 1978) and Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983); Chris Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism; Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993); Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. London; New York: Routledge, 1995). 35 Martin J. Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850– 1980, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004) 10. 36 The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism 102. 37 Goodheart, “The Function of Matthew Arnold” 451; Ian Hunter, Culture and Government: The Emergence of Literary Education (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1988) 192. 38 The subject of “ethical criticism” was debated in the pages of Philosophy and Literature in 1997 and 1998. See Richard A. Posner, “Against Ethical Criticism,” Philosophy and Literature 21.1 (1997): 1–27. Martha C. Nussbaum and Wayne C. Booth replied in

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Overcoming Matthew Arnold

If his academic-English stock is trading for pennies, Arnold’s topical value as a “constant reference-point” among the many varieties of “culture talk” has arguably never been greater.39 Machann seems generally correct in claiming that, “overall, the academic stereotype of Arnold as defender of elitist values and the figurehead for a discredited traditional humanism remains strong,” yet there persists a liberal remnant who finds important contraindications in Arnold—hints, suggestions, and implications that prove “far more radical,” as Wendell V. Harris says, “than our usual view of Arnold would allow.”40 Our usual view of Culture and Anarchy, for instance, takes it as “the central document in contemporary indictments of Arnold’s conservatism,” according to Harris, and to many modern readers its final chapter, “Our Liberal Practitioners,” seems to be “the epitome of his intransigent allegiance to the status quo and invincible opposition to political action.” From Harris’s perspective, however, Arnold was “no mere trimmer,” and although “his animadversions on specific arguments at the time were too quiet and too topical to be noted by later readers,” and his rhetorical strategies often “imply goals that he evidently did not yet think it useful to state directly,” the evidence nonetheless suggests that “if his strategies were conservative, his goals were radical enough,” and they leave us in “no doubt that in the long view Arnold was a socioeconomic leveler.”41 Harris’s is of course a minority opinion today, putting forth an Arnold whom neither his right-wing admirers nor his left-wing detractors can recognize or readily accept, an Arnold of land reform, birth control, and no-fault divorce. Harris is not altogether alone in his exorbitance, however, but is joined by scholars like Bill Bell, Eugene Goodheart, Donald D. Stone, and Tim Walters in a rather small circle of critics who give Arnold credit for genuinely progressive political opinions.42 Collini might even number among these revisionists: he describes the following year’s symposium. See Martha C. Nussbaum, “Exactly and Responsibly: A Defense of Ethical Criticism,” Philosophy and Literature 22.2 (1998): 343–65; Wayne C. Booth, “Why Banning Ethical Criticism Is a Serious Mistake,” Philosophy and Literature 22.2 (1998): 366–93. For rebuttal, see Richard A. Posner, “Against Ethical Criticism: Part Two,” Philosophy and Literature 22.2 (1998): 394–412. See also Martha C. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford; New York: Oxford UP, 1990); Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge UP, 2001); Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia UP, 2004); John Guillory, “The Ethical Practice of Modernity: The Example of Reading,” The Turn to Ethics, ed. Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (New York; London: Routledge, 2000) 29–46. 39 See Stefan Collini, “Culture Talk,” New Left Review 7 (Jan.–Feb. 2001): 43–53. 40 Clinton Machann, “Matthew Arnold,” Victorian Poetry 42.3 (fall 2004): 328; Wendell V. Harris, “Interpretive Historicism: ‘Signs of the Times’ and Culture and Anarchy in Their Contexts,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 44.4 (Mar. 1990): 454. 41 “Interpretive Historicism” 460–62. 42 See Bill Bell, “Arnoldian Culture in Transition: An Early Socialist Reading,” English Literature in Transition 35.2 (1992): 141–61; Eugene Goodheart, “Arnold among the Neoconservatives,” CLIO 25:4 (summer 1996): 455–8; Bill Bell, “The Function of

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Arnold’s opinions in the essay “Equality” (1878) as “deliberately heterodox and remarkably radical” in their “sustained denunciation of the extreme inequality of the distribution of property in Britain, and of the impress which that had left on social relations.”43 These views face some rather daunting prima facie evidence to the contrary, of course, such as Arnold’s notorious motto (borrowed from Joseph Joubert), “Force till right is ready” (CPW 3.265), and his father’s advice, repeated by the son apropos of the Hyde Park rioters, to “flog the rank and file, and fling the ringleaders from the Tarpeian Rock!” (CPW 5.526). These lines have become negative touchstones in the left critique of Arnold, and it is unclear what measure of tacit, implicit, and indirect radicalism would suffice to outweigh the apparent blatancy of such statements. Nevertheless, his would-be rehabilitators might retort that Arnold’s marxisant and postcolonial critics have all the same been too apt to ascribe an intellectual and ideological efficacy to him, and by extension to the racist and bourgeois-hegemonic force of his “Culture” more broadly, that his Victorian contemporaries certainly never imputed either to him or his cloudy notions. Arnold admittedly occupied a minority position within nineteenthcentury Liberalism. His ideas were perpetually under siege by liberals and conservatives alike. By investing his “Culture” with a supposed predominance within mainstream Victorian Liberalism, presentist theories now risk producing a curious form of critical euhemerism, as it might be called, such as that found in Mulhern’s description of Arnold as “the lawgiver of English liberal education,” whose “statement of the cultural principle, as it can pointedly be called, became classic in English-language Kulturkritik in the twentieth century.”44 Just as Arnold, Mulhern claims, “was the pivotal figure in Williams’s [Culture and Society] history,” so he pivots centrally in Mulhern’s machinery as well, a kind of crystallizing Archimedean point from which the concept of metacultural discourse as organizing principle is abstracted and set to work ordering the moments of Kulturkritik.45 As the linchpin in Mulhern’s “general theory” of metaculture, Arnold’s importance cannot be overstated, committed as he was to culture as the “normative value” and “the principle of a good society,” and addicted as he Arnold at the Present Time,” Essays in Criticism 47.3 (summer 1997): 203–19; Donald D. Stone, Communications with the Future: Matthew Arnold in Dialogue (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997); Tim Walters, “The Question of Culture (and Anarchy),” Modern Language Notes 112.3 (Apr. 1997): 349–65. 43 Arnold 88. 44 Francis Mulhern, Culture/Metaculture (London; New York: Routledge, 2000) 28, xvi. It should perhaps be mentioned that “Kulturkritik,” in Mulhern’s theoretical retooling, is a species of the genus “metacultural discourse,” a discursive formation in which culture “speaks of itself” and “addresses its own generality and conditions of existence.” The academic discipline of cultural studies is Kulturkritik’s institutional opposite number, in Mulhern’s taxonomy, and Arnold is that rara avis whose singularity seems to be constitutive of both the species and the genus. See Culture/Metaculture xiv. 45 Ibid. 166.

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was to preaching an authoritarian gospel “in which culture dissolves the political and takes up the general labour proper to it, assuming the role of valid social authority.”46 To see how such retrospective inflation works—Mulhern elsewhere describes an analogous process in terms of “a selective and polemical reading of the archive in the perspective of present-day interests”47—it will be useful to retrace the construction of Arnold’s critical reputation with a view to clarifying his place in the culture-talk tradition and identifying some ideas that might have been obscured in the more recent decline of Arnold studies. The Most Momentous and Profound Problem of Ethics As the fog slowly lifts on the 1980s culture wars, we find the poet of Victorian melancholy among the cloudy trophies hung, a supposedly deserving victim of ideological polemics and the moving toy shop of high-theory fashions. Or perhaps he rather hangs like some smokehouse ham, cured and “blackened,” as he once said of William Cobbett, “with the smoke of a lifelong conflict in the field of political practice,” a field that Arnold had thought to eschew (CPW 3.275). Tracking the progress of Arnold’s politicization within academic literary-critical discourse might also serve to reveal how and why his ethical notions were apparently misunderstood, misrepresented, or simply missed in his own day and at the hands of later critics. Writing of Arnold in 1950, Leavis notes that not only is he “not easy to do justice to” but that “to attempt it seriously is to refine one’s understanding of the nature of intelligence.”48 The present discussion demonstrates just how easy, even necessary, such critical injustice toward Arnold has been, as it retrieves from comparative neglect some large fragments of his oeuvre that seem still to pertain to current intellectual debates about “Culture” and “Conduct.” From the outset, Arnold’s Victorian contemporaries often prove unwilling or unable to engage with his ethic of renunciation. As early as 1865 Arnold complains of his reviewers that “they all give unfair turns to views they do not like” (Letters 2.176), and a useful specimen of one such bad turn is found in the Cambridge philosopher Henry Sidgwick’s rapid response to the publication of Arnold’s “Culture and Its Enemies” in the July 1867 Cornhill Magazine, the essay that later becomes Culture and Anarchy’s first chapter, “Sweetness and Light” (CPW 87–114). Answering Arnold in the August 1867 number of Macmillan’s Magazine, Sidgwick first remarks “the delicate impertinences of egotism” in Arnold’s essay.49 By striking the “egotism” keynote at the start of his essay, Sidgwick exemplifies the “obsessive antipathy to selfishness” that is the common terrain of the Victorian Ibid. xvi, xix. “Translation: Re-writing Degree Zero,” The Present Lasts a Long Time: Essays in

46 47

Cultural Politics (Cork, Ireland: Cork UP, 1998) 164. 48 “Introduction,” On Bentham and Coleridge 36. 49 “The Prophet of Culture,” Macmillan’s 16.94 (Aug. 1867): 271.

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moralists in general, as Collini describes them.50 The Christian duty of selfsacrifice and self-denial, on the other hand, is essential to the ethics of altruism, “the ‘dominant’ Victorian moral sensibility,” Collini claims, which tends “to look upon altruism as the heart of all moral virtue.”51 Having set the selfishness tone, Sidgwick proceeds to redefine Arnold’s culture as morally self-centered: “Mr. Arnold assumes implicitly what, perhaps, should have been expressly avowed—that the study of perfection, as it forms itself in members of the human race, is naturally and primarily a study of the individual’s perfection, and only incidentally and secondarily a study of the general perfection of humanity.”52 To Sidgwick, “the root of [Arnold’s] culture, when examined ethically, is found to be a refined eudaemonism: in it the social impulse springs out of and re-enters into the self-regarding, which remains predominant.”53 In the upshot, Sidgwick converts Arnold’s culture, “the claims of harmonious selfdevelopment,” into a fundamentally “self-regarding” impulse, hence its dubious value as a moral or religious standard, as Sidgwick implies: Life shows us the conflict and the discord: on one side are the claims of harmonious self-development, on the other the cries of struggling humanity: we have hitherto let our sympathies extend along with our other refined instincts, but now they threaten to sweep us into regions from which those refined instincts shrink. Not that harmonious development calls on us to crush our sympathies; it asks only that they should be a little repressed, a little kept under: we may become (as Mr. Arnold delicately words it) philanthropists “tempered by renouncement.”

Sidgwick thus deftly reverses the polarity of Arnold’s “renouncement” and turns it from an exercise in overcoming the ordinary self to a species of selfish “selfdevelopment,” and from there he moves to capture the moral high ground for “the most useful, the most important work, or what in the interests of the world is most pressingly entreated and demanded,” and which, “if done at all, must be done as self-sacrifice, not as self-development. And so we are brought face to face with the most momentous and profound problem of ethics.”54 As noted in the introduction, the big ethical problem for Sidgwick turns on the reconciliation of egoism and 52 53

Public Moralists 65. Ibid. 63. “The Prophet of Culture” 273. Arnold later tweaks Sidgwick on this “eudaemonism” comment when, in the first Cornhill Magazine installment of Literature and Dogma in July 1871, he notes that “we English are taunted with our proneness to eudaemonism” (CPW 6.192), and he makes a less oblique allusion in an 1874 letter to Sidgwick, thanking him for sending along a copy of his newly published The Methods of Ethics: “I thank you for sending it to me and am very glad to possess it. It is sure to interest me; though I approach it with the nervousness of a man whose critics have pronounced him guilty of ‘Eudaemonism’” (Letters 4.241). 54 “The Prophet of Culture” 273–4. 50 51

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altruism in “a perfect ideal of rational conduct,” a reconciliation that he eventually deems “to have been foredoomed to inevitable failure.”55 Sidgwick’s allusion to this “momentous and profound” ethical problem also seems to bear a note of condescension toward Arnold. One might even find in his essay an early expression of the spirit of turf jealousy within the rapidly professionalizing class of academics, a defensive tone of mild resentment that is discernible in the charge that Arnold’s article is “over-ambitious, because it treats of the most profound and difficult problems of individual and social life with an airy dogmatism that ignores their depth and difficulty.”56 After all, “a man ought not to touch cursorily upon such a question, much less to dogmatize placidly upon it, without showing us that he has mastered the elements of the problem.”57 Leave it to the philosophers, Sidgwick seems to say. He is also surprised and troubled to find that “a man of genius and ripe thought, perhaps even elevated by a position of academic dignity [“Culture and Its Enemies” was Arnold’s last lecture from the chair of Poetry at Oxford, a “position of academic dignity” that he held for 10 years], should deliver profound truths and subtle observations with all the dogmatic authority and self-confidence of a prophet,” while at the same time “titillating the public by something like the airs and graces, the playful affectations of a favorite comedian.”58 Between the patent selfishness of Arnold’s culture, then, and the strong suggestion of his glib and supercilious “dilettantism,” it is no surprise that Sidgwick finally judges him to be no more than “a cheerful modern liberal, tempered by renouncement, shuddering aloof from the rank exhalations of vulgar enthusiasm, and holding up the pouncet-box of culture betwixt the wind and his nobility.”59 The question of Sidgwick’s “vulgar enthusiasm” is taken up below, when he counters culture’s sweetness and light with the “fire and strength” of Nonconformist religion, a “fire and strength” that seems to reduce, in Sidgwick’s calculus, to “our middle-class affection for commerce and bustle.”60 More to the point at present, however, is the importance of Sidgwick in authorizing a central 57 58

Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics (London: Macmillan, 1874) 473. “The Prophet of Culture” 272. Ibid. 275. Ibid. 272. Eliot thought Arnold was “at his best in satire,” while Raymond Williams, equaling Sidgwick’s humorless tone, describes the ludicious quality in Arnold’s prose as a power of “witty and malicious observation better suited to minor fiction.” See Eliot, “Arnold and Pater” 384; Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780–1950 (London: Chatto, 1958) 116. 59 Ibid. 277, 280. 60 Ibid. 276, 279. Arnold’s use of Sidgwick’s phrase, “fire and strength,” in Culture and Anarchy (CPW 5.224) receives a significantly graver interpretation from Williams. See Culture and Society 124. While Arnold grants that “for resisting anarchy the lovers of culture may prize and employ fire and strength, yet they must, at the same time, bear constantly in mind that it is not at this moment true, what the majority of people tell us, that the world wants fire and strength more than sweetness and light, and that things are for the most part to be settled first and understood afterwards” (CPW 5.224–5). 55

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and enduring line in Arnold criticism, a characterization of Arnoldian “Culture” as a species of selfishness the influence of which can be traced through Eliot’s overly tight identification of Arnold with the “untidy” lives inspired by Paterian and Wildean elaborations of culture to the still-current image of the cultural critic’s “indolence” and “evident incapacity for action.”61 One striking example of the persistence of Sidgwick’s view appears in an 1885 book by Jane Hume Clapperton, Scientific Meliorism and the Evolution of Happiness. Although Clapperton gives Arnold credit for his rather daring advocacy of birth control (in passages discussed in detail in Chapter 6), her description of culture reads like a note-for-note transcription of Sidgwick: Some writers teach that culture is the thing to be desired. The rapid growth of wealth in this country, and consequent reign of capital, has forced upwards in the social scale a class of people destitute of culture and refinement. These dominate society and take the lead in fashion. Luxury and ostentation are everywhere prominent, extravagant modes of living prevail without the comfort of the former simpler and more genial social modes; and all this is side by side with poverty and destitution that do not decrease… . There is little to surprise us in the fact that gentle and refined natures turn with disgust from both. In the effervescence of youthful enthusiasm they had plunged into manifold schemes of philanthropy, to be thrown back upon themselves by the futility of the work, and the vulgarity of the workers. Slowly and gradually they withdrew into a narrower sphere—not necessarily a selfish one, but a sphere bounded and circumscribed by their own personal tastes and temperaments. They found solace and relief in intellectual pursuits. Art and culture yielded them a pure and elevated enjoyment; and, conscious of the breach between themselves and the great mass of human beings around, they adopt the theory that what is wanted is culture. Sweetness and light are held up as the panacea for the ills of life, and to elevate the masses, as the only path of progress! Sitting serene in their high altitude of intellectual light, they think they solve the problem of life for millions of toiling workers struggling for existence, when they indicate that what all want is happiness, and happiness means a culture which will take whole ages to secure.62

Following Sidgwick, Clapperton thus takes “renouncement” to mean a withdrawal from social engagement “into a narrower sphere,” but “not necessarily a selfish one,” of course, since sweetness and light do not require us “to crush our sympathies” but only to keep them “a little repressed, a little kept under.” The nearly 20 years separating Sidgwick’s claims from Clapperton’s demonstrate the tenacity of one of the “unfair turns” that Arnold lamented. A second case of what Leavis might call “critical injustice” toward Arnold, this time taking the rather cruder form of strategic misrepresentation, appears in an

Eliot, “Arnold and Pater” 392; Sidgwick, “The Prophet of Culture” 280. Jane Hume Clapperton, Scientific Meliorism and the Evolution of Happiness

61 62

(London: Kegan Paul, 1885) 4–5.

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1874 Quarterly Review screed by W. J. Courthope.63 The Tory polemicist relishes the spectacle of internecine struggles among the Liberal factions, and he praises Arnold’s “genius for embodying the weak points of his friends in lively caricatures and suggestive phrases, which to the Tory mind are full of salt and savour.”64 Launching into his own critique of Arnold’s political and religious opinions, Courthope again obliquely praises the vigorous scourging that Arnold delivers to the Philistines, and then he partially quotes Arnold: “‘I am a Liberal,’ he says, ‘but a Liberal tempered by experience and reflection,’ and his attitude towards popular Liberalism is all that we, who do not profess that creed, can desire.”65 Courthope twice deliberately omits Arnold’s “renouncement” from his quotation of this line, apparently because it ill suits his polemical aim of constructing a particular image of “Liberalism, or religion based on self-worship, of which selfculture is the last and the logical development.”66 Once again, the connection of Arnold’s culture—here pointedly called “self-culture”—to selfishness is crucial to Courthope’s rhetorical goal and requires drawing on the many connotative associations linking culture with selfishness that had been established earlier in the century, a bonding process that David J. DeLaura helpfully describes.67 Any association of Arnold with a Liberalism tempered by “renouncement,” in its self-denying sense, is precisely what Courthope wishes to prevent, for to the Tory mind has been revealed the orthodox truth “that the radical imperfection of the human will can only be cured by the supervention of a perfect and Divine Power … . But Mr. Arnold’s notable scheme of culture is to cure selfishness by means of self, to oppose bare idea to hard fact, to enforce a law, of which he would abolish the sanction.”68 In Courthope’s view, Arnold’s self-worshipping self-culture articulates itself from “the modern professorial standpoint” of “a philosopher who maintains that the whole fabric of historical Christianity is based on a delusion,” and so it cannot produce “true Culture” but rather something that seems to “consist of constant self-analysis, perpetual depreciation of our fathers, [and] everlasting glorification of ourselves.”69 In contrast to Arnold’s “self-cultivation,” Courthope’s “true Culture” calls on all Christian people to “perform the duties and maintain the dignity proper to their condition in society,” in other words, faithfully to preserve all the traditional Courthope’s “indignantly clairvoyant Toryism,” in Linda Dowling’s phrase, punctured many Liberal platitudes at this time. See Dowling, The Vulgarization of Art: The Victorians and Aesthetic Democracy (Chalottesville; London: UP of Virginia, 1996) xi. 64 W. J. Courthope, “Modern Culture,” Quarterly Review 137.274 (Oct. 1874): 400. 65 Ibid. 399–400. The phrase, “a Liberal tempered by experience and reflection,” is repeated on page 401. 66 Ibid. 412. 67 “Matthew Arnold and Culture: The History and the Prehistory,” Matthew Arnold in His Time and Ours 3–5. 68 “Modern Culture” 399. 69 Ibid. 395, 397, 415. 63

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standards of honour, courtesy, politeness, refinement—all that is comprised in the sense of what is due to others as well as to ourselves, which we call by the name of good breeding, and which is the result of complex traditions, and continuous development, these qualities are as far above the manufacture of art as they are beyond the reach of analysis. Formed as they have been out of the instincts and characteristics which have made society in England stable and free, the laws which enforce these virtues should not be questioned, but obeyed.70

Interesting as it is to observe Courthope giving performative utterance to the public moralist’s “constant anxiety,” as Collini describes it, “about the possibility of sinking into a state of psychological malaise or anomie, a kind of emotional entropy assumed to be the consequence of absorption in purely selfish aims,” the more immediate point here concerns the deliberate misrepresentation of Arnold’s words, another striking example of the “unfair turns” that Arnold laments.71 Courthope’s rather blunt instrument of selective omission, though favored even today in some circles, is less typical than other, subtler forms of unjust criticism. Three months after Courthope’s article, the Liberal Edinburgh Review opens its January 1875 issue with a page-one broadside against the full spectrum of modern thought in all its forms, from the “system of metaphysics and psychology based entirely on the perception of the senses, like that of Mr. Spencer, Mr. Bain, and the elder Mill,” to the “system of morals recognizing no test of duty but public utility in the interest of the race—the natural evolution of Mr. Darwin—the Lucretian doctrines of Professor Tyndall—the automatous frogs of Mr. Huxley,” and so on through the natural and social sciences, arriving eventually at “the religion of Humanity of Mr. Congreve and the Comtists—the lamentations of Mr. W. R. Greg over the enigmas of life—and Mr. Matthew Arnold’s latest caricature of the Deity.”72 The pretext for Edinburgh editor Henry Reeve’s comminations is a notice of John Stuart Mill’s Three Essays on Religion (1874) and John Tyndall’s Belfast Address (1874), but Reeve uses the occasion to indict the full range of products “of a false and shallow philosophy,” which collectively tend to deny “the evidence of the spiritual origin and destiny of our being.” These ideas must be rejected, he says, for “[n]ot only religious creeds, but the entire fabric of society, of morals, and of law, would be subverted and overthrown if mankind were really persuaded to renounce its faith in the creation and moral government of the world, in the freedom of the will of man, and in the immortality of the soul.” Mill takes most of Reeve’s fire in the essay, but Arnold becomes the obvious target in the review’s final passage:

Ibid. 391, 415. Public Moralists 65. 72 [Henry Reeve], “Three Essays on Religion,” Edinburgh Review 141.287 (Jan. 70

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1875): 2.

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Other writers of the same school [of “false and shallow philosophy”] have acknowledged that however inconsistent religious belief may be with what they call scientific reasoning, yet it is essential to purify and elevate the emotions of man. This faint homage to the Power they have sought to dethrone cannot alter our judgment of the fatal perversity of their systems. The primary condition of religious belief is the Truth of the objects to which it is directed—that Truth being the basis of all other truths, and without it there being no truth or certainty at all. To substitute a dream of imagination, or a thrill of emotion, for that which is, if it exist at all, the foundation of all Being and all Knowledge, appears to us to be but a feeble attempt to dispel the gloom of this philosophy of despair. When the light that should lighten the world is darkened, how great is that darkness!73

Reeve rightly perceives that Arnold, more gently perhaps than Mill (or Nietzsche) but no less firmly, denies unequivocally the supernatural elements in Christianity— God, the soul, and immortality—and the Edinburgh Review deems such denials to be “the negation of the moral government of the universe” and “obviously subversive of all law whatever,” a theory that “would let loose all the bad passions of the human race, and turn earth into hell.”74 Among them, then, Sidgwick’s objection to Arnold’s “impertinences of egotism,” Reeve’s oblique allusions to the “fatal perversity” of his atheism, and the disappearing to which Courthope subjects his Liberal “renouncement” seem fairly to represent a major strain within the larger chorus of Arnold’s critical reception, a strain that can also be thrown into relief by examples both of older and more recent vintage. Reeve is not the first of Arnold’s critics to sense the atheism in his “philosophy of despair.” One early reviewer of Arnold’s melancholy poems detects in them “an infidel and worldly spirit” and “a sceptical and irreligious train of thought,” while another hears the “apotheosis of despair” and a frank “profession of atheism.”75 Accompanying Arnold’s atheism is its twin, the “indolent, selfish quietism” that another reviewer predicts will lead his readers to “turn away contemptuously from the self-complacent reverie, and refined indolence, which too often disfigures Ibid. 30–31. Perhaps worth noting here is Reeve’s perspicuous grasp of an epistemological issue that a dozen years later becomes the crux of Friedrich Nietzsche’s power-ethic: “From the moment faith in the God of the ascetic ideal is denied,” he writes, “a new problem arises: that of the value of truth.” See Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufman and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1967) 153. 74 “Three Essays on Religion” 27–8. 75 [John Duke Coleridge], “Poems by Matthew Arnold,” Christian Remembrancer 27 (Apr. 1854): 331 [Anon.], “Notices of Recent Publications,” English Review 13 (Mar. 1850): 212. Original sources have been consulted whenever possible in preparing the present study, but several guides to Arnold criticism deserve mention for the invaluable direction they provide to the early reviews: Carl Dawson, ed., Matthew Arnold, the Poetry: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1973); Sidney Coulling, Matthew Arnold and His Critics: A Study of Arnold’s Controversies (Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 1974); Carl Dawson and John Pfordresher, eds., Matthew Arnold, the Prose: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1979). 73

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his pages.”76 In light of these harsh criticisms from the early 1850s, Arnold’s analysis in Culture and Anarchy of “a peculiarly British form of Atheism” and “a peculiarly British form of Quietism” seems to acquire a rich irony, as if he were settling old scores by means, as Harris might say, of “animadversions” that were “too quiet and too topical to be noted by later readers” (CPW 5.156). Arnold’s discussion of atheism and quietism marks a step in his more general argument in Culture and Anarchy that “everything in our political life tends to hide from us that there is anything wiser than our ordinary selves, and to prevent our getting the notion of a paramount right reason,” and should any such wiser light shine, it “never reaches at all the mass of us governed, to serve as a lesson to us, to abate our self-love, and to awaken in us a suspicion that our favorite prejudices may be, to a higher reason, all nonsense” (CPW 5.153). Some of Arnold’s most contentious political tropes appear in this passage— “higher reason,” “paramount right reason,” “ordinary selves”—all elements of his cultural authoritarianism, which, according to some critics, seems to join hands rather too willingly with coercive state power. Arnold’s correlative note of “Conduct” is also struck, as usual, in his desire that we “abate our self-love.” These notions are examined in detail in Chapters 3 and 4. The point at present is simply to note how these same tropes of quietism and atheism reappear in twentyfirst-century forms in the Mulhern-Collini debate. For instance, Mulhern finds “a quietist variation” in “the Arnoldian problematic that governs Collini’s reasoning” as a cultural critic, the defectiveness of which also emerges in the “far less tangible evidence of specific commitments or aspirations” in Collini’s work than one finds even in that of other practitioners of Kulturkritik.77 The object of Mulhern’s faith and hope is plainly different from Sidgwick’s or Reeve’s, but the demand for “fire and strength” remains. The burden of Mulhern’s judgment of Collini is roughly symmetrical with the judgment of Arnold made by John Duke Coleridge, his school fellow, who once deemed Arnold’s “lazy philosophical literature” to be only too likely to undermine the “strongholds of Christianity” and “sap their foundations.”78 Coleridge’s 1854 review of Arnold’s poetry makes his objection clear: The art that has no relevancy to actual life, that passes by God’s truth and the facts of man’s nature as if they had no existence, the art that does not seek to ennoble and purify and help us in our life-long struggle with sin and evil,

“Glimpses of Poetry,” North British Review 19 (May 1853): 214. Sidney Coulling attributes this review to Coventry Patmore. See Coulling, Matthew Arnold and His Critics: A Study of Arnold’s Controversies (Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 1974) 307–8n36, 309n66. It has also been attributed to George David Boyle; see Carl Dawson, ed. Matthew Arnold, the Poetry: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1973) 67. The Wellesley Index lists both men as the possible author. 77 “Beyond Metaculture,” New Left Review 16 (July–Aug. 2002): 100; “What Is Cultural Criticism?” New Left Review 23 (Sept.–Oct. 2003): 49. For a further example of the left-quietist charge, see Chapter 4, note 20. 78 “Poems by Matthew Arnold” 332. 76

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however beautiful, however outwardly serene and majestic, is false, and poor, and contemptible. It is not worth the serious attention of a man in earnest. All noble and true and manly art is concerned with God’s glory and man’s true benefit.79

If one were to conduct a thought experiment on this passage and convert some of Coleridge’s terms, turning his art into, say, culture, and his God into politics or, better yet, Althusser—with sin and evil becoming capitalist exploitation, bourgeois hegemony, or a similar formulation—the result would be both structurally and functionally indistinguishable from Mulhern’s critique of Collini’s “elusive” cultural criticism. Collini parries Mulhern’s thrusts much as Arnold parries Coleridge’s, with a modest tone of winning bonhomie and equable irony—and additionally, in Collini’s case, with a hefty 500-page study of public intellectuals, Absent Minds (2006), an expansive portrait gallery of self-scrutinizing and theoretically acute masters of Kulturkritik, with the odd celebrity or professor of cultural studies thrown in.80 Not for the last time are Collini and Mulhern found rehearsing rhetorical positions that are structurally equivalent to those occupied by Arnold and his critics, and their antic dispositions provide a leitmotif for the present study, illustrating the continuity and perhaps even the relative poverty of options in the field of rhetorical polemics. Politics, Polemics, and the Plastic Presence of Arnold To track the progress of Arnold’s politicization within the discursive formations of the academy and of the “higher journalism”—sometimes generalized as the sphere of public intellectuals—the natural place to start is with his Victorian contemporaries, who quickly establish an image of Arnold as a rather weakminded thinker with little or no argumentative force or logical rigor. This image proves highly versatile and persists in a variety of forms right down to the present, most notably perhaps in the canard about Arnold’s supposed anti-intellectualism. Beginning with these earnest Victorian arguers, then, this chapter and the following examine the development of the caricatures of Arnold in five significant manifestations, critical milestones that for convenience are labeled the Victorian logicians, the Strachey-Eliot interlude, the moment of Scrutiny, the New Left turn, and the postcolonial Arnold. In the earlier of these caricatures, Arnold is pilloried primarily for his defective logic and puny eristic efforts—the related complaints of selfish indolence and infidelity also remain fairly constant—but the more recent formulations figure him as deliberately acting to undermine reflective analysis and prevent popular direct action, in other words, “to resolve the tension of the relationship between culture and politics by dissolving political reason itself.”81 Ibid. 332–3. Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006). 81 Francis Mulhern, Culture/Metaculture xxi. 79 80

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The chief feature shared by these otherwise quite divergent critical responses is their almost exclusive focus on Arnold’s “Culture” to the neglect of his “Conduct.” “I love the mystics,” Arnold said late in life, “but what I find best in them is their golden single sentences” (CPW 11.186). If Arnold survives today, then it is largely in his own gem-like apothegms, and even self-mockery cannot altogether shade a certain proud awareness of rhetorical strength, as seen in his 1882 description of himself as “a nearly worn-out man of letters” with no more than “a frippery of phrases about sweetness and light, seeing things as they really are, knowing the best that has been thought and said in the world, which never had very much solid meaning, and have now quite lost the charm and gloss of novelty” (CPW 10.74). By most accounts, Arnold’s fripperies told on Victorian thought. Although his ideas have never lacked critics and can still exercise readerly indignation, the seductive style in which he couches his notions has perhaps “led astray” more than one “untutored mind, not protected by a systematic philosophy,” as Arnold quips (CPW 5.320). Today this mental armor might take the form of a mind trained to unmask the protean mystifications of bourgeois hegemony and the metacultural will to power. Collini speaks to this contemporary point in his critical portrait: It is noticeable, too, that Arnold attracts a particular rage of resentment not just because of what he can be accused of “standing for,” but also because of the very poise and grace with which he conducted himself. This, in turn, is partly because these qualities themselves are now frequently subject to the suspicion of being obstructive affectations, but also perhaps because unless guarded against, their seductive appeal may still do some of its work of sapping dogmatism and reducing exaggeration. The rage may be involuntary tribute to his power: the resentment is redoubled by an irritation that the despised qualities should still be able to exert any pull over us.82

Given this suasive power, it is perhaps best to approach Arnold’s social and political opinions obliquely. Critics repeatedly chastise him for his positions on particular issues of the day, such as his troubling silence on the Governor Eyre controversy, his elitist hostility toward Bishop Colenso, his supposed sympathy for the slaveholding states in the American Civil War, and his ultimate alignment with the Liberal Unionists in opposition to Gladstone’s home rule for Ireland.83 As Eagleton 82 Arnold 116. Although T. S. Eliot firmly opposed what he believed that Arnold “stood for,” he admitted withal his attraction to him as “a man qui sait se conduire.” See The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism 119. 83 On Arnold’s relation to the Governor Eyre controversy, see Bernard Semmel, The Governor Eyre Controversy (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1962); Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993) 130–31; Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London; New York: Routledge, 1995) esp. Ch. 3; Tim Watson, “Jamaica, Genealogy, George Eliot: Inheriting the Empire after Morant Bay,” Jouvert 1.1 (1997): 47 paras, 15 Dec. 2007 ; Catherine Hall and Sonya Rose, eds., At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (New York: Cambridge UP, 2006).

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notes, “Matthew Arnold may have believed in culture as social improvement, but he also refused to take sides over the slavery question in the American civil war,” and historian Donald Bellows pushes this claim a step further, characterizing Arnold as an Englishman who “argues in actual defense of slavery” and numbering him with Carlyle, Ruskin, Kingsley, and others.84 Insinuations and imputations of this kind are standard fare in Arnold criticism, even if the argument from silence is weak if not quite weightless. It is true that Arnold did not, as a public figure, make detailed pronouncements on British imperial actions overseas, neither those in the Crimea, in East Asia (the three Anglo-Burmese wars), in Central and South Asia (the two Anglo-Afghan wars, the annexation of the Sindh, the Anglo-Sikh wars and annexation of the Punjab, the Indian Mutiny, the crown’s eventual assumption of Indian rule), nor in Africa (the war in Abyssinia, the expeditions in Egypt and the Sudan, the annexation of the gold-rich Transvaal, the Zulu war). His nearest approach to direct engagement probably occurs in his 1859 pamphlet “England and the Italian Question” (CPW 1.65–96) and in the highly allusive treatment On his part in the Colenso controversy, see Leo Bentley Varner, “The Literary Reception of Bishop Colenso: Arnold, Kingsley, Newman, and Others,” diss., U of Illinois UrbanaChampaign, DAI-A 35/07 (1975): 4567A–8A; Terry G. Harris, “Matthew Arnold, Bishop Joseph Butler, and the Foundation of Religious Faith,” Victorian Studies 31.2 (winter 1988): 189–208. On Arnold’s attitude toward the American Civil War, see James Dow McCullum, “The Apostle of Culture Meets America,” New England Quarterly 2 (1929): 357–81; Howard Mumford Jones, “Arnold, Aristocracy, and America,” American Historical Review 49.3 (Apr. 1944): 393–409; John Henry Raleigh, Matthew Arnold and American Culture (Berkeley: U of California P, 1957); John O. Waller, “Matthew Arnold and the American Civil War,” Victorian Newsletter 22 (1962): 1–5; C. H. Leonard, Arnold in America: A Study of Matthew Arnold’s Literary Relations with America and His Visits to This Country in 1883 and 1886 (Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms, 1965); Donald Bellows, “A Study of British Conservative Reaction to the American Civil War,” Journal of Southern History 51.4 (Nov. 1985): 508, 516, 519–21; Sidney Coulling, “Matthew Arnold and the American South,” Matthew Arnold in His Time and Ours: Centenary Essays, ed. Clinton Machann and Forrest D. Burt (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1988) 40–56; Len Gougeon, “Emerson’s Circle and the Crisis of the Civil War,” Emersonian Circles: Essays in Honor of Joel Myerson, ed. Wesley T. Mott and Robert E. Burkholder (Rochester, NY: U of Rochester P, 1997) 29, 32, 34–5, 51. On Arnold’s Irish politics, see William Robbins, “Matthew Arnold and Ireland,” University of Toronto Quarterly 17 (1947): 52–67; Thomas S. Snyder, “Matthew Arnold and the Irish Question,” Arnoldian 4.2 (1977): 12–20; Seamus Deane, “‘Masked with Matthew Arnold’s Face’: Joyce and Liberalism,” James Joyce: The Centennial Symposium, ed. Morris Beja et al. (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1986) 9–20; Leonard Orr, “The Mid-Nineteenth-Century Context of Arnold’s Essay on Celtic Literature,” Matthew Arnold in His Time and Ours 135–56; Dillon Johnston, “Cross-Currencies in the Culture Market: Arnold, Yeats, Joyce,” South Atlantic Quarterly 95.1 (winter 1996): 45–77. 84 Eagleton, The Idea of Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000) 17; Bellows, “A Study of British Conservative Reaction to the American Civil War, Journal of Southern History 51.4 (Nov. 1985): 520. For a sense of the extent of Eagleton’s overstatement and Bellows’s error, see [Anon.] “An Intellectual Angel,” Spectator 39 (3 Feb. 1866): 125–6.

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found in the 1866 essay “My Countrymen” (CPW 5.3–31). But for all his hightoned urbanity, there were plainly some sharp edges to Arnold’s Liberalism. At the same time, essays such as “Democracy” (1861), “Equality” (1878), and “Numbers; or, the Majority and the Remnant” (1886) reveal a speculative daring that some twentieth-century readers, as noted, even call radical. According to Lionel Trilling, “in his last years” Arnold’s “liberalism became more rather than less adventurous,” although what qualifies as adventurous, relative to Trilling’s “feline liberalism,” might seem like so much Biedermeier reaction to a Karl Marx or an Alexander Herzen—to say nothing of an Eagleton or Said, a Baldick or Young.85 Modern critics sometimes find Arnold hard to pin down politically because he seems to present a curiously duplex aspect, at once historicist and idealist, empiricist and rationalist, a man for whom no idea was too radical to engage his “free play of mind” and “disinterested play of consciousness” (CPW 3.268; 5.228), but also one to whom no institution was so entrenched and hidebound but it might inspire his perfervid defense.86 Literary historian Michael North expertly analyzes the political and cultural tensions inherent to emergent literary Modernism, particularly the complex, even contradictory elements that constitute Modernism’s critique of liberalism. These elements eventually prove equally serviceable to both Communist and Fascist political programs, thus proving North’s “general point” that “there is an affinity between Marxism and what seems its opposite.”87 One could claim that these same tensions are already discernible within mid-Victorian Liberalism, and the diremption appears particularly striking at some points in Arnold’s thought, not least in his definition of “Culture,” which “at last gives the tradition a single watchword and a name,” as Williams says.88 On the one hand, Arnold calls culture “the social idea,” an “idea of perfection” that “consists in becoming something rather than in having something,” that culture “seeks to do away with classes” and “is not satisfied till we all come to a perfect man,” that “culture hates hatred,” and that “the men of culture are the true apostles of equality” (CPW 5.113, 95, 112). Surely these are fine words, yet some critics claim that this is merely Liberalism’s most cheerful mask, and behind these fripperies an authoritarian ugliness screams 85 “Editor’s Introduction,” The Portable Matthew Arnold, ed. Lionel Trilling (New York: Harper, 1949) 27. On Trilling’s “feline liberalism,” see Francis Mulhern, “Intellectual Corporatism and Socialism: The Twenties and After,” News from Nowhere 5 (June 1988): 83. 86 On this oft-made point see, for example, Lionel Trilling, Matthew Arnold (New York: Columbia UP, 1939) 366–7. Arnold’s self-division has become something of a critical commonplace since E. K. Brown used it as the central explanatory trope in his Matthew Arnold: A Study in Conflict (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1948). See also Morris Dickstein, Double Agent: The Critic and Society (New York: Oxford UP, 1992) 28–9; Donald D. Stone, Communications with the Future: Matthew Arnold in Dialogue (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997) v, 9–10. 87 Michael North, The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge UP, 1991) 200n53. 88 Culture and Society 114.

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for floggings and flingings. This latter face reveals the true Arnold, these critics claim, the nervous, knee-jerk, bourgeois reactionary whose ideal culture is a mere ruse calculated to neutralize popular direct action and shore up the social authority of elite ruling-class intellectuals and the state power they serve. Northrop Frye, for instance, believes that Arnold sounds “badly frightened” in the “Conclusion” to Culture and Anarchy; Williams thinks “Arnold’s fears run deep” in the same passages, that a “prejudice overcomes ‘right reason’ and a deep emotional fear darkens the light”; and New Left ideologues like Baldick suppose that Culture and Anarchy is “a work haunted by fear of large working-class demonstrations.”89 J. Dover Wilson similarly admits that Arnold “clearly fears the advent of ‘this vast residuum’ to political power,” but he also claims that Arnold “yet retains his faith in their possibilities of perfection and does not, like Lowe, give way to the shrieking of panic, or like Carlyle turn in despair to the upper classes and implore them to effect a coup d’état and rule the country from the House of Lords.”90 Turning to the subject of education, one finds an equally instructive contrast between rival readings of Arnold’s opinions. It is true that he devotes 35 years to advocating the establishment of state-supported schools for the middle and working classes in Britain, but he also claims that the “highly instructed few, and not the scantily-instructed many, will ever be the organ to the human race of knowledge and truth. Knowledge and truth, in the full sense of the words, are not attainable by the great mass of the human race at all” (CPW 3.44). These are hard words certainly (not least for us made painfully aware of our scantiness), and perhaps they bespeak Arnold’s hankering, as Said sees it, after “a supposedly older, supposedly more humanistic and authentic ideal of association—embodied in the small elite or cabalistic quasi aristocracy.”91 Mulhern takes a somewhat similar view, seeing in Arnold’s attitude an epitome of the antidemocratic and antiegalitarian tendencies of the “intellectual corporation,” because “[t]he logic of corporatism is always, finally, authoritarian.”92 According to this particular caricature of Arnold, he prefigures and inspires the Leavisite defense of “minority culture” in Britain as well as the more general European movement of the interwar “discourse of Kulturkritik,” a point discussed more fully in Chapter 4.93 The figures composing this “cultural catena” of Kulturkritik form, for Mulhern, an intellectual high church in which the “professions of faith were in all cases

Northrop Frye’s marginalia qtd. in J. Russell Perkin, “Northrop Frye and Matthew Arnold,” University of Toronto Quarterly 74.2 (summer 2005): 793; Williams, Culture and Society 123, 125; Baldick, The Social Mission of English Literature, 1848–1932 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983) 35. 90 “Editor’s Introduction,” Culture and Anarchy, by Matthew Arnold, ed. J. Dover Wilson (1932) (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986) xxiv. 91 Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia UP, 2004) 22. 92 Culture/Metaculture 21, 180. 93 The Moment of Scrutiny 306–13; Culture/Metaculture 15, 17. 89

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minoritarian,” and where “[p]essimism was the characteristic feeling,” even if only the “commonplace mock-aristocratic pessimism” of bourgeois decadence.94 Collini also notes that “Arnold has been accused of viewing suffering humanity a little too much de haut en bas,” although this passive construction shades Arnold’s accusers (no footnote lightens the obscurity) and leaves one wondering who objects to his loftiness—“suffering humanity” perhaps? his utilitarian and Positivist peers? latter-day intellectual historians and cultural critics?95 That Arnold regards human suffering with contempt is at least doubtful. “It is a mistake,” according to one recent critic, “to accuse Arnold of looking down on his audiences,” and “it is patently unfair,” in the view of another, “to suggest that both the apostle and the doctrine of culture were shams.”96 While the merits of these contradictory claims are explored below, the context of Arnold’s quotation about the “highly instructed few” suggests that his point is surely somewhat finer than simply saying that those who cannot be led must needs be driven. He is applying his elitist formula to Bishop Colenso’s 1865 mathematical forays into the Pentateuch. The quotation comes from his essay “The Bishop and Philosopher” and continues thus: The great mass of the human race have to be softened and humanised through their heart and imagination, before any soil can be found in them where knowledge may strike living roots. Until the softening and humanising process is very far advanced, intellectual demonstrations are uninforming for them; and, if they impede the working influences which advance this softening and humanising process, they are even noxious; they retard their development, they impair the culture of the world. (CPW 3.44)

As usual, Arnold cites numerous authorities for his view—the Old Testament Son of Sirach, Pindar, Plato, Spinoza, Newman, even Christ himself—none of whom “our playful giant” should be permitted to bolt whole, of course, lest it retard his culture (CPW 5.123). He concludes: “Human culture is not, therefore, advanced by a religious book conveying intellectual demonstrations to the many, unless they be conveyed in such a way as to edify them” (CPW 3.44). Arnold reaffirms his position in an 1874 letter to his brother Tom: [A]ll I said about Colenso was my real opinion, but things have gone very far and fast since then, and his book helped to accelerate things. Even now I am faithful to my formula—Edify the many or inform the few—for the whole end and aim of L&D [Literature and Dogma (1873)] is to edify the many by giving them a ground for loving the Bible when their old grounds fail them. (Letters 4.27)

The Moment of Scrutiny 307; Culture/Metaculture 20–21, 27. Arnold 28. While David J. DeLaura detects in Arnold “a strong hint of talking de

94 95

haut en bas” in his essay “Emerson” (1883), this judgment is then immediately qualified. See DeLaura, “Arnold and Carlyle,” Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 79.1 (Mar. 1964): 105. 96 Stone, Communications with the Future 8; Sidney Coulling, “Matthew Arnold and the American South,” Matthew Arnold in His Time and Ours 51.

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Low-Church Tories like Maurice Cowling fulminate against Arnold’s supposed double-dealing, finding him at once “contemptuous of the ‘modern thinking’” of liberal theology, represented by Colenso, but also opposed to “the doubts of the intelligentsia being broadcast to the ‘multitude’ until abandonment of the doctrine of biblical inspiration had been examined intellectually and a search conducted for something else for churches to base their beliefs on.”97 Cowling paraphrases Arnold’s position: since the “masses” are not yet fit to digest either the dilutions of the Essays and Reviews (1860) or the unmixed impieties imported from the Tübingen School of Higher Criticism, then “the necessary reconstruction should be conducted initially on a closed circuit where the intelligentsia, instead of talking to its servants, talked to itself. This circuit was a ‘laboratory’ of the mind where ideas were fashioned for use in the world, but where transference to the world involved a complicated process.”98 Cowling rightly registers the change in Arnold’s attitude as reflected in his 1874 letter to Tom, since by the time Literature and Dogma was published, Arnold’s “caution of the 1860s had disappeared. Where previously it had been dangerous to upset popular superstition unless there was something popular to replace it with, now there had been the inevitable revolution created by the high-quality secular literature of the late 1860s. What was required was total reconstruction.”99 One might suspect the sincerity of Cowling’s allusion to “high-quality secular literature,” since his opposition to Arnold’s religious liberalism is as inflexible as T. S. Eliot’s, and he resents the least innovation in matters of doctrine and dogma. In order to outflank and discredit any notion of a “total reconstruction,” Cowling seems here to pose as a populist critic of Arnold’s elitism, and while these hoary religious polemics might seem rather remote from issues of contemporary interest, Cowling nonetheless illustrates, as do Courthope and Reeve, a common means of avoiding a direct confrontation with Arnold’s thought, a tactic that we now have seen in several discursive registers. Said offers a further example, this time from the left. In the last book he completed before his death in 2003, the critical activist reflects once again on the topic that, of all others, seems most to animate his career in criticism: “the relevance and future of humanism in contemporary life.”100 Said opens his study with a backward glance, past his 40 years on the faculty of Columbia University, to a crucial stage in his intellectual development at Princeton and Harvard in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the “theory that dominated humanities departments”—and largely stocked his own critical armory—“was strongly influenced by T. S. Eliot and, later, by the Southern Agrarians and New Critics.”101 Taking his own cue, Said proceeds to lead a large cast of twentieth-century 97 “One-and-a-Half Cheers for Arnold,” Culture and Anarchy by Matthew Arnold, ed. Samuel Lipman (New Haven; London: Yale UP, 1994) 206. 98 Ibid. 206. 99 Ibid. 207–8. 100 Humanism and Democratic Criticism 5. 101 Ibid. 16.

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Anglo-American literary intelligentsia across the stage—Eliot, Richards, Leavis, Trilling, Irving Babbitt, Kenneth Burke, Norman Foerster, Northrup Frye, Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, R. P. Blackmur, Cleanth Brooks, William Wimsatt, René Wellek, Austin Warren, Paul Elmer More, and more—the whole swollen chorus figuring the “dry-as-dust academic humanities that had for years represented an unpolitical, unworldly, and oblivious (sometimes even manipulative) attitude toward the present.”102 Although Said does not name him, Arnold can be presumed to head this rout or perhaps to stand a little apart and aloof, looking down with “a smile of heart-broken forbearance, as of a teacher in an idiot school,” as G. K. Chesterton once described Arnold’s “enormously insulting” bearing toward the public.103 As potted history, Said’s account of the social and political upheavals that soon changed the face of this insular academicism sometimes reads like high drama, the third act featuring “the antihumanist revolution of the 1960s and 1970s,” with Continental theories of structuralism and poststructuralism, flanked by worldwide movements for civil and human rights, leading the charge against the privileged coziness and “casual, pipe-smoking, tweedy anti-intellectualism” of the Eisenhower-era Ivy League.104 The ensuing liberation of academic literary studies introduced, among other things, a “new generation of humanist scholars [that] is more attuned than any before it to the non-European, genderized, decolonized, and decentered energies and currents of our time.”105 Said humbly elides his own yeoman’s work in helping to bring about this overthrow of the “old humanism,” in Williams’s phrase,106 although his Orientalism (1978) virtually founded the field of postcolonial studies in the United States and largely inspired the very generation of scholar-activists and public intellectuals whom he admires.107 In a later chapter of Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004), as Said continues to gauge how far the new humanism has come in his day, he harkens back to his first-chapter account of the New Criticism’s dominance in the 1950s: “In my first chapter,” he says, “I characterized this older practice as generally Arnoldian: the changes that have overtaken this Arnoldianism are so deep, however, as to have made Arnold’s residual influence more or less negligible.”108 Said neither mentions Ibid. 13. The Victorian Age in Literature (New York: Holt, 1913) 13. 104 Humanism and Democratic Criticism 16; Edward Said, Out of Place: A Memoir 102 103

(New York: Knopf, 1999) 278. 105 Humanism and Democratic Criticism 47. 106 The Long Revolution (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961) 163. 107 In an “Afterword” to the 1994 anniversary edition of his seminal work, a “pleased and flattered” Said admits that Orientalism has indeed “made a difference,” and as evidence for its catalyzing effect he notes “the invigorated study of Africanist and Indological discourses; the analyses of subaltern history; the reconfiguration of post-colonial anthropology, political science, art history, literary criticism, musicology, in addition to the vast new developments in feminist and minority discourses.” See Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1994) 339. 108 Humanism and Democratic Criticism 33.

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Arnold in his first chapter nor characterizes there any “older practice as generally Arnoldian,” although it would of course make perfect sense if he did.109 Why this small slip? One possible reason lies in Humanism and Democratic Criticism itself, which began as a series of Columbia lectures before making a less-than-seamless transition to hardcovers—references to “lectures” and “chapters” alternate even on the same page110—so perhaps the inaugural lecture originally contained an allusion to Arnoldianism that was later cut from the published version. In any case, the point here is not captiously to criticize Said but to suggest that his minor misstatement illustrates a connotative curiosity, particularly in relation to his notion of the “more or less negligible” Arnoldian residue in contemporary criticism. Although he does not name Arnold, Said seems to be able, merely by invoking Eliot, Leavis, the New Critics, and so forth, to conjure up Arnold indirectly as a kind of epiphenomenal presence. Arnold is, after all, whether named or not, the Victorian éminence grise presiding at—some might say poisoning—the source of the “older practice.” The culture wars have apparently sufficiently fixed Arnold’s place in this critical-cum-political constellation of old humanists that he can now be summoned from the void simply by means of associated guilt or, put another way, a version of “Arnoldianism” is deployable even in the absence of Arnold.111 To Said’s hindsight, the teachers of his youth “all inhabited a mental and aesthetic universe that was linguistically, formally, and epistemologically grounded” in European and North Atlantic culture.112 Their worldview was underpinned by “the classics, the church, and empire, in their traditions, languages, and masterworks, along with a whole ideological apparatus of canonicity, synthesis, centrality and consciousness.”113 In a tone marked by the ambivalence of his perennial insideroutsider performative posture, Said numbers himself among the “generation of humanistically trained scholars of the 1950s and 1960s” who was nurtured in the “hypocritical universalism of classical Eurocentric humanistic thought,” and while the presumptuous cultural hegemony of that Cold War intellectual atmosphere “has now been replaced by a much more varied and complex world with many contradictory, even antinomian and antithetical currents running within it,” in its day it peddled a suite of mental furniture that was “rarely reflected on in a searching way, but rather continued in its grandly unthinking Arnoldian way.” The irony (perhaps unintended) in Said’s account is easy to overlook, obscured as it is by his higher profile as a postcolonial theorist and activist in the struggle for Palestinian liberation. For Said’s own literary-critical method, perhaps best exemplified in his In strict accuracy, it should be noted that Said does allude in his first chapter to a Henry James essay on Arnold, in which James mocks American provinciality in matters of culture. But nowhere in the chapter does Said characterize the unreformed humanism as “Arnoldian” or “Arnoldianism.” See ibid. 19. 110 For example, see ibid. 32–4, 85. 111 On this point, see Bill Bell, “The Function of Arnold at the Present Time” 203–19. 112 Humanism and Democratic Criticism 44. 113 Ibid. 45. 109

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1966 study of Joseph Conrad, is found on inspection to be almost wholly indebted in its principles and general approach to the method of scholars such as Blackmur, who directed his literary studies at Princeton; Richards, his lecturer at Harvard; and Trilling, his Columbia colleague and mentor of sorts in Said’s professional endeavors.114 In the milder tone of his memoir, Said describes the influence of these “men of the utmost competence and philological rigor” as “the foundation of everything I have done as a scholar and teacher.”115 Trilling himself embodies Arnold’s “residual influence” in a particularly vital way: his 1939 critical biography of Arnold still sets the standard, and his later essays in cultural critique, such as The Liberal Imagination (1950) and Beyond Culture (1965), led many contemporary observers to situate him—along with Leavis—in the direct line of Arnoldian descent, a legitimate inheritor of the supple style and critical subtlety of the Victorian man of letters, whose “reputation for wide-ranging and urbane reflectiveness, together with his elegant gravity of manner meant that his remarks could not be dismissed as merely polemical or partisan.”116 Said, in his turn, is certainly no canon-buster, much to the chagrin of his more iconoclastic admirers. For all his self-fashioning as the paradigmatic cultural insider-outsider, as a literary critic Said is markedly conventional, practically patrician, in his deference to Anglophone and Francophone canonical authority, a bent to which his perennial devotion to the humanism of Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer eloquently testifies. In his unique way, then, Said also exemplifies the tendency in left-liberal cultural criticism that finds it expedient to deploy a particular partial and distorted image of Arnold. This tactic is by no means exclusive to the left but applies broadly to Arnold criticism as a whole, as the following chapters seek to demonstrate. Strategic misappropriation appears to be the perennial mode of choice among Arnold’s critics. Conservative critics have certainly been no less diligent in contriving an Arnold of their own. Eliot, for instance, writing in 1956 and bearing the marks of his own polemical campaigns, claims that modern literary criticism takes its broad Out of Place 276–7, 289–90; Humanism and Democratic Criticism 4. Out of Place 277. For Said’s literary criticism, see Joseph Conrad and the Fiction

114 115

of Autobiography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1966). 116 Stefan Collini, “Introduction,” The Two Cultures, by C. P. Snow (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge UP, 1998) xxxviii. A revisionist historian of quite another stripe calls Trilling “a progenitor of conservatism” who unfortunately “did not reflect much upon the kinds of moral questions, or ‘moral values,’ that occupy us today: marriage, family, sex, abortion,” but he did figure “a mode of thought, a moral and cultural sensibility, that was inherently subversive of liberalism and thus an invitation not to conservatism but to some hybrid form of neoliberalism or neoconservatism.” See Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Moral Imagination: From Edmund Burke to Lionel Trilling (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006) 228, 223. At least one philosopher attributes to the influence of thinkers like Trilling “the wholesale conversion of the social democratic Jewish intelligentisia of New York to the cause of neoconservatism.” Roger Scruton, Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life (London; New York: Continuum, 2005) 37–8.

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social purview “in direct descent from Coleridge,” who “established the relevance of philosophy, aesthetics, and psychology” to literature and “brought to bear on his discussion of poetry” a “scope and variety” of interests that, once introduced, later critics could afford to ignore only “at their own risk.”117 Yet one could argue, and without disparaging Coleridge, whose influence has indeed been immense, that a more plausible account of the modern critical tradition would place Arnold at its head, the most immediate and obvious exemplar of a critical practice that takes a culture-wide view. Mulhern confidently takes Arnold as the “pivotal figure” in Williams’s Culture and Society, for instance, where Williams claims that the impact of Culture and Anarchy was “immediate” and that “it has remained more influential than any other single work in this tradition.”118 Arnold not only models the posture of the public intellectual in its recognizably modern form, but he also sets the terms and parameters for much of the subsequent critical discourse— from his “function” of criticism and apology for “Culture,” to his chastening of the Philistine’s tasteless vulgarity, his defense of humane letters and the ideals of Greek paideia against the encroachments of scientific systematizers, his advocacy of undogmatic religion, and so forth. No, Eliot says, while “we cannot afford to neglect Arnold,” Coleridge is yet “the greatest of English critics, and in a sense the last.”119 Arnold is merely one of the Victorian “second-order minds,” rather a “propagandist for criticism than a critic, a popularizer rather than a creator of ideas,” and what ideas he does create are “inadequate” and “assemble more doubts than they dispel.”120 Coleridge, by contrast, possesses talents “more remarkable than those of any other modern critic.”121 Again one might argue that Eliot deliberately understates the Arnoldian influence on modern criticism not so much out of deference to Coleridge’s “abstruse research” but in despite of Arnold’s religious and political liberalism.122 It is Arnold, in Eliot’s view, who “skilfully initiated” the “degradation of philosophy and religion” that is then “competently continued by Pater.”123 At the same time, a simple Bloomian influence-anxiety is possibly at play here too, a relation analogous to a professional rivalry but occurring within the ideal order of critics. Eliot is “ambivalent but not consistently adversarial toward Arnold,” according to one critic’s generous construction of the rivalry that nonetheless seems plain.124 “Frontiers of Criticism,” On Poetry and Poets (New York: Noonday, 1961) 115. Culture and Society 115. 119 The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Poetry to 117

118

Criticism in England (1933) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1964) 97; The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1934) 1. 120 The Sacred Wood xiv, 1, 2. 121 Ibid. 12. 122 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Dejection: An Ode,” The Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (London; New York: Oxford UP, 1960) line 89. 123 “Arnold and Pater” 388. 124 Clinton Machann, “Matthew Arnold,” Victorian Poetry 42.3 (fall 2004): 331.

