It is, I believe, not so “correct” as it once was to admire this; but I confess indocility to correctness, at least the correctness which varies with fashion. The Forsaken Merman is not a perfect poem — it has longueurs, though it is not long; it has those inadequacies, those incompetences of expression, which are so oddly characteristic of its author; and his elaborate simplicity, though more at home here than in some other places, occasionally gives a dissonance. But it is a great poem — one by itself, one which finds and keeps its own place in the foreordained gallery or museum, with which every true lover of poetry is provided, though he inherits it by degrees. No one, I suppose, will deny its pathos; I should be sorry for any one who fails to perceive its beauty. The brief picture of the land, and the fuller one of the sea, and that (more elaborate still) of the occupations of the fugitive, all have their own charm. But the triumph of the piece is in one of those metrical coups which give the triumph of all the greatest poetry, in the sudden change from the slower movements of the earlier stanzas or strophes to the quicker sweep of the famous conclusion —
“The salt tide rolls seaward,
Lights shine from the town” —
to
“She left lonely for ever
The kings of the sea.”
Here the poet’s poetry has come to its own.
In Utrumque Paratus sounds the note again, and has one exceedingly fine stanza: —
“Thin, thin the pleasant human noises grow,
And faint the city gleams;
Rare the lone pastoral huts — marvel not thou!
The solemn peaks but to the stars are known,
But to the stars, and the cold lunar beams;
Alone the sun arises, and alone
Spring the great streams.”
But Resignation, the last poem in the book, goes far higher. Again, it is too long; and, as is not the case in the Merman, or even in The Strayed Reveller itself, the general drift of the poem, the allegory (if it be an allegory) of the two treadings of “the self-same road” with Fausta and so forth, is unnecessarily obscure, and does not tempt one to spend much trouble in penetrating its obscurity. But the splendid passage beginning —
“The Poet to whose mighty heart,”
and ending —
“His sad lucidity of soul,”
has far more interest than concerns the mere introduction, in this last line itself, of one of the famous Arnoldian catchwords of later years. It has far more than lies even in its repetition, with fuller detail, of what has been called the author’s main poetic note of half-melancholy contemplation of life. It has, once more, the interest of poetry — of poetical presentation, which is independent of any subject or intention, which is capable of being adapted perhaps to all, certainly to most, which lies in form, in sound, in metre, in imagery, in language, in suggestion — rather than in matter, in sense, in definite purpose or scheme.
It is one of the heaviest indictments against the criticism of the mid-nineteenth century that this remarkable book — the most remarkable first book of verse that appeared between Tennyson’s and Browning’s in the early thirties and The Defence of Guenevere in 1858 — seems to have attracted next to no notice at all. It received neither the ungenerous and purblind, though not wholly unjust, abuse which in the long — run did so much good to Tennyson himself, nor the absurd and pernicious bleatings of praise which have greeted certain novices of late years. It seems to have been simply let alone, or else made the subject of quite insignificant comments.
In the same year (1849) Mr Arnold was represented in the Examiner of July 21 by a sonnet to the Hungarian nation, which he never included in any book, and which remained peacefully in the dust-bin till a reference in his Letters quite recently set the ruthless reprinter on its track. Except for an ending, itself not very good, the thing is quite valueless: the author himself says to his mother, “it is not worth much.” And three years passed before he followed up his first volume with a second, which should still more clearly have warned the intelligent critic that here was somebody, though such a critic would not have been guilty of undue hedging if he had professed himself still unable to decide whether a new great poet had arisen or not.
This volume was Empedodes on Etna and other Poems, [still] By A. London: Fellowes, 1852. It contained two attempts — the title-piece and Tristram and Iseult — much longer and more ambitious than anything that the poet had yet done, and thirty-three smaller poems, of which two — Destiny and Courage — were never reprinted. It was again very unequal — perhaps more so than the earlier volume, though it went higher and oftener high. But the author became dissatisfied with it very shortly after its appearance in the month of October, and withdrew it when, as is said, less than fifty copies had been sold.
One may perhaps not impertinently doubt whether the critical reason, v. infra — in itself a just and penetrating one, as well as admirably expressed — which, in the Preface of the 1853 collection, the poet gave for its exclusion (save in very small part) from that volume tells the whole truth. At any rate, I think most good judges quarrel with Empedodes, not because the situation is unmanageable, but because the poet has not managed it. The contrast, in dramatic trio, of the world-worn and disappointed philosopher, the practical and rather prosaic physician, and the fresh gifts and unspoilt gusto of the youthful poet, is neither impossible nor unpromising. Perhaps, as a situation, it is a little nearer than Mr Arnold quite knew to that of Paracelsus, and it is handled with less force, if with more clearness, than Browning’s piece. But one does not know what is more amiss with it than is amiss with most of its author’s longer pieces — namely, that neither story nor character — drawing was his forte, that the dialogue is too colourless, and that though the description is often charming, it is seldom masterly. As before, there are jarring rhymes— “school” and “oracle,” “Faun” and “scorn.” Empedocles himself is sometimes dreadfully tedious; but the part of Callicles throughout is lavishly poetical. Not merely the show passages — that which the Roman father,
“Though young, intolerably severe,”
saved from banishment and retained by itself in the 1853 volume, as Cadmus and Harmonia, and the beautiful lyrical close, — but the picture of the highest wooded glen on Etna, and the Flaying of Marsyas, are delightful things.
