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Page 49
I feel that history has given me at the moment rather an unfair
advantage over Mr Arnold here. One could always pick plenty of holes
in "Equality," could suggest that the Greeks did not make such a very
good thing of it with their equality (which included slavery); that
the Biblical point is far from past argument; that M. Zola, for
instance, supplies an interesting commentary on Mr Hamerton's
rose-coloured pictures of the French peasantry; that whatever Mr
Arnold's own lot may have been, others who have lived in small French
towns with the _commis voyageur_ have not found his manners so
greatly superior to those of the English bagman. But just at this
moment, and, in fact, in an increasing degree ever since Mr Arnold
wrote, the glorification of France has become difficult or impossible.
Sir Erskine May, it seems, had warned him in vain about the political
effect of French Equality even at that time: but one need not confine
oneself to politics. At the end of the nineteenth century France has
enjoyed the blessings of social equality, enforced by compulsory
division of estates, for a hundred years and more. Perhaps equality
has nothing to do with the decadence of her literature, with that
state of morals which Mr Arnold himself deplored with almost Puritan
emphasis, with the state of religion which he holds up as an awful
example, fit to warn England to flee to the refuge of his own
undogmatic _Nephelococcygia_, with the ineffable scandals of
Panama and the Dreyfus case, with the mixture of blind illucidity and
febrile passion which characterises the French press. Only, what is
left? Where are the improvements due to this great influence? They
are, according to Mr Arnold, in the amiable dignity of the French
peasant and the polished refinement of the French middle-class.
Frankly, one may prefer Hodge and Bottles.
"Irish Catholicism and British Liberalism" has less actuality, and,
moreover, it belongs to a group of which enough has been said in
reference to the _Irish Essays_. But "Porro Unum est Necessarium"
possesses not merely an accidental but a real claim to fresh
attention, not merely at the moment when there is at last some chance
of the dream of Mr Arnold's life, the interference of the State in
English secondary education, being realised, but because it is one of
the expressions of that dream which was in his life so important. It
consists partly of statistics and partly of a moan over the fact that,
in the heat and heyday of Mr Gladstone's _lev�e en masse_ against
the Tory Government of 1874-80, the Liberal programme contained
nothing about this darling object. And the superiority of France is
trotted out again; but it would be cruel to insist any more. Yet at
last Mr Arnold becomes practical, and contends for pretty much the
substance of present Secondary Education Reform schemes--limited
inspection, qualification of masters, leaving certificates, &c. "It do
not over-stimulate," to quote an author to whom Mr Arnold was shortly
to devote much attention; but we leave the political or semi-political
batch in considerably greater charity with the author than his prose
volumes for years past had rendered possible.
No reserves, no allowances of the least importance are necessary in
dealing with the rest of the volume. I do not think it fanciful to
discern a sort of involuntary or rather unconscious "Ouf!" of relief
in the first, the "Guide to English Literature," on the subject, as
has been said, of Mr Stopford Brooke's always excellent and then novel
_Primer_. A tribute to duty is, indeed, paid at starting: we are told
sternly that we must not laugh (as it is to be feared too many of us
did and do) at the famous boast of the French Minister, as to all the
boys in France learning the same lesson at the same hour. For this was
the result of State interference: and all the works of State
interference are blessing and blessed. But, this due rite paid, Mr
Arnold gives himself up to enjoyment, laudation, and a few
good-natured and, for the most part, extremely judicious proposals for
making the good better still. Even if this last characteristic were
not present, it would be unjust to call the article a puff. Besides,
are puffs so wholly bad? A man may be not very fond of sweets, and yet
think a good puff now and then, a puff with its three corners just hot
from the oven, full of jam, light, artistically frothed, to be a very
pleasing thing. And, as I have said, Mr Arnold's review is much more
than a puff. Once, indeed, there is even a hypercriticism, due to that
slight want of familiarity with literary history proper which has been
noticed more than once. Mr Arnold finds fault with Mr Brooke for
adopting, as one of his chapter divisions, "from the Restoration to
George III." He objects to this that "George III. has nothing to do
with literature," and suggests "to the Death of Pope and Swift." This
is a curious mistake, of a kind which lesser critics have often
repeated. Perhaps George III. _had_ nothing to do with literature; but
his accession immediately preceded, and may even, as the beginning of
a pure English _r�gime_, have done something to produce, numerous
appearances of the Romantic revival--Percy's _Reliques_, Hurd's
_Essays_, Macpherson's _Ossian_, _The Castle of Otranto_, and others.
The deaths of Pope and Swift have no such synchronism. They mark,
indeed, the disappearance of the strongest men of the old school, but
not the appearance of even the weakest and most infantine of the new.
Still this, though interesting in itself, is a trifle, and the whole
paper, short as it is, is a sort of _Nunc Dimittis_ in a new sense, a
hymn of praise for dismissal, not from but to work--to the singer's
proper function, from which he has been long divorced.
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