10 - Chapter 6 Part 2: Our Liberal Practitioners

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Chapter six, Part two of Culture and Anarchy. This is
a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org.
Recording by Nicole Lee. Culture and Anarchy by Matthew Arnold,
Chapter six, Part two. A distinguished liberal supporter of mister

(00:23):
Chambers in the debate which followed the introduction of the bill,
produced a formula of much beauty and neatness for conveying
in brief the liberal notions on this head, Liberty said,
he is the law of human life. And therefore, the
moment it is ascertained that God's law, the Book of Leviticus,
does not stop the way man's law, the law of
liberty asserts its right and makes us free to marry

(00:46):
our deceased wife's sister. And this exactly falls in with
what mister Heppworth Dixon, who may almost be called the
Colenso of love and marriage. Such a revolution does he
make in our ideas on these matters, just as doctor
Colenso does in our ideas on religion, tells us of
the notions and proceedings of our kinsmen in America. With
that affinity of genius to the Hebrew genius, which we

(01:09):
have already noticed. And with the strong belief of our
race that liberty is the law of human life, so
far as a fixed, perfect and paramount rule of conscience,
the Bible does not expressly control it, our American kinsmen
go again. Mister Heppeth Dixon tells us to their Bible,
the Mormons, to the Patriarchs, and the Old Testament, Brother Noise,

(01:29):
to Saint Paul and the New And having never before
read anything else but their Bible, they now read their
Bible over again and make all manner of great discoveries there.
All these discoveries are favorable to liberty. And in this
way is satisfied that double craving so characteristic of the Philistine,
and so eminently exemplified in that crowned Philistine Henry the Eighth,

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the craving for forbidden fruit and the craving for legality.
Mister Herperth Dixon's eloquent writings give currency over here to
these important discoveries, so that now, as regards love and marriage,
we seem to be entering with all our sales spread
upon what mister Heppoth Dixon its apostle an evangelist calls
a Gothic revival. But what one of the many newspapers

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that so greatly admire mister Hepporth Dixon's lithe and sinewy
style and form their own style upon it, calls, by
a yet bolder and more striking figure, a great sexual
insurrection of our Anglo Teutonic race. For this end, we
have to avert our eyes from everything hellenic and fanciful,
and to keep them steadily fixed upon the two cardinal
points of the Bible and liberty. And one of those

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practical operations in which the Liberal Party engage, and in
which we are summoned to join them, directs itself entirely.
As we have seen to these cardinal points, I may
almost be regarded, perhaps as a kind of first installment
or public and parliamentary pledge of the great sexual insurrection
of our Anglo Teutonic race. But here, as elsewhere, what

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we seek is the philistine's perfection, the development of his
best self, not mere liberty for his ordinary self. And
we no more allow absolute validity to his stock maxim
liberty is the law of human life than we allow
it to the opposite maxim, which is just as true
renouncement is the law of human life. For we know
that the only perfect freedom is, as our religion says,

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a service, not a service to any stock maxim but
an elevation of our best self, and a harmonizing in
subordination to this and to the idea of a perfected humanity.
All the multitudinous, turbulent and blind impulses of our ordinary selves.
Now the philistine's great defect being a defect in delicacy
of perception. To cultivate in him, this delicacy, to render

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it independent of external and mechanical rule, and a law
to itself, is what seems to make most for his perfection,
his true humanity, and his true humanity. And therefore his
happiness appears to lie much more so far as the
relations of love and marriage are concerned, in becoming a
lie to the finer shades of feeling which arise within
these relations, in being able to enter with tact and

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sympathy into the subtle instinctive propensions and repugnances of the
person with whose life his own life is bound up,
to make them his own, to direct and govern in
harmony with them. The arbitrary range of his personal action,
and thus to enlarge his spiritual and intellectual life in
liberty than in remaining insensible to these finer shades of

