Matthew Arnold is responsible for two of the most celebrated remarks ever made about Oxford. One is the phrase “city of dreaming spires”—actually “that sweet City with her dreaming spires,” in his poem “Thyrsis.” The other is a passage in the preface to Essays in Criticism where Oxford is seen as the “home of lost causes” and is heard to be “whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age.” The phrase from “Thyrsis” is routinely misquoted and endlessly reused. There is an Oxford Spires Barbers on the High Street, an Oxford Spires hotel, and (perhaps less incongruously) an Oxford Spires Scaffolding company. More seriously, “dreaming spires” has become a compound noun, used as a synonym not just for Oxbridge but for the traditional conception of the university more generally, especially when that conception is attacked as outdated or inadequate. The “dreaming spires” model of academic life is, we are told, a false ideal, a complacent or self-congratulatory convention.
The circumstances in which Arnold made these statements, however, are rather less well known. Have we, perhaps, misunderstood them? The preface to Essays in Criticism, which describes Oxford in its final paragraph, was published in February 1865. “Thyrsis,” Arnold’s elegy for Arthur Hugh Clough, appeared fourteen months later in April 1866. Though close in date, they are very different texts: One is in prose, the other in verse. One is a comic and combative introduction to a volume of essays, the other an elegy for a close friend. They also give two curiously different accounts of the skyline of Oxford: one as “towers,” the other as “spires.”
The “dreaming spires” model of academic life is, we are told, a false ideal, a complacent or self-congratulatory convention.
Both date from Arnold’s second term as Oxford’s Professor of Poetry, a visiting post that he held (while working elsewhere as an inspector of schools) for ten years between 1857 and 1867. The preface to Essays in Criticism, written in the winter of 1864–65, introduces nine essays that had previously appeared in magazines, six of them having originally been given as Oxford lectures. Arnold wished to hit back at the critics who had attacked either these magazine articles or his previous volume of Oxford lectures, On Translating Homer (1861). He needed, however, to make it clear that Matthew Arnold, rather than the university, was responsible for what had been said in the lectures: “seekers often make mistakes, and I wish mine to redound to my own discredit only, and not to touch Oxford.” And, more particularly, he needed to establish that the university could not be blamed for his savage mockery of his critics in the earlier sections of the preface (even more savage in the original version than in the now more familiar 1869 revision). He therefore constructed a vivid contrast between himself, on the one hand, and Oxford—“so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century”—on the other. Arnold swapping insults with James Fitzjames Stephen is “the fierce intellectual life of our century.” Oxford, “whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age,” is not.
The preface is, in other words, an exercise in aggressive irony, counterbalanced at the end by a short passage of deliberate overstatement. Writing to his brother Edward in July 1867, Arnold confessed that, “in the praise I have given to Oxford . . . I am generally thought to have buttered her up to excess.” Was this insincerity? Not quite—writing to his wife from Cambridge in March 1853, he felt “that the Middle Ages and all their poetry and impressiveness are in Oxford and not here,” and in a letter to another brother, Tom, in May 1857, he remembered
that life at Oxford, the freest and most delightful part, perhaps, of my life, when . . . I shook off all the bonds and formalities of the place, and enjoyed . . . that unforgotten Oxfordshire and Berkshire country. . . . [T]he sentiment of the place is overpowering to me when I have leisure to feel it.
But he distinguished the countryside, here, from the “bonds and formalities” of the university, and the final paragraph of the preface (which lacks that careful distinction) is certainly calculated or contrived. Arnold’s words are, in their literary context, a rhetorical exaggeration—a deliberate overstatement that has since been mistaken for straightforward or literal description.
