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The Zeitgeist of Matthew Arnold

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Fraser Neiman
Fraser Neiman*
Affiliation:
College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Va.
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Extract

At least since Matthew Arnold exploited the term Zeitgeist in Literature and Dogma, the expression has been variously a source of irritation and confusion to a number of his critics. Identifying it with a tendency to disparage the past, an exasperated contemporary reviewer of that work in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine cried, “Can anything be more unscientific than such a spirit? It is the very apotheosis of self-opinion intoxicated by its own pride, and flaunting its own dogmatisms with a crude audacity in the face of preceding dogmas.” Among other critics of Arnold, R. H. Hutton protested that the Zeitgeist was a will-o'-the-wisp “who misleads us at least as much as he enlightens”; W. H. Dawson concluded that for Arnold it was “a fetish, a talisman, a thaumaturgy”; for W. H. Paul it became a bore; Hugh Kingsmill began his caricature of Don Matthew, “So forth he sallied, mounted on Zeit-Geist, a hobby horse.” Still others, less annoyed than these by the reiteration, have themselves borrowed it as they write of him—sometimes effectively, because with consistency of meaning, as H. F. Lowry in his edition of Arnold's letters to Clough; sometimes bewilderingly, as when one reads such a statement as this: “Expediency, which had become in Burke's hands an anti-revolutionary doctrine, was equated by Arnold with the Zeitgeist, a force which, in his conception of it, was quite as revolutionary as that of natural right.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 72 , Issue 5 , December 1957 , pp. 977 - 996
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1957

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References

1 “Amateur Theology,” cxiii (June 1873), 692; Essays on Some of the Modern Guides of English Thought in Matters of Faith (London, 1887), p. 103; Matthew Arnold and His Relation to the Thought of Our Time (New York, 1904), p. 174; Matthew Arnold (London, 1902), p. 142; Matthew Arnold (New York, 1928), p. 263; W. F. Connell, The Educational Thought and Influence of Matthew Arnold (London, 1950), p. 82.

2 A New English Dictionary erroneously gives 1893 for 1873 as the date of Literature and Dogma. The error is by implication perpetuated in the Supplement (1933) of the N.E.D. where an “earlier” use of Zeitgeist is cited from “Recent Fiction in England and France,” Macmillan's Mag., l (Aug. 1884), 254.

3 Ethical Studies (London, 1876), p. 283.

4 The Letters of Matthew Arnold to Arthur Hugh Clough, ed. H. F. Lowry (London, 1932), pp. 80, 82, n. 2—hereafter cited as Letters to Clough; The Note-Books of Matthew Arnold, ed. H. F. Lowry, Karl Young, and W. H. Dunn (London, 1952), p. 438.

5 “On the Modern Element in Literature,” Macmillan's Mag., xix (Feb. 1869), 308.

6 Gaylord C. LeRoy, Perplexed Prophets (Philadelphia, 1953), p. 50.

7 Dr. Thomas Arnold, Introductory Lectures on Modern History (Oxford, 1842), p. 180.

8 The Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. C. B. Tinker and H. F. Lowry (London, 1950), pp. 251–254.

9 The Works of Matthew Arnold, 15 vols. (London, 1903–04), xii, 83.

10 Letters to Matthew Arnold, 1848–88, ed. G. W. E. Russell, in Works, xiii, 4–5. See Carlyle, Rescued Essays, ed. Percy Newberry (London, [1892]), pp. 3–13.

11 Letters to Clough, p. 95. The descending scale, European-English-Arnerican, is implied also in Arnold's letter to his mother, 7 March 1848, in Works, xiii, 5–6.

12 If Arnold read Carlyle's “State of Modern Literature,” Edinburgh Rev. (Oct. 1827), where the issues of time and historic process, including Fichte's interpretation, are explored, he became aware of Schiller's congenial Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen. Richard Waidelich in his unpub. diss. (Harvard, 1952), “The Theme of Change in Matthew Arnold's Poetry,” discusses the place of this work of Schiller in Arnold's intellectual history.

