Culture and Anarchy
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Matthew Arnold >> Culture and Anarchy
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It is a little unjust, perhaps, to attribute to the Divinity
exclusively this philoprogenitiveness, which the British Philistine,
and the poorer class of Irish, may certainly claim to share with him;
yet how inspiriting is here the whole strain of thought! and these
beautiful words, too, I carry about with me in the East of London,
and often read them there. They are quite in agreement with the
popular language one is accustomed to hear about children and large
families, which describes children as sent. And a line of poetry
which Mr. Robert Buchanan throws in presently after the poetical
prose I have quoted:--
'Tis the old story of the fig-leaf time--
this fine line, too, naturally connects itself, when one is in the
East of London, with the idea of God's [240] desire to swarm the
earth with beings; because the swarming of the earth with beings does
indeed, in the East of London, so seem to revive
. . . the old story of the fig-leaf time--
such a number of the people one meets there having hardly a rag to
cover them; and the more the swarming goes on, the more it promises
to revive this old story. And when the story is perfectly revived,
the swarming quite completed, and every cranny choke-full, then, too,
no doubt, the faces in the East of London will be gleaming faces,
which Mr. Robert Buchanan says it is God's desire they should be, and
which every one must perceive they are not at present, but, on the
contrary, very miserable.
But to prevent all this philosophy and poetry from quite running away
with us, and making us think with The Times, and our practical
Liberal free-traders, and the British Philistines generally, that the
increase of small houses and manufactories, or the increase of
population, are absolute goods in themselves, to be mechanically
pursued, and to be worshipped like fetishes,--to prevent this, we
have got that notion of ours immoveably fixed, of which I [241] have
long ago spoken, the notion that culture, or the study of perfection,
leads us to conceive of no perfection as being real which is not a
general perfection, embracing all our fellow-men with whom we have
to do. Such is the sympathy which binds humanity together, that we
are indeed, as our religion says, members of one body, and if one
member suffer, all the members suffer with it; individual perfection
is impossible so long as the rest of mankind are not perfected along
with us. "The multitude of the wise is the welfare of the world,"
says the wise man. And to this effect that excellent and often
quoted guide of ours, Bishop Wilson, has some striking words:--"It is
not," says he, "so much our neighbour's interest as our own that we
love him." And again he says: "Our salvation does in some measure
depend upon that of others." And the author of the Imitation puts
the same thing admirably when he says:--"Obscurior etiam via ad
coelum videbatur quando tam pauci regnum coelorum quaerere
curabant,"+--the fewer there are who follow the way to perfection,
the harder that way is to find. So all our fellow-men, in the East
of London and elsewhere, we must take along with us in the progress
towards perfection, [242] if we ourselves really, as we profess, want
to be perfect; and we must not let the worship of any fetish, any
machinery, such as manufactures or population,--which are not, like
perfection, absolute goods in themselves, though we think them so,--
create for us such a multitude of miserable, sunken, and ignorant
human beings, that to carry them all along with us is impossible, and
perforce they must for the most part be left by us in their
degradation and wretchedness. But evidently the conception of free-
trade, on which our Liberal friends vaunt themselves, and in which
they think they have found the secret of national prosperity,--
evidently, I say, the mere unfettered pursuit of the production of
wealth, and the mere mechanical multiplying, for this end, of
manufactures and population, threatens to create for us, if it has
not created already, those vast, miserable, unmanageable masses of
sunken people,--one pauper, at the present moment, for every nineteen
of us,--to the existence of which we are, as we have seen, absolutely
forbidden to reconcile ourselves, in spite of all that the philosophy
of The Times and the poetry of Mr. Robert Buchanan may say to
persuade us.
[243] And though Hebraism, following its best and highest instinct,--
identical, as we have seen, with that of Hellenism in its final aim,
the aim of perfection,--teaches us this very clearly; and though from
Hebraising counsellors,--the Bible, Bishop Wilson, the author of the
Imitation,--I have preferred (as well I may, for from this rock of
Hebraism we are all hewn!) to draw the texts which we use to bring
home to our minds this teaching; yet Hebraism seems powerless, almost
as powerless as our free-trading Liberal friends, to deal
efficaciously with our ever-accumulating masses of pauperism, and to
prevent their accumulating still more. Hebraism builds churches,
indeed, for these masses, and sends missionaries among them; above
all, it sets itself against the social necessitarianism of The Times,
and refuses to accept their degradation as inevitable; but with
regard to their ever-increasing accumulation, it seems to be led to
the very same conclusions, though from a point of view of its own, as
our free-trading Liberal friends. Hebraism, with that mechanical and
misleading use of the letter of Scripture on which we have already
commented, is governed by such texts as: Be fruitful and multiply,+
the edict of [244] God's law, as Mr. Chambers would say; or by the
declaration of what he would call God's words in the Psalms, that the
man who has a great number of children is thereby made happy. And in
conjunction with such texts as these it is apt to place another text:
The poor shall never cease out of the land.+ Thus Hebraism is
conducted to nearly the same notion as the popular mind and as Mr.
