Culture and Anarchy

M >> Matthew Arnold >> Culture and Anarchy

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So far, then, is culture from making us unjust to the Nonconformists
because it forbids us to worship their fetishes, that it even leads
us to propose to do more for them than they themselves venture to
claim. It leads us, also, to respect what is solid and respectable
in their convictions, while their latitudinarian friends make light
of it. Not that the forms in which the human spirit tries to express
the inexpressible, or the forms by which man tries to [xlv] worship,
have or can have, as has been said, for the follower of perfection,
anything necessary or eternal. If the New Testament and the practice
of the primitive Christians sanctioned the popular form of church
government a thousand times more expressly than they do, if the
Church since Constantine were a thousand times more of a departure
from the scheme of primitive Christianity than it can be shown to be,
that does not at all make, as is supposed by men in bondage to the
letter, the popular form of church government alone and always sacred
and binding, or the work of Constantine a thing to be regretted.
What is alone and always sacred and binding for man is the climbing
towards his total perfection, and the machinery by which he does this
varies in value according as it helps him to do it. The planters of
Christianity had their roots in deep and rich grounds of human life
and achievement, both Jewish and also Greek; and had thus a
comparatively firm and wide basis amidst all the vehement inspiration
of their mighty movement and change. By their strong inspiration
they carried men off the old basis of life and culture, whether
Jewish or Greek, and generations arose [xlvi] who had their roots in
neither world, and were in contact therefore with no full and great
stream of human life. Christianity might have lost herself, if it
had not been for some such change as that of the fourth century, in a
multitude of hole-and-corner churches like the churches of English
Nonconformity after its founders departed; churches without great
men, and without furtherance for the higher life of humanity. At a
critical moment came Constantine, and placed Christianity,--or let us
rather say, placed the human spirit, whose totality was endangered,--
in contact with the main current of human life. And his work was
justified by its fruits, in men like Augustine and Dante, and indeed
in all the great men of Christianity, Catholics or Protestants, ever
since. And one may go beyond this. Monsieur Albert Reville, whose
religious writings are always interesting, says that the conception
which cultivated and philosophical Jews now entertain of Christianity
and its founder, is probably destined to become the conception which
Christians themselves will entertain. Socinians are fond of saying
the same thing about the Socinian conception of Christianity. Even
if this were true, it would still have been [xlvii] better for a man,
through the last eighteen hundred years, to have been a Christian,
and a member of one of the great Christian communions, than to have
been a Jew or a Socinian; because the being in contact with the main
stream of human life is of more moment for a man's total spiritual
growth, and for his bringing to perfection the gifts committed to
him, which is his business on earth, than any speculative opinion
which he may hold or think he holds. Luther,--whom we have called a
Philistine of genius, and who, because he was a Philistine, had a
coarseness and lack of spiritual delicacy which have harmed his
disciples, but who, because he was a genius, had splendid flashes of
spiritual insight,--Luther says admirably in his Commentary on the
Book of Daniel: "A God is simply that whereon the human heart rests
with trust, faith, hope and love. If the resting is right, then the
God too is right; if the resting is wrong, then the God too is
illusory." In other words, the worth of what a man thinks about God
and the objects of religion depends on what the man is; and what the
man is, depends upon his having more or less reached the measure of a
perfect and total man.

