03 - Chapter 2 Part 1 Doing As One Likes

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chapter two, Part one of Culture and Anarchy. This is
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Recording by Nicoli. Culture and Anarchy by Matthew Arnold, Chapter two,
Part one. I have been trying to show that culture is,

(00:21):
or ought to be, the study and pursuit of perfection,
and that of perfection as pursued by culture. Beauty and intelligence,
or in other words, sweetness and light are the main characters.
But hitherto I have been insisting chiefly on beauty or
sweetness as a character of perfection. To complete rightly my design,
it evidently remains to speak also of intelligence or liked,

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as a character of perfection. First, however, I ought perhaps
to notice that both here and on the other side
of the Atlantic, all sorts of objections are raised against
the religion of culture. As the objectis mockingly call it,
which I am supposed to be promulgating. It is said
to be a religion proposing pharmaceti or some centered salve
or other as a cure for human miseries, a religion

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breathing a spirit of cultivated inaction, making its believer refuse
to lend a hand at uprooting the definite evils on
all sides of us, and filling him with antipathy against
the reforms and reformers which try to extirpate them. In general,
it is summed up as being not practical, or, as
some critics more familiarly put it, all moonshine. That Alchebiades,

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the editor of the Morning Star, taunts me, as its promulgator,
with living out of the world and knowing nothing of
life in men. That great austere Toiler, the editor of
the Daily Telegraph, upbraids me but kindly and more in
sorrow than in anger, for trifling with esthetics and pertical fancies,
while he himself, in that arsenal of his in Fleet Street,
is bearing the burden and heat of the day. An

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intelligent American newspaper the Nation says that it is very
easy to send him one's study and find fault with
the course of modern society, but the thing he is
to propose practical improvements for it. While finally, mister Frederic Harrison,
in a very good tempered and witty satire which makes
me quite understand his having apparently achieved such a conquest
of my young Prussian friend, Arminius at last gets moved
to an almost stern moral impatience to behold as he says, death, sin,

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cruelty stalk among us, filling their moors with innocence and youth,
and me in the midst of the general tribulation, handing
out my pouncet box. It is impossible that all these
remonstrances and reproofs should not affect me. And I shall
try my very best in completing my design, and in
speaking of light as one of the characters of perfection
and of culture, as giving us light to profit by
the objections I have heard and read, and to drive

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at practice as much as I can, by showing the
communications and passages into practical life from the doctrine which
I am inculcating. It is said that a man with
my theories of sweetness and light is full of antipathy
against the rougher or coarser movements going on around him,
that he will not lend a hand to the humble
operation of uprooting evil by their means, and that therefore
the believers in action grow impatient with them. But whatever

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rough in coarse action, ill calculated action. Action with insufficient
light is and has for a long time been our bane.
What if our urgent want now is not to act
at any price, but rather to lay in a stock
of light for our difficulties. In that case, to refuse
to lend a hand to the rougher and coarser movements
going on round us. To make the primary need both

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for oneself and others to consist in enlightening ourselves and
qualifying ourselves to act less at random is surely the
best and in real truth, the most practical line our
endeavors can take. So that if I can show what
my opponents call rough or coarse action, but what I
would rather call random and ill regulated action, action with
insufficient light, action pursued because we like to be doing

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something and doing it as we please, and do not
like the trouble of thinking and the severe constraint of
any kind of rule. If I can show this to be,
at the present moment a practical mischief and danger to us,
then I have found a practical use for light in
correcting this state of things, and have only to exemplify
how in cases which fall under everybody's observation, it may
deal with it. When I began to speak of culture,

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I insisted on our bondage to machinery, on our proneness
to value machinery as an end in itself, without looking
beyond it, to the end for which alone, in truth
it is valuable. Freedom, I said, was one of those
things which we thus worshiped in itself, without enough regarding
the ends for which freedom is to be desired. In
our common notions and talk about freedom, we eminently show

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our idolatry of machinery. Our prevalent notion is, and I
quoted a number of instances to prove it, that it
is a most happy and important thing for a man
merely to be able to do as he likes on
what he is to do. When he is thus free
to do as he likes, we do not lay so
much stress. Our familiar praise of the British Constitution under
which we live is that it is a system of checks,

