Matthew Arnold: The Poet as Humanist 9781400878130

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments
Contents
Introduction
I. The Idea of Poetry
II. The Idea of Nature
III. The Idea of the Self
IV. The Idea of Love
Conclusion
Index

Citation preview

The Poet as Humanist

MATTHEW ARNOLD G. ROBERT STANCE

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

1967

Copyright © 1967 by Princeton University Press ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

L.C. Card: 66-26588 Printed in the United States of America by Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey

FOR ALIDA

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank the Yale University Library for per­ mission to study and quote from the so-called Yale Manuscript of Arnold's notebooks, and the staff of the Reading Room of the British Museum for their unfail­ ing courtesy and efficiency. The writing of this book was made possible by a summer research grant from the Graduate School of the University of Minnesota, and a fellowship granted by the President and Trustees of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Founda­ tion. It is also appropriate here to acknowledge less specific obligations to two colleagues who, whether they like this book or not, must accept some responsibility for its existence. Samuel Holt Monk of the University of Min­ nesota has offered constant support and the example of his deep and graceful learning. To speak of owing a debt to my teacher and friend, Walter E. Houghton of Wellesley College, is to reveal the inadequacy of meta­ phor; the many kinds of help I have received from him over the years could not even be enumerated, let alone repaid. G.R.S. Minneapolis, Minn. Chilmark, Mass.

CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii Introduction 3 ι The Idea of Poetry 13 II

The Idea of Nature 105 III The Idea of the Self 165 IV

The Idea of Love 196 Conclusion 281 Index 293

The Poet as Humanist

T

". . . Our cogitations this way have been drawn, These are the points," the Wanderer said, "on which Our inquest turns." The Excursion, BOOK V

HE most modest aim of the critic—simply bring­ ing a reader into contact with a work of literature —is in fact the least easy to achieve. Sainte-Beuve re­ marked that he believed two things about criticism which seemed to contradict each other but really did not: first, that the critic is no more than a man who knows how to read and who teaches others to read; and second, that criticism—as he, at least, would practice itis an invention, a perpetual creation. The definition is just. In beginning this study I was concerned only to find a way of reading Arnold's poetry which allowed one to come, without blinding prejudice, at what was in the poems, to hear what I think Arnold was trying to say. But in order even to begin to read I found I had to de­ fine a way of approach that would take account of the special nature of this poetry, and that to know its move­ ment I had to put it into connection with the order of ideas which formed the poet's atmosphere. Arnold will always be among the most inaccessible of nineteenth-century poets. He was aware of this fact himself, and explained it by saying that he had "less poetical sentiment than Tennyson, and less intellectual vigour and abundance than Browning."1 But this is only 1 From

a letter to his mother. Letters of Matthew Arnold, collected and arranged by George W. E. Russell, 2 vols., New York and London, 1895, n, 10.

INTRODUCTION

part of the story: Arnold accomplished something in poetry that no other English poet of his century triedhe made his poems serve the great critical effort which he felt was requisite to the best creation. He was a much more complex poet than his contemporaries—a writer of extreme subtlety of mind and formidable austerity of manner. He asked a great deal of his readers, expecting them to share his own remote excitements and follow the windings of his complicated intellectual processes, without offering them surface drama, delights of lan­ guage, or shock to the senses. How then does the critic set about bringing the reader into contact with the art of so uncompromising a poet? One can profitably study the literary development of such poets as Milton or Tennyson or Yeats; but there is nothing in Arnold's career like Yeats' dramatic dis­ covery of a new style and subject matter, or Tennyson's studied emergence as sacer vates. Arnold, in fact, took pains to obliterate the chronology of his poems, and though he arranged them by genres, they do not give the sense of a consciously ordered oeuvre. It is often use­ ful to compare the work of his youth with that of his maturity, but a study of Arnold's growth as a poet tells us surprisingly little about the nature of his achieve­ ment. A more promising method, especially for the aca­ demic critic, is to approach the poetry through his own critical theory. Since Arnold wrote so copiously on all aspects of literature, a diligent scholar can compare, at one point after another, his principles with his practice. This may be an instructive exercise, but it can lead to dissatisfaction with the poet for not meeting the high

INTRODUCTION

requirements of his own critical program. One distin­ guished scholar who took this approach expressed sur­ prise and disappointment at finding Arnold's poetry "strangely inconsistent with his poetics";2 and a less sympathetic writer has managed to find almost all the poetry deficient when measured by the poet's own stand­ ards.3 These results would not have surprised Arnold; in his essays he was concerned, as every major critic has been, to indicate the nature of the highest poetic achievement and to define, for his own time, the condi­ tions under which the best poetry could be written. He knew, better than anyone else, that his poems did not fulfill his own criteria; his job was to avoid false poetic practice and to aspire toward the ideal of excellence he had defined. A painstaking correlation of Arnoldian the­ ory and practice makes for a logically neat but critically negative study. It would be obliquitous for an admirer of Arnold to ignore his essays, but in discussing his po­ etry I have tried not to depend on the formulations of his expository prose. It is easy to let an eloquent state­ ment of a poetics determine the questions one asks of the poetry and ultimately overshadow it. I hope to keep the prose in the back of my mind and use it only to gloss or amplify the connotations of the poems. The most tempting approach is to offer extended criti­ cal analysis of several representative poems regarded as self-contained entities. So much recent criticism has de­ pended on this method that there is a tendency to con2 Ε. K. Brown, Matthew Arnold: A Study in Conflict, Chi­ cago, 1948, p. 1. 8 See Paull F. Baum, Ten Studies in the Poetry of Matthew Arnold, Durham, N. C., 1958.

INTRODUCTION sider it the only way to understand poetry. I have con­ cluded that it is not—certainly that it is not the best way to understand Arnold, or most nineteenth-century po­ ets. Though the core of any literary study should be some kind of careful reading and exegesis, the "reading" of an Arnold poem often depends on a response to ele­ ments which a "New" critic would consider external and irrelevant to the poetic artifact. Most of his poems do not function as integral universes of discourse. They are impure, in the sense that considerations outside the work of art—interaction with his other poems, or a back­ ground of knowledge which the reader is assumed to share—may help to create their expressive effects. Ar­ nold emphasized the necessity of seeing experience as a totality, and it is one of the difficulties of his poetry that the reader must see it in the same way. None of his poems, I think, can be understood in isolation. Some of the unfashionable, "Victorian" aspects of Arnold's poetry can also not be dealt with by the ac­ cepted methods of modern criticism. The search for truth was in his view the special aim of a poet. And though this conception does not seem particularly origi­ nal or unorthodox—one supposes that every serious art­ ist is in some way attempting to find and express the truth of his experience—Arnold's commitment to it was of a special sort. He could say, for example: "It is a great deal to give one a true feeling in poetry, . . . but I do not at present very much care for poetry unless it can give me true thought as well."4 And one of the nineteenth-century critics who understood his work observed 4 From

i, 241.

a letter to his mother, dated Nov. 19, 1863. Letters,

INTRODUCTION

that even early in his career, in what the critic called his "most 'aesthetic' period," being a poet meant for Arnold "struggling hard to get clear on the great ques­ tions."5 In his carefully qualified praise of Coleridge, Arnold defined his own intentions when he concluded that "that which will stand of Coleridge is this . . . the stimulus of his continual effort. . . crowned often with rich success, to get at and to lay bare the real truth of his matter in hand, whether that matter were literary, or philosophical, or political, or religious."6 It is not, then, inaccurate to describe Arnold's poetry as a continual effort to lay bare the truth. But his typical method is to reveal truth by means of opposing views of the matter in hand; through the simultaneous perception of opposites he creates a continuing dialectic. In Ar­ nold's work the state of mind which is to be actualized, the apergu to be seized, are shaped by opposites, formu­ lated as a "neither-this-nor-that." We do not find in his poetry unresolved conflicts of the sort that are frequently the substance of Tennyson's work. Instead he sees the problems he treats through a series of antitheses, and tries to get at his truth by circling around a question, reaching the center of the problem by approaching it from several different directions in turn. I eventually concluded that I should try to look at Arnold's poetry as a whole and define the "points" (as I at first called them) around which the poet's thoughts 5

Alan Harris, "Matthew Arnold: The 'Unknown Years,'" Nineteenth Century and After, cxm (1933 ), 503. " "Joubert," Lectures and Essays in Criticism, The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed., R. H. Super, Ann Arbor, Mich., 1960 HI, 189.

INTRODUCTION

and images tended to cluster. These objects were diffi­ cult to name: they are not precisely themes, nor prob­ lems, nor topics; they are actually the centers of appre­ hension around which the poet organized his examina­ tion of life. And then I realized I was trying to find a term for what Arnold called ideas: "the elements with which the creative power works." He considered "the most essential part of poetic greatness" to be "the noble and profound application of ideas to life." For Arnold, ideas were not only, in the familiar sense, "things with which the mind occupies itself," but—more activelyunifying interpretations rather like what some modern writers mean by the word "myth." Before they could be applied to life, Arnold's ideas had to be clarified, and so his poems tend to function as instruments for explor­ ing and eventually setting forth a sound and genuine idea. Perhaps because they are so profound, the ideas Ar­ nold treats in his poems are surprisingly few. I find the chief ones to be the idea of poetry, the idea of nature, the idea of the self, and the idea of love. To these might be added the ideas of history and of the hero, but they are distinctly peripheral. I have, then, tried to under­ stand the nature of Arnold's poetic work by tracing the four constellations of his poems from which his major ideas emerge. If the method works, one will arrive at what might be called the "Idea of Arnold's Poetry" and understand more fully than we have the relevance of his achievement to literary practice and, indeed, to life in our time. As I pursued Arnold's sometimes elusive ideas, a few aspects of his work emerged with unexpected persist­ ency. It became clear that the main bearing of the

INTRODUCTION

poems was to offer a positive alternative to Romantic theories of life and literature. Arnold the poet is the most effective anti-Romantic writer of his century, and he is so because he did not set out—as the French op­ ponents of Romanticism, Seilliere and Brunetiere, or Babbitt and the new Humanists did—with the inten­ tion of attacking every aspect of Romantic faith and practice through bitter polemics. Arnold accepted Ro­ manticism as a phase of literary development and con­ sidered its ethos to be a necessary stage in the personal growth of a nineteenth-century writer. His judgments of Romantic literature were severely discriminating, but nevertheless warm and generous. His concern was to suggest a way of salvaging what was good, en­ thusiastic, and stimulating in the Romantic view, but of learning how to live through and go beyond it to some more controlled and, in the most ample sense, reasonable way of life and thought. In his pursuit of the way beyond Romanticism Ar­ nold never tried to re-assert any simple form of neoclassicism. The preface to his poems of 1853 is the most imposing restatement made in the nineteenth century of some aspects of Aristotle's literary theory, but it is not an attempt to construct a complete Aristotelian system: Arnold emphasizes the principle of action, but leaves the doctrine of imitation virtually untouched. Indeed, Sainte-Beuve concluded from the 1853 preface that Ar­ nold was "a truly classical critic," but made no mention of his Aristotelianism. Rather, he said, "l'ingenieux auteur anglais s'est montre un vrai critique de l'ecole de Lessing."7 However, Arnold was no more a totally com7

Oeuvres de Virgile, precede d'une Etude sur Virgile, par M. Sainte Beuve, Paris, 1866, p. 32.

INTRODUCTION

mitted follower of Lessing than he was of Aristotle. For him a restoration of classical literary principles would simply not be adequate to the needs and experience of the nineteenth-century writer. He found his guide (to an extent that I had not previously been aware of) in the work and life of Goethe, whose total activity—in poetry, drama, criticism or desultory discussion—is made part of a coordinated search for truth. That "great and powerful spirit" was, in Arnold's view, the model for the serious nineteenth-century writer, the poet who could immerse himself in Romanticism and yet be saved, who by a "great critical effort" won through to an expression of the purest Hellenism. Arnold's "classicism" could be defined as the emula­ tion of Goethe's wisdom and balance. In many passages of his prose works he paid tribute to his master and tried to assess his magisterial position in modern letters. The statement in "A French Critic on Goethe" expresses his judgment most concisely: "Goethe is the greatest poet of modern times, not because he is one of the half-dozen human beings who in the history of our race have shown the most signal gift for poetry, but because having a very considerable gift for poetry, he was at the same time, in the width, depth, and richness of his criticism of life, by far our greatest modern man."8 And, in a phrase of Goethe's, he once summed up his own literary task as the need "to keep pushing one's posts into the darkness." Like most readers of Arnold, I was familiar with the explicit allusions to Goethe, but I was not fully aware of his permeating influence on the poetry itself.9 8

9

Mixed Essays, New York, 1904, pp. 233-234.

Arnold's debt to Goethe has been noted by scholars, but in nothing Ϊ have seen is it discussed in more than a general way.

I N T R O D U C T I O N

Arnold sometimes took Goethe's writings as a point of departure for a poem which he tied so closely to its source that it has to be regarded as a commentary on or continuation of it. I find that of the four major ideas which I regard as the organizing centers of Arnold's po­ etry, three seem to be conscious extensions of Goethe's insights. The last discovery I made provided the working title of this book, which was first conceived as an analysis of the consistency of Matthew Arnold. The word con­ sistency is meant to connote those realizable qualities of Arnold's poetry which I have tried to understand and define, and also to suggest the tendentious purpose of this study—to affirm that Arnold's whole imaginative en­ terprise is a consistent effort to apply ideas to life. By approaching the poet through his ideas one necessarily sees how the same problems occupy him from the begin­ ning to the end of his career. Arnold, however, did not persist in dully recurring to the same subjects; each re­ turn modifies what has gone before and adds to it. All the poems on one subject eventually create a new pattern which has its own meaning, and the consistency of man­ ner and style makes even the most superficially disparate poems congruent in structure and tone. These observa­ tions may seem obvious, but they are not generally ac­ cepted; so distinguished a critic as Ε. K. Brown claimed See: J. M. Carre, Goethe en Angleterre, Paris, 1920; Helen C. White, "Matthew Arnold and Goethe," PMLA, xxxvi (1921), 436-453; and James B. Orrick, Matthew Arnold and Goethe, Publications of the English Goethe Society, n.s., Vol. iv, Lon­ don, 1928. • 11

INTRODUCTION

that Arnold's verse was "in style . . . astonishingly un­ certain."10 I do not believe it is. There are falterings and failures, but the body of the poetry represents a coherent effort of interpretation and analysis. In the twenty-odd years which Arnold devoted to poetry his work did not develop, in the sense that Pope's or Yeats's did, but it displayed a constant direction of mind and expressed a continually finer and more precise sense of the world upon which his creative power played. This is what I have discovered to be the consistency of Matthew Arnold. 10

Brown, p. 1.

CHAPTER I

FERVID interest in artistic creation on the part of poets themselves is one of the signs of the Ro­ mantic spirit. Since the early nineteenth century, poets have continually reflected in verse on the nature, value, and significance of art, and on the conditions of the po­ etic life. Before the Romantics there had, of course, been poets who wrote about their aims and techniques: the tradition of the Ars poetica was especially vigorous in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But even a casual comparison of Boileau's Art poetique or Pope's Essay on Criticism with such works as Keats's Sleep and Poetry or Tennyson's The Poet suggests the change that had come over poems on poetry. The nineteenthcentury poets are not particularly concerned with mat­ ters of rhetoric, or the perpetuation of a tradition, or even the way of making; they try instead to define the spiritual state that conduces to creativity, and to formu­ late a theory—or mystique—of expression. In making his idea of poetry the subject of many of his poems, Arnold was in tune with contemporary taste. Tennyson explored almost obsessively the questions of what poetry should be and what the poet's duties and rights were. Browning investigated more deeply than any of his contemporaries the dynamics of creation and the relation of the artist to his experience and to the so­ cial order. In Tennyson's work the problems of the poet and his function are often considered covertly, behind a

THE IDEA OF POETRY

veil of symbol or allegory, and his repeated treatments of the subject represent not so much an attempt to for­ mulate a poetics as a compulsive return to the perennial conflict between the attractions of the exoteric and eso­ teric, the contradictory needs for social engagement and for aesthetic retreat. Browning's interests are more intel­ lectual than Tennyson's: considered together, his poems on art come close to formulating a doctrine. In them Browning established and defended a naturalist theory of art and—what was for him inseparable from it—a vitalist ethics. The approaches that Arnold makes in his poems on poetry are noticeably different from either Tennyson's or Browning's. Like Browning—in this one respect at least—Arnold's interest is fundamentally intellectual; and unlike Tennyson, he is concerned less with the exis­ tential agony of the poet than with the conscious attitude he is to take toward experience—with the artist's task of shaping the inchoate material he receives through his senses. In Arnold's letters—particularly in those to Ar­ thur Hugh Clough—and in his early critical essays there is a wealth of statement explicitly defining his poetic theory; one quotation from an early letter to his sister will suffice to indicate the objective, even classical, as­ pect of his approach: "If I have health & opportunity to go on, I will shake the present methods until they go down, see if I don't. More and more I feel bent against the modern English habit (too much encouraged by Wordsworth) of using poetry as a channel for thinking aloud, instead of making anything."1 In the matter of 1

Unpublished Letters of Matthew Arnold, ed., Arnold Whitridge, New Haven, 1923, p. 17.

TEE IDEA OF POETRY poetics Arnold differs from Browning and Tennyson simply by virtue of his critical cast of mind. Potential in Arnold the poet is the greatest critic of his age, where­ as Tennyson wrote not a paragraph of systematic criti­ cism, and Browning wrote only one essay.2 A critical intelligence as fully developed as Arnold's may not be entirely advantageous for a poet, but for good or ill it affected the language of his poetry as much as it did his speculative interests, so that from The Strayed Rev­ eller and Other Poems to the volume of 1867, we find many poems serving not only as examples of sound prac­ tice, but as instruments of critical exploration and defi­ nition. In considering Arnold's idea of poetry, I am primarily concerned to show what has not, I think, been suffi­ ciently recognized: that the body of his poetical work may be seen to have as one of its significant nexus the apprehensions that are achieved by his persistent at­ tempts to discover what poetry in his age could be. If we look at his approach to this question we discover a characteristic method of procedure and a group of welldefined themes. Arnold did not seek simple answers, and he never produced a doctrine; his method is more indi­ rect. In his poems an area of investigation is first sug­ gested; a problem is looked at from several vantage points and argued out within the poetry; eventually the diverse approaches establish a kind of dialectic, and a set of closely related tenets is defined. I should say that the two dominant topics of Arnold's investigation are the question of the artist's attitude toward external ex21

refer, of course, to the "Essay on Shelley." The "Essay on Chatterton" is too slight a product to qualify as real criticism.

THE IDEA OF POETRY

perience, a problem that is usually approached through the opposition of those complex qualities we may call "quietness" and "excitement"; and the closely related question of the Romantic ethos and the cult of sensibil­ ity. Interwoven with these topics are considerations of the limitations and proper extent of poetry as an aes­ thetic mode: Arnold inquired in an analytical way not only what was proper, but what was possible to his po­ etic art. Underlying these speculations—and inseparable from them—is an attempt to define the attitudes the wise poet should take toward his own age and toward the past. For Arnold aesthetic and ethical ideals are ulti­ mately the same, so that the way of the wise poet, which involves a paradoxical detachment with participation, the achieving of a passionate austerity, is also the way by which the thoughtful man may be reconciled to life. The approaches, the symbols, and the images in which these apprehensions are realized change constantly, but in the poems, early and late, that treat the nature of po­ etry and the function of the poet Arnold expressed a set of convictions which is in harmony with, but quite different from, the dicta of the critical essays.

The Strayed Reveller Among Arnold's poems on the nature of poetry The Strayed Reveller is preeminent; its title is that of the first volume the poet published, and it is the initial statement of themes that were to be repeated, varied, and developed in his later work. The problems ap­ proached in this rather fragile poem are those large ones that came to dominate all Arnold's later considera-

THE IDEA OF POETRY

tions of the art of his time: that of the attitude the good poet must take toward the flow of external experience, of the proper view of one's own time and of the past, and particularly of the peculiar attractions and dangers of the Romantic sensibility. In form too The Strayed Revel­ ler anticipates practices and procedures that were to be­ come characteristic.3 Like certain works that follow it, it can be described as a modern myth of the poet's way; the poem is not reflective, or narrative, or—in any regu­ lar sense—dramatic; it has, however, a fable, a clearly defined mise en scene, a definite time scheme, and sev­ eral characters brought into significant relation with each other. These are the usual properties of dramatic poetry, but in Arnold's practice generally, and very clearly in The Strayed Reveller, the characters do not act upon each other; place and time, rigidly limited by the unities, are static and assume an entirely symbolic significance. A similar procedure is to be found in such poems as The New Sirens, Resignation, Empedocles on Etna, Bacchanalia, even in Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse. In the later poems this partially dramatic form is varied, but never transcended. The structure of The Strayed Reveller is like that of a masque, but of a masque without music. As in Comus —the best example of the serious masque—the charac81

am not here concerned with the metrical aspects of the poem, though it may be remarked that it is a very early example —for England—of free verse. Though Arnold's invention is most effective, his originality is not remarkable: the chief in­ fluence on his verses is Goethe's imitation of Greek metres (see, for example, Prometheus, Ganymed, Grenzen der Menschheit, and other poems among the Vermischte Gedichte) which are often startlingly like Arnold's. Arnold would also have been familiar with Heine's experiments in Hellenic metres.

THE IDEA OF POETRY

ters face each other in a highly contrived way, and are made to express opposing attitudes in a series of elevated speeches. Arnold's characters do not come into active conflict, nor are they affected by action; they are, in fact, not so much dramatic characters as embodiments of states of being or thought, and it is attitudes that con­ front, conflict with, and modify each other. This general­ ization applies, I think, to all those poems I have just mentioned. The dramatis personae of The Strayed Rev­ eller are more, certainly, than abstractions or allegorical figures, but they are constrained by the framework of the poem to represent limited views or ranges of percep­ tion. One way of apprehending the poem is to regard it as a modern myth based on elements of classical mythol­ ogy; the fable is anchored in the concrete, but the situa­ tion represented in The Strayed Reveller is that of the post-Romantic poet; it is a mythical treatment of the temptations the poet is subjected to and of the ways which he might take. As the poem opens the youth who has strayed from the Bacchic rout is discovered at evening in the portico of Circe's palace. In his first speech he explains that he has drunk the enchantress's wine and succumbed to the charms of her magical world. Circe asks, "Whence art thou, sleeper?" and he tells how in the dawn he went out with his vine-crown, his "fir-staff,/ All drench'd in dew" to join the Bacchic revels. But, —I saw On my left, through the beeches, Thy palace, Goddess, Smokeless, empty! • 18

TEE IDEd

OF POETRY

Trembling, I enter'd; beheld The court all silent, The lions sleeping, On the altar this bowl. I drank, Goddess! And sank down here, sleeping, On the steps of thy portico. (lines 42-52)4 In this poem and elsewhere in Arnold's work (as, for ex­ ample, in Bacchanalia), the procession of Bacchus stands for the distractions to which the poet is particu­ larly subject; it is a complex but traditional symbol which stands partly for the Dionysiac abandonment to sense, but also for the flux of experience, the confused multitudinousness of the age, the press and fury of mod­ ern times. The distinction between being a part of the procession and observing it with detachment has for Arnold both an individual, subjective meaning and an objective, general one. R. H. Hutton, one of his most perceptive contemporaries, remarked that "no English poet ever painted so powerfully the straining of emotion against the reins of severe intellectual repression. In Mr. Arnold," he went on to say, "there is a deep love of excitement, and a deep fear of it, always strug­ gling."5 To achieve poetic insight the artist must re­ move himself from the fevered rout, just as the wise man can achieve moral insight only in detachment from the 4

This, and all subsequent references, are to the standard edition, The Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold, eds. C. B. Tinker and H. F. Lowry, London and New York, 1950. 0 R. H. Hutton, Brief Literary Criticisms, London, 1906,

p. 273.

THE IDEA OF POETRY

business of the world. But this is no more than the first step toward becoming a true poet; to leave the rout is to make the decision for poetry, but the question posed by the fable of The Strayed Reveller, and the urgent question in all of Arnold's poems on the nature of po­ etry, is what the aspirant becomes after his initial dis­ engagement. For the reveler in this poem represents the inexperi­ enced poet; he has strayed in more than one sense: away from Bacchic frenzy, but into enchantment and intoxi­ cation. Arnold's Circe is decidedly not the wicked witch of mythology; her wine is merely left upon an altar to be taken at will: "I lured him not hither, Ulysses," she protests. The suggestion is that Circean temptations are not thrust upon us; we find them out, straying easily to the palace which lies just beside the path. But there is no reason to assume that because the goddess appears mild and indifferent, her snares have lost their force. In Arnold's new myth, the wine of Circe still represents submission to sense: it offers sweet sleep and intensely lucid visions, but they are deceptive; the reveler in Cir­ ce's halls only seems to see. It is quite wrong to assume, as several critics have done, that the reveler stands for Arnold himself. For the fable to have meaning its subject must be the aspiring poet, the poet in posse or, more topically, the young writer who has come under the sway of the Romantic spirit. The whole scheme of the poem expresses the at­ titude toward Romanticism that Arnold repeatedly de­ fined in prose and verse. The responsive artist of the mid-nineteenth century would inevitably become en­ chanted by a Byron, a Senancour, a George Sand, but if

THE IDEA OF POETRY

he is to grow he must go beyond them. For Arnold the intoxication of Romanticism is associated with youth and passive joy; it brings some insight into the nature of poetry, a poignant melancholy, but not disciplined accomplishment. The dialogue of The Strayed Reveller asserts that the "wise bard" is one who has waked from enchanted reveries and achieved a difficult and active balance of attitudes. The poem's statement is, unfortu­ nately, somewhat blurred—chiefly, I think, because the suggestions of the plot are not carried to a conclusion— but its general implication is always discernible. Ulysses makes his appearance about a third of the way through the poem. He speaks first to Circe, then to the youth, who has been awakened by his voice. His welcome to the reveler expresses the somewhat patroniz­ ing appreciation of the "travel-tarnish'd" hero for the pleasures of poetry: It may be thou hast follow'd Through the islands some divine bard, By age taught many things, Age and the Muses; And heard him delighting The chiefs and people In the banquet, and learn'd his songs, Of Gods and Heroes, Of war and arts, And peopled cities, Inland, or built By the grey sea.—If so, then hail! I honour and welcome thee. (lines 117-129)

THE IDEA OF POETRY

To this the youth replies in a speech which takes up the remainder of the poem; he begins with seeming obliquity, The Gods are happy. They turn on all sides Their shining eyes.... The lines that follow are among the finest in Arnold's poetry and contain the essential meanings of The Strayed Reveller·, but to appreciate them we must ar­ rive at some judgment of the adequacy of this speech as a reply to Ulysses' statement, and consider whether the whole passage could not have stood more effectively as an independent lyric meditation. Let us begin with Ulysses' role in the poem. Like Circe, who embodies the temptations of restricted sensuousness, he represents a condition of being; he, the "proved, much enduring, / Wave-toss'd Wanderer," symbolizes the life of action, but action of the heroic, rather than of the tumultuous, Bacchic sort. A more austere figure than the young poet, he too is disengaged from the rout. In discriminating the states of being that are the actual personae of this poem, Arnold is interest­ ingly precise in defining the moral weight of useful ac­ tion. It is not suggested that the possibility of heroic action need tempt the poet away from his proper sphere; the way of the hero and the way of the poet are not in conflict: excellence in each may be a source of joy to the other. However, Ulysses has expressed an attitude to­ ward poetry, and the youth's speech is a clear and pains­ taking reply to the implications of the phrase, "some divine bard." The warrior has apparently responded to

T H E I D E A OF POETRY

the delights of poetry without appreciating the difficul­ ties of its creation; the young poet reproves him, corrects his limited, self-indulgent view of poetry, and at the same time gives a luminous definition of the relation to experience that the highest kind of poetry must achieve. There is no such thing as a "divine" bard, singing—pre­ sumably—by happy inspiration, learning as he mellows with age. "The Gods are happy," they alone possess the divine vision; the vision of the wise poet is achieved only through pain and suffering.6 The poet must begin by recognizing his humanity, by immersing himself in the crude anguish of his kind. His ultimate task—though this is to anticipate Arnold's conclusions—is to achieve an elevated, steady view of man in the universe. This ® It appears that the germ of Arnold's conception owes more to Goethe than to any other source. Though the vision of happy (and indifferent?) gods has clear affinities with Lucretius, a parallel to the Reveller's distinction between gods and men is to be found in the fourth stanza of Grenzen der MenschheUx Was unterscheidet Gotter von Menschen? Dass viele Wellen Vor jenen wandeln, Ein ewiges Strom: Uns hebt die Welle, Verschlingt die Welle Und wir versinken. [How are gods different from men? It is that the gods see be­ fore them an endless flow of innumerable waves; but we are swept up and devoured by the waves, and we sink to our deaths.] (Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe und Gesprache, ed., Ernst Beutler, 24 vols., Zurich, 1949-50, Samtliche Gediehte, i. 323324.)

THE IDEA OF POETRY

distinction between god-like, Olympian detachment, and the detachment the great artist can achieve by imagina­ tively living through experience is the crux of Arnold's poem. A rigorous parallelism of structure emphasizes the contrast between the vision of the gods and that of the wise bard. The gods are said to see six specific things: Tiresias, the centaurs, the Indian in the vale of Cashmeer, the Scythians, the ferry crossing the Oxus, and the heroes nearing the Happy Islands. These various objects, several of them drawn from literary sources that scholars have identified,7 are suggestively heterogene­ ous: they represent the range of things that might at­ tract the interest of gods and poets. Each one, however, has a double aspect, and may be seen either as charming and "poetical," or as grim and terrible. What matters is not so much what is seen as how it is seen. The gods see Tiresias (lines 135ff.) sitting "On the warm, grassy/ Asopus bank," "Revolving inly / The doom of Thebes." In their impassive view, he maintains the calm dignity of the prophet. The wise bards can also see Tiresias, —but the Gods, Who give them vision, Added this law: That they should bear too His groping blindness, His dark foreboding, His scorn'd white hairs; 7 See

C. B. Tinker and H. F. Lowry, The Poetry of Matthew Arnold: A Commentary, London and New York, 1940 (hence­ forth referred to as Commentary ).

THE IDEA OF POETRY

Bear Hera's anger Through a life lengthen'd To seven ages. (lines 213-222) The notable quality of this "divine" view is its charm: to the gods the centaurs present only a scene of living nature. In Greek mythology, however, centaurs sug­ gest the contrasting aspects of earthly life; in only one set of tales do they represent the elemental, physical realm. Callicles, the free and joyous young singer in Empedocles on Etna, alludes to the myth of Chiron, the aged centaur who taught Achilles, Hercules, and other heroes the lore of nature. In Empedoeles the cen­ taurs on Pelion symbolize man's connection with the animal and vegetative world and the potentiality of that world as a source of joy. But the double-natured centaur is a mythical expression of man's own nature: though these creatures have the beauty and wisdom of natural things, they have also the violence of brutes. The other aspect of the centaur myth—that which, in The Strayed Reveller, is not seen by the gods—concerns their rela­ tions with ordinary men. The battle of the Lapiths and the centaurs, so prominent in Greek art, symbolizes the victory of civilization over barbarism and blind force, of reason over passion. In contrast to the gods, the wise bards see the centaurs as both beautiful and terrible: They see the Centaurs On Pelion;—then they feel, They too, the maddening wine Swell their large veins to bursting; in wild pain They feel the biting spears

TEE IDEA OF POETRY

Of the grim Lapithae, and Theseus, drive, Drive crashing through their bones; they feel High on a jutting rock in the red stream Alcmena's dreadful son Ply his bow;—such a price The Gods exact for song: To become what we sing. (lines 223-234) Arnold's allusions here are both to the battle at the Lapiths' wedding and to the story of Hercules and the cen­ taur Nessus. While carrying Deianeira across a stream, Nessus offered her violence. As punishment for this in­ sult to his wife Hercules shot the centaur with a poi­ soned arrow, and in revenge, the dying Nessus gave Deianeira the philtre made of his blood which was even­ tually to destroy Hercules. In The Strayed Reveller the implications of the centaurs are not labored, but the two aspects of these myths express what Arnold felt to be a central truth about poetry and the poet's task. Only the gods can see events on earth without being involved in them or feeling their painful consequences. For the artist there is no escape from the human lot; it is the cost of his humanity that he must become -what he sings. But as Arnold came to see the problem for the poet of his time, it was primarily one of striking a balance between involvement and removal or, put another way, of finding the razor-edge of sympathetic detachment. This passage of The Strayed Reveller is a preliminary formulation of a theory of poetry that is common to all of Arnold's writings. The succeeding strophes of the poem extend the con-

THE IDEA OF POETRY

trasts of ways of seeing to other objects of poetic inter­ est, but do not modify the fundamental conception. While the gods see the primitive beauty of the Indian's condition, the poets see the pain and uncertainty of his life, just as they feel the anxious care of the picturesque Persian merchants. The poets see the heroes reaching their goal, but they also "share / Their lives, and former violent toil in Thebes, Seven-gated Thebes, or Troy." In its conclusion the poem returns to the reveler in Circe's palace. It appears that his understanding of the vision of the poets and of the gods was imparted to him by Silenus who has visited him in his drowsy state. The demigod Silenus, tutor of Bacchus, was reputed to be infinitely wise;8 in Arnold's poem he seems to share in both the cold knowledge of the gods and the anguished knowledge of men. Inspired by the magic wine, the reveler has been able in the course of the day to per­ ceive many things "Without pain, without labour" (line 274). But he does not see with either the gods' inhuman serenity or the compassionate insight of the wise bards. 8

In Virgil's Eclogue vi, the two satyrs who discover Silenus drunken and asleep force him to sing for them. His song, which recounts both the origins of the universe and a mythological past, charms all of nature. There is also a well-known myth which tells of King Midas's desire to learn from Silenus what was the best and most de­ sirable of all things for man. After long search Silenus was found and captured in a rose garden. When forced to reply to the king's questions, he answered that what was best of all was forever beyond man's reach: it was never to have been born. But the second best thing was to die quickly. The story is re­ told with great emphasis in the third chapter of Nietzsche's

Birth of Tragedy.

THE IDEA OF POETRY

He has had only partial glimpses of the Bacchic proces­ sion, of the sky and sea, and of Circe and Ulysses. The implication—and it is an important one for Arnold's poetics—is that the reveler sees painlessly, but with the fitful and incomplete vision of a young and intoxicated singer. He can learn from Silenus what poetry is, but he still lacks the extended, steady view of the true bard. In the last two strophes of the poem the imagery em­ phasizes movement and multiplicity: the "cool nightwind, tremulous stars," "glimmering water,/ Fitful earth-murmur." The figures of Circe and Ulysses fade, swim and waver before the youth. Because he does not see steadily, the reveler's poetic spirit, we are made to feel, is inadequate, still to be formed. In the last strophe the first six lines of the poem are repeated, leaving the reader with the image of the . . . wild, thronging train, The bright procession Of eddying forms . . . . The circularity of structure indicates that this is not a poem that arrives at conclusions. Several contrasting ways of seeing, or states of mind, have been presented, but no resolution is attempted. The inactive drama of the reveler is a fable of the poet in mid-century, a tenta­ tive conclusion in Arnold's continued effort to express the values and dangers of Romanticism for the writers of his time. Whether the protagonist, the young poet still in thrall to Romantic intoxication, can escape from his enchantment, recover from the effects of Circe's wine, is left in doubt. He has, at least, been granted a vision of excellence: the teachings of Silenus affirm the

THE IDEA OF POETRY

paradoxical relation which must exist between the im­ agination of the serious poet and the crude experience on which it acts. In other poems and in celebrated essays Arnold elaborated on this question, but The Strayed Reveller embodies with great effect and unequaled fresh­ ness the sense of the double aspect of things, of the po­ et's necessity to be of, and yet detached from, life, to know suffering and yet not be subject to it.

The Ways of Seeing Among the group of sonnets with which The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems began, the first which touches on the nature of poetry was written to Clough and called To a Friend. It is not one of Arnold's major works, but it will survive, if only for the sake of one line which underlies the poet's whole view of literature. In answer, it will be remembered, to the tongue-twisting question, "Who prop, thou ask'st, in these bad days, my mind?," the poet refers to Homer and to Epictetus, and in the sestet concludes: But be his My special thanks, whose even-balanced soul, From first youth tested up to extreme old age, Business could not make dull, nor passion wild; Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole; The mellow glory of the Attic stage, Singer of sweet Colonus, and its child. The most familiar line in this quotation was to be often repeated by its author and glossed by his critics. In his inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry at Ox-

THE

IDEA OF POETRY

ford,9 Arnold observed, in speaking of the Greek writ­ ers: "—in Sophocles there is the same energy, the same maturity, the same freedom, the same intelligent ob­ servation; but all these idealized and glorified by the grace and light shed over them from the noblest poetical feeling. And therefore I have ventured to say of Sopho­ cles, that he 'saw life steadily, and saw it whole'."10 This may be the best-known line of Arnold's poetry, but it is still not easy to understand. In To α Friend the two key words appear without explanatory context or amplification; it is only as they resound through the later writings that they acquire definition through im­ age, comparison, and allusion. But the two words, and the attributes they connote, are germinal to all of the poet's more mature and expanded reflections on the na­ ture of great poetry. Steadiness involves the achieve­ ment of a position (and an unwavering one) from which to regard life, while wholeness has to do with extension —not with the observer's vantage point or the act of seeing, but with the attributes, condition, extent, and di­ mensions of the thing seen. Arnold's notion of what the excellent poet sees in nature and in humanity, even his elaborately philosophical concept of the General Life (which I shall consider later), are in some ways no more than expansions of the meanings of wholeness. The two words are linked in a subject-object relationship 9

The lecture was later reprinted with the title, "On the Mod­ ern Element in Literature," MacmillaTi1S Magazine, xix (Febru­ ary, 1869), 304-314. It was reprinted in Essays in Criticism, Third Series, and in On the Classical Tradition, vol. I of The Complete Prose Works. 10 On the Classical Tradition, p. 28.

T E E IDEA OF POETRY

which is reciprocal: it is the way of seeing which makes it possible to see a whole, but the attempt to contemplate the whole, rather than mere fragments, conduces to steadiness of vision. Of the two terms "whole" is the more complex. Lionel Trilling, indicating what he takes to be the "common interpretation," quotes a literary journalist who refers fliply to "that Arnoldian phrase which denies that litera­ ture can make use of a division of labor."11 Of course it is an error to consider the line to mean that Sophocles saw all of life; and yet this popular misconception re­ sults from the paradoxical implications of Arnold's term. Primarily, seeing life whole means that, however limited the segment of experience the true poet sees, he sees it as a unity, not in fragments or multiplicities. But Arnold also suggests that by achieving this unified vi­ sion the poet penetrates to essential, underlying realities and arrives by this means at something like a vision of totality. The two aspects of this concept represent, I think, a typical fusion on Arnold's part of neo-classical and Romantic tenets. In one sense the great poet (in this 11 Lionel

Trilling, Matthew Arnold, New York, 1949, p. 32, nl. Trilling's discussion of Arnold's concept of wholeness is the most extensive so far. He was the first to connect the poetic phrase with the critical statements in the letters to Clough. "Integration," is, in Trilling's view, "the obsessive theme of Arnold's youthful letters to Clough, the integration of the in­ dividual, the integration of the work of art, the integration, finally, of the social order." (p. 33) This extension of Arnold's notion—subsequently interpreted as including his theories of religion and even of culture—seems to me just. My interest, however, is directed toward the significance of these concepts in the poems themselves.

• 31

THE IDEA OF POETRY

case Sophocles) achieves a vision of the whole of life by grasping the essential and unchanging characteristics of mankind, what Arnold was later to call "the great primary human affections,"12 a term that is closely re­ lated to the neo-classical conception of man's universal nature. But the obverse of this idea, the suggestion that a segment of experience, however limited, can be seen as a whole, resembles the organic principle of the Ger­ man Idealists which was expounded for English readers by Coleridge. The organicist asserts that all reality is a living whole, a unity, rather than a sum of, its parts, and that each part embodies the pattern of the whole. This melding of two diverse traditions represents the unify­ ing activity that is essential to Arnold's theory. The poet both creates a unity and submits his imagination to the objective unity of nature; by avoiding the misguided, febrile (in fact, Romantic) desire to see and experience totality, he may ultimately achieve a comprehensive vi­ sion and come to know the all. In the writings of Goethe, Arnold found both his ter­ minology (the word that Goethe used is Ganz) and an example of wholeness of vision, of a poetic achievement which rested on the unification of the two great tend­ encies of modern thought. So clearly is Arnold's con­ ception of wholeness based on Goethe's that we are, I think, intended to have the earlier poetry as a back­ ground against which Arnold's ideas can be seen to de­ velop. In Goethe we first find the double notion of seeing the whole and seeing things as a whole. In an epigram of 1797, for example, the poet enjoins his reader to avoid the fragmentary: 12 See

the 1853 Preface, Poetical Works, p. xix.

T E E IDEA OF POETRY

Immer strebe zum Ganzen, und kannst du selber kein Ganzes Werden, als dienendes Glied schliess an ein Ganzes dich an.18 [Aspire always toward the whole, and if you are unable to become a whole, attach yourself, as a serviceable member, to a whole.] The Generalbeichte of 1802, a poem which we know Arnold admired, is a mock confession expressing re­ morse for sins of omission, moments of joy that were not seized. From this lightly ironic context, in a way that is characteristic of Goethe, the serious meaning emerges: Willst du Absolution Deinen Treuen geben, Wollen wir nach deinem Wink Unablasslich streben, Uns vom Halben zu entwohnen Und im Ganzen, Guten, Schonen Resolut zu leben.14 [If you will grant absolution to those who are true to you, we will strive ceaselessly to do as you bid: to wean ourselves from half-measures, and to live resolutely in the whole, the good and the beautiful.] Goethe's expression of the organic principle is most suc­ cinct in an epigram of 1815 which urges man to recog­ nize the universal wholeness reflected in the smallest of living entities: 13 "Herbst," 14

stanza 45, Samtliche Gedichte, i, 260. Samtliche Gedichte, i, 89-90.

THE IDEA OF POETRY

Willst du dich am Ganzen erquicken, So musst du das Ganze im Kleinsten erblicken.15 These examples should be enough to indicate how much Arnold owed to Goethe and, perhaps, to suggest that the notion of shunning "the Half" and living resolutely in "the Whole" is no less full of suggestion and elusive of explicit definition in Goethe's German than in Arnold's English. If we press further in an attempt to understand the connotations of "wholeness" we find Arnold's early let­ ters and notes very helpful. To a Friend was undoubt­ edly addressed to Clough,1® and in the letters Arnold wrote his friend during the late 1840's and early '50's, he expressed a number of ideas that bear on his poems. In a letter of 1852 there is a notable passage on the dan­ ger of poetry modelling itself on the practice of the Eliz­ abethans and producing only "exquisite bits and im­ ages—" . . . whereas modern poetry can only subsist by its contents·, by becoming a complete magister vitae as the poetry of the ancients did: by including as theirs did, religion with poetry, instead of existing as poetry only, and leaving religious wants to be supplied by the Christian religion, as a power existing independ­ ent of the poetical power. But the language, style and general proceedings of a poetry which has such an immense task to perform, must be very plain direct 15

Samtliche Gedichte, i, 410. Tinker and Lowry observe that the last three lines of the octave of the sonnet were sent to Clough in a letter of "August or early September, 1848." (Commentary, p. 24.) 18

THE IDEA OF POETRY

and severe: and it must not lose itself in parts and episodes and ornamental work, but must press for­ wards to the whole.17 In this context wholeness appears to mean extensiveness, the all-inclusive view of the noblest poets. An earlier letter, however, reflects the other aspect of Arnold's con­ cept: in 1848 he wrote Clough, "you may often hear my sinews cracking under the effort to unite matter."18 It is helpful, I think, to put alongside these passages in the letters some jottings from the so-called Yale Manuscript, a miscellaneous collection of notes, drafts of poems, and reflections which seem to belong chiefly to the late forties.19 There is a reference, first, to the possibility of achieving "a feeling of the whole" if one does not strive for "expression and publicity." And farther on in the notebook is a comment which parallels those in the letters to Clough and serves as one of the best glosses on To a Friend. In this note Arnold has, not unnaturally, allowed Homer and Shakespeare to take the place of Sophocles and contrasted them with the writers of his own day. The passage comes very close, I think, to articulating the important later conception of the Grand Style: "only that which recalls a whole can refresh him who looks upon a whole. Tennyson has the naivete of language & image—but not the huge plain manner of thinking & feeling that is in nature—the Greek philosophers (Epicurus, Empedocles etc.) have 17

The Letters of Matthew Arnold to Arthur Hugh Clough, ed., Howard Γ. Lowry, London and New York, 1932, p. 124. 18 Letters to Clough, p. 65. 19 The Manuscript is fully described in Commentary, pp. 810.

THE IDEA OF POETRY

the great way of thinking, coextensive with nature, & not fantastically individual, but not the relief of, the naivete of Nature—with its landscapes & affections. Homer & the Old Testament & on the whole Shake­ speare unite both."20 The reader may at this point feel that the brief verse of Arnold's sonnet has been submerged under a killing weight of analogue and allusion. I think, however, that the poetry invites us to circle round the concepts it touches on and to discern ultimately in Arnold's notions of steadiness and wholeness the center of his complex idea of poetry. IN The World and the Quietist, another short poem in

the volume of 1849, the poet's relation to the world of action is considered with oblique irony. One aspect of the artist's function is justified by a witty parable ex­ plaining how poets, mournful though they may be, may nevertheless bring pleasure to the world. The title is misleading, since the poet of these verses is not a quietist in the philosophical or religious sense, but a detached, disenchanted figure who will not join in the labor of turning "life's mighty wheel."21 In the opening lines of the poem Critias, who may be assumed to speak for the world, censures the poet for his negativistic attitude. "Why," Critias is imagined to ask, 20

Yale MS., f. 21. few sentences that M. Bonnerot gives to this poem are most perceptive. He remarks that the poet's reply to his inter­ locutor "n'est guere d'un quietiste, mais d'un observateur sceptique." Louis Bonnerot, Matthew Arnold, poete: Essai de biographie psychologique, Paris, 1947, p. 149. 21 The

THE IDEd OF POETRY

". . . be debating still? Why, with these mournful rhymes Learn'd in more languid climes, Blame our activity Who, with such passionate will, Are what we mean to be?" (lines 3-8) The rest of the poem is the poet's answer to this reproof. Critias is a significant figure in the mythology of Arnold's poems on poetry. He is, I think, the first sketch of a type to be developed in several poems—the new Faustian man, "time's chafing prisoner" (as the Fausta of Resignation is called), the modernist who lives in the world and gives himself totally to it. There is no rea­ son to imagine, as the authors of the Commentary sug­ gest, that Arnold meant Critias to stand for Arthur Clough;22 the character is, rather, generic, and repre­ sents the active man in opposition to the contemplative one, and, the name, I assume, is derived with ironic in­ tent from κριτής, a judge or arbiter. The poet's answer to the activist is appropriately detached and cool. He ac­ cepts the necessity of "the world" having "set its heart to live," but pities the credulousness with which active men turn "life's mighty wheel," continue to impress la­ borers, and to expect that their own labors will have an end. The conception of fruitless activity, imaged here as the wheel of a great mill, recurs in the description in Heine's Grave of England stupidly travelling "her 22 See Commentary, p. 56. Considering the wide implications of the character's name, it seems equally unnecessary to trace it back—as these authors do—to a possible source in the three Platonic dialogues in which Critias appears.

THE IDEA OF POETRY

round / Of mechanic business" (lines 81-82). The prin­ cipal literary association is with the mill at which the slaves toil in Gaza. However, the poet defends his own activity only by seeming to deprecate it. He observes that "adverse voices" such as his may, after all, be pleasing to the great world since, Deafen'd by his own stir The rugged labourer Caught not till then a sense So glowing and so near Of his omnipotence. (lines 20-24) This equivocal notion is then illustrated by the anecdote, drawn from Herodotus, of Darius and his monitory slave: So, when the feast grew loud In Susa's palace proud, A white-robed slave stole to the Great King's side. He spake—the Great King heard; Felt the slow-rolling word Swell his attentive soul; Breathed deeply as it died, And drain'd his mighty bowl. (lines 25-32) Though apparently flattering to men of action, this comparison has cutting implications. The occasion of the slave's reminder was the report to the emperor of the rising of the subjugated Athenians and the taking of Sardis. Darius, in the pride of his omnipotence, had not previously heard of the Athenians; but being informed of their activities, he made a vow to revenge himself on

THE IDEA OF POETRY

them. After this, "he bade one of his servants every day, when his dinner was spread, three times repeat these words to him—'Master, remember the Athenians."'28 For Darius, this insignificant uprising, so soon to be crushed, provided a foil to his unlimited power; he pre­ sumably derived a gloomy pleasure from the contem­ plation of a revolt that could so easily be dealt with. Thus, Arnold's fable suggests, do the lords of the mod­ ern world regard the futile outbursts of the poetic spirit. But in the light of the later histories of Persia and Athens there is a stinging irony in the comparison of the detached and melancholy poet with the slave of Darius. The World and the Quietist, which seems at first to be lighthearted or even cynical, is a defense of poetry: the poet candidly suggests that he can please modern activ­ ists by offering them a view of experience which con­ trasts with but does not threaten their own, by suggest­ ing how (almost) unlimited their control of the world is; but in another sense, as the ominous parallel with Darius which the Conqueror implies, the voice of the quietist may well outlast the noise of the busy world.

The New Sirens The New Sirens, which also appeared in the volume of 1849, is the same kind of poem as The Strayed Revel­ ler·, it has a young poet as its central character, and it again makes use of a Homeric episode to construct a modern myth of the youthful sensibility confronting the temptations of Romanticism. The kind of refurbishment that made the Circe of The Strayed Reveller less a 23

Herodotus, v, 105 (Rawlinson's translation).

THE IDEA OF POETRY

formidable enchantress than the kind and comfortable hostess of a well-appointed palace, expressed the truth that in the confused world of modern morality, sorcer­ esses are not easily identified: the modern man, in fact, makes his own temptations. The transformation of Ho­ mer's sirens has gone even farther; these are not the straightforward maidens Ulysses heard, whose voices so charmed men that "they forgot home and everything relating to it." Arnold's New Sirens have left their re­ mote island and taken up residence in a proper country house; their song comes, not from a bone-strewn beach (as the ancient poets had it), but from an English gar­ den. The poem suggests, however, that these respectable sirens, by being "lawfully attractive," are even more dangerous than of old. Arnold approached the siren myth in an almost comic spirit and treated it in a manner that is halfway between simple burlesque and Romantic mythopoeia. There are, I think, no prototypes of this method in English litera­ ture. Burlesque (in the strict sense of the term) involves a comic treatment of myth for purposes that are ulti­ mately serious, but it works by a simple reversal of conventional positions: the high or heroic is placed in the framework of the low, Juno trades curses with the fishwife, or in such a play as Shaw's Caesar and Cleopa­ tra, those legendary figures are comically scaled down to a very human size. However, Arnold does not invert, but modifies responses; he uncovers meanings inherent in the original myth and makes them assume a modern connotation. There are, I think, sketchy suggestions of the method in the surviving fragment of Goethe's comic opera, Circe, in which—in her single speech—

THE IDEA OF POETRY

the goddess bemoans her lovelorn condition in the lan­ guage of a sentimental German lady,24 and in some of Heine's poetry, such as Die Gotter Griechenlands, in Die Nordsee, Zyklus 2. But the only close parallels to Arnold's method are in the twentieth century, and in such stylish works as Gide's Thesee or Anouilh's "mod­ ernization" of the Antigone. Perhaps because he was a profound classicist and learned respecter of the past, Arnold had the confidence to make free with the legacy of myth and to express the knowledge that the sirens have a new song for every age. Homer had, wisely, been vague as to the nature of this thrilling song; he described it simply as music so beau­ tiful that it crazed any mortal who heard it and made him forget his desire to return home;25 and other an­ cient authorities were as little concerned to define the sirens' temptation (though in later ages much attention was given to naming the maidens and establishing their number and exact location) .26 This concentration on the object, rather than on an analysis of it, might be thought typically Greek; the music is so beautiful that it beguiles the mariner to his death; no elaboration is necessary. It appears that the desire to ask what song the sirens sang is a strictly modern one. As a way of emphasizing the singular aspects of Arnold's treatment of the myth, I find it useful to look at the more familiar reinterpretation 24 See

Gedenkausgabe, vii, 1120-1121. Odyssey, xn, 1-200. 26 See, for example, Argonautica Orphica, 1284; Plato, Re­ public, x, 617 (in which the sirens, rendered harmless, provide the music of the eight celestial spheres); Ovid, Metamorphoses, v, 55 Iff. 25 See

THE IDEA OF POETRY

of Samuel Daniel in his charming Ulysses and the Si­ ren." For Daniel, the temptation is a conventional one— to give up toil, to "joy the day in mirth—And spend the night in sleep." Ulysses, hot after fame and honor, re­ jects the invitation "To spend the time luxuriously," insisting that the manly person finds his joy in labor. The argument proceeds, but Ulysses has the better of it—to such an extent, in fact, that the siren concludes in agreeably feminine fashion that if she cannot persuade Ulysses to come live with her, she will go with him, For beauty hath created been rPundo, or be undone. Simple as the conflict in Daniel's poem is, it is con­ ceived in the spirit of his age, and to hold it as a foil against The New Sirens is to be made sharply aware of the topical aspects of Arnold's poem. For Arnold, the si­ ren song offers a moral and intellectual temptation; it is the Romantic attitude toward life and art which the wise poet must learn to resist. The speaker of the dra­ matic monologue is "one of a band of poets"28 who is torn by conflicting views of what he should be both as man and as artist. The poem is concerned, in the first place, with the permanent conflict between intellect and passion, or between emotional satisfaction and enduring good; but the values expressed in this opposition also determine contrasting attitudes toward the poet and his ordering of experience. In The New Sirens we find, in fact, an admirable example of Arnold's ability to project 27 In 28

Certain Small Poems, 1605. Letters to Clough, p. 105.

THE IDEA OF POETRY

in historical and universal terms oppositions that might, by another poet, have been conceived as wholly personal and internal. Unfortunately The New Sirens is now equipped with a descriptive apparatus so extensive that the poem tends to drop out of sight behind Arnold's prefatory note and prose explanation. Tinker and Lowry's Commentary supplies a full account of background and history which need not be repeated here. However, in establishing the ambiance of the poem it is good to have in mind the surprisingly intense last sentence of the 1876 note in which Arnold explained that he was reprinting it at Swinburne's request: "To a work of his youth, a work produced in long-past days of ardour and emotion, an author can never be very hard-hearted; and after a dis­ appearance of more than twenty-five years, The New Sirens, therefore, is here reprinted." Arnold seems to have been deeply attached to the poem; it underwent an extraordinary amount of revision, and in a letter of 1849 he sadly accepted Clough's judgment that the "New Sirens are, what you called them, a mumble"; but later, after repeating this comment, he added, "I have doctored it so much and looked at it so long that I am now power­ less respecting it."29 Still refusing to give up, he pre­ pared a running commentary for the poem and sent it to Clough. This prose statement is so complete that it has become a subtle obstacle to criticism; it tempts the reader to accept it as the equivalent of the poem. And, indeed, the few critics who have commented on The 29

Letters to Clough, pp. 104 and 107.

• 43·

THE IDEA OF POETRY

New Sirens have been too ready to consider it a "mum­ ble" and to evade the challenge of the poem itself.80 This is particularly unfortunate since Arnold's commentary was not intended as exegesis, but merely as a statement of his argument; and since Clough had said he had no trouble with the last seven stanzas, even the argument is incomplete. What we have, then, is a set of marginal notes by the poet which no more convey the meaning of his poem than—to make an exalted comparison—Cole­ ridge's notes to The Ancient Mariner convey its mean­ ing. The plot and setting of this dramatic monologue man­ age to be both quite vague and definitely "period." The poet who speaks (one of a group, since in the fourth stanza he speaks of his fellows) has come without know­ ing the nature of his temptresses to inhabit the sirens' palace and to join in their revels. The mise-en-scene is interestingly typical of late nineteenth-century style, the two scenes resembling two elaborate tableaux-vivants. In the first half of the poem the speaker, grave and poetic, stands at evening under a cedar tree contemplating the classically draped figures of the New Sirens who are 80

Paull F. Baum, for example, considers exegesis of the po­ em unnecessary, since "Arnold was his own commentor." (Baum, p. xiii.) And Tinker and Lowry, after remarking the "incoherence" of the poem and the difficulty of following "its development through its various stages," assert cryptically that "the meaning is made clear at the end. '—Shall I seek, that I may scorn her, Her I loved at eventide? Shall I ask, what faded mourner Stands, at daybreak, weeping by my side?'" (Commentary, p. 47.) • 44 ·

THE IDEA OF POETRY

seen "round about in their bowers in the garden, de­ jected."31 Subsequently the sirens rise, and "With a sad, majestic motion," re-enter their palace. The special quality of this kind of poetic situation is realized by com­ paring it with the concreteness of scene in such a poem as Gray's Elegy, or with the saturated world of romance in The Eve of Saint Agnes. Arnold places symbolic figures in a real, but dimly traced landscape. In the visual arts, one finds an analogy to his method in the paintings of Bocklin, or of Puvis de Chavannes. The speaker is imagined to have succumbed to the temptations of the sirens but, at the moment of the mono­ logue, has awakened from a monitory dream and real­ ized the identity of his hostesses. He and his fellow-po­ ets have been seduced from their "upland valleys" (pre­ sumably the austere dwelling of the true poets); heed­ ing the sirens' song they have cast off their Apollonian laurel and "heap'd with myrtles," the plant of Venus and the symbol of pleasure, have descended from their high and solitary life: From the watchers on the mountains, And the bright and morning star; We are exiles, we are falling, We have lost them at your call— O ye false ones, at your calling Seeking ceiled chambers and a palace-hall! (lines 35-40) This is, indeed, a band of fallen angels. It is significant that Arnold, unlike earlier poets who treated the siren 81 Thus Arnold described it in his notes. Letters to Clough, p. 105.

THE IDEA OF POETRY

myth, is not concerned with the actual temptation, con­ flict, and choice. His poet has already given in; the dra­ ma is in his recognition that these "pensive Graces" are the very maidens who, "With blown tresses, and with beckoning hands," lured the Greek mariners to destruction. These ladies, being completely up to date, have dis­ pensed with crude, sensual temptation and with a fate so simple as death. They offer, as Arnold paraphrased it, a "love [that] is romantic and claims to be a satisfying of the spirit."32 With "diviner features,/ Loftier bear­ ing, and a prouder eye," (lines 63-64) they celebrate the Romantic cult of feeling and the supremacy of the heart over the head: 'Come,' you say, 'the brain is seeking, While the sovran heart is dead; Yet this glean'd, when Gods were speaking, Rarer secrets than the toiling head. 'Come,' you say, 'opinion trembles, Judgment shifts, convictions go; Life dries up, the heart dissembles— Only, what we feel, we know. Hatii your wisdom felt emotions? Will it weep our burning tears? Hath it drunk of our love-potions Crowning moments with the wealth of years?'33 (lines 77-88) 82

Letters to Clough, p. 105. apparent inconsistency of the sirens' argument in line 83: "the heart dissembles," must be understood to refer to the intellectual order the poet originally celebrated. That is, in a ss The

THE

IDEA OF POETRY

The day that elapses in The New Sirens is reminis­ cent of the stylized day of conventional pastoral; the movement from morn to gloomy eve symbolizes both the poet's progression from youth to maturity, and the evolution of his attitudes toward life and art. In a wider context, this day also stands for the life of the nineteenth century advancing from its early bliss and turmoil to a chastened maturity. As at sunrise, in his youth, man quickens to the life of the senses, so at the beginning of the century men responded to that art which offered a pure and naive awakening to the power of feeling. But, Arnold's fable suggests, as the individual leaves his youth behind, so must the wise poet find the way beyond Romanticism. Once more, then, Arnold does not so much attack the Romantic achievement as reject its value for his own time. His judgments, I have remarked, have little in common with those of such later polemicists as Bruneti£re, Babbitt, or T. E. Hulme. He loved the work of his poetic "fathers,"34 but wished first to distinguish the true light of feeling from the false, and then to see where the poet might go next. The best clues to his atworld that emphasizes "falsely" intellectual values, life dries up and the heart is forced to dissemble. 84 See Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse, in which wistful tribute is paid to the Romantic poets: Our fathers water'd with their tears This sea of time whereon we sail, Their voices were in all men's ears Who pass'd within their puissant hail. Still the same ocean round us raves, But we stand mute, and watch the waves. (Stanza 21)

THE IDEA OF POETRY

titude are, I think, in two prose passages that bear on his early reading; one is Joubert's discussion of Mme. de Stael's fiction, in the course of which he observes that the lady was born to excel in "la morale," "... mais son imagination a ete seduite par quelque chose qui est plus brillant, que Ies vrais biens: l'eclat de la flamme et des feux l'a egaree. Elle a pris Ies fievres de l'ame pour ses facultes, l'ivresse pour une puissance, et nos ecarts pour un progres. Les passions sont devenues a ses yeux une espece de dignity et de gloire. Elle a voulu Ies peindre comme ce qu'il y a de plus beau, et, prenant Ieur enormite pour Ieur grandeur, elle a fait un roman difforme."35 We know that Arnold read and re-read Joubert, and I think it not unlikely that this weighty con­ demnation influenced not only the leading ideas, but the imagery of The New Sirens. The other essential passage is Arnold's own descrip­ tion of his youthful enthusiasm for George Sand: The hour of agony and revolt passed away for George Sand, as it passed away for Goethe, as it passes away for their readers likewise. It passes away and does not return; yet those who, amid the agitations, more or less stormy of their youth, betook themselves to the early works of George Sand, may in later life cease to read them, indeed, but they can no more forget them than they can forget Werther. George Sand speaks somewhere of her "days of Corinney Days of Valentine, many of us may in like manner say,—days of Valentine, days of Lelia, days never to return! 85

Pensees, essais, et maximes de J. Joubert, ed., Paul Raynal, 2 vols., Paris, 1842, n, 208.

THE

IDEA OF POETRY

They are gone, we shall read the books no more, and yet how ineffaceable is their impression!38 We can none of us recapture our "days of L£/ia." It is clear from this passage that Arnold sees youth and the supremacy of sense in the individual life as correspond­ ing to Romanticism in the literature of the age; to at­ tempt to continue its poetics into the noon of the nine­ teenth century would result in a trivial or deadly art. All this, crisply and ironically expressed, emerges without need of gloss in the first fourteen stanzas of The New Sirens. The reader's difficulty comes when Arnold tries to extend the reinterpretation of the original myth and to give the sirens a history, to consider them as sub­ ject to temptation and capable of choice. The idea is not without promise: the notion of rearranging the fixed absolutes of archetypal temptation, of showing the tempters tempted, makes possible an oblique comment on the relative spirit, the instability of the nineteenth century. The sirens advocate the surrender to feeling; it is entertaining that they should themselves be sub­ ject to the ennui that accompanies the life of passion. And indeed, as the now "sombre day" drags on the si­ rens themselves become despondent: —Sitting cheerless in your bowers, The hands propping the sunk head, Still they gall you, the long hours, And the hungry thought, that must be fed! (lines 127-130) It appears that the needs of the intellect may be as in­ sistent as those of the heart. The sirens, according to 86 "George

Sand," Mixed Essays, pp. 241-242.

TEE IDEd

OF POETRY

Arnold's commentary (and I think that at this point the reader would be helpless without it), were once, like the poet, attracted to the life of the spirit, but "finding it hard and solitary . . . soon abandoned [it] for the vehe­ ment emotional life of passion as 'the new Sirens'."87 The relevant passage in the poem reads, Once, like us, you took your station Watchers for a purer fire; But you droop'd in expectation, And you wearied in desire. (lines 139-142) It is possible that Arnold had in mind here the in­ ternal history of Romanticism: the passion of Byron, the melancholy of Senancour, even George Sand's devo­ tion to the ideal life were corrupted by their own excess. But such meanings must be supplied from the reader's external knowledge; the passage fails through a total lack of specificity. It was all very well for Arnold to make up his own story, to give the Victorian sirens a relatively virtuous past, but in doing so he neglected the beguiling circumstantiality that surrounds the sym­ bolic essence of viable myth. The motifs of classical mythology are effective in modern literature because they allow the writer to achieve by mere allusion a den­ sity of remembered detail. If the fable is to be extended, the modern writer must supply the narrative. Since Arnold does not tell us the sirens' story it is difficult to see how the notion of their fall from the life of the spirit to the febrile raptures of the flesh adds anything to the meanings of the poem. 37

Letters to Clough, p. 106.

THE IDEA OF POETRY

IN THE last third of the poem night has fallen, the sirens

are in their palace, "amidst light and dancing." The tone in this section drops to a dignified but rather abstract dialogue of the mind with itself. The poet, alone in the dark garden, wonders whether this "alternation of ennui and excitement is worth much"38 and whether even if it were "the best discoverable existence" it would not soon be worn out by time, to be succeeded only by weariness. In another shift of tone, the final stanzas turn into a beautiful lament which adds some new and melancholy implications to the sirens' charms. The morning that will put a term to the revelry and dalliance of the night is an emblem of the epoch that is to come: When the lamps are paled at morning, Heart quits heart and hand quits hand. Cold in that unlovely dawning, Loveless, rayless, joyless you shall stand! (lines 263-266) In the hard light of nineteenth-century day the charms of pagan sensuality are grayed. Nevertheless, the poet cannot coolly dismiss his temptresses: singing of their downfall he sounds the note of ambivalent longing that is in so much Victorian poetry. He has given fully to the sirens, withholding nothing of passion or expectation or faith (see lines 226-234); it is more than sad that in this harsh new day they can offer nothing in return: Can men worship the wan features, The sunk eyes, the wailing tone, 38

Letters to Clough, p. 106.

THE IDEA OF POETRY

Of unsphered, discrowned creatures, Souls as little godlike as their own? (lines 247-250) The interest of this conclusion, in which the sirens are revealed as, like some illusively beautiful actress, hag­ gard in a natural light, lies in its fusion of meanings. In the sirens' fall the poet laments the brevity of sensory pleasure and passionate love. The new day marks the passing of youth. But though this theme dominates the final stanzas, it would be mistaken to consider the poem as exclusively about the temptations and transiency of love and the necessity to resist its allure.88 A kind of love is included in the temptations the sirens offer, but the poem is no more "about" romantic love than it is about the contrast between youth and age. Its real subject is the attitudes we must take toward experience, toward art, and toward the world; and the several planes on which its meanings are expressed are not easily sep­ arable. The New Sirens is an impressive poem partly because it offers no answers; it describes one world as already dead, and shows the dawn of another that may never be fully born. The question asked in the conclud­ ing lines leaves the reader in a state of poignant doubt: 89 The notion that The New Sirens expresses a love conflict closely related to that in the Marguerite poems is suggested in the Commentary (p. 47). E. D. H. Johnson's brief discussion of the poem (see The Alien Vision of Victorian Poetry, Princeton, 1952, p. 164) is based on a similar interpretation. Bonnerot's discovery of "elements autobiographiques," and his identifica­ tion of "Her I loved at eventide" (line 272) as Marguerite car­ ries the idea even further. (See Bonnerot, p. 103.)

THE IDEA OF POETRY

—Shall I seek, that I may scorn her, Her I loved at eventide? Shall I ask, what faded mourner Stands, at daybreak, weeping by my side? (lines 271-274) This is a question that points in more than one direction, but it is not (as too many readers have claimed) im­ penetrable. In relation to romantic love, the speaker asks whether he should turn back to act out the rejection of his former love, and whether he should devote himself to analyzing the impermanence and decay of passion. In relation to the theme of youth and age, the question evokes the possibility of a fixation on the vanished joys of youth; and in relation to the theme of the inadequacy of Romantic doctrines, it suggests a possible choice between constant working over of the dead Romantic precepts and the making of a fresh start, the fashioning of a living idea of poetry and life. But the question remains unanswered. Though it was posed in many different ways in the earlier poems, and though it was Arnold's principal question as to the func­ tion of the modern poet, it was never to be conclusively answered in his poetic practice. Much of Arnold's work can be explained as an attempt to create a genuine postRomantic poetry; but he never succeeded, I think, in pro­ viding both a critique of Romantic tenets and an exam­ ple of what a genuinely new, yet traditional, poetry could be. He achieved a brilliant exposure of false attitudes, but no more than a noble reaching toward a poetry of wholeness, toward the expression of a tragic spirit ulti53·

TEE IDEA OF POETRY

mately dedicated to joy. With so high and pure an aim it is perhaps no wonder that he failed. I think it no dis­ paragement of Arnold to say that the closest he came to the expression of this elevated poetic art was in the stir­ ring definitions of his critical prose.

Resignation Resignation, the last poem in the volume of 1849, does not—like The Strayed Reveller and The New Si­ rens—pose a question that is left unanswered. It offers no less than a description of that state of mind which is requisite both to the creation and to the fullest en­ joyment of poetry: "resignation" is a spiritual condition, the moral attitude of the wise man and, for the aspiring poet, a philosophical preparation for achievement. The poem itself is the most imposing member, indeed the culmination, of that group of poems I have already dis­ cussed which approach by various techniques and from several points of view a definition of the poet's task. Arnold gave Resignation a very precise setting and situation. This specificity of description, which pro­ vides a happily objective base for the poem, has encour­ aged critics to treat it as if it were a verse memoir; but the "facts" are important only through what they lend to structure and evoke by association. The occasion, as well as the Lake Country setting, is patently Wordsworthian: the poet-speaker and his sister (called in the poem Fausta) are taking a walking trip over Wythburn Fells to Keswick; the journey is one they had made ten years before so that the poem—like Tintern Abbey— involves a contrast between the impressions of a first and

THE IDEA OF POETRY

second visit.40 The subjects the poet contemplates are also Wordsworthian but—and it is this, I think, that the poem's allusive structure is meant to emphasize—the conclusions are of a very different kind from Words­ worth's. The quality of Resignation is, in fact, purely Arnoldian: characters and setting, though well-defined, are not genuinely dramatic; as in The Strayed Reveller, the characters represent conditions of being, contrasting attitudes toward life and poetry; the action they engage in, rich though it is in symbolic meaning, lacks the clarity and literal primacy of dramatic action. One feels that the significances of Resignation are made to fluc­ tuate between the allegorical and the literal. Each char­ acter is a point of view, a state of mind, and each— whether he be poet or gypsy—is seen as a walker on the face of the earth. Similarly, the journey through the Cumberland hills, though it has an immediate topo­ graphical interest, is, with its difficulties and its end at the unbounded sea, the journey of life. But the easy delicacy of Arnold's creation would be destroyed if we imposed a strict allegorical or symbolical interpretation on it. Rather, the occasion, the actualities of the poem, provide a structure of the concrete that gives strength and immediacy to essentially abstract speculations. The situation of the poem (that is, setting, character, and 40

Arnold and his sister Jane (whom he usually called "K") did, in fact, take this very trip in 1833. Mrs. Humphry Ward, Arnold's niece, observed that "It was to her, Jane Arnold, that 'Resignation' was addressed, in recollection of their mountain walks and talks together." (A Writer's Recollections, London, 1918, p. 39.) There is a full discussion of the factual back­ ground of the poem in Commentary, pp. 63-64.

THE IDEA OF POETRY

action) is a center from which several kinds of experi­ ence can be regarded. The pattern of Resignation is one that Arnold was to repeat with great success in Philomela, Dover Beach, and A Summer Night. All these poems progress from the level of ordinary observation, from an almost con­ versational tone, to an elevated meditation. Typically, the poet-speaker finds himself in a natural setting, or engaged in simple discourse; then, from some associa­ tion or recollection, his mind moves toward illuminated insight. Since I have said so much about Arnold's re­ jection of Romanticism, it is worth noting that this po­ etic pattern is almost a paradigm of successful Ro­ mantic practice. Coleridge, for example, in what he called his "conversation" poems, managed to register the movement of the mind circling out from an insig­ nificant incident to some luminous insight. Yeats, by no means the "last Romantic," frequently based a poem on an intentionally specific and humdrum episode which became a springboard for passionate reflection. In Among School Children, for example, the "public man's" routine school inspection provides the occasion for both recollection and contemplation of the ends of life. The situation, by containing the poet's lyrical meditation and his exalted philosophical questioning, helps the reader to grasp his thought as feeling, not merely as reflective verse. Modern readers are willing to concede the gran­ deur of Yeats's meditation, but they balk at Arnold's. I would not say that Resignation is as successful a poem as Among School Children, but that it is the same kind of poem; it also expresses a philosophical insight which

THE IDEA OF POETRY

grows out of an ordinary occasion; what happens in the poem—the walk, the recollection of the previous walk, the poet's consideration of various ethical atti­ tudes, and his earnest debate with Fausta—is, in its total configuration, a kind of metaphor for the activity of the poetic intelligence. The form, of which Resignation is the earliest and clearest example, dramatizes the movement of the speaker's mind. At least six definable attitudes or conditions of sensi­ bility are presented in Resignation·, indeed the poem displays so complex a use of definition by contrast (of what I have called Arnold's "this-but-not-that" method) that the reader must exert himself to discriminate its meanings. It begins simply enough by describing the state of those wayfarers (actual and metaphorical) who are unperplexed by metaphysical or ethical questions. "Pilgrims, bound for Mecca," Crusaders, Goths, and Huns, have a common prayer, uTο die be given us, or at­ tain! / Fierce work it were, to do again.n —so pray all, Whom labours, self-ordain'd, enthrall; Because they to themselves propose On this side the all-common close A goal which, gain'd, may give repose. So pray they; and to stand again Where they stood once, to them were pain; Pain to thread back and to renew Past straits, and currents long steer'd through. (lines 13-21) These are the men of forceful and unquestioning action; the fact that they are, as it were, disposed of in a prel-

THE IDEA OF POETRY

ude to the poem suggests that they have little to do with the problems the poet is about to consider. There is an interesting parallel between Arnold's neutral presenta­ tion of the life of action in this poem and his interpreta­ tion of Ulysses in The Strayed Reveller. In general, the active life does not present itself for Arnold as a pos­ sible alternative; his poetry shrewdly suggests that the life of unquestioning struggle is not arrived at through conscious choice, but assumed by natural faculty. The pilgrims and militants, involved in a constant progress, find no meaning in the past; they are unwilling to look back either on their own life or on the life of the race. The next section of the poem (lines 22-39) briefly describes the condition of the resigned natures, the ex­ treme opposite of the crusader mentality: But milder natures, and more free— Whom an unblamed serenity Hath freed from passions, and the state Of struggle these necessitate; Whom schooling of the stubborn mind Hath made, or birth hath found, resign'd— These mourn not, that their goings pay Obedience to the passing day. (lines 22-29) This preliminary definition of resignation is for the benefit of the poet's companion, Fausta, "Time's chafing prisoner," who apparently seeks satisfaction and ac­ complishment in outward action. Fausta, as her name suggests, represents the modern spirit, and the rest of the poem is a reproof to her for being insufficiently "re-

TEE IDEA OF POETRY

signed," for resembling too much the crusaders in ask­ ing that "every laughing Hour [be] handmaid to their striding power." Arnold's notion of the Faustian per­ sonality comes into many of his earlier works. The Critias of The World and the Quietist is, in his devo­ tion to action, a sketch of the type, and there is a pas­ sage in the Yale Manuscript which seems to point di­ rectly toward the formulations of Resignation: "I will not ask, are you sure you are mended in this or that par­ ticular? but I will ask, are you sufficient for that new, that self-contained, abundant life, which we should be mended into. This crusade, this attacking state, is ab­ normal temporary: it occupies existence with the same stimulus of noise & outward action, the cowardly selfbetaking whereto has been the source of the meanness & blindness of all those you would mend."41 The section in which Fausta appears as the person to whom the speaker's argument is addressed, is en­ riched by recollection of the walking trip the two had taken over the same course ten years before. As the physical setting of the poem is sketched in, four dis­ tinct attitudes toward experience are suggested: there are the activist pilgrims; the wise men who have achieved resignation; the Faustian sensationalists; and the speaker himself who, we infer, is an aspirant toward resignation. The speaker's description of the country through which he walked with Fausta, and the joyful end of their earlier journey, underlies the account of the present moment and suggests the pattern of per­ manence in which they have changed: « Yale MS., f. 43.

THE IDEA OF POETRY

And many a mile of dusty way, Parch'd and road-worn, we made that day; But, Fausta, I remember well, That as the balmy darkness fell We bathed our hands with speechless glee, That night, in the wide-glimmering sea. (lines 80-85) We do not need to be reminded (as we, in fact, are in line 260) that this body of water is "the seas of life and death"; all the suggestions in the passage enforce a sense of the stillness and eternality of nature. Turn­ ing, in the section which begins with line 86, to the present journey, the speaker sees himself and Fausta as having changed, becoming "Ghosts of that boisterous company"; but nature is unaltered. This contrast of man and nature and the comparison of two journeys, separated only in time, is an image of unchanging change. However, Fausta's response to the comparison is not the same as the speaker's; she recognizes the sempiternal aspect of nature, but protests that she and her brother "Are scarce more changed" than the blue gentians which still grow above the stream. In this Fausta displays her restless subjection to time, her fret­ ful modernism. The rest of the poem is a debate with Fausta, in which the speaker establishes with considerable clarity a kind of scale of resignation. The gypsies, whom they have met on both trips, are wanderers rather than striders; they would seem to have achieved a kind of resig­ nation, but the speaker is at pains to point out that their attitude is an unconscious or, at least, unthinking one.

TEE IDEA OF POETRY

They might, he suggests, find much to be troubled about; they could make unfavorable comparisons of the present with the past, But no!—they rubb'd through yesterday In their hereditary way, And they will rub through, if they can, To-morrow on the self-same plan, Till death arrive to supersede, For them, vicissitude and need. (lines 138-143) These gypsies, it may be necessary to observe, bear none of the connotations of the Scholar Gipsy. They represent a concern with simple survival, the irreducible instinctive life. Arnold's treatment has behind it the example of Wordsworth, whose short poem, The Gip­ sies (1807), begins, Yet are they here the same unbroken knot Of human beings, in the self-same spot! and goes on to condemn . . . this torpid life; Life which the very stars reprove As on their silent tasks they move! The speaker of Resignation is less stern than Words­ worth; he suggests (we discover presently) that if Fausta can learn to rate the gypsies aright, she can profit from their example. Following immediately on this section (and the col­ location is important) is a description of the highest form of resignation, that which is achieved by the wise

THE IDEA OF POETRY

poet. The figure described in these lines is not—it must be said with emphasis—the speaker of the poem, nor Arnold himself, nor some actual nineteenth-century writer.42 This is, rather, the wise bard who has by "schooling of the stubborn mind," by labor, and by suf­ fering achieved the ideal attitude toward which a thoughtful and serious writer (such as the poet-speaker of Resignation) might aspire. He manifests that con­ dition of mind in which the best life can be lived and the best art produced. An essential part of Arnold's idea of poetry is to be found in this passage which carries to a more ample development some of the notions that were touched on in The Strayed Reveller, The New Si­ rens and, indeed, in all the early writings on poetry. The poet, the argument runs, by nature more highly endowed than other men, . . . to whose mighty heart Heaven doth a quicker pulse impart, Subdues that energy to scan Not his own course, but that of man. (lines 144-147) This true poet can act and bear great pain, but he does not—and this is the heart of the paradox—live in his action and suffering. The necessary thing is to go be­ yond Romantic self-absorption. At the time when he was forming the ideas which are expressed in this po­ em, Arnold found in Keats an example of the false com­ mitment which weakened poetry; he described Keats 42 M. Bonnerot attempts to identify the poet and concludes that he is either Wordsworth or Goethe (Bonnerot, pp. 296298).

• 6 2 ·

TEE IDEA OF POETRY

as an artist "passionately desiring movement and ful­ ness, but obtaining but a confused multitudinousness."48 The true poet who is evoked in Resignation must know all the strong and beautiful forces of life and not be tempted to make them his own. These notions are il­ lustrated in an orderly way as the speaker gives exam­ ples of the poet freeing himself from individual attach­ ment in the several important areas of human experi­ ence. Confronting first the temptation of power, the po­ et sees A ruler of the people stand, Sees his strong thought in fiery flood Roll through the heaving multitude; Exults—yet for no moment's space Envies the all-regarded place. (lines 155-159) He encounters physical beauty and "Bears to admire uncravingly"; he can rejoice in its triumph without de­ siring to possess it. Exposed to the attractions of domes­ tic happiness, he is seen looking down from his "high station" at the groups of happy townsfolk busy with their affairs "And does not say: I am alone." Finally, and most important, there is a scene which illustrates the Tightness of the poet's attitude toward nature. In each of the episodes concerned with the temptations of ordinary life the poet has, to a limited extent, seen and felt (the word "sees" is constantly repeated in this pas­ sage), but his seeing of nature is something more pro­ found, and results in an intense emotion which involves a fusion of seeing and feeling: 43

Letters to Clough, p. 97.

THE IDEA OF POETRY

Lean'd on his gate, he gazes—tears Are in his eyes, and in his ears The murmur of a thousand years. Before him he sees life unroll, A placid and continuous whole— That general life, which does not cease, Whose secret is not joy, but peace .... (lines 186-192) It is to be noticed that the only approach to ecstasy comes, not from regarding the human situation, but from insight into the life of nature. The poet's tears in­ volve no abandonment to floating emotion, nor are they, it would seem, lacrimae rerum\ they are, rather, the tribute of the philosophic, visionary soul to the primal beauty at the heart of things. The passage concludes, That life, whose dumb wish is not miss'd K birth proceeds, if things subsist; The life of plants, and stones, and rain, The life he craves—if not in vain Fate gave, what chance shall not control, His sad lucidity of soul. (lines 193-198) This deepest insight of the poet is at once ethical and aesthetic. Poetry is by nature, Arnold would insist, normative, and the finest wisdom provides a rule of life as well as art.44 The poet, therefore, by submitting him" Goethe formulated a similar notion in terms that, I think, Arnold would have accepted without reservation: "Moral cul­ ture," he wrote in Dichtung und Wahrheit, "[is] so intimately allied to, nay incorporated with aesthetic culture . . . that to their mutual perfection the one cannot be conceived without the

THE IDEA OF POETRY

self to the general life sees into it and learns from na­ ture the Stoic resignation essential to wise conduct and a peaceful spirit. But Fausta disagrees. In a sug­ gested dialogue (the speaker imagines her unuttered thoughts) she presents a more "progressive" view. The images of the passage which give her point of view (lines 199-214) are of change, restlessness, and in­ stability. Fausta's disagreement is betrayed by a "wan­ dering smile"; her eyes pursue "the bells of foam / Wash'd, eddying, from this bank." The poet, as she de­ scribes him, is frenetic; "he leaves his kind, o'erleaps their pen," he "flees," and "escapes." The Faustian poet is essentially one who feels; of that fine balance by which human suffering is experienced yet distanced, Fausta seems unaware. She also elevates the poetic function in a typically Romantic way; for her, the gyp­ sies "Are less, the poet more, than man." They feel not, though they move and see; Deeper the poet feels; but he Breathes, when he will, immortal air, Where Orpheus and where Homer are. In the day's life, whose iron round Hems us all in, he is not bound; He leaves his kind, o'erleaps their pen, And flees the common life of men. (lines 205-212) The rest of the poem is an answer to Fausta in which the speaker considers first the problem of seeing and feeling. In the correct view it is as if—by a reversal of other." (Truth and Poetry, translated by Oxenford, 2 vols., London, 1897, n, 158.)

THE IDEA OF POETRY

Fausta's formulation—the wise poet could be said to feel widely and see deeply. There is, the speaker asserts, a real world, the physical universe "in which we live and move." This world is independent of, and outlasts, all human emotions; and even, the argument continues (lines 219fF.), if these emotions were to extend farther than they now can, man would have sight only of fur­ ther "regions of eternal change"; by comprehending more of the imiversal process, he would see even more clearly how limited and insignificant are his hopes and desires. The speaker then considers the eternality of natural things: the external world is not merely projec­ tive, but has an existence independent of human per­ ceptions. And because this universe persists through continual change the speaker can assert: This world in which we draw our breath, In some sense, Fausta, outlasts death. (lines 229-230) The philosophical notion of mutability, derived both from the Stoics and from Lucretius, is expressed only as thought. But the realization grows out of the con­ crete situation of the poem: the landscape through which the speaker and Fausta have walked is a token of the universal process. The next section of Resignation (lines 231-260) describes the security of mind achieved by the poet who has "natural insight" into the phenomenal world. This philosophical vision, as it is here described, resembles not only the detachment of the traditional Stoic, but the comfort which Spinoza derived from "understand­ ing the causes and effects of all things." The speaker

TEE IDEA OF POETRY

and Fausta do not have this natural insight (". . . though fate grudge to thee and me / The poet's rapt security"), but they can train themselves to seek not amusement, but freedom of spirit, not passion, but quiet; and thus finally to "Draw homeward to the gen­ eral life." Fausta, particularly, must learn to give over her restless desires "to fill the day," to experience emo­ tion. But the speaker, though he has a steadier philo­ sophical mind than Fausta, has also not reached the condition of the wise poet. In its conclusion the poem turns again to its natural setting and to the values that lie in nature: Enough, we live!—and if a life, With large results so little rife, Though bearable, seem hardly worth This pomp of worlds, this pain of birth; Yet, Fausta, the mute turf we tread, The solemn hills around us spread, This stream which falls incessantly, The strange-scrawl'd rocks, the lonely sky, If I might lend their life a voice, Seem to bear rather than rejoice. (lines 261-270) The lines are a quietus to the restless, aspiring Faustian spirit; the ultimate resignation is to be perceived in the tranquil, perfect workings of nature. The poem might well (might best, I sometimes think) have ended here. But there is a coda, a final point of argument, in which the speaker turns to the problem of evil: 67 ·

TEE IDEA OF POETRY

And even could the intemperate prayer Man iterates, while these forbear, For movement, for an ampler sphere, Pierce Fate1S impenetrable ear; Not milder is the general lot Because our spirits have forgot, In action's dizzying eddy whirl'd, The something that infects the world. (lines 271-278) Here the argument departs from Stoicism. According to the Stoics, evil does not exist in the universe of things. In the words of Epictetus, "there is nothing intrinsically evil in the world";45 so even death is not an evil, nor, if we could rightly know them, would natural limitations and sufferings be considered harmful. What is evil is man's own moral disorder. The concluding lines of Resignation do not contradict such a view, but they de­ part from it in suggesting an evil immanent in things. Arnold's passage is so compressed as to prevent clarity. I find a helpful gloss, however, in some lines from Wordsworth's tragedy, The Borderers (not published until 1842), in which the hero, Marmaduke, exclaims: . . . we look But at the surfaces of things; we hear Of towns in flames, fields ravaged, young and old Driven out in troops to want and nakedness; Then grasp our swords and rush upon a cure That flatters us, because it asks not thought: The deeper malady is better hid; The world is poisoned at the heart. (lines 1029-1036) " See Enchiridion, 27.

TEE IDEA OF POETBY

This recognition of evil and the distrust of action as a means of countering it are identical with the views ex­ pressed by Arnold's speaker. Its position as the last poem in The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems indicates the emphasis Arnold wished to put on Resignation. Looked at in relation to the po­ ems we have already discussed, it can be seen as an answer to some of the questions previously raised. The Strayed Reveller and The New Sirens dramatize the false views of life and art that a young poet is subject to, but they do not extend to a definition of the way of the achieved poet. This Resignation does; and in its weaknesses as well as its strengths it can stand as a distinguished example of Arnold's earlier poetry. Its subject is both high and ample; it has a solidity and firmness of structure that come from the interweaving of event, character, and natural description. But how­ ever admirable—even magnificent—the language and imagery of the poem, the reader is not left with the sense that these disparate elements are fused. Resigna­ tion is perhaps too much a poem of discursive argument; it lacks the magic coherence which makes Tintern Ab­ bey, so similar in theme and method, completely mem­ orable, or that leads the reader of Among School Chil­ dren to follow the poet as he rises naturally from hum­ blest beginnings to great elevation of style and mood. Arnold had not totally mastered the forms of philo­ sophical poetry; in his eagerness to tell us important things he sometimes descends from the language of imagery, or abandons the poetic situation he has cre­ ated. We do not arrive—as we should—unwittingly at the conclusions the poet would have us reach; we may

THE IDEA OF POETRY

admire, approve, and agree, but we have not been charmed into assent. And yet Resignation is that rare thing, an intensely interesting and remarkably intelligent poem. Not many philosophical poems—even dull ones—really contain much in the way of serious ideas concisely expressed. Arnold succeeds in defining a theory of poetry and an ideal poet which are worth anyone's consideration; fur­ thermore, his idea of poetry is demonstrated as insepara­ bly linked with an idea of life and conduct. His poem, rising from the objects of everyday observation, is at its best an illustration of how a genuine perception of experience incorporates ethical insights. And in a few passages, it can be said, the verse expresses a lucid emo­ tion, an austere and humane passion, which are Arnold at his best.

Wordsworth and Senancour Among the poems published in 1852 as Empedocles on Etna and Other Poems there are only two that deal explicitly with an idea of poetry. Memorial Verses and Stanzas in Memory of the Author of uObermannn con­ tinue the discussion begun in The Strayed Reveller, but transpose it to a different plane of conception. The po­ ems that were published in 1849 attempted a mytho­ logical or sjTnbolic treatment of the predicament of the young poet; those which appeared with Empedocles are objectively critical, even historical; they deal with actual writers and in their analyses prefigure the opinions and language of the later critical essays. The poems that claim our attention were composed within a few months of each other: Arnold dated the Stanzas No-

THE IDEA OF POETRY vember 1849; and the Memorial Verses on the death of Wordsworth, first published in FraSer1S Magazine for June 1850, were dated April 27, 1850. In structure the Stanzas only faintly resemble the kind of objective situa­ tion which is so often the basis of one of Arnold's medi­ tative poems. The speaker is first seen in nature, con­ templating an Alpine landscape which evokes for him the setting of Senancour's Obermann. But the relation­ ship between the poem's physical setting and its inner movement is not exploited, as it was, for example, in Resignation, and by the end of the third stanza the de­ scription of landscape is discarded in favor of a discur­ sive statement recalling Senancour's whole imaginative enterprise and interpreting his work and personality to Arnold's generation.48 The author of Obermann, how­ ever, becomes something more than a particular minor writer; like Wordsworth, Goethe, and Byron, he is, for 46

The place of Senancour in literary history and Arnold's particular debt to him have been thoroughly studied. The most learned and perceptive discussion is by Louis Bonnerot in Mat­ thew Arnold, Poete, pp. 178-181, 330-338 and passim. Com­ mentary provides a succinct summary of the essential informa­ tion. A lengthy discussion of Senancour's influence on Arnold runs through Iris Sells's Matthew Arnold and France, Cam­ bridge, 1935. But the occasional value of Mrs. Sells's informa­ tion and insight is too often vitiated by her defects of judg­ ment in reaching conclusions on insufficient evidence, and her insistence on finding in Senancour's work the "sources" of a startling proportion of Arnold's thought and language. For background on Senancour and his meaning to Arnold it is best, perhaps, to begin with the 1867 poem, Obermann Once More, and Arnold's essay on Senancour, first published in the Academy for October 9, 1869, and reprinted in Essays in Criti­ cism, Third Series.

TEE IDEA OF POETRY

Arnold, an actor in the cultural agon of the modern world. The Stanzas, then, are less an elegiac apprecia­ tion than the description of an attitude which Arnold himself had—with some reluctance—abandoned. The oppositions the poem establishes are precisely those of the earlier work, but they are now projected into the context of actual literary history. The speaker who con­ siders what way the poet might follow through "The hopeless tangle of [his] age" is barely dramatized: we feel that he is as much the author as is the "I" in a work of literary criticism. Senancour is not, in the Arnoldian sense, either re­ signed or Sophoclean. Beneath his charming treatment of nature "There sobs I know not what ground-tone / Of human agony." It is this melancholy note that the world has not wished to hear; so Senancour remained isolated and unpopular. Nevertheless, the poem claims, he belongs, with Wordsworth and Goethe, to the emi­ nent triad of modern writers who have seen their way. And in order to support this extravagant claim the poet turns to consider the two greater men; Wordsworth is briefly dealt with (his "eyes avert their ken / From half of human fate"); Goethe, though he is said to be beyond emulation and, in strength, freedom, and clarity of spir­ it much beyond modern men, had the advantage of passing his youth in a tranquil, pre-revolutionary world. For men who were born later things have not been so easy: Too fast we live, too much are tried, Too harass'd to attain

TEE IDEA OF POETRY

Wordsworth's sweet calm, or Goethe's wide And luminous view to gain. (lines 77-80) Senancour, it is implied, was a true enfant du siecle, a "sadder sage" who scanned well the "hopeless tangle of our age." In a manner that seems uncharacteristic of Arnold, Senancour's literary significance is made to depend en­ tirely on his topicality, on the peculiar relevance of his work to modern feeling and suffering. As the poem goes on, however, we see that the author of Obermann rep­ resents all that was thrilling and illuminating in Ro­ manticism. For Arnold, Obermann expressed more ful­ ly than Werther or Childe Harold or Rene the malady of the age. He put this view in the note to his Stanzas: "The stir of all the main forces, by which modern life is and has been impelled, lives in the letters of Obermann\ the dissolving agencies of the eighteenth cen­ tury, the fiery storm of the French Revolution, the first faint promise and dawn of that new world which our own time is but now more fully bringing to light,—all these are to be felt, almost to be touched, there." But Arnold's poem is also personal, and the book of Obermann represents not only a moment in modern thought but the condition of Arnold's own youth, a condition be­ yond which the thoughtful poet must find his own way: Away the dreams that but deceive And thou, sad guide, adieu! I go, fate drives me; but I leave Half of my life with you. (lines 129-132)

THE IDEA OF POETRY

The Stanzas are an elegy not only for the author of Obermann, but for the poet's own past: We, in some unknown Power's employ, Move on a rigorous line; Can neither, when we will, enjoy, Nor, when we will, resign. I in the world must live (lines 133-137) Senancour was able to escape the pressures imposed on ordinary men by virtue of a special gift. He was one of "that small, transfigured band," "Children of the Sec­ ond Birth / Whom the world could not tame." These are the choice spirits who have the power to live "Un­ spotted by the world." In a letter to Clough written while Arnold was composing the Stanzas, the concep­ tion is explained more fully: "Marvel not, that I say unto you, ye must be born again. While I will not much talk of these things, yet the considering of them has led me constantly to you the only living one almost that I know of The children of the second birth Whom the world could not tame— for my dear Tom has not sufficient besonnenheit for it to be any rest to think of mystics and such cattle—not that Tom is in any sense cattle or even a mystic but he has not a 'still, considerate mind.' "47 Besonnenheit, which Matthew's brother Tom is considered to lack, may be translated as "reflective self-possession," and is 47

Letters to Clough, pp. 109-110.

• 74·

THE IDEA OF POETRY

conceived not as a final state of intellectual grace, but as a prerequisite to illumination. The author of Obermann, then, had a kind of pure, melancholy ardor. But it is made clear that the poet who praises him does not have—does not really wish to have—these qualities. Those critics who have suggested that the Stanzas express a conflict within the poet's mind seem to me to have missed the point. For Arnold, Senancour was not a great writer; he was merely the finest example of a certain kind of reclusive writer. The wise poet achieves a different form of austerity; he must come to terms with the world, master it, and yet retain his own inner quiet and integrity of being. IN MAY 1850, after finishing Memorial Verses, Arnold proudly wrote Clough that he had "dirged W. W. in the grand styled The term "grand style" had not presumably acquired all the connotations that Arnold was to give it in his Oxford lectures; in its ordinary meaning it applies very happily to this elegy on Words­ worth, for the poem has a gravity and elevation which are the more impressive because they seem effortless. It is a very plain work, quiet and austere in tone; the decoration consists only of mythological or classical al­ lusions, and the figurative language is curbed. The trappings of conventional elegy can easily seem absurd in modern poetry, but the devotion (it is nothing less) which inspires Memorial Verses gives a freshness to Arnold's conception of Wordsworth come, like Orpheus, to make the pale ghosts of Hades rejoice; and in 48

Letters to Clough., p. 115.

THE IDEA OF POETRY

using the elegy to consider the essential value of poetry he was giving new life to an ancient custom. As in the Obermann poem, Arnold's subject is con­ sidered as one of three great modern writers: Goethe in Weimar sleeps, and Greece, Long since, saw Byron's struggle cease. But one such death remain'd to come; The last poetic voice is dumb— We stand to-day by Wordsworth's tomb. (lines 1-5) Byron's position in this distinguished group is some­ what insecure: "He taught us little; but our soul / Had felt him like the thunder's roll"; Goethe and Words­ worth, however, are modern examples of the two per­ manently opposed types of poet. Of Goethe the poet says: His eye plunged down the weltering strife, The turmoil of expiring lifeHe said: The end is everywhere, Art still has truth, take refuge there! And he was happy, if to know Causes of things, and far below His feet to see the lurid flow Of terror, and insane distress, And headlong fate, be happiness. (lines 25-33) The lines imitate the description in Georgics II of the poet who achieves the happiness of knowing the causes of things, and is able to overcome all fear and rise above concern with inexorable fate and the roar of hungry

TEE IDEA OF POETRY

Acheron.49 The contrasting kind of poet is the one who comes to know the country gods, Pan, old Sylvanus, and the sisterhood of nymphs: "Fortunatus et ille deos qui novit agrestis / Panaque Silvanumque senem Nymphasque sorores." (lines 493-494). Wordsworth, of course, is by nature a poet of the country gods: He laid us as we lay at birth On the cool flowery lap of earth, Smiles broke from us and we had ease. (lines 48-50) This conventional distinction was suggested in the Stanzas in Memory of the Author of uObermann," but there the conflict was conceived as internal: . . . two desires toss about The poet's feverish blood. One drives him to the world without, And one to solitude. Arnold makes no overt judgment, and does not in the Memorial Verses explicitly state that it is better to be a poet who knows the causes of things than one who is friendly with the country gods. However, the obvious reference to Virgil implies a comparison of values: in the beginning of the passage on poetry in Georgics II, the poet speaks of his devotion to the Muse and of his overweening desire that she grace him by revealing the 49

The passage in Virgil reads: Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas, atque metus omnis et inexorabile fatum subiecit pedibus strepitumque Acherontis avari. (lines 490-492)

THE IDEA OF POETRY

movements of the earth and of the heavenly bodies— of what might be called "the causes of things." But if by sluggishness or coldness of blood he is unable to achieve such knowledge, he would then wish to rejoice in the charm of stream and woodland and give up the desire for fame. Virgil does not leave us in doubt as to which is the higher poetic calling, and by his allusion to the Georgics Arnold suggests that Wordsworth's poetic function is less noble than Goethe's. Without minimiz­ ing the charm or worth of the nature poet's achieve­ ment, he has made of Memorial Verses a vigorous affir­ mation of his sense of the range of thought and feeling which could alone give weight and seriousness to the poetry of his own time.

