Some of the expressions in that poem ... come back now to my ear with the true Homeric ring. But that in him of which I think oftenest is the Homeric simplicity of his literary life."
We have seen more than once that, according to Arnold, poetry was a criticism of life; but he always maintained that this was true of poetry only because poetry is part of literature, and all literature was a criticism of life. One may demur to the statement as greatly too unguarded in its terms, but certainly he was true to his own doctrine, and in practice, from first to last, he used literature as a medium for criticising the life and conduct of his fellow-men. In the last year of his life he produced with approbation "a favourite saying of Ptolemy the astronomer, which Bacon quotes in its Latin version thus:--_Quum fini appropinquas, bonum c.u.m augmento operare_"--"As you draw near to your latter end, redouble your efforts to do good." And this redoubled effort was in his case all of a piece with what had gone before. In 1863 he wrote to a friend: "In trying to heal the British demoniac, true doctrine is not enough; one must convey the true doctrine with studied moderation; for, if one commits the least extravagance, the poor madman seizes hold of this, tears and rends it, and quite fails to perceive that you have said anything else."
All his literary life was spent in trying to convey "true doctrine with studied moderation." And in his true doctrine nothing was more conspicuous than his insistence, early and late, on the supreme importance of character and conduct. The first object of life was to realize one"s best self, and this endeavour required not merely cleverness or information: even genius would not of itself suffice; still less would adherence to any particular body of opinions. If a man was _dis-respectable_, "not even the merit of not being a Philistine could make up for it." Character issuing in Conduct--this was the true culture which we must all ensue, if by any means we were to attain to our predestined perfection; and, if that were once secured, all the rest--talent, fame, influence, length of days, worldly prosperity--mattered little. Thus he wrote of his friend Edward Quillinan--
I saw him sensitive in frame, I knew his spirits low: And wish"d him health, success, and fame-- I do not wish it now.
For these are all their own reward, And leave no good behind; They try us, oftenest make us hard, Less modest, pure, and kind.
Alas! yet to the suffering man, In this his mortal state, Friends could not give what fortune can-- Health, ease, a heart elate.
But he is now by fortune foil"d No more; and we retain The memory of a man unspoil"d, Sweet, generous, and humane--
With all the fortunate have not, With gentle voice and brow.
--Alive, we would have changed his lot, We would not change it now.
When his eldest boy died he wrote to a friend: "He is gone--and all the absorption in one"s own occupations which prevented one giving to him more than moments, all one"s occasional impatience, all one"s taking his ailments as a matter of course, come back upon one as something inconceivable and inhuman. And his mother, who has nothing of all this to reproach herself with, who was everything to him and would have given herself for him, has lost the occupation of sixteen years, and has to begin life over again. The one endless comfort to us is the thought of the _sweet, firm, sterling character_ which the darling child developed in and by all his sufferings and privations. Of that we can think and think."
When his second boy died he said that his "deepest feeling" was best expressed by his own _Dejaneira_--
But him, on whom, in the prime Of life, with vigour undimm"d, With unspent mind, and a soul _Unworn, undebased, undecay"d_, Mournfully grating, the gates Of the city of death have for ever closed-- _Him_, I count _him_ well-starr"d.
In teaching the high lesson of Character and Conduct, he dealt sparingly in words, even words of "studied moderation." He taught princ.i.p.ally, he taught conspicuously, he taught all his life long, by Example. In regarding that example, as it stands clear across the inters.p.a.ce of fifteen years, we are reminded of Tertullian"s doctrine concerning the _anima naturaliter Christiana_. A more genuinely amiable man never lived. His sunny temper, his quick sympathy, his inexhaustible fun, were natural gifts. But something more than nature must have gone to make his constant unselfishness, his manly endurance of adverse fate, his n.o.ble cheerfulness under discouraging circ.u.mstances, his buoyancy in breasting difficulties, his unremitting solicitude for the welfare and enjoyment of those who stood nearest to his heart. The secret of his life was that he had taken pains with his own character. While he was still quite young we find him bewailing the "worldly element which enters so largely into his composition," and which threatens to make a gulf between him and the strict, almost Puritanical, a.s.sociations of his youth. "But," he says in writing to his sister, "as Thomas a Kempis recommended, _frequentur tibi violentiam fac_ ... so I intend not to give myself the rein in following my natural tendency, but to make war against it till it ceases to isolate me from you, and leaves me with the power to discern and adopt the good which you have and I have not."