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feeling this delicate sympathy in giving unchecked range so far
as he can to his mere personal action, in allowing
no limits or government to this except such as a
mechanical external law imposes, and in thus really narrowing for
the satisfaction of his ordinary self, his spiritual and intellectual
life and liberty. Still more, must this be so when

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his fixed eternal rule, his God's Law, is supplied to
him from a source which is less fit, perhaps to
supply final and absolute instructions on this particular topic of
love and marriage than on any other relation of human life.
Bishop Wilson, who is full of examples of that fruitful
hellenizing within the limits of Hebrewism itself, of that renewing

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of the stiff and stark notions of Hebrewism by turning
upon them a stream of fresh thought and consciousness, which
we have already noticed in Saint Paul, Bishop Wilson gives
an admirable lesson to rigid hebrewiz us, like mister Chambers,
asking themselves does God's Law that is the Book of
Leviticus forbid us to marry our wife's sister. Does God's law,

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that is, again, the Book of Leviticus allow us to
marry our wife's sister. When he says, Christian duties are
founded on reason, not on the sovereign authority of God,
commanding what he pleases. God cannot command us what is
not fit to be believed or done, all his commands
being founded in the necessities of our nature and immense
us is our debt to the Hebrew race and its genius,

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incomparable as is its authority on certain profoundly important sides
of our human nature, worthy as it is to be
described as having uttered for those sides the voice of
the deepest necessities of our nature, the statutes of the
divine and eternal order of things, the law of God,
who that is not manacled and hoodwinked by his Hebrism,

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can believe that as to love and marriage, our reason
and the necessities of our humanity have their true, sufficient
and divine law expressed for them by the voice of
any oriental and polygamous nation like the Hebrews, who I say,
will believe when he really considers the matter that where
the feminine nature, the feminine ideal, and our relations to

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them are brought into question, the delicate and apprehensive genius
of the Indo European race, the race which invented the
muses and chivalry and the Madonna, is to find its
last word on this question in the institutions of a
Semitic people whose wisest king had seven hundred wives and
three hundred concubines. If here again, therefore, we seem to

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minister better to the diseased spirit of our time by
leading it to think of the operation our liberal friends
have in hand, than by lending a hand to this
operation ourselves. Let us see, before we dismiss from our
view the practical operations of our liberal friends, whether the
same thing does not hold good as to their celebrated
industrial and economical labors. Also, their great work of this

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kind is, of course their free trade policy, this policy,
as having enabled the poor man to eat untaxed bread,
and as having wonderfully augmented trade, we are accustomed to
speak of with the kind of solemnity. It is chiefly
on their having been our leaders in this policy that
mister Bright founds for himself and his friends the claim
so often asserted by him, to be considered guides of

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the blind teachers, of the ignorant benefactors, slowly and laboriously
developing in the Conservative party and in the country, that
which mister Bright is fond of calling the growth of intelligence,
the object, as is well known of all the friends
of culture also, and the great end and aim of
the culture that we preach. Now. Having first saluted free

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trade and its doctors with all respect, let us see
whether even here too, our liberal friends do not pursue
their operations in a mechanical way without reference to any firm,
intelligible law of things, to human life as a whole
and human happiness, And whether it is not more for
our good at this particular moment, at any rate, if,
instead of worshiping free trade with them hebrewistically as a

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kind of fetish, and helping them to pursue it as
an end in and for itself, we turn the free
stream of our thought upon their treatment of it, and
see how this is related to the intelligible law of
human life and to national well being and happiness. In short,
suppose we hellenize a little with free trade, as we
hellenize with the real estate in Testasy bill and with

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the disestablishment of the Irish Church by the power of
the nonconformist antipathy to religious establishments and endowments. And see
whether what our approvers beautifully call ministering to the disease
spirit of our time is best done by the Hellenizing
method of proceeding or by the other. But first let
us understand how the policy of free trade really shapes
itself for our liberal friends, and how they practically employ

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it as an instrument of national happiness and salvation. For
as we said that it seemed clearly right to prevent
the church property of Ireland from being all taken for
the benefit of the church of a small minority, so
it seems clearly right that the poor man should eat
untaxed bread. And generally that restrictions and regulations which, for
the supposed benefit of some particular person or class of

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persons make the price of things artificially high here or
artificially low there, and interfere with the natural flow of
trade and commerce, should be done away with. But in
the policy of our liberal friends, free trade means more
than this, and especially valued as a stimulant to the
production of wealth as they call it, and to the
increase of the trade, business, and population of the country.

