[51] I have been trying to show that culture is, or ought to be, the
study and pursuit of perfection; and that of perfection as pursued by
culture, beauty and intelligence, or, in other words, sweetness and
light, are the main characters. But hitherto I have been insisting
chiefly on beauty, or sweetness, as a character of perfection. To
complete rightly my design, it evidently remains to speak also of
intelligence, or light, as a character of perfection. First,
however, I ought perhaps to notice that, both here and on the other
side of the Atlantic, all sorts of objections are raised against the
"religion of culture," as the objectors mockingly call it, which I am
supposed to be promulgating. It is said to be a religion proposing
parmaceti, or some scented salve or other, as a cure for human
miseries; a religion breathing a spirit of cultivated inaction,
making its believer refuse to lend a hand at uprooting the definite
evils on all sides of us, and filling him with antipathy against the
reforms and reformers which try to [52] extirpate them. In general,
it is summed up as being not practical, or,--as some critics more
familiarly put it,--all moonshine. That Alcibiades, the editor of
the Morning Star, taunts me, as its promulgator, with living out of
the world and knowing nothing of life and men. That great austere
toiler, the editor of the Daily Telegraph, upbraids me,--but kindly,
and more in sorrow than in anger,--for trifling with aesthetics and
poetical fancies, while he himself, in that arsenal of his in Fleet
Street, is bearing the burden and heat of the day. An intelligent
American newspaper, the Nation, says that it is very easy to sit in
one's study and find fault with the course of modern society, but the
thing is to propose practical improvements for it. While, finally,
Mr. Frederic Harrison, in a very good-tempered and witty satire,
which makes me quite understand his having apparently achieved such a
conquest of my young Prussian friend, Arminius, at last gets moved to
an almost stern moral impatience, to behold, as he says, "Death, sin,
cruelty stalk among us, filling their maws with innocence and youth,"
and me, in the midst of the general tribulation, handing out my
pouncet-box.
[53] It is impossible that all these remonstrances and reproofs
should not affect me, and I shall try my very best, in completing my
design and in speaking of light as one of the characters of
perfection, and of culture as giving us light, to profit by the
objections I have heard and read, and to drive at practice as much as
I can, by showing the communications and passages into practical life
from the doctrine which I am inculcating.
It is said that a man with my theories of sweetness and light is full
of antipathy against the rougher or coarser movements going on around
him, that he will not lend a hand to the humble operation of
uprooting evil by their means, and that therefore the believers in
action grow impatient with them. But what if rough and coarse
action, ill-calculated action, action with insufficient light, is,
and has for a long time been, our bane? What if our urgent want now
is, not to act at any price, but rather to lay in a stock of light
for our difficulties? In that case, to refuse to lend a hand to the
rougher and coarser movements going on round us, to make the primary
need, both for oneself and others, to consist in enlightening
ourselves and qualifying ourselves [54] to act less at random, is
surely the best, and in real truth the most practical line, our
endeavours can take. So that if I can show what my opponents call
rough or coarse action, but what I would rather call random and ill-
regulated action,--action with insufficient light, action pursued
because we like to be doing something and doing it as we please, and
do not like the trouble of thinking, and the severe constraint of any
kind of rule,--if I can show this to be, at the present moment, a
practical mischief and danger to us, then I have found a practical
use for light in correcting this state of things, and have only to
exemplify how, in cases which fall under everybody's observation, it
may deal with it.
When I began to speak of culture, I insisted on our bondage to
machinery, on our proneness to value machinery as an end in itself,
without looking beyond it to the end for which alone, in truth, it is
valuable. Freedom, I said, was one of those things which we thus
worshipped in itself, without enough regarding the ends for which
freedom is to be desired. In our common notions and talk about
freedom, we eminently show our idolatry of machinery. Our prevalent
notion is,--and I quoted a [55] number of instances to prove it,--
that it is a most happy and important thing for a man merely to be
able to do as he likes. On what he is to do when he is thus free to
do as he likes, we do not lay so much stress. Our familiar praise of
the British Constitution under which we live, is that it is a system
of checks,--a system which stops and paralyses any power in
interfering with the free action of individuals. To this effect Mr.
Bright, who loves to walk in the old ways of the Constitution, said
forcibly in one of his great speeches, what many other people are
every day saying less forcibly, that the central idea of English life
and politics is the assertion of personal liberty. Evidently this is
so; but evidently, also, as feudalism, which with its ideas and
habits of subordination was for many centuries silently 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. We have not the notion,
so familiar on the Continent and to antiquity, of the State--the
nation, in its collective [56] and corporate character, entrusted
with stringent powers for the general advantage, and controlling
individual wills in the name of an interest wider than that of
individuals. We say, what is very true, that this notion is often
made instrumental to tyranny; we say that a State is in reality made
up of the individuals who compose it, and that every individual is
the best judge of his own interests. Our leading class is an
aristocracy, and no aristocracy likes the notion of a State-authority
greater than itself, with a stringent administrative machinery
superseding the decorative inutilities of lord-lieutenancy, deputy-
lieutenancy, and the posse comitatûs,+ which are all in its own
hands. Our middle-class, the great representative of trade and
Dissent, with its maxims of every man for himself in business, every
man for himself in religion, dreads a powerful administration which
might somehow interfere with it; and besides, it has its own
decorative inutilities of vestrymanship and guardianship, which are
to this class what lord-lieutenancy and the county magistracy are to
the aristocratic class, and a stringent administration might either
take these functions out of its hands, [57] or prevent its exercising
them in its own comfortable, independent manner, as at present.
