Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold

by Matthew Arnold

  Again, we remember some one’s parody-remonstrance thirty years later, and again we may think that the condemnation which Mr Arnold himself was soon to pronounce upon Empedocles is rather disastrously far-reaching, while even this phrase is a boomerang. Musical and philosophical despair is one of the innumerable strings of the poetic lyre; but ‘tis not what our youth, or our age either, desires for a monochord.

  The remarkable manifesto just referred to was not long delayed. Whatever may have been his opinion as to the reception of the two volumes “by A,” he made up his mind, a year after the issue and withdrawal of the second, to put forth a third, with his name, and containing, besides a full selection from the other two, fresh specimens of the greatest importance. In the two former there had been no avowed “purpose”; here, not merely were the contents sifted on principle, the important Empedocles as well as some minor things being omitted: not merely did some of the new numbers, especially Sohrab and Rustum, directly and intentionally illustrate the: poet’s theories, but those theories themselves were definitely put in a Preface, which is the most important critical document issued in England for something like a generation, and which, as prefixed by a poet to his poetry, admits no competitors in English, except some work of Dryden’s and some of Wordsworth’s.

  Beginning with his reasons for discarding Empedocles, reasons which he sums up in a sentence, famous, but too important not to require citation at least in a note, he passes suddenly to the reasons which were not his, and of which he makes a good rhetorical starting-point for his main course. The bad critics of that day had promulgated the doctrine, which they maintained till a time within the memory of most men who have reached middle life, though the error has since in the usual course given way to others — that “the Poet must leave the exhausted past and draw his subjects from matters of present import.” This was the genuine “Times-v.-all-the-works-of-Thucydides” fallacy of the mid-nineteenth century, the fine flower of Cobdenism, the heartfelt motto of Philistia — as Philistia then was. For other times other Philistines, and Ekron we have always with us, ready, as it was once said, “to bestow its freedom in pinchbeck boxes” on its elect.

  This error Mr Arnold has no difficulty in laying low at once; but unluckily his swashing blow carries him with it, and he falls headlong into fresh error himself. “What,” he asks very well, “are the eternal objects of Poetry, among all nations and at all times?” And he answers — equally well, though not perhaps with impregnable logical completeness and accuracy— “They are actions, human actions; possessing an inherent interest in themselves, and which are to be communicated in an interesting manner by the art of the Poet.” Here he tells the truth, but not the whole truth; he should have added “thoughts and feelings” to “actions,” or he deprives Poetry of half her realm. But he is so far sufficient against his Harapha (for at that date there were no critical Goliaths about). Human action does possess an “inherent,” an “eternal,” poetical interest and capacity in itself. That interest, that capacity, is incapable of “exhaustion” — nay (as Mr Arnold, though with bad arguments as well as good, urges later), it is, on the whole, a likelier subject for the poet when it is old, because it is capable of being grasped and presented more certainly. But the defender hastens to indulge in more than one of those dangerous sallies from his trenches which have been fatal to so many heroes. He proclaims that the poet cannot “make an intrinsically inferior action equally delightful with a more excellent one by his treatment of it,” forgetting that, until the action is presented, we do not know whether it is “inferior” or not. He asks, “What modern poem presents personages as interesting as Achilles, Prometheus, Clytemnestra, Dido?” unsuspicious, or perhaps reckless, of the fact that not a few men, who admire and know the classics quite as well as he does, will cheerfully take up his challenge at any weapons he likes to name, and with a score of instances for his quartette. It is true that, thanks to the ineptitude of his immediate antagonists, he recovers himself not ill by cleverly selecting the respectable Hermann and Dorothea, the stagy-romantic Childe Harold, the creature called “Jocelyn,” and the shadowy or scrappy personages of the Excursion, to match against his four. But this is manifestly unfair. To bring Lamartine and Wordsworth in as personage-makers is only honest rhetorically (a kind of honesty on which Wamba or Launcelot Gobbo shall put the gloss for us). Nay, even those to whom Goethe and Byron are not the ideal of modern poetry may retort that Mephistopheles — that even Faust himself — is a much more “interesting” person than the sulky invulnerable son of Thetis, while Gulnare, Parisina, and others are not much worse than Dido. But these are mere details. The main purpose of the Preface is to assert in the most emphatic manner the Aristotelian (or partly Aristotelian) doctrine that “All depends on the subject,” and to connect the assertion with a further one, of which even less proof is offered, that “the Greeks understood this far better than we do,” and that they were also the unapproachable masters of “the grand style.” These positions, which, to do Mr Arnold justice, he maintained unflinchingly to his dying day, are supported, not exactly by argument, but by a great deal of ingenious and audacious illustration and variation of statement, even Shakespeare, even Keats, being arraigned for their wicked refusal to subordinate “expression” to choice and conception of subject. The merely Philistine modernism is cleverly set up again that it may be easily smitten down; the necessity of Criticism, and of the study of the ancients in order to it, is most earnestly and convincingly championed; and the piece ends with its other famous sentence about “the wholesome regulative laws of Poetry” and their “eternal enemy, Caprice.”

