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Arnold and Carlyle

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

David J. DeLaura
David J. DeLaura*
Affiliation:
University of Texas Austin 12
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Extract

The influence of the writings and personality of Thomas Carlyle on the poetic and critical career of Matthew Arnold is a complex story, the outlines of which have only recently begun to be traced. Kathleen Tillotson, in her illuminating Warton Lecture on “Matthew Arnold and Carlyle,” revealed in great detail how passage after passage in Arnold's poetry is related to Carlyle's early writings. Since the bulk of Arnold's major poetry was written by 1853, her study in effect proved how much more “puissant” than earlier Arnold scholars had suspected, the voice of Carlyle had been for Arnold—one of the four “voices,” as he said in later life, he had heard at Oxford in the early 1840's. Significantly, however, in that list of 1883, in which Carlyle's name is linked in dignity with those of Newman, Goethe, and Emerson, Arnold departs from his subject in order to turn his keenest critical instruments against Carlyle; and he rejects him for a temper “morbid, wilful and perverse,” as well as for his “perverse attitude towards happiness” (DA, p. 198). In a similar mood of reminiscence Arnold had written to John Henry Newman a decade earlier: “There are four people, in especial, from whom I am conscious of having learnt—a very different thing from merely receiving a strong impression—learnt habits, methods, ruling ideas, which are constantly with me; and the four are—Goethe, Wordsworth, Sainte-Beuve, and yourself” (UL, pp. 65–66; 28 May 1872). Curiously, there is no mention of Carlyle here, though demonstrably Carlyle's influence on Arnold's thought and writing extends far beyond mere “strong impression.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 79 , Issue 1 , March 1964 , pp. 104 - 129
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1964

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References

1 All references to Carlyle, except where otherwise indicated, are to the 30-volume Centenary edition of the Works, ed. H. IX Traill (Boston, 1897–1901). References are to volume and page number alone. The following abbreviations are used in citing Arnold's works: CA: Culture and Anarchy (1869). Ed. J. Dover Wilson. Cambridge, Eng., 1932. CL & OTH: On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867) and On Translating Homer (1862). 2 vols. in one. New York, 1883. DA: Discourses in America (1885). New York, 1896. EC-I: Essays in Criticism, First Series (1865). New York, 1895. FG: Friendship's Garland (1871). In Culture and Anarchy and Friendship's Garland (2 vols. in one). New York, 1883. GB: God and the Bible (1875). New York, 1883. LC: The Letters of Matthew Arnold to Arthur Hugh Clough. Ed. Howard Foster Lowry. London and New York, 1932. LD: Literature and Dogma (1873). New York, 1883. L: Letters of Matthew Arnold, 1848–1888. Ed. G. W. E. Russell. 2 vols. in one. New York, 1900. ME & IEO: Mixed Essays (1879) and Irish Essays and Others (1882). 2 vols. in one. New York, 1883. PW: The Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold. Edd. C. B. Tinker and H. F. Lowry. London, 1950. SPP: St. Paul and Protestantism (1870). In St. Paul and Protestantism and Last Essays on Church and Religion (2 vols. in one). New York, 1883. UL: Unpublished Letters of Matthew Arnold. Ed. Arnold Whitridge. New Haven, 1923.

2 Kathleen Tillotson, “Matthew Arnold and Carlyle” (Warton Lecture on English Poetry), Proc. British Acad., xlii (1956), 133–153.

3 See Mrs. Humphrey Ward, A Writer's Recollections (New York, 1918), I, 12, where she suggests that at Oxford George

Sand, Emerson, and Carlyle all contributed to unsettling the religious belief of Matthew Arnold, his brother Tom, and Clough.

4 See Kenneth Allott, “Matthew Arnold's Reading-Lists in Three Early Diaries,” VS, ii (March 1959), 264. Carlyle's essays were first collected in 1839, went into a third edition in 1847, and included “Signs of the Times,” “Characteristics,” and a number of pieces on German literature, all of which were to be major influences on Arnold's poetry and critical writings.

5 See Mrs. Tillotson, p. 138, n.

6 See ibid., p. 138.

7 One concerns Novalis: LC, pp. 66 and 67, n.; the other concerns “Gig-owning” (LC, pp. 68, 69, n.), a reference to the French Revolution (“Respectability, with all her collected Gigs”; iv, 323) which recurs, slightly altered, in 1863, in “Heinrich Heine” (“respectability with its thousand gigs”; EC-1, p. 163). Mrs. Tillotson, pp. 141–142, notes a number of further Carlylean echoes in the letters to Clough.

