[In the following essay, Altick examines Arnold's use of wit and satire in portraying the governors of Victorian society as enemies of the people.]

Banter, levity, raillery, superciliousness, badinage, facetiousness, playfulness: all these terms, as well as the less common ‘coxcombry’ and ‘vivacities’, have been used by Matthew Arnold's critics, contemporary and modern, to describe his comic manner in Culture and Anarchy. He himself spoke of it as ‘chaff’ and ‘persiflage’. The broadest term he used, in a letter to his mother some months after the first installment of the book appeared in the Cornhill Magazine, was ‘irony’, which, he explained, referred to ‘the saying rather less than one means’.¹ But, as we shall see, his irony went far beyond mere understatement, and his choice of argumentative language included a number of comic effects not covered by the word. Perhaps the spirit and effect of Arnold's manner are best caught, not in any critical description, but in two caricatures: Beerbohm's of a rangy, carpet-slippered Arnold leaning negligently against a mantelpiece, his teeth exposed in a grimace that falls somewhere between a grin and a smirk, and an unsigned one in Vanity Fair (11 November 1871) of Arnold leaning on a furled umbrella, his face wreathed in an amiable smile, the whole figure suggesting, to one reader at least, a benevolent but not especially bright Nonconformist clergyman. The deceptive blandness of the latter picture is as sharp a satire of Arnold's public personality as one could wish.

The essence of the comedy in Culture and Anarchy is the persona that Arnold adopts with the assistance of his adversaries. Its development had begun as early as the preface to the 1853 Poems, with its ‘delicate strokes of irony’ and its ‘slight but unmistakable air of superiority’ (Coulling, pp. 45-6), and it had continued for the next dozen years as Arnold became embroiled in the several controversies which made him a well-known public figure. His opponents, seizing on such characteristics and mannerisms, baited him with them, and in response Arnold refined and exaggerated them. These elements of his forensic personality coalesced into the persona we see, in fully realised form, in Culture and Anarchy. How much of the image of Arnold that found its way into print was a natural reflection or extension of his private personality, and how much was deliberately assumed, was a matter of constant dispute among those who knew him. It is certain, however, that persona and personality overlapped; several of the terms cited at the beginning of this essay were used to describe the real Arnold as well as his fictive counterpart.

The running debate stirred by the publication of Culture and Anarchy in the Cornhill between July 1867 and August 1868 encouraged Arnold's strong inclination to argue in personal terms.² He delighted in casting himself as a nimble combatant in a clash of ideas. ‘Here’, he said at one point of his jousting, ‘I think I see my enemies waiting for me with a hungry joy in their eyes. But I shall elude them’ (p. 124, lines 2-4).³ Their facetious characterisations of his gladiatorial manner provided further shape and coloration for the developing portrait, and their oracular utterances in print, Parliament, and elsewhere, along with those of other favourite butts, gave him ‘golden opportunities’, as he told his mother (Super, p. 410), to score points—not least, he might have added, through turning their personal aspersions on him to witty use. With such obliging adversaries, Arnold had little need of supporting troops.

Behind both the Beerbohm caricature and the Vanity Fair one of the benign middle-class man with the umbrella lay the most famous of the numerous labels that Arnold's opponents attached to him: the Daily Telegraph's earlier (1866) description of him as an ‘elegant Jeremiah’ (p. 88, lines 9-21). Arnold had already accepted the characterisation, and though when he first revived it in Culture and Anarchy he deflected the shaft by the irrelevant observation that the paper had coupled him, ‘by a strange perversity of fate, with just that very one of the Hebrew prophets whose style I admire the least’ (ibid.), he later turned the epithet to his usual good account by implicitly recalling the biblical tag about prophets going unhonoured in their own country (or time). The preachers of culture, he says, ‘have, and are likely long to have, a hard time of it, and they will much oftener be regarded, for a great while to come, as elegant or spurious Jeremiahs than as friends and benefactors. That, however, will not prevent their doing in the end good service if they persevere’ (p. 95, lines 30-4).

In the same spirit, Arnold welcomed the accusation in the Illustrated London News (4 January 1868) that he had an ‘effeminate horror’ of ‘practical reforms’ (p. 200, lines 11-12; p. 202, line 23). Earlier, no fewer than four of his critics, Fitzjames Stephen in the Saturday Review (3 December 1864), the Daily Telegraph (2 July 1867), Henry Sidgwick (Macmillan's Magazine, August 1867) and Frederic Harrison (Fortnightly Review, November 1867) had cast Arnold as a latter-day parmaceti lord holding pouncet box to nose as he picked his way through the cultural wasteland of mid-Victorian England. At the outset of Chapter ii (pp. 115, line 9-116, line 8) he recalled the complaint, saying that its burden was that the ‘religion of culture’ he espoused was ‘not practical, or,—as some critics familiarly put it,—all moonshine’. He enumerated several specific complaints to this effect, in each case simplifying them in his paraphrase and, as he did so, inviting sympathy for himself. A determined idealist and—as he was to call himself later—one among the ‘poor disparaged followers of culture’ (p. 222, line 13), he suffered a species of martyrdom, mocked by ‘objectors’ in general, taunted by one paper and upbraided by another. At the end of the essay, he portrayed himself as continuing to smart under such persecution: ‘It cannot but accurately try a tender conscience to be accused, in a practical country like ours, of keeping aloof from the work and hope of a multitude of earnest-hearted men, and of merely toying with poetry and aesthetics’ (p. 135, lines 11-14). Let his opponents say their worst: Arnold's withers were unwrung and his heart was pure.

To the image of an elegant Jeremiah crying (to adopt the phrase of an earlier evangelistic Matthew) in the wilderness and that of a trifler with ‘aesthetics and poetical fancies’ (p. 115, lines 24-5), one of Arnold's principal disputants, Frederic Harrison, added another: that of a would-be prophet, thinker, and reformer who was incapable of philosophical thought, deficient, as Harrison said, in ‘coherent, interdependent, subordinate, and derivative principles’. Of the several contributions Arnold's critics made to his persona, this was the allegation he most relished for argumentative purposes. From the time of ‘On Translating Homer’ (1861) onward, in response to his critics' complaints of his air of superiority, of intellectual arrogance, he had occasionally adopted a pose of humility. Now, in Culture and Anarchy, he freely conceded that he was ‘a man without a philosophy’ (p. 137, lines 1, 10-11) and adroitly turned that seeming deficiency into a virtue. He could disclaim sophistication and put himself forward instead as a slow thinker who had to take pains to make things clear to himself: ‘the simple unsystematic way which best suits both my taste and my powers’ (pp. 88, lines 38-89, line 1). ‘Knowing myself to be indeed sadly to seek, as one of my many critics says, in “a philosophy with coherent, interdependent, subordinate, and derivative principles”, I continually have recourse to a plain man's expedient of trying to make what few simple notions I have, clearer and more intelligible to myself by means of example and illustration’ (p. 126, lines 27-32). The apologetic posture, however, serves to mask a far from hesitant thrust at his critics. What Arnold really means is that they must have the truth spelled out for them in the simplest terms.

