Parliament of 1868-1874--the first elected by a democratic
suffrage--was intent on Reform, and the right of a father to starve his
child's mind was strenuously denied. Forster, then Vice-President of the
Council, was charged with the duty of preparing a Bill to establish
Compulsory Education. Arnold was Forster's brother-in-law, and "heard
the contents" of the Bill in November, 1869. When in the following
February it was brought in, he wrote: "I think William's Bill will do
very well. I am glad it is so little altered"; and, after the Second
Reading, he wrote: "The majority on the Education Bill is a great
relief; it will now, if William has tolerable luck, get through safely
this session." By this time, therefore, he must have become a convert to
the system of compulsion. Perhaps he regarded the demand for the Bill as
a proof that the English people were at length waking up to a sense of
the value of Education. But, while the State thus outstripped his ideal
by establishing compulsion, it fell short of his ideal by severely
limiting the area of the population to which compulsion was to apply.
Again and again he warned his countrymen, then unaccustomed to the
practical working of Compulsory Education, that it would be intolerable,
unjust, and absurd if it were applied only to the children of the poor.
He contended that the Upper and Middle Classes were every bit as much
in need of a compulsory system, if their children were to be properly
educated, as the working classes for whom it was proposed to legislate.
This theme he illustrated, with the most exuberant fun and fancy, in a
letter addressed to the _Pall Mall Gazette_ in 1867, and afterwards
republished in _Friendship's Garland_. Arminius, the cultivated
Prussian, accompanies his English friend to Petty Sessions in a country
town, and is horrified by the degraded plight of an old peasant who is
tried for poaching. The English friend (the imaginary Arnold) says that
for his own part he is not so much concerned about the poacher as about
his children. They are being allowed to grow up anyhow. Really he thinks
the time has come when compulsion must be applied to the education of
children of this class. "The gap between them and our educated and
intelligent classes is really too frightful."
"_Your educated and intelligent classes_," sneered Arminius, in his most
offensive manner--"where are they? I should like to see them." The
English friend, thus rudely challenged, leads the Prussian into the
justice-room, where they find on the Bench three excellent specimens of
education and intelligence--Lord Lumpington, the Rev. Esau Hittall, and
Mr. Bottles. Arminius insists on knowing their qualifications for the
post of magistrate. He begins by defining the principle of Compulsory
Education. "It means that to ensure, as far as you can, every man's
being fit for his business in life, you put education as a bar, or
condition, between him and what he aims at. The principle is just as
good for one class as another, and it is only by applying it impartially
that you save its application from being insolent and invidious.... You
propose to make old Diggs' boys instruct themselves before they go
bird-scaring or sheep-tending. I want to know what you do to make those
three worthies in that justice-room instruct themselves before they may
go acting as magistrates and judges?"
The imaginary Arnold replies that Lord Lumpington was at Eton, and Mr.
Hittall at Charterhouse, and Mr. Bottles at Lycurgus House Academy,
Peckham. But Arminius insists that to send boys of the wealthy classes
to school is nothing--the natural course of things takes them there.
"Don't suppose that, by doing this, you are applying the principle of
Compulsory Education fairly, and as you apply it to Diggs' boys. You are
not interposing, for the rich, education as a bar or condition between
them and what they aim at.
"In my country," he went on, "we should have begun to put a pressure on
those future magistrates at school. Before we allowed Lord Lumpington
and Mr. Hittall to go to the University at all, we should have examined
them.... There would have been some Mr. Grote as School Board
Commissary, pitching into them questions about history, and some Mr.
Lowe, as Crown Patronage Commissary, pitching into them questions about
English literature; and these young men would have been kept from the
University, as Diggs' boys are kept from their bird-scaring, till they
had instructed themselves. Then, if, after three years of their
University, they wanted to be magistrates, another pressure!--a great
Civil Service Examination before a Board of Experts, an examination in
English law, Roman law, English history, history of jurisprudence."
"A most abominable liberty to take with Lumpington and Hittall," says
Arnold.
"Then your compulsory education is a most abominable liberty to take
with Diggs' boys," retorted Arminius.... "Oh, but," I answered, "to live
at all, even at the lowest stage of human life, a man needs
instruction." "Well," returns Arminius, "and to administer at all, even
at the lowest stage of public administration, a man needs instruction."
"_We have never found it so_," I said.
The same argument was urged, in a graver fashion, in _Schools and
Universities of the Continent_.
"In the view of the English friends of compulsory education, the
educated and intelligent Middle and Upper Classes amongst us are to
confer the boon of compulsory education upon the ignorant lower class,
which needs it while they do not. But, on the Continent, instruction is
obligatory for Lower, Middle, and Upper Class alike. I doubt whether our
educated and intelligent classes are at all prepared for this. I have an
acquaintance in easy circumstances, of distinguished connexions, living
in a fashionable part of London, who, like many other people, deals
rather easily with his son's schooling. Sometimes the boy is at school,
then for months together he is away from school, and taught, so far as
he is taught, by his father and mother at home. He is not the least an
invalid, but it pleases his father and mother to bring him up in this
manner. Now, I imagine, no English friends of compulsory education dream
of dealing with such a defaulter as this, and certainly his father, who
perhaps is himself a friend of compulsory education for the working
classes, would be astounded to find his education of his own son
interfered with. But, if my worthy acquaintance lived in Switzerland or
Germany, he would be dealt with as follows. I speak with the school-law
of Canton Neufchatel, immediately under my eyes, but the regulations on
this matter are substantially the same in all the states of Germany and
of German Switzerland. The Municipal Education Committee of the district
where my acquaintance lived would address a summons to him, informing
him that a comparison of the school-rolls of their district with the
municipal list of children of school-age, showed his son not to be at
school; and requiring him, in consequence, to appear before the
Municipal Committee at a place and time named, and there to satisfy
them, either that his son did attend some public school, or that, if
privately taught, he was taught by duly trained and certificated
teachers. On the back of the summons, my acquaintance would find printed
the penal articles of the School-Law, sentencing him to a fine if he
failed to satisfy the Municipal Committee; and, if he failed to pay the
fine, or was found a second time offending, to imprisonment. In some
Continental States he would be liable, in case of repeated infraction of
the School-Law, to be deprived of his parental rights, and to have the
care of his son transferred to guardians named by the State. It is
indeed terrible to think of the consternation and wrath of our educated
and intelligent classes under a discipline like this; and I should not
like to be the man to try and impose it on them. But I assure them most
emphatically--and if they study the experience of the Continent they
will convince themselves of the truth of what I say--that only on these
conditions of its equal and universal application is any law of
compulsory education possible."
We have now seen, at least in general outline, the system of National
Education which he would have wished to set up--how he would have
co-ordinated all instruction from the lowest to the highest, and how he
would have compelled all classes alike to submit their children, and in
the higher ranks of life to submit themselves, to the training which
should best equip them for their chosen or appointed work. We must now
enquire what sort of knowledge he would have endeavoured, by his
co-ordinated system, to impart.
He laid it down, more than once, that the aim of culture was "to know
ourselves and the world," and that, as the means to this end, we ought
"to know the best which has been thought and said in the world." He
recognized, candidly and fully, the claims of the physical sciences, and
their use and value in Education. For example, in advising about the
instruction of a little girl, in whom her teacher wished to arouse
"perception," he said, "You had much better take some science--(botany
is perhaps the best for a girl) and, choosing a good handbook, go
through it regularly with her.... The verification of the laws of
grammar, in the examples furnished by one's reading, is certainly a far
less fruitful stimulus of one's powers of observation and comparison,
than the verification of the laws of a science like botany in the
examples furnished by the world of nature before one's eyes."
But in spite of this, and of similar concessions, he deliberately held
the opinion that Literature, rather than Science, was the chief agent in
culture. In 1872 he wrote to an enquirer: "A single line of poetry,
working in the mind, may produce more thought and lead to more light,
which is what man wants, than the fullest acquaintance (to take your own
instance) with the processes of digestion." In 1884 he said to his
American audience: "My own studies have been almost wholly in Letters,
and my visits to the field of the natural sciences have been very slight
and inadequate, although those sciences have always strongly moved my
curiosity." In a word, he was, and gloried in being, a Humanist. What
Humanism meant for him is curiously illustrated by his comment on some
speeches which the late[14] Lord Salisbury delivered at Oxford on his
first appearance there as Chancellor of the University. After praising
his skill and courtesy, Arnold says: "He is a dangerous man, through,
and chiefly from, his want of any true sense and experience of
literature and its beneficent function. Religion he knows, and physical
science he knows; but the immense work between the two, which is for
literature to accomplish, he knows nothing of; and all his speeches at
Oxford[15] pointed this way. On the one hand, he was full of the great
future for physical science, and begging his University to make up her
mind to it, and to resign much of her literary studies; on the other
hand, he was full, almost defiantly full, of counsels and resolves for
retaining and upholding the old ecclesiastical and dogmatic form of
religion. From a juxtaposition of this kind, nothing but shocks and
collisions can come."
_The immense work which is for literature to accomplish._ This work,
lying between the work of Religion and the work of Science, was, in his
view, nothing less than the culture of Humanity. Religion had its
sphere, and Science had its sphere, but culture was to be effected
neither by Religion nor by Science, but by Literature. The literature
which he extolled was literature in its widest sense--ancient and
modern, English and Continental, Occidental and Oriental--whatever
contained "the best which had been thought and said in the world." And,
when we come to the sub-divisions of literature, we note that he was
pre-eminently a classicist. This he was partly by temperament, partly by
training, partly by his matured and deliberate judgment. It can scarcely
be doubted that he had an innate love of perfect form, an innate
"sentiment against hideousness and rawness," and so he was a classicist
by temperament. Then his training was essentially classical. He used to
protest, with amusing earnestness, against the notion that his father
had been a bad scholar. "People talk the greatest nonsense about my
father's scholarship. The Wykehamists of his day were excellent
scholars. Dr. Gabell made them so. My father's Latin verses were not
good; but that was because he was not poetical--not because he was a bad
scholar. But he wrote the most admirable Latin prose; and, as for his
Greek prose, you couldn't tell it from Thucydides." In this kind of
scholarship Matthew Arnold was nurtured; and whatever in this respect
his training had left imperfect, he perfected by close and continuous
study. His Greek and Latin reading was both wide and accurate, perhaps
wider in Greek than in Latin, though the soundness of his Latin
scholarship is proved by the fact that he was _proxime_ for the Hertford
Scholarship at Oxford. He had read Plato in the Sixth Form at Rugby, and
Oxford taught him Aristotle. From first to last his "unapproachable
favourites" were Homer and Sophocles, and Hesiod was "a Greek friend to
whom he turned with excellent effect." But though he was thus
essentially a classicist, a mere classicist he was not. No one had a
wider, a more familiar, a more discriminating knowledge of English
literature; no one--and this is worthy of remark--had the text of the
Bible more perfectly at his fingers' ends. He had read all that was best
in French, German, and Italian;[16] and in French at any rate he was an
exact and judicious critic, as is sufficiently shown by his essay on
_The French Play in London_.[17] Hebrew he mastered sufficiently to
"follow and weigh the reasons offered by others" for a retranslation of
the Old Testament; and into Celtic literature he made at any rate one
memorable incursion.[18]
A man so equipped was essentially a man of letters: a great deal more
than a classicist, but a classicist first and foremost. And so it was
natural that he should think a classical education the best education
that could be offered to boys, and should desire to see classics, taught
in a literary and not a pedantic spirit, the staple of instruction in
all those Public Schools, whether of ancient or of modern foundation,
to which the Upper and Middle Classes should resort. He was perfectly
ready to make composition in Greek and Latin the luxury of the few who
had a special aptitude for it, therein following the doctrine of Dr.
Whewell, and leading the way to a notable reform in Public Schools. But
to read the best Latin and Greek authors was to be the staple of a boy's
education, and thereto were to be added a full and scholarly knowledge
of English, and a sufficiency, such as modern life demands, of Science
and Mathematics. He "ventured once, in the very Senate-House and heart
of Cambridge, to hazard the opinion that for the majority of mankind a
little of mathematics goes a long way." He thought it no particular gain
for a boy to know that "when a taper burns, the wax is converted into
carbonic acid and water." He thought it a clear loss that he should not
know the last book of the _Iliad_, or the sixth book of the _Æneid_, or
the _Agamemnon_. He encouraged the Eton boys to laugh at "Scientific
lectures, and lessons on the diameter of the sun and moon"; but he was
moved almost to tears when "Can you not wait upon the lunatic?" was
offered as a paraphrase of "Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?"
He listened with amused interest to the teachers who deduced our descent
from "a hairy quadruped furnished with a tail and pointed ears,
probably arboreal in his habits." But he thought it deplorable that a
leading physicist should never have heard of Bishop Wilson of Sodor and
Man, and that a leading journalist should confound him with Bishop
Wilson of Calcutta.
To the Public Schools he would have entrusted that thorough drilling in
Greek, Latin and English which was to be the foundation of the pupils'
culture; and, this done, he would have required the University to offer
scope for the fullest development of any special aptitude which the
pupil might display. In brief, the school was to train in general
knowledge; the University was to specialize. In 1868 he wrote: "An
admirable English mathematician told me that he should never recover the
loss of the two years which after his degree he wasted without fit
instruction at an English University, when he ought to have been under
superior instruction, for which the present University course in England
makes no provision. I daresay he _will_ recover it, for a man of genius
counts no worthy effort too hard; but who can estimate the loss to the
mental training and intellectual habits of the country, from the
absence--so complete that it needs genius to be sensible of it, and
costs genius an effort to repair it--of all regular public provision
for the scientific study and teaching of any branch of knowledge?"
[Illustration: Rugby
Matthew Arnold entered Rugby School in August, 1837, living under his
father's roof at the School-house.
He left Rugby for Oxford in June, 1841
_Photo H.W. Taunt_]
But these larger views of education belong, after all, to the region of
theory, and he never had the opportunity, except very indirectly, of
putting them into practice. With the Elementary Schools he dealt
practically, officially, and directly; but even here, as in so many
other departments, his influence was rather critical than constructive.
He had only an imperfect sympathy with "that somewhat terrible
character, the scientific educator." A brother-inspector says that, "if
he saw little children looking good and happy, and under the care of a
kindly and sympathetic teacher, he would give a favourable report,
without enquiring too curiously into the percentage of scholars who
could pass the 'standard' examination." There must be many who still
remember with amused affection his demeanour in an Elementary School.
They see the tall figure, at once graceful and stately; the benign air,
as of an affable archangel; the critical brow and enquiring eyeglass
bent on some very immature performance in penmanship or needlework; and
the frightened children and the anxious teacher, gradually lapsing into
smiles and peace, as the great man tested the proficiency in some such
humble art as spelling. "Well, my little man, and how do you spell
_dog_?" "Please sir, _d-o-g_." "Capital, very good indeed. I couldn't
do it better myself. And now let us go a little further, and see if we
can spell _cat_." (Chorus excitedly.) "C-A-T." "Now, this is
really excellent. (To the teacher.) You have brought them on wonderfully
in spelling since I was here last. You shall have a capital report.
Good-bye." To those who cherish these memories there is nothing
surprising in this tribute by a friend: "His effect on the teachers when
he examined a school was extraordinary. He was sympathetic without being
condescending, and he reconciled the humblest drudge in a London school
to his or her drudgery for the next twelve months."
As regards the matter of education, he was all for Reality, as against
Pretentiousness, "the stamp of plainness and freedom from charlatanism."
He had no notion that children could be humanized by being made to read
that "the crocodile is oviparous," or that "summer ornaments for grates
are made of wood shavings and of different coloured papers." He wished
that the youngest and poorest children should be nurtured on the
wholesome and delicious food of actual literature, instead of
"skeletons" and "abstracts." He set great store on learning poetry by
heart, for he believed in poetry as the chief instrument of culture. He
poured just contempt upon the wretched doggerel which in school
reading-books too often passed for poetry. "When one thinks how noble
and admirable a thing genuine popular poetry is, it is provoking to
think that such rubbish should be palmed off on a poor child, with any
apparent sanction from the Education Department and its grants."
With regard to the special evil of teaching poetry by "selections" or
"extracts," he wrote in his Report for 1880: "That the poetry chosen
should have real beauties of expression and feeling, that these beauties
should be such as the children's hearts and minds can lay hold of, and
that a distinct point or centre of beauty and interest should occur
within the limits of the passage learned--all these are conditions to be
insisted on. Some of the short pieces by Mrs. Hemans, such as 'The
Graves of a Household,' 'The Homes of England,' 'The Better Land,' are
to be recommended because they fulfil all three conditions; they have
real merits of expression and sentiment; the merits are such as the
children can feel, and the centre of interest, these pieces being so
short, necessarily occurs within the limits of what is learnt. On the
other hand, in extracts taken from Scott or Shakespeare, the point of
interest is not often reached within the hundred lines which is all that
children in the Fourth Standard learn. The Judgment Scene in the
_Merchant of Venice_ affords me a good example of what I mean.... The
children in the Fourth Standard begin at the beginning and stop at the
end of a hundred lines. Now the children in the Fourth Standard are
often a majority of the children learning poetry, and this is all their
poetry for the year. But within these hundred lines the real interest of
the situation is not reached; neither do they contain any poetry of
signal beauty and effectiveness. How little, therefore, has the
poetry-exercise been made to do for these children, many of whom will
leave school at once, and learn no more poetry!" He greatly favoured all
such exercises as tend to make the mind "creative," and give it "a
native play of its own, as against such exercises as learning strings of
promontories, battles, and minerals." As to the number of subjects
taught, he was in favour of few rather than many. He dreaded for the
children the strain of having to receive a large number of "knowledges"
(as he oddly called them), and "store them up to be reproduced in an
examination." But in spite of this well-founded dread of an undue
multiplication of subjects, he wished to make Latin compulsory in the
upper standards of elementary schools, and he wished to see it taught
through the Vulgate. Perhaps in this particular he showed an effect of
his father's influence; for the late Dean of Westminster[19] used to
imitate the enormous emphasis with which Dr. Arnold replied to some one
who had depreciated the language of the Vulgate as "Dog Latin"--"_Dog
Latin_, indeed! I call it _Lion Latin_!"
Be that as it may, Matthew Arnold thus gave his judgment on the possible
uses of the Vulgate in elementary schools--
"Latin is the foundation of so much in the written and spoken language
of modern Europe, that it is the best language to take as a second
language; in our own written and book language, above all, it fills so
large a part that we perhaps hardly know how much of their reading falls
meaningless upon the eye and ear of children in our elementary schools,
from their total ignorance of either Latin or a modern language derived
from it. For the little of languages that can be taught in our
elementary schools, it is far better to go to the root at once; and
Latin, besides, is the best of all languages to learn grammar by. But it
should by no means be taught as in our classical schools; far less time
should be spent on the grammatical framework, and classical literature
should be left quite out of view. A second language, and a language
coming very largely into the vocabulary of modern nations, is what Latin
should stand for to the teacher of an elementary school. I am convinced
that for his purpose the best way would be to disregard classical Latin
entirely, to use neither Cornelius Nepos, nor Eutropius, nor Cæsar, nor
any _delectus_ from them, but to use the Latin Bible, the Vulgate. A
chapter or two from the story of Joseph, a chapter or two from
Deuteronomy, and the first two chapters of St. Luke's Gospel would be
the sort of delectus we want; add to them a vocabulary and a simple
grammar of the main forms of the Latin language, and you have a
perfectly compact and cheap school book, and yet all that you need. In
the extracts the child would be at home, instead of, as in extracts from
classical Latin, in an utterly strange land; and the Latin of the
Vulgate, while it is real and living Latin, is yet, like the Greek of
the New Testament, much nearer to modern idiom, and therefore much
easier for a modern learner than classical idiom can be. True, a child
whose delectus is taken from Cornelius Nepos or Cæsar will be better
prepared perhaps for going on to Virgil and Cicero than a child whose
delectus is taken from the Vulgate. But we do not want to carry our
elementary schools into Virgil or Cicero; one child in five thousand,
with a special talent, may go on to higher schools, and to Virgil, and
he will go on to them all the better for the little we have at any rate
given him. But what we want to give to our Elementary Schools in
general is the vocabulary, to some extent, of a second language, and
that language one which is at the bottom of a great deal of modern life
and modern language. This, I am convinced, we may give in some such
method as the method I have above suggested, but in no other."
There is, perhaps, no more interesting or more characteristic feature of
his doctrine about elementary schools than his insistence, early and
late, on a close and familiar acquaintance with the Bible. "Chords of
power," he said, "are touched by this instruction which no other part of
the instruction in a popular school reaches, and chords various, not the
single religious chord only. The Bible is for the child in an elementary
school almost his only contact with poetry and philosophy. What a course
of eloquence and poetry (to call it by that name alone) is the Bible in
a school which has and can have but little eloquence and poetry! and how
much do our elementary schools lose by not having any such course as
part of their school programme! All who value the Bible may rest assured
that thus to know and possess the Bible is the most certain way to
extend the power and efficacy of the Bible."
The spiritual sense, the doctrinal and dogmatic import, of Holy
Scripture lay, in his judgment, quite outside the scope of the School.
"The Bible's application and edification belong to the Church; its
literary and historical substance to the School." He saw clearly the
manifold and conflicting perils to which a simple love and knowledge of
the Bible were exposed the moment that exegesis began to play about it.
He pointed out that Cardinal Newman interpreted the words, _I will lay
thy stones with fair colours and thy foundations with sapphires_, as
authorizing "the sumptuosities of the Church of Rome"; and to
Protestants who said that this was a wrong use of the passage he pointed
out that their similar use of the Beast and the Scarlet Woman and
Antichrist would seem equally wrong to Cardinal Newman; "and in these
cases of application who shall decide"? What he insisted on was the
value of the Bible as a beautiful and ennobling literature, easily
accessible to all. He would have it taught with intelligence, sympathy,
reverence, and, above all, "as a Literature,"--for biblical teaching
ought to show the widely varying elements of which the Bible is
composed: the profound differences, not merely of authorship and style,
but of tone and temper, between one book and another; the historical
circumstances under which each came into being; the section of humanity
and the period of time to which each made its appeal.
In 1869 he wrote in his Annual Report--
"Let the school managers make the main outlines of Bible history, and
the getting by heart a selection of the finest Psalms, the most
interesting passages from the historical and prophetical books of the
Old Testament, and the chief parables, discourses, and exhortations, of
the New, a part of the regular school work, to be submitted to
inspection and to be seen in its strength or weakness like any other.
This could raise no jealousies; or, if it still raises some, let a
sacrifice be made of them for the sake of the end in view. Some will say
that what we propose is but a small use to put the Bible to; yet it is
that on which all higher use of the Bible is to be built, and its
adoption is the only chance for saving the one elevating and inspiring
element in the scanty instruction of our primary schools from being
sacrificed to a politico-religious difficulty. There was no Greek school
in which Homer was not read; cannot our popular schools, with their
narrow range and their jejune alimentation in secular literature, do as
much for the Bible as the Greek schools did for Homer?"
In 1870 he wrote about a book[20] by two young Jewish ladies: "I am sure
it will be found, as I told them, that their book meets a real want;
there were good books about the Bible for the learned, and there were
bad books about it--that is to say, bad _résumés_ of its history and
literature--for the general public; but anything like a good and sound
_résumé_ for the general public did not exist till this book came."
