04 - Chapter 2 Part 2: Doing As One Likes

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Chapter two, Part two of Culture and Anarchy. This is
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Recording by Nicol Lee. Culture and Anarchy by Matthew Arnold,
Chapter two, Part two. Knowing myself to be indeed sadly

(00:23):
to seek, as one of my many critics says, in
a philosophy with coherent, interdependent, subordinate and derivative principles, I
continually have recourse to a plain man's expedient of trying
to make what few simple notions I have clearer and
more intelligible to myself by means of example and illustration.
And having been brought up at Oxford in the bad
old times, when we were stuffed with Greek and Aristotle,

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and thought nothing of preparing ourselves as after mister Low's
great speech at Edinburgh we shall do to fight the
battle of life with the German waiters. My head is
still full of a lumber of phrases we learned at
Oxford from Aristotle about virtue being in a mean and
about excess and defas and so on. Once, when I
had the advantage of listening to the Reformed debates in
the House of Commons, having heard a number of interesting speakers,

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and among them Lord Elcoe and Sir Thomas Bateson, I
remember it struck me, applying Aristotle's machinery of the mien
to my ideas about aristocracy, that Lord Elkoe was exactly
the perfection or happy mean or virtue of aristocracy, and
Sir Thomas Bateson the excess. And I have fancied that
by observing these two we might see both the inadequacy
of aristocracy to supply the principle of authority needful for

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our present ones, and the danger of its trying to
supply it when it was not really competent for the business.
On the one hand, in Lord Elcoe showing plenty of
high spirit, but remarkable far above and beyond his gift
of high spirit, for the fine tempering of his high spirit,
for ease, serenity, politeness, the great virtues, as mister Carlyle
says of aristocracy, in this beautiful and virtuous mean, there

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seemed evidently some insufficiency of light. While on the other hand,
Sir Thomas Bateson, in whom the high Spirit of aristocracy,
its impenetrabliity, defiant courage, and pride of resistance were developed
even in excess, was manifestly capable if he had his
way given him of causing us great danger, and indeed
of throwing the whole commonwealth into confusion. Then I reverted

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to that old fundamental notion of mine about the grand
merit of our race being really our honesty. And the
very helplessness of our aristocratic, our governing class in dealing
with our perturbed social state, gave me a sort of
pride and satisfaction, because I saw they were as a
whole too honest to try and manage a business for
which they did not feel themselves capable. Surely, now, it

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is no inconsiderable boon culture confers upon us if in
embarrassed times like the present, it enables us to look
at the inns and the outs of things in this way,
without hatred and without partiality, and with the disposition to
see the good in everybody all round. And I try
to follow just the same course with our middle class
as with our aristocracy. Mister Lowe talks to us of
this strong middle part of the nation, of the unrivaled

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deeds of our liberal middle class Parliament, of the noble,
the heroic work it has performed in the last thirty years.
And I begin to ask myself if we shall not
then find in our middle class the principle of authority
we want, and if we had not better take administration
as well as legislation, away from the weak extreme which
now administers for us, and commit both to the strong
middle part. I observe too that the hearers of middle

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class liberalism, such as we have hitherto known it, speak
with a kind of prophetic anticipation of the great destiny
which awaits them, and as if the future was clearly theirs.
The Advanced Party, the Progressive Party, the party in alliance
with the future are the names they like to give themselves.
The principles which will obtain recognition in the future, says
mister Meil, a personage of deserved eminence among the political dissenters,

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as they are called, who have been the backbone of
middle class liberalism. The principles which will obtain recognition in
the future are the principles for which I have long
and zealously labored. I qualified myself for joining in the
work of harvest by doing, to the best of my ability,
the duties of seed time. These duties, if one is
to gather them, from the works of the Great Liberal
Party in the last thirty years, are as I have

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elsewhere summed them up. The advocacy of free trade, of
parliamentary reform, of abolition of church rates, of voluntarism in
religion and education, of non interference of the state between
employers and employed, and of marriage with one's deceased wife's sister.
Now I know when I object that all this is machinery.
The great middle class has by this time grown cunning

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enough to answer that it always meant more by these
things than meets the eye, that it has had that
within which passers show, and that we are soon going
to see in a free church and all manner of
good things what it was. But I have learned from
Bishop Wilson. If mister Frederick Harrison will forgive my again
quoting that poor old hierophant of a decayed superstition, if
we would really know our heart, let us impartially view

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our actions. And I cannot help thinking that if our
liberals had had so much sweetness and light in their
inner minds as they allege. More of it must have
come out in their sayings and doings. An American friend
of the English liberal says, indeed, that their distance of
descent has been a mere instrument of the political dissenters
for making reason and the will of God prevail. And
no doubt he would say the same of marriage with

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the one's deceased wife's sister, and that the abolition of
a state church is merely the dissent as means to
this end, just as culture is mine. Another American defend
of theirs says just the same of their industrialism and
free trade. Indeed, this gentleman, taking the bull by the horns,
proposes that we should for the future call industrialism culture,
and the industrialists the men of culture. And then, of

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course there can be no longer any misapprehension about their
true character, and besides the pleasure of being wealthy and comfortable,
they will have authentic recognition as vessels of sweetness and light.
All this is undoubtedly specious, but I must remark that
the culture of which I talked was an endeavor to
come at reason and the will of God by means
of reading, observing, and thinking, And that whoever calls anything else.

