Matthew Arnold and the Romantics

Leon Gottfried

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317278047
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1963. Matthew Arnold grew up under the personal as well as literary influence of Wordsworth, when Keats, Shelley, and Byron were dominant poetic forces and Coleridge a seminal thinker on social and religious problems. However, the great Romantics were not always positive influences. This study attempts to provide an examination of Arnold by exploring and evaluating the full range of Arnold's reactions to the major Romantic poets over his whole career. This title will be of interest to students of literature.

NOTES

List of Abbreviations

FOR convenience, the following abbreviations are used throughout the notes.

I. BOOKS BY MATTHEW ARNOLD

CA — Culture and Anarchy, ed. J. Dover Wilson, 1948.

Celtic — On the Study of Celtic Literature (bound with Homer), 1907.

EC I — Essays in Criticism (first series), 1889.

EC II — Essays in Criticism: Second Series, 1924.

EC III — Essays in Criticism: Third Series, ed. Edward J. O’Brien, 1910.

GB — God and the Bible, 1901.

Homer — On Translating Homer (including Last Words on Translating Homer; bound with Celtic), 1907.

Irish — Irish Essays, and Others (bound with Mixed), 1908.

LC — The Letters of Matthew Arnold to Arthur Hugh Clough, ed. H. F. Lowry, 1932.

LD — Literature and Dogma, 1883.

Letters — Letters of Matthew Arnold, 1848–1888, ed. G. W. E. Russell, 2 vols., 1896.

Mixed — Mixed Essays (bound with Irish), 1908.

NB — The Note-Books of Matthew Arnold, ed. H. F. Lowry, K. Young, and W. H. Dunn, 1952.

PW — The Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. C. B. Tinker and H. J. Lowry, 1950.

UL — Unpublished Letters of Matthew Arnold, ed. A. Whitridge, 1922.

Works — The Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. de luxe, 15 vols., 1903–4.

II. OTHER TITLES

CBEL — The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, ed. F. W. Bateson, 4 vols., Cambridge, 1941. Vol. V (Supplement), ed. George Watson, Cambridge, 1957.

Com — C. B. Tinker and H. F. Lowry, The Poetry of Matthew Arnold: A Commentary, 1950.

JEGP — Journal of English and Germanic Philology.

MLN — Modern Language Notes.

MP — Modern Philology.

OW — The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Oxford Standard Edition, ed. T. Hutchinson, 1933.

PMLA — Publications of the Modern Language Association of America.

RES — Review of English Studies.

Shedd — The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. W. G. T. Shedd, 7 vols., 1884.

TLS — Times Literary Supplement.

II. SUCH NEED OF JOY: WORDSWORTH

¹ UL, pp. 65–6. This letter was written May 28, 1872: Arnold did not meet Newman until May 12, 1880 (see Letters, II, 195–6).

² ‘Wansfell! this Household has a favoured lot’, XLII of Miscellaneous Sonnets. See Thomas Arnold, Passages in a Wandering Life, pp. 11, 39–44, and A. P. Stanley, Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, I, 30, 280.

³ Thomas Arnold, Passages, p. 45.

⁴ LC, p. 29.

⁵ Letters, I, 255, 386, and II, 58, 126, 186, 378–9.

⁶ Although Wordsworth was appreciated and even claimed by representatives of various religious opinions, including the Catholics, his most notable influence seems to have been on such free-thinkers as Leslie Stephen, George Eliot, John Stuart Mill, and Matthew Arnold.

⁷ NB, p. 123. See Ecclesiastical Sonnets, Part I, Sonnet VII. In EC I, p. 3, Arnold suggests that Wordsworth was much better employed in making his Preface than in writing the Ecclesiastical Sonnets, and in ‘Wordsworth’ he placed them among the work which can generally be enjoyed only by the Wordsworthians (EC II, p. 161).

⁸ The Prelude, V, 359–63, 573–7; NB, p. 406.

