[In the following introduction, Wilson considers the development and background of Culture and Anarchy.]

Matthew Arnold holds a position in the history of modern English civilisation which it requires an unusual combination of qualities and interests to appreciate. As a poet and a critic he was the most considerable literary figure of the mid-Victorian period; for though his poetry ranks third after that of Browning and Tennyson, it is a good third, and they have nothing in criticism in any way comparable with his brilliant Essays. As a religious thinker he produced books which had a remarkable vogue and much influence in his own day and, though at the moment a little outmoded, one of them at least, the beautiful Literature and Dogma, will assuredly find an enduring place as an expression, no less sincere because more liberal than that of his much-admired master Newman, of the religious genius of the English race. Lastly, as an educationalist—to use an ugly if convenient word which he himself detested—he was both in experience and insight far ahead of his contemporaries and of most of his present-day successors.

Here, in his passion for education, the passion of a life-time inherited from a father equally devoted to its service, is to be found the centre of all his work and the root even of his poetry and his religious writings. These have attracted more notice because they afforded greater scope to his gifts of expression, and because “education” is for most critics at once a dull and a technical subject. Arnold has accordingly often been ill served by those who have written upon him, for to slight or to misunderstand his educational work is to miss the heart of the man. He was indeed all of a piece. His Essays in Criticism cannot be fully appreciated without a study on the one hand of the Introduction to Popular Education on the Continent and A French Eton, and on the other of Literature and Dogma, while a reading of the poems and the Essays in Criticism forms the best preparation for the understanding of his educational and religious writings. But the culmination of it all—I do not say the best thing he ever wrote but certainly his most characteristic utterance—is Culture and Anarchy, which is at once a masterpiece of vivacious prose, a great poet's great defence of poetry, a profoundly religious book, and the finest apology for education in the English language.

A brief account of Arnold's career up to 1869 when the volume first appeared, and of the years 1866-70, which were some of the most critical in modern English history, and to the events of which Culture and Anarchy makes constant reference, will help to explain how the book, here for the first time reprinted in its original entirety, came to be written.

Born in 1822, Matthew Arnold was the eldest son of Thomas Arnold, the headmaster of Rugby and the principal creator of the modern English public school system. He inherited a full share of his father's moral force, which was, however, to some extent concealed by a lively temperament and poetic gifts, both evident in boyhood. As a pupil at Rugby he also drank deep of his father's intellectual interests, and came to appreciate under the greatest teacher of the age the national significance of education and its connexion with social and political problems. Dr Arnold died a year after his son went up to Oxford, but his memory was the most abiding influence in Matthew Arnold's life, and nothing is more charming in his letters than the delight he displays at any public tribute to it. Thomas Arnold was a liberal both in theology and politics; so was Matthew, but he wore his liberalism with a difference, a difference, it cannot be doubted, due to the influence of Oxford, which during the period of his residence was in the throes of the Tractarian Movement. Matthew Arnold cared little for the ecclesiastical problems which agitated Newman, Pusey and the other tractarians, but Newman won his wholehearted respect both as a man and as a writer, and when he was made a cardinal Arnold was found among the crowd to pay him homage. Thus the spirit of the Oxford Movement, which he associated with the traditions and beauty of the city itself, “spreading her gardens to the moonlight and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the middle ages,” may be seen in everything he wrote¹. And but for Newman's Idea of a University it is likely that Culture and Anarchy would never have seen the light; different as the two books are in tone and in the circumstances which produced them, their hearts beat as one. These two men then, Thomas Arnold and John Henry Newman, were Matthew Arnold's chief teachers; and when he speaks of “culture” he is thinking of the “liberal education” of which Newman writes made available for the whole of England by an indefinite multiplication of non-residential Rugby schools under state supervision.

In 1851 he was appointed H.M. Inspector of Schools, a post he continued to hold until 1886, two years before his death, and it was as an official that he learnt to look to the state as the agent of the educational reformation which he dreamed of. When he entered the public service English elementary education had been under government control for twelve years, the guiding hand for the first ten years being that of Kay-Shuttleworth, a man who regarded elementary education as missionary work on behalf of civilisation, and the inspectors he sent out as apostles of culture. Ill-health forced him to retire in 1849 so that Arnold never served under him, but he greatly admired him and derived much from his spirit, which continued to animate the inspectorate until 1862. In that year, however, on the recommendation of the Newcastle Commission, in the supposed interests of “sound and cheap elementary instruction,” and under aegis of the brilliant but commercially minded Robert Lowe, the cabinet minister then responsible for education, the notorious Revised Code was promulgated which shackled the elementary schools for a generation with the mechanical system of “payment by results,” and entirely changed the character of the inspectors' duties. Hitherto Arnold had inspected schools which he entered, as the guide, philosopher and friend of the teacher; henceforward he became the examiner of children in the three R's at an annual judgment day. When he complains, as he does in his letters, of the tedium and drudgery of his official duties, all this should be remembered. The life of an inspector under the Revised Code must have been well-nigh unendurable, and Arnold endured it for twenty-four years. When again we find Lowe, with his preposterous education speeches and his glorification of the middle-classes, as one of Arnold's chief butts in Culture and Anarchy, we should recollect that the shafts of ridicule are directed at a man who was not merely one of “the enemies of culture” but the organiser of an educational disaster under which the inspectorate, the teachers and the children of the country groaned. In defiance of official prudence Arnold exposed and condemned the Revised Code in report after report. But the road that way was barred; and if he was to carry on the work his father had begun he must approach the enemy from another quarter.

Nevertheless, his life as an inspector taught him many things he could never have guessed at from Rugby and Oxford. Of all the nineteenth-century prophets who pronounced upon the condition of England, Matthew Arnold knew his England best. His work took him all over the country, and made him intimately acquainted with every class of society. Above all it threw him into close contact with what used at that period to be called “the lower middle class,” the small shopkeepers and petty employers, for the most part nonconformist in persuasion, who were managers of the schools he inspected, and often parents of the children attending them. For by an arrangement with the National Society church schools were at this period reserved for clerical inspectors, and laymen were only permitted to visit the schools of the other denominations. Thus Arnold's whole official career was spent in that atmosphere of “disputes, tea-meetings, openings of chapels, sermons” which made up “the dismal and illiberal life” of the nonconformist in the 'sixties, “a life so unlovely, so unattractive, so incomplete, so narrow, so far removed from a true and satisfying ideal of human perfection²,” that he found himself compelled to write Culture and Anarchy for its sweetening and enlightening.

