by Edward Short
Chapter 11
Culture and Hollowness: Newman and Matthew Arnold
“Your creeds are dead, your rites are dead,
Your social order too!
Where tarries he, the Power who said:
See I make all things new?”
Matthew Arnold, “Obermann Once More” (1867)
“I hold that unbelief is in some shape unavoidable in an age of intellect … considering that faith requires an act of will, and presupposes the due exercise of religious advantages.”
J. H. Newman, The Idea of a University (1873)
“God keep us all from hollowness! I am sure I need this prayer for myself, as much as any one.”
J. H. Newman to G. D. Ryder (7 January 1839)
Matthew Arnold and Arthur Hugh Clough will always be paired together, for all their differences, because they personify the doubts that riddled the Victorians. They were formed, in their separate ways, one as a neglected son and the other as an adopted son, by Thomas Arnold, the celebrated Headmaster of Rugby, with whose extravagant reputation Lytton Strachey had so much unfair fun. A. P. Stanley, Arnold’s biographer, described Dr. Arnold in the pulpit of Rugby School Chapel, where, Sunday after Sunday, he could be seen and heard “combating face to face the evil with which, directly or indirectly, he was elsewhere perpetually struggling.” For Stanley and for so many others, in addition to being a charismatic preacher, “He was still the scholar, the historian, and theologian, basing all that he said … on the deepest principles of the past and present. He was still the instructor and the schoolmaster, only teaching and educating with increased solemnity and energy. He was still the simple-hearted and earnest man, labouring to win others to share in his own personal feelings of disgust at sin, and love of goodness …”1 The gist of Dr. Arnold’s latitudinarian philosophy was that Christianity was moralism and it would prove of no use whatever to either his son or his adopted son when they encountered what Bishop Ullathorne called “the subtle sophistries of unbelief.”2 There were other shared influences. Thomas Carlyle made a formidable impact on both men. In looking back at his undergraduate days at Balliol, Arnold recalled “the puissant voice of Carlyle; so sorely strained, over-used, and misused since, but then fresh, comparatively sound, and reaching our hearts with true, pathetic eloquence.”3 Clough referred to himself in a letter to a friend as a sort of Carlylean lieutenant, one who was “content to be an operative—to dress intellectual leather, cut it out to pattern and stitch and cobble it into boots and shoes for the benefit of the work that is being guided by wiser heads”—chief of whom was the author of Chartism and Sartor Resartus. Emerson was another strong influence. Arnold paid attention to him not because he thought him a good poet or even a good writer but because he held fast to “happiness and hope:” it was the hallmark of his “hopeful, serene, beautiful temper.”4 Clough saw Emerson as the epitome of a new American nobility. “He is very Yankee to look at, lank and sallow and not quite without the twang; but his look and voice are pleasing nevertheless and give you the impression of perfect intellectual cultivation as complete as would any great scientific man in England … One thing that struck everybody is that he is much less Emersonian than his Essays. There is no dogmatism … about him.”5 Few would have said that John Henry Newman lacked dogmatism and yet his was the influence over Arnold and Clough that was deepest precisely because he embodied the faith that neither could entirely reject nor accept. Arnold wrote a letter to Clough in which he bemoaned the discontents of the age, “these damned times,” as he called them, in which “everything is against one—the height to which knowledge has come, the spread of luxury, our physical enervation, the absence of great natures, the unavoidable contact with millions of small ones, newspapers, cities, light profligate friends, moral desperadoes like Carlyle, our own selves, and the sickening consciousness of our own difficulties.”6 Newman, far from allowing himself to be made desperate by such difficulties, worked to resolve them, and although neither Arnold nor Clough adopted his Catholicism, they would always have their hands full trying to replace it. Arnold got at the very essence of the predicament that this put them into when he observed in God and the Bible (1875): “at the present moment two things about the Christian religion must be clear … One is that men cannot do without it; the other, that they cannot do with it as it is.”7 How Newman sheds light on the work of Arnold, especially in its religious aspects, will be the subject of this chapter. I shall look at Newman’s influence on Clough in a separate chapter.
