This conception of the conflict, and especially of the unparalleled complexity, of modern life, is the dominant thought of Arnold. It is the warfare of so many elements that in his eyes distinguishes his own from all previous ages. In former times each civilisation stood by itself, not vitally affected by the puzzling elements of alien civilisations. The modern task is to fuse all together. The actress Rachel is typical, and as in her birth, and life, and death, and in her physical, mental and moral nature, there met and clashed ‘Germany, France, Christ, Moses, Athens, Rome,’—so do they meet and clash in the lives of all Arnold offers no solution of the problem. He points out the difficulty, he cherishes an ultimate hopefulness, but none of the answers to the riddle satisfies him.
The tone most characteristic of Arnold is in harmony with such fundamental conceptions. It is a tone of refined and thoughtful melancholy. This made him a supreme elegiac poet. Thyrsis, the memorial poem on his friend Clough, is generally ranked with the masterpieces in the same type of Tennyson and Shelley and Milton. But Thyrsis does not stand alone. The Scholar Gipsy, the Obermann poems, Rugby Chapel, A Southern Night, and several others of Arnold’s finest pieces likewise belong to this class. The elegiac spirit is his special gift, and he shows it in a characteristic way. His poems are not elegiacs for the individual; they are not so even when, as in Rugby Chapel and A Southern Night, the subjects are most intimately related in blood to Arnold. He habitually looks beyond the individual to the race, and rather mourns ‘the something that infects the world.’
Arnold was a student of Wordsworth, and was among the most discriminating admirers of that great poet. One of the best of the critical essays is devoted to him; and the finest selection ever made from the poetry of Wordsworth was made by Arnold. The skill of that selection proves that Arnold was capable of benefiting from Wordsworth without being tempted to follow him where his guidance would have been dangerous. He admired Wordsworth’s calm, he admired him for his power to ‘possess his soul,’ he admired him as a student of nature. The calm and rest in himself were with Arnold rather an aspiration than a thing attained: it was part of his creed that in these latter days such calm was unattainable. But he followed Wordsworth as a student of nature. The love of nature was with Arnold an inborn passion, the strength of which is proved not only by his poetry, but in one sense even more convincingly by his familiar letters. Wordsworth gave him a point of view and strengthened his power of vision. But Arnold writes his nature-poetry for a new age under new conditions. The very fact that the calm of Wordsworth is unattainable imparts to his verse a subdued tone. He stands between Wordsworth and his other favourite Senancour, sharing the spiritual force of the one and the reflective melancholy of the other. Arnold’s best descriptions are tinged with this melancholy. The ‘infinite desire of all which might have been’ inspires Resignation, one of the poems of his earliest volume. We see it again in the lovely closing lines of The Church of Brou. It determines Arnold’s preference for pale colours, soft lights and subdued sounds, for moonlight effects, and for the hum of ‘brooding mountain bee.’ In the beautiful Dover Beach it is associated with his sense of the decay of faith. Even in the lyric rapture of the description of the sea-caverns in The Forsaken Merman, the melancholy is still present. To many it is oppressive, and perhaps it is the absence of it from the song of Callicles in Empedocles on Etna that has caused some sympathetic critics to pronounce that the finest of all Arnold’s poems.
Arnold’s longer pieces fall into two classes: the dramatic, including Merope and Empedocles on Etna; and the narrative, best represented by Sohrab and Rustum and Balder Dead, for Tristram and Iseult is as much lyrical as narrative. As a dramatist Arnold was not successful. His Merope, a play on the Greek model, is frigid; and fine as is Empedocles on Etna, its merits are in the thought and the beautiful verse rather than the dramatic structure. The truth is that Arnold had neither the eye for fine shades of character nor the interest in action essential to the drama. His treatment of character has already been commented upon in connexion with his prose. With regard to action, Arnold himself withdrew Empedocles on Etna shortly after its publication, on the ground that it was a poem in which all was to be endured and nothing to be done.
