# Four Victorian Poets: a Study of Clough, Arnold, Rossetti and Morris/Matthew Arnold

MATTHEW ARNOLD
Matthew Arnold, who is loved as a poet by so many of us, and justly loved; whom we do not read continuously as we read the greater poets, but who suits us so well in certain circumstances of the inner life; who, in them, reflects and strengthens us; whose poetry, always unimitative and underived, rose clear out of his own soul; who stood alone with an ill-hidden scorn for other English poetry in his eyes—was worthy of more acceptance as a poet than he received in his lifetime, and has his own distinct chair in the general assembly and church of the first-born of England.
He was unfortunate in the time in which be began to be a poet, if any man who has a strong will, a clear aim, a joyous temper, and a bold faith, can be called unfortunate at any time. Arnold had a strong will, but it was not strong enough to master within himself the sceptical spirit of his age (which, however useful, is not poetical), or the unpoetic spirit of self-analysis, which, in men of the poetic temperament, naturally accompanies the habit of scepticism. Inquiry is a good thing, but it is prosaic. It is true that Arnold grew into a clear aim, but he was at first ​too contemptuous of the world in which he lived, and too apart from it to give it that sympathy with its goods, which is one of the needs-be of a poet's power. He had courage, but it was not the courage of faith or of hope; he had little firm faith or hope in God, or in man, or, I may say, in himself. He had insight into the evils, the dulness, the follies, the decay, and death of the time at which he wrote; but he had little insight into its good, into the hopes and ideas which were arising in its darkness, or the life which was collecting itself together under its decay. His temper, therefore, was not joyous, nor was it in sympathy with the temper of the whirling but formative time in which he began, and continued, to write poetry. I do not say he was at daggers drawn with the elements of his world; he did not fight with them in the fierce way in which Byron and Shelley fought with those of their day; but he sat apart from them in a silent, brooding, wrathful, even contemptuous opposition, When he spoke against them in poetry, it was not so much to attack or vilify them, but to glorify the spirit which was the enemy of their turbulence. He did not see the elements of life and of far-off peace in the turbulence, and he never gave it sympathy. At times he could not bear it, and he fled away, like Obermann, into the solitudes of nature to commune with his own soul. It was not a wise thing to do, but he thought it eminently wise; and perhaps it was the only thing he was then capable ​of doing. In later life he modified his view and felt that he had been too quick to condemn his world, But he was too proud to say that he had then been too blind to be able to divide the good from the evil in the turmoil, or that he had not then seen its good.
His earlier poetry then—since he and his world were so inharmonious—was, with a few exceptions, too much a poetry of opposition. He could not sufficiently disentangle himself from the pressure of his age, and he hated that pressure. Under it his poetry contended, mourned, and analysed. And it suffered, as poetry, from this perturbing element. Had he possessed the animation, like that of birds in spring, which marks the great poets, he would have neutralised this element. But he had it not; he could not lift himself into that bright, magnanimous air, in whose clearness a poet sees, and is able to love and help, the good as well as the evil, the joy as well as the trouble, of humanity.
Arnold sat by the tomb where he thought the true life of England lay dead, and mourned over its disappointed hopes. He did not hear the angel of the nation say, "What is best in England has arisen, and has gone before you into Galilee." It was not his to understand—"Let the dead past bury his own dead." Only at intervals the clouds lifted for him, and he saw through mist the flush of dawn; but he had not heard enough to follow that gleam. He had settled down in these early days into a stoic sadness, as yet unilluminated by humour. It had a certain moral force, a grim ​tenacity of duty, a stern resolution to fight on, were the heavens themselves to fall; and this makes his poetry dear and useful to men and women even now who may still be in his condition, But the condition did not develop his art, as it might have been developed in a happier world. Absence of joy limited, it even maimed, his creative energy. It repressed in him the powers of faith and hope. And the want of these powers, without which creativeness is weak, prevented him all his life long from being as complete or as great a poet as either Tennyson or Browning.
Without the full energy of these powers, his poetry suffers in melody, in charm, in unconsciousness, in natural exquisiteness of expression (there is some art-exquisitiveness of expression), in imaginative ardour, except when he was writing mournfully. In the elegy, where his genius was quite at ease, he is excellent. Nothing better has been done in that way for two centuries than the Scholar Gipsy and Thyrsis. Indeed, all his best verse has this elegiac note, or nearly all. I should like, among a few others, to except the Strayed Reveller, into the inconsequence of whose enchanted intoxication I wish he had oftener wandered.
It was a pity, then, he was so unfortunate in the time at which he began and continued to write, for had he not been burdened with its fierce questionings and turmoil, had he found himself in an age of sweetness and light, when life was keen and keen for high things, he had been a greater poet. He might then ​have spoken to the universal in man, "seen life steadily and seen it whole," as he said of Sophocles. Steadily he did see it, but not as a whole. That he could not do. He is the poet of a backwater, of a harbour, of a retired garden, not of the full, swift river, not of the open sea, not of the king's highway. He is so far like Hamlet that he was not able to grasp the nettle of the world so that it should not sting. The sad, philosophic, poetic imagination of Hamlet was also his, but he had more moral power, a closer grasp on realities, than Hamlet. And he had this power because he clasped stoicism—which Hamlet could not do—to his breast.
The power of stoicism lies in the appeal it makes to the moral endurance of the soul in resolute, unviolent resistance to the tyranny of outward and inward evil. It it bids us claim our moral individuality as the conqueror of fate and of the outward world. The claim is high, and uplifts the character of the claimer. "The fates are hard on me," the stoic says, "but they shall not subdue my soul. Things are dark as night, but there shall be light within. Pain is here, but it does not touch my real self. It is not I that suffer, but the shell of me. I do not understand why the world is so wrong and so troubled, but one thing I do understand, that I need not be wrong or troubled, and that I will not be. The furies of the gods may hunt me down, but my soul remains unconquered, even by the gods."
There is no doubt of the power which is hid in that ​position, and it has transferred itself to a great deal of Arnold's poetry. It makes his language resonant, clear; his thought, his matter, weighty; and it brings into his poetry a moral passion which at times reaches a lofty exaltation. Moreover, its spirit proceeds outward from the poetry, as should be the case with any fine art work, into the lives of a number of men and women who are battling with fate, who do not understand why things are so awry, who find no brightness in life, but whose soul passionately answers the stoic's appeal to keep themselves, in spite of fate, unsubdued in right, clear in their own thought, and unconquered by evil. "I am I," they say, "and everything else is indifferent." It is to that class of men and women that Matthew Arnold speaks with power, and will continue to speak, it may be, for centuries to come.
But this power has the weakness which follows on pride. It thinks itself powerful, and in the thought loses some of its strength. If it belong to an artist, it makes him not only intrude it into his art, but also over-conscious of the artist-elements in his nature. Arnold shared more than was fitting in this weakness, and it lowers the excellence of many of his poems. It helps to place him below the poets who are unconscious, in the rush of their creation, of themselves; who, lost in the glory and grief of what they see, break into song without knowing why or how they sing; whose work is prideless, for they behold face to face the infinities of that they try to express; who leave any work ​they have finished behind them without considering it, and pass on, unconcerned, to new things. Rarely, if ever, does Arnold's poetry make that impression upon us. It has too much pride in itself; it is too self-conscious of its artistic effort, and this lowers its imaginative power; and too conscious of its being moral and teaching morality, and this lowers its influence as art.
Then, again, the stoic position which gave him the power of which I have spoken, made him weak, on another side, as a poet. It often isolated him too much from the mass of men, very few of whom are stoics either in philosophy or practice. A certain touch of contempt for ordinary humanity entered into his work. His appeal was so far to the few, not to the many; to a class, not to the whole; to the self-centred, not to those who lose their self in love. In this way also, he became too self-involved, and, troubled with the restlessness and noise of man, took refuge in the solitudes of his own heart. Owing to this self-involvement—which, though it was modified towards the end of his poetic life, was an integral part of his nature— he was very rarely, if ever, swept by any high passion out of himself altogether. He could not feel, till later in life, the greater waves of human emotion, save once perhaps with regard to England's vast imperial toil, breaking upon his heart. Into the infinite hopes, the infinite possibilities of man—into that country where the greater poets live, his early poetry entered only for moments, and then his sceptical self-consciousness ​recalled him from it, and bade him consider how little the history of his own soul supported the far-off hopes for man into which he had been momentarily hurried by poetic imagination. The highest, the most inspiring passion which can thrill a poet was therefore not his in the first years of his poetry. This self-involvement and this isolation from the universal hope of man are the great weakness inherent in stoicism, and when they belong to an artist, they enfeeble his art. Only by drinking incessantly at the deep wells of common humanity does a poet win the power to rejoice in his creative work, and the love which enables him to continue it till old age. Arnold, in the end, even though he did gain much self-forgetful sympathy with humanity, found his poetic power fail. His vein was exhausted. He took to prose. But the greater men, not isolated from but intimately mixed with all men: if not in life, yet by the imagination of love; not self-involved but self-forgetful—love the whole movement of mankind, even the noise and restlessness of it, appeal to and win the universal love they give, are always impassioned by the divinity which they see everywhere in man, think nothing common or unclean, and live, eagerly creating to the close.
However, there is something to say on the other side. Arnold was too human to be the finished stoic. The stoic demand for duty, for obedience to the eternal laws of right, was always with him. It often fills his poetry with an austere beauty. It keeps much of its ​dignity, even in poems where, like a serpent round the witch it loves, he winds round and round himself and saves them from failure. So far he was pure stoic.
But the stoic demand of indifference to pain and trouble, of the independence of the soul of all the fates of men—Arnold could not fulfil. His stoicism broke down into sadness for himself and for the world. The pain was too great not to cry out, not to afflict the soul. It sought expression, and it found it in his poetry.
The stoic might think this a weakness, unworthy of a philosopher. But in a poet, this deep emotion of sadness, felt in himself and for himself, but felt far more for the labouring and laden world, is not a weakness but a strength. A poet may have a philosophy, but the proper mistress of his house is poetry. If his philosophy seek to be mistress, poetry shakes her celestial pinions, and flies away. But when Arnold, violating his stoicism expressed his pain with cries, his philosophic weakness became poetic strength. He came back to high natural art and feeling; he did the natural thing; and, indeed, it is one of the paradoxes of life, the truth of which the stoic forgets or does not know, that till pain is expressed, it cannot be fully conquered. The stoic who hides it in his breast or pretends that it does not exist, never conquers it or its evil. But the poet, expressing pain as well as pleasure, becomes at one with all who feel pain. Conscious then of his brotherhood with man, and far more conscious of it ​than by sympathy only with man's pleasure, strength and passion flow into his poetry. Men feel themselves expressed, sympathised with, and empowered by the noble representation of their trouble, and send back to the poet their gratitude and sympathy, till he, conscious of their affection, is himself uplifted and inspired, Then his poetic power, fed by human love, increases. A fuller emotion, a wider thought, a knowledge of life, deepened by imagination into something far more true than any intellectual philosophy of life can give,—fill his verse with the unsought for, revealing phrases, which seem to express, with strange simplicity, the primary thoughts of Being, to speak from the secret place where the laws of the universe abide.
