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Page 4
But in the ten or twelve years which had passed since _Alaric at
Rome_, literature itself had been by no means neglected, and in
another twelvemonth after the birth of his first-born, Matthew Arnold
had practically established his claim as a poet by utterances to which
he made comparatively small additions later, though more than half his
life was yet to run. And he had issued one prose exercise in
criticism, of such solidity and force as had not been shown by any
poet since Dryden, except Coleridge.
These documents can hardly be said to include the Newdigate poem
(_Cromwell_) of 1843: they consist of _The Strayed Reveller and other
Poems_, by "A.," 1849; _Empedocles on Etna, and other Poems_, [still]
by "A.," 1852; and _Poems_ by Matthew Arnold, a new edition, 1853--the
third consisting of the contents of the two earlier, with _Empedocles_
and a few minor things omitted, but with very important additions,
including _Sohrab and Rustum, The Church of Brou, Requiescat_, and
_The Scholar-Gipsy_. The contents of all three must be carefully
considered, and the consideration may be prefaced by a few words on
_Cromwell_.
This [Greek: agonisma], like the other, Mr Arnold never included in
any collection of his work; but it was printed at Oxford in the year
of its success, and again at the same place, separately or with other
prize poems, in 1846, 1863, and 1891. It may also be found in the
useful non-copyright edition above referred to. Couched in the
consecrated couplet, but not as of old limited to fifty lines, it is
"good rhymes," as the elder Mr Pope used to say to the younger; but a
prudent taster would perhaps have abstained, even more carefully than
in the case of the _Alaric_, from predicting a real poet in the
author. It is probably better than six Newdigates out of seven at
least, but it has no distinction. The young, but not so very young,
poet--he was as old as Tennyson when he produced his unequal but
wonderful first volume--begins by borrowing Wordsworth's two voices of
the mountain and the sea, shows some impression here and there from
Tennyson's own master-issue, the great collection of 1842, which had
appeared a year before, ventures on an Alexandrine--
"Between the barren mountains and the stormy sea"
--which comes as a pleasant relief, and displays more than once (as he
did afterwards in _Tristram and Iseult_) an uncertain but by no means
infelicitous variety of couplet which he never fully or fairly worked
out, but left for Mr William Morris to employ with success many years
later. Otherwise the thing is good, but negligible. It would have
taken an extremely strong competition, or an extremely incompetent
examiner, to deprive it of the prize; but he must have been a sanguine
man who, in giving the author that prize, expected to receive from him
returns of poetry.
Yet they came. If we did not know that the middle of this century was
one of the nadirs of English[3] criticism, and if we did not know
further that even good critics often go strangely wrong both in praise
and in blame of new verse, it would be most surprising that _The
Strayed Reveller_ volume should have attracted so little attention.
It is full of faults, but that is part of the beauty of it. Some of
these faults are those which, persevering, prevented Mr Arnold from
attaining a higher position than he actually holds in poetry; but no
critic could know that. There is nothing here worse, or more
necessarily fatal, than many things in Tennyson's 1830 and 1832
collections: he overwent those, so might Mr Arnold have overgone
these. And the promise--nay, the performance--is such as had been seen
in no verse save Tennyson's, and the almost unnoticed Browning's, for
some thirty years. The title-poem, though it should have pleased even
a severe judge, might have aroused uncomfortable doubts even in an
amiable one. In the first place, its rhymelessness is a caprice, a
will-worship. Except blank verse, every rhymeless metre in English has
on it the curse of the _tour de force_, of the acrobatic. Campion
and Collins, Southey and Shelley, have done great things in it; but
neither _Rose-cheeked Laura_ nor _Evening_, neither the
great things in _Thalaba_ nor the great things in _Queen
Mab_, can escape the charge of being caprices. And caprice, as some
have held, is the eternal enemy of art.
But the caprice of _The Strayed Reveller_ does not cease with its
rhymelessness. The rhythm and the line-division are also studiously
odd, unnatural, paradoxical. Except for the "poetic diction" of
putting "Goddess" after "Circe" instead of before it, the first stave
is merely a prose sentence, of strictly prosaic though not
inharmonious rhythm. But in this stave there is no instance of the
strangest peculiarity, and what seems to some the worst fault of the
piece, the profusion of broken-up decasyllables, which sometimes
suggest a very "corrupt" manuscript, or a passage of that singular
stuff in the Caroline dramatists which is neither blank verse, nor any
other, nor prose. Here are a few out of many instances--
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