The result of this self-discipline and self-culture was to produce in him all the virtues which are supposed to be specifically and peculiarly Christian. "Christianity," said Bishop Creighton, "impressed the Roman world by its power of producing men who were strong in self-control, and this must always be its contribution to the world." Arnold"s self-control was absolute and unshakable; and to self-control he added the characteristically Christian virtues of surrender, placability, readiness to forgive injuries, perfect freedom from envy, hatred, and malice. He revered the "method and secret of Jesus"; he did all honour to His "mildness and sweet reasonableness." "Christianity," he said, "is Hebraism aiming at self-conquest and rescue from the thrall of vile affections, not by obedience to the letter of a law, but by conformity to the image of a self-sacrificing example. To a world stricken with moral enervation Christianity offered its spectacle of an inspired self-sacrifice; to men who refuse themselves nothing it showed one who refused himself everything." Following this example, Arnold preached "Grace and peace by the annulment of our ordinary self," and what he preached he practised. "Kindness and Pureness," he said, "Charity and Chast.i.ty. If any virtues could stand for the whole of Christianity, these might. Let us have them from the mouth of Jesus Christ Himself.
"He that loveth his life shall lose it; a new commandment give I unto you, that ye love one another." There is charity. "Blest are the pure in heart, for they shall see G.o.d." There is purity." Charity was indeed the law of Arnold"s life. He loved with a pa.s.sionate and persistent love. He loved his wife with increasing devotion as years went on, when she had become "my sweet Granny," and they both felt that "we are too old for separations." He loved with equal fondness his mother (whom in his brightness, fun, and elasticity he closely resembled), the sisters who so keenly shared his intellectual tastes, his children living and departed. "d.i.c.k[34] was a tower of strength." "Lucy[35] is such a perfect companion." "Nelly[36] is the dearest girl in the world." "That little darling[4] we have left behind us at Laleham; and he will soon fade out of people"s remembrance, but _we_ shall remember him as long as we live, and he will be one more bond between us, even more perhaps in his death than in his sweet little life." "It was exactly a year since we had driven to Laleham with darling Tommy[38] and the other two boys to see Basil"s[37] grave; and now we went to see _his_ grave, poor darling." "I cannot write Budge"s[39] name without stopping to look at it in stupefaction at his not being alive."
Outside the circle of his family, his affection was widely bestowed and faithfully maintained. He had the true genius of friendship, and when he signed himself "affectionately" it meant that he really loved.
Enmities he had none. If ever he had suffered injuries they were forgiven, forgotten, and buried out of sight. Even in the controversies where his strongest convictions were involved, he steadily abstained from bitterness, violence, and detraction. "Fiery hatred and malice," he said, with perfect truth, "are what I detest, and would always allay or avoid if I could."
In the preface to his _Last Essays on the Church and Religion_, he takes those two great lessons of the Christian Gospel--Charity and Chast.i.ty--and goes on to show how they ill.u.s.trate "the _natural truth_ of Christianity," as distinct from any considerations of Revelation or Law. "Now, really," he says, writing in 1877, "if there is a lesson which in our day has come to force itself upon everybody, in all quarters and by all channels, it is the lesson of the _solidarity_, as it is called by modern philosophers, of men. If there was ever a notion tempting to common human nature, it was the notion that the rule of "every man for himself" was the rule of happiness. But at last it turns out as a matter of experience, and so plainly that it is coming to be even generally admitted--it turns out that the only real happiness is in a kind of impersonal higher life, where the happiness of others counts with a man as essential to his own. He that loves his life does really turn out to lose it, and the new commandment proves its own truth by experience."
