Pindar, Æschylus, Sophocles, I must not now attempt more than the bare mention. . . . No doubt that effort was imperfect. Perhaps everything, take it at what point in its existence you will, carries within itself the fatal law of its own ulterior development. Perhaps, even of the life of Pindar's time, Pompeii was the inevitable bourne. Perhaps the life of their beautiful Greece could not afford to its poets all that fulness of varied experience, all that power of emotion, which 66 . . . the heavy and the weary weight affords the poet of after-times. Perhaps in Sophocles the thinking-power a little overbalances the religious sense, as in Dante the religious sense overbalances the thinking-power. The present has to make its own poetry, and not even Sophocles and his compeers, any more than Dante and Shakspeare, are enough for it.'1 And in his final account of poetry, he decides that the 'high seriousness' which is the mark of supreme poetic merit belongs to Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton as much as to Homer and Sophocles. Moreover, he modifies the disparaging estimate which he originally formed of contemporary poetry, as based upon his estimate of the character of contemporary life. It seemed to him that in such an age poetry and literature must be critical, not creative. But criticism subsequently comes to mean for him all that is best and most characteristic of poetry. There are two orders in literature, he says, 2 'the famous men of 1 Essays in Criticism, I. p. 220–1. 2 Ib. p. 303. genius-the Homers, Dantes, Shakspeares,' and 'the famous men of ability'; but the work of these two orders 'is at the bottom the same-a criticism of life. The end and aim of all literature, if one considers it attentively, is, in truth, nothing but that.' As a matter of fact, while Arnold was complaining of the materialism of the age, a great poetic literature was growing up, which included, together with his own work, that of Tennyson, Browning, D. G. Rossetti, Swinburne, William Morris, and George Meredith.' The lack of ideas, which he attributed to the sterility of the Victorian epoch, was really the result of its youth. The happy concurrence of 'the power of the man and the power of the moment' did, in fact, come while his thoughts were still fixed upon the past. And for that reason he has only a dim consciousness of the change. 'I grant,'' he says, 'it is mainly the privilege of faith, at present, to discern this end to our railways, our business, and our fortune-making; but we shall see if, here as elsewhere, faith is not in the end the true prophet.' And he concludes his essay on the Function of Criticism-the instrument by which the new order of thought was to be brought into being-with these words: 'The epochs of Eschylus and Shakspeare make us feel 1 And what would he have said of Mr. Rudyard Kipling? Surely in Mr. Kipling's verse we have an example of Emerson's new artthe art which raises to a divine use the railroad, the galvanic battery, and the 'primary assemblies'—in short, all the applications of science, and all the manifestations of social and political progress. 2 Ib. p. 17. their pre-eminence. In an epoch like those is, no doubt, the true life of literature; there is the promised land, towards which criticism can only beckon. That promised land it will not be ours to enter, and we shall die in the wilderness: but to have desired to enter it, to have saluted it from afar, is already, perhaps, the best distinction among contemporaries; it will certainly be the best title to esteem with posterity.'1 If he had only known it, he was not in the wilderness when he died. But this dim consciousness of the change which was going on around him was sufficient to enable him to distinguish between the character of the possible harvest of the future and that of the early nineteenthcentury poetry—the work of Shelley, Keats, Scott, Coleridge, Byron, and Wordsworth. And he tells us very definitely to what the failure of this poetry was due. It was due to an absence of ideas in the nation at large. 'We in England, in our great burst of literature during the first thirty years of the present century, had no manifestation of the modern spirit, as this spirit manifests itself in Goethe's works or Heine's. And the reason is not far to seek. We had neither the German wealth of ideas, nor the French enthusiasm for applying ideas. There reigned in the mass of the nation that inveterate inaccessibility to ideas, that Philistinism—to use the German nickname—which reacts even on the individual genius that is exempt from it.'2 And so Byron and Shelley 'did not succeed in their attempt freely to apply the modern spirit in English ... literature; the resistance to baffle them, the want of intelligent sympathy to guide and uphold them were too great.' Without this application of the modern spirit that is to say, the identification of the poet with the life of his epoch-what he writes loses the poetic quality of universality, and becomes only partial truth. Even the external circumstances of his life are affected. This was the case with Wordsworth, who 'retired into a monastery'; with Coleridge, 'who took opium'; with Scott, 'who became the historiographer-royal of feudalism'; with Keats, 'who died of consumption at twenty-five.' 'Wordsworth, Scott and Keats have left admirable works; far more solid and complete works than those which Byron and Shelley have left. But their works have this defectthey do not belong to that which is the main current of the literature of modern epochs, they do not apply modern ideas to life; they constitute, therefore, minor currents, and all other literary work of our day, however popular, which has the same defect, also constitutes but a minor current.' 91 These extracts serve to give us some idea of the general standpoint from which Arnold looks out upon contemporary life, and also of his method of approaching the study of literature, and we are, therefore, now in a position to examine more at length the actual contribution which he has made to the science and practice of literary criticism. But, first, it will be well for me to indicate at once what I conceive to be the sum of the advance which 1 Ib. p. 177. is embodied in his writings on this subject. It is this. The test of symmetry which was laid down by Aristotle in the Poetics was found by Addison to be inadequate, and a new test, that of the power to appeal to the imagination, was substituted in its place. The former was a material test, and its use implied that the form of literature was prior in importance to the thought: the latter is a spiritual test, and its use implies that the thought of literature has been recognized as prior in importance to its form. In what respects, then, has Arnold advanced? In the first place, he has applied this principle to the study of literature. Addison only discovered it after he had tried to measure Paradise Lost by the rules of formal criticism. But it is from this aspectthought, not form-that Matthew Arnold wrote of poetry and poets from the first. 'The grand power of poetry is its interpretative power . . . it interprets by expressing with magical felicity the physiognomy and movement of the outward world, and it interprets by expressing with inspired conviction the ideas and laws of the inward world of man's moral and spiritual In the next place, he gave definiteness to the principle by pointing out that there was a special field of the imagination which belonged to poetry as of right; and that poetry of the highest order confined itself to appealing to the imagination within this sphere. 1 Ib. p. 110. |