Matthew Arnold Part 9

and justifies, not without some misgiving, its exclusive appropriation to the Middle Cla.s.s. "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 Cla.s.s, 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 pa.s.sion 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 Cla.s.s half way up, we come to the Working Cla.s.s; and of that cla.s.s the higher portion "looks forward to the happy day when it will sit on thrones with commercial Members of Parliament and other Middle Cla.s.s potentates; and this portion is naturally akin to the Philistinism just above it. But below this there is that vast portion of the Working Cla.s.s which, raw and undeveloped, has long lain half hidden amidst its poverty and squalor, and is now issuing from its hiding-place to a.s.sert 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 cla.s.s we may from time to time find "aliens"--men free from the prejudices, the faults, the temptations of the cla.s.s 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 cla.s.ses 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 cla.s.ses. 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 h.e.l.lenism."

[Ill.u.s.tration: Matthew Arnold, 1869

_Photo Hills & Saunders_]

Of all the phrases which Arnold either created or popularized, there is none more closely a.s.sociated with his memory than this famous conjunction of Hebraism and h.e.l.lenism; 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 pa.s.sages 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 pa.s.sing moment and to his bodily senses, to enn.o.ble 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 h.e.l.lenism 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 h.e.l.lenism after the two races of men who have most signally ill.u.s.trated them. "Hebraism and h.e.l.lenism--between these two points of influence moves our world." The idea of h.e.l.lenism 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 princ.i.p.al at the wrong moment, and the princ.i.p.al 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 pa.s.ses 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 G.o.d 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 a.s.surance 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 h.e.l.lenism--a term for giving our consciousness free play, and enlarging its range."

In his Sixth Chapter--headed "Our Liberal Pract.i.tioners"--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 Pract.i.tioners" for the spirit in which they were disestablishing and disendowing it. They did not approach the subject in the spirit of h.e.l.lenism: 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 h.e.l.lenism--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 "h.e.l.lenize 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 h.e.l.lenism. If I was to think only of the Dissenters, or if I were in your position, I should press incessantly for more h.e.l.lenism; 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 h.e.l.lenism 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 ign.o.ble 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.

[Footnote 21: A favourite creation of the late Mr. William Cory.]

[Footnote 22: Burke.]

[Footnote 23: Mr. Willis' motion to remove the Bishops from the House of Lords was lost by 11 votes on the 21st of March, 1884.]

[Footnote 24: Now (1893) Lord Wemyss.]

[Footnote 25: _Culture: a Dialogue_, 1867.]

[Footnote 26: See p. 63.]

[Footnote 27: It contains also "My Countrymen" and "A Courteous Explanation."]

[Footnote 28: The writer was then a schoolboy at Harrow, where Arnold lived from 1868 to 1873.]

[Footnote 29: William Cory.]

[Footnote 30: Reprinted in _Essays in Criticism_.]

[Footnote 31: A Protestant lecturer of the period.]

[Footnote 32: In 1885.]

CHAPTER V

CONDUCT

"By desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil--widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower."

Whether Lactantius was etymologically right or wrong, there is no doubt that he was right substantially when he defined Religion as that which binds the soul to G.o.d. And religion thus conceived naturally divides itself into two parts: duty and doctrine, practice and theory, conduct and theology. Both elements are presented to us in the Bible. Of the one it is written: "The wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein."

Of the other: "Which things the angels desire to look into." Even the respective functions of the Synoptists and St. John seem to accommodate themselves to this natural division. Following the line thus indicated, we shall consider Arnold's influence on Religion under the two heads of Conduct and Theology. The pa.s.sage from _Middlemarch_ which stands at the head of this chapter seems in a way to express his att.i.tude towards the religious problems of his time. It would be impossible for a convinced believer in the faith of the Christian Church, as traditionally received, to profess that Arnold "knew what was perfectly good" in the domain of religion; but beyond all question he "desired" it with an even pa.s.sionate desire, and attained far more closely to it than many professors of a more orthodox theology.

