into a temper, Carlyle seemed never to fly out of one. But Arnold kept a
smile of heart-broken forbearance, as of the teacher in an idiot school,
that was enormously insulting. One trick he often tried with success. If
his opponent had said something foolish, like "the destiny of England is
in the great heart of England," Arnold would repeat the phrase again and
again until it looked more foolish than it really was. Thus he recurs
again and again to "the British College of Health in the New Road" till
the reader wants to rush out and burn the place down. Arnold's great
error was that he sometimes thus wearied us of his own phrases, as well
as of his enemies'.

These names are roughly representative of the long series of protests
against the cold commercial rationalism which held Parliament and the
schools through the earlier Victorian time, in so far as those protests
were made in the name of neglected intellect, insulted art, forgotten
heroism and desecrated religion. But already the Utilitarian citadel had
been more heavily bombarded on the other side by one lonely and
unlettered man of genius.

The rise of Dickens is like the rising of a vast mob. This is not only
because his tales are indeed as crowded and populous as towns: for truly
it was not so much that Dickens appeared as that a hundred Dickens
characters appeared. It is also because he was the sort of man who has
the impersonal impetus of a mob: what Poe meant when he truly said that
popular rumour, if really spontaneous, was like the intuition of the
individual man of genius. Those who speak scornfully of the ignorance of
the mob do not err as to the fact itself; their error is in not seeing
that just as a crowd is comparatively ignorant, so a crowd is
comparatively innocent. It will have the old and human faults; but it is
not likely to specialise in the special faults of that particular