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Introduction to Modern Criticism 245 “Platonic” in his practice, but that so are the neo-Aristotelians, surreptitiously, precisely at their most successful. It takes no more than a reading of thePoeticsto establish that, although Aristotle worked as inductively and close to the specific text as the neo-Aristotelians would have him, at the same time he continued much of Plato’s approach, deepening Plato’s charge ofmimesisor imitation to give poetry philosophic validity, and substituting a sounder socio-psychological concept,catharsis, for Plato’s inadequate concept of poetic function as harmful stimulation of the passions. In addition to analyzing poetry by means of these remarkably explicit philosophic, social, and psychologicala priori(assumptions, Aristotle also turned on it an embryonic anthropology, traditions of the primitive origins of Greek drama, that has turned out to be surprisingly accurate to later anthropological, archaeological, and philological research (despite such inevitable’ flaws as his concept of the Choric song as a mere “embellishment” to tragedy)” Aristotle thus anticipated the chief features and techniques of the literary criticism we have come to call “modern.” Later classical and medieval critics continued one or another of these modern strains, from Aristarchus and the scholiasts in the second century before Christ, writing an embryonic social criticism, to Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio in the fourteenth century, furnishing allegorical interpretations of literature very close to what we would now call “symbolic” readings. The modem environmental criticism of literature began with Vico’sLa Scienza Nuovain 1725, which includes a social and psychological interpretation of Homer; it developed more fully (apparently independently of Vico) in Montesquieu’s work, particularly.The Spirit of Lawsin 1748. After this Italian and French origin, the movement spread principally in Germany through the latter half of the eighteenth century, shifting its focus from history and law to literature and art. In the work of Winckelmann, Lessing, and Herder, it became an aspect of burgeoning German nationalism. Winckelmann began it in 1764 with hisHistory of Ancient Art, which studies Greek plastic art in terms of its political, social, and philosophic background; Lessing continued it, principally in his Laocoontwo years later, with particular emphasis on the relativity of forms in historical usage and the importance of Aristotle’s principles; Herder developed the environmentalist approach still further, increasing the method’s relativism by opposing folk art and Gothic to the Classic-worship of Winckelmann and Lessing, extending Vico’s dynamic historical concepts in his own CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

246 Literary Criticism and Critical Approaches - I Philosophy of Historyand emphasizing a comparative method in all the fields he touched (making him the ancestor of our modern fields of comparative philology, comparative religion and mythology, and comparative literary study). All of this flowered in the next century in the work of the first really great modern critic, Coleridge, in England, and in a substantial school in France. TheBiographia Literaria, published in 1817, is almost the bible of modern criticism, and contemporary critics have tended to see it, with Arthur Symons, as “the greatest book of criticism in English,” and with Herbert Read as “the most considerable.” On its first page it announces the manifesto for modern criticism: the application of Coleridge’s political, philosophic (including the psychological), and religious principles to poetry and criticism. TheBiographiawas thus a century in advance of its time, and only the inadequacy of the knowledge available to him kept Coleridge from founding modern criticism then and there. He is, however, with the exception of Aristotle, certainly its most important progenitor. His work found no one to carry it on, unfortunately, and when the doctrines of environmentalist criticism reappeared in England, in H. T. Buckle’sHistory of Civilization in Englandin 1857, they were derived not from Coleridge but from his German predecessors and his French successors. Meanwhile, the German doctrine of literature as an expression of society was brought to France by Madame de Stael inLiterature in Relation to Social Institutions(1800), which was responsible in part for such diverse progeny as the rationalist history of Guizot, the populist history of Michelet, and the sceptical history of Renan, as well as by the biographical literary criticism of Sainte - Beuve and the sociological literary criticism of Taine. Sainte - Beuve was the point at which the whole earlier tradition split in two. On the one hand, he saw criticism as a social science, “the natural history of literature,” with a methodical procedure that studies the author, in the words of Macclintock inSainte-Beuve’s Critical Theory, in relation to “his race, his native country, his epoch, his family, his education and early environment, his group of associates, his first success, his first moment of disintegration, his peculiarities of body and mind, especially his weaknesses,” and much else. This is the tradition that continues in Taine, Brandes, Brunetiere, etc. On the other hand, Sainte-Beuve insists, in his criticism of Taine, in “M. Taine’sHistory of English Literature,” that the critic must also “continue to respect and inhale the scent of that sober, CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Introduction to Modern Criticism 247 delicately-perfumed flower which “is Pope’s, Boileau’s, Fontane’s.” This second tradition has been continued in the line through Arnold, Babbitt, and Eliot, equally indebted to him. Sainte- Beuve defines the combination of the two schools as the formula for the perfect critic, but admits that the hope of this reconciliation in one man is “an impossibility,” “a dream.” So it has proved to be for most of a century, at least, although in our time we might express the same hope with somewhat more reason. Taine himself claimed the historicaI imagination of Lessing and Michelet as part of his ancestry, and in the incidental literary anlyses in the latter’sHistory of France, some of them sharp class―anglings (like the reading ofManon Lescautas an expression of the small landed gentry before the Revolution), the resemblance to Taine is obviously more than a matter of historical imagination. At the same time, Taine’s three principal criteria for criticism -race, moment, milieu―had all been anticipated by Sainte - Beuve, who got them from Hegel’sZeit, Volke, Umgebung, which were in turn derived from Herder. Taine thus brought to a focus most of the earlier tendencies toward a scientific criticism, and his work logically enough became the target for all attacks on these tendencies. The Goncourts, for example, wrote very superciliously on meeting him, “This was Taine, the incarnation in flesh and blood of modern criticism, a criticism at once very learned, very ingenious, and very often erroneous beyond imagining.” Perhaps the sharpest and most perceptive recognition of his weaknesses and the weaknesses of a good deal of modem criticism, more perceptive than Sainte-Beuve’s strictures, came from Flaubert, who wrote in one of his letters, on theHistory of English Literature. There is something else in art beside the milieu in which it is practiced and the physiological antecedents of the worker. On this system you can explain the series, the group, but never the individuality, the special fact that makes him this person and not another. This method results inevitably in leavingtalentout of consideration. The masterpiece has no longer any significance except as an historical document. It is the old critical method of La Harpe exactly turned around. People used to believe that literature was an altogether personal thing and that books fell out of the sky like meteors. Today they deny that the will and the absolute have any reality at all. The truth, I believe, lies between the two extremes. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

248 Literary Criticism and Critical Approaches - I In 1869, Flaubert wrote to George Sand on the subject of critics: “At the time of La Harpe they were grammarians; at the time of Sainte-Beuve and Taine they were historians. When will they be artistes really artistes?” It was a question not to be answered for half a century. The next major development in modern criticism came in 1912 and the years immediately following. That year Jane Ellen Harrison, a professor of Greek studies at Newnham College, Cambridge, publishedThemis:A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion. The book includes “An Excursus on the Ritual Forms Preserved in Greek Tragedy” by Gilbert Murray, to whom the book is dedicated, and “A Chapter on the Origin of the Olympic Games” by F. M. Cornford, one of Miss Harrison’s colleagues at Cambridge. Although most of it is Miss Harrison’s independent work,Themisthus constituted a kind of collective manifesto of what is known as the Cambridge school of Classical scholarship, which completely revolutionized the study of Greek art and thought by turning on ft the anthropological knowledge and theories of Sir James G. Frazer and his followers.1 Both Murray and Miss Harrison had published before, the latter in fact for more than a quarter of a century, butThemisis the first full statement of their ritual view of origins and the first really detailed application of anthropology to the analysis of literature, here the Greek drama. Since in addition to printing and using Murray and Cornford, Miss Harrison drew heavily - on unpublished work by another colleague, A. B. Cook, and by others, it also constitutes a genuinely collective production by the group. Shortly afterwatds, the same year, Cornford publishedFrom Religion to Philosophy, a similar anthropological tracing of the ritual origins of Greek philosophic thoughts.2 In 1913, Murray published Euripides, and His Age, a study of Euripides and his drama against the background of the ritual origin of tragedy, and Miss Harrison publishedAncient Art and Ritual. The following year, Cornford publishedThe Origin of Attic Comedy, which analyzed Greek comedy in the same terms, and Cook published Zeus, an application of anthropological material to still another area. Finally, in 1920, Miss Jessie Weston tried the method, of the Cambridge school, with great success, on non-Greek material in 1. In fairness to indignant Oxonians, it should be pointed out that Oxford scholars, among them Murray and Andrew Lang, had sketched out the techniques for applying not only Frazer’s disreputable Cantabrigian anthropology, but Sir E. B. Tylor’s authentic Oxonian anthropology, to literature as early as 1907, in the symposium Anthropology and the Classics, edited by R. R. Marett, and that Murray had publishedThe Rise of the Greek Epicthe same year. 2. 1912 was a watershed year for more than this. It also saw the publication of F. C. Prescott’s “Poetry and Dreams” in The Journal of Abnormal Psychology, the first detailed and authentic application of psychoanalysis to poetry by a literary man. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Introduction to Modern Criticism 249 herFrom Ritual to Romancean anthropological exploration of the origins of the Grail Romances in ritual terms. Although these books are, for all practical purposes, modern literary criticism, as the work of scholars writing in fairly specialized fields they failed to attract the attention of literary men sufficiently to inaugurate the new movement. In America in 1919, Conrad Aiken turned, Freudian and other psychologies on poetry inScepticisms, and clearly formulated the basic assumption of modern criticism, that poetry is “a natural, organic product, with discoverable functions, clearly open to analysis.” Like,the Cambridge group, however, he lacked the literary influence to set criticism following out his assumption. It remained for I. A. Richards -Principles of Literary Criticismin 1924 to constitute the formal beginnings of modem criticism with a variant of the same statement that aesthetic experiences are “not in the least a new and different kind of thing” from other human experiences, and can be studied in the same fashion. It was, as we have noted, no new doctrine (not only had Aiken specifically anticipated it five years before, but John Dewey had stated substantially the same thing as his doctrine of the “continuity” of experience as early as hisStudies in Logical Theoryin 1903, and Aristotle had clearly operated on that assumption), but this time it was supported by the tremendous prestige of Ogden and Richards’The Meaning of Meaning, published the year before, it carried general conviction, and it bore fruit in a quarter of a century of modem literary criticism. The battle of course, is not yet won. The past century has seen critic after critic quarrel with every assumption or method of modern criticism, including every type of knowledge that might be brought to bear on literature, and even the basic assumption of continuity. At one end of the scale these attacks are the simple pettishness of James Russell Lowell in a review of Longfellow, mocking the modern critical view that “the form of an author’s work is entirely determined by the shape of his skull, and that in turn by the peculiar configuration of his native territory,” and Ludwig Lewisohn, in his Preface to Rank’sArt and the Artist, dismissing all modern criticism since Taine offhand for “leaving Hamlet out of the play.” At the other end of the scale they include the reasoned skepticism of Chekhov, writing to Suvorin in November 1888, noting the amount of “rubbish” by “blockheads” that scientific criticism, “working from irreproachable CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