Tristram and Iseult, with fewer good patches, has a greater technical interest. It is only one, but it is the most remarkable, of the places where we perceive in Mr Arnold one of the most curious of the notes of transition-poets. They will not frankly follow another’s metrical form, and they cannot strike out a new one for themselves. In this piece the author — most attractively to the critic, if not always quite satisfactorily to the reader — makes for, and flits about, half-a-dozen different forms of verse. Now it is the equivalenced octosyllable of the Coleridgean stamp rather than of Scott’s or Byron’s; now trochaic decasyllabics of a rather rococo kind; and once at least a splendid anapæstic couplet, which catches the ear and clings to the memory for a lifetime —
“What voices are these on the clear night air?
What lights in the court? What steps on the stair?”
But the most interesting experiment by far is in the rhymed heroic, which appears fragmentarily in the first two parts and substantively in the third. The interest of this, which (one cannot but regret it) Mr Arnold did not carry further, relapsing on a stiff if stately blank verse, is not merely intrinsic, but both retrospective and prospective. It is not the ordinary “stopped” eighteenth-century couplet at all; nor the earlier one of Drayton and Daniel. It is the “enjambed,” very mobile, and in the right hands admirably fluent and adaptable couplet, which William Browne and Chamberlayne practised in the early and middle seventeenth century, which Leigh Hunt revived and taught to Keats, and of which, later than Mr Arnold himself, Mr William Morris was such an admirable practitioner. Its use here is decidedly happy; and the whole of this part shows in Mr Arnold a temporary Romantic impulse, which again we
cannot but regret that he did not obey. The picture-work of the earlier lines is the best he ever did. The figure of Iseult with the White Hands stands out with the right Præ-Raphaelite distinctness and charm; and the story of Merlin and Vivian, with which, in the manner so dear to him, he diverts the attention of the reader from the main topic at the end, is beautifully told. For attaching quality on something like a large scale I should put this part of Tristram and Iseult much above both Sohrab and Rustum and Balder Dead; but the earlier parts are not worthy of it, and the whole, like Empedocles, is something of a failure, though both poems afford ample consolation in passages.
The smaller pieces, however, could have saved the volume had their larger companions been very much weaker. The Memorial Verses on Wordsworth (published first in Fraser) have taken their place once for all. If they have not the poetical beauty in different ways of Carew on Donne, of Dryden on Oldham, even of Tickell upon Addison, of Adonais above all, of Wordsworth’s own beautiful Effusion on the group of dead poets in 1834, they do not fall far short even in this respect. And for adequacy of meaning, not unpoetically expressed, they are almost supreme. If Mr Arnold’s own unlucky and maimed definition of poetry as “a criticism of life” had been true, they would be poetry in quintessence; and, as it is, they are poetry.
Far more so is the glorious Summer Night, which came near the middle of the book. There is a cheering doctrine of mystical optimism which will have it that a sufficiently intense devotion to any ideal never fails of at least one moment of consummate realisation and enjoyment. Such a moment was granted to Matthew Arnold when he wrote A Summer Night. Whether that rather vague life-philosophy of his, that erection of a melancholy agnosticism plus asceticism into a creed, was anything more than a not ungraceful or undignified will-worship of Pride, we need not here argue out. But we have seen how faithfully the note of it rings through the verse of these years. And here it rings not only faithfully, but almost triumphantly. The lips are touched at last: the eyes are thoroughly opened to see what the lips shall speak: the brain almost unconsciously frames and fills the adequate and inevitable scheme. And, as always at these right poetic moments, the minor felicities follow the major. The false rhymes are nowhere; the imperfect phrases, the little sham simplicities or pedantries, hide themselves; and the poet is free, from the splendid opening landscape through the meditative exposition, and the fine picture of the shipwreck, to the magnificent final invocation of the “Clearness divine!”
His freedom, save once, is not so unquestionably exhibited in the remarkable group of poems — the future constituents of the Switzerland group, but still not classified under any special head — which in the original volume chiefly follow Empedocles, with the batch later called “Faded Leaves” to introduce them. It is, perhaps, if such things were worth attempting at all, an argument for supposing some real undercurrent of fact or feeling in them, that they are not grouped at their first appearance, and that some of them are perhaps designedly separated from the rest. Even the name “Marguerite” does not appear in A Farewell; though nobody who marked as well as read, could fail to connect it with the To my Friends of the former volume. We are to suppose, it would appear, that the twelvemonth has passed, and that Marguerite’s anticipation of the renewed kiss is fulfilled in the first stanzas. But the lover’s anticipation, too, is fulfilled, though as usual not quite as he made it; he wearies of his restless and yet unmasterful passion; he rather muses and morals in his usual key on the “way of a man with a maid” than complains or repines. And then we go off for a time from Marguerite, though not exactly from Switzerland, in the famous “Obermann” stanzas, a variation of the Wordsworth memorial lines, melodious, but a very little impotent — the English utterance of what Sainte-Beuve, I think, called “the discouraged generation of 1850.” Now mere discouragement, except as a passing mood, though extremely natural, is also a little contemptible — pessimism-and-water, mere peevishness to the “fierce indignation,” mere whining compared with the great ironic despair. As for Consolation, which in form as in matter strongly resembles part of the Strayed Reveller, I must say, at the risk of the charge of Philistinism, that I cannot see why most of it should not have been printed as prose. In fact, it would be a very bold and astonishingly ingenious person who, not knowing the original, perceived any verse-division in this —
“The bleak, stern hour, whose severe moments I would annihilate, is passed by others in warmth, light, joy.”