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We have already seen how these things, trade, business, and
population are mechanically pursued by us as ends precious in themselves,
and are worshiped as what we call fetishus. And mister
Bright I have already said, when he wishes to give
the working class a true sense of what makes glory
and greatness, tells it to look at the cities it
has built, the railroads it has made, the manufactures it

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has produced. So to this idea of glory and greatness,
the free trade, which our liberal friends extol so solemnly
and devoutly, has served or to the increase of trade, business,
and population, and for this it is prized. Therefore, the
untaxing of the poor man's bread has, with this view
of national happiness, been used not so much to make
the existing poor man's bread cheaper or more abundant, but

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rather to create more poor men to eat it. So
that we cannot precisely say that we have fewer poor
men than we had before free trade, but we can
say with truth that we have many more centers of industry,
as they are called, and much more business population and manufactures.
And if we are sometimes a little troubled by our
multitude of poor men, yet we know the increase of

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manufactures and population to be such a salutary thing in itself,
And our free trade policy begets such an admirable movement,
creating fresh centers of industry and fresh poor men. Here
while we were thinking about our poor men. There that
we are quite dazzled and borne away, And more and
more industrial movement is called for, and our social progress
seems to become one triumphant and enjoyable course of what

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is sometimes called vulgarly outrunning the constable if, however, taking
some other criterion of man's well being than the cities
he has built and the manufactures he has produced, we
persist in thinking that our social progress would be happier
if there were not so many of us, so very poor,
And in busying ourselves with notions of in some way
or other, adjusting the poor man and business one to

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the other, and not multiplying the one and the other
mechanically and blindly. Then our liberal friends, the appointed doctors
of free trade, take us up very sharply. Art is long,
says the times, and life is short. For the most part,
we settle things first and understand them afterwards. Let us
have as few theories as possible. What is wanted is

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not the light of speculation. If nothing worked well of
which the theory was not perfectly understood, we should be
in sad confusion. The relations of labor and capital, we
are told, are not understood yet. Trade and commerce, on
the whole work satisfactorily. I quote from the times of
only the other day. But thoughts like these, as I
have often pointed out, are thoroughly British thoughts, and we

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have been familiar with them for years. Or if we
want more of a philosophy of the matter than this,
our free trade friends have two axioms for us, axioms
laid down by their justly esteemed doctors, which they think
ought to satisfy us entirely. One is that, other things
being equal, the more population increases, the more does production
increase to keep place with it, because men, by their

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numbers and contact, call forth all manner of activities and
resources in one another and in nature, which when men
are few and sparse, are never developed. The other is that,
although population always tends to equal, the means of subsistence.
Yet people's notions of what subsistence is and large as
civilization advances and take in a number of things beyond

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the bare necessaries of life, and thus therefore is supplied
whatever check coom population is needed. But the error of
our friends is just perhaps that they apply axioms of
this sort as if they were self acting laws which
will put themselves into operation without trouble or planning on
our part, if we will only pursue free trade, business
and population zealously and staunchly. Whereas the real truth is that,

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however the case might be under other circumstances. Yet in fact,
as we now manage the matter, the enlarged conception of
what is included in subsistence does not operate to prevent
the bringing into the world of numbers of people who
but just attain to the barest necessaries of life, or
who even fail to attain to them. While again, though
production may increase as population increases, yet it seems that

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the production may be of such a kind and so
related or rather non related to population, that the population
may be little the better for it. For inti, with
the increase of population since Queen Elizabeth's time, the production
of silk stockings has wonderfully increased, and silk stockings have
become much cheaper and procurable in much greater abundance by