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Eliot claims that “[f]rom time to time, every hundred years or so, it is desirable that some critic shall appear to review the past of our literature, and set the poets and the poems in a new order.”125 In the meantime, “[t]he majority of critics can be expected only to parrot the opinions of the last master … until a new authority comes to introduce some order.”126 Eliot indubitably fancies himself playing this world-historical role of new authorial paradigm-shifter, and his Nobel Prize, Order of Merit, and Westminster Abbey memorial lend retrospective weight to such a fancy, so perhaps it follows that he would need to strive mightily to overcome Arnold, the “last master,” who died in the year of Eliot’s birth and thus presents an obvious challenge to his hundred-year rule. “The sad ghost of Coleridge beckons me from the shadows,” Eliot says in the lyrical exordium to The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), and he likely presumes that the hierophant of Highgate wishes to bind his brows with laurel and nominate him his critical heir.127 Outside this twilit world, however, it seems rather to be the long shadow of Arnold that Eliot cannot easily escape. At any rate, that literary critics like Eliot, Leavis, Trilling, or Said feel authorized to look up from their Lancelot Andrewes or their Joseph Conrad and pronounce ex cathedra on matters social, political, and religious is largely owing to the sanction that Arnold gives to the cultural duty of the public intellectual. This line could be traced back beyond Arnold to Coleridge, and so to Samuel Johnson, John Dryden, even John Milton, none of whom restricts himself to matters purely literary. The point here is that Arnold, pace Eliot and Said, seems to embody the modern public intellectual’s posture par excellence and in the form that still largely obtains, riven though that posture is by ambivalences and contradictions of the kind that Collini’s Absent Minds surveys and that also have an important bearing on the present study.128 Critics like Eliot and Said thus represent that most common proclivity among Arnold critics, the tendency to spin his image in one culturally and politically tendentious direction or another, usually at the cost of obscuring or distorting Arnold’s influence and reducing or partially denying whatever continuing relevance his thought might yet offer. Wendell Harris rightly notes that Arnold is treated as a “plastic presence” in literary studies, “remodeled by critic after critic for polemical purposes,” and that “[p]resent-day detractors”—he was writing in

The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism 100. Ibid. 101. 127 Ibid. 149. 128 It was Trilling’s unequivocal opinion that “we cannot avoid coming to the judgment 125 126

that Arnold was one of the greatest critics in English literature, or, indeed, in the literature of the world … . For English-speaking people, Arnold is the father of criticism. Coleridge is in some respects a greater critical mind than Arnold—he is no doubt larger, more subtle, more complex and systematic. But Coleridge, great as he is, never has had the effect upon criticism that Arnold has had.” See “Matthew Arnold, Poet,” Major British Writers, gen. ed. G. B. Harrison, vol. 2 (New York: Harcourt, 1954) 409–10.

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1988—“have more conspicuously distorted Arnold’s program.”129 The remarkable tenacity of these “distorted” criticisms demonstrates how effective such caricature drawing can be “as programme,” but as Isobel Armstrong points out, in every case the resulting “extrapolation of Arnoldian thought ignores some of the best and the worst in it.”130 In the recurring waves of twentieth-century British and American cultural critique, we see Arnold used as a sometime stalking horse by both the right and left, serving a kind of apotropaic function for some American New Critics, for instance, with “detachment” and “disinterestedness” the perfect means of depoliticizing literary studies in the face of threats from the radical left. Said vividly evokes the “extremely apolitical and rigid, even mechanical conception of literary history” that prevailed in his youth and that effectively burked “a radical examination of the ideology of the field itself.”131 Once so mobilized, this Cold Warrior’s Arnold in turn offered a fixed target for New Left partisans and other reformers and revolutionaries to aim at in their resistance to race, class, and gender oppressions, thus yielding his current image as “the supposed representative of elitist values or bourgeois values or patriarchal values.”132 Arnold has thus served many masters since his death in 1888, sometimes demonized and deified almost in the same breath. He has proved a serviceable villain all round, by turns a despairing apostate, a critical Luddite, an antiintellectual obscurantist, a shill for the English Ideology, and a Eurocentric racist. Along with his subjection to these political metonymies, however, Arnold also projects a shadowy image as poet, publicist, propagandist for criticism, and prophet of culture. To trace the historical trajectory of his complex public persona and the salient features of the “grandly unthinking” Arnoldianism, the next order of business must be, varying a phrase of Oscar Wilde, to see Arnold as in himself he really is not.133 To understand, even in part, how these reductions and distortions are accomplished entails describing the function of Arnold at the present time, and in the next chapter I take up the early reception of his ideas by tracking a few of the strategic deployments of these partisan caricatures. The history of these appropriations of Arnold provides an essential context for the analysis, in later chapters, of Arnold’s core ideas and their surprising relevance to issues in contemporary political and moral philosophy and, perhaps most surprisingly, literary criticism.

“The Continuously Creative Function of Arnoldian Criticism,” Victorian Poetry 26.1–2 (spring–summer 1988): 117, 120. 130 “Arnoldian Repression: Two Forgotten Discourses of Culture,” News from Nowhere 5 (June 1988): 37. 131 Humanism and Democratic Criticism 38. 132 Clinton Machann, “Matthew Arnold,” Victorian Poetry 39.3 (fall 2001): 432. 133 See “The Critic as Artist,” The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, vol. 5 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1923) 160. 129

Chapter 3

Poetry is the Reality: Arnoldian Culture Tackles the Athletes of Logic Logic was intended as facilitation; as a means of expression—not as truth— Later it acquired the effect of truth—. —Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will To Power The discussion of values in the abstract, engaging nowhere, remains a barren academic exercise … . It is of little use to discuss values if the sense for value in the concrete—the experience and perception of value—is absent. —F. R. Leavis, Towards Standards of Criticism

In his Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry on Arnold, Stefan Collini claims that his star rose swiftly after World War II, when he came to be “retrospectively canonized” as the founding father of academic English studies.1 If this assessment is correct, then the contrast with Arnold’s prewar status is all the more striking because, from his own day until well into the 1930s, one prominent line of critics consistently judges Arnold to be a rather frivolous dandy and a logical lightweight—in short, a stupid weakling. His contemporaries never put the case quite so baldly, of course, since well-bred Victorian men of letters prefer to honey their malice, but that is the gist of their attack. This attitude toward the “grandly unthinking Arnoldian way,” as Edward W. Said terms it, is thus not unique to the “unusually violent” anti-Arnold criticism of recent decades.2 It appears ab ovo, and this chapter and the next trace the trope of Arnold’s “unthinking” from its nineteenth-century roots to its current configuration. The grounds for complaint vary among Arnold’s Victorian readers, but in general the harshest gibes seem to come from critics who can never quite forgive him for failing to be a cardcarrying Benthamite, Comtean, Millite, Hegelian, Phalansterian, or (lest we forget) assenting apologist for Anglican orthodoxy. “Culture,” Arnold says, “is always assigning to system-makers and systems a smaller share in the bent of human destiny than their friends like,” a statement well calculated to provoke fierce howls, from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first, in those nursing their “addiction to an abstract system” of one stripe or another (CPW 5.109). 1 “Arnold, Matthew (1822–1888),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford UP, 2004) 26 Jan. 2007 . 2 Edward W. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia UP, 2004) 45; Stefan Collini, Arnold (Oxford; New York: Oxford UP, 1988) 3.

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Latter-day defenders of cultural criticism can apparently be just as provoking when they assume an antisystem posture. Take Collini, for instance, who in Francis Mulhern’s view is a kind of closet neo-Arnoldian, so “little sympathy” does he have “with those who expect or impute ‘doctrine’ or ‘system’ or ‘theory’ in the thinkers he studies, and even modest ‘views’ can be put in their place, which is between ironizing quotation marks.”3 Collini “dislodges ideas from their commonsense status as the first test of intellectual virtù,” Mulhern claims, and he demotes them in order to elude the sort of “agonistic theoretical content” that “smacks too much of theory, views, positions, all the effigies of thinking against which Collini the historian has repeatedly warned his audience.”4 This is certainly a serious charge to level at a scholar who has done much to establish the disciplinary status and legitimacy of “intellectual history.”5 As noted in Chapter 2, Collini embodies a “quietist variation” of “literary-liberal culture,” in Mulhern’s opinion, and his “rhetoric, neither aspiring to system nor valuing it in others,” is a further mark of his supposed Arnoldian anti-intellectual intellectualism—a sometime paradox that this chapter attempts to elucidate.6 Collini understandably cocks a snook at finding himself so characterized: “May it not be,” he asks with Socratic loftiness, “that offering a reasonably wide and heterogeneous range of readers some prompts to re-examining what they think they know has a claim to being as ‘effective,’ in its own way, as advancing a set of theoretical claims, couched at a high level of abstraction, to a small and largely converted set of readers?”7 Size matters, evidently, when it comes to the public moralist’s readership. More to the point, however, is Collini’s categorical rejection of the imputed charge that he regards “all efforts at classification as potentially presumptuous.”8 On the contrary, Collini counters, in Mulhern’s “over-theorized” statement of the case—presumably an ever-present danger for an old Althusserian with a serious “addiction to an abstract system”—“the ‘liberal’ culture has to be parodied as incurably nominalist and resistant to any activity of concept-formation,” whereas in reality, Collini warmly asserts, “there is nothing inherently naïve or obstructively nominalist or reprehensibly conservative” in his critical method.9

“What Is Cultural Criticism?” New Left Review 23 (Sept.–Oct. 2003): 35. Ibid. 44, 39, 43. 5 See, for instance, Collini, “General Introduction,” Economy, Policy, Society: British 3 4

Intellectual History, 1750–1950, ed. Stefan Collini, Richard Whatmore, and Brian Young (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000) 1–21; rpt. in Collini, “General Introduction,” History, Religion, Culture: British Intellectual History 1750–1950, ed. Stefan Collini, Richard Whatmore, and Brian Young (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000) 1–21. 6 “What Is Cultural Criticism?” 45, 44. 7 “On Variousness; And on Persuasion,” New Left Review 27 (May–June 2004): 86. 8 Ibid. 89. 9 Ibid. 91, 89.

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The merits of these conflicting claims will be taken up presently. It is rather the relative heat and the hint of partisan rancor in the exchange that perhaps first deserves some inspection. A September 1853 letter from Arnold to Arthur Hugh Clough might throw a sidelight on this tension if, once again, one treats as structurally convertible the religious and political values at issue. Arnold is apparently addressing Clough’s chronically self-conflicted struggles over matters of faith and morals, but his words could also perhaps be taken as speaking to a more general and long-standing configuration within the psychology of rhetoric: If one loved what was beautiful and interesting in itself passionately enough, one would produce what was excellent without troubling oneself with religious dogmas at all. As it is, we are warm only when dealing with these last—and what is frigid is always bad. I would have others—most others stick to the old religious dogmas because I sincerely feel that this warmth is the great blessing, and this frigidity the great curse—and on the old religious road they have still the best chance of getting the one and avoiding the other. (Letters 1.274)

Looking past (for the moment) the note of condescension in “most others,” we find Arnold lamenting as misplaced that enthusiasm which defends its theory more ardently than it embraces its practice, yet in spite of this he puts a high value on this very “warmth.” He expresses a similar sentiment in 1849, around the time of his first published poetry: “I cannot conceal from myself the objection which really wounds & perplexes me from the religious side is that the service of reason is freezing to feeling, chilling to the religious mood … & feeling & the religious mood are eternally the deepest being of man, the ground of all joy and greatness for him.”10 This thermal imperative, as it might be called, lies at the heart of Arnold’s rhetorical style, a claim that Chapters 5 and 6 explore in detail, and it seems plainly to entail his deprecation of “system-makers and systems.” At the same time, Arnold is also aware how zealous the partisans of a system can be, a truth that his critics seldom fail to drive home. Although the grounds have greatly shifted since Arnold wrote—with the finer points of, say, antihumanist materialism or postmodern subjectivities now generating the warmth that issues like solifidianism or the real presence once produced—a similar rhetorical tension might well be found to structure some of the positions in current discursive formations, as in Collini and Mulhern’s intellectual exchange. Eric Hobsbawm notes that prior to the American and French revolutions the social and political issues of the Dutch and English revolutions “had still been discussed and fought out in the traditional language of Christianity, orthodox, schismatic, or heretical.”11 Applying a similar logic, one might suppose that today’s principal moral conflicts find themselves mediated in the register 10 The Yale Manuscript: Matthew Arnold, ed. S. O. A. Ullmann (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1989) 160. 11 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (New York: Mentor, 1962) 261–2.

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of politico-cultural high theory. Without further pursuing this line of inquiry at present, we can turn to Arnold’s relations with the theory-addled “system-makers” of the Victorian era, since they establish many of the most durable tropes in the canon of Arnold criticism, ones that are apparently still fully capable of yeoman’s service today. If the theological theorists of the Victorian age may be set aside for the moment, then Arnold’s system-friendly critics are found to include such faithful utilitarian sectaries as Henry Sidgwick, Cambridge professor of moral philosophy, and the Stephen brothers, James Fitzjames Stephen and Leslie Stephen, all prominent Victorian men of letters and noteworthy “public moralists,” in Collini’s concise formulation.12 The positivism of the French sociologist Auguste Comte inspires a similar fervency in many of its British devotees, such as Richard Congreve, whose English translations of Comte’s works in the early 1850s drew many to the fold, and George Henry Lewes, notable for giving the Comtean term altruism currency in English. But it is the Liberal M. P. Frederic Harrison, for whom Comte was a “lifelong prophet and high priest,” who stands out among Arnold’s positivist critics for his spirited attacks on the logical looseness of Arnold’s arguments.13 Other prominent Victorian intellectuals seem to have a foot in both utilitarian and positivist camps or at least to move easily between them—figures like Harriet Martineau, Walter Bagehot, George Eliot, W. R. Greg, Francis Newman, and others. To Arnold, what unites all of these “athletes of logic,” as he humorously styles them, is their rigid adherence to ratiocinative machinery (CPW 6.170). They are the system fetishists whose “hard abstruse reasonings” form the inflexible point of the Philistine spear, and Arnold’s fixed resistance to these “scientific friends” with their “systematic philosophy” becomes a touchstone of his criticism, a stance that some later critics mistake as his anti-intellectualism (CPW 6.168–9, 294).14

12 Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991). 13 Basil Willey, More Nineteenth Century Studies: A Group of Honest Doubters (New York: Harper, 1966) 162. 14 This particular caricature of Arnold, which would assimilate him to some of the antimodern and anti-intellectual tendencies classically analyzed by Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Knopf, 1963), is remarkably persistent. A recent example of its longevity is seen in the opinions of historian of Victorian psychology Rick Rylance, who mistakenly describes Arnold as “the leading champion of anti-scientific, anti-technological ‘Culture’” and incongruously groups him with American literary critics “John Crowe Ransom, for instance, [who] had views on biology that were little developed from the Romantic organicism of Coleridge, and Allen Tate, [who] as late as 1940, was willing to assert ‘the belief, philosophically tenable, in a radical discontinuity between the physical and the spiritual realms.’” See Rylance, Victorian Psychology and British Culture, 1850–1880 (Oxford; New York: Oxford UP, 2000) 153–4, 253n6. For a salutary corrective to this view, see Michael North, The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge UP, 1991) 1–20.

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As schools go, however, Arnold is himself firmly embedded in the “cultureand-society tradition,” in the words of Richard Hoggart, with which phrase he honors the literary genealogy that Raymond Williams constructs in Culture and Society.15 Williams himself calls it “the tradition of English social criticism,” in which the chief feature is the emergence of “culture” as a “criticism of what has been called the bourgeois idea of society.”16 On this view, the chronic tension between Arnold and the athletes of logic could be said to reproduce in miniature the larger utilitarian-versus-romantic polarity that fired anti-industrial philippics throughout the nineteenth century, from S. T. Coleridge and William Cobbett to John Ruskin and William Morris, and that goes on to inform much of the cultural critique produced by Britain’s “native Left” line of F. R. Leavis, Williams, and E. P. Thompson.17 Within Williams’s interpretive scheme, Arnold’s work “has remained more influential than any other single work in this tradition,” yet he appears as a figure of late romanticism—“soured romanticism,” as Williams’s puts it—a thinker sodden with “spilt religion,” whose contemporaries claim that his weak-tea arguments lack the mental and moral toughness demanded by the disciplines of political economy and the felicific calculus.18 The Cambridge wrangler perhaps best embodies this “manly fellows” line of argument, a type who is described by Leslie Stephen, himself a fair specimen, as one of those who “despised ‘movements’” and “scorned sentimentalism and aesthetic revivals, and, if [they] took any interest in speculative matters, read John Stuart Mill, and were sound Utilitarians and orthodox Political Economists.”19 By these Spartan standards, Arnold’s notions are deemed rather flaccid, and his thought seems to betray a certain laxness, an almost feminine concreteness of mind that rarely rises above the simplistic level of anecdotal narrative. This critical line is first laid out by Fitzjames Stephen, Leslie’s elder brother, the jurist and doctrinaire Hobbesian whose writings consistently reveal a relish for systematic rigor—he once even criticized Mill for deviating from Benthamism’s “proper principles of Richard Hoggart, The Way We Live Now (London: Chatto and Windus, 1995) 316. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780–1950 (London: Chatto, 1958) 71, 328. 17 Perry Anderson, “Foreword,” English Questions (London; New York: Verso, 15 16

1992) 4. See also Williams, Culture and Society x–xii; Donald Winch, “Mr. Gradgrind and Jerusalem,” Economy, Polity, and Society: British Intellectual History, 1750–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP) 243–66. In a related discussion, Francis Mulhern similarly claims that “the educational themes and practices handed down by Scrutiny, seen as the elements of a strategy, were never more than a radical-romantic counterpoint to the conventional wisdom of liberal-Fabian educational policy, a latter-day variation on the romantic/ utilitarian antinomy that constitutes one of the abiding structures of industrialcapitalist culture in general and, very conspicuously, that of modern Britain.” See The Moment of Scrutiny (London: NLB, 1979) 330. 18 Culture and Society 115, 117. For romanticism as “spilt religion,” see T. E. Hulme, “Romanticism and Classicism,” Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art, ed. Herbert Read (London: Routledge, 1924) 118. 19 “Matthew Arnold,” National and English Review 22 (22 Dec. 1893): 459.

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rigidity and ferocity.”20 The distinction in question, which only partially reduces to an Oxford-Cambridge polar rivalry, becomes a mid-Victorian commonplace. It is characterized by the Tory polemicist W. J. Courthope, for instance, as one opposing “literary Liberalism” to “commercial Liberalism,” but the tension is perhaps most concisely expressed in the title of Bagehot’s review of Ruskin’s Unto This Last (1862): “Aesthetic Twaddle versus Economic Science.”21 Although Arnold later comes to be portrayed—in the retrospective caricatures of some of his late-twentieth-century critics—as a kind of titan of elite cultural authority and Liberal hegemony, he is certainly not throwing around much bourgeois-hegemonic weight in the eyes of his contemporaries. On the contrary, they figure him as the soft underbelly of Victorian Liberalism. A Nerveless, Pampered Dilettantism Arnold’s weak-minded effeminacy is discerned at once by the reviewers of his earliest poetry, the anonymously published The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849) and Empedocles on Etna, and Other Poems (1852). Although the detailed discussion of this topic must be postponed until Chapters 5 and 6, it is enough here to note that these critics largely set the tone and fix the tropes for the rest of the century’s Arnold criticism. To these reviewers, his “hazy” metaphysics and “useless and unmanly lamentations” betray a spirit “of ascetic and timid selfculture,” an “indolent, selfish quietism” that is an offence to the ethic of “severe manliness” propounded by muscular Christians.22 When Arnold takes up prose in the mid-1850s, these turns on his unmanliness and weak logic resurface. Essays like “My Countrymen” (1866) and “Culture and Its Enemies” (1867) particularly enrage the heroes of action and athletes of logic, to whom Arnold is a mere “fop,” the “most delicate of living English critics,” one appealing only to the “dainty taste” of such “sentimentalists” as lack “the strong sense and sturdy morality of their fellow Englishmen.”23 To these earnest and manly moralizers, Arnold seems to evince a “really effeminate horror” toward even the most “simple, practical, 20 Qtd. in Leslie Stephen, The Life of James Fitzjames Stephen (London: Smith, Elder, 1895) 308. See also James Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, ed. R. J. White (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1967) 12. 21 W. J. Courthope, “Modern Culture,” Quarterly Review 137 (Oct. 1874): 409, 412; Walter Bagehot, The Collected Works of Walter Bagehot, ed. Norman St-John Stevas, vol. 9 (London: Economist, 1965–1986) 315–29, qtd. in Winch, “Mr. Gradgrind and Jerusalem” 264. 22 [William E. Aytoun], “The Strayed Reveller,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 67 (Sept. 1849): 344; [John Campbell Shairp], “Poems by Matthew Arnold,” North British Review 21 (Aug. 1854): 500; [Arthur Hugh Clough], “Recent English Poetry,” North American Review 77 (July 1853): 22; “Glimpses of Poetry,” North British Review 19 (May 1853): 210, 218. 23 [James Macdonell], Daily Telegraph, 8 Sept. 1866, 4–5; London Times, 8 Sept. 1866, 8.

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common-sense reforms” and to produce only a “monotony of nonsense” in his essays, full of “harmony, but no system; instinct, but no logic,” amounting at bottom to no more than the advice “that under present circumstances it is inexpedient to do anything in particular.”24 Arnold’s “nerveless, pampered dilettantism” lacks “any real stimulus to progress,” his “airy dogmatism” is “ambitious, vague, and perverse,” and his system-free ideas are devoid of “principles … coherent … interdependent, subordinate, and derivative”—this last phrase, from a review by Harrison, Arnold seizes upon and never ceases to repeat with mock humility.25 Perhaps Harrison’s is a palpable hit, since Arnold’s discursive method does indeed seem to settle into an obstinate and invariable critical nominalism, at least in the view of some, although the analysis in Chapter 6 reveals this rhetorical tendency’s place at the heart of Arnold’s practice of ethical exemplarity, an application of the “renouncement” entailed by his philosophical pessimism. At any rate, whether the matter at issue is poetry, politics, or prophecy, Arnold is no more willing to satisfy his critics’s insistence that he provide an abstract and systematic formulation of his critical or philosophical principles than was Leavis willing to satisfy a similar demand made by René Wellek in the 1930s, but this is to anticipate.26 Arnold’s thought can perhaps best be described, then, as resting not so much on a first principle as on a first anti-principle. He plainly eschews all theoretical abstraction in favor of the concrete facts of practical experience, and this empirical, inductive method appears as early as his 1860 discussion of the “grand style” in poetry. “I may discuss what, in the abstract, constitutes the grand style,” he says, “but that sort of general discussion never much helps our judgment of particular instances” (CPW 1.136). He chooses rather “to take specimens of the grand style, and to put them side by side” with specimens of the author in question. Arnold famously reformulates this method twenty years later with his clutch of literary touchstones, but along the way, in “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (1865), he again advises the avoidance of abstraction in his discussion of “the subject-matter which literary criticism should most seek” (CPW 3.282). As the term itself denotes, criticism first requires judgment, he says, but in addition to this, “knowledge, and ever fresh knowledge, must be the critic’s great concern.” Critical judgment can accompany this fresh knowledge, “but insensibly, and in the second place, not the first, as a sort of companion and clue, not as an abstract lawgiver” (CPW 3.282–3). In some cases, however, the effort “to establish a “The Magazines,” Illustrated London News 52.1463 (4 Jan. 1868): 10; “Mr. Buchanan and His Reviewer,” Spectator 41 (22 Feb. 1868): 227; “Mr. Matthew Arnold Again” 39–40; Frederic Harrison, “Culture: A Dialogue,” Fortnightly Review 8 (Nov. 1867): 609; “The Magazines,” Illustrated London News 53.1490 (4 July 1868): 3. 25 [Anon.], “Mr. Arnold’s Theory of Perfection,” Aberdeen Free Press, 19 July 1867, 5; Henry Sidgwick, “The Prophet of Culture,” Macmillan’s Magazine, 16.94 (Aug. 1867): 272; “Culture: A Dialogue” 608. 26 See “A Letter, by René Wellek,” The Importance of Scrutiny, ed. Eric Bentley (New York: Grove Press, 1948) 23–30. For Leavis’s reply, see “A Reply, by F. R. Leavis,” The Importance of Scrutiny 30–40. 24

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current of fresh and true ideas” by means of a “disinterested endeavor” after the best that has been known and thought will lead the critic to deal with a subject that is already so thoroughly familiar both to herself and her readers alike that fresh knowledge is quite out of the question. In these instances, Arnold says, criticism “must be all judgment; an enunciation and application of detailed principles,” but even “[h]ere the great safeguard is never to let oneself become abstract” and always to remember that “mere judgment and application of principles” is not the aim, for “like mathematics, it is tautological, and cannot well give us, like fresh learning, the sense of creative activity” (CPW 3.283). Not for the last time does Arnold here treat mathematics as the polar opposite of his intuitive method of touchstone knowledge, a position that is fully discussed in Chapter 5. The suggestion of a high-toned passivity in Arnold’s “Culture” outrages his muscular reviewers who, like Fitzjames Stephen, see in him yet one more of the “philosophers and critics full of antipathies against the rougher and coarser movements they see on all sides of them.”27 Arnold’s weakness in practical politics appears in the position he takes in “The Function of Criticism”: “I say, the critic must keep out of the region of immediate practice in the political, social, humanitarian sphere, if he wants to make a beginning for that more free speculative treatment of things, which may perhaps one day make its benefits felt even in this sphere, but in a natural and thence irresistible manner” (CPW 3.275). In such passages, Arnold seems to shrink from all engagement in the rough-and-tumble give-and-take of Liberal partisanship, preferring instead, his critics claim, an aloof, remote, purely theoretical consideration—“far too much of the Epicurean gods about him,” as one put it—and Fitzjames Stephen speaks for the tribe of logical athletes when he says that anyone who could so “sneer” at the “greatness and majesty” of England’s commercial and industrial muscles must “despise human life itself.”28 Not least, he says in a similar context, because “no nation in the world is so logical as the English nation.”29 Since the academic idée reçue now tends rather to emphasize the remote and rather chilly qualities in Arnold’s Olympian persona, it is easy to forget that his contemporaries see a kid-gloved coxcomb, and the more they decry his weakness, the more quickly Arnold works to fashion his supposed emasculation into a ram to batter the Philistine strongholds. He begins by feigning to take correction at the hands of the athletes of logic and admitting that “the universal disgust with which my ‘Culture and Anarchy’ speculations have been received, the severe but deserved chastisement which I have brought on myself by giving way to a spirit of effeminacy and cultivated inaction, have quite conquered me” (CPW 5.319). Confessing his own most grievous sins of illogic, he yet wishes “to plead how 27 [James Fitzjames Stephen], “Culture and Action,” Saturday Review 24 (9 Nov. 1867): 591–3. 28 [Anon.], “An Intellectual Angel,” Spectator 39 (3 Feb. 1866): 126; [James Fitzjames Stephen], “Mr. Arnold and the Middle Classes,” Saturday Review 21 (10 Feb. 1866): 163. 29 “Mr. Arnold and His Countrymen,” Saturday Review 18 (3 Dec. 1864): 684.

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plausible were some of the appearances which led astray an untutored mind, not protected by a systematic philosophy” (CPW 5.320). Arnold makes frequent use of this faux-peccant style, although his “Preface” to Essays in Criticism (1865) offers a less supercilious reply to the chronic gibes about his slipshod thinking, and there he plainly states his objection to the methods of the left-brained logic choppers: I have never been able to hit it off happily with the logicians, and it would be mere affectation in me to give myself the airs of doing so. They imagine truth something to be proved, I something to be seen; they something to be manufactured, I as something to be found. I have profound respect for intuitions, and a very lukewarm respect for the elaborate machine-work of my friends the logicians. I have always thought that all which was worth much in this elaborate machine-work of theirs came from an intuition, to which they gave a grand name of their own. How did they come by this intuition? Ah! if they could tell us that. But no; they set their machine in motion, and build up a fine showy edifice, glittering and unsubstantial like a pyramid of eggs. (CPW 3.535–6)

Much of Arnold’s critical method is comprised in this passage—a seeing, a finding, an intuition. At the same time, the attitude is in some ways a mere rhetorical commonplace, one of a number of topoi that is marshaled in the perennial struggle for intellectual authority: figure yourself as natural, normal, and commonsensical, your opponents as “almost prisoners of their own commitment to analytical reasoning; it blinds them to the more intuitive or emotional truths which those not so imprisoned are able to experience in other ways.”30 These topoi have their opposite numbers, of course, as Leslie Stephen demonstrates in an 1893 lecture, delivered in a tone of soppy-sternness and mock-self-disparagement that probably would have tickled Arnold, then five years dead. Stephen first distinguishes between “the poetic and the prosaic mind,” represented respectively by Arnold and himself, and he admits that the prosaic mind is apt “to despise the power in which [it] is so deficient: and probably to suggest unreasonable doubts as to its reality and value”—once again, an argument that serves all turns. He then points the differences: He has intuitions where we have only calculations; he can strike out vivid pictures where we try laboriously to construct diagrams; he shows at once a type where our rough statistical and analytical tables fail to reveal more than a few tangible facts; he perceives the spirit and finer essence of an idea where it seems to slip through our coarser fingers, leaving only a residuum of sophistical paradox. In the long run, the prosaic weigher and measurer has one advantage: he is generally in the right.31

Collini, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006) 35. “Matthew Arnold,” National Review 22.127 (22 Dec. 1893): 460. Mill speaks in

30 31

nearly identical terms, though with considerably more deference, of Carlyle’s influence: “I felt that he was a poet and that I was not, that he was a man of intuition, which I was not; and that as such he not only saw many things long before me which I could only, when

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Faced with such specimens of the “elaborate machine-work of [his] friends the logicians,” perhaps Arnold’s ultimate resort is to the mysticism of “golden single sentences,” as in his famous proposition: “Poetry is the reality, philosophy the illusion” (CPW 11.186, 9.48). Short of this extremity, however, other rhetorical devices are to hand and become regular features of his discursive regime. For example, in “The Function of Criticism,” he describes Fitzjames Stephen as “a reasoner, a member of a school, a disciple of the great Bentham” (CPW 3.3531). In Culture and Anarchy he characterizes Harrison as a prose stylist “in the systematic and stringent manner of his school,” a “school whose mission it is to bring into order and system that body of truth with which the earlier Liberals merely fumbled” (CPW 5.87). This shrewd nip at the “enormous condescension of posterity,” to borrow Thompson’s phrase, would not be Arnold’s last.32 By contrast, he portrays himself as a kind of solivagant pilgrim of ordinary language: “I am a mere solitary wanderer in search of the light, and I talk an artless, unstudied, everyday, familiar language. But, after all, this is the language of the mass of the world.” Behind the po-faced paradox—he is at once a solitary Everyman and in solidarity with the mass—Arnold again shows his perennial antipathy to philosophical schools and system-builders (CPW 3.531). Collini would find in such a passage “the classic topos of scorn disguised as false humility, the characteristically English backhanded compliment to one’s own down-to-earth style,” but the issue for Arnold, as the present study seeks to show, was larger than one of mere rhetorical tactics.33 In spite of his ludic demeanor, or perhaps because of it, the image of Arnold as effeminate and illogical and of Arnoldian “Culture” as fostering a kind of limpwristed sociopolitical passivity persists into the twentieth century and finally comes to be identified with the aristocratic posing of middle-class snobs. The 1921 Newbolt report on English schools, for instance, describes the “working classes, especially those belonging to organized labour movements,” as “antagonistic to, and contemptuous of, literature,” which is now “classed by a large number of thinking working men with antimacassars, fish knives, and other unintelligible and futile trivialities of ‘middle-class culture,’ and, as a subject of instruction, is suspect as an attempt ‘to side-track the working-class movement.’”34 Rather like Arnold himself, literary culture is regarded “merely as an ornament, a polite they were pointed out to me, hobble after and prove, but that it was possible he could see many things which were not visible to me even when pointed out. I knew that I could not see round him, and could never be quite sure that I saw over him; and I never formed a definitive judgment of him.” See Autobiography (1873) The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. John M. Robinson and Jack Stillinger, vol. 1 (Toronto: Toronto UP, 1981) 182. 32 The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1963) 12. 33 Absent Minds 37. 34 The Teaching of English in England, being the Report of the Departmental Committee Appointed by the President of the Board of Education to Inquire into the Position of English in the Educational System of England (London: HM Stationery Office, 1921) 252.

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accomplishment, a subject to be despised by really virile men,” the report says. On the other hand, the entry on Arnold in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1911) decisively challenges his Victorian-Edwardian reputation for “fastidious and feminine delicacy,” dismissing this characterization as the fantastic creation of “Arnold as he was conceived by certain ‘young lions’ of journalism whom he satirized—a somewhat over-cultured petit-maître—almost, indeed, a coxcomb of letters.”35 The reality, write Theodore Watts-Dunton and Sir Joshua Girling Fitch, was “a broad-shouldered, manly—almost burly—Englishman with a fine countenance, bronzed by the open air of England, wrinkled apparently by the sun, wind-worn as an English skipper’s, open and frank as a fox-hunting squire’s.”36 Instead of a Victorian “girly man,” Arnold here becomes rather a cross between Charles Kingsley’s Muscular Christian and Ezra Pound’s Goodly Fere: Aye lover he was of brawny men, O’ ships and the open sea. … No capon priest was the Goodly Fere, But a man o’ men was he.37

Not that everyone perceives Arnold’s all-English charms. Walter Raleigh, for example, who from 1904 held the first chair in English literature (and later the Merton Chair) at Oxford University, complained in his introduction to a 1912 edition of Essays in Criticism that “Arnold’s attitude to English literature was that of a foreigner,” one with “too little affection for England.”38 To support this claim, Raleigh observes that “among the names which are the subject of these essays there is no English name. The ideals that are set before us are European or cosmopolitan, not national,” and he hints rather darkly at the “significant” fact that “the finest of these essays, the essay on Heinrich Heine, is an essay on a Jew.”39 English literature, after all, “is an intensely national literature,” Raleigh says, “and can be only imperfectly criticized from the cosmopolitan point of view. 35 Theodore Watts-Dunton and Sir Joshua Girling Fitch, “Arnold, Matthew,” Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed., 29 vols. (New York: Sears, 1911) 2.635. 36 The Britannica’s spirited description goes some way to giving the lie to Geoffrey Tillotson’s claim that Arnold’s critics “might have stomached his urbanity if it had been like that of Newman—an, as it were, unconscious urbanity. They could not take the urbanity of one who postured. It seems that he made a big strategical mistake. The writer who had most effect on English culture was William Morris. For him, urbanity was fluff and nonsense— unlike Arnold, he was once mistaken for a sea-captain.” See Tillotson, “Matthew Arnold’s Prose: Theory and Practice,” The Art of Victorian Prose, ed. George Levine and William Madden (New York; London: Oxford UP, 1968) 98. 37 Ezra Pound, “The Ballad of the Goodly Fere,” The New Poetry: An Anthology, ed. Harriet Monroe and Alice Corbin Henderson (New York: Macmillan, 1917) lines 3–4, 15–16. 38 “Matthew Arnold,” Some Authors: A Collection of Literary Essays, 1896–1916 (Freeport, NY: Books for All Libraries Press, 1968) 305, 303. 39 Ibid. 304.

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That, and no other, was [Arnold’s] point of view, from first to last.”40 The term cosmopolitan was already attracting the connotative accretions that would later turn it into a Stalinist code word for Jew.41 Leavis later characterizes the “animus” in Raleigh’s essay as a “critical injustice” and a specimen of the “unscrupulous and silly malice, revealing a radical dislike of live intelligence, that so often goes with a reputation for ‘brilliance’ in the academic mind.”42 While insinuations about Arnold’s suspiciously Francophile tastes and stylistic tendencies had long been standard fare—Fitzjames Stephen teased Arnold in the 1860s for writing “a dialect as like French as pure English can be”43—his Englishness seems generally unexceptionable at this time, at least insofar as the poet and essayist Edward Thomas, Raleigh’s contemporary, finds Arnold sufficiently dulce et decorum to merit inclusion in a 1915 volume that he edits, This England: An Anthology from Her Writers.44 Raleigh, however, implies that there is a stranger among us: There is no evidence that [Arnold] ever understood the English character. With incredible lightness he speaks of “prescription and routine” as things evil in themselves when they get a hold upon a people! He preaches accessibility to ideas, readiness to move at the bidding of reason, and exalts the pure intelligence, which is depressed and impeded in England by a world of unreasoning custom and habit. There is no harm in this kind of preaching, taken as a stimulant, but it seems strangely to neglect the affections, which build their nest in custom and habit.45

Sounding somewhat like Edmund Burke—and prefiguring our twenty-first-century defenders of Burkean “prejudice”46—Raleigh is that rare critic who chides Arnold for an almost Jacobinical excess of rationality and for neglecting the “nest” of emotions where custom and habit dwell. The more usual line of attack aims rather at Arnold’s supposed paucity of logical rigor and his overemphasis on emotional and intuitive aestheticism. Eliot, as we have seen, says that Arnold’s religious writing Ibid. 305–6. Konstantin Azadovskii and Boris Egorov, “From Anti-Westernism to Anti-

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Semitism,” Journal of Cold War Studies 4:1 (winter 2002): 66–80. 42 F. R. Leavis, “Arnold as Critic,” Scrutiny 7.3 (Dec. 1938): 319; F. R. Leavis, “Introduction,” On Bentham and Coleridge, by John Stuart Mill, ed. F. R. Leavis (New York: Harper, 1962) 37. 43 “Matthew Arnold and His Countrymen,” Saturday Review 18 (3 Dec. 1864): 684. 44 Edward Thomas, ed., This England: An Anthology from Her Writers (London: Oxford UP, 1915) 6–7. 45 “Matthew Arnold,” Some Authors 305. 46 For a celebration of “deep and immovable prejudice, in which outrage, shame, and honor are the ultimate grounds,” see Roger Scruton, Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life (London; New York: Continuum, 2005) 41–3. For reflections on the pedagogical and spiritual efficacy of “prejudices and superstitions,” see Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Moral Imagination: From Edmund Burke to Lionel Trilling (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006) 8–11.

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aims “to divorce Religion from thought,”47 and critics like Chris Baldick later multiply this charge, claiming that Arnold sought to divorce politics and criticism from thought as well, a project supposedly glimpsed in Arnold’s 1882 advice to Liverpool College students: “Don’t think; try and be patient.”48 More recently, a historian of Victorian psychology describes Arnold as “the leading champion of anti-scientific, anti-technological ‘Culture.’”49 To make sense of such claims and establish their continuity with the caricatures deployed by the athletes of logic, it will be useful to examine a few elect episodes from the Strachey-Eliot interlude. Wandering Beyond His True Scope Writing in 1914, Bloomsbury biographer Lytton Strachey ignores the cosmopolitanism that so exercises Raleigh’s indignation. He even downplays Arnold’s feminine delicacy, describing him simply as “a man, so he keeps telling us, of a refined and even fastidious taste.”50 But Strachey puts all the more emphasis on the theme of Arnold’s mediocre mind: “Arnold was a poet,” he says with a sniff, “but his conception of poetry reminds us that he was also an inspector of schools.”51 Above all, Arnold is a man whose nature it was to look at literature from the detached and disinterested standpoint of a refined—a fastidious—aesthetic appreciation; and yet … and yet … well, after all (but please don’t say so), how could anyone, at this time of day, in the ’sixties, be expected to take literature seriously, on its own merits, as if it were a thing to be talked about for its own sake?

One can fairly smell Strachey’s breath in this passage’s susurrations, so close is his tone of entre-nous intimacy. Wyndham Lewis pillories this Bloomsbury style, of course, which he also finds in Virginia Woolf, and he mocks the way that the set “shrink and cluster together, they titter in each other’s ears and delicately tee-hee, pointing out to each other the red-blood antics of this or that upstanding figure, treading the perilous Without. That was the manner in which the late Lytton Strachey lived.”52 Be that as it may, Arnold’s is, for Strachey, “a curious and instructive case,” all the more so “since no one could suppose that he was a stupid man. On the contrary, his intelligence was above the average, and he could write lucidly, and he got up his subjects with considerable care.”53 49 50 51 52

“Arnold and Pater,” Selected Essays of T. S. Eliot (New York: Harcourt, 1950) 385. The Social Mission of English Criticism, 1848–1932, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983) 42. Rylance, Victorian Psychology and British Culture, 1850–1880 153–4. “A Victorian Critic,” Literary Essays (New York: Harcourt, n.d.) 221. Ibid. 83. “Virginia Woolf,” Men without Art, ed. Seamus Cooney (Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow, 1987) 139. 53 “A Victorian Critic” 214. 47 48

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Unfortunately, Arnold “mistook his vocation,” in Strachey’s unapologetically patronizing view. “He might, no doubt, if he had chosen, have done some excellent and lasting work upon the movements of glaciers or the fertilization of plants, or have been quite a satisfactory collector in an up-country district in India. But no; he would be a critic.” Even Strachey’s exiguous praise apparently seems excessive to Eliot, to whom Arnold “might have become a critic” had his age been one that respected letters, but instead he was “rather a propagandist for criticism.”54 A hint of Bloomsbury smugness seems still to qualify the odor of sanctity in Eliot’s evocation of a middling-minded Arnold: “he was an Inspector of Schools”—an echo of Strachey’s sneer55—“and he became Professor of Poetry,” a simple “educator” with “an educator’s view,” a man who “had neither walked in hell nor been rapt to heaven; but what he did know, of books and men, was in its way well-balanced and well-marshalled.”56 He got up his subjects, that is, with considerable care, no small feat for one “incapable of sustained reasoning.”57 Eliot’s superior tone might again The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1928) xiii, 1. The sneer at Arnold’s professional place was most recently (to my knowledge) trotted

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out by Harold Bloom, who alludes to “Matthew Arnold, greatest of School Inspectors,” in a snide dismissal of critics who doubt that “there is no text, only interpretations.” See Harold Bloom, “The Breaking of Form,” Deconstruction and Criticism, by Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey H. Hartmann, and J. Hillis Miller (New York: Seabury, 1979) 7. It might be worth noting here that Arnold’s “hours and conditions of work,” as one historian describes them, were “those of the gentlemanly nineteenth-century public service which allowed some time for other pursuits,” and he would “often inspect his schools in the morning and mark his exercises at night, but spend the afternoon at the Athenaeum writing an article.” See Collini, Arnold 21. This adds up, in the calculation of one of Arnold’s biographers, to a typical 16-hour work day, and Arnold’s letters reflect the rigors of frequent travel, Spartan accommodations, eye strain, and so on. See Nicholas Murray, A Life of Matthew Arnold (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996) 148–9, 199, 284. Critics tempted to derogate Arnold’s poetry or criticism by means of insinuations about his profession should perhaps not overlook Raymond Williams’s generous comments: “Those who accuse him of a policy of ‘cultivated inaction’ forget not only his arguments but his life. As an Inspector of schools, and independently, his efforts to establish a system of general and humane education was intense and sustained. There is nothing of the dandy in Arnold’s fight against the vicious mechanism of the Revised Code. On a number of similar educational matters of great importance he showed a fine capacity for detailed application of principles that in his theoretical writings are often open to a charge of vagueness. Culture and Anarchy, in fact, needs to be read alongside the reports, minutes, evidence to commissions and specifically educational essays which made up so large a part of Arnold’s working life.” See Williams, Culture and Society 119. 56 The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Poetry to Criticism in England (London: Faber, 1933) 102, 111, 96. 57 “Arnold and Pater” 390. Oddly enough, Eliot similarly impugns his own forensic abilities in a 1934 letter to Paul Elmer More: “I am not a systematic thinker, if indeed I am a thinker at all. I depend upon intuitions and perceptions; and although I may have

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suggest—Lewis implies as much58—that he is struggling to get clear of Arnold’s long shadow. Another telling suggestion of rivalry appears in his 1927 essay on the Oxford neo-Hegelian F. H. Bradley, Eliot’s philosophical guru. He claims that Bradley “knocked the bottom out of Literature and Dogma” with a few pointed footnotes in his Ethical Studies (1876).59 With undisguised glee, Eliot exults in Bradley’s supposed “great triumph of wit,” finding the whole performance “a great delight to watch.”60 To Eliot, the verdict is clear: “Such criticism is final.” In a side-by-side comparison of Arnold’s and Bradley’s prose styles, Eliot concludes that “[i]t is not altogether certain that the passage from Bradley is not the better,” but Eliot’s use of litotes in this context, and in light of his ordinary relish of the altogether certain, seems calculated to damn Arnold with faint praise.61 “The vision of the horror and the glory was denied to Arnold,” he says, “but he knew something of the boredom.”62 The lives of H.M. Inspectors of Schools were, without doubt, often enough rounds of tedious drudgery,63 as Arnold’s letters make painfully clear, and particularly so when compared with that of, say, a Merton College sinecurist who, wholly relieved of the burdens of tutoring and lecturing, could instead devote his gentlemanly leisure to the horrors and glories of the occasional Italian dalliance. Such a life was Bradley’s, who apparently glimpsed the steeps and deeps at firsthand since he was, as the DNB phrases it, “a man without doubt who enjoyed amorous experience of some depth.”64 This was presumably a comfortably tenable position for an ethical idealist bearing the onus of a confessional-cum-professional bachelorhood. some skill in the barren game of controversy, have little capacity for sustained, exact, and closely knit argument and reasoning.” Quoted in John D. Margolis, T. S. Eliot’s Intellectual Development, 1922–1939 (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1972) xvn8. Though Eliot believes that Arnold “had no real serenity, only an impeccable demeanor,” he admits withal his attraction to him as “a man qui sait se conduire.” See The Use of Poetry 105, 119. Perhaps Eliot’s self-consciousness in addressing the saintly More evokes this epistolary posturing in the confessional register as an exhibition of his own impeccably humble self-conduct. 58 “Appendix (To T. S. Eliot—Pseudoist),” Men without Art 80. 59 “Francis Herbert Bradley,” Selected Essays of T. S. Eliot 399. Trilling notes the “irresistible ferocity” of Bradley’s attack on Arnold, and Noël Annan describes Bradley’s footnotes as “among the most savage passages” that he ever wrote. See Trilling, Matthew Arnold 359n; Noël Annan, Leslie Stephen: The Godless Victorian (London: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, 1984) 252. 60 “Francis Herbert Bradley” 401. 61 Ibid. 396–7. 62 The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism 98–9. 63 For a full discussion, see Linda Ray Pratt, “Passionate Reporting: Arnold on Elementary Schools, Teachers, and Children,” Nineteenth-Century Prose 34.1–2 (spring– fall 2007): 25–57. 64 Guy Stock, “Bradley, Francis Herbert (1846–1924),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004) 1 Apr. 2006 .

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If Arnold and Bradley fought “for the same causes,” and Eliot implies that perhaps they did, then Bradley’s weapons “had behind them a heavier force and a closer precision,” for “the greatest weakness of Arnold’s culture was his weakness in philosophical training.”65 This seems fair, as no one could suppose that he was a stupid man. Eliot could overlook Arnold’s “fastidiousness and superciliousness and officiality,” but in Literature and Dogma Arnold incautiously makes “an excursion into a field for which he was not armed.”66 The upshot of Arnold’s inept religious liberalism, in Eliot’s view, that is, his “divorce” of “Religion from thought,” is the clear path he opens for Paterism—and worse. Pater’s thought is “only a development of the intellectual Epicurianism of Arnold,” and the “degradation of philosophy and religion, skilfully initiated by Arnold, is competently continued by Pater.”67 Further, Arnold’s religious campaign is conducted irresponsibly, “without reading the future to foresee Marius the Epicurean, and finally De Profundis.”68 Yet what is to be expected of Arnold, for “[i]n philosophy and theology he was an undergraduate: in religion a Philistine”?69 As Bradley finds Arnold’s “thin abstractions” redolent with “the scent of claptrap” and his “literary groping … helpless as soon as it ceases to be blind,” so Eliot deems Arnold’s mind to be “unsuited and ill-equipped,” with “little gift for consistency or for definition” and “no power of connected reasoning at any length.”70 Even as sympathetic an Arnoldian as E. K. Brown concludes that “Arnold was never a learned man; and he did not have the learned man’s methods of inquiry or his scruples about judging in areas where his knowledge was scanty.”71 He is a mere critical dilettante, Brown says, flitting about “lightheartedly” and “wandering beyond his true scope.” The forms of condescension that appear in such comments can vary—from the proprietary officiousness of the specialist who takes umbrage in the foolhardy generalist traipsing across his academic turf, to the generalist who, encountering a disputant, looks down pitifully upon one so insufficiently ondoyant et divers as to stray beyond his proper sphere. Eliot uses this dodge when he claims that Arnold “made an excursion into a field for which he was not armed,” and he later takes a similar stance in relation to “the scientific paladins of religion,” such as the mathematician A. N. Whitehead and the astrophysicist A. S. Eddington, who dare to air their religious opinions in public:

67 68 69 70 65

“Francis Herbert Bradley” 397, 399. The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism 97; “Francis Herbert Bradley” 399. “Arnold and Pater” 388, 385. Ibid. 385. The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism 97. F. H. Bradley, Ethical Studies (1876) (New York: G. E. Stechert, 1927) 283–4; The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism 97; “Arnold and Pater” 382. 71 E. K. Brown, Matthew Arnold: A Study in Conflict (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1948) 182. 66

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I suspect that there is some taint of Original H. G. Wells about most of us in the English-speaking countries; and that we enjoy drawing general conclusions from particular disciplines, using our accomplishment in one field as the justification for theorizing about the world in general. It is also a weakness of Anglo-Saxons to like to hold personal and private religions and to promulgate them. And when a scientist gets loose into the field of religion, all he can do is give us the impression which his scientific knowledge and thought has produced upon his everyday, and usually commonplace, personal and private imagination.72

Rhetorical exigencies here call forth the usual “charges of self-importance, of mere windy opinionatedness, of the rank presumption involved in holding forth on some matter on which one has no special credentials to speak”—all defensive tropes deftly analyzed by Collini in Absent Minds.73 In Collini’s more general view, playing the role of public intellectual “involves doing something more, or other, than merely applying expertise,” although the necessary notoriety that makes one’s “doing something more” of any presumably wider public significance must first be attained by successfully applying one’s specialized expertise. This precondition reveals an inherent tension in the intellectual’s role: “the source of the initial standing or claim to attention will always include distinction in at least one relatively specialized activity, but effective speaking out will always entail going beyond this attested level of achievement or expertise,” thus exposing one’s flanks to critics like Bradley, Eliot, Brown, and many others, who chastise Arnold for going beyond his depth. The same attitude appears in Sidgwick’s posture toward Arnold’s “over-ambitious” treatment of “Culture,” a subject of such “depth and difficulty” that “a man ought not to touch cursorily upon such a question, much less to dogmatize placidly upon it, without showing us that he has mastered the elements of the problem.”74 Arnold often seeks to forestall such attacks by humbly referring to himself as “a mere man of letters” (CPW 6.239), though even here some worldly critics discern “Arnold’s egotism, clothed in a self-effacing pose?”75 At any rate, Arnold’s function as a public intellectual remains a contentious constant in the varying critical caricatures, of which the moment of Scrutiny offers further evidence. Honest and Forthright Crudity Leavis adheres to Arnold’s antisystematic empiricism in his own criticism, and while his particular valuations might diverge rather widely from any standards that Arnold might have accepted, he nonetheless recognizes and repeatedly defends Arnold’s exemplary critical method. While admitting that “Arnold as a theological or philosophical thinker had better be abandoned explicitly at once,” Leavis yet 74 75 72 73

“Thoughts after Lambeth” (1931) Selected Essays of T. S. Eliot 328. Absent Minds 57. “The Prophet of Culture,” Macmillan’s 16.94 (Aug. 1867): 272, 275. Collini, Arnold 10.

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insists that “he is not disposed of as a literary critic by pointing out that he was not theologian or philosopher; nor is it proved that he was incapable of consistency or vigour of thought.”76 An “essential strength” is discernible in Arnold, Leavis says, in spite of the “weaknesses and inconsistencies as a thinker” that make him “not easy to do justice to.”77 Unlike Mill, he is not a systematic thinker, he represents no strict intellectual discipline, he doesn’t go in for sharpness or completeness of analysis or full and clear statement of principle, and he is not preoccupied with consistency. This might seem to leave little that can be claimed for him—a conclusion, by all appearances, that has been pretty widely entertained, though he has contrived to command attention and remain a live author as Carlyle, I think, has not, and Ruskin has not.78

The 50 years that have elapsed since Leavis delivered himself of this opinion have plainly taken their toll on Arnold as an academically “live” author and on the attention he commands. Yet Leavis’s defense remains pertinent. While he seems to be trying to put a good face on a limitation or weakness in Arnold’s thought, I would argue that Leavis is in fact touching on the very essence of Arnold’s wholly deliberate rhetorical style, a style that I argue is rooted in his method of ethical exemplarity. To Leavis, what Arnold lacks in “consistency” or “definition” is compensated for by certain “positive virtues,” particularly “a habit of keeping in sensitive touch with the concrete, and an accompanying gift for implicit definition,” virtues that permit Arnold “the sure and easy management of a sustained argument.”79 One particular stripe of critic—say, the athlete of logic—“tends to apply inappropriate criteria of logical rigour and ‘definition’” to Arnold, a misjudgment often proceeding from “taking critical stock at a remove from the actual reading” of Arnold’s essays.80 In other words, Arnold needs to be taken on his own terms, at least in the first instance, not transposed into an alien key or sifted through a hermeneutic sieve. What, then, are Arnold’s own terms? The answer is “Culture” and “Conduct,” with the latter embodying the concept of “renouncement” and embodied by a rhetoric of ethical exemplarity. Of particular relevance here, in its relation to the broader scope of this study, is the notable similarity between Leavis’s rather generous defense of Arnold’s method and the line taken by literary historian Sharon Cameron in her recent discussion of the authorial inconsistencies in the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose style, she says, “functions as a validation of propositions in lieu of logic or as a supplement to logic.”81 This observation might seem at first glance to be half a commonplace, since style would appear 78 79 80 81 76 77

“Arnold as Critic,” Scrutiny 7.3 (Dec. 1938): 322–3. “Introduction,” On Bentham and Coleridge 36. Ibid. 37. “Arnold as Critic” 330. Ibid. 322. Impersonality: Seven Essays (Chicago; London: U of Chicago P, 2007) 91.

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always to supplement, though not always to substitute for, logic, but Cameron’s fine-grained analysis is worth quoting in full because it closely parallels my own conception of Arnold’s style of rhetorical impersonality, which is fully discussed in Chapter 5. Cameron addresses Emerson’s famed inconsistencies in these terms: [U]nlike a systematic thinker, Emerson makes no attempt to confer consistency on his designations, or even to establish connections among terms that occupy the same structural position in different essays. Intuition has depth; as the soul has depth; as Jesus’ name [… ] has depth; but whether these are different terms for the same phenomenon remains, I believe, intentionally unaddressed. The consequence for a reader is to encounter phenomena which clearly overlap without being clearly identical. And this nonidenticality seems a purposeful block to the summarizing definition which could characterize the impersonal, but which cannot do so here because the experiences in which it is shown to be situated eschew logical “comparative” relations.82

Cameron’s description of Emerson’s deliberately extralogical technique, in which he deploys structurally parallel terms in different contexts but without explicitly defining or identifying them as “comparative” equivalents, applies equally well to Arnold’s rhetorical technique.83 Perhaps it is enough to suggest here that the social and political “best self” of Culture and Anarchy reappears, under different names, as the critical best self of lucidity, disinterestedness, and seeing the object as in itself it really is, and as the religious best self of purity, charity, and sweet reasonableness. At the same time, Arnold repeatedly uses mathematics as a foil to his concrete, intuitive, empirical method. For instance, men such as St. Paul use many terms—“grace, new birth, justification”—in a literary way, Arnold claims, a “fluid and passing way,” in order to try “to describe approximately, but only approximately, what they have present before their mind, but do not profess that their mind does or can grasp exactly or adequately” (CPW 6.170). These terms, the stuff “of eloquence and poetry,” are then “taken in a fixed and rigid manner” by theologians, who blunderingly wield them “as if they were symbols with as definite and fully grasped a meaning as the names line or angle, and proceeded to use them on this supposition … as if they were scientific terms.” Once again, Arnold’s contempt for the pretenses of dogmatic theology (as of positivism and utilitarianism)—the “systematic philosophy” of scriptural and doctrinal exegesis— never flags. Though he intends his own biblical hermeneutics to harmonize with the findings of “our scientific friends,” an adequate exegesis must not seek to ape the formal methods of science, he says, but must be, like the language of the Bible itself, literary. He states this position forcefully in the “Preface” to Ibid. 92. Gianni Vattimo notes a similar device of implicit structural equivalencies in the

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rhetoric of Friedrich Nietzsche, who also shares with Arnold an Emersonian influence. See Vattimo, Dialogues with Nietzsche, trans. William McCuaig (New York: Columbia UP, 2006) 54.