250 Literary Criticism and Critical Approaches - I principles, has produced; or of Anatole France, in a criticism of Brunetiere inLa vie litteraire, proposing the same balance and reservations Sainte-Beuve had earlier proposed. As a matter of prime theory a critical method is conceivable which, proceeding from science, might share the latter’s certainty.... All things in the universe are inextricably intertwined. In reality, however, the links of the chain are, in any given spot, so jumbled that the devil himself could not disentangle them, even if he were a “logician”. One cannot foresee today, whatever one may say, a time when criticism will have the rigorousness of a positive science. One may even believe, reasonably enough, that that time will never come. Nevertheless the great philosophers of antiquity crowned their cosmic systems with a poetics. And they did wisely. For it is better to speak of beautiful thoughts and forms with incertitude than to be forever silent. Few things in the world are so absolutely subject to science that they will let science reproduce or predict them. And one may be sure that a poem or a poet will never be among those few If these things sustain a relation to science, it is to one that is blended with art, that is intuitive, restless, forever unfinished. That science or, rather, that art exists. It is philosophy, ethics, history, criticism ― in a word, the whole beautiful romance of man. A number of critics have found themselves sharply split on the matter. Thus John Middleton Murry, inThe Problem of Style, attacks “the fantastic dream” that criticism “might be reduced to the firm precision of a science,” and “the vain hope” of giving its language a constant and invariable significance,” but later in the same book proposes an equally scientific (or mechanistic) social and economic criticism, including a one: to-one correlation between economic and social conditions and artistic and literary forms, and even An EconomicHistory of English Literature. Allen Tate, an outstanding product of the assumptions of modern criticism and practicer of its methods, inReason in Madness, attacks the social sciences as the fundamental menace, as well as modem criticism itself, which he calls “the historica1 method,” and in which he lumps, along with history, the use, of the physical, biological, social, and political sciences in criticism. Similarly, John Crowe Ransom has at one time or another attacked the use of science in criticism, been violently opposed to social sciences like anthropology, and announced that he does not share Max Eastman’s “sanguine expectations” for psychology, while himself drawing brilliantly on all three in his own criticism. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Introduction to Modern Criticism 251 Probably more damaging to modern criticism than the attacks by good men and the ambivalence in some of its practitioners has been its enthusiastic defense by men whose own practice ranges from weak to execrable. Thus Louis MacNeice, inModern Poetry, announces a watered-down form of Richards’ continuity doctrine, that poetry is a normal activity, the poet being :“a specialist in something which every one practices,” but then fails to follow up that assumption in the ’book by turning any knowledge whatsoever on poetry. It would be hard to find two more violent enthusiasts for scientific criticism in recent times than Max Eastman, writing a manifesto in The Literary Mind for “a department of science which will have literature as its object of study,” and V. F. Calverton, in The New Ground of Criticism, eloquently advocating a criticism that will synthesize psychology, sociology and anthropology - and it would be equally hard to find two worse or more infuriating critics in our time. A comparable mistrust is inspired by Henri Peyre. He makes the very shrewd statement inWriters and Their Critics. Modern criticism is still groping for its method and enthusiastically experimenting with several techniques. It has not yet outgrown the primitive stage in which physics similarly fumbled before Bacon and Descartes chemistry before Lavoisier, sociology before Auguste Comte, and physiology before Claude Bernard. Then in the book Peyre reserves his sharpest attack for precisely those methods - of social, psychological, verbal, and other analysis―and precisely those critics - Richards, Empson, Burke. and Blackmur―who most clearly represent the attempt of criticism to outgrow the primitive tage he describes. At the same time, modern criticism has been regularly under attack by the invested enemy, the reviewers and the professional obscurantists. A characteristic illustration of the first, worth quoting for its typicality, is a review by Orville Prescott that appeared inThe New York Times March 28, 1945. The book under discussion is Florence Becker Lennon’s study of Lewis Carroll, Victoria Through the Looking Glass. Prescott writes: Miss Lennon has performed prodigies of research, but in spite of her conscientious labours her book is disappointing and tedious. The enchanting magic of the Alice books defies analysis. To seek its source in Freudian probings into Carroll’s complexes and CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

252 Literary Criticism and Critical Approaches - I repressions is as fruitless as to attempt to find explanations for a butterfly’s flight or the lightning’s choice of a target. Genius mysteriously exists; and flowers into enduring treasures as inexplicably. That Carroll lived a blameless bachelor life is true; but then some men are bachelors from choice and quite content with their lot, in spite of Miss Lennon’s Freudian suspicions. That carroll likes the company of little girls better than that of boys or adults IS also true, and rather odd of him. But all Miss Lennon’s solemn pryings into his psyche, into the sexual symbols of his books just don’t seem to get anywhere. ... But Lewis Carroll, to whom “hardly anything ever, happened,” led a singularly blank life... But Lewis Carroll led a life without exterior conflict of any kind, and with few inner ones (just vague religious hesitations). He knew neither love nor close friendships. He was a good man and a good Christian. He tried to get his own salary reduced and he insisted on a publishing contract that insured that he himself would bear any possible loss. But his life was dull and colourless.... As these quotations should make clear, in the course of attacking Miss Lennon’s psychoanalytic study, Prescott gives all the reasons why a psychoanalytic study seems very much to the point, and in the course of insisting that Carroll’s life was uneventful, fills it full of the most remarkable events. Like many contemporary reviewers Prescott attacks modern criticism seemingly not so much out of malice as out of simple ignorance. In other cases, such as J. Donald Adams’ weekly column inThe Sunday Timesand his bookThe Shape of Books to Come,malice and a kind of shrill venom are added, and the picture clearly is of the happily superficial reviewer, fighting to preserve his status and investment in what he thinks is criticism against a mob of sans- culottes. The attack by the professional obscurantists is a more complicated matter. Perhaps the best example is Mark Van Doren, whose approach to criticism, consistent with his St. John’s College approach to education, is opposed to the inroads of -any modern knowledge. whatsoever. In the Preface toThe Private ReaderVan Doren has written the most complete and eloquent attack ―on modem criticism with which I am familiar. He describes it as “deserts of ingenuity and plateaus CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Introduction to Modern Criticism 253 of learning,” reproaches it with ”doing all it can to arrest the lyric in its flight,” concludes that “it is at best a faulty science .. not an art.” To it Van Doren opposes a pure obscurantism: ”Arnold was wrong in the emphasis he placed upon ideas”; “We do not know that much about poetry, and we never shall”; “undiscussable,” “the mystery,” etc. The piece is remarkable for its tone of bitter elegy, beginning on a theme of exile (“contemporary criticism, a house in which I no longer feel at home”), rising to a wail of keening (“Our literary age is sick”), and ending .on the imagery of self-extinction (“My only ambition as a critic is henceforth to be one of those nameless strangers with whom writers dream that they communicate. Poetry itself can do with silence for a while.”) The final comment on Van Doren’s slogan of “private reading,” the bringing of nothing to bear on literature but the reader’s attention, was made accidentally by I. A. Richards. He writes in Interpretation in Teaching. The remedy, I suppose, is growth, which will occur if testing occasions enough force the adolescent survivals of the Child’s dream-world habit to withdraw into their proper place Unluckily, private reading ― when. it is only a partially controlled form of dreaming ― is a protection from such tests. It too often becomes a romantic,preserve for mental processes which are relatively extinct in fully waking life. Contemporary with modern criticism, along with embattled reviewers and obscurantists, are the violently controversial schools of aesthetic and philosophic doctrine that have enlivened the literary magazines in the past: Impressionists and Expressionists, Neo-Humanists and Naturalists, Classicists and Romanticists, Positivists and anti-Positivists, etc. Their current successor seems to be the largely pointless quarrel between the neo-Aristotelians and the neo-Platonists or neo- Coleridgeans. All of these schools and controversies have their function, but it tends to be one of debating large generalities and saying little so far as actual method is concerned. In one way or another, they are all contemporary blind alleys for the man really concerned with the analysis of literature. While the bricks are flying overhead, the serious modern critic will ‘tend to be down in the mine, digging away. He gets his hands dirtier, but he may also tum up a nugget now and then. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

254 Literary Criticism and Critical Approaches - I 8.3 In the Woods Near Cabin John Behind my back the way is lost in green, And I think here is a peace beyond destruction, For no man aims from any coign my death. But this peace is subtle before the eye: A glance will shatter it if sharp enough. I look where the blight eats silently the leaf To lacy death, and silently the thrush Soars for the fly; the tendrils of the creeper, Tightening, crush the host, and the spider, still At his ancient station, waits between two trees. Stumbling in the undergrowth, I pitch and fall, Tearing my hand upon a thorn. It bleeds, And I remember suddenly in my blood The motes warring for the mastery of me. ―Ernest Kroll 8.4 Keywords/Abbreviations  Aesthetics:Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of beauty and taste, as well as the philosophy of art. It examines subjective and sensori-emotional values, or sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste.  Democratic Criticism:Democratic criticism includes in its scope both the objective and the subjective. It takes account of the medium in space and time, and also of the subjective response. It requires personal absorption. It permits the fullest play of those CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Introduction to Modern Criticism 255 vital associations which are different in every person. The end of its work is not “good taste,” not knowledge, but life and character. 8.5 Unit End Questions (MCQ and Descriptive) A. Descriptive Type Questions 1. How is modern criticism different from the previous criticisms? 2. Define modern criticism. 3. “Modern criticism has vast organized bodies of knowledge.” Comment. 4. What are the methods and disciplines established useful for modern criticism? 5. Explain the features of contemporary criticism. 6. “Modern criticism has a formal methodology and a system of procedures.” Comment. 7. Discuss some of the modern critics mentioned in this chapter. 8. What change came over in 1912 in literary criticism? 9. Why has John Crowe Ransom attacked modern criticism on the use of science? B. Multiple Choice/Objective Type Questions 1. Modern criticism is also called . (a) New Criticism (b) Novel Criticism (c) Theoretical Criticism (d) Traditional Criticism 2. One of the important features of Modern Criticism is that each critic tends to have a which shapes, informs or limits his work. (a) Style (b) Rules (c) Master metaphor (d) School 3. One of the principle implications of Modern Literary Criticism is its development towards a . (a) Goal (b) Science (c) Notion (d) Tradition CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

