Blake in the Academe

Source: http://www.criticalflame.org/verse/0712_novak.htm

Blake in the Academe

an essay by David X. Novak

In 1969, Northrop Frye introduced the new edition of his groundbreaking study of the works of the poet William Blake, with some offhand comments about its genesis: "The doctoral thesis is useful for encouraging intensive reading, but of very little use for gaining literary perspective, which takes years to develop and cannot be hurried. The present book never went through the thesis stage, and my interest in Blake had from the beginning been of the extensive kind." He does not go into specifics as to the nature of that involvement, but a later edition does the courtesy of reprinting a 1935 letter from Frye to his fiancée, in which he details something of that encounter — an immersion really, precipitated (to use Ian Singer's words) by a paper on Blake's epic Milton — as anything but casual:

I don't know what dimension I'm working in any more. Nothing has mattered, nothing has even existed, for the past six weeks, but Blake, Blake, Blake: I've spun the man around like a teetotum, I've torn him into tiny shreds and teased and atomized him with pincers, I've stretched my mind over passages as though it were on a rack, I've plunged into darkness and mist, out again into the clear light — where I started from in the first place — rushed up blind alleys of comparison and sources, broken down completely from sheer inertia, worked all night on a paragraph no better in the morning. . . But what I have done is a masterpiece. . . the best, clearest and most accurate exposition of Blake's thought yet written. If it's no good I'm no good. There isn't a sentence, and there won't be a sentence, in the whole work that hasn't gone through purgatory.

It is the kind of involvement one might expect Blake to elicit, and the eventual book,Fearful Symmetry (which was published in 1947), was instantly recognized as something of a classic in its field.

Frye's book represents the culmination of a style of writing about literature that, reaching its apex, would gradually be superseded by other modes: "Academic literary criticism has. . . become hung up on 'textuality': intertextuality, paratextuality, subtextuality, contextuality — count the ways", writes John Sutherland in Literary Review: "'Text' is a noumenon" which "does not exist materially, and as such "can be materialized in an infinite variety of ways." "The whole [academic] profession is following the pipes of Pan" in what might be considered its wholesale subscription to Jacques Derrida's motto: "Il n'ya pas de hors-texte ('there is nothing outside the text')."

This of course dovetails neatly with the academic need of teaching to students who, by virtue of their youth (in the main), have not had the time to gain the requisite "literary perspective". One easily stumbles upon sentences like, "In the transition from the era of Classicism into the era of Romanticism there was a time in English literature when there were artists who showed the first signs of incoming time in their writings marked with romantic attitude towards the world, respect for individualism and awakening of the idea of Rousseau's 'natural man'." This is taken from a work titled William Blake, Dichotomy of Existence in Songs of Experience vs [sic] Songs of Experience by Bojana Stretenovic, which was done "for the purpose of obtaining a Master's degree in English literature" according to the publisher's description at Amazon.com. I take it to be representative.

It is hard, when one is struggling to achieve a literary (or even a historical) perspective, to realize that the classifying names by which we, in hindsight, recognize our forbears, can only perhaps be loosely applied to them, and that the transition from one "era" to another usually does not occur so cleanly or abruptly, as though it were the changing from a Republican administration to a Democratic one. A poet like Blake, peripheral to the power bases of society, witnessed power relations shifting, such as that between wages and labor, and responded accordingly.

The New Pelican Guide to English Literature (From Blake to Byron) summarizes the transition from the weirdly named Augustan era to the Romantic period by noting new "conditions which created the demand for writers of a higher standard of performance than the Grub Street hack of Pope's day." This is Edgell Rickword, acknowledging an "increase in the literate and relatively well-to-do sections of the population" which transformed the economics of publishing entirely. Moreover, "none of [the new breed of] writers was intimately associated with those holding political power, none had moved so close to the control-room of the State as had Swift and Prior, Milton, Marvell, or Donne."

He is reporting a general trend, not easy to simplify, vaguely derived from the insertion of machines into industry, which disrupted "the social order [which] had been fixed most sharply in England in the subservience of the villager to the landed gentleman", to quote Joseph Bronowski from the introduction to his book on Blake, William Blake and the Age of Revolution. He titles that first chapter, "A Turbulent Age."

It is too much to try to encompass the whole period into a few glib sentences, but I cannot refrain from mentioning that I've never liked the appellation of "Romantic" to describe the broad spectrum of individuals it envelops. A swath of the English population — including Blake among other notables — greeted the coming of the French Revolution with romantic idealism, only to be crushed when it was betrayed. That is how I understand the term. Blake was not crushed — but that was perhaps owed to the strength of his vision: his wife said "I have very little of Mr. Blake's company; he is always in Paradise", and Paradise for Blake meant the imagination.

He said, "I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's". Keeping to the realm of "textuality," it might be suggested that Blake was deliberately raising a fist at the rationalism of John Locke, positing instead "his own system of values such as creative power, imagination, intuition, spiritual development all united in 'poetic genius'" (Stretenovic) or even a "Sexual Path to Spiritual Vision" to quote a recent popular title. However, Blake's next sentence is telling: "I will not reason and compare: my business is to create."

It would be apropos to say "Blake opposes the exploitative industrial system he sees around him in London." In Rickover's summary of the social milieu, he describes recently introduced "mechanical contrivances" such as James Watt's improved steam engine: "Although steam-power is the most spectacular of the innovations of the time, it was not the effective instrument of the great change, though these engines' clangour and belching of smoke and flame made them appropriate symbols of a baleful modernity." One such machine "operated the Albion Flour Mills in Southwark" (before it burned down) and "was certainly familiar to Blake. The snorting, ear-shattering monster must have been impressive in action, and may have helped to condition the [Romantic] poets' attitude to the new technology."

Sven Birkerts, in the wake of 9/11, suggested "[p]oetry does not. . . defeat trauma". Rather, it "is the reverse of the terrorist act, its antithesis" creating "something to hold against horror. . .that is equally persistent." In such a way poetry offers a means to "[help] restore the delicate inner balance we call sanity." The irony there is that it is hard to find a poet labeled "insane" by his peers more frequently than Blake, even when meant as a backhanded compliment from a discerning reader like Wordsworth: "the insanity of this man interests me more than the sanity of Byron and Moore." (I take my quote from E. de Selincourt, though I believe it to be more meaningful than precise: the Blake Records have it slightly different.)

The Industrial Revolution was beginning in Europe. "Only in England had there been, by 1873, any substantial progress towards the large-scale introduction of labour-saving machinery," wrote George Rudé in his history, Revolutionary Europe. "In England alone a distinct class of industrial entrepreneurs was arising in the wake of the technical innovations introduced by the Darbys, Hargreaves, Cort, Arkwright and Watt. . . . Its leaders, new men sprung from farming and commercial stock, were rapidly amassing fortunes and finding a place in society." This was the class Blake was born into.

Though his father, a hosier, would not have been as successful as some, his shop commanded prime Golden Square real estate (a corner with double frontage) at 28 Broad Sreet. The family lived upstairs, and it was here when he was age four Blake famously saw God peek through the window.

