The Norton Anthology of English literature. Volume 2

on religion, education, and politics; but like many sons of clergymen, he made a

determined effort in his youth to be different. As a student at Oxford he behaved like

a dandy. Elegantly and colorfully dressed, alternately languid or merry in manner, he

refused to be serious and irritated more solemn undergraduate friends and acquain

tances with his irreverent jokes. "His manner displeases, from its seeming foppery,"

wrote Charlotte Bronte after talking with the young man in later years. "The shade

of Dr. Arnold," she added, "seemed to me to frown on his young representative." The

son of Dr. Arnold thus appeared to have no connection with Rugby School's standards

of earnestness. Even his studies did not seem to occupy him seriously. By a session

of cramming, he managed to earn second-class honors in his final examinations, a

near disaster that was redeemed by his election to a fellowship at Oriel College. Arnold's biographers usually dismiss his youthful frivolity of spirit as only a tem

porary pose or mask, but it permanently colored his prose style, brightening his most

serious criticism with geniality and wit. For most readers the jauntiness of his prose

is a virtue, though others find it offensive. Anyone suspicious of urbanity and irony

would applaud Walt Whitman's sour comment that Arnold is "one of the dudes [dan

dies, or city slickers] of literature." A more appropriate estimate of his manner is

provided by Arnold's own description of the French writer Charles-Augustin Sainte-

Beuve: "a critic of measure, not exuberant; of the centre, not provincial . . . with gay

and amiable temper, his manner as good as his matter�the 'critiquesouriant' [smiling

critic]." Unlike authors such as Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Thomas Carlyle who committed

themselves solely to their literary pursuits, Arnold confined his writing and reading

to his spare time. In 1847 he took the post of private secretary to Lord Lansdowne;

and in 1851, the year of his marriage, he became an inspector of schools, a demanding

and time-consuming position that he held for thirty-five years. Although his work as

an inspector may have reduced his output as a writer, it had several advantages. His

extensive traveling in England took him to the homes of the more ardently Protestant

middle classes, and when he criticized the dullness of middle-class life (as he often

did), his scorn was based on intimate knowledge. His position also led to travel on

the Continent to study the schools of Europe. As a critic of English education, he

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MATTHEW ARNOLD / 135 1

was thus able to make helpful comparisons and to draw on a stock of fresh ideas in

the same way as in his literary criticism he used his familiarity with French, German,

Italian, and classical literatures to talk knowledgeably about the distinctive qualities

of English writers. Despite the monotony of much of his work as an inspector, Arnold

became convinced of its importance. It contributed to what he regarded as his cen

tury's most important need: the development of a satisfactory national system of

education. In 1849 Arnold published The Strayed Reveler, his first volume of poetry. Eight

years later, as a tribute to his poetic achievement, he was elected to the professorship

of poetry at Oxford, a part-time position that he held for ten years. Later, like Charles

Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray before him, Arnold toured America to

make money by lecturing. His lectures could leave audiences indifferent, but some

times they were highly acclaimed: thus the Washington Post reported that, following

a two-hour address in the U.S. capital, the African American leader Frederick Doug-

lass "moved that a tremendous vote of thanks be tendered to the speaker." A further

inducement for his two visits (in 1883 and 1886) was the opportunity of seeing his

daughter Lucy, who had married an American. In 1888 Arnold died of a sudden heart

attack. Arnold's career as a writer can be roughly divided into four periods. In the 1850s

most of his poems appeared; in the 1860s, literary criticism and social criticism; in

the 1870s, his religious and educational writings; and in the 1 880s, his second set of

essays in literary criticism.

Today Arnold is perhaps better known as a writer of prose than as a poet, although

individual poems such as "Dover Beach" (1867) continue to be widely popular. In his

own era his decision to spend hardly any time composing poetry after 1860 was

considered wrongheaded by some: "Tell Mat not to write any more of those prose

things like Literature and Dogma," Tennyson wrote in a letter, wishing that Arnold

would instead "give us something like his 'Thyrsis,' 'Scholar Gypsy,' or 'Forsaken

Merman.' " Others have felt that he made the right move: Arnold's poetry has been

criticized, in both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, on numerous grounds.

Some have disliked its excessive reliance on italics instead of on meter to emphasize

the meaning of a line, while others object to the prosy flatness of certain passages or,