12
The Function of Criticism at the Present Time: Arnold and Irish Culture Author(s): Peter McDonald Source: The Irish Review (1986-), No. 23 (Winter, 1998), pp. 94-104 Published by: Cork University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29735917 . Accessed: 15/06/2014 09:20 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Cork University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Irish Review (1986-). http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 185.44.78.113 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 09:20:44 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

The Function of Criticism at the Present Time: Arnold and Irish Culture

Embed Size (px)

Citation preview

Page 1: The Function of Criticism at the Present Time: Arnold and Irish Culture

The Function of Criticism at the Present Time: Arnold and Irish CultureAuthor(s): Peter McDonaldSource: The Irish Review (1986-), No. 23 (Winter, 1998), pp. 94-104Published by: Cork University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29735917 .

Accessed: 15/06/2014 09:20

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Cork University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Irish Review(1986-).

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 185.44.78.113 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 09:20:44 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: The Function of Criticism at the Present Time: Arnold and Irish Culture

4>

The Func^^^/Criticism

at theTresent Time: Arnold and Irish Culture

peter McDonald

Matthew

Arnold's essay of 1864, 'The Function of Criticism at the

Present Time', is as well-known now for its title as for its argument; and even that argument, when known at all, is remembered by a few sound?

bites: * the free play of the mind upon all subjects','to see the object as in

itself it really is', 'disinterestedness'.1 To appropriate Arnold's title, also, is

hardly an original gesture amongst critics (T S. Eliot and F. W. Bateson, to

name just two, have done this). In the context of Irish literature and literary

discussion, reference to Arnold is nothing new, and his name has come to be

part of that common currency whereby cultural and historical transactions

in Ireland are conducted. However, it is a rarer thing (both in Ireland and

beyond) to take Arnold seriously, just as it is unusual to take seriously some

of those terms and concepts upon which so much of his writing turns ?

terms such as 'criticism' itself. 'Seriousness' too, of course, is a word whose

rhetorical tinge seems now in some ways unhelpful, and which fails to

account for a great deal in Arnold, notably his pervasive sense of humour

and the satirical hover and dart of his prose; even so, it remains a concept central to his own critical intent. If we mean to take criticism seriously, we

must take Arnold seriously; but in Ireland neither intention seems likely to

commend itself at the present time.

The proposition that Irish criticism is not practised seriously, or taken

seriously, will appear to fly in the face of available facts; surely there is now,

more indeed than at any point in the past, a huge volume of both academic

writing, and periodical journalism, on an unprecedentedly wide range of

Irish literature? This is true; but it does not disprove the proposition, for the

question concerns 'criticism', and 'criticism' does not exist simply by virtue

of being printed, bought and read. It may seem less contentious to say that

94 McDONALD 'Criticism at the Present Time', Irish Review 23 (1998)

This content downloaded from 185.44.78.113 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 09:20:44 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 3: The Function of Criticism at the Present Time: Arnold and Irish Culture

Arnold is not taken seriously in Ireland, though in fact this may prove the

more tendentious of the two propositions, since the obviousness and direct?

ness of Arnold s significance in much Irish cultural discourse means that he

is habitually employed very seriously (and, of course, very simply) indeed.

For the purposes of the present essay, these two propositions may be

reshaped as paired hypotheses: first, that criticism in Ireland is a rare (but

possible) commodity; second, that re-reading (or often, in all likelihood,

reading) Matthew Arnold provides important clues about both the nature

and consequences of such critical activity. For some, the second of the hypotheses above will do no more than

announce the fatuousness of the first: the given meaning of Arnold in Irish

culture will certainly taint any call for the beginning of'criticism' in Ireland

as a neo-colonial gesture. This reflex ? a revealingly unselfconscious one -

need not be argued against. The mistake, in any genuinely critical endeav?

our, is to engage with secondary symptoms when the cause remains

undiagnosed: the misreading of Arnold is precisely a symptom which ren?

ders criticism, properly understood, unwelcome in Ireland's literary

discussions. Here, what Arnold called'the slow approaches of culture' are the

only, and the inevitable, means of critical advance, and they will appear

almost always to be (in the immediate sense) unsuccessful. Wrong or harm?

