SOURCE: “Matthew Arnold, The Apostle of Culture,” in Priests of Culture: A Study of Matthew Arnold and Henry James, Peter Lang, 1999, pp. 23-67.

[In the following essay, Sterner studies Arnold's conception of culture and the implications of this ideal for his evaluation of modernity.]

Culture is then properly described not as having its origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection. It moves by the force, not merely or primarily of the scientific passion for pure knowledge, but also of the moral and social passion for doing good. … there is no better motto which it can have than these words of Bishop Wilson: “To make reason and the will of God prevail!”

—Matthew Arnold

Poor Matt, he’s gone to Heaven, no doubt—but he won’t like God.

—Robert Louis Stevenson

The smile of paradox may be glimpsed in the conjunction of Stevenson's affectionate joke with Matthew Arnold's sober proclamation of culture's destiny: “to make reason and the will of God prevail!”¹ If Arnold has indeed “gone to Heaven,” I am sure that he would smile with us, for paradox suited his mind. The balancing in tension of opposing tendencies, the moderation of extremes, the mind turning on itself—these are quintessential traits of Arnold's habit of mind and of the “modern spirit” he grew to celebrate. This effort to rest in tension is itself paradoxical and points to one of the outstanding contrasts of his life's works: the “sad lucidity” reflecting upon “the something that infects the world”² of the early, poetical Arnold set against the blithe assurance and cheerful urbanity of the later critical prose. The presence of this contrast has been a challenge to his critics, and I believe it contains the secret of his continuing relevance and appeal.

More than a century after Arnold's death in 1888, there has been no waning of that appeal.³ His most recent biographer, Park Honan, calls him “the Victorian who matters the most” and goes on to quote Arnold writing of Oxford and of himself in Culture and Anarchy that “we have kept up our communications with the future.”⁴ Oddly enough, part of the success of his communication, not only to his contemporaries but to subsequent generations of critics, lies in the very ambiguity and vagueness for which he has been criticized. “In Arnold's prose,” Honan points out, “a verbal term throws out its magnetic field and is modified by the field of an opposing word.”⁵ Since for Arnold the needle of truth would fluctuate somewhere midway between these polarities, he was able to exasperate his critics by hopping back and forth across his compass with an agility rivaled only by his bland assurance that he was, after all, only disinterestedly pointing the way to truth. William Robbins has expressed Arnold's ability to maneuver amid the ambiguities of his thought in graphic terms:

It is true, as John Holloway says, that Arnold “had no metaphysics which might form apparent premises for the moral principles he wished to assert.” Whether this is a damaging criticism is another matter; to Arnold it was not. … The fact is that Arnold has continued to worry both the theologian and the philosopher, turning up all over again after he has been put in his place or disposed of for the last time. … Roped in by dogma, padlocked by logic, and shut up in a dark metaphysical cupboard, he would always escape Houdini-like, stroll back to the footlights, and urbanely tell the audience that such conventional bonds were child's play to a supple man of culture.⁶

However vague or doubtful in substance his doctrine of culture might be, moreover, there is no doubting its hopefulness. In his prose Arnold holds out to the uncertain and doubting reader the hope of reason. Beaming with fatherly good humor, he patiently assures us that with a little good will and pragmatic perseverance we can make our way through any uncertainty; he offers to save us even the consolation of faith once faith itself is gone. His air of calm superiority, once infuriating to his opponents, can be strangely reassuring to a reader fresh from the wastelands of modernity. His proffered “culture” is after all, as Honan says, a process of “psychological becoming” whereby one “moves towards realizing his mental, emotional, and creative potential, or his humanity,”⁷ and so what if it is a bit vague and uncertain?—its uplifting tone promises that, however blurred at the edges or soft at the center, in time it will become what it promises and carry us along in its triumph. Offering this genial reassurance, Arnold's temper and style thus combine to disguise a vagueness of definition, while the vagueness of definition itself protects his doctrine of culture from definitive assault; its very vagueness in a curious way becomes its masterful touch. Together with his hopeful temper and genial style, it has contributed to his continued appeal.

But surely the most important reason for his enduring relevance to us, as “the Victorian who matters the most,” is that, as Homan goes on to summarize, “His poetry seems to give us to ourselves, even as it portrays a modern mind, sensitive to the historic past and to its own past. …”⁸ Robert Langbaum, writing on the problem of identity in modern literature, strikes a similar note, declaring that what “Arnold as a poet can give us that the romanticists cannot, and that even Tennyson and Browning cannot, is a convincing rendition of modern urban numbness and alienation”; he was, Langbaum adds, “the first Victorian poet to deal with the modern problem of loss of self.”⁹ Whatever the vagueness or inconsistency to which Arnold succumbs in the course of his efforts, it is in grappling with modernity that he matters most to us. I remarked at the outset that he “grew to celebrate” modernity because his early poetry could hardly be characterized as a celebration. “Perhaps more than any poet of his time,” Lionel Trilling writes, “Arnold saw what was happening”; but his poetic response to what was happening, Trilling adds, “is a threnody for the lives of men smirched by modernity, of men who have become, in the words of Empedocles, living men no more, nothing but ‘naked, eternally restless mind.’”¹⁰ This phrase of Arnold's, taken from “Empedocles on Etna,”¹¹ portrays the plight of modern man, which for Arnold is a condition of mind and not limited to recent time; it points to the central characteristic of modernity for Arnold: the unanchored mind.

Seen positively, a mind “unanchored” is free from past errors and the constraint of custom; no longer bounded by ignorance or narrow prejudice, the mind expands its quest for truth with a new freedom and critical maturity, guided by “one irresistible force, which is gradually making its way everywhere, removing old conditions and imposing new, altering long-fixed habits, undermining venerable institutions, even modifying national character: the modern spirit.”¹² The positive features of this modern spirit Arnold first identified in his inaugural lecture after being elected at 34 to the Chair of Poetry at Oxford in 1857; the first to deliver the lecture in English, he fittingly entitled it “On the Modern Element in Literature”:

One of the most characteristic outward features of a modern age … is the banishment of the ensigns of war and bloodshed from the intercourse of civil life. … With the disappearance of the constant means of offense the occasions of offense diminish; society at last acquires repose, confidence, and free activity. An important inward characteristic, again, is the growth of a tolerant spirit; that spirit which is the offspring of an enlarged knowledge; a spirit patient of the diversities of habits and opinions. Other characteristics are the multiplication of the convenences of life, the formation of taste, the capacity for refined pursuits. And this leads to the supreme characteristic of all: the intellectual maturity of man himself; the tendency to observe facts with a critical spirit; to search for their law, not to wander among them at random, to judge by the rule of reason, not by the impulse of prejudice or caprice.¹³

While possible survivors of the twentieth century might question the “banishment of the ensigns of war and bloodshed” as the modern age's “characteristic outward feature,” it is really the “inward” features that are important to his definition of modernity. They include that inner flexibility of consciousness, the widening of possibilities consequent upon freedom from convention, that Arnold stressed in another key passage for understanding his conception of modernity from an essay on Heinrich Heine:

Modern times find themselves with an immense system of institutions, established facts, accredited dogmas, customs, rules, which have come to them from times not modern. In this system their life has to be carried forward; yet they have a sense that this system is not of their own creation; that it by no means corresponds exactly with the wants of their actual life, that, for them, it is customary, not rational. The awakening of this sense is the awakening of the modern spirit. The modern spirit is now awake almost everywhere; the sense of want of correspondence between the forms of modern Europe and its spirit, between the new wine of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the old bottles of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, or even of the sixteenth and seventeenth. … To remove this want of correspondence is beginning to be the settled endeavor of most persons of good sense. Dissolvents of the old European system of dominant ideas and facts we must all be, all of us who have any power of working; what we have to study is that we may not be acrid dissolvents of it.¹⁴

The hint at the end of this passage that the dissolution of the old order may not be without its dangers is echoed a little further on in the essay in Arnold's tribute to “that grand dissolvent,” his cherished Goethe:

Goethe's profound, imperturbable naturalism is absolutely fatal to all routine thinking; he puts the standard, once for all, inside every man instead of outside of him; when he is told, such a thing must be so, there is immense authority and custom in favor of its being so, it has been held to be so for a thousand years, he answers with Olympian politeness, “But is it so? is it so to me?” Nothing could be more really subversive of the foundations on which the old European order rested; and it may be remarked that no persons are so radically detached from this order, no persons so thoroughly modern, as those who have felt Goethe's influence most deeply.¹⁵

With the standard placed inside each man, he may look out upon the world from within his own self to question (with “Olympian politeness”), “Is it so to me?” But his detachment is equally Olympian; and this detachment and isolation, so hauntingly captured for generations of moderns in “To Marguerite—Continued” and “Dover Beach,” characterize the negative features of modernity, its element of pain:

                    Yes! in the sea of life enisled,
With echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
We mortal millions live alone.
Oh! then a longing like despair
Is to their farthest caverns sent;
For surely once, they feel, we were
Parts of a single continent!
Now round us spreads the watery plain—
Oh might our marges meet again!(16)
… for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.(17)

Here that modern world—“so various” and “so new” as to deprive the speaker of “joy” and “peace” along with “certitude” (which has dwindled with the sea of faith)—shows its depressing and frightening dimensions. It is a world against which Arnold as a young man himself cried out when he wrote to his close friend Arthur Clough:

These are damned times. Everything is against one—the height to which knowledge is come, the spread of luxury, our physical enervation, the absence of great natures, the unavoidable contact with millions of small ones, newspapers, cities, light profligate friends, moral desperadoes like Carlyle, our own selves, and the sickening consciousness of our difficulties.¹⁸

Arnold was then 26, a struggling young poet, and much of his poetry would express this negative response to modernity and attempt to find escape from or an answer to the disorienting flux of freedom.

