Clinton Machann

Mixed Essays (1879), Irish Essays (1882), Discourses in America (1885), Essays in Criticism, Second Series (1888)

By the summer of 1878, Arnold was planning a book that would collect together the eight essays he had published since the beginning of 1877: ‘Equality’, ‘Irish Catholicism and British Liberalism’, ‘Porro Unum Est Necessarium’, ‘A Guide to English Literature’, ‘Falkland’, ‘A French Critic on Milton’, ‘A French Critic on Goethe’ and ‘George Sand’. He decided to place the retitled ‘Democracy’, previously published as the Preface to The Popular Education of France in 1861, at the front of the collection. However, Last Essays had not sold well, and when he offered a formal proposal to Smith in August, the publisher was not enthusiastic. Smith finally agreed to pay Arnold £50 for an edition of 1000 copies, which appeared in March 1879. In spite of the eclectic nature of the book’s contents, Arnold was hopeful about its success because ‘it has a good deal of literature mixed up with it’ and would thus please readers who had been asking for more literary studies like those from the ‘Essays in Criticism’ period. As it turned out, Mixed Essays was at least moderately successful, and a second edition was called for in June 1880.

The Strayed Reveller (1849),Empedocles on Etna (1852), Poems (1853)

Arnold’s years at Balliol College (1841–4) were decisive for his subsequent literary career and the formation of his mature thought. This is not to say that he was very successful as a student. Arnold went into residence at Oxford after distinguishing himself at Rugby and winning an open scholarship, but his formal studies seemed to stagnate at Balliol. He earned a reputation there not as a scholar but as a dandified dresser, a flippant wit, and an avid fisherman and whist player. He ended by obtaining a disappointing second-class BA in ‘Greats’.

Poems, Second Series (1854), Merope (1857), On Translating Homer (1861), The Popular Education of France (1861)

Arnold’s sensitivity concerning ‘Sohrab and Rustum’ during the composition process and his eagerness to seize upon praise of the poem after its publication revealed his anxiety about the new direction he was taking in his poetry. The years 1853–7 can be seen as an interregnum in his literary career. In 1853 Arnold was primarily a poet; four years later he would begin the prose phase of his career in earnest. This was not a calculated change, however. Arnold had every intention of vigorously pursuing his new poetic program as announced in the 1853 Preface. Once more he wrestled with his Lucretius materials to no avail, but by early October 1854 he had completed a poem which he thought ‘will consolidate the peculiar sort of reputation that I got by Sohrab and Rustum’ (SL 95). Again he had turned to legend and myth for his subject, basing ‘Balder Dead’ on the story of the Scandinavian sun god Balder from the Edda of Snorri Sturluson, through the French version given by Paul Henri Mallet in Northern Antiquaries.

St Paul and Protestantism (1870), Literature and Dogma (1873), God and the Bible (1875), Last Essays on Church and Religion (1877)

Arnold’s religious and Biblical criticism grows directly out of his writings about culture. His critique of the English Dissenters begins with ‘My Countrymen’ in 1866, and he refers to St Paul repeatedly in the essays of Culture and Anarchy. To Arnold St Paul represents the best of the Christian ‘Hebraic’ tradition because, up to a point, he incorporated Hellenism, a free flow of consciousness, into his thinking about morality. The English Puritans, however, treated his teachings in a mechanical way, much like the mechanical way that the Jews treated the Mosaic law in Paul’s day. Observers who have watched Puritanism ‘handle such terms as grace, faith, election, righteousness’ must feel that these terms ‘have for the mind of Puritanism a sense false and misleading’ and that ‘this sense is the most monstrous and grotesque caricature of the sense of St Paul, and his true meaning is by these worshippers of his words altogether lost’ (CPW 5:182). In addition, Arnold wanted to challenge the Dissenters’ claim to the historical justification of their separation from the English Church. Arnold felt that he was qualified to make these judgments.

Essays in Criticism (1865), New Poems (1867)

Although there is evidence that Arnold had plans from the beginning to publish his Oxford lectures, the ones on Homer were the first to see print. From that point on, nearly all of them were published, initially as essays in journals. As Arnold became increasingly accustomed to journal publication, he supplemented these essays with other original articles as suitable subjects presented themselves. Many of the journal articles were in turn revised and collected in book form. Arnold followed this pattern with the pieces that eventually made up Essays in Criticism, one of the most important books of his career.

Culture and Anarchy (1869), Friendship’s Garland (1871)

After publishing Essays in Criticism in 1865, Arnold not only curtailed his composition of poetry, he even abandoned literary criticism per se for an entire decade. Most of his contemporary critics encouraged him to publish more essays on poets and poetry, but the introductory ‘Function of Criticism’ in Essays clearly signalled the direction of his development. Arnold’s expansive concept of criticism in that essay anticipates that of culture in Culture and Anarchy, and the thematic continuity is acknowledged in modern criticism of Arnold, which refers to these titles more often than to any of his other works. There is also an obviously close connection between these two texts in the history of Arnold’s polemics. In the mid-1860s, he did not waste his creative energy in worrying about the poetic vocation that was slipping away from him. Soon after reading Stephen’s attack on ‘Function’ in December 1864, Arnold wrote to his mother that: [the critic’s] complaint that I do not argue reminds me of dear old [brother] Edward, who always says when any of his family do not go his way, that they do not reason. However my sinuous, easy unpolemical mode of proceeding has been adopted by me first, because I really think it the best way of proceeding if one wants to get at, and keep with, truth; secondly because I am convinced only by a literary form of this kind being given to them can ideas such as mine ever gain any access in a country such as ours. So from anything like a direct answer, or direct controversy I shall religiously abstain; but here and there I shall take an opportunity of putting back this and that matter into its true light, if I think he has pulled them out of it; and I have the idea of a paper for the Cornhill, about March, to be called ‘My Countrymen’ and in which I may be able to say a number of things I want to say, about the course of this Middle Class Education matter amongst others. (SL 166–7)