Other poets say anything—say everything that is in them. Browning lived to realise the myth of the Inexhaustible Bottle; Mr. William Morris is nothing: if not fluent and copious; Mr. Swinburne has a facility that would seem impossible if it were not a living
fact; even the Laureate is sometimes prodigal of unimportant details, of touches insignificant and superfluous, of words for words’ sake, of cadences that have no reason of being save themselves. Matthew Arnold alone says only what is worth saying. In other words, he selects: from his matter whatever is impertinent is eliminated and only what is vital is permitted to remain. Sometimes he goes a little astray, and his application of the principle on which Sophocles and Homer wrought results in failure. But in these instances it will always be found, I think, that the effect is due not to the principle nor the poet’s application of it but to the poet himself, who has exceeded his commission, and attempted more than is in him to accomplish. The case is rare with Arnold, one of whose qualities—and by no means the least Hellenic of them—was a fine consciousness of his limitations. But that he failed, and failed considerably, it were idle to deny. There is Merope to bear witness to the fact; and of Merope what is there to say? Evidently it is an imitation Greek play: an essay, that is, in a form which ceased long since to have any active life, so that the attempt to revive it—to create a soul under the ribs of very musty death—is a blunder alike in sentiment and in art. As evidently Arnold is no dramatist. Empedocles, the Strayed Reveller, even the Forsaken Merman, all these are expressions of purely personal feeling—are so many
metamorphoses of Arnold. In Merope there is no such basis of reality. The poet was never on a level with his argument. He knew little or nothing of his characters—of Merope or Æpytus or Polyphontes, of Arcas or Laias or even the Messenger; at every step the ground is seen shifting under his feet; he is comparatively void of matter, and his application of the famous principle is labour lost. He is winnowing the wind; he is washing not gold but water.
His Triumphs.
It is other-guess work with Empedocles, the Dejaneira fragment, Sohrab and Rustum, the Philomela, his better work in general, above all with the unique and unapproached Balder Dead. To me this last stands alone in modern art for simple majesty of conception, sober directness and potency of expression, sustained dignity of thought and sentiment and style, the complete presentation of whatever is essential, the stern avoidance of whatever is merely decorative: indeed for every Homeric quality save rhythmical vitality and rapidity of movement. Here, for example, is something of that choice yet ample suggestiveness—the only true realism because the only perfect ideal of realisation—for which the
similitudes of the ‘Ionian father of his race’ are pre-eminently distinguished:—
‘And as a spray of honeysuckle flowers
Brushes across a tired traveller’s face
Who shuffles through the deep dew-moistened dust
On a May evening, in the darken’d lanes,
And starts him, that he thinks a ghost went by—
So Hoder brushed by Hermod’s side.’
Here is Homer’s direct and moving because most human and comprehensive touch in narrative:—
‘But from the hill of Lidskialf Odin rose,
The throne, from which his eye surveys the world;
And mounted Sleipner, and in darkness rode
To Asgard. And the stars came out in heaven,
High over Asgard, to light home the king.
But fiercely Odin gallop’d, moved in heart;
And swift to Asgard, to the gate, he came.
And terribly the hoofs of Sleipner rang
Along the flinty floor of Asgard streets,
And the Gods trembled on their golden beds
Hearing the wrathful Father coming home—
For dread, for like a whirlwind Odin came.
And to Valhalla’s gate he rode, and left
Sleipner; and Sleipner went to his own stall;
And in Valhalla Odin laid him down.’
And here—to have done with evidence of what is known to every one—here is the Homeric mariner, large and majestic and impersonal, of recording speech:—