The Norton Anthology of English literature. Volume 2

ing by its modern language, familiar manners, and contemporary allusions, to

all our transient feelings and interests. These, however, have no right to

9. In the Spectator of April 2nd, 1 853. The words "intelligent critic" was R. S. Rintoul, editor of the quoted were not used with reference to poems of Spectator. mine [Arnold's note]. According to Arnold, the 1. Cf. Aristotle's Poetics 6.

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PREFACE TO POEMS (1853) / 1 379

demand of a poetical work that it shall satisfy them; their claims are to be

directed elsewhere. Poetical works belong to the domain of our permanent

passions; let them interest these, and the voice of all subordinate claims upon

them is at once silenced.

Achilles, Prometheus, Clytemnestra, Dido�what modern poem presents

personages as interesting, even to us moderns, as these personages of an

"exhausted past"? We have the domestic epic dealing with the details of mod

ern life which pass daily under our eyes;2 we have poems representing modern

personages in contact with the problems of modern life, moral, intellectual,

and social; these works have been produced by poets the most distinguished

of their nation and time; yet I fearlessly assert that Hermann and Dorothea,

Childe Harold, Jocelyn, The Excursion,3 leave the reader cold in comparison

with the effect produced upon him by the latter books of the Iliad, by the

Oresteia, or by the episode of Dido.4 And why is this? Simply because in the

three last-named cases the action is greater, the personages nobler, the situ

ations more intense: and this is the true basis of the interest in a poetical work,

and this alone. It may be urged, however, that past actions may be interesting in themselves,

but that they are not to be adopted by the modern poet, because it is impossible

for him to have them clearly present to his own mind, and he cannot therefore

feel them deeply, nor represent them forcibly. But this is not necessarily the

case. The externals of a past action, indeed, he cannot know with the precision

of a contemporary; but his business is with its essentials. The outward man of

Oedipus or of Macbeth, the houses in which they lived, the ceremonies of

their courts, he cannot accurately figure to himself; but neither do they essen

tially concern him. His business is with their inward man; with their feelings

and behavior in certain tragic situations, which engage their passions as men;

these have in them nothing local and casual; they are as accessible to the

modern poet as to a contemporary. The date of an action, then, signifies nothing: the action itself, its selection

and construction, this is what is all-important. This the Greeks understood far

more clearly than we do. The radical difference between their poetical theory

and ours consists, as it appears to me, in this: that, with them, the poetical

character of the action in itself, and the conduct of it, was the first consider

ation; with us, attention is fixed mainly on the value of the separate thoughts

and images which occur in the treatment of an action. They regarded the

whole; we regard the parts. With them, the action predominated over the

expression of it; with us, the expression predominates over the action. Not that

they failed in expression, or were inattentive to it; on the contrary, they are

the highest models of expression, the unapproached masters of the grand style:

but their expression is so excellent because it is so admirably kept in its right

degree of prominence; because it is so simple and so well subordinated;

because it draws its force directly from the pregnancy of the matter which it

conveys. For what reason was the Greek tragic poet confined to so limited a

range of subjects? Because there are so few actions which unite in themselves,

in the highest degree, the conditions of excellence: and it was not thought that

2. Perhaps alluding to poems such as Tennyson's William Wordsworth (1814), respectively. The Princess (1847) and Alexander Smith's Life 4. See Virgil's Aeneid, book 4. Oresteia: a trilogy Drama (1853) or to the modern novel. of plays by Aeschylus that tells the story of Aga3. Long poems hv Goethe (1797), Rvron (1818), memnon's murder by his wife, Clytemnestra, and Alphonse-Marie-Louis de Lamartine (1836), and the vengeance taken by their son, Orestes.

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137 8 / MATTHEW ARNOLD

on any but an excellent subject could an excellent poem be constructed. A few

actions, therefore, eminently adapted for tragedy, maintained almost exclusive

possession of the Greek tragic stage; their significance appeared inexhaustible;

they were as permanent problems, perpetually offered to the genius of every

fresh poet. This too is the reason of what appears to us moderns a certain

baldness of expression in Greek tragedy; of the triviality with which we often

reproach the remarks of the chorus, where it takes part in the dialogue: that

the action itself, the situation of Orestes, or Merope, or Alcmaeon,5 was to

stand the central point of interest, unforgotten, absorbing, principal; that no