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Literature and Dogma, claiming that “letters meet a greater want in us than does logic,” and people “with small aptitude for abstruse reasoning” may yet gain through letters “some hold on sound judgment and useful knowledge, and may even clear up blunders committed, out of their very excess of talent, by the athletes of logic” (CPW 6.168–9). Intending to edify and instruct ordinary people, Arnold’s rhetorical style easily obscures his own methodical effort to situate his argument within the interstitial gaps of Victorian art, science, and religion. His position is not unlike the unmoving center of the Platonic circle, where aesthetics reflects an inverse image of beauty as a promise of suffering, where logic makes a return upon itself in paradox, and morality finds its practical end in an ethic of inaction. If the kind of critical injustice toward Arnold that Leavis describes is “illustrated at the most distinguished level” by Eliot and “in a much less respectable way by Raleigh,” then he finds it illustrated with “honest and forthright crudity” in J. M. Robertson’s Modern Humanists Reconsidered (1927).84 Robertson worthily succeeds the nineteenth-century athletes of logic, setting out, as he says, to make “an appraisement of Arnold’s capacity as a thinker” and “to weigh completely the question of Arnold’s competence as a theoretic critic.”85 After finding that here his “logic miscarries,” and there his “argument is finally a blind alley,” here he produces “a distressing promenade of fallacy,” and there he speaks “uncommon nonsense,” Robertson logically concludes by classifying Arnold with the many modern “practitioners of the Higher Charlatanism.”86 He searches diligently for Arnold’s “specifications of laws and methods by which the quality of any writing as literature can be tested,” but he only comes away “convinced that poets have changeable palates, but not critical systems.”87 Speaking more in sorrow than in anger, Robertson says, “Science in criticism may or may not be worth striving after: on any view, we do not get it from” Arnold, who, when faced with a complex problem, “blandly launches a bevy of graceful and sonorous formulas, and goes on ringing their changes, till the one oftenest used is claimed to have settled the question.”88 Arnold’s penchant for repetition is apparently a perennial irritant to critics. A more substantial point is found in Robertson’s claim, which prefigures Eliot’s, that it is “really a singular thing” that men like Arnold should “alternately treat morals aesthetically and aesthetics ethically. If we seek an explanation, it is hardly to be found save in the verdict that, strictly speaking, they do not

“Introduction,” On Bentham and Coleridge 37–8. Leavis’s remarks on Robertson also glance obliquely at Eliot, who repeatedly recommends Robertson’s work as a “painstakingly” adequate assessment of Arnold’s thought. See “Arnold and Pater” 382, “Frances Herbert Bradley” 401. 85 J. M. Robertson, Modern Humanists Reconsidered (London: Watts, 1927) 107, 120. 86 Ibid. 112, 120, 114, 116. 87 Ibid. 117, 120. 88 Ibid. 120, 118. 84

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competently think.”89 In Robertson’s view, Arnold thus seems to divorce ethics and aesthetics from thought. Leavis answers Robertson in terms that might apply equally well to the scientistic systematizers of several schools: The obtuseness manifested in the march of Robertson’s relentless logic has a clear relation to his demand for an equivalent logic in Arnold. And here we have the clue to the general unfairness from which Arnold has suffered: he has been judged by inappropriate criteria, as if he offered what he doesn’t, and as if a critic who fails of logical rigour and strictness of definition is left with no respectable function of intelligence that he might be performing.90

These 1962 remarks might be taken broadly as yet another configuration of the utilitarian-versus-romantic (or science-versus-twaddle) divide, although they also very likely take some of their color from Leavis’s ongoing embroilment in the Two Cultures debate with C. P. Snow, which smoldered on from 1959.91 When not defending the Arnoldian practice, Leavis seems to practice it. Arnold’s “business,” he claims, is not to “define the criteria he [is] concerned with, those by which we make the most serious kind of comparative judgement” but to “evoke them effectively (can we really hope for anything better?), and that, I think, he must be allowed to have done.”92 Leavis assumes a similar position himself in his famous exchange of letters with Wellek, who first asks him to “defend [his] position abstractly and to become conscious that large ethical, philosophical, and of course, ultimately, also aesthetic choices are involved.”93 Leavis replies, Ibid. 111. If Eliot draws on Robertson for this particular line of criticism, Robertson in turn seems to have drawn on such responses to Arnold as were articulated by Victorian contemporaries like John Tulloch, who, while admitting that there “is no reason why religion should not become a theme of belles-lettres … . And a theory of religion which not only professes to discard metaphysics, but at every step turns it out of the Temple with playful and incessant ridicule, lends itself happily to a literary method of treatment,” still claims that “our literary theologians have not been content with sober advances or new methods. They have espoused naturalistic theories as beyond question, and, while wishing to save religion, they enunciate principles subversive of all that has hitherto been supposed essential in religion. The very substructure of all Christian thought is not so much questioned as set aside. The idea of the Supernatural is scouted. It is disposed of not by argument but by apothegm.” See John Tulloch, Modern Theories in Philosophy and Religion (Edinburgh; London: William Blackwood, 1884) 282–3. For a recent reprise of this perennial criticism, see Maud Ellmann, The Poetics of Impersonality: T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester, 1987) 48–9. 90 “Introduction,” On Bentham and Coleridge 37–8. 91 For a useful review of the Leavis-Snow controversy and some of its broader intellectual implications, see Stefan Collini, ed., “Introduction,” The Two Cultures, by C. P. Snow (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge UP, 1998) vii–lxxi. 92 “Arnold as Critic” 325. 93 “A Letter, by René Wellek” 23. 89

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in recognizably empirico-Arnoldian terms, that “[t]he business of the literary critic is to attain a peculiar completeness of response and to observe a peculiarly strict relevance in developing his response into commentary; he must be on his guard against abstracting improperly from what is in front of him and against any premature or irrelevant generalizing—of it or from it.”94 While not dismissing out of hand the propriety of an ex post facto “theoretical statement” of “principles and abstractly formulable norms,” Leavis advises that criticism proper should instead “keep as close to the concrete as possible,” work “in terms of concrete judgements and particular analyses,” and always illustrate “concretely in comparison and analysis” and “by choice, arrangement, and analysis of concrete examples.”95 Even Leavis’s “sonorous formulas” are true to the repetitive Arnoldian original. Since there is little to be gained in needlessly multiplying quotations, a 1933 statement of his critical credo may stand for all: “It is of little use to discuss values if the sense for value in the concrete—the experience and perception of value—is absent,” for “discussion of values in the abstract, engaging nowhere, remains a barren academic exercise.”96 Leavis again shows the basic continuity between Arnold’s method and his own in this similarly representative passage: “The flexibility, the sensitiveness, the constant delicacy of touch for the concrete in all its complexity, the intelligence that is inseparably one with an alert and fine sense of value—these qualities,” he says, “however severe the criticism to be brought against him, are exemplified by Arnold; and it is the reader of literary critical training who should find them a challenge to appreciation.”97 Leavis’s later critics leave largely untouched this facet of his critical method. Mulhern, for instance, claims that the “literary canons established by Leavis became highly influential, his critical methods even more so,” and that “fundamental and comprehensive challenges to [Leavis’s] central aesthetic, cultural, and social presuppositions were and still are exceedingly rare.”98 While Mulhern’s work mounts just such a comprehensive challenge to the “persistent strength of Scrutiny’s hegemony in English criticism,” he appears only to aim at the cultural and social “presuppositions” of this hegemony, not at the “loosely formulated methodology of critical practice” associated with Leavis, which “in company with Ricardian ‘practical criticism’ and the methods of the New Critics, was more or less naturalized as the technically necessary approach to literary language.”99 This Leavisite method he seems rather to commend, and he also notes that New Left stalwarts Anderson and Eagleton “both have emphasized and paid tribute to this dimension” of Leavis’s work, and that while both they and “A Reply, by F. R. Leavis” 32. Ibid. 33–4. 96 “Introduction: The Standards of Criticism,” Towards Standards of Criticism: 94

95

Selections from The Calendar of Modern Letters, 1925–27 (Bristol: Wishart, 1933) 9, 7. 97 “Introduction,” On Bentham and Coleridge 36–8. 98 The Moment of Scrutiny 318–19. 99 Ibid. 329, 328.

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Williams “have been considerably more synoptic and probing in their analyses” of Leavis’s ideas about the nature of literature and its place in social life, “none of them has focused centrally and in detail on this dimension of their subject.”100 Some counterevidence for this last claim is examined in the next chapter, where the empirical, antisystematic tendency in Leavis’s critical Arnoldianism is interrogated, but Mulhern seems quite clearly to value the rigor (if not the content) of Scrutiny’s discriminations. These standards seem to persist in Mulhern’s more recent lament over the habit of academic cultural studies to mistake “the forms and practices of the culture industry” for “the conditions of autonomous popular activity,” a collapse in critical categories that to Mulhern’s eye proves that “uncritical populism”—a phase of 1990s cultural studies—“is not simply naïve, it is objectively conformist.”101 Collini, on the other hand, faults those performers of cultural studies who “automatically stigmatize an interest in the writings of the most articulate and influential intellectuals of a society as ‘elitist,’” and by whom “any tough-minded criticism or detailed individual study [is] fatally branded as ‘antitheoretical discourse.’”102 He describes cultural studies as a discipline “unwilling to accept the responsibility for making exclusions” and suggests that “until hard choices are made about some connections being more persuasive and interesting than others, and until the aggressive programmatic manifestos are matched by illuminating and thickly textured particular studies,” one might be best “to suspend judgement on the likely long-term fruitfulness of the approaches recommended” by cultural studies.103 For all the difference between them, Arnold’s more or less negligible residual influence animates these contemporary intellectual attitudes. Thus far, the general drift of Arnold criticism, from his own time until the interwar period, largely figures him—Leavis notably excepted—as a bon viveur who rather toyed with ideas than mastered them with rigorous systematicity. To put it broadly, Arnold’s particular political positions rarely crop up as the explicit object of his critics’s attention in these highbrow quizzings, except insofar as his positions are mediated or inflected by contemporary theological disputes, but in the 1930s the conceptual terrain of the criticism begins to change markedly, and by the 1960s the modern image of Arnold appears fully formed: Arnold as chief symbol, in Tom Nairn’s phrase, of “English ideology,” that armature of state hegemony the analytical unmasking of which will occupy a generation of leftist intellects.104 Isobel Armstrong, writing at the centenary of Arnold’s death, said that “one could argue that the Arnold we know … did not exist before the 1930s, that he came into being as the construct of pre- and post-second world war liberals who Ibid. 329n45, 329n46. Culture/Metaculture 139. 102 “Grievance Studies: How Not to Do Cultural Criticism,” English Pasts: Essays in 100

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History and Culture (Oxford; New York, Oxford UP, 1999) 264. 103 Ibid. 265. 104 Tom Nairn, “English Literary Intelligentsia,” Bananas, ed. Emma Tennant (London: Blond and Briggs, 1977) 67.

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were seeking an alternative to communism.”105 On this line, one could also argue that the literary Cold Warriors draft Arnold as their free-world standard bearer in order to deploy him as the leading exponent of a depoliticized, elite, highbrow cultural centrality, although again Armstrong reminds us “that this extrapolation of Arnoldian thought ignores some of the best and the worst in it.” The left critique of Arnold then reacts to and crystallizes around this very caricature. Armstrong’s analysis makes clear that the problem of Arnold’s politics is perhaps less the supposed elitism of his views than the ease with which his views could lend themselves to elitist colorings by right-wing ideologues. [A]s Dover Wilson realised [in his introduction to the 1932 Cambridge edition of Culture and Anarchy], there is a minority reading of Arnold to be made which does not exclude “the people.” But his views could be used in the service of an elite and oppressive high culture. This could be done because the detachments which Arnold tried so hard to make “living and moving” could collapse into categories which were external, formal, static, and contentless, as Hegel saw of the stoic. Such contentlessness is compounded by the consciousness which fractures the world into the “true” and the “real,” as Marx saw.106

The obscurities in Armstrong’s final points need not detain us, but the terms in which she frames them are relevant to the present discussion because they nicely illustrate the place that G. W. F. Hegel and Karl Marx come to fill in some twentieth-century criticisms of Arnold, reprising, in their ways, the roles that Mill, Comte, Jeremy Bentham, or Charles Darwin once played for Arnold’s nineteenth-century critics. These Victorian grands récits are thus succeeded by twentieth-century versions, totalizing philosophical systems of global explanatory amplitude. As the next chapter shows, a notable hallmark of the British New Left is its “addiction”—to borrow Arnold’s phrase—“to an abstract system” (CPW 5.109), in this case a program-fetishistic adherence to the theories of such Marxist epigones as Louis Althusser, Antonio Gramsci, Theodor W. Adorno, Antonio Negri, Michel Foucault, and others.

105 Isobel Armstrong, “Arnoldian Repression: Two Forgotten Discourses of Culture,” News from Nowhere 5 (June 1988): 37. 106 Ibid. 59.

Chapter 4

Culture Hates Hatred: Critical Antihumanism and the Fate of Arnold It is at this point, on the basis of a different social ethic, that one becomes awkward. How We Are Governed, as an explanation of democracy, is an expression of the idea of service at its psychological limit. The breakthrough to ‘How we govern ourselves’ is impossible, on the basis of such a training: the command to conformity, and to respect for authority as such, is too strong. —Raymond Williams, Culture and Society It is culture that is the genuinely revolutionary force in society, for culture “seeks to do away with classes,” and tends to create out of actual society an ideal order of liberty, equality, and fraternity. —Northrop Frye, “The Problem of Spiritual Authority in the Nineteenth Century”

In the arc of Arnold’s critical reception traced in Chapter 3, from the Victorian athletes of logic to the interwar moment of Scrutiny, the commonest grounds for his critics’ attacks generally reduce to the logical and the ideological, with ideology gradually moving along an axis from religion to culture. A ready, almost automatic transposition occurs, in either direction, between the logical and ideological registers, the one proving the other. Their mutual reinforcement appears, for instance, in Arnold’s obituary notice in the London Times, which reports that “to many he seemed to destroy the substance of religion, while he preserved merely a kind of aroma or tradition,” yet even those “who deplore his rejection of dogma, and see a lamentable want of logic in his argument, can admire the spirituality of his work, and the salutary manner in which he constantly dwells on the importance of ‘conduct’ in life.”1 In the logical-moral calculus of the Times, to reject dogma is to “destroy the substance of religion,” and this is a highly illogical (not to say wicked) operation on Arnold’s part. Doctrinal orthodoxy’s critique of Arnold’s religious liberalism has held to this fundamental ground ever since, thus revealing a remarkable stability through time—from W. J. Courthope to T. S. Eliot to Maurice Cowling—that perhaps proves no more than that ossification defines a steady state. Within this critical line, inferences regarding Arnold’s character are drawn with an unconscious assurance that is sometimes breathtaking. The Times obituary generously subsumes Arnold’s logical shortcomings under his constant care for “conduct,” but other Victorian voices are both much more censorious and more apt “Death of Mr. Matthew Arnold,” London Times, 17 Apr. 1888, 10.

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to overlook or misread the place of Arnold’s “renouncement.” To these critics, his notions of culture and critical disinterestedness amount to no more than formulas for egoistic self-indulgence—“transcendental excuses for laziness,” in the words of one early reviewer2—and his weakness in turn is taken as a typical trait of the despairing apostate. Surely atheism lurks behind the “thin abstractions” and “loose phrases” that clothe Arnold’s thought, which “as a whole [is] ambitious, vague, and perverse” and certainly not conducive to what Henry Sidgwick identifies as the imperatives of “religion and self-sacrifice” or to what F. H. Bradley promotes as “My Station and Its Duties.”3 Similarly, the morose, unmanly posturing that some critics find in Arnold’s poems, with their predominant tone of impotence and frustration, follows as the logical consequence of his spiritless infidelity. According to Lionel Trilling, “a simpler religious age” would have taken Arnold’s poetry “to mean an abandonment by God”—a subtext that still animates much of the early commentary on the verse, as Chapter 5 shows—and since “the misery of living in a pointless universe which makes pointless everything in it” is the hallmark of Arnold’s verse (and of his age, in Trilling’s view), so all his ancillary sins must follow from this cardinal defect, again from the point of view of religious orthodoxy.4 With the gradual rise of Marxist critique in Britain after World War II, the litany of Arnold’s objectionable symptoms remains more or less the same, with a few notable additions, but the New Left’s nosology now points decisively to a politically reactionary basis for Arnold’s disease. Where Sidgwick thinks Arnold’s supposed Hegelianism “excellently fitted to reconcile antagonisms” within society and so is “vexed” to find him instead “dropping from the prophet of an ideal culture into a more or less prejudiced advocate of the actual,” Arnold’s later New Left critics also see in his fundamental commitment to the form of the bourgeois state the cause of all the old symptoms, and Arnold’s detached, disinterested pose and his antisystem bias here become not signs of a sick soul but tactics to subvert critical thought and direct action.5 This chapter tracks these continuities and discontinuities in the Arnoldian caricatures as his critics deploy them (some say redeploy them) in the politically charged cultural climate of the 1960s and 1970s.6 The genealogical portion of the book concludes with the examination of Charles Kingsley, “Recent Poetry, and Recent Verse,” Fraser’s Magazine 39 (May 1849): 579. 3 F. H. Bradley, Ethical Studies (1876) (New York: G. E. Stechert, 1927) 283, 281, 145; Henry Sidgwick, “The Prophet of Culture,” Macmillan’s Magazine 16.94 (Aug. 1867): 272, 280. 4 Matthew Arnold (New York: Columbia UP, 1939) 84. 5 Sidgwick, “The Prophet of Culture” 280. 6 For a discussion of the interwar politicization of Arnold and Arnoldianism, see Francis Mulhern, “‘Teachers, Writers, Celebrities’: Intelligentsias and Their Histories,” New Left Review 1.126 (Mar.–Apr. 1981): 43–59; Isobel Armstrong, “Arnoldian Repression: Two Forgotten Discourses of Culture,” News from Nowhere 5 (June 1988): 36–63; Francis Mulhern, “Intellectual Corporatism and Socialism: The Twenties and After,” News from 2

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some postcolonial caricatures of Arnold, which share many New Left features, particularly in an ever more exclusive attention to “Culture” and almost complete ignorance of “Conduct.” In 1960 the New Left Review begins to publish the steady stream of articles that eventually revolutionizes the left-historiographical criticism of British culture and society. Leading the second wave of the NLR charge is a phalanx of young Marxist “zealots,” as Donald Winch describes them, angrier young men “who entered New Left circles after 1968” armed with all the “scientistic rigour” of the new Gramscian and Althusserian theoretical paradigms and mobilizing concepts then in vogue.7 These hard-thinking theorists extend and to some degree subvert the native tradition of literary socialism, epitomized in the 1950s and early 1960s by the works of Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, and E. P. Thompson, tainted though these latter were, as Winch says, with the -isms of the age, “romantic populism, moralism, subjectivism, and literary idealism.”8 Among the NLR’s notable stable of intellectuals—the all-maleness of this avant-garde is notable— are Tom Nairn, Perry Anderson, and Robin Blackburn, with Chris Baldick, Francis Mulhern, and Terry Eagleton also participating. Anderson writes little about Arnold. He admits to a certain “indiscriminate rejection of English cultural traditions” in his own work, a tendency first pointed out by Thompson and further confirmed by Isaac Deutscher’s detection of “national nihilism” in Anderson’s essays.9 Collini also notes Anderson’s “constant (and, in its way, parochial) dismissiveness of English culture as incorrigibly sterile and hidebound.”10 Anderson nevertheless helps to set the scene for later New Left engagements with Arnold by criticizing the general absence of theory within Victorian Liberal thought, in some ways simply echoing Leslie Stephen’s 1902 observation that Liberalism had failed to construct “a new theory, based on scientific observation of modes of development of the whole social structure.”11 While Anderson readily acknowledges the place of the “social critics of Victorian capitalism,” as classically figured in Williams’s Culture and Society (1958), he laments that theirs was “a literary tradition that never generated a cumulative conceptual system.”12 Britain’s social development never brought about a true Nowhere 5 (June 1988): 78–85; Stefan Collini, Arnold (Oxford; New York: Oxford UP, 1988) 111–13; Francis Mulhern, Culture/Metaculture (London; New York: Routledge, 2000) 7–28, 42–8; George Watson, Politics and Literature in Modern Britain (London: Macmillan, 1977) 135–52. 7 “Mr. Gradgrind and Jerusalem,” Economy, Polity, and Society: British Intellectual History, 1750–1950, ed. Stefan Collini, Richard Whatmore, and Brian Young (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000) 249. 8 Ibid. 250. 9 English Questions (London: New York: Verso, 1992) 4–5. 10 Common Reading: Critics, Historians, Publics (Oxford; New York: Oxford UP, 2008) 191. 11 Leslie Stephen, “The Good Old Cause,” Nineteenth Century 51 (1902): 13. 12 English Questions 58.

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bourgeois revolution, according to the famous Anderson-Nairn theses, and for this reason the “dominant class” was “never forced,” as Anderson puts it, “to produce a counter-totalizing body of thought by the danger of a revolutionary socialism.” Lacking the critical tensions of the revolutionary states on the Continent, “British culture was consequently characterized by an absent centre. Both classical sociology and Marxism were global theories of society, articulated in a totalizing conceptual system,” which is a “synthesis designed to capture the ‘structure of structures’—the social totality as such,” but the forces of British cultural hegemony were able to burke all intellectual tendencies in the direction of global theorizing.13 Collini paraphrases this New Left position in similar terms and, quoting Anderson himself, notes that like most left-wing intellectuals in Britain, F. R. Leavis also “fell far short of the ideal, above all because, hampered by his supposed ‘empiricism,’ he was unable to develop a sophisticated theoretical critique of his own society. But at least he was ‘oppositional’: ‘Leavis correctly sensed a cultural landscape of much mediocrity and conformity.’”14 Britain’s developmental peculiarity thus explains, in Anderson’s terms, both the retarded growth of British sociology in the nineteenth century and the NLR’s own inevitable resort to continental Marxists for a “totalizing conceptual system,” most notably to Jean Paul Sartre but also Louis Althusser, Antonio Gramsci, Georg Lukács, Lucien Goldmann, Georgi Plekhanov, and others. Anderson admits that the Hungarian theorist Lukács played a minor role in his own “intellectual formation,” and perhaps this inheritance appears most clearly in Anderson’s reference to 1920s Italy, where “the leading philosopher was a leisured rentier.”15 Even the most idealist member of the bourgeoisie can scarcely deny that one’s class position at least partly determines one’s philosophical position, and so the 1883 Ischian earthquake that killed Benedetto Croce’s parents and sister, buried him alive for days, and left him the sole heir of the family fortune was perhaps a boon to middle-class hegemony in the short run. At the same time, few reflective marxisant analysts would argue that programmatic reductions of the kind that Anderson deploys here do not risk obscuring more than they reveal. But then Lukács also works this same reductivist line when he dismisses Arthur Schopenhauer as a “bourgeois rentier” whose “Romantic-reactionary philosophy” of irrationalistic pessimism simply served as “an indirect apologetic of the capitalist social order.”16 In a parenthetical aside, Lukács also finds it “significant that Kierkegaard and Nietzsche also enjoyed an independence stemming from a private income which much resembled Schopenhauer’s.”17 13 “Components of the National Culture,” Student Power, ed. Alexander Cockburn and Robin Blackburn (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1969) 224–5. 14 Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006) 180; for quotations, see Anderson, English Questions 99, 100, 102. 15 English Questions 3, 10. 16 The Destruction of Reason (1953) trans. Peter Palmer (London: Merlin, 1980) 239, 243. 17 Ibid. 198.

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The two-dimensionality of such analyses is perhaps not the least of their dangers. In discussing the hypocrisies that sometimes flourish in the internally contradictory interstices of bourgeois society, Eric Hobsbawm, a European historian with leftist credentials as weighty as Lukács’s, notes that in the nineteenth century, “[t]he most suitable fate for a philosopher was to be born the son of a banker, like George Lukács.”18 More recently (and more generally), philosopher Gianni Vattimo describes Lukács as “emblematic” of a phase of leftist thought that is “dominated by schematic historicist positions” and according to which Nietzsche, for instance, “represents a stage in the descent of bourgeois culture into irrationalism during the age of imperialism. Lukács sees Nietzsche as a mere symptom of bourgeois culture’s irrationalist crisis, in the same way that the artistic avant-gardes of the early twentieth century are.”19 To Vattimo, “Lukács’s scheme has lost its relevance for reasons having to do not only with its intrinsic theoretical weakness but also with the revision of Marxism in recent decades that has led to a revaluation of the ‘subversive’ impact of the avant-garde, and a revival of interest in Nietzsche even in the culture of ‘the left.’” One could take Vattimo’s comments to authorize a similar revaluation of Arnold’s thought, while Hobsbawm’s remark is reminiscent of the sometimes ferocious internecine struggles within Victorian Liberalism that so delighted reactionary observers like W. J. Courthope and that reproduced themselves in the British New Left of the 1960s and 1970s with equal vigor, Thompson’s The Poverty of Theory (1978) perhaps representing the zenith.20 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital: 1848–1875 (New York: Vintage, 1996) 232. Gianni Vattimo, Dialogue with Nietzsche, trans. William McCuaig (New York:

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Columbia UP, 2006) 145. 20 E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory, or an Orrery of Errors (London: Merlin, 1995). The tradition of a self-cannibalizing left continues today in spite of the apparently raised stakes, and it sometimes yields more heat than light. For example, the political theorist Ernesto Laclau characterizes the postmodernist Slavoj Žižek’s discussion of “the opposition between class struggle” and “what Žižek calls postmodern identity politics” as “totally insufficient” and “fundamentally flawed,” and he calls this “crude version” of Marxism “a new example of the way in which [Žižek’s] discourse is schizophrenically split between a highly sophisticated Lacanian analysis and an insufficiently deconstructed traditional Marxism.” Indeed, Žižek’s “anti-capitalism is mere empty talk,” Laclau claims; many of Žižek’s assertions “mean absolutely nothing,” and his class-struggle sloganeering is a mere “succession of dogmatic assertions without the slightest effort to explain the centrality of the category of class for the understanding of contemporary societies.” The notion of “overcoming the capitalist regime” meant something when mouthed by Marx or Lenin or Trotsky or Luxemburg, Laclau asserts, “[b]ut in the work of Žižek that expression means nothing—unless he has a secret strategic plan of which he is very careful not to inform anybody.” Laclau even suspects “that the notion of class is brought into Žižek’s analysis as a sort of deus ex machina to play the role of the good guys against the multicultural devils.” In any event, and before he can judge what Žižek means by calling for the replacement of the present liberal democratic regimes with something “thoroughly different,” Žižek will need to define his terms, Laclau says: “Before that, I cannot even know what Žižek is talking about—and the more this exchange progresses, the more suspicious I become

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To cultural and political conservatives from Courthope to Cowling, a divided left is a joy forever, and they are “always ready to seize with delight upon those who presume to criticize radical orthodoxies,” as Collini ruefully notes, apparently no stranger himself to “being enfolded in the warm embrace of those whose attitudes [he] does not share.”21 Theoretical Nullity Of the many cultural critiques produced in the New Left turn, however, Baldick’s The Social Mission of English Criticism (1983) deserves mention for its sustained assault on Arnold.22 Baldick argues that political conservatism inheres in Arnold’s “practical,” antitheoretical approach to both sociocultural that Žižek himself does not know either.” Laclau concludes that “Žižek’s thought is not organized around a truly political reflection but is, rather, a psychoanalytic discourse which draws its examples from the politico-ideological field … . The only thing one gets from him are injunctions to overthrow capitalism or to abolish liberal democracy, which have no meaning at all. Furthermore, his way of dealing with Marxist categories consists in inscribing them in a semi-metaphysical horizon which, if it were accepted—a rather unlikely event—would put the agenda of the Left back fifty years.” In fact, there is a “short circuit that takes place whenever Žižek tries to combine his Lacanianism with his Hegelianism,” and “Žižek’s suggestion of a direct struggle for overthrowing capitalism and abolishing liberal democracy [is] only a prescription for political quietism and sterility.” See Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, and Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London; New York: Verso, 2000) 202–6, 289–93. 21 Arnold 90; “Afterword to the Clarendon Paperback Edition,” Matthew Arnold: A Critical Portrait (Oxford; New York: Clarendon, 1994) 125. 22 Baldick’s hostility toward Arnold in The Social Mission of English Criticism seems to me to be beyond dispute, which is what renders Laurence W. Mazzeno’s assessment of Baldick’s work particularly perplexing. Having no sooner noted the “intense negative criticism” that Arnold has attracted since the late 1970s and deplored both “the disdain most poststructuralists display toward Arnold” and their “tendency to denigrate” his critical positions, Mazzeno then promptly commends Baldick’s “sound judgments,” particularly in “[d]isavowing the primacy of poststructuralism,” and he praises The Social Mission of English Criticism as “one of the finest scholarly studies of its kind published in the latter half of the century.” This conclusion might follow if one were taking an enemy-of-myenemy line of argument, but when Mazzeno then claims that “Baldick argues throughout that the Arnoldian view provides a sound basis for the practice of criticism both in his own day and in the succeeding century,” one begins to suspect that Mazzeno has somehow been misled, perhaps by the faulty summary of a hastily skimming graduate researcher or some such mishap. A certain vagueness in his summary of Baldick’s position suggests as much, as in his claim that Baldick thinks that “[t]he belief that criticism could somehow affect the social order” can be traced to Arnold, whose “systematic formulation of this high-minded role for the critic” left a lasting impression on Eliot, Richards, and the Leavises. See Lawrence W. Mazzeno, Matthew Arnold: The Critical Legacy (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 1999) 97, 103, 116.

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and literary-critical issues, and he rightly sees the related and very important place of exemplarity in Arnold’s thought: The study of elevated literary models, it was claimed, could soften the stridency of self-interest, leaving some leeway for humility and self-control. In literature as in religious ideology, Arnold sought to replace repressive and restrictive rules, which only invited rebellion, with ennobling examples and models which invited conformity through self-restraint, conscience, and the subordination of a “lower” to a “higher” self.23

This is a fair summary of the Arnoldian “Conduct” line, but Baldick then proceeds to interpret Arnold’s purported aim within the conceptual grid of a New Left hermeneutics of suspicion, and this theoretical paradigm leads him to construct, by means of highly selective quotations, a caricature of Arnold that reproduces the excesses of the nineteenth-century athletes of logic. In Baldick’s programmatic construction, Arnold stands forth again as the selfish, indolent quietist with a do-nothing policy of practical disengagement, but now his pursuit of “innocent language” masks a reactionary policy deliberately calculated to neutralize popular political power, an insidious bourgeois-hegemonic subversion by which political and direct action are “successively substituted, postponed, concealed, and quarantined.”24 Read in context, of course, Arnold is merely advocating his usual “free disinterested treatment of things,” a posture predicated on critical nonpartisanship, for how can a partisan like William Cobbett, he asks, fail to “be misunderstood, blackened as he is with the smoke of a lifelong conflict in the field of political practice?” or like Ruskin, “after his pugnacious political economy?” (CPW 3.275). Arnold’s point perhaps generalizes to all classes of doctrinaire ideologues. “Where shall we find language innocent enough,” he asks, “how shall we make the spotless purity of our intentions evident enough, to enable us to say to the political Englishman that the British Constitution itself … [is] a colossal machine for the manufacture of Philistines?” Baldick shades the ironic context of Arnold’s remarks in order to force the general conclusion that Arnold is an “anti-intellectual” who “found it convenient to prevaricate,” a position that might reasonably lead a reader to conclude that Baldick is cribbing the criticisms of Arnold’s more malicious Victorian antagonists.25 He equates Arnold’s “anti-theoretical tendencies” with “antiintellectualism” and claims that “theoretical vagueness becomes a positive advantage” in Arnold’s programmatic conservatism.26 Where critics once found Arnold’s logical inconsistencies and discursive ambiguities a mere sign of intellectual infirmity, whether pitiable or vexatious, Baldick sees a darker design of deliberate obscurantism in Arnold’s “suppression of any new encounter between 25 26 23 24

The Social Mission of English Criticism 229. Ibid. 42. Ibid. 49. Ibid. 24–5.

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ideas and practice.” By means of his convenient prevarications, Baldick claims, Arnold seeks to neutralize political dissent by “reducing ideas to impotence,” confident that his authoritarian ideals “would be resurrected from their suspended animation at the fringes of powerful establishments [such as the English School at Cambridge, no doubt, or the editorial board of ACTA], when the time was ripe.”27 Bill Bell rightly notes that “for Baldick Arnold’s linguistic ambiguity is ultimately no more than a diversionary tactic to draw attention away from his ‘real programme’—the preservation of the very same values that are to emerge time after time in his faithful disciples,” such as Eliot, Leavis, the jailers of the Birmingham Six, Allan Bloom, and so forth.28 The noted Victorianist scholar Josephine Guy, in a recent retrospective article, criticizes some of the acolytes of the “new (post) modern, politically aware English studies” that emerged in the 1980s for their “tendency to be highly selective, to the point of misrepresentation, in their use of contemporary evidence.”29 Baldick’s work seems to offer an example of the scholarship that Guy’s understatement chides. While Baldick claims that the “very real divergences” between the positions of Arnold, Eliot, Richards, and the Leavises “need not be artificially played down in order to enforce a continuity between them,” such down-playing becomes precisely the method used in his study.30 The “common ground is substantial enough” among these cultural critics, he claims, but it appears to extend no further than “to the importance, that is, of literary criticism as a discipline of considerable practical importance for a civilization at a turning-point.” Behind these rather insipid formulations, however, a more doctrinaire program seems to animate Baldick’s work. He admits the “necessarily selective and partial” character of his study, but in fact his quotations from Arnold are often so fragmentary and his deployment of Eliot’s distortions of Arnold’s ideas so tendentious that the net effect can fairly be called a deliberate misrepresentation.31 He appears to be less interested in “seeking to follow a particular ‘line’ in the development of criticism,” as he describes it, than in imposing on his highly selective evidence a polemical line of his own, constructing in the process a just-so genealogy of literary-cultural hegemony. Baldick’s caricature of the antiintellectual Arnold unfortunately even misleads later commentators, such as Gerald Graff, who claims that “[r]eason for Arnold always verges threateningly on ‘speculative opinion,’ the sort of thing cultivated by Jews, Socinians, and other rootless types presumably outside the main stream of ‘human life,’” which is why Ibid. 24, 48–9. Bill Bell, “The Function of Arnold at the Present Time,” Essays in Criticism 47.3

27 28

(summer 1997): 210–11. 29 Josephine Guy, “Specialization and Social Utility: Disciplining English Studies,” The Organization of Knowledge in Victorian Britain, ed. Martin Daunton (Oxford; New York: Oxford UP, 2005) 200–201. 30 The Social Mission of English Criticism 232. 31 Ibid. 16.

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“grappling with a problem for Arnold always means finding a way to keep rational analysis of it within bounds while using ritualistically repeated slogans to conceal contradictions.”32 The exiguous basis for Graff’s imputation of Arnold’s racism will be taken up below. For now, his remarks simply illustrate Baldick’s influence: “My argument in this essay,” Graff disclaims, “is heavily indebted to Baldick” and to his “excellent critique of the Arnoldian tradition,” an admission by Graff that seems to justify Bell’s assertion that “Baldick’s re-reading has become for many the standard text, rapidly adopted as valid institutional history” but one that in fact “comes dangerously close to the wilful fabrication of history as fiction.”33 One of Baldick’s examples deserves particular notice for the sheer interpretive violence it does to Arnold’s words. Paraphrasing what he conceives to be Arnold’s views, Baldick says, “Critical thought is always in some way inappropriate just at the moment, and is told to wait its turn, as in the astonishing motto Arnold recommended to the students of Liverpool: ‘Don’t think: try and be patient.’”34 In Baldick’s analysis, Arnold’s counsel, than which nothing more anti-intellectual can be conceived, might just as well be, “Speak flattery to power, O swinish multitude.” The original context for Arnold’s quotation is again worth reviewing, since it illustrates Baldick’s regular technique of strategic misrepresentation. Arnold indeed recommends nonthought in the speech he delivers in the fall of 1882 at University College, Liverpool: the city where he dies six years later. He is before an audience that includes the medical school faculty, and the speaker originally scheduled to address the gathering, a prominent surgeon and benefactor of the university, has withdrawn at the last moment, leaving Arnold to stand in. The 60-year-old inspector of schools opens his remarks by alluding to the disappointment that he imagines that his hearers must feel upon being presented with a “worn-out man of letters” instead of with the technical expert and scientist whom they had been led to expect. Then he shares a personal anecdote: Long ago, when I was occupying myself with things which seem now much out of my line, and when I had even thoughts of studying medicine, I fell in with two sentences of two eminent men in high honour with all surgeons and physicians, which made a deep impression on me, which I carefully wrote down, and have never forgotten. One is an exhortation by Sir Astley Cooper to a young student: “That, sir, is the way to learn your business; look for yourself, never mind what other people may say; no opinion or theories can interfere with information acquired from dissection.” The other is a saying, more brief, of the great John Hunter: “Don’t think; try and be patient.” (CPW 10.82)

32 Gerald Graff, “Arnold, Reason, and Common Culture,” Culture and Anarchy, by Matthew Arnold, ed. Samuel Lipman (New Haven; London: Yale UP, 1994) 191. 33 Graff, “Arnold, Reason, and Common Culture” 190n3; Bell, “The Function of Arnold at the Present Time” 214–15. 34 The Social Mission of English Criticism 42.

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Arnold then points out the moral of these quotations, of which the latter is perhaps not quite the “astonishing motto” of anticritical thought that Baldick purports it to be, since it dovetails with one of Arnold’s own endlessly ingeminated maxims. The brief saying of John Hunter, Arnold says, “points to the simplicity of truth, the simplicity with which things are seen when they are seen as they really are.” Arnold explains: “We labour at words and systems, and fancy that we are labouring at the things for the sake of which those exist. But in truth we are often only labouring at the artificial and difficult forms under which we choose to try to think things, and the things themselves must be seen simply if we are to see them at all.” His point—leaving the question of its relative profundity aside—cannot fairly be taken as proof of anti-intellectualism.35 Beyond that, his remarks can be read as the tired claptrap of a “worn-out man of letters” or can be thought to raise epistemological problems that still excite scholarly interest.36 Baldick also points out the connection between Arnold’s use of the intuitive, impressionistic touchstone method of literary analysis and its later deployment in his social and religious polemics.37 Once again, he touches an important and subtle point, one that Courthope notes as early as 1874 in his claim that much of Arnold’s rhetorical energy goes toward “giving an apparently general character to his own personal perceptions by crystallising them in precise forms of expression”—say, sweetness and light or Hellenism and Hebraism—and Courthope supposes it “plainly a mere device of rhetoric when [Arnold] ascribes the impression which he himself derives from the New Testament to the inspiration of the ‘Zeit-Geist’ or ‘Time-Spirit.’”38 Courthope’s is an oft-heard complaint in Arnold criticism. The scholar David G. Riede recently renewed the charge and in much the same terms in which it was framed five years before the publication of Baldick’s book, in Eagleton’s assertion that Arnold’s touchstone method yields a “theoretical nullity” because it is “an entirely intuitive response to some ghostly resonances supposedly common to a handful of poetic images ripped from their aesthetic and historical contexts” and then “solemnly elevated into an absolute measure of Friedrich Nietzsche makes the same point in 1880: “Do not want to see prematurely. —For as long as one is experiencing something one must give oneself up to the experience and close one’s eyes: that is to say, not be an observer of it while still in the midst of it. For that would disturb the absorption of the experience: instead of a piece of wisdom one would acquire from it indigestion.” See “The Wander and his Shadow,” Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986) 385–6. 36 As in, for instance, Lorrain Daston’s interesting work on the evolving conception of scientific objectivity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. See Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, eds., Objectivity (New York; Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2007); Lorraine Daston, “Attention and the Values of Nature in the Enlightenment,” The Moral Authority of Nature, ed. Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004) 100–126; Lorraine Daston, “Objectivity and the Escape from Perspective,” Social Studies of Science 22 (1997): 597–618; Lorraine Daston, “The Moral Economy of Science,” Osiris 10 (1995): 2–24. 37 The Social Mission of English Criticism 25. 38 Courthope, “Modern Culture” 410–11. 35

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literary evaluation.”39 From Eagleton’s ideological vantage point, which is also Baldick’s, the “theoretical nullity” of Arnold’s touchstones is no longer merely a mark of critical inadequacy but a deliberate bourgeois-hegemonic contrivance calculated to subvert critical reflection as such, and Eagleton also shares Baldick’s contempt for the transparent clumsiness of Arnold’s efforts in this line, as his Stracheyan sarcasm implies: Since literature, as we know, deals in universal human values rather than in such historical trivia as civil war, the oppression of women, or the dispossession of the English peasantry, it could serve to place in cosmic perspective the petty demands of working people for decent living conditions or greater control over their own lives, and might even with luck render them oblivious of such issues in their high-minded contemplation of eternal truths and beauties.40

To suppose that Eagleton is here mock-outmaneuvering a straw man of his own programmatic design, crying crocodile tears the while, would be to impute an improbable cynicism to an otherwise distinguished critic and theorist of ideological aesthetics. A likelier gloss might show that he is simply “taking critical stock at a remove from the actual reading” of Arnold, as Leavis describes it, and mistaking a Strachey-Eliot caricature for the genuine article.41 The tone of Eagleton’s analysis of Arnold’s thought in Criticism and Ideology (1978) seems strongly to suggest this earlier influence, although he naturally shares the standard New Left presuppositions regarding Arnold’s hidden bourgeois-hegemonic agenda. Although immensely fruitful in other ways, the reductions demanded by the New Left critique clearly show their limitations in Eagleton’s analysis, in which Arnold’s contribution to the project of “ensuring the survival of private property” entails “distracting the masses from their immediate commitments.”42 Eagleton similarly detects in Culture and Anarchy “a drive to deepen the spiritual hegemony of the middle class” and to “convert” the Philistines “into a truly hegemonic class.”43 Although Arnold’s “notion of class hegemony” is “theoretically invalid” from a left perspective, he claims, it is nonetheless “this ideological necessity which underlies Arnold’s apparently altruistic efforts to ‘Hellenize’ his stiff-necked fellow bourgeois.”44 Arnold’s agenda reveals itself, he says, in his efforts—“the final resort of a society in extreme ideological crisis”—to promote poetry to a place of ideological preeminence and to replace “criticism with consolation, the analytic with the affective, the subversive with the 39 See David G. Riede, Matthew Arnold and the Betrayal of Language (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1988) 7; Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (London: Verso, 1978) 108. 40 Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983) 25. 41 Leavis, “Arnold as Critic,” Scrutiny 7.3 (Dec. 1938): 322. 42 Literary Theory 26. 43 Criticism and Ideology 106–7, 104. 44 Ibid. 106–7, 105.

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sustaining,” a project that ultimately produces “less a particular literary practice than the mode of operations of ideology in general.”45 As in Mulhern’s notion of metacultural discourse, Arnold again manages to define, for Eagleton, both the genus and the species: a critic ideological in himself and the cause of ideology in others. Eagleton sees in Arnold’s antisystem bias the desire (to vary Eliot’s phrase once more) to divorce politics from thought: “Arnold correctly perceives that ideologies establish themselves chiefly through image and representation rather than through systems of doctrine,” and “it is precisely divisive rationalist debate over ‘doctrines’ which threatens to destroy those instinctual pieties and spiritual allegiances which ideology must nurture”—a threat figured most plainly in the Colenso affair—and this perception leads Arnold to try to stifle such debate.46 Leaving aside the ideological implications that Eagleton draws from his observations, one should note that he correctly perceives the prominence of images and representations over doctrinal systems in Arnold’s technique, a point that is more fully developed in Chapter 6. In Eagleton’s cultural-political schema, the consequence of Arnold’s “intuitive aesthetics” amounts to “a politically catastrophic vagueness” and a “theoretical nullity,” one that is nowhere more evident than in “Arnold’s ‘touchstones’ concept of criticism.” At the same time, Arnold’s efforts to establish the “spiritual hegemony” of literature succeed so well, according to Eagleton, that he risks “liberalising out of existence the very ‘absolute’ moral values which in practice sustained bourgeois hegemony.”47 To prevent so dangerous an overshooting, Arnold produces his religious works, in which he declares that a “Hellenized religion must become the handmaiden of a Hebraistic ethics.”48 With Eagleton’s critical stock coming from so far afield, it is not surprising that issues of “Conduct” and “renouncement” only enter the purview of his programmatic predictabilities in the form of existentialist mauvais foi, the sort of paradox of ideological self-mystification that claims that “my subordination to others is so effective that it appears to me in the mystified guise of governing myself.”49 Moral Impulse and Social Achievements In his acute New Left critique of the pre-Thatcherite cultural milieu, Nairn analyzes the political implications of English exceptionalism, that is, “the peculiar 47 48 49 45

Ibid. 108. Ibid. 107–8. Ibid. 108–9. Ibid. 109. The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990) 25. For the hermeneutics of suspicion, see Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven: Yale UP, 1970); Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Hermeneutics of Suspicion,” Hermeneutics: Questions and Prospects, ed. Gary Shapiro and Alan Sica (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1984) 63ff. 46

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unity imposed upon England by the politico-cultural counter-revolution.”50 With the easy sweep of history that characterizes the NLR style at its best, Nairn describes “English Ideology” as an “indigenous English romanticism,” a form of “synthetic conservatism” that was cooked up by “the artificers of the system,” the “old landlord-merchant order,” that is, “the landed gentry and the traditional (or non-industrial) sector of the bourgeoisie.”51 Their “system” or “apparatus” of “romantic-national conservatism” produced England’s ideological “mythcommunity” or “legend-world,” Nairn says, a rural-pastoral social imaginary that “was of necessity anti-machine, anti-money, and anti-city. It was not—of course— anti-bourgeois or designed to impede the serious accumulation of capital.”52 The last point crucially marks the horizon within which Britain’s native Socialist tradition pitches its critique. English literature naturally plays a leading role “in this incredible ideological empire,” and Nairn derives a line of “conservative hegemony” that passes “downwards, like the secret genetic code of the English intelligentsia,” from its roots in Burke, Wordsworth, and Coleridge to Carlyle, Ruskin, and Morris, with collateral filiations running from George Eliot and Charles Dickens, and further down “through the profoundly significant Landbevölkerung of Thomas Hardy, to the Life-enhancing values of D. H. Lawrence; Matthew Arnold’s idea of an organic, civilizing Culture down to Scrutiny and F. R. Leavis’s sermons on the identity of Literature and Life. One has considerable choice.”53 Such choice might sound considerable, but the line seems bred out by the midtwentieth century and reduces in Nairn’s analysis to alternate inflections of LeftLeavisism, the Hoggart, Williams, and Thompson varieties. Nairn asserts that Leavis’s “Great Tradition has positively resisted and ousted ‘reason,’ as something irrelevant, or damaging, to the idiom of conservative romanticism.”54 In other words, Leavis divorces the Great Tradition from thought. The only native intellectual tradition ever to mount a serious challenge to the “profound resistance” of the anti-intellectual English Ideology has a brief flowering, according to Nairn, in the late-nineteenth-century “English Hegelianism” of T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley, and Bernard Bosanquet. Nairn’s account of this attempt to impart “philosophical system and dignity to the English universe—to frame a theory worthy (as they conceived it) of the moral impulse and social achievements of Victorian England”—reads like a cautionary tale told for the edification of his NLR cohorts, since the Victorian Hegelians are now “vanished from the English cultural memory entirely,” and oblivion is surely a powerful mobilizing concept. A plangent Tom Nairn, “English Literary Intelligentsia,” Bananas, ed. Emma Tennant (London: Blond and Briggs, 1977) 75. 51 Ibid. 67, 63. 52 Ibid. 63, 72, 66, 64, 67. 53 Ibid. 75, 69, 64. For the up-to-date pedigree, see Tom Nairn, “Introduction: 21st Century Hindsight,” The Break-Up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism, 3rd ed. (Altona, Victoria: Common Ground, 2003) xxx. 54 “English Literary Intelligentsia” 76. 50

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note of nostalgia infuses Nairn’s narrative of opportunity missed, for with these Hegelian moralizers vanishes “most of the likely basis for the diffusion of Marxism among English intellectuals (in an other than ghettoised fashion).” It is probably safe to say that the New Left tradition itself will not soon “vanish from the English cultural memory entirely” and that its worthiness to frame the moral impulse and social achievements of the antihegemonic movements of pre-Thatcherite Britain is assured, if only in the formulation that Arnold made famous: “‘They went forth to the war,’ Ossian says most truly, ‘but they always fell’” (CPW 3.346). Perhaps the real wonder is that Marxism ever found its way into the British social imaginary at all without the enabling armature of Bradley’s “harsh dogmatism and neo-Hegelian nonsense,” as one critic terms it.55 One could plausibly argue that if Marx had not constructed his materialist philosophy as a deliberate inversion of Hegelian idealism, Hegel would never have enjoyed such undue prominence in twentieth-century thought but would share equally the relative obscurity of other post-Kantian German philosophers, such as Schelling and Fichte. Nevertheless, in Nairn’s view, Hegel’s influence in Britain was sadly effaced shortly after 1900 “by another chapter in the conservative counter-revolution of ideas,” now in the form of the nascent analytical-philosophy movement of the Bertrand RussellG. E. Moore-Ludwig Wittgenstein triumvirate, “intellectual reactionaries” all, Nairn says, who “turned philosophy into a harmless anti-theoretical pursuit, capable of presiding over the National Myth-world hand in hand with Literature.”56 In Nairn’s New Left narrative, then—and the description generalizes to this generation of NLR critics—Arnoldian “Literature” renders its antitheoretical (read, non-Marxist) service to the cause of bourgeois cultural hegemony by interposing idealistic and humanistic mystifications between the victims of capitalist exploitation and the cumulative and totalizing conceptual system that could otherwise ground an emancipatory discourse and foster a revolutionary movement for social and economic justice. Mulhern implies that Collini’s brand of intellectual history serves an analogous Arnoldian purpose in the New Labour mystifications now prevailing, and he speaks as fondly as Nairn of the Victorian Hegelianism and “neo-Idealism” of Green, which he says held the field until “the Arnoldian project” was revived in the 1920s with the dissipation of Modernist energies.57 During the period of “Green’s ascendancy, Arnold’s project survived only as an idea,” but “in the generalized 55 Anthony Hartley, A State of England (London: Hutchinson, 1963) 23, qtd. in Collini, Absent Minds 166. 56 “English Literary Intelligentsia” 76. 57 Francis Mulhern, The Moment of Scrutiny 18–19. Anderson is notably less sentimental than Nairn and Mulhern regarding the “aqueous Hegel” that was “innocently adopted” by Bradley, Bosanquet, and Green “in their quest for philosophical assistance to shore up the traditional Christian piety of the Victorian middle class.” In Anderson’s opinion, this short-lived “anachronism” merely indicated “the retarded preoccupations of its milieu.” See Anderson, English Questions 58–9.

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crisis of the Victorian order that set in after the First World War, its prospects were suddenly transformed,” Mulhern claims; the “Arnoldian programme was revitalized,” and Arnold again becomes a useful tool of bourgeois hegemony in its “categorical dissolution of politics.”58 Mulhern identifies the start of this reactionary retrenchment with the short-lived literary journal The Calendar of Modern Letters in the late 1920s and with Leavis’s founding in the early 1930s of Scrutiny.59 With trademark NLR breadth, Mulhern analyzes not only the refurbished Arnoldian project of the Leavisites but also the analogous cultural reactions then occurring with Croce in Italy, Ortega y Gasset in Spain, Julien Benda in France, Thomas Mann and Arthur Möller van den Bruck in Germany, and others.60 “All of them,” Mulhern says, “wrote from and for the presumptive commitments of a received humane culture. Their respective understanding of this culture revealed a shared idealism,” although politically they were “rather elusive, for, in effect, their political options were emergency measures dictated finally by a commitment that was meta-political in character.”61 Nevertheless, no superficial programmatic differences can obscure what these thinkers all share, according to Mulhern, which is a common inclination “towards an authoritarian liberalism disengaged from the clashing social interests whose true moral measure it claimed exclusively to be.” In other words, these interwar cultural critics assume and encourage a (loosely defined) Arnoldian posture of critical detachment from the sphere of practical politics, a transcendental, “meta-political” position that unfortunately deploys an insufficiently Marx-enabling form of “idealism.” Mulhern extends his analysis of interwar Arnoldianism to the postwar version that embeds itself in university English departments and forms a crucial component of Cold War humanism. After World War II, with anticommunism particularly rampant in the United States, the agents of authoritarian liberalism, according to Mulhern, deploy a kind of Free-World Arnoldianism that is prominent in the thought of Cold War ideologues like Friedrich von Hayek, Leo Strauss, Joseph Schumpeter, and others.62 For example, Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1943) claims that capitalist society “creates, educates, and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest,” and this interest goes by the name of “the intellectual.”63 In Schumpeter’s model, the intellectual is necessarily an “outsider,” an “onlooker” with no “direct responsibility for practical affairs,” so his “main chance of asserting himself lies in his actual or potential

60 61 62

The Moment of Scrutiny 18, 311–12. Ibid. 15. Francis Mulhern, “Intellectual Corporatism and Socialism” 78–85. Ibid. 79. On the importance of this wave of “white emigration” to the development of postwar conservatism in the United States, see Anderson, English Questions 60–65; Anderson, Spectrum (London: New York: Verso, 2005) 3–28. 63 Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942) (New York: Harper, 1976) 146. 58 59

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nuisance value.”64 Schumpeter is sometimes at a loss for words to characterize the role of the intellectual—is it the “profession of the unprofessional?” he wonders. “Professional dilettantism?”—but he discerns its function clearly enough: since “the mass of people never develops definite opinions on its own initiative,” he says, it must depend on a group “whose interest it is to work up and organize resentment, to nurse it, to voice it, and to lead it.”65 The primary function of Schumpeter’s intellectual is to mobilize resentment in the cause of subverting state-capitalism. As “the general hostile atmosphere which surrounds the capitalist engine” steadily increases in a society (such disgruntlement is a postulate of Schumpeter’s theory), it inevitably produces “the raw material for the intellectual group to work on,” that is, the inarticulate resentment of the masses, and the intellectuals are ever at hand, “stimulating, energizing, verbalizing, and organizing this material and only secondarily adding to it.”66 Mulhern’s comment on the anxiously overwrought antisocialism of Schumpeter and his ilk deserves quotation for the light it throws on the postwar progress of Arnold’s guilt by association: In the film noir lighting of the Cold War, the shadow cast by intellectuals was socialism. Lionel Trilling, a literary critic working in self-conscious descent from Arnold, went so far as to claim that the left movements of the 1930s had “created” the US intelligentsia. His own solution was a feline liberalism committed to “variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty”: and there were many who agreed. But to another kind of liberal—Schumpeter’s compatriot and fellow-economist Hayek—the Arnoldian play of mind was precisely the endemic favouring condition of anti-capitalism. Little more than a measure of fastidiousness distinguished Trilling’s cultural politics from official ideology. But in the world of loyalty oaths and passionate conformism, even that could seem subversive.67

Mulhern’s examples, from Leavis to Schumpeter, demonstrate the remarkable ease with which now one particular inflection of Arnoldianism could be used, as Isobel Armstrong says, “in the service of an elite and oppressive high culture” and now another inflection might yet, to the discriminating Chicago-School palate of a Hayek or Strauss, for instance, yield an ambiguous Arnoldianism that was far too subversive for reliable hegemonic service in the United States.68 One has considerable choice among politicized Arnoldianisms even today. Gertrude Himmelfarb, for instance, considers Trilling to be “a progenitor of conservatism,” or at least of “some hybrid form of neoliberalism or neoconservatism,” and she claims that his critical thought touched her youthful 66 67 68 64

Ibid. 147. Ibid. 145. Ibid. 153. “Intellectual Corporatism and Socialism” 83. Isobel Armstrong, “Arnoldian Repression: Two Forgotten Discourses of Culture,” News from Nowhere 5 (June 1988): 59. 65

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Trotskyism like “a revelation, the beginning of a disaffection not only with our antiStalinist radicalism but, ultimately, with liberalism itself.”69 Even if one corrects for the element of just-so revisionism in Himmelfarb’s account of Trilling’s liberalism, the serviceable malleability of Arnoldianism so conceived—its “vagueness of definition,” in Eliot’s phrase—is again strikingly clear. Collini distinguishes between “Right-Arnoldians” and “Left-Arnoldians,” but he draws his distinction by means of neither a New Left nor a neoconservative political analytic. Instead, he constructs his categories on evidence drawn from the era of the 1980s culture wars (although the examples adduced above show that Arnold’s politicization long predates these). To Collini, “where Right-Arnoldians fasten above all on the notion of ‘culture,’” using it to buttress their resistance to “trendy progressivism, radical theorizing, self-indulgent experiment,” and other symptoms of modern “anarchy,” the “Left-Arnoldians incline rather to focus on ‘criticism’” and on Arnold as an “exemplary instance of how to bring a critical perspective to bear upon the pieties of one’s own society.”70 No one, it seems, emphasizes Arnold’s “Conduct,” least of all Collini, who promptly disclaims all “sympathy with the Right-Arnoldian appropriation of this particular Victorian writer to add a historical veneer to their intransigent anti-modernism,” preferring himself to “inhabit a cultural situation which makes it easier to indulge my temperamental preference for not being drawn in to such partisan side-taking exercises.”71 Since he takes the obviousness of his own posture of critical distance and ironical detachment for granted, Collini is surprised, he says, to discover in reviews of his 1988 study of Arnold “an occasional imputation of a conservative polemical purpose which I found, and find, hard to recognize, though it helped to educate me about the cultural geography of the terrain on which I had rather blithely set foot.”72 All the same, Collini is perhaps easy to mistake for a “Right-Arnoldian.” For instance, although he admits his “culpably indulgent” preference for Arnold’s “more winning and cheerful” prose of the 1860s, this is not the only occasion for his exhibition of peccant humors in his retrospective view of Arnold: “[A]n omission which does now seem culpable, even in such a short book,” he says, “is a proper discussion of [Arnold’s] On the Study of Celtic Literature [1867] and his complex relations with Ireland more generally, just as I should have devoted more space to his irritable and irritating, though far from wholly dismissive, views of America.”73 Perhaps Mulhern suffers from what Collini calls “the distorting and confining obsession which insists that the cultural politics of a piece of scholarly work is necessarily the most important thing about it,” since he takes Collini to task on just this score, describing him as a political “quietist” whose reasoning 69 Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Moral Imagination: From Edmund Burke to Lionel Trilling (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006) 223. 70 “Afterword to the Clarendon Paperback Edition” 131. 71 Ibid. 131–2. 72 Ibid. 132. 73 Ibid. vii, 137.

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is governed by an “Arnoldian problematic” that seeks to neutralize politics by trumping it with the social authority of culture.74 One might even see opportunism in Collini’s omission of Arnold’s controversial Celtic Literature essay, a telling instance of Collini’s deliberate avoidance of the kind of “agonistic theoretical content” that “smacks too much of theory, views, [and] positions” that Mulhern elsewhere finds.75 As briefly noted in earlier chapters, one of the fundamental points of disagreement between Mulhern and Collini derives from their different attitudes toward what can loosely be called theory—toward “system-makers and systems,” in Arnold’s terms (CPW 5.109)—and in this they occupy analogous positions within the same basic rhetorical structure that once mediated the conflicts of Arnold and the athletes of logic. Before leaving the critics of the New Left turn, then, a brief look at the structural-morphological similarities between these selfdivided leftisms of the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries will help to clarify some of the issues that later prove relevant in the positive explication of Arnoldian pessimism undertaken in Chapters 5 and 6. The Collini-Mulhern exchange begins early in 2001 with Collini’s NLR review of Mulhern’s Culture/Metaculture (2000). Mulhern issues a rejoinder some months later, and by 2004 the exchange has stretched to five installments. Collini emerges in the course of the conversation as a defender of Arnoldian cultural critique in its latter-day form, not only making explicit use of Arnoldian vocabulary but also pointing up these self-conscious allusions. For example, he refers to “practical criticism” (“if Mulhern will forgive the term”), to “the function of criticism” (“another antique term”), and to a politics that never can be quite “adequate” (“Arnoldian vocabulary has a way of seeping back in”).76 But Collini’s Arnoldianism extends well beyond mere diction. Whereas Mulhern treats metacultural discourse, of which Arnold’s seems to be the archetype, “as a wholly discredited enterprise,” Collini wishes rather to salvage such “culture talk” insofar as it embodies, as he claims it can, “the kinds of values that those principally engaged in controlling the wealth and power in the world habitually tend to neglect.”77 Culture, in this context and in contradistinction to what Collini calls politics, comprises “those forms of signifying activity which are not principally governed by an instrumental purpose, and certainly not by the goal of bringing about, amid the clash of contending interests, the least bad state of affairs in the world.”78 To “attempt to speak from ‘culture’ as part of political debate within society” is not simply “to repeat some outmoded mandarin gesture,” Collini says, because culture “still names an ethical move, an allusion to the bearing 74 Ibid. 136; Francis Mulhern, “Beyond Metaculture,” New Left Review 16 (July–Aug. 2002): 100. 75 Francis Mulhern, “What Is Cultural Criticism?” New Left Review 23 (Sept.–Oct. 2003): 39, 43. 76 “Culture Talk,” New Left Review 7 (Jan.–Feb. 2001): 46, 49, 53. 77 Ibid. 48. 78 Ibid. 50.