Thanks to biographical work found in books such as The Stranger in Paradise, by G.E. Bentley, Jr., compiler of the Blake Records, we know quite a lot about Blake's life. For example, the poverty and isolation for which Blake is renowned definitely did not obtain at least during the first half of his life. Not disposed toward the family trade, Blake, with the indulgence of his father (the word is Bentley's and is the right word), was able to attend Pars Drawing School, from the age of ten, for four years. It was his wish, and evidently the family could afford both the tuition and the sacrifice of a boy's labor for that duration. It was a blessing for the young and would-be artist, for it gained him entry to some of the best collections in private hands, usually only accessible with presentation of "a suitable douceur."

At age fifteen, he apprenticed to an engraver, which would become his life's profession. The contract agreement of his seven-year indenture deserves reprinting. "During that term", runs the standard legalistic jargon,

the said Apprentice his said Master faithfully shall serve, his Secrets keep, his lawful Commandments every where gladly do. . .. He shall not waste the Goods of his said Master, nor lend them unlawfully to any. He shall not commit Fornication, nor contract Matrimony within the said Term. He shall not play at Cards, Dice, Tables, or any other unlawful Games, whereby his said Master may have any loss. With his own Goods or others, during the Said Term, without License of his said Master he shall neither buy nor sell. He shall not haunt Taverns, or Play-Houses, nor absent himself from this said Master's Service Day nor Night unlawfully. . .. And the said Master. . . his said Apprentice in the same Art and Mystery which he useth, by the best Means that he can, shall teach and instruct, or cause to be taught and instructed, finding unto his said Apprentice, Meat, Drink, Apparel, Lodging, and all other Necessaries, according to the Custom of London, during the said Term.

A consideration of fifty guineas was paid by Blake's father (I have followed Bentley's ellipses throughout).

Upon successful completion of his indenture, Blake moved home, and then became a student at the Royal Academy, "the obvious step for any Londoner aspiring to be an artist." Blake was not without his admirers, but the requisite funds for a "finishing" trip to Rome ("the greatest ambition of every serious European artist") lay beyond his means, and so, after a time, he set up shop, and he married.

The origins of Blake's literary art remain a mystery. He would say that it was inspired. While we know so much about his life, the interior details of Blake's intellectual development are woefully lacking. Where did he get his books? Possibly at his Master's when he was an Apprentice. Perhaps his mother encouraged his early reading of poetry. We do not know, and speculation is fruitless. Blake became a highly educated man, and was probably self-taught, but more than that we cannot say. His antipathy toward formalized education is well known:

Thank God I never was sent to School

To be Flogd into following the Style of a Fool[.]

A Blake follower wrote after his death that "his theories wanted solidity". In Matthew Arnold's phrase, "The less a literature has felt the influence of a supposed centre of correct information, correct judgment, correct taste, the more we shall find in it this note of provinciality." T.S. Eliot takes it further: "We have the same respect for Blake's philosophy. . . that we have for an ingenious piece of home-made furniture: we admire the man who has put it together out of the odds and ends about the house. . .. What his genius required, and what it sadly lacked, was a framework of accepted and traditional ideas which would have prevented him from indulging in a philosophy of his own". In other words, compelled to create his own system, the ad hoc resultant conurbation precluded Blake from reaching the consistency and cohesion of Dante's Commedia.

Yet, to return to Frye, the poems "make a vivid impact on the reader at once," indisputably. Blake has "the peculiar quality of a definitive poet [in] that he always seems to have a special relevance to the preoccupations of one's own age, whatever they may be." Especially in his lyrics, "Blake makes an immense appeal to a great variety of people outside the academic profession," as Frye puts it.

In his influential essay "An Introduction to William Blake", Alfred Kazin suggests some reasons as to why. "His theme is always the defense of the integral human personality," Kazin writes. "Blake's fight is against secrecy, unnatural restraint, the fear of life — the distortions of the personality that follow from deception and resignation to it." What themes could be more universal, or have more resonance — not just with the downtrodden public, but with "members of the elite" as we today would call such eminent personages as Wordsworth and Coleridge, Walter Savage Landor, Edward FitzGerald, to name a few of the better-known poetic voices who immediately recognized Blake's talent.

The assault against integrity — spurred on by the Industrial Revolution which was only just beginning to make itself felt — seems akin to ours today (brought on by the Information Revolution, I suppose) in its ferocity. Kazin writes:

Blake's need of certainty, whatever its personal roots, is also one of the great tragedies of modern capitalist society; particularly of that loss of personal status that was the immediate fate of millions in the industrial England of the "dark satanic mills." Blake was only one of many Englishmen who felt himself being slowly ground to death, in a world of such brutal exploitation amid such inhuman ugliness, that the fires of the new industrial furnaces and the cries of the child laborers are always in his work. His poems and designs are meant to afford us spiritual vision; a vision beyond the factory system, the hideous new cities, the degradation of children for the sake of profit, the petty crimes for which children could still be hanged.

Not just children, I might add. The economics surrounding Blake — and he was no Dickens waif — must have made an impression. An economic tract — something of a national survey but done in a Q&A format — was published in 1757, the year of Blake's birth, and offers a glimpse into that world. Its author, Josiah Tucker, was "[a]n acute observer", and my Pelican Guide quotes him from his Instructions for Travellers: "Few countries are equal, perhaps none excel, the English in the Numbers and Contrivances of their Machines to abridge Labour. . ." His argument runs deeper than that, however. After a passage in which he makes the case — convincingly, I might add — that this influx of labor-abridging machines will increase overall consumption (and thereby employment) by putting low-cost goods into the hands of many more consumers, Tucker embarks on a marvelous discourse to explain, ideally, how well the system might function. I quote at length, beyond what is strictly necessary, because of the delicious insight it affords into economic policy at the time of Blake's birth:

Q. Is that Labour, which is still to be performed by the human Kind, so judiciously divided, that Men, Women and Children have their respective Shares in Proportion to their Strength, Sex, and Abilities? And is every Branch so contrived, that there is no Waste of Time, or unnecessary Expence of Strength or Labour? Moreover, what good Consequences attend these Circumstances in such Parts of the Kingdom, where they are observed, and what bad ones in other Parts, where they are not?

A. In many Provinces of the Kingdom, particularly, Staffordshire, Warwickshire, and certain Districts of Yorkshire, with the Town of Manchester, Norwich, and some others, the Labour, for the most Part, is very properly proportioned, and great Judgment appears in the Methods and Contrivances for bringing the several Parts of the Manufacture so within the Reach of each other, that no Time should be wasted in passing the Goods to be manufactured from Hand to Hand, and that no unnecessary Strength should be employed. For instance of both Kinds, take one among a Thousand at Birmingham, viz. When a Man stamps a metal Button by means of an Engine, a Child stands by him to place the Button in readiness to receive the Stamp, and to remove it when received, and then to place another. By these means the Operator can stamp at least double the Number, which he could otherwise have done, had he been obliged to have stopped each Time to have shifted the Buttons: And as his Gettings may be from 14d. to 18d. and the Child's from a Penny to 2d. per Day for doing the same Quantity of Work, which must have required double the Sum, had the Man alone been employed; this single Circumstance saves above 80, or near 100 per Cent. At the same Time that it trains up Children to an Habit of Industry, almost as soon as they can speak. And hence it is, that the Bijoux d' Angleterre, or the Birmingham Toys, are rendered so exceedingly cheap as to astonish all Europe; and that the Roman Catholic Countries are supplied with such vast Quantities of Crucifixes, Agnus Dei's, &c. from England. A Dozen of these Crucifixes, as I am informed, being to be sold, in the wholesale Way, for 7-1/2d. — But the good Effects of this proportioning of Labour to different Strengths and Sexes, is still more extensive than it at first appears. For in Birmingham the Numbers of poor Women on the Pay Bill, compared to those of poor Men, are hardly as three to two; whereas in Bristol, where no such good Politics obtain, the Numbers are upwards of four to one; and in many Parts of London, it is still much worse: So great is the Difference, and such the Expensiveness and heavy Burdens of a wrong Conduct even in this Respect: not to mention, that Prostitution and Debauchery seem to be an unavoidable Consequence in the female Sex of Poverty and Idleness, when they are young, and when they grow old, what Refuge can they have, if they do not soon rot with their Diseases, but the Parish Pay?

