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Page 6
"And prayers, and gifts, and tears, are fruitless all,
_And the night waxes, and the shadows fall_."
The blank-verse tail-piece is finer still in execution; it is, with
the still finer companion-_coda_ of _Sohrab and Rustum_, the
author's masterpiece in the kind, and it is, like that, an early and
consummate example of Mr Arnold's favourite device of finishing
without a finish, of "playing out the audience," so to speak, with
something healing and reconciling, description, simile, what not, to
relieve the strain of his generally sad philosophy and his often
melancholy themes.
One may less admire, despite its famous and often-quoted line,
"Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole,"
the sonnet _To a Friend_, praising Homer and Epictetus and
Sophocles, for it seems to some to have a smatch of priggishness. Nor
am I one of those who think very highly of the much longer _Sick
King in Bokhara_ which (with a fragment of an _Antigone_,
whereof more hereafter) follows, as this sonnet precedes, _The
Strayed Reveller_ itself. There is "the note," again, and I daresay
the orientalism has the exactness of colour on which, as we know from
the _Letters_, Mr Arnold prided himself. Yet the handling of the
piece seems to me prolix and uncertain, and the drift either very
obscure or somewhat unimportant. But about the _Shakespeare_
sonnet which follows there can be no controversy among the competent.
"Almost adequate" is in such a case the highest praise; and it must be
given.
The companions of this sonnet are respectable, but do not deserve much
warmer words; and then we turn to a style of poem remarkably different
from anything which the author had yet published and from most of his
subsequent work. It is not unnoteworthy that the batch of poems called
in the later collected editions _Switzerland_, and completed at
last by the piece called _On the Terrace at Berne_, appeared
originally piecemeal, and with no indication of connection. The first
of its numbers is here, _To my Friends who Ridiculed a Tender
Leave-taking_. It applies both the note of thought which has been
indicated, and the quality of style which had already disengaged
itself, to the commonest--the greatest--theme of poetry, but to one
which this poet had not yet tried--to Love. Let it be remembered that
the thought has the cast of a strictly pessimist quietism--that the
style aims, if it aims at any single thing, at the reproduction of the
simpler side of classicalism, at an almost prim and quakerish
_elegance_, a sort of childlike grace. There is, however, by no
means any great austerity in the tone: on the contrary, the refrain
(altered later)--
"Ere the parting kiss be dry,
Quick! thy tablets, Memory!"--
approaches the luscious. It is not easy to decide, and it is perhaps
in both senses impertinent to speculate, whether the "Marguerite"
(whose La Tour-like portrait is drawn in this piece with such relish,
and who is so philosophically left to her fate by her lover on the
Terrace at Berne later) had any live original. She seems a little more
human in some ways than most of those cloud-Junos of the poets, the
heroines of sonnet-sequence and song-string. She herself has a
distinct touch of philosophy, anticipating with nonchalant resignation
the year's severance, and with equally nonchalant anticipation the
time when
"Some day next year I shall be,
Entering heedless, kissed by thee."
Her wooer paints her with gusto, but scarcely with ardour; and ends
with the boding note--
"Yet, if little stays with man,
Ah! retain we all we can!"--
seeming to be at least as doubtful of his own constancy as of hers.
Nor do we meet her again in the volume. The well-known complementary
pieces which make up _Switzerland_ were either not written, or
held back.
The inferior but interesting _Modern Sappho_, almost the poet's
only experiment in "Moore-ish" method and melody--
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