[xlviii] All this is true; and yet culture, as we have seen, has more
tenderness for scruples of the Nonconformists than have their Broad
Church friends. That is because culture, disinterestedly trying, in
its aim at perfection, to see things as they really are, sees how
worthy and divine a thing is the religious side in man, though it is
not the whole of man. And when Mr. Greg, who differs from us about
edification, (and certainly we do not seem likely to agree with him
as to what edifies), finding himself moved by some extraneous
considerations or other to take a Church's part against its enemies,
calls taking a Church's part returning to base uses, culture teaches
us how out of place is this language, and that to use it shows an
inadequate conception of human nature, and that no Church will thank
a man for taking its part in this fashion, but will leave him with
indifference to the tender mercies of his Benthamite friends. But
avoiding Benthamism, or an inadequate conception of the religious
side in man, culture makes us also avoid Mialism, or an inadequate
conception of man's totality. Therefore to the worth and grandeur of
the religious side in man, culture is rejoiced and willing to pay any
tribute, [xlix] except the tribute of man's totality. True, the
order and liturgy of the Church of England one may be well contented
to live and to die with, and they are such as to inspire an
affectionate and revering attachment. True, the reproaches of
Nonconformists against this order for "retaining badges of
Antichristian recognisance;" and for "corrupting the right form of
Church polity with manifold Popish rites and ceremonies;" true, their
assertion of the essentialness of their own supposed Scriptural
order, and their belief in its eternal fitness, are founded on
illusion. True, the whole attitude of horror and holy superiority
assumed by Puritanism towards the Church of Rome, is wrong and false,
and well merits Sir Henry Wotton's rebuke:--"Take heed of thinking
that the farther you go from the Church of Rome, the nearer you are
to God." True, one of the best wishes one could form for Mr.
Spurgeon or Father Jackson is, that they might be permitted to learn
on this side the grave (for if they do not, a considerable surprise
is certainly reserved for them on the other) that Whitfield and
Wesley were not at all better than St. Francis, and that they
themselves are not at all better than Lacordaire. Yet, [l] in spite
of all this, so noble and divine a thing is religion, so respectable
is that earnestness which desires a prayer-book with one strain of
doctrine, so attaching is the order and discipline by which we are
used to have our religion conveyed, so many claims on our regard has
that popular form of church government for which Nonconformists
contend, so perfectly compatible is it with all progress towards
perfection, that culture would make us shy even to propose to
Nonconformists the acceptance of the Anglican prayer-book and the
episcopal order; and would be forward to wish them a prayer-book of
their own approving, and the church discipline to which they are
attached and accustomed. Only not at the price of Mialism; that is,
of a doctrine which leaves the Nonconformists in holes and corners,
out of contact with the main current of national life. One can lay
one's finger, indeed, on the line by which this doctrine has grown
up, and see how the essential part of Nonconformity is a popular
church-discipline analogous to that of the other reformed churches,
and how its voluntaryism is an accident. It contended for the
establishment of its own church-discipline as the only true [li] one;
and beaten in this contention, and seeing its rival established, it
came down to the more plausible proposal "to place all good men alike
in a condition of religious equality;" and this plan of proceeding,
originally taken as a mere second-best, became, by long sticking to
it and preaching it up, first fair, then righteous, then the only
righteous, then at last necessary to salvation. This is the plan for
remedying the Nonconformists' divorce from contact with the national
life by divorcing churchmen too from contact with it; that is, as we
have familiarly before put it, the tailless foxes are for cutting off
tails all round. But this the other foxes could not wisely grant,
unless it were proved that tails are of no value. And so, too,
unless it is proved that contact with the main current of national
life is of no value (and we have shown that it is of the greatest
value), we cannot safely, even to please the Nonconformists in a
matter where we would please them as much as possible, admit Mialism.

But now, as we have shown the disinterestedness which culture
enjoins, and its obedience not to likings or dislikings, but to the
aim of perfection, let us show its flexibility,--its independence of
machinery. That [lii] other and greater prophet of intelligence, and
reason, and the simple natural truth of things,--Mr. Bright,--means
by these, as we have seen, a certain set of measures which suit the
special ends of Liberal and Nonconformist partisans. For instance,
reason and justice towards Ireland mean the abolishment of the
iniquitous Protestant ascendency in such a particular way as to suit
the Nonconformists' antipathy to establishments. Reason and justice
pursued in a different way, by distributing among the three main
Churches of Ireland,--the Roman Catholic, the Anglican, and the
Presbyterian,--the church property of Ireland, would immediately
cease, for Mr. Bright and the Nonconformists, to be reason and
justice at all, and would become, as Mr. Spurgeon says, "a setting up
of the Roman image." Thus we see that the sort of intelligence
reached by culture is more disinterested than the sort of
intelligence reached by belonging to the Liberal party in the great
towns, and taking a commendable interest in politics. But still more
striking is the difference between the two views of intelligence,
when we see that culture not only makes a quite disinterested choice
of the machinery [liii] proper to carry us towards sweetness and
light, and to make reason and the will of God prevail, but by even
this machinery does not hold stiffly and blindly, and easily passes
on beyond it to that for the sake of which it chose it.

