RugbyRugbyMatthew Arnold entered Rugby School in August, 1837, living under his father's roof at the School-house.He left Rugby for Oxford in June, 1841Photo H.W. Taunt
But these larger views of education belong, after all, to the region of theory, and he never had the opportunity, except very indirectly, of putting them into practice. With the Elementary Schools he dealt practically, officially, and directly; but even here, as in so many other departments, his influence was rather critical than constructive. He had only an imperfect sympathy with "that somewhat terrible character, the scientific educator." A brother-inspector says that, "if he saw little children looking good and happy, and under the care of a kindly and sympathetic teacher, he would give a favourable report, without enquiring too curiously into the percentage of scholars who could pass the 'standard' examination." There must be many who still remember with amused affection his demeanour in an Elementary School. They see the tall figure, at once graceful and stately; the benign air, as of an affable archangel; the critical brow and enquiring eyeglass bent on some very immature performance in penmanship or needlework; and the frightened children and the anxious teacher, gradually lapsing into smiles and peace, as the great man tested the proficiency in some such humble art as spelling. "Well, my little man, and how do you spelldog?" "Please sir,d-o-g." "Capital, very good indeed. I couldn't do it better myself. And now let us go a little further, and see if we can spellcat." (Chorus excitedly.) "c-a-t." "Now, this is really excellent. (To the teacher.) You have brought them on wonderfully in spelling since I was here last. You shall have a capital report. Good-bye." To those who cherish these memories there is nothing surprising in this tribute by a friend: "His effect on the teachers when he examined a school was extraordinary. He was sympathetic without being condescending, and he reconciled the humblest drudge in a London school to his or her drudgery for the next twelve months."
As regards the matter of education, he was all for Reality, as against Pretentiousness, "the stamp of plainness and freedom from charlatanism." He had no notion that children could be humanized by being made to read that "the crocodile is oviparous," or that "summer ornaments for grates are made of wood shavings and of different coloured papers." He wished that the youngest and poorest children should be nurtured on the wholesome and delicious food of actual literature, instead of "skeletons" and "abstracts." He set great store on learning poetry by heart, for he believed in poetry as the chief instrument of culture. He poured just contempt uponthe wretched doggerel which in school reading-books too often passed for poetry. "When one thinks how noble and admirable a thing genuine popular poetry is, it is provoking to think that such rubbish should be palmed off on a poor child, with any apparent sanction from the Education Department and its grants."
With regard to the special evil of teaching poetry by "selections" or "extracts," he wrote in his Report for 1880: "That the poetry chosen should have real beauties of expression and feeling, that these beauties should be such as the children's hearts and minds can lay hold of, and that a distinct point or centre of beauty and interest should occur within the limits of the passage learned—all these are conditions to be insisted on. Some of the short pieces by Mrs. Hemans, such as 'The Graves of a Household,' 'The Homes of England,' 'The Better Land,' are to be recommended because they fulfil all three conditions; they have real merits of expression and sentiment; the merits are such as the children can feel, and the centre of interest, these pieces being so short, necessarily occurs within the limits of what is learnt. On the other hand, in extracts taken from Scott or Shakespeare, the point of interest is not often reached within the hundred lines which is all that children in the Fourth Standard learn.The Judgment Scene in theMerchant of Veniceaffords me a good example of what I mean.... The children in the Fourth Standard begin at the beginning and stop at the end of a hundred lines. Now the children in the Fourth Standard are often a majority of the children learning poetry, and this is all their poetry for the year. But within these hundred lines the real interest of the situation is not reached; neither do they contain any poetry of signal beauty and effectiveness. How little, therefore, has the poetry-exercise been made to do for these children, many of whom will leave school at once, and learn no more poetry!" He greatly favoured all such exercises as tend to make the mind "creative," and give it "a native play of its own, as against such exercises as learning strings of promontories, battles, and minerals." As to the number of subjects taught, he was in favour of few rather than many. He dreaded for the children the strain of having to receive a large number of "knowledges" (as he oddly called them), and "store them up to be reproduced in an examination." But in spite of this well-founded dread of an undue multiplication of subjects, he wished to make Latin compulsory in the upper standards of elementary schools, and he wished to see it taught through the Vulgate. Perhaps in this particular he showed an effect of his father's influence; for the late Dean of Westminster[19]used to imitate the enormous emphasis with which Dr. Arnold replied to some one who had depreciated the language of the Vulgate as "Dog Latin"—"Dog Latin, indeed! I call itLion Latin!"