13 Sartor Resartus, Works, Centenary ed. (London, 1896–99), i, 209. Cf. i, 103–104, 155, 178, 207. See also René Wellek, “Carlyle and the Philosophy of History,” PQ, xxiii (Jan. 1944), 70–71. For the guise of time as Zeitfürst see Sartor Resartus, Works, i, 96.

14 Carlyle reserved the phrase “the spirit of the age” to represent the Divine Idea manifest in the local phenomenon of time, whereas he used “Time-Spirit” to indicate the negative force of local appearance impeding man's awareness of the reality of the realm of spirit. See Carlyle's “State of German Literature,” Works, xxvi, 66. Arnold did not make such a distinction in terms.

15 Poetical Works, p. 238. One recalls the ultimate injunction of Arnold's “Civilization in the United States,” Nineteenth Cent., xxiii (April 1888), 496: “Except a man be born from above, he cannot have part in the society of the future.”

16 See John Holloway, The Victorian Sage: Studies in Argument (London, 1953), p. 204.

17 Burke's essay is mentioned in the reading list for 1853 in Arnold's Note-Books, p. 553.

18 “Carlyles Misceli” (i.e., Critical and Miscellaneous Essays) is an entry in the reading list for 1847 in an unpublished notebook in the possession of C. B. Tinker, Yale Univ. Lib. The 1st volume of this work of Carlyle, of which the 3rd edition, in 4 volumes, was published in 1847, contains the “State of German Literature.”

19 See Duncan Forbes, The Liberal Anglican Idea of History (Cambridge, Eng., 1952), pp. 13–16, 60. See also “The Hand of God in Prussia's Deliverance from Napoleon” and “On the Periods of Genius in Literature” in The Life and Letters of Barthold George Niebuhr, ed. and trans. Susanna Winkworth, 3 vols. (London, 1852), iii, 115–116, 175–181.

20 Letter to Dr. Arnold from Rome, 21 Jan. 1834, in Frances, Baroness Bunsen, A Memoir of Baron Bunsen, 2 vols. (London, 1868), i, 394; Francis W. Newman, rev. of Literature and Dogma, Fraser's Mag., lxxxviii (July 1873), 127.

21 Unpublished Letters to Matthew Arnold, ed. Arnold Whitridge (New Haven, 1923), pp. 56, 65–66.

22 Lionel Trilling has shrewdly remarked in his Matthew Arnold (New York, 1949), p. 137, “Arnold shared the avid historical appetite of the 19th century which his father had helped to increase.” Trilling's remarks passim on the Arnolds and history are valuable. Dr. Arnold's concept of history has been recently explored in Duncan Forbes's The Liberal Anglican Idea of History (see n. 19 above) and the unpub. diss. (Harvard, 1951) by Richard K. Barksdale, “Thomas Arnold as Historian.”

23 “Dr. Stanley's Lectures on the Jewish Church,” Macmillan's Mag., vii (Feb. 1863), 333–334.

24 Ibid., p. 334. Cf. Arnold's proposition in “A Psychological Parallel,” Last Essays on Church and Religion, Works, ix, 226: “That a man shares an error of the minds around him and of the times in which he lives, proves nothing against his being a man of veracity, judgment and mental power.”

25 Works, vii, 33. Arnold remarks in Literature and Dogma, p. 10: “Terms, in short, which with St. Paul are literary terms, theologians have employed as if they were scientific terms.” Cf. also Arnold's comment in Culture and Anarchy, Works, vi, 151, that “terms which St. Paul employs … are detached and employed by Puritanism, not in the connected and fluid way in which St. Paul employs them, and for which alone words are really meant, but in an isolated, fixed, mechanical way, as if they were talismans.” See John Holloway's interesting analysis of argumentation in The Victorian Sage, pp. 10–11.

