ARNOLD, MATTHEW (1822-1888), English poet, literary critic, and inspector of schools, was born at Laleham, near Staines, on Dec. 24, 1822. He was the son of the famous Dr. Arnold, of Rugby, and was educated at Winchester, Rugby and Balliol col lege, Oxford. After a year at Winchester, Matthew Arnold entered Rugby school in 1837. He early began to write and print verses. His first publication was a Rugby prize poem, Alaric at Rome, in 1840. This was followed, in 1843, of ter he had gone up to Oxford in 1840 as a scholar of Balliol, by his poem Cromwell, which won the Newdigate prize. In 1844 he graduated with second-class honours, and in 1845 was elected a fellow of Oriel college, where among his colleagues was A. H. Clough, his friend ship with whom is commemorated in that exquisite elegy Thyrsis. From 1847 to 1851 he acted as private secretary to Lord Lans downe ; and in the latter year, after acting for a short time as assistant-master at Rugby, he was appointed to an inspectorship of schools, a post which he retained until two years before his death. This was probably not the career he would have chosen, but his impending marriage (June 1851), with Frances Lucy Wightman, made a settled income desirable. Meanwhile, in appeared The Strayed Reveller, and other Poems, by A, a volume which gained a considerable esoteric reputation. In 1852 he pub lished another volume under the same initial, Empedocles on Etna, and other Poems. Empedocles is as undramatic a poem, perhaps, as was ever written in dramatic form, but studded with lyrical beauties of a very high order. In 1853 Arnold published a volume of Poems under his own name. This consisted partially of poems selected from the two previous volumes. A second series of poems, which contained, however, only two new ones, was published in 1855. So great was the impression made by these in academic circles, that in 1857 Arnold was elected professor of poetry at Oxford, and he held the chair for ten years. In 1858 he published his classical tragedy, Merope. Nine years afterwards his New Poems (186 7) were published. While he held the Oxford professorship he published several series of lectures, which gave him a high place as a scholar and critic. The essays (edited in 1905 with an introduction by W. H. D. Rouse) On Translating Homer: Three Lectures given at Oxford, published in 1861, sup plemented in 1862 by On Translating Homer: Last Words, a fourth lecture given in reply to F. W. Newman's Homeric Trans lation in Theory and Practice (1861) and On the Study of Celtic Literature, published in 1867, were full of subtle and brilliant criticism. So were the two series of Essays in Criticism, the first of which, consisting of articles reprinted from various reviews, appearing in 1865. The essay on "A Persian Passion Play" was added in the editions of 1875; and a second series, edited by Lord Coleridge, appeared in 1888.
Arnold's poetic activity almost ceased after he left the chair of poetry at Oxford. He was several times sent by the Govern ment to make enquiries into the state of education in France, Germany, Holland and other countries; and his reports, with their thorough-going and searching criticism of continental meth ods, as contrasted with English methods, showed how conscien tiously he had devoted some of his best energies to the work. His fame as a poet and a literary critic has somewhat over shadowed the fact that he was, during 35 years of his life (1851-86) employed in the education department as one of H.M. inspectors of schools. The influence he exerted on schools, on the department, and on the primary education of the whole country was very great. His annual reports of which more than 20 were collected (1889) into a volume (new edition, with addi tional matter and introduction by F. S. Marvin, [1908] ) by his friend and official chief, Sir Francis (afterwards Lord) Sandford attracted, by reason of their freshness of style and thought, more public attention than is usually accorded to Blue Book literature.
In 1859, as foreign assistant commissioner, he prepared for the duke of Newcastle's commission to enquire into the subject of elementary education a report (printed 186o) which was after wards reprinted (1861) in a volume entitled The Popular Educa tion of France, with Notices of that of Holland and Switzerland. In 1865 he was again employed as assistant-commissioner by the Schools enquiry commission under Lord Taunton; and his report on this subject, On Secondary Education in Foreign Countries (1866), was subsequently reprinted under the title Schools and Universities on the Continent (1868). Twenty years later he was sent by the education department to make special enquiries on certain specified points, e.g., free education, the status and training of teachers, and compulsory attendance at schools. The result of this investigation appeared as a parliamentary paper, Special Report on certain points connected with Elementary Education in Germany, Switzerland and France, in 1886. He also contributed the chapter on "Schools" (1837-87) to the second volume of Mrs. Humphrey Ward's Reign of Queen Victoria. All these reports form substantial contributions to the history and literature of education in the Victorian age. They have been quoted often, and have exercised marked influence on subsequent changes and contro versies. One great purpose underlies them all. It is to bring home to the English people a conviction that education ought to be a national concern. To this theme he constantly recurred in his essays, articles, and official reports. "Porro unum est necessarium. One thing is needful; organize your secondary education." Arnold's critical work includes : Culture and Anarchy (1869) ; St. Paul and Protestantism . . . ; Friendship's Garland: being the Conversations, Letters and Opinions of the late Arminius Baron von Thunder-ten-Tronckh (1871); Literature and Dogma: an Essay towards a Better Apprehension of the Bible (1873) ; God and the Bible: a Review of Objections to Literature and Dogma (1875) ; Last Essays on Church and Religion (1877) ; Mixed Essays (1879) ; Irish Essays and Others (1882) ; Discourses in America (1885). These books startled the public. But, objection able as Arnold's rationalizing criticism was to contemporary ortho doxy, and questionable as was his equipment in point of theolog ical learning, his spirituality of outlook and ethical purpose were not to be denied. Yet it is not Arnold's views that have become current coin so much as his literary phrases—his craving for "cul ture" and "sweetness and light," his contempt for "the dissidence of Dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion," his classification of "Philistines and barbarians." His death at Liver pool, of heart failure on April 15, 1888, was sudden and quite unexpected.
