M IS MATTHEW ARNOLD'S POETRY CONSOLING ? R. AUGUSTINE BIRRELL, in

his recently published volume of literary essays, " Res Judicatm," falls foul of the Spectator for having declared that the poetry of Matthew Arnold "never consoled anybody." With a momentary lapse into that prosaic literalness which is so often the object of his genial satire, Mr. Birrell insists on taking this statement au pied de la lettre ; and, thus narrowly interpreted, it is, of course, triumphantly refuted by his counter-statement that in Matthew Arnold's verse he himself has found consolation. It would be an insult to the intelligence of Mr. Birrell and

of our readers to say that we claimed no knowledge of the emotional experience of every one of the thousands of men and women who have studied the poetry in question, or to explain that we only used a familiar rhetorical figure to express our sense of its general lack of the consolatory quality. Mr. Birrell, of course, quite understood this ; and when he says of our remark, "a falser statement was never made innocently," he does not mean simply that our generali- sation is imperfect because this or that person has found consolation in Mr. Arnold's poetical work ; he means, and can only mean, that our statement as a general verdict cannot be substantiated,—that it indicates on our part a deficient or perverted sensibility.

This may be so, but Mr. Birrell gives no evidence that it is so; nay, we cannot see that he makes any serious attempt towards such evidence. Indeed, in the sentence immediately following the one we have quoted, he writes as if he were not thinking of consolation, but of some other quality. " It may never," he says, " have consoled the writer in the Spectator ;

but because the stomach of a dram-drinker rejects cold water, is no kind of reason for a sober man abandoning his morning

tumbler of the pure element." The comparison drawn in this rather carelessly constructed sentence would have had some rhetorical effectiveness if we had denied to Mr. Arnold's

poetry the power to stimulate ; but though stimulation may sometimes bring consolation in its train, the two things are essentially different. As a matter of fact, and in spite of the vitiated stomach which Mr. Birrell attributes to us, we do not think that we fail to appreciate and enjoy the stimulus which Mr. Arnold so frequently provides. We doubt whether there are in English literature two lines richer in an invigo- rating tonic quality than the couplet which closes the first stanza of the poem entitled " Morality : "-

" We cannot kindle when we will

The fire that in the heart resides ; The spirit bloweth and is still, In mystery the soul abides ; But tasks in hours of insight willed Can be through hours of gloom fulfilled."

Not less genuine is the power of the fine sonnet, " Even in a palace life may be lived well," which is so well known that it need not be quoted, and we might reproduce a score of passages pitched in the same invigorating key. So far from our denial of Mr. Arnold's power to console being equivalent to a denial of his power to stimulate, we should say that he is often most effective when he is least consoling. If you can- not find consolation,' he seems to say, learn to live without

it ;' and the lesson, like George Eliot's advice to "do without opium," is essentially bracing though essentially cheerless.

It is like an east wind, the penetrating chill of which forces us to resisting activity. When on Dover beach he listens to the murmuring ebb of the Northern sea, he feels that he is standing also on the marge of the Sea of Faith, and that it is his to hear-

" Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world."

Bat the sound, instead of relaxing his emotional energies, stings them into passionate activity :— " Ah, love, let us be true

To one another ! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night."

The universe is empty ; therefore let us live for what in ourselves is best and noblest and most beautiful,'—this is the utterance here. We will not say that there are no richly endowed and highly strung spirits to whom such an appeal would come with the urgency of a General's call for volun- teers to man a forlorn-hope ; but to speak of the utterance as an utterance of consolation, is to use the word in an utterly non-natural sense. If it be objected that the quotation is made unfairly—that the poem from which it is taken is an outcome of one of those passing moods of despondency from

which even the most cheerful spirits a•re not free—we can only reply that that assertion is quite erroneous. All

Matthew Arnold's poetry is of the same tenor. Take another poem, to which such objection is manifestly impossible, be- cause it is a poem written with a directly and explicitly con- solatory aim. If Mr. Arnold's message of consolation is not to be found in the lines entitled " Self-Dependence," it may be safely said that it is to be found nowhere :—

" Weary of myself, and sick of asking What I am and what I ought to be, At the vessel's prow I stand, which bears me Forwards, forwards, o'er the starlit sea.

And a look of passionate desire O'er the sea and to the stars I send : • Ye who from my childhood up have calmed me, Calm me, ah ! compose me to the end.

