ABSTRACT
In his preface to ‘Selections from Byron’s Poetry,’ Matthew Arnold doubts ‘whether Shelley’s delightful essays and letters will not resist the wear and tear of time better, and stand higher, than his poetry.’ We may turn this sentence round, and, applying it to the acute critic himself, ‘doubt whether his poetry will not resist the wear and tear of time better, and stand higher, than his delightful essays.’ For delicate, brilliant, full of verve as they are, only those into which the controversial and the personal are not intruded will endure; the rest, despite the rapier style which makes its passes through our smug and vulgarised respectabilities, and which cuts away the base on which miracles and a materialised heaven alike rest, vainly attempting to save Christianity while surrendering whatever is distinctive in it, will share the relative impermanence of all such work, and have small interest for a later time. Probably Mr. Arnold’s own sound instinct has, in the issue of his Selected Prose Passages, correctly anticipated the verdict of the future as to the place which Literature and Dogma and God and the Bible will occupy. In the judgment of a slowly increasing number of thoughtful readers he is winning, as, in the judgment of a smaller circle, he has already won, no mean place among the masters of immortal song, and a first place among contemporary poets. Such an assessment of his position, thus stated at the outset, may sound like a challenge, since it at once invites that comparison between himself and other poets of our time which imports the din of controversy into a realm where we would fain listen only to the lyre of Apollo.
