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

were over, King Mycerinus must have got very sleepy; and the philosophic mind would certainly recall the parallel of Cleobis and Biton as to the best gift for man. Mr Arnold, however, draws no direct moral. The stanza-part of the poem, the king's expostulation, contains very fine poetry, and "the note" rings again throughout it, especially in the couplet -

"And prayers, and gifts, and tears, are fruitless all,
And the night waxes, and the shadows fall ."

The blank-verse tail-piece is finer still in execution; it is, with the still finer companion- coda of Sohrab and Rustum , the author's masterpiece in the kind, and it is, like that, an early and consummate example of Mr Arnold's favourite device of finishing without a finish, of "playing out the audience," so to speak, with something healing and reconciling, description, simile, what not, to relieve the strain of his generally sad philosophy and his often melancholy themes.

One may less admire, despite its famous and often-quoted line,

"Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole,"

the sonnet To a Friend , praising Homer and Epictetus and Sophocles, for it seems to some to have a smatch of priggishness. Nor am I one of those who think very highly of the much longer Sick King in Bokhara which (with a fragment of an Antigone , whereof more hereafter) follows, as this sonnet precedes, The Strayed Reveller itself. There is "the note," again, and I daresay the orientalism has the exactness of colour on which, as we know from the Letters , Mr Arnold prided himself. Yet the handling of the piece seems to me prolix and uncertain, and the drift either very obscure or somewhat unimportant. But about the Shakespeare sonnet which follows there can be no controversy among the competent. "Almost adequate" is in such a case the highest praise; and it must be given.

The companions of this sonnet are respectable, but do not deserve much warmer words; and then we turn to a style of poem remarkably different from anything which the author had yet published and from most of his subsequent work. It is not unnoteworthy that the batch of poems called in the later collected editions Switzerland , and completed at last by the piece called On the Terrace at Berne , appeared originally piecemeal, and with no indication of connection. The first of its numbers is here, To my Friends who Ridiculed a Tender Leave-taking . It applies both the note of thought which has been indicated, and the quality of style which had already disengaged itself, to the commonest - the greatest - theme of poetry, but to one which this poet had not yet tried - to Love. Let it be remembered that the thought has the cast of a strictly pessimist quietism - that the style aims, if it aims at any single thing, at the reproduction of the simpler side of classicalism, at an almost prim and quakerish
elegance , a sort of childlike grace. There is, however, by no means any great austerity in the tone: on the contrary, the refrain (altered later) -

"Ere the parting kiss be dry,
Quick! thy tablets, Memory!" -

approaches the luscious. It is not easy to decide, and it is perhaps in both senses impertinent to speculate, whether the "Marguerite" (whose La Tour-like portrait is drawn in this piece with such relish, and who is so philosophically left to her fate by her lover on the Terrace at Berne later) had any live original. She seems a little more human in some ways than most of those cloud-Junos of the poets, the heroines of sonnet-sequence and song-string. She herself has a distinct touch of philosophy, anticipating with nonchalant resignation the year's severance, and with equally nonchalant anticipation the time when

"Some day next year I shall be,
Entering heedless, kissed by thee."

Her wooer paints her with gusto, but scarcely with ardour; and ends with the boding note -

"Yet, if little stays with man,
Ah! retain we all we can!" -

seeming to be at least as doubtful of his own constancy as of hers. Nor do we meet her again in the volume. The well-known complementary pieces which make up Switzerland were either not written, or held back.

The inferior but interesting Modern Sappho , almost the poet's only experiment in "Moore-ish" method and melody -

"They are gone - all is still! Foolish heart, dost thou quiver?" -

is a curiosity rather than anything else. The style is ill suited to the thought; besides, Matthew Arnold, a master at times of blank verse, and of the statelier stanza, was less often an adept at the lighter and more rushing lyrical measures. He is infinitely more at home in the beautiful New Sirens , which, for what reason it is difficult to discover, he never reprinted till many years later, partly at Mr Swinburne's most judicious suggestion. The scheme is trochaic, and Mr Arnold (deriving beyond all doubt inspiration from Keats) was happier than most poets with that charming but difficult foot. The note is the old one of yearning rather than passionate melancholy, applied in a new way and put most clearly, though by no means most poetically, in the lines -

"Can men worship the wan features,
The sunk eyes, the wailing tone,
Of unsphered, discrowned creatures,
Souls as little godlike as their own?"

