on,
if they are to last, if they are to do any good, must be in accordance
with the spirit of the nation; that if the French Academy has been
beneficial, it is because the French spirit is academic; and that if
(as we may fear, or hope, or believe, according to our different
principles) the English spirit is unacademic, an Academy would
probably be impotent and perhaps ridiculous in England. But we can
allow for this; and when we have allowed for it, once more Mr Arnold's
warnings are warnings on the right side, true, urgent, beneficial.
There are still the minor difficulties. Even at the time, much less as
was known of France in England then than now, there were those who
opened their eyes first and then rubbed them at the assertion that
"openness of mind and flexibility of intelligence" were the
characteristics of the French people. But once more also, no matter!
The central drift is right, and the central drift carries many
excellent things with it, and may be allowed to wash away the less
excellent. Mr Arnold is right on the average qualities of French
prose; whether he is right about the "provinciality" of Jeremy Taylor
as compared to Bossuet or not, he is right about "critical freaks,"
though, by the way--but it is perhaps unnecessary to finish that
sentence. He is right about the style of Mr Palgrave and right about
the style of Mr Kinglake; and I do not know that I feel more
especially bound to pronounce him wrong about the ideas of Lord
Macaulay. But had he been as wrong in all these things as he was
right, the central drift would still be inestimable--the drift of
censure and contrast applied to English eccentricity, the argument
that this eccentricity, if it is not very good, is but too likely to
be very bad.

Yet it is perhaps in the illustrative essays that the author shows at
his best. Even in the Guerin pieces, annoyance at the waste of
first-rate power on tenth-rate people need not wholly blind us to the
grace of the exposition and to the charming eulogy of "distinction" at
the end. That, if Mr Arnold had known a little more about that French
Romantic School which he despised, he would have hardly assigned this
distinction to Maurice; and that Eugenie, though undoubtedly a "fair
soul," was in this not distinguished from hundreds and thousands of
other women, need not matter very much after all. And with the rest
there need be few allowances, or only amicable ones. One may doubt
whether Heine's charm is