OUR GREAT ELEGIAC POET.

WE should hardly have thought Lord Coleridge's com- parison between Matthew Arnold and Horace, in the interesting speech which he delivered on Saturday last, when the new bust of Matthew Arnold was unveiled in the Bap tiatery of Westminster Abbey, a very apposite one. One would hardly call Horace, whose finest poems were many of them what we should now call exquisite vers de societe, a great elegiac poet, which Matthew Arnold certainly was,—the greatest, we are disposed to think, in the English language, certainly very much greater than Gray. He is always at his best in elegy. " Thyrsis " and " The Scholar-Gipsy" will stand by the side of, if not above, Milton's " Lycidas," we believe, in the estimate of the best entice of the future. His magnificent elegies on De Senan- cour, the author of " Obermann," are as much more touching than Gray's Elegy in a country churchyard as they are richer in true vision. The lines on " Rugby Chapel" and on " Heine's Grave" are amongst the most vivid pictures in the language, of two great figures in the first half of the present eentury. The " Southern Night," in which he commemorates his brother William Delafield Arnold, is perhaps the most musical expression of profound yet gentle and subdued regret that English literature contains ; the " Memorial Verses " on Byron, Goethe, and Wordsworth are living studies penetrated by that " sad lucidity of soul " which Matthew Arnold has himself illustrated with so much power in the singularly fine lines called " Resignation." The little poem " By a Death-Bed," also called " Youth and Calm," is of the very essence of elegy. And the main beauty even of the longer poems, of " Sohrab and Rustem," of " Tristram and Iseult," of "The Sick King of Bokhara," lies in the elegiac terminations and the modulated beauty of those trains of thought which lead up to those terminations. Again, " The For- saken Merman " and " The Church of Brou " would hardly be true poems at all without their elegiac tone ; while some even of the most beautiful of all his elegies are devoted to his little dog ' Geist,' in the poem on " Geist's ' Grave," and to his daughter's canary, in " Poor Matthias.' " Lord Coleridge knows Horace a thousand times better than the present writer, but we should never have thought that Horace would be regarded as most at home in his elegiac mood. No doubt the two beautiful passages which Lord Coleridge quotes from Horace are both elegiac, but surely that is not Horace's most common nor even his most fre- quently successful attitude of mind. We should have thought Horace a considerably greater artist in the lighter lyrical vein, than Arnold, but not nearly so great an elegiac poet. Elegy demands that special " sad lucidity of soul " which Gray poured forth with such exquisite tenderness in the celebrated Elegy, and in the Ode on the distant prospect of Eton. It is a mood of regret, but of calm regret which heightens instead of disturbing and confusing the power of vision,—nay, which seems to lend to the apprehension of the external object treated, a singular discernment of its finest atmospheric con- ditions, a halo of its own, transforming mere sight into vision. To illustrate what we mean by contrast : Browning is hardly ever elegiac,—we should not suppose him to have ever known the mood at all, but for the lines, " 0 lyric love, half-angel and half-bird," in " The Ring and the Book," and the elegiac ring in the " Toccata of Galuppi." But though elegy must be suffused with feeling, it must not rise to what Arnold has himself called the lyrical cry. Principal Shairp was quite wrong, in the fine lines quoted by Lord Coleridge, when he spoke of Arnold as pouring forth in his songs "the calm

which is not calm but agony." Shelley does that, in such lines, for instance, as those beginning, " When the lamp is shattered, the light in the dust lies dead," or in the lines " Written in Dejection at Naples ;" but there is not a poem in all Arnold's volumes that seems to us to suggest anything approaching to agony, anything beyond a lofty and calm regret. Take the lines on his brother's death :—

" But now that trouble is forgot ; Thy memory, thy pain, to-night, My brother ! and thine early lot, Possess me quite.

The murmur of this Midland deep Is heard to-night around thy grave, There, where Gibraltar's connoted steep O'erfrowns the wave.

