ARNOLD'S POEMS. * Ma. ARNOLD has collected from two volumes published
in 1849 and 18.52 those poems of which his maturer judgment approves, and, with some others not before published, has formed them into the single volume now given to the public with the author's name. We find neither in reperusing the poems on which this journal has already passed some opinion, nor in reading those that are new, any ground for modifying our general judgment. " Sohrab and Rus- tum," the longest of the new contributions, is mainly characterized by a studied sobriety of colouring, and a revival of the formal simile-making of the olden epic, which, with its quaint iteration of "As when," &c. occurring at almost every slight change of action or feeling, gives it even more the air of an intentional imitation than perhaps really belongs to it. Apart from its form, it does not paint scenery or represent character and passion with sufficient power, or abound in single thoughts and images of sufficient beauty or depth, to induce us to change our opinion that Mr. Arnold has culture rather than originality, writes verses because he has read the poets rather than because Nature has given him a creative faculty and, bound him to the necessity of uttering his knowledge and experience in song. The Church of Brou, the only other no- velty of considerable length, falls below most of the compositions of this volume, though the Schiller-like ballad forming the first part or canto is not amiss as an imitation of Schiller. " Empedocles on Etna," which gave its name to the volume published last year, the author has omitted, not because, as he says," I had in my own opinion failed in the delineation which I intended to effect," but because the delineation of mental suffering which finds no vent in action, and is unrelieved by incident, hope, or resistance; is one from which, however accurate, no poetical enjoyment can be derived, and is therefore resthetically faulty. Mr. Arnold states his reason for excluding Empedoeles, because he is anxious to protest against an opinion which he attributes to "many critics of the present day," that poetical subjects should not be chosen from distant times and countries. As he accompanies his protest with a quo- tation from our journal, and makes it the text for a preface of thirty pages, we are bound in courtesy and by inclination to touch lances with him in this quarrel, and at least to clear up some mis- apprehensions into which he appears to have fallen as to the bear- ing of the passage he selects in illustration of the false criticism of the present day. "'The poet,' it is said, and by an apparently intelligent critic, 'who would really fix the public attention must leave the exhausted past, and draw his subjects from matters of present import, and therefore both of interest and novelty.' Now, this view I believe to be completely false."—Arnold's Pre- face, page ix.
Mr. Arnold argues, that " the modernness or antiquity of an action has nothing to do with its fitness for poetical representation ; this depends upon its inherent qualities." Citing "Achilles, Pro- metheus, Clytemnestra, Dido," he asks-
" What modern poem presents personages as interesting, even to us mo-
derns, as these pertionages of an exhausted past' ? We have the domes- tic epic dealing with the details of modern life which pass daily under our eyes; we have poems representing modern personages in contact with the problems of modern life, moral, intellectual, and social : these works have been produced by poets the most distinguished of their nation and time ; yet I fearlessly assert that Hermann and Dorothea, Childe Harold, Jocelyn! The Excursion, leave the reader cold in comparison with the effect produced upon him by the latter books of the Iliad, by the Orestea, or by the episode of Dido. And why is this ?—simply because in the three latter cases the action is greater, the personages nobler, the situations more intense ; and this is the true basis of the interest in a poetical work, and this alone."