In 1880, in an essay entitled “The Study of Poetry,” Matthew Arnold made a famous pronouncement: “The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay. There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve. Our religion has materialised itself in the fact, in the supposed fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact, and now the fact is failing it. But for poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion to-day is its unconscious poetry.”8 Then, again, in the same essay, he was even more categorical. “More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.”9 T. S. Eliot’s response to this aspect of Arnold is worth quoting. “Nothing in this world or the next is a substitute for anything else,” he told Harvard in 1933; “and if you find that you must do without something, such as religious faith or philosophic belief, then you must just do without it. I can persuade myself … that some of the things that I can hope to get are better worth having than some of the things I cannot get; or I may hope to alter myself so as to want different things; but I cannot persuade myself that it is the same desires that are satisfied, or that I have in effect the same thing under a different name.”10 This was to see the object as in itself it really is. Eliot was convinced that Arnold “comes to an opinion about poetry different from that of any of his predecessors. For Wordsworth and for Shelley poetry was a vehicle for one kind of philosophy or another, but the philosophy was something believed in. For Arnold the best poetry supersedes both religion and philosophy.”11 Arnold may have imagined that poetry was a substitute for religion but imagining such a thing and actually writing poetry in accordance with it are two different things. In his poetry, the personal God in whom he does not believe is his constant theme. Take that away and most of the poetry would be incomprehensible. So there is no sense in which his own poetry replaces religion: if anything, it shows that religion cannot be replaced. In his prose, he often expresses impatience with the practical, convinced that real discoveries in art and criticism can only be made in what he called “the order of ideas.”12 Yet since that “order” frequently landed him on “life’s arid mount,” where he could only attest the failure of ideas, his own preoccupation with the practical consequences of his ideas disproves them.13 After all, what sharply differentiated Arnold from other English poets of the nineteenth century were not his ideas on religion or even his many critical and social interests but his despair. In trying to understand Arnold, therefore, it is best to pay attention to what he does rather than to what he claims he is doing. In all of his attempts to rub along without religion, one man came back to haunt him and that was Newman. But before I look at Newman’s influence on Arnold, I should like to show how it was Newman, not Arnold, who first suggested that poetry might be a substitute for religion.
In Lyra Innocentium, the book of poems that John Keble published in 1846, the year after Newman’s secession from the Church of England, Newman saw many contradictory impulses at play, which epitomized the incoherence of Keble’s continuing adherence to an Anglo-Catholic faith that had more in
common with Catholic Rome than Protestant Canterbury. At one level, he saw a kind of turning away from the world in Keble’s poems: “Actual England is too sad to look upon. The Poet seems to turn away from the sight; else, in his own words, would it ‘bruise too sore his tender heart;’ and he takes refuge in the contemplation of that blessed time of life, in which alone the Church is what God intended it, what Christ made it, the time of infancy and childhood. He strikes the Lyra Innocentium. He hangs over the first springs of divine grace, and fills his water-pots with joy ‘ex fontibus Salvatoris,’ before heresy, schism, ambition, worldliness, and cowardice have troubled the still depths.”14 Then, he saw the poems embodying Keble’s devotion to the Blessed Virgin, which, for Newman, was proof of his yearning for genuine catholicity. “If the author is to sing of regenerate infants and their sinless blessedness, and is to view them in such lights as thence belong to them, to what is he necessarily brought back at once, but to the thought of our Lord in the first years of His earthly existence, when He was yet a little one in the arms and at the breast of His Blessed Mother? Hence the Virgin and Child is the special vision, as it may be called, which this truly evangelical poet has before him …”15 Bearing in mind their devotion to Mary, Newman saw Keble’s verses tending to reinforce the Romish character of Anglo-Catholicism, even though their maker would not abandon the Church of England. Yet, despite the catholic tendencies of the verses, Newman saw in Lyra Innocentium evidence for what he saw in The Christian Year as well: Keble’s readiness to use his verses to try to refurbish an otherwise dilapidated Anglicanism. “He did that for the Church of England which none but a poet could do: he made it poetical.” In itemizing how Keble managed this, Newman brought to bear his own deep experience of “the huge ugly boxes of wood, sacred to preachers, frowning on the congregation in the place of the mysterious altar …”
