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Teachers' Resource Web Net Comments on Arnold's "Preface to 1853 Poems" Al Drake, UCI, Criticism 100A, 1996 General Comments: In his "Preface to the 1853 Edition of Poems," Arnold calls for a poetry that emphasizes action, not romantic morbidity and fixation on the self. He seems to wish that Empedocles had jumped into the mountain a bit sooner before he said so much. The criticism is significant in that Arnold is accusing the romantic project--which his own poem continues--the romantic attempt to overcome various kinds of alienation, as having immolated itself and collapsed inward. Arnold says that poetry should consist of action in a rather Aristotelian sense--it should reveal something universally valid about human nature and social interactions. (We should not, however, fail to notice that the kind of "universality" that Arnold believes in does not contain the same penchant for direct moralism of the sort we find in, say, Dr. Johnson.) This qualified revelation gained from the study of the classics, Arnold hopes, will have a "steadying and composing effect" on both the aesthetic and the everyday judgments of educated readers. Presumably, then, studying the classics will help to make the world somewhat more intelligible. 1. Why may every "representation . . . consistently drawn . . . be supposed to be interesting"? When is a representation not interesting? Any such representation will be interesting along Aristotelian lines: "all knowledge," says Arnold, "is naturally agreeable to us." This remark is similar to Aristotle's statement as poetic anthropologist that "to learn gives the liveliest pleasure." The only imitation that would not interest us, according to Arnold, is one that has been "vaguely conceived and loosely drawn . . . general, indeterminate, and faint, instead of . . . particular, precise, and firm." The main point here is that we can learn nothing from such vague imitations, so we will not be interested in them. In making Aristotle's claim, Arnold is also implying that poetry is--or at least could be--a valid way of talking about the world and human nature. Unless, of course, those brooding, solipsistic romantic poets get hold of it. To illustrate Arnold's problem with the ‘uninteresting,' unhealthy romantics, we might have recourse to the field of drama. Have you ever noticed that the romantics seem to have produced remarkably few original dramas, and even fewer good ones? Well, that paucity results from the fact that romantic poets were primarily interested in expression, not in representation of actions like the ones we see on the stage. Even the most interesting romantic "plays"--Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, say, or Byron's Manfred, are psychological dramas--in fact, they really aren't plays at all; they are poems conveniently divided into acts and scenes. How could one stage Manfred convincingly? Everything of interest that "happens" occurs in the protagonist's own mind. Obviously, this kind of inwardness does not suit Arnold's ideal for poetry. Finally, remember that it is not enough for a poetic imitation to be "interesting"--it must possess a further power. See the next question. 2. What must be true of a "poetical work" for it to be "justified"? What does Schiller say about the purpose of art? Poetry, Arnold implies, should be "a forgetfulness of evils, and a truce from cares." Adding to our knowledge is not enough; poetry, says Schiller, must make us happy: "All art is dedicated to joy." Unfortunately for Arnold's reputation as a poet, we shall get no joy from his portrayal of the morbidly self-conscious "romantic" Empedocles. This tragic hero spends most of Arnold's poem on the edge of Mount Etna droning lines like this: But I-- (Allott, Kenneth. The Poems of Matthew Arnold. London: Longman. pp. 186-187. Act II.10-15) After having read the poem, I wish Empedocles had jumped into the crater several hundred lines sooner. Arnold might well agree because for him, a poem should conduce to something very like Aristotle's favored result of tragedy: "catharsis," or, to use Professor Schell's interpretation, "clarification." Poetry should steady one's judgment about the affairs of life and provide insight into mankind's universal and timeless passions. Arnold, then, is truly a classicist--he wants poetry to provide stability, a measure of order, in a crumbling modern world. Going back to the ancients as models might help the poet reinforce the sense that modern humanity is not as entirely severed from the past, and from past standards, as it might have thought. 