Mr Arnold himself never attempted any such defence.  He pleaded, with literal justice, that the phrase “a criticism of life” was only part of his formula, which adds, “under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.”  But this does not make the matter much better, while it shows beyond controversy that it was a philosophical definition that he was attempting.  It merely takes us round in a circle, telling us that poetry is poetical, that the archdeacon performs archidiaconal functions.  And while it is not more illuminative than that famous and useful jest, it has the drawback of being positively delusive, which the jest is not.  Unless we are to assign some quite new meaning to “criticism”—­and the assignment of new meanings to the terms of an explanation is the worst of all explanatory improprieties—­poetry is not a criticism of life.  It may be a passionate interpretation of life—­that has seemed to some not a bad attempt at the unachievable,—­a criticism it cannot be.  Prose fiction may be and should be such; drama may be and should be such; but not poetry.  And it is especially unfortunate that such poetry as answers best to the term is exactly that poetry which Mr Arnold liked least.  Dryden and Pope have much good and true criticism of life:  The Vanity of Human Wishes is magnificent criticism of life; but Mr Arnold has told us that Dryden and Pope and Johnson are but “classics of our prose.”  That there is criticism of life in poetry is true; but then in poetry there is everything.

It would also, no doubt, be possible to pick other holes in the paper.  The depreciation of the “historic estimate,” instead of a simple hint to correct it by the intrinsic, is certainly one.  Another is a distinct arbitrariness in the commendation or discommendation of the examples selected.  No one in his senses would put the Chanson de Roland on a level with the Iliad as a whole; but some among those people who happen to possess an equal acquaintance with Greek and Old French will demur to Mr Arnold’s assignment of an ineffably superior poetical quality to one of the two passages he quotes over the other.  So yet again with the denial of “high seriousness” to Chaucer.  One feels disposed to enter and argue out a whole handful of not quite contradictory pleas, such as “He has high seriousness” (vide the “Temple of Mars,” the beginning of the Parliament of Fowls, and many other places):  “Why should he have high seriousness?” (a most effective demurrer); and “What is high seriousness, except a fond thing vainly invented for the nonce?”