No More Learning

In order to live and work and
write,' he had 'to break up everything and go to England. ' He
never returned to Florence, nor did he visit Italy again until
1878.
Although they lived at first in happy seclusion, 'soundless and
stirless hermits,' as Elizabeth Browning said, still, no one followed
with fuller sympathy the changing fortunes of Italy. But Browning
sang neither its hopes nor its sorrows— Nationality was not an
effectual motive with him’-nor did its contemporary politics mean


## p. 74 (#90) ##############################################

74
Robert and Elizabeth Browning [[
CH.
so much for him as a poet as its medieval art. But it was other-
wise with his wife. She responded to what was present. Even the
art of which we hear in her letters is not the art of the Vatican or
the Capitol, but Story's, or Gibson's, or Page’s. She was profoundly
moved by the agitation for freedom. Italy was the land where she
herself first knew freedom, and her emotions swept her into song.
Of the four publications of her later life, two are entirely Italian in
theme-Casa Guidi Windows (1851) and Poems before Congress
(1860). And both are political.
It was a time of revolution when the Brownings settled in
Italy, and the ferment continued throughout the whole period of
their married life. Casa Guidi Windows dealt with the earlier
phases of the movement for liberation. In its later stages, the
part taken in it by Napoleon III and the equivocal character
of his motives and actions were matter of intense interest to
them. Elizabeth Browning was his devoted defender; Browning
was alternately critical and condemnatory. Even the annexation
of Savoy and Nice' only momentarily shook her faith in him.
Browning summed up the situation by saying of Napoleon's part
in the Italian war that it was a great action but he has taken
eighteen pence for it, which is a pity. They had agreed to write
of Napoleon and publish jointly. Elizabeth Browning's labours
resulted in Poems before Congress; on the annexation, Browning
dropped the project and destroyed what he had written. But he
came back to the subject, during that period when it delighted
him most to explore the intricacies of ambiguous souls whose
morality was 'pied' and intellects casuistical; and he produced
Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau.
Both Casa Guidi Windows and Poems before Congress illustrate
the difficulty of lifting contemporary politics into poetry. Neither
these nor the aftermath in her posthumous Last Poems (1862)
have added to Elizabeth Browning's literary reputation.
It remains to notice the longest and the most ambitious of
her poems--Aurora Leigh, with its eleven thousand lines of
blank verse. It was the literary venture on which she staked
her fortune; in her dedication of it to Kenyon, she calls it 'the
most mature of my works, and the one into which my highest
convictions upon Life and Art have entered. ' The readers of
her time agreed with her; critics were unanimous, and their
praise was pitched high; the first edition was exhausted in a
fortnight, and a third was required within a few months.
Later readers have become much more temperate. It is a novel


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6
11] Robert Browning's Italian Period
75
in iambic decasyllables. The story is a thin thread on which are
strung the opinions of the writer on all manner of matters-
educational, social, artistic, ethical.
Elizabeth Browning's gifts were lyrical. She was essentially
a subjective poet, in the sense that the events she described and
the characters she drew were saturated with her own sympathies.
All the characters in Aurora Leigh are entirely subordinate to
the heroine, and the heroine, however little Elizabeth Browning
intended it, is the unsubstantial shadow of herself. She had no
dramatic or narrative genius. The world in which her characters
move is always created on the pattern of her own inner life,
for she dipped her brush in her own emotions. Her later poems
show some improvement in technique, and some of them are
enriched by her life in Italy and by the influence of her husband,
which was very great: for it is not Pippa Passes only which
counts for something in Aurora Leigh, nor even Paracelsus,
whose faith is paraphrased in hundreds of its lines. But they
contain nothing equal to Rhyme of the Duchess May, Cowper's
Grave and The Cry of the Children. If she is remembered
permanently, it will be, as a poet, by reason of the expression
she gave to a mother's love in A Child's Grave at Florence,
and, even more securely, by the sublime passion of the love
of wife for husband in Sonnets from the Portuguese.
The Italian period of Browning's life was comparatively barren.
It has been suggested that this was due, in part, to the fact that the
climate of Italy lowered his vitality; in part, to the unpopularity
of his works. Moreover, he took to drawing, and to modelling in
clay, copying masterpieces with intense pleasure. Only two publi-
cations of verse marked this period—Christmas Eve and Easter
Day (1850) and Men and Women (1855). He also wrote at this
time an essay on Shelley, by way of introduction to Certain Letters
of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1852), which were afterwards found to be
fabrications. The essay was evidently influenced by Milsand's
article on Browning himself, in La Revue des Deux Mondes. It
accentuates in the same way the distinction between subjective
and objective poetry, and discusses Shelley's work with much skill
and insight.
In Christmas Eve and Easter Day, critics discover clear
evidence of the influence of Elizabeth Browning's devout Christian
faith. Browning had been interested in religion all his life: for
the atheism' which he caught from Shelley was as superficial and
temporary as the vegetarianism. Pauline, Paracelsus, Pippa


## p. 76 (#92) ##############################################

76
[CH.
Robert and Elizabeth Browning
Passes, all the principal poems of the early period bear witness to
his sense of the profound significance of religion. Christmas Eve
deals with contemporary attitudes towards Christianity-dissent,
the higher criticism, Roman catholicism-with a characteristic
preference for the first. Easter Day is more restrained and stern,
more full of lyric beauty and more searching in its truth. It deals
with the inner nature of the faith that is religious-religious and
not epicurean or materialistic-not seeking its evidences in out-
ward happenings or its worth in the complacency which it
brings, the zest it gives to joy, or the bitterness it takes away from
sorrow. Both poems are dramatic; neither is to be regarded as
the poet's confession of faith; nevertheless, they express the pro-
foundest of his spiritual convictions, which centred upon the most
sublime of all religious hypotheses, namely, that of the omnipotence
and omnipresence of a Christlike God, the divine power and work
of love. Saul, especially the second part, which contains the
prophecy of Christianity, Cleon, Karshish, bear witness to the
same conceptions--the omnipresent wonder that transcends defini-
tion, and is yet the sole sure light whereby man can walk and find
safe footing.
Elizabeth Browning's influence may be detected, also, in the
poems which treat of love. The original Dramatic Lyrics (the
Dramatic Lyrics as they stood before the poems transferred thereto
from Men and Women) included Cristina and in a Gondola, and
among Dramatic Romances and Lyrics there appeared The
Lost Mistress. But the collection which included A Woman's Last
Word, Any Wife to Any Husband, The Last Ride Together, One
Way of Love, among many more, was certainly a richer rendering of
the marvel of love than any of his previous works. It is probable
that no single poet, in any country, so rendered the variety of its
phases and the abundance of its power-its triumph, its failure;
its victory over the world, its defeat by the world; its passion and
poignancy; its psychical subtlety and its romance, and the im-
mensity of its spiritual significance, whether in the life of the soul
or in the outer cosmos.
Many of the poems in Men and Women of which the scene can
be determined have reference to Italy. But it is doubtful whether
his residence in Italy influenced Browning's choice of subjects to
any great extent. “He was deeply Italianised before he went to
live in Italy. To say nothing of Sordello and Pippa Passes, there
'
was an Italian group in the original Dramatic Romances and
Lyrics, which is almost as conspicuous as that of the original Men


