Matthew Arnold’s New Poems.

(1867.)

There are two things which most men begin by hating until they have won their way, and which when combined are more than doubly hateful to all in whose eyes they are not doubly admirable: perfection of work, and personality in the workman. As to perfection, it must be seen to be loved, and few have eyes to see it. To none but these few can it be acceptable at first; and only because these few are the final legislators of opinion, the tacit and patient lawgivers of time, does it ever win acceptance. A strong personal tone of character stamped and ingrained into a man’s work, if more offensive at first to the mass, is likelier to find favour before long in the sight of some small body or sect of students. If not repulsive, it must be attractive and impressive; and there are always mental cripples in plenty to catch at a strong man’s staff and cut it down into a crutch for themselves. But the more love a man has for perfection, the more faith in form, the more instinct for art, the fewer will these early believers be, and the better worth having; the process of winning their suffrages will be slower, and surer the hold of them when won.
For some years the immediate fame of Mr. Matthew Arnold has been almost exclusively the fame of a prose writer. Those students could hardly find hearing—they have nowhere of late found expression that I know of—who, with all esteem and enjoyment of his essays, of their clearness, candour, beauty of sentiment and style, retained the opinion that if justly judged he must be judged by his verse and not by his prose; certainly not by this alone; that future students would cleave to that with more of care and of love; that the most memorable quality about him was the quality of a poet. Not that they liked the prose less, but that they liked the verse more. His best essays ought to live longer than most, his best poems cannot but live as long as any, of their time. So it seemed to some who were accordingly more eager to receive and more careful to study a new book of his poems than most books they could have looked for; and since criticism of the rapid and limited kind possible to contemporaries can be no more than the sincere exposition of the writer’s belief and of his reasons for it, I, as one of these, desire, with all deference but with all decision, to say what I think of this book, and why. For the honour of criticism, if it is to win or to retain honour at all, it must be well for the critic to explain clearly his personal point of view, instead of fighting behind the broad and crestless shield of a nameless friend or foe. The obscurest name and blazon are at least recognisable; but a mere voice is mere wind, though it affect to speak with the tongues and the authority of men and of angels.
First on this new stage is the figure of an old friend and teacher. Mr. Arnold says that the poem of “Empedocles  on Etna” was withdrawn before fifty copies of the first edition were sold. I must suppose then that one of these was the copy I had when a schoolboy—how snatched betimes from the wreck and washed across my way I know not; but I remember well enough how then as now the songs of Callicles  clove to my ear and memory. Early as this was, it was not my first knowledge of the poet; the “Reveller,” the “Merman,” the “New Sirens,” I had mainly by heart in a time of childhood just ignorant of teens. I do not say I understood the latter poem in a literal or logical fashion, but I had enjoyment enough of its music and colour and bright sadness as of a rainy sunset or sundawn. A child with any ear or eye for the attraction of verse or art can dispense with analysis and rest content to apprehend it without comprehension; it were to be wished that adults equally incapable would rest equally content Here I must ask, as between brackets, if this beautiful poem is never to be reissued after the example of its younger? No poet could affordto drop or destroy it; I might at need call into court older and better judges to back my judgment in this; meantime “I hope here be proofs” that, however inadequate may be my estimate of the poet on whom I am now to discourse, it is not inadequate through want of intimacy with his work. At the risk of egotism, I record it in sign of gratitude; I cannot count the hours of pure and high pleasure, I cannot reckon the help and guidance in thought and work, which I owe to him as to all other real and noble artists whose influence it was my fortune to feel when most susceptible of influence, and least conscious of it, and most in want. In one of his books, where he presses rather hard upon our school as upon one wholly void of spiritual or imaginative culture, he speaks of his poems as known to no large circle—implies this at least, if I remember: he will not care to be assured that to some boys at Eton Sohrab and Rustum , Tristram  and Iseult , have been close and common friends, their stream of Oxus and bays of Brittany familiar almost as the well-loved Thames weirs and reaches. However, of this poem of “Empedocles ” the world it seems was untimely robbed, though I remember on searching to have found a notice of it here and there. Certain fragments were then given back by way of dole, chiefly in the second series of the author’s revised poems. But one, the largest if not the brightest jewel, was withheld; the one long and lofty chant of Empedocles . The reasons assigned by Mr. Arnold  in a former preface for cancelling the complete poem had some weight: the subject-matter is oppressive, the scheme naked and monotonous; the blank verse is not sonorous, not vital and various enough; in spite of some noble interludes, it fails on the whole to do the work and carry the weight wanted; its simplicity is stony and grey, with dry flats and rough whinstones. To the lyrics which serve as water-springs and pastures I shall have to pay tribute of thanks in their turn; but first I would say something of that strain of choral philosophy which falls here “as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.” It is a model of grave, clear, solemn verse; the style plain and bare, but sufficient and strong; the thought deep, lucid, direct. We may say of it what the author has himself said of the wise and sublime verses of Epictetus , that “the fortitude of that is for the strong, for the few; even for them, the spiritual atmosphere with which it surrounds them is bleak and grey;” but the air is higher and purer, the ground firmer, the view clearer; we have a surer foothold on these cold hills of thought than in the moist fragrance of warmer air which steeps the meadows and marshes of sentiment and tradition.
“Thin, thin the pleasant human noises grow, And faint the city gleams; Rare the lone pastoral huts; marvel not thou! The solemn peaks but to the stars are known, But to the stars, and the cold lunar beams; Alone the sun arises, and alone Spring the great streams.”
These noble verses of another poem clipped from Mr. Arnold’s first book, and left hanging in fragments about one’s memory—I here make my protest against its excision —may serve as types of the later, the more immediate and elaborate discourse of thought here embodied and attired in words of stately and simple harmony. It is no small or common comfort, after all the delicate and ingenious shuffling of other English poets about the edge of deep things, to come upon one who speaks with so large and clear and calm an utterance; who begins at the taproot and wellspring of the matter, leaving others to wade ankle-deep in still waters and weave river-flags or lake-lilies in lieu of stemming the stream. Nothing in verse or out of verse is more wearisome than the delivery of reluctant doubt, of half-hearted hope and half-incredulous faith. A man who suffers from the strong desire either to believe or disbelieve something he cannot may be worthy of sympathy, is certainly worthy of pity, until he begins to speak; and if he tries to speak in verse, he misuses the implement of an artist We have had evidences of religion, aspirations and suspirations of all kinds, melodious regrets and tortuous returns in favour or disfavour of this creed or that—all by way of poetic work; and all within the compass and shot-range of a single faith; all, at the widest, bounded north, south, east, and west by material rivers or hills, by an age or two since, by a tradition or two; all leaving the spirit cramped and thirsty. We have had Christian sceptics, handcuffed fighters, tongue-tied orators, plume-plucked eagles; believers whose belief was a sentiment, and free-thinkers who saw nothing before Christ or beyond Judea. To get at the bare rock is a relief after acres of such quaking ground.
A French critic has expressed this in words which may quote here, torn out from their context:—“Le côté fort du caractère d’un peuple fait souvent le côte faible de sa poésie. Ces poëtes anglais pèchent du côté de la raison religieuse. Ce n’est pas que les anglais soient effectivement ou trop religieux ou trop raisonnables. C’est qu’ils ont la manie de vouloir réconcilier les choses irréconciliables. On voit cela partout, dans la politique, dans les beaux arts, dans la vie pratique, dans la vie idéale. Leur république est juchée sur deséchasses féodales, attifée des guenilles étincelantes d’une royauté usée jusqu’à la corde; tout le bric-à-brac monarchique lui plaît; ses parfums rances, ses lambris dédorés, sa défroque rapiécée; elle n’ose se montrer sans mettre son masque de reine, sans rajuster ses jupons de pairesse. Pourquoi se donne-t-elle cette peine? quel profit espère-t-elle en retirer? c’est ce qu’un anglais m~e ne saurait dire; tout en repondantque Dieu le sait, il est permis de douter que Dieu le sache. Venons aux arts; que veut-on d’un peintre? de la peinture? fi done! II nous fa.ut un peu de morale, un peu d’intention, le beau vrai, le wai beau, l’idée actuelle, l’actualite ideaéle, mille autres cboses très-recommandables dans ce genre-la. C’est ce malin esprit, très-peu spirituel, qui est venu souffler aux pöetes la belle idee de se poser en apotres réconciliateurs entre le croyant et le libre penseur. L’un d’eux fait foudroyer M. Renan  par Saint Jean  expirant en pleine odeur de philosophie, ecrase sous son talon le pauvreévêque Colenso , éet demontre que si le Christ n’est pas ‘le Dieuincommensurable,’ il doit tre tout bonnement un homme ‘perdu’ (c’est son mot); vu que d’après la tradition de saparoleécrite plusieurs millions’ de gens plus ou moinshonnêtes sont morts dans cette foi, et que voilà apparemment le seul Dieu, et que voila la seule religion, qui ait jamais produit un effet pareil. Sous des vers plussoigneusement limés, plus coquettement ajustés, nous ne trouverons qu’une plus profonde stérilité de raisonnement Voici une belle Arne de pëete qui pleure, qui cherche, qui envisage la mort, le néant, l’infini; qui veut peser les faits, trier les croyances, vanner la foi; et voici sous dernier mot: Croyons, afin de moins souffrir; tâchons au moins de nous faire accroireà nous-mêmes que nous croyonsà quelque chose de consolant. Il est douloureux de ne pas croire qu’on doit revivre un jour, revoir ses amis morts, accomplir de nouveaux destins. Posons done que cela est, que cela doitêtre, qu’il faut absolument y croire, on du moins faire semblantà propres yeux d’y croire, se persuader, se réitérerà haute voix que cela est La vie sans avenir est impossible. Plus de raisonnements d’incrédule. Le creur se lève comme un homme irrité et répond; J’ai senti! Vous manquez de foi, dites-vous, vous manquez de preuves, mais ii suflit que vous ayez eu des sensations. Á ce compte-là, ii vaut bien la peine de faire rouler le wagon poetique sur les rails de la philosophie, de s’embourber les roues dans les ornières de la theologie. Aimez, souffrez, sentez, c’est très-bien; vousêtes là dans votre droit. Cela ne prouve rien, mais cela est fort joli, mis en de beaux vers. On perd un objet aime, on desire le revoir, onépreuve des émotions douloureusesà songer qu’on ne le reverra point Après? La mort, la douleur, l’oubli, la misère, voilà sans doute des chases penibles, et que l’on voudrait eviter; ii est clair que nous ’ferions tous notre possible pour yéchapper. Cela prouve-t-il que ces choses-la n’existent pas? On est tenté de répondre une bonne foisà ces bonnes gens: Messieurs, vous raisonnez en poetes, vous poetisez en raisonneurs. De grâce, soyez l’un ou l’autre: ou bien, si vous avez les deux dons reunis, raisonnez en raisonneurs, poetisez en poetes. Faites-nous gdce en attendant de cette poesie demontee, de cette philosophie deraillee.
