MATTHEW ARNOLD'S LETTERS.

MR. RUSSELL, in his graceful and skilful preface to his perhaps too copious collection of Matthew Arnold's letters,* says with great truth that the charm of the poet's letters lies in their perfect naturalness. But he adds with what seems to us less truth, that they are himself,—which does not seem quite adequate,--nay, they are, we think, a good deal less than himself, if Mr. Russell means by being "himself"

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that they give you the glow and the essence of the man. On the contrary, we should say that their charm is not at all up to the charm of his poetry ; not at all up to the charm of his conversation. They are to those who knew him delightful letters, as recalling the man; but they do not fill you with the sense of buoyancy,—though often it was buoyant sad- ness, not buoyant joyousness,—with which his poems fill you,

or even with the sense of buoyancy with which his conver- sation filled you. They are, as most letters are, a good deal less than the man, not as a very few letters are, as Cowper's and Gray's letters have been, more than the man, more even in Cowper's case than his poems ; or as some other letters,—Mrs. Carlyle's, for instance,—have been, the letters of one in a specially exuberant frame of mind, filled with the exhilaration of firing off a kind of volley of well- aimed shots which the reserve of ordinary social intercourse might have checked. There is no sense in reading Matthew Arnold's correspondence that the act of letter-writing stimu- lated and exalted him, and that is what we find with Cowper's

letters and Gray's letters, and, so far as the stimulating goes, with Byron's letters (though in Byron's case, the act of corre- spondence made him a different man, something of an actor as well as a correspondent). Matthew Arnold was not at his full height in letter-writing, as he was in writing his poems. His letters are pleasant, affectionate, wholly unaffected, but they are a faint reflection of the poet, and not even a bright or vivid reflection of his conversation. They are himself

a little subdued, not as the letters of a born letter-writer should be, himself a little exalted. Compare, for instance, what he says of the composition of that lovely little poem on his favourite dog's death, " Geist's' Grave," in his letters, with what the present writer heard him say of it in his con- versation, and one misses at once the spring and emphasis and aan of his high-strung personality :-- "Mr DARLING Boy—I hoped to have sent you to-day my lines about your dear, dear little boy [Geist], but I have not yet been able to get a correct copy from the printer. You shall have it by next week's mail—at least, I hope so,—and you will then get it a fortnight sooner than if we waited for the magazine containing it to be published. The daily miss of him will wear off, but we shall never forget him, and I am very glad to have stamped him in our memories by these lines,ltritten when he was fresh in our minds. I like to think of all the newspapers having his dear little name in them when the Christmas number of the Port-nightly Review is advertised, and I hope people will like the lines, and that will lead to his being more mentioned and talked about, which seems to be a sort of continuation of him in life, dear little fellow, though it is but a hollow and shadowy one, alas!"

That is simple and natural and fascinating. But those who heard him talk of the composition of that poem, miss all the singular rapture of the manner with whieh he said, "I assure you I wrote it with the tears streaming down my face," and with a simple sort of delight in the full consciousness of the emotion which the mere attempt to recall the poor little

dog's affectionateness and grace of manner had excited within him. Now any one who reads the poem will feel, just as those who heard Arnold speak of it would feel, that he did write it

in a passion of tenderness and sorrow, in a sort of summtr- storm of the heart :—

" Only four years, those winning ways

Which make me for thy presence yearn, Called us to pet thee or to praise, Dear little friend! at every turn.

That loving heart, that patient soul, Had they indeed no longer span, To run their course, and reach their goal, And read their homily to man ? That liquid, melancholy eye, From whose pathetic, soul-fed springs Seena'd surging the Virgilian cry,

The sense of tears in mortal things,—

That steadfast, mournful strain consoled By spirits gloriously gay, And temper of heroic mould, What, was four years their whole short day ? "

There you see, as you saw in the curious mixture of grief and triumph with which he told his friends of the storm of tears

with which he had written the poem, the curious buoyancy as well as the curious scud of passion with which ' Geist's' death was commemorated. But you would never gather it from the letter, touching and pleasant as the letter is. Indeed, the verse recalling "that steadfast, mournful strain consoled by spirits gloriously gay," exactly expresses not only poor little Geist,' but still more the poet himself, whose exquisite elegiac poems are at least as remarkable for their elasticity as for their melancholy, for the elation with which he wept, as for the sense of desolation with which he exulted in his own tenderness.

