Appendix I of the author's Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England: Newman , Arnold, and Pater, which University of Texas Press published in 1969. It appears in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.

Bibliographical information appears in the form of in-text citations, which refer to the bibliography at the end of each document to which the note refers.

n a letter to John Duke Coleridge of January 8, 1843, (Life and Correspondence of John Duke Lord Coleridge, I, p. 122-123.) following a paragraph on the memorial and scholarship fund to be collected in honor of Dr. Thomas Arnold, Matthew Arnold continues: "I am extremely glad that you like the sermons. I always wished that you should read them. They seem to me the most delightful and most satisfactory to read, of all his writings. The last sermon but two in the last volume preached on Whitsunday, is, I think, the most beautiful of all of them. I neither expect nor desire that they should change your admiration for Newman. I should be very unwilling to think they did so in my own case, but owing to my utter want of prejudice ... I find it perfectly possible to admire them both. You cannot expect that very detailed and complete controversial sermons, going at once to the root of all the subjects in dispute, should be preached to a congregation of boys. It would be very unfit that they should. The peculiar nature of Newman's congregation gives him, I think, a great advantage, in enabling him to state his views and to dwell on them, in all their completeness." Louis Bonnerot garbles the significance of this passage by suggesting that "the sermons" md "his writings" are Newman's. (Matthew Arnold, Poète, pp. 26-27.) No sermon of Newman's, published by this date, however, fulfills Arnold's conditions; the only supposition on which the passage is intelligible is that the sermons alluded to are those of Dr. Arnold. "The last sermon but two in the last volume preached on Whitsunday" is Sermon XXXII ("Waiting for God in Christ," preached on Whitsunday, 1842), which appeared in the second volume of sermons titled Christian Life, and subtitled Its Hopes, Its Fears, and Its Close. The volume was edited by Dr. Arnold's widow, and its preface is dated October 20, 1842; it appeared later in the same year. The elegiac note ("I always wished that you should read them") is accounted for by the fact of Dr. Arnold's death on June 12, of the preceding year, within a week of Whitsunday. Arnold's reference to a particular volume of sermons ("the last volume") seems to indicate that he had given Coleridge two or more [345/346] of his father's volumes. Clearly, moreover, Newman's sermons would not alter Coleridge's "admiration" for Newman; the reference is, instead, to Christian Life: Its Course, Its Hindrances, and Its Helps, Thomas Arnold's fourth volume of sermons, published in 1841, the sixty-eight-page introduction to which Thomas Arnold makes his most detailed attack on "the new counter-reformation" of "Mr. Newman and his friends." (Page references to quotations from this edition are given in the text.) Dr. Arnold pleads at the end (p. lxvii) that "in naming Mr. Newman as the chief author of the system which I have been considering, I have in no degree wished to make the question personal." Nevertheless, despite the attempt at measured judgement, Dr. Arnold insists that the doctrines of Newman and his companions "are not of God" (p. xxvii), and he bears down heavily on the serious "moral and intellectual faults" found in "the writings of the supporters of Mr. Newman's system" (p. xxvii n). Moreover, all the sermons of these two volumes of Dr. Arnold's were "preached to a congregation of boys" at Rugby. Finally, despite Arnold's evident interest in "the peculiar nature of Newman's congregation," the letter cited above gives us no special warrant to assume that Arnold was at this time (early in 1843) reading the published volumes of Newman's sermons. [E. K. Brown sees that the volume of sermons is not Newman's but speaks of it only as being "by some cleric who differed from J. H. Newman." pp. 192-93n.]

References

Bonnerot, Louis. Matthew Arnold, Poète: Essai de Biographie Psychologique. Paris: Librairie Marcel Didier, 1947.

Brown, E. K. Matthew Arnold, A Study in Conflict, Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1948.

Coleridge, Ernest Hartley. Life and Correspondence of John Duke Lord Coleridge, 2 vols. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1904.


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