Further on he asks, "What Politics are established by the Constitution to prevent the monopolizing of landed Property into a few Hands?" When one "Master of the whole Manufacture from first to last. . . employs perhaps a thousand Persons under him. . ."

will they not also sometimes look upon him as their Tyrant? And as great Numbers of them work together in the same Shop, will they not have it the more in their Power to vitiate and corrupt each other, to cabal and associate against their Masters, and to break out into Mobs and Riots upon every little occasion?

After some rigamarole, the answer comes down to something like, "the Tenant who pays his Rent, has as little to fear from his Landlord, as from any other person", which sounds curiously like Blake's line from "The Chimney Sweeper": "So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm."

Working conditions were no picnic. Yet Frye discounts "portrayal[s] of Blake as a mystical snail who retreated from the hard world of reality into the refuge of his own mind, and evolved his beautifully obscure visions there in contemplative loneliness". Circumscribed by circumstance, writes Kazin, "his ability to hit back ended in his notebook."

This is not entirely true. The historical record belies Kazin's assertion — just look up the incident when Blake ejected the dragoon from his garden. He more than capable of interfering actively when he witnessed an injustice. Frederick Tatham, an early biographer, reports "an anecdote showing his courage" in which Blake intervenes upon seeing a boy maltreated: "Blakes blood boiled & his indignation surpassed his forebearance, he sallied forth & demanded in no very quiescent terms that the Boy should be loosed. . ." and so forth; an anecdote which is matched by others.

What Blake was not, however, was foolhardy: "To defend the Bible in this year 1798 would cost a man his life" he scribbled, but did not publish. At question were "perversions of Christ's words & acts" by those in authority — but then Blake was raised "in the Dissenting tradition of private devotion and private Bible reading rather than public catechism and public worshippers" whose adherents "believed that all truth lies in the Bible and that the proper interpreter of that truth is the individual conscience, not the priest or the church" (Bentley). Regarding one such occasion, Bronowski points out: "Neither Wordsworth nor Blake printed their [privately written] attacks, and both remained free all their lives. Wakefield printed his, and was imprisoned for it from 1799 to 1801."

Though he later fell away from it — and how! — Blake and his wife signed a charter in 1789 affirming, "We whose names are hereunto subscribed, do each of us approve of the Theological Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, believing that the Doctrines contained therein are genuine Truths, revealed from Heaven, and that the New Jerusalem Church ought to be established, distinct and separate from the Old Church", which demonstrates, incidentally, that the lines "Till we have built Jerusalem / In England's green and pleasant land" were more than a metaphor idiosyncratic to Blake.

In 1795 Blake published Songs of Innocence and of Experience, the work which provides most of us our introduction to his poetry. Songs of Innocence had been published five years earlier as a stand-alone work, but Songs of Experience (including a few poems shifted from Innocence) never existed independently. One of the better-known lyrics is "The Garden of Love":

I went to the Garden of Love,

And saw what I never had seen:

A Chapel was build in the midst,

Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut,

And Thou shalt not writ over the door;

So I turned to the Garden of Love,

That so many sweet flowers bore,

And I saw it was filled with graves,

And tomb-stones where flowers should be:

And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds,

And binding with briars, my joys and desires.

The theme is a common one in Blake. In "The Little Vagabond" he contrasted the "cold" church with the "Ale-house [which] is healthy & pleasant & warm". In "The School-Boy" he makes explicit, in contrast to the lovely "summer morn / When the birds sing on every tree", that "to go to school on a summer morn, / O! it drives all joy away."

Here we get into territory of Blake's philosophy. As Robert Gleckner writes (in "Point of View and Context in Blake's Songs"), "Blake created a system in which innocence and experience are vital parts" — though this "basic symbology" draws interpretation manifold in variety. "Innocence is belief and experience is doubt", Kazin tells us. Frye says, "The fallen world is the world of the Songs of Experience: the unfallen world is the world of the Songs of Innocence." For Bronowski, "the Songs of Experience are, at bottom, songs of indignation", whereas theSongs of Experience reflect "that happy child mood which the French Revolution seemed to fulfill" before the British government entered the fray in opposition. Gleckner distinguishes between the piper and the bard who host (or introduce) their respective sections: "for the piper the past can only be the primal unity, for the present is innocence and the immediate future is experience; for the Bard the past is innocence, the present experience, and the future a higher innocence."

This last strikes to the core of what Blake is attempting: reconciliation, if you will, of "the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul." He was not, as Keats, "ambitious of doing the world some good", so much as demarcating the good, as Frye indicates:

In reading about child labor and slavery in Blake's time (or their equivalents in our time) we hardly know which is more detestable: the cruelty involved or the complacency with which that cruelty was rationalized in pamphlets, Parliamentary debates, newspapers, and sermons. Blake was struck with this too, and never failed to see the rationalizing of evil as an essential part of the evil itself. . . .

The stultifying classroom may have been a crime against the childish spirit yearning to breathe free in the summertime; but how much more so the button factory, wherein one earned (if we believe Josiah Tucker) perhaps a tenth of the adult machinist for the privilege of having inculcated "the Habit of Industry". The economics of it must have seemed astounding; though never so staggering as the even wider disparities we know about today, in America — especially taking the perspective of global commerce. And yet, Blake's words ring no less true now: "Pity would be no more / If we did not make somebody Poor."

If expedience and high profit justified the employment of young boys (and sometimes girls) as low-wage factory drudges, necessity did the same for their use as chimney sweepers. Mark Edmundson explains: "the need for the sweeps was strong. Chimney fires could beget larger blazes that would destroy blocks and blocks of wooden houses." Blake biographer Peter Ackroyd likewise write, "The average size of these vents was something like seven inches square, and the small child was prodded or pushed into the even smaller spaces within; sometimes they were encouraged with poles, or pricked with pins, or scorched with fire to make them climb with more enthusiasm." Martin K. Nurmi writes, "Blake does not really describe the living and working conditions of the sweeps; he presupposes a knowledge of them." The poem succeeds because of meticulous understatement:

When my mother died I was very young,

And my father sold me while yet my tongue

Could scarcely cry " 'weep! 'weep! 'weep! 'weep!' "

So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep.

There's little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head

That curled like a lamb's back, was shaved: so I said,

"Hush, Tom! never mind it, for when your head's bare

You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair."

And so he was quiet, & that very night,

As Tom was a-sleeping he had such a sight!

That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned & Jack,

Were all of them locked up in coffins of black.

And by came an Angel who had a bright key,

And he opened the coffins & set them all free;

Then down a green plain, leaping, laughing, they run,

And wash in a river and shine in the Sun.

Then naked & white, all their bags left behind,

They rise upon clouds and sport in the wind.

