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This essay compares Wordsworth’s and Arnold’s conceptions of nature and suggests reasons for the differences found. Both poets were keenly sensitive to the leveliness of the external world, and found in nature a soothing and healing power for the troubled mind of man. Both derived sensuous enjoyment from the beauties of nature, and found in nature permanence, peace, and tranquillity. The fundamental difference in their doctrines of nature is in their conceptions of abstract nature. To Wordsworth, nature was a benevolent force which actively participated in the moral and spiritual growth of man. His was a doctrine of joy and optimism. To Arnold, nature was a great and indifferent force which man must transcend. His was a doctrine of stoicism and pessimism. The differences are mainly due to the progress in science and thought from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Wordsworth inherited the eighteenth century belief in a benevolent and all-powerful Deity, who manifested his goodness in nature. By a synthesis of this philosophy, the assumptions of associationist psychology, and his own experience, he explained the moral and spiritual growth of man. Wordsworth believed that through love of nature, man was led to love of his fellow man and of God. He believed that nature participated in man’s moral growth, through the senses, with the aid of some super-sensuous power – ‘a superadded soul’, an ‘auxilier light’, which he believed to be the imagination. Through semi-mystical and visionary experiences, he became convinced of the unity between the soul of man and the soul of nature. This was the source of his joy in nature. Arnold took for granted many of the assumptions of nineteenth century science regarding nature. Through these, and his own search for truth, he lost faith in a benevolent force in the universe. He saw no evidence of harmony or teleological purpose in nature. He found in nature only an edifying example of tranquility, steadfastness, and stoicism. The central tenet of his doctrine was of the superiority of man over nature, through his reason and conscience. On a broader basis, the change in attitude to nature between Wordsworth and Arnold is due to the changed conception of men’s place in the Chain of Being. In the eighteenth century, man held the most important earthly place in nature’s Chain of Being. In the nineteenth century, he lost that place. The Industrial Revolution created a materialistic world in which only the fittest survived economically. Biologists and zoologists reduced man to the level of all other creatures. He lost his favoured place in the Chain of Being, and for him nature lost all order and purposiveness. A pessimistic view of nature was logical and common. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

As Matthew Arnold saw the philosophies of the classical ancients as touchstones for evaluating the new political and social philosophies of his own time, Arnold himself has served as a "touchstone" for historians who must evaluate the political and social events of the Victorian Age. Arnold made many comments about the three great Prime Ministers of his time: Lord Palmerston, Benjamin Disraeli, and William E. Gladstone, and about the policies of their respective administrations. Arnold's point of view toward these men is reflected in personal letters to members of his family and in his most significant political works, Culture and Anarchy and Friendship's Garland. In the study that follows, these selections are examined in terms of the three Prime Ministers. Chapter I is an introduction to Arnold's political philosophy and an account of Arnold's comments about Disraeli, for of the three, Arnold had the least to say about Disraeli. Arnold dwells almost exclusively on differences he has with the government, and he found less to disagree with in Disraeli's policies than with the others. Arnold's reactions to Disraeli were more personal in nature than political. Chapter II deals with Lord Palmerston's administration and with key events and people associated with it. Chapter III deals more specifically with Culture and Anarchy and with political and social events that served as a background for Arnold's commentary. Finally, Chapter IV concentrates on the Gladstone years, concluding with Arnold's assessment of the Liberal party and its leader in "The Nadir of Liberalism."

The thesis consists of a selection of original poems and an essay on the literary relationship between Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot. The poems are loosely related in theme; they are the responses of the poet to the various forces in his upbringing, such as literature, religion and the American Southwest. The essay compares the literary criticism of Arnold and Eliot, the foremost critics of their respective periods, with special attention to Eliot's criticism of Arnold. The conclusion is that despite this criticism Eliot accepted Arnold's major critical precepts and perpetuated in his own work Arnold's central concerns about literature and culture.

In its earliest form, the Tristram legend was probably a Celtic folk-tale known in oral tradition as early as the eighth or ninth century. During the early part of the twelfth century it became known in France and Brittany; and there, in the later years of that same century, it was recorded in a lost romance now referred to as the Ur-Tristan. From this source, so it is believed, the earliest extant romances upon the subject were derived. During the twelfth century, two main versions developed—first the version des jongleurs, given in the poems of Béroul and Eilhart von Oberge, and second, the version courtoise given in Thomas's Tristan and some derivatives of it. Among these last, the Tristan of Gottfried von Strassburg, written about 1215, is generally regarded as one of the masterpieces of medieval literature. In the early thirteenth century, the legend was employed in an anonymous romance, the French prose Tristan. In this version, which was greatly influenced by the prose Lancelot cycle, the narrative is so grossly adulterated by the machinery of thirteenth-century courtly romance that the original love story is all but obscured. In most texts of the prose Tristan, even the traditional love-death scene is altered. This account of the legend became for five centuries the only version in which it was known. Two treatments of the legend appeared in Middle English literature. First is the northern Sir Tristrem, an anonymous poem composed about 1300 and based upon the Tristan of Thomas. Secondly, the Morte d'Arthur, composed by Sir Thomas Malory about 1469, contains an account of the Tristram legend based entirely upon the French prose Tristan. The legend did not again receive a major treatment in English literature until the mid-nineteenth century, when it became the subject of poems by Matthew Arnold, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Algernon Charles Swinburne. Arnold's "Tristram and Iseult" is based, except for the love-death episode, upon the version courtoise. Arnold regarded as the central problem of the narrative, not the love story itself, but Tristram's conflicting loyalties to the two Iseults, and sympathized, not with the ill-fated lovers, but with Iseult of Brittany, the innocent victim of the tragic love. She becomes in his poem symbolic of the Stoic way of life, the compromise which Arnold offered to resolve the conflict of emotion and intellect. Tennyson treated the Tristram legend in "The Last Tournament," one of the Idylls of the King based upon Malory's Morte d'Arthur. The legend is employed in the moral allegory of the Idylls as an illustration of the evil consequences of adultery. In thus regarding the love story merely as a tale of adultery, Tennyson deviated greatly from the traditionally sympathetic treatment of the narrative. Swinburne's Tristram of Lyonesse is, like Arnold's poem, based chiefly upon the version courtoise. In Swinburne’s treatment the love story is again central, the theme being an exaltation of the ennobling and sanctifying power of human love. Along with the explicit exaltation of passionate love is an implied criticism of the hypocritical morality and distrust of passion which Swinburne regarded as prevalent in his age. Although these three Victorian poems differ widely in plot, characterization and purpose, the Tristram legend is employed didactically in each, and the purposes governing its didactic treatment are dictated by the age in which and for which the poems were written. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate