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.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Matthew Arnold
Is it so small a thing to have enjoyed the sun, to have lived the light in the spring, to have loved, to have thought, to have done, to have advanced true friends, and beat down baffling foes?
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Living, Blessings
But each day brings its petty dust our soon-choked souls to fill, and we forget because we must, and not because we will.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Memory
Mind is a light which the Gods mock us with To lead false those who trust it.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Mind
Resolve to be thyself: and know, that he who finds himself, loses his misery.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Acceptance, Realization, Awareness, Self-Discovery, Self-love, Being Ourselves, Self-Knowledge
Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Culture
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
Who hesitate and falter life away, and lose tomorrow the ground won today.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Secrets of Success
The true meaning of religion is thus, not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Religion, Morality
Light half-believers of our casual creeds, who never deeply felt, nor clearly will d, whose insight never has borne fruit in deeds, whose vague resolves never have been fulfilled.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Belief
Culture is the passion for sweetness and light, and (what is more) the passion for making them prevail.
—Matthew Arnold
The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Light, Perfection
We must hold fast to the austere but true doctrine as to what really governs politics and saves or destroys states. Having in mind things true, things elevated, things just, things pure, things amiable, things of good report; having these in mind, studying and loving these, is what saves states.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Truth
Experience—making all futures, fruits of all the pasts.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Experience
With close-lipped Patience for our only friend, Sad Patience, too near neighbor to Despair.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Patience
Morality represents for everybody a thoroughly definite and ascertained idea: the idea of human conduct regulated in a certain manner.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Morals
And that sweet city with her dreaming spires,
She needs not June for beauty’s heightening…
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: City Life, Cities
Because thou must not dream, thou need not despair.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Dreams
One thing only has been lent to youth and age in common—discontent.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Discontent
Still bent to make some port he knows not where, still standing for some false impossible shore.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Hope
The brave, impetuous heart yields everywhere to the subtle, contriving head.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Intelligence
Life is the application of noble and profound ideas to life.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Ideas
Culture, then, is a study of perfection, and perfection which insists on becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Culture
‘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
They… who await
No gifts from Chance, have conquered Fate.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Fate
Men of culture are the true apostles of equality.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Culture
Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Men
Life is not a having and a getting, but a being and a becoming.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Goals
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
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
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
Cruel, but composed and bland,
Dumb, inscrutable and grand,
So Tiberius might have sat,
Had Tiberius been a cat.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Cats
They who await no gifts from chance have conquered fate.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Luck, Fortune
Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Poetry
Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Perfection, Culture
Greatness is a spiritual condition.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Greatness, Greatness & Great Things
Journalism is literature in a hurry.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Journalism, Journalists
Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Culture
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
Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Colleges, Education, Universities
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
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