And, while our new critic was thus disdainful of much that we held sacred, of political machinery and logical government, and individual liberty of speech and action, he recalled our attention to certain objects of reverence which we, or at least some of us, had forgotten. He insisted on the immense value of history and continuity in the political life of a nation. He extolled (though the words were not his) the "institutions which incorporate tradition and prolong the reign of the dead." He affirmed that external beauty, stateliness, splendour, gracious manners, were indispensable elements of civilization, and that these were the contributions which Aristocracy made to the welfare of the State. He reminded us that the true greatness of a nation was to be found in its culture, its ideals, its sentiment for beauty, its performances in the intellectual and moral spheres—not in its supply of coal, its volume of trade, its accumulated capital, or its multiplication of railways. Above all—and this was to some of our Party the unkindest cut—he asserted for Religion the chief place among the elements of national well-being. We were just then living at the fag-end of an anti-religious time. The critical, negative, and utilitarian spirit which had seized on Oxford after the apparent defeat and collapse of Newman's movement had profoundly affected the Liberal Party. It was an essential characteristic of the political Liberals to pour scorn on that "retrograding transcendentalism" which was "the hardheads' nickname for the Anglo-Catholic Symphony."[29] The fact that Gladstone was so saturated with the spirit of that symphony was a cause of mistrust which his genius and courage could barely overcome; and, even when it was overcome, a good many of his Party followed him as reluctantly and as mockingly as Sancho Panza followed Don Quixote. The only heaven of which the political Liberal dreamed was what Arnold called "the glorified and unending tea-meeting of popular Protestantism." And the portion of the Party which regarded itself as the intellectual wing, seemed to have reverted to the temper described by Bishop Butler; "taking for granted that Christianity is not so much as a subject of enquiry, but that it is now at length discovered to be fictitious"; and habitually talking as if "this were an agreed point among all people of discernment." Great was the vexation of the "old Liberal hacks" who had been repeating these dismal shibboleths, and ignoring or denying the greatest force in human life, to find in this new teacher of liberal ideas a convinced and persistent opponent. He affirmed that Religion was the best, the sweetest, and the strongest thing in the world; he insisted that without it there could be no perfect culture, no complete civilization; he showed a reverent admiration for the historical character and teaching of Jesus Christ; he urged the example of His "mildness and sweet reasonableness." He taught that the best way of extending Christ's kingdom on earth was by sweetening the character and brightening the lives of the men and women whose nature He shared.

It belongs to another part of this work to enquire what he meant by Religion and Christianity, and how far his interpretations accorded with, or how far they departed from, the traditional creed of Christendom. But enough, perhaps, has been said to explain why the appearance of Culture and Anarchy so profoundly disquieted the "old Liberal hacks" and the popular teachers of irreligion. One of these called Christianity "that awful plague which has destroyed two civilizations and but barely failed to slay such promise of good as is now struggling to live amongst men." Of that teacher, and of others like him, Arnold wrote in later years: "If the matter were not so serious one could hardly help smiling at the chagrin and manifest perplexity of such of one's friends as happen to be philosophical radicals and secularists, at having to reckon with religion again when they thought its day was quite gone by, and that they need not study it any more or take account of it any more; that it was passing out, and a kind of new gospel, half Bentham, half Cobden, in which they were themselves particularly strong, was coming in. And perhaps there is no one who more deserves to be compassionated than an elderly or middle-aged man of this kind, such as several of their Parliamentary spokesmen and representatives are. For perhaps the younger men of the Party may take heart of grace, and acquaint themselves a little with religion, now that they see its day is by no means over. But, for the older ones, their mental habits are formed, and it is almost too late for them to begin such new studies. However, a wave of religious reaction is evidently passing over Europe, due very much to our revolutionary and philosophical friends having insisted upon it that religion was gone by and unnecessary, when it was neither the one nor the other."



A study of Arnold's work ought to give something more than a sketch of the prose-book by which he most powerfully affected the thinking of his time, and we will therefore take the contents of Culture and Anarchy chapter by chapter. The Preface is only a summary of the book, and may therefore be disregarded. The Introduction briefly points out the foolishness of orators and leader-writers who had assumed that Culture meant "a smattering of Greek and Latin," and then addresses itself to the task of finding a better definition. "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 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."

The First Chapter bears the memorable heading—"Sweetness and Light"; in reference to which Lord Salisbury so happily said that, when he conferred the degree of D.C.L. on Arnold, he ought to have addressed him as "Vir dulcissime et lucidissime." In this chapter Arnold lays it down that Culture, as he understands the word, is, in part, "a desire after the things of the mind, simply for their own sakes, and for the pleasure of seeing them as they are." But he goes on to say that "there is of Culture another view, in which not solely the scientific passion, the sheer desire to see things as they are, natural and proper in an intelligent being, appears as the ground of it. There is a view in which all the love of our neighbour, the impulses towards action, help, and beneficence, the desire for removing human error, clearing human confusion, and diminishing human misery, the noble aspiration to leave the world better and happier than we found it—motives eminently such as are called social—come in as part of the grounds of Culture, and the main and pre-eminent part. Culture is then properly described not as having its origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection. It moves by the force, not merely or primarily of the scientific passion for pure knowledge, but also of the moral and social passion for doing good.... There is no better motto which it can have than these words of Bishop Wilson: "To make reason and the will of God prevail." Thus the true disciple of Culture will not be content with merely "learning the truth for his own personal satisfaction"; but will try to make it prevail; and in this endeavour Religion plays a commanding part. It is "the greatest and most important of the efforts by which the human race has manifested its impulse to perfect itself"; it is "the voice of the deepest human experience." It teaches that "The Kingdom of God is within you," and that internal perfection must first be sought; but then it goes on, hand in hand with Culture, to spread perfection in widest commonalty. "Perfection is not possible, while the individual remains isolated." "To promote the Kingdom of God is to increase and hasten one's own happiness." Finally, Perfection as Culture conceives it, is a harmonious expansion of all the powers which make the beauty and worth of human nature: "and here," says Arnold, "Culture goes beyond Religion, as Religion is generally conceived by us." Stress must be laid upon those last words; for Religion, according to its full and catholic ideal, is the perfection and consecration of man's whole nature, intellectual and physical, as well as moral and spiritual. All that is lovely, splendid, moving, heroic, even enjoyable, in human life—all health and vigour and beauty and cleverness and charm—all nature and all art, all science and all literature—are among the good and perfect gifts which come down from the Father of Lights. But this is just the conception of Religion which Puritanism never grasped—nay, rather which Puritanism definitely rejected." And here probably is the origin of that quarrel with Puritanism, at least in its more superficial and obvious aspects, which so coloured and sometimes barbed Arnold's meditations on Religion. "As I have said with regard to wealth: Let us look at the life of those who live in and for it—so I say with regard to the religious organizations. Look at the life imaged in such a newspaper as the Nonconformist—a life of jealousy of the Establishment, disputes, tea-meetings, openings of chapels, sermons; and then think of it as an ideal of human life completing itself on all sides, and aspiring with all its organs after sweetness, light, and perfection!"

So much then for his definition of Culture; and we must admit that "the old Liberal hacks," the speakers on Liberal platforms, and the writers in Liberal papers, were not without excuse when they failed so utterly to divine what the new Teacher meant by harping on a word which Bacon and Pope had used in so different a sense.

Chapter II is headed "Doing as One Likes." And here it was that our new critic came most sharply into conflict with our cherished beliefs. We believed in the liberty which Milton loved, "to know, to utter, and to argue freely, according to conscience," and to frame our action by sole reference to our conviction. We believed that of such liberty there was only one endurable limit, and that was the condition that no man should so use his own liberty as to lessen his brother's—and the liberty thus conceived we regarded as the supreme boon of human life, for which no other could conceivably be taken in exchange. And now came the new Teacher of Liberalism with a doctrine which, while it made us angry, also set us thinking. "Our familiar praise of the British Constitution under which we live, is that it is a system of checks—a system which stops and paralyzes any power in interfering with the free action of individuals.... As Feudalism, which with its ideas and habits of subordination was for many centuries 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." Aristocracy, according to Arnold, who strangely mingled admiration of it with contempt, had been doing what it liked from time immemorial. It had enjoyed all the good things of life—great station, great wealth, great power—with a comfortable assurance that they belonged to it by divine right. It had governed England with credit to itself and benefit to the country. As Lord Beaconsfield said, it was only because a Whig Minister wished to curry favour with the populace, that an Earl who had committed a murder was hanged.

