MATTHEW ARNOLD'S 1853 PREFACE

Abstract

prefaced by an essay which ranks as one of the classics of English literary criticism. 'I doubt', says Mr. Saintsbury, 'whether he ever wrote better, either in sense or in style.'1 Arnold relied a good deal at this time on the sympathy and judgment of Froude. Froude admired the Poems of 1853-'Sohrab and Rustum', he writes to Clough, 'is to my taste all but perfect '.2 But he was against a Preface. 'He rather discounsels from a preface', Arnold writes, 'but I shall try my hand at it, at any rate, I think'.3 And on io October 'The Preface is done', he tells Clough-'there is a certain Geist in it, I think, but it is far less precise than I had intended. How difficult it is to write prose !'4 He had, in fact, never written prose before. When, two and a half years later, he became professor of Poetry at Oxford, he owed his election to his poetry-and to the Preface to the Poems of 1853Froude, when he 'discounselled from a preface', had seen, not the Preface, but the Poems. He thought the wine good enough to need no bush. In poems that call for a preface there is usually something which wants explaining away. In the Poems of 1853 the only thing that wanted explaining away was what was not there. Arnold had left out Empedocles on Etna; and he did not want the world to draw false conclusions about his reason for doing so. 'It has not been excluded', he writes, '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'. Of these 'many critics' he names none; but he quotes one, a writer in The Spectator (2 April 1853), whom he calls 'an apparently intelligent critic'. The writer was, as luck would have it, the editor of The Spectator himself, Robert Stephen Rintoul; who,