Of Matthew Arnold himself, as a poet, I am able to speak; for though he was not long ago one’s contemporary, he is no longer one of ourselves. In Matthew Arnold it has always seemed to me, the poet and the man, his reason and his imagination, were not quite one. They were harnessed together rather than incorporated one with the other; and, many years before he died, if I may press the comparison a little farther, the poet, the imaginative part of him became lame and halt, and he conveyed his mind in the humbler one-horse vehicle of prose. The poetic impulse in him was not strong enough to carry him along permanently against the prosaic opposition of life. Nevertheless, he was a poet who wrote some very beautiful poetry; and he exercised a powerful influence, both as a poet and as a prose-writer, on the thoughts and sentiments of his time. Now, what do we find him saying? Listen!
Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born,
With nowhere yet to rest my head,
Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.
Their faith, My tears, the world deride,
I come to shed them at your side.
There yet perhaps may dawn an age,
More fortunate alas! than we,
Which without hardness will be sage,
And gay without frivolity.
Sons of the world, oh haste those years!
But, till they rise, allow our tears.
Hark to the words he puts into the mouth of Empedocles:
And yet what days were those, Parmenides!
Then we could still enjoy, then neither thought
Nor outward things were closed and dead to us;
But we received the shock of mighty thoughts
On simple minds with a pure natural joy.
······
We had not lost our balance then, nor grown
Thought’s slaves, and dead to every natural joy.
Achilles ponders in his tent:
The Kings of modern thought are dumb;
Silent they are, though not content,
And wait to see the future come.
······
Our fathers watered with their tears
The sea of time whereon we sail;
Their voices were in all men’s ears
Who passed within their puissant hail.
Still the same ocean round us raves,
But we stand mute and watch the waves.
Last and worst of all, and in utter despondency and pessimism he cries:
Your creeds are dead, your rites are dead,
Your social order, too!
Where tarries He, the Power who said,
See, I make all things new?
... The past is out of date,
The future not yet born;
And who can be alone elate,
While the world lies forlorn?
Can Pessimism in Poetry go farther than that? Many will perhaps think it cannot; but, unfortunately, it can. It is only from poets who are dead, if dead but recently, that one can draw one’s illustrations; otherwise I could suggest you should read to yourselves volume upon volume of verse, the one long weary burden of which is the misery of being alive. I daresay you will not be sorry that one is precluded from introducing these melancholy minstrels. But the spirit that imbues and pervades them is compendiously and conveniently expressed in a composition that I can read to you, and which I select because it seems to express, in reasonably small compass, the indictment which our metrical pessimists labour to bring against existence.
I have confined my survey entirely to poets of our own land, and have said nothing to you of Giacomo Leopardi, the celebrated Italian Pessimistic Poet; nothing of Heine, whose beautiful but too often cynical lyrics must be known to you either in the original German, or in one or other of the various English versions, into which they have been rendered; nothing of the long procession of railers, sometimes bestial, nearly always repulsive, in French verse, beginning with Baudelaire, and coming down to the petits crevés of poetry who are not ashamed to be known by the name of décadens, and who certainly deserve it, for if they possess nothing else, they possess to perfection the art of sinking. One would naturally expect to find in the country where occurred the French Revolution, the most violent forms of the malady which, as I have said, is mainly attributable to it; and surely it is a strong confirmation of the truth of that theory that it is in France poetic pessimism has in our day had its most outrageous and most voluminous expression.