by Edward Short
One thing that makes Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) such an interesting figure is that he was never prepared for the full force of this “ambient chaos and meaninglessness” and when it gradually engulfed him it took him by a kind of tragic surprise. He was enamored of what he regarded as the “transcendental disinterestedness” of such figures as Sophocles and Goethe because he thought they might somehow sustain him in his own “Godless condition.” Culture and Anarchy was written, in part, to suggest ways that this accelerating chaos could be negotiated. He sought out continental mentors largely because of his unhappy relationship with his father, who nicknamed him “Crab,” after one of his legs was found to be deformed. When a doctor applied leg-irons to correct the problem, Arnold was left permanently maimed and always walked with a shambling gait. That he was a hobbled Pegasus even before he put pen to paper must have appealed to his sardonic sense of humor. If this deformity distanced him from his father, his temperament also set him apart. He had nothing of the earnestness or sanctimony that his father approved: he was too playful. Dr. Arnold’s Christianity, with its emphasis on manliness, moralism and self-examination, alienated his more ironical son. When he was removed from Winchester and enrolled in Rugby, Arnold found himself competing for his father’s affections with Clough, a devout and brilliant boy, four years his senior, who was the invariable apple of the famous Headmaster’s eye. “I verily believe that my whole being is soaked through with the wishing and hoping and striving to do the school good,” the insufferable golden boy in Clough wrote in 1836.20 Arnold was the reverse of the golden boy, and this would always leave his father imagining him frivolous and unsound. Arnold initially took up writing poetry to escape the dreary loneliness he felt at Rugby. He certainly never attended to his studies with the diligence his father expected. Nevertheless, when it came time to sit his Balliol exam, the indifferent scholar suddenly buckled down. The exam itself was demanding: four days of written work followed by an extensive viva voce. More than 30 candidates competed for the two ₤30 per annum awards. In his incisive biography of Arnold, Ian Hamilton recounts the results.
When it was learned at Rugby that Matthew was one of the two winners, Dr. Arnold wrote: ‘I had not the least expectation of his being successful … The news actually filled me with astonishment.’ For the headmaster, a Balliol scholarship meant Clough or—before him—Lake or A.P. Stanley, his own biographer-to-be. It meant surely a more strenuous Christian commitment than was evident so far in the always amiable Matthew. What did this triumph signify? A lowering of standards at Balliol? An error of judgment at Rugby? How was it that Matthew had managed to pretend to be his father’s son? Had he been practicing in secret?21
At Oxford, where he arrived in October 1841, after the publication of Tract 90, Arnold refused to join either the Arnoldians or the followers of Newman. Nevertheless, he enjoyed hearing Newman preach, which was a fair testament to his independence, considering the “unmixed aversion” with which his father regarded Newman and his Tractarian views.22 Still, however glowingly Matthew spoke of the man who had wondered aloud if his father was Christian, he always referred to Newman with an air of condescension. In this, he resembled Lord Acton, who referred to Newman in letters to his Liberal friends as “the venerable Noggs.”23 In 1881, Arnold wrote an account of what it was like to hear Newman’s legendary sermons, in which he could not resist taking a swipe at the man, who, at other times, he was intent on claiming as one of his masters.
The name of Cardinal Newman is a great name to the imagination still; his genius and his style are still things of power. But he is over eighty years old; he is in the Oratory at Birmingham; he has adopted, for the doubts and difficulties which beset men’s minds to-day, a solution which, to speak frankly, is impossible. Forty years ago he was in the very prime of life; he was close at hand to us at Oxford; he was preaching in St. Mary’s pulpit every Sunday; he seemed about to transform and to renew what was for us the most national and natural institution in the world, the Church of England. Who could resist the charm of that spiritual apparition, gliding in the dim afternoon light through the aisles of St. Mary’s, rising into the pulpit, and then, in the most entrancing of voices, breaking the silence with words and thoughts which were a religious music—subtle, sweet, mournful? I seem to hear him still, saying: ‘After the fever of life, after weariness and sicknesses, fightings and despondings, languor and fretfulness, struggling and succeeding; after all the changes and chances of this troubled unhealthy state,—at length comes death, at length the white throne of God, at length the beatific vision.’24
Arnold was quoting here from “Peace in Believing,” the sermon which Newman preached on Trinity Sunday in 1839, two years before Arnold came up to Oxford. In referring to the sermon as “religious music,” Arnold was only the first of many who would effuse about Newman’s style and ignore his content. The content of “Peace in Believing” could have been written expressly with the future poet in mind, who spent so many of his days chronicling unbelief’s lack of peace. “The doctrine of the Blessed Trinity,” Newman wrote, “has been made the subject of especial contention among the professed followers of Christ. It has brought a sword upon earth, but it was intended to bring peace. And it does bring peace to those who humbly receive it in faith. Let us beg of God … that it may not be an occasion of strife, but worship; not of division, but of unity; not jealousy, but of love.”25 For Arnold to choose to quote this one sermon, out of the 1,270 Newman preached when he was an Anglican, showed a certain self-knowledge.26 Here was the peace he elected to renounce.