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which that kind of disinterested or autotelic exploration of human possibility, characteristically (but not exclusively) pursued in artistic and intellectual activity, can have upon those processes that are governed by the need to bring about proximate instrumental ends.”79 To Collini, cultural criticism still does its social duty by goading stiff-necked Philistines, now figured as the technical-managerial class of system-optimizers and the power elite whose interests they serve. Collini further believes that such a conception of cultural criticism can “furnish us with some grounds from which to criticize any actual politics” and that a “disciplined reflection partly grounded in an extensive intellectual and aesthetic inheritance can furnish a place to stand in attempting to engage critically with the narrow pragmatism (or ‘specialism’) of any particular political programme.”80 If culture thus names “the standpoint from which such criticism speaks” and is “a useful shorthand for a set of collectively practiced prompts to reflection,” then we should not, Collini says, “simply disown these (and other) predecessors [such as Arnold], however much we may wish to distance ourselves from the historically contingent content of their critiques.”81 Putting the case specifically, if Arnold believes, as his New Left critics suppose, “that an essentialized, largely inherited ‘culture’ provides some kind of over-arching or corrective locus of value and hence of authority,” then one would do well to throw out this essentialist and transcendentalist bathwater while taking care not to lose the baby of Arnold’s general critical-ethical posture along with it. Mulhern in turn plays the logical athlete to Collini’s Arnold. He does not pull any punches when he finds that “the formulations in which [Collini] sets out his position are circular,” or again when he detects a statement in which Collini’s “first phrase is no more than an elaboration of the second”—plainly a distinction without a difference—or when Collini’s “assertion simply assumes what it needs to establish”—what the schoolmen call a petitio principii.82 Sounding like Fitzjames Stephen, Mulhern admonishes Collini for trying to smuggle “a transcendent value” in with his culture talk, thus proving that “[c]ontrary to Collini’s unmistakable intention, the place of critical engagement turns out to be another world.” There is even perhaps a hint of Victorian muscularity in Mulhern’s brand of cultural politics “by virtue of its constitutive relation to practice” and its grappling with “actual social relations,” while Collini’s “quietist” avoidance of “agonistic” theory and his relative paucity of “specific commitments or aspirations” suggest the same old emasculate, pouncet-box Arnoldianism, now retooled for a postmodern millennium.83 In true Arnoldian fashion, Collini retorts that Mulhern’s “critical machinery” depends on categories that are “formulated at quite a high level of abstraction” and 81 82 83 79 80

Ibid. 48. Ibid. 48–9, 51. Ibid. 52–3. “Beyond Metaculture” 100. Ibid. 100–101; “What Is Cultural Criticism?” 49.

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thereby yield an “excessively functionalist analysis of culture” that is “strained and unpersuasive.”84 When it comes to Mulhern’s notion of metaculture, for example, the “definition of the category is drawn too tightly,” Collini says, thus becoming “obstructively Procrustean when made subject to one governing logic.”85 Conversely, the “sweepingness” of some of Mulhern’s other formulations also impede lucid thinking, as in his “notion of ‘the ideological dominant,’” which is just the kind of totalizing concept, Collini says, that “always threatens to over-reach itself.”86 To Mulhern’s penchant for the “hasty assumption” and the “over-generalized and even, dare I say, over-theorized” case, Collini opposes his own historical method, which tries “to rescue the quiddity of past historical agents from the schematizing and present-minded treatment they often received from social scientists and political theorists raiding the past to support some contemporary theoretical position.”87 To expect and demand “specific commitments and aspirations” from such finegrained quiddity-hunting is to enter “that topsy-turvy world in which proclaiming one’s general allegiance to some supposed direction of world history counts as ‘substantive,’ whereas offering some individual characterization or detailed critical discrimination is derogated as mere ‘algebra.’”88 Thus far, then, the isomorphism of the nineteenth- and twenty-first-century rhetorical structures seems to hold, with Collini taking the Arnoldian part of antisystematist and Mulhern the high-theory role of system addict. Yet this mapping is not perfectly regular or consistent. For one thing, the truculent stridency and flaying invective that mar mid-Victorian literary journalism happily do not carry over to the twenty-first-century correlations, at least not in this case. Mulhern and Collini are both remarkably cordial, kindly, and “generous beyond ordinary expectation” in print.89 Neither thinker fits the description that John Macdonell attached to Karl Marx in 1875, claiming that Marx “abuses everybody, or at least everybody that is deemed by the world an authority; abuses in a downright, uncompromising fashion. Cobbett does not strike harder blows than this literary bruiser. He has got a rather terrible trick of coining nicknames that pass current.”90 Collini and Mulhern, by contrast, expend their energies almost exclusively in logical and analytical labor, without descending to personalities as their Victorian forebears were wont to do. This tendency marks a significant difference, maybe an advance, in the rhetorical economy. In addition to their common ground of modesty, forbearance, and overall mannerliness, a further incongruity appears in the way that Collini particularly stands 86 87 88 89 90

“Defending Cultural Criticism,” New Left Review 18 (Nov.–Dec. 2002): 97, 76, 94, 80. “On Variousness; And on Persuasion,” New Left Review 27 (May–June 2004): 69. Ibid. 71, 74. Ibid. 71, 91, 79. Ibid. 78. “Beyond Metaculture” 86; “Defending Cultural Criticism” 73. John Macdonell, “Karl Marx and German Socialism,” Fortnightly Review 97.17 (1 Jan. 1875): 384. 84

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out, for all his plain-spoken Arnoldian sympathies, as a thinker of not inconsiderable logical athleticism of his own. Perhaps the bracing air of Cambridge University still fosters this temper in its denizens. Collini certainly flexes his logical muscles in his second contribution to the “intellectual exchange” with Mulhern, bringing a scrupulous attention to bear on the formal niceties of argumentation.91 For instance, he uses the term category 37 times in his 24-page response to Mulhern. Concept is a close second. There is much ado about “conceptual structures,” “conceptual relations,” “conceptual innovations,” and the like.92 Concepts array themselves in a “conceptual grid,” make transactions in a “governing conceptual economy,” and cover the ground in a “conceptual geography.”93 “Mulhern’s is undeniably a tidier intellectual world than mine,” Collini says in his final essay, with the suggestion that Mulhern’s “over-theorized” method—characterized as something of a cross between a game of chess and a mathematical demonstration—is both more adversarial and more formalistic than Collini’s own.94 But it must be said that Collini keeps a very tidy intellectual house as well, and this rigorism is among the more striking features of his NLR articles. It appears, for instance, in his tireless efforts to clarify definitions, distinguish concepts, tease out the tacit premises and unspoken presuppositions in Mulhern’s subtle enthymemes, and in general to classify, categorize, and label with exhaustive precision. Collini’s intensive focus on the logical and conceptual architecture of Mulhern’s thought is surely justifiable in an intellectual exchange; clear and distinct ideas are undoubtedly the soul of rational thought, and concepts and categories are obviously important to the labor of thinking. As Collini rightly notes, “What we call ‘theories’ furnish powerful, provocative, and wholly legitimate contributions to such conversations, often setting the standards in respect of definitions of terms and tightness of logical entailment. But such theories do not bring the conversation to an end.”95 On the other hand, interminable wrangling over protocols and procedures, terms and conditions, and similar rule-setting maneuvers can sometimes seem never to bring the conversation to a beginning. Collini’s more recent works, Absent Minds (2006) and Common Reading (2008), can be read as tacitly extending his response to Mulhern, insofar as his will to rigorous logical method is similarly insistent. He gives attention throughout Absent Minds, for instance, to “stipulative definitions” and is particularly attracted to “polarity”—from “simple polarity,” “structuring polarity,” or “binary polarity,” to the “familiar binary polarity” or “thin binary characterization.”96 He notes, for example, that the “ostensibly definitional” project in Edward W. Said’s 1993 Reith Lectures turns on “many acts of stipulative definition” while simultaneously 93 94 95 96 91

92

“Defending Cultural Criticism” 73. Ibid. 76. Ibid. 84, 82, 85. “On Variousness; And on Persuasion” 91, 96. Ibid. 97. Absent Minds 47, 59, 428, 150, 145, 139, 147, 177, 140.

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showing a “disabling reliance of simplistic binary alternatives,” and Collini similarly observes, in discussing Raymond Williams’s famous culture-society opposition, that “the pitfalls of binary thinking are threatening” Williams in his simplistic contrast of a monolithic “dominant social order” with a sphere of critical-intellectual generalists.97 Collini again attends with great strictness both to “the logic of the concepts” and the “tension within the concept itself,” thus producing a kind of sociology and psychology of concepts, and thinkers who draw conclusions “not altogether logically” or who indulge in “contradictory logic” are gently but firmly put in their place.98 He has a keen sense as well for the faulty “minor premise” and for arguments that produce “a form of eternal regress, a logical symptom rather than a historical truth.”99 The study of Englishness, for instance, a notable offshoot of the tradition of New Left political critique that has come to prominence in the last 10 or 15 years, sometimes offers analyses that, to Collini, are “reductively functionalist or historically insensitive,” such as when scholars of Englishness deploy an “excessive holism in speaking of how ‘a society’ functions and also the imputation of sinister agency to an (implausibly unified and powerful) ‘ruling class,’ ‘bourgeois state,’ or similarly conceptualized entity.”100 As these examples seem to suggest, Collini’s critical judgments tend not toward the ideological but the logical simpliciter, and his arguments seek to attain to a formal purity with no apparent aim beyond itself, a trait that might support Mulhern’s claim that in supposing himself to be “speaking from and to a general interest,” Collini simply serves “the ideological dominant.”101 On the other hand, simple sportsmanship suggests that nit-picking a thinker’s diction must have its limits. Collini himself very judiciously cites “the truth of Dr. Johnson’s observation that ‘he who writes much will not easily escape a manner, such a recurrence of particular modes as may be easily noted.’”102 When cornered by an insistent ideologue such as Mulhern, however, or perhaps simply when he brings his arguments to the point at which the readerly expectation of a substantive moral judgment begins to press for satisfaction (historical accounts of social or economic states being preeminently moral), Collini often has recourse to what one might call his bombazine standard of historiographical criticism. That is, he is very apt to point out, for instance, that “the thick texture of intellectual life” is underexamined in this case, or that it suffers from a “damaging underdescription of the actual social and institutional” complexity in that, and hence the call for “a more historical and thickly textured account of the British past” regularly emerges in his essays and becomes a kind of standing desideratum.103 Ibid. 431, 427–8, 189. Ibid. 58, 59, 156, 194. 99 Ibid. 143, 59. 100 Ibid. 192. 101 “What Is Cultural Criticism?” 37–8. 102 “On Variousness; And on Persuasion” 79. 103 Absent Minds 180, 429, 173. 97

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Collini says, for example, that one of the “substantive weaknesses” of cultural studies—apart from a tediously “recurring cry of rage and resentment” in the face of its (now largely imaginary) exclusion from the institutional levers of academic power—is “its insensitivity to the rich texture of those cultural strands it regards as ‘dominant,’” and he therefore intends to “suspend judgement” on cultural studies until its “aggressive programmatic manifestos are matched by illuminating and thickly textured particular studies.”104 Collini always strives, as he says, “to do justice to the thick texture of relations and to the patterns they form,” and perhaps his efforts do yield a history-as-upholstery kind of justice, but such a critical practice, according to Mulhern, poses at best a toothless challenge to the “well-being of capital and the state,” which is the “great, simple principle of Conservative strategy.”105 From Mulhern’s perspective, whatever the critical “distance” that Collini gains on his historical subjects, he always keeps well “within the space of the ideological dominant,” thus proving that such an “intramundane” form of critical “distance is too purely formal a criterion to assist the inevitably substantive choices entailed in any criticism of society.”106 The “unargued premise” of Collini’s practical criticism, Mulhern says, “has recognizable antecedents in one of the central commonplaces of literary-liberal culture in the twentieth century: the responsibility of ‘literature’ and its attendant values in the face of ‘ideology,’” and his mode of intellectual history is thus “one with the times in this at least, it is another kind of privatization”: It seems clear, however, that [Collini] is little moved by the thought that specifically political contentions might mediate choices of fundamental and positive human significance, and it would be surprising if this strategic hesitation had no bearing on his sense of critical stakes. The terms of evaluation that he brings to public discourse are scarcely political, even where politics is the matter in hand, and not “cultural” either, in any telling sense: their common denominator is their association with the private sphere. Ideas count for less than the voices that circulate them and the sensibilities that vary their texture.107

“Manner, tone, identity, conduct”—these make up Collini’s stock-in-trade as an intellectual historian, Mulhern says, and they define “a committed moral stance” of political quietism and “an order of treatment that does not lend itself to the critical reconstruction” of thought about the “social relations of capitalism.”108 Mulhern’s critical sallies seem rather daunting, even when witnessed from a neutral corner. Collini appears to be visibly stung, for instance, by Mulhern’s “jibe” 104 “Grievance Studies: How Not to Do Cultural Criticism,” English Pasts: Essays in History and Culture (Oxford; New York: Oxford UP, 1999) 262–3, 265. 105 Absent Minds 6; “What Is Cultural Criticism?” 40. 106 “What Is Cultural Criticism?” 38. 107 Ibid. 45, 48. 108 Ibid. 44, 45, 47.

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that his “style of cultural criticism is ‘at one with the times’ in being ‘another kind of privatization,’” a remark that Collini describes as “an uncharacteristically cheap shot that stands self-condemned.”109 Perhaps not quite sufficiently self-condemned, however, since Collini immediately mounts a vigorous effort of self-justification, quoting examples of his own “more general thoughts that do not, on re-reading, seem chiefly distinguished by their avoidance of political terms of evaluation.”110 But his exercise in self-defense almost fails of its own success. Most attentive readers of Collini’s work would not suppose that he has an ideological ax of his own to grind, or that he has so subtly incorporated a stealth agenda into his rhetorical posture as to render it imperceptible, and many of his readers would probably agree that it is this very stance of impartiality or disinterestedness that lends his portraits their remarkable lucidity. One often comes away from a Collini essay with a salutary sense of delightful instruction. If the critical heft of his analyses occasionally seems slight or the rhetorical style somewhat bland—Does he have a horse in any race?—might this not be an index rather of one’s own jaded partisan-political palate than of any defect in the degree of Collini’s energetic engagement? Mulhern nevertheless touches this point of Collini’s style when, summoning the authority of the European high Marxist tradition, he notes the “far less tangible evidence of specific commitments or aspirations” in Collini’s historical writings, works that sometimes seem to come packaged within an implicit context in which there are no burning questions or issues of ultimate concern, as if intellectual history were all just a matter of four-square logic and a manner of shrewd urbanity and subpolitical attitudinizing.111 There is one final point of conjuncture between Mulhern and Collini, however, although they might not recognize or readily embrace it. In commenting on Mulhern’s “construction” of the category of Kulturkritik, Collini notes that he “makes European interwar cultural pessimism its defining moment, so that the appeal to ‘culture’ has to be socially elitist, culturally alarmist, and politically conservative.”112 Mulhern, in order to refute Collini’s claim that Kulturkritik is more than a purely formal category of analysis, and in particular to demonstrate that it is not an inherently reactionary configuration inspired by antidemocratic politics or antimodernist aesthetics, replies with a long argument proving that, among the many varieties of Kulturkritik, there is also a Marxist version, with Frankfurt School theorists Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse serving as its exemplary figures.113 Both Adorno and Marcuse are subject to an unfortunate form of political “regression,” according to Mulhern.114 In Adorno’s case, his “unqualifiable leftism underwrote a critical ethic of remoteness,” a regressive attitude that Adorno figures with the image of the “promise that mocks hope,” and such “regression,” Mulhern “On Variousness; And on Persuasion” 84n32. Ibid. 85. 111 Ibid. 49. For a further example of the left-quietist charge, see note 18 above. 112 “Culture Talk” 47. 113 “Beyond Metaculture” 91–8. 114 Ibid. 96, 98. 109 110

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claims, when “‘objectively viewed,’ is renunciation.”115 Mulhern also says that Marcuse’s “estimate of historical possibilities was scarcely more optimistic than Adorno’s.”116 While this argument goes some way to show that Kulturkritik need not be elitist, alarmist, and conservative, Mulhern ultimately seems to prove that the common denominator in Kulturkritik is not its political conservatism but its pessimism. This conclusion might not be altogether surprising in light of Wolf Lepenies’s interesting work on the coincidence of melancholy and utopian fantasy.117 Even Anderson admits that in spite of Socialism’s progressive, emancipatory, and utopian strains, the “major monuments” of the Western Marxist tradition are “in one way or another, secretly or openly, all affected by a deep historical pessimism.”118 Anderson develops this point by contrasting “the will to change” that characterizes the “realist” politics of American literary critic Fredric Jameson with the cultural pessimism, bred of the “determinate failure of all the revolutions that have taken place in human history to date,” that afflicts the Continental marxisant thinkers: Their most original and powerful themes—Lucáks’s destruction of reason, Gramsci’s war of position, Benjamin’s angel of catastrophe, Adorno’s damaged subject, Sartre’s violence of scarcity, Althusser’s ubiquity of illusion—spoke not of an alleviated future, but of an implacable present. Tones varied within a common range, from the stoic to the melancholic, the wintry to the apocalyptic. Jameson’s writing is of a different timbre. Although his topic has certainly not been one of comfort to the Left, his treatment of it has never been acrimonious or despondent … . Behind this consent to the world lies the deeply Hegelian cast of Jameson’s Marxism, noted by many critics, which has equipped him to confront the adversities of the epoch, and work though its confusion, with an intrepid equanimity all his own. Categories such as optimism or pessimism have no place in Hegel’s thought. Jameson’s work cannot be described as optimistic, in the sense in which we can say of the Western Marxist tradition that it was pessimistic.119

Ibid. 94–5. Ibid. 96. 117 See Wolf Lepenies, Melancholy and Society, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris Jones 115 116

(Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard UP, 1992). Lepenies extends his analysis to Matthew Arnold and to Victorian culture more broadly in Qu’est-ce qu’un Intellectuel Européen? Les Intellectuels et la Politique de l’Esprit dans l’Histoire Européenne (Paris: Seuil, 2007) 337–56. See also Lepenies, Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge UP; Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1988) 155–95. 118 Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (London: Verso, 1998) 76. 119 Ibid. 76–7. Deep Hegelianism is apparently one of the highest accolades that Anderson bestows on thinkers, an honor that Jameson shares with Norberto Bobbio. See Spectrum 135, 171–3.

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Several points emerge from these remarks by Mulhern, Collini, and Anderson. The first is the notable looseness in their use of the term pessimism, which is perhaps all the more striking given the imposing theoretical equipment and eristic and analytical rigorism of the thinkers in question. In addition, each seems anxious to distance himself from all suggestion of cultural pessimism, which is figured as a kind of mental miasma that is necessarily “acrimonious and despondent.” While Collini is quick to note Anderson’s own “pessimism about the course of recent history,” he thinks it best in his own case, in order “to avoid misunderstanding,” to “declare still more emphatically that I do not endorse the condescension and cultural pessimism of those interwar cultural critics whom Mulhern so effectively criticizes.”120 The final difference, then, between the Victorian polemicists and their twentyfirst-century counterparts lies in the greater willingness of the former to embrace their pessimism in what they would themselves doubtlessly call a manlier manner. As the Victorian critic Macdonell says, not only is Marx a “literary bruiser,” but “Marx’s own gospel is dolorous enough, and we might well call him the Schopenhauer of economics.”121 Macdonell’s acute analysis has a further significance, however, because Arnold copies the last sentence of Macdonell’s article into his 1875 notebook. In fact, Arnold enters this line several more times into his notebooks over the following years, a common practice with him, and it even happens to be the very last entry in his notebooks. On the page for Sunday, 22 May 1888, that is, one week after his death (thus suggesting that Arnold planned his Sunday meditations somewhat in advance), one finds quotations from Ecclesiasticus, Virgil, Thomas à Kempis—and Karl Marx: “Society is a sort of organism on the growth of which conscious efforts can exercise little effect. Karl Marx.”122 If such a sentiment can justly be termed pessimistic, then it seems fair to conclude that pessimism is of the essence of Kulturkritik. Between Culture and System Returning to Mulhern’s sneer at the “feline liberalism” of Trilling (and by extension, perhaps, at that of Collini), it is worth recalling that Trilling’s “variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty” are the chief virtues of mind Common Reading 195; “Defending Cultural Criticism” 97. “Karl Marx and German Socialism” 385. 122 The Note-Books of Matthew Arnold, ed. Howard Foster Lowry, Karl Young, and 120

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Waldo Hilary Dutton (London: Oxford UP, 1952) 228, 273, 299, 438. Macdonell’s full quotation: “And perhaps they [English economists] would appreciate Marx’s political economy a little better, if they held with him that society is a sort of organism on the growth of which conscious efforts can exercise little effect.” Macdonell, “Karl Marx and German Socialism” 391. See Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “Feuerbach,” The German Ideology, trans. W. Lough (New York: International Publishers, 1976) 3–93, vol. 5, Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, 50 vols., 1975–2004.

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that an Arnoldian culture must bring to bear in “the job of criticizing the liberal imagination,” and of which virtues “literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account.”123 As noted in Chapter 2, Said seems in some ways to further Trilling’s Arnoldian tradition, and his hymning of the virtues of new humanism is essentially identical—from his account of his own “early fascination with complexity and unpredictability” and “the multiple complexities and ambiguities of writing and speech” to his later admiration for Goethe’s “extremely catholic, indeed almost altruistic attitude” toward Weltliteratur and Goethe’s “universalist conception” and “grandly utopian vision” of a “majestic symphonic whole,” a “vast synthesis of the world’s literary production transcending borders and languages, but not in any way effacing the individuality and historical concreteness of its constituent parts.”124 Said’s new humanism would be a process, as he describes it, of “unending disclosure, discovery, selfcriticism, and liberation,” an “unsettling adventure in difference, in alternative traditions, in texts that need a new deciphering,” an openness to “the emergent, the insurgent, the unrequited, and the unexplored,” a project that is by design always “radically incomplete, insufficient, provisional, disputable, and arguable.”125 He urges “contemporary humanists to cultivate that sense of multiple worlds and complex interacting traditions, that inevitable combination … of belonging and detachment, reception and resistance. The task of the humanist is … not simply to belong somewhere, but rather to be both insider and outsider to the circulating ideas and values that are at issue in our society or someone else’s society or the society of the other.”126 Such flights typify Said’s trademark discourse, and they understandably tempt hostile critics like Robert Irwin, Middle East editor for the Times Literary Supplement, to conclude that Said “wildly overvalued” both the importance of “high literature” and “the contestatory role of the intellectual” and to suppose that Said, with his “inconsistent methodology and shaky grasp of facts,” held the view “that the political problems of the Middle East were ultimately textual ones that could be solved by critical reading skills.”127 One hears similar views even from more politically sympathetic critics than Irwin. Collini, for instance, says that Said “never rises to a sufficiently analytical level” in some of his scholarship but rather relies on a tone that is “altogether too reminiscent of the genre of the 123 The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: Anchor, 1953) xii–xiii. 124 Out of Place: A Memoir (New York: Knopf, 1999) 277; Humanism and Democratic Criticism 95. 125 Humanism and Democratic Criticism 22, 26, 55. 126 Ibid. 76. 127 Robert Irwin, Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents (Woodstock, New York: Overlook, 2006) 286; Robert Irwin, “Edward Said’s Shadowy Legacy,” Times Literary Supplement 7 May 2008, 15 June 2008 .

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spiritual pep-talk.”128 Robert J. C. Young observes that “Said’s culture, for all his reservations, resembles nothing so much as that of Arnold, Eliot, or Leavis—there seems to be no irony intended at all when Said, the great campaigner against racism and ethnocentrism, laments in Leavisite tones the loss of culture’s ‘discrimination and evaluation.’”129 Young here touches a genuine ambivalence in Said’s attitude, one that Said seems to be at least in part aware of, as shown in his claim that Arnold “connects his persuasive, even seductive thought about the virtues of culture with the coercive, authoritarian violence of the national state,” and he does so, Said says, “in an unmistakably frank, not to say brutally honest, manner.”130 A similar ambivalence appears in Said’s attraction to the thought of Charles Malik, whose Christian fundamentalism teaches him “the beauty of absolute authority.”131 This apparent contradiction promises to resolve itself once Said’s “grandly unthinking” Arnoldianism is uncoupled from imputations of authoritarianism, ethnocentrism, racism, sexism, and so forth, yet the coupling remains serviceable, in some quarters even indispensable, to the construction of the postcolonial Arnold. A particular construal of the Arnoldian conception of “Culture” plays a programmatically crucial role in postcolonial studies, which largely owes its origin and ideological affiliations to the New Left. To Said, for example, “Arnold covered critical writing with the mantle of cultural authority and reactionary political quietism,” and this construal is still widely accepted.132 Arnoldian culture in its generalized functioning maintains its power, according to Said, only “by virtue of its elevated or superior position to authorize, to dominate, to legitimate, demote, interdict, and validate,” an oppressive “system of exclusions and discriminations” that is imposed “from above but enacted throughout its polity, by which such things as anarchy, disorder, irrationality, inferiority, bad taste, and immorality are 128 Absent Minds 428, 429. While critical, Collini’s analysis of Said’s lectures is not the “hatchet job” that Robert Irwin terms it. See Irwin, “Edward Said’s Shadowy Legacy.” 129 White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: New York: Routledge, 1990) 133. 130 “Nationalism, Human Rights, and Interpretation,” Freedom and Interpretation: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1992, ed. Barbara Johnson (New York: Basic Books, 1993) 178. 131 Out of Place 265. 132 The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1983) 28. The postcolonial literature is vast and this reading very common. See, for example, Paul B. Rich, Race and Empire in British Politics (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge UP, 1986); Paul Gilroy, “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack”: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991); Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London; New York: Routledge, 1994); Saree Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge UP, 1998); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999); David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge UP, 2000); Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholy (London; New York: Routledge, 2006); Gina Wisker, Key Concepts in Postcolonial Literature (Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

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identified, then deposited outside the culture and kept there by the power of the State and its institutions.”133 Transposed to a colonial paradigm, culture “permits the conqueror not to look into the truth of the violence he does,” Said claims.134 The “idea of culture itself, as Arnold refined it, is designed to elevate practice to the level of theory, to liberate ideological coercion against rebellious elements—at home and abroad—from the mundane and historical to the abstract and general.” To help give his own abstract generalizations some bite, Said claims in Culture and Imperialism (1993), for instance, that Arnold actively opposed the murder prosecution of Edward John Eyre, the infamous Jamaican Governor whose brutal suppression of an insurrection by Afro-Jamaican citizens in the fall of 1865 involved a monthlong campaign of pillage and slaughter by British colonial forces that left more than 500 Afro-Jamaicans dead.135 Once news of the Eyre atrocities shocked the imperial metropolis, Mill immediately formed a committee to agitate for Eyre’s prosecution. A committee for his defense was formed equally rapidly, led by Carlyle. Among the notable Victorian men of letters who joined Carlyle in publicly backing Eyre and supporting his actions were Charles Dickens, Alfred Tennyson, Ruskin, and Kingsley. Those joining Mill and seeking to prosecute Eyre for murder included T. H. Huxley, Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, and Leslie Stephen. Arnold remained unattached to either committee, although in Said’s assured account the ensuing “debate engaged famous public personalities both for Eyre’s declaration of martial law and massacre of Jamaican Blacks (Ruskin, Carlyle, Arnold) and against him (Mill, Huxley, Lord Chief Justice Cockburn).”136 Said thus claims that Arnold was “for Eyre’s … massacre of Jamaican Blacks” and that he “strongly approved” of Eyre’s crimes, unmistakably revealing a Tarpeian blackness behind the false front of “epieikeia,” the “sweet reasonableness” of Jesus (CPW 6.115). Young notes that Said offers “no evidence” for his claim.137 Said appears either to be misspeaking or deliberately misrepresenting the facts, although perhaps The World, the Text, and the Critic 9, 11. Culture and Imperialism, (New York: Knopf, 1993) 131. 135 For background on the Eyre controversy, see Report of the Case of the Queen v. 133 134

Edward John Eyre: On His Prosecution, in the Court of the Queen’s Bench, for High Crimes and Misdemeanors Alleged to have been Committed by Him in His Office as Governor of Jamaica (London: Chapman and Hall, 1868); Bernard Semmel, The Governor Eyre Controversy (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1962); Geoffrey Dutton, In Search of Edward John Eyre (New York: Macmillan, 1982); Rande W. Kostal, A Jurisprudence of Power: Victorian Empire and the Rule of Law (Oxford; New York: Oxford UP, 2005). 136 Culture and Imperialism 130. For an authoritative analysis, see Catherine Hall and Sonya Rose, eds., At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (New York: Cambridge UP, 2006). 137 Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London; New York: Routledge, 1995) 193n82. Young suggests that Said might have been misled by similar inaccuracies in Paul Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto, 1984).

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the term nonfacts better describes the scanty evidence for Arnold’s opinions on the Eyre controversy. Park Honan’s 1981 biography of Arnold notes an oblique allusion to the massacres in an 1866 letter to the Pall Mall Gazette: “In hearts we are (except when we find ourselves in India or Jamaica) very well off; but in heads there is always room for improvement” (CPW 5.35). Honan sees Arnold’s “[r]efusing to take part in the bitter Governor Eyre controversy” as evidence of his “‘healing’ and mild” attitude.138 Rather less mild is the attitude that Arnold’s father once showed toward rioters in the 1830s—agitations probably associated with the “last labourers’s revolt” of 1830 or with the unrest in 1834 surrounding the “Tolpuddle Martyrs”139—an attitude vividly captured in the words that his son chooses to repeat in the first edition of Culture and Anarchy: “As for rioting, the old Roman way of dealing with that is always the right one; flog the rank and file, and fling the ringleaders from the Tarpeian Rock!” (CPW 5.526). While the father’s oft-quoted passage conveys neither sweetness nor light, it remains questionable whether it expresses the son’s sympathy for Eyre. According to Said, Arnold’s argument in Culture and Anarchy “was specifically believed to be a deterrent to rampant disorder—colonial, Irish, domestic”—although just who “specifically believed” so is left unstated.140 Is it Arnold himself or his contemporary readers or postcolonial professors of comparative literature? At any rate, Said’s point seems plain, and it has become a truism of Arnold criticism: Arnold applies his father’s strong-arm dictum to the unsettled mid-1860s context of Jamaican rioting, Fenian bombing, and Hyde Park rail-breaking, perhaps intending thereby an object lesson in another Arnoldian paradox: “culture hates hatred” (CPW 5.112).141 Admittedly, as an index of tact or sensitivity, Arnold’s decision to repeat in 1867 his father’s incendiary Tarpeian Rock statement ranks right alongside “Wragg is in custody” on the short list of his failed “vivacities of expression” (CPW 3.273, 1.170). Matthew Arnold: A Life (London: Wiedenfield and Nicolson, 1981) 340. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: 1789–1848 (New York: Mentor, 1962)

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148, 153. 140 Culture and Imperialism 130. 141 The connection is taken for granted by one Columbia University scholar, for instance, who claims that “[b]uried deep within Arnold’s text [Culture and Anarchy], we find a connection between the unrest in the Caribbean … and the sometimes unruly agitation for working-class enfranchisement and parliamentary reform.” Although he acknowledges that “Matthew Arnold, like his father before him, was strongly opposed to slavery,” and he even cites Young’s statement that Arnold “refused to take sides” in the Eyre affair, this author plainly implies that Arnold dearly wished to “[c]rucify all the slaves” and treat the Hyde Park rioters in kind: “It was these connections, more or less explicitly made, that gave the Jamaica uprising such a disproportionate significance at the time, and produced the sense of crisis that Arnold and Carlyle felt compelled to respond to.” The only compulsion apparent here is in the author’s own deep-buried but more or less explicit misrepresentation. See Tim Watson, “Jamaica, Genealogy, George Eliot: Inheriting the Empire after Morant Bay,” Jouvert 1.1 (1997): para 2, para. 47n3, 15 Dec. 2007 .

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In casting Arnold’s ethico-political account, Young notes that while Arnold “did support the abolition of the slave-trade,” he both “refused to take sides in the bitter controversy about Governor Eyre’s conduct” and “refused to take sides over the question of slavery during the American Civil War.”142 In this measured assessment, Arnold’s public silence on the Eyre case is at best morally negligible when compared, for instance, with the proactive statements of the committee seeking Eyre’s conviction. As Said’s prophet of Eurocentric high culture, however, Arnold still remains wide open to the charge of trading on an ideology that is root-and-branch racist. One need not dip too deeply into the secondary literature on Culture and Anarchy, for instance, to confront discussions of Arnold’s use of Victorian race science, and no one disputes that Arnold indulges freely in much preposterous racialism in his less well-known On the Study of Celtic Literature, the “meaningless” “absurdity” of which racialism was “obvious” to Trilling, for example, even in 1939, who says that “we must take his elaborate theory only as a kind of parable.”143 In the opinion of some postcolonial thinkers, however, Arnold’s racism is not as benign as Trilling imagines, and they claim it has yet to receive the critical scrutiny that it deserves, although this imbalance has perhaps begun to correct itself in the last two decades, particularly at the hands of race-sensitive critics such as Young, David Lloyd, and Vincent P. Pecora. Arnold’s Celtic Literature attracts considerable interest today for the way that it juggles the elements of Victorian race essentialism at just that point of historical juncture when they are beginning to coalesce into a somewhat stable and systematic pseudoscience. In Lloyd’s construction of Arnoldian racism, for instance, Arnold’s particular “configuration of ideas about race, language, state, and culture” is permanently influential because it “acts like a template in the recurrent articulation of the ideological function of culture in the bourgeois state,” and culture’s function is, ex hypothesi, “a crucial mode of bourgeois hegemony,” just as it was for the New Left scholars.144 Lloyd points out that as the mouthpiece for “humanist culture Colonial Desire 87. Matthew Arnold 240–41, 233. Along with Trilling, for some of the significant

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scholarship bearing either on Arnold’s use of race or on the general question of Victorian race thinking, see Howard Mumford Jones, “Arnold, Aristocracy, and America,” American Historical Review 49.3 (Apr. 1944): 393–409; Frederic Everett Faverty, Matthew Arnold, the Ethnologist (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1951); George Stocking, “Matthew Arnold, E. B. Tylor, and the Uses of Invention,” American Anthropologist 65 (1963): 783–99; David J. DeLaura, Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England (Austin: U of Texas P, 1969). See also Joseph Carroll, The Cultural Theory of Matthew Arnold (Berkeley: U of California P, 1982); Lionel Gossman, “Philhellenism and Antisemitism: Matthew Arnold and His German Models,” Comparative Literature 46 (1994): 1–39; James Buzard, Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005). 144 David Lloyd, “Arnold, Ferguson, Schiller: Aesthetic Culture and the Politics of Aesthetics,” Cultural Critique 2 (winter 1985): 142, 139.

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in its militant phase,” Arnold relies on “an ethnography, and on a philology, whose narrative formalizes a set of distinct racial essences.”145 This formalizing narrative permits Arnold to structure his argument in Celtic Literature “around a mobile series of inter-related oppositions based upon concepts of essential ethnic types,” and in this “play of difference and identity, the essential racial ‘genius’ is both secretly operative in producing differences between races, and legible in the actual characteristics by which racial identities are known.”146 The thrust of Lloyd’s argument seems to be that the concepts of race and national character are common Victorian mythologemes and that even Arnold believes that one can speak coherently of Jew and Greek, Anglo-Saxon and Celt, German and Frenchman, as if there really were such stable bio-conceptual entities as Jews, Greeks, and so on. If Celtic Literature was, as Lloyd claims, “generally ignored both by partisans and opponents of Arnold” prior to 1985—once again, it seems that one is either with us or with the Arnoldians—then subsequent scholarship goes some way toward correcting that ignorance.147 For instance, in Colonial Desire (1995), which Eagleton describes as “the best brief introduction available to the modern idea of culture, and its dubious racist overtones,”148 Young places Celtic Literature at the center of his efforts to unmask Arnold’s racism and its role in buttressing bourgeois-imperial hegemony. Where Lloyd claims that Arnold’s racialist assimilationism “refuses any relationship to its objects that would be based on either ‘separation’ or ‘coercion,’” and that his “refusal … of the alternative of separation” is a “crucial index of the Romantic legacy in Arnold’s thinking,” Young’s analysis, by contrast, discovers in Arnold an “apartheid mode of dialogic separation” that requires exclusionary violence.149 Sometimes, however, Young no sooner makes a claim than he immediately undercuts it. For example, he says that Arnold “inaugurated the institution of national culture,” but he did so in a way that was “never straightforward.”150 By this Young means that Arnold inaugurates English cultural nationalism by the curious method of concentrating his critical acumen—as Raleigh bitterly complains—predominantly on French, German, and Greco-Roman Classical literature, meanwhile informing his countrymen that they are culturally retarding themselves. This kind of dialectical doublespeak seems to typify Young’s method generally: the “public functions” of Arnold’s culture “are all rigorously stabilizing,” he says, but to produce this salutary stabilization culture must “destabilize” stock notions and received opinions, a process that

Ibid. 145. Ibid. 144–5. 147 Ibid. 141. 148 Terry Eagleton, The Idea of Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000) 132n2. 149 Lloyd 148, 142; Young, Colonial Desire 87. Young offers a much more measured 145 146

account, moderate even to the point of sympathy, in his most recent volume. See Young, The Idea of English Ethnicity (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008) Ch. 5. 150 Colonial Desire 56.

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Young calls “anti-reifying, indeed anti-ideological.”151 Thus, “culture’s function is ultimately to produce stabilization,” and “it achieves this dialectically, through a form of destabilization.”152 Culture “can work both as a lever for subversion and as an inclusive, containing force of harmonization,” and the anti-ideological “man of culture … can subvert anything in contemporary culture in the name of a higher or larger vision, exercising a double function of subversion and totalization through an oppositional stance—a position that doubtless accounts for its great attractiveness to intellectuals ever since.” It appears that the “man of culture” thus positions himself “between culture and system,” which for Young is a useful “point of exteriority to the totality,” and from there he mounts his inside-outside subversive totalization. Whether Young supposes Arnold to have so contorted himself remains unclear, but the intellectual attractiveness of such “theory” is perhaps less so. If Young’s fondness for dialectical acrobatics reveals itself in these formulations, so too does his complementary penchant for absolute construction, perhaps a further symptom of latent Hegelianism. He insists, for example, that “[c]ulture has always marked cultural difference by producing the other; it has always been comparative, and racism has always been an integral part of it: the two are inextricably clustered together, feeding off and generating each other. Race has always been culturally constructed. Culture has always been racially constructed.”153 Having propounded these apodictic certainties, Young then generalizes: “culture must apparently always operate antithetically. Culture never stands alone but always participates in a conflictual economy … Culture is never liable to fall into fixity, stasis, or organic totalization.”154 As Peter Mandler says, with characteristic understatement, Young’s treatment of Arnold “rather over-eggs the pudding.”155 In this postcolonial-Arnold line, Pecora’s 1998 Victorian Studies article— later garnished with a Pauline meditation for republication in Secularization and Cultural Criticism (2006)—similarly engages the problem of Arnold’s racism. Pecora is as pitiless as any nineteenth-century Cambridge wrangler in his criticism of “the shortcomings of Arnold’s logic,” his “fuzzy concepts,” his “ambiguous terminology,” and his “characteristic lack of conceptual rigor,” but then Arnold always was “too deliberately free of the hobgoblins of systematic thought” to be “much bothered by inconsistency,” so naturally Arnoldian discourse will be “riddled with contradictions.”156 Thus Pecora announces that Arnold was “fundamentally Ibid. 57. Ibid. 58–9. 153 Ibid. 54, emphasis added. 154 Ibid. 53, emphasis added. 155 The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to 151

152

Tony Blair (New Haven; London: Yale UP, 2006) 263n173. 156 Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation, and Modernity (Chicago; London: U of Chicago P, 2006) 136–7, 140.

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a racist,” and the “lingering resonance” of his racism “cannot be ignored.”157 He regrets that Arnold’s racism is not made more of but is typically distorted or omitted altogether from discussions by such distinguished critics and historians as Trilling, George Stocking, David J. DeLaura, and Lionel Gossman. Trilling’s opinions have already been noted. Stocking ignores the race question entirely, Pecora says, and DeLaura does “little to explore the race-culture link,” while Gossman “more or less absolves Matthew Arnold of any overt complicity.”158 Frederic Everett Faverty, on the other hand, whose Matthew Arnold, the Ethnologist (1951) is a study that Pecora finds “too often ignored” by Arnold scholars, does not let the prophet of culture off the hook so easily: his “conclusion is as harsh as criticism of Arnold gets.”159 Gerald Graff similarly finds Faverty’s “a devastating book” for Arnold, who supposedly “subscribed to some of the more unsavory versions of the theory of national racial dispositions that many Victorians entertained.”160 While Faverty admits that Arnold was “no systematic racialist”—which might add up to no more than again calling him a stupid weakling—he darkly avers that Arnold’s “racial hypothesis” produced effects that “have not gone unheard,” for they “have told upon the world’s practice.”161 Writing in 1951, Faverty might plausibly be taken to insinuate here, in the manner of the critic John Carey, that Arnold was at least remotely instrumental in the Nazi Holocaust, although the kid-gloved coxcomb would surely have deplored the logical disciplinarity and rigorous systematicity of the Sh’oah death camps.162 In Pecora’s view, the racialist “sentiments” in Culture and Anarchy should be “assimilated to those in Celtic Literature,” since the latter was published “only one year before the earliest elements of Culture and Anarchy began appearing.”163 Using Pecora’s chronometric standard, one could then extend his argument and assert that such “sentiments” should in turn be “assimilated” to those of Literature and Dogma, the first installment of which ran in Cornhill only 18 months after the publication of Culture and Anarchy, in other words, in a temporal proximity nearly equal to that of Celtic Literature and Culture and Anarchy. As it happens, Literature and Dogma also offers a further fruitful example of Arnold’s deployment of Victorian race science. He takes up Émile Burnouf’s La Science des religions (1872) and gives an extended analysis of Burnouf’s new theory of the racial basis of biblical transmission. Burnouf, he says,

Ibid. 153. Ibid. 136–8. 159 Ibid 139. 160 “Arnold, Reason, and Common Culture” 191. 161 Faverty, Matthew Arnold, the Ethnologist 1, 191–2, qtd. in Pecora, Secularization 157 158

and Cultural Criticism 138–9. 162 See John Carey, Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 (London: Faber, 1992). 163 Secularization and Cultural Criticism 139.

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will prove to us in a thick volume that the oracles of God were not committed to a Semitic race at all, but to the Aryan; that the true God is not Israel’s God at all, but is “the idea of the absolute” which Israel could never properly master. This “sacred theory of the Aryas,” it seems, passed into Palestine from Persia and India, and got possession of the founder of Christianity and of his greatest apostles St. Paul and St. John; becoming more perfect, and returning more and more to its true character of a “transcendent metaphysic,” as the doctors of the Christian Church developed it. So that we Christians, who are Aryas, may have the satisfaction of thinking that “the religion of Christ has not come to us from the Semites,” and that “it is in the hymns of the Veda, and not in the Bible, that we are to look for the primordial source of our religion.” (CPW 6.239)

Once Arnold takes to quoting phrases like “sacred theory,” “transcendent metaphysic,” and “the idea of the absolute,” his scorn for the pretentious philosophical systematizing of the athletes of logic is sure to be close behind, and so it proves in this case. Speculations such as Burnouf’s, he says, “almost take away the breath of a mere man of letters,” the “mere” here further signifying that Arnold is hanging ironic fire. He continues: “Undoubtedly these exploits of the Aryan genius are gratifying to us members of the Aryan race,” and “we ought to be pleased at having vindicated the greatness of our race, and not having borrowed a Semitic religion as it stood, but transformed it by importing our metaphysics into it” (CPW 6.239–40). The bow is taut: Israel, therefore, instead of being a light to the Gentiles and a salvation to the ends of the earth, falls to a place in the world’s religious history behind the Arya. He is dismissed as ranking anthropologically between the Aryas and the yellow man; as having frizzled hair, thick lips, small calves, flat feet, and belonging, above all, to those “occipital races” whose brain cannot grow above the age of sixteen; whereas the brain of a theological Arya, such as one of our bishops, may go on growing all his life. (CPW 6.240)

Humor of this kind covers a multitude of sins, though perhaps not in the eyes of many postcolonial moralizers. R. H. Super, the distinguished editor of Arnold’s prose, comments usefully on this passage: Having “quickly perceived the fallacies of Burnouf’s use of the modern ‘sciences’ of comparative religion, philology, ethnology, etc.,” Arnold could now “ridicule the ethnological theories he himself took seriously in On the Study of Celtic Literature” (CPW 6.479). That he ever took such race theories any more seriously than he does in Literature and Dogma is at least questionable, I believe, since his trademark irony there leaves most attentive readers in no doubt of his attitude. Arnold’s subtle delicacies sometimes verge on impalpability, and Pecora risks a strong misprision when he takes at face value the claim made by “Matthew Arnold,” narrator of the letters

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in Friendship’s Garland (1867), that he is making a systematic study of Hegel under the tutelage of Arminius (CPW 5.76–7).164 Since Pecora recasts many of Young’s earlier claims, he cannot be said to forward the argument significantly, although he does have the virtue of rephrasing these claims with greater clarity. For instance, like Young he makes the point that Arnold’s deployment of the tropes of nineteenth-century race science in the service of an essentialist characterology shows an affinity with some of the more recent conceptual heavy lifting done by ideas like culture and ethnicity in the field of cultural studies. As the basis for an identitarian politics, words like culture and ethnicity today bear much of the same mystificatory freight that race, bent, force, or complexion did in Arnold’s day. Ethnicity now seems to operate, as Pecora rightly says, as a postmodern essentialism that “allows the disavowed ghost of bloodcarried cultural humors to occupy the sanitized (or non-‘essentialist’) precincts of contemporary cultural studies.”165 This point well deserves making, and one could even add that a similar conceptual fuzziness and presentist fallacy threatens fields like evolutionary anthropology or historical demographics when DNA distribution patterns are used to ground hypotheses of an “apartheid-like social structure” in early Anglo-Saxon Britain.166 Young and Pecora risk similarly misrepresenting the very evidence that supposedly most strongly supports their claim of racism in Culture and Anarchy, particularly when the terms Hellenism and Hebraism are construed as if used by Arnold in a narrowly essentializing sense. Arnold’s definitions of Hellenism and Hebraism, if they can be styled definitions, are worth recalling: each is a “force,” he says, Hebraism an “energy driving at practice” and Hellenism an “intelligence driving at … ideas” (CPW 5.163). The energy of Hebraism gives us our “paramount sense of the obligation of duty, self-control, and work, this earnestness in going manfully with the best light we have,” while the intelligence of Hellenism gives us our “ardent sense for all the new and changing combinations of [ideas] which man’s development brings with it, the indomitable impulse to know and to adjust them perfectly.” He calls the energy of practice “paramount,” which implies Hebraism’s priority, but at the same time the intelligence of ideas is, “after all, the basis of right practice.” The two forces thus are “rivals dividing the empire of the world between them,” he says, but “not by the necessity of their own nature, but as exhibited in man and Ibid. 142. There may yet be more to say on this point. Sidgwick refers in 1867 to Hegel as a “philosopher with whom [Arnold] is more familiar than I am.” See “The Prophet of Culture” 274n1. Hegel has almost no place in Arnold’s letters and notebooks, although he numbers him, in “The Bishop and the Philosopher” (1863), among the “freethinkers who really speak to the higher culture of their nation or of Europe” (CPW 3.49) and refers to him respectfully, but almost always ironically, in other essays as well (CPW 3.65, 180–81; 5.76–7; 7.182, 272; 8.136). 165 Ibid. 152–3. 166 Mark G. Thomas et al., “Evidence for an Apartheid-like Social Structure in Early Anglo-Saxon England,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 273.1601 (22 Oct. 2006): 2651–7, 18 July 2006 . 164

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his history,” that is, not as abstract, theoretical essences but in concrete, practical, historical experience. Arnold takes his names for these two forces “from the two races of men who have supplied the most signal and splendid manifestations of them”—namely, the Hellenes and Hebrews. Arnold borrows this duality from Heinrich Heine, as he acknowledges at various times (CPW 3.127–8; 5.164).167 Plainly enough, instead of Jew and Greek, Arnold might as easily choose from among other common binaries—say, Ouranos and Chthonos, Sol and Luna, Venus and Mars, Atman and Brahman, Thomas and Mary, and so forth. His attitude toward “Culture” reveals his terminological flexibility: “We will not stickle for a name,” he says, when we seek to identify the means to individual and social perfection (CPW 5.191). “The name of culture one might easily give up. … But what we are concerned for is the thing, not the name; and the thing, call it by what name we will, is simply the enabling ourselves … to get a basis for a less confused action and a more complete perfection than we have at present.” Conversely, he vigorously resists hostile redefinitions of “the thing,” as he shows in his attitude toward an “American friend of the English Liberals”: [for] this gentleman, taking the bull by the horns, proposes that we should for the future call industrialism culture, and the industrialists the men of culture, and then of course there can be no longer any misapprehension about their true character; and besides the pleasure of being wealthy and comfortable, they will have authentic recognition as vessels of sweetness and light. (CPW 5.129)

Transposed to the analysis of the supposed racist subtext of Arnold’s use of Hellenism and Hebraism, Leavis’s monitory remark about the risk of doing interpretive injustice to Arnold by “taking critical stock at a remove from the actual reading” of his essays is perhaps worth recalling here. To construe Hellenism and Hebraism as entailing a form of race-essentializing, as Young, Pecora, and others do, one must ignore the telos of Arnold’s argument: “Conduct.” “The final aim of both Hellenism and Hebraism,” he says, “as of all great spiritual disciplines, is no doubt the same: man’s perfection or salvation” (CPW 5.164). The operative terms—“spiritual discipline,” “perfection,” “salvation”—figure the means and end of Arnold’s “Culture,” “[s]o long as we do not forget that both Hellenism and Hebraism are profound and admirable manifestations of man’s life, tendencies, and powers, and that both of them aim at a like final result” (CPW 5.166). His focus, as usual, is wholly on the impalpable moral and intellectual qualities of character, with Hellenism and Hebraism called up merely for the sake of their figural force in impressing the reader’s memory, simply colorful embodiments of his pale abstractions. Astute contemporary critics like Amanda Anderson recognize that Arnold’s innocuous racialism is a bit of a red herring. Yet while Anderson seems inclined to challenge the received wisdom 167 Mill makes basically the same distinction when he counterposes a “Calvinistic” to a “Greek ideal.” See “On Liberty,” The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. John M. Robinson, vol. 18 (Toronto: Toronto UP, 1977) 265–6.

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regarding his “seemingly pervasive race-thinking” and the “disturbing ideology” of his “ethno-logic,” and indeed her argument in The Powers of Distance (2001) moves well beyond the two-dimensional culture-wars image of Arnold, she finally accepts Young’s assertion of a fundamental racism in Arnold’s thought, claiming that “no matter how far Arnold’s theory of race tends to transmute into culture,” and “no matter how willful or mediated the relationship between the cultivated individual or group and its racial characteristics, the fact remains that Arnold necessarily relies upon, or always returns to, a bedrock theory of racial difference.”168 An Intimidatingly Nit-Picking Superego Ruth apRoberts once claimed that Arnold’s criticism impresses the modern academic mind “so profoundly that on the one hand we take many of his achievements for granted and on the other hand we have yet to exhaust the virtue of his influence.”169 As the preceding trajectory from the athletes of logic to the postcolonial Arnold shows—at times perhaps coming closer to a catalog of invective than to an account of intellectual filiations—taking Arnold for granted and, by the same token, keeping his influence unexhausted has been no accidental happenstance. He never did “hit it off happily with the logicians,” he said, and they seem to have repaid his scorn with interest. Yet Arnold’s fixed attitude never wavered, as his later essays reveal. In “A French Critic on Goethe” (1878), for instance, he itemizes the variety of critical judgments, such as those rooted in “enthusiasm and admiration,” in “gratitude and sympathy,” in “ignorance,” in “incompatibility,” even those springing from “envy and jealousy” (CPW 8.254). None yields a “definitive judgment,” a “clear-sighted, impartial,” disinterested view, yet all can be instructive by virtue of their very partiality, at least all but one: Finally there is the systematic judgment, and this judgment is the most worthless of all. The sharp scrutiny of envy and jealousy may bring real faults to light. The judgments of incompatibility and ignorance are instructive, whether they reveal necessary clefts of separation between the experiences of different sorts of people, or reveal simply the narrowness and bounded view of those who judge. But the systematic judgment is altogether unprofitable. Its author has not really his eye upon the professed object of his criticism at all, but upon something else which he wants to prove by means of that object. He neither really tells us, therefore, anything about the object, nor anything about his own ignorance of the object. He never fairly looks at it, he is looking at something else. Perhaps if he looked at it straight and full, looked at it simply, he might be able to pass a good judgment on it. As it is, all he tells us is that he is no genuine critic, but a man with a system, an advocate. (CPW 8.254–5) 168 Amanda Anderson, The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanisms and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton; Oxford: Princeton UP, 2001) 98–9. 169 Arnold and God (Berkeley; London: U of California P, 1983) 2.

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One might justly claim that nearly all of Arnold’s detractors have been advocates of one sort or another, each determined “to prove by means of that object”—object-A, one might say—the veracity of Comte or Mill, of dogmatic Anglicanism, dialectical materialism, or critical antihumanism. The discussion thus far, by casting into a revisionist light the received wisdom regarding Arnold and his place in the critical tradition, seems to reveal some gaps and flaws in that received wisdom, which suggest that the conventional view of Arnold still retains a significant measure of academic advocacy. His image starts to seem a mere suppositious representation, almost a stock stage villain—the chief apologist for high-culture exclusivity and the high priest of academic canonicity and Eurocentric racism. This largely moralized Arnoldian inheritance obscures, among other things, the considerably more interesting role that Arnold plays in prefiguring the twentieth-century critique of Enlightenment and its postmodern reverberations, a subject taken up in the following chapters. The ground is now clear for the positive construction of an account of Arnold’s ideas, starting with the idea that predominates in his poetry and prose like a master trope: “Renouncement.” Before leaving these various Arnold caricatures, however, it might be useful to speculate briefly about the general conditions that fostered them. Surely partisan rancor alone is not a sufficient cause. The British philosopher Bernard Williams describes the style of argument now dominant in contemporary analytical philosophy as one that “seeks precision by total mind control.”170 He cites the Cambridge philosopher and Bloomsbury idol G. E. Moore as one source for this discursive habit, but it seems to derive equally directly from the older line of logical athletes as well. Williams attributes the prevalence of this style to a combination of factors at play within the general process of academic professionalization, such as the peculiar exigencies involved in producing a philosophy dissertation and the institutional pressures toward careerist self-promotion. Most relevant to the present discussion, however, because apparently less historically contingent, is the tradition of teaching philosophy by means of “eristic arguments, which tends to implant in philosophers an intimidatingly nit-picking superego, a blend of their most impressive teachers and their most competitive colleagues, which guides their writing by means of constant anticipations of guilt and shame.” The moral economy of modern academic philosophy that Williams describes sounds not unlike the one structuring the discursive atmosphere of the Victorian literarycritical reviews, demanding a kind of mental tightrope walking sans net between the equal and opposite strictures of the gentlemen’s-club shame culture and the late-evangelical guilt culture. Leslie Stephen, for example, while admitting that the “prosaic mind”—read, the “intimidatingly nit-picking” thinker—is apt to “despise” the poetical mind for its poetical power, nevertheless deems Arnold “too much inclined to trust to his intuitions, as if they were equivalent to scientific and measurable statements,” which is one reason why Arnold’s “judgments show greater skill in seizing characteristic aspects than in giving a logical analysis or a “Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline,” Three Penny Review 22.1 (spring 2001): 8.

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convincing proof.”171 While Stephen’s logical stringencies might even seem loose in comparison with the rigorist theology of his Clapham Sect forebears or with the current philosophical standards of analytical acumen described by Williams, they are nonetheless cut from the same cloth, and this discursive continuity helps to explain the early image of Arnold as Liberalism’s logical lightweight and his later status as founding father of metacultural authoritarianism. Arnold’s relations with his “scientific friends” also perhaps reflect the more general anxiety that many Victorian intellectuals feel in the face of social and market forces that are gradually effeminizing their status as gentlemanly laborers and amateur men of letters.172 At the same time, the hostility of the athletes of logic also reveals incipient symptoms of the tensions that later produce the F. R. Leavis– C. P. Snow controversy of the Two Cultures in the late 1950s and that today manifest in the intensity of the forces of academic specialization and professionalization. This intensity is by no means unique to philosophy departments. Said, for instance, laments the “advent of aggressive new subspecialties, mostly centered on the academic study of postmodern identities,” which “have been displaced from the worldly context into the academy—and therefore denatured and depoliticized— imperiling that sense of a collective human history as grasped in some of the global patterns of dependence and interdependence” that his preferred brand of antiessentialist humanism explores.173 Arnold’s weak-mindedness and effeminacy receive yet another inflection at the hands of his New Left and postcolonial critics, who see in him the smiling façade that fronts a coercive bourgeois hegemony, but even here Said’s criticisms cannot obscure his own ambiguous allegiance. Although he taunts and teases those critics of his Orientalism who launch “disapproving attacks because of its ‘residual’ humanism, its theoretical inconsistencies, its insufficient, perhaps even sentimental, treatment of agency,” he does not ultimately answer them.174 But how can he? On the score of “residual” humanism, Said stands convicted by his own words: “All the while, I was also saying that many of us believe, with Arnold and T. S. Eliot, that we must in some perhaps almost instinctual way continue to hold on to a wonderfully stable order of great works of art whose sustaining power means a great deal to each of us in his or her own way.”175 As Chapter 6 shows, Said is not the only postmodernist harboring an Arnoldian residuum.

“Matthew Arnold,” National and English Review 22.127 (22 Dec. 1893): 462. See Stefan Collini, “Manly Fellows: Fawcett, Stephen, and the Liberal Temper,”

171 172

Chapter 5 of Public Moralists; James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (Ithaca, NY; London: Cornell UP, 1995); James Eli Adams, “Gentleman, Dandy, Priest: Manliness and Social Authority in Pater’s Aestheticism,” ELH 59.2 (summer 1992): 448–9. 173 Humanism and Democratic Criticism 55. 174 Orientalism 339. 175 Humanism and Democratic Criticism 33.

