ABSTRACT
Irving Babbitt praises Matthew Arnold as a positive and critical humanist. He cites Arnold's awareness of man's "permanent self that is felt in its relation to his ordinary self as a power of control". That Arnold saw the importance of the role that the humanistic idea should play in a qualitative and selective democracy emphasizes his modernism. Arnold and his message have been put thus persuasively before Americans, one is naturally tempted to inquire what value this message is likely to have for them. Perhaps no Englishman has expressed more perfectly than Arnold in his poetry this particular form of nostalgia. Arnold's remedy for anarchy—the failure to rise sufficiently above the level of one's ordinary self—is, it is hardly necessary to say, culture. The warfare that Arnold waged on the Philistine in the name of culture is not to be confused with the romantic revolt from convention.
