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will not, so we are assured, hang upon the lips of one who bids them not to be too sure that the winds are wailing man's secret to the complaining sea, or that nature is nothing but a theme for poets. These people may be right. In any event it is unwise to prophesy. What will be, will be. Nobody can wish to be proved wrong. It is best to be on the side of truth, whatever the truth may be. The real atheism is to say, as men are found to do, that they would sooner be convicted of error they think pleasing, than have recognised an unwelcome truth a moment earlier than its final demonstration, if, indeed, such a moment should ever arrive for souls so craven. In the meantime, this much is plain, that there is no consolation in non-coincidence with fact, and no sweetness which does not chime with experience. Therefore, those who have derived consolation from Mr. Arnold's noble verse may take comfort. Religion, after all, observes Bishop Butler in his tremendous way, is nothing if it is not true. The same may be said of the poetry of consolation.

The pleasure it is lawful to take in the truthfulness of Mr. Arnold's poetry should not be allowed to lead his lovers into the pleasant paths of exaggeration. The Muses dealt him out their gifts with a somewhat niggardly hand. He had to cultivate his Sparta. No one of his admirers can assert that in Arnold

The force of energy is found,

And the sense rises on the wings of sound. He is no builder of the lofty rhyme. This he was well aware of. But neither had he any ample measure of those "winged fancies " which wander

at will through the pages of Apollo's favourite children. His strange indifference to Shelley, his severity towards Keats, his lively sense of the wantonness of Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, incline us to the belief that he was not quite sensible of the advantages of a fruitful as compared with a barren soil. His own crop took a good deal of raising, and he was perhaps somewhat disposed to regard luxuriant growths with disfavour.

But though severe and restricted, and without either grandeur or fancy, Arnold's poetry is most companionable. It never teases you there he has the better of Shelley-or surfeits you-there he prevails over Keats. As a poet, we would never dare or wish to class him with either Shelley or Keats, but as a companion to slip in your pocket before starting to spend the day amid

The cheerful silence of the fells,

you may search far before you find anything better than either of the two volumes of Mr. Arnold's poems.

His own enjoyment of the open air is made plain in his poetry. It is no borrowed rapture, no mere bookish man's clumsy joy in escaping from his library, but an enjoyment as hearty and honest as Izaak Walton's. He has a quick eye for things, and rests upon them with a quiet satisfaction. No need to give instances; they will occur to all. Sights and sounds alike pleased him well. So obviously genuine, so real, though so quiet, was his pleasure in our English lanes and dells, that it is still difficult to realise that his feet can no longer stir the cowslips or his ear hear the cuckoo's parting cry.

Amidst the melancholy of his verse, we detect

deep human enjoyment and an honest human endeavour to do the best he could whilst here below. The best he could do was, in our opinion, his verse, and it is a comfort amidst the wreckage of life, to believe he made the most of his gift, cultivating it wisely and well, and enriching man's life with some sober, serious, and beautiful poetry. We are, indeed, glad to notice that there is to be a new edition of Mr. Arnold's poems in one volume. It will, we are afraid, be too stout for the pocket, but most of its contents will be well worth lodgment in the head. This new edition will, we have no doubt whatever, immensely increase the number of men and women who own the charm of Arnold. The times are ripening for his poetry, which is full of foretastes of the morrow. As we read we are not carried back by the reflection, "so men once thought," but rather forward along the paths, dim and perilous it may be, but still the paths mankind is destined to tread. Truthful, sober, severe, with a capacity for deep, if placid, enjoyment of the pageant of the world, and a quick eye for its varied sights and an eager ear for its delightful sounds, Matthew Arnold is a poet whose limitations we may admit without denying his right. Our passion for him is a loyal passion for a most temperate king. There is an effort on his brow, we must admit it. It would never do to mistake his poetry for what he called the best, and which he was ever urging upon a sluggish populace. It intellectualises far too much; its method is a known method, not a magical one. But though

effort may be on his brow, it is a noble effort and has had a noble result.

For most men in a brazen prison live,
Where, in the sun's hot eye,

With heads bent o'er their toil, they languidly
Their lives to some unmeaning task-work give,
Dreaming of nought beyond their prison wall.
And as, year after year,

Fresh products of their barren labour fall
From their tired hands, and rest

Never yet comes more near,

Gloom settles slowly down over their breast;

And while they try to stem

The waves of mournful thought by which they are prest,
Death in their prison reaches them

Unfreed, having seen nothing, still unblest.

Or if not a slave he is a madman, sailing where he

will on the wild ocean of life.

And then the tempest strikes him; and between

The lightning bursts is seen

Only a driving wreck,

And the pale master on his spar-strewn deck,

With anguish'd face and flying hair,

Grasping the rudder hard,

Still bent to make some port he knows not where,

Still standing for some false impossible shore;

And sterner comes the roar

Of sea and wind, and through the deepening gloom
Fainter and fainter wreck and helmsman loom,

And he too disappears and comes no more.

To be neither a rebel nor a slave is the burden of much of Mr. Arnold's verse-his song we cannot call it. It will be long before men cease to read their Arnold; even the rebel or the slave will occasionally find a moment for so doing, and when he does it may be written of him:

And then 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.

JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE

1895

T is part of the melancholy of middle age that it dooms us to witness one by one the extin

I

guishment of the lights that cast their radiance over youth. When I was at Cambridge, in the very early seventies, the men we most discussed were Newman, Froude, Carlyle, and Ruskin-Tennyson, Browning, and Matthew Arnold. The names of Swinburne and George Meredith were indeed hotly canvassed by a few, but neither of these distinguished men was then well enough known to youngsters to allow of general conversation about their merits. To have read The Shaving of Shagpat, Rhoda Fleming, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, was to betray a curious taste, and a desire to be wise above your fellows, while Mr. Swinburne's splendid verses were at that time the badge of a coterie. So it was about the names I have mentioned the battle raged most furiously; and of them all, but one is left.1

Nor can it be said-death makes no difference. When a great writer whose books we read as they came forth warm from his heart goes over to the majority, he does not forthwith join the ranks of the dead but sceptred sovereigns who rule us from their urns. To those who come after him he may or may not be able to make out a title to possession of their memories; but for us the personal note,

1 None now.

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