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a system which stops and paralyzes any power in interfering
with the free action of individuals. To this effect, mister Bright,
who loves to walk in the old ways of the Constitution, said,
forcibly in one of his great speeches, what many other
people are every day saying less forcibly that the central
idea of English life and politics is the assertion of
personal liberty. Evidently this is so, But evidently also as feudalism,

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which with its ideas and habits of subordination, was for
many centuries silently behind the British constitution dies out, and
we are left with nothing but our system of checks
and our notion of its being the great right and
happiness of an Englishman to do, as far as possible
what he likes. We are in danger of drifting towards anarchy.
We have not the notion so familiar on the continent
and to antiquity, of the state, the nation, in its

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collective and corporate character, entrusted with stringent powers for the
general advantage, and controlling individual wills in the name of
an interest wider than that of individuals. We say, what
is very true, that this notion is often made instrumental
to tyranny. We say that a state is in reality
made up of the individuals who compose it, and that
every individual is the best judge of his own interests.

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Our leading class is an aristocracy, and no aristocracy likes
the notion of a state authority greater than itself, with
a stringent administrative machinery, superseding the decorative inutilities of lord lieutenancy,
deputy lieutenancy, and the posse comitatus, which are all in
its own hands. Our middle class, the great representative of
trade and descent, with its maxims of every man for

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himself in business, every man for himself in religion, dreads
a powerful administration which might somehow interfere with it. And besides,
it has its own decorative in utilities of vestrymanship and guardianship,
which are to this class what lord lieutenancy and the
county magistracy are to the aristocratic class. And a stringent
administration might either take these functions out of its hands

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or prevent its exercising them in its own comfortable, independent
manner as at present. Then, as to our working class,
this class, pressed constantly by the hard daily compulsion of
material ones, is naturally the very center and stronghold of
our national idea that it is man's ideal right and
felicity to do as he likes. I think I have
somewhere related how Monsieur Michelais said to me of the

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people of France that it was a nation of barbarians
civilized by the conscription. He meant that through their military service,
the idea of public duty and of discipline was brought
to the mind of these masses. In other respects so
raw and uncultivated. Our masses are quite as raw and
uncultivated as the French, and so far from their having
the idea of public duty and of discipline superior to

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the individual self, will brought to their mind by universal
obligation of military service, such as that of the conscription,
so far from their having this. The very idea of
a conscription is so at variance with our English notion
of the prime right and blessedness of doing as one
likes that I remember the manager of the clay Cross
works in Derbyshire told me during the Crimean War, when
our want of soldiers was much felt and some people

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were talking of a conscription, that sooner than submit to
a conscription, the population of that district would flee to
the mines and lead a sort of robin hood life underground.
For a long time. As I have said, the strong
feudal habits of subordination and difference continued to tell upon
the working class. The modern spirit has now almost entirely
dissolved those habits, and the anarchical tendency of our worship

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of freedom in and for itself, of our superse sitious faith,
as I say, in machinery, is becoming very manifest. More
and more because of this are blind faith in machinery,
Because of our want of light to enable us to
look beyond machinery to the end for which machinery is valuable.
This and that man, and this and that body of
men all over the country are beginning to assert and

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put in practice an Englishman's right to do what he likes,
his right to march where he likes, meet where he likes,
enter where he likes, hoot as he likes, threaten as
he likes, smash as he likes. All this, I say,
tends to anarchy. And though a number of excellent people,
and particularly my friends of the Liberal or Progressive Party
as they call themselves, are kind enough to reassure us

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by saying that these are trifles, that a few transient
outbreaks of rowdism signify nothing, That our system of liberty
is one which itself cures all the evils which it works,
that the educated and intelligent classes stand in overwhelming strength
and majestic repose, ready like our military force in riots,
to act at a moment's notice. Yet one finds that
one's liberal friends generally say this because they have such

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faith in themselves and their nostrums when they shall return
as the public welfare requires to place and power. But
this faith of theirs one cannot exactly share when one
has so long had them and their nostrums at work,
and sees that they have not prevented our coming to
our present embarrassed condition. And one finds also that the
outbreaks of rowdism tend to become less and less of trifles,

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to become more frequent, rather than less frequent, And that meanwhile,
our educated and intelligent classes remain in their majestic repose,
and somehow or other, whatever happens, their overwhelming strength, like
our military force and riots, never does act. How indeed,
should their overwhelming strength act. When the man who gives
an inflammatory lecture, or breaks down the park railings or

