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Page 42
We must now turn to the incursions of this time into politics, which,
if not much happier, were more amusing. The chief monument of them is
the long unreprinted _Friendship's Garland_, which has always had
some fervent devotees, and is very characteristic. It so happened that
the period when _Essays in Criticism_, combined with his Oxford
Lectures, introduced Mr Arnold to the public, was the period of the
first years of the _Pall Mall Gazette_, when that brilliant
periodical, with the help of many of the original staff of the
_Saturday Review_, and others, was renewing for the sixties the
sensation of a new kind of journalism, which the _Saturday_
itself had given to the fifties, while its form and daily appearance
gave it even greater opportunities. As early as the summer of 1866,
during the agitation into which the public mind had been thrown by the
astounding rapidity and thoroughness of the Prussian successes in the
Seven Weeks' War, Mr Arnold had begun a series of letters, couched in
the style of _persiflage_, which Kinglake had introduced, or
reintroduced, twenty years earlier in _Eothen_, and which the
_Saturday_ had taken up and widely developed. He also took not a
few hints from Carlyle in _Sartor_ and the _Latterday
Pamphlets_. And for some years at intervals, with the help of a
troupe of imaginary correspondents and _comparses_--Arminius von
Thundertentronckh, Adolescens Leo of the _Daily Telegraph_, the
Bottles family of wealthy Dissenters, with cravings for their deceased
wife's sisters, as well as a large number of more or less celebrated
personages of the day, introduced in their proper persons, and by
their proper names--he instructed England on its own weakness, folly,
and vulgarity, on the wisdom and strength of the Germans, on the
importance of _Geist_ and ideas, &c., &c. The author brought
himself in by name as a simple inhabitant of Grub Street, victimised,
bullied, or compassionately looked down upon by everybody; and by this
well-known device took licence for pretty familiar treatment of other
people. When the greater crash of 1870 came, and the intelligent
British mind was more puzzled, yet more _Prusso-mimic_, than
ever, he supplemented these letters, framed or bound them up, as it
were, with a moving account of the death of Arminius before Paris, and
launched the whole as a book.
The letters had been much laughed over; but I do not think the book
was very widely bought--at any rate, its 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.
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