The stoic tends to be unhuman, but is continually like Arnold self-humanised; and the breakdown of Arnold's stoicism into sadness for the world, and his expression of it, was a progress in him, not a retrogression. The higher levels of song, where joy lives because of the presence of faith and hope, he did not reach; but this mingling in his poetry of stoicism and of the sad crying which denies stoicism, of the spirit which isolates itself from the crowd of men in lonely endurance and the spirit which breaks down from that position into sympathy with men, gives to Arnold's poetry a strange passion, a stimulating inconsistency, an element of attractive surprise—the atmosphere changing from poem to poem and within the same poem—and a solitary distinction. No other poet is ​built on the same lines. Few have been so self-centred, and none pleases us more whenever we are in that mood in which, dividing ourselves from all mankind, we choose to cherish our own personality, to sit in its silent chambers, to reject the Not-me, to believe that in our own being is the universe, that nothing exists beyond ourselves. To that strange mood, which may have its good if it last a short time, but which has certainly its own naughtiness, Arnold speaks, and has revealed its thoughts in a poetry full of subtle and impassioned charm. It came out of the depths of his nature; but he could not always remain in these solitudes of the soul, He fled from them into sympathy with the sorrow and confusion of men; and the mingling of these two opposites—and they are frequently mingled, even in single poems—gives this uncommon note of distinction to his poetry; a human cry, shrill and piercing as of a soul divided, beating between two moods, and angry with the indecision. The instrument on which he plays is like a violin played by a regretful artist in a lonely room.
These are considerations concerning his poetry which arise out of his character. There are others which arise from the condition of the world when he began to write. It was a time (and I repeat what I have already said in writing of Clough), when the old foundations of the Christian faith were no longer accepted without inquiry. They were dug down to, exposed to the dry light of science, and to a searching ​investigation. The criticism of German scholars had thrown the gravest doubt on the history of the Gospels; scientific discoveries and historical criticism had invaded the Old Testament; and both had begun to shatter that belief in the inspiration of the Bible on which so much of English religion reposed in peace. The stormy waves these investigations awakened had reached Oxford when Arnold and Clough were students, and they were first disturbed, then dismayed, and finally thrown into a scepticism which profoundly troubled them, Their skies were darkened; the old stars had gone out in the heavens, and no new stars had arisen. They staggered blindly on, and at last fell back on their own souls alone, on the unchallengeable sense of right they felt therein, on the imperative of duty and on resolution to obey it. Nothing else was left. But much more had been; and it was with bitter and ineffable regret that they looked back on the days when they were at peace, when the sun shone upon their way. With what intimate naiveté Clough expressed this trouble, and what cure he found for it, has been already considered. With Clough it was extremely personal. Arnold generalised it far more; hey extended its results all over life; it drove him in after days, not now, to consider world-wide questions, the fates and fortunes of the whole race.
Fifteen years after his earliest book of poetry he emerged from the trouble I have described. His long strife ended in a quiet force which looked steadily on ​the problems of life. He looked with eyes, purged from personal consideration, at the pressure of every kind of trouble on the human family, and asked why it was and to what end. And he never let the question go till he found his solution for it, and gave it to the world in hope that it might help and comfort others. In the process, he reconstituted, for himself, the theology of his youth. And then, feeling, as he did, that in faith in God, in worship, in a right and graceful spirit of love, and in righteousness of conduct, was the true foundation of life, he devoted himself, in prose, to clear away from religion those forms of it which violated intellectual or moral truth, and to establish what was eternal in it, beyond controversy, and fitted for God to be, and for man to believe and love. With that, into which he passed from poetry, we have nothing to do here. What we are in contact with now is his early religious trouble, and its distress breathes through all his youthful poetry.
Again—and this belongs to his personal feeling against mob turbulence and chattering theories—Oxford, when he was there, was filled with the noise of controversy between the High Churchmen and their opponents. Both were intolerant one of another, and the battle raged with confused tumult, not only between these two hot-headed parties, but also between both of them united against the Neologians, as the critical school was then called. Clough, greatly disturbed by the loss of his faith, was not much disturbed ​by the noise of the contest in which he lost it. He rather liked the smoke and the roar of fighting; the revolutionary atmosphere he breathed with pleasure. But Arnold was of another temper. He hated noise, quarrel, confusion; he loved tranquillity, tolerance, clearness, plainness, moderation, ordered thought, and passions brought under control, especially those passions which belong to theological contests of the intellect. He had much ado to keep down his natural abhorrence of this tumultuous shouting about things which even then seemed to him to have nothing to do with the weightier matters of the Law or the Gospel. "It is a sorrowful time," he might have said, "to live in; the outward noise about things indifferent doubles my inward trouble."
Then again, the year before he published his first volume of poems, the whole continent was disquieted, and even England shared in that disquiet. France, Italy, Germany, Austria broke into revolution; the Chartist movement threatened revolution in England. The accredited order which in 1815 had restored so many of the evils the French Revolution had shaken, was again (to leave out 1830) broken into by popular fury, and with a confusion of thought and an ignorance of what was to replace the old, which jarred on everything which Arnold thought wise and practical. Clough liked it; he wrote rejoicingly from Paris, with whose revolution he lived; he stayed at Rome when the people set up a republic and fought the French. ​But Arnold had no belief in the popular cries, and he hated the disturbance and the noise. Out of these, he thought, no salvation comes. And weariness of the turmoil fell upon him, and desire that he had been born at another and a quieter time, By this also his personal sadness was deepened, and it drove him into a longing for solitude and calm outside tortured world.
We can trace these impressions all through his first three volumes of poems; and we can read what was his temper with regard to revolutionary Europe in the two sonnets addressed to Clough, entitled To a Republican Friend. The first says how far he agrees with his friend, and it would not have been thought worth much by the enthusiasm of Clough. The second says where he parts from his friend; and it is full of his suppressed anger with, and disbelief in, the revolutionary movement. More impressive than these, more personal, expressing that which was deepest in him at this time, that which he most desired—and more important for our knowledge of him, because he chose it as a preface to his third volume, published three years after his first—is the sonnet with which the volume of 1849 opens:—
To work with Nature's constancy, but without turbulent passion; like her sleepless ministers "Their ​glorious tasks in silence perfecting." To stand apart from fierce explosions like the Revolution was his desire, but he forgot that Nature sometimes works by explosions, relieving by them her over-burdened breast, and that revolutions are in a strict analogy with her volcanic outbursts. Yet Arnold would have disliked Nature's catastrophes and blamed her for them. His work was to be, he hoped, done with patience, trusting his own soul, choosing one clear aim, and confident that in following it sincerely he would best assist the world. It was for that he praised the Duke of Wellington. He had a vision, Arnold thought, of the general law, saw what he could and could not do, and followed the one thing he saw. That made, among all the fret and foam of Europe acting without sight of a clear goal, the splendour of his place in history. But to fulfil this resolve clearness of vision was the great need, that clearness which all his life was Arnold's deep desire. In a noble sonnet, To a Friend, he asked who are they who support his mind in these bad days? They are Homer, whose clear soul though his eyes were blind, saw man and life so well; and, for the inner strength of the soul, Epictetus, whose friendship he had lately won; and, for the just and temperate view of life, Sophocles—
​all Greeks; for Arnold bent his poetic effort to that Hellenic spirit which, by temperance and the clearness ensuing from it, and by the desire to make the world better, made the artist-work of the Greeks so nearly perfect.
But to return to the sonnet on Nature (Quiet Work). It is plain that its view of Nature is quite different from that of the poets who preceded Arnold. It contains that scientific conception of Nature, already far more than half embodied, which declared that all its developments could be correlated under one energy and were forms of that energy, ourselves included. Belief in this theory made a mighty change in all poetry written by men who were sufficiently educated to realise it, and it influenced a good deal of Arnold's poetry from the beginning to the end. Not altogether; he slipped out of the theory where it pleased him. At one point, even now (and this is illustrated in another sonnet—In Harmony with Nature), he rebelled against it, at the point where it subjected man, as only a part of Nature, to its law. He was willing to be taught by the course of Nature. He was not willing to be mingled up with her.
We are different from her; we move on in a straight line, he might have said, Nature goes round and round. "We begin," he did say, "where Nature ends"; and he recurs elsewhere to the same thought.
​These are some of the cries of his first poems, when he was but twenty-seven, It is plain, then, that the racking trouble of man's disobedience to law, his necessary restlessness, and the confused noise that attended it—in contrast with Nature's obedience, tranquillity, and steady toil—were heavily pressed on Arnold by the circumstances of his time. He found no solution of the problem now, none in reasoning, none in warring religions and philosophies. "I will listen no more to them," he thought; "I will fall back on my own soul; know the worst and endure it austerely, holding fast to the power of righteousness within. Of that I may be sure. The will is free, the seeds of Godlike power are in us. Within, we may be what we will."
This did not solve the question, but it gave a noble basis for life, and the worry of the question might be laid by. What we can, we will secure. Then wait, and as the world goes on the question may solve itself. At least, if the solution come, those who wait quietly in patient righteousness obeying law, will be capable of seeing it. Even if we are mixed up with a blind Nature, with matter alone, have ourselves no divine origin, and no end beyond the elements, there is that in us which is ready for either fate, and which is above both, and can choose how to meet the one or the other. There is a remarkable poem—In Ultrumque Paratus—which, on a higher poetic level than most of the other poems in this first volume, puts this view before us. ​It begins by supposing that the universe has its course in God's thoughts—
If this be true, and thou, man, awaking to the consciousness that the world of Nature is thus caused of God, wishest to know the whole of life and thine own life in it, oh, beware. Only by pure and solitary thought thou shalt attain, if thou canst attain; and the search will sever thee from the pleasant human world into a painful solitude. The verse in which Arnold tells this is so prophetic in its excellence of his best poetry, so full of his distinctive note, that I quote it:
But if this be not true, and Nature has never known a divine birth, and thou, man, alone wakest to consciousness of a great difference between thyself and Nature—thou, the last and radiant birth of earth's obscure working—oh, beware of pride. Think that thou too only ​seemest; art, like the rest, a dream, Yet, since thou canst think that, since thou mayst control thy pride, thou standest clear of Nature.
So, once he saw the problem of human life. Then, tossed as he was from thought to thought in those days when evil things held sway, he recurred, in another sphere of thought, to his view of the necessity for the steady pursuit of one aim, clearly conceived in the soul. Here, he mingled it up with one of the common angers of men who suffer and know no reason for their pain—an anger which no doubt, had stirred in him at intervals. He took the story of Mycerinus, and treated it with a brief nobility of imaginative and sympathetic thought which was rare in so young a poet. The king's father had been unjust, cruel, a wicked king, He had lived long and happily. The son had believed in justice, kindness, good government, and practised them; yet the gods condemned him to die in six years. He had governed himself, sacrificed himself, and this was his reward for giving up the joy of life. "Then have I cleansed my heart in vain." There is then no justice, no morality in the gods. Or they are themselves slaves of a necessity beyond them, or careless, in their leisured pleasure, of mankind. I scorn them; and, men of Egypt, if you wish to please them, do wrong, indulge in injustice, be like my father, then they will give you length of days. For me, I will give my six years to revel, to youthful joys, and so farewell.
Nor does Arnold, in that passing mood, altogether ​blame him. At least, the king knew his aim and followed it? It is curious to read the lines in which Arnold expresses this. He would not have approved the life, but he approved—since the king had deliberately chosen that life—the firmness and clearness of his choice, the settled purpose of his soul—
But this was the only point at which he approved the king's life of pleasure. In The New Sirens, which fine as it is in parts is feeble as a whole, he seems to express, with obscure length, the gloom, satiety, and sorrow of the soul in which mere pleasure ends, the reckless following of impulse after impulse.
Another poem of far higher quality, called The Voice, dwells, in the two last verses, on the same thought with a noble brevity and imagination. It records an hour when the ancient cry of youth to fulfil all joy came to him out of a forgotten time, came to him when his heart had been long sobered by dreary and doubtful thought, by heavy circumstance. Sweet and far, in strange contrast with his present trouble, like a wanderer from the world's extremity, it asked again to be listened to. And his answer is given in lovely poetry, in passionate revelation of himself:—
In these many ways he turned the problem of life. One would think that among them there would be, brought up as he had been, a cry for freedom and salvation, an appeal to the Power who is with us in the night. Once at least, and suddenly as it seems, Arnold, in the mouth of Stagirius, a young monk to whom St. Chrysostom addressed three books, made this cry. We cannot miss the personal passion in these verses, nor fail to feel that they are the outburst of long-endured distress which having tried many ways of escape in vain, fled at last to the fatherhood of God. "I do not know Thee clearly," they seem to say, "but there is that within me which bids me take my chance with Thee."
