Matthew Arnold (1822–88) was an English Victorian poet and literary and social critic. He made it his mission to censure the boorishness of the English, finding in ‘culture’ the cure for contemporary ills and a potent help towards the formation of human character. His theories were mostly responsible for the establishment of English literature as a “core” subject in schools and universities.
Arnold is renowned particularly for his classical attacks on the contemporary tastes and manners of the “Barbarians” (the aristocracy,) the “Philistines” (the commercial middle class,) and the “Populace.” He became the apostle of “culture” in such works as Culture and Anarchy (1869.)
Born in Laleham, Middlesex, the eldest son of English educationalist and scholar Thomas Arnold of Rugby, Matthew Arnold was educated at Winchester, Rugby and Balliol College, Oxford. He won the Newdigate prize with a poem on Oliver Cromwell (1843,) and in 1845 was elected a Fellow of Oriel College. He was private secretary to Lord Lansdowne 1847–51 and then was appointed one of the lay inspectors of schools 1851–86, and professor of poetry at Oxford 1857–67.
Arnold was regularly sent by the government to probe into the state of education on the Continent, especially in France, Germany, and Holland, and his reports of English deficiencies attracted much attention in England, as did his application to the scripture of the methods of literary criticism. He made his mark with Poems: A New Edition (1853–54) and New Poems (1867.)
Arnold’s prose writings include On Translating Homer (1861,) Essays in Criticism (1865; 2nd ser., 1888,) and Culture and Anarchy (1869.) For his religious views, St Paul and Protestantism (1870,) Literature and Dogma (1873,) God and the Bible (1875,) and Last Essays on Church and Religion (1877) are of particular interest.
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They… who await
No gifts from Chance, have conquered Fate.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Fate
The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Light, Perfection
The need of expansion is as genuine an instinct in man as the need in a plant for the light, or the need in man himself for going upright. The love of liberty is simply the instinct in man for expansion.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Growth
With aching hands and bleeding feet
We dig and heap, lay stone on stone;
We bear the burden and the heat
Of the long day, and wish ’twere done.
Not till the hours of light return
All we have built as we discern.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Retirement
Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Education, Colleges, Universities
For the creation of a masterwork of literature two powers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Writing
And that sweet city with her dreaming spires,
She needs not June for beauty’s heightening…
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: City Life, Cities
The brave, impetuous heart yields everywhere to the subtle, contriving head.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Intelligence
Life is not a having and a getting, but a being and a becoming.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Goals
‘Tis not to see the world
As from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes,
And heart profoundly stirred;
And weep, and feel the fullness of the past,
The years that are not more.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: The Past
Greatness is a spiritual condition.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Greatness, Greatness & Great Things
Who hesitate and falter life away, and lose tomorrow the ground won today.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Secrets of Success
Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Poetry
Experience—making all futures, fruits of all the pasts.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Experience
One thing only has been lent to youth and age in common—discontent.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Discontent
They who await no gifts from chance have conquered fate.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Fortune, Luck
Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Men
Culture is both an intellectual phenomenon and a moral one.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Culture
Culture is the passion for sweetness and light, and (what is more) the passion for making them prevail.
—Matthew Arnold
Mind is a light which the Gods mock us with To lead false those who trust it.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Mind
If experience has established any one thing in this world, it has established this: that it is well for any great class and description of men in society to be able to say for itself what it wants, and not to have other classes, the so-called educated and intelligent classes, acting for it as its proctors, and supposed to understand its wants and to provide for them. A class of men may often itself not either fully understand its wants, or adequately express them; but it has a nearer interest and a more sure diligence in the matter than any of its proctors, and therefore a better chance of success.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Class
Unquiet souls. In the dark fermentation of earth, in the never idle workshop of nature, in the eternal movement, yea shall find yourselves again.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Death
People think that I can teach them style. What stuff it all is. Have something to say and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Authors & Writing
Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines and Populace; and America is just ourselves with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: America
Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Culture
With close-lipped Patience for our only friend, Sad Patience, too near neighbor to Despair.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Patience
Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Dying, Truth, Death
The working-class is now issuing from its hiding-place to assert an Englishman’s heaven-born privilege of doing as he likes, and is beginning to perplex us by marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, bawling what it likes, breaking what it likes.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Class
Resolve to be thyself: and know, that he who finds himself, loses his misery.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Being Ourselves, Self-love, Self-Knowledge, Acceptance, Realization, Self-Discovery, Awareness
Cruel, but composed and bland,
Dumb, inscrutable and grand,
So Tiberius might have sat,
Had Tiberius been a cat.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Cats
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