‘What I know of my own mind and its poverty’ (p. 160, line 2) forces him, he says, to avoid philosophising and to stick to practical issues, just as his critics urge: ‘an unpretending writer, without a philosophy based on inter-dependent, subordinate, and coherent principles, must not presume to indulge himself too much in generalities. He must keep close to the level ground of common fact, the only safe ground for understandings without a scientific equipment’ (p. 192, lines 1-5). ‘We … having no coherent philosophy, must not let ourselves philosophize’ (p. 194, lines 6-7).

On this point, however, the reader must feel that Arnold protests too much, although the effect may have been less grating on those who read Culture and Anarchy as it was serialised over a period of a year than it was on those who subsequently read it straight through in book form. Time and again he depreciates himself, regretting his ‘want of coherent philosophic method’ (p. 139, lines 35-6), his being ‘a notoriously unsystematic and unpretending writer’ (p. 143, lines 22-3), his ‘confessed inexpertness in reasoning and arguing’ (p. 192, lines 12-13). Here, by no means uniquely in his polemic prose, Arnold failed to recognise when a joke had worn thin.

The same affectation of humility leads him, following the picture of the pouncet-box lord beleaguered by his enemies, to declare his willingness to learn from his betters: ‘It is impossible that all these remonstrances and reproofs should not affect me, and I shall try my very best … to profit by the objections I have heard and read’ (p. 116, lines 9-13). And to this assumed receptivity Arnold adds another ingratiating quality, his willingness to present himself as a comic figure. He describes himself as a free spirit, ‘delivered from the bondage of Bentham’ (p. 111, lines 10-11), an unlikely allegiance indeed for an elegant Jeremiah, but useful for the implication that he has thus liberated himself from the philosophy which still holds the enemies of culture captive. At another place he represents himself as carrying about with him on his school-inspecting rounds in the East End, in the manner of a breviary, a particularly pompous (and wrong-headed) leading article from The Times, attributing the economic distress in that vicinity to ‘Nature's simplest laws’, and a complementary effusion by Robert Buchanan interpreting Malthus in the roseate light of William Paley (pp. 213, lines 26-214, line 33).

Both the self-mockery and the claim to possess homely virtues are meant, according to the ancient precepts of rhetoric, actually to enhance the writer's authority and diminish that of his opponents. In confessing his own fallibility, Arnold undercuts their own pretensions of superior wisdom. His candour regarding himself further implies that all that he says of them is equally lacking in guile. And who but such a clear-sighted person as he depicts himself as being can have the truth within his grasp? Since he harbours no illusions about himself, he is equally able, with respect to the society about him, to see things steadily and see them as they really are (p. 167, line 31; p. 172, line 1). By adopting such a posture, Arnold in effect turns the tables on his opponents. Now it is he, not they, who can claim final authority by virtue of his celebration of the clear light of reason.

‘This sort of plain-dealing’ with himself, as he puts it, which ‘has in it, as all the moralists tell us, something very wholesome’ (p. 138, lines 13-14), also enables him to score a specific point or two. In anatomising the failings of the middle class, he humbly offers himself as a ‘representative man’ who illustrates what he considers to be its ‘defect’ (i.e. deficiency).

The too well-founded reproaches of my opponents [he says] declare how little I have lent a hand to the great works of the middle class … and … ‘the believers in action grow impatient’ with me. The line, again, of a still unsatisfied seeker which I have followed, the idea of self-transformation, of growing towards some measure of sweetness and light not yet reached, is evidently at clean variance with the perfect self-satisfaction current in my class, the middle class, and may serve to indicate in me, therefore, the extreme defect of this feeling. But these confessions, though salutary, are bitter and unpleasant.

(p. 138, lines 17-30)

By pleading guilty to the ‘reproaches’ Arnold makes for himself a fresh opportunity to emphasise his own earnest search for truth and at the same time to pin down the ‘defect’ of the middle class. As a seeker after his better self, he exemplifies what the middle class should be—and is not.

A few pages later, he reiterates his membership in the middle class. ‘I myself am properly a Philistine’, he confesses, ‘—Mr Swinburne would add, the son of a Philistine’ (p. 144, lines 7-9). Or more precisely, a Philistine manqué. But he also admits that when, for example, he takes up a gun or fishing-rod or finds himself in one of the Barbarian's ‘great fortified posts’ he feels a strong, perhaps atavistic, affinity with the aristocracy (p. 144, lines 15-32). There, but for ‘reason and the will of God’ (p. 145, line 24), walks a true Barbarian, ‘a very passable child of the established fact, of commendable spirit and politeness, and, at the same time, a little inaccessible to ideas and light’ (p. 144, lines 25-38). But, the implication is, he is accessible to such ideas. Thus Arnold again eats his cake and has it too. He has established his sympathy with both the Philistines (from whom he sprang) and the Barbarians (toward whom he feels a powerful attraction), yet, by virtue of his short-comings, as they would view them, he is a man without a class, an outsider. Because of this, as well as because he possesses the crucial faculty of perception and self-criticism they are without, he can exercise a disinterestedness of which truly involved members of a class are incapable. (It is noteworthy, incidentally, that Arnold makes no such attempt to associate himself with the Populace.)

Through his mask of benignity Arnold repeatedly manifests his lack of hostility and partiality and his ‘disposition to see the good in everybody all round’ (p. 127, lines 36-7). Mainly through his favourite device of ironic praise, he constantly stresses that no personal enmity taints the ongoing debate; on the contrary, he is eager to perceive and do homage to his adversaries' sterling qualities. His reluctant disagreement with them rests on exclusively ideological grounds. Disinterestedness could go no further. Witness the generosity with which he alludes to his antagonists and the other objects of his scorn: ‘Mr Bright … said forcibly in one of his great speeches’ (p. 117, lines 18-19); ‘a powerful speech from that famous speaker, Mr Bright’ (p. 200, lines 10-11); the Nonconformist newspaper is ‘written with great sincerity and ability’ (p. 101, lines 19-20); The Times and the Daily News are ‘authorities I so much respect’ (p. 156, line 18).

The essence of the irony often resides in the fact that the professed respect is not only pro forma but is misdirected. The impact of such thrusts lies in what they fail to praise. In a passage deleted when the Cornhill articles were collected, Arnold expressed his admiration for ‘vigorous language, as language’ (p. 504, lines 28-9); and this proves to be the basis on which he finds himself able, in a way, to praise men whose ideas are repugnant to him. Whether or not his respect is sincere—in most instances it is not—it is concentrated on matters of style, the surfaces, manners and effects of the statement in question, and not on the crucial question of its intellectual validity. Nowhere in Arnold's generous distribution of brickbats transparently disguised as bouquets is there any implication that the recipients think correctly. Thus Charles Spurgeon the revivalist (p. 194, lines 35-6), Hepworth Dixon, author of a book about the Mormons (p. 206, line 29) and the Daily News (p. 152, line 36) are all credited with ‘eloquence’, and another mixed bag of writers and speakers with the gift of ‘beautiful’ utterance, as we shall see.

