Culture and Anarchy

M >> Matthew Arnold >> Culture and Anarchy

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And all this time, we are in an epoch of expansion; [72] and the
essence of an epoch of expansion is a movement of ideas, and the one
salvation of an epoch of expansion is a harmony of ideas. The very
principle of the authority which we are seeking as a defence against
anarchy is right reason, ideas, light. The more, therefore, an
aristocracy calls to its aid its innate forces,--its impenetrability,
its high spirit, its power of haughty resistance,--to deal with an
epoch of expansion, the graver is the danger, the greater the
certainty of explosion, the surer the aristocracy's defeat; for it is
trying to do violence to nature instead of working along with it.
The best powers shown by the best men of an aristocracy at such an
epoch are, it will be observed, non-aristocratical powers, powers of
industry, powers of intelligence; and these powers, thus exhibited,
tend really not to strengthen the aristocracy, but to take their
owners out of it, to expose them to the dissolving agencies of
thought and change, to make them men of the modern spirit and of the
future. If, as sometimes happens, they add to their non-
aristocratical qualities of labour and thought, a strong dose of
aristocratical qualities also,--of pride, defiance, turn for
resistance--this truly aristocratical [73] side of them, so far from
adding any strength to them really neutralises their force and makes
them impracticable and ineffective.

Knowing myself to be indeed sadly to seek, as one of my many critics
says, in "a philosophy with coherent, interdependent, subordinate and
derivative principles," I continually have recourse to a plain man's
expedient of trying to make what few simple notions I have, clearer,
and more intelligible to myself, by means of example and
illustration. And having been brought up at Oxford in the bad old
times, when we were stuffed with Greek and Aristotle, and thought
nothing of preparing ourselves,--as after Mr. Lowe's great speech at
Edinburgh we shall do,--to fight the battle of life with the German
waiters, my head is still full of a lumber of phrases we learnt at
Oxford from Aristotle, about virtue being in a mean, and about excess
and defect, and so on. Once when I had had the advantage of
listening to the Reform debates in the House of Commons, having heard
a number of interesting speakers, and among them Lord Elcho and Sir
Thomas Bateson, I remember it struck me, applying Aristotle's
machinery of the [74] mean to my ideas about our aristocracy, that
Lord Elcho was exactly the perfection, or happy mean, or virtue, of
aristocracy, and Sir Thomas Bateson the excess; and I fancied that by
observing these two we might see both the inadequacy of aristocracy
to supply the principle of authority needful for our present wants,
and the danger of its trying to supply it when it was not really
competent for the business. On the one hand, in Lord Elcho, showing
plenty of high spirit, but remarkable, far above and beyond his gift
of high spirit, for the fine tempering of his high spirit, for ease,
serenity, politeness,--the great virtues, as Mr. Carlyle says, of
aristocracy,--in this beautiful and virtuous mean, there seemed
evidently some insufficiency of light; while, on the other hand, Sir
Thomas Bateson, in whom the high spirit of aristocracy, its
impenetrability, defiant courage, and pride of resistance, were
developed even in excess, was manifestly capable, if he had his way
given him, of causing us great danger, and, indeed, of throwing the
whole commonwealth into confusion. Then I reverted to that old
fundamental notion of mine about the grand merit of our race being
really our honesty; and the [75] very helplessness of our
aristocratic or governing class in dealing with our perturbed social
state gave me a sort of pride and satisfaction, because I saw they
were, as a whole, too honest to try and manage a business for which
they did not feel themselves capable.