It is interesting to observe that to his deep conviction of the ethical
and educational value of the Bible is due his only direct and
constructive effort to enrich the apparatus of the schools which he
inspected. Of improvement by way of criticism and suggestion he gave
them enough and to spare, but to supply them with a new reading-book was
a departure from his usual method. Nevertheless in 1872 he wrote: "An
ounce of practice, they say, is better than a pound of theory; and
certainly one may talk for ever about the wonder-working power of
Letters, and yet produce no good at all, unless one really puts people
in the way of feeling their power. The friends of Physics do not content
themselves with extolling Physics; they put forth school-books by which
the study of Physics may be with proper advantage brought near to those
who before were strangers to it; and they do wisely. For any one who
believes in the civilizing power of Letters, and often talks of this
belief, to think that he has for more than twenty years got his living
by inspecting schools for the people, has gone in and out among them,
has seen that the power of Letters never reaches them at all, and that
the whole study of Letters is thereby discredited, and its power called
in question, and yet has attempted nothing to remedy this state of
things, cannot but be vexing and disquieting. He may truly say, like the
Israel of the prophet, 'We have not wrought any deliverance in the
earth'! and he may well desire to do something to pay his debt to
popular education before he finally departs, and to serve it, if he can,
in that point where its need is sorest, where he has always said its
need was sorest, and where, nevertheless, it is as sore still as when he
began saying this twenty years ago. Even if what he does cannot be of
service at once, owing to special prejudices and difficulties, yet these
prejudices and difficulties years are almost sure to dissipate, and the
work may be of service hereafter."
These wise, though rather melancholy, words occur in the Preface to a
little book called _A Bible Reading for Schools_, and in its fuller and
alternative title, _The Great Prophecy of Israel's Restoration, Arranged
and Edited for Young Learners_. Arnold, himself a constant and attentive
student of Holy Writ, "liked reading his Bible without being baffled by
unmeaningnesses." He complained that "the fatal thing about our version
is that it so often spoils a chapter in the Old Testament by making
sheer nonsense out of one or two verses, and so throwing the reader
out." He habitually used a Bible--a present from his godfather, John
Keble--"where the numbers of the chapters are marked at the side and do
not interpose a break between chapter and chapter; and where the
divisions of the verses, being numbered in like manner at the side of
the page, not in the body of the verse, and being numbered in very small
type, do not thrust themselves forcibly on the attention," and these
circumstances suggested the form of his _Bible Reading for Schools_. The
little book consists of the last twenty-seven chapters of Isaiah,
running on continuously, with some twenty pages of notes, and he thus
introduces it--
"At the very outset, the humbleness of what is professed in this little
book cannot be set forth too strongly. With the aim of enabling English
school children to read as a connected whole the last twenty-seven
chapters of Isaiah, without being frequently stopped by passages of
which the meaning is almost or quite unintelligible, I have sought to
choose, among the better meanings which have been offered for each of
the passages, that which seemed the best, and to weave it into the
authorized text in such a manner as not to produce any sense of
strangeness or interruption." The attempt was truly laudable, and the
execution admirable for taste and ease. The majestic flow and cadence of
the traditional English are never interrupted. There is no concession to
such pedantries as Professor Robertson Smith's "greaves of the warrior
that stampeth in the fray," or such barbarisms as Professor Cheynes'
"boot of him that trampleth noisily." But here and there a turn is given
to a sentence, which for the first time reveals its true meaning; here
and there a word which really represents the Hebrew is substituted for
one which makes nonsense of the sentence.
The little book has often been reprinted; but as "A Bible Reading for
Schools" it failed, as, to judge by his own melancholy words about it,
he seems to have foreseen that it would fail. People who have charge of
Elementary Education in England, whether in Church Schools or in Board
Schools, are eminently and rightly suspicious about new views in
religion; and _The Great Prophecy of Israel's Restoration_ gave currency
to a view which in 1872 was probably new to most School Managers and
School Boards. He carefully disclaimed any intention to decide the
authorship of the chapters which he edited. But the fact that they were
detached from the earlier ones might perhaps raise questions in
enquiring minds; and in the preface he stated his personal belief that
"the author of the earlier part of the Book of Isaiah was not the author
of these last chapters." He most truly added that "there is nothing to
forbid a member of the Church of England, or, for that matter, a member
of the Church of Rome either, or a member of the Jewish Synagogue, from
holding such a belief"; but probably clergymen and Dissenting ministers
and pious laymen of all denominations looked rather askance at it; and
the little book never got itself adopted as "A Bible Reading for
Schools."
Thus ended his one attempt to improve, positively and by construction,
the curriculum of the Elementary Schools; and we return, at the end of
this study of his Educational doctrine, to the point at which we began.
"Organize your Elementary, your Secondary, your Superior, Education."
This was the burden of his teaching for five-and-thirty years; and, if
the community has at length really set its hand to that great task, it
is only right that we should remember with honour the Master who first
taught us (when the doctrine was unpopular) that the primary duty of a
civilized State is to educate its children.
[Footnote 9: Thomas Arnold, D.D., Head Master of Rugby. His eldest son,
Matthew Arnold, Inspector of Schools. His second son, Thomas Arnold,
Professor in University College, Dublin. His third son, Edward Penrose
Arnold, Inspector of Schools. His fourth son, William Delafield Arnold,
Director of Public Instruction in the Punjaub.]
[Footnote 10: See p. 135.]
[Footnote 11: Reprinted in _Irish Essays and Others_.]
[Footnote 12: This essay, unfortunately, was never reprinted.]
[Footnote 13: It was published in 1850.]
[Footnote 14: An Oxford man must write this word _late_ with regret.
August 23, 1903.]
[Footnote 15: In 1870.]
[Footnote 16: For the width of his reading, see his _Note-Books_, Edited
by his daughter, Mrs. Wodehouse.]
[Footnote 17: Reprinted in _Irish Essays, and Others_.]
[Footnote 18: _On the Study of Celtic Literature_, 1867.]
[Footnote 19: Dr. Bradley.]
[Footnote 20: _The History and Literature of the Israelites._ By C. and
A. de Rothschild.]
CHAPTER IV
SOCIETY
"Culture seeks to do away with classes and sects; to make the best that
has been thought and known in the world current everywhere; to make all
men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light, where they may use
ideas, as it uses them itself, freely; nourished, and not bound, by
them. This is the _social idea_; and the men of culture are the true
apostles of equality."
The words--_social idea_--which Arnold himself italicized in the
foregoing extract from _Culture and Anarchy_, will indicate the sense in
which "Society" is here intended. We are not thinking of that which
Pennialinus[21] means when he writes about "Society gossip" or "a
Society function." We are concerned with the thoughts and temper and
actions of men, not as isolated units, but as living in an organized
community; and, taking "Society" in this sense, we are to examine
Arnold's influence on the Society of his time.
[Illustration: Front of Balliol College, Oxford, in Arnold's Time
In 1840 Matthew Arnold won an open scholarship at Balliol and went into
residence in 1841
_Photo H.W. Taunt_]
Certainly the most obvious and palpable way of affecting Society--and to
many Englishmen the only conceivable way--is by the method of Politics;
by the definite and positive action of human law, and by such endeavours
as we can make towards shaping that action. Now, if indeed the Political
method were the only one, there could be little to be said about his
effect on Society. Politics, in the limited and conventional sense just
now suggested, were not much in his line. He was interested in them; he
had opinions about them; he occasionally intervened in them. But he made
no mark on the political work of his time; nor, so far as one can judge,
did he aspire to do so. Of the man of letters in the field of politics,
he said: "He is in truth not on his own ground there, and is in peculiar
danger of talking at random." In politics, as in all else that he
touched, he was critical rather than constructive; and in politics,
"immersed," as Bacon said, "in matter," a man must be constructive, if
his influence is to be felt and to endure. "Politicians," he said in
1880, "we all of us here in England are and must be, and I too cannot
help being a politician; but a politician of that commonwealth of which
the pattern, as the philosopher says, exists perhaps somewhere in
Heaven, but certainly is at present found nowhere on earth." In 1887,
describing himself as "an aged outsider," he thus stated his own
attitude towards political problems--
"The professional politicians are always apt to be impatient of the
intervention in politics of a candid outsider, and he must expect to
provoke contempt and resentment in a good many of them. Still the action
of the regular politicians continues to be, for the most part, so very
far from successful, that the outsider is perpetually tempted to brave
their anger and to offer his observations, with the hope of possibly
doing some little good by saying what many quiet people are thinking and
wishing outside of the strife, phrases, and routine of professional
politics."
From first to last, he professed himself, and no doubt believed himself,
to be on the Liberal side. At the General Election of 1868 he urbanely
informed a Tory Committee, which asked for the advantage of his name,
that he was "an old Whig," nurtured in the traditions of Lansdowne
House. "Although," he said in 1869, "I am a Liberal, yet I am a Liberal
tempered by experience, reflection, and renouncement." In 1878 he
described himself as a "sincere but ineffectual Liberal": in 1880, as "a
Liberal of the future rather than a Liberal of the present." A year
later, he spoke smilingly of "all good Liberals, of whom I wish to be
considered one"; and as late as 1887 he declared himself "one of the
Liberals of the future, who happen to be grown, alas! rather old."
But, though he believed himself to be a Liberal, he had the most lively
disrelish for the Liberalism of that great Middle Class which, during
the greater part of his life, played so large a part in Liberal
politics. In 1882, reviewing, in his favourite manner, the various
classes of English Society, and discussing their adequacy to fulfil the
ideal of perfect citizenship, he wrote--
"Suppose we take that figure we know so well, the earnest and
non-conforming Liberal of our Middle Classes, as his schools and his
civilization have made him. He is for Disestablishment; he is for
Temperance; he has an eye to his Wife's Sister; he is a member of his
local caucus; he is learning to go up to Birmingham every year to the
feast of Mr. Chamberlain. His inadequacy is but too visible."
Certainly Arnold's Liberalism had nothing in common with the Liberalism
of the great Middle Class. Indeed, so far as theory is concerned, it had
a democratic basis, inasmuch as he believed that democracy was a product
of natural law, and that our business was to adapt our political and
social institutions to it. "Democracy," he said, "is trying to _affirm
its own essence_: to live, to enjoy, to possess the world, as
aristocracy has tried, and successfully tried, before it."
The movement of Democracy he regarded as being an "operation of nature,"
and, like other operations of nature, it was neither to be praised nor
blamed. He was neither a "partisan" of it, nor an "enemy." His only care
was, if he could, to guide it aright, and to secure that it used its
predominant power in human affairs at least as wisely as the aristocracy
which had preceded it. Of aristocratic rule in foreign countries--of
such rule as preceded the French Revolution--he thought as poorly as
most men think; but for the aristocracy of England he had a singular
esteem. It is true that he gave it a nickname; that he poked fun at its
illiteracy and its inaccessibility to ideas; that he was impatient of
"immense inequalities of condition and property," and huge estates, and
irresponsible landlordism; that he contemned the "hideous English
toadyism" and "immense vulgar-mindedness" of the Middle Class when
confronted with "lords and great people."
But, for all that, he wrote about the English Aristocracy, as it stood
in 1859: "I desire to speak of it with the most unbounded respect. It is
the most popular of aristocracies; it has avoided faults which have
ruined other aristocracies equally splendid. While the aristocracy of
France was destroying its estates by its extravagance, and itself by
its impertinence, the aristocracy of England was founding English
agriculture, and commanding respect by a personal dignity which made
even its pride forgiven. Historical and political England, the England
of which we are all so proud, is of its making."
In spite, however, of this high estimate of what Aristocracy had
accomplished in the past, he felt that power was slipping away from it,
and was passing into the hands of the Multitude. But he also felt--and
it was certainly one of his most profound convictions--that the
Multitude could never govern properly, could never regulate its own
affairs, could never present England adequately to the view of the
world, unless it cast aside the Individualism in which it had been
nurtured, and made up its mind to act in and through the State. Perhaps
his ideal of a State can best be described as an Educated Democracy,
working by Collectivism in Government, Religion, and Social order.