For instance: culture leads us to think that the ends of human
perfection might be best served by establishing,--that is, by
bringing into contact with the main current of the national life,--in
Ireland the Roman Catholic and the Presbyterian Churches along with
the Anglican Church; and, in England, a Presbyterian or
Congregational Church of like rank and status with our Episcopalian
one. It leads us to think that we should really, in this way, be
working to make reason and the will of God prevail; because we should
be making Roman Catholics better citizens, and Nonconformists,--nay,
and Churchmen along with them,-- larger-minded and more complete
men. But undoubtedly there are great difficulties in such a plan as
this; and the plan is not one which looks very likely to be adopted.
It is a plan more for a time of creative statesmen, like the time of
Elizabeth, than for a time of instrumental [liv] statesmen like the
present. The Churchman must rise above his ordinary self in order to
favour it; and the Nonconformist has worshipped his fetish of
separatism so long that he is likely to wish still to remain, like
Ephraim, "a wild ass alone by himself." The centre of power being
where it is, our instrumental statesmen have every temptation, as is
shown more at large in the following essay, in the first place, to
"relieve themselves," as The Times says, "of troublesome and
irritating responsibilities;" in the second place, when they must
act, to go along, as they do, with the ordinary self of those on
whose favour they depend, to adopt as their own its desires, and to
serve them with fidelity, and even, if possible, with impulsiveness.
This is the more easy for them, because there are not wanting,--and
there never will be wanting,--thinkers like Mr. Baxter, Mr. Charles
Buxton, and the Dean of Canterbury, to swim with the stream, but to
swim with it philosophically; to call the desires of the ordinary
self of any great section of the community edicts of the national
mind and laws of human progress, and to give them a general, a
philosophic, and an imposing expression. A generous statesman may
[lv] honestly, therefore, soon unlearn any disposition to put his
tongue in his cheek in advocating these desires, and may advocate
them with fervour and impulsiveness. Therefore a plan such as that
which we have indicated does not seem a plan so likely to find favour
as a plan for abolishing the Irish Church by the power of the
Nonconformists' antipathy to establishments.

But to tell us that our fond dreams are on that account shattered is
inexact, and is the sort of language which ought to be addressed to
the promoters of intelligence through public meetings and a
commendable interest in politics, when they fail in their designs,
and not to us. For we are fond stickers to no machinery, not even
our own; and we have no doubt that perfection can be reached without
it,--with free churches as with established churches, and with
instrumental statesmen as with creative statesmen. But it can never
be reached without seeing things as they really are; and it is to
this, therefore, and to no machinery in the world, that culture
sticks fondly. It insists that men should not mistake, as they are
prone to mistake, their natural taste for the bathos for a relish for
the sublime; and if statesmen, either [lvi] with their tongue in
their cheek or through a generous impulsiveness, tell them their
natural taste for the bathos is a relish for the sublime, there is
the more need for culture to tell them the contrary. It is delusion
on this point which is fatal, and against delusion on this point
culture works. It is not fatal to our Liberal friends to labour for
free trade, extension of the suffrage, and abolition of church-rates,
instead of graver social ends; but it is fatal to them to be told by
their flatterers, and to believe, with our pauperism increasing more
rapidly than our population, that they have performed a great, an
heroic work, by occupying themselves exclusively, for the last thirty
years, with these Liberal nostrums, and that the right and good
course for them now is to go on occupying themselves with the like
for the future. It is not fatal to Americans to have no religious
establishments and no effective centres of high culture; but it is
fatal to them to be told by their flatterers, and to believe, that
they are the most intelligent people in the whole world, when of
intelligence, in the true and fruitful sense of the word, they even
singularly, as we have seen, come short. It is not [lvii] fatal to
the Nonconformists to remain with their separated churches; but it is
fatal to them to be told by their flatterers, and to believe, that
theirs is the one pure and Christ-ordained way of worshipping God,
that provincialism and loss of totality have not come to them from
following it, or that provincialism and loss of totality are not
evils. It is not fatal to the English nation to abolish the Irish
Church by the power of the Nonconformists' antipathy to
establishments; but it is fatal to it to be told by its flatterers,
and to believe, that it is abolishing it through reason and justice,
when it is really abolishing it through this power; or to expect the
fruits of reason and justice from anything but the spirit of reason
and justice themselves.

Now culture, because of its keen sense of what is really fatal, is
all the more disposed to be pliant and easy about what is not fatal.
And because machinery is the bane of politics, and an inward working,
and not machinery, is what we most want, we keep advising our ardent
young Liberal friends to think less of machinery, to stand more aloof
from the arena of politics at present, and rather to try and promote,
with us, an inward working. They do not listen [lviii] to us, and
they rush into the arena of politics, where their merits, indeed,
seem to be little appreciated as yet; and then they complain of the
reformed constituencies, and call the new Parliament a Philistine
Parliament. As if a nation, nourished and reared in Hebraising,
could give us, just yet, anything better than a Philistine
Parliament!--for would a Barbarian Parliament be even so good, or a
Populace Parliament? For our part, we rejoice to see our dear old
friends, the Hebraising Philistines, gathered in force in the Valley
of Jehoshaphat before their final conversion, which will certainly
come; but for this conversion we must not try to oust them from their
places, and to contend for machinery with them, but we must work on
them inwardly and cure them of Hebraising.