Is there substance, here, as well as rhetoric? What are the preface’s “lost causes,” “forsaken beliefs,” “impossible loyalties,” and “unpopular names”? When Tom Brown arrives at the university in Thomas Hughes’s 1859 novel Tom Brown at Oxford, he visits the colleges of figures accepted as heroes, one assumes, at Dr. Arnold’s Rugby School, the first seven of whom might all be said to have been unpopular or, at least, to have come to a bad end: “Wycliffe, the Black Prince . . . Sir Walter Raleigh, Pym, Hampden, Laud, Ireton, Butler, and Addison.” More generally, one might see the Oxford of the English Civil War as the home of a “lost cause” for having served as the Cavalier headquarters. Meanwhile the colleges had opposed Roman Catholic emancipation in 1829 and responded rather reluctantly to the changes required by the Oxford University Act of 1854. Arnold himself, in his essay on Emerson, linked his “last enchantments of the Middle Age” phrase to another issue, the Oxford Movement and John Henry Newman:
Forty years ago he was . . . preaching in St. Mary’s pulpit every Sunday. . . . Somewhere or other I have spoken of those “last enchantments of the Middle Age” which Oxford sheds around us, and here they were!
Though the Emerson essay was not written until 1883, Newman was certainly in Arnold’s mind in 1864, since the Apologia had been published that year and was praised in Arnold’s “The Literary Influence of Academies” lecture on June 4. Delighted though he was by Newman’s “charm” and “sentiment,” however, Arnold was not persuaded by his views: “he has adopted, for the doubts and difficulties which beset men’s minds to-day, a solution which, to speak frankly, is impossible.” In the words of the preface to Essays in Criticism, these are “sides and . . . heroes not mine.” Arnold celebrates Oxford as a fellow opponent of “the Philistines”—the new, non-Oxbridge, non-Anglican, middle-class culture that he associates with scientific materialism and Utilitarian moral philosophy. But he does so on the basis that my enemy’s enemy is my friend, rather than by identifying himself with the university.
Arnold celebrates Oxford as a fellow opponent of “the Philistines.”
Oxford’s ideality, in other words, consists of a (supposed) outdatedness, which in his active life Arnold opposed. He supported the movement for university reform in the late 1840s. His move to London in 1847 was a rejection of the traditional assumption that a college fellowship should lead to a career in the Anglican Church. He was the first Professor of Poetry to lecture in English, rather than Latin. His Essays in Criticism lectures were not on the major Greek, Latin, and English poets that his audience expected but on relatively minor, modern European writers, one of them a woman. On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867) was a protest against the fact that the subject was not studied at Oxford. Arnold’s other famous Oxford poem, “The Scholar-Gipsy” (1853), is set, like “Thyrsis,” in the Cumnor hills, where “the eye travels down to Oxford’s towers” (towers, not spires). But the poem’s hero is a scholar who has rejected Oxford in order to live, instead, with the gypsies in the Berkshire countryside.
As for being “unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century,” Oxford dons of the 1860s would have been surprised to hear that they were living in an intellectual backwater. Their university had been the setting for two very conspicuous battles in “the fierce intellectual life” of the nineteenth century: the publication of Essays and Reviews in March 1860 and the clash, three months later, between Thomas Henry Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Did Arnold know about the Huxley–Wilberforce debate? He was on terms of polite acquaintance with Wilberforce and later became a close friend of Huxley; he was in Oxford in October and November 1860, staying first at All Souls and then at Oriel. Though it seems improbable that he did not hear about it, there is no evidence that he did.
Their university had been the setting for two very conspicuous battles in “the fierce intellectual life” of the nineteenth century.
Essays and Reviews, on the other hand, Arnold certainly knew, since he wrote a letter about it in March 1861. This was a collection of seven essays, six of them by Anglican clergymen, five of whom were or had been Oxford dons. It welcomed both the German Bible scholarship that Arnold refers to in his preface as “the science of Tübingen” and the recent developments in geology and biology that made some traditional assumptions about religion hard to sustain. Baden Powell, the Savilian Professor of Geometry (and the father of the future scouting pioneer), referred in his essay to “Mr Darwin’s masterly volume,” which “must soon bring about an entire revolution in opinion in favour of the grand principle of the self-evolving powers of nature.” Two of the authors were tried for heresy in the Court of Arches in 1862 and only acquitted after an appeal to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in 1864. Another, Benjamin Jowett, was brought before the vice-chancellor’s court in 1863 for teaching contrary to the doctrines of the Church of England.