8 See also a letter of 7 March to his mother: “How deeply restful it comes upon one, amidst the hot dizzy trash one reads about these changes everywhere. . . . The source of repose in Carlyle's article is that he alone puts aside the din and whirl and brutality which envelop a movement of the masses, to fix his thoughts on its ideal invisible character” (L, i, 4).

9 Mrs. Tillotson, pp. 144, 143. To this should be added the even more substantial evidence of Carlyle's influence on Arnold in the 1840's and '50's offered by Fraser Neiman in “The Zeitgeist of Matthew Arnold,” PMLA, lxxii (Dec. 1957), 977–996. Neiman shows (p. 979) that Arnold's early conception of the Zeitgeist as “the temper of the times, with the additional idea that time is a local, changeable phenomenon opposing eternal values” was derived from Carlyle (later, Arnold presents the Zeitgeist as “an aspect of the eternal, promoting change as a manifestation of its own being”). Neiman concludes (p. 981): “That one's age is in some measure escapable, that the artist may preserve his integrity by turning 'deeper in the bowering wood ! / Averse, as Dido did, with gesture stern,' in pursuit of universal values are ideas that Carlyle, like Arnold, applauded. Indeed, Arnold comes closer here to common feeling with Carlyle than at any other point in his thought.”

10 In “Goethe's Works” (1832), xxvii, 435, Carlyle had said, almost as if anticipating Arnold's point: “Woe to the land where, in these seasons, no prophet arises; but only censors, satirists and embittered desperadoes, to make the evil worse.”

11 See James Insley Osborne, Arthur Hugh Clough (Boston and New York, 1920), p. 66.

12 See C. B. Tinker and H. F. Lowry, The Poetry of Matthew Arnold: A Commentary (London, 1940), p. 300. Hereafter cited as Commentary.

13 Tillotson, pp. 144–146.

14 R. L. Lowe, “Two Arnold Letters,” MP, lii (May 1955), 264.

15 Further evidence of hostility in this year is an anecdote told by Alexander Macmillan, the publisher. Charles Kingsley is reported to have said to Arnold: “Alec strongly suspects Tommy Carlyle of being a deeper humourist than Dante.” “Arnold snorted and smiled grimly.” Cited in David Alec Wilson, Carlyle to Threescore-and-Ten (1853-1865) (London, 1929), p. 344.

16 Arnold may well have been thinking of Carlyle when he wrote on 29 October 1863, in a letter whose topic is really the effect of the Heine article: “everything turns upon one's exercising the power of persuasion, of charm; . . . without this all fury, energy, reasoning power, acquirement, are thrown away, and only render their owner more miserable. Even in one's ridicule one must preserve a sweetness and good-humour” (L, i, 234).

17 This early reference, in a note to the introductory essay on “Goethe” in Vol. I of Carlyle's translation of Wilhelm Meister (xxiii, 22), antedates the first reference given to the word in the OED. That Arnold had early read Carlyle's translation of Meister is of course evident in “Emerson” (DA, p. 143). In the same essay of 1824 Carlyle would also have informed Arnold of the origin of the term: “Philister in the dialect of German Universities corresponds to the Brute, or Snob, of Cambridge; designating every non-student.” On the early background of the term in German literature, see Estelle McIlvenna, “The ‘Philistine’ in ‘Sturm und Drang’,” MLR, xxxiii (Jan. 1938), 31–39.

18 Sartor Resartus, ed. Charles Frederick Harrold (New York, 1937), p. 140.

19 For a sample of Carlyle's frequently expressed contempt for “Constitutional Palaver,” see Latter-Day Pamphlets, XX, especially pp. 125, 149, 208; on the word “mechanical” and its cognates, see below.

20 Tillotson, p. 146.

21 Whether Carlyle smarted from a sense of public humiliation or because he felt a more personal betrayal, and whether Arnold ever knew of it or not, Arnold's friend Sir M. E. Grant Duff reported a conversation with Carlyle in 1865: “Carlyle ‘tore up’ Matthew Arnold himself, for esteeming Heine the ‘continuator’ of Goethe, and then he said that Heine was a ‘filthy, foetid sausage of spoiled victuals’.” Cited in David Alec Wilson, Carlyle in Old Age (London, 1934), p. 23. It should be noted that when Arnold issued Essays in Criticism in February 1865, he added to “The Literary Influence of Academies” a note which repeated the ambivalent judgment in the Heine article. We hear (EC-I, p. 64, n.) that Addison does not equal men of his own order of ability, like La Bruyère and Vauvenargues, “because the medium in which he finds himself, the atmosphere in which he lives and works; an atmosphere which tells unfavourably . . . either upon style or else upon ideas; tends to make even a man of great ability either a Mr. Carlyle or else a Lord Macaulay.” Here, Carlyle is treated as “a man of great ability” suffering from a defect of style so notorious it need not, apparently, be specified.

22 This phrase, from “Obermann Once More” (1867), appears, perhaps significantly, just after the image of the icebergs, which, as Mrs. Tillotson has noted (p. 148), “comes straight from a passage in The French Revolution.” Two other poems first collected in 1867, in which Mrs. Tillotson notes Carlylean echoes (“Dover Beach” and “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse”), were both composed considerably earlier.

23 Mrs. Tillotson, in N&Q, N.S. ii (March 1955), 126, gives the source as an 1852 letter of Carlyle's to the Rev. John Llewelyn Davies.

24 Tillotson, “Matthew Arnold and Carlyle,” p. 147.

25 “Democracy” contains, moreover, even if tentatively, some of those later Arnoldian terms—such as “machinery,” “best self,” “inferior self,” “perfection”—which bear, as we shall see below, strong Carlylean overtones.

26 Mrs. Tillotson, “Matthew Arnold and Carlyle,” p. 147, surely overstates the case, however, when she declares Friendship's Garland to be “Arnold's most characteristic prose work.” On Carlyle's direct influence on the work, John P. Kirby, “Matthew Arnold's Friendship's Garland” (2 vols.; Yale Univ. diss., 1937), i, 80–83, should be consulted. He admits Arminius resembles Diogenes Teufelsdröckh in being “a German, a philosophical vagabond, and evidently a transcendentalist” (i, 80). Nevertheless, the transcendentalism is mentioned only once (Letter iii), and all three characteristics were part of the popular English image of the German of that era. Above all, Arminius lacks Teufelsdröckh's romantic dreamy solitary soulfulness: “Diogenes Teufelsdröckh is the literary predecessor of Arminius, but not the progenitor” (pp. 80–81). Admittedly, Arnold's reading in Sartor Resartus must (even if unconsciously) have influenced Arnold's technique. For example, both Arnold and Carlyle pose as editors of “scattered memorials” (p. 81); both have nostalgic recollections of their heroes' rooms and their tobacco smoking (pp. 81–82); both Carlyle and Arnold, as editors, practice ironies at the expense of their heroes; and finally, both authors “admitted the intellectual dominance” of their heroes (p. 82). Even here, however, Kirby hesitates: resemblances in technique “suggest that Arnold perhaps does owe something to his predecessor,” but the “influence is neither wide nor deep” (p. 83). In earlier pages, Kirby sees Heine as a more direct source and influence.

27 William E. Buckler, “Studies in Three Arnold Problems,” PMLA, lxxiii (June 1958), 261, n.

28 Ibid., p. 261.

29 In Past and Present (1843), Carlyle is far from flattering the actual aristocracy; he predicts (x, 29–30) that “Dilettantisms, . . . double-barrelled Aristocracies, shall disappear,” and agrees (p. 30) that “we must be governed by the Wisest, we must have an aristocracy of Talent.” His contempt for “Phantasm-Aristocracy” is a continual theme here (see pp. 140, 171, 173, 176, 202, 250, 271, 296). Much of this argument is repeated in Latter-Day Pamphlets, where, for example, he says: “It is tragically evident to me, our first want ... is that of a new real Aristocracy of fact, instead of the extinct imaginary one of title, which the anarchic world is everywhere rebelling against” (xx, 263). Richard Holt Hutton, Essays on Some of the Modern Guides to English Thought in Matters of Faith (2nd ed.; London, 1888), pp. 11–12, wrote of Carlyle: “His diatribes against idle aristocracies . . . have sunk deeper into the public mind, and done more directly and indirectly to make members of these aristocracies feel that they have their social position to earn and justify, than all the writings in the English tongue put together, outside Carlyle's, have accomplished in the same time. Has not his language in Past and Present concerning the idle nobleman passed into the very substance of English political thought?”

