s were thus
described by the foreign critic. "The fineness and capacity of man's
spirit is shown by his enjoyments; your Middle Class has an enjoyment in
its business, we admit, and gets on well in business, and makes money;
but beyond that? Drugged with business, your Middle Class seems to have
its sense blunted for any stimulus besides, except Religion; it has a
religion, narrow, unintelligent, repulsive.... What other enjoyments
have they? The newspapers, a sort of eating and drinking which are not
to our taste, a literature of books almost entirely religious or
semi-religious, books utterly unreadable by an educated class anywhere,
but which your Middle Class consumes by the hundred thousand, and in
their evenings, for a great treat, a lecture on Teetotalism or
Nunneries. Can any life be imagined more hideous, more dismal, more
unenviable?... Your Middle Class man thinks it the highest pitch of
development and civilization when his letters are carried twelve times a
day from Islington to Camberwell, and from Camberwell to Islington, and
if railway trains run to and fro between them every quarter of an hour.
He thinks it is nothing that the trains only carry him from an
illiberal, dismal life at Islington to an illiberal, dismal life at
Camberwell; and the letters only tell him that such is the life there."
And, as to political and social reform, "Such a spectacle as your Irish
Church Establishment you cannot find in France or Germany. Your Irish
Land Question you dare not face." English Schools, English vestrydom,
English provincialism--all alike stand in the most urgent need of
reform; but with all alike the Middle Class is serenely content. After
reporting these exceedingly frank comments of foreign critics to his
English readers, Arnold thus expresses his own conviction on the matters
in dispute. "All due deductions made for envy, exaggeration, and
injustice, enough stuck by me of these remarks to determine me to go on
trying to keep my mind fixed on these, instead of singing hosannahs to
our actual state of development and civilization. The old recipe, to
think a little more and bustle a little less, seemed to me still to be
the best recipe to follow. So I take comfort when I find the _Guardian_
reproaching me with having no influence; for I know what influence
means--a party, practical proposals, action; and I say to myself: 'Even
suppose I could get some followers, and assemble them, brimming with
affectionate