And the Angel told Tom, if he'd be a good boy,

He'd have God for his father & never want joy.

And so Tom awoke; and we rose in the dark,

And got with our bags & our brushes to work.

Though the morning was cold, Tom was happy & warm;

So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.

From the ritualistic head shearing to the "coffins of black", Blake details the conditions of degradation inherent to the profession. In our minds the lines might evoke imagery from Auschwitz — which in the individual "worst case scenario" would probably not be far from wrong. Yet the underpinning of the system depended on an aversion, or a looking away from, those basic conditions on the part of a public that knew, nevertheless, all too well what those were.

In Songs of Experience, Blake's corresponding poem (also titled "The Chimney Sweeper") takes a different tack: he notes the underpinning rationale, or malign rationalization, and rubs people's faces in it:

A little black thing among the snow,

Crying " 'weep! 'weep!" in notes of woe!

"Where are thy father and mother? say?" — 

"They are both gone up to the church to pray.

"Because I was happy upon the heath,

And smiled among the winter's snow,

They clothed me in the clothes of death,

And taught me to sing the notes of woe.

"And because I am happy and dance and sing,

They think they have done me no injury,

And are gone to praise God and his Priest and King,

Who make up a heaven of our misery."

The poem closes not with a pious platitude, but with an acute irony: the case against religious hypocrisy could not be plainer. "Both poems," writes Robert Pinsky, "dramatize the way religion, government, and custom collaborate in social arrangements that impose cruel treatment on some people while enhancing the lives of others."

Blake considered "the Eye of Imagination [to be] the Real Man." This being the case, Blake — a businessman himself, by force of circumstance predominantly — yet recognized, reportedly, "Were I to love money, I should lose all power of original thought". Moreover, he was not shy about intoning: "Christianity is Art & not Money. Money is its Curse." That may account for Blake's estrangement from both philosophical creeds and the New Church, or, as Frye puts it, "Blake's conception of art is not only central in his thinking, but distinctive of him as a thinker, and though he reminds us frequently of [George] Berkeley or Swedenborg, he was what neither Berkeley nor Swedenborg was, a practicing artist."

In a phrase which enraged T.S. Eliot, Matthew Arnold defined one aspect of the functionality of poetry: "Poetry is, at bottom, a criticism of life." Eliot rejoined, "At bottom: that is a great way down; the bottom is the bottom" in a rant that continued several more sentences over a seemingly innocuous figure of speech. Sometime Blake scholar Mark Edmundson, well-known for his attacks against college students (in the main) and the university system (overall), must accept enough of Arnold's definition to enable him to render them this stinging judgement: "What they will not generally do. . . is indict the current system. They won't talk about how the exigencies of capitalism lead to a reserve army of the unemployed and nearly inevitable misery." This is strong stuff, if remarkably selective in his singling out "the unemployed."

Eliot also finds fault with Arnold's subsequent assertion — not original to Arnold but extrapolated directly from Epictetus — "that the greatness of a poet lies in his powerful and beautiful application of ideas to life." To this, Eliot storms: "Not a happy way of putting it, as if ideas were a lotion for the inflamed skin of suffering humanity." Yet both by Arnold's measurement and by general consensus, I think there can be no doubt that Blake qualifies as a "great poet," one of the greatest in the English tradition — if only of the "second tier" as Eliot would have it ("Dante is a classic, and Blake only a poet of genius").

That time has not vitiated the trenchancy of Blake's moral vision is amply attested by references in contemporary media reports "exposing" labor practices at factories making goods for the American market, such as this last year from China Daily (August 19, 2011): "Workers toil in the heat and noise inside the grim workshop that conjures up images of Dickensian conditions and William Blake's 'dark, satanic mills'". Eliot's grousing aside, Blake conjures in the human conscience a righteous indignation against inhumane labor practices where they are found, much as Oscar Wilde said that fogs and sunsets exist "because poets and painters have taught [people to see] the mysterious loveliness of such effects." Frye finds an affinity in Blake's Vision of the Last Judgment with George Berkeley's phrase esse est percipi ("to be is to perceive"), citing this passage: "Mental Things alone are Real; what is call'd Corporeal, Nobody Knows of its Dwelling Place: it is in Fallacy, & its Existence an Imposture." This also forms the basis of Blake's Wordsworthian criticism: "Wordsworth must know that what he Writes Valuable is Not to be found in Nature."

The moral sense in Blake, almost a stridency, reaches out across the generations to shape our image of the past; however less certain its application to ourselves. David V. Erdman writes, "In an age when Luxury was still a sin and every fat man was a living comment on the inequitable distribution of a meager food supply, Blake shared the popular belief that the drone or waster was the wolf at the door." How popular this actually was then, it is hard to gauge. I suppose it is possible for our peers abroad to have a better sense of America's "luxury" and spendthrift profligacy than we have ourselves — though such a connection might not be drawn in some "self-enclosed" critical system.

Blake was not, however, a poet of social reform. While he may have signed petitions — he opposed slavery as well — his poems operated on another level. His work educated consciousness, in the Wildean sense. The real question to be asked is, why did so many of his peers not appear to take notice? The answers are already obvious from contemporary analogy: some are "being slowly ground to death, in a world of. . . brutal exploitation" and others occupy themselves climbing the flues of intellectual systems designed "to debunk wordviews" that they may find untenable. In this sense, as Eliot said, Blake was an artist of exceptional honesty.

All language is reducible to symbol. But to say that, and nothing more, is not saying much. The symbolism of Blake's poems may be extrapolated — stretched and teased and atomized (to echo Frye's letter to his fiancée) — for the betterment of understanding. Yet that is not all. "No symbol in Blake is single and fixed", writes Bronowski. Moreover, the chimney sweeper in Blake's poems, was not, and cannot ever be, merely a symbol, any more than a subsistence worker in Wenzhou, China's "Button City" wherein "almost two-thirds of all the buttons in the world are made", can be a symbol. The chimney sweeper was a real person.

In a sense, Blake had it wrong. There is no need for students in "School / To be Flogd into following the Style of a Fool". When it comes to justifying the policies of empire, our students may be pinpricked, poled, or even scorched (by verbal admonition) to get them to climb. What holds true for university students increasingly applies to grammar school students as well. Tailored to become a cog in the machine, children are deprived of their opportunity to bask in the "summer morn/When the birds sing on every tree". They are even sold into an economic system of drudgery by their very parents (with the best of intentions). In a process which he cited as "the pathetic surrender of babes" (the phrase is from sociologist Jules Henry), psychiatrist R.D. Laing explained: "Children do not give up their innate imagination, curiosity, dreaminess easily. You have to love them to get them to do that." Psychology had not yet been invented in Blake's day; but it is hard to see that he would have disagreed with that.

Arnold

“BALDER DEAD” by Matthew Arnold (first published 1855)

I’ll be quite clear about this. As I have written about poetry this week, I know I have at once halved the readership of this blog. Wiseacres now say “Nobody reads poetry!”. Except poets and critics. This is not quite true, but near enough to be common wisdom. Some poets reply sharply that it doesn’t matter if they are little read, so long as their works achieve what they intended them to achieve. This is the line taken by the Dunedin poet David Howard in the after-word to his little collection S(t)et (Gumtree Press, 2009), where he professes not to be concerned about the “market share” he gets.

Good for him. I think this is a sane attitude for a poet.

