Poetry or Religion? by John S. Reist, Jr.

John S. Reist, Jr.

Poetry or Religion? Text, Tact, and Tactic in Matthew Arnolds Literary Critical Method
In the initial two paragraphs of Matthew
Arnolds essay, The Study of Poetry, there lies a theory which continues, on a more overtly religious and metaphysical level, the idea which Shelley espoused in his A Defense of Poetry, that Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world (359). Arnolds point in his essay is that, due to the breakdown of dogma and the loss of evidence for the supernatural which occurred through the rise of modern science and the Darwinian theory and explication of evolution, Shelleys role of the poet will more and more come to be acknowledged. Poetry will now provide the consolation and inspiration, the sense of purpose and the guarantee of values that religion had previously embodied. Arnold states: More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry (1927:76-77). Thus, Arnold imagined for poetry a higher, or at least a different, place in the scheme of things than had heretofore been conceived. Poetry now becomes a surrogate religion, a criticism of life. It is from poetry, rather than from revealed dogma or traditions of the church that all other
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spheres of lifescience, politics, economics, and moralitywill gain their meaning. Concerning science and literature, Arnold says, in his famous debate with Huxley: And for the generality of men there will be found, I say, to arise, when they have duly taken in the proposition that their ancestor was a hairy quadraped furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably aboreal in his habits, there will be found to arise an invincible desire to relate this proposition to the sense in us for beauty. But this the men of science will not do for us, and will hardly even profess to do (1924:107-08). This sense in us for beauty is what Arnold calls in another place, a pursuit of total perfection by means of getting to know, on all matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world. . . (1900:xi). This perfection neither science, politics, nor even dogma can give us, for these are all machinery which are mistaken by most Englishmen for the thing itself. As a result of this pursuit of total perfection, Arnold developed a critical method based largely on his ideal of culture, beauty, and right conduct. Northrup Frye declares: We see that Arnold is trying to
John S. Reist, Jr. is professor of Christianity and Literature at Hillsdale College.

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create a new scriptural canon out of poetry to serve as a guide for those social principles which he wants culture to take over from religion (22). Thus Arnold looks for elements of high seriousness and sincerity in literary works, and seldom examines an individual work as a whole, or in itself. As a consequence, he dismisses Chaucer on the one hand, and accepts Dante on the other. However, he makes such distinctions by culling touchstones from various works and rarely does formal, or textual criticism of any depth or to any extent. Thus, his criticism is at best cultural; and, at worst, he misreads certain texts because he wishes them to reflect the tact or sincerity of a nineteenth-century gentleman who is as much lamenting the breakup of Western culture during the last century as he is examining specific works of art in toto and in situ. He was a harbinger and prophet of contemporary readerly criticism and thus our examination of his method and achievement will help us to understand contemporary critical movements and problems. My aim here is an exposition and evaluation of Arnolds critical method, not in order to show that it is worthless, (which is obviously untrue), but only to show that because he confused the disciplines of poetics and literary criticism with moral and cultural philosophy, he never did come to a full understanding of any particular work of art.

The problem of Arnolds methodology is

fundamental; and it arises because he hardly ever examines the whole work of art before him, nor does he examine any work of art in the light of the philosophical milieu in which it was written. He thinks, rather, that the critic should call poetry to service in the name of a higher order of being: We should conceive of poetry worthily, and more highly than it has been the custom to

