Different again, inferior perhaps, but certainly not in any hostile sense inferior, is the “Joubert.”  It has been the fashion with some to join this essay to the Guerin pieces as an instance of some incorrigible twist in Mr Arnold’s French estimates, of some inability to admire the right things, even when he did admire I cannot agree with them.  Joubert, of course, has his own shortcomings as a pensee-writer.  He is rococo beside La Bruyere, dilettante beside La Rochefoucauld, shallow beside Pascal.  There is at times, even if you take him by himself, and without comparison, something thin and amateurish and conventional about him.  But this is by no means always or very often the case; and his merits, very great in themselves, were even greater for Mr Arnold’s general purpose.

That subtle and sensitive genius did not go wrong when it selected Joubert as an eminent example of those gifts of the French mind which most commended themselves to itself—­an exquisite justesse, an alertness of spirit not shaking off rule and measure, above all, a consummate propriety in the true and best, not the limited sense of the word.  Nor is it difficult to observe in the shy philosopher a temperament which must have commended itself to Mr Arnold almost as strongly as his literary quality, and very closely indeed connected with that—­the temperament of equity, of epieikeia, of freedom from swagger and brag and self-assertion.  And here, once more, the things receive precisely their right treatment, the treatment proportioned and adjusted at once to their own value and nature and to the use which their critic is intending to make of them.  For it is one of the greatest literary excellences of the Essays in Criticism that, with rare exceptions, they bear a real relation to each other and to the whole—­that they are not a bundle but an organism; a university, not a mob.

The subjects of the two last essays, Spinoza and Marcus Aurelius, may at first sight, and not at first sight only, seem oddly chosen.  For although the conception of literature illustrated in the earlier part of the book is certainly wide, and admits—­nay, insists upon, as it always did with Mr Arnold—­considerations of subject in general and of morals and religion in particular, yet it is throughout one of literature as such.  Now, we cannot say that the interest of Spinoza or that of Marcus Aurelius, great as it is in both cases, is wholly, or in the main, or even in any considerable part, a literary interest.  With Spinoza it is a philosophical-religious interest, with Marcus Aurelius a moral-religious, almost purely.  The one may indeed illustrate that attempt to see things in a perfectly white light which Mr Arnold thought so important in literature; the other, that attention to conduct which he thought more important still.  But they illustrate these things in themselves, not in relation to literature.  They are less literary even than St Francis; far less than the author of the Imitation.