reat importance should appear here, because it cannot
appear very appropriately anywhere else: the man hardly belonged to the
same school as Ruskin and Carlyle, but fought many of their battles, and
was even more concentrated on their main task--the task of convicting
liberal _bourgeois_ England of priggishness and provinciality. I mean,
of course, Matthew Arnold. Against Mill's "liberty" and Carlyle's
"strength" and Ruskin's "nature," he set up a new presence and entity
which he called "culture," the disinterested play of the mind through
the sifting of the best books and authorities. Though a little dandified
in phrase, he was undoubtedly serious and public-spirited in intention.
He sometimes talked of culture almost as if it were a man, or at least a
church (for a church has a sort of personality): some may suspect that
culture was a man, whose name was Matthew Arnold. But Arnold was not
only right but highly valuable. If we have said that Carlyle was a man
that saw things, we may add that Arnold was chiefly valuable as a man
who knew things. Well as he was endowed intellectually, his power came
more from information than intellect. He simply happened to know certain
things, that Carlyle didn't know, that Kingsley didn't know, that Huxley
and Herbert Spencer didn't know: that England didn't know. He knew that
England was a part of Europe: and not so important a part as it had been
the morning after Waterloo. He knew that England was then (as it is now)
an oligarchical State, and that many great nations are not. He knew
that a real democracy need not live and does not live in that perpetual
panic about using the powers of the State, which possessed men like
Spencer and Cobden. He knew a rational minimum of culture and common
courtesy could exist and did exist throughout large democracies. He knew
the Catholic Church had been in history "the Church of the multitude":
he knew it was not a sect. He knew that great landlords are no more a
part of the economic law than nigger-drivers: he knew that small owners
could and did prosper. He was not so much the philosopher as the man of
the world: he reminded us that Europe was a society while Ruskin was
treating it as a picture gallery. He was a sort of Heaven-sent courier.
His frontal attack on the vulgar and sullen optimism of Victorian
utility may be summoned up in the admirable sentence, in which he asked
the English what was the use of a train taking them quickly from
Isling