360 - Matthew Arnold: A Life

Matthew Arnold: A Life
By Park Honan
New York, McGraw Hill, 1981. 496 pp. $19.95.

That Matthew Arnold did not care to be the subject of a biography is less surprising than the fact that nearly a century elapsed before Park Honan, Reader in English at the University of Birmingham and

361 - Matthew Arnold: A Life

co-author of a Browning biography, The Book, The Ring and The Poet, got the job done. A decade in the making, Matthew Arnold: A Life, is an important book for anyone interested in the man and his age.

Arnold's writing in every genre offers the reader a performance not a confession. Enjoyment of his art and consideration of his message require appreciation of the mask Arnold has chosen, the manner selected for the occasion. Some setting of the mask against the life is standard in Arnold criticism; and the tale of the potential dandy who married into responsibility, sagecraft, and prose is a commonplace. Behind the familiar stories, Honan discloses an Arnold crafting personae from infancy while playing the sympathy of his mother against the demands of an overwhelming father whose moral, intellectual, and physical energy were remarkable even by Victorian standards. The leg braces intended to correct rickets that encumbered "Crabby" Arnold in his third year perforce turned him into an observer, watching from the sidelines family activity in which he was emotionally engaged, thus anticipating the stance of the mature critic, at once rhetorically distanced and deeply committed.

The eventual emergence of the son of Thomas Arnold of Rugby as a public figure in his own right, after his failure to take the expected Oxford first, is an oft-told tale here told well. Honan's real contribution, however, lies in treatment of the women in Arnold's life: the mother who encouraged his imagination and provided the psychological weapons with which to fend off his father's dominating personality; his sister Jane ("K"), chief confidante after his mother and his early audience; his wife Fanny Lucy, whose influence not only upon his personal life but upon the form and substance of his public lectures Honan argues convincingly.

Honan understands the crucial role of sibling relationships in the nurturing of Victorian genius and wisely presents the friendship of Arnold and Arthur Hugh Clough as part of a quadruple portrait using the relationship between Clough and his remarkable sister Anne Jemima to cast light upon that between Matthew and Jane. Of the other woman in Arnold's early life, the wraith-like Mary Claude, Honan may make too much, insisting that the "Cruel Invisible" must be the Marguerite of the Switzerland poems, in effect confirming the notion that the Marguerite episode must have been actual because Arnold lacked the imagination to invent it.

Honan makes more fruitful connections between Empedocles by Etna, Arnold's strained relations with Clough, emotions roused by the loss of "K" through her marriage to William Foster (though he was to give the bride away he could not bear to attend the wedding), and the uncertain progress of his courtship. (Daughter of the jurist Sir William Wightman, Fanny Lucy's social station and material prospects were far above Arnold's, and at one point his suit was forbidden.) Honan connects the picture of Empedocles as a Victorian Hamlet figure to Arnold's perplexities without reducing the poem to a biographical gloss.

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Marriage and the change from Secretary to Lord Landsdowne to work as Inspector of Schools forms the logical transition between the halves of Honan's biography, placing the emphasis upon Arnold's first thirty years. In the Council Office, Arnold remained in an inferior position, inferior, among others, to the virtuous brother-in-law whose school legislation laid the groundwork for England's belated system of national education-this despite Arnold's increasing fame in the world of letters and the quality of his reports.

Honan's account of Arnold's anomalous position and the combination of real injustice and personal jealousy it produced is essential reading for anyone interested in his social criticism, both the personal digs it contains and Arnold's insistence that, unlike Carlyle and Ruskin, he could prod without offending. Arnoldian irony and indirection can be those of the civil servant raised to the heights of art.

Only late in his career did Arnold directly address the religious concerns that had so exercised his father. Honan makes great claims for Literature and Dogma and God and the Bible, finding anticipations of Bultmann, Tillich, H. R. Niebuhr, Bonhoeffer, and even Martin Buber, but he asserts without demonstration. And to say that Frank Kermode's Genesis of Secrecy "borrows Arnold's insight that classic and sacred texts depend on interpretation for their vitality" (p. 369) would seem to turn both Arnold and Kermode into English provincials unaware of continental hermeneutics, even though Arnold's interest in Europe and his comparativist critical bias are Honan's chief arguments for his continuing importance.

While there are questionable passages in the book (once we mysteriously gain access to the Arnolds' connubial bedroom), the weakness of the biography is less in substance than in style. A book on a master of prose may well create unrealistic expectations, redoubled in this case by memory of Lionel Trilling's classic study, Matthew Arnold. Neither Honan's prose nor his narrative are smooth, the novelistic foreshadowings are often clumsy, and too many sentences are whipped to the finishing line by exclamation points.

Though largely shaped by the record the man chose to leave behind him, Honan's life revivifies Arnold for the general reader while his notes to the Arnold family papers provide an invaluable service to scholars. A learned work, this biography will inspire learning in others, and that far outweighs any surface flaws.

Jeffrey L. Spear
Columbia University
New York, New York