30 These pages (CA, pp. 107–108) are replete with references to “Philistines,” “machinery,” “ordinary self,” and “culture” as the “pursuit of perfection”—all of which are discussed later in this paper. Moreover, Arnold's sentence, “The sterner self of the Populace likes bawling, hustling, and smashing; the lighter self, beer” (CA, p. 108), is not far in tone from Carlyle's remarks on “the vulgarest Cockney crowd, flung out millionfold on a Whit-Monday, with nothing but beer and dull folly to depend on for amusement” (xxx, 43).

31 William Savage Johnson, Thomas Carlyle: A Study of his Literary Apprenticeship, 1814–1833 (New Haven, Conn., 1911), p. 98.

32 Mrs. Tillotson shows, in “Matthew Arnold and Carlyle,” pp. 148–149, that the echoes from “Characteristics” in “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse” (probably written 1849–52) “amount almost to conscious quotation,” and are so numerous as to make this poem the most strikingly Carlylean in the whole Arnold canon.

33 Frederic Harrison, in “Culture: A Dialogue,” Fortnightly Rev., N.S. ii (Nov. 1867), 603–614, was brilliantly to parody the rose-water religion of Arnold's lecture; but as early as August of the same year, Henry Sidgwick, the future Cambridge philosopher, had with practised eye searched out the ethical flaw which resided even in Arnold's social argument: “the root of culture, when examined ethically, is found to be a refined eudaemonism: in it the social impulse springs out of and re-enters into self-regarding, which remains predominant” (“The Prophet of Culture,” Macmillan's Mag., xvi, Aug. 1867, 273).

34 In the final instalment of “Anarchy and Authority,” in a passage laced with Carlylean references to “Philistines,” “mechanical,” and “machinery,” Arnold says: “Such is the sympathy which binds humanity together, that we are indeed, as our religion says, members of one body, and if one member suffer, all members suffer with it” (CA, p. 192). For a similar passage in the Introduction, see CA, p. 11.

35 In “Characteristics” also occurs a sentence which sums up a surprising amount of Arnold's later attitudes towards literature: “Literature is but a branch of Religion, and always participates in its character: however, in our time, it is the only branch that still shows any greenness; and, as some think, must one day become the main stream” (xxviii, 23).

36 Lionel Trilling, Matthew Arnold, Meridian Books (3rd ed.; New York, 1955), p. 229.

37 Ibid., p. 222.

38 George H. Ford, “The Governor Eyre Case in England,” UTQ, xvii (April 1948), pp. 226 and 233.

39 Ibid., p. 233.

40 CA, Editor's Introduction, p. xxiv. Oddly, Wilson, in his otherwise valuable comments, does not see the relevance of the Eyre case to Culture and Anarchy.

41 Trilling, p. 252.

42 Democratic Education, Vol. ii of The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1962), p. 324.

43 Ibid., p. 325.

44 James Bentley Orrick, “Matthew Arnold and Goethe,” Pub. English Goethe Soc., N.S. iv (1928), 52.

45 Ibid., p. 53.

46 Ibid.

47 It might also be noted that in at least two points concerning the German people made in the Celtic lectures—that of the Germans as an unmixed race, and that of the Germans as coarse—Arnold was perpetuating, though with inverted valuations, two points which Carlyle had made familiar many years before. See Frederic E. Faverty, Matthew Arnold the Ethnologist (“Northwestern Univ. Studies in the Humanities,” No. 27; Evanston, Ill.., 1951), pp. 42, 50.

48 Buckler, p. 261. And despite the rather questionable claim for the origin of the phrase in a speech of F. D. Maurice in 1859; see Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780–1950, Doubleday Anchor Books (2nd ed.; New York, 1959), p. 122.

49 Sartor Resartus, ed. Harrold, p. 160.

50 Ibid., p. 162.

51 This severe attack on the lack of “force of style” and “distinction” in the Nibelungenlied is taken up again several years later in the last of the Celtic lectures (delivered in May 1866; CL, p. 108), at the end of a passage (pp. 103 ff.) dealing with the deficiencies of German literary style, a passage which seems to me to be an implicit running reference to Carlyle's early essays on German literature, especially his Goethe studies.

52 A similar Carlylean metaphor concerning Goethe is more openly acknowledged in “A French Critic on Goethe” (January 1878): “we all remember how Mr. Carlyle has taught us to see in Götz and in Werther the double source from which have flowed those two mighty streams,—the literature of feudalism and romance, represented for us by Scott, and the literature of emotion and passion, represented for us by Byron” (ME, p. 213). The reference is to Carlyle's introductory essay on “Goethe” in the first volume of his translation of Wilhelm Meister (1824) (xxiii, 14–16).

