Culture and Anarchy
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Matthew Arnold >> Culture and Anarchy
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NOTES
174. +unum necessarium or one thing needful. Arnold refers here, and
in his subsequent chapter title, Porro Unum est Necessarium, to Luke
10:42. Here is the context, 10:38-42. "[Jesus] . . . entered into a
certain village: and a certain woman named Martha received him into
her house. / And she had a sister called Mary . . . . / But Martha
was cumbered about much serving, and came to him, and said, Lord,
dost thou not care that my sister hath left me to serve alone? bid
her therefore that she help me. / And Jesus answered and said unto
her, Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things:
/ But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part,
which shall not be taken away from her." King James Bible.
177. +Romans 11:34. "For who hath known the mind of the Lord? or who
hath been his counsellor?" King James Bible.
189-90. +Romans 2:21-22. "Thou therefore which teachest another,
teachest thou not thyself? thou that preachest a man should not
steal, dost thou steal? / Thou that sayest a man should not commit
adultery, dost thou commit adultery? thou that abhorrest idols, dost
thou commit sacrilege?" King James Bible.
CHAPTER VI
[197] But an unpretending writer, without a philosophy based on
inter-dependent, subordinate, and coherent principles, must not
presume to indulge himself too much in generalities, but he must keep
close to the level ground of common fact, the only safe ground for
understandings without a scientific equipment. Therefore I am bound
to take, before concluding, some of the practical operations in which
my friends and countrymen are at this moment engaged, and [198] to
make these, if I can, show the truth of what I have advanced.
Probably I could hardly give a greater proof of my confessed
inexpertness in reasoning and arguing, than by taking, for my first
example of an operation of this kind, the proceedings for the
disestablishment of the Irish Church, which we are now witnessing.
It seems so clear that this is surely one of those operations for the
uprooting of a certain definite evil in which one's Liberal friends
engage, and have a right to complain and to get impatient and to
reproach one with delicate Conservative scepticism and cultivated
inaction if one does not lend a hand to help them. This does,
indeed, seem evident; and yet this operation comes so prominently
before us just at this moment,--it so challenges everybody's regard,-
-that one seems cowardly in blinking it. So let us venture to try
and see whether this conspicuous operation is one of those round
which we need to let our consciousness play freely and reveal what
manner of spirit we are of in doing it; or whether it is one which by
no means admits the application of this doctrine of ours, and one to
which we ought to lend a hand immediately.
[199] Now it seems plain that the present Church establishment in
Ireland is contrary to reason and justice, in so far as the Church of
a very small minority of the people there takes for itself all the
Church property of the Irish people. And one would think, that
property assigned for the purpose of providing for a people's
religious worship when that worship was one, the State should, when
that worship is split into several forms, apportion between those
several forms, with due regard to circumstances, taking account only
of great differences, which are likely to be lasting, and of
considerable communions, which are likely to represent profound and
widespread religious characteristics; and overlooking petty
differences, which have no serious reason for lasting, and
inconsiderable communions, which can hardly be taken to express any
broad and necessary religious lineaments of our common nature. This
is just in accordance with that maxim about the State which we have
more than once used: The State is of the religion of all its
citizens, without the fanaticism of any of them. Those who deny
this, either think so poorly of the State that they do not like to
see religion condescend to touch the State, or they think [200] so
poorly of religion that they do not like to see the State condescend
to touch religion; but no good statesman will easily think thus
unworthily either of the State or of religion, and our statesmen of
both parties were inclined, one may say, to follow the natural line
of the State's duty, and to make in Ireland some fair apportionment
of Church property between large and radically divided religious
communions in that country. But then it was discovered that in Great
Britain the national mind, as it is called, is grown averse to
endowments for religion and will make no new ones; and though this in
itself looks general and solemn enough, yet there were found
political philosophers, like Mr. Baxter and Mr. Charles Buxton, to
give it a look of more generality and more solemnity still, and to
elevate, by their dexterous command of powerful and beautiful
language, this supposed edict of the British national mind into a
sort of formula for expressing a great law of religious transition
and progress for all the world. But we, who, having no coherent
