indeterminate, and faint, instead of being particular, precise, and firm. Any accurate representation may therefore be expected to be interesting;
but, if the representation be a poetical one, more than this is demanded. It is
demanded, not only that it shall interest, but also that it shall inspirit and
rejoice the reader; that it shall convey a charm, and infuse delight. For the
muses, as Hesiod says, were born that they might be 'a forgetfulness of evils,
and a truce from cares':7 and it is not enough that the poet should add to the
knowledge of men, it is required of him also that he should add to their hap
piness. 'All art,' says Schiller, 'is dedicated to Joy, and there is no higher and
no more serious problem, than how to make men happy. The right art is that
alone, which creates the highest enjoyment.'8 A poetical work, therefore, is not yet justified when it has been shown to be
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.
.
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
