MATTHEW ARNOLD'S POPULARITY.

MATTHEW ARNOLD can hardly be called a popular poet, but yet he is a poet who is probably more especially popular with the literary class than any other poet of our day. Messrs. Macmillan have just issued the thirteenth reprint of the selected poems as he himself chose them in 1878, so that there has been a reprint of this little volume of Selections very nearly once in every year since it was first issued. Yet we should have thought that a small volume of selected poems would hardly have sold so well, in the case of an author the bulk of whose whole poetical work was so moderate, as the poems themselves. And it is likely enough that this may be actually the case. For it is very probable that the greater number of those who buy the selected poems for their small size, may really possess some complete edition of the poems as well, using the Selections only for the purpose of carrying about from place to place. Fasci- nating as the selected poems are, we can hardly say that they are at all more fascinating, in proportion to their bulk, than the poems from which they are selected. It cannot even be asserted that they contain specimens of all Matthew Arnold's most characteristic work. For they do not contain either " Geist's Grave" or "Poor Matthias," though the poems on his dog and his daughter's canary are some of the most unique and characteristic of all his productions. Nor have they "The Sick King of Bokhara ; " nor the fine poems on the author of " Obermann,"—perhaps the finest he ever wrote; nor, again, the stanzas from "The Grande Chartreuse;" nor the lines at Heine's grave, which contain the great passage on England, as the weary Titan, "with labour-dimm'd eyes, staggering on to her goal, bearing, on shoulders immense, Atlantean, the load, well-nigh not to be borne, of the too vast orb of her fate." Now, almost all these we have just named are poems which are specially characteristic of Matthew Arnold, and of which those who know him well think at once, whenever they wish to discriminate what is most individual in his genius ; so that it certainly cannot even be maintained that there are specimens of all his most typical poems in the little volume of Selections, though there are hardly a dozen of the number that one would be willing to exchange for others of equal length. Wordsworth is positively improved by judicious selection ; so, indeed, is Shelley, and Browning, and Buchanan, and so, most of all, is Swinburne. But Matthew Arnold was so select in what he wrote, that any selection neces- sarily excludes what it seems almost barbarous to exclude, and what oannoVbe excluded without sacrificing a special feature of his poetry, as well as mere replicas of a class. There are few poets, indeed, the poetical effect of whose works you would not positively improve by weeding out some fifty or even a hundred of their poems. But you could hardly weed out more than a score of Matthew Arnold's poems without gravely injuring the total effect. Nothing can better show how little he wrote that was not of fine and separate quality.

The first characteristic we should select from amongst those wliich make his poems popular with the literary class, is that rare carving of his words, which makes so many of his single lines and phrases intellectually memorable. For instance, this of Shakespeare :— " We ask and ask. Thou smilest and art still, Out-topping knowledge."

Of death

Though nothing can dismarNe now The smoothness of that limpid brow."

Of the flatteries of love :— "Au, not the nectarous poppies lovers use,

Nor daily labour's dull Lethasan spring, Oblivion in lost angels can infuse Of the soil'd glory and the trailing wing,"

Of the solitude of the heart :— "And bade betwixt our shores to be The unplumb'd, salt, estranging, sea."

Of a momentary relaxation in the poignancy of remorse :— " I staunch with ice my burning breast,

With silence balm my whirling brain, Oh Brendan, to that hour of rest, The Yoppe beggar's ease was pain."

Of the helplessness of memory :— "And we forget because we must, And not because we will."

Of the frugality of the will :—

"And tasks in hours of insight will'd May be in hours of gloom fulfill'd."

Of the insatiable soul of the Roman noble :— " He made a feast, drank fierce and fast, And crown'd his hair with flowers ; No easier nor no quicker pealed The impracticable hours."

Of the hurry of the English practical man :— We "see all sights from pole to pole, And glance and nod and bustle by, And never once possess our soul

Before we die.'

And instances like these of perfect carving in a few short words we could multiply largely with the greatest ease.

