SOURCE: Buckler, William E. “Facing the Enemy Within: An Examination of the Moralist Mythos in Culture and Anarchy.” In Matthew Arnold's Prose: Three Essays in Literary Enlargement, pp. 67-112. New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1983.

[In the following essay, Buckler analyzes Arnold's role as a critical moralist, focusing on the high standard that the author set for himself and the society in which he lived.]

In the “Introduction” to Culture and Anarchy,¹ Matthew Arnold said that, in his opinion, “the speech most proper, at present, for a man of culture to make to a body of his fellow-countrymen … is Socrates': Know thyself!” He thus rooted his Essay in Political and Social Criticism, an essay which wears contemporaneousness like an identifying badge and takes on a generation of Liberal social and political advocates in direct, toe-to-toe fashion, quite unmistakably in the classical moralist tradition. Adopting his motto from Jesus, his theme from the temple of Apollo at Delphi, and his imaginative literary guidance from Socrates, he entered the lists of modern controversy agile, supremely armed, and, by the test of normal expectation, subtly disguised. In one sense, the disguise was engagingly transparent. Persons sophisticated enough to be regular readers of such magazines as the Cornhill and the Pall Mall Gazette² and to have an interest in the internal sparrings of the periodical press would expect a practicing poet³ of a conspicuously classical bent and a Professor of Poetry at Oxford to travel a high moralist road. Many of them would remember that, by Newman's account in The Scope and Nature of University Education, Oriel College, where, according to the title-page, Arnold was formerly a Fellow, had been the foundation from which the great apology for classical humanism had emanated a generation or so earlier. But though poets, professors of poetry, and Oriel fellows could be expected to take such edifying moralist positions quite regularly, indeed quite properly, they could hardly expect to be taken seriously, especially by the power brokers of their generation. Indeed, the very light-heartedness of his way of proceeding, his turn for wit, gaiety, and the most scintillating irony, sufficiently proved that Matthew Arnold was no exception. It was delicious to see certain over-solemn, over-confident, over-eager public figures discomfited by a sprightly academic, but his role as gadfly was too deftly played to betoken any more fundamental purpose than that.

Even the widow of Thomas Arnold was troubled by his manner. The style was too flippant and the ostensible purpose too frivolous, and it not only made the son vulnerable to demeaning journalistic attacks but also inevitably invited odious and perhaps telling comparisons between him and his late father.⁴ Arnold tried repeatedly to reassure her that he knew exactly what he was doing as to both style and purpose. When he heard from his sister Jane that Mrs. Arnold did “not quite like” “My Countrymen” (Cornhill, February 1866), he told her that he was

sure it was wanted, and will do good; and this … I really wish to do, and have my own ideas as to the best way of doing it. … there are certain things which it needs great dexterity to say in a receivable manner at all; and what I had to say, I could only get said, to my thinking, in the manner I have said it.⁵

His ironic letters continued to appear in the Pall Mall Gazette, and on July 27, 1866, he again expressed faith in the technique he had adopted:

I understand what you feel about my graver and gayer manner, but there is a necessity in these things, and one cannot always work precisely as one would. To be able to work anyhow for what one wishes—always supposing one has real faith that what one wishes is good and needful—is a blessing to be thankfully accepted.⁶

After the articles that make up Culture and Anarchy had begun to appear, he wrote to her (December 5, 1867):

For my part, I see more and more what an effective weapon, in a confused, loud-talking, clap-trappy country like this, where every writer and speaker to the public tends to say rather more than he means, is irony, or according to the strict meaning of the original Greek word, the saying rather less than one means. The main effect I have had on the mass of noisy claptrap and inert prejudice which chokes us has been, I can see, by the use of this weapon; and now, when people's minds are getting widely disturbed and they are beginning to ask themselves whether they have not a great deal that is new to learn, to increase this feeling in them is more useful than ever.⁷

The rather more that he meant than he was saying in Culture and Anarchy had been expressed some two years earlier: “I, who do not believe that the essential now to be done is to be done through this external machinery of Reform bills and extension of the franchise, yet look upon the outward movement as a necessary part of the far more vital inward one, and think it important accordingly.”⁸

He was delighted with the way his chief terms in Culture and Anarchy gained general currency because of his faith in their penetrating symbolic working: “The merit of terms of this sort [“sweetness and light,” “Philistinism,” “Hebraism and Hellenism”] is that they fix in people's minds the things to which they refer.”⁹ He also expressed a profound faith in the symbolic truth of the chapters later entitled “Hebraism and Hellenism” and “Porro Unum Est Necessarium”: “The chapters on Hellenism and Hebraism are in the main, I am convinced, so true that they will form a kind of centre for English thought and speculation on the matters treated in them.”¹⁰ “Hebraism” and “Hellenism” are not scientific or philosophical terms, certainly. The historical framework that Arnold supplies for them in Chapter IV is clearly fictional—an aid to reflection rather than to autonomous fact. They are symbolic instruments of release from an infinity of factual details, metaphors of consciousness by which one can achieve a satisfying, almost tactile sense of the fluid movements of time and of the relationship to the master-currents within the self of an image of history that is both essentially spiritual and imaginatively contemporaneous. They create a context of reciprocation between the self and the not-self, the now and the then, and supply an externalizing structure for the study of oneself, a way of avoiding the demon of self-consciousness that had made the pursuit of the Apollonian principle so harrowing an experience to the “sons” of the Romantics.¹¹

One begins to suspect, then, that Arnold has assumed the moralist's role in Culture and Anarchy in a far deeper sense than is usually thought, which explains the inner, dramatic truth of the book to which everything else is a genuine rather than a transparent disguise. So deep was his commitment that he could hold steady even in the face of his mother's discomfort with the appearance of mere “persiflage” because he knew how deep, true, and needful was the book's innermost flow. He believed, as Tennyson had believed in casting The Princess, that he could not hope to get a hearing for his profounder purpose unless he came at it obliquely, appearing to do one thing while he was intensely, if feignedly, engaged in doing quite another. The marvelous nimbleness of the book is, in effect, an expression—a literarily successful expression—of the hyper-perceptive state necessary to succeed at his imaginatively evasive ends, so that the book's inner dramatic truth is being pursued, not in the vague, descriptive sense of general intention and import, but in the particular, functional sense of design and maneuver having a working analogy in religious discipline, spiritual exercises, and the subtle, wholly circumspect relentlessness of a Socratic dialogue. In short, “Know thyself” is indeed the fundamental and controlling concern of Culture and Anarchy, informing its mythos, shaping its architecture, monitoring its metaphors, and illustrating how a modern poet (Arnold) succeeds at an imaginatively organic transformation of an ancient literary model (Plato).

Even though, like Tennyson in the early stages of composing In Memoriam and Idylls of the King, Arnold did not have in his conscious mind a fully designed Culture and Anarchy when he delivered “Culture and Its Enemies” as his final lecture as Professor of Poetry at Oxford in June 1867 and published it in the July number of the Cornhill, it is all there: the subject or action or myth and the implicit imperatives by which the ultimate design is inherent in and under the control of the action or myth. Present are not only the predominant metaphors—the narrative voice or persona, the antiphonal styles, the insistent contemporaneousness, the mediating presence of Jesus and Socrates in the background—but also the enlarging analogies (poetry, religion, philosophy) and the deeply imbedded key for their conversion into a truly functional, wholly operative relevance (that endlessly rewarding critical process set in motion by “reading, observing, thinking” in an attentive and dispassionate manner of which Culture and Anarchy is itself a self-fulfilling model, as are the examples of Jesus in the New Testament and of Socrates in the Platonic dialogues). By the very act of coming to full terms with the “Introduction” and “Sweetness and Light,” which “Culture and Its Enemies” ultimately became in Culture and Anarchy, we know that the central figure of “machinery” is cunningly self-reflexive.

The almost universal tendency to read life mechanically, to confuse the means with the end, applies to the way we habitually read books, including this book, and the way we see and think about life generally. The narrative persona's talk about the fetish that the nation has made of freedom, population, coal, railroads, wealth, and religion is, if looked at “attentively and dispassionately” (95), really talk about us: our share in ordinary human nature's self-indulgent neglect of order or distrust of and restless response to authority (freedom) and in ordinary human nature's ingrained tendency to nest and propagate (population), to get and be comfortable (coal), to prize physical convenience (railroads), to put a very high premium on material security (wealth), and to wrap ourselves in a mechanical cloak of righteousness (religion). Though the language and sentiments have, on the one hand, a highly familiar ring through their association with the pulpit or the lectern, the Bible or the school classics, they gradually begin to work in a more immediate, less institutionalized way, getting closer to where we actually live and assuming a new and altogether more interesting aspect. Evolutionary in this context, culture is in truth a total state of human being that stirs into life some dwarfed, inner, almost alien dimension of ourselves, and enables us to see our own faces in the mirrors of Mr. Bright and Mr. Harrison, recognizing that the enemies of culture are in our everyday, thoroughly human, quite ordinary selves.

Thus the reciprocation between culture and religion has already begun. “The kingdom of heaven is within you” (94) is, at a threshold level, being converted from a dictum to a dramatically or processively verified personal experience. Reflecting this movement, the book's range—the parameters of appropriateness which will determine the decorum of its literary procedures, its tone, the field of its action and argument, the character of its metaphors, the posture of its narrative persona—is being firmly established. The dualism which it creates in a very delicate, tentative, and fluid way is nothing so lurid, substantively, as a fire-and-brimstone Manichaeism and nothing so rigid and methodologically systematic as a Hegelian dialectic.¹² The counterpoint to “The kingdom of heaven is within you” is not and so is the kingdom of hell, but rather and so is the kingdom of quotidian ordinariness.

