Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold

by Matthew Arnold

  With reference to the enormous publicity given in England to such malefic matter, Arnold says to Arminius: “When a Member of Parliament wanted to abridge the publicity given to the M —— case, the Government earnestly reminded him that it had been the solemn decision of the House of Commons that all the proceedings of the Divorce Court should be as open as the day. When there was a suggestion to hear the B —— case in private, the upright magistrate who was appealed to said firmly that he could never trifle with the public mind in that manner. All this was as it should be. So far, so good. But was the publicity in these cases perfectly full and entire? Were there not some places which the details did not reach? There were few, but there were some. And this, while the Government has an organ of its own, the London Gazette, dull, high-priced, and of comparatively limited circulation! I say, make the price of the London Gazette a halfpenny; change its name to the London Gazette and Divorce Intelligencer; let it include besides divorce news, all cases whatever that have an interest of the same nature for the public mind; distribute it gratis to mechanics’ institutes, workmen’s halls, seminaries for the young (these latter more especially), and then you will be giving the principle of publicity a full trial. This is what I often say to Arminius; and, when he looks astounded, I reassure him with a sentence which, I know very well, the moment I make it public will be stolen by the Liberal newspapers. But it is getting near Christmas-time, and I do not mind making them a present of it. It is this: The spear of freedom, like that of Achilles, has the power to heal the wounds which itself makes.”

  In Friendship’s Garland, from the very structure of the book, his serious judgments have to be delivered by the mouth of his Prussian friend; and here is his judgment on our public concessions to pruriency— “By shooting all this garbage on your public, you are preparing and assuring for your English people an immorality as deep and wide as that which destroys the Latin nations.”

  But his “hedge of the law” had other thorns besides those with which he pierced the Divorce Court and its hideous literature. He had shrewd sarcasms for all who, by whatever method, sought to gratify “that double craving so characteristic of our Philistine, and so eminently exemplified in that crowned Philistine, Henry the Eighth — the craving for forbidden fruit and the craving for legality.” He poured scorn on the newspapers which glorified “the great sexual insurrection of the Anglo-Teutonic race,” and the author who extolled the domestic life of Mormonism. “Mr. Hepworth Dixon may almost be called the Colenso of Love and Marriage — such a revolution does he make in our ideas on these matters, just as Dr. Colenso does in our ideas on religion.” He thus forecasts the doings of a Philistine House of Commons in 1871. “Mr. T. Chambers will again introduce that enfranchising measure, against which I have had some prejudices — the Bill for enabling a man to marry his deceased wife’s sister. The devoted adversaries of the Contagious Diseases Act will spread through the length and breadth of the land a salutary discussion of this equivocal measure and of all matters connected with it; and will thus, at the same time that they oppose immorality, enable the followers of even the very straitest sects of Puritanism to see life.” All these various attempts to break down the “hedge of the law” received in turn their merited condemnation; but always we are brought back from the consideration of kindred evils, to the proposal to legalize marriage with a wife’s sister. Thus the imaginary leader-writer of the Daily Telegraph summarizes the controversy: “Why, I ask, is Mr. Job Bottles’ liberty, his Christian liberty, as our reverend friend would say, to be abridged in this manner? And why is Protestant Dissent to be diverted from its great task of abolishing State Churches for the purpose of removing obstacles to the ‘sexual insurrection’ of our race? Why are its poor devoted ministers to be driven to contract, in the interests of Christian liberty, illegal unions of this kind themselves, pour encourager les autres? Why is the earnest Liberalism and Nonconformity of Lancashire and Yorkshire to be agitated on this question by hope deferred? Why is it to be put incessantly to the inconvenience of going to be married in Germany or in the United States, that greater and better Britain —

  Which gives us manners, freedom, virtue, power?

