Arnold: 'Culture and Anarchy' and Other Writings (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought) [Paperback]

This is probably the most important work of an important English social critic. Cambridge University does an admirable job with the text. Arnold lives today as a grotesque caricature. He is the bone-headed Neanderthal Terry Eagleton digs up just to bury again for a generation of English majors. This image could not possibly be more wrong. In his day, Arnold was known almost as well for his good-humor as for the critical phrases he coined. Arnold was a three dimensional human being, deeply afraid that materialism was breeding crassness, and that crassness would destroy the best in everything worth being and knowing in every culture in the world. Unlike Ruskin and Morris and Swinburne and others of the Victorian world, Arnold worked hard for a living, and yet still cared deeply for things beyond his daily bread. Students assigned this text shouldn't grumble. They might learn something very close to their own hearts.

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 in support of democracy 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 did, however, foresee 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 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 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 might have had,-- that of losing Arnold in out-of-date and very local arguments. Instead, Arnold's discursiveness, his irony, his playful mind, keep his text engaging and lively.

As Collini points out elsewhere (in the wonderful little volume, now back in print, entitled simply "Arnold"), the quibbles that many post-modernists have had with Arnold today seem to be largely based on misreading or over-reading,-- in many respects Arnold was a notable precursor to post-modernism: his abundant use of irony, his urge for a free play of mind, his desire to see a text from multiple points of view, his comfortable explorations of his own subjective response to literature, his casual attachment to historicism, and his blurring of the line between politics and literature,-- all of these have their corollaries amongst today's literary critics.

At the same time, modern Arnoldians tend to overly simplify Arnold as much as do his detractors. Arnold's culture, when Arnold's discussion of it is at its best, was not a thing, not a collection of the best books, but a way of thinking about the world,-- "the best that has been thought and said" was not an end, but a tool to be used in critical and moral thinking; perfection not a thing to be attained, but an impetus to progressive thought; culture not an isolated, static monument, but a dynamic way of interacting with the modern world,-- it could, Arnold notably pointed out, be found in reading the daily newspaper, just as it could be found in the "modern" writings of ancient authors. Admittedly, at times, Arnold reduced culture to an end in itself,-- only to step back, and with his ever resourceful irony, put himself back upon the track of (to use his language from "Literature and Dogma") the method, having been too free with the secret. (I think Arnold was inclined to want to have it both ways,-- to let culture be both the thing to be attained and the means by which it was to be attained. The result is that he was not always consistent in his discussions of culture.)

Read him for how he thinks; read him as a precursor of and a counterpoint to today's critical meanderings; but do not read him as the apostle of culture, or as an exemplar of high seriousness, or as the quintessence of authority and elitism. Read him toward your own desire to become more perfect, but do not expect him to be perfect, and, certainly, do not expect that through him or through culture perfection is achievable (he knew it was not). Read him as he read the ancient Greeks, as a fellow citizen of the modern world.

His writing deserves this current excellent edition. Indeed, one cannot but reflect what a terrible shame it is that more of Arnold's writing is not available at the present time.

Matthew Arnold is right up there with Tennyson and Browning as the most caracatured of the Victorian writers. He was a very wise and cool cat. He had the coolest sideburns since the likes of another boss cat, Aleksandr Pushkin, the founder of modern Russian Literature.

Arnold's social commentary is among the best prose of the Victorian age...and there's a lot to comment against in that era. Just read the beginning of Charles Dickens' Bleak House to know what I'm talking about.