Commonplace 197 George & His Contemporaries: Matthew Arnold. PART ONE.
Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) is not a name on everyone's lips these days, but when George was a nipper, Arnold was a towering figure, involved is all aspects of social and cultural life. He epitomised the cliché we now hold of a typical Victorian of the intellectual middle class - intelligent, serious, capable, driven by strict religious zeal, and totally committed to his own view of the world. We know George was a fan because he includes several quotes from Arnold in his American Notebook, and, on July 4th 1895, he visited the great man's grave in the Surrey village of Laleham.
Matthew Arnold travelled the well-trod path that would guarantee success: he came from a family with a track record for involvement in social affairs; he was intellectually precocious; he achieved success with his university studies, particularly the Classics; he was capable of working a self-imposed schedule of untiring and unceasing endeavour for the greater good of others. One of his greatest attributes was his ability to challenge the orthodoxy of his day, especially on religious matters.
When he was at Oxford, he attended John Newman's lectures, but never fully joined the Oxford Movement, the group that promoted the reverting of some of the Protestant version of Christianity back to include some of Catholic, pre-Reformation doctrine.
Arnold started out being educated privately at home but soon joined the pupils at Rugby School where his father, Thomas Arnold, was headmaster. In one of those Douglas Adams Interconnectedness moments that spring up in George's life, his man-wife, Eduard Bertz, joined the Rugby Colony in Tennessee started by Thomas Hughes, the author of Tom Brown's Schooldays and a former pupil of Thomas Arnold's. Later, Matthew went to Winchester, the school where pupils were most likely to go up to Oxford University. Hughes was also a Liberal MP (for Lambeth) and worked with Frederic Harrison, George's some-time employer and mentor to help draft legislation to improve the legal rights of workers. When he graduated, Arnold had a stint as a teacher at Rugby School before becoming one of Her Majesty's Inspector of Schools in 1851. Although he described the work as 'drudgery', it gave him a chance to familiarise himself with the lives and aspirations of the people who lived in the provinces, well away from the dynamism of inner city life. And the constant travelling gave him plenty of chance to write.
Arnold was also a celebrated poet whose works, though nowadays out of fashion, are still things of wonder. In his younger years, he spent a good deal of time in the company of William Wordsworth, a family friend, and when Wordsworth died in 1850, Arnold wrote Memorial Verses as a tribute. In some ways, Arnold was the man George might have aspired to be. He will have marvelled at the older man's versatility and been slightly jealous of the Newdigate Prize awarded for his poem, Cromwell, kept on his mantelpiece: the Newdigate is the gold standard of poetry prizes. In 1878, when George was in the States, having been sent down from Owens College for stealing, the Divine One, Oscar Wilde won the Newdigate for his poem entitled Ravenna. Coincidentally, George wrote a poem entitled Ravenna during his first year at college (1873) and won the Ward prize - Owens College's own poetry prize; not quite the Newdigate, but a step in the right direction. Arnold also won a prize for a poem about Alaric I, the chap who sacked Rome; the sacking of Rome was, of course, a lifelong obsession for George, as we know from the reading he did and the work he put into his posthumously published but unfinished (and unreadable) novel, Veranilda.
In 1857, Arnold was appointed Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, and broke with tradition by presenting his lectures in English as opposed to Latin. In 1861, he published On Translating Homer, a selection of these lectures. George considered himself a bit of an expert on Homer, and will have been interested in Arnold's criticism of the various versions of the Odyssey. According to the Wikipedia page: Arnold identifies four essential qualities of Homer the poet to which the translator must do justice: that he is eminently rapid; that he is eminently plain and direct both in the evolution of his thought and in the expression of it, that is, both in his syntax and in his words; that he is eminently plain and direct in the substance of his thought, that is, in his matter and ideas; and, finally, that he is eminently noble. He championed the translating of Homer into 6-line hexameters, the way the Germans translated it. So, plenty here for George to riff off of, and a sign of how much the world needed television, back in 1861.
Matthew Arnold is referred to as a 'sage writer', which means he often used publications as a pulpit from where he could lambaste public attitudes and mores. One celebrated skirmish was with the legendary WT Stead of the Pall Mall Gazette. (See Commonplaces 180 and 181 for more on WTS.) In 1887, Arnold is sometimes cited as the first one who coined the phrase 'new journalism' to describe the sleazy preoccupations of publications that chased sales by concentrating on salacious, sensational or controversial topics. Owen Mulpetre of the WT Stead website Attacking the Devil click begs to differ. Before WT Stead was appointed editor, Arnold had contributed to the PMG. He was friends with its first editor, Frederick Greenwood, a staunch Tory, and of its second, John Morley, a Liberal. Stead was the third, and a Scottish Presbyterian.
