Matthew Arnold as a Poet

MR. ARNOLD’S life has been so quiet and so exclusively literary that his history, so far as it concerns the world, is almost comprised in the history of his works. He was born December 24, 1822, at Laleham, in Middlesex, where his father, Dr. Thomas Arnold, afterwards of Rugby, was then receiving private pupils. Matthew was the eldest child. Thomas, the father’s namesake, was also born at Laleham, a little more than a year later. The two boys are almost always mentioned together, whenever intense preoccupation with public affairs allows them to be mentioned at all, in the exceedingly interesting correspondence of their father, collected by the late Dean of Westminster, himself one of Dr. Arnold’s most illustrious pupils. That correspondence ceased, as the world knows, to its long regret, during the first year of the residence of the brothers at Oxford, when they were eighteen and nineteen years of age. They were therefore four and five when Dr. Arnold left Laleham to be head master of Rugby, and began that brief, brilliant, aggressive, but wholly self-devoted career, which left so deep an impression on his own and the rising generation.

In estimating the influences which have gone to the shaping of Matthew Arnold’s peculiar genius, no critic has ever yet seemed to us to lay sufficient stress upon the fact that he was the son of Dr. Arnold. One finds his poetry entirely penetrated by the special pantheism of Spinoza. Another can see only the impress of Wordsworth, which is obvious enough, indeed, and loyally confessed ; inevitable, also, from the earlyT personal familiarity of the younger with the elder poet, and with that landscape of the Lake country which is Wordsworth’s own. A third detects the subtler and less direct influence of Keats. For ourselves, such fitful attempts at analyzing the poems as we have now and then made, during the years in which we have loved and conned them, have almost always issued in a maze of speculation on the mysteries of heredity. It does not very often happen that so distinguished a father has a distinguished son. Amid the many uncertainties which beset this matter of mental inheritance, nothing seems more nearly certain than this : that, while a general excellence of quality often descends in the direct line, the special powers which have flourished with exceptional energy in one generation will be languid or dormant in the next; while faculties of which the germs have been plainly discernible, but which have been hampered, neglected, or in any way stunted, in the progenitor absorb whatever of energy there may be in the nature, and spring to a profuse blossoming in the offspring. The elder Arnold smothered and extinguished with an unshrinking hand an early tendency of his own toward religious doubt and speculative inquiry,—a tendency so serious and unaffected that even the devout Keble could say of it, “ It is better to have Arnold’s doubts than another man’s certainties.” Always reverent in spirit, he became a man of the most intense and definite convictions, — convictions so entirely final to his own mind that he would fain have imposed them upon all the world, and did, in fact, impart them to hundreds whose connection with him was merely external and temporary ; convictions for which he was at all times ready to do valiant and, until the shadow of death itself fell suddenly upon him, even joyous battle. A man above all things practical; who had no time to toy with thought, so instantly he translated it into deed. It was on this side, apparently, that the Roman character touched, and the history of Rome in the great days of the republic so strongly attracted him. On the other hand, scattered all through the pages of that prolific correspondence of Dr. Arnold, in which the pulse of life throbs always with the over full energy which presages early exhaustion, there are traces of gentler and finer possibilities postponed ; of more ideal faculties pining for indulgence ; of a yearning after stillness, seclusion, and the permitted rest of old age, extremely pathetic to the reader who foreknows its vanity. There is that thirst for the perpetual solace of natural beauty around human life, barely slaked for the time being by his flying visits to Fox-How, his vacation house in the Lake country, and finding vent in vivaciously expressed disgust with the tameness of “ leafy Warwickshire.” “ It is no wonder,” he writes, “ that we do not like looking eastward from Rugby. There is nothing fine between us and the Ural Mountains, Holland, the north of Germany, the centre of Russia! ”

