SOCIETY
"Culture seeks to do away with classes and sects; to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere; to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light, where they may use ideas, as it uses them itself, freely; nourished, and not bound, by them. This is the social idea; and the men of culture are the true apostles of equality."
The words—social idea—which Arnold himself italicized in the foregoing extract from Culture and Anarchy, will indicate the sense in which "Society" is here intended. We are not thinking of that which Pennialinus[21] means when he writes about "Society gossip" or "a Society function." We are concerned with the thoughts and temper and actions of men, not as isolated units, but as living in an organized community; and, taking "Society" in this sense, we are to examine Arnold's influence on the Society of his time.
Certainly the most obvious and palpable way of affecting Society—and to many Englishmen the only conceivable way—is by the method of Politics; by the definite and positive action of human law, and by such endeavours as we can make towards shaping that action. Now, if indeed the Political method were the only one, there could be little to be said about his effect on Society. Politics, in the limited and conventional sense just now suggested, were not much in his line. He was interested in them; he had opinions about them; he occasionally intervened in them. But he made no mark on the political work of his time; nor, so far as one can judge, did he aspire to do so. Of the man of letters in the field of politics, he said: "He is in truth not on his own ground there, and is in peculiar danger of talking at random." In politics, as in all else that he touched, he was critical rather than constructive; and in politics, "immersed," as Bacon said, "in matter," a man must be constructive, if his influence is to be felt and to endure. "Politicians," he said in 1880, "we all of us here in England are and must be, and I too cannot help being a politician; but a politician of that commonwealth of which the pattern, as the philosopher says, exists perhaps somewhere in Heaven, but certainly is at present found nowhere on earth." In 1887, describing himself as "an aged outsider," he thus stated his own attitude towards political problems—
"The professional politicians are always apt to be impatient of the intervention in politics of a candid outsider, and he must expect to provoke contempt and resentment in a good many of them. Still the action of the regular politicians continues to be, for the most part, so very far from successful, that the outsider is perpetually tempted to brave their anger and to offer his observations, with the hope of possibly doing some little good by saying what many quiet people are thinking and wishing outside of the strife, phrases, and routine of professional politics."
From first to last, he professed himself, and no doubt believed himself, to be on the Liberal side. At the General Election of 1868 he urbanely informed a Tory Committee, which asked for the advantage of his name, that he was "an old Whig," nurtured in the traditions of Lansdowne House. "Although," he said in 1869, "I am a Liberal, yet I am a Liberal tempered by experience, reflection, and renouncement." In 1878 he described himself as a "sincere but ineffectual Liberal": in 1880, as "a Liberal of the future rather than a Liberal of the present." A year later, he spoke smilingly of "all good Liberals, of whom I wish to be considered one"; and as late as 1887 he declared himself "one of the Liberals of the future, who happen to be grown, alas! rather old."
But, though he believed himself to be a Liberal, he had the most lively disrelish for the Liberalism of that great Middle Class which, during the greater part of his life, played so large a part in Liberal politics. In 1882, reviewing, in his favourite manner, the various classes of English Society, and discussing their adequacy to fulfil the ideal of perfect citizenship, he wrote—
"Suppose we take that figure we know so well, the earnest and non-conforming Liberal of our Middle Classes, as his schools and his civilization have made him. He is for Disestablishment; he is for Temperance; he has an eye to his Wife's Sister; he is a member of his local caucus; he is learning to go up to Birmingham every year to the feast of Mr. Chamberlain. His inadequacy is but too visible."
Certainly Arnold's Liberalism had nothing in common with the Liberalism of the great Middle Class. Indeed, so far as theory is concerned, it had a democratic basis, inasmuch as he believed that democracy was a product of natural law, and that our business was to adapt our political and social institutions to it. "Democracy," he said, "is trying to affirm its own essence: to live, to enjoy, to possess the world, as aristocracy has tried, and successfully tried, before it."
The movement of Democracy he regarded as being an "operation of nature," and, like other operations of nature, it was neither to be praised nor blamed. He was neither a "partisan" of it, nor an "enemy." His only care was, if he could, to guide it aright, and to secure that it used its predominant power in human affairs at least as wisely as the aristocracy which had preceded it. Of aristocratic rule in foreign countries—of such rule as preceded the French Revolution—he thought as poorly as most men think; but for the aristocracy of England he had a singular esteem. It is true that he gave it a nickname; that he poked fun at its illiteracy and its inaccessibility to ideas; that he was impatient of "immense inequalities of condition and property," and huge estates, and irresponsible landlordism; that he contemned the "hideous English toadyism" and "immense vulgar-mindedness" of the Middle Class when confronted with "lords and great people."
But, for all that, he wrote about the English Aristocracy, as it stood in 1859: "I desire to speak of it with the most unbounded respect. It is the most popular of aristocracies; it has avoided faults which have ruined other aristocracies equally splendid. While the aristocracy of France was destroying its estates by its extravagance, and itself by its impertinence, the aristocracy of England was founding English agriculture, and commanding respect by a personal dignity which made even its pride forgiven. Historical and political England, the England of which we are all so proud, is of its making."
In spite, however, of this high estimate of what Aristocracy had accomplished in the past, he felt that power was slipping away from it, and was passing into the hands of the Multitude. But he also felt—and it was certainly one of his most profound convictions—that the Multitude could never govern properly, could never regulate its own affairs, could never present England adequately to the view of the world, unless it cast aside the Individualism in which it had been nurtured, and made up its mind to act in and through the State. Perhaps his ideal of a State can best be described as an Educated Democracy, working by Collectivism in Government, Religion, and Social order.
"If experience has established any one thing in this world, it has established this: that it is well for any great class or description of men in society to be able to say for itself what it wants, and not to have other classes, the so-called educated and intelligent classes, acting for it as its proctors, and supposed to understand its wants and to provide for them. They do not really understand its wants, they do not really provide for them. A class of men may often itself not either fully understand its own wants, or adequately express them; but it has a nearer interest and a more sure diligence in the matter than any of its proctors, and therefore a better chance of success." Amid many fluctuations of opinion on minor points, he was, from first to last, a thoroughgoing advocate for extending the action of the State. In his ideal of government, the State was to play in a democratic age the part which the Aristocracy had played in earlier ages—it was to govern and administer and control and inspire. And, it was, in one important respect, a far nobler thing than the best aristocracy could ever be, for it was the "representative acting-power of the nation"; and so the relation of the citizen to the State was a much more dignified relation than that of a citizen to an aristocracy could ever be. "Is it that of a dependant to a parental benefactor? By no means: it is that of a member in a partnership to the whole firm." The citizens of a State, the members of a society, are really "'a partnership,' as Burke nobly says, 'in all science, in all art, in every virtue, in all perfection.' Towards this great final design of their connexion, they apply the aids which co-operative association can give them." We turn now to the practical application of this doctrine.
We have seen in the previous chapter how earnestly and consistently throughout his working life he urged the State to take into its control, and so far as was needed to subsidize, the Education of the whole nation. "How vain, how meaningless," he cried, "to tell a man who, for the instruction of his offspring, receives aid from the State, that he is humiliated! Humiliated by receiving help for himself as an individual from himself in his corporate and associated capacity! help to which his own money, as a tax-payer, contributes, and for which, as a result of the joint energy and intelligence of the whole community in employing as powers, he himself deserves some of the praise!... He is no more humiliated than when he crosses London Bridge or walks down the King's Road, or visits the British Museum. But it is one of the extraordinary inconsistencies of some English people in this matter, that they keep all their cry of humiliation and degradation for help which the State offers." We shall see in a subsequent chapter that he was as strong for Established Churches as for State-regulated Schools, and for the same reason. In Religion, as in Education, he disparaged private institutions and individual ventures. The State, "the nation in its corporate and collective capacity," ought to transcend the individual citizen: it should supply him, to help him as one of its units to supply himself, with the thing which he wanted—Education or Religion—in the grand style, on a large scale, with all the authority which comes from national recognition, with all the dignity of a historical descent.
