Culture and Anarchy
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Matthew Arnold >> Culture and Anarchy
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This, I say, seems to be what a man's consciousness, simply
consulted, would tell him about the actual welfare of our Barbarians
themselves. Then, as to their actual effect upon the welfare of the
community, how can this be salutary, if a class which, by the very
possession of wealth, power and consideration, becomes a kind of
ideal or standard for the rest of the community, is tried by ease and
pleasure more than it can well bear, and almost irresistibly carried
away from excellence and strenuous virtue? This must certainly be
what [219] Solomon meant when he said: "As he who putteth a stone in
a sling, so is he that giveth honour to a fool."+ For any one can
perceive how this honouring of a false ideal, not of intelligence and
strenuous virtue, but of wealth and station, pleasure and ease, is as
a stone from a sling to kill in our great middle-class, in us who are
called Philistines, the desire before spoken of, which by nature for
ever carries all men towards that which is lovely; and to leave
instead of it only a blind deteriorating pursuit, for ourselves also,
of the false ideal. And in those among us Philistines whom this
desire does not wholly abandon, yet, having no excellent ideal set
forth to nourish and to steady it, it meets with that natural bent
for the bathos which together with this desire itself is implanted at
birth in the breast of man, and is by that force twisted awry, and
borne at random hither and thither, and at last flung upon those
grotesque and hideous forms of popular religion which the more
respectable part among us Philistines mistake for the true goal of
man's desire after all that is lovely. And for the Populace this
false idea is a stone which kills the desire before it can even
arise; so impossible and unattainable for [220] them do the
conditions of that which is lovely appear according to this ideal to
be made, so necessary to the reaching of them by the few seems the
falling short of them by the many. So that, perhaps, of the actual
vulgarity of our Philistines and brutality of our Populace, the
Barbarians and their feudal habits of succession, enduring out of
their due time and place, are involuntarily the cause in a great
degree; and they hurt the welfare of the rest of the community at the
same time that, as we have seen, they hurt their own.
But must not, now, the working in our minds of considerations like
these, to which culture, that is, the disinterested and active use of
reading, reflection, and observation, carries us, be really much more
effectual to the dissolution of feudal habits and rules of succession
in land than an operation like the Real Estate Intestacy Bill, and a
stock notion like that of the natural right of all a man's children
to an equal share in the enjoyment of his property; since we have
seen that this mechanical maxim is unsound, and that, if it is
unsound, the operation relying upon it cannot possibly be effective?
If truth and reason have, as we believe, any natural irresistible
effect on [221] the mind of man, it must. These considerations, when
culture has called them forth and given them free course in our
minds, will live and work. They will work gradually, no doubt, and
will not bring us ourselves to the front to sit in high place and put
them into effect; but so they will be all the more beneficial.
Everything teaches us how gradually nature would have all profound
changes brought about; and we can even see, too, where the absolute
abrupt stoppage of feudal habits has worked harm. And appealing to
the sense of truth and reason, these considerations will, without
doubt, touch and move all those of even the Barbarians themselves,
who are (as are some of us Philistines also, and some of the
Populace) beyond their fellows quick of feeling for truth and reason.
For indeed this is just one of the advantages of sweetness and light
over fire and strength, that sweetness and light make a feudal class
quietly and gradually drop its feudal habits because it sees them at
variance with truth and reason, while fire and strength tear them
passionately off it because it applauded Mr. Lowe when he called, or
was supposed to call, the working-class drunken and venal.
