Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold

by Matthew Arnold

  And so we were brought to the conclusion of the whole matter. The stock-beliefs and stock-performances of Liberalism were exhausted, uninteresting, in some grave respects mischievous. Seekers after truth, disciples of culture, men bent on trying to see things as they really are, should lend no hand to these labours of the Philistines. Their right course was to stand absolutely aloof from the political work which was going on round them; and to pursue, with undeviating consistency, “increased sweetness, increased light, increased life, increased sympathy.”

  It is interesting to recall that Charles Kingsley praised Culture and Anarchy in a letter which greatly pleased Arnold, as showing “the generous and affectionate side” of Kingsley’s disposition. And this is his answer to Kingsley’s praise: “Of my reception by the general public I have, perhaps, no cause to boast; but from the men who lead in literature, from men like you, I have met with nothing but kindness and generosity. The being thrown so much for the last twenty years with Dissenters, and the observing their great strength and their great impenetrability — how they seemed to think that in their ‘gospel’ — a mere caricature, in truth, of the real Gospel — they had a secret which enabled them to judge all literature and all art and to keep aloof from modern ideas — set me on thinking how they might be got at, and on the use of this parallel of Hebraism and Hellenism. If I was to think only of the Dissenters, or if I were in your position, I should press incessantly for more Hellenism; but, as it is, seeing the tendency of our young poetical litterateur (Swinburne), and, on the other hand, seeing much of Huxley (whom I thoroughly liked and admire, but find very disposed to be tyrannical and unjust), I lean towards Hebraism, and try to prevent the balance from on this side flying up out of sight.” Dean Church, also, in writing about the book, expressed “his sense of the importance of the distinction between Hellenism and Hebraism.” “This,” said Arnold, “showed his width of mind”; for “it is a distinction on which more and more will turn, and on dealing wisely with it everything depends.”

  I have dwelt at this rather disproportionate length on the structure and teaching of Culture and Anarchy, partly because it was to men who were young in 1869 a landmark in their mental life, and partly because it gives the whole body of Arnold’s political and social teaching. He pursued this line of thought for twenty years; Friendship’s Garland, with its inimitable fun, appeared in 1871, and was followed by a long series of essays and lectures; but the germ of whatever he subsequently wrote is to be found in Culture and Anarchy. And from that memorable book what did we learn?

  To answer first by negatives, we did not learn to undervalue personal liberty, or to stand aloof from the practical work of citizenship, or to despise Parliamentary effort and its bearing on the better life of England. To these lessons of a fascinating teacher we closed our ears, charmed he never so wisely. To answer affirmatively, we learned that our first object must be to attain our own best self, and that only so could we hope to help others. We learned to discard prepossessions, and try to see things as they really are. We learned that the Liberty which we worshipped must be conditioned by Authority — an authority not wielded by rank or bureaucracy, but by the State acting as a whole through its accredited representatives, and depending for its existence on the co-operation of the entire nation. In self-government so founded, however stringently it might exercise its power, there was no degradation for the governed, because, in the wider sense, they were also governors. In brief, Arnold’s idea of the State was exactly that which in later years one of his disciples — Henry Scott Holland — conceived, when, defending Christian Socialism against the reproach of “grandmotherly legislation,” he said that, in a well-governed commonwealth, “every man was his own grandmother.” But, while Authority belongs to the State as a whole, it must be exercised through the agency of officialdom — through the action of officers or governors designated for the special functions. And here he taught us that we must not, as Bishop Westcott said, “trust to an uncultivated notion of duty for an improvised solution of unforeseen difficulties”; must not, like the Alderman-Colonel, “sit in the hall of judgment or march at the head of men of war, without some knowledge how to perform judgment and how to direct men of war.”

  Then again we learned from him to value machinery, not for itself, but for what it could produce. He taught us that all political reconstruction was at the best mere improvement of machinery; that political reform was related to social reform as the means to the end: and that the end was the perfection of the race in all its physical, mental, and moral attributes.

