"But Clear As Words Can Make Revealing? Arnold's Language and the Struggle for Transparency
Dan S. Kline Department of English
Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts
Faculty of Graduate Studies The University of Western Ontario London, Ontario August 1997
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In the 1853 "PrefaceN to the Poems, Matthew Arnold argues that the poet should adopt the "grand style" to assist in the production of a type of poetry that is content-driven. The precise nature and meaning of the "grand style" remains one of the more elusive problems in Arnold scholarship. Despite
Arnold's conviction that the idea escapes definition, 1 argue, in this thesis, that the ambiguous and unstable concept of the "grand style" is involved with Arnold's belief in an ideal language characterized by transparency. The poetry of Matthew Arnold is, in many ways, a record of his struggle with this transparent linguistic ideal. Arnold's realization of the need for greater transparency in language and his attempts to achieve it are inf ormed by the work of John Locke in An Essay concerning Human Understanding and Of the Conduct of the Understanding respectively. Locke's sceptical attitude towards language as an effective medium of communication parallels Arnold's discovery of the human, arbitrary, and opaque nature of language in his first volume of poetry, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems. However, Arnold's later exposure to Locke's heavily qualified endorsement of particular tropes in Of the Conduct of the Understanding has important implications and consequences for an understanding of the varied use of the simile in Arnold's poetry from the 1850s and 1860s. key words: Matthew Arnold, language, John Locke, simile
iii Acknow ledgements
I wish to express my deepest gratitude and appreciation to my supervisor, Professor Donald S. Hair. Dr. Hair's patience, erudition, and guidance provided continual assistance and consLant reassurance at every stage of this thesis. It has been a privilege to study with such a mode1 teacher-scholar. Also, 1 am deeply indebted to Professor J. Douglas Kneale, the second reader of this thesis, for his remarkably efficient and helpful editorial advice, as well as his thought provoking questions and suggestions. Finally, 1 am immeasurably grateful to my family for their love and unflagging support and encouragement. TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
Certificate of Examination Abstract Acknowledgements Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter One: Arnold, Locke, and Language
Chapter Two: Fragments
Cnapter Three: Tensions
Chapter Four: Strategies
Chapter Five: '1Thyrsis19
Conclusion
Notes Works Cited Vita Introduction
The year 1850 is the annus mirabilis for nineteenth- century literature. The appearance of The Prelude and In Memoriam offers readers the seminal poems of the Romantic and Victorian periods respectively. In June of that same year
Fraser's Magazine printed a poem entitled t'Mernorial Verses: April 1850t1 by the author of a small, largely unnoticed, volume of poetry published the previous year. The volume was The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems and its author, the semi-anonymous VIt of the title page, was in the midst of consolidating an embryonic collection of ideas into a coherent and controversial poetics. 1850 is also a critical year for
Matthew Arnold in ways 1 shall demonstrate in the next chapter. tlMemor~alVersest' does not share the reputation of poems such as IfThe Forsaken Merman," l'The Scholar Gip~y,~'or ItDover Beach,ttbut it is an important text nevertheless because of Arnold's own comments about it. In a letter to Clough prior to the poem'ç appearance, Arnold mentions that frustratingly elusive and unstable concept which lies at the very centre of his theories of poetry and language: "1 have at Quillinants sollicitation [sic] dirged W. W. in the grand style & need thy rapture therewithu (Lang 172). The "grand style'' remains one of the more ambiguous of Arnold's ideas, a fact which Arnold hirnself acknowledges in On Translating Homer: 2
Alas! the grand style is the last matter in the world for verbal definitionto deal with adequately.
One may Say of it as is said of faith: 'One must
feel it in ordex to kriow what it is. ' (Super 1:
188)' David Riede has noted the rhetorical inqenuity with which
Arnold shifts his own feelings of guiit and responsibility ont0 the reader (22), and even when Arnold does resort to definition the result is unsatisfactory: "1 think it will be found that the grand style arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject'l (Super 1: 188) . 1 would suggest that the most effective way of approaching the "grand style" is through the alembic of Arncld's interest in lanquage.
Arnold l s connection with some of the leading linguistic theorists and philoloqists of the day is amply demonstrated by his letters which refer to figures such as F.D. Maurice and
Trench and indicate a persona1 acquaintance with Furnivall.
Julius Hare was a frequent visitor to Dr. Arnold's widow at Fox How, and Arnold himself cultivated a friendship and correspondence with the German Sanskrit scholar Max Mueller. There are many places in the Arnoldian canon where one might initiate an investiqation into Arnold's language and its relationship to his poetics and the "grand style." David Riede, for example, begins his study of Arnold's language with a close, but not exclusive, analysis of the later religious 3 prose pieces as qlArnold'smost rigorous, rational, systematic thought about languagel' (21) . Riede argues, parsuasively, that Arnold's wdeconstruction of Biblical language makes explicit a distrust of his medium that had undermined his poetry even early in his career" (12). As an alternative to
Riede's retrospective approach, 1 prefer to begin in medias res, as it were, throuqh an examination of Arnold's letters and early critical prose. The key texts are the I1Preface1'to the 1853 edition of the Poems, the often passionate polemic about poetry and language he carried on with Clough through their correspondence, and On Translating Honier. 1 think that initiating an investigation of Arnold's lancjuage frorn the early 1850s is im2ortant for many reasons. In the remaininy pages of this Introduction and the chapter that follows 1 hope to demonstrate that the ideas of the 1853 "Preface" and the somewhat later advice of the Homer lectures assume an important place within a particular contour of Arnold's eclectic thought, namely British empiricism and, particularly, the philosophy of John Locke. Additionally, 1 want to emphasize that this particular contour was by no means stable and was itself underqoing a major shift in these years. The usefulness of beginning at precisely the moment of this shift in Arnold's thinking is that it encourages us to look, with a degrce of flexibility, back to the earlier poetry of the 1840s and forward to some of Arnold's greatest poetic triumphs and failures in the next two decades. This particular shift is 4 itself part of a larger turn in both Arnold's poetics (which is inaugurated by the "Preface'?) and biography.'
On the eve of the publication of Culture and Anarchy
(1869) Arnold wrote to his mother: My poems represent the main movement of mind of the last quarter century, and thus they will probably have their day as people become conscious of what that movement of mind is, and interested in the literary productions which reflect it (Russell
2: 9). It is certainly possible to reduce this "rnovement of mindl to Arnold's career itself by dividing it into periods of poetry and various types of prose. We can even chart certain movements within Arnold's poetry. The publication of The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems in 1349 primarily collected Arnold's lyrics from the previous decade while the next ten years would witness al1 of his major works in dramatic and narrative poetry, including Empedocles on Etna, Tristram and
Iseult, Sohrab and Rustum, Balder Dead, and Merope. In the 1860s Arnold would again concentrate on the lyric mode. These generic and chronological divisions are noteworthy but far from absolute. Indeed, the transitions within this tripartite structure are often characterized by a nebulosity, and some of Arnold's greatest lyric accomplishments, such as "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse, "Dover Beach, and IlThe Scholar Gipsy," appear concurrently with the longer works in other genres. The llPrefaceMto the Poems and On Translating Homer are situated in the midst of Arnold's Ifmovement of mind, l1 and it is dif f icult to know how to read them. Should they be read as apologias or manifestos or both?' The ftPrefacelfopens with an indication that Arnold is moving in a different direction as a poet, as he defends his decision to exclude Empedocles on
Etna from the 1853 edition. For Arnold, as the "Prefaceft elucidates, poetry is driven, primarily but not solely, by its contents--ideas and actions that 'lare the eternal objects of poetryf' (Super 1: 3). As Edward Alexander has argued, Arnold sought to avoid the excesses of romantic expressionism and vulgar utilitarian didacticism (153). The contents of poetry are historically determined and are something not completely under the poetfs control. Arnold once remarked to Clough:
'The what you have to Say depends on your age" (Lang 78). The attempt by a poet, when confronted with the multitudinousness of Victorian life, to resort (like Arnold) to ancient subjects alleviates but does not completely solve this dilemma. What the poet did have control over was the Ifway" in which the contents were organized in language. Arnold's theory of the poet is predicated on the assumption that he/she must perform multiple functions: "It is not enough that the poet should add to the knowledge of men, it is required of him also that he should add to their happinessw (Super 1: 2). This idea appears in the letter to Clough four years earlier which contains Arnold's f irst use of the term the I1grand stylel1: On the other hand, there are two offices of Poetry--
one to add to one's store of thoughts & feelings--
another to compose & elevate the mind by a sustained tone, numerous allusions, and a grand style ...For the style is the expression of the nobility of the poet's character, as the matter is the expression of the richness of his mind: but on men character
produces as great an effect as mind. (Lang 133) Thus style, particularly the linguistic attitudes and resulting grammatical practices and rhetorical strategies which help to Eorm it, is of great importance to any poet who wishes to increase the happiness of his/her audience.
Insofar as the poetics of the 1853 IIPrefaceM can be described as the poetics of facility, Arnold's conception of the poet differs quite radically from that of contemporaries such as Browning and Carlyle. Shelley, following Sidney's example, argued for the role of the poet as prophet in "A
Defence of Poetryu (1840), and Alba Warren pointed out, long ago, that the vatic notion of the poet carried on into the Victorian age: The critics of the nineteenth century conceived the function of the poet in grandiose Shelleyan
terms. . .the poet must be "the exemplar of his age, its teacher and guide. The poet is the mediator between the sou1 and the infinite according to 7
Browning, the revealer of "the open secrettt of
nature accordinq to Carlyle. He makes the truth
more ttimpressive,lt and above al1 he binds men
together in fellowship of feeling. (Warren 24)
Arnold, by 1853, did not hold such a position and Itregistcred a protest against the exalted notions of his contemporariestf
(Warren 25). The poetics of facility do not require the
prophet or the philosopher-poet. Rather, the poet must be 'la man speaking to mentt--a facilitator:
They [poets] do not talk of their mission, nor of
interpreting their age, nor of the cominq poet; al1 this, they know, is the mere delirium of vanity;
their business is not to praise their age, but to
afford to the men that live in t the highest
pleasure which they are capable of feeling. (Super
1: 13; my italics)
Although Warren has demonstrated, through the Clough correspondence, Arnold's gradua1 shift in emphasis from form to content in his thoughts about poetry, form continues to play an essential role for Arnold. Warren remarks:
Arnold was almost alone in emphasizing the technical
side of poetic activity, the caref ul construction of the poem itself (and so seems closer to the more practical attitude of modern criticisn towards the
poet as skilled craftsman) . (24) 1 noted earlier that 1 wish to approach the "grand stylett 8 through lanquage. It is with this in mind that we should turn to On Translatinq Homer. In these lectures Arnold's failure to define the "grand style" is set in the context of a demonstration of it in Homer1s work. On Translating Homer offers a substantial repository of Arnold's practical thouyhts about language. Homer is worthy of yet another translation; in fact he requires one since Arnold's experience of first looking into Chapman's Homer has been decidedly less rapturous than Keats's. Successive translations from Pope and Cowper to the most recent foray of Francis Newman have done little to improve the situation. Homer is also, regardless of language, nationality, or historical epoch, the greatest poet of the past and a mode1 for al1 present and future poets. Arnold identifies some of the qualities of Homerlswork which should guide practising translators and, by extension, poets: "He is eminently plain and direct, both in the evolution of his thought and in the expression of it, that is, both in his syntax and in his words ..JI (Super 1: 102). This passage seems to offer itself as an antidote to the numerous lures and snares that Arnold warns the poet to avoid in the wPreface." Single thoughtç, excessive illustration, and abundant imagery are the characteristics of the Romantics (and the Elizabethans before them) and have been propagated through the work of Clough, Tennyson, and, as many critics have noted, Arnold hirnself in his earlier poetry. I would like to focus 9 on the concepts of syntax and, particularly, diction as key elements in Arnold's approach to language and their relationship to the theoretical premises of the Y?reface.I1 Syntax plays a crucial role in poetry and ideally should draw attention away from the act of expression itself and towards the action and content of the text. Arnold is not arguing for a rigidly logical and straightforward grammatical structure, since this would attract attention in its own way.
