by Simon Heffer
One of the many influences upon him as a poet – and one of the strongest – was his family’s friendship with Wordsworth, near whom they lived in the Lake District during school and university vacations at Fox How, Dr Arnold’s property in Westmorland. Arnold never conformed with his father’s rigid educational structure in the way that Stanley or Clough did, and at Oxford contrived to be as unlike him as possible; yet his father’s influence on him was powerful, imbibed as it was from the cradle, and in his maturity it manifested itself mightily. Arnold only joined Rugby for the last four years of his education, from 1837, having previously had an unsuccessful episode at his father’s alma mater, Winchester. He showed precocity as a poet and in 1841 won a scholarship to Balliol.
For one who would make a career complaining about the lack of original thought among his countrymen, Arnold as a young man rarely showed the required promise. His father, writing to William Lake, a favoured pupil who had already won a scholarship to Balliol, complained in August 1840 that ‘Matt does not know what it is to work because he so little knows what it is to think.’68 Lake was preparing Matt for a Balliol scholarship; and despite his father’s reservations, and the belief the boy was incipiently lazy, he later won one of the two available awards out of a field of thirty-three candidates.
His years at Oxford culminated, to his chagrin, in a second-class degree in literae humaniores. This was thanks partly to the distraction of his joining the ‘fast set’ of drunks and dandies, and partly because of his addiction to poetry. Yet Oxford was in other ways immensely significant. He formed a deep friendship with Clough, who had left Rugby just before Arnold joined; he won the Newdigate prize for poetry, which confirmed him in what he considered his vocation; and when tumultuous intellectual currents were swirling around interpretations of Christianity, he began to question his faith. He had trouble with the Athanasian Creed and the anti-papalism of the Thirty-nine Articles, not least because of what he felt was their propensity to divide rather than to unite Christendom.69 He was not alone in this problem: Charles Kingsley also had it, feeling the creed laced with ‘bigotry, cruelty and quibbling’.70 Kingsley also struggled with the Trinity, and found it hard to trust clergymen, though that was probably to do with his experience of his father, who had entered the Church largely as a means of earning a living rather than out of any deep spiritual conviction.
Clough reached Balliol as Benjamin Jowett became a tutor there, and in the middle of the fight between Keble and Newman on one side and, shortly to arrive as Regius professor of modern history, Dr Arnold on the other. Matthew came under the influence of Archibald Tait, a fellow of Balliol and arch-opponent of Newman: Tait would succeed Dr Arnold as headmaster of Rugby, and become Bishop of London and Archbishop of Canterbury, while having five of his children die of smallpox.
His friendship with Clough intensified after Dr Arnold’s death: they both appear to have lost a father, one literally, the other metaphorically. When fellows of Oriel in the 1840s they lived in each other’s pockets, and Arnold’s letters to Clough contain much intimacy (he writes to Clough as ‘My dear Love’ in August 184871) and criticism of the latter’s poetry (‘I doubt your being an ARTIST,’ he told Clough in February 184872). They were close also for a time in 1849–51, when both living in London, and would meet for breakfast twice a week. At Oxford, they entered into a phase of writing more poetry, influenced by the Classics but also by the landscape encountered on their regular walks. They started to read vast tracts of Carlyle, reflecting their political engagement. Dr Arnold, who had supported the French Revolution until it became violent, had greatly admired Carlyle’s History; his son and star pupil now read Past and Present. Matthew’s Newdigate-winning poem was about Cromwell, restored to intellectual consciousness by Carlyle in his lectures On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History. It would not be long, though, before Arnold dismissed Carlyle to Clough as a ‘moral desperado’.73
He returned to Rugby briefly as a teacher. Then, despite his second, he secured a fellowship at Oriel, joining Clough there and following in the Doctor’s footsteps. His dandyism impaired his attempt to pass as an homme serieux; he was also exceptionally partial to champagne. While he took a less literal approach to religion than his father he was moved by the cultural aspects of Anglicanism and held his faith; the importance of Christianity as a heritage informed much of his criticism and social commentary. But just as important an influence was France, to which Arnold became quite attached, from the mid-1840s. He used France as an example when advocating reforms in Britain, notably in education. ‘In a few years,’ he told his mother in 1848, ‘people will understand better why the French are the most civilised of European peoples; when they see how fictitious our manners and civility have been.’74