"If experience has established any one thing in this world, it has
established this: that it is well for any great class or description of
men in society to be able to say for itself what it wants, and not to
have other classes, the so-called educated and intelligent classes,
acting for it as its proctors, and supposed to understand its wants and
to provide for them. They do not really understand its wants, they do
not really provide for them. A class of men may often itself not either
fully understand its own wants, or adequately express them; but it has a
nearer interest and a more sure diligence in the matter than any of its
proctors, and therefore a better chance of success." Amid many
fluctuations of opinion on minor points, he was, from first to last, a
thoroughgoing advocate for extending the action of the State. In his
ideal of government, the State was to play in a democratic age the part
which the Aristocracy had played in earlier ages--it was to govern and
administer and control and inspire. And, it was, in one important
respect, a far nobler thing than the best aristocracy could ever be, for
it was the "representative acting-power of the nation"; and so the
relation of the citizen to the State was a much more dignified relation
than that of a citizen to an aristocracy could ever be. "Is it that of a
dependant to a parental benefactor? By no means: it is that of a member
in a partnership to the whole firm." The citizens of a State, the
members of a society, are really "'a _partnership_,' as Burke nobly
says, '_in all science, in all art, in every virtue, in all
perfection_.' Towards this great final design of their connexion, they
apply the aids which co-operative association can give them." We turn
now to the practical application of this doctrine.
We have seen in the previous chapter how earnestly and consistently
throughout his working life he urged the State to take into its control,
and so far as was needed to subsidize, the Education of the whole
nation. "How vain, how meaningless," he cried, "to tell a man who, for
the instruction of his offspring, receives aid from the State, that he
is humiliated! Humiliated by receiving help for himself as an individual
from himself in his corporate and associated capacity! help to which his
own money, as a tax-payer, contributes, and for which, as a result of
the joint energy and intelligence of the whole community in employing as
powers, he himself deserves some of the praise!... He is no more
humiliated than when he crosses London Bridge or walks down the King's
Road, or visits the British Museum. But it is one of the extraordinary
inconsistencies of some English people in this matter, that they keep
all their cry of humiliation and degradation for help which the State
offers." We shall see in a subsequent chapter that he was as strong for
Established Churches as for State-regulated Schools, and for the same
reason. In Religion, as in Education, he disparaged private institutions
and individual ventures. The State, "the nation in its corporate and
collective capacity," ought to transcend the individual citizen: it
should supply him, to help him as one of its units to supply himself,
with the thing which he wanted--Education or Religion--in the grand
style, on a large scale, with all the authority which comes from
national recognition, with all the dignity of a historical descent.
Arnold's appeal for State-supplied and State-controlled Education has,
as we have already seen, met with some practical response, and in the
main falls in with the modern drift of Liberal ideas. In upholding
State-supported and State-controlled Religion, he was rather continuing
an old tradition than starting a new idea, and modern Liberalism is
moving away from him.
But in some important respects, all strictly political, his advocacy of
extended action by the State fell in with the Liberal movement of his
time. The hideous misgovernment of Ireland he had always deplored. It
touched him long before it touched the great majority of Englishmen.
With a view to informing people on the Irish question, he compiled a
book of Burke's most telling utterances on Ireland and her woes. Those
utterances, as he said, "Show at work all the causes which have brought
Ireland to its present state--the tyranny of the grantees of
confiscation; of the English garrison; Protestant ascendancy; the
reliance of the English Government upon this ascendancy and its
instruments as their means of government; the yielding to menaces of
danger and insurrection what was never yielded to considerations of
equity and reason; the recurrence to the old perversity of mismanagement
as soon as ever the danger was passed." To all these evils he would have
applied the remedies which Burke suggested. He would have had the State
endow the religions of Ireland and their ministries, supply Ireland with
good schools, and defend Irish tenants against the extortions of bad
landlords. He was vehemently opposed to Gladstone's scheme of Home Rule,
because, in his view, it tended to disintegration where he specially
desired cohesion: but, in the tumults of 1885-8, he never lost his head,
never forgot his old sympathy with Irish wrongs, never "drew up an
indictment against a whole people."[22] All through these stormy years,
he stood firm for an effective system of Local Government in Ireland.
Irish government, he said, had "been conducted in accordance with the
wishes of the minority, and of the British Philistine." He desired a
system which should accord with the wishes of the majority. He
deprecated Forster's "expression of general objection to Home Rule";
because, though Home Rule as understood by Parnell was intolerable,
there was another kind of Home Rule which was possible and even
desirable. He was keenly anxious that his friends, the Liberal
Unionists, should not let the opportunity slip, but should bring forward
a "counter scheme to Gladstone's," giving real powers of local
government. In 1887 he again insisted that the "opinion of quiet
reasonable people throughout the country" was bent on giving the Irish
the due control of their own local affairs. He pleaded for a system
"built on sufficiently large lines, not too complicated, not fantastic,
not hesitating and suspicious, not taking back with one hand what it
gives with the other." A similar system he wished to see extended to
England, and he pointed out that it admirably facilitated that national
control of Secondary Education for which he was always pleading.
Then again, with reference to Irish land, his belief in the action of
the State displayed itself very clearly. In his opinion the remedy for
agrarian trouble in Ireland was that the State should, after rigid and
impartial enquiry, distinguish between good landlords and bad, and then
expropriate the bad ones. This, he thought, would "give the sort of
equity, the sort of moral satisfaction, which the case needed." Once
again he was in harmony with Liberal opinion, when he desired to widen
the basis of the State by extending the suffrage in turn to the Artisans
and the Labourers. In one respect at least he was in harmony rather with
Collectivist Radicalism than with orthodox Liberalism, for he did not in
the least dread the intervention of the State between employer and
employed. He desired to strengthen Parliament, the supreme organ of the
national will, by reforming the House of Lords; though he strongly
dissented from a scheme of reform just then in vogue. "One can hardly
imagine sensible men planning a Second Chamber which should not include
the Archbishop of Canterbury, or which should include the young
gentlemen who flock to the House of Lords when pigeon-shooting is in
question. But our precious Liberal Reformers are for retaining the
pigeon-shooters and for expelling the Archbishop of Canterbury."[23]
Even in the full flood of Liberal victory which followed the General
Election of 1880, he saw what was coming. "What strikes one is the
insecureness of the Liberals' hold upon office and upon public favour;
the probability of the return, perhaps even more than once, of their
adversaries to office, before that final and happy consummation is
reached--the permanent establishment of Liberalism in power." And, while
he saw what was coming, he thus divined the cause. The official and
commanding part of the Liberal Party was at the best stolidly
indifferent to Social Reform; at the worst, viciously angry with the
idea and those who propagated it. The commercialism of the great Middle
Class had covered the face of England with places like St. Helens, which
the capitalists called "great centres of national enterprise," and
Cobbett called "Hell-Holes." In these places life was lived under
conditions of squalid and hideous misery, and the inhabitants were
beginning to find out, in the words of one of their own class, that
"free political institutions do not guarantee the well-being of the
toiling class." Under these circumstances it was natural that the
toilers, having looked for redress to the Liberal Party and looked in
vain, should, when next they had the chance, try a spell of that
Democratic Toryism which at any rate held out some shadowy hope of
social betterment. Arnold's misgivings about the future of the Liberal
Party were abundantly made good by the General Election of 1885; but
enough has now been said about his contribution to the practical
politics of his time. A much larger space must be given to the influence
which he brought to bear on Society by methods not political--by
criticism, by banter, by literary felicities, by "sinuous, easy,
unpolemical" methods.
England had known him first as a poet, then as a literary critic. Next
came a rather hazy impression that he was an educational reformer whose
suggestions might be worth attending to. It was not till 1869 that his
countrymen became fully aware of him as a social critic, a commentator
on life and society. Looking back, one seems to see that by that time
his poetical function was fulfilled. As far as the medium of poetry is
concerned, he had said his say; said it incomparably well, said it with
abiding effect. Now it seemed that a new function presented itself to
him; a great door and effectual was opened to him. He found a fresh
sphere of usefulness and influence in applying his critical method to
the ideals and follies of his countrymen; to their scheme of life, ways
of thinking and acting, prejudices, conventions, and limitations. Mr.
Paul said, as we have already seen, that the appearance of _Essays in
Criticism_ was "a great intellectual event." That is perfectly true; and
the appearance of _Culture and Anarchy_ was a great social event. The
book so named was published in 1869; but the ground had been prepared
for it by some earlier writings, and these we must consider before we
come to the book itself.
In February, 1866, there appeared in the _Cornhill Magazine_ an essay
called "My Countrymen." In this essay Arnold, fresh from one of his
Continental tours, tried to show English people what the intelligent
mind of Europe was really thinking of them. "'It is not so much that we
dislike England,' a Prussian official, with the graceful tact of his
nation, said to me the other day, 'as that we think little of her.'"
Broadly speaking, European judgment on us came to this--that England had
been great, powerful, and prosperous under an aristocratic government,
at a time when the chief requisite for national greatness was Action,
"for aristocracies, poor in ideas, are rich in energy"; but that England
was rapidly losing ground, was becoming a second-rate power, was falling
from her place in admiration and respect, since the Government had
passed into the hands of the Middle Class. What was now the chief
requisite for national greatness was Intelligence; and in intelligence
the Middle Class had shown itself signally deficient. In foreign
affairs--in its dealings with Russia and Turkey, Germany and America--it
had shown "rash engagement, intemperate threatenings, undignified
retreat, ill-timed cordiality," in short, every quality best calculated
to lower England in the esteem of the civilized world.
In domestic affairs, the life and mind of the Middle Class were thus
described by the foreign critic. "The fineness and capacity of man's
spirit is shown by his enjoyments; your Middle Class has an enjoyment in
its business, we admit, and gets on well in business, and makes money;
but beyond that? Drugged with business, your Middle Class seems to have
its sense blunted for any stimulus besides, except Religion; it has a
religion, narrow, unintelligent, repulsive.... What other enjoyments
have they? The newspapers, a sort of eating and drinking which are not
to our taste, a literature of books almost entirely religious or
semi-religious, books utterly unreadable by an educated class anywhere,
but which your Middle Class consumes by the hundred thousand, and in
their evenings, for a great treat, a lecture on Teetotalism or
Nunneries. Can any life be imagined more hideous, more dismal, more
unenviable?... Your Middle Class man thinks it the highest pitch of
development and civilization when his letters are carried twelve times a
day from Islington to Camberwell, and from Camberwell to Islington, and
if railway trains run to and fro between them every quarter of an hour.
He thinks it is nothing that the trains only carry him from an
illiberal, dismal life at Islington to an illiberal, dismal life at
Camberwell; and the letters only tell him that such is the life there."
And, as to political and social reform, "Such a spectacle as your Irish
Church Establishment you cannot find in France or Germany. Your Irish
Land Question you dare not face." English Schools, English vestrydom,
English provincialism--all alike stand in the most urgent need of
reform; but with all alike the Middle Class is serenely content. After
reporting these exceedingly frank comments of foreign critics to his
English readers, Arnold thus expresses his own conviction on the matters
in dispute. "All due deductions made for envy, exaggeration, and
injustice, enough stuck by me of these remarks to determine me to go on
trying to keep my mind fixed on these, instead of singing hosannahs to
our actual state of development and civilization. The old recipe, to
think a little more and bustle a little less, seemed to me still to be
the best recipe to follow. So I take comfort when I find the _Guardian_
reproaching me with having no influence; for I know what influence
means--a party, practical proposals, action; and I say to myself: 'Even
suppose I could get some followers, and assemble them, brimming with
affectionate enthusiasm, to a committee-room in some inn; what on earth
should I say to them? What resolutions could I propose? I could only
propose the old Socratic commonplace, _Know thyself_; and how black they
would all look at that!' No; to enquire, perhaps too curiously, what
that present state of English development and civilization is, which
according to Mr. Lowe is so perfect that to give votes to the working
class is stark madness; and, on the other hand, to be less sanguine
about the divine and saving effect of a vote on its possessor than my
friends in the committee-room at the _Spotted Dog_--that is my
inevitable portion. To bring things under the light of one's
intelligence, to see how they look there, to accustom oneself simply to
regard the Marylebone Vestry, or the Educational Home, or the Irish
Church Establishment, or our railway management, or our Divorce Court,
or our gin-palaces open on Sunday and the Crystal Palace shut, as
absurdities--that is, I am sure, invaluable exercise for us just at
present. Let all persist in it who can, and steadily set their desires
on introducing, with time, a little more soul and spirit into the too,
too solid flesh of English society."
