The Sun.
London, England, 1855-09-10 00:00:00

LITERATUI:E.

Poems. By Matthew Arnold. Second Edition.
1854. Longman and Co.
Poems. By Matthew Arnold. Second &rim
1855. Longman and Co.

It is something quite refreshing to meet for once
in a way—as in the instance of Mr. Arnold—with
a poet who can write both musically and coherently.
Can he not ? Read that exquisite poem of his—
" The Church of Brou "—and answer. Answer,
then, if here, at length, we have not one man, at
least, who can chaunt forth strains of genuine
poetry—no mere metrical fragments, scraps of
graceful versification—but true poetry (such as it
is), rising up like a sound of sweet music through
all this hubbub of rhythmical rant, rhymed gib-
berish, vapouring mysticism, and conceited rhodo-
montade. It comes to us like a relief, a balm, an
anodyne, a delicious assuagement. We drink in
the unaccustomed melodies somewhat as Saul
must have drunk in the dulcet, tones trickling from
the harp strings of the Hebrew shepherd—for
(reverently be it said) the Son of Kish could hardly
have been more maddened by his evil spirits than
we have had reason to be goaded almost to the
verge of insanity by the ravings and howlings of
the mob of false-bards, irritating the patience,
stunning the ears, and afflicting the intellects of
this ill-fated generation. Almost the only really
great poet living has but very recently capped the
climax of this din of discords by the shrieks and
babblings of that miserable Maud, who, as the
" sheeted dead" once " squeaked and gibbered in
the Roman streets" what time great Ca3sar fell—
comes forth nowadays to mark, as it were, as by a
dreadful portent, the downfall of the lofty and
beautiful intellect of AlfrE d Tennyson. Long
since we had been compelled to listen with an in-
describable anguish to the crealsings of Elizabeth
Barrett Browning—one whose voice had erst been
so ravishingly harmonious, but which seemed to
have grown hoarse, and harsh, and guttural, and
discordant, from long sitting in an uncomfortable
draft at the Casa Guidi Windows, mooning over
the heads of the rabble of Florence and maunder-
ing about impossible republics and impracticable
confederations. Then, again, Robert Browning—
the modern Bion who had espoused this our Eng-
lish Sappho—had he not himself already horrified
our imagination through his dissonant " Christmas
Eve and Easter Day," by singing us with a snuffling
"song thro' the nose" into that detestable li tae
conventicle, among the stifling crowd of which he
gave us so hideous a glimpse of a very horrible wen
tied up in a handkerchief ? After all which, have
we not had quite an appalling surfeit of the Spas-
medics ? Have we not had tuneful aspirants
thronging about our ears, who fancied they could
roar you like any sucking doves—fellows, howbeit,
braying with more than the assinine bell .w of
goodman Bottom ? Esch fresh corner with his
little, moonstruck following of votaries crying him
up to the skies as though he were a new Tyrtreus
—or as though in his hands the lyre were in those
of a greater and a more gifted wizard of the chords
than Timotheus ! One, by the sheer force, wo pre-
sume, of a most poignant indignation has
raved into being . the inimitable satirist
of these abortions of intellect—we mean
the ingenious Mr. T. Percy Jones, the author of
" Firmilian." Another has so ranted about the
sun, and the moon, and the stars, and the comets,
and the clouds, and the ocean, that he has whirled
us, and himself, and the earth, and the heavens
back again into chaos, so utter and irretrievable that
before the close of his raging paroxysm of exceed-
ingly blank verse, he cries out, as with a cry of
stark, staringlunacy— .

" Goti! our souls aro apron'd waiters !"
Another is so dandled into premature fame, toge-
ther with his own Babe Christable by the nimious
zeal of their critical forefathers, that he lifts up his
voice in regard to the great Russian War, and that,
too, in a tone so high and loud from over-confi-
dence in its compass and sonorousness, that it
fairly cracks with the earliest utterance. Alas !
the idols are broken not- only in the Temple of
Baal, but also in some of the loftiest niches of the
poetic Walhalla. -The iconoclasts, moreover, strange
to say, are the very men in whose honour these
tawdry and shattered images were erected. The
instruments of destruction employed are the iron
pens with which they were to have engraven their
names in ineffaceable characters upon the tablets
of immortality.
Wherefore, we repeat, it is absolutely refreshing
to meet, in the person of Mr. Arnold, with one who
can write verses which are, in some sort, at once
both melodious and comprehensible. His
elaborate explanatory preface to the first edi-
tion of his avowed " Poems"—a preface penned
en the Ist of October, 1853, and dated Fox
How, An.bleside—indicated that ho had from
the outset appreciated the real nature of the evil
infecting this the loftiest department of our litera-
ture—" The great vice of our intellect, manifesting
itself," says he, " in our incredible vagaries, in
letters, in art, in religion, in morals"—is, that " it
wants sanity," that "it is fantastic." Adding signi-
Pleantly and in admiring wonder, " Sanity—that is
the great virtue of the ancient literature." It is
the merit, let us observe at once, of these " Poems:
By Matthew Arnold." If nothing else, they are,
they must be allowed even by the most captious,
to be at least sane, at least lucid, at least compre-
hensible. To us theyaresaore. They are not only
rational in their coherence, and in their all-per-
vading capability of being immediately understood
upon the first perusal—theyare, besides this, full of
passion and feeling, sometimes expressive of ex-
ceeding grace and tenderness, occasionally adorned
with utterances of elevating and ennobling senti-
ments. " Solirab and Rustum," the principal
poem in the earlier volume, opens, it is true, with
the intolerable affectation of a wholly unaccoun-
table conjunction—

