Part 9

In the lectures on _Celtic Literature_ Arnold points out, in closing, that it has been his aim to lead Englishmen to “reunite themselves with their better mind and with the world through science”; that he has sought to help them “conquer the hard unintelligence, which was just then their bane; to supple and reduce it by culture, by a growth in the variety, fulness, and sweetness of their spiritual life.” In the Preface to his first volume of _Essays_ he explains that he is trying “to pull out a few more stops in that powerful, but at present somewhat narrow-toned organ, the modern Englishman.” In _Culture and Anarchy_ he assures us that his object is to convince men of the value of “culture”; to incite them to the pursuit of “perfection”; to help “make reason and the will of God prevail.” And, again, in the same work he declares that he is striving to intensify throughout England “the impulse to the development of the whole man, to connecting and harmonizing all parts of him, perfecting all, leaving none to take their chance.”

These phrases give, often with capricious picturesqueness, hints of the prevailing intention with which Arnold writes. They may well be supplemented by a series of phrases in which, in similarly picturesque fashion, he finds fault with life as it actually exists in England, with the individual Englishman as he encounters him from day to day; these phrases, through their critical implications, also reveal the purpose that is always present in Arnold’s mind, when he addresses his countrymen. “Provinciality,” Arnold points out as a widely prevalent and injurious characteristic of English literature; it argues a lack of centrality, carelessness of ideal excellence, undue devotion to relatively unimportant matters. Again, “arbitrariness” and “eccentricity” are noticeable traits both of English literature and scholarship; Arnold finds them everywhere deforming Professor Newman’s interpretations of Homer, and he further comments on them as in varying degrees “the great defect of English intellect--the great blemish of English literature.” In religion he takes special exception to the “loss of totality” that results from sectarianism; this is the penalty, Arnold contends, that the Nonconformist pays for his hostility to the established church; in his pursuit of his own special enthusiasm the Nonconformist becomes, like Ephraim, “a wild ass alone by himself.”

From all these brief quotations this much at least is plain, that what Arnold is continually recommending is the complete development of the human type, and that what he is condemning is departure from some finely conceived ideal of human excellence--from some scheme of human nature in which all its powers have full and harmonious play. The various phrases that have been quoted, alike the positive and the negative ones, imply, as Arnold’s continual purpose in his prose-writings, the recommendation of this ideal of human excellence and the illustration of the evils that result from its neglect. Evidently, his imagination is haunted by some symmetrical scheme of character--by some exquisitely conceived pattern of perfection--wherein manners and knowledge, and passion and religion, all have their due value, and work together for righteousness. With this scheme in mind, he goes through the length and breadth of England, scanning each class of men he meets, and questioning how far its members conform to his type. And his continual purpose is to stir in the minds of his fellow-countrymen as keen a sense as may be of the value of this perfect type and of the dangers of disregarding it. The significance and the scope of this purpose will become clearer if we consider some of the imperfect ideals that Arnold finds operative in place of his absolute ideal, and note their misleading and depraving effects.

One such partial ideal is the worship of the excessively practical and the relentlessly utilitarian as the only things in life worth while. England is a prevailingly practical nation, and our age is a prevailingly practical age; the unregenerate product of this nation and age is the Philistine, and against the Philistine Arnold never wearies of inveighing. The Philistine is the swaggering enemy of the children of light, of the chosen people, of those who love art and ideas disinterestedly. The Philistine cares solely for business, for developing the material resources of the country, for starting companies, building bridges, making railways, and establishing plants. The machinery of life--its material organization--monopolizes all his attention. He judges of life by the outside, and is careless of the things of the spirit. The Philistine may, of course, be religious; but his religion is as materialistic as his every-day existence; his heaven is a triumph of engineering skill, and his ideal of future bliss is, in Sydney Smith’s phrase, to eat “_pâtés de foie gras_ to the sound of trumpets.” Against men of this class Arnold cannot show himself too cynically severe. They are pitiful distortions; the practical instincts have usurped, and have destroyed the symmetry and integrity of the human type. The senses and the will to live are monopolizing and determine all the man’s energy toward utilitarian ends. The power of beauty, the power of intellect and knowledge, the power of social manners, are atrophied. Society is in serious danger unless men of this class can be touched with a sense of their shortcomings; made aware of the larger values of life; made pervious to ideas; brought to recognize the importance of the things of the mind and the spirit.