A firm and frank recognition of the book's peculiar placement on the spectrum of literary propriety or decorum is indispensable to a fruitful reading of it, and such critical unfriendliness toward it as has gotten into print over more than a century can be traced to commentators' resistance to its being what it in fact is, to its working out of its own hypotheses according to its own direct, internal imperatives rather than theirs. Culture and Anarchy is a modern expression of a perennial outlook, both ancient and modern, Christian and secular: it is an enlargement into political and social relevance, that is, into the daily life of man in his public actions and relationships, of the “style,” that is, the manner and meaning, of classical, Christian, and post-Renaissance humanism. Its dependence on the dialogues of Plato, especially the Charmides and the Protagoras, is obvious, as is its use of the Aristotelian technique of conceptual winnowing; but obvious, too, is that Arnold has subjected his models to such a thoroughgoing metamorphosis of application and literary manner that his book is sui generis even in the tradition of humanistic apologetics. His topical metaphors are aggressively contemporaneous. The historical construct by which he mythicizes the archetypal contention between doing and thinking in the cultural-spiritual history of the West is, though not absolutely unique, so distinctive and contextual that it is always identified with him in the English-speaking world. His creation of a narrative persona, a mark of the book's essential literariness, supplies the perfect strategy for keeping the humanistic perspective which he has chosen to represent wholly intact while visiting upon his narrator an ingratiatingly ironic fallibility that implicitly concedes how imperfect this pursuit of perfection can be without letting his weakness interfere with his faith.

The goal, the method, the range of the book are all seeded in the words of Montesquieu and Bishop Wilson at the beginning: “To render an intelligent being yet more intelligent” and “To make reason and the will of God prevail!” It is not the fanaticism of the proletarian revolutionary but the deceptive plausibility of the Liberal spokesmen for the middle class that constitutes the book's focus. It is they who are the power brokers and soi-disant philosophers, the parliamentarians and policy-makers, of the age—ardent, vocal, influential, and second-class. They constitute current “authority,” busily making laws in the name of order without any adequate notion of the true seat of law or the real source and beauty of order. Hence, they are mirror-images of the age and, since they have said and done things publicly, they become splendid devices by which to show their constituents that “all manner of confusion” (anarchy) has arisen “out of the habits of unintelligent routine and one-sided growth” (191) which they reflect. It is not the worst of all possible worlds, but it certainly is not the best. It is the most ordinary of human situations, and it is susceptible of redemption through properly directed insight (“Know thyself”) and simple faith (Believe in thy best self).

Culture and Anarchy has none of the apocalyptic rhetoric of the nineteenth-century Romantic revolutionaries. Its rhetoric is freed from the cataclysmic urgency of Carlyle's crisis of survival in Past and Present by Arnold's faith in what the Duke of Wellington had described as “a revolution by due course of law” (135-36), which Arnold enlarged to encompass the “law” of human nature; by his subscription to Plato's unfettered, idealistic conception of “the desire which … ‘for ever through all the universe tends towards that which is lovely’” (185); and by his intuition that there was at the moment a pervasive national “weariness with the old organisations” and so real, if “vague and obscure,” a desire for “transformation” that “his is for the next twenty years the real influence who can address himself to this” (228). But Arnold intuited, just as surely, that his generation and the generation coming on had developed a resistant distrust of the furious stridency of critic-moralists like the later Carlyle and of the volatile Romanticism in which such “harsh, uncouth, difficult, abstract, professional, exclusive” investitures of knowledge appeared to take place (113). Such rhetorical intemperance made “a dreadful havoc in the heart” (133, Bishop Wilson), contradicting the gradualness with which “nature would have all profound changes brought about” (205). There was too much of the Jeremiah in such men, and Jeremiah was “just that very one of the Hebrew prophets whose style” he admired “the least” (88)—too little classical, too “incomplete and mutilated” (236).

A generation growing weary of its routine arrangements and distrustful of rhetorical firestorms was, despite its desire for transformation, not to be reached through the falsetto of lamentation or the melodrama of other forms of emotional inflation and extravagance. They had had more than enough of that sort of seedy Romanticism. It was their reason and their imagination that needed renewing, their capacity for aesthetic joy rather than their ordinary tolerance for flattery and high-minded overstatement—their “natural talent for the bathos” (147 and passim)—in re-enforcement of arguments that had begun to pall. It was a classic human situation for which there was a classical literary solution. The comedic formulations and practice of the Greeks, as masters of a rhetoric of corrective deflation and of subtle moral reconstruction, were perfectly suited to the nature and range of the problem as Arnold had conceived it: the very tropes with which he had characterized the situation (“confused, loud-talking, clap-trappy”) shows that it had taken shape in his critical imagination around the metaphor of style—style is the man / style is the nation.

Arnold's adoption and transformation of a classical solution accounts for the recurrent sense of déjà vu that Culture and Anarchy generates. The book is reminiscent of that superb renewal of the classical moralist tradition undertaken by the generation of Pope and Swift and embodied in such masterpieces as Pope's The Dunciad and Swift's The Battle of the Books.¹³ But Arnold effects a very different kind of literary metamorphosis—more genial, far less conspicuously rooted in analogies with the epic, only very occasionally allowing his wit to wield a hammer-blow. The texture of his apprehension is altered by the addition of the “sweet reasonableness” of Jesus to the epieikeia of Socrates, and his strategy of conversion is monitored by his efforts to give his readers personal experience of the truth of Socrates' “simple, spontaneous, and unsophisticated” assertion that “‘The best man is he who tries to perfect himself, and the happiest man is he who most feels that he is perfecting himself’” (167-68). This strategy makes Arnold's mythos very different from those of Pope and Swift.

The mythos or working fable of Culture and Anarchy is, like its dualism, delicate, tentative, and fluid. It was meant to be imaginatively co-operant with the “vague and obscure” desire for “transformation” whose presence Arnold intuited in the national psyche, and to have made his design upon a somewhat skittish audience too obvious and purposeful would have jeopardized its affectiveness. But as a design in the distance, it is a real and indispensable dimension of the book. Given that the subject is metamorphosis or “transformation,” the action or “plot” is the resolution of the dramatic conflict between two metaphoric contenders or antagonists, culture and anarchy, in such a way as to avoid merely substituting one routine, unimaginative way of seeing one's life in this world for another routine, unimaginative way, that is, to avoid a mere exchange of complacencies. To achieve this elusive goal, the narrator must “do the thing shall breed the thought,” must demonstrate in his own person that the end is implicit in the means, that, if undertaken in a genuine spirit of conscientiousness, the method of the book—“reading, observing, thinking” with a clarity uninhibited by special class or “club” interests or by such ordinary self-interests as physical comfort, material security, and routine notions of respectability—is the goal of the book.

In short, a truly enlightened and circumspect engagement with one's acts of living is the beginning of a process of imaginative self-redemption that can never lead to the perfection which is its goal, but which, even in its initial stages, is a verifiable source of the imaginative joy that provides the spiritual energy for further efforts in the same direction. It is this that justifies seeing the spokesman for culture in the text as a narrative persona rather than literally as Matthew Arnold. He becomes a complexly characterized contender in the book's central comedic antagonism, fallible but dependable on the whole, an actor as well as a listener, a functional literary metaphor. And Arnold's casting of himself in the role of himself-not-himself is instructive in an almost paradigmatic way: it exemplifies how dispassionate attentiveness metamorphosizes the ordinary self into a different life-role (as, implicitly, passionate inattentiveness does also) and, for the reader willing to experiment with the process that the book recommends, is a monitory preparation for the kind of ad hominem criticism that the assumption of this life-role is likely to provoke from those who have had little experience of it.

Indeed, Arnold's extension of his mythos outward to include his least friendly critics as well as inward to involve his sympathetic readers in a ritual of co-participation may be the subtlest index to the books's imaginative autonomy. He seems to have built into his overall strategy the necessity for the special kinds of critical dissatisfaction that Culture and Anarchy from the beginning provoked as a part of the technique, the “literary art,” by which he assured the book's continued vitality. Few books in English so forthrightly topical have maintained such a persistent critical interest, have so successfully resisted the ever-present urge of succeeding generations to reduce its significance to an essentially historical one.

Though its contemporary trappings are far more plentiful than are those of The Idea of a University, for example, it has not slipped into a historical frame even to the degree that Newman's most analogous text has. This would seem to be the result of the book's mythic/metaphoric/fabulous center of imaginative dynamism, and the extension of the mythos outward is a dimension of that dynamism. Arnold's efforts to collect the usable criticisms against him while the book was appearing serially is an important part of the history of the book's evolution.¹⁴ When one considers the close similarities between those original criticisms and succeeding ones, a persuasive conclusion is that the kinds of criticism to which the book has been subjected are actually a part of the book's own expectations, essential to its continued vigor. Alexander Macmillan had seen the point as early as July 25, 1867: “Your critics and opponents increase your influence for good.”¹⁵ Thus, in the spirit of the book's carefully calculated irony, Arnold's detractors are actually made to play a part in Arnold's sophisticated cultural drama.

The narrator's antagonists are such as to sustain the book's comedic integrity, its generic literary decorum, and they exactly fit his intention of gradually drawing the capable and sympathetic co-participatory reader into making more refined distinctions than has apparently been his wont. They are, for the most part, young, gifted, impressive, and off the mark—second-rate, not by natural endowment, but by habit of mind. They are more than reasonably complacent, more than reasonably sure that they have diagnosed the social problem and found the political solution, although less than reasonably informed about how people in other places and in other eras have sought to remedy analogous situations. They have not submitted their motives to such a reasonable degree of self-scrutiny as to recognize possible differences between their real and their declared rationales, and they tend to react to any contradiction of their position with somewhat more than reasonable fierceness.

In other words, his antagonists are humanly barometric, neither ominous villains nor authentic guides, but dependable measures of ordinary human nature plausibly maneuvering in a civilized social state not visibly under threat from external forces and not finely tuned enough to recognize the enemy within. They are our own unexamined political and social selves, and the narrator's gradual and generally effective erosion of their credibility through submersion in a medium of ironic skepticism and carefully scaled deflationary understatement that processively strips them of their patina of plausibility is his strategy for detaching us from our routine faith in our ordinary selves, while preparing us, without the precariousness of confrontation, for a role shift of which this ourselves-not-ourselves perceptual perspective is the elementary pattern.

Social radicalism is not his focus, but social torpor is. He fully recognizes that the proletariat is a quite distinctive force that will lay a very different hand upon the future. He sees this class, however, as an undefined, unpredictable force with whom middle-class spokesmen with nonconformist tendencies are playing highly fanciful theoretical or rhetorical parlor games, while remaining wilfully blind to the devastating truth that even the rudiments of urban anthropology would teach them. What he calls the “populace” in Chapter III is germane to his purposes for three specific reasons: because of the inevitable tendency of upwardly mobile members of their class to ape the class above them (Mrs. Gooch's Golden Rule, 122); because, in the metaphoric sense in which the term is used, we all have a portion of “populace” in our makeup and in our usual response to life; and because the inadequacy of the middle-class Liberals' apprehension or admission of the real situation of the populace and of its likely patterns of response is a stunning illustration of their social and political incompetence.

