by Simon Heffer
His peroration made Culture and Anarchy inevitable, for the book is an extended echo of this final paragraph.
Undoubtedly we are drawing on towards great changes; and for every nation the thing most needful is to discern clearly its own condition, in order to know in what particular way it may best meet them. Openness and flexibility of mind are at such a time the first of virtues. Be ye perfect, said the Founder of Christianity. I count not myself to have apprehended, said its greatest Apostle. Perfection will never be reached; but to recognise a period of transformation when it comes, and to adapt themselves honestly and rationally to its laws, is perhaps the nearest approach to perfection of which men and nations are capable. No habits or attachments should prevent their trying to do this; nor, indeed, in the long run, can they. Human thought, which made all institutions, inevitably saps them, resting only in that which is absolute and eternal.80
Where this essay ended – with estote ergo vos perfecti! – so, seven years later, Culture and Anarchy began.
By ‘culture’ Arnold means a system of civilisation, a condition in which the people are invested with the full sense of their humanity. Culture embraces truth, morality, reason, faith. To achieve this state is to achieve perfection; it is, though Arnold never says so, impossible. Some of serious purpose might attain something close to it; but for a whole society to do so was utterly unpractical. The book must be read as an exhortation towards an aspiration, written at a time of frightening upheaval. Culture and Anarchy marked his move towards social conservatism and away from liberalism. It said that a regard for institutions and the benign State should play a larger part in British life: an important chapter is devoted to attacking the notion of ‘doing as one likes’, and the cult of the individual. Arnold seems to feel that a dose of authoritarianism was required to put Britain on the right path, a trait he shared with Stephen, who nonetheless continued to criticise him.
He particularly took against the Nonconformists who comprised so much of the new middle class. In his scheme, that class would rescue England from the rule of the ignorant, promulgate sweetness and light, and lead the pursuit of perfection: so it needed to do better. Its members were obsessed with what he called ‘machinery’, material rather than metaphysical objects. If all reform meant was that more had been liberated to pursue an existence rooted in mediocrity and ignorance, then Arnold, too, would have to consider the vocabulary of despair. He wished ‘to recommend culture as the great help out of our present difficulties; culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world; and through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a virtue in following them staunchly which makes up for the mischief of following them mechanically.’81
Arnold subtitled Culture and Anarchy ‘an Essay in Social and Political Criticism’. The discerning public was used to him as a poet, and as a literary critic, educationist and theological scholar: all these come together in Culture and Anarchy. The book’s first chapter, Sweetness and Light, was Arnold’s outgoing lecture when he vacated the chair of Poetry at Oxford. He saw a society suddenly transformed by the extension of political power, but in need of transformation in its educational, moral and spiritual contexts. He savages various public figures (it is a deeply satirical and humorous book) who have provided leadership in the wrong direction: notably Bright, with his rabble-rousing, and Lowe, whom Arnold the school inspector had not forgiven for the Revised Code. Bright he assailed for using his ‘noble oratory’ to laud only material improvements:
And though our pauperism and ignorance, and all the questions which are called social, seem now to be forcing themselves upon his mind, yet he still goes on with his glorifying of the great towns, and the Liberals, and their operations of the last thirty years. It never seems to occur to him that the present troubled state of our social life has anything to do with the thirty years’ blind worship of their nostrums by himself and our Liberal friends, or that it throws any doubts on the sufficiency of this worship. But he thinks what is still amiss is due to the stupidity of the Tories, and will be cured by the thoughtfulness and intelligence of the great towns, and by the Liberals going on gloriously with their political operations as before; or that it will cure itself. So we see what Mr Bright means by thoughtfulness and intelligence, and in what manner, according to him, we are to grow in them.82
Arnold may be criticised for intellectual snobbery: he cringes at the notion that Manchester, or Rochdale, or Bradford could represent a route to the pursuit of perfection. But his criticism of Bright and those like him is just, and important: by all means make material advances that lift people out of poverty, and that indeed improve whole districts and cities; but do not suppose these are the only advances worth taking seriously. For society to be happy and harmonious there needs to be (and for this Arnold borrows a phrase from Swift) ‘sweetness and light’: beauty and intelligence. Arnold maintained he had ‘traced much of our present discomfort to the want of them’.83 He specifically blamed the ‘provincialism’ of the Nonconformists, which it was his aim to ‘extirpate’. His language sometimes has the imagery of violence, reflecting his sense that England was at a turning point, and whoever fought hardest would win. The middle classes had to end their betrayal of true culture, forsaking the utilitarianism that poisoned their outlook.