Robert Buchanan, that children are sent, and that the divine nature
takes a delight in swarming the East End of London with paupers.
Only, when they are perishing in their helplessness and wretchedness,
it asserts the Christian duty of succouring them, instead of saying,
like The Times: "Now their brief spring is over; there is nobody to
blame for this; it is the result of Nature's simplest laws!" But,
like The Times, Hebraism despairs of any help from knowledge and says
that "what is wanted is not the light of speculation." I remember,
only the other day, a good man, looking with me upon a multitude of
children who were gathered before us in one of the most miserable
regions of London,--children eaten up with disease, half-sized, half-
fed, half-clothed, neglected by their parents, without health,
without [245] home, without hope,--said to me: "The one thing really
needful is to teach these little ones to succour one another, if only
with a cup of cold water; but now, from one end of the country to the
other, one hears nothing but the cry for knowledge, knowledge,
knowledge!" And yet surely, so long as these children are there in
these festering masses, without health, without home, without hope,
and so long as their multitude is perpetually swelling, charged with
misery they must still be for themselves, charged with misery they
must still be for us, whether they help one another with a cup of
cold water or no; and the knowledge how to prevent their accumulating
is necessary, even to give their moral life and growth a fair chance!
May we not, therefore, say, that neither the true Hebraism of this
good man, willing to spend and be spent for these sunken multitudes,
nor what I may call the spurious Hebraism of our free-trading Liberal
friends,--mechanically worshipping their fetish of the production of
wealth and of the increase of manufactures and population, and
looking neither to the right nor left so long as this increase goes
on,--avail us much here; and that here, again, what we [246] want is
Hellenism, the letting our consciousness play freely and simply upon
the facts before us, and listening to what it tells us of the
intelligible law of things as concerns them? And surely what it
tells us is, that a man's children are not really sent, any more than
the pictures upon his wall, or the horses in his stable, are sent;
and that to bring people into the world, when one cannot afford to
keep them and oneself decently and not too precariously, or to bring
more of them into the world than one can afford to keep thus, is,
whatever The Times and Mr. Robert Buchanan may say, by no means an
accomplishment of the divine will or a fulfilment of Nature's
simplest laws, but is just as wrong, just as contrary to reason and
the will of God, as for a man to have horses, or carriages, or
pictures, when he cannot afford them, or to have more of them than he
can afford; and that, in the one case as in the other, the larger the
scale on which the violation of reason's laws is practised, and the
longer it is persisted in, the greater must be the confusion and
final trouble. Surely no laudations of free-trade, no meetings of
bishops and clergy in the East End of London, no reading of papers
and reports, can tell [247] us anything about our social condition
which it more concerns us to know than that! and not only to know,
but habitually to have the knowledge present, and to act upon it as
one acts upon the knowledge that water wets and fire burns! And not
only the sunken populace of our great cities are concerned to know
it, and the pauper twentieth of our population; we Philistines of the
middle-class, too, are concerned to know it, and all who have to set
themselves to make progress in perfection.
