Alfred J. Drake, PhD, has graciously shared with readers of the Victorian Web this chapter from Arnold's Culture and Anarchy from his website. He has produced this e-text from the first edition, London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1869.
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The disparagers of culture make its motive curiosity; sometimes,
indeed, they make its motive mere exclusiveness and vanity. The
culture which is supposed to plume itself on a smattering of Greek
and Latin is a culture which is begotten by nothing so intellectual
as curiosity; it is valued either out of sheer vanity and ignorance,
or else as an engine of social and class distinction, separating its
holder, like a badge or title, from other people who have not got it.
No serious man would call this culture, or attach any value to it, as
culture, at all. To find the real ground for the very differing
estimate which serious people will set upon culture, we must find
some motive for culture in the terms of which [5/6] may lie a real
ambiguity; and such a motive the word curiosity gives us. I have
before now pointed out that in English we do not, like the
foreigners, use this word in a good sense as well as in a bad sense;
with us the word is always used in a somewhat disapproving sense; a
liberal and intelligent eagerness about the things of the mind may be
meant by a foreigner when he speaks of curiosity, but with us the
word always conveys a certain notion of frivolous and unedifying
activity. In the Quarterly Review, some little time ago, was an
estimate of the celebrated French critic, Monsieur Sainte-Beuve, and
a very inadequate estimate it, in my judgment, was. And its
inadequacy consisted chiefly in this: that in our English way it left
out of sight the double sense really involved in the word curiosity,
thinking enough was said to stamp Monsieur Sainte-Beuve with blame if
it was said that he was impelled in his operations as a critic by
curiosity, and omitting either to perceive that Monsieur Sainte-Beuve
himself, and many other people with him, would consider that this was
praiseworthy and not blameworthy, or to point out why it ought really
to be accounted worthy of blame [6/7] and not of praise. For as there
is a curiosity about intellectual matters which is futile, and merely
a disease, so there is certainly a curiosity, — a desire after the
things of the mind simply for their own sakes and for the pleasure of
seeing them as they are, — which is, in an intelligent being, natural
and laudable. Nay, and the very desire to see things as they are
implies a balance and regulation of mind which is not often attained
without fruitful effort, and which is the very opposite of the blind
and diseased impulse of mind which is what we mean to blame when we
blame curiosity. Montesquieu says: — "The first motive which ought to
impel us to study is the desire to augment the excellence of our
nature, and to render an intelligent being yet more intelligent."
This is the true ground to assign for the genuine scientific passion,
however manifested, and for culture, viewed simply as a fruit of this
passion; and it is a worthy ground, even though we let the term
curiosity stand to describe it.
But there is of culture another view, in which not solely the scientific passion, the sheer desire to see things as they are, natural and proper in an intelligent [7/8] being, appears as the ground of it. There is a view in which all the love of our neighbour, the impulses towards action, help, and beneficence, the desire for stopping human error, clearing human confusion, and diminishing the sum of human misery, the noble aspiration to leave the world better and happier than we found it, — motives eminently such as are called social, — come in as part of the grounds of culture, and the main and pre-eminent part. Culture is then properly described not as having its origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection. It moves by the force, not merely or primarily of the scientific passion for pure knowledge, but also of the moral and social passion for doing good. As, in the first view of it, we took for its worthy motto Montesquieu's words: "To render an intelligent being yet more intelligent!" so, in the second view of it, there is no better motto which it can have than these words of Bishop Wilson: "To make reason and the will of God prevail!" Only, whereas the passion for doing good is apt to be overhasty in determining what reason and the will of God say, because its turn is for acting rather than thinking, and it wants to be [9] beginning to act; and whereas it is apt to take its own conceptions, which proceed from its own state of development and share in all the imperfections and immaturities of this, for a basis of action; what distinguishes culture is, that it is possessed by the scientific passion, as well as by the passion of doing good; that it has worthy notions of reason and the will of God, and does not readily suffer its own crude conceptions to substitute themselves for them; and that, knowing that no action or institution can be salutary and stable which are not based on reason and the will of God, it is not so bent on acting and instituting, even with the great aim of diminishing human error and misery ever before its thoughts, but that it can remember that acting and instituting are of little use, unless we know how and what we ought to act and to institute.
This culture is more interesting and more far-reaching than that other, which is founded solely on the scientific passion for knowing. But it needs times of faith and ardour, times when the intellectual horizon is opening and widening all round us, to flourish in. And is not the close and bounded intellectual horizon within which we have long lived [9/10] and moved now lifting up, and are not new lights finding free passage to shine in upon us? For a long time there was no passage for them to make their way in upon us, and then it was of no use to think of adapting the world's action to them. Where was the hope of making reason and the will of God prevail among people who had a routine which they had christened reason and the will of God, in which they were inextricably bound, and beyond which they had no power of looking? But now the iron force of adhesion to the old routine, — social, political, religious, — has wonderfully yielded; the iron force of exclusion of all which is new has wonderfully yielded; the danger now is, not that people should obstinately refuse to allow anything but their old routine to pass for reason and the will of God, but either that they should allow some novelty or other to pass for these too easily, or else that they should underrate the importance of them altogether, and think it enough to follow action for its own sake, without troubling themselves to make reason and the will of God prevail therein. Now, then, is the moment for culture to be of service, culture which believes in making reason and the [10/11] will of God prevail, believes in perfection, is the study and pursuit of perfection, and is no longer debarred, by a rigid invincible exclusion of whatever is new, from getting acceptance for its ideas, simply because they are new.
