Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew ArnoldArnold, Matthew
General
Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold
Arnold, Matthew
English essays -- 19th century
superseding; and they, too, like the middle class, will be encouraged to
sit down at the banquet of the future without having on a wedding
garment, and nothing excellent can then come from them. Those who know
their besetting faults, or those who have watched them and listened to
them, or those who will read the instructive account recently given of
them by one of themselves, the _Journeyman Engineer_, will agree that
the idea which culture sets before us of perfection,--an increased
spiritual activity, having for its characters increased sweetness,
increased light, increased life, increased sympathy,--is an idea which
the new democracy needs far more than the idea of the blessedness of the
franchise, or the wonderfulness of its own industrial performances.
Other well-meaning friends of this new power are for leading it, not in
the old ruts of middle-class Philistinism, but in ways which are
naturally alluring to the feet of democracy, though in this country they
are novel and untried ways. I may call them the ways of Jacobinism.[415]
Violent indignation with the past, abstract systems of renovation
applied wholesale, a new doctrine drawn up in black and white for
elaborating down to the very smallest details a rational society for the
future,--these are the ways of Jacobinism. Mr. Frederic Harrison[416]
and other disciples of Comte,[417]--one of them, Mr. Congreve,[418] is
an old friend of mine, and I am glad to have an opportunity of publicly
expressing my respect for his talents and character,--are among the
friends of democracy who are for leading it in paths of this kind. Mr.
Frederic Harrison is very hostile to culture, and from a natural enough
motive; for culture is the eternal opponent of the two things which are
the signal marks of Jacobinism,--its fierceness, and its addiction to
an abstract system. Culture is always assigning to system-makers and
systems a smaller share in the bent of human destiny than their friends
like. A current in people's minds sets towards new ideas; people are
dissatisfied with their old narrow stock of Philistine ideas,
Anglo-Saxon ideas, or any other; and some man, some Bentham[419] or
Comte, who has the real merit of having early and strongly felt and
helped the new current, but who brings plenty of narrowness and mistakes
of his own into his feeling and help of it, is credited with being the
author of the whole current, the fit person to be entrusted with its
regulation and to guide the human race.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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