To reach this ideal, culture is an indispensable aid, and that is the true value of culture." Not a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it and here, too, it coincides with religion. "It is in making endless additions to itself, in the endless expansion of its powers, in endless growth in wisdom and beauty, that the spirit of the human race finds its ideal. It sounds great to hear Arnold use such flowery rhetoric like: Just like the quote about greatness could be interpreted to mean all things to all people, Arnold's argumentation by use of fictional characters (and few real ones) generalised his ideas so much, that for most of the book I was left wanting to shout at him: "But where is your proof? Where are your sources for making this claim? What evidence have you to support your claim?"Īnd this was true even more so with the points I wanted to agree with, than it was with the sketchy claims I was looking to refute. There are a lot of sides to Arnold's writing that are worth exploring - tho, his sometimes tongue-in-cheek style of narration has left me wondering more than a few times which point he was trying to make. Having revisited with Arnold over the past couple of weeks, the best I can say is that I am glad I have read the book without the pressing agenda of writing a piece of coursework about it. Back then, I read the book with the purpose of finding arguments for and against different aspects of "culture" and whatever that meant, but I never got the time to read what Arnold actually had to say beyond his eternal buzzwords of "sweetness and light", both which are still as vague as ever.
I had first read the book way back when I was at university. Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy was an odd book to come back to in these times of talk about making things "great" again. Greatness is a spiritual condition worthy to excite love, interest, and admiration and the outward proof of possessing greatness is that we excite love, interest, and admiration. But what is greatness?- culture makes us ask.
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