The moment this view of culture is seized, the moment it is regarded not solely as the endeavour to see things as they are, to draw towards a knowledge of the universal order which seems to be intended and aimed at in the world, and which it is a man's happiness to go along with or his misery to go counter to, — to learn, in short, the will of God, — the moment, I say, culture is considered not merely as the endeavour to see and learn this, but as the endeavour, also, to make it prevail, the moral, social, and beneficent character of culture becomes manifest. The mere endeavour to see and learn it for our own personal satisfaction is indeed a commencement for making it prevail, a preparing the way for this, which always serves this, and is wrongly, therefore, stamped with blame absolutely in itself, and not only in its caricature and degeneration. But perhaps it has got stamped with blame, and disparaged with the dubious title of curiosity, because [11/12] in comparison with this wider endeavour of such great and plain utility it looks selfish, petty, and unprofitable.
And religion, the greatest and most important of the efforts by which the human race has manifested its impulse to perfect itself, — religion, that voice of the deepest human experience, — does not only enjoin and sanction the aim which is the great aim of culture, the aim of setting ourselves to ascertain what perfection is and to make it prevail; but also, in determining generally in what human perfection consists, religion comes to a conclusion identical with that which culture, — seeking the determination of this question through all the voices of human experience which have been heard upon it, art, science, poetry, philosophy, history, as well as religion, in order to give a greater fulness and certainty to its solution, — likewise reaches. Religion says: The kingdom of God is within you; and culture, in like manner, places human perfection in an internal condition, in the growth and predominance of our humanity proper, as distinguished from our animality, in the ever-increasing efficaciousness and in the general harmonious expansion [12/13] of those gifts of thought and feeling which make the peculiar dignity, wealth, and happiness of human nature. As I have said on a former occasion: "It is in making endless additions to itself, in the endless expansion of its powers, in endless growth in wisdom and beauty, that the spirit of the human race finds its ideal. To reach this ideal, culture is an indispensable aid, and that is the true value of culture." Not a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it; and here, too, it coincides with religion. And because men are all members of one great whole, and the sympathy which is in human nature will not allow one member to be indifferent to the rest, or to have a perfect welfare independent of the rest, the expansion of our humanity, to suit the idea of perfection which culture forms, must be a general expansion. Perfection, as culture conceives it, is not possible while the individual remains isolated: the individual is obliged, under pain of being stunted and enfeebled in his own development if he disobeys, to carry others along with him in his march towards perfection, to be continually doing all he can to enlarge [13/14] and increase the volume of the human stream sweeping thitherward; and here, once more, it lays on us the same obligation as religion, which says, as Bishop Wilson has admirably put it, that "to promote the kingdom of God is to increase and hasten one's own happiness." Finally, perfection, — as culture, from a thorough disinterested study of human nature and human experience, learns to conceive it, — is an harmonious expansion of all the powers which make the beauty and worth of human nature, and is not consistent with the over- development of any one power at the expense of the rest. Here it goes beyond religion, as religion is generally conceived by us.
If culture, then, is a study of perfection, and of harmonious
perfection, general perfection, and perfection which consists in
becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward
condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of
circumstances, — it is clear that culture, instead of being the
frivolous and useless thing which Mr. Bright, and Mr. Frederic
Harrison, and many other liberals are apt to call it, has a very
important function to fulfil for mankind. And this function is
particularly [14/15] important in our modern world, of which the whole
civilisation is, to a much greater degree than the civilisation of
Greece and Rome, mechanical and external, and tends constantly to
become more so. But above all in our own country has culture a
weighty part to perform, because here that mechanical character,
which civilisation tends to take everywhere, is shown in the most
eminent degree. Indeed nearly all the characters of perfection, as
culture teaches us to fix them, meet in this country with some
powerful tendency which thwarts them and sets them at defiance. The
idea of perfection as an inward condition of the mind and spirit is
at variance with the mechanical and material civilisation in esteem
with us, and nowhere, as I have said, so much in esteem as with us.
The idea of perfection as a general expansion of the human family is
at variance with our strong individualism, our hatred of all limits
to the unrestrained swing of the individual's personality, our maxim
of "every man for himself." The idea of perfection as an harmonious
expansion of human nature is at variance with our want of
flexibility, with our inaptitude for seeing more than one side of a
thing, with our intense [15/16] energetic absorption in the particular
pursuit we happen to be following. So culture has a rough task to
achieve in this country, and its preachers have, and are likely long
to have, a hard time of it, and they will much oftener be regarded,
for a great while to come, as elegant or spurious Jeremiahs, than as
friends and benefactors. That, however, will not prevent their doing
in the end good service if they persevere; and meanwhile, the mode of
action they have to pursue, and the sort of habits they must fight
against, should be made quite clear to every one who may be willing
to look at the matter attentively and dispassionately.