3. What are the "external objects of poetry"? How does a poet recognize an "excellent action"? The poet must choose actions "which most powerfully appeal to the great primary human affections: to those elementary feelings which subsist permanently in the race, and which are independent of time." Perhaps Arnold agrees, to some extent, with Wordsworth when the latter says that humankind's most fundamental passions are always "there" to be appealed to, even if modern society is reducing city-dwellers to savage torpor. Superficial agreement aside, however, we cannot ignore the great differences between Wordsworth and Arnold: Arnold's idea is that action, not feeling, should predominate in poetry. Only a well-designed action makes it possible for valid expression to come through. Wordsworth, however, explicitly says that the action or situation must be made to suit the emotion to be expressed. So really the two poets are in direct opposition. Why should they disagree so strongly? Well, Arnold's model of the self to be expressed and developed through poetic experience differs strongly from that of Wordsworth. While the latter, according to Arnold, overemphasizes the cultivation and expression of mere emotion and thereby falls into what Keats called the "egotistical sublime," Arnold's model of self-development amounts to a new classicism. Arnold, that is, like his mentors Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Goethe, hearkens back to the cheerful Greek ideal of full, balanced development of all man's powers, both intellectual and emotional. He believes that the romantics spent too much time brooding about the problem of their own passions, their own alienated subjectivity. (One might say--inadequately enough--that the romantics overcompensated for eighteenth-century rationalism's lopsided emphasis on reason as the primary human quality.) Arnold, by contrast, appears to think that the standard of humanity is somewhat closer to the ideal of Pope or Johnson: universal, objectified human nature. Certain intellectual qualities, certain emotions--courage, and so on--are part of the fabric of human nature. The whole person is to be cultivated; he is to develop himself along the lines of an external, universal pattern of human nature that can be discerned largely from timeless works of art which, through the proper representation of an action, can reveal and appeal to the universal passions of men. In Arnold's view, the passion of Dido upon being betrayed by an Aeneas determined to sail for Italy is more permanent than anything in Byron's Childe Harold or Wordsworth's Excursion. Above all, we do not want a Prufrockian poetry in which "there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done." The mention of Prufrockian, of course, reminds us that the artist or critic's feeling of irrelevance and helplessness did not exactly disappear in the twentieth century. Arnold is, we might say, the father of the Anglo-American Humanism within which we often place modernist authors like Woolf, Yeats, Joyce, Pound, and T.S. Eliot. 4. What, according to Arnold, is the "radical difference" between the poetical theory of the Greeks and the poetical theory of the modern age? The Greeks, says Arnold, put the action first, while modern-day artists and critics and spectators regard not the whole action but the parts--separate thoughts, lines, and images; expression without action or intelligibility. The Greeks constructed whole works of art; modern poets produce only disjointed fragments. Again, this is because, for Arnold, the Greek model of the self and of community was an integrated one; we moderns have had this integrative model taken from us. 5. What is the false aim for poetry that the "modern critic," according to Arnold, "absolutely prescribes"? The modern critic is wrong to prescribe "A true allegory of the state of one's own mind in a representative history." To Arnold, this is the malaise of romanticism. The poet becomes enveloped by the thick veil of his own subjectivity, isolated by the rifts in his own psyche, and cannot relate to the world outside or to others from whom he is alienated. Byron's Manfred would be the perfect example of this. Moreover, we are reminded of Raymond Williams' thesis: Romanticism is an effect of what it proposes to resolve: failure of community, technological materialism, bourgeois individualism. The romantic project of cultural healing and community-building, Williams might well say, is founded upon the emotional self-realization of the individual. But the romantic wish for transsubjective, emotional ties between one human and all others can never be achieved; the message of romantic poetry cannot be received by the very culture that has in part made it necessary. Arnold is suggesting that "allegories about the state of one's own mind" offer no way out of Industrial and increasingly "democratic" Britain's problems; they are not at all representative or universal in the same way that Greek drama is. No principle of intelligibility, no steadying effect on the judgment, according to Arnold, emerges from Wordsworth's self-revelatory Excursion, or from any other romantic poem. 6. A "young writer having recourse to Shakespeare as his model" runs what "great risk"? Why exactly, according to Arnold, is Shakespeare the great poet he is? The risk is that modern authors will end up imitating only Shakespeare's expressive richness, not his facility in choosing significant subjects and constructing good actions. If this romantic reduction occurs, we face new poems like Keats' "Isabella"--chock full of happy, sensuous expressions, but loosely and vaguely drawn in terms of intelligible, whole action. 