And then he goes on to what he justly calls "the other great Christian virtue, Pureness." When he was thirty-two, he had written--"The lives and deaths of the "pure in heart" have, perhaps, the privilege of touching us more deeply than those of others--partly, no doubt, because with them the disproportion of suffering to deserts seems so unusually great. However, with them one feels--even I feel--that for their purity"s sake, if for that alone, whatever delusions they may have wandered in, and whatever impossibilities they may have dreamed of, they shall undoubtedly, in some sense or other, see G.o.d." And now, twenty-three years later, he returns to the same theme. Science, he says, is beginning to throw doubts on the "truth and validity of the Christian idea of Pureness." There can be no more vital question for human society. On the side of _natural truth_, experience must decide.
"But," he says, "finely-touched souls have a presentiment of a thing"s natural truth, even though it be questioned, and long before the palpable proof by experience convinces all the world. They have it quite independently of their att.i.tude towards traditional religion.... All well-inspired souls will perceive the profound natural truth of the idea of pureness, and will be sure, therefore, that the more boldly it is challenged the more sharply and signally will experience mark its truth. So that of the two great Christian virtues, charity and chast.i.ty, kindness and pureness, the one has at this moment the most signal testimony from experience to its intrinsic truth and weight, and the other is expecting it."
Again, in _G.o.d and the Bible_, he has a most instructive pa.s.sage on the relation of the s.e.xes. "Here," he says, "we are on ground where to walk right is of vital concern to men, and where disasters are plentiful." He speculates on that relation as it may be supposed to have subsisted in the first ages of the human race, and tries to trace it down to the point of time "where history and religion begin." "And at this point we first find the Hebrew people, with polygamy still clinging to it as a survival from the times of ignorance, but with the marriage-tie solidly established, strict and sacred, as we see it between Abraham and Sara.
Presently this same Hebrew people, with that apt.i.tude which characterized it for being profoundly impressed by ideas of moral order, placed in the Decalogue the marriage-tie under the express and solemn sanction of the Eternal, by the Seventh Commandment: _Thou shalt not commit adultery_." And again: "Such was Israel"s genius for the ideas of moral order and of right, such his intuition of the Eternal that makes for righteousness, that he felt without a shadow of a doubt, and said with the most impressive solemnity, that Free Love was--to speak, again, like our modern philosopher--fatal to progress. _He knoweth not that the dead are there, and that her guests are in the depths of h.e.l.l._"
The fact, already stated, that in the last years of his life, Arnold declared that his _Discourses in America_ was the book by which, of all his prose-writings, he most wished to be remembered, gives to whatever he enounced in those Discourses a special authority, a peculiar weight, for his disciples; and nowhere is his testimony on behalf of Virtue and Right Conduct more earnestly delivered.
When the odious Voltaire urged his followers to "Crush the Infamous," he had in mind that virtue which is specially characteristic of Christianity.[40] A century later Renan said: "Nature cares nothing for chast.i.ty." _Les frivoles out peutetre raison_--"The gay people are perhaps in the right." Against this doctrine of devils Arnold uttered a protesting and a warning voice. He was--heaven knows!--no enemy to France. All that is best in French literature and French life he admired almost to excess. His sympathy with France was so keen that Sainte-Beuve wrote to him--"Vous avez traverse notre vie et notre litterature par une ligne interieure, profonde, qui fait les inities, et que vous ne perdrez jamais." But in spite of, perhaps because of, this sympathy with France, he felt himself bound to protest and to warn.
Addressing his American audience in November, 1883, he pointed out the dangers which England, Ireland, America, and France incur through habitual disregard, in each case, of some virtue or grace without which national perfection is impossible. He used, as a kind of text for his discourse, the famous pa.s.sage from the Philippians. "Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are elevated, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are amiable, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, have these in your mind, let your thoughts run upon these."