[Illustration: 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 Class, and it is natural to ask why that class was so specially
the target for his scorn. To that class, as he was fond of declaring,
half in fun and half in earnest, he himself belonged. "I always thought
my marriage," he used to say, "such a perfect marriage of the Middle
Classes--a schoolmaster's son and a judge's daughter." In the preface to
the _Essays in Criticism_, he spoke of "the English Middle Class, of
which I am myself a feeble unit." He used to declare that his feeling
towards his brethren of the Middle Class was that of St. Paul towards
his brethren of Israel: "My heart's desire and prayer for them is that
they may be saved." In _Culture and Anarchy_ he was constrained to admit
that "through circumstances which will perhaps one day be known, if ever
the affecting history of my conversion comes to be written, I have, for
the most part, broken with the ideas and the tea-meetings of my own
class"; but he found that he had not, by that conversion, come much
nearer to the ideas and works of the Aristocracy or the Populace.
He admired the fine manners, the governing faculty, the reticent and
dignified habit, of the Aristocracy. He deplored its limitations and its
obduracy, its "little culture and no ideas." He made fun of it when its
external manifestations touched the region of the ludicrous--"Everybody
knows Lord Elcho's[24] appearance, and how admirably he looks the part
of our governing classes; to my mind, indeed, the mere cock of his
lordship's hat is one of the finest and most aristocratic things we
have." In a more serious vein he taught--and enraged the _Guardian_ by
teaching--that, "ever since the advent of Christianity, _the prince of
this world is judged_"; and that wealth and rank and dignified ease are
bound to justify themselves for their apparent inconsistency with the
Christian ideal. He pitied the sorrows of the "people who suffer," the
"dim, common populations," the "poor who faint alway"; but he pitied
them from above. He certainly did not enter into their position; did not
share their ideas, or feel their sorrows as part of his own experience.
In an amazing passage he says that, when we snatch up a vehement opinion
in ignorance and passion, when we long to crush an adversary by sheer
violence, when we are envious, when we are brutal, when "we add our
voices to swell a blind clamour against some unpopular personage," when
"we trample savagely on the fallen," then we find in our own bosom "the
eternal spirit of the Populace." That a spirit so hideous, so infernal
as is here described, is the eternal spirit of fallen humanity may be
painfully true; but to say that it is the special or characteristic
spirit of "the Populace" is to show that one has no genuine sympathy and
no real acquaintance with the life and heart of the poor. So far, then,
his account of his own transition is true. He had "broken with the ideas
of his own class, and had not come much nearer to the ideas and works
of Aristocracy or the Populace." But the work of his life had brought
him into close and continuous contact with the great Middle Class, which
practically had the whole management of Elementary Education in its
hands. He knew the members of that class, as he said, "experimentally."
He slept in their houses, and ate at their tables, and observed at close
quarters their books, their amusements, and their social life. Thus he
judged of their civilization by intimate acquaintance, and found it
eminently distasteful and defective. From 1832 to 1867 the Middle Class
had governed England, manipulating the Aristocracy through the medium of
the House of Commons; and the Aristocracy, though still occupying the
place of visible dignity, had its eye nervously fixed on the movement,
actual and impending, of the Middle Class. This system of government by
the predominance of the Middle Class, was not only distasteful to
culture, but was actually a source of danger to the State when it came
to be applied to Foreign Affairs. "That makes the difference between
Lord Grenville and Lord Granville." So it was to the shortcomings of the
Middle Class, from which he professed to be sprung and which he so
intimately knew, that he first addressed his social criticism. The essay
on "My Countrymen" immediately attracted notice. It was fresh, it was
lively, it put forth a new view, it gaily ran counter to the great mass
of current prejudice. He was frankly pleased by the way in which it was
received. It was noticed and quoted and talked about. He reported to his
mother that it was thought "witty and suggestive," "timely and true."
Carlyle "almost wholly approved of it," and Bright was "full of it." He
did not expect it to be liked by people who belonged to "the _old_
English time, of which the greatness and success was so immense and
indisputable that no one who flourished when it was at its height could
ever lose the impression of it," or realize how far we had fallen in
Continental esteem. His friend Lingen was "indignant" because he thought
the essay exalted the Aristocracy at the expense of the Middle Class;
and the Whig newspapers were "almost all unfavourable, because it tells
disagreeable truths to the class which furnishes the great body of what
is called the Liberal interest." From the foreign side came a criticism
in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, "professing to be by a Frenchman," but "I am
sure it is by a woman I know something of in Paris, a half Russian, half
Englishwoman, married to a Frenchman." The first part of this criticism
"is not good, and perhaps when the second part appears I shall write a
short and light letter by way of reply." That "short and light letter"
appeared in the _Pall Mall_ of March 20, 1866. It dealt with the
respective but not incompatible claims of Culture and Liberty--the
former so defective in England, the latter so abundant--and it contained
this aspiration for Englishmen of the Middle Class. "I do not wish them
to be the café-haunting, dominoes-playing Frenchmen, but some third
thing: neither the Frenchmen nor their present selves."
He was now fairly launched on the course of social criticism. As time
went on, his essays attracted more and more notice, sometimes friendly,
sometimes hostile, but always interested and not seldom excited. Some of
the comments on the new and daring critic were inconceivably absurd. Of
Mr. Frederic Harrison's retort,[25] Arnold wrote that it was "scarcely
the least vicious, and in parts so amusing that I laughed till I cried."
Mr. Goldwin Smith described him as "a gentleman of a jaunty air, and on
good terms with the world." To the _Times_ he seemed "a sentimentalist
whose dainty taste requires something more flimsy than the strong sense
and sturdy morality of his fellow-Englishmen." One newspaper called him
"a high priest of the kid-glove persuasion"; another, "an elegant
Jeremiah"; and Mr. Lionel Tollemache, combining in one harmonious whole
the absurdities of all the other commentators, says: "When asked my
opinion of this quaint man of genius, I have described him as a _Hebrew
prophet in white kid gloves_."
The fact is that we are a serious people. The Middle Class, which he
singled out for attack, is quite pre-eminently serious. Philosophers and
critics--the _Spectator_ and the _Edinburgh_--had made seriousness a
religion. Editors, leader-writers, reviewers, the Press generally, were
steeped to their lips in seriousness. They could not understand, and
were greatly inclined to resent, the appearance of this bright, playful,
unconventional spirit, happy and brilliant himself, and loving the
happiness and brilliancy of the world; with not an ounce of pomposity in
his own nature, and with the most irreverent demeanour towards pomposity
in other people. "Our social Polyphemes," as Lord Beaconsfield said,
"have only one eye"; and they could not the least perceive that Arnold's
genius was like the genius of poetry as he himself described it--
Radiant, adorn'd outside; a hidden ground
Of thought and of austerity within.
In a letter to the _Pall Mall Gazette_ of July 21, 1866, he first
introduced his friend Arminius,[26] Baron Von Thunder-Ten-Tronckh, the
cultivated and enquiring Prussian who had come to England to study our
Politics, Education, Local Government, and social life. A series of
similar letters followed at irregular intervals during the years 1866,
1867, 1869, and 1870. And Arminius' drastic method of questioning and
arguing became the idoneous vehicle for Arnold's criticisms on such
topics as our Foreign Policy, Compulsory Education, the Press, and the
Deceased Wife's Sister. The letters were eventually collected in that
little-read but most fascinating book, _Friendship's Garland_, which was
published in 1871.[27] But before _Friendship's Garland_ came out,
Arnold, who had tested his powers in social criticism by these fugitive
pieces, addressed himself to a more serious and solid effort in the same
field. The essays which eventually formed the book called _Culture and
Anarchy_ began to appear in the _Cornhill Magazine_ for July, 1867, and
were continued in 1868. The book was published in 1869. We saw at the
outset that he himself said of his _Discourses in America_ that they, of
all his prose-writings, were the writings by which he would most wish to
be remembered. Many of his disciples would say that _Essays in
Criticism_ was his most important work in prose. Some people would give
the crown to _Literature and Dogma_. "It has been more in demand," the
author told us in 1883, "than any other of my prose-writings." Respect
is due to what a great master thought of his own work, and to what his
best-qualified disciples think of it. But after all we uphold the right
of private judgment, and the present writer is strongly of opinion that
_Culture and Anarchy_ is Arnold's most important work in prose. It was,
to borrow a phrase used by Mr. Gladstone in another connexion, not a
book, but an event. We must consider it in its proper setting of time
and circumstance.
The beginning of 1869 was a great moment in our political and social
history. Ever since the enthusiasm which surrounded the Reform Act of
1832 had faded away in disappointment and disillusion, the ardent
friends of freedom and progress had been crying out for a further
extension of the franchise. The next Reform Bill was to give the workmen
a vote; and a Parliament elected by workmen was to bring the Millennium.
The Act of 1867 gave the desired vote, and the workmen used it for the
first time at the General Election of 1868. At the beginning of 1869 the
new Parliament was just assembling, and it was possible to take stock of
it, to analyze its component parts, to form some estimate of its
capacity, some forecast of its intentions. It was a Liberal Parliament.
There was no mistake about that. Bishop Wilberforce wrote just after the
Election: "In a few weeks Gladstone will be in office, at the head of a
majority of something like a hundred, elected on the distinct issue of
'Gladstone and the Irish Church.'"
Certainly the Election had been fought and won on Irish
Disestablishment, but disestablishment was only part of a larger scheme.
Rather late in the day, the Liberal Party, urged thereto by a statesman
who had never set foot in Ireland, had taken into its head to "govern
Ireland according to Irish ideas," or what was understood by that taking
phrase. We were to disestablish and disendow the Irish Church, reform
the Irish system of land-tenure, and reconstruct the Irish Universities.
Robert Lowe, who was a conspicuous member of the new Cabinet, burst into
rather premature dithyrambics, crying, "The Liberal Ministry resolved to
knit the hearts of the Empire into one harmonious concord, and _knitted
they were accordingly_." And we, of the rank and file, believed this
claptrap; but to us it was not claptrap, for our whole hearts were in
the great enterprise of pacification in which we believed our leaders to
be engaged. But Ireland by no means exhausted our reforming zeal. We had
enough and to spare for many departments of the Constitution. We were
determined to give the workmen the protection of the Ballot, and to
compel them to educate their children. We meant to abolish Purchase in
the Army and Tests at the University; and some of us were beginning to
feel our way to more extensive changes still; to hanker after universal
suffrage, to dream of simultaneous disarmament, to anticipate the
downfall of monarchical institutions, and to listen with complacency to
attacks on the Civil List and Impeachments of the House of Brunswick. In
fine, Reformers were in a triumphant and sanguine mood. We were
constrained to admit that, as regards its personal composition, the new
House of Commons was a little Philistine--not so democratic, not so
redolent of Labour, as we had hoped. But we believed that we had the
promise of the future. We believed that by enfranchising the artisans we
had undertaken a long step towards the ideal perfection of the
Commonwealth. We believed that these new citizens, who had just proved
themselves worthy of their citizenship, would continue to support, with
increasing ardour and devotion, Liberal administrations and Liberal
measures. Above all, we believed that, as our recent achievements were
the direct developments of great principles asserted in the past, so
they would in turn develop into constitutional changes far more
momentous, and that in the fulfilment of those changes lay the only
real prospect of human happiness.