  As Mr Arnold’s critical position will be considered as a whole later, it would be waste of time to say very much more of this first manifesto of his. It need only be observed that he might have been already, as he often was later, besought to give some little notion of what “the grand style” was; that, true and sound as is much of the Preface, it is not a little exposed to the damaging retort, “Yes: this is your doxy, and she seems fair to you, no doubt; but so does ours seem fair to us.” Moreover, the “all-depends-on-the-subject” doctrine here, as always, swerves from one fatal difficulty. If, in what pleases poetically, poetical expression is always present, while in only some of what pleases poetically is the subject at the required height, is it not illogical to rule out, as the source of the poetic pleasure, that which is always present in favour of that which is sometimes absent?

  We know from the Letters — and we should have been able to divine without them — that Sohrab and Rustum, the first in order, the largest in bulk, and the most ambitious in scheme of the poems which appeared for the first time in the new volume, was written in direct exemplification of the theories of the Preface. The theme is old, and though not “classical” in place, is thoroughly so in its nature, being the story of a combat between a father and a son, who know not each other till too late, of the generosity of the son, of the final triumph of the father, of the anagnorisis, with the resignation of the vanquished and the victor’s despair. The medium is blank verse, of a partly but not wholly Miltonic stamp, very carefully written, and rising at the end into a really magnificent strain, with the famous picture of “the majestic river” Oxus floating on regardless of these human woes, to where the stars

  “Emerge, and shine upon the Aral Sea.”

  Even here, it is true, the Devil’s Advocate may ask whether this, like the Mycerinus close, that of Empedocles, and others, especially one famous thing, to which we shall come presently, is not more of a purple tail-patch, a “tag,” a “curtain,” than of a legitimate and integral finale. It is certain that Mr Arnold, following the Greeks in intention no doubt, if not quite so closely as he intended, was very fond of these “curtains” — these little rhetorical reconciliations and soothings for the reader. But this is the most in place of any of them, and certainly the noblest tirade that its author has left.

  Most of the new poems here are at a level but a little lower than thi
s part of Sohrab-and Rustum, while some of them are even above it as wholes. Philomela is beautiful, in spite of the obstinate will-worship of its unrhymed Pindaric: the Stanzas to the Memory of Edward Quillinan are really pathetic, though slightly irritating in their “sweet simplicity”; and if Thekla’s Answer is nothing particular, The Neckan nothing but a weaker doublet of the Merman, A Dream is noteworthy in itself, and as an outlier of the Marguerite group. Then we have three things, of which the first is, though unequal, great at the close, while the other two rank with the greatest things Mr Arnold ever did. These are The Church of Brou, Requiescat, and The Scholar-Gipsy.

  If, as no critic ever can, the critic could thoroughly discover the secret of the inequality of The Church of Brou, he might, like the famous pedant, “put away” Mr Arnold “fully conjugated in his desk.” The poem is in theme and scheme purely Romantic, and “nineteenth century” in its looking back to a simple and pathetic story of the Middle Age — love, bereavement, and pious resignation. It is divided into three parts. The first, in trochaic ballad metre, telling the story, is one of the poet’s weakest things. You may oft see as good in Helen Maria Williams and the Delia Cruscans. The second, describing the church where the duke and duchess sleep, in an eight-line stanza of good fashion, is satisfactory but nothing more. And then the third, after a manner hardly paralleled save in Crashaw’s Flaming Heart, breaks from twaddle and respectable verse into a rocket-rush of heroic couplets, scattering star-showers of poetry all over and round the bewildered reader. It is artifice rather than art, perhaps, to lisp and drawl, that, when you do speak out, your speech may be the more effective. But hardly anything can make one quarrel with such a piece of poetry as that beginning —

  “So rest, for ever rest, O princely pair!”

  and ending —

  “The rustle of the eternal rain of Love.”