“Encore un mot. La poèsie n’a que faire de tout cela. Il n’y a pas de religion possible dont elle ne sache prendre son parti. Toute croyance quièmeut, qui fait viborer, rèsonner, tressaillir une seule corde intèrieure--toute vèritable religion, sombre ou radieuse, tragique ou riante, est une chose essentiellement poètique. Partout où puisse aller la passion, l’émotion, le sentiment qui fait les martyrs, les prophetes, les vierges mystérieuses, les apôtres effrayants du bien ou du mal, partout où puissent penetrer les terreurs mystiques, les joies enonnes, lesélans obscurs de la foi, il y a pour les pöetes un milieu respirable. Vénus  ou Moloch , Jesus  ou Brahma , n’importe. Un pöete enferme chez lui peutêtre le meilleur chretien du monde, ou bien le plus affreux paien; ce sont la des affaires de foyer oò la critique n’a rienà voir; mais la poesie propre ne sera jamais ni ceci ni cela. Elle est tout, elle n’est rien… . Toute emotion Jui sert, celle de l’anachorete ni plus ni moins que celle du blasphémateur. Pour la morale, elle est mauvaise et bonne, chaste et libertine; pour la religion, elle est incredule et fidèle, soumise et rebelle. Mais l’impuissance religieuse ou morale, mais la pensée qui boite, l’esprit qui louche, l’âme qui a peur et de se soumettre et de se révolter, la foi manquée qui pleure des larmes sceptiques, les effluves fades, tristes, nauséabonds, de la caducité spirituelle, les plantesétiolées, les sources desséchées, les pousses sans sève d’uneépoque douteuse et crépusculaire-que voulez vous qu’elle fasse de tout cela? Pour elle, la negation m@me n’est pas stérile; chez elle, Lucèce a sa place comme MoÏse, Omar  comme Job ; mais elle ne saurait où glisser les petites questions d’évidence, Jes petites tracasseries theologiques. Même en cetteépoque cependant nous ne manquons pas de poëtes qui sachent manier des choses hautes et sombres. Nous ne renverrons pas desécrivains anglais au sixième livre des Cotemplations, aux: sommets pour eux inabordaples de la poésie actuelle, où la lumière se mêle au vertige; sans citer le grand maître, nous pourrions leur indiquer un des leurs qui a mieux fait qu’eux.” Here follows the reference to Mr. Arnold’s poem and to the exact passages supposed to bear upon the matter at issue. “Ce monologue lyrique est d’une ampleur, d’une droiture poétique dont on ne saurait ailleurs retrouver une trace. C’est un rudeévangile qu’on vient là nous prêcher; on sent dans cette cratère des flammes éteintes; c’est lugubre pour lesÂmes faibles, pour les esprits a l’oeil chassieux; c’est une poésie froide et fenne et forte. Voici enfin quelqu’un qui a le regard haut, le pied sûr, la parole nette, la vue large; on sait ce qu’il nous veut. Sa philosophieâpre, escarpée, impassible, est après tout meilleure consolatrice que la theologie douteuse, pleureuse, tracassiere de ses rivaux.” In spite of his flippancy and violence of manner, I am disposed in part to agree with this critic.
Elsewhere, in minor poems, Mr. Arnold also has now and then given signs of an inclination for that sad task of sweeping up dead leaves fallen from the dying tree of belief; but has not wasted much time or strength on such sterile and stupid work. Here, at all events, he has wasted none; here is no melodious whine of retrospective and regretful scepticism; here are no cobwebs of plea and counterplea, no jungles of argument and brakes of analysis. “Ask what most helps when known” let be the oracular and the miraculous, and vex not the soul about their truth or falsehood; the soul, which oracles and miracles can neither make nor mar, can neither slay nor save.
“Once read thy own breast right. And thou hast done with fears. Man gets no other light. Search he a thousand years. Sink in thyself; there ask what ails thee, at that shrine.”
This is the gospel of αὐτάρκεια, the creed of self-sufficience, which sees for man no clearer or deeper duty than that of intellectual self-reliance, self-dependence, self-respect; an evangel not to be cancelled or supplanted by any revelation of mystic or prophet or saint Out of this counsel grows the exposition of obscure and afflictive things. Man’s welfare—his highest sphere and state of spiritual well-doing and well-being—this indeed is his true aim; but not this is the aim of nature: the world has other work than this to do; and we, not it, must submit: submit, not by ceasing to attempt and achieve the best we can, but by ceasing to expect subservience to our own ends from all forces and influences of existing things; it is no reason or excuse for living basely instead of nobly, that we must live as the sons and not as the lords of nature. “To tunes we did not call out: being must keep chime;” but this bare truth we will not accept Philosophy, as forcibly and clearly as religion, indicates the impediments of sin and self-will; “we do not what we ought, what we ought not we do;” but there religion stops, as far as regards this world, and passes upward into a new would and life; philosophy has further to go without leaving her hold upon earth. Even were man pure, just, wise, instead of unwise, unjust, and impure, this would not affect the “other existences that dash with ours.”
“Like us, the lightning fires Love to have scope and play; The stream, like us, desires An unimpeded way; like us, the Libyan wind delights to roam at large.
“Streams will not curb their pride The just man not to entomb, Nor lightnings go aside To leave his virtues room; Nor is that wind less rough which blows a good man’s barge.
“Nature, with equal mind, Sees all her sons at play; Sees man control the wind. The wind sweep man away: Allows the proudly-riding and the founder’d bark.”
Again, there are “the ill-deeds of other men” to fill up the account against us of painful and perilous things. And we, instead of doing and bearing all we can under our conditions of life, must needs “cheat our pains” like children after a fell who “rate the senseless ground:”
“So, loth to suffer mute, We, peopling the void air, Make gods to whom to impute The ills we ought to bear; With God and Fate to rail at, suffering easily.
“Yet grant—as sense long miss’d Things that are now perceiv’d, And much may still exist Which is not yet believ’d — Grant that the world were full of Gods we cannot see;
All things the world which fill Of but one stuff are spun, That we who rail are still, With what we jail at, one; One with the o’er-labour’d Power that through the breadth and length
“Of earth, and air, and sea, In men, and plants, and stones, Hath toil perpetually, And struggles, pants. and moans; Fain would do all things well, but sometimes fails in strength.
“And, patiently exact, This universal God Alike to any act Proceeds at any nod, And quietly declaims the cursings of himself
“This is not what man bates, Yet he can curse but this. Harsh Gods and hostile Fates Are dreams; this only is; Is everywhere; sustains the wise, the foolish elf.”
Again, we must have comfortable Gods to bless, as well as these discomfortable to curse; “kind Gods who perfect what man vainly tries;” we console ourselves for long labour and research and failure by trust in their sole and final and sufficient knowledge. Then comes the majestic stroke of reply to rebuke and confute the feeble follies of inventive hope, the futile forgeries of unprofitable comfort; scornful and solemn as the forces themselves of nature.
“Fools! that in man’s brief term He cannot all things view, Affords no ground to affirm That there arc Gods who do; Nor does being weary prove that he has where to rest."
In like manner, when pleasure-seekers fail of pleasure in this world, they turn their hearts Godward, and thence in the end expect that joy which the world could not give; making sure to find happiness where the foiled student makes sure to find knowledge. Again the response from natural things unseen, or from the lips of their own wisest, confronts their fancies as before.
“Fools! that so often here Happiness mocked our prayer, I think, might make us fear A like event elsewhere; Make us, not fly to dreams, but moderate desire.”
Nor finally, when all is said, need the wise despair or repine because debarred from dreams of a distantand dubious happiness in a world outside of ours.
“Is it so small a thing To have enjoyed the sun. To have lived light in the spring, To have loved, to have thought, to have done?”
The poorest villager feels that it is not so small a thing that he should not be loth to lose the little that life can yield him. Let the wiser man, like him, trust without fear the joys that are; life has room for effort and enjoyment, though at sight of the evil and sorrow it includes one may have abjured else faith and foolish hope and fruitless fear.