Be that as it may, Matthew Arnold thus gave his judgment on the possible uses of the Vulgate in elementary schools—
"Latin is the foundation of so much in the written and spoken language of modern Europe, that it is the best language to take as a second language; in our own written and book language, above all, it fills so large a part that we perhaps hardly know how much of their reading falls meaningless upon the eye and ear of children in our elementary schools, from their total ignorance of either Latin or a modern language derived from it. For the little of languages that can be taught in our elementary schools, it is far better to go to the root at once; and Latin, besides, is the best of all languages to learn grammar by. But it should by no means be taught as in our classical schools; far less time should be spent on the grammatical framework, and classical literature should be left quite out of view. A second language, and a language coming very largely into the vocabulary of modern nations, is what Latin should stand for to theteacher of an elementary school. I am convinced that for his purpose the best way would be to disregard classical Latin entirely, to use neither Cornelius Nepos, nor Eutropius, nor Cæsar, nor anydelectusfrom them, but to use the Latin Bible, the Vulgate. A chapter or two from the story of Joseph, a chapter or two from Deuteronomy, and the first two chapters of St. Luke's Gospel would be the sort of delectus we want; add to them a vocabulary and a simple grammar of the main forms of the Latin language, and you have a perfectly compact and cheap school book, and yet all that you need. In the extracts the child would be at home, instead of, as in extracts from classical Latin, in an utterly strange land; and the Latin of the Vulgate, while it is real and living Latin, is yet, like the Greek of the New Testament, much nearer to modern idiom, and therefore much easier for a modern learner than classical idiom can be. True, a child whose delectus is taken from Cornelius Nepos or Cæsar will be better prepared perhaps for going on to Virgil and Cicero than a child whose delectus is taken from the Vulgate. But we do not want to carry our elementary schools into Virgil or Cicero; one child in five thousand, with a special talent, may go on to higher schools, and to Virgil, and he will go on to them all the better for the little we have at any rate given him.But what we want to give to our Elementary Schools in general is the vocabulary, to some extent, of a second language, and that language one which is at the bottom of a great deal of modern life and modern language. This, I am convinced, we may give in some such method as the method I have above suggested, but in no other."
There is, perhaps, no more interesting or more characteristic feature of his doctrine about elementary schools than his insistence, early and late, on a close and familiar acquaintance with the Bible. "Chords of power," he said, "are touched by this instruction which no other part of the instruction in a popular school reaches, and chords various, not the single religious chord only. The Bible is for the child in an elementary school almost his only contact with poetry and philosophy. What a course of eloquence and poetry (to call it by that name alone) is the Bible in a school which has and can have but little eloquence and poetry! and how much do our elementary schools lose by not having any such course as part of their school programme! All who value the Bible may rest assured that thus to know and possess the Bible is the most certain way to extend the power and efficacy of the Bible."
The spiritual sense, the doctrinal and dogmatic import, of Holy Scripture lay, in his judgment,quite outside the scope of the School. "The Bible's application and edification belong to the Church; its literary and historical substance to the School." He saw clearly the manifold and conflicting perils to which a simple love and knowledge of the Bible were exposed the moment that exegesis began to play about it. He pointed out that Cardinal Newman interpreted the words,I will lay thy stones with fair colours and thy foundations with sapphires, as authorizing "the sumptuosities of the Church of Rome"; and to Protestants who said that this was a wrong use of the passage he pointed out that their similar use of the Beast and the Scarlet Woman and Antichrist would seem equally wrong to Cardinal Newman; "and in these cases of application who shall decide"? What he insisted on was the value of the Bible as a beautiful and ennobling literature, easily accessible to all. He would have it taught with intelligence, sympathy, reverence, and, above all, "as a Literature,"—for biblical teaching ought to show the widely varying elements of which the Bible is composed: the profound differences, not merely of authorship and style, but of tone and temper, between one book and another; the historical circumstances under which each came into being; the section of humanity and the period of time to which each made its appeal.
In 1869 he wrote in his Annual Report—
"Let the school managers make the main outlines of Bible history, and the getting by heart a selection of the finest Psalms, the most interesting passages from the historical and prophetical books of the Old Testament, and the chief parables, discourses, and exhortations, of the New, a part of the regular school work, to be submitted to inspection and to be seen in its strength or weakness like any other. This could raise no jealousies; or, if it still raises some, let a sacrifice be made of them for the sake of the end in view. Some will say that what we propose is but a small use to put the Bible to; yet it is that on which all higher use of the Bible is to be built, and its adoption is the only chance for saving the one elevating and inspiring element in the scanty instruction of our primary schools from being sacrificed to a politico-religious difficulty. There was no Greek school in which Homer was not read; cannot our popular schools, with their narrow range and their jejune alimentation in secular literature, do as much for the Bible as the Greek schools did for Homer?"
In 1870 he wrote about a book[20]by two young Jewish ladies: "I am sure it will be found, as I told them, that their book meets a real want; therewere good books about the Bible for the learned, and there were bad books about it—that is to say, badrésumésof its history and literature—for the general public; but anything like a good and soundrésuméfor the general public did not exist till this book came."