256 Literary Criticism and Critical Approaches - I 4. Reason in Madness is written by . (a) Murrey (b) John Crowe Ransom (c) Allen Tate (d) Max Eastman 5. The Literary Mind is written by . (a) Louis MacNeice (b) V.F.Calverton (c) Henry Peyre (d) Max Eastman Answers: 1. (a), 2. (c), 3. (b), 4. (c), 5. (d). 8.6 References 1. Hyman, Stanley Edgar (1948), “Modern Literary Criticism”,New Mexico Quarterly, University of UNM Digital Repository, https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/cgi/view content.cgi?article=2857&context=nmq 2. Johns Hopkins (2005),Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism(2 nd Edition), Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ISBN 0801880106, OCLC 54374476. 3. Gelder, G.J.H. (1982),Beyond the Line: Classical Arabic Literary Critics on the Coherence and Unity of the Poem,Leiden: Brill Publishers, pp. 1-2, ISBN 9004068546, OCLC 10350183. 4. Murray, Stuart (2009),The Library: An Illustrated History, New York: Skyhorse, pp. 132-133, ISBN 9781616084530, OCLC 277203534. 5 Regan, Shaun and Dawson, Books (2013),Reading 1759: Literary Culture in Mid- eighteenth-century Britain and France,Lewisburg [Pa.]: Bucknell University Press, pp. 125-130, ISBN 9781611484786. 6. Jones, E. Michael (1991),Degenerate Moderns: Modernity as Rationalized Sexual Misbehaviour, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, pp. 79-84, ISBN 0898704472, OCLC 28241358. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Introduction to Modern Criticism 257 7. “Contemporary Women’s Writing | Oxford Academic”,OUP Academic, Retrieved 2019- 08-01. 8. Vladimir Nabokov,Lectures on Literature, chap.L’Envoi, p. 381. 9. Speirs, Logan (1986), Eagleton, Terry (ed.), “Terry Eagleton and ‘The Function of Criticism’”,The Cambridge Quarterly, 15(1): 57-63. ISSN 0008-199X, JSTOR 42966605. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

UNIT 9 MATHEW ARNOLD:THE STUDY OF POETRY Structure: 9.0 Learning Objectives 9.1 Introduction 9.2 Summary 9.3 The Study of Poetry 9.4 Conclusion 9.5 Keywords/Abbreviations 9.6 Unit End Questions (MCQ and Descriptive) 9.7 References 9.0 Learning Objectives In this unit, the students will study Mathew Arnold’sThe Study of Poetry:  Many of the ideas for which Arnold is best remembered.  Why in an age of crumbling creeds, poetry will have to replace religion.  Why we will “turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us.” 9.1 Introduction Matthew Arnold was one of the foremost poets and critics of the 19th century. While often regarded as the father of modern literary criticism, he also wrote extensively on social and cultural issues, religion, and education. Arnold was born into an influential English family — his CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Mathew Arnold: The Study of Poetry 259 father was a famed headmaster at Rugby — and graduated from Balliol College, Oxford. He began his career as a school inspector, travelling throughout much of England on the newly built railway system. When he was elected professor of poetry at Oxford in 1857, he was the first in the post to deliver his lectures in English rather than Latin. Walt Whitman famously dismissed him as a “literary dude,” and while many have continued to disparage Arnold for his moralistic tone and literary judgments, his work also laid the foundation for important 20th century critics like T. S. Eliot, Cleanth Brooks, and Harold Bloom. His poetry has also had an enormous, though underappreciated, influence; Arnold is frequently acknowledged as being one of the first poets to display a truly Modern perspective in his work. Perhaps Arnold’s most famous piece of literary criticism is his essay “The Study of Poetry.” In this work, Arnold is fundamentally concerned with poetry’s “high destiny;” he believes that “mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us” as science and philosophy will eventually prove flimsy and unstable. Arnold’s essay thus concerns itself with articulating a “high standard” and “strict judgment” in order to avoid the fallacy of valuing certain poems (and poets) too highly, and lays out a method for discerning only the best and therefore “classic” poets (as distinct from the description of writers of the ancient world). Arnold’s classic poets include Milton, Shakespeare, Dante, and Homer; and the passages he presents from each are intended to show how their poetry is timeless and moving. For Arnold, feeling and sincerity are paramount, as is the seriousness of subject: “The superior character of truth and seriousness, in the matter and substance of the best poetry, is inseparable from the superiority of diction and movement marking its style and manner.” An example of an indispensable poet who falls short of Arnold’s “classic” designation is Geoffrey Chaucer, who, Arnold states, ultimately lacks the “high seriousness” of classic poets. At the root of Arnold’s argument is his desire to illuminate and preserve the poets he believes to be the touchstones of literature, and to ask questions about the moral value of poetry that does not champion truth, beauty, valour, and clarity. Arnold’s belief that poetry should both uplift and console drives the essay’s logic and its conclusions. The essay was originally published as the introduction to T. H. Ward’s anthology,The English Poets(1880). It appeared later in Essays in Criticism, Second Series. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

260 Literary Criticism and Critical Approaches - I “The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay. There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve. Our religion has materialised itself in the fact, in the supposed fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact, and now the fact is failing it. But for poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry.” Let me be permitted to quote these words of my own [fromThe Hundred Greatest Men — ed.],as uttering the thought which should, in my opinion, go with us and govern us in all our study of poetry. In the present work[The English Poets — ed.] it is the course of one great contributory stream to the world-river of poetry that we are invited to follow. We are here invited to trace the stream of English poetry. But whether we set ourselves, as here, to follow only one of the several streams that make the mighty river of poetry, or whether we seek to know them all, our governing thought should be the same. We should conceive of poetry worthily, and more highly than it has been the custom to conceive of it. We should conceive of it as capable of higher uses, and called to higher destinies, than those which in general men have assigned to it hitherto. More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry. Science, I say, will appear incomplete without it. For finely and truly does Wordsworth call poetry “the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science;” and what is a countenance without its expression? Again, Wordsworth finely and truly calls poetry “the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge;” our religion, parading evidences such as those on which the popular mind relies now; our philosophy, pluming itself on its reasonings about causation and finite and infinite being; what are they but the shadows and dreams and false shows of knowledge? The day will come when we shall wonder at ourselves for having trusted to them, for having taken them seriously; and the more we perceive their hollowness, the more we shall prize “the breath and finer spirit of knowledge” offered to us by poetry. But if we conceive thus highly of CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Mathew Arnold: The Study of Poetry 261 the destinies of poetry, we must also set our standard for poetry high, since poetry, to be capable of fulfilling such high destinies, must be poetry of a high order of excellence. We must accustom ourselves to a high standard and to a strict judgment. Sainte-Beuve relates that Napoleon one day said, when somebody was spoken of in his presence as a charlatan: “Charlatan as much as you please; but where is there not charlatanism?” — “Yes” answers Sainte-Beuve, “in politics, in the art of governing mankind, that is perhaps true. But in the order of thought, in art, the glory, the eternal honour is that charlatanism shall find no entrance; herein lies the inviolableness of that noble portion of man’s being”. [Les Cahiers — ed.]. It is admirably said, and let us hold fast to it. In poetry, which is thought and art in one, it is the glory, the eternal honour, that charlatanism shall find no entrance; that this noble sphere be kept inviolate and inviolable. Charlatanism is for confusing or obliterating the distinctions between excellent and inferior, sound and unsound or only half-sound, true and untrue or only half-true. It is charlatanism, conscious or unconscious, whenever we confuse or obliterate these. And in poetry, more than anywhere else, it is unpermissible to confuse or obliterate them. For in poetry the distinction between excellent and inferior, sound and unsound or only half-sound, true and untrue or only half-true, is of paramount importance. It is of paramount importance because of the high destinies of poetry. In poetry, as in criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty, the spirit of our race will find, we have said, as time goes on and as other helps fail, its consolation and stay. But the consolation and stay will be of power in proportion to the power of the criticism of life. And the criticism of life will be of power in proportion as the poetry conveying it is excellent rather than inferior, sound rather than unsound or half-sound, true rather than untrue on half-true. The best poetry is what we want; the best poetry will be found to have a power of forming, sustaining, and delighting us, as nothing else can. A clearer, deeper sense of the best in poetry, and of the strength and joy to be drawn from it, is the most precious benefit which we can gather from a poetical collection such as the present. And yet in the very nature and conduct of such a collection there is inevitably something which tends to obscure in us the consciousness of what our benefit should be, and to distract us from the pursuit of it. We should therefore steadily set it CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

262 Literary Criticism and Critical Approaches - I before our minds at the outset, and should compel ourselves to revert constantly to the thought of it as we proceed. Yes; constantly in reading poetry, a sense for the best, the really excellent, and of the strength and joy to be drawn from it, should be present in our minds and should govern our estimate of what we read. But this real estimate, the only true one, is liable to be superseded, if we are not watchful, by two other kinds of estimate, the historic estimate and the personal estimate, both of which are fallacious. A poet or a poem may count to us historically, they may count to us on grounds personal to ourselves, and they may count to us really. They may count to us historically. The course of development of a nation’s language, thought, and poetry, is profoundly interesting; and by regarding a poet’s work as a stage in this course of development we may easily bring ourselves to make it of more importance as poetry than in itself it really is, we may come to use a language of quite exaggerated praise in criticising it; in short, to overrate it. So arises in our poetic judgments the fallacy caused by the estimate which we may call historic. Then, again, a poet or poem may count to us on grounds personal to ourselves. Our personal affinities, likings and circumstances, have great power to sway our estimate of this or that poet’s work, and to make us attach more importance to it as poetry than in itself it really possesses, because to us it is, or has been, of high importance. Here also we overrate the object of our interest, and apply to it a language of praise which is quite exaggerated. And thus we get the source of a second fallacy in our poetic judgments — the fallacy caused by an estimate which we may call personal. Both fallacies are natural. It is evident how naturally the study of the history and development of poetry may incline a man to pause over reputations and works once conspicuous but now obscure, and to quarrel with a careless public for skipping, in obedience to mere tradition and habit, from one famous name or work in its national poetry to another, ignorant of what it misses, and of the reason for keeping what it keeps, and of the whole process of growth in its poetry. The French have become diligent students of their own early poetry, which they long neglected; the study makes many of them dissatisfied with their so-called classical poetry, the court-tragedy of the seventeenth century, a poetry which Pellisson long ago reproached with its want of the true poetic stamp, with its politesse stérile et rampante [sterile and bombastic politeness—ed.], but which nevertheless has reigned in France as absolutely as if it had been the CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Mathew Arnold: The Study of Poetry 263 perfection of classical poetry indeed. The dissatisfaction is natural; yet a lively and accomplished critic, M. Charles d’Héricault, the editor of Clément Marot, goes too far when he says that “the cloud of glory playing round a classic is a mist as dangerous to the future of a literature as it is intolerable for the purposes of history.” “It hinders,” he goes on, “it hinders us from seeing more than one single point, the culminating and exceptional point; the summary, fictitious and arbitrary, of a thought and of a work. It substitutes a halo for a physiognomy, it puts a statue where there was once a man, and hiding from us all trace of the labour, the attempts, the weaknesses, the failures, it claims not study but veneration; it does not show us how the thing is done, it imposes upon us a model. Above all, for the historian this creation of classic personages is inadmissible; for it withdraws the poet from his time, from his proper life, it breaks historical relationships, it blinds criticism by conventional admiration, and renders the investigation of literary origins unacceptable. It gives us a human personage no longer but a God seated immovable amidst His perfect work, like Jupiter on Olympus; and hardly will it be possible for the young student to whom such work is exhibited at such a distance from him, to believe that it did not issue ready-made from that divine head.” All this is brilliantly and tellingly said, but we must plead for a distinction. Everything depends on the reality of a poet’s classic character. If he is a dubious classic, let us sift him; if he is a false classic, let us explode him. But if he is a real classic, if his work belongs to the class of the very best (for this is the true and right meaning of the word classic, classical), then the great thing for us is to feel and enjoy his work as deeply as ever we can, and to appreciate the wide difference between it and all work which has not the same high character. This is what is salutary, this is what is formative; this is the great benefit to be got from the study of poetry. Everything which interferes with it, which hinders it, is injurious. True, we must read our classic with open eyes, and not with eyes blinded with superstition; we must perceive when his work comes short, when it drops out of the class of the very best, and we must rate it, in such cases, at its proper value. But the use of this negative criticism is not in itself, it is entirely in its enabling us to have a clearer sense and a deeper enjoyment of what is truly excellent. To trace the labour, the attempts, the weaknesses, the failures of a genuine classic, to acquaint oneself with his time and his life and his historical relationships, is mere literary dilettantism unless it has that clear sense and deeper CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

