Matthew Arnold (24 December 1822 – 15 April 1888) was an English Victorian writer and social critic who filled in as an inspector of schools. He was known for his assaults on the contemporary tastes and habits of the “Savages” (The nobility), the ‘Philistines” (the business white-collar class), and the “People.” He was the son of Thomas Arnold, the praised superintendent of Rugby School.
He was a sibling to both Tom Arnold, art teacher, and William Delafield Arnold, writer, and colonial administrator. Matthew Arnold has been described as a wise essayist, a sort of author who rebukes and trains the readers on contemporary social issues. He was likewise an inspector of schools for thirty-five years and upheld the idea of state-directed auxiliary instruction. He turned into the missionary of culture in such fills in as Culture and Anarchy (1869).
Matthew Arnold is extraordinary in that his notoriety rests similarly upon his verse and his verse analysis. Just a fourth of his profitable life was given to composing verse. However, a significant number of similar qualities, mentalities, and emotions that are communicated in his sonnets accomplish a progressively adjusted detailing in his prose writings. This solidarity was clouded for most readers by the typical assessments of his verse as gnomic or suspected loaded, or as despairing or elegiac. His writing was considered as urbane, pedantic, and regularly satirically clever in its willful errand of illuminating the social cognizance of England.
A Short Biography of Matthew Arnold
Matthew Arnold was born on 24th December 1822. The place of his birth was Laleham. It was located in the valley of Thames. He was the second son of Dr. Arnold Thomas. He was the headmaster of Rugby. He received his early education from his uncle in Laleham. During his childhood, he fell in deep love with Thames and this love lasted till his death. When he got 13 years old, he was sent for proper schooling to Winchester. He studied there for a single year.
In 1837, he was shifted to Rugby and he stayed there till 1841. Although he was not a good student yet his improvement in studies with time could not be ignored. In 1841, he got admitted as a classical scholar to Balliol College, Oxford. Here he developed a taste for poetry and won several prizes in poetry. In his life at Oxford, Arnold became a vocal person who would expound his views on literature and would talk about things analytically.
In 1845, he was awarded a Newdigate prize and he was given a fellowship. In 1856, Arnold got the position of Private Secretary to Lord Lansdowne. He was an influential Whig statesman.
Matthew Arnold published his first poetic volume The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems in 1849. In the holiday period in 1847, Matthew Arnold fell in love with a girl of blue eyes. They might have loved each other but the exact details about the girl are unknown. No one knows about the girl. The poems of Matthew Arnold do suggest that there were some obstacles for the two lovers due to which the two lovers could not get united. They had to part ways. The obstacles are also not known.
In the meanwhile, he again fell in love with Miss Wightman. She was the daughter of Judge, Sir William Wightman. But the daughter of Miss Wightman refused for the marriage because Arnold did not have a good job and enough income. He decided to go for a higher job. With the help of Lord Lansdowne, he was appointed as the Inspectors of School in 1851. When he got the job, the consent for the marriage was also given by Sir William Wightman. The marriage was arranged and both got married in June 1851. The couple then went to Switzerland, France, and Italy for their honeymoon.
The couple bore six children. Two among the six were girls while four were boys. Three of the four boys died at an early age. He remained the inspector of schools for thirty-five years.
He published his second volume of poems, Empedocles, on Etna and other poems in 1852. He then published Poems: A new Edition in 1853. This volume included famous poems like Sohrab and Rustam and The Scholar Gipsy. Poems: Second series was published in 1854. This included some new poems.
In 1857, he was appointed as Professor of Poetry at Oxford. He continued to teach poetry at Oxford for ten years. He became the first lecturer to teach in English because the other professors would teach in Latin. He was re-elected for the same post in 1862.
This teaching of poetry aroused his interest in criticism too. He started speaking about the values and approaches of poetry. He then decided to write essays and published his literary criticisms as well. This included On Translating Homer 1861, Essays in Criticism 1865, and On the Study of Celtic Literature 1867. Then he published Culture and Anarchy in 1869.
Ultimately Arnold turned towards religion. In this religious zeal, he composed St. Paul and Protestantism (1870), Literature and Dogma (1873), God and the Bible (1875), and Last Essays on Church and Religion (1877). In these books, Arnold truly established Anglican innovation. Like every religious liberal, he experienced harsh criticism from different sides: from the standard, who blamed him for disloyalty, of transforming God into a “flood of inclination and of subbing obscure feelings for clear conviction.