conceive of it. We should conceive of it as capable of higher uses, and called to higher destinies than those in general men have assigned to it hitherto (1927:76). To Arnold, it does not seem to matter if the higher use originates in a mentality or Zeitgeist alien to that of the work of art; as long as we have in mind a sense for the best we shall be able to distinguish between poetry and any other thing; . . . constantly in reading poetry a sense for the best, the really excellent, and of the strength and joy to be drawn from it, should be present in our minds and should govern our estimate of what we read (1927:79). Now, Arnold realizes the pitfalls involved in the exegesis of any text, and he attempts to guard against these by erecting two hermeneutical fences: the historical fallacy and the personal fallacy. The historical involves focusing on the environment of the poet; works of art . . . may count to us historically. The course of a nations language, thought, and poetry, is profoundly interesting; and by regarding a poets work as a stage in this course of development we may easily bring ourselves to make it of more importance than it really is, we may come to use a language of quite exaggerated praise in criticizing it; in short, to over-rate it (1927:79). The personal fallacy occurs when Our personal affinities, liking, or circumstances, have great power to sway our estimate of this or that poets work, and to make us attach more importance to it as poetry than in itself it really possesses, because to us it is, or has been, of high importance. Here also, we over-rate the object of our interest and apply to it a language of praise which is quite exaggerated (1927:79, Italics mine). However, there are actually three ways that a poet or poem may count: A poet or poem may count to us historically, they may count to us on grounds personal to ourselves, and they may count to us really
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(1927:79, Italics mine). It is poetry that really counts which Arnold is concerned to apprehend. However, his suggestion as to how to recognize real poetry is really what makes such poetry qua poetry unavailable. When he is arguing for an intelligent critical approach to texts, he is really contending for the critical intelligence, the man of taste, or the Hellenist. For instance, in that justly famous portion of the latter part of The Study of Poetry, (which reveals how wellread and deeply steeped Arnold is in culture), we see the kind of criticism he wishes to do; and even though he has warned us that our personal affinities may prevent us from apprehending the poem as poetry, he himself focuses on the cultural critic, or audience, and not on the work of art itself. Thus, he can freely refer to such various kinds of poetry as that of Dante, Shakespeare, Burns, Homer, Milton, and Chaucer; and he finds in all of them what he calls the poetic quality: The specimens I have quoted differ widely from one another, but they have in common this: the possession of the very highest poetic quality (1927:86). Yet, the poetic quality (and we have yet to discuss the ambiguity of this term in Arnolds thinking) is discoverable only . . . if we have tact (1927:86). It is significant that, before he concludes that single lines or passages have the poetic quality, he carefully states twice that it is the tactful or sensitive person who will recognize this quality.
. . . if we have any tact we shall find them, when we have lodged them well in our minds, an infallible touchstone for detecting the presence or absence of high poetic quality, and also the degree of this quality, in all other poetry which we may place beside them. . . . These few lines, if we have tact and can use them, are enough even of themselves to keep clear and sound our judgments about poetry, to save us from fallacious estimates of it, to conduct us to a real estimate (1927:84-85, 86, Italics mine). 20

Who is this tactful person? It is evident that he or she is the guardian or monitor of culture, of sweetness and light. Arnold believes that when this critic comes to the text, he or she will be able to discover, because of their predisposition to do so, that enigmatic quality of real poetry. The poetic quality does not, therefore, arise from the work of art. Arnolds final understanding of poetry does not clearly involve a poetic judgment, then, because he never really examines a poem; that is, the entire poem, the totality of parts, the work as product. Rather, he isolates touchstones, single lines which speak to him of a higher truth and a higher seriousness, and invests them with the poetic quality. In his argument that true poetry will possess high seriousness, he is referring to Aristotle, who states, Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars (353). However, what Arnold overlooks is that immediately before Aristotles famous statement that art is more philosophical than history, he (Aristotle) states: The truth is that, just as in the other imitative arts one imitation is always of one thing, so in poetry the story, as an imitation of action, must represent one action, a complete whole, with its several incidents so closely connected that the transposal or withdrawal of any one of them will disjoin and dislocate the whole (35253). (Italics mine) Thus, Arnolds appeal to Aristotles doctrine of high seriousness loses its power, for it ignores his view that seriousness or truth in poetry arises from a unified aesthetic whole, with its several incidents so closely connected that the transposal or withdrawal of any one of them will disjoin and dislocate the whole. Arnolds touchstone method does precisely what Aristotle argues one should not do; it withdraws lines, or sections, or parts

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from larger wholes and thereby divests the entire work of these key lines, while at the same time, it suggests that these separated parts may be understood without their context in the complete poem. Ironically, Arnold also does the same thing with Aristotles statement about the philosophical seriousness of art; he separates Aristotles concept of seriousness from his contention that such seriousness is embodied in a complete whole.

soon leads to the observation that every text speaks in the language of its time and of its historical setting (291).

Critics as various as Samuel T. Coleridge

and Rudolph Bultmann also have asserted and argued that literary criticism must analyze the specific qualities of each text. Coleridge states:
Our genuine admiration of a great poet is a continuous under-current of feeling; it is everywhere present, but seldom anywhere as a separate excitement. I was wont boldly to affirm, that it would scarcely be more difficult to push a stone out from the pyramids with the bare hand, than to alter a word, or the position of a word, in Milton or Shakespeare, (in their most important works at least) without making the author say something else, or something worse, than he does say (23).

