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"But Clear As Words Can Make Revealing? Arnold's Language and the Struggle for Transparency
Dan S. Kline Department of English
Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts
Faculty of Graduate Studies The University of Western Ontario
London, Ontario August 1997
@ Dan S. Kline 1997
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Abstract
In the 1853 "PrefaceN to the Poems, Matthew Arnold argues
that the poet should adopt the "grand style" to assist in the
production of a type of poetry that is content-driven. The
precise nature and meaning of the "grand style" remains one of
the more elusive problems in Arnold scholarship. Despite
Arnold's conviction that the idea escapes definition, 1 argue,
in this thesis, that the ambiguous and unstable concept of the
"grand style" is involved with Arnold's belief in an ideal
language characterized by transparency. The poetry of Matthew
Arnold is, in many ways, a record of his struggle with this
transparent linguistic ideal.
Arnold's realization of the need for greater transparency
in language and his attempts to achieve it are inf ormed by the
work of John Locke in An Essay c o n c e r n i n g Human U n d e r s t a n d i n g
and Of the Conduct of the Understanding respectively. Locke's
sceptical attitude towards language as an effective medium of
communication parallels Arnold's discovery of the human,
arbitrary, and opaque nature of language in his first volume
of poetry, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems. However,
Arnold's later exposure to Locke's heavily qualified
endorsement of particular tropes in Of the C o n d u c t of the
Understanding has important implications and consequences for
an understanding of the varied use of the simile in Arnold's
poetry from the 1850s and 1860s.
key words: Matthew Arnold, language, John Locke, simile
iii
Acknow ledgements
I wish to express my deepest gratitude and appreciation
to my supervisor, Professor Donald S. Hair. Dr. Hair's
patience, erudition, and guidance provided continual
assistance and consLant reassurance at every stage of this
thesis. It has been a privilege to study w i t h such a mode1
teacher-scholar. Also, 1 am deeply indebted to Professor J.
Douglas Kneale, the second reader of this thesis, for his
remarkably efficient and helpful editorial advice, as well as
his thought provoking questions and suggestions.
Finally, 1 am immeasurably grateful to my family for
their love and unflagging support and encouragement.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
Certificate of Examination Abstract Acknowledgements Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter One: Arnold, Locke, and Language
Chapter Two: Fragments
Cnapte r Three: Tensions
Chapter Four: Strategies
Chapter Five: '1Thyrsis19
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
Vita
Introduction
The year 1850 is the annus mirabilis for nineteenth-
century literature. The appearance of T h e P r e l u d e and I n
Memoriam offers readers the seminal poems of the Romantic and
Victorian periods respectively. In June of that same year
F r a s e r ' s Magazine printed a poem entitled t'Mernorial Verses:
April 1850t1 by the author of a small, largely unnoticed,
volume of poetry published the previous year. The volume was
The S t r a y e d Reveller, and Other Poems and its author, the
semi-anonymous V I t of the title page, was in the midst of
consolidating an embryonic collection of ideas into a coherent
and controversial poetics. 1850 is also a critical year for
Matthew Arnold in ways 1 shall demonstrate in the next
chapter.
tlMemor~al Versest' does not share the reputation of poems
such as IfThe Forsaken Merman," l'The Scholar Gip~y,~' or ItDover
Beach,tt but it is an important text nevertheless because of
Arnold's own comments about it. In a letter to Clough prior
to the poem'ç appearance, Arnold mentions that frustratingly
elusive and unstable concept which lies at the very centre of
his theories of poetry and language: "1 have at Quillinants
sollicitation [sic] dirged W. W. in the grand style & need thy
rapture therewithu (Lang 172). The "grand style'' remains one
of the more ambiguous of Arnold's ideas, a fact which Arnold
hirnself acknowledges in On Translating Homer:
2
Alas! the grand style is the last matter in the
world for verbal definitionto deal with adequately.
One may Say of it as is said of faith: 'One must
feel it in ordex to kriow what it is. ' (Super 1:
188)'
David Riede has noted the rhetorical inqenuity with which
Arnold shifts his own feelings of guiit and responsibility
ont0 the reader (22), and even when Arnold does resort to
definition the result is unsatisfactory: "1 think it will be
found that the grand style arises in poetry, when a noble
nature, poetically gifted t r e a t s w i t h simplicity or with
severity a ser ious subject'l (Super 1: 188) . 1 would suggest that the most effective way of approaching the "grand style"
is through the alembic of Arncld's interest in lanquage.
Arnold l s connection with some of the leading linguistic
theorists and philoloqists of the day is amply demonstrated by
his letters which refer to figures such as F.D. Maurice and
Trench and indicate a persona1 acquaintance with Furnivall.
Julius Hare was a frequent visitor to Dr. Arnold's widow at
Fox How, and Arnold himself cultivated a friendship and
correspondence with the German Sanskrit scholar Max Mueller.
There are many places in the Arnoldian canon where one
might initiate an investiqation into Arnold's language and its
relationship to his poetics and the "grand style." David
Riede, for example, begins his study of Arnold's language with
a close, but not exclusive, analysis of the later religious
3
prose pieces as qlArnold's most rigorous, rational, systematic
thought about languagel' (2 1) . Riede argues, parsuasively,
that Arnold's wdeconstruction of Biblical language makes
explicit a distrust of his medium that had undermined his
poetry even early in his career" (12). A s an alternative to
Riede's retrospective approach, 1 prefer to begin in medias
res, as it were, throuqh an examination of Arnold's letters
and early critical prose. The key texts are the I1Preface1' to
the 1853 edition of the Poems, the often passionate polemic
about poetry and language he carried on with Clough through
their correspondence, and On Translating Honier. 1 think that
initiating an investigation of Arnold's lancjuage frorn the
early 1850s is im2ortant for many reasons. In the remaininy
pages of this Introduction and the chapter that follows 1 hope
to demonstrate that the ideas of the 1853 "Preface" and the
somewhat later advice of the Homer lectures assume an
important place within a particular contour of Arnold's
eclectic thought, namely British empiricism and, particularly,
the philosophy of John Locke. Additionally, 1 want to
emphasize that this particular contour was by no means stable
and was itself underqoing a major shift in these years. The
usefulness of beginning at precisely the moment of this shift
in Arnold's thinking is that it encourages us to look, with a
degrce of flexibility, back to the earlier poetry of the 1840s
and forward to some of Arnold's greatest poetic triumphs and
failures in the next two decades. This particular shift is
4
itself part of a larger turn in both Arnold's poetics (which
is inaugurated by the "Preface'?) and biography.'
On the eve of the publication of Culture and Anarchy
(1869) Arnold wrote to his mother:
My poems represent the main movement of mind of the
last quarter century, and thus they will probably
have their day as people become conscious of what
that movement of mind is, and interested in the
literary productions which reflect it (Russell
2: 9).
It is certainly possible to reduce this "rnovement of mindl to
Arnold's career itself by dividing it into periods of poetry
and various types of prose. We can even chart certain
movements within Arnold's poetry. The publication of The
Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems in 1349 primarily collected
Arnold's lyrics from the previous decade while the next ten
years would witness al1 of his major works in dramatic and
narrative poetry, including Empedocles on Etna, Tristram and
I s e u l t , Sohrab and Rustum, Balder Dead, and Merope. In the
1860s Arnold would again concentrate on the lyric mode. These
generic and chronological divisions are noteworthy but far
from absolute. Indeed, the transitions within this tripartite
structure are often characterized by a nebulosity, and some of
Arnold's greatest lyric accomplishments, such as "Stanzas from
the Grande Chartreuse, "Dover Beach, and IlThe Scholar
Gipsy," appear concurrently with the longer works in other
genres.
The llPrefaceM to the Poems and On Translating Homer are
situated in the midst of Arnold's Ifmovement of mind, l1 and it
is d i f f icult to know how to read them. Should they be read as
apologias or manifestos or both?' The ftPrefacelf opens with an
indication that Arnold is moving in a different direction as
a poet, as he defends his decision to exclude Empedocles on
Etna from the 1853 edition. For Arnold, as the "Prefaceft
elucidates, poetry is driven, primarily but not solely, by its
contents--ideas and actions that 'lare the eternal objects of
poetryf' (Super 1: 3). A s Edward Alexander has argued, Arnold
sought to avoid the excesses of romantic expressionism and
vulgar utilitarian didacticism (153). The contents of poetry
are historically determined and are something not completely
under the poetfs control. Arnold once remarked to Clough:
'The what you have to Say depends on your age" (Lang 78). The
attempt by a poet, when confronted with the multitudinousness
of Victorian life, to resort (like Arnold) to ancient subjects
alleviates but does not completely solve this dilemma. What
the poet did have control over was the Ifway" in which the
contents were organized in language. Arnold's theory of the
poet is predicated on the assumption that he/she must perform
multiple functions: "It is not enough that the poet should add
to the knowledge of men, it is required of him also that he
should add to their happinessw (Super 1: 2). This idea
appears in the letter to Clough four years earlier which
contains Arnold's f irst use of the term the I1grand stylel1:
On the other hand, there are two offices of Poetry--
one to add to one's store of thoughts & feelings--
another to compose & elevate the mind by a sustained
tone, numerous allusions, and a grand style . . . For the style is the expression of the nobility of the
poet's character, as the matter is the expression
of the richness of his mind: but on men character
produces as great an effect as mind. (Lang 133)
Thus style, particularly the linguistic attitudes and
resulting grammatical practices and rhetorical strategies
which help to Eorm it, is of great importance to any poet who
wishes to increase the happiness of his/her audience.
Insofar as the poetics of the 1853 IIPrefaceM can be
described as the poetics of facility, Arnold's conception of
the poet differs quite radically from that of contemporaries
s u c h as Browning and Carlyle. Shelley, following Sidney's
example, argued for the role of the poet as prophet in " A
Defence of Poetryu (1840), and Alba Warren pointed out, long
ago, that the vatic notion of the poet carried on into the
Victorian age:
The critics of the nineteenth century conceived the
function of the poet in grandiose Shelleyan
terms. . .the poet must be "the exemplar of his age,
its teacher and guide. The poet is the mediator
between the sou1 and the infinite according to
7
Browning, t h e r e v e a l e r o f " t h e open s e c r e t t t of
n a t u r e a c c o r d i n q t o C a r l y l e . H e makes t h e t r u t h
more t t i m p r e s s i v e , l t a n d above a l 1 h e b i n d s men
t o g e t h e r i n f e l l o w s h i p o f f e e l i n g . (Warren 2 4 )
A r n o l d , by 1 8 5 3 , d i d n o t h o l d s u c h a p o s i t i o n and I t r e g i s t c r e d
a p r o t e s t a g a i n s t t h e e x a l t e d n o t i o n s o f h i s c o n t e m p o r a r i e s t f
(Warren 2 5 ) . The p o e t i c s o f f a c i l i t y d o n o t require t h e
p r o p h e t o r t h e p h i l o s o p h e r - p o e t . R a t h e r , t h e p o e t m u s t be 'la
man s p e a k i n g t o mentt--a f a c i l i t a t o r :
They [ p o e t s ] do n o t t a l k o f t h e i r m i s s i o n , n o r of
i n t e r p r e t i n g their age, n o r of t h e cominq p o e t ; al1
t h i s , t h e y know, is t h e mere d e l i r i u m o f v a n i t y ;
t h e i r b u s i n e s s is n o t t o p r a i s e t h e i r age , b u t t o
a f f o r d t o t h e men t h a t l i v e i n t t h e h i g h e s t
p l e a s u r e wh ich t h e y are c a p a b l e of f e e l i n g . ( S u p e r
1: 1 3 ; my i t a l i c s )
A l t h o u g h Warren h a s d e m o n s t r a t e d , t h r o u g h t h e Clough
c o r r e s p o n d e n c e , A r n o l d ' s g r a d u a 1 s h i f t i n e m p h a s i s f rom form
t o c o n t e n t i n h i s thoughts a b o u t p o e t r y , form c o n t i n u e s t o
p l a y a n e s s e n t i a l r o l e f o r Arno ld . Warren r emarks :
Arno ld was a l m o s t a l o n e i n e m p h a s i z i n g t h e t e c h n i c a l
s ide of poetic a c t i v i t y , t h e c a r e f u l c o n s t r u c t i o n of
t h e poem i t s e l f (and s o seems c l o s e r t o t h e more
p r a c t i c a l a t t i t u d e o f modern c r i t i c i s n t o w a r d s t h e
p o e t a s s k i l l e d c r a f t s m a n ) . ( 2 4 )
1 n o t e d earlier t h a t 1 w i s h t o a p p r o a c h t h e " g r a n d s t y l e t t
8
through lanquage. It is with this in mind that we should turn
to On Translatinq Homer. In these lectures Arnold's failure
to define the "grand style" is set in the context of a
demonstration of it in Homer1s work. On Translating Homer
offers a substantial repository of Arnold's practical thouyhts
about language.
Homer is worthy of yet another translation; in fact he
requires one since Arnold's experience of first looking into
Chapman's Homer has been decidedly less rapturous than
Keats's. Successive translations from Pope and Cowper to the
most recent foray of Francis Newman have done little to
improve the situation. Homer is also, regardless of language,
nationality, or historical epoch, the greatest poet of the
past and a mode1 for al1 present and future poets. Arnold
identifies some of the qualities of Homerls work which should
guide practising translators and, by extension, poets: "He is
eminently plain and direct, both in the evolution of his
thought and in the expression of it, that is, both in his
syntax and in his words . . J I (Super 1: 102).
This passage seems to offer itself as an antidote to the
numerous lures and snares that Arnold warns the poet to avoid
in the wPreface." Single thoughtç, excessive illustration, and
abundant imagery are the characteristics of the Romantics (and
the Elizabethans before them) and have been propagated through
the work of Clough, Tennyson, and, as many critics have noted,
Arnold hirnself in his earlier poetry. I would like to focus
9
on the concepts of syntax and, particularly, diction as key
elements in Arnold's approach to language and their
relationship to the theoretical premises of the Y?reface.I1
Syntax plays a crucial role in poetry and ideally should
draw attention away from the act of expression itself and
towards the action and content of the text. Arnold is not
arguing for a rigidly logical and straightforward grammatical
structure, since this would attract attention in its own way.
He allows for what is termed "idiomatic grammar" (Super 1:
153). There must, however, be limits and Arnold objects
(despite his own culpability) to grammatical and rhetorical
elements such as persona1 interjections. Idiomatic grammar
contributes to style, which in turn is the expression of the
poetls (here translater's) character:
His syntax [Newman's], the mode in which his thought
is evolved, although not the actual words in which
it is expressed . . . fails ... by not being noble
enough . . . Homer presents his thought naturally; but when Mr. Newman has, ''A thousand f ires alony the
plain, 1 Say, that night were burning--" he presents
his thought familiarly. (Super 1: 125)
Arnold's concern is with Newman's persona1 interjection of ''1
say" which distracts the readerts attention from the actions
and ideas of the poem. This concern can be traced back to the
early letters to Clough. In an 1849 letter on various
technical matters, including Clough's suggestions for ''The New
10
Sirens," Arnold chides his friend's attachment to the
apostrophe and offers the following piece of facilitative
editorial advice: " Y e t would be better than Ah in the passage
that you mention. It expresses the connection which is now
left to be perceivedtv (Lang 134).
In contrast to the familiar idiomatic syntax that Arnold
counsels against, he is also wary of complicated and awkward
grammatical constructions. He takes the opening lines of
Parad i se Lost as an example. The periodic style of Milton's
syntax, which withholds the first verb of his epic until the
thirty-ninth word, is powerful, Arnold admits, but also
appropriate for his densely allusive diction and complex
thoughts (Super 1: 146). Although Arnold can recommend Milton
as an example of the "grand style severetv (Super 1: 1 8 9 ) he
seeks to establish a more suitable idiomatic syntactical
framework, like Homervs, which stresses greater simplicity
than Milton and more dignity than the farniliar style of
Newmanv s translation.
The other aspect of language that Arnold addresses in the
lectures is diction. Because Arnold advocates Homer's words
for their are plainness and directness, and it might be useful
to place these qualities of diction in the context of Arnold's
awareness of the issues and ideas surrounding the movement in
Victorian linguistics known as purism. This movement, which
flourished in the 1 8 5 0 ~ ~ advocated a pure English language
purged of al1 foreign elements, particularly French and Latin,
11
in favour of a vocabulary derived from Anglo-saxon. Arnold's
definition of English is something very different from that of
the purists. Tennyson's Idylls of the King are attempts to
achieve purism in the language of poetry, and with this in
mind, Arnold's harsh criticism of Tennyson's vulgar
provinciality in Maud (Lang 322) takes on added dimensions
beyond his immediate Crimean War jingoism. In On Translating
Homer, Arnold protests against Newman's predominant use of
Saxo-Norman vocabulary. Although his comments are directed at
translation, they have important implications for a theory of
poetry which takes actions as the eternal object of poetry,
stresses the whole over the parts, and is concerned with
facilitating the experience of the audience. Arnold defines
and values the English language by its very heterogeneity.
