more varied, more fanciful, more musical, more joyous. By temperament and by training, he, who at birth, as he tells us, 'was breathed on by the rural Pan,' was deprived of that fountain of delight that is essential to the highest poetry, the dithyrambic glow—the ἀνήριθμον γέλασμα:—
The countless dimples of the laughing seas—[1]
of perennial poetry. This perhaps, more than his want of passion, of dramatic power, of rapidity of action, limits the audience of Arnold as a poet. But those who thirst for the pure Castalian spring, inspired by sustained and lofty thoughts, who care for that—σπονδαιότης—that 'high seriousness,' of which he spoke so much as the very essence of the best poetry,—have long known that they find it in Matthew Arnold more than in any of his even greater contemporaries.
II. The Critic
About Matthew Arnold as critic of literature it is needless to enlarge, for the simple reason that we have all long ago agreed that he has no superior, indeed no rival. His judgments on our poets have passed into current opinion, and have ceased to be discussed or questioned. It is, perhaps, a grave loss to English literature that Arnold was not able, or perhaps never strove, to devote his whole life to the interpretation of our best poetry and prose, with the same systematic, laborious, concentrated energy which has placed Sainte-Beuve at the head of French critics. With his absorbing professional duties, his hardly austere aloofness from the whirlpool of society, his guerilla warfare with journalism, Radicals, theologians, and all devotees of Dagon, it was not destined to be that Arnold could vie with
- ↑ E. H. Pember, Q.C.
