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“... her early self-punitive Evangelicism to consort with fashionable Coventry freethinkers. For Matthew Arnold, it is culture which will inherit the ideological role of religion in sustaining a corporate faith; but Arnold’s ‘culture’ is altogether too lofty and nebulous an idea for the task in hand, too much on ...”

“... A and another for friend B. Some people manage this without even noticing it. For others, as for Matthew Arnold, There rises an unspeakable desire After the knowledge of our buried life, A thirst to spend our fire and restless force In tracking out our true, original course. There was Sartre’s mauvaise foi (not unconnected, I suppose, with ...”

“... the dimensions of historical understanding. Otherwise we are back in Victorian England, with Matthew Arnold finding signs of millennial chaos in the trampling of flowers and climbing of trees in Hyde Park. It is not that Wiener is unaware of these or similar objections, or that he does not in general appreciate the structural peculiarities of the ...”

“... too self-conscious. ‘The great art of criticism is to get oneself out of the way,’ said Matthew Arnold, and such is the great art of biography. One day in mid-March, as Swift sat in his chair, he reached towards a knife. But Mrs Ridgeway moved it away from him. He shrugged his shoulders, rocked himself, and said, ‘I am what I am, I am what I ...”

“... it natural to leave all this out? For Richards, the significant predecessors were such figures as Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater or A.C. Bradley and Edmund Gosse. Moreover, it isn’t easy to say when criticism ‘entered the university’: Pater was an Oxford don and Bradley held chairs of English at more than one British university, so they cannot be ...”

“... boggling, baboon-blooded … sapless, soulless, beginningless, endless, topless, bottomless’. Matthew Arnold and William Morris thought their own engagement with Arthurian and Norse literature far superior to this tedious Teutonic competitor.But rivalry and resistance can also be modes of reception, and the most astute Wagnerians were those who ...”

“... most un-German of all German books that I have ever read’), de Quincey translated it, and Matthew Arnold opened a poem with the lines ‘One morn as through Hyde Park we walk’d,/My friend and I, by chance we talk’d/Of Lessing’s famed Laocoön.’ If the projected Life of Lessing proved too much for Coleridge, he was not entirely to ...”

“... of the Victorian age’ with more forgiveness. In August 1914, in the course of anatomising Matthew Arnold in the New Statesman (‘He might … have done some excellent and lasting work upon the movement of glaciers … But no; he would be a critic’), Strachey had reflected that the Age of Victoria … has the odd attractiveness of something ...”

“... give uprightness a rest. ‘He laid us as we lay at birth/On the cool flowery lap of earth,’ as Matthew Arnold had it of Wordsworth. The man in blue in the London picture is the perfect instance of this; but he is one of scores of such figures all through Poussin’s career. Give him a drowsing river god to paint, or a drunken cherub sucking his thumb ...”

“... claim that Homer’s Latona prefigured the Virgin was to advance one of those theories which, as Matthew Arnold caustically remarked, was attended by the inconvenience ‘that there really exist no data for determining them’. Gladstone climbed down a bit, in his usual furtive, roundabout style, and admitted that much early religious practice could be ...”

“... of the Church and State – a book whose influence on later thinkers such as John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold was immense – is despatched in 15 lines, with no mention at all of the most essential circumstance of its production and reception, the imminence of Catholic emancipation. When you think how important Coleridge was becoming as theorist of ...”

“... Trollope and Edward Fitzgerald thought Carlyle had finally gone mad, and former disciples such as Matthew Arnold denounced him as frankly dangerous, a ‘moral desperado’. Some of the mud stuck. It was soon apparent that he was unwholesomely fascinated by Blood and Iron. In 1874, at Bismarck’s behest, the Kaiser conferred on him the Prussian Order of ...”

“... Greece. Try as Jowett might to reconcile the two moralities, they were soon put asunder. There was Arnold coining the terms ‘Hebraism’ and ‘Hellenism’, and there, more insidiously, was Pater defining a delectable hedonism in which the Greek passion for beauty was treated as a direct challenge to Protestant puritanism. Unlike the generations who ...”

“... been harried by vigilante groups of scholarly theorists trying to pass on their own obsessions. Matthew Arnold set the agenda for modern versions when he insisted Homer should be pacy, noble and plain. Since then, the Oralists have insisted the text should also somehow reflect the ‘orality’ of the poems, which often comes down to a more urgent ...”

“... serve to enfranchise these strange children pitiless in their ignorance and contempt? Like Matthew Arnold telling the early Romantic poets that they did not know enough, he needles us with our callowness. Some of the poems in The Triumph of Love adopt voices other than Hill’s, but those that sound like him resemble the angriest poems in ...”