“The one wide-welcomed for a father’s fame,
Entered with free bold step that seemed to claim
Fame for himself, nor on another lean.
So full of power, yet blithe and debonair,
Rallying his friends with pleasant banter gay,
Or half a-dream chaunting with jaunty air
Great words of Goethe, catch of Béranger,
We see the banter sparkle in his prose,
But knew not then the undertone that flows
So calmly sad, through all his stately lay.”
Like some other persons of much distinction, and a great many of little or none, he “missed his first,” in December 1844; and though he obtained, three months later, the consolation prize of a Fellowship (at Oriel, too), he made no post-graduate stay of any length at the university. The then very general, though even then not universal, necessity of taking orders before very long would probably in any case have sent him wandering; for it is clear from the first that his bent was hopelessly anti-clerical, and he was not merely too honest, but much too proud a man, to consent to be put in one of the priests’ offices for a morsel of bread. It may well be doubted — though he felt and expressed not merely in splendid passages of prose and verse for public perusal, but in private letters quite towards the close of his life, that passionate attachment which Oxford more than any other place of the kind inspires — whether he would have been long at home there as a resident. For the place has at once a certain republicanism and a certain tyranny about its idea, which could not wholly suit the aspiring and restless spirit of the author of Switzerland. None of her sons is important to Oxford — the meanest of them has in his sonship the same quality as the greatest. Now it was very much at Mr Arnold’s heart to be important, and he was not eager to impart or share his qualities.
However this may be, there were ample reasons why he should leave the fold. The Bar (though he was actually called and for many years went circuit as Marshal to his father-in-law, Mr Justice Wightman) would have suited him, in practice if not in principle, even less than the Church; and he had no scientific leanings except a taste for botany. Although the constantly renewed cries for some not clearly defined system of public support for men of letters are, as a rule, absurd, there is no doubt that Mr Arnold was the very man for a sinecure, and would have justified the existence of Pipe or Hanaper to all reasonable men. But his political friends had done away with nearly all such things, and no one of the very few that remained fell to his lot. His father had died in 1842, but the son served a short apprenticeship to school-teaching at Rugby, then became private secretary to Lord Lansdowne, the President of the Council (it is now that we first meet him as an epistoler), and early in 1851 was appointed by his chief to an inspectorship of schools. Having now a livelihood, he married, in June of that year, Frances Lucy Wightman, daughter of a judge of the Queen’s Bench. Their first child, Thomas, was born on July 6, 1852, and Mr Arnold was now completely estated in the three positions of husband, father, and inspector of schools, which occupied — to his great delight in the first two cases, not quite so in the third — most of his life that was not given to literature. Some not ungenerous but perhaps rather unnecessary indignation has been spent upon his “drudgery” and its scanty rewards. It is enough to say that few men can arrange at their pleasure the quantity and quality of their work, and that not every man, even of genius, has had his bread-and-butter secured for life at eight-and-twenty.
But in the ten or twelve years which had passed since Alaric at Rome, literature itself had been by no means neglected, and in another twelvemonth after the birth of his first-born, Matthew Arnold had practically established his claim as a poet by utterances to which he made comparatively small additions later, though more than half his life was yet to run. And he had issued one prose exercise in criticism, of such solidity and force as had not been shown by any poet since Dryden, except Coleridge.
These documents can hardly be said to include the Newdigate poem (Cromwell) of 1843: they consist of The Strayed Reveller and other Poems, by “A.,” 1849; Empedocles on Etna, and other Poems, [still] by “A.,” 1852; and Poems by Matthew Arnold, a new edition, 1853 — the third consisting of the contents of the two earlier, with Empedocles and a few minor things omitted, but with very important additions, including Sohrab and Rustum, The Church of Brou, Requiescat, and The Scholar-Gipsy. The contents of all three must be carefully considered, and the consideration may be prefaced by a few words on Cromwell.
