Miscellaneous essays and addresses

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2. The Prophet of Culture (Macmillan's Magaziiie, August

1867) ....... 40-

II The Peophet Of Cultuee

{Macmillan's Magazine, August 1867)

The movement against anonymous writing, in which this journal some years ago took a part, has received, I think, an undeniable accession of strength from the development (then unexpected) of Mr. Matthew Arnold. Some persons who sympathised on the whole with that movement yet felt that the case was balanced, and that if it succeeded we should have sacrified something that we could not sacrifice without regret. One felt the evils that " irresponsible reviewers " were continually inflicting on the progress of thought and society: and yet one felt that, in form and expression, anonymous writing tended to be good writing. The buoyant confidence of youth was invigorated and yet sobered by having to sustain the prestige of a well-earned reputation ; while the practised weapon of age, relieved from the restraints of responsibility, was wielded with almost the elasticity of youth. It was thought we should miss the freedom, the boldness, the reckless vivacity with which one talented writer after another had discharged his missiles from behind the common shield of a coterie of unknown extent, or at least half veiled by a pseudonym. It was thought that periodical literature would gain in carefulness, in earnestness, in sincerity, in real moral influence : but that possibly it might become just a trifle dull. "We did not >J foresee that the dashing insolences of " we-dom " that we should lose would be more than compensated by the delicate impertinences of egotism that we should gain. We did not imagine the new and exquisite literary enjoyment that would be created when a man of genius and ripe thought, perhaps even elevated by a position of academic dignity, should deliver profound truths and subtle observations with all the dogmatic authority and self-confidence of a prophet : at the same time titillating the public by something like the airs and graces, the playful affectations of a favourite comedian. We did not, in short, foresee a Matthew Arnold : and I think it must be allowed that our apprehensions have been much removed, and our cause much strengthened, by this new phenomenon.

I have called Mr. Arnold the prophet of culture : I will not call him an " elegant Jeremiah," because he seems to have been a little annoyed (he who is never annoyed) by that phrase of the Daily Tdegraph. " Jeremiah ! " he exclaims, " the very Hebrew prophet whose style I admire the least." I confess I thought the phrase tolerably felicitous for a Philistine, from whom one would not expect any very subtle discrimination of the differentiae of prophets. Nor can I quite determine which Hebrew prophet Mr. Arnold does most resemble. But it is certainly hard to compare him to Jeremiah, for Jeremiah is our type of the lugubrious ; whereas there is nothing more striking than the imperturbable cheerfulness with which Mr. Arnold seems to sustain himself on the fragment of culture that is left him, amid the deluge of Philistinism that he sees submerging our age and country. A prophet however, I gather, Mr. Arnold does not object to be called ; as such I wish to consider and weigh him ; and thus I am led to examine the lecture with which he has closed his connexion with Oxford, — the most full, distinct, and complete of the various utterances in which he has set forth the Gospel of Culture.

As it will clearly appear in the course of this article, how highly I admire Mr. Arnold as a writer, I may say at once, without reserve or qualification, that this utteranqe has disappointed me very much. It is not even so good in style as former essays ; it has more of the mannerism of repeating his own phrases, which, though very effective up to a certain point, may be carried too far. But this is a small point : and Mr. Arnold's style, when most faulty, is very charming. My complaint is that, though there is much in it beautifully and subtly said, and many fine glimpses of great truths, it is, as a whole, ambitious, vague, and perverse. It seems to me over-ambitious, because it treats of the most profound and difficult problems of individual and social life with an airy dogmatism that ignores their depth and difficulty. And though dogmatic, Mr. Arnold is yet vague ; because when he employs indefinite terms he does not attempt to limit their indefiniteness, but rather avails himself of it. Thus he speaks of the relation of culture and religion, and sums it up by saying, that the idea of culture is destined to " transform and govern " the idea of religion. Now I do not wish to be pedantic; and I think that we may discuss culture and religion, and feel that we are talking about the same social and intellectual facts, without attempting any rigorous definition of our terms. , But there is one indefiniteness that ought to be avoided. When we speak of culture and religion in common conversation, we sometimes refer to an ideal state of things and sometimes to an actual.