The “damned times” in which Arnold found himself witnessed, in the inner life of its heart and mind, the decline of the authority and unity of Christianity, the collapse of what historians are fond of calling the “medieval synthesis.” Arnold perceived that collapse, as Park Honan observes, to be the “chief fact about modern Europe”:

Since no Christian church could reassert its authority or enforce its dogmas, a psychological vacuum remained. In consequence, Arnold concluded, man lacks a deep identity; he suffers from disorientation and ennui, shifting and unsatisfying feelings, shallowness of being, dissatisfaction with his own endeavors—from debilities caused by the lack of any compelling authority for the spiritual life.¹⁹

Or as Arnold himself writes, in contrast to the time of Dante or even of Shakespeare, for whom “the basis of spiritual life was given,” by the time of Goethe “Europe had lost her basis of spiritual life. …”²⁰

Cut loose from traditional anchors, prejudice, and custom, modern consciousness is cut loose from meaning and purpose in life, for it is in the connections one makes or perceives to exist between oneself, others, and the world that meaning consists. Moderns play a price for their freedom from those vital connections:

The predominance of thought, of reflection, in modern epochs is not without its penalties; in the unsound, in the over-tasked, in the over-sensitive, it has produced the most painful, the most lamentable results; it has produced a state of feeling unknown to less enlightened but perhaps healthier epochs—the feeling of depression, the feeling of ennui.²¹

Writing from a positive, more hopeful outlook than had been his at an earlier point in life, Arnold neglects to add in this essay that he is here describing his own earlier condition. It is a condition in which one's “feelings” are in conflict, characterized by anxiety and frustration, because one's life is given no clear direction or meaning by one's confused and restless “thoughts”: reason questions and feeling desires, but those desires find no answers in reason. This disjunction is the very same as that to be identified later in T. S. Eliot's famous phrase as a “dissociation of sensibility”; its tendency is to reduce the artist into neurotic forms of self-expression and generally to cripple the modern self with alienation from within (Langbaum's “loss of self”).²²

The other historical dimension of modernity, paralleling the decline of Christianity, is the rise of industrial and materialistic civilization, which adds its outer pressures to the alienation within the modern mind. It is these pressures that Arnold cites in his litany of complaints in the letter to Clough (the “spread of luxury,” “physical enervation,” “newspapers,” “cities”). In their divorce of life from the physical presence and routines of nature, they parallel the modern mind's metaphysical divorce of values from nature represented in the rise of scientific consciousness. Finally, the social and political stress accompanying all of these changes, and democracy's rising challenge to structures and customs inherited from the disintegrated medieval world view, add further dimensions of stress and uncertainty to modern life.

From this state of alienation and detachment, occasioned by the decline of the unified Christian cosmos and the rise of scientific naturalism and critical reason amid the changing social and political environment of urban industrial and commercial civilization, the modern spirit cries out for “deliverance.” And since the root difficulty is the inner experience of the unanchored mind—the self freed from traditional supports and connections giving purpose and meaning to life—it is an “intellectual deliverance” that is most needed:

An intellectual deliverance is the peculiar demand of those ages which are called modern. … Such a deliverance is emphatically, whether we will or no, the demand of the age in which we ourselves live. All intellectual pursuits our age judges according to their power of helping to satisfy this demand; of all studies it asks, above all, the question, how far they can contribute to this deliverance.

… The demand arises, because our present age has around it a copious and complex present, and behind it a copious and complex past; it arises, because the present age exhibits to the individual man who contemplates it the spectacle of a vast multitude of facts awaiting and inviting his comprehension. The deliverance consists in man's comprehension of this present and past.²³

In effect, a reconnection: if not precisely a new anchor, at least a positioning of the self in a significant cosmos so as to constitute a modern ethos which would serve to reconnect the self to that cosmos; and by reconnecting him to the world outside himself, to restore the sense of meaning and purpose to his life, to offer his feelings a hopeful direction on which to fix their desires and his mind an intelligible cosmos on which to exercise its rule of reason. Then the poet would find words to unite his heart and mind; together with other men of culture similarly “delivered,” they would be able to “see life steadily, and see it whole.”²⁴—which means to see it integral and harmonious, no longer fragmented in lonely isolation, adrift without meaning.

Whether the world was ever as integrated and “whole” as Arnold envisions it to have been is problematic at best. But the point here is not the accuracy of his historical estimate; it is his identification of modernity with both that loss of unity and that gain of critical independence. Arnold felt both the pain of the former and the promise of the latter. He not only identifies the key features of modernity but also represents in himself a range of possible responses to that condition of being modern, felt sometimes as a “sickness” and then again as a hopeful opportunity. In sympathetically representing both reactions to a condition in which we still find ourselves, Arnold has continued ever since to stir responses across a wide intellectual spectrum.

MODERNITY AND THE CONTINUITY OF ARNOLD'S THOUGHT

Joseph Carroll in his study of The Cultural Theory of Matthew Arnold focuses on Arnold's response to modernity as the key variable in distinguishing the early Arnold's poetical achievement from the later Arnold of the critical prose. In the early poetry, Carroll argues, Arnold succeeds in establishing “the problems to which all of his later, critical work responds,”²⁵ but he is nonetheless unable to reach a satisfactory resolution of them, since none of his tentative responses (stoic withdrawal, mystical union in nature, pragmatic moderation of desire) succeeds in resolving the plight of modern consciousness: the mind's unanchored state, its awareness of its own freedom and the absence of any prescriptive or authoritative relation to the world outside of it, of any connection affording purpose or enduring value. This dilemma is most thoroughly explored in “Empedocles,” and Carroll's superb summary merits extensive quotation:

“Empedocles” is Arnold's most thorough exploration of the spiritual malaise of his own times. The problems it describes and the various solutions or alternatives it proposes subsume those of the shorter poems and, by subsuming them, implicates them in the final, suicidal frustration of Empedocles himself. Arnold repudiates this poem because it has no resolution; the suffering of Empedocles “finds no vent in action” (I, 2).

… There is no possibility of union between the animated life of nature and the divisive, intrusive, and distorting character of the intellect. This conclusion comes near the end of the poem, and it reveals to us, beyond the scope of Arnold's intentions, the real source of Empedocles' despair.

Since mentality is the defining quality of humanity, our “human side,” spiritual frustration appears as the culmination of all human experience, and from this human condition there is no escape. Once the intellect becomes “the master part of us,” once we have identified ourselves with our own conscious recognitions, we must then remain “prisoners of our consciousness,” unable ever to “clasp and feel the All” but through “forms, and modes, and stifling veils” of thought. After he reaches this conclusion, Empedocles recognizes that death cannot provide the resolution he seeks. Mind remains an alien element, and death only gives the stamp of finality to spiritual futility: “the ineffable longing for the life of life / Baffled for ever.”

Carried to its logical extreme, Empedocles' problem is not merely personal and social but epistemological and metaphysical. The problem is not his alone, and is not limited to one anomalous phase of history. It appears to him rather as an inevitable and recurrent progression of intellectual alienation that provides a prototype for all of cultural history.²⁶

Arnold will continue to be drawn to the various forms of attempted escape from the agony of modern consciousness, but his best poems, as Carroll points out, are those which confront it directly while providing “some vent for distress” or some “appeal to elementary passions that transcend the modern condition,” as in the cry for love in “Dover Beach” (“Ah, love, let us be true / To one another!”).²⁷

But even these poems are “compromises,” in Carroll's view, “between his a priori aesthetic criteria [laid out in the 1853 preface] and his actual experience given to him in his historical situation [of modernity].”²⁸ In fact, poetry cannot resolve the underlying problem, which is intellectual (or spiritual); it is not the function of poetry, Arnold writes to Clough, “to solve the Universe.”²⁹ So that after exhausting “the ideas of the world accessible to him in poetry,” and finding that “they did not add up, in his own view, to that grand unity of vision he found in the best of ancient literature.”³⁰ Arnold turns from poetry to prose—a turn which, far from being a “defeat” for Arnold's talent, represents a maturer recognition of where his talent would achieve its greatest success in addressing his overriding concern (which is, in fact, precisely to “solve” modernity). Arnold's shift from poetry to prose prepares the way for the exercise of his talents to their greatest effect; Carroll thus concludes that Arnold's poetic stream “did not so much dry up as become diverted into another channel; that is, the spring was not basically poetic but literary, and so convertible to Arnold's needs as he felt them change.”³¹

This shift in Arnold's basic orientation dates from the time of his opening Oxford lecture, “On the Modern Element in Literature,” in 1857, in which Arnold “announces his critical mission, to find an ‘intellectual deliverance’ from spiritual distress.”³² At the heart of Arnold's new approach is a redefinition of the idea of the “modern,” associated now with the idea of criticism and offering the hopeful prospect of a progressive intellectual “deliverance” from the previous dead end of a stagnant emotional quandary. Whereas in his earlier phase the term “modern” implied decline, a loss of unity, Arnold's new departure, elevating the creative function of “criticism,” highlights the positive and hopeful features of modernity whereby freedom is not simply a loss of moorings but an opportunity to construct new ones, to progressively reconstruct a unity in harmony with modern forces (rather than seeking to escape them). Arnold has moved beyond his initial critical doctrine of “aesthetic withdrawal from the modern world” to a more aggressive stance, centered around this redefinition of “modern”:

… The querulous passivity of the letters to Clough and of “Empedocles” is suppressed through the assumption that the course of culture is in some measure subject to intelligible control. This is the central redefinition of “modern.” A modern age is one in which the critical intelligence rises above the blind forces of history and by grasping them gains freedom over them.³³

It is the formulation of this theory of cultural progress, Carroll argues, “that enables Arnold to satisfy his deepest and most abiding intellectual need—the need for wholeness, that is, unity and completeness.”³⁴

The essence of this cultural theory is the dialectic of cultural forces (Hebraism and Hellenism) which correspond to innate traits of human nature and social prerequisites (order, or “conduct,” and freedom, or “expansion”). Whereas the Hebraistic tendency represents a concern for morality and conduct according to its standards, the tendency of Hellenism is for spontaneity of consciousness, for beauty and rationality, for seeing things as they are, in all spheres of life, not simply the moral. What is needed, in Arnold's view, is a proper balance of these forces, both in the individual and in society. “Culture” becomes the advocate for and instrument of this balance. All this is familiar terrain. However, Carroll finds a logic and unity to Arnold's exposition and development of it that, while occasionally compounded of scattered insights made before, appears to be original in its synthesis of them into a coherent thesis covering the entire span of Arnold's career and thought as a unified whole. Arnold's cultural theory is seen to evolve, as he is forced by his need for wholeness and purpose to add to it gradually, so that its systematic comprehensiveness emerges over the course of Arnold's career, rather than being definitively or systematically presented. But the scattered method of presentation ought not to prevent us, Carroll argues, from recognizing the systematic, comprehensive result.

There are several steps along the way to this result.³⁵ One is an adjustment in Arnold's understanding of how any “bridge” connecting one's consciousness to formless “life,” “nature,” or “world” is to be experienced. In an early essay (“Heinrich Heine”) Arnold seems to reflect “the Romantic assumption that ‘the All’ is a formless infinity inaccessible to the divisive analytical categories of the mind.”³⁶ Both Hebraism and Hellenism reach to connect with that “beyond” through some kind of merger—Hellenism via “beauty,” Hebraism through “sublimity.” However, by the time of Culture and Anarchy, the notion of merger has been replaced by that of order, so that the “goal of both Hebraism and Hellenism is no longer ‘the infinite’ but the universal order, an order accessible to rational intuition.” Here enter in Arnold's ideas of “right reason,” as the human capacity to perceive (and by cooperating, to advance) that order, and of “God,” not as a person but as “a summary term of that order.”³⁷ Perfection as the goal of Arnold's “culture” thus becomes, as will be seen, not a closed condition capable of definitive analytical description, but an open-ended process of cultural and individual becoming, a progressive apprehension and approximation of an order inherent in the universe.

