High Minds

by Simon Heffer

  Despite his own reservations about religion Stephen backed laws against freedom of expression, including the punishment of blasphemy, because ‘it seems to me that to publish opinions upon morals, politics and religion is an act as important as any which any man can possibly do; that to attack opinions on which the framework of our society rests is a proceeding which both is and ought to be dangerous. I do not say that it ought not to be done in many cases, but it should be done sword in hand, and a man who does it has no more right to be surprised at being fiercely resisted than a soldier who attacks a breach.’50

  Justifying coercion, Stephen adduced one particular example where it had been used, if not successfully, then in good faith. ‘Was Pilate right in crucifying Christ? I reply, Pilate’s paramount duty was to preserve the peace in Palestine, to form the best judgment he could as to the means required for that purpose, and to act upon it when it was formed. Therefore, if and in so far as he believed, in good faith and on reasonable grounds, that what he did was necessary for the preservation of the peace of Palestine, he was right. It was his duty to run the risk of being mistaken, notwithstanding Mr Mill’s principle as to liberty, and particularly as to liberty in the expression of opinion.’51 Not being omniscient, Pilate was not to know that something deemed so beneficial as Christianity would be the result of his judgement: such are the consequences of coercion.

  Stephen’s society is one in which a class system, its divisions between the educated and the uneducated and the responsible and the irresponsible, is inevitably in place and must be reckoned with. Again, one is reminded of Carlyle’s assertion that the one human right worth having was the right of the foolish to be governed by the wise. The responsible must govern the irresponsible, if necessary with a firmness that borders upon harshness, if the society they have made, with its institutions, is to be preserved. For this reason he deplores, in a passage vigorous even by his standards, Mill’s attempt to depict certain acts as ‘self-regarding’ and therefore without the State’s competence to restrict or punish. He cites fornication as one such, but muses whether licence should be extended to those who wish to be pimps or run a gambling-house.

  Stephen calls this the permission for ‘an experiment in living’, and is outraged at the very notion. ‘How can the State or the public be competent to determine any question whatever if it is not competent to decide that gross vice is a bad thing? I do not think the State ought to stand bandying compliments with pimps.’52 In Stephen’s view, society must have standards, and it is the duty of the educated classes to impose them and to ensure that those most subject to temptation abide by them; something insufficiently appreciated when so many men of the baser sort now had the vote, and when the sense of power that went with it had gone to their heads. Were he to come across such an experimental pimp, Stephen would have said: ‘You dirty rascal, it may be a question whether you should be suffered to remain in your native filth untouched, or whether my opinion about you should be printed by the lash on your bare back. That question will be determined without the smallest reference to your wishes and feelings; but as to the nature of my opinion about you, there can be no question at all.’53 On the purely political question, Stephen noted that ‘it is quite true that in these days we have not much titular inequality. It is quite true that we have succeeded in cutting political power into very little bits, which with our usual hymns of triumph we are continually mincing, till it seems not unlikely that many people may come to think that a single man’s share of it is not worth having at all.’54 If parcelling out the franchise had created equality, Stephen listed all those more profound inequalities that continued – wealth, talent, education, sentiment, religious belief and so on.

  ‘Nearly every newspaper, and a very large proportion of modern books of political speculation, regard the progress of democracy, the approaching advent of universal suffrage, with something approaching to religious enthusiasm. To this I for one object.’55 He dismissed the effects of reform. ‘Political power has changed its shape but not its nature. The result of cutting it up into little bits is simply that the man who can sweep the greatest number of them into one heap will govern the rest. The strongest man in some form or other will always rule . . . in a pure democracy the ruling men will be the wirepullers and their friends.’ This actually had nothing to do with equality, or with liberty. ‘Universal suffrage . . . tends to invert what I should have regarded as the true and natural relation between wisdom and folly. I think that wise and good men ought to rule those who are foolish and bad.’56