  On the other hand, in Requiescat there is not a false note, unless it be the dubious word “vasty” in the last line; and even that may shelter itself under the royal mantle of Shakespeare. The poet has here achieved what he too often fails in, the triple union of simplicity, pathos, and (in the best sense) elegance. The dangerous repetitions of “roses, roses,” “tired, tired,” &c., come all right; and above all he has the flexibility and quiver of metre that he too often lacks. His trisyllabic interspersions — the leap in the vein that makes iambic verse alive and passionate — are as happy as they can be, and the relapse into the uniform dissyllabic gives just the right contrast. He must be " ¸·Á¯¿½ " ·µx — and whichever he be, he is not to be envied — who can read Requiescat for the first or the fiftieth time without mist in the eyes and without a catch in the voice.

  But the greatest of these — the greatest by far — is The Scholar-Gipsy. I have read — and that not once only, nor only in the works of unlettered and negligible persons — expressions of irritation at the local Oxonian colour. This is surely amazing. One may not be an Athenian, and never have been at Athens, yet be able to enjoy the local colour of the Phædrus. One may not be an Italian, and never have been in Italy, yet find the Divina Commedia made not teasing but infinitely vivid and agreeable by Dante’s innumerable references to his country, Florentine and general. That some keener thrill, some nobler gust, may arise in the reading of the poem to those who have actually watched

  “The line of festal light in Christ Church Hall”

  from above Hinksey, who know the Fyfield elm in May, and have “trailed their fingers in the stripling Thames” at Bablockhithe, — may be granted. But in the name of Bandusia and of Gargarus, what offence can these things give to any worthy wight who by his ill luck has not seen them with eyes? The objection is so apt to suggest a suspicion, as illiberal almost as itself, that one had better not dwell on it.

  Let us hope that there are after all few to whom it has presented itself — that most, even if they be not sons by actual matriculation of Oxford, feel that, as of other “Cities of God,” they are citizens of her by spiritual adoption, and by the welcome accorded in all such cities to God’s children. But if the scholar had been an alumnus of Timbuctoo, and for Cumnor and Godstow had been substituted strange places in -wa and -ja, I cannot think that, even to those who are of Oxford, the intrinsic greatness of this noble poem would be much affected, though it might lose a separable charm. For it has everything — a sufficient scheme, a definite meaning and purpose, a sustained and adequate command of poetical presentation, and passages and phrases of the most exquisite beauty. Although it begins as a pastoral, the mere traditional and conventional frippery of that form is by no means so prominent in it as in the later (and, I think, less consummate) companion and sequel Thyrsis. With hardly an exception, the poet throughout escapes in his phraseology the two main dangers which so constantly beset him — too great stiffness and too great simplicity. His “Graian” personification is not overdone; his landscape is exquisite; the stately stanza not merely sweeps, but sways and swings, with as much grace as state. And therefore the Arnoldian “note” — the special form of the maladie du siècle which, as we have seen, this poet chooses to celebrate — acquires for once the full and due poetic expression and music, both symphonic and in such special clangours as the never-to-be-too-often-quoted distich —

  “Still nursing the unconquerable hope,

  Still clutching the inviolable shade” —

  which marks the highest point of the composition.

  The only part on which there may be some difference between admirers is the final simile of the Tyrian trader. This finishes off the piece in nineteen lines, of which the poet was — and justly — proud, which are quite admirable by themselves, but which cannot perhaps produce any very clear evidences of right to be where they are. No ingenuity can work out the parallel between the “uncloudedly joyous” scholar who is bid avoid the palsied, diseased enfants du siècle, and the grave Tyrian who was indignant at the competition of the merry Greek, and shook out more sail to seek fresh markets. It is, once more, simply an instance of Mr Arnold’s fancy for an end-note of relief, of cheer, of pleasant contrast. On his own most rigid principles, I fear it would have to go as a mere sewn-on patch of purple: on mine, I welcome it as one of the most engaging passages of a poem delightful throughout, and at its very best the equal of anything that was written in its author’s lifetime, fertile as that was in poetry.

