BIBLIOGRAPHY

Selections: 

I. Theories of literature and criticism: 

1.  Poetry and the Classics (1853) 2.  The Function of Criticism at the Present Time (1864) 3.  The Study of Poetry (1880) 4.  Literature and Science (1882)

II.  Literary criticism: 

1.  Heinrich Heine (1863) 2.  Marcus Aurelius (1863) 3.  The Contribution of the Celts to English Literature (1866) 4.  George Sand (1877) 5.  Wordsworth (1879)

III.  Social and political studies: 

   1.  Sweetness and Light (1867)
   2.  Hebraism and Hellenism (1867)
   3.  Equality (1878)

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

I

[Sidenote:  Life and Personality]

“The gray hairs on my head are becoming more and more numerous, and I sometimes grow impatient of getting old amidst a press of occupations and labor for which, after all, I was not born.  But we are not here to have facilities found us for doing the work we like, but to make them.”  This sentence, written in a letter to his mother in his fortieth year, admirably expresses Arnold’s courage, cheerfulness, and devotion in the midst of an exacting round of commonplace duties, and at the same time the energy and determination with which he responded to the imperative need of liberating work of a higher order, that he might keep himself, as he says in another letter, “from feeling starved and shrunk up.”  The two feelings directed the course of his life to the end, a life characterized no less by allegiance to “the lowliest duties” than by brilliant success in a more attractive field.

Matthew Arnold was born at Laleham, December 24, 1822, the eldest son of Thomas Arnold, the great head master of Rugby.  He was educated at Laleham, Winchester, Rugby, and Balliol College, Oxford.  In 1845 he was elected a fellow of Oriel, but Arnold desired to be a man of the world, and the security of college cloisters and garden walls could not long attract him.  Of a deep affection for Oxford his letters and his books speak unmistakably, but little record of his Oxford life remains aside from the well-known lines of Principal Shairp, in which he is spoken of as

  So full of power, yet blithe and debonair,
  Rallying his friends with pleasant banter gay.