Of him it might be truly said, as of his favourite poet, that he "saw life steadily and saw it whole." And of life he declared that Conduct was three-fourths. For all the infinite varieties and contradictions of mere opinion he had the largest tolerance, knowing that no opinion, as such, is culpable. For people thinking so diversely as Wordsworth, Bunsen, Clough, and Palgrave; Church and Temple, Lake and Stanley; Lord Coleridge, William Forster, and John Morley, he had equally warm regard, and, in some ways, sympathy. It was only when the sphere of conduct was approached that his judgment became severe and his sympathy dried up. In Politics--levity, time-serving, mob-pleasing, the spirit which prefers partisanship to patriotism, were the faults which he could not pardon.

His imperfect sympathy with Mr. Gladstone, a deplorable but undeniable fact, was due not so much to dissent from Gladstone's theory of the public good as to disapproval of his character. "Respect is the very last feeling he excites in me; he has too little solidity and composure of character or mind for that. He is brilliantly clever, of course, and he is honest enough, but he is pa.s.sionate, and in no way great, I think." In Religion--obscurantism, resistance to the light, the smug endeavour to make the best of both worlds, offended Arnold as much on the one hand, as insolence, violence, ignorant negation, "lightly running amuck at august things," offended him on the other. He loved a "free handling, _in a becoming spirit_, of religious matters," and did not always find it in the writings of his Liberal friends. It is true that he once made a signal lapse from his own canon of religious criticism, but he withdrew it with genuine regret that "an ill.u.s.tration likely to be torn from its context, to be improperly used, and to give pain, should ever have been adopted." In Literature, again, though his judgment was critical, his charity was unbounded. He could find something to praise even in the most immature and unpretending efforts; and he knew how to distinguish what we call "good of its sort," good in the second order of achievement, from what is simply bad. In literature, as in opinion, it was only when moral faults were mingled with intellectual defects that he became censorious. He detested literary humbug--a pretence of knowledge without the reality, a show of philosophy masking poverty of thought; the vanity of quaintness, the "ring of false metal," the glorification of commonplace.

And so again when we come to Life--the social life of the civilized community--he was the consistent teacher and the bright example of an exalted and scrupulous morality. Even the intellectual brilliancy of authors whom he intensely admired did not often blind him to ethical defects. It is true that some objects of his literary admiration--Goethe and Byron and George Sand--could scarcely be regarded as moral exemplars; but, while he praised the genius, he marked his disapproval of the moral defect. In writing of George Sand, who had so profoundly influenced his early life, he did not deny or extenuate "her pa.s.sions and her errors." Byron, though he thought him "the greatest natural force, the greatest elementary power, which has appeared in our literature since Shakespeare," he roundly accused of "vulgarity and effrontery," "coa.r.s.eness and commonness," "affectation and brutal selfishness." In the case of Goethe, he said that "the moralist and the man of the world may unite in condemning" his laxity of life; and even in _Faust_, which he esteemed the "most wonderful work of poetry in our century," the fact that it is a "seduction-drama" marred his pleasure.

In the same tone he wrote, in the last year of his life, about Renan's _Abbesse_--"I regret the escapade extremely; he was entirely out of his role in writing such a book.... Renan descends sensibly in the scale from having produced his _Abbesse_." Heine, with all his genius, "lacked the old-fashioned, laborious, eternally needful moral deliverance": he left a name blemished by "intemperate susceptibility, unscrupulousness in pa.s.sion, inconceivable attacks on his enemies, still more inconceivable attacks on his friends, want of generosity, sensuality, incessant mocking."