German, French, Latin, and Greek elements al1 minqle in the
lanquage and can be manipulated by the translator or poet for
larger eff ects:
We owe to the Latin element in our language most of
that very rapidity and clear decisiveness by which
it is contradistinguished from the German, and in
sympathy with the languages of Greece and Rome: so
that to limit an English translator of Homer to
words of Saxon origin is to deprive him of his
special advantages in translating Homer. In Vossls
well-known translation of Homer, it is precisely
these qualities of his German language itself,
12
something heavy and trailing both in the structure
of the sentences and in the words of which it is
composed. (Super 1: 101)
The very advantage of Enqlish is its lack of purity, since the
language contains a variety of words which, by their different
origins and natures, can be utilized for variety, different
effects, or to accelerate or decelerate the experience of
reading a clause, sentence, or poem. Certainly one of the key
p o i n t s of the I1Prefaceq1 is Arnold's insistence that a poem
must be experienctd as a whole, and modern poetry is hindered
by an excessive attention to the parts. A poem cannot be
understood piecemeal but must be digested entirely in order
to have any enriching effect on the reader.
Yet another reason for Arnold's advocacy of modern
heterogeneous English emerges from his relationship to
Victorian notions of synchronic and diachronic ways of
reading. Arnold does not appear to advocate or require that
a word be known in a diachronic sense. Words are obviously
important as the very medium in which Arnold works, and he
does not deny the importance of etymology in his belief that
the synchronic approach to reading is essential and ultimately
more successful to the understanding of a poem. I will return
to the question of etymology in the next chapter, but it is
noteworthy that Arnold scoffs at Ruskin's diachronic analysis
of Milton's uLycidasN in his lecture I1Of King's Treasuries."
In "The Literary Influence of the Academies'l Arnold calls such
13
attention to the historical accretions of words "e~travagance'~
(Super 3: 252). Diachronie reading encourages close attention
(in Arnold's opinion ridiculously close) to the words
themselves and, more often than not, recourse to a dictionary
entry of the history of the word. Instead, Arnold believes a
poet should use words synchronically as they are understood
generally and immediately by the majority of readers. This
approach to words channels the energies of the reader to what
is important: the whole experience and noble human actions of
the poem. Arnold discusses the dictior. proper to poetry in
the following excerpt:
How many words occur in the Bible, for instance, to
which thousands of hearers do not feel sure they
attach the precise real meaning; but they make out
a meaning for them out of what materials they have
at hand; and the words heard over and over ayain,
come to convey this meaning with a certainty whicn
poetically is adequate, though notphilologically . . . How clearly, again, have readers got a sense from
Milton's words, "grate on the scrannel pipes," who
might yet have Seen puzzled to write a commentary on
the word scrannel for the dictionary! (Super 1: 184-
8 5 )
Arnold believes that if a poem is accomplishing what it
should, namely carrying the reader d o n g and enriching the
mind with the noble human actions and ideas it depicts, a
14
diachronie approach to words actually works against the aims
of the poet. He does not deny that one must know the meanings
of words in order to appreciate poetry, but he believes that
the discovery of meaning in words is persona1 and qrows from
the whole experience of the poem. Arnold would argue that by
reading a poem diachronically (which is a time-consuminq
activity) we gain the precise historical meanings of words and
phrases, but we lose the most important meaning and enrichment
the poem as a whole may o f f e r . The poet must be able to find
words which evoke a meaninq that is familiar enough tc people
through common use and avoid using words which check the
reading process and turn poetry into pedantry. Diction must
not act as an impediment to the larger effects the poem can
accomplish. Indeed, Arnold even advocates repetition of
particular words if necessary:
Here in order to keep Homer's effect of perfect
plainness and directness, 1 repeat the word
"f irest'. . . although in a more elaborate and lit~rary style of poetry this recurrence of the same word
would be a fault to be avoided . . . what 1 wish you to remark is my endeavour after absolute plainness, my
care to avoid anything which may check or surprise
the reader.... (Super 1: 155)
Arnold was often accused of preaching principles that he
himself ignored in his own poetry; this, however, is not one
of them, as we see from the opening of Sohrab and Rustum,
1 5
whe re A r n o l d r e p e a t s t h e word V e n t 1 ' seven t i m e s i n t h e
o p e n i n g t w e n t y - f i v e l i n e s o f t h e poem. T h i s is n o t t o Say
t h a t t h e p o e t is bound t o common, r e p e t i t i v e , and b o r i n g
words . D i c t i o n a s a component o f s t y l e is t i e d t o t h e mora l
c h a r a c t e r of t h e p o e t , a n d A r n o l d r e g a r d e d t h e B i b l e a s " t h e
g r a n d m i n e of d i c t . i on I1 (Supe r 1: 156).
What are w e t o make o f a l 1 t h i s p r a c t i c a l adv i ce a b o u t
l a n g u a g e that Arno ld o f f e r s i n On T r a n s l a t i n g Homer? I n many
ways t h e s e O x f o r d l e c t u r e s c a n be r e a d a s a s o r t o f p r a c t i c a l
a p p e n d i x t o t h e t h e o r e t i c a l s p e c u l a t i o n s o f t h e 1 8 5 3
" P r e f a c e . " P e r h a p s t h e mos t i m p o r t a n t o b s e r v a t i o n w e c a n make
is t h a t the v i ew o f l a n g u a g e which emerges is d i s t i n c t l y
a m b i v a l e n t . T h i s a t t i t u d e is r e f l e c t e d i n A r n o l d ' s v i e w s on
t h e o r i g i n o f l a n g u a g e where h e a d o p t s t h e s t a n c e o f t h e
s p e a k e r i n " I n Utrumque P a r a t u s ' ' :
1 had n e v e r r e f l e c t e d on t h e s e t h i n g s ... The q u e s t i o n
t o o seemed t o m e i n some d e g r e e a n i d l e o n e . . . I f man
was o f d i v i n e o r i g i n , s o was l a n g u a g e i t s e l f t o o :
a n d i f man, c o n s i d e r e d i n t h e c y c l e of nature, was
a n a t u r a l Being, s o t o o was l a n q u a g e e q u a l i y
n a t u r a l . (Note-books 4 5 6 )
T h i s b a l a n c e d v i ew h a s been c o g e n t l y summarized by R i e d e a s
" A r n o l d ' s s i m u l t a n e o u s m y s t i f i c a t i o n and d e m y s t i f i c a t i o n o f
p o e t i c languaqe" ( 2 5 ) . I n t h e c h a p t e r s which f o l l o w 1 w i l l
c o n c e n t r a t e on t h e l a t t e r h a l f o f Riede's d e c o n s t r u c t i v e
paradigrn .
IG
The lectures on Homer, the "Preface," and the letters to
Clough reveal an attitude where language is seen as a tool--a
distinctly human product. Words can be chosen, manipulated,
and arranged for particular poetic and moral effects that
fulf il the conditions of the "Preface. They are powerful
tools which the poet as facilitator can use to fulfil his/her
responsibility of affording happiness and inspiriting the
reader. And yet there is a strong note of caution sounded
throughout the lectures on Homer. Indeed, Arnold points out
that he has been drawn to the subject of Homeric translation
by the very fact that language has been, and is being, abused,
with harmful effects.
1 believe that such an ambivalent attitude to lanyuaye
emerges from a particular contour of Arnold's thought that has
yet to be fully acknowledged or investigated. 1 am speaking
of Arnold's engagement with the philosophical tradition of
British empiricism and particularly the work of John Locke.
Locke's epistemology and the language theory that emerges from
it allow us to contextualize Arnold's distrust of his medium
within a larger philosophical framework. In the next chapter
1 will demonstrate that Arnold's engagement with Locke is both
more complex than has been generally acknowledged and
chronologically pertinent to the shift in Arnold's poetry
signalled by the 1853 "Preface.
Chapter One: Arnold, Locke, and Language
Arnoldts attitude to his age is, by now, well known and
is memorably expressed in a letter to Clough from Switzerland
in the autumn of 1849: "My dearest Clough these are damned
times--everything is against oneN (Lang 15G). Although Arnold
con+.inues on in this letter to label Carlyle a t tmoral
desperadou (Lang 1 5 6 ) , Alba Warren has argued that he concurs
with the author of Sartor Resartus in "the surely romantic
conviction thst the times were diseasedl? (153).
Arnold is one of the more famous agnostics of the
Victorian period, a condition common to many of the members of
"Clougho-Matthean" circle at Oxford, including Arnold's
brother Tom (who oscillated between atheism and Roman
Catholicism) and L A . Froude (whose controversial N e m e s i s of
Faith appeared the same week as The St rayed Reveller) . Arnold's scepticism ranged from, most notably, religion, to
the nature of man and human knowledge, to languaye itself . In
this respect Arnold is one of those early Victorian
contemporaries of Browning who share what Peter Allan Dale
calls a ttphilosophical commonplace in the England of the 1830s
and 1840sI1: "the limitedness of man's mental powerstl (359).
This scepticism is the central concern of an early poem
from The Strayed Reveller, "In Utrumque Paratus.I1 The poem,
as its title indicates, offers t w o competing theories of human
origin: one a form of Plotinian idealism ("the silent mind of
the One al1 Pure" [lj) and the other a kind
evolutionary materialism ("the wild unf athered
Significantly, the speaker does not choose, or,
appropriately, is unable to choose one view over
18
of Darwinian
mass" [ X ] ) .
perhaps more
another--yet
another example of Arnold's famous line from a later poem,
"wandering between two ~orlds.~'
These two worlds were given a philosophic context, many
years ago, by Alfred Lubel1 who sought to reconcile the
idealist strains of Arnold's heavy philosophic reading from
the mid-1840s with "the relatively crude, ancient materialism
Arnold imbibed f rom Lucretius" (252) . However, Arnold's
interests and thinking have a much wider scope (even within
the period of philosophic reading Lubell concentrates on) than
a narrow dialectic between materialism and idealism. Douglas
Bush offers a catalogue of the numerous labels applied to
Arnold's thought:
Arnold might be called an individual mixture of
eighteenth-century rationality, Romantic idealism,
Victorian skepticism, and, if we like the overworn
word, modern existentialism. (xvii)
Such a formula is certainly accurate but by no means
exhaustive. We gather from it, if we were not already aware,
the fact that Arnold is the antithesis of a systematic
thinker, and such an eclectic mixture of influences and
tendencies is both a help and a hindrance in any analysis of
bis poetry or prose.
13
There is another contour of Arnold's thought that can be
added to Bush's list which, 1 believe, has yet to be fully
documented and explored. We should be aware that Arnold's
cosmopolitan interests in German ideas, the ancient philosophy
of Greece, the Roman stoics, the novels of George Sand, the
criticism of Sainte-Beuve, and the Hindu teachings of the
Bhagavad G i t a , are complemented by an interest in, and a debt
to, English thought, notably British empiricism and, in
particular John Locke. In this chapter, 1 will trace Arnold's
complex exposure to and interaction with Locke's work. 1
intend to argue that Locke's ideas about language contained in
An Essay c o n c e r n i n g Human U n d e r s t a n d i n g and elsewhere
parallel , conf irm, and off er assistance to Arnold ' s own
notions about language at various points in h i s career as a
poet. Furthermore, Arnold's engagernent w i t h Locke is
intimately tied to his changing conceptions of poetry,
publicly signalled by the 1853 "Preface.
Throughout his life Arnold was suspicious of German
transcendentalisrn.' Such a distrust of the Germano-Coleridgean
tradition climaxes in Arnold's later religious prose. David
Riede has demonstrated that this suspicion takes on linguistic
dimensions :
Not believing in a transcendental and all-
creating God, or even in a supernal Platonic ideal,
[Arnold] naturally rejected the metaphysics of
Christianity, almostcasually dismissingthe primary
textual authority for Christian
in the divine Loqos by rejecting
Gospel of St. John. (9)
2 O
and rornantic faith
as mere theory the
1 do not wish to suggest that Arnold's dissatisfaction
with the Germano-Coleridgean tradition naturally led him to
the adoption of a dogrnatic, unqualif ied endorsement of British
empiricism. We are never confronted with a statement as
overt (or ironic) as Sterne's "the saqacious Locke, who
certainly understood the nature of these things better t h a n
most men" (7). However, the importance of Locke is surely
greater than the casual acknowledgements of Park Honan--"At
the bottom of his heart, he was even enough of a sensible
Lockean empiricist to be wary of teutonizing his soul with too
many a priori disquisitions" ( 9 6 ) --or the early
phenomenological criticism of J. Hillis Miller, who
perfunctorily reads in Empedocles on Etna the corcept of a
soul "Like the t a b u l a rasa cf Locke and the ssnsationalistsu
(212). We have evidence that Arnold read and was familiar with
Bacon's Essays and De Augumentis. Berkeley also appears on
Arnold's reading lists in preparation for the Oriel fellowship
examination in 1845 (Allott 258). But by far the most
important empirical thinker for Arnold is John Locke.
Arnold ' s engagement with Locke occurs in two important stages.
Each of these stages contributes to, parallels, or confirms
Arnold's ambivalent attitude to language which emerges in the
'tPreiace't and On Translating Homer.
2 1
Locke's reputation throughout the nineternth century has
been thoroughly doc-imented in Hans Aarsleff's informative
essay "Locke's Reputation in Nineteenth Century England."
Aarsleff's essay demonstrates that despite the presence of
important defenders such as Dugald Stewart and John Stuart
Mill, the preponderance of opinion (effectively marshalled by
Coleridge and Whewell in England and Victor Cousin in France)
was opposed to Locke, particularly An Essay concerning Human
Understanding. Indeed, Aarslef f notes, I1To the nineteenth
century Locke meant the Essay" (121), and the Essay as the
central document in British empiricism was continually
subordinated to the German transcendental philosophy
championed by Coleridge in England.
According to Aarsleff, one source of the nineteenth
century'ç reaction to Locke can be attributed to the work of
eighteenth-century philosophers such as Condillac who had
admired Locke to the extent that he was misinterpreted and
offered as the father of sensationalism. Locke presents h i s
epistemology in the second book of the Essay:
Let us then suppose the Mind to be, as we Say, white
Paper, void of al1 Characters, without any I d e a s ;
How cones it to be furnished?. . .To this I answer, in one word, From Experience: In that, a i l Our
Knowledge is founded; ... Our Observation employtd
either about the external sensible O b j e c t s ; or about
the interna1 Operations of o u r Minds, p e r c e i v e d and
2 2
r e f l e c t e d on by our s e l v e s , is that, which supplies
our Onderstandings wi t h the mater ia ls of t h i n k i n g .
These two are the Fountains of Knowledge. (2.1.2)
The sensationalists neglected Locke's second fountain of
knowledge and reduced ideas to Ittransformed sensation1'
(Aarsleff 129). Unfortunately, nineteenth-century opponents
of Locke often read the Essay through the well-intentioned
misinterpretation of the sensationalists, and mistakenly
assumed that Locke had reduced the mind to a passive
storehouse of ideas devoid of any power (Aarsleff 129). This
was the argument of Victor Cousin in the second volume of his
Cours de l ' h i s t o i r e d e la philosophie which appears on
Arnold's 1845 reading list. Aarsleff cornments that Cousin
devoted eleven of the twenty-five lectures in the volume to a
virulent attack on Locke% Essay, and that he is determined to
fin? the roots of the sensationalist school in Locke (124) . In l'The New Sirens,It a poem that was singled out for praise in
an early review by Michael Rossetti, Arnold satirically
reveals an awareness of the sensationalist epistemology when
his speaker, a young poet, chides the new sirens for their
extreme views, encapsulated as IfOnly what we feel, we knowl'
( 8 4 )
Although Carlyle thought Locke l1had paved the way for
banishing religion from the worldu (215), Arnold had already
banished religion (in the orthodox sense) from his own l i f e by
the time he reached his teenage years. Lubell has argued,
effectively, that this was to have a tremendous impact on
Arnold's entire "intellectual and spiritual developrnentu
( 2 4 8 ) . Locke is something of a philosophical ally for Arnold,
and in the climactic fourth book of the Essay he offers a
hierarchy of knowledge ranging from certainty through opinion
to doubt that Arnold, as he shed his Christian orthodoxy,
surely found interesting and intriguing if not comforting.
However, it is not so much Locke's epistemology as the
language theory that emerges from it that is of interest. We
know that Arnold read, or at least was familiar with, An Essay
concerning Human Understanding from his comments in God and
the Bible. Riede has alerted us to Arnold's
misinterpretation, deliberate or otherwise, of one of the most
famous passages from the Essay as it pertains to language:
Aside from his definition of "being," perhaps the
clearest example of reductive etymoloqical
definition in Arnold is his Lockian derivation of
%pirittt f rom I1breathtt: "Spirit. . . means literally, we know, only breath" ( 7 : 8 ) . But this is a far
cry from Locke's statement that spirit originally
meant breath, for it denies any validity to meanings
attached after the word has fallen away from its
original material referent. (18)
Arnold's reductive view must be reconciled with the earlier,
more flexible, position he takes on the meaning of words in
the lectures on Horner. How seriously Arnold adopted the
24
reductive etymology he demonstrates in God and the Bible is
unclear since the passage above strongly echoes section fifty-
six of In Memoriam: "The spirit does but mean the breath:/I
know no more" (56.7-8).
