POETRY AND THE CLASSICSPAGE 1(1) ~Poetry and the Classics~. Published as Preface to _Poems_: 1853 (dated Fox How, Ambleside, October 1, 1853). It was reprinted in Irish Essays, 1882.(2) ~the poem~. _Empedocles on Etna_.(3) ~the Sophists~. "A name given by the Greeks about the middle of the fifth century B.C. to certain teachers of a superior grade who, distinguishing themselves from philosophers on the one hand and from artists and craftsmen on the other, claimed to prepare their pupils, not for any particular study or profession, but for civic life." _Encyclopaedia Britannica_.PAGE 2(4) _Poetics_, 4.(5) _Theognis_, ll. 54-56.PAGE 4(6) ~"The poet,"...
Nonfictions - Post by : rlscott - Date : May 2012 - Author : Matthew Arnold - Read : 1859
EQUALITY(459)When we talk of man's advance towards his full humanity, we think of an advance, not along one line only, but several. Certain races and nations, as we know, are on certain lines preeminent and representative. The Hebrew nation was preeminent on one great line. "What nation," it was justly asked by their lawgiver, "hath statutes and judgments so righteous as the law which I set before you this day? Keep therefore and do them; for this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the nations which shall hear all these statutes and say: Surely this great nation...
Nonfictions - Post by : vbhnl - Date : May 2012 - Author : Matthew Arnold - Read : 3617
HEBRAISM AND HELLENISM(430)This fundamental ground is our preference of doing to thinking. Now this preference is a main element in our nature and as we study it we find ourselves opening up a number of large questions on every side.Let me go back for a moment to Bishop Wilson,(431) who says: "First, never go against the best light you have; secondly, take care that your light be not darkness." We show, as a nation, laudable energy and persistence in walking according to the best light we have, but are not quite careful enough, perhaps, to see that our light be not...
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SWEETNESS AND LIGHT(389)The disparagers of culture make its motive curiosity; sometimes, indeed, they make its motive mere exclusiveness and vanity. The culture which is supposed to plume itself on a smattering of Greek and Latin is a culture which is begotten by nothing so intellectual as curiosity; it is valued either out of sheer vanity and ignorance or else as an engine of social and class distinction, separating its holder, like a badge or title, from other people who have not got it. No serious man would call this _culture_, or attach any value to it, as culture, at all. To...
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Wordsworth(346)I remember hearing Lord Macaulay say, after Wordsworth's death, when subscriptions were being collected to found a memorial of him, that ten years earlier more money could have been raised in Cambridge alone, to do honor to Wordsworth, than was now raised all through the country. Lord Macaulay had, as we know, his own heightened and telling way of putting things, and we must always make allowance for it. But probably it is true that Wordsworth has never, either before or since, been so accepted and popular, so established in possession of the minds of all who profess to care for...
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GEORGE SAND(295)The months go round, and anniversaries return; on the ninth of June George Sand will have been dead just one year. She was born in 1804; she was almost seventy-two years old when she died. She came to Paris after the revolution of 1830, with her _Indiana_(296) written, and began her life of independence, her life of authorship, her life as _George Sand_. She continued at work till she died. For forty-five years she was writing and publishing, and filled Europe with her name.It seems to me but the other day that I saw her, yet it was in the...
Nonfictions - Post by : ben.g - Date : May 2012 - Author : Matthew Arnold - Read : 1898
THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE CELTS TO ENGLISH LITERATURE(252)If I were asked where English poetry got these three things, its turn for style, its turn for melancholy, and its turn for natural magic, for catching and rendering the charm of nature in a wonderfully near and vivid way,--I should answer, with some doubt, that it got much of its turn for style from a Celtic source; with less doubt, that it got much of its melancholy from a Celtic source; with no doubt at all, that from a Celtic source it got nearly all its natural magic.Any German with penetration and tact...
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MARCUS AURELIUS(182)Mr. Mill(183) says, in his book on Liberty, that "Christian morality is in great part merely a protest against paganism; its ideal is negative rather than positive, passive rather than active." He says, that, in certain most important respects, "it falls far below the best morality of the ancients." Now, the object of systems of morality is to take possession of human life, to save it from being abandoned to passion or allowed to drift at hazard, to give it happiness by establishing it in the practice of virtue; and this object they seek to attain by prescribing to human...
Nonfictions - Post by : Truman - Date : May 2012 - Author : Matthew Arnold - Read : 1148
HEINRICH HEINE(135)"I know not if I deserve that a laurel-wreath should one day be laid on my coffin. Poetry, dearly as I have loved it, has always been to me but a divine plaything. I have never attached any great value to poetical fame; and I trouble myself very little whether people praise my verses or blame them. But lay on my coffin a _sword_; for I was a brave soldier in the Liberation War of humanity."(136)Heine had his full share of love of fame, and cared quite as much as his brethren of the _genus irritabile whether people praised his...
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LITERATURE AND SCIENCE(116)Practical people talk with a smile of Plato and of his absolute ideas; and it is impossible to deny that Plato's ideas do often seem unpractical and impracticable, and especially when one views them in connection with the life of a great work-a-day world like the United States. The necessary staple of the life of such a world Plato regards with disdain; handicraft and trade and the working professions he regards with disdain; but what becomes of the life of an industrial modern community if you take handicraft and trade and the working professions out of it? The base...
