MATTHEW ARNOLD.

TN the great poet whom we have just lost, England is robbed of the spring of the most consoling influences ever closely blended with profound scepticism. Matthew Arnold was a singer on whose verses sceptics and believers alike loved to brood,—the sceptics, because his verse showed that a powerful mind which shared their doubts could still evince all the buoyancy, or (as Matthew Arnold himself pre- ferred to call it in speaking of Hebrew prophecy, which was to him but poetry of the higher kind) all the exhilaration usually attributed to faith; the believers, because his verse did such ample justice to the depth and magnitude of the void which had been left in his heart by the creed which he had put aside, and because it embodied so powerfully that long swell of religious feeling which the deeper Christian convictions leave behind them even when they have dis- appeared. We call him a great poet because he treated the greatest themes with true passion, though the passion was evinced in the shape of yearning for that divine strength on which the world had leaned without (as he thought) any adequate justification for so leaning, not in the shape of any exultant love for it. No one surely in this world who ascribed spiritual feeling to no higher source than the deep natural well-springs of the universal life, ever had so fine a sympathy with that feeling. "To make a great work pass into the popular mind," he wrote in his Bible-reading of Isaiah, "is not easy ; but the series of chapters at the end of the Book of Isaiah, the chapters con- taining the great prophecy of Israel's restoration,—have, as has Hebrew prophecy in general, but to a still higher degree than anything else in Hebrew prophecy, one quality which facilitates this passage for them : their boundless exhilara- tion. Much good poetry is profoundly melancholy; now the life of the people is such that in literature they require joy. If ever that good time coming' for which they long, was pre- sented with energy and magnificence, it is in these chapters ; it is impossible to read them without catching its glow." Matthew Arnold himself had caught this glow, though it was the glow of sunset and not the glow of sunrise. All his best poetry is steeped in its light, and animated by its exalted emotion. Even the exquisite lyrics which were almost his latest productions, the poems on " Geist's Grave" and "Poor Matthias," while they pour forth the almost despairing passion of tenderness with which he gazed across the chasm between the lower animals and man, suggest a sympathy between the creative life and some of even the less exalted of its works that lifts us on to the higher plane of spiritual insight. This is what Matthew Arnold had to say of a favourite dog that had lived only four years :— " 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 Seem'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 ?

Yes, only four, and not the course Of all the centuries yet to come, And not the infinite resource Of Nature, with her countless sum Of figures, with her fulness vast Of new creation evermore, Can ever quite repeat the past, Or just thy little self restore.

Stern law of every mortal lot Which man, proud man, finds hard to bear,

And builds himself I know not what Of second life, I know not where.

But thou, when struck thine hour to go On us, who stood despondent by, A meek last glance of love didst throw, And humbly lay thee down to die."

Who can read these pathetic lines without feeling that, whatever Matthew Arnold's explicit doctrine might be as to "the Stream of Tendency, not Ourselves, which makes for Righteousness," implicitly he attributed to the creative spirit the inspiration of that " Virgilian cry, the sense of tears in mortal things," and that delight in the humility with which such a little creature as Geist laid himself down to die, which he describes as reading its "homily to man"? There is an exaltation in the whole poem,—as well as in the equally beautiful poem on "Poor Matthias,"—which shows Matthew Arnold's instinctive feeling that, even in treading the lower levels of the universe, he is dealing as much with anticipations of higher things, as he is when he paints the passionate melancholy of the hermit of the Genevese Alps, or the yearning of sceptical Western thought for the ascetic faith of the Carthusian monks in their mountain solitudes. The exhilaration of faith, such exhilaration as Isaiah's, is not, indeed, for Matthew Arnold. He cannot get further than the exhilaration of a passionate sympathy with the attitude of mind which faith could produce. But that he always feels, and feels so deeply, that he engenders something akin to faith in those who have no faith. When he contrasts the East bowing low in "patient, deep disdain" before the heavy tramp of the Roman legions, or the vehement hurry of English energy with the passionless calm of the Indian sage who,— " Hoar-headed, wrinkled, clad in white, Without compassion, without speech By day and night, Pondering God's mysteries untold," lives "tranquil as the glacier-snows ;" when he contrasts the feverish force and passion of Byron with Goethe's intellectual calm and Wordsworth's healing spiritual touch ; when he contrasts the aimless tumult and frenzy of the French Revo- lution with the new life inspired by a spiritual creed ; when he contrasts the mocking and bitter irony of Heine with the spirit of peace which he himself desires to breathe, and which he attributes to the "spirit who fillest us all,"— he throws every mind that he dominates into an attitude of exaltation and serenity which, though very far from faith, is at least equally far from compliant acquiescence in a low- born destiny. And even if his exhilaration be born so much of an air-born dream that he cannot possibly communicate it adequately to the majority of those who heartily accept his distinctive teaching, yet it is at least of a kind to impress and bewilder them with its deep sense of infinite yearning and mysterious exaltation. As he himself says :— "Well may we mourn when the head Of a sacred poet lies low In an age which can rear them no more :

The complaining millions of men Darken in labour and pain.

But he was a priest to us all Of the wonder and bloom of the world, Which we saw with his eyes and were glad."

It is not exactly "the wonder and bloom of the world' which Matthew Arnold interprets for us ; but it 'is that sense of illumination and exaltation with which the buoyancy of the human intellect and of the human spirit is always filling him.

