Now, in spite of all this banter and sarcasm, these passages express a real dread which, at the time when Household Suffrage was claimed and conceded, really possessed Arnold’s mind. He came with the lapse of years to see that it was illusory, and that the working-classes of England are as steady, as law-abiding, as inaccessible to ideas, as little in danger of being hurried into revolutionary courses, as unwilling to jeopardize their national interests and their stake in the country, as the Aristocracy and the Middle Class. But at the period which we are considering, when the dread of popular violence had really laid hold of him, it is interesting to mark the direction in which he looked for social salvation. He did not turn to our traditional institutions; to the Church or the Throne or the House of Lords: to a military despotism, or an established religion, or a governing Aristocracy: certainly not to the Middle Class with its wealth and industry — least of all to the Populace, with its “bright powers of sympathy.” In an age which made an idol of individual action, and warred against all collectivism as tyranny, he looked for salvation to the State. But the State, if it was to fulfil its high function, must be a State in which every man felt that he had a place and a share, and the authority of which he could accept without loss of self-respect. “If ever,” Arnold said in 1866, “there comes a more equal state of society in England, the power of the State for repression will be a thousand times stronger.” He was for widening the province of the State, and strengthening its hands, and “stablishing it on behalf of whatever great changes are needed, just as much as on behalf of order.” And, forasmuch as the State, in its ideal, was “the organ of our collective best self,” our first duty was to cultivate, each man for himself, what in himself was best — in short, Perfection. “We find no basis for a firm State-power in our ordinary selves; culture suggests one to us in our best self.” And so we come back to the governing idea of the book before us, that Culture is the foe of Anarchy.
In the Third Chapter— “Barbarians, Philistines, Populace” — he divided English Society into three main classes, to which he gave three well-remembered nicknames. The aristocracy he named (not very happily, seeing that he so greatly admired their fine manners) the Barbarians; the Middle Class he had already named the Philistines; and to the great mass which lies below the Middle Class he gave the name of “Populace.” The name of “Philistine” in its application to the great Middle Class dates from the Lecture on Heine delivered from the Chair of Poetry at Oxford in 1863. And it seems to have supplied a want in our system of nomenclature, for it struck, and it has remained, at least as a name for a type of mind, if not exactly as a name for a social class.
When we originally encounter the word in the Lecture on Heine, Arnold is speaking of Heine’s life-long battle — with what? With Philistinism. “Philistinism! We have not the expression in English. Perhaps we have not the word, because we have so much of the thing. At Soli, I imagine, they did not talk of solecisms; and here, at the very headquarters of Goliath, nobody talks of Philistinism. The French have adopted the term épicier (grocer) to designate the sort of being whom the Germans designate by the term Philistine; but the French term — besides that it casts a slur upon a respectable class, composed of living and susceptible members, while the original Philistines are dead and buried long ago — is really, I think, in itself much less apt and expressive than the German term. Efforts have been made to obtain in English some term equivalent to Philister or épicier; Mr. Carlyle has made several such efforts: “Respectability with its thousand gigs,” he says; well, the occupant of every one of these gigs is, Mr. Carlyle means, a Philistine. However, the word respectable is far too valuable a word to be thus perverted from its proper meaning; if the English are ever to have a word for the thing we are speaking of — and so prodigious are the changes which the modern spirit is introducing, that even we English shall perhaps one day come to want such a word — I think we had much better take the word Philistine itself.
“Philistine must have originally meant, in the mind of those who invented the nickname, a sturdy, dogged, unenlightened opponent of the Chosen People, of the Children of Light. The party of change, the would-be remodellers of the old traditional European order, the invokers of reason against custom, the representatives of the modern spirit in every sphere where it is applicable, regarded themselves, with the robust self-confidence natural to reformers, as a chosen people, as children of the light. They regarded their adversaries as humdrum people, slaves to routine, enemies to light, stupid and oppressive, but at the same time very strong.... Philistia has come to be thought by us the true Land of Promise, and it is anything but that; the born lover of ideas, the born hater of commonplaces, must feel in this country that the sky over his head is of brass and iron. The enthusiast for the idea, for reason, values reason, the idea, in and for themselves; he values them, irrespectively of the practical conveniences which their triumphs may obtain for him, and the man who regards the profession of these practical conveniences as something sufficient in itself which compensates for the absence or surrender of the idea, of reason, is, in his eyes, a Philistine.”
