The stage lost a real friend in Arnold. His criticisms were not the fretful, carping essays of the moderns. He had the capacity to do common-place work earnestly, and gave of his best to the task of every day. Moreover, he loved good acting, and knew
it when he saw it, and was catholic in his tastes. Like all men, he had his mannerisms. As he said of himself, “It is the pedagogue in me which needs subduing,” and in the main he kept it under. Yet I think I could trace his unsigned writings in the Press by his love of a French phrase. The French were always with him, and in season and occasionally out of season, like the great Mr. Wegg, he dropped into French. Some of these adjectives were well chosen. Thus Irving’s humour in the grave-digger’s scene was macabre; Pinero understood the use of the mot de la situation; and the English opinion of the French classical writers was sangrenu—I have but a hazy notion of the meaning of the word, still it sounds satisfying. These words are expressive, but on occasion he would, to show he was a mortal journalist, descend to déclassé and tour de force like the lower infusoria of the reporter’s room.
I remember in his French enthusiasm he gave me to read a criticism in a French paper—by Sarcey, I fancy. “Why cannot we do work like that? Why can’t that be done in England?” he asked.
“I think it might be,” I replied. “Indeed, under proper conditions, I think I could do it myself. All I should want is the same conditions as the French fellow—half the first sheet of the Manchester Guardian once a week to print my criticisms on, and, of course, Sarcey’s salary, and my name at the bottom of the page.”
The ribaldry of demanding half the first page of the Guardian for anything but advertisements was
too much for Arnold, and the gathering rebuke of flippancy dissolved in laughter.
Arnold was disabled at forty-four and died in 1904, at the age of fifty-two. Bravely and unselfishly he bore his weary years of sickness, using every available hour for scholarship and study. I last saw him in Manchester some time before his death. He was then very weak and ill and in great pain; but I remember this of it at least with pleasure, that when I came to say farewell at his bedside the word he whispered, at which I proudly caught, was “friend.”
And it was through the kindness of Mrs. Scott, too, that Miss Gaskell and her sister became aware of our existence and collected us into their fold, so that whenever some actor or doctor or artist or musician or writer or thinker came to Manchester there was an invitation to meet him or her at their historic house in Plymouth Grove. It is hard to say whether these pleasant dinner-parties were more refreshing to the body or the soul. One reads of the Parisian salons of the reign of Louis XV., but one cannot believe that the privilege of attending Madame Geoffrin or Madame Necker could be compared to the honour of an invitation to Plymouth Grove. Art, literature, music, and drama were impersonated by the greatest artists, though they were not there as lions to gaze at, but rather as friends of the home. The hospitality and elegance of the entertainment would have been a happy memory for Lord Guloseton himself, and as he came away he would have sheathed his silver weapons
with content. Though these were things other houses could give you, the real treasure casketed in the shrine of Plymouth Grove was the homely welcome which great and small received from the high priestesses. It was a salon of Louis XV. conceived in the spirit of Cranford.
And if, as we are promised, there are to be many mansions in the realms above, I trust it is not impious to hope that one will be situated in some Elysian Plymouth Grove, exact in every detail to the dear original. For it must have the same semi-circular drive approaching its old-fashioned portico, and the steps must be a trifle steep by which you reach the shuttered door, and I must be permitted to be young again, unknown and obscure, and to drive up in a heavenly hired four-wheeled cab, so that when the door is opened by some neat angel maid-servant I may feel fully again the honour that is done me. Everything must be in its place in the beloved drawing-room, for each book and picture, and piece of furniture had its own welcome for you, and though, of course, I should like to meet the shade of Charlotte Brontë as well as some of those noted men and women who were visitors in my day, yet all I shall really wish for is the Manchester welcome the good ladies gave me twenty-five years ago. For if heaven is to be a success, there must be kind hostesses to welcome shy, awkward, unknown, youthful persons like myself, and make us at ease and at home in the presence of the great ones. And though I write this as a nonsense dream, I do it because I find