ful ideas are not to be attacked and replaced with alternative ideas, hastily

pressed into service as they come to hand, but are rather to be undermined,

with minuteness, determination and patience. In this process, no progress is

possible without 'criticism', an activity which resists definition just as it

resists ideological placing. Its enemies (who will be in the majority in Ire?

land as elsewhere) will be eager and, according to their lights, sometimes

exceptionally able, in defining and placing criticism; they will also be just

too late to prevent its undermining work from the next minute advance. In

literature, real criticism never confuses theory with execution; it does not

proceed by theory, but by reflection, examination, and questioning; it has no

end in view, which can be defined in terms of ideas or ideologies. For all

these reasons, Arnoldian 'criticism' is rightly distrusted even by those who

have read about Arnold only in books written by their own professors. None of this is to claim that Arnold is always

- or often - right in his par?

ticular judgements, nor that his writings are especially far-seeing in terms of

their political horizons. In many respects, Arnold suffers from severe limita?

tions as a critic, which are partly owing to his over-investment in ideas (of

order as something that can be enforced, or of national character as some?

thing that can be defined) that serve in the end to hamper his critical

responses to literature. In his preoccupation with religion, too, Arnold pays a

critical price for fighting what is essentially a rearguard action on behalf of

McDONALD 'Criticism at the Present Time', Irish Review 23 (1998) 95

This content downloaded from 185.44.78.113 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 09:20:44 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 4: The Function of Criticism at the Present Time: Arnold and Irish Culture

an Anglicanism without beliefs -Anglicanism, that is, in a very refined form, and in some ways perhaps ahead of its time in the late nineteenth century, but finally, for all that, a cultural blind alley. In all these ways, Matthew

Arnold is far from our contemporary, and a set of Arnoldian political 'ideas',

if this could be set out, would be rightly regarded as irrelevant or unhelpful in most late twentieth-century contexts.

In one context, however, Arnold is still held to be very much a contem?

porary force: Irish politics, and in a wider sense Irish culture, are still in

contact with the dynamics of the colonial, or imperial, discourse in which

Arnold operated, and a sense of his 'relevance' to contemporary debates is

therefore hard to resist. It was Arnold, after all, who published On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867) and later collected his Irish Essays (1882), who wrote

throughout his career with reference to Irish topics and, in particular, to the

relations between Ireland and England. The particular political circumstances

of these writings have long passed, and Arnold's assumptions and recommen?

dations have long been overtaken by events, so that many of his formulations

ought by now to have lost any relevance. For example, in Irish Essays: 'If we

want to bring the Irish to acquiesce cordially in the English connection, it is

not enough even to do justice and to make well-being general; we and our

civilisation must also be attractive to them'; or, again:'in order to attach Ire?

land to us solidly, English people have not only to do something different

from what they have done hitherto, they have also to be something different

from what they have been hitherto.' Yet somehow, in Irish literary discus?

sion, a sense of Arnold's relevance persists, and expresses itself in a rejection or an indignation that ought to be, by now, redundant. Here is Dec?an

Kiberd, in 1995, on the subject of'Ireland ? England's Unconscious?'2

Through the centuries from Spenser's View to Arnold's Irish Essays, most

English persons who visited Ireland did so as colonia administrators,

warmongering soldiers, planters or tourists. Their contacts with the

natives were inevitably attenuated. What the real Ireland or Irish were

like, few of them could have known. Many experts, indeed, were able to

set themselves up without the indignity or inconvenience of first-hand

experience, Matthew Arnold being the outstanding example... Arnold's

call for a chair of Celtic Studies at Oxford and a 'Union of Hearts' poli?

cy came on the verge of the Fenian rebellion of the 1860s.

Handwringing in the wings of revolution has been perhaps the central

pastime of experts in Irish Studies.

