Page 35 - Cultural Theory and Popular Culture an Introduction

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Matthew Arnold 19

is best; (iii) the mental and spiritual application of what is best, and (iv) the pursuit of
what is best.
Popular culture is never actually defined. However, it becomes clear when reading
through Arnold’s work that the term ‘anarchy’ operates in part as a synonym for popu-
lar culture. Specifically, anarchy/popular culture is used to refer to Arnold’s concep-
tion of the supposedly disruptive nature of working-class lived culture: the political
dangers that he believes to be inevitably concomitant with the entry of the male urban
working class into formal politics in 1867. The upshot of this is that anarchy and
culture are for Arnold deeply political concepts. The social function of culture is to
police this disruptive presence: the ‘raw and uncultivated . . . masses’ (176); ‘the raw
and unkindled masses’ (69); ‘our masses . . . quite as raw and uncultivated as the
French’ (76); ‘those vast, miserable unmanageable masses of sunken people’ (193).
The problem is working-class lived culture: ‘The rough [i.e. a working-class political
protester] ...asserting his personal liberty a little, going where he likes, assembling
where he likes, bawling as he likes, hustling as he likes’ (80–1). Again:

the working class . . . raw and half developed . . . long lain half hidden amidst its
poverty and squalor . . . now issuing from its hiding place to assert an
Englishman’s heaven born privilege of doing as he likes, and beginning to perplex
us by marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, bawling what it likes, break-
ing what it likes (105; my italics).

The context of all this is the suffrage agitation of 1866–7. Arnold’s employment of
the phrase ‘beginning to perplex us’ is a clear indication of the class nature of his dis-
course. His division of society into Barbarians (aristocracy), Philistines (middle class)
and Populace (working class) would seem at first sight to defuse the class nature of this
discourse. This seems to be supported by his claim that under all ‘our class divisions,
there is a common basis of human nature’ (ibid.). However, if we examine what
Arnold means by a common basis, we are forced to a different conclusion. If we ima-
gine the human race existing on an evolutionary continuum with itself at one end
and a common ancestor shared with the ape at the other, what Arnold seems to be
suggesting is that the aristocracy and middle class are further along the evolutionary
continuum than the working class. This is shown quite clearly in his example of the
common basis of our human nature. He claims that

every time that we snatch up a vehement opinion in ignorance and passion, every
time that we long to crush an adversary by sheer violence, every time that we are
envious, every time that we are brutal, every time that we adore mere power or suc-
cess, every time that we add our voice to swell a blind clamour against some
unpopular personage, every time that we trample savagely on the fallen [we have]
found in our own bosom the eternal spirit of the Populace (107).

According to Arnold, it takes only a little help from ‘circumstances’ to make this
‘eternal spirit’ triumph in both Barbarian and Philistine. Culture has two functions in