The Victorian era (1837-1901) was marked by social contrasts, technological advances, and the rise of literary criticism, most notably through Matthew Arnold, who stressed the importance of poetry as a 'criticism of life.' Arnold's critical approach emphasized objective standards in literature, distinguishing between personal and historical judgments to reveal 'real estimates' of poetic worth while imploring readers to focus on the moral and emotional depth of poetry. Despite being overshadowed by contemporaries like Tennyson and Browning, Arnold's intellectual contribution to poetry and criticism remains significant for understanding Victorian literature's transition to modernism.

1. VICTORIAN ERA - The Victorian Era was characterized by an extended
period of peace and strict codes of Social Conduct. It took place mainly
during the reign of Queen Victoria from about 1837-1901
• The Victorian Compromise was a
combination of the positive and negative
aspects of the Victorian Age: The
expansion, great technology,
communication and colonial empire
(Middle Class). Poverty, injustices,
starvation,
slums (working class).
Victorian Upper Class - the
King and the Queen,
Aristocrats, Nobles, Dukes,
Viscounts and other wealthy
families working in
the Victorian courts

2. MATTHEW ARNOLD
1822-1888
“The critical power is of lower rank than
the creative. . . . It is undeniable that the
exercise of a creative power, that a free
creative activity, is the highest function
of man . . . . The critical power . . . see[s]
the object as in itself it really is. . . .”
The Function of Criticism 1385-6

3. QUICK BIO
Born
24 December 1822
Laleham, Surrey, England
Died
15 April 1888 (aged 65)
Liverpool, England
Occupation Her Majesty's Inspector of Schools
Nationality British
Period Victorian
Genre Poetry; literary, social and religious criticism
Spouse Frances Lucy

4. Matthew Arnold is the first critic who produced
scientific conception of reading.
Arnold initiated the formal criticism in poetry!
Mathew Arnold, the most influential of the Victorian critic has been
characterized by David Daiches as “the great modern critic”.
 Arnold deplored [found unacceptable] the lack of firm authority and
centrality of excellence in the literature of their age and within their
criticism each has sought to establish critical standards which would be
valid independent of time and space.

5. • Arnold fought against the romantic theory of criticism with
its emphasis on the mind of the poet and the psychological
patterns which prevail in the given work and stressed the
need to see the esthetic object as a thing independent of
the mind of its creator.
• Arnold influenced not only T. S. Eliot but a number of other
twentieth century critics among whom Irving Babbitt, Paul
Elmer More, F.R. Leavis and Lionel Triling stand out.

6. • In THE STUDY OF POETRY (1850) Matthew wrote: “More and more mankind will discover
that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without
poetry, our science will remain incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for
religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.”
• Poetry must have “high seriousness”; it must be “a criticism of life”; it must exhibit “the
application of ideas to life.” All of this is asking a great deal of poetry, perhaps asking more
than it is capable of accomplishing. To expect that poetry will take the place of religion—
even of “what now passes for religion”—is to place upon the poet an intolerable burden.
• Yet the question of religion is one that goes straight to the center of Arnold’s poetry and
of his intellectual and religious predicament.

7. VICTORIAN CRITICISM
• Art and Morality: Art for Life’s sake
– Carlyle and Ruskin: Moral view point should be the benchmark to judge
the work of literature. Art should be for the betterment of life.
• Art and Aesthetic pleasure: art for Art’s sake
– Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde: Aesthetic and artistic delight should be
the benchmark to judge the work of literature: Art should be for delight
and pleasure of mankind.

8. LET’S DIG DOWN DEEP
• The Victorians provide the last major step in the advancement of English
critical theory before its twentieth century establishment as a scientific and
methodological discourse. It is also true to assume that Victorian criticism
represents the transition to or culminates in modern literary theory and
criticism. In the nineteenth century, the co-existence of different artistic and
literary trends during one period leads to the separation of criticism from
literary process.
• The separation of criticism from literary practice is also a result of the
diversity of literary forms. But primarily the independence of criticism from
literature is acquired by creative and critical writing confronting and falling
under the influence of diversity and complexity of philosophical thought,
social theories and scientific advances, where critics attempt to assimilate
science to literary criticism.

9. • The diversification of the critical systems in the Victorian Age is the result of the
massive presence of different critical voices belonging to both professional critics, like
John Ruskin, and writer-critics, like Walter Pater, Matthew Arnold and Henry James.
Among others, they are critics focusing on art and/or literature as well as metacritics
providing critical commentary on criticism.

