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The Method of Arnold's Essays in Criticism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Robert A. Donovan
Robert A. Donovan*
Affiliation:
Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.
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Extract

The first series of Essays in Criticism was one of four works growing directly out of the lectures which Matthew Arnold delivered at Oxford between 1857 and 1867. The so-called “inaugural series,” on the “modern element” in literature, survives only in fragments—one whole lecture and part of another. A second series, on the translation of Homer, was begun even before the first was completed, and the lectures on Celtic literature wound up Arnold's professorship, except for the valedictory “Culture and Its Enemies.” Crowded into the interstices of this ambitious program were the pieces which were to make up the bulk of the Essays in Criticism of 1865.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 71 , Issue 5 , December 1956 , pp. 922 - 931
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1956

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References

1 The inaugural lecture, “On the Modern Element in Literature,” was published in Macmillan's Mag. in Feb. 1869 (xix, 304–314), and “Dante and Beatrice,” which may well be a shortened form of the lecture advertised in the Times as “The Modern Element in Dante,” was published in Fraser's Mag. in May 1863 (LXVIT, 665–669). Both were reprinted by E. J. O'Brien in Essays in Criticism, Third Series (Boston. 1910).

2 Essays in Criticism (London, 1884), p. 40; hereafter cited as EC in parenthetical references in text.

3 Letters of Matthew Arnold, 1848–1888, ed. G. W. E. Russell (New York, 1900), i, 287.

4 The earliest mention of Joubert which I have found in Arnold's writings is a quotation from Sainte-Beuve's Chateaubriand et son Groupe littéraire. See The Note-books of Matthew Arnold, ed. Lowry, Young, and Dunn (London, 1952), p. 15. The Sainte-Beuve volume was also listed among Arnold's reading at Fox How for Sept. 1861. At the end of the same memorandum book appears the notation: “Pensées et Maximes de M. Joubert” (Notebooks, p. 566).

5 Sir Walter Raleigh, in his introduction to the Gowans and Gray edition of the Essays in Criticism (1912), wrote: “The first essay supplies the text which is expanded, diversified, and put into action in all the succeeding essays,” but he said nothing specific about the way in which the other essays exemplify the method discussed in “The Function of Criticism” (Some Authors, Oxford, 1923, p. 300). NB. The lecture “Functions” became “Function” in the published essay.

6 Matthew Arnold: The Critic and the Advocate,“ Essays by Divers Bands (Trans. Royal Soc. of Lit. of the United Kingdom), N.S. xx (1943), 29–41.

7 Matthew Arnold (New York, 1899), p. 85.

8 Matthew Arnold, rev. ed. (New York, 1949), p. 193.

9 The textual history of this essay is very complicated. For a fuller account see E. K. Brown, Studies in the Text of Matthew Arnold's Prose Works (Paris, 1935).

10 In his obituary notice of Sainte-Beuve, published in The Academy in Nov. 1869 (1, 31–32), Arnold found it impossible to avoid expressing his dissatisfaction with mere curiosity, and his eulogy ends almost apologetically: “That Sainte-Beuve stopped short at curiosity, at the desire to know things as they really are, and did not press on with faith and ardour to the various and immense applications of this knowledge which suggest themselves, and of which the accomplishment is reserved for the future, was due in part to his character, but more to his date, his period, his circumstances. Let it be enough for a man to have served well one need of his age” (Essays in Criticism, Third Series, pp. 149–150).

11 Herbert Paul, Matthew Arnold (New York 1902), p. 74.