The Middle Class also, had, at any rate, since the Reform Act of 1832, "done what it liked," in a style not quite so grand but excessively comfortable and self-satisfied. It had carried some great reforms on which it had set its heart. It had established, enormously to its profit, Free Trade, and it had accumulated vast wealth. Its maxim had been—"Every man for himself in business, every man for himself in religion,"—and the devil take the hindmost.

But now, said Arnold, is the judgment of this world. The Aristocracy and the Middle Class had come to an end of their reign. A "tide of secret dissatisfaction had mined the ground under the self-confident Liberalism of the last thirty years (1839-1869) and had prepared the way for its sudden collapse and supersession." So far, the young Liberals and Radicals of the day did not disagree. They liked this doctrine, and had preached it; but from this point they and their new Teacher parted company. The working-man was now enfranchised; and of the newly-enfranchised working-man, or at least of some of the most conspicuous representatives of his class, Arnold had a curious dread. "His apparition is somewhat embarrassing; because, while the Aristocratic and Middle Classes have long been doing as they like with great vigour, he has been too undeveloped and too submissive hitherto to join in the game; and now, when he does come, he comes in immense numbers, and is rather raw and rough."

The dread of the working-men, and the apprehension of the bad use which they might make of their new power, can be traced to certain incidents which happened just before they were admitted to the Franchise and which perhaps precipitated their admission. In June, 1866, the Reform Bill, for which Lord Russell and Mr. Gladstone were responsible, was defeated in the House of Commons, and the Tories came into office. The defeated Bill would have enfranchised the upper class of artisans, and its rejection led to considerable riots, in which certain leaders of the working-men played conspicuous parts. The mob carried all before it, and the railings of Hyde Park were broken. The Tory Government behaved with the most incredible feebleness. The Home Secretary shed tears. The whole business, half scandalous and half ridiculous, furnished Arnold with an illustration for his sermon on "Doing What One Likes." Reviewing, three years after their occurrence, the events of July, 1866, he wrote thus: "Everyone remembers the virtuous Alderman-Colonel or Colonel-Alderman, who had to lead 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 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 which one's convictions 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 freeborn Englishman's impulse to do as he likes, which would justify us in preventing, at the cost of bloodshed, other freeborn Englishmen from doing as they like, and robbing and beating as much as they please?' And again, 'the Rough is just asserting his personal liberty a little, going where he likes, assembling where he likes, bawling as he likes, hustling as he likes.... 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 cries out that he is being butchered by the aristocracy.'"

Now, in spite of all this banter and sarcasm, these passages express a real dread which, at the time when Household Suffrage was claimed and conceded, really possessed Arnold's mind. He came with the lapse of years to see that it was illusory, and that the working-classes of England are as steady, as law-abiding, as inaccessible to ideas, as little in danger of being hurried into revolutionary courses, as unwilling to jeopardize their national interests and their stake in the country, as the Aristocracy and the Middle Class. But at the period which we are considering, when the dread of popular violence had really laid hold of him, it is interesting to mark the direction in which he looked for social salvation. He did not turn to our traditional institutions; to the Church or the Throne or the House of Lords: to a military despotism, or an established religion, or a governing Aristocracy: certainly not to the Middle Class with its wealth and industry—least of all to the Populace, with its "bright powers of sympathy." In an age which made an idol of individual action, and warred against all collectivism as tyranny, he looked for salvation to the State. But the State, if it was to fulfil its high function, must be a State in which every man felt that he had a place and a share, and the authority of which he could accept without loss of self-respect. "If ever," Arnold said in 1866, "there comes a more equal state of society in England, the power of the State for repression will be a thousand times stronger." He was for widening the province of the State, and strengthening its hands, and "stablishing it on behalf of whatever great changes are needed, just as much as on behalf of order." And, forasmuch as the State, in its ideal, was "the organ of our collective best self," our first duty was to cultivate, each man for himself, what in himself was best—in short, Perfection. "We find no basis for a firm State-power in our ordinary selves; culture suggests one to us in our best self." And so we come back to the governing idea of the book before us, that Culture is the foe of Anarchy.

In the Third Chapter—"Barbarians, Philistines, Populace"—he divided English Society into three main classes, to which he gave three well-remembered nicknames. The aristocracy he named (not very happily, seeing that he so greatly admired their fine manners) the Barbarians; the Middle Class he had already named the Philistines; and to the great mass which lies below the Middle Class he gave the name of "Populace." The name of "Philistine" in its application to the great Middle Class dates from the Lecture on Heine delivered from the Chair of Poetry at Oxford in 1863. And it seems to have supplied a want in our system of nomenclature, for it struck, and it has remained, at least as a name for a type of mind, if not exactly as a name for a social class.

When we originally encounter the word in the Lecture[30] on Heine, Arnold is speaking of Heine's life-long battle—with what? With Philistinism. "Philistinism! We have not the expression in English. Perhaps we have not the word, because we have so much of the thing. At Soli, I imagine, they did not talk of solecisms; and here, at the very headquarters of Goliath, nobody talks of Philistinism. The French have adopted the term epicier (grocer) to designate the sort of being whom the Germans designate by the term Philistine; but the French term—besides that it casts a slur upon a respectable class, composed of living and susceptible members, while the original Philistines are dead and buried long ago—is really, I think, in itself much less apt and expressive than the German term. Efforts have been made to obtain in English some term equivalent to Philister or epicier; Mr. Carlyle has made several such efforts: "Respectability with its thousand gigs," he says; well, the occupant of every one of these gigs is, Mr. Carlyle means, a Philistine. However, the word respectable is far too valuable a word to be thus perverted from its proper meaning; if the English are ever to have a word for the thing we are speaking of—and so prodigious are the changes which the modern spirit is introducing, that even we English shall perhaps one day come to want such a word—I think we had much better take the word Philistine itself.

"Philistine must have originally meant, in the mind of those who invented the nickname, a sturdy, dogged, unenlightened opponent of the Chosen People, of the Children of Light. The party of change, the would-be remodellers of the old traditional European order, the invokers of reason against custom, the representatives of the modern spirit in every sphere where it is applicable, regarded themselves, with the robust self-confidence natural to reformers, as a chosen people, as children of the light. They regarded their adversaries as humdrum people, slaves to routine, enemies to light, stupid and oppressive, but at the same time very strong.... Philistia has come to be thought by us the true Land of Promise, and it is anything but that; the born lover of ideas, the born hater of commonplaces, must feel in this country that the sky over his head is of brass and iron. The enthusiast for the idea, for reason, values reason, the idea, in and for themselves; he values them, irrespectively of the practical conveniences which their triumphs may obtain for him, and the man who regards the profession of these practical conveniences as something sufficient in itself which compensates for the absence or surrender of the idea, of reason, is, in his eyes, a Philistine."

In Culture and Anarchy, Arnold thus elaborates the term "Philistine," and justifies, not without some misgiving, its exclusive appropriation to the Middle Class. "Philistine gives the notion of something particularly stiffnecked and perverse in the resistance to light and its children, and therein it specially suits our Middle Class, who not only do not pursue Sweetness and Light, but who even prefer to them that sort of machinery of business, chapels, tea-meetings, and addresses from Mr. Murphy,[31] which make up the dismal and illiberal life on which I have so often touched." The force of Philistinism in English life and society is the force which, from first to last, he set himself most steadily to fight, and, if possible, transform. That the effort was arduous, and even perilous, he was fully aware. He must, he said, pursue his object through literature, "freer perhaps in that sphere than I could be in any other, but with the risk always before me, if I cannot charm the wild beast of Philistinism while I am trying to convert him, of being torn in pieces by him, and, even if I succeed to the utmost and convert him, of dying in a ditch or a workhouse at the end of it all."

The nickname of "Barbarians" for the Aristocracy he justified on the ground that, like the Barbarians of history who reinvigorated and renewed our worn-out Europe, they had eminent merits, among which were staunch individualism and a passion for doing what one likes; a love of field sports; vigour, good looks, fine complexions, care for the body and all manly exercises; distinguished bearing, high spirit, and self-confidence—an admirable collection of attributes indeed, but marred by insufficiency of light, and "needing, for ideal perfection, a shade more soul." When we have done with the Barbarians at the top of the social edifice, and the Middle Class half way up, we come to the Working Class; and of that class the higher portion "looks forward to the happy day when it will sit on thrones with commercial Members of Parliament and other Middle Class potentates; and this portion is naturally akin to the Philistinism just above it. But below this there is that vast portion of the Working Class which, raw and undeveloped, has long lain half hidden amidst its poverty and squalor, and is now issuing from its hiding-place to assert an Englishman's heaven-born right of doing as he likes. To this vast residuum we give the name of 'Populace.'" In thus dividing the nation, he is careful to point out that in each class we may from time to time find "aliens"—men free from the prejudices, the faults, the temptations of the class in which they were born; elect souls who, unhindered by their antecedents, share the higher life of intellectual and moral aspiration.

