ABSTRACT
Criticism steps beyond its province when it prescribes limits to the poet, or attempts to dictate what his subject should be, or chains him down to the present. All ages, past, present, and future, are alike open to him. Which he is to choose his own instinct must decide. But some are more promising, because they have a deeper hold on men’s minds than others. Therefore we cannot but doubt whether Mr. Arnold, or any man, will succeed in really interesting his countrymen by merely disinterring and reconstructing, however skilfully, the old Greek legends. And we are quite sure, that if he is ever to take permanent possession of men’s thoughts it must be in the strength of some better, healthier spirit than the blank dejection of his early poems. Mr. Arnold must learn, if he has indeed to learn, that whatever are the faults or needs of our time, the heart has not yet died out of it; that if he thinks it bad, it is the duty of poets, and all thoughtful men, to do their part to mend it, not by weak-hearted lamentations, but by appealing to men’s energies, their hopes, their moral aspirations. Let him be quite sure that these are still alive, if he can but arouse them, and that if he cannot the fault lies elsewhere than in his age. To arouse, to strengthen, to purify whatever is good in the men of his own and after times, this is the work which the true poet does. A noble work, if any is, and it takes a noble unworldly nature rightly to fulfil it.
