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MODERN ENGLISH WRITERS.
* * * * *
MATTHEW ARNOLD...... Professor SAINTSBURY.
R.L. STEVENSON...... L. COPE CORNFORD.
JOHN RUSKIN ....... Mrs MEYNELL.
ALFRED TENNYSON ..... ANDREW LANG.
THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY ... EDWARD CLODD.
THACKERAY ........ CHARLES WHIBLEY.
GEORGE ELIOT....... A.T. QUILLER-COUCH.
BROWNING......... C.H. HERFORD.
FROUDE.......... JOHN OLIVER HOBBES.
DICKENS ......... W.E. HENLEY.
[Symbol: 3 asterisks] _Other Volumes will be announced in due
course_.
* * * * *
WILLIAM BLACKWOOD & SONS, EDINBURGH AND LONDON
MATTHEW ARNOLD
BY
GEORGE SAINTSBURY
PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC AND ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE
UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH
THIRD IMPRESSION
WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS
EDINBURGH AND LONDON
MCMII
PREFACE.
Mr. Matthew Arnold, like other good men of our times, disliked the
idea of being made the subject of a regular biography; and the only
official and authoritative sources of information as to the details of
his life are the _Letters_ published by his family, under the
editorship of Mr G.W.E. Russell (2 vols., London, 1895)[1]. To these,
therefore, it seems to be a duty to confine oneself, as far as such
details are concerned, save as regards a very few additional facts
which are public property. But very few more facts can really be
wanted except by curiosity; for in the life of no recent person of
distinction did things literary play so large a part as in Mr
Arnold's: of no one could it be said with so much truth that, family
affections and necessary avocations apart, he was _totus in
illis_. And these things we have in abundance.[2] If the following
pages seem to discuss them too minutely, it can only be pleaded that
those to whom it seems so are hardly in sympathy with Matthew Arnold
himself. And if the discussion seems to any one too often to take the
form of a critical examination, let him remember Mr. Arnold's own
words in comparing the treatment of Milton by Macaulay and by M.
Scherer:--
"Whoever comes to the _Essay on Milton_ with the desire to get
at the real truth about Milton, whether as a man or a poet, will
feel that the essay in nowise helps him. A reader who only wants
rhetoric, a reader who wants a panegyric on Milton, a panegyric on
the Puritans, will find what he wants. A reader who wants criticism
will be disappointed."
I have endeavoured, in dealing with the master of all English critics
in the latter half of the nineteenth century, to "help the reader who
wants criticism."
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Mr Arthur Galton's _Matthew Arnold_ (London, 1897) adds a
few pleasant notes, chiefly about dachshunds.
[2] It is impossible, in dealing with them, to be too grateful to Mr.
T. B. Smart's _Bibliography of Matthew Arnold_ (London, 1892), a
most craftsmanlike piece of work.
CONTENTS.
* * * * *
CHAP.
I. LIFE TILL MARRIAGE, AND WORK TILL THE PUBLICATION OF THE
_POEMS_ OF 1853
II. LIFE FROM 1851-62--SECOND SERIES OF _POEMS_--_MEROPE_--_ON
TRANSLATING HOMER_
III. _A FRENCH ETON_--_ESSAYS IN CRITICISM_--_CELTIC LITERATURE_--_NEW
POEMS_--LIFE FROM 1862 TO 1867
IV. IN THE WILDERNESS
V. THE LAST DECADE
VI. CONCLUSION
* * * * *
INDEX
MATTHEW ARNOLD.
* * * * *
CHAPTER I.
LIFE TILL MARRIAGE, AND WORK TILL THE PUBLICATION OF THE _POEMS_
OF 1853.
Even those who are by no means greedy of details as to the biography
of authors, may without inconsistency regret that Matthew Arnold's
_Letters_ do not begin till he was just five-and-twenty. And then
they are not copious, telling us in particular next to nothing about
his literary work (which is, later, their constant subject) till he
was past thirty. We could spare schoolboy letters, which, though often
interesting, are pretty identical, save when written by little prigs.
But the letters of an undergraduate--especially when the person is
Matthew Arnold, and the University the Oxford of the years
1841-45--ought to be not a little symptomatic, not a little
illuminative. We might have learnt from them something more than we
know at present about the genesis and early stages of that not
entirely comprehensible or classifiable form of Liberalism in matters
political, ecclesiastical, and general which, with a kind of altered
Voltairian touch, attended his Conservatism in literature. Moreover,
it is a real loss that we have scarcely anything from his own pen
about his poems before _Sohrab and Rustum_--that is to say, about the
great majority of the best of them. By the time at which we have full
and frequent commentaries on himself, he is a married man, a harnessed
and hard-working inspector of schools, feeling himself too busy for
poetry, not as yet tempted by promptings within or invitations from
without to betake himself to critical prose in any quantity or
variety. Indeed, by a not much more than allowable hyperbole, we may
say that we start with the book of his poetry all but shut, and the
book of his prose all but unopened.
We must therefore make what we can of the subject, and of course a
great deal more is to be made in such a case of the work than of the
life. The facts of the latter are but scanty. Matthew Arnold, as all
the world knows, was the son--the eldest son--of the famous Dr
(Thomas) Arnold, Head-master of Rugby, and Regius Professor of Modern
History at Oxford, where he had earlier been a Fellow of Oriel. Dr
Arnold survives in the general memory now chiefly by virtue of his
head-mastership, which was really a remarkable one, whatever
distinction it may owe to the loyalty of such a group of pupils as his
son, Dean Stanley, Clough, "Tom Brown" Hughes, and others. But he was,
if not positively great, a notable and influential person in many
ways. As a historian he was alert and intelligent, though perhaps too
much under the influence of that subtlest and most dangerous kind of
"popular breeze" which persuades those on whom it blows that they are
sailing not with but away from the vulgar. As a scholar he was
ingenious, if not very erudite or deep. He was really a master, and
has been thought by some good judges a great master, of that admirable
late Georgian academic style of English prose, which is almost the
equal of the greatest. But he was, if not exactly _cupidus novarum
rerum_ in Church and State, very ready to entertain them; he was
curiously deficient in logic; and though the religious sense was
strong in him, he held, and transmitted to his son, the heresy--the
foundation of all heresies--that religion is something that you can
"bespeak," that you can select and arrange to your own taste; that it
is not "to take or to leave" at your peril and as it offers itself.
On August 11, 1820, Dr Arnold married Mary Penrose, and as he had
devoted his teaching energies, which were early developed, not to
school or university work, but to the taking of private pupils at
Laleham on the Thames, between Staines and Chertsey, their eldest son
was born there, on Christmas Eve, 1822. He was always enthusiastic
about the Thames valley, though not more so than it deserves, and in
his very earliest letter (January 2, 1848) we find record of a visit,
when he found "the stream with the old volume, width, shine, rapid
fulness, 'kempshott,'[1] and swans, unchanged and unequalled." He was
only six years old when his father was elected to the head-mastership
of Rugby; he was educated in his early years at his birthplace, where
an uncle, the Rev. John Buckland, carried on the establishment, and at
the age of fourteen he was sent to Winchester, his father's school.
Here he only remained a year, and entered Rugby in August 1837. He
remained there for four years, obtaining an open Balliol scholarship
in 1840, though he did not go up till October 1841. In 1840 he had
also gained the prize for poetry at Rugby itself with _Alaric at
Rome_, a piece which was immediately printed, but never reprinted
by its author, though it is now easily obtainable in the 1896 edition
of those poems of his which fell out of copyright at the seven years
after his death.
