Transformed religion: Matthew Arnold and the refining of dissent

Renascence, Winter 2001 by Ward, David A

But there were edifying examples for England as well. The people of France, unlike their American counterparts, had a keen sense of the national self and of the usefulness of asserting collective authority over the vagaries of individual opinion, as evidenced in their efficient lycee system of education, which Arnold lauded in A French Eton (1864), and their national academy of the arts, a type of institution England conspicuously lacked.

France also had, of course, the example of the Roman Catholic Church, which exercised the kind of discipline over private judgment that Arnold found immensely appealing (fuller 110), to say nothing of the aesthetic richness of the French Catholic experience, which contrasted sharply with the drab worship of white-washed English chapels, a way of life "so unlovely, so unattractive, so incomplete, so narrow, so far removed from a true and satisfying ideal of human perfection" (58). Arnold's great fear was that British culture, largely because of the influence of Dissenters, was moving in an American rather than a Continental direction, toward ever-increasing parochialism and complacency rather than the large-mindedness and sophistication he associated with the highest ideals of human living. These latter goals were achievable only with the aid of State-sanctioned corporate entities, including the Church, which could resist the country's strong bent toward "vulgarity, hideousness, ignorance, [and] violence" (Culture and Anarchy 150).