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invades a secretary of state's office is only following an
englishman's impulse to do as he likes. And our own
conscience tells us that we ourselves have always regarded this
impulse as something primary and sacred. Mister Murphy lectures at
Birmingham and showers on the Catholic population of that town.
Words says, mister hardy only fit to be addressed to
thieves or murderers. What then, mister Murphy has his own

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reasons of several kinds. He suspects the Roman Catholic Church
of designs upon Missus Murphy. And he says, if mayors
and magistrates do not care for their wives and daughters,
he does. But above all he is doing as he likes, or,
in worthier language, asserting his personal liberty. I will carry
out my lectures if they walk over my body as
a dead corpse. And I say to the Mayor of

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Birmingham that he is my servant while I am in Birmingham,
and as my servant, he must do his duty and
protect me. Touching and beautiful words which find a sympathetic
chord in every British bosom. The moment it is plainly
put before us that a man is asserting his personal liberty,
we are half disarmed because we are believers in freedom,
and not in some dream of a right reason to

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which the assertion of our freedom is to be subordinated. Accordingly,
the Secretary of State had to say that, although the
lecture's language was only fit to be addressed to thieves
or murderers, yet I do not think he is to
be deprived. I do not think that anything I have said,
Dad could justify the inference that he is to be
deprived of the right of protection in a place built
by him for the purpose of these lectures, because the

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language was not language which afforded grounds for criminal prosecution.
No nor to be silenced by mayor or Home Secretary,
or any administrative authority on earth, simply on their notion
of what is discreet and reasonable. This is imperfect consonance
with our public opinion and with our national love for
the assertion of personal liberty. In quite another department of affairs,

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an experienced and distinguished chancery judge relates an incident which
is just to the same effect as this of mister Murphy.
A testator bequeathed three hundred pounds a year to be
forever applied as a pension to some person who had
been unsuccessful in literature, and whose duties should be to
support and diffuse by his writings. The testatus own views

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as enforced in the Testatus publications. This bequest was appealed
against in the court of Chancery on the ground of
its absurdity, but being only absurd, it was upheld, and
the so called charity was established. Having I say, at
the bottom of our English hearts a very strong belief
in freedom and a very weak belief in right reason,
we are soon silenced when a man pleads the prime

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right to do as he likes, because this is the
prime right for ourselves too. And even if we attempt
now and then to mumble something about reason, yet we
have ourselves thought so little about this, and so much
about liberty, that we are in conscience forced when our
brother Philistine with whom we are meddling, turns boldly round
upon us and asks, have you any light to shake
our heads ruefully and to let him go his own way.

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After all, there are many things to be said on
behalf of this exclusive attention of ours to liberty, and
of the relaxed habits of government which it has engendered.
It is very easy to mistake or to exaggerate the
sort of anarchy from which we are in danger through them.
We are not in danger from Fenianism fierce and turbulent
as it may show itself. For against this, our conscience
is free enough to let us act resolutely and put

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forth our overwhelming strength the moment there's any real need
for it. In the first place, it never was any
part of our creed that the great right and blessedness
of an Irishman, or indeed of anybody on earth except
an Englishman, is to do as he likes, And we
can have no scruple at all about abridging, if necessary,
a non Englishman's assertion of personal liberty. The British Constitution,

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its checks, and its prime virtues are for Englishmen. We
may extend them to others out of love and kindness,
but we find no real divine law written on our
hearts constraining us so to extend them. And then the
difference between an Irish Fenian and an English rough is
so immense, and the case in dealing with the Fenian
so much more clear. He is so evidently desperate and dangerous,

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a man of a conquered race, a papist with centuries
of ill usage to inflame him against us, with an
alien religion established in his country by us at his expense,
with no admiration of our institutions, no love of our virtues,
no talents for our business, no turn for our comfort.
Show him our symbolical trust Manufactory on the finest sight
in Europe, and tell him that British industrialism and individualism

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can bring a man to that, and he remains cold. Evidently,
if we deal tenderly with the sentimentalists like this, it
is out of pure philanthropy. But with a hyde Park rioter,
how different he is our own flesh and blood. He
is a Protestant. He is framed by nature to do
as we do. Hate what we hate, love what we love.
He is capable of feeling the symbolical force of the

