Carlyle and Arnold as critics of culture

By prof.Abdelhamid Fouda 

 In marked contrast to Macaulay, Thomas Carlyle is the prophet and censor of the 19th century. He lived apart from all practical interest, looked with disgust on the progress of his age and told people that truth, justice and immortality are the only worthy objects of human endeavour. In Carlyle, there is a spirit of dissatisfaction throughout; he felt strongly the weakness of his own time and castigated his fellows with his powerful observation. Carlyle was the much historian to be the successful social reformer. When a man is dissatisfied with the present and also feels that it is an unprofitable occupation to peer in the future, he turns for hope and inspiration to past ages. So, he sees Mathew Arnold turned away in disgust from the outlook of Victorian times which he terms Philistinism. He sorts his inspiration in the writing of the ancient Greeks and held up to the people of England, the 'Grandeur and Grave' beauty of Greek literature. Similarly, Carlyle went back to the art and the life of the 14th century in an effort to find worthier ideas than those which he saw around him. Carlyle message may be summed up in two imperatives - labour and be sincere. He lectured chiefly for the upper classes who had begun to think somewhat sentimentally of the condition of labouring and he demanded for latter, not charity or pity but justice and honour. All labour whether of head or hand is divined and labour alone justifies a man as a son of earth and heaven. To the society which Carlyle thought to be occupied wholly with conventional affairs, he comes with the stamps of sincerity calling upon man to lay aside hypocrisy and to think and speak and lived the truth. Carlyle's theory of justice gradually gave way to his strange dictum - 'might is right'. This dictum was incorporated by Carlyle without any rated by Carlyle without any attempt to modify and limit it. Three ideas are notable in Carlyle's political treatises. First, he believed that Laisses-Faire ( the theory of invisible hand ) is a fallacious theory. The government can not stand aside, he says, but is directly responsible for the distribution, regulation and social legislature in the industry.

Secondly, he advocated the organisation of labour. Carlyle's third practical point was his advocacy of immigration rather his insistence on it as a sufficient remedy for overpopulation. 'Criticism', Mathew Arnold defined, as the 'disinterested endeavour to know the best which has been thought and said in the world'. It is the servant of culture, the ideal of all-round perfection; of sweetness and light. His volume, 'Culture and Anarchy' gives his best exposition of culture which he conceived as a balanced or perfected development of human faculties and which he defines mainly by pointing out hostile tendencies. His attacks are mainly against the great middle class ingrossed in money-making. Arnold's social message was more definite than Carlyle's gospel of work and hero-worship. it is easy to see that this idea of total perfection in life and harmony with Arnold's classical ideals in poetry. Carlyle had preached the value of conduct, the Hebraic element in life - open-mindedness, delight in ideas and willingness to examine life constantly. Moody and Lovett, therefore rightly comments: "Wherever, in religion, politics, education, or literature, he saw his countrymen under the domination of narrow ideals, he came speaking the mystic word of deliverance - culture." It is by culture that the Puritan dissenter shall be made to see the lack of elevation and beauty in his church form; that the radical politician shall reach a saving sense of vulgarity of his programme of state and the man whose literary taste is bad, shall win admission to the true kingdom of latter.