MR. MATTHEW ARNOLD ON EQUALITY.
MR. ARNOLD'S recent panegyric on Equality, delivered at the Royal Institution about a fortnight ago, and pub- lished in the March number of the Fortnightly Review, is a model of style which no one could well study too carefully who wished to master the most effective and polished manner of delivering
keen, not to say brilliant, thrusts at the various sections of an audience which he nevertheless wished to please, and probably succeeded in pleasing. The theme of the lecture was the tendency of the great inequalities in English society " to materialise the upper class, to vulgarise the middle-class, and to brutalise the lower class." A contributor to our contemporary the Examiner, who appears to have been present, thus happily describes the effect produced on Mr. Arnold's polished and crowded audience :—
" It required some tact to tell an English audience to their faces that they were either material, or vulgar, or brutal, but Mr. Arnold was fully
equal to the occasion. He so thoroughly succeeded in disarming his audience by the polite deference of his manner, that he had not to make a rush for the door when his lecture was concluded. He had even the
audacity to stay and shake hands with some of the people whom he had so grossly insulted. To be sure, he did admit that there was an elect few to bo found even in England who had by unusual grace escaped the prevailing influence of our institutions, and he contrived somehow to convey the impression that they were all to be found within the walls of the Royal Institution at that moment, an adroit flattery which pro- bably saved him from the fate of another Orpheus at the hands of his fair hearers. Still it required some courage on Mr. Arnold's part to repeat his leading phrase about the effect of inequality on the various classes of English society, with his eye steadily fixed upon a noble lord who sat in the front Sept, and to turn with graceful courtesy to a dis- tinguished Scotch commoner when ho added that all these evils of inequality were much worse in Scotland. Mr. Arnold might fairly adopt Lord Beaconsfield's motto,—N'orti niAil chyjicile."
And no doubt Mr. Arnold's criticism on the moral effect of our aristocracy's inheritance of great material wealth and splendour, without adequate corresponding responsibilities, on the vulgarising tendency of our middle-class love of rank for rank's sake, and on the brutalising effect on the lower class of a middle class whose narrow and Philistine conception of life has for them no attrac- tions, while the material splendour of the aristocracy is a distant dream that only misleads them into indulging a false ideal, was keen and true. But yet his lecture was not a very dangerous kind of intellectual sword-play for those who most value these inequalities, and for this simple reason,—that Mr. Arnold hardly once, or at least only once, struck at the origin of this intemperate love of inequality in England ; and in treating, as he did, the law of bequest as practically the root of the matter, he betrayed how much the material splendour' of the aristocracy had dazzled his own imagination, and led him to confound effect with cause. We quite hold, with Mr. Arnold, that a consider- able reduction of the vast inequalities in fortune between different sections of English society, if it could be, as some day it certainly will be, naturally and voluntarily brought about, would be an immense addition to the moral force of English civilisation. The Psalmist who was so much at fault to understand the prosperity of the ungodly, would have been puzzled almost beyond what he could bear, if he had seen, as he could so often see here, a great nobleman,— possessing, perhaps, no small political influence and oratorical prestige,—increasing his vast means, the inheritance of centuries, by judicious gambling on the turf, while he saw at the same time thousands of upright labourers or artisans slaving away ineffectually to keep themselves out of the workhouse, and their wives and children out of squalor and starvation. Beholding such sights he would surely say,—" I was grieved at the wicked, I do also see the ungodly in such prosperity. For they are in no peril of death : but are lusty and strong. They come in no misfortune like other folk : neither are they plagued like other men. And this is the cause that they are so holden with pride : and overwhelmed with cruelty. Their eyes swell with fatness : and they do even what they lust. They corrupt other, and speak of wicked blasphemy : their talking is against the most High. For they stretch forth their mouth unto the heaven : and their tongue goeth through the world. Therefore fall the people unto them : and thereout suck they no small advantage." Or again, as another Psalmist, speaking of the same class, puts it, who evidently was specially disturbed at Mr. Arnold's difficulty of the inequality of inheritances, " They have children at their desire, and leave the rest of their substance for their babes." But if the Psalmist had seen this, and had made again in modern England the reflections which he made perhaps three thousand years ago in Jerusalem, we do not think that he would have gone on with Mr. Arnold to advocate some kind of limitation on the liberty of bequest, as the real cure for such a class of evils. As we understand Mr. Arnold's lecture, he puts the cart before the horse. The pleasure in superior wealth as such, is undoubtedly injurious to those who, under the pride it fosters, find their eyes swelling with fatness and their will doing what it lusts ; and the pleasure in beholding it in others, is vulgarising to those who stupidly gaze on the material splendour above them as an
ideal state, which they may enjoy with the imagination, though they cannot enjoy it with their senses. But the pleasure in in- equality will never be removed by attempts to limit it artificially. By all means let us get rid as soon as we can of all laws intended to produce or protect it artificially. Such laws are conceived in a wrong spirit, and are inconsistent with what ought to be the disinterested wish of all civilised men,—that so far as it is possible, we should refuse to enrich ourselves at the cost of others, and that a well-diffused though moderate well-being is far more really beneficial to all, than great extremes of wealth and poverty, luxury and want. But it is one thing to deprecate any artificial regulation tending to foster inequality, and quite another to make equality a direct and deliberate aim, which is the drift of Mr. Arnold's lecture. He holds that the deliberate bias of the law towards equality is one great secret of French civilisation ; that it is that which has enabled the French spirit of society to take the high rank it does take in European life ; and that our social life would be purified, if we made the direct attainment of 4 equality' one of the great ends and aims of English legislation. The truth is, that Mr. Arnold appears deliberately to confound the spirit of true society with the spirit of equality, and to regard the latter as at least one true cause of the former. He says very finely, "civilisation is the humanisation of man in society," by which we suppose he means the making man more truly man,—higher man,—by developing to the full the structural unity of society. That is a fine saying. And it is most true that the spirit of society thus developed, produces the love of a very high kind of equality, of that moral republicanism in which men are really " members one of another." But it is not true that equality in wealth, any more than equality in any other individual characteristic, can be made the foundation and the sine qua non of a true social spirit. We admit that such a social spirit is totally inconsistent with the wish to increase the inequalities of any kind in human society,—to increase the inequalities of wealth, or of education, or of enjoy- ment. The wish to increase such inequalities,—nay, the ab- sence of the wish to reduce them in an effective and fundamental way, is itself unsocial, or to say the truer word, un-Christian. Bat whatever we may do, inequalities of the most serious kind will remain,—inequalities of body and mind, in- equalities of property which result from such inequalities of body and mind, inequalities of memory, inequalities of fancy and imagination, inequalities of temper, inequalities of affection, and inequalities of will. Any attempt to reduce these by positive enactment from the material side may be wise, if they are justified by a large observation and experience ; but they are quite certain to be relatively ineffectual, when compared with the far more fruitful attempt to reduce them by inspiring the desire to diffuse all the best gifts as universally as they can be diffused ;—and such enactments may very well be positively in- jurious. Mr. Arnold himself admits that the external provisions for equal division of property in France have gone too far ; and certainly if they have bad the effect, as is often said, of causing Frenchmen to limit the number of their families, they have caused a quantity and kind of moral evil which no amount of external equality could possibly balance.