This is a fair statement of the mental temper in which young and
inexperienced Liberals found themselves in the year 1869.[28] And there
was much to encourage us in our complacency. Gladstone, to whom during
the rather dreary reign of exhausted Whiggery we had looked as to our
rising star--the one man who combined Religion and Poetry and Romance
with the love of Progress and the passion of Freedom--had told us that
"the great social forces were on our side," and that our opponents
"could not fight against the future." Philosophers, like Mill, had told
us that all the intelligence, all the science, all the mental courage of
the world were with us, and that Toryism was the creed of the
intellectually destitute. Morning after morning a vigorous Press sang
its loud hymn of triumph, and assured us that, even if for a moment our
chariot-wheels drave rather heavily, still we were going forth
conquering and to conquer, and that the future of Liberalism was to be
one long series of victories, uninterrupted till the crack of doom.
And then to us, thus comfortably entrenched in self-esteem, there
entered the figure, unknown to most, only half-known to any, of a new
and most disturbing critic. Here was a man whose very name breathed
Liberalism; for whom speculation had no fears; who had harassed the most
hoary conventions with obstinate questionings; who had accepted
Democracy as the evolution of natural law; who had poked delicious fun
at the most highly-placed impostures, the most solemn plausibilities. In
such a one we might surely have expected to find a friend, an ally, a
comforter, a fellow-worker; a preacher of the smooth things which we
loved to hear, an encourager of the day-dreams which we had learned from
_Locksley Hall_. Instead of all this we found a critic--so gracious that
we could not quarrel with him, so reasonable that we found it hard to
dispute with him; so absolutely free from pomposity that we could not
laugh at him, so genuinely and freshly witty that we could not help
laughing with him--but a critic still. He thought scorn of our pleasant
land, and gave no credence unto our word. He belittled our heroes; he
pooh-poohed our achievements; he cast doubt on our prophecies; he
caricatured our aspirations. He told us that we were the victims of a
profound delusion. He warned us that the great Democracy on which we
relied as our unchangeable foundation would give way under our feet. He
pointed out that Labour had no more reason to expect its salvation from
Liberalism than from Toryism. He insisted that all our political reform
was mere machinery; that the end and object of politics was Social
Reform; and that the promise of the future was for those who should help
us to be better, wiser, and happier; for those who concerned themselves
rather with the product of the machine than with the machine itself; who
were not satisfied by eternally taking it to pieces and putting it
together again, but who wanted to know what sort of stuff it was, when
perfected, to turn out. He suggested that "the present troubled state of
our social life" had at least something to do with "the thirty years'
blind worship of their idols by our Liberal friends," and that it threw
some doubt on "the sufficiency of their worship." "It is not," he said,
"fatal to our Liberal friends to labour for Free Trade, Extension of the
Suffrage, and Abolition of Church Rates, instead of graver social ends;
but it is fatal to them to be told by their flatterers, and to believe,
with our social condition what it is, that they have performed a great,
a heroic work, by occupying themselves exclusively, for the last thirty
years, with these Liberal nostrums."
And, while our new critic was thus disdainful of much that we held
sacred, of political machinery and logical government, and individual
liberty of speech and action, he recalled our attention to certain
objects of reverence which we, or at least some of us, had forgotten. He
insisted on the immense value of history and continuity in the political
life of a nation. He extolled (though the words were not his) the
"institutions which incorporate tradition and prolong the reign of the
dead." He affirmed that external beauty, stateliness, splendour,
gracious manners, were indispensable elements of civilization, and that
these were the contributions which Aristocracy made to the welfare of
the State. He reminded us that the true greatness of a nation was to be
found in its culture, its ideals, its sentiment for beauty, its
performances in the intellectual and moral spheres--not in its supply of
coal, its volume of trade, its accumulated capital, or its
multiplication of railways. Above all--and this was to some of our Party
the unkindest cut--he asserted for Religion the chief place among the
elements of national well-being. We were just then living at the fag-end
of an anti-religious time. The critical, negative, and utilitarian
spirit which had seized on Oxford after the apparent defeat and collapse
of Newman's movement had profoundly affected the Liberal Party. It was
an essential characteristic of the political Liberals to pour scorn on
that "retrograding transcendentalism" which was "the hardheads' nickname
for the Anglo-Catholic Symphony."[29] The fact that Gladstone was so
saturated with the spirit of that symphony was a cause of mistrust which
his genius and courage could barely overcome; and, even when it was
overcome, a good many of his Party followed him as reluctantly and as
mockingly as Sancho Panza followed Don Quixote. The only heaven of which
the political Liberal dreamed was what Arnold called "the glorified and
unending tea-meeting of popular Protestantism." And the portion of the
Party which regarded itself as the intellectual wing, seemed to have
reverted to the temper described by Bishop Butler; "taking for granted
that Christianity is not so much as a subject of enquiry, but that it is
now at length discovered to be fictitious"; and habitually talking as if
"this were an agreed point among all people of discernment." Great was
the vexation of the "old Liberal hacks" who had been repeating these
dismal shibboleths, and ignoring or denying the greatest force in human
life, to find in this new teacher of liberal ideas a convinced and
persistent opponent. He affirmed that Religion was the best, the
sweetest, and the strongest thing in the world; he insisted that without
it there could be no perfect culture, no complete civilization; he
showed a reverent admiration for the historical character and teaching
of Jesus Christ; he urged the example of His "mildness and sweet
reasonableness." He taught that the best way of extending Christ's
kingdom on earth was by sweetening the character and brightening the
lives of the men and women whose nature He shared.
It belongs to another part of this work to enquire what he meant by
Religion and Christianity, and how far his interpretations accorded
with, or how far they departed from, the traditional creed of
Christendom. But enough, perhaps, has been said to explain why the
appearance of _Culture and Anarchy_ so profoundly disquieted the "old
Liberal hacks" and the popular teachers of irreligion. One of these
called Christianity "that awful plague which has destroyed two
civilizations and but barely failed to slay such promise of good as is
now struggling to live amongst men." Of that teacher, and of others like
him, Arnold wrote in later years: "If the matter were not so serious one
could hardly help smiling at the chagrin and manifest perplexity of such
of one's friends as happen to be philosophical radicals and secularists,
at having to reckon with religion again when they thought its day was
quite gone by, and that they need not study it any more or take account
of it any more; that it was passing out, and a kind of new gospel, half
Bentham, half Cobden, in which they were themselves particularly strong,
was coming in. And perhaps there is no one who more deserves to be
compassionated than an elderly or middle-aged man of this kind, such as
several of their Parliamentary spokesmen and representatives are. For
perhaps the younger men of the Party may take heart of grace, and
acquaint themselves a little with religion, now that they see its day is
by no means over. But, for the older ones, their mental habits are
formed, and it is almost too late for them to begin such new studies.
However, a wave of religious reaction _is_ evidently passing over
Europe, due very much to our revolutionary and philosophical friends
having insisted upon it that religion was gone by and unnecessary, when
it was neither the one nor the other."
[Illustration: 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 assumed that Culture
meant "a smattering of Greek and Latin," and then addresses itself to
the task of finding a better definition. "I propose now to try and
enquire, in the simple unsystematic way which best suits both my taste
and my powers, what Culture really is, what good it can do, what is our
own special need of it; and I shall seek to find some plain grounds on
which a faith in Culture--both my own faith in it and the faith of
others--may rest securely."
The First Chapter bears the memorable heading--"Sweetness and Light"; in
reference to which Lord Salisbury so happily said that, when he
conferred the degree of D.C.L. on Arnold, he ought to have addressed him
as "_Vir dulcissime et lucidissime_." In this chapter Arnold lays it
down that Culture, as he understands the word, is, in part, "a desire
after the things of the mind, simply for their own sakes, and for the
pleasure of seeing them as they are." But he goes on to say that "there
is of Culture another view, in which not solely the scientific passion,
the sheer desire to see things as they are, natural and proper in an
intelligent being, appears as the ground of it. There is a view in which
all the love of our neighbour, the impulses towards action, help, and
beneficence, the desire for removing human error, clearing human
confusion, and diminishing human misery, the noble aspiration to leave
the world better and happier than we found it--motives eminently such as
are called social--come in as part of the grounds of Culture, and the
main and pre-eminent part. Culture is then properly described not as
having its origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in the love of
perfection; it is a _study of perfection_. It moves by the force, not
merely or primarily of the scientific passion for pure knowledge, but
also of the moral and social passion for doing good.... There is no
better motto which it can have than these words of Bishop Wilson: "To
make reason and the will of God prevail." Thus the true disciple of
Culture will not be content with merely "learning the truth for his own
personal satisfaction"; but will try to make it _prevail_; and in this
endeavour Religion plays a commanding part. It is "the greatest and most
important of the efforts by which the human race has manifested its
impulse to perfect itself"; it is "the voice of the deepest human
experience." It teaches that "The Kingdom of God is within you," and
that internal perfection must first be sought; but then it goes on, hand
in hand with Culture, to spread perfection in widest commonalty.
"Perfection is not possible, while the individual remains isolated." "To
promote the Kingdom of God is to increase and hasten one's own
happiness." Finally, Perfection as Culture conceives it, is a harmonious
expansion of _all_ the powers which make the beauty and worth of human
nature: "and here," says Arnold, "Culture goes beyond Religion, as
Religion is generally conceived by us." Stress must be laid upon those
last words; for Religion, according to its full and catholic ideal, is
the perfection and consecration of man's whole nature, intellectual and
physical, as well as moral and spiritual. All that is lovely, splendid,
moving, heroic, even enjoyable, in human life--all health and vigour and
beauty and cleverness and charm--all nature and all art, all science and
all literature--are among the good and perfect gifts which come down
from the Father of Lights. But this is just the conception of Religion
which Puritanism never grasped--nay, rather which Puritanism definitely
rejected." And here probably is the origin of that quarrel with
Puritanism, at least in its more superficial and obvious aspects, which
so coloured and sometimes barbed Arnold's meditations on Religion. "As I
have said with regard to wealth: Let us look at the life of those who
live in and for it--so I say with regard to the religious organizations.
Look at the life imaged in such a newspaper as the _Nonconformist_--a
life of jealousy of the Establishment, disputes, tea-meetings, openings
of chapels, sermons; and then think of it as an ideal of human life
completing itself on all sides, and aspiring with all its organs after
sweetness, light, and perfection!"
So much then for his definition of Culture; and we must admit that "the
old Liberal hacks," the speakers on Liberal platforms, and the writers
in Liberal papers, were not without excuse when they failed so utterly
to divine what the new Teacher meant by harping on a word which Bacon
and Pope had used in so different a sense.
Chapter II is headed "Doing as One Likes." And here it was that our new
critic came most sharply into conflict with our cherished beliefs. We
believed in the liberty which Milton loved, "to know, to utter, and to
argue freely, according to conscience," and to frame our action by sole
reference to our conviction. We believed that of such liberty there was
only one endurable limit, and that was the condition that no man should
so use his own liberty as to lessen his brother's--and the liberty thus
conceived we regarded as the supreme boon of human life, for which no
other could conceivably be taken in exchange. And now came the new
Teacher of Liberalism with a doctrine which, while it made us angry,
also set us thinking. "Our familiar praise of the British Constitution
under which we live, is that it is a system of checks--a system which
stops and paralyzes any power in interfering with the free action of
individuals.... As Feudalism, which with its ideas and habits of
subordination was for many centuries behind the British Constitution,
dies out, and we are left with nothing but our system of checks, and
our notion of its being the great right and happiness of an Englishman
to do as far as possible what he likes, we are in danger of drifting
towards Anarchy." Aristocracy, according to Arnold, who strangely
mingled admiration of it with contempt, had been doing what it liked
from time immemorial. It had enjoyed all the good things of life--great
station, great wealth, great power--with a comfortable assurance that
they belonged to it by divine right. It had governed England with credit
to itself and benefit to the country. As Lord Beaconsfield said, it was
only because a Whig Minister wished to curry favour with the populace,
that an Earl who had committed a murder was hanged.