Indeed, Arnold imagines he is still fighting the Civil War, aligning Nonconformity with Puritanism and identifying a shared narrowness.84 He searches for a new centre of authority – open-minded, benign, intellectually curious and valuing the growth of intelligence. Such leadership would help new voters understand their responsibilities, and exercise their vote with disinterestedness rather than self-interest. ‘What is alone and always sacred and binding for man is the making progress towards his total perfection,’ he writes.85 Expanding upon this, he says that ‘culture, disinterestedly trying, in its aim at perfection, to see things as they really are, sees how worthy and divine a thing is the religious side in man’: which further set him against the narrowness he perceived in Nonconformity, so prevalent in the great provincial towns admired by Bright.86
Arnold had been brought up a Liberal and still professed to be one – ‘yet I am a Liberal tempered by experience, reflection and renouncement, and I am above all a believer in culture’.87 This was what sundered him from the Liberal masses. It was not just that some – including Lowe – had disparaged culture as the learning of dead languages, not understanding, or choosing not to understand, the wisdom, history and philosophy to which those languages were the key. Arnold felt they regarded culture as something ‘valued either out of sheer vanity and ignorance, or else as an engine of social and class distinction, separating its holder, like a badge or title, from other people who have not got it.’88 He continued: ‘No serious man would call this culture, or attach any value to it.’ For him, culture did not originate in intellectual curiosity, but ‘in the love of perfection; it is the 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.’89 He took a phrase of Montesquieu for his definition – ‘to render an intelligent being more intelligent’ – and one of Bishop Wilson, an eighteenth-century prelate, whose maxims he had discovered in his father’s library, and which Arnold had rather taken to: ‘To make reason and the will of God prevail!’
Gladstone, Prime Minister when Culture and Anarchy appeared in book form in 1869, grasped Arnold’s view of culture. The breakfasts the two men shared demonstrated the politician’s regard for the critic, as did Gladstone’s assiduous reading of Arnold’s work. Gladstone saw that criticism could be applied to society as well as to creative work: and that enabled one ‘to see things as they really are’. Arnold also helped influence him to cross one of the Liberal rubic
ons: his regard for the power of the State as a civilising force, which he had taken from his experience in France, set Arnold apart from most Liberals. They regarded the State as an instrument of the destruction of liberty, and cherished an English ideal of the ordinary man being left alone. The way Gladstone would bring the State into the regulation of education owed much to Arnold’s advocacy, and nothing to the Liberal tradition.
All the main writers on the reform crisis – Carlyle, Ruskin and Stephen as well as Arnold – had diverse views of what could, or should, be done. They agreed on the need for reason, a commodity all saw to be in short supply. Arnold believed that spiritual means, rather than temporal force or coercion, could inspire it. Culture was not just the means to see and learn the will of God, but to make it prevail: and at which point ‘the moral, social and beneficent character of culture becomes manifest’.90 For all his doubts, and his gloom about the Sea of Faith, Arnold could not but see religion (by which he meant the Established Church, in the English context) as central to his thesis. He wrote of ‘religion, the greatest and most important of the efforts by which the human race has manifested its impulse to perfect itself – religion, that voice of the deepest human experience – does not only enjoin and sanction the aim which is the great aim of culture, the aim of setting ourselves to ascertain what perfection is and to make it prevail.’91 This is an assault on the secular society: there can be no true culture, in Arnold’s view, without faith. Just as the Kingdom of God is within you, culture places ‘human perfection in an internal condition, in the growth and predominance of our humanity proper, as distinguished from our animality.’ His mission was to rescue England from the savages. He might have struggled against his father’s example; he might have entertained doubts and seen his closest friend subsumed under them; but in the end, religion remained the key to civilisation, to reason, to seeing things as they really were.
