Matthew Arnold Views in Relation to the Age and art and poetry

His Views in Relation to the Age

Arnold did not find his age very congenial to the production of great poetry. He did not notice much promise in the age, which, he thought, was 'wanting in moral grandeur'. It might be an age of progress, destined to carry out the great ideas of industrial development and amelioration. It was not an age to supply the necessary incentive to the production of great poetry. The intellectual and spiritual atmosphere that is necessary to call forth the creative activity was wanting. He depicts the age in The Scholar Gipsy an age of 'mental strife', 'sick hurry', and 'divided aims'. We may not deny that there was 'mental strife' in the age, a break up of old faith and tradition, due to the progress of science, and industrial development. The intellectual unrest of the age is reflected in Tennyson too, while Browning seems to have shirked it. It seems to have stricken Arnold's poetry with a sort of palsy, and in it we find much of 'sick fatigue' and 'Janguid doubt'. And as a critic he made it his business to propagate fresh and free ideas and they had their effect too upon his contemporaries, he, in fact, sought to generate an intellectual and spiritual atmosphere in which literary genius can be active. The truth is that he seems to have been carried away by his 'moral and social passion for doing good', and blinked at the out-burst of great poetic literature, which included, together with his own work, that of Tennyson, Browning, D. G. Rossetti, Swinburne, William Morris and George Meredith.

His Views about Art and Poetry

Arnold was really in despair about his own age. He writes, "The epochs of Aeschylus and Shakespeare make us feel their pre-eminence. In an epoch like those there is, no doubt, the true life of literature, there is the Promised Land, towards which criticism can only beckon. That promised land, it will not be ours to enter, and we shall die in the wilderness; but to have desired to enter it, to have selected it from afar is already, perhaps, the best distinction among contemporaries; it will certainly be the best title to esteem with posterity." He had a very fastidious taste, and nothing could have satisfied him after he had let his intellectual appetite be nourished by Greek poetry and Greek art of criticism. He draws a distinction between Greek and modern poetry, but traces the modern spirit back to Greek poetry. He says, ....the main element of the modern spirit's life is neither the senses and understanding, nor the heart and imagination; it is the imaginative reason." Of the Greek poets he writes, "No other poets have lived so much by the imaginative reason; no other poets have made their work so well-balanced; no other poets have so well satisfied the thinking power, have so well satisfied the religious sense." And he explains why there had been no similar achievement in England. "We, in England, in our great burst of literature during the first thirty years of the present century, had no manifestation of the modern spirit, as this spirit manifests itself in Goethe's works or Heine's. And the reason is not far to seek. We had neither the German wealth of ideas, nor the French enthusiasm for applying ideas. There reigned in the mass of nation that inveterate inaccessibility to ideas, that Philistinism-to use the German nick-name-which reacts even on the individual genius that is exempt from it." About poetry, Arnold gave very significant views. He believed that poetry etry is "a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty." Of all modern poets, except Goethe, he was the best critic. Of all modern critics, with some exceptions, he was the best poet.

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