Matthew Arnold

Work till the Publicat

hew Arnold, and the University the Oxford of the years 1841-45-ought to be not a little symptomatic, not a little illuminative. We might have learnt from them something more than we know at present about the genesis and early stages of that not entirely comprehensible or classifiable form of Liberalism in matters political, ecclesiastical, and general which, with a kind of altered Voltairian touch, attended his Conservatism in literature. Moreover, it is a real loss that we have scarcely anything from his own pen about his poems before Sohrab

loyalty of such a group of pupils as his son, Dean Stanley, Clough, "Tom Brown" Hughes, and others. But he was, if not positively great, a notable and influential person in many ways. As a historian he was alert and intelligent, though perhaps too much under the influence of that subtlest and most dangerous kind of "popular breeze" which persuades those on whom it blows that they are sailing not with but away from the vulgar. As a scholar he was ingenious, if not very erudite or deep. He was really a master, and has been thought by some good judges a grea

rd of a visit, when he found "the stream with the old volume, width, shine, rapid fulness, 'kempshott,'[3] and swans, unchanged and unequalled." He was only six years old when his father was elected to the head-mastership of Rugby; he was educated in his early years at his birthplace, where an uncle, the Rev. John Buckland, carried on the establishment, and at the age of fourteen he was sent to Winchester, his father's school. Here he only remained a year

critical and scholarly character of the writer with very fair foreshadowing; but it does not fore-shadow his poetry in the very least. It is quite free from the usual formal faults of a boy's verse, except some evidences of a deficient ear, especially for rhyme ("full" and "beautiful," "p

e stories regi

tains Time's fin

to produce some yea

ng the uncon

ing the invi

ss; even its melancholy is probably mere Byronism, and has nothing di

en said, not one letter. The most interesting evidence comes from Principal Shairp's well-known

welcomed for a

e bold step that

self, nor on

er, yet blithe

iends with plea

am chaunting

f Goethe, cat

nter sparkle

hen the undert

through all his

first that his bent was hopelessly anti-clerical, and he was not merely too honest, but much too proud a man, to consent to be put in one of the priests' offices for a morsel of bread. It may well be doubted-though he felt and expressed not merely in splendid passages of prose and verse for public perusal, but in private letters quite towards the close of his life, that passionate attachment which Oxford more than any other place of the kind inspires-wheth

o all reasonable men. But his political friends had done away with nearly all such things, and no one of the very few that remained fell to his lot. His father had died in 1842, but the son served a short apprenticeship to school-teaching at Rugby, then became private secretary to Lord Lansdowne, the President of the Council (it is now that we first meet him as an epistoler), and early in 1851 was appointed by his chief to an inspectorship of schools. Having now a livelihood, he married, in June of that year, Frances Lucy Wightman, daughter of a judge of the Queen's Bench. Their first child, Thomas

is first-born, Matthew Arnold had practically established his claim as a poet by utterances to which he made comparatively small additions later, though more than half

"A.," 1852; and Poems by Matthew Arnold, a new edition, 1853-the third consisting of the contents of the two earlier, with Empedocles and a few minor things omitted, but with very important additions, i

not as of old limited to fifty lines, it is "good rhymes," as the elder Mr Pope used to say to the younger; but a prudent taster would perhaps have abstained, even more carefully than in the case of the Alaric, from predicting a real poet in the author. It is probably better than six Newdigates out of seven at least, but it has no distinction. The

ren mountains an

or fairly worked out, but left for Mr William Morris to employ with success many years later. Otherwise the thing is good, but negligible. It would have taken an extremely strong competition

tion than he actually holds in poetry; but no critic could know that. There is nothing here worse, or more necessarily fatal, than many things in Tennyson's 1830 and 1832 collections: he overwent those, so might Mr Arnold have overgone these. And the promise-nay, the performance-is such as had been seen in no verse save Tennyson's, and the almost unnoticed Browning's, for some thirty years. The title-poem, though it should have pleased even a severe judge, might have aroused uncomfortable dou

before it, the first stave is merely a prose sentence, of strictly prosaic though not inharmonious rhythm. But in this stave there is no instance of the strangest peculiarity, and what seems to some the worst fault of the piece, the profus

then,

I see the

thick beads

·

e white d

e rough fi

·

s, grac

weet fume

·

see the

upper g

en lines, by the insertion of one "and" only, becomes a smooth blank-verse piece of seven, two of

