[DOWNLOAD] "Did Arnold Believe in God?(Matthew Arnold) (Essay)" by Nineteenth-Century Prose * Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Did Arnold Believe in God?(Matthew Arnold) (Essay)
- Author : Nineteenth-Century Prose
- Release Date : January 22, 1994
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 174 KB
Description
I want to start by submitting that I do not come before you as a scholar or as an academic. I have no degrees in English, and I have never taught the humanities. I am by training a concert pianist, and to some extent a political scientist, with my specialty in British politics at the end of the 19th century; I have spent the last twenty or so years writing about music, and increasingly of late about the general situation of high culture today. In 1989 I wrote an article in The New Criterion, based on Culture and Anarchy, attempting to examine the linkage, in Amoldian terms, of these two words. I stayed with Culture and Anarchy, and in 1991 I agreed to edit for Yale a reprinting of the first edition (1869) of the work, with an extended glossary and several commissioned essays, including one from me. But then, like Arnold himself, my interests began to turn from culture to religion. Arnold's remarkable hymn to Hebraism at the end of the "Preface" to Culture and Anarchy (the last part of the entire work to be written) led me inescapably to his three great subsequent religious works--St. Paul and Protestantism (1870), Literature and Dogma (1873), and God and the Bible (1875). So far as my own intellectual friends were concerned, these works are mostly devalued, when not actually ignored. Arnold's pre-eminence, then and now, remains for his literary-critical essays and because of the frequent use by William Bennett--the Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities during the early 1980s--of Arnold's once famous phrase, "The best that is known and thought" (Bennett, To Reclaim a Legacy [1984], 3).