Faith in machinery is, I said, our besetting danger; often in machinery most absurdly disproportioned to the end which this machinery, if it is to do any good at all, is to serve; but always in machinery, as if it had a value in and for itself. What is freedom but machinery? what is population but machinery? what is coal but machinery? what are railroads but machinery? what is wealth but machinery? what are religious organisations but machinery? Now almost every voice in England is accustomed to speak of these things as if they [16/17] were precious ends in themselves, and therefore had some of the characters of perfection indisputably joined to them. I have once before noticed Mr. Roebuck's stock argument for proving the greatness and happiness of England as she is, and for quite stopping the mouths of all gainsayers. Mr. Roebuck is never weary of reiterating this argument of his, so I do not know why I should be weary of noticing it. "May not every man in England say what he likes?" — Mr. Roebuck perpetually asks; and that, he thinks, is quite sufficient, and when every man may say what he likes, our aspirations ought to be satisfied. But the aspirations of culture, which is the study of perfection, are not satisfied, unless what men say, when they may say what they like, is worth saying, — has good in it, and more good than bad. In the same way The Times, replying to some foreign strictures on the dress, looks, and behaviour of the English abroad, urges that the English ideal is that every one should be free to do and to look just as he likes. But culture indefatigably tries, not to make what each raw person may like, the rule by which he fashions himself; but to draw ever nearer to a sense of what is indeed [17/18] beautiful, graceful, and becoming, and to get the raw person to like that. And in the same way with respect to railroads and coal. Every one must have observed the strange language current during the late discussions as to the possible failure of our supplies of coal. Our coal, thousands of people were saying, is the real basis of our national greatness; if our coal runs short, there is an end of the greatness of England. But what is greatness? — culture makes us ask. Greatness is a spiritual condition worthy to excite love, interest, and admiration; and the outward proof of possessing greatness is that we excite love, interest, and admiration. If England were swallowed up by the sea to-morrow, which of the two, a hundred years hence, would most excite the love, interest, and admiration of mankind, — would most, therefore, show the evidences of having possessed greatness, — the England of the last twenty years, or the England of Elizabeth, of a time of splendid spiritual effort, but when our coal, and our industrial operations depending on coal, were very little developed? Well then, what an unsound habit of mind it must be which makes us talk of things like coal or iron as constituting [18/19] the greatness of England, and how salutary a friend is culture, bent on seeing things as they are, and thus dissipating delusions of this kind and fixing standards of perfection that are real!
Wealth, again, that end to which our prodigious works for material advantage are directed, — the commonest of commonplaces tells us how men are always apt to regard wealth as a precious end in itself; and certainly they have never been so apt thus to regard it as they are in England at the present time. Never did people believe anything more firmly, than nine Englishmen out of ten at the present day believe that our greatness and welfare are proved by our being so very rich. Now, the use of culture is that it helps us, by means of its spiritual standard of perfection, to regard wealth as but machinery, and not only to say as a matter of words that we regard wealth as but machinery, but really to perceive and feel that it is so. If it were not for this purging effect wrought upon our minds by culture, the whole world, the future as well as the present, would inevitably belong to the Philistines. The people who believe most that our greatness and welfare [19/20] are proved by our being very rich, and who most give their lives and thoughts to becoming rich, are just the very people whom we call the Philistines. Culture says: "Consider these people, then, their way of life, their habits, their manners, the very tones of their voice; look at them attentively; observe the literature they read, the things which give them pleasure, the words which come forth out of their mouths, the thoughts which make the furniture of their minds; would any amount of wealth be worth having with the condition that one was to become just like these people by having it?" And thus culture begets a dissatisfaction which is of the highest possible value in stemming the common tide of men's thoughts in a wealthy and industrial community, and which saves the future, as one may hope, from being vulgarised, even if it cannot save the present.
Population, again, and bodily health and vigour, are things which are nowhere treated in such an unintelligent, misleading, exaggerated way as in England. Both are really machinery; yet how many people all around us do we see rest in them and fail to look beyond them! Why, I have heard [20/21] people, fresh from reading certain articles of The Times on the Registrar-General's returns of marriages and births in this country, who would talk of large families in quite a solemn strain, as if they had something in itself beautiful, elevating, and meritorious in them; as if the British Philistine would have only to present himself before the Great Judge with his twelve children, in order to be received among the sheep as a matter of right! But bodily health and vigour, it may be said, are not to be classed with wealth and population as mere machinery; they have a more real and essential value. True; but only as they are more intimately connected with a perfect spiritual condition than wealth or population are. The moment we disjoin them from the idea of a perfect spiritual condition, and pursue them, as we do pursue them, for their own sake and as ends in themselves, our worship of them becomes as mere worship of machinery, as our worship of wealth or population, and as unintelligent and vulgarising a worship as that is. Every one with anything like an adequate idea of human perfection has distinctly marked this subordination to higher and spiritual ends of the cultivation of bodily vigour and activity.
[22] "Bodily exercise profiteth little; but godliness is profitable unto all things," says the author of the Epistle to Timothy. And the utilitarian Franklin says just as explicitly: — "Eat and drink such an exact quantity as suits the constitution of thy body, in reference to the services of the mind." But the point of view of culture, keeping the mark of human perfection simply and broadly in view, and not assigning to this perfection, as religion or utilitarianism assign to it, a special and limited character, — this point of view, I say, of culture is best given by these words of Epictetus: — "It is a sign of aphuia"+ says he, — that is, of a nature not finely tempered, — "to give yourselves up to things which relate to the body; to make, for instance, a great fuss about exercise, a great fuss about eating, a great fuss about drinking, a great fuss about walking, a great fuss about riding. All these things ought to be done merely by the way: the formation of the spirit and character must be our real concern." This is admirable; and, indeed, the Greek words aphuia, euphuia, a finely tempered nature, a coarsely tempered nature, give exactly the notion of perfection as culture brings us to conceive of it: a perfection in which the [22/23] characters of beauty and intelligence are both present, which unites "the two noblest of things," — as Swift, who of one of the two, at any rate, had himself all too little, most happily calls them in his Battle of the Books, — "the two noblest of things, sweetness and light." The euphyÕs is the man who tends towards sweetness and light; the aphyÕs is precisely our Philistine [euphyÕs — Liddell and Scott definition: "well-grown, shapely, goodly: graceful. II. of good natural parts: clever, witty; also 'of good disposition.'" ; aphyÕs — Liddell and Scott: "without natural talent, dull."]. The immense spiritual significance of the Greeks is due to their having been inspired with this central and happy idea of the essential character of human perfection; and Mr. Bright's misconception of culture, as a smattering of Greek and Latin, conies itself, after all, from this wonderful significance of the Greeks having affected the very machinery of our education, and is in itself a kind of homage to it.
