Page:Literary studies by Joseph Jacobs.djvu/119

 life of the provinces. But we prefer not to parade differences where there is so much with which we can agree and from which we can learn. The analysis of the French character and its threefold strain—Gallic, Latin, and Germanic—recalls some of the best parts of the Celtic Literature. The admirable quotations from Newman, Carlyle, Goethe, and Emerson, in the opening passage of the essay on the last, together with the remarks on each author—often but a word, but what an instructive word!—exhibit Mr. Arnold at one of his best moments; as, indeed, the whole discourse on Emerson shows him to us in one of his happiest hours of inspiration, and might be selected as giving an admirable specimen of his peculiar qualities as a critic of letters and of life; or, as Mr. Arnold would say, it gives us his method and his secret.

There is an apt phrase—we believe, of Professor Huxley's—which exactly expresses the differentia of Mr. Arnold's studies: they are lay sermons. The object of the sermon may be assumed to be the moral regeneration of the hearers. This is clearly and avowedly the object of most of Mr. Arnold's utterances. Notice how he invariably picks out the favourite sin of his audience. At the Royal Institution, in the midst of the London season, he lectures on equality. At Cam-