Yet the days of Israel are innumerable; and in its blame of
Hebraising too, and in its praise of Hellenising, culture must not
fail to keep its flexibility, and to give to its judgments that
passing and provisional character which we have seen it impose on its
preferences and rejections of machinery. Now, and for us, it is a
time to Hellenise, and to praise knowing; for we have Hebraised too
much, [lix] and have over-valued doing. But the habits and
discipline received from Hebraism remain for our race an eternal
possession; and, as humanity is constituted, one must never assign
them the second rank to-day, without being ready to restore them to
the first rank to-morrow. To walk staunchly by the best light one
has, to be strict and sincere with oneself, not to be of the number
of those who say and do not, to be in earnest,--this is the
discipline by which alone man is enabled to rescue his life from
thraldom to the passing moment and to his bodily senses, to ennoble
it, and to make it eternal. And this discipline has been nowhere so
effectively taught as in the school of Hebraism. Sophocles and Plato
knew as well as the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews that
"without holiness no man shall see God," and their notion of what
goes to make up holiness was larger than his. But the intense and
convinced energy with which the Hebrew, both of the Old and of the
New Testament, threw himself upon his ideal, and which inspired the
incomparable definition of the great Christian virtue, Faith,--the
substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,--this
energy of faith in its ideal has [lx] belonged to Hebraism alone. As
our idea of holiness enlarges, and our scope of perfection widens
beyond the narrow limits to which the over-rigour of Hebraising has
tended to confine it, we shall come again to Hebraism for that devout
energy in embracing our ideal, which alone can give to man the
happiness of doing what he knows. "If ye know these things, happy
are ye if ye do them!"--the last word for infirm humanity will always
be that. For this word, reiterated with a power now sublime, now
affecting, but always admirable, our race will, as long as the world
lasts, return to Hebraism; and the Bible, which preaches this word,
will forever remain, as Goethe called it, not only a national book,
but the Book of the Nations. Again and again, after what seemed
breaches and separations, the prophetic promise to Jerusalem will
still be true:--Lo, thy sons come, whom thou sentest away; they come
gathered from the west unto the east by the word of the Holy One,
rejoicing in the remembrance of God.

NOTES

xxvii. *"Les pays qui comme les Etats-Unis ont cree un enseignement
populaire considerable sans instruction superieure serieuse,
expieront longtemps encore leur faute par leur mediocrit
intellectuelle, leur grossierete de moeurs, leur esprit superficiel,
leur manque d'intelligence generale."

[PREAMBLE] CULTURE AND ANARCHY

[1] In one of his speeches a year or two ago, that fine speaker and
famous Liberal, Mr. Bright, took occasion to have a fling at the
friends and preachers of culture. "People who talk about what they
call culture!" said he contemptuously; "by which they mean a
smattering of the two dead languages of Greek and Latin." And he
went on to remark, in a strain with which modern speakers and writers
have made us very familiar, how poor a thing this culture is, how
little good it can do to the world, and how absurd it is for its
possessors to set much [2] store by it. And the other day a younger
Liberal than Mr. Bright, one of a school whose mission it is to bring
into order and system that body of truth of which the earlier
Liberals merely touched the outside, a member of the University of
Oxford, and a very clever writer, Mr. Frederic Harrison, developed,
in the systematic and stringent manner of his school, the thesis
which Mr. Bright had propounded in only general terms. "Perhaps the
very silliest cant of the day," said Mr. Frederic Harrison, "is the
cant about culture. Culture is a desirable quality in a critic of
new books, and sits well on a possessor of belles lettres; but as
applied to politics, it means simply a turn for small fault-finding,
love of selfish ease, and indecision in action. The man of culture
is in politics one of the poorest mortals alive. For simple pedantry
and want of good sense no man is his equal. No assumption is too
unreal, no end is too unpractical for him. But the active exercise
of politics requires common sense, sympathy, trust, resolution and
enthusiasm, qualities which your man of culture has carefully rooted
up, lest they damage the delicacy of his critical olfactories.
Perhaps they are the only class [3] of responsible beings in the
community who cannot with safety be entrusted with power."