The second criticism came from the heathens, for sticking to the congregation and holding certain Christian convictions of which he had subverted the establishments. Arnold believed his strict compositions to be useful and preservationist.
The individuals who blamed him for ruinous tendencies didn’t understand how far authentic and logical analysis had just perplexed the old establishments. The individuals who blamed him for meekness neglected to see that he viewed religion as the most noteworthy type of culture, the one essential without which all mainstream instruction is futile.
His demeanor is best summarized when he states that the current second two things about the Christian religion should without a doubt be obvious to anyone with eyes in his mind. One is, that men can’t manage without it; the other, that they can’t do it with all things considered.
He was convinced that much in famous religion was contacted with the finger of death. Thus, he looked to discover for religion a premise of logical truth that even the positive present-day soul must acknowledge. A reading of Arnold’s Note Books will persuade any reader of the profundity of Arnold’s otherworldliness. It will also convince the reader of how much, in his covered life, he trained himself in consistent dedication and self-absent mindedness.
Matthew Arnold died suddenly in Liverpool in 1888. He was going to meet his daughter who had come with her husband from America. He died of a heart attack. Arnold`s wife died in 1901.
Matthew Arnold’s Writing Style
Arnold’s Classicism
Arnold tried to restore style, structure and substance, in his subjects and works. He learned from his loving masters, Greeks. He learned the fine bits of considerations to be subjected to the complete impression of his works. Byron was pioneering trails of wonder in the third decade of the century. Shelley and Keats covered in a lack of clarity during their lifetime.
They were being restored in Victorian England by Arnold. A decent number of individuals neglecting to evaluate them, wrongly imagined that felicity of articulation was what their beautiful enormity comprised in. Phrase mongering turned into the need for the day.
Arnold as a poetical reformer enlisted his dissent against this look of rebellion. He was resolved to reestablish structure and form in poetry. In a letter, Arnold stated that at Oxford many students complained that the subjects treated in his poetry did not intrigue them. However, as he felt rather as a reformer in poetical issues, he was happy with this restriction. He wanted to have wellbeing and a chance to go on and shake the romantic strategies until they go down. Thus he turned against the advanced English propensity rather than making anything. “
A true classicist, Arnold had a classical mind and sought to embody the Greek spirit in all his writing. His classical ideal was perfection within limits. He had the classical tradition in his poem. Since form and content are inseparable, he avoided all kinds of subjectivity in poetical themes and expressions, which he described as allegory of a mind. Allegory, he maintained, instantly involves you in the unnecessary- and the unnecessary is the necessarily un-poetical.”
Arnold being a genuine classicist had a traditional brain, and tried to exemplify the Greek soul in his compositions. His old style was flawless inside cutoff points. He had the old-style convention in his poetic works. Since structure and substance are indivisible, he stayed away from a wide range of subjectivity in poetical topics and articulations, which he portrayed as purposeful anecdotes of a psyche.
Purposeful anecdote right away includes the readers in the superfluous and the pointless is fundamentally un-poetical. Thus Arnold`s style was more and more bent towards classical style of poetry both in form and matter. He did not follow the romanticized structures rather he focused on morality through the form and content written by Greeks.
Arnold’s Form and Content
Arnold despised the Elizabethan sentimental writers who had no order in structure and substance. In the nineteenth century, sentimental poets, especially Shelley and Keats, had done incredible damage to English verse. According to Arnold, Keats was a minor style and structure searcher. Shelley and Keats had just an abundance of articulations, the appeal, the extravagance of pictures, and the felicity of Elizabethan artists.
According to Arnold, true poets don’t comprise extravagance of articulation or in the wealth of pictures. A writer must be guided by specific standards. There are two workplaces of verse one to add to one’s store of contemplations and sentiments while another to form and hoist the psyche by a supported tone, various implications, and a stupendous style.
In unequivocal terms Arnold applied that genuine verse doesn’t comprise in choice and pictures. Verse can just remain alive by its substance. This is a gold certification of the all-relies regarding the theory of matters. In this manner poetry must not lose itself in parts and scene and fancy work yet should squeeze advances to the whole.
