r
hitherto unpublished): "The modern world is the widest and richest
material ever offered to the artist; but the moulding and representing
power of the artist is not, or has not yet become (in my opinion),
commensurate with his material, his _mundus representandus_. This
adequacy of the artist to his world, this command of the latter by him,
seems to me to be what constitutes a first-class poetic epoch, and to
distinguish it from such an epoch as our own; in this sense, the Homeric
and Elizabethan poetry seems to me of a superior class to ours, though
the world represented by it was far less full and significant."

There is no need to describe in greater detail the two Prefaces, which
can be read, among rather incongruous surroundings, in the volume called
_Irish Essays, and Others_. But they are worth noting, because in them,
at the age of thirty, he first displayed the peculiar temper in literary
criticism which so conspicuously marked him to the end; and that temper
happily infected the critical writing of a whole generation; until the
Iron Age returned, and the bludgeon was taken down from its shelf, and
the scalping-knife refurbished.

In his critical temper, lucidity, courage, and serenity were equally
blended. In his criticism of books, as in his criticism of life, he
aimed first at Lucidity--at that clear light, uncoloured by
prepossession, which should enable him to see things as they really are.
In a word, he judged for himself; and, however much his judgment might
run counter to prejudice or tradition, he dared to enounce it and
persist in it. He spoke with proper contempt of the "tenth-rate critics,
for whom any violent shock to the public taste would be a temerity not
to be risked"; but that temerity he himself had in rich abundance. Homer
and Sophocles are the only poets of whom, if my memory serves me, he
never wrote a disparaging word. Shakespeare is, and rightly, an object
of national worship; yet Arnold ventured to point out his
"over-curiousness of expression"; and, where he writes--

Till that Bellona's bridegroom, lapped in proof,
Confronted him with self-comparisons,

Arnold dared to say that the writing was "detestable."

Macaulay is, perhaps less rightly, another object of national worship;
yet Arnold denounced the "confident shallowness which makes him so
admired by public speakers and leading-article writers, and so
intolerable to all searchers for truth"; and frankly avowed that