Arnold's appeal for State-supplied and State-controlled Education has, as we have already seen, met with some practical response, and in the main falls in with the modern drift of Liberal ideas. In upholding State-supported and State-controlled Religion, he was rather continuing an old tradition than starting a new idea, and modern Liberalism is moving away from him.
But in some important respects, all strictly political, his advocacy of extended action by the State fell in with the Liberal movement of his time. The hideous misgovernment of Ireland he had always deplored. It touched him long before it touched the great majority of Englishmen. With a view to informing people on the Irish question, he compiled a book of Burke's most telling utterances on Ireland and her woes. Those utterances, as he said, "Show at work all the causes which have brought Ireland to its present state—the tyranny of the grantees of confiscation; of the English garrison; Protestant ascendancy; the reliance of the English Government upon this ascendancy and its instruments as their means of government; the yielding to menaces of danger and insurrection what was never yielded to considerations of equity and reason; the recurrence to the old perversity of mismanagement as soon as ever the danger was passed." To all these evils he would have applied the remedies which Burke suggested. He would have had the State endow the religions of Ireland and their ministries, supply Ireland with good schools, and defend Irish tenants against the extortions of bad landlords. He was vehemently opposed to Gladstone's scheme of Home Rule, because, in his view, it tended to disintegration where he specially desired cohesion: but, in the tumults of 1885-8, he never lost his head, never forgot his old sympathy with Irish wrongs, never "drew up an indictment against a whole people."[22] All through these stormy years, he stood firm for an effective system of Local Government in Ireland. Irish government, he said, had "been conducted in accordance with the wishes of the minority, and of the British Philistine." He desired a system which should accord with the wishes of the majority. He deprecated Forster's "expression of general objection to Home Rule"; because, though Home Rule as understood by Parnell was intolerable, there was another kind of Home Rule which was possible and even desirable. He was keenly anxious that his friends, the Liberal Unionists, should not let the opportunity slip, but should bring forward a "counter scheme to Gladstone's," giving real powers of local government. In 1887 he again insisted that the "opinion of quiet reasonable people throughout the country" was bent on giving the Irish the due control of their own local affairs. He pleaded for a system "built on sufficiently large lines, not too complicated, not fantastic, not hesitating and suspicious, not taking back with one hand what it gives with the other." A similar system he wished to see extended to England, and he pointed out that it admirably facilitated that national control of Secondary Education for which he was always pleading.
Then again, with reference to Irish land, his belief in the action of the State displayed itself very clearly. In his opinion the remedy for agrarian trouble in Ireland was that the State should, after rigid and impartial enquiry, distinguish between good landlords and bad, and then expropriate the bad ones. This, he thought, would "give the sort of equity, the sort of moral satisfaction, which the case needed." Once again he was in harmony with Liberal opinion, when he desired to widen the basis of the State by extending the suffrage in turn to the Artisans and the Labourers. In one respect at least he was in harmony rather with Collectivist Radicalism than with orthodox Liberalism, for he did not in the least dread the intervention of the State between employer and employed. He desired to strengthen Parliament, the supreme organ of the national will, by reforming the House of Lords; though he strongly dissented from a scheme of reform just then in vogue. "One can hardly imagine sensible men planning a Second Chamber which should not include the Archbishop of Canterbury, or which should include the young gentlemen who flock to the House of Lords when pigeon-shooting is in question. But our precious Liberal Reformers are for retaining the pigeon-shooters and for expelling the Archbishop of Canterbury."[23]
Even in the full flood of Liberal victory which followed the General Election of 1880, he saw what was coming. "What strikes one is the insecureness of the Liberals' hold upon office and upon public favour; the probability of the return, perhaps even more than once, of their adversaries to office, before that final and happy consummation is reached—the permanent establishment of Liberalism in power." And, while he saw what was coming, he thus divined the cause. The official and commanding part of the Liberal Party was at the best stolidly indifferent to Social Reform; at the worst, viciously angry with the idea and those who propagated it. The commercialism of the great Middle Class had covered the face of England with places like St. Helens, which the capitalists called "great centres of national enterprise," and Cobbett called "Hell-Holes." In these places life was lived under conditions of squalid and hideous misery, and the inhabitants were beginning to find out, in the words of one of their own class, that "free political institutions do not guarantee the well-being of the toiling class." Under these circumstances it was natural that the toilers, having looked for redress to the Liberal Party and looked in vain, should, when next they had the chance, try a spell of that Democratic Toryism which at any rate held out some shadowy hope of social betterment. Arnold's misgivings about the future of the Liberal Party were abundantly made good by the General Election of 1885; but enough has now been said about his contribution to the practical politics of his time. A much larger space must be given to the influence which he brought to bear on Society by methods not political—by criticism, by banter, by literary felicities, by "sinuous, easy, unpolemical" methods.
England had known him first as a poet, then as a literary critic. Next came a rather hazy impression that he was an educational reformer whose suggestions might be worth attending to. It was not till 1869 that his countrymen became fully aware of him as a social critic, a commentator on life and society. Looking back, one seems to see that by that time his poetical function was fulfilled. As far as the medium of poetry is concerned, he had said his say; said it incomparably well, said it with abiding effect. Now it seemed that a new function presented itself to him; a great door and effectual was opened to him. He found a fresh sphere of usefulness and influence in applying his critical method to the ideals and follies of his countrymen; to their scheme of life, ways of thinking and acting, prejudices, conventions, and limitations. Mr. Paul said, as we have already seen, that the appearance of Essays in Criticism was "a great intellectual event." That is perfectly true; and the appearance of Culture and Anarchy was a great social event. The book so named was published in 1869; but the ground had been prepared for it by some earlier writings, and these we must consider before we come to the book itself.
In February, 1866, there appeared in the Cornhill Magazine an essay called "My Countrymen." In this essay Arnold, fresh from one of his Continental tours, tried to show English people what the intelligent mind of Europe was really thinking of them. "'It is not so much that we dislike England,' a Prussian official, with the graceful tact of his nation, said to me the other day, 'as that we think little of her.'" Broadly speaking, European judgment on us came to this—that England had been great, powerful, and prosperous under an aristocratic government, at a time when the chief requisite for national greatness was Action, "for aristocracies, poor in ideas, are rich in energy"; but that England was rapidly losing ground, was becoming a second-rate power, was falling from her place in admiration and respect, since the Government had passed into the hands of the Middle Class. What was now the chief requisite for national greatness was Intelligence; and in intelligence the Middle Class had shown itself signally deficient. In foreign affairs—in its dealings with Russia and Turkey, Germany and America—it had shown "rash engagement, intemperate threatenings, undignified retreat, ill-timed cordiality," in short, every quality best calculated to lower England in the esteem of the civilized world.
