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Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Stefan Collini
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

In one of his speeches a short time ago, that fine speaker and famous Liberal, Mr. Bright, took occasion to have a fling at the friends and preachers of culture. “People who talk about what they call culture!” said he, contemptuously; “by which they mean a smattering of the two dead languages of Greek and Latin.” And he went on to remark, in a strain with which modern speakers and writers have made us very familiar, how poor a thing this culture is, how little good it can do to the world, and how absurd it is for its possessors to set much store by it. And the other day a younger Liberal than Mr. Bright, one of a school whose mission it is to bring into order and system that body of truth with which the earlier Liberals merely fumbled, a member of the University of Oxford, and a very clever writer, Mr. Frederic Harrison, developed, in the systematic and stringent manner of his school, the thesis which Mr. Bright had propounded in only general terms. “Perhaps the very silliest cant of the day,” said Mr. Frederic Harrison, “is the cant about culture. Culture is a desirable quality in a critic of new books, and sits well on a professor of belles-lettres; but as applied to politics, it means simply a turn for small fault-finding, love of selfish ease, and indecision in action.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1993

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  • Introduction
  • Matthew Arnold
  • Edited by Stefan Collini, University of Cambridge
  • Book: Arnold: 'Culture and Anarchy' and Other Writings
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511802072.007
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  • Introduction
  • Matthew Arnold
  • Edited by Stefan Collini, University of Cambridge
  • Book: Arnold: 'Culture and Anarchy' and Other Writings
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511802072.007
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Introduction
  • Matthew Arnold
  • Edited by Stefan Collini, University of Cambridge
  • Book: Arnold: 'Culture and Anarchy' and Other Writings
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511802072.007
Available formats
×