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

Rhine , containing, among other things, the good distich -

"Eyes too expressive to lie blue,
Too lovely to be grey";

on which Mr Swinburne gave a probably unconscious scholion as well as variation in his own -

"Those eyes, the greenest of things blue,
The bluest of things grey."

The intense pathos, which the poet could rarely "let himself go" sufficiently to reach, together with the seventeenth-century touch which in English not unfrequently rewards the self-sacrifice necessary to scholarly poets in such abandonment, appears in Longing ;
The Lake takes up the faint thread of story gracefully enough; and Parting does the same with more importance in a combination, sometimes very effective, of iambic couplets and anapaestic strophes, and with a touch of direct if not exalted nature in its revelation of that terrible thing, retrospective jealousy, in the lover. Woe to the man who allows himself to think -

"To the lips! ah! of others
Those lips have been pressed,
And others, ere I was,
Were clasped to that breast,"

and who does not at once exorcise the demon with the fortunately all-potent spell of Bocca bacciata , and the rest! Absence and
Destiny show him in the same Purgatory; and it is impossible to say that he has actually escaped in the crowning poem of the series - the crowning-point perhaps of his poetry, the piece beginning

"Yes! in the sea of life enisled."

It is neither uninteresting nor unimportant that this exquisite piece, by a man's admiration of which (for there are some not wholly lost, who do not admire it) his soundness in the Catholic Faith of poetry may be tested, perhaps as well as by any other, has borne more than one or two titles, It is in the 1852 volume, To Marguerite. In returning a volume of the letters of Ortis . In 1853 it became
Isolation , its best name; and later it took the much less satisfactory one of To Marguerite - continued , being annexed to another.

Isolation is preferable for many reasons; not least because the actual Marguerite appears nowhere in the poem, and, except in the opening monosyllable, can hardly be said to be even rhetorically addressed. The poet's affection - it is scarcely passion - is there, but in transcendence: he meditates more than he feels. And that function of the riddle of the painful earth which Lucretius, thousands of years ago, put in his grim Nequicquam! which one of Mr Arnold's own contemporaries formulated with less magnificence and more popularity, but still with music and truth in Strangers Yet - here receives almost its final poetical expression. The image - the islands in the sea - is capitally projected in the first stanza; it is exquisitely amplified in the second; the moral comes with due force in the third; and the whole winds up with one of the great poetic phrases of the century - one of the "jewels five [literally five!] words long" of English verse - a phrase complete and final, with epithets in unerring cumulation -

"The unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea."

Human Life , no ill thing in itself, reads a little weakly after
Isolation ; but Despondency is a pretty piece of melancholy, and, with a comfortable stool, will suit a man well. In the sonnet, When I shall be divorced , Mr Arnold tried the Elizabethan vein with less success than in his Shakespeare piece; and Self-Deception and Lines written by a Death-Bed , with some beauty have more monotony. The closing lines of the last are at the same time the moral of the book and the formula of the Arnoldian "note" -

"Calm's not life's crown, though calm is well.
'Tis all perhaps which man acquires,
But 'tis not what our youth desires."

Again, we remember some one's parody-remonstrance thirty years later, and again we may think that the condemnation which Mr Arnold himself was soon to pronounce upon Empedocles is rather disastrously far-reaching, while even this phrase is a boomerang. Musical and philosophical despair is one of the innumerable strings of the poetic lyre; but 'tis not what our youth, or our age either, desires for a monochord.

The remarkable manifesto just referred to was not long delayed. Whatever may have been his opinion as to the reception of the two volumes "by A," he made up his mind, a year after the issue and withdrawal of the second, to put forth a third, with his name, and containing, besides a full selection from the other two, fresh specimens of the greatest importance. In the two former there had been no avowed "purpose"; here, not merely were the contents sifted on principle, the important Empedocles as well as some minor things being omitted: not merely did some of the new numbers, especially Sohrab and Rustum , directly and intentionally illustrate the: poet's theories, but those theories themselves were definitely put in a Preface , which is the most important critical document issued in England for something like a generation, and which, as prefixed by a poet to his poetry, admits no competitors in English, except some work of Dryden's and some of Wordsworth's.

