Culture and Anarchy

M >> Matthew Arnold >> Culture and Anarchy

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16

NOTES

22. +aphuia.

22. +aphuia, euphuia. See notes below for these words separately,
page 23.

23. +euphyes. Liddell and Scott definition: "well-grown, shapely,
goodly: graceful. II. of good natural parts: clever, witty; also 'of
good disposition.'"

23. +aphyes. Liddell and Scott definition: "without natural talent,
dull." GIF image:

31. +publice egestas, privatim opulentia. E-text editor's
translation: public penury and private opulence.

36. +Quae regio in terris nostri non plena laboris? E-text editor's
translation: Which part of the world is not filled with our sorrows?
P. Vergilius Maro (Virgil), Aeneid, Book 1, Line 459.

CHAPTER II

[51] I have been trying to show that culture is, or ought to be, the
study and pursuit of perfection; and that of perfection as pursued by
culture, beauty and intelligence, or, in other words, sweetness and
light, are the main characters. But hitherto I have been insisting
chiefly on beauty, or sweetness, as a character of perfection. To
complete rightly my design, it evidently remains to speak also of
intelligence, or light, as a character of perfection. First,
however, I ought perhaps to notice that, both here and on the other
side of the Atlantic, all sorts of objections are raised against the
"religion of culture," as the objectors mockingly call it, which I am
supposed to be promulgating. It is said to be a religion proposing
parmaceti, or some scented salve or other, as a cure for human
miseries; a religion breathing a spirit of cultivated inaction,
making its believer refuse to lend a hand at uprooting the definite
evils on all sides of us, and filling him with antipathy against the
reforms and reformers which try to [52] extirpate them. In general,
it is summed up as being not practical, or,--as some critics more
familiarly put it,--all moonshine. That Alcibiades, the editor of
the Morning Star, taunts me, as its promulgator, with living out of
the world and knowing nothing of life and men. That great austere
toiler, the editor of the Daily Telegraph, upbraids me,--but kindly,
and more in sorrow than in anger,--for trifling with aesthetics and
poetical fancies, while he himself, in that arsenal of his in Fleet
Street, is bearing the burden and heat of the day. An intelligent
American newspaper, the Nation, says that it is very easy to sit in
one's study and find fault with the course of modern society, but the
thing is to propose practical improvements for it. While, finally,
Mr. Frederic Harrison, in a very good-tempered and witty satire,
which makes me quite understand his having apparently achieved such a
conquest of my young Prussian friend, Arminius, at last gets moved to
an almost stern moral impatience, to behold, as he says, "Death, sin,
cruelty stalk among us, filling their maws with innocence and youth,"
and me, in the midst of the general tribulation, handing out my
pouncet-box.

[53] It is impossible that all these remonstrances and reproofs
should not affect me, and I shall try my very best, in completing my
design and in speaking of light as one of the characters of
perfection, and of culture as giving us light, to profit by the
objections I have heard and read, and to drive at practice as much as
I can, by showing the communications and passages into practical life
from the doctrine which I am inculcating.

It is said that a man with my theories of sweetness and light is full
of antipathy against the rougher or coarser movements going on around
him, that he will not lend a hand to the humble operation of
uprooting evil by their means, and that therefore the believers in
action grow impatient with them. But what if rough and coarse
action, ill-calculated action, action with insufficient light, is,
and has for a long time been, our bane? What if our urgent want now
is, not to act at any price, but rather to lay in a stock of light
for our difficulties? In that case, to refuse to lend a hand to the
rougher and coarser movements going on round us, to make the primary
need, both for oneself and others, to consist in enlightening
ourselves and qualifying ourselves [54] to act less at random, is
surely the best, and in real truth the most practical line, our
endeavours can take. So that if I can show what my opponents call
rough or coarse action, but what I would rather call random and ill-
regulated action,--action with insufficient light, action pursued
because we like to be doing something and doing it as we please, and
do not like the trouble of thinking, and the severe constraint of any
kind of rule,--if I can show this to be, at the present moment, a
practical mischief and danger to us, then I have found a practical
use for light in correcting this state of things, and have only to
exemplify how, in cases which fall under everybody's observation, it
may deal with it.

