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Selected Prose
Selected Prose (English Library) [May 30, 1971] Arnold, Matthew
480 pages, Paperback
First published January 11, 2008
28 people are currently reading
66 people want to read
About the author
Matthew Arnold
1,362 books176 followersPoems, such as "Dover Beach" (1867), of British critic Matthew Arnold express moral and religious doubts alongside his
Culture and Anarchy
, a polemic of 1869 against Victorian materialism.
Matthew Arnold, an English sage writer, worked as an inspector of schools. Thomas Arnold, the famed headmaster of rugby school, fathered him and and Tom Arnold, his brother and literary professor, alongside William Delafield Arnold, novelist and colonial administrator.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew...
Matthew Arnold, an English sage writer, worked as an inspector of schools. Thomas Arnold, the famed headmaster of rugby school, fathered him and and Tom Arnold, his brother and literary professor, alongside William Delafield Arnold, novelist and colonial administrator.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew...
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
June 19, 2025
Towards the end of the C19th, many intellectuals were tacitly – not yet openly – distancing themselves from the Christianity which had been the basis of Western civilisation for 1500 years. They felt the need for something *like* Christianity which, however, wouldn’t require them to believe things which they thought had been proven impossible. The result for several influential thinkers, Arnold among them, was an ideology – almost a religion – of ‘Beauty’, the idea that Art could take the place of God.
Well, Christianity is still here, but the ideology of Beauty has bankrupted itself long since. And it is the chief weakness of this book. As long as Arnold talks the specifics of art, particularly poetry, his judgement is generally sound; even today we need not quarrel with his discrimination of who are the good poets, who the great, and who merely prose writers using verse; nor with his demonstration of the qualities in which the greatness of the great consists. But the problem always is – clutching at Aristotle’s dictum that ‘there is more truth in poetry than in history’ – he wants more from poetry than it can do. It can give us comfort certainly, it can elevate our minds – but to what? Poetry in itself cannot tell us.
The reason he can make such a mistake is that what he really believes in, as a classic Victorian, is ‘Progress’, and judges everything on how it tends to that end. Philosophy and religion – which he labels ‘Hellenism’ and ‘Hebraism’ – he sees as rival systems with the same aim, perfection of the self. Actually that is what neither of them are. Philosophy (including science) does not aim at perfecting the self but at understanding the world; and religion aims at being perfected by God. Self-culture for its own sake is in fact neither philosophy nor religion but simply a form of consumerism.
I think it can only be ideology that leads him to push Wordsworth forward as ‘a classic’ – he is the poet who would most nearly serve Arnold’s turn as a poet-prophet. And yet, his encomium isn’t convincing; after many pages explaining what is not great about Wordsworth, he actually has little to say about what is. Incidentally, it’s amusing that a pompous pedant like Arnold disbelieves in widespread childhood sensitivity to nature (like Wordsworth’s) – he thinks this faculty is more often ‘well established’ by the age of thirty! It reminds me of the privileged middle-class writers who 'discovered' football when it became fashionable in the 90s - but at least they didn't have the nerve to pretend that nobody else had got there before them!
The last gasp of the Ideology of Beauty was, I suppose, DH Lawrence in the 1920s. Shrugging his shoulders, he seemed by the time of his death to have accepted defeat. Since then we have seen the concept of ‘moral purpose’ fall into ever greater disrepute, and at length be almost abandoned altogether: with the help of technology society has proved it can exist without one, after a fashion, by keeping its members occupied with a continuing stream of new sensations. The study and practice of art has been increasingly subordinated to serving short-term social goals. And a book like this, discussing the principles and canons of a classical culture, seems as quaint and irrelevant as the whiskers on Arnold’s face. His ideas are limited and lack coherence, and he was fundamentally barking up the wrong tree. But he's thought-provoking, and his prose is a pleasure to read - far more so than any cultural commentator today.
Well, Christianity is still here, but the ideology of Beauty has bankrupted itself long since. And it is the chief weakness of this book. As long as Arnold talks the specifics of art, particularly poetry, his judgement is generally sound; even today we need not quarrel with his discrimination of who are the good poets, who the great, and who merely prose writers using verse; nor with his demonstration of the qualities in which the greatness of the great consists. But the problem always is – clutching at Aristotle’s dictum that ‘there is more truth in poetry than in history’ – he wants more from poetry than it can do. It can give us comfort certainly, it can elevate our minds – but to what? Poetry in itself cannot tell us.
