High Minds

by Simon Heffer

  The enemy of reason now, however – and here Arnold anticipates Stephen’s arguments in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity – is ‘the notion of its being the prime right and happiness, for each of us, to affirm himself, and his ordinary self; to be doing, and to be doing freely and as he likes.’112 This, he says, lies ‘at the bottom of our present unsettled state’. As a result there is a ‘disbelief in right reason as a lawful authority’. The long-term effect of Hebraism on British society was that the people ‘have been led to regard in themselves, as the one thing needful, strictness of conscience, the staunch adherence to some fixed law of doing we have got already, instead of spontaneity of consciousness, which tends continually to enlarge our whole law of doing.’ This was why Nonconformity bred narrow-minded provincialism: it took no account of what Arnold saw as the Hellenic half of a person’s nature, or the Platonic aspects of intellectual development. As this nature atrophied or was confined, so too did, and was, society. Arnold lauded Greek art and beauty, dismissed by Bright and wilfully closed off from himself by Lowe, as the prime example of the ‘impulse to see things as they really are’.113 Greek art rested on a fidelity to nature, allowing a ‘delicate discrimination of what this best nature is’.114

  Arnold’s final substantive chapter is entitled Our Liberal Practitioners, and is an assault on the party that had ruled for most of the previous thirty years – and that, as he wrote, would shortly return to power – for its complacency. The new religion of free trade, he observed, had left one in nineteen a pauper: he was unclear why increases in trade and population should be regarded as goods in themselves. He referred to the East End of London, with which he was familiar in his work as a schools inspector. When times were good, all was reasonably well: but when trade slackened off, when the docks were quiet, when demand for the goods from the sweatshops slumped, there was squalor, poverty and misery. That was how the laws of supply and demand worked in an industrial society, which was, as Carlyle had said since the early 1840s, nothing like had used to be the case. The Liberals seemed to have no answer.

  However, Arnold knew the pursuit of perfection had to be a mass movement. ‘The fewer there are who follow the way to perfection, the harder that way is to find.’115 He added: ‘So all our fellow men, in the East of London and elsewhere, we must take along with us in the progress towards perfection, if we ourselves really, as we profess, want to be perfect; and we must not let the worship of any fetish, any machinery, such as manufactures or population – which are not, like perfection, absolute goods in themselves, though we think them so – create for us such a multitude of miserable, sunken, and ignorant human beings, that to carry them all along with us is impossible, and perforce they must for the most part be left by us in their degradation and wretchedness.’ The continuation of the economic ideology of ‘our Liberal practitioners’ would create more paupers, and the burden, in all ways, would become unbearable.

  Arnold knew the political nature of his message. He sent Disraeli the text in time for the campaign of 1868; could Disraeli begin to grasp the stately prose, or the layered irony? In truth, there was little he could do to quell what Arnold himself saw as the bigotries and prejudices not only of the two political parties, but of the mass of Nonconformity, that in their different ways were impeding disinterestedness. Arnold knew his high-minded view of the one thing needful was never likely to chime with that of the political class, let alone of the masses over whom they ruled. If Disraeli did not comprehend him, Gladstone – a far more subtle intellect, and cut from the same cloth as Arnold – would. But what could Gladstone do, even had he wanted to? Few men alive had done more to support and design the present economic system than he had: and he would not be persuaded so easily that it was failing.

  Arnold’s conclusion was laced with pragmatism. The Hyde Park riots and working-class unrest had disturbed him. He said of society: ‘Whoever administers it, and however we may seek to remove them from their tenure of administration, yet, while they administer, we steadily and with undivided heart support them in repressing anarchy and disorder; because without order there can be no society, and without society there can be no human perfection.’116 He quoted his father, citing one of his sayings from memory: ‘As for rioting, the old Roman way of dealing with that is always the right one; flog the rank and file, and fling the ringleaders from the Tarpeian Rock!’ Stanley thought it might have been ‘crucify the slaves’ rather than flogging, but Arnold was sure he had it right.117 He endorsed his father (though the family were sufficiently upset by this exhibition of the Doctor’s illiberal side that he was prevailed upon to excise the reference from the second edition), mocking the Liberals for finding ‘a little rioting . . . useful sometimes to their own interests.’ However important it was, when necessary, to show the iron hand, he still refused to believe the notion that ‘the world wants fire and strength more than sweetness and light’.118

  Time was, he feared, running out: soon Bradlaugh and his friend Odger ‘will be there with their mission to oust both Barbarians and Philistines, and to get the heritage for the Populace.’119 And, as its contribution to the fight for culture, sweetness and light, the Liberal party sought to ‘abolish the Irish Church by the power of the Nonconformists’ antipathy to establishments, or they enable a man to marry his deceased wife’s sister.’120

  ‘It is so much a counsel of perfection,’ wrote Trilling, ‘that it becomes a counsel of despair.’121 Trilling’s definition of perfection – entirely reasonably – is ‘the conscious effort of each man to come to the realisation of his complete humanity’. He perhaps takes Arnold too much at face value. The social and moral unities Arnold sought had always been unattainable; just as the unity his father, thirty years earlier, had sought between Churches and State was. They required a shift of national consciousness of which a society like Britain’s, and especially England’s, with its proud record of individualism, could not contemplate. But Arnold would set the course for the establishment of a State-backed education system. He did not deal with the detail of what would be taught in it, or how.

