|
Main
- books.jibble.org
My Books
- IRC Hacks
Misc. Articles
- Meaning of Jibble
- M4 Su Doku
- Computer Scrapbooking
- Setting up Java
- Bootable Java
- Cookies in Java
- Dynamic Graphs
- Social Shakespeare
External Links
- Paul Mutton
- Jibble Photo Gallery
- Jibble Forums
- Google Landmarks
- Jibble Shop
- Free Books
- Intershot Ltd
|
books.jibble.org
Previous Page
| Next Page
Page 57
We must now return, for the last time unfortunately, to the narrative
of biographical events. December 1877 furnishes, in some letters to
his sister, evidence that he was increasingly "spread" (as the French
say quaintly) by notices of parties and persons--Mr Disraeli and Mr
Gladstone, Mr Huxley and Mr Ruskin. One is glad to hear of the
last-named that the writer "is getting to like him "--the passages on
the author of _Modern Painters_ in the earlier letters are
certainly not enthusiastic--and that "he gains much by his fancy being
forbidden to range through the world of coloured cravats." This
beneficial effect of evening dress is not limited to Mr Ruskin, and is
so well expressed that one only wishes Mr Arnold had let his own fancy
range more freely in such epistolary criticisms of life. We hear that
Mr J.R. Green "likes the Reformation and Puritanism less the more he
looks into them," again a not uncommon experience--and that Mr
Stopford Brooke is deriving much edification from the review of his
_Primer_. The next year continues the series of letters to M.
Fontanes, and gives a pleasant phrase in one to another sister, Mrs
Cropper. "My poems have had no better friends in their early and needy
days than my own sisters"--wherein Mr Arnold unconsciously quotes
_Goblin Market_, "there is no friend like a sister." Later, Mr
Freeman is dashed off, _a la maniere noire_, as "an ardent,
learned, and honest man, but a ferocious pedant." 1879 yields a letter
to Miss Arnold, expressing the intention to send the Wordsworth book
of selections to M. Scherer, and beg him to review it, which request
resulted in one of the very best, perhaps _the_ very best, of
that critic's essays in English Literature. Mr Arnold is distressed
later at Renan's taking Victor Hugo's poetry so prodigiously _au
serieux_, just as some of us have been, if not distressed, yet
mildly astonished, at Mr Arnold for not taking it, with all its
faults, half seriously enough. Geist, the dachshund, appears
agreeably, with many other birds and beasts, in a May letter of this
year, and botany reinforces zoology in a later one to Mr Grant Duff.
1880 is at first less fertile, but gives an amusing account of a
semi-royal reception of Cardinal Newman at the Duke of Norfolk's in
May, and a very interesting series of letters from Pontresina in the
autumn. Fortunately for us Mrs Arnold was not with him, and we profit
by his letters to her. In one of them there is a very pleasing and
probably unconscious touch. "Rapallo [the Duchess of Genoa's husband]
smokes the whole evening: _but I think he has a good heart_." And
later still we have the curious and not uncharacteristic information
that he is reading _David Copperfield_ for the first time (whence
no doubt its undue predominance in a certain essay), and the
description of Burns as "a beast with splendid gleams," a view which
has been fully developed since. On February 21, 1881, there is another
interview, flattering as ever, with Lord Beaconsfield, and later he
tells M. Fontanes, "I never much liked Carlyle," which indeed we knew.
The same correspondent has the only references preserved to Dean
Stanley's death; but the magnificent verses which that death produced
make anything else superfluous. They appeared in the first number of
the _Nineteenth Century_ for 1882, when New Year's Day gives us a
melancholy prediction. If "I live to be eighty [_i.e._, in some
three years from the present moment], I shall probably be the only
person in England who reads anything but newspapers and scientific
publications." Too gloomy a view, let us hope; yet with something in
it. And a letter, a very little later, gives us interesting hints of
his method in verse composition, which was to hunt a Dictionary
(Richardson's) for good but unusual words--Theophile Gautier's way
also, as it happens, though probably he did not know that.
These later letters contain so many references to living people that
one has to be careful in quoting from them; but as regards himself,
there is of course no such need of care. That self-ruthlessness which
always prevented him from scamping work is amazingly illustrated in
one of October 1882, which tells how he sat up till five in the
morning rewriting a lecture he was to deliver in Liverpool, and got up
at eight to start for the place of delivery. Let us hope that a
champagne luncheon there--"chiefly doctors, but you know I like
doctors"--revived him after the night and the journey. And two months
later he makes pleasant allusion to "that demon Traill," in reference
to a certain admirable parody of _Poor Matthias_. He had thought
Mr Gladstone "hopelessly prejudiced against" him, and was
proportionately surprised when in August 1883 he was offered by that
Minister a pension of �250 for service to the poetry and literature of
England. Few Civil List pensions have been so well deserved. But Mr
Arnold, as most men of his quality would have been, was at once struck
with the danger of evil constructions being put by the baser sort on
the acceptance of an extra allowance from public funds by a man who
already had a fair income from them, and a comfortable pension in the
ordinary way to look forward to. Mr John Morley, however, and Lord
Lingen, luckily succeeded in quieting his scruples, and only the very
basest sort grumbled. The great advantage, of course, was that it
enabled him to retire, as soon as his time was up, without too great
loss of income.
Previous Page
| Next Page
|
|