Space, Time, and Culture: Sorèze, Lacordaire, and Matthew Arnold's Conceptualisation of Culture in A French Eton

Abstract

This essay seeks to explore connections between Matthew Arnold's A French Eton (1864) and his works of cultural criticism, an endeavour which has been largely neglected in Arnold scholarship. The article provides a close linguistic reading of the passages in A French Eton in which Arnold visits and describes the school of Sorèze, and its principal, the French theologian and liberal thinker/activist Jean-Baptiste Henri-Dominique Lacordaire. It shows how these passages feed into ideas of space and time in Arnold's cultural works, especially Culture and Anarchy (1869), and his idea(l)s of how systems and individuals can and should function towards mutual self-realisation, the benefits of which constitute much of what Arnold calls culture. In so doing, the study focuses upon two different orders of space: the Arnoldian metaphorical binary of centre and periphery; and the physical descriptions of the spaces of the two French schools examined in the opening section of A French Eton. In both cases, the article highlights Arnold's preoccupation with and encouragement of the liminal over the permanent, and the simultaneous necessity for symbiotic interdependence between the centre and the periphery. These concerns, enacted through the spatial description of the private school of Sorèze, allow the school to act as a miniature version of Arnold's ideal State. Overlapping both orders of space is Arnold's depiction of Lacordaire. The French school principal is shown to simultaneously exist in past, present, and future, as well as being both central and peripheral, tying him to the cultural heroes depicted and drawn upon throughout Arnold's works of cultural criticism, from Essays in Criticism (1865) to Discourses in America (1885). The essay concludes that for Arnold, Lacordaire becomes a transcendent man of culture and, through his school, a generator of men of culture. Arnold thereby posits affordable state-regulated education as the solution to the modern tendency to anarchy and fetishism.