fice for the Greek, he clothes abstractions in broad if not life-like outlines; but the Englishman must represent the varied forms which these same passions and sentiments assume in given individual men. There is no doubt that the easiest and most effective mode by which the poetic art can interest men, is through the sympathy of the passions, and that these can only be displayed in some action; but this is not the highest interest that art can afford. On the stage, and for some time even in the closet, it is some special scene that interests us in a great play, some crisis in the action-Lear howling to the winds, or Macbeth towards his design creeping like a ghost; but the more cultivated our taste, and the more intimate our knowledge of the work, the more does our interest centre upon the whole character, and it is the vivid images of the represented men and women—the noble credulous Moor-the keen crafty Richard—it is Imogen, Juliet, Hamlet, who live in our hearts and memories, and afford the highest pleasure that art is capable of yielding. We thoroughly coincide with Mr. Arnold in his criticism on Shakspere, and in the necessity of the due subordination of expression to the perfecting of the main conception. But we should scarcely acquiesce in the grounds on which he bases his dicta. Let poetry be what it will, it is valuable to draw a distinction between it and art. Poetry creates, art moulds these creations into the highest forms of which they are capable. The poet moves from an instinctive impulse quá poet; quá artist he employs this impulse for a remoter purpose. It is art, to quote Mr. Arnold's quotation from Goethe, which is "Architectonicè in the highest sense." A man may be a greater poet than artist-Shakspere was such a one; he may be a far greater artist than poet, such was Goethe. In all this Mr. Arnold agrees; indeed, he says almost the same thing; but he makes the attainment of pleasure the highest test of art, and, what makes the matter of interest here, uses it for the

eduction of practical consequences. This is to introduce the doctrines of utilitarianism, exploded from the field of morals, into that of æsthetics. True art never fails to bring enjoyment, as good morals never fail to bring happiness; but the artist is going as far wrong as the moralist, if he makes the enjoyment his work is calculated to afford to others the test and object of his labours. Art seeks the highest, and the rules that lead to the highest admit of no such simple and narrow gauge.

As to the choice of ancient subjects, we will only just say that, quite acquiescing in the poverty and groundless assumption of the doctrine which would limit the poet to modern interests, it is yet true that the points on which we can touch the ancient world with sufficient closeness to embody in art the materials it affords, are few, and require much tact and skill in the avoidance of the Scylla and Charybdis which beset them-the danger, on the one hand, of making them hybrid and untruthful, by the admixture of modern ideas, and that, on the other, of finding them too remote not only from the interests of the reader, but, what is more important, from the sympathies of the poet himself. More than this, the higher you go in art, the fewer are these points of contact. Restrict yourself to great actions and single exhibitions of the "permanent passions," and the task is less difficult; but to delineate a complex individual character as it existed in ancient Egypt, would be hard, to say the least of it. "Mycerinus," we confess, falls dead on our ears.

53

THE CLASSICAL SCHOOL OF ENGLISH POETRY:

MATTHEW ARNOLD.

II.-MEROPE: A TRAGEDY.*

[April 1858.]

MR. ARNOLD is no doubt following his own true bent when he devotes himself to what is called the classical school of literature. Certainly no living poet is so well qualified to familiarise the English mind (if that be possible) with the forms and substance of the Greek drama. The limits, as well as the quality, of his genius give him more than common facilities for such a task. His love of beauty is profound, and he loves best, perhaps by nature, and certainly from study, its more abstract manifestations, especially those of form. He uses the emotions as a field for the intellect, not the mind to subserve the heart, and his imagination is bound up with the former rather than the latter; it is a lamp that shines, not a fire that glows. He lays a cold hand on sensuous imagery; and there is a keen clear atmosphere about his pictures from nature, as if his muse had steeped his eyes in Attic air and sunshine. Thus gifted, he devotes himself to reproducing Greek poetry in an English dress, and presents us with an Athenian tragedy in our own language. We are not ungrateful for the gift. But Mr. Arnold is not content that we should accept it as a beautiful curiosity, or treat it as a rare exotic: he has written a preface to urge that such plants should be acclimatised; he boldly demands place in English literature for the forms of poetry which took their

* Merope: a Tragedy. By Matthew Arnold. Longmans.

rise in Greek sacrificial observances, adapted themselves to Greek social habits, were limited by Greek ideas, and embodied Greek religion, Greek patriotism, and, above all, that which is most characteristic of a people,—the feelings with which it looks at the hidden arbiters of life, the controlling destinies of the world. That drama, which held these things as a wine holds its flavour and spirit, Mr. Arnold thinks should be studied in England; not studied to know it, that we may rejoice in it and the knowledge it brings with it, but studied to reproduce it, that we may make the same kind of thing for ourselves. He thinks he can dig up the dusky olive from the plains of Attica, and plant it in our English wheat-fields; that he can take in its fullest development the most purely indigenous and the most intensely and narrowly national literature the world ever saw, and bid it find new springs of life some two thousand years later in a nation which has already found its expression in a dramatic literature evolved by itself. Did such an attempt ever succeed? A native literature in its infancy may take the impression of a foreign one; though even then, if it have strength to grow at all, it soon throws off, or carries only as a superficies, the marks of its early tutoring: but when did a foreign growth ever share the field with an indigenous one? A nation whose habits of thought were sufficiently congruous with those of some other, has plagiarised and adapted its literary productions: Terence went to Greece as Planché goes to Paris. But in these cases it is not a foreign form and spirit which is transferred, but the adapter merely consults his own idleness, or the poverty of his own resources, by borrowing a plot and a certain stock of wit and ideas; and his effort is to oust all that is specially foreign, or to transform it into a more familiar shape.

Is the epic a Greek form naturalised? It may be so; the particular form of the Iliad has been adopted in great measure as the model of all epics: but it is a form so

broad and simple, has in it so little that is special or national, that it may be said to be a mode of embodying imaginative ideas common to all mankind. It is a form which is easily separable from the matter, and it is the form alone which has been borrowed. No great poet has ever written another Greek epic. We shall not be confuted by Glover's Leonidas. Every one has emptied out the old form, and filled it with his own native ideas. The Eneid is Roman; the Inferno is Florentine; the Paradise Lost is English. In the same way, Jonson in England and Molière in France adhered more or less strictly to the rules deduced by the critics as the true conditions of comedy; but applied them to modern manners, modern character, and all the wider range and greater richness, intricacy, and variety of modern ideas. When we speak of form, we are apt to confound two things. There is a form which is one with its spirit, and is its outer manifestation; there is another which is merely a sort of outside shell. It is this alone perhaps which in art one century or one nation can borrow from another; certainly it is this alone which we have taken in the epic, and in some of the broad rules which govern our dramatic constructions.

But there is what is called the classical school of tragedy. Is this what we have professed to think impossible,―a new birth of an art which rose like a star so many centuries ago, and after its brief but imperishable shining, fell headlong again into silence? Have France and Italy revived the Athenian stage? Mr. Arnold claims, and claims justly, for the tragedy of Athens, that though wanting in the richness of that of England, it has not only power and intensity, but speaks strongly to the highest artistic feelings in our nature, because it is steeped as it were, thoroughly interpenetrated, by a rhythmic proportion and correspondence which governs its spirit as well as its outer form. Has either the greatness of its matter, or the beauty of its forms, been preserved by