POEMS (1853) & HEGEL’S PREFACE TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT
I. “I am fragments”
Clearly the February Revolution created a crisis in Matthew Arnold‟s life. His ontological struggles, with a sense of identity, and with trying to find a place within himself from which to act in the world, pushed him, early in life, away from those around him, into the Alpine forests of his idol, Senancour‟s Obermann, and into communion with the Hindu and Buddhist philosophy that he believed was typified in the Bhagavad-Gita.
The philosophy of the Gita, however, presented its own problems, in Arnold‟s
interpretation of it, as he tried reconciling himself to his place in the world and his subjective relationship to the outside world. Ultimately, Arnold rejected the Gita‟s
philosophy, and, as the previous chapter demonstrated, his rejection parallels in many points G.W.F. Hegel‟s critique of the Gita. Having rejected the Gita along these Hegelian lines, not surprisingly Arnold‟s new life philosophy mirrors Hegel, as well. In the famous preface to his 1853 volume Poems, one witnesses a reversal of many of the early ideas
that Arnold tried to put into action and that demonstrate such conflict in his personal journaling explored in chapter 2 of this work. In this preface, Arnold appeals to an exterior force against which one must struggle in order to see one‟s true self, or to compose poetry.
Matthew Arnold‟s preface to his 1853 volume of poems mirrors Hegel‟s preface to The Philosophy of Right, and bringing the two together provides some connection
between Arnold and Hegel‟s vision of the State and its necessary connection to
between Hegel and Arnold in Arnold‟s first publicly published work of criticism make a further case for reading Arnold‟s work more closely with Hegel‟s. These parallels prompt even more close connections between Arnold‟s literary criticism and his social and political criticism. Critics commonly note, as Lionel Trilling does, that for every literary judgment Matthew Arnold makes one can read an underlying social and political
judgment (Trilling 145). To find in Arnold‟s earliest work of poetic theory echoes of Hegel‟s ultimate expression of his social and political thought reinforces the link between these two great thinkers.
The road to that point, though, was tough. Arnold took his separation from those around him to an extreme when, in the course of just over one year, he journeyed twice to the Continent. From Switzerland, among Obermann‟s Alpine forests, Arnold composed two letters to Arthur Clough, one in 1848 and the second in 1849. These two letters offer the reader evidence of the shift in Arnold‟s worldview suggested in the previous chapter, particularly as regards his feelings about the outside world, himself, and others. The letters also point the way towards the philosophy with which Arnold will replace the
Gita. The shift these letters evidence point to the major move away from the Gita and
towards Arnold‟s mature vision of the State‟s necessity in progressing humanity towards a realization of French Revolutionary ideals. In the first letter, one notices Arnold tiring already of the introspection to which he has been committing himself. He writes, from the hotel at the Baths of Leuk, of feeling “all alone in this vast hotel” (CL 91). Perhaps most telling, though, are his comments on his beloved Béranger. This French poet, a favorite among the young liberals of Arnold‟s day for his light, airy chansons and his liberal
Arnold‟s return from Paris in 1846, writes, “Matt is full of Parisianism. […] Theatres in general, and Rachel in special: he enters the room with a chanson of Béranger‟s on his lips – for the sake of French words almost conscious of tune: his carriage shows him in fancy parading the Rue de Rivoli; and his hair is guiltless of English scissors” (qtd. in Trilling 21-22). To the Baths of Leuk, Arnold took Béranger, but he writes to Clough:
of [Béranger] I am getting tired. Horace whom he resembles had to write only for a circle of highly cultivated desillusionés roués [Fr. circle of disillusioned (men?)], in a sceptical age: we have the sceptical age, but a far different and wider audience: viola pourquoi [Fr. therefore], with all his genius, there is something „fade‟ [Fr. insipid, tasteless, dull] about Beranger‟s Epicureanism. […] In the reste [Fr. In the end], I am glad to be tired of an author: one link in the immense series of cognoscenda et indagenda [L. known and learned] despatched. (CL 92-93)
Clearly, Arnold‟s self-examination leads him to cut himself off further from the very things he hoped were helping him find his subjectivity, and he dispatches even Béranger on his way to self-discovery.
