And this leads us to Mr Arnold’s preface, and to the account which he gives us of the object which he proposes to himself in poetry:  and our notice of this must be brief, as our space is running to its conclusion.  He tells us, in a manner most feelingly instructive, something of the difficulties which lie round a young poet of the present day who desires to follow his art to some genuine purpose; and what he says will remind readers of Wordsworth of Professor Wilson’s beautiful letter to him on a very similar subject.  Unhappily the question is not one of poetry merely, but of far wider significance.  Not the poet only, but every one of us who cannot be satisfied to tread with the crowd along the broad road which leads—­we used to know whither, but desires “to cultivate,” as Mr. Arnold says, “what is best and noblest” in ourselves, are as sorely at a loss as he is with his art.  To find the best models,—­that indeed is the one thing for him and for us.  But what are they and where? and the answer to the aesthetic difficulty lies as we believe in the solution of the moral one.  To say this, however, is of infinitely little service for the practical direction of a living poet; and we are here advised (and for present purposes no doubt wisely) to fall back on the artists of classic antiquity.  From them better than from the best of the moderns, the young poet will learn what art really is.  He will learn that before beginning to sing it is necessary to have something to sing of, and that a poem is something else than a collection of sweet musical sentences strung together like beads or even jewels in a necklace.  He will learn that the subject is greater than the manner; that the first is the one essential without a worthy choice of which nothing can prosper.  Above all, he will learn that the restless craving after novelty, so characteristic of all modern writing, the craving after new plots, new stories, new ideas, is mere disease, and that the true original genius displays itself not in the fabrication of what has no existence, but in the strength and power with which facts of history, or stories existing so fixedly in the popular belief as to have acquired so to say the character of facts, shall be exhibited and delineated.

But while we allow with Mr. Arnold that the theory will best be learnt from the ancients, we cannot allow, as he seems to desire us to allow, that the practice of it was confined to them, or recommend as he does the disproportionate study, still less the disproportionate imitation of them.  All great artists at all times have followed the same method, for greatness is impossible without it.  The Italian painters are never weary of the Holy Family.  The matter of Dante’s poem lay before him in the creed of the whole of Europe.  Shakespeare has not invented the substance of any one of his plays.  And the “weighty experience” and “composure of judgment” with which the study of the ancients no doubt does furnish “those who habitually practise it,” may be obtained we believe by the study of the thoughts of all great men of all ages; by the study of life in any age, so that our scope be broad enough.