Matthew Arnold (1822 – 1888) is sometimes called the third great Victorian poet alongside Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning, although, unlike those two full-time moneyed poets, he actually had a proper job too, earning his living working as an inspector of schools for thirty-five years. He was the son of the celebrated headmaster of Rugby School, Thomas Arnold (who was a neighbour and good friend of William Wordsworth, unsurprisingly a strong influence on the young Matthew), and it was at Rugby where Matthew Arnold received most of his education before winning a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford.
In 1849 (the year before Wordsworth’s death), Arnold published his first book of poetry, The Strayed Reveller, and followed that up in 1852 with his second volume of poems, Empedocles on Etna, and Other Poems, coinciding with the launch of both his school-inspecting career and his marriage. Much output would follow and not just in poetry: Arnold wrote in prose too and was an influential literary, political and social critic. Between 1867 and 1869 he wrote Culture and Anarchy, setting his High Victorian cultural agenda, and famous for the term he popularised to denote a certain sub-set of the English population: “Philistines”, i.e. namely that class of persons having a deprecatory attitude towards art, beauty, spirituality and intellect. He would have felt at home here at OGOTS Towers, I feel sure!
These days, Arnold is perhaps best known for his poem Dover Beach. The poem’s speaker (whom we may assume is Matthew Arnold himself) begins by describing a calm and quiet sea out in the English Channel. He is standing on the Dover coast and looking out across to France, where a small light can be seen briefly and then vanishes. Throughout the poem Arnold crafts visual and auditory imagery of the sea receding and returning to land. At this point in time, though, the sea is not returning; it is receding farther out, and we realise that Arnold is equating it with the diminution of religious faith amongst his compatriots.
This was, after all, the post-Darwin era, when religious faith was being profoundly challenged, and Arnold was known to bemoan the creep of materialism and, in his eyes, its attendant philistinism. For him, truth and beauty were in retreat, like the tide, and, apart from the fact that he has his missus beside him (“Ah, love, let us be true to one another!”), there’s little light at the end of his tunnel, and the poem remains pessimistic to the end. It’s probably a blessing that Arnold is not around today: I suspect he would consider his pessimism to have been understated!
The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