7. What effects does the study of the ancient writers have upon "those who constantly practice it"? What do such people especially want? "I know not how it is," says Arnold, but such study produces "a steadying and composing effect upon their judgment, not of literary works only, but of men and events in general." These diligent students are "like persons who have had a very weighty and impressive experience; they are more truly than others under the empire of facts, and more independent of the language current among those with whom they live." What do these people especially want? They want "to educe and cultivate what is best and noblest in themselves." Arnold's students are no Frenchmen who run out into the streets with their new ideas; they want to understand their age, not condemn, praise, or rashly rearrange it. Arnold's phrase, "I know not how it is" may, of course, be more than just rhetorical filler. There is a kind of quiet desperation in this Victorian's attempts to claim that poetry offers steadiness and intellectual order. Arnold's "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time" General Comments: In the previous piece we read, Arnold was concerned to promote a poetry of action, but we cannot but have failed to notice that by action, Arnold does not mean anything that would conduce to direct social or political activity; he means that an artist's rather Aristotelian formal concern with the imitation of an action will lead to poetry that helps make the world at least somewhat more intelligible. It will also lead, he believes, to readers whose judgments about things in general will be "steadier" and more balanced for having read such classical poetry. In "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time" (1864), Arnold maintains this aloof attitude toward the possible direct social or political effects of culture, within which grand process and field art must be included. He recognizes the basic difficulty in which he and other critics of culture and literature find themselves by the mid-Victorian Era: criticism is only tangentially related, if at all, to anything we might call "action." Arnold argues against what he sees as social chaos and disunity. He fears the disunity and the anarchic social conditions that industrial capitalism has brought upon nineteenth-century Britain. Unlike the more immediately practical solutions of writers like Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill, Arnold's has more to do with the intellectual sphere and with large matters of statecraft. While Carlyle, for example, decries the anarchic, brutal relation between alienated workers and their capitalist employers, Arnold is upset over the corollary of this economic struggle, the struggle for control of the state. Arnold pushes an aloof, classless state that will encourage the development of "the best self." Freed from the passionate narrow-mindedness of the three great classes--the Barbarians (the outmoded aristocracy), the Philistines (the middle class--the ascendant capitalists), and the Populace (the clamorous working class)--Arnold's State will serve as a grand clearing house for his favorite critical operations: "to make current the best that has been known and thought in the world" and "to see the object as in itself it really is." Like Carlyle, Arnold puts little faith in either democracy or the reforms suggested by his more liberal acquaintances. Though Arnold's work as an inspector of the public schools and his esteem for his Broad-Church supporting father, Reverend Thomas Arnold, place him to some degree in the "liberal" camp, much that he writes loudly bespeaks his disdain for England's contented boastings about its intellectual and economic freedom. England, suggests Arnold, must choose between Anarchy, between "doing as one likes," and Culture; it can no ways have both. The country's best hope, he says, lies in the pursuit of Culture; that is, in the disinterested "reading," "studying," and "observing" that his new State will encourage as a regimen for the best minds and future governors of England. In relatively practical terms, Arnold seems to be calling for a strong central state run by an efficient, independent, well-educated bureaucracy, perhaps one reminiscent of Wilhelm von Humboldt's Prussia. Culture--the disinterested (i.e. objective or unbiased) pursuit of perfection--is Arnold's answer to industrial chaos. The State, striving in accordance with right reason toward the full and balanced development of its citizenry's powers, will at last allow Britain to take control of its affairs. The point of the State and Culture, then, says Arnold, would be to let citizens develop a "Best Self," a degree of humanity that would allow them to rise above petty class warfare and promote the general good. Criticism, the free play of the mind and a ceaseless attempt to evaluate statements to see if they measure up to "the best