10. • The literature of the Victorian age (1837-1901) entered a new
period after the romantic revival. The literature of this era was
preceded by Romanticism and was followed by modernism or
realism. Hence, it can also be called a fusion of romantic and
realistic style of writing.
Though the Victorian Age produced two great poets; Alfred Lord
Tennyson and Robert Browning, the age is also remarkable for the
excellence of its prose.
However, the contribution of Matthew Arnold should also not be
forgotten!

11. TRUTH BE TOLD,
• Matthew Arnold has often been called “the forgotten Victorian,” and it is
certainly true that his poetry is much less read than that of his two great
contemporaries, Tennyson and Browning Their vast productivity tends, as it
did a century ago, to overshadow his rather modest accomplishment.
• After the publication in 1867 of his NEW POEMS, when he was only forty-five,
Arnold wrote very little poetry. He turned more and more to prose, and his
increasing fame as a critic of literature and of society soon drove his poetic
achievement into the background, so that to modern readers he is familiar, if
at all, only through a few standard anthology pieces, such as “Dover Beach”
and “The Scholar-Gypsy”. Yet it has become almost a critical platitude to say
that Arnold’s poetry, in its intellectual content, is much closer to the modern
mind than is that of either Tennyson or Browning.

12. Arnold was quite aware of the limited audience to which his poetry appealed. To write
poetry with the high quality of both content and craftsmanship that he demanded of
himself was, he said, an “actual tearing of oneself to pieces”; moreover, his position as
an inspector of schools did not allow him the time he needed for the writing of verse.
He knew also that he lacked many of the qualities possessed by Tennyson and
Browning that made them so widely popular; he did not have Browning’s intellectual
vigor or Tennyson's musical skill. He was not capable of the strenuous affirmations of
the later browning or of the final struggle to faith that Tennyson achieved in In
Memoriam.
He had only the “gray elegiac mood,” and this was not calculated to make a writer
popular in nineteenth century England or America. There were Browning societies
everywhere in the English-speaking world, and Tennyson became a national institution.
Arnold was ignored except by an intellectual elite.

13. MATTHEW ARNOLD AS A LITERARY CRITIC!
• Arnold was a stern and grave critic who put down certain
ideologies of criticism and educated others how to
criticize.
• According to him, criticism did not come from the
branch of philosophy. It was not even a craft; it was a
form of art, the art of judgment. He says that a critic
should belong to no party whether intellectual, religious
or political. He should learn to think objectively, he
should demonstrate that this is better than that.

14. • Criticism must be a ‘dissemination of ideas, an unprejudiced and impartial
effort to study and spread the best that is known and thought in the world’,
is what Matthew Arnold says in his essay- The Function of Criticism at the
Present Time (1864).
• Arnold says criticism is nothing if it is not related to life. So his criticism of
literature, society, politics, and religion all tends towards being a criticism of
life. So does his poetic activity. Thus criticism with Arnold denotes a
comprehensive activity which embraces all the departments of life.
• After Aristotle, Arnold was the only one who set rules about criticism. His
input towards English criticism was phenomenal. Matthew Arnold was the first
critic to declare that people could be consoled, healed and changed by reading
literature.

15. THE STUDY OF POETRY
• “THE FUTURE of poetry is immense, because in poetry, our race, as time goes
on, will find an ever surer and surer stay. There is not a creed which is not
shaken. But for poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of
divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact.
The strongest part of our religion to-day is its unconscious poetry.”
• Meaning: We should turn ourselves to poetry to interpret life for us, to
console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete;
and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be
replaced by poetry.

16. POETRY IS THE CRITICISM OF LIFE
 Arnold asserts that literature, and especially poetry, is
"Criticism of Life".
 In poetry, this criticism of life must conform to the laws of
poetic truth and poetic beauty.
 Truth and seriousness of matter, felicity and perfection of
diction and manner, as are exhibited in the best poets, are
what constitutes a criticism of life.

17. Poetry Interprets Life
Poetry, according to Arnold, interprets life in two ways: "Poetry is
interpretative by having natural magic in it, and moral profundity".
And to achieve this the poet must aim at high and excellent seriousness in all that
he writes. This demand has two essential qualities.
The first is the choice of excellent actions. The poet must choose those which
most powerfully appeal to the great primary human feelings which subsist
permanently in the race.
The second essential is what Arnold calls the Grand Style - the perfection of
form, choice of words, drawing its force directly from the matter which it
conveys.

