Culture and Anarchy

and admirable man gave all through his lifetime the great example, and which was the secret of his incomparable influence? And he who leads men to call forth and exercise in themselves this power, and who busily calls it forth and exercises it in himself, is at the present moment, perhaps, as Socrates was in his time, more in concert with the vital working of men’s minds, and more effectually significant, than any House of Commons’ orator, or practical operator in politics.

Everyone is now boasting of what he has done to educate men’s minds and to give things the course they are taking. Mr. Disraeli educates, Mr. Bright educates, Mr. Beales educates. We, indeed, pretend to educate no one, for we are still engaged in trying to clear and educate ourselves. But we are sure that the endeavour to reach, through culture, the firm intelligible law of things, we are sure that the detaching ourselves from our stock notions and habits, that a more free play of consciousness, an increased desire for sweetness and light, and all the bent which we call Hellenising, is the master-impulse even now of the life of our nation and of humanity⁠—somewhat obscurely perhaps for this moment, but decisively and certainly for the immediate future; and that those who work for this are the sovereign educators.

Docile echoes of the eternal voice, pliant organs of the infinite will, such workers are going along with the essential movement of the world; and this is their strength, and their happy and divine fortune. For if the believers in action, who are so impatient with us and call us effeminate, had had the same fortune, they would, no doubt, have surpassed us in this sphere of vital influence by all the superiority of their genius and energy over ours. But now we go the way the human race is going, while they abolish the Irish Church by the power of the Nonconformists’ antipathy to establishments, or they enable a man to marry his deceased wife’s sister.

Endnotes

1. The Christian Knowledge Society has, since 1869, republished the Maxims of Bishop Wilson. ↩

2. The late Dean Milman. ↩

3. The late Bishop Wilberforce. ↩

4. “Les pays qui comme les États-Unis ont créé un enseignement populaire considérable sans instruction supérieure sérieuse, expieront longtemps encore leur faute par leur médiocrité intellectuelle, leur grossièreté de moeurs, leur esprit superficiel, leur manque d’intelligence générale.” ↩

5. The two first books. ↩

6. I have ventured to give to the foreign word Renaissance, destined to become of more common use amongst us as the movement which it denotes comes, as it will come, increasingly to interest us, an English form. ↩

7. Written in 1869. ↩

8. 1869. ↩

9. Written in 1869. ↩

10. This was in 1869. ↩

Colophon

Culture and Anarchy
was published in 1869 by
Matthew Arnold.

This ebook was produced for
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