It is interesting to observe that to his deep conviction of the ethical and educational value of the Bible is due his only direct and constructive effort to enrich the apparatus of the schools which he inspected. Of improvement by way of criticism and suggestion he gave them enough and to spare, but to supply them with a new reading-book was a departure from his usual method. Nevertheless in 1872 he wrote: "An ounce of practice, they say, is better than a pound of theory; and certainly one may talk for ever about the wonder-working power of Letters, and yet produce no good at all, unless one really puts people in the way of feeling their power. The friends of Physics do not content themselves with extolling Physics; they put forth school-books by which the study of Physics may be with proper advantage brought near to those who before were strangers to it; and they do wisely. For any one who believes in the civilizing power of Letters, and often talks of this belief, to think that he has for more than twenty years got his living by inspecting schools for the people, hasgone in and out among them, has seen that the power of Letters never reaches them at all, and that the whole study of Letters is thereby discredited, and its power called in question, and yet has attempted nothing to remedy this state of things, cannot but be vexing and disquieting. He may truly say, like the Israel of the prophet, 'We have not wrought any deliverance in the earth'! and he may well desire to do something to pay his debt to popular education before he finally departs, and to serve it, if he can, in that point where its need is sorest, where he has always said its need was sorest, and where, nevertheless, it is as sore still as when he began saying this twenty years ago. Even if what he does cannot be of service at once, owing to special prejudices and difficulties, yet these prejudices and difficulties years are almost sure to dissipate, and the work may be of service hereafter."
These wise, though rather melancholy, words occur in the Preface to a little book calledA Bible Reading for Schools, and in its fuller and alternative title,The Great Prophecy of Israel's Restoration, Arranged and Edited for Young Learners. Arnold, himself a constant and attentive student of Holy Writ, "liked reading his Bible without being baffled by unmeaningnesses." He complained that "the fatal thing about our version isthat it so often spoils a chapter in the Old Testament by making sheer nonsense out of one or two verses, and so throwing the reader out." He habitually used a Bible—a present from his godfather, John Keble—"where the numbers of the chapters are marked at the side and do not interpose a break between chapter and chapter; and where the divisions of the verses, being numbered in like manner at the side of the page, not in the body of the verse, and being numbered in very small type, do not thrust themselves forcibly on the attention," and these circumstances suggested the form of hisBible Reading for Schools. The little book consists of the last twenty-seven chapters of Isaiah, running on continuously, with some twenty pages of notes, and he thus introduces it—
"At the very outset, the humbleness of what is professed in this little book cannot be set forth too strongly. With the aim of enabling English school children to read as a connected whole the last twenty-seven chapters of Isaiah, without being frequently stopped by passages of which the meaning is almost or quite unintelligible, I have sought to choose, among the better meanings which have been offered for each of the passages, that which seemed the best, and to weave it into the authorized text in such a manner as not to produce any senseof strangeness or interruption." The attempt was truly laudable, and the execution admirable for taste and ease. The majestic flow and cadence of the traditional English are never interrupted. There is no concession to such pedantries as Professor Robertson Smith's "greaves of the warrior that stampeth in the fray," or such barbarisms as Professor Cheynes' "boot of him that trampleth noisily." But here and there a turn is given to a sentence, which for the first time reveals its true meaning; here and there a word which really represents the Hebrew is substituted for one which makes nonsense of the sentence.
The little book has often been reprinted; but as "A Bible Reading for Schools" it failed, as, to judge by his own melancholy words about it, he seems to have foreseen that it would fail. People who have charge of Elementary Education in England, whether in Church Schools or in Board Schools, are eminently and rightly suspicious about new views in religion; andThe Great Prophecy of Israel's Restorationgave currency to a view which in 1872 was probably new to most School Managers and School Boards. He carefully disclaimed any intention to decide the authorship of the chapters which he edited. But the fact that they were detached from the earlier ones might perhaps raise questions in enquiring minds; and inthe preface he stated his personal belief that "the author of the earlier part of the Book of Isaiah was not the author of these last chapters." He most truly added that "there is nothing to forbid a member of the Church of England, or, for that matter, a member of the Church of Rome either, or a member of the Jewish Synagogue, from holding such a belief"; but probably clergymen and Dissenting ministers and pious laymen of all denominations looked rather askance at it; and the little book never got itself adopted as "A Bible Reading for Schools."
Thus ended his one attempt to improve, positively and by construction, the curriculum of the Elementary Schools; and we return, at the end of this study of his Educational doctrine, to the point at which we began.
"Organize your Elementary, your Secondary, your Superior, Education." This was the burden of his teaching for five-and-thirty years; and, if the community has at length really set its hand to that great task, it is only right that we should remember with honour the Master who first taught us (when the doctrine was unpopular) that the primary duty of a civilized State is to educate its children.
"Culture seeks to do away with classes and sects; to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere; to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light, where they may use ideas, as it uses them itself, freely; nourished, and not bound, by them. This is thesocial idea; and the men of culture are the true apostles of equality."