In the previous chapter we noted that Arnold is concerned
that words can act as obstacles in the reading process and
ultimately obscure meaning. Thus in the lectures on Homer
Arnold advocates a synchronie cognition of words ahead of a
diachronie one. He allows for the repetition of words and,
here, in his misinterpretation of Locke's parayraph concerniny
the origin of words in sensible ideas, he shares, with Locke,
the same suspicion about the opacity of abstract terms. As
Riede points out: "Arnold approvingly quoted Joubert t o this
effect: 'Instead of saying 'gracett Say help, succour, a
divine influence, a dew of heaven; then one can corne to the
right understanding' " (19) . Arnold's thoughts on etymology and diction are concerned
with the auditor and his/her ability to comprehend with a
relative degree of ease and quickness. While Arnold's
concerns are as a poet, they are not far removed from the more
general philosophic beliefs of Locke:
It was necessary that Man should find out some
external Signs, whereby those invisible Ideas, which
his thoughts are made up of, might be made known to
others. For this purpose , nothing was so fit,
either for Plenty or Quickness, as those articulate
2 5
Sounds, he found himself able to make. (3.2.1)
However, both men realize the inherent weakness in language as
a medium of communication. Because words are the arbitrary
signs for i d e a s in the mind, and every person's ideas remain
to a certain extent unique, the chance for a perfect
correspondence of ideas between speaker and auditor through
language is an impossibility. Paul Guyer has summarized this
dilemma:
If Our words immediately signify only our ideas, and
stand for outer objects as well as the ideas of
others at best indirectly, then indeed we can never
be quite sure that another means exactly the same
thing we do ourselves, or is sayiny the same thiny
about an object we are, and we had better be careful
about hastily assuming he does. But this skeptical
consequence is hardly a refutation of Lockefs view:
instead, it is exactly the practical lesson he
wishes us to learn from his theoretical inquiry.
(1?1)
Locke, like Arnold, is suspicious of language as a medium of
communication, and they both believe we must use it
judiciously with an awareness of its basic imperfections.
Despite al1 our care and precision, eventually Our use of
language is an everyday example of Tennyson's definition of
faith: "Bel ieving where we cannot provef' (In Memoriam
Prologue 4). We realize our thoughts do not correspond
26
exactly with others, but we trust, without a guarantee, that
the words effect some type of connection.
Locke's ideas add a linguistic dimension to Arnold's
persistent theme of isolation, seen, for example, in "To
Marguerite-Continued." Our thoughts are, initially and
primarily, Our own, and this mental isolation is a part of
Arnold's assertion:
Yes! in the sea of life enisled,
With echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
We mortal millions live alone. (1-4)
Yet we do not "sit still and perish" (Eçsay 4.14.1) . Even with this realization, there is the desire and the attempt to
cornmunicate: "And lovely notes from shore to shore,/Across
the sounds and channels pourm1 (11-12).
Despite their mutual scepticism akout language as an
effective instrument of communication, both Locke and Arnold
are proactive in their attempts to reduce the degree of
opacity in language. Locke endeavours to distinguish between
the imperfections and abuses of language. He resigns himself
to the imperfections but rails against those deliberate and
avoidable abuses which unnecessarily add to the imperfect
nature of the medium.
In Arnold's case, he fights against opacity in language
by adopting a creed of Joubert which lies behind al1 his
practical thoughts on reductive etymology, word repetition,
27
and synchronic reading in On Translating Homer. In the
critical essay "Joubert, or a French Coleridge, " Arnold notes:
"One must employ one's expressions s i m p l y as media--as
glasses, through which one's thoughts can best be made
evident ... 1 know by my own experience, how hard this rule is to f01low'~ (Super 4: 195; my italics). Arnold realizes that
language can never be a perfectly transparent medium, but it
is a linguistic ideal worthy of striving after, since it is
involved with the ever elusive "grand style.fr
In the lectures on Homer, Arnold demonstrates, through
al1 the practical advice about language, a concern that the
reader or auditor can easily be checked by the word itself and
pass through to the idea only with difficulty. This is seen
again in God and the Bible with Arnold's reductive etymology
and misinterpretation of the Essay. If the epistemology of
the Essay appealed to Arnold, then its theory of language
confirmed his own suspicions about the possibility for
meaningful communication. Part of Arnold's ambivalence about
language that emerges from On Translating Homer is a suspicion
grounded in the sense that words act as impediments in the
communication of meaning. We are not sure when Arnold
encountered the Essay but, as 1 will shortly demonstrate, it
was surely before 1850, and through his exposure to Cousin in
1845 Arnold was at least engaging with the ideas around this
time. The chronology is of some importance here. The Essay's
general suspicion of language as an effective tool of
communication was the view Arnold would have been most
farniliar with during the composition of the poems that make up
his first volume and part of his second. Nevertheless, as the
lectures on Homer and the "Preface" indicate, though words nay
be naturally imperfect, the poet must make use of them in such
a way that, to use Locke's terms, the "natural imperfectiont'
of words is not compounded by their abuse. Locke had devoted
the last two chapters of the third book of the Essay to a
catalogue of abuses of language and suggestions for their
remedy . If this were the end of Arnold's engagement with Locke,
his debt to the empiricist philosopher would be interesting
but not particularly remarkable. However, as 1 mentioned at
the outset of the introduction, 1850 was an important year for
Arnold just as it was for readers of Wordsworth and Tennyson.
It marked the second stage of h i s engagement with Locke. In
the autumn of that year, Arnold indicates, in a letter to
Clough, a continuing interest in Locke which leads us in new
directions. Park Honan cites the letter as evidence that
Arnold was reading An Essay concerninq Human Understanding
along with Spinoza's Ethics while in the employment of Lord
Landsdowne. 1 think it is worthwhile to examine the relevant
part of this letter:
1 go to read Locke on the Conduct of the
Ufiderstanding: my respect for the reason as the rock
of refuge to this poor exaggerated surexcited
29
humanity increases and increases. Locke is a man
who has cleared his mind of vain repetitions, though
without the positive and vivifying atmosphere of
Spinoza about him. (Lang 176-77)
There are several important points to be made about this
letter that reveal and complete Our understanding of Arnold's
engagement with Locke.
First, the letter signals that Arnold is returning to
Locke once again as the phrasing suggests: "Locke is a man who
has cleared his mind of vain repetitions." Kenneth Allott has
also inclicated that the letter Ilimplies familiarity with
Locke" (2G1) . Secondly, Arnold ' s identification with Locke as
a champion of reason points to a familiarity with the Essay
and its recurrent insistence on reason as the supreme faculty
of the understanding. This estimate of Locke and the Essay
distances Arnold from the main current of Victorian
misinterpretation of Locke, and it reveals Arnold has not
surrendered to Cousin who claims that Locke devalues reason in
favour of sensation. Such a careful estimate of Locke seems,
also, to clash with his seemingly heavyhanded reductive view
of etymology in God and the Bible. Finally, and most
importantly, the text that Arnold indicates he is going to
read 1 go on to read Locke on the Conduct of the
understanding") is not Locke's An Essay concerninq Human
Understanding; Arnold s very words Vonduct of the
Understanding" allude to a lesser-known text by Locke entitled
30
Of the Conduct of the Understanding. These two works, while
closely related, should not be confused with each other. Of
the C o n d u c t of the Understanding is a practical appendix to
the Essay and often recapitulates some of that text's main
points, but it also introduces some new material and
significantly amends some of Locke's ideas on language from
the Essay.
Although Aarsleff primarily identifies Locke with the
Essay for the nineteenth century, he points out that Of the
Conduct of the Understanding was the second most published of
Locke's works, going through ten editions in the century.
Henry Hallam speaks approvingly of it ( C o n d u c t v), and there
is evidence that Gerard Manley Hopkins was familiar with it
(8). The heyday for the C o n d u c t was not the nineteenth but
the eighteenth century, as W.S. Howell has noted:
Of the Conduct of the Understanding and its parent
work An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, were
without question the most popular, the most widely
read, the most frequently reprinted, and the most
influential, of al1 English books of the eighteenth
century . (277) The Conduct, Howell continues, "was often used in British
universities as a textbook on logic" (278). Locke's text is
composed of forty-five brief chapters encompassinq a variety
of topics ranging from religion to mathematics.
Three chapters f rom the C o n d u c t , "Reading, " "Words, and
"~imiles," buttress some of the key points of the 1853
t'Preface, echo the practical aims of On Translating Homer,
and build upon or modify some of the Lockean views of language
Arnold had previously encountered in the Essay. The chapter
on "Readingu speaks strongly to Arnold's insistence in the
Vrefacetl for a strong subject and a careful consideration of
the whole argument of the text to gain any real benefit from
it.
It is Locke's chapters on ''Words1' and "Sirnilesu that
establish some provocative links with Arnold's own thoughts
about language . We recall that in the Essay Locke
distinguishes between the natural imperfections of words and
those abuses which increase the amount of opacity in language
and make communication even more imperfect than it inevitably
is. Arnold quoted Joubert's aim to achieve transparency in
language with approval, and we noted how much of the practical
advice in the lectures on Homer is concerned with making words
as clear as possible in the transmission of meaning. The
chapter entitled "Words" f rom the Conduct essentially restates
what Locke considers to be one of the chief abuses of language
in the Essay:
They who would advance in knowledge . . . should lay down this as a fundamental rule, not to take words
for things . . . till they can frame clear and distinct ideas of those entities. (Conduct 65)
At the conclusion of the chapter, Locke offers a convenient
32
tenet for the use of words which can be read as his version of
the aim for transparency in language that Arnold found so
appealing in Joubert: "Words are not meant to conceal, but to
declare and shew [sic] somethingu (66) . Arnold's ambivalence to language is centred on the idea
that words, although they are naturally obscure, can be made
more so through their irnproper use, effectively hampering
proper communication. Thus both Arnold and Locke direct their
energies at how we can best use these tools to reduce their
opacity. This is the principle behind Locke's catalogue of
remedies for the abuse of language. In the Essay the most
highly criticized abuse of words is rhetoric, partially
because it is the most deliberate. Locke does admit that
rhetoric is also one of the more effective uses of words.
Locke's famous attack on rhetoric at the end of Book III of
the Essay concludes:
1 confess, in Discourses, where we seek rather
Pleasure and Delight, than Information and
Improvement, such Ornzments...can scarce pass for
Faults. But yet, if we would speak of Things as
they are, we must allow, that al1 the Art of
Rhetorick, besides Order and Clearness, al1 the
artificial and figurative application of Words
Eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to
insinuate wrong Ideas, move the ~assions, and
thereby mislead the Judgement; and so indeed are
perfect cheat.... (3.10.34)
However, when Locke cornes to examine figurative language in
the Conduct his attitude remains suspicious but is also more
accommodating:
For those are always more acceptable in discourse,
who have the way to let in their thoughts into other
men's minds with the greatest ease and
facility.. .They who in their discourse strike the
fancy, and take their hearersf conceptions along
with them as fast as their words flow, are the
applauded talkers . . . Nothing contributes so much to this as similes ... But it is one thing to think
right, and another thing to know the right way to
lay Our thoughts before others with advantage and
clearness, be they right or wrong. Well chosen
similes, metaphors, and allegories, with method and
order, do this the best of any thing, because being
taken from objects already known and familiar to the
understanding, they are conceived as fast as
spoken; and, the correspondence being concluded, the
thing they are brought to explain and elucidate is
thought to be understood too . . . Figured and
metaphorical expressions do well to illustrate more
abstruse and unfamiliar ideas which the mind is not
yet accustomed to. (Conduct 73)
In this passage Locke makes the important qualification
3 4
between thinking in figures and communicatiny through them.
He grudgingly concedes the effectiveness and perhaps the
necessity of the latter. He does, however, place certain
important restrictions on figurative lanquage, namely that its
adoption be used in the service of one of the two essential
functions of language--the I'dispatchH of communication.
Locke's insistence on the speed of communication is not
dissimilar to Arnold's admiration of Homer's rapidity and his
views on etymology and reading. Perhaps the three most
important words of the passage are Locke's qualifications of
l'method and order" in the use of metaphors, allegories, and
similes. We immediately think of Arnold's tamous Tyrian
trader simile in ' T h e Scholar Gipsy'? and the epic similes of
Sohrab and Rustum.
To summarize: Arnold's distrust of language is well
known. As Riede argues, it arises from his ~~simultaneous
mystification and demystification of poetic language" (25).
The 1853 "Preface," On Translating Homer, and the Clough
correspondence offer an ambivalent attitude to language
considered as a demystif ied, I'natural, human invention.
Arnold realizes that words are tools of communication that can
be used effectively by the poet to communicate ideas to the
reader. This faith in the power of lanyuage when used
effectively is tempered by a suspicion that it is quite often
abused, as recent translations of Homer have revealed.
Arnold's wariness about the proper use of langiiage springs
3 5
from a philosophical scepticism that seems quite Lockean in
orientation. Languaqe is the imperfect medium through which
we t r y to communicate thoughts to others. This does not
preclude Arnold from striving after a transparer?t i d e a l in
language as the excerpt from his essay on Joubert indicates,
and which 1 repeat here:
One must employ one's expressions simply as media--
as glasses, through which one's thoughts can best be
made evident. 1 know, by my own experience, how
hard this rule is to follow (Super 4: 1 9 5 ; my
italics) . 1 return to the statement, this time, to emphasize Arnold's
persona1 aside about the difficulty of attempting to make
languaye a transparent medium. "Joubert1' was originally
delivered as a lecture in 1863. The difficulty that Arnold
mentions surely refers to his experience as a poet. In the
next chapter 1 would like to begin to examine that experience
which is initiated by Arnold's first volume, The Strayed
Reveller, and Other Poems. It is important to remember that
these poems were composed prior to Arnold's encounter with
Locke's Conduct of the Understanding, and they contain some of
Arnold's most Lockean and sceptical notions (as expressed in
the Essay) about the nature and imperfections of language.
Chapter Two: Fragments
In "Parting, '' a lyric from the llSwitzerlandqt series,
Arnold memorably summarizes his dilemma as a failed lover--a
predicament that, in fact, extends well beyond the province of
love :
Far, far from each other
Our spirits have grown;
And what heart knows another?
Ah! who knows his own? (71-74)
The 1840s might accurately be called the Sturm und Drang
period of Matthew Arnold in a biographical, poetical, and, as
I will argue, linguistic sense. The decade is bracketed on
one side by the death of Dr. Arnold in 1842 and on the other
by the failure of love at Thun in the autunn of 1849. Dr.
Arnold was spared the disappointment of his son's second class
Oxford degree, but he was also denied the pleasure of
Matthewfs surprising Oriel fellowship. As Lubbell has
indicated, these are the years of Arnoldq s heaviest
philosophical reading (251), and yet it is also the period
when Arnold, a notorious Oxford dandy, travels to France
infatuated with the French actress Rachel (later the subject
of three elegiac sonnets). Many critics have devoted a great
deal of attention to biographical readings of the poerns of The
Strayed Reveller and especially the lqSwitzerland'l series.'
The poetry of The Strayed Reveller is Arnold's
37
problematic attempt to know himself--as the last line from
Vartingt' quoted above indicates-and settle on his vocation
as a poet. Douglas Bush has elucidated one of Arnold's
fundamental assumptions about the improvement of society, and
I believe that that assumption is put into practice in
Arnold's early poetry:
Arnold believed that the improvement of society
begins at home, with the individual's very difficult
task of improving himself, his own ways of thought,
feeling, and action. (xix)
The poetics of facility still lie in the future. Intimately
involved in Arnold's quest to settle and define his vocation
as a poet adequately, in these early poems, is an
investigation to discover the nature and possibilities of his
medium. It is that important aspect of Arnold's search that
I wish to emphasize in my examination of some of the poems
from The Strayed Reveller.
But what strategy should one adopt to analyze this
initial volume? There are two general approaches to this
question. The first, which is A.D. Culler's, helieves that
the poems that make up The Strayed Reveller (and even the
entire Arnoldian oeuvre) "cohere perf ectlyl' (Cul ler 3) to form
a unified system and philosophy. Later critics--Alan Grob,
for example, in his fine essay on l'Mycerinus'v--have attempted
to loosen such rigidly absolute assertions. 1 concur with
Grob's approach, and Arnold himself seems to address the
3 8
problem of poetic unity in a letter to his sister:
Fret not yourself to make my poems square in al1
their parts.. .The true reason why parts suit you
while others do not is that my poems are fragments
i. e. that 1 am fragments, while you are a whole; the
whole effect of my poems is quite vague &
indeterminate. . . a person therefore who endeavoured to make them accord would only lose his labour.
(Lang 143)
The poems of The Strayed Reveller are fragments of a restless
search to define the role of the poet in the modern world.
Several of these fragments are also part of a restless search
into the nature of the poet's medium--1anguage. David Riede
has argued along these lines:
T h e S t r a y e d Reveller, and Other Poems (1849) returns
over and over again to questions about the poet's
relation to his age, his relation to nature, h i s
vision, his voice, his languaqe. (30)
However, what 1 wish to ernphasize in this chapter is that
Arnoldts investigation into the nature and possibilities of
language yields results and tendencies in these poems that are
distinctly Lockean. In the pages that follow, three of these
"fragmentsu f rom The Strayed Reveller will be examined.