In 1847 he became private secretary to Lord Lansdowne, a role that gave him a modest income but allowed time for travel and writing poetry, several volumes of which would appear in the succeeding years. It also forced him to engage with politics, an accomplishment that never left him. His friends, not least Clough, deplored this new worldliness: but through it Arnold acquired a political sense, well concealed at the time, that gave an edge to his notion of criticism and his application of the critical faculty. Writing, as an expression of the creative temperament, was essential to Arnold; but he relieved this tension with prose more than poetry, as his enormous output of pamphlets, articles and books in the last thirty years of his life would show. Like Clough he became excited by the upheavals in Europe in 1848, his friend describing him as ‘really heated to a very fervid enthusiasm’, before he became ‘very cynical’ in the aftermath of the revolution preceding the failure of the Second Republic.75
Arnold was heavily influenced by Carlyle’s account of the earlier revolution, describing aristocratic Frenchmen as ‘gig-owners’.76 In the same letter to Clough he dismisses a leading article in that morning’s Times (1 March 1848) that had attacked the socialistic economic policies of the new rulers in France, showing the direction in which his political idealism was moving. But what especially moved him was the ‘wide and deepspread intelligence’ of the French people, which gave them a consciousness about political questions that he felt his fellow-countrymen lacked.77 ‘We neither courageously have thrown ourselves into this movement like the French: nor yet have driven our feet into the solid ground of our individuality as spiritual, poetic, profound persons.’ It is a clear representation of Arnold’s belief that people will be brought to care about their political condition only by deepening their cultural understanding, an argument that would be refined in Culture and Anarchy. On 10 April 1848 he went to Kennington to look at the Chartist demonstration and told Clough ‘the Chartists gave up at once in the greatest fright at seeing the [police and military] preparations: braggarts as they are’.78
‘However, I think the poetism goes on favourably,’ Clough observed of his friend.79 Arnold took himself seriously, not just as a poet, and was inclined to broader social thought than Clough, being perhaps less absorbed by himself. Froude complained to Clough in 1849: ‘I wish M didn’t so utterly want humour’.80 The ‘poetism’ produced a first volume that year, prompting one of Arnold’s sisters to comment that ‘it is the moral strength, or, at any rate, the moral consciousness which struck and surprised me so much in the poems. I could have been prepared for any degree of poetical power, for there being a great deal more than I could at all appreciate; but there is something altogether different from this, something which such a man as Clough has, for instance, which I did not expect to find in Matt; but it is there.’81 In his essay on the poetry of Byron, Arnold indicated the place of poetry in his analysis of and insight into the world. There were, he wrote, poets who were ‘supreme masters in whom a profound criticism of life exhibits itself in indissoluble connection with the laws of poetic truth and beauty.’82 However, he maintained that all literature was ‘a criticism of life’, qualifying his remark by adding that ‘in poetry, however, the criticism of life has to be made con
formably to the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.’ In prose, truth would be enough: ‘felicity and perfection of diction and manner’ were poetic virtues.
When, in 1851, he sought to marry, his prospective father-in-law, a senior judge, objected to his penury. Thanks to Lansdowne, Arnold secured a post as an inspector of schools, which brought with it more money and security. He did not enter upon it with enthusiasm – ‘I think I shall get interested in the schools after a little time’, he told his wife.83 But he saw the importance of what he was doing, and struck a theme that coursed through the rest of his life: ‘Their effects on the children are so immense, and their future effects in civilising the next generation of the lower classes, who, as things are going, will have most of the political power of the country in their hands, may be so important.’ His marriage was happy and produced six children, four sons and two daughters. Three sons died within four years – two in 1868, the other in 1872 – and this succession of blows struck him exceptionally hard and cast a shadow over his life.
