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 of life.” What he seems to have meant is that poetry is the crowning fruit of a criticism of life; that just as the poet’s metrical effects are and must be the result of a thousand semiconscious generalizations upon the laws of cause and effect in metric art, so the beautiful things he says about life and the beautiful pictures he paints of life are the result of his generalizations upon life as he passes through it, and consequently that the value of his poetry consists in the beauty and the truth of his generalizations. But this is saying no more than is said in the line—

or in the still more famous lines—

To suppose that Arnold confounded the poet with the writer of pensées would be absurd. Yet having decided that poetry consists of generalizations on human life, in reading poetry he kept on the watch for those generalizations, and at last seemed to think that the less and not the more they are hidden behind the dramatic action, and the more unmistakably they are intruded as generalizations, the better. For instance, in one of his essays he quotes those lines from the “Chanson de Roland” of Turoldus, where Roland, mortally wounded, lays himself down under a pine-tree with his face turned towards Spain and the enemy, and begins to “call many things to remembrance; all the lands which his valour conquered, and pleasant France, and the men of his lineage, and Charlemagne, his liege lord, who nourished him”—

“That,” says Arnold, “is primitive work, I repeat, with an undeniable poetic quality of its own. It deserves such praise, and such praise is sufficient for it.” Then he contrasts it with a famous passage in Homer—that same passage which is quoted in the article, for the very opposite purpose to that of Arnold’s, quoted indeed to show how the epic poet, leaving the dramatic action to act as chorus, weakens the  of the picture—the passage in the Iliad (iii 243-244) where the poet, after Helen’s pathetic mention of her brother’s comments on the causes of their absence, “criticizes life” and generalizes upon the impotence of human intelligence, the impotence even of human love, to pierce the darkness in which the web of human fate is woven. He appends Dr Hawtrey’s translation:—

“We are here,” says Arnold, “in another world, another order of poetry altogether; here is rightly due such supreme praise as that which M. Vitel gives to the Chanson de Roland. If our words are to have any meaning, if our judgments are to have any solidity, we must not heap that supreme praise upon poetry of an order immeasurably inferior.” He does not see that the two passages cannot properly be compared at all. In the one case the poet gives us a dramatic picture; in the other; a comment on a dramatic picture.

Perhaps, indeed, the place Arnold held and still holds as a critic is due more to his exquisite felicity in expressing his views than to the penetration of his criticism. Nothing can exceed the easy grace of his prose at the best. It is conversational and yet absolutely exact in the structure of the sentences; and in spite of every vagary, his distinguishing note is urbanity. Keen-edged as his satire could be, his writing for the most part is as urbane as Addison’s own. His influence on contemporary criticism and contemporary ideals was considerable, and generally wholesome. His insistence on the necessity of looking at “the thing in itself,” and the need for acquainting oneself with “the best that has been thought and said in the world,” gave a new stimulus alike to originality and industry in criticism; and in his own selection of subjects—such as Joubert, or the de Guérins—he opened a new world to a larger class of the better sort of readers, exercising in this respect an awakening influence in his own time akin to that of Walter Pater a few years afterwards. The comparison with Pater might indeed be pressed further, and yet too far. Both were essentially products of Oxford. But Arnold, whose description of that “home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties,” is in itself almost a poem, had a classical austerity in his style that savoured more intimately of Oxford tradition, and an ethical earnestness even in his most flippant moments which kept him notably aloof from the more sensuous school of aesthetics.

ARNOLD, SAMUEL (1740–1802), English composer, was born at London on the 10th of August 1740. He received a thorough musical education at the Chapel Royal, and when little more than twenty years of age was appointed composer at Covent Garden theatre. Here, in 1765, he produced his popular opera, The Maid of the Mill, many of the songs in which were selected from the works of Italian composers. In 1776 he transferred his services to the Haymarket theatre. In 1783 he was made composer to George III. Between 1765 and 1802 he wrote as many as forty-three operas, after-pieces and pantomimes, of which the best were The Maid of the Mill, Rosamond, Inkle and Yarico, The Battle of Hexham, The Mountaineers. His oratorios included The Cure of Saul (1767), Abimelech (1768), The Resurrection (1773), The Prodigal Son (1777) and Elisha (1795). In 1783 he became organist to the Chapel Royal. In 1786 he began an edition of Handel’s works, which extended to 40 volumes, but was never completed. In 1793 he became organist of Westminster Abbey, where he was buried after his death on the 22nd of October 1802. Arnold is chiefly remembered now for the publication of his Cathedral Music, being a collection in score of the most valuable and useful compositions for that service by the several English masters of the last 200 years (1790). ARNOLD, THOMAS (1795–1842), English clergyman and headmaster of Rugby school, was born at West Cowes, in the Isle of Wight, on the 13th of June 1795. He was the son of William and Martha Arnold, the former of whom occupied the