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Trust Manufactory. The question of questions for him is a
wage's question. That beautiful sentence Sir Daniel Gooch quoted to
the Swindon workmen, and which our treasure as Missus Goucher's
golden rule, or the divine injunction be ye perfect done
into British the sentence Sir Daniel Goucher's mother repeated to
him every morning when he was a boy going to work. Ever, remember,
my dear Dan, that you should look forward to being

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some day manager of that concern. This fruitful maxim is
perfectly fitted to shine forth in the heart of the
hyde park rough also and to be his guiding star
through life. He has no visionary schemes of revolution and transformation,
though of course he would like his class to rule,
as the aristocratic class like their class to rule, and
the middle class theirs. Meanwhile, our social machine is a

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little out of order. There are good many people in
our paradiscical centers of industrialism and individualism taking the bread
out of one another's mouths. The rioter has not yet
quite found his groove and settled down to his work,
and so he is just asserting his personal liberty a
little going where he likes, assembling, where he likes, bawling,
as he likes hustling, as he likes, just as the

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rest of us, as the country squires in the aristocratic class,
as the political dissenters in the middle class. He has
no idea of a state of the nation in its
collective and corporate character, controlling as government the free swing
of this or that one of its members in the
name of the higher reason of all of them, his
own as well as that of others. He sees the rich,
the aristocratic class in occupation of the executive government. And

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so if he stopped from making Hyde Park a bear garden,
or the streets impassable, he says he is being butchered
by the aristocracy. His apparition is somewhat embarrassing because too
many cooks spoil the broth. Because while the aristocratic and
middle classes have long been doing as they like with
great vigor, he has been too undeveloped and submissive hitherto
to join in the game. And now when he does,

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he comes in immense numbers and is rather raw and rough.
But he does not break many laws, or not many
at one time. And as our laws were made for
very different circumstances from our present, but always with an
eye to Englishmen doing as they like, and as the
clear letter of the law must be against our Englishman
who does as he likes, and not only the spirit
of the law and public policy, and as government must

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neither have any discretionary power nor act resolutely on its
own interpretation of the law if any one disputes it.
It is evident our laws give our playful giant, in
doing as he likes, considerable advantage. Besides, even if he
can be clearly proved to commit an illegality in doing
as he likes. There is always the resource of not
putting the law in force, or of abolishing it. So

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he has his way, and if he has his way,
he is soon satisfied for the time. However, he falls
into the habit of taking it oftener and oftener, and
at last begins to create, by his operations a confusion
of which mischiev people can take advantage, and which, at
any rate, by troubling the common course of business throughout
the country, tends to cause distress, and so to increase
the sort of anarchy and social disintegration which had previously commenced.

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And thus that profound sense of settled order and security
without which a society like ours cannot live and grow
at all, is beginning to threaten us with taking its departure. Now,
if culture, which simply means trying to perfect oneself and
one's mind as part of oneself, brings us light, and
if light shows us that there is nothing so very
blessed in merely doing as one likes, that the worship

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of the mere freedom to do as one likes is
worship of machinery. That the really blessed thing is to
like what right reason ordains, and to follow her authority.
Then we have got a practical benefit out of culture.
We have got a much wanted principle, a principle of authority,
to counteract the tendency to anarchy which seems to be
threatening us. But how to organize this authority, or to

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what hands to entrust the wielding of it? How to
get your state summing up the right reason of the
community and giving effect to it as circumstance answers may
require with vigor. And here I think I see my
enemies waiting for me, with a hungry joy in their eyes.
But I shall elude them. The state the power most
representing the right reason of the nation, and most worthy
therefore of ruling, of exercising when circumstances require it. Authority

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over us all is for mister Carlyle, the aristocracy. For
mister Lowe, it is the middle class with its incomparable parliament.
For the reform League, it is the working class, with
its brightest powers of sympathy and readiest powers of action. Now, culture,
with its disinterested pursuit of perfection, Culture are simply trying
to see things as they are in order to seize

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on the best and to make it prevail. Is surely
well fitted to help us to judge rightly by all
the aids of observing, reading, and thinking, the qualification send
titles to our confidence of these three candidates for authority,
and can thus render us a practical service of no
mean value. So when mister Carlyle, a man of genius,
to whom we have all, at one time or other
been indebted for refreshment and stimulus, says we should give

