Some light reading

Still discovering books we have on our shelves that I have never picked up -- except to move them from abode to abode. Here's one: 'Representative Essays of Matthew Arnold'. It's a doozie, as my late mother used to say.

Having been an English major, I studied Arnold, but thought him principally a poet; an essayist I did not know he was. Essays. Who has a clue about them today? What's an "essay"? We wrote them in school, but most of us just rattled them off without faintest notion of their purpose.

"A literary composition intended to prove some particular point or illustrate a particular subject, not having the importance of a regular treatise; a short disquisition (look that up, if you dare) on a subject of taste, philosophy, or common life"....is how 'Blackie's Concise English Dictionary' defines it. (Blackie's, by the way, was the only dictionary my father used. The version I am looking at was printed at 50 Old Bailey, London, but they also had offices in Glasgow and Bombay. It contains sections on etymology, prefixes and suffixes, keys to pronunciation, abbrevations and signs, principal moneys of the world, principal weights and measures and other esoteric necessities. I intend to do a separate blog on Blackie's but, forgive me, I digress. Back to Matthew Arnold.

Arnold, born in 1822, died 1888, was a venerable scholar and his essays demonstrate it. Some of the chapter titles follow:

Marcus Aurelius
The Function of Criticism at the Present Time
Sweetness and Light
Ecce Convertimur ad Gentes (yes, he wrote and spoke in Latin)
Wordsworth
The Study of Poety
Liturature and Science, and
Civilisation in the United States

This final essay is facinating. He sums up America thusly:
"What really dissatisfies in American civilisation is the want of the interesting, a want due chiefly to the want of those two great elements of the interesting, which are elevation and beauty. And the want of these elements is increased and prolonged by the Americans being assured that they have them when have them not....Perhaps the very first step should be to insist on having for America better newspapers.

"We have a good deal to learn from them; we shall find in them, also, many things to be aware of, many points in which it is to be hoped our democracy may not be like theirs."

Canada, societally perched as it is between the United States and Britain, remains firmly in between. We remain definitely unlike either.