Matthew Arnold

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E CONNECT Matthew Arnold with a love of sweetness and light and the art of reading and with opposition to Gradgrinds and the commercial view of things; to harsh puritans, arid theorizers, mechanical systematizers; to everything that is crude, narrow and harsh. Some have mocked Arnold for this. The American poet, Whitman, described him as one of those dudes of literature who led that great army of critics, parlor apostates, worshippers of hangings, curtains, lace, and chinaware, whom the world can well do without because it is much too rich, indeed lousy, reeking with delicacy, refinement, elegance, prettiness, propriety, criticism.' It is more usual, however, to think of Arnold as the champion of English civility against those who are too indolent, ignorant, or bigoted to appreciate and perpetuate the gentle nuances of a high civilization. This is what Arnold is supposed to have intended in his defense of But that is not the true relation between Arnold's defense of and English civility. It should be noticed first of all that Arnold did more than defend culture-he invented it. He gave the word a new meaning which he had discovered in foreign lands and which carried to England a heavy baggage of foreign notions. Arnold's idea of can be traced to Herder's view that each nation is a self-sufficient totality embodied as much in its language and arts as in its religion and politics, from which it follows that to understand any aspect of a nation's life, we must understand the whole of its culture. It was through the historians, through the development of Kulturgeschichte, that this conception of culture became influential in Germany. Burckhardt said that the postulate of his study of the Renaissance, which became the model for Kulturgeschichte, was that every cultural epoch is a complete and articulate whole, which expresses itself in religion, art, the state, and social life as such.2 The successors of Burckhardt took a stricter view of