'First-hand experience', in this reading, is what Arnold and his like did not

(and do not) possess; without this 'first-hand experience', it seems, all that is

possible for any 'expert' is 'Handwringing in the wings of revolution'. Even

allowing for Kiberd's evident conviction that Irish history ? now and for

96 McDONALD 'Criticism at the Present Time', Irish Review 23 (1998)

This content downloaded from 185.44.78.113 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 09:20:44 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 5: The Function of Criticism at the Present Time: Arnold and Irish Culture

ever - boils down to one 'revolution', we might nevertheless ask whether

'Handwringing' is not sometimes a necessary activity, one for which both

English and Irish culture have had cause to thank intellectuals in the past. And yet, the attack on Arnold here is curiously unconvincing: how, after all, was Arnold (or any non-'real' Irish person) to experience Ireland if even

being a 'tourist' is under suspicion? Furthermore, Kiberd makes a large

assumption when he takes the subject of Arnold's On the Study of Celtic Lit?

erature to be, in a narrow, almost academic, sense, Celtic literature itself. Had

Arnold been writing about that literature as literature, his lack of knowledge of the original languages would indeed have been a serious matter. But

Arnold's subject was something other than the particulars of literary history, and other than philology (though in both of these he kept up a responsible, and responsibly deferential, interest); it was, in part, the critical temper of

England and English letters in his day, and, in part, the deficiencies of Eng? lish habits of understanding and imagination, from which pressing immediate political consequences might follow. Of these subjects, Arnold

had any amount of'first-hand experience'. Nevertheless, for Kiberd, Arnold

remains a kind of supra-historical type, 'the consummate surveyor', whose

activities represent a continuing affront.

Critical questions must be asked of such positions as Kiberd's, and they

will continue to be asked even when no replies seem to be forthcoming. In

what sense, for example, is 'first-hand experience' a criterion in discussing

Irish matters? Does 'first-hand experience' of Ireland and the Irish (even the

'real' Irish) help or hinder a just critical approach to (say) literature written

in Ireland or by Irish people? What is literature if it requires a particular,

localised, historicised and politicised 'experience' in order to be rightly understood? If criticism cannot operate without 'first-hand experience',

what can it do? While Arnold had no 'first-hand experience' of Celtic liter?

ature, he never visited (even as a 'tourist') the times and places of Dante, or

Sophocles, or Shakespeare; just as Dec?an Kiberd can enjoy no 'first-hand

experience' of Arnold, or of Dublin or London in 1867; just as, in fact, we

have no 'first-hand experience' of the nineteenth century, and as the end of

the twenty-first century will have no 'first-hand experience' of us. Whatever

arguments critics may have about the notion of posterity or the history of

that concept, it is clear that literature in some sense persists, sticks around,

while its circumstances fall away and can be only imperfecdy recovered. It is

for this reason, at least, that criticism is something other than contemporary

comment, and this is why criticism cannot allow 'first-hand experience' to

become in itself a sign of critical value.

And yet, for much Irish writing, the primacy of the 'first-hand' is beyond

question. This manifests itself in a number of ways: the tone of spurious

McDONALD 'Criticism at the Present Time', Irish Review 23 (1998) 97

This content downloaded from 185.44.78.113 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 09:20:44 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 6: The Function of Criticism at the Present Time: Arnold and Irish Culture

intimacy which some writing adopts towards its subjects, both in openly

biographical contexts and in more relaxedly anecdotal ones; the absurd

recourse to history (sometimes very remote history) to set the terms for

contemporary literary values; and the reluctance to permit literary judge? ments to exist without some extra-literary explanation or appeal being adduced. In Ireland, there is very little real criticism: there is, in general, either celebration or gossip. This is not new, though what is more recent is

the proliferation in much professional literary criticism of the international

currency of time-serving academic jargon and circles of mutual citation.

Perhaps the closest such a culture can come to critical engagement is silence

though the increase in volume of writing makes this less and less likely. It is

obvious that such tendencies cannot be confined to Ireland alone, and that

they are rather the shared characteristics of a whole Anglo-American dis?

course, one which might be likened, in its pervasiveness and its addiction to

immediacy, its impatience with and (luckily) incomprehension of'slow

approaches', to what Arnold called Philistinism.

