CHAPTER XI

Arnold's views of English society - The three classes, the Barbarians, the Philistines, the Populace - Characteristics of the Philistine or middle class - Why his diagnosis, though true in the main, was inadequate - The want of culture among Nonconformists - The disabilities under which they had suffered — A sonnet Illustration of the difference between public schools and private" academies"-Schools for special trades, sects, or professions Hymns-Effects of his polemic in favour of a system of secondary instruction

MATTHEW ARNOLD never lost an opportunity of exposing with pitiless candour the fallacy of the belief so fondly cherished by the British Philistine, that we are a well-educated people, and that we are likely to remain so, if we give free play to local initiative and private enterprise. On the contrary, he brought forward, as we have seen, an immense mass of facts, personal experiences, and statistics to prove that whereas in Continental countries, in which the education of the middle class is a matter of national concern and State supervision, "that class in general may be said to be brought up upon the first plane, in England it is brought up on the second plane," and he quotes with sorrowful acquiescence the language of a foreign reporter who said, “L'Angleterre proprement dite est le pays d'Europe où l'instruction est le moins répandue."1 Arnold regarded it as one of the chief aims of his life to disturb our insular self

1 Preface to Schools and Universities on the Continent.

CLASSIFICATION OF ENGLISH SOCIETY 221

gratulation, and to make English people profoundly discontented with their present provision for intermediate and higher instruction.

He was fond of dividing English society into three classes, the upper or aristocratic and official class, the middle class, and the working or lower class. The first he playfully characterized as the Barbarians, the second as the Philistines, and the third as the Populace. Of the first of these classes, he always speaks with good-humoured tolerance and with a certain qualified admiration.

"It is the chief virtue of a healthy and uncorrupted aristocracy that it is in general in the grand style. That elevation of character, that noble way of thinking and behaving which is an eminent gift of nature to some individuals, is also often generated in whole classes of men (at least when these come of a strong and good race) by the possession of power, by the importance and responsibility of high station, by habitual dealing with great things, by being placed above the necessity of struggling for little things. It may go along with a not very quick or open intelligence, but it cannot well go along with a conduct vulgar and ignoble.”

" 1

But on the other hand, in the same essay he dwells emphatically on the incapacity of the ruling class for ideas, and traces to this cause the secret of their declining influence and their want of success in modern epochs.

"They can, and often do, impart a high spirit, a fine ideal of grandeur, to the people; thus they lay the foundations of a great nation. But they leave the people still the

1 Mixed Essays.

multitude, the crowd; they have small belief in the power of the ideas which are its life. . . . In one most important part of general human culture openness to ideas and ardour for them aristocracy is less advanced than democracy, and to keep the latter under the tutelage of the former would on the whole be actually unfavourable to the progress of the world. At epochs when new ideas are powerfully permeating in a society, and profoundly changing its spirit, aristocracies, as they are in general not long suffered to guide it without question, so are they by nature not fitted to guide it intelligently."

1

And he quotes with approval from his favourite, De Tocqueville, the remark "that the common people

is more uncivilized in aristocratic countries than in others, because there the lowly and the poor feel themselves, as it were, overwhelmed with the weight of their own inferiority." 2

It is not easy to understand the true nature of Arnold's influence on public education without considering the estimate he formed of the society in which he lived, and the rather merciless view he took of some of our national foibles and weaknesses. In a spirit which reminds us from time to time of Apemantus, of Jacques, of Swift, or of Carlyle, he poses throughout many of his prose writings as the critic and censurer of mankind. He once said of Goethe:

"He took the suffering human race,

He read each wound, each weakness clear,

And struck his finger on the place

And said, 'Thou ailest, here and here!'”

1 Mixed Essays.

2 Irish Essays, The Future of Liberalism.

THE PHILISTINES

223

In a sense it is true of Arnold that he set himself the like task, and that on the whole he fulfilled it with sureness of touch, with insight and skill, with a pleasant mingling of raillery and persuasiveness, though not with unqualified success. As he looked upon English society, he thought he saw an upper class materialized and frivolous, a middle class vulgarized, and a lower class brutalized.

But while he recognized some compensation for the lack of ideas in the tone of manners and in the public services of the aristocracy, and some corrective for the peculiar vices of democracy in its openness of mind and accessibility to ideas, he reserved for the middle class his severest criticism and his most humorous invective. He called them Philistines. He said of this class, that although with virtues of its own it was "full of narrowness, full of prejudices, with a defective type of religion, a narrow range of intellect and knowledge, a stunted sense of beauty, a low standard of manners, and averse, moreover, to whatever may disturb it in its vulgarity."1

"The great English middle class, the kernel of the nation, the class whose intelligent sympathy had upheld a Shakespeare, entered the prison of Puritanism and had the key turned upon its spirit there for two hundred years. 'He enlargeth a nation,' said Job, 'and straiteneth it again.' If the lower classes in this country have utterly abandoned the dogmas of Christianity, and the upper classes its practice, the cause lies very much in the impossible and unlovely

1 Irish Essays, The Future of Liberalism.

presentment of Christian dogmas and practice which is offered by the most important part of the nation, the serious middle class, and above all by its Nonconforming portion."1

Arnold's own experience had brought him into exceptionally near contact with this portion of our social organism. As Inspector, during many years, of schools not connected with the Church of England, he was necessarily the recipient of the hospitality of the managers of such schools. He had known what it was to be prayed for by name, and to have his faults gently hinted at in the family devotions. He railed at "the hideousness, the immense ennui of the life which the Puritan type had created." He described the middle-class Londoner as oscillating between a dismal and illiberal life at Islington and an equally dismal and illiberal life at Camberwell. To him the typical Philistine was one who never admired or even knew what was best in literature, but only that which is flimsy and ephemeral; who prided himself on upholding the "dissidence of dissent, and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion," who liked tea meetings and Bands of Hope and unctuous sermons, and who had a morbid hankering after marriage with his deceased wife's sister. Mr. Leslie Stephen has said:

"Condemned as he was to live and work among the middle class, while imbued with the ideas in which they were most defective, loving as he did the beauty and the fresh

1 Essays in Criticism.