Matthew Arnold - George Saintsbury (best book club books .txt) 📗

"classical" in place, is thoroughly so in its nature, being the story of a combat between a father and a son, who know not each other till too late, of the generosity of the son, of the final triumph of the father, of the anagnorisis , with the resignation of the vanquished and the victor's despair. The medium is blank verse, of a partly but not wholly Miltonic stamp, very carefully written, and rising at the end into a really magnificent strain, with the famous picture of "the majestic river" Oxus floating on regardless of these human woes, to where the stars

"Emerge, and shine upon the Aral Sea."

Even here, it is true, the Devil's Advocate may ask whether this, like the Mycerinus close, that of Empedocles , and others, especially one famous thing, to which we shall come presently, is not more of a purple tail-patch, a "tag," a "curtain," than of a legitimate and integral finale. It is certain that Mr Arnold, following the Greeks in intention no doubt, if not quite so closely as he intended, was very fond of these "curtains" - these little rhetorical reconciliations and soothings for the reader. But this is the most in place of any of them, and certainly the noblest
tirade that its author has left.

Most of the new poems here are at a level but a little lower than this part of Sohrab and Rustum , while some of them are even above it as wholes. Philomela is beautiful, in spite of the obstinate will-worship of its unrhymed Pindaric: the Stanzas to the Memory of Edward Quillinan are really pathetic, though slightly irritating in their "sweet simplicity"; and if Thekla's Answer is nothing particular, The Neckan nothing but a weaker doublet of the
Merman, A Dream is noteworthy in itself, and as an outlier of the Marguerite group. Then we have three things, of which the first is, though unequal, great at the close, while the other two rank with the greatest things Mr Arnold ever did. These are The Church of Brou , Requiescat , and The Scholar-Gipsy .

If, as no critic ever can, the critic could thoroughly discover the secret of the inequality of The Church of Brou , he might, like the famous pedant, "put away" Mr Arnold "fully conjugated in his desk." The poem is in theme and scheme purely Romantic, and "nineteenth century" in its looking back to a simple and pathetic story of the Middle Age - love, bereavement, and pious resignation. It is divided into three parts. The first, in trochaic ballad metre, telling the story, is one of the poet's weakest things. You may oft see as good in Helen Maria Williams and the Delia Cruscans. The second, describing the church where the duke and duchess sleep, in an eight-line stanza of good fashion, is satisfactory but nothing more. And then the third, after a manner hardly paralleled save in Crashaw's
Flaming Heart , breaks from twaddle and respectable verse into a rocket-rush of heroic couplets, scattering star-showers of poetry all over and round the bewildered reader. It is artifice rather than art, perhaps, to lisp and drawl, that, when you do speak out, your speech may be the more effective. But hardly anything can make one quarrel with such a piece of poetry as that beginning -

"So rest, for ever rest, O princely pair!"

and ending -

"The rustle of the eternal rain of Love."

On the other hand, in Requiescat there is not a false note, unless it be the dubious word "vasty" in the last line; and even that may shelter itself under the royal mantle of Shakespeare. The poet has here achieved what he too often fails in, the triple union of simplicity, pathos, and (in the best sense) elegance. The dangerous repetitions of "roses, roses," "tired, tired," &c., come all right; and above all he has the flexibility and quiver of metre that he too often lacks. His trisyllabic interspersions - the leap in the vein that makes iambic verse alive and passionate - are as happy as they can be, and the relapse into the uniform dissyllabic gives just the right contrast. He must be [Greek: ê thêrion ê theos] - and whichever he be, he is not to be envied - who can read Requiescat for the first or the fiftieth time without mist in the eyes and without a catch in the voice.

But the greatest of these - the greatest by far - is
The Scholar-Gipsy . I have read - and that not once only, nor only in the works of unlettered and negligible persons - expressions of irritation at the local Oxonian colour. This is surely amazing. One may not be an Athenian, and never have been at Athens, yet be able to enjoy the local colour of the Phædrus . One may not be an Italian, and never have been in Italy, yet find the Divina Commedia made not teasing but infinitely vivid and agreeable by Dante's innumerable references to his country, Florentine and general. That some keener thrill, some nobler gust, may arise in the reading of the poem to those who have actually watched

"The line of festal light in Christ Church Hall"

from above Hinksey, who know the Fyfield elm in May, and have "trailed their fingers in the stripling Thames" at Bablockhithe, - may be granted. But in the name of Bandusia and of Gargarus, what offence can these things give to any worthy wight who by his ill luck has not seen them with eyes? The objection is so apt to suggest a suspicion, as illiberal almost as itself, that one had better not dwell on it.