Finally, to close the eventful history of this volume, there is the last poem, entitled Resignation. It represents that to which the struggle had brought him, what he thought the wisest manner of life, the groove in which he desired to move onwards.
​He wished it, but in vain, But it never ceased to be one of the moods of life in which he desired to live at intervals. Yet it was well that it could not be a continuous desire. Resignation is fitting for age, for the man who has fought in the battles of the world for fifty years, but not well for the young who go forth to battle. And, in spite of Arnold's wish for patient peace, he had the just spirit of impatience with the evil ideas which were oppressing the world in which he lived. When he became a man, he was always a fighter. Yet those who fight the most, most long at times for the rest of resignation. And this poem is his record of that desire, even in youth, as many other poems record its recurrence in the years that were to come.
The subject is worthy of poetry, and Arnold has made it worthier by the fine composition of the poem, and especially by the imaginative fusion in it of the mental and natural scenery. The illustrations, the episode of the gipsies, the phantom grace of Fausta, develop and enhance the main thought. The verse is flowing, and the scenery of that walk between Wythburn and Rosthwaite which many know so well is drawn with its own distinctive touch and feeling. We see, as we read, that it made on him a new impression on this day. But we also feel, that in and through the new impression, the old impression of the years before is mingled, bringing with it another tenderness and light,—and this is a delightful piece of fine art.
​Ten years before, as a boy of seventeen, he had taken the same walk with Fausta. What ten years had done we read in these verses; and the many changes and wanderings of his soul during this decade of life are well represented by the windings in the poem of various thoughts within the unity of its main thought. The lines I quoted are full of the soul of Arnold at twenty-seven. Their quiet, self-controlled, and solitary note, with their love of peace and obedience, and of union not with quarrelsome particulars but with the still movement of the general life to an ordered and luminous end, is no unfitting close to the struggle I have endeavoured to describe. "Blame not," he cries, "Fausta, the man who has seen into life, and who has attained tranquillity, but for thyself"—
The second volume of Matthew Arnold's poems was published in 1852, and its title was Empedocles on Ætna, and other Poems, by A. Empedocles, a Greek of Sicily, one of the last of the religious philosophers, is supposed by Arnold—in a preface to an after-edition of the poem—"to have lived on into a time when the habits of Greek thought and feeling had begun to change, character to dwindle, the influence of the sophists to prevail. Into the feelings of a man so situated there entered much we are accustomed to consider as exclusively modern: the calm, the cheerfulness, the disinterested objectivity of the genius of the earlier Greek have disappeared; the dialogue of the mind with itself has commenced; modern problems have presented themselves; we hear already the doubts, we witness the discouragement of Hamlet and of Faust."
This is a sufficient description of the poem, and suggests its motive. It enabled Arnold to express, on the lips of Empedocles, the problems which confronted him in his own time, to tell with a certain passion how he felt concerning them, to relieve his heart by giving words to the profound discouragement and confusion into which they put his soul, and to suggest what means of escape from their tyranny occurred to him. Empedocles escapes by flinging himself into the crater ​of Ætna. Had Arnold been a Greek he might, perhaps, have shuffled off his trouble in the same easy fashion. When a man is brave, is sick of mankind, and recognises no duty to God, suicide is almost too facile a business.
The representation of a man beset by such feelings and pains, if he is stern enough with himself to represent them truly, cannot be without interest, or even without passion; but their representation, if too elaborate, becomes wearisome. And Empedocles goes over his troubles at such a severe length that it is fortunate he is alone save with Pausanias, who is only a shadow. Callicles would have tired of him. Moreover, he sings them in so lumbering a metre that we begin to conjecture that the entangled melancholy of his mind had unconsciously influenced his ear, and dulled it out of tune. These were the real reasons, I think, why the poem displeased its writer. But they were not the reasons he gave for leaving it out in the volume issued in 1853, and issued, for the first time, under his own name. He left it out, he said, because, though the representation was interesting, it did not inspirit and rejoice the reader, and poetry was bound not only to add to the knowledge of men, but also to add to their happiness.
"The Muses," said Hesiod, "were born to be a forgetfulness of evils, and a truce from cares." This happiness may be felt in the representation of the most tragic, even tortured, situations, provided they ​are full of the permanent, noble, and primary passions of human nature, passing onwards into magnanimous action, whether of endurance of, or of resistance to, human or divine oppression—into action which awakens high passion and action in others. Such action, represented in poetic form, kindles high pleasure in us, however painful the situation.
In Empedocles there is no such action. A "continuous state of mental distress was prolonged in it"; the atmosphere was morbid, and the unhappiness monotonous. It was not then a fit subject of poetry and Arnold excluded the poem from his next book.
This is a very grand reason for so simple a matter as the poem of Empedocles on Ætna, and indeed it might lay itself open to some slight ridicule. It is an example of that overweening self-consciousness of himself as an artist which sometimes deprived his poetry of naturalness and of spontaneity. The real reason was that Empedocles bored him, and no wonder; and that Arnold, under the mask of Empedocles, exposing all his present woes, confusions and wanderings of thought, his hatreds and scorns of his time, had begun to bore himself. Again, the Empedocles of the poem is quite petulant with the Universe, and especially with that state of man which, having vast desires and conceiving noble ideals, is disenabled by the gods, and apparently on purpose, to realise them. It may be that this petulance, when Arnold came afterwards to read of it, ​displeased his proud taste: it certainly did not fit in with his stoicism.
Two years after he wrote Empedocles, in 1853, he was in a more healthy state of mind. He wrote about the problems of life and their trouble, but he wrote about them in short lyrics, some of which ended with hope, even presaged joy. Later on, many years later, when his foot was on firmer ground, and some sunlight in his sky, he restored Empedocles to its place in his collected work, at the instance of Robert Browning. When he left it out, his soul was too near the shipwreck of Empedocles to relish its representation. He was tossed to and fro on the deep, close to the rocks, But when he had escaped, it was not unpleasant to see the picture he had made of old of the storm and the labouring ship, and to hang it up as a votive tablet in a shrine of the gods of the sea.
Again, Empedocles accuses, and with all the weakness of his type, the hopeless confusion to which the gods have brought the soul of man; and then, remembering his philosophy, scoffs at himself and all the complainers whom the course of nature and their own thought have enslaved. At last, in a transient excitement, having persuaded himself that he is free,—and before the persuasion fails him, and lest it should—he finishes his worry by the medicine of the volcano. Arnold did not. He fought his way through to no petulant conclusion, to no excited, hurried surrender of the battle, In 1867, when after an interval of fifteen ​years, he republished Empedocles on Ætna, he had grown into a wiser but sorrowful calm. It was not the calm of the stoic, but of one who, realising with passion the sorrow of humanity yet looked forward with hope, even at times with a chastened joy, to its redemption. Life at least was worth the living; the battle was to be without despair. It pleased him then, now that his feet were set on a rock and his goings ordered, to republish this picture of his youth and its disordered wavering, to realise afresh how much he had gained. Moreover, it pleased the artist in him to feel through all the wailing of the poem, the freshness of youth in it, its intensity and the pleasure of its pain,
Even when it was written, the poem was not all melancholy or monotonous. Callicles lives in it as well as Empedocles—Callicles, the lyrist and the poet, young and exulting in his youth, inspired by the beauty of Nature and the romantic stories of Greece, loving women and song, feasting and the dance— incarnate joy—yet tender of heart, wise through rever- ence of wisdom, and with that deep common sense which born of love and imagination is one of the first attributes of genius, When Arnold created him he was half way to a higher region of thought, feeling, and action than he could ever have attained by stoic- ism on the one hand, or by wailing and indignation on the other. But he did not create him excellently. It is a thing half done—half flesh and blood, half marble, like the poor prince in the Arabian Nights. Callicles ​is but a voice, not a living young man; the voice only of the half-reaction in Arnold's mind towards life and untroubled joy. Callicles sings of what he sees; of the pleasant outside of things, of the loveliness of Nature, and of the natural life of men and animals, but the descriptions are a little too literary. He sings, and better, of the beautiful legends of Greece, of Cadmus and Harmonia, of Apollo and Marsvas, of the Ætnean giant, of the singing of the Muses, with youthful sentiment and artist charm; and Arnold thought these songs and the temper of them so good, that when he repressed the poem, he extracted and published some of them as separate lyrics. Indeed, these two regions, the beauty of the common world and the great stories, were the homes where Arnold found some comfort in his trouble, some hours of refreshment. They saved him from himself. In the physical peace of the one, and in the moral peace he was conscious of in the other, he attained so much of the resemblance of rest that he believed in its possibility. When he speaks of natural beauty, he loses his self-inquiring self. When he tells a fair or noble tale, the intellectual snake which was gnawing at his entrails goes to sleep, and the frigid weight of his stoicism was lifted off. He forgot himself—that blessed remedy for all the afflictions of the world. In the Strayed Reveller, the Forsaken Merman, the King at Bokhara, in Sohrab and Rustum, Balder Dead, Tristram and Iseult, the Church at Brou, the weary, self-inquiring, self-controlling Arnold does ​not appear. We are freed from him, and he is freed from himself.
This is the noble power which the great stories of the world have upon us, this, their healing and exalting good. They release the soul from its own despotism. They hush the heart into self-forgetfulness. They fill our being with sorrow and with joy which are not our own. And it was well for Arnold that he felt their power. It was one of the enabling elements in his battle towards peace and light. It took him away not only from the turmoil in his own soul, but also from the turmoil without, the evil of which he grossly exaggerated. He was fortunate in that; far more fortunate than the great number of persons whose souls, even now after so many years, are sensitive to, and whose reason is troubled by, the bitter problems of life which afflicted him. They have no means of expression; they fight alone and in silence the grief that would, but cannot speak. Arnold at least had the gift of expression, and he rid himself by his art of a great deal of his distress. No sooner did some aspect of the human question rise threateningly before him, and mock him, than he put it into a poem. It is really curious how many of the short lyrics in this second volume are dedicated to fragments of that problem. One would think he would, after Empedocles, have been a little anxious to throw off the yoke of inquiry, a little tired of walking up and down the alleys of yew within his soul; but it is not so. He ​had an undying interest in himself as an epitome of man.
I will touch on a few of them. One, entitled Human Life, glances, in spite of its important title, at only one experience of life. We would fain steer our ship as we please, and not by the inward law. But we cannot live, we are compelled not to live, by chance impulse. As the ship leaves behind it the waves it divides, so we leave behind the joys not designed for us, the friends not destined to be ours. Unknown powers direct our course as they will, not as we will. This is only one small fragment of the riddle of human life. Its title is a misnomer.
Then he asks himself in a well-written sonnet: Shall I be glad, when I am growing old, that the heats of youth are left behind and I at peace? No, I shall wish its agitations, fire, and desire back again, and sigh that nothing is left to youth and age save discontent. This is a common human cry, but it belongs only to one type of men, and even they do not feel its passion, save at intervals. Browning and Tennyson would not have come to that conclusion, nor the lovers of mankind, It also is only a fragment of the problem.