_Whatsoever things are pure_. [Greek: osa hagua]--thus the teacher of Culture moralized on this pregnant phrase.
[Ill.u.s.tration: The Union Rooms, Oxford
At the Jubilee of the Union, 1873, Matthew Arnold responded to Dr.
Liddon"s speech proposing "Literature"
_Photo H.W. Taunt_]
"The question was once asked by the Town Clerk of Ephesus: "What man is there that knoweth not how that the city of the Ephesians is a worshipper of the great G.o.ddess Diana?" Now really, when one looks at the popular literature of the French at this moment--their popular novels, popular stage-plays, popular newspapers--and at the life of which this literature of theirs is the index, one is tempted to make a G.o.ddess out of a word of their own, and then, like the Town Clerk of Ephesus, to ask: "What man is there that knoweth not how that the city of the French is a worshipper of the great G.o.ddess Lubricity?" Or rather, as Greek is the cla.s.sic and euphonious language for names of G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses, let us take her name from the Greek Testament, and call her the G.o.ddess Aselgeia. That G.o.ddess has always been a sufficient power amongst mankind, and her worship was generally supposed to need restraining rather than encouraging. But here is now a whole people, law, literature, nay, and art too, at her service! Stimulations and suggestions by her and to her meet one in it at every turn.... "Nature,"
cries M. Renan, "cares nothing about chast.i.ty." What a slap in the face to the sticklers for "Whatsoever things are pure"!... Even though a gifted man like M. Renan may be so carried away by the tide of opinion in France where he lives, as to say that Nature cares nothing about chast.i.ty, and to see with amused indulgence the worship of the great G.o.ddess Lubricity, let us stand fast and say that her worship is against nature--human nature--and that it is ruin. For this is the test of its being against human nature, that for human societies it is ruin. And the test is one from which there is no escape, as from the old tests in such matters there may be. For, if you allege that it is the will of G.o.d that we should be pure, the sceptical Gallo-Latins will tell you that they do not know any such person. And in like manner, if it is said that those who serve the G.o.ddess Aselgeia shall not inherit the Kingdom of G.o.d, the Gallo-Latin may tell you that he does not believe in any such place. But that the sure tendency and upshot of things establishes that the service of the G.o.ddess Aselgeia is ruin, that her followers are marred and stunted by it, and disqualified for the ideal society of the future, is an infallible test to employ.
"The saints admonish us to let our thoughts run upon whatsoever things are pure, if we would inherit the Kingdom of G.o.d; and the divine Plato tells us that we have within us a many-headed beast and a man, and that by dissoluteness we feed or strengthen the beast in us, and starve the man; and finally, following the divine Plato among the sages at a humble distance, comes the prosaic and unfashionable Paley, and says in his precise way: that "this vice has a tendency, which other species of vice have not so directly, to unsettle and weaken the powers of the understanding; as well as, I think, in a greater degree than other vices, to render the heart thoroughly corrupt." True; and, once admitted and fostered, it eats like a canker, and with difficulty can ever be brought to let go its hold again, but for ever tightens it. Hardness and insolence come in its train; an insolence which grows till it ends by exasperating and alienating everybody; a hardness which grows until the man can at last scarcely take pleasure in anything, outside the service of his G.o.ddess, except cupidity and greed, and cannot be touched with emotion by any language except Fustian. Such are the fruits of the worship of the great G.o.ddess Aselgeia.
"So, instead of saying that Nature cares nothing about chast.i.ty, let us say that human nature, _our_ nature, cares about it a great deal.... The Eternal has attached to certain moral causes the safety or the ruin of States, and the present popular literature of France is a sign that she has a most dangerous moral disease."
In the following year, he thus commented on the Festival of Christmas and its spiritual significance:
"When we are asked, What really is Christmas, and what does it celebrate? We answer, the birthday of Jesus. What is the miracle of the Incarnation? A homage to the virtue of Pureness, and to the manifestation of this virtue in Jesus. What is Lent, and the miracle of the temptation? A homage to the virtue of self-control, and to the manifestation of this virtue in Jesus."