that is known and thought in the world" fits within the overall project of Culture, as does poetry and education. We have begun to place Arnold's essay, "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time," in context. It is clear that Arnold, writing just three years before the Second Reform Bill of 1867, opposes the strategy of the Utilitarian reformers, with their free-trading, laissez-faire capitalist attitude and their clamor for increasing social democracy as well as individual liberty--"doing as one likes," as Arnold calls it later--and the Carlylean worshippers of Industrial Heroism. In part, Arnold's promotion of disinterested criticism is designed to express his dissatisfaction at the more concrete strategies of Mill and Carlyle. In the face of these unsatisfying solutions to British problems, Arnold is trying to keep open a window of criticism and disinterested, free thought to stave off what he perceives as a threat of revolutionary anarchism. It is important to note, with respect to this perceive threat, that like some prophets before him, Arnold expresses his dissatisfaction not during a time of sackcloth and ashes but during a time that many people seem to believe is full of prosperity and hope. The 1850's and 1860's marked a period of prosperity for England following the decade that has come to be called "the Hungry Forties." Still, Arnold, like the cultural sage that he is, will not be satisfied. Perhaps his ultimate value lies in his insistence on criticizing what he sees around him, his refusal to accept the pig-like bourgeois conformity and self-congratulation of the advancing middle class, that hallelujah chorus for Bentham's greatest happiness principle and the political economy of Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Arnold, like Carlyle before him, is searching for a true principle of order in British society, and he sees it nowhere around him. He is certain of one thing, if nothing else: utilitarian democratic pushpinism is not, as old Bentham thought, as good as poetry--or criticism. Arnold's understandable inability to find the solution to his day's troubles leads us to the main problem that has since become associated not only with Arnold's poetic and cultural scheme but with Anglo-American Humanism right on through to T.S. Eliot and Cleanth Brooks. (Modernists aside from Eliot, too, are subject to much the same difficulty, though the Modernist response to it is far more aggressive than what we find in Arnold.) With respect to Arnold's theory about the need for a strong central state, we can see that he is unable to offer any convincing objective embodiment of this State. Indeed, how can a State be aloof from the designs of the most powerful class? Can we really assume that such an aloof, classless entity can be established? Arnold wants to establish a strong central government that will promote the full development of the individual, but his political theory is subject to the same complaint as his yearning after artistic "touchstones": he cannot convincingly demonstrate how contemporary Britain contains the necessary material with which to establish an enlightened governing power. He thinks that England is a kind of organic entity that can only change in slow, sure stages like those through which a plant goes as it matures. That is a very Burkean, and Coleridgean, ideal of political and social change; however, unlike Burke, and to some extent Coleridge, Arnold looks around him in 1864 and cannot find anyone or anything in which to embody his ideal State. As Raymond Williams points out, Arnold's Culture--the very process that the State is called upon to promote--is simply not the same thing as society as a whole; unfortunately, there is no easy way to bring together the pursuit of culture and the practical world of Victorian England. All Arnold has is a utopian ideal, not a reality to be preserved. Perhaps that is why he is so tentative in making claims about the practical effectiveness of criticism. How, finally, is criticism supposed to help establish Arnold's State, which does not yet exist in his time--when the State would appear to be the precondition for sustained criticism and for the molding of the class-free "best self"? In Marxian terms, isn't Arnold's refusal to deal with vulgar economic realities a weakness as well as a strength? Doesn't it keep him from addressing the very difficulties that make the establishment of a classless State impossible? Marx, after all, says that "life is not determined by consciousness; consciousness is determined by life." One suspects that Mr. Arnold is all too concerned with consciousness, with ideas divorced from brute economic concerns, to please Karl Marx. As a final comment, I shall pass along to you the ground plan for the lecture that I ought to have given on Arnold, if I had had more than a few hours' sleep a week ago. I hope I made the majority of these points, but in any case, here are the main things that I believe should be said about the two Arnold pieces we have examined: Arnold's "Preface to the 1853 