“Do you care to write for the Manchester Guardian occasionally?”
Did I care to write? What a question to ask a young man with a wife and daughter and rent and taxes and no hope of an old age pension.
The bargain was struck, and the next week I commenced dramatic critic. Arnold approved, and I remained.
I never caught the Manchester Guardian manner, and I know I was too enthusiastic and unacademic, but I wrote on all sorts of subjects, and shall always remember the kindness of Arnold, who was my immediate chief, and all the staff, from the highest
to the lowest. Generally Arnold’s blue pencil was rightly wielded, but now and again, of course, enthusiasm scored.
I remember among a lot of books to review I had singled out the “Auld Licht Idylls,” by J. M. Barrie. I am glad to say for my reputation as a reviewer that it captured me and I enthused. I came into Arnold’s room in the office after the theatre. I can see him now, sitting wearily in the midst of proofs and papers. He looked up at me as I entered with an amused smile—he regarded me, I think, as an irrepressible, journalistic infant.
“That Scots’ book, you know,” he said, pulling out a proof—“Walter Scott and Bret Harte and Mark Twain rolled into one. Really, Parry, when will you grow up?”
I defended my point of view earnestly, and after listening a while he shrugged his shoulders, saying, “Good night; it’s not badly written—except for the adjectives. I’ll see to it.” He did see to it—with the blue pencil. For Arnold did not believe with the moderns in discovering a new literary genius once a week and canonizing him on the spot. He was a high priest of letters, and his literary saints had to be thoroughly tested in the pure fires of his critical insight before they were consecrated. But months afterwards he was just enough to say as I brought him in a theatre notice, “By the way, Parry, that Scots’ book. I’ve read it. We might have left in all that about Mark Twain and Bret Harte—and even Scott. But mind you don’t do
it again; you won’t find another Barrie in a hurry.”
I have not; nor indeed have I found another Arnold, so patient, cynical, learned and full of kindliness to those who worked under him. He was indeed a great loss to Manchester and the English Press. He too was, like myself, a stranger within the gates. He came to Manchester in 1879 from Oxford, where I think he had been a coach, and he had certainly brought from Oxford the best she has to give. For nearly twenty years he was a hard-working journalist, but he never lost his love of scholarship, and he was a scholar without pedantry. In his old-world house in Nelson Street, the site of which is now, I think, covered by the Infirmary buildings, he loved to greet newcomers and cheer them on their path with good-humoured, sane and helpful thoughts. He knew the best of Manchester, for he, too, loved to explore on foot or a wheel the moors and lanes and woodlands which lie within such tempting adjacence to the city. “I see him,” writes one who knew him best, “alert and vigorous, his broad shoulders somewhat over-weighted by the strong intellectual head, his dark eyes full of fun and affection.” The picture is by a great artist, and it cannot be bettered.