It began, according to the author’s favourite manner, which was already passing into something like a mannerism, with a sort of half-playful, half-serious battery against a living writer (in this case Mr Frederic Harrison), and with a laudatory citation from a dead one (in this case Bishop Wilson).  Mr Harrison had blasphemed “the cant about culture,” and Mr Arnold protests that culture’s only aim is in the Bishop’s words, “to make reason and the will of God prevail.”  In the first chapter, famous thenceforward in English literature by its title, borrowed from Swift, of “Sweetness and Light,” we have the old rallyings of the Daily Telegraph and the Nonconformist.  Then the general view is laid down, and is developed in those that follow, but still with more of a political than a religious bent, and with the political bent itself chiefly limited to the social aspect.

“Doing as one Likes” scatters a mild rain of ridicule on this supposed fetich of all classes in England; and then, the very famous, if not perhaps very felicitous, nickname-classification of “Barbarian-Philistine-Populace” is launched, defended, discussed in a chapter to itself.  To do Mr Arnold justice, the three classes are, if not very philosophically defined, very impartially and amusingly rallied, the rallier taking up that part of humble Philistine conscious of his own weaknesses, which, till he made it slightly tiresome by too long a run, was piquant enough.  The fourth chapter, “Hebraism and Hellenism,” coasts the sands and rocks (on which, as it seems to some, Mr Arnold was later to make shipwreck) very nearly in the title and rather nearly in the contents, but still with a fairly safe offing.  The opposition might be put too bluntly by saying that “Hellenism” represents to Mr Arnold the love of truth at any price, and “Hebraism” the love of goodness at any price; but the actual difference is not far from this, or from those of knowing and doing, fear of stupidity and fear of sin, &c.  We have the quotation from Mr Carlyle about Socrates being “terribly at ease in Zion,” the promulgation of the word Renascence for Renaissauce, and so forth.  “Porro unum est necessarium,” a favourite tag of Mr Arnold’s, rather holds up another side of the same lesson than continues it in a fresh direction; and then “Our Liberal Practitioners” brings it closer to politics, but (since the immediate subject is the Disestablishment of the Irish Church) nearer also to the quicksands.  Yet Mr Arnold still keeps away from them; though from what followed it would seem that he could only have done so by some such tour de force as the famous “clubhauling” in Peter Simple.  Had Culture and Anarchy stood by itself, it would have been, though very far from its author’s masterpiece, an interesting document both in regard to his own mental history and that of England during the third quarter of the century, containing some of his best prose, and little, if any, of his worst sense.