To make that process of becoming purposive, however, Arnold has to evolve, first, an historical understanding according to which each pole of the dialectical process generates its opposite tendency as a corrective, and, second, an overriding goal or principle according to which the process may be seen to progress. Hence, the Hebraic tendency of Christianity cannot be viewed simply as a mistaken fable, dismissed of no use to a “modern” perspective, but rather must be seen as contributing its needed corrective to a prior Hellenic phase, as well as itself requiring further correction from a subsequent Hellenic phase. This historical view is presented in Culture and Anarchy, wherein Arnold positions his own period as one in need of the Hellenizing corrective, following as it does upon the heels of the Hebraisizing Reformation. Moreover, as Carroll convincingly argues,³⁸ Arnold implicitly (though never explicitly) crowns this historical progression with an overall goal and principle of progress by elevating the Hellenic principle as the higher and more inclusive ideal of the two. With this elevation of the Hellenic ideal of perfection, history and man's place in it become purposive, with culture both perfection's instrument (seen as critical method) and its goal (seen as an ideal of balanced character, both individual and national).

In order to arrive at this view, of course, Arnold has to adopt some assumptions which are not strictly compatible with what would today pass for a “modern” view. He must believe in the existence of objectively valid universal moral and aesthetic laws, and that these laws progressively reveal themselves to govern history. The insertion of these assumptions into Arnold's “system” occurs gradually, almost imperceptibly, in response to his underlying drive for “unity and completeness.” They enter in (as noted above) through the ideas of “right reason” and of “God.” (“Imaginative reason,” in Arnold's lexicon, would appear to be an analogue of “right reason” applied to literature.) While these assumptions appear to vitiate the “modern” dimension of Arnold's thought and are allied to vague and often inconsistent definitions (which form the basis for much of the debunking of Arnold's inaptitude for systematic thought), in fact, Carroll notes, Arnold “finds a modern philosophical grounding for these views in Spinoza,” though he also departs from Spinoza in his own conception of the universal order which “unlike that of Spinoza …, is of a progressive historical character [allowing for] only one absolute principle of value: the idea of human perfection as a harmonious expansion of all the faculties.”³⁹

However vague or inconsistent in their formulation at different times in different places in Arnold's work, these assumptions are essential to the construction of Arnold's “comprehensive vision of man's place in nature and in history”⁴⁰ by which his life is anchored once again to a significant cosmos, a universe with an ideal goal (transcending the present, but not the natural order) to which the individual can intelligibly relate himself and which (as the pursuit of perfection) provides his life with moral meaning. However naive his reading of history might seem today, moreover, the important point is that Arnold believed his view to be “verifiable,” based on experience, and so freed from the death grip of what he believed to be a moribund form of Christianity; it was thus capable of providing that “deliverance” which eluded Empedocles, overcoming “the division of mind and nature and the consequent sense of futility in the cultural progression.”⁴¹ In contrast to his earlier period, when the lonely eminence of human consciousness was felt to leave man adrift without purpose or significance, that height of consciousness is now deemed capable of objectively identifying history's progression in harmony with an ideal of perfection which man can now—by virtue of that same critical intellect which separates him from nature—actively seek and foster. Arnold, in erecting an ideal of “culture” as part of a redefined, positive conception of “modern,” thus enables modernity to triumph over its own malaise.

I have elaborated extensively the main part of Carroll's thesis, partly because he correctly identifies the overall shape of Arnold's career, the progress and structure of his thought, and partly as background for a subsequent discussion in which I depart from Carroll's views. Suffice it to comment at this point that what Carroll terms a “redefinition” of modernity in Arnold's thought I refer to as a difference of response to a conception of the modern condition which Arnold accurately perceived in his early period.⁴² In his later writing Arnold finds new and more hopeful applications for features of modernity that had once left him discouraged, but he does not thereby redefine the nature of modernity itself.

ARNOLD'S DOCTRINE OF CULTURE

Having explored the meaning of modernity for Arnold and introduced the most significant recent scholarly contribution to understanding the pivotal role of that concept in his thought, we must now turn to consider more directly Arnold's central doctrine of “culture.” The enclosure in quotation marks is meant to mark a recognition that we are here dealing with a major nebula of modern thought. Raymond Williams calls it “one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language”; surely it is one of the few to have an entire book devoted to collecting and analyzing its definitions.⁴³ There is no need here to rehearse the complex history of its derivation and usage, except to note that its three most common usages today (disregarding its specialized use in biology and agriculture) are significantly interrelated: (1) use of the term in anthropology and sociology to indicate “the totality of socially transmitted behavior patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions, and all other products of human work and thought characteristic of a community or population”⁴⁴ is the most inclusive, but still distinct from (2) the use of “culture” to indicate intellectual or artistic activity or achievements (including what is sometimes called “high culture”) and from (3) “culture” used to refer to a more general process of formation and development of the mind and character of an individual.

A significant distinction affecting the second two usages in contrast to the first points to the role of value judgments. While an anthropologist studying a particular culture in the first sense would certainly take account of expressions of “culture” in the other two senses, his study would not equip him to make value judgments of the intrinsic moral worth of the various elements of the culture under study (though he could make judgments of their utility to the harmonious functioning and survival of the society); the term “culture” as used by the anthropologist is not laden with implicit value judgments, even though values comprise an essential part of any given culture. When the term “culture” is used in either of the other two senses, however, it typically carries a heavy freight of normative meaning. This implicit moral dimension is especially true of its use in the third sense, since the development of mind and character is not normally considered a morally neutral process; but even in the second usage, there is usually a presumption that intellectual and artistic achievement is a good thing (unless of course it is used derogatorily to challenge the pretensions of “high culture,” in which the moral judgment is merely reversed). Most confusion in the use of “culture” involves a failure to distinguish this element of moral judgment—a lack of clarity about when it is present and when it is not. In ordinary usage the “magnetic fields” (to borrow Honan's metaphor) of these three meanings overlap; a speaker may use the word in one sense with a vague sense of its qualification in relation to the other two meanings or without any awareness at all—in either case an illicit association with either objectivity or moral value may be introduced by mere use of the word without its ever being made clear or justified.

When Arnold began writing of “culture,” the anthropologist's sense of the word was not fully established; but it was formally introduced by Tylor in his Primitive Culture in 1871, and it was also used by the mid-nineteenth century generally to describe a particular way of life of a people or period (as was “civilization”). Moreover, Arnold was certainly aware of the idea (if not the terminology) of cultural relativity: he had read Herder's Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, in which Herder challenges the notion of “universal” history and stresses the importance of the local conditioning of culture, making it necessary to speak of “cultures” in the plural.⁴⁵ Arnold in his own criticism also places great emphasis on the importance of a comparative knowledge of literature and history as part of his emphasis on the value of culture. So that it seems clear that the idea of “culture” affording a perspective of relativity, or the objectivity fostered by comparative knowledge of cultures, was familiar to him. So familiar to him, indeed, that it became one of the ingredients on the basis of which he recommended his famous “culture”: its flexibility, its offering a current of “fresh ideas.” Arnold also had available to him, as we do, its other two uses, and they too were admirable features of “culture.” But Arnold did not always distinguish these various uses; to the contrary, possessed of a mighty weapon by which to redeem modernity and slay the Philistines (which for him meant educating them), he took full promiscuous advantage of the illicit association of meanings detailed above. This talented polemicist and poet instinctively knew a good symbol when he had one in hand, and Matthew Arnold, apostle of “culture,” rode the term for all its worth.

“Culture” for Arnold is the means of our “intellectual deliverance” from the ills of modernity. Developed and used ambiguously, the concept is intended to provide the source of authority both for the life of the individual and for the social order. For the individual it offers an ideal of “perfection” fostering intellectual as well as emotional and moral growth; for society it provides a standard of judgment and a stabilizing perspective, a means of promoting harmony and order along with the necessary and inevitable changes in the social order. In association with other key Arnoldian phrases—“sweetness and light,” “study of perfection,” “spontaneity of consciousness,” “free play of ideas,” “reason and the will of God,” “imaginative reason” and its twin “right reason,” and, simplest of all, “the best”—the central term culture becomes in Arnold's hands a symbol promising a rational and human solution to doubt and disorder.

Defending Arnold against the critical consensus “that Arnold is not to be regarded as a systematic thinker,” Joseph Carroll argues for the comprehensive “unity” of Arnold's thought as a kind of “synthesis.”⁴⁶ But if Carroll is right in calling our attention to the overall unity of Arnold's work—and I believe he is—it remains true that there is inconsistency, ambiguity, a lack of analytic rigor, in his “unity.” Carroll admits as much, while claiming at the same time a “consistency” in Arnold's pursuit of the “synthesis”: “Despite variations and reversals in his theoretical formulations, the consistency with which Arnold pursues this ideal of perfection gives unity to his whole body of thought.”⁴⁷

Here he is close to the truth. The truth is that the “unity” of Arnold's thought is his desire for unity which took on objective reality for him in the symbolism of culture; his “synthesis” of culture comes to represent both the means to fulfill the desire, to achieve unity, and the goal itself—a vision of culture containing the promise of unity achieved, desire harmonized, so as to motivate and inspire with hope the purposeful effort to achieve it. The “unity” of Arnold's thought is symbolic, not analytic, in character. When subjected to the rigors of analytic scrutiny, the unity breaks down: a confusion of means and ends in its key term, culture, is fatal to its coherence; but this same blur of meaning or logical ambiguity is the dynamic heart of a functioning symbol, which can both represent a goal achieved and inspire an effort to achieve it. Ambiguity, or a blur of associated meanings reinforcing one another, can add power to a symbol where it would muddy an attempt at systematic doctrine. Thus the very vagueness and ambiguity for which Arnold has been often criticized (correctly, but missing the point), far from being a “weakness,” is the very secret of the success and power of Arnold's appeal to culture. In appealing to culture he is appealing to a symbol promising hope and cohesion, purpose and peace, “reason and the will of God”—deliverance from the ills of the modern world; it is a symbol owing considerably to his own efforts at creating it and to his success in resisting its analytic reduction or precise formulation. Carroll is right in claiming for Arnold's thought a “unity” and “cohesion,” but it is not a systematic intellectual cohesiveness or “system.” The terms Carroll uses, “complete cultural system” and “synthesis,” are too strong, suggesting an analytic rigor which Carroll himself admits is not present. Rather, it is the unity and cohesion afforded by culture functioning symbolically both to embody desired goals as ideally present within itself and to inspire the effort towards those goals through its own means.