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6
111]
Dramatis Personae
77
and Women. After The Ring and the Book, Italian subjects
become both more rare and less important.
On leaving Italy, Browning settled in London. With the
change of residence came a change of habit. His Italian life,
quiet in the early years, had become gradually much more social.
In Florence, in Rome and during their visits to London, the charm
of Elizabeth Browning, and Robert Browning's own genius for
noble friendship, brought them into intimate relations with the
most gifted of their time. After her death, until the spring of
1863, he retired within himself, and his life, as he said, was ‘as
grey as the London sky. ' Then, he thought that way of life
morbid and unworthy, resolved to accept every suitable invitation
and, thenceforth, his figure was familiar in the circles of the lovers
of literature, although, except for a very few friends, all women,
none ever saw of Browning more than 'a splendid surface. '
In 1863, he was much agitated by a proposal to publish a life
of Elizabeth Browning, with letters. He turned savagely upon the
blackguards' who would 'thrust their paws into his bowels,' and
he destroyed the greater part of his own correspondence. But he
preserved the letters that had passed between himself and his
wife prior to their marriage ; with the result that hardly anyone,
except, perhaps, Carlyle, protested more strongly against the
intrusion of spies into his life's intimacies, and had the inner
shrine more ruthlessly laid bare. He, however, freely gave to the
public what had been intended for them. He republished Elizabeth
Browning's prose essays on the Greek Christian poets and the
English poets in 1863; and, two years later, made a selection from
her poems, and expressed his delight at the popularity which made
it necessary.
For three years in succession, he spent the summer months at
Ste Marie, near Pornic, where he worked at his Dramatis Personae,
published in 1864. Part of 1866 and 1867 was spent at Croisic, the
name of which is linked with The Two Poets of Croisic, as he
linked that of Pornic with Gold Hair, Red Cotton Night-Cap
Country and the gipsy woman of Fifine at the Fair.
Browning was at the height of his power during this period.
Nowhere is his poetic work so uniformly great as in Dramatis
Personae (1864); and there is no doubt that The Ring and the
Book is the most magnificent of all his achievements, in spite of
its inequalities. Critics miss in Dramatis Personae something of
the lightness and brightness and early morning charm of Pippa
Passes and of some of his earlier Men and Women; and they find


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78
[CH.
Robert and Elizabeth Browning
6
in it, not any trace of the pathetic fallacy, yet a lingering echo of
the brooding sorrow for his life's loss. It was later in the day, the
world was more commonplace; the outlook more desolate and
man's failure less tinged with glory; women were more homely,
love was less ethereal; and the stuff to be idealised through being
better known by a wiser love was more stubborn. "The summer
had stopped,' and 'the sky was deranged. ' But the autumn had
come, bringing a richer harvest in Dramatis Personae. The
significance of man's life, and of the clash of circumstance which
elicited it, was deeper as well as more grave. The world's worn
look disappears when it is seen in the great context in which it
stands—All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall
exist,' says Abt Vogler. Man has himself 'a flash of the will that
can,' for he can use its distraught elements of life to a moral
purpose, and weld them in a spiritual harmony-out of three
sounds make, 'not a fourth sound, but a star. ' Prospice, Rabbi
Ben Ezra, A Death in the Desert, even Mr Sludge, 'The Medium'
and Caliban upon Setebos, are strong with a controlled ethical
passion for what is real and true as things stand, and by interest
in the issues which are ultimate ; and, with this realism, natural
and spiritual, in both kinds, there is blended an imaginative
splendour which transfigures even the least of all mankind,'
when we 'look at his head and heart'; and
see what I tell you-nature dance
About each man of us, retire, advance,
As though the pageant's end were to enhance
His worth, and-once the life, his product, gained-
Roll away elsewhere.
It is a permanent theme, its echoes are to be heard all the way to
A solando—this wash of circumstance around man's soul which yet
maintains its mastery over all the play of the waves; and nowhere
is it rendered more finely than in Dramatis Personae and its
Epilogue.
The Edinburgh Review found it a 'subject of amazement
that poems of so obscure and uninviting a character should find
numerous readers’; and there were other critics besides Frederick
Tennyson who still thought Browning's poetry 'the most grotesque
conceivable. ' But the situation had, in truth, changed. Browning's
admirers were no longer confined to pre-Raphaelites and young
men at the Universities. A second edition of Dramatis Personae
was called for within the same year as the first. And the reception
accorded to The Ring and the Book was still more favourable.
6


## p. 79 (#95) ##############################################

CE
art
te and
vi
an lead
TIL
ichi
6
Posle
6
dia
This
tra
tur
11]
The Ring and the Book
79
At last, Browning was coming into his kingdom. It had taken
long: so late as 1867, he spoke of himself as 'the most unpopular
poet that ever was. '
There was an interval of four years between Dramatis Per-
sonae and The Ring and the Book. But the theme had interested
him from the moment when he came upon the 'old, square, yellow
book' on an old bookstall in Florence—the parchment-bound tale
of the trial of an Italian noble for the murder of his wife. He
saw its dramatic possibilities when he stood on the balcony of
Casa Guidi, in June 1860, at night, watching the storm. But it lay
long working in his mind, and the sorrow of the following year
led him to abandon the idea of writing, and he suggested the
subject to two of his friends. In September 1862, he recurred
to it, spoke of 'my new poem that is about to be,''the Roman
murder story. He began to write it about 1864, and the poem grew
steadily, for it became his crowning venture and he gave it regularly
every day 'three quiet, early morning hours. ' It was published
in four volumes, the first of which appeared in November 1868;
and the others during the three months following.
Many things concurred to make the story attractive to
Browning. He had inherited a taste for tales of crime from
his father; the situation was ambiguous and, as regards the priest
and the girl-wife, it left room for a most beautiful, as well as for a
sordid, explanation, and, therefore, it appealed both to Browning's
love of argument and to his ethical idealism ; moreover, opinion
in Rome was divided, and the popular mind was on its trial; there
was the possibility that the truth told for once for the church,
and dead against the world, the flesh, and the devil'; and the
story, in its essence, was not a common drab, but glorious—the
romance of the young priest and Pompilia was 'a gift of God, who
showed for once how he would have the world go white. '
It was inevitable that such a theme should set free all the
powers of Browning's spirit; but it borrowed sublimity and a
sacred loveliness from another quarter. For, undoubtedly, the
poem which enshrined Pompilia was instinct with reminiscence. '
With all its abounding vitality it was yet commemorative and
memorial? ' When he wrote of 'the one prize vouchsafed unworthy
me’; of 'the one blossom that made me proud at eve’; of a 'life
companioned by the woman there'; of living and seeing her learn,
and learning by her, can there be doubt as to who lent to these
utterances their pathetic beauty?
1 Herford.
ature
UM
10
R
1
1
.