But, after making this exception, he traces in all three classes the presence and working of the same besetting sin. All alike, by a dogged persistence in doing as they like, have come to ignore the existence of Authority or Right Reason; and this irrecognition of what ought to be the rule of life operates not only in the political sphere, but also, and conspicuously, in the spheres of morals, taste, society, and literature. Self-satisfaction blinds all classes. All alike believe themselves infallible, and there is no sovereign organ of opinion to set them right. The fundamental ground of our erroneous habits, and our unwillingness to be corrected, is "our preference of doing to thinking," The mention of this preference leads us to the subject of Chapter IV, "Hebraism and Hellenism."



Of all the phrases which Arnold either created or popularized, there is none more closely associated with his memory than this famous conjunction of Hebraism and Hellenism; and in this connexion, it is not out of place to note his abiding interest in, and affection for, the House of Israel. The present writer once delivered a rather long and elaborate lecture on Arnold's genius and writings; and next morning a daily paper gave this masterpiece of condensed and tactful reporting: "The lecturer stated that Mr. Arnold was of Jewish extraction, and proceeded to read passages from his works." It might have been more truly said that the lecturer suggested, as interesting to those who speculate in race and pedigree, the question whether Arnold's remote ancestors had belonged to the Ancient Race, and had emigrated from Germany to Lowestoft, where they dwelt for several generations. There is certainly no proof that so it was; and genealogical researches would in any case be out of keeping with the scope of this book. It is enough to note the fact of his affectionate and grateful feeling towards the Jewish race, and this can best be done in his own words. The present Lord Rothschild, formerly Sir Nathaniel de Rothschild, is the first adherent of the Jewish faith who ever was admitted to the House of Lords, though of course there have been other Peers of Jewish descent. When Mr. Gladstone created this Jewish peerage,[32] Arnold wrote as follows to an admirable lady whose name often appears in his published Letters—

"I have received so much kindness from your family, and I have so sincere a regard for yourself, that I should in any case have been tempted to send you a word of congratulation on Sir Nathaniel's peerage; but I really feel also proud and happy for the British public to have, by this peerage, signally marked the abandonment of its old policy of exclusion, the final and total abandonment of it. What have we not learned and gained from the people whom we have been excluding all these years! And how every one of us will see and say this in the future!"

What, in his view, we had "learned and gained" from the Jewish people, is well expressed in the preface to Culture and Anarchy.

"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. The intense and convinced energy with which the Hebrew, both of the Old and the New Testament, threw himself upon his ideal of righteousness, 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 devotion to its ideal has belonged to Hebraism alone. As our idea of perfection widens beyond the narrow limits to which the over-rigour of Hebraising has tended to confine it, we shall yet 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 human infirmity 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."

Having thus described the function of Hebraism, Arnold goes on to define Hellenism as "the intelligence driving at those ideas which are, after all, the basis of right practice, the ardent sense for all the new and changing combinations of them which man's development brings with it, the indomitable impulse to know and adjust them perfectly." These two great forces divide the empire of the world between them; and we call them Hebraism and Hellenism after the two races of men who have most signally illustrated them. "Hebraism and Hellenism—between these two points of influence moves our world." The idea of Hellenism is to see things as they are: the idea of Hebraism is conduct and obedience. Our aim should be to combine the merits of both ideas, and be "evenly and happily balanced between them." Enlarging on this text, he traces the working of the two principles, which ought not to be rivals but have been made such by the perverseness of men, philosophy and history; and then, turning to our own day and its doings, he says that Puritanism, which originally was a reaction of the conscience and moral sense against the indifference and lax conduct of the Renascence, has gone counter, during the last two centuries, to the main stream of human advance; has hindered men from trying to see things as they really are, and has made strictness of conduct the great aim of human life. "It made the secondary the principal at the wrong moment, and the principal it at the wrong moment treated as secondary." Hence have arisen all sorts of confusion and inefficiency. Everywhere we see the signs of anarchy, and the need for some sound order and authority. "This we can only get by going back upon the actual instincts and forces which rule our life, seeing them as they really are, connecting them with other instincts and forces, and enlarging our whole view and rule of life."

From this short chapter, he passes on to Chapter V, which he heads: "Porro unum est necessarium"; and here he pursues his controversy with modern Puritanism, which imagines that it has, in its special conception of God and religion, the unum necessarium, which can dispense with Sweetness and Light, self-culture and self-discipline. "The Puritan's great danger is that he imagines himself in possession of a rule telling him the unum necessarium, or one thing needful, and that he then remains satisfied with a very crude conception of what this rule really is and what it tells him, thinks he has now knowledge and henceforth needs only to act, and, in this dangerous state of assurance and self-satisfaction, proceeds to give full swing to a number of the instincts of his ordinary self.... What he wants is a larger conception of human nature, showing him the number of other points at which his nature must come to its best, besides the points which he himself knows and thinks of. There is no unum necessarium, or one thing needful, which can free human nature from the obligation of trying to come to its best at all these points. Instead of our 'one thing needful' justifying in us vulgarity, hideousness, ignorance, violence—our vulgarity, hideousness, ignorance, violence are really so many touchstones which try our one thing needful, and which prove that in the state, at any rate, in which we ourselves have it, it is not all we want. And, as the force which encourages us to stand staunch and fast by the rule and ground we have is Hebraism, so the force which encourages us to go back upon this rule, and to try the very ground on which we appear to stand, is Hellenism—a term for giving our consciousness free play, and enlarging its range."

In his Sixth Chapter—headed "Our Liberal Practitioners"—he applies his general doctrine to persons and performances of the year 1869. The Liberal Party was just then busy disestablishing and disendowing the Irish Church. He was in favour of Established Churches, and of Concurrent Endowment. He realized the absurdity of the Irish Church as it then stood; but, true to his critical character, he rebuked the "Liberal Practitioners" for the spirit in which they were disestablishing and disendowing it. They did not approach the subject in the spirit of Hellenism: they did not appeal to Right Reason: they did not attempt to see the problem of religious establishment as it really was. But they Hebraized about it—that is, they took an uncritical interpretation of biblical words as their absolute rule of conduct. "It may," he said, "be all very well for born Hebraizers, like Mr. Spurgeon, to Hebraize; but for Liberal statesmen to Hebraize is surely unsafe, and to see poor old Liberal hacks Hebraizing, whose real self belongs to a kind of negative Hellenism—a state of moral indifference, without intellectual ardour—is even painful." In the same manner he dealt with the movement to abolish Primogeniture, strongly urged by John Bright; the movement to legalize marriage with a wife's sister—"the craving for forbidden fruit" joined with "the craving for legality"; and the doctrine, then supposed to be incontrovertible, of Free Trade. In all these cases, he proposed to "Hellenize a little," to "turn the free stream of our thought" on the Liberal policy of the moment; and to "see how this is related to the intelligible law of human life, and to national well-being and happiness."

And so we were brought to the conclusion of the whole matter. The stock-beliefs and stock-performances of Liberalism were exhausted, uninteresting, in some grave respects mischievous. Seekers after truth, disciples of culture, men bent on trying to see things as they really are, should lend no hand to these labours of the Philistines. Their right course was to stand absolutely aloof from the political work which was going on round them; and to pursue, with undeviating consistency, "increased sweetness, increased light, increased life, increased sympathy."

It is interesting to recall that Charles Kingsley praised Culture and Anarchy in a letter which greatly pleased Arnold, as showing "the generous and affectionate side" of Kingsley's disposition. And this is his answer to Kingsley's praise: "Of my reception by the general public I have, perhaps, no cause to boast; but from the men who lead in literature, from men like you, I have met with nothing but kindness and generosity. The being thrown so much for the last twenty years with Dissenters, and the observing their great strength and their great impenetrability—how they seemed to think that in their 'gospel'—a mere caricature, in truth, of the real Gospel—they had a secret which enabled them to judge all literature and all art and to keep aloof from modern ideas—set me on thinking how they might be got at, and on the use of this parallel of Hebraism and Hellenism. If I was to think only of the Dissenters, or if I were in your position, I should press incessantly for more Hellenism; but, as it is, seeing the tendency of our young poetical litterateur (Swinburne), and, on the other hand, seeing much of Huxley (whom I thoroughly liked and admire, but find very disposed to be tyrannical and unjust), I lean towards Hebraism, and try to prevent the balance from on this side flying up out of sight." Dean Church, also, in writing about the book, expressed "his sense of the importance of the distinction between Hellenism and Hebraism." "This," said Arnold, "showed his width of mind"; for "it is a distinction on which more and more will turn, and on dealing wisely with it everything depends."

