ABSTRACT
Be this as it may, Mr Arnold’s poetical position is remarkable in our literature, and not wholly benign in its influence. He provides for those who know and love letters an interesting and admirable example of a literary poet. He provides for those who can appreciate poetry some exquisite notes nowhere else heard, and not to be resigned even if the penalty for hearing them were twenty times as great. But be provides also a most dangerous model. For he may seem to suggest, and has, I think, already suggested to some, that the acquisition by dint of labour of a certain ‘marmoresque’ dignity of thought and phrase will atone for the absence of that genius which cometh not with labour, neither goeth with the lack of it. [Note by Saintsbury, 1923] A year or two later a book in Messrs Blackwood’s Series enabled me to work out these views on this subject pretty fully. The recent centenary of Arnold’s birth seemed to elicit from younger critics a still lower view of his criticism, an almost entire neglect of his theology, but an estimate of his poetry certainly higher than that which prevailed in 1895 though scarcely higher than mine.