One of Arnold's most celebrated works was another collection of lectures published in the Cornhill Magazine as 'Culture And Anarchy'. Arnold introduces terms he is most often associated with: culture and Philistinism, among them. Here is his definition of culture:
Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) is not a name on everyone's lips these days, but when George was a nipper, Arnold was a towering figure, involved is all aspects of social and cultural life. He epitomised the cliché we now hold of a typical Victorian of the intellectual middle class - intelligent, serious, capable, driven by strict religious zeal, and totally committed to his own view of the world. We know George was a fan because he includes several quotes from Arnold in his American Notebook, and, on July 4th 1895, he visited the great man's grave in the Surrey village of Laleham.
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The Man.
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When he was at Oxford, he attended John Newman's lectures, but never fully joined the Oxford Movement, the group that promoted the reverting of some of the Protestant version of Christianity back to include some of Catholic, pre-Reformation doctrine.
Arnold started out being educated privately at home but soon joined the pupils at Rugby School where his father, Thomas Arnold, was headmaster. In one of those Douglas Adams Interconnectedness moments that spring up in George's life, his man-wife, Eduard Bertz, joined the Rugby Colony in Tennessee started by Thomas Hughes, the author of Tom Brown's Schooldays and a former pupil of Thomas Arnold's. Later, Matthew went to Winchester, the school where pupils were most likely to go up to Oxford University. Hughes was also a Liberal MP (for Lambeth) and worked with Frederic Harrison, George's some-time employer and mentor to help draft legislation to improve the legal rights of workers. When he graduated, Arnold had a stint as a teacher at Rugby School before becoming one of Her Majesty's Inspector of Schools in 1851. Although he described the work as 'drudgery', it gave him a chance to familiarise himself with the lives and aspirations of the people who lived in the provinces, well away from the dynamism of inner city life. And the constant travelling gave him plenty of chance to write.
Arnold was also a celebrated poet whose works, though nowadays out of fashion, are still things of wonder. In his younger years, he spent a good deal of time in the company of William Wordsworth, a family friend, and when Wordsworth died in 1850, Arnold wrote Memorial Verses as a tribute. In some ways, Arnold was the man George might have aspired to be. He will have marvelled at the older man's versatility and been slightly jealous of the Newdigate Prize awarded for his poem, Cromwell, kept on his mantelpiece: the Newdigate is the gold standard of poetry prizes. In 1878, when George was in the States, having been sent down from Owens College for stealing, the Divine One, Oscar Wilde won the Newdigate for his poem entitled Ravenna. Coincidentally, George wrote a poem entitled Ravenna during his first year at college (1873) and won the Ward prize - Owens College's own poetry prize; not quite the Newdigate, but a step in the right direction. Arnold also won a prize for a poem about Alaric I, the chap who sacked Rome; the sacking of Rome was, of course, a lifelong obsession for George, as we know from the reading he did and the work he put into his posthumously published but unfinished (and unreadable) novel, Veranilda.
In 1857, Arnold was appointed Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, and broke with tradition by presenting his lectures in English as opposed to Latin. In 1861, he published On Translating Homer, a selection of these lectures. George considered himself a bit of an expert on Homer, and will have been interested in Arnold's criticism of the various versions of the Odyssey. According to the Wikipedia page: Arnold identifies four essential qualities of Homer the poet to which the translator must do justice: that he is eminently rapid; that he is eminently plain and direct both in the evolution of his thought and in the expression of it, that is, both in his syntax and in his words; that he is eminently plain and direct in the substance of his thought, that is, in his matter and ideas; and, finally, that he is eminently noble. He championed the translating of Homer into 6-line hexameters, the way the Germans translated it. So, plenty here for George to riff off of, and a sign of how much the world needed television, back in 1861.
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| The 1878 Newdigate Prize winner, every inch a poet. |
One of Arnold's most celebrated works was another collection of lectures published in the Cornhill Magazine as 'Culture And Anarchy'. Arnold introduces terms he is most often associated with: culture and Philistinism, among them. Here is his definition of culture:
The whole scope of the essay is to recommend
culture as the great help out of our present difficulties; culture being a
pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters
which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world,
and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon
our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically,
vainly imagining that there is a virtue in following them staunchly which makes
up for the mischief of following them mechanically.
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| Matthew Arnold's grave. JOIN ME IN PART TWO TO SEE HOW CLOSELY GEORGE FOLLOWED MATTHEW ARNOLD'S TEACHINGS |
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