Inspection Sorry, George Crabbe, Adam Mickiewicz, Kit Carson, IF Stone and Mauricio Kagel. Yes, it’s your birthdays; but while I’d be glad to write about you today, I already wrote about you last year. And today I’m writing about Matthew Arnold on his 192nd birthday: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Arnold#mediaviewer/File:Matthew_Arnold.jpg But only a little bit. I feel I still haven’t got him right in my mind. Forty-five years ago, I wrote a huge essay about him for Terry Eagleton – the longest I wrote as an undergraduate – and tried to get into it everything I thought then about poetry and criticism and culture and anarchy. I called it Little Matthew And His Struggle Against the Eunuchs, which maybe betrays more than it ought. It was quite a good essay, I think – Terry liked it and disagreed with it in immense detail – but there’s no point in trying to reproduce its arguments or its colouring now. I’ll quote one short bit of Arnold’s poetry: ‘…Forgive me, masters of the mind! At whose behest I long ago So much unlearnt, so much resignd— I come not here to be your foe! I seek these anchorites, not in ruth, To curse and to deny your truth; Not as their friend, or child, I speak! But as, on some far northern strand, Thinking of his own Gods, a Greek In pity and mournful awe might stand Before some fallen Runic stone— For both were faiths, and both are gone. Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born, With nowhere yet to rest my head, Like these, on earth I wait forlorn. Their faith, my tears, the world deride— I come to shed them at their side. Oh, hide me in your gloom profound, Ye solemn seats of holy pain! Take me, cowld forms, and fence me round, Till I possess my soul again; Till free my thoughts before me roll, Not chafed by hourly false control! For the world cries your faith is now But a dead times exploded dream; My melancholy, sciolists say, Is a passd mode, an outworn theme— As if the world had ever had A faith, or sciolists been sad! Ah, if it be passd, take away, At least, the restlessness, the pain; Be man henceforth no more a prey To these out-dated stings again! The nobleness of grief is gone Ah, leave us not the fret alone! But—if you cannot give us ease— Last of the race of them who grieve Here leave us to die out with these Last of the people who believe! Silent, while years engrave the brow; Silent—the best are silent now. Achilles ponders in his tent, The kings of modern thought are dumb, Silent they are though not content, And wait to see the future come. They have the grief men had of yore, But they contend and cry no more. Our fathers waterd with their tears This sea of time whereon we sail, Their voices were in all mens ears We passd within their puissant hail. Still the same ocean round us raves, But we stand mute, and watch the waves. For what availd it, all the noise And outcry of the former men?— Say, have their sons achieved more joys, Say, is life lighter now than then? The sufferers died, they left their pain— The pangs which tortured them remain. What helps it now, that Byron bore, With haughty scorn which mockd the smart, Through Europe to the Ætolian shore The pageant of his bleeding heart? That thousands counted every groan, And Europe made his woe her own?...’ [Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse] And one short extract from The Function of Criticism: ‘…But then comes another question as to the subject-matter which literary criticism should most seek. Here, in general, its course is determined for it by the idea which is the law of its being: 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. By the very nature of things, as England is not all the world, much of the best that is known and thought in the world cannot be of English growth, must be foreign; by the nature of things, again, it is just this that we are least likely to know, while English thought is streaming in upon us from all sides, and takes excellent care that we shall not be ignorant of its existence….Here the great safeguard is never to let oneself become abstract, always to retain an intimate and lively consciousness of the truth of what one is saying, and, the moment this fails us, to be sure that something is wrong….’ And two sentences from the comparison of Joubert with Coleridge: ‘…But that in which the essence of their likeness consisted is this, — that they both had from nature an ardent impulse for seeking the genuine truth on all matters they thought about, and a gift for finding it and recognising it when it was found. To have the impulse for seeking this truth is much rarer than most people think; to have the gift for finding it is, I need not say, very rare indeed….’ That’s enough to keep a year’s meditation going about how we look at the surprising Victorians in the twenty-first century, about poetry, about prose, about Us and Them, about why we read, about what Arnold says in the essay on Wordsworth: ‘Perhaps we shall one day learn to make this proposition general, and to say: Poetry is the reality, philosophy the illusion.’ His irony is pervasive and positive and preservative. I can’t do without him in my mind, whatever his place should be: lima.ohio-state.edu/english/marcella/ward/imagepages/wardandarnold.html
Posted on: Wed, 24 Dec 2014 08:19:47 +0000
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