Editor's Page We happily announce a new Arnoldian and several, fine additions to our staff managing editor Laurence Mazzeno and consulting editor Nancy R. Wicker. Beginning with' this issue we will move to longer Arnoldians, fewer in number (two a year, rather than three). Our new sub-title puts our aspirations, already formulated in our editorial policy, on the face of things. Please bring us to the attention of Victorian colleagues who may think of us mainly as a newsletter for Arnold specialists. We remain that at heart, but the body extends. Our look changes with this issue also. The Arnoldian: A Review of Mid-Victorian Culture will have an enlarged cover field, more spatial transitions inside and altered page margins. We hope these differences will please our readers. In future issues I will use this page to announce meetings, events and news items of interest to Victorian scholars. I will also use it as a "Victorian coffee-table" a corner for light conversation and for brief notice of handsome art and pictorial books, along with whatever stray matter may interest some of you. On my desk now is Gareth Rees's Early Railway Prints: British Railways from 1825 to 1850 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), a Phaidon Book, $35.00. This is obligatory perusing for railroad buffs, machine-in-the-landscape aestheticians, and for anyone interested in curious facts: many British lines required pulley engines to draw trains up slight grades, the evolution in design from horse carriage to railway carriage is more gradual than one would expect, "railway literature" (a forerunner of drugstore novels) flourished, especially in romantic fiction, and most railway prints were lithographs — a nice conjunction of technologies. -JMH Open Letter To The Editor of Biographer of Matthew Arnold Dear Professor Hill, Your predecessor, Professor Allan B. Lefcowitz, once asked me for a preliminary report on my biographical research into Arnold's life and then printed my tentative "Note on Arnold's Experience of Isolation" in 1973. Mr. Lefcowitz is typical of Arnoldians: he came to my house in Birmingham and gave me very valuable detailed help, sharing his own researches; and I must say that without the generous help of Arnoldians my ten years' work on a biography would have been in vain. Now that my book is finished I feel that I owe readers of The Arnoldian a special word of thanks — since many of you have helped either by replying to my queries or by printing material of considerable use. I began my research in January 1970 and finished the Arnold biography in December 1979; a long task is over, and before I turn to something else I should like to give you my impressions about the state of Arnold studies today. One "lives" with one's subject while a biography is in progress, and then re-emerges into one's historical present—to note, always with some surprise, the present consensus of feeling about the biographee. In my case, the surprise is mixed with exasperation over our failure to correct a number of mistakes in what seems to be the current British and American estimate of Arnold and of his ideas. The first, widely evident error in the public's understanding of Arnold that strikes one has to do with his idea of "culture." It is generally felt that Arnold is an apologist for books and art, for "high culture" of a kind that can be appreciated by bookish, privileged persons with university degrees. I have read a book in ms. which contends that Arnold made a case for bookish culture, and then abandoned "culture" for "religion" when he understood Christ's central importance, in the 1870s. Again, I hear from post-graduates in England that Birmingham's Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies takes a wider view of "culture" than Arnold ever did. Arnold felt that Heine and Sainte-Beuve were cultural, whereas our Centre knows that telly soap-operas and Woman and Woman's Own belong to culture too. Who is to blame? Arnoldians, evidently, fail to press the point that "culture" in Culture and Anarchy is not Heine, Sainte-Beuve, Schubert, or Rembrandt, but a psychological condition or an openness-of-mind; in the "Preface" to his first edition Arnold insists that those who never read books may enter into this condition, which involves a growing, a becoming, a process similar to the one implied in Herder and Goethe's idea of Bildung whereby a person moves towards realizing his full mental, emotional, and creative potential, his Humanität. The process may involve a rejection of books, and always involves rejection of faith in fixed systems and shibboleths. If Arnold devotes space in Essays in Criticism to popular newspapers, popular styles, a popular English poet (Emma Tatham) or a second-rate French writer (Mlle. de Guérin), and builds much of his key essay around an item ("Wragg is in Custody') in a widely-read journal, then who is this Arnold who neglects popular culture? Second, I read in the T.L.S. that Arnold, with Voltaire, was one of the last great optimists, undermined forever now by the revelation of man's evil at Buchenwald or Hiroshima. Who is to blame? Arnoldians have failed to press the point that the vision of ignorant armies that clash by night and of man's selfignorance runs through Arnold's whole career as a poet, and is implicit in his prose. We hear that he looked ahead to a serene future; and yet "revolution" is a theme in Arnold's late letters and prose; in May 1871 when the violent Paris Communards are fighting to the last he writes (for the next century) of "that fixed resolved of the working class to count for something and live, which is destined to make itself so much felt in the coming time, and to disturb so much that dreamed it would last forever" (May 31, 1871). One could multiply examples. The near impossibility of inwardness and self-possession in a future of "baffling change" is a theme not of the early poems, but of Arnold's last formal elegy or "Westminster Abbey" of 1881. How optimistic is Arnold that central books in the Western tradition such as the Bible will be long read? Again, it is still fashionable to downgrade Arnold for his terms, such as "Hebraism and Hellenism" or "spontaneity" and "conscience" or others in Culture and Anarchy; what we Arnoldians have failed to show, I think, is that from his sonnet about Butler, until the end of his life, Arnold attacks fixed definitions and strictly avoids using them. He anticipates certain ideas in modern Structuralism: "Structural linguistics," as Claude Lévi-Strauss writes, shifts from the study of conscious linguistic phenomena to study of their unconscious infrastructure; second, it does not treat terms as independent entities, taking instead as its basis of analysis the relations between terms (Structural Anthropology, translated by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf [London, 1969], I, 33). Arnold shares this much in common with the structural linguists and anthropologists: he is interested in the unapparent infrastructure of, for example, journalism, architecture, economics, religion, and daily life in an urban culture, and dissatisfied with a scientific positivism that would assign rigid definitions to experiences within that culture. It is in the interplay between terms such as "Hebraism and Hellenism" or "Barbarians, Philistines, Populace," that Arnold suggests the real conditions of the modern mind in Culture and Anarchy. The term "Anarchy" itself has plural meanings: it is the laissezfaire attitude in economics, religion, politics, and morals, and no single instance of "Anarchy" is to be understood until we grasp the range of its manifestations. In one popular essay after another, in book-reviews, lectures, guidebooks, or surveys relating to Arnold and the Victorians, in our time, we read or hear that Arnold's "idea" of religion or poetry or education "was" this or that. Arnold becomes a pudding; we dip out of him anything we like, for a sniff, whereas the fact is that Arnold's ideas were in motion, evolving and modifying themselves. The Arnold who lived from 1822 to 1888 had no "idea" about anything, but a developing idea or a set of ideas, often involving interesting contradictions. He "found" no fixed point, no "central belief" in God, Christ, Goethe, culture, or anything of the kind; and this movement or continual quest in his thought, along with his habit of avoiding definitions and looking for infrastructures, makes him interesting today. One is certain that no book about Arnold will, by itself, convince the public that he wasn't a machine, or a head hopping about on a stick. The public, when it thinks of Arnold at all, takes it for granted that his merciless conscience killed the poet |