Sometimes Arnold is not content to let the patent insincerity of his epithets respecting style do its work unaided. Bringing down two birds with one stone, he observes at one point that ‘we seem to be entering, with all our sails spread, upon what Mr Hepworth Dixon, its apostle and evangelist, calls a Gothic revival, but what one of the many newspapers that so greatly admire Mr Hepworth Dixon's lithe and sinewy style and form their own style upon it, calls, by a yet bolder and more striking figure, “a great sexual insurrection of our Anglo-Teutonic race”’ (p. 206, lines 31-7). The ‘bold’ figure may be judged on its own merits; what is not so apparent is that ‘lithe and sinewy style’ is not Arnold's phrase but that of a magazine review, quoted in an advertisement for Dixon's book (Super, p. 443). He disposes of The Times' editorial prose with equal deftness: ‘The first-named melancholy doctrine is preached in the Times with great clearness and force of style; indeed, it is well known, from the example of the poet Lucretius and others, what great masters of style the atheistic doctrine has always counted among its promulgators’ (p. 156, lines 20-5).

Especially when contained in a mere word or two, without the elaboration that might clarify his intention, an ironist's praise is, by definition, dubious. In its very equivocation lies much of its effect. But it Arnold's case, it is sometimes hard to tell whether he is being ironic or not. The presence of so many instances of unmistakably ironic praise tempts the reader to believe that all his admiring epithets are delivered tongue in cheek, but a closer inspection, employing the aid of either context or external evidence (his letters sometimes provide a litmus test for suspected irony), reveals that several of them are not as hollow as they first sound. In the opening chapter, in a passage that most readers, not least modern Americans whose received views of Benjamin Franklin and Arnold would seem to place the two in spectacular ideological opposition, Arnold pays what seems to be excessive if not actually false tribute to Franklin—‘a mind to which I feel the greatest obligations, the mind of a man who was the very incarnation of sanity and clear sense, a man the most considerable, it seems to me, whom America has yet produced’ (p. 110, lines 22-5). But an ironic interpretation is doubly unlikely: we have solid evidence of Arnold's genuine regard for Franklin and his ‘imperturbable common sense’ (Super, pp. 421-2), and this chapter originally was an Oxford lecture, a thoroughly sober discourse in which there are only the slightest flecks of comedy. He refers at another place to Frederic Harrison's ‘very good-tempered and witty satire’ of himself in ‘Culture: a Dialogue’ (p. 116, lines 1-2). In view of the spirit in which he alludes to Harrison elsewhere in Culture and Anarchy, one might justifiably assume that here, too, Arnold was being ironic. But the fact is that in one of his letters he wrote that he found the satire ‘in parts so amusing that I laughed till I cried’ (Super, p. 424).

The touchstone of context is not always reliable. At the opening of Chapter ii, in the famous paragraph about the parmaceti lord, Arnold writes:

That Alcibiades, the editor of the Morning Star, taunts me, as its promulgator, with living out of the world and knowing nothing of life and men. That great austere toiler, the editor of the Daily Telegraph, upbraids me—but kindly, and more in sorrow than in anger,—for trifling with aesthetics and poetical fancies, while he himself, in that arsenal of his in Fleet Street, is bearing the burden and heat of the day. An intelligent American newspaper, the Nation, says that it is very easy to sit in one's study and find fault with the course of modern society, but the thing is to propose practical improvements for it.

(p. 115, lines 19-29)

The irony is obvious—the more so when we become aware that, as Dover Wilson points out, Alcibiades is ‘the type of all that was luxurious, cosmopolitan, brilliant, accomplished, fascinating and unprincipled in the Athens of Socrates’.⁴

Arnold uses various kinds of deflationary techniques to qualify or, indeed, negate what starts out to be praise. Mr Miall, he says, is ‘a personage of deserved eminence’—‘among the political Dissenters’ (p. 128, lines 15-16). In an especially feline instance, he describes Mr Odger as a working-class exemplar of the ‘beautiful and virtuous mean’—‘of whom his friends relate … much that is favourable’ (p. 133, lines 21-3). A sentence that begins amiably enough (in a letter to his mother, Arnold praised Robertson's biography as ‘a most interesting, remarkable life’: Super, p. 436) takes a distinctly unamiable turn at the end:

There is a sermon on Greece and the Greek spirit by a man never to be mentioned without interest and respect, Frederick Robertson, in which this rhetorical use of Greece and the Greek spirit, and the inadequate exhibition of them necessarily consequent upon this, is almost ludicrous, and would be censurable if it were not to be explained by the exigencies of a sermon.

(p. 164, lines 25-31)

There is a decidedly qualified compliment to be found, also, in Arnold's reference to his ‘old adversary, the Saturday Review, [which] may, on matters of literature and taste, be fairly enough regarded, relatively to the mass of newspapers which treat these matters, as a kind of organ of reason’ (p. 147, lines 29-32). He can also invert the device, to praise with a faint ironic damn. Knowing that his opponents are annoyed by his repeated admiring quotation of Bishop Wilson, a man of wisdom of whom they have never heard (Huxley accused Arnold of inventing him: p. 231, lines 9-11), Arnold obliges them by referring to him as ‘that poor old hierophant of a decayed superstition’ (p. 128, lines 34-5).

‘Interesting’ is one of the most equivocal words in Arnold's argumentative vocabulary. In his private letters he used it as a mildly laudatory epithet; there was no more irony in his application of it, in conjunction with ‘very well behaved’, to describe Swinburne's demeanour at a dinner party than there was in its application to Robertson's ‘deeply interesting’ life (Super, pp. 432, 436). In print, the word could be interpreted as non-committal, ambiguous or—possibly—even approving. There is probably a difference in degree and pitch of ironic inflection in each of these references: the ‘interesting speakers’ he heard during the Reform debates in the House of Commons (p. 127, line 4); the ‘interesting productions of nature’ who were the old Barbarians (p. 141, line 29); Hepworth Dixon's ‘able and interesting work’ (p. 148, line 17); ‘interesting explorers’ (a motley crowd of ultra-Hebraists, called a ‘noble army’ in the same passage: p. 159, lines 24-6); ‘that very interesting operation,—the attempt to enable a man to marry his deceased wife's sister’ (p. 205, lines 20-2). One can find speakers, writers, activists and their proposals ‘interesting’ for more than one reason. At the very least, the word is a convenient one when a more definite judgement is to be (conspicuously) withheld. The same dry ambiguity may be detected in Arnold's several professions of pleasure in hearing the debates in the Commons: ‘Once when I had had the advantage of listening …’ (p. 127, lines 2-3); ‘This operation I had the great advantage of with my own ears hearing discussed in the House of Commons, and recommended by a powerful speech from that famous speaker, Mr Bright’ (p. 200, lines 8-11); ‘I was lucky enough to be present when Mr Chambers brought forward … his bill for enabling a man to marry his deceased wife's sister’ (p. 205, lines 25-7).

