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.