ABSTRACT
It is not very long since two volumes of poetry, by ‘A,’ The Strayed Reveller, and Empedocles on Ætna, passed under our review. If we return so soon to this author it is because his present work comes to us enriched by new and interesting poems, together with an Essay, remarkable for its vigorous contrast between
ancient and modern poetry, and endorsed on its title-page no longer by the abstraction ‘A,’ but by a well-known and honourable surname. The date of Fox How and the name of Arnold will awaken interest in many hearts, which remember the earnest voice that once spoke from that retirement. They will listen perhaps in hope of hearing the tones that once stirred them prolonged to a younger generation. But the resemblance hardly reaches beyond date and name. These poems so little recall, either in subject, form, or sentiment, the works of the late Dr. Arnold, that they will derive small favour from hereditary association, but must stand or fall by their intrinsic merit. The most rapid glance at Mr. Arnold’s poems must convince every reader that they are the work of a man of undeniable power and high culture; nor can any one fail to perceive the author’s fine eye for beauty and the artistic mould in which all his poems are cast;—for his whole mind is of the cultivated and artistic order, and it is to a place among the learned and artistic poets that he aspires. Learned and artistic poets! some one may exclaim. Is it not the very essence of the poet that he is a child of nature, one who works without aid of learning or of art? True, the poetic soul is the first indispensable condition-that without which there can be no poet. But starting from this common basis, one order of poets sings straight from their own heart, in the native dialect, to a self-taught tune, in whatever form comes readiest to hand. This is the natural or unlearned race of poets, of which the great names are Homer, Æschylus, Shakespeare, Burns, Scott, and Wordsworth. The other order is not content with beauty deeply felt and naturally expressed, till they have found for their thought the most perfect expression, and set it to a more elaborate music. Such are Sophocles, Virgil, Dante, Milton, and, they say, Goethe in his latter days. These, of course, as the former, had an inspiration of their own, or they would not have been true poets, but it is an inspiration which, if it is enriched, is also tinged with all the hues of past cultivation. To the first, the subject so fills their eye, the feeling it awakens so absorbs them, that the form in which it is embodied is wholly subordinate. To the second, subject and form seem of equal, or nearly equal, importance. That this is a real distinction, a line which separates into two orders the whole poetic brotherhood, is no theory, but a fact which the history of literature compels us to recognise. We may,—no doubt most men will prefer the natural poets, while the artistic will be dear chiefly to the scholar, but this should not blind us to a style of excellence which some noble poets have chosen as their own.
