Victorian Literary Critics [antikvár]

IntroductionWe know so much about Matthew Arnold's contribution to literary criticism, and so little about his contemporaries who wrote as professional men of letters, that a book of this sort, reviewing the careers of seven major bookmen, has become a needed contribution to our understanding of the Victorian landscape. It is much too easy to assume that Arnold's most striking formulations - his definition of culture, his handy dichotomy of Hebraist versus Hellenist, his attack on Philistines and a large assortment of barbarians, his notion that poetry is a criticism of life, his firm conviction that we must acquaint ourselves with the best that has been thought and said in the world, his touchstones of literary perfection - were wholly original; that, indeed, Arnold was as contemptuous of his fellow critics as he was of members of the middle class who read and understood superficially the finest productions of Western culture. In fact, Arnold learned from his contemporaries, and read their writings with great care. The more we know about those critics who actively pursued their literary pleasures through the pages of widely read periodicals (including the newspapers that printed their reviews of dramatic productions and equally ephemeral writings in a wide variety of fields), collections of essays, full-length studies, and textbook surveys of several national literatures, the better able are we to see Arnold plain.For this kind of survey of Victorian letters, it has not been deemed necessary to summarise, still one more time, the major tenets of Arnold's critical essays, or to express reservations about various inconsistencies and elements of an unpleasant (and occasionally unearned) snobbism. Arnold's influence on Victorian thought was, on the whole, salutary, and the shock that he administered to set modes of viewing both the past and the present highly necessary. Moreover, Arnold's receptivity to new developments in Continental literature, although more rigidly selective and narrowly based than perhaps even he perceived, was of enormous benefit to those who