Another partial ideal, the prevalence of which Arnold laments, is the narrowly and unintelligently religious ideal. The middle-class Englishman is, according to Arnold, a natural “Hebraist”; his whole energy is spent, when he is at his best, in the struggle to obey certain traditional rules of morality. In the origin of these rules, or in the question as to whether or no they be founded in right reason, he has little or no interest. In general, he is careless or contemptuous of speculation and of whatever savours of philosophy. He is intent upon the fulfilment of a conventional code of duty. _Conduct_, narrowly conceived, is his only concern in life. Beauty has no charm for him; art, no meaning. The free play of mind in the disinterested pursuit of truth seems waste of energy or even vicious self-assertion. All the bright irresponsibility, the sparkling delight in life and in thought for their own sakes, that are characteristic of what Arnold calls the “Hellenistic” temper--its burning eagerness to _know_, its strenuous will to be _sure_ that its truth is really truth--all these qualities and instincts seem to the Hebraist abnormal, pagan, altogether evil. The Puritanism of the seventeenth century was the almost unrestricted expression of the Hebraistic temper, and from the conceptions of life that were then wrought out the middle classes in England have never wholly escaped. The Puritans looked out upon life with a narrow vision, recognized only a few of its varied interests, and provided for the needs of only a part of man’s nature. Yet their theories and conceptions of life--theories and conceptions that were limited in the first place by the age in which they originated, and in the second place by a Hebraistic lack of sensitiveness to the manifold charm of beauty and knowledge--these limited theories and conceptions have imposed themselves constrainingly on many generations of Englishmen. To-day they remain, in all their narrowness and with an ever-increasing disproportion to existing conditions, the most influential guiding principles of large masses of men. Such men spend their lives in a round of petty religious meetings and employments. They think all truth is summed up in their little cut-and-dried Biblical interpretations. New truth is uninteresting or dangerous. Art distracts from religion, and is a siren against whose seductive chanting the discreet religious Ulysses seals his ears. To Arnold this whole view of life seems sadly mistaken, and the men who hold it seem fantastic distortions of the authentic human type. The absurdities and the dangers of the unrestricted Hebraistic ideal he satirizes or laments in _Culture and Anarchy_, in _Literature and Dogma_, in _God and the Bible_, and in _St. Paul and Protestantism_.

Still another kind of deformity arises when the intellect grows self-assertive and develops overweeningly. To this kind of distortion the modern man of science is specially prone; his exclusive study of material facts leads to crude, unregenerate strength of intellect, and leaves him careless of the value truth may have for the spirit and of its glimmering suggestions of beauty. Yes, and for the philosopher and the scholar, too, over-intellectualism has its peculiar dangers. The devotee of a system of thought is apt to lose touch with the real values of life, and in his exorbitant desire for unity and thoroughness of organization, to miss the free play of vital forces that gives to life its manifold charm, its infinite variety, and its ultimate reality. Bentham and Comte are examples of the evil effects of this rabid pursuit of system. “Culture is always assigning to system-makers and systems a smaller share in the bent of human destiny than their friends like.” As for the pedant, he is merely the miser of facts, who grows withered in hoarding the vain fragments of precious ore of whose use he has lost the sense. Men of all these various types offend through their fanatical devotion to truth; for, indeed, as some one has in recent years well said, the intellect is “but a _parvenu_,” and the other powers of life, despite the Napoleonic irresistibleness of the new-comer, have rights that deserve respect. Over-intellectualism, then, like the over-development of any other power, leads to disproportion and disorder.

Such being some of the partial ideals against which Arnold warns his readers, what account does he give of that perfect human type in all its integrity, in terms of which he criticises these aberrations or deformities? Perhaps Arnold felt that any attempt at an exact and systematic definition of this type would be somewhat grotesque and presumptuous; at any rate, he has avoided such an attempt. Still, he has recorded clearly, in many passages, his ideas as regards the powers in man that are essential to perfect humanity, and that must all be duly recognized and developed, if man is to attain in full scope what nature offers. A representative passage may be quoted from the lecture on _Literature and Science_: “When we set ourselves to enumerate the powers which go to the building up of human life, and say that they are the power of conduct, the power of intellect and knowledge, the power of beauty, and the power of social life and manners, he [Professor Huxley] can hardly deny that this scheme, though drawn in rough and plain lines enough, and not pretending to scientific exactness, does yet give a fairly true representation of the matter. Human nature is built up of these powers; we have the need for them all. When we have rightly met and adjusted the claims for them all, we shall then be in a fair way for getting soberness and righteousness with wisdom.”