  Why must ideas on this topic have to be incubated for years in that ‘nest of spicery,’ as the divine Shakespeare says, the mind of Mr. T. Chambers, before they can rule the world? For my own part, my resolve is formed. This great question shall henceforth be seriously taken up in Fleet Street. As a sop to those toothless old Cerberuses the bishops, who impotently exhibit still the passions of another age, we will accord the continuance of the prohibition which forbids a man to marry his grandmother. But in other directions there shall be freedom. Mr. Chambers’ admirable Bill for enabling a woman to marry her sister’s husband will doubtless pass triumphantly through Committee to-night, amidst the cheers of the Ladies’ Gallery. The Liberal Party must supplement that Bill by two others: one enabling people to marry their brothers’ and sisters’ children, the other enabling a man to marry his brother’s wife.”

  There is perhaps no social mischief which Arnold attacked so persistently as the proposal to legalize marriage with a wife’s sister. The most passionate advocates of that “enfranchising measure” will scarcely think that his hostility was due to what John Bright so gracefully called “ecclesiastical rubbish.” Councils and Synods, Decrees and Canons, were held by him in the lightest esteem. The formal side of Religion — the side of dogma and doctrine and rule and definition — had no attractions for him, and no terrors. He never dreamed that the Table of Kindred and Affinity was a Third Table of the Divine Law. His appeal in these matters was neither to Moses nor to Tertullian, but to “the genius of the race which invented the Muses, and Chivalry, and the Madonna.” And yet he disliked the “enfranchising measure” quite as keenly as the clergyman who wrote to the Guardian about incest, though indeed he expressed his dislike in a very different form. Here, as always and everywhere, he betook himself to his “sinuous, easy, unpolemical” method, and thereby made his repugnance to the proposed change felt and understood in quarters which would never have listened to arguments from Leviticus, or fine distinctions between malum per se and malum prohibitum. The ground of his repugnance was primarily his strong sense, already illustrated, that the sacredness of marriage, and the customs that regulate it, were triumphs of culture which had been won, painfully and with effort, from the unbridled promiscuity of primitive life. To impair that sacredness, to dislocate those customs, was to take a step backwards into darkness and anarchy. His keen sense of moral virtue — that instinctive knowledge of evil which, as Frederick Robertson said, comes not of contact with evil but of repulsion from it, assured him that the “great sexual insurrection” was not merely a grotesque phrase, but a movement of the time which threatened national disaster, and to which, in its most plausible manifestations, the stoutest resistance must be offered. Here again his love of coherence and logical symmetry, his born hatred of an anomaly, his belief in Reason as the true guide of life, made him intolerant of all the palpably insincere attempts to say Thus far and no farther. He knew that all the laws of Affinity must stand or fall together, and that no ground in reason can be alleged against marriage with a husband’s brother which does not tell against marriage with a wife’s sister. Yet again he regarded the proposed changes as betraying the smug viciousness of the more full-blooded Philistines —

  Men full of meat whom wholly He abhors, —

  who, trying to keep a foot in each world of legality and indulgence, sought patronage from the rich and deceived and exploited the poor.

  Certainly not the least of his objections to the “enfranchising measure” was that, in breaking down the hedge of the law, it invaded Delicacy; and whatever invaded delicacy helped to precipitate gross though perhaps unforeseen evils. Unfortunately there are great masses — whole classes — of people to whom delicacy, whether in speech or act, means nothing. To eat, drink, sleep, buy and sell, marry and be given in marriage, is for those masse
s the ideal and the law of life. These things granted, they desire no more: any restriction on them, any refinement of them, they dislike and resent. In another place we have cited the mysterious effect produced upon the Paris Correspondent of the Daily Telegraph by the sudden sound of the word “Delicacy.” And that word was uttered in connexion with the “enfranchising measure.” “If legislation on this subject were impeded by the party of bigotry, if they chose not to wait for it, if they got married without it, and if you were to meet them on the boulevard at Paris during their wedding tour, should you go up to Bottles and say: ‘Mr. Bottles, you are a profligate man!’ Poor Mr. Matthew Arnold, upon this, emerged suddenly from his corner, and asked hesitatingly: ‘But will any one dare to call him a man of delicacy?’ The question was so utterly unpractical that I took no note of it whatever, and should not have mentioned it if it had not been for its extraordinary effect upon our Paris Correspondent.... My friend Nick, who has all the sensitive temperament of genius, seemed inexplicably struck by this word delicacy, which he kept repeating to himself. ‘Delicacy,’ said he— ‘delicacy — surely I have heard that word before! Yes, in other days,’ he went on dreamily, ‘in my fresh enthusiastic youth; before I knew Sala, before I wrote for that infernal paper, before I called Dixon’s style lithe and sinewy— ‘ ‘Collect yourself, my friend,’ laying my hand on his shoulder; ‘you are unmanned. But in mentioning Dixon you redouble my strength; for you bring to my mind the great sexual insurrection of the Anglo-Teutonic race, and the master-spirit which guides it.’”

