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Page 33
_The Terrace at Berne_ has been already dealt with, but that mood for
epicede, which was so frequent in Mr Arnold, finds in the _Carnac_
stanzas adequate, and in _A Southern Night_ consummate, expression.
_The Fragment of Chorus of a Dejaneira_, written long before, but now
first published, has the usual faults of Mr Arnold's rhymeless verse.
It is really quite impossible, when one reads such stuff as--
"Thither in your adversity
Do you betake yourselves for light,
But strangely misinterpret all you hear.
For you will not put on
New hearts with the inquirer's holy robe
And purged considerate minds"--
not to ask what, poetically speaking, is the difference between this
and the following--
"To college in the pursuit of duly
Did I betake myself for lecture;
But very soon I got extremely wet,
For I had not put on
The stout ulster appropriate to Britain,
And my umbrella was at home."
But _Palladium_, if not magnificent, is reconciling, the Shakespearian
_Youth's Agitations_ beautiful, and _Growing Old_ delightful, not
without a touch of terror. It is the reply, the _verneinung_, to
Browning's magnificent _Rabbi ben Ezra_, and one has almost to fly to
that stronghold in order to resist its chilling influence. But it is
poetry for all that, and whatever there is in it of weakness is
redeemed, though not quite so poetically, by _The Last Word_. The
_Lines written in Kensington Gardens_ (which had appeared with
_Empedocles_, but were missed above) may be half saddened, half
endeared to some by their own remembrance of the "black-crowned
red-boled" giants there celebrated--trees long since killed by London
smoke, as the good-natured say, as others, by the idiotic tidiness of
the gardeners, who swept the needles up and left the roots without
natural comfort and protection. And then, after lesser things, the
interesting, if not intensely poetical, _Epilogue to Lessing's
Laocoon_ leads us to one of the most remarkable of all Mr Arnold's
poems, _Bacchanalia, or the New Age_. The word remarkable has been
used advisedly. _Bacchanalia_, though it has poignant and exquisite
poetic moments, is not one of the most specially _poetical_ of its
author's pieces. But it is certainly his only considerable piece of
that really poetic humour which is so rare and delightful a thing.
And, like all poetic humour, it oscillates between cynicism and
passion almost bewilderingly. For a little more of this what pages and
pages of jocularity about Bottles and the Rev. Esau Hittall would we
not have given! what volumes of polemic with the _Guardian_ and
amateur discussions of the Gospel of St John! In the first place, note
the metrical structure, the sober level octosyllables of the overture
changing suddenly to a dance-measure which, for a wonder in English,
almost keeps the true dactylic movement. How effective is the
rhetorical iteration of
"The famous orators have shone,
The famous poets sung and gone,"
and so on for nearly half a score of lines! How perfect the sad
contrast of the refrain--
"_Ah! so the quiet was!
So was the hush!_"
how justly set and felicitously worded the rural picture of the
opening! how riotous the famous irruption of the New Agers! how
adequate the quiet-moral of the end, that the Past is as the Present,
and more also! And then he went and wrote about Bottles!
"Progress," with a splendid opening--
"The master stood upon the mount and taught--
He saw a fire in his disciples' eyes,"--
conducts us to two other fine, though rhymeless, dirges. In the first,
_Rugby Chapel_, the intensity of feeling is sufficient to carry off
the lack of lyrical accomplishment. The other is the still better
_Heine's Grave_, and contains the famous and slightly pusillanimous
lines about the "weary Titan," which are among the best known of their
author's, and form at once the motto and the stigma of mid-century
Liberal policy. And then the book is concluded by two other
elegies--in rhyme this time--_The Stanzas written at the Grande
Chartreuse_ and _Obermann once more_. They are, however, elegies of a
different kind, much more self-centred, and, indeed, little more than
fresh variations on "the note," as I ventured to call it before. Their
descriptive and autobiographic interest is great, and if poetry were a
criticism of life, there is plenty of that of them. The third
book--_Schools and Universities on the Continent_ (1868)--in which are
put the complete results of the second Continental exploration--is, I
suppose, much less known than the non-professional work, though
perhaps not quite so unknown as the earlier report on elementary
education. By far the larger part of it--the whole, indeed, except a
"General Conclusion" of some forty pages--is a reasoned account of the
actual state of matters in France, Italy, Germany, and Switzerland. It
is not exactly judicial; for the conclusion--perhaps the foregone
conclusion--obviously colours every page. But it is an excellent
example (as, indeed, is all its author's non-popular writing) of clear
and orderly exposition--never arranged _ad captandum_, but also never
"dry." Indeed there certainly are some tastes, and there may be many,
to which the style is a distinct relief after the less quiet and more
mannered graces of some of the rest.
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