We are lingering too long, perhaps, over the preface to our subject; but is it not plain that in thus roughly indicating the strength and weakness of the father’s nature we have at the same time indicated the correlative weakness and strength of the son’s ? It remains to push one step farther our inquiry into the shaping influences of Matthew Arnold’s youth, before we can lay firm hold of the clue to whatever may appear dreary, disheartening, and prematurely disillusioned in the spirit of his early work, and by so doing render all the more intelligent and ample homage to its patient concentration, regulated imagination, and reflective calm, and to the studied but almost perfect beauty of its form. The year 1842, in which Matthew and Thomas Arnold began their residence at Oxford, in which their father delivered his first and last course of lectures as Regius Professor of History there, and in which he died, memorable as it must ever remain in the Arnold family, was hardly less so in the annals of the university itself. It marks the culmination of what has ever since been known as the Oxford movement, whose definite defeat as an attempt to revive in the Church of England the claims of primitive Christianity, and bind her to its traditions, was signalized by the secession to Rome of Newman and many of his more devoted adherents, a year or two later. The very appointment to a Regius professorship of Dr. Arnold, the antagonist acharné of those whom he disrespectfully but not incorrectly called the “ Newmanites,” showed that the mind of Oxford was firmly made up on the question which had divided and agitated her so long. Deeply as the university had been moved, men had hardly realized as yet the full significance of that question, the fundamental character of the choice then made between the two warring principles of the age. Years were to pass before all this became plainly apparent. Meanwhile, to young, untried, and impressible spirits, caught, as it were, between the rush of those two opposing tendencies, the spiritual peril was as great as the bodily peril of the man between two railway tracks, who is passed by lightning trains going in opposite directions, and is felled and perhaps killed by the mere displacement of the air, without having been touched by either. From the effects of that double shock not one of the young âmes d’élite who sustained it ever fully recovered. Clough struggled with his hurt manfully for a few years, and died with his lifetask hardly begun. Froude, older and, as one may say, tougher, brought away from that experience the intemperate spirit and the wrongheadedness which have often vitiated his judgments and injured his brilliant work. Of the two Arnolds, moved by so sad and sacred a compulsion to follow in their father’s footsteps, moved equally in the contrary direction by the very rebound within them of some of his own repressed instincts, the younger survived, to a course of sorrowful vacillation ; the elder, with a soul of finer temper, powers of a more unusual order, and a greater tenacity of spiritual life than his comrades, though doomed to a lasting division of sympathies and balance of opinion, became, in fine, the consummate artist whom we know, and also, to a degree, because of his transparent sincerity, and because, although cheated of hope, he was incapable of fear, “ the helper,” as he himself has lately said of Emerson, —‘‘the helper of those who would live in the spirit,” and so live without hope of personal reward.

He won the Newdigate prize for poetry in 1843, and delivered in the Sheldonian theatre at Oxford a poem, in proper heroic couplets, upon Cromwell. The occasion of the encomia was not then as peaceful and decorous as it has now become, and nobody heard a word of the poem, by reason of the antics of the undergraduates in the gallery It was forty years ago last June, but Cromwell will bear reading still. Mr. Arnold’s versification was already singularly beautiful, polished and yet free; and how prophetic of the thoughtful, neutral temper of the poet in his maturity, and his half-mystical devotion to natural beauty, were the lines in which he laments his hero’s inaccessibility to the loftier influences of landscape! —

There is, indeed, something almost humorous in the hare conception of Oliver Cromwell as concerned with what the wild waves are saying, and in what now seems to us the exceedingly antipathetic character of Mr. Arnold’s first subject. Five years later, in 1848, being at that time private secretary to the Marquis of Lansdowne, he published anonymously The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems. The leading piece in this modest little volume reveals Mr. Arnold’s definite preoccupation with Greek ideals, both of spirit and form. As a continuous vision of the heroic age, the “ wild-thronging train,” the bright procession of eddying forms ” that sweep through the brain of the mountain youth who has drunk of Circe’s cup, have a clearness, a vivid beauty of realization, which is beyond praise. What surely drawn and exquisitely tinted pictures are these ! —