But we all know it already! some one will say; it is the simplest law
of prudence. But how little reality must there be in our knowledge
of it; how little can we be putting it in practice; how little is it
likely to penetrate among the poor and struggling masses of our
population, and to better our condition, so long as an unintelligent
Hebraism of one sort keeps repeating as an absolute eternal word of
God the psalm-verse which says that the man who has a great many
children is happy; or an unintelligent Hebraism of another sort keeps
assigning as an absolute proof of national prosperity the multiplying
of manufactures and population! Surely, the one set of Hebraisers
have [248] to learn that their psalm-verse was composed at the
resettlement of Jerusalem after the Captivity, when the Jews of
Jerusalem were a handful, an undermanned garrison, and every child
was a blessing; and that the word of God, or the voice of the divine
order of things, declares the possession of a great many children to
be a blessing only when it really is so! And the other set of
Hebraisers, have they not to learn that if they call their private
acquaintances imprudent and unlucky, when, with no means of support
for them or with precarious means, they have a large family of
children, then they ought not to call the State well managed and
prosperous merely because its manufactures and its citizens multiply,
if the manufactures, which bring new citizens into existence just as
much as if they had actually begotten them, bring more of them into
existence than they can maintain, or are too precarious to go on
maintaining those whom for a while they maintained? Hellenism,
surely, or the habit of fixing our mind upon the intelligible law of
things, is most salutary if it makes us see that the only absolute
good, the only absolute and eternal object prescribed to us by God's
law, or the divine order of [249] things, is the progress towards
perfection,--our own progress towards it and the progress of
humanity. And therefore, for every individual man, and for every
society of men, the possession and multiplication of children, like
the possession and multiplication of horses and pictures, is to be
accounted good or bad, not in itself, but with reference to this
object and the progress towards it. And as no man is to be excused
in having horses or pictures, if his having them hinders his own or
others' progress towards perfection and makes them lead a servile and
ignoble life, so is no man to be excused for having children if his
having them makes him or others lead this. Plain thoughts of this
kind are surely the spontaneous product of our consciousness, when it
is allowed to play freely and disinterestedly upon the actual facts
of our social condition, and upon our stock notions and stock habits
in respect to it. Firmly grasped and simply uttered, they are more
likely, one cannot but think, to better that condition, and to
diminish our formidable rate of one pauper to every nineteen of us,
than is the Hebraising and mechanical pursuit of free-trade by our
Liberal friends.
So that, here as elsewhere, the practical operations [250] of our
Liberal friends, by which they set so much store, and in which they
invite us to join them and to show what Mr. Bright calls a
commendable interest, do not seem to us so practical for real good as
they think; and our Liberal friends seem to us themselves to need to
Hellenise, as we say, a little,--that is, to examine into the nature
of real good, and to listen to what their consciousness tells them
about it,--rather than to pursue with such heat and confidence their
present practical operations. And it is clear that they have no just
cause, so far as regards several operations of theirs which we have
canvassed, to reproach us with delicate Conservative scepticism; for
often by Hellenising we seem to subvert stock Conservative notions
and usages more effectually than they subvert them by Hebraising.
But, in truth, the free spontaneous play of consciousness with which
culture tries to float our stock habits of thinking and acting, is by
its very nature, as has been said, disinterested. Sometimes the
result of floating them may be agreeable to this party, sometimes to
that; now it may be unwelcome to our so-called Liberals, now to our
so-called Conservatives; but what culture seeks is, above all, to
float them, to [251] prevent their being stiff and stark pieces of
petrifaction any longer. It is mere Hebraising, if we stop short,
and refuse to let our consciousness play freely, whenever we or our
friends do not happen to like what it discovers to us. This is to
make the Liberal party, or the Conservative party, our one thing
needful, instead of human perfection; and we have seen what mischief
arises from making an even greater thing than the Liberal or the
Conservative party,--the predominance of the moral side in man,--our
one thing needful. But wherever the free play of our consciousness
leads us, we shall follow; believing that in this way we shall tend
to make good at all points what is wanting to us, and so shall be
brought nearer to our complete human perfection.
Thus we may often, perhaps, praise much that a so-called Liberal
thinks himself forbidden to praise, and yet blame much that a so-
called Conservative thinks himself forbidden to blame, because these
are both of them partisans, and no partisan can afford to be thus
disinterested. But we who are not partisans can afford it; and so,
after we have seen what Nonconformists lose by being locked up in
their New Road forms of religious institution, [252] we can let
ourselves see, on the other hand, how their ministers, in a time of
movement of ideas like our present time, are apt to be more exempt
than the ministers of a great Church establishment from that self-
confidence, and sense of superiority to such a movement, which are
natural to a powerful hierarchy; and which in Archdeacon Denison, for
instance, seem almost carried to such a pitch that they may become,
one cannot but fear, his spiritual ruin. But seeing this does not
dispose us, therefore, to lock up all the nation in forms of worship
of the New Road type; but it points us to the quite new ideal, of
combining grand and national forms of worship with an openness and
movement of mind not yet found in any hierarchy. So, again, if we
see what is called ritualism making conquests in our Puritan middle-
class, we may rejoice that portions of this class should have become
alive to the aesthetical weakness of their position, even although
they have not yet become alive to the intellectual weakness of it.