In Self-Deception we have another fragment. We think we have great powers, and expect to realise their ends. We may have had them in an antenatal world, and been as eager then to use them towards their perfection as we are now. But the Great Power who gave us them, imposed on us a rigid law, and the ​law baffled us. And when He sent us here He left us only the stress of them, and yet their full desires. And we know we shall never win their fulfilment. Yet, there is a power which rules us, and there is a chance in that, the vaguest of chances, but a chance. This is the Empedocles' argument over again, and it is interesting to contrast it with Browning's view of the same aspect of the problem. Browning, looking out of himself with love upon humanity, saw far and clear the certain end which the inabilities of life suggested, and to which they led. Arnold, loving the personalities of his own soul more than man, saw at this time of his life only one dim chance for man. Gross is the film which self-consideration draws over the eyes of the spirit.
Take another, Lines at a Death Bed. The face of the dead is calm. The settled loveliness of rest is there. Is this the end of life? this the attainment of its desire? Is youth so fresh and bright because of the hope of rest in death? No, youth desires light and joy, life and passion, here, on this side of death—
This, too, is but a fragment of the problem, enough for a lyric, and an unfinished one.
Take another—take Courage. Our business here is to tame the will to Nature's law. Renounce, or endure, keeping the soul free from fear or shame. That is his stoicism; but there is room, Arnold thought, for ​another side of the question; he could not altogether fix his thought into the stoic limits. Now, in these bad times, he cries, when fate and circumstance are strong, praise the strong for their defiant courage, even though they do not live under the law of right—and here he recurs to the motive of Mycerinus—praise the younger Cato, praise Byron, for their dauntlessness. For what we want now is force of soul, even in the things which in themselves are blameable. Our bane is faltering, indecision. We may see clear, but can we act forcibly? That, too, is only a fragment of the problem of life, a little lyric cry.
Then there is the poem of Self-Dependence—a piece of modern stoicism. I say modern because the Nature Arnold dwells on—Nature as the revealer of law moving in the universe in quietude, and teaching us obedience and its calm—is a thought the ancients only conjectured. They had no knowledge of the constancy of energy. The close applies to himself the teaching of Nature.
It is a thought which grows out of the stoic position, out of that weary reference to the soul alone as the source of strength, that pride engendering self-consideration, which, isolating a man, enfeebles love, and, if the gods do not interfere, slays it altogether. Who ​finds himself loses misery! Nay, I answer, gains it. Who loses himself, he alone loses misery, and it is the only way to lose it. That, too, is the poem of a fragment of the problem.
Kensington Gardens, a lovelier poem, has the same thought at its root. He contrasts the peace of the quiet meadows, trees, and water with the impious and raving uproar of men, the sound of which he vaguely hears. Here is quietude, always new; the sheep, the birds, the flowers, the children sleep. Calm soul of all things, he cries, give me—
Peace! Like Dante, but without his power, Arnold sought for peace. Could he now have loved more, could he have more fulfilled his prayer to feel with others more than with himself, could he have not had that foolish desire to know himself—the utmost thing the Pagan reached—he would soon have gained it. "Know thyself," said Socrates, and man, because this dictum flattered his pride, thought it the ultimate wisdom. It is rather the ultimate foolishness. The true thing to say is this—"Know Nature, man, and God; get outside of thyself into their glory and beauty. Only then, thou canst begin to justly know thyself; only then, at union through love with all that is without thee, lost in joy, beyond self-disturbance, ​self-inquiry, canst thou, in humility, attain to peace."
Then there is another poem—The Buried Life—it too, touches only one aspect, one fragment of the problem of life. The poem, full of imaginative beauty, has also its deep interest; it touches what we imagine in the mysticism of the heart of the subconscious stream of our being the unexplored tracts of our nature, the revealing of which we wait for so long and so vainly. Even two lovers, Arnold thought, cannot tell each other what they are. They would if they could, but their buried life flows on, unseen, unknown. Fate, knowing how we are led astray by the apparent and confused, has ordained it thus, in order that our truer life should not be mastered by the apparent; but live within itself, independent of the world. We are beset with longing to find our actual self. In vain we strive; yet could we find it, we should be at rest. Only at times, fallings from us, vanishings, airs, floating echoes, "as from an infinite distant land," reveal or seem to reveal the heart of the life which beats within:—
Another aspect of the same thought is to be found in the poem—Palladium, where the soul, as far apart from our outward life as the Palladium was from the battle round Troy, is pictured on its lonely height. When it fails we die, while it lives, we cannot wholly be a victim of the world.
The best of all these battling, fragmentary poems is A Summer Night. Its composition is good, its arrangement clear, its thoughts well-shaped. It does not wander like the rest. It is passionate throughout, and it soars to a climax from which it descends in peace, like a still sunset after storm. The natural description with which it begins is done with a delicate purity of touch. It represents Arnold's temper at the point where it was changing from unmixed sadness and a somewhat fierce contempt of the world, into a better and wiser mind, into a greater harmony with mankind, into pity for men with a touch of love in the pity; into some hope, some faith for them, and therefore into some hope and faith in God.
There are yet other poems which illustrate this story of a soul in those troubled years, but enough has been said of these fragments, The essence of the history is concentrated in the Stanzas in Memory of the Author of Obermann. This poem places Arnold as he was in 1852. Fifteen years later his position was not ​the same; and he records the change in another poem in 1867, addressed to the same person. Obermann once more. The similar titles make it plain that he intended to reveal the change that had passed over the temper in which he viewed the world.
Obermann, as Arnold conceived him in 1852, had fled from the world, in which, like Arnold, he moved a stranger, to find what peace he could in the pastoral life of Switzerland, and in a chalet on the lower hills, whence he saw the solemn snows of the high peaks rise in ethereal purity and calm. Nature, in her quiet order, might heal his heart; and though Obermann's pain did not leave him, yet he saw his way to as much peace as he could find; and for that threw everything else away. And that was some attainment. Only two others Arnold thought, had been as bold, as self-certain in the whole of Europe—Wordsworth and Goethe; and Wordsworth saw only half of human life, and Goethe's clear and lonely soul few of the sons of men could follow. But our time, he says to Obermann, is worse than theirs—a hopeless tangle—and we turn for help to the immovable composure of thy icy despair. Thou hast renounced the world and thy life in it; at least thou hast the peace of renunciation, and the majestic pleasures which Nature brings. Half my soul I leave with thee and Nature, but the other half Fate takes, and forces it to abide in the world. May I live there, like thee, unsoiled by wrong, unspotted by the world, and bear the pain of these miserable days. ​Rigorous is the line on which the unknown power drives us; we cannot
That is his position in 1852. Many years passed by, and he remembers at the same place, where Glion looks down on Chillon and the lake, Obermann once more, and slips, in a moment of thought, back to his old desire to be in solitude and calm with him, out of the warfare he has waged so long. He recalls the infinite desire of his youth—that he and man might reach harmonious peace in union with the universal order.
And as he mused night came down, and Obermann stood beside him—
Dost thou turn now to me, now when the world is being new born, when hopes and hearts are blossoming? The history of the world is the history of the Rise and Fall of Ideas. We lived, of old, when one set of ideas was falling into fragments. In the turmoil and confusion we could find no sure aim for life. We despaired and fled from the world. But now, is not the Power at hand which will reanimate humanity? I died wrapped in gloom, but thou, who sought me of old, do not thou despair. The ​sun is risen on the earth. The present I despaired of held in it resurrection power. But thou—
​This is a higher strain, but the redemption was not yet fully attained. There were still hours of deep depression, following on noble vision. Men recover from illness of the soul with relapses. The tide ebbs before it foods the strand. Oscillation is half of our convalescence. And in the same book—New Poems—in which these second Stanzas to Obermann appear, are the Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse, 1867. The high emotion and thought of a heart, worn more by sorrow for the world than by its own pain, fills these verses to the brim. The wisdom of joy is not in them, but the wisdom of pain is. Yet, they look forward; waiting for light with weary eyes, with a faint hope which has at least slain despair. Meanwhile, he cries, while we wait and hope, allow us our tears, our solitude, our absence from the from the gayer world. Let its bright procession pass. Leave us to our monastic peace.
Another poem, Dover Beach—one of the finest he ever wrote—is also a poem of relapse into depression, but so profoundly felt that, both in thought and expression, it rises into the higher regions of poetry. He hears the "grating roar of pebbles which the wave sucks back" with the ebb, and the return of the waves that bring
​He hears in it, as in the silence he lives over again the religious tempest he had suffered—the retreat of the ancient faith in unconquerable sadness, and in the sadness the whole world is dark. And so great is the darkness that while he lives in it he can do no good to the world, and none to himself.
This temper, now in 1867, was not a constant one. Hope for the world and for himself had grown almost into flower within him; and he attained through hopefulness a new strength, even some rest. And then, having found a haven where he could anchor, and looking out on the storm, but not of the storm, he used his quiet to give warning and counsel to the new and excited world.
The present, he thought, may be full of vigour and of a dancing life; but when its noise is loudest, retreat for a time; remember the past and its quiet beauty. Do not lose its power; and his Bachanalia, or the New Age, contrasts the dance of Manads, breaking in on the shepherd's still enjoyment of the hush of Nature, with the wild orgie of the New Age, scattering ​the charm, the dignity, and the peace of the past. "Rejoice in this," the new men cry, as the shepherd was bid to rejoice in the stormy riot of the Bacchanals.
"Ah," says the poet, "the shepherd thought the hush and quiet beautiful, and I feel the past while I live in the present. Lovely was the silence, the hush of the world, when but a few were great, and men loved them; when what was excellence was known."
And Progress, another poem of warning, tells the new world (which has thrown the old religion overboard) to take care not to lose with its loss the fire within, not to perish of cold, There is no religion which God has tot loved, which has not taught weak wills how much they can do, which has not let soft rain fall on the dry heart, and cried to self-weary men, "Ye must be born again." Keep these things. It is not in the pride of life that the New Age should excel; it is not for its noisy movement that we should be chiefly glad:
These things are written in a loftier, truer, wiser music than his melancholy, troubled harp could sing twenty years before. I trust I have not dwelt on them too long for my readers' patience. But the story is valuable because it is not only the history of a single soul, but the history of thousands of thoughtful English folk in those days between 1840 and 1870, when the discoveries of science and criticism, and the new ​developments of democratic ideas, changed all the habits of men's thinking, shook the old fabrics to their foundations, and did not, as yet, build new temples. Science changed its front, so did History, Literature, and Art. Theology and Philosophy strove to preserve their old formation, but as the years went on were forced, if they were to exist at all, to change it also. And in the wildered disorder of men running to and fro, searching in vain for some foundation of the mind, there were only a few who found it or who believed it would be found, The greater number doubted like Arnold, were restless like him, or like him fell back on stoicism, or fled away from the noises into silence and solitude. There are many who remember those days. They lived in the thick of the battle, and most of them, being serious in that serious time, did their duty as they could. There are many now who are too young to have partaken of that strife or endured its confusion of hustling thoughts, of multitudinous efforts to find truth, but they ought to know something of its history, and be grateful to those who fought so well the battle of progress, and who suffered in the battle. It is because Arnold's poetry concerning his own soul and the soul of man reflects and embodies so much more closely that time of thirty years than either the poetry of Tennyson or Browning, that I have dwelt on it so long. It is history, an interesting history.
