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| Life |
| 1822-1888; b. Laleham nr. Staines, England; ed. Winchester, then Rugby when his father was headmaster, and at Balliol Coll., Oxford; Fellow at Oriel, 1845; private sec. to Lord Lansdowne, 1847, later confessing to Benjamin Jowett [of Balliol] that he was appalled at the sang froid with which Lansdowne foresaw a million deaths before the famine would be over; wrote “The Scholar Gipsy”; publ. The Strayed Reveller (1849); schools inspector, 1851; m. 1851; wrote “Dover Beach” during honeymoon, giving classical expression to Victorian scepticism (‘Where ignorant armies clash by night’), prob. written 1851, poss. 1867; |
| wrote to Arthur Clough ‘I am past thirty and three parts iced over’, in mitigation of his cooling friendship, 1853; wrote Euripides on Etna and Other Poems (1855); elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford, 1857; wrote England and the Italian Question (1860); wrote On Translating Homer (1861); conceived an interest in the Celtic contribution to culture, having read Renan’s Essay on the Poetry of the Celtic Races during a holiday in Llandudno, 1864; also Henry Martin’s France before 1789; influenced by continental Celtic studies and the urgency of events in Ireland to write four lectures under the title “On the Study of Celtic Literature” (1865-66), appearing serially in Cornhill Magazine in 1866 and in book-form in 1867 - in which he speaks of Celtic languages as ‘a badge of the beaten race’; |
Arnold spoke of the ‘shrunken and diminished remains of this great primitive race’, remarking on ‘their failure to reach any material civilisation sound and satisfying, and not out at the elbows, poor, slovenly, and half-barbarous’. As an epigraph for his lectures, he selected the sentence from MacPherson’s Ossian, ‘They always went to battle and they always fell.’ [But see Arthur O’Shaughnessy - infra] |
| draws on works of Eugene O’Curry, Zeuss, and Renan’s ‘Essai sur la poèsie des races celtiques’ [1863] to argue that the Celts are part of Indo-European race in contradistinction from the Semitic peoples, and not therefore ‘unassimilable’ like those others; postulated the inevitably unification of the British Isles as an English-speaking people; defined the Celtic spirit in terms of ‘its chafing against the despotism of fact’ - borrowing Henri Martin’s phrase - while denying its capacity for self-government; issued New Poems (1867); wrote Culture and Anarchy (1869), his classic essay on the philistinism of bourgeois society, first issued serially in Cornhill Magazine, 1867-68; publ.; |
| edited Burke’s Letters, Speeches and Tracts on Irish Affairs (1881), ‘to set them on thinking’ [pref., p.xxxx - quoting Burke to Mrs. Crewe]; his essays of 1878-81 incl. “Irish Catholicism and British Liberalism”, “The Incompatibles” - on Fenians, and “An Unregarded Irish Grievance”; issued Irish Essays and Others (1882); d. 14 April 1888; Arnold’s definition of the Celtic spirit has latterly been treated as the chief signifier for a British hegemonic relation to Irish culture, chiefly due to W. B. Yeats’s development of the theme in “The Celtic Element in Literature”; now more often treated as signal instance of a wider European trend. ODNB FOC OCEL FDA OCIL |
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Works| Relating to Ireland |
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| General editions |
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| [ See James Carty, Bibliography of Irish History 1870-1911 (Dublin: Stationary Office 1936).] |
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| Cambridge Scholars Publishing Classic Texts - (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008), 197pp. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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[*Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. William Savage Johnson [Riverside Press Cambridge] (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1913) - digital copy at Gutenberg Project online - accessed 20.03.2011.]
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Criticism| Full-length studies |
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| Essays (the Irish connection) |
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See also L. P. Curtis, Anglo-Saxons and Celts, A Study of anti-Irish Prejudice in Victorian England (Bridgeport UP 1968), and see Seamus Deane, Declan Kiberd, and Luke Gibbons in Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Vol. 2 (Derry 1991) - as infra. |
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Commentary
[See separate file, infra.]
Quotations
[See separate file, infra.]
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References
Mark Storey, Poetry and Ireland since 1800: A Source Book (London: Routledge 1988), pp.61-68, reprints extract from ‘On the Study of Celtic Literature’, which he characterises - in Seamus Deane’s phrase - as ‘Thomas Davis rewritten for the Murdstones’. Storey see Yeats’s ‘Celtic Element in Literature’ (1897) as a riposte to Arnold.