26 “Les sciences de la nature et les sciences historiques,” Revue des deux mondes, xlvii 2nd period (15 Oct. 1863), 762; “La crise religieuse au dix-neuvième siècle,” Revue des deux mondes, xliii, 2nd period (15 Feb. 1863), 811.

27 Works, ix, 133–134. The Note-Books, p. 587, show that in 1870 Arnold read Milman's early hostile review, “Newman on the Development of Christian Doctrine,” which was reprinted in that year in Savonarola, Erasmus, and Other Essays. In 1871 he began a brief and sympathetic correspondence with Newman (Unpublished Letters, pp. 55–67). It might be noted in connection with Arnold's interest in a theory of development that the reading lists for 1868 and 1869 in his Note-Books, pp. 584, 586, include Herder's Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit. In 1868 he extracted for his reference (Note-Books, p. 85) F. W. Riemer's maxim that, “die Religion selbst, wie die Zeit, wie Leben und Wissen, in stetem Fortschritt und Fortbildung begriffen ist.”

28 Works, vii, 114, 177, 330.

29 Academy, i (Aug. 1870), 282 and Contemporary Rev., xiv (June 1870), 340; Atlantic Monthly, xxxii (July 1873), 111–112; Blackwood's Edinburgh Mag., cxiii (June 1873), 690, 691, 692; Contemporary Rev., xxi (May 1873), 843, 854; Dublin Rev., lxxii (April 1873), 364; Fraser's Mag., lxxxviii (July 1873), 121, 134; Sat. Rev., xxxv (1 March 1873), 285; Spectator, xlvi (22 Feb. 1873), 244. Perhaps an indication of the new popularity of the term is reflected by its appearance in Edward Dowden's “Poetry of Victor Hugo,” Contemporary Rev., xxii (July 1873), 177, 178, 181.

30 Contemporary Rev., xxi, 843. Arnold's critics have assigned reasons for the style of Literature and Dogma. In “The Background of Arnold's Literature and Dogma,” Modern Philology, xliii (Nov. 1945), 130, William M. Blackburn suggests that Arnold was animated by his enthusiasm for the controversy. George Saintsbury conjectured in Matthew Arnold (Edinburgh, 1899), pp. 131–132, that the style was influenced by both the popular thirst for “skits” in England during the excitement of the Franco-Prussian War and Arnold's own recent excursion into farce in Friendship's Garland. Actually the last letter of Friendship's Garland appeared in November 1870; the first part of Literature and Dogma in July 1871. Perhaps the mood in which Arnold wrote carried over.

31 For Time-Spirit, see Works, vii, xx, xxi, xxix, 128; for Zeitgeist, see pp. xxix, 114, 128, 145, 177, 289–290, 305, 330, 337, 390. The English and German expressions are used synonymously.

32 Works, vii, xiii–xiv. This concept finds parallel expression in Schelling.

33 Works, vii, 128–129, 289–290.

34 “Democracy,” Mixed Essays, in Works, x, 45. “Democracy” was originally the preface to The Popular Education of France (1861).

35 The term Zeitgeist is not used in God and the Bible; Time-Spirit is used only once. Speaking of the decline in belief in miracles, Arnold says of the Roman Catholic: “But for him too, even for him, the Time-Spirit is gradually becoming too strong” (Works, viii, 371). In the context of the passage Time-Spirit seems only to mean a time when the empirical experience of man is more complete than it has been.

36 In his Matthew Arnold, George Saintsbury quaintly observed of “Bishop Butler and the Zeit-Geist”: “it requires rather careful ‘collection’ in order to discover what our friend the Zeit-Geist has to do in this galley” (p. 145).

37 Works, ix, 261, 263, 293, also 299.

38 Works, ix, 309. See also pp. 301–302, 307–309, 325–326. In “The Future of Liberalism,” Works, xi, 142, Arnold said, “Instinctively, however slowly, the human spirit struggles towards the light; and the adoption and rejection of its agents by the multitude are never wholly blind and capricious, but have a meaning.”

39 Works, ix, 210; cf. pp. 216–217.