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Page 36
We have seen that he had, some years before, conceived the ambitious
idea of changing the mind of England on a good many points by no means
merely literary; and he seems, not altogether unnaturally, to have
thought that now was the time to apply seriously to that work. His
tenure of the Oxford chair had given him the public ear; and the
cessation of that tenure had removed any official seal of etiquette
which it might have laid on his own lips. A far less alert and acute
mind than his must have seen that the Reform troubles of 1866 and the
"leap in the dark" of 1867 were certain to bring about very great
changes indeed at home; and that the war of the first-named year meant
the alteration of many things abroad. He at least thought--and there
was some justification of a good many kinds for him in thinking--that
intellectual changes, of importance equal to the political, were
coming or come upon the world. And so for a time he seems to have
grown rather cold towards the Muses, his earliest and always his
truest loves. Social, political, and religious matters tempted him
away from literature; and for a matter of ten years it can hardly be
said that he had anything to do with her except to take her name in
vain in the title of by far his worst, as it was by far his most
popular, volume.
It has been hinted in a note on one of the early pages in this book
that the secret of this unfortunate twist is at least partly to be
found in the peculiar character of Mr Arnold's official employment.
For nearly twenty years he had been constantly thrown into contact
with the English Dissenters; and, far earlier than the time which we
have reached, they seem not only, in familiar phrase, to have "got
upon his nerves," but to have affected his brain. He saw all things in
Dissent--or, at least, in the middle-class Philistine Dissenter. His
Philistia is not in the least a true portrait of the average
middle-class household thirty or forty years ago; though, I daresay (I
have little direct knowledge), it is not an unfair one of the average
Dissenting middle-class household. The religion which Mr Arnold
attacks is not the religion of the Church of England at all, or only
of what was even then a decaying and uninfluential part of it, the
extremer and more intolerant sect of the Evangelicals. Once more, I
cannot from personal knowledge say whether this portrait was true of
Dissent, but I can believe it.
Now, to derive an idea of England from the English Dissenter is and
was absurd. Politically, indeed, he had only too much power between
1832 and 1866, from the tradition which made Liberal politicians fond
of petting him. Socially, intellectually, and to a great extent
religiously, he had next to no power at all. To take the average
manager of a "British" school as the average representative of the
British nation was the wildest and most mischievous of confusions. Yet
this practically was the basis of Mr Arnold's crusade between 1867 and
1877.
The First Blast of the Trumpet was, intentionally no doubt, the last
of the Oxford lectures, and for that very reason a rather gentle and
insinuating one. _Culture its Enemies_, which was the origin and
first part, so to say, of _Culture and Anarchy_, carried the
campaign begun in the _Essays in Criticism_ forward; but only in
the most cautious manner, a caution no doubt partly due to the fact of
the author's expressed, and very natural and proper, intention of
closing his professorial exercises with the _bocca dolce_. Still
this is at least conceivably due to the fact that the boldest
extension of the campaign itself had not definitely entered, or at
least possessed, the author's mind. A considerable time, indeed from
July 1867 to January 1868, passed before the publication of the
lecture as an article in the _Cornhill_ was followed up by the
series from the latter month to August, which bore the general title
of _Anarchy and Authority_, and completed the material of
_Culture and Anarchy_ itself. This, as a book, appeared in 1869.
It began, according to the author's favourite manner, which was
already passing into something like a mannerism, with a sort of
half-playful, half-serious battery against a living writer (in this
case Mr Frederic Harrison), and with a laudatory citation from a dead
one (in this case Bishop Wilson). Mr Harrison had blasphemed "the cant
about culture," and Mr Arnold protests that culture's only aim is in
the Bishop's words, "to make reason and the will of God prevail." In
the first chapter, famous thenceforward in English literature by its
title, borrowed from Swift, of "Sweetness and Light," we have the old
rallyings of the _Daily Telegraph_ and the _Nonconformist_.
Then the general view is laid down, and is developed in those that
follow, but still with more of a political than a religious bent, and
with the political bent itself chiefly limited to the social aspect.
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