I have dwelt at this rather disproportionate length on the structure and teaching of Culture and Anarchy, partly because it was to men who were young in 1869 a landmark in their mental life, and partly because it gives the whole body of Arnold's political and social teaching. He pursued this line of thought for twenty years; Friendship's Garland, with its inimitable fun, appeared in 1871, and was followed by a long series of essays and lectures; but the germ of whatever he subsequently wrote is to be found in Culture and Anarchy. And from that memorable book what did we learn?

To answer first by negatives, we did not learn to undervalue personal liberty, or to stand aloof from the practical work of citizenship, or to despise Parliamentary effort and its bearing on the better life of England. To these lessons of a fascinating teacher we closed our ears, charmed he never so wisely. To answer affirmatively, we learned that our first object must be to attain our own best self, and that only so could we hope to help others. We learned to discard prepossessions, and try to see things as they really are. We learned that the Liberty which we worshipped must be conditioned by Authority—an authority not wielded by rank or bureaucracy, but by the State acting as a whole through its accredited representatives, and depending for its existence on the co-operation of the entire nation. In self-government so founded, however stringently it might exercise its power, there was no degradation for the governed, because, in the wider sense, they were also governors. In brief, Arnold's idea of the State was exactly that which in later years one of his disciples—Henry Scott Holland—conceived, when, defending Christian Socialism against the reproach of "grandmotherly legislation," he said that, in a well-governed commonwealth, "every man was his own grandmother." But, while Authority belongs to the State as a whole, it must be exercised through the agency of officialdom—through the action of officers or governors designated for the special functions. And here he taught us that we must not, as Bishop Westcott said, "trust to an uncultivated notion of duty for an improvised solution of unforeseen difficulties"; must not, like the Alderman-Colonel, "sit in the hall of judgment or march at the head of men of war, without some knowledge how to perform judgment and how to direct men of war."

Then again we learned from him to value machinery, not for itself, but for what it could produce. He taught us that all political reconstruction was at the best mere improvement of machinery; that political reform was related to social reform as the means to the end: and that the end was the perfection of the race in all its physical, mental, and moral attributes.

Above all we learned—and perhaps it was the most important of our lessons—to think little of material boons—vulgar wealth and stolid comfort and ignoble ease; to set our affections on the joys of soul and spirit; and to recognize in the practice of religion the highest development and most satisfying use of the powers which belong to man.

[Footnote 21: A favourite creation of the late Mr. William Cory.]

[Footnote 22: Burke.]

[Footnote 23: Mr. Willis' motion to remove the Bishops from the House of Lords was lost by 11 votes on the 21st of March, 1884.]

[Footnote 24: Now (1893) Lord Wemyss.]

[Footnote 25: Culture: a Dialogue, 1867.]

[Footnote 26: See p. 63.]

[Footnote 27: It contains also "My Countrymen" and "A Courteous Explanation."]

[Footnote 28: The writer was then a schoolboy at Harrow, where Arnold lived from 1868 to 1873.]

[Footnote 29: William Cory.]

[Footnote 30: Reprinted in Essays in Criticism.]

[Footnote 31: A Protestant lecturer of the period.]

[Footnote 32: In 1885.]



CHAPTER V

CONDUCT

"By desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil—widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower."

Whether Lactantius was etymologically right or wrong, there is no doubt that he was right substantially when he defined Religion as that which binds the soul to God. And religion thus conceived naturally divides itself into two parts: duty and doctrine, practice and theory, conduct and theology. Both elements are presented to us in the Bible. Of the one it is written: "The wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein." Of the other: "Which things the angels desire to look into." Even the respective functions of the Synoptists and St. John seem to accommodate themselves to this natural division. Following the line thus indicated, we shall consider Arnold's influence on Religion under the two heads of Conduct and Theology. The passage from Middlemarch which stands at the head of this chapter seems in a way to express his attitude towards the religious problems of his time. It would be impossible for a convinced believer in the faith of the Christian Church, as traditionally received, to profess that Arnold "knew what was perfectly good" in the domain of religion; but beyond all question he "desired" it with an even passionate desire, and attained far more closely to it than many professors of a more orthodox theology.

Of him it might be truly said, as of his favourite poet, that he "saw life steadily and saw it whole." And of life he declared that Conduct was three-fourths. For all the infinite varieties and contradictions of mere opinion he had the largest tolerance, knowing that no opinion, as such, is culpable. For people thinking so diversely as Wordsworth, Bunsen, Clough, and Palgrave; Church and Temple, Lake and Stanley; Lord Coleridge, William Forster, and John Morley, he had equally warm regard, and, in some ways, sympathy. It was only when the sphere of conduct was approached that his judgment became severe and his sympathy dried up. In Politics—levity, time-serving, mob-pleasing, the spirit which prefers partisanship to patriotism, were the faults which he could not pardon. His imperfect sympathy with Mr. Gladstone, a deplorable but undeniable fact, was due not so much to dissent from Gladstone's theory of the public good as to disapproval of his character. "Respect is the very last feeling he excites in me; he has too little solidity and composure of character or mind for that. He is brilliantly clever, of course, and he is honest enough, but he is passionate, and in no way great, I think." In Religion—obscurantism, resistance to the light, the smug endeavour to make the best of both worlds, offended Arnold as much on the one hand, as insolence, violence, ignorant negation, "lightly running amuck at august things," offended him on the other. He loved a "free handling, in a becoming spirit, of religious matters," and did not always find it in the writings of his Liberal friends. It is true that he once made a signal lapse from his own canon of religious criticism, but he withdrew it with genuine regret that "an illustration likely to be torn from its context, to be improperly used, and to give pain, should ever have been adopted." In Literature, again, though his judgment was critical, his charity was unbounded. He could find something to praise even in the most immature and unpretending efforts; and he knew how to distinguish what we call "good of its sort," good in the second order of achievement, from what is simply bad. In literature, as in opinion, it was only when moral faults were mingled with intellectual defects that he became censorious. He detested literary humbug—a pretence of knowledge without the reality, a show of philosophy masking poverty of thought; the vanity of quaintness, the "ring of false metal," the glorification of commonplace.

And so again when we come to Life—the social life of the civilized community—he was the consistent teacher and the bright example of an exalted and scrupulous morality. Even the intellectual brilliancy of authors whom he intensely admired did not often blind him to ethical defects. It is true that some objects of his literary admiration—Goethe and Byron and George Sand—could scarcely be regarded as moral exemplars; but, while he praised the genius, he marked his disapproval of the moral defect. In writing of George Sand, who had so profoundly influenced his early life, he did not deny or extenuate "her passions and her errors." Byron, though he thought him "the greatest natural force, the greatest elementary power, which has appeared in our literature since Shakespeare," he roundly accused of "vulgarity and effrontery," "coarseness and commonness," "affectation and brutal selfishness." In the case of Goethe, he said that "the moralist and the man of the world may unite in condemning" his laxity of life; and even in Faust, which he esteemed the "most wonderful work of poetry in our century," the fact that it is a "seduction-drama" marred his pleasure. In the same tone he wrote, in the last year of his life, about Renan's Abbesse—"I regret the escapade extremely; he was entirely out of his role in writing such a book.... Renan descends sensibly in the scale from having produced his Abbesse." Heine, with all his genius, "lacked the old-fashioned, laborious, eternally needful moral deliverance": he left a name blemished by "intemperate susceptibility, unscrupulousness in passion, inconceivable attacks on his enemies, still more inconceivable attacks on his friends, want of generosity, sensuality, incessant mocking."



And, while he thus criticised the defective morality of writers whom he greatly admired, he was, perhaps naturally, still more severe on the moral defects of those whom he esteemed less highly. "Burns," he said, "is a beast, with splendid gleams, and the medium in which he lived, Scotch peasants, Scotch Presbyterianism, and Scotch drink, is repulsive." On Coleridge, critic, poet, philosopher, his judgment was that he "had no morals," and that his character inspired "disesteem, nay, repugnance." Bulwer-Lytton he thought a consummate novel-writer, but "his was by no means a perfect nature"—"a strange mixture of what is really romantic and interesting with what is tawdry and gimcracky." Villette he pronounced "disagreeable, because the writer's mind contains nothing but hunger, rebellion, and rage, and therefore that is all she can put into her book." Of Harriet Martineau, the other of the "two gifted women," whose exploits he had glorified in Haworth Churchyard, he wrote in later years that she had "undeniable talent, energy, and merit," but "what an unpleasant life and unpleasant nature!"

