Transformed religion: Matthew Arnold and the refining of dissent

Renascence, Winter 2001 by Ward, David A

SAMUEL Lipman is not alone in seeing in Culture and Anarchy "a kind of hvmn to the State" (218 . Arnold himself declares. with an air of reverence difficult to imagine in a present-day cultural critic, that "the very framework and exterior order of the State, whoever may administer the State, is sacred" (204).

But he is careful not to align the centralized power he advocates with a particular class or party. Indeed, throughout the work, he is at pains to argue that the cultural program he advocates operates disinterestedly, outside the realm of party politics; this despite his own relentless exposure of the shortsighted comments and attitudes of numerous public figures, especially those associated with the middle class and religious Dissent, such as the radical politician John Bright, ultra-- Protestant firebrands William Murphy and the Reverend W. Cattle, the popular Charles Haddon Spurgeon, and anti-State Church crusader Edward Miall, all of whose names come up repeatedly in Culture and Anarchy. (Tim Marshall refers to Arnold's strategy of "inverted name-- dropping," a rhetorical tactic in which he "parades particular individuals, inflecting their names with his meanings" [360].) In Arnold's explaining, the State is a kind of transcendent force, "entrusted with stringent power for the general advantage, and controlling individual wills in the name of an interest wider than individuals" (75); its authority is not centered in any particular class, for no one group-the Barbarians, the Philistines, or the Populace-is adequate to the task of national leadership, fixated as they are on their own narrow allegiances, and lacking as they are in sweetness and light. Arnold's careful sifting of these three classes and their representative figures (the most methodical aspect of a thoroughly unmethodical book) is largely an inventory of their shortcomings, and those positive remarks that do appear tend to be cut short by the kind of barbed generalization one comes to expect in his prose, such as when he follows a discussion of the admirable "manners and dignity" of the aristocracy with the observation that their serenity "appears to come from their never having had any ideas to trouble them" (83-84). For an author whose notion of culture was grounded in "reading, observing, and thinking" (89), not to have any ideas was a serious defect, but it was perhaps less of a hindrance to the cause of culture than that posed by the middle class, whose minds were cluttered with the wrong ideas, including a misguided faith in the value of various liberal reforms, the obsessive pursuit of which tended to crowd out all other concerns and to make public life in Britain an arena of endless strife. Men of culture, on the other hand, were not prisoners of the "ready-made judgments and watchwords" of partisan politics (70), and it is through their example of the intelligent and humane use of knowledge that the country could achieve a worthy government, one that was, as Trilling puts it in his seminal study of Arnold, "above all sects, above all classes, synthesizing their diversities, resolving their conflicts" (186).