Abstract
It would be most difficult to find two literary critics who are more opposed than the two great Victorian critics, Matthew Arnold and Walter Horatio Pater. Each represents an entirely different viewpoint in nineteenth century criticism. Arnold constantly seeks "disinterestedness," a position which removes one from personal prejudices; he opposes the excesses of the Romantic Movement and the Romantics' futile abhorrence of life; and he condemns literary criticism that does not teach men to dwell on excellence which in turn leads to perfection. Arnold constantly condemns mere Romantic expressionism and Romantic criticism because as he declares the Romantic Age lacked "intellectual atmosphere." He is at one and the same time the chief force in opposition to the Romantics in the nineteenth century and a severe critic of his own Romantic contemporaries. Ruskin, for Arnold, is "eccentric" and "dogmatic;" Carlyle is a "moral desperato," and Swinburne is a "pseudo-Shelley." His theories of literary criticism, then, are unique to a century which continues the subjective criticism of the Romantic critic, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Arnold, instead, continues some of the theories of Goethe’s period of classicism, during which objective form and values were sought, when he looks to antiquity as a model and when he seeks "disinterestedness." Arnold admires the Classics because he, like Goethe, thought that Classical literature possessed those elements which are universally found in great literature. Arnold, then, stands in opposition to the highly subjective criticism of his own century, and is, instead a judicial critic, one who seeks an objective norm by which to judge.