The majesty and composure of thought and verse, die perfect clearness and competence of words, distinguish this from other poetry of the intellect now more approved and applauded. The matter or argument is not less deep and close than clear and even in expression; although this lucidity and equality of style may diminish its material value in eyes used to the fog and ears trained to the clatter of the chaotic school. But a poem throughout so flowerless and pallid would miss much of the common charm of poetry, however imbued with the serene and severe splendour of snows and stars. And the special crown and praise of this one is its fine and gentle alternation of tone and colour. All around the central peak, bathed in airs high as heaven and cloven with craters deep as hell, the tender slopes of hill and pasture close up and climb in gradual grace of undulation, full of sunbeams and murmurs, winds and birds. The lyric interludes of the “Empedodes” are doubtless known by heart to many ignorant of their original setting, in which they are now again enchased. We have no poet comparable for power and perfection of landscape. This quality was never made more of by critics, sought after by poets with so much care; and our literature lies in full flowerage of landscape, like Egypt after the reflux of the Nile. We have galleries full of beautiful and ingenious studies, and an imperial academy of descriptive poets. The supreme charm of Mr. Arnold’s work is a sense of right resulting in a spontaneous temperance which bears no mark of curb or snaffle, but obeys the hand with imperceptible submission and gracious reserve. Other and older poets are to the full as vivid, as incisive and impressive; others have a more pungent colour, a more trenchant outline; others as deep knowledge and as fervid enjoyment of natural things. But no one has in like measure that tender and final quality of touch which tempers the excessive light and suffuses the refluent shade; which as it were washes with soft air the sides of the earth, steeps with dew of quiet and dyes with colours of repose the ambient ardour of noon, the fiery affluence of evening. His verse bathes us with fresh radiance and light rain, when weary of the violence of summer and winter in which others dazzle and detain us; his spring wears here and there a golden waif of autumn, his autumn a rosy stray of spring. His tones and effects are pure, lucid, aerial; he knows by some fine impulse of temperance all rules of distance, of reference, of proportion; nothing is thrust or pressed upon our eyes, driven or beaten into our ears. For the instinctive selection of simple and effectual detail he is ummatched among English poets of the time, unless by Mr. Morris , whose landscape has much of the same quality, as clear, as noble, and as memorable—memorable for this especially, that you are not vexed or fretted by mere brilliance of point and sharpness of stroke, and such intemperate excellence as gives astonishment the precedence of admiration: such beauties as strike you and startle and go out. Of these it is superfluous to cite instances from the ablest of our countrymen’s works; they are taught and teach that the most remote, the most elaborate, the most intricate and ingenious fashions of allusion and detail make up the best poetical style; they fill their verse with sharp-edged prettinesses, with shining surprises and striking accidents that are anything but casual; upon every limb and feature you see marks of the chisel and the plane: there is a conscious complacency of polish which seems to rebuke emulation and challenge improvement. It is otherwise with the two we have named; they are not pruned and pared into excellence, they have not so much of pungency and point; but they have breadth and ease and purity, they have largeness and sureness of eyesight; they know what to give and to withhold, what to express and to suppress. Above all, they have air; you can breathe and move in their landscape, nor are you tripped up and caught at in passing by intrusive and singular and exceptional beauties which break up and distract the simple charm of general and single beauty, the large and musical unity of things. Their best verse is not brought straight or worked right; it falls straight because it cannot fall awry; it comes right because it cannot go wrong. And this wide and delicate sense of right makes the impression of their work so durable. The effect is never rubbed off or worn out; the hot suffering eastern life of “The Sick King in Bokhara;” the basking pastures and blowing pines about the “Church of Brou; ” the morning field and midday moorland so fondly and fully and briefly painted in “Resignation;” above all, to me at least, the simple and perfect sea-side in the “Merman”—“the sandy down where the sea-stocks bloom,” the white-walled town with narrow paved streets, the little grey church with rain- worn stones and small leaded panes, and blown about all the breath of wind and sound of waves—these come in and remain with us; these give to each poem the form and colour and attire it wants, and make it a distinct and complete achievement The description does not adorn or decorate the thought; it is part of it; they have so grown into each other that they seem not welded together, but indivisible and twin-born.
Of the five songs of Callicles —whom we have left somewhat too long midway on Etna—that of Marsyas  seems to me the highest and sweetest in tone, unless the first place be rather claimed for that of Cadmus  and Harmonia . Others may prefer the first for its exquisite grace of scenery, or the last for its fresh breath and light, shed on softer places than the fiery cone of Etna—for its sweetness and calm, subduing, after all, the force of flames and darkness with the serenity of stars and song; but how fine in each one alike is the touch which relieves the scenery with personal life, Chiron ’s or Typho ’s or the sleeping shepherds’ and passing Muses ’. We have no word but the coarse and insufficient word taste to express that noble sense of harmony and high poetic propriety shown in the arrangement and composition of these lyrics; the first, full of the bright moist breath of well-watered glen and well-wooded ford, serving as prelude with its clear soft notes to the high monotone of Empedocles ; the second, when that has ceased upon the still keen air, rising with fuller sweetness from below. Nothing can be more deep and exquisite in poetical tact than this succession of harmonies, diverse without a discord. For the absolute loveliness of sound and colour in this and the next song there are no adequate words that would not seem violent; and violence is too for from this poetry to invade even the outlying province of commentary. It must be accepted as the “warm bay among the green Illyrian hills” accepts the sunlight, as the frame of maiden flowers and enclosure of gentle grass accept the quiet presence of the sacred snakes. No ear can forget the cadence, no eye the colour; I am half shaken in my old preference of the next ode untill I recall it from end to end:
“That triumph of the sweet persuasive lyre, That famous, final victory, When jealous Pan  with Marsyas  did conspire; When, from far Parnassus’ side. Young Apollo, all the pride Of the Phrygian flutes to tame, To the Phrygian highlands came.”
Verse stately as the step and radiant as the head of Apollo ; not “like to the night” this time, but coming as the morning to the hills. How clear it makes the distance between Parnassus and Phrygia, the beautiful scorn and severe youth of the God, leaving for these long reed-beds and rippled lakes and pine-clad ridges of hill the bays and olives of his Greece; how clear the presence of the listening Muses, the advent of the hunting Maenads , the weeping Olympus, and the implacable repose of Apollo. No poet has ever come so near the perfect Greek; he has strung with a fresh chord the old Sophoclean lyre; he has brought back the Muses  from Phrygia even to Colonus;
ἔνθ’ ἁ λίγεια μινύρεται θαμίζουσα μάλιστ’ ἀηδὼν χλωραῖς ὑπὸ βάσσαις·
he has watered afresh the fruitful foliage of that unfooted grove of the God, sunless and stormless in all seasons of wind or sun; and for him the sleepless wellsprings of Cephisus are yet unminished and unfrozen,
οὐδὲ Μουσᾶν χοροὶ νὶν ἀπεστύγησαν, οὐδ’ ἁ χρυσάνιος Ἀφροδίτα
Even after his master, the 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. Here is indeed the triumph of the lyre; and he has had to refashion it for himself among a nation and in an age of flute-players and hornblowers.
For the rest, the scheme of this poem is somewhat meagre and inefficient. Dramatic or not, the figure of Empedocles  as here conceived is noble, full of a high and serene interest; but the figure as here represented is a ghost, without form and void; and darkness is upon the face of the deep in which his life lies stagnant; and we look in vain for the spirit to move upon the face of the waters. Dimly and with something of discomfort and depression we perceive the shadow of the poet’s design; we discern in rough and thin outline the likeness of the wise world-wearied man, worn down and worsted in the struggle of spirit against unwisdom and change and adverse force of men and things. But how he stands thus apart among the saints and sophists, whence and whither he comes and goes, what ruin lies behind or what revolution before, we hardly see at all. Not only do we contemplate a disembodied spirit, but a spirit of which we cannot determine how it was once embodied, what forms of thought or sense it once put on, what labour and what life it once went through. There is a poetry of the bodiless intellect, which without touching with finger-tip or wing-tip the edge of actual things may be wise and sweet and fruitful and sublime; but at least we must see the light and feel the air which guides forward and buoys upward the naked fleshless feet of the spirit. Grant that we want no details of bodily life and terrene circumstance, no touch of local or temporal colour; we want at least an indication of the spiritual circumstance, the spiritual influence, without which this poetry would have no matter to work upon. “Il fallait nous faire sentir l’entourage, l’habillement, le milieu respirable de cetteâme nuageuse, de cet esprit fatigué.” After the full effusion of spirit in his one great utterance, Empedocles  has little to bring forth but fragments and relics of the soul, shadows of thin suggestion and floating complaint. The manliness and depth, the clearness and sufficiency of thought have passed from him; he is vague and weak, dissatisfied much as the commonest thinker is dissatisfied with whom all things have not gone well, to whom all things are visibly imperfect and sensibly obscure. Now the prophet of nature who spoke to us and to Pausanias  in the solemn modulation of his lyric speech was more than that. There needs no ghost come from the grave—Acre needs no philosopher scale the summit of Etna—to tell us this that we find here: that a man had better die than live who can neither live with other men as they do nor wholly suffice to himself; that power and cunning and folly are fellows, that they are lords of life in ages of men with minds vulgar and feeble, and overcome the great and simple servants of justice and the right; that the lord of our spirit and our song, the god of all singers and all seers, is an intolerable and severe god, dividing and secluding his elect from full enjoyment of what others enjoy, in the stress and severity of solitude—sacrificing the weaker and sequestering the strong; that men on whom all these things beat and bear more heavily than they need can find no fullness of comfort or communion in the eternal elements made of like matter with us, but better made, nor in any beauty nor in any life of the laborious and sleepless soul of things; that even when all other components of our transient nature are duly and happily resolved into those durable elements, the insoluble and inevitable riddle of mind and thought must vex us to the last as at the first.
“We know all this, we know! Cam’st thou from heaven, O child Of light! but this to declare? Alas! to help us forget Such barren knowledge awhile, God gave the poet his song.”