Surely, now, it is no inconsiderable boon culture confers upon us, if
in embarrassed times like the present it enables us to look at the
ins and the outs of things in this way, without hatred and without
partiality, and with a disposition to see the good in everybody all
round. And I try to follow just the same course with our middle-
class as with our aristocracy. Mr. Lowe talks to us of this strong
middle part of the nation, of the unrivalled deeds of our liberal
middle-class Parliament, of the noble, the heroic work it has
performed in the last thirty years; and I begin to ask myself if we
shall not, then, find in our middle-class the principle of authority
we want, and if we had not better take administration as well as
legislation away from the weak extreme which now administers for us,
and commit both to the strong middle part. I observe, too, that the
heroes of middle-class liberalism, such as we have [76] hitherto
known it, speak with a kind of prophetic anticipation of the great
destiny which awaits them, and as if the future was clearly theirs.
The advanced party, the progressive party, the party in alliance with
the future, are the names they like to give themselves. "The
principles which will obtain recognition in the future," says Mr.
Miall, a personage of deserved eminence among the political
Dissenters, as they are called, who have been the backbone of middle-
class liberalism--"the principles which will obtain recognition in
the future are the principles for which I have long and zealously
laboured. I qualified myself for joining in the work of harvest by
doing to the best of my ability the duties of seed-time." These
duties, if one is to gather them from the works of the great liberal
party in the last thirty years, are, as I have elsewhere summed them
up, the advocacy of free-trade, of parliamentary reform, of abolition
of church-rates, of voluntaryism in religion and education, of non-
interference of the State between employers and employed, and of
marriage with one's deceased wife's sister.

Now I know, when I object that all this is machinery, the great
liberal middle-class has by this [77] time grown cunning enough to
answer, that it always meant more by these things than meets the eye;
that it has had that within which passes show, and that we are soon
going to see, in a Free Church and all manner of good things, what it
was. But I have learned from Bishop Wilson (if Mr. Frederic Harrison
will forgive my again quoting that poor old hierophant of a decayed
superstition): "If we would really know our heart let us impartially
view our actions;" and I cannot help thinking that if our liberals
had had so much sweetness and light in their inner minds as they
allege, more of it must have come out in their sayings and doings.
An American friend of the English liberals says, indeed, that their
Dissidence of Dissent has been a mere instrument of the political
Dissenters for making reason and the will of God prevail (and no
doubt he would say the same of marriage with one's deceased wife's
sister); and that the abolition of a State Church is merely the
Dissenter's means to this end, just as culture is mine. Another
American defender of theirs says just the same of their industrialism
and free-trade; indeed, this gentleman, taking the bull by the horns,
proposes that we should for the [78] future call industrialism
culture, and the industrialists the men of culture, and then of
course there can be no longer any misapprehension about their true
character; and besides the pleasure of being wealthy and comfortable,
they will have authentic recognition as vessels of sweetness and
light. All this is undoubtedly specious; but I must remark that the
culture of which I talked was an endeavour to come at reason and the
will of God by means of reading, observing, and thinking; and that
whoever calls anything else culture, may, indeed, call it so if he
likes, but then he talks of something quite different from what I
talked of. And, again, as culture's way of working for reason and
the will of God is by directly trying to know more about them, while
the Dissidence of Dissent is evidently in itself no effort of this
kind, nor is its Free Church, in fact, a church with worthier
conceptions of God and the ordering of the world than the State
Church professes, but with mainly the same conceptions of these as
the State Church has, only that every man is to comport himself as he
likes in professing them,--this being so, I cannot at once accept the
Nonconformity any more than the industrialism and the other great
[79] works of our liberal middle-class as proof positive that this
class is in possession of light, and that here is the true seat of
authority for which we are in search; but I must try a little
further, and seek for other indications which may enable me to make
up my mind.

