Arnold to Clough, 6th March 1848
Arnold, writing to his best friend Arthur Hugh Clough, concerning the situation in France: the revolution of 1848, a new nation being forged: ‘distilled’, in Clough’s phrase, like an essential oil (though we don’t have Clough’s original phrasing: perhaps he meant, extracted from the ground like petroleum).
Arnold starts his letter by reporting on a not-very-good performance of Othello he has just seen: the smell of the theatre (earthy and orange-y — on account of the Victorian habit of eating citrus fruits whilst watching plays, and often of throwing the peel at the actors, if they were doing a bad job); the poor calibre of the actors here, up to and including the star lead, whose Othello was too ‘harsh’ for Arnold; and then, almost as a parting shot, ‘the unconquerable difficulty of the play.’ That’s a striking afterthought. Would a better performance of Othello have made the play less difficult to understand? Presumably not, since the difficulty is ‘unconquerable’. Lionel Trilling says somewhere that we’re always watching Shakespeare with a hangover, or listening to an undercompetent orchestra playing Beethoven: that the impedimenta of practicality get in the way of us accessing the work of art in pure and direct form. I like the style of theatrical directing implied by the quotation from William Macready’s diary:
‘Fanny Kemble is awful, awful as Desdemona: she’s ruining the play: I’ve never seen anyone so bad … ah well, I must hope God somehow improves her.’ Spoken like a true director!
As far as the revolution in France is concerned, Arnold’s belief in what he calls ‘the wide and deepspread intelligence’ of France leads him to believe that the upheaval will be enormously consequential for the whole of Europe. The English aristocracy, what he here calls ‘the riding class’, are not intelligent — in Culture and Anarchy (1869) they are the ‘barbarians’, as opposed to the ‘philistine’ middle-classes, and the unshaped working-class, the ‘populace’ — and are not capable of reforming, or redistilling, society; and no more are the people. But in France it is different. Four days later he wrote on a similar theme to his sister, Jane Martha:
What agitates me is this, if the new state of things succeeds in France, social changes are inevitable here and elsewhere, for no one looks on seeing his neighbour mending without asking himself if he cannot mend in the same way; but, without waiting for the result, the spectacle of France is likely to breed great agitation here, and such is the state of our masses that their movements now can only be brutal plundering and destroying. And if they wait, there is no one, as far as one sees, to train them to conquer, by their attitude and superior conviction; the deep ignorance of the middle and upper classes, and their feebleness of vision becoming, if possible, daily more apparent. You must by this time begin to see what people mean by placing France politically in the van of Europe; it is the intelligence of their idea-moved masses which makes them, politically, as far superior to the insensible masses of England as to the Russian serfs, and at the same time they do not threaten the educated world with the intolerable laideur of the well-fed American masses, so deeply anti-pathetic to continental Europe.
That stab at the ‘ugliness’ of the American populace seems harsh. In his letter to Clough, Arnold mentions Lamartine’s manifesto for the new revolution, just published — Lamartine was at this point Minister of Foreign Affairs, and he soon joined the French Executive Commission of 1848, the short-lived government of the revolutionary French Second Republic, that wielded executive power from 9 May 1848 to 24 June 1848. Arnold thinks the ruling-classes will not understand this work, and will consider it only a kind of appendix to Lamartine’s prior Histoire des Girondins (3 volumes 1847, which had just been translated into English as Arnold was writing), his heroizing history of the first French Revolution. It’s not, though, says Arnold. It’s something new.
You have seen Lamartine’s circular. The Austrian and English aristocracies to whom it comes the latter particularly will simply not understand it. Vague theorizing out of his ‘Girondins’ they will say here. Yet no more will the people here than their rulers. Therefore while I own that the riding class here are incapable of distilling the oil you speak of, let us add that the people would be at any rate insensible to it. It is this — this wide and deepspread intelligence that makes the French seem to themselves in the van of Europe. People compare a class here with a class there the best in each, and then wonder at Michelet’s or Guizot’s vanity. I don’t think you have done them justice in this respect. Do you remember your pooh-poohing the revue des deux Mondes, and my expostulating that the final expression up to the present time of European opinion, without fantastic individual admixture, was current there: not emergent here and there in a great writer, — but the atmosphere of the commonplace man as well as of the Genius.