It is by thus making sweetness and light to be characters of perfection, that culture is of like spirit with poetry, follows one law with poetry. I have called religion a more important manifestation of human nature than poetry, because it has worked on a broader scale for perfection, and with greater masses of men. But the idea of beauty and of a human nature perfect on all its sides, which is the dominant idea of poetry, is a true and invaluable idea, though it [23/24] has not yet had the success that the idea of conquering the obvious faults of our animality, and of a human nature perfect on the moral side, which is the dominant idea of religion, has been enabled to have; and it is destined, adding to itself the religious idea of a devout energy, to transform and govern the other. The best art and poetry of the Greeks, in which religion and poetry are one, in which the idea of beauty and of a human nature perfect on all sides adds to itself a religious and devout energy, and works in the strength of that, is on this account of such surpassing interest and instructiveness for us, though it was, — as, having regard to the human race in general, and, indeed, having regard to the Greeks themselves, we must own, — a premature attempt, an attempt which for success needed the moral and religious fibre in humanity to be more braced and developed than it had yet been. But Greece did not err in having the idea of beauty, harmony, and complete human perfection, so present and paramount; it is impossible to have this idea too present and paramount; only the moral fibre must be braced too. And we, because we have braced the moral fibre, are not on that account in the right way, if at the same [24/25] time the idea of beauty, harmony, and complete human perfection, is wanting or misapprehended amongst us; and evidently it is wanting or misapprehended at present. And when we rely as we do on our religious organisations, which in themselves do not and cannot give us this idea, and think we have done enough if we make them spread and prevail, then, I say, we fall into our common fault of overvaluing machinery.
Nothing is more common than for people to confound the inward peace and satisfaction which follows the subduing of the obvious faults of our animality with what I may call absolute inward peace and satisfaction, — the peace and satisfaction which are reached as we draw near to complete spiritual perfection, and not merely to moral perfection, or rather to relative moral perfection. No people in the world have done more and struggled more to attain this relative moral perfection than our English race has; for no people in the world has the command to resist the Devil, to overcome the Wicked One, in the nearest and most obvious sense of those words, had such a pressing force and reality. And we have had our reward, not only in the great worldly prosperity which our obedience to this [25/26] command has brought us, but also, and far more, in great inward peace and satisfaction. But to me few things are more pathetic than to see people, on the strength of the inward peace and satisfaction which their rudimentary efforts towards perfection have brought them, use, concerning their incomplete perfection and the religious organisations within which they have found it, language which properly applies only to complete perfection, and is a far-off echo of the human soul's prophecy of it. Religion itself, I need hardly say, supplies in abundance this grand language, which is really the severest criticism of such an incomplete perfection as alone we have yet reached through our religious organisations.
The impulse of the English race towards moral development and self-
conquest has nowhere so powerfully manifested itself as in
Puritanism; nowhere has Puritanism found so adequate an expression as
in the religious organisation of the Independents. The modern
Independents have a newspaper, the Nonconformist, written with great
sincerity and ability. The motto, the standard, the profession of
faith which this organ of theirs carries aloft, is: "The Dissidence
of Dissent and the [27] Protestantism of the Protestant religion."
There is sweetness and light, and an ideal of complete harmonious
human perfection! One need not go to culture and poetry to find
language to judge it. Religion, with its instinct for perfection,
supplies language to judge it: "Finally, be of one mind, united in
feeling," says St. Peter. There is an ideal which judges the Puritan
ideal, — "The Dissidence of Dissent and the Protestantism of the
Protestant religion!" And religious organisations like this are what
people believe in, rest in, would give their lives for! Such, I say,
is the wonderful virtue of even the beginnings of perfection, of
having conquered even the plain faults of our animality, that the
religious organisation which has helped us to do it can seem to us
something precious, salutary, and to be propagated, even when it
wears such a brand of imperfection on its forehead as this. And men
have got such a habit of giving to the language of religion a special
application, of making it a mere jargon, that for the condemnation
which religion itself passes on the shortcomings of their religious
organisations they have no ear; they are sure to cheat themselves and
to explain this condemnation [27/28] away. They can only be reached by
the criticism which culture, like poetry, speaking a language not to
be sophisticated, and resolutely testing these organisations by the
ideal of a human perfection complete on all sides, applies to them.