In domestic affairs, the life and mind of the Middle Class were thus described by the foreign critic. "The fineness and capacity of man's spirit is shown by his enjoyments; your Middle Class has an enjoyment in its business, we admit, and gets on well in business, and makes money; but beyond that? Drugged with business, your Middle Class seems to have its sense blunted for any stimulus besides, except Religion; it has a religion, narrow, unintelligent, repulsive.... What other enjoyments have they? The newspapers, a sort of eating and drinking which are not to our taste, a literature of books almost entirely religious or semi-religious, books utterly unreadable by an educated class anywhere, but which your Middle Class consumes by the hundred thousand, and in their evenings, for a great treat, a lecture on Teetotalism or Nunneries. Can any life be imagined more hideous, more dismal, more unenviable?... Your Middle Class man thinks it the highest pitch of development and civilization when his letters are carried twelve times a day from Islington to Camberwell, and from Camberwell to Islington, and if railway trains run to and fro between them every quarter of an hour. He thinks it is nothing that the trains only carry him from an illiberal, dismal life at Islington to an illiberal, dismal life at Camberwell; and the letters only tell him that such is the life there." And, as to political and social reform, "Such a spectacle as your Irish Church Establishment you cannot find in France or Germany. Your Irish Land Question you dare not face." English Schools, English vestrydom, English provincialism—all alike stand in the most urgent need of reform; but with all alike the Middle Class is serenely content. After reporting these exceedingly frank comments of foreign critics to his English readers, Arnold thus expresses his own conviction on the matters in dispute. "All due deductions made for envy, exaggeration, and injustice, enough stuck by me of these remarks to determine me to go on trying to keep my mind fixed on these, instead of singing hosannahs to our actual state of development and civilization. The old recipe, to think a little more and bustle a little less, seemed to me still to be the best recipe to follow. So I take comfort when I find the Guardian reproaching me with having no influence; for I know what influence means—a party, practical proposals, action; and I say to myself: 'Even suppose I could get some followers, and assemble them, brimming with affectionate enthusiasm, to a committee-room in some inn; what on earth should I say to them? What resolutions could I propose? I could only propose the old Socratic commonplace, Know thyself; and how black they would all look at that!' No; to enquire, perhaps too curiously, what that present state of English development and civilization is, which according to Mr. Lowe is so perfect that to give votes to the working class is stark madness; and, on the other hand, to be less sanguine about the divine and saving effect of a vote on its possessor than my friends in the committee-room at the Spotted Dog—that is my inevitable portion. To bring things under the light of one's intelligence, to see how they look there, to accustom oneself simply to regard the Marylebone Vestry, or the Educational Home, or the Irish Church Establishment, or our railway management, or our Divorce Court, or our gin-palaces open on Sunday and the Crystal Palace shut, as absurdities—that is, I am sure, invaluable exercise for us just at present. Let all persist in it who can, and steadily set their desires on introducing, with time, a little more soul and spirit into the too, too solid flesh of English society."
So much for his first deliberate attempt in the way of social criticism. It was levelled, we observe, at the thoughts and doings of the great Middle Class, and it is natural to ask why that class was so specially the target for his scorn. To that class, as he was fond of declaring, half in fun and half in earnest, he himself belonged. "I always thought my marriage," he used to say, "such a perfect marriage of the Middle Classes—a schoolmaster's son and a judge's daughter." In the preface to the Essays in Criticism, he spoke of "the English Middle Class, of which I am myself a feeble unit." He used to declare that his feeling towards his brethren of the Middle Class was that of St. Paul towards his brethren of Israel: "My heart's desire and prayer for them is that they may be saved." In Culture and Anarchy he was constrained to admit that "through circumstances which will perhaps one day be known, if ever the affecting history of my conversion comes to be written, I have, for the most part, broken with the ideas and the tea-meetings of my own class"; but he found that he had not, by that conversion, come much nearer to the ideas and works of the Aristocracy or the Populace.
He admired the fine manners, the governing faculty, the reticent and dignified habit, of the Aristocracy. He deplored its limitations and its obduracy, its "little culture and no ideas." He made fun of it when its external manifestations touched the region of the ludicrous—"Everybody knows Lord Elcho's[24] appearance, and how admirably he looks the part of our governing classes; to my mind, indeed, the mere cock of his lordship's hat is one of the finest and most aristocratic things we have." In a more serious vein he taught—and enraged the Guardian by teaching—that, "ever since the advent of Christianity, the prince of this world is judged"; and that wealth and rank and dignified ease are bound to justify themselves for their apparent inconsistency with the Christian ideal. He pitied the sorrows of the "people who suffer," the "dim, common populations," the "poor who faint alway"; but he pitied them from above. He certainly did not enter into their position; did not share their ideas, or feel their sorrows as part of his own experience. In an amazing passage he says that, when we snatch up a vehement opinion in ignorance and passion, when we long to crush an adversary by sheer violence, when we are envious, when we are brutal, when "we add our voices to swell a blind clamour against some unpopular personage," when "we trample savagely on the fallen," then we find in our own bosom "the eternal spirit of the Populace." That a spirit so hideous, so infernal as is here described, is the eternal spirit of fallen humanity may be painfully true; but to say that it is the special or characteristic spirit of "the Populace" is to show that one has no genuine sympathy and no real acquaintance with the life and heart of the poor. So far, then, his account of his own transition is true. He had "broken with the ideas of his own class, and had not come much nearer to the ideas and works of Aristocracy or the Populace." But the work of his life had brought him into close and continuous contact with the great Middle Class, which practically had the whole management of Elementary Education in its hands. He knew the members of that class, as he said, "experimentally." He slept in their houses, and ate at their tables, and observed at close quarters their books, their amusements, and their social life. Thus he judged of their civilization by intimate acquaintance, and found it eminently distasteful and defective. From 1832 to 1867 the Middle Class had governed England, manipulating the Aristocracy through the medium of the House of Commons; and the Aristocracy, though still occupying the place of visible dignity, had its eye nervously fixed on the movement, actual and impending, of the Middle Class. This system of government by the predominance of the Middle Class, was not only distasteful to culture, but was actually a source of danger to the State when it came to be applied to Foreign Affairs. "That makes the difference between Lord Grenville and Lord Granville." So it was to the shortcomings of the Middle Class, from which he professed to be sprung and which he so intimately knew, that he first addressed his social criticism. The essay on "My Countrymen" immediately attracted notice. It was fresh, it was lively, it put forth a new view, it gaily ran counter to the great mass of current prejudice. He was frankly pleased by the way in which it was received. It was noticed and quoted and talked about. He reported to his mother that it was thought "witty and suggestive," "timely and true." Carlyle "almost wholly approved of it," and Bright was "full of it." He did not expect it to be liked by people who belonged to "the old English time, of which the greatness and success was so immense and indisputable that no one who flourished when it was at its height could ever lose the impression of it," or realize how far we had fallen in Continental esteem. His friend Lingen was "indignant" because he thought the essay exalted the Aristocracy at the expense of the Middle Class; and the Whig newspapers were "almost all unfavourable, because it tells disagreeable truths to the class which furnishes the great body of what is called the Liberal interest." From the foreign side came a criticism in the Pall Mall Gazette, "professing to be by a Frenchman," but "I am sure it is by a woman I know something of in Paris, a half Russian, half Englishwoman, married to a Frenchman." The first part of this criticism "is not good, and perhaps when the second part appears I shall write a short and light letter by way of reply." That "short and light letter" appeared in the Pall Mall of March 20, 1866. It dealt with the respective but not incompatible claims of Culture and Liberty—the former so defective in England, the latter so abundant—and it contained this aspiration for Englishmen of the Middle Class. "I do not wish them to be the café-haunting, dominoes-playing Frenchmen, but some third thing: neither the Frenchmen nor their present selves."
He was now fairly launched on the course of social criticism. As time went on, his essays attracted more and more notice, sometimes friendly, sometimes hostile, but always interested and not seldom excited. Some of the comments on the new and daring critic were inconceivably absurd. Of Mr. Frederic Harrison's retort,[25] Arnold wrote that it was "scarcely the least vicious, and in parts so amusing that I laughed till I cried." Mr. Goldwin Smith described him as "a gentleman of a jaunty air, and on good terms with the world." To the Times he seemed "a sentimentalist whose dainty taste requires something more flimsy than the strong sense and sturdy morality of his fellow-Englishmen." One newspaper called him "a high priest of the kid-glove persuasion"; another, "an elegant Jeremiah"; and Mr. Lionel Tollemache, combining in one harmonious whole the absurdities of all the other commentators, says: "When asked my opinion of this quaint man of genius, I have described him as a Hebrew prophet in white kid gloves."