Looking back, we see that the times were not so ​bad as Arnold thought them to be, nor was their restless movement really evil. The turmoil was not caused by want of ideas, but by new ideas surging into the sleepy elements of the time. It was not the seething of decay and dissolution, it was the heating upwards into force of new creative powers. Big, formative conceptions were cast into the world, and every element in that vast caldron boiled up and over in resistance or agreement. Only after years, did the ebullition settle down, did another world of thought begin to arise into a temple in which men could rest and live. It is not yet half finished. Every year it is being built into harmony. But we owe its beginnings, and we shall owe much of its beauty and of the peace of its aisles, to the wild creative turmoil which Arnold thought so evil, which filled him with trouble and dismay. He began to see the truth of this in 1867. It was clearer to him in 1877, when he collected his poems. But by that time he had drained dry his poetic vein. Weary when he began to write, he was far more wearied as a poet when he had gone through the storm. His imaginative power was tired out. His intellectual power was not. On the contrary, the sword of his intellect had been tempered in the fight, ground down to exceeding sharpness, and if he used it with too little mercy on his foes, it was always with a certain humour, sometimes grim, sometimes gentle, which made even those whom he satirised smile, and forgive him after their pain was over. Men who loved ​his true poetic note, who felt a new and lovely charm in such poems as the Scholar Gipsy, were sorry when poetry fled away from him, when the practical reason sat in the throne of imagination; but consoled themselves by thinking that he had done all he could do in poetry, that the gold of that mine was exhausted, and that if he had gone on, it would only have been silver that he could have given us. And Westminster Abbey and Geist are only silver. And then they felt how clear-eyed and sensible it was of him to put aside with so much ease and dignity his commerce with the Muses. It is not every day that we touch a man who, having reached some excellence in one of the great arts, knows when he can be excellent no more, and lays it by; and, moreover, takes up new work, in other realms altogether, conscious of new powers, pleased to exercise them, and exercising them with a sure hand. In this new work Arnold followed his own advice to others. He kept his eye fixed on his subjects. He realised his aim, and saw it, for the most part, distinctly. He worked with a deep anxiety to help the world forward to clearer views of life. He lived far less within himself, and far more for the sake of his fellow men. He took his share in the daily drudgery of the world and brought to it "sweetness and light." He believed in the new age while he deprecated its sensational elements, and he used all his powers to lead it into a simpler, quieter, and truer life. Much might well be said of his prose work; of ​its uniqueness, of its excellence, of its keen fitness for these later times, even when he still retained somewhat in it of his old apartness—but that is not my business in this essay. I pass on to those other poems of his which are outside of the struggle I have described, which belong to subjects more or less independent of its pain. Moreover, as I have written of the poems in their relation to the time in which he lived, so now it is their poetry itself which, as far as I can, I shall try to estimate.
"The eternal objects of poetry," said Arnold in his Preface to the Poems of 1853, "are actions, human actions," Excellent actions! he goes on to say, "and excellent actions are those which most powerfully appeal to the great primary human affections, feelings which are permanent and the same in the race, in all climes, and at all times. Poetical work belongs to the domain of our permanent passions; let it interest these, and it does not matter whether the subject is ancient or modern, But, as in the ancient subjects the action is greater, the personages nobler, the situations more intense, those critics are wrong who say that the poet must leave the 'exhausted past' and draw his subjects from matters of present importance."
No wise critic would ever say that the poet should not take his subjects from the past, or that the subjects ​of the past are exhausted. But he would say that the poet who wrote only of the past, ignoring the present, would find that after a time his poetic enthusiasm would lesson and finally die away; or that he would be forced to introduce, probably unconsciously, modern feeling or a modern atmosphere into his record of the ancient subjects; or, at least, that he would bring the subjects nearer to us by mediævalising them, as Morris did the Greek tales. Moreover, he would certainly add to Greek or to mediæval tales, as both Morris and Keats did, the modern feeling for nature and the modern subtlety of passion. Try as he will, the poet cannot divest himself of the spirit of the time in which he lives. However, to support his point of view, Arnold chose some of the great stories of the past for poetic treatment. He took the fine subject of Merope, and made it into a drama in the manner of the Greek. He selected Sohrab and Rustum—a tale common to the Eastern, Teutonic, and Celt peoples. He folded in his net the story of Tristram and Iseult. He tried to put the Norse mythology and sentiment into the poem of Balder Dead. And then he went no farther into the great subjects of the past. The present seized on him. Having carefully laid down his theory of the greater excellence of the ancient subjects, he made three-fourths of his poetry belong to the age in which he lived. His great, his dominant subject, up to 1855 (New Poems was published in 1867), was himself face to face with his age.
​His theory then faded away before the pressure on his modern soul of the modern time, the modern pain. But the present, at least at first, seized on him in the wrong way. Afterwards, in poems which we may call poems of transition, his self-isolation was modified. But now, the present did not urge him outside of himself to live in the thoughts and emotions of the movement which surged around him. It drove him into his own soul to consider and reconsider what thoughts and emotions the movement outside awakened into life within himself—what his soul suffered from it, what hatreds, what fears, what clashing! And he closed the windows of the inner house, that he might not hear or see that which disturbed his peace. I will know myself, he thought, alone, and then I may be able to understand and help the world. This was his early mistake as a poet. It was putting the cart before the horse.
I have said that had he lived with the movements of his time, with some hope and faith, and with some joy in the strife, he would have been a greater poet. But here there is a special thing to say, in this connection, with regard to the poems he wrote on the great ancient subjects. Had he not been too self-involved to enter with living interest into the movement of the world around him, he would have treated those great subjects with a fuller mastery. They are treated with a certain remoteness and coldness which can only be explained by the tyranny which the storms and woes of the time ​in which he lived exercised over his self-questioning spirit. He is less in the tales than in himself. He is not rapt away by Sohrad and Rustum, Balder, or Tristram as Keats was by Lorenzo or Porphyro, or Morris by the tales of the Earthly Paradise. They truly escaped from their age, and brought passion to their subjects. Their subjects were more to them than their self.
Nevertheless, Arnold did partly escape from himself when he handled the noble stories of the past. His poetry then, partly freed from self-inquiry and its restlessness, rose into a clearer, sweeter region and reached a higher level of art. When we read the Strayed Reveller, the Forsaken Merman, Sohrab and Rustum, the Scholar Gipsy, the Church at Brou, in all of which he more or less escaped from self-consideration, we say, feeling their excellence, "What a pity he was so worried; what a greater pity that he worried himself; what a greatest pity that he allowed himself to be so tormented by his age or by himself, Yet, after all—for everything has two sides—we have seen how interesting as history as well as poetry he has made his age to us through himself. When he looked into its mirror he saw his own tired face, and the waves of thought that passed over it. But the reflection was also that of thousands who then lived and suffered and strove to find their way, but who could not, like Arnold, formulate their thought, or crystallise into words their feeling. And in this indirect fashion ​he may be said to have joined in the battle he hated, and to have helped the world.
Might he not have escaped from the trouble of the present, and his own in it, by falling in love? Most men, most poets certainly, pass in youth through a period in which love leads them out of themselves, and opens the gates of that vast and shining realm of self-forgetfulness where art has built her noblest palace. We may not say that youthful love-passion brings a man into that excelling realm, or leads an artist into its inner shrine. A larger, a mightier expansion of love is needed for that high citizenship—a love which passes beyond one woman or one man to embrace nature, and man, and God; but we may say that love-passion opens the gates of this kingdom, gives us our first experience of loss of self, and affords a fleeting vision of the glory it may he to lose ourselves in the whole of Love.
Arnold had but little, it seems, of that young experience. It was not the natural outcome of his character or of the character of Clough. This, too, was a pity. Had they had more of the usual love-passion of youth, they would much sooner have learnt the great lesson they needed so much, of not thinking of themselves. Only here and there, by fits and starts, and always mixed with retreats on his own soul, love seems to have come to Arnold in his poetry. And his few love-poems, half of the woman and half of himself, form a sort of transition between poems about himself ​and the others about subjects beyond himself. These poems then I shall briefly discuss.
It was not only the youthful passion of love which, if we judge from his early poetry, was of small force in Arnold. He seems also, in his desire for almost a stoic temperance, to have felt less than other poets those eager enthusiasms for natural beauty, for human causes, for universal ideas which stir into great emotion, whether of joy, aspiration, or pity, poets in their youth. The intense glow of young life, of which love-poems are only one result, was either weak in him, or repressed; and in consequence, his poetic life was sure, sooner or later, to suffer from the exhaustion at which it did arrive. He ceased to write poetry.
But when that youthful fire is strong in a poet, it does not burn out. It only changes the objects on which it feeds, and glows with a steadier heat around them. When it is not strong, it is easily put out by ill-fortuned circumstances, and the poet is then left without one of the elements which most feed, impel, and develop the youthful imagination. Such ill fortune, we have seen, did befall Arnold. The pressure of that noisy, sceptical time ministered to the chilling of what youthful fire he possessed. His training also chilled it. Rigorous teachers imposed on him and Clough moral and intellectual responsibilities, too early for their strength, too heavy for them to bear, and froze the genial current of their youth. His father's mind, his father's view of life, lay heavy on ​him, and all the more heavy because he reverenced him so much. Duties were not sufficiently mingled with natural pleasures. He carried to Oxford a somewhat austere solemnity; and the love-poem, with its exalted note of ardour, may have seemed to him unworthy of a serious man. But he was not yet a man, and it is a misfortune to a youth, much more to a blossoming poet, to anticipate the gravity of manhood. Nevertheless, if Arnold had had more of youthful fire, he might have saved his life from these despondencies. And it is that want which makes his poem of Tristram and Iseult so inadequate. The story of Tristram is a story of passion between the sexes. The passion. of the story is faded out in Arnold's poem. Thin, thin as the speech of the wailing ghosts Ulysses saw in Hades are the voices in that poem. Perhaps Arnold felt that the wounds of Tristram, the long lapse of time since the lovers had met, excused, even insisted on the presence of a weakness in the expression of passion. But had he known more of true passion in love, and felt the story and the atmosphere of its time more truly, he would not have made this artistic mistake, which he probably thought was an artistic excellence. The note which is sounded in the poem might suit the temper and situation of Iseult of Brittany. It does not suit those of Tristram and Iseult of Ireland. The poem is cold.
There are other poems which may be called, each with its own difference, love-poems, of which the most ​remarkable are Faded Leaves, Euphrosyne, Calais Sands, and the series addressed to Marguerite. The poems entitled Faded Leaves, in which all the love is unhappy, "too late or separated, or despairing or longing," should not, I think, have been kept among the collected poems. The subject is plainly worked up and chosen from the outside. Their workmanship is weak; unfortunate phrases jar the lyric sense; there is none of the naturalness of love in the series, save in one verse of the last poem. His artistic sense is scarcely born in these poems, and his longing for quiet intrudes its philosophy curiously and unhappily into them. They must have been a very youthful effort, yet, if they were so, what a curious. youth! As to Euphrosyne, it is better done. Browning would have liked its motive. This is sufficiently given in the last verse:—
Calais Sands comes nearer to reality, but its close remains obscure. Whether the lover is to live always apart in a silent worship, as in one verse—or to be happy in meeting his sweetheart, as in the last verse—we cannot know. One motive or the other should have been chosen and completed.
No one can tell whether the series addressed to Marguerite, and entitled Switzerland, records a real ​passage of love in his life when he loved for a time a daughter of France who lived in Switzerland, or whether he invented the subject in order to write on the matter of a love-passion which was born, lived for a time and died, in a heart too restless, too untamed, too feverish with the trouble of the world, too unable to forget itself, for unforgetful happiness in another. I do not like to think that the subject was invented, but there are passages—it may be they were added afterwards—which are chill with that intellectual or moral analysis both of which are apart from love in its passionate mood. On the other hand, if anywhere in Arnold's poetry there is youthful passion, it is here.
They begin with a poem of the first volume, 1849, A Memory Picture, and record his first meeting and parting with Marguerite. It ought to have been collected with the others. The poems of 1852 record the progress of this love affair. Three years had not dimmed his occasional passion for this girl; and they close with a poem written ten years afterwards, in which he remembers her, and wonders where she is, as he muses on the terrace at Berne.