⁹ Discourses in America, p. 205. Wordsworth has ‘that’ instead of ‘which’; Poems Dedicated to National Independence and Liberty, Part II, poem XXXIII.

¹⁰ See, among other places, LD, p. 37, and GB, pp. x, 139. ‘Stream of tendency’ is from The Excursion, IX, 87.

¹¹ ‘I am a Liberal tempered by experience, reflection, and renouncement.’ CA, p. 41. (As J. Dover Wilson points out in a note in his edition, Arnold is glancing at the Liberal slogan ‘Peace, retrenchment, reform’.) Elsewhere he called himself ‘a Liberal of the future rather than a Liberal of the present’. Irish, p. 381.

¹² Katherine M. Peek, Wordsworth in England: Studies in the History of His Fame, pp. 247–60, offers a summary of Wordsworth’s political views, quoting from a number of commentators such as Orville Dewey, William Hale White, Edith Batho, etc.

¹³ Later in life, Arnold did make more of an effort to reach the Populace; see, for example, his speech ‘Ecce, Convertimur ad Gentes’, 1879 (Irish), in which he expressed discouragement over the progress of the middle class.

¹⁴ See last paragraph of Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes, Section Second (pp. 57–9 of fifth edition, 1835), for one of his most striking descriptions of this idyllic but vanishing culture.

¹⁵ ‘Emerson’, Discourse in America, p. 196.

¹⁶ ‘A Study of Matthew Arnold’, Sewanee Review. X (1902), 153.

¹⁷ Matthew Arnold, p. 176.

¹⁸ NB, pp. 294, 329; EC II, pp. 2, 3. See also EC I, p. 5.

¹⁹ EC II, p. 96. See also ibid., p. 36: ‘Are Dryden and Pope poetical classics? … Wordsworth and Coleridge, as is well known, denied it; but the authority of Wordsworth and Coleridge does not weigh much with the young generation.’

²⁰ NB, p. 329, from The Prelude, I, 150.

²¹ The Prelude, IV, 297–8, 304–6; NB, pp. 406, 519.

²² Palladium, 11. 9–11; cf. The Prelude, XIV, 38 ff.

²³ NB, pp. 350, 514; from a letter of Wordsworth to Lady Beaumont, 1807.

²⁴ NB, p. 63, and used as close of ‘Wordsworth’, EC II, p. 162; from a letter of Wordsworth to Lady Beaumont, 1807.

²⁵ Ibid., p. 329.

²⁶ Memorial Verses, 1. 57.

²⁷ EC II, p. 154, from The Recluse. Incidentally, the stanza form of Westminster Abbey is reminiscent of that in the third stanza of Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode.

²⁸ ‘Charles Dickens’, Quarterly Review, CXCVI (1902), 37. Swinburne’s disaffection from Arnold goes back at least to the Wordsworth and Byron prefaces, in which Arnold had ranked Byron above Swinburne’s beloved Shelley and Coleridge, but Swinburne was also exacerbated, no doubt, by reading in Arnold’s Letters, published in 1895, a characterization of himself as ‘a sort of pseudo-Shelley’. See Letters, I, 227.

²⁹ John Duke Coleridge’s observation was published in The Christian Remembrancer, XXVII, 312, cited in Com, p. 37. Lines 102–3 of Mycerinus seem to reflect 11. 147–8 of the Immortality Ode:

Might shrink half startled, like a guilty man

Who wrestles with his dream …

ARNOLD

High instincts before which our mortal Nature

Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised:

WORDSWORTH

On Melville, see Walter E. Bezanson, ‘Melville’s Reading of, Arnold’s Poetry’, PMLA, LXIX (1954), 378–9. Melville had noticed that the opening lines of A...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• I. Introduction
• II. Such Need of Joy: Wordsworth
• III. The Anguish of Greatness: Byron
• IV. The Strayed Reveller: Keats
• V. The Intense Inane: Shelley and Coleridge
• VI. Between Two Worlds: Matthew Arnold and Romanticism
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index