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Page 45
In February 1870 the famous Persian cat Atossa (now in the most
comfortable lap of all the gods or goddesses, with Hodge and Bona
Marietta and Hinse of Hinsfeldt) makes her first appearance; and in
June Mr Arnold received the Oxford D.C.L. He set it down to "a young
and original sort of man, Lord Salisbury, being Chancellor"; and Lord
Salisbury himself afterwards told him that "no doubt he ought to have
addressed him as 'vir dulcissime et lucidissime.'" But though he was
much pleased by his reception, he thought Lord Salisbury "dangerous,"
as being unliterary, and only scientific and religious in his tastes.
In December he had an amusing and (as it ended well) not
unsatisfactory experience of the ways of Income Tax Commissioners.
These gentlemen acted on even vaguer principles than those on which
they once assessed a poor dramatic amateur, who had by accident
received �6 "author's rights" for a week, at �300 per annum, on the
sound arithmetical argument that there are fifty (indeed, there are
fifty-two) weeks in a year, and that fifty times six is three hundred.
They put Mr Arnold's literary profits at �1000, and he had to
expostulate in person before they would let him down to �200, though
he pathetically explained that "he should have to write more articles
than he ever had done" to prevent his being a loser even at that.
About the catastrophe of the _Ann�e Terrible_, his craze for
"righteousness" makes him a very little Pecksniffian--one thinks of
the Tower of Siloam. But it is pleasant to hear that, early in 1871,
they are arranging for him "a perfect district, Westminster and a
small rural part near Harrow." So one hopes that the days of posting
from shire to shire and subsisting on buns were over. He is interested
about Deutsch (the comet of a season for his famous Talmud articles),
receives the Commandership of the Crown of Italy for his services to
Prince Thomas, and is proposed for the Middlesex magistracy, but (to
one's sorrow) declines. There is fishing at Chenies (_vide_ an
admirable essay of Mr Froude's) in the early summer, a visit to
Switzerland in the later, and in September "the pigs are grown very
large and handsome, and experts advise their conversion into bacon."
But Mrs Arnold "does not like the idea." Indeed this is the drawback
of pig-keeping, which is otherwise a most fascinating pastime; but you
can escape it, and unite pleasure with profit, by merely breeding the
pigs and selling the litters young.
After this respite fate was again cruel. On February 16, 1872, Mr
Arnold's second son died at Harrow, and again the reception of the
blow and its effect are marked by lesser voicefulness in the grief.
Yet one phrase, "I cannot write his name without stopping to look at
it in stupefaction at his not being alive," is equal to volumes. The
letters of this year are few, but in September begins a correspondence
of some interest and duration with a French pastor, M. Fontan�s. Nor
does 1873 give much except description of a tour to Italy, while in
May the Arnolds moved from Harrow, with its painful memories, to
Cobham, which was Mr Arnold's home for the rest of his life. In
September he "shoots worse than ever" (_vide_ _Friendship's
Garland_) in the famous preserves of Six Mile Bottom, and soon
after his mother dies. But it is not given to all men not to be
motherless till they themselves are fifty. And 1874 is again rather
barren, even such yield as it gives being rather didactic and
controversial, as for instance in a letter to his sister, who had
apparently remonstrated with some vigour against the tone of
_Literature and Dogma_. A pleasant letter to Miss Kingsley on her
father's death (1875) puts in good evidence against the charge of
grudging appreciation of contemporaries which has often been brought
against Mr Arnold, and which some unguarded expressions, rather
injudiciously published in other letters, may seem to confirm.
Another in December contains an instance[4] of that dislike to
history, which long before its publication careful students of his
works had always noticed in him. The fact is, that to a man of ideas,
as Mr Arnold would have liked to be called--a man of theories or of
crotchets, as in extending order of unkindness people actually did
call him--history must be an annoying study. The things that ought to
happen do not happen, and the things that do happen have to be
awkwardly explained away or hazardously ignored His almost pettish
disgust for the historic estimate in literature itself may have either
caused or been caused by this more general dislike, and the dislike
itself explains the leniency with which he always regarded the sheer
guess-work of the Biblical critics. But it is possible to sympathise
with his disapproval of the divorce of History and Law, which used to
be united in the Oxford schools. Together they made a discipline,
inferior indeed, but only inferior, to that of the great school of
_Liter� Humaniores_, the best intellectual training in the world.
When they are divided, it may be feared that law becomes a mere
technicality, if not a mere bread-study, and that history is at once
thin and vague.
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