It is an observation seldom falsified, that such exercises, by poets
of the higher class, display neither their special characteristics,
nor any special characteristics at all. Matthew Arnold's was not one
of the exceptions. It is very much better than most school prize
poems: it shows the critical and scholarly character of the writer
with very fair foreshadowing; but it does not fore-shadow his poetry
in the very least. It is quite free from the usual formal faults of a
boy's verse, except some evidences of a deficient ear, especially for
rhyme ("full" and "beautiful," "palaces" and "days"). It manages a
rather difficult metre (the sixain rhymed _ababcc_ and ending
with an Alexandrine) without too much of the monotony which is its
special danger. And some of the tricks which the boy-poet has caught
are interesting and abode with him, such as the _anadiplosis_--
"Yes, there are stories registered on high,
Yes, there are stains Time's fingers cannot blot";
in which kind he was to produce some years later the matchless
"Still nursing the unconquerable hope,
Still clutching the inviolable shade,"
of the _Scholar-Gipsy_. On the whole, the thing is correct but
colourless; even its melancholy is probably mere Byronism, and has
nothing directly to do with the later quality of _Dover Beach_
and _Poor Matthias_.
Of Mr Arnold's undergraduate years we have unluckily but little
authentic record, and, as has been said, not one letter. The most
interesting evidence comes from Principal Shairp's well-known lines in
_Balliol Scholars, 1840-1843_, written, or at least published,
many years later, in 1873:--
"The one wide-welcomed for a father's fame,
Entered with free bold step that seemed to claim
Fame for himself, nor on another lean.
So full of power, yet blithe and debonair,
Rallying his friends with pleasant banter gay,
Or half a-dream chaunting with jaunty air
Great words of Goethe, catch of Béranger,
We see the banter sparkle in his prose,
But knew not then the undertone that flows
So calmly sad, through all his stately lay."[2]
Like some other persons of much distinction, and a great many of
little or none, he "missed his first," in December 1844; and though he
obtained, three months later, the consolation prize of a Fellowship
(at Oriel, too), he made no post-graduate stay of any length at the
university. The then very general, though even then not universal,
necessity of taking orders before very long would probably in any case
have sent him wandering; for it is clear from the first that his bent
was hopelessly anti-clerical, and he was not merely too honest, but
much too proud a man, to consent to be put in one of the priests'
offices for a morsel of bread. It may well be doubted--though he felt
and expressed not merely in splendid passages of prose and verse for
public perusal, but in private letters quite towards the close of his
life, that passionate attachment which Oxford more than any other
place of the kind inspires--whether he would have been long at home
there as a resident. For the place has at once a certain republicanism
and a certain tyranny about its idea, which could not wholly suit the
aspiring and restless spirit of the author of _Switzerland_. None
of her sons is important to Oxford--the meanest of them has in his
sonship the same quality as the greatest. Now it was very much at Mr
Arnold's heart to be important, and he was not eager to impart or
share his qualities.
However this may be, there were ample reasons why he should leave the
fold. The Bar (though he was actually called and for many years went
circuit as Marshal to his father-in-law, Mr Justice Wightman) would
have suited him, in practice if not in principle, even less than the
Church; and he had no scientific leanings except a taste for botany.
Although the constantly renewed cries for some not clearly defined
system of public support for men of letters are, as a rule, absurd,
there is no doubt that Mr Arnold was the very man for a sinecure, and
would have justified the existence of Pipe or Hanaper to all
reasonable men. But his political friends had done away with nearly
all such things, and no one of the very few that remained fell to his
lot. His father had died in 1842, but the son served a short
apprenticeship to school-teaching at Rugby, then became private
secretary to Lord Lansdowne, the President of the Council (it is now
that we first meet him as an epistoler), and early in 1851 was
appointed by his chief to an inspectorship of schools. Having now a
livelihood, he married, in June of that year, Frances Lucy Wightman,
daughter of a judge of the Queen's Bench. Their first child, Thomas,
was born on July 6, 1852, and Mr Arnold was now completely estated in
the three positions of husband, father, and inspector of schools,
which occupied--to his great delight in the first two cases, not quite
so in the third--most of his life that was not given to literature.
Some not ungenerous but perhaps rather unnecessary indignation has
been spent upon his "drudgery" and its scanty rewards. It is enough to
say that few men can arrange at their pleasure the quantity and
quality of their work, and that not every man, even of genius, has had
his bread-and-butter secured for life at eight-and-twenty.
But in the ten or twelve years which had passed since _Alaric at
Rome_, literature itself had been by no means neglected, and in
another twelvemonth after the birth of his first-born, Matthew Arnold
had practically established his claim as a poet by utterances to which
he made comparatively small additions later, though more than half his
life was yet to run. And he had issued one prose exercise in
criticism, of such solidity and force as had not been shown by any
poet since Dryden, except Coleridge.
These documents can hardly be said to include the Newdigate poem
(_Cromwell_) of 1843: they consist of _The Strayed Reveller and other
Poems_, by "A.," 1849; _Empedocles on Etna, and other Poems_, [still]
by "A.," 1852; and _Poems_ by Matthew Arnold, a new edition, 1853--the
third consisting of the contents of the two earlier, with _Empedocles_
and a few minor things omitted, but with very important additions,
including _Sohrab and Rustum, The Church of Brou, Requiescat_, and
_The Scholar-Gipsy_. The contents of all three must be carefully
considered, and the consideration may be prefaced by a few words on
_Cromwell_.
This [Greek: agonisma], like the other, Mr Arnold never included in
any collection of his work; but it was printed at Oxford in the year
of its success, and again at the same place, separately or with other
prize poems, in 1846, 1863, and 1891. It may also be found in the
useful non-copyright edition above referred to. Couched in the
consecrated couplet, but not as of old limited to fifty lines, it is
"good rhymes," as the elder Mr Pope used to say to the younger; but a
prudent taster would perhaps have abstained, even more carefully than
in the case of the _Alaric_, from predicting a real poet in the
author. It is probably better than six Newdigates out of seven at
least, but it has no distinction. The young, but not so very young,
poet--he was as old as Tennyson when he produced his unequal but
wonderful first volume--begins by borrowing Wordsworth's two voices of
the mountain and the sea, shows some impression here and there from
Tennyson's own master-issue, the great collection of 1842, which had
appeared a year before, ventures on an Alexandrine--
"Between the barren mountains and the stormy sea"
--which comes as a pleasant relief, and displays more than once (as he
did afterwards in _Tristram and Iseult_) an uncertain but by no means
infelicitous variety of couplet which he never fully or fairly worked
out, but left for Mr William Morris to employ with success many years
later. Otherwise the thing is good, but negligible. It would have
taken an extremely strong competition, or an extremely incompetent
examiner, to deprive it of the prize; but he must have been a sanguine
man who, in giving the author that prize, expected to receive from him
returns of poetry.
Yet they came. If we did not know that the middle of this century was
one of the nadirs of English[3] criticism, and if we did not know
further that even good critics often go strangely wrong both in praise
and in blame of new verse, it would be most surprising that _The
Strayed Reveller_ volume should have attracted so little attention.
It is full of faults, but that is part of the beauty of it. Some of
these faults are those which, persevering, prevented Mr Arnold from
attaining a higher position than he actually holds in poetry; but no
critic could know that. There is nothing here worse, or more
necessarily fatal, than many things in Tennyson's 1830 and 1832
collections: he overwent those, so might Mr Arnold have overgone
these. And the promise--nay, the performance--is such as had been seen
in no verse save Tennyson's, and the almost unnoticed Browning's, for
some thirty years. The title-poem, though it should have pleased even
a severe judge, might have aroused uncomfortable doubts even in an
amiable one. In the first place, its rhymelessness is a caprice, a
will-worship. Except blank verse, every rhymeless metre in English has
on it the curse of the _tour de force_, of the acrobatic. Campion
and Collins, Southey and Shelley, have done great things in it; but
neither _Rose-cheeked Laura_ nor _Evening_, neither the
great things in _Thalaba_ nor the great things in _Queen
Mab_, can escape the charge of being caprices. And caprice, as some
have held, is the eternal enemy of art.
