In "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time" Arnold makes a slightly different use of it by situating the promised land in the past as well as in the future. God grants his prophet a sight of Canaan, the land his people will enter after his death, as reward for his obediently leading the obstinate, backsliding Hebrews out of Egypt and through the desert, but since he does not permit Moses to enter the promised land (as punishment for disobediently striking a desert rock to bring forth water), God blends punishment and reward. Some exegetes, such as the great  Evangelical Anglican preacher Henry Melvill, interpreted this incident at least in part to indicate that the Lord desired to show that all men, no matter how blessed or high in position, had to obey His word. [ full text of Melvill's sermon.] Most orthodox students of the Bible, however, concentrated upon the element of promise and took the Pisgah Sight, as it came to be known, as a type of Heaven. Both the type (Canaan) and its fulfillment (Heaven) emphasize futurity, but Arnold sees the "promised land" of culture in the past. True, he implies that such a promised land, such a Canaan of culture, will be entered in the future by another, more fortunate, generation, and he therefore establishes what is essentially a typological relation between prefiguring Periclean Athens and Elizabethan England and a future England of great culture. At the same time, however, his emphasis upon the pastness of the promised land undercuts this closing promise, perhaps unintentionally.

Coming upon Arnold's mention that "we shall die in the wilderness," one is not at first certain if he draws an analogy between his contemporaries and the Israelites born in slavery who were not fit to enter the promised land or if he intends to establish one between them (or himself) and Moses, the prophet of God and giver of the Law; but his following statement, that t hey have "saluted it from afar," seems to make clear that he sees his generation -- and particularly his own criticism -- in the role of Moses, who struggled with a blind, rebellious, benighted people and finally brought them in sight of the promised land, which they then had to attain by their own efforts. Such grandiose self presentation, which casts the sage in the guise of an inspired prophet, is not at all uncommon in the writings of the Victorian sages. Thoreau thus casts himself as John the Baptist to John Brown's Christ, and Ruskin presents himself, at different times and at different places in his writing, as virtually all the prophets of the Old Testament. What may surprise, of course, is that Arnold, a man deeply suspicious of the Hebraizing Evangelical Protestant tradition, should have drawn upon it both with such skill and with such lack of irony. As Geoffrey Tillotson has noted in "Matthew Arnold: The Critic and the Advocate," Arnold had a "Puritan passion for what he saw to be best, and missionary passion for making what he saw to be best prevail" Critics and Criticism in the Nineteenth Century, London, Athlone, 1951, 60.) Arnold does not always seem to be particularly comfortable using such literary structures drawn from a religious tradition upon which he so looked down, and occasionally he employs them ineffectively. The examples at which we have looked of the way he himself, Ruskin, Carlyle, and Thoreau invoke the full range of prophetic rhetoric suggest that completing the pattern involves more than a closing flourish. In fact, if the would-be sage does not have an adequate vision or promise with which to solace his readers, the attempt at closure falls rather flat, as it does at one point in Culture and Anarchy, where Arnold employs a powerful rhetorical climax as he presents his understanding of what will happen when his higher view of culture becomes accepted:

The moment this view of culture is seized, the moment it is regarded not solely as the endeavour to see things as they are, to draw towards a knowledge of the universal order which seems be intended and aimed at in the world, and which it is a man's happiness to go along with or his misery to go counter to, -- to learn, in short, the will of God, -- the moment, I say, culture is considered not merely as the endeavour to see and learn this, but as the endeavour, also, to make it prevail, the moral, social, and beneficent character of culture becomes manifest. (5.93)

The problem here lies in the fact that Arnold's progressive movement through higher and higher matters-, including "the will of God," ends with an unintentionally comic anticlimax because, rather than stop with some promise of future betterment for his audience, he instead informs them that they will understand that he is right. The fact that the "moral, social, and beneficent character of culture becomes manifest" when his definition of it is accepted hardly justifies the rhetorical fanfare of the sentence. One suspects that Arnold, who was so influenced by Newman and the whole High Church emphasis upon reticence and reserve, found himself unwilling -- or unable to produce the positive vision necessary to complete the structure invoked. Although throughout his career Arnold remained deeply indebted to Thomas Carlyle for individual techniques, general approach, and various major themes, he seems to have been embarrassed by such influence, in large part because he found the self-assertive, openly combative Carlyle uncosmopolitan -- too Evangelical, too provincial, and too lower-class.

Nonetheless, it is from Carlyle that Arnold learned the sage's devices and stance. One can point to other examples of one author's learning the sage's techniques, such as the prophetic pattern, from another. Ruskin, for example, followed Carlyle, particularly in his social criticism, and D. H. Lawrence in turn drew heavily upon Ruskin for his word-painting and manner of self presentation. [George P. Landow, "Lawrence and Ruskin: The Sage as Word-Painter," in Lawrence and Tradition, ed. Jeffrey Meyers (London, Athlone Press, 1985), 35-50, examines some aspects of this relationship. See also Paul Delany, "Lawrence and Carlyle," 21-34, in the same volume.] But although instances of direct influence, particularly that of Carlyle, appear throughout the nineteenth-century development of this genre, they do not centrally concern us now while we are trying to map the limits of the genre itself. Similarly, although all nineteenth-century practitioners of this form of wisdom literature consciously draw upon the traditions of Old Testament prophecy, such direct indebtedness concerns us only while we observe the genre taking form. Once a genre develops, it assumes a life of its own, and those who come to it after the first generation do not necessarily concern themselves with its roots and sources. The way literary forms thus develop has important consequences for students of literature and literary traditions since it implies that later practitioners of a genre need not have a feeling for the traditions out of which it grew. Carlyle, Thoreau, Ruskin, and Arnold all knew the Old Testament prophets and conventional Victorian assumptions about them, and as it turns out, so did Lawrence, who grew up surrounded by working-class Evangelical Protestantism. But Mailer, Didion, Wolfe, and a host of other writers of nonfiction who draw upon this genre may, like most recent authors, be ignorant of biblical traditions that have had major, if indirect, impact upon their writings. In fact, as we shall observe in the next chapter, which discusses the sage's use of grotesque emblems, his characteristic techniques sometimes take on such a life of their own that later authors need have no knowledge of the original biblical and exegetical sources.

Last modified 2000