hem
to be the cafe-haunting, dominoes-playing Frenchmen, but some third
thing: neither the Frenchmen nor their present selves."

He was now fairly launched on the course of social criticism. As time
went on, his essays attracted more and more notice, sometimes friendly,
sometimes hostile, but always interested and not seldom excited. Some of
the comments on the new and daring critic were inconceivably absurd. Of
Mr. Frederic Harrison's retort,[25] Arnold wrote that it was "scarcely
the least vicious, and in parts so amusing that I laughed till I cried."
Mr. Goldwin Smith described him as "a gentleman of a jaunty air, and on
good terms with the world." To the _Times_ he seemed "a sentimentalist
whose dainty taste requires something more flimsy than the strong sense
and sturdy morality of his fellow-Englishmen." One newspaper called him
"a high priest of the kid-glove persuasion"; another, "an elegant
Jeremiah"; and Mr. Lionel Tollemache, combining in one harmonious whole
the absurdities of all the other commentators, says: "When asked my
opinion of this quaint man of genius, I have described him as a _Hebrew
prophet in white kid gloves_."

The fact is that we are a serious people. The Middle Class, which he
singled out for attack, is quite pre-eminently serious. Philosophers and
critics--the _Spectator_ and the _Edinburgh_--had made seriousness a
religion. Editors, leader-writers, reviewers, the Press generally, were
steeped to their lips in seriousness. They could not understand, and
were greatly inclined to resent, the appearance of this bright, playful,
unconventional spirit, happy and brilliant himself, and loving the
happiness and brilliancy of the world; with not an ounce of pomposity in
his own nature, and with the most irreverent demeanour towards pomposity
in other people. "Our social Polyphemes," as Lord Beaconsfield said,
"have only one eye"; and they could not the least perceive that Arnold's
genius was like the genius of poetry as he himself described it--

Radiant, adorn'd outside; a hidden ground
Of thought and of austerity within.

In a letter to the _Pall Mall Gazette_ of July 21, 1866, he first
introduced his friend Arminius,[26] Baron Von Thunder-Ten-Tronckh, the
cultivated and enquiring Prussian who had come to England to study our
Politics, Education, Local Government, and social life. A series of
similar letters followed at irregular intervals during the years 1866,
1867, 1869, and 1870.