Matthew Arnold, George Saintsbury [best fiction novels TXT] 📗

very high price during the time in which it was out of print shows that no large number was printed. Perhaps this cold welcome was not altogether so discreditable to the British public as it would have been, had its sole cause been the undoubted but unpalatable truths told by the writer. Either, as some say, because of its thick-hidedness, or, as others, because of its arrogant self-sufficiency, the British public has never resented these much. But, in the first place, the thing was a falsetto. Mr Arnold had plenty of wit but not much humour; and after a time one feels that Bottles and Leo & Co. may be, as Dousterswivel says, "very witty and comedy," but that we should not be altogether sorry if they would go . Further, the direct personalities - the worst instances concerned Lord Elcho, Mr Frederic Harrison, and the late Mr Sala - struck, and strike, some people as being not precisely in good taste. The constant allusions and references to minor and ephemeral things and persons were not of course then unintelligible, but they were even then teasing, In all these points, if Friendship's Garland be compared, I will once more not say with A Tale of a Tub , but even with the History of John Bull , its weakness will come out rather strongly.

But this was not all. It was quite evident - and it was no shame and no disadvantage to him - that the jester was endeavouring to urge a very serious earnest behind, and by means of, his jest; that he was no mere railer, or caviller, or even satirist, but a convinced reformer and apostle. Yet when we try to get at his programme - at his gospel - there is no vestige of anything tangible about either. Not very many impartial persons could possibly accept Mr Arnold's favourite doctrine, that the salvation of the people lies in state-provided middle-class schools; and this was specially difficult in 1871, if they remembered how some few years before Mr Arnold had been extolling the state-provided middle-class schools of France. While, for the rest, a man might be (as many men were) thoroughly dissatisfied with the part England had played abroad in Italy, in the American Civil War, in Denmark, in the war of 1866, in the war of 1870, and at home from 1845 onwards, and yet not be able for the life of him to discover any way of safety in Friendship's Garland .

Nor, to take with the Garland for convenience sake Irish Essays , 1882, the political book which closed this period with the political book that opened it, do we find things much better, even long after "the Wilderness" had been mostly left behind. There is indeed less falsetto and less flippancy; perhaps Mr Arnold had silently learnt a lesson, perhaps the opportunities of regular essays in "three-decker" reviews - of a lay sermon to working men, of a speech at the greatest public school in the world - discouraged the playfulness which had seemed permissible in addressing a skittish young evening newspaper. But the unpracticalness - not in the Philistine but in the strictly scientific sense - is more glaring than ever, and there are other faults with it. Great part of An Unregarded Irish Grievance is occupied by a long-drawn-out comparison of England's behaviour to Ireland with that of Mr Murdstone and his friend and manager Quinion to David Copperfield. In the first place, one thinks wickedly of the gibe in Friendship's Garland about "Mr Vernon Harcourt developing a system of unsectarian religion from the life of Mr Pickwick." In the second, one asks on what principles of literary art a comparison, not wholly improper as a mere illustration in passing, can be worked to death and turned inside out and upside down, for some twenty mortal pages.

And so in other places. Yet the worst faults are not in form but in substance. Minor contradictions do not matter, though in a copy of the book I have read there is a damaging comparison by some annotator between Mr Arnold's description of English Government at p. 4 and his rosy picture of education under Government at p. 107. This might happen to anybody, and is not fatal. What is fatal is that this censor of the "unideaed" has evidently himself no "ideas," no first principles, in politics at all. That, play what tricks you will, all possible politics come round either to the Rule of the One, the Rule of the Few, or the Rule of the Many, and that the consequences of these rules, differentiated a little but not materially by historical and racial characteristics, are as constant as anything commonly called scientific, - this never seems to have occurred to Mr Arnold at all. He did not fully appreciate Thackeray, and Thackeray died too soon to know very much of him. But I have always thought that, for a criticism of life possessing prophetic genius, the Chevalier Strong's wedding congratulations to Arthur Pendennis are almost uncanny as regards the Matthæan gospel. "Nothing," said the Chevalier, when he had established himself as agent to the Duke of Garbanzos, "is so important to the welfare of the household as Good Sherry ." And so we find that the Irish question, like all others, will be solved by the substitution of State-governed for private middle-class schools, by the saturation of England with "ideas," by all our old friends.