The reason he can make such a mistake is that what he really believes in, as a classic Victorian, is ‘Progress’, and judges everything on how it tends to that end. Philosophy and religion – which he labels ‘Hellenism’ and ‘Hebraism’ – he sees as rival systems with the same aim, perfection of the self. Actually that is what neither of them are. Philosophy (including science) does not aim at perfecting the self but at understanding the world; and religion aims at being perfected by God. Self-culture for its own sake is in fact neither philosophy nor religion but simply a form of consumerism.
I think it can only be ideology that leads him to push Wordsworth forward as ‘a classic’ – he is the poet who would most nearly serve Arnold’s turn as a poet-prophet. And yet, his encomium isn’t convincing; after many pages explaining what is not great about Wordsworth, he actually has little to say about what is. Incidentally, it’s amusing that a pompous pedant like Arnold disbelieves in widespread childhood sensitivity to nature (like Wordsworth’s) – he thinks this faculty is more often ‘well established’ by the age of thirty! It reminds me of the privileged middle-class writers who 'discovered' football when it became fashionable in the 90s - but at least they didn't have the nerve to pretend that nobody else had got there before them!
The last gasp of the Ideology of Beauty was, I suppose, DH Lawrence in the 1920s. Shrugging his shoulders, he seemed by the time of his death to have accepted defeat. Since then we have seen the concept of ‘moral purpose’ fall into ever greater disrepute, and at length be almost abandoned altogether: with the help of technology society has proved it can exist without one, after a fashion, by keeping its members occupied with a continuing stream of new sensations. The study and practice of art has been increasingly subordinated to serving short-term social goals. And a book like this, discussing the principles and canons of a classical culture, seems as quaint and irrelevant as the whiskers on Arnold’s face. His ideas are limited and lack coherence, and he was fundamentally barking up the wrong tree. But he's thought-provoking, and his prose is a pleasure to read - far more so than any cultural commentator today.
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November 17, 2010"ondoyant et divers..." -Montaigne
"Im Ganzen, Guten, Wahren resolut zu leben." -Goethe
THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM AT THE PRESENT TIME
". . . everyone can see that a poet, for instance, ought to know life and the world before dealing with them in poetry; and life and the world being in modern times very complex things, the creation of a modern poet, to be worth much, implies a great critical effort behind it; else it must be a comparatively poor, barren, and short-lived affair. This is why Byron's poetry had so little endurance in it, and Goethe's so much . . ." (6)
"Its business is, as I have said, simply to know the best that is known and thought in the world and by in its turn making this known, to create a current of true and fresh ideas." (18)
"The mass of mankind will never have any ardent zeal for seeing things as they are; very inadequate ideas will always satisfy them. On these inadequate ideas reposes, and must repose, the general practice of the world." (24; he goes on to say that criticism should be dissatisfied and push toward a perfect ideal)
SWEETNESS AND LIGHT
"Culture is then properly described not as having its origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection." (149)
"Im Ganzen, Guten, Wahren resolut zu leben." -Goethe
THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM AT THE PRESENT TIME
". . . everyone can see that a poet, for instance, ought to know life and the world before dealing with them in poetry; and life and the world being in modern times very complex things, the creation of a modern poet, to be worth much, implies a great critical effort behind it; else it must be a comparatively poor, barren, and short-lived affair. This is why Byron's poetry had so little endurance in it, and Goethe's so much . . ." (6)
"Its business is, as I have said, simply to know the best that is known and thought in the world and by in its turn making this known, to create a current of true and fresh ideas." (18)
"The mass of mankind will never have any ardent zeal for seeing things as they are; very inadequate ideas will always satisfy them. On these inadequate ideas reposes, and must repose, the general practice of the world." (24; he goes on to say that criticism should be dissatisfied and push toward a perfect ideal)
SWEETNESS AND LIGHT
"Culture is then properly described not as having its origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection." (149)
April 3, 2024
I haven't read close to all of this (just dipping in here and there for thesis purposes), but I'm really liking what I'm reading. Arnold is a wonderful and pointed stylist who passionately defends Western culture against the apathy and decay of modernity (though the nature of those modern circumstances has changed drastically since his time, there are also a lot of striking similarities) and for that reason alone is worth studying. Sure, he misses the mark a lot, especially in "Culture and Anarchy" where he pushes Enlightenment optimism to silly extremes, but I find even the places where he differs, sometimes radically, from my convictions to be thoroughly enjoyable. His criticism is also really solid and interesting. It seems to me as if his thought is indispensable without that of John Stuart Mill as both a complement and counterpoint, so I would recommend On Liberty first. You've read "Dover Beach" and "The Scholar Gipsy"; now read what's behind them.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews