ABSTRACT
The younger section of the poets who have illustrated this age could not be headed by any name so appropriate as that of Matthew Arnold-younger not so much in time, for he was not more than a dozen years in age after Lord Tennyson —but because not only of much later publication, but of a mind and temper which never got far beyond the Academic circle, or remembered that the atmosphere of the classics is not that most familiar and dear to all men. It is perhaps this atmosphere more than anything else which has prevented him and others of his brethren from ever penetrating into the heart of the country, and which forms a kind of argument against that careful training which it is now the fashion to claim for every literary workman-the ‘woodnotes wild,’ which once were chiefly believed in as the voice of poetry, having lost their acceptance among those growing theories of development and descent which would make of every poet a well defined and recognisable product of the influences surrounding him. If this could be said with truth of any group of poets, it might be of Matthew Arnold, Clough, Swinburne, and some later names-to their advantage no doubt in the way of perfect versification, but to their great disadvantage in respect to nature and life. The intellectual difficulties of a highly organised age, and that ‘doubt,’ unkindly and unmusical spirit, which has been converted into a patron saint or demon by the fashion of the time, are not poetical founts of inspiration, and the old Helicon has run somewhat dry for the general reader. Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), the son of Dr. Arnold of Rugby, and occupied for the greater part of his life in the service of the country, as H.M. Inspector of Schools, is the poet of the Universities,—of the intellectual classes who derive their chief life therefrom, either at first hand or in reflection; he has not in him the mixture of common life and feeling which can conciliate that inner circle with the wider one of the general world, or the warm inspiration of passion and emotional nature which goes to the common heart. The old audience to which the old poets appealed, the donne che hanno intelletto d’amore,1 are left out, unless perhaps
when they belong to Girton; so are the children, except those precocious beings who lisp in Greek. The audience which is left him is perhaps the one which he would have preferred, just as Dr. Isaac Watts would no doubt have preferred his audience of the chapels and nurseries; but it is a limited audience, and not that of the greatest poets. It would be difficult, however, to find a man who made a more prominent appearance on the stage of general literature in his time. His essays, critical and otherwise, kept him very distinctly before the world; and this, and other partlyartificial reasons, raised his name to such a point of general knowledge and acquaintance that a selection of his poems was made and published in his lifetime, an honour which falls to few poets. These we may take as his own selection of what he thought most likely to live. And we find among them the two poems on which most of those who esteem him most highly are willing to rest his fame,— ‘Thyrsis’ and the ‘Scholar Gipsy,’ both of them comparatively short, and so much more individual than most of his poetical works as to touch a chord of sympathy wanting in many of the others. The extreme diffuseness of much of this poetry is indeed one of the faults which will always keep it outside the popular heart. There is something in the flow of even rhyme, page after page, long, fluent, smooth, looking as if it might go on forever, which appalls the reader. Life is not long enough, as the word goes, for ‘Empedocles on Etna.’ Mr. Browning in his ‘Cleon’ has given us the spirit and fine concentrated essence of a philosopher of antiquity in a few pages. In the hands of Mr. Arnold this revelation takes almost a book and with how much less success! The same thing may be said of other poems, of which even the conception appears to be taken from an elder poet, but so amplified as to turn a fine suggestion into weariness. Wordsworth put his ‘Yarrow’ and ‘Yarrow Revisited’ (which indeed are not on the highest level of his poetry) into poems which a child might learn by heart without difficulty; but when Mr. Arnold visits the scene of Obermann again and again, each pilgrimage is so flooded with endless streams of verse that the attention of the reader is drowned and carried away like a straw on the tide. The same is the case in the poems called ‘Switzerland,’ and addressed to a certain Marguerite, which probably would never have been thought of had not Wordsworth dedicated a lovely string of little lyrics to Lucy, lines not only of the greatest beauty, but so brief that they lodge where they fall in the willing memory, and cannot be forgotten. The lesser singer draws out his much lighter theme into link after link of unmemorable verse. That the elder poet should influence the younger even to the point of actual suggestion is a thing perfectly natural and sanctioned by all the tenets of the time, which demand indeed that one should be the descendent and outcome of the other. Perhaps it is also a law of development that the successor should be more lengthy in proportion as he is less strong.
