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Page 15
But there was something more than this. Mr Arnold's poetic ambition,
as we have seen, did not aim at very long and elaborate works. His
forte was the occasional piece--which might still suggest itself and
be completed--which, as we shall see, did sometimes suggest itself and
was completed--in the intervals, the holidays, the relaxations of his
task. And if these lucid and lucent intervals, though existent, were
so rare, their existence and their rarity together suggest that
something more than untoward circumstance is to blame for the fact
that they did not show themselves oftener. A full and constant tide of
inspiration is imperative; it will not be denied; it may kill the poet
if he cannot or will not give vent to it, but it will not be patient
of repression--quietly content to appear now and then, even on such
occasions as the deaths of a Clough and a Stanley. Nor is it against
charity or liberality, while it is in the highest degree consonant
with reason and criticism, to infer that Mr Arnold's poetic vein was
not very full-blooded, that it was patient of refusal to indulge it,
that his poetry, in nearly the happiest of his master's phrases, was
not exactly "inevitable," despite the exquisiteness of its quality on
occasion.
It is fortunate for the biographer that this earliest part of Mr
Arnold's life is so fertile in poetry, for otherwise, in the dearth of
information, it would be a terribly barren subject. The thirty years
of life yield us hardly twenty pages of letters, of which the first,
with its already cited sketch of Laleham, is perhaps the most
interesting. At the Trafalgar Square riots of March 1848 the writer is
convinced that "the hour of the hereditary peerage and eldest sonship
and immense properties has struck"; sees "a wave of more than American
vulgarity, moral, intellectual, and social, preparing to break over
us"; and already holds that strange delusion of his that "the French
are the most civilised of European peoples." He develops this on the
strength of "the intelligence of their idea-moved classes" in a letter
to his sister; meets Emerson in April; goes to a Chartist
"convention," and has a pleasant legend for Miss Martineau that the
late Lord Houghton "refused to be sworn in as a special constable,
that he might be free to assume the post of President of the Republic
at a moment's notice." He continues to despair of his country as
hopelessly as the Tuxford waiter;[6] finds Bournemouth "a very stupid
place"--which is distressing; it is a stupid place enough now, but it
was not then: "a great moorland covered with furze and low pine coming
down to the sea" could never be that--and meets Miss Bront�, "past
thirty and plain, with expressive grey eyes though." The rest we must
imagine.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The editor glosses this variously spelt and etymologically
puzzling word "landing-stage." But unless I mistake, a "kempshott,"
"campshed," or "campshedding" is not a landing-stage (though it helps
to make one) so much as a river-wall of stakes and planks, put to
guard the bank against floods, the wash of barges, &c.
[2] _Glen Desseray and other Poems_. By John Campbell Shairp,
London, 1888. P. 218.
[3] This statement may seem too sweeping, especially as there is
neither room nor occasion for justifying it fully. Let us only
indicate, as among the heads of such a justification, the following
sins of English criticism between 1840-1860,--the slow and reluctant
acceptance even of Tennyson, even of Thackeray; the obstinate refusal
to give Browning, even after _Bells and Pomegranates_, a fair
hearing; the recalcitrance to Carlyle among the elder, and Mr Ruskin
among the younger, innovators in prose; the rejection of a book of
erratic genius like _Lavengro_; the ignoring of work of such
combined intrinsic beauty and historic importance as _The Defence of
Guenevere_ and FitzGerald's _Omar Khayyam_. For a sort of
quintessence of literary Philistinism, see the advice of Richard Ford
(himself no Philistine) to George Borrow, in Professor Knapp's
_Life_ of the latter, i. 387.
[4] This "undertone," as Mr Shairp calls it.
[5] "What, then, are the situations, from the representation of which,
though accurate, no poetical enjoyment can be derived? They are those
in which the suffering finds no vent in action; in which a continuous
state of mental distress is prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope,
or resistance; in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to
be done. In such situations there is inevitably something morbid, in
the description of them something monotonous. When they occur in
actual life, they are painful, not tragic; the representation of them
in poetry is painful also."
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