  Above all we learned — and perhaps it was the most important of our lessons — to think little of material boons — vulgar wealth and stolid comfort and ignoble ease; to set our affections on the joys of soul and spirit; and to recognize in the practice of religion the highest development and most satisfying use of the powers which belong to man.

  CHAPTER V. CONDUCT

  “By desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil — widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.”

  Whether Lactantius was etymologically right or wrong, there is no doubt that he was right substantially when he defined Religion as that which binds the soul to God. And religion thus conceived naturally divides itself into two parts: duty and doctrine, practice and theory, conduct and theology. Both elements are presented to us in the Bible. Of the one it is written: “The wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein.” Of the other: “Which things the angels desire to look into.” Even the respective functions of the Synoptists and St. John seem to accommodate themselves to this natural division. Following the line thus indicated, we shall consider Arnold’s influence on Religion under the two heads of Conduct and Theology. The passage from Middlemarch which stands at the head of this chapter seems in a way to express his attitude towards the religious problems of his time. It would be impossible for a convinced believer in the faith of the Christian Church, as traditionally received, to profess that Arnold “knew what was perfectly good” in the domain of religion; but beyond all question he “desired” it with an even passionate desire, and attained far more closely to it than many professors of a more orthodox theology.

  Of him it might be truly said, as of his favourite poet, that he “saw life steadily and saw it whole.” And of life he declared that Conduct was three-fourths. For all the infinite varieties and contradictions of mere opinion he had the largest tolerance, knowing that no opinion, as such, is culpable. For people thinking so diversely as Wordsworth, Bunsen, Clough, and Palgrave; Church and Temple, Lake and Stanley; Lord Coleridge, William Forster, and John Morley, he had equally warm regard, and, in some ways, sympathy. It was only when the sphere of conduct was approached that his judgment became severe and his sympathy dried up. In Politics — levity, time-serving, mob-pleasing, the spirit which prefers partisanship to patriotism, were the faults which he could not pardon. His imperfect sympathy with Mr. Gladstone, a deplorable but undeniable fact, was due not so much to dissent from Gladstone’s theory of the public good as to disapproval of his character. “Respect is the very last feeling he excites in me; he has too little solidity and composure of character or mind for that. He is brilliantly clever, of course, and he is honest enough, but he is passionate, and in no way great, I think.” In Religion — obscurantism, resistance to the light, the smug endeavour to make the best of both worlds, offended Arnold as much on the one hand, as insolence, violence, ignorant negation, “lightly running amuck at august things,” offended him on the other. He loved a “free handling, in a becoming spirit, of religious matters,” and did not always find it in the writings of his Liberal friends. It is true that he once made a signal lapse from his own canon of religious criticism, but he withdrew it with genuine regret that “an illustration likely to be torn from its context, to be improperly used, and to give pain, should ever have been adopted.” In Literature,
again, though his judgment was critical, his charity was unbounded. He could find something to praise even in the most immature and unpretending efforts; and he knew how to distinguish what we call “good of its sort,” good in the second order of achievement, from what is simply bad. In literature, as in opinion, it was only when moral faults were mingled with intellectual defects that he became censorious. He detested literary humbug — a pretence of knowledge without the reality, a show of philosophy masking poverty of thought; the vanity of quaintness, the “ring of false metal,” the glorification of commonplace.