Then how great and refreshing was Arnold as a descriptive poet. Shall we ever have again such soul-resting pictures of the Thames, of the scenery near Oxford, of "those wide fields of breezy grass, where black-wing'd swallows haunt the glittering Thames," amid the "red loose-strife and blond meadow-sweet" of the summer term P And when again shall we have such cool, enchanting pictures of the green alps of Switzerland, and see " —darkness steal o'er the wet grass, With the pale crocus starr'd,

And reach that glimmering sheet of glass Beneath the piny sward, Lake Leman's waters far below,"

as we have so often had in his 4ngularly cool and refresh- ing poems? We know no poet,—not even Gray,—whose descriptive poetry refreshes and rests the soul like Matthew Arnold's.

But we have left Arnold's greatest characteristic still untouched. It is as a poet of elegy, as a singer of regret, that Matthew Arnold was greatest, at once so pathetic and so buoyant. Even in his passion of regret for his favourite dog, written, as the present writer remembers hearing himself attesting, with tears literally raining down his cheeks, his pathos is at once pathetic and elastic. You feel his grief profoundly, and yet there is an. elasticity in the poem which makes even the grief comparatively soothing. No poet gives us the buoyancy which, though it offers no consolation, nay, often expressly refuses it, yet bears you along the current of a passionate regret with such a sense of life, rather than loss, in the singer, as Matthew Arnold does in his elegies. He reminds his sister in the fine lines headed " Re3ignation " (which do not really describe Resignation at all, but a very different thing, that bounding of the heart underneath the sense of irreparable loss which promises new life beyond the loss), how, as children, they had crossed one of the passes in the Westmoreland hills and got down to the sea, probably somewhere near Whitehaven :— "But Fausta, I remember well

That as the balmy darkness fell We bath'd our hands with speechless glee That night in the wide-glimmering sea."

And somehow even in the saddest of his elegies, you seem to find him bathing his hands, not exactly with speechless glee, but with a certain bounding of the heart that defies regret to paralyse him, "in the wide-glimmering sea." Take the two poems to the author of " Obermann ; " both of them are in the essence of their doctrine, almost hopeless poems, or at least the hope to which they cling is so fanciful, so much of a mere straw, that if that were all, you would say their teaching was pure despair ; and yet the buoyancy and elasticity in them is quite irresistible. He says farewell to Obermann in the first of these thus :— " Farewell ! under the sky we part, In this stern Alpine glen.

Oh, unstrung will oh, broken heart! A last, a last farewell."

But the whole poem conveys that, whether M. de S6nancour's will was unstrung and his heart broken, or not, Matthew Arnold's certainly was not. He was clearly off to fresh woods and pastures new. It is the same with the second poem addressed to the author of " Obermann." He closes that fine poem with the following buoyant verses :— " Still in my soul the voice I heard

Of Obermann ! Away I turned; by some vague impulse stirr'd, Along the rocks of Nays.

Past Sonchaud's piny flanks I gaze, And the blanch'd summit bare Of Malatrait to where in haze • The Valais opens fair, And the domed Volan with his snows Behind the uperowding hills, Doth all the heavenly opening close Which the Rhone's murmur fills :— And glorious there, without a sound Across the glimmering lake, High in the Valais-dopth profound I saw the morning break."

Evidently that dawn brought Mr. Arnold more brightness than " Obermann " had brought him gloom. And the stanzas from "The Grande Chartreuse," though they take leave of his passionately regretted faith, end with the same note of almost triumphant life. "The Buried Life," again, is one of the most characteristic of these poems of buoyant sadness,—poems with no consolation in them, but with a spring of life so fresh that it seems to defy the need of consolation. He describes first the airs and floating echoes "that convey a melancholy into all our day," and then he goes on :— " Only—but this is rare,—

When a belov6d hand is laid in our's, When, jaded with the rush and glare Of the interminable hours, Our eyes can in another's eyes read clear, When our world-deafened ear Is by the tones of a loved voice caress'd- A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again. The eye sinks inward and the heart lies plain, And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know. A man becomes aware of his life's flow, And hears its winding murmur ; and he sees The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze."

That is Matthew Arnold's mood all through his exquisite elegies. They are all sad, but buoyant in their sadness. They discourage faith and chill hope, but they have such a high pulse beating in them that they never leave the reader cheer- less in spite of their melancholy.