Our Great Middle Class

________________________________________________
Title:     Our Great Middle Class
Author: Augustine Birrell [More Titles by Birrell]

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.

[The end]
Augustine Birrell's essay: Our Great Middle Class

________________________________________________



GO TO TOP OF SCREEN