In Puritanism, on the other hand, we can respect that idea of dealing
sincerely with oneself, which is at once the great force of
Puritanism,--Puritanism's great superiority over all products, like
ritualism, of our Catholicising [253] tendencies,--and also an idea
rich in the latent seeds of intellectual promise. But we do this,
without on that account hiding from ourselves that Puritanism has by
Hebraising misapplied that idea, has as yet developed none or hardly
one of those seeds, and that its triumph at its present stage of
development would be baneful.
Everything, in short, confirms us in the doctrine, so unpalatable to
the believers in action, that our main business at the present moment
is not so much to work away at certain crude reforms of which we have
already the scheme in our own mind, as to create, through the help of
that culture which at the very outset we began by praising and
recommending, a frame of mind out of which really fruitful reforms
may with time grow. At any rate, we ourselves must put up with our
friends' impatience, and with their reproaches against cultivated
inaction, and must still decline to lend a hand to their practical
operations, until we, for our own part at least, have grown a little
clearer about the nature of real good, and have arrived nearer to a
condition of mind out of which really fruitful and solid operations
may spring.
In the meanwhile, since our Liberal friends keep [254] loudly and
resolutely assuring us that their actual operations at present are
fruitful and solid, let us in each case keep testing these operations
in the simple way we have indicated, by letting the natural stream of
our consciousness flow over them freely; and if they stand this test
successfully, then let us give them our commendable interest, but not
else. For example. Our Liberal friends assure us, at the very top
of their voices, that their present actual operation for the
disestablishment of the Irish Church is fruitful and solid. But what
if, on testing it, the truth appears to be, that the statesmen and
reasonable people of both parties wished for much the same thing,--
the fair apportionment of the church property of Ireland among the
principal religious bodies there; but that, behind the statesmen and
reasonable people, there was, on one side, a mass of Tory prejudice,
and, on the other, a mass of Nonconformist prejudice, to which such
an arrangement was unpalatable? Well, the natural way, one thinks,
would have been for the statesmen and reasonable people of both sides
to have united, and to have allayed and dissipated, so far as they
could, the resistance of their respective extremes, and where [255]
they could not, to have confronted it in concert. But we see that,
instead of this, Liberal statesmen waited to trip up their rivals, if
they proposed the arrangement which both knew to be reasonable, by
means of the prejudice of their own Nonconformist extreme; and then,
themselves proposing an arrangement to flatter this prejudice, made
the other arrangement, which they themselves knew to be reasonable,
out of the question; and drove their rivals in their turn to blow up
with all their might, in the hope of baffling them, a great fire,
among their own Tory extreme, of fierce prejudice and religious
bigotry,--a fire which, once kindled, may always very easily spread
further? If, I say, on testing the present operation of our Liberal
friends for the disestablishment of the Irish Church, the truth about
it appears to be very much this, then, I think,--even with a
triumphant Liberal majority, and with our Liberal friends making
impassioned appeals to us to take a commendable interest in their
operation and them, and to rally round what Sir Henry Hoare (who may
be described, perhaps, as a Barbarian converted to Philistinism, as
I, on the other hand, seem to be a Philistine converted to culture)
finely calls the conscientiousness of a [256] Gladstone and the
intellect of a Bright,--it is rather our duty to abstain, and,
instead of lending a hand to the operation of our Liberal friends, to
do what we can to abate and dissolve the mass of prejudice, Tory or
Nonconformist, which makes so doubtfully begotten and equivocal an
operation as the present, producible and possible.
And so we bring to an end what we had to say in praise of culture,
and in evidence of its special utility for the circumstances in which
we find ourselves, and the confusion which environs us. Through
culture seems to lie our way, not only to perfection, but even to
safety. Resolutely refusing to lend a hand to the imperfect
operations of our Liberal friends, disregarding their impatience,
taunts, and reproaches, firmly bent on trying to find in the
intelligible law of things a firmer and sounder basis for future
practice than any which we have at present, and believing this search
and discovery to be, for our generation and circumstances, of yet
more vital and pressing importance than practice itself, we
nevertheless may do [257] more, perhaps, we poor disparaged followers
of culture, to make the actual present, and the frame of society in
which we live, solid and seaworthy, than all which our bustling
politicians can do. For we have seen how much of our disorders and
perplexities is due to the disbelief, among the classes and
combinations of men, Barbarian or Philistine, which have hitherto
governed our society, in right reason, in a paramount best self; to
the inevitable decay and break-up of the organisations by which,
asserting and expressing in these organisations their ordinary self
only, they have so long ruled us; and to their irresolution, when the
society, which their conscience tells them they have made and still
manage not with right reason but with their ordinary self, is rudely
shaken, in offering resistance to its subverters. But for us,--who
believe in right reason, in the duty and possibility of extricating
and elevating our best self, in the progress of humanity towards
perfection,--for us the framework of society, that theatre on which
this august drama has to unroll itself, is sacred; and whoever
administers it, and however we may seek to remove them from the
tenure of administration, yet, while they administer, [258] we
steadily and with undivided heart support them in repressing anarchy
and disorder; because without order there can be no society, and
without society there can be no human perfection.