And, so everywhere the moral element—the sense for Conduct—mingles itself with his literary judgment. But it was in his attack on Shelley, written within four months of his own death, that he most vigorously displayed his detestation of moral shortcomings, and his sense of their poisonous effect on the performances of genius. "In this article on Shelley," he wrote, "I have spoken of his life, not his poetry. Professor Dowden was too much for my patience."[33] It can hardly be questioned that the publication of that biography did a signal disservice to the memory of the poet whom Professor Dowden idolized. The lack of taste, judgment, and humour which pervades the book, and its complete, though of course unintended, condonation of heinous evil, deserved a severe castigation, and Arnold bestowed it with a vigour and a thoroughness which show how deeply his moral sense had been shocked. "What a set! what a world! is the exclamation that breaks from us as we come to an end of this history of 'the occurrences of Shelley's private life.' ... Godwin's house of sordid horror, and Godwin preaching and holding the hat, and the green-spectacled Mrs. Godwin, and Hogg the faithful friend, and Hunt the Horace of this precious world!"

Fresh from pursuing, step by step, Professor Dowden's grim narrative of seduction and suicide, with its ludicrous testimony to Shelley's "conscientiousness," Arnold says, with honest indignation, "After reading his book, one feels sickened for ever of the subject of irregular relations.... I conclude that an entirely human inflammability, joined to an inhuman want of humour and a super-human power of self-deception, are the causes which chiefly explain Shelley's abandonment of Harriet in the first place, and then his behaviour to her and defence of himself afterwards."

In spite of all this abomination, which he so clearly saw and so strongly reprehended, he still stands firm in his admiration of the "ideal Shelley," "the delightful Shelley," "the friend of the unfriended poor," the radiant and many-coloured poet, with his mastery of the medium of sounds, and the "natural magic in his rhythm." But then he adds this salutary caution: "Let no one suppose that a want of humour and a self-delusion such as Shelley's have no effect upon a man's poetry. The man Shelley, in very truth, is not entirely sane, and Shelley's poetry is not entirely sane either." In poetry, as in life, he is "a beautiful and ineffectual angel."

And just as, in Arnold's view, moral defects in an author were apt to mar the perfection of his work, so an author's moral virtues might ennoble and enlarge his authorship. Hear him on his friend Arthur Clough: "He possessed, in an eminent degree, these two invaluable literary qualities: a true sense for his object of study, and a single-hearted care for it. He had both; but he had the second even more eminently than the first. He greatly developed the first through means of the second. In the study of art, poetry, or philosophy, he had the most undivided and disinterested love for the object in itself, the greatest aversion to mixing up with it anything accidental or personal. His interest was in literature itself; and it was this which gave so rare a stamp to his character, which kept him so free from all taint of littleness. In the saturnalia of ignoble personal passions, of which the struggle for literary success, in old and crowded communities, offers so sad a spectacle, he never mingled. He had not yet traduced his friends, nor flattered his enemies, nor disparaged what he admired, nor praised what he despised. Those who knew him well had the conviction that, even with time, these literary arts would never be his. His poem, The Bothie of Toper-na-Fuosich, has some admirable Homeric qualities—out-of-doors freshness, life, naturalness, buoyant rapidity. Some of the expressions in that poem ... come back now to my ear with the true Homeric ring. But that in him of which I think oftenest is the Homeric simplicity of his literary life."

We have seen more than once that, according to Arnold, poetry was a criticism of life; but he always maintained that this was true of poetry only because poetry is part of literature, and all literature was a criticism of life. One may demur to the statement as greatly too unguarded in its terms, but certainly he was true to his own doctrine, and in practice, from first to last, he used literature as a medium for criticising the life and conduct of his fellow-men. In the last year of his life he produced with approbation "a favourite saying of Ptolemy the astronomer, which Bacon quotes in its Latin version thus:—Quum fini appropinquas, bonum cum augmento operare"—"As you draw near to your latter end, redouble your efforts to do good." And this redoubled effort was in his case all of a piece with what had gone before. In 1863 he wrote to a friend: "In trying to heal the British demoniac, true doctrine is not enough; one must convey the true doctrine with studied moderation; for, if one commits the least extravagance, the poor madman seizes hold of this, tears and rends it, and quite fails to perceive that you have said anything else."

All his literary life was spent in trying to convey "true doctrine with studied moderation." And in his true doctrine nothing was more conspicuous than his insistence, early and late, on the supreme importance of character and conduct. The first object of life was to realize one's best self, and this endeavour required not merely cleverness or information: even genius would not of itself suffice; still less would adherence to any particular body of opinions. If a man was dis-respectable, "not even the merit of not being a Philistine could make up for it." Character issuing in Conduct—this was the true culture which we must all ensue, if by any means we were to attain to our predestined perfection; and, if that were once secured, all the rest—talent, fame, influence, length of days, worldly prosperity—mattered little. Thus he wrote of his friend Edward Quillinan—

I saw him sensitive in frame, I knew his spirits low: And wish'd him health, success, and fame— I do not wish it now.

For these are all their own reward, And leave no good behind; They try us, oftenest make us hard, Less modest, pure, and kind.

Alas! yet to the suffering man, In this his mortal state, Friends could not give what fortune can— Health, ease, a heart elate.

But he is now by fortune foil'd No more; and we retain The memory of a man unspoil'd, Sweet, generous, and humane—

With all the fortunate have not, With gentle voice and brow. —Alive, we would have changed his lot, We would not change it now.

When his eldest boy died he wrote to a friend: "He is gone—and all the absorption in one's own occupations which prevented one giving to him more than moments, all one's occasional impatience, all one's taking his ailments as a matter of course, come back upon one as something inconceivable and inhuman. And his mother, who has nothing of all this to reproach herself with, who was everything to him and would have given herself for him, has lost the occupation of sixteen years, and has to begin life over again. The one endless comfort to us is the thought of the sweet, firm, sterling character which the darling child developed in and by all his sufferings and privations. Of that we can think and think."

When his second boy died he said that his "deepest feeling" was best expressed by his own Dejaneira—

But him, on whom, in the prime Of life, with vigour undimm'd, With unspent mind, and a soul Unworn, undebased, undecay'd, Mournfully grating, the gates Of the city of death have for ever closed— Him, I count him well-starr'd.

In teaching the high lesson of Character and Conduct, he dealt sparingly in words, even words of "studied moderation." He taught principally, he taught conspicuously, he taught all his life long, by Example. In regarding that example, as it stands clear across the interspace of fifteen years, we are reminded of Tertullian's doctrine concerning the anima naturaliter Christiana. A more genuinely amiable man never lived. His sunny temper, his quick sympathy, his inexhaustible fun, were natural gifts. But something more than nature must have gone to make his constant unselfishness, his manly endurance of adverse fate, his noble cheerfulness under discouraging circumstances, his buoyancy in breasting difficulties, his unremitting solicitude for the welfare and enjoyment of those who stood nearest to his heart. The secret of his life was that he had taken pains with his own character. While he was still quite young we find him bewailing the "worldly element which enters so largely into his composition," and which threatens to make a gulf between him and the strict, almost Puritanical, associations of his youth. "But," he says in writing to his sister, "as Thomas a Kempis recommended, frequentur tibi violentiam fac ... so I intend not to give myself the rein in following my natural tendency, but to make war against it till it ceases to isolate me from you, and leaves me with the power to discern and adopt the good which you have and I have not."

