Matthew Arnold: Pessimist?

A propos de Matthew Arnold. "Un Eton Français : le Lycée de Toulouse" (1864)

Caliban ◽

10.3406/calib.1964.897 ◽

1964 ◽

Vol 1 (1) ◽

pp. 101-122

Author(s):

Françoise Lafourcade

Keyword(s):

Matthew Arnold

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MATTHEW ARNOLD: A FORGOTTEN VERSE IMPROMPTU

Notes and Queries ◽

10.1093/notesj/ccxxiii.197806.244a ◽

1978 ◽

Vol CCXXIII (jun) ◽

pp. 244-a-244

Author(s):

ANTHONY W. SHIPPS

Keyword(s):

Matthew Arnold

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Matthew Arnold and the Institutional Imagination of Liberalism

Victorian Literature and Culture ◽

10.1017/s106015032000042x ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 49 (2) ◽

pp. 361-375

Author(s):

Sebastian Lecourt

Keyword(s):

Close Reading ◽

Common Language ◽

Matthew Arnold ◽

Main Claim ◽

Great Books ◽

Shared Identity ◽

The World ◽

Class Divisions ◽

Literary Canons

I first took up Matthew Arnold's essays as a dissertation writer circa 2008. Although I had not read much of Arnold's prose beyond the commonly anthologized pieces (“The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” “The Study of Poetry,” bits of Culture and Anarchy), he was a figure very much out of favor, and I brought to the table a strong preconception of his polemic. Arnold, I had learned, was a kind of cultural nationalist trying to fight class divisions within Britain by prescribing a narrow canon of books that could shore up a common language for his compatriots. His main claim was that there was a singular tradition of great books called “culture” that embodied “the best that is known and thought in the world.” Everyone in Britain needed to keep reading these books if the nation were to retain a shared identity and not fall into chaos. Furthermore, as I understood it, Arnold thought that to experience culture you needed to remain “disinterested” and “aloof from what is called ‘the practical view of things’” (5:252). Arnold was a Victorian Mortimer Adler who sought to defend the authority of traditional literary canons as well as a Victorian Wimsatt-and-Beardsley who upheld disinterested close reading against hyperpolitical Theory.

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Matthew Arnold

Political Theory ◽

10.1177/0090591782010003002 ◽

1982 ◽

Vol 10 (3) ◽

pp. 333-351 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Shirley Robin Letwin

Keyword(s):

Matthew Arnold

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The Zeitgeist of Matthew Arnold

PMLA ◽

10.2307/460374 ◽

1957 ◽

Vol 72 (5) ◽

pp. 977-996 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Fraser Neiman

Keyword(s):

Matthew Arnold ◽

Natural Right ◽

The Past ◽

The Face

At least since Matthew Arnold exploited the term Zeitgeist in Literature and Dogma, the expression has been variously a source of irritation and confusion to a number of his critics. Identifying it with a tendency to disparage the past, an exasperated contemporary reviewer of that work in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine cried, “Can anything be more unscientific than such a spirit? It is the very apotheosis of self-opinion intoxicated by its own pride, and flaunting its own dogmatisms with a crude audacity in the face of preceding dogmas.” Among other critics of Arnold, R. H. Hutton protested that the Zeitgeist was a will-o'-the-wisp “who misleads us at least as much as he enlightens”; W. H. Dawson concluded that for Arnold it was “a fetish, a talisman, a thaumaturgy”; for W. H. Paul it became a bore; Hugh Kingsmill began his caricature of Don Matthew, “So forth he sallied, mounted on Zeit-Geist, a hobby horse.” Still others, less annoyed than these by the reiteration, have themselves borrowed it as they write of him—sometimes effectively, because with consistency of meaning, as H. F. Lowry in his edition of Arnold's letters to Clough; sometimes bewilderingly, as when one reads such a statement as this: “Expediency, which had become in Burke's hands an anti-revolutionary doctrine, was equated by Arnold with the Zeitgeist, a force which, in his conception of it, was quite as revolutionary as that of natural right.”

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The Athenaeum

10.12987/yale/9780300246773.001.0001 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Michael Wheeler

Keyword(s):

Cold War ◽

Charles Darwin ◽

Cultural Influence ◽

Private Life ◽

Political Affiliation ◽

Matthew Arnold ◽

Winston Churchill ◽

Gore Vidal

When it was founded in 1824, the Athenæum broke the mold. Unlike in other preeminent clubs, its members were chosen on the basis of their achievements rather than on their background or political affiliation. Public rather than private life dominated the agenda. The club, with its tradition of hospitality to conflicting views, has attracted leading scientists, writers, artists, and intellectuals throughout its history, including Charles Darwin and Matthew Arnold, Edward Burne-Jones and Yehudi Menuhin, Winston Churchill and Gore Vidal. This book is not presented in the traditional, insular style of club histories, but devotes attention to the influence of Athenians on the scientific, creative, and official life of the nation. From the unwitting recruitment of a Cold War spy to the welcome admittance of women, this lively and original account explores the corridors and characters of the club; its wider political, intellectual, and cultural influence; and its recent reinvention.

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“The Chalk Wall Falls to the Foam”: Reimagining Littoral Space in the Poetry of the Dover Cliffs

Comparative Literature ◽

10.1215/00104124-8874095 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 73 (2) ◽

pp. 209-224

Author(s):

Maxwell Uphaus

Keyword(s):

Material Composition ◽

Matthew Arnold ◽

Geological History ◽

Marine Microorganisms ◽

Human History ◽

New Model ◽

British Identity ◽

The World ◽

British Coast

Abstract Where beaches and harbors have frequently been taken to signify openness and intermingling, a different coastal setting, the cliffs of Dover, overtly bespeaks opposition and closure. Demarcating the British coast at its closest point to continental Europe, the cliffs often stand for Britain’s supposedly elemental insularity. However, the chalk composing the cliffs makes them, in their own way, as malleable and permeable as a beach. I argue that poems by Matthew Arnold, W. H. Auden, and Daljit Nagra contest the cliffs’ association with an exclusive Britishness by focusing on their material composition. In these poems, the cliffs’ chalk—formed by fossilized marine microorganisms at a time when what would become Britain was at the bottom of a prehistoric sea—attests to Britain’s geohistorical contingency. Arnold, Auden, and Nagra use this chalk geology to develop a new model of British identity as contingent, permeable, and linked with the wider world. In these poems, that is, Dover’s cliffs collapse oppositions rather than enforcing them: they blur the lines between Britain and the world, past and present, organic and inorganic, human history and geological history. The literature of the Dover cliffs thus highlights the revisionary potential of this distinctive kind of littoral space.

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