his first essay in Literary Criticism.  In this essay he enounces a certain doctrine of poetry, and, true to his lifelong practice, he enounces it mainly by criticism of what other people had said.  A favourite cry of the time was that Poetry, to be vital and interesting, must “leave the exhausted past, and draw its subjects from matters of present import.”  It was the favourite theory of Middle Class Liberalism.  The Spectator uttered it with characteristic gravity; Kingsley taught it obliquely in Alton Locke.  Arnold assailed it as “completely false,” as “having a philosophical form and air, but no real basis in fact.”  In assailing it, he justified his constant recourse to Antiquity for subject and method; he exalted Achilles, Prometheus, Clytemnestra, and Dido as eternally interesting; he asserted that the most famous poems of the nineteenth century “left the reader cold in comparison with the effect produced upon him by the latter books of the Iliad, by the Oresteia, or by the episode of Dido.”  He glorified the Greeks as the “unapproached masters of the grand style.”  He even ventured to doubt whether the influence of Shakespeare, “the greatest, perhaps, of all poetical names,” had been wholly advantageous to the writers of poetry.  He weighed Keats in the balance against Sophocles and found him wanting.

[Illustration:  Thomas Arnold, D.D.

Head Master of Rugby, and father of Matthew Arnold

From the Painting in Oriel College

Photo H.W.  Taunt]

Of course, this criticism, so hostile to the current cant of the moment, was endlessly misinterpreted and misunderstood.  He thus explained his doctrine in a Preface to a Second Edition of his Poems:  “It has been said that I wish to limit the poet, in his choice of subjects, to the period of Greek and Roman antiquity; but it is not so.  I only counsel him to choose for his subjects great actions, without regarding to what time they belong.”  A few years later he wrote to a friend (in a letter hitherto unpublished):  “The modern world is the widest and richest material ever offered to the artist; but the moulding and representing power of the artist is not, or has not yet become (in my opinion), commensurate with his material, his mundus representandus.  This adequacy of the artist to his world, this command of the latter by him, seems to me to be what constitutes a first-class poetic epoch, and to distinguish it from such an epoch as our own; in this sense, the Homeric and Elizabethan poetry seems to me of a superior class to ours, though the world represented by it was far less full and significant.”

There is no need to describe in greater detail the two Prefaces, which can be read, among rather incongruous surroundings, in the volume called Irish Essays, and Others.  But they are worth noting, because in them, at the age of thirty, he first displayed the peculiar temper in literary criticism which so conspicuously marked him to the end; and that temper happily infected the critical writing of a whole generation; until the Iron Age returned, and the bludgeon was taken down from its shelf, and the scalping-knife refurbished.