ABSTRACT
Matthew Arnold, as critic and advocate of culture, is content to deploy relatively shallow arguments of recommendation and disapprobation to state his case; he appeals to the surface play of events — symbolised by the breaking down of the gates of Hyde Park — in his attempted reassertion of rational elite values. He sees the culture of his poet heroes threatened by the turbulent forces of mass democracy; but he makes little attempt to assess these psychic elements in their profoundest antagonistic depths. What Arnold skates over, Nietzsche seeks to explore. From the very beginning his analysis is framed in terms of what he sees as the demiurges representative
of fundamental orientations of the human spirit, of subterranean forces and myth, part pitted against, part informing, the detached powers of rationality and positive knowledge characteristic of the age. In his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, he embarks on an attempted diagnosis of modern ills which has few parallels in the nineteenth century for psychological
penetration; and, as he sees any subsequent resolution partly, at least, in terms of 'education' and the casting out of false ideals, even today he speaks to our condition. What he achieved, indeed, constituted an overturning of current valuations, penetrated the facade of nineteenthcentury optimism and progress to reveal a reality of 'decline, fatigue, distemper'. In this, of course, he wasn't unique; what matters, however, is the profundity of his analysis and penetration. For Nietzsche questioned the very historical evaluations which more conventional minds — even Arnold's — offered up as corrective exempla for current discontents.