But if we are appraising, weighing, as it were, these two, one with the other, it is necessary to know whether it is the ideal or the actual that we are weighing. When I say ideal, I do not mean something that is not realised at all by individuals at present, but something not reaUsed sufficiently to be much called to mind by the term denoting the general social fact. I think \it clear that Mr. Arnold, when he speaks of culture, is '^peaking sometimes of an ideal, sometimes of an actual (culture, and does not always know which. He describes it in one page as " a study of perfection, moving by the force, not merely or primarily of the scientific passion for pure knowledge, but of the moral and social passion for doing good." A study of this vast aim, moving with the impetus of this double passion, is something that does, I hope, exist among us, but to a limited extent ; it is hardly that which has got itself stamped and recognised as culture. And Mr. Arnold afterwards admits as much. For we might have thought, from the words I have quoted, that we had in culture, thus possessed by the passion of doing good, a mighty social power, continually tending to make "reason and the will of God prevail." But we find that this power only acts in fine weather. " It needs times of faith and ardour to flourish in." Exactly; it is not itself a spring and source of faith and ardour. Culture " believes " in making reason and the will of God prevail, and will even " endeavour "" to make them prevail, but it must be under very favourable circumstances. This is rather a languid form of the passion of doing good ; and we feel that we have passed from the ideal culture, towards which Mr. Arnold aspires, to the actual culture in which he lives and moves.

Mr. Arnold afterwards explains to us a little further how much of the passion for doing good culture involves, and how it involves it. " 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 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." These phrases are true of culture as we know it. In using them Mr. Arnold assumes implicitly what, perhaps, should have been expressly avowed — that the study of perfection, as it forms itself in members of the human race, is naturally and primarily a study of the individual's perfection, and only incidentally and secondarily a study of the general perfection of humanity. It is so incidentally and secondarily for the two reasons Mr. Arnold gives, one internal and the other external : first, because it finds sympathy as one element of the human nature that it desires harmoniously to develop ; and secondly, because the development of one individual is bound up by the laws of the universe with the development of at least some other individuals. Still the root of culture, when examined ethically, is found to be a refined eudsemonism : in it the social impulse springs out of and re-enters into the self-regarding, which remains predominant. That is, I think, the way in which the love of culture is generally developed : an exquisite pleasure is experienced in refined states of thought and feeling, and a desire for this pleasure is generated, which may amount to a passion, and lead to the utmost intellectual and moral effort. Mr. Arnold may, perhaps, urge (and I would allow it true in certain cases) that the direct impulse towards perfection, whether realised in a man's self or in the world around, may inspire and impassion some minds, without any consideration of the enjoyment connected with it. In any case, it must be admitted that the impulse toward perfection in a man of culture is not practically limited to himself, but tends to expand in infinitely increasing circles. It is the wish of culture, taking ever wider and wider sweeps, to carry the whole race, the whole universe, harmoniously towards perfection.

And, if it were possible that aU men, under all circumstances, should feel what some men, in some fortunate spheres, may truly feel — that there is no conflict, no antagonism, between the full development of the individual and the progress of the world — I should be loth to hint at any jar or discord in this harmonious movement. But this paradisaical state of culture is rare. We dwell in it a little space, and then it vanishes into the ideal. Life shows us the conflict and the discord : on one side are the claims of harmonious self-development, on the other the cries of struggling humanity : we have hitherto let our sympathies expand along with our other refined instincts, but now they threaten to sweep us into regions from which those refined instincts shrink. Not that harmonious self-development calls on us to crV/Sh our sympathies ; it asks only that they should be a little repressed, a little kept under: we may become (as Mr. Arnold delicately words it) philanthropists " tempered by renouncement." There is much useful and important work to be done, which may be done harmoniously: still we cannot honestly say that this seems to us the most useful, the most important work, or what in the interests of the world is most pressingly entreated and demanded. This latter, if done at all, must be done as self-sacrifice, not as self-development. And so we are brought face to face with the most momentous and profound problem of ethics.

It is at this point, I think, that the relation of culture and religion is clearly tested and defined. Culture (if I have understood and analysed it rightly) inevitably takes one course. It recognises with a sigh the limits of self-development, and its first enthusiasm becomes " tempered by renouncement." Eeligion, of which the essence is self-sacrifice, inevitably takes the other course. We see this daily realised in practice : we see those we know and love, we see the ilite of humanity in history and literature, coming to this question, and after a struggle answering it : going, if they are strong clear souls, some one way and some the other ; if they are irresolute, vacillating and " moving in a strange diagonal " between the two. It is because he ignores this antagonism, which seems to me so clear and undeniable if stated without the needless and perilous exaggerations which preachers have used about it, that I have called Mr. Arnold perverse. A philosopher^ with whom he is more familiar than I am speaks, I think, of " the reconciliation of antagonisms " as the essential feature of the most important steps in the progress of humanity. I seem to see profound truth in this conception, and perhaps Mr. Arnold has intended to realise it. But, in order to reconcile antagonisms, it is needful to probe them to the bottom ; whereas Mr. Arnold skims over them with a lightly\\ won tranquillity that irritates instead of soothing. \