Some of Arnold’s most revelatory writing is contained in letters he wrote to Clough. “If one loved what was beautiful and interesting in itself passionately enough, one would produce what was excellent without troubling with religious dogmas at all,” he explained to his friend in 1853. “As it is, we are warm only when dealing with these last—and what is frigid is always bad.” However opposed he was to acknowledging that truth might have something to do with religion, he recognized why “most others stick to the old religious dogmas … this warmth is the great blessing, and this frigidity is the great curse—and on the old religious road they have still the best chance of getting the one and avoiding the other.”27 Here, in a nutshell, was Arnold’s peculiarly Anglican skepticism, in which he sought to retain the consolatory warmth after jettisoning the truth of Christianity. In this respect, he was reminiscent of another good English poet who made despair his specialty. “I’m an agnostic,” Philip Larkin would tell anyone who asked, “but an Anglican agnostic of course.”28 For truth, Arnold would go not to religion but to culture, the consequences of which Eliot saw so clearly. “The total effect of Arnold’s philosophy is to set up Culture in the place of Religion, and to leave Religion to be laid waste by the anarchy of feeling. And culture is a term which each man not only may interpret as he pleases, but must indeed interpret as he can. So the gospel of Pater follows naturally upon the prophecy of Arnold.”29
After Newman’s conversion, Arnold became a Fellow of Oriel, where Newman and his father had also been Fellows, and then, in 1851, an inspector of schools, a demanding post requiring much traveling up and down the country, which he held for 35 years. “I must go back to my charming occupation of hearing students give lessons,” he wrote to one correspondent with an audible groan. “Here is my programme for this afternoon: Avalanches—the Steam Engine—The Thames—India Rubber—Bricks—The Battle of Poitiers—Subtraction—The Reindeer—The Gunpowder Plot—The Jordan. Alluring, is it not? Twenty minutes each, and the days of one’s life are only threescore and ten.”30
Thomas Arnold (1823–1900), Matthew’s younger brother, was an inspector of schools in New Zealand and while posted in Hobart Town, he wrote to Newman to tell him how his writings had exercised “the greatest influence” over his mind. “You who have said that a man who has once comprehended and admitted the theological definition of God, cannot logically rest until he has admitted the whole system of Catholicism,
will not wonder if after having admitted Christianity to be an assemblage of real indubitable historical facts, I gradually came to see that the foundation of the One-Catholic Church was one of those facts, and that She is the only safe and sufficient witness, across time and space, to the reality of those facts and to the mode of their occurrence.”31 Thomas converted in 1856, over the vehement objections of his wife. After lapsing from the Church in the 1860s and reconverting in 1876, his brother Matthew wrote him a revealing letter:
As to Catholicism, that is a long story. Catholicism is most interesting, and were I born in a Roman Catholic country I should most certainly never leave the Catholic Church for a Protestant; but neither then or now could I imagine that the Catholic Church possessed ‘the truth,’ or anything like it, or that it could possess it.32
In 1857, Tom and Matthew dined with Clough at Verrey’s Restaurant in Regent Street, and during dinner, Matthew warmly recommended some work of Voltaire. Clough took offense, objecting to its licentiousness. When Matthew brushed this aside, Clough replied, with some acerbity, “Well, you don’t think any the better of yourself for that, do you?”33 Had Newman been one of the diners that night (however difficult it is to imagine him dining in a London restaurant) he might have come to Matthew’s defense. Newman always had a good word for Voltaire, despite his infidelity, asking vis-à-vis the authors of France, “who is there that holds a place among its writers so historical and important, who is so copious, so versatile, so brilliant, as that Voltaire, who is an open scoffer at everything sacred, venerable, or high-minded?”34 At the same time, in Matthew’s taunting Clough with his would-be infidelity, Newman might have seen a tell-tale diffidence. As he told Lady Herbert of Lea, “I think the great argument against this day’s infidelity is, that it does not, cannot believe in itself. I do not deny, of course, that there are certain minds who have as little concern about their religious ignorance and [are] as well satisfied with themselves, as are Unitarians, or Wesleyans etc etc in their own form of faith; but in the majority of unbelievers there is a deep misgiving that they are wrong or probably wrong.”35 Whether Arnold was among these dubious doubters is questionable, but his poetry certainly suggests that he had trouble believing his own disbelief.
In 1851, Arnold married Fanny Wightman, whose delicacy put one observer in mind of a Dresden shepherdess.36 Her husband made passing reference to her in his poem, “On the Rhine,” where he speaks of “Eyes too expressive to be blue/Too lovely to be grey.” The daughter of a prominent judge, Fanny had been brought up in the High Church and had strong Tractarian sympathies. In his vivid biography of Arnold, Park Honan gives a sympathetic portrait of this admirable woman, with whom Arnold had six children, three of whom predeceased him. Of all his friends and relations, Franny understood him best. Certainly, she recognized, for all his high spirits, the pain he suffered in measuring the confines of his willful skepticism.
