"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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