For Arnold, a critic's ear must be attuned, with painstaking acuteness, to

the accents of the contemporary; but he must be able to hear these also as

they sound to the critical sense, for which contemporaneity alone is a mere

fact of no especial value. In'The Function of Criticism at the Present Time',

the accents of contemporary English discourse are heard with an unflinch?

ingly satirical (though also, in fact, satirically flinching) authorial ear: the

words of Sir Charles Adderley, with those of John Arthur Roebuck, on 'the

old Anglo-Saxon race . . . the best breed in the whole world', 'I ask you

whether, the world over or in past history, there is anything like it?', togeth? er with the canting prayer 'that our unrivalled happiness may last' are put

into the Arnoldian echo-chamber, to devastating effect. All this requires is

recourse to another page in the Times, where a workhouse inmate, 'A girl named Wragg', is reported as having murdered her child, 'found dead on

Mapperley Hills', and now 'Wragg is in custody':

Wragg\ If we are to talk of ideal perfection, of 'the best in the whole

world', has any one reflected what a touch of grossness in our race, what

an original shortcoming in the more delicate spiritual perceptions, is

shown by the natural growth amongst us of such hideous names,? Hig

ginbottom, Stiggins, Bugg! In Ionia and Attica they were luckier in this

respect than 'the best race in the world'; by the Ilissus there was no

Wragg, poor thing! And 'our unrivalled happiness'; -

what an element of

grimness, bareness, and hideousness mixes with it and blurs it; the work?

house, the dismal Mapperley Hills, - how dismal those who have seen

them will remember; -

the gloom, the smoke, the cold, the strangled

illegitimate child! 'I ask you whether, the world over or in past history,

98 McDONALD 'Criticism at the Present Time', Irish Review 23 (1998)

This content downloaded from 185.44.78.113 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 09:20:44 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 7: The Function of Criticism at the Present Time: Arnold and Irish Culture

there is anything like it?' Perhaps not, one is inclined to answer; but at

any rate, in that case, the world is not very much to be pitied. And the

final touch, -

short, bleak, and inhuman: Wragg is in custody.The sex lost

in the confusion of our unrivalled happiness; or (shall I say?) the super? fluous Christian name lopped off by the straightforward vigour of our

old Anglo-Saxon breed!

This is funny, and it is cruel; but the cruelty of the humour, which Arnold

wrings from the newspaper, is less than the cruelty of the rhetoric that can

perceive neither the connection nor the joke. Adderley's and Roebuck's

words, and the 'short, bleak, and inhuman' language of the Times, are shown

to be mutually uncomprehending, while it is what Arnold calls 'criticism'

which can establish the 'contrasts' involved. Such an objective may appear

modest, and will certainly do so to Arnold's opponents ? 'Mr. Roebuck will

have a poor opinion of an adversary who replies to his defiant songs of tri?

umph only by murmuring under his breath, Wragg is in custody' ? but this is,

also, a sign of the effectiveness of its subversive activity. For Arnold,'criticism' and Philistinism are always necessarily at odds. The

'old Anglo-Saxon race' is a particular target at this point, one that Arnold

undermines remorselessly in much of his work. It is all the more remark?

able, then, to find Declan Kiberd including amongst 'Arnoldian ideas' 'the

more insulting cliches of Anglo-Saxonist theory'. This is to confuse Arnold

with Adderley, and to read against the grain, not only of Arnold's essays and

works like Culture and Anarchy, but of On the Study of Celtic Literature itself.

There is no sense, that can be arrived at by almost any tortuous twist of

interpretation, in which Arnold's writings promote an 'Anglo-Saxonist' ide?

ology; they do, undoubtedly, speak from a specifically English context, and

speak also, on occasion, from that context about the Irish, but this is quite

another matter. For Kiberd, 'English' becomes 'Anglo-Saxonist' by a process

of natural association, and this process, while it is ideologically sanctioned

and conditioned, owes nothing to 'criticism', and is ultimately vulnerable to

the approaches of'criticism'.

