ponderating quality of Shakespeare's genius, accordingly almost the whole of
modern English poetry has, it appears to me, felt the influence. To the exclu
sive attention on the part of his imitators to this it is in a great degree owing,
that of the majority of modern poetical works the details alone are valuable,
the composition worthless. In reading them one is perpetually reminded of
that terrible sentence on a modern French poet: II dit tout ce qu'il veut, mais
malheureusement il n'a rien a dire.5
Let me give an instance of what I mean. I will take it from the works of the
very chief among those who seem to have been formed in the school of Shake
speare: of one whose exquisite genius and pathetic death render him forever
interesting. I will take the poem of Isabella, or the Pot of Basil, by Keats. I
choose this rather than the Endymion, because the latter work (which a mod
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
