Matthew Arnold

Poetry

Dover Beach

• the most impt thing, as Charles would say, is that "the sea of faith" is still pretty full in the 1850s: so in a way this isn't so much a genuine poem of religious pessimism as a lyric utterance of the position of religious pessimism (or it is that but it's also an examination of the position)
  • in the 1850 religious census, 51% of the population was in church that Sunday
• first stanza is 14 lines, like a tangled sonnet
• strong caesuras moving around in the line in first stanza a rhythmic effect, then in 33-4 it switches so that pauses are less rhythmic than accumulative/enumerative
• "roar" repeated: of the sea but also embodied, chagrined, and repressed or muffled, like the "ignorant armies clash[ing] by night"
• second stanza: Sophocles and the speaker finding "also in the sound a thought" - empty natural phenomena that the lyric subject fills with a content, dramatizing the struggle of that
• "the moon-blanched land": its light is as alien, it feels like, as the speaker's vision
• "so new": again, as Armstrong 1993, the self-consciousness/anxiety about modernity

Empedocles on Etna

• Act 1: "modern thought"
• ln 118-125: sophistry leading (in part) to Emp's self-exile
• 149-53:

'Tis not the times, 'tis not the sophists vex him;
There is some root of suffering in himself, 
Some secret and unfollowed vein of woe, 
Which makes the time look black and sad to him.

• Callicles' pastoral in dialogue with Empedocles' worldweariness
• 87-160: some key positions from Emp
• 232-3: "We would have inward peace, / Yet will not look within"
• history and knowledge - 317-346
• Act 2: "modern feelings"
• belatedness: "No, thou art come too late, Empedocles" (16)
  • also 258-275

The Scholar-Gipsy

• the interplay between forms: pastoral and narrative, ballad (almost) and "plaint,"
• the interplay of time: shifting from narrative present to Glanvil, then to timeless pastoral, then specific temporal pastoral, then back to the ancient Greeks
  • in a way he's imploring the scholar-gipsy to stay outside time
• the situation is predicated on reading, too: the book is next to him
• modern condition reflection: 141-210 especially
• From ODNB on Glanvill:
  • "Glanvill published his first book, The Vanity of Dogmatizing in 1661. Influenced by Henry More, it attacked Aristotle and praised ‘that wonder of men, the Great Des-Cartes’ (p. 28) as an opponent of outmoded dogma, while criticizing Cartesian physics and psychology. It also included the story of the scholar Gypsy, who learned from the Gypsies how to employ the power of his imagination to perform wonderful feats, including controlling the wills of others without their being aware of it, a tale later to inspire a poem by Matthew Arnold. Glanvill asserted the unknowability of the inner workings of the universe, arguing that certain knowledge of nature was possible only in Eden. The fall, by limiting human sensory awareness, made it impossible for humans truly to understand the cosmos. Glanvill was neither a system builder nor a profound student of philosophical texts, understanding Greek thought mainly through translations. He saw scepticism as a solvent of dogmatism rather than as an adequate philosophy in itself. A passage in The Vanity of Dogmatizing attacking the idea of a necessary connection between a cause and an effect prefigures David Hume's argument about the non-intrinsic nature of the causal relationship, although there is no discernible direct influence from Glanvill to Hume. The connection between Glanvill and Hume on causality was first made in the late eighteenth century, and led to revival of interest in Glanvill as a philosopher."
  • "Glanvill was a prominent and untiring advocate of the new philosophy in science and of an Anglican church tolerant of a broad range of opinion within itself but intolerant of dissenting churches. He was an equally zealous opponent of Aristotelianism and materialism. Glanvill embodied many of the features of the eighteenth-century latitudinarian compromise in the Church of England, but his defence of witch belief and an intolerant state church mark him as a man of the Restoration."

Context

"Disinterestedness and Liberalism." Victorian Literature: Criticism and Debates. Ed. Lee Behlman and Anne Longmuir. London: Routledge, 2016. Print.

• 295 Our intellectual model, one widely practiced in the academy, presumes that an informed critical perspective can result only from careful consideration of contrasting arguments and the evidence provided, rather than through monologic appeals to authority. Criticism, in other words, appears both within and as a result of debate. This approach derives originally from Enlightenment rationalism, but its most influential (and controversial) articulation occured in the nineteenth century with the British liberal ideal of disinterestedness. According to this model, after a process of intellectual bildung or growth, a cultivated mind will be prepared to review controversies, and indeed to rearticulate and respond to them in writing, with conviction without partisanship.
• 297 [from Amanda Anderson, The Powers of Distance] An ideal of critical distance, itself deriving from the project of the Enlightenment, lies behind many Victorian aesthetic and intellectual projects, including the emergent human sciences and allied projects of social reform; various ideals of cosmopolitanism and disinterestedness; literary forms such as omniscient realism and dramatic monologue; and the prevalent project of Bildung, or the self-reflexive cultivation of character, which animated much of Victorian ethics and aesthetics, from John Stuart Mill to Matthew Arnold and beyond. Yet at the same time many Victorians were wary of certain distancing effects of modernity, including the overvaluing [298] and misapplication of scientific method as well as the forms of alienation and rootlessness that accompanied modern disenchantment, industrialization, and the globalization of commerce.
• 323 Where the C19, in short, had once debated how best to balance disinterested and interested motives in a liberal, capitalist society, the C20 ended with disinterestedness either ardently celebrated by the right as key to (what we call a) traditionalist libertarianism or ardently reviled by the left as poitically and philosophically central to a repressive "disciplinary society."
• 324 The Victorian liberal imagination was, after all, broad enough to engage both what we would call right-leaning liberal or (more precisely) libertarian policies...as well as what we would call left-leaning liberal or welfare liberal policies. As Goodlad summarizes, "although many Victorians did not regard themselves as political liberals, most were responsive to the overall [325] projects of liberating individuals from illegitimate authority [i.e., libertarianism] while simultaneously ensuring their moral and spiritual growth [i.e., welfare liberalism]."