53 It should be noted that in two of the final instalments of Friendship's Garland (Letters ix and x, dated 9 Aug. and 21 Nov. 1870), Arnold resumed his familiar attack on “the British Philistine.” And certain Carlylean terms are adopted and heightened by Arnold during this period in his first extended religious work, St. Paul and Protestantism. In the second part of “St. Paul and Protestantism” (Nov. 1869), Arnold takes up again his theme of “the solidarity of men” in “the mystical body of Christ,” and speaks of “our duties towards our neighbour,” who is “merely an extension of myself” (SPP, p. 67). And in the Preface written for book publication, in May 1870, we hear that church-order is a matter of “machinery and outward form” (SPP, p. xxviii; and see pp. xxi, xxxii), that “the annulment of our ordinary self” in favor of “the mildness and sweet reasonableness of Christ” is to be achieved by giving up sectarianism (SPP, pp. xxiii, xxviii, xxxi); and that the Dissenters form “the Church of the Philistines” (SPP, p. xxvii).

54 See Thomas Carlyle, Reminiscences, ed. James Anthony Froude (New York, 1881), pp. 419–420. Arnold had also briefly discussed the aristocracy in Literature and Dogma (1873), contrasting the “considerable destinies to which its politeness, in Mr. Carlyle's opinion, entitles it” with its actual “great and genuine disregard for letters” (LD, p. 2). And in God and the Bible (1875) Arnold alludes to Carlyle by transferring the latter's epithet for political economy, “the Dismal Science,” to metaphysics (GB, p. 50).

55 Wilson, Carlyle in Old Age, p. 464. A letter of 19 February 1876 indicates that even in this period Carlyle's approval could be important to Arnold. The first of the two parts of “Bishop Butler and the Zeit-Geist” had appeared in the Contemporary for February; Arnold comments: “George Eliot says, a lady tells me, that of all modern poetry mine is that which keeps constantly growing upon her; she, Carlyle, and Gladstone have all expressed great satisfaction with the first instalment of my Butler.... it is a great and solid satisfaction, at fifty, to find one's work, the fruit of so many years of isolated reflexion and labour, getting recognition amongst those whose judgment passes for the most valuable” (L, i, 146).

56 Sartor Resartus, ed. Harrold, p. 192.

57 Selections from the Prose Writings of Matthew Arnold, ed. Lewis E. Gates (New York, 1898), p. 347, n.

58 See Waldo H. Dunn, Froude and Carlyle: A Study of the Froude-Carlyle Controversy (London, 1930), pp. 73–74, 83, 85, 120.

59 Froude's letter to the Times alluded to by Arnold is dated 1 Nov. 1886 and is quoted in full in Dunn, Froude and Carlyle, pp. 304–307. In it, Froude answered the charges of Mary Carlyle and Norton, and attempted to put a final end to the controversy.

60 One last, more favorable reference to Carlyle was to occur in the month of Arnold's death, in “Civilisation in the United States” (Nineteenth Century, April 1888). Arnold asks whether American civilization is “interesting”: “An American friend of mine, Professor Norton, has lately published the early letters of Carlyle. If anyone wants a good antidote to the unpleasant effect left by Mr. Froude's Life of Carlyle, let him read these letters. Not only of Carlyle will those letters make him think kindly, but they will also fill him with admiring esteem for the qualities, character, and family life, as there delineated, of the Scottish peasant. Well, the Carlyle family were numerous, poor, and struggling. Thomas Carlyle, the eldest son, a young man in wretched health and worse spirits, was fighting his way in Edinburgh. One of his younger brothers talked of emigrating. 'The very best thing he could do!' we should all say. Carlyle dissuades him. 'You shall never,' he writes, 'you shall never seriously meditate crossing the great Salt Pool to plant yourself in the Yankee-land. That is a miserable fate for any one, at best; never dream of it. Could you banish yourself from all that is interesting to your mind, forget the history, the glorious institutions, the noble principles of old Scotland—that you might eat a better dinner perhaps?'” (Five Uncollected Essays of Matthew Arnold, ed. Kenneth Allott [Liverpool, 1953], p. 53).

61 John Holloway, The Victorian Sage (London, 1953), p. 215.

62 Ibid., p. 207.