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

  “Emerge, and shine upon the Aral Sea.”

Even here, it is true, the Devil’s Advocate may ask whether this, like the Mycerinus close, that of Empedocles, and others, especially one famous thing, to which we shall come presently, is not more of a purple tail-patch, a “tag,” a “curtain,” than of a legitimate and integral finale.  It is certain that Mr Arnold, following the Greeks in intention no doubt, if not quite so closely as he intended, was very fond of these “curtains”—­these little rhetorical reconciliations and soothings for the reader.  But this is the most in place of any of them, and certainly the noblest tirade that its author has left.