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80 Robert and Elizabeth Browning [
[CH.
6
6
Nor is it fanciful to find in Caponsacchi something of the poet
himself-more, perhaps, than in any other character he created.
There was his own tempestuousness, much that a wise old pope
could find 'amiss,' 'blameworthy,' 'ungainly,' 'discordant,' 'in-
fringement manifold' of convention ; but there was also a
“symmetric soul within,' 'championship of God at first blush,
'prompt, cheery thud of glove on ground,' answering ‘ringingly
the challenge of the false knight. ' What are these qualities, with
the ardour of a great love and the headlong and utter devotion
of a large-hearted manhood, except the poet's own ? Capon-
sacchi's
I am, on earth, as good as out of it,
A relegated priest; when exile ends,
I mean to do my duty and live long,
is inspired by the manly recoil of Browning and bis refusal
to be crushed by his sorrow. But the dream of having his 'lyric
Love' by his side has been broken ; and the bereaved poet is
not perceptible in the 'drudging student,' who 'trims his lamp,
draws the patched gown close' and awakes 'to the old solitary
nothingness. ' The last words are a promise of this priest to
'pass content, from such communion’; and Browning would fain
have come back into the world of men as if his wound had
healed. But the truth breaks out-
O great, just, good God! Miserable me!
There was, for both priest and poet, the rule in the world
of a love that wrapped all things round about, and yet, some-
how, also, there were sorrows that knew neither shores nor
shoals.
To pass all the parts of this great poem under review is not
possible, and to estimate the relative poetic worth of its several
parts—Caponsacchi, Pompilia, The Pope and Guido—is not
necessary; there are kinds as well as degrees of perfection, and
comparison is sometimes absurd. The possibility of justifying the
structure of the poem as a whole will remain doubtful; and the
maccaronic speeches of the lawyers, and some parts of what
Rome said, have no real artistic value. But the poem is unique
in its excellence as well as in its defects.
During the six years which followed The Ring and the Book,
Browning wrote nothing but long poems—with the exception
of Hervé Riel, which was published for a charitable purpose.
Balaustion's Adventure appeared in 1871. Balaustion had the


## p. 81 (#97) ##############################################

>
6
6
111] Transcripts from Euripides
81
Alcestis of Euripides by heart, and, by rendering that 'strangest,
saddest, sweetest song,' saves her own life and wins for the ship
refuge in the harbour of Syracuse. Balaustion's character has the
charm of Pippa; Hercules, re-created by Browning, is magnificent
—with the gay cheer' of his great voice, heralding gladness as
he helped the world, the human and divine, i'' the weary, happy
face of him, half god, half man, which made the god-part god the
more (a favourite and recurrent conception). In Aristophanes'
Apology, Balaustion is reintroduced, and we have a second
transcript from Euripides—and, with it, above all else, the in-
comparable portrait of Aristophanes. “No ignoble presence':
‘mind a-wantoning,' it is true, but at ease,' all the same, 'of
undisputed mastery over the body's brood, those appetites. '
A sea-worn face, sad as mortality,
Divine with yearning after fellowship.
The transcribed portions of both poems have only secondary
value; and the translation is said to be often tame, literal and
even awkward. The Agamemnon of Aeschylus (1877) is said to
be an even less acceptable rendering : 'exact' and unintelligible.
It was undertaken on the suggestion of Carlyle and dedicated to
him. One would like to know what mood Carlyle was in, when
he gave his advice, telling Browning 'ye ought to translate the
whole of the Greek tragedians-that's your vocation. Browning
was better left to sport in his own way, in his own element, like
his ‘King of Pride,' 'through deep to deep,''churning the blackness
hoary. ' There is ample evidence of his wide, intimate knowledge
of the literature of Athens, and of his love of its methods; but
his strength was not similar to that of the Greeks; and he cannot
be said to have made a significant contribution either to the
knowledge or to the love, in England, of the Greek drama.
As if Browning were under compulsion to squander the
popularity gained by Dramatis Personae and The Ring and the
Book, and with both hands, there appeared, besides these Greek
poems, Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau (1871), Fifine at the Fair
(1872), Red Cotton Night-Cap Country or Turf and Towers
(1873) and The Inn Album (1875). Either for its theme, or for
the treatment of it, or for both theme and treatment, every one
of these poems failed to please. Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau,
a monologue over a cigar, illustrated by connecting blot with blot
on a 'soiled bit' of paper, is the mean and tortuous plea of a
weak, possibly well-meaning, certainly discredited, politician. Its
hero, Napoleon III, was hardly great enough to be tragical,
6
>
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CH. III.