philosophy, must not let ourselves philosophise, only see that the
English and Scotch Nonconformists have a great horror of
establishments and endowments for [201] religion, which, they assert,
were forbidden by Christ when he said: "My kingdom is not of this
world;"+ and that the Nonconformists will be delighted to aid
statesmen in disestablishing any church, but will suffer none to be
established or endowed if they can help it. Then we see that the
Nonconformists make the strength of the Liberal majority in the House
of Commons, and that, therefore, the leading Liberal statesmen, to
get the support of the Nonconformists, forsake the notion of fairly
apportioning Church property in Ireland among the chief religious
communions, declare that the national mind has decided against new
endowments, and propose simply to disestablish and disendow the
present establishment in Ireland without establishing or endowing any
other. The actual power, in short, by virtue of which the Liberal
party in the House of Commons is now trying to disestablish the Irish
Church, is not the power of reason and justice, it is the power of
the Nonconformists' antipathy to Church establishments. Clearly it
is this; because Liberal statesmen, relying on the power of reason
and justice to help them, proposed something quite different from
what they now propose; and they proposed [202] what they now propose,
and talked of the decision of the national mind, because they had to
rely on the English and Scotch Nonconformists. And clearly the
Nonconformists are actuated by antipathy to establishments, not by
antipathy to the injustice and irrationality of the present
appropriation of Church property in Ireland; because Mr. Spurgeon, in
his eloquent and memorable letter, expressly avowed that he would
sooner leave things as they are in Ireland, that is, he would sooner
let the injustice and irrationality of the present appropriation
continue, than do anything to set up the Roman image, that is, than
give the Catholics their fair and reasonable share of Church
property. Most indisputably, therefore, we may affirm that the real
moving power by which the Liberal party are now operating the
overthrow of the Irish establishment is the antipathy of the
Nonconformists to Church establishments, and not the sense of reason
or justice, except so far as reason and justice may be contained in
this antipathy. And thus the matter stands at present.
Now surely we must all see many inconveniences in performing the
operation of uprooting this evil, [203] the Irish Church
establishment, in this particular way. As was said about industry
and freedom and gymnastics, we shall never awaken love and gratitude
by this mode of operation; for it is pursued, not in view of reason
and justice and human perfection and all that enkindles the
enthusiasm of men, but it is pursued in view of a certain stock
notion, or fetish, of the Nonconformists, which proscribes Church
establishments. And yet, evidently, one of the main benefits to be
got by operating on the Irish Church is to win the affections of the
Irish people. Besides this, an operation performed in virtue of a
mechanical rule, or fetish, like the supposed decision of the English
national mind against new endowments, does not easily inspire respect
in its adversaries, and make their opposition feeble and hardly to be
persisted in, as an operation evidently done in virtue of reason and
justice might. For reason and justice have in them something
persuasive and irresistible; but a fetish or mechanical maxim, like
this of the Nonconformists, has in it nothing at all to conciliate
either the affections or the understanding; nay, it provokes the
counter-employment of other fetishes or mechanical maxims [204] on
the opposite side, by which the confusion and hostility already
prevalent are heightened. Only in this way can be explained the
apparition of such fetishes as are beginning to be set up on the
Conservative side against the fetish of the Nonconformists:--The
Constitution in danger! The bulwarks of British freedom menaced!
The lamp of the Reformation put out! No Popery!--and so on. To
elevate these against an operation relying on reason and justice to
back it is not so easy, or so tempting to human infirmity, as to
elevate them against an operation relying on the Nonconformists'
antipathy to Church establishments to back it; for after all, No
Popery! is a rallying cry which touches the human spirit quite as
vitally as No Church establishments!--that is to say, neither the one
nor the other, in themselves, touch the human spirit vitally at all.
Ought the believers in action, then, to be so impatient with us, if
we say, that even for the sake of this operation of theirs itself and
its satisfactory accomplishment, it is more important to make our
consciousness play freely round the stock notion or habit on which
their operation relies for aid, than to [205] lend a hand to it
straight away? Clearly they ought not; because nothing is so
effectual for operating as reason and justice, and a free play of
thought will either disengage the reason and justice lying hid in the
Nonconformist fetish, and make them effectual, or else it will help
to get this fetish out of the way, and to let statesmen go freely
where reason and justice take them.
