Matthew Arnold

340 Pages·2014·1.94 MB·English

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Thesis Title: The Arnoldian Element in Yeats’s A Vision

Candidate: Jaron Murphy (Merton College)

Degree: D.Phil English

Term: Trinity 2014

ABSTRACT

In this study of the influence of Matthew Arnold on W.B. Yeats, I describe
a tendency in the critical field to overlook the placement of Arnold at Phase
18, and the implications of his presence beside Yeats at Phase 17, in Yeats’s
key philosophical treatise A Vision (1926, 1937). The central contribution of
my thesis is to address this crucial blind spot but also the concomitant
failure by critics to consider Arnold’s overall bearing on the ‘System’ itself.
Chiefly through analysis of the gyres, two types of man, and lunar phases
of the Great Wheel, I trace five main, interrelated aspects comprising
‘the Arnoldian element’ in A Vision: 1) Romanticism; 2) morbidity;
3) Celticism; 4) culture; and 5) the over-arching ideal of ancient Greek
genius. My thesis that Arnold is paramount to Yeats’s poetical and political
concerns in the treatise demonstrates how the Arnoldian element –
including a covert extension of Yeats’s dialogue with Arnold in “The Celtic
Element in Literature” (1897) – within its abstruse occult discourse partly
but powerfully shapes: 1) the projection of Irish self-rule and unity,
principally in the figure of the Daimonic Man of the ideal Phase 17 (Yeats)
subversively juxtaposed with the fragmenting Emotional Man of Phase 18
(Arnold and Goethe), in a time of anarchy; and 2) the representation of a
range of phasal examples (named and unnamed, encompassing both
literature and sexual love). I argue that Yeats’s considerable indebtedness
to Arnold 1) both spurs and troubles readings of Yeats as a poet of
decolonization; 2) merits attention in the long-running ‘Orwellian’ debate
over Yeats’s alleged fascism, coinciding with Yeats’s eugenics;
3) illuminates A Vision as an ‘anxiety of influence’ text in which Yeats
‘kills’ his critical fathers Arnold and J.B. Yeats; and 4) warrants Arnold’s
routine inclusion among Yeats’s foremost influences like Nietzsche, Blake,
Dante, and Shelley whose portrayals in A Vision are partly bound up, as I
show, with Yeats’s engagement with Arnold.

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The Arnoldian Element in Yeats’s A Vision

By Jaron Murphy

Supervised by Bernard O’Donoghue
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Contents

Introduction 6

i) A Visible Blind Spot in the Critical Field: Yeats, Arnold, and
A Vision 6
ii) On Familiar Terms: The Allusive Yeats and Elusive Arnold 15

Chapter One
A General Survey of the Arnoldian Element in Yeats 25

i) Amid the Labyrinth in Art or Politics: Towards A Vision from
Yeats’s Earliest Reviews, on Ferguson 26
ii) The Scholar-Gipsy Yeats: Cross-referencing Arnold’s
Projections of Genius 70

Chapter Two
Nobility in Unity: Yeats’s Recourse to Primitivism in
Response to Arnold’s Celt 93

i) A Class Above: Arnold and the Yeatsian Dream of the Noble
and the Beggar-Man 94
ii) Natural Aristocracy and the State from Burke through Arnold
to Yeats 122

Chapter Three
In Search of the Arnoldian Element in A Vision 151

i) Littleness United is Become Invincible: In-Built
Anti-Philistinism in the Framework of the ‘System’ 152
ii) Dialectical Progression: Echoes of the Arnoldian Element in
the Principal Symbol 161
iii) Entering the Great Wheel: The Morbid Phases 23 and 13 183
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Chapter Four
Yeats at the Ideal Phase 17 206

i) The Buried Self: How Arnold Comes Back to Haunt Kiberd’s
Theory of the Gyres 207
ii) Poetical and Political Measure and Order: Qualities Shaping
Yeats’s Alleged Fascism and Eugenics 226
iii) The Daimonic Man: Yeats, Dante, Shelley, and Landor, Plus
Implications for the Critical Field 246

Chapter Five
Sexual Love and the Writing of Poetry: Phases 18, 16, and 14
277

i) A Wounding Beyond Healing: Arnold, Goethe, Mrs Yeats,
and JBY at Phase 18 277
ii) Vehemence and Self-Will: Maud Gonne and Blake at
Phase 16 297
iii) Intoxication and Natural Magic: Iseult Gonne, Keats, and
Wordsworth at Phase 14 305

Conclusion 319

References 323

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And when we consider Arnold as a critic, no matter
how often we note his errors of opinion, we cannot
avoid coming to the judgment that Arnold was one
of the greatest critics in English literature, or,
indeed, in the literature of the world. It is never
really of consequence how wrong a critic is on one
point or another, or even on many points. What is
of consequence is that he should, by what he says
about a work of literature, induce us to look at
it with a renovated curiosity, and that he should
lead us to judge it not merely by the highest literary
standards but also by our own sense of life. To do
this, a critic must take large chances. He must unsettle
old established notions and propose new ones, and
this is never without its risk. We can go so far as to
say that a critic who is essentially right may be most
interesting and most powerful and most useful when
he is wrong, that his mistakes may sometimes be the
most vital part of him, for they represent his passion
and commitment.
– Lionel Trilling, Matthew Arnold

Why should you leave the lamp
Burning alone beside an open book,
And trace these characters upon the sands?
A style is found by sedentary toil
And by the imitation of great masters.