The answer is, "No," of course; but, as some one informed Mr Arnold many years later, we knew that before, and it is distressing to be told it, as we are a little later, with a rhyme of "dawning" and "morning." Yet the poem is a very beautiful one - in some ways the equal of its author's best up to this time; at least he had yet done nothing except the Shakespeare sonnet equal to the splendid stanza beginning -

"And we too, from upland valleys;"

and the cry of the repentant sirens, punished as they had sinned -

"'Come,' you say, 'the hours are dreary.'"

Yet the strong Tennysonian influence (which the poet rather ungraciously kicked against in his criticism) shows itself here also; and we know perfectly well that the good lines -

"When the first rose flush was steeping
All the frore peak's awful crown" -

are but an unconscious reminiscence of the great ones -

"And on the glimmering summit far withdrawn,
God made himself an awful rose of dawn."

He kept this level, though here following not Tennyson or Keats but Shelley, in the three ambitious and elaborate lyrics, The Voice , To Fausta , and Stagirius , fine things, if somehow a little suggestive of inability on their author's part fully to meet the demands of the forms he attempts - "the note," in short, expressed practically as well as in theory. Stagirius in particular wants but a very little to be a perfect expression of the obstinate questionings of the century; and yet wanting a little, it wants so much! Others, To a Gipsy Child and
The Hayswater Boat (Mr Arnold never reprinted this), are but faint Wordsworthian echoes; and thus we come to The Forsaken Merman .

It is, I believe, not so "correct" as it once was to admire this; but I confess indocility to correctness, at least the correctness which varies with fashion. The Forsaken Merman is not a perfect poem - it has longueurs , though it is not long; it has those inadequacies, those incompetences of expression, which are so oddly characteristic of its author; and his elaborate simplicity, though more at home here than in some other places, occasionally gives a dissonance. But it is a great poem - one by itself, one which finds and keeps its own place in the foreordained gallery or museum, with which every true lover of poetry is provided, though he inherits it by degrees. No one, I suppose, will deny its pathos; I should be sorry for any one who fails to perceive its beauty. The brief picture of the land, and the fuller one of the sea, and that (more elaborate still) of the occupations of the fugitive, all have their own charm. But the triumph of the piece is in one of those metrical coups which give the triumph of all the greatest poetry, in the sudden change from the slower movements of the earlier stanzas or strophes to the quicker sweep of the famous conclusion -

"The salt tide rolls seaward,
Lights shine from the town" -

to

"She left lonely for ever
The kings of the sea."

Here the poet's poetry has come to its own.

In Utrumque Paratus sounds the note again, and has one exceedingly fine stanza: -

"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."

But Resignation , the last poem in the book, goes far higher. Again, it is too long; and, as is not the case in the Merman , or even in
The Strayed Reveller itself, the general drift of the poem, the allegory (if it be an allegory) of the two treadings of "the self-same road" with Fausta and so forth, is unnecessarily obscure, and does not tempt one to spend much trouble in penetrating its obscurity. But the splendid passage beginning -

"The Poet to whose mighty heart,"

and ending -

"His sad lucidity of soul,"

has far more interest than concerns the mere introduction, in this last line itself, of one of the famous Arnoldian catchwords of later years. It has far more than lies even in its repetition, with fuller detail, of what has been called the author's main poetic note of half-melancholy contemplation of life. It has, once more, the interest of poetry - of poetical presentation, which is independent of any subject or intention, which is capable of being adapted perhaps to all, certainly to most, which lies in form, in sound, in metre, in imagery, in language, in suggestion - rather than in matter, in sense, in definite purpose or scheme.

It is one of the heaviest indictments against the criticism of the mid-nineteenth century that this remarkable book - the most remarkable first book of verse that appeared between Tennyson's and Browning's in the early thirties and The Defence of Guenevere in 1858 - seems to have attracted next to no notice at all. It received neither the ungenerous and purblind, though not wholly unjust, abuse which in the long - run did so much good to Tennyson himself, nor the absurd and pernicious bleatings of praise which have greeted certain novices of late years. It seems to have been simply let alone, or else made the subject of quite insignificant comments.

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