Of course we are all continually trying to reconcile this and other antagonisms, and many persuade themselves that they have found a reconciliation. The religious man tells himself that in obeying the instinct of self-sacrifice he has] chosen true culture, and the man of culture tells himselfl that by seeking self-development he is really taking the best course to "make reason and the will of God prevail. But I do not think either is quite convinced. I think each dimly feels that it is necessary for the world that the other

^ Hegel.

46 ESSA YS AND ADDRESSES ir

line of life should be chosen by some, and each and all look forward with yearning to a time when circumstances shall have become kinder and more pliable to our desires, and when the complex impulses of humanity that we share shall have been chastened and purified into something more easy to harmonise. And sometimes the human race seems to the €ye of enthusiasm so very near this consummation : it seems that if just a few simple things were done it would reach it. But these simple things prove mountains of difficulty ; and the end is far off. I remember saying to a friend once — a man of deep culture — that his was a " fair-weather theory of life." He answered with much earnestness, "We mean it to be fair weather henceforth." And I hope the skies are growing clearer every century ; but meanwhile there is much storm and darkness yet, and we want — the world wants — all the self-sacrifice that religion can stimulate. Culture diffuses " sweetness and light " ; I do not undervalue these ■*-i blessings : but religion gives fire and strength, and the world wants fire and strength even more than sweetness and light. Mr. Arnold feels this when he says that culture must "borrow a devout energy " from religion ; but devout energy, as Dr. Newman somewhere says, is not to be borrowed. At the ^ame time, I trust that the ideal of culture and the ideal of religion will continually approach one another : that culture will keep developing its sympathy, and gain in fire and ■strength ; that religion will teach that unnecessary self-sacrifice is folly, and that whatever tends to make life harsh and gloomy cometh of evil. And if we may allow that the progress of culture is clearly in this direction, surely we may say the same of religion. Indeed the exegetic artifices by which the Hellenic view of life is introduced and allowed a place in Christian preaching would sometimes be almost ludicrous, if they were not touching, and if they were not, on the whole, such a sign of a hopeful progress: of progress not as yet, perhaps, very great or very satisfactory, but still very distinct. I wish Mr. Arnold had recognised this. I do not think he would then have said that culture would transform ^nd absorb religion, any more than that religion wouldij

11 THE PROPHET OF CULTURE 47

transform and absorb culture. To me the ultimate and ideal relation of culture and religion is imaged like the union of the golden and silver sides of the famous shield — each leading to the same " orbed perfection " of actions and results, but shining with a diverse splendour in the light of its different principle.

Into the difficulties of this question I have barely entered ; but I hope I have shown the inadequacy of Mr. Arnold's treatment of it. I think we shall be more persuaded of this inadequacy when we have considered how he conceives of actual religion in the various forms in which it exists among us. He has but one distinct thing to say of them, — that they subdue the obvious faults of our animality. Th^^fnT-m a„snrt nf i8piT.i,f.ng1 -po,1jp.Pi : that is all. He says ^ntbinpr nf t.TiR p.motional side of religion ; of the infinite and infinitely varied vent which it gives, in its various forms, for the deepest fountains of feeling. He savs nothing of its intellectual side : of the indefinite but inevit- "abie questions about the world and human destiny into which the eternal metaphysical problems form themselves in minds of rudimentary development; questions needing confident answers — nay, imperatively demanding, it seems, from age to age, different answers : of the actual facts of psychological experience, so strangely mixed up with, and expressed in, the mere conventional " jargon " of religion (which he characterises with appropriate contempt) — how the moral growth of men and nations, while profoundly influenced and controlled by the formulae of traditional religions, is yet obedient to laws of its own, and in its turn reacts upon and modifies these formulae : of all this Mr. Arnold does not give a hint. He may say that he is not treating of religions, but of culture. But it may be replied that he is treating of the relation of culture to religions ; and that a man ought not to touch cursorily upon such a question, much less to dogmatise placidly upon it, without showing us that he has mastered the elements of the problem.