In Culture and Anarchy, Arnold thus elaborates the term “Philistine,” and justifies, not without some misgiving, its exclusive appropriation to the Middle Class. “Philistine gives the notion of something particularly stiffnecked and perverse in the resistance to light and its children, and therein it specially suits our Middle Class, who not only do not pursue Sweetness and Light, but who even prefer to them that sort of machinery of business, chapels, tea-meetings, and addresses from Mr. Murphy, which make up the dismal and illiberal life on which I have so often touched.” The force of Philistinism in English life and society is the force which, from first to last, he set himself most steadily to fight, and, if possible, transform. That the effort was arduous, and even perilous, he was fully aware. He must, he said, pursue his object through literature, “freer perhaps in that sphere than I could be in any other, but with the risk always before me, if I cannot charm the wild beast of Philistinism while I am trying to convert him, of being torn in pieces by him, and, even if I succeed to the utmost and convert him, of dying in a ditch or a workhouse at the end of it all.”
The nickname of “Barbarians” for the Aristocracy he justified on the ground that, like the Barbarians of history who reinvigorated and renewed our worn-out Europe, they had eminent merits, among which were staunch individualism and a passion for doing what one likes; a love of field sports; vigour, good looks, fine complexions, care for the body and all manly exercises; distinguished bearing, high spirit, and self-confidence — an admirable collection of attributes indeed, but marred by insufficiency of light, and “needing, for ideal perfection, a shade more soul.” When we have done with the Barbarians at the top of the social edifice, and the Middle Class half way up, we come to the Working Class; and of that class the higher portion “looks forward to the happy day when it will sit on thrones with commercial Members of Parliament and other Middle Class potentates; and this portion is naturally akin to the Philistinism just above it. But below this there is that vast portion of the Working Class which, raw and undeveloped, 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 right of doing as he likes. To this vast residuum we give the name of ‘Populace.’” In thus dividing the nation, he is careful to point out that in each class we may from time to time find “aliens” — men free from the prejudices, the faults, the temptations of the class in which they were born; elect souls who, unhindered by their antecedents, share the higher life of intellectual and moral aspiration.
But, after making this exception, he traces in all three classes the presence and working of the same besetting sin. All alike, by a dogged persistence in doing as they like, have come to ignore the existence of Authority or Right Reason; and this irrecognition of what ought to be the rule of life operates not only in the political sphere, but also, and conspicuously, in the spheres of morals,
taste, society, and literature. Self-satisfaction blinds all classes. All alike believe themselves infallible, and there is no sovereign organ of opinion to set them right. The fundamental ground of our erroneous habits, and our unwillingness to be corrected, is “our preference of doing to thinking,” The mention of this preference leads us to the subject of Chapter IV, “Hebraism and Hellenism.”
Matthew Arnold, 1869
Photo Hills & Saunders
Of all the phrases which Arnold either created or popularized, there is none more closely associated with his memory than this famous conjunction of Hebraism and Hellenism; and in this connexion, it is not out of place to note his abiding interest in, and affection for, the House of Israel. The present writer once delivered a rather long and elaborate lecture on Arnold’s genius and writings; and next morning a daily paper gave this masterpiece of condensed and tactful reporting: “The lecturer stated that Mr. Arnold was of Jewish extraction, and proceeded to read passages from his works.” It might have been more truly said that the lecturer suggested, as interesting to those who speculate in race and pedigree, the question whether Arnold’s remote ancestors had belonged to the Ancient Race, and had emigrated from Germany to Lowestoft, where they dwelt for several generations. There is certainly no proof that so it was; and genealogical researches would in any case be out of keeping with the scope of this book. It is enough to note the fact of his affectionate and grateful feeling towards the Jewish race, and this can best be done in his own words. The present Lord Rothschild, formerly Sir Nathaniel de Rothschild, is the first adherent of the Jewish faith who ever was admitted to the House of Lords, though of course there have been other Peers of Jewish descent. When Mr. Gladstone created this Jewish peerage, Arnold wrote as follows to an admirable lady whose name often appears in his published Letters —
“I have received so much kindness from your family, and I have so sincere a regard for yourself, that I should in any case have been tempted to send you a word of congratulation on Sir Nathaniel’s peerage; but I really feel also proud and happy for the British public to have, by this peerage, signally marked the abandonment of its old policy of exclusion, the final and total abandonment of it. What have we not learned and gained from the people whom we have been excluding all these years! And how every one of us will see and say this in the future!”
What, in his view, we had “learned and gained” from the Jewish people, is well expressed in the preface to Culture and Anarchy.
“To walk staunchly by the best light one has, to be strict and sincere with oneself, not to be of the number of those who say and do not, to be in earnest — this is the discipline by which alone man is enabled to rescue his life from thraldom to the passing moment and to his bodily senses, to ennoble it, and to make it eternal. And this discipline has been nowhere so effectively taught as in the School of Hebraism. The intense and convinced energy with which the Hebrew, both of the Old and the New Testament, threw himself upon his ideal of righteousness, and which inspired the incomparable definition of the great Christian virtue, Faith — the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen — this energy of devotion to its ideal has belonged to Hebraism alone. As our idea of perfection widens beyond the narrow limits to which the over-rigour of Hebraising has tended to confine it, we shall yet come again to Hebraism for that devout energy in embracing our ideal, which alone can give to man the happiness of doing what he knows. “If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them!” — the last word for human infirmity will always be that. For this word, reiterated with a power now sublime, now affecting, but always admirable, our race will, as long as the world lasts, return to Hebraism.”