These same ideas are presented, under a somewhat different aspect and with somewhat different terminology, in the first chapter of _Culture and Anarchy_: “The great aim of culture [is] the aim of setting ourselves to ascertain what perfection is and to make it prevail.” Culture seeks “the determination of this question through all the voices of human experience which have been heard upon it,--of art, science, poetry, philosophy, history, as well as of religion,--in order to give a greater fulness and certainty to its solution.... 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. It places it in the ever-increasing efficacy and in the general harmonious expansion 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.’”

In such passages as these Arnold comes as near as he ever comes to defining the perfect human type. He does not profess to define it universally and in abstract terms, for indeed he “hates” abstractions almost as inveterately as Burke hated them. He does not even describe concretely for men of his own time and nation the precise equipoise of powers essential to perfection. Yet he names these powers, suggests the ends towards which they must by their joint working contribute, and illustrates, through examples, the evil effects of the preponderance or absence of one and another. Finally, in the course of his many discussions, he describes in detail the method by which the delicate adjustment of these rival powers may be secured in the typical man; suggests who is to be the judge of the conflicting claims of these powers, and indicates the process by which this judge may most persuasively lay his opinions before those whom he wishes to influence. The method for the attainment of the perfect type is _culture_; the censor of defective types and the judge of the rival claims of the coöperant powers is the _critic_; and the process by which this judge clarifies his own ideas and enforces his opinions on others is _criticism_.

III

We are now at the centre of Arnold’s theory of life and hold the key to his system of belief, so far as he had a system. His reasons for attaching to the work of the critic the importance he palpably attached to it are at once apparent. Criticism is the method by which the perfect type of human nature is at any moment to be apprehended and kept in uncontaminate clearness of outline before the popular imagination. The ideal critic is the man of nicest discernment in matters intellectual, moral, æsthetic, social; of perfect equipoise of powers; of delicately pervasive sympathy; of imaginative insight; who grasps comprehensively the whole life of his time; who feels its vital tendencies and is intimately aware of its most insistent preoccupations; who also keeps his orientation towards the unchanging norms of human endeavour; and who is thus able to note and set forth the imperfections in existing types of human nature and to urge persuasively a return in essential particulars to the normal type. The function of criticism, then, is the vindication of the ideal human type against perverting influences, and Arnold’s prose-writings will for the most part be found to have been inspired in one form or another by a single purpose: the correction of excess in some human activity and the restoration of that activity to its proper place among the powers that make up the ideal human type.

_Culture and Anarchy_ (1869) was the first of Arnold’s books to illustrate adequately this far-reaching conception of criticism. His special topic is, in this case, social conditions in England. Politicians, he urges, whose profession it is to deal with social questions, are engrossed in practical matters and biassed by party considerations; they lack the detachment and breadth of view to see the questions at issue in their true relations to abstract standards of right and wrong. They mistake means for ends, machinery for the results that machinery is meant to secure; they lose all sense of values and exalt temporary measures into matters of sacred import; finally, they come to that pass of ineptitude which Arnold symbolizes by the enthusiasm of Liberals over the measure to enable a man to marry his deceased wife’s sister. What is needed to correct these absurd misapprehensions is the free play of critical intelligence. The critic from his secure coign of vantage must examine social conditions dispassionately; he must determine what is essentially wrong in the inner lives of the various classes of men around him, and so reveal the real sources of those social evils which politicians are trying to remedy by external readjustments and temporary measures.

And this is just the task that Arnold undertakes in _Culture and Anarchy_. He sets himself to consider English society in its length and breadth with a view to discovering what is its essential constitution, what are the typical classes that enter into it, and what are the characteristics of these classes. So far as concerns classification he ultimately accepts, it is true, as adequate to his purpose, the traditional division of English society into upper, middle, and lower classes. But he then goes on to give an analysis of each of these classes that is novel, penetrating, in the highest degree stimulating. He takes a typical member of each class and describes him in detail, intellectually, morally, socially; he points out his sources of strength and his sources of weakness. He compares him as a type with the abstract ideal of human excellence, and notes wherein his powers “fall short or exceed.” He indicates the reaction upon the social and political life of the nation of these various defects and excesses, their inevitable influence in producing social misadjustment and friction. Finally, he urges that the one remedy that will correct these errant social types and bring them nearer to the perfect human type is culture, increase in _vital_ knowledge.

