The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [10]
Arnold’s theory of critical disinterestedness, clearly indebted to Kant (and reinforced later by T. S. Eliot), has been challenged—and sometimes simply dismissed—by later critics concerned with the “situatedness” of literature and criticism and with what Stanley Fish called “interpretive communities.” Arnold’s idea that a critic should, and could, “know the best that is known and thought in the world” presumes both a wide and capacious reading and a somewhat restricted world. And his belief that a generally accepted canon of what he called “touchstones” from classical literature could be used as a measure of the greatness of modern poets has been often taken, or mistaken, as a naive notion about universal standards of value. Arnold did not hesitate to evaluate authors and works: Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton are classics. Chaucer and Burns “come short of the high seriousness of the great classics.” Dryden and Pope are classics of prose but not of poetry; it is Thomas Gray who is the “poetical classic” of their period. Not every critic will agree with these views. But Arnold’s method was designedly comparative, aimed at avoiding the personal when it comes to judging the poetry of times so near that a critic’s feelings are likely to be not only personal but “personal with passion.” Thus he thought that “using the poetry of the great classics as a sort of touchstone” might “correct” an overly personal assessment, or at least put it in a broader context.26
Arnold was forthright about suggesting the function of criticism. But what was the use of poetry? Again, he was not reluctant to say what he thought.
More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.27
It is because of these lofty ideals that Arnold proceeded, in his essay “The Study of Poetry,” to articulate a plan for identifying “the best poetry,” the “really excellent.” His comparative—and, to a certain extent, transnational and transhistorical—project was conceived as a way of getting beyond the historical and the personal toward “the best, the truly classic, in poetry.” This goal may strike some twenty-first-century readers as misguided or impossible, but it is premised on the notion that poetry and literature count—that a great deal is at stake.
We are often told that an era is opening in which we are to see multitudes of a common sort of readers, and masses of a common sort of literature; that such readers do not want and could not relish anything better than such literature, and that to provide it is becoming a vast and profitable industry. Even if good literature entirely lost currency with the world, it would still be abundantly worth while to continue to enjoy it by oneself. But it never will lose currency with the world, in spite of monetary appearances; it never will lose supremacy. Currency and supremacy are insured to it, not indeed by the world’s deliberate and conscious choice, but by something far deeper—by the instinct of self-preservation in humanity.28
I think it would be wrong to think of this spirited peroration as utilitarian. Arnold’s “end … of supreme importance” is enjoyment; he thinks of that as coterminous with the instinct of self-preservation, not as the evolutionary by-product of that instinct. If anything is subliminal or instinctual here, it is poetry, which is why he could say that “the strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry.”29
Matthew Arnold’s essay on “The Function of Criticism” was written in 1864, “The Study of Poetry” in 1880. It’s intriguing to