Arnold recognizes, though, this path‟s dangers. He ends this letter on a negative note. He admits learning from all of his experiences and trying to retain the knowledge, but then writes, “Tho: this uti possedetes principle may be compatible with entire loss of individuality and the power to recognize one another” (CL 93). The military principle of “uti possedetes” describes the right of a country to keep those areas that it has acquired during war. Arnold fears, though, losing his ontological status, a loss, as he puts it, of “individuality” and the ability to recognize another subject even as he acquires some sense of knowledge on this difficult path. This ability to recognize another individual as different from oneself functions as a keystone in Hegelian philosophy, for only through mutual recognition can a subject feel completely free, an idea that will be explored more fully in Chapter 4. Arnold, by this time seeing the confusion that the 1848 Revolution
plunged France into, recognizes the problems that emerge from the philosophy presented in the Gita calling for identifying oneself apart from anything else, pure negative self-
identification.
One year later, 1849, on Arnold‟s second visit to Switzerland, he writes again to Clough, and the letter‟s tone changes markedly. If the dispatching of links in the chain of his knowledge were written off lightheartedly in the first letter, his recognition of a change in attitude following from his intense engagement with the Gita has taken on a
level of gravity by the second. Likewise, this letter provides a path into the intense shift in aesthetics, metaphysics, and politics that Arnold would demonstrate over the next few years. It provides, moreover, a direct link between the philosophy of the Gita and
Arnold‟s changing relationship with it.
To witness this second letter‟s shift, one must go back one year, to the letters, referenced in the previous chapter, Arnold wrote to Clough during the February
Revolution, when he was bringing the Gita‟s philosophy to Clough‟s attention. He writes
on March 8, 1848, that Thomas Carlyle‟s editorial on the Revolution strikes Arnold as “solemn” and “deeply restful […] amidst the heat and vain words that are everywhere just now” (CL 75). Arnold continues, “Yet the thoughts extracted and abstractly stated, are every newspaper‟s: it is the style and feeling by which the beloved man appears” (CL
75). In this letter, Carlyle‟s style, removed from the hasty confusion and the “swift- kindling” situation of revolutionary fervor, allows Arnold to grasp more clearly the nature of the situation than even Clough, immersed in the Paris mobs, can. Stylistically, Arnold writes, it mirrors the Gita‟s philosophy, which emerges out of a removal from the
same, it seems, allows Arnold much more clarity and insight about the events of the February Revolution.
However, only one year later, as Arnold reposes at Thun and takes up his pen to write Clough, he has already recognized a problem with the very thing that he admired both the Gita and Carlyle for. “My dearest Clough,” he begins, “these are damned times –
everything is against one – […] moral desperadoes like Carlyle, our own selves, and the sickening consciousness of our difficulties” (CL 111). Carlyle‟s deeply “restful” and “solemn” style has become evidence of a wildly individualistic and self-absorbed morality that does not, apparently, strike Arnold as conducive to life in the “damned times” in which he lives. Arnold desires another way out, one that neither makes him a “fanatic” nor “chalf [sic] blown by the wind,” neither a man deeply and immovably absorbed in a particularly limited and removed ideology (like Carlyle) nor a man who flares up with the historical moment but has no subjective unity of his own on which to stand (like Clough) (Letters Digital Edition v1p155d2). These two positions, of course,
constitute the two positions that Hegel saw emerging from the philosophy presented in the Gita and that Arnold was in the process of rejecting. He remarks in the letter of his
own “impatience at being faussé in which drove me some time since so strongly into myself” (CL 109). Arnold provides his solution to the problem with recourse to a maxim of Aristotle, which H.F. Lowry glosses in a note to the letter: “but let us be „as the prudent man would define‟, and not as any one [sic] else would „define‟” (CL 112 n.6). Arnold references Aristotle‟s vision of acting by virtue, a “habit, accompanied with deliberate preference, in the relative mean, defined by reason, and as the prudent man would define it” (qtd. in CL 112 n.6). Carlyle‟s removed style now evidences Carlyle‟s
moral desperado character, suggesting a self-assuredness not tempered by virtue and prudence.