It is idle to say, with Professor Saintsbury, that “to derive an idea of England from the English Dissenter is and was absurd³.” After the rise of Methodism in the 18th century, nonconformists formed the majority of the English people; and after the second Reform Bill of 1867 they came to form the majority of the English electorate. The future of the country, as Arnold very well knew, was in their hands. Were they not indeed already remaking and rebuilding the country according to their “dismal and illiberal” vision, inasmuch as the bulk of the new industrial magnates were drawn from their ranks? It is equally idle to say, as nonconformists of to-day will be inclined to say, that Arnold was unfair, that a man of his temperament and upbringing could not help being unfair, to those outside the pale of the Established Church. It is beyond question that the atmosphere of most nonconformist homes in the mid-nineteenth century was inexpressibly dreary and stuffy, so stuffy that a modern nonconformist would find it insufferable. What has happened in the meantime? The nonconformists have been saved in the only way that, as Arnold pointed out, they could be saved. In 1869 they lived in Arnold's phrase a “hole-and-corner” existence with an entirely provincial outlook. To-day they are “of the centre,” they take part freely in all departments of the national life, they give us leaders of art movements, heads of colleges, prime ministers of conservative governments, they even have their great public schools. And the main agency of this remarkable transformation has been the spread of secondary and university education, the necessity for which was the whole burden of Arnold's writings⁴.

Moreover, though the Philistines were Arnold's chief preoccupation, because their need was greatest, he by no means confined his attention to them. With the Populace, for him as for most other thinking men in 1868 an unknown quantity, he could do little directly. But he saw their filthy and ragged children daily in the schools—“children eaten up with disease, half-sized, half-fed, half-clothed, neglected by their parents, without health, without home, without hope⁵”—he had to thread his way through their squalid streets and past their unsanitary hovels as he went to his work, and he knew all too well what a foul canker of poverty lay beneath the smiling prosperity of the middle classes. As for the upper classes, he kept his eye, with its irrepressible twinkle, constantly open for their excesses, and reserved some of his best “vivacities” for their follies and their purely “external culture.” His father had begun taking the Barbarians in hand, but there was much, very much, still to do.

By the time Culture and Anarchy came to be written Arnold had not only studied England to some purpose, he had also won for himself a position in the very first rank of English poets and critics. This is not the place to speak of his verse, except in so far as it throws light upon his general standpoint. He defined literature as “a criticism of life,” and much of his own is criticism both of life and letters. Above all it expresses better than any other poetry of the age the strange malaise which beneath all the glitter and pretentiousness of industrial success afflicted the heart of the country. In 1851, the year Arnold became an inspector, the new industrial order, with the “hungry forties” now behind it and a vista of unlimited progress before it, had celebrated high festival in the Great Exhibition; and the next quarter of a century was a period of immense commercial prosperity—and immense self-complacency. Science was at the same time opening up new and unexpected horizons; the Origin of Species appeared in 1859, and Huxley the champion of Evolution had met and routed the magnificent but specious Bishop Wilberforce in open debate at Oxford. Everywhere the forces of materialism seemed triumphant, everywhere the old creeds, the old institutions, the old traditions with all their beauty and historic associations were in retreat. Arnold was no blind opponent of change; in many ways he welcomed the new tendencies⁶. Yet at the same time he shuddered as he noted how uncivilised the English were, how lacking in the foundations of culture, how self-satisfied and provincial, how utterly unprepared for the readjustment which the time demanded. “I see a wave,” he writes in 1848, “of more than American vulgarity, moral, intellectual and social, preparing to break over us⁷”; and in the concluding lines of “Dover Beach” this constantly recurring thought finds other expression.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

In these last three lines the whole country traversed in Culture and Anarchy is revealed as in a lightning flash.

Arnold's two recipes for the rawness and provinciality of his countrymen were the organisation of higher education under state control and the disinterested criticism of ideas and political nostrums, which involves a study of “the best that is known and thought in the world” and “a free play of the mind on all subjects which it touches⁸.” And in both instances he went abroad for his illustrations. Being that rare thing, an Englishman who had at command not only the classical languages but also French and German, he was found useful as a foreign agent by his department which sent him to the continent in 1859 to report on popular education in France, Holland and Switzerland for the Newcastle Commission, and again in 1865 to report on higher education abroad for the Taunton Commission. The fruit of these journeys were Popular Education on the Continent (1861), A French Eton, or middle-class education and the state (1864), and Schools and Universities on the Continent (1868). In all three books he urged again and yet again that the real need of England was an organised system of secondary schools for the education of the middle classes, that it was idle to look for such provision to any other body but the state, and that all progressive nations on the continent had long ago discovered this and acted upon it. The Taunton Commission itself reported very much on these lines, but its sole legislative result, the Endowed Schools Act of 1869, concerned itself merely with the question of endowments and their redistribution, an important matter but falling very far short of what Arnold had recommended and hoped for. Once again his frontal attack had failed.

