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Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold   By: (1822-1888)

Book cover

First Page:

[Transcriber's notes:

Bold text is denoted with ~.

Footnotes: In the original, footnote numbering restarted on each page, and they were collated at the end of the text in page number order. In this e text, footnotes have been renumbered consecutively through the text. However, they are still to be found in their original position after the text, and the original page numbers have been retained in the footnotes.

There is one footnote in the Preface, which is to be found in its original position at the end of the Preface.]

Riverside College Classics

SELECTIONS

FROM THE PROSE WORKS OF

MATTHEW ARNOLD

EDITED WITH INTRODUCTION AND NOTES

BY

WILLIAM SAVAGE JOHNSON, PH.D.

Professor of English Literature in the University of Kansas

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO SAN FRANCISCO

The Riverside Press Cambridge

The essays included in this issue of the Riverside College Classics are reprinted by permission of, and by arrangement with, The Macmillan Company, the American publishers of Arnold's writings.

1913, HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Riverside Press CAMBRIDGE MASSACHUSETTS PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

PREFACE

This book of selections aims to furnish examples of Arnold's prose in all the fields in which it characteristically employed itself except that of religion. It has seemed better to omit all such material than to attempt inclusion of a few extracts which could hardly give any adequate notion of Arnold's work in this department. Something, however, of his method in religious criticism can be discerned by a perusal of the chapter on Hebraism and Hellenism , selected from Culture and Anarchy . Most of Arnold's leading ideas are represented in this volume, but the decision to use entire essays so far as feasible has naturally precluded the possibility of gathering all the important utterances together. The basis of division and grouping of the selections is made sufficiently obvious by the headings. In the division of literary criticism the endeavor has been to illustrate Arnold's cosmopolitanism by essays of first rate importance dealing with the four literatures with which he was well acquainted. In the notes, conciseness with a reasonable degree of thoroughness has been the principle followed.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SELECTIONS:

I. THEORIES OF LITERATURE AND CRITICISM:

1. Poetry and the Classics (1853) 2. The Function of Criticism at the Present Time (1864) 3. The Study of Poetry (1880) 4. Literature and Science (1882)

II. LITERARY CRITICISM:

1. Heinrich Heine (1863) 2. Marcus Aurelius (1863) 3. The Contribution of the Celts to English Literature (1866) 4. George Sand (1877) 5. Wordsworth (1879)

III. SOCIAL AND POLITICAL STUDIES:

1. Sweetness and Light (1867) 2. Hebraism and Hellenism (1867) 3. Equality (1878)

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

I

[Sidenote: Life and Personality]

"The gray hairs on my head are becoming more and more numerous, and I sometimes grow impatient of getting old amidst a press of occupations and labor for which, after all, I was not born. But we are not here to have facilities found us for doing the work we like, but to make them." This sentence, written in a letter to his mother in his fortieth year, admirably expresses Arnold's courage, cheerfulness, and devotion in the midst of an exacting round of commonplace duties, and at the same time the energy and determination with which he responded to the imperative need of liberating work of a higher order, that he might keep himself, as he says in another letter, "from feeling starved and shrunk up." The two feelings directed the course of his life to the end, a life characterized no less by allegiance to "the lowliest duties" than by brilliant success in a more attractive field... Continue reading book >>




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