middle of the century, and the short, crisp
criticisms which had appeared to take its place in weekly papers were
almost necessarily exposed to grave faults and inadequacies. It was Mr.
Arnold's great merit that by holding up Sainte-Beuve, from whom he had
learnt much, and other French critics, and by urging successfully the
revival of the practice of "introducing" editions of classics by a sound
biographical and critical essay from the pen of some contemporary, he
did much to cure this state of things. So that, whereas the _corpus_ of
English essay-criticism between 1800 and 1835 or thereabouts is
admirable, and that of 1835 to 1865 rather thin and scanty, the last
third of the century is not on such very bad terms as regards the first.
And he gave example as well as precept, showing--though his subjects, as
in the case of the Guerins, were sometimes most eccentrically
selected--a great deal of critical acuteness, coupled, it may be, with
something of critical "will-worship," with a capricious and unargued
preference of this and rejection of that, but exhibiting wide if not
extraordinarily deep reading, an honest enthusiasm for the best things,
and above all a fascinating rhetoric.

The immediate effect of this remarkable book was good almost unmixedly
on two of the three parties concerned. It was more than time for the
flower of middle-class complacency, which horticulturists of all
degrees, from Macaulay downwards, had successively striven to cultivate,
and which was already overblown, to drop from its stalk; and the whiff
of pleasant scorn which Mr. Arnold directed at it was just the thing to
puff it off. So the public, upon which he was never likely to produce
too much effect, had reason to thank him for the effect that he did
produce, or helped to produce. And on the critics too his effect, or the
effect of which he was the symptom and voice, was also good, recalling
them on the one hand from the dulness of the long reviews of the period,
and on the other from the flippancy of the short, while inculcating a
wider if not always a sounder comparison. Practically German poetry had
nothing left to do in Mr. Arnold's day, and French had much: he thought
just the other way, and reserved his encomium of France for its prose,
in which it was drooping and failing. But this did not matter: it is the
general scope of the critic's advice which is valuable in such cases,
and the general scope of Mr. Arnold's was sound. On the t