The Norton Anthology of English literature. Volume 2

ern critic has classed with the Fairy Queen!)6 although undoubtedly there

blows through it the breath of genius, is yet as a whole so utterly incoherent,

as not strictly to merit the name of a poem at all. The poem of Isabella, then,

is a perfect treasure house of graceful and felicitous words and images: almost

in every stanza there occurs one of those vivid and picturesque turns of expres

3. In the essay "Concerning the So-called Dilet-and the felicity, of the Elizabethan poets. tantism" (1799) in his Werke (1833) 44.262-63. 5. He savs everything he wishes to, but unfortu4. Cf. Arnold's letter to Clough (Oct. 28, 1852): nately he has nothing to say (French). A comment about Theophile Gautier (1811-1872), whose More and more I feel that the difference emphasis on style was severely criticized by Arnold between a mature and a youthful age of the in his late essay "Wordsworth" (1888). world compels the poetry of the former to use 6. In the North British Review 19 (Aug. 1853): great plainness of speech . . . and that Keats and 172-74, John Keats's Endymion (1818) is twice Shelley were on a false track when they set linked with Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queenethemselves to reproduce the exuberance of (1 590) as "leisurely compositions of the sweet senexpression, the charm, the richness of images, suous order."

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PREFACE TO POEMS (1853) / 1 379

sion, by which the object is made to flash upon the eye of the mind, and which

thrill the reader with a sudden delight. This one short poem contains, perhaps,

a greater number of happy7 single expressions which one could quote than all

the extant tragedies of Sophocles. But the action, the story? The action in

itself is an excellent one; but so feebly is it conceived by the poet, so loosely

constructed, that the effect produced by it, in and for itself, is absolutely null.

Let the reader, after he has finished the poem of Keats, turn to the same story

in the Decameron:8 he will then feel how pregnant and interesting the same

action has become in the hands of a great artist, who above all things delin

eates his object; who subordinates expression to that which it is designed to

express. I have said that the imitators of Shakespeare, fixing their attention on his

wonderful gift of expression, have directed their imitation to this, neglecting

his other excellences. These excellences, the fundamental excellences of

poetical art, Shakespeare no doubt possessed them�possessed many of them

in a splendid degree; but it may perhaps be doubted whether even he himself

did not sometimes give scope to his faculty of expression to the prejudice of a

higher poetical duty. For we must never forget that Shakespeare is the great

poet he is from his skill in discerning and firmly conceiving an excellent action,

from his power of intensely feeling a situation, of intimately associating him

self with a character; not from his gift of expression, which rather even leads

him astray, degenerating sometimes into a fondness for curiosity of expression,

into an irritability of fancy, which seems to make it impossible for him to say

a thing plainly, even when the press of the action demands the very direct

language, or its level character the very simplest. Mr. Hallam, than whom it

is impossible to find a saner and more judicious critic, has had the courage

(for at the present day it needs courage) to remark, how extremely and faultily

difficult Shakespeare's language often is.9 It is so: you may find main scenes

in some of his greatest tragedies, King Lear for instance, where the language

is so artificial, so curiously tortured, and so difficult, that every speech has to

be read two or three times before its meaning can be comprehended. This

overcuriousness of expression is indeed but the excessive employment of a

wonderful gift�of the power of saying a thing in a happier way than any other

man; nevertheless, it is carried so far that one understands what M. Guizot

meant, when he said that Shakespeare appears in his language to have tried

all styles except that of simplicity.1 He has not the severe and scrupulous self-

restraint of the ancients, partly no doubt, because he had a far less cultivated

and exacting audience. He has indeed a far wider range than they had, a far

richer fertility of thought; in this respect he rises above them. In his strong

conception of his subject, in the genuine way in which he is penetrated with

it, he resembles them, and is unlike the moderns. But in the accurate limita

tion of it, the conscientious rejection of superfluities, the simple and rigorous

development of it from the first line of his work to the last, he falls below them,

and comes nearer to the moderns. In his chief works, besides what he has of

his own, he has the elementary soundness of the ancients; he has their impor

tant action and their large and broad manner; but he has not their purity of

method. He is therefore a less safe model; for what he has of his own is