But the caprice of _The Strayed Reveller_ does not cease with its
rhymelessness. The rhythm and the line-division are also studiously
odd, unnatural, paradoxical. Except for the "poetic diction" of
putting "Goddess" after "Circe" instead of before it, the first stave
is merely a prose sentence, of strictly prosaic though not
inharmonious rhythm. But in this stave there is no instance of the
strangest peculiarity, and what seems to some the worst fault of the
piece, the profusion of broken-up decasyllables, which sometimes
suggest a very "corrupt" manuscript, or a passage of that singular
stuff in the Caroline dramatists which is neither blank verse, nor any
other, nor prose. Here are a few out of many instances--
"Is it, then, evening
So soon? [_I see the night-dews
Clustered in thick beads_], dim," etc.
* * *
["_When the white dawn first
Through the rough fir-planks. _"]
* * *
["_Thanks, gracious One!
Ah! the sweet fumes again._"]
* * *
["_They see the Centaurs
In the upper glens._"]
One could treble these--indeed in one instance (the
sketch of the Indian) the entire stanza of _eleven_ lines, by the
insertion of one "and" only, becomes a smooth blank-verse piece of
_seven_, two of which are indeed hemistichs, and three "weak-ended,"
but only such as are frequent in Shakespeare--
"They see the Indian drifting, knife in hand,
His frail boat moored to a floating isle--thick-matted
With large-leaved [_and_] low-creeping melon-plants
And the dark cucumber.
He reaps and stows them, drifting, drifting: round him,
Round his green harvest-plot, flow the cool lake-waves,
The mountains ring them."
Nor, perhaps, though the poem is a pretty one, will it stand criticism
of a different kind much better. Such mighty personages as Ulysses and
Circe are scarcely wanted as mere bystanders and "supers" to an
imaginative young gentleman who enumerates, somewhat promiscuously, a
few of the possible visions of the Gods. There is neither classical,
nor romantic, nor logical justification for any such mild effect of
the dread Wine of Circe: and one is driven to the conclusion that the
author chiefly wanted a frame, after his own fashion, for a set of
disconnected vignettes like those of Tennyson's _Palace of Art_
and _Dream of Fair Women_.
But if the title poem is vulnerable, there is plenty of compensation.
The opening sonnet--
"Two lessons, Nature, let me learn of thee"--
is perhaps rather learnt from Wordsworth, yet it does not fail to
strike the note which fairly differentiates the Arnoldian variety of
Wordsworthianism--the note which rings from _Resignation_ to
_Poor Matthias_, and which is a very curious cross between two
things that at first sight may seem unmarriageable, the Wordsworthian
enthusiasm and the Byronic despair. But of this[4] more when we have
had more of its examples before us. The second piece in the volume
must, or should, have struck--for there is very little evidence that
it did strike--readers of the volume as something at once considerable
and, in no small measure, new. _Mycerinus_, a piece of some 120
lines or so, in thirteen six-line stanzas and a blank-verse
_coda_, is one of those characteristic poems of this century,
which are neither mere "copies of verses," mere occasional pieces, nor
substantive compositions of the old kind, with at least an attempt at
a beginning, middle, and end. They attempt rather situations than
stories, rather facets than complete bodies of thought, or
description, or character. They supply an obvious way of escape for
the Romantic tendency which does not wish to break wholly with
classical tradition; and above all, they admit of indulgence in that
immense _variety_ which seems to have become one of the chief
devices of modern art, attempting the compliances necessary to gratify
modern taste.
The Herodotean anecdote of the Egyptian King Mycerinus, his
indignation at the sentence of death in six years as a recompense for
his just rule, and his device of lengthening his days by revelling all
night, is neither an unpromising nor a wholly promising subject. The
foolish good sense of Mr Toots would probably observe--and
justly--that before six years, or six months, or even six days were
over, King Mycerinus must have got very sleepy; and the philosophic
mind would certainly recall the parallel of Cleobis and Biton as to
the best gift for man. Mr Arnold, however, draws no direct moral. The
stanza-part of the poem, the king's expostulation, contains very fine
poetry, and "the note" rings again throughout it, especially in the
couplet--
"And prayers, and gifts, and tears, are fruitless all,
_And the night waxes, and the shadows fall_."
The blank-verse tail-piece is finer still in execution; it is, with
the still finer companion-_coda_ of _Sohrab and Rustum_, the
author's masterpiece in the kind, and it is, like that, an early and
consummate example of Mr Arnold's favourite device of finishing
without a finish, of "playing out the audience," so to speak, with
something healing and reconciling, description, simile, what not, to
relieve the strain of his generally sad philosophy and his often
melancholy themes.
One may less admire, despite its famous and often-quoted line,
"Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole,"
the sonnet _To a Friend_, praising Homer and Epictetus and
Sophocles, for it seems to some to have a smatch of priggishness. Nor
am I one of those who think very highly of the much longer _Sick
King in Bokhara_ which (with a fragment of an _Antigone_,
whereof more hereafter) follows, as this sonnet precedes, _The
Strayed Reveller_ itself. There is "the note," again, and I daresay
the orientalism has the exactness of colour on which, as we know from
the _Letters_, Mr Arnold prided himself. Yet the handling of the
piece seems to me prolix and uncertain, and the drift either very
obscure or somewhat unimportant. But about the _Shakespeare_
sonnet which follows there can be no controversy among the competent.
"Almost adequate" is in such a case the highest praise; and it must be
given.
The companions of this sonnet are respectable, but do not deserve much
warmer words; and then we turn to a style of poem remarkably different
from anything which the author had yet published and from most of his
subsequent work. It is not unnoteworthy that the batch of poems called
in the later collected editions _Switzerland_, and completed at
last by the piece called _On the Terrace at Berne_, appeared
originally piecemeal, and with no indication of connection. The first
of its numbers is here, _To my Friends who Ridiculed a Tender
Leave-taking_. It applies both the note of thought which has been
indicated, and the quality of style which had already disengaged
itself, to the commonest--the greatest--theme of poetry, but to one
which this poet had not yet tried--to Love. Let it be remembered that
the thought has the cast of a strictly pessimist quietism--that the
style aims, if it aims at any single thing, at the reproduction of the
simpler side of classicalism, at an almost prim and quakerish
_elegance_, a sort of childlike grace. There is, however, by no
means any great austerity in the tone: on the contrary, the refrain
(altered later)--
"Ere the parting kiss be dry,
Quick! thy tablets, Memory!"--
approaches the luscious. It is not easy to decide, and it is perhaps
in both senses impertinent to speculate, whether the "Marguerite"
(whose La Tour-like portrait is drawn in this piece with such relish,
and who is so philosophically left to her fate by her lover on the
Terrace at Berne later) had any live original. She seems a little more
human in some ways than most of those cloud-Junos of the poets, the
heroines of sonnet-sequence and song-string. She herself has a
distinct touch of philosophy, anticipating with nonchalant resignation
the year's severance, and with equally nonchalant anticipation the
time when
"Some day next year I shall be,
Entering heedless, kissed by thee."