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82
Robert and Elizabeth Browning [ch.
6
6
or even picturesque. Fifine at the Fair shocked and alienated
good people. It was supposed to be a defence of illicit love; and
its style was thought as turgid as its morality was false. Red
Cotton Night-Cap Country is a novel in verse; the story of a
Paris jeweller and his mistress. It has been defended on the
ground that, as a strong treatment of the ugly, it makes the ugly
uglier! More sanely it has been disapproved as 'versified special
correspondence,'' from which every pretence of poetry is usually
remote. ' The Inn Album once more deals with illicit passion, and,
once more, is 'a novel in verse. ' Its hero is all tinsel, and 'rag
and feather sham,' irredeemably mean, smart and shallow, a cheat
at cards, growing old amid his 'scandalous successes'—a figure,
one might say, better let be by the poet. The heroine, the
betrayed girl, is a genuinely tragical figure. And the tragedy is
final, remorseless ; for she marries a parish priest who is unloving
and unloved, dull, elderly, poor, conscientious, whom she ‘used
to pity' till she learned what woes are pity-worth. Him, in an
ugly, filthy village, sterile as if' sown with salt,' she helps to drug
and dose his flock with the doctrine of heaven and hell—the latter
'made explicit. Much of this poem is powerful ; it contains
one passage strangely Shakespearean in quality : that in which
the elder lady describes her lost love, when its reality was
questioned by her betrayer. As a whole, however, it cannot
compare with Fifine at the Fair, either in range of reflective
power, or in wealth of artistic splendour, or in the weight of the
issues which are called forth. It was not without reason that
Browning spoke of Fifine as the most metaphysical and boldest
he had written since Sordello”; and not in all respects was
Swinburne's dictum wrong—' This is far better than anything
Browning has yet written. ' Its main defect is that in it, even
more than usual, ‘Browning has presumed too much upon his
reader's insight' and taken no pains to 'obviate confusions he
would have held to be impossible had they occurred to his mind. '
His experience of his critics— the inability of the human goose
to do other than either cackle or hiss'-led him to banter them in
Pacchiarotto and how he worked in Distemper (1876), which tells
the whimsical tale of the artist who tried to reform his fellows. The
poem is genial and boisterous and, in its rime, brilliant and absurd;
an instance of another of the poet's ways of Aristophanic wantoning.
In At the 'Mermaid' and House and other poems in the same
volume, the aloofness of the inner life, the deepest and real, is
brought before us; and how, in the last resort, the world of men,
6


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111]
Later Poems
83
mingle with them as he might, was nothing but 'world without'-
as wood, brick, stone, this ring
of the rueful neighbours.
He lived and he sang, and he was for 'one' only; for the rest of
men, there was but his self's surface and the garb, and what it
pleased him to dole.
The fact that, unmistakably, he speaks of himself, mingles
and involves himself in his creations, shows that Browning's
dramatic power was beginning to decline. The plea that the
‘utterances' are those of 'imaginary characters' becomes less and
less valid; for the imagined characters are unsubstantial, the
shadows thrown by the poet himself. But there is one theme
which, change as life's seasons may, remains for him a peren-
nial source of perfect song. In St Martin's Summer, where much
that is green had turned sere, and the heart had lost its enter-
prise, in Numpholeptos and in other poems in this volume, love,
which is now a memory of what was, and a wistful longing for what
must yet be, retains all its mystic power and breaks into lyric
poetry of unabated beauty.
In 1877, Browning visited the Savoy alps; and there his com-
panion, Miss Egerton Smith, died suddenly, as she was making
ready for a mountain expedition with him.
In the following year, La Saisiaz was published, a com-
memorative poem which states and tests the arguments for and
against the immortality of the soul, and pronounces judgment.
But the pronouncement, though affirmative, is not untinged with
doubt, and it has the fatal weakness of being, at best, valid or con-
clusive only for the poet. Here, as elsewhere, there is a sophistic
touch in Browning's philosophy; and it was not in the intelligence,
but in the potency of love that he trusted. In the same volume as
La Saisiaz there appeared The Two Poets of Croisic, in which,
once more, the poet gambols, mocking, this time, at fame.
In the autumn of 1878, for the first time after the death of his
wife, Browning went to Italy; and he repeated his visits every year
until the close of his life. On his first journey, he stayed for some
weeks at a hotel near the summit of the Splügen pass. Ivàn
Ivànovitch and Ned Bratts were written here, and the volume
entitled Dramatic Idyls (1879) contains these and Martin Relph,
and Pheidippides, both magnificently told stories, the latter
carrying the reader back to the tale How they brought the Good
News from Ghent to Aix. The second series of Dramatic Idyls
contained the dramatic stories of the foolishness,' which is love, of
6
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84
Robert and Elizabeth Browning [CH. III
Muléykeh’s Arab owner, and Clive's confession to fear, with its
startling turn. Jocoseria, published in 1883, contains two great
poems, namely, Ixion and the lyric Never the Time and the Place-
where longing love finds once more its perfect utterance. Then came
Ferishtah's Fancies (1884) and Parleyings with Certain People of
Importance in their Day (1887) and, finally, A solando (1890).
The garb of Ferishtah is eastern: he is a Persian sage; and
the allegories and parables have, also, an eastern flavour. But
Ferishtah is only a name, and the sage who speaks the wisdom of
commonsense through his lips, illustrating his convictions regarding
moral matters, pain, prayer, asceticism, punishment, by reference to
common objects—the sun, a melon-seller, cherries, two camels, plot-
culture-is Browning himself. The poems are simple, direct and
pleasing; they contain a practical faith touched with theoretical
doubt. The conclusions are all tentative and insecure, so long as
the heart does not lead to them, and love is silent. The lyrics that
intervene between the dialogues are exquisite.
Browning was seventy-five years old when he published Parley-
ings; and the ‘importance' of the people with whom he parleys
comes from the fact that they carried him back to his boyhood's
industrious happiness in his father's library. There he learnt
of 'Artistry's Ideal' from 'the prodigious book' of Gerard de
Lairesse; and he remembered his mother playing Avison's grand
march. The poems are vigorous, the learning displayed in them is
immense and they abound in intellectual vitality ; but the per-
sonages are as shadowy as they are voluble, and the poetic glory
has left the grey.
Browning's health was becoming more uncertain, but he con-
tinued both his social life in London and his journeys south
to the mountains and to Italy. In 1887, his son married, and
bought the Rezzonico palace, Venice, and thither, for two summers
more, the poet returned. He also went back (after forty years) to
Asolo, and lived in a house there on the old town-wall; and the
place which he had loved from the days of Pippa renewed its
charm for him.
He died at Venice, on 12 December 1889, and
was buried in the poet's corner of Westminster abbey on the last
day of the year.
He had not expected death, but, to the last, was full of projects,
his courage unabated and his enterprise not weary; and his last
words, the great Epilogue with which, in Asolando, he closed the
collected gleanings of his genius, fitly express the faith which made
his life heroic.


