Background
Matthew Arnold was born at Laleham, England, United Kingdom on December 24, 1822. A member of the upper stratum, he was the eldest son of Dr. Thomas Arnold, one of the most noble-tempered men of his time.
Matthew Arnold was born at Laleham, England, United Kingdom on December 24, 1822. A member of the upper stratum, he was the eldest son of Dr. Thomas Arnold, one of the most noble-tempered men of his time.
He was tutored by his uncle at Laleham, and after a year at Winchester (1836), he studied at Rugby (1837 - 1841), where his father had become headmaster.
In 1840 he wrote the Rugby Prize Poem, Alaric at Rome; the same year he won a competitive scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford.
After some teaching he became private secretary to Lord Lansdowne, who eventually had him appointed to an inspectorship of schools, a difficult, demanding job which required Arnold to do a good deal of traveling and which he held for most of his life.
Several of Arnold's early poems express his hopeless love for a girl he calls Marguerite. Scholars have been unable to identify an original for this girl, and whether she existed at all is a question.
In 1849 Arnold, under the pseudonym "A," published a collection of short lyric poems called The Strayed Reveller; the sale was poor and the book was withdrawn. In 1852 he published another collection, Empedocles on Etna and Other Poems, but this too, after a sale of 50 copies, was withdrawn. Two poems in this collection, however, require special notice. The first, "Empedocles on Etna," is in dramatic form. The second is Arnold's long poem on Tristram and Iseult, which again uses the monologue form. In 1853 Arnold published a collection called simply Poems; it included poems from the two earlier collections as well as others never before published, notably "Sohrab and Rustum" and "The Scholar Gypsy."
In 1857 Arnold was elected to the professorship of poetry at Oxford, and he held this post for the next decade. In 1869 Arnold collected his poems in two volumes. An important new poem was "Rugby Chapel," in which he payed tribute to his father. In 1861 Arnold published his lectures On Translating Homer and in the next year On Translating Homer: Last Words. He first isolates the main characteristics of the Homeric style and then consides a number of translations of Homer and the degree of their success in duplicating these characteristics in English.
Arnold's two-volume Essays in Criticism (1865 and 1888) includes essays on a variety of writers - Marcus Aurelius, Heinrich Heine, Leo Tolstoy, and Wordsworth among them. His critical essays are concerned with the discipline and preservation of taste at a time when literary standards were threatened by commercialism and mass education. With schoolmasterly repetitiousness Arnold attacks English provincialism, or "Philistinism" as he calls it. Of the several books which Arnold wrote on politics and sociology the most important is Culture and Anarchy (1869). Of the four books in which Arnold dealt with the threat to religion posed by science and historical scholarship, the most important is Literature and Dogma (1873).
In 1883 and 1886 he toured the United States and gave lectures, in which he tried to win Americans to the cause of culture. On April 15, 1888, Arnold went to Liverpool to meet his beloved daughter, and he died there of a sudden heart attack.
His religious views were unusual for his time. He rejected the supernatural elements in religion, even while retaining a fascination for church rituals. Arnold argues that the Bible has the importance of a supremely great literary work, and as such it cannot be discredited by charges of historical inaccuracy. And the Church, like any other time-honored social institution, must be reformed with care and with a sense of its historical importance to English culture.
Arnold criticizes 19th-century English politicians for their lack of purpose and their excessive concern with the machinery of society. The English people - and the narrow-minded middle class in particular - lack "sweetness and light," a phrase which Arnold borrowed from Jonathan Swift. For him England can only be saved by the development of "culture," which for Arnold means the free play of critical intelligence, a willingness to question all authority and to make judgments in a leisurely and disinterested way.
Quotations:
"Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things."
"Sad Patience, too near neighbour to despair."
"Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world."
He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1883.
Quotes from others about the person
Harold Bloom writes that "Whatever his achievement as a critic of literature, society or religion, his work as a poet may not merit the reputation it has continued to hold in the twentieth century. Arnold is, at his best, a very good, but highly derivative poet, unlike Tennyson, Browning, Hopkins, Swinburne and Rossetti, all of whom individualized their voices."
In 1851 Arnold married Frances Lucy Wightman, the daughter of a judge. The marriage was a happy one, and some of Arnold's most attractive poems are addressed to his children. The Arnolds had six children.