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THE STUDY OF POETRY(62)"The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay. There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve. Our religion has materialized itself in the fact, in the supposed fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact, and how the fact is failing it. But for poetry the idea is everything; the rest is...
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THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM AT THE PRESENT TIME(21)Many objections have been made to a proposition which, in some remarks of mine(22) on translating Homer, I ventured to put forth; a proposition about criticism, and its importance at the present day. I said: "Of the literature of France and Germany, as of the intellect of Europe in general, the main effort, for now many years, has been a critical effort; the endeavor, in all branches of knowledge, theology, philosophy, history, art, science, to see the object as in itself it really is." I added, that owing to the operation in English literature...
Nonfictions - Post by : runtonk - Date : May 2012 - Author : Matthew Arnold - Read : 3388
POETRY AND THE CLASSICS(1)In two small volumes of Poems, published anonymously, one in 1849, the other in 1852, many of the Poems which compose the present volume have already appeared. The rest are now published for the first time.I have, in the present collection, omitted the poem(2) from which the volume published in 1852 took its title. I have done so, not because the subject of it was a Sicilian Greek born between two and three thousand years ago, although many persons would think this a sufficient reason. Neither have I done so because I had, in my own opinion, failed...
Nonfictions - Post by : add2it - Date : May 2012 - Author : Matthew Arnold - Read : 2388
This book of selections aims to furnish examples of Arnold's prose in all the fields in which it characteristically employed itself except that of religion. It has seemed better to omit all such material than to attempt inclusion of a few extracts which could hardly give any adequate notion of Arnold's work in this department. Something, however, of his method in religious criticism can be discerned by a perusal of the chapter on _Hebraism and Hellenism_, selected from _Culture and Anarchy_. Most of Arnold's leading ideas are represented in this volume, but the decision to use entire essays so far as...
Nonfictions - Post by : Dusty13 - Date : May 2012 - Author : Matthew Arnold - Read : 1435
CHAPTER VI. Our Liberal Practitioners(197) But an unpretending writer, without a philosophy based on inter-dependent, subordinate, and coherent principles, must not presume to indulge himself too much in generalities, but he must keep close to the level ground of common fact, the only safe ground for understandings without a scientific equipment. Therefore I am bound to take, before concluding, some of the practical operations in which my friends and countrymen are at this moment engaged, and (198) to make these, if I can, show the truth of what I have advanced. Probably I could hardly give a greater proof of my...
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CHAPTER V. Porro Unum est Necessarium(166) The matter here opened is so large, and the trains of thought to which it gives rise are so manifold, that we must be careful to limit ourselves scrupulously to what has a direct bearing upon our actual discussion. We have found that at the (167) bottom of our present unsettled state, so full of the seeds of trouble, lies the notion of its being the prime right and happiness, for each of us, to affirm himself, and his ordinary self; to be doing, and to be doing freely and as he likes. We have...
Nonfictions - Post by : rlscott - Date : May 2012 - Author : Matthew Arnold - Read : 1306
CHAPTER IV. Hebraism and Hellenism(142) This fundamental ground is our preference of doing to thinking. Now this preference is a main element in our nature, and as we study it we find ourselves opening up a number of large questions on every side.Let me go back for a moment to what I have already quoted from Bishop Wilson:--"First, never go against the best light you have; secondly, take care that your light be not darkness." I said we show, as a nation, laudable energy and persistence in walking according to the best light we have, but are not quite careful enough,...
Nonfictions - Post by : simkl - Date : May 2012 - Author : Matthew Arnold - Read : 1204
CHAPTER III. Barbarians, Philistines, Populace(93) From a man without a philosophy no one can expect philosophical completeness. Therefore I may observe without shame, that in trying to get a distinct notion of our aristocratic, our middle, and our working class, with a view of testing the claims of each of these classes to become a centre of authority, I have omitted, I find, to complete the old-fashioned analysis which I had the fancy of applying, and have not shown in these classes, as well as the virtuous mean and the excess, the defect also. I do not know that the omission...
Nonfictions - Post by : runtonk - Date : May 2012 - Author : Matthew Arnold - Read : 2596
CHAPTER II. Doing as One Likes(51) I have been trying to show that culture is, or ought to be, the study and pursuit of perfection; and that of perfection as pursued by culture, beauty and intelligence, or, in other words, sweetness and light, are the main characters. But hitherto I have been insisting chiefly on beauty, or sweetness, as a character of perfection. To complete rightly my design, it evidently remains to speak also of intelligence, or light, as a character of perfection. First, however, I ought perhaps to notice that, both here and on the other side of the Atlantic,...
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CHAPTER I. Sweetness and Light(5) The disparagers of culture make its motive curiosity; sometimes, indeed, they make its motive mere exclusiveness and vanity. The culture which is supposed to plume itself on a smattering of Greek and Latin is a culture which is begotten by nothing so intellectual as curiosity; it is valued either out of sheer vanity and ignorance, or else as an engine of social and class distinction, separating its holder, like a badge or title, from other people who have not got it. No serious man would call this culture, or attach any value to it, as culture,...
Nonfictions - Post by : cclittle - Date : May 2012 - Author : Matthew Arnold - Read : 2275
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Selections From The Prose Works Of Matthew Arnold - - Notes
