England had not lacked, and for nearly thirty more was not to lack, poets and prose-writers of the first order by the dozen and almost the score!  Here, too, is the marvellous companion-statement that in the England of the first quarter of the century was “no national glow of life.”  It was the chill of death, I suppose, which made the nation fasten on the throat of the world and choke it into submission during a twenty years’ struggle.

But these things are only Mr Arnold’s way.  I have never been able to satisfy myself whether they were deliberate paradoxes, or sincere and rather pathetic paralogisms.  For instance, did he really think that the Revue des Deux Mondes, an organ of “dukes, dunces, and devotes,” as it used to be called even in those days by the wicked knowing ones, a nursing mother of Academies certainly, and a most respectable periodical in all ways—­that this good Revue actually “had for its main function to understand and utter the best that is known and thought in the world,” absolutely existed as an organ for “the free play of mind”?  I should be disposed to think that the truer explanation of such things is that they were neither quite paradoxes nor quite paralogisms; but the offspring of an innocent willingness to believe what he wished, and of an almost equally innocent desire to provoke the adversary.  Unless (as unluckily they sometimes are) they be taken at the foot of the letter, they can do no harm, and their very piquancy helps the rest to do a great deal of good.

For there can be no doubt that in the main contention of his manifesto, as of his book, Mr Arnold was absolutely right.  It was true that England, save for spasmodic and very partial appearances of it in a few of her great men of letters—­Ben Jonson, Dryden, Addison, Johnson—­had been wonderfully deficient in criticism up to the end of the eighteenth century; and that though in the early nineteenth she had produced one great philosophical critic, another even greater on the purely literary side, and a third of unique appreciative sympathy, in Coleridge, Hazlitt, and Lamb, she had not followed these up, and had, even in them, shown certain critical limitations.  It was true that though the Germans had little and the French nothing to teach us in range, both had much to teach us in thoroughness, method, style of criticism.  And it was truest of all (though Mr Arnold, who did not like the historic estimate, would have admitted this with a certain grudge) that the time imperatively demanded a thorough “stock-taking” of our own literature in the light and with the help of others.