The result of this self-discipline and self-culture was to produce in him all the virtues which are supposed to be specifically and peculiarly Christian. "Christianity," said Bishop Creighton, "impressed the Roman world by its power of producing men who were strong in self-control, and this must always be its contribution to the world." Arnold's self-control was absolute and unshakable; and to self-control he added the characteristically Christian virtues of surrender, placability, readiness to forgive injuries, perfect freedom from envy, hatred, and malice. He revered the "method and secret of Jesus"; he did all honour to His "mildness and sweet reasonableness." "Christianity," he said, "is Hebraism aiming at self-conquest and rescue from the thrall of vile affections, not by obedience to the letter of a law, but by conformity to the image of a self-sacrificing example. To a world stricken with moral enervation Christianity offered its spectacle of an inspired self-sacrifice; to men who refuse themselves nothing it showed one who refused himself everything." Following this example, Arnold preached "Grace and peace by the annulment of our ordinary self," and what he preached he practised. "Kindness and Pureness," he said, "Charity and Chastity. If any virtues could stand for the whole of Christianity, these might. Let us have them from the mouth of Jesus Christ Himself. 'He that loveth his life shall lose it; a new commandment give I unto you, that ye love one another.' There is charity. 'Blest are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.' There is purity." Charity was indeed the law of Arnold's life. He loved with a passionate and persistent love. He loved his wife with increasing devotion as years went on, when she had become "my sweet Granny," and they both felt that "we are too old for separations." He loved with equal fondness his mother (whom in his brightness, fun, and elasticity he closely resembled), the sisters who so keenly shared his intellectual tastes, his children living and departed. "Dick[34] was a tower of strength." "Lucy[35] is such a perfect companion." "Nelly[36] is the dearest girl in the world." "That little darling[4] we have left behind us at Laleham; and he will soon fade out of people's remembrance, but we shall remember him as long as we live, and he will be one more bond between us, even more perhaps in his death than in his sweet little life." "It was exactly a year since we had driven to Laleham with darling Tommy[38] and the other two boys to see Basil's[37] grave; and now we went to see his grave, poor darling." "I cannot write Budge's[39] name without stopping to look at it in stupefaction at his not being alive."

Outside the circle of his family, his affection was widely bestowed and faithfully maintained. He had the true genius of friendship, and when he signed himself "affectionately" it meant that he really loved. Enmities he had none. If ever he had suffered injuries they were forgiven, forgotten, and buried out of sight. Even in the controversies where his strongest convictions were involved, he steadily abstained from bitterness, violence, and detraction. "Fiery hatred and malice," he said, with perfect truth, "are what I detest, and would always allay or avoid if I could."

In the preface to his Last Essays on the Church and Religion, he takes those two great lessons of the Christian Gospel—Charity and Chastity—and goes on to show how they illustrate "the natural truth of Christianity," as distinct from any considerations of Revelation or Law. "Now, really," he says, writing in 1877, "if there is a lesson which in our day has come to force itself upon everybody, in all quarters and by all channels, it is the lesson of the solidarity, as it is called by modern philosophers, of men. If there was ever a notion tempting to common human nature, it was the notion that the rule of 'every man for himself' was the rule of happiness. But at last it turns out as a matter of experience, and so plainly that it is coming to be even generally admitted—it turns out that the only real happiness is in a kind of impersonal higher life, where the happiness of others counts with a man as essential to his own. He that loves his life does really turn out to lose it, and the new commandment proves its own truth by experience."

And then he goes on to what he justly calls "the other great Christian virtue, Pureness." When he was thirty-two, he had written—"The lives and deaths of the 'pure in heart' have, perhaps, the privilege of touching us more deeply than those of others—partly, no doubt, because with them the disproportion of suffering to deserts seems so unusually great. However, with them one feels—even I feel—that for their purity's sake, if for that alone, whatever delusions they may have wandered in, and whatever impossibilities they may have dreamed of, they shall undoubtedly, in some sense or other, see God." And now, twenty-three years later, he returns to the same theme. Science, he says, is beginning to throw doubts on the "truth and validity of the Christian idea of Pureness." There can be no more vital question for human society. On the side of natural truth, experience must decide. "But," he says, "finely-touched souls have a presentiment of a thing's natural truth, even though it be questioned, and long before the palpable proof by experience convinces all the world. They have it quite independently of their attitude towards traditional religion.... All well-inspired souls will perceive the profound natural truth of the idea of pureness, and will be sure, therefore, that the more boldly it is challenged the more sharply and signally will experience mark its truth. So that of the two great Christian virtues, charity and chastity, kindness and pureness, the one has at this moment the most signal testimony from experience to its intrinsic truth and weight, and the other is expecting it."

Again, in God and the Bible, he has a most instructive passage on the relation of the sexes. "Here," he says, "we are on ground where to walk right is of vital concern to men, and where disasters are plentiful." He speculates on that relation as it may be supposed to have subsisted in the first ages of the human race, and tries to trace it down to the point of time "where history and religion begin." "And at this point we first find the Hebrew people, with polygamy still clinging to it as a survival from the times of ignorance, but with the marriage-tie solidly established, strict and sacred, as we see it between Abraham and Sara. Presently this same Hebrew people, with that aptitude which characterized it for being profoundly impressed by ideas of moral order, placed in the Decalogue the marriage-tie under the express and solemn sanction of the Eternal, by the Seventh Commandment: Thou shalt not commit adultery." And again: "Such was Israel's genius for the ideas of moral order and of right, such his intuition of the Eternal that makes for righteousness, that he felt without a shadow of a doubt, and said with the most impressive solemnity, that Free Love was—to speak, again, like our modern philosopher—fatal to progress. He knoweth not that the dead are there, and that her guests are in the depths of hell."

The fact, already stated, that in the last years of his life, Arnold declared that his Discourses in America was the book by which, of all his prose-writings, he most wished to be remembered, gives to whatever he enounced in those Discourses a special authority, a peculiar weight, for his disciples; and nowhere is his testimony on behalf of Virtue and Right Conduct more earnestly delivered.

When the odious Voltaire urged his followers to "Crush the Infamous," he had in mind that virtue which is specially characteristic of Christianity.[40] A century later Renan said: "Nature cares nothing for chastity." Les frivoles out peutetre raison—"The gay people are perhaps in the right." Against this doctrine of devils Arnold uttered a protesting and a warning voice. He was—heaven knows!—no enemy to France. All that is best in French literature and French life he admired almost to excess. His sympathy with France was so keen that Sainte-Beuve wrote to him—"Vous avez traverse notre vie et notre litterature par une ligne interieure, profonde, qui fait les inities, et que vous ne perdrez jamais." But in spite of, perhaps because of, this sympathy with France, he felt himself bound to protest and to warn.

Addressing his American audience in November, 1883, he pointed out the dangers which England, Ireland, America, and France incur through habitual disregard, in each case, of some virtue or grace without which national perfection is impossible. He used, as a kind of text for his discourse, the famous passage from the Philippians. "Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are elevated, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are amiable, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, have these in your mind, let your thoughts run upon these."

Whatsoever things are pure. [Greek: osa hagua]—thus the teacher of Culture moralized on this pregnant phrase.



"The question was once asked by the Town Clerk of Ephesus: 'What man is there that knoweth not how that the city of the Ephesians is a worshipper of the great goddess Diana?' Now really, when one looks at the popular literature of the French at this moment—their popular novels, popular stage-plays, popular newspapers—and at the life of which this literature of theirs is the index, one is tempted to make a goddess out of a word of their own, and then, like the Town Clerk of Ephesus, to ask: 'What man is there that knoweth not how that the city of the French is a worshipper of the great goddess Lubricity?' Or rather, as Greek is the classic and euphonious language for names of gods and goddesses, let us take her name from the Greek Testament, and call her the goddess Aselgeia. That goddess has always been a sufficient power amongst mankind, and her worship was generally supposed to need restraining rather than encouraging. But here is now a whole people, law, literature, nay, and art too, at her service! Stimulations and suggestions by her and to her meet one in it at every turn.... 'Nature,' cries M. Renan, 'cares nothing about chastity.' What a slap in the face to the sticklers for 'Whatsoever things are pure'!... Even though a gifted man like M. Renan may be so carried away by the tide of opinion in France where he lives, as to say that Nature cares nothing about chastity, and to see with amused indulgence the worship of the great goddess Lubricity, let us stand fast and say that her worship is against nature—human nature—and that it is ruin. For this is the test of its being against human nature, that for human societies it is ruin. And the test is one from which there is no escape, as from the old tests in such matters there may be. For, if you allege that it is the will of God that we should be pure, the sceptical Gallo-Latins will tell you that they do not know any such person. And in like manner, if it is said that those who serve the goddess Aselgeia shall not inherit the Kingdom of God, the Gallo-Latin may tell you that he does not believe in any such place. But that the sure tendency and upshot of things establishes that the service of the goddess Aselgeia is ruin, that her followers are marred and stunted by it, and disqualified for the ideal society of the future, is an infallible test to employ.