Her wooer paints her with gusto, but scarcely with ardour; and ends
with the boding note--
"Yet, if little stays with man,
Ah! retain we all we can!"--
seeming to be at least as doubtful of his own constancy as of hers.
Nor do we meet her again in the volume. The well-known complementary
pieces which make up _Switzerland_ were either not written, or
held back.
The inferior but interesting _Modern Sappho_, almost the poet's
only experiment in "Moore-ish" method and melody--
"They are gone--all is still! Foolish heart, dost thou quiver?"--
is a curiosity rather than anything else. The style is ill suited to
the thought; besides, Matthew Arnold, a master at times of blank
verse, and of the statelier stanza, was less often an adept at the
lighter and more rushing lyrical measures. He is infinitely more at
home in the beautiful _New Sirens_, which, for what reason it is
difficult to discover, he never reprinted till many years later,
partly at Mr Swinburne's most judicious suggestion. The scheme is
trochaic, and Mr Arnold (deriving beyond all doubt inspiration from
Keats) was happier than most poets with that charming but difficult
foot. The note is the old one of yearning rather than passionate
melancholy, applied in a new way and put most clearly, though by no
means most poetically, in the lines--
"Can men worship the wan features,
The sunk eyes, the wailing tone,
Of unsphered, discrowned creatures,
Souls as little godlike as their own?"
The answer is, "No," of course; but, as some one informed Mr Arnold
many years later, we knew that before, and it is distressing to be
told it, as we are a little later, with a rhyme of "dawning" and
"morning." Yet the poem is a very beautiful one--in some ways the
equal of its author's best up to this time; at least he had yet done
nothing except the _Shakespeare_ sonnet equal to the splendid
stanza beginning--
"And we too, from upland valleys;"
and the cry of the repentant sirens, punished as they had sinned--
"'Come,' you say, 'the hours are dreary.'"
Yet the strong Tennysonian influence (which the poet rather
ungraciously kicked against in his criticism) shows itself here also;
and we know perfectly well that the good lines--
"When the first _rose_ flush was steeping
All the frore peak's _awful_ crown"--
are but an unconscious reminiscence of the great ones--
"And on the glimmering summit far withdrawn,
God made himself an _awful rose_ of dawn."
He kept this level, though here following not Tennyson or Keats but
Shelley, in the three ambitious and elaborate lyrics, _The Voice_, _To
Fausta_, and _Stagirius_, fine things, if somehow a little suggestive
of inability on their author's part fully to meet the demands of the
forms he attempts--"the note," in short, expressed practically as well
as in theory. _Stagirius_ in particular wants but a very little to be
a perfect expression of the obstinate questionings of the century; and
yet wanting a little, it wants so much! Others, _To a Gipsy Child_ and
_The Hayswater Boat_ (Mr Arnold never reprinted this), are but faint
Wordsworthian echoes; and thus we come to _The Forsaken Merman_.
It is, I believe, not so "correct" as it once was to admire this; but
I confess indocility to correctness, at least the correctness which
varies with fashion. _The Forsaken Merman_ is not a perfect poem--it
has _longueurs_, though it is not long; it has those inadequacies,
those incompetences of expression, which are so oddly characteristic
of its author; and his elaborate simplicity, though more at home here
than in some other places, occasionally gives a dissonance. But it is
a great poem--one by itself, one which finds and keeps its own place
in the foreordained gallery or museum, with which every true lover of
poetry is provided, though he inherits it by degrees. No one, I
suppose, will deny its pathos; I should be sorry for any one who fails
to perceive its beauty. The brief picture of the land, and the fuller
one of the sea, and that (more elaborate still) of the occupations of
the fugitive, all have their own charm. But the triumph of the piece
is in one of those metrical _coups_ which give the triumph of all the
greatest poetry, in the sudden change from the slower movements of the
earlier stanzas or strophes to the quicker sweep of the famous
conclusion--
"The salt tide rolls seaward,
Lights shine from the town"--
to
"She left lonely for ever
The kings of the sea."
Here the poet's poetry has come to its own.
_In Utrumque Paratus_ sounds the note again, and has one exceedingly
fine stanza:--
"Thin, thin the pleasant human noises grow,
And faint the city gleams;
Rare the lone pastoral huts--marvel not thou!
The solemn peaks but to the stars are known,
But to the stars, and the cold lunar beams;
Alone the sun arises, and alone
Spring the great streams."
But _Resignation_, the last poem in the book, goes far higher. Again,
it is too long; and, as is not the case in the _Merman_, or even in
_The Strayed Reveller_ itself, the _general_ drift of the poem, the
allegory (if it be an allegory) of the two treadings of "the self-same
road" with Fausta and so forth, is unnecessarily obscure, and does not
tempt one to spend much trouble in penetrating its obscurity. But the
splendid passage beginning--
"The Poet to whose mighty heart,"
and ending--
"His sad lucidity of soul,"
has far more interest than concerns the mere introduction, in this
last line itself, of one of the famous Arnoldian catchwords of later
years. It has far more than lies even in its repetition, with fuller
detail, of what has been called the author's main poetic note of
half-melancholy contemplation of life. It has, once more, the interest
of _poetry_--of poetical presentation, which is independent of any
subject or intention, which is capable of being adapted perhaps to
all, certainly to most, which lies in form, in sound, in metre, in
imagery, in language, in suggestion--rather than in matter, in sense,
in definite purpose or scheme.
It is one of the heaviest indictments against the criticism of the
mid-nineteenth century that this remarkable book--the most remarkable
first book of verse that appeared between Tennyson's and Browning's in
the early thirties and _The Defence of Guenevere_ in 1858--seems to
have attracted next to no notice at all. It received neither the
ungenerous and purblind, though not wholly unjust, abuse which in the
long--run did so much good to Tennyson himself, nor the absurd and
pernicious bleatings of praise which have greeted certain novices of
late years. It seems to have been simply let alone, or else made the
subject of quite insignificant comments.
In the same year (1849) Mr Arnold was represented in the _Examiner_ of
July 21 by a sonnet to the Hungarian nation, which he never included
in any book, and which remained peacefully in the dust-bin till a
reference in his _Letters_ quite recently set the ruthless reprinter
on its track. Except for an ending, itself not very good, the thing is
quite valueless: the author himself says to his mother, "it is not
worth much." And three years passed before he followed up his first
volume with a second, which should still more clearly have warned the
intelligent critic that here was somebody, though such a critic would
not have been guilty of undue hedging if he had professed himself
still unable to decide whether a new great poet had arisen or not.
This volume was _Empedodes on Etna and other Poems_, [still] _By A._
London: Fellowes, 1852. It contained two attempts--the title-piece and
_Tristram and Iseult_--much longer and more ambitious than anything
that the poet had yet done, and thirty-three smaller poems, of which
two--_Destiny_ and _Courage_--were never reprinted. It was again very
unequal--perhaps more so than the earlier volume, though it went
higher and oftener high. But the author became dissatisfied with it
very shortly after its appearance in the month of October, and
withdrew it when, as is said, less than fifty copies had been sold.
One may perhaps not impertinently doubt whether the critical reason,
_v. infra_--in itself a just and penetrating one, as well as admirably
expressed--which, in the Preface of the 1853 collection, the poet gave
for its exclusion (save in very small part) from that volume tells the
whole truth. At any rate, I think most good judges quarrel with
_Empedodes_, not because the situation is unmanageable, but because
the poet has not managed it. The contrast, in dramatic trio, of the
world-worn and disappointed philosopher, the practical and rather
prosaic physician, and the fresh gifts and unspoilt gusto of the
youthful poet, is neither impossible nor unpromising. Perhaps, as a
situation, it is a little nearer than Mr Arnold quite knew to that of
_Paracelsus_, and it is handled with less force, if with more
clearness, than Browning's piece. But one does not know what is more
amiss with it than is amiss with most of its author's longer
pieces--namely, that neither story nor character-drawing was his
_forte_, that the dialogue is too colourless, and that though the
description is often charming, it is seldom masterly. As before, there
are jarring rhymes--"school" and "oracle," "Faun" and "scorn."