So, suppose we take this absolute rule, this mechanical maxim of Mr.
Spurgeon and the Nonconformists, that Church establishments are bad
things because Christ said: "My kingdom is not of this world."
Suppose we try and make our consciousness bathe and float this piece
of petrifaction,--for such it now is,--and bring it within the stream
of the vital movement of our thought, and into relation with the
whole intelligible law of things. An enemy and a disputant might
probably say that much machinery which Nonconformists themselves
employ, the Liberation Society which exists already, and the
Nonconformist Union which Mr. Spurgeon desires to see existing, come
within the scope of Christ's words as well as Church establishments.
This, however, is merely a negative and [206] contentious way of
dealing with the Nonconformist maxim; whereas what we desire is to
bring this maxim within the positive and vital movement of our
thought. We say, therefore, that Christ's words mean that his
religion is a force of inward persuasion acting on the soul, and not
a force of outward constraint acting on the body; and if the
Nonconformist maxim against Church establishments and Church
endowments has warrant given to it from what Christ thus meant, then
their maxim is good, even though their own practice in the matter of
the Liberation Society may be at variance with it.
And here we cannot but remember what we have formerly said about
religion, Miss Cobbe, and the British College of Health in the New
Road. In religion there are two parts, the part of thought and
speculation, and the part of worship and devotion. Christ certainly
meant his religion, as a force of inward persuasion acting on the
soul, to employ both parts as perfectly as possible. Now thought and
speculation is eminently an individual matter, and worship and
devotion is eminently a collective matter. It does not help me to
think a thing more clearly that thousands of other people are
thinking [207] the same; but it does help me to worship with more
emotion that thousands of other people are worshipping with me. The
consecration of common consent, antiquity, public establishment,
long-used rites, national edifices, is everything for religious
worship. "Just what makes worship impressive," says Joubert, "is its
publicity, its external manifestation, its sound, its splendour, its
observance universally and visibly holding its way through all the
details both of our outward and of our inward life." Worship,
therefore, should have in it as little as possible of what divides
us, and should be as much as possible a common and public act; as
Joubert says again: "The best prayers are those which have nothing
distinct about them, and which are thus of the nature of simple
adoration." For, "The same devotion," as he says in another place,
"unites men far more than the same thought and knowledge." Thought
and knowledge, as we have said before, is eminently something
individual, and of our own; the more we possess it as strictly of our
own, the more power it has on us. Man worships best, therefore, with
the community; he philosophises best alone. So it seems that whoever
[208] would truly give effect to Christ's declaration that his
religion is a force of inward persuasion acting on the soul, would
leave our thought on the intellectual aspects of Christianity as
individual as possible, but would make Christian worship as
collective as possible. Worship, then, appears to be eminently a
matter for public and national establishment; for even Mr. Bright,
who, when he stands in Mr. Spurgeon's great Tabernacle is so ravished
with admiration, will hardly say that the great Tabernacle and its
worship are in themselves, as a temple and service of religion, so
impressive and affecting as the public and national Westminster
Abbey, or Notre Dame, with their worship. And when, very soon after
the great Tabernacle, one comes plump down to the mass of private and
individual establishments of religious worship, establishments
falling, like the British College of Health in the New Road,
conspicuously short of what a public and national establishment might
be, then one cannot but feel that Christ's command to make his
religion a force of persuasion to the soul, is, so far as one main
source of persuasion is concerned, altogether set at nought.
[209] But perhaps the Nonconformists worship so unimpressively
because they philosophise so keenly; and one part of religion, the
part of public national worship, they have subordinated to the other
part, the part of individual thought and knowledge? This, however,
their organisation in congregations forbids us to admit. They are
members of congregations, not isolated thinkers; and a true play of
individual thought is at least as much impeded by membership of a
small congregation as by membership of a great Church; thinking by
batches of fifties is to the full as fatal to free thought as
thinking by batches of thousands. Accordingly, we have had occasion
already to notice that Nonconformity does not at all differ from the
Established Church by having worthier or more philosophical ideas
about God and the ordering of the world than the Established Church
has; it has very much the same ideas about these as the Established
Church has, but it differs from the Established Church in that its
worship is a much less collective and national affair. So Mr.
