[COPYRIGHT IN THE UNITED STATES OP AMERICA BY THE New

York Times.] Selections from Matthew Arnold's Poetry. Compiled by R. E. C. Houghton. (Methuen and Co. 3s. 6d. net.) IT may seem at first sight strange to call a little volume of selections from Matthew Arnold's poetry a Book of the

Moment. Yet in a very exact sense it is. The volume is a sign, and to me a very welcome sign, that the world is once more beginning to take Matthew Arnold's poetry seriously. Hitherto his has teen the blindest of all the blind spots for this generation in the region of poetry. For twenty years I have been expecting a revival, but instead of that I have

seen his poetic stock falling lower and lower, till at last it had become a bilise, almost an indiscretion, to quote Matthew Arnold in speech or on the printed page. But now bottom has been reached, and there are evident signs that the poet is coming into his own and, remember, to his own not merely in prose, for he always kept his place there, but in verse. And this is no mere swing of the pendulum, no artificial revival by pedants or discoverers. The revival of Matthew Arnold as a poet is due to the new epoch. He is beginning to appeal, and appeal intensely, to a generation to whom his own poignant

phrase may be applied—a generation "Whose youth in the fires of anguish bath died."

Matthew Arnold's genius matured in what we are soon going to discover, if we have not already discovered it, was

the annus miraUlis of the nineteenth century, the year 1847-48, the year of the first attempt at social revolution, the year in which the Hungry Forties with all their dis-

tractions, moral, intellectual, and economic, culminated, the year of revolution, the year of the Barricades, the year of thunder and eclipse.

Matthew Arnold was born in that period of reaction and relaxation which followed the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. From that epoch he learned much. No sooner, however, had he thought out his message of sweetness and light, reflection and humanity, the message of a Stoicism vitalized and purified by Christianity, than there came the revolutionary outburst, and with it a new age. But Matthew Arnold, though the change had come not the way he hoped for but through a violence and a disorder which he not merely deprecated but dreaded, maintained his calm and his belief in the essential goodness and nobility of the evolutionary processes of the world, in "the stream of tendency making for righteousness." He was a new Marcus Aurelius, and the fact that he had to live and work, not in a palace, but in a public office, made no difference to him and would have been recognized, we may be sure, by the Imperial Philosopher as being a thing immaterial. If ever man understood the freemasonry of the spirit and believed firmly that nothing else mattered but co-operation in the good and the beautiful, in truth and in reality, and in the recognition of and reconciliation with Nature, it was Matthew Arnold.

I have quoted very recently in these columns the lines in

Obennann Once More, in which the poet paints a world as

full of distraction and distress of mind as our own. At the end he makes Obermann speak to his disciple, in words which we may now pass on as Matthew Arnold's own admonition to those who at this moment "pine in life's disease." Properly understood, the stanzas bring not merely understanding, but consolation :

" Despair not thou as I despaired Nor be cold gloom thy prison ! Forward the gracious hours have fared, And see the aim is risen.

He melts the icebergs of the past, A green, new earth appears,

Millions, whose life in ice lay fast, Have thoughts, and smiles, and tears.

The world's great order dawns in sheen After long darkness rude, Divinelier imaged, clearer seen, With happier seal pursued.

• -• •4••■• • •

Though more than half thy years be past, And spent thy youthful prime ; Though, round thy firmer manhood east, Hang weeds of our sad time, Whereof thy youth felt all the spell, And traversed all the shade— Though late, though dimin'd, though weak, yet ten Hope to a world new-made I Help it to reach our deep desire, The dream which fill'd our brain, Filed in our soul a thirst like fire Immedicable pain What still of strength is left, employ, That end to help men gain ; Ono mighty wavc of thought and joy Lifting mankind amain I"

Here is the same lesson which is to be found in the earlier Obermann poem. There, too, he told us that, in spite of all the phenomena of change and unrest, we must keep the equal mind. It was comparatively easy for the men who, like Goethe, had been reared in a tranquil world, to bear "the blast of Europe's stormiest time."