Empedocles himself is sometimes dreadfully tedious; but the part of
Callicles throughout is lavishly poetical. Not merely the show
passages--that which the Roman father,
"Though young, intolerably severe,"
saved from banishment and retained by itself in the 1853 volume, as
_Cadmus and Harmonia_, and the beautiful lyrical close,--but the
picture of the highest wooded glen on Etna, and the Flaying of
Marsyas, are delightful things.
_Tristram and Iseult_, with fewer good patches, has a greater
technical interest. It is only one, but it is the most remarkable, of
the places where we perceive in Mr Arnold one of the most curious of
the notes of transition-poets. They will not frankly follow another's
metrical form, and they cannot strike out a new one for themselves. In
this piece the author--most attractively to the critic, if not always
quite satisfactorily to the reader--makes for, and flits about,
half-a-dozen different forms of verse. Now it is the equivalenced
octosyllable of the Coleridgean stamp rather than of Scott's or
Byron's; now trochaic decasyllabics of a rather rococo kind; and once
at least a splendid anapæstic couplet, which catches the ear and
clings to the memory for a lifetime--
"What voices are these on the clear night air?
What lights in the court? What steps on the stair?"
But the most interesting experiment by far is in the rhymed heroic,
which appears fragmentarily in the first two parts and substantively
in the third. The interest of this, which (one cannot but regret it)
Mr Arnold did not carry further, relapsing on a stiff if stately blank
verse, is not merely intrinsic, but both retrospective and
prospective. It is not the ordinary "stopped" eighteenth-century
couplet at all; nor the earlier one of Drayton and Daniel. It is the
"enjambed," very mobile, and in the right hands admirably fluent and
adaptable couplet, which William Browne and Chamberlayne practised in
the early and middle seventeenth century, which Leigh Hunt revived and
taught to Keats, and of which, later than Mr Arnold himself, Mr
William Morris was such an admirable practitioner. Its use here is
decidedly happy; and the whole of this part shows in Mr Arnold a
temporary Romantic impulse, which again we cannot but regret that he
did not obey. The picture-work of the earlier lines is the best he
ever did. The figure of Iseult with the White Hands stands out with
the right Præ-Raphaelite distinctness and charm; and the story of
Merlin and Vivian, with which, in the manner so dear to him, he
diverts the attention of the reader from the main topic at the end, is
beautifully told. For attaching quality on something like a large
scale I should put this part of _Tristram and Iseult_ much above both
_Sohrab and Rustum_ and _Balder Dead_; but the earlier parts are not
worthy of it, and the whole, like _Empedocles_, is something of a
failure, though both poems afford ample consolation in passages.
The smaller pieces, however, could have saved the volume had their
larger companions been very much weaker. The _Memorial Verses_ on
Wordsworth (published first in _Fraser_) have taken their place once
for all. If they have not the poetical beauty in different ways of
Carew on Donne, of Dryden on Oldham, even of Tickell upon Addison, of
_Adonais_ above all, of Wordsworth's own beautiful _Effusion_ on the
group of dead poets in 1834, they do not fall far short even in this
respect. And for adequacy of meaning, not unpoetically expressed, they
are almost supreme. If Mr Arnold's own unlucky and maimed definition
of poetry as "a criticism of life" had been true, they would be poetry
in quintessence; and, as it is, they are poetry.
Far more so is the glorious _Summer Night_, which came near the middle
of the book. There is a cheering doctrine of mystical optimism which
will have it that a sufficiently intense devotion to any ideal never
fails of at least one moment of consummate realisation and enjoyment.
Such a moment was granted to Matthew Arnold when he wrote _A Summer
Night_. Whether that rather vague life-philosophy of his, that
erection of a melancholy agnosticism _plus_ asceticism into a creed,
was anything more than a not ungraceful or undignified will-worship of
Pride, we need not here argue out. But we have seen how faithfully the
note of it rings through the verse of these years. And here it rings
not only faithfully, but almost triumphantly. The lips are touched at
last: the eyes are thoroughly opened to see what the lips shall speak:
the brain almost unconsciously frames and fills the adequate and
inevitable scheme. And, as always at these right poetic moments, the
minor felicities follow the major. The false rhymes are nowhere; the
imperfect phrases, the little sham simplicities or pedantries, hide
themselves; and the poet is free, from the splendid opening landscape
through the meditative exposition, and the fine picture of the
shipwreck, to the magnificent final invocation of the "Clearness
divine!"
His freedom, save once, is not so unquestionably exhibited in the
remarkable group of poems--the future constituents of the
_Switzerland_ group, but still not classified under any special
head--which in the original volume chiefly follow _Empedocles_, with
the batch later called "Faded Leaves" to introduce them. It is,
perhaps, if such things were worth attempting at all, an argument for
supposing some real undercurrent of fact or feeling in them, that they
are not grouped at their first appearance, and that some of them are
perhaps designedly separated from the rest. Even the name "Marguerite"
does not appear in _A Farewell_; though nobody who marked as well as
read, could fail to connect it with the _To my Friends_ of the former
volume. We are to suppose, it would appear, that the twelvemonth has
passed, and that Marguerite's anticipation of the renewed kiss is
fulfilled in the first stanzas. But the lover's anticipation, too, is
fulfilled, though as usual not quite as he made it; he wearies of his
restless and yet unmasterful passion; he rather muses and morals in
his usual key on the "way of a man with a maid" than complains or
repines. And then we go off for a time from Marguerite, though not
exactly from Switzerland, in the famous "_Obermann_" stanzas, a
variation of the Wordsworth memorial lines, melodious, but a very
little _impotent_--the English utterance of what Sainte-Beuve, I
think, called "the discouraged generation of 1850." Now mere
discouragement, except as a passing mood, though extremely natural, is
also a little contemptible--pessimism-and-water, mere peevishness to
the "fierce indignation," mere whining compared with the great ironic
despair. As for _Consolation_, which in form as in matter strongly
resembles part of the _Strayed Reveller_, I must say, at the risk of
the charge of Philistinism, that I cannot see why most of it should
not have been printed as prose. In fact, it would be a very bold and
astonishingly ingenious person who, not knowing the original,
perceived any verse-division in this--
"The bleak, stern hour, whose severe moments I would annihilate,
is passed by others in warmth, light, joy."
Nor perhaps can very much be said for some of the other things. The
sonnet afterwards entitled _The World's Triumphs_ is not strong;
_The Second Best_ is but "a chain of extremely valuable
thoughts"; _Revolution_ a conceit. _The Youth of Nature_ and
_The Youth of Man_ do but take up less musically the _threnos_ for
Wordsworth. But _Morality_ is both rhyme and poetry; _Progress_ is at
least rhyme; and _The Future_, though rhymeless again, is the best of
all Mr Arnold's waywardnesses of this kind. It is, however, in the
earlier division of the smaller poems--those which come between
_Empedocles_ and _Tristram_--that the interest is most concentrated,
and that the best thing--better as far as its subject is concerned
even than the _Summer Night_--appears. For though all does _not_
depend upon the subject, yet of two poems equally good in other ways,
that which has the better subject will be the better. Here we have the
bulk of the "Marguerite" or _Switzerland_ poems--in other words, we
leave the windy vagaries of mental indigestion and come to the real
things--Life and Love.