Arnold's “definition” of culture, such as it is, begins as a definition of the function of criticism: “to know the best that is known and thought in the world, and by in its turn making this known, to create a current of true and fresh ideas.”⁴⁸ As the role of criticism grows in scope and responsibility, Arnold eventually adopts the term “culture,” but the definition is virtually the same:

The whole scope of this essay is to recommend culture as the great help out of our present difficulties; culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world; and through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits. …⁴⁹

The job of criticism, operating not in literature alone but surveying the entire breadth and depth of culture past and present, is to mine these sources to identify “the best” in every aspect of individual and social life to serve as standards of excellence and sources of authority. By seeking after and adhering to these models of excellence, pearls of “sweetness and light,” we grow towards perfection (Arnold elsewhere refers to culture as “the study of perfection”⁵⁰). Since perfection is an ideal standard and goal, imperfections abound, and the partisan of culture must be disinterested in detecting and correcting them. Hence the importance of flexibility to culture, of an inward attitude of openness and balance:

… culture directs our attention to the natural current there is in human affairs, and to its continual working, and will not let us rivet our faith upon any one man and his doings. It makes us see not only his good side, but also how much in him was of necessity limited and transient; nay, it even feels a pleasure, a sense of increased freedom and of an ampler freedom, in so doing.⁵¹

It is this pleasure that Arnold takes in the close of Burke's Thoughts on French Affairs where, having argued and struggled against the Revolution, Burke suggests (incorrectly as it turns out) that he is through arguing with it, that if in fact the current of history is for it, to oppose it is folly:

That return of Burke upon himself has always seemed to me one of the finest things in English literature, or indeed in any literature. That is what I call living by ideas: when one side of a question has long had your earnest support, when all your feelings are engaged, when you hear all round you no language but one, when your party talks this language like a steam-engine and can imagine no other—still to be able to think, still to be irresistibly carried, if so it be, by the current of thought to the opposite side of the question. …⁵²

This open-minded and flexible attitude—the mind questioning itself—is essential to a disinterested apprehension of “the best”; it precludes routine, mechanical actions or hasty, “practical” (but ill-considered) solutions over thoughtful, considered ones (however delayed their results). But this disinterested flexibility of mind does not mean that culture is aloof from social or political questions. Culture is concerned not only to discover “the best,” but also to propagate it, to make it prevail. “It is not satisfied till we all come to a perfect man; it knows that the sweetness and light of the few must be imperfect until the raw and unkindled masses of humanity are touched with sweetness and light.”⁵³ Or, as Arnold says elsewhere, the perfection aimed at must be both a general and a harmonious “expansion of all the powers which make the beauty and worth of human nature”:

… culture, which is the study of perfection, leads us … to conceive of true human perfection as a harmonious perfection, developing all sides of our humanity; and as a general perfection, developing all parts of our society. For if one member suffer, the other members must suffer with it; and the fewer there are that follow the true way of salvation, the harder that way is to find.⁵⁴

The overall contribution of culture to social harmony is to recognize and to “establish an order of ideas”⁵⁵—the truest, the best ideas available. Just as in criticism these ideas provide the basis for growth of “creative epochs of literature,” so in the realm of culture they tend

to draw towards a knowledge of the universal order which seems to be intended and aimed at in the world, and which it is a man's happiness to go along with or his misery to go counter to—to learn, in short, the will of God …⁵⁶

The fostering of this order of ideas in society, tending to promote individual happiness and social harmony, requires the allegiance and support of the “best self” in each individual. While the state has a role in supporting the growth in the number of “best selves” in the population, its action in behalf of culture depends on culture's prior appeal to a select number of “best selves” already existing across class lines. This “best self,” capable of recognizing an order of “best ideas,” Arnold identifies as “right reason.”

Right reason is the intuitive recognition of where one's “perfection” lies. It presumes a structure or “law” to characterize human nature (hence society); it is this law that right reason intuits, and it is in following it that perfection is approached.⁵⁷ It is “right” because it accords with our true nature and results in our happiness; it is rational because it is open to discovery by our reason, is verifiable in human experience. It becomes for Arnold a principle of authority sanctioning and defining “the best”:

If we look at the world outside us we find a disquieting absence of sure authority. We discover that only in right reason can we get a source of sure authority; and culture brings us toward right reason … by enabling ourselves, by getting to know, whether through reading, observing, or thinking, the best that can at present be known in the world, to come as near as we can get to the firm intelligible law of things, and thus to get a basis for a less confused action and a more complete perfection than we have at present.⁵⁸

This “less confused action” is both personal and social, for the “enabling” authority of right reason provides an ordering sanction for both personal and social life:

Now, if culture, which simply means trying to perfect oneself, and one's mind as part of oneself, brings us light, and if light shows us that there is nothing so very blessed in merely doing as one likes, … that the really blessed thing is to like what right reason ordains, and to follow her authority, then we have got a practical benefit out of culture. We have got a much wanted principle, a principle of authority, to counteract the tendency to anarchy which seems to be threatening us.⁵⁹

Yet “right reason” is not to be confused with conscience, which for Arnold is a narrower moral term implying literal-minded observance of rules of conduct. Indeed, he contrasts “belief in right reason” with the Hebraistic emphasis, “as the one thing needful,” on a

strictness of conscience, the staunch adherence to some fixed law of doing we have got already, instead of spontaneity of consciousness, which tends continually to enlarge our whole law of doing. They have fancied themselves to have in their religion a sufficient basis for the whole of their life fixed and certain for ever, a full law of conduct and a full law of thought. …⁶⁰

This emphasis on spontaneity of consciousness as part of the functioning of right reason within us recalls the emphasis on flexibility and disinterestedness as elements of culture. Right reason is not narrow rationality, reducible to formula or capable of charting our course with scientifically experimental precision (in our sense of these terms); that is why I characterized it above as an “intuitive recognition” which Arnold nonetheless believes to be rational. It is rational, not in being scientifically or logically demonstrable, but in being “apparent” or “reasonable” to a man of culture looking at the available evidence.

Here again we are confronted with the centrality of culture. Its defining elements are elaborated in an effort to explain its workings; accordingly, we have right reason exercised in a disinterested and flexible manner apprehending the best so as to establish an order of ideas which will engender, with the aid of imaginative reason and a spontaneity of consciousness, the perfection of humankind in society. Yet none of these terms succeeds in escaping the invocation of culture itself in order to explain their own workings. Like altar regalia, they surround and suggestively enhance the central mystery, but the mystery remains. The regalia and vestments borrow dignity and significance from the mystery they are presumed to surround, at the same time that the mystery is made present to those assembled through the ceremonial adornments. It is ever thus when it is symbols, or symbolic actions, that are set before us on the altar. Supernatural transubstantiations having become impossible for him to believe in (and soon, he believes, for most others), Arnold has placed before us on the bare altar table a resplendent vision of culture; he entertains us with its varied allurements and invites us to share in his reverence for it. If we ask him for a closer look at this object of our invited devotion, he tells us it is “the best” we can ever obtain, “perfection” itself is its destination; if we ask him how we shall recognize it, he tell us that our “right reason” will show us. But how, then, shall we gain this pearl of “right reason”?—why, culture will bring it!⁶¹ If, sensing contradiction, we press him yet further, he cautions us to be “flexible,” that dogmas and doctrines or narrow systems cannot touch the holy of holies wherein culture resides, to be approached only by the “imaginative reason.”⁶²

If I am here having fun at Arnold's expense, it is not to belittle his achievement but to expose its true character, to portray the symbolic working of his culture. That working is disguised in Arnold's thought because he did not intend it to be taken as a symbol; he believed in his offer of culture, believed himself to be offering us real sustenance (real food). Quite simply, Arnold believed in his own symbol, so that it was to his own mind not symbolic at all, but substantial—just as to the orthodox Christian believer of his day, the Eucharist or other supernatural tenets of the faith were not mere “symbols” or “metaphors” so touching one's imaginative reason as to inspire Christian conduct (as Arnold saw them), but were real and substantial. Arnold, while disagreeing with these believers and pointing out the looming inadequacy of that faith for the society as a whole, honored those for whom this was an adequate faith in their own lives; so we must honor his.

How, then, if unintended, and without suggesting any insincerity or inadequacy on Arnold's part, might this symbolic functioning of culture be demonstrated? If Arnold did not intend his culture concept as a symbol, but believed in its “content” as a substantive aid to thought and a solution to the modern plight of consciousness, two questions must be addressed in offering this “symbolic functioning” as an explanation for the simultaneous vagueness and power of Arnold's doctrine of culture: (1) where precisely in Arnold's own writing can evidence be found of this symbolic treatment? and (2) how can we account for Arnold's failure himself to awaken to this element in his thought?—or more precisely (since who among us knows his own mind?), what enabled Arnold to treat culture in this symbolic fashion, without its hollowness (from an analytic point of view) being exposed to his full view? In the process of answering these questions we shall have to review and evaluate more critically Arnold's doctrine of culture.

THE SYMBOLIC FUNCTION OF CULTURE

The role of Arnold's style in promoting his doctrine of culture has been noted by numerous critics and referred to previously in this chapter. T. S. Eliot has written that, in spite of the vagueness of Arnold's prose, which will not stand “very close analysis,” yet “Arnold does still hold us … by the power of his rhetoric and by representing a point of view which is particular though it cannot be wholly defined.” Eliot goes on to point out that a lack of clarity in ideas is “one reason why Arnold, Carlyle, and Ruskin were so influential, for precision and completeness of thought do not always make for influence.”⁶³ But it was the particular combination of a vague idea of culture with a style suggesting a genial worldliness, prudent cosmopolitanism, and a casual temper of assurance, of confident knowing (which were themselves what his culture promised) that was one of the secret's of Arnold's success. His own style, in a sense, seems to stand as witness for his recommended culture; it breathes with the voice of culture, repetitiously chanting culture's key words, and by its self-assured, genial, unruffled tone seems to say to the reader, “This is what culture does for you: it makes you whole, secure, serene, free.”

John Holloway has analyzed one of the devices by which Arnold's prose style works this effect in a discussion of its “value frames.” In scrutinizing a number of different instances of Arnold rendering judgments, he notes that they “influence us less because they describe than because they exemplify the right habit of mind; that is to say, they effect the reader less through their meaning than through their tone.”⁶⁴ This “right habit of mind” is of course the habit of culture, and it is the invocation of culture that is the consistent feature of these value frames: “Surely culture is useful in reminding us …” or “The aspirations of culture are not satisfied unless …”—to cite only two instances of Arnold's recommending a quality of culture by first “framing” it with an invocation of the central symbol.⁶⁵ This repetitious invocation of culture (only vaguely defined previously) enhances the term's positive content by associating it with the various goods recommended in these more specific judgments, or by contrasting it to things condemned, so that these value frames not only “recommend [particular] assertions and offer grounds for them” but also “elucidate and recommend the temper of mind to which they seem true”⁶⁶—which is to say they recommend culture while at the same time culture validates them—and all of this kept swimmingly afloat by Arnold's tone and temper, his characteristic “urbanity and amenity … so pervasively recommended to the reader by the whole texture of his writing.”⁶⁷

It is this blurred associative value of the term that is at work in its “symbolic functioning”: its repetitious use and varied associations give it what Eliot calls “a kind of illusion of precision and clarity”⁶⁸ while the enormous appeal of the qualities and state of mind associated with it protect its vagueness by surrounding it with an aura of ultimate value. The most concrete evidence of the term's functioning in this manner in Arnold's thought is the transformation that occurs in the use of the term. In his definition and early use of “culture,” Arnold is referring to a habit of mind and of human inquiry, to a process at the end of which a human judgment invoking value is needed for it to have an effect. But very quickly this use of “culture” is transformed into another, subtly and significantly different: “culture” becomes in Arnold's usage an abstract noun of force, used in much the same way a layman might refer to “gravity,” as a power of its own—still a process, but now capable of generating its own results, with the element of human value silently subsumed into the concept! It is only this rhetorical shift in his use of the term that enables Arnold to write sentences like “culture brings us toward right reason” and get away with it!—because he is implicitly using the term in two different senses: culture in the sense he began with requires the exercise of right reason in order to reach its judgments, it is dependent upon it; but now culture—in the grander sense, with value judgments subsumed within it—is freed from that dependence upon right reason: it will in fact create right reason within us. This unmarked dual use of “culture” in Arnold's prose is effective and highly infectious; it seduces the mind of the reader to believe in its promises even as he remains vaguely unsure what “it” is or how it can accomplish them. To oppose culture, once Arnold is through ringing her changes, would constitute a kind of sacrilege:

The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light. He who works for sweetness and light, works to make reason and the will of God prevail. He who works for machinery, he who works for hatred, works only for confusion. Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light. It has one even greater!—the passion for making them prevail. It is not satisfied till we all come to a perfect man; it knows that the sweetness and light of the few must be imperfect until the raw and unkindled masses of humanity are touched with sweetness and light.⁶⁹

Here we have all the blessed realms of England, the heights of poetry, the wisdom of Oxford, the rustic sagacity of Wordsworthian nature, the light of Heaven, and the will of God Himself, gathered up into one sweet cuddly bundle together with “the raw and unkindled masses”—all drawn close to the bosom of culture! Surely our apostle has chosen the side of God and the angels in trumpeting his cause!