But the middle-classness of the middle class is Arnold's central subject, and his goal is not to shock or to comfort, but to awaken. Moreover, the fact that the central antagonism of the book is so precisely scaled rather enlarges than shrinks its significance. Middle-class Liberals are the manipulators of the reform spirit of the age. What they do is likely to affect the quality of life profoundly at the moment and to determine the character, the direction, the style of social and political metamorphosis for a very long time to come. Whatever shifts in external authority the future may bring, there will always be a middle class stereotyping its middle-classness. Hence an effort like that of Culture and Anarchy—to return habit, complacency, and spiritual hardness to solution, while at the same time guiding those who are weary of stolidity and desirous of transformation toward making their lives and the lives of others more humane and beautiful, more dispassionate and reasonable—will always have an import of large and complex proportions.

The protagonist of Culture and Anarchy is the reader. It is for his soul that the antagonists, who embody external manifestations of his inner dualism, contend. His ordinary self, more topical and contemporaneous in its definition than merely ordinary human nature's proneness to snuggle into a comfortable hole, has been nurtured on the philosophical theories, the moral and legislative dogmas, of men like Jeremy Bentham and Auguste Comte as glossed by such varied disciples as Thomas Buckle, John Bright, Frederic Harrison, Henry Sidgwick, Richard Congreve, and John Stuart Mill. Lord Macaulay, who was the stalking-horse of Essays in Criticism, is not even mentioned in Culture and Anarchy. His usefulness at a primary level had perhaps been exhausted. In any case, he had, since his death in 1859, rather drifted into the background. Even more important, however, Macaulay had projected a mammoth personality rather than standing for a philosophical school, and in Culture and Anarchy, Arnold diminishes the role of the charismatic individual in changing the course of human history, emphasizing instead “the natural current there is in human affairs” (110), while assigning alterations in culture to unconscious accretive tendencies among the many.

Bentham and Comte were the authors of two very different systems, of course, but the Arnold-persona sees them in the background of the present intellectual-spiritual difficulty, pairing them not only for their common dependence upon a rigid system but also for their fierceness in defending it: “some man, some Bentham or Comte, who has the real merit of having early and strongly felt and helped the new current, but who brings plenty of narrowness and mistakes of his own into his feeling and help of it, is credited with being the author of the whole current, the fit person to be entrusted with its regulation and to guide the human race” (109-10). Only two sentences from Bentham's Deontology were enough, he says, to deliver him “from the bondage of Bentham”: “‘While Xenophon was writing his history and Euclid teaching geometry, Socrates and Plato were talking nonsense under pretence of teaching wisdom and morality. This morality of theirs consisted in words; this wisdom of theirs was the denial of matters known to every man's experience’” (111).

Culture abhors a Rabbi as nature abhors a vacuum, but system-lovers adore a Rabbi, narrow and fierce, regarding true culture as “an impertinence and an offence” (111). In a long passage that appeared in the Cornhill but was cut from the book itself, a passage strongly reminiscent of Newman's style of combat in the pamphlets that were eventually modified into the text of the Apologia, Arnold drives home with relentless vigor and irony-run-to-sarcasm the justness of his view that the English disciples of Comte were “full of furious indignation with the past,” while Comte himself, by the evidence of the “authorized version” of “the book of the master,” was guilty of the “charge of system-mongering and machinery-mongering on an excessive scale” (504-06). Arnold probably cancelled this passage because he found that, in the stress of controversy, he had been drawn into the use of too fierce a rhetoric, thus risking a serious misdirection of the reader's attentiveness and compromising his speaker's emphasis on dispassion since style is clearly the chief instrument of psychological and spiritual measure and influence in Culture and Anarchy.

Throughout, the quotations from the “enemies” of culture are both fairly representative of their substantive positions and reflective of the peculiar state of their psychological growth, spiritual development, and temper. A reader-protagonist considering attentively and dispassionately the two sentences from Bentham quoted above, for example, will discover, after the initial stock response to their impressiveness has worn off, that they project a spiritual state that is neither attentive nor dispassionate, but peremptory and haughty. It is a stereotyped, formulaic style very much like that of a spokesman for the Government in the House of Commons rebuffing an objection from a member of the Opposition, a style of quick kill and very little circumspection. In this particular context, it invokes the ghost of the now silent, distant enemy of the friends of true culture, Lord Macaulay, with his sweeping dismissal of the ideals of the Greek moralists and his identifying logo, “as every schoolboy knows.” In addition, a feeling of absurdity that explodes all possibility of serious reflection is provoked by Comte's “‘System of Sociolatry, embracing in a series of eighty-one annual Festivals the Worship of Humanity under all its aspects,’” his “‘Synthetical Festival of the Great Being [Humanity],’” his “‘Metropolis of the Regenerated West [Paris],’” his “‘systematization of ideas conducting to the systematization of sentiments,’” and his “dating a preface the 15th of Dante, … an appendix the 22nd of Moses, a circular the 27th of Aristotle” (505-06).

When the reader-protagonist looks the other way, he sees Socrates and Christ in the place of Bentham and Comte, and instead of the fierceness and systematic rigidity of men like Buckle, Bright, Harrison, and Congreve, the ingratiating luminosity of such men as Montesquieu, Bishop Wilson, Goethe, and Newman, of men like Abelard, Lessing, and Herder. Nor does it need explicit pointing for a reader in whose inner ear still echo the words of Saint Augustine:

“Let us not leave thee alone to make in the secret of thy knowledge, as thou didst before the creation of the firmament, the division of light from darkness; let the children of thy spirit, placed in their firmament, make their light shine upon the earth, mark the division of night and day, and announce the revolution of the times; for the old order is passed, and the new arises; the night is spent, the day is come forth; and thou shalt crown the year with thy blessing, when thou shalt send forth labourers into thy harvest sown by other hands than theirs; when thou shalt send forth new labourers to new seed-times, whereof the harvest shall not be yet.”

(113-14)

These are words that seem to speak directly to the inner self of the contemporary reader and to translate the very personality of Jesus into the “Canticles” of St. Francis of Assisi and “The Second Spring” of Newman. It takes no external help for such a reader to realize, when he sees these sentiments in this style characterized two pages later as “handing out [one's] pouncet-box” (116), that, indeed, “Intemperance in talk makes a dreadful havoc in the heart” (133).

Thus style, being the chief instrument of psychological and spiritual influence on the reader-protagonist of Culture and Anarchy, is, for the critic, an indispensable dimension of its mythos. It is not surprising, then, that the book's essential poetry can perhaps best be seen in the textual overlay, also mythic in character, of three worlds of style.¹⁶ Most conspicuous is the contemporary world, the world being recorded, criticized, and corrected. This is the “style of anarchy,” which is woven of the “facts” and “events” that give the book its modern rootedness and truth, its dense cluster of images by which we are induced to acknowledge the incontrovertibility of its portraiture. That is the way of the world of the 1860s without much serious doubt as erected on the substructure of its own premises. Arnold's way is a real way of seeing the epoch. By comparison, other ways of seeing it (e.g., those of Carlyle, Marx, Bentham's followers) seem duplicitous, thesis-ridden, and over-selective.

But the fact is that its metaphors are so precisely and so quantitatively cogent that it is also the contemporary world of the 1980s: nothing has changed but the images, and even they are alterations in the wording rather than of the objects designated by the wording (e.g., coal > oil > energy). If this is true, then it is also probable that an 1860s that can be altered to a 1980s can be in turn altered to a 1660s or a 420s B. C. Now we are talking about a timeless contemporaneousness rather than a provincial one, and the truth lies, not in literal topicality, but in poetic topicality. If, in any time frame, we select the authentic images well, we have thereby gotten in touch with timelessness by virtue of seeing what in fact is, not just because it is timely, but just because it is independent of time. For this, whether one is writing prose or verse—a Divina Commedia or a Culture and Anarchy, a History of the Peloponnesian War or an Iliad—one must be a literary artist (composer, poet, architect in language).

The second world, created like the first, is the world of words that is released by a serious effort to have these “facts” or “events” rationalized by two or more metaphoric voices or personalities. This is the archetypal contention, and its literary excitement lies in its action, architecture, and language. The “facts” are not the focus of interest, but the face one puts on the facts. The first world is obviously a language-world too, but it is language at a Baconian level, so to speak: the representation of data in language, a “table of discovery” that embodies, in a form of verbal translation, data of a non-verbal character. At least this is the illusion that enables us to make sense of it at the most primitive level. It may be, like time and space, a mere stubborn illusion, but it is very stubborn indeed. It is a second, more advanced order of “style,” the general field in which we conceive of the notion of style. In Culture and Anarchy, for example, it is the “style” of the Liberal voices of the book (e.g., Mr. Bright, Mr. Harrison) in counterpoint with the “style” of the narrative voice (what is customarily referred to as “Arnold”): what they say is perpetually counterbalanced by what he says. That is the dialogue/debate/contention of the book, its conventional literary center. Not every book has this dramatic center. It is, however, a defining mark of Culture and Anarchy as well as of Plato's dialogues; that is how their literary machinery works. The facts have been superseded by perception in all of its complex reality: personality, implicit value-systems, recurrence to authority, response to challenge, concession, distinction, ad hominem attack, broad-based exposure, face-saving surrender. Of the three worlds being considered, this is the most quintessentially literary, the conversion of fact to an imaginative sense of fact, a highly formalized re-enactment of the age-old drama of human nature struggling to fulfil the best law of its own being.

The third world is that of utopia, the perfect world of which the authorial mind can realistically conceive—not a Paradiso, but one in which an ideally realized humanness can be presented, a harmonious state in which perfection can finally have, not mechanical achievement, but the consciousness of a faith verified by undiverted, visible, empirical evidence of emergence. It is a state beyond strategy, a mythic state imaginatively confirmed. It is like the first world in that it is not to be debated, but established, a “fact” or “event” or “truth.” This third world is made possible by the existence of the first world, being a transubstantiation of its factual images. In a poem like the Divina Commedia or Paradise Lost, this is language's explicit goal: to create credible intimations of such a state in full-bodied, question-answering terms. In a book like Culture and Anarchy, it is an implicit goal, conditioning the drama of the second world and suggested or evoked by the way in which language perpetually threatens to shape itself into a coherent utopianism while in fact not doing so. It is the compromise with imaginative fulfilment of a wholly autonomous kind that critical prose must make in order not to be a poem.