In essence, the condition for criticism is, and has always been, intelli?

gence; without this, Arnold's polemical stand in favour of'disinterestedness'

loses its meaning. Intelligence is not, as Arnold's Philistines might want to

define it, merely a certain kind of knowledge and mastery of the facts. Here

again, 'The Function of Criticism at the Present Time' provides suggestive formulations:

The rules may be given in one word; by being disinterested. And how is it

[criticism] to be disinterested? By keeping aloof from practice; by res?

olutely following the law of its own nature, which is to be a free play of

McDONALD 'Criticism at the Present Time', Irish Review 23 (1998) 99

This content downloaded from 185.44.78.113 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 09:20:44 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 8: The Function of Criticism at the Present Time: Arnold and Irish Culture

the mind on all subjects which it touches; by steadily refusing to lend

itself to any of those ulterior, political, practical considerations about

ideas, which plenty of people will be sure to attach to them, which per?

haps ought often to be attached to them, which in this country at any rate are certain to be attached to them quite sufficiently, but which crit?

icism has really nothing to do with.

'Free play of the mind' is no longer, perhaps, taken to be possible: the limits of

Arnold's own 'free play' can be described in terms of ideology, and more con?

temporary pretensions to any such freedom might meet with a reflex

scepticism. Similarly, any claim to being 'disinterested' may appear self-can

cellingly ignorant of its own ideological conditioning. And yet, Arnold's

practice of criticism in some ways anticipates such reactions ? repetitively, it

may be - in its delineation of a Philistine orthodoxy in England. In his final

flourish at the close of On the Study of Celtic Literature, Arnold returns to disin?

terestedness, speaking of'this moment, when the narrow Philistinism, which

has long had things its own way in England, is showing its natural fruits':

... at such a moment it needs some moderation not to be attacking

Philistinism by storm, but to mine it through such gradual means as the

slow approaches of culture, and the introduction of chairs of Celtic. But

the hard unintelligence, which is just now our bane, cannot be con?

quered by storm; it must be suppled and reduced by culture, by a growth in the variety, fullness, and sweetness of our spiritual life; and this end

can only be reached by studying things that are outside of ourselves, and

by studying them disinterestedly.

To believe this, one has to believe that there are, finally, things 'outside of

ourselves' which may be studied, that, in this primary sense, disinterestedness

is possible. Such a belief is not common in the professional world of'human?

ities' in the late twentieth century; it has never been common, for other

reasons, among intellectuals in Ireland (consider the tickings-off adminis?

tered to 'revisionist' historians by both older and younger ideologically

committed colleagues); it was also, in effect, anathema to the self-approving

mindset of imperial England in Arnold's time.'Hard unintelligence' allowed

knowledge to centre on itself, and on its interests, so that, in relation to Ire?

land, it was often exactly 'Anglo-Saxonist' in its analysis and negatively

domineering in its policies, whether Liberal or Conservative in nature.

In recommending 'disinterestedness', Arnold was not offering an ethereal

or ivory-tower impartiality, and he never pretended to do this. On the con?

trary, the criterion by which Philistinism is measured and found wanting is

'culture'. For Arnold, of course,'culture' is far removed from a value-neutral,

descriptive term; it is both specific in content ('the best that is known and

100 McDONALD 'Criticism at the Present Time', Irish Review 23 (1998)

This content downloaded from 185.44.78.113 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 09:20:44 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 9: The Function of Criticism at the Present Time: Arnold and Irish Culture

thought in the world' - Western, Judaeo-Christian, male) and prescriptive,

not so much in its intent as in its very essence. The 'hard unintelligence', which Arnold identified in the England of his day, was to be undermined by

the very culture which is now more likely to be identified a politically

unacceptable canon. Culture threatened'Anglo-Saxonism', and was (Arnold

hoped) to creep up on the England of the Philistines partly through an

insistence on the 'Celtic'. In a letter to his sister, ten years before On the

Study of Celtic Literature, Arnold wrote in the excitement of his discovery of

Ernest Renan:3

I thought the other day that I would tell you of a Frenchman whom I

saw in Paris, Ernest Renan, between whose line of endeavour and my

own I imagine there is considerable resemblance, that you might have a

look at some of his books if you liked. The difference is, perhaps, that he

tends to inculcate morality, in a high sense of the word, upon the French

nation as what they most want, while I tend to inculcate intelligence, also

in a high sense of the word, upon the English nation, as what they most

want ? but with respect both to morality and intelligence I think we are

singularly at one in our ideas ... I have read few things for a

long time

with more pleasure than a long essay

. . . 'Sur la po?sie des races cel?

tiques' - I have long felt that we owed far more, spiritually and

artistically, to the Celtic races than the somewhat coarse Germanic intel?

ligence readily perceived, and been increasingly satisfied at our own

semi-celtic origin, which, as I fancy, gives us the power, if we will use it,

of comprehending the nature of both races.

