Congestion of the Brain in an Age of Unpoetrylessness: Matthew Arnold's Digestive Tracts for the Times

Extract

“Kan kunst de wereld redden?” When Antwerp was cultural capital of Europe in 1993, this question — “Can art save the world?” — was adopted as one of the city's official slogans, prompting the mayor at the time, Bob Cools, to offer his contribution to an answer by way of a quotation: “Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world.” As his source Cools mentioned Literature and Dogma, but in order to register accurately the phrase's critical relation to the salvation of and by culture, we must at least retrace it to its origin in Arnold's work, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.” In that essay, Arnold famously argues for the logical priority of criticism over poetry, claiming that poetry can only thrive when it has at its disposal the “materials” of literary creation, the high-quality “ideas” which it is the province of criticism to furnish (270).” The business of criticism is “simply to know the best that is known and thought in the world, and by in its turn making this known, to create a current of true and fresh ideas” (270). Measured by this standard, Arnold finds his own English modernity sadly deficient, representative of “the modern situation in its true blankness and barrenness, and unpoetrylessness” (Letters 126), and bereft of “just that very thing which now Europe most desires, — criticism” (“Function” 258). For in England, more than anywhere else, the critical spirit suffers from the short-sighted pragmatism and innate mindlessness that render the British immune to ideas, a fundamental philistinism that deprives the creative faculty of its materials and stifles the genuine development of criticism according to “the idea which is the law of its being: the idea of a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world, and thus to establish a current of fresh and true ideas” (“Function” 282).