So long as one is content to bask in the sweetness and light of Arnold's deft style, the trumpet's call sounds serenely oblivious to the underlying theoretical difficulties in the culture concept. Once Arnold gets down to specific cases, however, and considers how his culture might be fostered concretely in society and politics, the tune strains and cracks, as those difficulties sound their discordant notes.

INADEQUACY OF ARNOLD'S DOCTRINE OF CULTURE

As the title of Culture and Anarchy suggests, Arnold's interest in advancing the cause of culture arose not simply out of some abstract Platonic conception of the ideal human condition. Throughout his long career as Inspector of Schools beginning in 1851, Arnold was in close touch with social and educational conditions in England among the middle and lower classes; moreover, Culture and Anarchy was written amid agitation for suffrage extension, including mass meetings and occasional outbreaks of violence, as well as continuing disputes over Ireland. Arnold's endorsement of the maintenance of order in response was unequivocal. For those “who believe in right reason” and “the progress of humanity towards perfection,” Arnold wrote (and here we note Holloway's “value frame” in action),

the framework of society, that theater on which this August drama has to unroll itself, is sacred; and whoever administers it, … we steadily and with undivided heart support them in repressing anarchy and disorder; because without order there can be no society, and without society there can be no human perfection.⁷⁰

The latter part of this statement is no mere window dressing intended to conceal a harsh repressiveness; that much is clear from Arnold's other statements in support of promoting equality through the reduction of class distinctions and the alleviation of oppressive economic conditions. Arnold was not a partisan of any of the three classes into which he divided English society; from the standpoint of culture, all were deficient. The upper class he calls “Barbarians” because they are impervious to ideas, settled in inherited patterns stemming from the feudal era of dissolution during which their elevated position served a unifying social function; later, their privileges lingered on without functional justification. The middle classes are “Philistines,” intent on immediate practical (and often material) benefits and committed to their “freedom” to grow in personal power and comfort. The lower class (that part of the working class not identifying with the middle class) he calls simply the “Populace”; it is the unleavened mass, “that portion … of the working class which, raw and half-developed, has long lain half-hidden amidst its poverty and squalor” but which is now beginning to do as it likes too, which means (in its benign mood) drinking and (in its menacing mood) “brawling, hustling, and smashing.”⁷¹ What all classes lack is a standard of excellence to summon them out of their “ordinary selves” and to stimulate their growth in the direction of culture.

With Tocqueville, Arnold believed the inevitable trend of the age to be toward equality, because inequality constrains man's “instinct of expansion” which is “as genuine an instinct in man as the need in plants for the light. …”⁷² But this tendency is not, in Arnold's view, merely unavoidable; in the providence of culture it is a necessary and desirable step toward that ideal of perfection which, given the nature of man, is both individual and social, which cannot rest in the elevation of the few but must extend the benefits of culture to all. Culture is inherently evangelistic; its vision is unitary:

[Culture leads us] to conceive of true human perfection as a harmonious perfection, developing all sides of our humanity; and as a general perfection, developing all parts of our society. For if one member suffer, the other members suffer with it; and the fewer there are that follow the true way of salvation, the harder that way is to find.⁷³

Arnold is saying something more here than what man's status as a “social” animal obviously implies (that human interaction is an essential by-product of his nature; therefore, what we do affects others in such a way that even the achievement of individual goals requires the cooperation of others). Alongside this obvious argument lies his belief that human nature contains a “vital instinct of expansion,” an innate tendency of life “to affirm one's own essence; meaning by this, to develop one's own existence fully and freely, to have ample light and air, to be neither cramped nor overshadowed.”⁷⁴ In a social creature like man this instinct of life toward expansion implies a drive toward unity, a desire to be in agreement, in harmony, with others.⁷⁵ This presumptive goal of unity is the buried axiom in Arnold's definition of the ideal culture, or civilization, according to our “true humanity”:

Civilization is the humanization of man in society. Man is civilized when the whole body of society comes to live a life worthy to be called human, and corresponding to man's true aspirations and powers.⁷⁶

And again:

To be humanized is to comply with the true law of our human nature. … To be humanized is to make progress towards this, our true and full humanity. And to be civilized is to make progress towards this in … civil society “without which,” says Burke, “man could not by any possibility arrive at the perfection of which his nature is capable, nor even make a remote and faint approach to it.”⁷⁷

The ideal of culture, or civilization,⁷⁸ thus presupposes not only an “order of ideas” (see page 44 above), but also social organization to embody those ideas in such a way that men's (and women's—though Arnold has little to say of them) “powers” of expansion may be exercised both freely and harmoniously.

What is needed, then, both as a principle of organization for such a society and to elevate members of all classes to its level, is a harmonizing standard, a “source of authority,” as well as a means to make it prevail. In attempting to meet this provision, Arnold's concept of culture is strained beyond its capacity. Culture, Arnold tells us,

seeks to do away with classes; to make the best … current everywhere; to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light, where they may use ideas … freely—nourished, and not bound by them.

This is the social idea; and the men of culture are the true apostles of equality.⁷⁹

The clarion call here is impeccable. The existing classes are, after all, so badly flawed that what is wanted is not the rule of any one of them, nor more aristocrats and fewer populace, but a new species—the man of culture. Happily he already exists; within each class there are—Arnold's chosen term here is striking—“aliens.” These blessed beings are “persons who are mainly led, not by their class spirit, but by a general humane spirit, by the love of human perfection. …”⁸⁰; in a word, they are, as the flashing of those key words tell us, men of culture. These are the ones who have risen above the “ordinary selves” of their classes and have found their “best selves.” And it is in that “best self,” the self of culture, that Arnold finds his “source of authority” and unity answering to the “difficulty of democracy” which is “how to find and keep high ideals.”⁸¹

But has he found an organizing principle for social order? There have always been elite souls, and it is at least arguable that at times they have gained the upper hand in a governing class and wielded power over the society as a whole. But this is not Arnold's vision; he is not attempting to reinvest the aristocracy; he wants a free, equal, and harmonious order. He admits that conditions are not such at that time “to help and elicit our best self,” but he claims that those conditions can be mended and the number of “aliens” increased. How? By the action of the State—and here the trumpet falters.

Arnold first tries to escape the difficulty by redefining “the State,” conceived in Burke's sense as “the nation in its collective and corporate character,” as a “center of light and authority”⁸²:

The question is … whether the nation may not thus acquire in the State an ideal of high reason and right feeling, representing its best self, commanding general respect, and forming a rallying-point for the intelligence and for the worthiest instincts of the community, which will herein find a true bond of union.

… Only, the State-power which [the nation] employs should be a power which really represents its best self, and whose action its intelligence and justice can heartily avow and adopt. … To offer a worthy initiative, and to set a standard of rational and equitable action—this is what the nation should expect of the State. …⁸³

Providence … generally works in human affairs by human means; so when we want to make right reason act on individual inclination, our best self on our ordinary self, we seek to give it more power of doing so by giving it public recognition and authority, and embodying it, so far as we can, in the State. …

… we are all afraid of giving to the State too much power, because we only conceive of the State as something equivalent to the class in occupation of the executive government, and are afraid of that class abusing power to its own purposes. … By our everyday selves … we are separate, personal, at war; we are only safe from one another's tyranny when no one has any power; and this safety, in its turn, cannot save us from anarchy. And when, therefore, anarchy presents itself as a danger to us, we know not where to turn.

But by our best self we are united, impersonal, at harmony. We are in no peril from giving authority to this, because it is the truest friend we all of us can have; and when anarchy is a danger to us, to this authority we may turn with sure trust. Well, and this is the very self which culture, or the study of perfection, seeks to develop in us; at the expense of our old untransformed self, taking pleasure only in doing what it likes or is used to do, and exposing us to the risk of clashing with everyone else who is doing the same! So that our poor culture, which is flouted as so unpractical, leads us to the very ideas capable of meeting the great want of our present embarrassed times! We want an authority, and we find nothing but jealous classes, checks, and a deadlock; culture suggests the idea of the State. We find no basis for a firm State-power in our ordinary selves; culture suggests one to us in our best self.⁸⁴

It is this reconstituted “State,” acting on culture's behalf as the “organ of our collective best self, of our national right reason,”⁸⁵ that Arnold charges with the task of creating conditions conducive to the growth of culture, augmenting the number of “best selves” within each of the existing classes. The primary field in which Arnold seeks this state harvest of culture is, not surprisingly, education—and especially education of the dominant middle class whose lead, he believes, the lower class will follow. Arnold has seen the educational system at first hand and has also had the opportunity to compare it with those on the Continent; he finds the English middle classes “are among the worst educated in the world” and strongly urges the adoption of a system of state-supported public schools for them.⁸⁶ Other state actions he urges include “a reduction of those immense inequalities of condition and property amongst us” and “a genuine municipal system.”⁸⁷

Raymond Williams in Culture and Society has focused succinctly on the “breakdown” in Arnold's thought at this point. In essence, Williams's point is that Arnold's “State” is reconstituted only in theory, so that the “State for which Burke was an actuality has become for Arnold an idea.”⁸⁸ Arnold may redefine the state as a “collective best self,” but saying so does not make it so. Lionel Trilling makes an interesting comparison of Arnold's position to Rousseau's: just as Rousseau was driven to posit a “General Will” to embody the good, “to place power and reason in the same agent,” so Arnold creates a theoretical “State” as a last resort given the inadequacy of the existing state. “In short,” Trilling concludes, “where Rousseau writes ‘general will’ we may, with no violence to his idea or Arnold's, read ‘best self.’”⁸⁹ Though Trilling does not make note of it in his discussion of the points of similarity, even Arnold's language in places is reminiscent of Rousseau. In writing of the “ordinary self” of the existing classes, he says that it is “wholly occupied … with the things of itself and not its real self, with the things of the State, and not the real State.”⁹⁰ Arnold is left, as Trilling and Williams both point out, with the same dilemma that confronts Rousseau: how to use the existing state to reconstitute the “real” or “true State”? This question goes begging in Arnold, as Williams neatly points out:

