Page:The Galaxy (New York, Sheldon & Co.) Volume 24 (1877).djvu/14

8 writings—the complete and final triumph. In these lectures, indeed, he disclaims all rancor toward Prof. Newman; and what he says in such a case we are bound to believe. But can the able and learned Prof. Newman quite believe it? would he quite believe it though he should live a hundred years, and came at last to see, with Mr. Arnold, that in his translation of Homer "he has chosen quite the wrong field for turning his ability and learning to account"?

If these admirable lectures, then, are culture militant, we find again a graver mood in his next work, "A French Eton" (1864). Of culture much is said in this work; but in its special and doctrinal sense the word is not yet used. This passage, describing the limitations of an aristocratic class, will give an idea of what Mr. Arnold then meant by the term, and how this conception of it is enlarging itself:

"Whatever may be its culture," he says, "an aristocratic class will always have at bottom, like the young man in Scripture with great possessions, an inaptitude for ideas; but besides this, high culture or ardent intelligence, pervading a large body of the community, acquire a breadth of basis, a sum of force, an energy of central heat for radiating further, which they can never possess when they pervade a small upper class only."

Here it is intimated that culture is to look beyond the individual, that it is, or should be, an affair of radiation as well as of internal illumination—an idea of which we shall find the full development in some of Mr. Arnold's later works.

In the "Essays on Criticism," collected in 1865, the doctrine of culture receives its full legitimate content; but it does not as yet receive the name of culture. In these essays, however, it has a name. It is called "criticism" and "the spirit of criticism," and what he describes under this provisional name, in his essay on "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time," is identical with what we shall find him naming as "culture" four years later. Identical, that is to say, so far as the conception of 1865 is coextensive with that of 1869; for the later definition, though it contradicts nothing in the earlier, includes more; somewhat more, indeed, than can perhaps be claimed quite justly for culture.

But what an admirable conception he has of this "spirit of criticism"! The business of criticism, he says, is "simply to know the best that is known and thought in the world, and by in its turn making this known, to create a current of true and fresh ideas. Its business is to do this with inflexible honesty, with due ability; but its business is to do no more, and to leave alone all questions of practical consequences and applications, questions which will never fail to have due prominence given to them."

The essay from which that passage is taken contains, as one of Mr. Arnold's critics (Mr. Hewlett) has remarked, the germ of the important book on "Culture and Anarchy." And in that work, little known among us, because not reprinted here, the doctrine with which we are now concerned finally receives its definition as culture.

If now we bring together some passages from that work, we shall see how much Mr. Arnold has come to claim for culture. It is in general, he says, "a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits." It does not consist in "a smattering of Greek and Latin ... no serious man would call this culture." "The thing, call it by what name we will, is simply the enabling ourselves, whether by reading, observing, or thinking, to come as near as we can to the firm, intelligible law of things, and thus to get a basis for a less confused action and a