Pioneers of “Dawnism” in Victorian Desert

Abstract

Arnold more than any other Victorian writer sums up for the reader the most typical qualities of the age. He shows the movement of thought in man in relation to the age. Arnold depicts the intellectual, cultural, religious and literary confusion of the age and calls it the “darkling plain. Throughout Arnold’s poetic career he tries to connect internal integrity with the social lives of men who are alone in an alien world. “The Scholar Gipsy” brings a sense of contemplation back to the frozen minds of the Victorian Utilitarianism. Although the images of hopes in “The Scholar Gipsy” done by the visionary quest and the Tyrian Trader put an end to the life-long doubt-stricken Victorian men, they are only the demonstrations without any palpable, real application in the wasteland of the age. Sohrab in Sohrab and Rustum is a servant of God who struggles to enter the territory of his father. It is his own lost origin to which he enters and consequently finds peace and joins the ‘All.’ Here, Sohrab is the son who is under the ageis of Thomas Arnold, the father, a triumphant practical spirit guiding the inhabitants of the darkness to the light. If “The Scholar Gipsy” is the renovation of man’s spirit from the uncertainty through the suggestion of a vision, and a ‘beacon of hope.’ Sohrab and Rustum is Arnold’s achieved vision and the real capture of the genuine self through the open involvement of the committed traveller in the way of perfection.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n4s2p340