Later on, speaking of Shakespeare in particular, he declares: . . . the consummate judgment of Shakespeare, not only in the general construction, but in all the detail, of his dramas impressed me with greater wonder, than even the might of his genius, or the depth of his philosophy (34). Rudolph Bultmann contends:
It belongs to the historical method, of course, that a text is interpreted in accordance with the rules of grammar and the meaning of words. And closely connected with this, historical exegesis also has to inquire about the individual style of the text. The sayings of Jesus in the synoptics, for example, have a different style from the Johannine ones. But with this there is also given another problem with which exegesis is required to deal. Paying attention to the meaning of words, to grammar, and to style

Astonishing as it is for a critic who was also a great poet himself, Arnold ignores the fact that Dantes In his will is our peace, and Miltons And courage never to submit or yield/And what is else not to be overcome, have the whole weight of the entire work behind them, and simply cannot be easily or arbitrarily compared with Homer, Chaucer, et al. without distorting their meaning. Arnolds method is limited not only because it brings a preconstructed idea of the poetic quality to the text; it is also fragmentary, in that it culls out parts from wholes and therefore does injustice to both the part and the whole. It is not at all obvious or clear that The Chanson de Roland, The Iliad, and The Divine Comedyeach in its entiretywill yield the same kind of high seriousness which Arnold thinks nineteenth-century England needs and which he therefore insists that really excellent poetry must have. And even if such works do possess high seriousness, that is to be discovered from the entire work, not from isolated parts. Arnold, then, falls into the pit of the personal fallacy which he was so careful to guard against, even though he states the value of going to the work of art itself: It is much better to have recourse simply to concrete examples;to take specimens of poetry of the high, the very highest quality, and to say: The characters of a high quality of poetry are what is expressed there (1927:87). Yet, because he brings to the work of art his poetic quality, his tact, his recourse to the text must be fragmentary. He is thus limited to singling out touchstones to illustrate his particular cultural sensitivity, and to that degree he disables himself as a critic who asks poetic questions. It naturally follows, then, that Arnolds
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definition of his methodology, which he labels disinterestedness, would concern the rules of the critics mind, rather than the principles of the work, the unity of the poem, the power of the imitation, or the totality of the parts of a whole. The rule may be given in one worddisinterestedness. And how is it to be disinterestedness? By keeping aloof from practice; by resolutely following the law of its own nature, which is to be a free play of the mind on all subjects which it touches. . . to know the best that is known and thought in the world, and by in its turn, making this known, to create a current of true and fresh ideas (1927:34-35). With this governing principle, it is no surprise that, even though Arnold states again and again that the goal of criticism is to see the object as in itself it really is (1927:21), he can sift various kinds of works through his sieve of taste or tact, and save only the nuggets which reinforce this taste. The object as it really is actually is the taste of Arnolds aristocratic mentality of the nineteenth century; thus, for Arnold the critics preeminent tact predetermines his critical tactic.

It remains to examine exactly what Arnold

means by the aforementioned poetic quality. Many of Arnolds terms are never accurately defined. For example, such a definition of greatness as . . . a spiritual condition worthy to excite love, interest, and admiration (1909:115) is quite nebulous. Indeed, T. S. Eliot has seen as one of Arnolds most irritating failings, his vagueness of definition (383). His lack of precision becomes most clearly evident when he speaks of God as the Eternal not ourselves making for righteousness (1892:349). Eliot aptly remarks that Arnolds concept of God comes exactly to the same thing as Spencers use of the term unknowable for God (386). For example, Arnold states
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that . . . for supreme poetical success more is required than the powerful application of ideas to life; it must be an application under the conditions fixed by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty (1927:102). And we ask, What are these laws? From whence do they come? How do they result in the poetic quality? What, in short, is the poetic quality? The poetic quality is high seriousness. Arnold states, Those laws fix as an essential condition, in the poets treatment of such matters as are here in question, high seriousness;the high seriousness which comes from absolute sincerity (1927:102-03). This high seriousness is to be achieved in conformity to certain laws as Arnold states them in the following: In poetry, however, the criticism of life has to be made conformably to the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty. Truth and seriousness of substance and matter, felicity and perfection of diction and manner, as these are exhibited in the best poets, are what constitutes a criticism of life made in conformity with the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty (1964:1283, Italics mine). If poetic techniques, such as diction and manner by which subject and matter are rendered, are important phenomena, it is disappointing that Arnold rarely undertakes the serious and formidable work of attending to the entire work of art before him, to show us how truth and seriousness actually arise from the work. If Arnold ignores reading the whole work of the artist who made it according to certain artistic principles, and which therefore has its principle mode of being as an aesthetic composition, how then does he find the poetic quality? If it is not by looking at the work of art per se and in toto that we ascertain that it is poetry, where does one look? The answer is that the poetic quality is not found at all; it does not arise from the work; it is not a knowledge of a universal

