Stopford Augustus Brooke

“ 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 the poetry itself is not of a high quality; its level is only a third of the way towards greatness; it is imaginative, but the imagination in it never soars and never is on fire, never at a white heat; on the contrary, its play is gentle, soft, touched, like an autumn evening when summer has just died, with tender, clear, brooding light. The greater number of these poems are such as a man who lived in a constant atmosphere of trouble and battle might write, when, wearied with the strife, he enjoyed an hour of forgetful rest after trouble, and of sheathing of the sword after battle ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”