attention to his performances in the field of
literary criticism; and we begin in the year 1853. He had won the prize
for an English poem at Rugby, and again at Oxford. In 1849 he had
published without his name, and had recalled, a thin volume, called _The
Strayed Reveller, and other Poems_. He had done the same with
_Empedocles on Etna, and other Poems_ in 1852. The best contents of
these two volumes were combined in _Poems_, 1853, and to this book he
gave a Preface, which was 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 lette