It remained to try the weapon of ridicule, in the use of which he was past master, and a flanking movement under cover of literary criticism. In 1857 Arnold had been appointed Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and retained the chair, according to the usual custom, for ten years. The more important of his lectures appeared in 1865 as Essays in Criticism (First Series), in which following the lead of his friend and idol, the great contemporary French critic Sainte-Beuve, he set himself with brilliant success to break new ground in English criticism. For Arnold, however, there was never any frontier between life and letters, and the central principles of Culture and Anarchy are already explicit in the essay on “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” seeing that the disinterested criticism advocated is the very core of the “culture” he speaks of later. As for the other essays, their subjects are chosen with exquisite tact to illustrate the study of perfection which is the true aim of culture. There is much about Goethe, who exemplified the ideal in the highest possible measure; but Arnold devotes no essay to him. Rather he turns to Heine, still comparatively neglected in England in 1865, and to quite unknown people like the de Guérins and Joubert, as if to mark the fact that on the continent “sweetness and light,” so much to seek in England, were possible to the obscure and the second-rate. They were possible too—a very important point—to persons holding religious opinions quite different from those entertained by the Hebraising Englishman, opinions indeed which he would repudiate with horror as “heathenish superstitions.” The heroes of Essays in Criticism are French Catholics, two Jews, an Italian saint, Marcus Aurelius and Sophocles. It was as if before setting his hand “to pull out a few more stops in that powerful but at present narrow-toned organ, the modern Englishman⁹,” Arnold wished to show what sweetness and range of harmony could be extracted from instruments of foreign manufacture.

In Essays in Criticism Arnold makes an open declaration of war against the Philistines, and the campaign developed quickly. The publication of the book in Feb. 1865 was immediately followed by a rejoinder in the Saturday Review entitled “Mr Arnold and his Countrymen” which took him solemnly to task for his attitude towards England. Such an attack in a Benthamite periodical, “expressly aiming,” to use Arnold's words, “at an immunity from the common newspaper spirit, aiming at being a sort of organ of reason¹⁰,” and numbering writers like Fitzjames Stephen, E. A. Freeman, and J. R. Green among its contributors, gave him just the opening he required. He was abroad most of 1865 collecting material for the Taunton Commission, but at the beginning of 1866 a long article on “My Countrymen” appeared over Arnold's signature in the Cornhill Magazine. This article, exceedingly entertaining in itself, is the germ of the wittiest of all Arnold's books, Friendship's Garland and Culture and Anarchy. Both, like many other Victorian masterpieces, were written in serial form, Friendship's Garland appearing as two letter sequences in the Pall Mall Gazette, the first written between July 1866 and April 1867 and the second between June 1869 and November 1870, while Culture and Anarchy saw light in the intervening period, its opening section (now comprising the Introduction and “Sweetness and Light”) being appropriately enough Arnold's concluding lecture as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, which lecture was given in May 1867 under the title of “Culture and Its Enemies.” Two months later this was published in the Cornhill, and was succeeded by five other articles, under the title of “Anarchy and Authority,” which were printed by the same magazine in January, February, June, July and September 1868. The six articles, which provoked the liveliest discussion as they came out, were then revised slightly, brought together in one volume and published in January, 1869, with a long preface written during the Christmas holidays, as Culture and Anarchy: an essay in political and social criticism, by Smith, Elder and Co., who also issued Friendship's Garland.

The close connexion between the two books is note-worthy. They are the product of the same impulse, full of the same allusions and personalities, and couched in the same happy vein of irony, so that if either is to be rightly appreciated both must be read. Yet there is a difference in their function. Friendship's Garland, which purports to be an account in letter form of a visit to England of a very outspoken young Prussian savant named Arminius, whom Arnold invents as the mouthpiece of his entertaining sallies upon British self-complacency, is written throughout in a vein of high-spirited raillery, and lacks the impassioned seriousness which lies beneath the surface levity of Culture and Anarchy. Disposed as it were on the flanks of the attacking force, the two letter-series in the Pall Mall were like light cavalry sent forward to harass the enemy with the shafts of ridicule while the main onslaught was launched from the centre.

The two books reflect minutely the occurrences, the hopes and the fears of the time in which they were written. The years 1866-70 represent a great turning-point in the history both of Europe and of England. The outstanding event was, of course, the sudden and dramatic rise of Prussia to a position of ascendancy on the continent, first by the victory over Austria in 1866 and then by the crushing defeat of France in 1870. But though there is much about this in the second half of Friendship's Garland the writing of Culture and Anarchy was practically complete two years before Sedan. The earlier book is therefore mainly concerned with internal affairs, the chief of these being the passing of the Second Reform Act of 1867, the immense discussion and agitation, together with rioting, which preceded this, and the spate of radical legislation which threatened to follow.

The Reform Act of 1832 had enfranchised half the middle class of the country, leaving the other half and the whole of the working class outside the pale. In 1865 Palmerston, the old Whig statesman who had kept the country from dwelling overmuch upon internal affairs by brilliant if risky adventures in foreign policy, died, leaving arrears of domestic legislation and a very different man from himself, named Gladstone, to carry them out. One of Gladstone's first acts was to introduce a franchise reform bill in March, 1866. It was a moderate measure, but it went too far for some of the Whigs of his own party, and a revolt in the House of Commons led by Robert Lowe who idolised the middle classes and dreaded any opening of the door to classes lower in the scale, enabled the conservatives to defeat the Russell ministry in which Gladstone held office and to form a government of their own with Lord Derby as prime minister, though really under the leadership of Disraeli. Lowe's secession group was wittily dubbed the Cave of Adullam by John Bright, the Quaker radical who led the left wing of Gladstone's forces, and in the course of the debates on the bill Lowe made the most famous speech of his life, one passage of which stirred the country to its depth, and which he was never allowed to forget. “You have had the opportunity,” he declared to his fellow representatives, “of knowing some of the constituencies of this country; and I ask, if you want venality, if you want ignorance, if you want drunkenness and facility for being intimidated; or if, on the other hand, you want impulsive, unreflecting, and violent people, where do you look for them in the constituencies? Do you go to the top or to the bottom?” John Bright made capital out of these words in every speech he delivered in the campaign that followed in the country; they were printed on leaflets, distributed broadcast among the working classes, and even posted up in factories and workshops. Without a doubt they did more, by inflaming the country, to make the Reform Act of 1867 inevitable than any action of the Reform party itself. Yet they were true. As he spoke them, Lowe had in mind a rough handling by a mob at Kidderminster in which he had barely escaped with his life, an experience which he well knew could be paralleled more or less by most members of parliament.