Each of the chapters of Culture and Anarchy makes a distinct contribution to the suffusive impact that the book was meticulously designed to have, enlarging at a different center the consciousness of confusion which a stereotyped, inadequately informed, and exclusive state of mind leads to. It works within the parameters of a highly civilized social and political state like that which John Stuart Mill made the premise of his doctrine of individualism in On Liberty. But it shows that even the mechanisms of reform which Mill delineates are frustrated by the state of mind from which they emanate and upon which they depend for strategic guidance in problem-solving.

“Sweetness and Light” is strategic in an extraordinarily accomplished way. Arnold had appraised the enemies of culture very precisely. He knew that, if taunted, they would presume to make quick work of this effete purveyor of familiar, foreign, long-discredited cant about beauty and truth. He knew that they would read too superficially, think too perfunctorily, respond with too stereotyped a fierceness in too hard and glittering a manner to see the traps that he had carefully laid for them and that, as Thomas Henry Huxley had said of “Soapy Sam” Wilberforce, God would thus deliver them into his hands. In the self-blinding glamour of a heady, aggressive secularism coupled with the contempt for antiquity that they had learned from Bentham and Macaulay, they would miss the profound significance of this incipient blending of Hellenism with Hebraism, this alliance of Socrates and Jesus, and their ingrained irreverence would propel them into offending a crucial dimension of the very persons to whom they hoped to appeal. This, in turn, would provide Arnold with the route of access into the inner selves of these same individuals—their weariness with the present and their desire for transformation—that, despite current confusion, was a reflection of human nature's admiration for great and gentle people, its inherent longing for personal improvement, and its peculiar susceptibility to the influence of language.

The chapter begins in a very emblematic way, with the redemption of a word (“curiosity”), and invokes the service of a very archetypal principle: “we must find some motive for culture in the terms of which may lie a real ambiguity” (90). This “real ambiguity” is not, as first appears, in the negative sense in which the English use the term curiosity as opposed to the favorable sense in which the French use it, but in the Janus-like face of its most favorable import, both “scientific” and “moral.” Thus Newman's “know” (The Idea of a University) and Carlyle's “do” (Past and Present) are reconciled in a view of human nature wherein the passion for knowledge and the passion for action are both defining characteristics; where the profound ambiguity (the archetypal contention) derives from man's imperfection, from his perpetual inability to be sure that he is in possession of the right reasons to do the right thing, or that even if his passion for knowing is well balanced and regulated, it is properly coordinated with his passion for doing. Moreover, the perfectionist passion which drives him despite the impossibility of its fulfilment constantly reminds him of his failures, wearies him with a sense of inadequacy, and tempts him to account the ordinary the best. Culture cannot alter man's archetypal nature, of course, but it can guide that nature, by that nature's own laws, toward fulfilment. Through the joy that comes of culture's progress in humanization, it can ease the distress of unfulfilled perfectionism. Culture is “the study and pursuit of perfection” (93), “Not a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming” (94), and hence it does not require the sacrifice of the present joy to the future dream (104-05). It is especially timely at the present moment (92), but it is equally timely whenever its full authentic character opens up to the human consciousness.

Thus far the Arnold-persona has rooted his idea of the nature and function of culture in what can only be called a philosophy of man, and his reiterated ironic strategy of confessing his inadequacy in the awesome rigors of systematic philosophy, which was really his way of indicting the pretensions of his adversaries, should not blind one to his keen sense of the philosophical temper of the times and his brilliance in stripping philosophy of all that was “harsh, uncouth, difficult, abstract, professional, exclusive” in its ordinary style (113). He then moves to the analogy that is the most telling and encompassing in the whole book: the analogy between culture and religion. What he accomplishes in his handling of this analogy is strategically monumental. He establishes a real truth with a real distinction. Religion has been the “voice of the deepest human experience.” Though its goals are identical with those of culture, however, religion has been narrower than culture in the pursuit of those goals, has not so fully promoted “a harmonious expansion of all the powers which make the beauty and worth of human nature …” (93-94). He removes from culture the onus of paganism or secularism, while implying that the sons of the philosophical radicals with whom he is contending are disqualified as judges of the true nature and character of culture by virtue of their alienation from or hostility toward religion. He prepares the way for a critical indictment of the ferocity of such mechanized and politicized religions among the Protestant Dissenters as are represented by an organ like the Nonconformist, inviting all those who are as put off by a “harsh, uncouth” religion as by a “harsh, uncouth” philosophy—those left stranded by the collapse of the Oxford Movement under the fierce attacks of middle-class Liberalism, for example—to find personal refuge in the humanizing process of culture. The religious analogy implicit in the merger of Hellenism with Hebraism is crucial to the argument of the book for several patent reasons: religion is the chief source of the kind of language Arnold is using and supplies the model of inner discipline with which his audience is most familiar; religion is likely to be the place where, in his audience's experience, the good as the enemy of the best is most visible and is often the most telling illustration of well-intentioned misguidance; and religion, the discipline most plentifully supplied with the mechanisms of redaction, is a rich treasury of that self-criticism which is indispensable to the central concerns of Culture and Anarchy.

The other chief analogy which the Arnold-persona uses is that of poetry—“culture is of like spirit with poetry, follows one law with poetry” (99)—and though, for reasons of scale, he touches the matter only briefly, it is important to recognize exactly what he does say. He creates a three-way analogy among poetry, religion, and culture that gives a futuristic turn to a metaphoric construct that, in “Hebraism and Hellenism,” will be put to essentially retrospective or historical uses. Historically, religion has been far more important than poetry because of its broad, elementary emphasis on the moral rectitude of behavior. In the future, however, when poetry will absorb into itself, will be transformed by, “the religious idea of a devout energy,” then will it have the power to “transform and govern” religion.

He sees as inevitable a tendency of poetry and religion to become one, as in fact they were one in “the best art and poetry of the Greeks” (101). When they become one again, the “devout energy” of Hebraism will have been added to the Hellenic “idea of beauty, harmony, and complete human perfection.” Thus poetry, having been transformed by religion, will in turn transform religion. The catalyst for this double transformation will be culture, which is the expression of the laws of human nature's innate desire to know, to act, and to convert or improve itself. Hidden in this equation is an implicit faith in some future epoch of humanistic grandeur that surpasses even the Golden Age of Greece. Jesus himself, enlarged as a metaphor of moral beauty with a genius for language, is Western man's supreme symbol of such a metamorphosis, and each man of true culture contributes to the ultimate realization of this ideal and beautiful image of the race.

The tendency of even friendly critics of Arnold to assume that, since he was not belligerently systematic, he was, therefore, philosophically soft is an exact misreading of the case. The fact is that Arnold was so comfortable, so at ease, with philosophical thought that he could go straight to the premise and the method without the least need for quantitative demonstration. Throughout his career he evinced an exact if relaxed familiarity with the chief formulators of modern philosophical thought. Aristotle was for him as familiar as a friend, and his Platonism, as Culture and Anarchy clearly shows, had passed beyond thought into dramatic and verbal gesture. He could distill a philosophical treatise masterfully, as witness his essay on Spinoza in Essays in Criticism. Of course, his classical background made him impatient with the formulaic professionalism which modern philosophers customarily imposed upon their thought, while his role as a practical critic demanded that he deconstruct philosophical formulae and follow their impact closer to the cultural mainstream. Moreover, again because of his classical background, Arnold's imagination had early taken a distinctly dramatic bent, and his best prose, like his best poetry, had a personative or dramatic character that erased the philosophical rigidities of mind speaking to mind, filtering thought through the complex intricacies of a multi-dimensional persona who felt, dreamed, gestured, strategized, played with language, who enticed as well as thought.

Having established the religious and poetic character of culture, that is, what a profoundly beautiful idea it really is, the speaker then proceeds to show what “a far-off echo of the soul's prophecy of it” are the drab mechanical lives we ordinarily live and the drab mechanical religions we ordinarily practice. These things shrink very quickly by the standards of culture that have been carefully developed, and we awaken very abruptly to the discomforting realization that we have been substituting the “grand language” for the grand thing. We have allowed our language to become pretentiously sophisticated and called ordinary comfort well-being and hideousness beauty because we have lost contact with a genuine ideal of beauty and with the standard of genuine well-being. We have allowed the Roebucks and the Lowes to “debauch” our minds with a conventional “style of laudation” (108) and the Nonconformists to make us fiercely argumentative rather than truly religious.

“Sweetness and Light” is so imaginatively evasive because it is so tactical: it simultaneously causes the enemies of culture to disintegrate without a confrontal attack and builds its complex constructive apprehensions without conventional definitions and professional formulae. At the beginning of Chapter II, the narrator says that he has thus far “been insisting chiefly on beauty” (115). This assertion comes as something of a surprise, since the trope itself has not had a conspicuous presence in the chapter, until we remind ourselves of the kind of beauty to which it refers. It is the beauty seen by the inner eye, the mind's eye, or the soul's; it is the Platonic beauty of the idea, the philosophical idea, the moral and social idea, the idea of culture or of religion or of poetry. Arnold's notion of beauty encompasses the itness of things that we ordinarily talk about in such a vague and routine fashion that they never assume an individually distinctive character, a significant form, but exist forever in a mist of sentiment. But most of all the beauty of which Arnold speaks is the idea of man himself who, at his very best, forms such concepts and finds his true dignity and happiness in pursuing them. To have framed such an idea in the conventional manner of a modern philosopher would have deprived it of all distinction and have led to its being confused with the very idea of happiness that it was meant to replace. So Arnold employed the manner of the modern poet: he made his point dramatically, evocatively, accretively, metaphorically, and so successfully that many of those who have misconceived the manner have nonetheless felt its inherent force.

