But, whether good or bad, criticism had been solemn.  Even Arnold’s first performances in the art had been as grave as Burke or Wordsworth.  But in his lectures On Translating Homer he added a new resource to his critical apparatus.  He still pursued Lucidity, Courage, and Serenity; he still praised temperately and blamed humanely; but now he brought to the enforcement of his literary judgment the aid of a delicious playfulness.  Cardinal Newman was not ashamed to talk of “chucking” a thing off, or getting into a “scrape.”  So perhaps a humble disciple may be permitted to say that Arnold pointed his criticisms with “chaff.”

This method of depreciating literary performances which one dislikes, of conveying dissent from literary doctrines which one considers erroneous, had fallen out of use in our literary criticism.  It was least to be expected from a professorial chair in a venerable university—­least of all from a professor not yet forty, who might have been expected to be weighed down and solemnized by the greatness of his function and the awfulness of his surroundings.  Hence arose the simple and amusing wrath of pedestrian poets like Mr. Ichabod Wright, and ferocious pedants like Professor Francis Newman, and conventional worshippers of such idols as Scott and Macaulay, when they found him poking his seraphic fun at the notion that Homer’s song was like “an elegant and simple melody from an African of the Gold Coast,” or at lines so purely prosaic as—­

    All these thy anxious cares are also mine,
    Partner beloved;

or so eccentric as—­

    Nor liefly thee would I advance to man-ennobling battle

or so painful as—­

    To every man upon this earth
      Death cometh soon or late.

This habit of enlisting playfulness in aid of literary judgment was carried a step further in Essays in Criticism, published in 1865.  This book, of which Mr. Paul justly remarks that it was “a great intellectual event,” was a collection of essays written in the years 1863 and 1864.  The original edition contained a preface dealing very skittishly with Bishop Colenso’s biblical aberrations.  The allusions to Colenso were wisely omitted from later editions, but the preface as it stands contains (besides the divinely-beautiful eulogy of Oxford) some of Arnold’s most delightful humour.  He never wrote anything better than his apology to the indignant Mr. Ichabod Wright; his disclaimer of the title of Professor, “which I share with so many distinguished men—­Professor Pepper, Professor Anderson, Professor Frickel”; his attempt to comfort the old gentleman who was afraid of being murdered, by reminding him that “il n’y a pas d’homme necessaire”; and in all these cases the humour subserves and advances a serious criticism of books or of life.