but Goethe and Heine for some five hundred years, no great
prose-writer but Heine (unless you call Goethe one), and were not
going to have any! It was 1865, when all the great French writers,
themselves of but some thirty years' standing, were dying off, not to
be succeeded! 1865, when for seventy years 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
_dévotes_," 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.