Chapter 5

To the Wise, Foolish; to the World, Weak: The Reception of Arnoldian Pessimism

For Brutus only overcame himself— —Shakespeare, Julius Caesar



The firmament secretly whispered in my heart “Do you know what sentence fate laid on me? If my revolving were in my control, I would release me from this circling.” —Edward Fitzgerald, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám







The labor of this book has thus far been almost exclusively negative: an attempt to relieve Arnold’s image, blackened as it is with the smoke of a more-than-lifelong conflict in the field of cultural politics, of some of the partisan soot that obscures his “Culture” and “Conduct.” To proceed now to a positive construction, it is necessary to return to the starting point and recall that Arnold famously opens Culture and Anarchy by describing himself as “a Liberal tempered by experience, reflection, and renouncement” (CPW 5.88). If one asks, “But renouncement of what?” then Arnold answers with the “secret” of Jesus: “Renounce thyself,” which he says is the negative side of the commandment, “Love one another” (CPW 6.298). This unexceptionable bit of stock moralizing has doubtless provided the text for innumerable sermons, but Arnold extends the familiar precept to its logical conclusion, drawing social and psychological inferences from it with a copiousness and consistency that ultimately saturate his thought. The burden of this chapter and the next lies in elucidating the philosophical pessimism that is at the root of Arnold’s ethic of “renouncement” and the extent to which the implications of this normative structure inform his work as a whole, particularly his rhetorical style. When critics engage Arnold’s pessimism (a rare event), they do so almost exclusively within the context of his verse. If the standard critical narrative holds that Arnold’s poetry is profoundly melancholic—few critics would dispute this premise—then his prose, in contrast, is deemed serenely optimistic, bringing forth sweetness and light, reason and the will of God, the balanced harmonies and wholeness of culture, the best selves of individuals and states, and so forth. It is admittedly pretty hard to ignore the note of resigned gloom in the verse— “O unstrung will! O broken heart!” (“Oberman” 183)—but the more salient point is the prominence in the poetry of the ethical posture of resignation and “renouncement,” a posture that also thoroughly permeates Arnold’s prose work. The goal of this chapter is to foster an understanding of Arnold’s philosophical pessimism first by demonstrating its ubiquitous presence in his poetry and in his

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critical, political, and religious prose. Read retrospectively, from the point of view of the religious writings, Arnold’s poems not only reveal their own significance in relation to “renouncement” but also show how his prose work is similarly unified around this theme of self-overcoming. Equally crucial is an understanding of Arnold’s deployment of a rhetoric of ethical exemplarity—living embodiments that first appear in the example-driven poems (examples that sometimes cause him trouble, such as Empedocles and Oberman), then in the moral exemplars who people Essays in Criticism (some of whom, atheists like Spinoza and Marcus Aurelius, for instance, again irk the critics), and finally in the imitated of all imitators and the one hero of “Conduct” whom Arnold’s critics cannot easily gainsay: Jesus. Although Arnold’s ethic of “renouncement” attracts little direct engagement— we have even seen critics like W. J. Courthope contrive to disappear it, Henry Sidgwick and T. S. Eliot to invert it, and Edward W. Said and Terry Eagleton to outrun it—Arnold himself stands prominently among the Victorian moralists, if only in Eliot’s sense that “a writer may be none the less classified a moralist, if his moralising is suspect or perverse.”1 Lytton Strachey claims that literature, to Arnold, “was always an excuse for talking about something else,” and Eliot says that Arnold only “wrote about poets when they provided a pretext for his sermon to the British public.”2 Arnold’s poet-sermons, in Eliot’s view, not only cause a “disturbance of our literary values” but also have the “deplorable moral and religious effects” of “confusing poetry and morals in an attempt to find a substitute for religious faith,” for even though Arnold “speaks to us of discipline, it is the discipline of culture, not the discipline of suffering.”3 So far is the prophet of culture from sermonizing on the discipline of suffering, according to Eliot, that “the gospel of [Walter] Pater follows naturally upon the prophecy of Arnold,” for Pater’s decadent aestheticism is “the offspring of Arnold’s Culture; and we can hardly venture to say that it is even a perversion of Arnold’s doctrine, considering how very vague and ambiguous that doctrine is.”4 Eliot sees in Pater’s aestheticism—with its “hard, gem-like flame,” its “ecstacy,” and its doctrine that “[n]ot the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end”5—only a further “development of the intellectual Epicurianism of Arnold,” and the “degradation of philosophy and religion, skilfully initiated by Arnold, is competently continued by Pater.”6 We learn nothing, Eliot says, about the discipline of suffering from

“Arnold and Pater,” Selected Essays of T. S. Eliot (New York: Harcourt, 1950) 389. Strachey, “A Victorian Critic,” Literary Essays (New York: Harcourt, n.d.) 210;

1 2

Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London: Faber, 1933) 103. 3 The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism 95, 108–9. 4 “Arnold and Pater” 387, 390. 5 Walter Pater, Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London: Macmillan, 1873) 210. 6 “Arnold and Pater” 388.

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Arnold, “any more than we learn about the ‘secret’ of Jesus of which he has so much to say.”7 Eliot’s view of the discipline in suffering was touched on in Chapter 1: “Thought, study, mortification, sacrifice: it is such notions as these that should be impressed upon the young,” he says, for “the way of discipline and asceticism must be emphasized.”8 He also claims, “There is no good making Christianity easy and pleasant; ‘Youth,’ or the better part of it, is more likely to come to a difficult religion than to an easy one.”9 Although Eliot strives to associate Arnold’s religious views with the sinful and self-indulgent pleasures of Pater and Wilde and to figure him as opposed to “the discipline of suffering,” it would be more critically just to say that Arnold unambiguously equates “the discipline of suffering” with the “secret” of Jesus, as he makes quite plain in Literature and Dogma. The “secret” of Jesus, he says, is “the secret of self-renouncement,” and “self-renouncement, the main factor in conduct or righteousness, is ‘the secret of Jesus,’ because, although others have seen that it was necessary, Jesus, above everyone, saw that it was peace, joy, love” (CPW 6.298–9, 296). Once we grasp the “necessity” of renunciation, Arnold says, which is the “law of rule and suppression,” we see “not only the pain and suffering” that it brings but also its “beneficence” (CPW 6.295). It is in this sense that Jesus revealed “the joy, which in self-renouncement underlies the pain,” when he “boldly called the suppression of our first impulses and current thoughts: life, real life, eternal life” (CPW 6.296). In preaching this law of self-denial, Jesus “saw through the suffering at its surface to the joy at its centre, filled it with promise and hope, and made it infinitely attractive.” He saw “the happiness of it,” and lest this “negative state of things” appear to be a mere formula for suffering and self-denial—“a reign of check and constraint, a reign, merely, of morality”—Arnold characterizes it instead as a discipline leading to peace, happiness, and life: “For the breaking the sway of what is commonly called one’s self, ceasing our concern with it and leaving it to perish, is not, Jesus said, being thwarted or crossed, but living” (CPW 6.296, 293). To bring the distinctiveness of Arnold’s pessimism clearly into focus, it is worth indicating at this point, albeit very briefly, the role played by the concept of suffering in philosophy and religion and its close relation to the concept of self-overcoming. One can simply note at the start the importance of both of these ideas in Christian theology, in Buddhist spirituality, and in the philosophical pessimism of Schopenhauer. In Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, existence equals suffering insofar as the phenomenal world is nothing but the objectification of a transcendental will, which in itself is a blind, ceaseless, and insatiable craving.

Ibid. 387. “Thoughts after Lambeth” (1931), Selected Essays of T. S. Eliot (New York:

7 8

Harcourt, 1950) 329. 9 Ibid. 328–9.

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“[I]ncurable suffering and endless misery,” he says, are “essential to the phenomenon of the will,” and as “there is no ultimate aim of striving,” so “there is no measure or end of suffering” (WWR 1.309, 411). Purely as a description of a state of affairs, Schopenhauer’s assessment is echoed, perhaps surprisingly, by the 1912 edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia, which now has the Church’s sanction as the online standard—“It can hardly be disputed that the Christian view of life in itself is scarcely less pessimistic than that of Schopenhauer … and its pains are regarded as essentially characteristic of its present condition.”10 The substance of this view reappears in a 1984 letter of Pope John Paul II, in which he says that “what we express by the word ‘suffering’ seems to be particularly essential to the nature of man … . Suffering seems to belong to man’s transcendence.”11 Similarly, in the Sutta Pitaka, part of the Pali Canon of Buddhist scriptures, the eleventh sutta of the fifty-sixth chapter of the Samyutta Nikaya, the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, one finds what are commonly called the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism: “Suffering, as a noble truth, is this: Birth is suffering; aging is suffering; sickness is suffering; death is suffering; sorrow and lamentation, pain, grief, and despair are suffering; association with the loathed is suffering; dissociation from the loved is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering—in short, suffering is the five categories of clinging objects.”12 Life thus necessarily entails suffering: this is a donnée of Christians, Buddhists, and philosophical pessimists alike. The traditions 10 Catholic Encyclopedia, ed. Charles G. Herbermann et al., 15 vols. (New York: Appleton, 1907–1912) s.v. “Pessimism” . 11 Pope John Paul II, “Salvifici Doloris,” 11 Feb. 1984, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1 May 2007 . 12 “Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta: Setting Rolling the Wheel of Truth,” Tipitaka: The Pali Canon, SN56.11, trans. Ñanamoli Thera, 2005–2010, 1 May 2007 . It is difficult to ascertain precisely the extent of the role that Eastern religion plays in Arnold’s thought. For a useful inquiry in this line, see James Whitlark, “Matthew Arnold and Buddhism,” The Arnoldian 9.1 (winter 1981): 5–16. That there appears to be at least some measure of harmony between Buddhism and Arnold’s Christian and Stoic notions is suggested by a note that Henry Sidgwick adds to his monumental 1874 study of ethics, in which he claims that Arnold, “in his striking Essay on Literature and Dogma, appears to have been led by a study of the Hebrew Scriptures to a conclusion substantially the same as that of enlightened Buddhism.” See The Methods of Ethics (London: Macmillan, 1874) 470n1. Sidgwick’s appreciative tone is perhaps prompted by his own extensive researches in Hebrew and Arabic scriptures, as noted by Bart Schultz, Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe, an Intellectual Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004) 70–71. On the other hand, an 1879 comment by Edwin Wallace (whose brother William writes the entry on “Pessimism” for the ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica) seems to presuppose an Eastern influence on Arnold: “[W]ith whatever freshness Mr. Matthew Arnold may expound his system of ‘Moral Idealism,’” he says, one need only “turn to the study of Confucius to see the same views exhibited with an elaborateness, a finish, and a consistency … which even the delicate repetitory pen of Mr. Arnold cannot rival.” See Edwin Wallace, “Pessimism,” Edinburgh

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differ, of course, over the etiology, ontology, and teleology of suffering or, put more simply, on the meaning of suffering. Philosophical pessimism deploys a fiercely simple logic: If life is suffering, and suffering is evil, then life is evil and a fate to be regretted. Schopenhauer states the matter clearly: “If we picture to ourselves roughly as far as we can the sum total of misery, pain, and suffering of every kind on which the sun shines in its course, we shall admit that it would have been much better if it had been just as impossible for the sun to produce the phenomenon of life on earth as on the moon.”13 Christian optimists will sometimes accept these pessimistic premises but dispute the conclusion, but to do so they typically seek refuge in mystery and darken counsel with claims to the effect that evil is good. John McClintock and James Strong, for instance, two mid-Victorian theologians, “find the explanation of evil in some greater and superabounding good, of which this evil in its infliction or permission is the condition or the means,” and in this they recognize “the existence of a wise and benevolent Ruler of the universe, who from seeming evil is ever educing good, and whose wisdom and goodness will be amply justified when the reasons of his administration are fully understood.”14 Evil here is only a “seeming evil,” and the promise of ample ultimate justification grounds Christian theodicy in optimism. To Schopenhauer, of course, optimism of this sort makes “a bitter mockery of the unspeakable sufferings of mankind. Let no one imagine,” he says, “that the Christian teaching is favorable to optimism; on the contrary, in the Gospels world and evil are used almost as synonymous expressions” (WWR 1.326). The Catholic Encyclopedia states that one important “characteristic of holiness according to the Christian ideal is love of suffering; not as though pleasure were evil in itself, but because suffering is the great means by which our love of God is intensified and purified.”15 The logic of this love-of-suffering argument accounts to some extent for the ascetic excesses embodied in the practices of, for instance, the Encratites and Flagellants.16 Admitting the case that life is suffering, yet determined in spite of all appearances to affirm the ultimate goodness of life, Christian optimism embraces and affirms human suffering, even organic suffering in general, with “the whole creation … groaning in labor pains.”17 Here one finds what could be termed a back door connecting Christianity to Friedrich Nietzsche’s so-called Review 149.306 (Apr. 1879): 502–3; William Wallace, “Pessimism,” Encyclopedia Britannica, 9th ed., vol. 18 (New York: Scribner’s, 1878) 684–91. 13 Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, trans. E. F. J. Payne, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1974) 99. 14 John McClintock and James Strong, eds., Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature, 10 vols. (New York: Harper, 1867–1881) s.v. “Pessimism.” 15 Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Sanctity” . 16 See Geoffrey Galt Harpham, The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism (Chicago; London: U of Chicago P, 1987). 17 New Oxford Annotated Bible, ed. Michael D. Coogan (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001) New Revised Standard Version, Rom. 8:22.

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“pessimism of strength,” which also affirms life in its most doubtful, even its most horrible, aspects.18 “The pessimism of strength,” Nietzsche said, “also culminates in a theodicy, in an absolute saying Yes to the world, but for the very reasons that used to prompt one’s No to it: and thus a Yes to the conception of this world as the actually attained, highest possible ideal.” To Nietzsche, the will would rather will its own suffering than not will. Even Schopenhauer, although he ultimately turns thumbs down on existence and seeks beatitude in will-less nothingness, suggests a kind of atheodicy with his notion of “eternal justice,” because [t]he will performs the great tragedy and comedy at its own expense and is also its own spectator. The world is precisely as it is, because the will, whose phenomenon is the world, is such a will as it is, because it wills in such a way. The justification for suffering is the fact that the will affirms itself even in this phenomenon; and this affirmation is justified and balanced by the fact that the will bears the suffering. (WWR 1.331)

But does the will bear the suffering? Near the end of his life, British philosopher Bernard Williams wrote an essay entitled “Unbearable Suffering.”19 At the time, Williams was himself bearing the pain of the spinal cancer that finally killed him in 2003. He chose as the text for his philosophical essay the concluding paragraphs of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals (1887): Man, the bravest of animals and the one most accustomed to suffering, does not repudiate suffering as such: he desires it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering. The meaninglessness of suffering, not suffering itself, was the curse that lay over mankind so far—and the ascetic ideal offered man meaning!20

Williams omits the final clause, concerning the ascetic ideal, asking instead what it means for suffering to lack a meaning. Does meaning here necessarily imply a purpose? he asks, a telos? or simply an explanation or the identification of a cause? and in any case, what is it for meaning to render suffering “bearable?”21 To Williams, “some suffering simply is unbearable. It can break people,” and this no matter how fully they might identify with the purpose for which they suffer.22 “The idea that meaning, or purpose, or understanding, or even, perhaps, a true philosophy could make all suffering bearable is a lie, whether it is told by recruiting sergeants or by ancient sages.” To Nietzsche, man “suffered from the problem of Writings from the Late Notebooks, ed. Rüdiger Bittner, trans. Kate Sturge (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003) 180. 19 Bernard Williams, “Unbearable Suffering,” The Sense of the Past: Essays in the History of Philosophy (Princeton; Oxford: Princeton UP, 2006) 331–7. 20 On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufman and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1967) 162. 21 Williams 333. 22 Ibid. 334. 18

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his meaning … his problem was not suffering itself, but that there was no answer to the crying question, ‘why do I suffer?’”23 As Williams notes, in traditional discussions of these questions an explanation was often taken to be a teleological explanation. But if that kind of explanation supposedly yielded meaning in the relevant sense, this was not just because it was an explanation, but because it introduced a purpose, and not merely somebody’s arbitrary purpose, but rather one that was the purpose of the universe (or something like that), and so was supposed to have authority for everyone insofar as they were rational.24

Williams leaves aside questions of divine or cosmic purpose and seeks instead a meaning that is local and personal, considering only those “cases in which a purpose has authority for the sufferer because it is involved in a project that expresses a purpose of the sufferer’s own.” “What gives my suffering a meaning for me,” he says, “need not be directly my own purpose, but rather a purpose that I acknowledge, or which has authority over me, or is, in some way, a purpose for me”25 Indeed, “we can use Nietzsche’s thought the other way round: imagining someone who suffers for such reasons and bears it, we can ask what new sense it is that his life is now finding for itself.”26 For Christian pessimists, suffering life finds sense in its suffering precisely insofar as it loses itself, which touches the theme of self-forgetting, in Arnold’s terms, renouncement. At least some Christians agree with the philosophical pessimists as to the symptoms of humanity’s existential disease, and they even concur in the salvific prescription for this state of earthly suffering, that is, in resignation, self-forgetting, the denial of the will. To Schopenhauer, if a salutary kind of “knowledge reacts on the will, it can bring about the will’s self-elimination, in other words, resignation. This is the ultimate goal, and indeed the innermost nature of all virtue and holiness, and is salvation from the world” (WWR 1.152). The Christian notion of sanctity points in the same direction: “All those who have attained a high degree of holiness have learnt to rejoice in suffering,” according to the Catholic Encyclopedia, “because by it their love to God was freed from every element of self-seeking, and their lives conformed to that of their Master. Those who have not grasped this principle may call themselves by the name of Christian, but they have not understood the meaning of the cross.”27 Here one finds another key—pace Nietzsche—to the multiple forms of religious asceticism, to the ego extirpation of the mystics, and to the chief theological virtue of caritas, selflessness, and compassion, what the moral philosophers call ethical altruism. It is also clearly akin to Arnoldian renouncement. Now Schopenhauer considers “asceticism and 25 26 27

On the Genealogy 162. Williams 335. Ibid. 333. Ibid. 337. Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Sanctity” . 23 24

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its central point, the meritorious nature of celibacy,” as “the innermost kernel of Christianity” (WWR 2.625). In his view, “Christianity is the doctrine of the deep guilt of the human race by reason of its very existence, and of the heart’s intense longing for salvation therefrom. That salvation, however, can be attained only by the heaviest sacrifices and by the denial of one’s own self, hence by a complete reform of man’s nature.” Unlike Williams’s modest local account, Schopenhauer’s metaphysics offers a global account of suffering, an ethical grand narrative that rivals Christian doctrine in its cosmic scope. As we shall see in the next chapter, however, Arnold could not embrace celibacy. By contrast, French philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas, in a 1982 essay, claims that “pure suffering … is intrinsically meaningless and condemned to itself without exit.”28 It is “through evil that suffering is understood,” he says, and “[t]his negativity of evil is, probably, the source or kernel of all apophantic negation. The not of evil is negative right up to non-sense. All evil refers to suffering. It is the impasse of life and being,” and of this “absurdity … the least one can say about suffering is that in its own phenomenality, intrinsically, it is useless, ‘for nothing.’”29 Yet there is a “beyond” to suffering, as Lévinas says, and it “takes shape in the inter-human”: In this [interhuman] perspective a radical difference develops between suffering in the Other, which for me is unpardonable and solicits me and calls me, and suffering in me, my own adventure of suffering, whose constitutional or congenital uselessness can take on a meaning, the only meaning to which suffering is susceptible, in becoming a suffering for the suffering—be it inexorable—of someone else … . To be sure, consciousness of this inescapable obligation makes the idea of God more difficult, but it also makes it spiritually closer than confidence in any kind of theodicy.30

With his trademark ethical absolutes, Lévinas calls for a “faith without theodicy,” and he asks whether “humanity, in its indifference, [is] going to abandon the world to useless suffering, leaving it to the political fatality—or the drifting— of the blind forces which inflict misfortune on the weak and conquered?”31 Lévinas’s demand for an ethical responsibility that subtends ontology recurs, with variations, in the thought of Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Derrida, for instance, and Jean-Luc Marion states the case most pointedly: “for every evil, there is always a cause: man.”32 Emmanuel Lévinas, “Useless Suffering,” The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other, ed. Robert Bernasconi and David Wood, trans. Richard Cohen (London; New York: Routledge, 1988) 157. 29 Ibid. 157–8. 30 Ibid. 159. 31 Ibid. 164. 32 Jean-Luc Nancy, “Responding to Existence,” A Finite Thinking, trans. Sara Guyer (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003) 289; Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two 28

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As these examples suggest, little progress has been made in the postmodern era on this question of the meaning of suffering. One might even detect a distinctly Victorian savor in these ethical turns in literary studies and moral philosophy, particularly in some recent redeployments of traditional Christian-pessimistic tropes of self-denial and self-forgetting. Figures of self-effacement are not only found at the heart of Lévinas’s work, where criticism of “egolatry” and a call for self-forgetting animate his ethics of the Other. Tropes of self-disappearing or self-overcoming are equally prominent in Derrida’s The Gift of Death (1995), for example, which privileges an ascetic discipline “that involves renouncing the self” and that thereby “transforms the Good into a Goodness that is forgetful of itself, into a love that renounces itself.”33 Similarly, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben defines subjectivity as “a self-annihilating nothing,” a kenosis, and a “messianic vocation” that “nullifies the entire subject.”34 Though differing vastly among themselves, these movements in postmodern theory all seem to share some striking resemblances to what Stefan Collini characterizes as the dominant Victorian moral sensibility, that is, altruism. In describing the Stoic ethics of Marcus Aurelius, for instance, Arnold says the mood produced by the pagan philosopher is one of “less than joy and more than resignation” (CPW 3.149). But what is “more than resignation?” In proclaiming that “[r]enouncement is the law of human life,” Arnold pushes Victorian altruism toward its furthest extreme in making it mandatory that all our actions should benefit others (CPW 5.207). “Never mind how various and multitudinous the impulses are,” Arnold says, “Die to them all, and to each as it comes! Christ did … . All impulses of selfishness conflict with Christ’s feelings” (CPW 6.48). Arnold’s Christ-inflected pessimism reveals, as he said himself, the “spectacle of an inspired self-sacrifice; to men who refused themselves nothing, it showed one who refused himself everything.” Nevertheless, Arnold’s transubstantiation of suffering into “joy, which in self-renouncement underlies the pain,” is a circle-squaring miracle that lies quite beyond Schopenhauer’s power (CPW 6.296). Suffering’s inescapable necessity and its synonymity with the ontic essence of life form the hard core of Schopenhauer’s metaphysical pessimism, and any optimistic effort at sophistical rose-tinting, when it is “not merely the thoughtless talk of those who harbour nothing but words under their shallow foreheads,” seems to him to be “not merely an absurd, but also a really wicked way of thinking” (WWR 1.326). Without further pursuing this ontological conundrum here, one can at least note that Arnold’s religious ideas generally, like his notion of “renouncement” particularly, receive little or no critical Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” Acts of Religion, trans. Samuel Weber (New York: Routledge, 2002) 72–9; Jean-Luc Marion, Prolegomena to Charity, trans. Stephen E. Lewis (New York: Fordham UP, 2002) 6. 33 The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago; London: U of Chicago P, 1995) 30, 40. 34 The Man without Content, trans. Georgia Albert (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999) 56; The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005) 41.

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attention today, although this neglect is hardly new.35 Lionel Trilling, for instance, omits the religious prose entirely from his 1949 Viking Portable edition of Arnold, and “religion scarcely existed” in Raymond Williams’s 1958 Culture and Society, according to Maurice Cowling, who finds nothing in Williams’s work to “suggest any interest in Christ or any wish to relate Christianity” to the larger project of cultural critique.36 By 1965, René Wellek could claim that Arnold’s advocacy of “undogmatic religion” is the “part of his activity [that] is most dated,” and this is still the situation two decades later when James C. Livingston, in a detailed study of Arnold’s religious works, Matthew Arnold and Christianity (1986), admits that the religious writings have, “until recently, been largely dismissed as of little interest or importance,” although he thinks he sees “signs that the historical and the inherent merits” of the religious prose is “gaining recognition.”37 When Clinton Machann checks the pulse of critical interest in Arnold’s religious works in 2000, however, he still finds them “routinely ignored, even by critics sympathetic to Arnold, in the past decade or so.”38 Nowadays, critical interest centers almost exclusively on Arnold’s role as a literary and cultural critic, lending at least short-term weight to Collini’s claim that this is where Arnold “will continue to have his greatest claims on us,” with the theological writings left, as Joe Phelan says, as “the part of his output that seems most obviously entwined with obsolete concerns and dead controversies, and it is perhaps for this reason that they have been comparatively neglected.”39 35 This has largely been the case in spite of occasional scholarly efforts expended on Arnold’s religious work since the mid-twentieth century. See, for example, Basil Willey, Nineteenth Century Studies: Coleridge to Matthew Arnold (London: Chatto and Windus, 1949); Humphry House, Coleridge (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1953); William Robbins, The Ethical Idealism of Matthew Arnold: A Study of the Nature and Sources of his Moral and Religious Ideas (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1959); A. O. J. Cockshut, Anglican Attitudes: A Study of Victorian Religious Controversies (London: Collins, 1959); David J. DeLaura, Hebrew and Hellene: (1969); Douglas Bush, Matthew Arnold: A Survey of his Poetry and Prose (New York: Macmillan, 1971); Ruth apRoberts, Arnold and God (Berkeley: U of California P, 1983); James C. Livingston, Matthew Arnold and Christianity: His Religious Prose Writings (Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1986); Maurice Cowling, Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England, 3 vols. (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge UP, 1980–2001). For a useful recent contribution, see Joe Phelan, “The Language of Criticism in Arnold’s Religious Writings,” Nineteenth-Century Prose 34.1–2 (spring–fall 2007): 191–209. 36 See Lionel Trilling, ed., The Portable Matthew Arnold (New York: Viking, 1949); Maurice Cowling, “Raymond Williams in Retrospect,” The New Criterion Online, 8 Feb. 1990, 15 Dec. 2007 . 37 René Wellek, The Later Nineteenth Century, vol. 4, A History of Modern Criticism: 1750–1950 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1965) 155; Livingston, Matthew Arnold and Christianity ix. 38 “Matthew Arnold,” Victorian Poetry 38.3 (fall 2000): 406. 39 Collini, “Afterword to the Clarendon Paperback Edition,” Matthew Arnold: A Critical Portrait (Oxford; New York: Clarendon, 1994) 137; Phelan, “The Language of Criticism in Arnold’s Religious Writings” 192.

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In spite of this neglect, however, Arnold’s “Conduct” nevertheless remains a more or less imposing presence, even in his least overtly religious works. Livingston rightly emphasizes religion’s centrality in Arnold’s literary-critical and political essays, noting that of the nine subjects treated in the first edition of Essays in Criticism, for example, six are “wholly or in part devoted to religion,” and Culture and Anarchy’s central pivot could justly be termed religious.40 Livingston also deftly identifies “renouncement” at the center of Arnold’s ethical thought. He finds unity in the works, not only in Arnold’s “Stoic detachment and repose” but also in “a more active, Carlylean, Goethean, biblical insistence on renouncement and selfless duty” and in the “teaching of necrosis—of dying to the self,” which was “to become the crux of his understanding of Christianity.”41 In the lucid summary of Arnold’s position that appears in the closing pages of his study, Livingston claims that “Arnold was taught by his father, but he also learned in his own experience, that human well-being and happiness are found not in self-absorption but in those disciplines, renunciations, and duties of life that require sublimation, self-loss, and commitment to a higher corporate vision.”42 For all its considerable insight, however, Livingston’s study overlooks the one crucial element in Arnold’s thought—philosophical pessimism—that the present study foregrounds. Along with Buddhist, Stoic, and Christian-mystical influences that Livingston identifies, Arnold’s striking affinity with the philosophy of Schopenhauer is also crucial, with self-loss, renunciation, and necrosis forming the core principles in Schopenhauer’s ethics too, just as his aim of redemptive ego-extirpation is paraphrased in the Christ-inflected self-effacement at the heart of Arnold’s thought, which latter Livingston adumbrates with great skill. To Schopenhauer, knowledge in general, rational knowledge as well as knowledge from perception, proceeds originally from the will itself and remains strictly subordinate to it, “a mere μηχανή [instrument], a means for preserving the individual and the species, just like any organ of the body” (WWR 1.152). Occasionally, however, in the case of individual persons, knowledge can withdraw from this subjection, throw off its yoke, and, free from all the aims of the will, exist purely for itself, simply as a clear mirror of the world; and this is the source of art. Finally … if this kind of knowledge reacts on the will, it can bring about the will’s selfelimination, in other words, resignation. This is the ultimate goal, and indeed the innermost nature of all virtue and holiness, and is salvation from the world.

The metaphysical basis of Schopenhauer’s ethical and aesthetic pessimism lies in this passage, and its close relation to Arnold’s notion of “renouncement” and of a critical disinterestedness that sees the object as in itself it really is, clearly

Matthew Arnold and Christianity 3. Ibid. 20. 42 Ibid. 176. 40 41

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obtains as well, although the extent of this kinship remains to be gauged. It is first necessary to explore the depth of Arnold’s own pessimism. O Life Unlike to Ours! When it comes to his Arnold’s verse, critics readily concede its pessimism. The indisputable bleakness of his poetry is a donnée in Arnold criticism, where descriptions of his unbearable melancholy recur with a predictability itself almost unbearable. Walter E. Houghton calls Arnold “the poet of Victorian loneliness”; Williams judges him a figure of “soured romanticism.”43 At the same time, many critics also claim that he eventually achieves a serene optimism after he gives over his gloomy versifying and turns to prose in the mid-1850s.44 The tone of genial urbanity and occasional hilarity in Arnold’s prose—that is, when he is not flinging ringleaders from the Tarpeian Rock—is again generally admitted by most attentive readers. On this view, the “abandonment to melancholy” that his poetry entailed, and which made “Arnold’s whole life a struggle to conquer melancholy,” leads irrefragably to the flight to prose, his “escape from despair,” as Trilling describes it.45 J. Hillis Miller similarly notes a tonal change accompanying Arnold’s prose turn and attributes it “not to Arnold’s escape from his earlier situation, but to the resigned acquiescence which he ultimately reaches.”46 It is only a small step from Miller’s “resigned acquiescence” to the “note of hope” and “sense of recovery” that William A. Madden finds in “the optimism of [Arnold’s] criticism,” and one further step reaches A. Dwight Culler’s view of the “new joy, the joy of active service in the world” that Arnold supposedly attains in prose.47 Culler’s influential view continues to attract critical adherents.48 As accounts of The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830–1870 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1957) 88; Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (New York: Columbia UP, 1983) 117. 44 Perhaps one monument to critical consensus can serve to represent the received opinion in general: “In [Arnold’s] prose his melancholy and ‘morbid’ personality was subordinated to the resolutely cheerful and purposeful character he had created for himself by an act of will.” Stephen Greenblatt et al., eds., The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 8th ed. (New York: Norton, 2006) 1352. 45 Matthew Arnold (New York: Colombia UP, 1949) 141, 140n, 158. 46 The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers (Cambridge: Belknap, 1963) 263. 47 William A. Madden, Matthew Arnold: A Study of the Aesthetic Temperament in Victorian England (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1967) 49; A. Dwight Culler, Imaginative Reason: The Poetry of Matthew Arnold (New Haven: Yale UP, 1966) 4. 48 His continuing influence is apparent, for example, on Collini, who believes that Arnold found “balance,” “release,” and “cheerfulness” after turning from poetry. See Arnold 25, 38, 43. Even Alan Grob, who does so much to reveal the pessimism of Arnold’s verse, concludes that “[o]nly Arnold the poet, then, can be termed a philosophic pessimist.” See A Longing Like Despair 29. 43

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Arnold’s personal temperament, all of these critical assessments may well be perfectly correct, and I would not wish to gainsay the value of such subtle and sensitive psychobiographical explorations.49 Arnold’s pessimism is also, and more importantly, of the philosophical variety. It long survives the overt despondency of his poetic output and forms in turn the lingering bass note of his prose, pace the opinions of these more sanguine critics. Though dominant, the cheerful view of Arnold’s prose has not been universal. René Wellek, for instance, notes that “Arnold’s personal melancholia and even defeatism is only thinly overlaid by the vague cosmic optimism of his more public prose writings.”50 At this point, a distinction drawn in James Sully’s Pessimism (1877) offers some timely assistance. Sully differentiates between personal pessimism, which he describes as “the impulsive ejaculatory form,” and philosophical pessimism, the kind that wears “the aspect of calm and studied affirmations,” although he modestly admits that it “may, no doubt, be a little difficult to say exactly where the unreasoned form passes into the reasoned, since even an ejaculation may seize and embody some faint rudiment of rational inference.”51 While Sully’s distinction is far from airtight, it might yet prevent a too easy conflation of the two sorts, which threatens the clear understanding both of Arnold’s ethical import and of his rhetorical strategy. Personally dreary or cosmically cheery as Arnold’s works may be—chacun à son goût—a more critically revealing approach becomes possible when he is placed within an interpretive frame that also takes philosophical pessimism into account. As to Arnold’s private temper, perhaps it is fair to say of him what he said of Goethe, that he was happy, if to know Causes of things, and far below His feet to see the lurid flow Of terror and insane distress, And headlong fate, be happiness. (“Memorial Verses” 29–33)

In any case, the critical consensus holds that Arnold’s prose works—literary, political, and religious—are far more “winning and cheerful,” as Collini says, 49 No more than I would belittle the speculative constructions of thinkers such as Norman N. Holland, who finds that Arnold’s notion of critical detachment, which seems to be a “quite reasonable intellectual position,” actually “has unconscious roots in a wish to avoid sexual touchings,” and “[f]rom a psychoanalytical point of view,” Holland “would characterize Arnold’s naming and looking and question-and-answering as defenses against or intellectual substitutes for words of action, action being felt as sexualized.” See Norman N. Holland, “Prose and Minds: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Non-Fiction,” The Art of Victorian Prose, ed. George Levine and William Madden (Now York; London: Oxford UP, 1968) 329. For a more recent example of the psychoanalytic approach, see Katherine Estelle Omelanuk Agar, “Parts of a single continent”: Maternal Objects in the Works of Matthew Arnold, diss., U of Georgia, 1998 (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1998) ATT 9836934. 50 The Later Nineteenth Century 164. 51 Pessimism: A History and a Criticism (1877) 2nd ed. (New York: Appleton, 1891) 31.

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than his verse, and his transition from poetry to prose is usually seen as a willful turn toward optimism. In this view, Arnold’s 1853 “Preface” and his suppression of Empedocles on Etna (1852) form milestones marking the turn from darkness to light, from “hope impossible” to “joy whose grounds are true” (Empedocles on Etna 2.34; “Oberman Once More” 238). Culler claims that “certain changes in philosophic outlook” accompanied the turn to prose, “[f]or with Arnold poetry derived from internal unrest and anguish, and once he achieved serenity he expressed himself in the literary medium of prose.”52 Culler’s reading thus presents the pessimistic poet reborn as an optimistic prophet of culture. The present study seeks at least to qualify this view by demonstrating the continuous function of philosophical pessimism in Arnold’s thought. Grob appears to be the first critic to recognize in Arnold’s poetry the central role of “philosophical” or “metaphysical” pessimism—he uses the terms interchangeably—calling it “the interpreter’s key” and “the leading idea” of Arnold’s verse.53 He rightly notes that critics tend to overlook Arnold’s pessimism, preferring instead a “more positive, ameliorative, even uplifting” Arnold, in other words, the prose Arnold. Culler, for instance, later comes to revise the view he sets forth in his highly influential Imaginative Reason (1966) and eventually locates Arnold’s optimistic turn even earlier, in the 1852 “Stanzas in Memory of the Author of ‘Oberman,’” which he calls “the most important spiritual act of [Arnold’s] entire life.”54 The later poetry and prose then presumably reflect, for Culler, Arnold’s attainment of “peace,” “calm,” and “joy of active service in the world.” Contrary to Culler and the rest of “Arnold’s more optimistically oriented critics,” however, Grob claims that “the gloomy worldview put forward in the poetry differs fundamentally from that which is put forward in the far more hopeful later prose.”55 In other words, instead of detecting dawning hope in the later poems, Grob sees only “further and more complex variants” of Arnold’s “poetic bleakness,” with the happy turn occurring only when Arnold abandons poetry altogether, a position apparently equivalent to Culler’s original view as “Introduction,” Poetry and Criticism of Matthew Arnold (Boston: Houghton, 1961) xvii. Henry Gay Hewlett was perhaps the first critic to assert this distinction between the dreariness of Arnold’s early and middle poems and the optimism of the later verse and the prose. Writing in 1874, his position is approximately the same as that assumed by Culler in 1985, particularly in reading Arnold’s prose turn as an attempt at a self-therapy. Hewlett gently claims that “the moral uneasiness and spiritual darkness” of Arnold’s early poetry, “often verging on despair,” gives way to “a gradual process of recovery from the morbid mental condition in which those [poems] belonging to his middle period were written, an approximation to the tone of balanced conviction and healthy hopefulness that characterize his later Essays. Criticism is the form of poetic reflection which these symptoms of convalescence commonly take.” See “The Poems of Matthew Arnold,” Contemporary Review 24 (Sept. 1874): 539–67. 53 A Longing Like Despair 19, 24. 54 The Victorian Mirror of History (New Haven: Yale UP, 1985) 124. 55 A Longing Like Despair 21. 52

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well as to that of many other critics.56 “Only Arnold the poet, then, can be termed a philosophic pessimist,” Grob says, while Arnold the prose stylist is an “optimistic historicizer” writing “essentially forward-looking prose.”57 In short, on the question of the relative optimism or pessimism in Arnold’s work, one finds critics like Culler and Grob claiming that all or at least part of Arnold’s poetry is despairing but the prose all joyfully serene. I argue instead that his entire oeuvre reflects a thoroughgoing philosophical pessimism, poetry and prose alike. Ruth apRoberts is in the minority of Arnold’s critics who finds his thought “remarkably consistent,” but in order to see how “his later work in prose actually illuminates the poetry,” she says, “we need to correlate his early work with his later.”58 ApRoberts performs this correlation astutely in Arnold and God (1983), and her expert critical analysis serves as a model for the present study. Like apRoberts, I would separate “one strand or theme out of the poetic works”—in the present case, the “renouncement” theme—which is “particularly premonitory” of Arnold’s lifelong ethical object.59 Before looking in detail at the philosophical side of Arnold’s pessimism, it might be useful briefly to follow the strand of his personal pessimism, if only in order to make the distinction between the two as clear as possible. Madden concisely summarizes the major themes of Arnold’s “mature poetry,” themes that he finds “already present in the 1849 volume,” and these include the need for “stoic detachment, the existence of a buried self, the primacy of universal law over personal desire, the inadequacy of romantic love, the transiency of human life, the exhaustion produced by inner division.”60 Since these characteristic themes— they are of course all prominent in Arnold’s prose—seem to pertain rather to the philosophical than to the personal strand of pessimism, they can be set aside for the moment, but not before noticing that the spectrum of emotional affect that such themes permit in the poetry is fairly narrow, different shades of black, as it were.61 To Madden, Arnold’s emotional range appears to extend from “confirmed dejection” through “profound melancholy” and “unbearable melancholy” to “near-despair.”62 Such, such were the joys. 58 59 60 56

Ibid. 22. Ibid. 29, 17, 20. Arnold and God (Berkeley; London: U of California P, 1983) 1. Ibid. 2. “Arnold the Poet (i),” Writers and Their Background: Matthew Arnold, ed. Kenneth Allot (London: G. Bell 1975) 49. 61 Although the “inadequacy of romantic love” is a quite minor theme in Arnold’s prose, with the essay “Dante and Beatrice” in Essays in Criticism offering perhaps the most notable example of its treatment, his discussion of the French worship of the “goddess Aselgeia” and “great goddess Lubricity” in “Numbers; or the Majority and the Remnant” in Discourses in America is perhaps indicative of his general attitude (CPW 10.155). 62 “Arnold the Poet (i)” 46, 56, 65, 59. In fairness, it should be noted that Madden also sometimes detects a “tentative hopefulness” in the later poems and says that “we may even believe that he eventually attained some measure of joy in his life” (56, 68). 57

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Some simple word study verifies the predominantly minor key of the poetry, as a cursory dip into the concordance reveals: Of Arnold’s 129 published poems (and their variants), the word pain, for example, and its compounds occurs 79 times, vain and vainly 76 times, gloom and gloomy 63 times, grief and its variants 60 times, sad 50 times alone and 78 in all forms, mourn and mournful 57, sorrow in all shades 38, lonely 37—lonelier, loneliness, and the deservedly lone lonelily bring the total to 41—suffer and the like 30 times, and so on.63 Joy is found 100 times in the poems, surely a hopeful sign, but it most often occurs in a context that marks its absence, as in “Loveless, rayless, joyless you shall stand!” (“The New Sirens” 266) or, most famously, in describing an earth that has “really neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain” (“Dover Beach” 33–4). Arnold’s frequent tinkering with his poems from edition to edition also reveals their general emotional valence. For instance, line 54 of “Iseult of Ireland,” the second part of Tristram and Iseult, went through four revisions by 1869, producing these variants: Both have passed a youth consumed and sad Both have passed a youth constrained and sad Both have passed a youth repressed and sad Both have passed a youth forlorn and sad.

Consumed, constrained, repressed, forlorn—and sad, sad, sad, sad—this example alone perhaps adequately conveys the dominant tone of Arnold’s verse as a whole and strongly implies personal pessimism. Additional evidence of Arnold’s personal pessimism emerges from the poetry and early prose. For the sake of convenience, the evidence can be ranged under two heads: the inner and outer worlds. The first thing to note under the inner-world category is Arnold’s commentary on the excessive “mental exercitation” of the age, which leaves one feeling inwardly dead, followed by his observations on the blank sterility of a world that wanders between a dead past and an unbearable future (CPW 6.297). In his intriguing 1992 study, Melancholy and Society, Wolf Lepenies analyzes melancholy as an affective response to disorder or chaos, and he couples it with compensatory fantasies of a perfected utopian order.64 Lepenies takes his primary data from the affective regimes of the seventeenthcentury French aristocracy and the eighteenth-century German bourgeoisie, but the sociopolitical position of the Victorian men of letters would serve his turn as well.65 For instance, Arnold’s attitude toward “multitudinousness” is highly 63 Stephen Maxfield Parrish, ed., A Concordance to the Poems of Matthew Arnold (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1959). The usefulness of this tool cannot be overstated, although it unfortunately omits Arnold’s preferred ejaculation: “Ah.” 64 Melancholy and Society, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris Jones (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard UP, 1992). 65 Lepenies briefly brings the case of British Liberals within his purview in his later lectures before the French Academy. See Lepenies, Qu’est-ce qu’un Intellectuel Européen?: Les Intellectuels et la Politique de l’Esprit dans l’Histoire Européenne (Paris: Seuil, 2007).

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fraught—as already seen in his reference to the “multitudinous, turbulent, and blind impulses of our ordinary selves” (CPW 5.207)—and his attitude thus seems to lend itself to Lepenies’s interpretive scheme as a kind of outward projection of inner tumults and perplexities. In the “Preface” to his 1853 Poems, for instance, Arnold declares that creative energy and literary greatness are impossible in the “bewildering confusion of our times,” in an age “wanting in moral grandeur,” an “age of spiritual discomfort” (CPW 1.13–15). Four years later, his inaugural address as Oxford Professor of Poetry calls for an “intellectual deliverance” from the “impatient irritation of mind” that all must feel in the presence of the “immense, moving, confused spectacle” of the modern age, a spectacle that “perpetually excites our curiosity” as it “perpetually baffles our comprehension” (CPW 1.20). He states in one poem, “Epilogue on Lessing’s Laocoön,” that only the greatest poets may dare, on “the life-stream’s shore / With safe unwandering feet explore,” because the world’s maelstrom threatens to overwhelm the less gifted (lines 190–91): And many, many are the souls Life’s movement fascinates, controls; It draws them on, they cannot save Their feet from its alluring wave; They cannot leave it, they must go With its unconquerable flow. But ah! how few, of all that try This mighty march do aught but die! For ill-endowed for such a way, Ill-stored in strength, in wits, are they. They faint, they stagger to and fro, And wandering from the stream they go; In pain, in terror, in distress, They see, all round, a wilderness. (163–76)

And so these many staggering, fainting wanderers die at last, although “[t]he stream of life’s majestic whole / Hath ne’er been mirrored on their soul” (187–8). Only the strongest natures can bear to mirror the pain, terror, and distress of life’s majestic whole, only those poets like “Homer, Shakespeare” (206), and Goethe, who could bear “to see the lurid flow / Of terror, and insane distress, / And headlong fate” (“Memorial Verses” 31–3). To render this confusing spectacle “intelligible” and thereby attain a “harmonious acquiescence of mind,” one must, as Arnold wrote to Clough in 1848, “begin with an Idea of the world in order not be prevailed over by the world’s multitudinousness” (Letters 1.128). This “multitudinousness” again proves taxing to Arnold, for where can such an “Idea” be found when “[i]n all directions, our habitual courses of action seem to be losing efficaciousness, credit, and control, both with others and even with ourselves,” when “[e]verywhere we see the beginnings of confusion, and we want a clue to some sound order and authority” (CPW 5.175)?

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In contrast, Arnold’s scholar-gypsy illustrates the soul who overcomes worldly multitudinousness by holding fast to “one aim, one business, one desire” (“The Scholar Gypsy” 152). He has not “spent, like other men, [his] fire” but is able to leave the world, with powers Fresh, undiverted to the world without, Firm to their mark, not spent on other things; Free from the sick fatigue, the languid doubt, Which much to have tried, in much been baffled, brings. O life unlike to ours! Who fluctuate idly without term or scope, Of whom each strives, nor knows for what he strives, And each half-lives a hundred different lives; Who wait like thee, but not like thee, in hope. (154, 161–70)

Like Sophocles, the scholar-gypsy “saw life steadily, and saw it whole,” but the rest of us merely fluctuate and wander our lives away in these “damned times,” as he laments to Clough, times when “everything is against one” and, as the logical obverse holds, when one is against everything (“To a Friend” 12, Letters 1.156). Among the symptoms of this temporal damnation against which Arnold braces himself are the height to which knowledge is come, the spread of luxury, our physical enervation, the absence of great natures, the unavoidable contact with millions of small ones, newspapers, cities, light profligate friends, moral desperadoes like Carlyle, our own selves, and the sickening consciousness of our difficulties. (Letters 1.156)

These early letters and poems rehearse many of the themes that later reappear in Arnold’s prose essays of the 1860s and 1870s. It is perhaps this same state of nervous hypertrophy that drives men like Arnold’s father or the historian George Grote to fetishize Greco-Roman antiquity or that drives Carlyle and John Henry Newman to a regular mania for the medieval. “Why,” Arnold asks, “are we so interested in origins, and in the dark ages?” Because man had in one case not overexcited himself—& in the other had succeeded in forgetting—had thrown off the burden of his over-stimulated, sophisticated, artificialized false-developed miserable nervous sceptical self, and begun life anew. To this the race when over-cultivated tends, and does now tend, & did tend in the Roman times.66 66 The Yale Manuscript: Matthew Arnold, ed. S. O. A. Ullmann (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1989) 199.

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Such are a few of the outer tumults—the “hopeless tangle of our age”—that characterize Arnold’s personal pessimism (“Oberman” 83). Whether his inner perplexities are themselves the cause or the effect of the outer is a nice question that a brief glance at some of his psychological notions might help to answer. As is well known, Culture and Anarchy treats of the “best self” and the “ordinary self,” but Arnold produces a somewhat finer and fuller analysis of the instincts and forces of human nature in “Bishop Butler and the Zeit-Geist” (1876), his most sustained penetration, he claims, into the “vast, dimly lighted, primordial region of the natural genesis of man’s affections and principles” (CPW 8.42). Of the “actual instincts and forces” that move human beings, the most “simple primary instinct” he finds to be “the all-ruling effort to live,” which he also calls “the desire for happiness,” preferring the former label, however, as “more exact” and perhaps less soiled with utilitarianism (CPW 8.42, 44). The most elementary of Arnold’s “forces,” meanwhile, lies is the duality of human nature, for “as man advances in his development, he becomes aware of two lives, one permanent and impersonal, the other transient and bound to our contracted self” (CPW 8.42). These twin “lives” seem to show a strong family resemblance to the best self and ordinary self of Culture and Anarchy. Having become aware of these two lives, “one higher and real, the other inferior and apparent,” man soon learns that “only in the impersonal life, and with the higher self, is the instinct [to live] truly served and the desire [for happiness] truly satisfied” (CPW 8.45). One who leads this “impersonal life” is “thus no longer living to himself but living, as St Paul says, to God” (CPW 8.62). For Arnold, such a person lives in conformity to reason and the will of God. And what is the will of God telling such a person? “Thou must go without, go without,” and “die daily” (CPW 5.165), the pessimistic imperatives of Victorian altruism at their starkest. In other words, “Renounce thyself ” (CPW 6.298). One must “die with Christ to the law of the flesh, to live with Christ to the law of the mind (CPW 6.47). This is the essence of the Pauline “doctrine of the necrosis,” according to Arnold, which is the only sure way “to find the energy and power to bring all those self-seeking tendencies of the flesh, those multitudinous, swarming, eager, and incessant impulses, into obedience to the central tendency” (CPW 6.47, 32). The path is steep: But to serve God, to follow that central clue in our moral being which unites us to the universal order, is no easy task; and here again we are on the most sure ground of experience and psychology. … Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor [Though I see and approve the better way, yet I follow the worse], say the thousand times quoted lines of the Roman poet. The philosophical explanation of this conflict does not indeed attribute, like the Manichæan fancy, any inherent evil to the flesh and its workings; all the forces and tendencies in us are, like our proper central moral tendency the desire of righteousness, in themselves beneficent … . And, though they are not evil in themselves, the evil which flows from these diverse workings is undeniable. The lusts of the flesh, the law in our members, passion, according to the Greek word used by

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Paul, inordinate affection, according to the admirable rendering of Paul’s Greek word in our English Bible, take naturally no account of anything but themselves; the arbitrary and unregulated action of theirs can produce only confusion and misery. (CPW 6.31)

The confusion and misery of unregulated action—critical, political, or ethical— is Arnold’s constant theme: “Renouncement is the law of human life,” he says, for with the “perfect freedom” of necrotic renunciation comes “an elevation of our best self, and a harmonising in subordination to this all the multitudinous, turbulent, and blind impulses of our ordinary selves” (CPW 5.207). Without it, the selfish desires that “take naturally no account of anything but themselves” remain the “law in our members,” and thus for many years “[t]hose multitudinous motions of appetite and self-will which reason and conscience disapproved, reason and conscience could not yet govern, and had to yield to them” (CPW 6.47). As noted, the world’s multitudinousness presents a perennial strain for Arnold, but with “necrosis” he finds the one key to “the subduing of the obvious faults of our animality” and effecting our “rescue from the thrall of vile affections” (CPW 5.100, 169). Never mind how various and multitudinous the impulses are; impulses to intemperance, concupiscence, covetousness, pride, sloth, envy, malignity, anger, clamour, bitterness, harshness, unmercifulness. Die to them all, and to each as it comes! Christ did … . All impulses of selfishness conflict with Christ’s feelings. (CPW 6.48)

At this point, Arnold touches the nec plus ultra of altruism, passing beyond the normal Victorian “tendency to look upon altruism as the heart of all moral virtue,” as Collini says, and reaching the “extreme tendency” of “making it an obligation that all our actions should benefit others.”67 Arnold also seems to attain here the zero degree of Schopenhauerian will-denial, and while he figures sexuality—“the lusts of the flesh, the law in our members”—as the very type and emblem of desire in general, he never openly advocates the outright “abstinence from further propagation of mankind,” a disciplinary staple of Schopenhauer’s philosophy (CPW 8.160). It is worth recalling that Arnold buried three sons in four years—his infant Basil and 16-year-old Thomas in 1868 and 18-year-old William in 1872— and the toll these sorrows took on his marriage and on both his wife’s mental health and his own can perhaps be imagined. In an early poem directed to “Fausta”—the name means lucky—Arnold claims that “[o]ur vaunted life is one long funeral” (“A Question” 10). Events were proving him correct. Love lends life a little grace, A few sad smiles; and then, Both are laid in one cold place, In the grave. (4–7)

Public Moralists 66.

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A Carlylean “Everlasting No” would surely not be unreasonable in such an hour, and perhaps Arnold’s doctrine of “necrosis” follows as a matter of course, in its way as attractive and consoling to him as George Herbert’s words: “my Savior banished joy!” or as Christ’s “spectacle of an inspired self-sacrifice; to men who refused themselves nothing, it showed one who refused himself everything” (CPW 5.169). Arnold also seems to have banished joy, first banishing it from his poems and ultimately banishing poetry itself tout court. The inquiry into the background of Arnold’s personal pessimism inevitably brings the discussion to the verge of his philosophical pessimism, and a closer view of some of the poems will show how he embodies the chief precept of his pessimistic ethics, “renouncement.” If Birth Proceeds, If Things Subsist An early clue to Arnold’s philosophical pessimism lies in the poem “Resignation: To Fausta,” which closes The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849), Arnold’s first volume of verse. The “far too hopeless” tone of the poem led Arnold’s sister Jane, the “Fausta” to whom “Resignation” is addressed, to confide in an October 1848 letter to their brother Tom that “Dear Matt has a good deal of the Eastern Philosopher about him at present, which does not suit the European mind” (Letters 1.123–4). Kenneth Allott’s critical notes to “Resignation” and to “The World and the Quietist,” another Strayed Reveller title, point to Arnold’s reading in the Bhagavad Gita as an important source for both poems. Arnold “probably first encountered the ideas” in 1845, Allott claims, and “probably read the poem itself first in late 1847 or early 1848.”68 Similarly, Howard Foster Lowry believes the Gita “heavily influenced Arnold’s own Resignation and other early poems.”69 In March, 1848, having lent Clough a copy of the Gita, Arnold is “disappointed the Oriental wisdom, God grant it were mine, pleased you not. To the Greeks, foolishness” (Letters 1.87). His next letter sheds light on his own interest: “The Indians distinguish between meditation or absorption—and knowledge: and between abandoning practice, & abandoning the fruits of action & all respect thereto. This last is a supreme step, & dilated on throughout the poem” (Letters 1.89). A third poem in The Strayed Reveller, “In Utremque Paratus” (“Prepared for Either Possibility”), also seems to owe a debt to “Oriental wisdom,” not least in its closing line: “I, too, but seem” (42). These early poems plainly confront the suffering inherent in life and the illusory nature of existence, and they encourage a turning away from the world and the assumption of a posture of imperturbable and impassible impersonality. These themes frequently reappear in Arnold’s later verse as well, and one need only think of his more famous titles—“The Scholar Gypsy,” “Stanzas from the Grande 68 The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. Kenneth Allott and Miriam Allott (London: Longmans, 1979) 95. 69 The Letters of Matthew Arnold to Arthur Hugh Clough, ed. Howard Foster Lowry (Oxford: Clarendon, 1932) 71n3.

