Concept of culture and meaning of ‘Anarchy in Society’ according to Matthew Arnold

Topic: Concept of culture and meaning of ‘Anarchy in Society’ according to Matthew Arnold

Name: Ranjan P. Velari

Class: M.A. Sem. 2

Paper No.: 6 (Victorian Literature)

PG Enrollment No.: 14101032

Email ID: ranjanvelari@gmail.com

Year: 2014-16

Guidance: Heenaba Zala

Submitted To: Smt. S.B. Gardi

                          Department of English

                          M.K. Bhavnagar University

v What is the concept of culture according to Matthew Arnold? Explain the various factors, which make ‘culture’. What does Arnold mean by ‘Anarchy in Society’ in his essay?

Introduction:
Matthew Arnold remarked that belong to a class of works in which the perfect balance of human nature is lost, and which have therefore, as spiritual productions, in their contents something excessive and morbid, in their form something not thoroughly sound.

v Concept of Culture according to Matthew Arnold:

·       Bishop Wilson unites, in Maxims, that downright honesty and plain good sense which our English race has so powerfully applied to the divine impossibilities of religion; by which it has brought religion so much into practical life, and has done its allotted part in promoting upon earth the kingdom of God.

·       His unction is so perfect, and in such happy alliance with his good sense, that it becomes tenderness and fervent charity. His good sense is so perfect, and in such happy alliance with his unction, that it becomes moderation and insight.

·       The whole scope of essay is,

“To recommend culture as the great help out of our present difficulties; culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a virtue in following them mechanically.”

·       Culture is above is all, an inward operation.

When we criticize the present operation of disestablishing the Irish Church, not by the power of reason and justice, but by the antipathy of the Protestant Nonconformists, English and Scotch, to establishments, we are called enemies of the Nonconformists, blind partisans of the Anglican Establishment, possessed with the one desire to help the clergy and to harm the Dissenters.

·       Culture is the study of perfection, to conceive of true human perfection as a harmonious perfection, developing all sides of our humanity; and as a general perfection, developing all parts of our society.

·       Hebraism and Hellenism, has for its main result to show how our puritans, ancient and modern, have not enough added to their care for walking staunchly by the best light they have, a care that that light be not darkness; has they have developed one side of their humanity at the expense of all others, and have become incomplete and mutilated in consequence.

·       We have got fixed in our minds that a more full and harmonious development of their humanity is what the Nonconformists most want, that narrowness, one-sidedness, and incompleteness is what they most suffer from; in a word, that in what we call provinciality they abound, but in what we may call totality they fall short.

·       The believer in machinery may think that to get a Government to abolish Church-rates or to legalize marriage with a deceased wife’s sister is to exert a moral and ennobling influence upon Government. But a lover of perfection, who looks to inward ripeness of our statesman than Dr. Watts, and has, therefore, done more to moralize and ennoble them, so an Establishment, which has produced Hooker, Barrow, Butler, has done more to moralize and ennoble English statesman and their conduct than communities which have produced the Nonconformist divines.

·       Only two religious disciplines seem exempted, these two are the Roman Catholic and Jewish. One may say that to be reared a number of national church is in itself a lesson of religious moderation, and a help towards culture and harmonious perfection.

·       National establishment of religion favors totality, whole-and corner forms of religion inevitably favor provincialism. However, perhaps we shall not be provincialized. For  Mr. White says that probably,

“ When all good men alike are placed in a condition of religious equality, and whole complicated iniquity of Government church patronage is swept away, more of moral and ennobling influence than ever will be brought to bear upon the action of statesman.”

·       The influence of religious establishments upon culture and a high development of our humanity,- we can surely see reasons why, with all energy and fine gifts, America does not show more of this development, or more promise of this.

·       In this essay, Matthew Arnold described that how our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace; and America is just ourselves, with the Barbarians quite left out, and the populace nearly. Philistines for the great bulk of the nation; and the Puritan and Hebraizing middle-class, and that its Hebraizing keeps it from culture and totality.

·       Culture, will never make us think it an essential of religion whether we have in our church discipline ‘a popular authority of elders’, as Hooker calls it, or whether we have Episcopal jurisdiction.

·       Culture is the disinterested Endeavor after man’s perfection. Culture, disinterestedly seeking in its aim at perfection to see things and they really are, shows us how worthy and divine a things is the religious side in man, though it is not the whole of man. But while recognizing the grandeur of the religious side in man, culture yet makes us also eschew and inadequate conception of man’s totality.

·       But although culture makes us fond stickers to know machinery, not even our own, and therefore we are willing to grant that perfection can be reached without it, with free churches as with established churches, and with instrumental statesmen as with creative statesmen as with creative statesman—yet perfection can never be reached without seeing things as they really are; and it is to this, therefore and to no machinery in the world, that we stick, we insist that men should not mistake, as they are prone to mistake, their natural test for the bathos for a relish for the sublime.

