hew Arnold for is not fact, it is
not argument, it is not even learning. It is phrase, attitude, style,
that by which, as he says admirably in this very book, "what a man has
to say is recast and heightened in such a manner as to add dignity and
distinction to it." It is the new critical attitude, the appreciation
of literary beauty in and for itself, the sense of "the word," the
power of discerning and the power of reflecting charm, the method not
more different from the wooden deduction of the old school of critics
than from the merely unenlightened and Philistine commonness of the
reviewers, his earlier contemporaries, or from the aimless "I like
that" and "I don't like this" which does duty now, and did then, and
has done always, for criticism itself. True, Mr Arnold himself might
be wilful, capricious, haphazard; true, he might often be absolutely
unable to give any real reason for the faith that was in him; true, he
sometimes might have known more than he did know about his subject.
But in all these points he saved himself: in his wilfulness, by the
grace and charm that sometimes attend caprice; in his want of reason,
by his genuineness of faith itself; in his occasional lack of the
fullest knowledge, by the admirable use--not merely display--which he
made of what knowledge he had. There may be hardly a page of the two
books of his lectures in which it is not possible to find some
opportunity for disagreement--sometimes pretty grave disagreement; but
I am sure that no two more valuable books, in their kind and subject,
to their country and time, have been ever issued from the press.

The _New Poems_ make a volume of unusual importance in the
history of poetical careers. Mr Arnold lived more than twenty years
after the date of their publication; but his poetical production
during that time filled no more than a few pages. At this date he was
a man of forty-five--an age at which the poetical impulse has been
supposed to run low, but perhaps with no sufficient reason. Poets of
such very different types as Dryden and Tennyson have produced work
equal to their best, if not actually their best, at that age and
later. Mr Browning had, a few years before, produced what are perhaps
his actually greatest volumes, _Men and Women_ and _Dramatis
Personae_, the one at forty-three, the other at fifty-two.
According to Mr Arnold's own conception of poetry-making, as depending
upon the subject and upon the just and artist-like exp