He allows for what is termed "idiomatic grammar" (Super 1:
153). There must, however, be limits and Arnold objects (despite his own culpability) to grammatical and rhetorical elements such as persona1 interjections. Idiomatic grammar contributes to style, which in turn is the expression of the poetls (here translater's) character: His syntax [Newman's], the mode in which his thought is evolved, although not the actual words in which it is expressed ...fails ...by not being noble enough ...Homer presents his thought naturally; but
when Mr. Newman has, ''A thousand f ires alony the
plain, 1 Say, that night were burning--" he presents
his thought familiarly. (Super 1: 125)
Arnold's concern is with Newman's persona1 interjection of ''1 say" which distracts the readerts attention from the actions and ideas of the poem. This concern can be traced back to the early letters to Clough. In an 1849 letter on various technical matters, including Clough's suggestions for ''The New 10 Sirens," Arnold chides his friend's attachment to the apostrophe and offers the following piece of facilitative editorial advice: "Yet would be better than Ah in the passage that you mention. It expresses the connection which is now left to be perceivedtv(Lang 134). In contrast to the familiar idiomatic syntax that Arnold counsels against, he is also wary of complicated and awkward grammatical constructions. He takes the opening lines of
Paradise Lost as an example. The periodic style of Milton's syntax, which withholds the first verb of his epic until the thirty-ninth word, is powerful, Arnold admits, but also appropriate for his densely allusive diction and complex thoughts (Super 1: 146). Although Arnold can recommend Milton as an example of the "grand style severetv(Super 1: 189) he seeks to establish a more suitable idiomatic syntactical framework, like Homervs, which stresses greater simplicity than Milton and more dignity than the farniliar style of Newmanvs translation. The other aspect of language that Arnold addresses in the lectures is diction. Because Arnold advocates Homer's words for their are plainness and directness, and it might be useful to place these qualities of diction in the context of Arnold's awareness of the issues and ideas surrounding the movement in Victorian linguistics known as purism. This movement, which flourished in the 1850~~advocated a pure English language purged of al1 foreign elements, particularly French and Latin, 11 in favour of a vocabulary derived from Anglo-saxon. Arnold's definition of English is something very different from that of the purists. Tennyson's Idylls of the King are attempts to achieve purism in the language of poetry, and with this in mind, Arnold's harsh criticism of Tennyson's vulgar provinciality in Maud (Lang 322) takes on added dimensions beyond his immediate Crimean War jingoism. In On Translating
Homer, Arnold protests against Newman's predominant use of Saxo-Norman vocabulary. Although his comments are directed at translation, they have important implications for a theory of poetry which takes actions as the eternal object of poetry, stresses the whole over the parts, and is concerned with facilitating the experience of the audience. Arnold defines and values the English language by its very heterogeneity. German, French, Latin, and Greek elements al1 minqle in the lanquage and can be manipulated by the translator or poet for larger eff ects: We owe to the Latin element in our language most of that very rapidity and clear decisiveness by which
it is contradistinguished from the German, and in sympathy with the languages of Greece and Rome: so that to limit an English translator of Homer to
words of Saxon origin is to deprive him of his special advantages in translating Homer. In Vossls
well-known translation of Homer, it is precisely these qualities of his German language itself, 12
something heavy and trailing both in the structure
of the sentences and in the words of which it is
composed. (Super 1: 101) The very advantage of Enqlish is its lack of purity, since the language contains a variety of words which, by their different origins and natures, can be utilized for variety, different effects, or to accelerate or decelerate the experience of reading a clause, sentence, or poem. Certainly one of the key points of the I1Prefaceq1is Arnold's insistence that a poem must be experienctd as a whole, and modern poetry is hindered by an excessive attention to the parts. A poem cannot be understood piecemeal but must be digested entirely in order to have any enriching effect on the reader. Yet another reason for Arnold's advocacy of modern heterogeneous English emerges from his relationship to Victorian notions of synchronic and diachronic ways of reading. Arnold does not appear to advocate or require that a word be known in a diachronic sense. Words are obviously important as the very medium in which Arnold works, and he does not deny the importance of etymology in his belief that the synchronic approach to reading is essential and ultimately more successful to the understanding of a poem. I will return to the question of etymology in the next chapter, but it is noteworthy that Arnold scoffs at Ruskin's diachronic analysis of Milton's uLycidasN in his lecture I1Of King's Treasuries." In "The Literary Influence of the Academies'l Arnold calls such 13 attention to the historical accretions of words "e~travagance'~
(Super 3: 252). Diachronie reading encourages close attention (in Arnold's opinion ridiculously close) to the words themselves and, more often than not, recourse to a dictionary entry of the history of the word. Instead, Arnold believes a poet should use words synchronically as they are understood generally and immediately by the majority of readers. This approach to words channels the energies of the reader to what is important: the whole experience and noble human actions of the poem. Arnold discusses the dictior. proper to poetry in the following excerpt: How many words occur in the Bible, for instance, to which thousands of hearers do not feel sure they attach the precise real meaning; but they make out a meaning for them out of what materials they have at hand; and the words heard over and over ayain, come to convey this meaning with a certainty whicn poetically is adequate, though notphilologically ... How clearly, again, have readers got a sense from
Milton's words, "grate on the scrannel pipes," who might yet have Seen puzzled to write a commentary on
the word scrannel for the dictionary! (Super 1: 184-
85) Arnold believes that if a poem is accomplishing what it should, namely carrying the reader dong and enriching the mind with the noble human actions and ideas it depicts, a 14 diachronie approach to words actually works against the aims of the poet. He does not deny that one must know the meanings of words in order to appreciate poetry, but he believes that the discovery of meaning in words is persona1 and qrows from the whole experience of the poem. Arnold would argue that by reading a poem diachronically (which is a time-consuminq activity) we gain the precise historical meanings of words and phrases, but we lose the most important meaning and enrichment the poem as a whole may offer. The poet must be able to find words which evoke a meaninq that is familiar enough tc people through common use and avoid using words which check the reading process and turn poetry into pedantry. Diction must not act as an impediment to the larger effects the poem can accomplish. Indeed, Arnold even advocates repetition of particular words if necessary:
Here in order to keep Homer's effect of perfect
plainness and directness, 1 repeat the word
"f irest'.. .although in a more elaborate and lit~rary style of poetry this recurrence of the same word would be a fault to be avoided ...what 1 wish you to remark is my endeavour after absolute plainness, my care to avoid anything which may check or surprise
the reader.... (Super 1: 155) Arnold was often accused of preaching principles that he himself ignored in his own poetry; this, however, is not one of them, as we see from the opening of Sohrab and Rustum, 15 where Arnold repeats the word Vent1' seven times in the opening twenty-five lines of the poem. This is not to Say that the poet is bound to common, repetitive, and boring words. Diction as a component of style is tied to the moral character of the poet, and Arnold regarded the Bible as "the grand mine of dict.ionI1 (Super 1: 156).
What are we to make of al1 this practical advice about language that Arnold offers in On Translating Homer? In many ways these Oxford lectures can be read as a sort of practical appendix to the theoretical speculations of the 1853 "Preface." Perhaps the most important observation we can make is that the view of language which emerges is distinctly ambivalent. This attitude is reflected in Arnold's views on the origin of language where he adopts the stance of the speaker in "In Utrumque Paratus'' : 1 had never reflected on these things ...The question too seemed to me in some degree an idle one.. .If man
was of divine origin, so was language itself too:
and if man, considered in the cycle of nature, was a natural Being, so too was lanquage equaliy
natural. (Note-books 456)
This balanced view has been cogently summarized by Riede as "Arnold's simultaneous mystification and demystification of poetic languaqe" (25) . In the chapters which follow 1 will concentrate on the latter half of Riede's deconstructive paradigrn. IG The lectures on Homer, the "Preface," and the letters to Clough reveal an attitude where language is seen as a tool--a distinctly human product. Words can be chosen, manipulated, and arranged for particular poetic and moral effects that fulf il the conditions of the "Preface. They are powerful tools which the poet as facilitator can use to fulfil his/her responsibility of affording happiness and inspiriting the reader. And yet there is a strong note of caution sounded throughout the lectures on Homer. Indeed, Arnold points out that he has been drawn to the subject of Homeric translation by the very fact that language has been, and is being, abused, with harmful effects.
1 believe that such an ambivalent attitude to lanyuaye emerges from a particular contour of Arnold's thought that has yet to be fully acknowledged or investigated. 1 am speaking of Arnold's engagement with the philosophical tradition of British empiricism and particularly the work of John Locke. Locke's epistemology and the language theory that emerges from it allow us to contextualize Arnold's distrust of his medium within a larger philosophical framework. In the next chapter
1 will demonstrate that Arnold's engagement with Locke is both more complex than has been generally acknowledged and chronologically pertinent to the shift in Arnold's poetry signalled by the 1853 "Preface. Chapter One: Arnold, Locke, and Language
Arnoldts attitude to his age is, by now, well known and is memorably expressed in a letter to Clough from Switzerland in the autumn of 1849: "My dearest Clough these are damned times--everything is against oneN (Lang 15G). Although Arnold con+.inues on in this letter to label Carlyle a ttmoral desperadou (Lang 156), Alba Warren has argued that he concurs with the author of Sartor Resartus in "the surely romantic conviction thst the times were diseasedl?(153).
Arnold is one of the more famous agnostics of the Victorian period, a condition common to many of the members of "Clougho-Matthean" circle at Oxford, including Arnold's brother Tom (who oscillated between atheism and Roman
Catholicism) and LA. Froude (whose controversial Nemesis of
Faith appeared the same week as The Strayed Reveller) . Arnold's scepticism ranged from, most notably, religion, to the nature of man and human knowledge, to languaye itself . In this respect Arnold is one of those early Victorian contemporaries of Browning who share what Peter Allan Dale calls a ttphilosophicalcommonplace in the England of the 1830s and 1840sI1: "the limitedness of man's mental powerstl(359). This scepticism is the central concern of an early poem from The Strayed Reveller, "In Utrumque Paratus.I1 The poem, as its title indicates, offers two competing theories of human origin: one a form of Plotinian idealism ("the silent mind of 18 the One al1 Pure" [lj) and the other a kind of Darwinian evolutionary materialism ("the wild unf athered mass" [X]). Significantly, the speaker does not choose, or, perhaps more appropriately, is unable to choose one view over another--yet another example of Arnold's famous line from a later poem, "wandering between two ~orlds.~' These two worlds were given a philosophic context, many years ago, by Alfred Lubel1 who sought to reconcile the idealist strains of Arnold's heavy philosophic reading from the mid-1840s with "the relatively crude, ancient materialism
Arnold imbibed f rom Lucretius" (252) . However, Arnold's interests and thinking have a much wider scope (even within the period of philosophic reading Lubell concentrates on) than a narrow dialectic between materialism and idealism. Douglas Bush offers a catalogue of the numerous labels applied to Arnold's thought: Arnold might be called an individual mixture of eighteenth-century rationality, Romantic idealism, Victorian skepticism, and, if we like the overworn word, modern existentialism. (xvii) Such a formula is certainly accurate but by no means exhaustive. We gather from it, if we were not already aware, the fact that Arnold is the antithesis of a systematic thinker, and such an eclectic mixture of influences and tendencies is both a help and a hindrance in any analysis of bis poetry or prose. 13 There is another contour of Arnold's thought that can be
added to Bush's list which, 1 believe, has yet to be fully documented and explored. We should be aware that Arnold's cosmopolitan interests in German ideas, the ancient philosophy of Greece, the Roman stoics, the novels of George Sand, the
criticism of Sainte-Beuve, and the Hindu teachings of the
Bhagavad Gita, are complemented by an interest in, and a debt to, English thought, notably British empiricism and, in
particular John Locke. In this chapter, 1 will trace Arnold's
complex exposure to and interaction with Locke's work. 1 intend to argue that Locke's ideas about language contained in An Essay concerning Human Understanding and elsewhere
parallel , conf irm, and off er assistance to Arnold ' s own
notions about language at various points in his career as a
poet. Furthermore, Arnold's engagernent with Locke is intimately tied to his changing conceptions of poetry,
publicly signalled by the 1853 "Preface.
Throughout his life Arnold was suspicious of German transcendentalisrn.' Such a distrust of the Germano-Coleridgean tradition climaxes in Arnold's later religious prose. David
Riede has demonstrated that this suspicion takes on linguistic dimensions : Not believing in a transcendental and all- creating God, or even in a supernal Platonic ideal, [Arnold] naturally rejected the metaphysics of Christianity, almostcasually dismissingthe primary 2 O textual authority for Christian and rornantic faith in the divine Loqos by rejecting as mere theory the
Gospel of St. John. (9)
1 do not wish to suggest that Arnold's dissatisfaction with the Germano-Coleridgean tradition naturally led him to the adoption of a dogrnatic, unqualif ied endorsement of British empiricism. We are never confronted with a statement as overt (or ironic) as Sterne's "the saqacious Locke, who certainly understood the nature of these things better than most men" (7). However, the importance of Locke is surely greater than the casual acknowledgements of Park Honan--"At the bottom of his heart, he was even enough of a sensible Lockean empiricist to be wary of teutonizing his soul with too many a priori disquisitions" (96) --or the early phenomenological criticism of J. Hillis Miller, who perfunctorily reads in Empedocles on Etna the corcept of a soul "Like the tabula rasa cf Locke and the ssnsationalistsu
(212). We have evidence that Arnold read and was familiar with Bacon's Essays and De Augumentis. Berkeley also appears on Arnold's reading lists in preparation for the Oriel fellowship examination in 1845 (Allott 258). But by far the most important empirical thinker for Arnold is John Locke.
Arnold 's engagement with Locke occurs in two important stages. Each of these stages contributes to, parallels, or confirms Arnold's ambivalent attitude to language which emerges in the 'tPreiace'tand On Translating Homer. 2 1 Locke's reputation throughout the nineternth century has been thoroughly doc-imented in Hans Aarsleff's informative essay "Locke's Reputation in Nineteenth Century England." Aarsleff's essay demonstrates that despite the presence of important defenders such as Dugald Stewart and John Stuart Mill, the preponderance of opinion (effectively marshalled by Coleridge and Whewell in England and Victor Cousin in France) was opposed to Locke, particularly An Essay concerning Human
Understanding. Indeed, Aarslef f notes, I1To the nineteenth century Locke meant the Essay" (121), and the Essay as the central document in British empiricism was continually subordinated to the German transcendental philosophy championed by Coleridge in England. According to Aarsleff, one source of the nineteenth century'ç reaction to Locke can be attributed to the work of eighteenth-century philosophers such as Condillac who had admired Locke to the extent that he was misinterpreted and offered as the father of sensationalism. Locke presents his epistemology in the second book of the Essay:
Let us then suppose the Mind to be, as we Say, white
Paper, void of al1 Characters, without any Ideas; How cones it to be furnished?. . .To this I answer, in one word, From Experience: In that, ail Our Knowledge is founded; ...Our Observation employtd either about the external sensible Objects; or about
the interna1 Operations of our Minds, perceived and 22 reflected on by our selves, is that, which supplies
our Onderstandings with the materials of thinking.
These two are the Fountains of Knowledge. (2.1.2) The sensationalists neglected Locke's second fountain of knowledge and reduced ideas to Ittransformed sensation1'
(Aarsleff 129). Unfortunately, nineteenth-century opponents of Locke often read the Essay through the well-intentioned misinterpretation of the sensationalists, and mistakenly assumed that Locke had reduced the mind to a passive storehouse of ideas devoid of any power (Aarsleff 129). This was the argument of Victor Cousin in the second volume of his
Cours de l'histoire de la philosophie which appears on Arnold's 1845 reading list. Aarsleff cornments that Cousin devoted eleven of the twenty-five lectures in the volume to a virulent attack on Locke% Essay, and that he is determined to fin? the roots of the sensationalist school in Locke (124) . In l'The New Sirens,Ita poem that was singled out for praise in an early review by Michael Rossetti, Arnold satirically reveals an awareness of the sensationalist epistemology when his speaker, a young poet, chides the new sirens for their extreme views, encapsulated as IfOnly what we feel, we knowl'
(84) Although Carlyle thought Locke l1had paved the way for banishing religion from the worldu (215), Arnold had already banished religion (in the orthodox sense) from his own life by the time he reached his teenage years. Lubell has argued, effectively, that this was to have a tremendous impact on Arnold's entire "intellectual and spiritual developrnentu
(248) . Locke is something of a philosophical ally for Arnold, and in the climactic fourth book of the Essay he offers a hierarchy of knowledge ranging from certainty through opinion to doubt that Arnold, as he shed his Christian orthodoxy, surely found interesting and intriguing if not comforting. However, it is not so much Locke's epistemology as the language theory that emerges from it that is of interest. We know that Arnold read, or at least was familiar with, An Essay concerning Human Understanding from his comments in God and the Bible. Riede has alerted us to Arnold's misinterpretation, deliberate or otherwise, of one of the most famous passages from the Essay as it pertains to language: Aside from his definition of "being," perhaps the clearest example of reductive etymoloqical definition in Arnold is his Lockian derivation of
%pirittt f rom I1breathtt:"Spirit. . . means literally,
we know, only breath" (7:8). But this is a far cry from Locke's statement that spirit originally meant breath, for it denies any validity to meanings attached after the word has fallen away from its
original material referent. (18) Arnold's reductive view must be reconciled with the earlier, more flexible, position he takes on the meaning of words in the lectures on Horner. How seriously Arnold adopted the 24 reductive etymology he demonstrates in God and the Bible is unclear since the passage above strongly echoes section fifty- six of In Memoriam: "The spirit does but mean the breath:/I know no more" (56.7-8). In the previous chapter we noted that Arnold is concerned that words can act as obstacles in the reading process and ultimately obscure meaning. Thus in the lectures on Homer
Arnold advocates a synchronie cognition of words ahead of a diachronie one. He allows for the repetition of words and, here, in his misinterpretation of Locke's parayraph concerniny the origin of words in sensible ideas, he shares, with Locke, the same suspicion about the opacity of abstract terms. As
Riede points out: "Arnold approvingly quoted Joubert to this effect: 'Instead of saying 'gracett Say help, succour, a divine influence, a dew of heaven; then one can corne to the right understanding'" (19). Arnold's thoughts on etymology and diction are concerned with the auditor and his/her ability to comprehend with a relative degree of ease and quickness. While Arnold's concerns are as a poet, they are not far removed from the more general philosophic beliefs of Locke: It was necessary that Man should find out some external Signs, whereby those invisible Ideas, which his thoughts are made up of, might be made known to
others. For this purpose, nothing was so fit, either for Plenty or Quickness, as those articulate 25
Sounds, he found himself able to make. (3.2.1)
However, both men realize the inherent weakness in language as a medium of communication. Because words are the arbitrary signs for ideas in the mind, and every person's ideas remain to a certain extent unique, the chance for a perfect correspondence of ideas between speaker and auditor through language is an impossibility. Paul Guyer has summarized this dilemma: If Our words immediately signify only our ideas, and stand for outer objects as well as the ideas of others at best indirectly, then indeed we can never
be quite sure that another means exactly the same
thing we do ourselves, or is sayiny the same thiny about an object we are, and we had better be careful about hastily assuming he does. But this skeptical consequence is hardly a refutation of Lockefsview:
instead, it is exactly the practical lesson he wishes us to learn from his theoretical inquiry.