Much of this is so obvious, that we rather wonder Mr. Arnold
should have supposed an "apparently intelligent critic" capable of denying it, or have thought it necessary to his own case to make an extremely unfair comparison between the acknowledged master- pieces of Homer, ..Eschylus, and Virgil, and certain modern poems, which, whatever may be their merit, neither belong to the same class as those with which he compares them, nor are, in two of the cases at least, the grandest works of their authors, and certainly fall immeasurably short, in respect of epic and dramatic qualities, of many works of English, German, and French litera- ture. Such a comparison betrays in Mr. Arnold a desire to win an argumentative victory, rather than to arrive at truth. Were we arguing with 'Mr. Arnold the relative merits of ancient and modern poetry, we should "fearlessly assert" that Othello, Ham- I let, Lady Macbeth, and Juliet—all, be it remembered, the crea- • Poems. By Isiattbew Arnold. A New Edition. Published by Longmans. tions of one genius—would outweigh in interest " to us moderns" the four eminent personages he calls into court ; we should fear- lessly assert that the " Paradise Lost " was as grand and interest- ing an epic as the Iliad ; that Dante was as profound as 2Eschylus, Shakspere as calm, wise, and genial as Sophoeles ; that "The Excursion" was as good philosophic poetry as the "De Rerum Naturi," which is its nearest ancient analogue, though far enough from resembling it either in treatment or subject. But such a dis- cussion would be unprofitable in itself, and would have, besides, no bearing on the question standing for settlement, which is not whether modern or ancient society has produced the greatest poets and the finest poetry, but whether the poet of the nineteenth century should seek the subjects of his art in the facts he gathers out of an- cient Greek books, rather than in the world of his own experience, action, and emotion. The passage we have quoted from Mr. Arnold argues against us, as if we could have meant to make the poetic fitness of a subject depend on mere dates ; as if we had asserted that great actors, grand characters, forms of beauty or of terror,. lost these qualities by the simple fact of having been manifested two or three thousand years ago, or that these were not the sub- jects on which the poet's imagination was to be primarily exercised. We meant, of course, to make no such assertions ; but noticing a variety of small poems, in which several of the subjects were drawn from common historical incidents such as poetasters use for Annuals, or from occurrences with which the present age has little or nothing in common, we laid down the general maxim that the poet must seek such subjects as both he and his audience could realize vividly and distinctly, and which dealt with ideas and feelings suffi- ciently akin to those of our living world, to be not only grasped by an act of intellectual apprehension, but appropriated by an act of moral sympathy. And such subjects we conceived, and still do conceive, are- to be found in modern times more easily and more abundantly than in ancient times ; not that the question is at all one of dates, but of changes of thought, feeling, and manners, that the lapse of time has brought with it, and also of the destruction and passing away of that ancient life of which fragments indeed have floated down. to us but of which we have the extremest difficulty in forming a full adequate conception, such as alone can satisfy in a poetic re- presentation.
Mr. Arnold, however, differs from us in this opinion and asserts that, though the modern poet cannot know the "externals of a past action with the precision of a contemporary," he can know " its essentials." How entirely Mr. Arnold confuses the real dis- tinction implied in our use of the words past and present is seen by his saying—" The outward man of CEdipus or of Macbeth, the houses in which they lived, the ceremonies of their courts, he can- not accurately figure to himself; but neither do they essentially concern him : his business is with their inward man, with their feelings and behaviour in certain tragic situations which engage their passions as men ; these have in them nothing local and casual ; they are as accessible to the modern poet as to a contem- porary." Because the historical Macbeth lived a thousand years ago, Mr. Arnold classes the Macbeth of our great dramatist as a subject of the past, in the same sense as the mythic legend of CE- dipus, which belongs to an epoch of religion, social relations, and philosophy, difficult to apprehend even by close study of its frag- ments, quite impossible to present to oneself as a concrete and living whole. With the exception of the objective form given to. the temptings of Alacbeth's ambition, nothing in the thought or passion of the play is alien from the spirit of modern life : the tra- ditions of our own history enable us without difficulty to realize even the externals of the action exactly as they were imagined by the poet ; and the existence of witches if it has generally departed from among us as an actual belief, has darkened too many pages of our own history, has furnished too many familiar tales of horror, is too closely akin to many superstitions still rife, and even re- viving, among us, to render the active belief of these powers of darkness any obstacle to our full enjoyment of and undoubting acquiescence in the situations and motives of the play. Thus, Macbeth and every other poem which is raised upon a moral and intellectual groundwork of feelings and ideas, the same as that on which the life of the audience to which it addresses itself is based, appeal to conceptions and sympathies already in existence and in daily exercise. The effort required for receiving the full impres- sion of the poet's representation is not mainly, if at all, an act of intellectual analysis and patient reconstruction of parts, each of which being unfamiliar demands separate study for its real- ization, but a delightful activity of the whole man in presence of a great object which is sufficiently familiar, and has elements enough in common with his actual life to raise his sympathies, and at the same time is individualized and heightened by the genius of the poet so as to powerfully excite the intellectual appe- tite, and by thus blending the old and new, the like and the un- like' leaves no faculty of the man inactive, vacant, or undelighted. But all this is changed when a poem is presented to an audience with whose actual life it has but faint and feeble elements in com- mon, and much that is utterly alien and unaccustomed. And this seems to us the ease with the poetry of ancient Greece, and that publics the best means of fixing whose attention is the point in question. For again, in following Mr. Arnold, we have been led rather to discuss the capacity of the moderns to enjoy ancient poetry than the capacity of ancient subjects for modern poetic treatment. Even to enjoy ancient poetry, a modern has to become familiar with and to breathe freely in a moral atmosphere so different from his own, as to involve a total and essential change of religion and worship, with all their concomitant sentiments and ideas; a vast