He will not hear of ascribing personality or any human quality to the "Stream of Tendency, not Ourselves, which makes for Righteousness ;" and yet he is so profoundly conscious of the force which drives the human spirit upwards into self-conquest and an exaltation that is only conceivable where the mind rises on the beat of some supporting wing, that one can hardly help saying of him what he said of every poet :— "Weak is the tremor of pain

That thrills in his mournfullest chord, To that which once ran through his soul ; Cold the elation of joy In his gladdest, airiest song, To that which of old in his youth Fill'd him and made him divine.

Hardly his voice at its best

Gives us a sense of the awe,

The vastness, the grandeur, the gloom Of the unlit gulph of himself."

There was always in Matthew Arnold's poetry the profound conviction that the animating power driving him to poetic pro- duction was much greater than any force which even his finest poem embodies.

Matthew Arnold has often been esteemed greater as a critic than as a poet. To this we demur. His criticism is always fine, always marked by distinction, generally true, but a little thin. It is the criticism of a poet who discriminates in his subject what most interests him, and leaves the rest without remark, His criticism on Heine, for instance, touches the revolutionary side of Heine, and but little else. His criticism of Shelley touches the angelic strain and the intellectual inconsequence of Shelley's poetry, and little else. Even his exquisite criticism of Homer, in the "Essays on Translating Homer," touches the style and not the substance of Homer. His criticism of Wordsworth, again, while it is most impressive and true so far as it goes, glides over the subject so as to evade many more of Wordsworth's characteristic features than it manages to outline. Most of his poems are, to use his own expression, "criticisms of life ;" but then, they are criticisms which select just what interests his own fine imagination, not criticisms intended to cover the whole subject ; and when he writes professedly as a critic, he expands the same kind of single impressions with which he deals as a poet. Critical interpretation was certainly not at all his most successful field. He criticised St. Paul only with a special object. He did not criticise his friend Clough at all, though he wrote the most beautiful of modern elegies upon his death. He criticised political thought in the same one-sided way, always limiting himself to the suggestion of some one particular idea. In some sense he was too original a writer to be a great critic. His themes interested him more by what they suggested to him than by the wish they inspired to delineate adequately the subject of his criticism. At the same time, he was always lucid and always showed an intellect in the highest degree detached in what he said, so that though he rarely wrote an adequate criticism, he always wrote a highly instructive one. It is quite too early to assign Matthew Arnold his place in English literature ; but doubtless it will fall somewhere be- tween Gray and Wordsworth, showing affinities with each.

He will certainly stand far higher than Gray, his workman- ship being as perfect and his mind far more affluent in poetical expression. He will fall below Wordsworth only because he wielded no power so massive and so full of inspiration, in spite of having a far clearer consciousness than Wordsworth had of his own aims and of the means by which he could attain them. For felicity of phrase, Matthew Arnold has few rivals. He showed this in his criticisms on life, in his handling of English Philistinism, in his happy criti- cism of Continental and English education, in his singularly skilful titles for essays, and in his humorous satires on the young "lions of the English Press." But he showed it far more perfectly in the distinctive phrases of his exquisitely transparent water-colour studies of Nature and Man. His "wet, bird-haunted English lawn ;" his "unplumbed, salt,

estranging sea;" his picture of the cottage-gardens, with their "roses that down the alleys shine afar;" his description of the

Scholar-Gipsy on the Thames near Oxford, "trailing in the cool stream his fingers wet ;" his account of M. de Senancour's reflections,—

" A fever in these pages burns

Beneath the calm they feign ; A wounded human spirit turns Here on its bed of pain ;"

his splendid image for Byron as bearing "from Europe to the ./Etolian shore, the pageant of his bleeding heart;" his delinea- tion of Sophocles, whose even-balanced soul— "Prom that youth tested up to extreme old age, Business could not make dull nor passion wild, Who saw life steadily and saw it whole; The mellow glory of the Attic stage,

Singer of sweet Colonus and his child ;"

with a hundred other delicately carved cameos, which gather up all the luminousness and all the lucidity of that clear

intellect, will be remembered as long as English literature exists. His own assertion is eminently true of himself,—

" Not deep the poet sees, but wide."

His theology or anti-theology is a mere series of superficial

observations made on the nature of man. His social criticisms are rather ironic attacks ex parte, than clear judgments. But his poetical insight into the intellectual aspects of the universe is the insight of a true naturalist, a naturalist who saw not only the external scene, but the interior panorama of man's wishes and aspirations :—

"Enough we live ! and if a life

With large results so little rife, Though bearable, seems hardly worth This pomp of worlds, this pain of birth; Yet, Fausta, the mute turf we tread, The solemn hills around us spread, This stream which falls incessantly,

The strange-scrawled rocks, the lonely sky—

If I might lend their life a voice Seem to bear rather than rejoice.

And even could the intemperate prayer Man iterates, while these forbear, For movement, for an ampler sphere, Pierce Fate's impenetrable ear ; Not milder is the general lot Because our spirits have forgot, In action's dizzying eddy whirled, The something that infects the world."

Of Matthew Arnold himself, it may be said that he seemed to "bear rather than rejoice." But he bore with an inward spring behind the fortitude, that gave endurance itself an air of exaltation. He never forgot "the something that infects the world," but he met that something with an elasticity and even an elation which contained in it a presage of victory.