Apropos of Centaurs, the short, unrhymed iambics and anapests of The Strayed Reveller constitute a measure sufficiently foreign to the genius of the English language, Hiawatha and the Kalavala to the contrary notwithstanding. They were, however, sedulously cultivated by Mr. Arnold from this time on, and forced into genuine pathos of expression in the elegy on his father, written ten years later. They have a certain music of their own ; but it is by no means the music of Endymion, — of which, in its spirit, The Reveller inevitably reminds us, — nor indeed the music of poetry at all, but of elevated and picturesque prose. There is no need here to repeat the experiment, long since made by a keen but not unfriendly critic of Mr. Arnold’s poetry,¹ of printing these short lines in a continuous paragraph. Prose they are, when thus printed, and not specially rhythmic prose either, although retaining all their imaginative charm. There comes out in them, however, when so written and read, a truly extraordinary likeness to the Centaur of Maurice de Guérin. Now we all know how enthusiastic an estimate Mr. Arnold formed, in his later critical days, of the genius of the delicate young Frenchman. He even compared him with Keats. Mr. Swinburne, — the most generous of all poets to his fellow-poets, — in the course of his eloquent essay on Matthew Arnold’s poetry, takes leave to repel with the utmost vivacity any such high association of De Guérin’s name. " In Keats,” he truly says, “ there was something of the anima mundi made flesh once more in the body of a divine interpreter ; in De Guérin only the ‘ animula, blandula vagula ’ of a tentative, sensitive, impressionable nature.” He quotes, as illustrating Mr. Arnold’s estimate of De Guérin, the pungent remark of a French critic: " Il y a quelque-chose de louche et de suspect dans les louanges que rend aux poëtes manqués un poëte réussi.” He says that the gentle pupil of Lamennais appears to have been to his own partial compatriot “ what the lesser celandine was to Wordsworth,” and so on, through a number of pages fairly sparkling with antitheses. For ourselves, we are specially grateful to Mr. Swinburne for having brought simultaneously before us these three names, — Keats, Arnold, Guérin. There is something suggestive and instructive in their association. What the earlier and greater genius was, unconsciously, by a divine intuition, the two others, so congenial to one another and to him, would have given their souls to be. Toward the serene pagan kingdom of his inheritance and his brief rule they looked, with homesick longing, from the devastated battle-fields of the stormy present; they made excursions into it, and gathered its flowers and sketched its scenery, but they might not abide there. The one returned to die, the other to a sterner life. De Guérin and Arnold, in their young days (and the former, as we know, had no other), were as Greek as they could possibly make themselves, but Keats was conceived a Greek. With a great price obtained they the freedom of the antique world, but he was free born.

In the chief poem of Mr. Arnold’s next volume, Empedocles upon Etna and Other Poems, 1852, also issued anonymously, or rather with the simple signature A, we seem to have our attention purposely directed to the strife between the two voices of his muse, — the false antique and the true modern, — and to hear the sweeter borne down and finally silenced by the stronger. The scenery is of course all classic still, but the voice of Empedocles upon Etna is a voice of to-day. The heavy-hearted old philosopher, spent by the spiritual conflict in which he has been so long and so vainly engaged, quietly resolves to contend no longer, and steals away into the volcanic wilderness of the lonely mountain top to die. As he goes he chants his own death song, — a stern, lofty, unimpassioned strain, — in which he reviews his life of empty thought and relinquishes it, flinging it back as with a sigh of relief into the general reservoir of being.

The majestic bass of this remarkable chant is interrupted from time to time by an exquisitely contrasted measure, — the warbling, far down amid the leafy glens of the lower mountain, of Callicles, a bright young harp-player, whose strains in previous days have sometimes soothed the heart of Empedocles as the harp of David charmed the madness of Saul. The songs of Callicles are a great advance on those of The Reveller. Their lyrical form is faultless ; their music such as haunts the memory by its sweetness. He sings, to the slender accompaniment of his harp-strings, of Cadmus and Harmonia, those two “ bright and aged snakes,” who

He sings of Apollo and Marsyas ; and once again, after the fatal plunge has actually been taken, and the tragedy of

the dreary mountain top is over, the voice of the unconscious minstrel becomes audible in a hymn to Apollo, whose cadence is like that of some slender cascade, leaping with a single flash from the summit to the plain : —

