Volume 28, Number 20 · December 17, 1981
The Triumph of Matthew Arnold
By Noel Annan
Matthew Arnold: A Life
by Park Honan
McGraw-Hill, 496 pp., $19.95
The intelligentsia of the last century have a curious habit. Sometimes they are people whose assumptions and behavior are as remote from ours as those of the Elizabethans and at other times we instantly recognize them. It is arguable that the young Tractarians of the 1830s displayed the same proselytizing zeal, narrowness, self-satisfaction in shocking the benighted, and the same conviction that salvation lay in the rigorous dissection of propositions as did the young communists of the 1930s. But how remote they are! What Newman, Pusey, and Froude thought important and what questions had to be answered are as distant from us as those which puzzled the Paracelsians.
Review, 3304 words
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