  But in matters far outside the region of marriage, that word “delicacy,” which so powerfully affected the Paris correspondent, is the key to a great deal of what Arnold felt and wrote. In the sphere of conduct he set up, as we have seen, two supreme objects for veneration and attainment: Chastity and Charity. He practised them, he taught them, and he used them as decisive tests of what was good and what was bad in national life. But plainly there are large tracts of existence which lie outside the purview of these two virtues. There is the domain of honesty, integrity, and fair dealing; there is a loyalty to truth, the pursuit of conscience at all costs and hazards; there is all that is contained in the idea of beauty, propriety, and taste. None of these are touched by charity or chastity. For example, a man may have an unblemished life and a truly affectionate heart; and yet he may be incorrigible in money-matters, or be ready to sacrifice principle to convenience, or, like our great Middle Class generally, may be serenely content with hideousness and bad manners.

  Now in all these departments of human life, less important indeed than the two chiefest, but surely not unimportant, Arnold applied the criterion of delicacy. “A finely-touched nature,” he said, “will respect in itself the sense of delicacy not less than the sense of honesty.... The worship of sharp bargains is fatal to delicacy; nor is that missing grace restored by accompanying the sharp bargain with an exhibition of fine sentiments.” Then, again, as regards loyalty to conviction, he knew full well that, in Newman’s phrase, he might “have saved himself many a scrape, if he had been wise enough to hold his tongue.” “The thought of you,” he wrote to Mr. Morley, “and of one or two other friends, was often present to me in America, and, no doubt, contributed to make me hold fast to ‘the faith once delivered to the Saints.’” The slightest deviation from the line of clear conviction — the least turning to left or right in order to cocker a prejudice or please an audience or flatter a class, showed a want of delicacy — a preference of present popularity to permanent self-respect — which he could never have indulged in himself, and with difficulty tolerated in others. He had nothing but contempt for “philosophical politicians with a turn for swimming with the stream, and philosophical divines with the same turn.” And then, again, in the whole of that great sphere which belongs to Beauty, Propriety, and Taste, his sense of delicacy was always at work, and not seldom in pain. “Ah,” he exclaimed, quoting from Rivarol, “no one considers how much pain any man of taste has to suffer, before ever he inflicts any.” To inflict pain was not, indeed, in his way, but to suffer it was his too-frequent lot. From first to last he was protesting against hideousness, rawness, vulgarity, and commonplace; craving for sweetness, light, beauty and colour, instead of the bitterness, the ugliness, the gloom and the drab which provided such large portions of English life. “The µPƽu is the man who turns towards sweetness and light; the ƽu on the other hand is our Philistine.” “I do not much believe in good being done by a man unless he can give light.” “Oxford by her ineffable charm keeps ever calling us nearer to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection, to beauty.” In his constant quest for these glorious things — beauty, colour, sweetness, and light, — his sense of delicacy had much to undergo; for, in the class with which he was by the work of his life brought in contact, they were unknown and unimagined; and the only class where “elegance and refinement, beauty and grace” were found, was inaccessible to Light. In both classes he found free scope for his doctrine of Delicacy, one day remonstrating with a correspondent for “living in a place with the absurd, and worse, name of ‘Marine Retreat’”; another, preaching that “a piano in a Quaker’s drawing-room is a step for him to more humane life;” and again “liking and respecting polite tastes in a grandee,” when Lord Ravensworth consulted him about Latin verses. “At present far too many of Lord Ravensworth’s class are mere men of business, or mere farmers, or mere horse-racers, or mere men of pleasure.” That was a consummation which delicacy in the Aristocratic class would make impossible. To cultivate in oneself, and apply in one’s conduct, this instinct of delicacy, was a lesson which no one, who fell under Arnold’s influence, could fail to learn. He taught us to “liberate the gentler element in oneself,” to eschew what was base and brutal, unholy and unkind. He taught us to seek in every department of life for what was “lovely and of good report,” tasteful, becoming, and befitting; to cultivate “man’s sense for beauty, and man’s instinct for fit and pleasing forms of social life and manners.” He taught us to plan our lives, as St. Paul taught the Corinthians to plan their worship, µPÃǼ½y½¿ º±v º±Äp Äq¾¹½,” — in right, graceful, or becoming figure, and by fore-ordered arrangement.” Alike his teaching and his example made us desire (however imperfectly we attained our object) to perceive in all the contingencies and circumstances of life exactly the line of conduct which would best consist with Delicacy, and so to make virtue victorious by practising it attractively.

