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Page 10
His freedom, save once, is not so unquestionably exhibited in the
remarkable group of poems--the future constituents of the
_Switzerland_ group, but still not classified under any special
head--which in the original volume chiefly follow _Empedocles_, with
the batch later called "Faded Leaves" to introduce them. It is,
perhaps, if such things were worth attempting at all, an argument for
supposing some real undercurrent of fact or feeling in them, that they
are not grouped at their first appearance, and that some of them are
perhaps designedly separated from the rest. Even the name "Marguerite"
does not appear in _A Farewell_; though nobody who marked as well as
read, could fail to connect it with the _To my Friends_ of the former
volume. We are to suppose, it would appear, that the twelvemonth has
passed, and that Marguerite's anticipation of the renewed kiss is
fulfilled in the first stanzas. But the lover's anticipation, too, is
fulfilled, though as usual not quite as he made it; he wearies of his
restless and yet unmasterful passion; he rather muses and morals in
his usual key on the "way of a man with a maid" than complains or
repines. And then we go off for a time from Marguerite, though not
exactly from Switzerland, in the famous "_Obermann_" stanzas, a
variation of the Wordsworth memorial lines, melodious, but a very
little _impotent_--the English utterance of what Sainte-Beuve, I
think, called "the discouraged generation of 1850." Now mere
discouragement, except as a passing mood, though extremely natural, is
also a little contemptible--pessimism-and-water, mere peevishness to
the "fierce indignation," mere whining compared with the great ironic
despair. As for _Consolation_, which in form as in matter strongly
resembles part of the _Strayed Reveller_, I must say, at the risk of
the charge of Philistinism, that I cannot see why most of it should
not have been printed as prose. In fact, it would be a very bold and
astonishingly ingenious person who, not knowing the original,
perceived any verse-division in this--
"The bleak, stern hour, whose severe moments I would annihilate,
is passed by others in warmth, light, joy."
Nor perhaps can very much be said for some of the other things. The
sonnet afterwards entitled _The World's Triumphs_ is not strong;
_The Second Best_ is but "a chain of extremely valuable
thoughts"; _Revolution_ a conceit. _The Youth of Nature_ and
_The Youth of Man_ do but take up less musically the _threnos_ for
Wordsworth. But _Morality_ is both rhyme and poetry; _Progress_ is at
least rhyme; and _The Future_, though rhymeless again, is the best of
all Mr Arnold's waywardnesses of this kind. It is, however, in the
earlier division of the smaller poems--those which come between
_Empedocles_ and _Tristram_--that the interest is most concentrated,
and that the best thing--better as far as its subject is concerned
even than the _Summer Night_--appears. For though all does _not_
depend upon the subject, yet of two poems equally good in other ways,
that which has the better subject will be the better. Here we have the
bulk of the "Marguerite" or _Switzerland_ poems--in other words, we
leave the windy vagaries of mental indigestion and come to the real
things--Life and Love.
_The River_ does not name any one, though the "arch eyes"
identify Marguerite; and _Excuse_, _Indifference_, and _Too
Late_ are obviously of the company. But none of these is exactly of
the first class. We grow warmer with _On the Rhine_, containing,
among other things, the good distich--
"Eyes too expressive to lie blue,
Too lovely to be grey";
on which Mr Swinburne gave a probably unconscious _scholion_ as
well as variation in his own--
"Those eyes, the greenest of things blue,
The bluest of things grey."
The intense pathos, which the poet could rarely "let himself go"
sufficiently to reach, together with the seventeenth-century touch
which in English not unfrequently rewards the self-sacrifice necessary
to scholarly poets in such abandonment, appears in _Longing_;
_The Lake_ takes up the faint thread of story gracefully enough;
and _Parting_ does the same with more importance in a combination,
sometimes very effective, of iambic couplets and anapaestic strophes,
and with a touch of direct if not exalted nature in its revelation of
that terrible thing, retrospective jealousy, in the lover. Woe to the
man who allows himself to think--
"To the lips! ah! of others
Those lips have been pressed,
And others, ere I was,
Were clasped to that breast,"
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