264 Literary Criticism and Critical Approaches - I enjoyment for its end. It may be said that the more we know about a classic the better we shall enjoy him; and, if we lived as long as Methuselah and had all of us heads of perfect clearness and wills of perfect steadfastness, this might be true in fact as it is plausible in theory. But the case here is much the same as the case with the Greek and Latin studies of our schoolboys. The elaborate philological groundwork which we require them to lay is in theory an admirable preparation for appreciating the Greek and Latin authors worthily. The more thoroughly we lay the groundwork, the better we shall be able, it may be said, to enjoy the authors. True, if time were not so short, and schoolboys wits not so soon tired and their power of attention exhausted; only, as it is, the elaborate philological preparation goes on, but the authors are little known and less enjoyed. So with the investigator of “historic origins” in poetry. He ought to enjoy the true classic all the better for his investigations; he often is distracted from the enjoyment of the best, and with the less good he overbusies himself, and is prone to over-rate it in proportion to the trouble which it has cost him. The idea of tracing historic origins and historical relationships cannot be absent from a compilation like the present. And naturally the poets to be exhibited in it will be assigned to those persons for exhibition who are known to prize them highly, rather than to those who have no special inclination towards them. Moreover, the very occupation with an author, and the business of exhibiting him, disposes us to affirm and amplify his importance. In the present work, therefore, we are sure of frequent temptation to adopt the historic estimate, or the personal estimate, and to forget the real estimate; which latter, nevertheless, we must employ if we are to make poetry yield us its full benefit. So high is that benefit, the benefit of clearly feeling and of deeply enjoying the really excellent, the truly classic in poetry, that we do well, I say, to set it fixedly before our minds as our object in studying poets and poetry, and to make the desire of attaining it the one principle to which, as the Imitation says, whatever we may read or come to know, we always return.Cum multa legeris et cognoveris, ad unum semper oportet redire principium[“When you have read and learned many things, you should always return to the one principle.” Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ — ed.]. The historic estimate is likely in especial to affect our judgment and our language when we are dealing with ancient poets; the personal estimate when we are dealing with poets our CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Mathew Arnold: The Study of Poetry 265 contemporaries, or at any rate modern. The exaggerations due to the historic estimate are not in themselves, perhaps, of very much gravity. Their report hardly enters the general ear; probably they do not always impose even on the literary men who adopt them. But they lead to a dangerous abuse of language. So we hear Cædmon, amongst our own poets, compared to Milton. I have already noticed the enthusiasm of one accomplished French critic for “historic origins.” Another eminent French critic, M. Vitet, comments upon that famous document of the early poetry of his nation, the Chanson de Roland. It is indeed a most interesting document. The joculator or jongleur Taillefer, who was with William the Conqueror’s army at Hastings, marched before the Norman troops, so said the tradition, singing “of Charlemagne and of Roland and of Oliver, and of the vassals who died at Roncevaux,” and it is suggested that in the Chanson de Roland by one Turoldus or Théroulde, a poem preserved in a manuscript of the twelfth century in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, we have certainly the matter, perhaps even some of the words, of the chant which Taillefer sang. The poem has vigour and freshness; it is not without pathos. But M. Vitet is not satisfied with seeing in it a document of some poetic value, and of very high historic and linguistic value; he sees in it a grand and beautiful work, a monument of epic genius. In its general design he finds the grandiose conception, in its details he finds the constant union of simplicity with greatness, which are the marks, he truly says, of the genuine epic, and distinguish it from the artificial epic of literary ages. One thinks of Homer; this is the sort of praise which is given to Homer, and justly given. Higher praise there cannot well be, and it is the praise due to epic poetry of the highest order only, and to no other. Let us try, then, the Chanson de Roland at its best. Roland, mortally wounded, lay himself down under a pine-tree, with his face turned towards Spain and the enemy— “De plusurs choses à remembrer li prist, De tantes teres cume li bers cunquist, De dulce France, des humes de sun lign, De Carlemagne sun seignor ki l’nurrit.” CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

266 Literary Criticism and Critical Approaches - I [“Then began he to call many things to remembrance, — all the lands which his valour conquered, and pleasant France, and the men of his lineage, and Charlemagne, his liege lord who nourished him” — Chanson de Roland, iii, 939–42. Arnold’s note.] That is primitive work, I repeat, with an undeniable poetic quality of its own. It deserves such praise, and such praise is sufficient for it. But now turn to Homer— Hös phato tous d’eide katechen physizoos aia en Lakedaimoni auphi philei en patridi gaiei [“So said she; they long since in Earth’s soft arms were reposing, / There, in their own dear land, their fatherland, Lacedaemon” — Iliad, iii, 243, 244 (translated by Dr. Hawtry). Arnold’s note.] We are here in another world, another order of poetry altogether; here is rightly due such supreme praise as that which M. Vitet gives to the Chanson de Roland. If our words are to have any meaning, if our judgments are to have any solidity, we must not heap that supreme praise upon poetry of an order immeasurably inferior. Indeed there can be no more useful help for discovering what poetry belongs to the class of the truly excellent, and can therefore do us most good, than to have always in one’s mind lines and expressions of the great masters, and to apply them as a touchstone to other poetry. Of course we are not to require this other poetry to resemble them; it may be very dissimilar. But if we have any tact we shall find them, when we have lodged them well in our minds, infallible touchstone for detecting the presence or absence of high poetic quality, and also the degree of this quality, in all other poetry which we may place beside them. Short passages, even single lines, will serve our turn quite sufficiently. Take the two lines which I have just quoted from Homer, the poet’s comment on Helen’s mention of her brothers;— or take his A deilo, ti sphoi, domen Pelei anakti Thneta; hymeis d’ eston agero t’ athanato’ te. ei hina dystenoisi met’ andrasin alge’ echeton CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Mathew Arnold: The Study of Poetry 267 [“Ah, unhappy pair, why gave we you to King Peleus, to a mortal? but ye are without old age, and immortal. Was it that with men born to misery ye might have sorrow?” — Iliad, xvii. 443–45.] The address of Zeus to the horses of Peleus; — or take finally his Kai se, geron, to prin men akouomen olbion einai [“Nay, and thou too, old man, in former days wast, as we hear, happy.” — Iliad, xxiv. 543.] The words of Achilles to Priam, a suppliant before him. Take that incomparable line and a half of Dante, Ugolino’s tremendous words— Io no piangeva; sì dentro impietrai. Piangevan elli. [“I wailed not, so of stone grew I within;/they wailed. — Inferno, xxxiii. 39–40.] Take the lovely words of Beatrice to Virgil— Io son fatta da Dio, sua mercè, tale, Che la vostra miseria non mi tange, Nè fiamma d’esto incendio non m’assale. [“Of such sort hath God, thanked be His mercy, made me,/That your misery toucheth me not,/Neither doth the flame of this fire strike me.” — Inferno, ii. 91–93.] Take the simple, but perfect, single line— In la sua volontade è nostra pace [“In His will is our peace.”—Paradiso, iii. 85.] Take of Shakespeare a line or two of Henry the Fourth’s expostulation with sleep— Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast Seal up the ship-boy’s eyes, and rock his brains In cradle of the rude imperious surge. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

268 Literary Criticism and Critical Approaches - I And take, as well, Hamlet’s dying request to Horatio— If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, Absent thee from felicity awhile, And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain To tell my story. Take of Milton that Miltonic passage— Darken’d so, yet shone Above them all the archangel; but his face Deep scars of thunder had intrench’d, and care Sat on his faded cheek. Add two such lines as— And courage never to submit or yield And what is else not to be overcome. And finish with the exquisite close to the loss of Proserpine, the loss which cost Ceres all that pain To seek her through the world.” These few lines, if we have tact and can use them, are enough even of themselves to keep clear and sound our judgments about poetry, to save us from fallacious estimates of it, to conduct us to a real estimate. The specimens I have quoted differ widely from one another, but they have in common this: the possession of the very highest poetical quality. If we are thoroughly penetrated by their power, we shall find that we have acquired a sense enabling us, whatever poetry may be laid before us, to feel the degree in which a high poetical quality is present or wanting there. Critics give themselves great labour to draw out what in the abstract constitutes the characters of a high CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Mathew Arnold: The Study of Poetry 269 quality of poetry. Aristotle’s critics own allegiance to the artist but Arnold’s critic own allegiance to the art (poetry) and the society. Art should be given value which it possesses in itself. Arnold views poetry as the criticism of life. According to Arnold, there is no place for charlatanism in poetry. A charlatan is defined as the flamboyant deceiver who attracts others with tricks or jokes. Charlatanism in poetry confuses or removes the distinction between excellent and inferior, sound and unsound, true and untrue or only half true. In this essay, Arnold clearly rejects charlatanism in poetry in following words: “In poetry, which is thought and art in one, it is the glory, the eternal honor that charlatanism finds no entrance that this noble sphere be kept inviolate and inviolable.” Arnold supports his idea for the nobility in poetry by recalling the Saint-Beuve’s reply to napoleon, Arnold states the Saint-Beuve’s reply to Napoleon when he said to him that charlatanism is found in everything. Saint-Beuve replied to this that charlatanism might be found in everything except poetry, because in poetry the distinction between the superior and inferior and noble and ignoble is of paramount importance. Arnold regards poetry as criticism of life in true sense. Poetry can reflect the true spirits of life when it will be free of any kind of corruption or ignobility. He regards poetry as “the criticism of life governed by poetic truth and poetic beauty.” According to him the spirits of our age will find stay and consolation by this true criticism of life. The extent to which the consolation, comfort, solace in poetry is obtained is proportional to the power of poem’s criticism of life. It means that the measure to which a poem is genuine and noble, and free from charlatanism. Arnold than defines the true canons for the best poetry. The best poetry is that which is according to the reader’s desire or wish. Arnold illustrates this in following words: “The best poetry is what we want, the best poetry will be found to have power of forming, sustaining and delighting us and nothing else can.” Arnold states three different kinds of estimates that govern the reader’s mind while evaluating any piece of literature, especially poetry. These are: Real estimate CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