… the position in which [the general argument is left] is this: that the State itself must be the principal agent through which the State as a “center of authority and light” is to be created. Yet the existing State, loaded with such an agency, is in fact, on Arnold's showing, subject to the deadlock of the existing and inadequate social classes.⁹¹

This kind of thinking is, in Trilling's phrase, “confusion in a circle.” Yet as Trilling also points out this confusion “lies not only in Arnold's thought but in the nature of the problem”: “The way in which society is ordered determines the moral life of individuals and classes, but the moral life of individuals determines the way in which society is ordered.”⁹² One may question as a practical matter—which was, in spite of the vagueness and idealism of his language, the level to which Arnold addressed his argument in Culture and Anarchy—whether this theoretical dilemma is all that staggering. Arnold in fact does take note of it, in a passage unmarked by either Trilling or Williams. Answering a contemporary critic's question—“how you can be certain that reason will be the quality which will be embodied in [the State]?”—Arnold replies:

You cannot be certain of it, undoubtedly, if you never try to bring the thing about; but the question is, the action of the State being the action of the collective nation, and the action of the collective nation carrying naturally great publicity, weight, and force of example with it, whether we should try to put into the action of the State as much as possible of right reason or our best self, which may, in this manner, come back to us with new force and authority … ?⁹³

In this passage we seem to see Arnold the pragmatist escaping the theoretical straitjacket into which his critics seek to confine his argument. For in spite of Williams's argument that “it is not merely the influence of the best individuals that Arnold is recommending; it is the embodiment of this influence in the creation of a State,”⁹⁴ it appears that it is precisely “the influence of the best individuals” that Arnold is recommending as the practical means to “the creation [technically a reconstituting] of a State.” Without denying the absence of a theoretical guarantee of the workability of his proposals, Arnold doggedly insists that we must do what we can and see what happens. He is savvy enough to realize that a state composed of Philistines and Barbarians is not going to adopt his proposals for culture unless, through an act of persuasion, their own “best selves” are called forth first; that being the case, what is involved is a simultaneous process of education to foster the growth of individual “best selves,” in and out of government, and a gradual adaptation of the state in exercising its influence in harmony with this slower, piecemeal process. Arnold is not proposing a wholesale revamping of the state according to a theoretical blueprint; he specifically rejects the radicalism and folly of such schemes as “Jacobinism.” Surprisingly, given his sensitivity to the idea of organicism in Culture and Society, Williams seems to miss the point where Arnold is concerned. Lionel Trilling is closer to an understanding of Arnold here, recognizing that Arnold's conception of the state is “essentially mythic … like a Platonic myth.” “The value of the myth”—in this case Arnold's ideal conception of the state—“cannot depend on its demonstrability as a fact,” Trilling writes, “but only on the value of the attitudes it embodies, the further attitudes it engenders and the actions it motivates.”⁹⁵

This assessment is surely closer to Arnold's intention, yet it does not wholly obviate the dilemma underscored in Williams's more abbreviated treatment. The fact remains that the influence even of Arnold's idea of the state depends to some extent on its theoretical integrity. Ultimately, what Arnold is attempting to create is an idea, or inner standard, which will hold people's loyalty and unite them in common purpose. If in illustrating the application of this standard to the social order, a crack appears in the internal consistency of the ideal, if the standard shows itself to be ambiguous, then even though a practical effort to urge its adoption may yet continue, its ultimate value and status as a standard is thrown into question. Even if one succeeded in converting a nation to Arnold's doctrine of culture, if the concept itself be flawed, then attempts to follow it, whether embodied in a state or not, would eventually falter. Thus even an analysis of Arnold's attempt to conceive a state or social order is thrown back onto an analysis of the integrity of his concept of culture. What the question comes down to is whether there is any real content to the concept, whether one can say what a “best self” is? If not, one may appeal to people's “best selves” and urge upon them a “collective best self” as much as one wants—and even accomplish some good results with this moralizing—but measured against Arnold's intentions, in the final analysis such efforts will be no more than “vain repetitions” babbled in the wind to no purpose.

“The best,” after all, is a relative term, a term of comparison. Arnold even admits its relativity, recognizing that what appears “best” is one era fades in another, giving way to a different or more advanced “best.” But if one cannot locate a consistent principle which defines what is “best” in each instance, then culture conceived as “the best” becomes a standard that undermines itself in ludicrous succession. A striving for “perfection” may unite people harmoniously in shared devotion to a common cause; it may also foment revolution and war. It all depends on the content of the “perfection” envisioned, on whether we are all devoted to the same cause in the same way. “Culture” urges one to strive for the “best,” and not to settle for the routine, to seek one's “best self” and to seek its embodiment in the state; this same culture is advanced as a harmonizing standard of unity. Yet this striving for the ideal, without any further qualification of the relativity of the standard proposed, breeds conflict and disunity as readily as harmony and peace. Conceived abstractly, with value judgments implicit but not spelled out, “culture” unifies, harmonizes; it seems to do so easily precisely because of Arnold's failure to spell out the hidden values. Conceived relatively and historically, “culture” breeds change and reform, frees us from routine and tradition; in Arnold's hands it seems to do so without conflict, still harmoniously, because it is now promiscuously joined to the other, more absolute but abstract, meaning of “culture.” This equivocality, I take it, is what Williams means when he comments that Arnold's “confusion of attachment was to be masked by the emphasis of a word”:

Culture was a process, but he could not find the material of that process, either, with any confidence, in the society of his own day, or, fully, in a recognition of an order that transcended human society. The result seems to be that, more and more, and against his formal intention, the process becomes an abstraction. Moreover, while appearing to resemble an absolute, it has in fact no absolute ground. … His way of thinking about institutions was in fact relativist, as indeed a reliance on “the best that has been thought and written in the world” (and on that alone) must always be. Yet at the last moment he not only holds to this, but snatches also towards an absolute: and both are Culture. Culture became the final critic of institutions, and the process of replacement and betterment, yet it was also, at root, beyond institutions. This confusion of attachment was to be masked by the emphasis of a word.⁹⁶

In this “emphasis of a word” we see the symbolic function of that word, culture: it functions both to focus commitment and to cloud the object of that commitment, just as a symbol both conceals and reveals the reality it mediates.

But even to speak of Arnold's “culture” (or of symbols in general) in this way presupposes a reality to be mediated; otherwise Arnold's “culture” becomes nothing but a subjective grab bag of relative preferences, just as symbols deprived of realities to mediate become an endless maze of self-reflecting mirrors, reducing thought and analysis to vain subjective babble. It seems clear, as in Williams's finding above, that Arnold “snatches toward an absolute,” that Arnold did admit into his thought a belief in an order of reality transcending reason. He appears to have done so without being fully aware of it; indeed, if challenged on this point, he would argue that the realities in question are fully “rational” and “verifiable.” But to our later perspective, his “rational” seems merely “conventional”; and deprived of the consensus that sustained (no doubt unconsciously) his reason, what appears to him as reasonably “verifiable” seems to us only “arguable.”

William Robbins has thoroughly detailed this buried content in Arnold's thought; he finds there, ultimately sustaining the content of all those relative terms clustering about it (“the best,” “perfection,” and so on), an implicit idealism which he identifies with the philosophical tradition of “ethical idealism.”⁹⁷ Though Robbins is more concerned with the invasion of the transcendent into Arnold's moral and religious thought, there seems little doubt that it also affects his doctrine of culture. Indeed, it is the hidden content of Arnold's “culture” that enables it to function successfully as a symbol in his thought, disguising even from himself its fatal ambiguity (considered from an analytic point of view). That implicit content provides the necessary basis of a presumed reality which allows “culture” to function as a symbol in both obscuring the nature of and heightening commitment to that reality.

In one sense this content, the ultimate “source of authority” in the ideas of the “best self,” “right reason,” and “perfection” that Arnold advances, is not hidden at all. He makes repeated references to the “true law of human nature,” “the law of human life,” and the “intelligible law of things.”⁹⁸ Arnold clearly believed in the existence of a moral order in individual life and in the life of society in history; while he denied supernatural status to that order, in the form of a personal God willing and enforcing that order, he believed that it was built into the nature and structure of the cosmos, pointing the path to human achievement and happiness. How or why it came to be does not seem to concern Arnold; he insists merely on reason's capacity to recognize that such is the order and to discover in it the direction to human life and history. “Right reason” is the spontaneous, intuitive recognition of that order, an appreciation of “the idea that the world is in a course of development, of becoming, towards a perfection infinitely greater than we now can even conceive, the idea of a tendance a l’ordre present in the universe.”⁹⁹ “Perfection” is being in accord with that order, just as the “best self” is the self awakened to the existence of such an order and desiring it. The “verifiable” or experimental “proof” of the existence of this order is the experience of satisfaction or happiness one experiences in seeking to follow it. While progress toward it is a process, both individually and socially, and although Arnold recognizes that the process is not automatic, still the impulse driving us to seek that order is built into human nature:

Such an effort to set up a recognized authority, imposing on us a high standard in matters of intellect and taste, has many enemies in human nature. We all of us like to go our own way. … But if the effort to limit this freedom of our lower nature finds, as it does and must find, enemies in human nature, it finds also auxiliaries in it. … Man alone of the living creatures, [Cicero] says, goes feeling after “… the discovery of an order, a law of good taste, a measure for his words and actions.” Other creatures submissively follow the law of their own nature; man alone has an impulse leading him to set up some other law to control the bent of his nature.¹⁰⁰

To say that there is in human nature and history a built-in tendency toward the ideal, toward “perfection,” does provide hope and incentive for the mission of culture in bringing us toward the ideal. It is also true, as Joseph Carroll notes, that for Arnold culture has replaced God as that in which he trusts to bring us toward that ideal—“culture” here being “spiritual progress in accordance with right reason … the ‘absolute’ not as state or substance but as the historical process of growth.”¹⁰¹ But a belief in an inherent tendency in human nature and in the universe toward such an order still does not define for us the nature of that order; without specifying the values endorsed by that order, the character of Arnold's “absolute” remains abstract, his “source of authority” unworkable.

When we turn to examine precisely with what values Arnold does in fact invest this universal order, we find that they turn out to be those of a traditional and humane Christianity—the values, by and large, of his own culture and class. The clue is dropped in the above passage by the reference to our “lower nature”; the duality of our nature—high and low, spirit and flesh—is here presumed, requiring only a reference to enlist the reader's acceptance of its truth. The principle of order in human nature leading to happiness thus turns out to be—righteousness! The supreme model of our “best self” turns out to be—Jesus! The values endorsed by the order of the universe and culture turn out to be—“self-renouncement,” “purity,” “mildness,” “charity.”

