Culture and Anarchy by Mathew Arnold Essay

My foremost design in writing this Preface is to address a word of exhortation to the Society for Promoting Christian K instantlyledge. In the es interpret which follows, the contri just nowor will practic eithery stick Bishop Wilson quoted. To me and to the members of the Society for Promoting Christian K flatledge his name and belles-lettres are still, no doubt, familiar l integrity round(prenominal) the world is fast going away from old-fashioned people of his salmagundi, and I learnt with consternation lately from a superior and distinguished votary of the natural sciences, that he had never so a great deal as heard of Bishop Wilson, and that he imagined me to present invented him.At a moment when the Courts of Law have skillful taken off the embargo from the recreative religion furnished on Sundays by my gifted acquaintance and others, and when St. Martins Hall iv and the Alhambra will soon be beginning again to resound with their pulpit-eloquence, it distresses one to think that the new lights should non only have, in oecumenical, a very low opinion of the preachers of the old religion, but that they should have it without knowing the outdo that these preachers washstand do.And that they are in this case is owing in part, for sure, to the negligence of the Christian Knowledge Society. In old clock they used to print and sp commemorate abroad Bishop Wilsons Maxims of Piety and Christianity the copy of this encounter which I use is one of their publications, bearing their imprint, and bound in the long-familiar brown calf which they made familiar to our childhood but the date of my copy is 1812. I know of no copy besides, and I believe the work is no longer one of those printed and circulated by the Society.Hence the error, flattering, I own, to me personally, yet in itself to be regretted, of the distinguished physicist already mentioned. notwithstanding Bishop Wilsons Maxims deserve to be circulated as a ghostly harbor, not only by c omparison with the cartloads of rubbish circulated at present under this designation, but for their own sake, and even by comparison with the other works of the same v author. Over the far better known Sacra Privata they have this advantage, that they were brisk by him for his own private use, while the Sacra Privata were prepared by him for the use of the public.The Maxims were never meant to be printed, and have on that account, like a work of, doubtless, far deeper emotion and power, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, some involvement peculiarly sincere and first-hand about them. rough of the best things from the Maxims have passed into the Sacra Privata still, in the Maxims, we have them as they first arose and whereas, too, in the Sacra Privata the writer speaks very often as one of the clergy, and as addressing the clergy, in the Maxims he almost always speaks solely as a man.I am not saying a word against the Sacra Privata, for which I have the highest regard only the Max ims seem to me a better and a more edifying book still. They should be read, as Joubert says Nicole should be read, with a direct direct at practice. The reader will leave on one side things which, from the change of time and from the changed point of view which the change of time inevitably brings with it, no longer lawsuit him adequacy vi will remain to serve as a sample of the very best, perhaps, which our nation and race can do in the way of ghostly writing.Monsieur Michelet makes it a reproach to us that, in all the doubt as to the real author of the take-off, no one has ever dreamed of ascribing that work to an Englishman. It is professedly, the Imitation could not well have been written by an Englishman the religious delicacy and the profound asceticism of that admirable book are hardly in our nature.This would be more of a reproach to us if in poetry, which requires, no less than religion, a authorized delicacy of spiritual perception, our race had not done such(preno minal) great things and if the Imitation, exquisite as it is, did not, as I have elsewhere remarked, belong to a class of works in which the unblemished balance of gentleman nature is lost, and which have therefore, as spiritual productions, in their contents something excessive and morbid, in their form something not thoroughly sound.On a lower hunt down than the Imitation, and awakening in our nature chords less poetical and delicate, the Maxims of Bishop Wilson are, as a religious work, far more solid. To the most sincere ardour and unction, Bishop Wilson unites, in these Maxims, that rank(a) honesty vii and plain good sense which our English race has so powerfully applied to the divine impossibilities of religion by which it has brought religion so much into practical emotional state, and has done its allotted part in promoting upon earth the kingdom of God. however with ardour and unction religion, as we all know, may still be fanatical with honesty and good sense, it may still be prosaic and the fruit of honesty and good sense united with ardour and unction is often only a prosaic religion held fanatically. Bishop Wilsons excellence lies in a balance of the four qualities, and in a fulness and saint of them, which makes this untoward response impossible his unction is so perfect, and in such blissful