the world, and men in general are far enough removed from the heroic type; but it may well be questioned whether the levelling of bitter accusations against the mass of one's fellow creatures tends either to the removal of evils or the exaltation of human nature. Do not lines like the following contain a real libel upon the world as it is ?— “Even in a palace life may be lived well, So spake the imperial sage, purest of men, "Our freedom for a little bread we sell, And drudge beneath some foolish master's ken, tion is the impatience of an over-sensitive spiritual nature; Mr. Arnold's impatience is intellectual, or mainly so; but the two express themselves with a wonderful similarity of accent. Dr. Newman did not catch his tone from Mr. Arnold—that is certain; did Mr. Arnold catch his from Dr. Newman? The enquiry might be an interesting one, but we cannot enter upon it here; it may suffice at present to remark, that the refinement of thought and phrase which we are so often called upon to admire in Mr. Arnold, is a very distinguishing characteristic of the earlier writer. To some persons it may seem that the qualities in which Mr. Arnold excels are matters, chiefly, of style; but, as the French most To be sure the sonnet winds up with the truly say, the style is the man; and when the noble sentiment that "The aids to noble life are all within—-” and its moral, therefore, is that we should triumph over circumstances, and not let them triumph over us; but is there not, I ask, an altogether inexcusable bitterness in the above description of “ common life?" The very fact that men can set before themselves a high ideal, in comparison with which the acts and tempers of every-day life seem mean or trivial, is a conclusive and most encouraging sign of the progress of the race; and Mr. Arnold, in his happier moments, could not fail to regard it in that light. If any man belongs essentially to the present age-an age, let its maligners say what they will, of light, of liberty, of free enquiry and of ever-widening sympathies-it is Mr. Arnold; and yet, at times, he seems to talk the language of one lamenting a lost age and a lost faith. One or two pieces that he has written might almost take their place beside Dr. Newman's beautiful but most unjust lines beginning "Now is the autumn of the Tree of Life." Dr. Newman's impatience with his genera style reaches a certain point of excellence, there is always something expressed which is well worth our attention. Doubtless there are qualities, and important ones, in which Mr. Arnold is deficient; but in connection with that refinement of thought and phrase, of which I spoke a moment ago, we recognize in him quick poetic sensibilities, and a fancy lively, delicate and pure. Breadth of imagination he has not; he sees life under but few aspects, and the thoughts which it suggests to him present consequently but little variety. Here is a poem which displays all his characteristic excellences in a remarkable degree: "DOVER BEACH. "The sea is calm to-night, The tide is full, the moon lies fair Upon the Straits; on the French coast the light Where the ebb meets the moon-blanched sand, Of pebbles which the waves suck back, and fling "Sophocles long ago Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow Of human misery; we Find also in the sound a thought, Hearing it by this distant, northern sea, The sea of faith nature as some of our great poets have been; but that he has a very quick and true eye for general effects, every page of his writing indicates. With a few touches, delicate but firm, he will sketch a landscape or a scene, and make it at once visible to every The opening of the above. Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's imagination. shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled; But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear "Ah, love, let us be true To one another !-for the world which seems poem, I think, illustrates this; but the longer poem, entitled "A Southern Night," which he has devoted to the memory of a younger brother, who died at Gibraltar on his way home from India, illustrates it still better. All the descriptive touches there, are broad and general but they are effective; they give a distinct impression of "a southern night"-moonlight on the Mediterranean. This poem, however, is, in other respects, well worth our dwelling upon a few moments. It exhibits, I think, a deeper tenderness of Swept with confused alarms of struggle and feeling than anything else Mr. Arnold has flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night." There are lines in this poem of extreme beauty, and the effect of the whole is, in the truest sense of the word, poetical. We may protest again against the estimate of the world as a place which "Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain," but the melancholy and the pathos here are genuine, and have a subduing effect upon the mind of the reader. It may be remarked in this place, that there are lines in Mr. Arnold which once heard can scarcely be forgotten, so singularly does their very sound carry the sense they express into the mind. Who that has ever listened to the moan of the sea "retreating," as the poet says, "to the breath of the night wind," can fail to feel the wonderful expressiveness, through their sound alone, of the words, "Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar❞—? I have said that Mr. Arnold is not so close a student or so passionate a lover of written; and the whole flow of the verse is surpassingly musical and expressive. To pluck out a few verses by way of illustration is to risk doing them and the whole poem an injustice, but I cannot forbear quoting the following: "The murmur of this Midland deep Is heard to-night around thy grave, There where Gibraltar's cannoned steep O'erfrowns the wave. "For there with bodily anguish keen, With Indian heats at last fordone, With public toil and private teen, Thou sank'st, alone. "Slow to a stop at morning gray, I see the smoke-crowned vessel come; Slow round her paddles dies away The seething foam. "A boat is lowered from her side; Ah gently place him on the beach! That spirit-if all have not yet diedA breath might quench. "Is this the eye, the footstep fast, The mien of youth we used to see, Poor, gallant boy?