Now for my part I do not wish to see men of culture asking to be
entrusted with power; and, indeed, I have freely said, that in my
opinion the speech most proper, at present, for a man of culture to
make to a body of his fellow-countrymen who get him into a committee-
room, is Socrates's: Know thyself! and this is not a speech to be
made by men wanting to be entrusted with power. For this very
indifference to direct political action I have been taken to task by
the Daily Telegraph, coupled, by a strange perversity of fate, with
just that very one of the Hebrew prophets whose style I admire the
least, and called "an elegant Jeremiah." It is because I say (to use
the words which the Daily Telegraph puts in my mouth):--"You mustn't
make a fuss because you have no vote,--that is vulgarity; you mustn't
hold big meetings to agitate for reform bills and to repeal corn
laws,--that is the very height of vulgarity,"--it is for this reason
that I am called, sometimes an elegant Jeremiah, sometimes a spurious
Jeremiah, a Jeremiah about the reality of whose mission the writer in
the Daily [4] Telegraph has his doubts. It is evident, therefore,
that I have so taken my line as not to be exposed to the whole brunt
of Mr. Frederic Harrison's censure. Still, I have often spoken in
praise of culture; I have striven to make all my works and ways serve
the interests of culture; I take culture to be something a great deal
more than what Mr. Frederic Harrison and others call it: "a desirable
quality in a critic of new books." Nay, even though to a certain
extent I am disposed to agree with Mr. Frederic Harrison, that men of
culture are just the class of responsible beings in this community of
ours who cannot properly, at present, be entrusted with power, I am
not sure that I do not think this the fault of our community rather
than of the men of culture. In short, although, like Mr. Bright and
Mr. Frederic Harrison, and the editor of the Daily Telegraph, and a
large body of valued friends of mine, I am a liberal, yet I am a
liberal tempered by experience, reflection, and renouncement, and I
am, above all, a believer in culture. Therefore I propose now to try
and enquire, in the simple unsystematic way which best suits both my
taste and my powers, what culture really is, what good it [5] can do,
what is our own special need of it; and I shall seek to find some
plain grounds on which a faith in culture--both my own faith in it
and the faith of others,--may rest securely.

CHAPTER I

[5] The disparagers of culture make its motive curiosity; sometimes,
indeed, they make its motive mere exclusiveness and vanity. The
culture which is supposed to plume itself on a smattering of Greek
and Latin is a culture which is begotten by nothing so intellectual
as curiosity; it is valued either out of sheer vanity and ignorance,
or else as an engine of social and class distinction, separating its
holder, like a badge or title, from other people who have not got it.
No serious man would call this culture, or attach any value to it, as
culture, at all. To find the real ground for the very differing
estimate which serious people will set upon culture, we must find
some motive for culture in the terms of which [6] may lie a real
ambiguity; and such a motive the word curiosity gives us. I have
before now pointed out that in English we do not, like the
foreigners, use this word in a good sense as well as in a bad sense;
with us the word is always used in a somewhat disapproving sense; a
liberal and intelligent eagerness about the things of the mind may be
meant by a foreigner when he speaks of curiosity, but with us the
word always conveys a certain notion of frivolous and unedifying
activity. In the Quarterly Review, some little time ago, was an
estimate of the celebrated French critic, Monsieur Sainte-Beuve, and
a very inadequate estimate it, in my judgment, was. And its
inadequacy consisted chiefly in this: that in our English way it left
out of sight the double sense really involved in the word curiosity,
thinking enough was said to stamp Monsieur Sainte-Beuve with blame if
it was said that he was impelled in his operations as a critic by
curiosity, and omitting either to perceive that Monsieur Sainte-Beuve
himself, and many other people with him, would consider that this was
praiseworthy and not blameworthy, or to point out why it ought really
to be accounted worthy of blame [7] and not of praise. For as there
is a curiosity about intellectual matters which is futile, and merely
a disease, so there is certainly a curiosity,--a desire after the
things of the mind simply for their own sakes and for the pleasure of
seeing them as they are,--which is, in an intelligent being, natural
and laudable. Nay, and the very desire to see things as they are
implies a balance and regulation of mind which is not often attained
without fruitful effort, and which is the very opposite of the blind
and diseased impulse of mind which is what we mean to blame when we
blame curiosity. Montesquieu says:--"The first motive which ought to
impel us to study is the desire to augment the excellence of our
nature, and to render an intelligent being yet more intelligent."
This is the true ground to assign for the genuine scientific passion,
however manifested, and for culture, viewed simply as a fruit of this
passion; and it is a worthy ground, even though we let the term
curiosity stand to describe it.

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