For there, with bodily anguish keen, With Indian heats at last fordone, With public toil and private teen— Thou sank'st, alone.

Slow to a stop, at morning grey, I see the smoke-crown'd vessel come ; Slow round her paddles dies away The seething foam.

A boat is lower'd from her side ; Ah, gently place him on the bench ! That spirit—if all have not yet died— A breath might quench.

Is this the eye, the footstep fast, The mien of youth we used to see, Poor, gallant boy !—for such thou wast, Still art, to me.

The limbs their wonted tasks refuse ; The eyes are glazed, thou coast not speak ; And whiter than thy white burnous That wasted cheek !"

Or compare Arnold's calm steadfastness in declaring the faith in our Lord's resurrection an illusion, with the passion of Clough's despair when he embodies in verse the same con- viction. This is Arnold's language :— " Ay, ages long endured his span Of true received—

That gracious Child, that thorn-crown'd Man ! —He lived while we believed.

While we believed, on earth he went, And open stood his grave.

Men call'd from chamber, church, and tent; And Christ was by to save.

Now he is dead ! Far hence he lies In the lorn Syrian town ;

And on his grave, with shining eyes, The Syrian stars look down.' " There is no agony there, only calm elegy over a lost faith, a dispelled illusion ; only another replica of the splendid elegy over a lost faith contained in the "Stanzas at the Grande Chartreuse." It is a more poetical and regretful form of the denial which he expressed more dogmatically and positively in his prose writings, when he said that the objection to miracles was that "they do not happen." Clough's tone is very different ; that is indeed agony, and not elegy at all :—

" Through the great sinful streets of Naples as I past,

With fiercer heat than flamed above my head My heart was hot within me; till at last My brain was lightened when my tongue had said, Christ is not risen !

Christ is not risen. No !

He lies and moulders low ; Christ is not risen !

What though the stone were rolled away, and though The grave found empty there ?

If not there, then elsewhere; If not where Joseph laid him first, why then Where other men Translaid him after in some humbler clay, Long ere to-day Corruption that sad perfect work hath done What here she scarcely, lightly had begun ; The foul engendered worm Feeds on the flesh of the life-giving form Of our most Holy and Anointed One.

He is not risen. No,—

He lies and moulders low, Christ is not risen !

What if the women ere the dawn was grey Saw one or more great angels as they say (Angels or Him himself) ? Yet neither there nor then,

Nor afterwards, nor elsewhere, nor at all Rath he appeared to Peter and the ten,

Nor, save in thunderous terror, to blind Saul; Save in an after gospel and late Creed,

He is not risen, indeed,—

Christ is not risen !" That is no elegy ; that is the burning passion of an agonised denial, due mainly to Clough's deep sense of the sinfulness of the world which should have been yet was not redeemed, and partly to his sceptical intellect weighing the evidence which then, at all events, he found wanting. But more passionate throes in renouncing a great faith, have never been depicted in the English tongue. Matthew Arnold never rose into that mood. Throughout his poems the grief and regret are always gentle and always mellow. His poetic pain is never anguish ; it never confuses, but only stimulates his vision. His grief

seldom rises even above that sweet and tender grief depicted in the perfect poem on " Geist's ' Grave." When he com- memorated—

" That liquid, melancholy eye, From whose pathetic soul-fed springs Seem'd surging the Virgilian cry The sense of tears in mortal things,"

he himself said that his own eyes were streaming with tears; but they were gentle tears, the tears of sweet elegiac regret, which brings with it a keener and brighter vision, not that stormy anguish which troubles and bedims the whole earthly scene. To our mind, Matthew Arnold was the greatest elegiac poet in our literature, though not a very great lyric poet. Indeed, the only perfect lyrics in his volumes are also elegiacs,—the songs of Callicles in " Empedocles on Etna," which com- memorate the visionary beauty of the old Greek mythology.