This ³Î½¹Ã¼±, like the other, Mr Arnold never included in any collection of his work; but it was printed at Oxford in the year of its success, and again at the same place, separately or with other prize poems, in 1846, 1863, and 1891. It may also be found in the useful non-copyright edition above referred to. Couched in the consecrated couplet, but not as of old limited to fifty lines, it is “good rhymes,” as the elder Mr Pope used to say to the younger; but a prudent taster would perhaps have abstained, even more carefully than in the case of the Alaric, from predicting a real poet in the author. It is probably better than six Newdigates out of seven at least, but it has no distinction. The young, but not so very young, poet — he was as old as Tennyson when he produced his unequal but wonderful first volume — begins by borrowing Wordsworth’s two voices of the mountain and the sea, shows some impression here and there from Tennyson’s own master-issue, the great collection of 1842, which had appeared a year before, ventures on an Alexandrine —
“Between the barren mountains and the stormy sea” —
which comes as a pleasant relief, and displays more than once (as he did afterwards in Tristram and Iseult) an uncertain but by no means infelicitous variety of couplet which he never fully or fairly worked out, but left for Mr William Morris to employ with success many years later. Otherwise the thing is good, but negligible. It would have taken an extremely strong competition, or an extremely incompetent examiner, to deprive it of the prize; but he must have been a sanguine man who, in giving the author that prize, expected to receive from him returns of poetry.
Yet they came. If we did not know that the middle of this century was one of the nadirs of English criticism, and if we did not know further that even good critics often go strangely wrong both in praise and in blame of new verse, it would be most surprising that The Strayed Reveller volume should have attracted so little attention. It is full of faults, but that is part of the beauty of it. Some of these faults are those which, persevering, prevented Mr Arnold from attaining a higher position than he actually holds in poetry; but no critic could know that. There is nothing here worse, or more necessarily fatal, than many things in Tennyson’s 1830 and 1832 collections: he overwent those, so might Mr Arnold have overgone these. And the promise — nay, the performance — is such as had been seen in no verse save Tennyson’s, and the almost unnoticed Browning’s, for some thirty years. The title-poem, though it should have pleased even a severe judge, might have aroused uncomfortable doubts even in an amiable one. In the first place, its rhymelessness is a caprice, a will-worship. Except blank verse, every rhymeless metre in English has on it the curse of the tour de force, of the acrobatic. Campion and Collins, Southey and Shelley, have done great things in it; but neither Rose-cheeked Laura nor Evening, neither the great things in Thalaba nor the great things in Queen Mab, can escape the charge of being caprices. And caprice, as some have held, is the eternal enemy of art.
But the caprice of The Strayed Reveller does not cease with its rhymelessness. The rhythm and the line-division are also studiously odd, unnatural, paradoxical. Except for the “poetic diction” of putting “Goddess” after “Circe” instead of before it, the first stave is merely a prose sentence, of strictly prosaic though not inharmonious rhythm. But in this stave there is no instance of the strangest peculiarity, and what seems to some the worst fault of the piece, the profusion of broken-up decasyllables, which sometimes suggest a very “corrupt” manuscript, or a passage of that singular stuff in the Carol
ine dramatists which is neither blank verse, nor any other, nor prose. Here are a few out of many instances —
“Is it, then, evening
So soon? [I see the night-dews
Clustered in thick beads], dim,” etc.
·····
[“When the white dawn first
Through the rough fir-planks.”]
·····
[“Thanks, gracious One!
Ah! the sweet fumes again.”]
·····
[“They see the Centaurs
In the upper glens.”]
One could treble these — indeed in one instance (the sketch of the Indian) the entire stanza of eleven lines, by the insertion of one “and” only, becomes a smooth blank-verse piece of seven, two of which are indeed hemistichs, and three “weak-ended,” but only such as are frequent in Shakespeare —
“They see the Indian drifting, knife in hand,
His frail boat moored to a floating isle — thick-matted
With large-leaved [and] low-creeping melon-plants
And the dark cucumber.
He reaps and stows them, drifting, drifting: round him,
Round his green harvest-plot, flow the cool lake-waves,
The mountains ring them.”
