His most famous critical dictum is that poetry is a “criticism of life.” What he seems to have meant is that poetry is the crowning fruit of a criticism of life; that just as the poet’s metrical effects are and must be the result of a thousand semiconscious generalizations upon the laws of cause and effect in metric art, so the beautiful things he says about life and the beautiful pictures he paints of life are the result of his generalizations upon life as he passes through it, and consequently that the value of his poetry consists in the beauty and the truth of his generalizations. But this is saying no more than is said in the line—
| “Rien n’est beau que le vrai; le vrai seul est aimable”— |
or in the still more famous lines—
| “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” |
To suppose that Arnold confounded the poet with the writer of pensées would be absurd. Yet having decided that poetry consists of generalizations on human life, in reading poetry he kept on the watch for those generalizations, and at last seemed to think that the less and not the more they are hidden behind the dramatic action, and the more unmistakably they are intruded as generalizations, the better. For instance, in one of his essays he quotes those lines from the “Chanson de Roland” of Turoldus, where Roland, mortally wounded, lays himself down under a pine-tree with his face turned towards Spain and the enemy, and begins to “call many things to remembrance; all the lands which his valour conquered, and pleasant France, and the men of his lineage, and Charlemagne, his liege lord, who nourished him”—
| “De plusurs choses à remembrer li prist, De tames teres cume li bers cunquist, De dulce France, des humes de sun ligu, De Carlemagne sun seignor ki l’nurrit.” |
“That,” says Arnold, “is primitive work, I repeat, with an undeniable poetic quality of its own. It deserves such praise, and such praise is sufficient for it.” Then he contrasts it with a famous passage in Homer—that same passage which is quoted in the article [Poetry], for the very opposite purpose to that of Arnold’s, quoted indeed to show how the epic poet, leaving the dramatic action to act as chorus, weakens the ἀπάτη of the picture—the passage in the Iliad (iii 243-244) where the poet, after Helen’s pathetic mention of her brother’s comments on the causes of their absence, “criticizes life” and generalizes upon the impotence of human intelligence, the impotence even of human love, to pierce the darkness in which the web of human fate is woven. He appends Dr Hawtrey’s translation:—
| Ὤς φάτο τοὐς δ᾽ ἤδη κάτεχεν φυσίζοος αἶα ἐν Λακεδαίμονι αὖθι, φἰλῃ ἐν πατρίδι γαίῃ. |
| “So said she; they long since in Earth’s soft arms were reposing There, in their own dear land, their fatherland, Lacedaemon.” |
“We are here,” says Arnold, “in another world, another order of poetry altogether; here is rightly due such supreme praise as that which M. Vitel gives to the Chanson de Roland. If our words are to have any meaning, if our judgments are to have any solidity, we must not heap that supreme praise upon poetry of an order immeasurably inferior.” He does not see that the two passages cannot properly be compared at all. In the one case the poet gives us a dramatic picture; in the other; a comment on a dramatic picture.