“And we shall fly for refuge to past times:”
Tragedy, the Individual, and the Classical Tradition
in Matthew Arnold’s Empedocles on Etna
Despite the seeming ubiquity of Arnold’s thematic engagement with tragedy and the tragic throughout the whole of his poetic output, relatively little critical attention has thus far been paid to this substantial and often conceptually erratic dimension of his poetry. Scholarly interest in Arnold’s poems, generally speaking, has been on the decline since the early 1970s, though an academic investment in selections of his prose has persisted. Within the criticism of those few scholars who have written extensively and variously on Arnold’s tragic poetry—most notably John Farrell, Henry Ebel, and Charles Moyer—Arnold’s poetic investment in the Victorian struggle between faith and doubt, the confrontation of old-world religions with scientific discovery and various forms of post-Enlightenment thinking, has perhaps been overemphasized. While poems like “Dover Beach” and “Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse” are yet frequently anthologized and recognized for their poignant exhibitions of the poet’s conflict with religious doubt, poems formerly regarded as written at the height of Arnold’s powers as a tragic poet are now seldom studied or even published. Empedocles on Etna, for instance, frequently mentioned by critics of the mid-twentieth century as the greatest of Arnold’s attempts to produce a tragic, dramatic poem based on the inherited models of the tragedians of Classical antiquity, warrants a greater degree of attention and scrutiny than academics have been willing to afford it in recent decades. Rife with what some early scholars have called “an excess of modern consciousness,” the interest of Arnold’s poem in the relationship between genuine tragedy and the situation of particular men in particular and philosophically distinct historical moments might offer those of us situated in the twenty-first century some measure of insight into the confusion, the fragmentation, and the ennui which so many of us—and, to be certain, many of our contemporary poets—describe as an intimate part of our own historical experience (Ebel 198).
To help demystify a term so potentially problematic as “genuine tragedy,” it may be profitable to turn to Arnold’s personal qualifications of the concept in the now famous preface to his 1853 edition of poems. Following the first appearance of Empedocles on Etna and Other Poems in 1852, Arnold deleted the collection’s titular dramatic poem from subsequent editions of his poetry. The 1853 preface contains, among other pertinent discussions of a particular Classical ideal of poetry, a lengthy and concerted attempt both to criticize the perceived poetic and tragic failings of Empedocles on Etna and to justify its deletion from the volume. Implicating a number of the central arguments of Aristotle’s Poetics—crucially, that genuine tragedy ought to excite pity and fear in such a way that facilitates the audience’s enjoyment—Arnold wonders, condemning his own work, from what variety of tragic poems “no poetical enjoyment can be derived.” He ultimately provides the following answer:
"They are those in which the suffering finds no vent in action; in which a continuous state of mental distress is prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope, or resistance; in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done. In such situations there is inevitably something morbid, in the description of them something monotonous. When they occur in actual life, they are painful, not tragic; the representation of them in poetry is painful also" (Arnold 1376).
Here, the Aristotelian emphasis on genuine tragedy as centered around some excellent action or, as Arnold later writes, “great [action], calculated powerfully and delightfully to affect what is permanent in the human soul,” might be taken as emblematic of Arnold’s conception of tragedy as a genre of dramatic poetry made increasingly impossible to render by the degenerative physical, philosophic, and literary conditions of modernity (Arnold 1383). Undoubtedly, the unwanted and ostensibly corrupting influence of what Arnold vaguely describes as “the modern” or more indeterminately as “the times” lies at the heart of his perception of Empedocles on Etna as a poetic failure. Describing the historical moment of the actual Empedocles as one in which “the habits of Greek thought and feeling had begun fast to change, character to dwindle, the influence of the Sophists to prevail,” Arnold writes,
"Into the feelings of a man so situated there entered much that we are accustomed to consider as exclusively modern; how much, the fragments of Empedocles himself which remain to us are sufficient at least to indicate. What those who are familiar only with the great monuments of early Greek genius suppose to be its exclusive characteristics, have disappeared; the calm, the cheerfulness, the disinterested objectivity have disappeared: the dialogue of the mind with itself has commenced; modern problems have presented themselves; we hear already the doubts, we witness the discouragement, of Hamlet and of Faust" (Arnold 1375).