Arnold‟s change of opinion concerning Carlyle is relevant because it
demonstrates that the life philosophy he felt the Gita would provide him presents itself
simultaneously as an aesthetic problem. Once again, though, the influence of Hegel emerges as important here, for in his criticism of von Humboldt‟s assessment of the Gita, Hegel finds the work lacking not just in philosophical consistency, but also in artistic value. Krishna‟s recommendation that Arjuna act without concern for the fruits of his actions, to act merely according to his duty, does not establish a good basis for composing a successful poem. At one point in the Gita, even, Krishna literally tells
Arjuna he should “fight for the sake of fighting” (2. 38). Can the conversation between a god and a warrior in the middle of a battlefield, fighting simply for the sake of fighting, be the proper situation for poetic expression? Hegel answers, engaging von Humboldt several times:
Here as the [practical/active] principle (p.6) we have the necessity to give up all claims to the fruits of actions, to all results. Never, says Krishna, is an action‟s value estimated by its fruits. This tranquility marks […] „without doubt philosophically a mental constitution coming close to the sublime‟. We can recognize in this the moral obligation to do the good for the sake of the good only and duty only for duty‟s sake. But that the demand of such indifference towards the result may at the same time (in itself) produce a great poetic effect, can well be doubted if one is inclined to demand of poetic characters a more concrete individuality and the direction of their whole intensity towards the realization of their goals, and to see great poetic vivacity and hence great poetic effect only in the
harmony of their will-power with their interests. (Hegel, On the Episode
13-15)
Hegel criticizes the Gita‟s poetic power because the poem secures itself neither on the
polished, but it does not have unity of action and style, of action and expression. It teaches, but as a piece of poetry if falls short. For great actions to occur and for great characters to participate in those actions, one must address intensity, Hegel believes, “towards the realization of their goals,” and the character‟s “will-power” must coincide with the character‟s investment in that project, or, as Hegel puts it, the harmony of will- power with the realization of “their interests.” Recall that Hegel believed the application of the Hindu and Buddhist philosophy of subjectivity – or lack of subjectivity – would result in an ontological black hole, a point that parallels Hegel‟s “night of the world” imagery. Certainly with this as the foundation for Arjuna‟s character, and with Krishna‟s counsel towards this sort of relationship between Arjuna and with the battle, the
Bhagavad-Gita provides no subject for adequate poetry.
This sliding between metaphysical and aesthetic criticism in Hegel‟s critique of von Humboldt prefigures Arnold‟s own merging of his metaphysical considerations with his later assessment of Carlyle in the letter from Thun. As Arnold matured, he questioned what the effects would be of the Gita‟s life philosophy on his poetry. Truly, melancholy
marks Arnold‟s best poetry, the lyrical “I” of his poems hearkens to the best Romantic writers. But Arnold‟s poems were perhaps too much of an open book. Moreover, if they were an open book to his struggles, they were demonstrating the fragmentation that he felt in his life and that he recognized in the world around him. Those around him
recognized the depth and the laying bare of Arnold‟s struggle. His younger sister, Mary, upon first reading one collection of poems, remarked, “Indeed [Poems] was almost like a
new Introduction to him…I felt there was so much more of…practical questioning in Matt‟s book than I was at all prepared for; in fact, that it showed a knowledge of life and
conflict which was strangely like experience if it was not the thing itself; and this with all Matt‟s great power I should not have looked for” (qtd. in Trilling 18). Arnold, too
recognized the tension evident in his collections. To “K” he wrote:
the whole effect of my poems is quite vague & indeterminate – this is their weakness; a person therefore who endeavoured to make them accord would only lose his labor; and a person who has any inward completeness can at best only like parts of them….I shall do better some day I hope – meanwhile change nothing, resign nothing that you have in deference to me or my oracles; & do not plague yourself to find a consistent meaning for these last, which in fact they do not possess through my weakness. (Letters Digital Edition v1p143d1)
Matthew Arnold realized what he had to do after turning away from his struggles with the Gita. It was necessary, he felt, to turn from his old ways, not only
philosophically, but also aesthetically. After only a brief run, Arnold retracted his 1853 publication of Empedocles on Etna, and Other Poems. He retracted the title poem from
that volume and, in 1853, published a new volume with a preface attached which carried within it a new aesthetic philosophy as well as a critique of his age and the poetry being produced in response to the age.
