In Matthew Arnold’s critical essays we meet with a restatement of classical principles and an application of them to the literature of the last generation.  There was something premature, he thinks, about the burst of creative activity in the first quarter of the nineteenth century.  Byron was empty of matter, Shelley incoherent, Wordsworth wanting in completeness and variety.  He finds much to commend in the influence of a literary tribunal like the French Academy, which embodies that ideal of authority so dear to the classical heart.  Such an institution acts as a salutary check on the lawlessness, eccentricity, self-will, and fantasticality which are the besetting intellectual sins of Englishmen.  It sets the standard and gives the law.  “Work done after men have reached this platform is classical; and that is the only work which, in the long run, can stand.”  For want of some such organ of educated opinion, to take care of the qualities of order, balance, measure, propriety, correctness, English men of genius like Ruskin and Carlyle, in their national impatience of prescription and routine, run on into all manner of violence, freak, and extravagance.

Again, in the preface of the 1853 edition of his poems, Arnold asserts the superiority of the Greek theory of poetry to the modern.  “They regarded the whole; we regard the parts.  With them the action predominated over the expression of it; with us the expression predominates over the action. . . .  We have poems which seem to exist merely for the sake of single lines and passages; not for the sake of producing any total impression.”

“Faust” itself, judged as a whole, is defective.  Failing a sure guide, in the confusion of the present times, the wisest course for the young writer is to fix his attention upon the best models.  But Shakspere is not so safe a model as the ancients.  He has not their purity of method, and his gift of expression sometimes leads him astray.  “Mr. Hallam, than whom it is impossible to find a saner and more judicious critic, has had the courage (for at the present day it needs courage) to remark, how extremely and faultily difficult Shakspere’s language often is.”  Half a century earlier it would have needed courage to question Hallam’s remark; but the citation shows how thoroughly Coleridge and Hazlitt and Lamb had shifted the centre of orthodoxy in matters of Shaksperian criticism. Now the presumption was against any one who ventured a doubt of Shakspere’s impeccability.  The romantic victory was complete.  “But, I say,” pursues the essayist, “that in the sincere endeavour to learn and practise . . . what is sound and true in poetical art, I seemed to myself to find the only sure guidance, the only solid footing, among the ancients.”  All this has a familiar look to one at all read in eighteenth-century criticism; but in 1853 it sounds very much like heresy.