The Norton Anthology of English literature. Volume 2

an accurate, and therefore interesting representation; it has to be shown also

that it is a representation from which men can derive enjoyment. In presence

of the most tragic circumstances, represented in a work of Art, the feeling of

enjoyment, as is well known, may still subsist; the representation of the most

utter calamity, of the liveliest anguish, is not sufficient to destroy it; the more

tragic the situation, the deeper becomes the enjoyment; and the situation is

more tragic in proportion as it becomes more terrible.

What then are the situations, from the representation of which, though

2. Pupil of the poet and musician Orpheus. The many stories and folktales, and later the hero of latter was the legendary founder of the Orphic reli-the plays by Christopher Marlowe (1604) and gion that flourished in 6th-century B.C.E. Greece Goethe (1808-32). and later declined. 6. See Aristotle's Poetics, especially I, 2, 4, 7, 14. 3. Greek rhetoricians, often criticized because of 7. From Theogony 52�56, by the Greek poet their reputed emphasis on winning arguments Hesiod (ca. 700 B.C.E.). rather than on truth or knowledge. 8. J. C. F. von Schiller's "On the Use of the Cho4. Empedocles' writings (medical and scientific rus in Tragedy," prefatory essay to The Bride of treatises in verse) have survived only in fragments. Messina (1803). Schiller (1759-1805) was a 5. Johann Faustus (ca. 1480�ca. 1540), a German German poet, playwright, and critic; see Friedrich teacher and magician who became the subject of Schiller's Works (1903) 8.224.

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137 6 / MATTHEW ARNOLD

accurate, no poetical enjoyment can be derived? They are those in which the

suffering finds no vent in action; in which a continuous state of mental distress

is prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope, or resistance; in which there is

everything to be endured, nothing to be done. In such situations there is inev

itably something morbid, in the description of them something monotonous.

When they occur in actual life, they are painful, not tragic; the representation

of them in poetry is painful also. To this class of situations, poetically faulty as it appears to me, that of

Empedocles, as I have endeavored to represent him, belongs; and I have

therefore excluded the poem from the present collection.

And why, it may be asked, have I entered into this explanation respecting a

matter so unimportant as the admission or exclusion of the poem in question?

I have done so, because I was anxious to avow that the sole reason for its

exclusion was that which has been stated above; and that it has not been

excluded in deference to the opinion which many critics of the present day

appear to entertain against subjects chosen from distant times and countries:

against the choice, in short, of any subjects but modern ones. "The poet," it is said, and by an intelligent critic, "the poet who would really

fix the public attention must leave the exhausted past, and draw his subjects

from matters of present import, and therefore both of interest and novelty."9

Now this view I believe to be completely false. It is worth examining, inas

much as it is a fair sample of a class of critical dicta everywhere current at the

present day, having a philosophical form and air, but no real basis in fact; and

which are calculated to vitiate the judgment of readers of poetry, while they

exert, so far as they are adopted, a misleading influence on the practice of

those who write it. What are the eternal objects of poetry, among all nations and at all times?

They are actions; human actions; possessing an inherent interest in them

selves, and which are to be communicated in an interesting manner by the art

of the poet.1 Vainly will the latter imagine that he has everything in his own

power; that he can make an intrinsically inferior action equally delightful with

a more excellent one by his treatment of it; he may indeed compel us to admire

his skill, but his work will possess, within itself, an incurable defect. The poet, then, has in the first place to select an excellent action; and what

actions are the most excellent? Those, certainly, which most powerfully appeal

to the great primary human affections: to those elementary feelings which

subsist permanently in the race, and which are independent of time. These

feelings are permanent and the same; that which interests them is permanent

and the same also. The modernness or antiquity of an action, therefore, has

nothing to do with its fitness for poetical representation; this depends upon

its inherent qualities. To the elementary part of our nature, to our passions,

that which is great and passionate is eternally interesting; and interesting

solely in proportion to its greatness and to its passion. A great human action

of a thousand years ago is more interesting to it than a smaller human action

of today, even though upon the representation of this last the most consum

mate skill may have been expended, and though it has the advantage of appeal