Now the author of the Christian Year found the Anglican system all but destitute of this divine element, which is an essential property of Catholicism;—a ritual dashed upon the ground, trodden on, and broken piece-meal;—prayers, clipped, pieced, torn, shuffled about at pleasure, until the meaning of the composition perished, and offices which had been poetry were no longer even good prose;—antiphons, hymns, benedictions, invocations, shovelled away;—Scripture lessons turned into chapters;—heaviness, feebleness, unwieldiness, where the Catholic rites had had the lightness and airiness of a spirit;—vestments chucked off, lights quenched, jewels stolen, the pomp and circumstances of worship annihilated; a dreariness which could be felt, and which seemed the token of an incipient Socinianism, forcing itself upon the eye, the ear, the nostrils of the worshipper; a smell of dust and damp, not of incense; a sound of ministers preaching Catholic prayers, and parish clerks droning out Catholic canticles; the royal arms for the crucifix; huge ugly boxes of wood, sacred to preachers, frowning on the congregation in the place of the mysterious altar … such was the religion of which this gifted author was,—not the judge and denouncer, (a deep spirit of reverence hindered it,)—but the renovator, as far as it has been renovated. Clear as was his perception of the degeneracy of his times, he attributed nothing of it to his Church, over which he threw the poetry of his own mind and the memory of better days.16
Here was how Keble’s Marian, Anglo-Catholic poetry served as a substitute for an actual Anglican religion that was as little welcoming to Mary as it was void of true principles of catholicity. For Newman, this was a considerable achievement and he did not make light of it. “Such doctrine coming from one who had such claims on his readers from the weight of his name, the depth of his devotional and ethical tone, and the special gift of consolation, of which his poems themselves were the evidence, wrought a great work in the Establishment.” For Newman, since it was clear that “the Anglican needs external assistance; [Keble’s] poems became a sort of comment upon its formularies and ordinances, and almost elevated them into the dignity of a religious system. It kindled hearts towards his Church; it gave a something for the gentle and forlorn to cling to; and it raised up advocates for it among those, who otherwise, if God and their good Angel had suffered it, might have wandered away into some sort of philosophy, and acknowledged no Church at all. Such was the influence of his Christian Year; and doubtless his friends hail his Lyra Innocentium, as being likely to do a similar work in a more critical time.”17 Newman may have rejected the religion of art, towards which some of his contemporaries were beginning to incline, but he nevertheless showed that it was not an idea that Matthew Arnold had originated.
Arnold’s version, however, was the one that became famous. It was also the one that inspired Walter Pater (1839–1894), the neurasthenic Fellow of Brasenose, whose overwrought essays had such an inordinate influence on Oscar Wilde and the aesthetes of the Nineties. “There are aspects of the religious character,” Pater wrote in an early essay on Coleridge, “which have an artistic worth distinct from their religious import. Longing, a chastened temper, spiritual joy, are precious states of mind, not because they are part of a man’s duty or because God has commanded them, still less because they are means of obtaining a reward, but because like culture itself they are remote, refined, intense, existing only by the triumph of a few over a dead world of routine in which there is no lifting of the soul at all.” Art, in other words, could be a tenable substitute for religion, especially after the grounds of religion were shown to be untenable. “Religious belief, the craving for objects of belief, may be refined out of our hearts, but they must leave their sacred perfume, their spiritual sweetness behind.” And to substantiate his point, he cited an unlikely authority. “This law of the highest intellectual life has sometimes seemed hard to understand. Those who maintain the claims of the older and narrower forms of religious life against the claims of culture are often embarrassed at finding the intellectual life heated through with the very graces to which they would sacrifice it. How often in the higher class of theological writings—writings which really spring from an original religious genius, such as those of Dr. Newman—does the modern aspirant to perfect culture seem to find the expression of the inmost delicacies of his own life, the same yet different!” Doubtless, Newman would have been surprised to see his theological writings cited to such confused purpose. Yet he could hardly have taken issue with Pater’s confirming how the young were seeking in art what they could not obtain in Anglicanism; in this regard, Pater was only confirming what Newman had been saying since the 1840s. Protestantism could not satisfy the genuine religious impulse in men and women. Unlike Newman, however, Pater openly welcomed the exodus from Christianity. “The spiritualities of the Christian life have often drawn men on, little by little, into the broader spiritualities of systems opposed to it—pantheism, positivism, or a philosophy of indifference. Many in our own generation, through religion, have become dead to religion. How often do we look for some feature of the ancient religious life, not in a modern saint, but in a modern artist or philosopher! For those who have passed out of Christianity, perhaps its most precious souvenir is the ideal of a transcendental disinterestedness.”18 Michael Burleigh takes a different view in his brilliant book, Earthy Powers, which can be read as a comprehensive response to Matthew Arnold’s claim that orthodox Christian faith became obsolete in the nineteenth century. “Art had replaced religion,” Burleigh points out, “in the sense of giving higher meaning to a world that was increasingly disenchanted, temporarily giving striking form and purpose to mythic incarnations of the human self to audiences all too aware of the ambient chaos and meaninglessness of the Godless condition.”19