Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold. Arnold Matthew

1

From Dr. Stanley's Lectures on the Jewish Church, Macmillan's Magazine, February, 1863, vol. 7, p. 336.

2

~Poetry and the Classics~. Published as Preface to Poems: 1853 (dated Fox How, Ambleside, October 1, 1853). It was reprinted in Irish Essays, 1882.

3

~the poem~. Empedocles on Etna.

4

~the Sophists~. "A name given by the Greeks about the middle of the fifth century B.C. to certain teachers of a superior grade who, distinguishing themselves from philosophers on the one hand and from artists and craftsmen on the other, claimed to prepare their pupils, not for any particular study or profession, but for civic life." Encyclopædia Britannica.

5

Poetics, 4.

6

Theognis, ll. 54-56.

7

~"The poet," it is said~. In the Spectator of April 2, 1853. The words quoted were not used with reference to poems of mine.[Arnold.]

8

~Dido~. See the Iliad, the Oresteia (Agamemnon, Choëpharæ, and Eumenides) of Æschylus, and the Æneid.

9

~Hermann and Dorothea, Childe Harold, Jocelyn, the Excursion~. Long narrative poems by Goethe, Byron, Lamartine, and Wordsworth.

10

~Oedipus~. See the Oedipus Tyrannus and Oedipus Coloneus of Sophocles.

11

~grand style~. Arnold, while admitting that the term ~grand~ style, which he repeatedly uses, is incapable of exact verbal definition, describes it most adequately in the essay On Translating Homer: "I think it will be found that the grand style arises in poetry when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject." See On the Study of Celtic Literature and on Translating Homer, ed. 1895, pp. 264-69.

12

~Orestes, or Merope, or Alcmæon~. The story of ~Orestes~ was dramatized by Æschylus, by Sophocles, and by Euripides. Merope was the subject of a lost tragedy by Euripides and of several modern plays, including one by Matthew Arnold himself. The story of ~Alcmæon~ was the subject of several tragedies which have not been preserved.

13

~Polybius~. A Greek historian (c. 204-122 B.C.)

14

. ~Menander~. See Contribution of the Celts, Selections, Note 3, p. 177.[Transcriber's note: this is Footnote 255 in this e-text.]

15

~rien à dire~. He says all that he wishes to, but unfortunately he has nothing to say.

16

Boccaccio's Decameron, 4th day, 5th novel.

17

~Henry Hallam~ (1777-1859). English historian. See his Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the Fifteenth, Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, chap. 23, §§ 51, 52.

18

~François Pierre Guillaume Guizot~ (1787-1874), historian, orator, and statesman of France.

19

~Pittacus~, of Mytilene in Lesbos (c. 650-569 B.C.), was one of the Seven Sages of Greece. His favorite sayings were: "It is hard to be excellent" ([Greek: chalepon esthlon emenai]), and "Know when to act."

20

~Barthold Georg Niebuhr~ (1776-1831) was a German statesman and historian. His Roman History (1827-32) is an epoch-making work. For his opinion of his age see his Life and Letters, London, 1852, II, 396.

21

Æneid, XII, 894-95.

22

Reprinted from The National Review, November, 1864, in the Essays in Criticism, Macmillan & Co., 1865.

23

In On Translating Homer, ed. 1903, pp. 216-17.

24

An essay called Wordsworth: The Man and the Poet, published in The North British Review for August, 1864, vol. 41. ~John Campbell Shairp~ (1819-85), Scottish critic and man of letters, was professor of poetry at Oxford from 1877 to 1884. The best of his lectures from this chair were published in 1881 as Aspects of Poetry.

25

I cannot help thinking that a practice, common in England during the last century, and still followed in France, of printing a notice of this kind,—a notice by a competent critic,—to serve as an introduction to an eminent author's works, might be revived among us with advantage. To introduce all succeeding editions of Wordsworth, Mr. Shairp's notice might, it seems to me, excellently serve; it is written from the point of view of an admirer, nay, of a disciple, and that is right; but then the disciple must be also, as in this case he is, a critic, a man of letters, not, as too often happens, some relation or friend with no qualification for his task except affection for his author.[Arnold.]

26

See Memoirs of William Wordsworth, ed. 1851, II, 151, letter to Bernard Barton.

27

~Irene~. An unsuccessful play of Dr. Johnson's.

28

~Preface~. Prefixed to the second edition (1800) of the Lyrical Ballads.

29

~The old woman~. At the first attempt to read the newly prescribed liturgy in St. Giles's Church, Edinburgh, on July 23, 1637, a riot took place, in which the "fauld-stools," or folding stools, of the congregation were hurled as missiles. An untrustworthy tradition attributes the flinging of the first stool to a certain Jenny or Janet Geddes.

30

Pensées de J. Joubert, ed. 1850, I, 355, titre 15, 2.

31

~French Revolution~. The latter part of Burke's life was largely devoted to a conflict with the upholders of the French Revolution. Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790, and Letters on a Regicide Peace,

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