The Middle Class also, had, at any rate, since the Reform Act of 1832,
"done what it liked," in a style not quite so grand but excessively
comfortable and self-satisfied. It had carried some great reforms on
which it had set its heart. It had established, enormously to its
profit, Free Trade, and it had accumulated vast wealth. Its maxim had
been--"Every man for himself in business, every man for himself in
religion,"--and the devil take the hindmost.
But _now_, said Arnold, _is the judgment of this world_. The Aristocracy
and the Middle Class had come to an end of their reign. A "tide of
secret dissatisfaction had mined the ground under the self-confident
Liberalism of the last thirty years (1839-1869) and had prepared the way
for its sudden collapse and supersession." So far, the young Liberals
and Radicals of the day did not disagree. They liked this doctrine, and
had preached it; but from this point they and their new Teacher parted
company. The working-man was now enfranchised; and of the
newly-enfranchised working-man, or at least of some of the most
conspicuous representatives of his class, Arnold had a curious dread.
"His apparition is somewhat embarrassing; because, while the
Aristocratic and Middle Classes have long been doing as they like with
great vigour, he has been too undeveloped and too submissive hitherto to
join in the game; and now, when he does come, he comes in immense
numbers, and is rather raw and rough."
The dread of the working-men, and the apprehension of the bad use which
they might make of their new power, can be traced to certain incidents
which happened just before they were admitted to the Franchise and which
perhaps precipitated their admission. In June, 1866, the Reform Bill,
for which Lord Russell and Mr. Gladstone were responsible, was defeated
in the House of Commons, and the Tories came into office. The defeated
Bill would have enfranchised the upper class of artisans, and its
rejection led to considerable riots, in which certain leaders of the
working-men played conspicuous parts. The mob carried all before it, and
the railings of Hyde Park were broken. The Tory Government behaved with
the most incredible feebleness. The Home Secretary shed tears. The whole
business, half scandalous and half ridiculous, furnished Arnold with an
illustration for his sermon on "Doing What One Likes." Reviewing, three
years after their occurrence, the events of July, 1866, he wrote thus:
"Everyone remembers the virtuous Alderman-Colonel or Colonel-Alderman,
who had to lead his militia through the London streets; how the
bystanders gathered to see him pass; how the London roughs, asserting an
Englishman's best and most blissful right of doing what he likes, robbed
and beat the bystanders; and how the blameless warrior-magistrate
refused to let his troops interfere. 'The crowd,' he touchingly said
afterwards, 'was mostly composed of fine, healthy, strong men, bent on
mischief; if he had allowed his soldiers to interfere, they might have
been overpowered, their rifles taken from them and used against them by
the mob; a riot, in fact, might have ensued, and been attended with
bloodshed, compared with which the assaults and loss of property that
actually occurred would have been as nothing.' Honest and affecting
testimony of the English Middle Class to its own inadequacy for the
authoritative part which one's convictions would sometimes incline one
to assign to it! 'Who are we?' they say by the voice of their
Alderman-Colonel, 'that we should not be overpowered if we attempt to
cope with social anarchy, our rifles taken from us and used against us
by the mob, and we, perhaps, robbed and beaten ourselves? Or what light
have we, beyond a freeborn Englishman's impulse to do as he likes, which
would justify us in preventing, at the cost of bloodshed, other freeborn
Englishmen from doing as they like, and robbing and beating as much as
they please?' And again, 'the Rough is just asserting his personal
liberty a little, going where he likes, assembling where he likes,
bawling as he likes, hustling as he likes.... He sees the rich, the
aristocratic class, in occupation of the executive government; and so,
if he is stopped from making Hyde Park a bear-garden or the streets
impassable, he cries out that he is being butchered by the
aristocracy.'"
Now, in spite of all this banter and sarcasm, these passages express a
real dread which, at the time when Household Suffrage was claimed and
conceded, really possessed Arnold's mind. He came with the lapse of
years to see that it was illusory, and that the working-classes of
England are as steady, as law-abiding, as inaccessible to ideas, as
little in danger of being hurried into revolutionary courses, as
unwilling to jeopardize their national interests and their stake in the
country, as the Aristocracy and the Middle Class. But at the period
which we are considering, when the dread of popular violence had really
laid hold of him, it is interesting to mark the direction in which he
looked for social salvation. He did not turn to our traditional
institutions; to the Church or the Throne or the House of Lords: to a
military despotism, or an established religion, or a governing
Aristocracy: certainly not to the Middle Class with its wealth and
industry--least of all to the Populace, with its "bright powers of
sympathy." In an age which made an idol of individual action, and warred
against all collectivism as tyranny, he looked for salvation to the
State. But the State, if it was to fulfil its high function, must be a
State in which every man felt that he had a place and a share, and the
authority of which he could accept without loss of self-respect. "If
ever," Arnold said in 1866, "there comes a more equal state of society
in England, the power of the State for repression will be a thousand
times stronger." He was for widening the province of the State, and
strengthening its hands, and "stablishing it on behalf of whatever
great changes are needed, just as much as on behalf of order." And,
forasmuch as the State, in its ideal, was "the organ of our collective
best self," our first duty was to cultivate, each man for himself, what
in himself was best--in short, Perfection. "We find no basis for a firm
State-power in our ordinary selves; culture suggests one to us in our
_best self_." And so we come back to the governing idea of the book
before us, that Culture is the foe of Anarchy.
In the Third Chapter--"Barbarians, Philistines, Populace"--he divided
English Society into three main classes, to which he gave three
well-remembered nicknames. The aristocracy he named (not very happily,
seeing that he so greatly admired their fine manners) the Barbarians;
the Middle Class he had already named the Philistines; and to the great
mass which lies below the Middle Class he gave the name of "Populace."
The name of "Philistine" in its application to the great Middle Class
dates from the Lecture on Heine delivered from the Chair of Poetry at
Oxford in 1863. And it seems to have supplied a want in our system of
nomenclature, for it struck, and it has remained, at least as a name for
a type of mind, if not exactly as a name for a social class.
When we originally encounter the word in the Lecture[30] on Heine,
Arnold is speaking of Heine's life-long battle--with what? With
Philistinism. "_Philistinism!_ We have not the expression in English.
Perhaps we have not the word, because we have so much of the thing. At
Soli, I imagine, they did not talk of solecisms; and here, at the very
headquarters of Goliath, nobody talks of Philistinism. The French have
adopted the term _épicier_ (grocer) to designate the sort of being whom
the Germans designate by the term Philistine; but the French
term--besides that it casts a slur upon a respectable class, composed of
living and susceptible members, while the original Philistines are dead
and buried long ago--is really, I think, in itself much less apt and
expressive than the German term. Efforts have been made to obtain in
English some term equivalent to _Philister_ or _épicier_; Mr. Carlyle
has made several such efforts: "Respectability with its thousand gigs,"
he says; well, the occupant of every one of these gigs is, Mr. Carlyle
means, a Philistine. However, the word _respectable_ is far too valuable
a word to be thus perverted from its proper meaning; if the English are
ever to have a word for the thing we are speaking of--and so prodigious
are the changes which the modern spirit is introducing, that even we
English shall perhaps one day come to want such a word--I think we had
much better take the word _Philistine_ itself.
"_Philistine_ must have originally meant, in the mind of those who
invented the nickname, a sturdy, dogged, unenlightened opponent of the
Chosen People, of the Children of Light. The party of change, the
would-be remodellers of the old traditional European order, the invokers
of reason against custom, the representatives of the modern spirit in
every sphere where it is applicable, regarded themselves, with the
robust self-confidence natural to reformers, as a chosen people, as
children of the light. They regarded their adversaries as humdrum
people, slaves to routine, enemies to light, stupid and oppressive, but
at the same time very strong.... Philistia has come to be thought by us
the true Land of Promise, and it is anything but that; the born lover of
ideas, the born hater of commonplaces, must feel in this country that
the sky over his head is of brass and iron. The enthusiast for the idea,
for reason, values reason, the idea, in and for themselves; he values
them, irrespectively of the practical conveniences which their triumphs
may obtain for him, and the man who regards the profession of these
practical conveniences as something sufficient in itself which
compensates for the absence or surrender of the idea, of reason, is, in
his eyes, a Philistine."
In _Culture and Anarchy_, Arnold thus elaborates the term "Philistine,"
and justifies, not without some misgiving, its exclusive appropriation
to the Middle Class. "Philistine gives the notion of something
particularly stiffnecked and perverse in the resistance to light and its
children, and therein it specially suits our Middle Class, who not only
do not pursue Sweetness and Light, but who even prefer to them that sort
of machinery of business, chapels, tea-meetings, and addresses from Mr.
Murphy,[31] which make up the dismal and illiberal life on which I have
so often touched." The force of Philistinism in English life and society
is the force which, from first to last, he set himself most steadily to
fight, and, if possible, transform. That the effort was arduous, and
even perilous, he was fully aware. He must, he said, pursue his object
through literature, "freer perhaps in that sphere than I could be in any
other, but with the risk always before me, if I cannot charm the wild
beast of Philistinism while I am trying to convert him, of being torn in
pieces by him, and, even if I succeed to the utmost and convert him, of
dying in a ditch or a workhouse at the end of it all."
The nickname of "Barbarians" for the Aristocracy he justified on the
ground that, like the Barbarians of history who reinvigorated and
renewed our worn-out Europe, they had eminent merits, among which were
staunch individualism and a passion for doing what one likes; a love of
field sports; vigour, good looks, fine complexions, care for the body
and all manly exercises; distinguished bearing, high spirit, and
self-confidence--an admirable collection of attributes indeed, but
marred by insufficiency of light, and "needing, for ideal perfection, a
shade more soul." When we have done with the Barbarians at the top of
the social edifice, and the Middle Class half way up, we come to the
Working Class; and of that class the higher portion "looks forward to
the happy day when it will sit on thrones with commercial Members of
Parliament and other Middle Class potentates; and this portion is
naturally akin to the Philistinism just above it. But below this there
is that vast portion of the Working Class which, raw and undeveloped,
has long lain half hidden amidst its poverty and squalor, and is now
issuing from its hiding-place to assert an Englishman's heaven-born
right of doing as he likes. To this vast residuum we give the name of
'Populace.'" In thus dividing the nation, he is careful to point out
that in each class we may from time to time find "aliens"--men free from
the prejudices, the faults, the temptations of the class in which they
were born; elect souls who, unhindered by their antecedents, share the
higher life of intellectual and moral aspiration.
But, after making this exception, he traces in all three classes the
presence and working of the same besetting sin. All alike, by a dogged
persistence in doing as they like, have come to ignore the existence of
Authority or Right Reason; and this irrecognition of what ought to be
the rule of life operates not only in the political sphere, but also,
and conspicuously, in the spheres of morals, taste, society, and
literature. Self-satisfaction blinds all classes. All alike believe
themselves infallible, and there is no sovereign organ of opinion to set
them right. The fundamental ground of our erroneous habits, and our
unwillingness to be corrected, is "our preference of doing to thinking,"
The mention of this preference leads us to the subject of Chapter IV,
"Hebraism and Hellenism."