  Matthew Arnold, 1880

  From the Painting by G.F. Watts, R.A.

  Photo F. Hollyer

  CHAPTER VI. THEOLOGY

  Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, after hearing a sermon by Dr. Howson, Dean of Chester, wrote thus in his diary: “One good bit — that the emptying Christianity of dogma would perish it, like Charlemagne’s face when exhumed.” It was a striking simile, and if well worked out by a rhetorician, say of Dr. Liddon’s type, it might have powerfully clinched some great argument for the necessary place of dogma in Christian theology. But the sermon has vanished, and we can only conjecture from the date of the entry — October 5, 1869 — that the good Dean’s ire had been excited by Matthew Arnold’s first appearance in the field of theological controversy. Six years before, indeed, Arnold had touched that field, when in The Bishop and the Philosopher he quizzed Colenso, “the arithmetical bishop who couldn’t forgive Moses for having written a Book of Numbers,” about his “jejune and technical manner of dealing with Biblical controversy.” “It is,” he wrote, “a result of no little culture to attain to a clear perception that science and religion are two wholly different things. The multitude will for ever confuse them.... Dr. Colenso, in his first volume, did all he could to strengthen the confusion, and to make it dangerous.” “Let us have all the science there is from the men of science; from the men of religion let us have religion.”

  But in that earlier essay he had merely criticised a critic; he had not originated criticisms of his own. So he had touched the field
of theological controversy, but had not appeared on it as a performer. That now he so appeared was probably due to the success which attended Culture and Anarchy. The publication of that book had immensely extended the circle of his audience. Those who care for literature are few; those who care for politics are many. And, though the politics of Culture and Anarchy were new and strange, hard to be understood, and running in all directions off the beaten track, still the professional politicians, and that class of ordinary citizens which aims at cultivation and seeks a wider knowledge, took note of Culture and Anarchy as a book which must be read, and which, though they might not always understand it, would at least show them which way the wind was blowing. The present writer perfectly recalls the comfortable figure of a genial merchant, returned from business to his suburban villa, and saying: “Well, I shall spend this Saturday afternoon on Mat Arnold’s new book, and I shall not understand one word of it.” It had never occurred to the good man that he was either a Hebraizer or a Hellenizer. He had always believed that he was a Liberal, a Low Churchman, and a silk-mercer.

  For Arnold to find that he was in possession of a pulpit — that he had secured a position from which he could preach his doctrine with a certainty that it would be heard and pondered, if not accepted — was a new and an invigorating experience. He at once began to make the most of his opportunity. While the Press was still teeming with criticisms of Culture and Anarchy, he began to extend his activities from the field of political and social criticism to that of theological controversy. The latter experiment seems to have grown spontaneously out of the former. In Culture and Anarchy he had charged Puritanism with imagining that in the Bible it had, as its own special possession, a unum necessarium, which made it independent of Sweetness and Light, and guided it aright without the aid of culture. “The dealings,” he said, “of Puritanism with the writings of St. Paul afford a noteworthy illustration of this. Nowhere so much as in the writings of St. Paul, and in that apostle’s greatest work, the Epistle to the Romans, has Puritanism found what seemed to furnish it with the one thing needful, and to give it canons of truth absolute and final.”