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Page 12
This error Mr Arnold has no difficulty in laying low at once; but
unluckily his swashing blow carries him with it, and he falls headlong
into fresh error himself. "What," he asks very well, "are the eternal
objects of Poetry, among all nations and at all times?" And he
answers--equally well, though not perhaps with impregnable logical
completeness and accuracy--"They are actions, human actions;
possessing an inherent interest in themselves, and which are to be
communicated in an interesting manner by the art of the Poet." Here he
tells the truth, but not the whole truth; he should have added
"thoughts and feelings" to "actions," or he deprives Poetry of half
her realm. But he is so far sufficient against his Harapha (for at
that date there were no critical Goliaths about). Human action
_does_ possess an "inherent," an "eternal," poetical interest and
capacity in itself. That interest, that capacity, is incapable of
"exhaustion"--nay (as Mr Arnold, though with bad arguments as well as
good, urges later), it is, on the whole, a likelier subject for the
poet when it is old, because it is capable of being grasped and
presented more certainly. But the defender hastens to indulge in more
than one of those dangerous sallies from his trenches which have been
fatal to so many heroes. He proclaims that the poet cannot "make an
intrinsically inferior action equally delightful with a more excellent
one by his treatment of it," forgetting that, until the action is
presented, we do not know whether it is "inferior" or not. He asks,
"What modern poem presents personages as interesting as Achilles,
Prometheus, Clytemnestra, Dido?" unsuspicious, or perhaps reckless, of
the fact that not a few men, who admire and know the classics quite as
well as he does, will cheerfully take up his challenge at any weapons
he likes to name, and with a score of instances for his quartette. It
is true that, thanks to the ineptitude of his immediate antagonists,
he recovers himself not ill by cleverly selecting the respectable
Hermann and Dorothea, the stagy-romantic Childe Harold, the creature
called "Jocelyn," and the shadowy or scrappy personages of the
_Excursion_, to match against his four. But this is manifestly
unfair. To bring Lamartine and Wordsworth in as personage-makers is
only honest rhetorically (a kind of honesty on which Wamba or
Launcelot Gobbo shall put the gloss for us). Nay, even those to whom
Goethe and Byron are not the ideal of modern poetry may retort that
Mephistopheles--that even Faust himself--is a much more "interesting"
person than the sulky invulnerable son of Thetis, while Gulnare,
Parisina, and others are not much worse than Dido. But these are mere
details. The main purpose of the _Preface_ is to assert in the most
emphatic manner the Aristotelian (or partly Aristotelian) doctrine
that "All depends on the subject," and to connect the assertion with a
further one, of which even less proof is offered, that "the Greeks
understood this far better than we do," and that they were _also_ the
unapproachable masters of "the grand style." These positions, which,
to do Mr Arnold justice, he maintained unflinchingly to his dying day,
are supported, not exactly by argument, but by a great deal of
ingenious and audacious illustration and variation of statement, even
Shakespeare, even Keats, being arraigned for their wicked refusal to
subordinate "expression" to choice and conception of subject. The
merely Philistine modernism is cleverly set up again that it may be
easily smitten down; the necessity of Criticism, and of the study of
the ancients in order to it, is most earnestly and convincingly
championed; and the piece ends with its other famous sentence about
"the wholesome regulative laws of Poetry" and their "eternal enemy,
Caprice."
As Mr Arnold's critical position will be considered as a whole later,
it would be waste of time to say very much more of this first
manifesto of his. It need only be observed that he might have been
already, as he often was later, besought to give some little notion of
what "the _grand style_" was; that, true and sound as is much of
the Preface, it is not a little exposed to the damaging retort, "Yes:
this is _your_ doxy, and she seems fair to you, no doubt; but so
does ours seem fair to us." Moreover, the "all-depends-on-the-subject"
doctrine here, as always, swerves from one fatal difficulty. If, in
what pleases poetically, poetical expression is always present, while
in only some of what pleases poetically is the subject at the required
height, is it not illogical to rule out, as the source of the poetic
pleasure, that which is always present in favour of that which is
sometimes absent?
We know from the _Letters_--and we should have been able to
divine without them--that _Sohrab and Rustum_, the first in
order, the largest in bulk, and the most ambitious in scheme of the
poems which appeared for the first time in the new volume, was written
in direct exemplification of the theories of the _Preface_. The
theme is old, and though not "classical" in place, is thoroughly so in
its nature, being the story of a combat between a father and a son,
who know not each other till too late, of the generosity of the son,
of the final triumph of the father, of the _anagnorisis_, with
the resignation of the vanquished and the victor's despair. The medium
is blank verse, of a partly but not wholly Miltonic stamp, very
carefully written, and rising at the end into a really magnificent
strain, with the famous picture of "the majestic river" Oxus floating
on regardless of these human woes, to where the stars
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