Spurgeon and the Nonconformists seem to have misapprehended the true
meaning of Christ's words, My kingdom is not of this world; [210]
because, by these words, Christ meant that his religion was to work
on the soul; and of the two parts of the soul on which religion
works,--the thinking and speculative part, and the feeling and
imaginative part,--Nonconformity satisfies the first no better than
the Established Churches, which Christ by these words is supposed to
have condemned, satisfy it; and the second part it satisfies much
worse than the Established Churches. And thus the balance of
advantage seems to rest with the Established Churches; and they seem
to have apprehended and applied Christ's words, if not with perfect
adequacy, at least less inadequately than the Nonconformists.
Might it not, then, be urged with great force that the way to do
good, in presence of this operation for uprooting the Church
establishment in Ireland by the power of the Nonconformists'
antipathy to publicly establishing or endowing religious worship, is
not by lending a hand straight away to the operation, and
Hebraising,--that is, in this case, taking an uncritical
interpretation of certain Bible words as our absolute rule of
conduct,--with the Nonconformists. If may be very well for born
[211] Hebraisers, like Mr. Spurgeon, to Hebraise; but for Liberal
statesmen to Hebraise is surely unsafe, and to see poor old Liberal
hacks Hebraising, whose real self belongs to a kind of negative
Hellenism,--a state of moral indifferency without intellectual
ardour,--is even painful. And when, by our Hebraising, we neither do
what the better mind of statesmen prompted them to do, nor win the
affections of the people we want to conciliate, nor yet reduce the
opposition of our adversaries but rather heighten it, surely it may
be not unreasonable to Hellenise a little, to let our thought and
consciousness play freely about our proposed operation and its
motives, dissolve these motives if they are unsound, which certainly
they have some appearance, at any rate, of being, and create in their
stead, if they are, a set of sounder and more persuasive motives
conducting to a more solid operation. May not the man who promotes
this be giving the best help towards finding some lasting truth to
minister to the diseased spirit of his time, and does he really
deserve that the believers in action should grow impatient with him?
But now to take another operation which does [212] not at this moment
so excite people's feelings as the disestablishment of the Irish
Church, but which, I suppose, would also be called exactly one of
those operations of simple, practical, common-sense reform, aiming at
the removal of some particular abuse, and rigidly restricted to that
object, to which a Liberal ought to lend a hand, and deserves that
other Liberals should grow impatient with him if he does not. This
operation I had the great advantage of with my own ears hearing
discussed in the House of Commons, and recommended by a powerful
speech from that famous speaker, Mr. Bright; so that the effeminate
horror which, it is alleged, I have of practical reforms of this
kind, was put to a searching test; and if it survived, it must have,
one would think, some reason or other to support it, and can hardly
quite merit the stigma of its present name. The operation I mean was
that which the Real Estate Intestacy Bill aimed at accomplishing, and
the discussion on this bill I heard in the House of Commons. The
bill proposed, as every one knows, to prevent the land of a man who
dies intestate from going, as it goes now, to his eldest son, and was
thought, by its friends and by its enemies, to be a [213] step
towards abating the now almost exclusive possession of the land of
this country by the people whom we call the Barbarians. Mr. Bright,
and other speakers on his side, seemed to hold that there is a kind
of natural law or fitness of things which assigns to all a man's
children a right to equal shares in the enjoyment of his property
after his death; and that if, without depriving a man of an
Englishman's prime privilege of doing what he likes by making what
will he chooses, you provide that when he makes none his land shall
be divided among his family, then you give the sanction of the law to
the natural fitness of things, and inflict a sort of check on the
present violation of this by the Barbarians. It occurred to me, when
I saw Mr. Bright and his friends proceeding in this way, to ask
myself a question. If the almost exclusive possession of the land of
this country by the Barbarians is a bad thing, is this practical
operation of the Liberals, and the stock notion, on which it seems to
rest, about the right of children to share equally in the enjoyment
of their father's property after his death, the best and most
effective means of dealing with it? Or is it best [214] dealt with
by letting one's thought and consciousness play freely and naturally
upon the Barbarians, this Liberal operation, and the stock notion at
the bottom of it, and trying to get as near as we can to the
intelligible law of things as to each of them?