Nor, perhaps, though the poem is a pretty one, will it stand criticism of a different kind much better. Such mighty personages as Ulysses and Circe are scarcely wanted as mere bystanders and “supers” to an imaginative young gentleman who enumerates, somewhat promiscuously, a few of the possible visions of the Gods. There is neither classical, nor romantic, nor logical justification for any such mild effect of the dread Wine of Circe: and one is driven to the conclusion that the author chiefly wanted a frame, after his own fashion, for a set of disconnected vignettes like those of Tennyson’s Palace of Art and Dream of Fair Women.
But if the title poem is vulnerable, there is plenty of compensation. The opening sonnet —
“Two lessons, Nature, let me learn of thee” —
is perhaps rather learnt from Wordsworth, yet it does not fail to strike the note which fairly differentiates the Arnoldian variety of Wordsworthianism — the note which rings from Resignation to Poor Matthias, and which is a very curious cross between two things that at first sight may seem unmarriageable, the Wordsworthian enthusiasm and the Byronic despair. But of this more when we have had more of its examples before us. The second piece in the volume must, or should, have struck — for there is very little evidence that it did strike — readers of the volume as something at once considerable and, in no small measure, new. Mycerinus, a piece of some 120 lines or so, in thirteen six-line stanzas and a blank-verse coda, is one of those characteristic poems of this century, which are neither mere “copies of verses,” mere occasional pieces, nor substantive compositions of the old kind, with at least an attempt at a beginning, middle, and end. They attempt rather situations than stories, rather facets than complete bodies of thought, or description, or character. They supply an obvious way of escape for the Romantic tendency which does not wish to break wholly with classical tradition; and above all, they admit of indulgence in that immense variety which seems to have become one of the chief devices of modern art, attempting the compliances necessary to gratify modern taste.
The Herodotean anecdote of the Egyptian King Mycerinus, his indignation at the sentence of death in six years as a recompense for his just rule, and his device of lengthening his days by revelling all night, is neither an unpromising nor a wholly promising subject. The foolish good sense of Mr Toots would probably observe — and justly — that before six years, or six months, or even six days were over, King Mycerinus must have got very sleepy; and the philosophic mind would certainly recall the parallel of Cleobis and Biton as to the best gift for man. Mr Arnold, however, draws no direct moral. The stanza-part of the poem, the king’s expostulation, contains very fine poetry, and “the note” rings again throughout it, especially in the couplet —
“And prayers, and gifts, and tears, are fruitless all,
And the night waxes, and the shadows fall.”
The blank-verse tail-piece is finer still in execution; it is, with the still finer companion-coda of Sohrab and Rustum, the author’s masterpiece in the kind, and it is, like that, an early and consummate example of Mr Arnold’s favourite device of finishing without a finish, of “playing out the audience,” so to speak, with something healing and reconciling, description, simile, what not, to relieve the strain of his generally sad philosophy and his often melancholy themes.
One may less admire, despite its famous and often-quoted line,
“Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole,”
the sonnet To a Friend, praising Homer and Epictetus and Sophocles, for it seems to some to have a smatch of priggishness. Nor am I one of those who think very highly of the much longer Sick King in Bokhara which (with a fragment of an Antigone, whereof more hereafter) follows, as this sonnet precedes, The Strayed Reveller itself. There is “the note,” again, and I daresay the orientalism has the exactness of colour on which, as we know from the Letters, Mr Arnold prided himself. Yet the handling of the piece seems to me prolix and uncertain, and the drift either very obscure or somewhat unimportant. But about the Shakespeare sonnet which follows there can be no controversy among the competent. “Almost adequate” is in such a case the highest praise; and it must be given.