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Culture may indeed call it so if he likes, but
then he talks of something quite different from what I
talked of. And again, as culture's way of working for
reason in the will of God is by directly trying
to know more about them, while the distance of descent
is evidently in itself no effort of this kind. Nor
is its free church in fact a church with worthy
conceptions of God and the ordering of the world than

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the state church professors, but with mainly the same conceptions
of these as the state Church has, only that every
man is to comport himself as he likes in professing them.
This being so, I cannot at once accept the nonconformity
any more than the industrialism and the other great works
of our liberal middle class, as proof positive that this
class is in possession of light, and that here is
the true seat of authority for which we are in search.

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But I must try a little further and seek for
other indications which may enable me to make up my mind.
Why should we not do with the middle class as
we have done with the aristocratic class, find in it
some representative men who may stand for the virtuous mean
of this class, for the perfection of its present qualities
and mode of being, and also for the excess of them.
Such men must clearly not be men of genius like

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mister Bright, For as I have formerly said, so far
as a man has genius, he tends to take himself
out of the category of class altogether and become simply
a man. Mister Bright's brother, mister Jacob Bright, would perhaps
be more to the purpose. He seems to sum up
very well in himself without disturbing influences, the general liberal
force of the middle class, the force by which it

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has done its great works of free trade, parliamentary reform, voluntarism,
and so on, and the spirit in which it has
done them. Now it is clear from what has been
already said that there has been at least an apparent
want of light in the force in spirit through which
these great works have been done, and that the works
have worn, in consequence too much a look of machinery.
But this will be clearer still if we take as

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the happy meen of the middle class, not mister Jacob Bright,
but his colleague in the representation of Manchester, mister Basley.
Mister Basley sums up for us in general the middle class,
its spirit and its works, at least as well as
mister Jacob Bright. And he has given us moreover a
famous sentence which bears directly on the resolution of our
present question, whether there is light enough in our middle

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class to make it the proper seat of the authority
we wish to establish. When that was talk some little
while ago about the state of middle class education, mister Basley,
as the representative of that class, spoke some memorable words.
There had been a cry that middle class education ought
to receive more attention. He confessed himself very much surprised
by the clamor that was raised. He did not think
that class need excite the sympathy either of the legislature

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or the public. Now, this satisfaction of mister baslely with
the mental state of the middle class was truly representative
and enhances his claim if that were necessary to stand
as the beautiful and virtuous mean of that class. But
it is obviously at variance with our definition of culture,
or the pursuit of light and perfection, which made light
and perfection consist not in resting and being, but in

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growing and becoming, in a perpetual advance in beauty and wisdom.
So the middle class is, by its essence, as one
may say, by its incomparable self satisfaction, decisively expressed through
its beautiful and virtuous mean, the self excluded from wielding,
an authority of which light is to be the very soul.
Clear as this is, it will be made clearer still
if we take some representative man as the excess of

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the middle class, and remember that the middle class in
general is to be conceived as a body swaying between
the qualities of its mien and of its excess, and
on the whole, of course, as human natures constituted inclining
rather towards the excess than the mean of its excess.
No better representative can possibly be imagined than the Reverend W. Cattle,
a dissenting minister from Walsall, who came before the public

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in connection with the proceedings at Birmingham of mister Murphy
already mentioned. Speaking in the midst of an irritated population
of Catholics, the Reverend W. Cattle exclaimed, I say, then,
away with the mass. It is from the bottomless pit,
and in the bottomless pit shall all liars have their
part in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone.
And again, when all the pratists were black in Ireland,

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why didn't the priests say the hookas pocus over them
and make them all good again? He showed too mister
Murphy's fears of some invasion of his domestic happiness. What
I wish to say to you, as Protestant husbands is
take care of your wives and find me in the
true vein of an Englis when doing as he likes,
a vein of which I have at some length pointed
out the present dangers. He recommended for imitation the example

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of some church wardens at Dublin, among whom said he
there was a Luther, and also Melanchthon, who had made
very short work with some ritualist or other, handed him
down from his pulpit and kicked him out of church.
Now it is manifest, as I said in the case
of Sir Thomas Bateson, that if he led the success
of the sturdy English middle class, this conscientious Protestant dissenter,