The words—social idea—which Arnold himself italicized in the foregoing extract fromCulture and Anarchy, will indicate the sense in which "Society" is here intended. We are not thinking of that which Pennialinus[21]means when he writes about "Society gossip" or "a Society function." We are concerned with the thoughts and temper and actions of men, not as isolated units, but as living in an organized community; and, taking "Society" in this sense, we are to examine Arnold's influence on the Society of his time.
Front of Balliol College, Oxford, in Arnold's TimeFront of Balliol College, Oxford, in Arnold's TimeIn 1840 Matthew Arnold won an open scholarship at Balliol and went into residence in 1841Photo H.W. Taunt
Certainly the most obvious and palpable way of affecting Society—and to many Englishmen the only conceivable way—is by the method of Politics; by the definite and positive action of human law, and by such endeavours as we can make towards shaping that action. Now, if indeed the Political method were the only one, there could be little to be said about his effect on Society. Politics, in the limited and conventional sense just now suggested, were not much in his line. He was interested in them; he had opinions about them; he occasionally intervened in them. But he made no mark on the political work of his time; nor, so far as one can judge, did he aspire to do so. Of the man of letters in the field of politics, he said: "He is in truth not on his own ground there, and is in peculiar danger of talking at random." In politics, as in all else that he touched, he was critical rather than constructive; and in politics, "immersed," as Bacon said, "in matter," a man must be constructive, if his influence is to be felt and to endure. "Politicians," he said in 1880, "we all of us here in England are and must be, and I too cannot help being a politician; but a politician of that commonwealth of which the pattern, as the philosopher says, exists perhaps somewhere in Heaven, but certainly is at present found nowhere on earth." In 1887, describing himself as "anaged outsider," he thus stated his own attitude towards political problems—
"The professional politicians are always apt to be impatient of the intervention in politics of a candid outsider, and he must expect to provoke contempt and resentment in a good many of them. Still the action of the regular politicians continues to be, for the most part, so very far from successful, that the outsider is perpetually tempted to brave their anger and to offer his observations, with the hope of possibly doing some little good by saying what many quiet people are thinking and wishing outside of the strife, phrases, and routine of professional politics."
From first to last, he professed himself, and no doubt believed himself, to be on the Liberal side. At the General Election of 1868 he urbanely informed a Tory Committee, which asked for the advantage of his name, that he was "an old Whig," nurtured in the traditions of Lansdowne House. "Although," he said in 1869, "I am a Liberal, yet I am a Liberal tempered by experience, reflection, and renouncement." In 1878 he described himself as a "sincere but ineffectual Liberal": in 1880, as "a Liberal of the future rather than a Liberal of the present." A year later, he spoke smilingly of "all good Liberals, of whom I wish to be considered one"; and as lateas 1887 he declared himself "one of the Liberals of the future, who happen to be grown, alas! rather old."
But, though he believed himself to be a Liberal, he had the most lively disrelish for the Liberalism of that great Middle Class which, during the greater part of his life, played so large a part in Liberal politics. In 1882, reviewing, in his favourite manner, the various classes of English Society, and discussing their adequacy to fulfil the ideal of perfect citizenship, he wrote—
"Suppose we take that figure we know so well, the earnest and non-conforming Liberal of our Middle Classes, as his schools and his civilization have made him. He is for Disestablishment; he is for Temperance; he has an eye to his Wife's Sister; he is a member of his local caucus; he is learning to go up to Birmingham every year to the feast of Mr. Chamberlain. His inadequacy is but too visible."
Certainly Arnold's Liberalism had nothing in common with the Liberalism of the great Middle Class. Indeed, so far as theory is concerned, it had a democratic basis, inasmuch as he believed that democracy was a product of natural law, and that our business was to adapt our political and social institutions to it. "Democracy," he said, "is trying toaffirm its own essence: to live, toenjoy, to possess the world, as aristocracy has tried, and successfully tried, before it."
The movement of Democracy he regarded as being an "operation of nature," and, like other operations of nature, it was neither to be praised nor blamed. He was neither a "partisan" of it, nor an "enemy." His only care was, if he could, to guide it aright, and to secure that it used its predominant power in human affairs at least as wisely as the aristocracy which had preceded it. Of aristocratic rule in foreign countries—of such rule as preceded the French Revolution—he thought as poorly as most men think; but for the aristocracy of England he had a singular esteem. It is true that he gave it a nickname; that he poked fun at its illiteracy and its inaccessibility to ideas; that he was impatient of "immense inequalities of condition and property," and huge estates, and irresponsible landlordism; that he contemned the "hideous English toadyism" and "immense vulgar-mindedness" of the Middle Class when confronted with "lords and great people."
But, for all that, he wrote about the English Aristocracy, as it stood in 1859: "I desire to speak of it with the most unbounded respect. It is the most popular of aristocracies; it has avoided faults which have ruined other aristocracies equally splendid. While the aristocracy of France wasdestroying its estates by its extravagance, and itself by its impertinence, the aristocracy of England was founding English agriculture, and commanding respect by a personal dignity which made even its pride forgiven. Historical and political England, the England of which we are all so proud, is of its making."