Sweetness and Light    

·       The disparagers of culture make its motive curiosity; sometimes, indeed, they make its motives mere exclusiveness in vanity. The culture which is supposed to plume itself on a smattering of Greek and Latin is a culture which is begotten by nothing so intellectual as curiosity; it is valued either out of sheer vanity and ignorance, or else as an engine of social and class distinction, separating its holder, like a badge or little, from other people who have not got it. No serious man would call this culture, or attach any value to it, as culture, at all.

·       But there is of culture another view, in which not solely the scientific passion, the sheer desire to see things as they are, natural and proper in intelligent beings, appears as the ground of it. There is a view in which all the love of our neighbors, the impulses towards action, help, and beneficence, the desire for removing human error, clearing human confusion, and diminishing human misery, the noble aspiration to live the world better and happier then we found it, motives eminently such as are called social come is as part of the grounds of culture and the main and pre-eminent part.

·       Culture is then properly described not as having its origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection. It moves by the force, not merely or primarily of the scientific passion for pure knowledge, but also of the moral and social passion for doing well.

·       The moment for culture is of service, culture which believes in making reason and the will of God prevail, believes in perfection, is the study and pursuit of perfection, and is no longer debarred, by a rigid invincible exclusion of whatever is new, from getting acceptance for its ideas, simply because they are new.

·       Religion, the greatest and most important of the efforts by which the human race has manifested its impulse to perfect itself,- religion, that voice of the deepest human experience. Culture seeking 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 fullness and certainty to its solution-likewise reaches.

·       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 distinguishing from our animality. It places it in the ever-increasing efficacy and the general harmonious expansion of those gifts of thought and feeling, which make the peculiar dignity, wealth, and happiness of human nature.

“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.”

·       Perfection, as culture conceives it, is not possible while the individual remain isolated. But finally, perfection,-- as culture from a through disinterested study of human nature and human experience learns to conceive it, is a harmonious expansion of all the powers which make the beauty and worth of human nature, and not consistent with the over-development of any one power at the expense of the rest. Here culture goes beyond religion, as religion is generally conceived by us.

·       The idea of perfection as an inward condition of the mind and spirit is at variance with the mechanical and material civilization. The idea of perfection as a general expansion of the human family is at variance with our strong individualism, our hatred of all limits to the unrestrained swing of the individual’s personality, our- maxim of ‘every man for himself’.

Culture: What is greatness? 

 Greatness is a spiritual condition worthy to excite love, interest, and admiration; and the outward proof of possessing greatness is that we excite love, interest, and admiration. If England were swallow up by the sea to-morrow, which of the two, a hundred years hence, would most excite the love, interest, and admiration of mankind, -- would most, therefore, show the evidences of having possessed greatness, -- the England of last 20 years, or the England of Elizabeth, of a time of splendid spiritual effort, but when our coal, and our industrial operations depending on coal, were very little developed? The people, who believe most that our greatness and welfare are proved by our being very rich, and who most give their lives and thoughts to becoming rich, are just the very people whom we call Philistines.

  Culture says; ‘Consider these people, then their way of life, their habits, their manners, the very tones of their voice; look at them attentively; observe the literature they read, the things which give them pleasure, the words which come forth out of their mouths, the thoughts which make the furniture of their minds; would any amount of wealth be worth having with the condition that one was to become just like these people by having it?’ And thus culture begets a dissatisfaction which is of the highest of possible value in stemming the common tide of men’s thoughts in a wealthy and industrial community, and which saves the future, as one may hope being vulgarized, even if it cannot save the present.

·       Culture, however, shows its single-minded love of perfection, the flexibility which sweetness and light give, and which is one of the rewards of culture pursued in good faith.

·       Culture does not set itself against the games and sports; it congratulates the future, and hopes it will make a good use of its improved physical basis; but it points out that our passing generation of boys and young men is, meantime, sacrificed.

·       The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light. He, who works for sweetness and light, works to make reason and the will of God prevail. He who works for machinery, he who works for hatred, works only for confusion. Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light. This is the social idea; and the men of culture are the true apostles of equality.

Doing as One likes

·       Culture, is or ought to be, study and pursuit of perfection, and that of perfection as pursued by culture, beauty and intelligence, or in other words, sweetness and light, are the main characters.

·       It is said that a man Arnold’s theories of sweetness and light is full of antipathy against the rougher or coarser movements going on around him.

·       When Matthew Arnold began to speak of culture, he insisted on our bondage to machinery, on our proneness to value machinery as  end itself, without looking it to the end for which alone, in truth, it is valuable. Freedom, he said, was one of those things which we thus worshiped in it, without enough regarding the ends for which freedom is to be desired. In our common notions and talk about freedom, we eminently show our idolatry of machinery.

·       Our middle-class, the great representative of trade and Dissent, with its maxims of every man for himself in business, every man for himself in religion, dreads a powerful administration which might somehow interfere with it.

