nold sharply challenges us, in the course of a hundred and fifty vivacious pages, to feel, mark, and compare with him the stylistic qualities in specific lines from: Homer, Newman, Cowper, Pope, Chapman, the romance of Richard Coeur de Leon, Milton, the Popular Ballads, Shakespeare, the Bible, Doctor Maginn, Scott, Virgil, Dante, Spenser, Tennyson, Horace, Hawtrey, Spedding, Wordsworth and Macaulay. If you compare all these passages as you are directed to compare them, if you make an earnest effort to perceive the stylistic distinctions which Arnold tells you are there, you will find the process highly exciting to your esthetic sensibility; you will undergo an esthetic discipline which you will never forget, and which will leave you with a sense of augmented power in these matters. That you can not always agree with your guide nor feel what he feels is of comparatively little moment. That he has induced in you a sustained effort of feeling and discrimination—there is the precious virtue of his discipline. In this connection one can not resist borrowing from Arnold, Joubert's exquisite appreciation of a Greek disciplinarian of the mind who achieved by similar methods similar results: "Plato shows us nothing, but he brings brightness with him; he puts light into our eyes, and fills us with a clearness by which all objects afterwards become illuminated. He teaches us nothing; but he prepares us, fashions us, and makes us ready to

know all. Somehow or other, the habit of reading him augments in us the capacity for discerning and entertaining whatever fine truths may afterwards present themselves. Like mountain-air, it sharpens our organs, and gives us an appetite for wholesome food."

It is pretty generally agreed that Arnold's discourses on Celtic literature are not so sound as his lectures on Homer. He had little or no acquaintance with Celtic works in the original languages; and his determination of national and racial characteristics is rather a matter of divination than of science. His method of detecting the presence of "Celtic Magic" in English poetry is itself a magical method, reminding one of the method of New England wellfinders with their hazel dipping-sticks. Professor Saintsbury, the erudite and animated historian of criticism, remarks severely: "With bricks of ignorance and mortar of assumption you can build no critical house." This is taking Arnold's effort just a bit too seriously. He himself openly avows his superficial acquaintance with the monuments of Celtic culture, and frequently reminds his readers that his opinions are conjectural and speculative. He writes as an “essayist" in the older sense of the word; does what he can to convey the impression that he is on a holiday-excursion into a comparatively unmapped and little traveled land. He has seen many delightful things, he has formed many

traveler's impressions; and he reports these sights and these impressions to enlist the interest of the general public and to stimulate scholarly investigation. Both these purposes his treatment of the subject was admirably calculated to serve. It related what was then a neglected and extremely obscure channel of European life to the central political, religious, social and literary interests of the day; and it thus engaged the attention of thousands of cultivated people who had thitherto no notion that the literature of the ancient Celts had any bearing on their concerns. Full of striking generalizations, it made conspicuous, if it did not settle, innumerable fascinating linguistic, literary and ethnological problems; and it thus stimulated many young scholars to enter a field where the harvest was ripe and the reapers few. It helped to prepare the way, on the one hand, for the Anglo-Celtic Renaissance engineered by Mr. Yeats, and, on the other hand, for the foundation of schools of Irish learning and chairs of Celtic in the universities. With results like these, a critic who desires that what he writes may “lead to something" may feel reasonably well satisfied.

We have given what Arnold would have called an "historical estimate" of the importance of his rather light-hearted excursion among the Celts. If the essay has accomplished its immediate purpose, what value has it now? If there are to-day more

experienced guides to the literature of the Celts, if interest in it is widely diffused, why should we turn any longer to this "popular" and "pioneer" discussion? One might give many reasons: the charm of its style, its incidental appreciations, its critical digressions, the fact that many of its guesses are as good as any one's guesses, its suggestive comparison of national traits and tendencies, its reprehension of national pride and arrogance, its various persuasions to the study of perfection. The chief reason, however, for still turning to the essay is suggested by its "historical" influence: it was and it is still a vigorous stimulus to intellectual curiosity. This virtue abides in it and distinguishes it just as the virtue of a stimulus to esthetic sensibility abides in and distinguishes the lectures on Homer. Intellectual curiosity was one of the "stops" which Arnold desired to pull out "in that powerful but at present somewhat narrow-minded organ, the modern Englishman." That he did not consider intellectual curiosity the supreme mark of a wise man is revealed in his criticism of Sainte-Beuve; but that he considered it the beginning of wisdom it is the effort of this essay to make manifest. His dealing with the Celts, unscientific as it may be in its method and results, is his most extended tribute in the field of literary criticism to the catholicism and the multiform energy of the scientific spirit. The bane of the modern English, he would say, and the bane of us

all, we may add, is our lethargic disdain for what we do not understand, is our indolence and dulness in the presence of "alien" things and thoughtslike philology, ethnology, and the Irish! Taking Celtic literature, the most "alien" matter at hand, he makes his own brilliant intelligence play through it and all around it, illuminating it and its relationships, making it at least momentarily important, and thus initiating the reader into the function of curiosity. The reader who follows him will be invited in the end to make all sorts of moral and esthetic and social applications of what he has seen; but the primary invitation is to open the eyes of the mind on unfamiliar fields, to enliven ourselves by variegating our interests, to enlarge our sympathies by widening our knowledge.

The discourses on Homer and the Celts are not the most frequently applauded portions of Arnold's literary criticism. We have lingered over them here because so many persons who have written about Arnold have not lingered over them, but, fixing attention rather exclusively upon portions of his work in which moral stimulus is the predominant impulse, have not exhibited his critical effort "whole"-have failed properly to emphasize its essential, its characteristic, many-sidedness. Having now indicated extensive studies in which the esthetic stimulus and the intellectual stimulus are the predominant impulses, we may cordially recognize the grave and