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rule to the aristoocracy mainly because of its dignity and politeness,
surely culture is useful in reminding us that in our
idea of perfection, the characters of beauty and intelligence are
both of them present, and sweetness and light, the two
noblest of things, are united, allowing, therefore, with mister Carlyle,
the aristocratic class to possess sweetness. Culture insists on the
necessity of light also and shows us that aristocracies, being

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by the very nature of things inaccessible to ideas, unapt
to see how the world is going, must be somewhat
wanting in light, and must therefore be at a moment
when light is our great requisite inadequate to our needs. Aristocracies,
those children of the established fact, are for epochs of concentration,
in epochs of expansion, epochs such as that in which

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we now live, epochs when always the warning voice is
again heard. Now is the judgment of this world. In
such epochs, aristocracies, with the unnatural clinging to the established fact,
their want of sense for the flux of things, for
the inevitable transitiveness of all human institution, are bewildered and helpless.
Their serenity, their high spirit, their power of haughty resistance,

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the great qualities of an aristocracy, and the secret of
its distinguished manners and dignity, These very qualities, in an
epoch of expansion, turn against their possessors. Again and again.
I have said, how the refinement of an aristocracy may
be precious and educative to a raw nation, as a
kind of shadow of true refinement. How its serenity and
dignified freedom from petty cares may serve as a useful

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foil to set off the vulgarity and hideousness of that
type of life which a hard middle class tends to establish,
and to help people to see this vulgarity and hideousness
in their true colors from such an ignoble spectacle as
that of poor missus Lincoln, a spectacle to vulgarize a
whole nation. Aristocracies undoubtedly preserve us. But the true grace
and serenities that of which Greece and Greek art suggest

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the admirable ideals of perfection, a serenity which comes from
having made order among ideas and harmonized them. Whereas the
serenity of aristocracies, at least the peculiar serenity of aristocracies
of Teutonic orl appears to come from their never having
had any ideas to trouble them. And so, in a
time of expansion like the present, a time for ideas,
one gets, perhaps in regarding an aristocracy, even more than

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the idea of serenity, the idea of futility and sterility.
One has often wondered whether upon the whole earth there
is anything so unintelligent, so unapt to perceive how the
world is really going. As an ordinary young englishman of
our upper class ideas, he has not, and neither has
he that seriousness of our middle class, which is, as
I have often said, the great strength of this class

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and may become its salvation. Why a man may hear
young divys of the aristocratic class, when the whim takes
him to sing the praises of wealth and material comfort,
sing them with a cynicism from which the conscience of
the veriest philistine of our industrial middle class would recoil
in affright. And when, with the natural sympathy of aristocracies
for firm dealing with the multitude, and his uneasiness at

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our feeble dealing with it at home, an unvarnished young
englishman of our aristocratic class applauds the absolute rulers on
the continent, He in general manages completely to miss the
grounds of reason and intelligence, which alone can give any
color of justification, any possibility of existence to those rulers,
and applauds among grounds to which it would make their
own hair stand on end to listen to. And all

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this time we are in an epoch of expansion, And
the essence of an epoch of expansion is a movement
of ideas. And the one salvation of an epoch of
expansion is a harmony of ideas. The very principle of
the authority which we are seeking as a defense against
anarchy is right, reason, ideas light. The more therefore an
aristocracy calls to its aid its innate forces, its impenetrability,

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its high spirit, its power of haughty resistance to deal
with an epoch of expansion. The graver is the danger,
the greater the certainty of explosion. The surer the aristocracies defeat,
for it is trying to do violence to nature instead
of working along with it. The best powers shown by
the best men of an aristocracy at such an epoch are,
it will be observed, non aristocratical powers, powers of industry,

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powers of intelligence. And these powers thus exhibited, tend really
not to strengthen the aristocracy, but to take their owners
out of it, to expose them to the dissolving agencies
of thought and change, to make the men of the
modern spirit and of the future. If, as sometimes happens,
they add to their non aristocratical qualities of labor and
thought a strong dose of aristocratical qualities also of pride, defiance,

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turn for resistance. This truly aristocratical side of them, so
far from adding any strength to them, really neutralizes their
force and makes them impracticable and ineffective. End of Chapter two,
Part one