The fact is that at this period the great mass of the people were in a condition of ignorance, squalor and brutality which in our happier age it is almost impossible to imagine. It is therefore to Arnold's credit that though he clearly fears the advent of “this vast residuum” to political power he yet retains his faith in their possibilities of perfection and does not, like Lowe, give way to the shrieking of panic, or like Carlyle turn in despair to the upper classes and implore them to effect a coup d'état and rule the country from the House of Lords. Indeed, nothing can give a better idea of the essential liberalism of Arnold's attitude than a comparison of Culture and Anarchy with an article published by Carlyle in Macmillan's Magazine for Aug. 1867 and significantly entitled “Shooting Niagara: and After?” Arnold retorts by asking how our aristocrats can govern when they are entirely devoid of ideas¹¹. Moreover, though Carlyle was the son of a working man, he understood the working classes less than did the Oxford professor of poetry who visited their schools. Both were convinced of the necessity of order and authority in the state—who that thinks about politics at all is not? But while Carlyle persuaded himself that no order could be had except through a discipline exerted by an aristocracy, Arnold “a true apostle of equality”¹² believed that order could only be ultimately secure when the whole people learnt self-discipline through culture, culture which “seeks to do away with classes, to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere¹³.” Moreover, he was alive to the fact that in 1867 there was already a large and growing “respectable” section of the working-class, trades unionists and others, such as the admirable George Odger, a London shoemaker and a well-known public speaker, whom Arnold singles out as standing “for the beautiful and virtuous mean of our present working class¹⁴.” It is true that the trades unions had acquired an undesirable notoriety in 1866 through certain excesses, mostly in the Sheffield area, and that in the following year a decision in the courts had seemed to deprive them of their legal rights. But the larger unions, confident in their integrity, thereupon demanded a commission of enquiry. The commission was granted and sat from 1867 to 1869, issuing a report largely inspired by Frederic Harrison, which eventually led to legislation satisfactory to the workers. Harrison, at this time a young barrister, an ardent supporter of working-class causes and already a leader of the English disciples of Comte, is often referred to in the pages that follow, sometimes in irony but always with respect. Arnold is careful to draw a very clear distinction between such a man, much as he might disagree with him, and violent people like Charles Bradlaugh, who seemed to him a mere demagogue of a dangerous kind.

The defeat of the Reform Bill of 1866 and of the Liberal government was followed by demonstrations all over the country. Ten thousand persons assembled in Trafalgar Square on June 29, marched to Gladstone's house to cheer, to the Carlton Club to hoot, and then quietly dispersed. Three weeks later a more serious affair took place in Hyde Park. A body known as the Reform League, under the leadership of a lawyer named Edmond Beales, a certain Colonel Dickson, G. J. Holyoake the co-operator and secularist, and Charles Bradlaugh, then known chiefly as an extreme radical and violent agitator, marched in processions converging from different quarters upon Hyde Park with the intention of holding a meeting there. The Park was at this time regarded by middle-class Londoners as a pleasure garden set aside for themselves and their families to take the air, and the notion of mass meetings being held there filled them with disgust and alarm. The Home Secretary therefore ordered the gates to be closed, and after a formal demand for entrance the leaders of the procession retired in an orderly fashion to hold their meeting in Trafalgar Square. They left behind them, however, a huge and miscellaneous crowd, which had collected en route. The rougher portions of this assemblage thereupon proceeded to pull down the railings, burst into the Park, and trample down the flower-beds, all very much to the terror of well-to-do citizens but little to the harm of any human being. The Hyde Park riots, as they were called, continued for some days, and produced an immense effect upon public opinion. It is scarcely too much to say that the fall of the Park railings did for England in July 1866 what the fall of the Bastille did for France in July 1789. The shooting of Niagara was seen to be inevitable.

Meanwhile John Bright began his campaign in the provinces at which he addressed enormous meetings in city after city. “The order of the day was a mass meeting, on some moor outside the town, of 150,000 to 200,000 citizens, a march past of the Trades Unions and Trades Societies before Bright, and in the evening one of his orations delivered in the largest hall of the city to as many as could find room therein. On the next day all England would be reading admirable reports of his speeches¹⁵.” Bright with “a foot in both worlds, the world of middle-class liberalism and the world of democracy”¹⁶ seemed a shallow person to Arnold. Culture and Anarchy is full of quotations from his speeches, and the context is almost always unfavourable. Professor George Trevelyan, Bright's biographer, explains the dislike as that of a man of Oxford culture for a self-taught industrialist and a non-conformist¹⁷. I think the truer explanation is that in 1866 Bright was a portent rather than a man; his real greatness had not made itself evident; and Arnold distrusted what he stood for and for passages in his speeches which flattered the pride of the unenfranchised middle and lower classes. Moreover, he dealt in “clap-trap” and believed in “machinery”; instead of employing his great powers in grappling with “pauperism and ignorance and all the questions which are called social … he still goes on with his glorifying of the great towns”¹⁸ and with his liberal nostrums like the disestablishment of the Irish Church and the Deceased Wife's Sister Bill. Arnold found him lacking in a sense of real values: he seemed a blind leader of the blind. He was one of those thinkers who had learnt “to call the desires of the ordinary self … of the community edicts of the national mind and laws of human progress and to give them a general, a philosophic, and an imposing expression.” Not that he was a conscious hypocrite; “a generous statesman may honestly soon unlearn any disposition to put his tongue in his cheek in advocating these desires, and may advocate them with fervour and impulsiveness¹⁹.”

