Victorian poet, essayist, and — for thirty-five years — a full-time school inspector, whose slim body of verse and extensive prose criticism gave Anglo-American culture most of the large phrases by which it still argues with itself: culture as "the best that has been thought and said," sweetness and light, Hebraism and Hellenism, "the Philistines," and the obligation of criticism "to see the object as in itself it really is." Son of Thomas Arnold, the famous reforming headmaster of Rugby, he read at Oxford, spent a couple of years as private secretary to Lord Lansdowne, and from 1851 until ill health retired him in 1886 worked as an Inspector of Schools, crossing and recrossing England by train with a stack of elementary-school reports on his lap. Everything he wrote was written in the margins of that job.
His poetry — "Dover Beach," "The Scholar-Gipsy," "Thyrsis," "Sohrab and Rustum," "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse" — is the great elegiac register of mid-Victorian religious doubt, written in a plain grave English very unlike Tennyson's music or Browning's jagged voice. "Dover Beach" in particular (the "Sea of Faith" receding, leaving the world "like a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight") is as close as the nineteenth century came to a single short lyric that says what was happening to it. By the mid-1860s, however, he had mostly stopped writing verse and turned to prose.
Culture and Anarchy (1869) is the central prose book — a set of essays arguing that industrial Britain in its Reform-era convulsion was ruled by three classes he christened Barbarians (aristocracy), Philistines (commercial middle class), and Populace (newly enfranchised workers), and that none of them had the internal resources to resist the slide into anarchy. What the country needed, Arnold argued, was culture — defined not as a canon of works but as "a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said." Later chapters set this ideal against a constitutive national imbalance between Hebraism — the English obsession with conduct, duty, and "strictness of conscience" — and Hellenism, the cultivation of "spontaneity of consciousness" and seeing things as they are. Essays in Criticism (first series 1865; second 1888) extended the argument into literary judgment; Literature and Dogma (1873) tried to preserve the moral force of the Bible after the historical-critical method had dissolved its supernatural claims.
He is an ambivalent ancestor. F.R. Leavis is unthinkable without him and acknowledged the debt directly. Raymond Williams's Culture and Society begins with Arnold as one of the founders of the very tradition it sets out to democratise and correct; Williams wanted to keep Arnold's seriousness about culture while throwing out the class-mandarin sociology around it. T.S. Eliot (grudgingly) and F.R. Leavis (less grudgingly) tried to keep both.