Was this a demonstration of Oxford’s status as a center of “forsaken beliefs”? Not obviously. The circulars opposing the views of the essayists and supporting traditional beliefs were signed by 137,000 laypeople and 11,000 clergymen. Nor, on the other hand, is it easy to see the controversial Essays and Reviews contributors as a “lost cause.” The book sold 22,000 copies in two years, Williams and Wilson were acquitted, the case against Jowett was dropped, and one of the essayists, Fredrick Temple, became Bishop of Exeter in 1869 and Archbishop of Canterbury in 1896. If “the last enchantments of the Middle Age” is a reference to Newman, he had left Oxford in 1846. Even if you do feel that one or other of the parties to these debates was the upholder of “forsaken beliefs,” as in the long run I suppose one must, it is hard to see the circumstances as “serene.” Describing Oxford in February 1865 as a city “unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century” would have struck well-informed readers as paradoxical, even perverse. Perhaps, they might have thought, Mr. Arnold is speaking with his tongue in his cheek.
The brief reference to Oxford in “Thyrsis” might seem less complicated or equivocal than this. How much ambiguity can there be in a phrase of just two words like “dreaming spires”? But was Oxford a city of spires? Not really—or, at least, much less so than, say, London. Oxford had just four spires: on its cathedral, on St Mary’s, on All Saints, and at St Aldate’s. “Towers” was much more accurate. Most colleges have towers, and their chapels are as thickly clustered as London parish churches. But college chapels don’t have spires. There are lots of pinnacles—at New College, for example, and around the spire of St Mary’s. But pinnacles are not spires, nor do they project sufficiently to be conspicuous when viewed from Boars Hill.
Some colleges had begun to make Gothic Revival gestures towards spires in the 1850s. Exeter’s new chapel (George Gilbert Scott, 1856–59) has a flèche, Balliol’s (William Butterfield, 1856–57) a turret. And the city’s new churches came to do something rather similar. St Aloysius (J. A. Hansom) echoed Balliol’s turret in 1873–75, while St Barnabas (Arthur Blomfield, 1869) added a campanile in 1872. But these postdate the 1860s, and many of Oxford’s spires have been added still more recently. There is the Wesley Memorial Methodist Church (Charles Bell, 1878). There is Nuffield College, designed with a spireless tower by Austen Harrison in 1938 but altered to include a spire when it was ultimately built (1949–60) because the donor wanted it to look like other Oxford colleges (which don’t, in fact, have them). And there is the Said Business School (Edward Jones and Jeremy Dixon, 2001) with its “deconstructed” spire—deconstructing a phenomenon that wasn’t really there in the first place.
Was there a reason why Arnold might have associated Oxford, so particularly, with spires?
Was there a reason why Arnold might have associated Oxford, so particularly, with spires? One was being built during his time as an undergraduate, just outside his college, though it is too low (in every sense of the word) to be seen from Boars Hill: the Martyrs’ Memorial (Gilbert Scott, 1841–43). And another was being built during the very years in which he was writing “Thyrsis.” Though St Philip & St James (G. E. Street) was mostly constructed in 1860–62, its spire was added in 1864–66. Despite this new addition, Arnold knew that Oxford was not really a city of spires—he had himself referred, instead, to towers, in both “The Scholar-Gipsy” and the Essays in Criticism preface. Other poets had done, and would do, the same. Wordsworth in his sonnet “Oxford, May 30, 1820” begins with spires but quickly adds the other components of the skyline: “Yet, O ye spires of Oxford! domes and towers!” Gerard Manley Hopkins captured the predominant quality of the view more precisely in his sonnet “Duns Scotus’s Oxford,” written in 1878 or 1879: “Towery city and branchy between towers.” The reference, in “Thyrsis,” only to “spires” is another rhetorical exaggeration or, in this case, rhetorical simplification.
