R,CHARD MONCKTON MILNES was born in the year - OUDL Home

Critics and Criticism in the 'Seventies 203Essays in Criticism appeared in 1881, and in 1880 Arnoldcontributed his Introduction to T. H. Ward's Selectionsfrom the English Poets, in which is found his famous, andinadequate, definition of poetry as a criticism of life. Butin the intervening period he was almost entirely occupiedwith treatises on theological and social questions, includingCulture and Anarchy (1869), Friendship's Garland(1871), Literature and Dogma (1873) and Last Essays onChurch and Religion (1877). Anything that Arnold wrotewas bound to contain striking phrases, and these tractsfor the times had a wider and more immediate vogue thanthe critical essays. But he had neither the temperamentnor the technical qualifications for controversy in suchfields and we are moved to address him in his own words:Not here, O Apollo!Are haunts meet for thee,But, where Helicon breaks downIn cliff to the sea.And fortunately, in the very last year of our decade, 1879,Arnold did have his hour on Helicon and brought backhis Introduction to his Selection from the poems ofWordsworth. Within its short range it is one of his mostmasterly achievements. He was out to save the poet fromhis friends—the Wordsworthians who 'are apt to praisehim for the wrong things, and to lay far too much stressupon what they call his philosophy'—though he afterwardsconfesses that he is a Wordsworthian himself.Wordsworth's philosophy, if interpreted in the right wayand in the light of what he originally wrote, is of greatersignificance than Arnold was inclined to allow. But hewas right in putting in the forefront his pure poeticpower which he interpreted in words of noble, andexquisitely apt, simplicity:Wordsworth's poetry, when he is at his best, is inevitable, asinevitable as Nature herself. It might seem that Nature not only