I may, perhaps, illustrate my meaning by referring to

48 ESSA YS AND ADDRESSES n

another essayist — one of the very few whom I consider superior to Mr. Arnold — one who is as strongly attached to culture as Mr. Arnold himself, and perhaps more passionately,— M. Eenan. It will be seen that I am not going to quote a partisan. From " my countryman's " judgment of our Protestant organisations I appeal boldly to a Frenchman and an infidel. Let any one turn to M. Kenan's delicate, tender, sympathetic studies of religious phenomena — I do not refer to the Vie de Jdsws, but to a much superior work, the Essais d'Histoire religieuse, — he will feel, I think, how coarse, shallow, unappreciabive, is Mr. Arnold's summing up, " they conquer the more obvious faults of our animaUty." To take one special point. When Mr. Arnold is harping on the " dissidence of Dissent," I recall the little phrase which M. Eenan throws at the magnificent fabric of Bossuet's attack upon Protestantism. " En France," he says, " on ne comprend pas qu'on se divise pour si peu de chose." M. Eenan knows that ever since the reviving intellect of Europe was turned upon theology, religious dissidence and variation has meant religious life and force. Mr. Arnold, of course, can find texts inculcating unity : how should unity not be included in the ideal of a religion claiming to be universal ? But Mr. Arnold, as a cultivated man, has read the New Testament records with the light of German erudition, and knows how much unity was attained by the Church in its fresh and fervent youth. Still, unity is a part of the ideal even of the religion that came not to send peace, but a sword : let us be grateful to any one who keeps that in view, who keeps reminding us of that. But it may be done without sneers. Mr. Arnold might know (if he would only study them a little more closely and tenderly) the passionate longing for unity that may be cherished within small dissident organisations. I am not defending them. I am not saying a word for separatism against multitudinism. But those who feel that worship ought to be the true expression of the convictions on which it is based, and out of which it grows, and that in the present fragmentary state of truth it is supremely difiicult to reconcile unity of worship with sincerity of conviction — those who know that the stmggle to realise in combination the ideals of truth and peace in many minds reaches the pitch of agony — will hardly think that Mr. Arnold's taunt is the less cruel because it is pointed with a text.

I wish it to be distinctly understood that it is as judged by his own rules and principles that I venture to condemn Mr. Arnold's treatment of our actual religions. He has said that culture in its most limited phase is curiosity ; and I quite sympathise in his effort to vindicate for this word the more exalted meaning that the French give to it. Even of j the ideal culture he considers curiosity (if I understand him rightly) to be the most essential^though not the noblest, element. Well, then, I complain that in regard to some of the most important elements of social life he has so little curiosity ; and therefore so thin and superficial an appreciation of them. I do not mean that every cultivated man ought to have formed for himself a theory of religion. " Non omnia possumus omnes," and a man must, to some extent, select the subjects that suit his special faculties. But every man of deep culture ought to have a conception of the importance and intricacy of the religious problem, a sense of the kind and amount of study that is required for it, a tact to discriminate worthy and unworthy treatment of it, an instinct which, if he has to touch on it, will guide him round the lacunae of apprehension that the limits of his nature and leisure have rendered inevitable. Now this cultivated tact, sense, instinct (Mr. Arnold could express my * meaning for me much more felicitously than I can for my- ; self), he seems to me altogether to want on this topic. He seems to me (if so humble a simile may be pardoned) to judge of religious organisations as a dog judges of human beings, chiefly by the scent. One admires in either case the exquisite development of the organ, but feels that the use of it for this particular object implies a curious, an almost ludicrous, limitation of sympathy. When these popular religions are brought before Mr. Arnold, he is content to detect their strong odours of Philistinism and

E so ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES ll

vulgarity ; he will not stoop down and look into them ; he

is not sufficiently interested in their dynamical importance ;

he does not care to penetrate the secret of their fire and

; strength, and learn the sources and effects of these ; much

■ less does he consider how sweetness and light may be added

' without any loss of fire and strength.

This limitation of view in Mr. Arnold seems to me the more extraordinary, when I compare it with the fervent language he uses with respect to what is called, par excellence, the Oxford movement. He even half associates himself with the movement — or rather he half associates the movement with himself.

