Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold Part 19

Let us recall Mr. Hamerton's account of the most illiterate cla.s.s in France; what an amount of civilization they have notwithstanding! And this is always to be understood, in hearing or reading a Frenchman's praise of England. He envies our liberty, our public spirit, our trade, our stability. But there is always a reserve in his mind. He never means for a moment that he would like to change with us. Life seems to him so much better a thing in France for so many more people, that, in spite of the fearful troubles of France, it is best to be a Frenchman. A Frenchman might agree with Mr. Cobden,[481] that life is good in England for those people who have at least 5000 a year. But the civilization of that immense majority who have not 5000 a year, or, 500, or even 100,--of our middle and lower cla.s.s,--seems to him too deplorable.

And now what has this condition of our middle and lower cla.s.s to tell us about equality? How is it, must we not ask, how is it that, being without fearful troubles, having so many achievements to show and so much success, having as a nation a deep sense for conduct, having signal energy and honesty, having a splendid aristocracy, having an exceptionally large cla.s.s of gentlemen, we are yet so little civilized?

How is it that our middle and lower cla.s.ses, in spite of the individuals among them who are raised by happy gifts of nature to a more humane life, in spite of the seriousness of the middle cla.s.s, in spite of the honesty and power of true work, the _virtus verusque labor_, which are to be found in abundance throughout the lower, do yet present, as a whole, the characters which we have seen?

And really it seems as if the current of our discourse carried us of itself to but one conclusion. It seems as if we could not avoid concluding, that just as France owes her fearful troubles to other things and her civilizedness to equality, so we owe our immunity from fearful troubles to other things, and our uncivilizedness to inequality.

"Knowledge is easy," says the wise man, "to him that understandeth";[482]

easy, he means, to him who will use his mind simply and rationally, and not to make him think he can know what he cannot, or to maintain, _per fas et nefas_, a false thesis with which he fancies his interests to be bound up. And to him who will use his mind as the wise man recommends, surely it is easy to see that our shortcomings in civilization are due to our inequality; or, in other words, that the great inequality of cla.s.ses and property, which came to us from the Middle Age and which we maintain because we have the religion of inequality, that this const.i.tution of things, I say, has the natural and necessary effect, under present circ.u.mstances, of materializing our upper cla.s.s, vulgarizing our middle cla.s.s, and brutalizing our lower cla.s.s.[483] And this is to fail in civilization.

For only just look how the facts combine themselves. I have said little as yet about our aristocratic cla.s.s, except that it is splendid. Yet these, "our often very unhappy brethren," as Burke calls them, are by no means matter for nothing but ecstasy. Our charity ought certainly, Burke says, to "extend a due and anxious sensation of pity to the distresses of the miserable great." Burke's extremely strong language about their miseries and defects I will not quote. For my part, I am always disposed to marvel that human beings, in a position so false, should be so good as these are. Their reason for existing was to serve as a number of centres in a world disintegrated after the ruin of the Roman Empire, and slowly re-const.i.tuting itself. Numerous centres of material force were needed, and these a feudal aristocracy supplied. Their large and hereditary estates served this public end. The owners had a positive function, for which their estates were essential. In our modern world the function is gone; and the great estates, with an infinitely multiplied power of ministering to mere pleasure and indulgence, remain.

The energy and honesty of our race does not leave itself without witness in this cla.s.s, and nowhere are there more conspicuous examples of individuals raised by happy gifts of nature far above their fellows and their circ.u.mstances. For distinction of all kinds this cla.s.s has an esteem. Everything which succeeds they tend to welcome, to win over, to put on their side; genius may generally make, if it will, not bad terms for itself with them. But the total result of the cla.s.s, its effect on society at large and on national progress, are what we must regard. And on the whole, with no necessary function to fulfil, never conversant with life as it really is, tempted, flattered, and spoiled from childhood to old age, our aristocratic cla.s.s is inevitably materialized, and the more so the more the development of industry and ingenuity augments the means of luxury. Every one can see how bad is the action of such an aristocracy upon the cla.s.s of newly enriched people, whose great danger is a materialistic ideal, just because it is the ideal they can easiest comprehend. Nor is the mischief of this action now compensated by signal services of a public kind. Turn even to that sphere which aristocracies think specially their own, and where they have under other circ.u.mstances been really effective,--the sphere of politics. When there is need, as now, for any large forecast of the course of human affairs, for an acquaintance with the ideas which in the end sway mankind, and for an estimate of their power, aristocracies are out of their element, and materialized aristocracies most of all. In the immense spiritual movement of our day, the English aristocracy, as I have elsewhere said, always reminds me of Pilate confronting the phenomenon of Christianity.