Much has happened in the intervening years when he wrote to Clough from Thun, first vocalizing his disgust with the world around him and his heretofore response to it. Not least significant of the events would have been his first love affair, which went awry and was chronicled in the poems collectively titled Switzerland. Arnold‟s love interest,
Marguerite in the series, has been a source of scholarly intrigue for years.26 The poems, though, help to provide a real-world example of the consequences of trying to incorporate the Gita‟s philosophy into life. Scholars find it difficult to understand why, exactly,
Arnold‟s love affair with Marguerite did not blossom, for blame seems to be on both the
26 See pages 79-80 of Nicholas Murray work for his three arguments in favor of a flesh and blood
lover and beloved. However, the poems evidence Arnold‟s difficulty in establishing relationships, primarily because of his recognition that he does not know himself enough to be grounded. In the poem “Meeting,” for example, a reader witnesses Arnold‟s
excitement as he sees, after a year‟s time, Marguerite coming. He sees “My Marguerite smil[ing] upon the strand” and “spring[s] to make my choice” (PW 174); however, he immediately hears “in tones of ire” a “God‟s tremendous voice; / „Be counseled, and retire‟” (PW 174). In the next poem, “Parting,” Arnold, just as he physically touches Marguerite, is immediately whisked away to the upper regions of the Alps where he once again presents the reader with a scene of isolation and removal such as was explored in the previous chapter:
Hark! the wind rushes past us! Ah! with that let me go
To the clear, waning hill-side, Unspotted by snow,
There to watch, o‟er the sunk vale, The frore mountain-wall,
Where the niched snow-bed sprays down Its powdery fall.
[…]
No life but, at moments, The mountain-bee‟s hum. - I come, O ye mountains!
Ye pine-woods, I come! (PW 176)
All in all, as Nicholas Murray concludes, the Switzerland series provides a real-world
example of the consequence of the posture Arnold had taken from the Gita and that he
found particularly wanting. The encounter with Marguerite has shown him “a reminder of his restless, transitional state,” showing him at least that the Gita‟s philosophy, as he
understood it, could not provide a romantic partner with what she would desire, “steadiness and constancy of purpose” (Murray 82, 85).
By 1853 Arnold‟s entire life philosophy, as well as his life, had changed. Although many critics point to practical matters as the reasons Arnold abandoned his poetry (working life, courtship of Fanny Lucy Wightman, marriage, children), Arnold was also working out what he felt were the kinks in his life philosophy and his aesthetics in a more abstract way. It also must be asserted that Arnold was not making a purely practical decision when he chose to reject the title poem from his new volume and to publish a preface of the provocative magnitude that he did. Arnold was recognizing a flaw he believed was present in the Gita, believing that it not only had moved him in a
new direction subjectively, but that it also had implications for art as well as for an adequate political response to an age fractured by revolution and marked by rapid
transition. The philosophy with which Arnold replaced the Gita‟s is one that provides the