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CHAPTER IV
MATTHEW ARNOLD, ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH,
JAMES THOMSON
EMINENT alike as poet and critic, Matthew Arnold holds a
place of singular distinction among the representative writers of
the Victorian age. His poetical work is much smaller in volume
and less varied in interest and range than that of his two more
popular contemporaries, Tennyson and Browning, but it reflects,
along certain lines, even more faithfully than the poetry of either,
some peculiarly significant tendencies of nineteenth-century thought.
Arnold himself, at any rate, was convinced-and few poets have
been surer critics of their own work than he-that he need not
fear comparison with either Browning or Tennyson as an interpreter
of even the 'main movement of mind”' in the England of his time.
In his intellectual sympathies and interests, he was much nearer
akin to Browning than to Tennyson. Like Browning, Arnold was
largely a man of the world, though, unlike him, he studiously kept
this side of his character out of his poetry. It is in his critical
prose writings, and in his letters, disappointing though the latter
may be from a purely literary point of view, that we discover the
real Arnold—both the self-searching poet, with his
hidden ground
Of thought and of austerity within,
and the shrewd observer of men and movements, curiously sensitive
to all 'play of the mind,' wherever and in whomsoever he found it.
When, at a comparatively early period in his literary career,
he virtually abandoned poetry for prose, he at once came into
touch with a much wider public, and his letters frankly express the
delight which he felt in having, at last, found an 'audience. His
poetry was the fruit of calm contemplation and majestic pains,'
rather than of urgent and imperative impulse. There is a sense
i See letter to his mother, June 1869. Letters, vol. II, p. 9.
a
6


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86
[CH.
Matthew Arnold
of freedom, and even of gaiety, about his prose which suggests a
liberated spirit moving easily and happily in its proper element.
And it was not only a delight, but a source of serious satisfaction,
to Arnold to feel that, through his prose writings, he was able to
exert a real influence upon the life and thought of his own genera-
tion. He was an ineffective public speaker; but his written
excursions into regions where the popular speaker holds the field
attracted as much attention and made as powerful an impression
as the most sounding platform utterances of the day. His manner
of preaching his new-found gospel had little in it of the fervour of
the social crusader, and offered a marked contrast to the strident
rhetoric with which Carlyle, for example, sought to impress his
contemporaries. He himself defined his method as 'sinuous, easy,
unpolemical’; but he employed it with deadly effect in undermining
the ‘forts of folly. His banter and his irony often gave offence,
and many of his readers found it difficult to put up with the
Olympian air of superiority affected by a critic who took the whole
conduct of life for his province. But there was no escaping the
literary charm of prose discourses cast in a delightfully fresh and
individual style, which, with all its mannerisms, retained the pellucid
clearness and distinction of his poetry. Moreover, his later prose
writings confirmed the opinion which his poetry, and a few early
essays, had gone far to establish, that Matthew Arnold was the
most brilliant literary critic of his time. Much of his social,
political and religious criticism is, perhaps because of its ephe-
meral subjects, doomed, ultimately, to oblivion, although a good
part of it can never lose its point or practical value while the
temper and habits of the English people remain substantially what
they are. His literary criticisms, however, will live as long as the
best of their kind; and, in the combination of remarkable poetic
achievement with illuminating discourse on the art of poetry and on
'the best that is known and thought in the world,' Dryden and
Coleridge alone, among English writers, share his pre-eminence.
Matthew Arnold, the eldest son of Thomas Arnold, headmaster
of Rugby, was born at Laleham on Christmas eve, 1822. His
mother, who survived her husband more than thirty years, was
a woman of great force of character, who had so much intellectual
sympathy with her son as to make his letters to her the most
intimate personal records of him that we possess. Matthew
owed much to his distinguished father-his high sense of duty,
his intellectual honesty, his austere moral ideals were abiding
paternal inheritances; but, as his life and writings tended more


## p. 87 (#103) #############################################

IV]
Arnold at Oxford
87
and more to show, he was in some ways, and particularly in
temperament, curiously unlike him. Matthew Arnold entered
Rugby in 1837, where he remained until he won a Balliol scholar-
ship at Oxford in 1841. Oxford, at that time, was agitated by the
tractarian movement, and Newman was at the height of his extra-
ordinary influence in the university. That influence does not
seem to have had much, if any, intellectual or spiritual effect
upon Matthew Arnold; but, like others of more or less note in
the Oxford of his day, he fell under the spell of Newman's personal
charm, of which he gives a vivid description in one of the latest
of his public utterances? . Arnold, by temperament, was too anti-
clerical, and, probably, shared too strongly his father's pronounced
hostility to the neo-catholic movement, to have any deep sympathy
with Newman's teaching. In 1843, he won the Newdigate prize
with a poem entitled Cromwell, but he disappointed his friends
and tutors, a year later, by obtaining only a second class in Literae
Humaniores. Like his friend Clough, however, who had met with
a similar fate before him, he was consoled for his ill-success in the
schools by the award of a fellowship at Oriel. Passionately though
Matthew Arnold loved the 'sweet city with her dreaming spires,'
even the attainment of this coveted academic dignity could not keep
him at Oxford. Probably, as some of his admirers have suggested,
the line of life that would have suited him best was that of a
diplomatist? A diplomatic career seemed to lie in his way when,
in 1847, he was appointed private secretary to lord Lansdowne.
The best thing, however, in the way of advancement which lord
Lansdowne, then president of the council, could do for him was
to appoint him to an inspectorship of schools. Though I am a
schoolmaster's son,' Arnold long afterwards frankly told a meeting
of teachers, 'I confess that school-teaching or school-inspecting is
not the line of life I should naturally have chosen. I adopted it in
order to marry. ' That was in 1851, when he married Frances Lucy
Wightman. The conditions of his official work were anything but
favourable to the production of poetry; but nearly all Arnold's
best poetry was written during the busiest years of his school
inspectorate. As the years went on, he came to discover that even
the drab task-work of school inspection had its compensations.
He loved children, and he took a genuine interest in the welfare of
teachers; moreover, in his journeys from school to school, he
acquired that manysided knowledge of English life and character
i Discourses in America.
2 G. W. E. Russell, Matthew Arnold, 1894, p. 49.
6