The fact is that we are a serious people. The Middle Class, which he singled out for attack, is quite pre-eminently serious. Philosophers and critics—the Spectator and the Edinburgh—had made seriousness a religion. Editors, leader-writers, reviewers, the Press generally, were steeped to their lips in seriousness. They could not understand, and were greatly inclined to resent, the appearance of this bright, playful, unconventional spirit, happy and brilliant himself, and loving the happiness and brilliancy of the world; with not an ounce of pomposity in his own nature, and with the most irreverent demeanour towards pomposity in other people. "Our social Polyphemes," as Lord Beaconsfield said, "have only one eye"; and they could not the least perceive that Arnold's genius was like the genius of poetry as he himself described it—
Radiant, adorn'd outside; a hidden ground
Of thought and of austerity within.
In a letter to the Pall Mall Gazette of July 21, 1866, he first introduced his friend Arminius,[26] Baron Von Thunder-Ten-Tronckh, the cultivated and enquiring Prussian who had come to England to study our Politics, Education, Local Government, and social life. A series of similar letters followed at irregular intervals during the years 1866, 1867, 1869, and 1870. And Arminius' drastic method of questioning and arguing became the idoneous vehicle for Arnold's criticisms on such topics as our Foreign Policy, Compulsory Education, the Press, and the Deceased Wife's Sister. The letters were eventually collected in that little-read but most fascinating book, Friendship's Garland, which was published in 1871.[27] But before Friendship's Garland came out, Arnold, who had tested his powers in social criticism by these fugitive pieces, addressed himself to a more serious and solid effort in the same field. The essays which eventually formed the book called Culture and Anarchy began to appear in the Cornhill Magazine for July, 1867, and were continued in 1868. The book was published in 1869. We saw at the outset that he himself said of his Discourses in America that they, of all his prose-writings, were the writings by which he would most wish to be remembered. Many of his disciples would say that Essays in Criticism was his most important work in prose. Some people would give the crown to Literature and Dogma. "It has been more in demand," the author told us in 1883, "than any other of my prose-writings." Respect is due to what a great master thought of his own work, and to what his best-qualified disciples think of it. But after all we uphold the right of private judgment, and the present writer is strongly of opinion that Culture and Anarchy is Arnold's most important work in prose. It was, to borrow a phrase used by Mr. Gladstone in another connexion, not a book, but an event. We must consider it in its proper setting of time and circumstance.
The beginning of 1869 was a great moment in our political and social history. Ever since the enthusiasm which surrounded the Reform Act of 1832 had faded away in disappointment and disillusion, the ardent friends of freedom and progress had been crying out for a further extension of the franchise. The next Reform Bill was to give the workmen a vote; and a Parliament elected by workmen was to bring the Millennium. The Act of 1867 gave the desired vote, and the workmen used it for the first time at the General Election of 1868. At the beginning of 1869 the new Parliament was just assembling, and it was possible to take stock of it, to analyze its component parts, to form some estimate of its capacity, some forecast of its intentions. It was a Liberal Parliament. There was no mistake about that. Bishop Wilberforce wrote just after the Election: "In a few weeks Gladstone will be in office, at the head of a majority of something like a hundred, elected on the distinct issue of 'Gladstone and the Irish Church.'"
Certainly the Election had been fought and won on Irish Disestablishment, but disestablishment was only part of a larger scheme. Rather late in the day, the Liberal Party, urged thereto by a statesman who had never set foot in Ireland, had taken into its head to "govern Ireland according to Irish ideas," or what was understood by that taking phrase. We were to disestablish and disendow the Irish Church, reform the Irish system of land-tenure, and reconstruct the Irish Universities. Robert Lowe, who was a conspicuous member of the new Cabinet, burst into rather premature dithyrambics, crying, "The Liberal Ministry resolved to knit the hearts of the Empire into one harmonious concord, and knitted they were accordingly." And we, of the rank and file, believed this claptrap; but to us it was not claptrap, for our whole hearts were in the great enterprise of pacification in which we believed our leaders to be engaged. But Ireland by no means exhausted our reforming zeal. We had enough and to spare for many departments of the Constitution. We were determined to give the workmen the protection of the Ballot, and to compel them to educate their children. We meant to abolish Purchase in the Army and Tests at the University; and some of us were beginning to feel our way to more extensive changes still; to hanker after universal suffrage, to dream of simultaneous disarmament, to anticipate the downfall of monarchical institutions, and to listen with complacency to attacks on the Civil List and Impeachments of the House of Brunswick. In fine, Reformers were in a triumphant and sanguine mood. We were constrained to admit that, as regards its personal composition, the new House of Commons was a little Philistine—not so democratic, not so redolent of Labour, as we had hoped. But we believed that we had the promise of the future. We believed that by enfranchising the artisans we had undertaken a long step towards the ideal perfection of the Commonwealth. We believed that these new citizens, who had just proved themselves worthy of their citizenship, would continue to support, with increasing ardour and devotion, Liberal administrations and Liberal measures. Above all, we believed that, as our recent achievements were the direct developments of great principles asserted in the past, so they would in turn develop into constitutional changes far more momentous, and that in the fulfilment of those changes lay the only real prospect of human happiness.
This is a fair statement of the mental temper in which young and inexperienced Liberals found themselves in the year 1869.[28] And there was much to encourage us in our complacency. Gladstone, to whom during the rather dreary reign of exhausted Whiggery we had looked as to our rising star—the one man who combined Religion and Poetry and Romance with the love of Progress and the passion of Freedom—had told us that "the great social forces were on our side," and that our opponents "could not fight against the future." Philosophers, like Mill, had told us that all the intelligence, all the science, all the mental courage of the world were with us, and that Toryism was the creed of the intellectually destitute. Morning after morning a vigorous Press sang its loud hymn of triumph, and assured us that, even if for a moment our chariot-wheels drave rather heavily, still we were going forth conquering and to conquer, and that the future of Liberalism was to be one long series of victories, uninterrupted till the crack of doom.
And then to us, thus comfortably entrenched in self-esteem, there entered the figure, unknown to most, only half-known to any, of a new and most disturbing critic. Here was a man whose very name breathed Liberalism; for whom speculation had no fears; who had harassed the most hoary conventions with obstinate questionings; who had accepted Democracy as the evolution of natural law; who had poked delicious fun at the most highly-placed impostures, the most solemn plausibilities. In such a one we might surely have expected to find a friend, an ally, a comforter, a fellow-worker; a preacher of the smooth things which we loved to hear, an encourager of the day-dreams which we had learned from Locksley Hall. Instead of all this we found a critic—so gracious that we could not quarrel with him, so reasonable that we found it hard to dispute with him; so absolutely free from pomposity that we could not laugh at him, so genuinely and freshly witty that we could not help laughing with him—but a critic still. He thought scorn of our pleasant land, and gave no credence unto our word. He belittled our heroes; he pooh-poohed our achievements; he cast doubt on our prophecies; he caricatured our aspirations. He told us that we were the victims of a profound delusion. He warned us that the great Democracy on which we relied as our unchangeable foundation would give way under our feet. He pointed out that Labour had no more reason to expect its salvation from Liberalism than from Toryism. He insisted that all our political reform was mere machinery; that the end and object of politics was Social Reform; and that the promise of the future was for those who should help us to be better, wiser, and happier; for those who concerned themselves rather with the product of the machine than with the machine itself; who were not satisfied by eternally taking it to pieces and putting it together again, but who wanted to know what sort of stuff it was, when perfected, to turn out. He suggested that "the present troubled state of our social life" had at least something to do with "the thirty years' blind worship of their idols by our Liberal friends," and that it threw some doubt on "the sufficiency of their worship." "It is not," he said, "fatal to our Liberal friends to labour for Free Trade, Extension of the Suffrage, and Abolition of Church Rates, instead of graver social ends; but it is fatal to them to be told by their flatterers, and to believe, with our social condition what it is, that they have performed a great, a heroic work, by occupying themselves exclusively, for the last thirty years, with these Liberal nostrums."