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Chartreuse,” “Thyrsis,” “Dover Beach,” the Oberman poems—to sense their ubiquity. Arnold demonstrates throughout his works an attraction to the notion of such a salvific state. Schopenhauer presents a similar ideal of renunciation as the fruit of pessimistic reflection, and he claims that in rare instances there can arise a phenomenon of the human will which is impossible in the animal kingdom, namely when man abandons all knowledge of individual things as such, which is subordinate to the principle of sufficient reason, and, by means of knowledge of the Ideas, sees through the principium individuationis. An actual appearance of the real freedom of the will as thing-in-itself then becomes possible, by which the phenomenon comes into a certain contradiction with itself, as is expressed by the word self-renunciation, in fact, the in-itself of its real nature ultimately abolishes itself. (WWR 1.301)

Metaphysical niceties apart, this general attitude conveys the essence of Arnold’s philosophical pessimism. When dressed up as the self-denial of Christian charity, such an attitude falls right in step with the altruistic ideal of mid-Victorian Britain’s “dominant” moral sensibility, as Collini calls it, but trotted out as a pusillanimous quietism of dubious orthodoxy, it would surely never “suit the European mind.” In “Resignation” the speaker claims that peace comes when one resigns oneself to the truth that all “human cares” are “vain”—all action and passion, love and hate—a truth that is grasped intuitively by the “poet” (232, 144). Once grasped, the wisest course of life becomes obvious: “Be passionate hopes not ill resigned / For quiet, and a fearless mind” (243–4). The attractions and aversions that entangle us in the world are an “unreal show,” and the speaker advises Fausta to “praise” the poet—not to be confused with the speaker, as he makes clear—and to “pray” to be like him, treading “at ease life’s uncheered ways,” knowing how to admire beauty “uncravingly,” and looking without envy on love, fame, and power (236, 161, 237–9). Although “Heaven” imparts a “quicker pulse” to the “mighty heart” of the poet, he wisely “[s]ubdues that energy to scan / Not his own course, but that of man” (146–7). The big picture thus revealed to the detached and disinterested soul of the poet holds a “secret”: Before him he sees life unroll, A placid and continuous whole— That general life, which does not cease, Whose secret is not joy, but peace; That life, whose dumb wish is not missed If birth proceeds, if things subsist; The life of plants, and stones, and rain, The life he craves—if not in vain Fate gave, what chance shall not control, His sad lucidity of soul. (189–98)

Several important elements of Arnold’s philosophical pessimism are concentrated in these lines: the yearning for joyless peace and sad lucidity, even for the blank

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unconsciousness of an inorganic selflessness.70 To be sure, Arnold clearly foresees what mockery notions such as those he expressed in “Resignation” would endure at the hands of his muscularly Christian and optimistic contemporaries. The speaker in “Resignation” even predicts the poem’s reception: To the wise, foolish; to the world, Weak; yet not weak, I might reply, Not foolish, Fausta, in His eye, To whom each moment in its race, Crowd as we will its neutral space, Is but a quiet watershed Whence, equally, the seas of life and death are fed. (254–60)

A pious reading of these lines might take “His eye” for the eye of God, gazing from heaven upon his beloved creation, but a likelier reading, in light of the “dismal cycle of his rehabilitated Hindoo-Greek theosophy,” as Clough terms Arnold’s interest in Indian religion, would suggest that “His eye” is the poet’s.71 To the sadly lucid poet, to the resigned consciousness “[w]hose natural insight can discern,” “[t]hrough clouds of individual strife,” the vanity of human wishes, to the poet who casts a cold eye on life, on death—to the genius, in Schopenhauer’s terms, who is the will-less subject of aesthetic contemplation—to him the world’s ceaseless flux of creation and destruction is a matter of indifference (233, 251). He has attained to Stoic ataraxia, the peace that passeth understanding, and for him all is one as he views the “general life” (191, 252). Let us conclude, he says, that lives such as ours, With large results so little rife, Though bearable, seem hardly worth This pomp of worlds, this pain of birth. (262–4)

And if we humans can sense the worthlessness and futility of existence, then what would nature say of it—the “mute turf we tread,” “the rocks, the lonely sky” (265, 268)? “If I might lend their life a voice, / [these] Seem to bear rather than rejoice” (269–70). Indeed, while “[m]an iterates” his “prayer” for an ever larger sphere of action, “these forbear” in their dumb being (272–3). The repetition here—human life is just “bearable,” while nature’s elements “bear” existence and “forbear” complaint—is significant: the verb bear occurs frequently in the poems, in the sense of rather bearing those ills we have than flying to others that

For a finely nuanced reading of these line of “Resignation” that makes astute use of biographical evidence, see Joseph Bristow, “‘Love, Let Us Be True to One Another’: Matthew Arnold, Arthur Hugh Clough, and ‘Our Aqueous Ages,’” Literature and History 41.3 (spring 1995): 27–49. 71 [Arthur Hugh Clough], “Recent English Poetry,” North American Review 77 (July 1853): 20. 70

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we know not of.72 The poet of “Resignation,” who gazes into beautiful eyes and “[b]ears to admire uncravingly,” offers a rare instance in Arnold’s poems of a positive pleasure resisted (161). The more usual situation is the negative one of suffering endured, as found in “Courage”: True, we must tame our rebel will: True, we must bow to Nature’s law: Must bear in silence many an ill; Must learn to wait, renounce, withdraw. (1–4)

The renouncement here demanded of the individual in “Courage” is precisely that demanded of the critic in “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (1865). The critical spirit, Arnold says, must embrace “the Indian virtue of detachment” in order to “maintain its independence of the practical spirit and its aims,” and it “must be patient and know how to wait; and flexible, and know how to attach itself to things and how to withdraw from them” (CPW 3.274, 280, my emphasis). It short, criticism must “learn to wait, renounce, withdraw.” Arnold first approximates this point in the “Preface” to Poems (1853), the well-known statement of his poetics that marks his prose turn. In a proto-Joycean fingernail-paring spirit, the “Preface” states that a dramatic poet is most successful when he can prevent “the intrusion of his personal peculiarities” from interfering with the dramatic action and is “most fortunate, when he most entirely succeeds in effacing himself, and in enabling a noble action to subsist as it did in nature” (CPW 1.8). Trilling discusses this Arnoldian principle of critical self-effacement and quotes with great insight the following passage from Schopenhauer’s description of the nature of genius:73 Only through the pure contemplation … which becomes absorbed entirely in the object, are the Ideas comprehended; and the nature of genius consists precisely in the preeminent ability for such contemplation. Now as this demands a complete forgetting of our own person and of its relations and connexions, the gift of genius is nothing but the most complete objectivity, i.e., the objective tendency of the mind, as opposed to the subjective directed to our own person, i.e., to the will. Accordingly, genius is the capacity to remain in a state of pure perception, to lose oneself in perception, to remove from the service of the will the knowledge which originally existed only for this service. In other words, genius is the ability to leave entirely out of sight our own interest, our willing, and our aims, and consequently to discard entirely our own personality for a time, in order to remain pure knowing subject, the clear eye of the world. (WWR 1.185–6)

Juxtaposing Schopenhauer’s terms with Arnold’s, we might say that it takes “the clear eye of the world” to see “the object as in itself it really is” (CPW 1.140–41). 72 More than 30 times, in fact. See A Concordance to the Poems of Matthew Arnold s.v. “bear,” “bears.” 73 Matthew Arnold 25.

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In language that uncannily echoes the German pessimist’s—no direct influence is here implied, although the question is addressed in the next chapter—Arnold restates his demand for impersonal criticism with his famous claim that the critic’s “disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world,” that is, his effort to see the object as it is, requires above all a “simple lucidity of mind” (CPW 3.283). Apparently akin to the “sad lucidity of soul” attained by the poet in “Resignation,” this “simple lucidity of mind” permits one “to observe facts with a critical spirit; to search for their law, not to wander among them at random; to judge by the rule of reason, not by the impulse of prejudice or caprice” (CPW 1.24). Such impulsiveness rather characterizes the partial, personal, interested, ordinary self and is not conducive to lucidity. In the “Last Words” section of On Translating Homer (1861), Arnold honors the recently deceased Clough by attributing to him this same critical ideal of impersonal lucidity: In the study of art, poetry, or philosophy, he had the most undivided and disinterested love for his object in itself, the greatest aversion to mixing up with it anything accidental or personal. His interest was in literature itself; and it was this that gave so rare a stamp to his character, which kept him so free from all taint of littleness. In the saturnalia of personal passions, of which the struggle for literary success, in old and crowded communities, offers so sad a spectacle, he never mingled. (CPW 1.215)

For Arnold, any engagement in the orgy of “personal passions”—the “littleness,” so to speak, that infects the world—distorts or altogether obscures one’s apprehension of the “object in itself” and so must be renounced. While Arnold’s claims for the poet, and for the critic as well, seem to avoid all trace of unacknowledged-legislator grandiosity, the crucial importance of the poet’s hieratic function is nevertheless implicit in Arnold’s formulation, an importance apparent even in his earliest verse. The poet “does not say: I am alone,” when “[f]rom some high station he looks down,” for he considers “[n]ot his own course, but that of man” (“Resignation” 164, 169, 147). Arnold’s poet thus becomes, in Schopenhauer’s terms, the will-less subject of aesthetic intuition, the “genius” or “sublime character” who grasps the objective essence of humanity in its Platonic ideality. Schopenhauer describes the type: Such a character will accordingly consider men in a purely objective way, and not according to the relations they might have to his will. For example, he will observe their faults, and even their hatred and injustice to himself, without being thereby stirred to hatred on his own part. He will contemplate their happiness without feeling envy, recognize their good qualities without desiring closer association with them, perceive the beauty of women without hankering after them. His personal happiness or unhappiness will not violently affect him … For in the course of his own life and in its misfortunes, he will look less at his own individual lot than at the lot of mankind as a whole, and accordingly will conduct himself in this respect rather as a knower than as a sufferer. (WWR 1.206–7)

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As Arnold advocates resignation and renunciation in his poetry, so he consistently privileges in his literary-critical prose the values of impersonality, detachment, disinterestedness, and independence—the duty to “wait, renounce, withdraw” for the sake of the critical best self. Arnold’s principle of critical self-effacement simply extends the ethical imperative of altruism to its logical conclusion in pessimism—a rule of “renouncement” that receives yet another inflection when he turns to social and political polemics. To Think a Little More and Bustle a Little Less Arnold’s earliest critics have little patience with his plaintive verse, and they rigorously deploy their dominant Victorian moral sensibilities in demanding a joyful and spiritually uplifting poetry, one that glorifies manly self-denial and denounces selfish egoism. Arnold does not meet this demand to their satisfaction. Instead, he informs the world that “[a] vague dejection / Weighs down my soul,” and “[o]ur bane, disguise it as we may, / Is weakness, is a faltering course” (“Consolation” 4–5, “Courage” 25–6). We are moved, he said, “in some unknown Power’s employ” and “[c]an neither, when we will, enjoy, / Nor, when we will, resign” (“Oberman” 133, 135–6). In such a state, “[w]eary of myself, and sick of asking / What I am, and what I ought to be,” he sees at last that “[w]e mortal millions live alone,” sheltering under a sky that “hides, if Gods, Gods careless of our doom” (“Self-Dependence” 1–2, “To Marguerite—Continued” 4, “Mycerinus” 54). Faced with such sentiments, one contemporary critic, Harriet Martineau, scornfully asks, “Have we really at this day amongst us one for whom the universe turns round that awful centre, of a blind necessity, grinding men and all things continually to dust?”74 These few examples suggest how tightly interlaced are the personal and philosophical strands of pessimism that animate Arnold’s poems. Surely he foresaw the likely critical reaction: Some secrets may the poet tell, For the world loves new ways; To tell too deep ones is not well— It knows not what he says. (“Oberman” 41–4)

Arnold’s poetry appalls many of his first readers. In contrast to his urbane Oxonian persona—the flowered waistcoats and gay persiflage, the songs of Béranger and rage for Rachel75—his poetical voice reveals a melancholy that fairly outrages his more muscular critics quite as much as his levity sometimes shocked his Oxford cohorts. The poems surprise even his sister Mary, who finds them “almost like an Introduction to him,” with “so much more of this practical “Poems by Matthew Arnold,” Daily News (26 Dec. 1853): 2. See Trilling, Matthew Arnold 18–20; Park Honan, Matthew Arnold: A Life (London:

74 75

Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981) 108–11.

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questioning” than she had expected (Letters 1.145–6). To the early reviewers, Arnold’s “weak-hearted lamentations” are overfilled with “reflecting, pondering, hesitating, musing, complaining,” and they show “the marked absence of anything like heartiness, happiness, or hope.”76 By their own lights, at least, Arnold’s critics are perfectly correct, for the poems in his first two volumes make a mournful group indeed. Arnold’s elegiac tone is unmistakable even in his earliest published verse, the 1840 Rugby prize-poem he wrote at age 18, in which he sings of “[e]nergies wasted, unimproved hours,” and “[t]he saddening visions of departed days” (“Alaric at Rome” 201–2). This sense of loss and futility comes eventually to pervade the bulk of Arnold’s verse, as does his sense of the “damned times” in which he lives (Letters 1.156): A little while, alas, a little while, And the same world has tongue, and ear, and eye, The careless glance, the cold unmeaning smile, The thoughtless word, the lack of sympathy! Who would not turn him from the barren sea? (“Alaric at Rome” 217–21)

One might easily dismiss the tone of “Alaric at Rome” as mere youthful attitudinizing or as a gloomy taint imported from his source in Edward Gibbon.77 But if it is a pose, it is one that Arnold the poet never wholly forsakes, and if it is an alien element, it seems eventually to grow native and endued. By the time his first two volumes were published, The Strayed Reveler, and Other Poems (1849) and Empedocles on Etna, and Other Poems (1852), Arnold’s seems a settled poetic pessimism. The Strayed Reveller attracts its first critical notice in March 1849. A puzzled Spectator reviewer complains that “the subject is left in such obscurity that none can clearly be made out,” and “the whole having no purpose, or the purpose not being distinctly impressed, the reader cannot catch the drift, or if perceived it leads to nothing.”78 Arnold seems to confirm this assessment: one week after the Spectator review appeared, he writes to his sister Jane, first apologizing— “I am a wicked wicked beast”—for taking back to London with him the Spectator number in question and then advising her, “Fret not yourself to make my poems square in all their parts … . The true reason why parts suit you while others do not is that my poems are fragments i.e. that I am fragments” (Letters 1.143). He claims that “the whole effect of my poems is quite vague & indeterminate: this is their weakness … the poems stagger weakly … do not plague yourself to find a consistent meaning for these last, which in fact they do not possess through my weakness.” Arnold’s description of the poetry’s weakness and fragmentation as a 76 [John Campbell Shairp], “Poems by Matthew Arnold,” North British Review 21.42 (Aug. 1854): 504; [Clough], “Recent English Poetry” 20; [William Edmonstone Aytoun], “The Strayed Reveller,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 66.407 (Sept. 1849): 340. 77 See Honan, Matthew Arnold 44. 78 “Books,” Spectator 22 (10 Mar. 1849): 231.

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reflection of his own anticipates the grounds for much of the criticism to follow. While the Spectator review does not specifically call the verses or their maker weak, men like Charles Kingsley and William E. Aytoun, who review The Strayed Reveller later in 1849, are far less reserved. Like many of Arnold’s critics over the years, Kingsley fiercely insists that poetry be faithful, hopeful, and above all joyful. In Arnold’s poems, however— Kingsley calls them “dreamy, transcendental excuses for laziness”—one finds only the “want of an earnest purpose and a fixed creed.”79 “What does the age want,” he asks, “with sleepy, melancholy meditations” or “with fainéant [i.e., lazy] grumblings?”80 Kingsley figures his objections energetically, but they are preeminently moral and are raised particularly against verses such as “Resignation: To Fausta”—“Resignation! to what? To do nothing?”—and “The Strayed Reveller,” with “a moral, if any, not more hopeful than Tennyson’s ‘Lotos-Eaters.’” Finally, scanning the volume’s penultimate poem, “In utrumque paratus,” the “moral, or we should rather say immorality, of which seems to be, that if there is a God, the author knows how to get on, and knows equally well how to get on if there is none,” Kingsley judges Arnold’s whole outlook to be “stolen from the dregs of German philosophy.” He ends his review with a warning to the author: If he chooses, while he confesses the great ideas with which the coming age is pregnant, to justify himself, by the paltry quibbles of a philosophy which he only half believes, for taking no active part in God’s work, instead of doing with all his might whatsoever his hand finds to do … let him know that the day is at hand when he that will not work neither shall he eat.81

Ever on the lookout for vestiges of latent Puseyism, Kingsley is naturally repelled by the world-denying sentiments in poems like “Resignation” and “The World and the Quietist: To Critias.” He is the doughty champion of “the common instincts and affections of humanity, divine, because truly human,” and an implacable foe to asceticism of all kinds, which sets itself up “in opposition to common honesty and justice, mercy and righteousness; in short, in opposition to God.”82 Kingsley’s muscular spirit never tires of denouncing all such traces of weakness and hopelessness, and he is certain he espies such in the “obscure transcendentalism” of “this new Phoebus Apragmon.” Aytoun, on the other hand, finds only “dreary melancholy” in Arnold’s “lugubrious ditties,” “overwhelming despondency” in the “unmirthful monologues,” “unmitigated woe” in these “singularly dolorous verses.”83 In fact, he suspects “the whole thing is a humbug,” an affectation that he says is 81 82 83 79 80

“Recent Poetry, and Recent Verse,” Fraser’s Magazine 39.233 (May 1849): 579. Ibid. 578. Ibid. 579. Ibid. 578. [Aytoun], “The Strayed Reveller” 340–41.

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growing common among the younger set of poets.84 “What makes them maunder so incessantly about gloom, and graves, and misery?” he asks. “What has society done to them, or what can they possibly have done to society, that the future tenor of their span must be one of … so vast a quantity of woe?” Such verse “appeals neither to the heart, the affections, nor the passions of mankind, but prefers appearing before them in the ridiculous guise of a misanthrope.”85 Arnold’s poetical taste he judges to be “perverted,” his rhythm “utterly destitute of melody,” and his metaphysics “abundantly hazy,” advising him to “abstain from any future attempts at profundity.”86 Still, admitting the author of The Strayed Reveller “a clever fellow,” Aytoun suggests that the public might yet hope for better things in future, once the author has “fairly got rid of his affected misanthropy [and] his false philosophy.”87 But please, he says, do “not inflict upon us any more such platitudes as ‘Resignation,’” for if we thought it “an accurate reflex of the ordinary mood of the author, we should infinitely prefer supping in company with the nearest sexton.”88 No less facetious than Kingsley, Aytoun in his moralizing is equally dogmatic, advising the poet to “do his duty to God and man, work six hours a-day, whether he requires to do so for a livelihood or not, marry and get children, and, in his moments of leisure, let him still study Sophocles and amend his verses.”89 To a very great extent, of course, this is exactly what Arnold proceeds to do, although 16-hour work days become more typical for the essayistcum-inspector of schools.90 Though thin, the critical attention Arnold’s first two volumes attract is usually as strident and censorious as Kingsley’s and Aytoun’s. The poetry puzzles and piques these early reviewers not least because Arnold seems to fail so signally as a moral guide and spiritual comforter, the chief duties of a poet, according to the prevailing wisdom. Why, they ask, would a respectable young gentleman be stepping forth and singing of “weakness” and “weariness,” of “vague dejection” and an “unstrung will,” just as British industrial and imperial 84 James Anthony Froude also suspects Arnold of indulging in factitious posing in his poems, as his 1849 letter to Clough makes clear. In discussing “Resignation,” Froude wonders “what business [Arnold] has to parade his calmness and lecture us on resignation when he has never known what a storm is, and doesn’t know what he has to resign himself to.” To Froude, Arnold “only knows the shady side of nature out of books.” See The Letters of Matthew Arnold to Arthur Hugh Clough (Oxford: Clarendon, 1932) 127n3. A man pursued by his own nemesis of faith might perhaps be expected to show more sympathy for the inner struggles of a friend, but perhaps a process of one-upmanship is at work here or even one of self-defense. 85 “The Strayed Reveller” 345. 86 Ibid. 342, 344. 87 Ibid. 346. 88 Ibid. 346, 341. 89 Ibid. 346. 90 Nicholas Murray, A Life of Matthew Arnold (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996) 148–9, 199, 284.

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triumphalism is approaching its apogee? But there is no mistaking the voice speaking from the shadow of the Great Exhibition. As Trilling notes, “At a time when official thought was announcing the Englishman’s ascent to the heights of human possibility, Arnold declared that the modern man was crippled and incomplete.”91 Such weak complaining, in the view of critics, was altogether unmanly. The poet’s moral and manly mission is paramount, for “[i]t is not merely as an artist that men love to regard a favorite poet. He must not only himself obey the dominion of moral and religious ideas, he must do more—he must teach others to go and do likewise.” In the same vein, a Guardian reviewer advises Arnold to leave off with his “[h]opeless apathy” and “morbid repinings” and instead “sing the godlike repose of trustful energy,” and “soothe and elevate those that mourn.”92 While there is often disagreement regarding other features of Arnold’s verse, on the matter of his morbid hopelessness the critics are unanimous. Any character capable of figuring such disheartening thoughts and feelings in verse must necessarily be weak, lazy, selfish, and unmanly—in short, a spiritually moribund infidel. Even Arnold’s elder sister, Jane—a more favorably predisposed critic would be far to seek—faults the poems on just this score of hopelessness, as her October 1848 letter makes clear. She doubts that the poems “would ever become very popular or deeply impress the mind of the country,” because “Matt’s philosophy holds out no help in the deep questions which are stirring in every heart in the life & death struggle in which the world is every year engaged more deeply” (Letters 1.123). In such an age of “tumults & perplexities without & within, we want to know the spell which shall evoke a righteous and peaceful order from this chaos,” but her brother’s poems offer no such spell. On the contrary, she says, “surely language which tells them of a dumb inalterable order of the universe and of the vanity of the labours in which they are vexing, will seem too unreal & far too hopeless for them to listen to” (Letters 1.124). This opinion too proves prescient of the larger critical response. Many critics who otherwise extol Arnold’s first three volumes regret the poems’ “far too hopeless” melancholy. “Our age may be sickly enough,” Arnold’s Oxford classmate John Campbell Shairp says, but that is all the more reason that poets “should do their utmost to strengthen and restore, not farther paralyze it by useless and unmanly lamentations.”93 Instead of strength and hope, however, Arnold offers only “blank dejection,” a phrase that Shairp uses three times in his review of Arnold’s third volume of verse, the 1853 Poems.94 With a precision seldom bettered in Arnold criticism, he describes the outlook in the poetry as one “pervaded by a strong sense of man’s nothingness in presence of the great powers of nature—that effort and sorrow are alike vain— that our warm hopes and fears, faiths and aspirations, are crushed like moths 93 94 91 92

Matthew Arnold 79. Guardian 7 (8 Dec. 1852): 823. [Shairp], “Poems by Matthew Arnold” 500. Ibid. 501, 503.

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beneath the omnipotence of deaf adamantine laws.”95 Shairp then prescribes the true moral duty of the poet, with a glance at Arnold’s disparagement of the present age: Mr. Arnold must learn, if he has indeed to learn, that whatever are the faults or needs of our time, the heart has not yet died out of it; that if he thinks it bad, it is the duty of poets, and all thoughtful men, to do their part to mend it, not by weak-hearted lamentations, but by appealing to men’s energies, their hopes, their moral aspirations. Let him be quite sure that these are still alive, if he can but rouse them, and that if he cannot the fault lies elsewhere than in his age. To arouse, to strengthen, to purify whatever is good in the men of his own and after times, this is the work which the true poet does.96

Apparently, nothing but hymns in the Doric mode will satisfy such moral militancy, and similar calls for the poet to do his Christian duty are heard from even closer quarters. Arthur Hugh Clough’s 1853 North American Review article, for instance, disparages the poetry’s spirit “of ascetic and timid self-culture.”97 Perhaps Arnold’s closest confidante, Clough seeks but fails to find “intimations” in Poems “of some better and further thing than these, some approximations to a kind of confidence, some incipiences to a degree of hope, some roots, retaining some vitality of conviction and moral purpose.”98 Likewise, another family friend and Oxford classmate, John Duke Coleridge, in a review of Poems that is stunning in its malice, claims to detect “an infidel and worldly spirit” that makes the volume “a really painful one to those who do not think the destiny or duty of man a doubtful question; and who feel, as we feel, the incalculable mischief of a sceptical and irreligious train of thought when presented to the mind in melodious verse.”99 Admitting Arnold’s power as a poet of nature, Coleridge yet complains, “The beauties which he sees begin and end in themselves. There is no reference to the hand that made them, no intimation of those lessons which they were appointed to convey.”100 Even the “unsatisfactory and depressing tone” of the “many melancholy and pathetic passages” could perhaps be overlooked were it not that when “natural images are introduced, there is no suggestion of the comfort to be derived from them, no such use of them as Scripture and great Christian poets have abundantly sanctioned.”101 In more general terms, the 97 98 99 95

Ibid. 502. Ibid. 504. [Clough], “Recent English Poetry” 22. Ibid. 17. [John Duke Coleridge], “Poems by Matthew Arnold,” Christian Remembrancer 27 (Apr. 1854): 330. Coleridge’s review is described as “unaccountably vicious” by Sidney Coulling. See Matthew Arnold and His Critics: A Study of Arnold’s Controversies (Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 1974) 48. 100 [Coleridge], “Poems by Matthew Arnold” 329–30. 101 Ibid. 330. 96

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omission in contemporary literature—to Coleridge it amounts to a denial—of explicit professions of Christian orthodoxy is “one of the most dangerous and difficult intellectual problems” of the day, and Arnold is a prime example of this class of fervorless poets: “They leave [religion] out, observe a perfect silence on the subject, and discuss questions, which, if it be true, it has forever settled, as if they were open questions, and admitted of discussion.”102 Such “lazy philosophical literature” is only too likely to undermine the “strongholds of Christianity” and “sap their foundations,” and so it must be pronounced anathema. Arnold parries this attack—Coleridge also publicly accuses him of plagiarizing his poem “Sohrab and Rustum”—with his usual bland irony, asking a mutual friend to inform Coleridge “that the limited circulation of the Christian Remembrancer makes the unquestionable viciousness of his article of little importance. I am sure that he will be gratified to think that it is so” (Letters 1.289). In bidding the author to do “God’s work,” to “marry and get children,” and to hymn “God’s glory” in “manly art,” Kingsley, Coleridge, and their ilk are merely doing their duty as “public moralists,” in Collini’s sense, by showing their “obsessive antipathy to selfishness.”103 As discussed in Chapter 2, critics deem the lazy, weak, and unmanly man to be neglecting his moral obligation to altruism; his attitude is not “productive of socially desirable actions,” the litmus test of ethical value. To Collini, such criticisms betray “a constant anxiety about the possibility of sinking into a state of psychological malaise or anomie, a kind of emotional entropy assumed to be the consequence of absorption in purely selfish aims.” One sure way to avoid the sin of selfishness and arouse motives to altruism lies in Kingsley’s style of Muscular Christianity. Animal vitality, expressed in the first instance as pure erotic energy and secondarily as vigorous athletic activity and a zest for working-class outreach, constitutes the most manly and morally suitable expression of altruism. In practice, this usually assumes the rather less exalted form of a simple devotion to hard work. Not only is work the cure for selfishness, in this view, but it can also preempt religious doubts and the despair to which doubts lead. Thomas Carlyle’s “Gospel of Work” pertains here as well, for only our “Works,” he says, “can render articulate and discernible” the self-consciousness that “dwells dimly in us.”104 His advice—“Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it in God’s name!”—is apparently Carlyle’s only positive prescription for despair in the face of “The Everlasting No!”105 Along this same line, when Arnold’s father, Thomas Arnold, is struggling as a young man with qualms over some of the finer points in the ThirtyNine Articles, his Oxford tutor John Keble (later Matthew Arnold’s godfather) Ibid. 331. Public Moralists 65. 104 Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh (1833) The Works of 102

103

Thomas Carlyle, vol. 1 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1897) 132. 105 Ibid. 157.

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advises him to quit thinking and turn to practical action as not only a protection against dangerous speculation but as the surest cure for one already suffering from painful doubts. Suppress your doubts “by main force,” Keble tells him, and do it “not by physic, i.e., reading and controversy, but by diet and regimen, i.e., holy living.”106 Years later, the middle-aged Master of Rugby in turn gives the same advice to a perplexed young man: “The more I think of the matter,” he writes, “the more I am satisfied that all speculations of the kind in question are to be repressed by the will, and if they haunt us, notwithstanding the efforts of our will, that then they are to be prayed against, and silently endured as a trial. I mean speculations … as to the origin and continued existence of moral evil.”107 The attitude is summed up by Thomas Arnold the younger: “For us, and for all of his children, the precept flowed steadily from his life, still more than from his lips, “Work.” Not, work at this or that—but, Work.”108 As the historian of Victorian religion Humphry House aptly notes, however, an undertone of desperation is sometimes discernible in this Victorian gospel of work. Quoting an 1850 letter of Kingsley, in which the canon says that if God were found to be a deceiver, “I’d go and blow my dirty brains out, and be rid of the whole thing at once, I would indeed,” House remarks dryly, “When irresponsible, suicidal cynicism is the other side of the religious medal, the religion is not now to us attractive.”109 Similarly unattractive, though undoubtedly pessimistic in an almost Schopenhauerian sense, is the sort of Manichean teeth-gnashing found in Carlyle’s Past and Present (1843): Your cotton-spinning and thrice-miraculous mechanism, what is this too, by itself, but a larger kind of Animalism? Spiders can spin, Beavers can build and show contrivance; the Ant lays up accumulation of capital and has, for aught I know, a Bank of Antland. If there is no soul in man higher than all that, did it reach to sailing on the cloud-rack and spinning sea-sand; then I say, man is but an animal, a more cunning kind of brute: he has no soul, but only a succedaneum for salt. Whereupon, seeing himself to be truly of the beasts that perish, he ought to admit it, I think;—and also straightaway universally kill himself; and so, in a manlike manner, at least, end, and wave these brute-worlds his dignified farewell!110

Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, D.D.: Late Head Master of Rugby School, and Regis Professor of Modern History in the University of Oxford, vol. 1 (London: B. Fellowes, 1844) 19–20. 107 Ibid. 380. 108 Thomas Arnold, Passages in a Wandering Life (London: Edward Arnold, 1900) vi. 109 Humphry House, “The Mood of Doubt,” Ideas and Beliefs of the Victorians (New York: Dutton, 1966) 76. 110 Past and Present (1843) The Works of Thomas Carlyle, vol. 10 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1896–1899) 221. 106

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This point about the work-cure applies no less, it should be noted, to Culler’s belief that the “joy of active service in the world” proves the saving grace in Arnold’s journey from poetic despair to prose serenity. That Arnold takes umbrage at finding his father portrayed as a “narrow bustling fanatic” strongly suggests his own at-best qualified antipathy to the exclusive worship of a laborious Hebraism, the Philistine “force” that is narrowly animated by this “driving energy at practice, this paramount sense of the obligation of duty, selfcontrol, and work, this earnestness in going manfully with the best light we have” (Letters 3.168; CPW 5.163). The historian Gertrude Himmelfarb might choose to number Matthew Arnold among the Muscular Christians, but the evidence suggests instead that he believes that only Hellenism, a force no less manly and earnest, can provide the intellectual counterweight to Victorian Britain’s hypertrophied Hebraism: “The old recipe, to think a little more and bustle a little less” is “still the best recipe to follow,” he says, and far preferable to relying only on Hebraism’s “too exclusive worship of fire, strength, earnestness, and action” (CPW 5.27–8, 191).111 Arnold’s reputed laziness is in part a function of his long-standing hostility to the forces of inflexible and mechanical muscularity, whether of the logical, theological, even the literal sort—our blind pursuit of “bodily health and vigour” for its own sake, he says, is “as unintelligent and vulgarising” as our blind pursuit of “wealth and population” when “we disjoin them from the idea of a perfect spiritual condition” (CPW 5.98–9). The next chapter further explains why the pessimism behind Arnold’s perfectionism, the dangerous thrust of which his contemporaries might well have recognized, leads his critics to call him lazy, weak, selfish, and effeminate. It now seems clear what “renouncement” means to Arnold, but since he does not preach it as part of an abstract system, its central importance to his ethics is easily overlooked. Maybe he would have been better served by a system. An auditor at Arnold’s first lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry in 1857, an address later published as “On the Modern Element in Literature” (1869), reports that as “a composition it was pointed & telling: tho’ the matter was little to my taste: he seems to lust after a system of his own: and systems are not made in a day” (CPW 1.225). If Arnold was indeed a lusty system-maker in the 1850s, the habit plainly did not take. Instead, he turns to a rhetorical style of ethical exemplarity to embody his aim of “renouncement,” and as the next chapter demonstrates, the complaints of Arnold’s critics are ultimately focused and clarified in the lens of his unique rhetorical style.

See Himmelfarb, The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values (New York: Knopf, 1995) 28. While the name of “Muscular Christian” might well fit Arnold’s father, Dr. Thomas Arnold, its application to the prophet of culture seems flatly wrong. 111

Chapter 6

Less than Joy and More than Resignation: Arnold’s Method of Ethical Exemplarity In both Buddhism and Christianity, there is something similar in spite of the great differences in doctrine. This is that the believer or devout person is called on to make a profound inner break with the goals of flourishing in their own case; they are called on, that is, to detach themselves from their own flourishing, to the point of the extinction of self in one case, or to that of renunciation of human fulfillment to serve God in the other. The respective patterns are clearly visible in the exemplary figures. The Buddha achieves Enlightenment; Christ consents to a degrading death to follow his father’s will. —Charles Taylor, A Secular Age Intellectual disinterestedness is possible only because of ethical disinterestedness, by the disinterestedness of holiness. —Emmanuel Levinas, Is It Righteous to Be? When God goes, everything goes.

—Georg Büchner, Wozzeck

This study of Arnold’s thought concludes with an analysis of his rhetorical style, the lens in which his most significant ideas come into focus and all of the critical lines reviewed in the earlier chapters converge. In particular, major features of Arnold’s ethical criticism, such as impersonality, disinterestedness, and detachment, find their place within this explication of his larger rhetorical strategy of “renouncement.” As the previous chapters show, Arnold’s style provokes a hostile reaction among some Victorian critics and moves them to call him illogical and effeminate, although one can see similarly soft Arnoldian ideas reemerging today in various movements of postmodern philosophy—in the “weak thought” of Gianni Vattimo, for instance, the antifoundationalism of Richard Rorty, or the postmetaphysical politics and ethics of Jacques Derrida and Emmanual Levinas.1 As with his more famous literary touchstones, Arnold’s touchstones of morality derive from concrete experience and practical examples, and they provide the 1 See, for example, Gianni Vattimo, Dialogue with Nietzsche, trans. William McCuaig (New York: Columbia UP, 2006); Richard Rorty and Gianni Vattimo, The Future of Religion, ed. and trans. Santiago Zabala (New York: Columbia UP, 2005); Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005); Emanuel Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001) and Humanism of the Other, trans. Nidra Poller (Urbana; Chicago: U of Illinois P, 2006).

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rhetorical armature to his pessimistic ethic of renunciation. Arnold states the general rationale for his approach in the late lecture “Numbers” (1885): “There is nothing like positive instances to illustrate general propositions,” he says, “and to make them believed” (CPW 10.152). Since conduct—the “patient continuance in well-doing, self conquest,” Arnold’s daily dying of “renouncement”—is threefourths of life, he uses his moral touchstones to conduct people along the road of suffering that leads to the palace of renunciation (CPW 5.166). The rhetoric of ethical exemplarity is the name that I give to Arnold’s method for marshaling these touchstones, the texts of his pessimistic sermons on letters—of necrosis lit up by emotion—which offer the models that he deems worthy of imitation in the ongoing discipline of self-government. Both as poet and essayist, Arnold’s style causes as much critical vexation as his substance. As the previous chapters demonstrate, critics call his arguments illogical and his attitude weak, lazy, and selfish. The charge of unmanliness first arises in reaction to the perceived infidelity in his poetry and is later applied with equal fervor to the perceived antipathy that he bears toward system-makers and systems. The survey of Arnold’s early critical reception that closed Chapter 5, for instance, shows how freely mid-Victorian moralists bandy about the terms manly and effeminate. The adjectives prove so elastic that they eventually seem to function virtually as convertible predicates. Celibacy, for instance, can be at once either effeminate or manly, depending on one’s polemical posture. To a Muscular Christian like Charles Kingsley, celibacy’s frigid piety breeds a “die-away effeminacy” that is aimed “at the roots of our wedded bliss” and is a “most insidious weapon of the Tractarians,” while to the ascetic taste of Richard William Church, Dean of St. Paul’s, to shrink from the ideal of celibacy implies “an unmanly preference for English home life,” a kind of beef-and-ale worldliness that is far too much at ease in Zion.2 Along with their bearing on broad questions of Frances H. Kingsley, ed., Charles Kingsley: His Letters and Memoirs of His Life, vol. 1 (London: H. S. King, 1877) 249; Una Birch Pope-Hennessy, Canon Charles Kingsley (London: Chatto and Windus, 1948) 39; David Newsome, Godliness and Good Learning: Four Studies on a Victorian Ideal (London: John Murray, 1961) 207; R. W. Church, The Oxford Movement: Twelve Years, 1833–1845 (London: Macmillan, 1891) 320–21. Church recalled how the Tractarians “brought out with great force and great sympathy the ascetic temper and the value put on celibacy in the early days, and it made a deep impression … . Celibacy came to be regarded as an obvious part of the self-sacrifice of a clergyman’s life, and the belief and the profession of it formed a test, understood if not avowed, by which the more advanced or resolute members of the party were distinguished from the rest. This came home to men on the threshold of life with a keener and closer touch than questions about doctrine. It was the subject of many a bitter agonising struggle which no one knew anything of; it was with many the act of a supreme self-oblation. The idea of the single life may be a utilitarian one as well as a religious one. It may be chosen with no thought of renunciation or self-denial, for the greater convenience and freedom of the student or the philosopher, the soldier or the man of affairs … . But the idea of celibacy, in those whom it affected at Oxford, was in the highest degree a religious and romantic one. The hold which 2

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sexual identity and the social construction of gender, the notions of manliness and effeminacy, as specifically deployed in Victorian-era rhetoric, also mark the salience of some particularly contentious moral and political positions.3 Manliness and it had on the leader of the movement made itself felt, though little was directly said. To shrink from it was a mark of want of strength or intelligence, of an unmanly preference for English home life, of insensibility to the generous devotion and purity of the saints.” One cannot read this account without imagining Kingsley’s unquiet grave. That “no one knew anything” of these acts of “supreme self-oblation” has been doubted by at least one critic, to whom Kingsley’s “manliness was an antidote to the poison of effeminacy—the most insidious weapon of the Tractarians—which was sapping the vitality of the Anglican Church. Young men came to the church for spiritual nourishment: they went away perverted. Their enthusiasms were diverted into unnatural, un-English pursuits. They were encouraged to think of themselves as beings set apart from other men, their minds bent on other-worldliness, the beauty of holiness and the satisfaction of self-denial. Scorning all earthly loves, they released their frustrated emotions upon saints long dead and upon the Holy Mother of God; renouncing the love of women, they clung to each other, casting aside all manly reticence by confessing to each other their secret temptations, and seeking solace in their own passionate attachments which seemed to a normal healthy male … undesirably high-pitched.” See David Newsome, Godliness and Good Learning: Four Studies on a Victorian Ideal (London: John Murray, 1961) 207–8. 3 Although this large subject falls outside the scope of the present discussion, several studies deserve mention for their relevance to Arnold and his critical reception. Robert J. C. Young, for instance, details the almost paradigmatic use of the manlyversus-effeminate polarity to figure the Saxon-versus-Celtic ethnic characterology. See Young, The Idea of English Ethnicity (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008) 20–21, 171–2, 203. James Eli Adams has described the “feminization” of male intellectual labor that occurs in the Victorian era and the self-defensive reaction to market forces that occurs among intellectuals, as seen in their construction of a “representation of masculine identity as an ascetic discipline.” Adams tracks Victorian representations of manliness and effeminacy, and his analysis reveals how the rapidly professionalizing middle-class writers seek to affirm and validate their headwork by means of “rhetorics” that, while “markedly varied,” are yet “persistently related in their appeal to a small number of models of masculine identity: the gentleman, the prophet, the dandy, the priest, and the soldier.” Each of these roles in turn embodies “the incarnation of an ascetic regimen, an elaborately articulated program of self-discipline.” Arnold does not figure in Adams’s seminal study, although the poet presents a particularly striking example—and an equally telling counterexample—of what Adams calls the “complex and largely unexplored interplay between Victorian literary forms and the social logics of masculine self-fashioning.” He further claims that the “understanding of masculinity as an ascetic discipline forms an especially powerful continuum between early and late Victorian rhetorics of masculine identity.” See Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (Ithaca; London: Cornell UP, 1995) 2–3, 230. See also Boyd Hilton, “Moral Disciplines,” Liberty and Authority in Victorian Britain, ed. Peter Mandler (Oxford; New York: Oxford UP, 2006) 224–46; Jean Ann Gregorek, Technologies of Culture: Self-Help and Masculinity in Nineteenth-Century Britain, diss., Ohio State U, 1998 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI, 1998) ATT 9911198; James Hiester Najarian, The “Unmanly” Poets: Keats and the Poetics of Desire, diss., Yale U, 1996 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI, 1996) ATT 9713705.

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effeminacy serve a deictic function within discourse, a dimension of Victorian rhetoric that Stefan Collini explores in Public Moralists (1991), and this chapter tests one of Collini’s chief claims: that the tropes of manliness serve partially to reveal “the pre- and sub-political level of moral and aesthetic sensibilities” that inform Victorian political attitudes.4 Instead of Collini’s manly fellows (the John Stuart Mills, Henry Fawcetts, and Leslie Stephens of nineteenth-century British culture), however, the focus here is rather on Arnold’s rhetorical style and the critical reaction that characterizes him as a remarkably unmanly fellow. These characterizations of Arnold as womanish and weak-minded merit close consideration because they touch the heart of his mission, both his rhetorical strategy—the promotion of “renouncement”—and the rhetorical style that was its vehicle—ethical exemplarity. Some evidence of this critical line appeared in Chapter 3 and is worth recalling here. When Arnold begins to produce his prose interventions in the social and cultural controversies of the day, his contemporaries take him for a figure embodying a “spirit of cultivated inaction” and possessing “hardly any power of argument,” an “elegant creature” with “gentle limbs” embowered in “a flowered dressing-gown,” one who can “pen pretty verses, turn pretty sentences, and express pretty sentiments” but is wholly unsuited to “the dust and sweat and noise and turmoil” of modern, manly England.5 Arnold’s ideas endure many critical assaults over the 40-year course of his writing career, yet of all the barbs, none fixes a particular line of critique as firmly as this trope on unmanliness. From the Kingsleyean critical flexions that his earliest poetry calls forth, to the sneers he draws from Walt Whitman and Theodore Roosevelt by his 1883 lectures on civilization in the United States, critics continually censure Arnold for his unmanly weakness, a softness less of body than of mind and character.6 He is deemed lazy, vain, dandified, squeamish, and above all delicate—a wielding of the full suite of The terms manly and effeminate seem to retain little of their gender-specific purchase today—pace the rearguard writings of scholars such as Harvey C. Mansfield. See his Manliness (New Haven: Yale UP, 2006). 4 Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850– 1930 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991) 185 and Chapter 5 passim. 5 [James Fitzjames Stephen], “Culture and Action,” Saturday Review 24 (9 Nov. 1867): 592; [James Fitzjames Stephen], “Matthew Arnold and His Countrymen,” Saturday Review 18 (3 Dec. 1864): 683; [James Macdonell], Daily Telegraph 2 July 1867, 7; [James Macdonell], Daily Telegraph 8 Sept. 1866, 5; [James Fitzjames Stephen], “Mr. Arnold and the Middle Classes,” Saturday Review 21 (10 Feb. 1866): 163. 6 For details on Whitman and Roosevelt, see the critical notes of R. H. Super (CPW 11.487). See also James Dow McCullum, “The Apostle of Culture Meets America,” New England Quarterly 2 (1929): 357–81; Howard Mumford Jones, “Arnold, Aristocracy, and America,” American Historical Review 49.3 (Apr. 1944): 393–409; John Henry Raleigh, Matthew Arnold and American Culture (Berkeley: U of California P, 1957); C. H. Leonard, Arnold in America: A Study of Matthew Arnold’s Literary Relations with America and His Visits to this Country in 1883 and 1886 (Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms, 1965).

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effete intellectual images that stock the Victorian imaginary. These outward signs of womanish weakness are matched per definitio by a mind that is vague, illogical, unorganized, incoherent, and incapable of sustained argument or philosophical abstraction. Superficially, at least, the tenor of Arnold’s poetry—its “useless and unmanly lamentations,” as one nineteenth-century critic describes it7—could not be further from the earnest and energetic spirit then inspiring Victorian imperial and industrial triumphalism. The doctrine of Muscular Christianity was rampant among middleclass moralists—if rampant is the armorial bearing best befitting Kingsley’s lusty leapfrogging and the pious pugnacity of Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s School Days (1857). Beneath the surface differences, however, some notable similarities appear. In The Manliness of Christ (1879), for example, Hughes lauds “the sublimity of self-sacrifice” and calls “self-restraint” the “highest form of selfassertion,” because “courage can only rise into true manliness when the will is surrendered; and the more absolute the surrender of the will the more perfect will be the temper of our courage and the strength of our manliness.”8 Hughes can afford to preach such a self-abnegating “surrender of the will” without danger of tarnishing the indubitable manliness of his public image. Arnold’s poetry, by contrast, is immediately suspect, for manliness is the very quality that his critics find so conspicuously absent, much as his prose critics later characterize as effeminate the supposed lack of logical rigor in his arguments. To Victorian readers of this moralizing kidney, Arnold’s early poetry reflects an irreligious and effeminate selfishness that is diametrically opposed to altruism, that heart of all moral virtue and chief ethical imperative of the “dominant” Victorian moral sensibility. With his prose turn in the 1850s, Arnold’s critics adjust but do not fundamentally change this central trope of unmanliness. What was figured as his weakness and indolence in verse becomes conceit and eristic effeminacy in prose. Arnold’s vague notions betray an intellect unfit to grapple—the Cambridge wrangler again comes to mind—by means of a virile and vigorous logical method. His abstractions are judged thin, his mind given to a sort of feminine concreteness that rarely rises above a simplistic level of anecdotal narrative. The prose and verse criticisms even overlap on occasion, with one contemporary reviewer finding Arnold’s New Poems (1867) “reflecting the speculations, the fears and hopes of many of the ablest, though feminine minds of the day, whose faith is based on sentiment rather than reason and experience,” while another says that Arnold’s provocative essay on “Culture and Its Enemies” (1867) “sets us an example of what we would call pretty behaviour” in his “peculiar kind of feminine satire.”9

7 [Coventry Patmore], “Poems by Matthew Arnold,” North British Review 21 (Aug. 1854): 500. 8 The Manliness of Christ (Boston: Houghton, 1879) 27–8, 33. 9 [Anon.], “Belles Lettres,” Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review n.s. 32.2 (1 Oct. 1867) 602; [Anon.], “Mr. Matthew Arnold Again,” London Review 15 (13 July 1867): 39.

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“Every Puny Whipster Gets My Sword” The Victorian men of action and athletes of logic, with their rage for order, find the prose Arnold a mere “fop,” the “most delicate of living English critics,” one appealing to the “dainty taste” of such “sentimentalists” as lack “the strong sense and sturdy morality of their fellow Englishmen.”10 The “idle and incoherent chatter” of “intellectual dandies” such as Arnold is fit only to elicit “the admiration of young ladies or of old women—of both sexes.”11 His “hysterics—cultivated hysterics, as they might be called,” his “air of coxcombry and insolent impertinence,” and his “very small, sneering, and unworthy style of criticism” is “without conscience, without noble impulse, and without any real stimulus to progress.”12 In the “really effeminate horror” that Arnold betrays toward “simple, practical, common-sense reforms,” and in the affectations of his “self-inflated egotism,” his critics see a soul that is clearly “degenerating into languid superciliousness.”13 When Arnold betrays a fond respect for the Celtic element in British culture and recommends, in On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867), the establishment of a chair of Celtic languages at Oxford, a reviewer in the London Times derides such “arrant nonsense” as matter best “left to antiquaries and historians, and to critics who have nothing more solid to occupy them.”14 To this reviewer, Arnold’s is “one of the most mischievous and selfish pieces of sentimentalism which could possibly be perpetrated.” Any Englishman can plainly see, he says, that the “Welsh language is the curse of Wales,” its prevalence excludes “the Welsh people from the civilization, the improvement, and the material prosperity of their English neighbors,” and their persistence in speaking it “prevents them from finding their own way into the world, and excludes the light of day from themselves”: And all this cruel incapacity and social disorganization must needs be fostered and encouraged for the gratification of a mere antiquarian conceit, and is actually made a subject of gratulation by sentimentalists who talk nonsense about “the children of Taliesin and Ossian,” and whose dainty taste requires something more flimsy than the strong sense and sturdy morality of their fellow-Englishmen.

[James Macdonell], Daily Telegraph 8 Sept. 1866, 5; London Times 8 Sept. 1866, 8. [Anon.], “Essays and Essayists,” London Review 10 (10 June 1865): 616; “Mr.

10 11

Matthew Arnold Again” 40. 12 “Mr. Matthew Arnold Again” 39; “Belles Lettres” 602; [Anon.], Morning Star 28 June 1867, 4; [Anon.], “Mr. Arnold’s Theory of Perfection,” Aberdeen Free Press, 19 July 1867, 5. 13 [Anon.], “The Magazines,” Illustrated London News 52 (4 Jan. 1868): 10; [Anon.], “Mr. Buchanan and His Reviewer,” Spectator 41 (22 Feb. 1868): 227; [Anon.], “The Magazines,” Illustrated London News 53 (4 July 1868): 3. 14 [Anon.], London Times 8 Sept. 1866, 8.

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Reading these critical pugilists today, one wonders what they wrote when the gloves really came off. Fitzjames Stephen makes the point when he observes that the “only objection to Mr. Arnold’s Preface [to Essays in Criticism (1865)] is that it is too goodnatured. There is no pleasure in hitting a man who will not hit you back.”15 Arnold advocates a purely personal and hence selfish self-development at the expense of the Christian’s manly duty to work for progressive political reform and social amelioration, according to charges leveled by Liberals such as Henry Sidgwick, Henry Reeve, and Jane Hume Clapperton. This caricature easily dovetails with Thomas Carlyle’s “Man of Theory,” that foil to all the heroes of active and forceful manliness whom he glorifies in Characteristics (1831) and Past and Present (1843). Walter E. Houghton claims that by making “force” the essential characteristic of manliness, Carlyle “in turn produced a low opinion of the meek or saintly character, and ultimately of the artistic and intellectual character, too,” a process of devaluation that is clearly at work in the critical reception of Arnold.16 By the mid-1870s, moral manliness even leads W. J. Courthope in the Quarterly Review to accuse Carlyle himself of preaching a sort of gospel of “inaction” that is as “wholly un-English” and effeminate as the prophet of culture’s.17 To Courthope, Arnold’s selfish “self-culture” (he extends the charge to Liberalism more generally) betrays the enduring Tory values of “the Christian Revelation and our national history,” while perverting the progress of “good breeding” in those who should otherwise “perform the duties and maintain the dignity proper to their condition in society.”18 Thus called, more or less, a stupid weakling, Arnold promptly admits that “it is not in my nature,—some of my critics would rather say, in my power,—to dispute on behalf of any opinion, even my own, very obstinately” (CPW 3.287). As the complaints about Arnold’s puny reasoning spread more widely with the publication of Culture and Anarchy and Friendship’s Garland, he cultivates this mock-penitent tone, the ironic insouciance of which sometimes goads his clumsier opponents to ever more waspish exasperation (much as John Henry Newman’s terrible blandness drove Kingsley into a yearlong funk during this same period). Arnold ceaselessly excuses himself in the slyly self-deprecatory tone found in Friendship’s Garland, in which he admits to possessing rather flaccid forensic skills but lays the blame on his imaginary friend, the masterful Prussian nobleman Arminius. He extenuates his case by claiming that, “on the whole, my intellect was (there is no use denying it) overmatched by his” (CPW 5.3). Arminius himself notes in Arnold the “discursiveness, the incapacity for arguing, the artlessness,” and he concludes, “I have taken his measure and know him to be, as a disputant, 15 [James Fitzjames Stephen], “Mr. Matthew Arnold amongst the Philistines,” Saturday Review 19 (25 Feb. 1865): 235. 16 The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830–1870 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1957) 208. 17 [W. J. Courthope], “Modern Culture,” Quarterly Review 137.274 (Oct. 1874): 392–3. 18 Ibid. 412, 414–15.

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rather a poor creature … . I love to proceed with the stringency of a philosopher, and Mr. Matthew Arnold with his shillyshallying spoils the ideas I confide to him” (CPW 5.43–4, 56). Arnold typically takes correction in a spirit of pliant meekness, replying “as a sincere penitent” and recalling that “Philosophy has always been bringing me into trouble” (CPW 5.4, 7). He finally grows “so cowed by all the rebuke” that he promises henceforth to play “the part of a mere listener,” for “I am no arguer, as is well known, ‘and every puny whipster gets my sword’” (CPW 5.27, 29).19 The mock-contrite tone continues in the later Arminius letters, with the chastened Arnold wishing “to plead how plausible were some of the appearances which led astray an untutored mind, not protected by a systematic philosophy” (CPW 5.320).20 Repetition was always high on Arnold’s list of preferred rhetorical devices, and he certainly turns the trope of his supposedly simplistic intellect into one of Culture and Anarchy’s leitmotifs.21 He simultaneously admits a weakness and deftly turns it to account, a move first used to great effect in On Translating Homer (1861), when he answers Francis Newman’s charge of ignorance by avowing that, “perverse as it seems to say so, I sometimes find myself wishing, when dealing with these matters of poetical criticism, that my ignorance were even greater than it is” (CPW 1.174). This tone appears frequently in Friendship’s Garland: One so “sadly to seek” in a logically coherent philosophy must needs “continually have recourse to a plain man’s expedient of trying to make what few simple notions I have, clearer and more intelligible to myself by means of example and illustration” (CPW 5.126). As he is “an unpretending writer, without a philosophy based on inter-dependent, subordinate, and coherent principles,” so he “must not presume to indulge himself too much in generalities” but “must keep close to the level ground of common fact, the only safe ground for understandings without a scientific equipment” (CPW 5.192). Arnold drops the faux-humility in his religious prose of the 1870s and makes his opposition to the athletes of theology and metaphysics quite explicit. For instance, when he seeks “to rescue St. Paul and the Bible from the perversions of mistaken men,” whose “mechanical and materializing theology, with its insane 19 The context of this line from Othello 5.2.253 might be significant. Having finally pierced the illusion that led him to smother his beloved, Othello moves to attack the deceiver, Iago, but Montano intervenes and disarms him. Othello’s debility here might indicate that it is delusion, his criminal weakness, which ultimately unmans him. 20 In his review of Grob’s A Longing Like Despair, Clinton Machann astutely notes that “Arnold, after he turned to prose … he with good-humored self-irony regularly agreed with critics who characterized him as the most unsystematic of thinkers, and he proudly differentiated himself from those writers who were dedicated to abstract, theoretical systems.” See Machann, “Matthew Arnold,” Victorian Poetry 41.3 (2003): 372. Machann perhaps underestimates the programmatic importance of Arnold’s “unsystematic” method as an element in his rhetoric of ethical exemplarity. 21 Examples abound: 5.88, 137, 139, 143, 159–60, 192, 194, 237, 319–20.

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licence of affirmation about God, [and] its insane licence of affirmation about a future state,” has obscured the simple message that “the fundamental thing for Christians is not the incarnation but the imitation of Christ,” Arnold is deliberately bearding the theological lions in their den (CPW 6.7, 152, 146). Surely he must smell the faggots of the Victorian inquisition kindling when he dares to claim that “our popular religion at present conceives the birth, ministry, and death of Christ, as altogether steeped in prodigy, brimful of miracle;—and miracles do not happen” (CPW 6.146). “A Comment on Christmas” (1884) offers perhaps Arnold’s plainest reply to the rearguard defenders of orthodoxy who accused him of apostasy: So angry are some good people at being told that miracles do not happen, that if we say this, they cannot bear to have us using the Bible at all, or recommending the Bible. Either take it and recommend it with its miracles, they say, or else leave it alone, and let its enemies find confronting them none but orthodox defenders of it like ourselves. (CPW 10.218–19)

Arnold’s religious opinions might seem like rather weak tea today, something akin to the bland ecumenical pronouncements that regularly issue from St. John Lateran’s or Lambeth Palace. On the other hand, perhaps some things cannot be repeated too often. For example, the following passage comes from a recent essay by Gianni Vattimo, a thinker prominent in contemporary philosophy’s religious turn, and it sounds as if it were lifted from an Arnold text of 175 years ago: The truth that, according to Jesus, shall make us free is not the objective truth of science or even that of theology: likewise, the Bible is not a cosmological treatise or a handbook of anthropology or theology. The scriptural revelation was not delivered to give us knowledge of how we are, what God is like, what the “natures” of things or the laws of geometry are, and so on, as if we could be saved through the “knowledge” of truth. The only truth revealed to us by Scripture, the one that can never be demythologized in the course of time— since it is not an experimental, logical, or metaphysical statement but a call to practice—is the truth of love, of charity.22

As the balance of the present discussion shows, the postmetaphysical propositions of thinkers like Vattimo, to whom charity is the essential truth of Christianity, fairly resume Arnold’s simple message. What appears to be provocative in Vattimo’s philosophy, such as his deployment of nihilism, kenosis, and the death of God as fundamental tenets in his postmetaphysical hermeneutics of religion, on closer inspection is found to be implicit in Arnold’s thought as well. This quality gives the current ethical and religious turn, in spite of its prodigious theoretical sophistication, a noticeable Victorian flavor. A similarly recursive tendency in the political sphere leads scholars like Robert J. C. Young to suggest that Arnoldian 22 Gianni Vattimo, The Future of Religion, trans. Santiago Zabala (New York: Columbia UP, 2005) 50–51.

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“tolerance” in religion has “in many ways provided the historical and ideological basis for its modern version, contemporary liberal multiculturalism,” and that “the appeal of Arnold’s account,” as Young says, “was that he did not try to produce an exact doctrine or definition.”23 As Joe Phelan rightly states, in a recent discussion of Arnold’s religious writings, “Arnold’s refusal to define his terms or to provide grand theoretical statements of his position is not an act of evasion, but a consistent and defensible critical stance.”24 This is precisely one of this book’s major conclusions. In contrast, however, to the image of “Mr. Kidglove Cocksure” that many of his Victorian contemporaries saw (the phrase is Robert Bridges’s, who earned by it a rebuke from Gerard Manley Hopkins),25 the image of Arnold that is current today tends rather to emphasize a kind of remoteness and austere reserve— the frosty Olympian impassibility that presides in such marmoreal poems as Merope and Balder Dead or in the thin-lipped precision of some of his more rigorously classicizing critical stringencies. This image is perhaps partly the work of Arnold himself, a product, for instance, of the perennial poker face that he assumes before the portrait camera (likely due as much to bad teeth as to any Stoic stifling of “le sanglot désespéré du désir impuissant,” “the despairing sob of impotent agony”).26 In any case, his rather forbidding academic persona surely owes something to Trilling as well, to whom Arnold is “frozen over” but “fearfully conscious of what lies beneath the ice,” and something again to W. H. Auden, who thinks that Arnold “thrust his gift in prison till it died,” and “all rang hollow but the clear denunciation / Of a gregarious optimistic generation.”27 J. Hillis Miller also furthers this line, claiming that Arnold is “never able to conquer his coldness.”28 As we have seen, however, Arnold is taken by critics in his own day for an affected and effeminate dandy, a jesting fop bent on “titillating the public by something like the airs and graces, the playful affectations of a favorite comedian,” and while The Idea of English Ethnicity 168, 174. Joe Phelan, “The Language of Criticism in Arnold’s Religious Writings,”

23 24

Nineteenth-Century Prose 34.1–2 (spring–fall 2007): 204. 25 The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges (London: Oxford UP, 1935) 97, qtd. in F. R. Leavis, “Arnold as Critic,” Scrutiny 7.3 (Dec. 1938): 319. 26 The phrase is George Sand’s and the translation Arnold’s, from his 1877 essay on Sand (CPW 8.221). It might also be rendered, using his own words from the first Oberman poem, as the hopeless cry of an “unstrung will” (“Oberman” 183). On Arnold’s dental troubles, particularly after 1867, see Letters 1.68–9, 233, 412; 2.59, 202, 222, 261; 3.64, 100, 106, 111, 202, 204, 254, 255–6, 264, 300, 407, 458; 4.48–9, 129; 5.21, 449. 27 Trilling, Matthew Arnold 34; W. H. Auden, “Matthew Arnold,” The Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden (New York: Random House, 1945) lines 1, 14–15. 28 The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1963) 242. According to Miller, “Arnold cannot find joy in things outside himself unless he has joy already in his own heart.” See J. Hillis Miller, “The Theme of the Disappearance of God in Victorian Literature,” Victorian Subjects (New York: Harvester, 1990) 55.

