Matthew Arnold, poet and critic was undoubtedly an eminent Victorian. His poetry represented its age in far profounder way. The Victorian age is one of the most remarkable periods in the history of inland. It was an era of material prosperity, political consciousness, dramatic reforms, industrial and mechanical progress, scientific advancement social unrest, educational expansion and religions uncertainly. Against such a background, the poets, the novelists and the essayist of this age wielded this profile pen to portray the panorama of life as observed by them. In the field of poetry Tennyson and Browning are said to represent this age in their poetical works. Arnold, though not considered equal to them, also represents this age in his poems. But the tone of his poetry and his attitude to life as expressed in his poems are completely different from those of Tennyson and browning.
Tennyson, Browning and Arnold are great poets; each in his individual way each of them represents one tendency or the other of the Victorian mind. While Tennyson is euphoric about the materiel port of the Victorian society, Arnold is pacifically conscious about the confusion and tension of the age. Browning on the other hand pursued an orthodox attitude toward Christianity and chose to deal with the psychological problems of men and women. Arnold is completely different from both Tennyson and Browning in his attitude towards life, his sentimentality as well as his passionate love for nature.
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Life to Arnold appears to be fall of darkness and gloom and he feels like a benighted traveler in a foreign land without any light of hope:
“ And we are here on a darkling plain swept with confused alarm of
Struggle on where ignorant armies clash by night”
This feeling of misery and melancholy throbs practically in every poem of Arnold. To him the world is a vale of tears, not of hope visualized by Tennyson and Browning. It is a place to snuffer, not to enjoy as desorbed
By Tennyson in his poem Ulysses. In wres Beach, the world is represented as a dreamy desert. The sea of faith has ebbed and there is nothing lent sadness and misery.
Both Tennyson and Browning behaved inn the possibilities of man. Tennyson in his Ulysses says:
“ To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield”
Browning beehives that this world is a place for straggle and under the guidance of god, man is sure to attain success. He says:
“ Gods in his Heaven
All’s right with the world”
But in the poem Rugby chapel Arnold says:
“ Most men eddy about
Here and there, eat and drink
Chatter and love and hate
Gather and squander
Staining blindly, achieving nothing”
Browning has unquestionable faith in god, Tennyson’s belief in god is equally strong, because their minds were not disturbed by the new scientific thoughts. On the other hand, Arnold says in Dover Beach:
The sea of faith was once, too at the full and round earths show lay like the folds of bright girdle furld;
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long with drawing roar”
In this world of science, religions belief has disappeared. Doubt and disbelief have combined to force back the wave of faith from the shore of the world and the world is now like a coast on which cold pebbles lie about in complete desolation.
In the treat went of nature Arnold is quite different from other Victorian poets. Tennyson’s nature was tinged with romantic colors. He was a worshipper of beauty like Keats. He had an unfailing thought not passionate love of beauty. But nature of Arnold is scientific. He has the unerring eye of the scientist in the presentation of the objects of nature. He dwells on each detail of nature with a quiet joy in his beauty, colors, form or sound poet Arnold not only sees the loveliness of nature’s doings, but he also sees her terrors, her dreadfulness and her relentlessness. His observation of nature lacks the warmth and rich that marked the romantic Treatment of nature, which we find considerably in the works of Tennyson.
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In Arnold’s Treatment of nature, there is a tinge of melancholy, because he is, all the time, being reminded of the contrasts she presents to human life. In this respect Arnold resembles Shelley, who looked upon nature as marked by perfection and peace as contrasted with the restlessness, the absence of peace, which mark the life of man.
Among the Victorian poets, Arnold occupies the middle place. He could neither share Browning’s optimism nor could he join the exultant positivism of Tennyson. Arnold was caught between two worlds- a traditional world of faith and peace that was dying and a new world of great expectation that was squiggling to be born.
