Matthew Arnold | Page 7

a very little to be a perfect expression of the obstinate questionings of the century; and yet wanting a little, it wants so much! Others, To a Gipsy Child and The Hayswater Boat (Mr Arnold never reprinted this), are but faint Wordsworthian echoes; and thus we come to The Forsaken Merman.
It is, I believe, not so "correct" as it once was to admire this; but I confess indocility to correctness, at least the correctness which varies with fashion. The Forsaken Merman is not a perfect poem--it has longueurs, though it is not long; it has those inadequacies, those incompetences of expression, which are so oddly characteristic of its author; and his elaborate simplicity, though more at home here than in some other places, occasionally gives a dissonance. But it is a great poem--one by itself, one which finds and keeps its own place in the foreordained gallery or museum, with which every true lover of poetry is provided, though he inherits it by degrees. No one, I suppose, will deny its pathos; I should be sorry for any one who fails to perceive its beauty. The brief picture of the land, and the fuller one of the sea, and that (more elaborate still) of the occupations of the fugitive, all have their own charm. But the triumph of the piece is in one of those metrical coups which give the triumph of all the greatest poetry, in the sudden change from the slower movements of the earlier stanzas or strophes to the quicker sweep of the famous conclusion--
"The salt tide rolls seaward, Lights shine from the town"--
to
"She left lonely for ever The kings of the sea."
Here the poet's poetry has come to its own.
In Utrumque Paratus sounds the note again, and has one exceedingly fine stanza:--
"Thin, thin the pleasant human noises grow, And faint the city gleams; Rare the lone pastoral huts--marvel not thou! The solemn peaks but to the stars are known, But to the stars, and the cold lunar beams; Alone the sun arises, and alone Spring the great streams."
But Resignation, the last poem in the book, goes far higher. Again, it is too long; and, as is not the case in the Merman, or even in The Strayed Reveller itself, the general drift of the poem, the allegory (if it be an allegory) of the two treadings of "the self-same road" with Fausta and so forth, is unnecessarily obscure, and does not tempt one to spend much trouble in penetrating its obscurity. But the splendid passage beginning--
"The Poet to whose mighty heart,"
and ending--
"His sad lucidity of soul,"
has far more interest than concerns the mere introduction, in this last line itself, of one of the famous Arnoldian catchwords of later years. It has far more than lies even in its repetition, with fuller detail, of what has been called the author's main poetic note of half-melancholy contemplation of life. It has, once more, the interest of _poetry_--of poetical presentation, which is independent of any subject or intention, which is capable of being adapted perhaps to all, certainly to most, which lies in form, in sound, in metre, in imagery, in language, in suggestion--rather than in matter, in sense, in definite purpose or scheme.
It is one of the heaviest indictments against the criticism of the mid-nineteenth century that this remarkable book--the most remarkable first book of verse that appeared between Tennyson's and Browning's in the early thirties and The Defence of Guenevere in 1858--seems to have attracted next to no notice at all. It received neither the ungenerous and purblind, though not wholly unjust, abuse which in the long--run did so much good to Tennyson himself, nor the absurd and pernicious bleatings of praise which have greeted certain novices of late years. It seems to have been simply let alone, or else made the subject of quite insignificant comments.
In the same year (1849) Mr Arnold was represented in the Examiner of July 21 by a sonnet to the Hungarian nation, which he never included in any book, and which remained peacefully in the dust-bin till a reference in his Letters quite recently set the ruthless reprinter on its track. Except for an ending, itself not very good, the thing is quite valueless: the author himself says to his mother, "it is not worth much." And three years passed before he followed up his first volume with a second, which should still more clearly have warned the intelligent critic that here was somebody, though such a critic would not have been guilty of undue hedging if he had professed himself still unable to decide whether a new great poet had arisen or not.
This volume was Empedodes on Etna and other Poems, [still] _By A._ London: Fellowes, 1852. It contained two attempts--the title-piece and _Tristram and Iseult_--much longer and more ambitious