Not that such barren knowledge is ignoble or inadequate matter for poetry; only it must assume something of the dramatic form and circumstances which here are scantily supplied. Less scanty is the supply of noble verses such as these:
“But we received the shock of mighty thoughts On simple minds with a pure natural joy;”
verses in the highest tone of Wordsworth ’s, as clear and grave as his best, as close and full and majestic. The good and evil influence of that great poet, perverse theorist, and incomplete man, upon Mr. Arnold’s work is so palpable and so strong as to be almost obtrusive in its effects. He is the last worth reckoning whom the “Excursion” is ever likely to misguide. The incalculable power of Wordsworth on certain minds for a certain time could not but be and could not but pass over. Part of this singular power was doubtless owing to the might of will, the solid individual weight of mind, which moulded his work into the form he chose for it; part to the strong assumption and high self-reliance which grew in him so close to self-confidence and presumption; part to the sublimity and supremacy of his genius in its own climate and proper atmosphere—one which forbids access to all others and escape to him, since only there can he breathe and range, and he alone can breathe and range there; part to the frequent vapour that wraps his head and the frequent dust that soils his feet, filling the simpler sort with admiration of one so lofty at once and so familiar; and part, I fear, to the quality which no other great poet ever shared or can share with him, to his inveterate and invincible Philistinism, his full community of spirit and faith, in certain things of import, with the vulgarest English mind—or that which with the Philistine does duty for a mind. To those who like Shelley  and Landor  could see and mark this indomitable dullness and thickness of sense which made him mix with magnificent and flawless verse the “enormous folly” of “those stupid staves,” his pupils could always point out again the peculiar and unsurpassable grandeur and splendour of his higher mood; and it was vain to reply that these could be seen and enjoyed without condonation or excuse of his violent and wearisome perversities. This is what makes his poetry such unwholesome and immoral reading for Philistines; they can turn round upon their rebukers, and say, “Here is one of us who by your own admission is also one of the great poets;” and no man can give them the lie; and the miserable men are confirmed in their faith and practice by the shameful triumph.
It will be a curious problem for the critics of another age to work at, and if they can to work out, this influence of men more or less imbued with the savour and spirit of Philistia upon the moral Samson  who has played for our behoof the part of Agonistes or protagonist in the new Gaza where we live. From the son of his father and the pupil of his teacher none would have looked for such efficient assault and battery of the Philistine outworks; none but those who can appreciate the certain and natural force, in a strong and well-tempered spirit, of loyal and unconscious reaction. I say reaction, and not revolt; he has assuredly nothing of the bad, perhaps not enough of the good stuff, which goes to make a rebel. He is loyal, not to a fault, but to the full; yet no man’s habit of mind or work can be less like that which men trained in other schools expect from a scholar of Rydal or of Rugby. A profane alien in my hearing once defined him as “David  the son of Goliath ;” and when rebuked for the flat irreverence, avowed himself unable to understand how such a graft could have ever been set by the head gardener of the main hotbed of Philistine saplings now flourishing in England. It is certain that the opinion put forth with such flippant folly of phrase is common to many of the profane, and not explicable by mere puerile prejudice or sentiment; and that students of Rugby or of Rydal, vocal and inarticulate, poetic and prosaic, are not seldom recognisable through certain qualities which, if any be, are undeniably Philistine. Whatever these schools have of good, their tendency is to cultivate all the merits recognised and suppress all the merits unrecognised in Ascalon  or in Gath . I will not call up witnesses past or present from the realms of prose or verse, of practice or theory: it would be a task rather invidious than difficult.
Son of Goliath  or son of Jesse , this David  or Samson  or Jephthah  of our days, the man who has taught our hands to war and our fingers to fight against the Philistines, must as a poet have sat long and reverently at the feet of their Gamaliel . And as when there is a high and pure genius on either side a man cannot but get good from the man he admires, and as it was so in this case if ever in any, he must have got good from that source over and above the certain and common good which the sense of reverence does to us all. The joy of worship, the delight of admiration, is in itself so excellent and noble a thing that even error cannot make it unvenerable or unprofitable; no one need repent of reverence, though he find flaws or cavities in his idol; it has done him good to worship, though there were no godhead behind the shrine. To shut his eyes upon disproof and affirm the presence of a god found absent, this indeed is evil; but this is not an act of reverence or of worship; this is the brute fatuity of cowardice, the violent impotence of fear; wanting alike what is good and fruitful in belief and what is heroic and helpful in disbelief; witness (for the most part) the religious and political, moral and aesthetic scriptures of our own time, the huge canonical roll of the Philistine. Nothing can be more unlike such ignoble and sluggard idolatry than the reverence now expressed and now implied by Mr. Arnold  for the doctrine and example of Wordsworth . His memorial verses at once praise and judge the great poet then newly dead better than any words of other men; they have the still clear note, the fresh breath as of the first fields and birds of spring awakened in a serene dawn, which is in Wordsworth’s own verse. With wider eyes and keener, he has inherited the soothing force of speech and simple stroke of hand with which Wordsworth assuaged and healed the weariness and the wounds of his time; to his hands the same appeasing spells and sacred herbs that fell from the other’s when they relaxed in death have been committed by the gods of healing song. The elder physician of souls had indeed something too much of Æsculapius in him, something too little of Apollo  his father; nevertheless the lineal and legitimate blood was apparent.
This elegy and the poem headed “Resignation” are in my eyes the final flower of Mr. Arnold’s poems after Wordsworth—as I take leave to qualify a certain division of his work. The second of these is an unspotted and unbroken model of high calm thought couched in pure and faultless words; the words more equal and the vision more dear than his old teacher’s, more just in view and more sure in grasp of nature and life. Imbued with the old faith at once in the necessity of things and in the endurance of man, it excels in beauty and in charm the kindred song of Empedocles; from first to last there rests upon it a serene spell, a sad supremacy of still music that softens and raises into wisdom the passionless and gentle pain of patience; the charm of earth and sorrowful magic of things everlasting; the spell that is upon the patient hills and immutable rocks, at work and asleep in “the life of plants and stones and rain”; the life to which we too may subdue our souls and be wise. At times he writes simply as the elder poet might have written, without sensible imitation, but with absolute identity of style and sentiment; at times his larger tone of thought, his clearer accent of speech, attest the difference of the men. So perfect and sweet in speech, so sound and lucid in thought as the pupil is at his best, the master seldom was; and at his best the pupil is no more seen, and in his stead is a new master. He has nothing of Wordsworth’s spirit of compromise with the nature of things, nothing of his moral fallacies and religious reservations; he can see the face of facts and read them with the large and frank insight of ancient poets; none of these ever had a more profound and serene sense of fate. But he has not grasped, and no man I suppose will ever grasp, the special and imperial sceptre of his elder. The incommunicable, the immitigable might of Wordsworth when the god has indeed fallen upon him cannot but be felt by all, and can but be felt by any; none can partake or catch it up. There are many men greater than he; there are men much greater; but what he has of greatest is his only. His concentration, his majesty, his pathos have no parallel; some have gone higher, many lower, none have touched precisely the same point as he; some poets have had more of all these qualities, and better; none have had exactly his gift. His pathos for instance cannot be matched against any other man’s; it is trenchant, and not tender; it is an iron pathos. Take for example the most passionate of his poems, the “Affliction of Margaret ;” it is hard and fiery, dry and persistent as the agony of a lonely and a common soul which endures through life, a suffering which runs always in one groove without relief or shift. Because he is dull and dry and hard, when set by the side of a great lyrist or dramatist; because of these faults and defects, he is so intense and irresistible when his iron hand has hold of some chord which it knows how to play upon. How utterly unlike his is the pathos of Homer  or Æschylus , Chaucer  or Dante , Shakespeare  or Hugo ; all these greater poets feel the moisture and flame of the fever and the tears they paint; their pathos when sharpest is full of sensitive life, of subtle tenderness, of playing pulses and melting colours; his has but the downright and trenchant weight of swinging steel; he strikes like the German headsman, one stroke of a loaded sword. This could not be done even by the poets who could do more and better than this. His metre too is sublime, his choice or chance of language casual or chosen has miraculous effects in it, when he feels his foot firm on ground fit for him; otherwise his verse is often hard as wood and dry as dust and weak as water. In this as ill other ways his influence has been now good and now bad. The grave cadence of such a poem as the “Resignation,” in this point also one of Mr. Arnold’s most noble and effective, bears with it a memory and a resonance of the master’s music, such as we find again in the lovely single couplets and lines which now and then lift up the mind or lull it in the midst of less excellent verse; such for instance as these, which close a scale of lower melodies, in a poem not wholly or equally pleasurable: but these are faultless verses and full of the comfort of music, which tell us how, wafted at times from the far-off verge of the soul,
“As from an infinitely distant land. Come airs, and floating echoes, and convey A melancholy into all our day.”
These have a subtle likeness to Wordsworth’s purer notes, a likeness undefined and unborrowed; the use of words usually kept back for prose (such as “convey”) is a trick of Wordsworth’s which either makes or mars a passage; here the touch, it may be by accident, strikes the exact chord wanted, elicits the exact tone.
But indeed, as with all poets of his rank, so with Mr. Arnold, the technical beauty of his work is one with the spiritual; art, a poet’s art above all others, cannot succeed in this and fail in that Success or achievement of an exalted kind on the spiritual side ensures and enforces a like executive achievement or success; if the handiwork be flawed, there must also have been some distortion or defect of spirit, a shortcoming or a misdirection of spiritual supply. There is no such thing as a dumb poet or a handless painter. The essence of an artist is that he should be articulate. It is the mere impudence of weakness to arrogate the name of poet or painter with no other claim than a susceptible and impressible sense of outward or inward beauty, producing an impotent desire to paint or sing. The poets that are made by nature are not many; and whatever “vision” an aspirant may possess, he has not the “faculty divine” if he cannot use his vision to any poetic purpose. There is no cant more pernicious to such as these, more wearisome to all other men, than that which asserts the reverse. It is a drug which weakens the feeble and intoxicates the drunken; which makes those swagger who have not learnt to walk, and teach who have not been taught to learn. Such talk as this of Wordsworth’s is the poison of poor souls like David Grays . Men listen, and depart with the belief that they have this faculty or this vision which alone, they are told, makes the poet; and once imbued with that belief, soon pass or slide from the inarticulate to the articulate stage of debility and disease. Aspiration foiled and impotent is a piteous thing enough, but friends and teachers of this sort make it ridiculous as well. A man can no more win a place among poets by dreaming of it or lusting after it than he can win by dream or desire a woman’s beauty or a king’s command; and those encourage him to fill his belly with the east wind who feign to accept the will for the deed, and treat inarticulate or inadequate pretenders as actual associates in art. The Muses can bear children and Apollo can give crowns to those only who are able to win the crown and beget the child; but in the school of theoretic sentiment it is apparently believed that this can be done by wishing.
