CHAPTER XII

THE CRITIC OF NONCONFORMITY

ATTHEW ARNOLD, with all his habitual open

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ness of mind and esteem of moderation, had nevertheless one personal prejudice which he constantly allowed to get out of hand, and its victims were the Nonconformists. One can only surmise how much greater success might have attended even his crusade of culture had his admonitions in this quarter, at any rate, been commended by a more equable temper and a greater indulgence for modes of thought which to him were unsympathetic. There are three kinds of charity-charity of the heart, charity of the intellect, charity of gratified vanity: the first gracious, the second specious, the third nauseous. Charity of the heart insists that every man should be persuaded in his own mind; it recognises that the end of thought is not simply to find and assert your own standpoint, but equally to ascertain how much of right there is in your opponent's case. It is the charity that speaks in those fine words of the large-souled Bishop Chillingworth: "Let them leave infallibility that have no title to it,

and let them that in their own words disclaim it, disclaim it also in their actions." Charity of the intellect tolerates just so far as it can understand another's position, though to this extent it is free from every shade of bigotry; yet withal it sees as in a glass darkly. The specious charity of vanity is the applause with which the shallow mind welcomes the echo of its own ideas. That in this ascending scale of magnanimity Arnold ever passed quite out of the second into the first grade must be doubted. So far as he could enter into other people's thoughts and feelings he was reasonableness itself; but beyond that his patience was easily exhausted. Unquestionably he handled the religious beliefs and convictions of others in a manner too indiscriminate, in a manner which fairly brings down upon him the reproach of that very lack of flexibility which he has so truly affirmed to be the spirit of intellectual Philistinism. Philistinism, however, we may not call it: Samsonism would better describe the "vigour and rigour" of his religious crusade, which left his enemies no place within their own gates, no safety even in the presence of their most treasured deities. Here the Nonconformists specially suffered.

It would be wrong to assume that he took no pains to understand Nonconformity or that he was intentionally unfair in the strictures which he passed upon it. On the contrary, what is particularly striking is the remarkable knowledge of Nonconformist life, thought, and character which goes hand in hand with his ina

bility to treat either quite fairly. It was a strange freak of fortune which apportioned to him the duty of constantly moving in and out of Nonconformist circles for the greater part of his official life. When he became an Inspector under the Department of Education in 1851 the schools allotted to his charge were almost wholly Wesleyan and British (the latter for the most part connected with the Independents), and in this entourage he remained for twenty years, meeting Nonconformity of every mental, religious, and social phase, and forming upon it judgments which gave direction to much of his literary work and bias to some of it. That he succeeded to a wonderful degree in comprehending the people whom thus he had so many opportunities of studying-in gauging their ideals, in sounding their mental depths, and taking measure of their religious outlook-is a singular proof of his keen faculty for character analysis; that he as certainly failed to do them at all times justice is merely a proof of the difficulty of putting oneself in another's place and seeing things from an alien point of view. For widen his judgment and correct his opinions though he did upon many things, here the earliest prepossessions persisted.

That he should have sympathised with Nonconformity was flatly impossible; but his prejudice took the form of positive dislike. The genial insularity which ever clung to him in his wanderings abroad, and which caused him to measure the whole world by an English rod, and it was not a very long one either, had its

counterpart at home in a provinciality-the word is his own and no other describes his attitude which at times expressed itself in narrowness of view when he happened to judge people, habits, and institutions which were not those of his own intellectual order. The "note of the provincial spirit," he tells us in one of his essays, consists in carrying prejudices and even predilections to extremes, in suffering them to become crotchets. "How prevalent all around us," he adds, "is the want of balance of mind and urbanity of style! How much, doubtless, it is to be found in ourselves,in each of us! but, as human nature is constituted, every one can see it clearest in his contemporaries." It is all true, all no doubt inevitable, but how unfortunate -for each of us!

It is characteristic of Arnold's frame of mind that his natural classification of English people is into Church and Dissent, a classification the very last which would have occurred to any one of the intelligent foreigners whom he allows to pass verdict upon his country and its institutions. He knew, too, that there existed Protestant and Roman Catholic, Liberal and Conservative, rich and poor, educated and uneducated, Barbarian, Philistine, and Populace; but these were artificial divisions; the true, the vital line of dissection was neither a social, a political, nor a confessional, but an ecclesiastical line,-upon one side of it the historical Establishment, upon the other the crowd of non-conformers. It might seem, indeed, that he became in time half re

conciled to "the well-known three great denominations," but the thirty others he could never stand. In his letters he continually notes his meeting with "Dissenters," sometimes to praise them, sometimes to blame, but always in a certain spirit of curiosity and wonderment, as though a Dissenter were a social oddity of which he, for his part, did not quite know what to make. One can see that to the end he was conscious as he mingled with them that either he or they were aliens, and judging by the steadiness with which he kept his critical searchlight turned upon them he clearly regarded the exoticism as on their side and not on his. When in 1871 he was given a different class of school his first thought was one of curiosity "to see what will be my experience in dealing with clerical managers; they will certainly be less interesting because so much more what one has been familiar with all one's life." He had then without intermission worked exclusively amongst Nonconformists for twenty years, yet he was conscious that he still saw them from the outside. In short, problems, not persons, blood of his blood and flesh of his flesh-such to Matthew Arnold were the Nonconformists. And you cannot fraternise with a problem.

I make no apology for dwelling at length on a side of Arnold's character upon which limitation is written large. For what is more human than prejudice, and what in Matthew Arnold is so lovable as his humanity? There are admirable critics against whom this