The details of Arnold’s application of this conception of culture as a remedy for the social evils of the time, every reader may follow out for himself in _Culture and Anarchy_. One point in Arnold’s conception, however, is to be noted forthwith; it is a crucial point in its influence on his theorizings. By culture Arnold means increase of knowledge; yes, but he means something more; culture is for Arnold not merely an intellectual matter. Culture is the best knowledge made operative and dynamic in life and character. Knowledge must be vitalized; it must be intimately conscious of the whole range of human interests; it must ultimately subserve the whole nature of man. Continually, then, as Arnold is pleading for the spread of ideas, for increase of light, for the acceptance on the part of his fellow-countrymen of new knowledge from the most diverse sources, he is as keenly alive as any one to the dangers of over-intellectualism. The undue development of the intellectual powers is as injurious to the individual as any other form of deviation from the perfect human type.

This distrust of over-intellectualism is the ultimate ground of Arnold’s hostility to the claims of Physical Science to primacy in modern education. His ideas on the relative educational value of the physical sciences and of the humanities are set forth in the well-known discourse on _Literature and Science_. Arnold is ready, no one is more ready, to accept the conclusions of science on all topics that fall within its range; whatever its authenticated spokesmen have to say upon man’s origin, his moral nature, his relations to his fellows, his place in the physical universe, his religions, his sacred books--all these utterances are to be received with entire loyalty as far as they can be shown to embody the results of expert scientific observation and thought. But for Arnold, the great importance of modern scientific truth does not for a moment make clear the superiority of the physical sciences over the humanities as a means of educational discipline. The study of the sciences tends merely to intellectual development, to the increase of mental power; the study of literature, on the other hand, trains a man emotionally and morally, develops his human sympathies, sensitizes him temperamentally, rouses his imagination, and elicits his sense of beauty. Science puts before the student the crude facts of nature, bids him accept them dispassionately, rid himself of all discolouring moods as he watches the play of physical force, and convert himself into pure intelligence; he is simply to observe, to analyze, to classify, and to systematize, and he is to go through these processes continually with facts that have no human quality, that come raw from the great whirl of the cosmic machine. As a discipline, then, for the ordinary man, the study of science tends not a whit towards humanization, towards refinement, towards temperamental regeneration; it tends only to develop an accurate trick of the senses, fine observation, crude intellectual strength. These powers are of very great importance; but they may also be trained in the study of literature, while at the same time the student, as Sir Philip Sidney long ago pointed out, is being led and drawn “to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls, made worse by their clay lodgings, can be capable of.” Arnold, then, with characteristic anxiety for the integrity of the human type, urges the superior worth to most young men of a literary rather than a scientific training. Literature nourishes the whole spirit of man; science ministers only to the intellect.

The same insistent desire that culture be vital is at the root of Arnold’s discomfort in the presence of German scholarship. For the thoroughness and the disinterestedness of this scholarship he has great respect; but he cannot endure its trick of losing itself in the letter, its “pedantry, slowness,” its way of “fumbling” after truth, its “ineffectiveness.”[33] “In the German mind,” he exclaims in _Literature and Dogma_, “as in the German language, there does seem to be something splay, something blunt-edged, unhandy, infelicitous,--some positive want of straightforward, sure perception.”[34] Of scholarship of this splay variety, that comes from exaggerated intellectuality and from lack of a delicate temperament and of nice perceptions, Arnold is intolerant. Such scholarship he finds working its customary mischief in Professor Francis Newman’s translation of Homer, and, accordingly, he gives large parts of the lectures on _Translating Homer_ to the illustration of its shortcomings and maladroitness; he is bent on showing how inadequate is great learning alone to cope with any nice literary problem. Newman’s philological knowledge of Greek and of Homer is beyond dispute, but his taste may be judged from his assertion that Homer’s verse, if we could hear the living Homer, would affect us “like an elegant and simple melody from an African of the Gold Coast.”[35] The remedy for such inept scholarship lies in culture, in the vitalization of knowledge. The scholar must not be a mere knower; all his powers must be harmoniously developed.