The upshot of Bright's campaign is known to all. Parliament met in Feb. 1867, and before six months were out the wily Disraeli, seeing that Reform was sooner or later inevitable, had “dished the Whigs” by passing an Act far more radical and sweeping than that introduced by Gladstone the previous year. As so often happens in English history, it was only when the conservative party found a “leap in the dark” necessary that the nation took the plunge. The state of England in 1867 did not encourage hopefulness of success in the adventure; and not a few agreed with Carlyle that the country was shooting the rapids leading to anarchy. Serious disturbances took place in Sheffield on June 12 among trade unionists²⁰. It was a year too of Fenian outrages organised in different parts of England by the party of revolutionary republican Irishmen, many of whom had returned from taking part in the American Civil War. On Feb. 11 Fenians attempted to seize the arms and ammunition at Chester castle. This was followed by disorders elsewhere, and on Sept. 18 armed Fenians rescued two men under arrest in the streets of Manchester and shot the sergeant in charge, while a little later an attempt to rescue prisoners in London took the form of blowing up with gunpowder the walls of Clerkenwell gaol in which they were incarcerated. The explosion failed in its object, but succeeded in killing a dozen innocent people living in the locality and injuring some hundred and twenty more. Concern was felt in certain circles for the Irishmen arrested in connexion with the affair at Manchester, some of whom were clearly innocent of murder, and a group of English sympathisers actually forced their way into the office of the Home Secretary with a demand for pardon, an incident to which Arnold refers on p. 77. But Arnold makes light of Fenianism; it was the natural product of “centuries of ill-usage²¹.” Much more serious in his view, because symptomatic of the anarchical tendencies in English society, were the counter-antics of a certain Mr Murphy which enlivened the Midlands in the summer of 1867 and the spring of 1868. This person, who described himself as “an agent of the London Protestant Electoral Union,” after causing riots in Wolverhampton and the neighbourhood by injudicious language concerning Roman Catholicism uttered on public platforms, announced a course of lectures on “The Errors of the Roman Church” to be delivered in Birmingham, beginning on June 16. He had applied to the Mayor for the use of the town hall, an application which was wisely refused. He therefore caused to be built, with the assistance of his local Protestant supporters, an enormous wooden “tabernacle” to hold 3000 people, which was packed at the first lecture. His lectures and speeches by his friends, sentences from which Arnold quotes (v. pp. 77-8, 91), were of a highly inflammatory character, and were followed by a series of disgraceful riots in the streets of Birmingham, which continued for days, and which the police were found unable to cope with, though they charged the crowds repeatedly with drawn cutlasses. Nothing abashed, Murphy repeated his exploits in Ashton under Lyne (May 1868) and again in Manchester (Sept. 1868), on both occasions causing bloodshed²².

Such events, following on the Hyde Park riots of 1866, filled all lovers of order with grave foreboding. Nor did the executive appear to be upholding authority with the firmness that might be expected. The Home Secretary, Spencer Walpole, handled the Hyde Park affair with such culpable gentleness, in the opinion of many Londoners, that he was forced to resign, and it was even rumoured, no doubt quite falsely, that on one occasion in pleading with a deputation of the Reform League he had actually shed tears²³. Something which looked very like an attempt to mob his successor, as we have seen, took place in connexion with the Fenian outrage, while a week before the Murphy riots Hyde Park again attracted public attention on account of a curious incident which still further shook the confidence of Londoners in those responsible for the preservation of law and order, and gave Arnold yet another instance of “the relaxed habits of government²⁴.” Alderman Samuel Wilson, Colonel of the Royal London Militia, a regiment belonging to the Corporation of London and long since disbanded, on Monday, June 10, took his men for a route march into Hyde Park, whither he was followed by a number of roughs, who knocked off people's hats as they went along and generally made a nuisance of themselves without any interference on the part of the gallant colonel and his troops. Great indignation was felt at the affair. Questions were asked in Parliament about the conduct of the colonel, and he attempted to justify it in a letter to the Times on June 12 and at a meeting of the Court of Aldermen reported on June 19. He did not improve his case by alleging that he was proud of his men and that he feared they might lose their rifles had they meddled with the roughs²⁵.

Meanwhile the Parliament elected in the time of Palmerston was nearing the end of its days. It dragged on through most of 1868, with Disraeli as premier but with Gladstone as its dominant personality. The General Election which came in November under the reformed franchise was a foregone conclusion; the new House of Commons was found to be predominantly liberal if not radical in colour, and while Arnold was busy writing his Preface, Gladstone was making up his cabinet, in which for the first time in history a nonconformist, John Bright, was to hold office. Culture and Anarchy appeared from the press in January and the new parliament got to work on Feb. 16; seldom was a book better timed. It should be remembered also that the final chapter, “Our Liberal Practitioners,” appearing as it did in the Cornhill for July and September 1868 just before the dissolution, was almost an electioneering pamphlet. Certainly the Preface was deliberately political in intention and Arnold took pains that it should come under Disraeli's eye²⁶. In it he once again addresses himself to the burning topic of the hour, which he had already handled in Chapter vi, namely the disestablishment of the Irish Church. This was in fact the first great measure taken in hand by the new Liberal government, Gladstone introducing the Bill on March 1, 1869 and placing it on the statute book in the following July. The other two examples of “Liberal practice” cited in Chapter vi are a Real Estate Intestacy Bill and the Deceased Wife's Sister Bill, which after Lord Lyndhurst's Act of 1835 made it definitely illegal for a man to marry his deceased wife's sister (a matter which had been in controversy among English lawyers since the Reformation), became almost a hardy annual in parliament, until the act of 1907 finally decided the question. Arnold uses the first of these measures as an illustration of Liberal muddle-headedness. His objection to the second, which will seem curious to many to-day, was more deep-seated. It was not based upon respect for the ecclesiastical table of affinity, for which he cared little. Rather it expressed “his strong sense … that the sacredness of marriage, and the customs that regulate it, were triumphs of culture which had been won, painfully and with effort, from the unbridled promiscuity of primitive life. To impair that sacredness, to dislocate those customs, was to take a step backwards into darkness and anarchy²⁷.” As for the Bill itself, it ministered to “that double craving so characteristic of our Philistine, and so eminently exemplified in that crowned Philistine, Henry the Eighth—the craving for forbidden fruit and the craving for legality²⁸.”