(1?1) Locke, like Arnold, is suspicious of language as a medium of communication, and they both believe we must use it judiciously with an awareness of its basic imperfections. Despite al1 our care and precision, eventually Our use of language is an everyday example of Tennyson's definition of faith: "Bel ieving where we cannot provef' (In Memoriam Prologue 4). We realize our thoughts do not correspond 26 exactly with others, but we trust, without a guarantee, that the words effect some type of connection. Locke's ideas add a linguistic dimension to Arnold's persistent theme of isolation, seen, for example, in "To
Marguerite-Continued." Our thoughts are, initially and primarily, Our own, and this mental isolation is a part of Arnold's assertion: Yes! in the sea of life enisled, With echoing straits between us thrown, Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
We mortal millions live alone. (1-4) Yet we do not "sit still and perish" (Eçsay 4.14.1) . Even with this realization, there is the desire and the attempt to cornmunicate: "And lovely notes from shore to shore,/Across the sounds and channels pourm1(11-12). Despite their mutual scepticism akout language as an effective instrument of communication, both Locke and Arnold are proactive in their attempts to reduce the degree of opacity in language. Locke endeavours to distinguish between the imperfections and abuses of language. He resigns himself to the imperfections but rails against those deliberate and avoidable abuses which unnecessarily add to the imperfect nature of the medium.
In Arnold's case, he fights against opacity in language by adopting a creed of Joubert which lies behind al1 his practical thoughts on reductive etymology, word repetition, 27 and synchronic reading in On Translating Homer. In the critical essay "Joubert, or a French Coleridge," Arnold notes: "One must employ one's expressions simply as media--as glasses, through which one's thoughts can best be made evident ...1 know by my own experience, how hard this rule is to f01low'~ (Super 4: 195; my italics). Arnold realizes that language can never be a perfectly transparent medium, but it is a linguistic ideal worthy of striving after, since it is involved with the ever elusive "grand style.fr In the lectures on Homer, Arnold demonstrates, through al1 the practical advice about language, a concern that the reader or auditor can easily be checked by the word itself and pass through to the idea only with difficulty. This is seen again in God and the Bible with Arnold's reductive etymology and misinterpretation of the Essay. If the epistemology of the Essay appealed to Arnold, then its theory of language confirmed his own suspicions about the possibility for meaningful communication. Part of Arnold's ambivalence about language that emerges from On Translating Homer is a suspicion grounded in the sense that words act as impediments in the communication of meaning. We are not sure when Arnold encountered the Essay but, as 1 will shortly demonstrate, it was surely before 1850, and through his exposure to Cousin in
1845 Arnold was at least engaging with the ideas around this time. The chronology is of some importance here. The Essay's general suspicion of language as an effective tool of communication was the view Arnold would have been most farniliar with during the composition of the poems that make up his first volume and part of his second. Nevertheless, as the lectures on Homer and the "Preface" indicate, though words nay be naturally imperfect, the poet must make use of them in such a way that, to use Locke's terms, the "natural imperfectiont' of words is not compounded by their abuse. Locke had devoted the last two chapters of the third book of the Essay to a catalogue of abuses of language and suggestions for their remedy . If this were the end of Arnold's engagement with Locke, his debt to the empiricist philosopher would be interesting but not particularly remarkable. However, as 1 mentioned at the outset of the introduction, 1850 was an important year for Arnold just as it was for readers of Wordsworth and Tennyson.
It marked the second stage of his engagement with Locke. In the autumn of that year, Arnold indicates, in a letter to Clough, a continuing interest in Locke which leads us in new directions. Park Honan cites the letter as evidence that
Arnold was reading An Essay concerninq Human Understanding along with Spinoza's Ethics while in the employment of Lord Landsdowne. 1 think it is worthwhile to examine the relevant part of this letter: 1 go to read Locke on the Conduct of the Ufiderstanding: my respect for the reason as the rock of refuge to this poor exaggerated surexcited 29 humanity increases and increases. Locke is a man who has cleared his mind of vain repetitions, though without the positive and vivifying atmosphere of
Spinoza about him. (Lang 176-77)
There are several important points to be made about this letter that reveal and complete Our understanding of Arnold's engagement with Locke.
First, the letter signals that Arnold is returning to Locke once again as the phrasing suggests: "Locke is a man who has cleared his mind of vain repetitions." Kenneth Allott has also inclicated that the letter Ilimplies familiarity with Locke" (2G1). Secondly, Arnold ' s identification with Locke as a champion of reason points to a familiarity with the Essay and its recurrent insistence on reason as the supreme faculty of the understanding. This estimate of Locke and the Essay distances Arnold from the main current of Victorian misinterpretation of Locke, and it reveals Arnold has not surrendered to Cousin who claims that Locke devalues reason in favour of sensation. Such a careful estimate of Locke seems, also, to clash with his seemingly heavyhanded reductive view of etymology in God and the Bible. Finally, and most importantly, the text that Arnold indicates he is going to read 1 go on to read Locke on the Conduct of the understanding") is not Locke's An Essay concerninq Human Understanding; Arnold s very words Vonduct of the Understanding" allude to a lesser-known text by Locke entitled 30
Of the Conduct of the Understanding. These two works, while closely related, should not be confused with each other. Of the Conduct of the Understanding is a practical appendix to the Essay and often recapitulates some of that text's main points, but it also introduces some new material and significantly amends some of Locke's ideas on language from the Essay. Although Aarsleff primarily identifies Locke with the
Essay for the nineteenth century, he points out that Of the Conduct of the Understanding was the second most published of Locke's works, going through ten editions in the century.
Henry Hallam speaks approvingly of it (Conduct v), and there is evidence that Gerard Manley Hopkins was familiar with it
(8). The heyday for the Conduct was not the nineteenth but the eighteenth century, as W.S. Howell has noted:
Of the Conduct of the Understanding and its parent work An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, were without question the most popular, the most widely read, the most frequently reprinted, and the most influential, of al1 English books of the eighteenth century . (277) The Conduct, Howell continues, "was often used in British universities as a textbook on logic" (278). Locke's text is composed of forty-five brief chapters encompassinq a variety of topics ranging from religion to mathematics.
Three chapters f rom the Conduct , "Reading," "Words, and "~imiles," buttress some of the key points of the 1853 t'Preface, echo the practical aims of On Translating Homer, and build upon or modify some of the Lockean views of language Arnold had previously encountered in the Essay. The chapter on "Readingu speaks strongly to Arnold's insistence in the Vrefacetlfor a strong subject and a careful consideration of the whole argument of the text to gain any real benefit from it. It is Locke's chapters on ''Words1' and "Sirnilesu that establish some provocative links with Arnold's own thoughts about language . We recall that in the Essay Locke distinguishes between the natural imperfections of words and those abuses which increase the amount of opacity in language and make communication even more imperfect than it inevitably is. Arnold quoted Joubert's aim to achieve transparency in language with approval, and we noted how much of the practical advice in the lectures on Homer is concerned with making words as clear as possible in the transmission of meaning. The chapter entitled "Words" f rom the Conduct essentially restates what Locke considers to be one of the chief abuses of language in the Essay: They who would advance in knowledge ... should lay down this as a fundamental rule, not to take words for things ... till they can frame clear and distinct ideas of those entities. (Conduct 65) At the conclusion of the chapter, Locke offers a convenient 32 tenet for the use of words which can be read as his version of the aim for transparency in language that Arnold found so appealing in Joubert: "Words are not meant to conceal, but to declare and shew [sic] somethingu (66). Arnold's ambivalence to language is centred on the idea that words, although they are naturally obscure, can be made more so through their irnproper use, effectively hampering proper communication. Thus both Arnold and Locke direct their energies at how we can best use these tools to reduce their opacity. This is the principle behind Locke's catalogue of remedies for the abuse of language. In the Essay the most highly criticized abuse of words is rhetoric, partially because it is the most deliberate. Locke does admit that rhetoric is also one of the more effective uses of words. Locke's famous attack on rhetoric at the end of Book III of the Essay concludes:
1 confess, in Discourses, where we seek rather Pleasure and Delight, than Information and
Improvement, such Ornzments...can scarce pass for Faults. But yet, if we would speak of Things as
they are, we must allow, that al1 the Art of
Rhetorick, besides Order and Clearness, al1 the artificial and figurative application of Words
Eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong Ideas, move the ~assions, and thereby mislead the Judgement; and so indeed are perfect cheat.... (3.10.34) However, when Locke cornes to examine figurative language in the Conduct his attitude remains suspicious but is also more accommodating: For those are always more acceptable in discourse, who have the way to let in their thoughts into other men's minds with the greatest ease and facility.. .They who in their discourse strike the fancy, and take their hearersf conceptions along with them as fast as their words flow, are the applauded talkers ...Nothing contributes so much to this as similes ...But it is one thing to think right, and another thing to know the right way to lay Our thoughts before others with advantage and clearness, be they right or wrong. Well chosen similes, metaphors, and allegories, with method and order, do this the best of any thing, because being taken from objects already known and familiar to the understanding, they are conceived as fast as spoken; and, the correspondence being concluded, the
thing they are brought to explain and elucidate is thought to be understood too ...Figured and metaphorical expressions do well to illustrate more
abstruse and unfamiliar ideas which the mind is not
yet accustomed to. (Conduct 73) In this passage Locke makes the important qualification 3 4 between thinking in figures and communicatiny through them. He grudgingly concedes the effectiveness and perhaps the necessity of the latter. He does, however, place certain important restrictions on figurative lanquage, namely that its adoption be used in the service of one of the two essential functions of language--the I'dispatchH of communication. Locke's insistence on the speed of communication is not dissimilar to Arnold's admiration of Homer's rapidity and his views on etymology and reading. Perhaps the three most important words of the passage are Locke's qualifications of l'method and order" in the use of metaphors, allegories, and similes. We immediately think of Arnold's tamous Tyrian trader simile in 'The Scholar Gipsy'? and the epic similes of Sohrab and Rustum. To summarize: Arnold's distrust of language is well known. As Riede argues, it arises from his ~~simultaneous mystification and demystification of poetic language" (25).
The 1853 "Preface," On Translating Homer, and the Clough correspondence offer an ambivalent attitude to language considered as a demystif ied, I'natural, human invention. Arnold realizes that words are tools of communication that can be used effectively by the poet to communicate ideas to the reader. This faith in the power of lanyuage when used effectively is tempered by a suspicion that it is quite often abused, as recent translations of Homer have revealed. Arnold's wariness about the proper use of langiiage springs 3 5 from a philosophical scepticism that seems quite Lockean in orientation. Languaqe is the imperfect medium through which we try to communicate thoughts to others. This does not preclude Arnold from striving after a transparer?t ideal in language as the excerpt from his essay on Joubert indicates, and which 1 repeat here: One must employ one's expressions simply as media-- as glasses, through which one's thoughts can best be
made evident. 1 know, by my own experience, how
hard this rule is to follow (Super 4: 195; my italics) . 1 return to the statement, this time, to emphasize Arnold's persona1 aside about the difficulty of attempting to make languaye a transparent medium. "Joubert1' was originally delivered as a lecture in 1863. The difficulty that Arnold mentions surely refers to his experience as a poet. In the next chapter 1 would like to begin to examine that experience which is initiated by Arnold's first volume, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems. It is important to remember that these poems were composed prior to Arnold's encounter with Locke's Conduct of the Understanding, and they contain some of Arnold's most Lockean and sceptical notions (as expressed in the Essay) about the nature and imperfections of language. Chapter Two: Fragments
In "Parting,'' a lyric from the llSwitzerlandqtseries, Arnold memorably summarizes his dilemma as a failed lover--a predicament that, in fact, extends well beyond the province of
love : Far, far from each other Our spirits have grown; And what heart knows another? Ah! who knows his own? (71-74) The 1840s might accurately be called the Sturm und Drang period of Matthew Arnold in a biographical, poetical, and, as I will argue, linguistic sense. The decade is bracketed on
one side by the death of Dr. Arnold in 1842 and on the other
by the failure of love at Thun in the autunn of 1849. Dr. Arnold was spared the disappointment of his son's second class Oxford degree, but he was also denied the pleasure of Matthewfs surprising Oriel fellowship. As Lubbell has indicated, these are the years of Arnoldqs heaviest
philosophical reading (251), and yet it is also the period when Arnold, a notorious Oxford dandy, travels to France infatuated with the French actress Rachel (later the subject of three elegiac sonnets). Many critics have devoted a great deal of attention to biographical readings of the poerns of The
Strayed Reveller and especially the lqSwitzerland'lseries.' The poetry of The Strayed Reveller is Arnold's 37 problematic attempt to know himself--as the last line from Vartingt' quoted above indicates-and settle on his vocation as a poet. Douglas Bush has elucidated one of Arnold's fundamental assumptions about the improvement of society, and I believe that that assumption is put into practice in Arnold's early poetry: Arnold believed that the improvement of society begins at home, with the individual's very difficult task of improving himself, his own ways of thought, feeling, and action. (xix) The poetics of facility still lie in the future. Intimately involved in Arnold's quest to settle and define his vocation as a poet adequately, in these early poems, is an investigation to discover the nature and possibilities of his medium. It is that important aspect of Arnold's search that
I wish to emphasize in my examination of some of the poems from The Strayed Reveller. But what strategy should one adopt to analyze this initial volume? There are two general approaches to this question. The first, which is A.D. Culler's, helieves that the poems that make up The Strayed Reveller (and even the entire Arnoldian oeuvre) "cohere perf ectlyl' (Culler 3) to form a unified system and philosophy. Later critics--Alan Grob, for example, in his fine essay on l'Mycerinus'v--haveattempted to loosen such rigidly absolute assertions. 1 concur with Grob's approach, and Arnold himself seems to address the 38 problem of poetic unity in a letter to his sister: Fret not yourself to make my poems square in al1 their parts.. .The true reason why parts suit you
while others do not is that my poems are fragments
i. e. that 1 am fragments, while you are a whole; the
whole effect of my poems is quite vague & indeterminate. .. a person therefore who endeavoured to make them accord would only lose his labour.