[222] But when once we have begun to recount the practical operations
by which our Liberal friends work for the removal of definite evils,
and in which if we do not join them they are apt to grow impatient
with us, how can we pass over that very interesting operation of this
kind,--the attempt to enable a man to marry his deceased wife's
sister? This operation, too, like that for abating the feudal
customs of succession in land, I have had the advantage of myself
seeing and hearing my Liberal friends labour at. I was lucky enough
to be present when Mr. Chambers, I think, brought forward in the
House of Commons his bill for enabling a man to marry his deceased
wife's sister, and I heard the speech which Mr. Chambers then made in
support of his bill. His first point was that God's law,--the name
he always gave to the Book of Leviticus,--did not really forbid a man
to marry his deceased wife's sister. God's law not forbidding it,
the Liberal maxim that a man's prime right and happiness is to do as
he likes ought at once to come into force, and to annul any such
check upon the assertion of personal liberty as the prohibition to
marry one's deceased wife's sister. A distinguished Liberal
supporter of Mr. Chambers, in [223] the debate which followed the
introduction of the bill, produced a formula of much beauty and
neatness for conveying in brief the Liberal notions on this head:
"Liberty," said he, "is the law of human life." And, therefore, the
moment it is ascertained that God's law, the Book of Leviticus, does
not stop the way, man's law, the law of liberty, asserts its right,
and makes us free to marry our deceased wife's sister.
And this exactly falls in with what Mr. Hepworth Dixon, who may
almost be called the Colenso of love and marriage,--such a revolution
does he make in our ideas on these matters, just as Dr. Colenso does
in our ideas on religion,--tells us of the notions and proceedings of
our kinsmen in America. With that affinity of genius to the Hebrew
genius which we have already noticed, and with the strong belief of
our race that liberty is the law of human life, so far as a fixed,
perfect, and paramount rule of conscience, the Bible, does not
expressly control it, our American kinsmen go again, Mr. Hepworth
Dixon tells us, to their Bible, the Mormons to the patriarchs and the
Old Testament, Brother Noyes to St. Paul and the New, and having
never before read anything else but [224] their Bible, they now read
their Bible over again, and make all manner of great discoveries
there. All these discoveries are favourable to liberty, and in this
way is satisfied that double craving so characteristic of the
Philistine, and so eminently exemplified in that crowned Philistine,
Henry the Eighth,--the craving for forbidden fruit and the craving
for legality. Mr. Hepworth Dixon's eloquent writings give currency,
over here, to these important discoveries; so that now, as regards
love and marriage, we seem to be entering, with all our sails spread,
upon what Mr. Hepworth Dixon, its apostle and evangelist, calls a
Gothic Revival, but what one of the many newspapers that so greatly
admire Mr. Hepworth Dixon's lithe and sinewy style and form their own
style upon it, calls, by a yet bolder and more striking figure, "a
great sexual insurrection of our Anglo-Teutonic race." For this end
we have to avert our eyes from everything Hellenic and fanciful, and
to keep them steadily fixed upon the two cardinal points of the Bible
and liberty. And one of those practical operations in which the
Liberal party engage, and in which we are summoned to join them,
directs itself entirely, as we have seen, to these cardinal points,
[225] and may almost be regarded, perhaps, as a kind of first
instalment or public and parliamentary pledge of the great sexual
insurrection of our Anglo-Teutonic race.
But here, as elsewhere, what we seek is the Philistine's perfection,
the development of his best self, not mere liberty for his ordinary
self. And we no more allow absolute validity to his stock maxim,
Liberty is the law of human life, than we allow it to the opposite
maxim, which is just as true, Renouncement is the law of human life.
For we know that the only perfect freedom is, as our religion says, a
service; not a service to any stock maxim, but an elevation of our
best self, and a harmonising in subordination to this, and to the
idea of a perfected humanity, all the multitudinous, turbulent, and
blind impulses of our ordinary selves. Now, the Philistine's great
defect being a defect in delicacy of perception, to cultivate in him
this delicacy, to render it independent of external and mechanical
rule, and a law to itself, is what seems to make most for his
perfection, his true humanity. And his true humanity, and therefore
his happiness, appears to lie much more, so far as the relations of
love and [226] marriage are concerned, in becoming alive to the finer
shades of feeling which arise within these relations, in being able
to enter with tact and sympathy into the subtle instinctive
propensions and repugnances of the person with whose life his own
life is bound up, to make them his own, to direct and govern, in
harmony with them, the arbitrary range of his personal action, and
thus to enlarge his spiritual and intellectual life and liberty, than
in remaining insensible to these finer shades of feeling, this
delicate sympathy, in giving unchecked range, so far as he can, to
his mere personal action, in allowing no limits or government to this
except such as a mechanical external law imposes, and in thus really
narrowing, for the satisfaction of his ordinary self, his spiritual
and intellectual life and liberty.
