Culture and Anarchy

Stefan Collini is surely foremost among today's Arnold scholars; his introduction to this volume earns the five stars along with the Arnold texts he has selected. While Collini does not think much of Arnold as a poet (which is probably not entirely fair), he is, no doubt, right in saying that as an essayist and social critic Arnold is most important to us today, and, quite possibly, was most important in his own time. This volume contains more than just that seminal work, "Culture and Anarchy"; Collini has included two other essays of a clearly political character: "Democracy" (the introduction to one of Arnold's studies of continental education, "The Popular Education of France") and "Equality." In these essays we have a relatively clear statement that democracy was not only inevitable, but necessary,-- or, let us say, that as statements they are as clear as Arnold was capable of making. Arnold was a deft ironist, but like many ironists, his meaning is often obscure and all too frequently misread. As a result, Arnold is often placed among those Victorian intellectuals (Ruskin and Carlyle most notably) who are classed today as anti-democrats. These essays (certainly in the context given them by Collini's wonderful introduction) go a long way to establishing the incongruity of that assessment. Arnold, also, foresaw that the tension between equality and liberty would become a difficult point for democracy to navigate. His comments on these issues, no doubt, have made him sound to modern ears somewhat undemocratic; Collini is, I believe, right in recognizing that this is not the case. A fourth essay in this edition comes as more than a small surprise; most critics would overlook "The Use of Poetry and The Use of Criticism" when searching for political or social texts in Arnold's collected works. Collini shows great insight in putting it, along with the central "Culture and Anarchy," in the political context of this volume. Arnold drew some censure in his own time for crossing the boundaries between literary and social criticism. No proper understanding of Arnold can be made without noting the degree to which he treated criticism as a generalizable quality to be applied freely to literature, politics, education and even religion. Arnold could be his own worst enemy, and his thinking can at times be a little too facile, a little too flippant, but he is never not engaging, not fascinating, not approachable. "Culture and Anarchy" is actually a collection of journal articles printed over a period of time. As Collini points out, Arnold, in the later chapters of "Culture and Anarchy", is responding to the critics of his earlier chapters; the "Preface" is best read where Collini puts it, at the end of the series, because it was written last, continuing the argument and the dialog of earlier chapters. The result of all this back and forth debate did not have the effect it should have had,-- that of losing Arnold in out-of-date and very local argume

[From the Plains of Troy... awakened from the dream][in his own words...]"The whole scope of the essay is to recommendculture as the great help out of our presentdifficulties; culture being a pursuit of ourtotal perfection by means of getting to know,on all matters which most concern us, the bestwhich has been thought and said in the world,and, through this knowledge, turning a streamof fresh and free thought upon our stocknotions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically, vainly imaginingthat there is a virtue in following themstaunchly which makes up for the mischiefof following them mechanically."* * * * * * * * *"Culture, which is the study of perfection,leads us, as we in the following pages haveshown, to conceive of true human perfectionas a HARMONIOUS perfection, developing allsides of our humanity; and as a GENERALperfection, developing all parts of oursociety. For if one member suffer, theother members must suffer with it; andthe fewer there are that follow the trueway of salvation, the harder that way isto find."* * * * * * * * *"Now, and for us, it is a time to Hellenise,and to praise KNOWING; for we have Hebraisedtoo much, and have over-valued DOING. But thehabits and discipline received from Hebraismremain for our race an eternal possession;and, as humanity is constituted, one must neverassign them the second rank to-day, withoutbeing ready to restore them to the first rankto-morrow. To walk staunchly by the bestlight one has, to be strict and sincerewith oneself, not to be of the number ofthose who say -- and do not; to be inearnest, -- this is the discipline by whichalone man is enabled to rescue his life from thraldom to the passing moment and to his bodily senses, to ennoble it, andto make it eternal."* * * * * * * * *

This edition is preferable to the gimmicky version published by Yale, where the original text is lost beneath the imposition of leftist ideologues.

So much of modern criticism has go so far afield, that the appellation has almost lost any sense to it. To recapture what criticism meant before the novel, but useless ideas of structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, post-modernism, et alia, Matthew Arnold is about as good a place to begin. His "Function of Criticism" and "Anarchy and Crticism" have become classics, even if they've been hidden from sight by academicians' self-serving agendas to bring nothing to light. This isn't a "conservative" vs. "liberal" thing, but an "intelligible and meaningful" vs. "labyrinthine and cockamamie" thing. Arnold is like encountering hermeneutics by having first visited Thomas Aquinas, or having studied democracy by having first studied Hobbes. Arnold is a seminal thinker, crtic, and student of the arts and society. He belongs in criticism's lexicon well before de Saussure, Derrida, Lacan, at alia.

Matthew Arnold, a British poet and critic, wrote on the importance of culture in this work. He defined culture, famously, as "sweetness and light" - implying that culture represented everything good, everything not barbaric. The work is most important for the way it forwards the notion of an "organic" society - that is, a society that evolves slowly, that grows into maturity, that does not strive for sudden "advances" led by experts working all at once to implement great change. For anyone wondering about the relationship between modern conservatism and classical Liberalism, this is a decent place to start. "I am a Liberal," Arnold writes in the introduction, "yet I am a Liberal tempered by experience, reflection, and renouncement, and I am, above all, a believer in culture." If you wish to take an intellectual journey from Burke to Bork, Arnold must make up one leg of your trip.