I’m distracted by one sentence, there, and surprised that a man with Arnold’s poet’s ear could have written it — in a letter, rather than in a piece destined for publication of course, but still: ‘do you remember your pooh-poohing the revue des deux Mondes, and my expostulating?’ Clanging stuff.
Do
You
Remember your pooh-pooh
-ing the Revue
des Doo
Indeed (and this is hardly Arnold’s fault) I find myself humming this to the tune and rhythm of ‘Wham Rap!’s ‘Do/You/Enjoy what you do?’
Do
You
Remember your pooh?
Dates me, that.
Not to be flippant. Arnold’s belief in the intelligence of the French revolutionary spirit, embodied in its people, was not shaken by Napoleon III’s coup d’état of 1851. On the contrary, Napoleon and his success in the popular plebiscite that followed his coup confirmed him as the embodiment of Arnold’s French social intelligence. He wrote to Clough in 1859 that though ‘the middle classes of England,’ were ‘savagely and blindly anti-LouisNapoleonist … they certainly misconceive Louis Napoleon.’ Arnold’s England and the Italian Question (1859) was positive towards Napoleon III’s Italian campaign, its anti-Austrian and Italian unificatory aims. By the late 1850s Arnold was more often in France than England, having expanded his job as Her Majesty’s Inspector of Schools by agreeing to be a ‘Special Commissioner to inquire into the state of education on the Continent’ in 1859.
Arnold was no stranger in Paris. He had friends there already and his educational mission soon enlarged his acquaintance. The charm of his personality, his readiness to please and to be pleased assured him a warm welcome. His pamphlet on England and the Italian Question, which was very sympathetic to the policy of Napoleon III, predisposed French officials in his favor. It was not long before “Monsieur le Professeur Doctor Arnold, Directeur-General de toutes les ecoles de la Grande Bretagne,” as his French friends quite erroneously insisted on calling him, was dining with Guizot, Villemain, the Duc de Broglie, and Barthelemy de St. Hilaire. He caught a glimpse of Byron’s Countess Guiccioli, and of Mile von Armin, the daughter of Goethe’s Bettina. But it was Sainte-Beuve more than anyone else whose society he really enjoyed. [Arnold Whitridge, ‘Matthew Arnold and Sainte-Beuve’, PMLA, 53:1 (1938), 304]
For Arnold, Napoleon III represented a kind of revolutionary stability.
It is needless to say that the French peasant did not make the Revolution of 1848. But perhaps it is not enough known in England how cordially the French peasant detested the state of anarchy and trouble produced by that revolution; how indignant he was with the townspeople, the petits bourgeois, whom he accused of producing the confusion. The burly Lorraine peasants came into the streets of Nancy on the day of the Presidential election with images of Napoleon hung round their necks; taking by the collar each bustling town-agitator whom they met, they held the image to his lips and compelled him to kiss it. But by the vigorous recourse to the sign of Napoleon the peasant was not so much betokening a romantic sentiment, as setting up a symbol of force and order amidst the anarchy which irritated him … The English in general regard Louis Napoleon as a skilful despot who has mastered France and who deals with it for his own advantage. The vast majority of the industrious classes in France regard him as a beneficent ruler on whom they have themselves conferred power, and who wields it for the advantage of the French nation. [Arnold, England and the Italian Question, 3–4]
The English, Arnold says in this book, regard Napoleon III with ‘aversion’ as ‘a despot’; but ‘the great industrious classes of France regard Louis Napoleon very differently. These classes did not make the last revolution: they were irritated and humiliated by it. They called Louis Napoleon to power that he might relieve them from it. They consider that he has performed with eminent success the task entrusted to him, and they are deeply . grateful. The words which one sees so often on commemorative monuments in the French provincial towns, the words which one hears so often in conversing with members of the industrious classes, — il nous a sauvés de l’anarchie, — il nous a tirés de l’abime, — are not, from them, mere official flatteries, but the sincere expressions of conviction.’ For Arnold Louis Napoleon ‘possesses, largely and deeply interwoven in his constitution, the popular fibre’ [5]. This, says Arnold, ‘is the most interesting feature in his character. It is his great advantage over the kings and aristocracies of Europe.’ The idea that a dictator, a leader or fuhrer or duce, can via some mode of mystic communion or mere essence, actually embody the will of the people over which he rules is, we might say, fascism of a pure sort. Fascism avant la lettre, but still.
