SIMON J.POTTER ARNOLD, MATTHEW (1822–87)

The most important British interpreter of the concept of ‘culture’ as a critique of vulgar democracy and overzealous evangelicism, Arnold was born at Laleham, near Staines, on

24 December 1822, the eldest son of the Rev. Thomas Arnold, historian and headmaster of Rugby School. Educated at Winchester, Rugby and Balliol College, Oxford, he was elected a Scholar in 1840, won the Newdigate Prize for English verse in 1843 on the subject of Cromwell, and became Fellow of Oriel College in 1845. In 1851 he became one of the Lay Inspectors of Schools, under the Committee of Council on Education, which post he retained until 1886. He published several volumes of poetry, and became Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1857. There followed a comparative study of the educational systems of France, Germany and Holland, which Arnold had been sent to study in 1859–60. A further visit instigated by the Royal Commission on Middle-Class Education in 1865 resulted in another volume on the subject. Amongst his other later works were Lectures on the Study of Celtic Literature (1868), Literature and Dogma; an Essay towards a better Apprehension of the Bible (1873) and Saint Paul and Protestantism (1873). Arnold became, consequently, an extremely influential literary critic.

Entries A-Z 35 Though he was increasingly anti-clerical, Arnold was apprehensive of the threat of

radical social and political reform, particularly when allied to a puritan spirit. As early as 1848 Arnold warned, during the Chartist riots of that year, ‘the hour of the hereditary peerage and eldest sonship and immense properties has struck’, a consequence of which was that ‘a wave of more than American vulgarity, moral, intellectual, social’ was ‘preparing to break over us’. This signalled the dominant theme that was central to his most important work, Culture and Anarchy (1869). Prior to this, however, Arnold published A French Eton; or, Middle Class Education and the State (1864), which argued against the prevailing laissez-faire individualism of the mid-Victorian period that it was necessary for the state to act as a mediating agency, rising above the conflicts of social class, and engaging in the cultural guidance of substantial parts of the population. The model to be used here was the French ‘Republic of Letters’, with an Academy centrally engaging in a constant process of cultural criticism, and promoting and organizing the most talented intellects in order to guide public opinion in a suitable direction.

The extension of the franchise promoted by the 1867 Reform Act, and the threat it announced of the growing social and political power of middle- and lower middle-class Dissenters, forms the immediate backdrop to Culture and Anarchy. An Essay in Political and Social Criticism. Arnold’s attack commenced with his last Oxford lecture, on ‘Culture and Its Enemies’, in 1867. The preface to the book states its purpose as being ‘to recommend culture as the great help out of our present difficulties’, defining culture as ‘the pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the 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’. Arnold denied that culture was ‘bookish, pedantic, futile’, insisting it could be derived even from reading newspapers. This ‘total perfection’, moreover, was not only individual, but also the development of a ‘harmonious perfection’ in the entire society. The enemy of ‘many-sided development’ or ‘totality’, correspondingly, was the ‘Hebraising’ tendency to sacrifice all sides of the personality to religiosity: this was the besetting sin of the smug, narrow, provincial Nonconformists. At the opposite extreme, however, Benthamism, or ‘an inadequate conception of the religious side in man’, is also criticized. Arnold noted that the USA already exemplified a society well advanced down this road; he later lectured there in 1883–4, and seemingly met few prepared to refute this view.

In Chapter One of Culture and Anarchy, ‘Sweetness and Light’, Arnold emphasized that things of the mind could be desired both for their own sake, for the ‘genuine scientific passion’ of seeing them in their true light, and for the sake of the ‘love of perfection’, which involved ‘clearing human confusion, and diminishing human misery, the noble aspiration to leave the world better and happier than we found it’. The goal of culture is thus social perfection, not resting content with what each ‘raw person may like’, but getting ‘ever nearer to a sense of what is indeed beautiful, graceful, and becoming, and to get the raw person to like that’. The dominant ethos of the era is addressed in the second chapter, ‘Doing As One Likes’, or the ‘assertion of personal liberty’, which Arnold associates with the Manchester School of political economy. More important than liberty, he contends, ‘is to like what right reason ordains, and to follow her authority’. But no traditional state, and certainly not one led by either the aristocracy or middle class, is capable of offering such leadership, only a state composed of ‘our

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collective best self, of our national right reason’. In Chapter Three Arnold delineates the chief characteristics of the main classes, the barbarians (aristocracy), philistines (middle classes) and populace (working classes) in order to ascertain where the ‘best self’ in each class is located. Chapter Four, ‘Hebraism and Hellenism’, contrasts the ideal of puritan zealousness to that of the Greek theory of culture, with its emphasis on perfecting both individual and society in this life, and upon the creation of works of beauty, a theme continued in the fifth chapter. Arnold concludes by examining some of the reform agenda of the upcoming middle classes, though this contributes little to his central argument. Arnold died on 15 April 1887.

SIMON J.POTTER ARNOLD, MATTHEW (1822–87)