Whatever happened to sweetness and light?(Matthew Arnold)(Biography)

FOR MOST of the twentieth century Matthew Arnold was treated as a relic of Victoriana. He coined a number of memorable phrases, such as "sweetness and light" or "the higher journalism". He also famously categorised his countrymen as Barbarians (aristocrats), Philistines (the middle class), and Populace (the working class). He saw the Western tradition as a conflict between Hebraism (conscience) and Hellenism (intelligence).

As a poet he was best remembered for his "Dover Beach" about the decline of religion:

 
   The Sea of Faith 
   Was once, too, at the full ... 
   But now I only hear 
   Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar. 

But that was it. In the era of modernism and totalitarianism Arnold seemed out of place, dated. T.S. Eliot set the tone: Arnold's poetry was frigid, his prose lacked the imagination of horror or glory, and his worldview was too elusive, evasive and elegant. How, it could be asked, would Arnold talk to Solzhenitsyn about the Gulag? Lionel Trilling, his American biographer, made a stout attempt to show that Arnold would have something to say about Nazi theories of science and truth. But what about Auschwitz?

Yet with the end of the Cold War, Arnold had an unexpected revival. There have been new biographies, new collections of his poetry and his letters, and new editions and commentaries of his most famous book of essays, Culture and Anarchy.

This would not have surprised Arnold himself. He rarely made his political or social criticisms in absolute terms. He was, he insisted, an unsystematic thinker, hoping to observe his day and age accurately rather than build a beautiful abstract system. At this period of our life, he would say at the high tide of Victorianism, we need less harping on conscience and more appeals to critical intelligence. But it was not always so and it will not always be so in the future.

Arnold's teaching is summed up in his classic Culture andAnarchy of 1869. By anarchy he meant life lived without any principle of authority beyond the sacred right of doing what one feels like. He saw this anarchy in everything from the growing cult of street riots and demonstrations to the hatred of authority and tradition in all aspects of religion and politics. Some 150 years later this anarchy completed "the long march through the institutions", especially cultural and educational institutions, the family and sexual mores. Its triumph is almost unchallenged.