And, while our new critic was thus disdainful of much that we held sacred, of political machinery and logical government, and individual liberty of speech and action, he recalled our attention to certain objects of reverence which we, or at least some of us, had forgotten. He insisted on the immense value of history and continuity in the political life of a nation. He extolled (though the words were not his) the "institutions which incorporate tradition and prolong the reign of the dead." He affirmed that external beauty, stateliness, splendour, gracious manners, were indispensable elements of civilization, and that these were the contributions which Aristocracy made to the welfare of the State. He reminded us that the true greatness of a nation was to be found in its culture, its ideals, its sentiment for beauty, its performances in the intellectual and moral spheres—not in its supply of coal, its volume of trade, its accumulated capital, or its multiplication of railways. Above all—and this was to some of our Party the unkindest cut—he asserted for Religion the chief place among the elements of national well-being. We were just then living at the fag-end of an anti-religious time. The critical, negative, and utilitarian spirit which had seized on Oxford after the apparent defeat and collapse of Newman's movement had profoundly affected the Liberal Party. It was an essential characteristic of the political Liberals to pour scorn on that "retrograding transcendentalism" which was "the hardheads' nickname for the Anglo-Catholic Symphony."[29] The fact that Gladstone was so saturated with the spirit of that symphony was a cause of mistrust which his genius and courage could barely overcome; and, even when it was overcome, a good many of his Party followed him as reluctantly and as mockingly as Sancho Panza followed Don Quixote. The only heaven of which the political Liberal dreamed was what Arnold called "the glorified and unending tea-meeting of popular Protestantism." And the portion of the Party which regarded itself as the intellectual wing, seemed to have reverted to the temper described by Bishop Butler; "taking for granted that Christianity is not so much as a subject of enquiry, but that it is now at length discovered to be fictitious"; and habitually talking as if "this were an agreed point among all people of discernment." Great was the vexation of the "old Liberal hacks" who had been repeating these dismal shibboleths, and ignoring or denying the greatest force in human life, to find in this new teacher of liberal ideas a convinced and persistent opponent. He affirmed that Religion was the best, the sweetest, and the strongest thing in the world; he insisted that without it there could be no perfect culture, no complete civilization; he showed a reverent admiration for the historical character and teaching of Jesus Christ; he urged the example of His "mildness and sweet reasonableness." He taught that the best way of extending Christ's kingdom on earth was by sweetening the character and brightening the lives of the men and women whose nature He shared.
It belongs to another part of this work to enquire what he meant by Religion and Christianity, and how far his interpretations accorded with, or how far they departed from, the traditional creed of Christendom. But enough, perhaps, has been said to explain why the appearance of Culture and Anarchy so profoundly disquieted the "old Liberal hacks" and the popular teachers of irreligion. One of these called Christianity "that awful plague which has destroyed two civilizations and but barely failed to slay such promise of good as is now struggling to live amongst men." Of that teacher, and of others like him, Arnold wrote in later years: "If the matter were not so serious one could hardly help smiling at the chagrin and manifest perplexity of such of one's friends as happen to be philosophical radicals and secularists, at having to reckon with religion again when they thought its day was quite gone by, and that they need not study it any more or take account of it any more; that it was passing out, and a kind of new gospel, half Bentham, half Cobden, in which they were themselves particularly strong, was coming in. And perhaps there is no one who more deserves to be compassionated than an elderly or middle-aged man of this kind, such as several of their Parliamentary spokesmen and representatives are. For perhaps the younger men of the Party may take heart of grace, and acquaint themselves a little with religion, now that they see its day is by no means over. But, for the older ones, their mental habits are formed, and it is almost too late for them to begin such new studies. However, a wave of religious reaction is evidently passing over Europe, due very much to our revolutionary and philosophical friends having insisted upon it that religion was gone by and unnecessary, when it was neither the one nor the other."
A study of Arnold's work ought to give something more than a sketch of the prose-book by which he most powerfully affected the thinking of his time, and we will therefore take the contents of Culture and Anarchy chapter by chapter. The Preface is only a summary of the book, and may therefore be disregarded. The Introduction briefly points out the foolishness of orators and leader-writers who had assumed that Culture meant "a smattering of Greek and Latin," and then addresses itself to the task of finding a better definition. "I propose now to try and enquire, in the simple unsystematic way which best suits both my taste and my powers, what Culture really is, what good it can do, what is our own special need of it; and I shall seek to find some plain grounds on which a faith in Culture—both my own faith in it and the faith of others—may rest securely."
The First Chapter bears the memorable heading—"Sweetness and Light"; in reference to which Lord Salisbury so happily said that, when he conferred the degree of D.C.L. on Arnold, he ought to have addressed him as "Vir dulcissime et lucidissime." In this chapter Arnold lays it down that Culture, as he understands the word, is, in part, "a desire after the things of the mind, simply for their own sakes, and for the pleasure of seeing them as they are." But he goes on to say that "there is of Culture another view, in which not solely the scientific passion, the sheer desire to see things as they are, natural and proper in an intelligent being, appears as the ground of it. There is a view in which all the love of our neighbour, the impulses towards action, help, and beneficence, the desire for removing human error, clearing human confusion, and diminishing human misery, the noble aspiration to leave the world better and happier than we found it—motives eminently such as are called social—come in as part of the grounds of Culture, and the main and pre-eminent part. Culture is then properly described not as having its origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection. It moves by the force, not merely or primarily of the scientific passion for pure knowledge, but also of the moral and social passion for doing good.... There is no better motto which it can have than these words of Bishop Wilson: "To make reason and the will of God prevail." Thus the true disciple of Culture will not be content with merely "learning the truth for his own personal satisfaction"; but will try to make it prevail; and in this endeavour Religion plays a commanding part. It is "the greatest and most important of the efforts by which the human race has manifested its impulse to perfect itself"; it is "the voice of the deepest human experience." It teaches that "The Kingdom of God is within you," and that internal perfection must first be sought; but then it goes on, hand in hand with Culture, to spread perfection in widest commonalty. "Perfection is not possible, while the individual remains isolated." "To promote the Kingdom of God is to increase and hasten one's own happiness." Finally, Perfection as Culture conceives it, is a harmonious expansion of all the powers which make the beauty and worth of human nature: "and here," says Arnold, "Culture goes beyond Religion, as Religion is generally conceived by us." Stress must be laid upon those last words; for Religion, according to its full and catholic ideal, is the perfection and consecration of man's whole nature, intellectual and physical, as well as moral and spiritual. All that is lovely, splendid, moving, heroic, even enjoyable, in human life—all health and vigour and beauty and cleverness and charm—all nature and all art, all science and all literature—are among the good and perfect gifts which come down from the Father of Lights. But this is just the conception of Religion which Puritanism never grasped—nay, rather which Puritanism definitely rejected." And here probably is the origin of that quarrel with Puritanism, at least in its more superficial and obvious aspects, which so coloured and sometimes barbed Arnold's meditations on Religion. "As I have said with regard to wealth: Let us look at the life of those who live in and for it—so I say with regard to the religious organizations. Look at the life imaged in such a newspaper as the Nonconformist—a life of jealousy of the Establishment, disputes, tea-meetings, openings of chapels, sermons; and then think of it as an ideal of human life completing itself on all sides, and aspiring with all its organs after sweetness, light, and perfection!"