"Resignation, "The Strayed Reveller, and "A Mernory Pictureft
are markers--snapshots so to speak-of Arnold's inquiries into
and uneven development of Lockean ideas about language. Before
3 9
we turn to these three poems, it is important to contrast them
with Arnold's partial rejection of expressive theories of
language.
We must remember, throughout the discussion that follows,
that Arnold's exposure to Locke as he composed and collected
the poems of the 1840s is limited to An Essay concerninq Human
Understanding and Cousin's critique of it. Arnold had not yet
encountered Locke's more practical and flexible advice about
language in Of the Conduct of the Understanding. The attitude
to language in Book III of the Bssay is generally sceptical,
and Locke argues that language that does not attempt to
concern itself with the direct communication of ideas is an
abuse of the medium of communication. Words that are
deliberately manipulated in the interests of rhetoric are
"perfect cheat" (3.10.34).
Among the techniques for the manipulation of language
treated in Aristot.lels Rhetoric (a required text for Arnold at
Oxford) is pathos or the appeal to the emotions.' Arnold's
attitude to expressive theories of language in The Strayed
Reveller is reflected in two poems from the volume: "The
Voice" and "The Forsaken Merman."
In "The Voicetl Arnold acknowledges the appeal of languaye
to the emotions. However, this appeal has a dmgerous
seductiveness which ultimately f a i l s :
Those lute-like tùnes which in the byyone year
Did steal into mine ear-
Blew such a thrilling summons to my will,
Yet could not shake it;
Made my tossed heart i ts very life-blood spill,
Yet could not break it. (35-40)
The emotional appeal of languaqe cannot overcome the primary
importance of meaning. This is especially true in this poem
when the voice, generally believed to be Newman's, preaches
Tractarian dogma.
The same pattern of acknowledgement and rejection is
repeated and, in this case, dramatized in "The Forsaken
Merman," which, because of its subtle handling of metre,
repetition, and imagery, was ironically linked to the early
poetry of Tennyson--Victorian England's most distinguished
practitioner of the poetry of sensation. Early in the poem,
the Merman urges his children to ca l1 to Margaret:
Call her once before you go--
Call once yet!
In a voice that she will know:
'Margaret! Margaret! '
Childrenls voices should be dear
(Call once more) to a mother's ear;
Childrenls voices, w i l d with pain--
Surely she will corne again! (10-17)
The l a s t four lines of the passage are concerned with the
affective power of expressive language and, significantly ,
that language f a i l s to move Margaret. The supernatural voice
4 1
of the Merman and his children cannot shake her Erom the
languaqe of the "holy book" she reads in the grey church on
the windy hill. I believe, with Frank Giordano, that Margaret
is as much the heroine of this poem as the Merman may be the
hero. Part of Margaret's rejection of the Merman is a
rejection of his language and the expressive languaye he
counsels the children to adopt in their cries to her. The
fact that the rejected voice of the Merman is both expressive
and supernatural is important. Riede has pointed out that the
voice Arnold repeatedly discovers in his early poetry is,
despite divinely authoritative aspirations, unmistakably
human. The language of the New Sirens is "just another human
voice, with no particular authority, no particular powerl1
( 5 0 ) . In the analysis of the three poems that follows, we may
see that this human voice is tinged with Lockean ideas and
assumptions.
l'Resignationll is the concluding poem in The Strayed
Reveller, but chronologically it is one of the earliest
compositions in the volume.' While it is primarily concerned
with the role and nature of the poet in the post-Romantic age,
it addresses the crucial and related questions of the origin
and nature of language itself. The poern is clearly based on
Wordsworthls "Tintern Abbey," and, as U.C. Knoepflmacher and
others have indicatedtJ it is an inversion of the
Wordsworthian vision of nature. Arnold and his sister Jane
(the speaker and Fausta of the poem, respectively) return to
4 2
a familiar landscape a decade later with the death of their
father intervening. Conscious of this fact, the speaker
discovers an indifferent nature:
Still this wild brook, the rushes cool,
The sailing foam, the shining pool!
T h e s e are not changed; and we, you Say,
Are scarce more changed, in truth, than they. (104-
O7
As the poem r e a c h e s its climax, the question of the origin and
nature of language is raised indirectly:
Yet Fausta, the mute turf we tread,
The solemn hills around us spread,
The stream which falls incessantly,
The strange-scrawled rocks, the lonely sky,
If I might l e n d the ir life a voice
Seem to bear rather than rejoice. (265-70; my
italics)
Nature is silent, characterized by the "mute turf." The
speaker seems more willing to entertain the plausible
suggestion that the animating force in nature is the human
voice that is lent, or metaphorically t r m s f e r r e d , to the
natural world. The interest in the human voice and language
corresponds to the note-book entry quoted in the
"Introduction" where Arnold weighed the possibilities of both
natural and divine origins of language. In this poem he
endorses the former, but, typically, he is never dogmatic.
4 3
There may be evidence in the 'lstrange-scrawled rocksl1 of a
language that is not human but it is indecipherable, and, as
Allott notes, the marks have a scientific explanation (Poems
100n). Arnold's interest in language as a human faculty
(while not ruling out the possibility of a supernatural
counterpart or complement) parallels and diverges from Locke's
ideas on the subject stated in the opening lines of Book III
of An Essay concerning Human Understanding:
God having designed Man for a sociable Creature,
made him not only with an inclination, and under a
necessity to have fellowship with those of his own
kind; but furnished him also with Language, which
was to be the great Instrument, and common Tye of
Society. Man therefore had by Nature bis Organs so
fashioned, as to be fit to f r a m e a r t i c u l a t e Sounds,
which we cal1 Words. (3.1.1)
For both Arnold and Locke, language is primarily a human
faculty which holds men togetiier and responds to human needs,
concerns, and observations. Where they differ is in thejr
degree of certainty about the origin of language. Arnold is
concerned, in this volume and this poem, with the hurnan voice,
but he agnostically refuses to rule out the possibility of a
divine origin for language. Locke, on the other hand, is much
more convinced that language, initially, is God-given. He is
careful to qualify this as the power of language ( V i t to
framet') and not the gift of a complete vocabulary. Regardless
44
of their respective degrees of (un)certainty as to the origin
of language, both men are essentially concerned with lanyuage
as a human production, as Arnold's climactic moment in
"Re~ignation'~ indicates.
"ResignationIg is not Arnold's only attempt to discover
and ultimately deny the presence of a non-human, authoritative
voice in nature. The opening lines of his Oxford prize poem
uCromwellt~ begin with the personif ication of the natural wor ld
along Wordsworthian lines. The opening fourteen lines explore
the possibilities of a voice in nature using words such as
tgvoice, "tone, "chant, I'scream, and "cadence. However ,
the narrator of the poem establishes al1 of this only to deny
it in favour of the development of the human voice of the
protagonist (29).
When we read uResignationu in its context in The S t r a y e d
Reveller, it seems like the culmination of a quest and a
discovery, on Arnold's part, that language is distinctively
human and can be used to animate the natural world. However,
if we consider that it is one of the earlier compositions of
The S t r a y e d R e v e l l e r (in fact, it was composed only a few
months after V r ~ m w e l l ~ ~ ) , we can read it as a prologue to the
entire volume. Arnold arrives, very early, at the realization
that language and voice (whatever their ultimate and perhaps
unknowable origins) are human faculties, and this recognition
leads to the distinctly Lockean ideas about language in a poem
such as IlThe Strayed Reveller. It
4 5
A s its eponymous status might suggest, "The Strayed
Reveller" is a pivotal poem in Arnold's initial collection.
While most approaches to the poern concentrate on the competing
Apollonian and Dionysion visions of the Youth,' 1 want to
concentrate on a part of the poem that is almost always
neglected. The exchange between Ulysses, Circe, and the Youth
(70-129) is the location of the poemls concern with language.
This section of "The Strayed Revellerl' is an examination of
two competing theories of naming, and the one which the poem
endorses j s indebted to Locke. The Youth shakes off the
effects of Circe's intoxicating wine, observes the figure
before him, and bases his knowledge on sensation in an act of
naming :
Who speaks? Ah, who cornes forth
To thy side, Goddess, from within?
How shali I name him?
This spare, dark-featured,
Quick-eyed s t r a n g e r ?
Ah, and 1 see too
His sailor's bonnet
His short-coat, travel-tarnished,
With one arm bare!--
Art thou n o t he, whom fame
This long tirne rumours
The favoured guest of Circe, brought by the waves?
The wise Ulysses .... (99-112)
4 6
The Youth catalogues al1 the various ideas that are presented
to his senses and assigns the name Ulysses. While obviously
not an exact parallel to Locke, the passage seems undeniably
linked with the Essayls explanation of the process of naming
complex ideas :
For the connexion between the loose parts of those
complex I d e a s , being made by the Mind, this union,
which has no particular foundation in Nature, would
cease again, were there not something that did, as
it were, hold it together, and keep the parts from
scattering. Though therefore it be the Mind that
makes the Collection, 'tis the Name which is, as it
were the Knot, that ties them fast together. What
a vast variety of different Ideas, does the word
Triumphus hold together. (3.5.10)
The same might be said for the variety of ideas that are tied
together by the name Ulysses. Of course, the situation is
complicated by the fact that the Youth is describing a proper
name and the catalogue of sensations is supplemented by
various intertextual references to Homer. But, fundamentally,
Locke's theory of naming is a presence in this section of the
poem. A parallel instance of this act of naming occurs at the
beginning of Tïistram and I s e u l t , when the narrator draws Our
attention away from the initial dramatic moment to name
Tristram and Iseult of Brittany.
The naming of Ulysses by the Youth also illustrates one
47
of the central tenets of Locke's language theory, namely that
the connection between the word or sign and the idea or
signif ied is an arbitrary one. This is, perhaps, clearer when
we compare the act of naming that the Youth performs with the
act of naming (or failure to name) attempted by Ulysses:
Hast thou then lured hither,
Wonderful Goddess, by thy art,
The Young, languid-eyed Ampelus,
Iacchus' darling--
Or some youth beloved of Pan,
Of Pan and the Nymphs?
That he sits, bending downward
His white, delicate neck
To the ivy-wreathed marge
Of thy cup; the bright, glancing vine-leaves
That crown his hair,
Falling forward, mingling
With the dark ivy-plant . . . . ( 7 6 - 8 8 )
Ulysses is unable to name definitively the figure before him
and can only offer possibilities. His conjecture that it is
Ampelus is interesting. The allusion is to Ovid where the
youth Arnpelus received, from Bacchus, a vine that now bears
his name. Ulysses sees the various vines intertwining with
the creature before him and seeks to narne him on criteria that
are not primarily arbitrary. The opposition between the
Youthts and Ulysses's acts of naming is not neatly
48
antithetical, but we can observe that Ulysses strives for a
more natural connection between name and idea (complex or
otherwise). This has been a central problem in theories of
language since Plato's Cratylus. Clearly, the poem advocates
the Lockean theory by voicing it through the Youth who is the
didactic force in the poem for Ulysses, Circe, and the reader.
The issue of the arbitrariness of language leads us to
one other poem in The Strayed Reveller. " A Memory PictureI1
betrays Arnold's realization of the inherent weakness in
language, and it is an excellent transition to the
llSwitzerland'l series which explores this weakness through the
failure of love. The central theme of the "SwitzerlandM poerns
is human isolation, and this condition is exacerbated by the
natural imperfection of language which 1 discussed in the
previous chapter with reference to "To Marguerite--Continued.I1
" A Memory Picturel' explores the troubled relationship and
ultimate incompatibility between Locke's two offices of
language. Locke defines the "double use of Wordsl' in the
third book of the Essay: I1First, One for the recording of Our
own Thoughts. Secondly, The othor for the communicating of Our
Thoughts to othersfl (3.9.1). For the speaker of ' lA Memory
Pictuire," the composition of the poem offers a chance to
preserve his experience and feelings in language. The refrain
of the poem "Quick, thy tablets, Memory!" continually links
this mental faculty with language. Locke notes that any word,
if used consistently, can serve to fix thoughts and ideas in
4 9
memory: " A Man may use what Words he pleases, to signify his
own Ideas to himself: and there will be no imperfection in
them, if he constantly use the same sign for the same Idea
(3.9.2) . In this poem, the fourth, firth, and sixth stanzas
al1 begin with a description of some physical aspect of
Marguerite but quickly point the speaker and reader to a
significance that is complete only to the former. It is clear
that the act of recording his thoughts in language has
satisfied the speaker:
Yet, if little stays with man,
Ah, retain we al1 we can!
I f the clear impression dies,
Ah, the dim remembrance prize! ( 5 3 - 6 2 )
The description of Marguerite reveals little to us compared to
the satisfaction of the speaker who seems to retain a degree
of privacy in the significance of Marguerite by only hinting
at the story behind the physical description. To the reader
the description of the 'IarchH chin is frustrating because it
keeps us at the surface of things and never allows us the same
full significance of I1archl1 the speaker experiences. We c a n
infer and conjecture what it may mean exactly but that is all.
We are thrust into the position of the speaker's friends who
accuse him:
What, my friends, these feeble lines
Show, you Say, my love declines?
To paint il1 as I have done,
5 0
Proves forgetfulness begun? (49-52)
The speaker of "A Memory Picturett receives more from his words
about Marguerite, because they function only as a record of
persona1 thoughts. A s instruments of communication, they are
misunderstood, misinterpreted, or elusive to his auditors.
The poem balances a faith in the personal utility of languaye
with a growing recognition of its inadequacy to bridge the
isolation we al1 live in. In a poem written about two years
later, "The Youth of Nature, " the personif ied voice of nature
(included here, likely, in a tribute to the recently deceased
Wordsworth) condemns al1 attempts to communicate in various
mediums: I t Y e express not yourselves; c a n you make/With marble,
with colour, with word,/What charmed you in others re-live?"
(107-09).
In these three poems we have evidence of Arnold's
fragmented engagement with Lockean ideas of language. The
human voice which is repeatedly found in The Strayed Reveller
is distinctively Lockean. The volume closes on the verge of
Arnold's gradua1 shift in thinking about poetry. In a letter
to his sister he notes:
More and more 1 feel bent against the modern English
habit (too much encouraged by Wordsworth) of using
poetry as a means for t h i n k i n g aloud, instead of
making anything. (Lang 141)
The poems from The Strayed Reveller are a register of Arnold's
''thinking aloud" on many things including, as we have just
51
seen, language. His desire to I1make somethingl' in poetry
culminates in the poetics of the 1853 I1Preface. This theory
of poetry (the poetics of facility) with its primary concern
over contents and i d e a s would require a medium much more
effective than the one explored in "A Memory Picture. The
" l o v e l y notest1 directed from one human i s l a n d to another i n
"To Marguerite--Continuedl' would have to b e made much more
transparent. Once again Arnold finds a philosophical a l l y in
Locke, this time in Of the Conduc t of the Understanding.
Locke's advice in this text would offer aid in service of a
transparent medium that would be put to the test in Arnold's
poetic failures and triumphs of the 1850s and 1860s.
Chapter Three: Tensions
By the early 1850s Arnold's career as a poet had reached
a critical stage, and the persistence of his doubts about the
effectiveness of language as a medium of communication
contributed to this crisis. The poems of The Strayed Reveller
and the 'vSwitzerlandl' series are a record of the poet's quest
to find an authoritative voice, but more often than not the
voices that these poems uncover are human. Furthermore, the
language that Arnold discovers is, frequently, Lockean in many
of its characteristics.
The central dilemma of Locke's linguistic theory is its
scepticism towards the ability of language to assist in an
exact correspondence of ideas between speaker and auditor, and
it was ideas that were coming to assume a prominent place in
Arnold's conception of poetry. We can see that Arnold's
interest in and development of Lockean ideas about languaye
add a darker tone to the persistent Arnoldian theme of
isolation. This theme, of course, is not limited to Arnold
and takes on a variety of manifestations in the Victorian
period. A s J. Hillis Miller has said, "His [Man's] situation
is essentially one of disconnection: disconnection between man
and nature, man and man, even between man and himselPt (2) .
It is the second of these forms of isolation that has an
impcrtant bearing on Arnold, not only as a theme in his poetry
but in his conception of the poet as the facilitator of a
53
poetry of ideas and actions. W.S. Johnson, echoing Miller,
states the trepidation this realization of isolation carries:
V t takes the form of anxiety as to whether a person so
isolated can know the world, his fellows, or himself, whether
he can achieve any sort of knowledgeIf (39). This anxiety can
be traced in the shift from the relative placidity of the
image of human islands separated by moonlit, echoing straits
to the darker vision of the concluding lines of ftDover Beachtf:
I1And we are here as on a darkling plain/Swept with confused
alarms of struggle and flight,/Where ignorant armies clash by
nighttl (35-37).
