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Page 43
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 Matth�an 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." "Om-m-ject and sum-m-m-ject!" "om-m-ject and
sum-m-m-ject," in short, as that famous flash of Thomas Carlyle's
genius discovered and summarised Coleridge, and with Coleridge the
whole nineteenth century. A screed of jargon--a patter of
shibboleth--and that is all. Never a thought for this momentous
question--"May you not possibly--indeed most probably--in attempting
to remove what you choose to consider as the defects of these classes,
remove also what you acknowledge to be their virtues--the governing
faculty of the upper class, the conduct and moral health of the
middle, the force and vigour of the lower?" A momentous question
indeed, and one which, as some think, has _got_ something of an answer
since, and no comfortable one!
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