The Idea of Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold’s critical style is famous for its slogans, what he once wryly summarized as ‘sweetness and light, and all that’. We might add, seeing ‘the object as it really is’, ‘the best that is known and said’, and more. The slogans, in their vagueness and repetition, can make Arnold seem a harbinger of hollow advertising idiom or the soundbites of political discourse and management-speak. This chapter argues, however, that the repetitiousness and vagueness of Arnold’s style are not faults, but a basis of his critical practice. It considers his essays of the 1860s, when Arnold established himself as a public critic, to show how their apparently empty style insists, not on logical propositions, but possible relational modes. These modes produce a space for the evocation of the unthinkable in British society: what Arnold called ‘the idea’, in an experience that would link the reader’s individual self-cultivation to communal social aims.