The theme of human isolation and the contribution of
language to that disconnection, issues which had been
developing throughout Arnold's early poetry, culminate in his
first major long effort, Empedocles on Etna. The failure of
language in this poem has been noted by Riede:
But the drama is designed to emphasize failed
communications in other more obvious ways as
well . . . Indeed, Empedoclest consistent
misunderstanding of Calliclesl songs wonderfully
epitomizes the problem of the modern poet who can
never make himself properly understood, cannot
communicate by poetry. (81)
Unlike Callicles, Arnold realizes the problem of the modern
poet in making himself properly understood. The result of
this realization is the poetic creed of the 1853 "PrefaceU and
5 4
a n i n c r e a s e d a w a r e n e s s on A r n o l d ' s p a r t t o s t r i v e f o r a
g r e a t e r t r a n s p a r e n c y i n his medium.
The ' f P r e f a c e f l t o t h e Poems o f 1 8 5 3 , a s w e n o t e d e a r l i e r ,
e m p h a s i z e s i d e a s and a c t i o n s i n p o e t r y , and c l a i m s t h a t it is
t h e r e s p o n s i b i l i t y o f t h e p o e t t o f a c i l i t a t e t h e t r a n s m i s s i o n
o f t h e s e i d e a s and a c t i o n s t o t h e r e a d e r . However, A r n o l d ' s
s u s p i c i o n of t h e n a t u r a l o p a c i t y o f l a n g u a g e c r e a t e s a
d i l emma. As Riede p o i n t s o u t , l lA rno ld s i d e a l , a s a l w a y s , was
' t o see t h e o b j e c t a s i n i t s e l f it r e a l l y i s , ' and h e was
e v i d e n t l y Secoming i n c r e a s i n g l y c o n v i n c e d t h a t p o e t i c l a n g u a g e
c o u l d o n l y g e t i n t h e waytt ( 9 5 ) . A s 1 a r g u e d i n t h e f i r s t
c h a p t e r , A r n o l d , once a g a i n , t u r n e d t o Locke, but this t i m e it
was n o t t o t h e Essay b u t r a t h e r t o t h e Conduct of the
Understanding. L o c k e ' s p r a c t i c a l a d v i c e i n t h i s t e x t is
d e s i g n e d n o t s o much t o s o l v e t h e p rob l em of t h e o p a c i t y o f
w o r d s , b u t r a t h e r t o r e d u c e it t h r o u g h t h e e f f e c t i v e
m a n i p u l a t i o n o f l a n g u a g e i n similes and m e t a p h o r s . L o c k e ' s
a d v i c e , which 1 r e p e a t h e r e f rom t h e f i r s t c h a p t e r , seems t o
s p e a k d i r e c t l y t o A r n o l d ' s d e s i r e f o r a more t r a n s p a r e n t
l a n g u a g e t o s e r v e a p o e t r y of i d e a s and a c t i o n s :
But it is o n e t h i n g t o t h i n k r i g h t , and a n o t h e r
t h i n g t o know t h e r i g h t way t o l a y Our t h o u g h t s
before o t h e r s w i t h a d v a n t a g e and c l e a r n e s s , be they
r i g h t o r wrong. Well chosen similes, m e t a p h o r s and
a l l e g o r i e s , w i t h method and order, d o t h i s t h e best
of a n y t h i n g , b e c a u s e taken from objects a l r e a d y
5 5
known and familiar to the understanding, they are
conceived as fast as spoken; and the correspondence
being concluded, the thing they are brought to
explain and elucidate is thought to be understood
too. (73; my italics)
In this chapter and the next 1 wish to explore Arnold's
application of Locke's advice for achieving (or at least
approaching) transparency in language. This chapter will
concentrzte on two zf Arnold's longer forays into narrative
poetry in the 1 8 5 0 ~ ~ while the following chapter will study
some of his lyrical accomplishments from the same period. It
is important to remember that neither Locke nor Arnold ever
asserts that a perfectly transparent medium is attainable.
Riede argues: "Arnold's ideal of a transparent language is, of
course, simply impossible to attain or even approachl' (97) . And yet Arnold, in adopting Locke's qualified endorsement of
the simile as a strategy for transparency, did try to approach
it. The question of his success or failure will be addressed
in the pages that follow.
Arnold's treatment of the simile in his two long
narrative poems from the mid 1850s, Sohrab and Rustum and
Balder Dead, is characterized by a tension which arises from
its equivocal use. Arnold's desire to employ the simile as a
technique for linguistic transparency in these poems is
severely hampered by his adoption of the narrative, Homeric
f orm.
56
Why the sirnile? Locke offers simile, metaphor, and
allegory as options in the Conduct, but if we survey Arnold's
poetry the first alternative on the list seems to be his
preference. One of the earliest theorists of the simile is
Aristotle, who treats it in the third book of the Rhetoric.
We have evidence that Aristotle's text appears on Arnold's
curriculum for every term he was at Oxford.' Aristotle, like
Locke, warily advocates style, and figurative lanyuage in
particular, as an aid to instruction and communication. A
simile, as Aristotle repeatedly asserts in the chapters on
style, is a subordinate form of metaphor and properly belongs
to the province of poetry.' McCall has offered the following
summary of Aristotlets position on the simile:
It is better fitted for poetry than for prose; it
will always be more extended than metaphor; its
instructive potential, for reasons of length and
poetic nature, is diluted, rendering it less
valuable as a stylistic figure than metaphor. (51-
5 2
In the Conduct Locke does not classify the various types of
figures. 1 think Arnold's preference for the simile over
metaphor and allegory as a technique for linguistic
transparency is more in line with a recent estimation of the
figure:
Unlike metaphor, which requires the reader to do the
work of constructing a l o g i c of categories and
57
analogies, a simile states explicitly that two terms
are comparable and often presents the basis for that
comparison. 'Her lips are red as wine' does not
leave the reader with the work that a metaphor
requires. The simile is therefore in general a more
controlled figure than metaphor, producinq less
excess of meaning. (McLaughlin 83)
The simile is the figure of speech among those listed by Locke
in the Conduct which is the least strenuous, mentally, for the
reader. It is specific and controlled and has a special
appeal to the poet as facilitator.
The similes of Sohrab and Rustum and Balder Dead have
been of interest to critics of these poems from the moment
they appeared. The similes in both poems were generally
4 attacked by Arnold's contemporary reviewers. Most critics
have concentrated on Arnold's most obvious use of the similes
in the poem, but they have tended to ignore Arnold's
simultaneous use of the figure as a technique of linguistic
transparency.
Sohrab and Rustum is characterized by a strong tension in
Arnold's desire to use the figure as a means to reduce opacity
in language and a competing aspiration to fulfil the
architectonic t e n e t s of the 1853 "Preface. Arnold's pleasure
with Sohrab and Rustum is evident in a letter to his mother
shortly after he completed the poem: "Al1 my spare time has
been s p e n t on a poem which 1 have just finished, and which 1
58
think by f a x the best thing 1 have yet donelt (Lang 266). One
aspect of the "Prefacet1 we have neglected thus fart but which
is worth introducing at this point, is Arnold's belief in the
necessity of a strong architectonic form in poetry. Along
with the choice of a worthy subject and the necessity of
subordinating expression, a good poem requires careful and
considered construction. Arnold, quotiny Goethe, argues that
what distinguishes the artist from the amatew is
llArchitectonice in the highest sense; that power of execution,
which creates, forms, and con~titutes~~ (Super 1: 9) . A . Dwight
Culler has assessed Sohrab and Rustum in such terms: V t was
his poetic Crystal Palace for the English peoplea1 ( 2 1 4 ) , and
the similes of the poem contribute to its careful
architectonic structure.' Critics have complained that the
language achieves precisely the opposite quality of
transparency: "Far from being transparent, the language is
showy and calls attention to its own Homeric posturest1 (Riede
104). 1 would argue that, in one sense, the similes are opaque
and do cal1 attention to themselves in ways beyond the fact
that they are merely epic similes. Culler, again, has argued
that they form a llsymbolic typology" (212), and if we
carefully study the similes of Sohrab and Rustum we see that
Arnold is self-consciously employing the similes to fulfil the
architectonic requirements of the I1Preface.l1 One way this is
achieved is through the limited subject matter of the similes.
Arnold returns again and again to images of cornfields,
59
mountains, various birds, different flowers, and pillars. The
economy of Arnold's symbolic vocabulary invites comparisons
between the similes, and the entire shape and action of the
poem are held concurrently even as the reader progresses
forward through the episode. The similes operate as a sort of
artificial system through which the reader is repeatedly
invited to look backwards and forwards in acts of comparison
and contrast. This system of epic similes contributes to the
observation about the entire poem: "one feels that it is al1
a little falsew (Culler 214) . The artificiality and sense of structure in the similes
are augmented by their interaction with some of the other
figures in the poem. One example which might suffice is the
simile which occurs at the climactic moment of the combat
between Sohrab and Rustum:
And lightnings rent the cloud; and Ruksh, the horse,
Who stood at hand, uttered a dreadful cry;
No horsevs cry was that, most like the roar
of some pained desert lion, who al1 day
Hath trailed the hunter's javelin in his side,
And cornes at night to die upon the sand. (501-06)
If we look forward, the simile foreshadows the imminent wound
which Sohrab will receive in his side from the spear of Rustum
(519-21) . If we look backward, the simile warns us that Sohrab is in grave danger. The detail of the wounded lion reminds
the reader of three metaphors early in the poem which identify
G O
Sohrab with a lion (91, 177, 216). Thus the simile is part of
a long, carefully structured chain of figures that comment on
and modify each other and invite the reader to consider the
entire poem.
There are other examples of this architectonic sense,
such as the various epic similes which compare Sohrab with
flowers and trees (313-18, 6 3 3 - 3 9 ) , Rustum with pillars (336-
3 6 , 8 5 9 - 6 4 ) , and the change from a vertical to a horizontal
position in both sets of similes. Earlier I cited Culler's
comparison of the poem to the Crystal Palace. The analogy is
historically pertinent to the datinq of the poem, but a more
accurate architectural parallel with reference to the careful
structuring of the similes might be the Hall of Mirrors at
Versailles.
The preceding discussion might suggest that Arnold's
desire to use the simile as a technique of transparency is a
complete failure. Perhaps we can see how Arnold may be
following Locke's p.rescription if we look carefully at some
individual similes and not at the intricate structure they
f orm.
Moments after the realization that he has rnortally
wounded his son, Rustumls attempt at suicide is prevented by
the dying Sohrab because, as the narrator says, "Sohrab saw
his thoughtl' (706) . 1 believe this is Arnold's desire for his
readers as well, and he attempts to accomplish this desire
through a group of memorable similes from the poem. Three
61
years earlier in the poem Valais Sands,I1 Arnold complains to
his future bride about their isolation from each other, and
the fact that he can only "guess thy thoughtsM (29). As
Amrollah Abjadian has shown, there are several important
sirniles in Sohrab and Rustum; they "are not only active
similes, underlying and mingling with the action of the poem,
but they also externalize or objectify the internal states of
the characterI1 (414) . We should examine, as representative
examples, two of these similes to see how Arnold may have been
using them as attempts in a movement towards linguistic
transparency. The first example is the famous Victorian lady
simile. Sohrab initially appears, unknown, before his father,
and Rustumis internal reaction is documented through an epic
simile:
As some rich woman, on winterts morn,
Eyes through her silken curtains the poor drudge
Who with numb blackened fingers makes her fire--
At cock-crow, on a starlit winterts morn,
When the frost flowers the whitened window-panes--
And wonders how she l i v e s , and what the thoughts
Of that poor drudge rnay be; so Rustum eyed
The unknown adventurous youth . . . . ( 302-09)
The mental state that is externalized in the simile is
curiosity. However, for Arnold, that word is f a r too vague
and ambiguous. Everyonefs (especially the readerls) idea
signified by the word %uriositytl is persona1 to a certain
62
extent. Arnold has a very specific type of curiosity in mind
that he is attempting to communicate to the reader, and the
fact that this simile is not orientalized is important. The
images of the trope belong more to mid-Victorian England than
ancient Persia. The simile dramatizes an encounter between
the middle and lower classes of Victorian Enyland and adds a
specific note of social disparity to Rustum's curiosity about
Sohrab. There is a sense of inequality, superiority, and
condescension attached to Rustum's curiosity. However, if
Arnold were to eliminate the simile and simply Say that Rustum
viewed Sohrab with condescending curiosity , 1 bel i e v e we would
be more arrested by such words than we are by the simile. The
figure not only externalizes the mental state, but it points
to the fine shading and colouring of that emotion which an
adjective and noun might not be able to communicate with ease
or adequacy. The simile is an attempt to overcorne the dilemma
which the poet confronts, armed with the imperfect medium of
language which struqgles to communicate, accurately and
effectively, "The nameless feelings that course through Our
breast" ("The Buried Life" 62). Arnold has a specific thought
he wants to show, and the simile is a vehicle to present the
particularities of that idea before the reader.
Paradoxically, then, the simile, which calls attention to
itself in one way, also seeks to alleviate the difficulties in
conveying to the reader an idea that may not in itself be
easily expressible or nameable.
6 3
The same strategy is at work in the Bahrein diver sirnile
which occurs prior to the previous example. As Rustum
approaches the front of the Persian army, the narrator
attempts to externalize the emotions felt by the Persian
troops :
And dear as the wet diver to the eyes
Of his pale wife who waits and weeps on shore,
By sandy Bahrein, in the Persian Gulf,
Plunging al1 day in the blue waves, at night,
Having made up his tale of precious pearls,
Rejoins her in their hut upon the sands--
So dear to the pale Persians Rustum came. ( 2 8 4 - 9 0 )
The mental state delineated is easily identified in a general
sense as relief, but again Arnold is interested in
communicatinq a precise shade of that relief in the simile.
The persona1 narrative that the simile depicts adds an
exactness and a precise dimension to that general mental state
which otherwise might be interpreted in any variety of ways
(and in a sense still is but to a lesser degree). This is
primarily accomplished by the domestic elements in the simile
which transfer the readerts thoughts from the alienating world
of the battlefield to the familiar atmosphere of the family.
We should remember that Locke argues, in the Conduct, that
part of a similets effectiveness is its use of the familiar
and the known (73). Arnold's domestication of the subject
matter of the simile might be seen as an attempt to achieve
6 4
such familiarity.
This simile is particularly useful in demonstratiny
Arnold's divided allegiances in his use of the trope. Unlike
the previous example, Arnold took pains to orientalize this
simile, and he notes in a letter that the Bahrein diver was
originally a simple fisher, more English than Persian: "1 took
great trouble to orientalize them...because I thought they
looked strange, and jarred, if Western1' (Lang 281). The
version of the simile in the manuscript is not clearly and
exclusively English, but we sense that the Persian Gulf has
been replaced with something closer to the North Sea or the
Atlantic:
At twilight, on a stormy eve in March,
Running fast homeward with the turn of tide
Beaches the pinnace in a darkening cove . . . . ( Poems
333n)
This version of the simile would have struck a greater chord
with Arnold's English audience more accustomed to the
particular shade of anxiety and relief associated with
maritime travel. Indeed, Arnold would later document these
same emotions in one of his last poems, entitled "S.S.
Lusitania." The simile that appears in the poem attempts to
show the precise nature of an emotion to the reader, but
Arnold's conscious decision to orientalize it reveals a
competing desire to make it function organically as part of an
architectonic whole.
65
Arnold's use of the simile in Sohrab and Rustum is
characterized by a tension which arises from a desire to have
these tropes do too many things at once. Arnold's endeavour
to follow Locke's claim that the simile can make language more
transparent is hampered by his strict adherence to his own
precepts in the "Pref ace. "
Ultimately in Balder Dead, the tension in Arnold's
utilization of the simile persists. Yet it is n o t e w o r t h y that
Arnold continues to search, through the simile, for new ways
to approach transparency in language. Arnold, unlike the
majority of his readers, preferred this later poem to Sohrab
and Rustum and, as Mark Sieqchrist has observed, Balder Dead
is f a r less rigidly structured:
It is surely relevant to observe that while he
continued to use...the prominent structural
devices.. . in the later poem they are not employed to
produce so rigid and static effect as they do in
Sohrab and R u s t u m . (58)
In one sense the poem remains incomplete since Arnold long
considered adding another episode depicting the death of
Balder. The looser structure significantly affects Arnold's
use of the simile (simple or epic) in the poem.
The most discernible difference between the similes in
the two poems is quantity, since the number of epic similes is
reduced by more than half in B a l d e r Dead. However, t h e
similes in this later poem differ from those in Sohrab and
6 6
Rus tum i n o t h e r ways. The similes t b a t 1 examined i n t h e
s e c o n d p a r t o f t h e d i s c u s s i o n o f Sohrab and Rustum a s
e x t e r n a l i z i n y m e n t a l s t a t e s a c c o u n t f o r a b o u t a t h i r d o f a l 1
t h e e p i c similes i n t h e poem. T h i s g r o u p is complemented by
v a r i o u s s imile f a m i l i e s wh ich c o n c e r n t h e m s e l v e s w i t h p h y s i c a l
c o m p a r i s o n o r n o i s e ( a s w e saw i n t h e simile compar ing t h e c r y
o f Ruksh t o t h e wounded l i o n ) . I n Balder Dead t h e q u a n t i t y is
reduced, b u t t h e similes a r e more u n i f o r m i n t h e i r
a p p l i c a t i o n . The m a j o r i t y o f t h e e p i c similes i n t h e la ter
poem a r e c o n c e r n e d w i t h compar ing s o m e t h i n y o r someone
a s s o c i a t e d w i t h t h e s u p e r n a t u r a l wor ld of V a l h a l l a and Asgard
w i t h n a t u r a l phenomena and p e o p l e . For examp le , n e a r t h e end
of P a r t 1 t h e g h o s t o f B a l d e r a p p e a r s b e f o r e h i s w i f e , Nanna,
a n d t h e n d i s a p p e a r s . T h e s u p e r n a t u r a l e v e n t is compared t o a
phenomenon t h a t is u n d e n i a b l y f rom t h e human w o r l d :
H e s p a k e , and s t r a i g h t h i s l i n e a m e n t s began
To f a d e ; a n d Nanna i n h e r s l e e p s t r e t c h e d o u t
Her a rms t o w a r d s him w i t h a c ry -bu t he
M o u r n f u l l y shook h i s h e a d , and d i s a p p e a r e d .