I have spent some time explaining the contemporary allusions and background of Culture and Anarchy in order that the reader may spend less upon them when he comes to the book itself. They are interesting for themselves, and they were important for Arnold, since his primary object was to arrest and persuade his own generation, to which end topical allusion is at all times the readiest means, and was particularly appropriate to the exciting historical moment when the book was written. Moreover, to understand exactly what was in Arnold's mind is necessary to the full appreciation of the delicious turns of irony, the urbane humour—so obviously enjoyed by the humorist—the “sunny malice” and “slim feasting smile²⁹” with which he handles his victims, handles them gently, almost lovingly; to the appreciation, in a word, of his comic muse. The task of unearthing the facts, which were the small change of London gossip in 1867, but which have to-day often proved difficult to come by, about the egregious Murphy, the golden Mrs Gooch, the perfect Lord Elcho, the lithe and sinewy Hepworth Dixon and his “great sexual insurrection,” the feeble-kneed Alderman-Colonel Samuel Wilson and his immaculate toy militia, together with all the other living puppets of Arnold's variety entertainment, has immensely quickened my own sense of his genius as master of a comic style all his own; and I hope that this introduction and the notes that follow may do the like for others. Yet these matters are after all by the way. What an editor has to do, if he can, with such a book as this, is—to adapt words of Arnold himself—“to labour, to divest it of all that is uncouth, difficult, transient, to make it efficient outside the circle of the author's immediate contemporaries, and a true source therefore of sweetness and light to posterity.” For what keeps, and will keep, the book alive and what concerns us is its great argument. Let us then consider this argument for a moment in conclusion.

It is not to be supposed that Arnold really thought, with Carlyle, that England in 1869 was about to plunge into a whirlpool of anarchy. What he did was to use certain anarchical tendencies and lawless incidents of his own day, due to a temporary phase of intense political excitement, as illustrations of the deep-seated spiritual anarchy of the English people, an anarchy which expressed itself in its hideous sprawling industrial cities, its loud-voiced assertion of personal liberty, its dismal, stuffy, and cantankerous forms of Christianity, its worship of size and numbers and wealth and machinery generally, its state-blindness, and its belief in collision (collision of parties, of sects, of firms) as the only way of salvation. Were Arnold to revisit the English glimpses of the moon in 1931, he would no longer see

                                                  a darkling plain,
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

The scene is dark enough, but the shadow is not wholly of our making, while the slough of despond into which we have tumbled for the moment is at least more salutary for the spirit than the vanity fair of great industrial triumphs and exhibitions through which our grandparents wandered and with which they drugged and deluded their souls. And as we struggle to climb out of the mire of unemployment and economic depression we shall assuredly find ourselves on a bank further from the city of destruction and nearer the wicket-gate which leads to perfection. For sweetness and light have wonderfully increased since Arnold first preached them to a stiff-necked generation. The “ignorant armies” still clash now and again; they have recently, as Arnold would not fail to note, trampled an education bill underfoot in a skirmish after the bad old nineteenth-century fashion. But such incidents are rare, and the armies have grown thin and ragged and discredited. Indeed, the outstanding change in England since 1869 is the decline in religious asperity and the almost miraculous sweetening of all the operations of national life in consequence.

Closely connected with this, and probably its main cause, is another change which would equally rejoice Arnold's heart, the organisation of secondary and higher education since 1902, or rather since 1869, for the Endowed Schools Act which so disappointed him was the beginning of it and opened the door to women and girls. The advance, however, has of course been mainly since 1902, and the country has as yet hardly begun to realise the incalculable increase of light, comparable in the spiritual with the coming of electricity in the material sphere, brought about by its municipal and country secondary schools, and the developments in university education that they have promoted. Furthermore, the progress in education, on the lines for which he pleaded in season and out for thirty-five years, has been accomplished by the very means which he prescribed. Nothing would strike him more about modern England than the ubiquity of state activity and the acquiescent temper of the people who rejoice to have it so. The network of local government which now covers the whole country and affects every side of human life, together with the great central departments which supervise from Whitehall the all-embracing work of local government, was unknown in his day, and has in the meanwhile created a new England. He would observe, as symptoms of all this, the cleanliness and salubrity of our streets filled with a healthier, better-mannered and better-dressed Populace than he could have dreamed possible. Arnold was no socialist; he was no -ist of any kind, for he profoundly distrusted all rigid systems of thought. But he believed in the state as the organ of the “right reason and best self” of the whole community, and the history of the last sixty years has done much to justify his faith in that and in the value of education, or rather the ripe fruit of education, which is culture.

It has been said that Arnold's conception of culture, despite his disclaimers, was too bookish, too academic, too aloof. One of the shrewdest of his contemporary critics, Henry Sidgwick, uttered a pregnant comment upon it:

If any culture really has what Mr Arnold in his finest mood calls its noblest element, the passion for propagating itself, for making itself prevail, then let it learn “to call nothing common or unclean.” It can only propagate itself by shedding the light of its sympathy liberally; by learning to love common people and common things, to feel common interests. Make people feel that their own poor life is ever so little beautiful and poetical; then they will begin to turn and seek after the treasures of beauty and poetry outside and above it³⁰.

There is indeed another kind of culture than that derived from “the best that has been known and thought in the world,” as we are coming more and more to realise. It is the culture that springs from the common life of the people, the culture which means cultivation of the ordinary soil of the human spirit, which sanctifies the work that men do with their hands and makes significant and beautiful the labour wherewith they earn their bread. Perhaps Arnold was a shade lacking in human sympathy, a little too much of the don to see this. Perhaps he lived just too early to catch a glimpse of this great possibility in “the vast residuum” which, “raw and half-developed, had long lain half-hidden amidst its poverty and squalor, and was then issuing from its hiding-place to assert an Englishman's heaven-born privilege of doing as he likes³¹.” Certainly the first to see it clearly in this country was William Morris, born twelve years later than Arnold, and his Hopes and Fears for Art, which appeared in 1882, supplied what was missing in Culture and Anarchy. It supplies too the basic principles for the next step in civilisation which the nation, hesitatingly, doubtingly, and yet perforcedly, is about to take. This step is the provision of schooling for all young persons who do not now find their way into secondary schools, that is to say for those who are destined to enter industrial and commercial rather than professional life. Such provision will, in the long run, result in a new kind of education and a new kind of industry; for it will bring face to face for the first time labour and culture and effect a marriage between them. What the offspring of this marriage will be we can only guess. But Morris's words: “If art which is now sick is to live and not die, it must in the future be of the people, for the people, by the people; it must understand all and be understood by all,” may set us dreaming. One thing we know, that nothing but good can come from the union for both parties, since what is wrong with labour to-day is not so much low wages and long hours as its lack of social meaning in the eyes of the worker, and what is wrong with our culture is its divorce from the crafts of common life. Yet though Arnold did not or could not see all this, it in no sense runs counter to his message. On the contrary, it fulfils and completes it. It gives a larger and deeper meaning to his great conclusion: “This is the social idea and the men of culture are the true apostles of equality³².”