– W.B. Yeats, “Ego Dominus Tuus”
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Introduction

i) A VISIBLE BLIND SPOT IN THE CRITICAL FIELD: YEATS, ARNOLD,
AND A VISION

In “Yeats, Victorianism, and the 1890s” (2006), George Watson observes that
although Yeats was born in 1865 “in… the high noon of the Victorian period”
and “lived thirty-six of his seventy-four years” during the reign of Queen
Victoria, critics tend not “to characterize Yeats as a Victorian” (2006:36). That
Yeats “was irredeemably hostile to everything Victorian,” he adds, “has been an
article of critical faith” (2006:36). He proceeds to demonstrate, however, that
Yeats’s emphatic anti-Victorianism has obscured a number of “ways in which
Yeats engaged more positively with the Victorian age into which he was born”
(2006:40). He asserts: “In particular, the relation between Yeats and Matthew
Arnold needs re-scrutiny” (2006:40). Convincingly, he argues that despite
Yeats’s “constant attacks on Arnold’s notion of art as a criticism of life” Yeats
was in fact “to conduct a covert dialogue with the most famous Victorian critic
for a good part of his life” (2006:40) in more productive ways than the repeated
rejection might appear to signal.

Watson presents a range of correspondences and references in Yeats’s writings
that confirm an Arnoldian influence, stretching from the 1880s to the last years
of Yeats’s life, but he does not explicitly link Arnold to Yeats’s key
philosophical treatise A Vision (published in 1926, with the revised version
appearing in 1937). This is a crucial oversight afflicting not only Watson’s
essay but Yeats scholarship in general. It is puzzling that despite Goethe and
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Arnold being named as the examples of Phase 18 in the Great Wheel of A
Vision (both versions), generations of Yeats biographers and critics have
scarcely ventured to interrogate the incorporation of Arnold, in particular, into
the ‘System’.1 In The Wisdom of Two: The Spiritual and Literary Collaboration
of George and W.B. Yeats (2006), Margaret Mills Harper has offered a most
considered reflection, as we will see, on Goethe in relation not to Arnold but to
the medium Mrs Yeats: the original occupant of Phase 18 in the so-called
Automatic Script from which Yeats compiled A Vision. Moreover, in her
account of the Great Wheel (which has the virtue of encompassing, among the
phasal examples, both great men and, expressly, great women), Harper
overlooks Arnold at Phase 18 – which has historically been the case among the
foremost biographers and critics, perhaps most notably Richard Ellmann and,
more recently, R.F. Foster.

Harold Bloom, aware of the ‘private’ placement of Mrs Yeats and (according to
Ellmann) Yeats’s father John Butler Yeats (JBY) at Phase 18, is the sole leading
critic to have attempted to explain the formal pairing of Goethe and Arnold in
the treatise. His conclusion in Yeats (1970) that their location at Phase 18
signifies Yeats’s rejection of “the flight from Romanticism of these poets”
(1972:256) is illuminating. However, Bloom’s brief analysis of Phase 18 is
severely limited by space and scope in the course of an accelerated expository
progression through the Great Wheel, and in particular by the narrow but
nevertheless important track which Bloom follows, of Yeats’s Romantic
sensibility. Bloom fails to appreciate, as we will see, the extraordinary
complexity of the critical treatment meted out to Arnold in particular at Phase
18, in both textual and symbolical terms, in relation to the placement of Yeats
himself at Phase 17. Although by no means neglected by Bloom, Arnold

1 As R.F. Foster reports, the “archetypes of the twenty-eight incarnations remain much the same” (2003:603) in
the 1937 version.
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remains little considered in relation to Yeats across Bloom’s works. This
appears to be partly the result of a critical distaste for Arnold. In The Anatomy
of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life (2011), Bloom dismisses Arnold in
passing as “the most overrated of all critics, ever” (2011:152).

