that he lost, if he ever possessed the capability of it, the natural rush of a poet in creation. There is an occasional artificiality in poems like Sohrab and Rustum and Balder Dead, which bears the same relation to art that Rochefoucauld said hypocrisy bore to virtue. And it is especially displayed in their direct imitation of the similes of the Homeric poems and of their way of introducing similes. He seems like Homeric writers, to fetch them from other poems, and fit them in unfitly. He introduces far too many of them, and sometimes excellent, sometimes too far apart from the thing they are supposed to illustrate, sometimes hopelessly wrong in the place they occupy, sometimes contradictory in detail,—they weaken the passion of the poem and delay its movement. In this, Arnold does not show the moderation he was so fond of preaching. Then, again, the just simile should only be introduced when the action or the emotion is heightened, when the moment is worthy, and when as it were in a pause, men draw in their breath to think what may happen next, for the moment has reached intensity. The simile fills that pause and allows men time to breathe. But Arnold introduces his similes often lightly, about unimportant matters, where the action should not pause but be rapid, when the moment is not weighty. This is an artistic frivolity.
Moreover, the Homeric tradition is out of place in Sohrab and Rustum. Arnold takes great pains with its local colour. We have all the geography of the
