‘Arnold and Pater’
‘Arnold and Pater’
Excerpts from ‘Arnold and Pater’
T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (3rd edn., London, 1951)
Arnold had little gift for consistency or for definition. Nor had he the power of connected reasoning at any length: his flights the power of connected reasoning at any length: his flights are either short flights or circular flights. Nothing in his prose work, therefore, will stand very close analysis, and we may well feel that the positive content of many words is very small. Culture and Conduct are the first things, we are told; but what Culture and Conduct are, I feel that I know less well on every reading.
(pp. 431–432)
Culture has three aspects, according as we look at it in Culture and Anarchy, in Essays and Criticism, or in the abstract. It is in the first of these two books that Culture shows to best advantage. And the reason is clear: Culture there stands out against a background to which it is contrasted, a background of definite items of ignorance, vulgarity and prejudice.
(p. 432)
[Arnold’s] books about Christianity seem only to say again and again – merely that the Christian faith is of course impossible to the man of culture. They are tediously negative. But they are negative in a peculiar fashion: their aim is to affirm that the emotions of Christianity can and must be preserved without the belief. From this proposition two different types of man can extract two different types of conclusion: (1) that Religion is Morals, (2) that Religion is Art. The effect of Arnold’s religious campaign is to divorce Religion from thought.
(p. 434)
So [Pater’s] peculiar appropriation of religion into culture was from another side: that of emotion, and indeed of sensation; but in making this appropriation, he was only doing what Arnold had given licence to do.
(p. 438)
If, as the Oxford Dictionary tells us, an aesthete is a ‘professed appreciator of the beautiful’, then there are at least two varieties: those whose profession is most vocal, and those whose appreciation is most professional. If we wish to understand painting, we do not go to Oscar Wilde for help. We have specialists, such as Mr Berenson, or even Mr Roger Fry. Even in that part of his work which can only be called literary criticism, Pater is always primarily the moralist.
(p. 438)
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