The Divided Tradition of English Criticism

Abstract

Except for several lengthy essays by certain of Arnold's worried contemporaries and scattered comments in out-of-the-way essays by later critics, no careful examination has ever been made of Arnold's religious views. It was not until 1930, when T. S. Eliot turned his attention to Arnold in an essay significantly treating Arnold's religious and aesthetic ideas together, that the long-neglected theological bearings of modern criticism were brought out into the open. Subsequently, Lionel Trilling made a more exhaustive criticism of Arnold's religious experience, but without clearly establishing its relation to Arnold's literary experience. In an effort to treat in detail what Eliot briefly touched on in his essay, I have tried elsewhere to show that Arnold's religious ideas changed in important ways during his life and that these changes affected his literary theory and practice. Religious and poetic ideas, which to later and more logical minds seemed hardly consistent with one another hung together in suspension in Arnold's mind, and as a result his work, taken as a whole, contains both Christian and non-Christian, romantic and nonromantic notions that have since his death been set against one another in the divided tradition which underlies modern English criticism.