Matthew Arnold's letters of travel, again, hardly suggest the vividness with which his imagination brooded over the love- liness of the scenes he visited. They are pleasant letters of travel, but they do not in any sense supplement or lend new colour to the poems. Take the letters from Switzerland. They are lively, unaffected letters, but they do not glow at all as the poems glow. We never see him pouring out his heart in his letters as we do in his poems. This is the kind of letter which we enjoy most; he is descending the Maloja pass into Italy:—

"We stopped at Vicosoprano, the chief town of the Swiss part of the valley, to lunch, and here a melancholy thing happened. I had been looking at a small oat, the colour of William's cat, running backwards and forwards across the street. It was in beautiful condition and high spirits, with a small bell round its neck like the bells worn here by the cows—evidently a favourite. I went a little way towards the bridge over the river to see if I could find any plants, and net a voiturier with four horses driving fast into the place. Presently I returned, saw a crowd, went up to it, and there was my poor little cat lying quite dead in a pool of blood. The volt urier had run over it - not by his fault, 1 believe—but it darted into the street at the moment he was passing; the wheels had gone over its neck, and it had died instantly, but it was not mutilated. It made quite a sensation, and presently a young man took the little thing up, and laid it under the wall of the side street from which it had just before been darting out full of prettiness and play. I know the girls will be interested in this sad story ; the sudden end of the poor little cat quite afflicted me. We went on in the diligence pre- sently, and passing through a gorge came into a new world ; chestnuts, walnuts, and mulberries began as if by magic, and vineyards on the hillsides and all the Italian landscape which is so beautiful. In the grass under the chestnuts I saw more flowers than I have yet seen this time in Switzerland, but no cyclamens, though we found them, if you remember, in a like country from Pre m la, downwards."

Here it is more the pity which the poor little cat's fate excites in him than the scenery which chiefly charms us. We find no transcript in the letters of travel of such poems as the two to the author of " Obermann," or those on the "Grande Chartreuse." There is nothing even of that kind of genius for geography which Arnold had inherited from his father,

and which comes out so vividly in his poems on the English lakes and on the Swiss passes. We seldom even recall such descriptions as that of the Gemmi Pass :—

"In front the awful Alpine track Climbs up its rocky stair ;

The autumn storm-winds drive the rack, Close o'er it in the air.

Behind are the abandoned baths, Mute in the meadows lone, The leaves are on the valley paths, The mists are on the Rhone."

The truth is that it took something more than letter-writing fully to kindle Matthew Arnold. The sympathy elicited by living personal intercourse did it, and the mingled toil and passion of imaginative composition did it, but correspondence did not usually do it. His letters are genial, tender, some- times playful, but they are not often passionate in the sense in which his poems are passionate,—that is, written in the mood in which the inner depths of his nature showed themselves. In a very interesting letter to his sister, Mrs. Forster, written from Martigny in 1858, he expresses his sympathy with Goethe's feeling that be could not write his beat while distracted by practical duties and cares. Goethe, he says, thought that he could have written several good

tragedies, but that in order to write them he must have been " sehr zerriesen,"—in other words, moved to the very bottom of his heart,—and that he dared not be so moved while there was so much that he needed a calm judgment and a busy mind in order to do well. And Arnold felt the same. His mind was too full of his practical duties to spare for poetry the full room needed to kindle intense imaginative life. His letters are pleasant, interesting, simple, unaffected, often even lively. But they have not the buoyancy and elan either of his poetry or even of his conversation. He was not excited by letter-writing. He only half-realised that living contact of mind with mind which sometimes kindles correspondence even more than it kindles talk. He was not a reserved man in talk. He seems almost a reserved man in his letters. They are written in a tone much more subdued than that of his talk or of his compositions whether in verse or often even in prose.