Culture and Anarchy by Matthew Arnold

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This etext was produced by Alfred J. Drake, Ph.D.

CULTURE AND ANARCHY: AN ESSAY IN POLITICAL AND SOCIAL CRITICISM
1869, FIRST EDITION
MATTHEW ARNOLD

Chapter Notes: I have indicated the author's notes with a superscript
asterisk *, my own substantive notes with a superscript + sign, and
my nonsubstantive notes with a superscript ± symbol.

Pagination: The text following a given page number in brackets marks
the beginning of that page, as in the following example: [22] This is
page twenty-two. [23] This is page twenty-three.

CONTENTS

Preface: iii-lx
I: 1-50 (Sweetness and Light)
II: 51-92 (Doing as One Likes)
III: 93-141 (Barbarians, Philistines, Populace)
IV: 142-166 (Hebraism and Hellenism)
V: 166-197 (Porro Unum est Necessarium)
VI: 197-272 (Our Liberal Practitioners)

*Note: in the first edition, chapters are numbered only, not named.
I have added the third edition's titles for reference.

CULTURE AND ANARCHY (1869, FIRST EDITION)

PREFACE

[iii] My foremost design in writing this Preface is to address a word
of exhortation to the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. In
the essay which follows, the reader will often find Bishop Wilson
quoted. To me and to the members of the Society for Promoting
Christian Knowledge his name and writings are still, no doubt,
familiar; but the world is fast going away from old-fashioned people
of his sort, and I learnt with consternation lately from a brilliant
and distinguished votary of the natural sciences, that he had never
so much as heard of Bishop Wilson, and that he imagined me to have
invented him. At a moment when the Courts of Law have just taken off
the embargo from the recreative religion furnished on Sundays by my
gifted acquaintance and others, and when St. Martin's Hall [iv] and
the Alhambra will soon be beginning again to resound with their
pulpit-eloquence, it distresses one to think that the new lights
should not only have, in general, a very low opinion of the preachers
of the old religion, but that they should have it without knowing the
best that these preachers can do. And that they are in this case is
owing in part, certainly, to the negligence of the Christian
Knowledge Society. In old times they used to print and spread abroad
Bishop Wilson's Maxims of Piety and Christianity; the copy of this
work which I use is one of their publications, bearing their imprint,
and bound in the well-known brown calf which they made familiar to
our childhood; but the date of my copy is 1812. I know of no copy
besides, and I believe the work is no longer one of those printed and
circulated by the Society. Hence the error, flattering, I own, to me
personally, yet in itself to be regretted, of the distinguished
physicist already mentioned.

But Bishop Wilson's Maxims deserve to be circulated as a religious
book, not only by comparison with the cartloads of rubbish circulated
at present under this designation, but for their own sake, and even
by comparison with the other works of the same [v] author. Over the
far better known Sacra Privata they have this advantage, that they
were 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, like a work of,
doubtless, far deeper emotion and power, the Meditations of Marcus
Aurelius, something peculiarly sincere and first-hand about them.
Some of the best things from the Maxims have passed into the Sacra
Privata; still, in the Maxims, we have them as they first arose; and
whereas, too, in the Sacra Privata the writer speaks very often as
one of the clergy, and as addressing the clergy, in the Maxims he
almost always speaks solely as a man. I am not saying a word against
the Sacra Privata, for which I have the highest respect; only the
Maxims seem to me a better and a more edifying book still. They
should be read, as Joubert says Nicole should be read, with a direct
aim at practice. The reader will leave on one side things which,
from the change of time and from the changed point of view which the
change of time inevitably brings with it, no longer suit him; enough
[vi] will remain to serve as a sample of the very best, perhaps,
which our nation and race can do in the way of religious writing.
Monsieur Michelet makes it a reproach to us that, in all 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 written by an Englishman; the religious
delicacy and the profound asceticism of that admirable book are
hardly in our nature. This would be more of a reproach to us if in
poetry, which requires, no less than religion, a true delicacy of
spiritual perception, our race had not done such great things; and if
the Imitation, exquisite as it is, did not, as I have elsewhere
remarked, belong to a class of works in which the perfect balance of
human nature is lost, and which have therefore, as spiritual
productions, in their contents something excessive and morbid, in
their form something not thoroughly sound. On a lower range than the
Imitation, and awakening in our nature chords less poetical and
delicate, the Maxims of Bishop Wilson are, as a religious work, far
more solid. To the most sincere ardour and unction, Bishop Wilson
unites, in these Maxims, that downright honesty [vii] and plain good
sense which our English race has so powerfully applied to the divine
impossibilities of religion; by which it has brought religion so much
into practical 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, may still be fanatical; with honesty and good sense, it
may still be prosaic; and the fruit of honesty and good sense united
with ardour and unction is often only a prosaic religion held
fanatically. Bishop Wilson's 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 tenderness
and fervent charity; his good sense is so perfect and in such happy
alliance with his unction, that it becomes moderation and insight.
While, therefore, the type of religion exhibited in his Maxims is
English, it is yet a type of a far higher kind than is in general
reached by Bishop Wilson's countrymen; and yet, being English, it is
possible and attainable for them. And so I conclude as I began, by
saying that a work of this sort is one which the Society for
Promoting Christian [viii] Knowledge should not suffer to remain out
of print or out of currency.