In truth, Arnold hardly needs to describe the values he has culture endorse because he leans so heavily upon and adopts so uncritically the prevailing moral consensus. He can write of “ideas of moral order and of right” that “are in human nature”¹⁰² without pausing to detail or attempt to argue for them because he can presume that no “reasonable” person questions them; everyone knows what “righteousness” and “conduct” are (he needn’t even prefix “moral” here), and when he does write “moral” the word can have only one meaning—the morality of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Where other religions overlap, whether pagan or Moslem, it is the Judeo-Christian tradition to which they are seen to correspond, which provides the standard by which they are measured; and where they fail to coincide, they are judged accordingly. The “relativity” of Arnold's standard of culture is dangerous and subversive of traditional order only in the abstract (or only to emphasize one part of that traditional order as against another, to right an imbalance). Even the “Judeo” part of the moral consensus can be dismissed readily with a smug blast of rhetorical questions where it conflicts with the Christian order (which at its best incorporates the Hellenic as well); thus the voice of righteousness can thunder its questions in full confidence of an answering moral consensus:

… immense as is our debt to the Hebrew race and its genius, incomparable as is its authority on certain profoundly important sides of our human nature, worthy as it is to be described as having uttered, for those sides, the statutes of the divine and eternal order of things, the law of God—who, that is not manacled and hoodwinked by his Hebraism, can believe that, as to love and marriage, our reason and the necessities of our humanity have their true, sufficient, and divine law expressed for them by the voice of any Oriental and polygamous nation like the Hebrews? Who I say, will believe, when he really considers the matter, that where the feminine nature, the feminine ideal, and our relations to them, are brought into question, the delicate and apprehensive genius of the Indo-European race, the race which invented the Muses, and chivalry, and the Madonna, is to find its last word on this question in the institutions of a Semitic people, whose wisest king had seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines?¹⁰³

Arnold is here arguing against a literal-minded interpretation of Scripture (forbidding a man to marry his deceased wife's sister on the basis of the book of Leviticus), for leavening a narrow Hebraism with Hellenic culture; but notice that culture's liberal method ends by endorsing conventional morality, with which no serious argument is presumed to be possible, as Basil Willey has pointed out:

And this righteousness, what is it? We have already seen that it involves renouncement of self, dying to sin, and rising to new life on the spiritual plane. In this Preface [to Last Essays on Church and Religion], Arnold reduces it to a yet simpler formula: kindness and pureness, or charity and chastity. I think a reader of today … will especially notice Arnold's sense of security on this subject; he can appeal to an almost unbroken consensus of opinion about what righteousness meant. There might be, and of course there were, the widest possible divergences in credal beliefs, but everybody knew perfectly well what was the right thing to do on any occasion, and what was wrong. A man might not do what he knew he ought to do, or he might do what he ought not; but conscience and universal agreement pointed unfailingly in the right direction.¹⁰⁴

How fortunate that the grand labor of culture, ranging comparatively over the whole of human experience and history, should find at its conclusion that “the best” lay, after all, pretty much in one's own back yard!

The content of “culture” turns out, then, to be in large measure the content of Christian character, with the added qualification that character be united to reason, conduct to intellect, Hebraism to Hellenism: “Culture without character is, no doubt, something frivolous, vain, and weak; but character without culture is, on the other hand, something raw, blind, and dangerous.”¹⁰⁵ In sum, as Trilling concludes succinctly, “Culture may best be described as religion with the critical intellect superadded.”¹⁰⁶ But if “culture goes beyond religion,” as Arnold believed in did,¹⁰⁷ it does not contradict its moral content; rather, that content is subsumed into the standard of “the best” along with an intellectual attitude of openness or flexibility, or not presuming any particular embodiment of that “best” to be immutable or incorruptible. True, “culture begets a dissatisfaction,” but only in behalf of “its spiritual standard of perfection”; culture opposes anarchy, and its dissatisfaction is a disciplined striving, not an indulgent liberty or nihilistic whim.¹⁰⁸ Arnold belonged, in Robbins's words, “to a generation which, though learning to do without God, could not be without absolutes, especially in the moral sphere.”¹⁰⁹

The concept of culture gave Arnold a perspective from which simultaneously to endorse and to critique his own particular culture. Able to draw upon a received consensus of moral values, which his concept confidently subsumed without questioning, he could proceed with his critique on a secure footing, without facing the unsettling possibility that the critique could be turned against the traditional Christian values presumed by his own concept of culture. Thus the delicate balance between the maintenance of the standards of perfection of culture, on the one hand, and the challenging, questioning, seeking, inconclusive attitude of flexibility, on the other—the balance between order and freedom—though difficult, was still theoretically possible to Arnold, because both rested on an unquestioned consensus of values. Once those values are called into question, however, both the integrity of this concept of culture and the unity it serves to symbolize collapse. Deprived of its implicit content of values, the standard becomes abstract, ultimately subjective in actual content; “the best” becomes a point of dispute instead of a unifying goal. Deprived of a moral consensus to endorse his tone in rhetorically dismissing “the voice of any Oriental polygamous nation like the Hebrews,” Arnold's presumption of the superior wisdom of monogamous family structures is left exposed, fair game for anthropologists of all races and cultures to dispute. Just as a nation's flag, to function successfully as a symbol, presumes a prior loyalty to the country symbolized, so Arnold's “culture,” functioning to represent in a word both the goal and method of “perfection,” “the best,” presumes an existing consensus about the nature of that goal, the moral content of that perfection.

Even with that moral consensus intact, however, Arnold's attempt to construct a unifying principle for modern society around his conception of culture faces a serious difficulty in his assumption that the ideal quest for culture could be spread throughout the society, that its excellence is sufficiently apparent to win endorsement in a democratic society when promoted through education. From the perspective of the late twentieth century, Arnold's hopes for the spread of his culture through education seem naive, even aside from the breakdown of traditional moral patterns. Arnold himself seems to have been ambivalent about the elitist implications of his appeal to culture. He argues of course for the extension of that appeal by education and by holding aloft its standard wherever it might be made visible (through the established church, the state, or the influence of example of those already responding to its call); and he states that it is part of culture's goal to extend itself to all. Yet at other times he evidences an awareness that not all can attain its sublime heights. In “Numbers” he places his hopes for culture in the leading influence of a significant minority, a saving “remnant,” and admits that the majority, while its action may be “good occasionally,”

lacks principle, it lacks persistence; if today its good impulses prevail, they succumb tomorrow; sometimes it goes right, but it is very apt to go wrong. … the world being what is it, we must surely expect the aims and doings of the majority of men to be at present very faulty. …¹¹⁰

We may perhaps reconcile these divergent strands in Arnold's conception of culture's operation and say that Arnold envisions culture extending its reach to all in the sense of prevailing in defining and setting the standards which all would at least honor, and to which all would aspire in the varying degrees of their capacities; but that the exercise of this dominant influence in society would always depend on an active, exemplary minority.

But even this partial resolution of conflict between culture's democratic and elitist tendencies leaves the question of how that influence could be exercised so as to prevail over the whole of society. It was Arnold's understanding of the importance of religion and the Bible in forming the standards and behavior of “the masses” that led him to focus his attention on religious questions almost exclusively for ten years (and four books) following the publication of Culture and Anarchy in 1869. By bringing the perspective of culture to bear upon religion, he hoped to strengthen and preserve an essential Christianity against a skepticism occasioned by the conflict felt to exist between the modern outlook of science and the rigid claims of a doomed dogmatic orthodoxy. He believed such a redefinition of Christian truth—focusing on the example of Christ (a paragon of the “best self”) and on a common institutional embodiment in a national church with shared rituals of worship, rather than on supernatural elements (occasioning doubt) and points of metaphysical dogma (occasioning institutional divisions)—would preserve the moral influence of the Bible and the institutional supports of the church for those standards which culture also endorsed. The continuity of Christianity thus appears as part of the overall program for the human advance toward the ideal of perfection presided over by culture. Since the dependence of culture upon Christianity for more than its influence in preserving a moral consensus (i.e., its dependence on Christianity as a source of values to subsume within its claim to be an ideal standard of its own) does not surface explicitly in Arnold's thought, he is quite comfortable in detaching the moral lessons and examples of Christianity from their traditional supernatural foundation. It is not merely that he does not believe in that foundation himself; equally important, he believes that he has in “culture” an adequate basis for authenticating values independently, apart from supernatural religion. Given the dependence of Arnold's doctrine of culture upon his understanding of religion, the following chapter will examine his attempt at redefining Christianity and evaluate the consequences of that redefinition for his ideal of culture.

Notes

1. The Arnold passage is from Culture and Anarchy in R. H. Super, ed., The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, 11 vols. (1960-77), 5:91. All subsequent citations of Arnold's prose are to this authoritative standard edition, but for the convenience of those referring to other editions I have retained references to the original titles of volumes published by Arnold. The Stevenson line is from Quotations of Wit and Wisdom, edited by John Gardner and Francesca Gardner Rease (1975), 4.

2. “Resignation,” in Kenneth Allott and Miriam Allott, eds., The Poems of Matthew Arnold, 2d ed. (1979), 97, 100 (lines 198, 278).

3. Three recent studies illustrate the diversity of Arnold's thought and the range of his continuing relevance: Joseph Carroll's The Cultural Theory of Matthew Arnold (1982) and Ruth apRoberts's Arnold and God (1983) offer contrasting but ultimately complementary interpretations of Arnold's thought. Carroll's book in particular is an excellent synthesis, taking issue with debunkers of Arnold's “unsystematic” thinking and proposing as Arnold's primary achievement the construction of a “complete cultural system.” Ruth apRoberts challenges the neglect of Arnold's religious writings; and while her study proceeds at a more pedestrian pace than Carroll's, it offers a worthwhile contrasting perspective and is useful in identifying sources of influence in the evolution of Arnold's thought. A third study, James C. Livingston's Matthew Arnold and Christianity: His Religious Prose Writings (1986) approaches Arnold's religious writings from a more rigorous theological perspective than does either Carroll or apRoberts, arguing counter to the critical mainstream for an interpretation of Arnold's religious beliefs as authentically Christian—indeed, as “in accord with the mainstream of liberal and modernist Christian theology of the past century” (xi).

4. Honan, 424, 425.

5. Honan, 349.

6. William Robbins, The Ethical Idealism of Matthew Arnold (1959), 139-40.

7. Honan, viii.

8. Honan, 424.

9. Robert Langbaum, The Mysteries of Identity: A Theme in Modern Literature (1977), 51, 52.

10. Lionel Trilling, Matthew Arnold (1939), 112.

11. “Empedocles on Etna,” II, line 330, in Allott and Allott, 200.

12. Matthew Arnold, “Democracy,” in Super, 2:29. “Democracy” was originally published as the introduction to The Popular Education of France in 1861 and later included in a collection of Mixed Essays (1879).