The perspicacity of Arnold in delaying the appearance of the “Anarchy and Authority” papers, which, with substantial revisions and a new preface, make up the balance of Culture and Anarchy, until he could “gather up all the murmurings [provoked by ‘Culture and Its Enemies’] into one and see what they come to”¹⁷ is well illustrated by the character of the next two chapters—“Doing as One Likes” and “Barbarians, Philistines, Populace.” These “murmurings” went far beyond the well-known rejoinders by Henry Sidgwick (“The Prophet of Culture,” Macmillan's Magazine [August 1867]) and Frederic Harrison (“Culture: a Dialogue,” Fortnightly Review [November 1867]); the Saturday Review, the Daily Telegraph, the Morning Star, the Daily News, and, in America, the Nation got conspicuously into the act, along with many of the provincial newspapers.¹⁸ There were no mortal hits, but the observations made by Arnold's critics were generally shrewder and more incisive than any that have been made since. Many of them had enjoyed a similar kind of intellectual training, and they were quick to recognize the chief outlines of his method of proceeding.

What they did not perceive, however, was the moralist mythos, the classical fable, into which “Know thyself” was being gradually converted. Both the tone and the substance of their rejoinders confirmed his judgment in several crucial respects: that his manner, which had caused an awful flurry in the henhouse of the periodical press, had been well chosen; that the soi-disant serious, practical, hard-working policy-makers of the world could, when sharply questioned, do little more than declare the virtues of being serious, practical, hard-working; that the idea of a thing, which can be acquired only through wide reading, attentive observing, and dispassionate thinking, activities with which ordinary human nature is either impatient or unfamiliar or woefully unpracticed, is everything—integrity, autonomy, and beauty making it the least vulnerable, hence the most truly practical, of all the objects of human endeavor and the conscientious pursuit of it the simple, wholly verifiable secret of self-humanization.

The idea at the center of “Doing as One Likes” is “the idea of the State” (122, 123-24, 134-36), and Plato, who taught us how to dream and to aspire toward our dreams' fulfillment, is reinforced by Aristotle, who taught us how to think. Thus, the argumentative method becomes rather more inductive, as “observing” is given first priority. The term anarchy begins to appear with increased frequency. To the intellectual confusion that had been its earlier import is added the ominous possibility of widespread civil disorder. The chapter fairly bristles with irony, some of it rather tough. This toughness seems literarily justified because these serious, practical, hard-working policymen, who have interpreted a more urbane warning as “all moonshine” (115), must be more briskly shown that the only assurance the nation has that order can in fact be maintained is the Liberals' blind self-assurance, which the events themselves have discredited.

Four writers in the moralist tradition play a significant part in the chapter: two of them ancient (Plato and Aristotle), two of them modern (Carlyle and Mill). The ancient writers emphasize thought, the modern writers emphasize action. Plato, the philosopher of the human ideal, is a pervasive presence in the background, the guide to the idea-principle which is here being applied to the State. Aristotle is the explicitly declared model for the method of intellectual winnowing which, for all his ironic self-depreciation in philosophical matters, the Arnold-persona uses to perfection. He refers to it as “a plain man's expedient” and as part of the “lumber of phrases” learned at Oxford in “the bad old times” (126-27) and then proceeds to employ it with a rapier-like keenness and relentless inevitability against the enemies of the very humanistic tradition of which it is a symbolic expression.

Carlyle is subjected to a diminishment that requires of the reader who, like the narrator, remembers his “genius” in its glory days and feels a real debt of gratitude for his “refreshment and stimulus” a good deal of dispassion. But it is clear to any objective reader of the Latter-Day Pamphlets that Carlyle is a prisoner of an earlier age, the epoch of concentration following the Napoleonic upheavals, and that his endorsement of the aristocracy is an anachronism in a “modern” era marked by “the dissolving agencies of thought and change” (126). It is clear, too, that the feudalism inherent in Carlyle's metaphor of the Middle Ages in Past and Present has caught up with him. His myth has retained its rigidity while it has lost its charm. It is painful to see his relevance in tatters, but the critique is just and the technique circumspect. Though Mill's name is used only once in the book (111) and that not in this chapter, he is such a pervasive point of reference (as the very emphasis in “the assertion of personal liberty” [117] shows) that some commentators have read this chapter as a full-dress rebuttal of On Liberty.¹⁹ But in light of the general vulgarization of the slogan “doing as one likes” which the narrator captures—its antipodal character as a voice played against Plato's voice, for example—it seems fairer to see the chapter as serving a subtler purpose. It suggests, rather, that this is what the philosophy embodied in On Liberty becomes when stripped of the gentle, delicate humanity of John Stuart Mill—fierce, raucous, and inhumane. The insight has larger ramifications: always look to the essential human idea rather than to the accidental practitioner because schools of thought that may look attractive in the hands of a founding genius very soon fall into the hands of third-rate persons who enjoy the impetus of the school without the genius that gave it an illusionary cogency.

There is also an ambiguity underlying the concept of “doing as one likes,” but it is not the archetypal ambiguity contained in the term curiosity. It is absurd, as Arnold shows, though often romantically absurd. Behind this most modern of slogans as practiced by the aristocracy, there is the remnant pattern of the feudal baron visible in the lord-lieutenancy, the deputy-lieutenancy, and the posse comitatus, and this pattern expresses itself among the middle class in such offices as vestrymanship and guardianship. The working class, having no such feudal remnants and fast losing its feudal habits of subordination and deference, is expressing an anarchical tendency that shows what mechanical freedom without even mechanical patterns of restraint leads to (118-19). Still, despite the anarchical threat that results from the rejection of “the idea of the State” based closely on Burke and defined as an “organ of our collective best self, of our national right reason” (136), the modern Englishman either revels in the inspirational “force” of Mrs. Gooch's “symbolical” Truss Factory (121-22) or threatens to take up such a feudal alternative as “lead[ing] a sort of Robin Hood life under ground” (118). Moreover, such romantic absurdity has a darker, more threatening side. The xenophobia which is so self-laudatory when radiated outward toward the non-Englishman is positively internecine when radiated inward among the several classes of the nation, making them “separate, personal, at war” rather than “united, impersonal, at harmony,” as “the idea of the State” would make them.

In “Doing as One Likes,” the term culture is not insistently reiterated. Like Plato, it is a pervasive presence rather than an instrument of verbal bombardment. It is the source of “the idea of the State,” and it is the process of transformation from the ordinary to the best self that makes such an idea both authentic and indispensable. But, with two notable exceptions, the technique of the chapter is one of exposure of both the vulgarity and the absurdity of the favorite national slogan when flooded with the light of reason and put into perspective by the need for national unity. One of the two exceptions to this overall technique is the abrupt shift in tenor which takes place after the quotation from Bishop Wilson on page 135, lines 24-25: we begin to talk, not about others, but about ourselves, and the process of meditative self-examination is renewed. The other exception is the transformation to which the slogan itself is put; “doing as one likes” attempts to make a social and political virtue out of fear of tyranny, whereas true virtue is rooted in faith, not fear. On the constructive side, therefore, “doing as one likes” can mean only doing what is best for ourselves collectively, the fulfilment of the very finest of our dreams.

To one who has observed the present situation, has read the best that has been known, and has thought the matter through, the issue takes on the metaphoric character of a choice between the social contract of Hobbes and the “idea of the State” of Plato, a choice between self-defensive fear and self-creative faith. Neither is realizable in theoretical perfection, so the question becomes which is the more integrated, autonomous, beautiful idea the pursuit of which will most fully enable us to discover and develop our best selves in order to bring us the happiness, not of material self-interest, but of the man “who most feels that he is perfecting himself” (from Plato, 168).

The rhetorical tradition in which the Arnold-persona works is that of simple plain-speaking in which both Socrates and Jesus had worked, free of the uncouth jargon, abstract principles, and structuralist formulae of professional philosophers and keeping as its focus the basic, clear, verifiable experience of a man resolved to examine the truth of his social and political—that is, his moral—character in the light of prevailing public arrangements. To the “sweetness” of Plato he adds the “light” of Aristotle, particularly the Aristotle of the Nicomachean Ethics. It is his Aristotelianism that draws “Doing as One Likes” and “Barbarians, Philistines, Populace” together, perhaps even determining the metaphors into which their subject-matter is converted. The still pervasive irony of “Barbarians, Philistines, Populace” becomes a bit more jovial in that it is more transparent and outlandish, becoming a more explicit clue to the book's character as a moral fable.

There is nothing particularly troublesome about the manifest intent of the new metaphors created to characterize the three principal social classes in “Barbarians, Philistines, Populace”; their explicit analytical meaning is cumulative and self-elucidating. But the spiritual ambience which the Arnold-persona creates around them is significant. He speaks of the need for “a shade more soul” (142), aligns himself more specifically with the moralists (e.g., 159), and recurs more frequently to the principle of “self-examination” (e.g., 151). Moreover, he quietly develops a complex network of implicit analogies between the conditions and workings of literature and the conditions and workings of the moral intelligence. In “Sweetness and Light,” he had asserted that “If it were not for the purging effect wrought upon our minds by culture, the whole world, the future as well as the present, would inevitably belong to the Philistines” (97), and this assertion is an application to culture of the classical concept of catharsis as the chief moral function of poetry, especially of tragedy. In “Barbarians, Philistines, Populace,” he not only draws an explicit analogy between culture and literature in the matter of “a scale of value for judgments” (148), he also employs literary concepts as an implicit way of enriching our idea of culture and of encouraging us “to look through the insistent … substance at the thing signified”²⁰: empathy (143), “talent” or “a special and striking faculty of execution” (145), the power of the moment over the power of the man (146), the crucial difference between bathos and sublimity (147), the psychological effects of one's style upon oneself (155), the general function of style as an index to the quality of thought.²¹ In fact, he provides a model for this sort of conversion in his reading of the style and substance of the Times as “a peculiarly British form of Atheism” and the style and doctrine of the Daily News as “a peculiarly British form of Quietism” (156-60).

It is within this spiritual ambience that the explicit clue to the book's character as a moral fable is given. The speaker asks us to bear in mind two things in considering “this new … and convenient division of English society” (143).

The first is that, since, under all class divisions, there is a common base of human nature, therefore, in every one of us, whether we be properly Barbarians, Philistines, or Populace, there exist, sometimes only in germ and potentially, sometimes more or less developed, the same tendencies and passions which have made our fellow-citizens of other classes what they are. This consideration is very important, because it has great influence in begetting that spirit of indulgence which is a necessary part of sweetness, and which, indeed, when our culture is complete, is, as I have said, inexhaustible. Thus, an English Barbarian who examines himself will, in general, find himself to be not so entirely a Barbarian but that he has in him, also, something of the Philistine, and even something of the Populace as well. And the same with the Englishmen of the two other classes.

