ABSTRACT
Whereas Robert Browning ‘lived to realize the myth of the Inexliaustible Bottle,’ W.E.Henley wrote, ‘Matthew Arnold says only what is worth saying’ (No. 28). There were many of Arnold’s contemporaries who would have vigorously disagreed with Henley, either because they had come to think of Browning as their poet-prophet, or because they found Arnold a poet of mere gloom. But many readers shared Henley’s estimate; for them, too, Arnold said exactly what was worth saying, so much so that he had given a voice to the doubts and perplexities of the age. Alfred Austin contrasted his trenchant and powerful expression with Tennyson’s ‘golden mediocrity’ (No. 19). Arnold was, said Henry James, the poet ‘of our modernity’ (No. 27).