‘Great’ is another useful multi-purpose word in Arnold's vocabulary. He normally uses it with plainly ironic intent, applied to a variety of subjects from Robert Lowe's fatuous speech at Edinburgh (p. 126, line 36) to the works—despised by Arnold—of the middle-class liberals (at least eight times, e.g. p. 137, line 22, p. 151, line 34 [‘great and heroic’]). Once, however, it is used both descriptively and ironically, in repeated reference to ‘Mr Spurgeon's great Tabernacle’ (p. 198, lines 3, 4, 8). Earlier, Arnold had spoken of the ‘bigness’ of Spurgeon's church (p. 108, line 36), a fact well known to every Londoner. ‘Great’ in the latter passage not only contains the idea of imposing physical dimensions but draws irony from the immediate context, the mention of Bright's being ‘so ravished with admiration’ as he beheld the building. But twenty lines farther on, Arnold transfers the epithet to the Church of England, where no irony can possibly be meant. Its force is diminished, if not actually compromised, by the preceding application.

A similar effect occurs in connection with the phrase ‘man of genius’. There is no reason to believe that Arnold's application of it to Carlyle is anything but sincere, even though it is hedged by a form of praise by which Arnold avoids expressing any judgement of Carlyle's ideas (‘a man of genius to whom we have all at one time or other been indebted for refreshment and stimulus’: p. 124, lines 19-20). We are thus prepared to accept the phrase as meant in the same spirit when it is later applied to Bright (p. 130, lines 4-5), but in view of the terms in which Arnold elsewhere professes his admiration of that politician (e.g. ‘that great man’: p. 228, line 9), its use there can only be ironic.

In Arnold's usage at least two other words are equally or even more unstable, to the detriment, surely, of his steady purpose. They are witness to the elementary truth that the connotations of a repeatedly used value word cannot be turned on or off at will but, once established, persist across many pages, to strike a false note when introduced in a context markedly different in spirit from earlier ones. Arnold's surprising neglect of this fact may doubtless be attributed to his having written Culture and Anarchy in ‘piecemeal’ fashion (Super, p. 411), as separate magazine articles, over a period of some six months. One such troublesome word is ‘affecting’, which first appears in a heavily ironic context, that of Alderman-Colonel Wilson's facile rationalising of his inaction in the face of civil disturbance in the streets of the West End: ‘Honest and affecting testimony of the English middle class to its own inadequacy!’ (p. 132, lines 12-13). The second occurrence is even more emphatically comic, related as it is to Arnold's self-mocking persona: ‘And although, through circumstances which will perhaps one day be known if ever the affecting history of my conversion comes to be written, I have, for the most part, broken with the ideas and the tea-meetings of my own class’ (p. 144, lines 9-12). Yet in the word's third appearance it is meant in utter seriousness: ‘boundless devotion to that inspiring and affecting pattern of self-conquest offered by Jesus Christ’ (p. 166, lines 7-9).

But the prime instance of Arnold's tone-deafness, so to speak, is provided by the words ‘beauty’ and ‘beautiful’. These are words that possess especially glowing resonance in the language of a Post-Romantic poet and literary critic, and by virtue of that circumstance they demand to be handled with the utmost tact. In the first chapter, ‘Sweetness and Light’, they occur often, in celebration of the desire for ‘beauty and sweetness’ nurtured by the Oxford Movement (p. 107, lines 21, 30) and, more prominently, in connection with Arnold's exposition of the ideal of perfection. Such uses are purely serious, and their intention—the presentation of a lofty moral idea in aesthetic terms—is underscored by the occasional appearance, as counterpoint, of the antonyms ‘hideous’ and ‘hideousness’, as in: ‘I say boldly that this our sentiment for beauty and sweetness, our sentiment against hideousness and rawness, has been at the bottom of our attachment to so many beaten causes, of our opposition to so many triumphant movements’ (p. 106, lines 6-10; another example is on p. 107, lines 21-4).⁵ But the coming ambiguity is foreshadowed early on, by the use of ‘beautiful’ in an essentially comic context. Arnold remarks that readers of The Times' smug articles on the steady increase of the population ‘would talk of our large English families in quite a solemn strain, as if they had something in itself beautiful, elevating, and meritorious in them; as if the British Philistine would have only to present himself before the Great Judge with his twelve children, in order to be received among the sheep as a matter of right!’ (p. 98, lines 13-19). No doubt more than one reader of Culture and Anarchy has found pleasure in the ‘beautiful’ notion of a complacent Victorian paterfamilias lining up his full dozen inside the pearly gates. Every subsequent occurrence of ‘beauty’/‘beautiful’ is tinged, to some degree, by that initial tincture of irony.

Henceforth, serious applications of the words abound. Arnold writes of ‘the beautiful and virtuous mean’, one of his catch-phrases (p. 127, lines 17-18; p. 130, lines 27, 34, etc.), of Wilhelm von Humboldt as ‘one of the most beautiful souls that have ever existed’ (p. 161, lines 5-6), of the Hellenist's ideal of ‘seeing things in their essence and beauty’ (p. 168, line 35), and of ‘the difference in force, beauty, significance, and usefulness, between primitive Christianity and Protestantism’ (pp. 174, line 38-175, line 2). (There are additional examples at p. 167, lines 32, 37; p. 168, line 19; p. 178, line 21; p. 179, lines 14, 26.) Meanwhile, however, these unquestionably serious uses have been interspersed with an equal number in which Arnold's intention is patently ironic. He alludes to Mr Murphy's appeal to the Mayor of Birmingham to defend his right to free speech: ‘Touching and beautiful words, which find a sympathetic chord in every British bosom!’ (p. 120, 11-12). Shortly thereafter, Arnold speaks with equally explicit irony of ‘That beautiful sentence Sir Daniel Gooch quoted to the Swindon workmen’, his mother's advice, ‘Ever remember, my dear Dan, that you should look forward to being some day manager of that concern!’ (p. 122, lines 7-14). By now, the reader probably is prepared to find ‘beauty’ and ‘beautiful’ playing a recurrent role in Arnold's game of ironic praise, and so they do: ‘As Mr Bright beautifully says, “the cities it has built, the railroads it has made, the manufactures it has produced, the cargoes which freight the ships of the greatest mercantile navy the world has ever seen”’ (p. 142, lines 20-3). Beauty is far to seek in so prosaic an utterance, as it also is, supposedly, in the ‘dexterous command of powerful and beautiful language’ Arnold attributes to political philosophers (p. 194, lines 2-3), in an M.P.'s ‘formula of much beauty and neatness for conveying in brief the Liberal notions. … “Liberty”, said he, “is the law of human life”’ (p. 206, lines 3-5), and in The Times' claim that the ‘indefinite multiplication of poor people’ is ‘the result of divine and beautiful laws’ (p. 214, lines 11-14).