If, for Arnold, the conditions, attributes, and attitudes of the modern world utterly preclude the possibility of actions excellent or grand enough to provide the basis for a genuine tragedy, the question of what precisely Arnold means to invoke with his use of the term “modern” seems one worth addressing at length. As Arnold states in this excerpt from the 1853 preface, modernity seems to describe historical moments marred by dominant philosophies which tend toward subjectivity as the basis of inquiry and interpretation, worldviews which eschew the search for ultimate truth in favor of various forms of relativism—what both Aristotle and Arnold’s Empedocles refer to as sophistry. Thus, for Arnold, the failure of Empedocles on Etna to inhabit the realm of genuine tragedy—and the literary category of “genuine tragedy” itself—has much to do with a perceived historical and philosophical resonance between late-fifth century Greece and Victorian England.
As critic Charles Moyer observes, many of Arnold’s poetic and critical works are suffused with a “belief that modernity is a ‘philosophical,’ not a chronological, concept and that Periclean Greece, late Rome, and contemporary England are modern and postromantic eras…” (Moyer 162). Arnold’s conceptions of modernity and the historical process itself—or, more accurately, the tension between an number of such (often conflicting) conceptions which appear throughout Arnold’s oeuvre—undoubtedly inform his ideas about tragedy and the tragic as well as his attempts to render them in various poetic forms. On the one hand, as Moyer’s analysis suggests, Arnold’s belief in a “philosophical modernity” is predicated on a simultaneously concrete and dynamic vision of the historical process, one which characterizes the pendulous or even cyclical motions of history as occasionally culminating in distinct moments capable of genuine tragic production—the age of the Sophocles and Aeschylus, the reign of Caesar Augustus. On the other hand, Arnold’s peculiar enchantment with the Hellenic Greeks manifests in varieties of scholarship and poetry (of which Empedocles on Etna might be read as emblematic) markedly more abstract, vague, and mystical than those of his contemporaries. As historian Frank Turner has eloquently noted, “most nineteenth-century scholars and critics of Greece, in contrast to Arnold, dealt with specific and well-defined areas of Greek life rather than with general phenomena or an extracted Hellenic essence” (Turner 9). In terms of reading Empedocles on Etna as an exemplar of the Arnoldian tragic vision, a vision which speaks yet and powerfully to our sense of tragedy in the twenty-first century, the task of the contemporary critic turns from an attempt to reconcile Arnold’s often vague, disparate, or indeterminate sentiments concerning tragedy as a dramatic genre of the Classical tradition (producible only in rare historical moments), to the task of constructing an analytic framework within which the interpretation of Arnold’s confusion, doubt, and indeterminacy in the context of tragedy can become newly useful.
To begin, scholar John Farrell understands the Arnoldian conception of tragedy in terms of what he calls a “tragic sense of history” which pervades both Empedocles on Etna particularly and Arnold’s poetry generally, an interpretive construction which has been seldom discussed since the early 1970s. Although Farrell attributes this sense of history in undue measure to ideas which Arnold himself consciously held and expressed, the aforementioned passages from the 1853 preface explicitly betray Arnold’s conviction that modern action/experience was utterly incapable of achieving the grandeur and solemnity of tragedy in the Aristotelian view. Put perhaps more clearly, criticism of Arnold’s tragic poems has thus far failed to adequately sever the author himself—often remembered or perceived as an Empedoclean figure—from his textual productions. The features of Arnold’s poems to which Arnold himself ascribed their failure as works of genuine tragedy are precisely those which have since been identified as the unique aspects which mark much of Arnold’s poetry as an emergent form or mode of tragedy in the context of a dawning modern era. As one critic has more cruelly put it, Arnold had been the consummate master of rendering “the sufferings of modernity, the one poetic topic he despised yet excelled in” (de Graef 94). For Farrell, the “tragic sense of history” of which much of Arnold’s poetry might be read as reflective is composed of several distinct and foundational attitudes:
"The attitude that human destiny is profoundly shaped by one’s milieu, that this milieu derives its organization from a historical process which is both magnificent and radically flawed, and that the participation of a heroic individual in this process, his confrontation with its revolutionary direction, may possess the dignity of tragic conflict" (Farrell 109).