  And so again when we come to Life — the social life of the civilized community — he was the consistent teacher and the bright example of an exalted and scrupulous morality. Even the intellectual brilliancy of authors whom he intensely admired did not often blind him to ethical defects. It is true that some objects of his literary admiration — Goethe and Byron and George Sand — could scarcely be regarded as moral exemplars; but, while he praised the genius, he marked his disapproval of the moral defect. In writing of George Sand, who had so profoundly influenced his early life, he did not deny or extenuate “her passions and her errors.” Byron, though he thought him “the greatest natural force, the greatest elementary power, which has appeared in our literature since Shakespeare,” he roundly accused of “vulgarity and effrontery,” “coarseness and commonness,” “affectation and brutal selfishness.” In the case of Goethe, he said that “the moralist and the man of the world may unite in condemning” his laxity of life; and even in Faust, which he esteemed the “most wonderful work of poetry in our century,” the fact that it is a “seduction-drama” marred his pleasure. In the same tone he wrote, in the last year of his life, about Renan’s Abbesse— “I regret the escapade extremely; he was entirely out of his role in writing such a book.... Renan descends sensibly in the scale from having produced his Abbesse.” Heine, with all his genius, “lacked the old-fashioned, laborious, eternally needful moral deliverance”: he left a name blemished by “intemperate susceptibility, unscrupulousness in passion, inconceivable attacks on his enemies, still more inconceivable attacks on his friends, want of generosity, sensuality, incessant mocking.”

  Pains Hill Cottage, Cobham, Surrey

  Matthew Arnold’s home from 1873 until his death in 1888

  And, while he thus criticised the defective morality of writers whom he greatly admired, he was, perhaps naturally, still more severe on the moral defects of those whom he esteemed less highly. “Burns,” he said, “is a beast, with splendid gleams, and the medium in which he lived, Scotch peasants, Scotch Presbyterianism, and Scotch drink, is repulsive.” On Coleridge, critic, poet, philosopher, his judgment was that he “had no morals,” and that his character inspired “disesteem, nay, repugnance.” Bulwer-Lytton he thought a consummate novel-writer, but “his was by no means a perfect nature”— “a strange mixture of what is really romantic and interesting with what is tawdry and gimcracky.” Villette he pronounced “disagreeable, because the writer’s mind contains nothing but hunger, rebellion, and rage, and therefore that is all she can put into her book.” Of Harriet Martineau, the other of the “two gifted women,” whose exploits he had glorified in Haworth Churchyard, he wrote in later years that she had “undeniable talent, energy, and merit,” but “what an unpleasant life and unpleasant nature!”

  And, so everywhere the moral element — the sense for Conduct — mingles itself with his literary judgment. But it was in his attack on Shelley, written within four months of his own death, that he most vigorously displayed his detestation of moral shortcomings, and his sense of their poisonous effect on the performances of genius. “In this article on Shelley,” he wrote, “I have spoken of his life, not his poetry. Professor Dowden was too much for my patience.” It can hardly be questioned that the publication of that biography did a signal disservice to the memory of the poet whom Professor Dowden idolized. The lack of taste, judgment, and humour which pervades the book, and its complete, though of course unintended, condonation of heinous evil, deserved a severe castigation, and Arnold bestowed it with a vigour and a thoroughness which show how deeply his moral sense had been shocked. “What a set! what a world! is the exclamation that breaks from us as we come to an end of this history of ‘the occurrences of Shelley’s private life.’ ... Godwin’s house of sordid horror, and Godwin preaching and holding the hat, and the green-spectacled Mrs. Godwin, and Hogg the faithful friend, and Hunt the Horace of this precious world!”

  Fresh from pursuing, step by step, Professor Dowden’s grim narrative of seduction and suicide, with its ludicrous testimony to Shelley’s “conscientiousness,” Arnold says, with honest indignation, “After reading his book, one feels sickened for ever of the subject of irregular relations.... I conclude that an entirely human inflammability, joined to an inhuman want of humour and a super-human power of self-deception, are the causes which chiefly explain Shelley’s abandonment of Harriet in the first place, and then his behaviour to her and defence of himself afterwards.”

  In spite of all this abomination, which he so clearly saw and so strongly reprehended, he still stands firm in his admiration of the “ideal Shelley,” “the delightful Shelley,” “the friend of the unfriended poor,” the radiant and many-coloured poet, with his mastery of the medium of sounds, and the “natural magic in his rhythm.” But then he adds this salutary caution: “Let no one suppose that a want of humour and a self-delusion such as Shelley’s have no effect upon a man’s poetry. The man Shelley, in very truth, is not entirely sane, and Shelley’s poetry is not entirely sane either.” In poetry, as in life, he is “a beautiful and ineffectual angel.”