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88
[ch.
Matthew Arnold
6
of which he made effective use in his social criticisms. He dwelt
with the Philistines' in their tents, was constantly going in and
out among the populace' and, on occasions, broke bread with the
barbarians. '
In 1859, Matthew Arnold was appointed foreign assistant
commissioner on education, and sent on a mission to enquire into
the systems of primary education prevailing in France, Holland,
Belgium, Switzerland and Piedmont. The immediate result of this
continental visit was the issue, in 1861, of his Popular Education
of France, of which the most permanently valuable part, the in-
troductory essay, was subsequently republished under the title
' Democracy' in Mixed Essays (1879). In 1864 appeared a by-
product of the same foreign mission entitled (not, perhaps, very
appropriately) A French Eton, being an account of the general
economy of a lycée at Toulouse. In 1865, he went abroad on a
second educational mission, of which the published record appeared,
in 1868, under the title Schools and Universities on the Continent.
These volumes, and the Reports on Elementary Schools, edited
after his death by Sir Francis Sandford, make up the sum of Arnold's
official educational writings, and they all belong to the period of
his poetical activity, which practically ended with the year 1867.
To the same period, also, belong two other prose works which
stand somewhat apart from the series of writings, beginning with
Culture and Anarchy, which won for him his contemporary renown
as a social and political critic. They are the delightful critical
discourses On Translating Homer (1861) and The Study of Celtic
Literature (1867), in which we find the essence of his prelections
from the chair of poetry at Oxford, a post to which he was elected
in 1857 and which he held for ten years. After 1867, Arnold wrote
little poetry, and entered upon a career as publicist on social,
religious and political subjects which led him somewhat far afield
from the high road of literature. He soon became a controversialist
whom the newspapers and magazines of the hour found it profitable
to notice and to attack; his fame spread across the Atlantic, and,
in 1883, led to the inevitable American lecturing tour which has
been the not always happy lot of many popular English authors.
Arnold's American experiences seem, on the whole, to have been
fairly fortunate, and he himself set such store by his lectures in the
United States as to tell one of his friends that Discourses in
America was the book by which, of all his prose writings, he
most desired to be remembered. ' In 1886, he resigned his school
1 G. W. E. Russell; see his Matthew Arnold, p. 12.
a


## p. 89 (#105) #############################################

89
a
IV]
Arnold's Early Poems
inspectorship, and was awarded a state pension. He died suddenly
at Liverpool on 15 April 1888. His life, in spite of uncongenial
tasks and some sore domestic trials, was a peculiarly happy one,
and the secret of its happiness was his serene temper and an
inexhaustible interest in mundane things, evident throughout
his letters to his friends and his family.
Arnold's first volume of poems was printed in 1849 under the
title The Strayed Reveller, and other Poems, by A. This modest
budget of verse, though it contained a few short poems not inferior
in quality to the best of his subsequent work, attracted little public
attention, and was withdrawn from circulation after only a few
copies had been sold. The same fate befell his second published
volume, Empedocles on Etna, and other poems, by A. , which
appeared in October 1852. Dissatisfaction with the title-poem
was the reason given by Arnold himself for the withdrawal of this
second volume; but, fifteen years afterwards, at the instance of
Robert Browning, he republished the poem. The sacrifice of
Empedocles, however, seems to have been a kind of strategic
retreat which enabled the poet, in the following year, to publish
boldly, under his own name, a new volume, with a preface defining
his views upon some of the prime objects and functions of poetry.
This volume (1853) included many of the poems already printed in
its two predecessors, together with others which are shining
examples of his more elaborate and considered work, such as
Sohrab and Rustum and The Scholar-Gipsy. In 1855 appeared
Poems by Matthew Arnold, Second Series, a volume with only
two new poems, Balder Dead and Separation, but containing a
further instalment of republications, including some fragments of
Empedocles, from the earlier volumes. In 1858, Merope, a Tragedy,
composed as a sort of 'poetical diploma-piece' on his election to
the Oxford professorship, was published. After an interval of nine
years, his next, and his last, separate volume of poems—as dis-
tinguished from editions of his collected works—appeared under
the title New Poems. In this volume, Empedocles made its re-
appearance in the company of such notable poems as Thyrsis,
Rugby Chapel, Heine's Grave, A Southern Night, Dover Beach
and Obermann Once More. During the last twenty years of his
life, with the exception of a few occasional pieces of the quality
of Westminster Abbey and Geist's Grave, Arnold produced nothing
which added materially to his poetical reputation.
A survey of Arnold's poems in their chronological order brings
into prominence two outstanding facts-the early maturity of


## p. 90 (#106) #############################################

90
[CH.
Matthew Arnold
his genius, and his steadfast adherence throughout to certain
very definite ideals of poetic art and to a singularly melancholy
philosophy of life. We note, at once, in the first small volume of
1849, the predominantly Greek inspiration of its contents, both in
matter and in style. As the poet himself avows in a famous sonnet,
the three Greek masters who, most of all, 'propped, in those bad
days, his mind' were Homer, Epictetus and, especially, Sophocles
—the latter a poet fulfilling Arnold's ideal as one whom
Business could not make dull, nor passion wild;
Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole.
The title-poem, The Strayed Reveller, is itself Greek in both
subject and form, its rimeless and irregular metre being an
attempt to reproduce the effect of the choric odes of Attic tragedy.
The Fragment of an 'Antigone'—another experiment in unrimed
lyric-Mycerinus, The New Sirens, The Sick King in Bokhara
are all Greek either in subject, or in source, or in manner of treat-
ment. Writing in 1867 of the Greek strain in Arnold's poetry
generally, Swinburne said,
Even after his master, this disciple of Sophocles holds his high place; he
has matched against the Attic of the gods this Hyperborean dialect of ours,
and has not earned the doom of Marsyas.
6
In his endeavours to attune our ‘Hyperborean dialect' to Attic
music, Arnold was plainly influenced by the example of Goethe
-another of his life-long masters, alike in art and in his 'wide and
luminous view of life, who, for him, was 'the greatest modern
poet, the greatest critic of all time? ' Goethe's presence is felt in
The Strayed Reveller volume, as, also, is that of the English
master who
laid us as we lay at birth
On the cool flowery lap of earth.
The Greeks, Goethe, Wordsworth-these are the prime literary
sources of Matthew Arnold's poetical inspiration ; and we are in
as close touch with them all in the poems of 1849 as we are in
those of 1867. The Wordsworthian ‘note,' as the poet himself
might say, is clearly heard in Resignation, To a Gipsy Child and
Mycerinus. Distinct echoes of Laodamia are caught in Mycerinus,
while the grave movement of To a Gipsy Child is quite after
Wordsworth's manner. But the influence of Wordsworth is most
.
apparent in Resignation—at once a poem of nature and a cry
i Preface to the 1853 volume of poems.


