that we can afford to lay aside or to forget such
consummate examples of it. Academic urbanity is not so universal a
feature of our race--the constant endeavour at least to "live by the
law of the _peras_," to observe lucidity, to shun exaggeration,
is scarcely so endemic. Let it be added, too, that if not as the sole,
yet as the chief, herald and champion of the new criticism, as a
front-fighter in the revolutions of literary view which have
distinguished the latter half of the nineteenth century in England, Mr
Arnold will be forgotten or neglected at the peril of the generations
and the individuals that forget or neglect him.

Little need be added about the loss of actual artistic pleasure which
such neglect must bring. Mr Arnold may never, in prose, be read with
quite the same keenness of delight with which we read him in poetry;
but he will yield delight more surely. His manner, except in his rare
"thorn-crackling" moments, and sometimes even then, will carry off
even the less agreeable matter; with matter at all agreeable, it has a
hardly to be exaggerated charm.

But it is in his general literary position that Mr Arnold's strongest
title to eminence consists. There have certainly been greater poets in
English: I think there have been greater critics. But as poet and
critic combined, no one but Dryden and Coleridge can be for a moment
placed beside him: the fate of the false Florimel must await all
others who dare that adventure. And if he must yield--yield by a long
way--to Dryden in strength and easy command of whatsoever craft he
tried, to Coleridge in depth and range and philosophical grasp, yet he
has his revenges. Beside his delicacy and his cosmopolitan
accomplishment, Dryden is blunt and unscholarly; beside his directness
of aim, if not always of achievement, his clearness of vision, his
almost business-like adjustment of effort to result, the vagueness and
desultoriness of Coleridge look looser and, in the literary sense,
more disreputable than ever. Here was a man who could not only
criticise but create; who, though he may sometimes, like others, have
convicted his preaching of falsity by his practice, and his practice
of sin by his preaching, yet could in the main make practice and
preaching fit together. Here was a critic against whom the foolish
charge, "You can break, but you cannot make," was confessedly
impossible--a poet who knew not only the rule of thumb, but the rule
of the uttermost art. In