BREADTH OF CULTURE

Dominion, Volume 18, Issue 191, 8 May 1924, Page 7

BREADTH OF CULTURE

MATTHEW ARNOLD’S INFLUENCE.

Though he is best known as critic and poet, Matthew Arnold was also an inspector of schools. In the “Quarterly Review” Dr. Richard Gummere points out that Arnold was ever an opponent of standardisation; his reports to the London Council were always favourable when teachers were conscientious and sympathetic and children happy. He opposed “payment- by results” and dictation of methods. Arnold was a pioneer in recommending the scientific study of English composition. By inheritance (as the son of Thomas Arnold, the celebrated headmaster of Rugby), and by early experience he was more familiar with public schools than with the popular institutions. For the public schools he advocated flexibility and intellectual freedom; the evils of “'restraint, stoppage, and prejudice” must be exposed. The test of a literary critic, says Dr. Gummere, is his ability to concentrate in the final message upon a solution of some eternal problem. Aristotle, in addition to talking about poetry, told mo how to reason; Dante, besides writing the “Divine Comedy,” proved that power and love are divine rather than material or social manifestations; Sir Joshua Reynolds, after painting a gallery of worthies, revealed in his best-known essay the rules of art as applied to life ; Goethe, while endeavouring to make the Germany of 1800 more sweetly reasonable, left us as his heritage the fellowship of intellectualism ; St. Beuve, party man at first, preached a gospel of lucidity. And what of Matthew Arnold? He made it his life-work to impress all these qualities upon Victorian England. Except for art —in which ho was always a defective analyst and observer —one feels that he has succeeded in leaving his world better than he found it. Ho is a. child in practical politics, and yet luminous in his off-hand dashes of truth; vague in details and yet a genius in cumulative progress. Perhaps the most significant phase of his world vision is the fundamental idea expressed in “The Function of Criticism at tho Present Time.” “Europe is, for intellectual and spiritual purposes, one great confederation, bound to a joint action and working to a common result. Special, local, and temporary advantages being put out of account, that modern nation will in the intellectual and spiritual sphere, make most progress . which most thoroughly carries out this programme.” Arnold fought till his death in 1888 for real culture as opposed to vGcationalism, for a spread of the Bible by its direct power among laymen, for a- literature which would be free from lubricity or opportunism, and for an education which would produce an international temper— the only salvation of a. harassed world.