Usually I click "New Post" and start typing away, confident I can speak my piece. But today I balk some (here in the public library, as usual, it's balky enough -- though appreciated!).
On this subject, I'm not likely to get much right, or, if I do, say only what's been said elsewhere by my betters. Still, I promised you, dear readers, and myself that I'd do it, so here goes:
Culture and Anarchy is pointed satire of British society as Matthew Arnold saw it in his day. Its tone is serious on one level, deliberately puckish on another level and stinging on still another.
Though it's written in the discursive Victorian style used in periodical writing then, the book's characteristic sniping at its academic and political targets is evenly sustained clause after clause, sentence after sentence, paragraph (some more than a page long in my edition) after paragraph, page after page, and chapter after chapter.
Most readers know the book from Chapter IV, which contains the most inspired writing. In it, Arnold contrasts what he called Hebraism with Hellenism -- twin forces of equal quality and power in Western culture, as Arnold saw it.
Hebraism, as Arnold described it, has less to do with Judaism than with what I might describe as the reforming zeal of some "Old Testament Protestants" (here my term, but one I've heard before in the South) in both religion and politics that Arnold felt had pushed society too far in a superficial direction. He wanted to balance that cultural force with Hellenism, what he saw as (my phrase again) a Socratic inquiry toward a life well-lived.
You really need to read the three chapters in front of this one to get a grasp of what Arnold means here. And you need to be there for the rest of the book, when he brings his point home.
Reading it, I admit, is a little frustrating, because Arnold keeps swinging his verbal sword at the miscues of a few long-dead politicians few people on my side of the pond have ever heard of, and he thrusts his rhetorical dirk at both them and his critics with one appositive after another, stacking the phrases into his sentences as a fisherman stacks herring. In Arnold's case, all his herrings are red.
A school inspector in England nearly all his working life, Arnold was frustrated by what he saw and was unable to change in what then passed for education of the working classes (he calls them the Populace -- contrasting them with the landed aristocratic class he calls Barbarians and the moneyed middle class he calls Philistines). He mentions the subject of education once or twice in Culture and Anarchy, but it's clearly sitting patiently at the back of his mind the whole time.
There's something else I want to mention: the effect of "Thyrsis" and the woman known only as "Marguerite." Arthur Hugh Clough and "Marguerite" were Arnold's twin inspirations while he was a poet. (I say this as a poet, not as a scholar, which I'm clearly not.) He chose Swift's "sweetness and light" as a key phrase in Culture and Anarchy, and I personally suspect these terms reminded him (unconsciously?) of Marguerite and Clough, or at least the effect they had on him.
The editor of my edition of Culture and Anarchy indicates in her introduction that Arnold's poetic inspiration left him in the mid-1860s. I instead suspect Arnold left poetry deliberately.
His monody on Clough (who died young, even by Victorian Age standards) pretty much concludes Arnold's poetic career. He issued his Poems (the collected edition, including "Thrysis," published only three years before) the same year as Culture and Anarchy. Another, I think, in that edition is his last addressed to "Marguerite," a woman he met twice in Switzerland as a younger man. Arnold also lost two of his sons the year before he published his collected poems.
Grief, estrangement and the righteous anger they can prompt make for some powerful poetic fuel. If the muse of poetry wants to use them to set you on fire, you can burn for years.
With all respect to the editor, I don't think "poetic inspiration" abandoned Matthew Arnold. She merely gave him another job to do. Culture and Anarchy is its monument, and it's living still.
Read it, if you dare.
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