But men of culture and poetry, it will be said, are again and again failing, and failing conspicuously, in the necessary first stage to perfection, in the subduing of the great obvious faults of our animality, which it is the glory of these religious organisations to have helped us to subdue. True, they do often so fail: they have often been without the virtues as well as the faults of the Puritan; it has been one of their dangers that they so felt the Puritan's faults that they too much neglected the practice of his virtues. I will not, however, exculpate them at the Puritan's expense; they have often failed in morality, and morality is indispensable; they have been punished for their failure, as the Puritan has been rewarded for his performance. They have been punished wherein they erred; but their ideal of beauty and sweetness and light, and a human nature complete on all its sides, remains the true ideal of perfection still; just as the Puritan's ideal [28/29] of perfection remains narrow and inadequate, although for what he did well he has been richly rewarded. Notwithstanding the mighty results of the Pilgrim Fathers' voyage, they and their standard of perfection are rightly judged when we figure to ourselves Shakspeare or Virgil, — souls in whom sweetness and light, and all that in human nature is most humane, were eminent, — accompanying them on their voyage, and think what intolerable company Shakspeare and Virgil would have found them! In the same way let us judge the religious organisations which we see all around us. Do not let us deny the good and the happiness which they have accomplished; but do not let us fail to see clearly that their idea of human perfection is narrow and inadequate, and that the Dissidence of Dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion will never bring humanity to its true goal. As I said with regard to wealth, — let us look at the life of those who live in and for it; — so I say with regard to the religious organisations. Look at the life imaged in such a newspaper as the Nonconformist; — a life of jealousy of the Establishment, disputes, tea-meetings, openings of chapels, sermons; and then think of it [29/30] as an ideal of a human life completing itself on all sides, and aspiring with all its organs after sweetness, light, and perfection!
Another newspaper, representing, like the Nonconformist, one of the religious organisations of this country, was a short time ago giving an account of the crowd at Epsom on the Derby day, and of all the vice and hideousness which was to be seen in that crowd; and then the writer turned suddenly round upon Professor Huxley, and asked him how he proposed to cure all this vice and hideousness without religion. I confess I felt disposed to ask the asker this question: And how do you propose to cure it with such a religion as yours? How is the ideal of a life so unlovely, so unattractive, so narrow, so far removed from a true and satisfying ideal of human perfection, as is the life of your religious organisation as you yourself image it, to conquer and transform all this vice and hideousness? Indeed, the strongest plea for the study of perfection as pursued by culture, the clearest proof of the actual inadequacy of the idea of perfection held by the religious organisations, — expressing, as I have said, the most wide-spread effort which the human [30/31] race has yet made after perfection, — is to be found in the state of our life and society with these in possession of it, and having been in possession of it I know not how many hundred years. We are all of us included in some religious organisation or other; we all call ourselves, in the sublime and aspiring language of religion which I have before noticed, children of God. Children of God; — it is an immense pretension! — and how are we to justify it? By the works which we do, and the words which we speak. And the work which we collective children of God do, our grand centre of life, our city which we have builded for us to dwell in, is London! London, with its unutterable external hideousness, and with its internal canker of publicé egestas, privatim opulentia [Alfred J. Drake's translation: "public penury and private opulence"] — to use the words which Sallust puts into Cato's mouth about Rome, — unequalled in the world! The word, again, which we children of God speak, the voice which most hits our collective thought, the newspaper with the largest circulation in England, nay, with the largest circulation in the whole world, is the Daily Telegraph! I say that when our religious organisations, — which I admit to express the most considerable effort after perfection [31/32] that our race has yet made, — land us in no better result than this, it is high time to examine carefully their idea of perfection, to see whether it does not leave out of account sides and forces of human nature which we might turn to great use; whether it would not be more operative if it were more complete. And I say that the English reliance on our religious organisations and on their ideas of human perfection just as they stand, is like our reliance on freedom, on muscular Christianity, on population, on coal, on wealth, — mere belief in machinery, and unfruitful; and that it is wholesomely counteracted by culture, bent on seeing things as they are, and on drawing the human race onwards to a more complete perfection.
Culture, however, shows its single-minded love of perfection, its
desire simply to make reason and the will of God prevail, its freedom
from fanaticism, by its attitude towards all this machinery, even
while it insists that it is machinery. Fanatics, seeing the mischief
men do themselves by their blind belief in some machinery or other, —
whether it is wealth and industrialism, or whether it is the
cultivation of bodily strength and activity, or whether it is a [32/33]
political organisation, or whether it is a religious organisation, —
oppose with might and main the tendency to this or that political and
religious organisation, or to games and athletic exercises, or to
wealth and industrialism, and try violently to stop it. But the
flexibility which sweetness and light give, and which is one of the
rewards of culture pursued in good faith, enables a man to see that a
tendency may be necessary, and even, as a preparation for something
in the future, salutary, and yet that the generations or individuals
who obey this tendency are sacrificed to it, that they fall short of
the hope of perfection by following it; and that its mischiefs are to
be criticised, lest it should take too firm a hold and last after it
has served its purpose. Mr. Gladstone well pointed out, in a speech
at Paris, — and others have pointed out the same thing, — how necessary
is the present great movement towards wealth and industrialism, in
order to lay broad foundations of material well-being for the society
of the future. The worst of these justifications is, that they are
generally addressed to the very people engaged, body and soul, in the
movement in question; at all events, that they are always seized with
[33/34] the greatest avidity by these people, and taken by them as quite
justifying their life; and that thus they tend to harden them in
their sins. Now, culture admits the necessity of the movement
towards fortune-making and exaggerated industrialism, readily allows
that the future may derive benefit from it; but insists, at the same
time, that the passing generations of industrialists, — forming, for
the most part, the stout main body of Philistinism, — are sacrificed
to it. In the same way, the result of all the games and sports which
occupy the passing generation of boys and young men may be the
establishment of a better and sounder physical type for the future to
work with. Culture does not set itself against the games and sports;
it congratulates the future, and hopes it will make a good use of its
improved physical basis; but it points out that our passing
generation of boys and young men is, meantime, sacrificed.