[Illustration: Matthew Arnold, 1869
_Photo Hills & Saunders_]
Of all the phrases which Arnold either created or popularized, there is
none more closely associated with his memory than this famous
conjunction of Hebraism and Hellenism; and in this connexion, it is not
out of place to note his abiding interest in, and affection for, the
House of Israel. The present writer once delivered a rather long and
elaborate lecture on Arnold's genius and writings; and next morning a
daily paper gave this masterpiece of condensed and tactful reporting:
"The lecturer stated that Mr. Arnold was of Jewish extraction, and
proceeded to read passages from his works." It might have been more
truly said that the lecturer suggested, as interesting to those who
speculate in race and pedigree, the question whether Arnold's remote
ancestors had belonged to the Ancient Race, and had emigrated from
Germany to Lowestoft, where they dwelt for several generations. There is
certainly no proof that so it was; and genealogical researches would in
any case be out of keeping with the scope of this book. It is enough to
note the fact of his affectionate and grateful feeling towards the
Jewish race, and this can best be done in his own words. The present
Lord Rothschild, formerly Sir Nathaniel de Rothschild, is the first
adherent of the Jewish faith who ever was admitted to the House of
Lords, though of course there have been other Peers of Jewish descent.
When Mr. Gladstone created this Jewish peerage,[32] Arnold wrote as
follows to an admirable lady whose name often appears in his published
Letters--
"I have received so much kindness from your family, and I have so
sincere a regard for yourself, that I should in any case have been
tempted to send you a word of congratulation on Sir Nathaniel's
peerage; but I really feel also proud and happy for the British public
to have, by this peerage, signally marked the abandonment of its old
policy of exclusion, the final and total abandonment of it. What have we
not learned and gained from the people whom we have been excluding all
these years! And how every one of us will see and say this in the
future!"
What, in his view, we had "learned and gained" from the Jewish people,
is well expressed in the preface to _Culture and Anarchy_.
"To walk staunchly by the best light one has, to be strict and sincere
with oneself, not to be of the number of those who say and do not, to be
in earnest--this is the discipline by which alone man is enabled to
rescue his life from thraldom to the passing moment and to his bodily
senses, to ennoble it, and to make it eternal. And this discipline has
been nowhere so effectively taught as in the School of Hebraism. The
intense and convinced energy with which the Hebrew, both of the Old and
the New Testament, threw himself upon his ideal of righteousness, and
which inspired the incomparable definition of the great Christian
virtue, Faith--_the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of
things not seen_--this energy of devotion to its ideal has belonged to
Hebraism alone. As our idea of perfection widens beyond the narrow
limits to which the over-rigour of Hebraising has tended to confine it,
we shall yet come again to Hebraism for that devout energy in embracing
our ideal, which alone can give to man the happiness of doing what he
knows. "If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them!"--the last
word for human infirmity will always be that. For this word, reiterated
with a power now sublime, now affecting, but always admirable, our race
will, as long as the world lasts, return to Hebraism."
Having thus described the function of Hebraism, Arnold goes on to define
Hellenism as "the intelligence driving at those ideas which are, after
all, the basis of right practice, the ardent sense for all the new and
changing combinations of them which man's development brings with it,
the indomitable impulse to know and adjust them perfectly." These two
great forces divide the empire of the world between them; and we call
them Hebraism and Hellenism after the two races of men who have most
signally illustrated them. "Hebraism and Hellenism--between these two
points of influence moves our world." The idea of Hellenism is to see
things as they are: the idea of Hebraism is conduct and obedience. Our
aim should be to combine the merits of both ideas, and be "evenly and
happily balanced between them." Enlarging on this text, he traces the
working of the two principles, which ought not to be rivals but have
been made such by the perverseness of men, philosophy and history; and
then, turning to our own day and its doings, he says that Puritanism,
which originally was a reaction of the conscience and moral sense
against the indifference and lax conduct of the Renascence, has gone
counter, during the last two centuries, to the main stream of human
advance; has hindered men from trying to see things as they really are,
and has made strictness of conduct the great aim of human life. "It made
the secondary the principal at the wrong moment, and the principal it at
the wrong moment treated as secondary." Hence have arisen all sorts of
confusion and inefficiency. Everywhere we see the signs of anarchy, and
the need for some sound order and authority. "This we can only get by
going back upon the actual instincts and forces which rule our life,
seeing them as they really are, connecting them with other instincts and
forces, and enlarging our whole view and rule of life."
From this short chapter, he passes on to Chapter V, which he heads:
"_Porro unum est necessarium_"; and here he pursues his controversy with
modern Puritanism, which imagines that it has, in its special
conception of God and religion, the _unum necessarium_, which can
dispense with Sweetness and Light, self-culture and self-discipline.
"The Puritan's great danger is that he imagines himself in possession of
a rule telling him the _unum necessarium_, or one thing needful, and
that he then remains satisfied with a very crude conception of what this
rule really is and what it tells him, thinks he has now knowledge and
henceforth needs only to act, and, in this dangerous state of assurance
and self-satisfaction, proceeds to give full swing to a number of the
instincts of his ordinary self.... What he wants is a larger conception
of human nature, showing him the number of other points at which his
nature must come to its best, besides the points which he himself knows
and thinks of. There is no _unum necessarium_, or one thing needful,
which can free human nature from the obligation of trying to come to its
best at all these points. Instead of our 'one thing needful' justifying
in us vulgarity, hideousness, ignorance, violence--our vulgarity,
hideousness, ignorance, violence are really so many touchstones which
try our one thing needful, and which prove that in the state, at any
rate, in which we ourselves have it, it is not all we want. And, as the
force which encourages us to stand staunch and fast by the rule and
ground we have is Hebraism, so the force which encourages us to go back
upon this rule, and to try the very ground on which we appear to stand,
is Hellenism--a term for giving our consciousness free play, and
enlarging its range."
In his Sixth Chapter--headed "Our Liberal Practitioners"--he applies his
general doctrine to persons and performances of the year 1869. The
Liberal Party was just then busy disestablishing and disendowing the
Irish Church. He was in favour of Established Churches, and of
Concurrent Endowment. He realized the absurdity of the Irish Church as
it then stood; but, true to his critical character, he rebuked the
"Liberal Practitioners" for the spirit in which they were
disestablishing and disendowing it. They did not approach the subject in
the spirit of Hellenism: they did not appeal to Right Reason: they did
not attempt to see the problem of religious establishment as it really
was. But they Hebraized about it--that is, they took an uncritical
interpretation of biblical words as their absolute rule of conduct. "It
may," he said, "be all very well for born Hebraizers, like Mr. Spurgeon,
to Hebraize; but for Liberal statesmen to Hebraize is surely unsafe, and
to see poor old Liberal hacks Hebraizing, whose real self belongs to a
kind of negative Hellenism--a state of moral indifference, without
intellectual ardour--is even painful." In the same manner he dealt with
the movement to abolish Primogeniture, strongly urged by John Bright;
the movement to legalize marriage with a wife's sister--"the craving for
forbidden fruit" joined with "the craving for legality"; and the
doctrine, then supposed to be incontrovertible, of Free Trade. In all
these cases, he proposed to "Hellenize a little," to "turn the free
stream of our thought" on the Liberal policy of the moment; and to "see
how this is related to the intelligible law of human life, and to
national well-being and happiness."
And so we were brought to the conclusion of the whole matter. The
stock-beliefs and stock-performances of Liberalism were exhausted,
uninteresting, in some grave respects mischievous. Seekers after truth,
disciples of culture, men bent on trying to see things as they really
are, should lend no hand to these labours of the Philistines. Their
right course was to stand absolutely aloof from the political work which
was going on round them; and to pursue, with undeviating consistency,
"increased sweetness, increased light, increased life, increased
sympathy."
It is interesting to recall that Charles Kingsley praised _Culture and
Anarchy_ in a letter which greatly pleased Arnold, as showing "the
generous and affectionate side" of Kingsley's disposition. And this is
his answer to Kingsley's praise: "Of my reception by the general public
I have, perhaps, no cause to boast; but from the men who lead in
literature, from men like you, I have met with nothing but kindness and
generosity. The being thrown so much for the last twenty years with
Dissenters, and the observing their great strength and their great
impenetrability--how they seemed to think that in their 'gospel'--a mere
caricature, in truth, of the real Gospel--they had a secret which
enabled them to judge all literature and all art and to keep aloof from
modern ideas--set me on thinking how they might be got at, and on the
use of this parallel of Hebraism and Hellenism. If I was to think only
of the Dissenters, or if I were in your position, I should press
incessantly for more Hellenism; but, as it is, seeing the tendency of
our _young_ poetical litterateur (Swinburne), and, on the other hand,
seeing much of Huxley (whom I thoroughly liked and admire, but find very
disposed to be tyrannical and unjust), I lean towards Hebraism, and try
to prevent the balance from on this side flying up out of sight." Dean
Church, also, in writing about the book, expressed "his sense of the
importance of the distinction between Hellenism and Hebraism." "This,"
said Arnold, "showed his width of mind"; for "it is a distinction on
which more and more will turn, and on dealing wisely with it everything
depends."
I have dwelt at this rather disproportionate length on the structure and
teaching of _Culture and Anarchy_, partly because it was to men who were
young in 1869 a landmark in their mental life, and partly because it
gives the whole body of Arnold's political and social teaching. He
pursued this line of thought for twenty years; _Friendship's Garland_,
with its inimitable fun, appeared in 1871, and was followed by a long
series of essays and lectures; but the germ of whatever he subsequently
wrote is to be found in _Culture and Anarchy_. And from that memorable
book what did we learn?
To answer first by negatives, we did not learn to undervalue personal
liberty, or to stand aloof from the practical work of citizenship, or to
despise Parliamentary effort and its bearing on the better life of
England. To these lessons of a fascinating teacher we closed our ears,
charmed he never so wisely. To answer affirmatively, we learned that our
first object must be to attain our own best self, and that only so could
we hope to help others. We learned to discard prepossessions, and try to
see things as they really are. We learned that the Liberty which we
worshipped must be conditioned by Authority--an authority not wielded
by rank or bureaucracy, but by the State acting as a whole through its
accredited representatives, and depending for its existence on the
co-operation of the entire nation. In self-government so founded,
however stringently it might exercise its power, there was no
degradation for the governed, because, in the wider sense, they were
also governors. In brief, Arnold's idea of the State was exactly that
which in later years one of his disciples--Henry Scott
Holland--conceived, when, defending Christian Socialism against the
reproach of "grandmotherly legislation," he said that, in a
well-governed commonwealth, "every man was his own grandmother." But,
while Authority belongs to the State as a whole, it must be exercised
through the agency of officialdom--through the action of officers or
governors designated for the special functions. And here he taught us
that we must not, as Bishop Westcott said, "trust to an uncultivated
notion of duty for an improvised solution of unforeseen difficulties";
must not, like the Alderman-Colonel, "sit in the hall of judgment or
march at the head of men of war, without some knowledge how to perform
judgment and how to direct men of war."
Then again we learned from him to value machinery, not for itself, but
for what it could produce. He taught us that all political
reconstruction was at the best mere improvement of machinery; that
political reform was related to social reform as the means to the end:
and that the end was the perfection of the race in all its physical,
mental, and moral attributes.
Above all we learned--and perhaps it was the most important of our
lessons--to think little of material boons--vulgar wealth and stolid
comfort and ignoble ease; to set our affections on the joys of soul and
spirit; and to recognize in the practice of religion the highest
development and most satisfying use of the powers which belong to man.
[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 God. 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 passage from _Middlemarch_ which stands at
the head of this chapter seems in a way to express his attitude 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 passionate 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 passionate, 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 illustration
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 passions
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," "coarseness 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 passion, inconceivable attacks on his enemies, still more
inconceivable attacks on his friends, want of generosity, sensuality,
incessant mocking."
[Illustration: 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 pronounced "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 Shelley,
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
Shelley," 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 Shelley's private
life.' ... Godwin's house of sordid horror, and Godwin preaching and
holding the hat, and the green-spectacled Mrs. Godwin, and Hogg the
faithful friend, and Hunt the Horace of this precious world!"