Mr. Matthew Arnold as Critic and Poet

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Excerpt from Mr. Matthew Arnold as Critic and Poet: Read Before the Liverpool Philomathic Society, 30th January, 1878 English Literature has never been famous in the department of criticism, and the union in one writer of marked power both in criticism and in original creation has been rare indeed. That there is nothing incongruous in such a union is proved by the Literature of Germany, where, in men like Goethe and Leasing, we see how critical activity of a high order has run with even steps by the side of original creation, has helped it and been helped by it. Yet the great poets of England have seldom been critics, and our critics have still more rarely been distinguished as poets. Dr. Johnson, the only great critic whom England produced in the eighteenth century - a period of intellectual rest, and therefore favourable to the exercise of critical energy - was nothing more than a critic Dryden and Wordsworth, though both endowed with fine perception and discrimination, seldom cared to exercise their undoubted powers. Coleridge, poet, theologian, and social reformer as well as critic, allowed his subtle critical faculty to be pressed into the background by more absorbing occupations. So far as I know, Mr. Matthew Arnold is as yet the only English writer of note who has not merely possessed, but habitually and successfully exercised, and preferred to exercise, both kinds of intellectual power. Dean Stanley calls him the first living English critic. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.