Edition of Poems" Here are some observations in outline form: 1. Withdrawal from romantic cultural project. (A) ANTI-EXPRESSIVE: Arnold wants to be an anti-expressive poet--self-expression is not the way to make an increasingly Prufrockian Europe better. Hence the polemics against his own "Empedocles" poem and Wordsworth. Arnold's idea is the opposite of Wordsworth's--action, not feeling, should predominate in poetry. (B) SELF: If Arnold doesn't like the romantics' engrossment in selfhood, what might be his own model of the self to be developed by poetry? Arnold looks back to the Greek ideal--as reconstructed by C19 German classics scholars--of full development of all man's powers, both intellectual and emotional. He believes that the romantics spent too much time brooding about the problem of their own alienated subjectivity. Arnold, by contrast, thinks that the standard of humanity is somewhat closer (though stripped of the neoclassicist's insistent emphasis on morality) to the realist ideal of Pope or Johnson: universal, objectified human nature. The individual, with the assistance of "healthy" poetry, is to develop himself or herself along the lines of an external, universal pattern of human nature. (C) THERAPY = STEADYING EFFECT, ALOOFNESS: Poems that represent universal action, poems that comprise an intelligible whole, are the best form of therapy for mid-Victorian Britain. The point is not to stir up the reader and make him run out into the street with his passions or politics; the point is rather to give the reader joy and help him "see the object--universal passions like those of Dido--as in itself it really is." Remember that Arnold says such study produces "a steadying and composing effect upon [the reader's] . . . judgment, not of literary works only, but of men and events in general." Disinteredness, aloofness, is the watchword. (D) UNCERTAIN ABOUT "TOUCHSTONES": The study of poetry should consist in discerning "the best that is known and thought in the world," but Arnold finds it rather difficult to provide objective grounds for these best ideas--all he can do is point to them with his cultivated finger. Arnold is a Victorian who wants to be a philosophical realist with absolute certainty about some universal truth--but you can see that he isn't quite sure of himself--the Victorian age, with its Darwinists, ravaging biblical scholars, ruthless industrialists, and so forth, was not one that encouraged thoughtful people to believe in absolute certainties. Arnold's "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time" Here are some observations in outline form: 1. This piece presents Arnold's solution in the wider sphere of culture and politics: (A) CRITICISM: Arnold promotes criticism: "a disinterested endeavor to learn the best that is known and thought in the world." (B) STATE ABOVE CLASS: Arnold says that in order to promote culture--reading, studying, and observing, i.e. development of a best self (a self that can see beyond petty class interests), through poetry, criticism, and education--we need to establish a State that is not beholden to any of the three classes now vying for political control of England: The Barbarians (aristocracy), the Philistines (the middle-class capitalists), and the Populace (the vulgar workingmen who want to seize power from the increasingly powerful Philistines--these are Marx's heroes, not Arnold's). (C) PROBLEM WITH THIS STATE--UNCONVINCING OBJECTIVE EMBODIMENT OF THE STATE: How can a State be aloof from the designs of the most powerful class? Isn't Arnold a utopian? He wants to establish a strong State that will promote the full development of the individual, but his political theory is subject to the same complaint as his yearning after artistic touchstones: Arnold cannot convincingly demonstrate how contemporary Britain contains the necessary material with which to establish an enlightened State power. He thinks that England is a kind of organic entity that can only change in slow, sure stages like those through which a plant goes as it matures. That is a very Burkean, and Coleridgean, ideal of political and social change; however, unlike Burke, and to some extent Coleridge, Arnold looks around him in 1864 and cannot find anyone or anything in which to embody his ideal State. As Raymond Williams points out, Arnold's Culture is simply not the same thing as society as a whole; unfortunately, there is no easy way to bring together the pursuit of culture and the practical world of Victorian England. All Arnold has is a utopian ideal, not a reality to be preserved. Perhaps that is why he is so tentative in making claims about the practical effectiveness of criticism. How, finally, is criticism supposed to help establish the State when the State is in fact the precondition for sustained criticism? Reading Questions for "Function of Criticism": 8. What is the nature of the "critical effort"? 