FITCH, SIR JOSHUA:  Thomas and Matthew Arnold and their Influence on
English Education, New York, 1897.

GATES, L.E.:  Selections from the Prose Writings of Matthew Arnold, New
York, 1898.

HARRISON, FREDERIC:  Culture; A Dialogue.  In The Choice of Books,
London, 1886.

HUTTON, R.H.:  Modern Guides of English Thought in Matters of Faith,
London, 1887.

JACOBS, JOSEPH:  Literary Studies, London, 1895.

PAUL, HERBERT W.:  Matthew Arnold.  In English Men of Letters Series,
London and New York, 1902.

ROBERTSON, JOHN M.:  Modern Humanists, London, 1891.

RUSSELL, G.W.E.:  Matthew Arnold, New York, 1904.

SAINTSBURY, GEORGE:  Corrected Impressions, London, 1895. Matthew
Arnold.  In Modern English Writers Series, London, 1899.

SHAIRP, J.C.:  Culture and Religion, Edinburgh, 1870.

SPEDDING, JAMES:  Reviews and Discussions, London, 1879.

STEPHEN, SIR LESLIE:  Studies of a Biographer, vol. 2, London, 1898.

WOODBERRY, GEORGE E.:  Makers of Literature, London, 1900.

SELECTIONS FROM MATTHEW ARNOLD

I. THEORIES OF LITERATURE AND CRITICISM

POETRY AND THE CLASSICS[1]

In two small volumes of Poems, published anonymously, one in 1849, the other in 1852, many of the Poems which compose the present volume have already appeared.  The rest are now published for the first time.

I have, in the present collection, omitted the poem[2] from which the volume published in 1852 took its title.  I have done so, not because the subject of it was a Sicilian Greek born between two and three thousand years ago, although many persons would think this a sufficient reason.  Neither have I done so because I had, in my own opinion, failed in the delineation which I intended to effect.  I intended to delineate the feelings of one of the last of the Greek religious philosophers, one of the family of Orpheus and Musaeus, having survived his fellows, living on into a time when the habits of Greek thought and feeling had begun fast to change, character to dwindle, the influence of the Sophists[3] to prevail.  Into the feelings of a man so situated there are entered much that we are accustomed to consider as exclusively modern; how much, the fragments of Empedocles himself which remain to us are sufficient at least to indicate.  What those who are familiar only with the great monuments of early Greek genius suppose to be its exclusive characteristics, have disappeared; the calm, the cheerfulness, the disinterested objectivity have disappeared; the dialogue of the mind with itself has commenced; modern problems have presented themselves; we hear already the doubts, we witness the discouragement, of Hamlet and of Faust.