  Through Sir John Coleridge, Gladstone’s Attorney General, he helped the Liberal government frame the Evidence Bill in 1873. He stood as a Liberal in a by-election in Dundee in August 1873, lamenting that it cost him £1,000 in expenses ‘and I know not what in regard of pay as a judge’.57 He found himself an agent and a committee, but after some public meetings realised that ‘there is no sympathy whatever between them and me. They want a thoroughgoing radical, and I am not one and cannot pretend to be one – it is found out in every possible way, on all occasions.’58 Within a few days he found that all the ‘educated people’ were for him, and confided in his wife on 2 August that ‘I am by no means sure I shall not win as it is.’59 But he was out of his depth, ‘badgered’ by the electorate on subjects about which he knew little or nothing. ‘I am sick of the election,’ he told his wife on 5 August, ‘and all its works’. When he lost he told her: ‘I am not really disappointed, though my fall has been a great one.’

  His defeat was just as well. He was no admirer of Gladstone, telling Lady Egerton in 1875 how an article he had read of his ‘shows for the 20th time what an essentially radically small and weak mind he has. It is, in a roundabout way, to me rather a comfort to see what a fool in matters of speculation a man may be, who in practical politics has played such an exceedingly prominent vigorous part. It seems to show that the fact that I have no turn for parliamentary life does not prove me to be a fool . . . this I am ashamed to say is a comfort to me in my gloomier moments.’60

  III

  In a land whose attitudes were deplored by such as Carlyle and Ruskin, and which no longer automatically deferred to God and the established order, other means had to be found to stabilise society and secure its eventual improvement. Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, written in the autumn of 1867 and published over several numbers of the Cornhill Magazine, attempted to suggest a means for this in a fashion that avoided the rhetoric of despair. Carlyle and Stephen had seen the barbarians as beyond redemption; Arnold saw them as barbarians who could be taught. It was, however, vitally important to work out what they should be taught; Arnold did not want utilitarian, middle-class values forced down the throats of those waiting to be educated. He showed he was his father’s son, pleading for the extension of education and civilisation as a bulwark against anarchy and the destruction of the social order. He had already stated his desire to encourage the British ‘to healing measures and an attractive form of civilisation’. From its title page onwards, Culture and Anarchy was devoted to the pursuit of perfection, however unattainable the ideal might seem.

  The work in some ways was the fruit of his friendship with Clough, in which from the 1840s onwards the ideas about civilisation and the civilising process that Arnold presents were thrashed out between them. But much, too, comes from Arnold’s experience as a schools inspector. Few understood the true nature of what passed for civilisation in England better than he did, or the nature of the relationship between the ordinary individual and society. Culture and Anarchy – like much of Arnold’s writings – is a remarkable work of extended journalism, and owes much of its effect to the direct and persuasive language Arnold uses in it. However, as he told his mother in a letter of 27 July 1866, he lived in the same square as Mayne, and ‘on the Monday night we were on our balcony and saw the crowd break into our square, throw a few stones at Sir R Mayne’s windows opposite us, and then be dispersed by police . . . here a man feels that the power which repr
esses him is the Tories, the upper class, the aristocracy, and so on; and with this feeling he can of course never without loss of self-respect accept a formal beating, and so the thing goes on smouldering.’61 This first-hand witnessing of the violence had a profound effect on Arnold’s writing.

