Reading Culture and Anarchy

Abstract

That statement many would probably be able to recognize as Arnold’s — and would perhaps by so recognizing it be able to lay claim to culture, for culture at least in part does seem still to be a kind of bookish thing, ‘a desirable quality in a critic of new books’. The strong irony, the modernity of that phrase, which Arnold was at pains to dismiss, puts a hard case for culture — a hard case which does not seem at all to suggest that only culture can hold anarchy at bay. Arnold puts his opponent’s views this way:

Culture is a desirable quality in a critic of new books, and sits well on a professor of belles lettres; but as applied to politics, it means simply a turn for small fault-finding, love of selfish ease, and indecision in action. The man of culture is in politics one of the poorest mortals alive. For simple pedantry and want of good sense no man is his equal. No assumption is too unreal, no end is too unpractical for him. But the active exercise of politics requires common sense, sympathy, trust, resolution and enthusiasm, qualities which your man of culture has carefully rooted up, lest they damage the delicacy of his critical olfactories. Perhaps they are the only class of responsible beings in the community who cannot with safety be entrusted with power. (p. 40)

I propose now to try and enquire, in the simple unsystematic way which best suits both my taste and my powers, what culture really is, what good it can do, what is our own special need of it; and I shall seek to find some plain grounds on which a faith in culture — both my own faith in it and the faith of others — may rest securely.

(Matthew Arnold¹)