13. Arnold, “On the Modern Element in Literature,” in Super, 1:23-24.

14. Arnold, “Heinrich Heine,” Essays in Criticism (1865), in Super, 3:109-10.

15. Arnold, “Heinrich Heine,” Essays in Criticism, in Super, 3:110.

16. “To Marguerite—Continued,” in Allott and Allott, 130, 131, lines 1-4, 13-18. Whether intended by Arnold or not, I find here a poignant reversal of John Donne's “no man is an island” imagery in his “Meditation 17.”

17. “Dover Beach,” in Allott and Allott, 256-57, lines 30-37. The reinforcing, echoing imagery of these two poems when read in conjunction in their entirety (and not simply the fragments given here) has always seemed to me to enhance both poems.

18. Howard Foster Lowry, ed., The Letters of Matthew Arnold to Arthur Hugh Clough (1932), 111 (September 23, 1849).

19. Honan, 140.

20. Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867), in Super, 3:381.

21. Arnold, “On the Modern Element in Literature,” in Super, 1:32.

22. Langbaum calls attention to what appears to be an echo of Arnold's line from “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse” (“Silent—the best are silent now”) in W. B. Yeats's classic characterization of the modern age (“The best lack all conviction”) in “The Second Coming” (Langbaum, 5).

23. Arnold, “On the Modern Element in Literature,” in Super, 1:19, 20.

24. This expression was often used by Arnold to describe the wholesome vision of Sophocles, which Arnold admired as a model of what “culture” seeks (cf. “To a Friend” in Allott and Allott, 111, and “On the Modern Element in Literature,” in Super, 1:28 and 35).

25. Carroll, xiv.

26. Carroll, 2, 7-8.

27. Carroll, 15.

28. Carroll, 16.

29. Lowry, 63.

30. Carroll, 30.

31. Carroll, 34. Though expressed in somewhat different terms, Honan's view of the shift in Arnold's career supports Carroll's. Honan writes that Arnold's “prose is an adjunct to his best poetry—and especially to Empedocles on Etna—since in his social and literary essays he seeks a middle ground between the aridity of fact (or the world of scientific positivism which really destroys Empedocles) and the truths in religion and myth (or the world implicit in the songs of Callicles, the nightmare boy myth-maker)” (Honan, 210). David DeLaura in an essay on Arnold's “Critical Ideas” also notes that the “mature” Arnold condemns a whole set of “modern” attitudes (melancholy, isolation, gloom, morbidity, etc.) which in themselves “represent the deepest attitudes and temptations of Arnold's early career” (Kenneth Allott, ed., Matthew Arnold [1975], 147).

32. Carroll, xiv.

33. Carroll, xvii, 42-43.

34. Carroll, xiv, xv.

35. Carroll distinguishes four “phases” in Arnold's career: the initial phase of discontent in the early poetry, establishing the problems to which his critical phases respond; the second “Hellenizing” phase extending from the early critical and political essays through Culture and Anarchy, in which Arnold develops the main outlines of his cultural theory serving as a “deliverance” from the modern spiritual dilemma; a third phase devoted almost exclusively to reinterpreting Christianity and the Bible in an effort to render them harmonious with the new “modern spirit” and so to preserve their moral influence; and a fourth phase of critical essays in Arnold's final decade in which he attempts to integrate his efforts of the previous two phases in a unified vision of intellectual “expansion” and moral “concentration” and in which poetry serves an elevating moral or religious function similar to that of his redefined (as poetry) religion.

36. Carroll, 75.

37. Carroll, 76.

38. Carroll, 83.

39. Carroll, 81. William Robbins argues along similar lines in The Ethical Idealism of Matthew Arnold for the philosophic seriousness of Arnold's views. He also suggests that Arnold might have found a more consistent philosophical position for his “experimental” approach, stopping short of adopting idealist assumptions, in William James's pragmatism, had the latter been available to him. However, given Arnold's evident desire for “unity and completion,” it is debatable whether he would have been content with a Jamesian universe; forced to admit he had inadmissibly reintroduced into his system elements he began by purging, he might instead have been plunged back into Empedoclean despair.

40. Carroll, xiii.

41. Carroll, 14.

42. See pages 26ff above. Carroll does recognize that in Arnold's “redefinition” of modernity, Arnold “still takes account of the intellectual neurasthenia … previously marked as peculiarly modern”; but this negative feature is now simply overshadowed by the positive uses of modernity (Carroll, 44).

43. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976), 76. The book of definitions and explanatory discussion is A. L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckholm's Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions (1952).

44. This definition is taken from The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1969). It may be compared with a “condensed” definition offered by Kroeber and Kluckholm: “Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievements of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e., historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other as constituting elements of further action” (357).

45. See Raymond Williams in Keywords (76-82) and Ruth apRoberts in Arnold and God (especially pages 37-47 where she traces a significant influence of Herder on Arnold).

46. Carroll, xi.

47. Carroll, 39.

48. Arnold, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” in Essays in Criticism, in Super, 3:270.

49. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, in Super, 5:233.

50. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, in Super, 5:235.

51. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, in Super, 5:110.

52. Arnold, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” Essays in Criticism, in Super, 3:267.

53. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, in Super, 5:112.

54. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, in Super, 5:94, 235.

55. Arnold, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” Essays in Criticism, in Super, 3:261.

56. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, in Super, 5:93.

57. It is true that we often need aid in following even that which we know to be right. Arnold attempts to locate this aid in what he calls “imaginative reason”—a concept loosely allied with “right reason.” To some extent they are interchangeable; both imply an intuitive (but rational) apprehension of the truth of human nature and the character of its ideal perfection. “Imaginative reason,” however, is more often used in Arnold's discussion of poetry, whereas “right reason” is invoked for social or political concerns; imaginative reason adds to those intuitions it shares with right reason elements of feeling and of the senses, sympathetically representing its vision of perfection so as to inspire the loyalty and dedication of the corresponding “best self” within us. It is akin to that “grand power of poetry” Arnold describes in his essay on “Maurice de Guerin”: “… the power of so dealing with things as to awaken in us a wonderfully full, new, and intimate sense of them, and of our relations with them. When this sense is awakened in us, as to objects without us, we feel ourselves to be in contact with the essential nature of those objects, to be no longer bewildered and oppressed by them, but to have their secret, and to be in harmony with them; and this feeling calms and satisfies us as no other can (“Maurice de Guerin,” Essays in Criticism, in Super, 3:13). While Arnold here refers to “objects without us,” because Guerin's poetic gift is to represent the natural world, poetry can also imaginatively awaken us to the moral world within and without us, allowing us to glimpse “reason and the will of God” at work in life and calling forth our “best self.”

58. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, in Super, 5:190-91.

59. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, in Super, 5:123.

60. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, in Super, 5:176-77.

61. See passage quoted above (“culture brings us toward right reason”) on pages 45-46.

62. William Robbins has similar fun with Arnold's attempt to forge a synthesis of Hellenism and Hebraism, the practical and the transcendent, by conceiving their reciprocal relation in “imaginative reason”: “When Arnold fuses this ‘reciprocal relation’ by means of ‘the imaginative reason,’ he reaches the climax of his endeavor, the completion of his critical doctrine. The synthesis has been achieved, the dialectic successfully resolved. The phrase is persuasive and challenging. Yet it is a phrase that defies precise definition, that vaguely suggests transcendent mysteries, a departure from the horizontal to the vertical. The critic has left the plains and foothills of historical experience and for the moment stands tip-toe on the misty mountain-tops” (Robbins, 162-63).

63. T. S. Eliot, “Arnold and Pater,” in Selected Essays, 1917-1932 (1932), 346-48.

64. John Holloway, The Victorian Sage: Studies in Argument (1953), in David J. DeLaura, ed., Matthew Arnold: A Collection of Critical Essays (1973), 121.

65. Holloway, in DeLaura, 121, 120.

66. Holloway, in DeLaura, 121.

67. Holloway, in DeLaura, 119.

68. Eliot, “Arnold and Pater,” in Selected Essays, 1917-1932, 347.

69. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, in Super, 5:112.

70. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, in Super, 5:222-23.

71. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, in Super, 5:143, 145.

72. Arnold, preface to Mixed Essays, in Super, 8:371.

73. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, in Super, 5:235. The echoing of Biblical language here is characteristic of Arnold's rhetoric.

74. Arnold, “Democracy,” in Super, 2:7.

75. Arnold does not make this connection between these strands of his thought explicit, but it seems to me clearly implicit as the link between his emphasis on expansion on the one hand and on harmony on the other.

76. Arnold, preface to Mixed Essays, in Super, 8:370.

77. Arnold, “Equality,” Mixed Essays, in Super, 8:286.

78. “Civilization” is the term Arnold uses in his later writing to describe the organization of society according to the ideal of culture. It involves four “powers,” or manifestations of the desire for “expansion” or “life” in human behavior: the power of social life, or manners; the power of conduct; the power of intellect and knowledge, or science; and the power of beauty. In his preface to Mixed Essays Arnold adds “expansion” as a presiding fifth power, comprehending the “love of liberty” and the “love of equality” and reigning over the other four because civilization “presupposes this instinct, which is inseparable from human nature; presupposes its being satisfied, not defeated” (Super, 8:372).

79. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, in Super, 5:113.

80. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, in Super, 5:147.

81. Arnold, “Democracy,” in Super, 2:17.

82. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, in Super, 5:117, 134.

83. Arnold, “Democracy,” in Super, 2:19, 28.

84. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, in Super, 5:159, 134-35.

85. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, in Super, 5:136.

86. Arnold, “Porro Unum Est Necessarium,” Mixed Essays, in Super, 8:349.

87. Arnold, “Ecce, Convertimur ad Gentes,” Mixed Essays, in Super, 9:7. Arnold was impressed with both the American and the French systems of municipal government which “provide people with the fullest liberty of managing their own affairs, and afford besides a constant and invaluable school of practical experience” (“A Word More About America,” in Super, 10:197).

88. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (1958), 123.

89. Trilling, 253, 281.

90. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, in Super, 5:143 (my emphasis).

91. Williams, 254.

92. Trilling, 254.

93. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, in Super, 5:158.

94. Williams, 122.

95. Trilling, 255.

96. Williams, 127-28.

97. See Robbins, 165-75.

98. I have drawn three such references here at random: “Civilization in the United States” in Super, 11:352; Culture and Anarchy in Super, 5:207; and “Ecce, Convertimur ad Gentes” (Mixed Essays) in Super, 9:5.

99. Arnold, “Theodore Parker,” in Super, 5:83.

100. Arnold, “The Literary Influence of the Academies,” in Super, 3:235-36.

101. Carroll, 84.

102. Arnold, God and the Bible (1875), in Super, 7:208.

103. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, in Super, 5:208.

104. Basil Willey, “Arnold and Religion,” in Allott, 255-56.

105. Arnold, “Democracy,” in Super, 2:24.

106. Trilling, 266.

107. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, in Super, 5:94.

108. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, in Super, 5:97-98.

109. Robbins, 164.

110. Arnold, Discourses in America (1885), in Super, 10:144-45.

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