to a new
society.

The method is not very different in "A French Critic on Goethe,"
though Carlyle, the English "awful example" selected for contrast, is
less maltreated than Macaulay, and shares the disadvantageous part
with Lewes, and with divers German critics. On the whole, this essay,
good as it is, seems to me less effective than the other; perhaps
because Mr Arnold is in less accord with his author, and even seems to
be in two minds about that author's subject--about Goethe himself.
Earlier, as we have partly seen, he had, both in prose and in verse,
spoken with praise--for him altogether extraordinary, if not
positively extravagant--of Goethe; he now seems a little doubtful, and
asks rather wistfully for "the just judgment of forty years," the calm
revised estimate of the Age of Wisdom. But M. Scherer's estimate is in
parts lower than he can bring himself to admit; and this turns the
final passages of the essay into a rather unsatisfactory chain of "I
agree with this," "I do not agree with that." But the paper retains
the great merit which has been assigned to its predecessor as a piece
of ushering; and that, we must remember, was what it was designed to
be.

In "George Sand," which completes the volume, we have Mr Arnold no
longer as harbinger of another, but in the character, in which after
all he is most welcome, of speaker on his own account. His estimate of
this prolific _amuseuse_ will probably in the long-run seem
excessive to the majority of catholic and comparative critics; nor is
it at all difficult to account for the excess. Mr Arnold belonged
exactly to the generation to which in England, even more than in
France, George Sand came as a soothing and sympathetic exponent of
personal sorrows. Even the works of her "storm-and-stress" period were
not too far behind them; and her later calmer productions seem to have
had, at least for some natures among the "discouraged generation of
1850" (to which, as we have said, Mr Arnold himself by his first
publications belonged), something of that healing power which he has
assigned, in larger measure and with greater truth, to Wordsworth. A
man is never to be blamed for a certain generous overvaluation of
those who have thus succoured him; it would be as just to blame him
for thinking his mother more beautiful, his father wiser than they
actually were. And Mr Arnold's obituary here has a great deal of
charm. The personal and biographical part is done with admi