To pass now to the matters canvassed in the following essay. The
whole scope of the essay is to recommend culture as the great help
out of our present difficulties; culture being a pursuit of our total
perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most
concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world,
and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free
thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow
staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a virtue
in following them staunchly which makes up for the mischief of
following them mechanically. This, and this alone, is the scope of
the following essay. I say again here, what I have said in the pages
which follow, that from the faults and weaknesses of bookmen a notion
of something bookish, pedantic, and futile has got itself more or
less connected with the word culture, and that it is a pity we cannot
use a word more perfectly free from all shadow of reproach. And yet,
futile as are many bookmen, and helpless as books and reading often
prove for bringing nearer to perfection those who [ix] use them, one
must, I think, be struck more and more, the longer one lives, to find
how much, in our present society, a man's life of each day depends
for its solidity and value on whether he reads during that day, and,
far more still, on what he reads during it. More and more he who
examines himself will find the difference it makes to him, at the end
of any given day, whether or no he has pursued his avocations
throughout it without reading at all; and whether or no, having read
something, he has read the newspapers only. This, however, is a
matter for each man's private conscience and experience. If a man
without books or reading, or reading nothing but his letters and the
newspapers, gets nevertheless a fresh and free play of the best
thoughts upon his stock notions and habits, he has got culture. He
has got that for which we prize and recommend culture; he has got
that which at the present moment we seek culture that it may give us.
This inward operation is the very life and essence of culture, as we
conceive it.

Nevertheless, it is not easy so to frame one's discourse concerning
the operation of culture, as to avoid giving frequent occasion to a
misunderstanding whereby the essential inwardness of the [x]
operation is lost sight of. We are supposed, when we criticise by
the help of culture some imperfect doing or other, to have in our eye
some well-known rival plan of doing, which we want to serve and
recommend. Thus, for instance, because I have freely pointed out the
dangers and inconveniences to which our literature is exposed in the
absence of any centre of taste and authority like the French Academy,
it is constantly said that I want to introduce here in England an
institution like the French Academy. I have indeed expressly
declared that I wanted no such thing; but let us notice how it is
just our worship of machinery, and of external 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 blindly flying to this outward
machinery of an Academy, in order to help ourselves. For the very
same culture and free inward play of thought which shows us how the
Corinthian style, or the whimsies about the One Primeval Language,
are generated and strengthened in the absence of an [xi] Academy,
shows us, too, how little any Academy, such as we should be likely to
get, would cure them. Every one who knows the characteristics 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
see the happy family in one's mind's eye as distinctly as if it was
already constituted. Lord Stanhope, the Bishop of Oxford, Mr.
Gladstone, the Dean of Westminster, Mr. Froude, Mr. Henry Reeve,--
everything which is influential, accomplished, and distinguished; and
then, some fine morning, a dissatisfaction of the public mind with
this brilliant and select coterie, a flight of Corinthian leading
articles, and an irruption of Mr. G. A. Sala. Clearly, this is not
what will do us good. The very same faults,--the want of
sensitiveness of intellectual conscience, the disbelief in right
reason, the dislike of authority,--which have hindered our having an
Academy and have worked injuriously in our literature, would also
hinder us from making our Academy, if we established it, one which
would really correct them. And culture, which shows us truly the
faults, shows us this also just as truly.

