Matthew Arnold, George Saintsbury [best fiction novels TXT] 📗

the meanest of them has in his sonship the same quality as the greatest. Now it was very much at Mr Arnold's heart to be important, and he was not eager to impart or share his qualities.

However this may be, there were ample reasons why he should leave the fold. The Bar (though he was actually called and for many years went circuit as Marshal to his father-in-law, Mr Justice Wightman) would have suited him, in practice if not in principle, even less than the Church; and he had no scientific leanings except a taste for botany. Although the constantly renewed cries for some not clearly defined system of public support for men of letters are, as a rule, absurd, there is no doubt that Mr Arnold was the very man for a sinecure, and would have justified the existence of Pipe or Hanaper to all reasonable men. But his political friends had done away with nearly all such things, and no one of the very few that remained fell to his lot. His father had died in 1842, but the son served a short apprenticeship to school-teaching at Rugby, then became private secretary to Lord Lansdowne, the President of the Council (it is now that we first meet him as an epistoler), and early in 1851 was appointed by his chief to an inspectorship of schools. Having now a livelihood, he married, in June of that year, Frances Lucy Wightman, daughter of a judge of the Queen's Bench. Their first child, Thomas, was born on July 6, 1852, and Mr Arnold was now completely estated in the three positions of husband, father, and inspector of schools, which occupied - to his great delight in the first two cases, not quite so in the third - most of his life that was not given to literature. Some not ungenerous but perhaps rather unnecessary indignation has been spent upon his "drudgery" and its scanty rewards. It is enough to say that few men can arrange at their pleasure the quantity and quality of their work, and that not every man, even of genius, has had his bread-and-butter secured for life at eight-and-twenty.

But in the ten or twelve years which had passed since Alaric at Rome , literature itself had been by no means neglected, and in another twelvemonth after the birth of his first-born, Matthew Arnold had practically established his claim as a poet by utterances to which he made comparatively small additions later, though more than half his life was yet to run. And he had issued one prose exercise in criticism, of such solidity and force as had not been shown by any poet since Dryden, except Coleridge.

These documents can hardly be said to include the Newdigate poem ( Cromwell ) of 1843: they consist of The Strayed Reveller and other Poems , by "A.," 1849; Empedocles on Etna, and other Poems , [still] by "A.," 1852; and Poems by Matthew Arnold, a new edition, 1853 - the third consisting of the contents of the two earlier, with Empedocles and a few minor things omitted, but with very important additions, including Sohrab and Rustum, The Church of Brou, Requiescat , and
The Scholar-Gipsy . The contents of all three must be carefully considered, and the consideration may be prefaced by a few words on
Cromwell .

This [Greek: agonisma], like the other, Mr Arnold never included in any collection of his work; but it was printed at Oxford in the year of its success, and again at the same place, separately or with other prize poems, in 1846, 1863, and 1891. It may also be found in the useful non-copyright edition above referred to. Couched in the consecrated couplet, but not as of old limited to fifty lines, it is "good rhymes," as the elder Mr Pope used to say to the younger; but a prudent taster would perhaps have abstained, even more carefully than in the case of the Alaric , from predicting a real poet in the author. It is probably better than six Newdigates out of seven at least, but it has no distinction. The young, but not so very young, poet - he was as old as Tennyson when he produced his unequal but wonderful first volume - begins by borrowing Wordsworth's two voices of the mountain and the sea, shows some impression here and there from Tennyson's own master-issue, the great collection of 1842, which had appeared a year before, ventures on an Alexandrine -

"Between the barren mountains and the stormy sea"

- which comes as a pleasant relief, and displays more than once (as he did afterwards in Tristram and Iseult ) an uncertain but by no means infelicitous variety of couplet which he never fully or fairly worked out, but left for Mr William Morris to employ with success many years later. Otherwise the thing is good, but negligible. It would have taken an extremely strong competition, or an extremely incompetent examiner, to deprive it of the prize; but he must have been a sanguine man who, in giving the author that prize, expected to receive from him returns of poetry.