  Arnold and those who thought like him saw education as having a wider reach: the defeat of philistinism would be accomplished not just by schools and colleges, but by museums, concert halls, art galleries, evening classes and libraries. This was the seed most successfully sown by Culture and Anarchy and by Arnold’s Essays in Criticism, both of which while advocating education for the masses for its own sake also saw that it was, in an increasingly secular society, an insurance policy against unrest and revolution. However, Arnold believed that before civilising the newly enfranchised, the newly enriched bourgeoisie required further training. Arnold’s experience in France had shown him that the middle classes were capable of better. Lionel Trilling, in his critical survey of Arnold, deployed T. S. Eliot’s metaphor of Arnold trying ‘to make the past of Europe march with the future’.62 In The Function of Criticism at the Present Time – the opening essay of Essays in Criticism – Arnold had observed that, once man had made himself physically comfortable, ‘this progress is likely, though not certain, to lead in the end to an apparition of intellectual life’.63 Having acquired comfort, man ‘may begin to remember that he has a mind, and that the mind may be made the source of great pleasure.’ Philistinism – the prejudices of the middle classes, notably utilitarianism – however, intervened: comfort seemed only to have brought ‘a self-satisfaction which is retarding and vulgarising’, whereas the true function of criticism – the disinterested scrutiny of life in pursuit of the truth – was to prevent such vices in a man, and instead ‘to lead him towards perfection, by making his mind dwell upon what is excellent in itself, and the absolute beauty and fitness of things.’64 Unfortunately, the middle classes, who should have been setting a positive example, were wallowing in their smugness, defining ‘unrivalled happiness’ as their property’s being safe, having freedom of speech, and being able to ‘walk from one end of England to the other in perfect security.’

  Arnold knew that those – usually politicians – who said such things were deluded, or propagandising, or both. He contrasted the self-satisfaction of the ‘old Anglo-Saxon race’, allegedly the finest in the world, with a story he read in a newspaper about a child murder in Nottingham. He quoted: ‘A girl named Wragg left the workhouse there on Saturday morning with her young illegitimate child. The child was soon afterwards found dead on Mapperley Hills, having been strangled. Wragg is in custody.’65 ‘Wragg!’ Arnold exclaimed. The depravity and wretchedness of the story was bad enough; but he also asked: ‘If we are to talk of ideal perfection, of “the best in the whole world”, has any one reflected what a touch of grossness in our race, what an original shortcoming in the more delicate spiritual perceptions, is shown by the natural growth amongst us of such hideous names – Higginbottom, Stiggins, Bugg!’ They were names that reflected the ‘dismal’ environment in which the girl had lived – ‘the gloom, the smoke, the cold, the strangled illegitimate child.’66

  The newspaper could not even afford Wragg the courtesy of a Christian name. ‘There is profit for the spirit in such contrasts as this,’ he wrote. ‘Criticism serves the cause of perfection by establishing them.’ However, the cultivation of the disinterested mind required for such a sensitive process, and for the spread of enlightenment and true progress, was rarely achieved. ‘The mass of mankind will never have any ardent zeal for seeing things as they are,’ he lamented. ‘Very inadequate ideas will always satisfy them.’67 In the pursuit of perfection, there could be no satisfaction until the final goal was reached. What the politicians, and their clientele in the self-satisfied middle classes, would not see was that ‘the British Constitution itself’ was ‘a colossal machine for the manufacture of Philistines.’68 It could not hope to produce people of learning and judgement with the critical faculty Arnold deemed essential to the pursuit of perfection, to enable ‘a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.’69 This sentiment was not universally approved of, even among intellectuals. Stephen disagreed violently: and Samuel Butler may have had Arnold in mind when he observed that ‘critics generally come to be critics by reason not of their fitness for this but of their unfitness for anything else.’70

  A similar argument is in Arnold’s earlier essay on Heine. ‘Modern times find themselves with an immense system of institutions, established facts, accredited dogmas, customs, rules, which have come to them from times not modern. In this system their life has to be carried forward; yet they have a sense that this system is not of their own creation, that it by no means corresponds exactly with the wants of their actual life, that, for them, it is customary, not rational . . . to remove this want of correspondence is beginning to be the settled endeavour of most persons of good sense.’71 Change was a challenge: it had to be managed, and people brought along with it, not made to feel they existed in spite of it. The creation of more ‘persons of good sense’ was essential.