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through some complete and particular imitation of a serious action; it is not even discernible in Arnolds poetical criticism, theoretical or practical, at all. To find it, one must go to his theory of culturea culture in which the man or woman of tact will make judgments in his or her critical tactic. Arnold wishes to ask by what means a critic might be enabled to create a cultural intelligence or moral vision which will produce the kind of art in which he (Arnold) is really interested. Speaking of the role of the critical power, he states: . . . thus, it tends, at last, to make an intellectual situation of which the creative power can profitably avail itself (1927:24). Arnolds attitude toward Chaucer is a prime example of the limitation of his method. Chaucers poetical power is real (1927:90). It has divine fluidity of movement, a large, free, simple, clear yet kindly view of life, and a diction of lovely charm (1927:91-92). However, Chaucer is not one of the great classics because he lacks high seriousness (1927:93). Arnold comes to this astonishing misjudgment simply because his touchstone method does not require him to look at the whole of The Canterbury Tales. It is beyond the compass of this paper to argue the fundamental unity of The Canterbury Tales, yet it has been cogently argued by several critics. Ralph Baldwin states: The ending is as neatly calculated as the beginning. Even the conventional metaphor, the springtime, has fostered one conspicuous, symbolic tree, the tree of Penitence, whose roots thrust through and whose branches overspread the world of the Canterbury pilgrims (49). In addition, Donald Howard argues convincingly and at great length that, although The Canterbury Tales is incomplete, it is a unified, carefully planned work with the metaphor of the pilgrimage giving it an appropriate beginning, a sustained continuity, and final fulfillment. His

judgment is that . . . it is unfinished but complete (1). Arnold saw only the ornamental embellishments or earthy playfulness of Chaucer and although he concluded that there indeed was Gods foysoun (he is agreeing with Dryden here), he also negatively concluded that there was no high seriousness. His judgment, then, is a moral judgment and not a poetic one. And this, finally, is Arnolds basic limitation as a literary critic; that is, he does not ask poetic or artistic questions which have to do with the making or structure of various works of art. Rather, he asks, as a brooding, plangent, cultural analyst of a nineteenth-century England whose gentlemanly religious tradition is crumbling, whether anything can save us. And he finds that poetry can, but only a poetry of touchstones, of illustrations of the enduring values which he as a moralist wishes to preserve.

One should not criticize Arnolds moral

sense in a paper on poetic method; indeed, there is an almost unassailable heroic stature to his position as moralist. One should, however, point out the palpable confusion of poetry and religion in his thinking as a literary critic, for he blurs the distinction between art and religion. He states (and I quote it again for its signal importance): More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry (1927:76-77). Arnold collapses artistic questions into questions about life; indeed, poetry is criticism of life. He robes his worldview in whatever touchstones he may find as his capacious memory rambles over the history of literature. Thus, he became a moralist in his poetic criticism. He identi23

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fied religion and culture: Religion, the greatest and most important of the efforts by which the human race has manifested its impulse to perfect itselfreligion, that voice of the deepest human experience. . . . [R]eligion comes to a conclusion identical with that which culture likewise reaches, . . (1909:10). And he then set up poetry as the arbiter over the whole of life, seeking thereby to fill the vacuum in mans religious nature and environment with poetry; and by doing so, he thought he was providing the nineteenth century and the future with a superior critical norm, which was beyond the inroads that science or positivism could make on religion. Arnold contended that the virtue of poetry is its insight and wisdom which is above the vagaries of the historical, diurnal ebb and flow of the Sea of Faith; poetry, he says, attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact (1927:76); religion had materialized itself in the fact which is now failing it because of the devastation that science and evolution had wrought on Christian dogma. By elevating itself to the idea, poetry perpetually endures, no matter what values may be displaced by the historical flotsam and jetsam of events, persons, scientific discoveries, or cultural ideologies. It thus becomes a consoling norm through each passing generation and provides a stay against random historical existence. That poetry has a primary value and function in society is obvious; by its imaginative and mimetic ordering of the spray of contingency called experience, it provides a seizure of life, a representation of life, which at its best provokes reflection about the basic issues and questions of humanity. However, Arnold was preoccupied with the moral vision, the high seriousness or lack thereof, which he saw in Victorian England. His willingness to commit so much of his time and energy as Inspector of Schools shows how important he regarded
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the cultural condition of nineteenth-century England. Yet his concern for tact or sincerity became a liability for his critical work, for it hindered him from asking formal or aesthetic questions about literature. That a man whose own poetry reveals that he knew what a poem is as a formal structure, as an imaginative composition, should also overlook such poetic questions in his literary criticism is one of the abiding ironies of nineteenth-century poetics and criticism, for Arnold tended to blur the distinction between poetry and religion, between culture and art, between the poem and the reader with tact. Cleanth Brooks has suggested: If Arnolds muddling of distinctions has got us into our trouble, the critics most aware of the muddlement will be precisely the critics one would expect to have a renewed sense of the importance of the distinctions which Arnold confused, and the critics who feel the necessity of reviving and maintaining these distinctions (131). Arnolds method hermeneutically sealed his sensibility from what is essential to literary criticisma focus on the text, and the whole text, with all of its touchstones. The distinction between the text as composition and the tact of the critic is fundamental; and the current need is for a hermeneutic that goes beyond formalism, beyond the excesses of the New Critics who came after Arnold, without relapsing into Arnolds mistake. Geoffrey Hartman has put it superbly: What is needed for literary study is a hundred percent of formalism and a hundred percent of critical intuition . . . . There are many ways to transcend formalism, but the worst is not to study form (56). What is required is a more responsible treatment of the text by critics who neither confuse their taste and sensibility with the values which arise from the work to be criticized (as contemporary reader-response interpreters are prone to