In spite, however, of this high estimate of what Aristocracy had accomplished in the past, he felt that power was slipping away from it, and was passing into the hands of the Multitude. But he also felt—and it was certainly one of his most profound convictions—that the Multitude could never govern properly, could never regulate its own affairs, could never present England adequately to the view of the world, unless it cast aside the Individualism in which it had been nurtured, and made up its mind to act in and through the State. Perhaps his ideal of a State can best be described as an Educated Democracy, working by Collectivism in Government, Religion, and Social order.
"If experience has established any one thing in this world, it has established this: that it is well for any great class or description of men in society to be able to say for itself what it wants, and not to have other classes, the so-called educated and intelligent classes, acting for it as its proctors, andsupposed to understand its wants and to provide for them. They do not really understand its wants, they do not really provide for them. A class of men may often itself not either fully understand its own wants, or adequately express them; but it has a nearer interest and a more sure diligence in the matter than any of its proctors, and therefore a better chance of success." Amid many fluctuations of opinion on minor points, he was, from first to last, a thoroughgoing advocate for extending the action of the State. In his ideal of government, the State was to play in a democratic age the part which the Aristocracy had played in earlier ages—it was to govern and administer and control and inspire. And, it was, in one important respect, a far nobler thing than the best aristocracy could ever be, for it was the "representative acting-power of the nation"; and so the relation of the citizen to the State was a much more dignified relation than that of a citizen to an aristocracy could ever be. "Is it that of a dependant to a parental benefactor? By no means: it is that of a member in a partnership to the whole firm." The citizens of a State, the members of a society, are really "'apartnership,' as Burke nobly says, 'in all science, in all art, in every virtue, in all perfection.' Towards this great final design of their connexion, they apply the aidswhich co-operative association can give them." We turn now to the practical application of this doctrine.
We have seen in the previous chapter how earnestly and consistently throughout his working life he urged the State to take into its control, and so far as was needed to subsidize, the Education of the whole nation. "How vain, how meaningless," he cried, "to tell a man who, for the instruction of his offspring, receives aid from the State, that he is humiliated! Humiliated by receiving help for himself as an individual from himself in his corporate and associated capacity! help to which his own money, as a tax-payer, contributes, and for which, as a result of the joint energy and intelligence of the whole community in employing as powers, he himself deserves some of the praise!... He is no more humiliated than when he crosses London Bridge or walks down the King's Road, or visits the British Museum. But it is one of the extraordinary inconsistencies of some English people in this matter, that they keep all their cry of humiliation and degradation for help which the State offers." We shall see in a subsequent chapter that he was as strong for Established Churches as for State-regulated Schools, and for the same reason. In Religion, as in Education, he disparaged private institutions and individual ventures. The State, "the nation in its corporate and collective capacity," ought to transcend the individual citizen: it should supply him, to help him as one of its units to supply himself, with the thing which he wanted—Education or Religion—in the grand style, on a large scale, with all the authority which comes from national recognition, with all the dignity of a historical descent.
Arnold's appeal for State-supplied and State-controlled Education has, as we have already seen, met with some practical response, and in the main falls in with the modern drift of Liberal ideas. In upholding State-supported and State-controlled Religion, he was rather continuing an old tradition than starting a new idea, and modern Liberalism is moving away from him.
But in some important respects, all strictly political, his advocacy of extended action by the State fell in with the Liberal movement of his time. The hideous misgovernment of Ireland he had always deplored. It touched him long before it touched the great majority of Englishmen. With a view to informing people on the Irish question, he compiled a book of Burke's most telling utterances on Ireland and her woes. Those utterances, as he said, "Show at work all the causes which have brought Ireland to its present state—the tyranny of the grantees of confiscation; of the English garrison; Protestant ascendancy; the reliance of the English Government upon this ascendancy and its instruments as their means of government; the yielding to menaces of danger and insurrection what was never yielded to considerations of equity and reason; the recurrence to the old perversity of mismanagement as soon as ever the danger was passed." To all these evils he would have applied the remedies which Burke suggested. He would have had the State endow the religions of Ireland and their ministries, supply Ireland with good schools, and defend Irish tenants against the extortions of bad landlords. He was vehemently opposed to Gladstone's scheme of Home Rule, because, in his view, it tended to disintegration where he specially desired cohesion: but, in the tumults of 1885-8, he never lost his head, never forgot his old sympathy with Irish wrongs, never "drew up an indictment against a whole people."[22]All through these stormy years, he stood firm for an effective system of Local Government in Ireland. Irish government, he said, had "been conducted in accordance with the wishes of the minority, and of the British Philistine." He desired a system which should accord with the wishes of the majority. He deprecated Forster's "expression of general objection to Home Rule";because, though Home Rule as understood by Parnell was intolerable, there was another kind of Home Rule which was possible and even desirable. He was keenly anxious that his friends, the Liberal Unionists, should not let the opportunity slip, but should bring forward a "counter scheme to Gladstone's," giving real powers of local government. In 1887 he again insisted that the "opinion of quiet reasonable people throughout the country" was bent on giving the Irish the due control of their own local affairs. He pleaded for a system "built on sufficiently large lines, not too complicated, not fantastic, not hesitating and suspicious, not taking back with one hand what it gives with the other." A similar system he wished to see extended to England, and he pointed out that it admirably facilitated that national control of Secondary Education for which he was always pleading.