  He himself, though he was but just over thirty when this poem appeared, and though his life was to last for a longer period than had passed since his birth to 1853, was to make few further contributions to poetry itself. The reasons of this comparative sterility are interesting, and not quite so obvious as they may appear. It is true, indeed, — it is an arch-truth which has been too rarely recognised, — that something like complete idleness, or at any rate complete freedom from regular mental occupation, is necessary to the man who is to do poetic work great in quality and in quantity at once. The hardest occupation — and Mr Arnold’s, though hard, was not exactly that — will indeed leave a man sufficient time, so far as mere time is concerned, to turn out as much verse as the most fertile of poets has ever produced. But then that will scarcely do. The Muses are feminine — and it has been observed that you cannot make up even to the most amiable and reasonable of that sex for refusing to attend to her at the minute when she wants you, by devoting even hours, even days, when you are at leisure for her. To put the thing more seriously, though perhaps not more truly, the human brain is not so constituted that you can ride or drive or “train” from school to school, examining as you go, for half-a-dozen or half-a-score hours a-day, or that you can devote the same time to the weariest and dreariest of all businesses, the reading of hundreds of all but identical answers to the same stock questions, and yet be fresh and fertile for imaginative composition. The nearest contradictory instances to this proposition are those of Scott and Southey, and they are, in more ways than one or two, very damaging instances — exceptions which, in a rather horrible manner, do prove the rule. To less harassing, and
especially less peremptory, work than Mr Arnold’s, as well as far more literary in kind, Scott sacrificed the minor literary graces, Southey immolated the choicer fruits of genius which he undoubtedly possessed the power of producing; and both “died from the top downward.”

  But there was something more than this. Mr Arnold’s poetic ambition, as we have seen, did not aim at very long and elaborate works. His forte was the occasional piece — which might still suggest itself and be completed — which, as we shall see, did sometimes suggest itself and was completed — in the intervals, the holidays, the relaxations of his task. And if these lucid and lucent intervals, though existent, were so rare, their existence and their rarity together suggest that something more than untoward circumstance is to blame for the fact that they did not show themselves oftener. A full and constant tide of inspiration is imperative; it will not be denied; it may kill the poet if he cannot or will not give vent to it, but it will not be patient of repression — quietly content to appear now and then, even on such occasions as the deaths of a Clough and a Stanley. Nor is it against charity or liberality, while it is in the highest degree consonant with reason and criticism, to infer that Mr Arnold’s poetic vein was not very full-blooded, that it was patient of refusal to indulge it, that his poetry, in nearly the happiest of his master’s phrases, was not exactly “inevitable,” despite the exquisiteness of its quality on occasion.

  It is fortunate for the biographer that this earliest part of Mr Arnold’s life is so fertile in poetry, for otherwise, in the dearth of information, it would be a terribly barren subject. The thirty years of life yield us hardly twenty pages of letters, of which the first, with its already cited sketch of Laleham, is perhaps the most interesting. At the Trafalgar Square riots of March 1848 the writer is convinced that “the hour of the hereditary peerage and eldest sonship and immense properties has struck”; sees “a wave of more than American vulgarity, moral, intellectual, and social, preparing to break over us”; and already holds that strange delusion of his that “the French are the most civilised of European peoples.” He develops this on the strength of “the intelligence of their idea-moved classes” in a letter to his sister; meets Emerson in April; goes to a Chartist “convention,” and has a pleasant legend for Miss Martineau that the late Lord Houghton “refused to be sworn in as a special constable, that he might be free to assume the post of President of the Republic at a moment’s notice.” He continues to despair of his country as hopelessly as the Tuxford waiter; finds Bournemouth “a very stupid place” — which is distressing; it is a stupid place enough now, but it was not then: “a great moorland covered with furze and low pine coming down to the sea” could never be that — and meets Miss Brontë, “past thirty and plain, with expressive grey eyes though.” The rest we must imagine.