Arnold was a prominent figure in that great galaxy of Victorian poets who were working simultaneously (Tennyson, Browning, Rossetti, William Morris and Swinburne), poets between whom there was at least this connecting link, that the quest of all of them was the old-fashioned poetical quest of the beautiful. Beauty was their watchword, as it had been the watchword of their immediate predecessors—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and Byron. That this group of early 19th century poets might be divided into two (those whose primary quest was physical beauty, and those whose primary quest was moral beauty) is no doubt true. Still, in so far as beauty was their quest they were all akin. And so with the Victorian group to which Arnold belonged. Not withstanding the exquisite work that Arnold has left behind him, some critics have come to the conclusion that his primary impulse in expression was that of the poetically-minded prosateur rather than that of the born poet. And this has been said by some who, nevertheless, deeply admire poems like "The Scholar Gypsy," "Thyrsis," "The Forsaken Merman," "Dover Beach," "Heine's Grave," "Rugby Chapel," "The Grande Chartreuse," "Sohrab and Rustum," "The Sick King in Bokhara," "Tristram and Iseult." Perhaps the place Arnold held and still holds as a critic is due more to his exquisite felicity in expressing his views than to the penetration of his criticism. Nothing can exceed the easy grace of his prose at its best. It is conversational and yet absolutely exact in the structure of the sentences; and in spite of every va gary, his distinguishing note is urbanity. Keen-edged as his satire could be, his writing for the most part is as urbane as Addison's own. His influence on contemporary criticism, and contemporary ideals was considerable and generally wholesome. His insistence on the necessity of looking at "the thing in itself," and the need for acquainting oneself with "the best that has been thought and said in the world," gave a new stimulus alike to originality and industry in criticism; and in his own selection of subjects (such as Joubert, or the De Guerins) he opened a new world to a larger class of the better sort of readers, exercising in this respect an awakening influence in his own time akin to that of Walter Pater a few years afterwards. The comparison with Pater might indeed be pressed farther, and yet too far. Both were essentially products of Oxford. But Arnold, whose description of that "home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties," is in itself almost a poem, had a classical austerity in his style that savoured more intimately of Oxford tradition, and an ethical earnestness, even in his most flippant moments, which kept him notably aloof from the more sensuous school of aesthetics.
The first collected edition of Arnold's poems was published in 1869 in two volumes, the first consisting of Narrative and Elegiac Poems, and the second of Dramatic and Lyric Poems. Other editions appeared in 1877, 1881; a library edition (1885) ; a one-volume reprint of the poems printed in the library edition, with one or two additions (189o) ; another edition (1926) is edited with an introduction by A. T. Quiller Couch and notes by G. St. Quintin. Publications by Matthew Arnold not mentioned in the foregoing article include: England and the Italian Question (1859) a pamphlet ; A French Eton; or, Middle Class Education and the State (1864) ; Higher Schools and Universities in Germany (1874), a partial reprint from Schools and Universities on the Continent (i868) ; A Bible Reading for Schools; The Great Prophecy of Israel's Restoration, an arrangement of Isaiah, chs. xl.—lxvi. (1872), republished with additions and varying titles in 1875 and 1883 ; an edition of the Six Chief Lives from Johnson's Lives of the Poets (1878) ; editions of the Poems of Wordsworth (1879), and the Poetry of Byron (188i) for the Golden Treasury series, with prefatory essays reprinted in the second series of Essays in Criticism; an edition of Letters, Speeches and Tracts on Irish Affairs by Edmund Burke (i881) ; and many contributions to periodical literature. The Letters of Matthew Arnold (1848-88) were collected and arranged by G. W. E. Russell in 1895 (reprinted 1901) . Matthew Arnold's Note Books, with a Preface by the Hon. Mrs. Wodehouse, appeared in 1902.
A complete and uniform edition of The Works of Matthew Arnold (1904-05) includes the letters as edited by Russell. Vol. iii. contains a complete bibliography of his works, many of the early editions of which are very valuable, by T. B. Smart, who published a separate bibliography in 1892. A valuable note on the rather complicated subject of Arnold's bibliography is given by H. Buxton Forman in Arnold's Poems, Narrative, Elegiac and Lyric (Temple classics, i900). There are innumerable reprints of Arnold's different works.
It was Arnold's expressed desire that his biography should not be written, and before his letters were published they underwent con siderable editing at the hands of his family. There are, however, monographs on Matthew Arnold (1899) in Modern English Writers by Prof. Saintsbury, and by H. W. Paul (1902) , in the English Men of Letters series. These two works were supplemented by G. W. E. Russell, in a sense, as the editor of Arnold's letters, the official biog rapher, in Matthew Arnold (1904, Literary Lives series) . There are also studies of Arnold in J. M. Robertson's Modern Humanists (1891), and in W. H. Hudson's Studies in Interpretation (1896), Sir J. G. Fitch's Thomas and Matthew Arnold (1897) ; one by G. K. Chesterton in the "Everyman" edition of the Essays, and by W. L. Jones in Cambridge History of Modern Literature, vol. xiii. (1916), and a review of some of the works above mentioned in the Quarterly Review (Jan. 1905) by T. H. Warren.