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many more people, and ten perhaps, as population and manufactures increase,
to get cheaper and cheaper, and at last to become,
according to Bastiat's favorite image, a common free property of
the human race, like light and air. But bread and
bacon have not become much cheaper with the increase of
population since Queen Elizabeth's time, nor procurable in much greater

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abundance by many more people. Neither do they seem at
all to promise to become, like light and air, a
common free property of the human race. And if bread
and bacon have not kept pace with our population, and
we have many more people in want of them now
than in Queen Elizabeth's time, it seems vain to tell
us that silk stockings have kept pace with our population,
or even more than kept pace with it, and that

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we are to get our comfort out of that. In short,
it turns out that our pursuit of free trade, as
of so many other things, has been too mechanical. We
fix upon some object, which in this case is the
production of wealth and the increase of manufactures, population and
commerce through free trade, as a kind of one thing
needful or end in itself. And then we pursue it

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staunchly and mechanically, and say that it is our duty
to pursue it staunchly and mechanically, not to see how
it is related to the whole intelligible law of things
and to full human perfection, or to treat it as
the piece of machinery of varying value, as its relations
to the intelligible law of things vary, which it really is.

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So it is of no use to say, to the
times and to our liberal friends, rejoicing in the possession
of the italisman of free trade, that about one in
nineteen of our population is a pauper, and that this
being so, trade and commerce can hardly be said to prove,
by their satisfactory working, that it matters nothing whether the
relations between labor and capital are understood or not. Nay,

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that we can hardly be said not to be in
sad confusion, For here comes in our faith in the
staunched mechanical pursuit of a fixed object, and covers itself
without imposing and colossal necessitarianism of the times which we
have before noticed, and this necessitarianism, taking for granted that
an increase in trade and population is a good in itself,

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one of the chiefest of goods, tells us that disturbances
of human happiness caused by ebbs and flows in the
tide of trade and business, which on the whole steadily mounts,
are inevitable and not to be quarreled with. This firm philosophy.
I seek to call to mind when I am in
the East of London, whither my avocations often lead me,
and indeed to fortify myself against the depressing sights which

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on these occasions assail us. I have transcribedupon the times
one strain of this kind, full of the finest economical doctrine,
and always carry it about with me. The passage is this.
The East End is the most commercial, the most industrial,
the most fluctuating region of the metropolis. It is always
the first to suffer, for it is the creature of prosperity,

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and falls to the ground the instant there is no
wind to bear it up. The whole of that region
is covered with huge docks, shipyards, manufactories, and a wilderness
of small houses, all full of life and happiness in
brisk times, but in dull times, withered and lifeless, like
the deserts we read of in the east. Now their
brief spring is over. There is no one to blame

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for this. It is the result of nature's simplest laws.
We must all agree that it is impossible that anything
can be firmer than this, or show a surer faith
in the working of free trade, as our liberal friends
understand and employ it. But if we still at all
doubt whether the indefinite multiplication of manufactories and small houses
can be such an absolute good in itself as to

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counterbalance the indefinite multiplication of poor people, we shall learn
that this multiplication of poor people, too, is an absolute
good in itself, and the result of divine and beautiful laws.
This is indeed a favorite thesis with our philistine friends,
and I have already noticed the pride and gratitude with
which they receive certain articles in the Times, dilating and

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thankful in solemn language on the majestic growth of our population.
But I prefer to quote now on this topic the
words of an ingenious young Scotch writer, mister Robert Buchanan,
because he invests with so much imagination and poetry. This
current idea of the blessed and even divine character, which
the multiplying of population is supposed in itself to have,

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we move to multiplicity, says mister Robert Buchanan. If there
is one quality which seems God's and his exclusively, it
seems that divine philoprogenitiveness, that passionate love of distribution and
expansion into living forms. Every animal added seems a new
ecstasy to the maker, every life added a new embodiment
of his love. He would swarm the earth with beings.