change in the relations of the sexes, with corresponding change in the whole range of ideas and sentiments connected with this as a centre, and ramifying through all social and individual life ; an al- most entire reversal of the estimate and interest attached to political and private life; manifold changes resulting from physical organiza- tion, and sensibility to external objects ; a totally different political system ; these, and countless other differences the man who would enjoy Greek poetry as he enjoys the poetry of his own age and country must not only understand as facts with his intellect, and be able to construct out of them an objective representation of Greek life, but must so by effort of imagination and constant habit imbue himself with Greek ways of thinking and feeling, as that his loves and his hates, his hopes, fears, and desires, sway to and fro under the influences of objects presented in poetry just as an Athenian's would have done. To accomplish this self-abnegation, and this power of putting on for a time another existence, to the full extent is impossible ; it is very bard to do it sufficiently to rid oneself of a sense of coldness and mere scientific interest in
Greek poetry, except indeed in isolated passages which are com- mon to all time, because they deal with passions common to all times and all countries, and of which the modes of expression do not materially alter. Allowing, however, the largest possible latitude to this exception, does Mr. Arnold think that the public whose attention is to be fixed has gone through, or is likely to go through, the preliminary process requisite for any considerable en- joyment of representations of ancient life, even as it is presented in the masterpieces of Greek poetry? And if not, to come at last to the real question between us, does Mr. Arnold think that he or any modern can present Greek life truly, and yet invest it with a more profound interest for the general English public, than the old Greek poets have done ? This is the form in which we would ask him to put the question to himself. For, of course, the question is of the presentation of Greek life with its essential modes of thought and feeling, not of selecting Greek names for his heroes, and Greek scenery for his background, and putting the nineteenth century into masquerade. This is what most poets have done when they have selected ancient subjects. Those poets who are thought to have succeeded with subjects chosen from an age remote from their own, and demanding the representa- tion of manners and types of character not to be found in the world about them, are in the first place men of quite exceptional genius; and, in the second place, have shown their capacity to write fine poems conceived in the spirit and embodying the ideas of their own times. We do not presume to limit the power of imagination in extraordinary men, but to point out certain difficulties that lie in the way of poets of average faculty, if they determine to select ancient rather than contemporary life for the subject of their art, If Mr. Arnold will first write Othello and Twelfth Night, he shall have carte blanche to select his next subject from Lempriere or Smith's Biographical Dictionary. Or, let him only make out of a fresh subject a fine poem that shall stir the heart, nourish the reason, and gratify the taste, and he shall have henceforth, we will warrant him, the most perfect liberty to range Parnassus and scale Olympus, and no critic shall presume to question his judgment or to call for his passport. Mr. Arnold seems to us to have first confounded the pleasure he himself, after long study, is capable of receiving from Greek poetry, with an assumed capacity in the public, after no study, for the same enjoyment ; next to have confounded the capacity of en- joying ancient poems with the faculty of producing poems similar in tone on similar subjects. He seems to forget that Greek life is not presenting to us moderns its living forms, its graceful move- ments, its deep musical voices, its myriad-minded activities and susceptibilities, its ebb and flow of thoughts and feelings about life and death, about the earth and the gods, about men and women and children. It told its message to the poets, and they have told it to us : but to us it speaks no more, gives us nothing new that we can tell to others ; only what it told to poets who listened to its living utterances can we interpret with difficulty back again from words into what words stand for and help to preserve the memory of. It is of course a question of degree ; some faint echoes we can catch of that world of thought and action that has passed away, but too vague, too low, for the melodies that are to stir the hearts, too thin for the harmonies that are to penetrate and temper the souls of a modern people. The scholar in his study may rejoice to listen to them in the deep silence of his solitude ; the poet may not unfitly blend them with the rich full tones of the living world that supply the substance of his song ; but since the sounds were uttered, of which they are the echoes, the world has gone on changing for two or three thousand years—has changed its religion, has changed its social life, has changed its political system, its philosophies, its sciences, its material arts. How idle would be the attempt to re- call any of these, though the study of them as stages in the world's progress, as having alike in their birth and death witnessed to and nourished the great life of humanity, is and ever will be profoundly interesting and instructive. It is so, too, with the poetry of the past ; involving all these other elements, changing as they change, perishing as they perish, only to pass into new forms. Idle, too, is the attempt to revive it, like all such attempts; ending in the composition of a mummy, not the creation of a life. And so Mr. Arnold, attempting to revive Greek poetry, and resolving not to be the Englishman that God has made him, ends in being nothing, neither Greek nor Englishman ; and, forgetting that the elemental passions, though not to be confounded with their local and casual modes, yet must be exhibited in some mode, and determining not tO represent them in the English mode, witioh he knows and feels,
succeeds in representing no human passions at all, but abstract moods of mind if anything; and in the earlier of his two principal Greek poems, "The Stray'd Reveller," so thoroughly succeeds his attempt to get rid of all that his life has taught him, that an Oxford wit aptly characterized the poem, when, by a very slight change of letters, he called it the Stray Driveller. There is lesson in the witticism, though a somewhat bitter joke for Mr. Arnold's palate.
