less read now. He himself did not mind, and would not mind. He did not seek for the fame either of poet or of prophet. Never could it have occurred to him to be disappointed that it did not, and has not, come. The English public takes small pleasure in philosophical poetry, unless an extraordinary harmony be inspired by an earthy self-love like Omar Khayyám's; and Arthur Clough's melody and philosophy are not thus inspired. Meanwhile, he wanders about Victorian literature like a phantom. Sometimes, however, phantoms become as much forces as are substances; and hereafter it may happen to be so with him. It is in truth difficult to believe that a spirit so gracious, so eager to learn as well as teach, so original, so reverent, so openminded, so penetrating in its insight, with a personality so interesting, so star-like, so generously hot against injustice and tyranny-and against them alone can actually be as faint in its influence as the deadness of popular attention to the works it permeates would seem to prove. Poems by Arthur Hugh Clough. With a Memoir. Sixth Edition. Macmillan & Co., 1878. 1 A River Pool (Early Poems). 2 Songs in Absence, st. 4. 3 ἐπὶ Λάτμῳ (Early Poems). 4 Dipsychus (published after Clough's death), Part II, Sc. 2. 5 Ite domum saturae (Miscellaneous Poems), stanzas 1-2. • The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich, 3. ? Ibid., 2. Say Not (ibid.). 8 Peschiera (Miscellaneous Poems), stanzas 8, 9, 10. 10 Easter Day (Naples, 1849) (Religious Poems). Easter Day, II. The Questioning Spirit (Poems on Life and Duty). Bethesda, a Sequel (ibid.). 11 Parting (Early Poems), stanzas 3-4. 12 úμvos avμvos (Religious Poems), stanzas 3-5. MATTHEW ARNOLD 1822-1888 I HAVE no ghoulish taste for visiting charnel-houses; but the whole Escurial is more of a tomb than a palace. There it seemed natural to descend into the royal vaults. Not among the Monarchs, where her Consort was to lie, but in an ante-chamber was the coffin of his loved and lost young Montpensier Queen and Bride. Not for her to rest with Sovereigns; for she had left no child to reign. Matthew Arnold established no dynasty, annexed no province of poetry; so, I dare say, he must repose for the present not with, though beside, the Kings of Song. Gladly I believe that he will be crowned in his grave by posterity; for I myself account him worthy. As it is, he is a king de jure rather than de facto. I cannot deny that the reading public has not yet pronounced for his enthronement. If I may modify the metaphor as to dignities, I would say that he has been Beatified, not for the present Sanctified. His poetry is not of a kind to be spontaneously popular. It is a scholar's poetry, with the drawback of being not so much over-learned as over-educational. It is free from eccentricity, grotesqueness, rhetoric; and its freedom has operated in its disfavour. It makes no effort to amuse with story-telling, history, or burlesque. The singer kept an abundant store of humour, if full of gall, for his brilliant prose. None diversifies his poetry, unless it be discoverable in the ten-years' ineffectual wooing of blueeyed, pale, and angelically grave Marguerite by the gleam lighted lake', and on the Terrace at Berne. Though the sin of monotony cannot be charged against his verse, not many keys are touched. Such as sound are all solemn and austere. Then, no Matthew-Arnold-Cult has arisen. No congregation, however minute, of reverent disciples gathers together in his name. Persons of refinement admire. They nurse the emotion in their own breasts. They fear to vulgarize it by publishing it abroad. The controversial fame which he acquired in the concluding stages of his career has itself in a way acted adversely. The sentiment of his essays was, though in the bitter without the sweet, akin to that of his verse. In latter days his poetry often appeared to be regarded as an appendage to his essays rather than they to it. Of the limitations, in fact, to his popularity there can be no question. They were necessary results of his whole habit of mind. He had an excessive tendency towards considering the poet a preacher, towards chanting homilies on the low aims and pursuits of modern society, its tinsel, its earthiness. He laid himself open to the reproach of parading as a discoverer of the hollowness of life. He was proud of being, through his honesty, a homeless wanderer forlorn from the hearth of orthodoxy. Sometimes he philosophized when he ought to have been singing. Often his thoughts pressed forward so eagerly as to threaten to stifle one another. Not merely are his poems unrelieved by a single flash of gaiety; they are not lighted by a sparkle of joy. Lastly, and most detrimentally, he insisted upon, perhaps could not help, mixing the work of the critical with that of the creative faculty. He would sit in judgement upon the purity of his own inspiration; upon the quantity of candle-power of the tongues of fire as they alighted upon him. One and all are heavy fetters upon fancy; and as such the general, even the instructed, public has always felt them. For an intimate circle they enhance respect for the powers which can burst through such obstacles. The drawbacks are for it the exalting defects of his Muse's qualities. Had he not deviated into preaching, we should, it will urge, have lost the heroic dirge of Rugby Chapel. No appeal, in Christ's name, would have been raised in Progress for sympathy with whatever Faith regenerates. Had he not been apt to confound philosophizing and singing, we might have been spared the cross-grained meditations of Empedocles, but should have missed the lovely interludes on the harp of Callicles. Three-fourths of The Buried Life are psychology rather than poetry; but without them we had lost the music of the close-the sudden pause in life's distracted turmoil · When our world-deafen'd ear Is by the tones of a lov'd voice caress'd A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast, And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again, The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain, And what we mean, we say, and what we would we know! A man becomes aware of his life's flow, And hears its winding murmur, and he sees The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze,― And there arrives a lull in the hot race Wherein he doth for ever chase That flying and elusive shadow, rest. An air of coolness plays upon his face, And an unwonted calm pervades his breast. And then he thinks he knows The hills where his life rose, And the sea where it goes.1 The Bacchanalia, without the rambling prelude, would not have danced from the silence of death into the silence of living light: And o'er the plain, where the dead age O'er that wide plain, now wrapt in gloom, Like stars over the bounding hill. The epoch ends, the world is still.2 Without the vain effort in the Epilogue to Lessing's Laocoön to marshal the arts in their respective ranks, we should have lost the noble tribute to Music: 'Miserere, Domine ! ' The words are utter'd, and they flee. Mighty their pathos, but 'tis gone! Beethoven takes them then-those two Poor, bounded words !—and makes them new ; Transplants them to another tongue, The wealth divine they have in charge. And still they live and still they burn, Even when we feel him straining after an idea which evades his grasp, as in The Strayed Reveller, the tendrils of floating fancy cling to a hundred entrancing scenes. Egotistical is he? If any one is a licensed egotist, is not a poet? Weary, worn-out, blasé too, if he please, so long |