Re Presentation of Romantic Ideas in Arnolds Essays

"There are four people, in especial," he once wrote to Cardinal Newman, "from whom I am conscious of having learnt a very different thing from merely receiving a strong impression learnt habits, methods, ruling ideas, which are constantly with me; and the four are Goethe, Wordsworth, SainteBeuve, and yourself."

Arnold's poetry is often seen as transitory between Wordworthian romanticism and a more pessimistic modernism. And personally he was also reputed to be a hybrid of the two. As a conversationalist he was exciting and witty; as a writer he was serious and melancholic. G. W. E. Russell called him "a man of the world entirely free from worldliness and a man of letters without the faintest trace of pedantry."

7. [C]ulture works differently. It does not try to reach down to the level of inferior classes; it does not try to win them for this or that sect of its own, with ready-made judgements and watchwords. It seeks to do away with classes; to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere; to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light, where they may use ideas, as it uses them itself, freely, - nourished, and not bound by them. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1869)

He praises Wordsworth thus: 'Nature herself took the pen out of his hand and wrote with a bare, sheer penetrating power'. Arnold also valued poetry for its strong ideas, which he found to be the chief merit of Wordsworth's poetry. About Shelley he says that Shelley is 'A beautiful but ineffectual angel beating in a void his luminous wings in vain'.

After the romantic period, which was the age confusion in criticism Arnold again imposed authority. He was an austere critic who laid down certain principles of criticism and taught others how to criticize. Scott James says, For half a century Arnolds position in this country was comparable with that of the venerable Greek (Aristotle) in respect of the wide influence he exercised. Matthew Arnolds contribution to English criticism is great; he was the first romantic critic. He was the first critic to declare that people could be consoled, healed and changed by reading literature. According to him, the spiritual health of a society lies in the ideal of spreading culture. He was also the first to claim that criticism civilizes the nations mind.
Arnolds classification of English society into Barbarians (with their high spirit, serenity, and distinguished manners and their inaccessibility to ideas), Philistines (the stronghold of religious

nonconformity, with plenty of energy and morality but insufficient sweetness and light), and Populace (still raw and blind) is well known. Arnold saw in the Philistines the key to the whole position; they were now the most influential section of society; their strength was the nations strength, their crudeness its crudeness: Educate and humanize the Philistines, therefore. Arnold saw in the idea of the State, and not in any one class of society, the true organ and repository of the nations collective best self. No summary can do justice to this extraordinary book; it can still be read with pure enjoyment, for it is written with an inward poise, a serene detachment, and an infusion of mental laughter, which make it a masterpiece of ridicule as well as a searching analysis of Victorian society. The same is true of its unduly neglected sequel, Friendships Garland (1871).

15. It flourished at the beginning and the end of the 18th centuries. It was a revolution against Classical criteria. It emphasized the value of a literary work in itself, apart from any external standards. It ascertains the viewpoint and intentions of the writer. It ignored ancient authorities and the doctrines of Aristotle in assessing a literary work.

16. Romantic criticism is entirely subjective. The critics expresses what he feels about the work, regardless of what others say about it. The romantic critic imposes new readings that cause readers to see the literary work in new lights. He can even create it anew. Its extreme subjectivity, not guided by objective rules, can lead to extreme and misleading views.

17. William Wordsworth (1770-1850): Freedom from submission to the classics. Criticism seeks what the author has to give, judging him on his own ground instead of applying a foreign measure to his genius. In Preface to Lyrical Ballads, he attacks the Neo-classical poetic diction. every author, as far as he is great and at the same time original, has had the task of creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed.

18. Matthew Arnold (1822 1888): Arnolds most significant literary thinking is contained in the essays The Function of Criticism at the Present Time and The Study of Poetry. Arnold says that criticism should be a means of learning the great values, or the dissemination of ideas, a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in

the world. He considered the most important criteria used to judge the value of a poem were high truth and high seriousness. Arnold advocated scientific objectivity in the study of literature. He sought for literary criticism to remain free of any external considerations outside the work itself. The appreciation of a literary work should be of the object as in itself it really is."Psychological, historical and sociological background are irrelevant. Knowledge of the literature of the past is a valuable means of measuring and assessing the literature of today. Arnold advises that we should have always in mind lines and expressions of the great masters, and apply them as a touchstone to other poetry. He suggests that his touchstone method should provide the basis for a real rather than an historic or personal estimate of poetry.

Function/definition of poetry: Arnold is confident that poetry has a great future. It is in poetry that our race will find an ever surer stay. Poetry acc to Arnold, is capable of higher uses, interpreting life for us, consoling us, and sustaining us, that is, poetry will replace religion and philosophy.