(143-44)

This is an unequivocal clue to what the substance of Culture and Anarchy signifies. “Know thyself!” is clearly the center of imaginative interest and the real point of all the book's social and political machinery. More than that, it provides a structure through which the discipline of self-examination can be pursued and, in the analogy with literary empathy or detached, critical sympathy, it points to an image of ourselves-as-not-ourselves that takes complacency out of judgment and sentimentality out of indulgence. “They” are “we” at the distance of form and insight.

This does not mean that the social and political dimension, the revelatory machinery, is either unreal or unimportant. Indeed, in this imaginative context it becomes even more real and more important because if the metaphor collapses, the ultimate meaning becomes confused and trivialized. The social and political dimension works like “the poetry of nature” itself: things must really be what they appear to be in order for one to make the leap through substance to significance. The significance of “significant form” cannot be properly perceived unless the form itself is trustworthy. On the other hand, if one concedes that the intent of the creator of the form has or may have relevance to the way in which we see the form (observe it, think about it), especially if it is a written form, then the tests that we apply, the demands we make upon the character of the form (e.g., its scientific exactness or purity), are inevitably affected. We would hardly be justified, for example, in applying the tests of the literal-minded social scientist or statistician who endorses or condemns the results simply on statistical grounds since that would be to ignore the metaphorical dimension of the form and to require of it what, by its very nature, form cannot be. But we would be justified in applying the tests of literary criticism, both scientific and imaginative, and demanding that the form be true to the point at which literalness necessarily self-destructs and something different from literalness takes over.²²

The second thing that we are asked to bear in mind is in some ways even more critically dramatic. Having refined the idea of class further, pointing out that each class (“they” still meaning “we”) has an ordinary self with both “severer” and “lighter” sides that express themselves in quite distinctive ways, the speaker says: “But in each class there are born a certain number of natures with a curiosity about their best self, with a bent for seeing things as they are, for disentangling themselves from machinery, for simply concerning themselves with reason and the will of God, and doing their best to make these prevail—for pursuit, in a word, of perfection” (145). He then goes on to say that the function or effect of these “aliens” is to “enfilade” their class and to “hinder the unchecked predominance” of the “classlife.” They generally have “a rough time of it”; and though their number is “sown more abundantly than one might think,” the number “of those who will succeed” will be proportionate “both to the force of the original instinct within them, and to the hindrance or encouragement which it meets with from without” (146). Holding steady in our recognition that “they” are “we,” we know that these “aliens” are aspects of ourselves, that this classless, humane instinct will vary in force from person to person, that we all have some degree of it, and that our capacity to realize its renovating power will depend to some degree on the character of our “moment” in cultural time. This “instinct” is the “possible Socrates” that “every man” carries about “in his own breast” (228). It is the “us” to whom the whole Socratic process is directed and that makes the reader the protagonist of Culture and Anarchy. It is the “talent” both of the New Testament parable and of the Greek myth; it is the poet that every man partakes of to some degree, the source of both his dignity and his joy; and it is the humanist's assurance that, even if he fails of ultimate fulfilment, he will not fail wholly.

The narrative persona of Culture and Anarchy ends the chapter “Hebraism and Hellenism” with one of the most circumspect, thought-provoking, and methodologically implicative sentences in the whole book. He has been speaking of the confusion of the current cultural situation brought about in England by the rise of Puritanism in the seventeenth century in contravention of “the natural order”—a Hebraic fundamentalism set against the strong new flow of Hellenism generated by the “Renascence”—and the consequent strong desire on the part of people of good sense for “a clue to some sound order and authority.” “This we can only get,” he says, “by going back upon the actual instincts and forces which rule our life, seeing them as they really are, connecting them with other instincts and forces, and enlarging our whole view and rule of life” (175). This masterful creative reprise gives renewed perspective to the book's assumptions, modes of proceeding, self-criticisms, and discoveries: the rootedness in human nature; the sensitivity to the tremendous power of social pressures and conventions over our individual lives; the dependence on philosophical or scientific truth combined with a deep distrust of the rigid, systematic over-simplifications of much elaborate, abstruse philosophy; the recognition of the indispensable need for imaginative historical perspective; and the resistance to persistent monistic tendencies to make a contribution to human development the law of human development. The sentence looks backward and forward to the line and operation of the whole book, of course, but it is a quite distinct and crucial convergence of language and concept, there being nothing quite like it elsewhere in Culture and Anarchy.

Rhetorically, this sentence connects “Hebraism and Hellenism” with “Porro Unum Est Necessarium,” offering us a basis for understanding Arnold's enthusiasm for the “chapters on Hellenism and Hebraism” and his conviction that they “are in the main … so true that they will form a kind of centre for English thought and speculation on the matters treated in them.”²³ Those “matters” include, certainly, the recovery of the metaphors Hebraism and Hellenism from the rhetorical misuse of others, specifically of Frederick Robertson and Heinrich Heine (164). One can reasonably credit the surge of energy and excitement in the chapters themselves to Arnold's sense of having found a new and happy way of representing his thought. Moreover, he was right in thinking that he had thus provided a central reference point for “English thought and speculation.” Though one recognizes their independent presence in Heine and in such English documents, besides the sermons of Robertson, as J. R. Seeley's Ecce Homo and George Eliot's novels, Arnold's particular formulation has dominated the large and continuing interest in them.

But it seems quite unlikely that Arnold's enthusiasm was singularly centered on those metaphors, and an earlier reference to Robertson in a letter to his mother points to a different issue in a quite relevant way: “the English do not really like being forced to widen their view, and to place history, politics, and other things in connexion with religion,” he said, after having asserted that Dr. Arnold's “greatness consists in his bringing such a torrent of freshness into English religion by placing history and politics in connexion with it. …”²⁴ In that sense, Arnold was, in these chapters, doing very much what “the English do not really like.” He undoubtedly took great pleasure in making an original contribution to the intellectual tradition in which his father's “greatness” was rooted, while at the same time redeeming these metaphors, Hebraism and Hellenism, and converting history into poetic myth—the “two points of influence [between which] moves our world” (163-64)—thus giving to “this idea a more general form still, in which it will have a yet larger range of application” (163). This enlarged perspective suggests that the “truth” of these chapters is as much methodological as substantive, that the “meaning” is inherent in the “manner,” thereby focusing one's critical attention on the exemplary methodological model by which this enlargement is achieved.

“Hebraism and Hellenism” is a superbly well-articulated example of the rhetorical use of the archetypal myth. Having initiated the book in what he perceived as the archetypal contention between the desire to “know” and the desire to “do,” he then sees that conflict realizing itself in the history of Western civilization. He then chooses the two races with the most classic literary embodiments of their life-apprehensions still having wide currency to give root-names to these contenders for the spirit of man. Like Romanticism and Classicism, they are ever-present in the culture under study; therefore, in a useful, non-literal way, Hebraism becomes a manifestation of the Romantic impulse, with Puritanism one example of Romanticism seen from its obverse side, while Hellenism becomes a manifestation of the classical impulse, with a rigid and exclusive form of Humanism, corresponding to Puritanism in religion, as its negative counterpart.

The role of the Arnold-persona in the chapter is to free these metaphors and the human history which they should vitalize from rigidity and exclusivity, providing the reader-protagonist with an imaginative model for perceiving man's essential nature negotiating its way through time. His purpose is “a rhetorical purpose” (164) set against the inadequate rhetorical purposes of other historian-moralists like Robertson, Heine, and ourselves. What he primarily illustrates is the “rhetorical use” (164) of a classical method, having analogues in both Plato and Aristotle, of developing an exemplary substantive insight (an archetypal contention in man's very nature) in a richly textured metaphoric way, as he makes all necessary distinctions (distinguo) and concessions (concessio), preserving the integrity of the insight for “a yet larger range of application” (163) without having recourse to tautological, question-begging definitions and the “inter-dependent, subordinate, and coherent principles”²⁵ of the so-called philosophical systematists.

Having clarified his thesis as to the archetypal character of the contention (¶'s 1 & 2) and revealed his “rhetorical purpose” (¶ 3), the Arnold-persona characterizes in a dense, accretive fashion the contrast between the Greek and the Hebrew notions of felicity (¶ 4). He obviates any confusion between Hebrews and Christians by showing that “Christianity changed nothing in the essential bent of Hebraism …” (¶ 5), thus underscoring his conversion of a racial designation into a moral metaphor. After again emphasizing the archetypal character of Hellenism and Hebraism, he insists strongly on “the divergence of line, and of operation with which they proceed” (¶ 6). He emphasizes yet a third time the archetype at the center of his conception, then delineates the Hellenic ideal of “beauty and rationalness” and the Hebraic unease with this ideal in its consciousness of “something which thwarts and spoils all our efforts” in pursuit of such an ideal (¶ 7).

“This something is sin”: from the beginning, sin has been “a positive, active entity”—a “hunchback seated on the shoulders,” the incubus, the cruel captor—of Hebraism (¶ 8). Though Hellenism was not in any absolute sense unsound, it was not, at the moment of Christ's conversion of the style of Hebraism, adequate, and “Hebraism ruled the world,” a world that sought self-conquest by being “baptized into a death” (¶ 9). For a time and especially in its “wholesomest and most necessary” moments, Christianity was so wide, effective, and beneficent a force that Hellenism “was foolishness compared with it” (¶ 10). But it is a gross though common error to make either Hebraism or Hellenism “the law of human development” when, in fact, “they are, each of them, contributions to human development” (¶ 11). For example, neither Hebraism (vide Corinthians XV) nor Hellenism (vide the Phaedo) has dealt adequately with the “great idea” of immortality and with other great ideas that rise in their “generality before the human spirit” (¶ 12).

