at of Pope as his own time, character,
and cultivation were from Pope's, but still correctness, that is to say
a scheme of literature which picks and chooses according to standards,
precedents, systems, rather than one which, given an abundant stream of
original music and representation, limits the criticising province in
the main to making the thing given the best possible of its kind. And it
is not a little curious that his own work is by no means always the best
of its kind--that it would often be not a little the better for a
stricter application of critical rules to itself.

But when it is at its best it has a wonderful charm--a charm nowhere
else to be matched among our dead poets of this century. Coleridge was
perhaps, allowing for the fifty years between them, as good a scholar as
Mr. Arnold, and he was a greater poet; but save for a limited time he
never had his faculties under due command, or gave the best of his work.
Scott, Byron, Keats, were not scholars at all; Shelley and Tennyson not
critical scholars; Rossetti a scholar only in modern languages. And none
of these except Coleridge, whatever their mere knowledge or instruction,
had the critical vein, the knack of comparing and adjusting, at all
strongly developed. Many attempts have been made at a formula of which
the following words are certainly not a perfect expression, that a poet
without criticism is a failure, and that a critic who is a poet is a
miracle. Mr. Arnold is beyond all doubt the writer who has most nearly
combined the two gifts. But for the present we are only concerned with
his poetry.

This shows itself distinctly enough, and perhaps at not far from its
best, in almost his earliest work. Among this earliest is the
magnificent sonnet on Shakespeare which perhaps better deserves to be
set as an epigraph and introduction to Shakespeare's own work than
anything else in the libraries that have been written on him except
Dryden's famous sentence; "Mycerinus," a stately blending of
well-arranged six-lined stanzas with a splendid finale of blank verse
not quite un-Tennysonian, but slightly different from Tennyson's; "The
Church of Brou," unequal but beautiful in the close (it is a curious and
almost a characteristic thing that Matthew Arnold's finales, his
perorations, were always his best); "Requiescat," an exquisite dirge. To
this early collection, too, belongs almost the whole of the singular
poem or collection of poems called "Switzerland,