## p. 91 (#107) #############################################

Iv]
Arnold's “Theory of Poetry'
91
6
from the depth of the poet's own soul. No poem, however,
illustrates better than this last the essential difference between
Arnold's feeling for nature and that of Wordsworth. There is a
wide distance between the poet to whom, if he might lend their
life a voice,' hills, streams, rocks, the sky, ‘seemed to bear rather
than rejoice,' and the seer who felt it was nature’s ‘privilege to lead
from joy to joy and who held the faith that “every flower enjoys
the air it breathes. ' Perhaps the most original poem in the 1849
volume is The Forsaken Merman, which is remarkable alike for
its pathos and its metrical skill, and was singled out by Clough in
a review published in 18531. Clough found The Sick King in
Bokhara rather strained. ' Other critics have found it dull,
whereas one whose literary judgment was never far at fault-
R. H. Hutton-held that Arnold 'never achieved anything so truly
dramatic. '
With the volume of poems published under his own name in
1853, Arnold, as already stated, issued a preface expounding some
of the main principles of his 'theory of poetry. ' This preface,
now easily accessible, deserves careful reading, as it is Arnold's
first published 'essay in criticism,' remarkable alike for its ease
and grace of style, which bears little trace of the marked
mannerisms of his later prose, and for its clear exposition of a
poetical creed to which its author, in the main, adhered, both in
precept and practice, throughout his life. We find him de-
finitely ranging himself as the apostle of a classical ideal of poetry,
in opposition to the vagaries and excesses of the romantic school,
of which England seemed to him then to be the stronghold? '
And, more particularly, he denounces views like those of the
critic whom he quotes as maintaining that
the poet who would really fix the public attention must leave the exhausted
past, and draw his subjects from matters of present import, and therefore
both of interest and of novelty.
Here is sounded the first note of that war-cry against the
Philistines which he was destined, in later years, to send ringing
through many grooves of the national life. When we examine the
preface in the light of Arnold's own poetical practice, it may be
urged that he failed in his attempts to exemplify, on any large
scale, one of its main theses. Empedocles and Merope are his
.
two most ambitious efforts to represent situations' after the
1 The North American Review, July 1853. Republished in Prose Remains of Arthur
Hugh Clough, edited by his wife, 1888.
? See preface to Merope, 1858.


## p. 92 (#108) #############################################

92
[CH.
Matthew Arnold
6
6
6
>
manner of the ancients—the first, on his own confession, an un-
satisfying achievement, the latter, in the opinion of the majority of
even his admirers, a graceful, but somewhat ineffectual, academic
exercise.
Of the contents of the volume of 1853, the poem which comes
nearest to a practical illustration of the theories of the preface is
Sohrab and Rustum, the most finished and successful of his
narrative poems. The subject appeals, like the themes of classical
tragedy, to the great primary human affections, and is treated
with a clearness and sustained elevation of style as closely
approximating the Greek manner, 'the grand style,' as anything
else to be found in later English poetry. The blank verse is
handled throughout with subtle skill, and, in many passages, is
reminiscent of Milton-particularly in the artistic use of the long
simile and of recurrent parades of sonorous proper names. Arnold's
similes, here, are, like Milton's, all after the Greek epic type, and
the whole poem is thoroughly Homeric in manner and substance.
The human interest of the 'episode '--for so the author describes
his poem-centres in the tragic fate of the brave and gentle
Sohrab, slain by the father who does not know him; and in the
delineation of no other character in his poetry does Matthew
Arnold show a surer and more sympathetic touch. The well-
known description of the Oxus at the close of the poem is no
mere pictorial afterthought, due to Arnold's alleged penchant for
'effective endings, but is as artistically right as it is intrinsically
beautiful.
With Sohrab and Rustum much the most notable new contri-
bution to the 1853 volume is The Scholar-Gipsy, perhaps the most
charming, as it is one of the happiest in conception and execution,
of all Arnold's poems. Its charm lies partly in the subject,
naturally congenial to the poet, and partly in the scene, which
stimulates one of Oxford's poetic children to lavish all his powers
of description upon the landscape which he dearly loved. He was
to return to the same natural scenery in Thyrsis, but, although,
in the later poem, there may be one descriptive passage which
surpasses anything to be found in the earlier, Thyrsis fails to give
the impression of eager freshness and ease which are felt through-
out The Scholar-Gipsy. The two poems are pastoral in form, but
there is much less concession to artificial conventions in The
Scholar-Gipsy than in its more consciously elegiac successor.
What, however, gives their abiding charm to both is the vividness
and the beauty of their pictures of nature, and the magic spell


## p. 93 (#109) #############################################

Iv]
Arnold's Later Poems
93
6
6
cast by their haunting lines over Oxford and its adjacent fields
and hills. In The Scholar-Gipsy, the subtle glamour of all that
Oxford and its neighbourhood suggest to the eye and to the
memory is felt in glimpses of
The line of festal light in Christ-Church hall,
of the Oxford riders blithe'
Crossing the stripling Thames at Bab-lock-hithe,
of 'the warm, green-muffled Cumner hills,' 'the Fyfield elm in
May,' the 'distant Wychwood bowers, Godstow bridge, Bagley
wood and the forest-ground called Thessaly. In the latter part
of the poem, Arnold finds a natural opening for his characteristic
pensive moralisings upon
this strange disease of modern life,
With its sick hurry, its divided aims,
when men are but 'half-believers' in their 'casual creeds'-as con-
trasted with days when 'life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames,'
and when it was still possible for an 'Oxford scholar poor' to
pass through them nursing the unconquerable hope' and 'clutch-
ing the inviolable shade. '
Several poems from the withdrawn volume of 1852 were re-
printed in 1853; but only two or three of the more important ones
can be noticed here. The most elaborate, and the finest, of these
is Tristram and Iseult, a poem which seems to reveal the author
in a peculiar mood of hesitation. He is here exploring the shores
of old romance as if afraid of making a firm landing and of boldly
occupying the fair country that opens out before him. The very
frequency of his changes of metre in the poem produces an im-
pression of uncertainty and of a shrinking from the full challenge
which his subject gave him. Stanzas in Memory of the Author
of 'Obermann' is one of those personal and reflective poems
which are characteristic of Matthew Arnold's work, and which
give us the most intimate revelations of his soul. It is strange to
find a comparatively obscure writer like Sénancour classified with
Goethe and Wordsworth as one of the three puissant spirits who, in
the hopeless tangle of our age,' alone seemed to the poet to
“have attain'd to see their way? ' But it was a somewhat morbid
interest, after all, that the poet felt in Sénancour-
A fever in these pages burns'
Beneath the calm they feign;
A wounded human spirit turns,
Here, on its bed of pain.
i See Arnold's note, appended to the poem.


