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The Divided Tradition of English Criticism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Except for several lengthy essays by certain of Arnold's worried contemporaries and scattered comments in out-of-the-way essays by later critics, no careful examination has ever been made of Arnold's religious views. It was not until 1930, when T. S. Eliot turned his attention to Arnold in an essay significantly treating Arnold's religious and aesthetic ideas together, that the long-neglected theological bearings of modern criticism were brought out into the open. Subsequently, Lionel Trilling made a more exhaustive criticism of Arnold's religious experience, but without clearly establishing its relation to Arnold's literary experience. In an effort to treat in detail what Eliot briefly touched on in his essay, I have tried elsewhere to show that Arnold's religious ideas changed in important ways during his life and that these changes affected his literary theory and practice. Religious and poetic ideas, which to later and more logical minds seemed hardly consistent with one another hung together in suspension in Arnold's mind, and as a result his work, taken as a whole, contains both Christian and non-Christian, romantic and nonromantic notions that have since his death been set against one another in the divided tradition which underlies modern English criticism.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1958
References
1 “Arnold and Pater,” Selected Essays, new ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950), pp. 382 ff.
2 Matthew Arnold (New York: W. W. Norton, 1939).
3 “The Religious and Aesthetic Ideas of Matthew Arnold,” unpub. Ph.D. diss. (Univ. of Michigan, 1955).
4 See L. E. Elliott-Binns, The Development of English Theology in the Later Nineteenth Century (London: Longmans, Green, 1952), pp. 4, 18–19.
5 Christianity and Naturalism: Essays in Criticism, Second Series (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1926), p. 197.
6 Preface, The Renaissance in Selections from Walter Pater, ed. Edward E. Hale (New York: Henry Holt, 1906), pp. 2–3, 21–22. Some aspects of Arnold's influence on Pater are discussed in detail by Geoffrey Tillotson in Criticism and the Nineteenth Century (London: Athlone Press, 1951), pp. 92–146.
7 “Coleridge's Writings,” English Critical Essays (Nineteenth Century), ed. Edmund Jones (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1916), esp. pp. 437, 449.
8 Selections, pp. 6, 133, 152–153.
9 Studies in Prose and Verse (New York: Dutton, 1922), p. 290.
10 See his recollections concerning the Rhymers' Club and the influence of Pater in his Introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892–1935 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), pp. viii-x, and in the chapter “The Tragic Generation” in The Trembling of the Veil.
11 Autobiographies: Reveries over Childhood and Youth, and The Trembling of the Veil (New York: Macmillan, 1927), pp. 142–143, 373.
12 Ideas of Good and Evil (London: A. H. Bullen, 1903), pp. 168, 112.
13 Cited by Holbrook Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties: A Review of Art and Ideas at the Close of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1916), p. 85.
14 “Theodicy, Poetry, and Tradition,” Spiritual Problems in Contemporary Literature, ed. Stanley R. Hopper (New York: Harper, 1952), p. 81.
15 See Peter Allt, “Yeats, Religion, and History,” Sewanee Rev., lx (1952), 626–627, 645–647.
16 George H. Ford, Keats and the Victorians (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1945), p. 179.
17 “We have seen that dogma does not explain, but safeguards the whole. It is like a wall built about a sacred source to keep the contents from running out, or an iron band surrounding the mystery to hold it intact” (Romano Guardini, “Dogma,” The Faith and Modern Man, trans. Charlotte E. Forsvth [New York: Pantheon Books, 1952], p. 120).
18 Speculations, ed. Herbert Read (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1924), pp. 32, 70, 50, 54, 117, 132, 131, 136.
19 Principles of Literary Criticism, 12th imp. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950), pp. 29, 35, 57, 62, 132, 251–252, 282.
20 Ibid., pp. 267, 277–283.
21 Science and Poetry (New York: W. W. Norton, 1926), pp. 95, 72. Richards rephrases the famous passage from the opening of Arnold's “The Study of Poetry” as follows: “Our impulses must have some order, some organisation, or we do not live ten minutes without disaster. In the past, Tradition, a kind of Treaty of Versailles assigning frontiers and spheres of influence to the different interests, and based chiefly upon [moral self-]conquest, ordered our lives in a moderately satisfactory manner. But Tradition is weakening. Moral authorities are not as well backed by beliefs as they were; their sanctions are declining in force. We are in need of something to take the place of the old order. ... a new order based on conciliation, not on attempted suppression. Only the rarest individuals hitherto have achieved this new order, and never yet perhaps completely. But many have achieved it for a brief while, for a particular phase of experience, and many have recorded it for these phases. Of these records poetry-consists” (pp. 44–45).
22 Annals of Innocence and Experience (London: Faber and Faber, 1946), pp. 101, 226, 234, 119, 123.
23 Art and Society, 2nd ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1945), pp. 64, 111.
24 Annals of Innocence and Experience, pp. 107, 229. On the underlying romanticism of Sorel's pessimism, and its contrast with Aristotelian and Scholastic views, see Yves R. Simon, Community of the Free, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Henry Holt, 1947), pp. 101–107.
25 Annals of Innocence and Experience, pp. 203, 230. Read's statement that happiness is the greatest enemy of art (p. 204) says in a more general way what Richards meant when he argued that some form of Manichean theology is necessary to a “tragic” view of life (Principles of Literary Criticism, p. 246).
26 Annals of Innocence and Experience, p. 10.
27 The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1933), p. 106.
28 The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, 2nd ed. (London: Methuen, 1928), pp. 1–2.
29 Use of Poetry, pp. 12, 77.
30 Selected Essays, pp. 13–14.
31 Eliot refers to a passage in Jacques Rivière's “La crise du concept du litterature,” published in the Nouvelle Revue Française in 1924. “If in the seventeenth century, anyone had taken it into his head to ask Molière and Racine why they wrote, they would probably only have been able to answer: 'To amuse people.' It was only with Romanticism that the art of writing began to be thought of as a raid on the absolute and its result as a revelation. At this time literature garnered the heritage of religion and organised itself on the model of the thing it was replacing. The writer became a priest; the sole aim of his gestures was to produce in the host that literature had become 'the real presence.' The whole of nineteenth-century literature is a vast incantation towards the miraculous.” See Martin Turnell, Jacques Rivière (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1953), p. 50, from which the translation is taken; in a footnote to the passage, Turnell cites a passage from Arnold's “The Study of Poetry” as representative of the point of view Rivière was attacking. For the similarity of Eliot's own “amusement” theory of poetry to Riviere's see The Use of Poetry, pp. 196 ff.
32 Use of Poetry, pp. 130–143.
33 Eliot argues that the poet as poet is concerned neither with Maritain's attempt to determine poetry's position in a Christian world nor with Richards' attempt to determine its position in a pagan world. But, he goes on, these ideas “get in through the pores” and make the poet overly conscious of his beliefs as held as opposed to the proper poetic consciousness of beliefs as felt. See The Use of Poetry, pp. 123–138.
34 Selected Essays, pp. 344, 378, 15, 341, 324, 342 ff.
35 Use of Poetry, p. 130.
36 See his essays “Arnold and Pater” and “Francis Herbert Bradley,” Selected Essays, pp. 382-404.
37 Use of Poetry, pp. 100, 118–121.
38 “The Literary Criticism of F. R. Leavis,” Essays in Criticism, ii (1952), 357.
39 “The State of Criticism: Representations to Fr. Martin Jarrett-Kerr,” Essays in Criticism, iii (1953), 230–231.
40 Essays in Criticism, iii (1953), 234.
41 “Editorial Note,” Essays in Criticism, i (1951), vi.