dignity, even in poems where, like a serpent round the witch it loves, he winds round and round himself and saves them from failure. So far he was pure stoic.
But the stoic demand of indifference to pain and trouble, of the independence of the soul of all the fates of men—Arnold could not fulfil. His stoicism broke down into sadness for himself and for the world. The pain was too great not to cry out, not to afflict the soul. It sought expression, and it found it in his poetry.
The stoic might think this a weakness, unworthy of a philosopher. But in a poet, this deep emotion of sadness, felt in himself and for himself, but felt far more for the labouring and laden world, is not a weakness but a strength. A poet may have a philosophy, but the proper mistress of his house is poetry. If his philosophy seek to be mistress, poetry shakes her celestial pinions, and flies away. But when Arnold, violating his stoicism expressed his pain with cries, his philosophic weakness became poetic strength. He came back to high natural art and feeling; he did the natural thing; and, indeed, it is one of the paradoxes of life, the truth of which the stoic forgets or does not know, that till pain is expressed, it cannot be fully conquered. The stoic who hides it in his breast or pretends that it does not exist, never conquers it or its evil. But the poet, expressing pain as well as pleasure, becomes at one with all who feel pain. Conscious then of his brotherhood with man, and far more conscious of it