Nor has scholarly attention been greatly exercised towards identifying, let alone
exploring in depth, any Arnoldian influence on Yeats’s ‘System’ itself. A
notable exception is Ronald Schuchard who, as the title of his essay “Yeats,
Arnold, and the Morbidity of Modernism” (1985) suggests, is especially attuned
to Yeats’s lifelong preoccupation with the ‘morbid’ in modern poetry.
Schuchard links the appearance of the single term “Morbidity” (Yeats 2008:54)
as a defining characteristic of Phase 13, that of Baudelaire, Dowson, and
Beardsley, to Yeats’s analysis of his ill-fated associates of the 1890s in “The
Tragic Generation” (1922) partly by way of Arnold’s notion of “morbid effort”
(Yeats 1991:313). Although this phrase arises in Arnold’s letter to Mrs Forster
dated 6 August 1858, Schuchard effectively relates both morbidity at Phase 13
in A Vision and morbid effort in “The Tragic Generation” (among other
correspondences across Yeats’s oeuvre) in turn to Arnold’s seminal “Preface to
First Edition of Poems” (1853) in which Arnold insists on joy and censures
morbidity in modern poetry, and on that basis famously excludes his own
dramatic poem “Empedocles on Etna” from the collection. Schuchard argues, as
Watson similarly maintains in his essay, that Yeats’s “seemingly conflicting
attitudes toward Arnold have obscured the fact that Arnold’s [1853] Preface
was to become Yeats’s primary critical touchstone for evaluating modern
poetry” (1985:89). He perceives – though perhaps in too reductive a way,
ignoring the interrelation of the preface and Arnold’s Celticism, for instance, as
well as wider nineteenth-century discourses on morbidity – that “for the whole
of Yeats’s career Arnold was not only an abiding and informing sage but the
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critical master of his fifty-year struggle with the morbid temperament of his
age” (1985:89).

Puzzlingly, however, Schuchard does not carry his insights into the Arnoldian
complexion of morbidity at Phase 13 any further in regard to the rest of the
treatise. As we will see, his recognition of Yeats’s Arnoldian influence on
Synge in viewing morbidity as an undesirable strain in modern literature could
also be instructively related to A Vision. Crucially, Schuchard also ignores the
presence of Arnold, with Goethe, at Phase 18. It is even more puzzling, then,
and chiefly provides the impetus for my thesis on the Arnoldian element in A
Vision, that linkage of Arnold to the treatise also falls by the wayside in the
chapter “The Last Aisling – A Vision” in Inventing Ireland: The Literature of
the Modern Nation (1995) by Declan Kiberd, the other notable exception to the
general critical neglect of Arnold’s bearing on A Vision. Kiberd’s account of A
Vision – specifically, as the chapter title indicates – is predicated upon, and yet
has the curious quality of treating rather obliquely and briefly, the notion of an
Arnoldian Celticist input to the treatise.

According to Kiberd, A Vision “deliberately refers the Irish reader back to the
aisling or vision-poem, practised by the fallen bards like Ó Rathaille to whom
Yeats was increasingly attracted” (1996:318). It is from the aisling tradition, he
argues, “that Yeats appears to have drawn his framework for A Vision. That the
spéirbhean should in this particular instance have been his own English wife
must have tickled his sceptical imagination: but Mrs. Yeats proved a wonderful
medium” (1996:318). Kiberd’s speculative alignment of the primary and
antithetical gyres with his own appellations of “Anglo” and “Celtic”
respectively, and his argument that A Vision is “a Celtic constitution not solely
for Ireland but for all the world, after the rough beast has come again”
(1996:319), are also buttressed in part by the insight that Yeats had in his essay
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“on Matthew Arnold and the Celtic element in literature… endorsed the basic
outlines of the Celticist analysis, but for the word ‘Celtic’ had repeatedly
substituted the word ‘ancient’” (1996:318). Therefore, Kiberd says, “[a]s early
as 1897” Yeats had been “expanding the meanings of ‘Celtic’ to global
dimensions, sensing that the ancient was due for a return” (1996:318).2 “For that
reason, as well as for its roots in aisling tradition,” he argues, “it makes sense to
read A Vision as a kind of Celtic constitution, first published in 1925, at a
juncture when the new Irish state, of which Yeats was by then a senator, was
seeking to codify its own laws and customs” (1996:318).3

Oddly, however, this is the only explicit mention of Arnold throughout Kiberd’s
chapter on A Vision. Kiberd proceeds to foreground the placement of Walt
Whitman at Phase 6 in the Great Wheel – and overlooks entirely the placement
of Arnold. This intriguing blind spot in regard to the significance of Arnold’s
presence at Phase 18, even on the part of critics who do stress the importance of
Arnold for Yeats, is compounded by the two volumes of George Mills Harper’s
The Making of Yeats’s A Vision: A Study of the Automatic Script (1987): when
and by whom, exactly, Arnold was selected and approved as an example of
Phase 18 is not recorded. Goethe’s appearance, however, can be traced to a key
preliminary list of examples dated June 1918, which also includes Mrs Yeats.
Harper’s study is the most authoritative account of the Script available to Yeats
scholars, but within the veritable avalanche of individuals considered as phasal
examples during the creative process and those ultimately named in A Vision,
Arnold is scarcely referred to. The odd impression is that Arnold rather
suddenly appears from nowhere alongside Goethe as the only other example of
Phase 18 in A Vision. Nor is the mystery cleared up by the four volumes of

2 Yeats’s “The Celtic Element in Literature” is dated 1897 in Essays and Introductions (1961). However, as the
editors Warwick Gould, John Kelly, and Deirdre Toomey explain in The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats Volume
II: 1896-1900 (1997), the essay “did not appear [in Cosmopolis] until June 1898” (1997:154).
3 In W.B. Yeats: A Life – II. The Arch-Poet 1915-1939 (2003), R.F. Foster determines that A Vision was “dated
1925 (though published in 1926)” (2003:282). The revised version was published in, and dated, 1937.