Then as to our working-class. This class, pressed constantly by the
hard daily compulsion of material wants, is naturally the very centre
and stronghold of our national idea, that it is man's ideal right and
felicity to do as he likes. I think I have somewhere related how
Monsieur Michelet said to me of the people of France, that it was "a
nation of barbarians civilised by the conscription." He meant that
through their military service the idea of public duty and of
discipline was brought to the mind of these masses, in other respects
so raw and uncultivated. Our masses are quite as raw and
uncultivated as the French; and, so far from their having the idea of
public duty and of discipline, superior to the individual's self-
will, brought to their mind by a universal obligation of military
service, such as that of the conscription,--so far from their having
this, the very idea of a conscription is so at variance with our
English notion of the prime right and blessedness of doing as one
likes, that I remember the manager of the Clay Cross works in
Derbyshire told me during the Crimean [58] war, when our want of
soldiers was much felt and some people were talking of a
conscription, that sooner than submit to a conscription the
population of that district would flee to the mines, and lead a sort
of Robin Hood life under ground.
For a long time, as I have said, the strong feudal habits of
subordination and deference continued to tell upon the working-class.
The modern spirit has now almost entirely dissolved those habits, and
the anarchical tendency of our worship of freedom in and for itself,
of our superstitious faith, as I say, in machinery, is becoming very
manifest. More and more, because of this our blind faith in
machinery, because of our want of light to enable us to look beyond
machinery to the end for which machinery is valuable, this and that
man, and this and that body of men, all over the country, are
beginning to assert and put in practice an Englishman's right to do
what he likes; his right to march where he likes, meet where he
likes, enter where he likes, hoot as he likes, threaten as he likes,
smash as he likes. All this, I say, tends to anarchy; and though a
number of excellent people, and particularly my friends of the
liberal or progressive party, as they [59] call themselves, are kind
enough to reassure us by saying that these are trifles, that a few
transient outbreaks of rowdyism signify nothing, that our system of
liberty is one which itself cures all the evils which it works, that
the educated and intelligent classes stand in overwhelming strength
and majestic repose, ready, like our military force in riots, to act
at a moment's notice,--yet one finds that one's liberal friends
generally say this because they have such faith in themselves and
their nostrums, when they shall return, as the public welfare
requires, to place and power. But this faith of theirs one cannot
exactly share, when one has so long had them and their nostrums at
work, and sees that they have not prevented our coming to our present
embarrassed condition; and one finds, also, that the outbreaks of
rowdyism tend to become less and less of trifles, to become more
frequent rather than less frequent; and that meanwhile our educated
and intelligent classes remain in their majestic repose, and somehow
or other, whatever happens, their overwhelming strength, like our
military force in riots, never does act.
How, indeed, should their overwhelming strength [60] act, when the
man who gives an inflammatory lecture, or breaks down the Park
railings, or invades a Secretary of State's office, is only following
an Englishman's impulse to do as he likes; and our own conscience
tells us that we ourselves have always regarded this impulse as
something primary and sacred? Mr. Murphy lectures at Birmingham, and
showers on the Catholic population of that town "words," says Mr.
Hardy, "only fit to be addressed to thieves or murderers." What
then? Mr. Murphy has his own reasons of several kinds. He suspects
the Roman Catholic Church of designs upon Mrs. Murphy; and he says,
if mayors and magistrates do not care for their wives and daughters,
he does. But, above all, he is doing as he likes, or, in worthier
language, asserting his personal liberty. "I will carry out my
lectures if they walk over my body as a dead corpse; and I say to the
Mayor of Birmingham that he is my servant while I am in Birmingham,
and as my servant he must do his duty and protect me." Touching and
beautiful words, which find a sympathetic chord in every British
bosom! The moment it is plainly put before us that a man is
asserting his personal liberty, we are half disarmed; [61] because we
are believers in freedom, and not in some dream of a right reason to
which the assertion of our freedom is to be subordinated.
Accordingly, the Secretary of State had to say that although the
lecturer's language was "only fit to be addressed to thieves or
murderers," yet, "I do not think he is to be deprived, I do not think
that anything I have said could justify the inference that he is to
be deprived, of the right of protection in a place built by him for
the purpose of these lectures; because the language was not language
which afforded grounds for a criminal prosecution." No, nor to be
silenced by Mayor, or Home Secretary, or any administrative authority
on earth, simply on their notion of what is discreet and reasonable!
This is in perfect consonance with our public opinion, and with our
national love for the assertion of personal liberty.
