Nothing has really changed. The "river of time" may pass through various landscapes, but it is the same river, and, at the last, it brings to us, as "the banks fade dimmer away" and "the stars come out" "murmurs and scents" of the same infinite Sea. Yes, there is only one Philosophy, as Disraeli said, jesting; and Matthew Arnold, among the moderns, is the one who has been allowed to put it into his poetry. For though, before the "Flamantia Moenia" of the world's triple brass, we are fain to bow our heads inconsolably, there come those moments when, a hand laid in ours, we think we know "the hills whence our life flows"!
The flowing of the river of life—the washing of the waves of life—how well one recalls, from Arnold's broken and not always musical stanzas, references to that sound—to the sound so like the sound of those real sea-tides that "Sophocles, long ago, heard in the Aegaean," and listened, thinking of many things, as we listen and think of many things today!
"For we are all like swimmers in the Sea,
Poised on the top of a huge wave of Fate,
And whether it will lift us to the land
Or whether it will bear us out to Sea,
Back out to Sea, to the dark gulfs of Death,
We know not—
Only the event will teach us, in its hour."
I sometimes think that a certain wonderful blending of realism and magic in Matthew Arnold's poetry has received but scant justice.
In "The Forsaken Merman" for instance, there are many stanzas that make you smell the salt-foam and imagine all that lies, hidden and strange, down there upon the glittering sand. That line,
"Where great whales go sailing by
Round the world for ever and aye,"
has a liberating power that may often recur, when one is, God knows, far enough from the spouting of any whale! And the whole poem has a wistful, haunting beauty that never grows tedious.
Matthew Arnold is a true classical poet. It is strictly in accordance with the authentic tradition to introduce those touches of light, quaint, playful, airy realism into the most solemn poetry. It is what Virgil, Catullus, Theocritus, Milton, Landor, all did. Some persons grow angry with him for a certain tone of half-gay, half-sad, allusive tenderness, when he speaks of Oxford and the country round Oxford. I do not think there is anything unpleasing in this. So did Catullus talk of Sirmio; Horace of his Farm; Milton of "Deva's wizard-stream"; Landor of Sorrento and Amalfi.
It is all of a piece with the "resignation" of a philosophy which does not expect that this or that change of dwelling will ease our pain; of a philosophy that naturally loves to linger over familiar well-sides and roadways and meadow-paths and hillsides, over the places where we went together, when we "still had Thyrsis."
The direct Nature-poetry of Matthew Arnold, touching us with the true classic touch, and yet with something, I know not what, of more wistful tenderness added, is a great refreshment after the pseudo-magic, so vague and unsatisfying, of so much modern verse.