Nor perhaps can very much be said for some of the other things. The sonnet afterwards entitled The World’s Triumphs is not strong; The Second Best is but “a chain of extremely valuable thoughts”; Revolution a conceit. The Youth of Nature and The Youth of Man do but take up less musically the threnos for Wordsworth. But Morality is both rhyme and poetry; Progress is at least rhyme; and The Future, though rhymeless again, is the best of all Mr Arnold’s waywardnesses of this kind. It is, however, in the earlier division of the smaller poems — those which come between Empedocles and Tristram — that the interest is most concentrated, and that the best thing — better as far as its subject is concerned even than the Summer Night — appears. For though all does not depend upon the subject, yet of two poems equally good in other ways, that which has the better subject will be the better. Here we have the bulk of the “Marguerite” or Switzerland poems — in other words, we leave the windy vagaries of mental indigestion and come to the real things — Life and Love.
The River does not name any one, though the “arch eyes” identify Marguerite; and Excuse, Indifference, and Too Late are obviously of the company. But none of these is exactly of the first class. We grow warmer with On the Rhine, containing, among other things, the good distich —
“Eyes too expressive to lie blue,
Too lovely to be grey”;
on which Mr Swinburne gave a probably unconscious scholion as well as variation in his own —
“Those eyes, the greenest of things blue,
The bluest of things grey.”
The intense pathos, which the poet could rarely “let himself go” sufficiently to reach, together with the seventeenth-century touch which in English not unfrequently rewards the self-sacrifice necessary to scholarly poets in such abandonment, appears in Longing; The Lake takes up the faint thread of story gracefully enough; and Parting does the same with more importance in a combination, sometimes very effective, of iambic couplets and anapaestic strophes, and with a touch of direct if not exalted nature in its revelation of that terrible thing, retrospective jealousy, in the lover. Woe to the man who allows himself to think —
“To the lips! ah! of others
Those lips have been pressed,
And others, ere I was,
Were clasped to that breast,”
and who does not at once exorcise the demon with the fortunately all-potent spell of Bocca bacciata, and the rest! Absence and Destiny show him in the same Purgatory; and it is impossible to say that he has actually escaped in the crowning poem of the series — the crowning-point perhaps of his poetry, the piece beginning
“Yes! in the sea of life enisled.”
It is neither uninteresting nor unimportant that this exquisite piece, by a man’s admiration of which (for there are some not wholly lost, who do not admire it) his soundness in the Catholic Faith of poetry may be tested, perhaps as well as by any other, has borne more than one or two titles, It is in the 1852 volume, To Marguerite. In returning a volume of the letters of Ortis. In 1853 it became Isolation, its best name; and later it took the much less satisfactory one of To Marguerite — continued, being annexed to another.
Isolation is preferable for many reasons; not least because the actual Marguerite appears nowhere in the poem, and, except in the opening monosyllable, can hardly be said to be even rhetorically addressed. The poet’s affection — it is scarcely passion — is there, but in transcendence: he meditates more than he feels. And that function of the riddle of the painful earth which Lucretius, thousands of years ago, put in
his grim Nequicquam! which one of Mr Arnold’s own contemporaries formulated with less magnificence and more popularity, but still with music and truth in Strangers Yet — here receives almost its final poetical expression. The image — the islands in the sea — is capitally projected in the first stanza; it is exquisitely amplified in the second; the moral comes with due force in the third; and the whole winds up with one of the great poetic phrases of the century — one of the “jewels five [literally five!] words long” of English verse — a phrase complete and final, with epithets in unerring cumulation —
“The unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea.”
Human Life, no ill thing in itself, reads a little weakly after Isolation; but Despondency is a pretty piece of melancholy, and, with a comfortable stool, will suit a man well. In the sonnet, When I shall be divorced, Mr Arnold tried the Elizabethan vein with less success than in his Shakespeare piece; and Self-Deception and Lines written by a Death-Bed, with some beauty have more monotony. The closing lines of the last are at the same time the moral of the book and the formula of the Arnoldian “note” —
“Calm’s not life’s crown, though calm is well.
‘Tis all perhaps which man acquires,
But ‘tis not what our youth desires.”
Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold Page 111