harvest of beauty. Of him we may aver, safely, that had he lived, he would have ranked high-perhaps only second among the poets of England. Wordsworth, from a soil not naturally rich, gathered by patient and indefatigable spade-husbandry a noble and abundant crop. In him culture was carried something too far, or at least was too anxiously pursued, until it even took a taint of egotism, and wanted a perpetual discrimination, which should not have left the tares to ripen with the wheat, to the unbounded annoyance of the purchaser of six volumes. Is Mr. Tennyson to stand as the instance of as disproportioned a neglect? We earnestly trust that the truer view is, that "Maud" indicates only some sudden and passing perversion of taste and judgment; that it is the symptom of an acute seizure, not of a chronic failing; and that one to whom the English language is already so deeply indebted, has still the power and the will to add some things worthy of his genius and his fame. 38 THE CLASSICAL SCHOOL OF ENGLISH POETRY: MATTHEW ARNOLD. I. MINOR POEMS.* [Feb. 1854.] MR. ARNOLD'S book will give genuine pleasure to every one whose judgment it is worth a man's while to consider. He measures himself, indeed, too justly to claim a place among the kings of song; but below the topmost heights of Parnassus lie many pleasant ranges and happy pastures, among whose denizens he may enjoy a not ignoble rank. He starts from a vantage-ground rare in these days. He possesses the uncommon and valuable conviction that poetic art has its nature and its rules, which admit of being studied with advantage. Nor does he want the more intrinsic attributes of a poet. A keen and refined sense of beauty, sometimes finding its expression in phrases of exquisite felicity, a mind and artistic faculty trained and disciplined to reticence, and an imagination of considerable scope and power, are no mean qualifications. One of the few observations worth noting (if it be worth noting) in that strangely barren work, the Life and Letters of Byron, is one in which his lordship maintains that there are qualities in poetry closely corresponding with those which distinguish the gentleman in life; and that the same sort of vulgarity may be found in the false assumptions of art as in those of the world. Now Mr. Arnold's are eminently the poems of a gentle *Poems. By A. Two Series. Poems. By Matthew Arnold. mans. Fellowes. A new edition. Long man; and what is perhaps part of this characteristic, they are thoroughly genuine and sincere; the author is always himself and not a pretence at any one else; there is no affectation, no strained effort, no borrowed plumage; he presents himself without disguise and without false shame; is dignified, simple, and self-restrained. If not always profound, at least he does not affect profundity; his strokes bring his thought or sentiment out clear and decisive; he is never guilty of false show and glitter; and those who have read some of our modern poets will recognise the inestimable comfort of not having to press through an umbrageous forest of verbiage and heterogeneous metaphors in order to get at a thin thought concealed in its centre. There is artistic finish too in his verse (though, as we wish hereafter to remark, not in his conceptions); not the finish of high polish, but the refined ease and grace of a taste pure by nature and yet conscientiously cultivated. Hence, instead of congratulating ourselves that we have read him, we find a pleasure in actually reading him, and take him up again and again with undiminished freshness and enjoyment. Partly it is, that he does not make too great a demand upon us; his light free air refreshes us. Instead of being hemmed in by that majesty and terror which make the vicinity of the Alps oppressive, we stroll with lighter hearts on breezy heaths and uplands. Like Wordsworth, Mr. Arnold owes part of his charm to the very absence of deep and engrossing feelings in his nature. A considerable portion of these poems are selfdescriptive, or more properly, self-betraying. These owe their interest chiefly to any fresh indication they may afford us of the tone of feeling and mode of thought prevalent among some of our recent Oxford scholars. Mr. Arnold will perhaps be startled to hear that he belongs to an unchristian school; but we hasten to assure him that by saying this we do not mean to charge him with a limited faith in the eternity of punishment, or with nourishing views of his own on baptismal regeneration, or even declining to rest implicit confidence on the verbal inspiration of the Bible. We don't feel it to be our duty, in the phrase of angry brother clergymen, to give him an opportunity of explaining his views on these or any similar and equally important links in the orthodox manacles. We are indifferent as to whether he overbalances himself towards faith or towards works, and not anxious to inquire into his exact place among the three subdivisions of the three main classes of the "Edinburgh classification." We are looking at the matter from the reverse point of view from that gentleman who said, Newman on the Soul was a horribly atheistic book, but that Thomas Carlyle's works contained nothing contrary to sound Christian doctrine. Probably, however, an error in dogmatic convictions can alone entitle us to call a man unchristian in his views; and that it would be more correct to say that Mr. Arnold is of a non-christian school. "Oh, how shocking!" exclaimed a lady on hearing a certain sonnet of Wordsworth's read aloud; " he'd rather be a pagan And so Mr. Arnold (or his Muse, for it is with the poet, not the man, we deal) prefers to be a pagan. In art the Greek is his model; and happily has he sometimes caught the clear Attic note. He is not a modern Greek like Shelley, nor an imitative scholar; but he has familiarised himself with Athenian poetry until the echo rings in his ears; and though when he is most himself he is least Greek, he often, both in form and expression, moulds himself, half consciously and half unconsciously, upon the impressions with which his mind is saturated. One might choose something more exactly in point than the following, but nothing more beautiful : "Through the black, rushing smoke-bursts, All Etna heaves fiercely Her forest-cloth'd frame. Not here, O Apollo ! Are haunts meet for thee, But where Helicon breaks down In cliff to the sea. Where the moon-silver'd inlets Send far their light voice On the sward, at the cliff-top, In the moonlight the shepherds, -What forms are these coming What sweet-breathing Presence 'Tis Apollo comes leading They are lost in the hollows. They stream up again. What seeks on this mountain The glorified train ?— They bathe on this mountain, In the spring by their road. Their endless abode. -Whose praise do they mention? Of what is it told?— What will be for ever, What was from of old. |