In quite another department of affairs, an experienced and
distinguished Chancery Judge relates an incident which is just to the
same effect as this of Mr. Murphy. A testator bequeathed 300£. a
year, to be for ever applied as a pension to some person who had been
unsuccessful in literature, and whose duty [62] should be to support
and diffuse, by his writings, the testator's own views, as enforced
in the testator's publications. This bequest was appealed against in
the Court of Chancery, on the ground of its absurdity; but, being
only absurd, it was upheld, and the so-called charity was
established. Having, I say, at the bottom of our English hearts a
very strong belief in freedom, and a very weak belief in right
reason, we are soon silenced when a man pleads the prime right to do
as he likes, because this is the prime right for ourselves too; and
even if we attempt now and then to mumble something about reason, yet
we have ourselves thought so little about this and so much about
liberty, that we are in conscience forced, when our brother
Philistine with whom we are meddling turns boldly round upon us and
asks: Have you any light?--to shake our heads ruefully, and to let
him go his own way after all.
There are many things to be said on behalf of this exclusive
attention of ours to liberty, and of the relaxed habits of government
which it has engendered. It is very easy to mistake or to exaggerate
the sort of anarchy from which we are in danger through them. We are
not in danger from [63] Fenianism, fierce and turbulent as it may
show itself; for against this our conscience is free enough to let us
act resolutely and put forth our overwhelming strength the moment
there is any real need for it. In the first place, it never was any
part of our creed that the great right and blessedness of an
Irishman, or, indeed, of anybody on earth except an Englishman, is to
do as he likes; and we can have no scruple at all about abridging, if
necessary, a non-Englishman's assertion of personal liberty. The
British Constitution, its checks, and its prime virtues, are for
Englishmen. We may extend them to others out of love and kindness;
but we find no real divine law written on our hearts constraining us
so to extend them. And then the difference between an Irish Fenian
and an English rough is so immense, and the case, in dealing with the
Fenian, so much more clear! He is so evidently desperate and
dangerous, a man of a conquered race, a Papist, with centuries of
ill-usage to inflame him against us, with an alien religion
established in his country by us at his expense, with no admiration
of our institutions, no love of our virtues, no talents for our
business, no turn for our comfort! Show him our symbolical [64]
Truss Manufactory on the finest site in Europe, and tell him that
British industrialism and individualism can bring a man to that, and
he remains cold! Evidently, if we deal tenderly with a
sentimentalist like this, it is out of pure philanthropy. But with
the Hyde Park rioter how different!+ He is our own flesh and blood;
he is a Protestant; he is framed by nature to do as we do, hate what
we hate, love what we love; he is capable of feeling the symbolical
force of the Truss Manufactory; the question of questions, for him,
is a wages' question. That beautiful sentence Sir Daniel Gooch
quoted to the Swindon workmen, and which I treasure as Mrs. Gooch's
Golden Rule, or the Divine Injunction "Be ye Perfect" done into
British,--the sentence Sir Daniel Gooch's mother repeated to him
every morning when he was a boy going to work: "Ever remember, my
dear Dan, that you should look forward to being some day manager of
that concern!"--this fruitful maxim is perfectly fitted to shine
forth in the heart of the Hyde Park rough also, and to be his
guiding-star through life. He has no visionary schemes of revolution
and transformation, though of course he would like his class to rule,
as the aristocratic [65] class like their class to rule, and the
middle-class theirs. Meanwhile, our social machine is a little out
of order; there are a good many people in our paradisiacal centres of
industrialism and individualism taking the bread out of one another's
mouths; the rioter has not yet quite found his groove and settled
down to his work, and so he is just asserting his personal liberty a
little, going where he likes, assembling where he likes, bawling as
he likes, hustling as he likes. Just as the rest of us,--as the
country squires in the aristocratic class, as the political
dissenters in the middle-class,--he has no idea of a State, of the
nation in its collective and corporate character controlling, as
government, the free swing of this or that one of its members in the
name of the higher reason of all of them, his own as well as that of
others. 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 says he is being
butchered by the aristocracy.
His apparition is somewhat embarrassing, because too many cooks spoil
the broth; because, while the aristocratic and middle classes have
long been doing [66] as they like with great vigour, he has been too
undeveloped and submissive hitherto to join in the game; and now,
when he does come, he comes in immense numbers, and is rather raw and
rough. But he does not break many laws, or not many at one time;
and, as our laws were made for very different circumstances from our
present (but always with an eye to Englishmen doing as they like),
and as the clear letter of the law must be against our Englishman who
does as he likes and not only the spirit of the law and public
policy, and as Government must neither have any discretionary power
nor act resolutely on its own interpretation of the law if any one
disputes it, it is evident our laws give our playful giant, in doing
as he likes, considerable advantage. Besides, even if he can be
clearly proved to commit an illegality in doing as he likes, there is
always the resource of not putting the law in force, or of abolishing
it. So he has his way, and if he has his way he is soon satisfied
for the time; however, he falls into the habit of taking it oftener
and oftener, and at last begins to create by his operations a
confusion of which mischievous people can take advantage, and which
at any rate, by troubling the common course [67] of business
throughout the country, tends to cause distress, and so to increase
the sort of anarchy and social disintegration which had previously
commenced. And thus that profound sense of settled order and
security, without which a society like ours cannot live and grow at
all, is beginning to threaten us with taking its departure.