So much then for his definition of Culture; and we must admit that "the old Liberal hacks," the speakers on Liberal platforms, and the writers in Liberal papers, were not without excuse when they failed so utterly to divine what the new Teacher meant by harping on a word which Bacon and Pope had used in so different a sense.
Chapter II is headed "Doing as One Likes." And here it was that our new critic came most sharply into conflict with our cherished beliefs. We believed in the liberty which Milton loved, "to know, to utter, and to argue freely, according to conscience," and to frame our action by sole reference to our conviction. We believed that of such liberty there was only one endurable limit, and that was the condition that no man should so use his own liberty as to lessen his brother's—and the liberty thus conceived we regarded as the supreme boon of human life, for which no other could conceivably be taken in exchange. And now came the new Teacher of Liberalism with a doctrine which, while it made us angry, also set us thinking. "Our familiar praise of the British Constitution under which we live, is that it is a system of checks—a system which stops and paralyzes any power in interfering with the free action of individuals.... As Feudalism, which with its ideas and habits of subordination was for many centuries behind the British Constitution, dies out, and we are left with nothing but our system of checks, and our notion of its being the great right and happiness of an Englishman to do as far as possible what he likes, we are in danger of drifting towards Anarchy." Aristocracy, according to Arnold, who strangely mingled admiration of it with contempt, had been doing what it liked from time immemorial. It had enjoyed all the good things of life—great station, great wealth, great power—with a comfortable assurance that they belonged to it by divine right. It had governed England with credit to itself and benefit to the country. As Lord Beaconsfield said, it was only because a Whig Minister wished to curry favour with the populace, that an Earl who had committed a murder was hanged.
The Middle Class also, had, at any rate, since the Reform Act of 1832, "done what it liked," in a style not quite so grand but excessively comfortable and self-satisfied. It had carried some great reforms on which it had set its heart. It had established, enormously to its profit, Free Trade, and it had accumulated vast wealth. Its maxim had been—"Every man for himself in business, every man for himself in religion,"—and the devil take the hindmost.
But now, said Arnold, is the judgment of this world. The Aristocracy and the Middle Class had come to an end of their reign. A "tide of secret dissatisfaction had mined the ground under the self-confident Liberalism of the last thirty years (1839-1869) and had prepared the way for its sudden collapse and supersession." So far, the young Liberals and Radicals of the day did not disagree. They liked this doctrine, and had preached it; but from this point they and their new Teacher parted company. The working-man was now enfranchised; and of the newly-enfranchised working-man, or at least of some of the most conspicuous representatives of his class, Arnold had a curious dread. "His apparition is somewhat embarrassing; because, while the Aristocratic and Middle Classes have long been doing as they like with great vigour, he has been too undeveloped and too submissive hitherto to join in the game; and now, when he does come, he comes in immense numbers, and is rather raw and rough."
The dread of the working-men, and the apprehension of the bad use which they might make of their new power, can be traced to certain incidents which happened just before they were admitted to the Franchise and which perhaps precipitated their admission. In June, 1866, the Reform Bill, for which Lord Russell and Mr. Gladstone were responsible, was defeated in the House of Commons, and the Tories came into office. The defeated Bill would have enfranchised the upper class of artisans, and its rejection led to considerable riots, in which certain leaders of the working-men played conspicuous parts. The mob carried all before it, and the railings of Hyde Park were broken. The Tory Government behaved with the most incredible feebleness. The Home Secretary shed tears. The whole business, half scandalous and half ridiculous, furnished Arnold with an illustration for his sermon on "Doing What One Likes." Reviewing, three years after their occurrence, the events of July, 1866, he wrote thus: "Everyone remembers the virtuous Alderman-Colonel or Colonel-Alderman, who had to lead his militia through the London streets; how the bystanders gathered to see him pass; how the London roughs, asserting an Englishman's best and most blissful right of doing what he likes, robbed and beat the bystanders; and how the blameless warrior-magistrate refused to let his troops interfere. 'The crowd,' he touchingly said afterwards, 'was mostly composed of fine, healthy, strong men, bent on mischief; if he had allowed his soldiers to interfere, they might have been overpowered, their rifles taken from them and used against them by the mob; a riot, in fact, might have ensued, and been attended with bloodshed, compared with which the assaults and loss of property that actually occurred would have been as nothing.' Honest and affecting testimony of the English Middle Class to its own inadequacy for the authoritative part which one's convictions would sometimes incline one to assign to it! 'Who are we?' they say by the voice of their Alderman-Colonel, 'that we should not be overpowered if we attempt to cope with social anarchy, our rifles taken from us and used against us by the mob, and we, perhaps, robbed and beaten ourselves? Or what light have we, beyond a freeborn Englishman's impulse to do as he likes, which would justify us in preventing, at the cost of bloodshed, other freeborn Englishmen from doing as they like, and robbing and beating as much as they please?' And again, 'the Rough is just asserting his personal liberty a little, going where he likes, assembling where he likes, bawling as he likes, hustling as he likes.... He sees the rich, the aristocratic class, in occupation of the executive government; and so, if he is stopped from making Hyde Park a bear-garden or the streets impassable, he cries out that he is being butchered by the aristocracy.'"
Now, in spite of all this banter and sarcasm, these passages express a real dread which, at the time when Household Suffrage was claimed and conceded, really possessed Arnold's mind. He came with the lapse of years to see that it was illusory, and that the working-classes of England are as steady, as law-abiding, as inaccessible to ideas, as little in danger of being hurried into revolutionary courses, as unwilling to jeopardize their national interests and their stake in the country, as the Aristocracy and the Middle Class. But at the period which we are considering, when the dread of popular violence had really laid hold of him, it is interesting to mark the direction in which he looked for social salvation. He did not turn to our traditional institutions; to the Church or the Throne or the House of Lords: to a military despotism, or an established religion, or a governing Aristocracy: certainly not to the Middle Class with its wealth and industry—least of all to the Populace, with its "bright powers of sympathy." In an age which made an idol of individual action, and warred against all collectivism as tyranny, he looked for salvation to the State. But the State, if it was to fulfil its high function, must be a State in which every man felt that he had a place and a share, and the authority of which he could accept without loss of self-respect. "If ever," Arnold said in 1866, "there comes a more equal state of society in England, the power of the State for repression will be a thousand times stronger." He was for widening the province of the State, and strengthening its hands, and "stablishing it on behalf of whatever great changes are needed, just as much as on behalf of order." And, forasmuch as the State, in its ideal, was "the organ of our collective best self," our first duty was to cultivate, each man for himself, what in himself was best—in short, Perfection. "We find no basis for a firm State-power in our ordinary selves; culture suggests one to us in our best self." And so we come back to the governing idea of the book before us, that Culture is the foe of Anarchy.
In the Third Chapter—"Barbarians, Philistines, Populace"—he divided English Society into three main classes, to which he gave three well-remembered nicknames. The aristocracy he named (not very happily, seeing that he so greatly admired their fine manners) the Barbarians; the Middle Class he had already named the Philistines; and to the great mass which lies below the Middle Class he gave the name of "Populace." The name of "Philistine" in its application to the great Middle Class dates from the Lecture on Heine delivered from the Chair of Poetry at Oxford in 1863. And it seems to have supplied a want in our system of nomenclature, for it struck, and it has remained, at least as a name for a type of mind, if not exactly as a name for a social class.