“Calm:” in this one word is already embodied Mr. Arnold’s most earnest aspiration. The last note struck by Callicles is the keynote of the majority of these the least youthful, surely, of all young poems. It is struck again and again, and always most distinctly in the most impressive of the short poems, collected along with the sonnets and the narrative pieces — of which more anon — in the first volume of the complete poetical works.² In the first sonnet of all, Quiet Work, he prays that he may learn of external nature the lesson “of toil unsevered from tranquillity.” In the second, in reply to the friend who inquires on what authors he most relies for comfort and support, in the “ bad days ” through which they are passing, he replies that more even than to Homer and to Epictetus he owes to him

We find him equally enamored of repose in the tender lament entitled Requiescat; and in its heart-sick but still composed and quiet pendant, Youth and Calm, in which he seems to lie, as he himself says elsewhere, “ passive at the nadir of dismay,” the same sentiment finds more austere expression in the nobly stoical strain of In Utrumque Paratus, while it is milder, and almost pious, after a certain pantheistic fashion, in the Lines Written in Kensington Gardens :

So, too, in Resignation, in whose limpid lines the landscape of the English Lake country lies reflected as in a flawless mirror: —

Notice, also, in this and the preceding extract, the curious felicity of diction, the perfect truth of tone and balance of rhythm, and the absolute simplicity withal; for these are the things which constitute Mr. Arnold’s proper and inalienable charm, in which he is virtually unsurpassable. The phrase “ lucidity of soul,” indeed, recalls one of the watchwords — the invidious call them catchwords — of the poet’s later days; but let us never forget, while Mr. Punch makes mirth for us over these, how much Mr. Arnold has himself done, by his delicate precision, toward making his mother tongue a clearer medium for the bright quality of thought which he admires. There is something of Wordsworth’s best in Resignation, and Mr. Swinburne’s whimsicality as a critic is nowhere more conspicuous than in calling the author of these crystalline verses, “ the last of those whom Wordsworth is likely to mislead.”

Nevertheless, all this grave introspection, this premature quietism and wouldbe pantheism, interesting as they are in themselves, and characteristic, indicate the direction in which Mr. Arnold’s genius is weak. He cannot detach his people from himself, and make them act independently ; he cannot be truly dramatic. Empedocles upon Etna is classed as a dramatic piece, and a portion of it is in dialogue ; and it is noble poetry, but it is anything rather than a drama. Empedocles voices Mr. Arnold’s most fundamental doubts, and Mycerinus his mood of desperation and defiance, and Stagirius his reactions toward faith. Very few, we fancy, of those who treasure Mr. Arnold’s lines most lovingly in memory will even recognize Stagirius under its name, — that of a youthful monk beloved of St. Chrysostom. It is the solemn and affecting prayer beginning, “ Thou who dost dwell alone ; ” and we ourselves first made acquaintance with it many years ago, in an American newspaper, as Matthew Arnold’s Litany, — a queer title, yet rather more appropriate than Stagirius. But how distinct, how objective, how living, an image would Mr. Browning have given us, whether of the Eastern monk or the Egyptian king.³ The same quality of irresistible self-infusion is conspicuous — one might say, but for the extreme dignity and pathos of the strain, almost amusingly conspicuous — in the Lines to a Gypsy Child on the Seashore: —

Exquisite verses ! But how is it possible to think, without a smile, of applying them to any little living vagrant, however dark her eyes ? — even though she were, as it would seem she must have been, first cousin to the melodious Boy of Windermere.

Nay, tit the risk of being hushed as flippant, we will even go a step farther, and confess that a trace of the same sense of disproportion, between the slightness of the theme and the solemnity of its treatment, affects us in the series of poems to Marguerite. They contain some of Mr. Arnold’s most penetrating and musical lines ; they are set, as with a series of precious medallions, with the loveliest vignettes of Alpine scenery ; but as the record of an experience they leave us unsympathetic and half incredulous. How can we fully believe in Marguerite, when the poet tells us so plainly that his own judgment disapproved her all along? How can we forget, for her sake, the lover who never forgets himself, — who is so languid in his desire, so distrait in his regret? The gracious, hut melancholy little idyl closes with a singularly fine passage on isolation : —

And the same thought is repeated and more fully developed in the frequently quoted lines beginning, “Yes, in the sea of life en-isled,” where we read with emotion, and very likely appropriate and never forget, but feel, none the less, that the strain has become quite impersonal; that it has soared into highly rarefied regions, and is completely severed from its first occasion. Indeed, we think it must be conceded that there is a certain austerity inherent in Mr. Arnold’s nature. His statuesque conceptions are but faintly colored by that “ love which is blood within the veins of time,” and his treatment of a fierce, typical tale of passion and sin, like that of Tristram and Iseult, is curiously inadequate. Fancy those two quietly admitting to each other, in their tragical last interview, that “ both have passed a youth constrained and sad ” !