Small things suffice to give immediate proof or disproof of the requisite power. In music or in painting all men admit this for a truth; it is not less certain in poetry. There is nothing in either of the poets I speak of more distinctive and significant than the excellence of their best sonnets. These are almost equally noble in style; though the few highest of Wordsworth’s remain out of reach of emulation, not out of sight of worship. Less adorable and sublime, not less admirable and durable, Mr. Arnold’s hold their own in the same world of poetry with these. All in this new volume are full of beauty, sound and sweet fruits of thought and speech that have ripened and brought forth together; the poetry of religious thought when most pure and most large has borne no fairer than that one on the drawing in the Catacombs of the Good Shepherd bearing the young, not of a sheep, but of a goat; or that other on the survival of grace and spirit when the body of belief lies dead; but all, I repeat, have a singular charm and clearness. I have used this word already more than once or twice; it comes nearest of all I can find to the thing I desire to express; that natural light of mind, that power of reception and reflection of things or thoughts, which I most admire in so much of Mr. Arnold’s work. I mean by it much more than mere facility or transparency; more than brilliance. more than ease or excellence of style. It is a quality begotten by instinct upon culture; one which all artists of equal rank possess in equal measure.
There are in the English language three elegiac poems so great that they eclipse and efface all the elegiac poetry we know; all of Italian, all of Greek. It is only because the latest born is yet new to us that it can seem strange or rash to say so. The “Thyrsis” of Mr. Arnold makes a third with “Lycidas” and “Adonais.” It is not so easy as those may think who think by rote and praise by prescription to strike the balance between them. The first however remains first, and must remain 5 its five opening lines are to me the most musical in all known realms of verse; there is nothing like them; and it is more various, more simple, more large and sublime than the others; lovelier and fuller it cannot be.
“The leader is fairest, But all are divine.”
The least pathetic of the three is “Adonais,” which indeed is hardly pathetic at all; it is passionate, subtle, splendid; but “Thyrsis” like “Lycidas,” has a quiet and tender undertone which gives it something of sacred. Shelley brings fire from heaven, but these bring also “the meed of some melodious tear.” There is a grace ineffable, a sweet sound and sweet savour of things past, in the old beautiful use of the language of shepherds, of flocks and pipes; the spirit is none the less sad and sincere because the body of the poem has put on this dear familiar raiment of romance; because the crude and naked sorrow is veiled and chastened with soft shadows and sounds of a “land that is very far off”; because the verse remembers and retains a perfume and an echo of Grecian flutes and flowers,
“Renews the golden world, and holds through all The holy laws of homely pastoral, Where flowers and founts, and nymphs and semi-gods, And all the Graces find their old abodes”
Here, as in the “Scholar Gipsy,” the beauty, the delicacy and affluence of colour, the fragrance and the freedom as of wide wings of winds in summer over meadow and moor, the freshness and expansion of the light and the lucid air, the spring and the stream as of flowing and welling water, enlarge and exalt the pleasure and power of the whole poem. Such English-coloured verse no poet has written since Shakespeare, who chooses his field-flowers and hedgerow blossoms with the same sure and loving hand, binds them in as simple and sweet an order. All others, from Milton  downward to Shelley  and onward from him, have gathered them singly or have mixed them with foreign buds and alien bloom. No poem in any language can be more perfect as a model of style, unsurpassable certainly, it may be unattainable. Any couplet, any line proves it. No countryman of ours since Keats died has made or has found words fall into such faultless folds and forms of harmonious line. He is the most efficient, the surest-footed poet of our time, the most to be relied on; what he does he is the safest to do well; more than any other he unites personality and perfection; others are personal and imperfect, perfect and impersonal; with them you must sometimes choose between inharmonious freedom and harmonious bondage. Above all, he knows what as a poet he should do, and simply does that; the manner of his good work is never more or less than right; his verse comes clean and full out of the mould, cast at a single jet; placed beside much other verse of the time, it shows like a sculptor’s work by an enameller’s. With all their wealth and warmth of flowers and lights, these two twin poems are solid and pure as granite or as gold. Their sweet sufficiency of music, so full and calm, buoys and bears up throughout the imperial vessel of thought. Their sadness is not chill or sterile, but as the sorrow of summer; pausing with laden hands on the middle height of the year, the watershed that divides the feeding fountains of autumn and of spring; a grave and fruitful sadness, the triumphant melancholy of full-blown flowers and souls full-grown. The stanzas from the sixth to the fourteenth of “Thyrsis,” and again from the sixteenth to the twentieth, are if possible the most lovely in either poem; the deepest in tone and amplest in colour; the choiceness and sweetness of single lines and phrases most exquisite and frequent
“O easy access to the hearer’s grace, When Dorian shepherds sang to Proserpine ! For she herself had trod Sicilian fields, She knew the Dorian water’s gush divine, She knew each lily white which Enna yields, Each rose with blushing face; She loved the Dorian pipe, the Dorian strain. But, ah! of our poor Thames she never heard! Her foot the Cumnor cowslips never stirred; And we should tease her with our plaint in vain.”
She has learnt to know them now, the river and the rivermeadows, and access is as easy for an English as a Dorian prayer to the most gentle of all worshipped gods. It is a triumphal and memorial poem, a landmark in the high places of verse to which future travellers studious of the fruits and features of the land may turn and look up and see what English hands could rear.
This is probably the highest point of Mr. Arnold’s poetry, though for myself I cannot wholly resign the old preference of things before familiar; of one poem in especial, good alike for children and men, the “Forsaken Merman;” which has in it the pathos of natural things, the tune of the passion we fancy in the note of crying birds or winds weeping, shrill and sweet and estranged from us; the swift and winged wail of something lost midway between man’s life and the life of things soulless, the wail overhead and caught up by the fitful northern fancy, filling with glad and sad spirits the untravelled ways of nature; the clear cry of a creature astray in the world, wild and gentle and mournful, heard in the sighing of weary waters before dawn under a low wind, in the rustle and whistle and whisper of leaves or grasses, in the long light breaths of twilight air heaving all the heather on the hills, in the coming and going of the sorrowful strong seas that bring delight and death, in the tender touch and recoil of the ripple from the sand; all the fanciful pitiful beauty of dreams and legends born in grey windy lands oil shores and hill-sides whose life is quiet and wild. No man’s hand has pressed from the bells and buds of the moors and downs by cape or channel of the north a sweeter honey than this. The song is a piece of the sea-wind, a stray breath of the air and bloom of the bays and hills: its mixture of mortal sorrow with the strange wild sense of a life that is not after mortal law—the childlike moan after lost love mingling with the pure outer note of a song not human—the look in it as of bright bewildered eyes with tears not theirs and alien wonder in the watch of them—the tender, marvellous, simple beauty of the poem, its charm as of a sound or a flower of the sea—set it and save it apart from all others in a niche of the memory. This has all the inexplicable inevitable sweetness of a child’s or a bird’s in its note; “Thyrsis” has all the accomplished and adult beauty of a male poem. In the volume which it crowns there is certainly no new jewel of equal water. “Palladium” is a fresh sample of the noble purity and clearness which we find always and always praise in his reflective poetry; its cool aerial colour like that of a quiet sky between full sunset and full moonrise, made ready for the muster of the stars, swept clean of cloud and flame, and laved with limpid unruffled air from western green to eastern grey; a sky the cenotaph of unburied sunlight, the mould of moonlight unborn. “A Southern Night” is steeped in later air, as gentle and more shining; the stanzas on the Grande Chartreuse are stamped with the impression of a solemn charm, and so the new verses on Obermann, the new verses on Marguerite , strange to read for those who remember reading the first at the time when all the loves we read of assume a form and ascend a throne in our thoughts, the old and the new side by side, so that now this poem comes under our eyes like a new love-song of Petrarca  to Laura  or Coleridge  to Genevieve . It is fine and high in tone, but not such as the famous verses, cited and admired even by critics sparing of their priceless praise, beginning “Yes, in this sea of life enisled—.” These in their profound and passionate calm strike deeper and sound fuller than any other of the plaintive dejected songs of Switzerland. “Dover Beach” marks another high point in the volume; it has a grand choral cadence as of steady surges, regular in resonance, not fitfull or gusty but antiphonal and reverberate. But nothing of new verse here clings closer to the mind than the overture of that majestic fragment firom the chorus of a “Dejaneira.”
“O frivolous mind of man, Light ignorance, and hurrying, unsure thoughts, Though man bewails you not, How I bewail you!”
We must hope to have more of the tragedy in time; that must be a noble statue which could match this massive fragment. The story of Merope , though dramatic enough in detail, is upon the whole more of a narrative romance than a tragic subject; in Mr. Arnold’s poem the deepest note is that struck by the tyrant Polyphontes , whose austere and patient figure is carved with Sophoclean skill of hand. It is a poem which Milton might have praised, an august work, of steady aim and severe success; but this of Dejaneira has in it a loftier promise and a larger chance. Higher matter of tragedy there can be none; none more intense and impressive, none fuller of keen and profound interest, none simpler and statelier; none where the weight and gravity, the sweetness and shapeliness of pure thought, could be better or closelier allied with the warmth and width of common tenderness and passion. We must all hope that the poet will keep to this clear air of the ancient heights, more natural and wholesome for the spirit than the lowlands of depression and dubiety where he has set before now a too frequent foot. This alone I find profitless and painful in his work; this occasional habit of harking back and loitering in mind among the sepulchres. Nothing is to be made by an artist out of scepticism, half-hearted or double-hearted doubts or creeds; nothing out of mere dejection and misty mental weather. Tempest or calm you may put to use, but hardly a flat fog. In not a few of his former poems in some reprinted here, there is a sensible and stagnant influence of moist vapour from those marshes of the mind where weaker souls paddle and plunge and disappear. Above these levels the sunnier fields and fresher uplands lie wide and warm; and there the lord of the land should sit at peace among his good things. If a spirit by nature dear and high, a harmonious and a shining soul, does ever feel itself “immured in the hot prison of the present,” its fit work is not to hug but break its chain; and only by its own will or weakness can it remain ill at ease in a thick and difficult air. Of such poetry I would say what Joubert , as cited by Mr. Arnold, says of all coarse and violent literature: it may be produced in any amount of supply to any excess of effect, but it is no proper matter of pure art, and “the soul says all die while, You hurt me.” Deep-reaching doubt and “large discourse” are poetical; so is faith, so are sorrow and joy; but so are not the small troubles of spirits that nibble and quibble about beliefs living or dead; so are not those sickly moods which are warmed and weakened by feeding on the sullen drugs of dejection; and the savour of this disease and its medicines is enough to deaden the fresh air of poetry. Nothing which leaves us depressed is a true work of art. We must have light though it be lightning, and air though it be storm.
