Matthew Arnold Part 8

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 a.s.sociated 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 inst.i.tutions 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 pa.s.sed." 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 Cla.s.s had covered the face of England with places like St. Helens, which the capitalists called "great centres of national enterprise," and Cobbett called "h.e.l.l-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 cla.s.s, that "free political inst.i.tutions do not guarantee the well-being of the toiling cla.s.s." Under these circ.u.mstances 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 s.p.a.ce 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 pa.s.sed into the hands of the Middle Cla.s.s. What was now the chief requisite for national greatness was Intelligence; and in intelligence the Middle Cla.s.s 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 Cla.s.s were thus described by the foreign critic. "The fineness and capacity of man's spirit is shown by his enjoyments; your Middle Cla.s.s 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 Cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s anywhere, but which your Middle Cla.s.s 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 Cla.s.s 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 Cla.s.s 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 a.s.semble them, br.i.m.m.i.n.g 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 cla.s.s 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."

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fisher's Buildings, Balliol College, Oxford

Showing Matthew Arnold's Rooms

_Photo H.W. Taunt_]

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 Cla.s.s, and it is natural to ask why that cla.s.s was so specially the target for his scorn. To that cla.s.s, 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 Cla.s.ses--a schoolmaster's son and a judge's daughter." In the preface to the _Essays in Criticism_, he spoke of "the English Middle Cla.s.s, of which I am myself a feeble unit." He used to declare that his feeling towards his brethren of the Middle Cla.s.s 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 circ.u.mstances 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 cla.s.s"; 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 cla.s.ses; to my mind, indeed, the mere c.o.c.k 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 pa.s.sage he says that, when we s.n.a.t.c.h up a vehement opinion in ignorance and pa.s.sion, 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 cla.s.s, 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 Cla.s.s, which practically had the whole management of Elementary Education in its hands. He knew the members of that cla.s.s, as he said, "experimentally."

He slept in their houses, and ate at their tables, and observed at close quarters their books, their amus.e.m.e.nts, 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 Cla.s.s 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 Cla.s.s. This system of government by the predominance of the Middle Cla.s.s, 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 Cla.s.s, 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 ma.s.s 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 Cla.s.s; and the Whig newspapers were "almost all unfavourable, because it tells disagreeable truths to the cla.s.s 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 Cla.s.s. "I do not wish them to be the cafe-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 st.u.r.dy 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 Cla.s.s, 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 circ.u.mstance.

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 a.s.sembling, and it was possible to take stock of it, to a.n.a.lyze 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 Const.i.tution. 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 antic.i.p.ate the downfall of monarchical inst.i.tutions, 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 a.s.serted in the past, so they would in turn develop into const.i.tutional 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 pa.s.sion 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 dest.i.tute. Morning after morning a vigorous Press sang its loud hymn of triumph, and a.s.sured 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 hara.s.sed the most h.o.a.ry 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 "inst.i.tutions 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 acc.u.mulated capital, or its multiplication of railways. Above all--and this was to some of our Party the unkindest cut--he a.s.serted for Religion the chief place among the elements of national well-being. We were just then living at the f.a.g-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 fict.i.tious"; 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 pa.s.sing 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 compa.s.sionated 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 pa.s.sing 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."

[Ill.u.s.tration: Oriel College, Oxford

In March, 1845, Matthew Arnold was elected to a Fellowship at Oriel

_Photo H.W. Taunt_]

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 a.s.sumed 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 pa.s.sion, 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 n.o.ble 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 pa.s.sion for pure knowledge, but also of the moral and social pa.s.sion 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 Const.i.tution 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 Const.i.tution, 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 a.s.surance 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 Cla.s.s 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 acc.u.mulated 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 Cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s, Arnold had a curious dread.

"His apparition is somewhat embarra.s.sing; because, while the Aristocratic and Middle Cla.s.ses 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 cla.s.s 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 pa.s.s; how the London roughs, a.s.serting 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 a.s.saults and loss of property that actually occurred would have been as nothing.' Honest and affecting testimony of the English Middle Cla.s.s to its own inadequacy for the authoritative part which one's convictions would sometimes incline one to a.s.sign 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 a.s.serting his personal liberty a little, going where he likes, a.s.sembling where he likes, bawling as he likes, hustling as he likes.... He sees the rich, the aristocratic cla.s.s, in occupation of the executive government; and so, if he is stopped from making Hyde Park a bear-garden or the streets impa.s.sable, he cries out that he is being butchered by the aristocracy.'"

Now, in spite of all this banter and sarcasm, these pa.s.sages 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-cla.s.ses 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 Cla.s.s. 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 inst.i.tutions; 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 Cla.s.s 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 cla.s.ses, 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 Cla.s.s he had already named the Philistines; and to the great ma.s.s which lies below the Middle Cla.s.s he gave the name of "Populace."

The name of "Philistine" in its application to the great Middle Cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s.

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, n.o.body talks of Philistinism. The French have adopted the term _epicier_ (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 cla.s.s, 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 _epicier_; 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 st.u.r.dy, 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 bra.s.s 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,"