Still more must this be so when his fixed eternal rule, his God's
law, is supplied to him from a source which is less fit, perhaps, to
supply final and absolute instructions on this particular topic of
love and marriage than on any other relation of human life. Bishop
Wilson, who is full of examples of that fruitful Hellenising within
the limits of Hebraism itself, of that renewing of the [227] stiff
and stark notions of Hebraism by turning upon them a stream of fresh
thought and consciousness, which we have already noticed in St.
Paul,--Bishop Wilson gives an admirable lesson to rigid Hebraisers,
like Mr. Chambers, asking themselves: Does God's law (that is, the
Book of Leviticus) forbid us to marry our wife's sister?--Does God's
law (that is, again, the Book of Leviticus) allow us to marry our
wife's sister?--when he says: "Christian duties are founded on
reason, not on the sovereign authority of God commanding what he
pleases; God cannot command us what is not fit to be believed or
done, all his commands being founded in the necessities of our
nature." And, immense as is our debt to the Hebrew race and its
genius, incomparable as is its authority on certain profoundly
important sides of our human nature, worthy as it is to be described
as having uttered, for those sides, the voice of the deepest
necessities of our nature, the statutes of the divine and eternal
order of things, the law of God,--who, that is not manacled and
hoodwinked by his Hebraism, can believe that, as to love and
marriage, our reason and the necessities of our humanity have their
true, [228] sufficient, and divine law expressed for them by the
voice of any Oriental and polygamous nation like the Hebrews? Who, I
say, will believe, when he really considers the matter, that where
the feminine nature, the feminine ideal, and our relations to them,
are brought into question, the delicate and apprehensive genius of
the Indo-European race, the race which invented the Muses, and
chivalry, and the Madonna, is to find its last word on this question
in the institutions of a Semitic people, whose wisest king had seven
hundred wives and three hundred concubines?
If here again, therefore, we seem to minister better to the diseased
spirit of our time by leading it to think about the operation our
Liberal friends have in hand, than by lending a hand to this
operation ourselves, let us see, before we dismiss from our view the
practical operations of our Liberal friends, whether the same thing
does not hold good as to their celebrated industrial and economical
labours also. Their great work of this kind is, of course, their
free-trade policy. This policy, as having enabled the poor man to
eat untaxed bread, and as having wonderfully augmented trade, we
[229] are accustomed to speak of with a kind of solemnity; it is
chiefly on their having been our leaders in this policy that Mr.
Bright founds for himself and his friends the claim, so often
asserted by him, to be considered guides of the blind, teachers of
the ignorant, benefactors slowly and laboriously developing in the
Conservative party and in the country that which Mr. Bright is fond
of calling the growth of intelligence,--the object, as is well known,
of all the friends of culture also, and the great end and aim of the
culture that we preach. Now, having first saluted free-trade and its
doctors with all respect, let us see whether even here, too, our
Liberal friends do not pursue their operations in a mechanical way,
without reference to any firm intelligible law of things, to human
life as a whole, and human happiness; and whether it is not more for
our good, at this particular moment at any rate, if, instead of
worshipping free-trade with them Hebraistically, as a kind of fetish,
and helping them to pursue it as an end in and for itself, we turn
the free stream of our thought upon their treatment of it, and see
how this is related to the intelligible law of human life, and to
national well- [230] being and happiness. In short, suppose we
Hellenise a little with free-trade, as we Hellenised with the Real
Estate Intestacy Bill, and with the disestablishment of the Irish
Church by the power of the Nonconformists' antipathy to religious
establishments and endowments, and see whether what our reprovers
beautifully call ministering to the diseased spirit of our time is
best done by the Hellenising method of proceeding, or by the other.