Then again, with reference to Irish land, his belief in the action of the State displayed itself very clearly. In his opinion the remedy for agrarian trouble in Ireland was that the State should, after rigid and impartial enquiry, distinguish between good landlords and bad, and then expropriate the bad ones. This, he thought, would "give the sort of equity, the sort of moral satisfaction, which the case needed." Once again he wasin harmony with Liberal opinion, when he desired to widen the basis of the State by extending the suffrage in turn to the Artisans and the Labourers. In one respect at least he was in harmony rather with Collectivist Radicalism than with orthodox Liberalism, for he did not in the least dread the intervention of the State between employer and employed. He desired to strengthen Parliament, the supreme organ of the national will, by reforming the House of Lords; though he strongly dissented from a scheme of reform just then in vogue. "One can hardly imagine sensible men planning a Second Chamber which should not include the Archbishop of Canterbury, or which should include the young gentlemen who flock to the House of Lords when pigeon-shooting is in question. But our precious Liberal Reformers are for retaining the pigeon-shooters and for expelling the Archbishop of Canterbury."[23]
Even in the full flood of Liberal victory which followed the General Election of 1880, he saw what was coming. "What strikes one is the insecureness of the Liberals' hold upon office and upon public favour; the probability of the return, perhaps even more than once, of their adversaries to office, before that final and happy consummation is reached—the permanent establishment of Liberalism in power." And, while he saw what was coming, he thus divined the cause. The official and commanding part of the Liberal Party was at the best stolidly indifferent to Social Reform; at the worst, viciously angry with the idea and those who propagated it. The commercialism of the great Middle Class had covered the face of England with places like St. Helens, which the capitalists called "great centres of national enterprise," and Cobbett called "Hell-Holes." In these places life was lived under conditions of squalid and hideous misery, and the inhabitants were beginning to find out, in the words of one of their own class, that "free political institutions do not guarantee the well-being of the toiling class." Under these circumstances it was natural that the toilers, having looked for redress to the Liberal Party and looked in vain, should, when next they had the chance, try a spell of that Democratic Toryism which at any rate held out some shadowy hope of social betterment. Arnold's misgivings about the future of the Liberal Party were abundantly made good by the General Election of 1885; but enough has now been said about his contribution to the practical politics of his time. A much larger space must be given to the influence which he brought to bear on Society by methods not political—by criticism,by banter, by literary felicities, by "sinuous, easy, unpolemical" methods.
England had known him first as a poet, then as a literary critic. Next came a rather hazy impression that he was an educational reformer whose suggestions might be worth attending to. It was not till 1869 that his countrymen became fully aware of him as a social critic, a commentator on life and society. Looking back, one seems to see that by that time his poetical function was fulfilled. As far as the medium of poetry is concerned, he had said his say; said it incomparably well, said it with abiding effect. Now it seemed that a new function presented itself to him; a great door and effectual was opened to him. He found a fresh sphere of usefulness and influence in applying his critical method to the ideals and follies of his countrymen; to their scheme of life, ways of thinking and acting, prejudices, conventions, and limitations. Mr. Paul said, as we have already seen, that the appearance ofEssays in Criticismwas "a great intellectual event." That is perfectly true; and the appearance ofCulture and Anarchywas a great social event. The book so named was published in 1869; but the ground had been prepared for it by some earlier writings, and these we must consider before we come to the book itself.
In February, 1866, there appeared in theCornhill Magazinean essay called "My Countrymen." In this essay Arnold, fresh from one of his Continental tours, tried to show English people what the intelligent mind of Europe was really thinking of them. "'It is not so much that we dislike England,' a Prussian official, with the graceful tact of his nation, said to me the other day, 'as that we think little of her.'" Broadly speaking, European judgment on us came to this—that England had been great, powerful, and prosperous under an aristocratic government, at a time when the chief requisite for national greatness was Action, "for aristocracies, poor in ideas, are rich in energy"; but that England was rapidly losing ground, was becoming a second-rate power, was falling from her place in admiration and respect, since the Government had passed into the hands of the Middle Class. What was now the chief requisite for national greatness was Intelligence; and in intelligence the Middle Class had shown itself signally deficient. In foreign affairs—in its dealings with Russia and Turkey, Germany and America—it had shown "rash engagement, intemperate threatenings, undignified retreat, ill-timed cordiality," in short, every quality best calculated to lower England in the esteem of the civilized world.