  Culture and Anarchy also echoes – and is in some ways an interesting development from – Arnold’s essay introducing The Popular Education of France, published in 1861. It was his minority report on the Newcastle Commission, published with the Commission’s approval. The introduction was republished in 1879 as the essay Democracy. As in A French Eton, he argued that ‘undoubtedly there arrive periods, when, the circumstances and conditions of government having changed, the guiding maxims of government ought to change also.’72 Britain may not have had a revolution, but industrialisation had changed it profoundly. The effects of those changes had to be dealt with.

  He noted in his 1861 essay that Liberals (with a fringe of Radicals) and Conservatives had replaced Whigs and Tories. The old parties had been ‘aristocratical’, their power rooted in the land or in Court favour. They shared a common culture, ‘the feelings and habits of the upper class of the nation’.73 The aristocracy might not have been intelligent but it had nobility of purpose; and, like the Roman aristocracy, ‘they each fostered in the mass of the peoples they governed – peoples of sturdy moral constitution and apt to learn such lessons – a greatness of spirit . . . they made . . . great peoples, peoples in the grand style.’74 However, the notion that the aristocracy were the only natural leaders now had to be discounted. ‘The time has arrived,’ he wrote, ‘when it is becoming impossible for the aristocracy of England to conduct and wield the English nation any longer.’ He had learned from France that aristocracies ‘inevitably fail’ to appreciate, or even to take into their minds, ‘the instinct pushing the masses towards expansion and fuller life’; and, as a result, ‘they lose their hold over them’.75 Any Englishman would have seen this happening, in various manifestations, since the Chartist riots of 1839 and 1842 and the unease of 1848. Arnold said this lack of comprehension was the ancient fault of aristocracies, and why they always came unstuck.

  Like his father, Arnold supported democracy: not because it was inevitable, but because it was just. However, he believed that ‘if the worst mischiefs of democracy ever happen in England, it will be, not because a new condition of things has come upon us unforeseen, but because, though we all foresaw it, our efforts to deal with it were in the wrong direction.’76 The main obstacle to cultural advancement was not the State, but the proud new middle classes who just wanted to be left alone, and felt they could provide perfectly well for themselves. Yet they lacked the trained minds and experience of culture to create schools that would emulate the best. This, again, echoed his father’s argument, that the middle classes tended to leave school to be articled or apprenticed in some calling, lacking time to be taught the rudiments of sweetness and light.

  He accepted that the middle classes had been zealots for liberty and paragons of industry: but ‘all the liberty and industry in the world will not ensure these tw
o things: a high reason and a fine culture.’77 Without those, Britain could never be ‘more than an independent, an energetic, a successful nation’ – it could never be ‘a great nation’. He felt that the part played by high reason was growing, not diminishing: and a nation that failed to develop reason in its people would fall behind. He felt the French had it – a contention perhaps belied by their tripping into the disastrous war with Prussia in 1870 – and it would never do for England to fall behind the French. A truly glorious people had both character and culture: character without culture was ‘something raw, blind and dangerous’.78 He took the example of ancient Athens, ‘the spectacle of the culture of a people . . . the middle and lower classes in the highest development of their humanity that these classes have yet reached.’ This was an example not just of the heights a society could attain, but evidence that a classical education was not ‘an aristocratic impertinence’ nor the remains of the ancient world ‘so much lumber’, which were the views of people he dismissed as ‘friends of progress’.

  The middle classes had to decide whether to civilise themselves or to surrender the chance to make Britain great. He feared if they rejected the help the State could give in improving schools and their curriculum, ‘if they go on exaggerating their spirit of individualism, if they persist in their jealousy of all governmental action, if they cannot learn that the antipathies and shibboleths of a past age are now an anachronism for them’, they might get control of their country, but would do little good with it.79 They would, in his uncomplimentary phrase, ‘Americanise’ it: separate it from sweetness and light, from true culture, and make it simply a machine. And without culture – and here lay the seed of his great work of later in the decade – ‘society is in danger of falling into anarchy’.