Still, I’m aware that people are not storming book-shops to buy volumes of poetry, and remainder bins fill up with those which book-stores have “bought in”’ rather than getting on a “sell-or-return” basis.

So, I think pig-headedly, if I have broached the topic of poetry in my “Something New”, and alienated casual browsers, I might as well push on and devote “Something Old” to poetry too. And, being as ready to be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb, I’ll set about commending a poem that is now regarded as a period piece, finding little favour and reflecting too much the tastes of its own age.

Balder Dead is High Victorian narrative poetry. It runs to approximately 2,000 lines and fills up 28 pages in the Everyman’s edition of Matthew Arnold’s Collected Poetry which I have on my shelf.

Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) is regarded as a very intellectual and sympathetic Victorian figure -  the man who regretted the decline of religious faith but who couldn’t bring himself to be a religious believer, as he made plain in his best-known short lyric Dover Beach. This made him a religiously-inclined agnostic and therefore very representative of intellectuals who were his contemporaries. In universities, Arnold is now studied more for his literary and social criticism (especially his book Culture and Anarchy) than for his poetry. This is true even in courses specialising in Victorian Poetry where he is seen to stand, with Arthur Hugh Clough, some way behind the two big boys, Tennyson and Browning.

Balder Dead is, therefore, the type of poem which is known to sit in the collected works of an esteemed figure, but which is hardly ever read.

The poem is written in blank-verse iambic pentameter, with heroic extended metaphors of the sort that Homer would have approved; and with key lines and phrases sometimes repeated, as in the days of the oral-culture bards.

It re-tells a story from Norse mythology.

Balder (his name is more commonly spelt Baldur), the beautiful and peaceful Sun God, is dead. Lok (more commonly known as Loki) the trickster cheated poor Hoder into a situation where Hoder accidentally killed Balder. Like so many mythic and legendary heroes (like Achilles, like Siegfried, like Superman) Balder was invulnerable except for one small weakness. The gods used to make sport with him by hurling weapons at him that bounced off him and did not harm him. But Balder succumbed to contact with his nemesis (or Krypton), mistletoe. This detail suggests that, before Matthew Arnold got hold of the story, the death of Balder had something to do with ancient legends about the death of the sun in the coming of long Norse winters.

The gods lament for the dead Balder. They want him returned to them. So Hermod mounts Odin’s horse and rides down to the underworld to ask for Balder back. But the Queen of the Underworld says Balder will be returned to the gods only if all things on Earth and in the heavens weep for the death of Balder. At the gods’ bidding all things do indeed weep for Balder (again, like the rain and snow-storms that follow the “death” of the sun in winter). All things, that is, except for Lok. Balder is not returned to the gods.

Odin plans to storm the underworld and rescue Balder by force. But Odin’s wife Freya argues that not even the Father of the Gods can contradict things like Death, which have been set for all eternity. The gods burn Balder’s mortal remains in a ship. The long poem therefore ends with Hermod sadly farewelling the shades of Balder and Balder’s wife Nanna, and Hoder (who committed suicide after accidentally killing Balder) as the three of them fade into the mists of the underworld of Death.

This is not a poem of densely-expressed philosophy, but a narrative poem taking all the opportunities for long descriptive passages provided by Hermod’s long journey. Its main theme seems simply to be the irreversibility of death, with suggestions of the “twilight of the gods”. The tone is elegiac – Arnold is farewelling a whole mythic way of seeing the world, a whole system of belief, as if it were analogous to the system of belief he saw dying in his own age. Hence Balder Dead is something like an extension of Dover Beach. Yet near the end, the shade of Balder gives a formal speech suggesting a better world will arise in the future – perhaps the obligatory piece of Victorian optimism.

To me, it is extraordinary that Arnold was only 33 when he wrote this death-haunted piece. Apparently critics have spilt much ink discussing the extent to which Arnold identifiedhimself with Balder – that is, as one who was wearied by the modern world and would have been glad to escape from it, as Balder tells Hermod he is glad to escape the ceaseless warfare that goes on in Valhalla. This is in an episode, near the end of the poem, which Arnold invented and which does not appear in the old  legend as he found it.

How do we now read a poem like this? When it first appeared in 1855, Balder Dead was reasonably acclaimed, although the humour magazine Punch couldn’t resist an obvious pun when it said that it wasn’t Balder Dead but balderdash.

In part, I take the advice of one old critic who said that all long poems are chaplets – strings threading together the good bits and the striking images. This is the imagist view that there are really no long poems – only collections of short ones. I’m sure this does an injustice to the skill that goes into making an extended narrative poem, but as I read Balder Dead it was the isolated images that held my attention and found their way into my notebooks.

Consider, for example, the six lines it takes (in Part One) to tell us that Hoder’s arm brushed against Hermod’s arm in the dark:

            “And as a spray of honeysuckle flowers

            Brushes across a tired traveller’s face

            Who shuffles through the deep dew-moistened dust,

            On a May evening, in the darken’d lanes,

            And starts him, that he thinks a ghost went by –

            So Hoder brushed by Hermod’s side….”

This is indeed extended heroic simile.

Or take this quick snapshot from Hermod’s journey to the underworld (in Part Two):

            “And o’er a darksome tract, which knows no sun,

            But by the blotted light of stars, he fared…”

(“Blotted”? I think that’s brilliant.)

Then there is this couplet on Niord, the god of storms, in Part Three:

            “He knows each frith, and every rocky creek

            Fringed with dark pines, and sands where seafowl scream”

It may now be a cliché to speak of birds “screaming”, but it jumps out at us in a decorous Victorian poem.

Finally, I quote some of the eulogy the warlike Thor speaks for Balder as Balder’s corpse is burned:

            “…from thy lip, O Balder, night or day,

            Heard no one ever an injurious word

            To God or Hero, but thou keptest back

            The others, labouring to compose their brawls,

            Be ye then kind, as Balder too was kind!

            For we lose him who smoothed all strife in Heaven.”

This, alas, is not great poetry. In fact it’s rather lame. But it does advance Balder to the position of  exemplary Christ-like Prince of Peace, and again suggests that Matthew Arnold was viewing the old Norse myth as a platform for a critique of the religion he saw dying in his own age.

I doubt if anything I’ve written here will persuade you to rush out and borrow a copy of Arnold’s poems. or to read Balder Dead on-line (as you can do). But at the very least, I’ve enjoyed reminding you that not all venerable-but-unfashionable poetry need moulder unread in small-print collected editions. Balder Dead speaks for its age capably. Reading it gives more perspective on ours. 

Arnold: As a Critics

Introduction: Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), the Victorian poet and critic, was 'the first modern critic' [1], and could be called 'the critic's critic', being a champion not only of great poetry, but of literary criticism itself. The purpose of literary criticism, in his view, was 'to know the best that is known and thought in the world, and by in its turn making this known, to create a current of true and fresh ideas', and he has influenced a whole school of critics including new critics such as T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis, and Allen Tate. He was the founder of the sociological school of criticism, and through his touchstone method introduced scientific objectivity to critical evaluation by providing comparison and analysis as the two primary tools of criticism. Arnold's evaluations of the Romantic poets such as Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Keats are landmarks in descriptive criticism, and as a poet-critic he occupies an eminent position in the rich galaxy of poet-critics of English literature.