The fact is that once a highly charged word like ‘beauty’ is used in a memorably ironic way, as in Arnold's tribute to Mother Gooch's Golden Rule, it is irremediably compromised for use later on; subsequent non-ironic occurrences are inescapably coloured by the reader's recollection of the preceding usage. The reader is conditioned to expect irony where, in fact, irony is farthest from the author's intention. The ironic resonance cannot be dispelled, no matter how opposed to irony the new context is.

Those who regret seeing the word ‘beauty’ falling victim to Arnold's ill-calculated use of emotive language may be pleased to behold him hoist with his own petard. At one place, ironically proposing that ‘we Hellenise a little with free-trade, as we Hellenised with the Real Estate Intestacy Bill’, he urges that we ‘see whether what our reprovers beautifully call ministering to the diseased spirit of our time is best done by the Hellenising method of proceeding, or by the other’ (p. 209, line 31-210, line 4). He has clearly forgotten that three times earlier, the last as close as the beginning of the preceding paragraph, it was not Arnold's ‘reprovers' but he himself who had (beautifully?) written, in contexts innocent of any ironical design, of ‘minister[ing]’ to the diseased spirit of our time’ (p. 191, lines 27-8; p. 199, line 34; p. 209, lines 1-2).

To his various devices for establishing, however suspectly, his goodwill, Arnold adds the age-old rhetorical trick of extending the clammy hand of friendship to his opponents. ‘Our Liberal friends’ tolls like a slightly defective bell through the last pages of Culture and Anarchy. Its chief connotation has already been prepared for. The note of condescension inherent in the device was struck in the first essay, where Arnold alludes to the ‘well-intentioned’ and ‘well-meaning’ friends of the people (p. 108, line 4; p. 109, line 17). Their purpose, he implies, is more to be admired than their ideas; moreover, whatever their altruistic motives, they are dangerous. Arnold expands this argument in the middle of ch. iii. The ‘guides and governors’ of Victorian society, namely the journalistic opinion-makers and legislators (p. 156, lines 14-16), are flatterers of the people: ‘the voice which makes a permanent impression on each of our classes is the voice of its friends’ (p. 151, lines 37-8). The upshot is that by the end of Culture and Anarchy, ‘our Liberal friends’, well-meaning and eloquent though they may be, are presented as being in truth enemies of the people.

Sometimes, as one or two examples have already shown, Arnold removes the glitter from his epithets by quick strokes of qualification. Writing of Lord Elcho, he seems to heap up praise. He begins: ‘… in the brilliant lord, showing plenty of high spirit, but remarkable, far above and beyond his gift of high spirit, for the fine tempering of his high spirit, for ease, serenity, politeness,—the great virtues, as Mr Carlyle says, of aristocracy. …’ But in completing the predication he defaces the portrait with a delicate but crushing understatement: ‘in this beautiful and virtuous mean, there seemed evidently some insufficiency of light’ (p. 127, lines 13-19)—a defect shared, Arnold would later point out, by Mr Odger, idol of the working class (p. 133, line 25). In such passages, ironical purpose is served by a kind of anticlimax, which, in its various forms and degrees, Arnold found a most congenial weapon. In its simplest form, it might be contained within a phrase (‘Thyesteän banquet of claptrap’: p. 227, lines 32-3), or in an unobtrusive declension of values (Englishmen believe that ‘the having a vote, like the having a large family, or a large business, or large muscles, has in itself some edifying and perfecting effect upon human nature’: p. 108, lines 17-20; the Barbarians' precious legacy of ‘vigour, good looks, and fine complexion’: p. 141, line 13).

Or anticlimax might require two sentences: ‘London, with its unutterable external hideousness, and with its internal canker of publicè egestas, privatim opulentia,—to use the words which Sallust puts into Cato's mouth about Rome—unequalled in the world! The word, again, which we children of God speak, the voice which most hits our collective thought, the newspaper … with the largest circulation in the whole world, is the Daily Telegraph!’ (pp. 103, line 37-104, line 7). An anticlimax worthy of a Mencken⁶ brings the pretentious structure of this sentence crashing to the ground:

And if we are sometimes a little troubled by our multitude of poor men, yet we know the increase of manufactures and population to be such a salutary thing in itself, and our free-trade policy begets such an admirable movement, creating fresh centres of industry and fresh poor men here, while we were thinking about our poor men there, that we are quite dazzled and borne away, and more and more industrial movement is called for, and our social progress seems to become one triumphant and enjoyable course of what is sometimes called, vulgarly, outrunning the constable.

(pp. 210, line 37-211, line 9)

A surprise of a different sort, anticlimax of idea rather than of language, awaits the reader of this artfully wrought sentence:

Who, I say, will believe, when he really considers the matter, that where the feminine nature, the feminine ideal, and our relations to them, are brought into question, the delicate and apprehensive genius of the Indo-European race, the race which invented the Muses, and chivalry, and the Madonna, is to find its last word on this question in the institutions of a Semitic people, whose wisest king had seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines?

(p. 208, lines 27-35)

And an inverted anticlimax, if it can be called such—a climax subverted in advance—crowns this sentence: ‘It is notorious that our middle-class Liberals have long looked forward to this consummation, when the working class shall join forces with them, aid them heartily to carry forward their great works, go in a body to their tea-meetings, and, in short, enable them to bring about their millennium’ (p. 142, lines 25-30).

At least one anticlimax Arnold owed, as he did certain hints for the shaping of his fictive self, to his ever-appreciative reading of public men's recent utterances. This was the passage in which he speaks of having gone to Oxford ‘in the bad old times, when we were stuffed with Greek and Aristotle, and thought nothing of preparing ourselves by the study of modern languages,—as after Mr Lowe's great speech at Edinburgh we shall do,—to fight the battle of life with the waiters in foreign hotels’ (p. 126, lines 33-7). Arnold somewhat bent Lowe's intended point, but Lowe had unquestionably said that ‘the advantage of knowing French would be that when [an Englishman] goes to Paris he would able to order his dinner at the café, and to squabble over his bill without making himself a laughingstock to every one present’ (Super, p. 429).