And a s a woodman sees a l i t t l e smoke
Hang i n t h e air, a f i e l d , and d i s a p p e a r ,
So B a l d e r f a d e d i n t h e n i g h t away . ( 1 . 3 3 1 - 3 7 )
W.S. J o h n s o n has commented on Arnoldfs a t t e m p t t o p r e s e n t
i d e a s and t h o u g h t s a s s o c i a t e d w i t h t h e s u p e r n a t u r a l w o r l d of
V a l h a l l a i n d i s t i n c t l y human, f a m i l i a r a n d e a s i l y a c c e s s i b l e
terms t h r o u g h t h e s imi les :
67
There is a contrast between epic characters,
setting, and movement, al1 of which are magnif ied
and formal, and the details that give a specific,
even personal, quality to the poem. This contrast
is enforced almost always by the Homeric similes,
which Arnold introduces with reference to neither
Homer nor the Edda. (123)
The contrast is vividly realized again in the poem at the
moment when Hoder, on his reconnaissance mission to the realms
of Hela, encounters the damsel who guards the bridge to the
underworld:
And on a bridge a damsel watching armed,
In the strait passage, at the farther end.
Scant space that warder left for passers-by;
But as when cowherds in October drive
Their kine across a snowy mountain-pass
To winter-pasture on the southern side,
And on the ridge a waggon chokes the way,
Wedged in the snow; then painfully the hinds
With goad and shouting urge their cattle past,
Plunging through deep untrodden banks of snow
To right and left, and warm stem fills the air--
So on the bridge the damsel blocked the way.. . . (2.87-99)
With Hoder on the verge of the entrance to the underworld,
Arnold offers a description that is easily recognizable and
68
pastoral. Johnson, again, has argued: "The road to Hell is
blocked by a maiden just as a mountain pass is blocked by
cattleu (123). Actually the vehicle of the simile is the
wagon and not the cattle, but the point is well taken in its
illustration of the manner in which Arnold attempted to
elucidate the supernatural with the ordinary. The simile
raised the ire of one contemporary reviewer who remarked:
The comparison of the damsel to the wagon is not
specially poetical; and the minute details of
drovers and cattle are vastly ineffective and
irrelevant. There could be no object in setting a
herd of oxen to stand as the type of Hermod, the
swift and nimble god of northern mythology. (Forman
198)
Just as in Sohrab and Rustum we witnessed Arnold attempting to
use the simile to offer a degree of precision ta the vagueness
embodied in words depicting complex mental and emotional
states, in Balder Dead Arnold seems to organize language
(through the simile) to make the unnatural more accessible to
t k reader. Arnold1 s description of the guardian of Hell might
be compared with a parallel but inverted episode in Milton--
the description of Sin in the second book of Paradise Lost
( 2 . 6 4 8 4 6 ) . Arnold's version is much more interested in
presenting the scene simply and uses the simile to delineate
the admittedly unfamiliar entrance to the underworld in
distinctly human and natural terms.
69
The simile also indicates another way in which Balder
Dead differs from Sohrab and Rustum. Arnold does not take the
trouble to s c a n d a n a v i a n i z e these similes in the manner he had
orientalized his earlier ones. In one sense the similes in
Balder Dead stand out more than those in Sohrab and Rustum
because of this, but, more importantly, they make the vehicle
much more accessible to the reader and facilitate Our
cornparison of the heavenly with the human. Tinker and Lowry
have noted:
The two forceful similes of cattle blocked in snowy-
mountain passes in October and of the traveller
watching the slopes break through the valley mists
at dawn are doubtless memory-pictures from
Switzerland--possibly from the English Lakes. (100)
Not only are the similes a vehicle used to compare the
supernatural to the human and the natural, but that human
world is distinctly English. Johnson, commentiny on the
simile where the touch of the god Hoder is compared to the
slight brush of honeysuckle on a tired traveller's face
(1.229-35), notes parenthetically: "(surely English
honeysuckle and an English traveller)" (123).
In Balder Dead, Arnold's use of the simile is more
consistent than in Sohrab and Rustum. Rather than usinq the
simile to delineate the fine shades of subjective human
psychology, he attempts to reduce the supernatural world, a
set of ideas naturally abstract and difficult to cornprehend,
7 O
to something that is extremely easy to understand. So once
again, Arnold seeks to get beyond mere words to the ideas that
lie behind them by using the self-consciously literary figure
of the simile. Of course this is not nearly transparent, but
the desire to reduce the opacity and generalities of words
such as t'curiosityll or I1relief," or to describe what the
tactile sensation of the touch of a God might feel like, is
attempted through the similes.
Nevertheless, Arnold once again asks his similes to do
too many things at once. We noted earlier that Balder Dead
has a much looser structure than its predecessor, and as a
result there is not the same desire to use the similes in the
creation of an intratextual network. Instead, a large number
of the similes participate intsrtextually with other epics by
Homer, Virgil, and Milton. One such example is a simple
simile employed to describe the various spirits in Hell: IfThen
he must not regard the wailful ghosts/Who al1 will flit, like
eddying leaves aroundtl (1.176-77) . Unlike the similes in
Sohrab and Rustum, this trope is not connected to other
similes in Balder Dead. However, the similes in Sohrab and
Rustum were either Arnold's invention or alluded to only one
classical or Miltonic predecessor. In this example (and a
qreat many others in the poem) Arnold's similes contain double
(and once even triple) echoes and reminiscences of earlier
epics. In the simile above the echoes are to both The A e n e i d
( 6 .309 -10 ) and Paradise Lost (1.302003) . Arnold may employ
7 1
these multiple echoes and al lusions to increase the
comparative field for the reader, but the main result of the
practice is to draw the reader away from the ideas in the poem
at hand and into the network of echoes and allusions. It is
a different technique from Sohrab and R u s t u m , but it also
works against the desire (if not complete attainment) of
linguistic transparency and towards the language of the
similes themselves.
The success of Arnold's use of the simile in these two
narrative poems is aecidedly mixed. In varying degrees the
similes, by their epic form, intratextual and intertextual
dimensions, cal1 attention to themselves and stand apart as
decorative and opaque. However, in both of these poems, we
see Arnold trying to manipulate these figures to ease and
clarify communication. In one poem he tries to externalize
those particular human mental states in their finer and more
precise shades, and in the other he tries to reduce the
formidable and often foreign ideas of the supernatural to
something familiar, domestic, and pastoral through the vehicle
of the simile. As always his desire is to use language to
communicate with accuracy. However, the two directions in
which these similes are often simultaneously pulling hinder
this desire irrevocably.
In a rather frigid elegiac poem entitled IfMatthew
Arnold," W.H. Auden says that Arnold Vhrust his gift in
prison till it diedl1 (3). Although in the context of Auden's
poem the speaker is referring to the baneful influence of Dr.
Arnold on his son, we might consider the statement with
reference to Arnold's use of the simile in these narrative
poems. The possibilities of a more transparent language
subservient to the accurate communication of ideas are
entombed within the restrictive generic form and tradition
prescribed by Arnold in his own critical agenda. George Eliot
may well have been thinking of the partial success of the
similes when she described the effect of Arnold's poetry in an
1855 article for the Westminster Review:
The thought is always refined and unhackneyed,
sometimes new and sublime, but he seems not to have
found the winged word which carries the thought at
once to the mind of the reader. (129)
Although these narrative experiments and their similes were
met with mixed admiration, several of Arnold's lyrics were
highly praised in the 1850s. Prominent among these triumphs
is "The Scholar Gipsy , which contains, perhaps, Arnold ' s most
famous simile. Coventry Patmore said that l 'The Scholar Gipsy"
should lead I I M r . Arnold to consider whether the acceptance
this poem is sure to win, does not prove to him that it is
bettor to forget al1 his poetic theories" (119). With such
high praise we should turn to Arnold's lyrical poetry from
this period to see if his quest for linguistic transparency is
successful.
Chapter Four: Strategies
A s pieces such as Sohrab and Rustum and Balder Dead
appeared for public perusal, Arnold produced another group of
poems far less rigid in structure and imitative in manner.
Three of these poems have gone a long way in securing Arnold's
place as an important and representative Victorian voice.
"Dover Beach, '* %tanzas From the Grande Chartreuse, and "The
Scholar GipsyIf can be labelled, with a certain degree of
confidence, as Arnold's three principal poetic achievements.
"Dover Beachi' has a secure status as Arnold's most popular and
anthologized poem, "Stanzas From the Grande Chartreuse1'
contains, arguably, Arnold's most famous lines, and l'The
Scholar Gipsyw is generally considered to be his masterpiece.
Significantly, these poems also contain some of Arnold's more
celebrated and controversial similes.
In the previous chapter we traced Arnold's mixed use of
the simile in his longer narrative works. Arnold's desire to
adopt the figure to delineate in a very precise and familiar
manner private, psychological states or complex and vague
supernatural phenomena is undermined by the concurrent
adoption of the simile partially to fulfil the architectonic
requirements imposed by his own 1853 "Preface." The poems 1
wish to consider in this chapter c m al1 be classified under
the broad rubric of the lyric. Virginia Carmichael states
that Arnold offers us "a body of fractured poetryf' (GI) that
7 4
frequently defies generictags. This seems especially true of
the three poems 1 wish to examine in this chapter. Al1 three
works mix genres and sub-genres f reely . 'IDover Beach" utilizes aspects of the serenade, the invitation, and the sonnet for
various purposes and effects.' Elements of the quest romance
and pastoral govern the early sections of I1Stanzas From the
Grande Chartreuse" and l'The Scholar Gipsytg respect ively ,
before a kind of Empedoclean philosophic statement dominates
the second half of both poems. Carmichael has noted the
varying degrees of emphasis between subjectivity and
objectivity between and within Arnold's lyrics. It is the
emphasis that these poems place on ideas, and, more precisely,
the relation between the central ideas of these poems and
their various similes that will be the general focus of the
pages which follow.
Despite their strong subjective elements, these poems are
f irmly entrenched in the camp of the "poetry of ideas." In
lgMemorial Verses, Arnold praises Goethe's particular faculty:
He took the suffering human race,
He read each wound, each weakness clear;
And struck his finger on the place,
And said: Thou a i l e s t here, a n d here! (19-22)
Although Arnold calls Goethe "the physician of the iron age"
(17), he might be called, more accurately, the era's
diagnostician, and Arnold later admits that the poet of Weimar
I1was happy, if to know/Causes of thingsl@ (29-30) .
In "Dover Beach, If "Stanzas From the Grande Chartreuse,
and "The Schola r Gipsyl' Arnold seeks to inherit Goethe's
mantle and is interested not only in reading "each weakness
clear/' but also in the communication of these ideas and
diagnoses of the age with ease and lucidity. Once again
Arnold turns, with Locke's advice from the Conduct of the
Understanding, to the simile as a method for communicating
ideas with clarity. Unlike the poems from the previous
chapter , the "method and ordePt (Conduct 7 3 ) that Locke
cautions in the use of the simile are not determined or
imposed by an imprisoning and rigidly conventional form.
Arnold adopts, in the three central lyrics, various strategies
in his use of the simile. These strategies are attempts to
f ind the best "method and order'' for the figure which will
clearly and effectively convey the ideas of the poem to the
reader.
I wish to consider, in varying degrees, three particular
aspects of these similes that have a bearing on Arnold's
search for "method and orderIf in his use of these figures;
first, the placement of the major similes within the poem;
second, the relationship of the s u b j e c t matter of the simile
with the imagery and diction of the rest of the poem; and
third, the relation or function of these similes (reiteration,
development, contradiction) to the central ideas of these
lyrics . "Dover Beacht1 has been celebrated by critics as Arnold's
76
Ivmost famous of lyricsf! (Madden 64) and "his most perfect work
of art" (Bush 40). In a telling comment Warren Anderson
remarks :
With the possible exception of The Waste Land, no
other poem of the nineteenth and twentieth century
captures the isolation of modern man as does "Dover
Beach,'! with its use of the Thucydidean night
battle. (285)
It is interesting that Anderson's high estimation of the
poemfs achievement is linked to one of the poem's two
memorable similes. Although "Dover Beachu was published in
1867, the evidence points to a much earlier initial
composition date in the summer of 1851 when the Arnolds spent
a night in Dover durinq their honeymoon.' This early date is
important since it indicates that "Dover BeachH is Arnold's
first significant poetic production following his encounter
with Locke's C o n d u c t of the Understanding eight months
earlier. A great deal of critical attention has been directed
at two of the poemls similes, and we should explore the
relationship of these two figures to Arnold's melancholy
diagnosis of a world characterized by an isolation occasioned
by the gradua1 withdrawal of faith.
The first of these similes seems, initially, to work in
ways antithetical to Locke's belief that a carefully chosen
simile can communicate with ease and clarity:
The Sea of Faith
77
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
(21-23)
Arnold's desire to elucidate the state of faith as it once
existed leads him into trouble here with his use of the
simile. Critics generally agree with George Ford that the
last line quoted above is a tldifficulttt one (1366n), and
William Ulmer justifiably calls the I1bright girdleIt simile
"the most enigmatic image in 'Dover Beacht t1 (54). My interest
in t h e simile is not, as it is with so many others, w i t h why
Arnold switched ttgarment" to tfgirdle" in his revision of the
poem, but rather in the structure of the simile and the steps
we as readers must go through in order to appreciate the full
force of this ingenious trope.
Essentially, Arnold attempts to control his simile
through an iconographie correspondence between the creases and
folds of the furled garment and the rippled and rouqh
appearance of the successive waves on a full and active sea.
However, the difficulty of the simile is apparent when one
attempts to gloss the figure in the manner above. Arnold is
not simply comparing the appearance of the sea to the image of
the girdle. Both images are directed back to the idea of
faith and its previous state of plentitude. Before we even
encounter the "bright girdle" simile, we are forced into the
mental labour of making sense of Arnold's metaphor of "The Sea
of Faith." Only then can we move to the simile which
7 8
establishes the iconographic degree of similitude. The figure
is the conclusion of a two-stage troping process. The
effectiveness of the simile depends on the effort of the
reader to carry over the meaning and comprehension from the
Vies of Faithl' metaphor to the "bright girdle." Althouqh the
simile may be, as McLaughlin indicates, the most controlled
and least mentally taxing figure, the placement of it in such
a close relationship to the metaphor of IlThe Sea of Faithql
actually works against this facility. All of this mental work
is contrasted with the relatively simple troping activity of
the Greek tragedian:
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brouqht
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery . . . . (15-18) Sophocles listens to the sea and, in one mental step, equates
it with human misery. This process is markedly simpler than
the multiple stages that the "bright girdleIq simile requires
to gather its full significance.
Despite the difficulties that attend its construction and
immediate comprehension, the Ivbright girdle" sirnile maintains
an important relationship with the "darkling plainf1 simile
that ends the poem. One of the more persistent cornplaints
about IqDover BeachH is the lack of unity in its imagery. The
seascape of the first three-quarters of the poem gives way, in
what Paul1 Baum calls "the one structural blemish of the poerntq
79
(91), to the imagery of the darklinq plain and the night
battle in the concluding trope. The poem ends with a simile
which alludes to Thucydides ' description of the Battle of
Epipolae:
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night. (35-37)
The simile can stand independently as a striking summary of
Arnold's bleak vision of human ignorance and isolation, but
the figure takes on still darker hues if w e consider its
relationship with the "bright girdleu simile. The earlier
figure referred, ultimately, to the state of faith as it once
existed. Arnold implies that the garment is now unfurled to
the limits of the world--"the vast edges drear" (27). The
girdle of faith is presently stretched out too tautly to the
edges of the world and the image suggests a state of faith
that has becorne somewhat threadbare. It offers little
spiritual protection in the battle of life. Not only does
this complicate the seemingly simple, certain, and untroubled
assertion that "The sea is calm tonightm (1) (since the sea
here iconographically resembles the present unfurled state of
the garment of faith), but the confusion of the night battle
becomes darker and more terrifying with the heightened sense
of vulnerability and nakedness with a lack of strong (or
perhaps any) spiritual arrnour/garment.
We must view these two similes of "Dover Beach" with
8 0
mixed admiration. Arnold's development of an individual
simile such as the "bright girdleM is only a partial success.