The truth is that when a poet seeks for subjects as far removed as possible from the region of his own knowledge and the life of his times, it already indicates weakness of the imaginative faculty and the moral sympathies which supply that faculty with its ma- terials. He turns from that which lies before his feet, and which he is placed in the world to know, because he has not the insight that can comprehend its significance. He turns to the dim past, or to the dimmer future, not because he comprehends their signifi- cance more clearly, or finds richer food there for his elementary passions, for his true humanity, but because there he can be vague and dreamy, and indulge his self-will, without being brought into comparison with facts. Mr. Arnold speaks with self-satisfied-irony of those who talk of their mission and of interpreting their age. These phrases, like all others that have a meaning, may have passed into cant, and be used, as he says, in the merest delirium of vanity. Will he call it cant if we suggest to him, that the mission of genius is to do the special work of genius; and that this special work consists in discerning the elements of beauty and of grandeur that the spirit of man can develop today, under the conditions of today, not in vain attempts to fly from those conditions into the primeval forests of old Greece, and recreate the life of Dryad and of Faun. That, even could it be done successfully, would be to neglect the work of the world for beautiful dreaming. And when Mr. Arnold asks what special fitness the present age has for supplying poetical subjects, and answers his own question by calling it an age wanting in moral grandeur, and an age of spiritual discomfort, it might be sufficient to reply, that an age of spiritual discomfort needs more than any other its interpreter, who shall declare its sickness and point out its cure; and that, specially fitted or not to supply poetical subjects, it is here, in the midst of this age, that his Maker has planted him, for the especial purpose, if he really possess poetical faculties, of showing how man conquers circumstances, and is in his own spirit the fountain of beauty and strength and all that makes the elements of poetry. What a mean and cowardly mood it is, this scorn and dislike of one's own time !—a transparent excuse to one's own conscience for not labouring in the post to which one is appointed, as Plato has it ; a thin veil for that practical atheism and despair which thinks there is no order, no law, no good, because one happens to have the stomach-ache. We have no doubt that Mr. Arnold is in his own person as free from this taint as the son of his father ought to be and that the expressions in which he seems to indulge the mood have but fallen from his pen in a natural eagerness to defend his own prae,- lice in poetry. We believe from his poem of "Tristram and Iseult," that if he would utterly abjure for the future all attempts to repro- duce Pagan Greek poetry, and would write what he himself feels, knows, and has seen and experienced in life, he might write poems not indeed of the first rank, but quite worth writing, and quite sure to be read. Nay, if he would study the life of the men and women around him, and find out the real poetry of that, it is not unlikely that he would be the better able, should he still hanker after it, to give us something more of the poetry, in other words of the reality, of that old Greek life, than he has yet done. But we suspect that he would find that he had opened a richer vein, and would be in no hurry to desert it. Mr. Arnold has doubtless read Alton Locke. There is a speech of Sandy Mackaye which will serve to clinch all that we have been saying. When the young tailor reads to the old Sootehman his poem about the Pacific Islands, Sandy bursts out- " Coral Islands! Pacific! What do ye ken about Pacifies? Are ye a Cockney or a Cannibal Islander? Diana stand there, ye gowk, as fusionless as a doeken, but tell me that! Whaur do ye live ?" "What do ye mean, Mr. Maekaye ?" asked I with a doleful and disap- pointed visage. "Mean !—why, if God had meant ye to write about Pacifies, He'd ha' put ye there ; and, because he means ye to write about London toon, He's put ye there—and gi'en ye an unco sharp taste o' the ways o't."
There lies the Whole philosophy needed to direct the ohoioe of poetical subjects. If any one cites against it Mr. Tennyson's Lotos-eaters, Enone, and Ulysses, we might reply, that in all three there is the nineteenth century musing on what three thousand years ago has told us of itself: but we prefer to say again that rules are not made for men of Mr. Tennyson's genius, nor do men of Mr. Tennyson's genius make safe rules for lesser folk to follow.
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