Seamus Deane, gen. ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 2: Deane remarks editorially, ‘helped by Standish O’Grady and ably seconded by Arnold and Renan on the Celtic spirit, a heroic vision of Ireland emerged, evoking the legendary past, the contemporary folk-culture, and the militant spirit’ [p.9]; Declan Kiberd remarks ‘Froude endorsed Arnold’s comment on the inability of the Celt to cope with the tyranny recte ‘harsh despotism’] of fact’ [p.375]; Terence Brown comments on ‘[T]he idea of the Celt, popularised by Arnold’s derivative but influential essay of 1867, On the Study of Celtic Literature’ [p.516]; Synge, Arnold, and Ruskin compared [idem., p.518]; D. P. Moran writes, ‘We were all on the look-out for someone to think for us, for we had given up that habit with our language. Matthew Arnold happily came along just in the nick of time, and in a much quoted essay suggested, among other things, that one of the characteristics of Celtic poetry was “natural magic”. I confess I don’t exactly know what “natural magic” means ... Then yet another Irish make-believe was born, and it was christened “The Celtic Note,” Mr W. B. Yeats standing sponsor for it ... caus[ing] a little stir among minor literary circles in London ... &c., &c.’ ( ‘the Battle of Two Civilizations’, in The Philosophy of Irish Ireland, 1905) [p.555]; Seamus Heaney, introducing Yeats, compares Arnold’s plaintively forsaken merman with Yeats’s “Collar-Bone of a Hare” [p.786]; Luke Gibbons remarks editorially, ‘It was not as if abstract though is beyond the reach of “the Irish mind”, for in Matthew Arnold’s The Study of Celtic Literature (1867), the locus classicus for the myth of the imaginative Celt, it was the tendency to get lost in abstraction [..., &c.] - “[T]he abstract, severe character of the Druidical religion”, which prevented a more practical, down-to-earth approach to worldly affairs ... The Celt revolted against ‘the despotism of fact’, but was only too willing to fasten on to an ideal’ [p.950; see also ftn. to selection from Eglinton explaining references to Renan, p.956n]; Thomas MacDonagh, in Literature in Ireland (1916), Chapter IV, writes, ‘... Matthew Arnold in his essay On the Study of Celtic Literature, largely a work of fiction, has written interestingly of the Celtic Note, using the name in a sense of his own. He has been rather apprehended than understood; and with later writers the meaning has become vaguer’ [p.989].
D. J. O’Donoghue, Poets of Ireland (Hodges Figgis 1912) contains a notice on Sir Francis Hastings Doyle, Bart., who was Arnold’s successor as Professor of Poetry (Chair) at Oxford, holding it from 1867 to 1877. He was born in England, 22 Aug. 1810, son of Major-General Sir Francis Doyle; ed. at Eton and Oxford; became Commissioner of Customs; died in London on 8 June 1888. His father is described as ‘an Irish officer’ which accounts for his inclusion in the reference work. Bibl. Miscellaneous Verses, London, 1834, 8vo; The Two Destinies, A Poem, London, 1844, 8vo; Edipus [sic], translated from Sophocles into English verse, London (?), 1849, 16mo; The Duke’s Funeral, a poem, London, 1852, 8vo; The Return of the Guards, and Other Poems, London, 1866, 8vo.; and other works. (O’Donoghue, p.121.)
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Notes
Oscar Wilde (1): On reading Grant Allen’s essay ‘The Celt in English Art’ in the Fortnightly Review (1 Feb. 1891) - the same issue of which contained his own essay ‘Man Under Socialism’ - Wilde wrote to Allen praising his ‘superb assertion of that Celtic spirit in Art that Arnold divined, but did not demonstrate, at any rate in the sense of scientific demonstration, such as yours is.’ (Isobel Murray, ed., Wilde, Man Under Socialism and Prison Writings, OUP 1990; quoted in Richard Haslam, ‘Oscar Wilde and the Imagination of the Celt’, in Irish Studies Review, 11 [Oscar Wilde Special Issue], Summer 1995, pp.2-5. [See also seq.]
Oscar Wilde (2) - again on Allen’s essay ‘The Celt in English Art’ in the Fortnightly Review (1 Feb. 1891): John Wilson Foster writes: Wilde wrote ot Grant Allen in early 1891 praising his essay [...] for its “scientific demonstration” of the Celtic spirit of Art that Arnold had merely “divined” - further noting that Allen wrote several books on evolution. (Foster, ‘Against Nature? Science and Oscar Wilde’, in Between Shadows: Modern Irish Writing and Culture, Dublin: IAP 2009, pp.44-45 [n.9.], citing Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis, NY: Harcourt, Brace 1962, pp.286-87.)
Oscar Wilde (2): Not that Basil Hallward’s phrase ‘the spirit that is Greek’ in The Portrait of Dorian Gray (1890) is actually a permutation on Arnold’s ‘the Greek spirit’ in ‘Hebraism and Hellenism’, in Culture and Anarchy (1869) [q.p.]. See John Wilson Foster, ‘Against Nature? Science and Oscar Wilde’, in Between Shadows: Modern Irish Writing and Culture(Dublin: IAP 2009), p.31 [n.7, p.44.]
George Moore chooses to use Arnold’s title Literature and Dogma for certain episodes in the second book of Hail and Farewell. (See “Salve”, Heinemann, 1926 edn., pp.180, 195, 206, 207, &c.)
Seán O’Faolain, in The Irish (West Drayton: Penguin 1947), quotes Arnold on the French revolution, ‘had their source in a great movement of feeling, not in a great movement of mind’, and remarks: ‘Not that Arnold’s ideas in the first of his Essays in Criticism have any political validity, and certainly no validity as between Ireland and England since (as he recognises freely [...]), you might as well try to change an Englishman’s [p.105] political views about his Empire by reasoning with him as hope to stop the charge of an elephant with an epigram’. Further, ‘[it is] still true of our Irish rebels that it was upon the emotional content of the Revolution that they seized and not on its intellectual content, with the result that the whole of Irish patriotic literature ever since has either concerned itself with matters of sentiment rather than thought; or with interim solutions [...]’ (pp.105-06.)
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