T. S. Eliot praised Arnold's objective approach to critical evaluation, particularly his tools of comparison and analysis, and Allen Tate in his essay Tension in Poetry imitates Arnold's touchstone method to discover 'tension', or the proper balance between connotation and denotation, in poetry. These new critics have come a long way from the Romantic approach to poetry, and this change in attitude could be attributed to Arnold, who comes midway between the two schools.

The social role of poetry and criticism

To Arnold a critic is a social benefactor. In his view the creative artist, no matter how much of a genius, would cut a sorry figure without the critic to come to his aid. Before Arnold a literary critic cared only for the beauties and defects of works of art, but Arnold the critic chose to be the educator and guardian of public opinion and propagator of the best ideas.

Cultural and critical values seem to be synonymous for Arnold. Scott James, comparing him to Aristotle, says that where Aristotle analyses the work of art, Arnold analyses the role of the critic. The one gives us the principles which govern the making of a poem, the other the principles by which the best poems should be selected and made known. Aristotle's critic owes allegiance to the artist, but Arnold's critic has a duty to society.

To Arnold poetry itself was the criticism of life: 'The criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty', and in his seminal essay The Study of Poetry' 1888) he says that poetry alone can be our sustenance and stay in an era where religious beliefs are fast losing their hold. He claims that poetry is superior to philosophy, science, and religion. Religion attaches its emotion to supposed facts, and the supposed facts are failing it, but poetry attaches its emotion to ideas and ideas are infallible. And science, in his view is incomplete without poetry. He endorses Wordsworth's view that 'poetry is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science', adding 'What is a countenance without its expression?' and calls poetry 'the breath and finer spirit of knowledge'.

A moralist

As a critic Arnold is essentially a moralist, and has very definite ideas about what poetry should and should not be. A poetry of revolt against moral ideas, he says, is a poetry of revolt against life, and a poetry of indifference to moral ideas is a poetry of indifference to life. Arnold even censored his own collection on moral grounds. He omitted the poem Empedocles on Etna from his volume of 1853, whereas he had included it in his collection of 1852. The reason he advances, in the Preface to his Poems of 1853 is not that the poem is too subjective, with its Hamlet-like introspection, or that it was a deviation from his classical ideals, but that the poem is too depressing in its subject matter, and would leave the reader hopeless and crushed. There is nothing in it in the way of hope or optimism, and such a poem could prove to be neither instructive nor of any delight to the reader.

Aristotle says that poetry is superior to History since it bears the stamp of high seriousness and truth. If truth and seriousness are wanting in the subject matter of a poem, so will the true poetic stamp of diction and movement be found wanting in its style and manner. Hence the two, the nobility of subject matter, and the superiority of style and manner, are proportional and cannot occur independently. Arnold took up Aristotle's view, asserting that true greatness in poetry is given by the truth and seriousness of its subject matter, and by the high diction and movement in its style and manner, and although indebted to Joshua Reynolds for the expression 'grand style', Arnold gave it a new meaning when he used it in his lecture On Translating Homer (1861): "I think it will be found that that the grand style arises in poetry when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with a severity a serious subject." According to Arnold, Homer is the best model of a simple grand style, while Milton is the best model of severe grand style. Dante, however, is an example of both.

Even Chaucer, in Arnold's view, in spite of his virtues such as benignity, largeness, and spontaneity, lacks seriousness. Burns too lacks sufficient seriousness, because he was hypocritical in that while he adopted a moral stance in some of his poems, in his private life he flouted morality.

Return to Classical values

Arnold believed that a modern writer should be aware that contemporary literature is built on the foundations of the past, and should contribute to the future by continuing a firm tradition. Quoting Goethe and Niebuhr in support of his view, he asserts that his age suffers from spiritual weakness because it thrives on self-interest and scientific materialism, and therefore cannot provide noble characters such as those found in Classical literature.

He urged modern poets to look to the ancients and their great characters and themes for guidance and inspiration. Classical literature, in his view, possess pathos, moral profundity and noble simplicity, while modern themes, arising from an age of spiritual weakness, are suitable for only comic and lighter kinds of poetry, and don't possess the loftiness to support epic or heroic poetry. Arnold turns his back on the prevailing Romantic view of poetry and seeks to revive the Classical values of objectivity, urbanity, and architectonics. He denounces the Romantics for ignoring the Classical writers for the sake of novelty, and for their allusive (Arnold uses the word 'suggestive') writing which defies easy comprehension.

Preface to Poems of 1853

In the preface to his Poems (1853) Arnold asserts the importance of architectonics; ('that power of execution, which creates, forms, and constitutes') in poetry - the necessity of achieving unity by subordinating the parts to the whole, and the expression of ideas to the depiction of human action, and condemns poems which exist for the sake of single lines or passages, stray metaphors, images, and fancy expressions. Scattered images and happy turns of phrase, in his view, can only provide partial effects, and not contribute to unity. He also, continuing his anti-Romantic theme, urges, modern poets to shun allusiveness and not fall into the temptation of subjectivity.

He says that even the imitation of Shakespeare is risky for a young writer, who should imitate only his excellences, and avoid his attractive accessories, tricks of style, such as quibble, conceit, circumlocution and allusiveness, which will lead him astray. Arnold commends Shakespeare's use of great plots from the past. He had what Goethe called the architectonic quality, that is his expression was matched to the action (or the subject). But at the same time Arnold quotes Hallam to show that Shakespeare's style was complex even where the press of action demanded simplicity and directness, and hence his style could not be taken as a model by young writers. Elsewhere he says that Shakespeare's 'expression tends to become a little sensuous and simple, too much intellectualised'.

Shakespeare's excellences are 1)The architectonic quality of his style; the harmony between action and expression. 2) His reliance on the ancients for his themes. 3) Accurate construction of action. 4) His strong conception of action and accurate portrayal of his subject matter. 5) His intense feeling for the subjects he dramatises. His attractive accessories (or tricks of style) which a young writer should handle carefully are 1) His fondness for quibble, fancy, conceit. 2) His excessive use of imagery. 3) Circumlocution, even where the press of action demands directness. 4) His lack of simplicity (according to Hallam and Guizot). 5) His allusiveness.

As an example of the danger of imitating Shakespeare he gives Keats's imitation of Shakespeare in his Isabella or the Pot of Basil. Keats uses felicitous phrases and single happy turns of phrase, yet the action is handled vaguely and so the poem does not have unity. By way of contrast, he says the Italian writer Boccaccio handled the same theme successfully in his Decameron, because he rightly subordinated expression to action. Hence Boccaccio's poem is a poetic success where Keats's is a failure. Arnold also wants the modern writer to take models from the past because they depict human actions which touch on 'the great primary human affections: to those elementary feelings which subsist permanently in the race, and which are independent of time'. Characters such as Agamemnon, Dido, Aeneas, Orestes, Merope, Alcmeon, and Clytemnestra, leave a permanent impression on our minds. Compare 'The Iliad' or 'The Aeneid' with 'The Childe Harold' or 'The Excursion' and you see the difference.

A modern writer might complain that ancient subjects pose problems with regard to ancient culture, customs, manners, dress and so on which are not familiar to contemporary readers. But Arnold is of the view that a writer should not concern himself with the externals, but with the 'inward man'. The inward man is the same irrespective of clime or time.

The Function of Criticism

It is in his The Function of Criticism at the Present Time (1864) that Arnold says that criticism should be a 'dissemination of ideas, a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world'. He says that when evaluating a work the aim is 'to see the object as in itself it really is'. Psychological, historical and sociological background are irrelevant, and to dwell on such aspects is mere dilettantism. This stance was very influential with later critics. Arnold also believed that in his quest for the best a critic should not confine himself to the literature of his own country, but should draw substantially on foreign literature and ideas, because the propagation of ideas should be an objective endeavour.