The companions of this sonnet are respectable, but do not deserve much warmer words; and then we turn to a style of poem remarkably different from anything which the author had yet published and from most of his subsequent work. It is not unnoteworthy that the batch of poems called in the later collected editions Switzerland, and completed at last by the piece called On the Terrace at Berne, appeared originally piecemeal, and with no indication of connection. The first of its numbers is here, To my Friends who Ridiculed a Tender Leave-taking. It applies both the note of thought which has been indicated, and the quality of style which had already disengaged itself, to the commonest — the greatest — theme of poetry, but to one which this poet had not yet tried — to Love. Let it be remembered that the thought has the cast of a strictly pessimist quietism — that the style aims, if it aims at any single thing, at the reproduction of the simpler side of classicalism, at an almost prim and quakerish elegance, a sort of childlike grace. There is, however, by no means any great austerity in the tone: on the contrary, the refrain (altered later) —
“Ere the parting kiss be dry,
Quick! thy tablets, Memory!” —
approaches the luscious. It is not easy to decide, and it is perhaps in both senses impertinent to speculate, whether the “Marguerite” (whose La Tour-like portrait is drawn in this piece with such relish, and who is so philosophically left to her fate by her lover on the Terrace at Berne later) had any live original. She seems a little more human in some ways than most of those cloud-Junos of the poets, the heroines of sonnet-sequence and song-string. She herself has a distinct touch of philosophy, anticipating with nonchalant resignation the year’s severance, and with equally nonchalant anticipation the time when
“Some day next year I shall be,
Entering heedless, kissed by thee.”
Her wooer paints her with gusto, but scarcely with ardour; and ends with the boding note —
“Yet, if little stays with man,
Ah! retain we all we can!” —
seeming to be at least as doubtful of his own constancy as of hers. Nor do we meet her again in the volume. The well-known complementary pieces which make up Switzerland were either not written, or held back.
The inferior but interesting Modern Sappho, almost the poet’s only experiment in “Moore-ish” method and melody —
“They are gone — all is still! Foolish heart, dost thou quiver?” —
is a curiosity rather than anything else. The style is ill suited to the thought; besides, Matthew Arnold, a master at times of blank verse, and of the statelier stanza, was less of
ten an adept at the lighter and more rushing lyrical measures. He is infinitely more at home in the beautiful New Sirens, which, for what reason it is difficult to discover, he never reprinted till many years later, partly at Mr Swinburne’s most judicious suggestion. The scheme is trochaic, and Mr Arnold (deriving beyond all doubt inspiration from Keats) was happier than most poets with that charming but difficult foot. The note is the old one of yearning rather than passionate melancholy, applied in a new way and put most clearly, though by no means most poetically, in the lines —
“Can men worship the wan features,
The sunk eyes, the wailing tone,
Of unsphered, discrowned creatures,
Souls as little godlike as their own?”
The answer is, “No,” of course; but, as some one informed Mr Arnold many years later, we knew that before, and it is distressing to be told it, as we are a little later, with a rhyme of “dawning” and “morning.” Yet the poem is a very beautiful one — in some ways the equal of its author’s best up to this time; at least he had yet done nothing except the Shakespeare sonnet equal to the splendid stanza beginning —
“And we too, from upland valleys;”
and the cry of the repentant sirens, punished as they had sinned —
“‘Come,’ you say, ‘the hours are dreary.’”
Yet the strong Tennysonian influence (which the poet rather ungraciously kicked against in his criticism) shows itself here also; and we know perfectly well that the good lines —
“When the first rose flush was steeping
All the frore peak’s awful crown” —
are but an unconscious reminiscence of the great ones —
“And on the glimmering summit far withdrawn,
God made himself an awful rose of dawn.”
He kept this level, though here following not Tennyson or Keats but Shelley, in the three ambitious and elaborate lyrics, The Voice, To Fausta, and Stagirius, fine things, if somehow a little suggestive of inability on their author’s part fully to meet the demands of the forms he attempts— “the note,” in short, expressed practically as well as in theory. Stagirius in particular wants but a very little to be a perfect expression of the obstinate questionings of the century; and yet wanting a little, it wants so much! Others, To a Gipsy Child and The Hayswater Boat (Mr Arnold never reprinted this), are but faint Wordsworthian echoes; and thus we come to The Forsaken Merman.
Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold Page 110