who cannot be satisfied to tread with the crowd along
the broad road which leads--we used to know whither,
but desires "to cultivate," as Mr. Arnold says, "what is
best and noblest" in ourselves, are as sorely at a loss
as he is with his art. To find the best models,--that
indeed is the one thing for him and for us. But what
are they and where? and the answer to the aesthetic
difficulty lies as we believe in the solution of the moral
one. To say this, however, is of infinitely little service
for the practical direction of a living poet; and we are
here advised (and for present purposes no doubt wisely)
to fall back on the artists of classic antiquity. From
them better than from the best of the moderns, the
young poet will learn what art really is. He will learn
that before beginning to sing it is necessary to have
something to sing of, and that a poem is something else
than a collection of sweet musical sentences strung
together like beads or even jewels in a necklace. He
will learn that the subject is greater than the manner;
that the first is the one essential without a worthy
choice of which nothing can prosper. Above all, he
will learn that the restless craving after novelty, so
characteristic of all modern writing, the craving after
new plots, new stories, new ideas, is mere disease,
and that the true original genius displays itself not in
the fabrication of what has no existence, but in the
strength and power with which facts of history, or
stories existing so fixedly in the popular belief as to
have acquired so to say the character of facts, shall be
exhibited and delineated.

But while we allow with Mr. Arnold that the theory
will best be learnt from the ancients, we cannot allow,
as he seems to desire us to allow, that the practice of it
was confined to them, or recommend as he does the
disproportionate study, still less the disproportionate
imitation of them. All great artists at all times have followed
the same method, for greatness is impossible without it.
The Italian painters are never weary of the Holy
Family. The matter of Dante's poem lay before him
in the creed of the whole of Europe. Shakespeare has
not invented the substance of any one of his plays.
And the "weighty experience" and "composure of
judgment" with which the study of the ancients no
doubt does furnish "those who habitually practise it,"
may be obtained we believe by the study of the thoughts
of all great men of all ages; by the s