Now, if culture, which simply means trying to perfect oneself, and
one's mind as part of oneself, brings us light, and if light shows us
that there is nothing so very blessed in merely doing as one likes,
that the worship of the mere freedom to do as one likes is worship of
machinery, that the really blessed thing is to like what right reason
ordains, and to follow her authority, then we have got a practical
benefit out of culture. We have got a much wanted principle, a
principle of authority, to counteract the tendency to anarchy which
seems to be threatening us.
But how to organise this authority, or to what hands to entrust the
wielding of it? How to get your State, summing up the right reason
of the community, and giving effect to it, as circumstances may
require, with vigour? And here I think I see [68] my enemies waiting
for me with a hungry joy in their eyes. But I shall elude them.
The State, the power most representing the right reason of the
nation, and most worthy, therefore, of ruling,--of exercising, when
circumstances require it, authority over us all,--is for Mr. Carlyle
the aristocracy. For Mr. Lowe, it is the middle-class with its
incomparable Parliament. For the Reform League, it is the working-
class, with its "brightest powers of sympathy and readiest powers of
action." Now, culture, with its disinterested pursuit of perfection,
culture, simply trying to see things as they are, in order to seize
on the best and to make it prevail, is surely well fitted to help us
to judge rightly, by all the aids of observing, reading, and
thinking, the qualifications and titles to our confidence of these
three candidates for authority, and can thus render us a practical
service of no mean value.
So when Mr. Carlyle, a man of genius to whom we have all at one time
or other been indebted for refreshment and stimulus, says we should
give rule to the aristocracy, mainly because of its dignity and
politeness, surely culture is useful in reminding us, [69] that in
our idea of perfection the characters of beauty and intelligence are
both of them present, and sweetness and light, the two noblest of
things, are united. Allowing, therefore, with Mr. Carlyle, the
aristocratic class to possess sweetness, culture insists on the
necessity of light also, and shows us that aristocracies, being by
the very nature of things inaccessible to ideas, unapt to see how the
world is going, must be somewhat wanting in light, and must therefore
be, at a moment when light is our great requisite, inadequate to our
needs. Aristocracies, those children of the established fact, are
for epochs of concentration. In epochs of expansion, epochs such as
that in which we now live, epochs when always the warning voice is
again heard: Now is the judgment of this world--in such epochs
aristocracies, with their natural clinging to the established fact,
their want of sense for the flux of things, for the inevitable
transitoriness of all human institutions, are bewildered and
helpless. Their serenity, their high spirit, their power of haughty
resistance,--the great qualities of an aristocracy, and the secret of
its distinguished manners and dignity,--these very qualities, in an
epoch of [70] expansion, turn against their possessors. Again and
again I have said how the refinement of an aristocracy may be
precious and educative to a raw nation as a kind of shadow of true
refinement; how its serenity and dignified freedom from petty cares
may serve as a useful foil to set off the vulgarity and hideousness
of that type of life which a hard middle-class tends to establish,
and to help people to see this vulgarity and hideousness in their
true colours. From such an ignoble spectacle as that of poor Mrs.
Lincoln,--a spectacle to vulgarise a whole nation,--aristocracies
undoubtedly preserve us. But the true grace and serenity is that of
which Greece and Greek art suggest the admirable ideals of
perfection,--a serenity which comes from having made order among
ideas and harmonised them; whereas the serenity of aristocracies, at
least the peculiar serenity of aristocracies of Teutonic origin,
appears to come from their never having had any ideas to trouble
them. And so, in a time of expansion like the present, a time for
ideas, one gets, perhaps, in regarding an aristocracy, even more than
the idea of serenity, the idea of futility and sterility. One has
often wondered whether upon the whole [71] earth there is anything so
unintelligent, so unapt to perceive how the world is really going, as
an ordinary young Englishman of our upper class. Ideas he has not,
and neither has he that seriousness of our middle-class, which is, as
I have often said, the great strength of this class, and may become
its salvation. Why, a man may hear a young Dives of the aristocratic
class, when the whim takes him to sing the praises of wealth and
material comfort, sing them with a cynicism from which the conscience
of the veriest Philistine of our industrial middle-class would recoil
in affright. And when, with the natural sympathy of aristocracies
for firm dealing with the multitude, and his uneasiness at our feeble
dealing with it at home, an unvarnished young Englishman of our
aristocratic class applauds the absolute rulers on the Continent, he
in general manages completely to miss the grounds of reason and
intelligence which alone can give any colour of justification, any
possibility of existence, to those rulers, and applauds them on
grounds which it would make their own hair stand on end to listen to.