_The River_ does not name any one, though the "arch eyes"
identify Marguerite; and _Excuse_, _Indifference_, and _Too
Late_ are obviously of the company. But none of these is exactly of
the first class. We grow warmer with _On the Rhine_, containing,
among other things, the good distich--
"Eyes too expressive to lie blue,
Too lovely to be grey";
on which Mr Swinburne gave a probably unconscious _scholion_ as
well as variation in his own--
"Those eyes, the greenest of things blue,
The bluest of things grey."
The intense pathos, which the poet could rarely "let himself go"
sufficiently to reach, together with the seventeenth-century touch
which in English not unfrequently rewards the self-sacrifice necessary
to scholarly poets in such abandonment, appears in _Longing_;
_The Lake_ takes up the faint thread of story gracefully enough;
and _Parting_ does the same with more importance in a combination,
sometimes very effective, of iambic couplets and anapaestic strophes,
and with a touch of direct if not exalted nature in its revelation of
that terrible thing, retrospective jealousy, in the lover. Woe to the
man who allows himself to think--
"To the lips! ah! of others
Those lips have been pressed,
And others, ere I was,
Were clasped to that breast,"
and who does not at once exorcise the demon with the fortunately
all-potent spell of _Bocca bacciata_, and the rest! _Absence_ and
_Destiny_ show him in the same Purgatory; and it is impossible to say
that he has actually escaped in the crowning poem of the series--the
crowning-point perhaps of his poetry, the piece beginning
"Yes! in the sea of life enisled."
It is neither uninteresting nor unimportant that this exquisite piece,
by a man's admiration of which (for there are some not wholly lost,
who do _not_ admire it) his soundness in the Catholic Faith of
poetry may be tested, perhaps as well as by any other, has borne more
than one or two titles, It is in the 1852 volume, _To Marguerite. In
returning a volume of the letters of Ortis_. In 1853 it became
_Isolation_, its best name; and later it took the much less
satisfactory one of _To Marguerite--continued_, being annexed to
another.
_Isolation_ is preferable for many reasons; not least because the
actual Marguerite appears nowhere in the poem, and, except in the
opening monosyllable, can hardly be said to be even rhetorically
addressed. The poet's affection--it is scarcely passion--is there, but
in transcendence: he meditates more than he feels. And that function
of the riddle of the painful earth which Lucretius, thousands of years
ago, put in his grim _Nequicquam!_ which one of Mr Arnold's own
contemporaries formulated with less magnificence and more popularity,
but still with music and truth in _Strangers Yet_--here receives
almost its final poetical expression. The image--the islands in the
sea--is capitally projected in the first stanza; it is exquisitely
amplified in the second; the moral comes with due force in the third;
and the whole winds up with one of the great poetic phrases of the
century--one of the "jewels five [literally five!] words long" of
English verse--a phrase complete and final, with epithets in unerring
cumulation--
"The unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea."
_Human Life_, no ill thing in itself, reads a little weakly after
_Isolation_; but _Despondency_ is a pretty piece of melancholy, and,
with a comfortable stool, will suit a man well. In the sonnet, _When I
shall be divorced_, Mr Arnold tried the Elizabethan vein with less
success than in his Shakespeare piece; and _Self-Deception_ and _Lines
written by a Death-Bed_, with some beauty have more monotony. The
closing lines of the last are at the same time the moral of the book
and the formula of the Arnoldian "note"--
"Calm's not life's crown, though calm is well.
'Tis all perhaps which man acquires,
But 'tis not what our youth desires."
Again, we remember some one's parody-remonstrance thirty years later,
and again we may think that the condemnation which Mr Arnold himself
was soon to pronounce upon _Empedocles_ is rather disastrously
far-reaching, while even this phrase is a boomerang. Musical and
philosophical despair is one of the innumerable strings of the poetic
lyre; but 'tis not what our youth, or our age either, desires for a
monochord.
The remarkable manifesto just referred to was not long delayed.
Whatever may have been his opinion as to the reception of the two
volumes "by A," he made up his mind, a year after the issue and
withdrawal of the second, to put forth a third, with his name, and
containing, besides a full selection from the other two, fresh
specimens of the greatest importance. In the two former there had been
no avowed "purpose"; here, not merely were the contents sifted on
principle, the important _Empedocles_ as well as some minor
things being omitted: not merely did some of the new numbers,
especially _Sohrab and Rustum_, directly and intentionally
illustrate the: poet's theories, but those theories themselves were
definitely put in a _Preface_, which is the most important
critical document issued in England for something like a generation,
and which, as prefixed by a poet to his poetry, admits no competitors
in English, except some work of Dryden's and some of Wordsworth's.
Beginning with his reasons for discarding _Empedocles_, reasons
which he sums up in a sentence, famous, but too important not to
require citation at least in a note,[5] he passes suddenly to the
reasons which were _not_ his, and of which he makes a good
rhetorical starting-point for his main course. The bad critics of that
day had promulgated the doctrine, which they maintained till a time
within the memory of most men who have reached middle life, though the
error has since in the usual course given way to others--that "the
Poet must leave the exhausted past and draw his subjects from matters
of present import." This was the genuine
"_Times_-_v._-all-the-works-of-Thucydides" fallacy of the
mid-nineteenth century, the fine flower of Cobdenism, the heartfelt
motto of Philistia--as Philistia then was. For other times other
Philistines, and Ekron we have always with us, ready, as it was once
said, "to bestow its freedom in pinchbeck boxes" on its elect.
This error Mr Arnold has no difficulty in laying low at once; but
unluckily his swashing blow carries him with it, and he falls headlong
into fresh error himself. "What," he asks very well, "are the eternal
objects of Poetry, among all nations and at all times?" And he
answers--equally well, though not perhaps with impregnable logical
completeness and accuracy--"They are actions, human actions;
possessing an inherent interest in themselves, and which are to be
communicated in an interesting manner by the art of the Poet." Here he
tells the truth, but not the whole truth; he should have added
"thoughts and feelings" to "actions," or he deprives Poetry of half
her realm. But he is so far sufficient against his Harapha (for at
that date there were no critical Goliaths about). Human action
_does_ possess an "inherent," an "eternal," poetical interest and
capacity in itself. That interest, that capacity, is incapable of
"exhaustion"--nay (as Mr Arnold, though with bad arguments as well as
good, urges later), it is, on the whole, a likelier subject for the
poet when it is old, because it is capable of being grasped and
presented more certainly. But the defender hastens to indulge in more
than one of those dangerous sallies from his trenches which have been
fatal to so many heroes. He proclaims that the poet cannot "make an
intrinsically inferior action equally delightful with a more excellent
one by his treatment of it," forgetting that, until the action is
presented, we do not know whether it is "inferior" or not. He asks,
"What modern poem presents personages as interesting as Achilles,
Prometheus, Clytemnestra, Dido?" unsuspicious, or perhaps reckless, of
the fact that not a few men, who admire and know the classics quite as
well as he does, will cheerfully take up his challenge at any weapons
he likes to name, and with a score of instances for his quartette. It
is true that, thanks to the ineptitude of his immediate antagonists,
he recovers himself not ill by cleverly selecting the respectable
Hermann and Dorothea, the stagy-romantic Childe Harold, the creature
called "Jocelyn," and the shadowy or scrappy personages of the
_Excursion_, to match against his four. But this is manifestly
unfair. To bring Lamartine and Wordsworth in as personage-makers is
only honest rhetorically (a kind of honesty on which Wamba or
Launcelot Gobbo shall put the gloss for us). Nay, even those to whom
Goethe and Byron are not the ideal of modern poetry may retort that
Mephistopheles--that even Faust himself--is a much more "interesting"
person than the sulky invulnerable son of Thetis, while Gulnare,
Parisina, and others are not much worse than Dido. But these are mere
details. The main purpose of the _Preface_ is to assert in the most
emphatic manner the Aristotelian (or partly Aristotelian) doctrine
that "All depends on the subject," and to connect the assertion with a
further one, of which even less proof is offered, that "the Greeks
understood this far better than we do," and that they were _also_ the
unapproachable masters of "the grand style." These positions, which,
to do Mr Arnold justice, he maintained unflinchingly to his dying day,
are supported, not exactly by argument, but by a great deal of
ingenious and audacious illustration and variation of statement, even
Shakespeare, even Keats, being arraigned for their wicked refusal to
subordinate "expression" to choice and conception of subject. The
merely Philistine modernism is cleverly set up again that it may be
easily smitten down; the necessity of Criticism, and of the study of
the ancients in order to it, is most earnestly and convincingly
championed; and the piece ends with its other famous sentence about
"the wholesome regulative laws of Poetry" and their "eternal enemy,
Caprice."