270 Literary Criticism and Critical Approaches - I Historical estimate Personal estimate According to him the most precious benefit to be collected from best poetry is “clearer and deeper sense of best” and “the strength and joy to be drawn from it.” This sense must be present in every reader’s mind while searching for the best in poetry, and to enjoy it. This sense should govern our estimate that what should we read. This estimate is called the real estimate of poetry. Arnold contrasts the real estimate to “two other kinds of estimate”, the historic estimate and the personal estimate. The real estimate of the poetry can be superseded by these two “fallacious” estimates. He says that these two estimates should be discarded while evaluating poetry; he cautions the critic that in forming a genuine and disinterested estimate of the poet under consideration, he should not be influenced by historical or personal judgments. Historical estimate is regarded fallacious, because we regard ancient poet excessive veneration. It calculates the poet’s merit on “historical grounds’, that is, by regarding a poets work as a stage in the course of development of a nation’s language, thought and poetry. The historical estimate is likely to affect our judgments and language when we are analyzing ancient poets. Arnold states this in essay, in the following words: “The course of development of nation’s language, thought and poetry, is profoundly interesting, and by regarding a poet’s work as a stage in this course of development, we may easily bring to ourselves to make it of more importance as poetry than in itself it really is, we may come to use a language of quite exaggerated praise in criticizing it; in short, to over rate it.” Personal estimate is another fallacy while criticizing poetry. It calculates a poet’s merit on the basis of personal affinities, liking or circumstances, which may make us over-rate the object of personal interest because the work in question “is, or has been of high importance to us personally”. We may over-rate the object of our interest, and can praise it in quite exaggerated language and grant it more value or importance than it really possesses. Personal estimate is regarded fallacious, because it makes people biased towards their contemporary poets. As example of erroneous judgments, he says that the 17th century French court tragedies were spoken with exaggerated praise, until Pellison reproached them for want of free poetic CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Mathew Arnold: The Study of Poetry 271 stamp, and another critic Charles d’Hericault, said that the 17th century French poetry had received excessive veneration. Arnold says that the critic seems to substitute, a halo for physiognomy, and a statue in place, where there was once a man. Many people, Arnold argues, skip in obedience to mere tradition and habit , from one famous name or work in its national poetry to another, ignorant of what it misses, and of the reason for keeping what it keeps, and of the whole process of growth in poetry. All this misses, however the indispensability of recognizing the “reality of poet’s classical character” that is the test whether it belongs to the class of very best and that appreciation of the wide difference between it and all the works which has not the same character. Arnold points out that tracing historical origins in works of poetry is not totally unimportant and that to some degrees personal choice enters into any attempt to anthologize the works. However, the ‘real estimate’, from which derives the benefit of clearly feeling and deeply enjoying the very best, the true classic in poetry ought to be the literary historian’s objective. Poetry as the Criticism of Life In his essay, ‘The Study of Poetry’ Matthew Arnold has presented poetry as a criticism of life. In the beginning of his essay he states: “In poetry as criticism of life, under conditions fixed for such criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty, the spirit of our race will find, as time goes by and as other helps fail, its consolation and stay.” Thus, according to him poetry is governed by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty. Poetic truth is a characteristic quality of the matter and substance of poetry. It means a sound representation of life. In other words, it is a true depiction of life without any attempt to falsify the facts. Poetic beauty is contained in the manner and style. It is marked by excellence of diction and flow of verse. While talking of Chaucer, Arnold mentions fluidity of diction and verse. Poetic beauty springs from right words in the right order. Poetic truth and poetic beauty are “inter-related and cannot be separated from one another.” The superior character of truth and seriousness in the matter and substance of best poetry, is inseparable from the superiority of diction and movement marking its manner and style,” says CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

272 Literary Criticism and Critical Approaches - I Arnold. If a poem is lacking in the qualities of poetic truth and high seriousness, it cannot possess the excellence of diction and movement, and vice-versa In his estimate of Burns and Wordsworth, Arnold points out that another characteristic of great poetry is application of ideas to criticism of life. The greatness of Wordsworth lies in his powerful application of the subject of ideas to man, nature and human life. Ideas according to Arnold are moral ideas. Another quality attributed to great poetry by Arnold is that of ‘high seriousness’. Although he does not fully explain the term, we gather quite a lot of information from his statement. Aristotle was of the view that poetry is superior to history due to the former’s qualities of higher truth and higher seriousness. What we judge from Arnold’s essay is that high-seriousness is concerned with the sad reality. This quality is possessed by poetry which deals with the tragic aspects of life. Even the examples given by Arnold from Dante, Shakespeare and Milton’s poetry illustrate this view. For instance, dying Hamlet’s request to Horatio: “If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart Absent thee from felicity awhile, And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain To tell my story…” Regarding the concept of criticism of life, it needs to be understood what Arnold meant by the phrase – “criticism of life”. It does not mean carping at or unnecessarily finding faults with life. The suggestion itself is unsound that it means a criticism of society and its follies. Criticism of life means a healthy interpretation of life. It means an evaluation, sympathetic sharing in and feeling for. The theory of poetry given Arnold has been challenged on many accounts. Arnold does not consider Burns a great poet because in his poetry Burns presents an ugly life. Arnold was of the view that a poet has the advantage of portraying a beautiful life in his poetry. Eliot attacked this opinion. He believed that the poet has not the advantage of describing a beautiful life but has rather an advantage of having the capacity to look beneath both ugliness and beauty. It is the power to look beyond boredom, horror and glory. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Mathew Arnold: The Study of Poetry 273 While teaching of the concept of poetic beauty, Arnold mentions excellence of diction but does not explain what it is. As regards the flow in verse or the fluidity in movement, Arnold probably does not realize that the use of coarseness is sometimes intentional to create a specific effect. Smoothness need not be the only one; harshness and ruggedness are equally great qualities, when used to create special effects. Matthew Arnold does not fully explain the term ‘high seriousness’. It should also be remembered here that seriousness should not at all be considered synonymous with solemnity. The serious and humorous can exist together. Another view put forward by Arnold that has been under the shadow of criticism is that of ‘ideas’. We might very well like to believe that what Arnold wants to say is that an author, while interpreting life for us, might also use a moral idea to convey a moral lesson. But what Arnold believes is that there is a pre-conceived idea on which the poet bases his evaluation. Eliot also criticizes Arnold on the latter’s occupation with only great poetry. Adhering to this principle, we might end up dealing with only a small part of the total poetry. Matthew Arnold talks of deriving pleasure from poetry. But according to critics he is actually biased towards morality – a fact that is evident from his view that poetry would replace religion. “More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us,” he writes. Apart from all the negative criticism directed against Arnold we cannot deny that he has very beautifully related literature to life. As Douglas Bush rightly points out that literature is not an end in itself for Arnold. It only adds to the beauty of life and answers the question ‘How to live?’ Arnold is such a person, who does not live to read, but reads to live. The Touchstone Method “Poetry is interpretative by having natural magic in it, and moral profundity.” Arnold’s touchstone method is a comparative method of criticism. According to this method, in order to judge a poet’s work properly, a critic should compare it to passages taken from works of great masters of poetry, and that these passages should be applied as touchstones to other poetry. Even a single line or selected quotation will serve the purpose. If the other work moves us CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

274 Literary Criticism and Critical Approaches - I in the same way as these lines and expressions do, then it is really a great work, otherwise not. This method was recommended by Arnold to overcome the shortcomings of the personal and historical estimates of a poem. Both historical and personal estimate go in vain. In personal estimate, we cannot wholly leave out the personal and subjective factors. In historical estimate, historical importance often makes us rate a work as higher than it really deserves. In order to form a real estimate, one should have the ability to distinguish a real classic. At this point, Arnold offers his theory of Touchstone Method. A real classic, says Arnold, is a work, which belongs to the class of the very best. It can be recognized by placing it beside the known classics of the world. Those known classics can serve as the touchstone by which the merit of contemporary poetic work can be tested. The best way to know the class, to which a work belongs in terms of the excellence of art, Arnold recommends, is: “To have always in one’s mind lines and expression of the great masters, and to apply them as a touchstone to the poetry.” This is the central idea of Arnold’s Touchstone Method. Matthew Arnold’s Touchstone Method of Criticism was really a comparative system of criticism. Arnold was basically a classicist. He admired the ancient Greek, Roman and French authors as the models to be followed by the modern English authors. The old English like Shakespeare, Spenser or Milton were also to be taken as models. Arnold took selected passages from the modern authors and compared them with selected passages from the ancient authors and thus decided their merits. This method was called Arnold’s Touchstone Method. However, this system of judgment has its own limitations. The method of comparing passage with a passage is not a sufficient test for determining the value of a work as a whole. Arnold himself insisted that we must judge a poem by the ‘total impression’ and not by its fragments. But we can further extend this method of comparison from passages to the poems as whole units. The comparative method is an invaluable aid to appreciation of any kind of art. It is helpful not merely thus to compare the masterpiece and the lesser work, but the good with the not so good, the sincere with the not quite sincere, and so on. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Mathew Arnold: The Study of Poetry 275 Those who do not agree with this theory of comparative criticism say that Arnold is too austere, too exacting in comparing a simple modern poet with the ancient master poet. It is not fair to expect that all hills may be Alps. The mass of current literature is much better disregarded. By this method we can set apart the alive, the vital, the sincere from the shoddy, the showy and the insincere. Arnold’s view of greatness in poetry and what a literary critic should look for are summed up as follows: “It is important, therefore, to hold fast to this: that poetry is at bottom a criticism of life; that the greatness of a poet lies in his powerful and beautiful application of ideas to life, to the question: how to live.” On Chaucer: Matthew Arnold is an admirer of Chaucer’s poetry. He remarks that Chaucer’s power of fascination is enduring. “He will be read far more generally than he is read now.” The only problem that we come across is the difficulty of following his language. Chaucer’s superiority lies in the fact that “we suddenly feel ourselves to be in another world”. His superiority is both in the substance of his poetry and in the style of his poetry. “His view of life [weltanschauung] is large, free, simple, clear and kindly. He has shown the power to survey the world from a central, a human point of view.” The best example is his Prologue toThe Canterbury Tales. Matthew Arnold quotes here the words of Dryden who remarked about it; “Here is God’s plenty.” Arnold continues to remark that Chaucer is a perpetual fountain of good sense. Chaucer’s poetry has truth of substance; “Chaucer is the father of our splendid English poetry.” By the lovely charm of his diction, the lovely charm of his movement, he makes an epoch and founds a tradition. We follow this tradition in Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton and Keats. “In these poets we feel the virtue.” And the virtue is irresistible. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

