Matthew Arnold | Page 9

upon Addison, of Adonais above all, of Wordsworth's own beautiful Effusion on the group of dead poets in 1834, they do not fall far short even in this respect. And for adequacy of meaning, not unpoetically expressed, they are almost supreme. If Mr Arnold's own unlucky and maimed definition of poetry as "a criticism of life" had been true, they would be poetry in quintessence; and, as it is, they are poetry.
Far more so is the glorious Summer Night, which came near the middle of the book. There is a cheering doctrine of mystical optimism which will have it that a sufficiently intense devotion to any ideal never fails of at least one moment of consummate realisation and enjoyment. Such a moment was granted to Matthew Arnold when he wrote A Summer Night. Whether that rather vague life-philosophy of his, that erection of a melancholy agnosticism plus asceticism into a creed, was anything more than a not ungraceful or undignified will-worship of Pride, we need not here argue out. But we have seen how faithfully the note of it rings through the verse of these years. And here it rings not only faithfully, but almost triumphantly. The lips are touched at last: the eyes are thoroughly opened to see what the lips shall speak: the brain almost unconsciously frames and fills the adequate and inevitable scheme. And, as always at these right poetic moments, the minor felicities follow the major. The false rhymes are nowhere; the imperfect phrases, the little sham simplicities or pedantries, hide themselves; and the poet is free, from the splendid opening landscape through the meditative exposition, and the fine picture of the shipwreck, to the magnificent final invocation of the "Clearness divine!"
His freedom, save once, is not so unquestionably exhibited in the remarkable group of poems--the future constituents of the Switzerland group, but still not classified under any special head--which in the original volume chiefly follow Empedocles, with the batch later called "Faded Leaves" to introduce them. It is, perhaps, if such things were worth attempting at all, an argument for supposing some real undercurrent of fact or feeling in them, that they are not grouped at their first appearance, and that some of them are perhaps designedly separated from the rest. Even the name "Marguerite" does not appear in _A Farewell_; though nobody who marked as well as read, could fail to connect it with the To my Friends of the former volume. We are to suppose, it would appear, that the twelvemonth has passed, and that Marguerite's anticipation of the renewed kiss is fulfilled in the first stanzas. But the lover's anticipation, too, is fulfilled, though as usual not quite as he made it; he wearies of his restless and yet unmasterful passion; he rather muses and morals in his usual key on the "way of a man with a maid" than complains or repines. And then we go off for a time from Marguerite, though not exactly from Switzerland, in the famous "_Obermann_" stanzas, a variation of the Wordsworth memorial lines, melodious, but a very little _impotent_--the English utterance of what Sainte-Beuve, I think, called "the discouraged generation of 1850." Now mere discouragement, except as a passing mood, though extremely natural, is also a little contemptible--pessimism-and-water, mere peevishness to the "fierce indignation," mere whining compared with the great ironic despair. As for Consolation, which in form as in matter strongly resembles part of the Strayed Reveller, I must say, at the risk of the charge of Philistinism, that I cannot see why most of it should not have been printed as prose. In fact, it would be a very bold and astonishingly ingenious person who, not knowing the original, perceived any verse-division in this--
"The bleak, stern hour, whose severe moments I would annihilate, is passed by others in warmth, light, joy."
Nor perhaps can very much be said for some of the other things. The sonnet afterwards entitled _The World's Triumphs_ is not strong; The Second Best is but "a chain of extremely valuable thoughts"; Revolution a conceit. The Youth of Nature and The Youth of Man do but take up less musically the threnos for Wordsworth. But Morality is both rhyme and poetry; Progress is at least rhyme; and The Future, though rhymeless again, is the best of all Mr Arnold's waywardnesses of this kind. It is, however, in the earlier division of the smaller poems--those which come between Empedocles and _Tristram_--that the interest is most concentrated, and that the best thing--better as far as its subject is concerned even than the _Summer Night_--appears. For though all does not depend upon the subject, yet of two poems equally good in other ways, that which has the better subject will be the better. Here we have the bulk of the "Marguerite" or Switzerland poems--in