Culture and Anarchy

M >> Matthew Arnold >> Culture and Anarchy

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Another newspaper, representing, like the Nonconformist, one of the
religious organisations of this country, was a short time ago giving
an account of the crowd at Epsom on the Derby day, and of all the
vice and hideousness which was to be seen in that crowd; and then the
writer turned suddenly round upon Professor Huxley, and asked him how
he proposed to cure all this vice and hideousness without religion.
I confess I felt disposed to ask the asker this question: And how do
you propose to cure it with such a religion as yours? How is the
ideal of a life so unlovely, so unattractive, so narrow, so far
removed from a true and satisfying ideal of human perfection, as is
the life of your religious organisation as you yourself image it, to
conquer and transform all this vice and hideousness? Indeed, the
strongest plea for the study of perfection as pursued by culture, the
clearest proof of the actual inadequacy of the idea of perfection
held by the religious organisations,--expressing, as I have said, the
most wide-spread effort which the human [31] race has yet made after
perfection,--is to be found in the state of our life and society with
these in possession of it, and having been in possession of it I know
not how many hundred years. We are all of us included in some
religious organisation or other; we all call ourselves, in the
sublime and aspiring language of religion which I have before
noticed, children of God. Children of God;--it is an immense
pretension!--and how are we to justify it? By the works which we do,
and the words which we speak. And the work which we collective
children of God do, our grand centre of life, our city which we have
builded for us to dwell in, is London! London, with its unutterable
external hideousness, and with its internal canker of public
egestas, privatim opulentia,+--to use the words which Sallust puts
into Cato's mouth about Rome,--unequalled in the world! The word,
again, which we children of God speak, the voice which most hits our
collective thought, the newspaper with the largest circulation in
England, nay, with the largest circulation in the whole world, is the
Daily Telegraph! I say that when our religious organisations,--which
I admit to express the most considerable effort after perfection [32]
that our race has yet made,--land us in no better result than this,
it is high time to examine carefully their idea of perfection, to see
whether it does not leave out of account sides and forces of human
nature which we might turn to great use; whether it would not be more
operative if it were more complete. And I say that the English
reliance on our religious organisations and on their ideas of human
perfection just as they stand, is like our reliance on freedom, on
muscular Christianity, on population, on coal, on wealth,--mere
belief in machinery, and unfruitful; and that it is wholesomely
counteracted by culture, bent on seeing things as they are, and on
drawing the human race onwards to a more complete perfection.

Culture, however, shows its single-minded love of perfection, its
desire simply to make reason and the will of God prevail, its freedom
from fanaticism, by its attitude towards all this machinery, even
while it insists that it is machinery. Fanatics, seeing the mischief
men do themselves by their blind belief in some machinery or other,--
whether it is wealth and industrialism, or whether it is the
cultivation of bodily strength and activity, or whether it is a [33]
political organisation, or whether it is a religious organisation,--
oppose with might and main the tendency to this or that political and
religious organisation, or to games and athletic exercises, or to
wealth and industrialism, and try violently to stop it. But the
flexibility which sweetness and light give, and which is one of the
rewards of culture pursued in good faith, enables a man to see that a
tendency may be necessary, and even, as a preparation for something
in the future, salutary, and yet that the generations or individuals
who obey this tendency are sacrificed to it, that they fall short of
the hope of perfection by following it; and that its mischiefs are to
be criticised, lest it should take too firm a hold and last after it
has served its purpose. Mr. Gladstone well pointed out, in a speech
at Paris,--and others have pointed out the same thing,--how necessary
is the present great movement towards wealth and industrialism, in
order to lay broad foundations of material well-being for the society
of the future. The worst of these justifications is, that they are
generally addressed to the very people engaged, body and soul, in the
movement in question; at all events, that they are always seized with
[34] the greatest avidity by these people, and taken by them as quite
justifying their life; and that thus they tend to harden them in
their sins. Now, culture admits the necessity of the movement
towards fortune-making and exaggerated industrialism, readily allows
that the future may derive benefit from it; but insists, at the same
time, that the passing generations of industrialists,--forming, for
the most part, the stout main body of Philistinism,--are sacrificed
to it. In the same way, the result of all the games and sports which
occupy the passing generation of boys and young men may be the
establishment of a better and sounder physical type for the future to
work with. Culture does not set itself against the games and sports;
it congratulates the future, and hopes it will make a good use of its
improved physical basis; but it points out that our passing
generation of boys and young men is, meantime, sacrificed.
Puritanism was necessary to develop the moral fibre of the English
race, Nonconformity to break the yoke of ecclesiastical domination
over men's minds and to prepare the way for freedom of thought in the
distant future; still, culture points out that the harmonious
perfection of generations of [35] Puritans and Nonconformists have
been, in consequence, sacrificed. Freedom of speech is necessary for
the society of the future, but the young lions of the Daily Telegraph
in the meanwhile are sacrificed. A voice for every man in his
country's government is necessary for the society of the future, but
meanwhile Mr. Beales and Mr. Bradlaugh are sacrificed.