18. TOUCHSTONE METHOD
–His general principles was - the" Touchstone Method" – which
introduced scientific objectivity to critical evaluation by providing
comparison and analysis as the two primary tools for judging
individual poets.
–Thus, Chaucer, Dryden, Pope, and Shelley fall short of the best,
because they lack "high seriousness".
Arnold's ideal poets are Homer and Sophocles in the ancient
world, Dante and Milton, and among others, Goethe and
Wordsworth.
–Arnold puts Wordsworth in the front rank not for his poetry
but for his "criticism of life".

19. FALLACIES OF REAL ESTIMATE
• Arnold while giving his touchstone method makes reader aware about the
fallacy in judgment. He says that historical fallacy and personal fallacy mars the
real estimate of poetry.
While expressing his views of the historic, the Personal, the Real; he writes that
‘… in reading poetry, a sense for the best, the really excellent, and of the strength
and joy to be drawn from it, should be present in our minds and should govern our
estimate of what we read.
• However this real estimate, the only true one, is liable to be superseded, if we are
not watchful, by two other kinds of estimate, the historic estimate and the
personal estimate, both of which are fallacious’.

20. ON CHAUCER
• Arnold praises Chaucer's excellent style
and manner, but says that Chaucer
cannot be called a classic since, unlike
Homer, Virgil and Shakespeare, his
poetry does not have the high poetic
seriousness which Aristotle regards as a
mark of its superiority over the other
arts.

21. ON DRYDEN AND POPE
• Dryden has been regarded, by Arnold, as the
glorious founder, and Pope as the splendid high
priest, of the age of prose and reason, our
indispensable 18th century. Their poetry was
that of the builders of an age of prose and
reason.
• Arnold says that Pope and Dryden are not
poet classics, but the 'prose classics' of
the 18th century.

22. ON THOMAS GRAY
• As for poetry, he considers Gray to be
the only classic of the 18th century.
Gray constantly studied and enjoyed
Greek
poetry and thus inherited their poetic
point of view and their application of
poetry to life. But he is the 'scantiest,
frailest classic' since his output was
small.

23. ON ROBERT BURNS
Like Chaucer, Burns lacks high poetic seriousness,
though his poems have poetic truth in diction and
movement.
Also like Chaucer, Burns possesses largeness, benignity, freedom
and spontaneity. But instead of Chaucer's fluidity, we find in
Burns a springing bounding energy. Chaucer's benignity deepens
in Burns into a sense of sympathy for both human as well as
non-human things, but Chaucer's world is richer and fairer than
that of Burns.
Sometimes Burns' poetic genius is unmatched by anyone. He is
even better than Goethe at times and he is unrivalled by anyone
except Shakespeare.

24. ON SHAKESPEARE
• Praising Shakespeare, Arnold says 'In England there
needs a miracle of genius like Shakespeare's to
produce a balance of mind'. This is praise tempered
by a critical sense. In a letter he writes. 'I keep
saying Shakespeare,
you are as obscure as life is'.
• In his sonnet On Shakespeare, Arnold says; 'Others
abide our question. Thou are free./ We ask and ask
- Thou smilest and art still,/ Out- topping
knowledge'.

25. Regarding the 3 estimates of reading poetry…
Arnold says that when one reads poetry he tends to estimate whether it is of the best form or not. It happens
in three ways- the real estimate, the historic estimate, and the personal estimate. The real estimate is an
unbiased viewpoint that takes into account both the historical context and the creative faculty to judge the
worth of poetry. But the real estimate is often surpassed by the historic and personal estimate. The historic
estimate places the historical context above the value of the art itself. The personal estimate on the other
hand depends on the personal taste, the likes and dislikes of the reader which affects his judgment of poetry.
Arnold says that both these estimates tend to be fallacious.
• The historic and personal estimate often overshadows the real estimate. But Arnold also says that it is
natural. The study of the historical background of poetry and its development often leads to the critic
skipping over the shortcomings because of its historical significance. Historic estimate raises poetry to a high
pedestal and thus hinders one from noticing its weaknesses. It is the historic estimate that leads to the
creation of classics and raises the poet to a nearly God like standard. Arnold says that if a poet is truly a
classic his poetry will give the reader real pleasure and enable him to compare and contrast other poetry
which are not of the same high standard. This according to Arnold is the real estimate of poetry. Hence,
Arnold appeals to his readers to read classics with an open eye and not be blind to its faults. This will enable
one to rate poetry with its proper value.

26. MATTHEW ARNOLD'S GRAVE AT ALL SAINTS' CHURCH,
SURREY

28. WORKS CITED
– Long, W.J. The History of English Literature
– http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/essay/237816
– http://janetschlarbaum.us/author/admin/page/2/
• http://www.superarticledirectory.com/Art/262944/306/The-Study-of-
Poetry.html