ABSTRACT
Any one who, like ourselves, has always procured and read Mr. Arnold’s poems with eagerness, from the first series of Poems by A. to this volume, will now be possessed of nearly every one of his poems in a double form, and of two or three of them in a triple form,—a result which, though it does not diminish their merit, is rather vexatious to the possessor of books. Mr. Arnold says that ‘Empedocles on Etna’ cannot be said to be republished in this volume, because it was withdrawn from circulation before fifty copies of it were sold, but as the present writer, at all events, was amongst the fifty buyers, he now finds himself in possession of the whole poem, as well as of most of the others belonging to the same volume, in a double shape, and of part of ‘Empedocles on Etna’—the exquisite verses called ‘The Harp Player upon Etna’—in a treble shape, which is a vexation that Mr. Arnold might perhaps have spared his readers. Nothing is less pleasant to the true lover of a poem than to have it in two or three different forms,—generally with minute differences in phrase in each,—and always associated with a different page, and different print, and different memories as regards the external shape of the volume in which it is contained. It dissipates to a certain extent the individuality of a poem to have it issued by its author in two or three distinct volumes, embedded in different company in each, and clipped or modified to suit its various settings. We feel now towards some of Mr. Arnold’s poems as we might towards friends who had two or three different bodies, and who were fond of trying the permutations and combinations of bodies in which they could appear to us. If they came with an entirely new gait, or with differentcoloured eyebrows, or a different voice and accent, we should feel inclined to beg them to keep as much the same in future as might be consistent with the law of growth and change in personal characteristics, and should be a little troubled to which form of friend to refer our own private feelings. So it is with Mr. Arnold’s various editions of his poems. We always feel a certain amount of
embarrassment, whether it is the form in Poems by A, or in the first or second series of Mr. Arnold’s acknowledged poems, or in the ‘new’ poems that we are thinking of. It is a small matter to cavil at, but an injury of this kind thrice repeated vexes the best disciple. We should scarcely have expressed our chagrin had not Mr. Arnold quoted two or three lines as motto to one of his pieces from ‘Lucretius, an Unpublished Tragedy,’ and so refused us deliberately what we want, while giving us duplicates and triplicates of what we have. However, much as there is,—near half the volume,—which is not only known to the students of Mr. Arnold, but already in their possession in volumes of his poems, we are not really ungrateful for anything new which he gives us stamped with the peculiar mark of his genius, and there are several new and fine poems here, though from one of the finest (on Heine’s grave) Mr. Arnold had quoted the finest passage, likening England to Atlas, ‘the weary Titan with deaf ears and labour-dimmed eyes,’ in that memorable address of his, a year and a half ago, to his ‘countrymen.’