alliance with his good sense, that it becomes tenderness and fervent charity his good sense is so perfect and in such happy alliance with his unction, that it becomes moderation and insight.While, therefore, the type of religion exhibited in his Maxims is English, it is yet a type of a far higher pleasant than is in general reached by Bishop Wilsons countrymen and yet, being English, it is possible and attainable for them. And so I conclude as I began, by saying that a work of this sort is one which the Society for Promoting Christian viii Knowledge should not suffer to remain out of print or out of currency. To pass now to the matters canvassed in the following essay.The whole scope of the essay is to recommend glossiness as the great help out of our present difficulties culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow stanchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a deservingness in following them staunchly which makes up for the mischief of following them mechanically.This, and this alone, is the scope of the following essay. I say again here, what I have said in the pages which follow, that from the faults and weaknesses of bookmen a notion of something bookish, pedantic, and futile has got itself more or less connected with the word culture, and that it is a pity we cannot use a word more utterly free from all shadow of reproach.And yet, futile as are m some( prenominal) bookmen, and helpless as books and reading often prove for bringing nearer to perfection those who ix use them, one must, I think, be struck more and more, the longer one lives, to find how much, in our present society, a mans life of each day depends for its solidity and value on whether he reads during that day, and, far more still, on what he reads during it.More and more he who examines himself will find the difference it makes to him, at the end of any given day, whether or no he has pursued his avocations throughout it without reading at all and whether or no, having read something, he has read the newspapers only. This, however, is a matter for each mans private conscience and experience. If a man without books or reading, or reading nonentity but his letters and the newspapers, gets nevertheless a fresh and free play of the best thoughts upon his stock notions and habits, he has got culture.He has got that for which we prize and recommend culture he has got that which at the present moment we seek culture that it may give us. This inward operation is the very life and essence of culture, as we conceive it. Nevertheless, it is not easy so to frame ones discourse concerning the operation of culture, as to avoid giving frequent occasion to a misunderstanding whereby the all-important(a) inwardness of the x operation is lost sight of.We are supposed, when we criticise by the help of culture some imperfect doing or other, to have in our pith some well-known rival plan of doing, which we want to serve and recommend. Thus, for instance, because I have freely pointed out the dangers and inconveniences to which our literature is exposed in the absence of any centre of taste and authority like the cut Academy, it is constantly said that I want to introduce here in England an institution like the French Academy.I have indeed expressly declared that I wanted no such thing but let us notice how it is tho our worship of machinery, and of external do ing, which leads to this charge being brought and how the inwardness of culture makes us seize, for watching and cure, the faults to which our want of an Academy inclines us, and yet prevents us from trusting to an arm of flesh, as the Puritans say,from blindly flying to this outward machinery of an Academy, in order to help ourselves.For the very same culture and free inward play of thought which shows us how the corinthian style, or the whimsies about the One Primeval Language, are generated and strengthened in the absence of an xi Academy, shows us, too, how slender any Academy, such as we should be likely to get, would cure them. Every one who knows the characteristics of our internal life, and the tendencies so fully discussed in the following pages, knows exactly what an English Academy would be like.One can see the happy family in ones minds eye as distinctly as if it was already constituted. Lord Stanhope, the Bishop of Oxford, Mr. Gladstone, the Dean of Westminster, Mr. Froude, Mr. Henry Reeve, everything which is influential, accomplished, and distinguished and then, some fine morning, a dissatisfaction of the public mind with this brilliant and select coterie, a flight of Corinthian leading articles, and an irruption of Mr. G. A. Sala. Clearly, this is not what will do us good.The very same faults,the want of sensitiveness of intellectual conscience, the disbelief in right reason, the dislike of authority,which have hindered our having an Academy and have worked injuriously in our literature, would similarly hinder us from making our Academy, if we established it, one which would really correct them. And culture, which shows us truly the faults, shows us this also just as truly. xii It is by a like sort of misunderstanding, again, that Mr.Oscar Browning, one of the assistant-masters at Eton, takes up in the Quarterly Review the cudgels for Eton, as if I had attacked Eton, because I have said, in a book about foreign