  And just as, in Arnold’s view, moral defects in an author were apt to mar the perfection of his work, so an author’s moral virtues might ennoble and enlarge his authorship. Hear him on his friend Arthur Clough: “He possessed, in an eminent degree, these two invaluable literary qualities: a true sense for his object of study, and a single-hearted care for it. He had both; but he had the second even more eminently than the first. He greatly developed the first through means of the second. In the study of art, poetry, or philosophy, he had the most undivided and disinterested love for the object in itself, the greatest aversion to mixing up with it anything accidental or personal. His interest was in literature itself; and it was this which gave so rare a stamp to his character, which kept him so free from all taint of littleness. In the saturnalia of ignoble personal passions, of which the struggle for literary success, in old and crowded communities, offers so sad a spectacle, he never mingled. He had not yet traduced his friends, nor flattered his enemies, nor disparaged what he admired, nor praised what he despised. Those who knew him well had the conviction that, even with time, these literary arts would never be his. His poem, The Bothie of Toper-na-Fuosich, has some admirable Homeric qualities — out-of-doors freshness, life, naturalness, buoyant rapidity. Some of the expressions in that poem ... come back now to my ear with the true Homeric ring. But that in him of which I think oftenest is the Homeric simplicity of his literary life.”

  We have seen more than once that, according to Arnold, poetry was a criticism of life; but he always maintained that this was true of poetry only because poetry is part of literature, and all literature was a criticism of life. One may demur to the statement as greatly too unguarded in its terms, but certainly he was true to his own doctrine, and in practice, from first to last, he used literature as a medium for criticising the life and conduct of his fellow-men. In the last year of his life he produced with approbation “a favourite saying of Ptolemy the astronomer, which Bacon quotes in its Latin version thus: — Quum fini appropinquas, bonum cum augmento operare”— “As you draw near to your latter end, redouble your efforts to do good.” And this redoubled effort was in his case all of a piece with what had gone before. In 1863 he wrote to a friend: “In trying to heal the British demoniac, true doctrine is not enough; one must convey the true doctrine with studied moderation; for, if one commits the le
ast extravagance, the poor madman seizes hold of this, tears and rends it, and quite fails to perceive that you have said anything else.”

  All his literary life was spent in trying to convey “true doctrine with studied moderation.” And in his true doctrine nothing was more conspicuous than his insistence, early and late, on the supreme importance of character and conduct. The first object of life was to realize one’s best self, and this endeavour required not merely cleverness or information: even genius would not of itself suffice; still less would adherence to any particular body of opinions. If a man was dis-respectable, “not even the merit of not being a Philistine could make up for it.” Character issuing in Conduct — this was the true culture which we must all ensue, if by any means we were to attain to our predestined perfection; and, if that were once secured, all the rest — talent, fame, influence, length of days, worldly prosperity — mattered little. Thus he wrote of his friend Edward Quillinan —

  I saw him sensitive in frame, I knew his spirits low: And wish’d him health, success, and fame — I do not wish it now.

  For these are all their own reward, And leave no good behind; They try us, oftenest make us hard, Less modest, pure, and kind.

  Alas! yet to the suffering man, In this his mortal state, Friends could not give what fortune can — Health, ease, a heart elate.

  But he is now by fortune foil’d No more; and we retain The memory of a man unspoil’d, Sweet, generous, and humane —

  With all the fortunate have not, With gentle voice and brow. — Alive, we would have changed his lot, We would not change it now.

  When his eldest boy died he wrote to a friend: “He is gone — and all the absorption in one’s own occupations which prevented one giving to him more than moments, all one’s occasional impatience, all one’s taking his ailments as a matter of course, come back upon one as something inconceivable and inhuman. And his mother, who has nothing of all this to reproach herself with, who was everything to him and would have given herself for him, has lost the occupation of sixteen years, and has to begin life over again. The one endless comfort to us is the thought of the sweet, firm, sterling character which the darling child developed in and by all his sufferings and privations. Of that we can think and think.”