Where the thought goes wrong, the verse follows after it. In Mr. Arnold’s second book there was more of weak or barren matter, and more therefore of feeble or faulty metre. Rhyme is the native condition of lyric verse in English; a rhymeless lyric is a maimed thing, and halts and stammers in the delivery of its message. There are some few in the language as good as, rare; but the habit or rule is bad. The fragments of his “Antigone ” and “Dejaneira ” no reader can wish other than they are; and the chorus for example in “Merope ” which tells of Arcas  and Callisto  is a model of noble form and colour; but it does not fasten at once upon the memory like a song of Callides , or like the “Merman ,” or like any such other. To throw away the natural grace of rhyme from a modern song is a wilful abdication of half the power and half the charm of verse. It is hard to realise and hopeless to reproduce the musical force of classic metres so recondite and exquisite as the choral parts of a Greek play. Even Milton  could not; though with his godlike instinct and his godlike might of hand he made a kind of strange and enormous harmony by intermixture of assonance and rhyme with irregular blank verse, as in that last Titanic chorus of Samson  which utters over the fallen Philistines the trumpet-blast and thunder of its triumph. But Milton , it may be said, even if he knew them, did not obey the laws of the choral scheme, and so forfeited the legitimate condition of its music. Who then has observed those laws and obtained that success which he did not? I scarcely think that Mr. Arnold has; and if ever man was qualified for the work it is he only. I have never seen other attempts at rhymeless choral metre which were not mere amorphous abortions of misshapen prose, halting on helpless broken limbs and feet. A poet of Mr. Arnold’s high station cannot of course but write in verse, and in good verse as far as the kind will allow; but that is not far enough to attain the ultimate goal, to fill up the final measure of delight. We lose something of the glory and the joy of poetry, of which he has no reason and no right to defraud us. It is in no wise a question of scholarship, or in the presence of a scholar I should be silent; as it is, I must say how inexplicable it seems to me that Mr. Arnold, of all men, should be a patron of English hexameters. His own I have tried in vain to reduce by scansion into any metrical feet at all; they look like nothing on earth, and sound like anapaests broken up and driven wrong; neither by ear nor by finger can I bring them to any reckoning. I am sure of one thing, that, some of them begin with a pure and absolute anapaest; and how a hexameter can do this it passes my power to conceive. And at best what ugly bastards of verse are these self-styled hexameters! how human tongues or hands could utter or could write them except by way of burlesque improvisation I could never imagine, and never shall. Once only, to be candid—and I will for once show all possible loyalty and reverence to past authority—once only, as far as I know, in Dr. Hawtre’s  delicate and fluent verse, has the riddle been resolved; the verses are faultless, are English, are hexametric; but that is simply a graceful interlude of pastime, a well-played stroke in a game of skill played with language. Such as pass elsewhere for English hexameters I do hope and suppose impossible to Eton. Mr. Clough ’s I will not presume to be serious attempts or studies in any manner of metre; they are admirable studies in graduated prose, full of fine sound and effect. Even Mr. Kingsle ’s “Andromeda,” the one good poem extant in that pernicious metre, for all its spirit and splendour, for all the grace and glory and exultation of its rushing and ringing words, has not made possible the impossible thing. Nothing but loose rhymeless anapaests can be made of the language in that way; and we hardly want these, having infinite command and resource of metre without them, and rhyme thrown in to turn the overweighted scale. I am unwilling to set my face against any doctrine or practice of a poet such as Mr. Arnold, but on this matter of metre I was moved to deliver my soul.
This is not the only example in his writings of some quality which seems to me intrusive and incoherent with his full general accuracy and clearness. These points of view and heads of theory which in my eyes seem out perspective do indeed cohere each with the other; but hardly with his own high practice and bright intuition of the best thing. His alliance is so precious against the mailed and gowned array of the Philistines, that the least defection, the least error of movement, imperils more than his own position; a whole regiment may be misled into ruin by the general, while the heat and burden of the day lie before us yet. No man has done so much to exalt and to correct men’s view of the higher criticism and its office. Wherever therefore in things great or small he outruns or falls short of the immediate goal of a just judgment, the instant aim of a pure argument, it is worth while to take note of the slippery or oblique reasoning, or at least to sift and strain it, on the chance that here may be some error. “The light of the body is the eye;” he is the eye of English criticism; and if ever for some passing purblind minute the light that is in that body be darkness, how great indeed is that darkness! Dark however he properly never is, but I think at times oblique or drowsy. He has smitten the Janus  of Philistine worship on one face; under the other, if he has not himself burnt a pinch or two of adulterate incense, he has encouraged or allowed others to burn. At the portal by which English devotees press thickest into the temple of Dagon  he has stood firm as in a breach, and done good service; but he has left unguarded other points of entrance. All that is said in his essays on the religious tradition and the religious idea, as opposed to Philistine demolition or to Philistine edification, I accept and admire as truth, excellent if not absolute, and suggestive if not final; but from his own vantage ground of meditation and idea I start my objection to this inference and that Protestantism, conservative and destructive, is the form in which the enemy has appeared to him; such in his eyes has been the banner, such the watchword under which they serve. All Philistia for him is resumed in the English Philistine; who may probably be the most noisome example in the world, but is assuredly not the only one. I do not say that marriage dissoluble only in an English divorce court is a lovely thing or a venerable; I do say that marriage indissoluble except by Papal action is not. It is irrelevant and unfair for a soldier of light to ally himself with Philistine against Philistine. From the ideal point of meditation to which he would recall us, where the pure justice and the naked beauty of thought are alone held sacred, I cannot “find the marriage theory of Catholicism refreshing and elevating” merely because the Protestant theory, which “neither makes divorce impossible nor makes it decent,” has assumed in English law-courts a gross and hideous incarnation. What is anomalous, what is unjust, cannot surely be beautiful to purged eyes looking from “the ideal sphere.” Of course the idea of a lifelong union has its beauty and significance; so has the idea of liberty and sincerity of action. Faith is good, and freedom is good; the office of the idea is to give free play and full justice to both. The Philistines on either side would fain draw sharper and harder the lines of demarcation and division; the thinkers on neither side would fain not reject but reconcile.
Again, it is doubtless the best and most direct service that a critic can do his countrymen to strip and smite their especial errors, to point out and fence off their peculiar pitfalls; and this Mr. Arnold has done for his English not once or twice only. I doubt if he has ever assailed or advised them without due cause: in one point above all he has done them most loyal and liberal service; he has striven to purge them of the pestilence of provincial thought and tradition, of blind theory and brute opinion, of all that hereditary policy of prejudice which substitutes self-esteem for self-culture, self-worship for self-knowledge; which clogs and encrusts all powers and all motions of the mind with a hard husk of mechanical conceit. And here, heaven knows, in his dull dumb way the Briton stands ahead of all men, towers above all men in stolid and sublime solitude, a massive, stupid, inarticulate god and priest in one; his mute and majestic autolatry is a deeper and more radical, religion than the self-love of other nations, the more vocal vanities of France or America. In the stone walls and iron girders of this faith our champion has done what a man may to make a breach; and the weapon was well chosen, the brand of provinciality, wherewith to stamp and mark that side of the double-faced head of Dagon which looks towards us with English features. But, to use his own term, there are two notes of provinciality perceptible, one or other, in most criticism of foreign things; error in praise and error in dispraise. He could have prescribed for the soul-sick British Philistine, “sick of self-love,” no better method of cure than study and culture of the French spirit, of its flexible intelligence and critical ambition, its many-sided faith in perfection, in possible excellence and ideal growth outward and upward, and the single-hearted love of all these which goes hand in hand with that faith. Faith in light and motion is what England has not and France has; often a blind, erring, heretical faith, often perverse and fanatical, a faith which kills its prophets and stones its protomartyrs; but in art as in politics, in literature as in ethics, an active and a living faith. To show this to English eyes and impress upon English ears its truth and its importance is to do a good work; but to pass from general doctrine to example and detail is hard and unsafe for a foreign preacher. Those who deserve gratitude at our hands deserve also candour; and I must in candour say that Mr. Arnold is not a sure guide over French ground. He does not know quite how the land lies: he turns down this declivity or stops short by that well-head, where a native guide would hardly bid one halt With a large and fine appreciation of the beauties and capacities of the national character, with a justice and strength of insight into these which compared with an average English judgment are wonderful and admirable, he has not the eyes and the nerves of one to the manner born, the sudden and sensitive intuition of an innate instinct: he thinks right, but he feels wrong; some men are right without being reasonable, he is reasonable without being right. He sets up a rational argument to prove why France should be, and why she is, weak in poetry and strong in prose; a very keen and clear argument, only the facts are all against it. Of classic verse Mr. Arnold is so much more competent to speak than I am that I dare not press the debateable question of choric metre; but of French verse I must have leave to say that he is not competent to speak. His touch has in it no pulse or play of French blood; his fine ear is deaf on that side. It would clearly be impossible to show him, to make him feel, the silent horror and wonder with which other ears receive such utterances from him as from the common Briton we expect and accept with all composure. Whether it be “the German paste in his composition” which so far thickens and deadens his subtle sense of song, I cannot say; but I can say that in that case it would be well for him to get quit of it. The cadence and impulse of harmonies in French verse are of course unlike those in English verse or Italian, and the laws which are their outgrowth are unlike too; but the one is not more sure and satisfying than the other: only there must be the right hands to play and the right ears to hear. Mr. Arnold says that a Frenchman born with the faculty or instinct of poetry finds in prose a fuller and easier expression than in verse. As justly might a French critic say this of an Englishman. In either case, the man who is a poet or nothing must be judged by his power of writing verse. If he can neither do that well nor do any other work, whatever his charm of aspiration and sentiment and sincerity may be, he slips into the second rank as surely if French as if English. Imagine that Frenchman’s tone of mind, or his tone of ear, who should proclaim the inadequacy of a language which has sufficed for all the great lyric poets of France, all the copious and glorious roll from Frangois Villon  and Charles of Orleans  to Victor Hugo  and Theophile Gautier , but is now convicted of inaptitude to render in full the sentiments of a Maurice de Guérin ! The English poet is here hopelessly at sea without oar or rudder, haven or guiding-star. He cannot even be trusted to speak of the academic poets, easier though they are of access and apprehension even to the run of Englishmen. The thin, narrow, shallow, but very real melodies of Racine  are as inaudible to him as the mightier symphonies of the great school; this perhaps, as he says, is natural in a foreigner. But no such excuse will serve for the confusion of judgment which places on a level the very best man of his kind, Pope , and Boileau, the very worst Perhaps their respective Odes on St Cecilia ’s Day and the Siege of Namur may be allowed to pair off as the shamefullest two lyrical poems in the world; but compare for a moment their general work, their didactic and satirical verse! the comparison is an insult too absurd to affect the Englishman. He is the finest, Boileau  the dullest craftsman of their age and school.
