close we always can imagine we hear a delivery of judgement of decay and death. In varying cadences of mournfulness, sobs of protest, recognized by the victim as unavailing, are raised against the inevitable blankness. They are succeeded at best by acquiescence in woe beyond compare, which leaves no more to suffer. What though, throughout the whole, we are sensible of some affectation in the guilty of grief which does not grieve-of some positive, preposterous pride in the remarkable elevation of soul which has elected him to be a remorseful exile from the Kingdom of Faith instead of a common comfortable believer! At all events, artistic values in the picture are intuitively observed; and the painter moreover had actually passed through the spiritual experiences he portrays. He had interrogated human nature; particularly, his own. He had ransacked libraries; always for his own. mind's sake; to discipline, and enrich it; to learn what manner of being he might have been and was not, or was. For him the one thing worth understanding was the complex organism of man's heart and intellect. To know it he used himself as subject, scalpel, and lecturer. His habit of identifying virtually the functions of writer and critic was a necessity of the position he assumed. We can contemplate him dissecting his inner personality, noting how his soul, which originally had glowed with devotion, exulted in the discovery of its liberty-then Wandering between two worlds, one dead, 'waited forlorn' in the discord of contrary enthusiasms, harassed by rival claims to allegiance, scared, distracted, seared, benumbed; and, finally, when the company, lost in the storm, at nightfall, at last Comes to the end of its way, To the lonely inn 'mid the rocks ; The storm-beat figures, and asks : Whom we have left in the snow?' 20 was content to let the doubt remain unresolved even by himself, whether he will be of the remnant to whom the question is put. When now and again suspicion arises, as I have said, of a want of genuineness in the anguish, it can be admitted without too much offence to the honour of the sufferer. He is operator, though on himself, and his primary duty was to apply the knife. To find fault with his assumption of the double character is to strike at the basis of his intimate poetry; and with that we cannot afford to quarrel. Take him as he is-body at once and anatomist, poet and critic and study of his work will both inform and delight. Whether he vivisect his own soul, or another's, he himself remains the principal object of interest. The ScholarGipsy is a picturesque vision of the legendary being who had doffed the trammelling gown, yet could not tear himself out of hearing of Oxford's sweet jangling bells, among the warm, green-muffled Cumnor hills.21 So is departed Thyrsis, in the sister idyll redolent of the fragrant beauty alike of Lycidas, and the Ode to a Grecian Urn, yet distinct from both. But the final cause of each is to echo Matthew Arnold, and in each we search for and discover him and his moods. Byron himself does not loom more largely in every poem he wrote than Arnold in his. The more impressive the poet and his verse, the more we feel the critic, the psychologist, analysing, characterizing every tissue, every nerve-centre; and we admire and sympathize with both the more. He was born a poet; and he had trained himself to be a consummate artist in words. Milton in the choruses of Samson Agonistes has not equalled the flexible harmony of the blank verse of Rugby Chapel and Heine's Grave. Tennyson in the Swan's death-song scarcely surpasses Dover Beach in the music of the ebb, and Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.22 I am afraid to praise, lest I be accused of exaggeration, the perfect accord of harmony and complaint in the Forsaken Merman's cry of mild hopelessness : Children, at midnight, When soft the winds blow, We will gaze, from the sand-hills, At the church on the hill-side- Singing: 'There dwells a loved one, But cruel is she! She left lonely for ever, As I read and re-read, I perpetually light upon passages which, like this, would do honour to any genius, however exalted. I can well understand how such a master might have expected to attain to something of the width of celebrity which fell to an illustrious contemporary. But, as constantly, I note personal characteristics which explain at once the disappointment of his hope of common popularity, and the peculiarity of the recognition he won. His was natural inspiration of the highest, which had happened to be exposed to the contradictory influences of Thomas Arnold's Rugby, with its 'cheerful, radiant vigour, and Newman's dissatisfied, self-troubled Oxford. None can tell whether without the blend, or strife, literature would have gained or lost. It might have counted bettermatured Sohrab and Rustums. It must have gone without the Grande Chartreuse, the Obermann, Heine, and the Chapel. As it is, the poet has failed of general favour, and has secured an audience all his own. Never has the educated, that is, the Academically educated, section of the community been enveloped in a cloud of incense like this! A poet, an inspired poet, and all for it! Nothing in him of the obscurity of Sordello, which a mere student from London, Manchester, anywhere, is free to penetrate. All clear as the day to glasses burnt on the banks of Isis or Cam. The elect of Oxford and Cambridge can never read a line of Matthew Arnold without a consciousness of his eyes upon them. No wonder that his followers, travelstained like himself, fellow wanderers, fellow exiles, from the Promised Land, are fit and select-but few. Poems by Matthew Arnold. Two vols. Macmillans, 1869. (Also Poetical Works, one vol., 1896.) 1 The Buried Life. 2 Bacchanalia; or, The New Age. |