or else from the Mabinogion, where some of the articles are positively known to be late translations of French-English originals, and the others are very uncertain.  You really cannot found any safe literary generalisations on so very small a basis of such very shaky matter.  In fact, Mr Arnold’s argument for the presence of “Celtic magic,” &c., in Celtic poetry comes to something like this.  “There is a quality of magic in Shakespeare, Keats, &c.; this magic must be Celtic:  therefore it must be in Celtic poetry.”  Fill up the double enthymeme who list, I am not going to endeavour to do so.  I shall only say that two sentences give the key-note of the book as argument.  “Rhyme itself, all the weight of evidence tends to show, came into our poetry from the Celts.”  Now to some of us all the weight of evidence tends to show that it came from the Latins.  “Our only first-rate body of contemporary poetry is the German.”  Now at the time (1867), for more than thirty years, Germany had not had a single poet of the first or the second class except Heine, who, as Mr Arnold himself very truly says, was not a German but a Jew.

But once more, what we go to Mr Matthew 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.