The rest matches. Mr Arnold pooh-poohs the notion that Ireland, except by force, will never be blended with England; it would be as sensible to say this "of Scotland, Wales, or Cornwall." He was not, I think, dead - he was certainly not dead long - when Wales actually did follow, less formidably, of course, in the path of Ireland, beginning with the Church, going on to the Land, and not distantly threatening the State. As usual he goes to his books. He quotes Goethe - a great man of letters, but perhaps the most pedantic of great men of letters except Milton - to prove that "the English are pedants." He quotes Burke - the unregenerate Irish Whig Burke, not the prophet whose tongue the French Revolution had touched as it opened his eyes - to tell us what to do with Ireland. But the main point in at least one of these essays, The Incompatibles , is again connected with David Copperfield . I have said that, from the merely literary point of view, the perpetual ringing of the changes on Creakle, Murdstone, Quinion - Quinion, Murdstone, Creakle - is inartistic and irritating. But from the philosophical and political point of view it is far worse. No Englishman with any sense of fact ever has taken, or could take, Dickens's characters as normal types. They are always fantastic exaggerations, full of genius occasionally, but as unlike actual reality as those illustrations by Cruikshank which are their nearest companions in the art of line. Of the three figures selected in particular, Creakle is a caricature; Murdstone, though not exactly that, is a repulsive exception; and Quinion is so mere a comparse or "super" that to base any generalisation on him is absurd. The dislike of the British public to be "talked book to" may be healthy or unhealthy; but if it takes no great heed of this kind of talking book, small blame to it! The same hopeless, not to say the same wilful, neglect of the practical appears throughout. Mr Arnold (to his credit be it said) had no great hopes of the Land Bill of 1881. But his own panaceas - a sort of Cadi-court for "bag-and-baggaging" bad landlords, and the concurrent endowment of Catholicism - were, at least, no better, and went, if it were possible, even more in the teeth of history.

It may be worth while (taking the usual chronological licence for the sake of logical coherence) to say a few words on the other political and quasi-political pieces reprinted with Irish Essays - the address to Ipswich working men, Ecce Convertimur ad Gentes , the Eton speech on Eutrapelia , and the ambitious Future of Liberalism [2] The first is a curious but not very important appeal to the lower class to educate the middle, with episodic praises of "equality," "academies," and the like, as well as glances at a more extensive system of "municipalisation," which, not to the satisfaction of everybody, has come about since. The second contains some admirable remarks on classical education, some still more admirable protests against reading about the classics instead of reading the classics, and the famous discourse on Eutrapelia , with its doctrine that "conduct is three-fourths of life," its denunciation of "moral inadequacy," and its really great indications of societies dying of the triumph of Liberalism and Conservatism respectively. A discourse quite admirable in intention, though if "heckling" had been in order on that occasion, a sharp youth might have put Mr Arnold in some difficulty by asking where the canons of "moral adequacy" are written.

But The Future of Liberalism , which the Elizabethans would have called a "cooling-card" after the Liberal triumph of 1880, exhibits its author's political quiddity most clearly. Much that he says is perfectly true; much of it, whether true or not, is, as Mr Weller observes, "wery pretty." But the old mistake recurs of playing on a phrase ad nauseam - in this case a phrase of Cobbett's (one of the greatest of phrase-makers, but also one of the chief of the apostles of unreason) about "the principles of Pratt, the principles of Yorke." It was, of course, a capital argumentum ad invidiam , and Mr Arnold frankly adopted it. He compared himself to Cobbett - a compliment, no doubt; but one which, I fear, Cobbett, who hated nothing so much as a university man, would not have appreciated. Cobbett thought of nothing but the agricultural labourer's "full belly" - at least this is how he himself put it; and it would have enforced Mr Arnold's argument and antithesis had he known or dared to use it. Mr Arnold thought of nothing but the middle classes' empty mind. The two parties, as represented by the rather small Lord Camden and the rather great Lord Hardwicke, cared for neither of these things - so "the principles of Pratt, the principles of Yorke" comes in as a refrain. To the average Briton quotation is no more argument than, on higher authority, is blank verse. Still it might do for ornament, if not for argument, - might help the lesson and point it at least. So we turn to the lesson itself. This "Liberal of the future," as Mr Arnold styles himself, begins, with orthodoxy if not with philosophy, by warning the Tories off entirely. "They cannot really profit the nation, or give it what it needs." Perhaps; but suppose we ask for a little reason, just a ghost of a premiss or two for this extensive conclusion? There is no voice, neither any that answers. And then, the Tories dismissed with a wave to all but temporary oblivion (they are to be allowed, it seems, to appear from time to time to chasten Liberalism), our prophet turns to Liberalism itself. It ought to promote "the humanisation of man in society," and it doesn't promote this. Ah! what a blessed word is "humanisation," the very equivalent, in syllables as in blessedness, of "Mesopotamia"! But when for the considerable rest of the essay we try to find out what humanisation is , why we find nothing but the old negative impalpable gospel, that we must " dis materialise our upper class, dis vulgarise our middle class, dis brutalise our lower class."