Puritanism was necessary to develop the moral fibre of the English
race, Nonconformity to break the yoke of ecclesiastical domination
over men's minds and to prepare the way for freedom of thought in the
distant future; still, culture points out that the harmonious
perfection of generations of [34/35] Puritans and Nonconformists have
been, in consequence, sacrificed. Freedom of speech is necessary for
the society of the future, but the young lions of the Daily Telegraph
in the meanwhile are sacrificed. A voice for every man in his
country's government is necessary for the society of the future, but
meanwhile Mr. Beales and Mr. Bradlaugh are sacrificed.
Oxford, the Oxford of the past, has many faults; and she has heavily paid for them in defeat, in isolation, in want of hold upon the modern world. Yet we in Oxford, brought up amidst the beauty and sweetness of that beautiful place, have not failed to seize one truth: — the truth that beauty and sweetness are essential characters of a complete human perfection. When I insist on this, I am all in the faith and tradition of Oxford. I say boldly that this our sentiment for beauty and sweetness, our sentiment against hideousness and rawness, has been at the bottom of our attachment to so many beaten causes, of our opposition to so many triumphant movements. And the sentiment is true, and has never been wholly defeated, and has shown its power even in its defeat. We have not won our political battles, we have not carried our [35/36] main points, we have not stopped our adversaries' advance, we have not marched victoriously with the modern world; but we have told silently upon the mind of the country, we have prepared currents of feeling which sap our adversaries' position when it seems gained, we have kept up our own communications with the future. Look at the course of the great movement which shook Oxford to its centre some thirty years ago! It was directed, as any one who reads Dr. Newman's Apology may see, against what in one word maybe called "liberalism." Liberalism prevailed; it was the appointed force to do the work of the hour; it was necessary, it was inevitable that it should prevail. The Oxford movement was broken, it failed; our wrecks are scattered on every shore: —
Quae regio in terris nostri non plena laboris? [Alfred J. Drake's
translation: "Which part of the world
is not filled with our sorrows?"
P. Vergilius Maro (Virgil), Aeneid, Book 1, Line 459]
But what was it, this liberalism, as Dr. Newman saw it, and as it
really broke the Oxford movement? It was the great middle-class
liberalism, which had for the cardinal points of its belief the
Reform Bill of 1832, and local self-government, in politics; in the
social sphere, free-trade, unrestricted competition, [36/37] and the
making of large industrial fortunes; in the religious sphere, the
Dissidence of Dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant
religion. I do not say that other and more intelligent forces than
this were not opposed to the Oxford movement: but this was the force
which really beat it; this was the force which Dr. Newman felt
himself fighting with; this was the force which till only the other
day seemed to be the paramount force in this country, and to be in
possession of the future; this was the force whose achievements fill
Mr. Lowe with such inexpressible admiration, and whose rule he was so
horror-struck to see threatened. And where is this great force of
Philistinism now? It is thrust into the second rank, it is become a
power of yesterday, it has lost the future. A new power has suddenly
appeared, a power which it is impossible yet to judge fully, but
which is certainly a wholly different force from middle-class
liberalism; different in its cardinal points of belief, different in
its tendencies in every sphere. It loves and admires neither the
legislation of middle-class Parliaments, nor the local self-
government of middle-class vestries, nor the unrestricted competition
of middle-class [37/38] industrialists, nor the dissidence of
middle-class Dissent and the Protestantism of middle-class Protestant
religion. I am not now praising this new force, or saying that its
own ideals are better; all I say is, that they are wholly different.
And who will estimate how much the currents of feeling created by Dr.
Newman's movement, the keen desire for beauty and sweetness which it
nourished, the deep aversion it manifested to the hardness and
vulgarity of middle-class liberalism, the strong light it turned on
the hideous and grotesque illusions of middle-class Protestantism, —
who will estimate how much all these contributed to swell the tide of
secret dissatisfaction which has mined the ground under the self-
confident liberalism of the last thirty years, and has prepared the
way for its sudden collapse and supersession? It is in this manner
that the sentiment of Oxford for beauty and sweetness conquers, and
in this manner long may it continue to conquer!