[xii] It is by a like sort of misunderstanding, again, that Mr. Oscar
Browning, one of the assistant-masters at Eton, takes up in the
Quarterly Review the cudgels for Eton, as if I had attacked Eton,
because I have said, in a book about foreign schools, that a man may
well prefer to teach his three or four hours a day without keeping a
boarding-house; and that there are great dangers in cramming little
boys of eight or ten and making them compete for an object of great
value to their parents; and, again, that the manufacture and 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 keeping a boarding-house;
that he knows excellent men (and, indeed, well he may, for a brother
of his own, I am told, is one of the best of them,) engaged in
preparing little boys for competitive examinations, and that the
result, as tested at Eton, gives perfect satisfaction. And as to
school-books he adds, finally, that Dr. William Smith, the learned
and distinguished editor of the Quarterly Review, is, as we all know,
[xiii] the compiler of school-books meritorious and many. This 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 finer example of that frankness and manly self-
confidence which our great public schools, and none of them so much
as Eton, are supposed to inspire, of that buoyant ease in holding up
one's head, speaking out what is in one's 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 thing, and his brother as evidence
that to train and race little boys for competitive examinations is a
good thing? Nay, and one sees that this frank-hearted Eton self-
confidence is contagious; for has not Mr. Oscar Browning managed to
fire Dr. William Smith (himself, no doubt, the modestest man alive,
and never trained at Eton) with the same spirit, and made him insert
in his own Review a puff, so to speak, of his own school-books,
declaring that they are (as they are) meritorious and many?
Nevertheless, Mr. Oscar Browning is 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 heroic ancestor,
Malvina's Oscar, as they are recorded by the family poet, Ossian, is
unnecessary. "The wild boar rushes over their tombs, but he does not
disturb their repose. They still love the sport of their youth, and
mount the wind with joy." All I meant to say was, that there were
unpleasantnesses in uniting the keeping a boarding-house with
teaching, and dangers in cramming and racing little boys for
competitive examinations, and charlatanism and extravagance in the
manufacture and supply of our school-books. But when Mr. Oscar
Browning tells us that all these have been happily got rid of in his
case, and his brother's case, and Dr. William Smith's 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 usefulness 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 culture's 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
two 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
antipathy of the Protestant Nonconformists, English and Scotch, to
establishments, we are charged with being dreamers of dreams, which
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 Establishment. More than a few words
we must give to showing how erroneous are these charges; because if
they were true, we should be actually subverting our own design, and
playing false to that culture which it is our very purpose to
recommend.

Certainly we are no enemies of the Nonconformists; [xvi] for, on the
contrary, what we aim at is their perfection. Culture, which is the
study of perfection, leads us, as we in the following pages have
shown, to conceive of true human perfection as a harmonious
perfection, developing all sides of our humanity; and as a general
perfection, developing all parts of our society. For if one member
suffer, the other members must suffer with it; and the fewer there
are that follow the true way of salvation the harder that way is to
find. And while 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 mutilated men in
consequence. Thus falling short of harmonious [xvii] perfection,
they fail to follow the true way of salvation. Therefore that way is
made the harder for others to find, general perfection is put further
off out of our reach, and the confusion and perplexity in which our
society now labours is increased by the Nonconformists rather than
diminished by 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 hands on an Establishment
which is efficient and popular, like the Anglican Establishment here
in England, yet it is in the abstract a fine and good thing that
religion should [xviii] be left to the voluntary support of its
promoters, and should thus gain in energy and independence; and Mr.
Gladstone has no words strong enough to express his admiration of the
refusal of State-aid by the Irish Roman Catholics, who have never yet
been seriously asked to accept it, but who would a good deal
embarrass him if they demanded it. And we see philosophical
politicians, with a turn for swimming with the stream, like Mr.
Baxter or Mr. Charles Buxton, and philosophical divines with the same
turn, like the Dean of Canterbury, seeking to give a sort of grand
stamp of generality and solemnity to this antipathy of the
Nonconformists, and to dress it out as a law of human progress in the
future. Now, nothing can be pleasanter than swimming with the
stream; and we might gladly, if we could, try in our unsystematic way
to help Mr. Baxter, and Mr. Charles Buxton, and the Dean of
Canterbury, in their labours at once philosophical and popular. But
we have got fixed in our minds that a more full and harmonious
development of their humanity is what the Nonconformists most want,
that narrowness, one-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 totality they fall short.

