The words—­social idea—­which Arnold himself italicized in the foregoing extract from Culture and Anarchy, will indicate the sense in which “Society” is here intended.  We are not thinking of that which Pennialinus[21] means when he writes about “Society gossip” or “a Society function.”  We are concerned with the thoughts and temper and actions of men, not as isolated units, but as living in an organized community; and, taking “Society” in this sense, we are to examine Arnold’s influence on the Society of his time.

[Illustration:  Front of Balliol College, Oxford, in Arnold’s Time

In 1840 Matthew Arnold won an open scholarship at Balliol and went into residence in 1841

Photo H.W.  Taunt]

Certainly the most obvious and palpable way of affecting Society—­and to many Englishmen the only conceivable way—­is by the method of Politics; by the definite and positive action of human law, and by such endeavours as we can make towards shaping that action.  Now, if indeed the Political method were the only one, there could be little to be said about his effect on Society.  Politics, in the limited and conventional sense just now suggested, were not much in his line.  He was interested in them; he had opinions about them; he occasionally intervened in them.  But he made no mark on the political work of his time; nor, so far as one can judge, did he aspire to do so.  Of the man of letters in the field of politics, he said:  “He is in truth not on his own ground there, and is in peculiar danger of talking at random.”  In politics, as in all else that he touched, he was critical rather than constructive; and in politics, “immersed,” as Bacon said, “in matter,” a man must be constructive, if his influence is to be felt and to endure.  “Politicians,” he said in 1880, “we all of us here in England are and must be, and I too cannot help being a politician; but a politician of that commonwealth of which the pattern, as the philosopher says, exists perhaps somewhere in Heaven, but certainly is at present found nowhere on earth.”  In 1887, describing himself as “an aged outsider,” he thus stated his own attitude towards political problems—­

“The professional politicians are always apt to be impatient of the intervention in politics of a candid outsider, and he must expect to provoke contempt and resentment in a good many of them.  Still the action of the regular politicians continues to be, for the most part, so very far from successful, that the outsider is perpetually tempted to brave their anger and to offer his observations, with the hope of possibly doing some little good by saying what many quiet people are thinking and wishing outside of the strife, phrases, and routine of professional politics.”