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do), nor insist, as the autotelic critics did, that a work of art has no important cultural source or moral effect. A critical tactic will be most tactful when it is employed by critics who enable us to experience the work of art as deeply and fully as possible. Such critics will not deny the hermeneutical circle in which all of us are caught; but, by admitting their own values with which they approach the text, they will consciously strive to enable us to see the text itself. They will strive to make the text as fully available as possible to us precisely because it is so difficult to do so. And then, as much as possible, the effect will be that of the text, not of the critic using the text to preach Marxism, to propagate sexism, or to promote high seriousness of whatever kind. The highest seriousness is the work of explication of the text; the true critic is the servant, not the creator of the text. Jacques Maritain has stated: Poetry (like metaphysics) is spiritual nourishment; but of a savor which has been created and is insufficient. There is but one eternal nourishment. Unhappy you who think yourselves ambitious, and who whet your appetites for anything less than the three Divine Persons and the humanity of Christ. It is a mortal error to expect from poetry the supersubstantial nourishment of man (1962a:132); and he has also contended that each work of art possesses a recta ratio factibilium, the right arrangement, proportion, and order (1962b:9). Text, therefore, is prior to tact; the tact and tactic of a sensitive reader will insist on this with high seriousness. Otherwise, poetry will become confused with politics, psychology, or culture; or worse yetas in Arnolds casepoetry will be misused as a surrogate for religion.

References
Aristotle. Poetics. The Pocket Aristotle. Ed. Justin D. Kaplan. Transl. Ingram Bywater. New York: The Washington Square Press, 1966. 340379. Arnold, Matthew. Byron. English Prose of the Victorian Era. Ed. Charles Harrold and William D. Templeman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964. 1276-1288; Culture and Anarchy. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1909; Literature and Dogma. London: MacMillan & Company, 1892; Matthew Arnold Prose and Poetry. Ed. Archibald L. Bouton. New York: Charles Scribners and Sons, 1927. Baldwin, Ralph. The Unity of The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer Criticism. Ed. Richard J. Schoeck and Jerome Taylor. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1960. 14-51. Brooks, Cleanth. Metaphor and the Function of Criticism. Spiritual Problems in Contemporary Literature. Ed. Stanley R. Hopper. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1957. 127-137. Bultmann, Rudolph. Is Exegesis Without Presuppositions Possible? Existence and Faith. Ed. and Transl. Schubert Ogden. New York: Meridian Books, Inc., 1960. 289-296. Coleridge, Samuel T. Biographia Literaria. Ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. PMLA 93 (1978): 240-247. Eliot, T. S. Arnold and Pater. Selected Essays. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1950. 382-393. Frye, Northrup. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957. Hartman, Geoffrey H. Beyond Formalism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970. Kelman, John. Prophets of Yesterday And Their Message for Today. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1924. Maritain, Jacques. Art and Scholasticism. New York: Charles Scribners Sons. 1962; Frontiers Of Poetry. New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1962. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. A Defense of Poetry. The Harvard Classics. Vol. 27. Ed. Charles W. Eliot. New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1930. 329-359.

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