Page 31 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

CULTURALISM

Matthew Arnold

I do not intend to repeat here Williams’s account of the culturalist
tradition as a whole, which would be simply impertinent, but rather
to concentrate on what seem to me four representative figures: Arnold,
Eliot, the literary critic F.R.Leavis (1895–1978), and finally Williams
himself. Matthew Arnold is indisputably one of the central figures in
the culturalist tradition: professor of Poetry at Oxford, inspector of
schools, and assistant commissioner on the Schools Inquiry
Commission, he is, both theoretically and practically, perhaps the
single most important 19th century progenitor of contemporary English
studies. The key text for our purposes is almost certainly Culture and
Anarchy, first published in 1869, in part by way of response to the
extension of the franchise in the Reform Bill of 1867. Arnold’s definitions
of culture are various: it is sweetness and light, it is the best that has
been thought and said, it is essentially disinterested, it is the study of
perfection, it is internal to the human mind and general to the whole
community, it is a harmony of all the powers that make for the beauty
and worth of human nature. But, however defined, culture stands in
opposition to mechanical civilization: “culture…has a very important
function to fulfil for mankind. And this function is particularly important
in our modem world, of which the whole civilization is… mechanical
and external, and tends constantly to become more so”. 4
Culture is thus for Arnold a social force in opposition to material
civilization, the equivalent, at the societal level, to his own individual
rôle as inspector of schools. As such, it clearly requires embodiment
in some social group or another. But, as is well known, Arnold firmly
rejected the pretensions to the title of guarantor of culture of each of
the three major social classes: the Barbarian aristocracy suffers from
a “natural inaccessibility, as children of the established fact, to ideas’;
the Philistine middle class is so preoccupied with external civilization
that “not only do they not pursue sweetness and light, but…even
prefer…that sort of machinery of business…which makes up [their]
dismal and illiberal life’; and the working class Populace either aspires
to follow the middle class, or is merely degraded, “raw and half-
developed…half-hidden amidst its poverty and squalor”. No class,
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but rather the “remnant” of the cultured within each class—what
today we might perhaps term “an intelligentsia”—sustains the
continued development of human culture: “persons who are mainly

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