The same want of action appears in the narratives. The charm of these beautiful poems resides not in what takes place in them, but in the restful pictures they present. There is no breathless speed such as we feel in the narratives of Scott and Byron, but, on the contrary, the calm of a reflective spirit. Sohrab and Rustum (1853) and Balder Dead (1855) seemed to open out to Arnold a wider field of productiveness than any he had hitherto found. They took him outside himself, and gave variety to his poetry; and perhaps the thing most to be regretted in his literary history is that he wrote no more pieces of this class. Not that they are altogether the best of his poems; but blank verse so beautiful as his never cloys, and it seemed as if he might have found innumerable subjects suitable to his genius, subjects inviting quiet reflexion and not injured by the absence of rapid movement.
There are two features of special value in the work of Arnold. One is his unshrinking intellectual sincerity. The bent of his mind compelled him to endeavour to understand the world in which he lived. He found much in it that was unwelcome to him. His scepticism as to dogmatic religion was a source of great pain to himself. Life would have been far more smooth and easy if he had been able to believe more; and hence that sympathy with many things he did not believe which Newman noted in him. Yet he never shows the slightest sign of yielding to the temptation and playing false with his intellect. Wherever it leads him Arnold goes; and he has taught no higher lesson than that of unvarying trust in reason and loyalty to ‘the high white star of truth.’ It may be doubted whether any of his poetic contemporaries has pursued a path so undeviatingly straight. Even Browning is bribed by his feelings to play questionable tricks with his intellect.
The second feature is the style of Arnold. He presents one of the best examples in English of the classical spirit. He is always measured and restrained. He detested ‘haste, half-work, and disarray,’ and certainly his own example tended to discourage them. Lucidity and flexibility and sanity were the qualities he specially strove to embody in his work. It was because he found them in Goethe that he specially admired the great German poet. It was because of the absence of them that he uttered his most severe criticisms upon his countrymen both in the present and in the past.
Arthur Hugh Clough
(1819-1861).
Arthur Hugh Clough is in so many respects associated with Arnold that they are best taken together. But just because of the similarities there is the less need to dwell upon the inferior poet. Clough, who spent his early boyhood in America, was educated under Dr. Arnold at Rugby and at Balliol College, Oxford. At Oxford he was for a time carried away by the Tractarian movement, in his own words, ‘like a straw drawn up the chimney by a draught.’ In this he was influenced doubtless by his friendship for W. G. Ward. But Clough was not born for unquestioning belief, and the reaction shook his whole faith. The story of his separation from Ward is told in the beautiful allegorical poem, Qua Cursum Ventus; and in another of his finest poems, Easter Day, Naples, 1849, we see the position to which Clough ultimately came. To use Arnold’s distinction, it is a faith which gives up the fact, but clings to the idea. Had Clough written much in the strain of these pieces he might have had some title to the name of a great poet. But he is seldom wholly satisfactory. He was prone to choose themes beyond his strength. Thus Dipsychus is a colourless and weak reproduction of Faust. The author has not sufficient force to deal with the battlings of a spirit with faith and doubt, pleasure and virtue, good and evil, and all the most complex problems of life. Defects fundamentally the same take a different shape in Amours de Voyage. Clough’s presentation, in Claude, of the doubts, distrust and dilettantism of the century fails to give the sense of power. The poet is happier in his ‘long vacation pastoral,’ the Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848), with its glimpses of nature, its easy light touch, and its underlying seriousness. But the verse is unfortunate. The hexameter in English is an exotic, and has never yet been used in any long poem with complete success. The reader tires at last of what might otherwise have been a most successful story in verse.
The same movement visible in the poetry of Arnold and Clough may be detected still moulding and modifying the works of Tennyson. In the year 1850 In Memoriam appeared. It was the product of long meditation, and part is known to have been written as early as 1833. Nevertheless it is remarkable that just in the year when Browning published his Christmas Eve and Easter Day, and just about the time when Arnold’s verse was exhibiting another aspect of the interest in religion, Tennyson too should have made his greatest contribution in this kind to literature. For while In Memoriam is of all great English elegies the most closely associated with the man to whom it is dedicated, still the treatment opens up the questions of death and immortality; and the passages of the poem which have clung to the popular memory are those in which the poet expresses his convictions or his hopes on these subjects. Perhaps the greatest weakness of In Memoriam is its length. It is difficult if not impossible to dwell on the subject of death long, and to preserve perfect healthiness of tone. The other great English elegies are in the first place much shorter, and in the second place the writers find more relief to them than Tennyson does. The intensity of his friendship for Arthur Hallam kept him perhaps even too strictly to his subject.