schools, that a man may well prefer to teach his three or four hours a day without keeping a boarding-house and that there are great dangers in cramming little boys of eight or ten and making them compete for an object of great value to their parents and, again, that the manufacture and fork out of school-books, in England, much needs regulation by some competent authority. Mr.Oscar Browning gives us to understand that at Eton he and others, with perfect satisfaction to themselves and the public, unify the functions of teaching and of keeping a boarding-house that he knows excellent men (and, indeed, well he may, for a brother of his own, I am told, is one of the best of them,) act in preparing little boys for competitive examinations, and that the result, as tested at Eton, gives perfect satisfaction. And as to school-books he adds, finally, that Dr. William Smith, the learned and distinguished editor of the Quarterly Review, is, as we all know, xiii the compiler of school-books meritorious and many.This i s what Mr. Oscar Browning gives us to understand in the Quarterly Review, and it is impossible not to read with pleasure what he says. For what can give a finer example of that frankness and manly self- confidence which our great public schools, and none of them so much as Eton, are supposed to inspire, of that buoyant serenity in holding up ones head, speaking out what is in ones mind, and flinging off all sheepishness and awkwardness, than to see an Eton assistant-master fling in fact himself as evidence that to combine boarding-house- keeping with teaching is a good hing, and his brother as evidence that to train and race little boys for competitive examinations is a good thing? Nay, and one sees that this frank-hearted Eton self- confidence is contagious for has not Mr. Oscar Browning managed to fire Dr. William Smith (himself, no doubt, the modestest man alive, and never handy at Eton) with the same spirit, and made him insert in his own Review a puff, so to speak, of his own school-books, declaring that they are (as they are) meritorious and many?Nevertheless, Mr. Oscar Browning is amiss(p) in xiv thinking that I wished to run down Eton and his repetition on behalf of Eton, with this idea in his head, of the strains of his heroic ancestor, Malvinas Oscar, as they are recorded by the family poet, Ossian, is unnecessary. The wild boar rushes over their tombs, but he does not disturb their repose. They still love the sport of their youth, and mount the wind with joy. All I meant to say was, that there were unpleasantnesses in uniting the keeping a boarding-house with teaching, and dangers in cramming and racing little boys for competitive examinations, and charlatanism and extravagance in the manufacture and supply of our school-books. But when Mr. Oscar Browning tells us that all these have been happily got rid of in his case, and his brothers case, and Dr. William Smiths case, then I say that this is just what I wish, and I hope other people will follo w their good example.All I seek is that such blemishes should not through any negligence, self-love, or want of due self- examination, be suffered to continue. Natural, as we have said, the sort of misunderstanding just noticed is yet our usefulness depends upon our being able to nominate it away, and to convince xv those who mechanically serve some stock notion or operation, and thereby go astray, that it is not cultures work or aim to give the victory to some rival fetish, but simply to turn a free and fresh stream of thought upon the whole matter in question.In a thing of more immediate interest, just now, than either of the ii we have mentioned, the like misunderstanding prevails and until it is dissipated, culture can do no good work in the matter. When we criticise the present operation of disestablishing the Irish Church, not by the power of reason and justice, but by the power of the repugnance of the Protestant Nonconformists, English and Scotch, to establishments, we ar e charged with being dreamers of dreams, hich the national will has rudely shattered, for endowing the religious sects all round or we are called enemies of the Nonconformists, blind partisans of the Anglican brass section. More than a few words we must give to showing how erroneous are these charges because if they were true, we should be actually subverting our own design, and playing false to that culture which it is our very purpose to recommend. Certainly we are no enemies of the Nonconformists xvi for, on the contrary, what we aim at is their perfection.Culture, which is the study of perfection, leads us, as we in the following pages have shown, to conceive of true human perfection as a harmonious perfection, developing all sides of our humanity and as a general perfection, developing all parts of our society. For if one member suffer, the other members must suffer with it and the fewer there are that follow the true way of salvation the harder that way is to find.And while t he Nonconformists, the successors and representatives of the Puritans, and like them staunchly walking by the best light they have, make a large part of what is strongest and most serious in this nation and therefore attract our respect and interest, yet all that, in what follows, is said about Hebraism and Hellenism, has for its main result