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Page 22
The non-literary events of his life during this period were
sufficiently varied if not very momentous. We have mentioned the
domiciling in Chester Square, which took place in February 1858,
perhaps on the strength of the additional income from Oxford. In the
late summer of that year he went alone to Switzerland, and next
spring, shortly after the New Year, received, to his very great joy, a
roving commission to France, Belgium, Switzerland, and Piedmont, to
report on elementary education. "Foreign life," he says, with that
perfect naturalness which makes the charm of his letters, "is still to
me perfectly delightful and liberating in the last degree." And he was
duly "presented" at home, in order that he might be presentable
abroad. But the first days of the actual sojourn (as we have them
recorded in a letter to his mother of April 14) were saddened by that
death of his brother William, which he has enshrined in verse.
He had, however, plenty to distract him. France was all astir with the
Austrian war, and it is impossible to read his expressions of
half-awed admiration of French military and other greatness without
rather mischievous amusement. He visited the Morbihan, which struck
him as it must strike every one. Here he is pathetic over a promising
but not performing dinner at Auray--"soup, Carnac oysters, shrimps,
_fricandeau_ of veal, breast of veal, and asparagus;" but
"everything so detestable" that his dinner was bread and cheese. He
must have been unlucky: the little Breton inns, at any rate a few
years later than this, used, it is true, to be dirty to an extent
appalling to an Englishman; but their provender was usually far from
contemptible. There is more sense of Breton scenery in another letter
a little later. Both here and, presently, in Gascony he notes truly
enough "the incredible degree to which the Revolution has cleared the
feudal ages out of the minds of the country people"; but if he
reflected on the bad national effect of this breach with the past, he
does not say so. By June 12 he is in Holland, and does not like
it--weather, language, &c., all English in the worst sense, apparently
without the Norman and Latin element which just saves us. And though
he was a very short time in the Netherlands, he has to relieve his
feelings by more abuse of them when he gets back to Paris--in fact, he
speaks of Holland exactly as the typical Frenchman speaks of England,
and is accordingly very funny to read. The two things that make
Holland most interesting, history and art, were exactly those that
appealed to Mr Arnold least. Then after a refreshing bath of Paris, he
goes to Strasbourg, and Time--Time the Humourist as well as the
Avenger and Consoler--makes him commit himself dreadfully. He "thinks
there cannot be a moment's doubt" that the French will beat the
Prussians even far more completely and rapidly than they are beating
the Austrians. Lord Cowley, it seems, "entirely shared" his conviction
that "the French will always beat any number of Germans who come into
the field against them, and never be beaten by any one but the
English." Let us hope that Jove, when he whistled half this prophecy
down the wind, affirmed the rest of it! Switzerland comes next; and he
is beginning to want very much to be back in England, partly "for the
children, but partly also from affection for that foolish old
country"--which paternal and patriotic desire was granted about the
end of the month, though only for a short time, during which he wrote
a pamphlet on the Italian question. Then "M. le Professeur Docteur
Arnold, Directeur G�n�ral de toutes les �coles de la Grande Bretagne,"
returned to France for a time, saw M�rim�e and George Sand and Renan,
as well as a good deal of Sainte-Beuve, and was back again for good in
the foolish old country at the end of the month.
In the early winter of 1859-60 we find him a volunteer, commenting not
too happily on "the hideous English toadyism which invests lords and
great people with commands," a remark which seems to clench the
inference that he had not appreciated the effect of the Revolution
upon France. For nearly three parts of 1860 we have not a single
letter, except one in January pleasantly referring to his youngest
child "in black velvet and red-and-white tartan, looking such a duck
that it was hard to take one's eyes off him."[4] This letter, by the
way, ends with an odd admission from the author of the remark quoted
just now. He says of the Americans, "It seems as if few stocks could
be trusted to grow up properly without having a priesthood and an
aristocracy to act as their schoolmasters at some time or other of
their national existence." This is a confession. The gap, however, is
partly atoned for by a very pleasant batch in September from Viel Salm
in the Ardennes, where the whole family spent a short time, and where
the Director-General of all the schools in Great Britain had splendid
fishing, the hapless Ardennes trout being only accustomed to nets.
Then the interest returns to literature, and the lectures on
translating Homer, and Tennyson's "deficiency in intellectual power,"
and Mr Arnold's own interest in the Middle Ages, which may surprise
some folk. It seems that he has "a strong sense of the irrationality
of that period" and of "the utter folly of those who take it seriously
and play at restoring it." Still it has "poetically the greatest charm
and refreshment for me." One may perhaps be permitted to doubt whether
you can get much real poetical refreshment out of a thing which is
irrational and which you don't take seriously: the practice seems to
be not unlike that medi�val one of keeping fools for your delectation.
Nor can the observations on Tennyson be said to be quite just or quite
pleasant. But every age and every individual is unjust to his or its
immediate predecessor--a saying dangerous and double-edged, but true
for all that. Then he "entangles himself in the study of accents"--it
would be difficult to find any adventurer who has _not_ entangled
himself in that study--and groans over "a frightful parcel of grammar
papers," which he only just "manages in time," apparently on the very
unwholesome principle (though this was not the same batch) of doing
twenty before going to bed when he comes in from a dinner-party at
eleven o'clock. Colds, Brighton, praise from Sainte-Beuve, critical
attacks in the English papers, and (not quite unprovoked) from F.W.
Newman, reflections on the Age of Wisdom (forty), and a meeting with
Thackeray, the Laureate of that age, diversify the history agreeably.
Then we come to a dead, and now rather more than dull, controversy
over the Revised Code, of which we need not say much. Official
etiquette on such matters, especially in England, is very loose,
though he himself seems to have at one time thought it distantly
possible, though not likely, that he would be ejected for the part he
took. And his first five years' tenure of the Oxford Chair ends with
the delivery of the Creweian oration, as to the composition of which
he consoles himself (having heard both from the Vice-Chancellor and
others that there was to be "a great row") by reflecting that "it
doesn't much matter what he writes, as he shall not be heard." I do
not know whether the prediction was justified; but if so, the same
fate had, according to tradition, befallen his Newdigate some twenty
years earlier. In neither case can the "row" have had any personal
reference. Though his lectures were never largely attended by
undergraduates, he was always popular in Oxford.
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