·       Then as to our working class. This class, pressed constantly by the hard daily compulsion of material wants, is naturally the very centre and stronghold of our national idea, that it is man’s ideal right and felicity to do as he likes.

·       Exclusive attention of ours to liberty, and of the relaxed habits of government which it has engendered. It is very easy to mistake or to exaggerate the sort of anarchy from which we are in danger through them.

·       Culture, which simply means trying to perfect oneself, and if light shows us that there is nothing so very blessed in merely doing as one likes, that the worship of the mere freedom to do as one likes is worship of machinery, that the really blessed thing is to like what right reason ordains, and to follow her authority, then we have got a practical benefit out of culture.

·       The state, the power most representing the right reason of the nation, and most worthy, therefore, of ruling,-- exercising, when circumstances require it, authority over us all,-- is for Mr. Carlyle the aristocracy.

·       Culture confers upon us, if in embarrassed times like the present it enables us to look at the ins and the outs of things in this way, without hatred and without partially, and with disposition to see the god in everybody all round.

·       Culture which Arnold talked was as Endeavor to come at reason and the will of God by means of reading, observing, and thinking. Still, to make it perfectly manifest that no more in the working class than in the aristocratic and middle classes can one find an adequate center of authority,-- that is, as culture teaches us to conceive our required authority, of light.

·       Two excellent rules of Bishop Wilson’s for a man’s guidance: ‘Firstly, never go against the best light you have; secondly take care that your light be not darkness’.

Anarchy in Society  

 

·       In the very beginning Matthew Arnold says that from a man without a philosophy no one can expect philosophical completeness. Therefore he observe that in trying to get a distinct notion of our aristocratic, our middle, and our working class, with a view of testing the claims of each of these classes to become a center of authority.

·       It is manifest, if the perfect and virtuous mean of that fine spirit which is the distinctive quality of aristocracies, is to be found in a high, chivalrous style, and its excess in fierce turn for resistance, that its defect must lie in a spirit not bold and high enough, and in an excessive and pusillanimous inaptness for resistance.

·       The working class is so fast growing and rising at the present time that instances of this defeat cannot well be now very common. He says that almost all my attention has naturally been concentrated on my own class, the middle class, with which he has in closest sympathy, and which has been, besides, the great power of our day, and has had its praises sung by all speakers and newspapers.

·       Philistine conveys a sense which makes it more peculiarly appropriate to our middle class than to our aristocratic. Aristocratic class called ‘The Barbarians’. The Barbarians brought with them that staunch individualism, as the modern phrase is and that passion for doing as one likes, for the assertion of personal liberty, which appears to Mr. Bright the central idea of English life.

·       The Barbarians, again, had the passion for asserting one’s personal liberty, and the great natural stronghold. The care of the Barbarians for the body, and for all manly exercise, the vigor, good looks, and fine complexion which they acquired and perpetuated in their families by these means,-- all this may be observed all this culture of the Barbarians was an exterior culture mainly. It consisted principally in outward gifts and graces, in looks, manner, accomplishments, and prowess.

·       Arnold says that it is notorious that our middle-class Liberals have long looked forward to this consumption, when the working class shall join forces with them. According to Plato’s subtle expression, with things of itself and not the real state. Working class which, raw and half developed, has long lain half-ridden amidst its poverty and squalor.

·       Division of English society, two things are to be borne in mind. The first is that since, under all our class divisions, there is common basis of human nature. The second things to be borne in mind that so far as we are Barbarians, Philistines, or Populace; imagine happiness to consist in doing what one’s ordinary self likes. Culture being the true nurse of the perusing love, and sweetness and light the true love with this bent emerge in all classes, -- among the Barbarians, Philistines and Populace.

·       Now it is clear that the very absence of any powerful authority amongst us, and the prevalent doctrine of the duty and happiness of doing as one likes, and to prevent the erection of any very strict standard of excellence, the belief in any very paramount authority of right reason, the recognition of our best self as anything very recondite and hard to come at.

·       Arnold has pointed out hoe in literature the absence of any authoritative center, like an Academy, tends to do this. Each section of the public has its own literary organ, and the mass of the public is without any suspicion that the value of these organs is relative to their being nearer a certain ideal center of correct information, taste, and intelligence, or farther away from it.

·       Our political system everybody is comforted. Our guides and governors who have to be elected by the influence on the Barbarians, and who depend on their favor, sing the praises of the Barbarians, and say all the smooth things that can be said of them.

·       Harsh things are said too, no doubt, against all the great classes of the community; but these things so evidently come from a hostile class, and are so manifestly dictated by the passions and prepossessions of a hostile class, and not by right reason, that they make no serious impression on those at whom they are launched, but slide easily off their minds.

Conclusion:

  So, we can conclude that from every walk of life some people must dedicate themselves to the pursuit of perfection. The doors of perfection and culture are wide open to any really dedicated soul from any three great divisions which Arnold finds proper to sort out the people of England.

  But then it is essential that man must strive to seek human perfection to establish his best self; and culture would, in the end, find its public recognition.