678
ARNOLD
language at least, that no really great line can be written in which the emphasis of accent, the emphasis of quantity, and the emphasis of sense, do not meet on the same syllable. Whenever this junction does not take place the weaker line, or lines, are always introduced, not for makeshift purposes, but for variety, as in the finest lines of Milton and Wordsworth. Wordsworth no doubt seems to have had a theory that the accent of certain words, such as “without,” “within,” &c., could be disturbed in an iambic line; but in his best work he does not act upon his theory, and endeavours most successfully to make the emphasis of accent, of quantity, and of sense meet. It might not be well for a poem to contain an entire sequence of such perfect lines as “I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous boy,” or “Thy soul was like a star and dwelt apart,” for then the metricist’s art would declare itself too loudly and weaken the imaginative strength of the picture. But such lines should no doubt form the basis of the poem, and weaker lines—lines in which there is no such combination of the three kinds of emphasis — should be sparingly used, and never used for make-shift purposes. Now, neither by instinct nor by critical study was Arnold ever able to apprehend this law of prosody. If he does write a line of the first order, metrically speaking, he seems to do so by accident. Such weak lines as these are constantly occurring— “The poet, to whose mighty heart Heaven doth a quicker pulse impart, Subdues that energy to scan Not his own course, but that of man.” Much has been said about what is called the “ Greek temper ” of Matthew Arnold’s muse. A good deal depends upon what is meant by the Hellenic spirit. But if the Greek temper expresses itself, as is generally supposed, in the sweet acceptance and melodious utterance of the beauty of the world as it is, accepting that beauty without inquiring as to what it means and as to whither it goes, it is difficult to see where in Arnold’s poetry this temper declares itself. Surely it is not in Empedocles on Etna, and surely it is not in Merope. If there is a poem of his in which one would expect to find the joyous acceptance of life apart from questionings about the civilization in which the poet finds himself environed (its hopes, its fears, its aspirations, and its failures)—such questionings, in short, as were for ever vexing Arnold’s soul—it would be in “The Scholar Gypsy,” a poem in which the poet tries to throw himself into the mood of a “ Komany Rye.” The great attraction of the gypsies to Englishmen of a certain temperament is that they alone seem to feel the joyous acceptance of life which is supposed to be specially Greek. Hence it would have been but reasonable to look, if anywhere, for the expression of Arnold’s Greek temper in a poem which sets out to describe the feelings of the student who, according to Glanville’s story, left Oxford to wander over England with the Romanies. But instead of this we get the old fretting about the unsatisfactoriness of modern civilization. Glanville’s Oxford student, whose story is glanced at now and again in the poem, flits about in the scenery like a cloud-shadow on the grass; but the way in which Arnold contrives to avoid giving us the faintest idea either dramatic or pictorial of the student about whom he talks so much, and about the gypsies with whom the student lived, is one of the most singular feats in poetry. The reflections which come to a young Oxonian lying on the grass and longing to escape life’s fitful fever without shuffling off this mortal coil are, no doubt, beautiful reflections beautifully expressed, but the temper they show is the very opposite of
the Greek. To say this is not in the least to disparage Arnold. “A man is more like the age in which he lives,” says the Chinese aphorism, “ than he is like his own father and mother,” and Arnold’s polemical writings alone are sufficient to show that the waters of life he drank were from fountains distilled, seven times distilled, at the topmost slope of 19th-century civilization. Mr George Meredith’s “Old Chartist” exhibits far more of the temper of acceptance than does any poem by Matthew Arnold. His most famous critical dictum is that poetry is a “ criticism of life.” What he seems to have meant is that poetry is the crowning fruit of a criticism of life; that just as the poet's metrical effects are and must be the result of a thousand semi-conscious generalizations upon the laws of cause and effect in metric art, so the beautiful things he says about life and the beautiful pictures he paints of life are the result of his generalizations upon life as he passes through it, and consequently that the value of his poetry consists in the beauty and the truth of his generalizations. But this is saying no more than is said in the line— “ Rien n’est beau que le vrai ; le vrai seal est aimable ” or in the still more famous lines— “ ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” To suppose that Arnold confounded the poet with the writer of pensees would be absurd. Yet, having decided that poetry consists of generalizations on human life, in reading poetry he kept on the watch for those generalizations, and at last seemed to think that the less and not the more they are hidden behind the dramatic action, and the more unmistakably they are intruded as generalizations, the better. For instance, in one of his essays he quotes those lines from the “Chanson de Roland” of Turoldus, where Roland, mortally wounded, lays himself down under a pine-tree with his face turned towards Spain and the enemy, and begins to “ call many things to remembrance ; all the lands which his valour conquered, and pleasant France, and the men of his lineage, and Charlemagne, his liege lord, who nourished him ”— “De plusurs choses a reraembrer li prist, De tantes teres cume li bers cunquist, De dulce France, des humes de sun ligu, De Carleniagne sun seignor ki 1’nurrit.” “That,” says Arnold, “is primitive work, I repeat, with an undeniable poetic quality of its own. It deserves much praise, and such praise is sufficient for it.” Then he contrasts it with a famous passage in Homer—that same passage which has been quoted in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (see Art. Poetry, vol. xix.) for the very opposite purpose to that of Arnold’s—quoted indeed to show how the epic poet, leaving the dramatic action to act as chorus, weakens the aTrd-n? of the picture the passage in the Iliad (iii. 243-4) where the poet, after Helen’s pathetic mention of her brother’s comments on the causes of their absence, “ criticizes life ” and generalizes upon the impotence of human intelligence, the impotence even of human love, to pierce the darkness in which the web of human fate is woven. He appends Dr Hawtrey’s translation :— fly (ptxTO * tous d’ rjoy Karexev (pvcrifoos ata iv AaKeSat/iovL auOi, (piXy ev TrarpiSi yair). “ So said she; they long since in Earth’s soft arms were reposing There, in their own dear land, their fatherland, Lacedsemon.” “ We are here,” says Arnold, “ in another world, another order of poetry altogether; here is rightly due such supreme praise as that which M. Vitel gives to the Chanson de Roland. If our words are to have any