On the other hand, the picture of the widowed Iseult, the spotless “ Ysolt-asblanches-mains,” living her breathless winter life of solitude and prayer among her children, on the Breton seacoast, is perfect. So is always Mr. Arnold’s narrative poetry, provided only he have a congenial theme, and can set his tale in a landscape sufficiently low in color. All these conditions are fulfilled in the Forsaken Merman, in Sohrab and Rustum, and in Balder Dead ; and it is difficult, indeed, to choose between these three, for each is a masterpiece. The Merman is the general favorite. The weird pathos of the legend, its innocent, wistful paganism and the extreme sweetness of the versification have helped to render it more nearly popular than any other production of Mr. Arnold’s fastidious muse, but for us Sohrab and Rustum bears off the palm. It is every whit as classical in conception and treatment as the erudite Merope. Its charm is distinctively Virgilian. The compulsion of mysterious fate under which the father unwittingly slays the son, the exceeding beauty of the boy-warrior’s portrait, the stately yet carefully subordinated imagery, the few unerring lines which bring so clearly before the reader’s mind the broad and simple scenery of the Oxus banks, the slight tremor of unshed tears in the melodious yet manly verse, — all these are in Virgil’s very manner, while there is an obvious reminiscence of the dead Pallas in the last scene of Sohrab’s brief history. He has told his distressed and remorseful father that the latter will yet have peace : —

And yet, beautiful as Mr. Arnold’s versified narrative is, it is not even in this line that we are to look for his highest poetical achievement. In the latest edition of his poems, there will be found collected under the head of Elegiacs nearly all of those pieces in which he has appealed most powerfully to the sensibilities of his time, — The Scholar Gypsy and Thyrsis, Rugby Chapel, the Stanzas from Carnac and the Grande Chartreuse, the two Obermanns. It has become almost a commonplace of criticism to remark that the English language has now produced three consummate elegies, Lycidas, Adonais, and Thyrsis ; while those are not wanting—and we think their number will increase, as the years go by — who find the threnody of Arthur Hugh Clough the most satisfying, because the most truly tender, informed by the deepest human sentiment of the three. It is the lament of a loyal soul over one who had shared his own deep intimacy with nature, in the dearest of all the quiet places of England to a scholarly mind; of a baffled inquirer bereft of the partner of his researches ; of a steadfast soldier over the comrade who has fallen by his side in a doubtful battle ; of a man over his heart’s friend. No wonder it appeals to many minds in many ways. Yet sincere as are the tones of personal sorrow in Thyrsis, and exquisitely modulated, they merge in that cry of the sufferer from the mal du siècle, which is the true theme of the other elegies as well : —

Into Mr. Arnold’s mission as prophet of the century’s eclipse of faith it is not, however, our purpose to enter more fully here : partly because it is on this side that he is best known, and has been most frequently and fully illustrated; partly because we have already indicated those outward circumstances of his life and hour of advent which seem to us to have rendered inevitable his peculiar attitude toward the more agitating questions of the day. Offspring and voice of his age he certainly has been, yet never the quite unquestioning disciple of her most radical and iconoclastic teaching. Nay, it is rather by virtue of his instinctive resistance to the more withering formulas of materialism, of his impulsive retours toward the faith of other days, along with his almost impassioned acceptance of the most difficult moral ideals, that he is most impressive, after all, and will perhaps be longest remembered. It is just here that what Goethe used to call the “ demonic ” element enters oftenest into his words, — that which is haunting, incalculable, immeasurable, and divine. “ “Whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report,” — some of us have lately heard his living voice persuasively urging the preoccupation of the mind with “ these things,” and have felt that the habit of his own life justified and enforced his exhortation.