to show how our Puritans, ancient and modern, have not enough added to their care for walking staunchly by the best light they have, a care that that light be not darkness how they have developed one side of their humanity at the expense of all others, and have become incomplete and mutilated men in consequence. Thus falling short of harmonious xvii perfection, they fail to follow the true way of salvation.Therefore that way is made the harder for others to find, general perfection is put further off out of our reach, and the confusion and perplexity in which our society now labours is increased by the Nonconformists rather than diminished by th em. So while we praise and esteem the zeal of the Nonconformists in walking staunchly by the best light they have, and desire to take no whit from it, we seek to add to this what we call sweetness and light, and develope their full humanity more perfectly and to seek this is certainly not to be the enemy of the Nonconformists. But now, with these ideas in our head, we come across the present operation for disestablishing the Irish Church by the power of the Nonconformists antipathy to religious establishments and endowments.And we see Liberal statesmen, for whose purpose this antipathy happens to be convenient, flattering it all they can saying that though they have no intention of laying give on an Establishment which is efficient and popular, like the Anglican Establishment here in England, yet it is in the abstract a fine and good thing that religion should xviii be left to the voluntary support of its promoters, and should thus gain in energy and independence and Mr. Gladstone has no words strong enough to express his admiration of the refusal of State-aid by the Irish Roman Catholics, who have never yet been seriously asked to accept it, but who would a good deal humiliate him if they demanded it. And we see philosophical politicians, with a turn for swimming with the stream, like Mr. Baxter or Mr.Charles Buxton, and philosophical divines with the same turn, like the Dean of Canterbury, seeking to give a sort of grand stamp of generality and solemnity to this antipathy of the Nonconformists, and to dress it out as a law of human progress in the future. Now, nothing can be pleasanter than swimming with the stream and we might gladly, if we could, try in our unsystematic way to help Mr. Baxter, and Mr. Charles Buxton, and the Dean of Canterbury, in their labours at once philosophical and popular. But we have got fixed in our minds that a more full and harmonious development of their humanity is what the Nonconformists most want, that narrowness, one-sided ness, and incompleteness is what they most suffer from xix in a word, that in what we call provinciality they abound, but in what we may call totality they fall short. And they fall short more than the members of Establishments.The great works by which, not only in literature, art, and science generally, but in religion itself, the human spirit has manifested its approaches to totality, and a full, harmonious perfection, and by which it stimulates and helps forward the worlds general perfection, come, not from Nonconformists, but from men who either belong to Establishments or have been skilled in them. A Nonconformist minister, the Rev. Edward White, who has lately written a temperate and well-reasoned pamphlet against Church Establishments, says that the unendowed and unestablished communities of England exert full as much moral and ennobling influence upon the conduct of statesmen as that Church which is both established and endowed. That depends upon what one means by moral a nd ennobling influence. The believer in machinery may think that to get a Government to abolish Church-rates or to legalise marriage with a deceased wifes sister is to exert a moral and ennobling influence xx upon Government.But a raw sienna of perfection, who looks to inward ripeness for the true springs of conduct, will surely think that as Shakspeare has done more for the inward ripeness of our statesmen than Dr. Watts, and has, therefore, done more to moralise and ennoble them, so an Establishment which has produced Hooker, Barrow, Butler, has done more to moralise and ennoble English statesmen and their conduct than communities which have produced the Nonconformist divines. The fruitful men of English Puritanism and Nonconformity are men who were trained within the pale of the Establishment,Milton, Baxter, Wesley. A generation or two outside the Establishment, and Puritanism produces men of national mark no more. With the same doctrine and discipline, men of national mark are produced in Scotland but in an Establishment.With the same doctrine and discipline, men of national and even European mark are produced in Germany, Switzerland, France but in Establishments. Only two religious disciplines seem exempted or comparatively exempted, from the operation of the law which seems to forbid the rearing, outside of national establishments, of men of the xxi highest spiritual significance. These two are the Roman Catholic and the Jewish. And these, both of them, rest on Establishments, which, though not indeed national, are cosmopolitan and perhaps here, what the individual man does not lose by these conditions of his rearing, the citizen, and the State of which he is a citizen, loses.