Among all the absurdities—as he regarded them—that Victorian politics and popular culture laid ready to his hand, one source of anticlimax seemed almost providentially designed for his purpose: the much-derided Deceased Wife's Sister Bill, ‘that annual blister’ as it was to be called in Iolanthe (1882). Regularly introduced, debated at length, and defeated ever since 1835, this piece of legislation was meant to nullify the canonical prohibition against a man's marrying his deceased wife's sister. Arnold could scarcely have avoided using the current parliamentary session's consideration of the bill as a satirical illustration of ‘the practical operations by which our Liberal friends work for the removal of definite evils’ (p. 205, lines 17-19). The main concerns of middle-class Liberalism, he declares, have been ‘the advocacy of free trade, of Parliamentary reform, of abolition of church-rates, of voluntaryism in religion and education, of non-interference of the State between employers and employed, and of marriage with one's deceased wife's sister’ (p. 128, lines 23-7). Arnold liked the ring of this, so he used it again a paragraph later: ‘An American friend of the English Liberals says, indeed, that their Dissidence of Dissent has been a mere instrument of the political Dissenters for making reason and the will of God prevail (and no doubt he would say the same of marriage with one's deceased wife's sister)’ (p. 129, lines 3-7). The extended passage devoted to excoriating political Hebraism, with the bill as a prime example, may strike some as an uneasy combination of Arnoldian witticisms and Arnoldian eloquence, notably in the paragraph beginning ‘But here, as elsewhere, what we seek …’ (p. 207, line 8). At this point the risibility of the Deceased Wife's Sister issue does not comport well with Arnold's basic seriousness; he seems torn between exploiting its comic potential and serving his deeper purpose. In any case, he valued the fatuous controversy so highly that he used it to crown his peroration. The last paragraph of Culture and Anarchy begins: ‘Docile echoes of the eternal voice, pliant organs of the infinite will’—cadences recalling ‘The Scholar Gypsy’. The paragraph—and the book—ends: ‘But now we go the way the human race is going, while they abolish the Irish Church by the power of the Nonconformists' antipathy to establishments, or they enable a man to marry his deceased wife's sister’ (p. 229, lines 23-33).

The incongruity that is the soul of anticlimax manifests itself in still other ways. Ironic juxtaposition and specious elevation are the principal devices by which Arnold pays his measured respects to contemporary journals of opinion. The Times and the Daily News are ‘our philosophical teacher[s]’ (p. 157, lines 37-8), the latter being distinguished also by its ‘subtle dialectics’ (p. 158, line 22). He speaks of the ‘imposing and colossal necessitarianism of the Times’ (p. 213, lines 19-20), through whose ‘mastery of style’ the ‘sad picture’ of contemporary national education ‘assumes the iron and inexorable solemnity of tragic Destiny’ (p. 157, lines 34-6). Persons are subjected to the same treatment, as when the dashing Colonel Dickson, factitious hero of the Hyde Park disturbances, is linked with Julius Caesar and Mirabeau (p. 133, line 15). The ‘symbolical Truss Manufactory’ which occupied what was called ‘the finest site in Europe’, facing Trafalgar Square, served Arnold as an architectural anticlimax (p. 121, lines 36-8), as did the British College of Health, ennobled, as readers of ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’ would have recalled, with a plaster statue of Hygeia, and mentioned in Culture and Anarchy just following Westminster Abbey, Notre Dame and Spurgeon's great Tabernacle (p. 198, lines 11-12).

On occasion, Arnold uses verbal deflation. As if to meet his adversaries' rebuke that his disputatious style is too elegant, he salts his ‘urbane’ language with an unexpected colloquialism on the order of ‘outrunning the constable’. Having established the idea that true culture consists of discovering the promptings of man's best self, his right reason, he declares that ‘to say that we shall learn virtue by performing any acts to which our natural taste for the bathos carries us,⁷ that the fanatical Protestant comes at his best self by Papist-baiting, or Newman Weeks and Deborah Butler at right reason by following their noses, this certainly does appear over-sanguine’ (p. 159, lines 31-5, my emphasis).⁸

The techniques Arnold uses to anatomise the several social classes have their comic elements, but they are matters of dialectic strategy rather than of style and, as such, demand a separate analysis for which there is no room here. Something must be said, however, about the way that current events, like the utterances of contemporary politicians and other public figures, obliged Arnold's penchant for mordant comedy. In a ‘tabernacle’ at Birmingham, an ‘agent of the London Protestant Electoral Union’ named William Murphy had undertaken a series of anti-Popery lectures which resulted in the police and hussars being mobilised to preserve order.⁹ In the face of imminent disturbance Murphy insisted on his right to free speech. ‘Mr Murphy’, wrote Arnold three or four months later in what became the second chapter of Culture and Anarchy, ‘lectures at Birmingham, and showers on the Catholic population of that town “words”, says the Home Secretary, “only fit to be addressed to thieves or murderers”. … But, above all, he [Murphy] is doing as he likes; or, in worthier language, asserting his personal liberty’ (pp. 119, lines 37-120, line 7). In the fortuitously supplied name ‘Murphy’ Arnold, always fastidious in such matters, found an attractive way of intensifying his ridicule of the masses' alleged right to act and speak as they liked. In a day when Fenianism was reviving in all its stridency (and occasional dynamiting) and fanatical Irish Catholics were out-Hebraising the Hebraists in their propaganda, the name ‘Murphy’ epitomised all that was regarded as deplorable and dangerous in the Irish character and aroused all the considerable anti-Hibernianism of which the popular English temper was then capable. One might reasonably have expected a man named Murphy to be, if anything, a rabid anti-Protestant, and Arnold must have found extra ironic delight in the spectacle of a Murphy preaching anti-Catholicism—the ultimate expression of the ‘dismal and illiberal’ atmosphere of Dissent, and of Dissenting propaganda at its raucous, bigoted worst (p. 140, lines 16-17).

By an ambiguity in reporting, The Times ascribed to a Rev. William Cassel, a Methodist preacher who presided at the Birmingham meeting, Murphy's warning to Protestant husbands to ‘Take care of your wives!’ (p. 131, lines 15-16, Arnold's emphasis. ‘He suspects’, Arnold had observed earlier, ‘the Roman Catholic Church of designs upon Mrs Murphy’: p. 120, lines 3-4). When Culture and Anarchy was serialised in the Cornhill, Arnold referred a dozen times to ‘Cassel's’ remarks. Only as the serialisation was drawing to an end did he learn that ‘Cassel’ was really ‘Cattle’. He corrected the error throughout when the separate papers were collected as a book, and in so doing he was able to add another happy touch, the name ‘the Rev. W. Cattle’, epitomising all that was unlovely and reproachable in Dissent. In Arnold's bag of stylistic tricks, the bovine Rev. W. Cattle was dignified over the unfortunate Wragg of celebrated memory, not to say Higginbottom, Stiggins and Bugg (‘our old Anglo-Saxon breed’), only by the margin of a truncated honorific and a similarly truncated Christian name. (Readers of subsequent editions are deprived of this not inconsiderable comic detail, Arnold having expunged Cattle, along with numerous other names, in order to reduce the ‘personalities’ of which critics complained, as well as to remove the misattribution of observations that were actually Murphy's.)