But first let us understand how the policy of free-trade really
shapes itself for our Liberal friends, and how they practically
employ it as an instrument of national happiness and salvation. For
as we said that it seemed clearly right to prevent the Church
property of Ireland from being all taken for the benefit of the
Church of a small minority, so it seems clearly right that the poor
man should eat untaxed bread, and, generally, that restrictions and
regulations which, for the supposed benefit of some particular person
or class of persons, make the price of things artificially high here,
or artificially low there, and interfere with the natural flow of
trade and commerce, should be done away with. But in the policy of
our Liberal friends free-trade [231] means more than this, and is
specially valued as a stimulant to the production of wealth, as they
call it, and to the increase of the trade, business, and population
of the country. We have already seen how these things,--trade,
business, and population,--are mechanically pursued by us as ends
precious in themselves, and are worshipped as what we call fetishes;
and Mr. Bright, I have already said, when he wishes to give the
working-class a true sense of what makes glory and greatness, tells
it to look at the cities it has built, the railroads it has made, the
manufactures it has produced. So to this idea of glory and greatness
the free-trade which our Liberal friends extol so solemnly and
devoutly has served,--to the increase of trade, business, and
population; and for this it is prized. Therefore, the untaxing of
the poor man's bread has, with this view of national happiness, been
used, not so much to make the existing poor man's bread cheaper or
more abundant, but rather to create more poor men to eat it; so that
we cannot precisely say that we have fewer poor men than we had
before free-trade, but we can say with truth that we have many more
centres of industry, as they are called, and much [232] more
business, population, and manufactures. And if we are sometimes a
little troubled by our multitude of poor men, yet we know the
increase of manufactures and population to be such a salutary thing
in itself, and our free-trade policy begets such an admirable
movement, creating fresh centres of industry and fresh poor men here,
while we were thinking about our poor men there, that we are quite
dazzled and borne away, and more and more industrial movement is
called for, and our social progress seems to become one triumphant
and enjoyable course of what is sometimes called, vulgarly,
outrunning the constable.
If, however, taking some other criterion of man's well-being than the
cities he has built and the manufactures he has produced, we persist
in thinking that our social progress would be happier if there were
not so many of us so very poor, and in busying ourselves with notions
of in some way or other adjusting the poor man and business one to
the other, and not multiplying the one and the other mechanically and
blindly, then our Liberal friends, the appointed doctors of free-
trade, take us up very sharply. "Art is long," says The Times, "and
life [233] is short; for the most part we settle things first and
understand them afterwards. Let us have as few theories as possible;
what is wanted is not the light of speculation. If nothing worked
well of which the theory was not perfectly understood, we should be
in sad confusion. The relations of labour and capital, we are told,
are not understood, yet trade and commerce, on the whole, work
satisfactorily." I quote from The Times of only the other day. But
thoughts like these, as I have often pointed out, are thoroughly
British thoughts, and we have been familiar with them for years.
Or, if we want more of a philosophy of the matter than this, our
free-trade friends have two axioms for us, axioms laid down by their
justly esteemed doctors, which they think ought to satisfy us
entirely. One is, that, other things being equal, the more
population increases, the more does production increase to keep pace
with it; because men by their numbers and contact call forth all
manner of activities and resources in one another and in nature,
which, when men are few and sparse, are never developed. The other
is, that, although population always tends to equal the means of
[234] subsistence, yet people's notions of what subsistence is
enlarge as civilisation advances, and take in a number of things
beyond the bare necessaries of life; and thus, therefore, is supplied
whatever check on population is needed. But the error of our friends
is just, perhaps, that they apply axioms of this sort as if they were
self-acting laws which will put themselves into operation without
trouble or planning on our part, if we will only pursue free-trade,
business, and population zealously and staunchly. Whereas the real
truth is, that, however the case might be under other circumstances,
yet in fact, as we now manage the matter, the enlarged conception of
what is included in subsistence does not operate to prevent the
bringing into the world of numbers of people who but just attain to
the barest necessaries of life or who even fail to attain to them;
while, again, though production may increase as population increases,
yet it seems that the production may be of such a kind, and so
related, or rather non-related, to population, that the population
may be little the better for it. For instance, with the increase of
population since Queen Elizabeth's time the production of silk-
stockings has wonderfully increased, and silk- [235] stockings have
become much cheaper and procurable in much greater abundance by many
more people, and tend perhaps, as population and manufactures
increase, to get cheaper and cheaper, and at last to become,
according to Bastiat's favourite image, a common free property of the
human race, like light and air. But bread and bacon have not become
much cheaper with the increase of population since Queen Elizabeth's
time, nor procurable in much greater abundance by many more people;
neither do they seem at all to promise to become, like light and air,
a common free property of the human race. And if bread and bacon
have not kept pace with our population, and we have many more people
in want of them now than in Queen Elizabeth's time, it seems vain to
tell us that silk-stockings have kept pace with our population, or
even more than kept pace with it, and that we are to get our comfort
out of that. In short, it turns out that our pursuit of free-trade,
as of so many other things, has been too mechanical. We fix upon
some object, which in this case is the production of wealth, and the
increase of manufactures, population, and commerce through free-
[236] trade, as a kind of one thing needful, or end in itself, and
then we pursue it staunchly and mechanically, and say that it is our
duty to pursue it staunchly and mechanically, not to see how it is
related to the whole intelligible law of things and to full human
perfection, or to treat it as the piece of machinery, of varying
value as its relations to the intelligible law of things vary, which
it really is.
