Page:The Galaxy (New York, Sheldon & Co.) Volume 24 (1877).djvu/11

 VOL. XXIV.—JULY, 1877.— No. 1.

 THE GOSPEL OF CULTURE.

of the penalties of distinction which has befallen Mr. Matthew Arnold is the clinging intimacy which his name has contracted of late years with a popular phrase—a phrase which is regarded by many, but perhaps a shade too readily, as a critical summary of his method. For the public his name is twinned with the word culture, as if by a second christening: people speak of Mr. Arnold as "the apostle of culture" with the same satisfaction, with something of the same easy antique content in the phrase, as that which one finds in the repetitious epithets of Homer. For many readers it is a mere formula of convenience; and indeed it is only the discreet minority of readers that we can credit with such a desire in this matter as that which Mr. Arnold translates from Joubert—his unlucky desire "to get a whole book into a page, a whole page into a phrase, and that phrase into one word," The word culture, indeed, is hardly a sufficient description here, nor is all said when we have pronounced Islx. Arnold "an apostle of culture." An apostle of culture undoubtedly he is; in culture, as he understands it, he has his being, and it is culture that he recommends to his readers. But let us inquire what he means by culture: how does he wear this noted weed, this irritating scarlet?

In the various domains of criticism, whether literary, social, political, or religious, Mr. Arnold has done so much that it would be more convenient, were I purposing here to examine that body of criticism, as well as more accurate, to speak of his genius instead of his culture. But "culture" is the word which Mr, Arnold himself has adopted in his later writings, and we cannot drop it as a catchword, though it is certainly, to those who may not have attended carefully to what he means by it, a misleading term. And so, keeping to the name of culture, let us examine the content of the idea which it implies.

And how shall we best do this? Best, as it seems to me, by tracing the growth of this idea of culture, under whatever name, in the succession of his writings. Mr. Arnold's is a self-revelatory nature; his books, from earlier to later, represent discriminable stages of growth. In such a case there are special opportunites for analysis. The author who begins to write and publish at an early age, who writes and publishes often, and enough to represent fully the course of the thought, seems to grow before our eyes, as we read the spirit of his works, like the tree of the Indian juggler. In his earlier books we see the germinating of his controlling ideas; in his later they develop   