In this manner it works to the same end as culture, and there is plenty of work for it yet to do. I have said that the new and more democratic force which is now superseding our old middle-class liberalism cannot yet be rightly judged. It has its [38/39] main tendencies still to form. We hear promises of its giving us administrative reform, law reform, reform of education, and I know not what; but those promises come rather from its advocates, wishing to make a good plea for it and to justify it for superseding middle- class liberalism, than from clear tendencies which it has itself yet developed. But meanwhile it has plenty of well-intentioned friends against whom culture may with advantage continue to uphold steadily its ideal of human perfection; that this is an inward spiritual activity, having for its characters increased sweetness, increased light, increased life, increased sympathy. Mr. Bright, who has a foot in both worlds, the world of middle-class liberalism and the world of democracy, but who brings most of his ideas from the world of middle-class liberalism in which he was bred, always inclines to inculcate that faith in machinery to which, as we have seen, Englishmen are so prone, and which has been the bane of middle-class liberalism. He complains with a sorrowful indignation of people who "appear to have no proper estimate of the value of the franchise;" he leads his disciples to believe, — what the Englishman is always too ready to believe, [39/40] — that the having a vote, like the having a large family, or a large business, or large muscles, has in itself some edifying and perfecting effect upon human nature. Or else he cries out to the democracy, — "the men," as he calls them, "upon whose shoulders the greatness of England rests," — he cries out to them: "See what you have done! I look over this country and see the cities you have built, the railroads you have made, the manufactures you have produced, the cargoes which freight the ships of the greatest mercantile navy the world has ever seen! I see that you have converted by your labours what was once a wilderness, these islands, into a fruitful garden; I know that you have created this wealth, and are a nation whose name is a word of power throughout all the world." Why, this is just the very style of laudation with which Mr. Roebuck or Mr. Lowe debauch the minds of the middle classes, and make such Philistines of them. It is the same fashion of teaching a man to value himself not on what he is, not on his progress in sweetness and light, but on the number of the railroads he has constructed, or the bigness of the Tabernacle he has built. Only the middle classes are told they have [40/41] done it all with their energy, self-reliance, and capital, and the democracy are told they have done it all with their hands and sinews. But teaching the democracy to put its trust in achievements of this kind is merely training them to be Philistines to take the place of the Philistines whom they are superseding; and they too, like the middle class, will be encouraged to sit down at the banquet of the future without having on a wedding garment, and nothing excellent can then come from them. Those who know their besetting faults, those who have watched them and listened to them, or those who will read the instructive account recently given of them by one of themselves, the Journeyman Engineer, will agree that the idea which culture sets before us of perfection, — an increased spiritual activity, having for its characters increased sweetness, increased light, increased life, increased sympathy, — is an idea which the new democracy needs far more than the idea of the blessedness of the franchise, or the wonderfulness of their own industrial performances.
Other well-meaning friends of this new power are for leading it, not in the
old ruts of middle-class [41/42] Philistinism, but in ways which are naturally
alluring to the feet of democracy, though in this country they are novel and
untried ways. I may call them the ways of Jacobinism.
Violent indignation with the past, abstract systems of renovation applied wholesale,
a new doctrine drawn up in black and white for elaborating down to the very
smallest details a rational society for the future, — these are the ways of
Jacobinism. Mr. Frederic Harrison and other disciples of Comte,
— one of them, Mr. Congreve, is an old acquaintance of mine, and I am glad
to have an opportunity of publicly expressing my respect for his talents and
character, — are among the friends of democracy who are for leading it in paths
of this kind. Mr. Frederic Harrison is very hostile to culture, and from a natural
enough motive; for culture is the eternal opponent of the two things which are
the signal marks of Jacobinism,-- its fierceness, and its addiction to an abstract
system. Culture is always assigning to system-makers and systems a smaller share
in the bent of human destiny than their friends like. A current in people's
minds sets towards new ideas; people are dissatisfied with their old narrow
stock of Philistine ideas, Anglo-Saxon [42/43] ideas, or any other; and some
man, some Bentham or Comte, who has the real merit of having early and strongly
felt and helped the new current, but who brings plenty of narrownesses and mistakes
of his own into his feeling and help of it, is credited with being the author
of the whole current, the fit person to be entrusted with its regulation and
to guide the human race. The excellent German historian of the mythology of
Rome, Preller, relating the introduction at Rome under the Tarquins of the worship
of Apollo, the god of light, healing, and reconciliation, observes that it was
not so much the Tarquins who brought to Rome the new worship of Apollo, as a
current in the mind of the Roman people which set powerfully at that time towards
a new worship of this kind, and away from the old run of Latin and Sabine religious
ideas. In a similar way, culture directs our attention to the current in human
affairs, and to its continual working, and will not let us rivet our faith upon
any one man and his doings. It makes us see, not only his good side, but also
how much in him was of necessity limited and transient; nay, it even feels a
pleasure, a sense of an increased freedom and of an ampler future, in so [44]
doing. I remember, when I was under the influence of a mind to which I feel
the greatest obligations, the mind of a man who was the very incarnation of
sanity and clear sense, a man the most considerable, it seems to me, whom America
has yet produced, — Benjamin Franklin, — I remember the relief with which,
after long feeling the sway of Franklin's imperturbable common-sense, I came
upon a project of his for a new version of the Book of Job, to replace the old
version, the style of which, says Franklin, has become obsolete, and thence
less agreeable. "I give," he continues, "a few verses, which may serve as a
sample of the kind of version I would recommend." We all recollect the famous
verse in our translation: "Then Satan answered the Lord and said: 'Doth Job
fear God for nought?'" Franklin makes this: "Does Your Majesty imagine that
Job's good conduct is the effect of mere personal attachment and affection?"
I well remember how when first I read that, I drew a deep breath of relief,
and said to myself: "After all, there is a stretch of humanity beyond Franklin's
victorious good sense!" So, after hearing Bentham cried loudly up as the renovator
of modern society, [44/45] and Bentham's
mind and ideas proposed as the rulers of our future, I open the Deontology.