So it is of no use to say to The Times, and to our Liberal friends
rejoicing in the possession of their talisman of free-trade, that
about one in nineteen of our population is a pauper, and that, this
being so, trade and commerce can hardly be said to prove by their
satisfactory working that it matters nothing whether the relations
between labour and capital are understood or not; nay, that we can
hardly be said not to be in sad confusion. For here comes in our
faith in the staunch mechanical pursuit of a fixed object, and covers
itself with that imposing and colossal necessitarianism of The Times
which we have before noticed. And this necessitarianism, taking for
granted that an increase in trade and population is a good in itself,
one of the chiefest of goods, tells us that disturbances of [237]
human happiness caused by ebbs and flows in the tide of trade and
business, which, on the whole, steadily mounts, are inevitable and
not to be quarrelled with. This firm philosophy I seek to call to
mind when I am in the East of London, whither my avocations often
lead me; and, indeed, to fortify myself against the depressing sights
which on these occasions assail us, I have transcribed from The Times
one strain of this kind, full of the finest economical doctrine, and
always carry it about with me. The passage is this:--
"The East End is the most commercial, the most industrial, the most
fluctuating region of the metropolis. It is always the first to
suffer; for it is the creature of prosperity, and falls to the ground
the instant there is no wind to bear it up. The whole of that region
is covered with huge docks, shipyards, manufactories, and a
wilderness of small houses, all full of life and happiness in brisk
times, but in dull times withered and lifeless, like the deserts we
read of in the East. Now their brief spring is over. There is no
one to blame for this; it is the result of Nature's simplest laws!"
We must all agree that it is impossible that [238] anything can be
firmer than this, or show a surer faith in the working of free-trade,
as our Liberal friends understand and employ it.
But, if we still at all doubt whether the indefinite multiplication
of manufactories and small houses can be such an absolute good in
itself as to counterbalance the indefinite multiplication of poor
people, we shall learn that this multiplication of poor people, too,
is an absolute good in itself, and the result of divine and beautiful
laws. This is indeed a favourite thesis with our Philistine friends,
and I have already noticed the pride and gratitude with which they
receive certain articles in The Times, dilating in thankful and
solemn language on the majestic growth of our population. But I
prefer to quote now, on this topic, the words of an ingenious young
Scotch writer, Mr. Robert Buchanan, because he invests with so much
imagination and poetry this current idea of the blessed and even
divine character which the multiplying of population is supposed in
itself to have. "We move to multiplicity," says Mr. Robert Buchanan.
"If there is one quality which seems God's, and his exclusively, it
seems that divine philoprogenitiveness, [239] that passionate love of
distribution and expansion into living forms. Every animal added
seems a new ecstasy to the Maker; every life added, a new embodiment
of his love. He would swarm the earth with beings. There are never
enough. Life, life, life,--faces gleaming, hearts beating, must fill
every cranny. Not a corner is suffered to remain empty. The whole
earth breeds, and God glories."
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