Oxford, the Oxford of the past, has many faults; and she has heavily
paid for them in defeat, in isolation, in want of hold upon the
modern world. Yet we in Oxford, brought up amidst the beauty and
sweetness of that beautiful place, have not failed to seize one
truth:--the truth that beauty and sweetness are essential characters
of a complete human perfection. When I insist on this, I am all in
the faith and tradition of Oxford. I say boldly that this our
sentiment for beauty and sweetness, our sentiment against hideousness
and rawness, has been at the bottom of our attachment to so many
beaten causes, of our opposition to so many triumphant movements.
And the sentiment is true, and has never been wholly defeated, and
has shown its power even in its defeat. We have not won our
political battles, we have not carried our [36] main points, we have
not stopped our adversaries' advance, we have not marched
victoriously with the modern world; but we have told silently upon
the mind of the country, we have prepared currents of feeling which
sap our adversaries' position when it seems gained, we have kept up
our own communications with the future. Look at the course of the
great movement which shook Oxford to its centre some thirty years
ago! It was directed, as any one who reads Dr. Newman's Apology may
see, against what in one word maybe called "liberalism." Liberalism
prevailed; it was the appointed force to do the work of the hour; it
was necessary, it was inevitable that it should prevail. The Oxford
movement was broken, it failed; our wrecks are scattered on every
shore:--

Quae regio in terris nostri non plena laboris?+

But what was it, this liberalism, as Dr. Newman saw it, and as it
really broke the Oxford movement? It was the great middle-class
liberalism, which had for the cardinal points of its belief the
Reform Bill of 1832, and local self-government, in politics; in the
social sphere, free-trade, unrestricted competition, [37] and the
making of large industrial fortunes; in the religious sphere, the
Dissidence of Dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant
religion. I do not say that other and more intelligent forces than
this were not opposed to the Oxford movement: but this was the force
which really beat it; this was the force which Dr. Newman felt
himself fighting with; this was the force which till only the other
day seemed to be the paramount force in this country, and to be in
possession of the future; this was the force whose achievements fill
Mr. Lowe with such inexpressible admiration, and whose rule he was so
horror-struck to see threatened. And where is this great force of
Philistinism now? It is thrust into the second rank, it is become a
power of yesterday, it has lost the future. A new power has suddenly
appeared, a power which it is impossible yet to judge fully, but
which is certainly a wholly different force from middle-class
liberalism; different in its cardinal points of belief, different in
its tendencies in every sphere. It loves and admires neither the
legislation of middle-class Parliaments, nor the local self-
government of middle-class vestries, nor the unrestricted competition
of middle-class [38] industrialists, nor the dissidence of middle-
class Dissent and the Protestantism of middle-class Protestant
religion. I am not now praising this new force, or saying that its
own ideals are better; all I say is, that they are wholly different.
And who will estimate how much the currents of feeling created by Dr.
Newman's movement, the keen desire for beauty and sweetness which it
nourished, the deep aversion it manifested to the hardness and
vulgarity of middle-class liberalism, the strong light it turned on
the hideous and grotesque illusions of middle-class Protestantism,--
who will estimate how much all these contributed to swell the tide of
secret dissatisfaction which has mined the ground under the self-
confident liberalism of the last thirty years, and has prepared the
way for its sudden collapse and supersession? It is in this manner
that the sentiment of Oxford for beauty and sweetness conquers, and
in this manner long may it continue to conquer!