When I began to speak of culture, I insisted on our bondage to
machinery, on our proneness to value machinery as an end in itself,
without looking beyond it to the end for which alone, in truth, it is
valuable. Freedom, I said, was one of those things which we thus
worshipped in itself, without enough regarding the ends for which
freedom is to be desired. In our common notions and talk about
freedom, we eminently show our idolatry of machinery. Our prevalent
notion is,--and I quoted a [55] number of instances to prove it,--
that it is a most happy and important thing for a man merely to be
able to do as he likes. On what he is to do when he is thus free to
do as he likes, we do not lay so much stress. Our familiar praise of
the British Constitution under which we live, is that it is a system
of checks,--a system which stops and paralyses any power in
interfering with the free action of individuals. To this effect Mr.
Bright, who loves to walk in the old ways of the Constitution, said
forcibly in one of his great speeches, what many other people are
every day saying less forcibly, that the central idea of English life
and politics is the assertion of personal liberty. Evidently this is
so; but evidently, also, as feudalism, which with its ideas and
habits of subordination was for many centuries silently behind the
British Constitution, dies out, and we are left with nothing but our
system of checks, and our notion of its being the great right and
happiness of an Englishman to do as far as possible what he likes, we
are in danger of drifting towards anarchy. We have not the notion,
so familiar on the Continent and to antiquity, of the State--the
nation, in its collective [56] and corporate character, entrusted
with stringent powers for the general advantage, and controlling
individual wills in the name of an interest wider than that of
individuals. We say, what is very true, that this notion is often
made instrumental to tyranny; we say that a State is in reality made
up of the individuals who compose it, and that every individual is
the best judge of his own interests. Our leading class is an
aristocracy, and no aristocracy likes the notion of a State-authority
greater than itself, with a stringent administrative machinery
superseding the decorative inutilities of lord-lieutenancy, deputy-
lieutenancy, and the posse comitatus,+ which are all in its own
hands. Our middle-class, the great representative of trade and
Dissent, with its maxims of every man for himself in business, every
man for himself in religion, dreads a powerful administration which
might somehow interfere with it; and besides, it has its own
decorative inutilities of vestrymanship and guardianship, which are
to this class what lord-lieutenancy and the county magistracy are to
the aristocratic class, and a stringent administration might either
take these functions out of its hands, [57] or prevent its exercising
them in its own comfortable, independent manner, as at present.

Then as to our working-class. This class, pressed constantly by the
hard daily compulsion of material wants, is naturally the very centre
and stronghold of our national idea, that it is man's ideal right and
felicity to do as he likes. I think I have somewhere related how
Monsieur Michelet said to me of the people of France, that it was "a
nation of barbarians civilised by the conscription." He meant that
through their military service the idea of public duty and of
discipline was brought to the mind of these masses, in other respects
so raw and uncultivated. Our masses are quite as raw and
uncultivated as the French; and, so far from their having the idea of
public duty and of discipline, superior to the individual's self-
will, brought to their mind by a universal obligation of military
service, such as that of the conscription,--so far from their having
this, the very idea of a conscription is so at variance with our
English notion of the prime right and blessedness of doing as one
likes, that I remember the manager of the Clay Cross works in
Derbyshire told me during the Crimean [58] war, when our want of
soldiers was much felt and some people were talking of a
conscription, that sooner than submit to a conscription the
population of that district would flee to the mines, and lead a sort
of Robin Hood life under ground.

For a long time, as I have said, the strong feudal habits of
subordination and deference continued to tell upon the working-class.
The modern spirit has now almost entirely dissolved those habits, and
the anarchical tendency of our worship of freedom in and for itself,
of our superstitious faith, as I say, in machinery, is becoming very
manifest. More and more, because of this our blind faith in
machinery, because of our want of light to enable us to look beyond
machinery to the end for which machinery is valuable, this and that
man, and this and that body of men, all over the country, are
beginning to assert and put in practice an Englishman's right to do
what he likes; his right to march where he likes, meet where he
likes, enter where he likes, hoot as he likes, threaten as he likes,
smash as he likes. All this, I say, tends to anarchy; and though a
number of excellent people, and particularly my friends of the
liberal or progressive party, as they [59] call themselves, are kind
enough to reassure us by saying that these are trifles, that a few
transient outbreaks of rowdyism signify nothing, that our system of
liberty is one which itself cures all the evils which it works, that
the educated and intelligent classes stand in overwhelming strength
and majestic repose, ready, like our military force in riots, to act
at a moment's notice,--yet one finds that one's liberal friends
generally say this because they have such faith in themselves and
their nostrums, when they shall return, as the public welfare
requires, to place and power. But this faith of theirs one cannot
exactly share, when one has so long had them and their nostrums at
work, and sees that they have not prevented our coming to our present
embarrassed condition; and one finds, also, that the outbreaks of
rowdyism tend to become less and less of trifles, to become more
frequent rather than less frequent; and that meanwhile our educated
and intelligent classes remain in their majestic repose, and somehow
or other, whatever happens, their overwhelming strength, like our
military force in riots, never does act.