  Kingsley told Arnold that Culture and Anarchy was ‘an exceeding wise and true book: and likely as such, to be little listened to this autumn: but to sink into the ground and die, and bear fruit next spring: when the spring comes.’122 John Morley said that ‘when all is said for and against the worth of his contribution to theology, the debt of Liberalism to Arnold as a general critic of our needs will long deserve grave commemoration.’123 The non-intellectual view was summed up by Disraeli, who after Culture and Anarchy told Arnold he was the only living Englishman to have become a classic in his lifetime. By the time of the second edition, seeking yet more divine guidance, Arnold went to the Vulgate, and from there borrowed for a superscription a phrase from St Matthew’s Gospel, in a language some of his detractors would not have understood: ‘Estote ergo vos perfecti!’ – Be ye, therefore, perfect.

  IV

  Huxley (‘whom I thoroughly like and admire’, Arnold told Kingsley, ‘but find very disposed to be tyrannical and unjust’), too, took up these arguments.124 In his inaugural address to the South London Working Men’s College in January 1868 he described educating the working class as ‘great work . . . the greatest work of all those which lie ready to a man’s hand just at present’.125 The work of education was being led from the industrial centres because ‘nobody outside the agricultural interest now dares to say that education is a bad thing.’ It was deemed ‘bad’ there because education would disrupt the supply of cheap, tied labour that landowners relied upon. The general view was that ‘if the country is not shortly to go to the dogs, everybody must be educated.’

  Although Huxley was no utilitarian, he saw that Britain would lag behind if it wasted its human resources. He despised those with ulterior motives for extending what he saw as this human right to a large swathe of humanity: ‘The politicians tell us, “you must educate the masses because they are going to be master”. The clergy join in the cry for education
, for they affirm that the people are drifting away from church and chapel into the broadest infidelity. The manufacturers and the capitalists swell the chorus lustily. They declare that ignorance makes bad workmen; that England will soon be unable to turn out cotton goods, or steam engines, cheaper than other people.’ Huxley’s view was quite different: ‘A few voices are lifted up in favour of the doctrine that the masses should be educated because they are men and women with unlimited capacities of being, doing, and suffering, and that it is as true now, as ever it was, that the people perish for lack of knowledge.’

  He had contempt for those who stood in the way of alleviating this suffering. ‘Compare the average artisan and the average country squire, and it may be doubted if you will find a pin to choose between the two in point of ignorance, class feeling or prejudice.’126 If there were to be change, then ‘why should we be worse off under one regime than under the other?’ He savaged the old universities – none of which he had attended – as having a ‘posture of half-clerical seminaries, half racecourses, where men are trained to win a senior wranglership, or a double-first, as horses are trained to win a cup, with as little reference to the needs of after-life in the case of the man as in that of the racer.’ He argued for compulsory education, if it could be agreed what that education should be; he thought that simply teaching reading, writing and arithmetic was ‘very like making a child practise the use of a knife, fork, and spoon, without giving it a particle of meat.’127 He defined education as ‘the instruction of the intellect in the laws of nature, under which name I include not merely things and their forces, but men and their ways; and the fashioning of the affections and of the will into an earnest and loving desire to move in harmony with those laws.’

  What passed for the primary education some children received was nothing like this. Despite instruction in reading and writing, few children took pleasure in reading, or were able to write the commonest letter properly. They learned ‘a quantity of dogmatic theology, of which the child, nine times out of ten, understands next to nothing’; plus ‘a few of the broadest and simplest principles of morality’, ‘a good deal of Jewish history and Syrian geography’ and ‘a certain amount of regularity, attentive obedience, respect for others.’128 He wanted working people taught the connection between moral probity and a stable society; and wanted to end the system whereby ‘the child learns absolutely nothing of the history or the political organisation of his own country.’129

  The danger of educating the lower classes was that they would realise who was really responsible for the conditions in which they had to live; and, when they had the vote, they could act upon that knowledge. Huxley noted that educating the poor would diminish neither ‘misery nor crime among the masses of mankind.’ He asserted that ‘if I am a knave or a fool, teaching me to read and write won’t make me less of either one or the other – unless somebody shows me how to put my reading and writing to wise and good purposes.’ Wisdom, not rote-learning, was needed: ‘Teach a man to read and write, and you have put into his hands the great keys of the wisdom box.’ But then he had to open the box; and be guided about how to use what he found in it.