Let us hope that there are after all few to whom it has presented itself - that most, even if they be not sons by actual matriculation of Oxford, feel that, as of other "Cities of God," they are citizens of her by spiritual adoption, and by the welcome accorded in all such cities to God's children. But if the scholar had been an alumnus of Timbuctoo, and for Cumnor and Godstow had been substituted strange places in -wa and -ja , I cannot think that, even to those who are of Oxford, the intrinsic greatness of this noble poem would be much affected, though it might lose a separable charm. For it has everything - a sufficient scheme, a definite meaning and purpose, a sustained and adequate command of poetical presentation, and passages and phrases of the most exquisite beauty. Although it begins as a pastoral, the mere traditional and conventional frippery of that form is by no means so prominent in it as in the later (and, I think, less consummate) companion and sequel Thyrsis . With hardly an exception, the poet throughout escapes in his phraseology the two main dangers which so constantly beset him - too great stiffness and too great simplicity. His "Graian" personification is not overdone; his landscape is exquisite; the stately stanza not merely sweeps, but sways and swings, with as much grace as state. And therefore the Arnoldian "note" - the special form of the maladie du siècle which, as we have seen, this poet chooses to celebrate - acquires for once the full and due poetic expression and music, both symphonic and in such special clangours as the never-to-be-too-often-quoted distich -

"Still nursing the unconquerable hope,
Still clutching the inviolable shade" -

which marks the highest point of the composition.

The only part on which there may be some difference between admirers is the final simile of the Tyrian trader. This finishes off the piece in nineteen lines, of which the poet was - and justly - proud, which are quite admirable by themselves, but which cannot perhaps produce any very clear evidences of right to be where they are. No ingenuity can work out the parallel between the "uncloudedly joyous" scholar who is bid avoid the palsied, diseased enfants du siècle , and the grave Tyrian who was indignant at the competition of the merry Greek, and shook out more sail to seek fresh markets. It is, once more, simply an instance of Mr Arnold's fancy for an end-note of relief, of cheer, of pleasant contrast. On his own most rigid principles, I fear it would have to go as a mere sewn-on patch of purple: on mine, I welcome it as one of the most engaging passages of a poem delightful throughout, and at its very best the equal of anything that was written in its author's lifetime, fertile as that was in poetry.

He himself, though he was but just over thirty when this poem appeared, and though his life was to last for a longer period than had passed since his birth to 1853, was to make few further contributions to poetry itself. The reasons of this comparative sterility are interesting, and not quite so obvious as they may appear. It is true, indeed, - it is an arch-truth which has been too rarely recognised, - that something like complete idleness, or at any rate complete freedom from regular mental occupation, is necessary to the man who is to do poetic work great in quality and in quantity at once. The hardest occupation - and Mr Arnold's, though hard, was not exactly that - will indeed leave a man sufficient time, so far as mere time is concerned, to turn out as much verse as the most fertile of poets has ever produced. But then that will scarcely do. The Muses are feminine - and it has been observed that you cannot make up even to the most amiable and reasonable of that sex for refusing to attend to her at the minute when she wants you , by devoting even hours, even days, when you are at leisure for her . To put the thing more seriously, though perhaps not more truly, the human brain is not so constituted that you can ride or drive or "train" from school to school, examining as you go, for half-a-dozen or half-a-score hours a-day, or that you can devote the same time to the weariest and dreariest of all businesses, the reading of hundreds of all but identical answers to the same stock questions, and yet be fresh and fertile for imaginative composition. The nearest contradictory instances to this proposition are those of Scott and Southey, and they are, in more ways than one or two, very damaging instances - exceptions which, in a rather horrible manner, do prove the rule. To less harassing, and especially less peremptory, work than Mr Arnold's, as well as far more literary in kind, Scott sacrificed the minor literary graces, Southey immolated the choicer fruits of genius which he undoubtedly possessed the power of producing; and both "died from the top downward."

But there was something more than this. Mr Arnold's poetic ambition, as we have seen, did not aim at very long and elaborate works. His forte was the occasional piece - which might still suggest itself and be completed - which, as we shall see, did sometimes suggest itself and was completed - in the intervals, the holidays, the relaxations of his task. And if these lucid and lucent intervals, though existent, were so rare, their existence and their rarity together suggest that something more than untoward circumstance is to blame for the fact that they did not show themselves oftener. A full and constant tide of inspiration is imperative; it will not