In this manner it works to the same end as culture, and there is
plenty of work for it yet to do. I have said that the new and more
democratic force which is now superseding our old middle-class
liberalism cannot yet be rightly judged. It has its [39] main
tendencies still to form. We hear promises of its giving us
administrative reform, law reform, reform of education, and I know
not what; but those promises come rather from its advocates, wishing
to make a good plea for it and to justify it for superseding middle-
class liberalism, than from clear tendencies which it has itself yet
developed. But meanwhile it has plenty of well-intentioned friends
against whom culture may with advantage continue to uphold steadily
its ideal of human perfection; that this is an inward spiritual
activity, having for its characters increased sweetness, increased
light, increased life, increased sympathy. Mr. Bright, who has a
foot in both worlds, the world of middle-class liberalism and the
world of democracy, but who brings most of his ideas from the world
of middle-class liberalism in which he was bred, always inclines to
inculcate that faith in machinery to which, as we have seen,
Englishmen are so prone, and which has been the bane of middle-class
liberalism. He complains with a sorrowful indignation of people who
"appear to have no proper estimate of the value of the franchise;" he
leads his disciples to believe,--what the Englishman is always too
ready to believe, [40] --that the having a vote, like the having a
large family, or a large business, or large muscles, has in itself
some edifying and perfecting effect upon human nature. Or else he
cries out to the democracy,--"the men," as he calls them, "upon whose
shoulders the greatness of England rests,"--he cries out to them:
"See what you have done! I look over this country and see the cities
you have built, the railroads you have made, the manufactures you
have produced, the cargoes which freight the ships of the greatest
mercantile navy the world has ever seen! I see that you have
converted by your labours what was once a wilderness, these islands,
into a fruitful garden; I know that you have created this wealth, and
are a nation whose name is a word of power throughout all the world."
Why, this is just the very style of laudation with which Mr. Roebuck
or Mr. Lowe debauch the minds of the middle classes, and make such
Philistines of them. It is the same fashion of teaching a man to
value himself not on what he is, not on his progress in sweetness and
light, but on the number of the railroads he has constructed, or the
bigness of the Tabernacle he has built. Only the middle classes are
told they have [41] done it all with their energy, self-reliance, and
capital, and the democracy are told they have done it all with their
hands and sinews. But teaching the democracy to put its trust in
achievements of this kind is merely training them to be Philistines
to take the place of the Philistines whom they are superseding; and
they too, like the middle class, will be encouraged to sit down at
the banquet of the future without having on a wedding garment, and
nothing excellent can then come from them. Those who know their
besetting faults, those who have watched them and listened to them,
or those who will read the instructive account recently given of them
by one of themselves, the Journeyman Engineer, will agree that the
idea which culture sets before us of perfection,--an increased
spiritual activity, having for its characters increased sweetness,
increased light, increased life, increased sympathy,--is an idea
which the new democracy needs far more than the idea of the
blessedness of the franchise, or the wonderfulness of their own
industrial performances.

