Matthew Arnold and the Crisis of Classicism: An Introduction

Abstract

Reflecting on the extreme difficulty of the practice of literary criticism as it was invoked by the conception and composition of Literature and Dogma, Matthew Arnold wrote the following sentence: “It calls into play the highest requisites for the study of letters; – great and wide acquaintance with the history of the human mind, knowledge of the manner in which men have thought, of their way of using words and what they mean by them, delicacy of perception and quick tact, and, besides all these, a favourable moment and the ‘Zeitgeist.’” This sentence is a mirror, a language-metaphor, of Arnold's critical mind. Without verbal fanfare, with the utmost directness and simplicity of statement, it encompasses its subject in an original, relevant, and satisfying way. The “highest requisites” for the literary critic are adequate working hypotheses about the human mind – not a formal philosophy or theory of mind, but a set of working hypotheses, empirically acquired and tested and always subject to empirically justified revision, that are both practical and trustworthy; genuine sophistication in the subtleties of language, its nuances, conventions, and diplomacies – again not scientific or philosophical expertise, but a knowledge acquired through experience of historical usage and of the tendency of language to contract and expand itself and to alter its character and significance as it moves in and out of differing contexts; a sensibility diat is especially responsive to literary fact and moves with practiced ease and dependability among literary phenomena; that degree of self-awareness that recognizes the peculiar aptness and applicability of one's talents to the needs and possibilities of one's era. Add to these “highest requisites for the study of letters” only a very few of Arnold's methodological principles – concentration on the centrality of the subject or action to the way in which a piece of imaginative literature actually works, reliance on “inward evidence, direct evidence” rather than on “outward evidence, indirect evidence,” recognition that “poets receive their distinctive character, not from their subject, but from their application to that subject of the ideas …