And all this time, we are in an epoch of expansion; [72] and the
essence of an epoch of expansion is a movement of ideas, and the one
salvation of an epoch of expansion is a harmony of ideas. The very
principle of the authority which we are seeking as a defence against
anarchy is right reason, ideas, light. The more, therefore, an
aristocracy calls to its aid its innate forces,--its impenetrability,
its high spirit, its power of haughty resistance,--to deal with an
epoch of expansion, the graver is the danger, the greater the
certainty of explosion, the surer the aristocracy's defeat; for it is
trying to do violence to nature instead of working along with it.
The best powers shown by the best men of an aristocracy at such an
epoch are, it will be observed, non-aristocratical powers, powers of
industry, powers of intelligence; and these powers, thus exhibited,
tend really not to strengthen the aristocracy, but to take their
owners out of it, to expose them to the dissolving agencies of
thought and change, to make them men of the modern spirit and of the
future. If, as sometimes happens, they add to their non-
aristocratical qualities of labour and thought, a strong dose of
aristocratical qualities also,--of pride, defiance, turn for
resistance--this truly aristocratical [73] side of them, so far from
adding any strength to them really neutralises their force and makes
them impracticable and ineffective.
Knowing myself to be indeed sadly to seek, as one of my many critics
says, in "a philosophy with coherent, interdependent, subordinate and
derivative principles," I continually have recourse to a plain man's
expedient of trying to make what few simple notions I have, clearer,
and more intelligible to myself, by means of example and
illustration. And having been brought up at Oxford in the bad old
times, when we were stuffed with Greek and Aristotle, and thought
nothing of preparing ourselves,--as after Mr. Lowe's great speech at
Edinburgh we shall do,--to fight the battle of life with the German
waiters, my head is still full of a lumber of phrases we learnt at
Oxford from Aristotle, about virtue being in a mean, and about excess
and defect, and so on. Once when I had had the advantage of
listening to the Reform debates in the House of Commons, having heard
a number of interesting speakers, and among them Lord Elcho and Sir
Thomas Bateson, I remember it struck me, applying Aristotle's
machinery of the [74] mean to my ideas about our aristocracy, that
Lord Elcho was exactly the perfection, or happy mean, or virtue, of
aristocracy, and Sir Thomas Bateson the excess; and I fancied that by
observing these two we might see both the inadequacy of aristocracy
to supply the principle of authority needful for our present wants,
and the danger of its trying to supply it when it was not really
competent for the business. On the one hand, in Lord Elcho, showing
plenty of high spirit, but remarkable, far above and beyond his gift
of high spirit, for the fine tempering of his high spirit, for ease,
serenity, politeness,--the great virtues, as Mr. Carlyle says, of
aristocracy,--in this beautiful and virtuous mean, there seemed
evidently some insufficiency of light; while, on the other hand, Sir
Thomas Bateson, in whom the high spirit of aristocracy, its
impenetrability, defiant courage, and pride of resistance, were
developed even in excess, was manifestly capable, if he had his way
given him, of causing us great danger, and, indeed, of throwing the
whole commonwealth into confusion. Then I reverted to that old
fundamental notion of mine about the grand merit of our race being
really our honesty; and the [75] very helplessness of our
aristocratic or governing class in dealing with our perturbed social
state gave me a sort of pride and satisfaction, because I saw they
were, as a whole, too honest to try and manage a business for which
they did not feel themselves capable.
Surely, now, it is no inconsiderable boon culture confers upon us, if
in embarrassed times like the present it enables us to look at the
ins and the outs of things in this way, without hatred and without
partiality, and with a disposition to see the good in everybody all
round. And I try to follow just the same course with our middle-
class as with our aristocracy. Mr. Lowe talks to us of this strong
middle part of the nation, of the unrivalled deeds of our liberal
middle-class Parliament, of the noble, the heroic work it has
performed in the last thirty years; and I begin to ask myself if we
shall not, then, find in our middle-class the principle of authority
we want, and if we had not better take administration as well as
legislation away from the weak extreme which now administers for us,
and commit both to the strong middle part. I observe, too, that the
heroes of middle-class liberalism, such as we have [76] hitherto
known it, speak with a kind of prophetic anticipation of the great
destiny which awaits them, and as if the future was clearly theirs.
The advanced party, the progressive party, the party in alliance with
the future, are the names they like to give themselves. "The
principles which will obtain recognition in the future," says Mr.
Miall, a personage of deserved eminence among the political
Dissenters, as they are called, who have been the backbone of middle-
class liberalism--"the principles which will obtain recognition in
the future are the principles for which I have long and zealously
laboured. I qualified myself for joining in the work of harvest by
doing to the best of my ability the duties of seed-time." These
duties, if one is to gather them from the works of the great liberal
party in the last thirty years, are, as I have elsewhere summed them
up, the advocacy of free-trade, of parliamentary reform, of abolition
of church-rates, of voluntaryism in religion and education, of non-
interference of the State between employers and employed, and of
marriage with one's deceased wife's sister.
