Four Cheers for Normality

Abstract

Matthew Arnold, the English poet, educationist and critic, was born on Christmas Eve, 1822. He died in 1888. His father Thomas was the famous headmaster and Oxford historian, whose reforms at Rugby initiated the wholesale transformation of the previously brutal English ‘public’ schools into something like genuine centres of learning and manners. (Some say that the real object was to manufacture an imperial governing class.) Less zealous, the younger Arnold idled, aesthetically but not unprofitably, first at Oxford and later in Paris. In 1847 he became secretary to the Whig politician Lord Lansdowne, a post which brought him into high society and also left him leisure for writing. His first published poems (1849) surprised all his acquaintance by their distinction, serious-mindedness and elegiac melancholy. Arnold continued to write poetry until 1867. Its subject-matter is distinctively modern: alienation, disenchantment, isolation, purposelessness, the collapse of faith, and (as in ‘Dover Beach’) the barely adequate solace afforded by love and friendship.