BOOK REVIEW: Edited by Cecil Y. Lang.THE LETTERS OF MATTHEW ARNOLD: VOLUME III, 1866-1870. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1998.

Abstract

The third of a projected six volumes, this handsome and necessary book covers five momentous years in Matthew Arnold's life. Among his great contemporaries none attempted such extraordinarily diverse projects as Arnold set his hand to in these years. The range and the achievement are, on any estimate, simply stunning. This volume opens with Arnold preparing the lectures he would publish in 1867 as On the Study of Celtic Literature. It ends (nearly) with a letter to T. H. Huxley in which he hopes that his great friend will read aright the presentation copy of St. Paul and Protestantism (1870) that is on its way to him. In between these attempts to carry light from the Celts to his countrymen and throw light for his countrymen on the poetics of Scripture, Arnold had a go at reviving his poetic life (New Poems [1867]), wrote a masterpiece of Victorian sagacity (Culture and Anarchy [1869]), and turned his employment as a school inspector into an occasion for composing a model educational report (Schools and Universities on the Continent [1868]). For an encore, he brought out second editions of both New Poems and St. Paul and Protestantism and he did sustained (but, alas, not completed) work on a sort of handbook to Greek poetry. All of this he accomplished while keeping his day job, battling toothache, worrying about money problems, suffering the deaths of two of his children, moving from London to Harrow (partly because of the money problems), writing an array of contributions for various periodicals, and keeping up his affectionate relationships with his family and friends. Only someone highly serious would attempt so heteroglossic a life.