Footnote 9, Introduction, of the author's Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England: Newman, Arnold, and Pater, which University of Texas Press published in 1969. It appears in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.
ichard Foster, The New Romantics: A Reappraisal of the New Criticism, describes in detail the movement of representative American New Critics from a formalist position to something like a religious or even mystical view of the role of letters in society. He centers his discussion on Arnold's statement of 1880 that "The future of poetry is immense."
William A. Madden's "The Divided Tradition of English Criticism" (PMLA, LXXIII [March 1958], 69-80) is the best discussion of the theological presuppositions of modern criticism. He sees an "unbridgeable gap" between those who view art as "handmaiden" (Hulme, Eliot) and those who take art as "savior" (Arnold, Pates, Yeats, I. A. Richards, Herbert Read). Madden brings up important continuities between Arnold and Pater, but I would question his failure to distinguish both in mood and substance Arnold's poetry from his prose, and (though he correctly sees the importance of religion in Pater) his virtual denial of any genuine Christian elements in his thought. Madden's Matthew Arnold: A Study of the Aesthetic Temperament in Victorian England, which appeared too late to be used in this study, is the fullest case yet argued for the "aesthetic" as the dominating motif of Arnold's career. But the book errs, in my judgment, by simplifying Arnold and by discounting or ignoring Arnold's later interests, especially religious, which I have tried to account for in this book.
Vincent Buckley, in Poetry and Morality, reflects in detail and helpfully on the ways in which Arnold's moralism distorts and limits his criticism, especially as the result of his defective views of religion and of poetic "form." Though he dwells centrally on "The Study of Poetry" (1880), he might have found Arnold's dilemmas in even sharper form, and self-confessed, in the comparatively neglected "Literature and Science" (1882).
Last modified AprilÝ2001