There I read: "While Xenophon was writing his history and Euclid teaching geometry,
Socrates and Plato were talking nonsense under pretence of talking wisdom and
morality. This morality of theirs consisted in words; this wisdom of theirs
was the denial of matters known to every man's experience." From the moment
of reading that, I am delivered from the bondage of Bentham! the fanaticism
of his adherents can touch me no longer; I feel the inadequacy of his mind and
ideas for being the rule of human society, for perfection. Culture tends always
thus to deal with the men of a system, of disciples, of a school; with men like
Comte, or the late Mr. Buckle, or Mr. Mill.
However much it may find to admire in these personages, or in some of them,
it nevertheless remembers the text: "Be not ye called Rabbi!" and it soon passes
on from any Rabbi. But Jacobinism loves a Rabbi; it does not want to pass on
from its Rabbi in pursuit of a future and still unreached perfection; it wants
its Rabbi and his ideas to stand for perfection, that they may with the more
authority recast the world; [45/46] and for Jacobinism, therefore, culture,
— eternally passing onwards and seeking, — is an impertinence and an offence.
But culture, just because it resists this tendency of Jacobinism to impose on
us a man with limitations and errors of his own along with the true ideas of
which he is the organ, really does the world and Jacobinism itself a service.
So, too, Jacobinism, in its fierce hatred of the past and of those whom it makes liable for the sins of the past, cannot away with culture, — culture with its inexhaustible indulgence, its consideration of circumstances, its severe judgment of actions joined to its merciful judgment of persons. "The man of culture is in politics," cries Mr. Frederic Harrison, "one of the poorest mortals alive!" Mr. Frederic Harrison wants to be doing business, and he complains that the man of culture stops him with a "turn for small fault-finding, love of selfish ease, and indecision in action." Of what use is culture, he asks, except for "a critic of new books or a professor of belles lettres?" Why, it is of use because, in presence of the fierce exasperation which breathes, or rather, I may say, hisses, through the whole production in which Mr. Frederic Harrison [47] asks that question, it reminds us that the perfection of human nature is sweetness and light. It is of use because, like religion,-- that other effort after perfection, — it testifies that, where bitter envying and strife are, there is confusion and every evil work.
The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light. He who works for sweetness works in the end for light also; he who works for light works in the end for sweetness also. But he who works for sweetness and light united, works to make reason and the will of God prevail. He who works for machinery, he who works for hatred, works only for confusion. Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has but one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light. Yes, it has one yet greater! — the passion for making them prevail. It is not satisfied till we all come to a perfect man; it knows that the sweetness and light of the few must be imperfect until the raw and unkindled masses of humanity are touched with sweetness and light. If I have not shrunk from saying that we must work for sweetness and light, so neither have I shrunk from saying that we must have a broad basis, must have sweetness and light [47/48] for as many as possible. Again and again I have insisted how those are the happy moments of humanity, how those are the marking epochs of a people's life, how those are the flowering times for literature and art and all the creative power of genius, when there is a national glow of life and thought, when the whole of society is in the fullest measure permeated by thought, sensible to beauty, intelligent and alive. Only it must be real thought and real beauty; real sweetness and real light. Plenty of people will try to give the masses, as they call them, an intellectual food prepared and adapted in the way they think proper for the actual condition of the masses. The ordinary popular literature is an example of this way of working on the masses. Plenty of people will try to indoctrinate the masses with the set of ideas and judgments constituting the creed of their own profession or party. Our religious and political organisations give an example of this way of working on the masses. I condemn neither way; but culture works differently. It does not try to teach down to the level of inferior classes; it does not try to win them for this or that sect of its own, with ready-made judgments and watchwords. [48/49] It seeks to do away with classes; to make all live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light, and use ideas, as it uses them itself, freely, — to be nourished and not bound by them.
This is the social idea; and the men of culture are the true apostles of equality. The great men of culture are those who have had a passion for diffusing, for making prevail, for carrying from one end of society to the other, the best knowledge, the best ideas of their time; who have laboured to divest knowledge of all that was harsh, uncouth, difficult, abstract, professional, exclusive; to humanise it, to make it efficient outside the clique of the cultivated and learned, yet still remaining the best knowledge and thought of the time, and a true source, therefore, of sweetness and light. Such a man was Abelard in the Middle Ages, in spite of all his imperfections; and thence the boundless emotion and enthusiasm which Abelard excited. Such were Lessing and Herder in Germany, at the end of the last century; and their services to Germany were in this way inestimably precious. Generations will pass, and literary monuments will accumulate, and works far more perfect than the [49/50] works of Lessing and Herder will be produced in Germany; and yet the names of these two men will fill a German with a reverence and enthusiasm such as the names of the most gifted masters will hardly awaken. Because they humanised knowledge; because they broadened the basis of life and intelligence; because they worked powerfully to diffuse sweetness and light, to make reason and the will of God prevail. With Saint Augustine they said: "Let us not leave Thee alone to make in the secret of thy knowledge, as thou didst before the creation of the firmament, the division of light from darkness; let the children of thy spirit, placed in their firmament, make their light shine upon the earth, mark the division of night and day, and announce the revolution of the times; for the old order is passed, and the new arises; the night is spent, the day is come forth; and thou shalt crown the year with thy blessing, when thou shalt send forth labourers into thy harvest sown by other hands than theirs; when thou shalt send forth new labourers to new seed-times, whereof the harvest shall be not yet."
Last updated December 2001; Thanks to Dr. David Reid of the University of Hull for pointing a bad link.