Farrell’s analysis, succinct and resonant as it undoubtedly is, is nevertheless predicated either on a misreading of Arnold’s self-criticism or on an anachronistic reading of Arnold’s early poetic output as expressing various ideas and sentiments which do not appear in Arnold’s writing until the 1860s and 70s. For Arnold, the young poet, Empedocles on Etna had failed because of the inability of its protagonist to confront history in a grand, meaningful, or even active way; the character of the confrontation conspicuously lacked “the dignity of tragic conflict.” Farrell’s invocation of the concept of revolution as a necessary part of a framework for understanding tragedy in Arnold’s dramatic poetry, however, could be wielded usefully as critical instrument. Although Arnold eventually came to believe in the power of the Classical tradition—as evidenced in later works like On Translating Homer—as capable of effecting a kind of cultural revolution and reinvigoration of English literature, the young Arnold of the 1850s saw in the “revolutionary direction” of history the mere banality of endless repetition, an uninteresting and inexorable circularity of movement. Arnold’s poem “Revolutions,” published alongside Empedocles on Etna in the 1852 volume, unambiguously articulates this attitude: “And empire after empire, at their height…/ Have felt their huge frames not constructed right,/ And droop’d, and slowly died upon their throne” (Arnold ll. 13, 15-16). This early conception of history speaks to Arnold’s poetic interest in the figure of Empedocles, who—anticipating no end of the historical process, no final redemption of mankind in a moment of apocalypse (as “Revolutions” does)—can meet no fate other than that of self-annihilation.
One of the fundamental tensions which Empedocles on Etna seeks but ultimately fails to resolve, however, might be articulated as the question of the primacy of psychology or fate as the final determining factor in the suicide of Arnold’s philosopher-poet. The ancillary figures of Pausanias and Callicles explicitly implicate despair, what Arnold alternately calls “mental distress,” as the source of Empedocles’ protracted misery—explicable only in terms of an individual’s personal psychological predispositions. As Callicles explains, “'Tis not the times, 'tis not the sophists vex him;/ There is some root of suffering in himself,/ Some secret and unfollow'd vein of woe,/ Which makes the time look black and sad to him’” (Arnold ll. 150-153). Although Empedocles himself briefly converts to this mode of explication in the moments before his final plunge in Etna’s glowing caldera, the profound anxiety evinced by his final soliloquy lingers after the suicide has been carried through, finding relief not even in the poem’s final lines. Toward the stars overhead, with whom Empedocles feels an uneasy sense of identification, he directs perhaps the most affecting portion of this final address:
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).
The conflict which Empedocles adumbrates in this passage emphasizes the confrontation of an individual with the passing of one age into the next, a confrontation which inevitably renders one’s existence as a kind of living death—a state of having survived oneself. The tragedy of such a condition, as Empedocles’ speech intimates, is in the inability of an individual in the midst of this conflict with history to react to or to alter what is essentially a condition of entrapment or displacement. Whether this inability results from actual, if indeterminate external pressures or from mere ennui, Empedocles cannot to decide. As he reflects in the lines immediately succeeding these, “No, no, ye stars! there is no death with you,/ No languor, no decay!…/ …I alone/ Am dead to life and joy; therefore I read/ In all things my own deadness” (Arnold ll. 301-302, 320-322). Ultimately, Empedocles seems to lament and resist modernity itself (i.e. the “philosophical modernity” of Arnold’s understanding), an age which has abandoned the old, the grand (indeed, the mythic) order of a world “peopled by gods” for the new and ignoble—which has abandoned certainty for relativism, faith for doubt, cheer for gloom, the ideal of ultimate truth for hollow sophistry.
To return to an emphasis on the centrality of revolution as a means of constructing a framework for understanding the tragedy of Empedocles on Etna, a number of remarks from Raymond Williams’ seminal volume Modern Tragedy may prove more useful than John Farrell’s above-quoted comments on Arnold’s “tragic sense of history.” Williams’ describes one of the conditions which facilitates or produces modern literary depictions of tragedy as a kind of lived experience marked by the sensation of progression through the state of historical deadlock into utter stalemate, an evocative concept which resonates easily with the historical position of Arnold’s Empedocles’ in late-fifth century Greece: “In a deadlock, there is still effort and struggle, but no possibility of winning: the wrestler with life dies as he gives his last strength. In a stalemate there is no possibility of movement or even the effort at movement; every willed action is self-cancelling” (Williams 172). Thus, Williams argues, “the tragedy is not, essentially, in what this or that person does, but in a total condition” (Williams 182). In the context of mid-late nineteenth century Europe, the literature of which Williams specifically addresses in this passage, the existentially weary figure caught in a state of historical deadlock or stalemate inevitably expresses the frustrated hopes of past revolutions or of those yet in the midst of transforming the world and the social relationships of which it is constructed—most notably, the rise of industrial capitalism, of the physical and natural sciences, and of the modes of social organization thereby produced. The prevalence of such an attitude is immediately apparent in the final pages of Empedocles on Etna, wherein the philosopher poet exhibits a poignant inability both to imagine a future radically different from the present and to situate himself meaningfully within the context of a collective. To return briefly to the 1853 preface, Arnold himself draws a painful distinction between common perceptions of the nineteenth century as “an era of progress, an age commissioned to carry out the great ideas of industrial development and social amelioration” and his own sense of the times as “an age wanting in moral grandeur… an age of spiritual discomfort” (Arnold 1383). The apparent frustrations of both Arnold and his Empedocles point toward one of Victorian England’s most dominant and problematic ideologies: a teleological narrative of the historical process which was fundamentally incapable of delivering on its various promises of progress.