Now I know, when I object that all this is machinery, the great
liberal middle-class has by this [77] time grown cunning enough to
answer, that it always meant more by these things than meets the eye;
that it has had that within which passes show, and that we are soon
going to see, in a Free Church and all manner of good things, what it
was. But I have learned from Bishop Wilson (if Mr. Frederic Harrison
will forgive my again quoting that poor old hierophant of a decayed
superstition): "If we would really know our heart let us impartially
view our actions;" and I cannot help thinking that if our liberals
had had so much sweetness and light in their inner minds as they
allege, more of it must have come out in their sayings and doings.
An American friend of the English liberals says, indeed, that their
Dissidence of Dissent has been a mere instrument of the political
Dissenters for making reason and the will of God prevail (and no
doubt he would say the same of marriage with one's deceased wife's
sister); and that the abolition of a State Church is merely the
Dissenter's means to this end, just as culture is mine. Another
American defender of theirs says just the same of their industrialism
and free-trade; indeed, this gentleman, taking the bull by the horns,
proposes that we should for the [78] future call industrialism
culture, and the industrialists the men of culture, and then of
course there can be no longer any misapprehension about their true
character; and besides the pleasure of being wealthy and comfortable,
they will have authentic recognition as vessels of sweetness and
light. All this is undoubtedly specious; but I must remark that the
culture of which I talked was an endeavour to come at reason and the
will of God by means of reading, observing, and thinking; and that
whoever calls anything else culture, may, indeed, call it so if he
likes, but then he talks of something quite different from what I
talked of. And, again, as culture's way of working for reason and
the will of God is by directly trying to know more about them, while
the Dissidence of Dissent is evidently in itself no effort of this
kind, nor is its Free Church, in fact, a church with worthier
conceptions of God and the ordering of the world than the State
Church professes, but with mainly the same conceptions of these as
the State Church has, only that every man is to comport himself as he
likes in professing them,--this being so, I cannot at once accept the
Nonconformity any more than the industrialism and the other great
[79] works of our liberal middle-class as proof positive that this
class is in possession of light, and that here is the true seat of
authority for which we are in search; but I must try a little
further, and seek for other indications which may enable me to make
up my mind.
Why should we not do with the middle-class as we have done with the
aristocratic class,--find in it some representative men who may stand
for the virtuous mean of this class, for the perfection of its
present qualities and mode of being, and also for the excess of them.
Such men must clearly not be men of genius like Mr. Bright; for, as I
have formerly said, so far as a man has genius he tends to take
himself out of the category of class altogether, and to become simply
a man. Mr. Bright's brother, Mr. Jacob Bright, would, perhaps, be
more to the purpose; he seems to sum up very well in himself, without
disturbing influences, the general liberal force of the middle-class,
the force by which it has done its great works of free-trade,
parliamentary reform, voluntaryism, and so on, and the spirit in
which it has done them. Now it is clear, from what has been already
said, that there has been at least [80] an apparent want of light in
the force and spirit through which these great works have been done,
and that the works have worn in consequence too much a look of
machinery. But this will be clearer still if we take, as the happy
mean of the middle-class, not Mr. Jacob Bright, but his colleague in
the representation of Manchester, Mr. Bazley. Mr. Bazley sums up for
us, in general, the middle-class, its spirit and its works, at least
as well as Mr. Jacob Bright; and he has given us, moreover, a famous
sentence, which bears directly on the resolution of our present
question,--whether there is light enough in our middle-class to make
it the proper seat of the authority we wish to establish. When there
was a talk some little while ago about the state of middle-class
education, Mr. Bazley, as the representative of that class, spoke
some memorable words:--"There had been a cry that middle-class
education ought to receive more attention. He confessed himself very
much surprised by the clamour that was raised. He did not think that
class need excite the sympathy either of the legislature or the
public." Now this satisfaction of Mr. Bazley with the mental state
of the middle-class [81] was truly representative, and enhances his
claim (if that were necessary) to stand as the beautiful and virtuous
mean of that class. But it is obviously at variance with our
definition of culture, or the pursuit of light and perfection, which
made light and perfection consist, not in resting and being, but in
growing and becoming, in a perpetual advance in beauty and wisdom.
So the middle-class is by its essence, as one may say, by its
incomparable self-satisfaction decisively expressed through its
beautiful and virtuous mean, self-excluded from wielding an authority
of which light is to be the very soul.