He sings the dirge of Christianity in verses of unexampled pathos, but a pulse is felt in every line that throbs responsive to

He mourns the failing of the living spring at which his father drank ; then sees, as in a sudden vision, the progress of that confident and intrepid spirit

He raises a stately hymn to Obermann, as the “ master of his wandering youth,” and they who are sent by Arnold to Obermann, as many must have been, and will still continue to be, perceive, at a glance, the deep constitutional sympathy between the elder and the younger mind, and the essential harmony of their leading views. But they will eventually find, if their experience is like our own, the interpretation stronger than the text; the pupil broader and manlier than the master. When Senancour writes, touchingly, “ Je n’aime que ce qu’ont aimé les meilleurs des hommes ; je ne cherche rien aux dépens d’aucun d’eux ; je cherche ce que chacun peut avoir, ce qui est nécessaire au besoin de tous, ce qui finirait leurs misères, ce qui rapproche, unit, console; je ne veux que la vie des peuples boils, — ma paix dans la paix de tous,” — we feel how wholly this is in Mr. Arnold’s vein, so far as it goes ; but we know that with him the matter did not rest here, and that, in the silence of his meditation upon the sources of peace, he must at least have heard, like the faint vibration of a far-away bell, a voice out of the dawning hour of the fourteenth century : —

On the other hand, Mr. Arnold is fairly outdone in despair — although he has a talent in that way, too — by the melancholy clairvoyance of a passage like the following : “ Quand toutes les mers seront sondées, quand on aura mesuré les antennes et compté les étamines; quand on aura observé le thermomètre sur les mers australes, près du pôle, au solstice de Juin ; quand on aura bâti des temples au milieu du Sahara, que serousnous alors ? Ce que nous sommes — ce que nous étions. Les pauvres mortels naitront dans les pleurs, ils vivront dans l’anxiete, ils mourront dans l’amertume.” If Mr. Arnold had dealt exclusively with negations he could have had no conspicuous influence even over his own denying generation; nay, he would then have been no poet at all, and could have laid no claim to his now assured place in the innermost circle of those who surround the very greatest. It may be that faith is utterly to perish, but poetry, as Senancour himself prophesied, will be involved in the same ruin, and the “ voice of the harper will be heard no more at all ” in the desolated city of this world.

We are conscious of having done but imperfect justice even to the most prominent of the excellences of Mr. Arnold’s poetical work: its temperance, clarity, and precision of diction; its high finish, and other of those secondary qualities which make or mar irrevocably the force of the inspired word, and which depend first of all upon the possession of a fine literary conscience and a strict obedience to its dictates, aud afterwards and always upon unwearying pains. Mr. Swinburne, in the very striking essay upon Mr. Arnold’s poetry already quoted, says truly that “ criticism of the rapid and limited kind possible to contemporaries can be no more than the sincere exposition of the critic’s own belief; ” and another modern essayist, both nice aud wise,⁴ has aptly compared the critic’s labor to that of the coral insect. The utmost he can hope, he says in substance, is to add a few undistinguished grains to the slowly growing mass of information concerning those whom it behooves us to know ; to solve a lurking puzzle or offer a pregnant suggestion. If we shall seem to some to have done so much in the case of Matthew Arnold, we shall be more than content.

Perhaps, when all is said, it remains the most noteworthy feature of Mr. Arnold’s poetical work that that work was never immature. And yet the poems were all, in some sort, early poems. Before their author had fully come to middle life he had virtually abandoned metrical expression. But the earliest among them, those distinctly marked as such, have none of the special faults of youth. There is no passion in them, as we have seen, — or next to none, — no hurry, no excess. They are grave, concise, philosophical, unsparingly pruned from the beginning, and untiringly polished. Such precocity is usually thought to foretell an early decline of mental vigor. It is all the more wonderful, therefore, as measuring Mr. Arnold’s vitality and versatility, that he should deliberately have unstrung his lyre only to enter with unsuspected energy into a new career, and win equal if not greater distinction as a writer of critical and didatic prose.

Harriet Waters Preston.