When we originally encounter the word in the Lecture[30] on Heine, Arnold is speaking of Heine's life-long battle—with what? With Philistinism. "Philistinism! We have not the expression in English. Perhaps we have not the word, because we have so much of the thing. At Soli, I imagine, they did not talk of solecisms; and here, at the very headquarters of Goliath, nobody talks of Philistinism. The French have adopted the term épicier (grocer) to designate the sort of being whom the Germans designate by the term Philistine; but the French term—besides that it casts a slur upon a respectable class, composed of living and susceptible members, while the original Philistines are dead and buried long ago—is really, I think, in itself much less apt and expressive than the German term. Efforts have been made to obtain in English some term equivalent to Philister or épicier; Mr. Carlyle has made several such efforts: "Respectability with its thousand gigs," he says; well, the occupant of every one of these gigs is, Mr. Carlyle means, a Philistine. However, the word respectable is far too valuable a word to be thus perverted from its proper meaning; if the English are ever to have a word for the thing we are speaking of—and so prodigious are the changes which the modern spirit is introducing, that even we English shall perhaps one day come to want such a word—I think we had much better take the word Philistine itself.
"Philistine must have originally meant, in the mind of those who invented the nickname, a sturdy, dogged, unenlightened opponent of the Chosen People, of the Children of Light. The party of change, the would-be remodellers of the old traditional European order, the invokers of reason against custom, the representatives of the modern spirit in every sphere where it is applicable, regarded themselves, with the robust self-confidence natural to reformers, as a chosen people, as children of the light. They regarded their adversaries as humdrum people, slaves to routine, enemies to light, stupid and oppressive, but at the same time very strong.... Philistia has come to be thought by us the true Land of Promise, and it is anything but that; the born lover of ideas, the born hater of commonplaces, must feel in this country that the sky over his head is of brass and iron. The enthusiast for the idea, for reason, values reason, the idea, in and for themselves; he values them, irrespectively of the practical conveniences which their triumphs may obtain for him, and the man who regards the profession of these practical conveniences as something sufficient in itself which compensates for the absence or surrender of the idea, of reason, is, in his eyes, a Philistine."
In Culture and Anarchy, Arnold thus elaborates the term "Philistine," and justifies, not without some misgiving, its exclusive appropriation to the Middle Class. "Philistine gives the notion of something particularly stiffnecked and perverse in the resistance to light and its children, and therein it specially suits our Middle Class, who not only do not pursue Sweetness and Light, but who even prefer to them that sort of machinery of business, chapels, tea-meetings, and addresses from Mr. Murphy,[31] which make up the dismal and illiberal life on which I have so often touched." The force of Philistinism in English life and society is the force which, from first to last, he set himself most steadily to fight, and, if possible, transform. That the effort was arduous, and even perilous, he was fully aware. He must, he said, pursue his object through literature, "freer perhaps in that sphere than I could be in any other, but with the risk always before me, if I cannot charm the wild beast of Philistinism while I am trying to convert him, of being torn in pieces by him, and, even if I succeed to the utmost and convert him, of dying in a ditch or a workhouse at the end of it all."
The nickname of "Barbarians" for the Aristocracy he justified on the ground that, like the Barbarians of history who reinvigorated and renewed our worn-out Europe, they had eminent merits, among which were staunch individualism and a passion for doing what one likes; a love of field sports; vigour, good looks, fine complexions, care for the body and all manly exercises; distinguished bearing, high spirit, and self-confidence—an admirable collection of attributes indeed, but marred by insufficiency of light, and "needing, for ideal perfection, a shade more soul." When we have done with the Barbarians at the top of the social edifice, and the Middle Class half way up, we come to the Working Class; and of that class the higher portion "looks forward to the happy day when it will sit on thrones with commercial Members of Parliament and other Middle Class potentates; and this portion is naturally akin to the Philistinism just above it. But below this there is that vast portion of the Working Class which, raw and undeveloped, has long lain half hidden amidst its poverty and squalor, and is now issuing from its hiding-place to assert an Englishman's heaven-born right of doing as he likes. To this vast residuum we give the name of 'Populace.'" In thus dividing the nation, he is careful to point out that in each class we may from time to time find "aliens"—men free from the prejudices, the faults, the temptations of the class in which they were born; elect souls who, unhindered by their antecedents, share the higher life of intellectual and moral aspiration.
But, after making this exception, he traces in all three classes the presence and working of the same besetting sin. All alike, by a dogged persistence in doing as they like, have come to ignore the existence of Authority or Right Reason; and this irrecognition of what ought to be the rule of life operates not only in the political sphere, but also, and conspicuously, in the spheres of morals, taste, society, and literature. Self-satisfaction blinds all classes. All alike believe themselves infallible, and there is no sovereign organ of opinion to set them right. The fundamental ground of our erroneous habits, and our unwillingness to be corrected, is "our preference of doing to thinking," The mention of this preference leads us to the subject of Chapter IV, "Hebraism and Hellenism."
Of all the phrases which Arnold either created or popularized, there is none more closely associated with his memory than this famous conjunction of Hebraism and Hellenism; and in this connexion, it is not out of place to note his abiding interest in, and affection for, the House of Israel. The present writer once delivered a rather long and elaborate lecture on Arnold's genius and writings; and next morning a daily paper gave this masterpiece of condensed and tactful reporting: "The lecturer stated that Mr. Arnold was of Jewish extraction, and proceeded to read passages from his works." It might have been more truly said that the lecturer suggested, as interesting to those who speculate in race and pedigree, the question whether Arnold's remote ancestors had belonged to the Ancient Race, and had emigrated from Germany to Lowestoft, where they dwelt for several generations. There is certainly no proof that so it was; and genealogical researches would in any case be out of keeping with the scope of this book. It is enough to note the fact of his affectionate and grateful feeling towards the Jewish race, and this can best be done in his own words. The present Lord Rothschild, formerly Sir Nathaniel de Rothschild, is the first adherent of the Jewish faith who ever was admitted to the House of Lords, though of course there have been other Peers of Jewish descent. When Mr. Gladstone created this Jewish peerage,[32] Arnold wrote as follows to an admirable lady whose name often appears in his published Letters—
"I have received so much kindness from your family, and I have so sincere a regard for yourself, that I should in any case have been tempted to send you a word of congratulation on Sir Nathaniel's peerage; but I really feel also proud and happy for the British public to have, by this peerage, signally marked the abandonment of its old policy of exclusion, the final and total abandonment of it. What have we not learned and gained from the people whom we have been excluding all these years! And how every one of us will see and say this in the future!"
What, in his view, we had "learned and gained" from the Jewish people, is well expressed in the preface to Culture and Anarchy.
"To walk staunchly by the best light one has, to be strict and sincere with oneself, not to be of the number of those who say and do not, to be in earnest—this is the discipline by which alone man is enabled to rescue his life from thraldom to the passing moment and to his bodily senses, to ennoble it, and to make it eternal. And this discipline has been nowhere so effectively taught as in the School of Hebraism. The intense and convinced energy with which the Hebrew, both of the Old and the New Testament, threw himself upon his ideal of righteousness, and which inspired the incomparable definition of the great Christian virtue, Faith—the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen—this energy of devotion to its ideal has belonged to Hebraism alone. As our idea of perfection widens beyond the narrow limits to which the over-rigour of Hebraising has tended to confine it, we shall yet come again to Hebraism for that devout energy in embracing our ideal, which alone can give to man the happiness of doing what he knows. "If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them!"—the last word for human infirmity will always be that. For this word, reiterated with a power now sublime, now affecting, but always admirable, our race will, as long as the world lasts, return to Hebraism."
