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Page 13
"Emerge, and shine upon the Aral Sea."
Even here, it is true, the Devil's Advocate may ask whether this, like
the _Mycerinus_ close, that of _Empedocles_, and others,
especially one famous thing, to which we shall come presently, is not
more of a purple tail-patch, a "tag," a "curtain," than of a
legitimate and integral finale. It is certain that Mr Arnold,
following the Greeks in intention no doubt, if not quite so closely as
he intended, was very fond of these "curtains"--these little
rhetorical reconciliations and soothings for the reader. But this is
the most in place of any of them, and certainly the noblest
_tirade_ that its author has left.
Most of the new poems here are at a level but a little lower than this
part of _Sohrab and Rustum_, while some of them are even above it
as wholes. _Philomela_ is beautiful, in spite of the obstinate
will-worship of its unrhymed Pindaric: the _Stanzas to the Memory of
Edward Quillinan_ are really pathetic, though slightly irritating
in their "sweet simplicity"; and if _Thekla's Answer_ is nothing
particular, _The Neckan_ nothing but a weaker doublet of the
_Merman, A Dream_ is noteworthy in itself, and as an outlier of
the _Marguerite_ group. Then we have three things, of which the
first is, though unequal, great at the close, while the other two rank
with the greatest things Mr Arnold ever did. These are _The Church
of Brou_, _Requiescat_, and _The Scholar-Gipsy_.
If, as no critic ever can, the critic could thoroughly discover the
secret of the inequality of _The Church of Brou_, he might, like
the famous pedant, "put away" Mr Arnold "fully conjugated in his
desk." The poem is in theme and scheme purely Romantic, and
"nineteenth century" in its looking back to a simple and pathetic
story of the Middle Age--love, bereavement, and pious resignation. It
is divided into three parts. The first, in trochaic ballad metre,
telling the story, is one of the poet's weakest things. You may oft
see as good in Helen Maria Williams and the Delia Cruscans. The
second, describing the church where the duke and duchess sleep, in an
eight-line stanza of good fashion, is satisfactory but nothing more.
And then the third, after a manner hardly paralleled save in Crashaw's
_Flaming Heart_, breaks from twaddle and respectable verse into a
rocket-rush of heroic couplets, scattering star-showers of poetry all
over and round the bewildered reader. It is artifice rather than art,
perhaps, to lisp and drawl, that, when you _do_ speak out, your
speech may be the more effective. But hardly anything can make one
quarrel with such a piece of poetry as that beginning--
"So rest, for ever rest, O princely pair!"
and ending--
"The rustle of the eternal rain of Love."
On the other hand, in _Requiescat_ there is not a false note,
unless it be the dubious word "vasty" in the last line; and even that
may shelter itself under the royal mantle of Shakespeare. The poet has
here achieved what he too often fails in, the triple union of
simplicity, pathos, and (in the best sense) elegance. The dangerous
repetitions of "roses, roses," "tired, tired," &c., come all right;
and above all he has the flexibility and quiver of metre that he too
often lacks. His trisyllabic interspersions--the leap in the vein that
makes iambic verse alive and passionate--are as happy as they can be,
and the relapse into the uniform dissyllabic gives just the right
contrast. He must be [Greek: � th�rion � theos]--and whichever he
be, he is not to be envied--who can read _Requiescat_ for the
first or the fiftieth time without mist in the eyes and without a
catch in the voice.
But the greatest of these--the greatest by far--is
_The Scholar-Gipsy_. I have read--and that not once only, nor
only in the works of unlettered and negligible persons--expressions of
irritation at the local Oxonian colour. This is surely amazing. One
may not be an Athenian, and never have been at Athens, yet be able to
enjoy the local colour of the _Ph�drus_. One may not be an
Italian, and never have been in Italy, yet find the _Divina
Commedia_ made not teasing but infinitely vivid and agreeable by
Dante's innumerable references to his country, Florentine and general.
That some keener thrill, some nobler gust, may arise in the reading of
the poem to those who have actually watched
"The line of festal light in Christ Church Hall"
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