"But we, brought forth and rotted in hours Of change, alarm, surprise— What shelter to grow ripe is ours What leisure to grow wise ?

Like children bathing on the shore, Buried a wave beneath,

The second wave succeeds, before We have had time to breathe."

But it is difficult to epitomize Matthew Arnold's attitude to his own age of revolution in practice and to our age in prophetic projection. His poems are full of lessons for us, but they must be studied in the whole rather than in quota- tions and summaries. Yet two more excerpts on this subject must be given. Take the sonnet entitled "Youth's Agitations."

'`When I shall be divorced, some ten years hence, From this poor present self which I am now ;

When youth has done its tedious vain e.x-pense

Of passions that for ever ebb and flow; Shall I not joy youth's heats are left bhind, And breathe more happy in an even clime ?

An no I for then I shall begin to find A thousand virtues in this hated time.

Then I shall wish its agitations back, And all its thwarting currents of desire ; Then I shall praise the heat which then I lack, And call this hurrying fever, generous tire, And sigh that one thing only has been lout To youth and age in common—discontent."

The last words have a deep meaning for our epoch. Who that is past sixty at this moment does not feel that through their sympathy in suffering the youth and the old man may join hands across the comfortable intervening generations that spread from thirty to sixty ?

It must not be supposed from the quotations I have made that Matthew Arnold's sympathies were with revolution. The poem, "Progress," in spite of a certain want of intelli- gibility and the uncouthness in many places of its phrases, must be carefully read by those who want to understand Matthew Arnold's attitude in order to get from it the help and guidance which he is able to give. He describes how

"The Master stood upon the mount and taught. He saw a fire in His disciples' eyes ;

The old law,' they said, is wholly come to naught I Behold the new world rise ! ' "

To that challenge He replied that they must keep the old law, not less but more faithfully than the Scribes and Pharisees

whom they scorned :—

"Too hasty heads for ordering worlds, alas ! Think not that I to annul the law have will'd ; No jot, no tittle from the law shall pass, Till all hath been fulfill'd."

And now comes the application of the poem :-- "So Christ said eighteen hundred years ago. And what then shall be said to those to-day Who cry aloud to lay the old world low To clear the new world's way ?

'Religious fervoure ! ardour misapplied !

Hence, hence,' they cry, ye do but keep man blind I

But keep him self-immersed, preoccupied. And lame the active mind.'

Ah ! from the old world let some one answer give : • Scorn ye this world, their tears, their inward course? I say unto you, see that your souls live A deeper life than theirs.

• Say ye : The spirit of man has found new roads, And we must leave the old faiths, and walk therein Leave then the Cross as ye have left carved gods, But guard the fire within !

'Bright, else, and fast the stream of life may roll, And no man may the other's hurt behold ; Yet each will have one anguish—his own soul Which perishes of cold.'

Here let that -,oice make end ! then let a strain From a far lonelier distance, like the wind Be heard, floating through heaven, and fill again These mon's profoundest mind."

What the voice said contains the master-thought of Matthew Arnold's inner life—the need of due service to Nature. "The unseen Power," whose eyes are always watching mankind, has, he tells us, looked on no religion with scorn—at any rate, upon no religion which has taught weak-willed men to master their wills, and has cried to "sunk, self-weary man : Thou must be born again."

"Children of men ! not that your age excel In pride of life the ages of your sires,

But that you think clear, feel deep, bear fruit well, The Friend of man desires."

Here is Arnold's message. Vre are not to exult in the pride of life, but are in true purity of heart to keep touch with Truth;

that is what he means by thinking clearly. To think clearly and deeply, and to give your heart its right to bear good fruit. But that is what the Master demands—nay, commands.