It is hard to perceive a conspiracy of 'Anglo-Saxonism' as being in the

process of formation here; furthermore, it is difficult to maintain, in the light

of this, that Arnold confuses 'disinterestedness' with a hollow pretence of

impartiality. None of this seems to matter very much in contemporary Irish discussion

of Ireland, and this is principally because it cannot be allowed to matter: in

an Irish context, Arnold's culture must be ? whether he knew it or not ? an

instrument of colonial imposition, and disinterestedness must be taken as a

pretended impartiality which can be easily debunked. The unintelligence on

this subject - whether it is 'hard' or soft, a cultivated or an automatic reflex,

is something beyond testing or proof - is as forthright amongst English as

amongst Irish academics. In Oxford (a kind of spiritual or imaginative centre

for the historical Matthew Arnold, who was in fact too busy and assiduous a

public servant to spend much of his adult life there), Terry Eagleton has

played a significant role in turning 'Arnold' into a handily compressed piece

of shorthand for the illusions of liberal humanism, the distortions of canon

formation, the sins of University 'English', and even the evident and

McDONALD 'Criticism at the Present Time', Irish Review 23 (1998) 101

This content downloaded from 185.44.78.113 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 09:20:44 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 10: The Function of Criticism at the Present Time: Arnold and Irish Culture

immemorial misdeeds of the Brits in Ireland.4 Dreamily from adjacent spires, Tom Paulin has written of how Arnold 'wants to take the critic out of the

fray, so he seizes the term "disinterestedness" and climbs into a tower.'5 While

repeating the elementary (and by now near-obligatory) error that Arnold

'thinks the critic can float free into a realm of pure, weightless impartiality', Paulin ends his piece with a rhetorical flourish:

Can 'disinterested' be redeemed ...? Or must it always be condemned to

carry the devious twist which Arnold gave it? Must we always minister

to the self-esteem of those who carry institutional power and yet believe

they are capable of impartiality? Who believe that as critics they are not

always polemicists for a particular practical

? i.e. ideological

- attitude?

Paulin stops himself here, and asks, 'hasn't the game moved on?' Like the

other rhetorical questions, this is one that a critical reading might actually want to answer. 'The game' is a phrase which, as a description of criticism

and literary journalism at the present time, speaks volumes: a game, as Paulin

and his readers know, has rules, and Arnold breaks these in some fundamen?

tal ways by insisting on 'the free play of the mind' in criticism. But 'the

game' is revealing, even (or especially) if it is thoughdessly used here, for it

emerges from a condition of knowing, and in some ways cynical, acceptance

of the impossibility of'impartiality': after all, games need to have sides for

the participants to be on, and they are about winning more than taking part.

Paulin's slide from 'practical' to 'ideological' in describing the effects of a

critical attitude is within the rules of'the game', but Arnold would have

rejected this, as he would have rejected sharply the snide knowingness of

contemporary Adderleys and Roebucks who believe in the fatuousness of

'the free play of the mind'.

'Hard unintelligence . . . cannot be conquered by storm': as a motto for

criticism, Arnold's words might seem off-puttingly grim, suggesting poor

prospects for players in 'the game' of contemporary cultural discussion.

Indeed, Arnold does not so much break the rules as refuse to play, and he has

become, in many academic contexts, unreadably scandalous for this reason.

One of the motifs which must at present underlie any active and alert liter?

ary criticism is that of apparent unsuccess, of appearing to play against the

spirit of'the game', of willful disregard, not for immediate relevance, but for

the cult of immediacy, as criticism goes about what Arnold called its 'slow

and obscure work'. However:

Slow and obscure it may be, but it is the only proper work of criticism.

The mass of mankind will never have any ardent zeal for seeing things as

they are; very inadequate ideas will always satisfy them. On these inade?

quate ideas reposes, and must repose, the general practice of the world.