  Huxley believed secondary schools were even more shamefully negligent than the primaries. Devoting their time to rote-learning of Euclid, algebra and the catechism, it meant ‘modern geography, modern history, modern literature; the English language as a language; the whole circle of the sciences, physical, moral and social, are even more completely ignored in the higher than in the lower schools.’130 He said that, until Clarendon, ‘a boy might have passed through any one of the great public schools with the greatest distinction and credit, and might never so much as heard of one of the subjects I have just mentioned.’ He would never have learned the earth went round the sun, that England had a revolution in 1688 and France one in 1789, or that Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Voltaire, Goethe or Schiller ever existed. He feared that ‘the time will come when Englishmen will quote it as the stock example of the stolid stupidity of their ancestors in the nineteenth century.’

  What most worried Huxley was that the schools for the middle classes – many newly enfranchised – emulated the old public schools in teaching little but Classics, but teaching them badly. He claimed a great sympathy for the Classics – ‘a great section of the palaeontology of man’ – but wished they could be taught ‘not merely as languages, but as illustrations of philological science’, and allowing ‘a vivid picture of life on the shores of the Mediterranean, two thousand years ago’ to be ‘imprinted on the minds of scholars.’131 He wanted boys who learned ancient literature to be impressed with ‘the grand simplicity of their statement of the everlasting problems of human life, instead of with their verbal and grammatical peculiarities.’132 In this, he was completely at odds with Arnold, and seemed to be embracing the very philistinism from which the author of Culture and Anarchy wished Britain to be saved. There would have to be a battle over the way forward.

  V

  John Ruskin, feted as Britain’s leading art critic since he began precociously to publish Modern Painters in the early 1840s, when barely down from Oxford, turned his considerable intelligence to political and social questions. Like many in his generation – he was the same age as Clough, and three years older than Arnold – he had come under the influence of Carlyle but, unlike Clough and Arnold, had stayed there. He was an odd fish. It is said he failed to consummate his marriage out of shock at the sight of the pubic hair of his wife, Euphemia ‘Effie’ Gray, who wrote to her father that Ruskin was ‘disgusted with my person the first evening’: such details had not been accentuated on the classical statues from which he had deduced his anatomical knowledge of women.133 Their marriage was annulled.

  He then, in his late thirties, conceived an affection for ten-year-old Rose La Touche, to whom he later proposed marriage, when he was forty-seven and she eighteen. In her fragment of autobiography Rose, who became a religious maniac, wrote that ‘I think it was Mr Ruskin’s teaching when I was about twelve years old that made me first take to looking after the poor – at least that made me see it as a thing Right, and a part of Christ’s love, and I got easily very fond of them and liked doing it. So I used to take them tracts in a basket (that papa gave me) and used to read the Bible to them, and go to see them when they were ill (and well too) and I suppose enough of childishness mixed with my visits to make them pleasant as well as “profitable”. I always liked the poor.’134 Rose died at twenty-seven, possibly of anorexia. Before then her parents had at various times forbidden Ruskin to communicate with her, not least because of Mrs La Touche’s having had a conversation with Effie Gray, now Mrs John Everett Millais. Ruskin was destined to be unhappy, and to make others so.

  He is an other-worldly figure in a way the other main intellectuals of the mid-Victorian era are not: perhaps because of his being rooted in the rarefied environment of art and architecture. He also exhibits a far more unquestioning Christian faith than most of his more cerebral contemporaries, most of whom struggled to profess any sort of faith at all. The editors of Ruskin’s diaries begin their introduction with the observation: ‘It is the solitary man who keeps a diary; and Ruskin, though he never lived and rarely travelled alone, was a man doomed to intellectual and spiritual solitude.’135 By the time of his death in 1900, after more than a decade of madness, he was revered not just as an art critic, but by many in the nascent Labour movement as one of its leading influences. Few took his views on political economy seriously, but they had an impact because of Ruskin’s reputation made elsewhere, and because of his eloquence of expression.

  Ruskin was the only child of an intense and unusual family. His parents were first cousins. His father made a small fortune importing sherry, and his mother was the daughter of a publican from Croydon. His paternal grandfather, John Thomas Ruskin, had a history of mental and financial problems. He killed himself in 1817, the year before Ruskin’s parents married and two years before his grandson’s birth. The family young John gr
ew up in was successful, but the success was founded on hard work, and Ruskin’s father took until 1832 to pay off John Thomas’s debts. Young John was educated at home and by tutors, the absence of childhood friends contributing to his solitary nature as an adult. It was from his father, a serious collector and a patron of Turner, that he acquired an interest in art, and from him too that he learned to draw and to love the novels of Sir Walter Scott.

  From his mother he imbibed a religious intensity that would colour all his works, artistic or political. His mother made him read the Bible every morning, and memorise passages, from the age of three: his literary style, which verges on the magnificent (note, for example, the opening and closing lines of the first volume of The Stones of Venice) owes much to this. However, by his early teens his interests in the aesthetic were at the forefront of his intellectual curiosity, and his parents did all they could to stimulate them. By fourteen he had seen most of the fine landscapes and treasures of Britain: he then embarked on tours around Europe, notably France, Italy and Switzerland. He went up to Christ Church, Oxford in January 1837, after a short course of lectures at King’s College, London.