The republication of Mr. Arnold's _Friendship's Garland_ after an
interval of twenty-seven years may well set us all a-thinking. Here it
is, in startling facsimile--the white covers, destined too soon to
become black, the gilt device, the familiar motto. As we gazed upon
it, we found ourselves exclaiming, so vividly did it recall the past:
'It is we, it is we, who have changed.'
_Friendship's Garland_ was a very good joke seven-and-twenty years
ago, and though some of its once luminous paint has been rubbed off,
and a few of its jests have ceased to effervesce, it is a good joke
still. Mr. Bottle's mind, qua mind; the rowdy Philistine Adolescens
Leo, Esq.; Dr. Russell, of the _Times_, mounting his war-horse; the
tale of how Lord Lumpington and the Rev. Esau Hittall got their
degrees at Oxford; and many another ironic thrust which made the
reader laugh 'while the hair was yet brown on his head,' may well make
him laugh still, 'though his scalp is almost hairless, and his
figure's grown convex.' Since 1871 we have learnt the answer to the
sombre lesson, 'What is it to grow old?' But, thank God! we can laugh
even yet.
The humour and high spirits of _Friendship's Garland_ were, however,
but the gilding of a pill, the artificial sweetening of a nauseous
draught. In reality, and joking apart, the book is an indictment at
the bar of _Geist_ of the English people as represented by its middle
class and by its full-voiced organ, the daily press. Mr. Arnold
invented Arminius to be the mouthpiece of this indictment, the
traducer of our 'imperial race,' because such blasphemies could not
artistically have been attributed to one of the number. He made
Arminius a Prussian because in those far-off days Prussia stood for
Von Humboldt and education and culture, and all the things Sir Thomas
Bazley and Mr. Miall were supposed to be without. Around the central
figure of Arminius the essentially playful fancy of Mr. Arnold grouped
other figures, including his own. What an old equity draughtsman would
call 'the charging parts' of the book consist in the allegations that
the Government of England had been taken out of the hands of an
aristocracy grown barren of ideas and stupid beyond words, and
entrusted to a middle class without noble traditions, wretchedly
educated, full of _Ungeist_, with a passion for clap-trap, only
wanting to be left alone to push trade and make money; so ignorant as
to believe that feudalism can be abated without any heroic Stein, by
providing that in one insignificant case out of a hundred thousand,
land shall not follow the feudal law of descent; without a single
vital idea or sentiment or feeling for beauty or appropriateness; well
persuaded that if more trade is done in England than anywhere else, if
personal independence is without a check, and newspaper publicity
unbounded, that is, by the nature of things, to be great; misled every
morning by the magnificent _Times_ or the 'rowdy' _Telegraph_;
desperately prone to preaching to other nations, proud of being able
to say what it likes, whilst wholly indifferent to the fact that it
has nothing whatever to say.
Such, in brief, is the substance of this most agreeable volume. Its
message was lightly treated by the grave and reverend seigniors of the
State. The magnificent _Times_, the rowdy _Telegraph_, continued to
preach their gospels as before; but for all that Mr. Arnold found an
audience fit, though few, and, of course, he found it among the people
he abused. The barbarians, as he called the aristocracy, were not
likely to pay heed to a professor of poetry. Our working classes
were not readers of the _Pall Mall Gazette_ or purchasers of
four-and-sixpenny tracts bound in white cloth. No; it was the middle
class, to whom Mr. Arnold himself belonged, who took him to honest
hearts, stuck his photograph upon their writing-tables, and sounded
his praises so loudly that his fame even reached the United States of
America, where he was promptly invited to lecture, an invitation he
accepted. But for the middle classes Mr. Arnold would have had but a
poor time of it. They did not mind being insulted; they overlooked
exaggeration; they pardoned ignorance--in a word, they proved
teachable. Yet, though meek in spirit, they have not yet inherited the
earth; indeed, there are those who assert that their chances are gone,
their sceptre for ever buried. It is all over with the middle-class.
Tuck up its muddled head! Tie up its chin!
A rabble of bad writers may now be noticed pushing their vulgar way
along, who, though born and bred in the middle classes, and disfigured
by many of the very faults Mr. Arnold deplored, yet make it a test of
their membership, an 'open sesame' to their dull orgies, that all
decent, sober-minded folk, who love virtue, and, on the whole, prefer
delicate humour to sickly lubricity, should be labelled 'middle
class.'
Politically, it cannot but be noticed that, for good or for ill, the
old middle-class audience no longer exists in its integrity. The
crowds that flocked to hear Cobden and Bright, that abhorred slavery,
that cheered Kossuth, that hated the income-tax, are now watered down
by a huge population who do not know, and do not want to know, what
the income-tax is, but who do want to know what the Government is
going to do for them in the matter of shorter hours, better wages, and
constant employment. Will the rabble, we wonder, prove as teachable as
the middle class? Will they consent to be told their faults as meekly?
Will they buy the photograph of their physician, or heave half a brick
at him? It remains to be seen. In the meantime it would be a mistake
to assume that the middle class counts for nothing, even at an
election. As to ideas, have we got any new ones since 1871? 'To be
consequent and powerful,' says Arminius, 'men must be bottomed on some
vital idea or sentiment which lends strength and certainty to their
action.' There are those who tell us that we have at last found this
vital idea in those conceptions of the British Empire which Mr.
Chamberlain so vigorously trumpets. To trumpet a conception is hardly
a happy phrase, but, as Mr. Chamberlain plays no other instrument, it
is forced upon me. Would that we could revive Arminius, to tell us
what he thinks of our new Ariel girdling the earth with twenty Prime
Ministers, each the choicest product of a self-governing and
deeply-involved colony. Is it a vital or a vulgar idea? Is it merely a
big theory or really a great one? Is it the ornate beginning of a
Time, or but the tawdry ending of a period? At all events, it is an
idea unknown to Arminius von Thunder-Ten-Tronckh, and we ought to be,
and many are, thankful for it.