Matthew Arnold | Page 9

once at any rate he bursts into a strain so
passionate, so combatant, that it is difficult for a disciple to recognize
his voice; and then the motive is a summons to a last charge for Truth
and Light--
They out-talk'd thee, hiss'd thee, tore thee? Better men fared thus before
thee; Fired their ringing shot and pass'd, Hotly charged--and sank at
last.
Charge once more, then, and be dumb! Let the victors, when they come,
When the forts of folly fall, Find thy body by the wall!
But the note of battle, even for what he holds dearest and most sacred,
is not a familiar note in his poetry. He had no natural love of
the throng'd field where winning comes by strife.
His criticism of life sets a higher value on work than on fighting. "Toil
unsevered from tranquillity," "Labour, accomplish'd in repose"--is his
ideal of happiness and duty.
Even the Duke of Wellington--surely an unpromising subject for poetic
eulogy--is praised because he was a worker,
Laborious, persevering, serious, firm.
Nature, again, is called in to teach us the secret of successful labour.
Her forces are incessantly at work, and in that work they are entirely
concentrated--
Bounded by themselves, and unregardful In what state God's other
works may be, In their own tasks all their powers pouring, These attain
the mighty life you see.

But those who had the happiness of knowing Arnold in the flesh will
feel that they never so clearly recognize his natural voice as when, by
his criticism of life, he is inculcating the great law of Love. Even in the
swirl of Revolution he clings to his fixed idea of love as duty. After
discussing the rise and fall of dynasties, the crimes of diplomacy, the
characteristic defects of rival nations, and all the stirring topics of the
time, he abruptly concludes his criticism with an appeal to Love. "Be
kind to the neighbours--'this is all we can.'"
And as in his prose, so in his poetry. Love, even in arrest of formal
justice, is the motive of The Sick King in Bokhara; love, that wipes out
sin, of Saint Brandan--
That germ of kindness, in the womb Of mercy caught, did not expire;
Outlives my guilt, outlives my doom, And friends me in the pit of fire.
The Neckan and The Forsaken Merman tell the tale of contemptuous
unkindness and its enduring poison. A Picture at Newstead depicts the
inexpiable evils wrought by violent wrong. Poor Matthias tells in a
parable the cruelty, not less real because unconscious, of imperfect
sympathy--
Human longings, human fears, Miss our eyes and miss our ears. Little
helping, wounding much, Dull of heart, and hard of touch, Brother
man's despairing sign Who may trust us to divine?
In Geist's Grave, the "loving heart," the "patient soul" of the dog-friend
are made to "read their homily to man"; and the theme of the homily is
still the same: the preciousness of the love which outlives the grave.
But nowhere perhaps is his doctrine about the true divinity of love so
exquisitely expressed as in The Good Shepherd with the Kid--
He saves the sheep, the goats He doth not save. So rang Tertullian's
sentence . . . . . . . . But she sigh'd, The infant Church! Of love she felt
the tide Stream on her from her Lord's yet recent grave. And then she
smiled; and in the Catacombs, With eye suffused but heart inspirèd true,
On those walls subterranean, where she hid Her head 'mid ignominy,
death, and tombs, She the Good Shepherd's hasty image drew-- And on

His shoulders not a lamb, a kid.
So much, then, for his Criticism of Life, as applied in and through his
poems. It is not easy to estimate, even approximately, the effect
produced by a loved and gifted poet, who for thirty years taught an
audience, fit though few, that the main concerns of human life were
Truth, Work, and Love. Those "two noblest of things, Sweetness and
Light" (though heaven only knows what they meant to Swift), meant to
him Love and Truth; and to these he added the third great ideal,
Work--patient, persistent, undaunted effort for what a man genuinely
believes to be high and beneficent ends. Such a "Criticism of Life," we
must all admit, is not unworthy of one who seeks to teach his
fellow-men; even though some may doubt whether poetry is the
medium best fitted for conveying it.
We must now turn our attention to his performances in the field of
literary criticism; and we begin in the year 1853. He had won the prize
for an English poem at Rugby, and again at Oxford. In 1849 he had
published without his name, and had recalled, a thin volume, called The