I have spent too much time, though that is perhaps natural in such a week as the present, on Matthew Arnold's message on the social and political side of human existence. He had an even greater and more intense message for the conduct of man's inner life. There is no more poignant and in a sense no more tragic poem in our whole literature than his poem, "The Youth of Man." Yet up till now it has been strangely neglected, and, curiously enough, is left out of the little anthology of Matthew Arnold spoken of above. "The Youth of Man," which belongs to the '48 period, begins with an invocation to Nature ; and here I must point out that by Nature Matthew Arnold meant something more than what we now mean by Nature. He means the whole environment of man in the universe, and also what we now call the life urge, or life spirit. We depart, but Nature watched us with a "mild and inscrutable calm." And then he goes on like a Greek chorus to tell us that it is

"Well for us that the Power • Which in our morning prime Saw the mistakes of our youth, Sweet, and forgiving, and good, Sees the contrition of age ! '

Then comes the tragic note. He describes a pair of old people looking out over the noble champaign of the Thames Valley, from Richmond. It is thus that he envisages them:—

" Behold, 0 Nature, this pair !

See them to-night where they stand, Not wi h the halo of youth Crowning their brows with its light, Not with the sunshine of hope, Not with the rapture of spring, Which they had of old, when they stood Years ago at my side In this self-same garden, and said We are young, and the world is ours, For man is the king of the world.

Fools that these mystics are Who prate of Nature ! but she Has neither beauty, nor warmth, Nor life, nor emotion, nor power.

But Man has a thousand gifts, And the generous dreamer invests The senseless world with them all.

Nature is nothing ! her charm Lives in our eyes which can paint, Lives in our hearts which can feel ! ' "

Nature listened and was mute, and the days passed, and Time " brush'd off the bloom from their souls." It clouded and dimmed their vision and made their hearts languid. Youth was no longer there to quicken their pulses. Within the walls of an ever-narrowing world they drooped, "grew blind, and grew old." There follows an invocation to Nature to leave not a human soul to grow old in darkness

and pain."

Here theyittid to-night- Here, where this grey balustrade Crowns the still valley : behind Is the castled hunse with its woods .

•

Which shelter'd their childhood, the sun On its ivied windows : a scent From the grey-wall'd gardens, a 'breath Of the fragrant stock and the pink Perfumes the evening air.

Their children play on the lawns. They stand and listen : • • • • ... • - Hush ! for tears

Begin to steal to their eyes.

Hush ! for fruit Grows from such sorrow as theirs.

And they remember With piercing untold anguish The proud boasting of their youth. And they feel how Nature was fair.

And the mists of delusion, And the scales of habit, Fall away from their eyes.

And they see, for a moment, Stretching out, like the desert In its weary, unprofitable length, Their faded, ignoble lives."

The poem, many people will think, should have ended here. Yet, and though the great note is not sustained, Matthew Arnold was perhaps right to make some attempt at consola- tion after lines fraught with a pathos so terrible. He bids the man whose "locks are yet brown on his head" and whose "soul still looks through his eyes," to

"Yearn to the greatness of Nature ! Rally the good in the depths of thyself "

What an impossible task I attempted when I started to set forth the spirit of Matthew Arnold in three columns of a newspaper ! I have given, I fear, not only a very imperfect, but a distorted view of Matthew Arnold's message. All I can do by way of amends is to urge, not men of my own age, for they do not need it so much and will not understand it so well, but the youth, the men and women of the present generation, to open their Matthew Arnolds and close their Tennysons and their Swinburnes. Those who are of good intent will not fail to find support for all I have said.

As an envoi to my criticism I will quote the second4 sonnet, "To a Republican Friend, 1848" :— " Yet, when I T1111136 on what life is, I seem

• Rather to patience prompted, than that proud - Prospect of hope which France proclaims so loud, France, fam'd in all great arts, in none supreme. Seeing this Vale, this Earth, whereon we dream, Is on all sides o'ershadow'd by the high Uno'erleap'd Mountains of Necessity,

Sparing us narrower, margin than we deem. Nor will that day dawn at a human nod, When, bursting through the network superpos'd By selfish occupation—plot and plan,

Lust, avarice, envy—liberated man, All difference with his fellow man compos'd, Shall be left standing face to face with God."

Could there be a better or more greatly needed admonition for our own day than these noble words ?

J. ST. Lox STRACHEY.