How, indeed, should their overwhelming strength [60] act, when the
man who gives an inflammatory lecture, or breaks down the Park
railings, or invades a Secretary of State's office, is only following
an Englishman's impulse to do as he likes; and our own conscience
tells us that we ourselves have always regarded this impulse as
something primary and sacred? Mr. Murphy lectures at Birmingham, and
showers on the Catholic population of that town "words," says Mr.
Hardy, "only fit to be addressed to thieves or murderers." What
then? Mr. Murphy has his own reasons of several kinds. He suspects
the Roman Catholic Church of designs upon Mrs. Murphy; and he says,
if mayors and magistrates do not care for their wives and daughters,
he does. But, above all, he is doing as he likes, or, in worthier
language, asserting his personal liberty. "I will carry out my
lectures if they walk over my body as a dead corpse; and I say to the
Mayor of Birmingham that he is my servant while I am in Birmingham,
and as my servant he must do his duty and protect me." Touching and
beautiful words, which find a sympathetic chord in every British
bosom! The moment it is plainly put before us that a man is
asserting his personal liberty, we are half disarmed; [61] because we
are believers in freedom, and not in some dream of a right reason to
which the assertion of our freedom is to be subordinated.
Accordingly, the Secretary of State had to say that although the
lecturer's language was "only fit to be addressed to thieves or
murderers," yet, "I do not think he is to be deprived, I do not think
that anything I have said could justify the inference that he is to
be deprived, of the right of protection in a place built by him for
the purpose of these lectures; because the language was not language
which afforded grounds for a criminal prosecution." No, nor to be
silenced by Mayor, or Home Secretary, or any administrative authority
on earth, simply on their notion of what is discreet and reasonable!
This is in perfect consonance with our public opinion, and with our
national love for the assertion of personal liberty.

In quite another department of affairs, an experienced and
distinguished Chancery Judge relates an incident which is just to the
same effect as this of Mr. Murphy. A testator bequeathed 300L. a
year, to be for ever applied as a pension to some person who had been
unsuccessful in literature, and whose duty [62] should be to support
and diffuse, by his writings, the testator's own views, as enforced
in the testator's publications. This bequest was appealed against in
the Court of Chancery, on the ground of its absurdity; but, being
only absurd, it was upheld, and the so-called charity was
established. Having, I say, at the bottom of our English hearts a
very strong belief in freedom, and a very weak belief in right
reason, we are soon silenced when a man pleads the prime right to do
as he likes, because this is the prime right for ourselves too; and
even if we attempt now and then to mumble something about reason, yet
we have ourselves thought so little about this and so much about
liberty, that we are in conscience forced, when our brother
Philistine with whom we are meddling turns boldly round upon us and
asks: Have you any light?--to shake our heads ruefully, and to let
him go his own way after all.

