Teaching Tact

This chapter shows that, for while it is true that Matthew Arnold focused on “the question of cultural values and intellectual and aesthetic standards,” the chapter suggests that it was precisely this focus that enabled Arnold to develop, against the grain of public discourse, an egalitarian ethic and a theory of education founded in the practice of tact. Arnold's writings propose, not a prescriptive content (of specific objects, rules, values, canonical goods), but a tactful mode of relation. It is a handling of experience, which is “adequate,” in Arnold's term, both to relieving the strain of, and finding new—egalitarian and creative—possibilities for, aesthetic freedom in modern social life. This effect of tact Arnold calls “deliverance,” and a “help out of our present difficulties.” It is a relation, a formal movement of making contact with the world, rather than an appropriation of the knowledge that would master it.