102 McDONALD 'Criticism at the Present Time', Irish Review 23 (1998)

This content downloaded from 185.44.78.113 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 09:20:44 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 11: The Function of Criticism at the Present Time: Arnold and Irish Culture

Irish criticism, if it is to flourish, will not invest in 'the general practice' of the

world in Ireland, or as seen from Ireland; it will insist on the necessity of lit?

erary judgements, and resist the arguments of immediacy and intimacy. Now, as at the end of the last century, it must absorb 'the world', and the 'politics' and 'ideology' of that world, so completely that it appears scandalous from

those particular points of vantage. It must not play by the rules of any 'game' other than its own - which is to say, rules that will never confine themselves

either to Ireland, or to the present time, or to 'institutional power'. Is all this a lost cause? To answer such a question, we need to ask first

whether there has ever been such a thing as a cause that is wholly gained. That critical question has a particular relevance in contemporary Irish poli?

tics, but it is a question with a pedigree that leads back to Arnold, and

Culture and Anarchy:

I say boldly that this our sentiment for beauty and sweetness, our senti?

ment against hideousness and rawness, has been at the bottom of our

attachment to so many beaten causes, of our opposition to so many tri?

umphant movements. And the sentiment is true, and has never been

wholly defeated, and has shown its power even in its defeat. We have not

won our political battles, we have not carried our main points,

we have

not stopped our adversaries' advance, we have not marched victoriously

with the modern world; but we have told silently upon the mind of the

country, we have prepared currents of feeling which sap our adversaries'

position when it seems gained,

we have kept up our own communica?

tions with the future.

'This is the Arnold', according to T. S. Eliot in 1925, 'who is capable of

being a perpetual inspiration'. As Eliot recognised, too, 'His "party" has no

name, and is always, everywhere and inevitably, in the minority.'6 Part of the

proof of criticism's ability to 'keep up communications' is the contextual

(and temporal) adaptability of these 'currents of feeling'. An English civil

servant of 1869 and an expatriate American editor of 1925 have, in effect,

'first-hand experience' not of each other, but of something separate from,

and larger than, both of them: and it is giving access to this 'first-hand expe?

rience' which remains the chief function of criticism in Ireland at the

present time.

Notes and References

1 Quotations from Arnold are taken from R. H. Super's edition, The Complete Prose Works

of Matthew Arnold, 11 vols. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960-1977). 'The

Function of Criticism at the Present Time' and On the Study of Celtic Literature are print?

ed in vol. 3; the text of Irish Essays is found in vol. 9.

McDONALD 'Criticism at the Present Time', Irish Review 23 (1998) 103

This content downloaded from 185.44.78.113 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 09:20:44 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 12: The Function of Criticism at the Present Time: Arnold and Irish Culture

2 Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (London: Cape, 1995), p. 30.

3 Matthew Arnold, letter to Jane Martha Arnold Forster, 24 December 1859, in Cecil Y.

Lang (ed.), The Letters of Matthew Arnold, vol. 1 (Charlo ttesville: University Press of Vir?

ginia, 1996), pp. 515-16.

4 See Bill Bell, 'The Function of Arnold at the Present Time', Essays in Criticism 47/3

(July 1997), pp. 203-219, especially pp. 215-16, where Eagleton adds 'the victimisation

of Sinn Fein to the already long catalogue of ideological abuses of which his predecessor

[Arnold] was now to be found guilty.' 5 Tom Paulin, Writing to the Moment (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), pp. 275-6.

6 T. S. Eliot, editorial in The Criterion 3/10 (January 1925), p. 162.

I MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESSl THE IRISH AND THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR 1936-39 Robert Stradling

'Extremely well-written, lively and

stimulating. There is no doubt that this is an

important piece of scholarship. '

' Professor Paul Preston

MANDOLIN February 1999 216x138mm 256pp 1-901341-13-5 paperback ?11.00

0-7190-5153-3 MUP hardback ?45.00

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR Tel: 0161 273 5539 Fax: 0161 274 3346 I Email: [email protected] Website: http://www.man.ac.uk/mup I

104 McDONALD 'Criticism at the Present Time', Irish Review 23 (1998)

This content downloaded from 185.44.78.113 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 09:20:44 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions