Nineteenth Century Thought (11 page)

The
second benefit to be expected from giving to women the free use of their
faculties, by leaving them the free choice of their employments, and opening to
them the same field of occupation and the same prizes and encouragements as to
other human beings, would be that of doubling the mass of mental faculties
available for the higher service of humanity. Where there is now one person
qualified to benefit mankind and promote the general improvement, as a public
teacher, or an administrator of some branch of public or social affairs, there
would then be a chance of two. Mental superiority of any kind is at present
everywhere so much below the demand; there is such a deficiency of persons
competent to do excellently anything which it requires any considerable amount
of ability to do; that the loss to the world, by refusing to make use of one-half
of the whole quantity of talent it possesses, is extremely serious. It is true
that this amount of mental power is not totally lost. Much of it is employed,
and would in any case be employed, in domestic management, and in the few
other occupations open to women and from the remainder indirect
benefit is in many individual cases obtained, through the personal influence of
individual women over individual men. But these benefits are partial; their
range is extremely circumscribed; and if they must be admitted, on the one
hand, as a deduction from the amount of fresh social power that would be
acquired by giving freedom to one-half of the whole sum of human intellect,
there must be added, on the other, the
 
benefit
 
of the stimulus
 
that would
 
be given to the Intellect of men by the competition; or (to use a more
true expression) by the necessity that would be imposed on them of deserving
precedency before they could expect to obtain it.

*
 
*
 
*

When
we consider the positive evil caused to the disqualified half of the human race
by their disqualification-first in the loss of the most inspiriting and
elevating kind of personal enjoyment, and next in the weariness,
disappointment, and profound dissatisfaction with life, which are so often the
substitute for it; one feels that among all the lessons which men require for carrying
on the struggle against the inevitable imperfections of their lot on earth,
there is no lesson which they more need, than not to add to the evils which
nature inflicts, by their jealous and prejudiced restrictions on one another.
Their vain fears only substitute other and worse evils for those which they are
idly apprehensive of: while every restraint on the freedom of conduct of any of
their human fellow features, (otherwise than by making them responsible for any
evil actually caused by it), dries up
pro tanto
²²
the
principal fountain of human happiness, and leaves the species less rich, to an
inappreciable degree, in all that makes life valuable to the individual human
being.

ANNOTATIONS

22.
   
Pro
Tanto
:
of its own; in normal course.

Born
in 1822 in a devout Christian family in England, Matthew Arnold truly
represented the Victorian spirit of uncertainty. Repressed initially by his
strong-willed father Dr. Arnold of Rugby in Christian discipline, Matthew
Arnold eventually broke free from the intellectual-religious stranglehold to
work out his own specific position. Soon, he was able to move from the
religious to the cultural arena where he found peace and solace. We notice a
clash in his views between the other-worldly and temporal as well · as between
traditional virtues and democratic questioning. What comes out clearly at the
end is his preference for a space in life entirely real and concrete, a sphere
allowing disagreements to coexist and making for a natural emergence of
solutions. His duties as an Inspector of Schools drew him away from poetry
where he had created a niche for himself as a representative Victorian poet.
Gradually, his interests shifted towards questions of education, social values,
literary excellence and human wisdom.

It
is interesting to see how Arnold coped with Protestantism to a greater part of
which he adhered. He did not approve of the reformist zeal associated with
Protestantism. At the same time, he argued for individual judgment able to
ensure that discerning minds created a culture of shared values. His impatience
with faith of the religious kind made him explore the middle area in social
life newly created by the educated sections in England. This area was
inaccessible both to the economically powerful and the destitute. The rich and
the poor remained, as Arnold argued, too enmeshed in their mundane practice to
think of freedom, mutuality or consensus in life.

Arnold's
emphasis on culture caused a rift, as it were, between literature and the common
masses and paved the way for criticism to establish itself as an independent
discipline. Thus, after Arnold
who died in 1888, criticism would
hold on its own and perform the distinct role of interpreting and assessing
literary works, confining itself to the select few capable of appreciating
finer things of literature and art. He also laid the foundation of liberalism,
something the English world of letters would swear by in the next fifty years. Interestingly,
this period of fifty years would also be the period of expansion of England's
imperialist interests. Imperialism in the first half of the twentieth century
needed an apolitical doctrine and liberalism came forward bravely to meet the
requirement.

In
his essay selected in this volume, Arnold has comprehensively attacked the
preaching as well as practice of those associated with the
Nonconformist,
a
magazine representing the voice of protest and dissidence in England. The essay
is marked by clarity of position and complex awareness of the issues involved.
Arnold has stressed that literature
  
and
  
culture
  
have
  
their
  
own
  
specific
  
domain
  
where understanding and wisdom area preferred to sharp argument and
difference of opinion. This is an obvious non-class position devoted entirely
to the interests of stability in society. Arnold would not find favour
 
with
 
either
 
the
 
ruling group
 
that
 
lives
 
by
 
suppression
 
and oppression or
with the ordinary masses that are prone to crude behaviour and
untempered
affections or sentiments. On his side, Arnold's
eye is on the expanding English middle class busy in the area of services,
explanation and elaboration (as in law), education, literature and the arts.
 