As Mr Arnold's critical position will be considered as a whole later,
it would be waste of time to say very much more of this first
manifesto of his. It need only be observed that he might have been
already, as he often was later, besought to give some little notion of
what "the _grand style_" was; that, true and sound as is much of
the Preface, it is not a little exposed to the damaging retort, "Yes:
this is _your_ doxy, and she seems fair to you, no doubt; but so
does ours seem fair to us." Moreover, the "all-depends-on-the-subject"
doctrine here, as always, swerves from one fatal difficulty. If, in
what pleases poetically, poetical expression is always present, while
in only some of what pleases poetically is the subject at the required
height, is it not illogical to rule out, as the source of the poetic
pleasure, that which is always present in favour of that which is
sometimes absent?
We know from the _Letters_--and we should have been able to
divine without them--that _Sohrab and Rustum_, the first in
order, the largest in bulk, and the most ambitious in scheme of the
poems which appeared for the first time in the new volume, was written
in direct exemplification of the theories of the _Preface_. The
theme is old, and though not "classical" in place, is thoroughly so in
its nature, being the story of a combat between a father and a son,
who know not each other till too late, of the generosity of the son,
of the final triumph of the father, of the _anagnorisis_, with
the resignation of the vanquished and the victor's despair. The medium
is blank verse, of a partly but not wholly Miltonic stamp, very
carefully written, and rising at the end into a really magnificent
strain, with the famous picture of "the majestic river" Oxus floating
on regardless of these human woes, to where the stars
"Emerge, and shine upon the Aral Sea."
Even here, it is true, the Devil's Advocate may ask whether this, like
the _Mycerinus_ close, that of _Empedocles_, and others,
especially one famous thing, to which we shall come presently, is not
more of a purple tail-patch, a "tag," a "curtain," than of a
legitimate and integral finale. It is certain that Mr Arnold,
following the Greeks in intention no doubt, if not quite so closely as
he intended, was very fond of these "curtains"--these little
rhetorical reconciliations and soothings for the reader. But this is
the most in place of any of them, and certainly the noblest
_tirade_ that its author has left.
Most of the new poems here are at a level but a little lower than this
part of _Sohrab and Rustum_, while some of them are even above it
as wholes. _Philomela_ is beautiful, in spite of the obstinate
will-worship of its unrhymed Pindaric: the _Stanzas to the Memory of
Edward Quillinan_ are really pathetic, though slightly irritating
in their "sweet simplicity"; and if _Thekla's Answer_ is nothing
particular, _The Neckan_ nothing but a weaker doublet of the
_Merman, A Dream_ is noteworthy in itself, and as an outlier of
the _Marguerite_ group. Then we have three things, of which the
first is, though unequal, great at the close, while the other two rank
with the greatest things Mr Arnold ever did. These are _The Church
of Brou_, _Requiescat_, and _The Scholar-Gipsy_.
If, as no critic ever can, the critic could thoroughly discover the
secret of the inequality of _The Church of Brou_, he might, like
the famous pedant, "put away" Mr Arnold "fully conjugated in his
desk." The poem is in theme and scheme purely Romantic, and
"nineteenth century" in its looking back to a simple and pathetic
story of the Middle Age--love, bereavement, and pious resignation. It
is divided into three parts. The first, in trochaic ballad metre,
telling the story, is one of the poet's weakest things. You may oft
see as good in Helen Maria Williams and the Delia Cruscans. The
second, describing the church where the duke and duchess sleep, in an
eight-line stanza of good fashion, is satisfactory but nothing more.
And then the third, after a manner hardly paralleled save in Crashaw's
_Flaming Heart_, breaks from twaddle and respectable verse into a
rocket-rush of heroic couplets, scattering star-showers of poetry all
over and round the bewildered reader. It is artifice rather than art,
perhaps, to lisp and drawl, that, when you _do_ speak out, your
speech may be the more effective. But hardly anything can make one
quarrel with such a piece of poetry as that beginning--
"So rest, for ever rest, O princely pair!"
and ending--
"The rustle of the eternal rain of Love."
On the other hand, in _Requiescat_ there is not a false note,
unless it be the dubious word "vasty" in the last line; and even that
may shelter itself under the royal mantle of Shakespeare. The poet has
here achieved what he too often fails in, the triple union of
simplicity, pathos, and (in the best sense) elegance. The dangerous
repetitions of "roses, roses," "tired, tired," &c., come all right;
and above all he has the flexibility and quiver of metre that he too
often lacks. His trisyllabic interspersions--the leap in the vein that
makes iambic verse alive and passionate--are as happy as they can be,
and the relapse into the uniform dissyllabic gives just the right
contrast. He must be [Greek: ê thêrion ê theos]--and whichever he
be, he is not to be envied--who can read _Requiescat_ for the
first or the fiftieth time without mist in the eyes and without a
catch in the voice.
But the greatest of these--the greatest by far--is
_The Scholar-Gipsy_. I have read--and that not once only, nor
only in the works of unlettered and negligible persons--expressions of
irritation at the local Oxonian colour. This is surely amazing. One
may not be an Athenian, and never have been at Athens, yet be able to
enjoy the local colour of the _Phædrus_. One may not be an
Italian, and never have been in Italy, yet find the _Divina
Commedia_ made not teasing but infinitely vivid and agreeable by
Dante's innumerable references to his country, Florentine and general.
That some keener thrill, some nobler gust, may arise in the reading of
the poem to those who have actually watched
"The line of festal light in Christ Church Hall"
from above Hinksey, who know the Fyfield elm in May, and have "trailed
their fingers in the stripling Thames" at Bablockhithe,--may be
granted. But in the name of Bandusia and of Gargarus, what offence can
these things give to any worthy wight who by his ill luck has not seen
them with eyes? The objection is so apt to suggest a suspicion, as
illiberal almost as itself, that one had better not dwell on it.