"The saints admonish us to let our thoughts run upon whatsoever things are pure, if we would inherit the Kingdom of God; and the divine Plato tells us that we have within us a many-headed beast and a man, and that by dissoluteness we feed or strengthen the beast in us, and starve the man; and finally, following the divine Plato among the sages at a humble distance, comes the prosaic and unfashionable Paley, and says in his precise way: that 'this vice has a tendency, which other species of vice have not so directly, to unsettle and weaken the powers of the understanding; as well as, I think, in a greater degree than other vices, to render the heart thoroughly corrupt.' True; and, once admitted and fostered, it eats like a canker, and with difficulty can ever be brought to let go its hold again, but for ever tightens it. Hardness and insolence come in its train; an insolence which grows till it ends by exasperating and alienating everybody; a hardness which grows until the man can at last scarcely take pleasure in anything, outside the service of his goddess, except cupidity and greed, and cannot be touched with emotion by any language except Fustian. Such are the fruits of the worship of the great goddess Aselgeia.

"So, instead of saying that Nature cares nothing about chastity, let us say that human nature, our nature, cares about it a great deal.... The Eternal has attached to certain moral causes the safety or the ruin of States, and the present popular literature of France is a sign that she has a most dangerous moral disease."

In the following year, he thus commented on the Festival of Christmas and its spiritual significance:

"When we are asked, What really is Christmas, and what does it celebrate? We answer, the birthday of Jesus. What is the miracle of the Incarnation? A homage to the virtue of Pureness, and to the manifestation of this virtue in Jesus. What is Lent, and the miracle of the temptation? A homage to the virtue of self-control, and to the manifestation of this virtue in Jesus."

"That on which Christmas, even in its popular acceptation, fixes our attention, is that to which the popular instinct in attributing to Jesus His miraculous Incarnation, in believing Him born of a pure virgin, did homage—pureness. And this, to which the popular instinct thus did homage, was an essential characteristic of Jesus and an essential virtue of Christianity, the obligation of which, though apt to be questioned and discredited in the world, is at the same time nevertheless a necessary fact of nature and eternal truth of reason."

So much I have quoted in order to show that, in relation to the most important department of human conduct, Arnold's influence, to use his own phrase, "made for righteousness," and made for righteousness unequivocally and persistently. So keen was his sense of the supreme value of this characteristically Christian virtue that he framed what old-fashioned theologians would have called a "hedge of the law."[41] In season and out of season, whether men would bear or whether they would forbear, he taught the sacredness of marriage. For the Divorce Court and all its works and ways he had nothing but detestation. He ranked it, with our gin-palaces, among the blots on our civilization. From Goethe, perhaps a curious authority on such a subject, he quotes approvingly a protest against over-facility in granting divorce, and an acknowledgment that Christianity has won a "culture-conquest" in establishing the sacredness of marriage. Man's progress, he says, depends on his keeping such "culture-conquests" as these; and of all attempts to undo these conquests, give back what we have won, and accustom the public mind to laxity, he was the unsparing foe.

It may help to remind us that, in spite of all our shortcomings, we have travelled a little way towards virtue, or at least towards decency, if we recall that in 1863 Lord Palmerston, then in his eightieth year and Prime Minister of England, figured in a very unseemly affair which had the Divorce Court for its centre. Arnold writes as follows: "We had —— with us one day. He was quite full of the Lord Palmerston scandal, which your charming newspaper, the Star—that true reflection of the rancour of Protestant Dissent in alliance with all the vulgarity, meddlesomeness, and grossness of the British multitude—has done all it could to spread abroad. It was followed yesterday by the Standard, and is followed to-day by the Telegraph. Happy people, in spite of our bad climate and cross tempers, with our penny newspapers!"

The admirable satire of Friendship's Garland is constantly levelled against national aberrations in this direction. In the year 1870 there was a fashionable divorce-case, more than usually scandalous, and the disgusting narrative had been followed with keen interest by those who look up at the Aristocracy as men look up at the stars. In reference to this case, he quotes to his imaginary friend Arminius the noble sentiment of Barrow: "Men will never be heartily loyal and submissive to authority till they become really good; nor will they ever be very good till they see their leaders such." To which Arminius replies, in his thoughtful manner: "Yes, that is what makes your Lord C——s so inexpressibly precious!" A certain Lord C——, be it observed, having figured very conspicuously in the trial.

With reference to the enormous publicity given in England to such malefic matter, Arnold says to Arminius: "When a Member of Parliament wanted to abridge the publicity given to the M—— case, the Government earnestly reminded him that it had been the solemn decision of the House of Commons that all the proceedings of the Divorce Court should be as open as the day. When there was a suggestion to hear the B—— case in private, the upright magistrate who was appealed to said firmly that he could never trifle with the public mind in that manner. All this was as it should be. So far, so good. But was the publicity in these cases perfectly full and entire? Were there not some places which the details did not reach? There were few, but there were some. And this, while the Government has an organ of its own, the London Gazette, dull, high-priced, and of comparatively limited circulation! I say, make the price of the London Gazette a halfpenny; change its name to the London Gazette and Divorce Intelligencer; let it include besides divorce news, all cases whatever that have an interest of the same nature for the public mind; distribute it gratis to mechanics' institutes, workmen's halls, seminaries for the young (these latter more especially), and then you will be giving the principle of publicity a full trial. This is what I often say to Arminius; and, when he looks astounded, I reassure him with a sentence which, I know very well, the moment I make it public will be stolen by the Liberal newspapers. But it is getting near Christmas-time, and I do not mind making them a present of it. It is this: The spear of freedom, like that of Achilles, has the power to heal the wounds which itself makes."

In Friendship's Garland, from the very structure of the book, his serious judgments have to be delivered by the mouth of his Prussian friend; and here is his judgment on our public concessions to pruriency—"By shooting all this garbage on your public, you are preparing and assuring for your English people an immorality as deep and wide as that which destroys the Latin nations."

But his "hedge of the law" had other thorns besides those with which he pierced the Divorce Court and its hideous literature. He had shrewd sarcasms for all who, by whatever method, sought to gratify "that double craving so characteristic of our Philistine, and so eminently exemplified in that crowned Philistine, Henry the Eighth—the craving for forbidden fruit and the craving for legality." He poured scorn on the newspapers which glorified "the great sexual insurrection of the Anglo-Teutonic race," and the author who extolled the domestic life of Mormonism. "Mr. Hepworth Dixon may almost be called the Colenso of Love and Marriage—such a revolution does he make in our ideas on these matters, just as Dr. Colenso does in our ideas on religion." He thus forecasts the doings of a Philistine House of Commons in 1871. "Mr. T. Chambers will again introduce that enfranchising measure, against which I have had some prejudices—the Bill for enabling a man to marry his deceased wife's sister. The devoted adversaries of the Contagious Diseases Act will spread through the length and breadth of the land a salutary discussion of this equivocal measure and of all matters connected with it; and will thus, at the same time that they oppose immorality, enable the followers of even the very straitest sects of Puritanism to see life." All these various attempts to break down the "hedge of the law" received in turn their merited condemnation; but always we are brought back from the consideration of kindred evils, to the proposal to legalize marriage with a wife's sister. Thus the imaginary leader-writer of the Daily Telegraph summarizes the controversy: "Why, I ask, is Mr. Job Bottles' liberty, his Christian liberty, as our reverend friend would say, to be abridged in this manner? And why is Protestant Dissent to be diverted from its great task of abolishing State Churches for the purpose of removing obstacles to the 'sexual insurrection' of our race? Why are its poor devoted ministers to be driven to contract, in the interests of Christian liberty, illegal unions of this kind themselves, pour encourager les autres? Why is the earnest Liberalism and Nonconformity of Lancashire and Yorkshire to be agitated on this question by hope deferred? Why is it to be put incessantly to the inconvenience of going to be married in Germany or in the United States, that greater and better Britain—

Which gives us manners, freedom, virtue, power?

Why must ideas on this topic have to be incubated for years in that 'nest of spicery,' as the divine Shakespeare says, the mind of Mr. T. Chambers, before they can rule the world? For my own part, my resolve is formed. This great question shall henceforth be seriously taken up in Fleet Street. As a sop to those toothless old Cerberuses the bishops, who impotently exhibit still the passions of another age, we will accord the continuance of the prohibition which forbids a man to marry his grandmother. But in other directions there shall be freedom. Mr. Chambers' admirable Bill for enabling a woman to marry her sister's husband will doubtless pass triumphantly through Committee to-night, amidst the cheers of the Ladies' Gallery. The Liberal Party must supplement that Bill by two others: one enabling people to marry their brothers' and sisters' children, the other enabling a man to marry his brother's wife."

