Matthew Arnold

by George William Erskine Russell

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."