Ah ! once more,' I cried, 'ye state, ye waters, On my heart your mighty charm renew ; Still, still let me, as I gaze upon you, Feel my soul becoming vast like you ' From the intense, clear, star-sown vault of heaven,. Over the lit sea's unquiet way,

In the rustling night-air came the answer : Wouldst thou be as these are ? Live as they.

Unaffrighted by the silence round them, Undistra,cted by the sights they see, These demand not that the things about them Yield them love, amusement, sympathy.

And with joy the stars perform their shining, And the sea its long moon-silvered roll; For self-poised they live, nor pine with noting All the fever of some differing soul.

Bounded by themselves, and unregardful In what state God's other works may be, In their own tasks all their powers pouring, These attain the mighty life you see.'

0 air-born voice ! long since, severely clear, A cry like thine in mine own heart I hear : Resolve to be thyself ; and know that he Who finds himself, loses his misery !'"

There are in these verses a calm dignity and an ethical strenuousness which are irresistibly attractive; they even sound consolatory ; but if read carefully with a view to prac- tice rather than to mere aesthetic pleasure, we see that the consolation of life is to come not from the satisfaction, but from the voluntary deadening of instinctive human desires.. The stars and the sea— "demand not that the things about them

Yield them love, amusement, sympathy ; "

and if we ask why they do not demand these things, there is,. of course, only one answer to the question,—that they are devoid of the capacities which in us make the demand inevitable.

They are satisfied, and the only way for us to gain satisfaction like theirs is to realise in ourselves—so far as such realisation

may be possible—their conditions of existence, to denude our- selves of the distinguishing capacity for spiritual, sensation to which we owe our discontent, our unrest, our painful yearning.. The argument is merely a statelier setting of the plea of the " still, small voice " which whispered to the Laureate,—

" Thou art so full of misery,

Were it not better not to be ?"

for diminution of sensation is diminution of vitality ; and when Mr. Arnold bids us gain peace by becoming as the sea and the stars, we feel impelled to make the old reply, and exclaim : -

"'Tis life whereof our nerves are scant, Oh life, not death, for which we pant ; More life, and fuller, that I want."

In another poem, written not by Matthew Arnold, but by a great poet whom Matthew Arnold venerated, there is a passage in which, as in " Self-Dependence," a parallel is drawn between the life of the stars and the highest life attain- able by man. In the " Ode to Duty," after uttering a like

yearning to that of Mr. Arnold for "a repose that ever is the came," Wordsworth exclaims :-

"Stern Lawgiver! yet thou dost wear

The Godhead's most benignant grace ; Nor know we anything so fair As is the smile upon thy face :

Flowers laugh before thee on their beds, And fragrance in thy footing treads ;

Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong ; And the most ancient heavens, through thee, are fresh and strong."

The same comparison, the same statement of the identity of the true conditions of existence in the " ancient heavens " and in the world of men ; but what a difference of moral effect ! Man's life is not to be impoverished that he may share the peace of the stars : rather the life of the star, seen as a divine obedience to duty, gains the dignity of the life of man ; because under and around both, as the root and source of both, is yet another life which stirs in the man as it does not stir in the star, and which by its stirring inspires a yearning for union, not with the dead but with the living,—a yearning which utters itself in the words of St. Augustine : " 0 Lord !

Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our souls find no rest until they rest in Thee."

To us it seems impossible for any human being to find final consolation—consolation, that is, which is distinguished from stoical resignation to the inevitable—in utterances which, despite all their beauty and charm, present us with a universe empty of a "living will that shall endure," a will whose existence and endurance provide us with the only possible guarantee for the permanent satisfaction of those human -desires and aspirations which are in harmony with itself.

We grudge no one such comfort as he can derive from Arnold's ethical object-lesson upon the " unaff righted " and

;' undistracted " stars. We only say that when we go to poetry for solace, we can only find it in some such utterance as that put by Browning into the mouth of the musician Abt

'Vogler :—

" Therefore to whom turn I but to Thee, the ineffable Name ? Builder and maker, Thou, of houses not made with hands ! What, have fear of change from Thee who art ever the same ? Doubt that Thy power can fill the heart that Thy power expands ?

And what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence For the fullness of the days ? Have we withered or agonised ? Why else was the pause prolonged but that singing might issue thence ?

Why rushed the discords in but that harmony should be prized ?

Sorrow is hard to bear and doubt is slow to clear, Each sufferer says his say, his scheme of the weal and woe : But God has a few of us whom He whispers in the ear; The rest may reason and welcome : 'tis we musicians know."

It seems to us that any poetry which is to console the ordinary tnan at the times when he most needs consolation, must strike the note which is struck here.