After emphasizing for a fourth time the archetypal quality of his central images, a reiteration which suggests the prototypical character of his rhetorical method, the narrator discusses the Renascence in Europe as “an uprising and re-instatement” of Hellenism with the Reformation as its “subordinate and secondary side,” while in England the Reformation was its primary manifestation. He says that the English Reformation “never consciously grasped and applied” the Hellenic idea of the European Renascence and that its “pretensions to an intellectual superiority [over Catholicism] are in general quite illusionary” (¶ 13). But the Renascence as a whole, despite its “splendid fruits,” manifested Hellenism's old weakness on the moral side, and a reaction against it set in (¶ 14). This reaction was peculiarly strong among the English and their descendants in America, who, despite their identity with philological and ethnological Indo-Europeanism and its imaginative response to “the multiform aspects of the problem of life,” have yet a strong affinity for the Semitic predilection for “assuredness, … tenacity, … and intensity” in matters of “practical life and moral conduct” (¶ 15). In consequence, Puritanism arose with considerable ferocity in the seventeenth century and created, in England, a movement that “contravened” the primary movement of post-Renaissance Europe, which was Hellenic. Hence, the problem: “Everywhere we see the beginnings of confusion, and we want a clue to some sound order and authority.” Hence, too, the solution: “This we can only get by going back upon the actual instincts and forces which rule our life, seeing them as they really are, connecting them with other instincts and forces, and enlarging our whole view and rule of life” (¶ 16).

Despite the undeniable importance of the chapter's substantive content, its format, i.e., its methodological content, is even more important. Its metaphors are absorbed into a yet larger metaphor. The clue that we “can only get by going back upon the actual instincts and forces which rule our life” is not commensurate with Hebraism and Hellenism: they are illustrative rather than conclusive, valuable as an initiation into a process that is itself the goal. That process is a re-creation in a transformed fashion of the finest legacy left by Socrates—his method, which is itself a metaphor of openness of mind and flexibility of intelligence put to the most conscientious of moral purposes, self-knowledge. The Socratic method is a structure in which manner and meaning ideally reciprocate each other and enable us all to “do the thing shall breed the thought.” And that is the idea of the Socratic method.

“Hebraism and Hellenism” shows how saturated by Plato Culture and Anarchy is. But it is not merely Plato modernized; it is Plato in a new and original context that erases the sterility of re-statement and gives Arnold the opportunity to co-create with Plato, to employ fully his literary-spiritual heritage while adding to it. Rooted in the scientific theories of the philologists and ethnologists, his dramatic historical-metaphorical fiction of man moving between Hebraic and Hellenic poles enables him to add Saint Paul to Plato, creating a fresh myth of Western man. Moreover, it provides him with the opportunity to add Aristotle to Plato (Chapters II and III added to Chapters I and IV) and to re-establish, in a world increasingly enamored of the Hegelian dialectical formula, the call upon our attention of a more fluid and culturally serviceable Socratic method. Finally, the “science of origins” which had arisen in France and was gaining increased attention among the new historians could, Arnold shows us, be fruitfully employed at a poetic distance that saved it from the methodological rigidity that tended to make it dangerously fanciful.

Architecturally, “Porro Unum Est Necessarium” completes the curve of Culture and Anarchy. It begins to gather together tropes from Chapter I, to echo more insistently its metaphors of machinery, and to work again variations on the theme of truth's relationship to beauty: “But many things are not seen in their true nature and as they really are, unless they are seen as beautiful” (184). The literary future to which it looks is not Chapter VI, which is a sort of casebook or table of political applications, but Literature and Dogma, the author's next classic critical text. Hebraism and Hellenism are still working metaphors, but they are knitted into the text's overall patterns of imagery and are subdued to the book's general, ongoing arguments. In the final paragraph, the Arnold-persona enacts an intimate sort of vale to the reader who has come the whole route:

And now, therefore, when we [you and I] are accused of [a rehearsal of the chief charges] …, we shall not be so much confounded and embarrassed what to answer for ourselves. We shall boldly say that … the best way is … getting our friends and countrymen to seek culture, to let their consciousness play freely round their present operations and the stock notions on which they are founded, show what these are like, and how related to the intelligible law of things, and auxiliary to true human perfection.

(191)

Or, in the sense of the Buddhist fable with which he had begun On Translating Homer, having been converted, convert.

The natural outgrowth of Literature and Dogma from this chapter seems, in retrospect, almost inevitable. Arnold took his text from the Vulgate version of St. Luke's Gospel 10:42—“But one thing is needful”—and he wrote to his publisher, “I think with great pleasure of the Nonconformists reading in this month's Cornhill my discussion of their favourite text with them.”²⁶ What he is basically criticizing is the Puritan myth of the magic wand, that is, the use of the Bible as a mechanical talisman, and some of the critical points he makes will be developed fully in Literature and Dogma, which is an elaborate exercise in the redemption of language. He applied to St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans a principle that Pater would later dramatize in the opening paragraph to the “Conclusion” to The Renaissance: “all writings …, even the most precious writings and the most fruitful, must inevitably, from the very nature of things, be but contributions to human thought and human development, which extend wider than they do” (181).²⁷ He links the idea of resurrection—“risen with Christ”—with his earlier discussion of “baptized into a death” (170), showing that the Puritan conception of resurrection “after the physical death of the body” is “mechanical and remote” compared with the apostle's “living and near conception of a resurrection now,” which is what St. Paul means in nine cases out of ten when he “thinks and speaks of resurrection” (183).

When Arnold in “Porro Unum Est Necessarium” applies the principle of literary exegesis to the language of the Bible, he finds that St. Paul, “in trying to follow with his analysis of such profound power and originality some of the most delicate, intricate, obscure, and contradictory workings and states of the human spirit,” used language “in the connected and fluid way” in which literature always uses language (182). He says that homo unius libri est homo nulli libri, the man of one book is the man of no book: “No man, who knows nothing else, knows even his Bible” (184). Perhaps most fascinating of all, he implants the idea that Christ was a literary critic of the text of the Old Testament, renewing its original intuition. Christianity, he says, “transformed and renewed Hebraism by criticising a fixed rule, which had become mechanical, and had thus lost its vital motive power …” (187-88).

In their most generalized form, the metaphors of “Porro Unum Est Necessarium” express an anxiety over a visible tendency toward the monism that, in both its intellectual and its psychological manifestations, has been so defining a characteristic of the modern period as well as one of its most curious paradoxes: as the need for circumspection has become more urgent, the movement toward single-mindedness has become more pronounced, almost as though increased scientism had resulted in mental constriction. The narrative persona shows a sensitivity to the opposite danger, the moral paralysis resulting from an over-refinement of man's analytical powers that concerned such writers as Sienkiewicz (Ohne Lehr), Goncharov (Oblomov), and Conrad (Victory): “The notion of this sort of equipollency in man's mode of activity may lead to moral relaxation; what we do not make our one thing needful, we may come to treat not enough as if it were needful, though it is indeed very needful and at the same time very hard” (185). But he considers his “Mr. Smith” as the more widely representative and fatal “type” and the “havoc” made in his life more largely cautionary. Mr. Smith's high-minded but grotesque Puritan “fetish,” his fear of perdition, had provided entry for the less high-minded though equally grotesque fetish of making money, supplying the paradigm of its “violently morbid” development: “It is because the second-named [fear of perdition] of these two master-concerns presents to us the one thing needful in so fixed, narrow, and mechanical a way, that so ignoble a fellow master-concern to it as the first-named [making money] becomes possible; and, having been once admitted, takes the same rigid and absolute character as the other” (186-87). It looks backward to Carlyle's characterization of “the hell of the English” as not making money and forward to Tawney's Protestantism and the Rise of Capitalism. Most of all, however, it captures with horrifying vividness that stultifying literalness which, long after Biblical fundamentalism has drifted into the background, still possesses the fetish-fixated materialist mind.

The suggestion that “Our Liberal Practitioners” is external to the basic architectural unity of Culture and Anarchy does not mean that it is of minimal significance. On the contrary, it supplies a sort of practicum by which the narrator can show how his principles apply to the current social and political situation and by which the reader can appraise the genuine usefulness of the method. Three of the issues (the disestablishment of the Irish Church, the Real Estate Intestacy Bill, and the attempt to enable a man to marry his deceased wife's sister) are pretty much lost to the current reader in the history of the times, but this has two distinct advantages: it shows how transient were most of the concerns that provoked such political passion and induced their advocates to costume them in such deceptively unctuous language; and it allows us to be attentive and dispassionate toward both the issue and the method, having no interest in the outcome to conflict with our dispassion. The fourth issue, that of free trade, is very much alive still, and this permits us to judge another crucial quality of Arnold's approach—the adequacy with which he develops the issue within the limits of rhetorical propriety which he has imposed upon the book. His narrator expresses satisfaction on the question: “For often by Hellenising we seem to subvert stock Conservative notions and usages more effectually than they subvert them by Hebraising” (220). But the question remains: does Arnold, within the space of fewer than ten pages, give adequate perspective to the issue of free trade as compared, for example, with Ruskin's much more expansive treatment of it in Unto This Last?

The answer to the rather surprising question is that he does, and the reason is that which Arnold gives: the voice of this critique Hellenizes, while that of Ruskin Hebraizes. How to think is Arnold's subject; what to think is Ruskin's. The ineptness of the official world's measuring and massaging of the issue by escaping into reassurance and irrelevance is the focus of Arnold's attention, while Ruskin attacks the rank immorality that results from the institutionalization of the system and the tenuous philosophy upon which it is founded. It is not that Arnold is less sensitive than Ruskin on either issue. His stunning quotations from the Times (211, 213-14) and his pinpointing of the “two axioms” of “our free-trade friends” (211-12) are evidence enough that he saw both the intellectual blankness and the philosophical chaos of the situation. He also opens a sufficient window on the vivid reality of human degradation: “such a multitude of miserable, sunken, and ignorant human beings” (216); “children eaten up with disease, half-sized, half-fed, half-clothed, neglected by their parents, without health, without home, without hope” (217).

But it is Arnold's premise that how intensely he feels about the social course the world is following under the banner of free trade is not as crucial at the present time as how clearly people in general, especially people in policy-making roles and their constituents, think about it; it is, he holds, “right reason” rather than plague-struck passion that ultimately effects “the will of God.” If one considers this altogether too Apollonian for a Dionysian world, he may yet recognize that it is the best and most helpful alternative in a world showing ever-stronger chaotic and violent tendencies (“anarchy”); that it embodies a steady faith in modern pluralistic man, the child of the Reformation-Renaissance who has lost his fundamentalism while clinging desperately and mechanically to his individualism; and that it is not Mill's sense of the diminishment of eccentricity but Arnold's sense of the emergence of chaotic fanaticism that more precisely identifies the greatest danger of our time.

