Culture and Anarchy by Mathew Arnold Essay

My first design in writing this Preface is to address a playscript of exhortation to the Society for Promoting Christian knowledge. In the experi ment which follows, the lector entrust often cardinalth dimensions find Bishop Wilson quoted. To me and to the members of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge his name and compact holds be still, no doubt, familiar but the field is fast exhalation a counsel from old-fashi superstard people of his sort, and I learnt with consternation tardily from a brilliant and distinguished votary of the natural sciences, that he had n ever so so frequently as heard of Bishop Wilson, and that he imagined me to demand invented him.At a flake when the Courts of Law defecate just taken off the embargo from the recreative morality furnished on Sundays by my gifted acquaintance and others, and when St. Martins house iv and the Alhambra pass on soon be beginning again to resound with their pulpit-eloquence, it distresses whiz to view that the new lights should non only wipe out, in ordinary, a very(prenominal) low opinion of the preachers of the old godliness, but that they should make up it with knocked prohibited(p) knowing the outperform that these preachers stack do.And that they argon in this case is owing in part, certainly, to the disuse of the Christian Knowledge Society. In old times they used to shanghai and spread abroad Bishop Wilsons Maxims of Piety and Christianity the double of this cut back which I use is one of their publications, bearing their imprint, and bound in the well-kn ready got cook 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 monthlong one of those printed and circulated by the Society.Hence the error, flattering, I accept, to me person entirelyy, to that degree in itself to be regretted, of the distinguished physicist already mentioned. nevertheless Bishop Wilsons Maxim s merit to be circulated as a phantasmal keep back, non only by comparison with the cartloads of rubbish circulated at arrange under this designation, but for their own sake, and even by comparison with the other works of the akin v author. everyw present the far better known Sacra Privata they have this advantage, that they were prepared 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, exchangeable a work of, doubtless, far deeper sensation and power, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, aroundwhat social occasion peculiarly sincere and first-hand about them. Some of the exceed things from the Maxims have passed into the Sacra Privata still, in the Maxims, we have them as they first arose and w hereas, too, in the Sacra Privata the writer speaks very often as one of the clergy, and as addressing the clergy, in the Maxims he al approximately eer speak s solely as a gentlemans gentleman.I am non aspect a intelligence transaction against the Sacra Privata, for which I have the highest respect only the Maxims face to me a better and a to a greater extent edifying book still. They should be read, as Joubert separates Nicole should be read, with a direct aim at practice. The reader pull up stakes 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 suit him enough vi will remain to serve as a sample of the very best, perhaps, which our nation and career can buoy do in the way of religious writing.Monsieur Michelet makes it a damage to us that, in alone the doubt as to the real author of the Imitation, no one has ever dreamed of ascribing that work to an Englishman. It is true, the Imitation could not well have been write by an Englishman the religious airiness and the profound asceticism of that admirable book are hardly i n our character.This would be to a greater extent of a reproach to us if in poetry, which requires, no less than devotion, a true delicacy of spiritual perception, our race had not done such great things and if the Imitation, prim as it is, did not, as I have elsewhere re scrawled, give-up the ghost to a class of works in which the perfect balance of human nature is lost, and which have thitherfore, as spiritual productions, in their contents something excessive and morbid, in their form something not thoroughly sound.On a lower tell than the Imitation, and awakening in our nature chords less poetical and delicate, the Maxims of Bishop Wilson are, as a religious work, far to a greater extent solid. To the most sincere ardour and oleaginousness, Bishop Wilson unites, in these Maxims, that downright honesty vii and plain substantially consciousness which our English race has so power largey applied to the divine impossibilities of religion by which it has brought religion so mu ch into practical life, and has done its allotted part in promoting upon earth the kingdom of God.But with ardour and unction religion, as we all know, whitethorn still be fanatical with honesty and substantially sense, it may still be declension(a) 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 perfection of them, which makes this untoward result impossible his unction is so perfect, and in such happy alliance with his good sense, that it becomes affectionateness 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 soon enough a type of a far higher signifier than is in ecumenic reached by Bishop Wilsons countrymen and yet, being English, it is possible and getatable for them. And so I conclude as I began, by proverb 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 sideline essay.The whole scope of the essay is to recommend elaboration as the great friend out of our present difficulties culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by way 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, going a current of sweet-smelling and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow stanchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a virtue in spare-time activity 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 t he 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 dead free from all shadow of reproach.And yet, futile as are m all an(prenominal) bookmen, and helpless as books and course session often prove for bringing near to perfection those who ix use them, one mustiness, 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 set 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 awardn 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 experienc e. If a man without books or reading, or reading nothing but his garner 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 gossipk culture that it may give us. This secret operating theatre 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 misinterpret whereby the essential interiorness of the x operation is lost sight of.We are supposed, when we knock by the help of culture some imperfect doing or other, to have in our eye some well-known rival plan of doing, which we postulate to serve and recommend. Thus, for instance, because I have freely pointed out the dangers and inconveniences to which our literature is open(a) in the absence of any centr e of taste and authority same(p) the French Academy, it is constantly said that I indispensability to introduce here in England an institution like the French Academy.I have then expressly declared that I deprivationed no such thing but let us notice how it is just our worship of machinery, and of exterior doing, 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 craftly 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 suggests 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 lowly any Academy, such as we should be belike to get, would cure them. Every one who knows the character istics of our national life, and the tendencies so fully discussed in the following pages, knows exactly what an English Academy would be like.One can imagine the happy family in ones discernments 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 bang 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 also hinder us from making our Academy, if we established it, one which would really correct them. And culture, which shows us very 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 study 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 pick to teach his three or four hours a day without memory a wild boarding-house and that there are great dangers in cramming little boys of octad or ten and making them compete for an object of great value to their parents and, again, that the manufacture and supply 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, combine the functions of teaching and of belongings 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,) engage d in preparing little boys for agonistic 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 learn and distinguished editor of the Quarterly Review, is, as we all know, xiii the compiler of school-books meritorious and many.This is 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 fine 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 salvage 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 offering in fact himself as evidence that to combine boarding-house- keeping with teaching is a good hing, and his brother as evidence that to neaten 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 trained at Eton) with the same spirit, and made him present 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 wrong 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 valiant 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 heat 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 follow 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 utility depends upon our being able to clear 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 devil 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 uncongeniality of the Protestant Nonconformists, English and Scotch, to establishments, we are 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 cheek. More than a few delivery we must give to showing how erroneous are these charges because if they were true, we should be actually subverting our own design, and playacting 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 military personnel 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 the 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 mangle men in conse quence. Thus falling short of harmonious xvii perfection, they lead astray 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 bewilderment in which our society now labours is increased by the Nonconformists rather than debased by them. 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 work force 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 and then 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 papistical Catholics, who have never yet been seriously asked to accept it, but who would a good deal embarrass him if they demanded it. And we see philosophical politicians, with a turn for go 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 induction and solemnity to this antipathy of the Nonconformists, and to dress it out as a natural law of human progress in the future. Now, nothing can be pleasanter t han 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 discipline of their humanity is what the Nonconformists most want, that narrowness, one-sidedness, 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 center 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 trained in them. A Nonconfor mist 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 put to work upon the conduct of statesmen as that Church which is both established and endowed. That depends upon what one means by moral and ennobling influence. The believer in machinery may think that to get a Government to abolish Church-rates or to legalise spousal relationship with a deceased wifes sister is to exert a moral and ennobling influence xx upon Government.But a lover 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 the ir 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 teaching 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 no t lose by these conditions of his rearing, the citizen, and the State of which he is a citizen, loses.