Arnold: 'Culture and Anarchy' and Other Writings

Rating:
Summary: Everybody's Cultural Conservative
Review: Matthew Arnold's incredibly important *Culture and Anarchy* has been available for many years in this unhandsome condition, but the status of Arnold as an arbiter of Anglophone culture determines that we take this book at more than face value. Written at approximately the same time as *Birth of Tragedy*, Arnold's observations on "Hebraism" and "Hellenism" as antagonistic cultural attitudes are quite a bit friendlier -- amiable, almost. That is to say, this is less donny than brook: Arnold is opining here as a mandarin rather than a scholiast, and if you were being shifted during this the early Victorian era he might very well have been your favorite public servant.

However, Everyman editions of Arnold typically focus not on the complete book but on the writings appended to it (including one left off here, a celebration of that Spinoza thoroughly not at odds with the spirit of Idealism). This edition is designed to leave you wondering exactly what Coleridge's pleasure was by determining it was not Blake: and once we've done that, why that man bothered with Dark Satanic Mills or Scripturesque agin democratic values becomes hard to figure. Really something of a revolutionary figure, who here betrays the "occult" nature of political revolutions ostentatious and circumstantial.

Rating:
Summary: Semi-sweetness and Light
Review: 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.