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this latter posture that might not rule out coldness of a kind, it surely seems to downplay it.29 In the gap between these contrasting images—the slightly reptilian Arnold, aloof, impersonal, gazing de haut en bas, and Arnold the dandified raffiné and jokey ambassador for high culture—the concept of impersonality offers a bridge that leads to the heart of Arnold’s ethics. The Most Free from Personality Mid-Victorian moralists took the idea of impersonality very personally. Among the ethical affections that were most encouraged in that supposedly earnest age, impersonality is surely conspicuous, sharing a range of the conceptual topography with other notions that are near akin, such as disinterestedness, detachment, selflessness, and so forth. These terms compose so large a part of the language of altruism that Collini could just as easily have titled his 1991 study Public Altruists. Victorian pulpit-pounders of every stripe, from Anglican priests to professors of philosophy to popular radicals, agree that altruism is the first principle of moral virtue.30 Some ethical purists even push this logic of altruism to an extreme by making it an obligation that all our actions should benefit others, typically pointing to the imitation of Christ as the perennial strategy for attaining this state of perfect selflessness and self-denial. Nearer to earth, local icons are also ready to hand, such as Florence Nightingale and the seventh earl of Shaftesbury, both of whom bear considerable cultural cachet as exemplary nineteenth-century altruists. The most prominent mid-Victorian “public moralists,” figures like Mill, Carlyle, John Henry Newman, Charles Dickens, George Eliot—one could add Frederick Denison Maurice, the Froude brothers, the Stephen brothers, Harriet and James Martineau, and so on—all reveal their almost “obsessive antipathy to selfishness,” as Collini says, and an intense preoccupation with finding and arousing motives to altruism. Arnold shares this general advocacy of selfless conduct, but the unique rhetorical style that he brings to bear in the effort and his grounding in philosophical pessimism set him apart. Before analyzing Arnold’s impersonality, however, it is useful to recall the topic’s current relevance. Impersonality appears to be enjoying something of a revival in contemporary ethical thought. Along with the various turns to religion or ethics now occurring in literary criticism and political philosophy, there is a complementary renovation at work in the discourse of altruism and hence of impersonality. For example, Sharon Cameron rightly observes, in her recent set of essays, simply titled Impersonality (2007), that “[m]odern criticism shows the point at which the idea of impersonality is completely detached from religion, which initially gave it life.”31 Some thinkers even see in the present “clash of civilizations” a Henry Sidgwick, “The Prophet of Culture,” Macmillan’s 16.94 (Aug. 1867): 271. Public Moralists 63. 31 Impersonality: Seven Essays (Chicago; London: U of Chicago P, 2007) 104. 29 30

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conjunctural pretext for general intellectual reflection on the religious roots of Western secularism and liberal democracy. At any rate, examples abound of the contemporary interest in impersonality, objectivity, universalism, and the like. This marked ethical and religious turn appears within the ranks of Victorian studies as well, with Cameron’s study presenting only the most obvious—and perhaps the most brilliant—symptom of this trend. One might also point to Amanda Anderson’s deployment of what she calls “cultivated distance” in her book The Powers of Distance (2001) and her pursuit of what she describes as “the distinctly modern question of whether universal or impersonal value can find subjective embodiment.”32 Anderson produces a sustained analysis of Arnoldian disinterestedness in an effort, as she says, to rethink “the fundamental critiques of Arnold as authoritarian and foundational” and to imagine a kind of ethical posture in which “universality might be lived or given a concrete characterology.”33 In focusing on Arnold’s “persistent concern with the moral and characterological elements of modern intellectual and aesthetic practices,” Anderson coins the phrase “embodied universality” to describe Arnold’s “transcendence of any rule-governed conception of identity or practice,” a transcendence that “nonetheless accords an objective value to what is repeatedly portrayed as not a science but rather an art of reason.”34 While Anderson accepts the “well-developed critique of Arnold’s ideals as falsely universal and ultimately dangerous” and admits the “noncontingent and nonsubjective” thrust of such dubious Arnoldian notions as the state, the best self, and the essentialist touchstones, she chooses rather to emphasize Arnold’s “successful subjective enactment or embodiment of forms of universality, as distinguished from moments where he seems to valorize impersonal or objective standards.”35 To Anderson’s acute analysis I would merely add that Arnold’s “embodied universality”—conceived here in terms of “renouncement”—is indeed his “art of reason,” an emotional and exemplary poetry of self-control and self-forgetting, a morality touched by an altruistic emotion that is nevertheless continuous and coterminous with his conception of impersonality and objectivity. Arnold preaches (if he does not himself at all times practice) this very immanent transcendence, a personal impersonality. Anderson rightly sees that Arnold ties morality to detachment; in other words, he tries “to represent as moral character the very form of detachment he is advocating [and] to make detachment ultimately indistinguishable from moral stance or ethos,” and this is exactly the point of his “renouncement.”36 At the same time, Anderson faults Arnoldian impersonality for lacking “any truly social or intersubjective dimension,” as if “the only zone 32 The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanisms and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton; Oxford: Princeton UP, 2001) 98. 33 Ibid. 98, 108. 34 Ibid. 91, 115. 35 Ibid. 94–5, 97. 36 Ibid. 113.

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of liberty resides in the self’s action upon the self.”37 In her reading, Arnold’s impersonal ideal is “articulated in almost exclusively individualist terms: the only relation is that between the singular subject and those forces and conditions (both intrinsic and extrinsic) that must be controlled, balanced, or heroically faced; missing is any intersubjective or public dialogue.”38 Returning to this theme on the broader canvas of The Way We Argue Now (2006), Anderson pointedly notes the unself-conscious way in which “the concept of critical distance has been seriously discredited” by contemporary theory “even as it necessarily informs many of the very accounts that announce its bankruptcy.”39 Although she seems to underrate the “truly social” thrust of Arnold’s ethics, Anderson recognizes his moral exemplarity and rightly grasps, as her last comment shows, the impossible but necessary place of “critical distance” in modern ethics and criticism. Other Victorianists share this interest in impersonality. George Levine, for instance, emphasizes impersonality’s sublimely self-sacrificial side in his Dying to Know (2002), although here the emphasis is put on the ideological intricacies of Victorian scientific epistemology. Still, Levine characterizes his own project as a “defense of all those impossible strivings toward disinterest and an implicit attack on the view that all attempts at objectivity are disingenuous and politically suspect.”40 Lauren Goodlad also works this line in Victorian Literature and the Victorian State (2003), particularly in her notion of “character” and “pastorship” à la Michel Foucault.41 Daniel Malachuk, in Perfection, the State, and Victorian Liberalism (2005), explicitly grounds his analysis of contemporary political theory in the liberal idealism of Mill and Arnold. Malachuk professes his own faith in “reason’s ability to locate compelling universal moral goods,” and he sees a shift in Victorian studies in which, “for the first time, the Victorian aspiration toward not just moral objectivity but objectivity in general” is gaining critical admiration and enabling us “to read the Victorian liberal aspiration toward moral objectivity and perfectionism with genuine appreciation.”42 While impersonality or altruism is not necessarily central to the works of all these thinkers, it is a trope that always manages to pop up at crucial turns in their arguments, whether they inflect it aesthetically, politically, or more strictly ethically. The critical utility of the notion of impersonality deserves particular emphasis in the present context, and Cameron’s new collection offers a perfect Ibid. 117. Ibid. 117–18. 39 The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Culture of Theory (Princeton; Oxford: 37 38

Princeton UP, 2006) 1–2. 40 Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England (Chicago; London, U of Chicago P, 2002) 13. 41 Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Victorian Literature and the Victorian State: Character and Governance in a Liberal Society (Baltimore; London: Johns Hopkins UP, 2003) 13. 42 Daniel Malachuk, Perfection, the State, and Victorian Liberalism (New York; Basingstoke, Hants: Palgrave, 2005) 3–4.

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opportunity for just such an examination. She has an insightful chapter on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s impersonality and another on T. S. Eliot’s, and I would argue that the link between these two noteworthy impersonalists is found in Arnold, who unfortunately does not get a chapter in Cameron’s study. This is especially unfortunate because Arnold seems to offer a corrective to just those faults that Cameron finds in both Emerson and Eliot. For example, “something is deficient in Emerson’s representations,” she says, “and this deficiency directly pertains to the understood relation between impersonality and individuation.”43 This is the very relation—between impersonality and individuation, or rather between impersonality and personality—that the present study explores. To characterize more precisely the Arnoldian style of impersonality, one can first clear a bit of ground by illustrating a minor curiosity in the Victorian usage of the word personality. In some generous remarks that Benjamin Jowett made in tribute to Arnold shortly after Arnold’s death, he says, “No-one ever united so much kindness and light-heartedness with so much strength. He was the most sensible man of genius whom I have ever known.” Collini closes the second chapter of his brisk 1988 critical biography of Arnold with this quotation, and he must have found it stirring because he also uses it to round off his 2004 DNB entry on Arnold.44 That Collini would repeat the quotation is not especially remarkable. Lionel Trilling uses the same line three times: in his 1939 study of Arnold, his 1949 introduction to the Viking Portable edition, and his 1954 essay in Major British Writers.45 What is worth noting is the rather curious fact that the line quoted from Jowett is actually a fragment. Collini docks the tail of Jowett’s second sentence. The whole runs thus: “He was the most sensible man of genius whom I have ever known and the most free from personality.”46 It is easy to see why Collini omits this equivocal phrase, since it seems to cast a shadow across the otherwise perfectly clear horizon of Jowett’s eulogism. What does Jowett mean—the most free from personality? Trilling notes the chilliness of that final phrase, and he supposes that Jowett is actually hinting here at Arnold’s remoteness and grand-style austerity. Arnold’s reputation as a cold fish, mentioned above, might also have some roots here. After all, he claims at 30 that he is already “three-parts iced over,” as he says in a letter and as his poetry might seem to confirm (Letters 1.252). Jowett’s ambiguity could similarly imply that Arnold, as Trilling says, is “frozen over” but “fearfully conscious of what lies

Impersonality 104. Arnold 24; “Arnold, Matthew (1822–1888),” Oxford Dictionary of National

43 44

Biography (Oxford UP, 2004) 26 Jan. 2007 . 45 Matthew Arnold (New York: Columbia UP, 1939) 34; “Editor’s Introduction,” The Portable Matthew Arnold (New York: Viking, 1949) 2; “Matthew Arnold, 1822–1888,” Major British Writers, gen. ed. G. B. Harrison, vol. 2 (New York: Harcourt, 1954) 419. 46 Evelyn Abbott and Lewis Campbell, eds., The Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett, vol. 1 (London: John Murray, 1897) 223, emphasis added.

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beneath the ice.”47 Trilling revises this quasi-Freudian interpretation somewhat in 1949, noting that “it was not our present sense of the word ‘personality’ that Jowett intended—he meant that there was no impulse in Arnold to make any special claim for himself, or to ask for any indulgence.”48 Nevertheless, Trilling’s reading of this item of Victorian usage can bear further refining. The term receives some light from a comment that S. T. Coleridge makes in an 1809 number of The Friend, in which he lambastes this AGE OF PERSONALITY, this age of literary and political GOSSIPING, when the meanest insects are worshipped with a sort of Egyptian superstition, if only the brainless head be atoned for by the sting of personal malignity in the tail! When the most vapid satires have become the objects of a keen public interest, purely from the number of contemporary characters named in the patchwork notes.49

Similar evidence comes from Mill’s “On Liberty” (1859): “With regard to what is commonly meant by intemperate discussion, namely invective, sarcasm, personality, and the like, the denunciation of these weapons would deserve more sympathy if it were ever proposed to interdict them equally to both sides.”50 In Geroge Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872), a character exclaims, “I should not have known, if Mr. Hackbutt hadn’t hinted it, that I was a Servile Crawler,” to which Hackbutt replies, “I disclaim any personalities.”51 Trilling is thus correct in noting that Jowett does not use personality in “our present sense of the word,” since the word, in Arnold’s day, still comprehends a large part of what we now mean by the phrase to make personal remarks, that is, a descent from the critical highroad to a level of merely personal commentary that criticism is conventionally advised to eschew. For Jowett, Arnold is “free from personality” in the sense that he does not stoop to personal invective and private insult of this kind. He does not indulge in personality. The veracity of such a claim is certainly disputable—the Victorian clergyman John Tulloch, for instance, thinks that the “irrepressible scorn with which [Arnold’s] style is constantly mantling” is “impaired by such headlong personalities,” and Walter Raleigh thinks Arnold not quite free enough from personality: “Nothing can exceed the quiet impertinence of his use of

Matthew Arnold 34. “Editor’s Introduction” 2. 49 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Bibliographia Literaria, The Collected Works of Samuel 47

48

Taylor Coleridge, vol. 7, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983) 41. 50 John Stuart Mill, “On Liberty,” The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. John M. Robinson, 33 vols. (Toronto: Toronto UP, 1963–94) 18.258–9. 51 George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Story of Provincial Life (1872; New York: Norton, 2000) 118.

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proper names.”52 Nevertheless, Jowett obviously does not mean that Arnold is himself without a personality in “our present sense” of the word. Arnold himself demonstrates the usual Victorian usage in a late essay, “Civilization in the United States” (1888), in his description of the general quality of American newspapers: “The absence of truth and soberness in them, the poverty in serious interest, the personality and sensation-mongering, are beyond belief” (CPW 11.361). On the other hand, an 1867 letter from Arnold to his mother points up the Victorian usage of the word personal in a form more congenial to Trilling’s sense: “I more and more become conscious of having something to do,” he writes, “and of a resolution to do it … I shall, I hope, do something of it, but whether one lives long or not, to be less and less personal in one’s desires and workings is the great matter” (Letters 3.99, original emphasis). As Arnold’s letter implies, he aims not to cease desiring tout court but rather to desire impersonally, although this might be a distinction without a difference. The ideal of impersonal desire recalls his “disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world” (CPW 3.283), and it also harmonizes with his encomium on Clough’s “undivided and disinterested love for his object in itself” and his avoidance of the “saturnalia of personal passions” (CPW 1.215). Nevertheless, notions like disinterested love and impersonal desire are apt to strike modern readers as oddly oxymoronic. Like most of the other mid-century moralists, Arnold tries to split the difference between two extremes: on the one hand, the public altruists all generally deplore the purely hedonic calculus of ethical egoism, and they dearly wish to arouse altruistic feelings, so the cultivation of the emotions is encouraged, because the deepest feelings are assumed to be innately good and productive of socially desirable actions. At the same time, Victorian moralists betray a constant anxiety about the dangers of excessive emotionality, which could not only lead men to effeminacy—an affront to all manly and muscular Christians—but sentimentality could also cause, as Kirstie Blair’s recent study shows, heart disease and other more “peculiarly feminine complaints.”53 Arnold’s reconciliation of these contrary claims is distinctly different from Emerson’s, for instance, although Arnold was strongly influenced by Emerson’s transcendentalism in the 1840s, as his notebooks and letters to Clough make clear. In fact, Arnold’s notion of impersonality is arguably drawn at least in 52 John Tulloch, Modern Theories in Philosophy and Religion (Edinburgh; London: William Blackwood, 1884) 289; Walter Raleigh, “Matthew Arnold,” Some Authors: A Collection of Literary Essays, 1896–1916 (Freeport, NY: Books for All Libraries, 1968) 308. Tulloch grants that Arnold’s St. Paul and Protestantism was “little more than a pamphlet. It had a semi-political as well as a religious object. Its personalities, therefore, if not justified, might be held to be provoked.” All the same, he says, “this is no reason why they [the Bishops of Gloucester and Winchester, the Archbishop of York, and the Dean of Norwich] should be made to play the part—not of chorus, but, we might say, of scullion in his later volume.” Modern Theories 288. 53 Kirstie Blair, Victorian Poetry and the Culture of the Heart (Oxford; New York: Clarendon, 2006) 11.

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part from such Emerson essays as “The Over-Soul” (1841) and “Circles” (1841). As noted in Chapter 3, Cameron locates the problem of Emersonian impersonality in its faulty relation between impersonality and personality. As she says, “The deficiency in Emerson’s representation of the impersonal lies peculiarly in the missing sense of a person.”54 Playfully paradoxical as Cameron’s formulation sounds, it is perhaps just here that Arnold corrects his New England teacher. Unlike Emerson, Arnold proves his case for critical and ethical disinterestedness by means of an even greater emotional investment in the other, an investment so forgetful of self that it approaches the kind of ethical absolutism that one finds today in the thought of Emmanuel Lévinas and Jacques Derrida, with their devotion to a selflessness that subtends ontology and subordinates itself utterly to the other, even as the very source and font of subjectivation.55 Arnold personalizes impersonality by dramatizing and embodying it, by performing it, and this movement appears plainly in “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (1865) when he famously tropes on the line, “Wragg is in custody.” In the paragraphs preceding his introduction of Wragg, Arnold quotes the triumphalist bragging of several Victorian milites gloriosos who expatiate thus: “Such a race of people as we stand, so superior to all the world! The old Anglo-Saxon race, the best breed in the whole world! I pray that our unrivalled happiness may last! I ask you whether, the world over or in past history, there is anything like it?” (CPW 3.273). Now rhetoric in such a register threatens, Arnold claims, to trap the mind “in a sphere, to say the truth, perfectly unvital, a sphere in which spiritual progression is impossible.” To short circuit this saturnalia of racial and national passions, Arnold first quotes the following brief (and previously unidentified) newspaper item:56 A shocking child murder has just been committed at Nottingham. A girl named Wragg left the workhouse there on Saturday morning with her young illegitimate child. The child was soon after found dead on Mapperly Hills, having been strangled. Wragg is in custody. (CPW 3.273)

Arnold has a marked fondness for this sort of topicality and often uses it for just the kind of deflationary tonal effect that he achieves here. He then comments Impersonality 81. See, for example, Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago;

54 55

London: University of Chicago Press, 1995) 30, 40, 51; Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” Acts of Religion, trans. Samuel Weber (New York; London: Routledge, 2002) 56, 71; Emmanuel Levinas, Is It Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas, ed. Jill Robbins (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001) 111–12; Emmanuel Levinas, Humanism of the Other, trans. Nidra Poller (Urbana; Chicago: U of Illinois P, 2006) 45–57. 56 Prior accounts of the story of Elizabeth Wragg, including that of R. H. Super, seem to rely exclusively on the London Times report of 15 Mar. 1865. See CPW 3.479. I traced Arnold’s quotation to this source: “General News,” Carlisle Express 17 Sept. 1864, 3.

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upon this news squib, first by noting the vulgarity of the name Wragg and of similar British names—“Higginbottom, Stiggins, Bugg!”—and this is of course the point that drew (and can still draw) the most immediate fire from Arnold’s critics. One might even suspect a form of critical tone deafness, if not downright humorlessness, in some of the responses to Arnold’s ironic observation on “what a touch of grossness in our race, what an original shortcoming in the more delicate spiritual perceptions, is shown by the natural growth amongst us of such hideous names.”57 Even R. H. Super, the esteemed editor of Arnold’s collected prose, feels compelled to note that all of these names are of ancient and venerable British stock (CPW 3.479). Worth recalling in passing is the perennially powerful comic affect that Dickens’s onomastic grotesques produce in some readers and Arnold’s 57 While George Watson finds the passage “a triumph of Arnoldian irony,” although “in a vein of playfulness which even his best admirers have at times found difficult to justify,” John Gross appreciates the overall thrust of Arnold’s irony but finds in the Wragg passage one of the “curious instances of misplaced emphasis” in Arnold’s prose and claims that this “initial piece of snobbery—and snobbery seems to me the right word for it—leaves an unpleasant taste behind.” See Watson, Politics and Literature in Modern Britain (London: Macmillan, 1977) 140; Gross, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: Aspects of English Literary Life since 1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969) 47. George Levine and William Madden seem rather far from the point (and from the source) when they say that “it is worth noting that Matthew Arnold was persistently driven toward aesthetic responses even in his social criticism (it will be remembered that his first criticism of the Wragg episode in Cultural and Anarchy was of the ugliness of the name Wragg).” See Levine and Madden, eds., “Introduction,” The Art of Victorian Prose (New York; London: Oxford UP, 1968) xiii. (The “Wragg episode” in fact appears in “The Function of Criticism.”) Robert Weisberg points to the same moral: “The Arnoldian spirit, then, lacks both moral and social substance, the two being inseparable. We see the whole Romantic line through Arnold up to Lawrence afflicted by aesthetic morality, the belief that aesthetic form, not a perfected moral-social character, creates the beauty of the soul. When Arnold decries the fate of poor Wragg, his criticism so lacks social substance that it is aesthetic annoyance at an unpleasant sound or thought.” See Weisberg, “T. S. Eliot: The Totemic-Mosaic Dream,” Bulletin of the Midwest Modern Language Association 8.2 (fall 1975): 32. Criticism in this key could also likely be found in response to Arnold’s similarly playful jesting at the expense of American toponyms in the last of his essays that he saw into print, “Civilization in the United States” (1888): “The mere nomenclature of the country acts upon a cultivated person like the incessant pricking of pins. What people in whom the sense for beauty and fitness was quick could have invented, or could tolerate, the hideous names ending in ville, the Briggsvilles, Higginsvilles, Jacksonvilles, rife from Maine to Florida; the jumble of unnatural and inappropriate names everywhere?” (CPW 11.359–60). Arnold seems to have found considerable phonic amusement in words with a double-g: Higginbottom, Stiggins, Bugg, Briggsville, Higginsville, and of course Wragg. History has lent a certain fame to Elizabeth Wragg simply because Arnold spent September, 1864 at Fox How, whereas if he had been in London, the same fame might instead have fallen upon “a young woman named Elizabeth Haggis,” tried in the Old Bailey “for the murder of her infant child.” See London Times, 20 Sept. 1864, 4; “19 September 1864, trial of Elizabeth Haggis (t18640919-887),” Old Bailey Proceedings Online, 17 June 2008 .

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equally notable (though often overlooked) flair for high-spirited farce.58 And while strangled newborns might not offer the most promising occasion for the ludic mode, the keenest edge of Arnold’s comments, his real point, seems to lie in what follows his name game: And the final touch,—short, bleak, and inhuman: Wragg is in custody. The sex lost in the confusion of our unrivalled happiness; or (shall I say) the superfluous Christian name lopped off by the straight-forward vigour of our Anglo-Saxon breed! There is profit for the spirit in such contrasts as this; criticism serves the cause of perfection by establishing them. By eluding sterile conflict, by refusing to remain in the sphere where alone narrow and relative conceptions have any worth and validity, criticism may diminish its momentary importance, but only in this way has it a chance of gaining admittance for those wider and more perfect conceptions to which all its duty is really owed. Mr. Roebuck will have a poor opinion of an adversary who replies to his defiant songs of triumph only by murmuring under his breath, Wragg is in custody; but in no other way will these songs of triumph be induced gradually to moderate themselves, to get rid of what in them is excessive or offensive, and to fall into a softer and truer key. (CPW 3.273–4)

Reactions to this specimen of Arnold’s signature “vivacity” come thick and fast. Some critics judge Arnold to be “affected,” “whimsical and petulant” in sporting with the name of Wragg.59 Richard Holt Hutton, a longtime champion of Arnold’s poetry and perhaps his most frequent contemporary reviewer, thinks he detects “just a grain of fatuity” in Arnold’s essays, the sort that comes “from too warm a selfsatisfaction”—a coded phrase for egoism, chiefest of sins.60 But perhaps the most interesting specimen comes from James Fitzjames Stephen in the Saturday Review. Stephen had long been among Arnold’s most caustic and hard-hitting critics. In the case of Wragg, Stephen’s mincing imitation of the higher criticism parodies Arnold’s apparently superfine scrupulosity:

John Gross feels that some of “the grotesques in Friendship’s Garland, for instance, sound as though they might have stepped straight out of the pages of Dickens,” though he notes that “on the other hand there are times when Arnold’s satire is far too narrowly-based to deserve being labelled Dickensian,” and he generally agrees with Raymond Williams’s claim that Arnold’s humor often amounts to little more than “a kind of witty and malicious observation better suited to minor fiction.” See Gross, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters 46. See also Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (London: Chatto, 1958) 116. Collini also appreciates Arnold’s “wit and high spirits” and notes that Friendship’s Garland “contains elements of extravagant burlesque reminiscent of Dickens’s social satires.” See Collini, Arnold 75. 59 [H. H. Lancaster], North British Review 42 (Mar. 1865): 88; [Anon.], “Arnold’s Essays in Criticism,” Pall Mall Gazette, 24 Feb. 1865, 7. 60 [Richard Holt Hutton], “Matthew Arnold’s Essays,” Spectator 38 (25 Feb. 1865): 214–15. 58

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Stephen’s wit cannot obscure the serious point of difference between his position, which one might describe as compassionate conservatism avant la lettre, and Arnold’s personal impersonality. Stephen’s fellow-feeling is akin to Emerson’s, and “[t]he great shame of Emerson,” as Cameron says, “is his callous indifference to the social distinctions he occasionally recognizes.”62 This attitude—in Stephen as well as Emerson—is apt to express itself practically in indifference toward the pain of others and in an authoritarian tendency to undercut the personal autonomy of others. Arnold’s critical impersonality—more nearly akin to the “inter-human” perspective of Lévinas, noted in the last chapter, which is “a suffering for the suffering—be it inexorable—of someone else”—avoids the pitfalls that Cameron identifies in Emerson and that also appear in Stephen. In fact, Emerson’s impersonality might be better termed depersonality, if only to chime with Eliot’s usage, who says in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) that the “progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality … . It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to approach the condition of science.”63 For Arnold, by contrast, “the condition of science” is the least desirable state to which to bring art. He would sooner see art—in his terms, “letters”—comprehend both science and religion, and he deliberately privileges the aesthetic realm in conscious opposition to the objectivist pretensions of physics and metaphysics. Writ large, Arnold could perhaps be said to mount a form of epistemological critique of the absolute or transcendental foundations of God and truth, thus heralding the kind of “weak” postmetaphysical and antifoundational thought that is prominent in philosophy today. I would not overstate this case, however, which remains to be proved. It seems fair to say that Arnold did not lead us to the promised land of postmodernism. That task was apparently left to Nietzsche, Heidegger, and their imitators and interpreters. Arnold dies in the wilderness of criticism (CPW 3.285), to be sure, but not before pointing toward the main line of modern thought. In his skirmishes with the systematic philosophers, Arnold’s position sometimes seems to imply, in Nietzsche’s words, that “art, in which precisely the lie is sanctified and the will to deception has a good conscience, 61 [James Fitzjames Stephen], “Matthew Arnold and His Countrymen,” Saturday Review 18 (3 Dec. 1864): 683. 62 Impersonality 100. 63 “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Selected Essays of T. S. Eliot (New York: Harcourt, 1950) 7.

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is much more fundamentally opposed to the ascetic ideal than is science,” but Arnoldian ethics can equally suggest Nietzsche’s parallel claim: “To place himself in the service of the ascetic ideal is therefore the most distinctive corruption of the artist that is at all possible.”64 Looked at in this way, Arnold might be the most distinctively corrupt of all Victorian men of letters, for his self-abnegating ethic of pessimism—the flowered waistcoats notwithstanding—is found both to determine his “effeminate” style of concrete exemplarity and to inform all his efforts “to restore the intuition” (CPW 6.284). Plainly a Paradox To touch the ground of Arnold’s rhetoric of ethical exemplarity, a closer look at the fundamental tenets of philosophical pessimism will be useful. Schopenhauer claimed that his moral philosophy agreed with the innermost truths of Christianity: that suffering is the law of life, compassion the ethical imperative, and transcendence of the will the only path to liberation. In comparing his pessimistic ethics to other systems, Schopenhauer says that “Christianity is nearest at hand, the ethics of which is entirely in the spirit we have mentioned, and leads not only to the highest degrees of charity and human kindness, but also to renunciation” (WWR 1.386). To Schopenhauer, “the greatest, the most important, and the most significant phenomenon that the world can show is not the conqueror of the world, but the overcomer of the world, and so really nothing but the quiet and unobserved conduct in the life of such a man,” for on him “has dawned the knowledge in consequence of which he gives up and denies that will-to-live that fills everything, and strives and strains in all,” and his actions “now become the very opposite of the ordinary” (WWR 1.385–6). The truth of self-renunciation, however, is not one that the world wants to know: The history of the world will, and indeed must, always keep silence about the persons whose conduct is the best and only adequate illustration of this important point in our investigation. For the material of world-history is quite different therefrom, and indeed opposed to it; thus it is not the denial and the giving up of the will-to-live, but its affirmation and manifestation in innumerable individuals in which its dissension with itself at the highest point of its objectification appears with perfect distinctness, and brings before our eyes, now the superior strength of the individual through his shrewdness, now the might of the many through their mass, now the ascendancy of chance personified as fate, always the vanity and futility of the whole striving and effort. (WWR 1.385)

Arnold seems to go rather far along this same pessimistic line of thought in St. Paul and Protestantism (1870) and Literature and Dogma, although he always cloaks his ideas in traditional Christian rhetoric. Even in Culture and Anarchy, 64 On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufman and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1967) 153–4.

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in order to stop the many ordinary English selves incessantly doing as they like, Arnold speaks of “the love of Christ constraining us to crucify, as he did, and with a like purpose of moral regeneration, the flesh with its affections and lusts, and thus establishing, as we have seen, the law” (CPW 5.167). This “law” is further elucidated in St. Paul and Protestantism: it is “the law of our mind,” which “takes account of the universal moral order, the will of God, and is indeed the voice of that order expressing itself in us” and telling us, apparently, to crucify our ordinary selves and become the enlightened one whose actions, as Schopenhauer says, are “the very opposite of the ordinary” (CPW 6.31). The “everyday self,” wholly devoted as it is to “doing as one likes,” is “separate, personal, at war” with all other ordinary selves, and will “not carry us beyond the ideas and wishes of the class to which we happen to belong” (CPW 5.134). In particular is this true, dangerously so, of the “vast residuum” that Arnold calls the “Populace,” the “vast portion” of the working class that is “beginning to perplex us by marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, bawling what it likes, breaking what it likes” (CPW 5.143). The only authority capable of curbing this anarchy of ordinary selves lies in the “best self,” which “inspires faith, and is capable of affording a serious principle of authority” (CPW 5.135). Our ordinary self must thus submit to our best self, for “by our best self we are united, impersonal, at harmony” (CPW 5.134). From these observations—and from the “deep emotional fear” that Arnold is supposed to have harbored toward the working classes—he draws his notion of “the State,” the notorious “organ of our collective best self, of our national right reason” (CPW 5.136). Since the “habits and practice” of the ordinary self are intractable and opposed to the “recognition” of the “best self, or right reason,” Arnold suggests that we “try to go a little deeper, and to find, beneath our actual habits and practice, the very ground and cause out of which they spring” (CPW 5.162). Predictably, this “ground and cause” comprise a binary opposition, perhaps the most famous of all the dualities that structure Arnold’s thought: Hellenism and Hebraism. The latter is the locus of moral order: “Self-conquest, self-devotion, the following not of our individual will, but the will of God, obedience, is the fundamental idea,” and to this we give “the general name of Hebraism” (CPW 5.165–6). One should note the curious payoff that seems to accompany this metaphorical suicide of self-renouncement, a point that is usefully illustrated by the oft-quoted remark of Carlyle that “the Fraction of Life can be increased in value not so much by increasing your Numerator as by lessening your Denominator.”65 Desiring nothing yields one, paradoxically, everything: “Nay, unless my Algebra deceive me, Unity itself divided by Zero will give Infinity. Make thy claim of wages a zero, then; thou hast the world under thy feet.” A similar contrapuntal movement occurs in Arnold’s scheme: as the ordinary self approaches total renouncement, the best self approaches total authority and becomes effectively the will of God articulate. 65 Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh (1833), The Works of Thomas Carlyle, vol. 1 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1896) 152–3.

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Nietzsche discerns in “this division of oneself, this mockery of one’s own nature, this spernere se sperni [scorn of being scorned] of which the religions have made so much” a “very high degree of vanity”: The entire morality of the Sermon on the Mount belongs here: man takes a real delight in oppressing himself with excessive claims and afterwards idolizing this tyrannically demanding something in his soul. In every ascetic morality man worships a part of himself as God and for that he needs to diabolize the other part.66

Or to crucify the other part, one might plausibly suggest. Nietzsche’s restless suspicion similarly claims that when the philosopher preaches the ascetic ideal, “he does not deny ‘existence,’ he rather affirms his existence and only his existence, and this perhaps to the point at which he is not far from harboring the impious wish: pereat mundus, fiat philosophia, fiat philosophus, fiam! [Let the world perish, but let there be philosophy, let there be the philosopher—let there be me!]”67 Carlyle is again a useful witness to this limit case of egoless megalomania: “[T]he Poet and the Priest, in all times, have spoken and suffered; bearing testimony, through life and through death, of the Godlike that is in Man, and in the Godlike only has he Strength and Freedom.”68 At any rate, Arnold’s “will of God,” the voice of the universal moral order expressing itself in us, approximates to what Schopenhauer calls the intellect, which was originally a product of and in complete subservience to the will but which now and then, in saints and sages, wholly overcomes, silences, and ultimately renounces the will. Moments of aesthetic contemplation give a foretaste of this holiness, according to Schopenhauer: It will be remembered … that aesthetic pleasure in the beautiful consists, to a large extent, in the fact that, when we enter the state of pure contemplation, we are raised for the moment above all willing, above all desires and cares; we are, so to speak, rid of ourselves. We are no longer the individual that knows in the interest of its constant willing, the correlative of the particular thing to which objects become motives, but the eternal subject of knowing purified of the will, the correlative of the Idea. And we know that these moments, when, delivered from the fierce pressure of the will, we emerge, as it were, from the heavy atmosphere of the earth, are the most blissful that we experience. From this we can infer how blessed must be the life of a man whose will is silenced not for a few moments, as in the enjoyment of the beautiful, but for ever, indeed completely extinguished, except for the last glimmering spark that maintains the body and is extinguished with it. (WWR 1.391)

66 Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) 74. 67 On the Genealogy of Morals 108. 68 Sartor Resartus 153.

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This is the zero degree of Schopenhauerian will-denial. Arnold never embraces the celibacy that philosophical pessimism logically entails, and in one of his few detailed references to Schopenhauer, Arnold claims in the “Preface” to Last Essays on Church and Religion (1877) that the German philosopher’s advocacy of “abstinence from further sexual propagation” is “plainly, somehow or other, a paradox, and that human thought (I say it with due deference to the many persons for whom Schopenhauer is just now in fashion) instinctively feels it to be absurd” (CPW 8.160). There is no evidence that Arnold read any of Schopenhauer’s works, although he could have drawn his knowledge from any of the numerous secondary sources available at this time. In the 12 months prior to the publication of Last Essays, for example, more than a dozen notices and reviews of Schopenhauer’s philosophy had been published in English and French journals, the common sources of Arnold’s notions of the trends in contemporary thought.69 In addition, Helen Zimmern’s highly successful biography of Schopenhauer appeared while Arnold was writing Last Essays, and James Sully’s best-selling Pessimism: A History and a Criticism (1877) was published the same year, so the Schopenhauer fashion was clearly raging in the mid-1870s. In characterizing Schopenhauer’s system of sexual “self-renouncement,” however, Arnold does not directly quote the philosopher’s writings, nor does he cite any of the recent reviews (CPW 8.159). Instead, he quotes from a Revue des Deux Mondes essay of 1870, 10 passages from which he enters into his notebook in August, 1876.70 Several of these notebook quotations he then uses in this passage from the “Preface” to Last Essays. The Revue article describes Schopenhauer’s thought as “une doctrine qui répond en philosophie à une des dispositions les plus marquées du siècle, à cette humeur noire qui a dominé en poésie dupuis cinquante ans, et qui a envahi beaucoup d’âmes sérieuses”71 [“a philosophical doctrine that answers one of the most marked dispositions of our age, this black mood that has dominated poetry for the last fifty years and has invaded many serious souls”]. A closer look at the Revue context from which Arnold draws his notebook passages, in particular for the quotations that he uses in Last Essays, suggests that he recognizes his own uncanny kinship with the father of German pessimism. The first line quoted in the “Preface” that Arnold lifts from his notebook—“It is evident, even a priori, that the world is doomed to evil, and that it is the domain of irrationality”—comes from Paul-Armand ChallemelLacour’s discussion of Schopenhauer’s account of the sufferings of life, and the context of the quotation that Arnold copies helps to reveal its attraction for him (CPW 8.160). The portions that Arnold quotes in his “Preface” are here emphasized for convenience: For some possible sources of Arnold’s knowledge of Schopenhauer, see Chapter 1, note 87. 70 The Note-Books of Matthew Arnold, ed. Howard Foster Lowry, Karl Young, and Waldo Hilary Dutton (London: Oxford UP, 1952) 253–4. 71 Paul-Armand Challemel-Lacour, “Un Bouddhiste Contemporain en Allemagne,” Revue des Deux Mondes 86 (15 Mar. 1870): 297. 69

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La plus simple expérience suffit pour démonstrer sans réplique que la souffrance est la loi du monde: l’univers, par la voix de tous les êtres sentans, exhale un cri de douleur ou un soupir d’ennui; mais la raison qui parvient à se préserver des illusions volontaires créées par les philosophes peut déclarer a priori que le monde est condamné au mal et qu’il est le règne de l’absurde, car la volonté va d’elle-même à la vie, et que trouve-t-elle aussitôt qu’elle atteint cet échelon de la nature où la sensibilité et l’intelligence sont une condition nécessaire de l’existence? Elle trouve que la vie suppose de toute nécessité concurrence et destruction. Dès lors la pensée devient pour l’homme une source de perpétuelles tortures.72 [The simplest experience suffices to prove beyond doubt that suffering is the law of the world. The universe, through the voice of all sentient beings, howls in sorrow or sighs in boredom. But the intellect, which succeeds in guarding us from the illusion created by the will, enables the philosopher to declare a priori that the world is doomed to evil and that it is the domain of irrationality because the will itself seeks existence. And what does it immediately find when it attains the point of development at which sensibility and intelligence are the necessary conditions of existence? It finds that life everywhere presupposes competition and destruction. This knowledge makes thinking a perpetual torture for mankind.]

As this example shows, Arnold often paraphrases the passages that he transcribes into his notebook, and the line in the “Preface” is not reproduced verbatim from the Revue article. Arnold also jots the first line of this same Revue passage into his notebook, the one declaring that “suffering is the law of the world,” although he does not quote it in his “Preface.”73 Similarly, the final line of this passage, stating that the thinking mind makes “a perpetual torture for mankind,” seems to harmonize with Arnold’s Empedoclean sentiments as well. But the absurdity he says he “instinctively feels” toward Schopenhauerian celibacy seems particularly focused on the second of the Challemel-Lacour passages that he quotes in the “Preface”—“In abstinence from further propagation of mankind is salvation. This would gradually bring about the extinction of our species, and, with our extinction, that of the universe, since the universe requires for its existence the co-operation of human thought.” This passage occurs in Challemel-Lacour’s exposition of a Buddhistic aspect of Schopenhauer’s ethics, for the discipline of Buddhism, he explains, numbers the links in la série des nidanas ou des causes, il arrive au bord du nirvana, de l’anéantissement volontaire, dans lequel on trouve le salut. Tel est aussi le résultat que notre philosophe propose aux efforts de l’homme. Pour l’atteindre, il y a la voie de la speculation, par laquelle on découvre le mystère de l’illusion infinie, et la voie de l’expérience pratique du malheur attaché à l’être et du néant de la vie. Ces deux voies sont celles que suivent naturellement les sages et qui les conduisent, quand ils ont secoué les rêves de la jeunesse et les ambitions de l’âge mûr, à la résignation parfaite; mais elles ne sont pas praticables à la

“Un Bouddhiste” 326; Note-Books 254. Note-Books 253.

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foule des hommes. C’est pourquoi les religions leur en ont ouvert une autre, elles ont inventé des moyens artificiels, et cependent efficaces, d’engendrer les âmes au détachement. Par l’ascétisme et les mortifications méthodiquement pratiquées, elles triomphent de l’amour de la vie, elles conduisent leurs croyans au désdain du plaisir, puis de l’existence, et de privation en privation elles les ménent, en dépit des protestations de la chair, à la continence, qui est le salut, car en se généralisant elle intraînerait peu à peu l’extinction de l’espèce, et, avec l’extinction de l’espèce, celle de l’univers, puisqu’il requiert pour exister le concours de la pensée humaine.74 [the series of causes, arriving at the verge of nirvana, of annihilation of the will, in which one finds salvation. This is also the result that he [Schopenhauer] proposes for mankind’s willing. Two ways lead to this result: the way of speculation, by which one uncovers the mystery of the infinite illusion, and the way of practical experience, by which one learns of the suffering that inheres in being and of the meaninglessness of life. These two ways, followed naturally by the wise once they have shaken off the dreams of youth and the ambitions of adulthood, lead to perfect resignation. Yet these paths are not practicable for the majority of human beings, and this is why religions have found another way. Religions invented artificial though no less efficacious means of leading souls to detachment. By asceticism and practical disciplines of mortification, they overcome the love of life, leading the mind to the disdain first of pleasure and then of existence itself. From privation to privation, and in spite of the flesh’s protests, they guide the soul to sexual abstinence, which is salvation, for as abstinence become general it will gradually lead to the extinction of the species. And with the extinction of the species will follow that of the universe, which requires the cooperation of human thought for its existence.]

The kinship with Arnold’s thought is readily seen here. The “perfect resignation,” the “detachment,” the ascetic rigors leading to “annihilation of the will”—all are elements in his own ethic of “self-renouncement.” The last step, however, the “abstinence from further propagation,” is apparently too “absurd” a “paradox” for Arnold to accept, not to mention that it savors rather strongly of Puseyism. Chastity was one thing—three-eighths of life, in Arnold’s calculus—but celibacy quite another, even if Schopenhauer could describe “the meritorious nature of celibacy” as the “central point” and “innermost kernel of Christianity” (WWR 2.625). Yet suffering and dying in the flesh in order to live in Christ was Arnold’s ceaseless refrain. We must be “baptized into the death of the great exemplar of self-devotion and self-annulment,” he says, a truth that even history bears out: “Through age after age and generation after generation, our race, or all that part of our race which was most living and progressive, was baptized into a death; and endeavored, by suffering in the flesh, to cease from sin” (CPW 5.183, 170). Equally revealing are the other passages from Challemel-Lacour that Arnold transcribed into his notebook but did not use in his preface: “Un Bouddhiste” 329; Note-Books 254.

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1. “Comme la volonté agit en chaque individu avec toutes ses prétentions, avec toute sa puissance, avec sa fougueuse envie d’être, l’égoïsme sans limites est la tendance première et instinctive.” “Comme la volonté agit en chaque individu avec toutes ses prétentions, avec toute sa puissance, avec sa fougueuse envie d’être, chaque être sentant et connaissant se fait centre et se considère comme unique; l’égoïsme sans limites est la tendance première et instinctive, et, si rien ne l’arrêtait, il sacrifierait au moi l’univers entire.”75 [As the will agitates each individual with all its claims, all its force, and all its ardent desire for being, each individual feels and believes itself to be the unique center of the world; limitless egoism is thus the primary and instinctive tendency and if nothing were to prevent it, it would sacrifice the entire universe to the ego.] 2. “L’intelligence n’est pas le principe primordial et créateur, elle est une faculté dérivée et dépend de l’organisation. Schop.”76 [Intellect is not the primary and creative principle. It is a derived faculty and contingent upon the organism.] 3. “La volunté qui est l’aveugle génératrice des choses, antérieure à toute intelligence, à toute idée, à tout choix, constitue le caractère fonddamental de chaque individu, caractère que rien ne peut changer ni détruire. Schp.”77 [The will, which is the blind generator of things and is prior to all intelligence, all ideas, all choice, constitutes the fundamental character of each individual, a character that nothing can change or destroy.] 4. “La plus simple expérience suffit pour demonstrer sans réplique que la souffrance est la loi du monde.”78 [The simplest experience suffices to demonstrate irrefutably that suffering is the law of the world.] It is again worth recalling that the Arnolds had recently buried three sons in four years, so even though he cannot embrace Schopenhauer’s paradoxical plan for species extinction, Arnold’s family-planning sympathies still appear plainly enough in Culture and Anarchy’s discussion of the multitudes of pauper children in the East of London, “children eaten up with disease, half-sized, half-fed, halfclothed, neglected by their parents, without health, without home, without hope” (CPW 5.217). In repeating his usual mantra—“Individual perfection is impossible so long as the rest of mankind are not perfected along with us”—Arnold also gives a sharp rebuke to the poet Robert Buchanan’s lively vision of God’s “Divine philoprogenitiveness,” which “would swarm the earth with beings. There are never enough. Life, life, life,—faces gleaming, hearts beating, must fill every cranny. Not a corner is suffered to remain empty. The whole earth breeds, and God glories”

77 78 75 76

“Un Bouddhiste” 326; Note-Books 254. “Un Bouddhiste” 324; Note-Books 253. “Un Bouddhiste” 325; Note-Books 253. “Un Bouddhiste” 326; Note-Books 253.

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(CPW 214).79 To a long-suffering political economist at the Spectator, Arnold seems to be saying “that the thing to be taught is apparently Malthusianism,” a teaching still tantamount to heresy in mid-Victorian England.80 By the mid-1880s, Jane Hume Clapperton, in a much more sympathetic and vigorously feminist register, claims that in Culture and Anarchy “Mr. Arnold touches the tender spot of our diseased social state, and points to the very nucleus or centre, from which there radiates—poverty and pauperism—social pressure and fierce competition— and disease, with all the misery and wretchedness that follow in its train.”81 It is further worth recalling that Gladstone once praised Mill’s “forgetfulness of self” but later rejects a proposed memorial tribute for Mill in 1875 after the “revelation” of Mill’s Malthusianist leanings early in life, an “act of cowardice” on Gladstone’s part “for which he has been condemned by even his most eulogistic biographers.”82 The advocacy of planned parenthood was thus no risk-free venture in 1869, and the deepest irony in Arnold’s sporting with the vulgar name of Wragg might well lie here in Buchanan’s “Divine philoprogenitiveness” and in the line of poetry, which Mr. Robert Buchanan throws in presently after the poetical prose I have quoted,— “’Tis the old story of the fig-leaf time”— this fine line, too, naturally connects itself, when one is in the East of London, with the idea of God’s desire to swarm the earth with beings; because the swarming of the earth with beings does indeed, in the East of London, so seem to revive the old story of the fig-leaf time, such a number of the people one meets there having hardly a rag to cover them; and the more the swarming goes on, the more it promises to revive this old story. And when the story is perfectly revived, the swarming quite completed, and every cranny choke-full, then, too, no doubt, the faces in the East of London will be gleaming faces, which Mr. Robert Buchanan says it is God’s desire they should be, and which everyone must perceive they are not at present, but, on the contrary, very miserable. (CPW 5.215)

79 Robert Buchanan, “The Student and His Vocation,” David Gray, and Other Essays, Chiefly on Poetry (London: Sampson Low, 1868) 199. 80 [Anon.], “Mr. Matthew Arnold’s Praise of Culture,” Spectator 42 (6 Mar. 1869): 296. 81 Jane Hume Clapperton, Scientific Meliorism and the Evolution of Happiness (London: Kegan Paul, 1885) 85–6. 82 Richard Reeves, “John Stuart Mill,” Prospect Magazine, May 2006, 4 July 2008 . See Norman E. Himes, “The Place of John Stuart Mill and Robert Owen in the History of English NeoMalthusianism,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 42.4 (Aug. 1928): 627–40; William L. Langer, “The Origins of the Birth Control Movement in England in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 5.4 (spring 1975): 669–86; Fergus D’Arcy, “The Malthusian League and the Resistance to Birth Control Propaganda in Late Victorian Britain,” Population Studies 31.3 (Nov. 1977): 429–48.

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A Clear, Almost Palpable Intuition As noted in Chapter 5, when Arnold proclaims, in Culture and Anarchy, that “[r]enouncement is the law of human life” (CPW 5.207), he is pushing Victorian altruism toward its most “extreme tendency,” as Collini describes it, in “making it an obligation that all our actions should benefit others.”83 Arnold states the position baldly in St. Paul and Protestantism (1870): “All impulses of selfishness conflict with Christ’s feelings, he showed it by dying to them all; if you are one with him by faith and sympathy, you can die to them also” (CPW 6.48). Again, when Arnold sets out in Literature and Dogma to demonstrate the truth of the rule of renunciation, he rolls out the big guns—Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Saints Peter and Paul, Bishop Wilson, even Wordsworth—all are marshaled to support the rule demanding that we “go without, go without!” (CPW 6.295). The schoolmanlike tenor produced by this parade of authorities modulates to a more modern key when Arnold describes Christ’s teaching as “a profound truth of what our scientific friends, who have a systematic philosophy and a nomenclature to match, and who talk of Egoism and Altruism, would perhaps call, psycho-physiology” (CPW 6.294). As keen a genealogist of morals as any whom the century produces, Arnold eagerly looks to his “scientific friends” for fresh knowledge and insights. But their “systematic philosophy” becomes anathema to him when edification is his primary rhetorical goal, and this is just the point at which Arnold engages his rhetoric of ethical exemplarity. In Arnold’s view, the teaching of Jesus, like that of Aristotle, is beautiful precisely because he “does not appeal to a speculative theory of the system of things, and deduce conclusions from it,” but stands instead on the “far safer ground” of practical experience and speaks directly to the question of conduct (CPW 6.296). For “the discipline of conduct,” as Arnold never tires of repeating, “is three-fourths of life,” and of the remainder, “art and science divide this one-fourth fairly between them”—in other words, an exiguous one-eighth of life comprises the domain of “our scientific friends,” the systematic philosophers— but it seems that Jesus “exhibited nothing for [their] benefit” (CPW 6.296–7): And [Jesus] shows his greatness in this, because the law of our being is not something which is already definitely known and can be exhibited as part of a speculative theory of the system of things; it is something which discovers itself and becomes, as we follow (among other things) the rule of renouncement. (CPW 6.296)

This passage reveals both the nub of Arnold’s ethics and its remarkably modern tenor. His conception of human nature does not derive from a theory of “psychophysiology” or any system of transcendental metaphysics but instead is clearly conceived in its determinate historical contingency as a self-creative process of becoming. Without denying the strongly Platonic cast to Arnold’s thought in Public Moralists 66.

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general, one could venture that this passage goes far to silence claims that his ideas depend on what Fitzjames Stephen once called “transcendental” ideals and which Amanda Anderson now describes as “falsely universal and ultimately dangerous.”84 To Stephen, Arnold’s thought “assumes the truth of the transcendental theory of philosophy,” although he “surely cannot be ignorant of the fact that, from the days of Hobbes and Locke to those of Mr. Mill and Mr. Bain, the most influential of English thinkers have utterly denied the truth of transcendentalism, and have constantly affirmed that all knowledge is based upon experience and sensation.” In short, Stephen objects to Arnold on epistemological grounds, and like Sidgwick he seems to detect a Hegelian or Emersonian (or merely an Oxonian) influence. To Anderson, on the other hand, who seems to be equally attuned to ideological orthodoxy (but of the late-twentieth-century kind), Arnold is “incapable of construing social interaction in concrete terms”; his “dialectical model of cultural fusion” is trapped within “a wholly transpersonal form of cultural interaction”; and he avoids “a dialogical conception of freedom” because he has “concerns about the normalizing effects of any social norms; Arnold is worried not about the institution of norms but rather about the disruptive effects of dissent and debate.”85 Anderson thus seems to address the more recently inherited caricature of Arnold as bourgeois hegemon. These critics, taken from the chronological extremes of Arnold commentary, again illustrate the persistence of the tropes of his supposed social and political quietism and his otherworldly idealism. At the same time, Arnold’s language also demonstrates his awareness of contemporary theories of “psycho-physiology” and of the Darwinist implications for moral philosophy. His own progressive model of the “law of our being,” of a human nature that “becomes,” is as much a tribute to the influence of evolutionary thought as to Dr. Arnold’s Viconian historicism.86 He looks forward to a time when practical experience might, “for philosophy, have its place in a theory of the system of human nature, when the theory is at last ready and perfect,” and then experience will perhaps “be found to be connected with other truths of psycho-physiology, such as the unity of life, as it is called, and the impersonality of reason,” but such a theory “was then [in Jesus’s day], and is still at present, utterly irreducible to experience,” and so “to a theory of such sort Jesus never appeals … it was the experience which Jesus always used” (CPW 6.297, 568). Instead of proceeding by a mathematically precise method of deductive logic, Jesus derives his doctrine intuitively: “How he reached a doctrine we cannot say; but he always exhibited it as an intuition and practical rule, and a practical rule which, if adopted, would have the force of an intuition for its adopter also” (CPW 6.297–8). Avid as Arnold’s interest in science is, then, his rhetorical goal—necrosis, “renouncement”—leads 84 [Stephen], “Matthew Arnold and His Countrymen” 684; Anderson, The Powers of Distance 94. 85 The Powers of Distance 118. 86 See R. A. Forsyth, “‘The Buried Life’: The Contrasting Views of Arnold and Clough in the Context of Dr. Arnold’s Historiography,” ELH 35.2 (June 1968): 218–53.

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him, as he claims that it led Jesus, always to “keep close to the level ground of common fact” (CPW 5.192). In his imitation of Christ’s rhetoric, Arnold thus eschews theoretical abstractions in favor of the concrete facts of practical experience, an empirical, inductive method that he employs as early as his 1860 discussion of the “grand style” in poetry. “I may discuss what, in the abstract, constitutes the grand style,” he said, “but that sort of general discussion never much helps our judgment of particular instances,” and so he prefers instead “to take specimens of the grand style, and to put them side by side” with specimens of the author in question (CPW 1.136). A similar avoidance of abstraction is advised in “The Function of Criticism” when Arnold turns to a consideration of “the subject-matter which literary criticism should most seek” (CPW 3.282). The critic’s first business, as the name denotes, is judgment, but “knowledge, and ever fresh knowledge, must be the critic’s great concern.” Critical judgment can pass along with this fresh knowledge—“but insensibly, and in the second place, not the first, as a sort of companion and clue, not as an abstract lawgiver” (CPW 3.282–3). Sometimes, however, this effort “to establish a current of fresh and true ideas” by means of a “disinterested endeavor” after the best that has been known and thought will lead the critic to deal with a subject so familiar that fresh knowledge is out of the question. In cases where criticism “must be all judgment; an enunciation and application of detailed principles,” then “the great safeguard is never to let oneself become abstract” and always to remember that the “mere judgment and application of principles” is not the aim, for “like mathematics, it is tautological, and cannot well give us, like fresh learning, the sense of creative activity” (CPW 3.283). Arnold treats mathematics and criticism virtually as polar opposites, with his inductive method of touchstone knowledge relying not on demonstration but on intuition or, as less friendly critics claim, on purely arbitrary standards of personal taste. It is probably an overstatement to claim, with some of Arnold’s critics, that his antipathy to “system-makers and systems” springs simply from his own inaptitude for the study of math.87 In the first place, this claim seems to exaggerate the importance of Tom Arnold’s description of his and Matthew’s preteen tuition: “Euclid he taught us also; but here the natural bent of my brother’s mind showed itself. Ratiocination did not at that time charm him; and the demonstration of what he did not care to know found him languid.”88 The argument also downplays the next sentence in Tom Arnold’s account: “Later on, when he applied his mind to reasoning, he found no difficulty; and some writer who knew the facts has lately told how easily and quickly he mastered the principles and terminology of Logic, when it was necessary for him to take up that subject as a substitute for Euclid at his Responsions.” One of Matthew Arnold’s earliest explicit criticisms 87 See, for example, G. W. E. Russell, Matthew Arnold (New York: Scribner’s, 1904) 95; William Madden, Matthew Arnold: A Study of the Aesthetic Temperament in Victorian England (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1967) 29, 147. 88 Thomas Arnold, Passages in a Wandering Life (London: Edward Arnold, 1900) 10.

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of the mathematical mentality in its relation to questions of conduct occurs in a September 1849 letter to Arthur Hugh Clough: What I must tell you is that I have never yet succeeded in any one great occasion in consciously mastering myself: I can go thro: the imaginary process of mastering myself & see the whole affair as it would then stand, but at the critical point I am too apt to hoist up the mainsail to the wind & let her drive. However as I get more awake to this it will I hope mend for I find that with me a clear almost palpable intuition (damn the logical senses of the word) is necessary before I get into praxis: unlike many people who set to work at their duty selfdenial &c. like furies in the dark hoping to be gradually illuminated as they persist in this course. Who also perhaps may be sheep of my fold, whose one natural craving is not for profound thoughts, mighty spiritual workings &c. &c. but a distinct seeing of my way as far as my own nature is concerned: which I believe to be the reason why the mathematics were ever foolishness to me. (Letters 1.156)

In spite of Cecil Y. Lang’s invaluable emendation of this text (replacing with “praxis” the hitherto inaccurately rendered “prayer,” which had led to some pious, albeit fanciful, interpretations), obscurities remain. At any rate, that Arnold markedly preferred palpable intuitions to “damned” logic and “foolish” mathematics seems sufficiently clear for present purposes, although his rejection of systematics seems to have its deepest roots elsewhere than in a merely personal dislike of mathematics. To Irving Babbitt, for instance, “there seems to be something more than this in [Arnold’s] avoidance of theory—some survival, namely, of the romantic fear of precise analysis.”89 The same rhetorical tactic that makes living “specimens” and concrete examples the essence of the literary touchstone method also determines Arnold’s discussion of conduct in Literature and Dogma: “[L]et us eschew all school-terms, like moral sense, and volitional, and altruistic, which philosophers employ, and let us help ourselves by the most palpable and plain examples,” and if anyone should ask, “But what is the application of emotion to morality, and by what marks may we know it?—we can quite easily satisfy him; not, indeed, by any disquisition of our own, but in a much better way, by examples” (CPW 6.173, 177). Arnold makes his most explicit and detailed criticism of the predominant philosophical and theological methodology in “The God of Metaphysics,” Chapter 2 of God and the Bible (1875), and he does so in terms that today could be seen as antifoundational. Arnold interrogates René Descartes’s famous dictum— along with such other metaphysical lumber as “essence, existence, substance, finite, infinite, cause and succession”—and he declares himself unashamed at “entertaining such a tyro’s question” and even expresses a readiness to “confess without shame,—for to the prick of shame in these matters, after all the tauntings 89 “Matthew Arnold,” Irving Babbitt: Representative Writings, ed. George A. Panichas (Lincoln, NB; London: U of Nebraska P, 1981) 107.

