Introduction: literature, science and the hothouse of culture

Summary

‘LIFE, LIFE, LIFE’: A READING AND WRITING RELATION

In Culture and Anarchy (1869), Matthew Arnold offered his gospel proclaiming sweetness and light. ‘Culture’ would speak through ‘all the voices of human experience … of art, science, poetry, philosophy, history, as well as of religion’. The many-sided receptor of culture would then look and listen: ‘Consider these people, then, their way of life, their habits, their manners, the very tones of their voice’ (97). Arnold had listened, and his response was to satirise. One vocal tone to receive this treatment belonged to the poet Robert Buchanan, who had celebrated God’s ‘move to multiplicity’ and ‘divine philoprogenitiveness’. Arnold cites Buchanan’s language praising God’s ‘love of distribution and expansion into living forms’ at length:

Every animal added seems a new ecstasy to the Maker; every life added, a new embodiment of his love. He would swarm the earth with beings. There are never enough. Life, life, life, — faces gleaming, hearts beating, must fill every cranny. Not a corner is suffered to remain empty. The whole earth breeds and God glories.

(215)

Arnold’s discourse on ‘culture’ here cites and confronts a discourse on ‘life’ and its divinely sanctioned reproductive urges. Buchanan’s language celebrating divinely created and cherished swarms of living things is derived in part from Christian traditions of agape, and in part from the popular science of phrenology.