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Studies in Three Arnold Problems
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
It is more and more frequently said that we need a critical edition of Matthew Arnold's prose works. Not that a sense of this need is of recent origin. The late E. K. Brown made note of it more than twenty years ago in the Preface to his pioneering Studies in the Text of Matthew Arnold's Prose Works (Paris, 1935); and before that, though with a considerably different emphasis, J. Dover Wilson, in the Editor's Preface to his edition of Culture and Anarchy (Cambridge, 1932), had pointed up the “surprises” which lie in store for readers of the first edition of Arnold's “Essay in Political & Social Criticism” who have known the book only from texts which have incorporated the author's revisions for the second edition of 1875. We now have a fine critical edition of the poetry (ed. Tinker and Lowry, Oxford, 1950), and we are, I think, coming very near to the time when a critical and definitive edition of the prose will be possible. Unpublished letters are being turned up and printed, anonymous contributions are being identified, and we are learning more and more about the developmental history of Arnold's books. In the first part of this article, then, I wish to add some new information and a new speculation or two about the evolution and text of Arnold's major effort at social criticism, Culture and A narchy.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1958
References
1 I have completed and am publishing this spring a modest volume entitled Matthew Arnold's Books: Toward a Publishing Diary (Paris and Geneva), in which the history of Arnold's books from the 1860's until his death is traced through excerpts, chronologically arranged, from some 300 unpublished letters from Arnold to his publishers. In that volume, the story is allowed to tell itself; in the present article, I have made an attempt to apply the materials from the letters toward a solution of three Arnold problems.
2 That Smith held Arnold morally obliged by this agreement is seen from the fact that when Macmillan's Mag. in Feb. 1869 printed Arnold's “On the Modern Element in Literature,” Smith wrote to ask Arnold if he was deserting him and the Cornhill. In a letter of 6 Feb. 1869 Arnold replied that this was an “old Oxford lecture ... 13 years old and in rather a high-horse academic style.” Arnold explained, too, that he had allowed the lecture to be printed with an eye to a quite special purpose (described in Sec. ii of this article). He reassured Smith: “I have a little gallery of subjects in my head, all of them meant for the Cornhill—but God knows when I shall have time to do any of them. They will certainly, however, if done at all, be done for the Cornhill and nothing else.”
3 The delivery of this lecture has been assigned to various dates; according to Arnold's statement here, it was given on 7 June 1867.
4 On 16 Nov. 1867 Arnold wrote to his mother: “Now I have to do a sort of pendant to Culture and its Enemies, to be called Anarchy and Authority, and to appear in the Christmas Cornhill. It will amuse me to do it, as I have many things to say; and Harrison, Sedgwick, and others, who have replied to my first paper, have given me golden opportunities” (Utters of Matthew Arnofd 1848–1888, ed. George W. E. Russell, London, 1895, i, 376—hereafter referred to as Letters).
5 No. 45, Pall Mall, the address of some of the publishing offices of Smith, Elder.
6 Mr. Chester apparently worked in the printing offices of Smith, Elder before the firm's printing jobs were “sent out” to Spottiswoode.
7 Brown, Studies in the Text of Matthew Arnold's Prose Works (Paris, 1935), p. 23. My dissenting references, here and hereafter, to Brown's book are made in the most respectful spirit. His is the only book we have on this subject; and, for the most part, against his very reasonable speculations I am setting information which was not available to him in 1934–35.
8 In English Prose of the Victorian Era, ed. C. F. Harrold and W. D. Templeman (New York, 1938), p. 1526, it is said—by what authority, I do not know—that “the popularity of Culture and Anarchy brought forth a second edition in 1875, in spite of its having appeared already in magazine form.”
9 George Grove (1820–1900) is today best known for his Dictionary of Music and Musicians. He was for many years a literary adviser for the Macmillan house and the second editor of Macmillan's Mag.
10 See n. 2 above.
11 The Note-books of Matthew Arnold, ed. Lowry, Young, and Dunn (London, 1952), p. xiv.
12 Such, that is, as “Eugénie de Guérin,” in the Cornhill of June 1863.
13 The Poets of Greece (London, 1869).
14 (Sir) Richard Claverhouse Jebb (1841–1905) published critical editions and translations of Theophrastus and other Greek writers.
15 The Education Act of 1870, providing for the first time universal state education. England had to wait many years, however, for free and compulsory education.
16 I have not succeeded in identifying this “distant cousin.”
17 The italics, except for best, are raine.
18 Walter Bagehot was editor of the National Rev.
19 Bishop John W. Colenso (1814–83), whose Critical Examination of the Pentateuch had evoked much opposition. An attempt was made to depose him, but in 1866 he was confirmed in the possession of his See by the law courts. Arnold's essay “The Bishop and the Philosopher” was on Colenso and Spinoza.
20 Donovan rather confuses his reader by bis statement that “the essay which found its way into Essays in Criticism as ‘Spinoza’ was the product of two articles published in Mac-millan's Magazine in 1863—‘The Bishop and the Philosopher’ and ‘A Word More About Spinoza‘” (p. 927); and the matter is not clarified by referring the reader to Brown's Studies in the Text of Matthew Arnold's Prose Works for the “very complicated” textual history of the essay. Donovan is exploring the first (1865) edition of Essays in Criticism; why, then, refer to the essay as it appeared, much recast, in the second edition (1869)? He does, after all, use “A Persian Passion Play” “as a negative instance to define more precisely the unity of the first edition of Essays in Criticism” (p. 929).