In domestic affairs, the life and mind of theMiddle Class were thus described by the foreign critic. "The fineness and capacity of man's spirit is shown by his enjoyments; your Middle Class has an enjoyment in its business, we admit, and gets on well in business, and makes money; but beyond that? Drugged with business, your Middle Class seems to have its sense blunted for any stimulus besides, except Religion; it has a religion, narrow, unintelligent, repulsive.... What other enjoyments have they? The newspapers, a sort of eating and drinking which are not to our taste, a literature of books almost entirely religious or semi-religious, books utterly unreadable by an educated class anywhere, but which your Middle Class consumes by the hundred thousand, and in their evenings, for a great treat, a lecture on Teetotalism or Nunneries. Can any life be imagined more hideous, more dismal, more unenviable?... Your Middle Class man thinks it the highest pitch of development and civilization when his letters are carried twelve times a day from Islington to Camberwell, and from Camberwell to Islington, and if railway trains run to and fro between them every quarter of an hour. He thinks it is nothing that the trains only carry him from an illiberal, dismal life at Islington to an illiberal, dismal life at Camberwell; and the letters only tell him that such is the life there." And, asto political and social reform, "Such a spectacle as your Irish Church Establishment you cannot find in France or Germany. Your Irish Land Question you dare not face." English Schools, English vestrydom, English provincialism—all alike stand in the most urgent need of reform; but with all alike the Middle Class is serenely content. After reporting these exceedingly frank comments of foreign critics to his English readers, Arnold thus expresses his own conviction on the matters in dispute. "All due deductions made for envy, exaggeration, and injustice, enough stuck by me of these remarks to determine me to go on trying to keep my mind fixed on these, instead of singing hosannahs to our actual state of development and civilization. The old recipe, to think a little more and bustle a little less, seemed to me still to be the best recipe to follow. So I take comfort when I find theGuardianreproaching me with having no influence; for I know what influence means—a party, practical proposals, action; and I say to myself: 'Even suppose I could get some followers, and assemble them, brimming with affectionate enthusiasm, to a committee-room in some inn; what on earth should I say to them? What resolutions could I propose? I could only propose the old Socratic commonplace,Know thyself; and how black they would all look at that!' No; to enquire, perhaps too curiously, what that present state of English development and civilization is, which according to Mr. Lowe is so perfect that to give votes to the working class is stark madness; and, on the other hand, to be less sanguine about the divine and saving effect of a vote on its possessor than my friends in the committee-room at theSpotted Dog—that is my inevitable portion. To bring things under the light of one's intelligence, to see how they look there, to accustom oneself simply to regard the Marylebone Vestry, or the Educational Home, or the Irish Church Establishment, or our railway management, or our Divorce Court, or our gin-palaces open on Sunday and the Crystal Palace shut, as absurdities—that is, I am sure, invaluable exercise for us just at present. Let all persist in it who can, and steadily set their desires on introducing, with time, a little more soul and spirit into the too, too solid flesh of English society."
Fisher's Buildings, Balliol College, OxfordFisher's Buildings, Balliol College, OxfordShowing Matthew Arnold's RoomsPhoto H.W. Taunt
So much for his first deliberate attempt in the way of social criticism. It was levelled, we observe, at the thoughts and doings of the great Middle Class, and it is natural to ask why that class was so specially the target for his scorn. To that class, as he was fond of declaring, half in fun and half in earnest, he himself belonged. "I always thought my marriage," he used to say, "sucha perfect marriage of the Middle Classes—a schoolmaster's son and a judge's daughter." In the preface to theEssays in Criticism, he spoke of "the English Middle Class, of which I am myself a feeble unit." He used to declare that his feeling towards his brethren of the Middle Class was that of St. Paul towards his brethren of Israel: "My heart's desire and prayer for them is that they may be saved." InCulture and Anarchyhe was constrained to admit that "through circumstances which will perhaps one day be known, if ever the affecting history of my conversion comes to be written, I have, for the most part, broken with the ideas and the tea-meetings of my own class"; but he found that he had not, by that conversion, come much nearer to the ideas and works of the Aristocracy or the Populace.
