And now we look at our second critic this week. John Ruskin was famed as an artist and art critic; but Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) was a poet and literary critic. Unlike Ruskin, who today is more famous for his critical work than his art, Arnold is known to most students of English for his poem "Dover Beach," and perhaps for "The Scholar Gipsy."

    Arnold's father was headmaster of the famous Rugby School, and the boy's godfather was the esteemed clergyman John Keble. The poet William Wordsworth was a family friend.

    It is no wonder that, raised in such an environment, young Matthew won literary prizes at school, or that he won a scholarship to Oxford. After his father's death, Arnold became a teacher at Rugby and, later, Oxford. He became an Inspector of Schools for the Queen, a position he held much of his life. Though he considered it "drudgery," the position familiarized him with much of provincial England.

    Meanwhile, he was writing. He is considered a great Victorian poet, only surpassed by Tennyson and Robert Browning. The attraction of his poetry--as Arnold himself foresaw--was that it "represent[ed]... the main movement of mind of the last quarter of a century." In other words, it caught the "spirit of the age" in a very important time.

    For example, "Dover Beach" (published in 1867 but probably written earlier) speaks of the increasing religious doubt of the 19th century. It describes the "withdrawing roar" of the "sea of faith," and suggests that love between individuals may be the only source of hope.

    "The Scholar Gipsy" takes on the academy, telling the tale of an Oxford student who left the halls of the university to live with gypsies and study their ways. He finds there an alternate, perhaps even a superior, form of knowing, promoting a democratization of knowledge and a decentralizing of the power of the university.

    Both poems point toward his other oeuvre, the body of work he published criticizing literature and society.

    Arnold died at 65 while running to catch a bus.

    Vocabulary: Which word above means:

    1. outside of the center of the country

    2. boring work

    3. the prevailing attitudes of a time and place

    4. giving of power to the people

    5. moving away from central power

    6. highly respected

    7. government officer who ensures the quality of education

    8. body of work

    9. all schools taken as a whole

    ANSWERS: 1. provincial 2. drudgery 3. spirit of the age 4. democratization 5. decentralizing 6. esteemed 7. Inspector of Schools 8. oeuvre 9. the academy