Nor can a materialized cla.s.s have any serious and fruitful sense for the power of beauty. They may imagine themselves to be in pursuit of beauty; but how often, alas, does the pursuit come to little more than dabbling a little in what they are pleased to call art, and making a great deal of what they are pleased to call love!

Let us return to their merits. For the power of manners an aristocratic cla.s.s, whether materialized or not, will always, from its circ.u.mstances, have a strong sense. And although for this power of social life and manners, so important to civilization, our English race has no special natural turn, in our aristocracy this power emerges and marks them. When the day of general humanization comes, they will have fixed the standard of manners. The English simplicity, too, makes the best of the English aristocracy more frank and natural than the best of the like cla.s.s anywhere else, and even the worst of them it makes free from the incredible fatuities and absurdities of the worst. Then the sense of conduct they share with their countrymen at large. In no cla.s.s has it such trials to undergo; in none is it more often and more grievously overborne. But really the right comment on this is the comment of Pepys[484] upon the evil courses of Charles the Second and the Duke of York and the court of that day: "At all which I am sorry; but it is the effect of idleness, and having nothing else to employ their great spirits upon."

Heaven forbid that I should speak in dispraise of that unique and most English cla.s.s which Mr. Charles Sumner extols--the large cla.s.s of gentlemen, not of the landed cla.s.s or of the n.o.bility, but cultivated and refined. They are a seemly product of the energy and of the power to rise in our race. Without, in general, rank and splendor and wealth and luxury to polish them, they have made their own the high standard of life and manners of an aristocratic and refined cla.s.s. Not having all the dissipations and distractions of this cla.s.s, they are much more seriously alive to the power of intellect and knowledge, to the power of beauty. The sense of conduct, too, meets with fewer trials in this cla.s.s. To some extent, however, their contiguousness to the aristocratic cla.s.s has now the effect of materializing them, as it does the cla.s.s of newly enriched people. The most palpable action is on the young amongst them, and on their standard of life and enjoyment. But in general, for this whole cla.s.s, established facts, the materialism which they see regnant, too much block their mental horizon, and limit the possibilities of things to them. They are deficient in openness and flexibility of mind, in free play of ideas, in faith and ardor.

Civilized they are, but they are not much of a civilizing force; they are somehow bounded and ineffective.

So on the middle cla.s.s they produce singularly little effect. What the middle cla.s.s sees is that splendid piece of materialism, the aristocratic cla.s.s, with a wealth and luxury utterly out of their reach, with a standard of social life and manners, the offspring of that wealth and luxury, seeming utterly out of their reach also. And thus they are thrown back upon themselves--upon a defective type of religion, a narrow range of intellect and knowledge, a stunted sense of beauty, a low standard of manners. And the lower cla.s.s see before them the aristocratic cla.s.s, and its civilization, such as it is, even infinitely more out of _their_ reach than out of that of the middle cla.s.s; while the life of the middle cla.s.s, with its unlovely types of religion, thought, beauty, and manners, has naturally, in general, no great attractions for them either. And so they, too, are thrown back upon themselves; upon their beer, their gin, and their _fun_. Now, then, you will understand what I meant by saying that our inequality materializes our upper cla.s.s, vulgarizes our middle cla.s.s, brutalizes our lower.

And the greater the inequality the more marked is its bad action upon the middle and lower cla.s.ses. In Scotland the landed aristocracy fills the scene, as is well known, still more than in England; the other cla.s.ses are more squeezed back and effaced. And the social civilization of the lower middle cla.s.s and of the poorest cla.s.s, in Scotland, is an example of the consequences. Compared with the same cla.s.s even in England, the Scottish lower middle cla.s.s is most visibly, to vary Mr.

Charles Sumner's phrase, _less_ well-bred, _less_ careful in personal habits and in social conventions, _less_ refined. Let any one who doubts it go, after issuing from the aristocratic solitudes which possess Loch Lomond, let him go and observe the shopkeepers and the middle cla.s.s in Dumbarton, and Greenock, and Gourock, and the places along the mouth of the Clyde. And for the poorest cla.s.s, who that has seen it can ever forget the hardly human horror, the abjection and uncivilizedness of Glasgow?

