CHAPTER VII.

CULTURE AND POLITICS.

A DISTINGUISHED writer, who was lately snatched away with a suddenness that sent a pang through the nation, expressed on a memorable occasion an opinion about the political life of the time which called forth indignation from some and amused astonishment in others. It has been the pride of the English to pose as an eminently practical people. The possession of ideas has been regarded as an encumbrance to a man rather than otherwise in the bustle of life. If the average Englishman about the time when Arnold delivered his celebrated farewell address from the Chair of Poetry at Oxford had any ideal at all, it was of the following description. Life to him was a campaign, in which it was his duty as a patriot to render certain services to his country, and as a private citizen to procure certain benefits for himself. The kind of warfare in which as a patriot he had to engage was of this peculiar description, that it was not waged against any avowed

public enemy either from without or within the limits of the country. It was carried on against another army corps of his own kith and kin, in which every officer and private claimed to be as ardent a patriot as those of his own army corps. The council of war of each army had its own plan of campaign, the ostensible object of which was always to promote in the long run the greatest happiness of the greatest number of citizens, but the immediate and real object was to baulk the endeavours of the other to attain the same ostensible result in its own peculiar way. The two armies, with the courtesy of knights of old, met always on the same familiar battle-field under the shadow of Westminster Abbey, where they were year after year manœuvred by their respective leaders so as to prevent each other from ruining the country by either of their mutually repugnant specifics. To the mind of such a man as Arnold the political situation of England was not unlike those ongoings from which his refined nature would have shrunk with abhorrence by the bedside and over the remains of the amiable and noble Frederick. As the soldier and the subordinate officer need have no ideas of their own beyond those requisite for the performance of their military duty, so the patriot of

each political corps was oblivious of the cause for which he fought, and thought only of doing his duty in the ranks, to assist his general in turning the flank of the rival leader. And so the strife went on, even any modicum of real service that was ever rendered to the nation being done more to outwit the opposite party than from any strong motives of genuine patriotism. For the sake of the great good which the partizans of each party believed that it alone could achieve for the country, if it had an adequate lease of power, they were not very scrupulous about the means they employed to disappoint the schemes of the rival patriots. Such was the aspect which practical England presented to Matthew Arnold twenty years ago; and the advice which he gave from the Chair of Culture to these practical men on whom he looked down with a measure of scorn, and with whom he declined to consort, was this wise one-to ponder the Socratic maxim "Know thyself." Between him and them there could be nothing in common. They had stultified their manhood by swearing allegiance to the Shibboleth of a party, and the end of their being was to make their party prevail. He trampled all party Shibboleths under his feet, whether of politics or religion, looked straight into the face of

fact as none of his critics could do, and strove like a gallant soldier of truth to "make reason and the will of God prevail." To his searching gaze, so far above the game of politics, in which an old statesman is vainly trying with bandaged eyes to catch the democratic vote, there were other cities than Paris in which the "gods" were laughing at the comedy of "The Goose that laid the Golden Eggs." And so he turned away with mingled scorn and disgust from the pitiful spectacle, and did his strenuous best to divert public opinion into a more excellent way. And the "elegant Jeremiah" of the Chair of Poetry was the practical man after all. In these days of democratic supremacy, it is imperative to see that the stream of political influence is pure at its source in the minds and breasts of the people. If Arnold was grieved to hear the politicians of his earlier days flattering the vanity of the middle classes by extolling their material achievements, while winking at their spiritual indigence, what must his indignation have risen to when he heard the man who, of all belonging to our century, has wielded the most potent influence over the nation, advising the people to blind their eyes and close their ears to the best thoughts of the best minds, and to force the vessel of the State among rocks of

difficulty such as she has never encountered before, with no better chart to steer by than their uneducated instinct? Twenty years ago, Arnold foresaw the coming trouble, and braced himself to meet it with generous courage. He laid it down as the duty of every true man in England to quit the senseless strife of politics, and become an apostle of culture to the people. The culture he advocated was no supercilious Pharisaism, parading its broad phylacteries in sight of the people, and reminding them how much it is superior to them. It was a broad and generous culture like his own nature, not to be announced at esoteric meetings of the initiated, but to be spoken in simple language to the public ear.

Since

Twenty years have gone by since Arnold bade farewell from the Chair of Poetry to the students of Oxford, and what are the relations of culture to politics now? There are not a few professional politicians who profess to be cultured men. Disraeli rose from the desk of a Litterateur to the intimate councils of sovereigns and statesmen, and his rival in St Stephen's alternated his parliamentary oratory with far-fetched dreams about the origin of the Homeric Mythology and a damaging defence of the scientific authority of Genesis against the

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