For a full programme of spiritual journeys to India, and to encounter the full £5 plus £1 p&p amazing religions, apes petal cultures, and humanity a eng Call now for a brochure Sanpete 01902 561485 The Revelation of Being DON CUPITT Gazing out of his Cambridge window across Parker’s Piece, Don Cupitt had a vision, a profound religious experience. Here, in retrospective analysis, he develops from it a doctrine of the trinity of Being, Man and Language which deserves to become a classic of postmodem spirituality. paper £8.95 tel 0171 359 8033 fax 0171 359 0049 SCM PRESS 9-17 ST ALBANS PLACE LONDON N1 ONX 4 senayresa@@btictemet.com DOVER BEACH JOHN CROMPTON thinks it is time we took another look at Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach, examining the whole poem instead of just the “Sea of Faith” bit. He reminds us that Arnold’s most famous work was probably written on his honeymoon. So what’s going on? h, Love, let Ithough Dover Beach was not Avstes until 1867 there is trong evidence that it was written in 1851, which confirms Don Cupitt’s contention that nonrealism was infecting thinking people well before the publication of such documents as Darwin’s Origin Of Species (1859). The focus here, however, is on the personal, emotional aspect of nonrealism, because the poem was probably written on honeymoon.
Cupitt omits the last section from his (1984) book of the television series, thus excluding the “personal,” and his discussion focuses on Arnold as giving voice to a new, “revisionist” state of mind. But, as Cupitt’s later books confirm, the personal is the religious and the religious is the personal. For this is surely a curious piece to write at a time which might be assumed to be full of joy, newfound happiness and fulfilment; not a point at which to compose one of the most despairing poems in the English language.
It is a strangely contradictory piece. It begins with a celebration of nature and has about it the sense of the satisfied lover inviting his spouse to share the post-nuptial calm. The “eternal note of sadness” even complements the peaceful acceptance of the scene and suggests the post-coital mood. But through Sophocles, within a dozen or so words we are through the window, out of the intimate, into the generalised “turbid ebb and flow/Of human misery.” This, apparently, proceeds, through “a thought” heard “by this distant northern sea,” to the ebb of ‘True “Culture seems to be an endlessly referential system of supposedly, or proposedly, shared values and meanings. But, as the poem itself records, there is no foundation.” the Sea of Faith. Sadness leads to misery to loss of faith.
There is an apparent alleviation.
The newly-wed makes the appropriate plea: “Ah, love, let us be true to one another!” In a world devoid of external validation, there is only the personal relationship to give meaning. The beauty of the scene outside the window is an illusion, “a land of dreams”. The external world “really” lacks joy, love, light, certitude, peace and “help for pain.” Having asked for fidelity, for love, the very possibility of love seems to be denied. And the peaceful, honeymoon-lit beach becomes “a darkling plain...Where ignorant armies clash by night.” The loss of faith, then, seems to mean loss of everything that gives value to life. The call to make meaning through relationship is half undermined by the final seven and a half lines. Or else we are to infer that only through love can any meaning be made within a universe otherwise not only meaningless but imbued with threatening chaos. This possibility, too, is half undermined.
Cupitt remarks in The Sea of Faith that Arnold “was not primarily a thinker.” Rather, he combined “an intuitive, imaginative mind with a sharp sense of social reality”. But the us be whole point of the poem, I believe, is its enactment of the relationship of thought (the thought found in the sound of the sea) and feeling. Or, even, the breakdown in that relationship. Without the validation of the old systems of belief even personal relationships become tenuous, ungrounded.
The poem has a quasi-mythic air about it — the speaker as representative, Everyman figure — in its dramatisation of this total loss of meaning.
This is how and why the poem and the writer seem relevant not just to mid-nineteenth century Erigland but to our own situation. For though Arnold remained a church-goer, his writings suggest an_ essentially humanist position. Though he was not a philosopher he sought to establish a system of shared meanings through the development of a “culture” which would bring what he called “sweetness and light.” The “Philistines” he sought to enlighten were, indeed, as he saw it, trapped within the realism of provincial nonconformist beliefs. Implicit in his Essays In Criticism (1865/1869) and his Culture And Anarchy (1867) is an irresolvable opposition between “culture” and religious realism, an element of the “anarchy.” The culture he desired to disseminate, to those with the resources to receive it, is implicit in Dover Beach.
The reference to Sophocles implies the knowledge of the classics believed to be the sine qua non (suitable Latin tag) of a good education. The poem paraphrases, too, the poem Obermann, by the French writer Etienne de Senancourt and implies Arnold’s belief that the cultured individual is fluent in modern languages, also, as he himself was. The last lines combine the classics and the moderns, because they derive from Thucydides’s description of the Battle of Epipolae (413BC) in his History Of The Peloponnesian War, which was also used by Arthur Hugh Clough in The Bothie of Toper-na-Fuosich (1848) and by Newman in a sermon of 1839 (Miriam Allott & Robert H. Super, The Oxford Authors: Matthew Arnold, OUP, 1986).
Culture seems, therefore, to be an endlessly referential system of supposedly, or proposedly, shared values and meanings. But, as the poem itself records, there is no foundation. One work validates itself by referring to another, which refers to another, and so ad infinitum. Arnold is, in effect, anticipating T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922), which seeks a Christian meaning through a maze of allusions.
So, surfing on Dover Beach is surfing the void?
Well, no. Arnold’s example is the point. His work as HM Inspector of Schools, like his aspirations to civilise the Philistines, was evidence of his attribution of value to education as a means for helping humans to become more human. “Sweetness and light” are psychic states. They are not “ideas.” Culture is about relationships, about feelings. It needs no other basis than its capacity to show us how to be human. It is a hall of mirrors. Or windows: we can fly in through Arnold’s casement and even be the one, the ones, to whom he aspired to be faithful. For the poem need not remain purely personal: he is addressing every reader, inviting human solidarity. He was himself not only a faithful husband and father but held to his self-conceived values all his life. And we should note that we are being invited to be faithful to him, too, to hold to human feeling and human values.
John Crompton is a semi-retired lecturer in education and English Literature. He is a Quaker and lives at Market Rasen, Lincolnshire.