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Page 11
and who does not at once exorcise the demon with the fortunately
all-potent spell of _Bocca bacciata_, and the rest! _Absence_ and
_Destiny_ show him in the same Purgatory; and it is impossible to say
that he has actually escaped in the crowning poem of the series--the
crowning-point perhaps of his poetry, the piece beginning
"Yes! in the sea of life enisled."
It is neither uninteresting nor unimportant that this exquisite piece,
by a man's admiration of which (for there are some not wholly lost,
who do _not_ admire it) his soundness in the Catholic Faith of
poetry may be tested, perhaps as well as by any other, has borne more
than one or two titles, It is in the 1852 volume, _To Marguerite. In
returning a volume of the letters of Ortis_. In 1853 it became
_Isolation_, its best name; and later it took the much less
satisfactory one of _To Marguerite--continued_, being annexed to
another.
_Isolation_ is preferable for many reasons; not least because the
actual Marguerite appears nowhere in the poem, and, except in the
opening monosyllable, can hardly be said to be even rhetorically
addressed. The poet's affection--it is scarcely passion--is there, but
in transcendence: he meditates more than he feels. And that function
of the riddle of the painful earth which Lucretius, thousands of years
ago, put in his grim _Nequicquam!_ which one of Mr Arnold's own
contemporaries formulated with less magnificence and more popularity,
but still with music and truth in _Strangers Yet_--here receives
almost its final poetical expression. The image--the islands in the
sea--is capitally projected in the first stanza; it is exquisitely
amplified in the second; the moral comes with due force in the third;
and the whole winds up with one of the great poetic phrases of the
century--one of the "jewels five [literally five!] words long" of
English verse--a phrase complete and final, with epithets in unerring
cumulation--
"The unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea."
_Human Life_, no ill thing in itself, reads a little weakly after
_Isolation_; but _Despondency_ is a pretty piece of melancholy, and,
with a comfortable stool, will suit a man well. In the sonnet, _When I
shall be divorced_, Mr Arnold tried the Elizabethan vein with less
success than in his Shakespeare piece; and _Self-Deception_ and _Lines
written by a Death-Bed_, with some beauty have more monotony. The
closing lines of the last are at the same time the moral of the book
and the formula of the Arnoldian "note"--
"Calm's not life's crown, though calm is well.
'Tis all perhaps which man acquires,
But 'tis not what our youth desires."
Again, we remember some one's parody-remonstrance thirty years later,
and again we may think that the condemnation which Mr Arnold himself
was soon to pronounce upon _Empedocles_ is rather disastrously
far-reaching, while even this phrase is a boomerang. Musical and
philosophical despair is one of the innumerable strings of the poetic
lyre; but 'tis not what our youth, or our age either, desires for a
monochord.
The remarkable manifesto just referred to was not long delayed.
Whatever may have been his opinion as to the reception of the two
volumes "by A," he made up his mind, a year after the issue and
withdrawal of the second, to put forth a third, with his name, and
containing, besides a full selection from the other two, fresh
specimens of the greatest importance. In the two former there had been
no avowed "purpose"; here, not merely were the contents sifted on
principle, the important _Empedocles_ as well as some minor
things being omitted: not merely did some of the new numbers,
especially _Sohrab and Rustum_, directly and intentionally
illustrate the: poet's theories, but those theories themselves were
definitely put in a _Preface_, which is the most important
critical document issued in England for something like a generation,
and which, as prefixed by a poet to his poetry, admits no competitors
in English, except some work of Dryden's and some of Wordsworth's.
Beginning with his reasons for discarding _Empedocles_, reasons
which he sums up in a sentence, famous, but too important not to
require citation at least in a note,[5] he passes suddenly to the
reasons which were _not_ his, and of which he makes a good
rhetorical starting-point for his main course. The bad critics of that
day had promulgated the doctrine, which they maintained till a time
within the memory of most men who have reached middle life, though the
error has since in the usual course given way to others--that "the
Poet must leave the exhausted past and draw his subjects from matters
of present import." This was the genuine
"_Times_-_v._-all-the-works-of-Thucydides" fallacy of the
mid-nineteenth century, the fine flower of Cobdenism, the heartfelt
motto of Philistia--as Philistia then was. For other times other
Philistines, and Ekron we have always with us, ready, as it was once
said, "to bestow its freedom in pinchbeck boxes" on its elect.
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