(Lang 143) The poems of The Strayed Reveller are fragments of a restless search to define the role of the poet in the modern world. Several of these fragments are also part of a restless search into the nature of the poet's medium--1anguage. David Riede has argued along these lines:
The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849) returns over and over again to questions about the poet's
relation to his age, his relation to nature, his
vision, his voice, his languaqe. (30)
However, what 1 wish to ernphasize in this chapter is that Arnoldts investigation into the nature and possibilities of language yields results and tendencies in these poems that are distinctly Lockean. In the pages that follow, three of these
"fragmentsu from The Strayed Reveller will be examined.
"Resignation, "The Strayed Reveller, and "A Mernory Pictureft are markers--snapshots so to speak-of Arnold's inquiries into and uneven development of Lockean ideas about language. Before 3 9 we turn to these three poems, it is important to contrast them with Arnold's partial rejection of expressive theories of language. We must remember, throughout the discussion that follows, that Arnold's exposure to Locke as he composed and collected the poems of the 1840s is limited to An Essay concerninq Human Understanding and Cousin's critique of it. Arnold had not yet encountered Locke's more practical and flexible advice about language in Of the Conduct of the Understanding. The attitude to language in Book III of the Bssay is generally sceptical, and Locke argues that language that does not attempt to concern itself with the direct communication of ideas is an abuse of the medium of communication. Words that are deliberately manipulated in the interests of rhetoric are
"perfect cheat" (3.10.34). Among the techniques for the manipulation of language treated in Aristot.lelsRhetoric (a required text for Arnold at Oxford) is pathos or the appeal to the emotions.' Arnold's attitude to expressive theories of language in The Strayed Reveller is reflected in two poems from the volume: "The
Voice" and "The Forsaken Merman." In "The VoicetlArnold acknowledges the appeal of languaye to the emotions. However, this appeal has a dmgerous seductiveness which ultimately fails: Those lute-like tùnes which in the byyone year Did steal into mine ear- Blew such a thrilling summons to my will, Yet could not shake it;
Made my tossed heart its very life-blood spill, Yet could not break it. (35-40) The emotional appeal of languaqe cannot overcome the primary importance of meaning. This is especially true in this poem when the voice, generally believed to be Newman's, preaches Tractarian dogma.
The same pattern of acknowledgement and rejection is repeated and, in this case, dramatized in "The Forsaken
Merman," which, because of its subtle handling of metre, repetition, and imagery, was ironically linked to the early poetry of Tennyson--Victorian England's most distinguished practitioner of the poetry of sensation. Early in the poem, the Merman urges his children to cal1 to Margaret: Call her once before you go-- Call once yet! In a voice that she will know: 'Margaret! Margaret! ' Childrenls voices should be dear (Call once more) to a mother's ear;
Childrenls voices, wild with pain--
Surely she will corne again! (10-17)
The last four lines of the passage are concerned with the affective power of expressive language and, significantly , that language fails to move Margaret. The supernatural voice 4 1 of the Merman and his children cannot shake her Erom the languaqe of the "holy book" she reads in the grey church on the windy hill. I believe, with Frank Giordano, that Margaret is as much the heroine of this poem as the Merman may be the hero. Part of Margaret's rejection of the Merman is a rejection of his language and the expressive languaye he counsels the children to adopt in their cries to her. The fact that the rejected voice of the Merman is both expressive and supernatural is important. Riede has pointed out that the voice Arnold repeatedly discovers in his early poetry is, despite divinely authoritative aspirations, unmistakably human. The language of the New Sirens is "just another human voice, with no particular authority, no particular powerl1
(50). In the analysis of the three poems that follows, we may see that this human voice is tinged with Lockean ideas and assumptions. l'Resignationllis the concluding poem in The Strayed
Reveller, but chronologically it is one of the earliest compositions in the volume.' While it is primarily concerned with the role and nature of the poet in the post-Romantic age, it addresses the crucial and related questions of the origin and nature of language itself. The poern is clearly based on Wordsworthls "Tintern Abbey," and, as U.C. Knoepflmacher and others have indicatedtJ it is an inversion of the Wordsworthian vision of nature. Arnold and his sister Jane (the speaker and Fausta of the poem, respectively) return to 4 2 a familiar landscape a decade later with the death of their father intervening. Conscious of this fact, the speaker discovers an indifferent nature: Still this wild brook, the rushes cool,
The sailing foam, the shining pool!
These are not changed; and we, you Say,
Are scarce more changed, in truth, than they. (104-
O7 As the poem reaches its climax, the question of the origin and nature of language is raised indirectly: Yet Fausta, the mute turf we tread, The solemn hills around us spread,
The stream which falls incessantly, The strange-scrawled rocks, the lonely sky,
If I might lend their life a voice Seem to bear rather than rejoice. (265-70; my italics) Nature is silent, characterized by the "mute turf." The speaker seems more willing to entertain the plausible suggestion that the animating force in nature is the human voice that is lent, or metaphorically trmsferred, to the natural world. The interest in the human voice and language corresponds to the note-book entry quoted in the "Introduction" where Arnold weighed the possibilities of both natural and divine origins of language. In this poem he endorses the former, but, typically, he is never dogmatic. 4 3 There may be evidence in the 'lstrange-scrawled rocksl1 of a language that is not human but it is indecipherable, and, as Allott notes, the marks have a scientific explanation (Poems 100n). Arnold's interest in language as a human faculty (while not ruling out the possibility of a supernatural counterpart or complement) parallels and diverges from Locke's ideas on the subject stated in the opening lines of Book III of An Essay concerning Human Understanding: God having designed Man for a sociable Creature, made him not only with an inclination, and under a necessity to have fellowship with those of his own kind; but furnished him also with Language, which was to be the great Instrument, and common Tye of
Society. Man therefore had by Nature bis Organs so fashioned, as to be fit to frame articulate Sounds,
which we cal1 Words. (3.1.1) For both Arnold and Locke, language is primarily a human faculty which holds men togetiier and responds to human needs, concerns, and observations. Where they differ is in thejr degree of certainty about the origin of language. Arnold is concerned, in this volume and this poem, with the hurnan voice, but he agnostically refuses to rule out the possibility of a divine origin for language. Locke, on the other hand, is much more convinced that language, initially, is God-given. He is careful to qualify this as the power of language (Vit to framet') and not the gift of a complete vocabulary. Regardless 44 of their respective degrees of (un)certainty as to the origin of language, both men are essentially concerned with lanyuage as a human production, as Arnold's climactic moment in "Re~ignation'~indicates. "ResignationIg is not Arnold's only attempt to discover and ultimately deny the presence of a non-human, authoritative voice in nature. The opening lines of his Oxford prize poem uCromwellt~begin with the personif ication of the natural wor ld along Wordsworthian lines. The opening fourteen lines explore the possibilities of a voice in nature using words such as tgvoice, "tone, "chant, I'scream, and "cadence. However , the narrator of the poem establishes al1 of this only to deny it in favour of the development of the human voice of the protagonist (29).
When we read uResignationu in its context in The Strayed Reveller, it seems like the culmination of a quest and a discovery, on Arnold's part, that language is distinctively human and can be used to animate the natural world. However, if we consider that it is one of the earlier compositions of
The Strayed Reveller (in fact, it was composed only a few months after Vr~mwell~~), we can read it as a prologue to the entire volume. Arnold arrives, very early, at the realization that language and voice (whatever their ultimate and perhaps unknowable origins) are human faculties, and this recognition leads to the distinctly Lockean ideas about language in a poem such as IlThe Strayed Reveller. It 4 5
As its eponymous status might suggest, "The Strayed Reveller" is a pivotal poem in Arnold's initial collection. While most approaches to the poern concentrate on the competing
Apollonian and Dionysion visions of the Youth,' 1 want to concentrate on a part of the poem that is almost always neglected. The exchange between Ulysses, Circe, and the Youth
(70-129) is the location of the poemlsconcern with language. This section of "The Strayed Revellerl' is an examination of two competing theories of naming, and the one which the poem endorses js indebted to Locke. The Youth shakes off the effects of Circe's intoxicating wine, observes the figure before him, and bases his knowledge on sensation in an act of naming : Who speaks? Ah, who cornes forth To thy side, Goddess, from within? How shali I name him? This spare, dark-featured,
Quick-eyed stranger?
Ah, and 1 see too His sailor's bonnet His short-coat, travel-tarnished, With one arm bare!--
Art thou not he, whom fame This long tirne rumours The favoured guest of Circe, brought by the waves? The wise Ulysses .... (99-112) 46 The Youth catalogues al1 the various ideas that are presented to his senses and assigns the name Ulysses. While obviously not an exact parallel to Locke, the passage seems undeniably linked with the Essayls explanation of the process of naming complex ideas : For the connexion between the loose parts of those
complex Ideas, being made by the Mind, this union, which has no particular foundation in Nature, would cease again, were there not something that did, as it were, hold it together, and keep the parts from scattering. Though therefore it be the Mind that
makes the Collection, 'tis the Name which is, as it
were the Knot, that ties them fast together. What a vast variety of different Ideas, does the word
Triumphus hold together. (3.5.10) The same might be said for the variety of ideas that are tied together by the name Ulysses. Of course, the situation is complicated by the fact that the Youth is describing a proper name and the catalogue of sensations is supplemented by various intertextual references to Homer. But, fundamentally, Locke's theory of naming is a presence in this section of the poem. A parallel instance of this act of naming occurs at the beginning of Tïistram and Iseult, when the narrator draws Our attention away from the initial dramatic moment to name Tristram and Iseult of Brittany. The naming of Ulysses by the Youth also illustrates one 47 of the central tenets of Locke's language theory, namely that the connection between the word or sign and the idea or signif ied is an arbitrary one. This is, perhaps, clearer when we compare the act of naming that the Youth performs with the act of naming (or failure to name) attempted by Ulysses: Hast thou then lured hither, Wonderful Goddess, by thy art, The Young, languid-eyed Ampelus, Iacchus' darling-- Or some youth beloved of Pan,
Of Pan and the Nymphs? That he sits, bending downward His white, delicate neck To the ivy-wreathed marge
Of thy cup; the bright, glancing vine-leaves That crown his hair, Falling forward, mingling
With the dark ivy-plant .... (76-88) Ulysses is unable to name definitively the figure before him and can only offer possibilities. His conjecture that it is Ampelus is interesting. The allusion is to Ovid where the youth Arnpelus received, from Bacchus, a vine that now bears his name. Ulysses sees the various vines intertwining with the creature before him and seeks to narne him on criteria that are not primarily arbitrary. The opposition between the
Youthts and Ulysses's acts of naming is not neatly 48 antithetical, but we can observe that Ulysses strives for a more natural connection between name and idea (complex or otherwise). This has been a central problem in theories of language since Plato's Cratylus. Clearly, the poem advocates the Lockean theory by voicing it through the Youth who is the didactic force in the poem for Ulysses, Circe, and the reader. The issue of the arbitrariness of language leads us to one other poem in The Strayed Reveller. "A Memory PictureI1 betrays Arnold's realization of the inherent weakness in language, and it is an excellent transition to the llSwitzerland'lseries which explores this weakness through the failure of love. The central theme of the "SwitzerlandM poerns is human isolation, and this condition is exacerbated by the natural imperfection of language which 1 discussed in the previous chapter with reference to "To Marguerite--Continued.I1
"A Memory Picturel'explores the troubled relationship and ultimate incompatibility between Locke's two offices of language. Locke defines the "double use of Wordsl' in the third book of the Essay: I1First,One for the recording of Our own Thoughts. Secondly, The othor for the communicating of Our
Thoughts to othersfl (3.9.1). For the speaker of 'lA Memory Pictuire," the composition of the poem offers a chance to preserve his experience and feelings in language. The refrain of the poem "Quick, thy tablets, Memory!" continually links this mental faculty with language. Locke notes that any word, if used consistently, can serve to fix thoughts and ideas in 4 9 memory: "A Man may use what Words he pleases, to signify his own Ideas to himself: and there will be no imperfection in them, if he constantly use the same sign for the same Idea (3.9.2) . In this poem, the fourth, firth, and sixth stanzas al1 begin with a description of some physical aspect of Marguerite but quickly point the speaker and reader to a significance that is complete only to the former. It is clear that the act of recording his thoughts in language has satisfied the speaker: Yet, if little stays with man, Ah, retain we al1 we can!
If the clear impression dies,
Ah, the dim remembrance prize! (53-62) The description of Marguerite reveals little to us compared to the satisfaction of the speaker who seems to retain a degree of privacy in the significance of Marguerite by only hinting at the story behind the physical description. To the reader the description of the 'IarchH chin is frustrating because it keeps us at the surface of things and never allows us the same full significance of I1archl1the speaker experiences. We can infer and conjecture what it may mean exactly but that is all. We are thrust into the position of the speaker's friends who accuse him: What, my friends, these feeble lines Show, you Say, my love declines?
To paint il1 as I have done, 50
Proves forgetfulness begun? (49-52)
The speaker of "A Memory Picturettreceives more from his words about Marguerite, because they function only as a record of persona1 thoughts. As instruments of communication, they are misunderstood, misinterpreted, or elusive to his auditors. The poem balances a faith in the personal utility of languaye with a growing recognition of its inadequacy to bridge the isolation we al1 live in. In a poem written about two years later, "The Youth of Nature," the personif ied voice of nature (included here, likely, in a tribute to the recently deceased Wordsworth) condemns al1 attempts to communicate in various mediums: ItYe express not yourselves; can you make/With marble, with colour, with word,/What charmed you in others re-live?"
(107-09). In these three poems we have evidence of Arnold's fragmented engagement with Lockean ideas of language. The human voice which is repeatedly found in The Strayed Reveller is distinctively Lockean. The volume closes on the verge of Arnold's gradua1 shift in thinking about poetry. In a letter to his sister he notes:
More and more 1 feel bent against the modern English habit (too much encouraged by Wordsworth) of using
poetry as a means for thinking aloud, instead of making anything. (Lang 141) The poems from The Strayed Reveller are a register of Arnold's ''thinking aloud" on many things including, as we have just 51 seen, language. His desire to I1make somethingl' in poetry culminates in the poetics of the 1853 I1Preface. This theory of poetry (the poetics of facility) with its primary concern over contents and ideas would require a medium much more effective than the one explored in "A Memory Picture. The
"lovely notest1directed from one human island to another in
"To Marguerite--Continuedl' would have to be made much more transparent. Once again Arnold finds a philosophical ally in Locke, this time in Of the Conduct of the Understanding.