However, the pursuit of perfection would struggle against the overwhelming force of materialism. ‘The idea of perfection as an inward condition of mind and spirit is at variance with the mechanical and material civilisation in esteem with us and nowhere, as I have said, so much in esteem as with us.’92 The great material triumphs of the last thirty years were not ‘ends in themselves’, however much that might seem to be the case. Arnold had a word for those who succumbed to this danger: ‘The people who believe most that our greatness and welfare are proved by our being very rich, and who most give their lives and thoughts to becoming rich, are just the very people whom we call Philistines.’
These middle-class bêtes noires might have known better had they not been so badly led. ‘Culture says: “Consider these people, then, their way of life, their habits, their manners, the very tones of their voice; look at them attentively; observe the literature they read, the things which give them pleasure, the words which come forth out of their mouths, the thoughts which make the furniture of their minds; would any amount of wealth be worth having with the condition that one was to become just like these people by having it?”’93 Arnold hoped the dissatisfaction with materialism that this understanding might create would save ‘the future, as one may hope, from being vulgarised, even if it cannot save the present.’
His enemies – such as Bright, whom he kicks constantly – are enemies not because of their malevolence (even Bright’s worst enemy would struggle to accuse him of that) but because of their ignorance. The very notion of the pursuit of perfection, with a recognition of sweetness and light at its core, is a Greek one, and the Greeks attached ‘immense spiritual significance’ to it.94 ‘And Mr Bright’s misconception of culture, as a smattering of Greek and Latin, comes itself, after all, from this wonderful significance of the Greeks having affected the very machinery of our education, and in itself a kind of homage to it.’ If one sought proof that the opposite was currently pertaining, one had only to look at ‘London, with its unutterable external hideousness, and with its internal canker of publice egestas, privatim opulentia . . . unequalled in the world!’95
That city harboured a newspaper with the largest circulation in the world – the Daily Telegraph, which Arnold reviled. It proved its inhabitants were as far from human perfection as could be measured. It was they for whom Lowe had sought to die in the last ditch, as he manifested ‘the hardness and vulgarity of middle-class Liberalism.’96 Now they had been swept from power by the democratic tide Lowe had resisted, an opportunity arose to make them realise materialism was not everything. At the other extreme of Liberalism, and representing the new democratic masters, was Bright: and Arnold ridiculed him for leading ‘his disciples to believe – what the Englishman is always too ready to believe – that the having a vote, like the having a large family, or a large business, or large muscles, has in itself some edifying and perfecting effect upon human nature.’97 The idea of sweetness and light, Arnold argued, was one the new democracy needed far more ‘than the idea of the blessedness of the franchise, or the wonderfulness of its own industrial performances’.98 ‘The pursuit of perfection,’ he decreed, ‘is the pursuit of sweetness and light.’99
Arnold was mocked by those, such as the editor of the Daily Telegraph, who accused him of not understanding the realities of life. He countered by saying that if people had been better educated – if someone had taken the trouble to develop their intelligence – then the ‘rougher and coarser movements’ might be a little less rough, and a little less coarse.100 Instead, the working class – which Arnold termed the Populace – ‘pressed constantly by the hard daily compulsion of material wants, as he realised, had become ‘the very centre and stronghold of our national idea, that it is man’s ideal right and felicity to do as he likes’.101
The decline of deference meant that ‘the anarchical tendency of our worship of freedom in and for itself, of our superstitious faith, as I say, in machinery, is becoming very manifest.’ Leading on from this was the notion of an Englishman’s right ‘to march where he likes, meet where he likes, enter where he likes, hoot as he likes, threaten as he likes, smash as he likes. All this, I say, tends to anarchy; and though a number of excellent people, and particularly my friends of the Liberal or progressive party, as they call themselves, are kind enough to reassure us by saying that these are trifles, that a few transient outbreaks of rowdyism signify nothing, that our system of liberty is one which itself cures all the evils which it works, that the educated and intelligent classes stand in overwhelming strength and majestic repose, ready, like our military force in riots, to act at a moment’s notice.’102 Arnold had no truck with such complacency, and in this he was at one with Carlyle, Ruskin and Stephen. He knew that the cast of mind that had broken down the railings in Hyde Park had been appeased, not improved, and remained a threat to civilisation.