Nor is his own view of culture in any way out of date; it can never be, since its relevance is eternal. And despite all the changes above spoken of, it needs reiterating to-day just as much as when Arnold first gave utterance to it. We are only at the beginning of the developments he foresaw in education, and if he could look into our class-rooms—university, secondary, elementary—and examine our curricula, he would, while acknowledging much improvement, find the instruction still far too rigid and too specialist to effect the “harmonious expansion of all the powers which make the beauty and worth of human nature³³,” and too external and mechanical to create that “inward condition of the mind and spirit”³⁴ from which perfection alone can proceed. “Repent, for the kingdom of Heaven is within you” was his message to his own generation. And how much we are still in need of this message let every teacher enquire of himself. Above all as regards religion, the schools, at last free or almost free from the disastrous war between the sects, find themselves drawing the breath of liberty in a desert where no water is. Thomas Arnold knew that religion was the heart of education and worship the centre of school life, and his son did no less, though his religion was different in emphasis from that preached in Rugby Chapel. No reader of Culture and Anarchy can fail to see that what its author cares about most is religion, a religion which would embrace the best of Hellenism and the best of Hebraism. And here once again time has worked with him, for the modern doctrine of absolute values—the values of Beauty, Truth and Goodness—which goes back to Plato and has become a commonplace of popular philosophy and religious thought, is implicit in all that Arnold writes about “an inward spiritual activity, having for its character increased sweetness, increased light, increased life, increased sympathy³⁵.” The writings of Clutton-Brock, Dean Inge and Baron von Hügel would have interested him beyond measure, for he would have found in them his own ideas developed, articulated and clarified. He would have assuredly perceived also that here was a common ground upon which all denominations might meet and from which an undenominational religious education might proceed. “The State,” he wrote, “is of the religion of all its citizens without the fanaticism of any of them³⁶.” If the future makes such a religion possible in our state schools, the credit will be partly his.

But points of contact between Arnold and the problems of to-day are innumerable. Let us be content with one more. Though the shadow of domestic anarchy under which his book was written has to some extent passed away, if it be not too bold to say this within five years of the Great Strike, a huger shadow has taken its place, that of a world-anarchy which threatens to bring the whole structure of civilisation toppling to the ground. Never in the history of the race was there greater demand for sweetness and light in human affairs, for a true Hellenic clarity of vision, for a “disinterested play of consciousness upon stock notions and habits,” in a word for men of culture determined “to make reason and the will of God prevail.” And this need is not one that affects Geneva or our public men alone. It knocks at the door of every home; it intimately concerns the schools and the teachers, as Professor Zimmern's wise little book, Learning and Leadership, has recently reminded us.

And so we come back again, as is fitting, to the children. It is part of the artistry of Culture and Anarchy that it leads us, by a cunning route, through the back alleys of the Deceased Wife's Sister Bill and Free Trade, to the little ones in the East End, and there—but for a brief “conclusion”—leaves us. Arnold might be deficient in sympathy for the crude and the uncultivated among adults, but he loved children, his own passionately, and all tenderly. Everything he wrote about education he dedicated to them, and what would delight him most of all in the world to-day is that, gigantic and terrifying as are the problems that press upon their parents for solution, the children at any rate have entered or are entering the promised land. Like the leader of the Israelites of old he could see that land in vision but was not permitted to pass its frontier himself. Arnold had a good life and a full life, and he died as most men would wish to die, suddenly, without pain, and at the height of his powers. Yet there is something wistful about him, the wistfulness of a man who could see what ought to be done, knew that in the end men would follow his behest, and yet knew too that he would long be dead before they did it. The thought recurs again and again in his writings. Let me conclude by quoting one expression of it, a passage which is itself the conclusion of one of his most beautiful, though less well-known books, A French Eton.

Children of the future, whose day has not yet dawned, you, when that day arrives, will hardly believe what obstructions were long suffered to prevent its coming! You who, with all your faults, have neither the aridity of aristocracies, nor the narrowmindedness of middle classes, you, whose power of simple enthusiasm is your great gift, will not comprehend how progress towards man's best perfection—the adorning and ennobling of his spirit—should have been reluctantly undertaken; how it should have been for years and years retarded by barren commonplaces, by worn-out clap-traps. You will wonder at the labour of its friends in proving the self-proving; you will know nothing of the doubts, the fears, the prejudices they had to dispel; nothing of the outcry they had to encounter; of the fierce protestations of life from policies which were dead and did not know it, and the shrill querulous upbraiding from publicists in their dotage. But you, in your turn, with difficulties of your own, will then be mounting some new step in the arduous ladder whereby man climbs towards his perfection; towards that unattainable but irresistible lode-star, gazed after with earnest longing, and invoked with bitter tears; the longing of thousands of hearts, the tears of many generations.

Notes

1. Cf. pp. 61-3 below.

2. vide [see text] below, p. 58.

3. Matthew Arnold (“Modern English Writers”), p. 127.

4. Two reforms of the “Liberal practitioners” whom Arnold so distrusted, carried through within three years of the publication of Culture and Anarchy, greatly assisted this process: (i) the substitution of open competition for patronage as the gateway to the Civil Service in 1871, thus making it possible to recruit the public administration from all classes and denominations; (ii) the Universities Tests Act of 1871 which likewise threw open all posts in the older universities to non-conformists.

