e business of the Foreign
Education Commission, and there is a very remarkable passage in a
letter to Mrs Forster on Christmas Eve of that year. He tells his
sister of "Ernest Renan, a Frenchman I met in Paris," and notes the
considerable resemblance between their lines of endeavour, observing,
however, that Renan is chiefly "trying to inculcate morality, in a
high sense of the word, on the French," while _he_ is trying to
inculcate intelligence on the English. After which he makes a long and
enthusiastic reference to the essay, _Sur la Poesie des Races
Celtiques_, the literary results of which we shall soon see. I do
not know whether Mr Arnold ever expressed to his intimates--for the
reference to M. Renan in "Numbers" is not quite explicit--what he
thought of those later and very peculiar developments of "morality in
a high sense of the word" which culminated in the _Abbesse de
Jouarre_ and other things. His sense of humour must have painfully
suggested to him that his own familiar friend and pattern Frenchman
had become one of the most conspicuous examples of that French
lubricity which he himself denounced. But there was no danger of his
imitating M. Renan in this respect. In others the following was quite
unmistakable, and, I am bound to say, on the whole rather disastrous.
In literary criticism Mr Arnold needed no teaching from M. Renan, and
as his English training on one of its sides preserved him from the
Frenchman's sentimental hedonism, so on another it kept him from the
wildest excesses of M. Renan's critical reconstructions of sacred
history. But he copied a great deal too much of his master's
dilettante attitude to religion as a whole, and, as we shall see, he
adopted and carried a great deal further M. Renan's (I am told) not
particularly well-informed and (I am sure) very hazardous and
fantastic ideas about Celtic literature. On the whole, the two were
far too much alike to do each other any good. Exquisite even as M.
Renan's mere style is, it is exquisite by reason of sweetness, with a
certain not quite white and slightly phosphorescent light, not by
strength or by practical and masculine force. Now it was the latter
qualities that Mr Arnold wanted; sweetness and light he could not
want.

As the tenure of his Chair drew to a close, and as he began to loathe
examination papers more and more (indeed I know no one to whom _usus
concinnat amorem_ in the case of these documents), he made some
endeavours to o