The second in the series as finally brought together, entitled Parting, is the most interesting. Like Goethe, when he fled from his slavery to Lili—and Arnold imitates here the motive of Goethe's poem—he calls on the mountains to receive him and release him from the storm of love; but the vision of Marguerite, passing to ​Matthew Arnold and fro in the house, will not let him go. At last, he seems to break away, but the next poem brings them together again, only to part. His love and her love faded for different reasons, and they slid away from one another. It is no wonder she ceased to care, for he mingled too much of his unquiet soul with his love; and women, in the matter of love, have no patience, and for good reason, with a lover whose psychology is engaged with his own soul, and not with theirs. It is no wonder, on the other hand, that he ceased to care, for her nature was unfitted to his, and, moreover, as we are unartistically informed, she had a past. Indeed, it is a melancholy business. There is none of the natural self-forgetfulness of passion in the poem.
As to the closing poem, which has its own grace and charm, it is spoilt by the verse which wonders whether she has not perhaps, in these ten years, followed her light and flowery nature, and returned to Paris to live an immoral life. That verse should be expunged; and I do not think that the poet could ever have really loved the girl, else memory of tenderness and of passion past would have spared her that conjecture. The greater artist would have left it out, even had he thought it. But Arnold, though an artist, was not a great artist.
I have said he was more of a careful artist in the poems which he wrote on subjects apart from his own time and his own self. He took great pains with them, sometimes almost so much self-conscious pains ​that he lost, if he ever possessed the capability of it, the natural rush of a poet in creation. There is an occasional artificiality in poems like Sohrab and Rustum and Balder Dead, which bears the same relation to art that Rochefoucauld said hypocrisy bore to virtue. And it is especially displayed in their direct imitation of the similes of the Homeric poems and of their way of introducing similes. He seems like Homeric writers, to fetch them from other poems, and fit them in unfitly. He introduces far too many of them, and sometimes excellent, sometimes too far apart from the thing they are supposed to illustrate, sometimes hopelessly wrong in the place they occupy, sometimes contradictory in detail,—they weaken the passion of the poem and delay its movement. In this, Arnold does not show the moderation he was so fond of preaching. Then, again, the just simile should only be introduced when the action or the emotion is heightened, when the moment is worthy, and when as it were in a pause, men draw in their breath to think what may happen next, for the moment has reached intensity. The simile fills that pause and allows men time to breathe. But Arnold introduces his similes often lightly, about unimportant matters, where the action should not pause but be rapid, when the moment is not weighty. This is an artistic frivolity.
Moreover, the Homeric tradition is out of place in Sohrab and Rustum. Arnold takes great pains with its local colour. We have all the geography of the ​district, and he has used the names well. He describes the Tartar and Persian dresses, armour, tents, the different aspects of the warring tribes, their manners and much more in great detail. But in this fully Oriental poem the similes and the whole manner of the verse are Greek. It is a mixture too odd for good art. Either have no local colour or keep it pure.
The story of Sohrab and Rustum, of the father who unknowingly fights with and slays his son, and discovers the misery too late, is a wide-spread tale. It exists in two forms at least, in one of which the discovery is made in time, in Teutonic saga. We find it in Celtic saga. It was attached to the Cuchullainn tale, and the rash hero, like Rustum, slays his son. The subject is simple, full of a terrible pity, and a natural horror, capable of passionate treatment, and of leaving in our minds, when wrought according to nature, a sympathy with the fates of men which softens and heals the heart. Arnold has not missed its opportunities. The brave, lovely, and tender-hearted youth is well contrasted with the worn, haughty, austere warrior; and the pathos swells from point to point, deepened by memorial allusion and description, till it culminates in the discovery that the father has slain the son. That crisis is simply and passionately wrought by Arnold, and both the characters, made beautiful by love and endurance of fate together, stir that high pleasure in us which is compact of honour for human nature and of pity for its sorrow—man ​weeping for, but enduring with a constant mind, the worse the gods can inflict; till we feel that man is nobler than the gods—till we know that the gods whom man has previously created must be replaced by a new creation. The poem closes in a lonely beauty. The son and the father lie alone on the plain as night falls, between the mourning hosts, none daring to intrude. The dark heaven alone is their tent, and their sorrow their shroud. And we hear the deep river flowing by, the image of the destiny of man that bears us on, helpless, on its breast, until, with it, we find the sea.
Balder Dead is by no means so fine a poem. It is almost absurdly Homerised. It is far too long, and made too long by irrelevant matter and descriptions, and by repetitions. It is curiously inartistic. In it, however, Arnold had found out that he was too lavish of his similes. Moreover, his temper of mind was quite apart from that of the North. He must have been incapable of apprehending it, or he would never have written this poem in this fashion. He tries for the masculine simplicity of the North, but he does not gain it; there are even times when his elaborate simplicity verges towards the ridiculous, as in the description of the daily battle and feast in Valhalla. Odin —and it would be to his blank amazement—is turned into the Zeus of Homer, and Frea speaks like Hera grown very old; and excessively curious this talk sounds to any one who cares for the northern sagas or the ​early northern poems. It is not a true Norse poem, yet it drags in so much of the northern mythology that the mind of the reader is dissipated away from the main subject. Some of the descriptions, however, like that of Hodur visiting Frea when night had fallen on the streets of Asgard, have a pictorial excellence. What Arnold has well seized—in spite of the excess of description—is the human emotion in the story, the bitter grief of Hodur for his unconscious slaying of Balder, the grief of Balder's wife, and Balder's love for her, the eagerness of the gods to get Balder back, the union of Balder and Nanna in Hela's realm, their happiness together in that shadowy place where even passion is thin; the farewell of Hodur to Balder when they part to meet no more till the Twilight of the gods. The last ride of Hermon to Hela's reign, his meeting with Hodur, the prophecy of Balder, his weariness of blood and war which half reconciles him to the world of the dead, the picture of the new world of peace for which he waits—this is the finest part of the poem, but, on the whole, the subject was outside of Arnold nor has he at all grasped its significance. Nevertheless, being thus outside of him, we are saved in it from the trouble of his soul.
Tristram and Iseult I have partly characterised. It does not cling and knit itself into its subject as ivy round and into the oak. It swims about it like a fish, hither and thither. Anything—the tapestry, the storm, the firelight, the bed curtains, the dress of the ​queen—leads it away from the central passion. It is a pretty poem, with charming descriptions, but sentimental, which Tristram and Iseult never were. The most important part of it is where his ancient love comes to visit him. There, if anywhere, Arnold should be vitally clear, and in the subject. He is miles and miles away from the time, the temper, the characters, and the passion of the matter in hand. The conventions of modern society and morality rule the irritating speeches of the lovers. Its ending is curious. Iseult of Brittany is left with her two children, and goes out to walk with them, just like a modern widow in a sentimental novel, along the cliffs, and tells stories to the boys. Among the rest she tells the story of Merlin and Vivien, and with this, which has nothing in the world to do with the subject, the poem closes. This dragging in of a new tale is the most inartistic thing that Arnold ever did, nor is the tale well told. Indeed, it is scarcely told at all. Three-fourths of this closing part are natural description, but natural description of great charm and clear vision, quite modern in feeling, and strangely apart from the atmosphere which surrounds the story of Tristram. It reads as if Arnold, unable to invent fresh matter, fell back on his remembrance of a visit to Brittany, and inserted a description of the landscape, in order to fill up his space. Tristram and Iseult must be a youthful piece of work, and I am the more driven to that opinion by its distant imitation of Coleridge and Byron, notes of both of whom sound ​clearly in its verse and manner. These are the three long poems.
We turn from these long poems, for which his genius was unfitted, for he had not the capacity of either copious or continuous invention, to the lyric and elegiac poems in which his genius is at its best, and in which—unlike those already discussed—the subjects have carried him away from himself. A few of them belong to the Greek cycle of tales, a region where he loved to dwell.
He tried to write a tragedy in the manner of the Greek drama on the subject of Merope. It really is a failure. Its worst fault is dulness, and though he strove hard to make a great moral impression emerge through the action of the drama, and leave its power on the audience—an end his friend Sophocles desired—he did not succeed in this because the action of his play had not enough of life in it. "Good wine needs no bush," we say when we read his long, interesting, explanatory preface; but here is an enormous sign hung out over the tavern door to lead us to try the wine. The landlord must have himself doubted its quality.
The songs, or rather the recitations, of Callicles, published in 1855 under the title of the Harp-Player on Ætna, are pleasant, but only one of them—Cadmus and Harmonia—is of the finest quality. Philomela, which recalls the old sad tale of the palace in the Thracian vale, is half English, half Greek, and full of ​a passion rare in Arnold, half for himself, half for the sorrow of the world. But far the best of these Hellenic things is the Strayed Reveller. This is a piece of pure creation with full invention flowing through it in happy ease. The scene is vividly pictured. The palace, the court, the fountain, the forest, and the hills around the palace, are clothed in the Greek beauty and clearness. We breathe that pellucid air, and see the Reveller in the dewy twilight, and Circe in the palace porch, and Ulysses, "the spare, dark-featured, quick-eyed stranger" coming from the pillared hall. This pictorial power charms us through the poem. The Reveller, half drugged into vision by Circe's wine, describes, with a conciseness and illumination which save it from the merely picturesque, a bright procession of countries, men, and the works of men—a "wild, thronging train of eddying forms" sweeping through his soul. But it is not mere description. Good matter of thought lies. at the centre of the poem. The youth tells what the happy gods see:—Tiresias the prophet, the Centaurs on Pelion, the Indian drifting on the mountain lake among his melon beds, the Scythian on the wide steppe, the merchants ferrying over the lone Chorasmian stream, the heroes sailing in Argo;—and the gods rejoice, pleased as men in a theatre with the stream of human life passing them by, where, unconcerned, they sit at ease.
The poet sees the same things, but not in the same way. He has to bear what he sees, to feel ​with the pain and the fates of men, to share the agony:—
The gods exact this price for the gift of song, that the poets become what they sing.
The poet, it is often said, by depth of sympathy, suffers more than other men, a part of their pains as well as his own. And this is a self-flattering theory that poets hug to their breast. I have little sympathy with the conceit. If the poet, being more sensitive than other men, feel the pain and ugliness of the world sorely, he also is just as sensitive to its joy and beauty; and he has greater rapture than other men. All things are set over one against another, and the poet has no business to enlarge on his pain and to ignore his joy. He is, in reality, very well paid for his trouble. Moreover, he has a great advantage over other men. There are thousands just as sensitive as he, who are obliged to suffer in silence; but the poet, having the gift of expression, can shape his pain into words, cry loudly his lyric cry, make the world the sympathetic witness of his woes; and then, having expressed his trouble, forget it, or get rid of it and go on, if that please him, to shiver with another pain, shape it in its turn, and forget it—and this he can do all his life long. It is a ​pleasing amusement, and one need not have much sympathy with his sorrows. Those whom I do sympathise with are those who have no voice, who appeal to no public, who live in lonely trouble with the troubled world. Yet they, too, have their outlet. What the poet sings truly expresses them to themselves. There is always a way to the common-sense of joy if only we look for it. These silent souls can read and be relieved: but that makes it all the more incumbent on the poet to take care that his muse should also prophesy joy and be the refreshment of care as well as the revealer of sorrow.
Arnold, though he cried out a great deal, did not hold this sentimental view of the poet. There is a fine passage in Resignation which enshrines another view. It is too long to quote, but it illustrates his poetic aim—and it belongs to his earliest poems.
He sees the great ruler wisely sway the people, and the just conquests of beauty, and the populous town; the whole movement of life; rejoices in it, but does not say: I am alone.
But that does not contain all the thought on the matter. He tells in a sonnet of that young Italian bride, lovely, gaily garmented, who, perishing in an accident, was found to wear a robe of sackcloth next her "smooth white skin."