It is singular and significant that Mr. Arnold, himself established and acknowledged as a poet standing in the first rank among his own people, has chosen for special praise and patronage men who have tried their hands at his work and failed, men who have fallen back baffled from the cliff-side he has climbed. Again I cite the evidence of his French critic; who naturally feels that he has paid the French but a poor compliment in praising as their best men those who fall short of their own aim and his achievement: “Il y a quelque chose de louche, de suspect, dans les louanges que prodigue aux poëtes manqués un poete réussi. Or, parmi tous les nôtres c’est a M. Sainte-Beuve , poëte manqué dont le temps a fait un critique réussi, que le poëte anglais adresse son hommage respectueux. II a eu mille fois raison d’étudier, d’appreciér, de louer cet illustre écrivain; ii n’a peut-être pas eu tort de le suivre les yeux fermés lorsqu’il s’envole à tire d’ailes dans les nuages du paradoxe, de le coire sur parole quand il affirme qu’on peut être grand poëte tout en échouant dans le champ poétique: pour moi, je préfère, soit dit en passant, les peintres qui sachent peindre, les medécins qui sachent guérir, les poëtes qui font des vers. Passons-lui ces spécialités; ce n’est pas une raison d’affinner qu’il ne saurait être en France de meilleurs poëtes que ces prosateurs, de plus forts travailleurs que ces lutteurs étiques, que ces génies tronqués. Quand on dénonce chez autrui les jugements saugrenus, les bêtises réciproques de l’esprit insulaire et provincial, ilfaudrait se garder par exemple de ranger au niveau des grands poëtes les talents délicats, de prendre pour des Keats  les Maurice de Guérin , pauvres belles âmes etiolées, douces et les petites fleurs effeuillées en pleine éclosion. Ces roses pâles, ces pousses maladives, ont bien leur channe et leur parfum, valent bien la peine qu’on les arrose et les recueille; mais on ne tresse point avec celles-là les grandes couronnes poétiques.”
The gentle pupil of Lamennais  is to Mr. Arnold what the lesser celandine was to Wordsworth: he has unearthed a new favourite, and must have some three or four who will love his little flower. It were churlish and foolish to refuse; the small petals are fresh and dewy, the slim stem bends and sways with a sylvan grace. But it is something too much to hold up. a bit of pilewort as the rose of Sharon; it provokes one to deny the poor blossom a place among flowers at all: it is indecorous and ludicrous. The “Centaur” is really so fine and graceful a little study, there are really such delicate and distinctive touches of expression and feeling, such traces of a bright clear sense of beauty and charm and meaning in nature, that it was but just, when the man was well dead and could get no good of it and no harm, to praise him without grudging and pick up his leavings as a windfall. A place in the cabinet of M. Sainte-Beuve  was no more than his desert. But the place which Mr. Arnold assigns him is reserved for men far other than this tender dreamer: five minutes of their life outweigh five centuries of such lives as his; one breath of the common air of their spirit would bum up the little tremulous soul as with fire. No tender Semele , but the queen of heaven alone, can face and enjoy the lightning of heaven. Of the contact of mortal and immortal, ashes are the only fruits. In Keats  there was something of the spirit and breath of the world, of the divine life of things; in Guérin  there was hardly a soft breathless pulse of fluttering sympathy; here was the anima mundi made flesh once more in the body of a divine interpreter such as all great poets must be after their kind; there was the animula, vagula, blandula of a tentative, sensitive, impressible nature; full of little native pieties and sincere little sensibilities, amiable and laudable enough. But the demigods of our kind are not cast in such clay as that. M. Sainte-Beuve  knew better than Mr. Arnold what was the rank and what the kindred of their foster-child when he called him a latter-day Lakist. If we must needs find him kinsmen among English poets, he may take his stand as a subordinate in the school of Gray or the household of Cowper . With them he had some good things in common; his letters, if less worth reading than the best of theirs, have the same frank delicacy and gentle play of personal sentiment applied to the landscape or the hearthside, and couched sometimes in choice and excellent words. But Keats , of all men born the ablest to hold his own with nature, and translate her gods into verbal incarnation; Keats, who was at once the lyrist and the lyre of that nature, the priest and the altar of those gods; more than all other poets receptive and passive of her influences and forces, and more than all other poets able and active to turn them all to a divine use, to transfigure them without transformation, to attune all colours and attemper all harmonies; whose power upon these things, whose gift of transfusion and expression, places him apart from all in his sovereign command of nature, able to do for nature what in his own day Shelley  could not achieve nor Wordsworth  attempt; above all Greece and all Italy and all England in his own line and field of work; to push forward as a competitor with him in that especial field of work where all the giants and all the gods of art would fail to stand against him for an hour, a man who in his own craft could not use the tools that lay ready to his hand—who was nothing (it seems) if not a poet, and could not as much as prove himself a poet by writing passable verse at all; this is a madness of mistake explicable and excusable only as the error of a foreign and provincial judgment. Any stanza of “Thyrsis,” any fragment of “Callicles ,” would outweigh in point of “natural magic” all Guéin ’s work, even were his thoughts clothed in the beauty of verse instead of the prettiness of prose; to weigh against it the entire work of Keats, or any such single poem as the “Ode to Psyche” or that “on a Grecian Urn”—poems which for perfect apprehension and execution of all attainable in their own sphere would weigh down all the world of poetry—is inexpressibly impossible.
Sweeping aside all this accumulated panegyric, we may discern the modest attraction of Guérin’s little plot of ground with its borders of crocus and snowdrop; though the gardeners have done their best to kill them with hothouse fumes and water-pipes and bell-glasses. As to his first posthumous patroness—he belongs to the breed of those suckling poets who live on patronage premature even when posthumous—I must say with another critic, “Madame Sand n’est vraiment pas heureuse en poëtes;” great and excellent as she is, their contact is not good for her. Assuredly the one aspiration of Guérin, his one desire that “a stronger soul would bow down to his weaker spirit,” has since his death been somewhat too much fulfilled. A niche in the Sainte-Beuve  collection is his due; but not the homage of George Sand and Matthew Arnold. His sister and he had in effect a certain distinction, they had graceful tastes and tunable minds: without distinction there cannot be genius, but there cannot be genius with nothing else; a man cannot live on air because he cannot live without it Mr. Arnold would set them as stars in heaven, lucida sidera; their little lights will hardly bum the night out, but meantime they shine well enough for children to watch them twinkle and “wonder what they are.” Without a glimpse of genius, without more light or strength of spirit than many others unknown, Mlle. de Guérin  shows always a beautiful and admirable soul; her diary and her letters have more than usual of the lovely and loving qualities of good women, true sisters and gentle wives, faithful and fervent and worthy to receive again the lavish love they give; they never would come forward, they need never be thrust forward, as genius or as saint. The immortal women in either kind—St Theresa , St Catherine , Vittoria Colonna , Mrs. Browning , Miss Christina Rossetti —belong to a different world and scheme of things. With one verse or one word of theirs any one of these could have absorbed and consumed her as a sunbeam of the fiery heaven a dewdrop of the dawning earth. Nor, to repass for an instant from the personal to the religious question started from this cover by Mr. Arnold, is it just or rational to oppose to her delicate provincial piety the coarsest and ugliest form of English faith. There are graceful as well as loathsome forms of Protestantism, loathsome as well as graceful forms of Catholicism: probably the balance is about even. The Christ of Clapham  is an ungracious god enough; the time is not fruitful of gods in any degree adorable; but the Christ of Montrouge ? Exeter Hall is not a wise or lovely oracle; but what of Saint-Acheul? Is there any more of grace, of light, of culture or sweetness, under the banner of M. Veuillot  than on the staff of the Record? There lies the question; not between Languedoc and Margate. Against the best of one creed it is but fair to set the best of another, against the worst the worst. As to culture, sanity, power of grasp and reception. Mlle. de Guérin  hesitating at the brink of Hugo is assuredly as pitiable as any Puritan shuddering on the verge of Shakespeare .
