a salutary check on the lawlessness, eccentricity,
self-will, and fantasticality which are the besetting intellectual sins
of Englishmen. It sets the standard and gives the law. "Work done after
men have reached this platform is _classical_; and that is the only work
which, in the long run, can stand." For want of some such organ of
educated opinion, to take care of the qualities of order, balance,
measure, propriety, correctness, English men of genius like Ruskin and
Carlyle, in their national impatience of prescription and routine, run on
into all manner of violence, freak, and extravagance.

Again, in the preface of the 1853 edition of his poems, Arnold asserts
the superiority of the Greek theory of poetry to the modern. "They
regarded the whole; we regard the parts. With them the action
predominated over the expression of it; with us the expression
predominates over the action. . . . We have poems which seem to exist
merely for the sake of single lines and passages; not for the sake of
producing any total impression."

"Faust" itself, judged as a whole, is defective. Failing a sure guide,
in the confusion of the present times, the wisest course for the young
writer is to fix his attention upon the best models. But Shakspere is
not so safe a model as the ancients. He has not their purity of method,
and his gift of expression sometimes leads him astray. "Mr. Hallam, than
whom it is impossible to find a saner and more judicious critic, has had
the courage (for at the present day it needs courage) to remark, how
extremely and faultily difficult Shakspere's language often is." Half a
century earlier it would have needed courage to question Hallam's remark;
but the citation shows how thoroughly Coleridge and Hazlitt and Lamb had
shifted the centre of orthodoxy in matters of Shaksperian criticism.
_Now_ the presumption was against any one who ventured a doubt of
Shakspere's impeccability. The romantic victory was complete. "But, I
say," pursues the essayist, "that in the sincere endeavour to learn and
practise . . . what is sound and true in poetical art, I seemed to myself
to find the only sure guidance, the only solid footing, among the
ancients." All this has a familiar look to one at all read in
eighteenth-century criticism; but in 1853 it sounds very much like heresy.

As an instance of the inferiority of romantic to classical method in
narrative poetry, Arnold refers to Keats' "Isabella." [54] "This