What a strange religion, then, is our religion of inequality! Romance often helps a religion to hold its ground, and romance is good in its way; but ours is not even a romantic religion. No doubt our aristocracy is an object of very strong public interest. The _Times_ itself bestows a leading article by way of epithalamium on the Duke of Norfolk's marriage. And those journals of a new type, full of talent, and which interest me particularly because they seem as if they were written by the young lion[485] of our youth,--the young lion grown mellow and, as the French say, _viveur_, arrived at his full and ripe knowledge of the world, and minded to enjoy the smooth evening of his days,--those journals, in the main a sort of social gazette of the aristocracy, are apparently not read by that cla.s.s only which they most concern, but are read with great avidity by other cla.s.ses also. And the common people, too, have undoubtedly, as Mr. Gladstone says, a wonderful preference for a lord. Yet our aristocracy, from the action upon it of the Wars of the Roses, the Tudors, and the political necessities of George the Third, is for the imagination a singularly modern and uninteresting one. Its splendor of station, its wealth, show, and luxury, is then what the other cla.s.ses really admire in it; and this is not an elevating admiration. Such an admiration will never lift us out of our vulgarity and brutality, if we chance to be vulgar and brutal to start with; it will rather feed them and be fed by them. So that when Mr. Gladstone invites us to call our love of inequality "the complement of the love of freedom or its negative pole, or the shadow which the love of freedom casts, or the reverberation of its voice in the halls of the const.i.tution," we must surely answer that all this mystical eloquence is not in the least necessary to explain so simple a matter; that our love of inequality is really the vulgarity in us, and the brutality, admiring and wors.h.i.+pping the splendid materiality.

Our present social organization, however, will and must endure until our middle cla.s.s is provided with some better ideal of life than it has now.

Our present organization has been an appointed stage in our growth; it has been of good use, and has enabled us to do great things. But the use is at an end, and the stage is over. Ask yourselves if you do not sometimes feel in yourselves a sense, that in spite of the strenuous efforts for good of so many excellent persons amongst us, we begin somehow to flounder and to beat the air; that we seem to be finding ourselves stopped on this line of advance and on that, and to be threatened with a sort of standstill. It is that we are trying to live on with a social organization of which the day is over. Certainly equality will never of itself alone give us a perfect civilization. But, with such inequality as ours, a perfect civilization is impossible.

To that conclusion, facts, and the stream itself of this discourse, do seem, I think, to carry us irresistibly. We arrive at it because they so choose, not because we so choose. Our tendencies are all the other way.

We are all of us politicians, and in one of two camps, the Liberal or the Conservative. Liberals tend to accept the middle cla.s.s as it is, and to praise the nonconformists; while Conservatives tend to accept the upper cla.s.s as it is, and to praise the aristocracy. And yet here we are at the conclusion, that whereas one of the great obstacles to our civilization is, as I have often said, British nonconformity, another main obstacle to our civilization is British aristocracy! And this while we are yet forced to recognize excellent special qualities as well as the general English energy and honesty, and a number of emergent humane individuals, in both nonconformists and aristocracy. Clearly such a conclusion can be none of our own seeking.

Then again, to remedy our inequality, there must be a change in the law of bequest, as there has been in France; and the faults and inconveniences of the present French law of bequest are obvious. It tends to over-divide property; it is unequal in operation, and can be eluded by people limiting their families; it makes the children, however ill they may behave, independent of the parent. To be sure, Mr.

Mill[486] and others have shown that a law of bequest fixing the maximum, whether of land or money, which any one individual may take by bequest or inheritance, but in other respects leaving the testator quite free, has none of the inconveniences of the French law, and is in every way preferable. But evidently these are not questions of practical politics. Just imagine Lord Hartington[487] going down to Glasgow, and meeting his Scotch Liberals there, and saying to them: "You are ill at ease, and you are calling for change, and very justly. But the cause of your being ill at ease is not what you suppose. The cause of your being ill at ease is the profound imperfectness of your social civilization.

Your social civilization is, indeed, such as I forbear to characterize.

But the remedy is not disestablishment. The remedy is social equality.

Let me direct your attention to a reform in the law of bequest and entail." One can hardly speak of such a thing without laughing. No, the matter is at present one for the thoughts of those who think. It is a thing to be turned over in the minds of those who, on the one hand, have the spirit of scientific inquirers, bent on seeing things as they really are; and, on the other hand, the spirit of friends of the humane life, lovers of perfection. To your thoughts I commit it. And perhaps, the more you think of it, the more you will be persuaded that Menander[488]

showed his wisdom quite as much when he said _Choose equality_, as when he a.s.sured us that _Evil communications corrupt good manners_.