ABSTRACT
"Modern critics tend to take Matthew Arnold seriously," R. H. Super has written. As Super notes, Arnold's contemporaries did not see him as grave; on the contrary, Arnold was decried for his foppishness and flamboyance. This chapter argues that dandyism was far more than a stage of Arnold's youth; rather, it informs the complex stance and tone that Arnold constructs in his criticism, a stance of mockery, theatricality, and ambivalence that together we can label irony. As Rhonda Garelick and Ellen Moers have shown, dandyism was theorized already in the nineteenth century in works by Balzac, Barbey, and Mallarme. Park Honan also sees Arnold's dandyism as a strategy that he used to conceal a volatile and sentimental temperament. In the process of making himself a prose critic, Arnold adapts dandyism to the creation of a critical persona. Trilling sees Arnold's dandyism as a more or less calculated act.