Having thus described the function of Hebraism, Arnold goes on to define Hellenism as “the intelligence driving at those ideas which are, after all, the basis of right practice, the ardent sense for all the new and changing combinations of them which man’s development brings with it, the indomitable impulse to know and adjust them perfectly.” These two great forces divide the empire of the world between them; and we call them Hebraism and Hellenism after the two races of men who have most signally illustrated them. “Hebraism and Hellenism — between these two points of influence moves our world.” The idea of Hellenism is to see things as they are: the idea of Hebraism is conduct and obedience. Our aim should be to combine the merits of both ideas, and be “evenly and happily balanced between them.” Enlarging on this text, he traces the working of the two principles, which ought not to be rivals but have been made such by the perverseness of men, philosophy and history; and then, turning to our own day and its doings, he says that Puritanism, which originally was a reaction of the conscience and moral sense against the indifference and lax conduct of the Renascence, has gone counter, during the last two centuries, to the main stream of human advance; has hindered men from trying to see things as they really are, and has made strictness of conduct the great aim of human life. “It made the secondary the principal at the wrong moment, and the principal it at the wrong moment treated as secondary.” Hence have arisen all sorts of confusion and inefficiency. Everywhere we see the signs of anarchy, and the need for some sound order and authority. “This we can only get by going back upon the actual instincts and forces which rule our life, seeing them as they really are, connecting them with other instincts and forces, and enlarging our whole view and rule of life.”
From this short chapter, he passes on to Chapter V, which he heads: “Porro unum est necessarium”; and here he pursues his controversy with modern Puritanism, which imagines that it has, in its special conception of God and religion, the unum necessarium, which can dispense with Sweetness and Light, self-culture and self-discipline. “The Puritan’s great danger is that he imagines himself in possession of a rule telling him the unum necessarium, or one thing needful, and that he then remains satisfied with a very crude conception of what this rule really is and what it tells him, thinks he has now knowledge and henceforth needs only to act, and, in this dangerous state of assurance and self-satisfaction, proceeds to give full swing to a number of the instincts of his ordinary self.... What he wants is a larger conception of human nature, showing him the number of other points at which his nature must come to its best, besides the points which he himself knows and thinks of. There is no unum necessarium, or one thing needful, which can free human nature from the obligation of trying to come to its best at all these points. Instead of our ‘one thing needful’ justifying in us vulgarity, hideousness, ignorance, violence — our vulgarity, hideousness, ignorance, violence are really so many touchstones which try our one thing needful, and which prove that in the state, at any rate, in which we ourselves have it, it is not all we want. And, as the force which encourages us to stand staunch and fast by the rule and ground we have is Hebraism, so the force which encourages us to go back upon this rule, and to try the very ground on which we appear to stand, is Hellenism — a term for giving our consciousness free play, and enlarging its range.”
In his Sixth Chapter — headed “Our Liberal Practitioners” — he applies his general doctrine to persons and performances of the year 1869. The Liberal Party was just then busy disestablishing and disendowing the Irish Church. He was in favour of Established Churches, and of Concurrent Endowment. He realized the absurdity of the Irish Church as it then stood; but, true to his critical character, he rebuked the “Liberal Practitioners” for the spirit in which they were disestablishing and disendowing it. They did not approach the subject in the spirit of Hellenism: they did not appeal to Right Reason: they did not attempt to see the problem of religious establishment as it really was. But they Hebraized about it — that is, they took an uncritical interpretation of biblical words as their absolute rule of conduct. “It may,” he said, “be all very well for born Hebraizers, like Mr. Spurgeon, to Hebraize; but for Liberal statesmen to Hebraize is surely unsafe, and to see poor old Liberal hacks Hebraizing, whose real self belongs to a kind of negative Hellenism — a state of moral indiffe
rence, without intellectual ardour — is even painful.” In the same manner he dealt with the movement to abolish Primogeniture, strongly urged by John Bright; the movement to legalize marriage with a wife’s sister— “the craving for forbidden fruit” joined with “the craving for legality”; and the doctrine, then supposed to be incontrovertible, of Free Trade. In all these cases, he proposed to “Hellenize a little,” to “turn the free stream of our thought” on the Liberal policy of the moment; and to “see how this is related to the intelligible law of human life, and to national well-being and happiness.”
Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold Page 102