" And the first grey of morning filled the Rist,"

Yet, forgetting that freak of syntax by an effort of good
nature, and pa:sing on to the context, the reader
will find the simple grandeur of the narrative rising
lowly, but appreciably, upon the recognition of
his judgment as he advances, and when the climax
of the tragic incident is attained, will assuredly (if
he have any apprehension of what is most affecting
or most beautiful) discover that with himself,
hardly less than with the eider hero of the tale—
" . . His soul sets to grief, as the vast tide
Of the bright rocking ocean sets to shore
At the full moon."

Ferdousi had already celebrated the history of
" Sohrab and Rustum" in a poem—that poem had
already been translated from the Orient original
into French by Mohl—nevertheless, Mr. Ar-
nold was happily not in any way deterred
by these circumstances from recounting the
occurrence anew in our own language, impressed
as lie was with a profound sense of the
wonderful pathos of the catastrophe. 133au-
tiful and noble though this poem undoubtedly is
as a record of the death of Sohrab by the hand of
his father, Rustum, it is considerably surpassed
to our thinking by the minor poem already alluded
to in these remarks of ours—" The Church of
Brou"—a narrative in three parts, and in three
different metres, descriptive of the " Castle," the
" Church," and the " Tomb." In the first—
" Steeds are neighing, gallants glittering,
Gay, her smiling lord to greet,
From her mullion'd chamber casement
Smiles the Duchess Marguerite."
Her lord is killed soon afterwards in a boar-hunt ;
and the Duchess awaits his return, in the castle
hail, impatiently.

" In the hall, with sconces blazing,
Ladies waiting round her seat,
Clothed in smiles, beneath the dais
Sate the Duchess Marguerite."
The hunters, after a pause in the outer court in
the darkness—

" Slowly entered with their Master;
In the hall they laid him clown,
On his coat wero leaves and blood-stains,
On his brow an angry frown."
Thus suddenly widowed, the Duchess Marguerite
dedicates her life thenceforth to the building of
The Cburch of Brou, in which when it is at length
completed, her artists raise, at her bidding, a noble
monument—

" On the tomb two forms they sculptured,
Life like in the marble pale.
One the Duke in helm and armour
One the Duchess in her veil."
Her widowed career is thus accomplished :
" Round the tomb the carv'd stone fretwork
Was at Eastertide put on.
They the Duchess closed her labours
And she died at the St. John."
Such is part one, " The Castle," as dimly hinted
through these fragmentary quotations. Part two,
" The Church," depicts in less than half's, dozen
stanzas the sequestered edifice in the seclusion and
silence of its solemn Alpine scenery- PArt th”ree
being exquisitely descriptive of " The Tomb it-
self, as it shines forth, glorified in the sunset
streaming through " the vast western window of
the nave," while
On the pavement round the
hirTome b there glints
A chequer work of glowing sapp tints,
And amethyst, and ruby."
Then, exclaims the poet he apostrophises , ag the
" Marble pair"—

then unclose
Your eyelids en the stone where ye repose,
I.nd from your 'broider'd pillows lift your heads,
your cold white marble beds,
And rise upon
And, looking down on the warm and rosy tints
That chequer at your feet the illumined flints,
say_, What is this? Wo are in bliss--forgiven—
Behold the pavement of the courts of heaven !'—
Or let it be an autumn night when rain
Doth rustlingly above your heads complain
Ou the smooth leaden roof, au
intervals
ot n the walls
Shedding her pensive light at
The Moon through the clerestory ervals
windows shines
9nd too u" 116'4 taag tto bleu tais

