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