Matthew Arnold | Page 6

be no controversy among the competent. "Almost adequate" is in such a case the highest praise; and it must be given.
The companions of this sonnet are respectable, but do not deserve much warmer words; and then we turn to a style of poem remarkably different from anything which the author had yet published and from most of his subsequent work. It is not unnoteworthy that the batch of poems called in the later collected editions Switzerland, and completed at last by the piece called On the Terrace at Berne, appeared originally piecemeal, and with no indication of connection. The first of its numbers is here, _To my Friends who Ridiculed a Tender Leave-taking_. It applies both the note of thought which has been indicated, and the quality of style which had already disengaged itself, to the commonest--the greatest--theme of poetry, but to one which this poet had not yet tried--to Love. Let it be remembered that the thought has the cast of a strictly pessimist quietism--that the style aims, if it aims at any single thing, at the reproduction of the simpler side of classicalism, at an almost prim and quakerish elegance, a sort of childlike grace. There is, however, by no means any great austerity in the tone: on the contrary, the refrain (altered later)--
"Ere the parting kiss be dry, Quick! thy tablets, Memory!"--
approaches the luscious. It is not easy to decide, and it is perhaps in both senses impertinent to speculate, whether the "Marguerite" (whose La Tour-like portrait is drawn in this piece with such relish, and who is so philosophically left to her fate by her lover on the Terrace at Berne later) had any live original. She seems a little more human in some ways than most of those cloud-Junos of the poets, the heroines of sonnet-sequence and song-string. She herself has a distinct touch of philosophy, anticipating with nonchalant resignation the year's severance, and with equally nonchalant anticipation the time when
"Some day next year I shall be, Entering heedless, kissed by thee."
Her wooer paints her with gusto, but scarcely with ardour; and ends with the boding note--
"Yet, if little stays with man, Ah! retain we all we can!"--
seeming to be at least as doubtful of his own constancy as of hers. Nor do we meet her again in the volume. The well-known complementary pieces which make up Switzerland were either not written, or held back.
The inferior but interesting Modern Sappho, almost the poet's only experiment in "Moore-ish" method and melody--
"They are gone--all is still! Foolish heart, dost thou quiver?"--
is a curiosity rather than anything else. The style is ill suited to the thought; besides, Matthew Arnold, a master at times of blank verse, and of the statelier stanza, was less often an adept at the lighter and more rushing lyrical measures. He is infinitely more at home in the beautiful New Sirens, which, for what reason it is difficult to discover, he never reprinted till many years later, partly at Mr Swinburne's most judicious suggestion. The scheme is trochaic, and Mr Arnold (deriving beyond all doubt inspiration from Keats) was happier than most poets with that charming but difficult foot. The note is the old one of yearning rather than passionate melancholy, applied in a new way and put most clearly, though by no means most poetically, in the lines--
"Can men worship the wan features, The sunk eyes, the wailing tone, Of unsphered, discrowned creatures, Souls as little godlike as their own?"
The answer is, "No," of course; but, as some one informed Mr Arnold many years later, we knew that before, and it is distressing to be told it, as we are a little later, with a rhyme of "dawning" and "morning." Yet the poem is a very beautiful one--in some ways the equal of its author's best up to this time; at least he had yet done nothing except the Shakespeare sonnet equal to the splendid stanza beginning--
"And we too, from upland valleys;"
and the cry of the repentant sirens, punished as they had sinned--
"'Come,' you say, 'the hours are dreary.'"
Yet the strong Tennysonian influence (which the poet rather ungraciously kicked against in his criticism) shows itself here also; and we know perfectly well that the good lines--
"When the first rose flush was steeping All the frore peak's awful crown"--
are but an unconscious reminiscence of the great ones--
"And on the glimmering summit far withdrawn, God made himself an awful rose of dawn."
He kept this level, though here following not Tennyson or Keats but Shelley, in the three ambitious and elaborate lyrics, The Voice, To Fausta, and Stagirius, fine things, if somehow a little suggestive of inability on their author's part fully to meet the demands of the forms he attempts--"the note," in short, expressed practically as well as in theory. Stagirius in particular wants but