[Ill.u.s.tration: Pains Hill Cottage, Cobham, Surrey

Matthew Arnold's home from 1873 until his death in 1888]

And, while he thus criticised the defective morality of writers whom he greatly admired, he was, perhaps naturally, still more severe on the moral defects of those whom he esteemed less highly. "Burns," he said, "is a beast, with splendid gleams, and the medium in which he lived, Scotch peasants, Scotch Presbyterianism, and Scotch drink, is repulsive." On Coleridge, critic, poet, philosopher, his judgment was that he "had no morals," and that his character inspired "disesteem, nay, repugnance." Bulwer-Lytton he thought a consummate novel-writer, but "his was by no means a perfect nature"--"a strange mixture of what is really romantic and interesting with what is tawdry and gimcracky." _Villette_ he p.r.o.nounced "disagreeable, because the writer's mind contains nothing but hunger, rebellion, and rage, and therefore that is all she can put into her book." Of Harriet Martineau, the other of the "two gifted women," whose exploits he had glorified in _Haworth Churchyard_, he wrote in later years that she had "undeniable talent, energy, and merit," but "what an unpleasant life and unpleasant nature!"

And, so everywhere the moral element--the sense for Conduct--mingles itself with his literary judgment. But it was in his attack on Sh.e.l.ley, written within four months of his own death, that he most vigorously displayed his detestation of moral shortcomings, and his sense of their poisonous effect on the performances of genius. "In this article on Sh.e.l.ley," he wrote, "I have spoken of his life, not his poetry.

Professor Dowden was too much for my patience."[33] It can hardly be questioned that the publication of that biography did a signal disservice to the memory of the poet whom Professor Dowden idolized. The lack of taste, judgment, and humour which pervades the book, and its complete, though of course unintended, condonation of heinous evil, deserved a severe castigation, and Arnold bestowed it with a vigour and a thoroughness which show how deeply his moral sense had been shocked.

"What a set! what a world! is the exclamation that breaks from us as we come to an end of this history of 'the occurrences of Sh.e.l.ley's private life.' ... G.o.dwin's house of sordid horror, and G.o.dwin preaching and holding the hat, and the green-spectacled Mrs. G.o.dwin, and Hogg the faithful friend, and Hunt the Horace of this precious world!"

Fresh from pursuing, step by step, Professor Dowden's grim narrative of seduction and suicide, with its ludicrous testimony to Sh.e.l.ley's "conscientiousness," Arnold says, with honest indignation, "After reading his book, one feels sickened for ever of the subject of irregular relations.... I conclude that an entirely human inflammability, joined to an inhuman want of humour and a super-human power of self-deception, are the causes which chiefly explain Sh.e.l.ley's abandonment of Harriet in the first place, and then his behaviour to her and defence of himself afterwards."

In spite of all this abomination, which he so clearly saw and so strongly reprehended, he still stands firm in his admiration of the "ideal Sh.e.l.ley," "the delightful Sh.e.l.ley," "the friend of the unfriended poor," the radiant and many-coloured poet, with his mastery of the medium of sounds, and the "natural magic in his rhythm." But then he adds this salutary caution: "Let no one suppose that a want of humour and a self-delusion such as Sh.e.l.ley's have no effect upon a man's poetry. The man Sh.e.l.ley, in very truth, is not entirely sane, and Sh.e.l.ley's poetry is not entirely sane either." In poetry, as in life, he is "a beautiful and ineffectual angel."

And just as, in Arnold's view, moral defects in an author were apt to mar the perfection of his work, so an author's moral virtues might enn.o.ble and enlarge his authorship. Hear him on his friend Arthur Clough: "He possessed, in an eminent degree, these two invaluable literary qualities: a true sense for his object of study, and a single-hearted care for it. He had both; but he had the second even more eminently than the first. He greatly developed the first through means of the second. In the study of art, poetry, or philosophy, he had the most undivided and disinterested love for the object in itself, the greatest aversion to mixing up with it anything accidental or personal.

His interest was in literature itself; and it was this which gave so rare a stamp to his character, which kept him so free from all taint of littleness. In the saturnalia of ign.o.ble personal pa.s.sions, of which the struggle for literary success, in old and crowded communities, offers so sad a spectacle, he never mingled. He had not yet traduced his friends, nor flattered his enemies, nor disparaged what he admired, nor praised what he despised. Those who knew him well had the conviction that, even with time, these literary arts would never be his. His poem, _The Bothie of Toper-na-Fuosich_, has some admirable Homeric qualities--out-of-doors freshness, life, naturalness, buoyant rapidity.