"That on which Christmas, even in its popular acceptation, fixes our attention, is that to which the popular instinct in attributing to Jesus His miraculous Incarnation, in believing Him born of a pure virgin, did homage--pureness. And this, to which the popular instinct thus did homage, was an essential characteristic of Jesus and an essential virtue of Christianity, the obligation of which, though apt to be questioned and discredited in the world, is at the same time nevertheless a necessary fact of nature and eternal truth of reason."
So much I have quoted in order to show that, in relation to the most important department of human conduct, Arnold"s influence, to use his own phrase, "made for righteousness," and made for righteousness unequivocally and persistently. So keen was his sense of the supreme value of this characteristically Christian virtue that he framed what old-fashioned theologians would have called a "hedge of the law."[41] In season and out of season, whether men would bear or whether they would forbear, he taught the sacredness of marriage. For the Divorce Court and all its works and ways he had nothing but detestation. He ranked it, with our gin-palaces, among the blots on our civilization. From Goethe, perhaps a curious authority on such a subject, he quotes approvingly a protest against over-facility in granting divorce, and an acknowledgment that Christianity has won a "culture-conquest" in establishing the sacredness of marriage. Man"s progress, he says, depends on his keeping such "culture-conquests" as these; and of all attempts to undo these conquests, give back what we have won, and accustom the public mind to laxity, he was the unsparing foe.
It may help to remind us that, in spite of all our shortcomings, we have travelled a little way towards virtue, or at least towards decency, if we recall that in 1863 Lord Palmerston, then in his eightieth year and Prime Minister of England, figured in a very unseemly affair which had the Divorce Court for its centre. Arnold writes as follows: "We had ---- with us one day. He was quite full of the Lord Palmerston scandal, which your charming newspaper, the _Star_--that true reflection of the rancour of Protestant Dissent in alliance with all the vulgarity, meddlesomeness, and grossness of the British mult.i.tude--has done all it could to spread abroad. It was followed yesterday by the _Standard_, and is followed to-day by the _Telegraph_. Happy people, in spite of our bad climate and cross tempers, with our penny newspapers!"
The admirable satire of _Friendship"s Garland_ is constantly levelled against national aberrations in this direction. In the year 1870 there was a fashionable divorce-case, more than usually scandalous, and the disgusting narrative had been followed with keen interest by those who look up at the Aristocracy as men look up at the stars. In reference to this case, he quotes to his imaginary friend Arminius the n.o.ble sentiment of Barrow: "Men will never be heartily loyal and submissive to authority till they become really good; nor will they ever be very good till they see their leaders such." To which Arminius replies, in his thoughtful manner: "Yes, that is what makes your Lord C----s so inexpressibly precious!" A certain Lord C----, be it observed, having figured very conspicuously in the trial.
With reference to the enormous publicity given in England to such malefic matter, Arnold says to Arminius: "When a Member of Parliament wanted to abridge the publicity given to the M---- case, the Government earnestly reminded him that it had been the solemn decision of the House of Commons that all the proceedings of the Divorce Court should be as open as the day. When there was a suggestion to hear the B---- case in private, the upright magistrate who was appealed to said firmly that he could never trifle with the public mind in that manner. All this was as it should be. So far, so good. But was the publicity in these cases perfectly full and entire? Were there not some places which the details did not reach? There were few, but there were some. And this, while the Government has an organ of its own, the _London Gazette_, dull, high-priced, and of comparatively limited circulation! I say, make the price of the _London Gazette_ a halfpenny; change its name to the _London Gazette and Divorce Intelligencer_; let it include besides divorce news, all cases whatever that have an interest of the same nature for the public mind; distribute it _gratis_ to mechanics"
inst.i.tutes, workmen"s halls, seminaries for the young (these latter more especially), and then you will be giving the principle of publicity a full trial. This is what I often say to Arminius; and, when he looks astounded, I rea.s.sure him with a sentence which, I know very well, the moment I make it public will be stolen by the Liberal newspapers. But it is getting near Christmas-time, and I do not mind making them a present of it. It is this: _The spear of freedom, like that of Achilles, has the power to heal the wounds which itself makes_."
