Matthew Arnold | Page 8

He took the suffering human race, He read each wound, each weakness
clear; And struck his finger on the place, And said: Thou ailest here,
and here.
His deepest conviction about "the suffering human race" would seem to
have been that its worst miseries arise from a too exalted estimate of its
capacities. Men are perpetually disappointed and disillusioned because
they expect too much from human life and human nature, and persuade
themselves that their experience, here and hereafter, will be, not what
they have any reasonable grounds for expecting, but what they imagine
or desire. The true philosophy is that which
Neither makes man too much a god, Nor God too much a man.
Wordsworth thought it a boon to "feel that we are greater than we
know": Arnold thought it a misfortune. Wordsworth drew from the
shadowy impressions of the past the most splendid intimations of the
future. Against such vain imaginings Arnold set, in prose, the
"inexorable sentence" in which Butler warned us to eschew pleasant
self-deception; and, in verse, the persistent question--
Say, what blinds us, that we claim the glory Of possessing powers not
our share?
He rebuked
Wishes unworthy of a man full-grown.
He taught that there are
Joys which were not for our use designed.
He warned discontented youth not to expect greater happiness from
advancing years, because

one thing only has been lent To youth and age in common--discontent.
Friendship is a broken reed, for
Our vaunted life is one long funeral,
and even Hope is buried with the "faces that smiled and fled."
Death, at least in some of its aspects, seemed to him the
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.
And yet, in gleams of happier insight, he saw the man who "flagged not
in this earthly strife,"
His soul well-knit, and all his battles won,
mount, though hardly, to eternal life. And, as he mused over his father's
grave, the conviction forced itself upon his mind that somewhere in the
"labour-house of being" there still was employment for that father's
strength, "zealous, beneficent, firm."
Here indeed is the more cheerful aspect of his "criticism of life." Such
happiness as man is capable of enjoying is conditioned by a frank
recognition of his weaknesses and limitations; but it requires also for its
fulfilment the sedulous and dutiful employment of such powers and
opportunities as he has.
First and foremost, he must realize the "majestic unity" of his nature,
and not attempt by morbid introspection to dissect himself into
Affections, Instincts, Principles, and Powers, Impulse and Reason,
Freedom and Control.
Then he must learn that
To its own impulse every action stirs.

He must live by his own light, and let earth live by hers. The forces of
nature are to be in this respect his teachers--
But with joy the stars perform their shining, And the sea its long
moon-silvered roll; For self-poised they live, nor pine with noting All
the fever of some differing soul.
But, though he is to learn from Nature and love Nature and enjoy
Nature, he is to remember that she
never was the friend of one, Nor promised love she could not give;
and so he is not to expect too much from her, or demand impossible
boons. Still less is he to be content with feeling himself "in harmony"
with her; for
Man covets all which Nature has, but more.
That "more" is Conscience and the Moral Sense.
Man must begin, know this, where Nature ends; Nature and man can
never be fast friends.
And this brings us to the idea of Duty as set forth in his poems, and
Duty resolves itself into three main elements: Truth--Work--Love.
Truth comes first. Man's prime duty is to know things as they are. Truth
can only be attained by light, and light he must cultivate, he must
worship. Arnold's highest praise for a lost friend is that he was "a child
of light"; that he had "truth without alloy,"
And joy in light, and power to spread the joy.
The saddest part of that friend's death is the fear that it may bring,
After light's term, a term of cecity:
the best hope for the future, that light will return and banish the follies,
sophistries, delusions, which have accumulated in the darkness.
"Lucidity of soul" may be--nay, must be, "sad"; but it is not less

imperative. And the truth which light reveals must not only be sought
earnestly and cherished carefully, but even, when the cause demands it,
championed strenuously. The voices of conflict, the joy of battle, the
"garments rolled in blood," the "burning and fuel of fire" have little
place in Arnold's poetry. But