In the brief “Conclusion” to Culture and Anarchy, the Arnold-persona shows how little capable he is of intellectual drabness or rhetorical perfunctoriness. At the end of a long, necessarily reiterative, and classically controlled literary demonstration from which popularly emotive appeals have been carefully excluded and into which a reader-protagonist has been drawn with utmost gradualness requiring great and precarious tact, because the process of redaction (culture) appears at first sight to be so grossly incommensurate with the dimensions of the problem (anarchy), the narrator yet holds steady, neither simply rehearsing what has already been said nor yielding to the enticement of peroration, thus rupturing the tone of clearheaded faith that has been carefully established and maintained. Instead, and by analogy with music, he reinvokes the dominant themes of the preceding movements, as he brings them to imaginative resolution in a way that is both familiar and new.

The identification between the Arnold-persona and the reader-protagonist is now assumed to be complete and operates fully as an assumption, “we” saturating the conclusion in a new and quite intimate way. The articulation of faith in ourselves makes possible the articulation of an intenser faith in the sacredness of the “idea of the State,” our collective best selves, and, in an oblique analogy with the sacraments of religion, that sacred efficacy is placed above and seen as independent of the moral condition of those administering it. As in religion, too, faith enables the Ideal State to function in its imperfect, quite ordinary present condition just as the Ideal Church is enabled to function in a quite comparable condition (224). Such is the utopianism of our awakened best selves that there will always be a discrepancy between even our best realizations and our ideal conceptions.

So our real problem is not the discrepancy between the best and the ideal, but between the good and the best, and it is only after we have had some experience of the best that the relative closeness of even the good to anarchy will be perceptible. Moreover, the two states of mind denied to “believers in culture” (226, emphasis added) are the same as those denied to Christians in Christianity's most gracious and debonair period, that is, “despondency and violence,” because they turn man in the direction from which redemption can never hope to come, self-destruction and the destruction of the order upon which even survival depends.

It is in this spiritualized ambience that the Arnold-persona separates himself, for the one and only time, from Aristotle. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle had stressed the idealism of the young and had seemed to despair of the conversion of the great “mass of mankind”: “‘to their lives, who can give another and better rhythm?’” (225). Putting his faith in the spiritual contribution that “the long discipline of Hebraism” has made to Western man since Aristotle's day, the Arnold-persona refuses to “admit and rest in the desponding sentence of Aristotle” and “dare[s] to augur” better for modern man than Aristotle had augured for his Hellenic contemporaries.²⁸ Finally, the charge which the Arnold-persona delivers to the reader-protagonists, whose work now becomes that of “the sovereign educators,” is an apostolic charge. In language suffused with the quiet energy of poetry rather than the inflation of self-conceit, he ends where he had begun, serenely orchestrating the spirit of both Jesus and Socrates: “Docile echoes of the eternal voice, pliant organs of the infinite will, such workers are going along with the essential movement of the world; and this is their strength, and their happy and divine fortune” (229).²⁹

No Englishman of equal critical genius has ever shown himself more intellectually just than Matthew Arnold. It was not easy for a man of such genial, lively spirits as Arnold to spend one's lifetime taking the moral (the intellectual, the aesthetic, the behavioral) inventory of one's contemporaries, especially of that segment or class of one's contemporaries with which he most strongly identified. Yet, it was just that role that Arnold's sense of conscientious duty made him play. A gift of insight peculiarly his own made it incumbent upon him to lend out his gift, not because it was singularly and dogmatically true, but because it was distinctively cogent, and hence needed, in an expansive and confused age, to be considered. Those who find him complacent here, extravagant there, should consider that, in an ardent crusade pursued so outspokenly for thirty-five years, the surprising thing is not that there are grounds for critical dissatisfaction, but that those grounds are ultimately so few and so relative.

While his Socratic querying was relentless, he offered no systematic codification as an alternative to the one he was challenging. Therefore, he did not create a “school” of thought, a systematic philosophy with which a substantial number of persons could identify and which would, in turn, enjoy the quantitative weight of their numbers. Like Plato and Aristotle, who were the chief models of his ideal of human rationalness and of his intellectual method, his “system” could be organized only by the individual and only within himself. To be an “Arnoldian,” then, means, not that one has adopted a set of substantive beliefs. Rather, it signifies that one has come to the general position that his great happiness is to be found in the creative activation of those resources of his purely human nature not dependent for their satisfaction on his animalilty and that he has recognized the existence of a significant number of sacred texts which, if one will simply gain access to them and learn the secret of their way of looking at life, will serve as profoundly affective guides to growth in these peculiarly satisfying, non-sensual dimensions of one's humanity. It is not the saint that Arnold would make, nor simply the “Gentleman” who is the “great but ordinary end” of Newman's university. It is, in Aristotle's terms, a person fulfilling the law of his being individually and contributing to society's fulfilment of the law of its collective being.

This is why reading is the keystone of Arnold's three-part process of self-humanization. Great books (a) look at life (b) in a quintessential way; hence, they enable us to reach out to life unimpeded by the barriers of local time and local space, as they offer us various exemplary ways of looking at it. The counterpart to reading is observing, seeing for ourselves the clusters of live-experience available to us in our own time and space. The two ways of seeing are then fused through the third element in the process—thinking—by which we develop our individual insights into the life we get to know through the modes of perceiving instracted from the books we read. Thus, Arnoldianism is no more nor less than a classical critical process rooted, not in a system of thought, but in a faith in the self-redemptive resources of man. The locus of one's critical dissatisfaction with such a process should be either the process or the faith as measured against a preferable ideal or in comparison with some other writer who has followed a similar line of endeavor to better general effect. This is what makes Culture and Anarchy such a crucial literary text, not just in Arnold studies, but in the whole critical enterprise: it provides, in exemplary form, the fullest direct, internal evidence of both the Arnoldian ideal and the Arnoldian process. What is even more edifying in a critical moralist, it shows us to what severe standards a work of criticism should aspire while subjecting itself to just such standards.

Notes

1. That is, the two introductory paragraphs to “Culture and Its Enemies” which, when Arnold gave the divisions of the book the titles we now know, he separated off and named “Introduction.” All references to Culture and Anarchy are to The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965), Volume V, and are given in parentheses in the text.

2. The pieces collected into Friendship's Garland, a sort of companion-volume to Culture and Anarchy, had chiefly appeared there.

3. Arnold's New Poems appeared in 1867.

4. Fitzjames Stephen's unfriendly remarks about Thomas Arnold which had prompted her son to write “Rugby Chapel” were still fresh and painful to Mrs. Arnold.

5. Letters of Matthew Arnold 1848-1888, ed. G. W. E. Russell (New York: Macmillan, 1895), I, 367.

6. Letters, I, 390, emphasis added.

7. December 5, 1867, as quoted in Super, V, 414.

8. November 25, 1865, as quoted in Super, V, 414.

9. April 5, 1869, as quoted in Super, V, 415.

10. Letters, II, 13.

11. Arnold had himself used both the metaphor and the psychological-moral state in “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse.”

12. For a different view leading to very different extrapolations, see Walter J. Whipple, “Matthew Arnold, Dialectician,” University of Toronto Quarterly, XXXII (October 1962), 1-26.

13. J. Dover Wilson, in the introduction to his edition of Culture and Anarchy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932), has elaborated the transfer by Swift to Arnold of Aesop's fable of the Spider and the Bee (“Sweetness and Light”).

14. See William E. Buckler, Matthew Arnold's Books: Toward a Publishing Diary (Geneva and Paris: E. Droz, 1958), pp. [85]-92.

15. Buckler, p. 87.

16. It is perhaps unnecessary to remind those familiar with John Holloway's fine chapter on Arnold in The Victorian Sage (London: Macmillan, 1953) that, though this essay touches many of the same terms—e.g., persuasion, techniques of dismantling the enemies of culture, irony—our conceptualizations of the essential literariness of Culture and Anarchy are fundamentally different.

17. Buckler, p. 86.

18. Super (esp. pp. 408-17, 422-25) gives a substantial representation of these and points to the very detailed studies upon which he has drawn.

19. For example, Lionel Trilling, Matthew Arnold (New York: W. W. Norton, 1939), pp. 259-65.

20. One of the rare limitations of the Super edition can be seen in the way “style” is indexed. Only entries referring to discussions of style are given, the important contextual uses of the metaphor being ignored. Thus we are disappointed in our hope that the index will work as a kind of simplified concordance.

21. Thomas Hardy, Preface to The Dynasts.

22. Patrick J. McCarthy's Matthew Arnold and the Three Classes (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964) suffers from inadequate attention to this critical principle.

23. Letters, II, 13.

24. Letters, I, 362.

25. This is the phrase, used reiteratively with ironic intent, by which Frederic Harrison's indictment of “Culture and Its Enemies” is pommeled. See Super, pp. 423-24, for a précis of this part of Harrison's “Culture: a Dialogue.”

26. Buckler, p. 89.

27. Pater's sentence is this: “That clear, perpetual outline of face and limb is but an image of ours, under which we group them—a design in a web, the actual threads of which pass out beyond it.”

28. Arnold's hope of self-transcendence also has a more practical strain than Plato's, who “expressly denies to the man of practical virtue merely [‘That partaking of the divine life’], of self-conquest with any other motive than that of perfect intellectual vision” (p.167). Arnold retains the ideal of “the φιλομαpήz”—“the lover of pure knowledge”—but throughout Culture and Anarchy, he insists on its practical serviceability to the nation.

29. The “Preface,” like “Our Liberal Practioners,” is not organic with the architectural design of Culture and Anarchy. Arnold no doubt saw it as an opportunity to do some good and to strip away some of the misconceptions that had accreted around his positions as taken in the serialization of the book. There are many good things well said, but the chief new inputs are his call for a reprinting of Bishop Wilson's Maxims, his putting of the matter of the United States' separation of Church and State and its educational system back into proper perspective, and his tentative suggestions, based on the situation of the reformed Church of England during the reign of the Tudors, for a re-union of the Nonconformists and the Church of England and the association, through the principle of establishment, of the chief churches of Ireland.