Surface Tension - Julie Carr

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(Works, 1:180)

      For Arnold, poetic language is provisional, a product of time and place. However, language’s relativity is not a product of individual invention, but instead of convention. For poetry to “carry” the race it must be recognizably pleasing as poetry; like the domestic woman, it must be unthreateningly “beautiful.” Style becomes useful as a bearer of ideas only in how well it disappears into the invisibility of conventional taste.

      And yet it should be said that the notion that poetry must bear the burden of criticism’s ideas is not unfamiliar to twenty-first century readers of experimental poetry. Robert Kaufman discusses just this issue in his essay “Sociopolitical (i.e. Romantic) Difficulty in Modern Poetry and Aesthetics,” in which he examines the close relationship between late twentieth-century critical theory and experimental poetry. In Kaufman’s analysis of “difficulty” in its romantic, modernist and postmodernist poetic incarnations, the lyric presses language in order to make language “think” beyond its objective purposeful function. The “special intensity” of lyric “arises from lyric’s constitutive need musically to stretch ‘objective’ conceptual thought’s very medium, language—to stretch it quasi-conceptually all the way towards affect and song, but without relinquishing any of the ‘rigor’ of conceptual intellection” (“Sociopolitical,” n. pag.).

      This celebration of lyric’s intellectual rigor forces us to ask if our contemporary “experimentation,” often called upon as a critical infiltration, more or less overt, into political and social hegemonies, does not rather closely follow Arnold’s model of poetry as the transmitter of criticism’s ideas. And yet this question hinges on how we understand poetry’s engagement with language. Kaufman is arguing that contemporary theory and contemporary poetry share a “negativity,” which is perhaps inherently critical of dominant patterns.xxxv As opposed to arguing that poetry should carry theory’s ideas as if it were incapable of generating ideas of its own, Kaufman (following Adorno) suggests that lyric itself takes a critical stance, that lyric difficulty per se presents, “a potentially emancipatory capacity for constructing new conceptual-objective knowledge.” In other words, poetry’s language-experiments are thought-experiments, capable of restructuring how we, its readers, think. Conversely, Arnold’s poetics places poetry in a secondary or belated position, even as his poems themselves, and poetic moments within his prose, quite stunningly suggest alternatives to the very positioning he sets up.xxxvi

      Following Arnold’s own hierarchy, I have begun this chapter with Arnold’s criticism, his poetics, rather than with his poetry itself. I will continue by examining the aesthetic politics that arise out of the essay “Democracy” and the more developed Culture and Anarchy before turning to the poems.

      The resistance to the new, the unknowable, which Arnold’s perpetually pregnant poetry suggests, manifests itself also in Arnold’s politics. This should not be surprising, for again, Arnold makes no pretense of distinguishing between the aesthetic and the political. As Ian Gregor puts it, “education, religion, politics, literature are not a series of interrelated ‘subjects,’ but fade into one another as they are woven into the fabric of contemporary society” (Culture and Anarchy, xxii). For Arnold, the problems of democracy are, at least in part, aesthetic problems. Describing in “Democracy” (1861) the inevitable rise of working-class political power, Arnold writes regretfully,

      I do not . . . say that a popular order, accepting [the] demarcation of classes as an eternal providential arrangement, not questioning the natural right of a superior order to lead it, content within its own sphere, admiring the grandeur and high-mindedness of its ruling class, and catching on its own spirit some reflex of what it thus admires, may not be a happier body, as to the eye of the imagination it is certainly a more beautiful body, than a popular order, pushing, excited, and presumptuous; a popular order jealous of recognizing fixed superiorities, petulantly claiming to be as good as its betters, and tastelessly attiring itself with the fashions and designations which have become unalterably associated with a wealthy and refined class, and which, tricking out those who have neither wealth nor refinement, are ridiculous. But a popular order of that old-fashioned stamp exists now only for the imagination. (Works, 2:10)

      Arnold’s distaste is not reserved for the working classes alone. The British middle class offends not only because it seems to have no “ideals,” not only because of its materialism and stubborn attachment to “stock notions and habits,” but also because it has no style and no taste, or worse, bad style, bad taste. In Culture and Anarchy, Arnold presents his aesthetic repugnance of the middle class, the philistines:

      Culture says: ‘Consider these people, then, their way of life, their habits, their manners, the very tones of their voice; look at them attentively; observe the literature they read, the things which give them pleasure, the words which come forth out of their mouths, the thoughts which make the furniture of their minds; would any amount of wealth be worth having with the condition that one was to become just like these people by having it?’ (41)

      This aestheticization of class, conflating the happiness of the social body with its beauty of body or voice, associating (uncultured) thoughts with (presumably ugly) furniture, points to the degree to which Arnold’s “culture,” which will be invoked to rescue the democratic nation from the self-interested strivings of its members, is always meant in part as aesthetic refinement. Arnold’s belief in the inevitable rise of democracy is matched by his worry that in modernity aristocratic characterological and aesthetic values will be lost. Despite the critique Arnold levels against the aristocracy, the “barbarian” class that he deems anachronistic, he values and wants to see perpetuated the aesthetic qualities of that class.

      This is not to say that Arnold did not authentically support the rights of the working classes. Clearly his work as an inspector of schools, his commitment to state-sponsored education, and his acute awareness of the failures, and in fact obsolescence, of an aristocratic government indicate that his politics were, at a practical level, certainly progressive; his life’s work included enormous efforts toward balancing the distribution of power and education.xxxvii However, in Arnold’s vision of the democratic future as expressed in Culture and Anarchy, a known and established set of cultural values will simply be spread (via “the State” as aristocracy’s replacement) amongst a greater number of people. Missing from this political and cultural philosophy, then, is the idea that a newly born and valuable culture might arise out of a new political and social balance of power—for Arnold did not trust the process of “welcoming the darker odds, the dross” of democracy (Whitman, Leaves, 428). In simple terms, Arnold is a gradualist—“Rather to patience prompted,” as he puts it in his early poem, “To a Republican Friend, 1848.” As Antony Harrison details in his thorough (and thoroughly readable) study, The Cultural Production of Matthew Arnold, Arnold’s desire for change is uncomfortably wed to an anxiety about the violent possibilities lurking in sudden cultural upheaval.xxxviii

      “Democracy” and Culture and Anarchy, written a few years before and just after the 1867 reform bill, respectively, contribute and respond to the controversies and upheavals of the years leading up to this change. (“Democracy” was originally written as the introduction to Arnold’s report on the popular education of France. Arnold republished it as an independent essay in 1879, indicating the essay’s continued importance to him.) In both works, Arnold is calling on “the State” to respond to “the new and more democratic force which is now superseding our old middle-class liberalism” by disseminating the values of “culture,” values that have their origin, as Arnold consistently reveals, in the aristocratic class—in the intellectual and aesthetic experience leisure affords (Culture and Anarchy, 51). xxxix

      One must keep in mind, as others have noted, that “culture” does not entirely mean for Arnold the knowledge of a particular collection of literary texts or aesthetic objects. Rather, as he defines it in Culture and Anarchy, culture is an attitude, an intellectual and moral curiosity through which an individual or group is able to “turn a free and fresh stream of thought” upon stock notions and habits (7). As Marc Redfield writes, “To acculturate does not mean to educate in the sense of imparting knowledge

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