Clear as this is, it will be made clearer still if we take some
representative man as the excess of the middle-class, and remember
that the middle-class, in general, is to be conceived as a body
swaying between the qualities of its mean and of its excess, and on
the whole, of course, as human nature is constituted, inclining
rather towards the excess than the mean. Of its excess no better
representative can possibly be imagined than the Rev. W. Cattle, a
Dissenting minister from Walsall, who came before the public in
connection with the proceedings at [82] Birmingham of Mr. Murphy,
already mentioned. Speaking in the midst of an irritated population
of Catholics, the Rev. W. Cattle exclaimed:--"I say, then, away with
the mass! It is from the bottomless pit; and in the bottomless pit
shall all liars have their part, in the lake that burneth with fire
and brimstone." And again: "When all the praties were black in
Ireland, why didn't the priests say the hocus-pocus over them, and
make them all good again?" He shared, too, Mr. Murphy's fears of
some invasion of his domestic happiness: "What I wish to say to you
as Protestant husbands is, Take care of your wives!" And, finally,
in the true vein of an Englishman doing as he likes, a vein of which
I have at some length pointed out the present dangers, he recommended
for imitation the example of some churchwardens at Dublin, among
whom, said he, "there was a Luther and also a Melancthon," who had
made very short work with some ritualist or other, handed him down
from his pulpit, and kicked him out of church. Now it is manifest,
as I said in the case of Sir Thomas Bateson, that if we let this
excess of the sturdy English middle-class, this conscientious
Protestant Dissenter, so strong, so self- [83] reliant, so fully
persuaded in his own mind, have his way, he would be capable, with
his want of light--or, to use the language of the religious world,
with his zeal without knowledge--of stirring up strife which neither
he nor any one else could easily compose.
And then comes in, as it did also with the aristocracy, the honesty
of our race, and by the voice of another middle-class man, Alderman
Wilson, Alderman of the City of London and Colonel of the City of
London Militia, proclaims that it has twinges of conscience, and that
it will not attempt to cope with our social disorders, and to deal
with a business which it feels to be too high for it. Every one
remembers how this virtuous Alderman-Colonel, or Colonel-Alderman,
led 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 [84] 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 one's
admiration 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 free-
born Englishman's impulse to do as he likes, which could justify us
in preventing, at the cost of bloodshed, other free-born Englishmen
from doing as they like, and robbing and beating us as much as they
please?"
This distrust of themselves as an adequate centre of authority does
not mark the working-class, as was shown by their readiness the other
day in Hyde Park to take upon themselves all the functions of [85]
government. But this comes from the working-class being, as I have
often said, still an embryo, of which no one can yet quite foresee
the final development; and from its not having the same experience
and self-knowledge as the aristocratic and middle classes. Honesty
it no doubt has, just like the other classes of Englishmen, but
honesty in an inchoate and untrained state; and meanwhile its powers
of action, which are, as Mr. Frederic Harrison says, exceedingly
ready, easily run away with it. That it cannot at present have a
sufficiency of light which comes by culture,--that is, by reading,
observing, and thinking,--is clear from the very nature of its
condition; and, indeed, we saw that Mr. Frederic Harrison, in seeking
to make a free stage for its bright powers of sympathy and ready
powers of action, had to begin by throwing overboard culture, and
flouting it as only fit for a professor of belles lettres. Still, to
make it perfectly manifest that no more in the working-class than in
the aristocratic and middle classes can one find an adequate centre
of authority,--that is, as culture teaches us to conceive our
required authority, of light,--let us again follow, with this class,
the method we have [86] followed with the aristocratic and middle
classes, and try to bring before our minds representative men, who
may figure to us its virtue and its excess. We must not take, of
course, Colonel Dickson or Mr. Beales; because Colonel Dickson, by
his martial profession and dashing exterior, seems to belong
properly, like Julius Caesar and Mirabeau and other great popular
leaders, to the aristocratic class, and to be carried into the
popular ranks only by his ambition or his genius; while Mr. Beales
belongs to our solid middle-class, and, perhaps, if he had not been a
great popular leader, would have been a Philistine. But Mr. Odger,
whose speeches we have all read, and of whom his friends relate,
besides, much that is favourable, may very well stand for the
beautiful and virtuous mean of our present working-class; and I think
everybody will admit that in Mr. Odger, as in Lord Elcho, there is
manifestly, with all his good points, some insufficiency of light.
The excess of the working-class, in its present state of development,
is perhaps best shown in Mr. Bradlaugh, the iconoclast, who seems to
be almost for baptizing us all in blood and fire into his new social
dispensation, and to whose [87] reflections, now that I have once
been set going on Bishop Wilson's track, I cannot forbear commending
this maxim of the good old man: "Intemperance in talk makes a
dreadful havoc in the heart." Mr. Bradlaugh, like Sir Thomas Bateson
and the Rev. W. Cattle, is evidently capable, if he had his head
given him, of running us all into great dangers and confusion. I
conclude, therefore,--what, indeed, few of those who do me the honour
to read this disquisition are likely to dispute,--that we can as
little find in the working-class as in the aristocratic or in the
middle class our much-wanted source of authority, as culture suggests
it to us.
