ABSTRACT
However, Mr. Arnold’s poetry is no more the worse, as poetry, for its erroneous spiritual assumptions, than drama is the worse, as drama, for delineating men as they seem to each other to be, and not as they really are to the eye of God. And as the poet of the soul’s melancholy hauteur and plaintive benignity, as the exponent of pity for the great excess of her wants beyond her gifts and graces, as the singer at once of the spirit’s hunger, of the insufficiency of the food which the intellect provides for her cravings, and yet also of her fastidious rejection of more heavenly nutriment, Mr. Arnold will be read and remembered by every generation in which faith continues to be daunted by reason, and reason to seek, not without pangs of inexplicable compunction, to call in question the transcendental certainties of faith; in a word, he will be read and remembered, as I said in my opening sentence, as the poet who, more than any other of his day, has embodied in his verse ‘the sweetness, the gravity, the strength, the beauty, and the languor of death.’