Why should we not do with the middle-class as we have done with the
aristocratic class,--find in it some representative men who may stand
for the virtuous mean of this class, for the perfection of its
present qualities and mode of being, and also for the excess of them.
Such men must clearly not be men of genius like Mr. Bright; for, as I
have formerly said, so far as a man has genius he tends to take
himself out of the category of class altogether, and to become simply
a man. Mr. Bright's brother, Mr. Jacob Bright, would, perhaps, be
more to the purpose; he seems to sum up very well in himself, without
disturbing influences, the general liberal force of the middle-class,
the force by which it has done its great works of free-trade,
parliamentary reform, voluntaryism, and so on, and the spirit in
which it has done them. Now it is clear, from what has been already
said, that there has been at least [80] an apparent want of light in
the force and spirit through which these great works have been done,
and that the works have worn in consequence too much a look of
machinery. But this will be clearer still if we take, as the happy
mean of the middle-class, not Mr. Jacob Bright, but his colleague in
the representation of Manchester, Mr. Bazley. Mr. Bazley sums up for
us, in general, the middle-class, its spirit and its works, at least
as well as Mr. Jacob Bright; and he has given us, moreover, a famous
sentence, which bears directly on the resolution of our present
question,--whether there is light enough in our middle-class to make
it the proper seat of the authority we wish to establish. When there
was a talk some little while ago about the state of middle-class
education, Mr. Bazley, as the representative of that class, spoke
some memorable words:--"There had been a cry that middle-class
education ought to receive more attention. He confessed himself very
much surprised by the clamour that was raised. He did not think that
class need excite the sympathy either of the legislature or the
public." Now this satisfaction of Mr. Bazley with the mental state
of the middle-class [81] was truly representative, and enhances his
claim (if that were necessary) to stand as the beautiful and virtuous
mean of that class. But it is obviously at variance with our
definition of culture, or the pursuit of light and perfection, which
made light and perfection consist, not in resting and being, but in
growing and becoming, in a perpetual advance in beauty and wisdom.
So the middle-class is by its essence, as one may say, by its
incomparable self-satisfaction decisively expressed through its
beautiful and virtuous mean, self-excluded from wielding an authority
of which light is to be the very soul.

Clear as this is, it will be made clearer still if we take some
representative man as the excess of the middle-class, and remember
that the middle-class, in general, is to be conceived as a body
swaying between the qualities of its mean and of its excess, and on
the whole, of course, as human nature is constituted, inclining
rather towards the excess than the mean. Of its excess no better
representative can possibly be imagined than the Rev. W. Cattle, a
Dissenting minister from Walsall, who came before the public in
connection with the proceedings at [82] Birmingham of Mr. Murphy,
already mentioned. Speaking in the midst of an irritated population
of Catholics, the Rev. W. Cattle exclaimed:--"I say, then, away with
the mass! It is from the bottomless pit; and in the bottomless pit
shall all liars have their part, in the lake that burneth with fire
and brimstone." And again: "When all the praties were black in
Ireland, why didn't the priests say the hocus-pocus over them, and
make them all good again?" He shared, too, Mr. Murphy's fears of
some invasion of his domestic happiness: "What I wish to say to you
as Protestant husbands is, Take care of your wives!" And, finally,
in the true vein of an Englishman doing as he likes, a vein of which
I have at some length pointed out the present dangers, he recommended
for imitation the example of some churchwardens at Dublin, among
whom, said he, "there was a Luther and also a Melancthon," who had
made very short work with some ritualist or other, handed him down
from his pulpit, and kicked him out of church. Now it is manifest,
as I said in the case of Sir Thomas Bateson, that if we let this
excess of the sturdy English middle-class, this conscientious
Protestant Dissenter, so strong, so self- [83] reliant, so fully
persuaded in his own mind, have his way, he would be capable, with
his want of light--or, to use the language of the religious world,
with his zeal without knowledge--of stirring up strife which neither
he nor any one else could easily compose.

And then comes in, as it did also with the aristocracy, the honesty
of our race, and by the voice of another middle-class man, Alderman
Wilson, Alderman of the City of London and Colonel of the City of
London Militia, proclaims that it has twinges of conscience, and that
it will not attempt to cope with our social disorders, and to deal
with a business which it feels to be too high for it. Every one
remembers how this virtuous Alderman-Colonel, or Colonel-Alderman,
led his militia through the London streets; how the bystanders
gathered to see him pass; how the London roughs, asserting an
Englishman's best and most blissful right of doing what he likes,
robbed and beat the bystanders; and how the blameless warrior-
magistrate refused to let his troops interfere. "The crowd," he
touchingly said afterwards, "was mostly composed of fine healthy
strong men, bent on mischief; if he had [84] allowed his soldiers to
interfere they might have been overpowered, their rifles taken from
them and used against them by the mob; a riot, in fact, might have
ensued, and been attended with bloodshed, compared with which the
assaults and loss of property that actually occurred would have been
as nothing." Honest and affecting testimony of the English middle-
class to its own inadequacy for the authoritative part one's
admiration would sometimes incline one to assign to it! "Who are
we," they say by the voice of their Alderman-Colonel, "that we should
not be overpowered if we attempt to cope with social anarchy, our
rifles taken from us and used against us by the mob, and we, perhaps,
robbed and beaten ourselves? Or what light have we, beyond a free-
born Englishman's impulse to do as he likes, which could justify us
in preventing, at the cost of bloodshed, other free-born Englishmen
from doing as they like, and robbing and beating us as much as they
please?"