Because of Arnold’s engagement with the wider world, he and Clough grew apart; but the former told the latter in February 1853: ‘I am and always shall be, whatever I do or say, powerfully attracted towards you, and vitally connected with you: this I am sure of: the period of my development (God forgive me the d----d expression!) coincides with that of my friendship with you so exactly that I am forever linked with you by intellectual bonds’.84 Later that year he told Clough: ‘If one loved what was beautiful and interesting in itself passionately enough, one would produce what was excellent without troubling oneself with religious dogmas at all.’85 It had been Dr Arnold’s aim to remove the barrier between religion and everything else, and this was one of the unfortunate results. Arnold withdrew his most successful long poem, Empedocles on Etna, almost immediately after it was published in 1852. Only a request from Robert Browning persuaded him to reissue it in 1867. It reveals the sense of conflict, lack of fulfilment, and bleakness with which Arnold viewed his inner life. Empedocles commits suicide by jumping into the volcano, suggesting a deep-seated unhappiness on Arnold’s part, and possibly profound religious doubt.
Arnold’s power as a thinker and observer was helped by the extent to which he had to travel, something made easier by the railway. His bailiwick as an inspector comprised much of central England, but it was even more significant to the development of his mind, his outlook and his philosophy that he also travelled widely in France. Having a mind of his own, Arnold was regarded by his superiors as troublesome. He was not a natural bureaucrat. Biographers have used this trait to explain why promotion was slow in coming to a man of his talent. He did not become a senior inspector until nearly twenty years into his job, and only became chief inspector in 1884, two years before retirement. However, public recognition came to him in a way it did not to Clough. In 1857 he became professor of poetry at Oxford, a post he held for a decade. In the 1860s he started writing for reviews, using them as a platform to express his political views. These were collected in 1865 as Essays in Criticism, and would have enormous influence, not least in the promotion of that most Arnoldian of virtues, disinterested endeavour. It is a mistake to think of Arnold as primarily a literary critic; his criticism was as much social, and, later in life, religious.
The first edition of the Dictionary of National Biography described these writings as demonstrating Arnold’s vocation as ‘detector-general of the intellectual failings of his own nation.’86 The writer Richard Garnett, who spent almost fifty years in the library of the British Museum and ended up Keeper of Printed Books, noted that in his critical essays ‘the intellectual defects [that he identified in others] were characteristically English defects.’ His writings show contemporary British culture failing by comparison not just with the Classics, but with France. These made him unpopular in certain circles; but Arnold thrived on such unpopularity. Stefan Collini deprecated his criticism, in his notice of Arnold in the New Dictionary of National Biography, as ‘backward looking’; not least because Arnold wrote when the novel was at its apogee, yet chose to write almost nothing on it.87
His criticism is not exclusively backward looking. The Function of Criticism at the Present Time is, as its title suggests, very much contemporary; so is Culture and Anarchy, his prose masterpiece, an exploration of how to deal with the resurgence in the late 1860s of the Condition of England Question. Garnett wrote that ‘he had become profoundly discontented with English indifference to ideas in literature, in politics, and in religion, and set himself to rouse his countrymen out of what he deemed their intellectual apathy by raillery and satire, objurgation in the manner of a Ruskin or a Carlyle not being at all in his way.’88 This approach, as Garnett also observed, had its problems. ‘Arnold is as one-sided as the objects of his attack, and does not sufficiently perceive that the defects which he satirises are often defects inevitably annexed to great qualities,’ he wrote. ‘Nor was it possible to lecture his countrymen as he did without assuming the air of the deservedly detested “superior person”.’ Garnett, writing at the dawn of the twentieth century, conceded that the ‘contemporary influence’ of Arnold’s prose writings ‘is a noticeable ingredient in the stream of tendency which has brought the national mind nearer to Arnold’s ideal’. However, he asserted that ‘these books are not likely to be extensively read in the future’, a judgement correct in respect of some of the minor writings, but wildly inaccurate about Culture and Anarchy and Essays in Criticism. Arnold’s significance in the pursuit of perfection would come in the 1860s, once he had overcome the power of religion in his life, and trained his mind instead to deal with social questions.