Other well-meaning friends of this new power are for leading it, not
in the old ruts of middle-class [42] Philistinism, but in ways which
are naturally alluring to the feet of democracy, though in this
country they are novel and untried ways. I may call them the ways of
Jacobinism. Violent indignation with the past, abstract systems of
renovation applied wholesale, a new doctrine drawn up in black and
white for elaborating down to the very smallest details a rational
society for the future,--these are the ways of Jacobinism. Mr.
Frederic Harrison and other disciples of Comte,--one of them, Mr.
Congreve, is an old acquaintance of mine, and I am glad to have an
opportunity of publicly expressing my respect for his talents and
character,--are among the friends of democracy who are for leading it
in paths of this kind. Mr. Frederic Harrison is very hostile to
culture, and from a natural enough motive; for culture is the eternal
opponent of the two things which are the signal marks of Jacobinism,-
-its fierceness, and its addiction to an abstract system. Culture is
always assigning to system-makers and systems a smaller share in the
bent of human destiny than their friends like. A current in people's
minds sets towards new ideas; people are dissatisfied with their old
narrow stock of Philistine ideas, Anglo-Saxon [43] ideas, or any
other; and some man, some Bentham or Comte, who has the real merit of
having early and strongly felt and helped the new current, but who
brings plenty of narrownesses and mistakes of his own into his
feeling and help of it, is credited with being the author of the
whole current, the fit person to be entrusted with its regulation and
to guide the human race. The excellent German historian of the
mythology of Rome, Preller, relating the introduction at Rome under
the Tarquins of the worship of Apollo, the god of light, healing, and
reconciliation, observes that it was not so much the Tarquins who
brought to Rome the new worship of Apollo, as a current in the mind
of the Roman people which set powerfully at that time towards a new
worship of this kind, and away from the old run of Latin and Sabine
religious ideas. In a similar way, culture directs our attention to
the current in human affairs, and to its continual working, and will
not let us rivet our faith upon any one man and his doings. It makes
us see, not only his good side, but also how much in him was of
necessity limited and transient; nay, it even feels a pleasure, a
sense of an increased freedom and of an ampler future, in so [44]
doing. I remember, when I was under the influence of a mind to which
I feel the greatest obligations, the mind of a man who was the very
incarnation of sanity and clear sense, a man the most considerable,
it seems to me, whom America has yet produced,--Benjamin Franklin,--I
remember the relief with which, after long feeling the sway of
Franklin's imperturbable common-sense, I came upon a project of his
for a new version of the Book of Job, to replace the old version, the
style of which, says Franklin, has become obsolete, and thence less
agreeable. "I give," he continues, "a few verses, which may serve as
a sample of the kind of version I would recommend." We all recollect
the famous verse in our translation: "Then Satan answered the Lord
and said: 'Doth Job fear God for nought?'" Franklin makes this:
"Does Your Majesty imagine that Job's good conduct is the effect of
mere personal attachment and affection?" I well remember how when
first I read that, I drew a deep breath of relief, and said to
myself: "After all, there is a stretch of humanity beyond Franklin's
victorious good sense!" So, after hearing Bentham cried loudly up as
the renovator of modern society, [45] and Bentham's mind and ideas
proposed as the rulers of our future, I open the Deontology. There I
read: "While Xenophon was writing his history and Euclid teaching
geometry, Socrates and Plato were talking nonsense under pretence of
talking wisdom and morality. This morality of theirs consisted in
words; this wisdom of theirs was the denial of matters known to every
man's experience." From the moment of reading that, I am delivered
from the bondage of Bentham! the fanaticism of his adherents can
touch me no longer; I feel the inadequacy of his mind and ideas for
being the rule of human society, for perfection. Culture tends
always thus to deal with the men of a system, of disciples, of a
school; with men like Comte, or the late Mr. Buckle, or Mr. Mill.
However much it may find to admire in these personages, or in some of
them, it nevertheless remembers the text: "Be not ye called Rabbi!"
and it soon passes on from any Rabbi. But Jacobinism loves a Rabbi;
it does not want to pass on from its Rabbi in pursuit of a future and
still unreached perfection; it wants its Rabbi and his ideas to stand
for perfection, that they may with the more authority recast the
world; [46] and for Jacobinism, therefore, culture,--eternally
passing onwards and seeking,--is an impertinence and an offence. But
culture, just because it resists this tendency of Jacobinism to
impose on us a man with limitations and errors of his own along with
the true ideas of which he is the organ, really does the world and
Jacobinism itself a service.