Again, we are told in the Epilogue to Lessing's Laocoon, the poet is to tell of Life's movement; all of it from source to close. It is Life's movement which fascinates the poets. But it is too much for them to bear or to tell. Only a gleam of it here and there can they see, only now and then can they hear a murmur of it; not the whole light, not the full music. A few, ​a very few, have seen and heard—Homer, Shakespeare—and these are the greatest of mankind.
Again, Arnold says—the poet is a priest of the wonder and bloom of the world. We see with his eyes and are glad. But he does not see all. As human life is wider than he, so Nature is greater, vaster than the singer. Her mighty march moves and will move on, when all our poetry of her is dead; nor can it ever express the thousandth part of her over-brimming life. Yet if the poet love, he has charm; and to charm the heart of man, to loose our heart in tears and joy, to give us the freshness of the early world, to heal the soul, to make us see and feel and know,—this is the poet's dignity and use.
But he takes another view. The poet is, by his nature, alone (and here the personality of Arnold intrudes), and solitude oppresses him. He flies from the noise of men which jars him. But can Life reach him in the solitude, and he is to express Life; and fenced from the multitude, who will fence him from himself? He hears nothing then but the mountain torrents and the beating of his own heart. Wherefore, tormented in exile, he flies back into the world of men. And there he is again unhappy. Absence from himself (for in the turmoil of men he cannot hear the voice of his soul) tortures him. Again he refuges in silence, and again the air is too keen to breathe, the loneliness unendurable. Thus, miserably bandied to and fro, only death can heal the long disease of his life. ​It is in that way that Arnold, in Empedocles, paints the Thinker and the Poet, nor is it only in Empedocles. It was a picture that he afterwards changed for a brighter one; but it represented truly during periods of depression, his view of his own, and of a poet's, life.
Of all these poems, written apart from himself, one of the most delicately felt is the third part of the Church of Brou, where the young prince and his duchess lie together, carved on their tomb; and in the silent night when the soft rain is on the roof, or in the sunset when the rose and sapphire glories of the great western window fall on pillar and pavement, wake to cry—This is the bliss of Heaven, this is eternity. That is a fair poem, but the most charming, the most romantic, most in the world of the pure and tender imagination is The Forsaken Merman. To read it is to regret that he could not oftener escape into that ideal region where, at least for a time, our sorrows seem dreams, and the soul is healed of its disease. Moreover, this poem is sweeter in melody than most of his poems, as if his ear had been purged in that loftier and brighter air. There is nothing stranger in a man who dwelt so much on excellence in the poetic art, and who criticised failure in form so sharply, than Arnold's inability to recognise the harshness, the broken sounds, the want of harmony in his own verse. How he could have left unchanged verses so frequently out of tune I cannot understand. His ear was not sensitive, but in the Forsaken ​Merman it was in tune. It may be that it derived this excellence from the good composition of the piece. When the composition is good, the melody of the verse is also good. One excellence induces the other. And this may be said of the Scholar Gipsy and of Thyrsis. They are both well composed, and the melody of the verse in them is always good and sometimes exquisite.
The mention of these two pieces brings me to the elegiac poems. I have said that Arnold, having sorrows at the root of his life, wrote with peculiar excellence the elegy. To excel in the elegy is not easy. Of course, it is easier to write than an ode of triumph or a song of rapture like the Epithalamium of Spenser; but there are many pitfalls into which a poet may fall in building an elegy, and into these Arnold, being austere in thought and hating excess as much as he loved temperance, and always mingling thought with feeling, did not easily fall. There is a severe beauty, an intellectual force, in these elegiac poems which strengthens, as it intensifies, their emotion, and is, as it were, the skeleton round which imagination compacts their living body.
The first of these is Memorial Verses—written on Wordsworth in 1850—and they contrast in soothing, healing power with Byron's force and Goethe's calm. Few things have been better said, or with more delight. ful finish, than these on the influence of Wordsworth, and the roots of his power. Not quite so well said, ​but said with more personal feeling and with Arnold's long affection for the Lake country made for the moment more tender by the death of Wordsworth, are the verses in the beginning of the poem, The Youth of Nature, where those strange lines occur which say that the age can rear no more poets, so blind Arnold was to the real significance of the time in which he lived.
Then there are the verses on his father—Rugby Chapel, 1857. They are written like the others without rhyme, in the form which Arnold often used, and which can only be perfectly used by an artist who, unlike Arnold, is a master of melody. Else he falls into prose, or, being unlimited by the austere rule of rhyme which ought to force concentration, he lets his thought run more loosely than it should. Into both these errors Arnold is sometimes betrayed in these rhymeless verses. Yet the deep, controlled, filial feeling with which he wrote this poem, and the steadfast matter of thought concerning human life which was born of the depth of his feeling, give to it so great a sincerity and so serious a spirituality, that no one can read it without being thrilled into sympathy by its moral power, and by its prophetic passion bettered in soul. It is an influence for life; and the close is noble—that close in which he paints the worn and weary hosts of mankind dispirited, scattered, and lost in the waste, but uplifted, cheered, and knit together by the great souls he always thought so few, but who are many more than he imagined:—
The poem on the Brontës, Haworth Churchyard, is scarcely up to the level of its subject, but that on Heine is of a different and a finer quality. It does not seize the whole of Heine, but it touches his youth and happiness with grace, and his manhood, in its mockery and agony, with so sympathetic a pity that the very censure seems part of the pity. The misery of Heine's life made most impression on Arnold, and he seems to trace it to an inborn root of bitterness. He quotes, with approval, Goethe's phrase concerning some poet, and applies it to Heine, "that he had every other gift, but wanted love," love which is "the fountain of charm-charm, the glory that makes the ​song of the poet divine." And in a strange close to his poem—in a thought of which Arnold seems to think far more highly than he ought to think, for it is intolerably fantastic—he makes Heine to be the incarnation of a momentary bitter mood of the Spirit of the world.
This is not as true as he thinks. Heine was much more than that. Far more than half of his bitterness was born of lovingness the fulness of which he could not exercise, of natural and excusable feeling against his terrible fate. He cried aloud at it; the poet must speak; but, in reality, no man could have borne that fate more resolutely, nor did he lose love in it. Nor could Arnold, when he wrote these lines, have known the poems where Heine's better soul went forth to feel with man and to fight man's battle, to stand as a lonely sentinel when he could fight no more, and to die alone, in the night at his outpost, for the cause of the whole army. I cannot quote the whole of the poem, the Enfant perdu, but here are the first and the last verses—
And now I touch on the two best poems he wrote—the Scholar Gipsy and Thyrsis. Both are engaged with Clough, and they are suffused throughout with the tenderness of that deep friendship between man and man, which, begun in youth, keeps in it the purple light of youth; which, continued in manhood, wins the strength of the love which perseveres through sad experience, and the beauty which is born of, and nourished by associated memories. These fill the poems with sweet emotion, enfold them in an air of tenderness. Then, though in this tenderness of friendship he has escaped from self-consideration, yet they are filled with thought concerning the time they had both lived through, the needs of their age and its remedies. In this region, on which I must dwell further, the poems ought to be read together. They illustrate and supplement one another; and whatever is said, both in retrospect and prospect, however different may be the momentary turn of thought, all is brought into unity by the pervasiveness of the one emotion of memorial and loving friendship.
Then, too, another emotion fills the verse—that love of Oxford as the home of his youthful heart, as the nurse of intellect, the mother of fine causes, the teacher and cherisher of the wisdom and beauty of the ancients, ​the lover of the masters of humane learning and art. That flows through these poems, and is supported by so rich a local colour that not even Tennyson has ever laid more fully a whole countryside before us. From every field and hilltop crowned with trees we see Oxford in the verse, her ancient colleges, her "dreaming spires," lovely in her peace, romantic in her memories, classic in her thought. Over every hill we wander in the verse, in the well-known woods, through the quiet villages, in the deep meadows where the flowers love their life, by the flowing of the Thames; in poetry so happy and so loving that each name strikes itself into a landscape before our eyes. And to add to the charm, Arnold has filled the landscape with humanity and its work, with shepherd and reaper, gipsies and scholars, hunters and oarsmen, dancing maidens and wandering youths, among whom, alive and gay, Thyrsis and the Scholar Gipsy, and a meditative Arnold, alive and serious, move and speak of the true aims, the just ideas, the grave conduct, of human life. The picture is delightful, and the urging power of it is love—the life-long love of an Oxford scholar for the shelter and inspiration of his youth. In no poems that Arnold wrote is his natural description better than it is in these.
His natural description to which I now turn, is always vivid, pictorial, accurate, done, to use his own phrase, with his eye on the subject. The adjectives which he chooses so carefully are so apt and striking ​that they have the force of facts. What can better words like these—
or these from Dover Beach—
This, as accurate as it is poetical, is finer but not truer—with "its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar"—than Tennyson's verse, describing the same thing—
The scream of a maddened beach dragged down by the wave.
At least, it enables Arnold to make a more human use of the natural fact than Tennyson could have done. Tennyson's phrase makes the sea and the stones of the beach be and feel like men, and, having done so, he cannot use them as illustrating the large movement of human life. But Arnold seeing and hearing them as pure nature, not humanised nature, transfers the scene ​into an image of the spiritual life of man; and with an imagination and force which, by their passion, reach splendour of thought and diction. This is a frequent way of his with nature, and no one has done it better in English poetry. I quote it:
Always it is the same in his poetry of nature. He describes the thing he sees, flower or bird, stream or hill, exactly as they are, without humanising them, without veiling them with any sentiment of their own, without having concerning nature any philosophy that spiritualises nature as the form of thought or love, any belief that she is alive or dwelt in by living beings. Nature to Arnold is frequently the nature that modern science has revealed to us—matter in motion, taking an inconceivable variety of form, but always, in its variety, acting rigidly according to certain ways, which, for want of a wiser term, we call laws. For the first time this view of nature enters into English poetry with Arnold. He sees the loveliness of her doings, but he also sees their terror and dreadfulness and their relentlessness. But what in his poetry he ​chiefly sees is the peace of nature's obedience to law, and the everlasting youth of her unchanging life.
He contrasts her calm with our turmoil, her quiet changes of action day after day, her rest after action, with our hurry, our confusion, and our noise. Calm soul of things, he cries, make me calm, let the human world, like thee, perfect its vast issues "in toil unsevered from tranquillity." Again, he contrasts the immortal life of nature with our decay and death. That life existed before us, will exist after us, fulfilling pauselessly its pure eternal course. Oh, he cries, to be alone with that intense life, and in its youthfulness, to be clear, composed, refreshed, ennobled; to have its steadfast joy! Calm, with life, that was the ideal he drew from nature.
Then, he also contrasts her joy and freedom with the sorrow and the slavery of our struggle towards any perfection. She obeys law silently and therefore ​is free. We do not obey, or we resent the law, and suffering from its rigid restrictions, are enslaved by it. This is the motive of a great number of passages in Arnold's poems. In this view of nature, he has slipped out of his view of her as seen by science. Science could not talk of the joy or freedom of nature. And indeed, he was not faithful to the scientific view of her. His conception of her wavered with his mood. He sometimes, in a sort of reversion to Wordsworth, speaks of her as powerful to help him, as having, like a mother, the heart to help him. He appeals to her to fill him with the healing qualities he vainly imputes to her. He is happily inconsequent in his conceptions of her.
For example, there is a half-outlined conception of nature, quite different from the rest, which obscurely appears in a poem entitled Morality. He seems to imagine that behind nature there is a self-harmonious, self-conscious Life, as it were a Demiourgos, who, putting the thoughts of the Eternal Intelligence into form, has made the Universe and the intelligent beings who inhabit it, and therefore, being in nature and in man as thought, can bring them into communion and cause nature to work and feel with man; and the lines which close A Summer Night, seem to be filled with that idea—
This thought which I suggest he conceived, is in these lines obscure and wandering. It takes a clearer, indeed another, consistency in Morality. Nature there, in her freedom and joy, looks on our agony, and, while we think she censures or despises our strife, does really nothing of the kind, but, on the contrary, is emotionalised by it, set into self-wonder and questioningby it. Did I ever feel, she asks, the eagerness to perfection, to realisation of thought in form, which gives to men that earnest air?