276 Literary Criticism and Critical Approaches - I In spite of all these merits, Arnold says that Chaucer is not one of greatest classics. He has not their accent. To strengthen his argument Arnold compares Chaucer with the Italian classic Dante. Arnold says that Chaucer lacks not only the accent of Dante but also the high seriousness. “Homer’s criticism of life has it, Shakespeare’s has it, Dante’s has it. But Chaucer’s has not.” Thus in his critical essay The Study of Poetry Matthew Arnold comments not only on the merits of Chaucer’s poetry, but also on the short-comings. He glorifies Chaucer with the remark, “With him is born our real poetry.” According to Matthew Arnold, Chaucer’s criticism of life has “largeness, freedom, shrewdness and benignity”, but it lacks “high seriousness.” The term “high seriousness” which Arnold says marks the works of Homer. Also, Dante and Milton and Wordsworth, apparently employed this “high seriousness” which entails a sustained magnificence of artistic conception and execution accompanied by deep morality and spiritual values. It must be remembered that Arnold laid a great deal of importance on the “human actions” as the proper subjects of poetry. His contention of “high seriousness” is inevitably bound up with this. His concept of poetry being a “criticism of life” is quite satisfied by Chaucer. Chaucer’s poetry is steeped with life, and yet there is basic sanity and order in his vision which Arnold should not have missed. The fun and comedy in Chaucer’s writing often blinds one to his basic greatness. His vision is truly Christian in its broad and forgiving tolerance. His vision of the earth ranges from one of amused delight to one of grave compassion. His fresh goodwill and kindly common sense, his sense of joy and warmth are communicated through his poetry especially inThe Canterbury Tales. But behind the fun and tolerance there is a sane moral view. Chaucer’s tolerance is not born of moral leniency or from a desire to excuse or mitigate the worldliness of the characters as he saw them. The Monk’s travesty of the cloister in the name of gracious living finds no exoneration from Chaucer, nor is Chaucer appreciative of the wickedness of the Summoner and the Pardoner. His tolerance is based on deep conviction of human frailty, and his medium of looking at it is irony, not inventive. When we read the pen portraits of the pilgrims, we can see how clearly Chaucer has suggested the values they live by and what they look for. In these values — the chivalry of the CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Mathew Arnold: The Study of Poetry 277 Knight, the Monk’s love for hunting, the Doctor’s love of gold, the poor Parson’s holy thought and work, the Clerk’s love for learning and teaching — lies Chaucer’s subtle moral judgment. When Arnold quotes a line from Chaucer as truly classic, he chooses a line expressive of stoic resignation. “O martir seeded to virginitee” from the Prioress’s tale. Indeed, all the lines quoted by Arnold as “touchstones” have the ring of stoic resignation. Thus, Arnold’s own view seems biased in favor of the obviously solemn and didactic. In fact, Arnold’s concept of poetry does not seem to include the genre of comedy. The term “high seriousness” has been interpreted to mean seriousness in the more obvious sense. The poet’s criticism of life is not only to be serious, but also seen to be serious. Arnold seems to demand solemn rhetoric. If we interpret “high seriousness” in this light, we can only say that Chaucer’s poetry lacks it, for Chaucer was anything but “solemn”. However, if we consider “high seriousness” in a broader light, Chaucer’s observation of life, his insight into its passions and weaknesses, its virtues and strength is truly great. If we strictly accept Matthew Arnold’s contention, then we will have to deny “high seriousness” to all comic writers, even to Moliere and Cervantes. On the Age of Dryden “The difference between genuine poetry and the poetry of Dryden, Pope, and all their school, is briefly this; their poetry is conceived and composed in their wits, genuine poetry is conceived and composed in the soul.” – Matthew Arnold John Dryden (1631–1700) was an English poet, literary critic, translator and playwright who was made Poet Laureate in 1668. He is seen as dominating the literary life of Restoration England to such a point that the period came to be known in literary circles as the “Age of Dryden”. Walter Scottish called him “Glorious John”. John Dryden was the greatest English poet of the seventeenth century. After William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, he was the greatest playwright. And he has no peer as a writer of prose, especially literary criticism, and as a translator. John Dryden was an English writer who was the dominant literary figure in Restoration England. Most of his contemporaries based their style of writing on innovations introduced by Dryden in poetry, drama, and literary criticism. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

278 Literary Criticism and Critical Approaches - I The age of Dryden is regarded as superior to that of the others for “sweetness of poetry”. Arnold asks whether Dryden and Pope, poets of great merit, are truly the poetical classics of the 18th century. He says Dryden’s post-script to the readers in his translation of The Aeneid reveals the fact that in prose writing he is even better than Milton and Chapman. Just as the laxity in religious matters during the Restoration period was a direct outcome of the strict discipline of the Puritans, in the same way in order to control the dangerous sway of imagination found in the poetry of the Metaphysicals, to counteract “the dangerous prevalence of imagination,” the poets of the 18th century introduced certain regulations. The restrictions that were imposed on the poets were “uniformity, regularity, precision, and balance.” These restrictions curbed the growth of poetry, and encouraged the growth of prose. Hence we can regard Dryden “as the glorious founder, and Pope as the splendid high priest, of the age of prose and reason, our indispensable 18th century.” Their poetry was that of the builders of an age of prose and reason. Arnold says that Pope and Dryden are not poet classics, but the “prose classics” of the 18th century. On Thomas Gray “He is the scantiest and frailest of the classics in our poetry, but he is a classic.” – Matthew Arnold Born in eighteenth-century London, Thomas Gray became one of those few names in English literature that despite a considerably short oeuvre are remembered and celebrated to this date. Often said to have been born in the wrong age and time, Gray led a highly troubled and dissatisfied life, and suffered from frequent bouts of melancholia and depression. But troubled as he was and the little which he wrote, he wrote incredibly well. Mostly remembered for his magnum opus, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, Gray wrote the kind of poetry where substance and form, thought and structure perfectly corroborate each other. Often the subject of many critical evaluations, Arnold, in his Study of Poetry and in several other commentaries, argue that Thomas Gray, often misunderstood and wrongly judged, belonged to the rare species of writers who never “spoke out”. “He never spoke out.” In these four words is contained the whole history of Gray, both as a man and as a poet.” ― Matthew Arnold. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Mathew Arnold: The Study of Poetry 279 For Arnold, Gray never “spoke out” rather words fell naturally and spontaneously from his pen. During his evaluation of the eighteenth-century, Arnold argues that it was not Dryden and Pope who were the poetical classics representative of their age, rather Gray who could be called the ultimate poetical classic of his century. In another commentary, Arnold enumerates different opinions that critics over time have had about Gray: Cowper writes: “I have been reading Gray’s works, and think him the only poet since Shakespeare entitled to the character of sublime. Perhaps you will remember that I once had a different opinion of him. I was prejudiced.” Adam Smith says: “Gray joins to the sublimity of Milton the elegance and harmony of Pope; and nothing is wanting to render him, perhaps, the first poet in the English language, but to have written a little more.” And, to come nearer to our own times, Sir James Mackintosh speaks of Gray thus: “Of all English poets he was the most finished artist. He attained the highest degree of splendour of which poetical style seemed to be capable.” Another reason for Gray not “speaking out” or writing enough is often said to be due to his being born in the wrong age. Eighteenth-century literature was gradually discovering the genre of prose and its possibilities. The greatest writers that the century produced were prose writers, as Arnold states in his discussion on the age of Dryden. In such an age, Gray, who was a born poet, could not blossom or flower the way he deserved to. Thus, Arnold writes: “Gray, a born poet, fell upon an age of prose. He fell upon an age whose task was such as to call forth in general men’s powers of understanding, wit and cleverness, rather than their deepest powers of mind and soul. As regards literary production, the task of the eighteenth century in England was not the poetic interpretation of the world; its task was to create a plain, clear, straightforward, efficient prose.” And so: “Coming when he did and endowed as he was, he was a man born out of date, a man whose full spiritual flowering was impossible.” But despite the fact that Gray did not enjoy a satisfying and long literary career, he managed to leave the coming generations with a small treasure of some of the finest verse ever written in the English language. For Arnold, Gray remains the most representative poet of the early CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