And what about the other word? In what sense are the spires “dreaming”? Or, in the words of the preface to Essays in Criticism, what does it mean to call Oxford an “[a]dorable dreamer”? The word “dream” has three principal meanings. One is the literal or neurological sense. Arnold’s usage is clearly not that. But the two figurative meanings are so different as to be contradictory. One of them is positive. A “dream,” in this sense, is a vision of a higher truth: originally an experience of the divine. The Romantic movement secularized it into a term for the imagination, seen as a mode of access to a transcendent reality, no longer religious but still apprehended less by observation than by inspiration. Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan: or a vision in a dream” and Schumann’s “Träumerei” are examples of this Romantic enthusiasm for dreaming. Martin Luther King Jr., drawing as much on religious as Romantic precedent, was still using the word in this way in his “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963. If the walk described in “Thyrsis” took place in November 1863 (as seems likely), then Arnold was in Oxford to lecture on Joseph Joubert as a French equivalent of Coleridge, so would have had Coleridge in mind. The preface to Essays in Criticism makes an explicit distinction between the supposed triumph of Benthamite Utilitarianism and what is referred to as “the last mists of transcendentalism.” Oxford, in Arnold’s account, is associated with the transcendental idealism of the Romantic period and distinguished from the Benthamism of University College London. The scholar-gypsy in the Berkshire countryside was seeking not scientific truth, but inspiration—“waiting for the spark from Heaven to fall.” Arnold’s simplification of the Oxford skyline to just “spires” brilliantly reinforces the idea: “spires” suggests (by sound rather than etymology) the words “aspires” and “inspires.” This subtle suggestion is, I think, one reason why the “dreaming spires” phrase has been so potent and persistent.
“Dream” can mean delusion as well as vision.
But the other figurative meaning of “dream” is entirely different. “Dream” can mean delusion as well as vision. Dreaming, and more especially the self-indulgent process of daydreaming, can be foolish and deceptive. There are some “dreaming garden-trees” in “Thyrsis” that sound pleasant enough. But elsewhere in Arnold’s poetry, “dream” is associated with self-deception or illusion. In Arnold’s verse drama Empedocles on Etna (1852), “Man . . . errs because he dreams,” and “dream” is the term for what we do when we delude ourselves, for example by attributing our misfortunes to external forces: “Harsh Gods and hostile Fates/ Are dreams!” The verse form used in “The Scholar-Gipsy” and “Thyrsis” is relevant here because it is adapted from the stanza pattern of Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” (1819). “Thyrsis” is Arnold’s nightingale ode, in matter as well as manner. Keats symbolically identifies his nightingale with the belief, suggested by the imagination, that there is life after death (“Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!”). But his nightingale flies away and the poet is left wondering, “Was it a vision, or a waking dream?”—a truth, that is, or a self-indulgent daydream? Arnold’s equivalent of the nightingale is the tree, or “signal-elm,” which turns out, reassuringly, still to be there. But it would, of course, have been tactless to end an elegy with a statement of doubt or despair, and Arnold does not do so: the tree and the scholar-gypsy remain present (the latter only fictively) in the Cumnor landscape. Keats’s disturbing question stays, nonetheless, allusively present, and just fifteen months later, in July 1867, Arnold returned to the topic of a dream in his best-remembered poem, “Dover Beach”:
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.
Dreams, alas, are an illusion. Dreaming spires are, at very best, ambivalent. Far from being a complacent self-description, Arnold’s famous phrases are, at best, a piece of deliberate “buttering up,” at worst a subtle attack by a critic who did not fully understand the process of evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, change in which nineteenth-century Oxford was involved. When Arnold’s words are deployed in modern debates about the nature and future of our universities, we would do well to remember their uncertain significance.