As importantly as the tragedy of historical deadlock or stalemate, another piece of Modern Tragedy’s commentary, what Williams refers to as the tragedy which consists in “the fact of ‘the personal, impenetrable world,’” aptly describes the conceptual architecture of Empedocles on Etna (Williams 182). Williams argues, “by a paradoxical procedure… other individuals, defending their personal, impenetrable worlds and their consequent ways of seeing and living, become a hostile society, and threaten to destroy one’s own personal way” (Williams 183). This remark echoes an early statement of Arnold’s Empedocles, who cannot satisfactorily situate himself within or without of Greek society: “…With men thou canst not live,/ Their thoughts, their ways, their wishes, are not thine;/ And being lonely thou art miserable,/ For something has impair’d thy spirit’s strength” (Arnold ll. 18-21). Ultimately, Empedocles reasons that the source of this particular vein of suffering lies merely in the lived experience of consciousness, in the filtration by the senses of the external phenomena which comprise the world we must independently navigate, in the reality of individuation itself. Implicating this tragedy of individual existence, of “the personal, impenetrable world,” Empedocles mourns in his final soliloquy that “…we shall be the strangers of the world.” Of mind and thought, he cries,
And they will be our lords, as they are now,
And keep us prisoners of our consciousness.
And never let us clasp and feel the All
But through their forms, and modes, and stifling veils.
And we shall be unsatisfied as now,
And we shall feel the agony of thirst,
The ineffable longing for the life of life
Baffled for ever… (Arnold ll. 350-359).
The evocative language of Arnold’s Empedocles in these lines—“lords,” “prisoners,” “forms,” “veils”—serves to underscore the philosopher’s despair at his absolute immobility, a condition imposed on him by external forces which he can never adequately articulate or even name. The lived reality of inhabiting an individual consciousness, which Empedocles ostensibly addresses in this passage (i.e. the fact of having “mind and thought”), however, does not satisfactorily account for the persistent backward direction toward which the rhetoric of Arnold’s protagonist continually gestures—his longing for the mythic world of a passed age, a world “peopled by gods.” The philosopher’s conflation of the ongoing degradation of Greek character and society (the loss of a golden age) with what Williams calls the tragedy of a “total condition” might be read as one of the conspicuous conceptual dissonances which marks Empedocles’ speech as excessively modern—in Arnold’s terms, marred by “the dialogue of the mind with itself.” The phenomenon of individuation, as Empedocles wistfully observes it, is ultimately mapped onto the historical process itself, insofar at least as humanity’s continued participation in it is concerned. In “each succeeding age in which we are born,” Empedocles reasons,
…we shall struggle awhile, gasp and rebel;
And we shall fly for refuge to past times,
Their soul of unworn youth, their breath of greatness;
And the reality will pluck us back,
Knead us in its hot hand and change our nature.
And we shall feel our powers of effort flag,
And rally them for one last fight, and fail;
And we shall sink in the impossible strife,
And be astray forever… (Arnold ll. 377, 382-389).
The crippling inability ofEmpedocles to conceive of himself as existing outside of or as part of something greater than the radical individuality which he takes to be a mere fact of the condition of living is a significant part of what makes Arnold’s text so simultaneously peculiar and resonant. As Arnold correctly, if not unproblematically points out in the 1853 preface, Empedocles’ internal struggle is a fundamentally modern one, an affliction the diagnosis of which might speak to and even improve the condition of contemporary world weariness. Empedocles on Etna’s undeviating focus on the internal life of an individual as the center of tragedy, the text’s inability to meaningfully imagine the social, moral, and political role of collectives in a future constitutionally different from the present (that is to say, revolution), might rightly be read as the first crucial component of such a diagnosis.
Arnold’s poetic investment in the various sufferings and lived experiences of modernity in Empedocles on Etna, as scholar Henry Ebel has noted, reflects a complex engagement with both the relics of Classical Greece and the emergent, newly scientific philosophies of the mid-nineteenth century; Arnold’s attitudes regarding the modern world are never rendered as categorically negative. Much of Arnold’s poetic output shows him “…struggling between the desire to place a positive valuation on modernity, on his own culture, and a desperate nostalgia for the imagined conditions of Greek society” (Ebel 190). The project of reinvigorating English poetry through contact with the remote past, as represented by a poem like Empedocles on Etna, seems deeply emblematic of this struggle. What Arnold identifies as the fundamental failing of the poem, an excess of modern-ness which precludes the adequate or genuine recapturing or revitalization of the tragedy of the Classical tradition, is the inevitable consequence of the nature of such a project. One cannot escape into the past, as Arnold often endeavors, without in some measure modernizing the literary forms and elements which one attempts to retrieve from it. As Ebel has observed, Arnold “…was the chief representative in England of the modern sentiment that seeks to make the ancient world its own, and the closely related sentiment that seeks to feel its way into the struggles, the state of mind, and the culture of classical antiquity” (Ebel 188). Of course, as Arnold notes in the self-criticism of the 1853 preface, the very attempt to feel one’s way into the past necessarily corrupts or distorts one’s vision of it; this process of cultural retrieval is always simultaneously a process of re-contextualization and often of modernization. The complex, tense, and occasionally contradictory ways in which Empedocles on Etna engages with an emergent modernity and the new possibilities for tragedy which such a set of historical and social conditions unavoidably generates marks the poem as one with an enduring, if often unrecognized literary and cultural relevance.
In the end, a renewed critical interest in Arnold’s tragic poetry might allow us to more meaningfully examine the ideological inheritance of our own culture, consisting as it does (in no small part) of distinctly Victorian ideas and attitudes. What I have formerly called the conceptual architecture of a poem like Empedocles on Etna resonates in a number of poignant ways with dominant contemporary perspectives and values. In conjunction with the poem’s focus on interiority and subjectivity—in terms of both the mental state of despair and the condition of individuation—the social, historical, and spiritual or psychical immobility of Arnold’s Empedocles speaks harshly to our modern veneration of individualism and individuality. As the closing lines of Arnold’s poem and the final speeches of his protagonist suggest, radical individuality—or, more accurately, the conception of individuality as a “total condition,” of isolation as a fact of lived experience—inexorably produces tragic outcomes. The inability of Empedocles on Etna to imagine either potential modes of human connection or substantial roles for individuals within the context of a collective evokes a painfully relevant sense of existential malaise which, once recognized, might be diverted from the path to tragedy, from the sad fate of Arnold’s Empedocles, and harnessed for the purposes of revolution—to construct a future constitutionally different from the present historical moment. The rhetorical/analytical maneuver, as I have briefly and vaguely attempted, of putting Victorian texts in conversation with the writing of more recent Marxist critics like Raymond Williams might aid our commencement and ongoing work in the laborious endeavor of imagining and articulating the necessary attributes of such a future. Ultimately, whether we turn to Victorian models or to the Greek literary foundations upon which they are laid, the ways in which we choose to read and to conceive of tragedy meaningfully inform the ways in which we attempt to diagnose the social, political, and ideological ills, the tragic features of our own culture. To conduct such a diagnosis as accurately as possible ought to be one end of our work as literary critics, an end which renders Arnold’s poetry—dismissed as mediocre though it often is—newly resonant and newly useful.
Works Cited
Arnold, Matthew. "Empedocles on Etna." The Poems of Matthew Arnold 1840-1867. London: Oxford UP, 1913. 121-22. Print.
Arnold, Matthew. "Preface to Poems (1853)." The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Victorian Age. 8th ed. Vol. E. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2006. N. pag. Print.
Arnold, Matthew. "Revolutions." Matthew Arnold's Poems: Lyric and Elegaic. New York: Macmillan, 1890. N. pag. Print.
de Graef, Ortwin. "Congestion of the Brain in an Age of Unpoetrylessness: Matthew Arnold's Digestive Tracts for the Times." Victorian Literature and Culture 26.1 (1998): 87- 103. JSTOR. Web. 16 Apr. 2014. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/25058405>.
Ebel, Henry. "Matthew Arnold and Classical Culture." Arion 4.2 (1965): 188-220. JSTOR. Web. 16 Apr. 2014. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/20162949>.
Farrell, John P. "Matthew Arnold's Tragic Vision." PMLA 85.1 (1970): 107-17. JSTOR. Web. 16 Apr. 2014. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/1261436>.
Moyer, Charles R. "The Idea of History in Thomas and Matthew Arnold." Modern Philology 67.2 (1969): 160-67. JSTOR. Web. 7 Jan. 2015. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/436005>.
Turner, Frank M. The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain. New Haven: Yale UP, 1981. Print.
Williams, Raymond. Modern Tragedy. Ontario: Broadview Press Ltd., 2006. Print.