Stopford Augustus Brooke

“ He contrasts her calm with our turmoil, her quiet changes of action day after day, her rest after action, with our hurry, our confusion, and our noise. Calm soul of things, he cries, make me calm, let the human world, like thee, perfect its vast issues "in toil unsevered from tranquillity." Again, he contrasts the immortal life of nature with our decay and death. That life existed before us, will exist after us, fulfilling pauselessly its pure eternal course. ”

“ Few have been so self-centred, and none pleases us more whenever we are in that mood in which, dividing ourselves from all mankind, we choose to cherish our own personality, to sit in its silent chambers, to reject the Not-me, to believe that in our own being is the universe, that nothing exists beyond ourselves. To that strange mood, which may have its good if it last a short time, but which has certainly its own naughtiness, Arnold speaks, and has revealed its thoughts in a poetry full of subtle and impassioned charm. ”

“ Then Keats, who had felt this exhaustion before the death of Bryon and Shelley, finding no ideas in the present, recovered for poetry the ideas of the past. He called on England to live for beauty, and bade her find it in the myths of Greece, and in the stories of romance. In these, he thought—recast so as to manifest the power of love, truth, and beauty—the poet would receive into his heart the impassionating ideas of the past, realise the deep emotion he needed for his work, and give to men the high pleasure which is the use and honour of his art. ”

“ They are pure poetry, moving in a dance, serious and bright, graceful and grave in turn, to the Dorian pipe, "the Dorian strain." The soft recorders accompany the pastoral, the idyllic song, wise with thought, happy with noble phrase, filled with accurate and loving description of nature; and in it lives from line to line the contemplation of humanity.
Virgil and Theocritus have been infused into their manner and their verse, nor has Lycidas been quite forgotten. Yet they are not imitative; the atmosphere, the thought, the music, and the subject are Arnold's own. ”

“ But our time, he says to Obermann, is worse than theirs—a hopeless tangle—and we turn for help to the immovable composure of thy icy despair. Thou hast renounced the world and thy life in it; at least thou hast the peace of renunciation, and the majestic pleasures which Nature brings. Half my soul I leave with thee and Nature, but the other half Fate takes, and forces it to abide in the world. May I live there, like thee, unsoiled by wrong, unspotted by the world, and bear the pain of these miserable days. Rigorous is the line on which the unknown power drives us; we cannot
when we will enjoy ”

“ The highest, the most inspiring passion which can thrill a poet was therefore not his in the first years of his poetry. This self-involvement and this isolation from the universal hope of man are the great weakness inherent in stoicism, and when they belong to an artist, they enfeeble his art. Only by drinking incessantly at the deep wells of common humanity does a poet win the power to rejoice in his creative work, and the love which enables him to continue it till old age. Arnold, in the end, even though he did gain much self-forgetful sympathy with humanity, found his poetic power fail. ”

“ The poet, it is often said, by depth of sympathy, suffers more than other men, a part of their pains as well as his own. And this is a self-flattering theory that poets hug to their breast. I have little sympathy with the conceit. If the poet, being more sensitive than other men, feel the pain and ugliness of the world sorely, he also is just as sensitive to its joy and beauty; and he has greater rapture than other men. All things are set over one against another, and the poet has no business to enlarge on his pain and to ignore his joy. He is, in reality, very well paid for his trouble. ”

“ Indeed, whenever Arnold's poetry touches Greece, we meet an especial music and grace; but nowhere is this clear, lovely, and sweet air so lucid and so pure as in the classic scenery and life which glide in and out of these two elegies. Oxford, while we read, seems not far away from the flowers of Enna or the silent stream of Mantua, nor is the wandering student then surprised to hear Theocritus piping near the Iffey mill, or see, as he passes by, Virgil dreaming under the shade of the Fyfield tree. ”

“ Matthew Arnold, who is loved as a poet by so many of us, and justly loved; whom we do not read continuously as we read the greater poets, but who suits us so well in certain circumstances of the inner life; who, in them, reflects and strengthens us; whose poetry, always unimitative and underived, rose clear out of his own soul; who stood alone with an ill-hidden scorn for other English poetry in his eyes—was worthy of more acceptance as a poet than he received in his lifetime, and has his own distinct chair in the general assembly and church of the first-born of England. ”