His intention of delineating t h e state of a n abstract idea
such as faith through a visual, iconographie comparison is
hampered. In order to render the abstract in such physical,
concrete terms, the simile is mediated through a rnetaphor in
order to provide that comparative foundation. Arnold is much
more successful when he moves in one step, as in the "darkling
plaintv simile, from the abstract to the concretely visual and
aura1 . "Dover Beach" also initiates the familiar Arnoldian
tactic of concludinq a poem with a sirnile that relates to the
central ideas of the poem which has preceded it. In this
case, that relationship involves a connection between the
"bright girdle" and "darkling plainN similes. Critics have
complained about the dichotomy in the imagery of the poem and
the images in the similes illustrate that division. While it
is true that the similes are not explicitly linked in the
intricate manner of Sohrab and Rustum, the "bright girdle" can
be seen as adding to and enriching the effect of its "darkling
plain" counterpart. Both of these similes contribute to the
central ideas of the poem, namely the melancholy isolation and
limited position of man. The similes seem to divide the work
of elucidation. The 'tbright girdle" simile clarifies, defines,
and makes concrete the cause of man's dilemma, while the
"darkling plainu figure images the effects of our isolation
and ignorance.
The other poem conceived on Arnold ' s honeymoon, "Stanzas from the Grande Chartre~se,~~ is a more extended exploration of
the ideas introduced in "Dover Beach." This poem opens with
the description of a journey up a mountainside which
identifies "Stanzas Fromthe Grande Chartreusev with the quest
tradition. The poem continues to describe various locales
within the Carthusian monastery before the speaker arrives at
his crucial question: "And what am 1, that 1 am here?" (66).
Arnold answers his own question and begins to introduce the
dilemma of modern man with the shorter of the two important
similes in the poem. Arnold has made the pilgrimage to the
Grande Chartreuse not as a potential convert:
But as, on some far northern strand,
Thinkiny of his own Gods, a Greek
In pity and mournful awe might stand
Before some fallen Runic stone--
For both were faiths, and both are gone. (80-84)
Once again, as in "Dover Beach, Arnold is dealing with the
question of a lost faith. The cornparison between the speaker
of the poem and the Greek's inability to grasp the complete
significance of the Runic stone in the simile is perhaps
inadvertentiy heightened through the various factual errors
with regard to the life and religious rites of the monks in
the description leading up to the simile. This brief simile
also looks forward and points to Arnold's famous statement of
82
the dilemma of modern man--"Wandering between two worlds, one
dead/The other powerless to be born" (85-86) . Arnold of fers the reader an overt statement and diagnosis
of the predicament facing man which affects the construction
and effectiveness of the extended, significant simile that
concludes the poem. The figure e x t e n d s for the last thirty-
nine lines of the poem but is worth quoting at length:
We are like children reared in shade
Beneath some old-world abbey wall,
Forgotten in a Eorest-glade,
And secret from the eyes of all.
Deep, deep the greenwood round them waves,
Their abbey, and its close of graves!
But, where the road runs near the stream,
O f t through the trees they catch a glance
Of passing troops in the suri's beam--
Pennon, and plume, and flashiny lance!
Forth to the world those soldiers fare,
To life, to cities, and to war!
And through the wood, another way,
Faint bugle-notes from far are borne,
Where hunters gather, staghounds bay,
Round some fair forest-lodge at rnorn.
o . .
The banners flashing through the trees
O . .
The bugle-music on the breeze
. . * O children, what do ye reply?--
. . . Too late for us your cal1 ye blow,
Whose bent was taken long ago.
. . . 'Fenced early in this cloistral round
Of reverie, of shade, of prayer,
How should we grow in other ground?
How can w e flower in foreign air? (169-208)
There are two points to be made about this extended simile.
The first concerns the literal, physical position of the
children. Are they inside or outside the abbey or a mixture
of both? The children have been Y e a r e d in shade/Beneath some
old-world abbey wallN (169-70). This in itself is
inconclusive, but the fact that they see the banners and
pennons of the soldiers seems to indicate a position outside
the abbey. It is true that the children acknowledge that they
have been raised in the abbey: "Fenced early in this cloistral
round/Of reverie, of shade, of prayertt (205-OG), but the
description is cast in the past tense. Indeed, now they hear
the bugle calls of the hunters in the forest which mixes with
the sound of the organ from the abbey. The reason 1 emphasize
a need to locate the precise present location of the children
is to examine how the simile works to clarify the poemts
84
central statement about man% modern dilemma. We miqht argue
that the children are now exterior to the abbey, or perhaps it
is more likely that they are at the moment of crossing the
threshold into the world despite their professed allegiances
to the Ityellow taper" and I%hadowed nave." The question of
whether the children stand outside the abbey wall or are still
physically inside the abbey with prof essed allegiance but with
eyes and ears increasingly "chainedtl to the sights and sounds
of the world renains unresolved, but either alternative offers
that sense of "in betweenness" that is Arnold's diagnosis of
modern life.
Another aspect of t he simile to consider is the question
of the choice of vehicle itself. Why does the speaker compare
himself (and those like him) to childreii? One criiic has
pointed out that the choice of the children may have been an
attempt to introduce more realistic detail into the poem:
It seems evident that if the final stanzas are to
produce one unified image, these children must be
something more than just peasant children playing
near the abbey ... We must assume that Arnold had in mind, however vaguely, an ancient monastic practice
of receiving into the abbey children of a very young
age. . . Not al1 the children in an abbey were intended for vows. (Boo)
Arnold's choice of the children for the simile may well have
been an attempt to exploit the example offered by these
85
rnonastic children who literally wander from the world of the
abbey to the world of the soldiers and hunters.
The children, when speaking of their aversion to the
world of cities, men, and war, compare themselves to plant
life: I'How should we grow in other ground?/How can we flower
in foreign air?" (207-08). The only other use of the word
Ifchildrennl in the poern occurs in a description of the activity
which is the monksl sole connection with the outside world.
The herbs which are used to produced the famous Carthusian
liqueur are troped as children:
The garden overgrown--yet mild,
See, fragrant herbs are flowering there!
Strony children of the Alpine wild
Whose culture is the brethrenls care;
Of human tasks their only one,
And cheerful works beneath the Sun. (55-60)
The herbs and plants begin their life in the confines of the
monastery but ultimately end up (in greatly altered form) out
in the world. The fate of the rnetaphorical children of the
Carthusian monks moving from one world to another points to
the likely fate of the children of the abbey in the simile who
unwillingly sit either outside the abbey or on its threshold.
The children may not want to leave the confines of the abbey
but we get the sense that the decision is not theirs.
I1Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse1' and I'Dover Beachu
apply very different strategies in their respective use of the
86
simile. We noted earlier that the Ifbright girdle" and
"darkling plainut similes arrest us initially in their
distinction from the rest of the poem's imaqery. In "Stanzas
from the Grande Chartreuseu the concluding simile takes the
subject matter of the children from elsewhere in the poem. It
is important to note that the main body of the poem is set in
the Carthusian monastery, while the extended simile which
closes the poem is set in the precincts of an llold-world
abbey . There is no radical departure from the poem in the
details and setting of the simile. Indeed, as we read the
simile, we tend to overlook the fact that the setting is not
the ~arthusian monastery. Arnold has sought a closer
identification between himself and the children of the simile
by blurring the distinctions between the details and contexts
of monastery and abbey. Consequently, Arnoldfs extended
simile in the later poem yokes itself to the main body of the
poem and blends in much more easily than the ffdarkling plain"
simile at the conclusion of "Dover Beach." The use of and
relationship between similes within the poem are different as
well. The two major similes of lfDover BeachM elucidate the
cause and effects of Arnold's diagnosis of the human
conditions, while in "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse" the
extended simile is more of a reassertion and concrete
realization of the poemfs explicitly stated thesis of
"wandering between two w ~ r l d s . ~ ~
"The Scholar Gipsyu is generally considered Arnold's best
87
poem and the famous Tyrian trader" simile has occasioned so
much attention that Sidney Coulling has remarked:
The simile of the Tyrian trader and the Grecian
coaster which closes "The Scholar Gipsy" has become
in Arnold's poetry what the concluding lines of 'Iode
to a Grecian Urn" have long been in Keats'. (11)
Judgements of the simile's merit have been divided since the
poem's appearance. George Saintsbury, writing on the cusp of
this century, objected:
No ingenuity c a n work out the parallel between the
"uncloudedly joyousl' scholar who is bid avoid the \
palsied, diseased enfants du siecle, and the g r a v e
Tyrian who was indignant at the cornpetition of the
merry Greek, and shook out more sail to seek fresh
markets, (42)
More recent critics such as Alan Roper have called it "the
finest ending by a poet of fine endings" (Roper 223).
More so than "Dover BeachH and "Stanzas From the Grande
Chartreuse," "The Scholar Gipsyw is more insistent in pointing
to both the disease of modern life and the possibility of
alleviation. "The Scholar Gipsyu counsels the necessity of
withdrawal £rom a modern life characterized as "a strange
disease" (203) with its "divided aimsu (204) which make
everyone, willingly or not, into a Victorian Hamlet. The cure
for the disease of modern life is drarnatized through the
scholar-gipsy's quest for the secret knowledge of the gipsies.
88
The content of the knowledge the scholar-gipsy seeks is never
revealed because it is the quest itself which is important.
The quest is characterized by a single-mindedness and sense of
unif ied purpose that distinguish it from the modern malaise of
division and aimless wandering.
T h e Scholar Gipsy" has three distinct movements. The
opening section (1-130) chronicles the speaker's pastoral
vision of the scholar-gipsy, and the second section (131-231)
is elegiac verse betraying "Arnold's tendency toward
philosophic statement [that] mars his poetrytt (Stitelman 146).
The poem then concludes:
Then fly Our greetings, fly our speech and srniles!
--As some grave Tyrian trader, from the sea,
Descried at sunrise an emerging prow
Lifting the cool-haired creepers stealthily,
The fringes of a southward-facing brow
Among the Aegean isles;
And saw the merry Grecian coaster come,
Freighted with amber grapes, and Chian wine,
Green, bursting figs, and tunnies steeped in
brine-
Ana knew the intruders on his ancient home,
The young light-hearted masters of the waves-
And snatched the rudder, and shook out more sail;
And day and night held on indignantly
Oter the blue Midland waters with the gale,
Betwixt the Syrtes and soft Sicily,
To where the Atlantic raves
Outside the western straits; and unbent sails
There, where down cloudy clif f s, through sheets of
f oam,
Shy traffickers, the dark Iberians come;
And on the beach undid his corded bales.
(231-50)
In the choice a n d construction of the vehicle and s u r r o u n d i n g
details of the simile, Arnold adopts a mediating position to
his methods in "Dover BeachH and ItStanzas from the Grande
Chartreuse." The Tyrian and the Greek lie somewhere between
the choice of the girdïe and the children. Arnold's subject
matter in the simile does not blend and mingle with earlier
imagery in the poem as it does in "Stanzas From the Grande
Chartreuse," but the simile contains details which link it
with the main body of the poem in a more natural way t h a n the
"green girdlett or "darkling plainu similes. Arnold creates a
series of correspondences between the simile and the poem.
For example, the "dark Iberianstv that the Tyrian flies to, as
many commentators have noted, bear a strong resemblance to the
gipsies with their physically swarthy complexion. The
movements of the Tyrian trader are constantly westward just as
the scholar roams the Cumner Hills which lie to the west of
Oxford. One point of controversy has been the identification
9 0
of t h e s c h o l a r - q i p s y w i t h t h e g r a v e T y r i a n when t h e
c h e e r f u l n e s s o f t h e l i g h t and mer ry Greeks seems t o p a r a l l e l
t h e s c h o l a r g i p s y ' s a t t i t u d e s . T h i s may be s o , b u t on t h e
b a s i s o f p h y s i c a l a p p e a r a n c e t h e Greeks, w i t h their c o l o u r f u l
c a r g o of "amber grapesM a n d " g r e e n f i g s , I t oppose t h e s c h o l a r -
g i p s y who is a s s o c i a t e d w i t h t h e g r e y c o l o u r of h i s c l o a k
(which is c l o s e r t o t h e c o l o u r l e s s T y r i a n ) . More i m p o r t a n t l y ,
t h e T y r i a n , l i k e t h e s c h o l a r - g i p s y , is s o l i t a r y a n d f l ies from
t h e p l u r a l i t y o f G r e e k s , j u s t a s t h e s c h o l a r - g i p s y abandons
his f e l l o w s and t h e m u l t i t u d i n o u s n e s s of t h e w o r l d . Arno ld
s e e k s t o r e d u c e t h e i n i t i a l s h o c k of d i s p a r i t y i n t h e movement
f rom t h e g r e e n Cumner h i l l s o f s e v e n t e e n t h - and n i n e t e e n t h -
c e n t u r y B e r k s h i r e t o t h e b l u e w a t e r s o f t h e a n c i e n t
M e d i t e r r a n e a n w o r l d .
"The S c h o l a r G i p s y , I t l i k e "Dover Beachmt and '%tanzas From
t h e Grande C h a r t r e u s e , c o n t a i n s two i m p o r t a n t s imi les . Thus
f a r w e h a v e o n l y examined t h e " T y r i a n t r a d e r u f i g u r e and have
n e g l e c t e d t h e simile i n v o l v i n g Dido and Aeneas . T h i s simile
i s c l o s e l y t i e d t o t h e " T y r i a n t r a d e r t t simile and o f f e r s a
t y p e of n e g a t i v e exemplum t o t h e p o s i t i v e and more f i t t i n g
c o u n t e r p a r t o f t h e e x t e n d e d t r o p e which e n d s t h e poem. The
s p e a k e r r e p e a t e d l y u r g e s t h e s c h o l a r - g i p s y t o f l y f rom t h e
wor ld :
Fly h e n c e , o u r c o n t a c t f e a r !
Still f l y , plunge deeper i n t h e bower ing wood!
Ave r se , a s Dido d i d w i t h g e s t u r e s t e r n
9 1
From her false friendts approach in Hades turn,
Wave us away, and keep thy solitude! (206-10)
The simile prepares us for the ItTyrian tradert1 simile but in
the comparison between the scholar-gipsy and Dido the note of
tragedy is sounded. Didois rejection of western civilization
represented in the figure of Aeneas still does not Save her
from death. Her rejection of civilization is a warning to the
scholar-gipsy who seeks to withdraw but always with the
promise to return. If the poem were to end here, Arnold would
have encountered difficulties in the poemls classification.
The poem would be tragic rather than elegiac. The IITyrian
traderv1 simile offers the possibility of a different, more
consolatory, ending. The speaker notes early in the poem the
scholar-gipsy's intention to return to the world, and the
simile conciudes with the Tyrian undoing the corded bundles on
the shores in an attempt to establish commercial ties with the
Iberians. It is important to note that this attempt does not
involve human contact or communication in their usual sense.
Kenneth Allott notes that Arnold is alluding to a description
from Herodotus where the Carthaginians and Iberians do
business without speaking, seeing or having any persona1
contact with each other (Poems 36911). The "Tyrian trader1'
simile reiterates the poemls need to withdraw from the world,
but unlike the Dido simile which ends in tragedy, this figure
offers hopeful, consolatory possibilities and takes us to the
verge of a transformed reintegration into the world.
32
''Dover Beach, " "Stanzas From the Grande Chartreuse, and
"The Scholar Gipsyu are three of Arnold's most important
poems. As a group they represent Arnold's diagnosis of the
evils of the iron age he found himself in. However, Arnold is
not content to identify the problems of the age and point to
possible solutions. His experiments and strategies with the
simile in these poems reflect an intense desire to lay these
thoughts before us in the most effective possible manner.
Arnold, in these lyrics, is free from some of the rigidly
forma1 demands of the 1853 "Preface, I t which he acknowledged
the following year did not apply to lyric poetry (Super 1:lG).
However, his desire for the facilitative communication of
ideas in poetry is carried into these poems. A l 1 of these
poems share certain strategies and develop their own
techniques for the simile. In al1 of these pieces, Arnold
employed his characteristic tactic of concluding the poem with
a simile that relates to the central idea in the main body of
the poem. In al1 three poems Arnold experimented with the
degree to which the vehicle of the simile should or could
stand apart from the general fabric of the main part of the
poem. In "Dover Beach," the "darkling plain1' and I1bright
girdleI1 similes arrest Our attention by what appears to be
their sudden intrusion into the poern. At the opposite end of
the spectrum is Arnold's final sirnile in "Stanzas From the
Grande Chartreuse.It In this poem, the simile which closes the
poem is made up of images and diction which are so closely
9 3
t i e d t o a l 1 t h a t h a s come b e f o r e t h a t t h e b a r r i e r s between t h e
s imi le and t h e poem a r e b l u r r e d t o a g r e a t e x t e n t . "The
S c h o l a r G ipsyu a t t e m p t s t o m e d i a t e t h e s e two e x t r e m e s w i t h i t s
m i x t u r e o f o b v i o u s d i f f e r e n c e s between t h e E n g l i s h and
M e d i t e r r a n e a n w o r l d s and s u b t l e s i m i l a r i t i e s t h a t f a c i l i t a t e
c o r r e s p o n d e n c e s between c h a r a c t e r s and a c t i o n s i n t h e s i m i l e
and t h e p r e v i o u s p a r t s o f t h e work.
