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Eleanor McNees, The Stephen Inheritance: Virginia Woolf and the Burden of the Arnoldian Critic, The Cambridge Quarterly, Volume 44, Issue 2, June 2015, Pages 119–145, https://doi.org/10.1093/camqtly/bfv012
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In an explicit attempt to engage Matthew Arnold's critical precepts in her own essays, Virginia Woolf protests, in ‘How it Strikes a Contemporary’ (1923): ‘But when it comes to the making of a critic, nature must be generous and society ripe’ (Essays, iii. 155).1 Woolf's comment echoes one of Arnold's main tenets from his 1864 essay ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’, that creative masterpieces depend upon the conjunction of two powers, ‘the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment’ (CPW iii. 261).2 Woolf, however, inverts Arnold's definition of the creative power, applying it instead to the critical. She asserts that the ‘great critics' of the past – Dryden, Johnson, Coleridge, Arnold – all possessed an authority, a ‘centralizing influence’, that her age lacks. Though Woolf's adaptation of the Arnoldian critic in her own essays and reviews was doubtless influenced by her contemporaries' attempts to dissociate themselves from Arnold and his Victorian ethos, she was also indebted to the literary legacies of her father, Leslie Stephen, and her uncle, James Fitzjames Stephen. She understood more clearly than her fellow Bloomsbury friend Lytton Strachey that the Victorians did not speak with a united voice.3 Strachey had attacked Arnold in his 1914 essay ‘A Victorian Critic’, arguing that Arnold's work was insignificant and his fame unwarranted. Conflating Arnold, Macaulay, and Leslie Stephen, Strachey redefined the Victorian critic: ‘To him literature was always an excuse for talking about something else. From Macaulay, who used it as a convenient peg for historical and moral disquisitions, to Leslie Stephen, who frankly despised the whole business, this singular tradition holds good.’4 Woolf's attitude towards Arnold's criticism was closer to that of T. S. Eliot. Her 1916 essay ‘Hours in a Library’ anticipates the publication of Eliot's ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ in 1919. Here Woolf suggests that after reading recently published works we develop ‘a far keener eye for the old’ (Essays, ii. 59). In ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, Eliot explicitly applied Arnold's idea of touchstones from ‘The Study of Poetry’ (1880) to examine the impact of new works on older ones. Like Woolf, however, Eliot rejected Arnold's classical hierarchy with its use of Greek texts as the principal models against which to evaluate new works.5