For the first edition of 1869 Arnold prepared a brief introduction, in which he added one more tongue-in-cheek mention of Bright as a ‘fine speaker and famous Liberal’ (p. 87, lines 1-2) and in another ironic vein identified himself as a Liberal like Bright, Harrison, the editor of the Daily Telegraph, ‘and a large body of valued friends of mine’ (p. 88, lines 33-5). The introduction was followed by a long preface, which, insofar as it concentrates on particular issues of the moment and expands some of the ideas expressed in the book proper, might better be regarded as an additional chapter, a coda rather than an overture. Laden as it is with arguments over narrow and ephemeral issues like church discipline, much of it, like most of ch. vi, has a pamphleteering air; certainly it is one of the least inviting entryways a famous book has ever acquired. Its rhetorical effect is lessened when it is placed at the beginning, because that effect depends on the reader's prior familiarity with the various themes and stylistic motifs established in the course of the six chapters: ‘stock notions’, ‘fetishes’, ‘the one thing needful’, the Philistines’ ‘natural taste for the bathos’, and quoted phrases like ‘walk staunchly by the best light we have’ and ‘make reason and the will of God prevail’.

Here, too, by a kind of post-hoc preparation as it were, Arnold assumed in advance the persona the reader would again meet in ch. ii. The mock self-depreciation (‘we might gladly, if we could, try in our unsystematic way to take part in labours at once so philosophical and so popular’: p. 237, lines 4-6); his ironically improbable association of himself with the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, mention of which gets the preface off to an artfully bathetic start (p. 231, lines 1-5); his smiling reference to ‘our dear old friends the Hebraising Philistines, gathered in force in the Valley of Jehoshaphat previous to their final conversion’ (p. 254, lines 36-8)—all supply foretastes of the fictive character to be developed after ch. i. So also do the preliminary samples of Arnold's suspect praise: his allusions to Bright's ‘noble oratory’ (p. 241, line 33) and to the Rev. Edward White's ‘temperate and well-reasoned pamphlet against Church Establishments’ (p. 237, lines 20-1).

But on one occasion he again beclouds his intention. Immediately after speaking of John Bright as ‘representing himself’ as above all, ‘a promoter of reason and of the simple natural truth of things, and his policy as a fostering of the growth of intelligence’ (pp. 240, line 36-241, line 1), Arnold refers to Renan, ‘another friend of reason and the simple natural truth of things’ whose opinion of America ‘seems to conflict violently with what Mr Bright says’ (p. 241, lines 9-12). At first glance, Arnold's ironic dismissal of Bright would seem to carry over to Renan; so, at least, his familiar habit of ironically repeated phraseology would seem to suggest. He links them, further on, as ‘these two friends of light’ (p. 241, lines 25). Only as we read on do we learn that in fact one is a false, the other a true, friend of light.

Murphy and the Rev. W. Cattle are absent from the preface, but Arnold doubtless found a similar pleasure in writing the name of Ezra Cornell, ‘Ezra’ being so suggestive of brick-and-mortar chapel Dissent as to qualify if not negate the praise of Cornell's university, ‘a really noble monument of his munificence’ (p. 244, lines 37-8). Two other touches in the preface are perhaps more subtle than any in the main text. In the second sentence of the following passage there are familiar devices—first, suspect praise and then a resounding anticlimax in the allusion to G. A. Sala, the prolific journalist and bon vivant whom Arnold uses to represent the antithesis of what an Academy should stand for:

One can see the happy family in one's mind's eye as distinctly as if it were already constituted. Lord Stanhope, the Dean of St Paul's, the Bishop of Oxford, Mr Gladstone, the Dean of Westminster, Mr Froude, Mr Henry Reeve,—everything which is influential, accomplished, and distinguished; and then, some fine morning, a dissatisfaction of the public mind with this brilliant and select coterie, a flight of Corinthian leading articles, and an irruption of Mr G. A. Sala.

(pp. 234, line 30-235, line 1)

But the sly subversion lies in the first sentence. In the Victorian mind ‘the happy family’ referred to a popular type of street exhibition by that name, a large cage filled with a variety of small animals living in harmony, in the spirit of the American painter Edward Hicks's famous picture of The Peaceable Kingdom. One such show had been invited inside Buckingham Palace in 1842; a decade or so later, Henry Mayhew had included a detailed description of the ‘happy family’ trade in his London Labour and the London Poor; and in 1854 W. P. Frith had introduced a happy family into his celebrated painting Life at the Seaside (Ramsgate Sands). There was even a parlour game so called. The term had, therefore, acquired lasting jocose connotations by Arnold's time. The reader encountering his enumeration of the brilliant and select coterie, Lord Stanhope, Gladstone and the rest, in all probability would have imaged them in the form of a domestic menagerie, evoked all the more readily by recollections of the many Punch cartoons by John Tenniel, who specialised in portraying public figures with heads of animals and birds.

In the preface to the 1869 edition, also, Arnold included a lengthy paragraph on Oscar Browning which cut too close to the knuckle of good taste and was therefore excised from subsequent editions. It had its abundance of characteristic Arnoldian comic effects, exemplified in the double-edged remark that ‘it is impossible not to read with pleasure [malicious pleasure?]’ what Browning says in the Quarterly Review (p. 530, lines 38-9). Much less obtrusive was the sting implied in a preceding sentence which began, ‘Mr Oscar Browning gives us to understand that at Eton he and others, with perfect satisfaction to themselves and the public, combine the functions of teaching and of keeping a boarding-house.’ The allusion to teaching and boarding-houses helps clarify the vulgarising implication of ‘with perfect satisfaction’, for the phrase was specifically associated with routine letters of recommendation that Victorian householders wrote on behalf of servants, including governesses, who had left their employment, or of proprietors of cheap schools to which they had sent their children.

The effect of thus examining the comedy of Culture and Anarchy is, I think, to justify in the main the reaction of many of its first readers. It is probably just as well that the comic touches are brief—usually a matter of detached phrases and sentences—and no more frequent than they are, and that they are largely concentrated in two or three chapters (ii, iii and to some extent iv). Apart from the witty dialectic of Arnold's description of the Barbarian character there is only one protracted comic passage, that in ch. vi in which Arnold engages The Times and Robert Buchanan on the topic of excess population and has mordant fun with the unrealistic notion that children are ‘sent’ into the world by a Divinity afflicted, like the British Philistine and the poorer class of Irish, with incurable philoprogenitiveness (p. 214, lines 33-5; cf. p. 217, lines 10-12). The fun is heavy-handed enough to preclude any wish that Arnold had indulged his taste for sustained irony elsewhere in the book. Even in short passages, his touch, as we have already noted, is not sure. He is successful, one feels, in such a passage as this:

Another American defender of theirs [the Liberals] says just the same of their industrialism and free trade; indeed, this gentleman, taking the bull by the horns, proposes that we should for the future call industrialism culture, and the industrialists the men of culture, and then of course there can be no longer any misapprehension about their true character; and besides the pleasure of being wealthy and comfortable, they will have authentic recognition as vessels of sweetness and light.

