MATTHEW ARNOLD'S CRITICISM 97 



" the Dissidence of Dissent, and the Protestantism 

 of the Protestant religion ; " in his efforts to divest 

 the mind of all that is harsh, uncouth, impenetrable, 

 exclusive, self-willed, one-sided ; in his efforts to ren- 

 der it more flexible, tolerant, free, lucid, with less 

 faith in individuals and more faith in principles. 

 They speak in him when he calls Luther a Philis- 

 tine of genius; when he says of the mass of his 

 countrymen that they have "a defective type of re- 

 ligion, a narrow range of intellect and knowledge, a 

 stunted sense of beauty, a low standard of manner ; " 

 that "Puritanism was a prison which the English 

 people entered and had the key turned upon its 

 spirit there for two hundred years ; " when he tells 

 the dissenters that in preferring their religious ser- 

 vice to that of the established church they have 

 shown a want of taste and of culture like that of 

 preferring Eliza Cook to Milton. "A public rite 

 with a reading of Milton attached to it is another 

 thing from a public rite with a reading from Eliza 

 Cook." 



His ideas of poetry as expressed in the preface to 

 his poems in 1853 are distinctly Greek, and they led 

 him to exclude from the collection his long poem 

 called "Empedocles on Etna," because the poem 

 was deficient in the classic requirements of action. 

 He says : — 



" The radical difference between the poetic theory 

 of the Greeks and our own is this : that with them 

 the poetical character of the action in itself, and the 

 conduct of it, was the first consideration; with us, 