Locke's advice in this text would offer aid in service of a transparent medium that would be put to the test in Arnold's poetic failures and triumphs of the 1850s and 1860s. Chapter Three: Tensions
By the early 1850s Arnold's career as a poet had reached a critical stage, and the persistence of his doubts about the effectiveness of language as a medium of communication contributed to this crisis. The poems of The Strayed Reveller and the 'vSwitzerlandl'series are a record of the poet's quest to find an authoritative voice, but more often than not the voices that these poems uncover are human. Furthermore, the language that Arnold discovers is, frequently, Lockean in many of its characteristics. The central dilemma of Locke's linguistic theory is its scepticism towards the ability of language to assist in an exact correspondence of ideas between speaker and auditor, and it was ideas that were coming to assume a prominent place in
Arnold's conception of poetry. We can see that Arnold's interest in and development of Lockean ideas about languaye add a darker tone to the persistent Arnoldian theme of isolation. This theme, of course, is not limited to Arnold and takes on a variety of manifestations in the Victorian period. As J. Hillis Miller has said, "His [Man's] situation is essentially one of disconnection: disconnection between man and nature, man and man, even between man and himselPt (2) . It is the second of these forms of isolation that has an impcrtant bearing on Arnold, not only as a theme in his poetry but in his conception of the poet as the facilitator of a 53 poetry of ideas and actions. W.S. Johnson, echoing Miller, states the trepidation this realization of isolation carries: Vt takes the form of anxiety as to whether a person so isolated can know the world, his fellows, or himself, whether he can achieve any sort of knowledgeIf (39). This anxiety can be traced in the shift from the relative placidity of the image of human islands separated by moonlit, echoing straits to the darker vision of the concluding lines of ftDoverBeachtf: I1And we are here as on a darkling plain/Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,/Where ignorant armies clash by nighttl (35-37). The theme of human isolation and the contribution of language to that disconnection, issues which had been developing throughout Arnold's early poetry, culminate in his first major long effort, Empedocles on Etna. The failure of language in this poem has been noted by Riede: But the drama is designed to emphasize failed communications in other more obvious ways as well ...Indeed, Empedoclest consistent misunderstanding of Calliclesl songs wonderfully epitomizes the problem of the modern poet who can
never make himself properly understood, cannot
communicate by poetry. (81) Unlike Callicles, Arnold realizes the problem of the modern poet in making himself properly understood. The result of this realization is the poetic creed of the 1853 "PrefaceU and 54
an increased awareness on Arnold's part to strive for a
greater transparency in his medium.
The 'fPrefacefl to the Poems of 1853, as we noted earlier,
emphasizes ideas and actions in poetry, and claims that it is the responsibility of the poet to facilitate the transmission of these ideas and actions to the reader. However, Arnold's suspicion of the natural opacity of language creates a dilemma. As Riede points out, llArnold s ideal, as always, was 'to see the object as in itself it really is, ' and he was evidently Secoming increasingly convinced thatpoetic language could only get in the waytt (95). As 1 argued in the first chapter, Arnold, once again, turned to Locke, but this time it was not to the Essay but rather to the Conduct of the
Understanding. Locke's practical advice in this text is designed not so much to solve the problem of the opacity of words, but rather to reduce it through the effective manipulation of language in similes and metaphors. Locke's advice, which 1 repeat here from the first chapter, seems to speak directly to Arnold's desire for a more transparent language to serve a poetry of ideas and actions:
But it is one thing to think right, and another
thing to know the right way to lay Our thoughts before others with advantage and clearness, be they
right or wrong. Well chosen similes, metaphors and
allegories, with method and order, do this the best
of anything, because taken from objects already 5 5
known and familiar to the understanding, they are conceived as fast as spoken; and the correspondence being concluded, the thing they are brought to explain and elucidate is thought to be understood
too. (73; my italics)
In this chapter and the next 1 wish to explore Arnold's application of Locke's advice for achieving (or at least approaching) transparency in language. This chapter will concentrzte on two zf Arnold's longer forays into narrative poetry in the 1850~~while the following chapter will study some of his lyrical accomplishments from the same period. It is important to remember that neither Locke nor Arnold ever asserts that a perfectly transparent medium is attainable. Riede argues: "Arnold's ideal of a transparent language is, of course, simply impossible to attain or even approachl' (97). And yet Arnold, in adopting Locke's qualified endorsement of the simile as a strategy for transparency, did try to approach it. The question of his success or failure will be addressed in the pages that follow. Arnold's treatment of the simile in his two long narrative poems from the mid 1850s, Sohrab and Rustum and Balder Dead, is characterized by a tension which arises from its equivocal use. Arnold's desire to employ the simile as a technique for linguistic transparency in these poems is severely hampered by his adoption of the narrative, Homeric f orm. 56
Why the sirnile? Locke offers simile, metaphor, and allegory as options in the Conduct, but if we survey Arnold's poetry the first alternative on the list seems to be his preference. One of the earliest theorists of the simile is
Aristotle, who treats it in the third book of the Rhetoric. We have evidence that Aristotle's text appears on Arnold's curriculum for every term he was at Oxford.' Aristotle, like Locke, warily advocates style, and figurative lanyuage in particular, as an aid to instruction and communication. A simile, as Aristotle repeatedly asserts in the chapters on style, is a subordinate form of metaphor and properly belongs to the province of poetry.' McCall has offered the following summary of Aristotlets position on the simile:
It is better fitted for poetry than for prose; it will always be more extended than metaphor; its instructive potential, for reasons of length and poetic nature, is diluted, rendering it less
valuable as a stylistic figure than metaphor. (51-
52 In the Conduct Locke does not classify the various types of figures. 1 think Arnold's preference for the simile over metaphor and allegory as a technique for linguistic transparency is more in line with a recent estimation of the figure: Unlike metaphor, which requires the reader to do the
work of constructing a logic of categories and 57 analogies, a simile states explicitly that two terms are comparable and often presents the basis for that comparison. 'Her lips are red as wine' does not leave the reader with the work that a metaphor requires. The simile is therefore in general a more controlled figure than metaphor, producinq less
excess of meaning. (McLaughlin 83) The simile is the figure of speech among those listed by Locke in the Conduct which is the least strenuous, mentally, for the reader. It is specific and controlled and has a special appeal to the poet as facilitator.
The similes of Sohrab and Rustum and Balder Dead have been of interest to critics of these poems from the moment they appeared. The similes in both poems were generally attacked by Arnold's contemporary reviewers. 4 Most critics have concentrated on Arnold's most obvious use of the similes in the poem, but they have tended to ignore Arnold's simultaneous use of the figure as a technique of linguistic transparency. Sohrab and Rustum is characterized by a strong tension in Arnold's desire to use the figure as a means to reduce opacity in language and a competing aspiration to fulfil the architectonic tenets of the 1853 "Preface. Arnold's pleasure with Sohrab and Rustum is evident in a letter to his mother shortly after he completed the poem: "Al1 my spare time has been spent on a poem which 1 have just finished, and which 1 58 think by fax the best thing 1 have yet donelt (Lang 266). One aspect of the "Prefacet1we have neglected thus fart but which is worth introducing at this point, is Arnold's belief in the necessity of a strong architectonic form in poetry. Along with the choice of a worthy subject and the necessity of subordinating expression, a good poem requires careful and considered construction. Arnold, quotiny Goethe, argues that what distinguishes the artist from the amatew is llArchitectonicein the highest sense; that power of execution, which creates, forms, and con~titutes~~(Super 1: 9). A. Dwight Culler has assessed Sohrab and Rustum in such terms: Vt was his poetic Crystal Palace for the English peoplea1 (214), and the similes of the poem contribute to its careful architectonic structure.' Critics have complained that the language achieves precisely the opposite quality of transparency: "Far from being transparent, the language is showy and calls attention to its own Homeric posturest1 (Riede
104). 1 would argue that, in one sense, the similes are opaque and do cal1 attention to themselves in ways beyond the fact that they are merely epic similes. Culler, again, has argued that they form a llsymbolic typology" (212), and if we carefully study the similes of Sohrab and Rustum we see that Arnold is self-consciously employing the similes to fulfil the architectonic requirements of the I1Preface.l1One way this is achieved is through the limited subject matter of the similes.
Arnold returns again and again to images of cornfields, 59 mountains, various birds, different flowers, and pillars. The economy of Arnold's symbolic vocabulary invites comparisons between the similes, and the entire shape and action of the poem are held concurrently even as the reader progresses forward through the episode. The similes operate as a sort of artificial system through which the reader is repeatedly invited to look backwards and forwards in acts of comparison and contrast. This system of epic similes contributes to the observation about the entire poem: "one feels that it is al1 a little falsew (Culler 214) . The artificiality and sense of structure in the similes are augmented by their interaction with some of the other figures in the poem. One example which might suffice is the simile which occurs at the climactic moment of the combat between Sohrab and Rustum: And lightnings rent the cloud; and Ruksh, the horse, Who stood at hand, uttered a dreadful cry; No horsevs cry was that, most like the roar of some pained desert lion, who al1 day Hath trailed the hunter's javelin in his side,
And cornes at night to die upon the sand. (501-06) If we look forward, the simile foreshadows the imminent wound which Sohrab will receive in his side from the spear of Rustum (519-21) . If we look backward, the simile warns us that Sohrab is in grave danger. The detail of the wounded lion reminds the reader of three metaphors early in the poem which identify GO
Sohrab with a lion (91, 177, 216). Thus the simile is part of a long, carefully structured chain of figures that comment on and modify each other and invite the reader to consider the entire poem.
There are other examples of this architectonic sense, such as the various epic similes which compare Sohrab with flowers and trees (313-18, 633-39), Rustum with pillars (336-
36, 859-64), and the change from a vertical to a horizontal position in both sets of similes. Earlier I cited Culler's comparison of the poem to the Crystal Palace. The analogy is historically pertinent to the datinq of the poem, but a more accurate architectural parallel with reference to the careful structuring of the similes might be the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. The preceding discussion might suggest that Arnold's desire to use the simile as a technique of transparency is a complete failure. Perhaps we can see how Arnold may be following Locke's p.rescription if we look carefully at some individual similes and not at the intricate structure they f orm. Moments after the realization that he has rnortally wounded his son, Rustumls attempt at suicide is prevented by the dying Sohrab because, as the narrator says, "Sohrab saw his thoughtl' (706). 1 believe this is Arnold's desire for his readers as well, and he attempts to accomplish this desire through a group of memorable similes from the poem. Three 61 years earlier in the poem Valais Sands,I1Arnold complains to his future bride about their isolation from each other, and the fact that he can only "guess thy thoughtsM (29). As Amrollah Abjadian has shown, there are several important sirniles in Sohrab and Rustum; they "are not only active similes, underlying and mingling with the action of the poem, but they also externalize or objectify the internal states of the characterI1 (414). We should examine, as representative examples, two of these similes to see how Arnold may have been using them as attempts in a movement towards linguistic transparency. The first example is the famous Victorian lady simile. Sohrab initially appears, unknown, before his father, and Rustumis internal reaction is documented through an epic simile: As some rich woman, on winterts morn, Eyes through her silken curtains the poor drudge Who with numb blackened fingers makes her fire-- At cock-crow, on a starlit winterts morn, When the frost flowers the whitened window-panes--
And wonders how she lives, and what the thoughts Of that poor drudge rnay be; so Rustum eyed
The unknown adventurous youth ....(302-09)
The mental state that is externalized in the simile is curiosity. However, for Arnold, that word is far too vague and ambiguous. Everyonefs (especially the readerls) idea signified by the word %uriositytl is persona1 to a certain 62 extent. Arnold has a very specific type of curiosity in mind that he is attempting to communicate to the reader, and the fact that this simile is not orientalized is important. The images of the trope belong more to mid-Victorian England than ancient Persia. The simile dramatizes an encounter between the middle and lower classes of Victorian Enyland and adds a specific note of social disparity to Rustum's curiosity about Sohrab. There is a sense of inequality, superiority, and condescension attached to Rustum's curiosity. However, if
Arnold were to eliminate the simile and simply Say that Rustum viewed Sohrab with condescending curiosity , 1 bel ieve we would be more arrested by such words than we are by the simile. The figure not only externalizes the mental state, but it points to the fine shading and colouring of that emotion which an adjective and noun might not be able to communicate with ease or adequacy. The simile is an attempt to overcorne the dilemma which the poet confronts, armed with the imperfect medium of language which struqgles to communicate, accurately and effectively, "The nameless feelings that course through Our breast" ("The Buried Life" 62). Arnold has a specific thought he wants to show, and the simile is a vehicle to present the particularities of that idea before the reader. Paradoxically, then, the simile, which calls attention to itself in one way, also seeks to alleviate the difficulties in conveying to the reader an idea that may not in itself be easily expressible or nameable. 63 The same strategy is at work in the Bahrein diver sirnile which occurs prior to the previous example. As Rustum approaches the front of the Persian army, the narrator attempts to externalize the emotions felt by the Persian troops : And dear as the wet diver to the eyes
Of his pale wife who waits and weeps on shore, By sandy Bahrein, in the Persian Gulf, Plunging al1 day in the blue waves, at night, Having made up his tale of precious pearls, Rejoins her in their hut upon the sands--
So dear to the pale Persians Rustum came. (284-90)
The mental state delineated is easily identified in a general sense as relief, but again Arnold is interested in communicatinq a precise shade of that relief in the simile. The persona1 narrative that the simile depicts adds an exactness and a precise dimension to that general mental state which otherwise might be interpreted in any variety of ways
(and in a sense still is but to a lesser degree). This is primarily accomplished by the domestic elements in the simile which transfer the readertsthoughts from the alienating world of the battlefield to the familiar atmosphere of the family. We should remember that Locke argues, in the Conduct, that part of a similets effectiveness is its use of the familiar and the known (73). Arnold's domestication of the subject matter of the simile might be seen as an attempt to achieve 64 such familiarity.
This simile is particularly useful in demonstratiny Arnold's divided allegiances in his use of the trope. Unlike the previous example, Arnold took pains to orientalize this simile, and he notes in a letter that the Bahrein diver was originally a simple fisher, more English than Persian: "1 took great trouble to orientalize them...because I thought they looked strange, and jarred, if Western1' (Lang 281). The version of the simile in the manuscript is not clearly and exclusively English, but we sense that the Persian Gulf has been replaced with something closer to the North Sea or the Atlantic: At twilight, on a stormy eve in March, Running fast homeward with the turn of tide
Beaches the pinnace in a darkening cove ....(Poems 333n)
This version of the simile would have struck a greater chord with Arnold's English audience more accustomed to the particular shade of anxiety and relief associated with maritime travel. Indeed, Arnold would later document these same emotions in one of his last poems, entitled "S.S. Lusitania." The simile that appears in the poem attempts to show the precise nature of an emotion to the reader, but Arnold's conscious decision to orientalize it reveals a competing desire to make it function organically as part of an architectonic whole. 65 Arnold's use of the simile in Sohrab and Rustum is characterized by a tension which arises from a desire to have these tropes do too many things at once. Arnold's endeavour to follow Locke's claim that the simile can make language more transparent is hampered by his strict adherence to his own precepts in the "Preface. " Ultimately in Balder Dead, the tension in Arnold's utilization of the simile persists. Yet it is noteworthy that Arnold continues to search, through the simile, for new ways to approach transparency in language. Arnold, unlike the majority of his readers, preferred this later poem to Sohrab and Rustum and, as Mark Sieqchrist has observed, Balder Dead is far less rigidly structured: It is surely relevant to observe that while he continued to use...the prominent structural devices.. . in the later poem they are not employed to produce so rigid and static effect as they do in
Sohrab and Rustum. (58) In one sense the poem remains incomplete since Arnold long considered adding another episode depicting the death of Balder. The looser structure significantly affects Arnold's use of the simile (simple or epic) in the poem. The most discernible difference between the similes in the two poems is quantity, since the number of epic similes is reduced by more than half in Balder Dead. However, the similes in this later poem differ from those in Sohrab and 66
Rustum in other ways. The similes tbat 1 examined in the second part of the discussion of Sohrab and Rustum as externaliziny mental states account for about a third of al1 the epic similes in the poem. This group is complemented by various simile families which concernthemselves with physical comparison or noise (as we saw in the simile comparing the cry of Ruksh to the wounded lion). In Balder Dead the quantity is reduced, but the similes are more uniform in their application. The majority of the epic similes in the later poem are concerned with comparing somethiny or someone associated with the supernatural world of Valhalla and Asgard with natural phenomena and people. For example, near the end of Part 1 the ghost of Balder appears before his wife, Nanna, and then disappears. The supernatural event is compared to a phenomenon that is undeniably from the human world:
He spake, and straight his lineaments began
To fade; and Nanna in her sleep stretched out
Her arms towards him with a cry-but he
Mournfully shook his head, and disappeared.
