Alfred J. Drake, PhD, has graciously shared with readers of the Victorian Web this chapter from Arnold's Culture and Anarchy from his website. He has produced this e-text from the first edition, London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1869.
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n one of his speeches a year or two ago, that fine speaker and
famous Liberal, Mr. Bright, took occasion to have a fling at the
friends and preachers of culture. "People who talk about what they
call culture!" said he contemptuously; "by which they mean a
smattering of the two dead languages of Greek and Latin." And he
went on to remark, in a strain with which modern speakers and writers
have made us very familiar, how poor a thing this culture is, how
little good it can do to the world, and how absurd it is for its
possessors to set much [1/2] store by it. And the other day a younger
Liberal than Mr. Bright, one of a school whose mission it is to bring
into order and system that body of truth of which the earlier
Liberals merely touched the outside, a member of the University of
Oxford, and a very clever writer, Mr. Frederic Harrison, developed,
in the systematic and stringent manner of his school, the thesis
which Mr. Bright had propounded in only general terms. "Perhaps the
very silliest cant of the day," said Mr. Frederic Harrison, "is the
cant about culture. Culture is a desirable quality in a critic of
new books, and sits well on a possessor 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 [2/3] of responsible beings in the
community who cannot with safety be entrusted with power."
Now for my part I do not wish to see men of culture asking to be entrusted with power; and, indeed, I have freely said, that in my opinion the speech most proper, at present, for a man of culture to make to a body of his fellow-countrymen who get him into a committee- room, is Socrates's: Know thyself! and this is not a speech to be made by men wanting to be entrusted with power. For this very indifference to direct political action I have been taken to task by the Daily Telegraph, coupled, by a strange perversity of fate, with just that very one of the Hebrew prophets whose style I admire the least, and called "an elegant Jeremiah." It is because I say (to use the words which the Daily Telegraph puts in my mouth):--"You mustn't make a fuss because you have no vote,--that is vulgarity; you mustn't hold big meetings to agitate for reform bills and to repeal corn laws,--that is the very height of vulgarity,"--it is for this reason that I am called, sometimes an elegant Jeremiah, sometimes a spurious Jeremiah, a Jeremiah about the reality of whose mission the writer in the Daily [3/4] Telegraph has his doubts. It is evident, therefore, that I have so taken my line as not to be exposed to the whole brunt of Mr. Frederic Harrison's censure. Still, I have often spoken in praise of culture; I have striven to make all my works and ways serve the interests of culture; I take culture to be something a great deal more than what Mr. Frederic Harrison and others call it: "a desirable quality in a critic of new books." Nay, even though to a certain extent I am disposed to agree with Mr. Frederic Harrison, that men of culture are just the class of responsible beings in this community of ours who cannot properly, at present, be entrusted with power, I am not sure that I do not think this the fault of our community rather than of the men of culture. In short, although, like Mr. Bright and Mr. Frederic Harrison, and the editor of the Daily Telegraph, and a large body of valued friends of mine, I am a liberal, yet I am a liberal tempered by experience, reflection, and renouncement, and I am, above all, a believer in culture. Therefore 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 [4/5] 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.
Last updated December 2001