There are many things to be said on behalf of this exclusive
attention of ours to liberty, and of the relaxed habits of government
which it has engendered. It is very easy to mistake or to exaggerate
the sort of anarchy from which we are in danger through them. We are
not in danger from [63] Fenianism, fierce and turbulent as it may
show itself; for against this our conscience is free enough to let us
act resolutely and put forth our overwhelming strength the moment
there is any real need for it. In the first place, it never was any
part of our creed that the great right and blessedness of an
Irishman, or, indeed, of anybody on earth except an Englishman, is to
do as he likes; and we can have no scruple at all about abridging, if
necessary, a non-Englishman's assertion of personal liberty. The
British Constitution, its checks, and its prime virtues, are for
Englishmen. We may extend them to others out of love and kindness;
but we find no real divine law written on our hearts constraining us
so to extend them. And then the difference between an Irish Fenian
and an English rough is so immense, and the case, in dealing with the
Fenian, so much more clear! He is so evidently desperate and
dangerous, a man of a conquered race, a Papist, with centuries of
ill-usage to inflame him against us, with an alien religion
established in his country by us at his expense, with no admiration
of our institutions, no love of our virtues, no talents for our
business, no turn for our comfort! Show him our symbolical [64]
Truss Manufactory on the finest site in Europe, and tell him that
British industrialism and individualism can bring a man to that, and
he remains cold! Evidently, if we deal tenderly with a
sentimentalist like this, it is out of pure philanthropy. But with
the Hyde Park rioter how different!+ He is our own flesh and blood;
he is a Protestant; he is framed by nature to do as we do, hate what
we hate, love what we love; he is capable of feeling the symbolical
force of the Truss Manufactory; the question of questions, for him,
is a wages' question. That beautiful sentence Sir Daniel Gooch
quoted to the Swindon workmen, and which I treasure as Mrs. Gooch's
Golden Rule, or the Divine Injunction "Be ye Perfect" done into
British,--the sentence Sir Daniel Gooch's mother repeated to him
every morning when he was a boy going to work: "Ever remember, my
dear Dan, that you should look forward to being some day manager of
that concern!"--this fruitful maxim is perfectly fitted to shine
forth in the heart of the Hyde Park rough also, and to be his
guiding-star through life. He has no visionary schemes of revolution
and transformation, though of course he would like his class to rule,
as the aristocratic [65] class like their class to rule, and the
middle-class theirs. Meanwhile, our social machine is a little out
of order; there are a good many people in our paradisiacal centres of
industrialism and individualism taking the bread out of one another's
mouths; the rioter has not yet quite found his groove and settled
down to his work, and so he is just asserting his personal liberty a
little, going where he likes, assembling where he likes, bawling as
he likes, hustling as he likes. Just as the rest of us,--as the
country squires in the aristocratic class, as the political
dissenters in the middle-class,--he has no idea of a State, of the
nation in its collective and corporate character controlling, as
government, the free swing of this or that one of its members in the
name of the higher reason of all of them, his own as well as that of
others. He sees the rich, the aristocratic class, in occupation of
the executive government, and so if he is stopped from making Hyde
Park a bear-garden or the streets impassable, he says he is being
butchered by the aristocracy.

His apparition is somewhat embarrassing, because too many cooks spoil
the broth; because, while the aristocratic and middle classes have
long been doing [66] as they like with great vigour, he has been too
undeveloped and submissive hitherto to join in the game; and now,
when he does come, he comes in immense numbers, and is rather raw and
rough. But he does not break many laws, or not many at one time;
and, as our laws were made for very different circumstances from our
present (but always with an eye to Englishmen doing as they like),
and as the clear letter of the law must be against our Englishman who
does as he likes and not only the spirit of the law and public
policy, and as Government must neither have any discretionary power
nor act resolutely on its own interpretation of the law if any one
disputes it, it is evident our laws give our playful giant, in doing
as he likes, considerable advantage. Besides, even if he can be
clearly proved to commit an illegality in doing as he likes, there is
always the resource of not putting the law in force, or of abolishing
it. So he has his way, and if he has his way he is soon satisfied
for the time; however, he falls into the habit of taking it oftener
and oftener, and at last begins to create by his operations a
confusion of which mischievous people can take advantage, and which
at any rate, by troubling the common course [67] of business
throughout the country, tends to cause distress, and so to increase
the sort of anarchy and social disintegration which had previously
commenced. And thus that profound sense of settled order and
security, without which a society like ours cannot live and grow at
all, is beginning to threaten us with taking its departure.

Now, if culture, which simply means trying to perfect oneself, and
one's mind as part of oneself, brings us light, and if light shows us
that there is nothing so very blessed in merely doing as one likes,
that the worship of the mere freedom to do as one likes is worship of
machinery, that the really blessed thing is to like what right reason
ordains, and to follow her authority, then we have got a practical
benefit out of culture. We have got a much wanted principle, a
principle of authority, to counteract the tendency to anarchy which
seems to be threatening us.

