Matthew Arnold and the Elizabethans

Nothing is more peculiar in the criticism of Matthew Arnold than the rarity and the brevity of his references to his English contemporaries. “ How astonishing it would be”, exclaims Mr. T. S. Eliot “if a man like Arnold had concerned himself with the art of the novel, had compared Thackeray with Flaubert, had analysed the work of Dickens, had shown his contemporaries exactly why the author of Amos Barton is a more serious writer than Dickens, and, why the author of La Chartreuse de Parme is more serious than either” It would not be in the least astonishing: the usual way to a critical reputation, the way followed by Sainte-Beuve and by Taine and by Hazlitt, is in large part, at least, by illuminating analysis and appraisal of contemporary books. Matthew Arnold was so far from following this way that his only significant allusion to Dickens is in the course of an argument about Irish education and his only consideration of Tennyson and Clough is in a consideration of the style and metre proper to a translation of Homer. He speaks of his contemporaries only in passing, touches only upon an aspect or two of their work, leaves us in doubt of the estimate he would place upon them. Arnold's silence was no accident,—it was imposed upon him by his definition of criticism as “a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world”. “How much of current English literature” he inquires, “comes into this ‘best that is known and thought in the world’?” And he makes haste to answer: “Not very much, I fear.”