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 à 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 was a tower of strength.” “Lucy is such a perfect companion.” “Nelly is the dearest girl in the world.” “That little darling 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 and the other two boys to see Basil’s grave; and now we went to see his grave, poor darling.” “I cannot write Budge’s 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. A century later Renan said: “Nature cares nothing for chastity.” Les frivoles out peutêtre 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 traversé notre vie et notre littérature par une ligne intérieure, profonde, qui fait les initiés, 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. Eñ ³Åp — thus the teacher of Culture moralized on this pregnant phrase.
The Union Rooms, Oxford
At the Jubilee of the Union, 1873, Matthew Arnold responded to Dr. Liddon’s speech proposing ‘Literature’
Photo H.W. Taunt
“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.” 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.
Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold Page 104