-for such thou wast, Still art to me. I do not know whether others will rate these verses as highly as I do, but it seems to me that in delicacy and felicity of phrase, in melody of versification and in their suffused pathos they reach a very high standard indeed of excellence. Like a true Greek, as he is, Mr. Arnold is a great lover of distinct outlines and of that, without which distinct outlines are impossible-light. Form with him is of the very first importance, and it is the form of his verse which produces the strongest, as it certainly produces the first, effect on the mind of the reader. In speaking here of form, I am not thinking of any imitation by the poet of antique models; that, strictly speaking, is a matter of garb, rather than of form. By the latter term I here understand the idea which scientific men have in view when they speak of type. Every poem at the moment of its conception in the poet's mind must assume some form; and the poet is sometimes more distinctly conscious of the form than of the content, while sometimes the reverse is the case. Mr. Arnold, I should say, realises the form first and works out his thoughts afterwards; and his readers, in like manner, in their interpretation and enjoyment of his work, take in a general impression first, derived mainly from its form, and then proceed to note the material or tissue of the composition. The best of his poems take shape before the mind with not less clearness than the hills of Hellas against their background of blue sky; indeed, in the character of their outline and all their general features, they remind us strongly of descriptions we have read of Grecian landscapes. "The scenery around Athens," says Hermann Hettner in his interesting book entitled Athens and the Peloponnese, "presents a harmonious ensemble of the most distinct forms; it must necessarily have produced in the Athenians a clear and precise mode of thinking, and a keen sense for the well-defined and complete. Even to the most sceptical mind, it must become evident at last in what an intimate relation the Greek temple, Roman architecture and the grand fulness of the forms of the Italian painters stand to the broad and calm forms of the Greek and Italian mountain; and how, on the other hand, the Gothic dome, and the whimsical, obstinate, faithfulness to nature in the works of the old German masters, descending almost to portrait, corresponds in a similar manner to the capricious zig-zag so frequently characterizing German mountain scenery. The heights which enclose the valley of Athens are not so near as to embarrass the eye of the spectator, nor are they so distant as to melt into indistinctness." In this passage lie nearly all the elements for a criticism of Mr. Arnold. Not quite all, however; for let an author imbibe as deeply as he may of the spirit of a past time, he cannot escape wholly from his age: its impress is on him, and he must bring it somewhere to the light. If Mr. Arnold were wholly Greek, of what interest would he be to us? He could be but the echo of that original inspiration the direct products of which are yet in our hands. But if, with that breadth and calmness of manner which distinguished the great minds of Greek antiquity, he can present to us the living ideas and issues of to-day, then indeed is there food for the mind, as well as for the æsthetic sense, in his writings. In his prose works, as is well known, he has dealt with some of the most vital questions of the present time; but in his poetry, too, though he does not and cannot discuss such questions formally, he never quite loses sight of them. They are there to give weight and concentration to his thought, when they do not directly guide its utter ance. The two best poems probably in Mr. Arnold's volume are "Rugby Chapel" and "Heine's Grave." The former is a noble and feeling tribute to the memory of his father and contains many passages which stamp themselves very powerfully-I was going to say indelibly on the memory. It is impossible to point, in either poem, to a single superfluous line or phrase; and yet this rigid economy of language does not interfere in the least with the free flow of the verse or the fervid expression of feeling. After describing his father as one of those whose mission it is, while pursuing arduous careers of their own, to lend a helping hand to all in need of assistance, and to fight with zeal and courage the general battles of humanity, he adds in a strain of real emotion: "And through thee, I believe In the noble and great who are gone; Is the race of men whom I see- Then, comparing humanity to a host toiling painfully through the wilderness towards a land of promise and of rest, he thus concludes : "Then in such hour of need Of your fainting, dispirited race, Beacons of hope ye appear! Langour is not in your heart, Ye alight in our van; at your voice, Ye move through the ranks, recall These are noble accents. We have here neither intellectual subtlety, nor wealth of metaphor, but we have, I make bold to say, the poetry of moral emotion, clothed in a form which could not have been better chosen. "Heine's Grave" contains more variety than "Rugby Chapel," and is altogether a richer poem. There is room, of course, from the nature of the subject, for a wider sweep of fancy than the pensive meditations connected with Rugby Chapel were adapted to call into play. The poet is struck in the first place by the contrast between the brightness and peace of the spot (the cemetery of Montmartre) where Heine had at length found rest, and the gloom and pain which had shrouded his latter years : "Half blind, palsied, in pain, Then, one by one, the contradictions and contrasts of Heine's character and career are brought to the poet's mind, and are all in turn admirably treated. I shall quote but one passage,—the very striking lines in which the poet touches upon Heine's well-known aversion to England :— "I chide thee not, that thy sharp We too say that she now, Scarce comprehending the voice "Yes, we arraign her! but she, Well nigh not to be borne, Of "Empedocles or Etna," a poem in its way, of very great merit and interest, I have no space left to speak. From one point of view, it may almost be regarded as a poetical rendering of the Positive Philosophy: there are verses in it which breathe the Positivist spirit in its purest and most essential form. "There is in that man," says the French historian De Tocqueville of Plato, “a con"tinual aspiration towards spiritual and lofty "things which stirs and elevates me. And "that, I am inclined upon the whole to think, "is the secret of the glorious progress "he has had through the centuries. For "after all, and in every age, men like to be "talked to about their souls even though, "for their own part, they may take little "thought except for their bodies." It is only doing Mr. Arnold justice to say that he also merits this praise. Whatever faults or deficiencies we may discover in him it is beyond dispute that his influence as a writer, whether in prose or verse, tends constantly to the refining of our taste, and the ennobling of our moral sense. This alone constitutes him one of the best teachers of our age, and an honour to the English nation. |