Transformed religion: Matthew Arnold and the refining of dissent

I am persuaded that the transformation of religion, which is essential for its perpetuance, can be accomplished only by carrying the qualities of flexibility, perceptiveness, and judgment, which are the best fruits of letters, to whole classes of the community which now know next to nothing of them, and by procuring the application of those qualities to matters where they are never applied now.

-Matthew Arnold Preface to Last Essays on Church and Religion

IN chapter 52 of The Pickwick Papers the elderly Tony Weller exacts his revenge on the spindly Mr. Stiggins, "Shepherd" of Emanuel Chapel. Stiggins had led Weller's wife (now dead) into a life of gloomy piety. As Weller's goodhearted son Sam looks on in approval, the old man assaults the preacher savagely.

[S]eizing the reverend gentleman firmly by the collar, he suddenly fell to kicking him most furiously, accompanying every application of his top-boot to Mr. Stiggins' person with sundry violent and incoherent anathemas upon his limbs, eyes, and body. ... It was a beautiful and exhilarating sight to see the red-nosed man in Mr. Weller's grasp, and his whole frame quivering with anguish as kick followed kick in rapid succession; it was a still more exciting spectacle to behold Mr. Weller, after a powerful struggle, immersing Mr. Stiggins' head in a horse-trough full of water, and holding it there, till he was all but suffocated. (662)

Valentine Cunningham notes that in popular imitations of Dickens' novel such as The Penny Pickwick (1838-42), the violence done to the Stiggins character (here named "Smirkins") is intensified: he is "degraded, pelted, bloodied, muddied, be-sooted and be-greased, horse-whipped, his eyes blackened, his nose dislocated" (227). In a later novel entitled Rosa Fielding (1876)-discussed in Stephen Marcus' Other Victorians (220-- 38)-he is tarred and feathered and carried into town in a wheelbarrow. No wonder that Anthony Trollope, in a comment on Dickens' scathing representations of religious hypocrisy, himself resorted to the imagery of public retribution; this novelist, he said, "gibbeted cant in the person of the Dissenters" (qtd. in Munson 209).

Set against scenes like these, in which physical assault serves as a metaphor for removing the threat posed by religious Dissent to the Victorian body politic-by the simple means of force and exclusion-the calm and civility that Matthew Arnold exhibits in his famous comments on Dissenters in Culture and Anarchy (1869) present, to say the least, a sharp contrast. Culture, Arnold says, enables us to look at things "without hatred and without partiality, and with a disposition to see the good in everybody all around" (87). His celebrated work, as measured in its language as Pickwick is excessive, marks, one might say, a withdrawal from the pillory to the parlour. In it we move from the novelist's concentrated imagery of vengeance and reprisal to the careful tones and ironies of polite argumentation, from a highly visual ritual of abuse to abstractions and social analysis. If Dickens revivifies and circulates virulent eighteenth-century stereotypes of Dissent in order to legitimize the social ostracism he wished on them, Arnold, the self-styled "Liberal of the future," presents them in an entirely different light, in which they appear not as a dark menace to be purged from society but as misguided fellow citizens in need of instruction. This essay traces the emergence of this new mode of representation.

THE Dickensian method, to borrow the words of James Wood (in an essay on Flaubert but entirely apt for his English contemporary), relies on "a pressure of detail; . of depiction rather than thought or commentary" (38); his is, first and last, a rich art of exteriors, the production of a man who, as George Orwell put it, "lives through his eyes and ears" (48). And since it was through their eyes and ears that Dickens claimed that his readers would be able to clearly recognize the Dissenters in their midst-and steer a wide berth around them-his vivid images of Dissent have, if not literal accuracy on their side, at least a certain measure of logic. What informs Arnold's representations of Dissent is not visible marks of physical difference and deformity but a long train of nowfamous abstract formulations-"reason and the will of God," "Sweetness and Light," "the pursuit of perfection," "Hebraism and Hellenism," "our best selves"-all put to service in his case for culture "as the great help out of our present difficulties" (6) and all useful standards for measuring the shortcomings of Dissenters. True culture, he repeatedly tells us, is an inward operation, and the same can be said of his thorough-going appraisal of the nation's non-Anglicans, which is likewise resolutely internal in its focus. It is not a hideousness of appearance but of mental operation that is repugnant. Arnold bids his reader to consider the nation's Philistines (a class, in his thinking, largely synonymous with Dissent): "observe the literature they read, the things which give them pleasure, the words which come forth out of their mouths, the thoughts which make the furniture of their minds. Would any amount of wealth be worth having with the condition that one was to become just like these people by having it?" (52). Nowhere in Culture and Anarchy does one discover what a Dissenter looks like, while in Dickens, one might argue, one finds little else.