All this is undoubtedly specious. …

(p. 129, lines 9-18)

The wit of the last words lies in their very gratuitousness; the speciousness of the notion is so blatant that it requires no comment, and Arnold's pointing it out anyway is part of the joke. On the other hand, a humorous effect is hardly enhanced when the author feels obliged to explain it. Hepworth Dixon, says Arnold, ‘may almost be called the Colenso of love and marriage’: a fancy that might have been allowed to stand on its own merit. But Arnold hastens to write a ponderous gloss: ‘such a revolution does he make in our ideas on these matters, just as Dr Colenso does in our ideas on religion’ (p. 206, lines 11-13).

The criticism implied in the Vanity Fair and Beerbohm caricatures strikes to the heart of the matter: Arnold's flippantly intrusive self distracts from his seriousness; too often it is personality, in two senses, rather than ideas which claims the reader's attention. Arnold's persona - and in this respect it is identical with Arnold himself - is capable of comedy but not of true humour; his self-mockery fails to conceal self-righteousness; his temperament is neither tolerant nor generous. The humility is not only too patently a pose, but too much insisted upon. The irony is too formulaic. the comic themes, like the notorious catch-phrases, recur too often. What wears best, no doubt, is the kind of wit that, once it has hit the target, Arnold does not frugally retrieve for repeated use later on.

Too often we have the feeling that Arnold is not so much debating as indulging in a protracted exchange of genteel Billingsgate. The abundance of ‘personalities’ typifies the level on which Arnold (pressed by his adversaries, no doubt; but he showed no reluctance to meet them on their own ground) chose to wage his campaign. Of the high-mindedness of his aims as a social critic there can be no question, but the methods he uses are doubtful. Granted that any man must be held responsible for his inane and asinine opinions, not least when they are expressed with the sublime assurance of a Murphy or a Rev. W. Cattle, still it must be affirmed that combating them with hollow praise of a speaker's eloquence or the beauty or profundity of a newspaper's leading article evades the intellectual issue. As to the ethics of Arnold's rhetorical tactics, his observance of the Queensberry rules of verbal sparring, every reader must judge for himself. But it does seem too bad, even allowing for his ironic intent and with due admiration of his skill in turning his opponents' tactics to his own advantage, that he sought sympathy for himself as the blameless victim of his ‘Liberal friends’, stoically ‘disregarding their impatience, taunts, and reproaches’ (p. 222, lines 6-7), at the same time as he was expressing his own impatience with them and hurling at them his own full measure of taunts and reproaches. There is something ultimately unsatisfactory about the comedy in Culture and Anarchy. A wit, yes; but the elegant Jeremiah was not a first-rate comedian.

Notes

1. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy with Friendship's Garland and Some Literary Essays, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965) pp. 412, 414. Factual material in this essay is from the apparatus in this volume, hereafter cited as ‘Super’, and from Sidney Coulling, Matthew Arnold and His Critics: A Study of Arnold's Controversies (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1974), hereafter cited as ‘Coulling’. In addition to tracing Arnold's whole career as a controversialist, Coulling shows how each installment of Culture and Anarchy, except the first, was affected by Arnold's desire to respond to criticism of the preceding installments in other organs of opinion. He also gathers contemporary comments on Arnold's authorial manner and its relation to his private personality (pp. 3-5) and information on his attacks on public men (pp. 10-14).

2. Culture and Anarchy consists of one lecture (‘Sweetness and Light’) and five essays, collectively titled ‘Anarchy and Authority’ in the serialisation.

3. Textual references, by page and line, are to Super's edition, which reproduces that of 1883.

4. J. Dover Wilson, in his edition of Culture and Anarchy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950) p. 224.

5. Still another is at p. 184, lines 22-35: ‘But many things are not seen in their true nature and as they really are, unless they are seen as beautiful. Behaviour is not intelligible, does not account for itself to the mind and show the reason for its existing, unless it is beautiful. The same with discourse, the same with song, the same with worship, all of them modes in which man proves his activity and expresses himself. To think that when one produces in these what is mean, or vulgar, or hideous, one can be permitted to plead that one has that within which passes show … this it is abhorrent to the nature of Hellenism to concede.’ This passage is of additional interest as an example of Arnold's sly use of submerged quotations. Hamlet's poignant confession to his mother, ‘I have that within which passeth show’ (i.ii.85), is hardly congruous with the tenor of the passage: there is no discernible affinity between Hamlet and the Hebraists of whom Arnold is speaking, least of all with Murphy, the anti-Papist Irishman mentioned in the ensuing lines. Earlier, the same Shakespearean words had been applied with equal incongruity to ‘the great Liberal middle class’, which, says Arnold, ‘has by this time grown cunning enough to answer that it always meant more by these things [the various examples of “machinery”] than meets the eye’ (p. 128, lines 28-31).

6. One also detects a Menckenian flavour here: ‘Why, a man may hear a young Dives of the aristocratic class, when the whim takes him to sing the praises of wealth and material comfort, sing them with a cynicism from which the conscience of the variest Philistine of our industrial middle class would recoil in affright. And when … an unvarnished young Englishman of our aristocratic class applauds the absolute rulers on the Continent, he in general manages completely to miss the grounds of reason and intelligence which alone give any colour of justification, any possibility of existence, to those rules, and applauds them on grounds which it would make their own hair stand on end to listen to’ (pp. 125, line 27-126, line 3).

7. It is tempting to seek a connection between Arnold's use of anticlimax and his argument that one of the characteristics of the Philistine middle class is its natural ‘taste of the bathos’ (p. 147, lines 13-14). Although bathos and anticlimax are closely related rhetorical devices, Arnold here uses the former term in a wide sense unrecognised by the Oxford English Dictionary. Expanding the Scriblerian definition, he designates as bathos a whole cluster of Philistine traits: cherishing of false values, veneration of the wrong authorities, clinging to obstinate prejudice, smugness, receptivity to flattery and claptrap. Perhaps it might be said that Arnold's rhetorical anticlimaxes are illustrations of middle-class bathos. He manipulates true and false values for comic effect, making clear distinctions between them, as if to exemplify by contrast the confusion of values, the inability to make distinctions, that is a mark of the Philistine.

8. There is something humorous, too, in Arnold's coinages, which Carlyle might not have disdained. In denouncing the proposal of the Licensed Victuallers and the Commercial Travellers to found their own schools in which to teach a new generation the precepts of the commercial middle class, Arnold characterises their spirit as ‘licensed victualism’ and ‘bagmanism’ (p. 154, lines 36-7).

9. For a full understanding of the connotations that Murphy's name had in the mind of Arnold's first readers, see Walter L. Arnstein, ‘The Murphy Riots: a Victorian Dilemma’, Victorian Studies, 19 (Sep. 1975) 51-71. Along with the Hyde Park riots, the disturbances and controversy stirred up by Murphy's virulently anti-Catholic crusade were the prime examples of what Arnold meant by ‘anarchy’ in its social, as opposed to intellectual, manifestations.