## p. 94 (#110) #############################################

94
[ch.
Matthew Arnold
a
What, however, in this first Obermann poem is of most import are
the brief passages which speak of Goethe and Wordsworth. Its
sequel, Obermann Once More—written many years afterwards—is,
as a whole, a more thought-compelling poem, not so much because
of what is said about Sénancour as of what is revealed of Arnold's
own attitude towards the religious thought of his time. In
Memorial Verses—another poem included in the 1853 volume-
we have the poet's elegiac tribute to his greatest English master,
Wordsworth, and, incidentally, memorable summaries of the gifts
of Byron and Goethe. Whether the critical estimate of Words-
worth embodied in these verses is complete or just at all points
may be a matter of dispute; but no one can refuse to join in their
felicitous parting note,
Keep fresh the grass upon his grave,
O Rotha, with thy living wave!
Sing him thy best! for few or none
Hears thy voice right, now he is gone.
A Summer Night gives us as moving and as artistically perfect
an expression of Arnold's philosophy of life as anything to be
found in his poetry. None of his poems opens in a finer imaginative
strain, and in no other is the transition from the human interest
suggested by the moon-blanch'd street,' and its opposite vision of
the headlands and the sea lit by 'the same bright, calm moon,' to
the central meditative passages more skilfully and yet naturally
contrived. After comparing, in one of these passages, those who
escape from this world's prison with its ‘unmeaning task-work'
to the tempest-tossed helmsman who clings to his ‘spar-strewn
deck,'
Still bent to make some port he knows not where,
Still standing for some false, impossible shore,
he ends up with a magnificent affirmation of the power and stead-
fastness of nature, as
A world above man's head, to let him see
How boundless might his soul's horizons be 1.
The so-called 'second series' of poems, which Arnold published
in 1855, included only one considerable new poem-Balder Dead,
a work which the poet thought would 'consolidate the peculiar
sort of reputation he got by Sohrab and Rustum? ' This poem,
slightly longer than Sohrab, is cast in the same Homeric vein, and
6
1 Cf. with this closing passage the entire poem called Self-Dependence, first
published in 1852.
2 Letters, vol. I, p. 47.


## p. 95 (#111) #############################################

IV] Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse 95
6
written in equally excellent blank verse. But the subject fails,
somehow, to grip the reader as powerfully as does that of the
earlier poem? To the year 1855 also belongs his next important
poem, Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse, which was published
in the April number of Fraser's Magazine. These verses, in
which Obermann again appears, are among the most pathetic of
Arnold's personal confessions' in verse. Nowhere else does he
'
give us a clearer, or a more poignant, articulation of his feelings
as a solitary, and all but forlorn, wanderer from all familiar folds
of faith than in the lines where, of the Carthusian 'brotherhood
austere,'
Not as their friend, or child, I speak!
But as, on some far northern strand,
Thinking of his own Gods, a Greek
In pity and mournful awe might stand
Before some fallen Runic stone-
For both were faiths, and both are gone.
Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born,
With nowhere yet to rest my head,
Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.
Their faith, my tears, the world deride-
I come to shed them at their side.
In 1858, a year after his election to the Oxford chair of poetry,
Arnold published Merope, a Tragedy—with an elaborate preface,
of which the most permanently interesting part is an exposition,
admirably clear and concise, of some of the cardinal principles
of Greek tragic art. Merope was not reprinted and included
in his own authorised canon of his poetical works until 1885.
As a drama, it lacks life; as poetry, it is certainly inferior
to Empedocles. The rimeless choruses, upon which Arnold
bestowed much pains, may, as he tells us, have produced on
his own feeling a similar impression to that produced on it by
the rhythms of Greek choric poetry’; but they fall flat on an
uninstructed ear and, despite their effort after correctness of
structure, give a much less vivid impression of the general effect
of Greek choric measures than does the relaxed form' which
Arnold wishes Milton had not adopted in Samson Agonistes.
The New Poems of 1867 included several by which Matthew
Arnold is now best remembered, but none which can be said to
excel the best of his previous work. They are, nearly all, of an
elegiac or meditative character, and repeat the old familiar
It is significant that the author, while including Sohrab and Rustum, left this
poem out of his own Golden Treasury selection of his poems published in 1878.
6


## p. 96 (#112) #############################################

96
[CH.
Matthew Arnold
melancholy strain. Like The Scholar-Gipsy, Thyrsis is both an
idyll of the Oxford country and a plaintive protest against the
discordant spectacle
Of men contention-tost, of men who groan.
The landscape is pictured, once more, in lines as exquisite as those
of the earlier poem, while no passage in all Arnold's poetry sur-
passes in beauty the two stanzas which contrast the 'tempestuous
morn in early June,' with the high Midsummer pomps' under
dreaming garden-trees,
And the full moon, and the white evening-star.
Rugby Chapel, again, is another professedly elegiac poem, which
is as much concerned with the cloud of human destiny' as with
the memory of the poet's father. Though Rugby Chapel is
charged with intense feeling, its rimeless verse has about it some-
thing hard and rhetorical, which is felt still more in Heine's
Grave. As a purely elegiac poem, A Southern Night, in which
Arnold laments the death of his brother, surpasses all the others
in tenderness and depth of feeling, and is not inferior to them in
poetical expression. Westminster Abbey-a noble elegy on his
father's biographer and his own life-long friend, dean Stanley—and
three other poems were the only efforts in verse Arnold attempted
after 1867. Of these last three, the poem on his dead dachshund
'Geist' is one of the most beautiful things of its kind in the language.
"The criticism of Dryden,' says Johnson, ‘was the criticism
of a poet'; with even greater justice it may be said that Matthew
Arnold's poetry was the poetry of a critic. Although it is the
fashion to call him the best of our elegiac poets, and although
his verse consists mainly of short poems, we do not instinctively
think of him as primarily, or pre-eminently, a lyric poet. There
is scarcely one poem by him which is felt to be an outburst of
unpremeditated, careless lyric rapture. There is, doubtless, an
"emotion of the intellect,' which finds as glowing utterance in
lyric poetry as the emotion of the heart; but it does not touch
us in quite the same way. And it is just because of our con-
sciousness of the predominance of the intellect over the heart,
even in his simpler and more moving poems, that we miss the
thrill which all really passionate lyric poetry forces us to feel.
Requiescat, the Switzerland poems, Dover Beach—to name a few
of his best known shorter pieces—are all either too 'lucidly sad'
or too palpably meditative to be classed as pure lyrics. His
second thoughts, running always on the riddle of this painful
earth, cloud his vision and stay his utterance. When he turned to
6
<


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IV]
The Qualities of Arnold's Poetry
97
6
poetry, Arnold-capable though he was of being gay and light-
hearted enough in his prose—seemed to surrender himself to a
melancholy apparently so bred in the bone as only to be explained
as something constitutional. This it was that, most of all, froze the
genial current of his poetic soul. His limitations, however, to
whatever cause they may have been due, have not been altogether
to his disadvantage, for few poets, at any time, have produced
so much which is so uniformly excellent in style.