And as a woodman sees a little smoke Hang in the air, afield, and disappear,
So Balder faded in the night away . ( 1.3 3 1-37) W.S. Johnson has commented on Arnoldfs attempt to present ideas and thoughts associated with the supernatural world of
Valhalla in distinctly human, familiar and easily accessible terms through the similes: 67 There is a contrast between epic characters, setting, and movement, al1 of which are magnif ied and formal, and the details that give a specific, even personal, quality to the poem. This contrast is enforced almost always by the Homeric similes, which Arnold introduces with reference to neither
Homer nor the Edda. (123) The contrast is vividly realized again in the poem at the moment when Hoder, on his reconnaissance mission to the realms of Hela, encounters the damsel who guards the bridge to the underworld: And on a bridge a damsel watching armed, In the strait passage, at the farther end. Scant space that warder left for passers-by;
But as when cowherds in October drive Their kine across a snowy mountain-pass To winter-pasture on the southern side, And on the ridge a waggon chokes the way, Wedged in the snow; then painfully the hinds With goad and shouting urge their cattle past, Plunging through deep untrodden banks of snow To right and left, and warm stem fills the air-- So on the bridge the damsel blocked the way.. . .
(2.87-99) With Hoder on the verge of the entrance to the underworld, Arnold offers a description that is easily recognizable and 68 pastoral. Johnson, again, has argued: "The road to Hell is blocked by a maiden just as a mountain pass is blocked by cattleu (123). Actually the vehicle of the simile is the wagon and not the cattle, but the point is well taken in its illustration of the manner in which Arnold attempted to elucidate the supernatural with the ordinary. The simile raised the ire of one contemporary reviewer who remarked:
The comparison of the damsel to the wagon is not specially poetical; and the minute details of drovers and cattle are vastly ineffective and irrelevant. There could be no object in setting a herd of oxen to stand as the type of Hermod, the swift and nimble god of northern mythology. (Forman
198) Just as in Sohrab and Rustum we witnessed Arnold attempting to use the simile to offer a degree of precision ta the vagueness embodied in words depicting complex mental and emotional states, in Balder Dead Arnold seems to organize language (through the simile) to make the unnatural more accessible to tkreader. Arnold1s description of the guardian of Hell might be compared with a parallel but inverted episode in Milton-- the description of Sin in the second book of Paradise Lost
(2.64846). Arnold's version is much more interested in presenting the scene simply and uses the simile to delineate the admittedly unfamiliar entrance to the underworld in distinctly human and natural terms. 69 The simile also indicates another way in which Balder
Dead differs from Sohrab and Rustum. Arnold does not take the trouble to scandanavianize these similes in the manner he had orientalized his earlier ones. In one sense the similes in Balder Dead stand out more than those in Sohrab and Rustum because of this, but, more importantly, they make the vehicle much more accessible to the reader and facilitate Our cornparison of the heavenly with the human. Tinker and Lowry have noted:
The two forceful similes of cattle blocked in snowy- mountain passes in October and of the traveller watching the slopes break through the valley mists at dawn are doubtless memory-pictures from
Switzerland--possibly from the English Lakes. (100) Not only are the similes a vehicle used to compare the supernatural to the human and the natural, but that human world is distinctly English. Johnson, commentiny on the simile where the touch of the god Hoder is compared to the slight brush of honeysuckle on a tired traveller's face
(1.229-35), notes parenthetically: "(surely English honeysuckle and an English traveller)" (123). In Balder Dead, Arnold's use of the simile is more consistent than in Sohrab and Rustum. Rather than usinq the simile to delineate the fine shades of subjective human psychology, he attempts to reduce the supernatural world, a set of ideas naturally abstract and difficult to cornprehend, 7O
to something that is extremely easy to understand. So once
again, Arnold seeks to get beyond mere words to the ideas that lie behind them by using the self-consciously literary figure of the simile. Of course this is not nearly transparent, but the desire to reduce the opacity and generalities of words such as t'curiosityllor I1relief," or to describe what the tactile sensation of the touch of a God might feel like, is attempted through the similes. Nevertheless, Arnold once again asks his similes to do
too many things at once. We noted earlier that Balder Dead has a much looser structure than its predecessor, and as a
result there is not the same desire to use the similes in the creation of an intratextual network. Instead, a large number of the similes participate intsrtextually with other epics by Homer, Virgil, and Milton. One such example is a simple simile employed to describe the various spirits in Hell: IfThen he must not regard the wailful ghosts/Who al1 will flit, like eddying leaves aroundtl (1.176-77) . Unlike the similes in Sohrab and Rustum, this trope is not connected to other
similes in Balder Dead. However, the similes in Sohrab and Rustum were either Arnold's invention or alluded to only one classical or Miltonic predecessor. In this example (and a qreat many others in the poem) Arnold's similes contain double (and once even triple) echoes and reminiscences of earlier epics. In the simile above the echoes are to both The Aeneid
(6.309-10) and Paradise Lost (1.302003) . Arnold may employ 7 1 these multiple echoes and al lusions to increase the comparative field for the reader, but the main result of the practice is to draw the reader away from the ideas in the poem
at hand and into the network of echoes and allusions. It is
a different technique from Sohrab and Rustum, but it also works against the desire (if not complete attainment) of
linguistic transparency and towards the language of the similes themselves. The success of Arnold's use of the simile in these two narrative poems is aecidedly mixed. In varying degrees the similes, by their epic form, intratextual and intertextual dimensions, cal1 attention to themselves and stand apart as decorative and opaque. However, in both of these poems, we
see Arnold trying to manipulate these figures to ease and clarify communication. In one poem he tries to externalize those particular human mental states in their finer and more precise shades, and in the other he tries to reduce the formidable and often foreign ideas of the supernatural to something familiar, domestic, and pastoral through the vehicle of the simile. As always his desire is to use language to communicate with accuracy. However, the two directions in which these similes are often simultaneously pulling hinder this desire irrevocably. In a rather frigid elegiac poem entitled IfMatthew Arnold," W.H. Auden says that Arnold Vhrust his gift in prison till it diedl1 (3). Although in the context of Auden's poem the speaker is referring to the baneful influence of Dr. Arnold on his son, we might consider the statement with reference to Arnold's use of the simile in these narrative poems. The possibilities of a more transparent language subservient to the accurate communication of ideas are entombed within the restrictive generic form and tradition prescribed by Arnold in his own critical agenda. George Eliot may well have been thinking of the partial success of the similes when she described the effect of Arnold's poetry in an
1855 article for the Westminster Review: The thought is always refined and unhackneyed,
sometimes new and sublime, but he seems not to have found the winged word which carries the thought at
once to the mind of the reader. (129) Although these narrative experiments and their similes were met with mixed admiration, several of Arnold's lyrics were highly praised in the 1850s. Prominent among these triumphs is "The Scholar Gipsy , which contains, perhaps, Arnold ' s most famous simile. Coventry Patmore said that l'The Scholar Gipsy" should lead IIMr. Arnold to consider whether the acceptance this poem is sure to win, does not prove to him that it is bettor to forget al1 his poetic theories" (119). With such high praise we should turn to Arnold's lyrical poetry from this period to see if his quest for linguistic transparency is successful. Chapter Four: Strategies
As pieces such as Sohrab and Rustum and Balder Dead appeared for public perusal, Arnold produced another group of poems far less rigid in structure and imitative in manner. Three of these poems have gone a long way in securing Arnold's place as an important and representative Victorian voice. "Dover Beach,'* %tanzas From the Grande Chartreuse, and "The Scholar GipsyIf can be labelled, with a certain degree of confidence, as Arnold's three principal poetic achievements. "Dover Beachi'has a secure status as Arnold's most popular and anthologized poem, "Stanzas From the Grande Chartreuse1' contains, arguably, Arnold's most famous lines, and l'The Scholar Gipsyw is generally considered to be his masterpiece. Significantly, these poems also contain some of Arnold's more celebrated and controversial similes. In the previous chapter we traced Arnold's mixed use of the simile in his longer narrative works. Arnold's desire to adopt the figure to delineate in a very precise and familiar manner private, psychological states or complex and vague supernatural phenomena is undermined by the concurrent adoption of the simile partially to fulfil the architectonic requirements imposed by his own 1853 "Preface." The poems 1 wish to consider in this chapter cm al1 be classified under the broad rubric of the lyric. Virginia Carmichael states that Arnold offers us "a body of fractured poetryf' (GI) that 74 frequently defies generictags. This seems especially true of the three poems 1 wish to examine in this chapter. Al1 three works mix genres and sub-genres f reely . 'IDover Beach" utilizes aspects of the serenade, the invitation, and the sonnet for various purposes and effects.' Elements of the quest romance and pastoral govern the early sections of I1Stanzas From the Grande Chartreuse" and l'The Scholar Gipsytg respect ively , before a kind of Empedoclean philosophic statement dominates the second half of both poems. Carmichael has noted the varying degrees of emphasis between subjectivity and objectivity between and within Arnold's lyrics. It is the emphasis that these poems place on ideas, and, more precisely, the relation between the central ideas of these poems and their various similes that will be the general focus of the pages which follow. Despite their strong subjective elements, these poems are f irmly entrenched in the camp of the "poetry of ideas." In lgMemorialVerses, Arnold praises Goethe's particular faculty: He took the suffering human race, He read each wound, each weakness clear; And struck his finger on the place,
And said: Thou ailest here, and here! (19-22) Although Arnold calls Goethe "the physician of the iron age"
(17), he might be called, more accurately, the era's diagnostician, and Arnold later admits that the poet of Weimar I1was happy, if to know/Causes of thingsl@ (29-30) . In "Dover Beach,If "Stanzas From the Grande Chartreuse,
and "The Scholar Gipsyl' Arnold seeks to inherit Goethe's mantle and is interested not only in reading "each weakness
clear/' but also in the communication of these ideas and diagnoses of the age with ease and lucidity. Once again Arnold turns, with Locke's advice from the Conduct of the Understanding, to the simile as a method for communicating ideas with clarity. Unlike the poems from the previous
chapter , the "method and ordePt (Conduct 7 3 ) that Locke cautions in the use of the simile are not determined or imposed by an imprisoning and rigidly conventional form. Arnold adopts, in the three central lyrics, various strategies in his use of the simile. These strategies are attempts to
f ind the best "method and order'' for the figure which will clearly and effectively convey the ideas of the poem to the reader. I wish to consider, in varying degrees, three particular aspects of these similes that have a bearing on Arnold's search for "method and orderIf in his use of these figures; first, the placement of the major similes within the poem;
second, the relationship of the subject matter of the simile with the imagery and diction of the rest of the poem; and third, the relation or function of these similes (reiteration, development, contradiction) to the central ideas of these lyrics .
"Dover Beacht1 has been celebrated by critics as Arnold's 76
Ivmost famous of lyricsf! (Madden 64) and "his most perfect work of art" (Bush 40). In a telling comment Warren Anderson remarks :
With the possible exception of The Waste Land, no other poem of the nineteenth and twentieth century
captures the isolation of modern man as does "Dover Beach,'! with its use of the Thucydidean night
battle. (285) It is interesting that Anderson's high estimation of the poemfs achievement is linked to one of the poem's two memorable similes. Although "Dover Beachu was published in
1867, the evidence points to a much earlier initial composition date in the summer of 1851 when the Arnolds spent a night in Dover durinq their honeymoon.' This early date is important since it indicates that "Dover BeachH is Arnold's first significant poetic production following his encounter with Locke's Conduct of the Understanding eight months earlier. A great deal of critical attention has been directed at two of the poemls similes, and we should explore the relationship of these two figures to Arnold's melancholy diagnosis of a world characterized by an isolation occasioned by the gradua1 withdrawal of faith.
The first of these similes seems, initially, to work in ways antithetical to Locke's belief that a carefully chosen simile can communicate with ease and clarity: The Sea of Faith 77 Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
(21-23) Arnold's desire to elucidate the state of faith as it once existed leads him into trouble here with his use of the simile. Critics generally agree with George Ford that the last line quoted above is a tldifficultttone (1366n), and William Ulmer justifiably calls the I1bright girdleIt simile
"the most enigmatic image in 'Dover Beachtt1 (54). My interest in the simile is not, as it is with so many others, with why Arnold switched ttgarment"to tfgirdle"in his revision of the poem, but rather in the structure of the simile and the steps we as readers must go through in order to appreciate the full force of this ingenious trope. Essentially, Arnold attempts to control his simile through an iconographie correspondence between the creases and folds of the furled garment and the rippled and rouqh appearance of the successive waves on a full and active sea. However, the difficulty of the simile is apparent when one attempts to gloss the figure in the manner above. Arnold is not simply comparing the appearance of the sea to the image of the girdle. Both images are directed back to the idea of faith and its previous state of plentitude. Before we even encounter the "bright girdle" simile, we are forced into the mental labour of making sense of Arnold's metaphor of "The Sea of Faith." Only then can we move to the simile which 78 establishes the iconographic degree of similitude. The figure is the conclusion of a two-stage troping process. The effectiveness of the simile depends on the effort of the reader to carry over the meaning and comprehension from the
Vies of Faithl'metaphor to the "bright girdle." Althouqh the simile may be, as McLaughlin indicates, the most controlled and least mentally taxing figure, the placement of it in such a close relationship to the metaphor of IlThe Sea of Faithql actually works against this facility. All of this mental work is contrasted with the relatively simple troping activity of the Greek tragedian: Sophocles long ago Heard it on the Aegean, and it brouqht Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow Of human misery .... (15-18) Sophocles listens to the sea and, in one mental step, equates it with human misery. This process is markedly simpler than the multiple stages that the "bright girdleIq simile requires to gather its full significance. Despite the difficulties that attend its construction and immediate comprehension, the Ivbrightgirdle" sirnile maintains an important relationship with the "darkling plainf1 simile that ends the poem. One of the more persistent cornplaints about IqDover BeachH is the lack of unity in its imagery. The seascape of the first three-quarters of the poem gives way, in what Paul1 Baum calls "the one structural blemish of the poerntq 79
(91), to the imagery of the darklinq plain and the night battle in the concluding trope. The poem ends with a simile which alludes to Thucydides ' description of the Battle of Epipolae: And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night. (35-37) The simile can stand independently as a striking summary of Arnold's bleak vision of human ignorance and isolation, but
the figure takes on still darker hues if we consider its relationship with the "bright girdleu simile. The earlier figure referred, ultimately, to the state of faith as it once existed. Arnold implies that the garment is now unfurled to
the limits of the world--"the vast edges drear" (27). The girdle of faith is presently stretched out too tautly to the edges of the world and the image suggests a state of faith that has becorne somewhat threadbare. It offers little spiritual protection in the battle of life. Not only does this complicate the seemingly simple, certain, and untroubled assertion that "The sea is calm tonightm (1) (since the sea here iconographically resembles the present unfurled state of the garment of faith), but the confusion of the night battle becomes darker and more terrifying with the heightened sense of vulnerability and nakedness with a lack of strong (or perhaps any) spiritual arrnour/garment. We must view these two similes of "Dover Beach" with 80 mixed admiration. Arnold's development of an individual simile such as the "bright girdleM is only a partial success.