280 Literary Criticism and Critical Approaches - I eighteenth-century before the Romantics. Thomas Gray never “spoke out” because he never had to and because he couldn’t bring himself to. His poetry flowed from him naturally, expectantly and inevitably. Arnold comments: “Compared, not with the work of the great masters of the golden ages of poetry, but with the poetry of his own contemporaries in general, Gray may be said to have reached, in his style, the excellence at which he aimed.” Passed away at the age of 54, Gray’s Elegy is the poet’s most loved work, and a poem that could be safely attributed to the poet and to the man himself. The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea, The ploughman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me. On Burns Robert Burns, as Douglas Bush and R. H. Super observed, gets a surprising amount of attention in Arnold’s discussion of poets inThe Study of Poetry. There are three explanations of the prominence of Burns in Arnold’s major essay on poetry. Firstly, Arnold is returning to the question that had interested him in exchanges with Clough, the connection between emotion and artistic form. In a letter in which Arnold touched on revolution and the relations between labour and capital, he breaks off abruptly to discuss Burns as an artiste. Apparently in reply to Clough, Arnold says, “Burns is certainly an artiste implicitly.” The “fiery, reckless energy” of Burns is noted inThe Study of Poetryas well as his “sense of the pathos of things”. Arnold’s concern with the admirers of Burns, however, suggests a second explanation, that Arnold is responding to the work of his old friend John Campbell Shairp. Shairp, as the Oxford Professor of Poetry, had given an Oxford lecture on Burns, and in 1879 had published a monograph on Burns; in both, Shairp praised Burns as the Scottish national poet and the poet who celebrated the Scottish peasantry. Arnold’s discussion of Burns inThe Study of Poetrymay be seen as a part of an argument connected with a larger question that had concerned Arnold in all of CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Mathew Arnold: The Study of Poetry 281 his criticism: the kind of poetry that was necessary for a democratic age. Shairp had indeed seen Burns as a poet sympathetic to the people and to the cause of democracy and equality. Arnold seizes the chance to talk about Burns because he wants to say, as he does at the end of the essay, that only the best poetry is adequate for a democratic age. Along with the names of Dryden and Pope, Matthew Arnold also mentions the name of Robert Burns. Burns’ English poems are simple to read. But the real Burns is of course in his Scottish poems. “By his English poetry Burns in general belongs to the 18th century, and has little importance for us. Evidently this is not the real Burns, or his name and fame would have disappeared long ago. Nor in Clarinda’s love-poet, Sylvander, the real Burns either. The real Burns is of course in his Scottish poems. Let us boldly say that of much of this poetry, a poetry dealing perpetually with Scottish drink, Scottish religion and Scottish manners; he has a tenderness for it. Many of his admirers will tell us that we have Burns, convivial, genuine, delightful, here.” Burns’ “real poems,” according to Arnold, are those that deal with “Scottish way of life, Scottish drinks, Scottish religion and Scottish manners.” A Scottish man may be familiar with such things, but for an outsider these may sound personal. For supreme practical success more is required. In the opinion of Arnold, Burns comes short of the high seriousness of the great classics, and something remains wanting in his poetry. Leeze me on drink! It gies us mair Than either school or college; It kindles wit, it waukens lair, It pangs us fou’o knowledge Be’t whisky gill or penny wheep Or any stronger potion, It never fails, on drinking deep, To kittle up our notion. According to Arnold, there is an element of bacchanalianism in Burns’ poetry. He refers to many of Burns’ stanzas, and comments: “There is a great deal of that sort of thing in Burns, and it is unsatisfactory, not because it is bacchanalian poetry, but because it has not that accent of sincerity which bacchanalian poetry, to do it justice, very often has. There is something in it of bravado, something which makes us feel that we have not the man speaking to us with his real voice; as in the famous song For a’ that and a’ that: CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

282 Literary Criticism and Critical Approaches - I A prince can make a belted knight, A marquis, duke, and a’ that; But an honest man’s aboon his might, Guid faith he mauna fa’ that! For a’ that, and a’ that, Their dignities and a’ that, Are higher rank than a’ that. To sum up Arnold’s views on Burns, Arnold does not see Burns as belonging to the rank of the ultimate classics in English literature, as, once again, Burns’ poetry lacks “high seriousness”. Burn’s poetry is frivolous, bacchanalian and passionate and is devoid of all the merits that characterize classic poetry. But despite his flaws, Burns remains one of those poets in whose work intensity of passion and spirit merge splendidly and whose work astounds as well as please. 9.4 Conclusion Matthew Arnold, one of foremost critic of 19th century, is often regarded as father of modern English criticism. Arnold’s work as a literary critic started with Preface to Poems in 1853. It is a kind of manifesto of his critical creed. It reflects classicism as well his views on grand poetic style. His most famous piece of literary criticism is his essayThe Study of Poetry. In this work he talks about poetry’s “high destiny”. He believes “mankind will discover that we have to turn poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us.” Arnold lived in a materialistic world where advancement of science has had led society in a strange darkness. Importance of religion was submerged. People were becoming fact seekers. A gap was being developed and Arnold believed poetry could fill that gap. In his words: “Our religion has materialized itself in the fact, and the fact is now failing it. But for poetry the idea is everything, the rest is world of illusion, of divine illusion.” Arnold wrote: “Without poetry our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.” He had a definite aim in writing poetry. It was the “criticism of life.” By the “criticism of life”, he meant “noble and profound application of ideas of life.” He said poetry should serve a greater purpose instead of becoming a mere medium of gaining pleasure and appreciating beauty. According to him, the best poetry is criticism of life, abiding laws of poetic truth and poetic CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Mathew Arnold: The Study of Poetry 283 beauty. By poetic truth he meant representation of life in true way. By poetic beauty he meant manner and style of poetry. He said that a poet should be a man with enormous experience. His intellect should be highly developed by means of enormous reading and deep critical thinking. Arnold said that poetry is an “application of ideas to life.” If the application of ideas is powerful the poetry will become great. He also laid emphasis on the quality of “high seriousness.” It comes with sincerity which the poet feels for his subject. Many critics disagreed with Arnold on this point. T. S. Elliot, a great poet himself, disagreed with this view by saying that Arnold’s view is “frigid to anyone who has felt the full surprise and elevation of new experience in poetry”. Arnold’s classic poets include Dante, Milton, Homer and Shakespeare. He quotes the famous line of Milton: Nor thy life nor hate; but what thou livest Live well: how long or short, permit to heaven Arnold said poetry should deal with ideas not facts. “Ideas should be moral. He said morality should not be taken in narrow sense. He said “poetry of revolt against life; a poetry of indifference towards moral idea is a poetry of indifference towards life.” Using metaphors concerning rivers in what would prove subsequently to be a very influential way; Arnold, furthermore, argued that the “stream of English poetry” is only one “contributory stream to the world river of poetry.” He argued that we should “conceive of poetry worthily, and more highly than it has been the custom,” that is, as “capable of higher uses, and called to higher destinies, than those in general which man has assigned to it hitherto.” He contends that we must “turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us” because, as Wordsworth put it, it is the ‘breath and finer spirit of all knowledge” as a result of which it is superior to science, philosophy, and religion. To be “capable of fulfilling such high destinies,” however, poetry must be “of a high order of excellence.” In poetry, for this reason, the “distinction between excellent and inferior, sound and unsound or only half-sound, true and untrue or only half-true, is of paramount importance.” It is in poetry that conveys the “criticism of life.” The criticism of life “will be of power in proportion as the poetry conveying it is excellent, rather than inferior, sound rather than unsound CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

284 Literary Criticism and Critical Approaches - I or half-sound, true rather than untrue or half-true.” The “best poetry” is that which has a “power of forming, sustaining, and delighting us, as nothing else can.” Its “most precious benefit” is a “clearer, deeper sense of the best in poetry, and of the strength and joy to be drawn from it.” This sense should “govern our estimate of what we read.” Arnold contrasts this, what he terms the “real estimate,” with two other kinds of estimate, the historic estimate and the personal estimate, which are both “fallacies.” The former calculates a poet’s merit on historical grounds, that is, by “regarding a poet’s work as a stage” in the “course and development of a nation’s language, thought, and poetry”. The latter calculates a poet’s merit on the basis of our “personal affinities, likings and circumstances” which may make us “overrate the object of our interest” because the work in question “is, or has been, of high importance” to us personally. Arnold’s most important achievement inThe Study of Poetrywould have to be the establishment of his system of literary criticism — the touchstone method. It is a comparative analysis which entails the valourization of modern texts by comparing them to the works of such greats as Shakespeare, Milton etc. Though criticized by many critics for its rigidity, Arnold’s theory of proper criticism is one of the most important elements in his essay. After giving an elaborate account of the function and nature of poetry and criticism, Arnold gives a critical account of many of the classics in English literature. He traverses through great names like that of Chaucer, Gray, Dryden, and Burns. About Chaucer, Arnold says that though he is one of the greatest classics of English poetry, he lacks the “high seriousness” that is found in the likes of Shakespeare and Milton. On Dryden, Arnold says that he is one of the finest prose writers of English language and proper prose began from him. Arnold complements Gray and Burns for their great poetry, but again he rejects them as classics as like Chaucer; their poetry lacks the “high seriousness” that must be present in great poetry. 9.5 Keywords/Abbreviations  Charlatanism in Poetry:A charlatan is defined as the flamboyant deceiver who attracts others with tricks or jokes. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Mathew Arnold: The Study of Poetry 285  “Classic” Poets:Distinct from the description of writers of the ancient world. Arnold’s classic poets include Milton, Shakespeare, Dante, and Homer; and the passages he presents from each are intended to show how their poetry is timeless and moving.  Touchstone Method:Arnold’s touchstone method is a comparative method of criticism. According to this method, in order to judge a poet’s work properly, a critic should compare it to passages taken from works of great masters of poetry, and that these passages should be applied as touchstones to other poetry. Even a single line or selected quotation will serve the purpose. 9.6 Unit End Questions (MCQ and Descriptive) A. Descriptive Type Questions 1. Why does Arnold say that genuine poetry is conceived and composed in the soul? 2. Why did Arnold feel Poetry superior to all knowledge? 3. What are the qualities attributed to great poetry by Arnold? 4. What is the role of the critic according to Arnold? 5. Why does Arnold view Poetry as the criticism on life? 6. What are the true canons for the best poetry? 7. What according to Arnold are the three different kinds of estimates that govern the reader’s mind while evaluating any piece of literature, especially poetry? 8. What is the concept of poetic beauty? 9. How has Arnold related life to literature? 10. What is Arnold’s theory of Touchstone Method? 11. Why does Arnold say that Pope and Dryden are not poet classics, but the “prose classics” of the 18th century? 12. What are Arnold’s views about Thomas Gray and Burns? CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