There is perhaps no social mischief which Arnold attacked so persistently as the proposal to legalize marriage with a wife's sister. The most passionate advocates of that "enfranchising measure" will scarcely think that his hostility was due to what John Bright so gracefully called "ecclesiastical rubbish." Councils and Synods, Decrees and Canons, were held by him in the lightest esteem. The formal side of Religion—the side of dogma and doctrine and rule and definition—had no attractions for him, and no terrors. He never dreamed that the Table of Kindred and Affinity was a Third Table of the Divine Law. His appeal in these matters was neither to Moses nor to Tertullian, but to "the genius of the race which invented the Muses, and Chivalry, and the Madonna." And yet he disliked the "enfranchising measure" quite as keenly as the clergyman who wrote to the Guardian about incest, though indeed he expressed his dislike in a very different form. Here, as always and everywhere, he betook himself to his "sinuous, easy, unpolemical" method, and thereby made his repugnance to the proposed change felt and understood in quarters which would never have listened to arguments from Leviticus, or fine distinctions between malum per se and malum prohibitum. The ground of his repugnance was primarily his strong sense, already illustrated, that the sacredness of marriage, and the customs that regulate it, were triumphs of culture which had been won, painfully and with effort, from the unbridled promiscuity of primitive life. To impair that sacredness, to dislocate those customs, was to take a step backwards into darkness and anarchy. His keen sense of moral virtue—that instinctive knowledge of evil which, as Frederick Robertson said, comes not of contact with evil but of repulsion from it, assured him that the "great sexual insurrection" was not merely a grotesque phrase, but a movement of the time which threatened national disaster, and to which, in its most plausible manifestations, the stoutest resistance must be offered. Here again his love of coherence and logical symmetry, his born hatred of an anomaly, his belief in Reason as the true guide of life, made him intolerant of all the palpably insincere attempts to say Thus far and no farther. He knew that all the laws of Affinity must stand or fall together, and that no ground in reason can be alleged against marriage with a husband's brother which does not tell against marriage with a wife's sister. Yet again he regarded the proposed changes as betraying the smug viciousness of the more full-blooded Philistines—

Men full of meat whom wholly He abhors,[42]—

who, trying to keep a foot in each world of legality and indulgence, sought patronage from the rich and deceived and exploited the poor.

Certainly not the least of his objections to the "enfranchising measure" was that, in breaking down the hedge of the law, it invaded Delicacy; and whatever invaded delicacy helped to precipitate gross though perhaps unforeseen evils. Unfortunately there are great masses—whole classes—of people to whom delicacy, whether in speech or act, means nothing. To eat, drink, sleep, buy and sell, marry and be given in marriage, is for those masses the ideal and the law of life. These things granted, they desire no more: any restriction on them, any refinement of them, they dislike and resent. In another place[43] we have cited the mysterious effect produced upon the Paris Correspondent of the Daily Telegraph by the sudden sound of the word "Delicacy." And that word was uttered in connexion with the "enfranchising measure." "If legislation on this subject were impeded by the party of bigotry, if they chose not to wait for it, if they got married without it, and if you were to meet them on the boulevard at Paris during their wedding tour, should you go up to Bottles and say: 'Mr. Bottles, you are a profligate man!' Poor Mr. Matthew Arnold, upon this, emerged suddenly from his corner, and asked hesitatingly: 'But will any one dare to call him a man of delicacy?' The question was so utterly unpractical that I took no note of it whatever, and should not have mentioned it if it had not been for its extraordinary effect upon our Paris Correspondent.... My friend Nick, who has all the sensitive temperament of genius, seemed inexplicably struck by this word delicacy, which he kept repeating to himself. 'Delicacy,' said he—'delicacy—surely I have heard that word before! Yes, in other days,' he went on dreamily, 'in my fresh enthusiastic youth; before I knew Sala, before I wrote for that infernal paper, before I called Dixon's style lithe and sinewy—' 'Collect yourself, my friend,' laying my hand on his shoulder; 'you are unmanned. But in mentioning Dixon you redouble my strength; for you bring to my mind the great sexual insurrection of the Anglo-Teutonic race, and the master-spirit which guides it.'"[44]

But in matters far outside the region of marriage, that word "delicacy," which so powerfully affected the Paris correspondent, is the key to a great deal of what Arnold felt and wrote. In the sphere of conduct he set up, as we have seen, two supreme objects for veneration and attainment: Chastity and Charity. He practised them, he taught them, and he used them as decisive tests of what was good and what was bad in national life. But plainly there are large tracts of existence which lie outside the purview of these two virtues. There is the domain of honesty, integrity, and fair dealing; there is a loyalty to truth, the pursuit of conscience at all costs and hazards; there is all that is contained in the idea of beauty, propriety, and taste. None of these are touched by charity or chastity. For example, a man may have an unblemished life and a truly affectionate heart; and yet he may be incorrigible in money-matters, or be ready to sacrifice principle to convenience, or, like our great Middle Class generally, may be serenely content with hideousness and bad manners.

Now in all these departments of human life, less important indeed than the two chiefest, but surely not unimportant, Arnold applied the criterion of delicacy. "A finely-touched nature," he said, "will respect in itself the sense of delicacy not less than the sense of honesty.... The worship of sharp bargains is fatal to delicacy; nor is that missing grace restored by accompanying the sharp bargain with an exhibition of fine sentiments." Then, again, as regards loyalty to conviction, he knew full well that, in Newman's phrase, he might "have saved himself many a scrape, if he had been wise enough to hold his tongue." "The thought of you," he wrote to Mr. Morley, "and of one or two other friends, was often present to me in America, and, no doubt, contributed to make me hold fast to 'the faith once delivered to the Saints.'" The slightest deviation from the line of clear conviction—the least turning to left or right in order to cocker a prejudice or please an audience or flatter a class, showed a want of delicacy—a preference of present popularity to permanent self-respect—which he could never have indulged in himself, and with difficulty tolerated in others. He had nothing but contempt for "philosophical politicians with a turn for swimming with the stream, and philosophical divines with the same turn." And then, again, in the whole of that great sphere which belongs to Beauty, Propriety, and Taste, his sense of delicacy was always at work, and not seldom in pain. "Ah," he exclaimed, quoting from Rivarol, "no one considers how much pain any man of taste has to suffer, before ever he inflicts any." To inflict pain was not, indeed, in his way, but to suffer it was his too-frequent lot. From first to last he was protesting against hideousness, rawness, vulgarity, and commonplace; craving for sweetness, light, beauty and colour, instead of the bitterness, the ugliness, the gloom and the drab which provided such large portions of English life. "The [Greek: euphnes] is the man who turns towards sweetness and light; the [Greek: aphnes] on the other hand is our Philistine." "I do not much believe in good being done by a man unless he can give light." "Oxford by her ineffable charm keeps ever calling us nearer to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection, to beauty." In his constant quest for these glorious things—beauty, colour, sweetness, and light,—his sense of delicacy had much to undergo; for, in the class with which he was by the work of his life brought in contact, they were unknown and unimagined; and the only class where "elegance and refinement, beauty and grace" were found, was inaccessible to Light. In both classes he found free scope for his doctrine of Delicacy, one day remonstrating with a correspondent for "living in a place with the absurd, and worse, name of 'Marine Retreat'"; another, preaching that "a piano in a Quaker's drawing-room is a step for him to more humane life;" and again "liking and respecting polite tastes in a grandee," when Lord Ravensworth consulted him about Latin verses. "At present far too many of Lord Ravensworth's class are mere men of business, or mere farmers, or mere horse-racers, or mere men of pleasure." That was a consummation which delicacy in the Aristocratic class would make impossible. To cultivate in oneself, and apply in one's conduct, this instinct of delicacy, was a lesson which no one, who fell under Arnold's influence, could fail to learn. He taught us to "liberate the gentler element in oneself," to eschew what was base and brutal, unholy and unkind. He taught us to seek in every department of life for what was "lovely and of good report," tasteful, becoming, and befitting; to cultivate "man's sense for beauty, and man's instinct for fit and pleasing forms of social life and manners." He taught us to plan our lives, as St. Paul taught the Corinthians to plan their worship, [Greek: euschmnonos kai kata taxin],"—in right, graceful, or becoming figure, and by fore-ordered arrangement."[45] Alike his teaching and his example made us desire (however imperfectly we attained our object) to perceive in all the contingencies and circumstances of life exactly the line of conduct which would best consist with Delicacy, and so to make virtue victorious by practising it attractively.