It was directed, he rightly says, against " Liberalism as Dr. Newman saw it." What was this ? " It was," he explains, " the great middle class Liberalism, which had for the cardinal points of its belief the Eeform Bill of 1832 and local self-government iu politics ; in the social sphere free trade, unrestricted competition, and the making of large industrial fortunes ; in the religious sphere the dissidence of Dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion." LiberaUsm to Dr Newman may have meant something of all this ; but what (as I infer from the Apologia) it more especially meant to him was a much more intelligent force than all these, which Mr. Arnold omits : and powr cause ; for it was precisely that view of the functions of religion and its place in the social organism in which Mr. Arnold seems at least complacently to acquiesce. Liberalism, Dr. Newman thought — and it seems to me true of one phase or side of Liberalism — wished to extend just the languid patronage to religion that Mr. Arnold does. What priesthoods were good for in the eyes of Liberalism were the functions, as I have said, of spiritual police ; and that is all Mr. Arnold thinks they are good for at present ; and even in the future (unless I misunderstand him), if we want more, he would have us come to culture. But Dr. Newman knew that even the existing religions, far as they fell below his ideal, were good for much more than this ; this view of them seemed to him not only shallow and untrue, but perilous, deadly, soul-destroying; and inasmuch as it commended itself to intellectual men, and was an intelligent force, he fought against it, not, I think, with much sweetness or light, but with a blind, eager, glowing asperity which, tempered always by humility and candour, was and is very impressive. Dr. Newman fought for a point of view which it required culture to appreciate, and therefore he fought in some sense with culture ; but he did not fight for culture, and to conceive him combating side by side with Mr. Matthew Arnold is almost comical.

I think, then, that without saying more about reUgion, Mr. Arnold might have said truer things about it ; and I think also that without saying less about culture — we have a strong need of all he can say to recommend it — he might have shown that he was alive to one or two of its besetting faults. And some notice of these might have strengthened his case ; for he might have shown that the faults of culture really arise from lack of culture ; and that more culture, deeper and truer culture, removes them. I have ventured to hint this in speaking of Mr. Arnold's tone about religion. What I dislike in it seems to me, when examined, to be exactly what he calls Philistinism ; just as when he commences his last lecture before a great university by referring to his petty literary squabbles, he seems to me guilty of what he calls " provincialism." And so, again, the attitude that] culture often assumes towards enthusiasm in general seems' to spring from narrowness, from imperfection of culture. > The fostering care of culture, and a soft application of sweetness and light, might do so much for enthusiasm — enthusiasm does so much want it. Enthusiasm is often a turbid issue of smoke and sparks. Culture might refine this to a steady glow. It is melancholy when, instead, it takes to pouring cold water on it. The worst result is not the natural hissing and sputtering that ensues, though that cannot be pleasing to culture or to anything else, but the waste of power that is the inevitable consequence.

It is wrong to exaggerate the antagonism between enthusiasm and culture ; because, in the first place, culture has an enthusiasm of its own, by virtue of which indeed, as Mr. Arnold contemplates, it is presently to transcend and absorb religion. But at present this enthusiasm, so far from being adequate to this, is hardly sufficient — is often insufiScient — to prevent culture degenerating into dilettantism. In the second place, culture has an appreciation of enthusiasm (with the source of which it has nothing to do), when that enthusiasm is beautiful and picturesque, or thrilling and sublime, as it often is. But the enthusiasm must be very picturesque, very sublime ; upon some completed excellence of form culture will rigorously insist. May it not be that culture is short-sighted and pedantic in the rigour of these demands, and thus really defeats its own ends, just as it is often liable to do by purely artistic pedantry and conventionality ? If it had larger and healthier sympathies, it might see beauty in the stage of becoming (if I may use a German phrase), in much rough and violent work at which it now shudders. In pure art culture is always erring on the side of antiquity — much more in its sympathy with the actual life of men and society. In some of the most beautiful lines he has written, Owen Meredith expresses a truth that deserves to be set in beautiful language :

I know tliat all acted time By that which succeeds it is ever received As calmer, completer, and more sublime, Only because it is finished ; because We only behold the thing it achieved, We behold not the thing that it was.

For while it stands whole and immutable In the marble of memory, how can we tell What the men that have hewn at the block may have been ? Their passion is merged in its passionleasness ; Their strife in its stillness closed for ever ; Their change upon change in its changeleasness ; In its final achievement their feverish endeavour.

Passion, strife, feverish endeavour — surely in the midst of these have been produced not only the rough blocks with which the common world builds, but the jewels with which culture is adorned. Culture the other day thought Mr. Garrison a very prosy and uninteresting person, and did not see why so much fuss should he made about him ; but I should not be surprised if in a hundred years or so he were found to be poetical and picturesque.

And I will go farther, and plead for interests duller and vulgarer than any fanaticism.