Romanticism, almost by definition, is difficult to clearly define. As Eric Partridge argues, ?We know what poetry is for all practical purposes, yet few are so full hardy as to attempt a rigid definition of it: the same applies to romanticism ?. We can, however more broadly define the movement?s ideology, if it may accurately be called such. A pantheistic adoration of nature, a desire to break free from the conscripts of traditional literary form, passionate support for revolutionary causes, and possibly most importantly a focus on the imagination as a unique creative force and exultation of individual emotional experience are all prominent features of Romantic literature. As with any movement, it shows a progression of intellectual ideas and corresponding literary works. William Blake, whose work I will seek to discuss is certainly one of the earliest Romantics and is widely regarded as the first poet to fully express the Romantic idea of how poetry should be composed. Along with Wordsworth and Coleridge, he was to greatly define the Romantic values and style. Where Byron, Shelly and Keats would follow with distinction, Blake helped to lead. In many senses he can be seen as the pioneering member of the movement, casting from the poetic ship all that may weigh it down; stifling the incalculably valuable imagination.

In some ways Wordsworth was for Arnold a personality even more congenial than Goethe. His range, to be sure, is narrow, but he, too, has attained spiritual peace. His life, secure among its English hills and lakes, was untroubled in its faith. Wordsworth strongly reinforces three things in Arnold, the ability to derive from nature its "healing power" and to share and be glad in "the wonder and bloom of the world"; truth to the deeper spiritual life and strength to keep his souland finally, a satisfaction in

the cheerful and serene performance of duty, the spirit of "toil unsevered from tranquillity," sharing in the world's work, yet keeping "free from dust and soil." From the Emperor Marcus Aurelius and from the slave Epictetus alike, Arnold learned to look within for "the aids to noble life." Overshadowed on all sides by the "uno'erleaped mountains of necessity," we must learn to resign our passionate hopes "for quiet and a fearless mind," to merge the self in obedience to universal law, and to keep ever before our minds These great masters, then, strengthened Arnold in those high instincts which needed nourishment in a day of spiritual unrest. From the Greek poets he learned to look at life steadily and as a whole, to direct it toward simple and noble ends, and to preserve in it a balance and perfection of parts. From Goethe he derived the lessons of detachment and self-culture. From Wordsworth he learned to find peace in nature, to pursue an unworldly purpose, and to be content with humble duties. From the Stoics he learned, especially, self-dependence and resignation. In general, he endeavored to follow an ideal of perfection and to distinguish always between temporary demands and eternal values. Criticism, to be effective, requires also an adequate style. In Arnold's discussion of style, much stress is laid on its basis in character, and much upon the transparent quality of true style which allows that basic character to shine through. Such words as "limpidness," "simplicity," "lucidity," are favorites. Clearness and effectiveness are the qualities that he most highly valued. The latter he gained especially through the crystallization of his thought into certain telling phrases, such as "Philistinism," "sweetness and light," "the grand style," etc. That this habit was attended with dangers, that his readers were likely to get hold of his phrases and think that they had thereby mastered his thought, he realized. Perhaps he hardly realized the danger to the coiner of apothegms himself, that of being content with a half truth when the whole truth cannot be conveniently crowded into narrow compass. Herein lies, I think, the chief source of Arnold's occasional failure to quite satisfy our sense of adequacy or of justice, as, for instance, in

his celebrated handling of the four ways of regarding nature, or the passage in which he describes the sterner self of the working-class as liking "bawling, hustling, and smashing; the lighter self, beer." By emotionalism, however, he does not allow himself to be betrayed, and he does not indulge in rhythmical prose or rhapsody, though occasionally his writing has a truly poetical quality resulting from the quiet but deep feeling which rises in connection with a subject on which the mind has long brooded with affection, as in the tribute to Oxford at the beginning of the _Essay on Emerson_. Sometimes, on the other hand, a certain pedagogic stiffness appears, as if the writer feared that the dullness of comprehension of his readers would not allow them to grasp even the simplest conceptions without a patient insistence on the literal fact. The fact that Arnold, in his social as in his literary criticism, laid the chief stress upon the intellectual rather than the moral elements of culture, was due to his constant desire to adapt his thought to the condition of his age and nation. The prevailing characteristics of the English people he believed to be energy and honesty. These he contrasts with the chief characteristics of the Athenians, openness of mind and flexibility of intelligence. As the best type of culture, that is, of perfected humanity, for the Englishman to emulate, he turns, therefore, to Greece in the time of Sophocles, Greece, to be sure, failed because of the lack of that very Hebraism which England possesses and to which she owes her strength. But if to this strength of moral fiber could be added the openness of mind, flexibility of intelligence, and love of beauty which distinguished the Greeks in their best period, a truly great civilization would result. That this ideal will in the end prevail, he has little doubt. The strain of sadness, melancholy, and depression which appears in Arnold's poetry is rigidly excluded from his prose. Both despondency and violence are forbidden to the believer in culture. "We go the way the human race is going," he says at the close of _Culture and Anarchy_.\