Again, Mr. Arnold has a fond faith in the French Academy and in the Revue des Deux Mondes which is nothing short of pathetic; he seems actually to take them at their own valuation. The too outspoken critic before cited ventures to express in ribald phrase his wonder that such a pair of “hoarse and haggard old temptresses” (vieilles teniatrices hâves et rauques) should play the part of Delilah to the scourger of Philistines. Not, as he adds, that he would impugn the venerable maiden reputation of their hoary hairs; but such as they are, “ces étranges séductrices ont failli couper de leurs ciseaux émoussés les cheveux au Samson aoglais. Déjà son engouement à manqué l’aveugler. Aux yeux de M. Arnold, l’amour à refait à I’Académie une virginité; ii est tout prêt à épouser sa Marion, à prôner ses quelquesappas émérites, à faire courber toutes les têtes anglaises devant cette Dulcinée à quarante. II est l’amant fougueux du bon sens, l’apotre échauffé de la froide raison, ravocat furibond du goût sain.” This is not a fair or clear judgment; it is indigested and violent and deformed in expression; but it shows as in a cracked and blurred mirror the reflection thrown upon other minds by Mr. Arnold’s act of homage in the outer courts of the Philistine temple: for thither he has unwittingly turned, and there has bent his knee, as no Frenchman could have done who was not a Philistine born and baptised and branded to the bone with the signet of the sons of Dagon . We may grant that the real office of an Academy should be—what the nominal office of this Academy is—culture and perfection of intelligence, elevation of the general standard of work, the average of mind and taste and sense which precludes absurdity or aberration and ensures something of care and conscience among the craftsmen of literature. Greater work an ideal Academy could hardly undertake, for greater work would require the vivid and personal advent of genius; and that, I presume, it could hardly undertake to supply. But has the actual Academy done this? Whom has it controlled, whom has it impelled, who but for such influence would either have gone wrong or failed to go right? whom at least among men really memorable and precious? Has it constantly done homage to the best? has it constantly rejected or rebuked the worst? Is it to the Academy that we owe the sound judgment, taste, temperance of the French prose classics whom Mr. Arnold eloquently extols? Did not the great Richelieu , its founder, set in motion the still virgin machinery of his engine against the greater Corneille ? What was Molière  in its eyes? and what was not Boileau ? Where now are its great men, in an age for France so fruitful of literary greatness? Does it include one of high and fine genius besides Mérimée? and do the rest of the sacred forty respect in him the official antiquary or the faultless writer on whose dawn Goethe  looked out and prophesied overmuch? There are names indeed still greater on its roll, but you do not see appended to them the academic title. Once for all,, waiving its mere theories and reserving its mere pretensions, let us inquire if in effect it now does, if it ever has done, if it ever will do, any real and good service whatever to pure literature? The advice which Mr. Arnold gives by implication to his English audience while preaching on the text of academies is precious and necessary in itself, if the mass of English literature now current or floating is ever to be in any measure elevated or purified; but the selection of text is merely fantastic, the process of deduction vicious and baseless. This double impression was made on me by the lecture when I heard it delivered at Oxford; I have read it since more than once, and the impression is strengthened and deepened. It is possible to start from some incongruous or ignorant assumption and yet proceed to speak words of truth and soberness; the sermon may be usefull and noble though the text be strained and misapplied. For the Revue des Deux Mondes I have as earnest a respect as Mr. Arnold; so far from regarding it with the eyes of irreverence and ribaldry, as an old lady of pleasure, a Delilah  of dangerously gay repute, the ideas of pleasure or gaiety are the last I should associate with a name so justly venerated, a fame so sound and round and solid. Rather would I regard it, as the author of “Mademoiselle de Maupin ” used to regard virtue in the days which found him unambitious of academic eminence, with such eyes as turn towards a fond and watchful grandmother. It is dangerous to ruffle the robe of that dowager. But I cannot regard her bosom as a safe pillow for the yet unshorn head of a Nazarite  champion. Too many of the uncircumcised Philistines lie in wait for him slumbering in the lap of M. Buloz . Are there not giants among them, and the sons of the old giant, all of them children of uncircumcision? and the least of these has twice the thews and seven times the wits of the heavy-headed homy-eyed English Philistine. Some of them there are that sleep with their father Goliath , and some abide to this day; and the acts of them past and present, and all that they did, and their might, are they not written in the books of the Revue des Deux Mondes? There is M. Gustave Planche , the staff of whose spear was so very like a weaver’s beam; there is M. Armand de Pontmartin , a man of great moral stature, having on every hand six fingers to fight with, if haply he may give the flesh of poets to the fowls of the air and to the beasts of the field; there is M. Louis Etienne , who lately laid lance in rest against me unoffending in championship of the upper powers. Since the time of Goliath it has been a holy habit and tradition with the Philistines to curse “by their gods”—which indeed seems the chief utility of those divine beings.
The comparative culture and relative urbanity of responsible criticism—qualities due to no prescription of academic authority, but in part to natural sense and self-respect, in part to the code of habitual honour which rather impels than compels a man to avow his words and his works—these qualities, which preserve from mere contempt even the Philistines of French literature when we turn from them to their English fellow-soldiers, have I suspect blinded Mr. Arnold to the real colours under which they also serve. As yet however they have not made a prey of him; Delilah has merely woven the seven locks of the champion’s head with the web and fastened it with the pin; he has but to awake out of his sleep and go away with the pin of the beam and with the web. But next time he goes to Gaza and sees there the Academy he must beware of going in into that siren, or in the morning he may find the gates too heavy to carry off. We may trust indeed never to find him there eyeless at the mill with slaves; but it is no good sign that he should ever be blind of this eye or deaf of that ear—blind to infirmities on this side, or deaf to harmonies on that I write not as a disciple of the dishevelled school, “romantique à tous crins;” all such false and foolish catchwords as the names of classic and romantic I repudiate as senseless, and revere form or harmony as the high one law of all art. It is because, both as poet and critic, Mr. Arnold has done the service he has in the front rank of an army which finds among us few enough of able recruits, that I grudge in him the least appearance of praise or dispraise unworthy of his rank and office. Otherwise he would be as welcome for me as another Englishman to deny the power and variety, the supple sweetness and the superb resources of French verse in its depths and heights of song; as welcome to ignore the higher and enhance the minor. merits of a foreign literature; to mistake for the causes the effects of these minor merits, which in their turn become (as in this case of the Academy) causes of grave error and defect, weakening where they should strengthen the hands and eyes they have in training. But in a child and champion of the light the least obliquity or obscurity of vision is to be noted as dangerous. If to any one these seem things of minor moment, to a poet such as he is they cannot; to him they must be more serious than to another. We owe him too much to keep silence here, though we might allow as harmless such graceful errors of pastime or paradox as the faith in Oxford which will not allow that she has ever “given herself to the Philistines;” the beauty of the valley of Sorek has surely blinded him to the nation and nature of the Gazites and Ascalonites who have dwelt there now and again as surely as have many of their betters. Both here and in the Academy there may be a profession, a tradition of culture, of sweetness, urbanity, loyalty to the light; but where, we may too often have had to ask, are the things themselves? By their fruits ye shall know them; and what are these? In them both, if not of them, there may be good men and great; have such been always their leaders? or were ever such their types?
“Not here, O Apollo ! Are haunts meet for thee; But where Helicon  breaks down In cliff to the sea.”
There, and not in the academies or the market-places of the Philistines, for peace or war; there, where all airs are full of the breath and all fields of the feet of the gods; where the sea-wind that first waved the wet hair of Venus  moves now only the ripples that remember her rising limbs; where the Muses are, and their mother. There is his place, who in such a place long since found Circe  feasting and heard Apollo play; there, below the upper glens and wellsprings of the Centaurs, above the scooped sea-shelves and flushing sands of the Sirens. Whatever now he say or do, he has been and will remain to us a lover and a giver of light; unwittingly, by impulse, for pure love of it; and such lead further and lighten otherwise than they know. All conscious help or guidance serves us less than unconscious leadership. In his best words there is often a craft and a charm; but in his best work there is always rest, and air, and a high relief; it satisfies, enlarges, refreshes with its cool full breath and serenity. On some men’s nerves the temperature strikes somewhat cold; there are lungs that cannot breathe but in the air of a hothouse or a hospital. There is not much indeed of heat or flame in the Vestal or lunar light that shines from this hearth; but it does not bum down. His poetry is a pure temple, a white flower of marble, unfretted without by intricate and grotesque traceries, unvexed within by fumes of shaken censers or intoning of hoarse choristers; large and clear and cool, with many chapels in it and outer courts, full of quiet and of music. In the plainest air played here there is a sound of sincerity and skill; as in one little Requiescat, which without show of beauty or any thought or fancy leaves long upon the ear an impressure of simple, of earnest, of weary melody, wound up into a sense of rest. We do not always want to bathe our spirit in overflowing waters or flaming fires of imagination; pathos and passion and aspiration and desire are not the only springs we seek for song. Sorrows and joys of thought or sense meet us here in white raiment and wearing maiden crowns. In each court or chapel there is a fresh fragrance of early mountain flowers which bring with them the wind and the sun and a sense of space and growth, all of them born in high places, washed and waved by upper airs and rains. Into each alike there fells on us as we turn a conscience of calm beauty, of cool and noble repose, of majestic work under melodious and lofty laws; we feel and accept the quiet sovereignties of happy harmony and loyal form, whose service for the artist is perfect freedom: it is good for us to be here. Nor are all these either of modem structure or of Greek; here is an Asiatic court, a Scandinavian there. And everywhere is the one ruling and royal quality of classic work, an assured and equal excellence of touch. Whether for Balder  dead and the weeping gods in Asgard, or for the thought-sick heart-sore king of a weary land far east, blinded and vexed in spirit with the piteous pains and wrongs of other men, the same good care and wise charm of right words are used to give speed of wing and sureness of foot to the ministering verse. The stormy northern world of water and air and iron and snow, the mystic oppression of eastern light and cruel colour in fiery continents and cities full of sickness and splendour and troubled tyrannies, alike yield up to him their spirit and their secret, to be rendered again in just and full expression. These are the trophies of his work and the gifts of his hand; through these and such as these things, his high and distinct seat is assured to him among English poets.