To our minds, the defect of the lecture is that Mr. Arnold never tells us what he means by equality. There really is no such thing,—though there is something far better, the wish to share as far as possible with others the full advantage of all blessings which are not intrinsically limited, and to hold those which are so limited in trust for all. The most equal society you can imagine is really a society in which there is no equality at all, except equality in the willingness to give and receive freely. Property, no doubt, is one of the things which cannot be shared, as air and light generally may be, equally by all ; and no investigation is more difficult than that which inquires how it can best be used lay those who have it so as to be held in trust for all. One thing only appears to be clear, that it is a mistake to assume that property is, like health, or religious feeling, or human affectionateness, or conscientious principle, or, to say the least, elementary educa- tion, likely to be, even in the general way, an equal blessing to all whether they have or have not obtained it in the way which would best train them to use it. Of course, it does not at all follow that some limitation on the freedom of bequest might not tend to increase the universality of men's aptitude for a right use of property. It is quite possible that it would. It is also quite possible that it would not. But what we do not at all understand is Mr. Arnold's apparent assumption that some approach to equality in property,—apart apparently from any approach to an equality in the capacity for using property,—must be good. He might almost as well assume that some approach to equality in power of conversation, apart from any approach to equality in the discretion which uses such powers well, would be necessarily good. As it seems to us, mutual help, mutual trust, mutual need, in a sense which will always make equality a purely moral, and not in any way a physical idea, is of the very essence of true society. Even in the French sense of the word, even in the sense in which 'Voltaire said that the age of Louis XIV. had con- tributed to the world l' esprit de societE,—a most imperfect sense, we submit,—there was no vestige of physical equality. There was, no doubt, that sense of lightness and ease, that mutual willing- ness of courtesy and intelligence to let every member of society contribute what he could to the quota of enjoyment, which gives the truest charm to general conversation. But even this is equality only in a very limited sense, since it implies that the wealthy in wit should give of their wealth, and the poor and modest only of their capacity to listen and enjoy. Now, if this be true social equality, why, equality in pro- perty, construed in the same sense, should mean the same thing, —that those who have a gift for property, so to speak, should use their property according to their gift, while those who have no such gift, should not be too unwilling to furnish the oppor- tunity for the others' willingness to bestow.
Take it how you will, no religious man can feel that the gospel of external equality will ever wield any really transforming power over society, such as, so far as we understand him, Mr. Arnold attributes to it,—while such a one will be the first to admit that the spirit of equality which consists in sharing equally one another's burdens is at the very root of the meaning of the word " society." The equality we wish to see is the equality of mutual appreciation and mutual service,—the equality which makes of wealth and good descent, not obstacles to frank communication between man and man, but new aids to such communication ; the equality which lets the high mental or moral gift take its natural prece- dence over mere material or external gifts ; the equality of defer- ence which all true culture implies between those capable of under- standing each other and contributing to each others' enjoyment ; the equality of sacrifice to which true affection entitles those who feel it ; the equality of freedom of different consciences to choose for themselves the path of duty ; and the equalisation, so far as is possible, of the opportunities of every man for making the most of his own gifts and powers. But beyond this, there is no equality of which it is possible to make, as Mr. Arnold does, a sort of gospel ; no equality of external condition at which it is even right to aim, except on the assumption that you can first ensure a certain approximate equality in the power to use and apply the advantages of such equality of condition. And after we have done all that we can do in this direction,—though a great deal of the superstitious awe of rank will have vanished, though all the vulgar admiration of external wealth, as distinguished from the high capacity for using wealth, will have disappeared ; though there will be certainly much more mutual respect between men of different modes of life, and much more power in each to help and take help from the other, without patronage or servility,—yet at the last, there will be no approximation at all to physical eq'tlity. The foot will still be the foot, and the hand the hand, and the head the head. And the eye will not say to the hand, ' I have no need of thee,' nor the hand to the feet, I have no need of you,' for in a true society we must all be members one of another. Mr. Arnold seems to us, while possessed with a very healthy scorn for the gaping Philistine satisfaction in physical inequality, to fall a great deal too much into that French school of thought which regards equality as a thing which can be measured by law, and protected by restrictions on bequest.'
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