“ And now I touch on the two best poems he wrote—the Scholar Gipsy and Thyrsis. Both are engaged with Clough, and they are suffused throughout with the tenderness of that deep friendship between man and man, which, begun in youth, keeps in it the purple light of youth; which, continued in manhood, wins the strength of the love which perseveres through sad experience, and the beauty which is born of, and nourished by associated memories. These fill the poems with sweet emotion, enfold them in an air of tenderness. ”

“ We may not say that youthful love-passion brings a man into that excelling realm, or leads an artist into its inner shrine. A larger, a mightier expansion of love is needed for that high citizenship—a love which passes beyond one woman or one man to embrace nature, and man, and God; but we may say that love-passion opens the gates of this kingdom, gives us our first experience of loss of self, and affords a fleeting vision of the glory it may he to lose ourselves in the whole of Love.
Arnold had but little, it seems, of that young experience. ”

“ I do not say he was at daggers drawn with the elements of his world; he did not fight with them in the fierce way in which Byron and Shelley fought with those of their day; but he sat apart from them in a silent, brooding, wrathful, even contemptuous opposition, When he spoke against them in poetry, it was not so much to attack or vilify them, but to glorify the spirit which was the enemy of their turbulence. He did not see the elements of life and of far-off peace in the turbulence, and he never gave it sympathy. ”

“ He has been thrown in the past, like Clough, into a world of jarring strife and noise, of mental and spiritual disturbance. Sensitive, refined till he thrills at a touch, angry with the circumstances of life which call him to act—when action, which forces him into contact with vulgar reality out of philosophic dreams, is as repugnant to him as it was to Hamlet "a cursed spite" of fate—he welcomes any change, any chance, which takes him out of the world of strife and effort. This also was the case with Clough himself, from whom the hero of the poem is partly drawn. ”

“ I have been surprised by the inferiority of Clough's prose to his poetry. His prose does not rise beyond the level of the ordinary review; his soul is not living in it. On the contrary, in his poetry, though it does want art, and does not seek for it, there is a spirit always moving—a delicate, fantastic, changing spirit; a humanity, with a touch here of Ariel, and there of Puck; a subtle sound and breathing such as one hears in lonely woods and knows not whence it came, and a melody of verse which his friend Matthew Arnold never arrived at ”

“ The very atmosphere of that lovely land, where so many hearts have been healed, the flowerhaunted meadows, the shimmering lake below, the blue hills, the far-off snows—is in the loving verse, and it is mingled with the soul of Arnold and Obermann, till each mountain slope and every flower upon them, and the waves of the lake as they break on the shore, are of men, and through men, and in men. ”

“ Moreover, he has a great advantage over other men. There are thousands just as sensitive as he, who are obliged to suffer in silence; but the poet, having the gift of expression, can shape his pain into words, cry loudly his lyric cry, make the world the sympathetic witness of his woes; and then, having expressed his trouble, forget it, or get rid of it and go on, if that please him, to shiver with another pain, shape it in its turn, and forget it—and this he can do all his life long. It is a pleasing amusement, and one need not have much sympathy with his sorrows. ”

“ And to add to the charm, Arnold has filled the landscape with humanity and its work, with shepherd and reaper, gipsies and scholars, hunters and oarsmen, dancing maidens and wandering youths, among whom, alive and gay, Thyrsis and the Scholar Gipsy, and a meditative Arnold, alive and serious, move and speak of the true aims, the just ideas, the grave conduct, of human life. The picture is delightful, and the urging power of it is love—the life-long love of an Oxford scholar for the shelter and inspiration of his youth. ”

“ To read it is to regret that he could not oftener escape into that ideal region where, at least for a time, our sorrows seem dreams, and the soul is healed of its disease. Moreover, this poem is sweeter in melody than most of his poems, as if his ear had been purged in that loftier and brighter air. There is nothing stranger in a man who dwelt so much on excellence in the poetic art, and who criticised failure in form so sharply, than Arnold's inability to recognise the harshness, the broken sounds, the want of harmony in his own verse. ”

“ They stirred England to its depths. Men could no longer complain that there was no national passion in the country; and this national passion for new ideas fled, like an angel with wings of fire, over the brains and into the souls of the old men who saw visions and the young men who dreamed dreams, 'Those who were by nature poets received the national emotion, and it stimulated their own. They woke to use both these emotions on their own subjects,—and before four years had passed by Tennyson and Browning began the new life of English poetry. ”