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and mockings we have had to undergo, we are by this time quite dead,—we shall confess that from this fundamental axiom of Descartes we were never able to derive the light and satisfaction which others derived from it” (CPW 7.182, 177). Without following the particulars of Arnold’s argument, it is enough to note his claims for “an eternal not ourselves that makes for righteousness. For this is really a law of nature, collected from experience, just as much as the law of gravitation … it has its origin in experience, it appeals to experience, and by experience it is, as we believe, verified” (CPW 7.191). A Formula of Disenchantment and Annihilation Once again, the claim made here is that the aim of Arnold’s rhetorical strategy— conducting the world toward “renouncement”—determines the rhetorical style of his prose: the deployment of religious and poetical exemplarity, the experiential evidence illustrating the intuition. Although Eliot claims that Arnold only “wrote about poets when they provided a pretext for his sermon to the British public,” Eliot was himself no stranger to dogmatic homiletics. He knew as well as Arnold that nothing breathes life into a sermon’s abstract precepts like the warm-bodied exempla that clothe them, and he knew, as Arnold says, that “[t]here is nothing like positive instances to illustrate general propositions” (CPW 10.152). Rhetorical heft is often thus less a product of the logician’s science than of the poet’s art, and le mot juste—particularly le mot of a recognized authority, such as Jesus—can still exude a charismatic charm for hearers. This affective peculiarity of rhetoric—perhaps it involves mirror neurons—at least partly explains the strong attraction and vehement repulsion that Arnold’s touchstone method has exerted in the development of academic English studies, a point that Eliot also notes when he says that “to be able to quote as Arnold could is the best evidence of taste.”90 Arnold’s power of tasteful quotation is everywhere evident in his critical prose, and the deftness of his apposite illustrations lends his political and religious writings their memorable tone as well. “Wragg is in custody” again springs immediately to mind, the scandalously glib topical allusion that Arnold deployed in The Function of Criticism as the Present Time (1865), but equally notable are the Trafalgar Square truss manufactory of Culture and Anarchy, the Holy Trinity of Lord Shaftesburys in Literature and Dogma, and the dying prayer

The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism 118. Eliot was still harping in the 1930s on Arnold’s “weakness in philosophical training,” which to him was of a piece with Arnold’s “fastidiousness and superciliousness and officiality” and his damnable “intellectual Epicureanism.” See “Frances Herbert Bradley,” Selected Essays of T. S. Eliot (New York: Harcourt, 1950) 399; The Use of Poetry 105; “Arnold and Pater,” Selected Essays of T. S. Eliot 388. Though he believes that Arnold “had no real serenity, only an impeccable demeanor,” Eliot admits withal his attraction to him as “a man qui sait se conduire.” See The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism 105, 119. 90

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of Arminius in Friendship’s Garland: “Say to Bottles from me … that I hope he will be comfortable with his dead wife’s sister” (CPW 5.347). In every case, Arnold introduces the figures of his prosopopoeial rhetoric in order to influence his readers’s conduct, to lead them toward “renouncement” (the nec plus ultra of altruism), and this aim suggests to him a definite rhetorical strategy. The goal of altering conduct can rarely if ever be attained merely by means of philosophical demonstrations, Arnold believes, because the majority of people is ill-equipped for “hard, abstruse reasoning” and but weakly moved by logical proofs in any case (CPW 6.168). No one ever became good by reading moral philosophy—a truism that Schopenhauer marks by noting that it would be “just as foolish to expect that our moral systems and ethics would create virtuous, noble, and holy men, as that our aesthetics would produce poets, painters and musicians” (WWR 1.217). Arnold the poet knows that stained glass and plainsong will sooner quicken hearts than scholastic disquisitions and cosmological proofs. Schopenhauer makes a similar point about the efficacy of examples in conveying the ascetic imperative of holiness, of quietening desire though self-renunciation: As the knowledge from which results the denial of the will is intuitive and not abstract, it finds its complete expression not in abstract concepts, but only in the deed and in conduct. Therefore, in order to understand more fully what we express philosophically as denial of the will-to-live, we have to learn to know examples from experience and reality. (WWR 1.384)

Only practical examples and concrete images—in other words, poetry— can sufficiently stir the imagination and light up the steep and narrow way to self-renunciation, a point that Arnold makes in his essay on Marcus Aurelius (1865) when he says that the “mass of mankind can be carried along a course full of hardship for the natural man, can be borne over the thousand impediments of the narrow way, only by the tide of a joyful and bounding emotion” (CPW 3.134). Unfortunately, much valuable ethical instruction intimidates us with its demands: “It is impossible,” Arnold says, “to rise from reading Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius without a sense of constraint and melancholy, without feeling that the burden laid upon man is well-nigh greater than he can bear. Honour to the sages who have felt this, and yet have borne it!” For the rest of us, however, for the non-sages, a gentler disciplinary gradient is needed, because for the ordinary man, this sense of labour and sorrow constitutes an absolute disqualification; it paralyses him; under the weight of it he cannot make way toward the goal at all. The paramount virtue of religion is, that it has lighted up morality; that it has supplied the emotion and inspiration needful for carrying the sage along the narrow way perfectly, for carrying the ordinary man along it at all. (CPW 3.134–5)

In Arnold’s unorthodox and highly controversial notion of religion, poetry’s power of rhetorical suasion is simply another name for religion’s “paramount virtue,” its ability to inspire emotion and make palatable “renouncement.” Arnold states this identity

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most explicitly—and notoriously—in “On Poetry” (1879): “The strongest part of our religion to-day is its unconscious poetry,” and in poetry “our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay” (CPW 9.63). He extends this claim in “Civilization in the United States” (1887), the last essay that Arnold saw through the press, in which he claims that both evangelical Protestantism and Catholicism mistranslate the following famous passage from the New Testament: “Except a man be born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.” With an eye toward heaven on earth, Arnold recommends the following emendations for the sake of a truer rendering: Instead of again, we ought to translate from above; and instead of taking the kingdom of God in the sense of a life in Heaven above, we ought to take it, as its speaker meant it, in the sense of the reign of saints, a renovated and perfected human society on earth, the ideal society of the future. In the life of such a society, in the life from above, the life born of inspiration or the spirit—in that life elevation and beauty are not everything; but they are much, and they are indispensable. Humanity cannot reach its ideal while it lacks them: “Except a man be born from above, he cannot have part in the society of the future.” (CPW 11.369)

If Eliot stands in the line of Arnold’s critics who attack him on the grounds of religious orthodoxy, then on Arnold’s opposite flank he faces religious agnostics like Leslie Stephen. No less manly than his elder brother Fitzjames, Leslie Stephen is a logical athlete par excellence and one of that breed of Cambridge wranglers who “scorned sentimentalism and aesthetic revivals, and, if [they] took any interest in speculative matters, read John Stuart Mill, and were sound Utilitarians and orthodox Political Economists.”91 According to Stephen, “Lord Shaftesbury was the Matthew Arnold of Queen Anne’s reign,” in other words, “a second-rate English author of Queen Anne’s time.”92 Just as Reeve mocks the efforts of men who offer “faint homage to the Power they have sought to dethrone,” so Stephen claims that the “agnostic is amazed to find that Arnold, while treating all theological dogmas as exploded rubbish, expatiates upon the supreme value of the sublimated essence of theology.”93 In an 1893 retrospective lecture on Arnold, Stephen reprises the theme of Arnold’s weak and womanish reasoning, albeit admitting his own inability, “doubtless it is a defect,” to sympathize with the objects of Arnold’s critical scrutiny, with figures such as Senancour, Joubert, Amiel, the Guérins, “excellent but surely effeminate persons, who taste of the fruits of the Tree of Knowledge, and finding the taste bitter, go on making wry faces over it all their lives.”94 Stephen humorously touches the heart of the matter in this passage. Just as Arnold chooses poetic touchstones that all tend toward a rather melancholy tone, so he shows a strong inclination throughout his prose works to marshal examples 93 94 91 92

Leslie Stephen, “Matthew Arnold,” National Review 22 (Dec. 1893): 459. “Shaftesbury’s Characteristics,” Fraser’s Magazine n.s. 7 (Jan. 1873): 81, 77. “Matthew Arnold” 474. Ibid. 463.

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that seem to figure his own position of “renouncement.” For example, as early as 1857, in his inaugural lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry, Arnold says that Lucretius is modern, “but is he adequate” as an example of the “highest literature?” (CPW 1.34, 28). He notes that Lucretius “withdraws himself” from the world, but there is no peace, no cheerfulness for him either in the world from which he comes, or in the solitude to which he goes. With stern effort, with gloomy despair, he seems to rivet his eyes on the elementary reality, the naked framework of the world, because the world in its fulness and movement is too exciting a spectacle for his discomposed brain. He seems to feel the spectacle of it at once terrifying and alluring; and to deliver himself from it he has to keep perpetually repeating his formula of disenchantment and annihilation. (CPW 1.33)

A particular “formula of disenchantment and annihilation” has its own significant place in Arnold’s philosophical pessimism, as we have seen, as does the “too exciting” spectacle of multitudinousness, which together point toward the significant fact that in this assessment of the adequacy of Lucretius, the Roman poet-physicist begins to sound remarkably like Matthew Arnold in a toga. John P. Farrell notes the similarity, finding Arnold’s “Lucretius hardly distinguishable from Empedocles,” with the latter, in Farrell’s view, an obvious proxy for the author.95 This tendency for the objects of Arnold’s criticism to serve as masks for both his personal and philosophical pessimism becomes particularly prominent in the Essays in Criticism. If he smothered his poetical muse because of her incorrigible gloominess—stifling, as Kenneth Allott says, “what the truth-telling poet was unable not to say”—this did not prevent Arnold’s musical gloom finding alternate outlets in his critical portraits.96 In discussing this rhetorical technique, Allott sees a distinctively modern self-consciousness behind Arnold’s impersonations, as he “performs and is the first spectator of his own performance.”97 In this sense, the voice of Arnold speaks through his literary-critical subjects much as it does through such verse-drama creations as Empedocles and Balder, all sad puppets who personate his philosophical pessimism. Arnold describes in his notebook the imaginative process by which “the poet, endeavoring to put himself in the place of the person represented, tries his own soul in certain situations, and reports accordingly: a great opening being left here for the subjective & arbitrary.”98 He fills this “great opening” with a pessimism that is less subjective and arbitrary than objective and determined. David J. De Laura surveys the “large “Matthew Arnold’s Tragic Vision,” Matthew Arnold: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. David J. DeLaura (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973) 111. 96 “Background for ‘Empedocles on Etna,’” Matthew Arnold: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. David J. DeLaura (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973) 65. 97 Matthew Arnold 8. 98 The Yale Manuscript: Matthew Arnold, ed. S. O. A. Ullmann (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1989) 135. 95

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gallery” of figures in Arnold’s poetry and prose and concludes, “They are often very like Matthew Arnold.”99 Similarly, Ruth apRoberts, leaving aside what she calls Arnold’s “philosophical Aurelian melancholy,” finds that “his characterization of George Sand is a characterization of himself.”100 To J. Hillis Miller, “Arnold makes a bad actor, and his own anxious face is always present behind the mask of Bishop Wilson, Sophocles, or Spinoza.”101 Finally, D. G. James harshly notes Arnold’s “way of nosing out people like himself,” and he concludes that “the melancholy, the shifting of belief, the turning to ancient pagan philosophies, the acedia, the loneliness, and half a dozen other sides of this psychopathy of the spirit”—all of which James heartily despises in Arnold—prove that Arnold’s choice of melancholy authors offered merely an occasion for self-portraiture.102 A late example of Arnold’s use of prosopographical mouthpieces for communicating his pessimism appears in his 1883 “Emerson” address. There he lavishes praise on Emerson’s “temper,” saying, “Yes, truly his insight is admirable; his truth is precious. Yet the secret of his affect is not … in these; it is in his temper. It is in the hopeful, serene, beautiful temper wherewith these, in Emerson, are indissolubly joined” (CPW 10.181). John Holloway thinks it “interesting to find Arnold so stressing in another’s writings what will prove central in his own.”103 In light of the evidence already adduced, Arnold’s stress is not only interesting but rhetorically very typical. He opens the “Emerson” address by evoking the “subtle, sweet, mournful” cadences of John Henry Newman’s sermons from the early 1840s—and perhaps by implication his own dulcet lines, since this address was originally delivered to an American audience during his first lecture tour— sermons that Arnold presumably attends while a student at Oxford: Who could resist the charm of that spiritual apparition, gliding in the dim afternoon light through the aisles of St. Mary’s, rising to the pulpit, and then, in the most entrancing of voices, breaking the silence with words and thoughts which were a religious music? … I seem to hear him still, saying: “After the fever of life, after weariness and sickness, fightings and despondings, languor and fretfulness, struggling and succeeding; after all the changes and chances of this troubled unhealthy state—at length comes death, at length the white throne of God, at length the beatific vision.” (CPW 10.165)

“Introduction,” Matthew Arnold: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. David J. DeLaura (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973) 2. 100 Arnold and God (Berkeley: U of California P, 1983) 270. 101 The Disappearance of God 242. 102 Matthew Arnold and the Decline of English Romanticism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1961) 24. René Wellek describes James’s approach as “sharply critical from a point of view which could be called visionary Christianity.” See Wellek, The Later Nineteenth Century, vol. 4, A History of Modern Criticism: 1750–1950 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1965) 538. 103 Victorian Sage 15–16. 99

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Arnold’s delivery of this exordial passage had probably become quite stirring by 21 March 1883, when he gives his address for the nineteenth and final time (CPW 10.506). The emphasis suggests that the attraction in Newman’s sermons is wholly aesthetic for Arnold, not doctrinal or dogmatic, for Newman’s dolorous theme is one that he seems to appreciate without fail. The beauty of Newman’s rhetoric, and of Arnold’s, lies far more in the powerful evocation of human pathos—the fever, weariness, sickness, fighting, desponding, and dying in a sick and troubled world—than in the image of eventual heavenly compensation, which to Arnold is “a solution which, to speak frankly, is impossible” (CPW 10.165). The rhetorical effect that he produces here is rather like that found in some of Shakespeare’s sonnets (number 30, for instance), in which the couplet’s exceeding sweetness cannot easily overcome the sense of sorrow developed in the first 12 lines. A final example of Arnold’s authorial projection occurs in his 1886 Encyclopedia Britannica entry on Charles Augustin Saint-Beuve. When he speaks of Sainte-Beuve’s “narrow, puny, and stifled” poetry, Arnold’s consciousness of his own limitations as a poet might be supposed to inform his characterization: Here we touch on a want which must no doubt be recognized in [Saint-Beuve], which he recognized in himself, and whereby he is separated from the spirits who succeed in uttering their most highly inspired note and in giving their full measure,—some want of flame, of breath, of pinion. Perhaps we may look for the cause in a confession of his own: “I have my weaknesses; they are those which gave to King Solomon his disgust with everything and his satiety with life. I may have regretted sometimes that I was thus extinguishing my fire, but I did not ever pervert my heart.” It is enough for us to take his confession that he extinguished or impaired his fire. (CPW 11.112)

It is enough for us as well to suppose that Arnold deliberately smothers his own creative heat. Trilling speaks of “the almost constant success Arnold has with the theme of controlled self-pity” and how this mood, “producing the best of his poetry, is the very mood Arnold undertook to banish from himself.”104 The poetry perhaps he banishes, but not the mood. When Arnold says that Lucretius is “overstrained, gloom-weighted, morbid; and he who is morbid is no adequate interpreter of his age,” the critics of his own poetry seem to speak again, though not this time in terms of the weak, selfish, or unmanly in Lucretius (CPW 1.34). As these examples demonstrate—they could be greatly multiplied—what Stephen takes for a weakness or rhetorical limitation in Arnold’s work is in fact its ethical hub. Even though Stephen allows that his own analysis might be hamstrung by the logical athlete’s tendency “to despise the power in which he is so deficient: and probably to suggest unreasonable doubts as to its reality and value,” he nevertheless identifies the “weak side” of Arnold’s thought in “its tendency to be ‘subjective,’

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that is, to reflect too strongly the personal prejudices of the author.”105 Arnold’s judgments always “show greater skill in seizing characteristic aspects than in giving a logical analysis or a convincing proof,” Stephen says, and he is “too much inclined to trust to his intuitions, as if they were equivalent to scientific and measurable statements.” Stephen’s posture of bluff and manly assurance, his faith in the power of positivistic science to promote the progressive moral and physical improvement of the “social tissue”106—basically, his notion of race—cannot altogether obscure his anxious awareness of the rising tide of decadence and irrationalism that is already, in the early 1890s, threatening to swamp the earnest altruism of the high-Victorian mission. His agnosticism, after all, shows a pessimistic bent no less pronounced than Arnold’s atheism: he finds “a deep sadness in the world” and judges optimism to be “radically alien to the Christian sentiment.”107 Beyond Stephen’s personal pessimism, however, historian Jeffrey Paul von Arx points out that Stephen can also be classed with other “pessimistic” liberals of the third quarter of the nineteenth century who are “primarily concerned with the new vitality of religious movements and the threat they pose to the emergence of a post-Christian cultural synthesis.”108 To this stripe of cultural pessimist, Arnold’s efforts to disencumber Christianity of its vestiges of “Aberglaube” (supernatural accretions) typify the sort of Broad-Church maneuvers that Stephen vigorously opposes (CPW 6.212). Thus, Stephen reproaches Arnold’s Bible-asliterature method as further evidence of the “weakness of the poetic or imaginative treatment” in its “tendency to confound a judgment of beauty with a judgment of fact.”109 Can “the essence of a religion be thus preserved intact when its dogma and its historical assertions are denied?” Stephen asks, asserting in his turn a belief in mankind’s perennial need of “a system of discipline and dogma for effectually stimulating their love of goodness.”110 In light of his elder brother’s enthusiasm for utilitarianism’s “proper principles of rigidity and ferocity,” Stephen probably intends to imply with this remark that the most effectual stimulus to a love of goodness is a lively fear of the consequences of badness, but this is speculation.111 What is certain, however, is that Leslie Stephen exercised his power as editor of the Cornhill Magazine to prevent, after two installments, the further publication of Arnold’s Literature and Dogma. Stephen, “Matthew Arnold” 460, 465. Leslie Stephen, The Science of Ethics (London: Smith, Elder, 1882) 120. 107 “An Agnostic’s Apology,” (1876) An Agnostic’s Apology and Other Essays (Bristol: 105

106

Thoemmes, 1991) 36; “Dreams and Realities” (1878), An Agnostic’s Apology 115. 108 Jeffrey Paul von Arx, Progress and Pessimism: Religion, Politics, and History in Late Nineteenth Century Britain (Cambridge; London: Harvard UP, 1985) 7–8, 123. 109 “Matthew Arnold” 474. 110 Ibid. 475. 111 Leslie Stephen, The Life of James Fitzjames Stephen (London: Smith, Elder, 1895) 308. See also James Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, ed. R. J. White (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1967) 12.

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Why Stephen moved to suppress Arnold’s final essay(s) remains a matter of scholarly conjecture. R. H. Super, in discussing the sketchy details surrounding the series’ termination, notes that in October 1869, just months before assuming the Cornhill editorship, Stephen “had criticized St. Paul and Protestantism for its vain conservatism in trying to purify and preserve Christianity instead of revolting against it” (CPW 6.449).112 According to Super, whose view is shared by von Arx, Stephen takes Arnold to be giving aid and comfort to the agents of a reactionary clerical revivalism in their efforts to attract the newly enfranchised classes. To von Arx, “Stephen’s attitude toward the Broad Church resolved itself into one of unmitigated hostility.”113 The Broad Church fatuously imagines that it can “achieve a reconciliation of Christianity with new ideas, a reconciliation that Stephen had concluded was impossible when he left the church.”114 Stephen takes Arnold for a hypocrite, von Arx says, because he believes that “false doctrines should be denounced as false” and the Church declared “antiquated beyond repair or transformation.” In this reading, Stephen spikes Arnold’s essays radically. But this is not the only possible reading. John W. Bicknell, editor of Stephen’s letters, claims that Arnold’s essays are censored not for their conservative bent but for their doctrinal heterodoxy, thus putting Stephen in the “ridiculous position” of suppressing essays that “attacked bibliolatry in terms much milder than Stephen’s own in other journals.”115 Once Stephen grasps the radical trajectory of Arnold’s intuitive and experiential—and thus “surely effeminate”—revision of scriptural Christianity, he actively interdicts his efforts to put new wine in old bottles. Perhaps Arnold’s demythologized and poeticized Christ pursues an unmanly logic of exemplarity that proves too challenging for the theorist of virile agnosticism. If so, then this is surely not manliness’s finest hour. Bicknell’s view gains plausibility from the comments of Stephen’s first biographer, Frederic William Maitland, who 112 Super later revises his judgment of both the dating of these events and their motive, concluding that, in Stephen’s view, Arnold’s work “proved too heterodox to be inflicted on the Cornhill’s respectable readership.” See R. H. Super, “Matthew Arnold’s Literature and Dogma, the Cornhill Magazine, and Censorship,” Notes and Queries 36.2 (June 1989): 188. For Stephen’s complaints about Arnold’s “vain conservatism,” see Leslie Stephen, “The Broad Church,” Fraser’s Magazine, n.s. 1.3 (Mar. 1870): 311–25; Leslie Stephen, “The Religious Difficulty,” Fraser’s Magazine, n.s. 1.5 (May 1870): 623–34; Leslie Stephen, “Mr. Matthew Arnold and the Church of England,” Fraser’s Magazine, n.s. 2.10 (Oct. 1870): 414–31. 113 Progress and Pessimism 22. 114 Ibid. 22–3. 115 Selected Letters of Leslie Stephen, 2 vols. (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1996) 1.93. In a letter written four years after his essay was spiked, Arnold discusses with his publisher the possibility of reprinting in the Cornhill one of his early poems prefaced with a note of thanks to Swinburne, and he asks, “Would L. S. think that dangerous?” (Letters 4.279). This “danger” could allude to Stephen’s earlier treatment of Arnold’s religious essay or could refer to a more general timorousness before the prospect of sullying the Cornhill’s pages with the name of a notoriously unclean beast like Swinburne. See infra n118.

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is “more surprised at seeing some part of ‘Literature and Dogma’ in the pages of the Cornhill, than at not seeing the residue.”116 Maitland’s surprise squares with Stephen’s oft-repeated claim that he allowed nothing into the Cornhill “calculated to call a blush to the cheek of modesty,” a boast he also made of his own ethical treatise.117 “‘Thou shalt not shock a young lady’ is, he says, the first commandment that he had to enforce.”118 In the end, it appears that both Arnold and Stephen, “priests of the ascetic ideal,” as Nietzsche might call them, are ultimately pulling in the same direction. Nietzsche claims that science “never creates values” and that the relation of the ascetic ideal to science “is by no means essentially antagonistic; it might even be said to represent the driving force in the latter’s inner development.”119 In the shape of religion’s mortal foe, science “opposes and fights, on closer inspection, not the ideal itself but only its exteriors, its guise and masquerade, its temporary dogmatic hardening and stiffening, and by denying what is exoteric in this ideal, liberates what life is in it.” Perhaps Nietzsche’s epistemological critique and excavations of moral deep structures lie beyond the ken of mere British men of letters, but Arnold and Stephen would surely claim that when “the heart lies plain, / And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know,” they too have had their vision (“The Buried Life” 86–7). “If evil predominates here,” Stephen says, “we have no reason to suppose that good predominates elsewhere,”120 a sentiment that Arnold captures in numbers: Fools! That so often here Happiness mocked our prayer, I think, might make us fear A like event elsewhere; Make us, not fly to dreams, but moderate desire. (Empedocles on Etna 1.382–6)

Maitland, The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen (London: Duckworth, 1906) 266. Stephen, Science of Ethics x. 118 Life and Letters 266. Maitland offers a further illustration: “When Mr. Sully wrote 116 117

of Pessimism, he was told [by Stephen] that he had better not mention Schopenhauer. ‘The ordinary person, who is the general object of my dread, has never heard of Schopenhauer, but he may vaguely scent infidelity in a German name.’ Such were the noses in the Mid-Victorian age.” At least one mid-Victorian nose detected this same odor of sanctimonious hypocrisy—generously called an “apparent inconsistency”—when he notes that “many of the most daring sceptics in matters of theology have been strict and even fanatical in their conformity to the established ethics,” and he cites Clough as an example, although the point might also apply, it appears, to Stephen: “Even when he doubted in theology most, he was firm and orthodox in his creed as to what is moral, noble and manly.” See David Masson, “The Poems of Arthur Hugh Clough,” Macmillan’s 6 (May–Oct. 1862): 322. 119 Genealogy of Morals 153. 120 “An Agnostic’s Apology” 38.

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As we have seen, moderating desire, impersonalizing if not silencing it altogether, is the goal of Arnold’s “renouncement,” and it seems in his own case to have demanded a flight not only from dreams but from what some would call necessary illusions and existence-enabling fictions. Among the curiosities of Arnold’s prose remains is an entry on the first page of his published notebooks, a line written in 1852: “You can’t die on flying birds’ feathers.”121 The sentence stands out strangely, shouldering as it does a London Times clipping on the gold standard, some eight-year-old bits from the Revue Suisse, and one of Sainte-Beuve’s twicetold proverbs—all of which items the editors of the notebooks have assiduously traced to their origins, leaving this one line to stand nakedly unsourced in all its logical oddity. Was it a spoonerism overheard and noted? Maybe it bears some sort of Icarian or angelic import, an image of dying faith in an age of deus absconditus, of dying hope at a point of Parnassian paralysis, or of dying love in a life sans Marguerite. As John Holloway says of the “cryptic” and “prophetic utterances” of the Victorian sages, “Everything depends on their interpretation in detail; and they do not interpret themselves.”122 The line may stand as one of Arnold’s mystical “golden single sentence,” perhaps even the “spell” that his sister Jane hoped for, to heal the horrid times (CPW 11.186; Letters 1.124). The thesis maintained throughout this study, that pessimistic renouncement is the key to Arnold’s entire oeuvre, both poetry and prose, challenges the more usual claim that his turn to prose marks a decisively optimistic break with his brooding poetry. Such a thesis might run the risk of committing a Casaubonian fallacy—finding the key to all Arnoldian mythology in just the place where one has buried it—but it also risks committing the latest critical injustice to Arnold. In practice, his critical flexibility and ceaseless returning upon himself, his “ondoyant et divers” method, seem deliberately designed to preclude any permanent resting in a fixed doctrine, even a pessimistic one (CPW 1.174). Arnold makes this very point about “renouncement” itself in Culture and Anarchy’s discussion of the Philistine’s slavish reliance on an “external and mechanical rule” as his “one thing needful” (CPW 5.207, 183): [W]e no more allow absolute validity to his stock maxim, Liberty is the law of human life, than we allow it to the opposite maxim, which is just as true, Renouncement is the law of human life. For we know that the only perfect freedom is, as our religion says, a service; not a service to any stock maxim, but an elevation of our best self, and a harmonizing in subordination to this, and to the idea of a perfected humanity, all the multitudinous, turbulent, and blind impulses of our ordinary selves.

One thus perhaps risks overstating the case by calling “renouncement” Arnold’s first principle, yet careful readers cannot fail to note its extraordinary prominence in his 121 Howard Foster Lowry, Karl Young, and Waldo Hilary Dutton, eds., The Note-Books of Matthew Arnold (London: Oxford UP, 1952) 1. 122 The Victorian Sage: Studies in Argument (New York: Norton, 1965) 3, 4.

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work—as in Culture and Anarchy’s demand that the “best self” should overcome the “obvious faults” of the ordinary self’s “animality” and its enthrallment to “vile affections” (CPW 5.169). But for all this prominence, it seems that few of Arnold’s readers have hitherto recognized that the theme of self-forgetting that runs throughout his work firmly allies him to the tradition of philosophical pessimism, although Alan Grob’s A Longing Like Despair (2002) at least reveals the centrality of philosophical pessimism in Arnold’s poetry, and James C. Livington’s careful exposition identifies the orthodox Christian elements of Arnoldian necrosis. The present work, then, building on these others, has aimed simply to demonstrate that philosophical pessimism undergirds the whole of Arnold’s work and that his thoroughgoing ethic of renunciation in fact constitutes the axis on which all of his texts turn. A clear recognition of pessimism’s role even makes comprehensible the most significant features of Arnold’s rhetorical style and the sometimes savage critical reactions that his manner and matter both provoke.

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Index Acton, John Dalberg, Lord 19 Adams, James Eli 124n172, 161n3 Adamson, Robert 23n87 Adorno, Theodor 84, 108–9 Agamben, Giorgio 2, 133 Agar, Katherine Estelle Omelanuk 137n49 Allott, Kenneth 6n17, 145, 194 Allott, Mirian 6n17, 32n14, 145n69 Althusser, Louis 48, 62, 84, 87–8, 109 altruism 2, 5–6, 9–10, 14, 22–3, 27, 41–2, 64, 131, 133, 143–4, 146, 150, 156, 163, 169–72, 175, 187, 191–2, 197; see also detachment, disinterestedness, impersonality, renouncement, resignation, self-effacement, selflessness, self-overcoming American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) 35, 92 Anderson, Amanda 2, 121, 122n168, 170–71, 188 Anderson, Perry 25, 65n17, 82, 87–8, 98n57, 99n52, 109–10 Anglicanism 61, 123, 169 Annan, Noel 75n59 apRoberts, Ruth 15n56, 122, 134n35, 139, 195 Aristotle 23, 187–8 Armstrong, Isobel 29n2, 60, 83–4, 86n6, 100 Arnold, Jane 145, 151, 154, 200 Arnold, Mary 150 Arnold, Matthew 1, 29 anti-intellectualism of 48, 62–4, 72–3 atheism of 46–7, 86, 197 bourgeois hegemonism of 1, 3, 37, 39, 48–9, 66, 86, 91, 95–6, 98–9, 115–16, 124, 188 caricatures of 11–12, 29, 34–5, 48–9, 52, 55–7, 60, 64–6, 73–7, 83–4, 87, 91–6, 100–102, 112–18, 123, 188

critical injustice toward 2, 40–47, 71–3, 77–87, 91–6, 100–102, 112–22, 200 cultural conservatism of 34–8, 112 current relevance of 2–4, 10, 38, 49–60, 122 current reputation of 1–4, 6–8, 29–40, 46–56, 61, 65, 123–4 dandyism of 61, 150, 168 effeminacy of 5, 65–6, 71, 86, 110, 124, 150, 154–63, 165, 173, 193, 196, 198 Englishness of 71 essays of 8, 30n8, 50–51, 66–7, 74n55, 122, 135, 142, 177, 198 “The Bishop and the Philosopher” 53, 120n164 “Bishop Butler and the Zeit-Geist” 143 “Civilization in the United States” 193 “A Comment on Christmas” 167 Culture and Anarchy 1, 6, 33, 38, 40, 42n60, 47, 52, 58, 68, 70, 79, 84, 95, 114–15, 118, 120, 125, 135, 143, 165–6, 179, 185–7, 191, 200–201 “Culture and its Enemies” 40, 42, 66, 163 “Dante and Beatrice” 139n61 “Democracy” 51 “Emerson” 53n95, 195 “Equality” 39, 51 Essays in Criticism, 69, 71, 126, 135, 165, 194 “Falkland” 10 “A French Critic on Goethe” 122 Friendship’s Garland 120, 165–6, 177, 192 “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” 67–8, 70, 148, 175, 176n57, 189, 191

228

Overcoming Matthew Arnold “George Sand” 168n26, 195 God and the Bible 9, 190 “Heine” 10, 71, 121 “Joubert” 10, 193 Last Essays on Church and Religion 182–4 Literature and Dogma 6, 41n53, 53–4, 75–6, 80, 118–19, 127, 128n12, 179, 187, 190–91, 197–9 “Marcus Aurelius” 126, 133, 192 “My Countrymen” 51, 66 “Numbers, or the Majority and the Remnant” 51, 139n61, 160, 185 “On Poetry” 193 “On the Modern Element in Literature” 158, 194 On the Study of Celtic Literature 101–2, 115–19, 164 On Translating Homer 149, 166 St. Paul and Protestantism 174n52, 179–80, 187, 198 “The Study of Poetry” 13 Francophile tastes of 72 logical weakness of 5, 12, 48, 61, 64–70, 72–3, 79–81, 85, 91, 102, 117–19, 122–4, 159–64, 190–93, 197, 199 Malthusianism of 43, 185–6 misrepresentations of 1–3, 6, 10–13, 16, 33–7, 39–41, 59–60, 66–7, 71–8, 91–6, 98–100, 126–7 mock humility of 69–70, 77 performativity of 10, 58–9, 175, 194–6 poetry of 6–8, 12, 30n8, 35, 37, 46–7, 63, 66–7, 74n55, 86, 123–6, 136–55, 160–63, 168, 170, 172, 177, 195–6, 200–201 “Alaric at Rome” 151 Balder Dead 168, 194 “The Buried Life” 199 “Consolation” 150 “Courage” 148, 150 “Dover Beach” 13, 140, 146 Empedocles on Etna 10, 66, 126, 138, 151, 154, 194, 199 “Epilogue on Lessing’s Laocoön” 141 “In Utremque Paratus” 145

“Memorial Verses” 137, 141 Merope 168 “Mycerinus” 150 New Poems 163 “The New Sirens” 140 “Oberman Once More” 138, 146 Poems 141, 148, 154–5 “A Question” 144 “Resignation: To Fausta” 145–53 “The Scholar Gypsy” 10, 142, 145 “Self-Dependence” 150 “Sohrab and Rustum” 156 “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse” 145 “Stanzas in Memory of the Author of ‘Oberman’” 6, 10, 20–21, 125–6, 138, 142–3, 146, 150, 168n26 The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems 66, 145, 151–3 “Thyrsis” 10, 146 “To a Friend” 142 “To Marguerite—Continued” 150 Tristram and Iseult 140 “The World and the Quietist: To Critias” 145, 152 politicization of 40, 48, 86n6, 101 racism of 1, 37, 39, 60, 93, 112, 115–23 radicalism of 38–9, 51 rhetorical strategy of 5, 10, 38, 67, 137, 159–61, 187–97 rhetorical style of 5, 10, 63, 78–80, 94, 125, 158–61, 167, 170, 192–7, 201 selfishness of 8, 40–45, 158 stupidity of 73–4, 80–81, unmanliness of 5, 48, 65–6, 71, 86, 150, 154, 156–65, 175, 197, 199 view of systems, system-makers of 10, 61–4, 70, 79 weakness of 1, 48, 61, 66, 68, 76, 78, 86, 89, 118, 124, 151–6, 158, 160–67, 191–4, 197–8 Arnold, Thomas (brother) 53–4, 145, 157, 189 Arnold, Thomas (father) 142, 157, 158n111, 188 asceticism 9, 13–14, 16, 66, 127, 129–31, 133, 152, 155, 160, 179, 180–85, 192, 199

Index Asher, David 23n87 Ashley-Cooper, Anthony, Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury 169, 193 Ashton, Rosemary 5n14 Aspects of Pessimism 18 atheism 46–7, 86, 126, 197 Auden, W. H. 168 Aytoun, William E. 66n22, 151n76, 152–3 Azadovskii, Konstantin 72n41 Babbitt, Irving 55, 190 Bagehot, Walter 64, 66 Bain, Alexander 23n87, 45, 188 Baldick, Chris 29, 30n5, 37, 51–2, 73, 87, 90–95 Barlow, James William 18n72, 23n87 Bell, Bill 38, 56n111, 92 Bellamy, Richard 4, 10n37 Bellows, Donald 50 Bennett, Oliver 19n73 Bennett, William J. 29, 35–6 Bentham, Jeremy 21, 61, 84; see also utilitarianism Béranger, Pierre-Jean de 150 Berlin, Isaiah 24 best self 6, 9n35, 10, 16, 35, 79, 143–4, 150, 171, 180–81, 201 Bhagavad Gita 16, 145 Bicknell, John W. 199 Biehl, Janet 20n76 Blackburn, Robin 25, 87, 88n13 Blackmur, R. P. 55, 57 Blair, Kirstie 174 Blavatsky, Helena 20 Bloom, Allan 29, 36, 92 Bloom, Harold 30n8, 58, 74n55 Booth, Wayne C. 2, 37n38 Bowen, Francis 23n87 Boyle, George David 47n76 Bradley, F. H. 19, 75–7, 86, 97–8 Bradley, Ian 10n37, 25 Bridges, Robert 168 Bridgwater, Patrick 5n14 Brinton, Crane 24 Bristow, Joseph 147n70 Brooks, Cleanth 55 Brown, E. K. 51n86, 76–7 Brunetière, Ferdinand 23n87 Buchanan, Robert 28, 185–6

229

Buckley, Vincent 24n88 Buddhism 9, 13, 15, 127–8, 135, 184 Burke, Edmund 72, 97 Burke, Kenneth 55 Burn, W. L. 17n65 Burnouf, Émile 118–19 Burrow, J. W. 5n14 Burt, Forrest D. 15n56, 32n14, 49n83 Bush, Douglas 134n35 Butler, Judith 6, 89n20 Buzard, James 115n143 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 16, 27 Cameron, Sharon 2, 78–9, 169, 172, 175, 178 Carey, John 118 caritas 27, 131 Carlyle, Thomas 13n42, 15–16, 19, 50, 52, 69n31, 78, 97, 113, 114n141, 135, 142, 145, 156–7, 165, 169, 181 Caro, Elme 21, 23n87 Carroll, Joseph 115n143 Catholic Encyclopedia 14, 128–9, 131 celibacy 132, 160, 162n8, 182, 184–6 cenobites 14 Challemel-Lacour, Paul-Armand 23n87, 183–5 Cheney, Lynne 29, 35–6 Chesterton, G. K. 55 Christianity 5, 6, 9–15, 19–27, 41, 44–7, 63, 66, 71, 81, 112, 127–35, 146–7, 155–8, 160–68, 175–80, 185, 197–9, 201 Church, Richard William 160n2 Clapperton, Jane Hume 43, 165, 186 Clifford, William Kingdon 13 Clough, Arthur Hugh 20, 28, 63, 66n22, 141–2, 145, 147, 149, 151n76, 153n84, 155, 174, 190, 199n118 Cobbett, William 40, 65, 91, 104 Cockshut, A. O. J. 134n35 Coleridge, John Duke 46n75, 47–8, 155–6 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 58–9, 65, 97, 173 Collini, Stefan 3–9, 14, 16, 22n84, 26, 32–8, 41, 45–9, 57n116, 59, 61–4, 70, 74n55, 77, 83, 87–8, 90, 98, 101–12, 133–4, 136n48, 137, 144, 146, 156, 162, 169–70, 172–3, 177n58, 187 compassion 5, 9, 14, 131, 178–9

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Comte, Auguste 27, 61, 64, 84, 123 conduct 3–10, 13–14, 16–17, 22, 27, 40, 42, 47, 49, 74n57, 78, 85, 87, 91, 96, 101, 107, 115, 121, 125–7, 135, 149, 160, 170, 180, 188, 190–92 Congreve, Richard 27, 64 Connell, W. F. 10n37 Cornhill Magazine 13, 40, 41n53, 118, 198–9 cosmopolitanism 2, 71–3 Coulling, Sidney 46n75, 47n76, 49n83, 53n96, 155n99 Coupland, William Chatterton 23n87 Courthope, W. J. 13, 19, 44–6, 54, 66, 85, 89–90, 94, 126, 165 Cowling, Maurice 24, 33, 54, 85, 90, 134 Culler, A. Dwight 136, 138–9, 158 cultural studies 1, 3, 6, 10, 48, 83, 107, 120 culture 1, 3–7, 9–20, 24, 26, 28–9, 34–44, 47–53, 56–8, 60–71, 73–4, 76–89, 99–108, 109n117, 111–26, 138, 155, 161, 164–9, 188, 197 D’Arcy, Fergus 186n82 Darwin, Charles 18–21, 23–4, 45, 84, 113, 189 Daston, Lorraine 94n36 Dawson, Carl 46n75 Deane, Seamus 10n37, 49n83 DeLaura, David J. 15n56, 44, 53n95, 115n143, 118, 194 Derrida, Jacques 15, 74n55, 132–3, 159, 175 Descartes, René 190–91 despair 17, 25, 46, 52, 60, 86, 128, 136, 138n52, 139, 156, 158, 168, 194 detachment 6, 14, 60, 84, 99, 101, 111, 135, 137n49, 139, 148, 150, 159, 169, 171, 184–5; see also altruism, disinterestedness, impersonality, renouncement, resignation, self-effacement, selflessness, self-overcoming Dickens, Charles 169 Dickstein, Morris 51n86 Dienstag, Joshua Foa 4–5, 7, 23n86, 25 disinterestedness 2, 6, 14, 35, 51, 60, 68, 73, 79, 86, 99, 103, 108, 122, 135, 146, 149–50, 159, 169–71, 174–5,

189; see also altruism, detachment, impersonality, renouncement, resignation, self-effacement, selflessness, self-overcoming doubt 17, 54, 58, 69, 130, 142, 155–7, 199n118 Dowling, Linda 44n63 Dryden, John 59 D’Souza, Dinesh 35 Dutton, Geoffrey 113n135 Dutton, Waldo Hilary 110n122, 182n70, 200n121 Eagleton, Terry 4, 29, 37, 49, 51, 82, 87, 94–6, 116, 126 Ecclesiastes 27 economics 27, 37–8, 65–6, 91, 98, 104–6, 110, 117, 123, 186, 194 Eddington, Arthur Stanley 76 edification 5, 53, 80, 97, 187 Edinburgh Review 13, 45–6, 66 egoism 9, 22, 27, 41, 86, 150, 175, 178, 187; see also selfishness Egorov, Boris 72n41 Eliot, George 64, 97, 169, 174 Eliot, T. S. 1, 3, 8–9, 12, 16, 26, 30, 36–7, 42–3, 48, 49n82, 54–9, 72–80, 81n89, 85, 90, 92, 95–6, 101, 112, 124, 126–7, 170, 172, 179, 191–3 Ellmann, Maud 81n89 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 78–9, 172, 175, 178, 188, 195–6 Empedocles 10, 126, 194–5 Encyclopedia Britannica 71, 128n12, 196 Engels, Frederick 110n122 Epictetus 16, 193; see also stoicism eremites 14 Essays and Reviews 13, 54 ethical criticism 2, 37, 159 eugenics 20 Eurocentrism 1, 29, 36, 56, 60, 115, 123 evolutionary biology 27 exemplarity 7, 10, 23, 58, 67, 77–8, 91, 101, 126, 158–9, 160–61, 166–7, 170–71, 179, 185, 188, 191–2, 194, 199 experience 1, 7–8, 14–15, 44, 67, 121, 125–6, 135, 143, 159, 163, 188–9, 191–2

Index Farrell, John P. 11n38, 194 Faverty, Frederic Everett 115n143, 118 Fitch, Joshua Girling 71 Foerster, Norman 55 Forsyth, R. A. 188n86 Foster, Howard 110n122, 182n70, 200n121 Foucault, Michel 13n46, 84, 171 Freud, Sigmund 9n35, 173 Frohschammer, Jakob 23n87 Frost, Robert 10 Froude, Hurrell 169 Froude, J. A. 19, 153n84, 170 Frye, Northrup 52, 55, 85 Fryer, Paul 113n137 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 96n49 Galison, Peter 94n36 game theory 27 Garber, Marjorie 37n38 Ghosh, Peter 24n89 Gibbon, Edward 151 Gilroy, Paul 2, 112n132 Goldman, Lucien 88 Goodale, Ralph Hinsdale 27n102 Goodheart, Eugene 33, 35, 38 Goodlad, Lauren M. E. 171 Gossman, Lionel 115n143, 118 Gougeon, Len 49n83 Graff, Gerald 33, 92–3, 118 Gramsci, Antonio 84, 87–8, 109 Great Books 3 Greg, W. R. 45, 64 Gregorek, Jean Ann 161n3 Grob, Alan 32–3, 136n48, 138–9, 166n20, 201 Gross, John 176n57, 177n58 Grote, George 142 Gryzanovski, Ernst 23n87, 28 Guy, Josephine 92 Haggard, Robert F. 10n37 Hall, Catherine 49n83, 113n136 Hanssen, Beatrice 37n38 Harms, Friedrich 23n87 Harpham, Geoffrey Galt 14n47, 129n16 Harris, Terry G. 32n14, 49n83 Harris, Wendell V. 33n20, 38, 47, 59 Harrison, Frederic 64, 70

231

Hartley, Anthony 98n55 Harvie, Christopher 10n37 Hearnshaw, F. J. C. 10n37 Hebraism 6, 94, 120–21, 158, 181 Hedge, F. H. 23n87 Hegel, G. W. F. 19, 61, 75, 84, 86, 90, 97–8, 109, 117, 120, 188 Hellenism 16, 94, 120–21, 158, 181 Herbert, George 145 Herodotus 27 Herzen, Alexander 51 Hewlett, Henry Gay 138n52 Hilton, Boyd 161n3 Himes, Norman E. 186n82 Himmelfarb, Gertrude 29, 57n116, 72n46, 100–101, 158 Hobsbawm, Eric 18, 63, 89, 114n139 Hoggart, Richard 12, 65, 87, 97 Holland, Norman N. 137n49 Holloway, John 195, 200 Honan, Park 114, 150n75 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 168 Horowitz, David 35–6 Houghton, Walter E. 136, 165 House, Humphry 134n35, 157 Hueffer, Franz 23n87 Hughes, Thomas 163 Hulme, T. E. 65n18 humanism 36–7, 110–12 Hunter, Ian 37n37 Hunter, John 93–4 Hutton, Richard Holt 177 identity politics 6, 10, 89n20 ideology 3, 5, 6, 8n29, 25–6, 35–40, 56, 60, 83, 85, 95–7, 104, 106–8, 112–17, 122, 168, 171, 188 imitationes 10 impersonality 2, 8, 14, 26, 79, 143–5, 149–50, 159, 169–75, 178, 180, 189, 200; see also altruism, detachment, disinterestedness, renouncement, resignation, self-effacement, selflessness, self-overcoming intuition 68–9, 72, 74, 79, 94, 96, 123, 146, 149, 179, 189–92, 197, 199 Irwin, Robert 111–12 Is Life Worth Living? 18

232

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James, D. G. 195 James, William 23n87 Jenkins, Roy 25 Jesus Christ 6, 14, 79, 113, 119, 125–7, 133–5, 143–5, 167–9, 180, 185–9, 191, 199 Job 27 Johnson, Lesley 10n37 Johnson, Samuel 59, 106 Johnston, Dillon 49n83 Jones, Howard Mumford 49n83, 115n143, 162n6 Jones, H. Stuart 10n37 Joubert, Joseph 10, 39, 193 Jowett, Benjamin 13n43, 172–4 Keble, John 156–7 Kekes, John 10n37 kenosis 14, 133, 168 Kidd, Benjamin 20 Kimball, Roger 35 Kingsley, Charles 50, 71, 86n2, 113, 152–7, 160–63, 166 Kostal, Rande W. 10n37 Kulturkritik 39, 47–8, 52, 108–10 Laclau, Ernesto 89n20 Lancaster, H. H. 178n59 Lang, Cecil Y. 9n34, 33, 190 Langer, William L. 186n82 Lawrenny, H. 23n87 Leavis, F. R. 2, 12, 13n45, 36, 40, 43, 52, 55–9, 65, 67, 72, 77–8, 80–83, 88, 92, 95, 97, 99–100, 112, 121, 124 Lecky, W. E. H. 19, 24 Leonard, C. H. 49n83, 162n6 Lepenies, Wolf 2, 109, 140–41 Lerner, Max 24 Lévinas, Emmanuel 2, 15n53, 132–3, 159, 175, 178 Levine, George 71n36, 171, 176n57 Lewes, George Henry 27, 64 Lewis, Percy Wyndham 73, 75 liberal, liberalism 1, 4, 6, 7, 10–13, 15, 17, 19, 21n80, 25, 30, 33, 36–9, 44–6, 48–51, 54–8, 62, 64–6, 68, 70, 76, 78–9, 83, 85, 87, 96, 99–101, 107,

110–11, 113, 121, 124–5, 140, 165, 168, 170, 172, 197 Lipman, Samuel 33 Livingston, James C. 33, 134–5 Lloyd, David 11, 115–16 Lloyd, Richard John 23n87, 28 logic 5, 10, 12, 14, 21–2, 26–7, 44, 48, 52, 61, 64–73, 78–81, 85–6, 91, 102–8, 117–19, 122–4, 129, 150, 158–64, 167–9, 189–93, 197, 199–200 The London Times 85, 164, 200 Lowry, Howard Foster 110n122, 145 Lucretius 16, 194, 197 Lukacs, Georg 88–9 Macdonell, James 66n23, 162n5, 164n10 Macdonell, John 104, 110 Machann, Clinton 15n56, 32–3, 38, 49n83, 58n124, 60n132, 134, 166n20 McCarthy, Patrick J. 10n37 McClintock, John 129 McCullum, James Dow 49n83, 162n6 Madden, William A. 136, 139, 176n57, 189n87 Magee, Bryan 5n14 Maine, Henry 19 Maitland, F. W. 198–9 Malachuk, Daniel 10n37, 171 Mallock, W. H. 18n72 Mandler, Peter 10n37, 117, 161n3 Manent, Pierre 10n37 The Manliness of Christ 163 manliness/unmanliness 5, 65–6, 71, 86, 110, 150, 154–63, 165, 173, 193, 197, 199 Mansfield, Harvey C. 161n3 Marcus Aurelius 126, 133, 193 Marcus, Steven 33 Marcuse, Herbert 108–9 Margolis, John D. 74n57 Marion, Jean-Luc 74n57, 132n32 Martineau, Harriet 27, 64, 150, 170 Martineau, James 169 Marx, Karl 25, 37, 51, 84, 86–90, 98–9, 104, 108–10 Masson, David 199n118 Maudsley, Henry 20 Maurice, Frederick Denison 13, 169 Mazzeno, Lawrence W. 32n15, 33, 90n22

Index melancholy 2, 8, 9, 12, 40, 46, 109, 136, 139, 150, 152, 154–5, 193–5 Mill, John Stuart 2n4, 18, 21, 24, 45–6, 61, 65, 69n31, 78, 84, 113, 121, 123, 161, 169–74, 186, 188, 193 Miller, J. Hillis 74n55, 136, 168, 195 Milton, John 59 Mitchell, Ellen M. 23n87 More, Paul Elmer 55, 74n57 Morley, John 19 Morris, William 28, 65, 71n36, 97 Mulhern, Francis 3, 4, 9n35, 12, 16, 26, 29, 39–40, 47–8, 51–2, 58, 62–3, 65n17, 82, 83, 86n6, 87, 96, 98–110 Murray, Nicholas 74n55, 153n90 Muscular Christianity 10, 66, 71, 156, 158 Nadel, Ira B. 32n14 Nagel, Thomas 27n104 Nairn, Tom 83, 87–8, 96–8 Najarian, James Hiester 161n3 Nancy, Jean-Luc 132 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) 35 necrosis 10, 14, 135, 143–5, 160, 189, 201 Negri, Antonio 84 The New Criterion 34, 134n37 New Left 1, 3, 12, 25, 48, 52, 60, 82, 84, 86–91, 95–6, 98, 101–3, 106, 112, 115, 124 Newman, Francis 64, 167 Newman, John Henry 25, 53, 71n36, 142, 160n2, 166, 169, 196 Newsome, David 160n2 Nietzsche, Friedrich 27n103, 46, 79n83, 88–9, 94n35, 129–31, 179, 181, 199–200 Nightingale, Florence 169 Nordau, Max 20 North, Michael 51, 64n14 Nussbaum, Martha 2, 22, 37n38 Oberman 6, 10, 20–21, 126, 146, 168n26 ordinary self 6, 41, 143, 149, 180–81, 201 Orr, Leonard 49n83 Osgood, Samuel 23n87

233

Oxenford, John 23n87 Parrish, Stephen Maxfield 140n63 Parry, J. P. 10n37 Pater, Walter 43, 58, 76, 126–7 Patmore, Coventry 47n76, 154n92, 163n7 Paul, Ellen Frankel 10n37 Pecora, Vincent P. 115, 117–21 Pedersen, Susan 10n37 Perkin, J. Russell 31n10, 52n89 pessimism see philosophical pessimism Pessimism: A History and a Criticism 18, 137, 199n118 Pfordresher, John 46n75 Phalansterians 61 Phelan, Joe 134, 168 philosophical pessimism 4–7, 9, 12–14, 17–28, 125–36, 145–50, 157–8 philosophy 1–2, 4–6, 9–10, 14–28, 40–49, 53, 58, 60, 64, 67–70, 75–81, 84, 88–9, 97–8, 119, 123–39, 143–6, 149–56, 159, 162, 165–70, 179–84, 187–95, 201 Pierrot, Jean 5n14 Pope John Paul II 15, 128n11 Pope-Hennessey, Una Birch 160n2 positivism 27, 53, 64, 79, 197 Posner, Richard A. 37n38 postcolonialism 1–2, 12, 37, 39, 48, 55–6, 87, 112, 114–15, 117, 119, 122, 124 Pound, Ezra 71 Pratt, Linda Ray 75n63 Quarterly Review 13, 44, 165 Rachel (Elizabeth-Rachel Félix) 150 Raleigh, John Henry 49n83, 162n6 Raleigh, Walter 70–73, 80, 116, 174 Ransom, John Crow 36, 55, 64n14 Reeve, Henry 13, 45–7, 54, 165, 193 Reeves, Richard 186n82 reflection 1, 6–8, 14–15, 29, 44, 48, 56–7, 95, 103, 125, 138n52, 146, 151, 163, 170 renouncement, 4–9, 14–16, 125–36, 143–5, 148–50; see also altruism, detachment, disinterestedness, impersonality, resignation,

234

Overcoming Matthew Arnold self-effacement, selflessness, self-overcoming

Repplier, Agnes 23n87 resignation 125, 131, 133, 135–6, 145–53, 184–5; see also altruism, detachment, disinterestedness, impersonality, renouncement, self-effacement, selflessness, self-overcoming Richards, I. A. 36, 55, 57, 90n22, 92 Ricoeur, Paul 96n49 Riede, David G. 94 Robbins, William 49n83, 134n35 Roberts, F. David 10n37 Robertson, J. M. 13, 80–81 Roosevelt, Theodore 162 Rorty, Richard 159 Rose, Sonya 49n83, 113n136 Royce, Josiah 23n87 Ruggerio, Guido de 10n37 Runcie, Catherine A. 32n14 Ruskin, John 50, 65–6, 78, 91, 97, 113 Russell, G. W. E. 189n87 Rylance, Rick 64n14 Safranski, Rudiger 5n14 Said, Edward 4, 29–30, 36–8, 49, 51–61, 105, 111–15, 124, 126 Sand, George 168n26, 195 Sandel, Michael J. 10n37 Schopenhauer, Arthur 5–6, 14–15, 17, 20–28, 88, 110, 127–35, 144–9, 157, 179–86, 192, 199n118 Schultz, Bart 22n84, 128n12 Schumpeter, Joseph A. 99–100 Scrutiny 12, 48, 65n17, 77, 82–3, 85, 97, 99 Scruton, Roger 20n76, 57n116, 72n46 Selden, John 22 Self-control 12, 91, 120, 171 Self-effacement 3, 13, 77, 133, 135, 148, 150; see also altruism, detachment, disinterestedness, impersonality, renouncement, resignation, selflessness, self-overcoming Self-government 12, 96, 144, 160 Self-interest 22, 91, 102, 148–9, 182 selfishness 1, 8, 12, 16–17, 27–8, 40–48, 66, 91, 133, 144, 150, 154, 156,

158, 160–65, 170, 187, 197; see also egoism selflessness 14, 27, 131, 135, 147, 169–70, 175; see also altruism, detachment, disinterestedness, impersonality, renouncement, resignation, self-effacement, self-overcoming self-overcoming 5, 126–7, 133, 142, 180, 182, 185, 201; see also altruism, detachment, disinterestedness, impersonality, renouncement, resignation, self-effacement, selflessness Semmel, Bernard 49n83 Senancour, Étienne Pivery de 193 Shairp, John Campbell 66n22, 151n76, 154–5 Sidgwick, Henry 4, 22, 40–43, 46–7, 64, 77, 86, 120n164, 126, 128n12, 165, 188 Smith, Goldwin 23n87 Snyder, Thomas S. 49n83 Society for Psychical Research 20 Sophocles 27, 142, 153, 195 Spinoza, Baruch 16, 53, 126, 195 Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn 157 Steiner, George 17 Stephen, James Fitzjames 4, 13n43, 19, 64–8, 70, 72, 103, 165, 170, 178, 188 Stephen, Leslie 13, 19, 64–5, 69, 87, 113, 123, 161, 170, 193, 197–200 Stock, Guy 75n64 Stocking, George W. 115n143, 118 Stoicism 8–9, 13, 15, 84, 109, 128n12, 133, 135, 139, 147, 168 Stone, Donald D. 38, 51n86, 53n96 Strachey, Lytton 12, 48, 73, 95, 126 Strong , James 129 Students for Academic Freedom 35 subjectivity 3, 6, 10, 23, 63, 109, 133, 147–9, 151, 170–71, 175, 182 suffering 8, 14–16, 20–22, 53, 80, 126–33, 140, 145, 148–9, 157, 160, 178–86 Sully, James 18n72, 23n87, 137, 182, 199n118 Super, R. H. 119, 162n6, 176, 198

Index Swinburne, Algernon Charles 198n115 Tallis, Raymond 18n68 Tate, Allen 36, 55, 64n14 Taylor, Charles 5n14 The Teaching of English in England 70n34 Temple, Frederick 13n43 Tennyson, Alfred 152 Thane, Pat 10n37 theosophy 20, 147 Thesing, William B. 31n11 Thomas, Edward 72 Thomas, Mark G. 120n166 Thomas, Paul 10n37 Thompson, E. P. 65, 70, 87, 89, 97 Thompson, F. M. L. 10n37 Thomson, James 20 Thomson, J. Radford 17, 25, 28 Tillotson, Geoffrey 71n36 Tillotson, Kathleen 15n56, 16n59 touchstones 10, 39, 64, 67–8, 94–6, 159–60, 171, 190–94 Trevelyan, G. M. 24, 25n91 Trilling, Lionel 31n8, 51, 55, 57, 59, 75n59, 86, 100–101, 110–11, 115, 118, 134, 146, 148, 154, 169, 173–4, 197 Tulloch, John 23n87, 81n89, 174 Tyndall, John 45 The Ultimatum of Pessimism 18 universality 2, 10, 56, 95, 111, 170–72, 180, 188 utilitarianism 21–2, 53, 64–5, 79, 81, 143, 192, 198 Vattimo, Gianni 79n83, 89, 159, 167 Villa, Luisa 5n14 von Arx, Jeffrey Paul 18–19, 24, 197–8

235

Walcott, Fred G. 10n37 Waldstein, Charles 23n87 Walkowitz, Rebecca L. 37n38 Wallace, Edwin 23n87, 128n12 Wallace, William 23n87, 128n12 Walters, Tim 38 Warren, Austen 55 Watson, George 10n37, 30n4, 86n6, 176n57 Watson, Tim 49n83, 114n141 Watts-Dunton, Theodore 71 Weisberg, Robert 134, 137, 176n57 Wellek, René 55, 67, 81, 134, 137, 195n102 Wenley, R. M. 18n72 Whatmore, Richard 62n5, 87n7 Wheeler, Saundra Segan 32n14 Whitehead, Alfred North 76 Whitlark, James 128n12 Whitman, Walt 162 Wiener, Martin J. 37 Wier, David 5n14 Wilde, Oscar 16, 43, 60, 127 Willey, Basil 17n66, 64n13, 134n35 Williams, Bernard 15n53, 123–4, 130–32 Williams, Raymond 2, 12, 16, 20, 25–6, 39, 42n58, 51–2, 55, 58, 65, 74, 83, 87, 97, 106, 134, 136, 177n58 Williams, Roger L. 5n14 Wilson, J. Dover 52, 84 Wilson, Thomas 187, 195 Wimsatt, William 55 Winch, Donald 65n17, 66n21, 87 Woodhead, Chris 29 Wragg, Elizabeth 114, 176–8, 187 Wundt, Wilhelm 23n87 Wyclif, John 17 Young, Brian 62n5, 87n7 Young, G. M. 19 Young, Karl 110n122, 182n70, 200n121 Young, Robert J. C. 29, 37, 49n83, 51, 112–17, 120–22, 161n3, 167–8 Zimmern, Helen 23n87, 182 Žižek, Slavoj 89n20