ndian drifting,

ored to a floatin

d [and] low-cree

dark c

them, drifting, d

rvest-plot, flow t

tains ri

ative young gentleman who enumerates, somewhat promiscuously, a few of the possible visions of the Gods. There is neither classical, nor romantic, nor logical justification for any such mild effect of the dread W

erable, there is plenty of co

Nature, let me

t, or should, have struck-for there is very little evidence that it did strike-readers of the volume as something at once considerable and, in no small measure, new. Mycerinus, a piece of some 120 lines or so, in thirteen six-line stanzas and a blank-verse coda, is one of those characteristic poems of this century, which are neither mere "copies of verses," mere occasional pieces, nor substantive compositions of the old kind, with at least an attempt at a beg

omising subject. The foolish good sense of Mr Toots would probably observe-and justly-that before six years, or six months, or even six days were over, King Mycerinus must have got very sleepy; and the philosophic mind would certainly recall the par

gifts, and tears,

waxes, and the

and it is, like that, an early and consummate example of Mr Arnold's favourite device of finishing without a finish, of "playing out the audience," so to speak

despite its famous

steadily, and

ereafter) follows, as this sonnet precedes, The Strayed Reveller itself. There is "the note," again, and I daresay the orientalism has the exactness of colour on which, as we know from the Letters, Mr Arnold prided himself. Yet the handling of the piece seems

ce at Berne, appeared originally piecemeal, and with no indication of connection. The first of its numbers is here, To my Friends who Ridiculed a Tender Leave-taking. It applies both the note of thought which has been indicated, and the quality of style which had already disengaged itself, to the commonest-the greatest-theme of poetry, but to one which this poet had not yet tried

parting k

y tablets

d who is so philosophically left to her fate by her lover on the Terrace at Berne later) had any live original. She seems a little more human in some ways than most of those cloud-Junos of the poets, the her

next year

edless, kis

to, but scarcely with ardour;

ittle stay

n we all

or do we meet her again in the volume. The well-known complementary p

appho, almost the poet's only experim

still! Foolish heart

tely more at home in the beautiful New Sirens, which, for what reason it is difficult to discover, he never reprinted till many years later, partly at Mr Swinburne's most judicious suggestion. The scheme is trochaic, and Mr Arnold (deriving beyond all doub

rship the w

yes, the w

d, discrown

tle godlike

ld it, as we are a little later, with a rhyme of "dawning" and "morning." Yet the poem is a very beautiful one-in some ways the equal of

, from upla

pentant sirens, punis

ay, 'the hours

ungraciously kicked against in his criticism) shows itself

st rose flush

re peak's a

ious reminiscence

immering summi

elf an awful

uthor's part fully to meet the demands of the forms he attempts-"the note," in short, expressed practically as well as in theory. Stagirius in particular wants but a very little to be a perfect expression of the obstinate ques

ore 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 bri

tide rol

ine from

t lonely

gs of t

s poetry has c

the note again, and has o

e pleasant hum

t the ci

pastoral huts-

ks but to the

rs, and the co

sun arises

he great

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

o whose mig

en

lucidity

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 intentio

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 t

he 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,

g 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

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 m

ng, intoler

and Harmonia, and the beautiful lyrical close,-but the picture of the hig

w 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

e these on the

e court? What ste

nd 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 o

y 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 fo

osticism 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 f

l 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 E

moments I would annihilate, is pass

try; 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 eve

ifference, and Too Late are obviously of the company. But none of these is exactly of the fi

xpressive t

ely to

robably unconscious scholion a

the greenest

t of thin

arly 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 ia

ips! ah!

s have be

ers, er

ped to th

he rest! Absence and Destiny show him in the same Purgatory; and it is impossible to say that he has actua

e sea of li

n 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 vo

he 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 ca

'd, salt, es

n 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 writt

e's crown, thou

haps which m

what our yo

f was soon to pronounce upon Empedocles is rather disastrously far-reaching, while even this phrase is a boomerang. Musical and philosoph

h 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 illust

at 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

e 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 himse

hat, 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.

reface. 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

shine upon

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 v

he 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

ivided 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 C

ever rest, O p

en

f the eternal

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-ar

urely amazing. One may not be an Athenian, and never have been at Athens, yet be able to enjoy the local colour of the Ph?drus. One may not be an Italian, and never have been in Italy, yet find the Divina Commedia made not teas

tal light in Chr

ranted. 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

e 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 m

ng the uncon

ing the invi

highest point of

ity 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

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 wearie

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 occasio

s 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 speci