In _Friendship"s Garland_, from the very structure of the book, his serious judgments have to be delivered by the mouth of his Prussian friend; and here is his judgment on our public concessions to pruriency--"By shooting all this garbage on your public, you are preparing and a.s.suring for your English people an immorality as deep and wide as that which destroys the Latin nations."
But his "hedge of the law" had other thorns besides those with which he pierced the Divorce Court and its hideous literature. He had shrewd sarcasms for all who, by whatever method, sought to gratify "that double craving so characteristic of our Philistine, and so eminently exemplified in that crowned Philistine, Henry the Eighth--the craving for forbidden fruit and the craving for legality." He poured scorn on the newspapers which glorified "the great s.e.xual insurrection of the Anglo-Teutonic race," and the author who extolled the domestic life of Mormonism. "Mr. Hepworth Dixon may almost be called the Colenso of Love and Marriage--such a revolution does he make in our ideas on these matters, just as Dr. Colenso does in our ideas on religion." He thus forecasts the doings of a Philistine House of Commons in 1871. "Mr. T.
Chambers will again introduce that enfranchising measure, against which I have had some prejudices--the Bill for enabling a man to marry his deceased wife"s sister. The devoted adversaries of the Contagious Diseases Act will spread through the length and breadth of the land a salutary discussion of this equivocal measure and of all matters connected with it; and will thus, at the same time that they oppose immorality, enable the followers of even the very straitest sects of Puritanism to see life." All these various attempts to break down the "hedge of the law" received in turn their merited condemnation; but always we are brought back from the consideration of kindred evils, to the proposal to legalize marriage with a wife"s sister. Thus the imaginary leader-writer of the _Daily Telegraph_ summarizes the controversy: "Why, I ask, is Mr. Job Bottles" liberty, his Christian liberty, as our reverend friend would say, to be abridged in this manner? And why is Protestant Dissent to be diverted from its great task of abolishing State Churches for the purpose of removing obstacles to the "s.e.xual insurrection" of our race? Why are its poor devoted ministers to be driven to contract, in the interests of Christian liberty, illegal unions of this kind themselves, _pour encourager les autres_? Why is the earnest Liberalism and Nonconformity of Lancashire and Yorkshire to be agitated on this question by hope deferred? Why is it to be put incessantly to the inconvenience of going to be married in Germany or in the United States, that greater and better Britain--
Which gives us manners, freedom, virtue, power?
Why must ideas on this topic have to be incubated for years in that "nest of spicery," as the divine Shakespeare says, the mind of Mr. T.
Chambers, before they can rule the world? For my own part, my resolve is formed. This great question shall henceforth be seriously taken up in Fleet Street. As a sop to those toothless old Cerberuses the bishops, who impotently exhibit still the pa.s.sions of another age, we will accord the continuance of the prohibition which forbids a man to marry his grandmother. But in other directions there shall be freedom. Mr.
Chambers" admirable Bill for enabling a woman to marry her sister"s husband will doubtless pa.s.s triumphantly through Committee to-night, amidst the cheers of the Ladies" Gallery. The Liberal Party must supplement that Bill by two others: one enabling people to marry their brothers" and sisters" children, the other enabling a man to marry his brother"s wife."
There is perhaps no social mischief which Arnold attacked so persistently as the proposal to legalize marriage with a wife"s sister.
