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Page 61
that
"We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea;"
but that a mighty launch of elaborate preparation is taking place,
that we are pleased and orderly spectators standing round, and that
the ship is gliding in due manner, but with no rush or burst, into the
sea of poetry. While elsewhere there may be even the sense of effort
and preparation without the success.
But, once more, a poet is to be judged first by his best things, and
secondly by a certain _aura_ or atmosphere, by a nameless,
intangible, but sensible quality, which, now nearer and fuller, now
farther and fainter, is over his work throughout. In both respects Mr
Arnold passes the test. The things mentioned above and others, even
many others, are the right things. They do not need the help of that
rotten reed, the subject, to warrant and support them; we know that
they are in accordance with the great masters, but we do not care
whether they are or not. They sound the poetic note; they give the
poetic flash and iridescence; they cause the poetic intoxication. Even
in things not by any means of the best as wholes, you may follow that
gleam safely. The exquisite revulsion of the undertone in
_Bacchanalia_--
"Ah! so the silence was,
So was the hush;"
the honey-dropping trochees of the _New Sirens_; the description
of the poet in _Resignation_; the outburst--
"What voices are these on the clear night air?"
of _Tristram and Iseult_; the melancholy meditation of _A
Summer Night_ and _Dover Beach_, with the plangent note so
cunningly yet so easily accommodated to the general tone and motive of
the piece,--these and a hundred other things fulfil all the
requirements of the true poetic criticism, which only marks, and only
asks for, the _differentia_ of poetry.
And this poetic moment--this (if one may use the words, about another
matter, of one who wrote no poetry, yet had more than all but three or
four poets), this "exolution, liquefaction, transformation, the kiss
of the spouse, and ingression into the divine shadow" which poetry and
poetry alone confers upon the fit readers of it--is never far off or
absent for long together in Mr Arnold's verse. His command of it is
indeed uncertain. But all over his work, from _The Strayed
Reveller_ to _Westminster Abbey_, it may happen at any minute,
and it does happen at many minutes. This is what makes a poet: not the
most judicious selection of subject, not the most studious
contemplation and, as far as he manages it, representation of the
grand style and the great masters. And this is what Mr Arnold has.
That his prose, admirable as it always is in form and invaluable as it
often is in matter, is on the whole inferior to his verse, is by no
means a common opinion, though it was expressed by some good judges
both during his life and at the time of his death. As we have seen,
both from a chance indication in his own letters and from Mr Humphry
Ward's statement, he took very great pains with it; indeed, internal
evidence would be sufficient to establish this if we had no positive
external testimony whatsoever. He came at a fortunate time, when the
stately yet not pompous or over-elaborated model of the latest
Georgian prose, raised from early Georgian "drabness" by the efforts
of Johnson, Gibbon, and Burke, but not proceeding to the extremes of
any of the three, was still the academic standard; but when a certain
freedom on the one side, and a certain grace and colour on the other,
were being taken from the new experiments of nineteenth-century prose
proper. Whether he or his contemporary Mr Froude was the greatest
master of this particular blend is a question which no doubt had best
be answered by the individual taste of the competent. I should say
myself that Mr Froude at certain moments rose higher than Mr Arnold
ever did; nothing of the latter's can approach that magnificent
passage on the passing of the Middle Ages and on the church-bell sound
that memorises it. And Mr Froude was also free from the mannerisms, at
times amounting to very distinct affectation, to which, in his middle
period more especially, Mr Arnold succumbed. But he did not quite keep
his friend's high level of distinction and _tenue_. It was almost
impossible for Mr Arnold to be slipshod--I do not mean in the sense of
the composition books, which is mostly an unimportant sense, but in
one quite different; and he never, as Mr Froude sometimes did,
contented himself with correct but ordinary writing. If his defect was
mannerism, his quality was certain manner.
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