MINISTERS OF CULTURE: ARNOLD, HUXLEY AND LIBERAL ANGLICAN REFORM OF LEARNING

摘要

In his introduction to C. P. Snow's famous essays, Stefan Collini provides an historical account of the two-cultures debate, suggesting that the notorious exchange between Snow and F. R. Leavis was prefigured in the 1880s in a series of addresses by Thomas Huxley (1825-95) and Matthew Arnold (1822-88).' A leading science popularizer and promoter of scientific education and technology, Huxley seems a good stand-in for Snow; while Arnold's pleas for the moral role of literature, and his sharp criticism of the vulgar and narrowly utilitarian classes who fail to appreciate it, make him a Victorian counterpart to Leavis. In the public statements that are taken to epitomize the Victorian debate, Huxley's 1880 lecture at Mason's College, Birmingham, and Arnold's 1882 Rede lecture, one can read a polarized and acrimonious account of science and literature. Huxley holds forth against "classical scholars" who, "in their capacity of Levites in charge of the ark of culture", have "excommunicated" science from centres of learning.2 Arnold upbraids science, which, for all its usefulness and interest, remains superficial, incapable of engaging the emotions or of inspiring moral action.3 Issuing from concerns about the narrowness of education, and about a more general moral and intellectual disintegration that only a reformed education can heal, the Huxley-Arnold debate appears to presage the fragmentation of learning by the rise of disciplines, and the triumph of specialization.