Arnold a l s o e x p l o r e d d i f f e r e n t ways o f o r d e r i n g t h e
s imi les w i t h i n t h e poems and r e l a t i n g them i n numerous ways t o
t h e c e n t r a l i d e a s o f t h e s e p i e c e s . The two similes o f "Dover
Beach , " a l t h o u g h r a d i c a l l y d i f f e r e n t a t f i r s t g l a n c e , e x p l o r e
and e l u c i d a t e e i t h e r t h e c a u s e o r e f f e c t s of human i s o l a t i o n
and i g n o r a n c e i n t h e wor ld . The c e n t r a l s t a t e m e n t o f t t S t a n z a s
From t h e Grande C h a r t r e u s e " is b r a c k e t e d on o n e s i d e by t h e
"Runic s t o n e " s imile which i n t r o d u c e s t h e c e n t r a l q u e s t i o n o f
f a i t h and t h e ex t ended simile which closes t h e poem. T h i s
s e c o n d t r o p e o f f e r s a c o n c r e t e p i c t u r e o f t h e " i n be tweenu
s t a t e of man i n t h e n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y . F i n a l l y , t h e two
similes i n "The S c h o l a r Gipsyu s p e a k t o e a c h o t h e r . The Dido
simile d r a m a t i z e s o n l y p a r t o f t h e message of t h e poem, and it
is t h e T y r i a n t r a d e r simile t h a t o f f e r s a f u l l r e i t e r a t i o n and
d r a m a t i z a t i o n o f t h e poem's c e n t r a l i d e a .
T h e s e poems mark t h e z e n i t h of A r n o l d ' s c a r e e r a s a p o e t ,
and a l t h o u g h t h e second h a l f o f t h e 1850s would o f f e r
i n t e r e s t i n g a c h i e v e m e n t s , such as "Haworth Churchya rdu and
"Rugby C h a p e l , " Arnold f i n d s it i n c r e a s i n g l y d i f f i c u l t t o
94
produce poetry. In the 1860s, Arnold's poetic production
slowed to a trickle and he turned increasingly to prose.
However, he was sporadically moved to poetic production and
one of those productions was occasioned by the death of Clough
in Florence in 1861. The result was Arnold's last significant
poem, HThyrsis," and it is with this work that we should
appropriately conclude Our survey of Arnold's poetry.
Chapter Five: I1Thyrsist1
After Arnold s election to Prof essor of P o e t r y at Oxford,
his poetic production--which had been naturally dwindling in
the second half of the 1850s--came to a virtual standstill
with the increased demands for prose which the professorship
required. When Arnold did find time and inspiration for
poetry in the last three decades of his life, he turned almost
excluçively to forms of the elegy or an elegiac tone.'
Furthermore, Riede points out that the elegy, with its need
for I1sincerity, puts "an added pressure on the lanquage, a
pressure to reconcile words with truth" (162).
The movement from "The Scholar Gipsy1I t o I1Thyrsisn seems
to be a logical progression. Indeed, many critics have opted
to treat the two poems as intimately related or as parts of a
single text .' While there are, of course, obvious
similarities or repetitions in setting and stanzaic form,
Culler and Riede have argued, effectively, that the true
interest lies in the differences between the two poems. T h e
Scholar Gipsyu and MThyrsisu are separated by over a decade
and Culler rightly notes: I1with Arnold fifteen years--
especially when they extend from the Iearly fifties to t h e rnid
'sixties-4s a long timeu (250). A great deal has occurred in
the interim between the two poems, particularly with regard to
Arnold% attitude to language.
In another poem from the 1860s) "Epilogue to Lessing's
9 6
Lao~oon,~' Arnold reveals that his overall desire for language
remains unchanged: "But clear as words can make revealingv
(137) . The language of "Thyrsis" illustrates Arnold ' s
continued struggle to achieve a greater degree of transparency
in his medium. The struggle in this poem is characterized by
a conscious awareness of the power and weakness of words, the
continued use of earlier techniques for linguistic
transparêncy, and the introduction or emergence of
alternatives.
Althouqh "Thyrsist' is an elegy, an encounter with the
poem quite often leads one to agree with Lionel Trilling that
it is "in some ways a strange commemoration" (298). Despite
the promise of its subtitle, the poem tends to forget about
Clough at times, and Culler has noted that the final three
stanzas seem to be awkward additions in an effort to offer
some sort of traditional consolatory conclusion ( 2 6 2 - 6 4 ) . '
Arnold anticipated much of this criticism in an l 8 G G letter to
J.C. Shairp:
One has the feeling, if one reads the poem as a
memorial poem, that not enough is said about Clouçh
in it; 1 feel this so much that 1 do not send the
poem to Mrs. Clouqh. (Russell 1: 3 2 7 )
The poem is as much about the poetry and the speaker (Arnold-
Corydon) as it is about the subject (Clough-Thyrsis) . Richard
Lessa has commented: "More than simply a commemoration of
Clough, it is a poem about its speaker, his relationship with
97
a fellow poet, and the relationship of both to their artu
(37) , and William Madden believes that, in the poem, Arnold
I1attempts to prove to himself that his Muse has not yet gone
awayl' (66).
A great deal of this anxiety is fostered by Arnold's
continued suspicion of his medium's ability to facilitate
communication between the poet and his audience. The fact
that he is writinq an elegy only increases Arnold's
consternation, since language must convey with ease and
accuracy both ideas and intense, unsettled, complex emotional
states. In fact, part of Arnold's anxiety over the
efiectiveness of his language may extend to the genre he
adopts for the poem--the pastoral elegy. We noted in the
previous chapter that Arnold's lyrics are often mixed and
hybrid forms, and it comes as sornething of a surprise that, in
this late poem, he maintains such a rigid fidelity to the
conventions of the pastoral elegy, from the flower catalogue
to the traditional u b i s u n t formula. At times the burden
becomes too much for the speaker in the poem, who laments: IlAh
me! this many a year/My pipe is lostfl (542).
Arnold's specific concern about the proper effect of his
words upon an audience is reflected in the allusion to
Proserpine and Orpheus. The failure of language is dramatized
in an imaginary encounter between Corydon (in an imitation of
Orpheus) and Proserpine, which concludes with Corydon's sighs:
And we should tease her with Our plaint in vain!
9 8
Well! wind-dispersed and vain the words will be,
Yet Thyrsis, let me give my grief its hour.
(100-02)
The final line of this excerpt tempers Corydon's doubts about
language with the assertion that he will continue to sing
without the assurance that his words will be effective or even
understood. If we now move from this self-conscious aspect of
the speaker's awareness of his language to the different
aspects of the poemts organization of words, we see that
Arnold's quest for linguistic transparency, like Corydon's,
had reached a crucial stage in this late work.
The planning and composition of H T h y r s i s l l stretch over
several years from Cloughls death in 1861 until the poem's
publication five years later . It is generally agreed that
Arnold began composition in earnest in late November and early
December of 1863 when he was at Oxford to deliver a lecture."
The dates are important because the lecture which Arnold
delivered on 28 November 1863 was "Joubert. In that lecture,
Arnold quoted with approval Joubert's belief that words and
expressions should be simply translucent glasses through which
we see ideas clearly and accurately. Joubert's belief is also
Arnold's, but the poetry professor was quick to add, somewhat
discouraged, that he had struggled with this linguistic ideal
personally: ItI know, by my own experience, how hard this rule
is to f01low'~ (Super 3: 195). Certainly part of that struggle
had included his attempts to apply Locke's advice about the
99
simile in poems ranging from Sohrab and Rustum to "The Scholar
Gipsy." We cannot know if Arnold felt that his experiments to
find method and order for the simile as a technique for
linguistic transparency were successful or foolish, but it is
noteworthy that following "The Scholar Gipsy" (1853) and
Balder Dead (1855) both the quantity and quality of similes in
Arnold's poetry are drastically reduced. The figure does not
disappear, but we do not encounter anything as mernorable as
the grave Tyrian trader and the merry Greek coaster again.
"ThyrsisU contains one of these later similes. Early in
the poem, the speaker, Corydon, explains that Thyrsis
impatiently left the sunny pastoral world of his own accord.
Corydon elaborates on the situation by likening Thyrsis's
impatience with that of the cuckoo's:
So, some tempestuous morn in early June,
When the year's prima1 burst of bloom is o'er,
Before the roses and the longest day--
When garden-walks and al1 the grassy floor
With blossoms red and white of Eallen May
And chestnut flowers are strewn--
So have 1 heard the cuckoo's parting cry,
From the wet field, through the vexed garden-
trees,
Corne with the volleying rain and tossing breeze:
The bloom is gone, and with the bloom go I! (51-60)
It is diff icult to arrive at a definitive judgement about this
100
simile. Part of the difficulty arises from the fact that
Arnold provides what might be called a fragment of a simile.
Instead of the usual as/so rhetorical formulation, we are
given only the latter half of a simile. Certainly the figure
is clear enough in its cornparison of Clough's persona1
impatience and troubled poetry with the preemptive migration
and changed note of the cuckoo. However, there are some
puzzling things about the simile. First, the very impulse to
compare Clough with the cuckoo, as many commentators have
noted, seems somewhat absurd and more than mildly insulting.
Secondly, the simile is not part of a system of similar tropes
such as those repeatedly delineating the precise mental states
of characters in Sohrab and Rustum, nor does it appear at the
end of the poem in a relationship with a central idea or
theme. It seems more like an isolated instance that does
little to further the ends of the poem. Third, it is
inaccurate, as Allott alerts us: "The cuckoo changes his tune
in June but does not migrate until Augustu (Poems 541). This
combination of a modified rhetorical structure, factual error,
isolated status, and inappropriateness hinders the simile's
overall effectiveness in elucidating Clough's impatience
(which is misleading in itself, as Allott informs us, Poems
540).
By the time Arnold writes 'lThyrsis," the simile, as an
effective strategy for transparent language, may have lost
much of its appeal, but the poem attempts other methods to
101
focus the reader's energies on the ideas and emotions and not
the language itself. It is useful to return to Corydon's
musings on an imaginary encounter with Proserpine:
O easy access to the hearer's grace
When Dorian shepherds sang to Proserpine!
For she herself had trod Sicilian fields,
She knew the Dorian waterls qush divine,
She knew each lily white which Enna yields,
Each rose with blushing face;
She loved the Dorian pipe, the Dorian strain.
But ah, of Our poor Thames she never heard!
Her foot the Cumner cowslips never stirred . . . . (91-99)
Proserpine cannot respond effectively to Corydon's Song
because the ideas and things signified by his words are
literally foreign to her. Her emotional response is stunted
and even negated by a breakdown at the initial cognitive
stage. Corydon% sonq fails to communicate either the idea or
the emotion. Corydon's failure with Proserpine is contrasted
with Arnold's success with h i s audience. Although Arnold%
speaker and subject draw their names from the Greek tradition,
the world of this pastoral elegy is local and familiar.
Warren Anderson remarks: IfNo classical origins can be
attributed to the superb descriptions of meadow and garden;
they are thoroughly English" (269).
The language of flThyrsislf refers to English flowers and
102
local Berkshire villages. Perhaps Arnold remains uncertain
whether his language will adequately express his grief or
accurately convey his ideas of loss, life, and death, but the
use of language which refers to the local and the familiar is
a strategy to focus the readerts attention on the ideas and
things signified by those words and not the words themselves.
It is a modest strategy to avoid obscurity and confusion at
even the most basic cognitive level. Even the language of the
cuckoo simile is rooted in familiarity: "The cuckoo on the
wet June morning 1 heard in the garden at WoodfordH (Russell
1:325). The domestication and anglicization of the language
of ttThyrsistt reflect Arnold's desire to make his language as
clear and unobtrusive as possible. This particular strategy is
not original to ttThyrsis.19 We noted its success in the
similes in Balder Dead and those figures Arnold failed to
orientalize in Sohrab and R u s t u m . However, by the time Arnold
composed tgThyrsis,lm the simile as a method of laying out
thoughts and ideas with clarity and order has faded while the
use of familiar, domestic language has increased.
ttThyrsis" is an interesting place to conclude an
investigation of Arnold's poetry. Arnold never loses his
belief that language should attempt to be as transparent as
possible. Even in this late poem it remains a primary concern
for the speaker and the poet. A s Arnold turns increasingly
from poetry to prose, it is interesting to note that the
strategy for transparency most closely associated with his
103
poetry, the simile, also falls Erom favour. It remains
unclear whether Arnold lost faith in the figure as a strategy,
or simply felt he had exhausted al1 of its possibilities.
Even though the prospects of a simile composed with ''method
and orderq1 may have declined in Arnold's estimation, he seems
to have remembered another aspect of Locke's advice from the
Conduct. Locke argues that part of a simile's effectiveness
depends on its subject matter being drawn from I1objects
already known and familiar to the understandingt1 (Conduct 73) .
Arnold struggles with this in many of his similes in the
narrative and lyric poems from the 1850s, but, by the time we
reach tlThyrsis,ll the concern of domesticating or anglicizing
the similes has extended to the rest of the poem.
104
Conclusion:
In her informative and persuasive study The Audience in
the Poem: Five Victor ian Poets, Dorothy Mermin offers the
following important assessrnent of Matthew Arnold:
The question of how he can speak to his audience,
and how (if at all) the audience will respond is
even more urgent and dif f icult for Arnold than it is
for Tennyson and Browning. (83)
Perhaps it is so urgent that Arnold finally turns from poetry
to prose. Arnold believes that the best way to speak to an
audience in poetry, and the way that offers the greatest
possibility of eliciting a response, is through the "grand
style." That vexing term is never defined by Arnold, who
believes that it escapes definition. At least part of the
"grand style" is concerned with an ideal in language that is
characterized by transparency. Arnold's poetry is a record
of, first, the realization of the necessity of that ideal,
and, second, the struggle to attain or at least approach it.
The influence of Locke's language theory is crucial at both of
these stages. Harold Fulweiler claims that Arnold l'more than
any other modern poet, was torn by the epistemological and
linguistic dilemma that had so concerned the romanticsu (29) . He locates the source of that dilemma in the "Lockian
revolution in epistemology and its corollary effect in
language" (18), and in Empedocles on Etna he sees "that the
seed of John Locke had borne bitter fruitt1 (36) . However,
105
Fulweiler does not take into account the help that Locke
offers to Arnold's search for a transparent medium--namely,
through a carefully controlled advocation of certain tropes
such as the simile.
Even the decline cf the simile's prominence in Arnold's
poetry and the eventual shift from poetry to prose cannot
dissuade him from a belief in the absolute necessity that
words be as accessible and transparent as possible. In
"Literature and Science" he argues: "How needful it is for
those who are to discuss any matter together, to have a common
understanding as to the sense of the terms they employu (Super
10: 57). However, such a simple precept is wistfully
undermined by Arnold's aside, undoubtedly with his own poetic
career in mind: "how needful, and how diff icultM (Super 10:
5 7 ) .
Notes to Introduction
' A l 1 subsequent references to Arnold's prose are from
The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, Ed. R.H. Super.
' For a full account of the importance of the years 1850- 51 for Arnold biographically, vocationally, and poetically,
the reader should consult the two appropriate chapters in
Honan, Matthew Arnold 1 9 5 - 2 4 4 .
' Two excellent contextualizing discussions of the 1853
"Preface" are offered by Cox and Coulling, IIMatthew Arnold's
1853 Preface."
Notes t o Chapter One: Arnold, Locke, and Languaqe
' See Honan, Matthew Arnold 93-101 for a full discussion
of Arnold's exposure and general dissatisfaction with German
transcendentalism.
Notes to Chapter Two: Fragments
' The question of Marguerite's identity and the
significance of biographical interpretation in general have
been the subjects of numerous critical debates. See
especially Miriam Allott and Honan, "The Character of
Marguerite. For another exchange between critics, see
Harris, "The Lure of Biographytt' the response of Bell, V n
Defense of Biography, and the counter-response of Harris,
I tB iography , The Interpretation of Meaning."
' See Covinqton.
See Kenneth Allott's headnote to the poem in The Poems
of Matthew Arnold 88.
4 See Knoepflmacher, Culler 37-39, and Morgan.
' See Hickman and Berlin.
Notes to Chapter Three: Tensions
' Covington 150.
' Sections 3.1, 3.2, 3.4, 3.10 in Rhetoric, Ed. George A.
Kennedy.
See especially Forman and Lewes.
' See Sieqchrist
Notes to Chapter Four: Strategies
' For a discussion of Arnold's use of the sonnet in
"Dover Beach" see Pitman.
? The dating of "Dover Beachtt has generated a great deal
of critical inquiry. An argument for a post-1855 date has been
offered by Super, IlThe Dating of l Dover Beach. l It Arguments
for a composition date in the summer of 1851 or shortly
afterward have been pursued by: Kenneth Allott, IlThe Dating of
Dover Beach and Ullmann.
Notes to Chapter Five: Thyrsis
' For a discussion of Arnold's varied use of the elegy
see Culler 232-286.
See Drew.
' See also Riede 155-156 and Delaura.
'' See Brooks.
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