A. de Rothschild.]

CHAPTER IV

SOCIETY

"Culture seeks to do away with classes and sects; to make the best that
has been thought and known in the world current everywhere; to make all
men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light, where they may use
ideas, as it uses them itself, freely; nourished, and not bound, by
them. This is the _social idea_; and the men of culture are the true
apostles of equality."

The words--_social idea_--which Arnold himself italicized in the
foregoing extract from _Culture and Anarchy_, will indicate the sense in
which "Society" is here intended. We are not thinking of that which
Pennialinus[21] means when he writes about "Society gossip" or "a
Society function." We are concerned with the thoughts and temper and
actions of men, not as isolated units, but as living in an organized
community; and, taking "Society" in this sense, we are to examine
Arnold's influence on the Society of his time.

[Illustration: Front of Balliol College, Oxford, in Arnold's Time

In 1840 Matthew Arnold won an open scholarship at Balliol and went into
residence in 1841

_Photo H.W. Taunt_]

Certainly the most obvious and palpable way of affecting Society--and to
many Englishmen the only conceivable way--is by the method of Politics;
by the definite and positive action of human law, and by such endeavours
as we can make towards shaping that action. Now, if indeed the Political
method were the only one, there could be little to be said about his
effect on Society. Politics, in the limited and conventional sense just
now suggested, were not much in his line. He was interested in them; he
had opinions about them; he occasionally intervened in them. But he made
no mark on the political work of his time; nor, so far as one can judge,
did he aspire to do so. Of the man of letters in the field of politics,
he said: "He is in truth not on his own ground there, and is in peculiar
danger of talking at random." In politics, as in all else that he
touched, he was critical rather than constructive; and in politics,
"immersed," as Bacon said, "in matter," a man must be constructive, if
his influence is to be felt and to endure. "Politicians," he said in
1880, "we all of us here in England are and must be, and I too cannot
help being a politician; but a politician of that commonwealth of which
the pattern, as the philosopher says, exists perhaps somewhere in
Heaven, but certainly is at present found nowhere