​This self-conscious communion of nature with her own heart, this questioning of her own being in contrast with man's being, this dim remembrance of herself elsewhere, hold in them a philosophic idea of nature we do not find elsewhere in the poets, and the philosophic imagination is charmed to play with it. It seems as if Arnold thought of the creative Logos, by whose being outward nature is and continues, as able to pass back momentarily from his existence in the natural world, which is subject to the conceptions of time and space, to a remembrance of the eternity when there was neither time nor space to him, when there was no material universe into which he had shaped the thoughts of God, when he was himself the Logos in God as yet unexpressed in form, but desiring eagerly towards form. This is Arnold playing with the obscure conceptions of Neoplatonism.
Again, he puts into two poems, the Youth of Nature and the Youth of Man, his contrast of the everlasting life of Nature with the decay and fleeting of our life. The beauty, charm, romance we feel in nature, are they, he asks, in nature or in the poet? In nature, he answers, and far more than in the poet; the singer is less than his theme. They were in the poet when he was conscious of the immeasurable glory of Nature's life. And what they were in him no pencil could ever paint, no verse could ever fully tell. The depth, the force, the joy, sadness, and longing of them which in youth he felt were nature's depth, force, joy, sadness, ​and longing; and only a shred of them could he ever put into all his verse. Yes, cries Nature, when all the poets who, because they were part of me, thought that my life was theirs, are dead dust, I remain as living, as young as ever. This is the law. Nature, rich and full in us when we are young, we think to have no life but that which we give her. But as years pass by, our energy fails, and, like fools, we think our decay is a decay in nature. But she watches us, silent and contemptuous. Her living beauty never sees our corruption. Therefore, cries Arnold, while we are able, get into vital union with the calm, and obedience and life of nature, order the soul into the spirit of her life—
That is his conclusion. It would not be mine from the premises, and it belongs to that part of Arnold's thinking which he derived from stoicism. It were better to rise out of one's soul into love of the soul of the world, to lose oneself in its beauty and joy and peace by self-forgetfulness, to see the perfect good outside of one's self, and spring off one's own shadow into union with the infinite light. No man can change his yearning to the greatness of nature into possession of that greatness who is sunk in his personal soul. But outside of that prison, ravished by the love of the perfect—he retains in decay, in old age, in death, not ​the misery Arnold paints in the poem, but delight and life, even rapture.
I say no more of his poetry of nature. I pass to his poetry of man, and here I must risk repetition, and take up, in this new connection, poems on which I have already written. He cared for the beauty of the natural world, but he cared far more for the landscape of the soul of man. It was at first the landscape of his own life-its rivers, its buried life,
the voices which called it in the night, of which he first wrote with his serious stoic passion. But the time came when the landscape of the soul of the world, of humanity at large, engaged him far more than that of the little world within him. He sang of man's history in the past, but chiefly of his own age and country, and of the battle for life and God in which he moved; yet, even now, he still remained more of an interested spectator than of a fighter. It was only when he gave up verse that he became a warrior hotly engaged in the fray. But whether spectator or not, it is when he is writing not about himself but about the soul of man travailing through its foes to the City of God that he is at his best as a poet. The larger subject makes the lovelier verse, when one is a poet at all. Even in the earliest poems, as in Resignation and in the passion of Philomela, he began, as also in some ​of the sonnets of that time, to look out beyond himself over the world of man. The close of Dover Beach marks how despairing and pitiful was sometimes that outlook. The world, he says,
Then, in another mood, hope for the world emerges at the close of that noble and frowning poem, A Summer Night. And then, changing again, he can stand apart, and give advice to the confused and toiling world. The New Age bids men keep reverence for the past, and Progress bids them keep religion. Guard the fire within, lest the heart of humanity perish of cold. The Future, a poem as full of imagination as of thought, paints first all that man has lost of the insight, the freshness, the calm, the vigour of life which filled the past; and then, the hoarse roar of the present, the huge cities, the black confusion of trade, the peacelessness. What was before man neglects, of what shall succeed he has no knowledge. But haply, the river of Time, as it grows, may gain, not the earlier calm, but a solemn quiet of its own; and as it draws to the Ocean, may, at last, allure peace to the soul of man out of the infinite sea into which it flows.
This is a higher, a more hopeful strain; and it is continued and strengthened in the Elegiac Poems. I ​have said something of them already, but more must now be said. I dwell now on their deep interest in the life and history of humanity. Their poetry, with a few lyric exceptions, is the best he wrote. They are weighty with interesting, novel, masculine, and often surprising thought. They extend their sympathy over wide areas of history and are in close contact also with the limited time in which he lived. They contain admirable drawings of men and women whom he admired and loved; of their characters and their influence on the world. Weighted with grave and clear thought, their imagination moves with power, and with a grace which results from the power. It grasps the higher nature of one division of the human race, as in these celebrated lines which describe the Orient when Rome had ceased to disturb it; yet the phrase is only partly true:
With as much forceful insight, when he pictures the Scholar Gipsy flying from the fevered world and pursuing still the unreachable ideal, he describes another whole class of men. And with the insight and the force of it, what beauty of words, what intimate love of the lovely world!
I rejoice to feel in these elegies, the delicate, sensitive art, the careful strength which, combined with a winning grace and serious love of quiet beauty, affect the soul as a still, fair autumn Italian day in lands full of human history affects the senses. Quietude, power, beauty, and tenderness pervade them.
The appreciations of Byron, Goethe, and Wordsworth, which in a poem on Obermann he carries further, are not only good in themselves, but they are applied to the story of man, and to the criticism of the time in which he lived. And the tenderness and gratitude with which he remembers the work of Wordsworth pass into gratitude to him for the healing which his verse has brought to the heart of man. A greater tenderness, a deeper reverence, a personal love and honour fill, as with sweet waters, the verses to his father's memory. But they also pass from personal feeling into feeling for the fates of man. What is the course of the life, he asks, of mortal men on the earth? Most men eddy about, blindly strive, achieve nothing, and perish. But some a thirst unquenchable fires, and they move to a clear goal; and of these he writes in a noble and imaginative passage, with a splendour of description. Only one out of many pilgrims reaches ​the desolate inn and the gaunt landlord on the ridge of the snow-clad pass. The rest have perished. But his father would not be saved alone, but gave his life to bring those that were lost safe to the goal. And from this he passes to describe in lofty phrase those others, servants and sons of God, through whom it is that mankind still has faith and strength enough to march on to the City of God. This is indeed a change from the days when he only thought of his own soul.
Then the famous passage in the poem on Heine's Grave on the Titan toil of England shows how he felt beyond himself the building pains of a nation. This dignified passage is lightened and enlightened by his delicate description of Heine's youth and his sympathy with his joy; and finally all the poem is made to thrill with its final thought concerning all humanity (thrown back from the end into all that precedes it)—that the Spirit in whom man exists has made each of us the revealer of one or more of His thoughts, discloses through us the infinite variety of His Being. It is a leading thought of Fichte's, a thought that arises in many, and that arose, I have no doubt uncommunicated, in the soul of Arnold.
The Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse, represent, as I have already said, a partial reaction from the wider, brighter view he now takes of the world to the trouble of his own life and spirit; but as they develop, they also pass from self-consideration into consideration of the fate of the world of men, and of those who shared ​in and were broken by the strife. Ah, he thinks at the close, with that constantly recurring thought of his in which so much of his inner life and of ours is hidden, let the new world thunder on its noisy triumph and use its powers, be proud of its turbulent life or of its eternal trifling-yet there are a few who would in quiet take their bent towards unwearied pursuit of the perfect, who like Glanvil have "one aim, one business, one desire," who wait in joyous unconcern for the celestial light; and they, in these unthinking days, are the refuge and light of the world.
Then the two poems to Senancour, the writer of Obermann, mingle their personal and self-revealing verse with so wide a human interest that in all who read them a hundred questions rise—of their own soul, of the age in which they live, and of the fates of man. On the great difference of the second from the first I have already written, but I may dwell here on their charm—charm of grave thought, ranging far and wide, charm of happy word and phrase, and charm of natural description. The very atmosphere of that lovely land, where so many hearts have been healed, the flowerhaunted meadows, the shimmering lake below, the blue hills, the far-off snows—is in the loving verse, and it is mingled with the soul of Arnold and Obermann, till each mountain slope and every flower upon them, and the waves of the lake as they break on the shore, are of men, and through men, and in men.
Of all these elegies, the Scholar Gipsy and Thyrsis ​are the most delightful, delightful even though their subject be sad. I have dwelt on the tenderness of their sadness. I have not dwelt on their contemplative beauty. They are pervaded by that retired contemplation of life a man may have who, flying from the storm of cities for a brief holiday, thinks the brief time into an eternity, and in the eternal hermitage of his soul muses on earth and human life.
These poems reach excellence, that rare thing Arnold himself loves so much, to whose lonely summit, the artist, climbing through rocks and mist, so seldom can attain. They are pure poetry, moving in a dance, serious and bright, graceful and grave in turn, to the Dorian pipe, "the Dorian strain." The soft recorders accompany the pastoral, the idyllic song, wise with thought, happy with noble phrase, filled with accurate and loving description of nature; and in it lives from line to line the contemplation of humanity.
Virgil and Theocritus have been infused into their manner and their verse, nor has Lycidas been quite forgotten. Yet they are not imitative; the atmosphere, the thought, the music, and the subject are Arnold's own. Although this classic echo is heard in them, they are modern, of the tempestuous age when they were written by one who, while he wrote them, looked on the tempest, but for their meditative hour was not tossed upon its waves. Some of the classic episodes seem a little out of place, especially that of the Tyrian trader and the Grecian coaster at the end of the Scholar ​Gipsy, but we are glad to forgive this for the sake of their charm. Indeed, whenever Arnold's poetry touches Greece, we meet an especial music and grace; but nowhere is this clear, lovely, and sweet air so lucid and so pure as in the classic scenery and life which glide in and out of these two elegies. Oxford, while we read, seems not far away from the flowers of Enna or the silent stream of Mantua, nor is the wandering student then surprised to hear Theocritus piping near the Iffey mill, or see, as he passes by, Virgil dreaming under the shade of the Fyfield tree.
But Glanvil's scholar, the gipsy-hearted wanderer, a shy shade that comes and goes, who loves the lovely, quiet world, pursuing ever the ineffable, is brought, in a beautiful variety, into contrast with Arnold's own life, and with the feverish life of his time. Beyond the elegiac cry is the greater cry of humanity. Thyrsis, too, closes with the same personal, ever-recurring strain. Thyrsis loved the country, so did I. He felt the storm of his world and went to meet it, It was too much for him and he died.
Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go?
But I was forced into the world. The way is long and the Alps of truth unclimbable. I too am going; but I wander on, like the shy Scholar, like Thyrsis, on the quest. The light we sought is shining still.
* ↑ Note.—In the first edition this line is better said: Drained all the life my full heart had to spill.
* ↑ I do not quote the whole statement, only passages from it, but I refer my readers to the book. It is too long to quote in extenso.
* ↑ Once he drew from this a strange corollary. Such vast life, ever evolving new things and old things in new shapes, may bring us (who are in that life) back hereafter into another conscious life—may even bring together again in better circumstance those who have been together here in sadness and pain. At least, so I read the meaning of a curious epilogue to Haworth Churchyard:Unquiet souls! —In the dark fermentation of earth, In the never idle workshop of nature, In the eternal movement, Ye shall find yourselves again!
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