The Sacred Wood
“Intravit pinacothecam senex canus, exercitati vultus etqui videretur nescio quid magnum promittere, sed cultu nonproinde speciosus, et facile appareret eum ex hac nota litteratumesse, quos odisse divites solent ... 'ego’ inquit'poeta sum et ut spero, non humillimi spiritus, si modocoronis aliquid credendum est, quas etiam ad immeritosdeferre gratia solet.’”—Petronius.
“I also like to dine on becaficas.”
For
H. W. E.
“Tacuit Et Fecit”
viiCertain of these essays appeared, in thesame or a more primitive form, in TheTimes Literary Supplement, The Athenæum,Art and Letters, and The Egoist. Theauthor desires to express his obligation tothe editors of these periodicals.
INTRODUCTION
To anyone who is at all capable of experiencingthe pleasures of justice, it is gratifying to beable to make amends to a writer whom one hasvaguely depreciated for some years. The faults andfoibles of Matthew Arnold are no less evident to menow than twelve years ago, after my first admirationfor him; but I hope that now, on re-reading some ofhis prose with more care, I can better appreciate hisposition. And what makes Arnold seem all the moreremarkable is, that if he were our exact contemporary,he would find all his labour to perform again. Amoderate number of persons have engaged in what iscalled “critical” writing, but no conclusion is anymore solidly established than it was in 1865. In thefirst essay in the first Essays in Criticism we readthat
it has long seemed to me that the burst of creativeactivity in our literature, through the first quarter ofthis century, had about it in fact something premature;and that from this cause its productions are doomed,most of them, in spite of the sanguine hopes whichaccompanied and do still accompany them, to provexhardly more lasting than the productions of far lesssplendid epochs. And this prematureness comesfrom its having proceeded without having its properdata, without sufficient material to work with. Inother words, the English poetry of the first quarter ofthis century, with plenty of energy, plenty of creativeforce, did not know enough. This makes Byron soempty of matter, Shelley so incoherent, Wordswortheven, profound as he is, yet so wanting in completenessand variety.
This judgment of the Romantic Generation has not,so far as I know, ever been successfully controverted;and it has not, so far as I know, ever made verymuch impression on popular opinion. Once a poetis accepted, his reputation is seldom disturbed, forbetter or worse. So little impression has Arnold’sopinion made, that his statement will probably be astrue of the first quarter of the twentieth century as itwas of the nine