Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/67

 high poetry is. He might—since he had no poetic genius, only a gentle and charming talent—have been enslaved by a scientific art, a slavery from which genius saves a man, and have become one of the literary prigs of poetry who prate of art but cannot practise it; who gain the whole world of a clique's applause and lose their soul as poets. He was saved from this by the strength of the passion with which he wrote, by his truthfulness which did not condescend to modify his work and by his love of clearness. But though he had this one artistic merit of clearness, he was, unlike a true artist, indifferent to beauty, to excellence, to delicate choice and arrangement of words and music. He spent no trouble on his work. His poetry, therefore, with all its personal charm, remains in the porch, not in the temple of the Muses.

That was his position, and it was just as well, for the sake of the minor poetry of the time, and for the sake of the poets who were to follow, that Matthew Arnold set himself deliberately to ask what art ought to do in poetry, in what it consisted, what was its right aim, and what were its fitting subjects. His poetry, then, its relation to his time, what he was as a poet, what ideas and what delight were in his poetry, is the matter of the following essay.