Why, in fact, should good, well-meaning, energetic, sensible people, like the bulk of our countrymen, come to have such light belief in right reason, and such an exaggerated value for their own independent doing, however crude? The answer is: because of an exclusive and excessive development in them, without due allowance for time, place and circumstance, of that side of human nature, and that group of human forces, to which we have given the general name of Hebraism. It was easy to show from our practice and current history that this is so but it was impossible to show why it is so without taking a somewhat wider sweep and going into things a little more deeply.

We have found at the bottom of it the disbelief in right reason as a lawful authority. By contrast, the aristocracy want to assert and maintain the privilege afforded them by those who came so long before. But the real Barbarian were revolutionaries who did transform progress.

We have found that at the bottom of our present unsettled state, so full of the seeds of trouble, lies the notion of its being the prime right and happiness, for each of us, to affirm himself, and his ordinary self to be doing, and to be doing freely and as he likes. Arnold makes the symbolic connection by reminding readers that the barbarian tribes brought much to Europe which was positive and historically transcendent. It is taken from a chapter of the First Epistle to the. This apologetic aspect can be followed to its end.

The maxim is this: Evil communications corrupt good manners. Arnolds experience of art is that it is an expression not only of ones self, but also of the right to be ones self. The matter here opened is so large, and the trains of thought to which it gives rise are so manifold, that we must be careful to limit ourselves scrupulously to what has a direct bearing upon our actual discussion. There is a maxim which we all know, which occurs in our copybooks, which occurs in that solemn and beautiful formulary against which the Nonconformist genius is just now so angrily chafing,the Burial Service.

Arnold culture and anarchy summary