ABSTRACT
Nowadays one meets with so much that is turgid and commonplace in thought and expression, that a volume like the one we propose noticing is a positive bonne bouche. A calm, contemplative, serious book is this one of Mr. Arnold’s, pervaded throughout by deep solemnity and an almost intense sadness. The keynote of his thoughts, sounded in the first poem, is heard to a greater or less extent in all the others. ‘Empedocles on Etna’ is hardly a dramatic poem, though it is called one by its author. There are no moving incidents in it; it lacks both the shadow and the substance of plot; nor have the characters any specific individuality; and though a tragedy, it hardly contains the elements of a tragedy. The mind of the hero is not fused with the ideas of his own time, but rather with modern ones. Banished from Agrigentum on account of the Sophists, ‘a lonely man in triple gloom,’ he lingers
Alone On this charred, blackened, melancholy waste, Crowned by the awful peak, Etna’s great mouth,
giving vent to his thoughts, which are very uniform in their strange sadness and plaintive despondency. He cannot live with men, nor with himself; and so he take his quietus by plunging into the crater. A bald story enough in the hands of any one but a poet; but Mr. Arnold extracts exquisite tones of thought and subtle plays of fancy from this rather barren episode; and yet in these portraitures of men, so oppressed by their thoughts as to be almost slaves to them, one naturally desires a little cheerfulness and hopefulness. The gloom of umbrageous shades, magnificent though they be, is apt to depress, unrelieved by the sunflecks. [Discusses ‘Empedocles’, mainly in terms of the justification for suicide] If there exists such a being as a man of cultured mind so stung by the wasps of misfortune, so pierced by the arrows of wretchedness, as to possess a wish to
make an end of himself, in all seriousness, the poem of ‘Empedocles of Etna’ would be irresistible in its persuasion to urge him on to his mad act.
