Essay: Essays in Criticism (Second Series)

Overview
Essays in Criticism (Second Series), published posthumously in 1888, gathers the late critical reflections of Matthew Arnold and consolidates his mature view of literature, culture, and the critic's public role. The volume extends the themes that made Arnold a central voice in Victorian letters: a commitment to aesthetic standards, an urgency about cultural education, and a belief that criticism serves a moral as well as an intellectual function. Its tone is measured, often elegiac, and marked by a persistent concern with how literature can steady a society in rapid intellectual and social change.
Rather than offering a systematic treatise, the essays present a series of closely argued meditations that move between close readings of poets and broader reflections on cultural life. Arnold treats criticism as a disciplined exercise of judgment informed by history and by an appeal to permanent human values, seeking to rescue taste from mere fashion or partisan enthusiasm.

Main Themes
A central theme is the function of criticism as a corrective and formative force: criticism should clarify standards, deepen appreciation, and guide public taste toward what Arnold sees as the "best that has been thought and said." He repeatedly argues that culture, understood as the pursuit of spiritual and intellectual perfection, must counterbalance the forces of materialism and provincialism that threaten public life. Literature, for Arnold, is a repository of human experience that can refine sensibility and enlarge sympathy.
Arnold also insists on the critic's responsibility to combine an historical sense with the ability to judge works against timeless standards. He advocates "disinterestedness" and an appeal to quality rather than to mere novelty or popularity, maintaining that a judicious reading of the past, paired with attention to current needs, produces sound judgments. These essays underscore a belief that literary judgment bears social consequence: the cultivation of taste is integral to civic health.

Method and Style
The essayistic method is a mixture of close reading, comparative reference, and aphoristic pronouncement. Arnold frequently isolates memorable passages or "touchstones" to test poets and to exemplify standards of verse, a technique that foregrounds discrimination of feeling and phrasing over abstract theory. His prose is concise, lucid, and often epigrammatic; it balances scholarly learning with rhetorically forceful claims intended to persuade a broad, educated readership.
Despite this clarity, Arnold's tone can be prescriptive. He moves easily from literary criticism into cultural diagnosis, assuming that evaluative judgments about poetry or prose are bound up with broader judgments about national taste, education, and moral life. The result is criticism that reads as both close textual engagement and public counsel.

Significance and Influence
The Second Series functions as a capstone to Arnold's lifetime of critical practice, refining positions developed earlier and addressing the cultural questions of a late-Victorian England increasingly shaped by industrialism, scientific advance, and expanding mass readerships. Its insistence on standards, objectivity, and the social stakes of taste made Arnold a pivotal figure in debates about canon formation and the responsibilities of intellectual life.
Later critics and theorists drew on Arnold's fusion of aesthetic and ethical concerns, even as others challenged his elitism and his faith in steady, universal standards. The essays remain important for understanding Victorian cultural conservatism and the enduring tension in literary study between historical relativity and normative judgment.

Legacy and Contemporary Relevance
Essays in Criticism (Second Series) continues to be read as an articulate statement of criticism as a public, cultural vocation. Its prescriptions for education and taste resonate in contemporary debates about the humanities' place in civic life and the criteria by which literary worth is assessed. While some of Arnold's assumptions about hierarchy and cultural authority have been contested, his core insistence that criticism matters, both to literature and to society, still commands attention among those who seek to balance historical understanding with evaluative standards.