Matthew Arnold (Paperback)

Excerpt: ...Pg 135 and enquiring Prussian who had come to England to study our Politics, Education, Local Government, and social life. A series of similar letters followed at irregular intervals during the years 1866, 1867, 1869, and 1870. And Arminius' drastic method of questioning and arguing became the idoneous vehicle for Arnold's criticisms on such topics as our Foreign Policy, Compulsory Education, the Press, and the Deceased Wife's Sister. The letters were eventually collected in that little-read but most fascinating book, Friendship's Garland, which was published in 1871. 27 But before Friendship's Garland came out, Arnold, who had tested his powers in social criticism by these fugitive pieces, addressed himself to a more serious and solid effort in the same field. The essays which eventually formed the book called Culture and Anarchy began to appear in the Cornhill Magazine for July, 1867, and were continued in 1868. The book was published in 1869. We saw at the outset that he himself said of his Discourses in America that they, of all his prose-writings, were the writings by which he would most wish to be remembered. Many of his disciples would say that Essays in Criticism was his most important work in prose. Some people would give the crown Pg 136 to Literature and Dogma. "It has been more in demand," the author told us in 1883, "than any other of my prose-writings." Respect is due to what a great master thought of his own work, and to what his best-qualified disciples think of it. But after all we uphold the right of private judgment, and the present writer is strongly of opinion that Culture and Anarchy is Arnold's most important work in prose. It was, to borrow a phrase used by Mr. Gladstone in another connexion, not a book, but an event. We must consider it in its proper setting of time and circumstance. The beginning of 1869 was a great moment in our political and social history. Ever since the enthusiasm which surrounded the Reform Act of...