The Study of Poetry

In The Study of Poetry, (1888) which opens his Essays in Criticism: Second series, in support of his plea for nobility in poetry, Arnold recalls Sainte-Beuve's reply to Napoleon, when latter said that charlatanism is found in everything. Sainte-Beuve replied that charlatanism might be found everywhere else, but not in the field of poetry, because in poetry the distinction between sound and unsound, or only half-sound, truth and untruth, or only half-truth, between the excellent and the inferior, is of paramount importance.

For Arnold there is no place for charlatanism in poetry. To him poetry is the criticism of life, governed by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty. It is in the criticism of life that the spirit of our race will find its stay and consolation. The extent to which the spirit of mankind finds its stay and consolation is proportional to the power of a poem's criticism of life, and the power of the criticism of life is in direct proportion to the extent to which the poem is genuine and free from charlatanism.

In The Study of Poetry he also cautions the critic that in forming a genuine and disinterested estimate of the poet under consideration he should not be influenced by historical or personal judgements, historical judgements being fallacious because we regard ancient poets with excessive veneration, and personal judgements being fallacious when we are biased towards a contemporary poet. If a poet is a 'dubious classic, let us sift him; if he is a false classic, let us explode him. But if he is a real classic, if his work belongs to the class of the very best . . . enjoy his work'.

As examples of erroneous judgements he says that the 17th century court tragedies of the French were spoken of with exaggerated praise, until Pellisson reproached them for want of the true poetic stamp, and another critic, Charles d' Hricault, said that 17th century French poetry had received undue and undeserving veneration. Arnold says the critics seem to substitute 'a halo for physiognomy and a statue in the place where there was once a man. They give us a human personage no larger than God seated amidst his perfect work, like Jupiter on Olympus.'

He also condemns the French critic Vitet, who had eloquent words of praise for the epic poem Chanson de Roland by Turoldus, (which was sung by a jester, Taillefer, in William the Conqueror's army), saying that it was superior to Homer's Iliad. Arnold's view is that this poem can never be compared to Homer's work, and that we only have to compare the description of dying Roland to Helen's words about her wounded brothers Pollux and Castor and its inferiority will be clearly revealed.

The Study of Poetry: a shift in position - the touchstone method

Arnold's criticism of Vitet above illustrates his 'touchstone method'; his theory that in order to judge a poet's work properly, a critic should compare it to passages taken from works of great masters of poetry, and that these passages should be applied as touchstones to other poetry. Even a single line or selected quotation will serve the purpose. From this we see that he has shifted his position from that expressed in the preface to his Poems of 1853. In The Study of Poetry he no longer uses the acid test of action and architectonics. He became an advocate of 'touchstones'. 'Short passages even single lines,' he said, 'will serve our turn quite sufficiently'.

Some of Arnold's touchstone passages are: Helen's words about her wounded brother, Zeus addressing the horses of Peleus, suppliant Achilles' words to Priam, and from Dante; Ugolino's brave words, and Beatrice's loving words to Virgil. From non-Classical writers he selects from Henry IV Part II (III, i), Henry's expostulation with sleep - 'Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast . . . '. From Hamlet (V, ii) 'Absent thee from felicity awhile . . . '. From Milton's Paradise Lost Book 1, 'Care sat on his faded cheek . . .', and 'What is else not to be overcome . . . '

The Study of Poetry: on Chaucer

The French Romance poetry of the 13th century langue d'oc and langue d'oil was extremely popular in Europe and Italy, but soon lost its popularity and now it is important only in terms of historical study. But Chaucer, who was nourished by the romance poetry of the French, and influenced by the Italian Royal rhyme stanza, still holds enduring fascination. There is an excellence of style and subject in his poetry, which is the quality the French poetry lacks. Dryden says of Chaucer's Prologue 'Here is God's plenty!' and that 'he is a perpetual fountain of good sense'. There is largeness, benignity, freedom and spontaneity in Chaucer's writings. 'He is the well of English undefiled'. He has divine fluidity of movement, divine liquidness of diction. He has created an epoch and founded a tradition.

Some say that the fluidity of Chaucer's verse is due to licence in the use of the language, a liberty which Burns enjoyed much later. But Arnold says that the excellence of Chaucer's poetry is due to his sheer poetic talent. This liberty in the use of language was enjoyed by many poets, but we do not find the same kind of fluidity in others. Only in Shakespeare and Keats do we find the same kind of fluidity, though they wrote without the same liberty in the use of language.

Arnold praises Chaucer's excellent style and manner, but says that Chaucer cannot be called a classic since, unlike Homer, Virgil and Shakespeare, his poetry does not have the high poetic seriousness which Aristotle regards as a mark of its superiority over the other arts.

The Study of Poetry: on the age of Dryden and Pope

The age of Dryden is regarded as superior to that of the others for 'sweetness of poetry'. Arnold asks whether Dryden and Pope, poets of great merit, are truly the poetical classics of the 18th century. He says Dryden's post-script to the readers in his translation of The Aeneid reveals the fact that in prose writing he is even better than Milton and Chapman.

Just as the laxity in religious matters during the Restoration period was a direct outcome of the strict discipline of the Puritans, in the same way in order to control the dangerous sway of imagination found in the poetry of the Metaphysicals, to counteract 'the dangerous prevalence of imagination', the poets of the 18th century introduced certain regulations. The restrictions that were imposed on the poets were uniformity, regularity, precision, and balance. These restrictions curbed the growth of poetry, and encouraged the growth of prose.

Hence we can regard Dryden as the glorious founder, and Pope as the splendid high priest, of the age of prose and reason, our indispensable 18th century. Their poetry was that of the builders of an age of prose and reason. Arnold says that Pope and Dryden are not poet classics, but the 'prose classics' of the 18th century.

As for poetry, he considers Gray to be the only classic of the 18th century. Gray constantly studied and enjoyed Greek poetry and thus inherited their poetic point of view and their application of poetry to life. But he is the 'scantiest, frailest classic' since his output was small.

The Study of Poetry: on Burns

Although Burns lived close to the 19th century his poetry breathes the spirit of 18th Century life. Burns is most at home in his native language. His poems deal with Scottish dress, Scottish manner, and Scottish religion. This Scottish world is not a beautiful one, and it is an advantage if a poet deals with a beautiful world. But Burns shines whenever he triumphs over his sordid, repulsive and dull world with his poetry.

Perhaps we find the true Burns only in his bacchanalian poetry, though occasionally his bacchanalian attitude was affected. For example in his Holy Fair, the lines 'Leeze me on drink! it gies us mair/ Than either school or college', may represent the bacchanalian attitude, but they are not truly bacchanalian in spirit. There is something insincere about it, smacking of bravado.

When Burns moralises in some of his poems it also sounds insincere, coming from a man who disregarded morality in actual life. And sometimes his pathos is intolerable, as in Auld Lang Syne. We see the real Burns (wherein he is unsurpassable) in lines such as, 'To make a happy fire-side clime/ to weans and wife/ That's the true pathos and sublime/ Of human life' (Ae Fond Kiss). Here we see the genius of Burns. But, like Chaucer, Burns lacks high poetic seriousness, though his poems have poetic truth in diction and movement. Sometimes his poems are profound and heart-rending, such as in the lines, 'Had we never loved sae kindly/ had we never loved sae blindly/ never met or never parted/ we had ne'er been broken-hearted'.