He admired the fine manners, the governing faculty, the reticent and dignified habit, of the Aristocracy. He deplored its limitations and its obduracy, its "little culture and no ideas." He made fun of it when its external manifestations touched the region of the ludicrous—"Everybody knows Lord Elcho's[24]appearance, and how admirably he looks the part of our governing classes; to my mind, indeed, the mere cock of his lordship's hat is one of the finest and most aristocratic things we have." In a more serious veinhe taught—and enraged theGuardianby teaching—that, "ever since the advent of Christianity,the prince of this world is judged"; and that wealth and rank and dignified ease are bound to justify themselves for their apparent inconsistency with the Christian ideal. He pitied the sorrows of the "people who suffer," the "dim, common populations," the "poor who faint alway"; but he pitied them from above. He certainly did not enter into their position; did not share their ideas, or feel their sorrows as part of his own experience. In an amazing passage he says that, when we snatch up a vehement opinion in ignorance and passion, when we long to crush an adversary by sheer violence, when we are envious, when we are brutal, when "we add our voices to swell a blind clamour against some unpopular personage," when "we trample savagely on the fallen," then we find in our own bosom "the eternal spirit of the Populace." That a spirit so hideous, so infernal as is here described, is the eternal spirit of fallen humanity may be painfully true; but to say that it is the special or characteristic spirit of "the Populace" is to show that one has no genuine sympathy and no real acquaintance with the life and heart of the poor. So far, then, his account of his own transition is true. He had "broken with the ideas of his own class, and had not comemuch nearer to the ideas and works of Aristocracy or the Populace." But the work of his life had brought him into close and continuous contact with the great Middle Class, which practically had the whole management of Elementary Education in its hands. He knew the members of that class, as he said, "experimentally." He slept in their houses, and ate at their tables, and observed at close quarters their books, their amusements, and their social life. Thus he judged of their civilization by intimate acquaintance, and found it eminently distasteful and defective. From 1832 to 1867 the Middle Class had governed England, manipulating the Aristocracy through the medium of the House of Commons; and the Aristocracy, though still occupying the place of visible dignity, had its eye nervously fixed on the movement, actual and impending, of the Middle Class. This system of government by the predominance of the Middle Class, was not only distasteful to culture, but was actually a source of danger to the State when it came to be applied to Foreign Affairs. "That makes the difference between Lord Grenville and Lord Granville." So it was to the shortcomings of the Middle Class, from which he professed to be sprung and which he so intimately knew, that he first addressed his social criticism. The essay on "My Countrymen" immediately attracted notice.It was fresh, it was lively, it put forth a new view, it gaily ran counter to the great mass of current prejudice. He was frankly pleased by the way in which it was received. It was noticed and quoted and talked about. He reported to his mother that it was thought "witty and suggestive," "timely and true." Carlyle "almost wholly approved of it," and Bright was "full of it." He did not expect it to be liked by people who belonged to "theoldEnglish time, of which the greatness and success was so immense and indisputable that no one who flourished when it was at its height could ever lose the impression of it," or realize how far we had fallen in Continental esteem. His friend Lingen was "indignant" because he thought the essay exalted the Aristocracy at the expense of the Middle Class; and the Whig newspapers were "almost all unfavourable, because it tells disagreeable truths to the class which furnishes the great body of what is called the Liberal interest." From the foreign side came a criticism in thePall Mall Gazette, "professing to be by a Frenchman," but "I am sure it is by a woman I know something of in Paris, a half Russian, half Englishwoman, married to a Frenchman." The first part of this criticism "is not good, and perhaps when the second part appears I shall write a short and light letter by way of reply."That "short and light letter" appeared in thePall Mallof March 20, 1866. It dealt with the respective but not incompatible claims of Culture and Liberty—the former so defective in England, the latter so abundant—and it contained this aspiration for Englishmen of the Middle Class. "I do not wish them to be the café-haunting, dominoes-playing Frenchmen, but some third thing: neither the Frenchmen nor their present selves."
He was now fairly launched on the course of social criticism. As time went on, his essays attracted more and more notice, sometimes friendly, sometimes hostile, but always interested and not seldom excited. Some of the comments on the new and daring critic were inconceivably absurd. Of Mr. Frederic Harrison's retort,[25]Arnold wrote that it was "scarcely the least vicious, and in parts so amusing that I laughed till I cried." Mr. Goldwin Smith described him as "a gentleman of a jaunty air, and on good terms with the world." To theTimeshe seemed "a sentimentalist whose dainty taste requires something more flimsy than the strong sense and sturdy morality of his fellow-Englishmen." One newspaper called him "a high priest of the kid-glove persuasion"; another, "an elegant Jeremiah"; and Mr. Lionel Tollemache, combining in one harmonious whole the absurdities of all the other commentators, says: "Whenasked my opinion of this quaint man of genius, I have described him as aHebrew prophet in white kid gloves."
The fact is that we are a serious people. The Middle Class, which he singled out for attack, is quite pre-eminently serious. Philosophers and critics—theSpectatorand theEdinburgh—had made seriousness a religion. Editors, leader-writers, reviewers, the Press generally, were steeped to their lips in seriousness. They could not understand, and were greatly inclined to resent, the appearance of this bright, playful, unconventional spirit, happy and brilliant himself, and loving the happiness and brilliancy of the world; with not an ounce of pomposity in his own nature, and with the most irreverent demeanour towards pomposity in other people. "Our social Polyphemes," as Lord Beaconsfield said, "have only one eye"; and they could not the least perceive that Arnold's genius was like the genius of poetry as he himself described it—