His intention of delineating the state of an abstract idea such as faith through a visual, iconographie comparison is hampered. In order to render the abstract in such physical, concrete terms, the simile is mediated through a rnetaphor in order to provide that comparative foundation. Arnold is much more successful when he moves in one step, as in the "darkling plaintvsimile, from the abstract to the concretely visual and aura1 . "Dover Beach" also initiates the familiar Arnoldian tactic of concludinq a poem with a sirnile that relates to the central ideas of the poem which has preceded it. In this case, that relationship involves a connection between the "bright girdle" and "darkling plainN similes. Critics have complained about the dichotomy in the imagery of the poem and the images in the similes illustrate that division. While it is true that the similes are not explicitly linked in the intricate manner of Sohrab and Rustum, the "bright girdle" can be seen as adding to and enriching the effect of its "darkling plain" counterpart. Both of these similes contribute to the central ideas of the poem, namely the melancholy isolation and limited position of man. The similes seem to divide the work of elucidation. The 'tbrightgirdle" simile clarifies, defines, and makes concrete the cause of man's dilemma, while the "darkling plainu figure images the effects of our isolation and ignorance. The other poem conceived on Arnold ' s honeymoon, "Stanzas from the Grande Chartre~se,~~is a more extended exploration of the ideas introduced in "Dover Beach." This poem opens with the description of a journey up a mountainside which identifies "Stanzas Fromthe Grande Chartreusev with the quest tradition. The poem continues to describe various locales within the Carthusian monastery before the speaker arrives at his crucial question: "And what am 1, that 1 am here?" (66). Arnold answers his own question and begins to introduce the dilemma of modern man with the shorter of the two important similes in the poem. Arnold has made the pilgrimage to the Grande Chartreuse not as a potential convert: But as, on some far northern strand, Thinkiny of his own Gods, a Greek In pity and mournful awe might stand Before some fallen Runic stone--
For both were faiths, and both are gone. (80-84) Once again, as in "Dover Beach, Arnold is dealing with the question of a lost faith. The cornparison between the speaker of the poem and the Greek's inability to grasp the complete significance of the Runic stone in the simile is perhaps inadvertentiy heightened through the various factual errors with regard to the life and religious rites of the monks in the description leading up to the simile. This brief simile also looks forward and points to Arnold's famous statement of 82 the dilemma of modern man--"Wandering between two worlds, one dead/The other powerless to be born" (85-86). Arnold of fers the reader an overt statement and diagnosis of the predicament facing man which affects the construction and effectiveness of the extended, significant simile that concludes the poem. The figure extends for the last thirty- nine lines of the poem but is worth quoting at length: We are like children reared in shade
Beneath some old-world abbey wall, Forgotten in a Eorest-glade, And secret from the eyes of all. Deep, deep the greenwood round them waves, Their abbey, and its close of graves! But, where the road runs near the stream,
Oft through the trees they catch a glance
Of passing troops in the suri's beam-- Pennon, and plume, and flashiny lance! Forth to the world those soldiers fare, To life, to cities, and to war! And through the wood, another way, Faint bugle-notes from far are borne, Where hunters gather, staghounds bay, Round some fair forest-lodge at rnorn.
o..
The banners flashing through the trees
O.. The bugle-music on the breeze ..* O children, what do ye reply?-- . . . Too late for us your cal1 ye blow,
Whose bent was taken long ago. ... 'Fenced early in this cloistral round
Of reverie, of shade, of prayer, How should we grow in other ground?
How can we flower in foreign air? (169-208) There are two points to be made about this extended simile.
The first concerns the literal, physical position of the children. Are they inside or outside the abbey or a mixture of both? The children have been Yeared in shade/Beneath some old-world abbey wallN (169-70). This in itself is inconclusive, but the fact that they see the banners and pennons of the soldiers seems to indicate a position outside the abbey. It is true that the children acknowledge that they have been raised in the abbey: "Fenced early in this cloistral round/Of reverie, of shade, of prayertt (205-OG), but the description is cast in the past tense. Indeed, now they hear the bugle calls of the hunters in the forest which mixes with the sound of the organ from the abbey. The reason 1 emphasize a need to locate the precise present location of the children is to examine how the simile works to clarify the poemts 84 central statement about man% modern dilemma. We miqht argue that the children are now exterior to the abbey, or perhaps it is more likely that they are at the moment of crossing the threshold into the world despite their professed allegiances to the Ityellow taper" and I%hadowed nave." The question of whether the children stand outside the abbey wall or are still physically inside the abbey with prof essed allegiance but with eyes and ears increasingly "chainedtlto the sights and sounds of the world renains unresolved, but either alternative offers that sense of "in betweenness" that is Arnold's diagnosis of modern life.
Another aspect of the simile to consider is the question of the choice of vehicle itself. Why does the speaker compare himself (and those like him) to childreii? One criiic has pointed out that the choice of the children may have been an attempt to introduce more realistic detail into the poem: It seems evident that if the final stanzas are to produce one unified image, these children must be something more than just peasant children playing near the abbey ...We must assume that Arnold had in mind, however vaguely, an ancient monastic practice of receiving into the abbey children of a very young
age. . . Not al1 the children in an abbey were intended for vows. (Boo) Arnold's choice of the children for the simile may well have been an attempt to exploit the example offered by these 85 rnonastic children who literally wander from the world of the abbey to the world of the soldiers and hunters. The children, when speaking of their aversion to the world of cities, men, and war, compare themselves to plant life: I'How should we grow in other ground?/How can we flower in foreign air?" (207-08). The only other use of the word Ifchildrennlin the poern occurs in a description of the activity which is the monksl sole connection with the outside world. The herbs which are used to produced the famous Carthusian liqueur are troped as children: The garden overgrown--yet mild, See, fragrant herbs are flowering there! Strony children of the Alpine wild Whose culture is the brethrenls care;
Of human tasks their only one,
And cheerful works beneath the Sun. (55-60) The herbs and plants begin their life in the confines of the monastery but ultimately end up (in greatly altered form) out in the world. The fate of the rnetaphorical children of the Carthusian monks moving from one world to another points to the likely fate of the children of the abbey in the simile who unwillingly sit either outside the abbey or on its threshold. The children may not want to leave the confines of the abbey but we get the sense that the decision is not theirs. I1Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse1' and I'Dover Beachu apply very different strategies in their respective use of the 86 simile. We noted earlier that the Ifbright girdle" and "darkling plainut similes arrest us initially in their distinction from the rest of the poem's imaqery. In "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuseu the concluding simile takes the subject matter of the children from elsewhere in the poem. It is important to note that the main body of the poem is set in the Carthusian monastery, while the extended simile which closes the poem is set in the precincts of an llold-world abbey. There is no radical departure from the poem in the details and setting of the simile. Indeed, as we read the simile, we tend to overlook the fact that the setting is not the ~arthusian monastery. Arnold has sought a closer identification between himself and the children of the simile by blurring the distinctions between the details and contexts of monastery and abbey. Consequently, Arnoldfs extended simile in the later poem yokes itself to the main body of the poem and blends in much more easily than the ffdarklingplain" simile at the conclusion of "Dover Beach." The use of and relationship between similes within the poem are different as well. The two major similes of lfDover BeachM elucidate the cause and effects of Arnold's diagnosis of the human conditions, while in "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse" the extended simile is more of a reassertion and concrete realization of the poemfs explicitly stated thesis of "wandering between two w~rlds.~~ "The Scholar Gipsyu is generally considered Arnold's best 87 poem and the famous Tyrian trader" simile has occasioned so much attention that Sidney Coulling has remarked: The simile of the Tyrian trader and the Grecian coaster which closes "The Scholar Gipsy" has become in Arnold's poetry what the concluding lines of 'Iode
to a Grecian Urn" have long been in Keats'. (11) Judgements of the simile's merit have been divided since the poem's appearance. George Saintsbury, writing on the cusp of this century, objected:
No ingenuity can work out the parallel between the "uncloudedly joyousl' scholar who is bid avoid the
\ palsied, diseased enfants du siecle, and the grave Tyrian who was indignant at the cornpetition of the merry Greek, and shook out more sail to seek fresh
markets, (42) More recent critics such as Alan Roper have called it "the finest ending by a poet of fine endings" (Roper 223). More so than "Dover BeachH and "Stanzas From the Grande Chartreuse," "The Scholar Gipsyw is more insistent in pointing to both the disease of modern life and the possibility of alleviation. "The Scholar Gipsyu counsels the necessity of withdrawal £rom a modern life characterized as "a strange disease" (203) with its "divided aimsu (204) which make everyone, willingly or not, into a Victorian Hamlet. The cure for the disease of modern life is drarnatized through the scholar-gipsy's quest for the secret knowledge of the gipsies. 88 The content of the knowledge the scholar-gipsy seeks is never revealed because it is the quest itself which is important. The quest is characterized by a single-mindedness and sense of unif ied purpose that distinguish it from the modern malaise of division and aimless wandering. The Scholar Gipsy" has three distinct movements. The opening section (1-130) chronicles the speaker's pastoral vision of the scholar-gipsy, and the second section (131-231) is elegiac verse betraying "Arnold's tendency toward philosophic statement [that] mars his poetrytt(Stitelman 146). The poem then concludes: Then fly Our greetings, fly our speech and srniles!
--As some grave Tyrian trader, from the sea, Descried at sunrise an emerging prow Lifting the cool-haired creepers stealthily, The fringes of a southward-facing brow Among the Aegean isles; And saw the merry Grecian coaster come, Freighted with amber grapes, and Chian wine, Green, bursting figs, and tunnies steeped in brine- Ana knew the intruders on his ancient home,
The young light-hearted masters of the waves- And snatched the rudder, and shook out more sail; And day and night held on indignantly Oter the blue Midland waters with the gale, Betwixt the Syrtes and soft Sicily, To where the Atlantic raves Outside the western straits; and unbent sails
There, where down cloudy clif f s, through sheets of foam, Shy traffickers, the dark Iberians come; And on the beach undid his corded bales.
(231-50)
In the choice and construction of the vehicle and surrounding details of the simile, Arnold adopts a mediating position to his methods in "Dover BeachH and ItStanzas from the Grande Chartreuse." The Tyrian and the Greek lie somewhere between the choice of the girdïe and the children. Arnold's subject matter in the simile does not blend and mingle with earlier imagery in the poem as it does in "Stanzas From the Grande Chartreuse," but the simile contains details which link it with the main body of the poem in a more natural way than the "green girdlettor "darkling plainu similes. Arnold creates a series of correspondences between the simile and the poem. For example, the "dark Iberianstvthat the Tyrian flies to, as many commentators have noted, bear a strong resemblance to the gipsies with their physically swarthy complexion. The movements of the Tyrian trader are constantly westward just as the scholar roams the Cumner Hills which lie to the west of Oxford. One point of controversy has been the identification 90 of the scholar-qipsy with the grave Tyrian when the cheerfulness of the light and merry Greeks seems to parallel the scholar gipsy's attitudes. This may be so, but on the basis of physical appearance the Greeks, with their colourful cargo of "amber grapesM and "green figs,It oppose the scholar- gipsy who is associated with the grey colour of his cloak (which is closer to the colourless Tyrian) . More importantly, the Tyrian, like the scholar-gipsy, is solitary and f lies from the plurality of Greeks, just as the scholar-gipsy abandons his fellows and the multitudinousness of the world. Arnold seeks to reduce the initial shock of disparity in the movement from the green Cumner hills of seventeenth- and nineteenth- century Berkshire to the blue waters of the ancient
Mediterranean world.
"The Scholar Gipsy, It like "Dover Beachmtand '%tanzas From the Grande Chartreuse, contains two important similes. Thus far we have only examined the "Tyrian traderu figure and have neglected the simile involving Dido and Aeneas. This simile is closely tied to the "Tyrian tradertt simile and offers a type of negative exemplum to the positive and more f itting counterpart of the extended trope which ends the poem. The speaker repeatedly urges the scholar-gipsy to fly from the wor ld :
Fly hence, our contact fear!
Still fly, plunge deeper in the bowering wood!
Averse, as Dido did with gesture stern 9 1 From her false friendtsapproach in Hades turn,
Wave us away, and keep thy solitude! (206-10) The simile prepares us for the ItTyrian tradert1simile but in the comparison between the scholar-gipsy and Dido the note of tragedy is sounded. Didoisrejection of western civilization represented in the figure of Aeneas still does not Save her from death. Her rejection of civilization is a warning to the scholar-gipsy who seeks to withdraw but always with the promise to return. If the poem were to end here, Arnold would have encountered difficulties in the poemls classification.
The poem would be tragic rather than elegiac. The IITyrian traderv1simile offers the possibility of a different, more consolatory, ending. The speaker notes early in the poem the scholar-gipsy's intention to return to the world, and the simile conciudes with the Tyrian undoing the corded bundles on the shores in an attempt to establish commercial ties with the Iberians. It is important to note that this attempt does not involve human contact or communication in their usual sense. Kenneth Allott notes that Arnold is alluding to a description from Herodotus where the Carthaginians and Iberians do business without speaking, seeing or having any persona1 contact with each other (Poems 36911). The "Tyrian trader1' simile reiterates the poemls need to withdraw from the world, but unlike the Dido simile which ends in tragedy, this figure offers hopeful, consolatory possibilities and takes us to the verge of a transformed reintegration into the world. 32 ''Dover Beach," "Stanzas From the Grande Chartreuse, and "The Scholar Gipsyu are three of Arnold's most important poems. As a group they represent Arnold's diagnosis of the evils of the iron age he found himself in. However, Arnold is not content to identify the problems of the age and point to possible solutions. His experiments and strategies with the simile in these poems reflect an intense desire to lay these thoughts before us in the most effective possible manner. Arnold, in these lyrics, is free from some of the rigidly forma1 demands of the 1853 "Preface,It which he acknowledged the following year did not apply to lyric poetry (Super 1:lG). However, his desire for the facilitative communication of ideas in poetry is carried into these poems. Al1 of these poems share certain strategies and develop their own techniques for the simile. In al1 of these pieces, Arnold employed his characteristic tactic of concluding the poem with a simile that relates to the central idea in the main body of the poem. In al1 three poems Arnold experimented with the degree to which the vehicle of the simile should or could stand apart from the general fabric of the main part of the poem. In "Dover Beach," the "darkling plain1' and I1bright girdleI1 similes arrest Our attention by what appears to be their sudden intrusion into the poern. At the opposite end of the spectrum is Arnold's final sirnile in "Stanzas From the Grande Chartreuse.It In this poem, the simile which closes the poem is made up of images and diction which are so closely 9 3
tied to al1 that has come before that the barriers between the
simile and the poem are blurred to a great extent. "The
Scholar Gipsyu attempts to mediate these two extremes with its
mixture of obvious differences between the English and
Mediterranean worlds and subtle similarities that facilitate
correspondences between characters and actions in the simile
and the previous parts of the work.
