Enter the Pop Philistine

PERSONAL COLUMN SIMON RAVEN

A middle-aged and exceedingly left-wing acquaintance -of mine recently attended.- a Ladies' Night at a Cambridge college.

'The whole thing was ruined,' he reported to me, `by the behaviour of the young dons. They threw bread about during the meal, though it was perfectly delicious. They brought- girl friends who were' unsuitably dressed and, what is more, dirty. They danced with them later on in a noisy and ugly —in a grotesque—fashion. • They jostled. They were insulting. They were abominable.

'And another thing,' he said with charac- teristic honesty; 'they were all socialists. Of the wrong sort. You see, in the old days we had to argue our beliefs. But this lot—well, everyone's a socialist in that college nowadays, so they just take it all for granted. They don't have to think it through in order to defend it.'

'But how,' I asked, 'would any of that account for their bad manners?'

'Philistines, dear boy. The two points about Philistines are that they don't think things through and that they have nasty, aggressive manners. The second thing's a result of the first: if they make enough noise, you see, they know there's less chance of their being caught out. You want to read Matthew Arnold about all that. But I expect you're as bad as those young dons—never open a book unless you have to.'

And so, with some difficulty, I procured a secondhand copy of Matthew Arnold's Cul- ture and Anarchy and read it for the first time.

It is a curiously modern work. The writing, to be sure, is sometimes redundant (though always vigorous) and the syntax is both elaborate and correct; otherwise, it might have been written yesterday. The complaints are of our time as well as of Arnold's; and the analyses, of social motives and attitudes, are in the end as relevant to our own problems as they were to those of the 1860s. What par- ticularly struck me was that Arnold, as my left-wing friend had claimed, did indeed ex- plain the behaviour of the rowdy young dons at the Ladies' Night—though he himself could never have witnessed, io his own Oxford, so unseemly a phenomenon.

Arnold begins by extolling 'Sweetness and Light,' his argument being somewhat the same as that of his better-known essay, 'The Func- tion.of Criticism at the Present Time' (National et-rew, November 1864). We are urged, that is, 'in all branches of knowledge . . . to see the object as in itself it really is,' to stand back, to ignore fashion and policy, to give full scope to the free play of the mind upon all sub-

jects,' a process which is not only 'a pleasure -?in itself' but also 'an essential provider of

• elements without which 'a nation's spirit . . . must, in the long ran, die of inanition.' Very well, then; what inhibits us from following this laudable (if hardly original) -advice? Simply, it seems, our 'worst selves,' which are the power- ful complements, or rather 'the excess,' of our best. Take the'upper class, the still semi-feudal ..'Barbarians!: these have a 'high, chivalrous style,' which, however, betrays 'its excess in a fierce turn for resistance.' Or the middle class, 'the Philistines': splendid, practical people, building an industrial empire, but so ,busy •that thty won't stop for a single moment to think whether it is worth having, whither it is leading, Ad what is to be done to prevent 'possession and multiplication' from swamping the entire earth (a very up-to-date point, this last one). Finally, take 'the Populace': this, on the good side, is determined to assert its freedom; but it is much too apt, as an 'excess' of this salutary instinct, `to perplex us by marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, bawling what it likes, breaking what it likes.'

And then, of course, there is the more specifically moral aspect of it all. The upper- - class Barbarians, setting a high value on mag- nificence (admirable), are far too keen on having their own way (naughty). The Philistines, being rigid about rectitude (ex- cellent), altogether reject the tender and am- biguous attributes of beauty (oh what a pity). And as for the Populace, it simply assumes that all of morality is comprehended in its own charter of rights (such impertinence). There is also another figure who appears at this stage, 'the intellectual or Critic, and his trouble is that he is so smugly absorbed in the arts and the graces of life (Hellenism) that he tends to Ignore or even to despise the boring but neces- sary (Hebraist) injunctions to purity, endeavour and what not. Thus in all our attitudes, Arnold apprehends, whether social, intellectual or ' moral, we all of us make a vice of our virtues merely by allowing them to go too far. What is the answer? A large—a massive—dose of 'Sweetness and Light.'

For what Sweetness and Light will teach us to do is this: first, to control our own virtues before they can run, by excess, to their complementary vices; and then to choose the salient virtues of all the social classes and ;combine them into a single pattern. Thus we

.,i4..f.hall extract the magnificence and the chivalry, but not the recalcitrance, of the aristocracy; the industry and strict moral principle, but not the Mindless vulgarity, of the bourgeoisie; the

love of freedoni though pot the riotousness of the working class: and the love of beauty but not, oh dear me, not, the moral laxity of the intellectual and critical clerisy. Having selected these prime qualities, these 'best selves,' we shall assemble them together in a new type

of human being. ssho will bear forward the bannefif 'SsNeetness and Light to the New Jerusalem.' Here Hellenist shall lie down with 'Hebraic and prince with puritan, and there will even os, room left over on the beds of roses for the 'pacified peasant and the enlightened labourer.

What it comes to, then, is that Arnold is drawing up an elementary blueprint for a man of all classes and so of none—for the classless man. Only given reason, only given good order and -good will, and there could be, he proclainstsuch a merging of attitudes and attributes as would wipe out squalor, ignorance and exploitation, and promote joy and under- standing without end. As we know, 'however, it has not turned out quite like that. Today, as in his Own time and all the tithe between, Arnold's message has fallen on deaf ears or on none. In which case, you may ask, how can I 'praise Arnold's modernity, how can I claim, as .1 did earlier, that he'understood and anticiellEd our circumstances as well as his own?,

'It is all tragically simple. For what Arnold blso said was that if people were not very careful, if they didn't pay heed to Sweetness and. Light, then it was all too probable, what with the pace and confusion of modern de- velopment, that instead of selecting and com- bining the best qualities of all classes society would select and combine the worst. If men forgot- intelligence (and when was an age less intelligent than that of George Brown and Screamatg Lord Stitch?); if they forfeited good will (and Was ever an era more rancorous than that of Harold Wilson and Stephen Ward?); if they neglected discipline (e.g., let any sec- tion of the community, students included, go 'bawling what it likes, breaking what it likes'): if, in one word, men betrayed reason, then, said Arnold, in the resultant chaos their 'worst selves' would emerge, each type of worst self joining with and reinforcing the rest. It is here that we return to the starting-point of this essay: for Arnold's grim prophecy is ade- quately, is abundantly illustrated by (among many others) the young Philistine dons who were so deplored by my left-wing friend and who, in one guise or another, are so prominent in the contemporary scene.

For pray observe. They have none of the style or chivalry of the old aristocrat, only the selfishness and the arrogance. They have indeed (we may assume) the energy of the old Philistine;; but they also have his exclusively practical end graceless tastes, his insistence on applied knowledge and mechanical activities; and while they lack his moral principle, they share, to the full, his intolerance. Although they have all the love of riot that characterised Arnold's Populace, they are without that Popu- lace's old love of freedom, for their socialist notions, as advertised, are ever more redolent of restriction and prohibition. In so far, lastly, as they resemble Arnold's Critic at all, it is only in their smug self-absorption, in their unwillingness to answer, or even to listen to, opinions opposed to their own. In sum, behold the classless man of our time, a figure who was foreseen and dreaded by Matthew Arnold a century ago and whoth, in Arnold's memory, we may aptly name—the Pop Philistine.