“ Science changed its front, so did History, Literature, and Art. Theology and Philosophy strove to preserve their old formation, but as the years went on were forced, if they were to exist at all, to change it also. And in the wildered disorder of men running to and fro, searching in vain for some foundation of the mind, there were only a few who found it or who believed it would be found, The greater number doubted like Arnold, were restless like him, or like him fell back on stoicism, or fled away from the noises into silence and solitude. ”

“ This is always true: "Knowledge puffeth up, but Love edifieth"; and if I may judge from the bulk of his poetry, Clough came to that at last. As to this insistence on fate, on the inevitable in circumstance, it is not an image of true life. Man is not master of the whole of fate, for he is not able to see all, but a great deal of what he thinks inevitable is in his hands. If he cannot climb over obstacles, he can get round them; that is, if he have courage, and chose to exercise his will, to be what he was made to be—a cause in the universe. ”

“ Anything—the tapestry, the storm, the firelight, the bed curtains, the dress of the queen—leads it away from the central passion. It is a pretty poem, with charming descriptions, but sentimental, which Tristram and Iseult never were. The most important part of it is where his ancient love comes to visit him. There, if anywhere, Arnold should be vitally clear, and in the subject. He is miles and miles away from the time, the temper, the characters, and the passion of the matter in hand. The conventions of modern society and morality rule the irritating speeches of the lovers. ”

“ He might—since he had no poetic genius, only a gentle and charming talent—have been enslaved by a scientific art, a slavery from which genius saves a man, and have become one of the literary prigs of poetry who prate of art but cannot practise it; who gain the whole world of a clique's applause and lose their soul as poets. He was saved from this by the strength of the passion with which he wrote, by his truthfulness which did not condescend to modify his work and by his love of clearness. ”

“ He could not feel, till later in life, the greater waves of human emotion, save once perhaps with regard to England's vast imperial toil, breaking upon his heart. Into the infinite hopes, the infinite possibilities of man—into that country where the greater poets live, his early poetry entered only for moments, and then his sceptical self-consciousness recalled him from it, and bade him consider how little the history of his own soul supported the far-off hopes for man into which he had been momentarily hurried by poetic imagination. ”

“ And the new wine in the land, the emotions of ideas growing into form, and shaping themselves into new circumstances, deepened, as all national movements will, the natural excitement of poetic young men, thirsting for fame and love. Therefore their poems begin, for the most part, with vast soliloquies, many pages long, which describe their soul, its ineffable powers and aims; and their own passion to reach the top of fame, not only in poetry, but in everything. Again, the hunger for love in many forms, moral and immoral, was raised by these poets into a kind of religion. ”

“ Nature, rich and full in us when we are young, we think to have no life but that which we give her. But as years pass by, our energy fails, and, like fools, we think our decay is a decay in nature. But she watches us, silent and contemptuous. Her living beauty never sees our corruption. Therefore, cries Arnold, while we are able, get into vital union with the calm, and obedience and life of nature, order the soul into the spirit of her life ”

“ But the poet, expressing pain as well as pleasure, becomes at one with all who feel pain. Conscious then of his brotherhood with man, and far more conscious of it than by sympathy only with man's pleasure, strength and passion flow into his poetry. Men feel themselves expressed, sympathised with, and empowered by the noble representation of their trouble, and send back to the poet their gratitude and sympathy, till he, conscious of their affection, is himself uplifted and inspired, Then his poetic power, fed by human love, increases. ”

“ But if this be not true, and Nature has never known a divine birth, and thou, man, alone wakest to consciousness of a great difference between thyself and Nature—thou, the last and radiant birth of earth's obscure working—oh, beware of pride. Think that thou too only seemest; art, like the rest, a dream, Yet, since thou canst think that, since thou mayst control thy pride, thou standest clear of Nature. ”

“ The poem, full of imaginative beauty, has also its deep interest; it touches what we imagine in the mysticism of the heart of the subconscious stream of our being the unexplored tracts of our nature, the revealing of which we wait for so long and so vainly. Even two lovers, Arnold thought, cannot tell each other what they are. They would if they could, but their buried life flows on, unseen, unknown. Fate, knowing how we are led astray by the apparent and confused, has ordained it thus, in order that our truer life should not be mastered by the apparent ”

“ Oxford's young enthusiasm is pictured in the pupils, its quiet temper in the tutor, its dress, its ways of talk, the beginning of its æstheticism, its hereditary self-satisfaction, its variety of youthful intellect, its high sense of honour and morality, its manliness, its noisy athleticism, its sense that Oxford is, on the whole, though a doubt may now and then intrude, the mother, and the father, too, of the intellectual universe ”