Also like Chaucer, Burns possesses largeness, benignity, freedom and spontaneity. But instead of Chaucer's fluidity, we find in Burns a springing bounding energy. Chaucer's benignity deepens in Burns into a sense of sympathy for both human as well as non-human things, but Chaucer's world is richer and fairer than that of Burns. Sometimes Burns's poetic genius is unmatched by anyone. He is even better than Goethe at times and he is unrivalled by anyone except Shakespeare. He has written excellent poems such as Tam O'Shanter, Whistle and I'll come to you my Lad, and Auld Lang Syne. When we compare Shelley's 'Pinnacled dim in the of intense inane' (Prometheus Unbound III, iv) with Burns's, 'They flatter, she says, to deceive me' (Tam Glen), the latter is salutary.

Arnold on Shakespeare

Praising Shakespeare, Arnold says 'In England there needs a miracle of genius like Shakespeare's to produce a balance of mind'. This is not bardolatory, but praise tempered by a critical sense. In a letter he writes. 'I keep saying Shakespeare, you are as obscure as life is'. In his sonnet On Shakespeare he says; 'Others abide our question. Thou are free./ We ask and ask - Thou smilest and art still,/ Out-topping knowledge'.

Arnold's limitations

For all his championing of disinterestedness, Arnold was unable to practise disinterestedness in all his essays. In his essay on Shelley particularly he displayed a lamentable lack of disinterestedness. Shelley's moral views were too much for the Victorian Arnold. In his essay on Keats too Arnold failed to be disinterested. The sentimental letters of Keats to Fanny Brawne were too much for him.

Arnold sometimes became a satirist, and as a satirical critic saw things too quickly, too summarily. In spite of their charm, the essays are characterised by egotism and, as Tilotson says, 'the attention is directed, not on his object but on himself and his objects together'.

Arnold makes clear his disapproval of the vagaries of some of the Romantic poets. Perhaps he would have agreed with Goethe, who saw Romanticism as disease and Classicism as health. But Arnold occasionally looked at things with jaundiced eyes, and he overlooked the positive features of Romanticism which posterity will not willingly let die, such as its humanitarianism, love of nature, love of childhood, a sense of mysticism, faith in man with all his imperfections, and faith in man's unconquerable mind.

Arnold's inordinate love of classicism made him blind to the beauty of lyricism. He ignored the importance of lyrical poems, which are subjective and which express the sentiments and the personality of the poet. Judged by Arnold's standards, a large number of poets both ancient and modern are dismissed because they sang with 'Profuse strains of unpremeditated art'.

It was also unfair of Arnold to compare the classical works in which figure the classical quartet, namely Achilles, Prometheus, Clytemnestra and Dido with Heamann and Dorothea, Childe Harold, Jocelyn, and 'The Excursion'. Even the strongest advocates of Arnold would agree that it is not always profitable for poets to draw upon the past. Literature expresses the zeitgeist, the spirit of the contemporary age. Writers must choose subjects from the world of their own experience. What is ancient Greece to many of us? Historians and archaeologists are familiar with it, but the common readers delight justifiably in modern themes. To be in the company of Achilles, Prometheus, Clytemnestra and Dido is not always a pleasant experience. What a reader wants is variety, which classical mythology with all its tradition and richness cannot provide. An excessive fondness for Greek and Latin classics produces a literary diet without variety, while modern poetry and drama have branched out in innumerable directions.

As we have seen, as a classicist Arnold upheld the supreme importance of the architectonic faculty, then later shifted his ground. In the lectures On Translating Homer, On the Study of Celtic Literature, and The Study of Poetry, he himself tested the greatness of poetry by single lines. Arnold the classicist presumably realised towards the end of his life that classicism was not the last word in literature.

Arnold's lack of historic sense was another major failing. While he spoke authoritatively on his own century, he was sometimes groping in the dark in his assessment of earlier centuries. He used to speak at times as if ex cathedra, and this pontifical solemnity vitiated his criticism.

As we have seen, later critics praise Arnold, but it is only a qualified praise. Oliver Elton calls him a 'bad great critic'. T. S. Eliot said that Arnold is a 'Propagandist and not a creator of ideas'. According to Walter Raleigh, Arnold's method is like that of a man who took a brick to the market to give the buyers an impression of the building.

Arnold's legacy

In spite of his faults, Arnold's position as an eminent critic is secure. Douglas Bush says that the breadth and depth of Arnold's influence cannot be measured or even guessed at because, from his own time onward, so much of his thought and outlook became part of the general educated consciousness. He was one of those critics who, as Eliot said, arrive from time to time to set the literary house in order. Eliot named Dryden, Johnson and Arnold as some of the greatest critics of the English language.

Arnold united active independent insight with the authority of the humanistic tradition. He carried on, in his more sophisticated way, the Renaissance humanistic faith in good letters as the teachers of wisdom, and in the virtue of great literature, and above all, great poetry. He saw poetry as a supremely illuminating, animating, and fortifying aid in the difficult endeavour to become or remain fully human.

Arnold's method of criticism is comparative. Steeped in classical poetry, and thoroughly acquainted with continental literature, he compares English literature to French and German literature, adopting the disinterested approach he had learned from Sainte-Beuve.

Arnold's objective approach to criticism and his view that historical and biographical study are unnecessary was very influential on the new criticism. His emphasis on the importance of tradition also influenced F. R. Leavis, and T. S. Eliot.

Eliot is also indebted to Arnold for his classicism, and for his objective approach which paved the way for Eliot to say that poetry is not an expression of personality but an escape from personality, because it is not an expression of emotions but an escape from emotions.

Although Arnold disapproved of the Romantics' approach to poetry, their propensity for allusiveness and symbolism, he also shows his appreciation the Romantics in his Essays in Criticism. He praises Wordsworth thus: 'Nature herself took the pen out of his hand and wrote with a bare, sheer penetrating power'. Arnold also valued poetry for its strong ideas, which he found to be the chief merit of Wordsworth's poetry. About Shelley he says that Shelley is 'A beautiful but ineffectual angel beating in a void his luminous wings in vain'.

In an age when cheap literature caters to the taste of the common man, one might fear that the classics will fade into insignificance. But Arnold is sure that the currency and the supremacy of the classics will be preserved in the modern age, not because of conscious effort on the part of the readers, but because of the human instinct of self-preservation.

In the present day with the literary tradition over-burdened with imagery, myth, symbol and abstract jargon, it is refreshing to come back to Arnold and his like to encounter central questions about literature and life as they are perceived by a mature and civilised mind.

(Original material by S. N. Radhika Lakshmi edited and revised by Ian Mackean)

Bibliography

[1] Annan, Noel, in Matthew Arnold: Selected Essays. London: OUP 1964

Arnold, Matthew. Essays in Criticism. Ed. S. R. Littlewood. London: Macmillan. 1958

Arnold, Matthew. 'Preface to the First Edition of poems: 1853'. The Poems of Matthew Arnold. Ed. Miriam Allot, London, 1979. 654-671

Arnold, Matthew. Selected Poems and Prose. Ed. Denys Thompson. London: Heinemann, 1971.

© S. N. Radhika Lakshmi

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