Well, then, what if we tried to rise above the idea of class to the
idea of the whole community, the State, and to find our centre of
light and authority there? Every one of us has the idea of country,
as a sentiment; hardly any one of us has the idea of the State, as a
working power. And why? Because we habitually live in our ordinary
selves, which do not carry us beyond the ideas and wishes of the
class to which we happen to belong. And we are all afraid of giving
to the State too much power, because we only conceive of the State
[88] as something equivalent to the class in occupation of the
executive government, and are afraid of that class abusing power to
its own purposes. If we strengthen the State with the aristocratic
class in occupation of the executive government, we imagine we are
delivering ourselves up captive to the ideas and wishes of Sir Thomas
Bateson; if with the middle-class in occupation of the executive
government, to those of the Rev. W. Cattle; if with the working-
class, to those of Mr. Bradlaugh. And with much justice; owing to
the exaggerated notion which we English, as I have said, entertain of
the right and blessedness of the mere doing as one likes, of the
affirming oneself, and oneself just as it is. People of the
aristocratic class want to affirm their ordinary selves, their
likings and dislikings; people of the middle-class the same, people
of the working-class the same. By our everyday selves, however, we
are separate, personal, at war; we are only safe from one another's
tyranny when no one has any power; and this safety, in its turn,
cannot save us from anarchy. And when, therefore, anarchy presents
itself as a danger to us, we know not where to turn.
[89] But by our best self we are united, impersonal, at harmony. We
are in no peril from giving authority to this, because it is the
truest friend we all of us can have; and when anarchy is a danger to
us, to this authority we may turn with sure trust. Well, and this is
the very self which culture, or the study of perfection, seeks to
develop in us; at the expense of our old untransformed self, taking
pleasure only in doing what it likes or is used to do, and exposing
us to the risk of clashing with every one else who is doing the same!
So that our poor culture, which is flouted as so unpractical, leads
us to the very ideas capable of meeting the great want of our present
embarrassed times! We want an authority, and we find nothing but
jealous classes, checks, and a dead-lock; culture suggests the idea
of the State. We find no basis for a firm State-power in our
ordinary selves; culture suggests one to us in our best self.
It cannot but acutely try a tender conscience to be accused, in a
practical country like ours, of keeping aloof from the work and hope
of a multitude of earnest-hearted men, and of merely toying with
poetry and aesthetics. So it is with no little [90] sense of relief
that I find myself thus in the position of one who makes a
contribution in aid of the practical necessities of our times. The
great thing, it will be observed, is to find our best self, and to
seek to affirm nothing but that; not,--as we English with our over-
value for merely being free and busy have been so accustomed to do,--
resting satisfied with a self which comes uppermost long before our
best self, and affirming that with blind energy. In short,--to go
back yet once more to Bishop Wilson,--of these two excellent rules of
Bishop Wilson's for a man's guidance: "Firstly, never go against the
best light you have; secondly, take care that your light be not
darkness," we English have followed with praiseworthy zeal the first
rule, but we have not given so much heed to the second. We have gone
manfully, the Rev. W. Cattle and the rest of us, according to the
best light we have; but we have not taken enough care that this
should be really the best light possible for us, that it should not
be darkness. And, our honesty being very great, conscience has
whispered to us that the light we were following, our ordinary self,
was, indeed, perhaps, only an inferior self, only darkness; and [91]
that it would not do to impose this seriously on all the world.
But our best self inspires faith, and is capable of affording a
serious principle of authority. For example. We are on our way to
what the late Duke of Wellington, with his strong sagacity, foresaw
and admirably described as "a revolution by due course of law." This
is undoubtedly,--if we are still to live and grow, and this famous
nation is not to stagnate and dwindle away on the one hand, or, on
the other, to perish miserably in mere anarchy and confusion,--what
we are on the way to. Great changes there must be, for a revolution
cannot accomplish itself without great changes; yet order there must
be, for without order a revolution cannot accomplish itself by due
course of law. So whatever brings risk of tumult and disorder,
multitudinous processions in the streets of our crowded towns,
multitudinous meetings in their public places and parks,--
demonstrations perfectly unnecessary in the present course of our
affairs,--our best self, or right reason, plainly enjoins us to set
our faces against. It enjoins us to encourage and uphold the
occupants of the executive power, whoever they [92] may be, in firmly
prohibiting them. But it does this clearly and resolutely, and is
thus a real principle of authority, because it does it with a free
conscience; because in thus provisionally strengthening the executive
power, it knows that it is not doing this merely to enable Sir Thomas
Bateson to affirm himself as against Mr. Bradlaugh, or the Rev. W.
Cattle to affirm himself as against both. It knows that it is
stablishing the State, or organ of our collective best self, of our
national right reason; and it has the testimony of conscience that it
is stablishing the State on behalf of whatever great changes are
needed, just as much as on behalf of order; stablishing it to deal
just as stringently, when the time comes, with Sir Thomas Bateson's
Protestant ascendency, or with the Rev. W. Cattle's sorry education
of his children, as it deals with Mr. Bradlaugh's street-processions.
NOTES
56. +posse comitatûs. Arnold's phrase refers to the medieval
institution of the "power of the county." It originally consisted of
a county's able-bodied males over fifteen, and the local authorities
might call upon it to preserve order. Later, the posse became an
instrument of the church parish.
64. +London's Hyde Park riots occurred in 1866. Reform Leaguers bent
on assembling to promote universal suffrage broke through the iron
rails encompassing the Park.