Having thus described the function of Hebraism, Arnold goes on to define Hellenism as "the intelligence driving at those ideas which are, after all, the basis of right practice, the ardent sense for all the new and changing combinations of them which man's development brings with it, the indomitable impulse to know and adjust them perfectly." These two great forces divide the empire of the world between them; and we call them Hebraism and Hellenism after the two races of men who have most signally illustrated them. "Hebraism and Hellenism—between these two points of influence moves our world." The idea of Hellenism is to see things as they are: the idea of Hebraism is conduct and obedience. Our aim should be to combine the merits of both ideas, and be "evenly and happily balanced between them." Enlarging on this text, he traces the working of the two principles, which ought not to be rivals but have been made such by the perverseness of men, philosophy and history; and then, turning to our own day and its doings, he says that Puritanism, which originally was a reaction of the conscience and moral sense against the indifference and lax conduct of the Renascence, has gone counter, during the last two centuries, to the main stream of human advance; has hindered men from trying to see things as they really are, and has made strictness of conduct the great aim of human life. "It made the secondary the principal at the wrong moment, and the principal it at the wrong moment treated as secondary." Hence have arisen all sorts of confusion and inefficiency. Everywhere we see the signs of anarchy, and the need for some sound order and authority. "This we can only get by going back upon the actual instincts and forces which rule our life, seeing them as they really are, connecting them with other instincts and forces, and enlarging our whole view and rule of life."
From this short chapter, he passes on to Chapter V, which he heads: "Porro unum est necessarium"; and here he pursues his controversy with modern Puritanism, which imagines that it has, in its special conception of God and religion, the unum necessarium, which can dispense with Sweetness and Light, self-culture and self-discipline. "The Puritan's great danger is that he imagines himself in possession of a rule telling him the unum necessarium, or one thing needful, and that he then remains satisfied with a very crude conception of what this rule really is and what it tells him, thinks he has now knowledge and henceforth needs only to act, and, in this dangerous state of assurance and self-satisfaction, proceeds to give full swing to a number of the instincts of his ordinary self.... What he wants is a larger conception of human nature, showing him the number of other points at which his nature must come to its best, besides the points which he himself knows and thinks of. There is no unum necessarium, or one thing needful, which can free human nature from the obligation of trying to come to its best at all these points. Instead of our 'one thing needful' justifying in us vulgarity, hideousness, ignorance, violence—our vulgarity, hideousness, ignorance, violence are really so many touchstones which try our one thing needful, and which prove that in the state, at any rate, in which we ourselves have it, it is not all we want. And, as the force which encourages us to stand staunch and fast by the rule and ground we have is Hebraism, so the force which encourages us to go back upon this rule, and to try the very ground on which we appear to stand, is Hellenism—a term for giving our consciousness free play, and enlarging its range."
In his Sixth Chapter—headed "Our Liberal Practitioners"—he applies his general doctrine to persons and performances of the year 1869. The Liberal Party was just then busy disestablishing and disendowing the Irish Church. He was in favour of Established Churches, and of Concurrent Endowment. He realized the absurdity of the Irish Church as it then stood; but, true to his critical character, he rebuked the "Liberal Practitioners" for the spirit in which they were disestablishing and disendowing it. They did not approach the subject in the spirit of Hellenism: they did not appeal to Right Reason: they did not attempt to see the problem of religious establishment as it really was. But they Hebraized about it—that is, they took an uncritical interpretation of biblical words as their absolute rule of conduct. "It may," he said, "be all very well for born Hebraizers, like Mr. Spurgeon, to Hebraize; but for Liberal statesmen to Hebraize is surely unsafe, and to see poor old Liberal hacks Hebraizing, whose real self belongs to a kind of negative Hellenism—a state of moral indifference, without intellectual ardour—is even painful." In the same manner he dealt with the movement to abolish Primogeniture, strongly urged by John Bright; the movement to legalize marriage with a wife's sister—"the craving for forbidden fruit" joined with "the craving for legality"; and the doctrine, then supposed to be incontrovertible, of Free Trade. In all these cases, he proposed to "Hellenize a little," to "turn the free stream of our thought" on the Liberal policy of the moment; and to "see how this is related to the intelligible law of human life, and to national well-being and happiness."
And so we were brought to the conclusion of the whole matter. The stock-beliefs and stock-performances of Liberalism were exhausted, uninteresting, in some grave respects mischievous. Seekers after truth, disciples of culture, men bent on trying to see things as they really are, should lend no hand to these labours of the Philistines. Their right course was to stand absolutely aloof from the political work which was going on round them; and to pursue, with undeviating consistency, "increased sweetness, increased light, increased life, increased sympathy."
It is interesting to recall that Charles Kingsley praised Culture and Anarchy in a letter which greatly pleased Arnold, as showing "the generous and affectionate side" of Kingsley's disposition. And this is his answer to Kingsley's praise: "Of my reception by the general public I have, perhaps, no cause to boast; but from the men who lead in literature, from men like you, I have met with nothing but kindness and generosity. The being thrown so much for the last twenty years with Dissenters, and the observing their great strength and their great impenetrability—how they seemed to think that in their 'gospel'—a mere caricature, in truth, of the real Gospel—they had a secret which enabled them to judge all literature and all art and to keep aloof from modern ideas—set me on thinking how they might be got at, and on the use of this parallel of Hebraism and Hellenism. If I was to think only of the Dissenters, or if I were in your position, I should press incessantly for more Hellenism; but, as it is, seeing the tendency of our young poetical litterateur (Swinburne), and, on the other hand, seeing much of Huxley (whom I thoroughly liked and admire, but find very disposed to be tyrannical and unjust), I lean towards Hebraism, and try to prevent the balance from on this side flying up out of sight." Dean Church, also, in writing about the book, expressed "his sense of the importance of the distinction between Hellenism and Hebraism." "This," said Arnold, "showed his width of mind"; for "it is a distinction on which more and more will turn, and on dealing wisely with it everything depends."
I have dwelt at this rather disproportionate length on the structure and teaching of Culture and Anarchy, partly because it was to men who were young in 1869 a landmark in their mental life, and partly because it gives the whole body of Arnold's political and social teaching. He pursued this line of thought for twenty years; Friendship's Garland, with its inimitable fun, appeared in 1871, and was followed by a long series of essays and lectures; but the germ of whatever he subsequently wrote is to be found in Culture and Anarchy. And from that memorable book what did we learn?
To answer first by negatives, we did not learn to undervalue personal liberty, or to stand aloof from the practical work of citizenship, or to despise Parliamentary effort and its bearing on the better life of England. To these lessons of a fascinating teacher we closed our ears, charmed he never so wisely. To answer affirmatively, we learned that our first object must be to attain our own best self, and that only so could we hope to help others. We learned to discard prepossessions, and try to see things as they really are. We learned that the Liberty which we worshipped must be conditioned by Authority—an authority not wielded by rank or bureaucracy, but by the State acting as a whole through its accredited representatives, and depending for its existence on the co-operation of the entire nation. In self-government so founded, however stringently it might exercise its power, there was no degradation for the governed, because, in the wider sense, they were also governors. In brief, Arnold's idea of the State was exactly that which in later years one of his disciples—Henry Scott Holland—conceived, when, defending Christian Socialism against the reproach of "grandmotherly legislation," he said that, in a well-governed commonwealth, "every man was his own grandmother." But, while Authority belongs to the State as a whole, it must be exercised through the agency of officialdom—through the action of officers or governors designated for the special functions. And here he taught us that we must not, as Bishop Westcott said, "trust to an uncultivated notion of duty for an improvised solution of unforeseen difficulties"; must not, like the Alderman-Colonel, "sit in the hall of judgment or march at the head of men of war, without some knowledge how to perform judgment and how to direct men of war."
Then again we learned from him to value machinery, not for itself, but for what it could produce. He taught us that all political reconstruction was at the best mere improvement of machinery; that political reform was related to social reform as the means to the end: and that the end was the perfection of the race in all its physical, mental, and moral attributes.
Above all we learned—and perhaps it was the most important of our lessons—to think little of material boons—vulgar wealth and stolid comfort and ignoble ease; to set our affections on the joys of soul and spirit; and to recognize in the practice of religion the highest development and most satisfying use of the powers which belong to man.