The most pa.s.sionate advocates of that "enfranchising measure" will scarcely think that his hostility was due to what John Bright so gracefully called "ecclesiastical rubbish." Councils and Synods, Decrees and Canons, were held by him in the lightest esteem. The formal side of Religion--the side of dogma and doctrine and rule and definition--had no attractions for him, and no terrors. He never dreamed that the Table of Kindred and Affinity was a Third Table of the Divine Law. His appeal in these matters was neither to Moses nor to Tertullian, but to "the genius of the race which invented the Muses, and Chivalry, and the Madonna."
And yet he disliked the "enfranchising measure" quite as keenly as the clergyman who wrote to the _Guardian_ about incest, though indeed he expressed his dislike in a very different form. Here, as always and everywhere, he betook himself to his "sinuous, easy, unpolemical"
method, and thereby made his repugnance to the proposed change felt and understood in quarters which would never have listened to arguments from Leviticus, or fine distinctions between _malum per se_ and _malum prohibitum_. The ground of his repugnance was primarily his strong sense, already ill.u.s.trated, that the sacredness of marriage, and the customs that regulate it, were triumphs of culture which had been won, painfully and with effort, from the unbridled promiscuity of primitive life. To impair that sacredness, to dislocate those customs, was to take a step backwards into darkness and anarchy. His keen sense of moral virtue--that instinctive knowledge of evil which, as Frederick Robertson said, comes not of contact with evil but of repulsion from it, a.s.sured him that the "great s.e.xual insurrection" was not merely a grotesque phrase, but a movement of the time which threatened national disaster, and to which, in its most plausible manifestations, the stoutest resistance must be offered. Here again his love of coherence and logical symmetry, his born hatred of an anomaly, his belief in Reason as the true guide of life, made him intolerant of all the palpably insincere attempts to say _Thus far and no farther_. He knew that all the laws of Affinity must stand or fall together, and that no ground in reason can be alleged against marriage with a husband"s brother which does not tell against marriage with a wife"s sister. Yet again he regarded the proposed changes as betraying the smug viciousness of the more full-blooded Philistines--
Men full of meat whom wholly He abhors,[42]--
who, trying to keep a foot in each world of legality and indulgence, sought patronage from the rich and deceived and exploited the poor.
Certainly not the least of his objections to the "enfranchising measure"
was that, in breaking down the hedge of the law, it invaded Delicacy; and whatever invaded delicacy helped to precipitate gross though perhaps unforeseen evils. Unfortunately there are great ma.s.ses--whole cla.s.ses--of people to whom delicacy, whether in speech or act, means nothing. To eat, drink, sleep, buy and sell, marry and be given in marriage, is for those ma.s.ses the ideal and the law of life. These things granted, they desire no more: any restriction on them, any refinement of them, they dislike and resent. In another place[43] we have cited the mysterious effect produced upon the Paris Correspondent of the _Daily Telegraph_ by the sudden sound of the word "Delicacy." And that word was uttered in connexion with the "enfranchising measure." "If legislation on this subject were impeded by the party of bigotry, if they chose not to wait for it, if they got married without it, and if you were to meet them on the boulevard at Paris during their wedding tour, should you go up to Bottles and say: "Mr. Bottles, you are a profligate man!" Poor Mr. Matthew Arnold, upon this, emerged suddenly from his corner, and asked hesitatingly: "But will any one dare to call him a man of delicacy?" The question was so utterly unpractical that I took no note of it whatever, and should not have mentioned it if it had not been for its extraordinary effect upon our Paris Correspondent....
My friend Nick, who has all the sensitive temperament of genius, seemed inexplicably struck by this word _delicacy_, which he kept repeating to himself. "Delicacy," said he--"delicacy--surely I have heard that word before! Yes, in other days," he went on dreamily, "in my fresh enthusiastic youth; before I knew Sala, before I wrote for that infernal paper, before I called Dixon"s style lithe and sinewy--" "Collect yourself, my friend," laying my hand on his shoulder; "you are unmanned.
But in mentioning Dixon you redouble my strength; for you bring to my mind the great s.e.xual insurrection of the Anglo-Teutonic race, and the master-spirit which guides it.""[44]