Beginning with his reasons for discarding Empedocles , reasons which he sums up in a sentence, famous, but too important not to require citation at least in a note,[5] he passes suddenly to the reasons which were not his, and of which he makes a good rhetorical starting-point for his main course. The bad critics of that day had promulgated the doctrine, which they maintained till a time within the memory of most men who have reached middle life, though the error has since in the usual course given way to others - that "the Poet must leave the exhausted past and draw his subjects from matters of present import." This was the genuine " Times - v. -all-the-works-of-Thucydides" fallacy of the mid-nineteenth century, the fine flower of Cobdenism, the heartfelt motto of Philistia - as Philistia then was. For other times other Philistines, and Ekron we have always with us, ready, as it was once said, "to bestow its freedom in pinchbeck boxes" on its elect.

This error Mr Arnold has no difficulty in laying low at once; but unluckily his swashing blow carries him with it, and he falls headlong into fresh error himself. "What," he asks very well, "are the eternal objects of Poetry, among all nations and at all times?" And he answers - equally well, though not perhaps with impregnable logical completeness and accuracy - "They are actions, human actions; possessing an inherent interest in themselves, and which are to be communicated in an interesting manner by the art of the Poet." Here he tells the truth, but not the whole truth; he should have added "thoughts and feelings" to "actions," or he deprives Poetry of half her realm. But he is so far sufficient against his Harapha (for at that date there were no critical Goliaths about). Human action
does possess an "inherent," an "eternal," poetical interest and capacity in itself. That interest, that capacity, is incapable of "exhaustion" - nay (as Mr Arnold, though with bad arguments as well as good, urges later), it is, on the whole, a likelier subject for the poet when it is old, because it is capable of being grasped and presented more certainly. But the defender hastens to indulge in more than one of those dangerous sallies from his trenches which have been fatal to so many heroes. He proclaims that the poet cannot "make an intrinsically inferior action equally delightful with a more excellent one by his treatment of it," forgetting that, until the action is presented, we do not know whether it is "inferior" or not. He asks, "What modern poem presents personages as interesting as Achilles, Prometheus, Clytemnestra, Dido?" unsuspicious, or perhaps reckless, of the fact that not a few men, who admire and know the classics quite as well as he does, will cheerfully take up his challenge at any weapons he likes to name, and with a score of instances for his quartette. It is true that, thanks to the ineptitude of his immediate antagonists, he recovers himself not ill by cleverly selecting the respectable Hermann and Dorothea, the stagy-romantic Childe Harold, the creature called "Jocelyn," and the shadowy or scrappy personages of the
Excursion , to match against his four. But this is manifestly unfair. To bring Lamartine and Wordsworth in as personage-makers is only honest rhetorically (a kind of honesty on which Wamba or Launcelot Gobbo shall put the gloss for us). Nay, even those to whom Goethe and Byron are not the ideal of modern poetry may retort that Mephistopheles - that even Faust himself - is a much more "interesting" person than the sulky invulnerable son of Thetis, while Gulnare, Parisina, and others are not much worse than Dido. But these are mere details. The main purpose of the Preface is to assert in the most emphatic manner the Aristotelian (or partly Aristotelian) doctrine that "All depends on the subject," and to connect the assertion with a further one, of which even less proof is offered, that "the Greeks understood this far better than we do," and that they were also the unapproachable masters of "the grand style." These positions, which, to do Mr Arnold justice, he maintained unflinchingly to his dying day, are supported, not exactly by argument, but by a great deal of ingenious and audacious illustration and variation of statement, even Shakespeare, even Keats, being arraigned for their wicked refusal to subordinate "expression" to choice and conception of subject. The merely Philistine modernism is cleverly set up again that it may be easily smitten down; the necessity of Criticism, and of the study of the ancients in order to it, is most earnestly and convincingly championed; and the piece ends with its other famous sentence about "the wholesome regulative laws of Poetry" and their "eternal enemy, Caprice."

As Mr Arnold's critical position will be considered as a whole later, it would be waste of time to say very much more of this first manifesto of his. It need only be observed that he might have been already, as he often was later, besought to give some little notion of what "the grand style " was; that, true and sound as is much of the Preface, it is not a little exposed to the damaging retort, "Yes: this is your doxy, and she seems fair to you, no doubt; but so does ours seem fair to us." Moreover, the "all-depends-on-the-subject" doctrine here, as always, swerves from one fatal difficulty. If, in what pleases poetically, poetical expression is always present, while in only some of what pleases poetically is the subject at the required height, is it not illogical to rule out, as the source of the poetic pleasure, that which is always present in favour of that which is sometimes absent?

We know from the Letters - and we should have been able to divine without them - that Sohrab and Rustum , the first in order, the largest in bulk, and the most ambitious in scheme of the poems which appeared for the first time in the new volume, was written in direct exemplification of the theories of the Preface . The theme is old, and though not