Then gazing up through the dim pillars high,
The foliae.l marble forest where ye lie,
Hush'—ye will say—' it is eternity.
This is the glimmering verge of Heaven, and these
The columns cf the Heavenly Palaces.'—
And in the sweeping of the wind your ear
The passage of the angels' wings will hear,
And on the lichen-crusted leads above
The rustle of the eternal rain of Love."
Enough has been given, we conceire, to justify nct
only what we have said in praise of " The Church
of Brou," but also whatever has been remarked by
us in commendation of Mr. Arnold as a young
poet gifted with rare powers alike of judgment, of
taste, and of imagination. His charming lay of
" The Neckan," brief though it is, might be taken
as of itself sufficiently corroborative. As might
also with nearly equal truth be observed in re-
ference to his larger but more unequal poem of
" Tristram and Iseult," the subject of which ap-
pears to have been suggested by a passage in Dun-
lop's " History of Fiction," but the music and the
sweetness of which are all Mr. Arnold's own—a
music not readily to be conjectured by those who
do not happen to be familiar with the lovely
recurrence of the interjectional refrain, after the
broken apostrophe—

" Iseult 1 -

Ah, sweet angels, let him dream !
Keep his eyelids ! let him seem
Not this fever wasted Wight
Thin and palid before his time,
But the brilliant youthful knight."
And so on in like manner throughout. As to "The
Strayed Reveller," a poem reprinted from an earlier
and anonymous volume, that, although revised and
considerably improved here and there, still con-
tinues to our thinking as it was once jestingly
called by some wag of a carping critic, little better
after all than " A stray driveller." Then, too,
" Mycerinus," and " Philomela," " Cadmus and
Harmonia," seem to us so fastidiously vague and
classically correct as to be altogether without the
pale of our sympathies and beyond the reach of our
admiration. Not so " The Forsaken Merman," a
fancy of singular pathos, and one coloured through-
out with a bewitching tenderness. " Consolation,"
and "The Future," and fragments of that kind are
on the contrary to us little else than mere rythmi-
cal conceits, one of them (the first of the fugitive
pieces headed " Switzerland,") having a refrain of
unpleasant dampness—
" Ere the parting kiss be dry,
Quick, thy tablets, memory !"

Incomprehensible, utterlyincomprehensible to us
has been the issue from the press by Mr. Arnold,
of the thin little volume constituting the second
series of his Poems—a volume as unworthy of his
powers as well could be. Everything in the book
from first to last, " Balder Dead," an episode in
three parts, i. "Sending," fi. " J ourney," and iii.
"Funeral," with this " The Sick King in Bokhara,"
and " The Harp Player of Etna" in four divisions,
i. " The Last Glen," ii. " Ty pho," fii. "Marsyas," and
iv. " Apollo," besides a variety of others, broadly
entitled "Revolutions," and " Excuse," and "De-
sire," and " Indifference," and " Resignation," and.
"Self-deception," and " Despondency," (subjects
rather too broad, and ample, and indefinite to come
within the scope of interest or the grasp of sympathy)
—everything from first to last, in this volume of
1855, is calculated, we fear, rather to retard than
to advance the poetic reputation of which we have
here in our comments upon the volume of 1854
notified the brilliant and auspicious commence-
ments

The Art Journal for September maintains its
well-earned reputation as au enlightened exponent
and patron of art. The engravings, as usual, are
executed in first-rate style, and the subjects have
been selected with much discrimination. The
larger illustrations comprise " The Vintage in the
South of France," engraved by J. Outrim and L.
Stocks, A.R.A., from a choice painting by T.
Uwins, R.A., in the Vernon Gallery ; " The
Dogana," Venice, engraved by J. B. Allen, from.
the well-known chef d'ceuvre of Canaletti ; " The
Lamp of the Ganges," engraved by W. Roth from
the statue by H. Timbrell ; and " Silence," en-
graved by G. Levy from the picture by Caracci.
The latter belongs to the Royal collection at
'Windsor ; while " The Lamp of the Ganges," a
pleasing and elegant work of art, executed by com-
mission for her Majesty, now adorns the Royal
drawing-room at Osborne. Among the minor en-
gravings will be found three spirited illustrations
of a " British Artist," William Hilton, R.A., and
a number of choice designs in various departments
of art. The Paris Exhibition, as might be expected,
is noticed at some length, and h is remarked that
by the arrangement there adopted of the pictures
and sculpture both are gainers, the one in richness,
and the other in purity.

Barry Coverdales Courtship. By T. E. Smedley.
Virtue, Ball and Virtue.
The September part of this highly popular maga-
zine story, which, with its animated and varied pic-
tures of life, is being issued in a separate form,
with illustrations by Phiz.

DB. EASTON'S AC(;OUNT OF THE HANGO