‘Aesthetic' ("sweetness and light")
is an important category for him. We also notice that Arnold is particularly
peeved and impatient with the preaching and arguing activist who is considered
aggressive, opportunistic and narrow-minded and, therefore, the main enemy of
the civil society. Is the idea of social change
favouring
the working masses not bypassed in the process and is Arnold not the chief Victorian
voice of compromise? As we read the essay, we should particularly ponder over
this question.

[Puritanism
and Culture]

The
impulse of the English race
²
towards moral development and
self-conquest has nowhere so powerfully manifested itself as in Puritanism
³
.
  
Nowhere has Puritanism found so adequate an expression
as in the religious organization of the Independents
⁴
. The modern
Independents have a newspaper, the
Nonconformist,
written with great
sincerity and ability. The motto, the standard, the profession of faith which
this organ of theirs carries aloft, is: "The Dissidence of Dissent and the
Protestantism of the Protestant
⁵
religion." There is sweetness
and light, and an ideal of complete harmonious human perfection! One need not
go to culture and poetry to find language to judge it. Religion, with its
instinct for perfection, supplies language to judge it, language, too, which is
in our mouths every day. "Finally, be of one mind, united in
feeling," says St. Peter. There is an Ideal which judges the Puritan
ideal: "The Dissidence of Dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant
religion!" And religious organizations like this are what people believe
in, rest in,
would
give their lives for! Such, I say,
is the wonderful virtue of even the beginnings of perfection, of having
conquered even the plain faults of our
animality, that
the religious organization which has helped us to do it can seem to us
something precious, salutary, and to be propagated, even when it wears such a
brand of imperfection on its forehead as this.

ANNOTATIONS

1.
      
Sweetness
and light:
These words signify something other than
meaning
in
human life. See how Arnold evolves here the idea of 'culture' through these
words.

2.
      
The impulse of the English race:
Some
force (not amenable to reason) working invisibly and compellingly behind acts
of the English people. 'Race' can be interpreted as an integrated community
with a long tradition behind it.

3.
      
Puritanism:
Christian
doctrine of self-denial and honesty in individual behaviour. This went totally
against the Roman Catholic principle of being at peace with oneself as one
followed age-old pieties and established norms. Puritans became targets of
ridicule for their insistence on pure conduct and rejection of tradition.

4.
      
Dissidence of Dissent and the
Protestantism of the Protestant:
As a motto, it stresses
the spirit behind a belief system. Further on, the spirit assumes purist-individualist
overtones. One can note a sense of aggression in this motto.

5.
      
The religious organization of The
Independents:
See the contradiction behind Independents
as part of an organization.

And
men have got such a habit of giving to the language of religion a special
application, of making it a mere jargon, that for the condemnation which
religion itself passes on the shortcomings of their religious organizations
they have no ear; they are sure to cheat themselves and to explain this
condemnation away. They can only be reached by the criticism which culture,
like poetry, speaking a language not to be sophisticated, and resolutely
testing these organizations by the ideal of a human perfection complete on all
sides, applies to them.

But
men of culture and poetry, it will be said, are again and again failing; and
failing conspicuously, in the necessary first stage to a harmonious perfection,
in the subduing of the great obvious faults of our animality, which it is the
glory of these religious organizations to have helped us to subdue. True, they
do often so fail. They have often been without the virtues as well as the
faults of the Puritan; it has been one of their dangers that they so felt the
Puritan's faults that they too much neglected the practice of his virtues. I
will not, however, exculpate them at the Puritan's expense. They have often
failed in morality and morality is indispensable. And they have been punished
for their failure, as the Puritan has been rewarded for his performance. They
have been punished wherein they erred; but their ideal of beauty, of sweetness
and light, and a human nature complete on all its sides, remains the true ideal
of perfection still; just as the Puritan's ideal of perfection remains narrow
and inadequate, although for what he did well he has been richly rewarded.
Notwithstanding the mighty results of the Pilgrim Fathers' voyage
⁶
,
they and their standard of perfection are rightly judged when we figure to
ourselves Shakespeare or

ANNOTATIONS

6.
      
Pilgrim Fathers' voyage
.
. .
Shakespeare and Virgil would have found them:
Look at the
construction of the sentence where the intended meaning (that Pilgrim Fathers
were at variance with Shakespeare and Virgil) is worked through suggestion.
Pilgrim Fathers were puritans who left the English shore for America in
1621.They constituted the early English settlers in America for whom
Shakespeare and Virgil would happily combine to meet the practical requirements
of settling at the new place.

Virgil-souls
in whom sweetness and light, and all that in human nature is most humane, were
eminent-accompanying them on their voyage, and think what intolerable company
Shakespeare and Virgil would have found them! In the same way let us judge the
religious organizations which we see all around us. Do not let us deny the good
and the happiness which they have accomplished; but do not let us fail to see
clearly that their idea of human perfection is narrow and inadequate, and that
the Dissidence of Dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion will
never bring humanity to its true goal. As I said with regard to wealth: Let us
look at the life of those who live in and for it-so I say with regard to the
religious organizations. Look at the life imaged in such a newspaper as the
Nonconformist
⁷
a
life of jealousy of the
Establishment
⁸
, disputes, tea-meetings, openings of chapels,
sermons; and then think of it as an ideal of a human life completing itself on
all sides, and aspiring with all its organs after sweetness, light, and
perfection!