The Freedom of Criticism
This chapter turns to the terrain of cultural criticism, with a predominantly literary focus. It develops an account of the attraction of Arnoldian criticism (with its ‘free play of ideas’) to the strong ironies, comic flair, and ‘sarcastic turns’ of cynicism—modes of argument that challenge and assist Arnold’s critical authority, and that become the subject of his most explicit critical reflection when he writes about a German literary cynic, of the generation before him, for whom he had a keen affection: Heinrich Heine. The chapter traces the process by which the kinds of cynicism that Arnold admired and (finally) found wanting in Heine became components of the style and content of his own public moralism, increasingly targeted to the work of describing and attacking the opponents of ‘culture’. The final section of the chapter considers a late reanimation of Arnold’s cynicisms in the context of his encounters with American democratic culture.