But why, he asks, does he dwell on this unimportant and private matter? Because he wishes particularly to disclaim any deference to the objection referred to above as to the choice of ancient subjects: to which he might have added (as the careful reader of the whole piece will soon perceive), because insistence on the character of the Subject was his critical being’s very end and aim. In effect, he uses both these battle-horses in his assault upon the opposite doctrine that the poet must “leave the exhausted past and fix his attention on the present.”[[962]] It is needless to say that over his immediate antagonists he is completely victorious. Whatever the origin of the ignoble and inept fallacy concerned, this particular form of it was part of the special mid-nineteenth century heresy of “progress.” But whether he unhorses and “baffles” it in the right way may be another question. His way is to dwell once more, and with something already of the famous Arnoldian iteration, on the paramount importance of the “action,” on the vanity of the supposition that superior treatment will make up for subjective inferiority. And he then exposes himself dangerously by postulating the superior interest of “Achilles, Prometheus, Clytemnestra, Dido,” to the personages of any modern poem, and, perhaps still more dangerously, by selecting as his modern poems Hermann and Dorothea, Childe Harold, Jocelyn [!!!], and The Excursion. He may be said here to lose a stirrup at least: but on the whole he certainly establishes the point—too clear to need establishment—that the date of an action signifies nothing. While if the further statement that the action itself is all-important is disputable, it is his doctrine and hypothesis.
He is consistent with this doctrine when he goes on to argue that “the Greeks understood it far more clearly than we do”—that “they regarded the whole, we the parts”—that, while they kept the action uppermost, we prefer the expression. Not that they neglected expression—“on the contrary, they were ... the masters of the grand style.” Where they did not indulge in this, where they were bald or trivial, it was merely to let the majesty of the action stand forth without a veil. “Their theory and practice alike, the admirable treatise of Aristotle and the unrivalled works of their poets, exclaim with a thousand tongues, ‘All depends upon the subject. Choose a fitting action, penetrate yourself with the feeling of its situations; this done, everything else will follow.’”[[963]]
As a necessary consequence, they were “rigidly exacting” as to construction: we believe in “the brilliant things that arise under the poet’s pen as he goes along.” We refuse to ask for a “total impression”: instead of requiring that the poet shall as far as possible efface himself, we even lay it down that “a true allegory of the state of one’s own mind in a representative history is perhaps the highest thing one can attempt in the way of poetry.” Against this Mr Arnold pronounces Faust—though the work of “the greatest poet of modern times, the greatest critic of all times”[[964]]—defective, because it is something like this. Next he deplores the want of a guide for a young writer, “a voice to prescribe to him the aim he should keep in view”—and, in default of it, insists once more on models.
The foremost of these models for the English writer is, of course, Shakespeare, of whom Mr Arnold speaks with becoming reverence, and of whom he had earned the right to speak by his magnificent sonnet years earlier. But his attitude towards Shakespeare, as a literary Bible, is guarded. Shakespeare chose subjects “than which the world could afford no better”; but his expression was too good—too “eminent and unrivalled,” too fixing and seductive to the attention, so to draw it away from those other things which were “his excellences as a poet.”[[965]] In leading writers to forget this, Shakespeare has done positive harm, and Keats’s Pot of Basil is taken as an instance, whence the critic diverges to a long condemnation of this great but erring bard’s “difficulty” of language, and returns to the doctrine that he is not safe as a model. The ancients are: though even in them there is something narrow, something local and temporary. But there is so much that is not, and that is an antidote to modern banes, that we cannot too much cling to them as models. These, he adds at some length, the present age needs morally as much as artistically. He has himself tried, in the poems he is issuing, to obey his own doctrines: and he ends with the famous peroration imploring respect for Art, and pleading for the observance and preservation of “the wholesome regulative laws of Poetry,” lest they be “condemned and cancelled by the influence of their eternal enemy, Caprice.”
and interim summary of its gist.
Comment on this, beyond the remarks already made, had best be postponed till we can consider Mr Arnold’s criticism as a whole. Contrast with Dryden.But to one thing we should draw attention, and that is, that here is a critic who knows what he means, and who means something not, directly, or as a whole, meant, or at least said, by any earlier critic. That “all depends on the subject” had been said often enough before: but it had not been said by any one who had the whole of literature before him, and the tendency—for half a century distinctly, for a full century more or less—had been to unsay or gainsay it. Further, the critic has combined with the older Neo-classic adoration of the “fable” something perhaps traceable, as hinted above, to the Wordsworthian horror of poetic diction, a sort of cult of baldness instead of beauty, and a distrust, if not horror, of “expression.” In fact, though I do not believe that he in the least knew it, he is taking up a position of direct and, as it were, designed antagonism to Dryden’s, in that remarkable preface to An Evening’s Love, one of those in which he comes closest to the Spaniards, where he says plumply “the story is the least part,” and declares that the important part is the workmanship—that this is the poiesis. It is hardly possible to state the “dependence”—in the old duelling sense—of the great quarrel of Poetics, and almost of Criticism, more clearly than is done in these two Prefaces by these two great poet-critics of the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries in England.
I do not think that there is any published evidence of the time or of the circumstances at and in which Mr Arnold began contributing critical articles to periodicals. Chair-work at Oxford, and contributions to periodicals. But his appointment (which must have been, at any rate to some extent, due to the Preface as well as to the Poems) to the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford in 1857 gave him a strong stimulus towards the development of his critical powers in reasoned form; while shortly afterwards, the remarkable developments of the press towards the end of the ’Fifties, which began by the institution of Macmillan’s and the Cornhill Magazine, and continued through the establishment of a strongly literary and critical daily newspaper in the Pall Mall Gazette, to the multiplication of monthly reviews proper in the Fortnightly, Contemporary, and Nineteenth Century, supplied him with opportunities of communicating these studies to a public larger than his Oxford audience, and with a profitable and convenient intermediate stage between the lecture and the book. He was, however, always rather scrupulous about permitting his utterances the “third reading”: and some of them (notably his Inaugural Address at Oxford) have still to be sought in the catacombs. But the matter of more than a decade’s production, by which he chose to stand, is included in the three well-known volumes, On Translating Homer and The Study of Celtic Literature for the Oxford Lectures, and the famous Essays in Criticism for the more miscellaneous work, the last, however, being rounded off and worked up into a whole by its Preface, and by its two opening pieces, The Function of Criticism in the Present Time and The Influence of Academies.
In these three books the expression of critical attitude, displayed, as we have said, unmistakably in the Preface of 1853, is not only developed and varied into something as nearly approaching to a Summa Criticismi as was in Mr Arnold’s not excessively systematic way, but furnished and illustrated by an extraordinarily interesting and sufficiently diversified body of critical applications in particular. Yet there is no divergence from the lines marked out in the Preface, nor is there to be found any such divergence—if divergence imply the least contradiction or inconsistency—in the work of the last decade of his life, when he had dropped his ill-omened guerilla against dogma and miracles, and had returned to the Muses. He is as much a typical example of a critic consistent in consistency as Dryden is of one consistent in inconsistency: and it naturally requires less intelligence to comprehend him than appears to be the case in the other instance. In fact, he could never be misunderstood in general: though his extreme wilfulness, and his contempt of history, sometimes made him a little bewildering to the plain man in detail.