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Page 32
The volume itself was well calculated to take advantage, to at least a
moderate extent, of this conjunction of circumstance. At no time was
the appeal of Mr Arnold's poetry of the most impetuous or peremptory
order. And it might be contended that this collection contains nothing
quite up to the very best things of the earlier poems, to the
_Shakespeare_ sonnet, to _The Scholar-Gipsy_, to the _Isolation_
stanzas. But with the majority of its readers it was sure rather to
send them to these earlier things than to remind them thereof, and its
own attractions were abundant, various, and strong.
In the poet himself there was perhaps a slight consciousness of "the
silver age." The prefatory _Stanzas_, a title changed in the
collected works to _Persistency of Poetry_, sound this note--
"Though the Muse be gone away,
Though she move not earth to-day,
Souls, erewhile who caught her word,
Ah! still harp on what they heard."
A confession perhaps a little dangerous, when the Muses were speaking
in no uncertain tones not merely to juniors like Mr Morris and Mr
Swinburne but to seniors like Tennyson and Browning. But the actual
contents were more than reassuring. Of _Empedocles_ it is not
necessary to speak again: _Thyrsis_ could not but charm. The
famous line,
"And that sweet city with her dreaming spires,"
sets the key dangerously high; but it is kept by the magnificent
address to the cuckoo,
"Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go?"
and the flower-piece that follows; by that other single masterpiece,
"The coronals of that forgotten time;"
by the more solemn splendour of the stanza beginning
"And long the way appears which seemed so short;"
by the Signal tree; and by the allegoric close with the reassertion of
the Scholar. All these things stand by themselves, hold their sure and
reserved place, even in the rush and crowd of the poetry of the
sixties, the richest, perhaps, since the time from 1805 to 1822.
_Saint Brandan_, which follows, has pathos if not great power,
and connects itself agreeably with those Celtic and medi�val studies
which had just attracted and occupied Mr Arnold. The sonnets which
form the next division might be variously judged. None of them equals
the _Shakespeare_; and one may legitimately hold the opinion that
the sonnet was not specially Mr Arnold's form. Its greatest examples
have always been reached by the reflex, the almost combative, action
of intense poetic feeling--Shakespeare's, Milton's, Wordsworth's,
Rossetti's--and intensity was not Mr Arnold's characteristic. Yet
_Austerity of Poetry, East London_, and _Monica's Last Prayer_ must
always stand so high in the second class that it is hardly critical
weakness to allow them the first. And then the tide rises. _Calais
Sands_ may not be more than very pretty, but it is that, and _Dover
Beach_ is very much more. Mr Arnold's theological prepossessions and
assumptions may appear in it, and it may be unfortunately weak as an
argument, for except the flood itself nothing is so certain a
testimony to the flood as the ebb. But the order, the purpose, the
argument, the subject, matter little to poetry. The expression, the
thing that is _not_ the subject, the tendency outside the subject,
which makes for poetry, are here, and almost of the very best. Here
you have that passionate interpretation of life, which is so different
a thing from the criticism of it; that marvellous pictorial effect to
which the art of line and colour itself is commonplace and _banal_,
and which prose literature never attains except by a _tour de force_;
that almost more marvellous accompaniment of vowel and consonant
music, independent of the sense but reinforcing it, which is the glory
of English poetry among all, and of nineteenth-century poetry among
all English, poetries. As is the case with most Englishmen, the sea
usually inspired Mr Arnold--it is as natural to great English poets to
leave the echo of the very word ringing at the close of their verse as
it was to Dante to end with "stars." But it has not often inspired any
poet so well as this, nor anywhere this poet better than here. If at
any time a critic may without fatuity utter judgment with some
confidence, it is where he disagrees with the sentiment and admires
the poem; and for my part I find in _Dover Beach_, even without the
_Merman_, without the _Scholar-Gipsy_, without _Isolation_, a document
which I could be content to indorse "Poetry, _sans phrase_."
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