IV
Arnold was not the only intellectual who, in shaking off the smothering embrace of religious orthodoxy, found a new voice and added a new tone and approach to English letters. So too did James Anthony Froude, remembered today, if at all, for his sensationally honest and deeply controversial biography of Carlyle, whose chief disciple he became. Before that, Froude had carved out a reputation as one of the age’s leading historians – but a historian determined to tell the story of Protestant England, and whose work helped feed the suspicion that educated Victorians held for the Catholic Church. But Froude’s first act of notoriety, thirty-five years before his life of Carlyle, was to have a confrontation with the authorities at Oxford on a matter of religious doubt that made Clough’s seem tame by comparison. That episode put Froude on a path of secularised Protestantism that became highly representative of many of his peers, and which came to flavour the second half of the nineteenth century.
Froude’s childhood and upbringing gave him the force of character required to survive confrontation with authority and controversy. We know about it in detail because of fragments of autobiography he left behind and which, fortunately, his daughter preserved contrary to her father’s instructions to destroy them. In the 1920s she allowed them to be read and copied by Waldo Hilary Dunn, an American scholar researching Froude’s approach to his life of Carlyle. More than thirty years later Dunn used them, verbatim, as the basis of his life of Froude.
Froude was born at Dartington, in a Devonshire parsonage, in 1818, the son of Archdeacon Robert Froude who, with his eldest son Hurrell, had been the travelling companion of John Henry Newman on his formative trip around the Mediterranean in the winter of 1832–3. Anthony’s mother died when he was two. Before going to school at Buckfastleigh, where he was a scholar, aged nine, he was regularly thrashed by his father: ‘We were a Spartan family. Whipping was always resorted to as the prompt consequence of naughtiness.’89 His aunt, who took over once his mother had died, decided when he was three that he needed ‘bracing’. Her means of doing this was to have little Anthony ‘taken out of bed every morning and dipped in the ice cold water which ran from a spring into a granite trough in the backyard. I remember now the horror of the plunge.’ With the urbanity that distinguishes his prose, Froude adds: ‘I didn’t die of it, but I didn’t grow any stronger.’
/> In case this abuse was insufficient, Anthony also became the victim of his intensely priggish eldest brother, Hurrell, who as well as being one of the progenitors of the Oxford Movement appeared to have inherited his father’s interest in sadism. Anthony worshipped Hurrell, but Hurrell thought his brother ‘wanted manliness’.90 His remedy for this was simple. ‘A small stream ran along the fence which enclosed the garden, with newts, frogs and other ugly things in it. I remember Hurrell once when I was very little [Hurrell was fifteen years his senior] taking me by the heels and stirring the mud at the bottom with my head.’ As Froude notes, ‘it had not the least effect which he desired’, so instead Hurrell took him out on a river in a boat and threw him overboard: that didn’t work either, although Froude appears not to have drowned.
At school he had some respite from persecution, noting he was ‘very happy’ there: ‘the boys were generally gentlemen, and the tone among them was honourable and good.’91 He had a hernia that prevented his taking part in games; and bullying was regarded as a great crime, with convicted bullies flogged. Froude shone as a classical scholar, and had happy memories of the three years there, from nine until twelve. After that, life took an unpleasant turn.
He was moved to Westminster, where he went as a scholar. His uncle, who delivered him there, was warned by the headmaster that life on the foundation was hard, especially for boys so puny and weak as young Anthony, and that boarding him out would be superior: but there was no chance of that. The youngest boys were fourteen or fifteen; he was barely twelve. No master was in the dormitories to supervise them. Relentless bullying by the younger boys, and thrashings by the elder ones for whom he had to fag, soon became the staples of Froude’s life. He recounted being woken by having a lighted cigar pressed to his face, and having his legs set fire to in order to make him dance. He was also force-fed brandy to make him drunk. His health broke down, and he was sent to another house to recover.