9. What, according to Arnold, is the "highest function of man"? How do we know this to be so? "The exercise of a creative power, that of a free creative activity, is the highest function of man." We know it to be so because this exercise makes us happy. Arnold argues that such creative activity is mainly the province of the poet; the creative power is one of "synthesis and exposition, not of analysis and discovery." Nonetheless, you may have noticed that while Arnold places the "critical power" lower than the creative power, he still smuggles into his definition of the former something of the creativity of the latter: "But it is undeniable, also, that men may have the sense of exercising this free creative activity in other ways than in producing great works of literature or art" (593B). The idea that critics do what they do in order to serve the master literary text, of course, has come under heavy fire in the latter half of the twentieth century. In this regard, one might examine J. Hillis Miller's article, "The Limits of Pluralism, II: The Critic as Host." Critical Inquiry, III (1977), 439-447. 10. What are the elements with which literary genius works? What precisely is the "grand work" of literary genius? What is it not? How is literary genius therefore somewhat dependent upon the age in which it works? The literary creative power works with ideas. The grand work of literary genius is "a work of synthesis and exposition, not of analysis and discovery." To achieve this synthesis, however, literary genius requires "a certain intellectual and spiritual atmosphere . . . a certain order of ideas." Both the man and the moment are necessary, Arnold says. He will soon qualify this direct linkage between the historical and cultural matrix and the work of art--left by itself, his statement sounds oddly relativistic for a critic who believes in touchstones. Contemporary theorists have often accused the Anglo-American Humanist tradition of being ahistorical--that is, of treating literature and culture in general as if it were beyond the ravages of time and societal change, beyond the grip of what Marxists call "ideology." When we see how hastily Arnold retreats from his conjoining of the "man and the moment," it is easy enough to see why this accusation makes sense. 11. What is the relationship between the "critical power" and the "creative" power"? Why can't there be a truly great period of literary creation without criticism? The critical power may enhance or give rise the kind of intellectual atmosphere in which art may flourish. There has to be enough intellectual ferment, enough vitality, in an epoch if literary genius is to succeed. Arnold says, as I mentioned above, that the creative power works with ideas as its material. If ideas be lacking in a given epoch, that epoch will not have satisfied the basic conditions for the production of great art. Apparently, when Arnold tests the intellectual atmosphere in 1864, he finds only "multitudinousness," not the necessary "current of fresh ideas" that makes for creative art. 12. What is "living by ideas," according to Arnold? Arnold's example is Edmund Burke, who, despite his tenacious opposition to those rash French revolutionists (see Reflections on the Revolution in France [1790]), agrees that change must come--at least when British society as a whole is organically "ripe" for it. Burke, implies Arnold, was willing to oppose his own countrymen for the sake of clear thinking and ideals. Unlike the romantics, he did not rush to the support of those who would overthrow by violence the established civil order. 13. What notion "hardly enters into an Englishman's thoughts"? No self-respecting Englishman would countenance the thought of "the free play of the mind upon all subjects being a pleasure in itself, being an object of desire, being an essential provider of elements without which a nation's spirit . . . must . . . die of inanition." That is a remarkable, and yet fairly common, thing for an Englishman to say! Carlyle played upon the same "John Bull" stereotype of the respectable--but rather stupid--English citizen. Carlyle called such mindless Brits "blockheads" ; Arnold, while his language is a bit more genteel, appears to think much the same thing of his countrymen, and he tends to look to Europe and to the classics for "the best that is known and thought." Arnold may very well think and do these things; I, Alfred James Drake, couldn't possibly comment. 14. What is the "instinct" real criticism always obeys? What does real criticism disregard? What one word therefore sums up the rule criticism ought to follow? What should criticism always refuse to do? Real criticism obeys "an instinct prompting it to try to know the best that is known and thought in the world." It disregards "practice, politics, and everything of the kind." Disinterestedness is the one rule. Criticism should refuse to "lend itself to any . . . ulterior, political, practical considerations about ideas." 15. How does Arnold finally define criticism? The law of criticism's being is "the idea of a disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world, and thus to establish a current of fresh and true ideas."
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