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so strong, so self reliant, so fully persuaded in his
own mind, have his way, he would be capable, with
his want of light, or to use the language of
the religious world with his zeal without knowledge of stirring
up strife which neither he nor any one else could
easily compose, and then comes in as it did also
with the aristocracy, the honesty of our race, and by

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the voice of another middle class man, Alderman Wilson Alderman
of the City of London and Colonel of the City
of London, militia proclaims that it has twinges of conscience,
and that it will not attempt to cope with our
social disorders and to deal with the business which it
feels to be too high for it. Everyone remembers how
this virtues Alderman Colonel or Colonel Alderman led his militia

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through the London streets, how the bystanders gathered to see
him pass, how the London roughs, asserting an englishman's best
and most s blissful right of doing what he likes,
robbed and beat the bystanders, And how the blameless warrior
magistrate refused to let his troops interfere. The crowd, he
touchingly said afterwards, was mostly composed of fine, healthy, strong
men bent on mischief. If he had allowed his soldiers

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to interfere, they might have been overpowered, their rifles taken
from them and used against them by the mob. A
rt in fact, might have ensued and been attended with bloodshed,
compared with which the assaults and loss of property that
actually occurred would have been as nothing honest and affecting
testimony of the English middle class to its own inadequacy
for the authoritative part. One's admiration would sometimes incline one

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to assign to it. Who are we? They say, by
the voice of their Alderman colonel, that we should not
be overpowered if we attempt to cope with social anarchy.
Our rifles take from us and used against us by
the mob, and we perhaps robbed and beaten ourselves. Or
what light have we beyond a freeborn englishman's impulse to
do as he likes, which could justify us in preventing,
at the cost of bloodshed, other freeborn Englishmen from doing

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as they like and robbing and beating us as much
as they please. This distrust of themselves as an adequate
center of authority does not mark the working class, as
or shown by their readiness the other day in Hyde
Park to take upon themselves all the functions of government.
But this comes from the working class being, as I
have often said, still an embryo of which no one
can yet quite foresee the final development, and from its

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not having the same experience and self knowledge as the
aristocratic and middle classes, Honesty, no doubt has just like
the other classes of Englishmen. But honesty in an incurate
and untrained state. And meanwhile, its powers of action, which
are as mister Frederick Harrison says, exceedingly ready easily run
away with that it cannot at present have a sufficiency
of light, which comes by culture, that is, by reading, observing,

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and thinking, is clear from the very nature of its condition.
And indeed we saw that mister Frederick Harrison, in seeking
to make a free stage for its bright powers of
sympathy and ready powers of action, had to begin by
throwing overboard culture and flouting It is only fit for
a Professor Boltt still to make it perfectly manifest that
no more in the working class than in the aristocratic

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and middle classes, come on find an adequate center authority,
that is, as culture teaches us to conceive our required
authority of light. Let us again follow with this class
a method we have followed with the aristocratic and middle classes,
and try to bring before our minds for presentative men
who may figure to us its virtue and its excess.
We must not take, of course, Colonel Dixon or mister Beale's,

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because Colonel Dixon, by his martial profession and dashing exterior,
seems to belong properly, like Julius Caesar and Mirabeaux and
other great popular leaders, to the aristocratic class, and to
be carried into the popular ranks only by his ambition
or his genius, while mister Beals belongs to our solid
middle class, and perhaps if he had not been a
great popular leader, would have been a philistine. But mister Oger,

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whose speeches we have all read, and of whom his
friends relate, besides much that is favorable, may well stand
for the beautiful and virtuous mean of our present working class.
And I think everybody will admit that in mister Odger,
as in Lord Elcore, there is manifestly, with all his
good points, some insufficiency of light. The excess of the
working class in its present state of development is perhaps

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best shown in mister Bradlaw, the iconoclast, who seems to
be almost for baptizing us all in blood and fire
into his new social dispensation, and to his reflections. Now
that I have once been set going on Bishop Wilson's track,
I cannot forbear commending this maxim of the good old
man in temperance, in talk makes a dreadful havoc in
the heart. Mister Bradlaw, like Sir Thomas Bateson and the

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Reverend w Castle, is evidently capable, if he at his
head given him, of running us all into great dangers
and confusion. I conclude therefore, what Indeed, few of those
who do me the honor to read this disquisition are
likely to dispute that we can as little find in
the working clas as in the aristocratic or in the
middle class, our much wanted source of authority, as culture

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suggests it to us. Well, then, what have we tried
to rise above the idea of class to the idea
of the whole community, the state, and to find our
center of light and authority there? Every one of us
has the idea of country as a sentiment. Hardly any
one of us has the idea of the state as
a working power. And why because we habitually live in
our ordinary selves, which do not carry us beyond the

