In August of last year, I made a little pilgrimage to the grave of Matthew Arnold at All Saints Church in Laleham. The journey was in the end a pleasant one, despite the various impedances I faced at the hands of Great Britain’s inept bureaucracies and London’s congested railway networks. When I initially inquired of a transit worker after directions to the site, half-shouting above the clamor of King’s Cross station—the churning din of hurried businessmen speaking loudly into cellphones mixed with the sharp, reverberant, concrete staccato of their footsteps—I was asked flippantly whether or not I understood how to operate a search engine. After a few less kind words, I replied with a hushed “thanks anyway” and left to consult a large paper map, a device which never required contact with distant satellites, projecting their faint, scattered signals through the geometric webs of steel and glass which housed the station; such a connection was inevitably brief, tenuous, and aggravating. Following my miscalculated arrival at serval train stops which took me as far north as Windsor, a kind young man behind the counter of a suburban coffee shop helped to plan a route which, two bus rides later, carried me finally to the church. According to a small plaque in the building’s vestibule, All Saints was erected sometime in the eleventh century and had been partially destroyed and rebuilt numerous times in a progression which was more or less parallel with the historical megrims of European warfare. The structure itself was small and squat, inhabiting the center of a considerable parcel of land in a quiet, unassuming way. The surrounding churchyard, impressively dense with markers and monuments in which the ephemerality of artistic vogue was memorialized in three dozen dead and archaic modes of sculpture, stretched toward the horizon and the suburbia beyond, enjoying a deep, mid-week quiescence broken only by the occasional passing bus. Crooked like teeth, the yard’s mossy gravestones stood, leaned, or laid in disarrayed rows, marking the dead of more than half a millennium.
To be frank, I had expected more. I spent three years of graduate study examining Arnold’s work intensely and with a sympathy of heart which over time and with the species of intimacy only possible between a reader and writer wrought between us a profound connection. I fell irretrievably in love with Arnold’s mind as I saw it at work on the page. I shared his anxieties and his sorrows. I admired his perspicacity, his unflinching engagement with the terror of the unknown, and his half-heroic struggle against the horrific infection of doubt—that devitalizing and amoebic affliction of the human spirit which had unexpectedly accompanied the scientific advancements of the mid-nineteenth century. Like Arnold’s Empedocles, the eponymous protagonist of a mostly forgotten tragic poem, I longed, still long, for “an older world, peopled by gods.” As I moved through decades of his poetry and criticism, the kinship—one I still feel—between Arnold and I seemed to extend far beyond my comparable philosophical predilections. Nicholas Murray, one of Arnold’s biographers, noted the pronounced discrepancy between Arnold’s somber reflections in writing and what his friends and family described in letters as a generally mirthful disposition, one prone to all manner of joking trivialities. I must imagine that my friends often mark in me a similar dissonance. And so, as I stood beneath Britain’s dull, beclouded sky, looking into the yard of a small, perfectly ordinary church where the bones of this kindred spirit had come finally to rest, the whole scene seemed to lack the ceremony or grandeur of which I considered Arnold’s legacy worthy. Indeed, the gravesite was difficult to find.
After a pensive, mostly silent tour of the churchyard, I came inadvertently upon the marker. The site was plain and perfectly demure, marked only by a sort of raised bed, a rectangular patch of purplish gravel which the yard’s other graves lacked. A few audacious weeds had erupted here and there between the little stones; I pulled them free, shook the damp earth from their roots, and cast them aside. Unlike the graves of Keats and Baudelaire which I had also visited that summer, no flowers, notes, or mementos of other pilgrims rested against the headstone. The site had not yet sunken into the decrepitude of disremembrance and ruin which distinguished other graves from the period, their rain-worn, unreadable faces in the midst of a slow, lopsided descent into the soil. Some measure of upkeep had clearly been employed to maintain the monument, and I read this as a sign of respect, a condition which witnessed the persistence of Arnold’s memory. Though in recent years his work had begun to vanish from literary curricula, his occasionally tended grave bore a heartening testament to someone's enduring fondness. At length, the arrival of a pair of mourners to the yard encouraged my departure. I laid my hand gently atop the marker, nodded a sort of “thanks,” and turned toward the bus stop. As I indulged myself in a final glance at the headstone, I kneeled surreptitiously and retrieved one of the small purple stones, slipping it silently into the pocket of my coat—a peculiar little relic which now rests beside a volume of Byron’s poetry edited and signed by Arnold. The stone holds for me some kind of vague, mystical symbolic charge. Wondering if too deep a consideration of it might cause this aura to dissipate, however, I will not attempt that here.
To gesture briefly toward the course of study which knit Arnold and I together and thus to conclude, I offer a small excerpt of his seldom-read poem, Empedocles on Etna. In a final soliloquy, an affecting, impassioned speech delivered before his suicidal plunge into the glowing caldera of Mount Etna, Arnold’s Empedocles petitions the stars overhead:
And you, ye stars…
Have you too survived yourselves?
Are you, too, what I fear to become?
You, too, once lived!
You too moved joyfully
Among august companions
In an older world, peopled by Gods…
The radiant, rejoicing, intelligent Sons of Heaven
But now, you kindle
Your lonely, cold-shining lights…
For a younger, ignoble world…
Without a friend and without home;
Weary like us, though not
Weary with our weariness
(Arnold ll. 276, 280-285, 287-289, 292, 298-300).
Empedocles on Etna first appeared in an 1852 edition of Arnold’s poetry, a collection from which it was subsequently removed. Arnold felt that the position of a man in the midst of the violent transition between one age and the next, his self-erasing confrontation with it, ultimately lacked a certain strain of heroism and thus failed to capture the dignity of a genuine tragedy. As a man struggling with a historical situation more or less analogous to that of Empedocles—differently though I have wrestled with the subtleties of my own moment—I strive, as Arnold did, to embrace bewilderment. And so, the temporally disjointed connection we share is marked by a transcendence of the philosopher-poet’s fruitless despondency, a willingness to live with the feeling of being out of time, to confront and to live in a world in the midst of a sweeping, often nightmarish metamorphosis. Unremarkable as it perhaps appears, my journey to Arnold’s grave seemed to me to establish through the closeness of space a literal proximity which I had felt for years as an affinity of mind and spirit. The pilgrimage contained a series of moments and reflections now sealed in my memory, sentiments and considerations awakened now and again as I open the glass doors of my bookcase, one eye caught by that small purple stone resting amid the dusty volumes of Tennyson, Browning, and the man from whose resting place it was quietly carried away.