A year or so ago I gave a lecture in the South Bank on the authority of the poet.
One of my subjects was Matthew Arnold. I described in detail my doubts about his work, his influence, his intellect. The American poet John Ashbery was in the audience. Afterwards he came up to me with a smile. "But I like Matthew Arnold," he said.
Despite the fact that I was charmed then - as I am now - by the idea that this most conservative of English poets could speak across tribes and boundaries to the most committed of experimental ones, I turned to this biography with the hardest of hard hearts. All poets have anti heroes and Matthew Arnold is one of mine. Why? Because he lived, as few poets have, at a turning point at a time when religion and poetry were finally drawing apart; when doubt and science and darkness were at last creeping to the edge of the lyric; when even a poet like Tennyson could allow doubt some presence and magnificence in as such as "In Memoriam."
Instead of allowing religion and poetry their proper tension, and doubt its proper daylight, Arnold rushed in. In his Oxford Lectures in his elaborate essays, he took a fluid moment and set it in stone. It is Arnold who addressed the distance between poetry and religion and came up with his own solution for it: the religion of poetry, something which would shadow the ethos of poetry for a hundred years, which would allow it to be less communal, more arrogant and more prone to false mystique than any other art form in this century.
But it is very difficult to keep a hard heart in the face of Nicholas Murray's quiet, loving and highly partisan study. To start with he tells an interesting story and tells it well, and insists, with a simple accumulation of eloquent detail that it is the story of a certain Englishness caught in time.
This is the first biography of Arnold since 1981. I had forgotten some of the details of his life especially the harsher ones. Some of them are worth recalling. He was born in 1822, the son of Thomas Arnold. In fact, his father, as headmaster of Rugby College, helped to define the English public school. His son, however, was a wayward student and did badly at Oxford. Partly because of this, his prospects as a Victorian star were damaged. His life as a school inspector - which is what he became - involved the day to day, often arduous travel and detail of what he himself called "an incessant grind". He married early, was a devoted husband and an afflicted father: he lost three children - one after the other - through a tragic mixture of illness and accident. In 1849 and 1853 he published his two important volumes of poetry, The Strayed Reveller and Empedocles. In 1857 he was elected to the Oxford Chair of Poetry. In 1888 he published The Study of Poetry, where the first essay contains one of his most characteristic proposals: that in an age of declining faith, poetry would have to replace religion. In 1888 he died and was buried with his three sons.
Nicholas Murray has had the Balliol archive of Arnold's letters to draw on, bequeathed to the college since the last biography, by the poet's grandson. He has also had access to the microfilm archive at Charlottesville. He quotes extensively from these letters and manages to humanise Arnold considerably in the process. He makes sure he comes across to us as a practical, impulsive, warm man - chatty without being effusive, endlessly diligent, loyal to friends and family.
The problem is that this is not quite enough. Arnold was a mystery and no amount of quotation from his letters will solve it. The mystery lies in the fracture between the poet and the critic, between the headstrong, awkward man who composed beautiful, nerve racked poems in his youth and then, still a young man but sensing that his gift was slipping away, wrote to Arthur Clough saying "I am past thirty and three parts iced over", who followed, in those poems, the dark life of instinct to a neurotic and fascinating source; who yet, in the huge edifice of lectures and advocacy, does not honour that life at all but subjugates it harshly to the expectation of an age, real story of Matthew Arnold would surely be of how the most pessimistic and psychologically original of the Victorian poets became the hard edged optimist and author of "Culture and Anarchy" and "Translating Homer". Such a story would not forget the fact that in his youth, starting to be iced over, he wrote what remains for me one of the most interesting poems of the century, "The Buried Life". The story would also include the fact that by the time he was forty the buried life had become the hidden one:
But often in the world's most crowded streets,
But often in the din of strife
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life..
Nicholas Murray is not at all interested in this approach. And, in one sense, why should he be? His project as a biographer is quite different. His intention is not to show the fractured intelligence, but the seamless development of the Victorian sage - to me, a less interesting phenomenon. "Increasingly," he writes in his preface, Arnold's calm and lucid temperament, his good faith, his Orwellian decency, his putting of the idea of disinteresedness' or the return upon oneself above instant partisanship, his passion for directing ideas at the widest audience and seeking for them broad consent rather than sectarian self satisfaction, are turning out to be not weaknesses but strengths."
The problem, in a technical sense, is that his biography does justice to the critic rather than the poet - indeed, his discussion of "Dover Beach" is poor and relentlessly biographical. The result is a readable, tactful book which eschews Matthew Arnold's lost self in favour of his selfinvestion.