So, too, Jacobinism, in its fierce hatred of the past and of those
whom it makes liable for the sins of the past, cannot away with
culture,--culture with its inexhaustible indulgence, its
consideration of circumstances, its severe judgment of actions joined
to its merciful judgment of persons. "The man of culture is in
politics," cries Mr. Frederic Harrison, "one of the poorest mortals
alive!" Mr. Frederic Harrison wants to be doing business, and he
complains that the man of culture stops him with a "turn for small
fault-finding, love of selfish ease, and indecision in action." Of
what use is culture, he asks, except for "a critic of new books or a
professor of belles lettres?" Why, it is of use because, in presence
of the fierce exasperation which breathes, or rather, I may say,
hisses, through the whole production in which Mr. Frederic Harrison
[47] asks that question, it reminds us that the perfection of human
nature is sweetness and light. It is of use because, like religion,-
-that other effort after perfection,--it testifies that, where bitter
envying and strife are, there is confusion and every evil work.

The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and
light. He who works for sweetness works in the end for light also;
he who works for light works in the end for sweetness also. But he
who works for sweetness and light united, works to make reason and
the will of God prevail. He who works for machinery, he who works
for hatred, works only for confusion. Culture looks beyond
machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has but one great passion,
the passion for sweetness and light. Yes, it has one yet greater!--
the passion for making them prevail. It is not satisfied till we all
come to a perfect man; it knows that the sweetness and light of the
few must be imperfect until the raw and unkindled masses of humanity
are touched with sweetness and light. If I have not shrunk from
saying that we must work for sweetness and light, so neither have I
shrunk from saying that we must have a broad basis, must have
sweetness and light [48] for as many as possible. Again and again I
have insisted how those are the happy moments of humanity, how those
are the marking epochs of a people's life, how those are the
flowering times for literature and art and all the creative power of
genius, when there is a national glow of life and thought, when the
whole of society is in the fullest measure permeated by thought,
sensible to beauty, intelligent and alive. Only it must be real
thought and real beauty; real sweetness and real light. Plenty of
people will try to give the masses, as they call them, an
intellectual food prepared and adapted in the way they think proper
for the actual condition of the masses. The ordinary popular
literature is an example of this way of working on the masses.
Plenty of people will try to indoctrinate the masses with the set of
ideas and judgments constituting the creed of their own profession or
party. Our religious and political organisations give an example of
this way of working on the masses. I condemn neither way; but
culture works differently. It does not try to teach down to the
level of inferior classes; it does not try to win them for this or
that sect of its own, with ready-made judgments and watchwords. [49]
It seeks to do away with classes; to make all live in an atmosphere
of sweetness and light, and use ideas, as it uses them itself,
freely,--to be nourished and not bound by them.

This is the social idea; and the men of culture are the true apostles
of equality. The great men of culture are those who have had a
passion for diffusing, for making prevail, for carrying from one end
of society to the other, the best knowledge, the best ideas of their
time; who have laboured to divest knowledge of all that was harsh,
uncouth, difficult, abstract, professional, exclusive; to humanise
it, to make it efficient outside the clique of the cultivated and
learned, yet still remaining the best knowledge and thought of the
time, and a true source, therefore, of sweetness and light. Such a
man was Abelard in the Middle Ages, in spite of all his
imperfections; and thence the boundless emotion and enthusiasm which
Abelard excited. Such were Lessing and Herder in Germany, at the end
of the last century; and their services to Germany were in this way
inestimably precious. Generations will pass, and literary monuments
will accumulate, and works far more perfect than the [50] works of
Lessing and Herder will be produced in Germany; and yet the names of
these two men will fill a German with a reverence and enthusiasm such
as the names of the most gifted masters will hardly awaken. Because
they humanised knowledge; because they broadened the basis of life
and intelligence; because they worked powerfully to diffuse sweetness
and light, to make reason and the will of God prevail. With Saint
Augustine they said: "Let us not leave Thee alone to make in the
secret of thy knowledge, as thou didst before the creation of the
firmament, the division of light from darkness; let the children of
thy spirit, placed in their firmament, make their light shine upon
the earth, mark the division of night and day, and announce the
revolution of the times; for the old order is passed, and the new
arises; the night is spent, the day is come forth; and thou shalt
crown the year with thy blessing, when thou shalt send forth
labourers into thy harvest sown by other hands than theirs; when thou
shalt send forth new labourers to new seed-times, whereof the harvest
shall be not yet."

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