Arnold’s abiding concern, developed most succinctly in “Democracy,” is that the middle and working classes, deprived of the examples of “nobility” and “grand style” afforded by the aristocracy, will come to power without humanistic ideals, or, to follow Arnold’s logic, without the desire to emulate the performance of such ideals. (It is worth noting here that Arnold’s political position in this essay is in no way absolute, or even clear. As Harrison puts it, Arnold’s political views in the essay “leave the reader mystified rather than persuaded” (16). However, we can trace some consistencies in Arnold’s anxieties, if not in his solutions.) In the fourteenth section of Popular Education in France, Arnold writes that the most pressing danger of educating and thus empowering the lower classes is that they will, in knowing little, presume too much. With little education and no nobility to emulate, they will become, like the Americans, self-satisfied. America, having grown up “without ideals,” with “no aristocracy,” and therefore with nothing to admire, overrates with “vulgar self-satisfaction” its inferior and fragmented culture. Thus, Arnold worries that the diminishment of the aristocracy will cause England to become “Americanized,” will cause it to fall into “anarchy”—the culture of the uncultured—in which citizens are not motivated to “transcend their class identity,” but instead act only from self-interest. (Works, 2:161). Clearly, the problem of Americanization is not simply a problem of embarrassing and ignorant vulgarity; it is also a problem of stunted intellectual and moral growth.
This problematic proximity between the value of disinterestedness and aristocratic culture is further complicated when, in “Democracy,” Arnold attempts to locate the source of these values in socio-material conditions themselves:
It is the chief virtue of a healthy and uncorrupted aristocracy, that it is, in general, in [the] grand style. That elevation of character, that noble way of thinking and behaving, which is an eminent gift of nature to some individuals, is also often generated in whole classes of men (at least when these come of strong and good race) by the possession of power, by the importance and responsibility of high station, by habitual dealing with great things, by being placed above the necessity of constantly struggling for little things . . . A governing class imbued with it may not be capable of intelligently leading the masses of people to the highest pitch of welfare for them; but it sets them an invaluable example of qualities without which no really high welfare can exist. (6)
Despite this assertion that power, responsibility, and economic well-being (not to mention, race) lead to an elevation of character, Arnold argues that the middle and working classes, new to their (limited) political freedoms, cannot achieve the disinterested curiosity that leads to “intellectual and moral growth,” unless provided an example of these values, or unless somehow trained to them. The inevitable weakening of the aristocratic class therefore presents a vacuum, which needs, in Arnold’s estimation, to be filled by “the State”:
On what action may we rely to replace, for some time at any rate, that action of the aristocracy upon the people of this country, which we have seen exercise an influence in many respects elevating and beneficial, but which is rapidly, and from inevitable causes, ceasing? In other words, and to use a short and significant modern expression which every one understands, what influence may help us to prevent the English people from becoming, with the growth of democracy, Americanized? I confess I am disposed to answer: On the action of the State. (16)
Even if one were to concede that the state can or should serve the role of guiding people toward a more disinterested approach to democracy (one of the abiding arguments in favor of state-mandated public education in our time), Arnold’s argument is logically flawed in at least two ways. Firstly, the idea that possession of economic and political power guarantees or even encourages disinterested behavior is pure fantasy, as history had abundantly demonstrated to Arnold and as it has to us. Secondly, even if it could be argued that economic and political freedom, by affording leisure time and granting responsibility, do in fact lend themselves to disinterestedness, then it is certainly problematic to argue that this quality must be carefully and stringently administered to those newly in possession of such freedoms. Either the qualities Arnold values arise out of socio-economic position, or they are ideologically constructed, and therefore learned or imposed. To claim both simultaneously problematically suggests that elevation of character is at once the property of a specific social group with specific traditions, and therefore inimitable, and a function of material conditions, and therefore automatically assumed once these conditions are met. xli
For running directly against Arnold’s claim that the disinterested critical attitude of the man of culture is a “practice of the self,” xlii is his even more prevalent and urgent argument that without a strong state to replace the strong aristocracy, the people will fall into the anarchy of pure self-interest, of “doing as one likes.” In Culture and Anarchy we find him stating that “culture” is a “balance and regulation of mind which is not often attained without fruitful effort” (34). However, just a few pages later we find him arguing against this self-fashioning, and in favor instead of ideological interpellation: “Culture indefatigably tries, not to make what each raw person may like, the rule by which he fashions himself; but to draw ever nearer to a sense of what is indeed beautiful, graceful, and becoming, and to get the raw person to like that” (39). This contradiction marks the degree to which Arnoldian disinterestedness, despite its project of pursuing “a current of true and fresh ideas,” resists its own most radical implications.xliii The embrace of the “new” implied in the progressive searching of the disinterested mind, is met by a resistance to the new, which, as Culture and Anarchy makes abundantly clear, stems largely from a strong mistrust of emergent working class power. To quote Harrison once again, “In Arnolds’ vision of an inevitable new political world in England, the lower classes clearly will play no role in the governance, and certainly not the leadership, of the nation” (17).
The recourse to disinterestedness as finally only the domain of the elite, and therefore a practice of self for some and an ideological imposition for others, arises also out of a profound mistrust of “modernity”—where modernity stands for the urban industrial “spectacle”—and thus reflects Arnold’s anxiety about the unknowable future that democracy always holds out as its hope. Furthermore, this resistance bears a strong relationship to Arnold’s erasure of the figure of the poet and the body of the metaphoric mother discussed above. Both poet and mother, in Arnold’s configuration, come to represent disruptive and productive desire, even as Arnold paradoxically attempts to employ these metaphorically conflated figures toward the perpetuation of tradition.
III. “Thy Remote and Sphered Course”: Desire and Isolation in Arnold’s Marguerite Poems
While Arnold’s Marguerite poems are often admired as some of his most powerfully affective work, they foreground the very problem of desire that leads Arnold finally to reject poetic language as a generative force, and to view poetry as instead the servant of criticism’s ideas. These poems, written during Arnold’s 1849 visit to Switzerland, offer an early assertion of his guiding ethos—that social usefulness must be predicated upon the rejection of unresolved desire. The poems explore the pathology of desire itself and seek to find a remedy to desire’s isolating impact through a movement into the social, a remedy that, for Arnold, demands the renunciation of erotic longing.xliv In these poems desire is problematic because rather than drawing one towards others, desire stands between the subject and the social world. As desire traps the subject in an impenetrable sphere of his own erotic/emotional life, his emergence from this sphere depends upon an absolute rejection of unsatisfied longing.
Arnold most clearly expresses a poetics that rejects desire and embraces disinterested social engagement in the Preface of 1853, though it also arises in “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (1864) and even later in “The Study of Poetry”