Matthew Arnold Book

My first impressions of this book were very strong. The first chapter is a good one, and it really raised my expectations. Unfortunately, though, it doesn't have a strong through-line. It doesn't build up as it goes along. Instead, in each chapter we feel Trilling working him up to his separate subject. He is better at some subjects, worse at others.

I found poetry to be his weak point. The poetry chapters are most focused on how Arnold's poems fit into the history of ideas. He doesn't seem to be deeply interested in the poems themselves, only in how they fit into certain period trends. He is also concerned to show the relationship between the history of ideas and Arnold's personality as expressed in his poems. This part is more promising, but also not really moving. I guess you could say that Trilling finds Arnold's poetry interesting only relative to other things, and it shows.

Trilling is at his best, meanwhile, when he takes the intellectual and political events of the period as his main focus. These are genuinely stirring; historical relativism, democracy, Benthamism, society as an organism, antidisestablishmentarianism. We feel the urgency of whether or not God exists and what to do about it, how to respond to mass industrialization and the proletarian class it creates, and what a historicist understanding of ideas demands of our approach to the world. Trilling shows Arnold taking all of this in, thinking about it, and responding to it. For this, the best chapters come in the middle: "The Grand Style," "The Spirit of Criticism," "The Failure of the Middle Class," and "Culture or Anarchy." I especially loved how Trilling can explain the biographies of those relatively obscure people that Arnold is always picking fights with.

Overall, I wouldn't want to overstate the appeal of this book, but it is the best piece of secondary literature I have read on Arnold. It is passionate while mostly letting Arnold speak for himself, and shows a very deep and wide reading in the relevant literature. More than anything, it makes it clear how the questions Arnold faced are not simply quaint snapshots of a past age, but crises that have not left us yet.

To go beyond Trilling's book, and just say something about Arnold, I feel like he hasn't gotten proper recognition in our day. The moderns (1920 to 1970 or so) could not understand him, because they saw criticism as something like a science, a discipline apart from the other academic disciplines. They had no intention of changing the world, but only of clarifying how many kinds of ambiguity there are in a poem. (This is an unfair generalization -- but only somewhat unfair). Today, we have been trying to see literature as just one part of a bigger picture which is inherently political. Although Arnold's perspective, aims, and methods would not seem to be a good fit for most critics today, he shares a conviction that literature cannot be silo'd off from life and politics, and that political change demands certain things of literature. His theory of criticism is from top to bottom a social-political-psychological vision of renovation. Perhaps there is still more to learn from him.