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ideas and wities of the class, to which we happen
to belong, and we are all afraid of giving to
the state too much power, because we only conceive of
the state as something equivalent to the class in occupation
of the executive government, and are afraid of that class
abusing power to its own purposes. If we strengthen the
state with the aristocratic class in occupation of the executive government,

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we imagine we are delivering ourselves up captive to the
ideas and wishes of Sir Thomas Bateson, if with the
middle class in occupation of the executive government to those
of the Reverend W. Cattle, if with the working class
to those of mister Bradlaw, and with much justice, owing
to the exaggerated notion which we English, as I have said, entertain,
of the right and blissedness of the mere doing as

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one likes, of the affirming oneself and oneself, just as
it is people of the aristocratic class one to affirm
their ordinary selves, their likings and dislikings, people of the
middle class, the same, people of the working class, the
same by our every day selves. However, we are separate
personal at war. We are only safe from one another's
tyranny when no one has any power, and this safety,

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in its turn, cannot save us from anarchy. And when
therefore anarchy presents itself as a danger to us, we
know not where to turn. But by our best self
we are united impersonal as at harmony. We are no
peril from giving authority to this because it is the
truest friend we all of us can have. And when
anarchy is a danger to us, to this authority we

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may turn with sure trust well. And this is the
very self rich culture, or the study of perfection, seeks
to develop in us at the expense of our old,
untransformed self, taking pleasure only in doing what it likes
or is used to do, and exposing us to the
risk of clashing with every one else who is doing
the same, So that our poor culture, which is flouted
as so unpractical, leads us to the very ideas capable

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of meeting the great want of our present embarrassed times.
We want an authority, and we find nothing but jealous classes,
checks and a deadlock. Culture suggests the idea of the state.
We find no basis for firm state power in our
ordinary selves. Culture suggests one to us in our best self.
It cannot but acutely try a tender conscience to be

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accused in a practical country like ours, of keeping aloof
from the work and hope of a multitude of earnest
hearted men, and not merely toying with poetry and esthetics.
So it is with no little sense of relief that
I find myself thus in the position of one who
makes a contribution in aid of the practical necessities of
our times. The great thing, it will be observed, is

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to find our best self, and to seek to affirm
nothing but that, not as we English, with our overvalue
for merely being free and busy, have been so accustomed
to do, resting satisfied with a self which comes uppermost
long before our best self, and affirming that with blind energy.
In short, to go back yet once more to Bishop Wilson,

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of these two excellent rules of Bishop Pulton's for a
man's guidance. Firstly, never go against the best light you have. Secondly,
take care that your light be not darkness. We English
have followed with praiseworthy zeal the first rule, but we
have not given so much heed to the second. We
have gone manfully. The Reverend W. Cattle and the rest
of us according to the best light we have. But

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we have not taken enough care that this should be
really the best light possible for us, that it should
not be darkness. And our honesty, being very great, conscience,
has whispered to us that the light we were following,
our ordinary self, was indeed, perhaps only an inferior self,
only darkness, and that it would not do to impose
this seriously on all the world. But our best self

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inspires faith and is capable of affording a serious principle
of authority. For example, we are on our way to
what the late Duke of Wellington, with his strong sagacity,
foresaw and admirably described as a revolution by due course
of law. This is undoubtedly if we are still to
live and grow, and this famous nation is not to
stagnate and dwindle away on the one hand, or on

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the other, to perish miserably in mere anarchy and confusion.
What we are on the way to, great changes there
must be, for revolution cannot accomplish itself without great changes.
Yet order there must be. For without order, a revolution
cannot accomplish itself by due course of law. So whatever
brings risk of tumult and disorder, multitudinous processions in the

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streets of our crowded towns, multitudinous meetings in their public
places and parks, demonstrations perfectly are necessary in the present
course of our affairs. Our best self or right reason
plainly enjoins us to set our faces against it, enjoins
us to encourage and uphold the occupants of the executive power,
whoever they may be infirmly prohibiting them. But it does

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this clearly and resolutely, and is thus a real principle
of authority because it does it with a free conscience,
Because in thus provisionally strengthening the executive power, it knows
that it is not doing this merely to enable Sir
Thomas Bateson to affirm himself as against mister Bradlaw, or
the Reverend W. Cattle to affirm himself as against both.
It knows that it is establishing the state or organ

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of our collective best self, of our national right reason.
And it has the testimony of conscience that it is
establishing the state on behalf of whatever great changes are needed,
just as much as on behalf of order, establishing it
to deal just as stringently when the time comes with
Sir Thomas Bateson's Protestant ascendancy, or with the Reverend W.

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Cattle's sorry education of his children as it deals with
mister Bradlaw's street processions. End of Chapter two