is not to say that Arnold did not authentically support the rights of the working classes. Clearly his work as an inspector of schools, his commitment to state-sponsored education, and his acute awareness of the failures, and in fact obsolescence, of an aristocratic government indicate that his politics were, at a practical level, certainly progressive; his life’s work included enormous efforts toward balancing the distribution of power and education.xxxvii However, in Arnold’s vision of the democratic future as expressed in Culture and Anarchy, a known and established set of cultural values will simply be spread (via “the State” as aristocracy’s replacement) amongst a greater number of people. Missing from this political and cultural philosophy, then, is the idea that a newly born and valuable culture might arise out of a new political and social balance of power—for Arnold did not trust the process of “welcoming the darker odds, the dross” of democracy (Whitman, Leaves, 428). In simple terms, Arnold is a gradualist—“Rather to patience prompted,” as he puts it in his early poem, “To a Republican Friend, 1848.” As Antony Harrison details in his thorough (and thoroughly readable) study, The Cultural Production of Matthew Arnold, Arnold’s desire for change is uncomfortably wed to an anxiety about the violent possibilities lurking in sudden cultural upheaval.xxxviii
“Democracy” and Culture and Anarchy, written a few years before and just after the 1867 reform bill, respectively, contribute and respond to the controversies and upheavals of the years leading up to this change. (“Democracy” was originally written as the introduction to Arnold’s report on the popular education of France. Arnold republished it as an independent essay in 1879, indicating the essay’s continued importance to him.) In both works, Arnold is calling on “the State” to respond to “the new and more democratic force which is now superseding our old middle-class liberalism” by disseminating the values of “culture,” values that have their origin, as Arnold consistently reveals, in the aristocratic class—in the intellectual and aesthetic experience leisure affords (Culture and Anarchy, 51). xxxix
One must keep in mind, as others have noted, that “culture” does not entirely mean for Arnold the knowledge of a particular collection of literary texts or aesthetic objects. Rather, as he defines it in Culture and Anarchy, culture is an attitude, an intellectual and moral curiosity through which an individual or group is able to “turn a free and fresh stream of thought” upon stock notions and habits (7). As Marc Redfield writes, “To acculturate does not mean to educate in the sense of imparting knowledge or skills; rather, it means to produce a subject capable of transcending class identity by identifying instead with what Arnold famously called ‘our best self,’ which is to say ‘the idea of the whole community, the State” (75-6). Thus culture and critical disinterestedness become more or less interchangeable terms, their definitions sliding into each other as Arnold moves between literary and social criticism.xl Furthermore, this ideology of consensus is best imparted by a communally shared aesthetic experience. Again, Redfield: “Culture . . . produces the consensual grounds for representative democracy” (76).
Arnold’s abiding concern, developed most succinctly in “Democracy,” is that the middle and working classes, deprived of the examples of “nobility” and “grand style” afforded by the aristocracy, will come to power without humanistic ideals, or, to follow Arnold’s logic, without the desire to emulate the performance of such ideals. (It is worth noting here that Arnold’s political position in this essay is in no way absolute, or even clear. As Harrison puts it, Arnold’s political views in the essay “leave the reader mystified rather than persuaded” (16). However, we can trace some consistencies in Arnold’s anxieties, if not in his solutions.) In the fourteenth section of Popular Education in France, Arnold writes that the most pressing danger of educating and thus empowering the lower classes is that they will, in knowing little, presume too much. With little education and no nobility to emulate, they will become, like the Americans, self-satisfied. America, having grown up “without ideals,” with “no aristocracy,” and therefore with nothing to admire, overrates with “vulgar self-satisfaction” its inferior and fragmented culture. Thus, Arnold worries that the diminishment of the aristocracy will cause England to become “Americanized,” will cause it to fall into “anarchy”—the culture of the uncultured—in which citizens are not motivated to “transcend their class identity,” but instead act only from self-interest. (Works, 2:161). Clearly, the problem of Americanization is not simply a problem of embarrassing and ignorant vulgarity; it is also a problem of stunted intellectual and moral growth.
This problematic proximity between the value of disinterestedness and aristocratic culture is further complicated when, in “Democracy,” Arnold attempts to locate the source of these values in socio-material conditions themselves:
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 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 constantly struggling for little things . . . A governing class imbued with it may not be capable of intelligently leading the masses of people to the highest pitch of welfare for them; but it sets them an invaluable example of qualities without which no really high welfare can exist. (6)
Despite this assertion that power, responsibility, and economic well-being (not to mention, race) lead to an elevation of character, Arnold argues that the middle and working classes, new to their (limited) political freedoms, cannot achieve the disinterested curiosity that leads to “intellectual and moral growth,” unless provided an example of these values, or unless somehow trained to them. The inevitable weakening of the aristocratic class therefore presents a vacuum, which needs, in Arnold’s estimation, to be filled by “the State”:
On what action may we rely to replace, for some time at any rate, that action of the aristocracy upon the people of this country, which we have seen exercise an influence in many respects elevating and beneficial, but which is rapidly, and from inevitable causes, ceasing? In other words, and to use a short and significant modern expression which every one understands, what influence may help us to prevent the English people from becoming, with the growth of democracy, Americanized? I confess I am disposed to answer: On the action of the State. (16)
Even if one were to concede that the state can or should serve the role of guiding people toward a more disinterested approach to democracy (one of the abiding arguments in favor of state-mandated public education in our time), Arnold’s argument is logically flawed in at least two ways. Firstly, the idea that possession of economic and political power guarantees or even encourages disinterested behavior is pure fantasy, as history had abundantly demonstrated to Arnold and as it has to us. Secondly, even if it could be argued that economic and political freedom, by affording leisure time and granting responsibility, do in fact lend themselves to disinterestedness, then it is certainly problematic to argue that this quality must be carefully and stringently administered to those newly in possession of such freedoms. Either the qualities Arnold values arise out of socio-economic position, or they are ideologically constructed, and therefore learned or imposed. To claim both simultaneously problematically suggests that elevation of character is at once the property of a specific social group with specific traditions, and therefore inimitable, and a function of material conditions, and therefore automatically assumed once these conditions are met. xli
For running directly against Arnold’s claim that the disinterested critical attitude of the man of culture is a “practice of the self,” xlii is his even more prevalent and urgent argument that without a strong state to replace the strong aristocracy, the people will fall into the anarchy of pure self-interest, of “doing as one likes.” In Culture and Anarchy we find him stating that “culture” is a “balance and regulation of mind which is not often attained without fruitful effort” (34). However, just a few pages later we find him arguing against this self-fashioning, and in favor
