MR. MATTHEW ARNOLD

AS

CRITIC AND POET.

(READ BEFORE THE LIVERPOOL PHILOMATHIC SOCIETY,
30th JANUARY, 1878).

Willcor

BY

JAMES W. ALSOP, B.A.

LIVERPOOL:

D. MARPLES & CO., LIMITED, PRINTERS, LORD STREET.

1879.

23433.46...

23433.46

Harvard College Library,
Nov. 14, 891.
LOWELL BEQUEST.

HARVARD
UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY
NOV 30 1973

MR. MATTHEW ARNOLD AS CRITIC AND POET.

ENGLISH Literature has never
been famous in the
department of criticism, and the union in one writer of
marked power both in criticism and in original creation
has been rare indeed. That there is nothing incongruous
in such a union is proved by the Literature of Germany,
where, in men like Goethe and Lessing, we see how critical
activity of a high order has run with even steps by the side
of original creation, has helped it and been helped by it.
Yet the great poets of England have seldom been critics,
and our critics have still more rarely been distinguished as
poets. Dr. Johnson, the only great critic whom England
produced in the eighteenth century-a period of intellectual
rest, and therefore favourable to the exercise of critical
energy-was nothing more than a critic. Dryden and
Wordsworth, though both endowed with fine perception
and discrimination, seldom cared to exercise their undoubted
powers. Coleridge, poet, theologian, and social reformer as
well as critic, allowed his subtle critical faculty to be pressed
into the background by more absorbing occupations.

So far as I know, Mr. Matthew Arnold is as yet the only English writer of note who has not merely possessed, but habitually and successfully exercised, and preferred to exercise, both kinds of intellectual power. Dean Stanley calls him the first living English critic. Mr. Swinburne, attracted perhaps by the qualities in which his own verse, with all its beauties, is most deficient, places him in the very highest rank of intellectual poets, higher in some respects than

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Wordsworth. But it must not be supposed that Mr. Arnold draws a hard and fast line between these two lines of activity. He is not a critic one day and a poet the next; he is always both. In nearly all his works we find both powers united, yet helping, not thwarting, one another. He reminds us of such a man as Francesco Francia, of Bologna, now famous only as a painter, but who in his own day was almost equally celebrated as a worker in gold. Mr. Eastlake tells us that it was Francia's practice to sign his pictures with the word "Goldsmith" after his name, while he engraved "Painter" upon his golden crucifixes. Not less clearly does Mr. Arnold in his poetry shew that he is a critic, while in his criticism he stamps himself poet.

But it will naturally be asked:-Though Mr. Arnold may be both critic and poet, is he both in an equal degree? May not one faculty predominate over the other, so as to give a bent to his whole work, whatever form it may assume? Certainly it is the ordinary notion that Mr. Arnold is mainly a critic, though Mr. Swinburne appears to hold the opposite opinion. It seems to me, however, that the two powers are, as nearly as possible, cqual, and that this equality results from a certain balance of apparently opposite and inconsistent tendencies very characteristic of Mr. Arnold's mind, and constantly shewing itself in one form or another in his works.

Mr. Arnold's chief critical efforts are his "Essays in Criticism," originally contributed to Reviews, and first collected in 1865, and his Oxford Lectures "On the Study of Celtic Literature," published in 1867. Before 1865 he had published in prose a Preface to a volume of his poems, an Introduction to his tragedy of " Merope," his Oxford Lectures on translating Homer, and several works on Education. The Introduction to "Merope," and the Lectures on Homer, well deserve perusal, but both are perhaps inferior in general interest to the remarkable Preface to his Poems, which