“And long the way appears which seemed so short;”
by the Signal tree; and by the allegoric close with the reassertion of the Scholar. All these things stand by themselves, hold their sure and reserved place, even in the rush and crowd of the poetry of the sixties, the richest, perhaps, since the time from 1805 to 1822.
Saint Brandan, which follows, has pathos if not great power, and connects itself agreeably with those Celtic and mediaeval studies which had just attracted and occupied Mr Arnold. The sonnets which form the next division might be variously judged. None of them equals the Shakespeare; and one may legitimately hold the opinion that the sonnet was not specially Mr Arnold’s form. Its greatest examples have always been reached by the reflex, the almost combative, action of intense poetic feeling—Shakespeare’s, Milton’s, Wordsworth’s, Rossetti’s—and intensity was not Mr Arnold’s characteristic. Yet Austerity of Poetry, East London, and Monica’s Last Prayer must always stand so high in the second class that it is hardly critical weakness to allow them the first. And then the tide rises. Calais Sands may not be more than very pretty, but it is that, and Dover Beach is very much more. Mr Arnold’s theological prepossessions and assumptions may appear in it, and it may be unfortunately weak as an argument, for except the flood itself nothing is so certain a testimony to the flood as the ebb. But the order, the purpose, the argument, the subject, matter little to poetry. The expression, the thing that is not the subject, the tendency outside the subject, which makes for poetry, are here, and almost of the very best. Here you have that passionate interpretation of life, which is so different a thing from the criticism of it; that marvellous pictorial effect to which the art of line and colour itself is commonplace and banal, and which prose literature never attains except by a tour de force; that almost more marvellous accompaniment of vowel and consonant music, independent of the sense but reinforcing it, which is the glory of English poetry among all, and of nineteenth-century poetry among all English, poetries. As is the case with most Englishmen, the sea usually inspired Mr Arnold—it is as natural to great English poets to leave the echo of the very word ringing at the close of their verse as it was to Dante to end with “stars.” But it has not often inspired any poet so well as this, nor anywhere this poet better than here. If at any time a critic may without fatuity utter judgment with some confidence, it is where he disagrees with the sentiment and admires the poem; and for my part I find in Dover Beach, even without the Merman, without the Scholar-Gipsy, without Isolation, a document which I could be content to indorse “Poetry, sans phrase.”
The Terrace at Berne has been already dealt with, but that mood for epicede, which was so frequent in Mr Arnold, finds in the Carnac stanzas adequate, and in A Southern Night consummate, expression. The Fragment of Chorus of a Dejaneira, written long before, but now first published, has the usual faults of Mr Arnold’s rhymeless verse. It is really quite impossible, when one reads such stuff as—
“Thither in your adversity
Do you betake yourselves for light,
But strangely misinterpret all you hear.
For you will not put on
New hearts with the inquirer’s holy robe
And purged considerate minds”—
not to ask what, poetically speaking, is the difference between this and the following—
“To college in the pursuit of duly
Did I betake myself for lecture;
But very soon I got extremely wet,
For I had not put on
The stout ulster appropriate to Britain,
And my umbrella was at home.”
But Palladium, if not magnificent, is reconciling, the Shakespearian Youth’s Agitations beautiful, and Growing Old delightful, not without a touch of terror. It is the reply, the verneinung, to Browning’s magnificent Rabbi ben Ezra, and one has almost to fly to that stronghold in order to resist its chilling influence. But it is poetry for all that, and whatever there is in it of weakness is redeemed, though not quite so poetically, by The Last Word. The Lines written in Kensington Gardens (which had appeared with Empedocles, but were missed above) may be half saddened, half endeared to some by their own remembrance of the “black-crowned red-boled” giants there celebrated—trees long since killed by London smoke, as the good-natured say, as others, by the idiotic tidiness of the gardeners, who swept the needles up and left the roots without natural comfort and protection. And then, after lesser things, the interesting, if not intensely poetical, Epilogue to Lessing’s Laocoon leads us to one of the most remarkable of all Mr Arnold’s poems, Bacchanalia, or the New Age. The word remarkable has been used advisedly. Bacchanalia, though it has poignant and exquisite poetic moments, is not one of the most specially poetical of its author’s pieces. But it is certainly his only considerable piece of that really poetic humour which is so rare and delightful a thing. And, like all poetic humour, it oscillates between cynicism and passion almost bewilderingly. For a little more of this what pages and pages of jocularity about Bottles and the Rev. Esau Hittall would we not have given! what volumes of polemic with the Guardian and amateur discussions of the Gospel of St John! In the first place, note the metrical structure, the sober level octosyllables of the overture changing suddenly to a dance-measure which, for a wonder in English, almost keeps the true dactylic movement. How effective is the rhetorical iteration of
“The famous orators have shone,
The famous poets sung and gone,”
and so on for nearly half a score of lines! How perfect the sad contrast of the refrain—