The problem, in a society riven by class differences, was that there could be no agreement on where the centre of authority lay. For Carlyle it was in the aristocracy, but that was a fantasy. For Lowe it was in the middle classes, but they had been defeated. For Bright and the Reform League it was the working class, but they were unfit. Arnold asked what constituted the State in post-1867 Britain: what was ‘the power most representing the right reason of the nation, and most worthy, therefore, of ruling – of exercising, when circumstances require it, authority over us all?’103 It was ‘culture, with its disinterested pursuit of perfection, culture, simply trying to see things as they are, in order to seize on the best and to make it prevail’ that would help one make the best judgement on where the new authority lay.
While Carlyle’s aristocrats had sweetness, they were short on light. The Liberal middle class, mocked by Arnold when he refers to their desire to have a man allowed to marry his deceased wife’s sister, were too obsessed with the machinery of life, and light was scarce among them too. It had an ‘incomparable self-satisfaction’ about being sufficiently educated.104 Its mind would always be narrow; and it was too pliant in the face of the threat of anarchy, too concerned to allow the potential anarchists to do as th
ey liked, to be a safe berth for authority. The philistines had chosen ‘some dismal and illiberal existence in preference to light’, and were beyond reasoning with.105
The working class were ‘one in spirit with the industrial middle class’, as was only to be expected as they watched the next rung on the ladder.106 ‘It is notorious’, Arnold observed ‘that our middle-class Liberals have long looked forward to this consummation, when the working class shall join forces with them, aid them heartily to carry forward their great works, go in a body to their tea-meetings, and, in short, enable them to bring about their millennium.’ He was alert to the attempt to forge working-class power independently of the Liberals, through the trades union movement: the first Trades Union Congress was held in 1868. This movement was built on self-interest, not disinterestedness, and nothing about it suggested the pursuit of perfection.
Beyond this was ‘that vast portion . . . of the working class which, raw and half-developed, 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 privilege of doing as he liked, and is beginning to perplex us by marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, bawling what it likes, breaking what it likes.’107 This was Arnold’s populace, and it plainly horrified him, not least because he struggled to find anyone with the will to keep it in check or the determination to try to improve it. Arnold makes no direct reference to Mill; though the chapter Doing as one Likes is a critique of On Liberty, and opens up a new debate in the family of liberalism.
He felt that among the barbarians (the aristocracy), the philistines and even the populace there were ‘natures’ who understood ‘the love and pursuit of perfection’ and the importance of ‘sweetness and light [as] the true character of the pursued perfection’.108 He added: ‘This bent always tends to take them out of their class, and to make their distinguishing characteristic not their Barbarianism or their Philistinism, but their humanity.’ These were ‘aliens’, not led by class spirit, but by ‘a general humane spirit, by the love of human perfection’.109 It was in these rare people that the hope for Britain’s future lay, if they could emerge from the crush of others doing as they liked and asserting their freedom to be boors. Arnold returns to the classical teaching Bright mocked and Lowe despised as lacking in utility: such as Socrates’s ‘the best man is he who most tries to perfect himself, and the happiest man is he who most feels that he is perfecting himself.’110 Hellenism is the term Arnold uses for the pursuit of sweetness and light, and he contrasts it with the Hebraism that imbues so much of the theology of the Nonconformists. Hebraism ‘manifested itself in Puritanism, and has had a great part in shaping our history for the last two hundred years.’111