This distrust of themselves as an adequate centre of authority does
not mark the working-class, as was shown by their readiness the other
day in Hyde Park to take upon themselves all the functions of [85]
government. But this comes from the working-class being, as I have
often said, still an embryo, of which no one can yet quite foresee
the final development; and from its not having the same experience
and self-knowledge as the aristocratic and middle classes. Honesty
it no doubt has, just like the other classes of Englishmen, but
honesty in an inchoate and untrained state; and meanwhile its powers
of action, which are, as Mr. Frederic Harrison says, exceedingly
ready, easily run away with it. That it cannot at present have a
sufficiency of light which comes by culture,--that is, by reading,
observing, and thinking,--is clear from the very nature of its
condition; and, indeed, we saw that Mr. Frederic Harrison, in seeking
to make a free stage for its bright powers of sympathy and ready
powers of action, had to begin by throwing overboard culture, and
flouting it as only fit for a professor of belles lettres. Still, to
make it perfectly manifest that no more in the working-class than in
the aristocratic and middle classes can one find an adequate centre
of authority,--that is, as culture teaches us to conceive our
required authority, of light,--let us again follow, with this class,
the method we have [86] followed with the aristocratic and middle
classes, and try to bring before our minds representative men, who
may figure to us its virtue and its excess. We must not take, of
course, Colonel Dickson or Mr. Beales; because Colonel Dickson, by
his martial profession and dashing exterior, seems to belong
properly, like Julius Caesar and Mirabeau and other great popular
leaders, to the aristocratic class, and to be carried into the
popular ranks only by his ambition or his genius; while Mr. Beales
belongs to our solid middle-class, and, perhaps, if he had not been a
great popular leader, would have been a Philistine. But Mr. Odger,
whose speeches we have all read, and of whom his friends relate,
besides, much that is favourable, may very well stand for the
beautiful and virtuous mean of our present working-class; and I think
everybody will admit that in Mr. Odger, as in Lord Elcho, there is
manifestly, with all his good points, some insufficiency of light.
The excess of the working-class, in its present state of development,
is perhaps best shown in Mr. Bradlaugh, the iconoclast, who seems to
be almost for baptizing us all in blood and fire into his new social
dispensation, and to whose [87] reflections, now that I have once
been set going on Bishop Wilson's track, I cannot forbear commending
this maxim of the good old man: "Intemperance in talk makes a
dreadful havoc in the heart." Mr. Bradlaugh, like Sir Thomas Bateson
and the Rev. W. Cattle, is evidently capable, if he had his head
given him, of running us all into great dangers and confusion. I
conclude, therefore,--what, indeed, few of those who do me the honour
to read this disquisition are likely to dispute,--that we can as
little find in the working-class as in the aristocratic or in the
middle class our much-wanted source of authority, as culture suggests
it to us.

Well, then, what if we tried to rise above the idea of class to the
idea of the whole community, the State, and to find our centre of
light and authority there? Every one of us has the idea of country,
as a sentiment; hardly any one of us has the idea of the State, as a
working power. And why? Because we habitually live in our ordinary
selves, which do not carry us beyond the ideas and wishes of the
class to which we happen to belong. And we are all afraid of giving
to the State too much power, because we only conceive of the State
[88] as something equivalent to the class in occupation of the
executive government, and are afraid of that class abusing power to
its own purposes. If we strengthen the State with the aristocratic
class in occupation of the executive government, we imagine we are
delivering ourselves up captive to the ideas and wishes of Sir Thomas
Bateson; if with the middle-class in occupation of the executive
government, to those of the Rev. W. Cattle; if with the working-
class, to those of Mr. Bradlaugh. And with much justice; owing to
the exaggerated notion which we English, as I have said, entertain of
the right and blessedness of the mere doing as one likes, of the
affirming oneself, and oneself just as it is. People of the
aristocratic class want to affirm their ordinary selves, their
likings and dislikings; people of the middle-class the same, people
of the working-class the same. By our everyday selves, however, we
are separate, personal, at war; we are only safe from one another's
tyranny when no one has any power; and this safety, in its turn,
cannot save us from anarchy. And when, therefore, anarchy presents
itself as a danger to us, we know not where to turn.

[89] But by our best self we are united, impersonal, at harmony. We
are in no peril from giving authority to this, because it is the
truest friend we all of us can have; and when anarchy is a danger to
us, to this authority we may turn with sure trust. Well, and this is
the very self which culture, or the study of perfection, seeks to
develop in us; at the expense of our old untransformed self, taking
pleasure only in doing what it likes or is used to do, and exposing
us to the risk of clashing with every one else who is doing the same!
So that our poor culture, which is flouted as so unpractical, leads
us to the very ideas capable of meeting the great want of our present
embarrassed times! We want an authority, and we find nothing but
jealous classes, checks, and a dead-lock; culture suggests the idea
of the State. We find no basis for a firm State-power in our
ordinary selves; culture suggests one to us in our best self.

It cannot but acutely try a tender conscience to be accused, in a
practical country like ours, of keeping aloof from the work and hope
of a multitude of earnest-hearted men, and of merely toying with
poetry and aesthetics. So it is with no little [90] sense of relief
that I find myself thus in the position of one who makes a
contribution in aid of the practical necessities of our times. The
great thing, it will be observed, is to find our best self, and to
seek to affirm nothing but that; not,--as we English with our over-
value for merely being free and busy have been so accustomed to do,--
resting satisfied with a self which comes uppermost long before our
best self, and affirming that with blind energy. In short,--to go
back yet once more to Bishop Wilson,--of these two excellent rules of
Bishop Wilson's for a man's guidance: "Firstly, never go against the
best light you have; secondly, take care that your light be not
darkness," we English have followed with praiseworthy zeal the first
rule, but we have not given so much heed to the second. We have gone
manfully, the Rev. W. Cattle and the rest of us, according to the
best light we have; but we have not taken enough care that this
should be really the best light possible for us, that it should not
be darkness. And, our honesty being very great, conscience has
whispered to us that the light we were following, our ordinary self,
was, indeed, perhaps, only an inferior self, only darkness; and [91]
that it would not do to impose this seriously on all the world.

But our best self inspires faith, and is capable of affording a
serious principle of authority. For example. We are on our way to
what the late Duke of Wellington, with his strong sagacity, foresaw
and admirably described as "a revolution by due course of law." This
is undoubtedly,--if we are still to live and grow, and this famous
nation is not to stagnate and dwindle away on the one hand, or, on
the other, to perish miserably in mere anarchy and confusion,--what
we are on the way to. Great changes there must be, for a revolution
cannot accomplish itself without great changes; yet order there must
be, for without order a revolution cannot accomplish itself by due
course of law. So whatever brings risk of tumult and disorder,
multitudinous processions in the streets of our crowded towns,
multitudinous meetings in their public places and parks,--
demonstrations perfectly unnecessary in the present course of our
affairs,--our best self, or right reason, plainly enjoins us to set
our faces against. It enjoins us to encourage and uphold the
occupants of the executive power, whoever they [92] may be, in firmly
prohibiting them. But it does this clearly and resolutely, and is
thus a real principle of authority, because it does it with a free
conscience; because in thus provisionally strengthening the executive
power, it knows that it is not doing this merely to enable Sir Thomas
Bateson to affirm himself as against Mr. Bradlaugh, or the Rev. W.
Cattle to affirm himself as against both. It knows that it is
stablishing the State, or organ of our collective best self, of our
national right reason; and it has the testimony of conscience that it
is stablishing the State on behalf of whatever great changes are
needed, just as much as on behalf of order; stablishing it to deal
just as stringently, when the time comes, with Sir Thomas Bateson's
Protestant ascendency, or with the Rev. W. Cattle's sorry education
of his children, as it deals with Mr. Bradlaugh's street-processions.

NOTES

56. +posse comitatus. Arnold's phrase refers to the medieval
institution of the "power of the county." It originally consisted of
a county's able-bodied males over fifteen, and the local authorities
might call upon it to preserve order. Later, the posse became an
instrument of the church parish.

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