Laying Claim: George Saintsbury's Assessment of Matthew Arnold (Critical Essay‪)‬

Among those prominent in assessing Matthew Arnold's significance soon after his death in 1888, George Saintsbury was without doubt the most persistent. As he declared in one of his contributions to the subject, though he could not claim to be an exact contemporary of Arnold, since Arnold had graduated before he was even born, he could Many others of course could say as much, but Saintsbury, as he showed by his various commentaries on Arnold in, for instance, Corrected Impressions (1895), A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1896), A Short History of English Literature (1898), Matthew Arnold (1899), A History of English Criticism (1911), and A Last Scrapbook (1924) clearly intended to provide the definitive account of the figure who loomed more importantly than any other in the minds of late Victorian literary critics. Most of these critics agreed that, in H. D. Traill's words, Arnold deserved "a permanent place in the history of English letters," (2) but the question was what place? Saintsbury determined to be the one to decide this. By avoiding both undue adulation and outright "spoliation," he aimed to show Arnold as he really was, present him in a way future generations of critics would find authoritative, and in the process of course enhance his own reputation as literary historian and critic. In doing this, he was clearly aware of the mass of critical opinion on Arnold already in existence by the 1890s but makes virtually no reference to any of it. The Arnold to be remembered was to be the one shaped by Saintsbury, not least of all in his book-length biographical and critical study of him in 1899, the first such study to appear.