Slowly she wore down his egocentricity. She was not swept off her feet by Rugby and the Dr. Arnold legend, or by Matthew’s usually inchoate liberal views. She sensed in him, however, a paradoxical austerity, an inner area of mind that her love could not penetrate—and this made her curious about his verse. His poetry seemed rather gloomier by far than the delightful man who wrote it: ‘From the austere tone of some of the poems,’ she felt, nobody could imagine his ‘lovable nature,’ and that he, indeed, was ‘Consoled by spirits gloriously gay!’ This woman was his chief consoling spirit: ‘beautiful & graceful as his prose is,’ she wrote generously, ‘he will be best remembered by his poetry.’37
Three years before marrying Franny, Arnold traveled to Thun, Switzerland, where he met “Marguerite,” his elusive Alpine muse, in whose “frank eyes” he saw “an angelic gravity.”38 One of the reasons why Arnold went to Thun was to see the places where Etienne Senacour (1770–1846), the French litterateur, had set his epistolary novel Obermann (1804), the luxuriant melancholy of which had an enormous impact on French and English writers, including Arnold and Sainte-Beauve. Clough’s decision to cast Amours de Voyage as a series of letters might have been a mocking response to Obermann. In any case, Arnold’s “Marguerite” could have walked out of the pages of this paean to Romantic ennui. Although many biographers have set out to discover the real “Marguerite,” none has ever succeeded, which leads one to suspect that she might have been imaginary. Nevertheless, the sense of solitude to which Arnold gave such moving expression in the “Marguerite” poems suggests the extent to which he felt cut off from his fellows:
… in the sea of life enisled
With echoing straits between us thrown
Dotting the shoreless watery wild
We mortals live alone.
Newman knew loneliness as well. After he survived his bout of fever in Sicily, he recalled how Gennaro, the faithful Neapolitan who had cared for him in his illness, hinted that he might like the blue cloak Newman had worn throughout the ordeal—“a little thing for him to set his services at,” Newman admitted, though he himself was strangely attached to it. “It had nursed me all through my illness … I had nearly lost it at Corfu—it was stolen by a solider but recovered. I have it still. I have brought it up here to Littlemore, & on some cold nights I have had it on my bed. I have so few things to sympathize with me, that I take to clokes.”39 In January 1846, weeks before he left Littlemore, he wrote to his close friend Ambrose St. John, “You may think how lonely I am.” Leaving Oxford and Littlemore was “like going on the open sea.”40 Arnold also invoked the sea to describe his loneliness.
Who order’d, that their longing’s fire
Should be, as soon as kindled, cool’d?
Who renders vain their deep desire?—
A God, a God their severance ruled!
And bade betwixt their shores to be
The unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea.
If Arnold’s loneliness confirmed God’s absence, Newman’s reaffirmed His presence. Writing to his sister Jemima in June 1836, after the deaths of his mother and of his best friend, Hurrell Froude, Newman wrote: “I am not more lonely than I have been a long while. God intends me to be lonely. He has so framed my mind that I am in a great measure beyond the sympathies of other people, and thrown upon Himself …”41
After writing the books of poetry on which his reputation rests, Arnold turned to criticism, in which he took up not only literature, society and education, but religion. St. Paul and Protestantism (1870), Literature and Dogma (1873), and God and the Bible (1875) attested to Arnold’s growing interest in religious themes, though he would go to his grave convinced that, in the nineteenth century, God had somehow gone missing. A fair sampling of these books can be gleaned from Literature and Dogma, in which he dispenses with argument—never one of his strong suits—and simply records the trajectory of his own loss of faith. Thus, he says, “of the premature and false criticism to which we are accustomed, we drop evidently weak parts first; we retain the rest, to drop it gradually and piece by piece as it loosens and breaks up. But it is all of one order, and in time it will all go. Not the Athanasian Creed’s damnatory clauses only, but the whole Creed; not this one Creed only, but the three Creeds …”42 Having unburdened himself of what he regarded as false credulity, Arnold could do as he liked, which was to treat the Bible as literature and, in the process, push aside the Fathers and Schoolmen and write his own theology. “The truth is,” he writes in one inimitable passage, “one may have a great respect for Lord Shaftesbury,” the Evangelical factory reformer, who gave England its first Lunacy Act (1845), “and yet be permitted … to imagine something far beyond him. And this is the good of such an unpretending definition of God as ours: the Eternal Power, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness;—it leaves the infinite to the imagination and to the gradual efforts of countless ages of men, slowly feeling after more of it and finding it …”43 Here was the Arnoldian theory of development in all its bravura succinctness.