Nobility of Expression
Clarity and gravity are the attributes of a real classicist, and Arnold’s style is described by these characteristics. In contrast to the Romantic artists, he was not a structure and style searcher. In none of his poetic work there is a making progress toward influence of romanticism. Duffin says that Arnold’s poetry shows a feeling of love. The writer’s feelings must be awakened by magnificence. Arnold never comes up short in this regard. It is this that makes his poetry totally satisfying.
A fastidious poet, Arnold had grace and elegance in his style. He would never have the slightest approach to levity. He always aimed at the nobility of thought and nobility of expression. He described his Scholar Gipsy, in quest of spiritual elimination.
A critical writer, Arnold had effortlessness and class in his style. He could never have the smallest way to deal with levity. He generally focused on honorability of thought and respectability of articulation. He depicted his Scholar Gipsy, in a mission of profound disposal.
Still nursing in -conquerable hope
Still clutching the inviolable shade
He achieves as much the respectability of thought as of articulation.
All the poetic works of Arnold are similarly excellent in articulation. W. L. Jones says that not many artists have created so much which is so uniformly excellent in style. It would be no misrepresentation to state that a large portion of his poetic work deserved to be anthologized as much for the honorability of assumptions concerning the classical magnificence of expression and articulation. In his writings, Arnold is limpid, and lambent, and never disorderly and trenchant. Effortlessness and certainly are his major strengths in his works.
Sense of Color
Arnold is a classicist yet he is never oblivious in regards to the feeling of colors and their sense. In a considerable lot of his letters and works, Arnold censured Keats, however unknowingly he was a Keatsian. Keats has been known as a pictorial craftsman, one who paints with the pen rather than with a brush. Arnold is a pictorial craftsman.
Various colors stir him to his profundities. Duffin alludes to Thyrsis as a rich picture display. All the readers find in the poem blooms, red and white, gold, snap mythical serpent, blue ringers, white lilies, carnations, daffodils, and roses. These colors are not referenced, yet distinctively present to the psyches, eye and orange and violet nightfall.
There is a presentation of colors; however the hues are only from time to time, boisterous and glaring. They are cold and curbed, as are mindfully anticipated from a classicist.
Arnold’s Symbolism
Arnold is certifiably not a symbolic writer like Blake, Yeats, T.S. Elliot are. In any case, every so often he uses images and references. The sea is a repetitive image in his poetry. He inclines toward evening glow to daylight, and the ocean withdraws from the moon-whitened land with its despairing long and attracting thunder to the ocean.
Jones says that the sea for Arnold was the one component where he found the most profound impression of his own despairing and feeling of disengagement. The sea was something more for him. The withdrawing sea represented the decay of religious confidence.
Arnold’s Musicality
As contrasted and the majority of the sentimental writers, Arnold can’t be known as a singing bird. However, the music and song of his verse are indisputable. Duffin says that outside the patches Arnold’s verbal quality is continually fulfilling and something roused.
In Dover Beach, for instance, the ebbing and streaming movement of the influxes of the ocean realizes the unpleasant music. The readers hear the sound of the progressing and withdrawing ocean. The rhythm and agreement of the section are obvious.
Free Verse
Arnold might be viewed as the maker of Verse libre or Free Verse. He made a few trials with meter In The Strayed Reveler, and later in Rugby Chapel and Heine Gravy. It is totally off-base to assume that the analysis or the Stayed Reveler was presumably incited, somewhat by following of German and partly by pseudo-old style aversion of rhyme. However for the most part by the eccentricity that craving to appear as something else. Whatever restrictions Arnold may have, he can’t be accused of the fancy.
Homeric Similes
Arnold has utilized Homeric Similes in his poetry. Homeric or traditional similes are detailed point by point examinations, giving an impression or gloriousness. While requesting that the Scholar Gipsy fly the welcome of present-day society, the writer utilizes an able comparison. Arnold has been driven by his theory to praise the old epic and sensational verse of Greeks.
It has also made room in this model for following his master Homer. It has as much high earnestness as graphic loftiness. It was masterfully a challenging development and to end the peaceful with the analogy so detailed that we become consumed in the image for the good of its own and overlook what it is intended to represent.
In Sohrab and Rustam Arnold followed a comparable arrangement, where he presented a large number of Homeric similes. In the last piece of this work, Arnold gives an intricate image of the Oxus which rolls serenely on dismissing human distresses and languishing.