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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Experience—making all futures, fruits of all the pasts.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Experience
Life is not a having and a getting, but a being and a becoming.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Goals
Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Poetry
Men of culture are the true apostles of equality.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Culture
Culture is both an intellectual phenomenon and a moral one.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Culture
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
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
Journalism is literature in a hurry.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Journalism, Journalists
Still bent to make some port he knows not where, still standing for some false impossible shore.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Hope
Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Culture
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
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
Because thou must not dream, thou need not despair.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Dreams
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
The true meaning of religion is thus, not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Religion, Morality
They who await no gifts from chance have conquered fate.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Luck, Fortune
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: Blessings, Living
This strange disease of modern life, with its sick hurry, its divided aims.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: The Past, Haste
Here is the element or power of conduct, of intellect and knowledge, of beauty, and of social life and manners, and all needful to build up a complete human life.—We have instincts responding to them all, and requiring them all, and we are perfectly civilized only when all these instincts of our nature—all these elements in our civilization have been adequately recognized and satisfied.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Civilization
They… who await
No gifts from Chance, have conquered Fate.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Fate
Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Perfection, Culture
With close-lipped Patience for our only friend, Sad Patience, too near neighbor to Despair.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Patience
Who hesitate and falter life away, and lose tomorrow the ground won today.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Secrets of Success
Cruel, but composed and bland,
Dumb, inscrutable and grand,
So Tiberius might have sat,
Had Tiberius been a cat.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Cats
Mind is a light which the Gods mock us with To lead false those who trust it.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Mind
Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Men
Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Truth, Death, Dying
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
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
Life is the application of noble and profound ideas to life.
—Matthew Arnold
Topics: Ideas
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