Arnold also explored different ways of ordering the
similes within the poems and relating them in numerous ways to
the central ideas of these pieces. The two similes of "Dover
Beach," although radically different at first glance, explore
and elucidate either the cause or effects of human isolation
and ignorance in the world. The central statement of ttStanzas
From the Grande Chartreuse" is bracketed on one side by the "Runic stone" simile which introduces the central question of
faith and the extended simile which closes the poem. This
second trope offers a concrete picture of the "in betweenu
state of man in the nineteenth century. Finally, the two
similes in "The Scholar Gipsyu speak to each other. The Dido
simile dramatizes only part of the message of the poem, and it
is the Tyrian trader simile that offers a full reiteration and dramatization of the poem's central idea.
These poems mark the zenith of Arnold's career as a poet, and although the second half of the 1850s would offer
interesting achievements, such as "Haworth Churchyardu and
"Rugby Chapel," Arnold finds it increasingly difficult to 94 produce poetry. In the 1860s, Arnold's poetic production slowed to a trickle and he turned increasingly to prose.
However, he was sporadically moved to poetic production and one of those productions was occasioned by the death of Clough in Florence in 1861. The result was Arnold's last significant poem, HThyrsis," and it is with this work that we should appropriately conclude Our survey of Arnold's poetry. Chapter Five: I1Thyrsist1
After Arnold s election to Professor of Poetry at Oxford, his poetic production--which had been naturally dwindling in the second half of the 1850s--came to a virtual standstill with the increased demands for prose which the professorship required. When Arnold did find time and inspiration for poetry in the last three decades of his life, he turned almost excluçively to forms of the elegy or an elegiac tone.'
Furthermore, Riede points out that the elegy, with its need for I1sincerity, puts "an added pressure on the lanquage, a pressure to reconcile words with truth" (162).
The movement from "The Scholar Gipsy1I to I1Thyrsisnseems to be a logical progression. Indeed, many critics have opted to treat the two poems as intimately related or as parts of a single text .' While there are, of course, obvious similarities or repetitions in setting and stanzaic form, Culler and Riede have argued, effectively, that the true interest lies in the differences between the two poems. The Scholar Gipsyu and MThyrsisu are separated by over a decade and Culler rightly notes: I1with Arnold fifteen years-- especially when they extend from the Iearly fifties to the rnid
'sixties-4s a long timeu (250). A great deal has occurred in the interim between the two poems, particularly with regard to Arnold% attitude to language.
In another poem from the 1860s) "Epilogue to Lessing's 96 Lao~oon,~'Arnold reveals that his overall desire for language remains unchanged: "But clear as words can make revealingv (137) . The language of "Thyrsis" illustrates Arnold ' s continued struggle to achieve a greater degree of transparency in his medium. The struggle in this poem is characterized by a conscious awareness of the power and weakness of words, the continued use of earlier techniques for linguistic transparêncy, and the introduction or emergence of alternatives. Althouqh "Thyrsist' is an elegy, an encounter with the poem quite often leads one to agree with Lionel Trilling that it is "in some ways a strange commemoration" (298). Despite the promise of its subtitle, the poem tends to forget about Clough at times, and Culler has noted that the final three stanzas seem to be awkward additions in an effort to offer some sort of traditional consolatory conclusion (262-64).'
Arnold anticipated much of this criticism in an l8GG letter to J.C. Shairp: One has the feeling, if one reads the poem as a memorial poem, that not enough is said about Clouçh
in it; 1 feel this so much that 1 do not send the
poem to Mrs. Clouqh. (Russell 1: 327) The poem is as much about the poetry and the speaker (Arnold- Corydon) as it is about the subject (Clough-Thyrsis). Richard Lessa has commented: "More than simply a commemoration of
Clough, it is a poem about its speaker, his relationship with 97 a fellow poet, and the relationship of both to their artu
(37) , and William Madden believes that, in the poem, Arnold I1attempts to prove to himself that his Muse has not yet gone awayl' (66). A great deal of this anxiety is fostered by Arnold's continued suspicion of his medium's ability to facilitate communication between the poet and his audience. The fact that he is writinq an elegy only increases Arnold's consternation, since language must convey with ease and accuracy both ideas and intense, unsettled, complex emotional states. In fact, part of Arnold's anxiety over the efiectiveness of his language may extend to the genre he adopts for the poem--the pastoral elegy. We noted in the previous chapter that Arnold's lyrics are often mixed and hybrid forms, and it comes as sornething of a surprise that, in this late poem, he maintains such a rigid fidelity to the conventions of the pastoral elegy, from the flower catalogue to the traditional ubi sunt formula. At times the burden becomes too much for the speaker in the poem, who laments: IlAh me! this many a year/My pipe is lostfl (542). Arnold's specific concern about the proper effect of his words upon an audience is reflected in the allusion to Proserpine and Orpheus. The failure of language is dramatized in an imaginary encounter between Corydon (in an imitation of Orpheus) and Proserpine, which concludes with Corydon's sighs:
And we should tease her with Our plaint in vain! 98 Well! wind-dispersed and vain the words will be, Yet Thyrsis, let me give my grief its hour.
(100-02)
The final line of this excerpt tempers Corydon's doubts about language with the assertion that he will continue to sing without the assurance that his words will be effective or even understood. If we now move from this self-conscious aspect of the speaker's awareness of his language to the different aspects of the poemts organization of words, we see that Arnold's quest for linguistic transparency, like Corydon's, had reached a crucial stage in this late work.
The planning and composition of HThyrsisll stretch over several years from Cloughls death in 1861 until the poem's publication five years later. It is generally agreed that Arnold began composition in earnest in late November and early
December of 1863 when he was at Oxford to deliver a lecture." The dates are important because the lecture which Arnold delivered on 28 November 1863 was "Joubert. In that lecture, Arnold quoted with approval Joubert's belief that words and expressions should be simply translucent glasses through which we see ideas clearly and accurately. Joubert's belief is also Arnold's, but the poetry professor was quick to add, somewhat discouraged, that he had struggled with this linguistic ideal personally: ItI know, by my own experience, how hard this rule is to f01low'~ (Super 3: 195). Certainly part of that struggle had included his attempts to apply Locke's advice about the 99 simile in poems ranging from Sohrab and Rustum to "The Scholar Gipsy." We cannot know if Arnold felt that his experiments to find method and order for the simile as a technique for linguistic transparency were successful or foolish, but it is noteworthy that following "The Scholar Gipsy" (1853) and
Balder Dead (1855) both the quantity and quality of similes in Arnold's poetry are drastically reduced. The figure does not disappear, but we do not encounter anything as mernorable as the grave Tyrian trader and the merry Greek coaster again. "ThyrsisU contains one of these later similes. Early in the poem, the speaker, Corydon, explains that Thyrsis impatiently left the sunny pastoral world of his own accord. Corydon elaborates on the situation by likening Thyrsis's impatience with that of the cuckoo's: So, some tempestuous morn in early June, When the year's prima1 burst of bloom is o'er, Before the roses and the longest day-- When garden-walks and al1 the grassy floor With blossoms red and white of Eallen May And chestnut flowers are strewn--
So have 1 heard the cuckoo's parting cry, From the wet field, through the vexed garden- trees,
Corne with the volleying rain and tossing breeze:
The bloom is gone, and with the bloom go I! (51-60) It is diff icult to arrive at a definitive judgement about this 100 simile. Part of the difficulty arises from the fact that Arnold provides what might be called a fragment of a simile. Instead of the usual as/so rhetorical formulation, we are given only the latter half of a simile. Certainly the figure is clear enough in its cornparison of Clough's persona1 impatience and troubled poetry with the preemptive migration and changed note of the cuckoo. However, there are some puzzling things about the simile. First, the very impulse to compare Clough with the cuckoo, as many commentators have noted, seems somewhat absurd and more than mildly insulting. Secondly, the simile is not part of a system of similar tropes such as those repeatedly delineating the precise mental states of characters in Sohrab and Rustum, nor does it appear at the end of the poem in a relationship with a central idea or theme. It seems more like an isolated instance that does little to further the ends of the poem. Third, it is inaccurate, as Allott alerts us: "The cuckoo changes his tune in June but does not migrate until Augustu (Poems 541). This combination of a modified rhetorical structure, factual error, isolated status, and inappropriateness hinders the simile's overall effectiveness in elucidating Clough's impatience (which is misleading in itself, as Allott informs us, Poems
540). By the time Arnold writes 'lThyrsis," the simile, as an effective strategy for transparent language, may have lost much of its appeal, but the poem attempts other methods to 101 focus the reader's energies on the ideas and emotions and not the language itself. It is useful to return to Corydon's musings on an imaginary encounter with Proserpine:
O easy access to the hearer's grace When Dorian shepherds sang to Proserpine! For she herself had trod Sicilian fields, She knew the Dorian waterls qush divine, She knew each lily white which Enna yields, Each rose with blushing face; She loved the Dorian pipe, the Dorian strain. But ah, of Our poor Thames she never heard! Her foot the Cumner cowslips never stirred ....
(91-99) Proserpine cannot respond effectively to Corydon's Song because the ideas and things signified by his words are literally foreign to her. Her emotional response is stunted and even negated by a breakdown at the initial cognitive stage. Corydon% sonq fails to communicate either the idea or the emotion. Corydon's failure with Proserpine is contrasted with Arnold's success with his audience. Although Arnold% speaker and subject draw their names from the Greek tradition, the world of this pastoral elegy is local and familiar.
Warren Anderson remarks: IfNo classical origins can be attributed to the superb descriptions of meadow and garden; they are thoroughly English" (269). The language of flThyrsislfrefers to English flowers and 102 local Berkshire villages. Perhaps Arnold remains uncertain whether his language will adequately express his grief or accurately convey his ideas of loss, life, and death, but the use of language which refers to the local and the familiar is a strategy to focus the readerts attention on the ideas and things signified by those words and not the words themselves.
It is a modest strategy to avoid obscurity and confusion at even the most basic cognitive level. Even the language of the cuckoo simile is rooted in familiarity: "The cuckoo on the wet June morning 1 heard in the garden at WoodfordH (Russell
1:325). The domestication and anglicization of the language of ttThyrsisttreflect Arnold's desire to make his language as clear and unobtrusive as possible. This particular strategy is not original to ttThyrsis.19 We noted its success in the similes in Balder Dead and those figures Arnold failed to orientalize in Sohrab and Rustum. However, by the time Arnold composed tgThyrsis,lmthe simile as a method of laying out thoughts and ideas with clarity and order has faded while the use of familiar, domestic language has increased. ttThyrsis" is an interesting place to conclude an investigation of Arnold's poetry. Arnold never loses his belief that language should attempt to be as transparent as possible. Even in this late poem it remains a primary concern for the speaker and the poet. As Arnold turns increasingly from poetry to prose, it is interesting to note that the strategy for transparency most closely associated with his 103 poetry, the simile, also falls Erom favour. It remains unclear whether Arnold lost faith in the figure as a strategy, or simply felt he had exhausted al1 of its possibilities. Even though the prospects of a simile composed with ''method and orderq1may have declined in Arnold's estimation, he seems to have remembered another aspect of Locke's advice from the
Conduct. Locke argues that part of a simile's effectiveness depends on its subject matter being drawn from I1objects already known and familiar to the understandingt1(Conduct 73) . Arnold struggles with this in many of his similes in the narrative and lyric poems from the 1850s, but, by the time we reach tlThyrsis,llthe concern of domesticating or anglicizing the similes has extended to the rest of the poem. 104 Conclusion: In her informative and persuasive study The Audience in the Poem: Five Victorian Poets, Dorothy Mermin offers the following important assessrnent of Matthew Arnold: The question of how he can speak to his audience,
and how (if at all) the audience will respond is
even more urgent and dif f icult for Arnold than it is
for Tennyson and Browning. (83) Perhaps it is so urgent that Arnold finally turns from poetry to prose. Arnold believes that the best way to speak to an audience in poetry, and the way that offers the greatest possibility of eliciting a response, is through the "grand style." That vexing term is never defined by Arnold, who believes that it escapes definition. At least part of the
"grand style" is concerned with an ideal in language that is characterized by transparency. Arnold's poetry is a record of, first, the realization of the necessity of that ideal, and, second, the struggle to attain or at least approach it. The influence of Locke's language theory is crucial at both of these stages. Harold Fulweiler claims that Arnold l'more than any other modern poet, was torn by the epistemological and linguistic dilemma that had so concerned the romanticsu (29). He locates the source of that dilemma in the "Lockian revolution in epistemology and its corollary effect in language" (18), and in Empedocles on Etna he sees "that the seed of John Locke had borne bitter fruitt1 (36) . However, 105 Fulweiler does not take into account the help that Locke offers to Arnold's search for a transparent medium--namely, through a carefully controlled advocation of certain tropes such as the simile. Even the decline cf the simile's prominence in Arnold's poetry and the eventual shift from poetry to prose cannot dissuade him from a belief in the absolute necessity that words be as accessible and transparent as possible. In "Literature and Science" he argues: "How needful it is for those who are to discuss any matter together, to have a common understanding as to the sense of the terms they employu (Super
10: 57). However, such a simple precept is wistfully undermined by Arnold's aside, undoubtedly with his own poetic career in mind: "how needful, and how diff icultM (Super 10:
57). Notes to Introduction
' Al1 subsequent references to Arnold's prose are from
The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, Ed. R.H. Super.
' For a full account of the importance of the years 1850- 51 for Arnold biographically, vocationally, and poetically, the reader should consult the two appropriate chapters in
Honan, Matthew Arnold 195-244.
' Two excellent contextualizing discussions of the 1853 "Preface" are offered by Cox and Coulling, IIMatthew Arnold's
1853 Preface." Notes to Chapter One: Arnold, Locke, and Languaqe
' See Honan, Matthew Arnold 93-101 for a full discussion of Arnold's exposure and general dissatisfaction with German transcendentalism. Notes to Chapter Two: Fragments
' The question of Marguerite's identity and the significance of biographical interpretation in general have been the subjects of numerous critical debates. See especially Miriam Allott and Honan, "The Character of
Marguerite. For another exchange between critics, see Harris, "The Lure of Biographytt'the response of Bell, Vn Defense of Biography, and the counter-response of Harris,
ItBiography, The Interpretation of Meaning."
' See Covinqton.
See Kenneth Allott's headnote to the poem in The Poems of Matthew Arnold 88.
4 See Knoepflmacher, Culler 37-39, and Morgan.
' See Hickman and Berlin. Notes to Chapter Three: Tensions
' Covington 150.
' Sections 3.1, 3.2, 3.4, 3.10 in Rhetoric, Ed. George A. Kennedy.
See especially Forman and Lewes.
' See Sieqchrist Notes to Chapter Four: Strategies
' For a discussion of Arnold's use of the sonnet in "Dover Beach" see Pitman.
? The dating of "Dover Beachtthas generated a great deal of critical inquiry. An argument for a post-1855 date has been offered by Super, IlThe Dating of l Dover Beach. l It Arguments for a composition date in the summer of 1851 or shortly afterward have been pursued by: Kenneth Allott, IlThe Dating of Dover Beach and Ullmann. Notes to Chapter Five: Thyrsis
' For a discussion of Arnold's varied use of the elegy see Culler 232-286.
See Drew.
' See also Riede 155-156 and Delaura.
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