And they fall short more than the members of Establishments. The
great works by which, not only in literature, art, and science
generally, but in religion itself, the human spirit has manifested
its approaches to totality, and a full, harmonious perfection, and by
which it stimulates and helps forward the world's general perfection,
come, not from Nonconformists, but from men who either belong to
Establishments or have been trained in them. A Nonconformist
minister, the Rev. Edward White, who has lately written a temperate
and well-reasoned pamphlet against Church Establishments, says that
"the unendowed and unestablished communities of England exert full as
much moral and ennobling influence upon the conduct of statesmen as
that Church which is both established and endowed." That depends upon
what one means by moral and ennobling influence. The believer in
machinery may think that to get a Government to abolish Church-rates
or to legalise marriage with a deceased wife's 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 their conduct than communities which
have produced the Nonconformist divines. The fruitful men of English
Puritanism and Nonconformity are men who were trained within the pale
of the Establishment,--Milton, Baxter, Wesley. A generation or two
outside the Establishment, and Puritanism produces men of national
mark no more. With the same doctrine and discipline, men of national
mark are produced in Scotland; but in an Establishment. With the
same doctrine and discipline, men of national and even European mark
are produced in Germany, Switzerland, France; but in Establishments.
Only two religious disciplines seem exempted; or comparatively
exempted, from the operation of the law which seems to forbid the
rearing, outside of national establishments, of men of the [xxi]
highest spiritual significance. These two are the Roman Catholic and
the Jewish. And these, both of them, rest on Establishments, which,
though not indeed national, are cosmopolitan; and perhaps here, what
the individual man does not lose by these conditions of his rearing,
the citizen, and the State of which he is a citizen, loses.

What, now, can be the reason of this undeniable provincialism of the
English Puritans and Protestant Nonconformists, a provincialism which
has two main types,--a bitter type and a smug type,--but which in
both its types is vulgarising, and thwarts the full perfection of our
humanity? Men of genius and character are born and reared in this
medium as in any other. From the faults of the mass such men will
always be comparatively free, and they will always excite our
interest; yet in this medium they seem to have a special difficulty
in breaking through what bounds them, and in developing their
totality. Surely the reason is, that the Nonconformist is not in
contact with the main current of national life, like the member of an
Establishment. In a matter of such deep and vital concern as
religion, this separation from the main current of the national life
has [xxii] peculiar importance. In the following essay we have
discussed at length the tendency in us to Hebraise, as we call it;
that is, to sacrifice all other sides of our being to the religious
side. This tendency has its cause in the divine beauty and grandeur
of religion, and bears affecting testimony to them; but we have seen
that it has dangers for us, we have seen that it leads to a narrow
and twisted growth of our religious side itself, and to a failure in
perfection. But if we tend to Hebraise even in an Establishment,
with the main current of national life flowing round us, and
reminding us in all ways of the variety and fulness of human
existence,--by a Church which is historical as the State itself is
historical, and whose order, ceremonies, and monuments reach, like
those of the State, far beyond any fancies and devisings of ours, and
by institutions such as the Universities, formed to defend and
advance that very culture and many-sided development which it is the
danger of Hebraising to make us neglect,--how much more must we tend
to Hebraise when we lack these preventives. One may say that to be
reared a member of an Establishment is in itself a lesson of
religious moderation, and a help towards [xxiii] culture and
harmonious perfection. Instead of battling for his own private forms
for expressing the inexpressible and defining the undefinable, a man
takes those which have commended themselves most to the religious
life of his nation; and while he may be sure that within those forms
the religious side of his own nature may find its satisfaction, he
has leisure and composure to satisfy other sides of his nature as
well.

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