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Page 9
"Though young, intolerably severe,"
saved from banishment and retained by itself in the 1853 volume, as
_Cadmus and Harmonia_, and the beautiful lyrical close,--but the
picture of the highest wooded glen on Etna, and the Flaying of
Marsyas, are delightful things.
_Tristram and Iseult_, with fewer good patches, has a greater
technical interest. It is only one, but it is the most remarkable, of
the places where we perceive in Mr Arnold one of the most curious of
the notes of transition-poets. They will not frankly follow another's
metrical form, and they cannot strike out a new one for themselves. In
this piece the author--most attractively to the critic, if not always
quite satisfactorily to the reader--makes for, and flits about,
half-a-dozen different forms of verse. Now it is the equivalenced
octosyllable of the Coleridgean stamp rather than of Scott's or
Byron's; now trochaic decasyllabics of a rather rococo kind; and once
at least a splendid anap�stic couplet, which catches the ear and
clings to the memory for a lifetime--
"What voices are these on the clear night air?
What lights in the court? What steps on the stair?"
But the most interesting experiment by far is in the rhymed heroic,
which appears fragmentarily in the first two parts and substantively
in the third. The interest of this, which (one cannot but regret it)
Mr Arnold did not carry further, relapsing on a stiff if stately blank
verse, is not merely intrinsic, but both retrospective and
prospective. It is not the ordinary "stopped" eighteenth-century
couplet at all; nor the earlier one of Drayton and Daniel. It is the
"enjambed," very mobile, and in the right hands admirably fluent and
adaptable couplet, which William Browne and Chamberlayne practised in
the early and middle seventeenth century, which Leigh Hunt revived and
taught to Keats, and of which, later than Mr Arnold himself, Mr
William Morris was such an admirable practitioner. Its use here is
decidedly happy; and the whole of this part shows in Mr Arnold a
temporary Romantic impulse, which again we cannot but regret that he
did not obey. The picture-work of the earlier lines is the best he
ever did. The figure of Iseult with the White Hands stands out with
the right Pr�-Raphaelite distinctness and charm; and the story of
Merlin and Vivian, with which, in the manner so dear to him, he
diverts the attention of the reader from the main topic at the end, is
beautifully told. For attaching quality on something like a large
scale I should put this part of _Tristram and Iseult_ much above both
_Sohrab and Rustum_ and _Balder Dead_; but the earlier parts are not
worthy of it, and the whole, like _Empedocles_, is something of a
failure, though both poems afford ample consolation in passages.
The smaller pieces, however, could have saved the volume had their
larger companions been very much weaker. The _Memorial Verses_ on
Wordsworth (published first in _Fraser_) have taken their place once
for all. If they have not the poetical beauty in different ways of
Carew on Donne, of Dryden on Oldham, even of Tickell upon Addison, of
_Adonais_ above all, of Wordsworth's own beautiful _Effusion_ on the
group of dead poets in 1834, they do not fall far short even in this
respect. And for adequacy of meaning, not unpoetically expressed, they
are almost supreme. If Mr Arnold's own unlucky and maimed definition
of poetry as "a criticism of life" had been true, they would be poetry
in quintessence; and, as it is, they are poetry.
Far more so is the glorious _Summer Night_, which came near the middle
of the book. There is a cheering doctrine of mystical optimism which
will have it that a sufficiently intense devotion to any ideal never
fails of at least one moment of consummate realisation and enjoyment.
Such a moment was granted to Matthew Arnold when he wrote _A Summer
Night_. Whether that rather vague life-philosophy of his, that
erection of a melancholy agnosticism _plus_ asceticism into a creed,
was anything more than a not ungraceful or undignified will-worship of
Pride, we need not here argue out. But we have seen how faithfully the
note of it rings through the verse of these years. And here it rings
not only faithfully, but almost triumphantly. The lips are touched at
last: the eyes are thoroughly opened to see what the lips shall speak:
the brain almost unconsciously frames and fills the adequate and
inevitable scheme. And, as always at these right poetic moments, the
minor felicities follow the major. The false rhymes are nowhere; the
imperfect phrases, the little sham simplicities or pedantries, hide
themselves; and the poet is free, from the splendid opening landscape
through the meditative exposition, and the fine picture of the
shipwreck, to the magnificent final invocation of the "Clearness
divine!"
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