Yet they came. If we did not know that the middle of this century was one of the nadirs of English[3] criticism, and if we did not know further that even good critics often go strangely wrong both in praise and in blame of new verse, it would be most surprising that The Strayed Reveller volume should have attracted so little attention. It is full of faults, but that is part of the beauty of it. Some of these faults are those which, persevering, prevented Mr Arnold from attaining a higher position than he actually holds in poetry; but no critic could know that. There is nothing here worse, or more necessarily fatal, than many things in Tennyson's 1830 and 1832 collections: he overwent those, so might Mr Arnold have overgone these. And the promise - nay, the performance - is such as had been seen in no verse save Tennyson's, and the almost unnoticed Browning's, for some thirty years. The title-poem, though it should have pleased even a severe judge, might have aroused uncomfortable doubts even in an amiable one. In the first place, its rhymelessness is a caprice, a will-worship. Except blank verse, every rhymeless metre in English has on it the curse of the tour de force , of the acrobatic. Campion and Collins, Southey and Shelley, have done great things in it; but neither Rose-cheeked Laura nor Evening , neither the great things in Thalaba nor the great things in Queen Mab , can escape the charge of being caprices. And caprice, as some have held, is the eternal enemy of art.

But the caprice of The Strayed Reveller does not cease with its rhymelessness. The rhythm and the line-division are also studiously odd, unnatural, paradoxical. Except for the "poetic diction" of putting "Goddess" after "Circe" instead of before it, the first stave is merely a prose sentence, of strictly prosaic though not inharmonious rhythm. But in this stave there is no instance of the strangest peculiarity, and what seems to some the worst fault of the piece, the profusion of broken-up decasyllables, which sometimes suggest a very "corrupt" manuscript, or a passage of that singular stuff in the Caroline dramatists which is neither blank verse, nor any other, nor prose. Here are a few out of many instances -

"Is it, then, evening
So soon? [ I see the night-dews
Clustered in thick beads ], dim," etc.

* * *
[" When the white dawn first
Through the rough fir-planks. "]

* * *
[" Thanks, gracious One!
Ah! the sweet fumes again. "]

* * *
[" They see the Centaurs
In the upper glens. "]

One could treble these - indeed in one instance (the sketch of the Indian) the entire stanza of eleven lines, by the insertion of one "and" only, becomes a smooth blank-verse piece of
seven , two of which are indeed hemistichs, and three "weak-ended," but only such as are frequent in Shakespeare -

"They see the Indian drifting, knife in hand,
His frail boat moored to a floating isle - thick-matted
With large-leaved [ and ] low-creeping melon-plants
And the dark cucumber.
He reaps and stows them, drifting, drifting: round him,
Round his green harvest-plot, flow the cool lake-waves,
The mountains ring them."

Nor, perhaps, though the poem is a pretty one, will it stand criticism of a different kind much better. Such mighty personages as Ulysses and Circe are scarcely wanted as mere bystanders and "supers" to an imaginative young gentleman who enumerates, somewhat promiscuously, a few of the possible visions of the Gods. There is neither classical, nor romantic, nor logical justification for any such mild effect of the dread Wine of Circe: and one is driven to the conclusion that the author chiefly wanted a frame, after his own fashion, for a set of disconnected vignettes like those of Tennyson's Palace of Art and Dream of Fair Women .

But if the title poem is vulnerable, there is plenty of compensation. The opening sonnet -

"Two lessons, Nature, let me learn of thee" -

is perhaps rather learnt from Wordsworth, yet it does not fail to strike the note which fairly differentiates the Arnoldian variety of Wordsworthianism - the note which rings from Resignation to
Poor Matthias , and which is a very curious cross between two things that at first sight may seem unmarriageable, the Wordsworthian enthusiasm and the Byronic despair. But of this[4] more when we have had more of its examples before us. The second piece in the volume must, or should, have struck - for there is very little evidence that it did strike - readers of the volume as something at once considerable and, in no small measure, new. Mycerinus , a piece of some 120 lines or so, in thirteen six-line stanzas and a blank-verse
coda , is one of those characteristic poems of this century, which are neither mere "copies of verses," mere occasional pieces, nor substantive compositions of the old kind, with at least an attempt at a beginning, middle, and end. They attempt rather situations than stories, rather facets than complete bodies of thought, or description, or character. They supply an obvious way of escape for the Romantic tendency which does not wish to break wholly with classical tradition; and above all, they admit of indulgence in that immense variety which seems to have become one of the chief devices of modern art, attempting the compliances necessary to gratify modern taste.

The Herodotean anecdote of the Egyptian King Mycerinus, his indignation at the sentence of death in six years as a recompense for his just rule, and his device of lengthening his days by revelling all night, is neither an unpromising nor a wholly promising subject. The foolish good sense of Mr Toots would probably observe - and justly - that before six years, or six months, or even six days