5. v. below, p. 194.

6. v. pp. 45-6, 97, 197 below and Essays in Criticism, i, pp. 17-18, 159-60.

7. Letters, i, p. 4.

8. Essays in Criticism, i, pp. 18-19.

9. Essays in Criticism, 1, p. vii.

10. Essays in Criticism, 1, p. 67.

11. v. below, pp. 83-5.

12. v. p. 70.

13. v. p. 70.

14. v. p. 94.

15. G. M. Trevelyan, Life of Bright, p. 362.

16. v. below, p. 64.

17. Life of Bright, p. 289.

18. v. below, p. 18.

19. v. below, pp. 34-5.

20. v. Annual Register.

21. v. pp. 79-80.

22. v. Annual Register, June 16, 1867; May 10, 1868; Sept. 1868 and Times, June 17-21, 1867.

23. v. p. 205.

24. v. p. 79.

25. v. p. 92; for the colonel's defence, v. Ed. Preface, pp. ix-x.

26. Letters i, 402; ii, 1. Perhaps he hoped to interest the Jewish sphinx in his interesting plan, borrowed from Germany, of bringing all the important religious denominations within the Establishment.

27. Matthew Arnold, by G. W. E. Russell, p. 205.

28. v. below, p. 181.

29. I quote from George Meredith's Essay on Comedy, which strangely enough makes no mention of Arnold.

30. The Prophet of Culture (Miscellaneous Essays and Addresses, p. 53), cf. note, p. 148.

31. v. p. 105.

32. v. p. 70.

33. v. p. 48.

34. v. p. 48.

35. v. p. 64.

36. v. p. 166.

Bibliography

I. General

For the historical background of Culture and Anarchy the student should consult Spencer Walpole's A History of Twenty-Five Years, vol. ii of which deals with the years 1865-70, Herbert Paul's History of Modern England, G. M. Trevelyan's Life of John Bright and where these fail, The Annual Register and The Times. For educational history J. W. Adamson's English Education, 1789-1902, R. L. Archer's Secondary Education in the XIXth Century, Frank Smith's History of Elementary Education, 1760-1902, and C. Birchenough's History of Elementary Education in England and Wales from 1800 to the present day are the standard authorities, while Arnold's own educational writings are indispensable.

II. Biographical and Critical Material

Arnold's Letters, edited by his friend G. W. E. Russell (2 vols., 1895), are of capital importance, and of the lives the same friend's Matthew Arnold (1904) is the best. Herbert Paul's volume in the “English Men of Letters” series and Professor Saintsbury's in the “Modern English Writers” series are both too purely literary in outlook and too wayward in judgment to be altogether satisfactory. Suggestive books are W. H. Dawson's Matthew Arnold and his relation to the thought of our time (1904) and J. G. Fitch's Thomas and Matthew Arnold and their influence on English Education (1897), while no better introduction for a beginner could be found than Selections from Matthew Arnold's Prose by D. C. Somervell (1924). Leonard Woolf, After the Deluge (1931), i, 281-7, criticizes Arnold severely. R. H. Tawney, Equality (1931), esp. ch. ii, is on the other hand appreciative.

III. Arnold's Principal Publications

(a) Verse

The Strayed Reveller, 1849.

Empedocles on Etna, 1852.

Poems, 2 vols., 1869. The only poem of note written after this date is Westminster Abbey (v. note on Dean of Westminster, A. P. Stanley, p. 8).

(b) Educational writings

Popular Education in France, etc., 1861 (Arnold's report as foreign assistant-commissioner to the Newcastle Commission, reprinted with a special Introduction on the relation between popular education and the State).

A French Eton, or Middle-class Education and the State, 1864.

Schools and Universities on the Continent, 1868 (a reprint of Arnold's report as foreign assistant-commissioner to the Taunton Commission, otherwise known as the Schools Enquiry Commission).

Special Report on Elementary Education abroad, 1886 (issued by the Education Department).

Reports on Elementary Schools, 1852-1882, edited by F. S. Marvin (1910) (containing the annual reports made by Arnold as H. M. Inspector to the Education Department).

Thoughts on Education from Matthew Arnold, ed. Leonard Huxley, 1912.

(c) Religious writings

St Paul and Protestantism with an Introduction on Puritanism and the Church of England, 1870.

Literature and Dogma, an essay towards a better apprehension of the Bible, 1873.

God and the Bible, a review of objections to “Literature and Dogma,” 1875.

Last Essays on Church and Religion, 1877.

(d) Literary, social and political

On translating Homer, 1861.

Essays in Criticism, 1865 (1st series).

On the Study of Celtic Literature, 1867.

Culture and Anarchy, 1869, 2nd. ed. 1875, 3rd ed. 1882, Pop. ed. 1889.

Friendship's Garland, 1871.

Mixed Essays, 1879.

Irish Essays and others, 1882.

Discourses in America, 1885.

Essays in Criticism, 1888 (2nd series).

A useful bibliography of Arnold's writings was compiled in 1892 by T. B. Smart.

IV. Some Contemporary Articles Illustrating Culture and Anarchy

The Saturday Review, Feb. 1865, “Mr. Arnold and his Countrymen” (a review of Essays in Criticism)

The Cornhill Magazine, Feb. 1866, “My Countrymen” by M. Arnold (a reply to the Saturday Review; reprinted in Friendship's Garland).

Macmillan's Magazine, Aug. 1867, “The prophet of Culture” by Henry Sidgwick (referred to on pp. 148, 208).

The Fortnightly Review, Oct. 1867, “Mr. Arnold's New Poems” by A. C. Swinburne referred to on p. 106.

The Fortnightly Review, Nov. 1867, “Culture: a Dialogue” by Frederic Harrison (referred to on p. 73).

The Quarterly Review, Oct. 1868, “Mr. Matthew Arnold's Report on French Education” (a review by Oscar Browning of Schools and Universities on the Continent; referred to on p. 8).