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They are never enough life. Life, life faces, gleaming, hearts, beating,
must fill every cranny, not a corner suffered to remain empty.
The whole earth breeds and God glories. It is a
little unjust, perhaps to attribute to the Divinity exclusively this
philoprogenitiveness which the British philistine and the poorer class of

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Irish may certainly claim to show with him. Yet how
inspiriting is here the whole strain of thought, and these
beautiful words too. I carry about with me in the
East of London, and often read them there. They are
quite in agreement with the popular language one is accustomed
to hear about children and large families, which describes children
as scent. And a line of poetry which mister Robert

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Buchanan throws in presently after the poetical prose I have quoted,
tis the old story of the fig leaf time. This
fine line too naturally connects itself when one is in
the East of London with the idea of God's desire
to swarm the earth with beings. Because the swarming of
the earth with beings does, indeed in the East of
London so seem to revive the old story of the

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fig leaf time, such a number of the people one
meets there having hardly a rag to cover them, And
the more all the swarming goes on, the more it
promises to revive this old story. And when the story
is perfectly revived, the swarming quite completed, and every cranny
choke full, then too, no doubt the faces in the
East of London will be gleaming faces, which mister Robert

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Buchanan says it is God's desire they should be, and
which every one must perceive they are not at present,
but on the contrary, very miserable. But to prevent all
this philosophy and poetry from quite running away with us
and making us think with the times and our practical
liberal free traders and the British philistines generally, that the
increase of small houses and manufactories, or the increase of

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population are absolute goods in themselves, to be mechanically pursued
and to be worshiped like fetishes. To prevent this we
have got that notion of ours immovably fixed, of which
I have long ago spoken, the notion that culture, or
the study of perfection leads us to conceive of no
perfection as being real, which is not a general perfection

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embracing all our fellow men with whom we have to do.
Such is the sympathy which binds humanity together. That we are, indeed,
as our religion says, members of one body. And if
one member suffer, all the members suffer with it. Individual
perfection is impossible so long as the rest of mankind
are not perfected along with us. The multitude of the

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wise is the welfare of the world, says the wise man.
And to this effect that excellent and often quoted guide
of ours, Bishop Wilson, has some striking words. It is not,
says he is so much our neighbor's interest as our own,
that we love him, And again he says our salvation
does in some measure depend upon that of others. And
the author of the imitation puts the same thing admirably

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when he says, obscurio etiam via at chelam vilebato kwando
tampakui regnum chelorum quairree currabunt. The fewer there are who
follow the way to perfection, the harder that way is
to find. So all our fellow men in the East
of London and elsewhere we must take along with us
in the progress towards perfection. If we ourselves really, as

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we profess one, to be perfect, and we must not
let the worship of any fetish any machinery, such as
manufactures or population, which are not like perfection absolute goods
in themselves, though we think them so, create for us
such a multitude of miserable, sunken and ignorant human beings
that to carry them all along with us is impossible,

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and perforce they must for the most part be left
by us in their degradation and wretchedness. But evidently, the
conception of free trade on which our liberal friends warned
themselves and in which they think they have found the
secret of national prosperity. Evidently, I say, the mere unfettered
pursuit of the production of wealth, and the mere mechanical
multiplying for this end of manufactures and population, threatens to

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create for us, if it has not created already those vast, miserable,
unmanageable masses of sunken people, one pauper at the present moment,
for every nineteen of us, to the existence of which
we are, as we have seen, absolutely forbidden to reckon ourselves.
In spite of all that the philosophy of the times
and the pursy of mister Robert Buchanan may say to

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persuade us. And though Hebrism, following its best and highest instinct,
identical as we have seen with that of Hellenism in
its final aim, the aim of perfection, teaches us this
very clearly. And though from hebrewising counselors the Bible, Bishop Wilson,
the author of the imitation I have preferred as well,
I may, for from this rock of Hebrism we are

