Matthew Arnold | Page 4

to include the Newdigate poem (_Cromwell_) of 1843: they consist of The Strayed Reveller and other Poems, by "A.," 1849; _Empedocles on Etna, and other Poems_, [still] by "A.," 1852; and Poems by Matthew Arnold, a new edition, 1853--the third consisting of the contents of the two earlier, with Empedocles and a few minor things omitted, but with very important additions, including _Sohrab and Rustum, The Church of Brou, Requiescat_, and _The Scholar-Gipsy_. The contents of all three must be carefully considered, and the consideration may be prefaced by a few words on Cromwell.
This [Greek: agonisma], like the other, Mr Arnold never included in any collection of his work; but it was printed at Oxford in the year of its success, and again at the same place, separately or with other prize poems, in 1846, 1863, and 1891. It may also be found in the useful non-copyright edition above referred to. Couched in the consecrated couplet, but not as of old limited to fifty lines, it is "good rhymes," as the elder Mr Pope used to say to the younger; but a prudent taster would perhaps have abstained, even more carefully than in the case of the Alaric, from predicting a real poet in the author. It is probably better than six Newdigates out of seven at least, but it has no distinction. The young, but not so very young, poet--he was as old as Tennyson when he produced his unequal but wonderful first volume--begins by borrowing Wordsworth's two voices of the mountain and the sea, shows some impression here and there from Tennyson's own master-issue, the great collection of 1842, which had appeared a year before, ventures on an Alexandrine--
"Between the barren mountains and the stormy sea"
--which comes as a pleasant relief, and displays more than once (as he did afterwards in _Tristram and Iseult_) an uncertain but by no means infelicitous variety of couplet which he never fully or fairly worked out, but left for Mr William Morris to employ with success many years later. Otherwise the thing is good, but negligible. It would have taken an extremely strong competition, or an extremely incompetent examiner, to deprive it of the prize; but he must have been a sanguine man who, in giving the author that prize, expected to receive from him returns of poetry.
Yet they came. If we did not know that the middle of this century was one of the nadirs of English[3] criticism, and if we did not know further that even good critics often go strangely wrong both in praise and in blame of new verse, it would be most surprising that The Strayed Reveller volume should have attracted so little attention. It is full of faults, but that is part of the beauty of it. Some of these faults are those which, persevering, prevented Mr Arnold from attaining a higher position than he actually holds in poetry; but no critic could know that. There is nothing here worse, or more necessarily fatal, than many things in Tennyson's 1830 and 1832 collections: he overwent those, so might Mr Arnold have overgone these. And the promise--nay, the performance--is such as had been seen in no verse save Tennyson's, and the almost unnoticed Browning's, for some thirty years. The title-poem, though it should have pleased even a severe judge, might have aroused uncomfortable doubts even in an amiable one. In the first place, its rhymelessness is a caprice, a will-worship. Except blank verse, every rhymeless metre in English has on it the curse of the tour de force, of the acrobatic. Campion and Collins, Southey and Shelley, have done great things in it; but neither _Rose-cheeked Laura_ nor Evening, neither the great things in Thalaba nor the great things in Queen Mab, can escape the charge of being caprices. And caprice, as some have held, is the eternal enemy of art.
But the caprice of The Strayed Reveller does not cease with its rhymelessness. The rhythm and the line-division are also studiously odd, unnatural, paradoxical. Except for the "poetic diction" of putting "Goddess" after "Circe" instead of before it, the first stave is merely a prose sentence, of strictly prosaic though not inharmonious rhythm. But in this stave there is no instance of the strangest peculiarity, and what seems to some the worst fault of the piece, the profusion of broken-up decasyllables, which sometimes suggest a very "corrupt" manuscript, or a passage of that singular stuff in the Caroline dramatists which is neither blank verse, nor any other, nor prose. Here are a few out of many instances--
"Is it, then, evening So soon? [_I see the night-dews Clustered in thick beads_], dim," etc.
* * * ["_When the white dawn first Through the rough fir-planks. _"]
* * * ["_Thanks, gracious One! Ah! the sweet fumes again._"]
* * * ["_They