Now does any one, if he simply and naturally reads his consciousness,
discover that he has any rights at all? For my part, the deeper I go
in my own consciousness, and the more simply I abandon myself to it,
the more it seems to tell me that I have no rights at all, only
duties; and that men get this notion of rights from a process of
abstract reasoning, inferring that the obligations they are conscious
of towards others, others must be conscious of towards them, and not
from any direct witness of consciousness at all. But it is obvious
that the notion of a right, arrived at in this way, is likely to
stand as a formal and petrified thing, deceiving and misleading us;
and that the notions got directly from our consciousness ought to be
brought to bear upon it, and to control it. So it is unsafe and
misleading to say that our children have rights against us; what is
true and safe to say is, that we have duties towards our [215]
children. But who will find among these natural duties, set forth to
us by our consciousness, the obligation to leave to all our children
an equal share in the enjoyment of our property? or, though
consciousness tells us we ought to provide for our children's
welfare, whose consciousness tells him that the enjoyment of property
is in itself welfare? Whether our children's welfare is best served
by their all sharing equally in our property depends on circumstances
and on the state of the community in which we live. With this equal
sharing, society could not, for example, have organised itself afresh
out of the chaos left by the fall of the Roman Empire, and to have an
organised society to live in is more for a child's welfare than to
have an equal share of his father's property. So we see how little
convincing force the stock notion on which the Real Estate Intestacy
Bill was based,--the notion that in the nature and fitness of things
all a man's children have a right to an equal share in the enjoyment
of what he leaves,--really has; and how powerless, therefore, it must
of necessity be to persuade and win any one who has habits and
interests which disincline him to [216] it. On the other hand, the
practical operation proposed relies entirely, if it is to be
effectual in altering the present practice of the Barbarians, on the
power of truth and persuasiveness in the notion which it seeks to
consecrate; for it leaves to the Barbarians full liberty to continue
their present practice, to which all their habits and interests
incline them, unless the promulgation of a notion, which we have seen
to have no vital efficacy and hold upon our consciousness, shall
hinder them.
Are we really to adorn an operation of this kind, merely because it
proposes to do something, with all the favourable epithets of simple,
practical, common-sense, definite; to enlist on its side all the zeal
of the believers in action, and to call indifference to it a really
effeminate horror of useful reforms? It seems to me quite easy to
show that a free disinterested play of thought on the Barbarians and
their land-holding is a thousand times more really practical, a
thousand times more likely to lead to some effective result, than an
operation such as that of which we have been now speaking. For if,
casting aside the impediments of stock notions and mechanical action,
we try to find the intelligible law [217] of things respecting a
great land-owning class such as we have in this country, does not our
consciousness readily tell us that whether the perpetuation of such a
class is for its own real welfare and for the real welfare of the
community, depends on the actual circumstances of this class and of
the community? Does it not readily tell us that wealth, power, and
consideration are, and above all when inherited and not earned, in
themselves trying and dangerous things? as Bishop Wilson excellently
says: "Riches are almost always abused without a very extraordinary
grace." But this extraordinary grace was in great measure supplied
by the circumstances of the feudal epoch, out of which our land-
holding class, with its rules of inheritance, sprang. The labour and
contentions of a rude, nascent, and struggling society supplied it;
these perpetually were trying, chastising, and forming the class
whose predominance was then needed by society to give it points of
cohesion, and was not so harmful to themselves because they were thus
sharply tried and exercised. But in a luxurious, settled, and easy
society, where wealth offers the means of enjoyment a thousand times
more, and the temptation to abuse [218] them is thus made a thousand
times greater, the exercising discipline is at the same time taken
away, and the feudal class is left exposed to the full operation of
the natural law well put by the French moralist: Pouvoir sans savoir
est fort dangereux. And, for my part, when I regard the young people
of this class, it is above all by the trial and shipwreck made of
their own welfare by the circumstances in which they live that I am
struck; how far better it would have been for nine out of every ten
among them, if they had had their own way to make in the world, and
not been tried by a condition for which they had not the
extraordinary grace requisite!
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