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all hewn to draw the texts which we use to
bring home to our minds this teaching. Yet Hebresm seems powerless,
almost as powerless as our free trading liberal friends, to
deal efficaciously with our ever accumulating masses of pauperism, and
to prevent their accumulating still more. Hebresm builds churches indeed,
for these masses, and sends missionaries among them. Above all,

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it sets itself against the social necessitarianism of the times
and refuses to accept their degradation as inevitable. But with
regard to their ever increasing accumulation, it seems to be
led to the very same conclusions, though from a point
of view of its own, as are free trading liberal friends. Hebrewism,
with that mechanical and misleading use of the letter of
scripture on which we have already commented is governed by

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such texts as be fruitful and multiply the edict of
God's law, as mister Chambers would say, or by the
declaration of what he would call God's words in the Psalms,
that the man who has a great number of children
is thereby made happy. And in conjunction with such texts
as these, it is apt to place another text, the
poor shall never cease out of the land. Thus Hebreism

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is conducted to nearly the same notion as the popular mind,
and as mister Robert Buchanan, that children are sent, and
that the divine nature takes a delight in swarming the
East end of London with paupers only when they are
perishing in their helplessness and wretchedness. It asserts the Christian
duty of succoring them, instead of saying light the times.
Now their brief spring is over. There is nobody to

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blame for this. It is the result of nature's simplest laws.
But like the Times, hebrewsm despairs of any help from
knowledge and says that what is wanted is not the
light of speculation. I remember only the other day a
good man, looking with me upon a multitude of children
who are gathered before us in one of the most
miserable regions of London. Children eaten up with disease, half sized,

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half fed, half clothed, neglected by their parents, without health,
without home, without hope, said to me, the one thing
really needful is to teach these little ones to succor
one another. If only we the cup of cold water.
But now from one end of the country to the
other one he has nothing but the cry for knowledge, knowledge, knowledge.
And yet surely, so long as these children are there

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in these festering masses, without health, without home, without hope,
and so long as their multitude is perpetually swelling, charged
with misery, they must still be for themselves, charge with misery.
They must still be for us, whether they help one
another with a cup of cold water or no. And
the knowledge how to prevent them accumulating is necessary even

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to give their moral life and growth a fair chance.
May me not therefore say that neither the true hebrism
of this good man, willing to spend and be spent
for these sunken multitudes, nor what I may call the
spurious hebrism of our free trading liberal friends, mechanically worshiping
the effetish of the production of wealth and of the
increase of manufactures and population, and looking neither to the

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right nor left, so long as this increase goes on
avail us much here and that here again what we
want is hellenism. They're letting our consciousness play freely and
simply upon the facts before us, and listening to what
it tells us of the intelligible law of things as
concerns them, and Surely what it tells us is that
a man's children are not really sent any more than

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the pictures upon his wall or the horses in his
stable are sent. And that to bring people into the
world when one cannot afford to keep them and one's
self decently and not too precariously, or to bring more
of them into the world than one can afford to keep.
Thus is whatever the time Sain Mister Robert Buchanan may say,
by no means an accomplishment of the divine will or

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a fulfillment of nature's simplest laws, but is just as wrong,
just as contrary to reason and the will of God,
as for a man to have horses or carriages or
pictures when he cannot afford them, or to have more
of them than he can afford. And that in the
one case as in the other, the larger the scale
on which the violation of Reason's laws is practiced, and
the longer it is persisted in, the greater must be

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the confusion and final trouble. Surely, no laudations of free trade,
no meetings of bishops and clergy in the East end
of London, no reading of papers and reports can tell
us anything about our social condition, which it more concerns
us to know than that, and not only to know,
but habitually to have the knowledge present, and to act
upon it as one acts upon the knowledge that water

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wets and fire burns. And not only the sunken populace
of our great cities are concerned to know it, and
the pauper twentieth of our population be philistines. Of the
middle class too are concerned to know it. And all
who have to set themselves to make progress imperfection. End
of Chapter six, Part two