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Matthew Arnold's Tragic Vision
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Abstract
In spite of his commitment to the classical tradition, Matthew Arnold saw tragedy not as man's violation of a supernal order, but as his victimization by a historical order. Arnold's essay on Lord “Falkland”, rather than the 1853 Preface, provides us with our most useful guide to his understanding of the tragic experience. In “Falkland” Arnold explicitly indicates that history becomes a tragic action in epochs of revolution when civilized life breaks down into a clash between a superannuated orthodoxy and a banal radicalism. In such periods, gifted individuals are left to wander, hopelessly, between two worlds. Four important works are informed by this vision. Empedocles on Etna shows that the protagonist's crisis is precipitated by the isolation Empedocles suffers in a world dominated by superstition on the one hand and sophistry on the other. “Lucretius” was to have used a similar background, the revolutionary clash between the conservative “Milonians” and the democratic “Clodians”. In Balder Dead Arnold turned to the myth of the Twilight of the Gods in order to dramatize the theme of “Falkland”. Finally, the heroine in Merope is forced to choose between the barbarism of the old order and the nullity of the new one.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1970
References
1 “The Implications of Tragedy,” in Tragedy: Vision and Form, ed. Robert W. Corrigan (San Francisco, 1965), p. 354.
2 The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1960- ), 'i“, 2. This edition cited hereafter as CPW.
3 Matthew Arnold: A Study of the Aesthetic Temperament in Victorian England (Bloomington, Ind., 1967), p. 185.
4 See E. M. Butler, The Tyranny of Greece over Germany (Cambridge, Eng., 1935), p. 97. Warren Anderson finds little of the Greek tragic vision in Arnold: Matthew Arnold and the Classical Tradition (Ann Arbor, 1965), p. 252.
5 “Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse” (ll. 85–86). Arnold's poetry is quoted from The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. C. B. Tinker and H. F. Lowry (London, 1950).
6 The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Oscar Levy (Edinburgh, 1909–13), 'xii“, 176. Hereafter, CWFN.
7 Modern Tragedy (London, 1966).
8 CWFN, ‘iv“, 120, and see Nietzsche's remarks on The Birth of Tragedy and ”Richard Wagner in Bayreuth“ in Ecce Homo, CWFN, ‘xvii”, secs. 1 and 4.
9 “On Tragedy,” in Corrigan, p. 285.
10 The Social History of Art, trans, by the author and Stanley Godman (New York: Vintage Books, 1951), 'iii“, 89–90.
11 The Death of Tragedy (New York, 1961), p. 119. Eric Auerbach has denned the importance of Senancour in formulating the Romantic view of historical reality. Mimesis, trans. Willard Trask (New York: Anchor Books, 1957), p. 412.
12 Tragedy is Not Enough, trans. H. A. T. Reiche et al. (Boston, 1952), p. 49.
13 P. 54. The same idea is treated briefly in Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (London, 1962), pp. 97–99.
14 Mixed Essays (1879) and Irish Essays and Others (1882), 2 vols, in one (New York, 1894), p. 155. Hereafter, ME.
15 C. B. Tinker and H. F. Lowry, The Poetry of Matthew Arnold: A Commentary (London, 1940), p. 291.
16 Unpublished Letters of Matthew Arnold, ed. Arnold Whitridge (New Haven, Conn., 1923), p. 14.
17 For a view of the sophist-Pausanius duel similar to the one being developed here, see A. Dwight Culler, Imaginative Reason: The Poetry of Matthew Arnold (New Haven, 1966), p. 161.
18 God and the Bible (New York, 1903; originally publ. London, 1875), p. 92.
19 David DeLaura, in an apposite comment, defines “the central intention of Culture and Anarchy” as the exposition of an ideal that would terminate “the historical oscillation of Hebraism and Hellenism ... by somehow combining them in a higher synthesis.” See his “Matthew Arnold and John Henry Newman: The ‘Oxford Sentiment’ and the Religion of the Future,” TSLL, 'vi“ (1965), 599.
20 The History of Rome, trans. W. P. Dickson (London: Everyman's Library, 1921), 'iv“, 553. Mommsen's work appeared between 1854 and 1856. We do not know exactly when Arnold read it, but it seems inconceivable, given his parentage and his plans for ”Lucretius“ in 1855, that it was not immediately. Arnold briefly compared Mommsen and Curtius, CPW, v, 258.
21 Culler, p. 220, shows that these lines refer to Lucretius.
22 G. W. E. Russell, Matthew Arnold (London, 1904), p. 42.
23 The Poems of Matthew Arnold, p. 326.
24 Essays, Letters, and Reviews by Matthew Arnold, ed. Fraser Neiman (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), p. 190.
25 See William Robbins, The Ethical Ideal of Matthew Arnold (Toronto, 1959), pp. 30–31.
26 Hegel, On Tragedy, ed. Anne and Henry Paolucci (Garden City, N. Y.: Anchor Books, 1962), pp. 46–51. The passage referred to is from The Philosophy of Fine Art.
27 This criticism is implicit in Nietzsche's attacks on Hegel (e.g.,CWFN, 'v“, 70–71).
28 See DeLaura, n. 19 above, and Walter J. Hippie, “Matthew Arnold, Dialectician,” UTQ, 'xxxii“ (1962), 1–26.