Let us hope that there are after all few to whom it has presented
itself--that most, even if they be not sons by actual matriculation of
Oxford, feel that, as of other "Cities of God," they are citizens of
her by spiritual adoption, and by the welcome accorded in all such
cities to God's children. But if the scholar had been an alumnus of
Timbuctoo, and for Cumnor and Godstow had been substituted strange
places in _-wa_ and _-ja_, I cannot think that, even to
those who are of Oxford, the intrinsic greatness of this noble poem
would be much affected, though it might lose a separable charm. For it
has everything--a sufficient scheme, a definite meaning and purpose, a
sustained and adequate command of poetical presentation, and passages
and phrases of the most exquisite beauty. Although it begins as a
pastoral, the mere traditional and conventional frippery of that form
is by no means so prominent in it as in the later (and, I think, less
consummate) companion and sequel _Thyrsis_. With hardly an
exception, the poet throughout escapes in his phraseology the two main
dangers which so constantly beset him--too great stiffness and too
great simplicity. His "Graian" personification is not overdone; his
landscape is exquisite; the stately stanza not merely sweeps, but
sways and swings, with as much grace as state. And therefore the
Arnoldian "note"--the special form of the _maladie du siècle_
which, as we have seen, this poet chooses to celebrate--acquires for
once the full and due poetic expression and music, both symphonic and
in such special clangours as the never-to-be-too-often-quoted
distich--
"Still nursing the unconquerable hope,
Still clutching the inviolable shade"--
which marks the highest point of the composition.
The only part on which there may be some difference between admirers
is the final simile of the Tyrian trader. This finishes off the piece
in nineteen lines, of which the poet was--and justly--proud, which are
quite admirable by themselves, but which cannot perhaps produce any
very clear evidences of right to be where they are. No ingenuity can
work out the parallel between the "uncloudedly joyous" scholar who is
bid avoid the palsied, diseased _enfants du siècle_, and the
grave Tyrian who was indignant at the competition of the merry Greek,
and shook out more sail to seek fresh markets. It is, once more,
simply an instance of Mr Arnold's fancy for an end-note of relief, of
cheer, of pleasant contrast. On his own most rigid principles, I fear
it would have to go as a mere sewn-on patch of purple: on mine, I
welcome it as one of the most engaging passages of a poem delightful
throughout, and at its very best the equal of anything that was
written in its author's lifetime, fertile as that was in poetry.
He himself, though he was but just over thirty when this poem
appeared, and though his life was to last for a longer period than had
passed since his birth to 1853, was to make few further contributions
to poetry itself. The reasons of this comparative sterility are
interesting, and not quite so obvious as they may appear. It is true,
indeed,--it is an arch-truth which has been too rarely
recognised,--that something like complete idleness, or at any rate
complete freedom from regular mental occupation, is necessary to the
man who is to do poetic work great in quality and in quantity at once.
The hardest occupation--and Mr Arnold's, though hard, was not exactly
that--will indeed leave a man sufficient time, so far as mere time is
concerned, to turn out as much verse as the most fertile of poets has
ever produced. But then that will scarcely do. The Muses are
feminine--and it has been observed that you cannot make up even to the
most amiable and reasonable of that sex for refusing to attend to her
at the minute when she wants _you_, by devoting even hours, even days,
when you are at leisure for _her_. To put the thing more seriously,
though perhaps not more truly, the human brain is not so constituted
that you can ride or drive or "train" from school to school, examining
as you go, for half-a-dozen or half-a-score hours a-day, or that you
can devote the same time to the weariest and dreariest of all
businesses, the reading of hundreds of all but identical answers to
the same stock questions, and yet be fresh and fertile for imaginative
composition. The nearest contradictory instances to this proposition
are those of Scott and Southey, and they are, in more ways than one or
two, very damaging instances--exceptions which, in a rather horrible
manner, do prove the rule. To less harassing, and especially less
peremptory, work than Mr Arnold's, as well as far more literary in
kind, Scott sacrificed the minor literary graces, Southey immolated
the choicer fruits of genius which he undoubtedly possessed the power
of producing; and both "died from the top downward."
But there was something more than this. Mr Arnold's poetic ambition,
as we have seen, did not aim at very long and elaborate works. His
forte was the occasional piece--which might still suggest itself and
be completed--which, as we shall see, did sometimes suggest itself and
was completed--in the intervals, the holidays, the relaxations of his
task. And if these lucid and lucent intervals, though existent, were
so rare, their existence and their rarity together suggest that
something more than untoward circumstance is to blame for the fact
that they did not show themselves oftener. A full and constant tide of
inspiration is imperative; it will not be denied; it may kill the poet
if he cannot or will not give vent to it, but it will not be patient
of repression--quietly content to appear now and then, even on such
occasions as the deaths of a Clough and a Stanley. Nor is it against
charity or liberality, while it is in the highest degree consonant
with reason and criticism, to infer that Mr Arnold's poetic vein was
not very full-blooded, that it was patient of refusal to indulge it,
that his poetry, in nearly the happiest of his master's phrases, was
not exactly "inevitable," despite the exquisiteness of its quality on
occasion.
It is fortunate for the biographer that this earliest part of Mr
Arnold's life is so fertile in poetry, for otherwise, in the dearth of
information, it would be a terribly barren subject. The thirty years
of life yield us hardly twenty pages of letters, of which the first,
with its already cited sketch of Laleham, is perhaps the most
interesting. At the Trafalgar Square riots of March 1848 the writer is
convinced that "the hour of the hereditary peerage and eldest sonship
and immense properties has struck"; sees "a wave of more than American
vulgarity, moral, intellectual, and social, preparing to break over
us"; and already holds that strange delusion of his that "the French
are the most civilised of European peoples." He develops this on the
strength of "the intelligence of their idea-moved classes" in a letter
to his sister; meets Emerson in April; goes to a Chartist
"convention," and has a pleasant legend for Miss Martineau that the
late Lord Houghton "refused to be sworn in as a special constable,
that he might be free to assume the post of President of the Republic
at a moment's notice." He continues to despair of his country as
hopelessly as the Tuxford waiter;[6] finds Bournemouth "a very stupid
place"--which is distressing; it is a stupid place enough now, but it
was not then: "a great moorland covered with furze and low pine coming
down to the sea" could never be that--and meets Miss Brontë, "past
thirty and plain, with expressive grey eyes though." The rest we must
imagine.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The editor glosses this variously spelt and etymologically
puzzling word "landing-stage." But unless I mistake, a "kempshott,"
"campshed," or "campshedding" is not a landing-stage (though it helps
to make one) so much as a river-wall of stakes and planks, put to
guard the bank against floods, the wash of barges, &c.
[2] _Glen Desseray and other Poems_. By John Campbell Shairp,
London, 1888. P. 218.
[3] This statement may seem too sweeping, especially as there is
neither room nor occasion for justifying it fully. Let us only
indicate, as among the heads of such a justification, the following
sins of English criticism between 1840-1860,--the slow and reluctant
acceptance even of Tennyson, even of Thackeray; the obstinate refusal
to give Browning, even after _Bells and Pomegranates_, a fair
hearing; the recalcitrance to Carlyle among the elder, and Mr Ruskin
among the younger, innovators in prose; the rejection of a book of
erratic genius like _Lavengro_; the ignoring of work of such
combined intrinsic beauty and historic importance as _The Defence of
Guenevere_ and FitzGerald's _Omar Khayyam_. For a sort of
quintessence of literary Philistinism, see the advice of Richard Ford
(himself no Philistine) to George Borrow, in Professor Knapp's
_Life_ of the latter, i. 387.
[4] This "undertone," as Mr Shairp calls it.
[5] "What, then, are the situations, from the representation of which,
though accurate, no poetical enjoyment can be derived? They are those
in which the suffering finds no vent in action; in which a continuous
state of mental distress is prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope,
or resistance; in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to
be done. In such situations there is inevitably something morbid, in
the description of them something monotonous. When they occur in
actual life, they are painful, not tragic; the representation of them
in poetry is painful also."
[6] "The Tuxford waiter desponds exactly as you do."--_Sydney Smith
to Jeffrey_.