But how to organise this authority, or to what hands to entrust the
wielding of it? How to get your State, summing up the right reason
of the community, and giving effect to it, as circumstances may
require, with vigour? And here I think I see [68] my enemies waiting
for me with a hungry joy in their eyes. But I shall elude them.

The State, the power most representing the right reason of the
nation, and most worthy, therefore, of ruling,--of exercising, when
circumstances require it, authority over us all,--is for Mr. Carlyle
the aristocracy. For Mr. Lowe, it is the middle-class with its
incomparable Parliament. For the Reform League, it is the working-
class, with its "brightest powers of sympathy and readiest powers of
action." Now, culture, with its disinterested pursuit of perfection,
culture, simply trying to see things as they are, in order to seize
on the best and to make it prevail, is surely well fitted to help us
to judge rightly, by all the aids of observing, reading, and
thinking, the qualifications and titles to our confidence of these
three candidates for authority, and can thus render us a practical
service of no mean value.

So when Mr. Carlyle, a man of genius to whom we have all at one time
or other been indebted for refreshment and stimulus, says we should
give rule to the aristocracy, mainly because of its dignity and
politeness, surely culture is useful in reminding us, [69] that in
our idea of perfection the characters of beauty and intelligence are
both of them present, and sweetness and light, the two noblest of
things, are united. Allowing, therefore, with Mr. Carlyle, the
aristocratic class to possess sweetness, culture insists on the
necessity of light also, and shows us that aristocracies, being by
the very nature of things inaccessible to ideas, unapt to see how the
world is going, must be somewhat wanting in light, and must therefore
be, at a moment when light is our great requisite, inadequate to our
needs. Aristocracies, those children of the established fact, are
for epochs of concentration. In epochs of expansion, epochs such as
that in which we now live, epochs when always the warning voice is
again heard: Now is the judgment of this world--in such epochs
aristocracies, with their natural clinging to the established fact,
their want of sense for the flux of things, for the inevitable
transitoriness of all human institutions, are bewildered and
helpless. Their serenity, their high spirit, their power of haughty
resistance,--the great qualities of an aristocracy, and the secret of
its distinguished manners and dignity,--these very qualities, in an
epoch of [70] expansion, turn against their possessors. Again and
again I have said how the refinement of an aristocracy may be
precious and educative to a raw nation as a kind of shadow of true
refinement; how its serenity and dignified freedom from petty cares
may serve as a useful foil to set off the vulgarity and hideousness
of that type of life which a hard middle-class tends to establish,
and to help people to see this vulgarity and hideousness in their
true colours. From such an ignoble spectacle as that of poor Mrs.
Lincoln,--a spectacle to vulgarise a whole nation,--aristocracies
undoubtedly preserve us. But the true grace and serenity is that of
which Greece and Greek art suggest the admirable ideals of
perfection,--a serenity which comes from having made order among
ideas and harmonised them; whereas the serenity of aristocracies, at
least the peculiar serenity of aristocracies of Teutonic origin,
appears to come from their never having had any ideas to trouble
them. And so, in a time of expansion like the present, a time for
ideas, one gets, perhaps, in regarding an aristocracy, even more than
the idea of serenity, the idea of futility and sterility. One has
often wondered whether upon the whole [71] earth there is anything so
unintelligent, so unapt to perceive how the world is really going, as
an ordinary young Englishman of our upper class. Ideas he has not,
and neither has he that seriousness of our middle-class, which is, as
I have often said, the great strength of this class, and may become
its salvation. Why, a man may hear a young Dives of the aristocratic
class, when the whim takes him to sing the praises of wealth and
material comfort, sing them with a cynicism from which the conscience
of the veriest Philistine of our industrial middle-class would recoil
in affright. And when, with the natural sympathy of aristocracies
for firm dealing with the multitude, and his uneasiness at our feeble
dealing with it at home, an unvarnished young Englishman of our
aristocratic class applauds the absolute rulers on the Continent, he
in general manages completely to miss the grounds of reason and
intelligence which alone can give any colour of justification, any
possibility of existence, to those rulers, and applauds them on
grounds which it would make their own hair stand on end to listen to.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16