In the practice of Sainte-Beuve himself, these two acknowledgments of the duty of the critic embraced each other in the happiest union. The want of enthusiasm which has been sometimes rather sillily charged against him, comes in reality to no more than this--that he is too busy in analysing, putting together again, comparing, setting things in different lights and in different companies, to have much time for dithyrambs. And the preference of second-to first-class subjects, which has been also urged, is little more than the result of the fact that these processes are more telling, more interesting, and more needed in the case of the former than in the case of the latter. Homer, Æschylus, Lucretius, Dante, Shakespeare will always make their own way with all fit readers sooner or later: it is not so with Meleager or Macrobius or Marmontel, with William Langland or with Thomas Love Peacock.
But Sainte-Beuve must not carry us too far from Mr Arnold, all important as was the influence of the one upon the other. It is enough to say that the new Professor of Poetry (who might be less appetisingly but more correctly called a Professor of Criticism) had long entertained the wish to attempt, and now had the means of effecting, a reform in English criticism, partly on Sainte-Beuve's own lines, partly on others which he had already made publicly known in his famous Preface, and in some later critical writings, and which he was for the rest of his life always unflinchingly to champion, sometimes rather disastrously to extend.
Still it has always been held that this chair is not _merely_ a chair of criticism; and Mr Arnold lodged a poetical diploma-piece in the shape of _Merope_. This was avowedly written as a sort of professorial manifesto--a document to show what the only Professor of Poetry whom England allowed herself thought, in theory and practice, of at least dramatic poetry. It was, as was to be expected from the author's official position and his not widespread but well-grounded reputation, much less neglected than his earlier poetry had been. He even tells us that "it sells well"; but the reviewers were not pleased. The _Athenæum_ review is "a choice specimen of style," and the _Spectator_ "of argumentation"; the _Saturday Review_ is only "deadly prosy," but none were exactly favourable till G.H. Lewes in _The Leader_ was "very gratifying." Private criticism was a little kinder. The present Archbishop of Canterbury (to whom, indeed, Mr Arnold had just given "a flaming testimonial for Rugby") read it "with astonishment at its goodness," a sentence which, it may be observed, is a little double-edged. Kingsley (whom the editor of the _Letters_ good-naturedly but perhaps rather superfluously reintroduces to the British public as "author of _The Saints' Tragedy_ and other poems") was "very handsome." Froude, though he begs the poet to "discontinue the line," was not uncomplimentary in other ways. His own conclusion, from reviews and letters together, is pretty plainly put in two sentences, that he "saw the book was not going to take as he wished," and that "she [Merope] is more calculated to inaugurate my professorship with dignity than to move deeply the present race of _humans_." Let us see what "she" is actually like.