With me, indeed, this rule of conduct is hereditary. I remember my
father, in one of his unpublished letters written more than forty
years ago, when the political and social state of the country was
gloomy and troubled, and there were riots in many places, goes on,
after strongly insisting on the badness and foolishness of the
government, and on the harm and dangerousness of our feudal and
aristocratical constitution of society, and ends thus: "As for
rioting, the old Roman way of dealing with that is always the right
one; flog the rank and file, and fling the ringleaders from the
Tarpeian Rock!" And this opinion we can never forsake, however our
Liberal friends may think a little rioting, and what they call
popular demonstrations, useful sometimes to their own interests and
to the interests of the valuable practical operations they have in
hand, and however they may preach the right of an Englishman to be
left to do as far as possible what he likes, and the duty of his
government to indulge him and connive as much as [259] possible and
abstain from all harshness of repression. And even when they
artfully show us operations which are undoubtedly precious, such as
the abolition of the slave-trade, and ask us if, for their sake,
foolish and obstinate governments may not wholesomely be frightened
by a little disturbance, the good design in view and the difficulty
of overcoming opposition to it being considered,--still we say no,
and that monster processions in the streets and forcible irruptions
into the parks, even in professed support of this good design, ought
to be unflinchingly forbidden and repressed; and that far more is
lost than is gained by permitting them. Because a State in which law
is authoritative and sovereign, a firm and settled course of public
order, is requisite if man is to bring to maturity anything precious
and lasting now, or to found anything precious and lasting for the
future.
Thus, in our eyes, the very framework and exterior order of the
State, whoever may administer the State, is sacred; and culture is
the most resolute enemy of anarchy, because of the great hopes and
designs for the State which culture teaches us to nourish. But as,
believing in right reason, and having faith in the progress of
humanity [260] towards perfection, and ever labouring for this end,
we grow to have clearer sight of the ideas of right reason, and of
the elements and helps of perfection, and come gradually to fill the
framework of the State with them, to fashion its internal composition
and all its laws and institutions conformably to them, and to make
the State more and more the expression, as we say, of our best self,
which is not manifold, and vulgar, and unstable, and contentious, and
ever-varying, but one, and noble, and secure, and peaceful, and the
same for all mankind,--with what aversion shall we not then regard
anarchy, with what firmness shall we not check it, when there is so
much that is so precious which it will endanger! So that, for the
sake of the present, but far more for the sake of the future, the
lovers of culture are unswervingly and with a good conscience the
opposers of anarchy. And not as the Barbarians and Philistines,
whose honesty and whose sense of humour make them shrink, as we have
seen, from treating the State as too serious a thing, and from giving
it too much power;--for indeed the only State they know of, and think
they administer, is the expression of their ordinary self; and though
the headstrong and violent [261] extreme among them might gladly arm
this with full authority, yet their virtuous mean is, as we have
said, pricked in conscience at doing this, and so our Barbarian
Secretaries of State let the Park railings be broken down, and our
Philistine Alderman-Colonels let the London roughs rob and beat the
bystanders. But we, beholding in the State no expression of our
ordinary self, but even already, as it were, the appointed frame and
prepared vessel of our best self, and, for the future, our best
self's powerful, beneficent, and sacred expression and organ,--we are
willing and resolved, even now, to strengthen against anarchy the
trembling hands of our Barbarian Home Secretaries, and the feeble
knees of our Philistine Alderman-Colonels; and to tell them, that it
is not really in behalf of their own ordinary self that they are
called to protect the Park railings, and to suppress the London
roughs, but in behalf of the best self both of themselves and of all
of us in the future.
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