286 Literary Criticism and Critical Approaches - I B. Multiple Choice/Objective Type Questions 1. We have to turn to “to interpret life for us, to console us, and to sustain us.” (a) Scriptures (b) Philosophy (c) Poetry (d) Critics 2. About which poet does Arnold say that—his view of things and his criticism of life—has “largeness, freedom, shrewdness, benignity.” He surveys the world from a truly human point of view. But his poetry is wanting in “high seriousness”. (a) Chaucer (b) Dante (c) Shakespeare (d) Dryden 3. About whom does Arnold write – “Their poetry is conceived and composed in their wits; genuine poetry is conceived and composed in the soul.” (a) Shakespeare and Milton (b) Dryden and Pope (c) Shelley and Wordsworth (d) Browning and Tennyson 4. According to Arnold, Poetry is Criticism of . (a) Morals and Values (b) Men and Women (c) Religion (d) Life 5. Arnold states three different kinds of estimates that govern the reader’s mind while evaluating any piece of literature, especially poetry. These are: Real estimate, Historical estimate and (a) Intellectual estimate (b) Imaginative estimate (c) Personal estimate (d) Educational estimate Answers: 1. (c), 2. (a), 3. (b), 4. (d), 5. (c). CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Mathew Arnold: The Study of Poetry 287 9.6 References 1. https://englishsummary.com/study-poetry-matthew-arnold/#Reading_Poetr 2. http://www.cssforum.com.pk/css-optional-subjects/group-v/english-literature/92538- mathew-arnold-study-poetry.html 3. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69374/the-study-of-poetry 4. George Saintsbury,Matthew Arnold(New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1899). 5. Saintsbury combines biography with critical appraisal. In his view, “Arnold’s greatness lies in ‘his general literary position’ (p. 227). Neither the greatest poet nor the greatest critic, Arnold was able to achieve distinction in both areas, making his contributions to literature greater than those of virtually any other writer before him.” Mazzeno, 1999, p. 8. 6. Herbert W. Paul,Mathew Arnold(London: Macmillan, 1902). 7. G.W.E. Russell,Matthew Arnold(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1904). 8. Lionel Trilling,Matthew Arnold(New York: Norton, 1939). 9. Trilling called his study a “biography of a mind.” 10. Stefan Collini,Arnold(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). 11. Nicholas Murray,A Life of Matthew Arnold(New York: St. Martin’s, 1996). 12. “...focuses on the conflicts between Arnold’s public and private lives. A poet himself, Murray believes Arnold was a superb poet who turned to criticism when he realized his gift for verse was fading”, Mazzeno, 1999, p. 118. 13. Ian Hamilton,A Gift Imprisoned: A Poetic Life of Matthew Arnold(London: Bloomsbury, 1998). CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

UNIT 10 T.S. ELIOT:TRADITION AND INDIVIDUAL TALENT Structure: 10.0 Learning Objectives 10.1 Introduction 10.2 Tradition and Individual Talent (Text) 10.3 Summary 10.4 Keywords/Abbreviations 10.5 Unit End Questions (MCQ and Descriptive) 10.6 References 10.0 Learning Objectives In this unit, the students will study:  The essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” – well-known work.  His contribution to the field of literary criticism.  His dual role as poet-critic.  Eliot’s influential conception of the relationship between the poet and preceding literary traditions. 10.1 Introduction Often hailed as the successor to poet-critics such as John Dryden, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Matthew Arnold, T.S. Eliot’s literary criticism informs his poetry just as his experiences as a CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

T S. Eliot: Tradition and Individual Talent 289 poet shape his critical work. Though famous for insisting on “objectivity” in art, Eliot’s essays actually map a highly personal set of preoccupations, responses and ideas about specific authors and works of art, as well as formulate more general theories on the connections between poetry, culture and society. Perhaps his best-known essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” was first published in 1919 and soon after included inThe Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1920). Eliot attempts to do two things in this essay: he first redefines “tradition” by emphasizing the importance of history to writing and understanding poetry, and he then argues that poetry should be essentially “impersonal,” that is separate and distinct from the personality of its writer. Eliot’s idea of tradition is complex and unusual, involving something he describes as “the historical sense” which is a perception of “the pastness of the past” but also of its “presence.” For Eliot, past works of art form an order or “tradition” however, that order is always being altered by a new work which modifies the “tradition” to make room for itself. This view, in which “the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past,” requires that a poet be familiar with almost all literary history—not just the immediate past but the distant past and not just the literature of his or her own country but the whole “mind of Europe.” Eliot’s second point is one of his most famous and contentious. A poet, Eliot maintains, must “self-sacrifice” to this special awareness of the past; once this awareness is achieved, it will erase any trace of personality from the poetry because the poet has become a mere medium for expression. Using the analogy of a chemical reaction, Eliot explains that a “mature” poet’s mind works by being a passive “receptacle” of images, phrases and feelings which are combined, under immense concentration, into a new “art emotion.” For Eliot, true art has nothing to do with the personal life of the artist but is merely the result of a greater ability to synthesize and combine, an ability which comes from deep study and comprehensive knowledge. Though Eliot’s belief that “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality” sprang from what he viewed as the excesses of Romanticism, many scholars have noted how continuous Eliot’s thought — and the whole of Modernism — is with that of the Romantics’; his “impersonal poet” even has links with John Keats, who proposed a similar figure in “the chameleon poet.” But Eliot’s belief that critical study should be “diverted” from the poet to the poetry shaped the study CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

290 Literary Criticism and Critical Approaches - I of poetry for half a century, and while “Tradition and the Individual Talent” has had many detractors, especially those who question Eliot’s insistence on canonical works as standards of greatness, it is difficult to overemphasize the essay’s influence. It has shaped generations of poets, critics and theorists and is a key text in modern literary criticism. 10.2 Tradition and Individual Talent (Text) In English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its absence. We cannot refer to “the tradition” or to “a tradition”; at most, we employ the adjective in saying that the poetry of so-and-so is “traditional” or even “too traditional.” Seldom, perhaps, does the word appear except in a phrase of censure. If otherwise, it is vaguely approbative, with the implication, as to the work approved, of some pleasing archaeological reconstruction. You can hardly make the word agreeable to English ears without this comfortable reference to the reassuring science of archaeology. Certainly the word is not likely to appear in our appreciations of living or dead writers. Every nation, every race, has not only its own creative, but its own critical turn of mind; and is even more oblivious of the shortcomings and limitations of its critical habits than of those of its creative genius. We know, or think we know, from the enormous mass of critical writing that has appeared in the French language the critical method or habit of the French; we only conclude (we are such unconscious people) that the French are “more critical” than we, and sometimes even plume ourselves a little with the fact, as if the French were the less. In English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its absence. We cannot refer to “the tradition” or to “a tradition”; at most, we employ the adjective in saying that the poetry of So-and-so is “traditional” or even “too traditional.” Seldom, perhaps, does the word appear except in a phrase of censure. If otherwise, it is vaguely approbative, with the implication, as to the work approved, of some pleasing archaeological reconstruction. You can hardly make the word agreeable to English ears without this comfortable reference to the reassuring science of archaeology. Certainly the word is not likely to appear in our appreciations of living or dead writers. Every nation, every race, has not only its own creative, but its own critical turn of mind; and is even CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

T S. Eliot: Tradition and Individual Talent 291 more oblivious of the shortcomings and limitations of its critical habits than of those of its creative genius. We know, or think we know, from the enormous mass of critical writing that has appeared in the French language the critical method or habit of the French; we only conclude (we are such unconscious people) that the French are “more critical” than we, and sometimes even plume ourselves a little with the fact, as if the French were the less spontaneous. Perhaps they are; but we might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism. One of the facts that might come to light in this process is our tendency to insist, when we praise a poet, upon those aspects of his work in which he least resembles any one else. In these aspects or parts of his work we pretend to find what is individual, what is the peculiar essence of the man. We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet’s difference from his predecessors, especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavour to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously. And I do not mean the impressionable period of adolescence, but the period of full maturity. Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, “tradition” should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to any one who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

292 Literary Criticism and Critical Approaches - I a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity. No poet, no artiste of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, thewholeexisting order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities. In a peculiar sense he will be aware also that he must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past. I say judged, not amputated, by them; not judged to be as good as, or worse or better than, the dead; and certainly not judged by the canons of dead critics. It is a judgment, a comparison, in which two things are measured by each other. To conform merely would be for the new work not really to conform at all; it would not be new, and would therefore not be a work of art. And we do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value — a test, it is true, which can only be slowly and cautiously applied, for we are none of us infallible judges of conformity. We say: it appears to conform, and is perhaps individual, or it appears individual, and many conform; but we are hardly likely to find that it is one and not the other. To proceed to a more intelligible exposition of the relation of the poet to the past: he can neither take the past as a lump, an indiscriminate bolus, nor can he form himself wholly on one or two private admirations, nor can he form himself wholly upon one preferred period. The first CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

T S. Eliot: Tradition and Individual Talent 293 course is inadmissible, the second is an important experience of youth, and the third is a pleasant and highly desirable supplement. The poet must be very conscious of the main current, which does not at all flow invariably through the most distinguished reputations. He must be quite aware of the obvious fact that art never improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same. He must be aware that the mind of Europe — the mind of his own country — a mind which he learns in time to be much more important than his own private mind — is a mind which changes, and that this change is a development which abandons nothingen route, which does not superannuate either Shakespeare, or Homer, or the rock drawing of the Magdalenian draughtsmen. That this development, refinement perhaps, complication certainly, is not, from the point of view of the artist, any improvement. Perhaps not even an improvement from the point of view of the psychologist or not to the extent which we imagine; perhaps only in the end based upon a complication in economics and machinery. But the difference between the present and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past’s awareness of itself cannot show. Some one said: “The dead writers are remote from us because weknowso much more than they did.” Precisely, and they are that which we know. I am alive to a usual objection to what is clearly part of my programme for themétierof poetry. The objection is that the doctrine requires a ridiculous amount of erudition (pedantry), a claim which can be rejected by appeal to the lives of poets in any pantheon. It will even be affirmed that much learning deadens or perverts poetic sensibility. While, however, we persist in believing that a poet ought to know as much as will not encroach upon his necessary receptivity and necessary laziness, it is not desirable to confine knowledge to whatever can be put into a useful shape for examinations, drawing-rooms, or the still more pretentious modes of publicity. Some can absorb knowledge, the more tardy must sweat for it. Shakespeare acquired more essential history from Plutarch than most men could from the whole British Museum. What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

294 Literary Criticism and Critical Approaches - I What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artiste is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality. There remains to define this process of depersonalization and its relation to the sense of tradition. It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to approach the condition of science. I, therefore, invite you to consider, as a suggestive analogy, the action which takes place when a bit of finely filiated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide. (II) Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry. If we attend to the confused cries of the newspaper critics and thesusurrusof popular repetition that follows, we shall hear the names of poets in great numbers; if we seek not Blue- book knowledge but the enjoyment of poetry, and ask for a poem, we shall seldom find it. I have tried to point out the importance of the relation of the poem to other poems by other authors, and suggested the conception of poetry as a living whole of all the poetry that has ever been written. The other aspect of this Impersonal theory of poetry is the relation of the poem to its author. And I hinted, by an analogy, that the mind of the mature poet differs from that of the immature one not precisely in any valuation of “personality,” not being necessarily more interesting, or having “more to say,” but rather by being a more finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations. The analogy was that of the catalyst. When the two gases previously mentioned are mixed in the presence of a filament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum is present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected; has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum. It may partly or exclusively operate upon the experience of the man himself; but, the more perfect the artiste, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material. The experience, you will notice, the elements which enter the presence of the transforming catalyst, are of two kinds: emotions and feelings. The effect of a work of art upon the person who CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)