Philomela Arnold's Poems of 1853 were prefaced by his most important essay on the nature of poetry, a manifesto which is no less than a fully conceived poetics, the most effective statement of an Aristotelian position to be made in the nineteenth century. The preface treats in an ex­ pository way many of the themes of the poems of 1849 and 1852, and the principles it asserts can be connected at many points with the poetry I have been considering. But the relation of this critical statement to Arnold's poetic practice is too large a topic for this particular discussion; here I shall be concerned with the preface only in a general way, regarding it as a background to certain recurrent notions expressed in the poems. The fact, for example, that the argument of the 1853 preface rises from Arnold's discussion of the weakness of any

THE

IDEA OF POETRY

art which expresses merely passive suffering, helps us to see how central this problem is to his idea of poetry. The question how the poet responds to his own suf­ fering and transmutes it into art is a persistent topic in the poems on poetry. The only new poem in the volume of 1853 that con­ cerns the nature of poetry tells a story of metamorphosis and reflects on the power of art to transform pain into joy. Philomela has many affinities with The Strayed Reveller·.50 it too is an attempt to express through myth an almost inexpressible apprehension of the sources of poetry. In The Strayed Reveller Arnold made his own myth out of well-known materials; in Philomela he used—perhaps more daringly—the legend of the mytho­ logical nightingale, a familiar type of the poet. To give life to so hackneyed a subject, Arnold had to regain some of the original, untarnished meanings of the myth. Both Coleridge and Keats had made the nightingale a symbol of the mysterious complexities of poetic power, but they had not tried to reinvigorate the whole myth of Procne and Philomela. In his treatment, Arnold did not so much add to his original as penetrate to its eternal meanings, enhance and connect them with contem­ porary life. Though the poem is not at all pretentious, it is a small triumph in confronting the temporal and the unchanging, past and present; it points a way by which the poets of Arnold's time could use the language of myth. 60 As he did in The Strayed Reveller, Arnold attempts in Philomela to evoke a Greek feeling by using a free-verse form strongly influenced by the broken lines and short verses of Heine's Freier Rhythmus.

THE IDEA OF POETRY The poem begins with the heard song: ". . . what a burst! / What triumph! hark!—what pain!" and the memory of the myth, which leads the speaker to specu­ late on the connection between song and suffering: O wanderer from a Grecian shore, Still, after many years, in distant lands, Still nourishing in thy bewilder'd brain That wild, unquench'd, deep-sunken, old-world painSay, will it never heal? (lines 5-9)51 In asking the meaning of this pain the poet is trying to understand both the significance of the myth and of anguish itself. The phrasing echoes the description in The Strayed Reveller of the "wild pain" which is the price the gods exact for song. Philomela continues: And can this fragrant lawn With its cool trees, and night, And the sweet, tranquil Thames, And moonshine, and the dew, To thy rack'd heart and brain Afford no balm? Dost thou to-night behold, Here, through the moonlight on this English grass, The unfriendly palace in the Thracian wild? (lines 10-18) 51 It should be noted that Arnold, in re-telling the myth, fol­ lowed not the Greek but the Latin version, which reverses the roles of the two sisters. In his poem Philomela is the wife of Tereus, and becomes a nightingale; Procne is turned into a swallow.

TEE IDEA OF POETRY This cool, English setting is very important to the meanings of the poem: the Mediterranean past is per­ ceived in the northern present, the universal in the local. Like so many of Arnold's poems, Philomela is a loose dramatic monologue; there is a specified time and place, a speaker, and an interlocutor (the Eugenia of the last lines), but all these are only partly defined. Essentially, the poem describes a moment at which lyrical experi­ ence becomes a means of insight. One way of paying tribute to the richness of Arnold's conception in Philomela is to compare his poem with T. S. Eliot's later use of the myth in Sweeney among the Nightingales. In Eliot's poem the nightingale's song points the distinction between a suffering that is bestial, confused, and meaningless, and one transformed by mythic art to beauty and significance. The same con­ trast is suggested by the Philomela passage in the sec­ ond section of The Waste Land, where the inability of the woman to understand the legend is a sign of mod­ ern man's inability to find meaning in his pain: As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale Filled all the desert with inviolable voice And still she cried, and still the world pursues, "Jug Jug" to dirty ears. (A Game of Chess, lines 98-103) One difference between Eliot's use of the myth and Arnold's is that for Eliot beauty and order and under­ standing are to be found only in the past—or, more ac­ curately, in what remains to us of the past in art and

THE IDEA OF POETRY

memory. Arnold was more hopeful; his poem by its very existence shows the eternal availability of the myth. The manner in which the tale of Philomela gives meaning to the birdsong typifies the connection between poetry and lived experience, that perpetual quickening of the present by the past in which Arnold put his faith. Philomela is not of a scale to exhibit many major ideas; in its finely wrought way, however, it presents more effective insights into aesthetic questions than do some of the ambitiously theoretical works. Here is the conclusion of the poem: Dost thou again peruse With hot cheeks and sear'd eyes The too clear web, and thy dumb sister's shame? Dost thou once more assay Thy flight, and feel come over thee, Poor fugitive, the feathery change Once more, and once more seem to make resound With love and hate, triumph and agony, Lone Daulis, and the high Cephissian vale? Listen, EugeniaHow thick the bursts come crowding through the leaves! Again—thou hearest? Eternal passion! Eternal pain! (lines 19-32) The passage touches on the re-creation of experience through art, and celebrates the value of living through agony. The three "once more's" suggest the repetitive as­ pect of the mimesis which seems to make the vale resound. The poem records an insight into the mys-

THE IDEd OF POETRY

teries of the unique that is recurrent, the eternal in the changing, the past made present. The myth of Philo­ mela is itself a kind of poetry, but to the poet who is master of his resources it is also a means of expressing the reconciliation of experience and art, of suffering and beauty.

New Poems Since it pleased Arnold himself to suggest that "real­ ly the cause" of his New Poems appearing in 1867 was his desire to reprint Empedocles on Etna, critics may be excused for underestimating the book. If we assign the composition of Dover Beach to the years around 1850,52 as I think we must, it is true that New Poems offered no entirely fresh masterpieces. And, in keep­ ing with the almost ironic modesty of his introductory comments, Arnold took care to lower the temperature of his volume by including epigrammatic statements on the decline of his lyrical impulse or on the blight of old age, and elegiac verses (e.g. Obermann Once More) which suggest a kind of spiritual valetudinarianism. Having reached the age of forty-five, Arnold may be said to have done his work in poetry, but a book which includes Thyrsis, Rugby Chapel, Bacchanalia, and Obermann Once More can command attention even after a century. Considered only in relation to the idea of poetry, the volume is impressive: there are several un­ pretentious verse statements on the problems of artistic creation, two of which return with ripe insight and 52

See the description of the MS. draft of part of the poem in Commentary, pp. 173ff.

TRE IDEA OF POETRY

stylistic originality to questions that had been previous­ ly considered, and at least two that add significantly to the poet's imaginative definition of the nineteenthcentury literary situation. The Prefatory Stanza to New Poems (later reprinted as Persistency of Poetry) establishes the characteristic note of the volume: Though the Muse be gone away, Though she move not earth to-day, Souls, erewhile who caught her word, Ah! still harp on what they heard. The saturnine tone of this quatrain is exceeded in The Progress of Poesy, which borrows the title of Gray's stately ode, but reverses its implications. Gray saw po­ etry in the image of a full and ever-widening stream, but Arnold presents instead the youthful poet who finds the vein which is within the rock, "And brings the wa­ ter from the fount"; but it is a "fount which shall not flow again," and the second stanza describes the "man mature," who . . . with labour chops For the bright stream a channel grand, And sees not that the sacred drops Ran off and vanish'd out of hand. For the old man, at the end of the poem, there is no course but to rake feebly among the dry stones. The epigram called A Caution to Poets had first ap­ peared in a letter to Clough in 1852,53 where Arnold 58

Tinker and Lowry observe that the first draft of this epi­ gram is in the Yale MS. (Commentary, p. 187), which I be­ lieve belongs to the late forties.

T H E IDEA OF POETRY

had written: "As for my poems they have weight, I think, but little or no charm What Poets feel not, when they make, A pleasure in creating, The world, in its turn, will not take Pleasure in contemplating. There is an oracular quatrain for you, terribly true. I feel now where my poems (this set) are all wrong, which I did not a year ago: but I doubt whether I shall ever have heat and radiance enough to pierce the clouds that are massed round me."54 When it appeared in print in 1867, the quatrain was changed only in punctuation. Belonging to this group of poems, and matching their epigrammatic laconicism with its anecdotal brevity, is the sonnet, Austerity of Poetry, which tells the story of the beautiful bride of the Tuscan poet, Giacopone da Todi, who, killed in the collapse of a platform, was found to be wearing a penitential garment of sackcloth underneath her "Gay raiment, sparkling gauds." The sonnet concludes: Such, poets, is your bride, the Muse! young, gay, Radiant, adorn'd outside; a hidden ground Of thought and of austerity within. Though they are certainly minor, these four poems are consistent with Arnold's more serious reflections on the poetic function. They establish a tone of cool ob­ jectivity, and regard the conditions of artistic creation 64

Letters to Clough, p. 126. The "set" of poems referred to is the Empedoeles volume, and it is presumably of that poem particularly that Arnold was thinking.

T E E IDEA OF POETRY

with a detachment which is not unfeeling, but which verges on the sardonic. They imply a disdain of either Romantic exaltation or luxurious self-pity; they lack color, but they are pungent; and they succeed in setting a mood for the steady examination of the most impor­ tant literary issues. IN THE volume of 1867, along with so much that is diminished or merely workmanlike, are two major po­ ems, companion pieces, that treat of the poetic function and expatiate with new force on themes that were first expressed in the Poems of 1849. The Epilogue to Leasing's Laocoon and Bacchanalia, or, the New Age stand in explicit relation to earlier poems; the Epilogue harks back to Resignation, Bacchanalia to The Strayed Revel­ ler. Both poems have been quite unfairly scorned by readers of Arnold; the authors of the Commentary give them short shrift, and we may take as typical the ex­ communication performed by the Arnold lover, Carleton Stanley, who remarked that "The best commentary on any poem of Arnold's is the rest of Arnold's poetry— from which, by the way, Merope, Balder Dead, and Epilogue to Lessing's Laocoon, may be omitted."55 It is not difficult to see why the poems have been unpopular; they are both (except for some passages in Baccha­ nalia) in octosyllabic couplets, a meter that was not well-suited to the discursive quality of Arnold's later 55

Matthew Arnold, Toronto, 1938, p. 91. As usual, however, I must except from this generalization M. Bonnerot. His learned discussion of the Epilogue is the only attempt I know to con­ nect the poem to Lessing's work and to give serious attention to its argument.

THE IDEA OF POETRY

poetry. They require more than ordinary attention on the reader's part; but they gain by being re-read, they engage the intelligence, and are unpretentiously inter­ esting. The Epilogue is a variation on the scheme of Resig­ nation; it too describes a walk in which the peripatetic poet-speaker, accompanied by a responsive, but not fully perceptive, friend, achieves an awareness that is both illustrated and, in a sense, provoked by the course of the walk and the objects of the concrete environment. The philosophers' tag, solvitur ambulando, fits both poems. In the Epilogue, movement is, appropriately, a chief subject of discourse. In structure, however, the Epilogue is a less fully realized poem than Resignation·, the friend to whom the speaker addresses his argument is a shadowy figure, not a genuine opponent as Fausta is. There is, in fact, no real dialectic; the friend's re­ marks serve merely as a prologue to the exposition that follows. In considering what makes for strength and weakness in poetry, it is also interesting to see that the connections between the "statement" of the Epilogue and its setting and action are much less intricate and suggestive than they are in Resignation·, the later poem does not seem to be the product of its situation. The most obvious thing to remark about Arnold's poem is that it is precisely what it is called: an Epilogue to the Laocoon. The poem assumes a knowledge of Lessing's theories, takes its departure from his treatise, and adds to his conceptions. Irving Babbitt observed that "the great central generalization of the 'Laokoon'" was "that poetry deals with temporal, painting with spatial relations, poetry with the successive and painting

THE IDEA OF POETRY

with the coexistent. .. ."5e Arnold accepts these general distinctions, but in his Epilogue is principally con­ cerned with poetry; he defines the bounds of the visual and musical arts, and then asserts the greater extensiveness and complexity of literary art. Lessing showed a similar preoccupation, but in the Laocoon he did not so much claim the superiority of poetry over the other arts as lead the reader to infer it. He was more con­ cerned with the relationships among the arts and the modes peculiar to the various forms of art than he was with a hierarchy of significance. Arnold's poem, then, departs quite rapidly from the specific topics of Lessing's treatise: And after we awhile had gone In Lessing's track, and tried to see What painting is, what poetryDiverging to another thought . . . . This comes at line four. But Lessing's ideas underlie the whole poem; even the eloquent conclusion, so typi­ cal an evolution of Arnold's perennial reflections on po­ etics, is to some extent a variation on Lessing's theme of motion and action. "Subjects," said Lessing, "whose wholes or parts are consecutive and reveal themselves in time are called actions. Consequently, actions are the peculiar subject of poetry." And, drawing a conclusion from this observation: "we see the making by the poet of that which, in the painter's works we only see as made." ("Und so, wie gesagt, sehen wir bei dem Dichter entstehen, was wir bei dem Maler nicht anders als ent56 The

New Laokoon, Boston, 1910, p. 52.

T E E IDEA OF POETRY

standen sehen konnen.")57 These ideas are embodied in the second half of the Epilogue, where the speaker considers the glories and difficulties of poetry.58 The friend—to turn to the explicit argument of the poem—remarks that poetry has achieved, over the cen­ turies, "fewer fine successes" than music and the plas­ tic arts. To support this judgment the friend makes a rapid survey of the condition of poetry in the great ages of the past and in the nineteenth century. Pausanias had found good poems rarer than good statues; the Italian painters overshadowed the poets; and in modern times the poetry of Goethe and Wordsworth, "Profound yet touching, sweet yet strong," does not match the "heav­ enly strains" of Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn. The rest of the poem is, in one way or another, an answer to this assertion. The setting is made to harmonize with the aesthetic principles the speaker affirms: Hyde Park is a microcosm of the poet's world; its small wilder­ nesses, its pastures, and metropolitan walks are like 57

The references are to Chapters XV and XVI of the Laakoon. 58 It may be well to observe here that a strict critic (and devoted "Lessingite") such as Babbitt is not as impressed as I am by the closeness of Arnold's ideas to Lessing's. He quotes the passage beginning, " 'Behold, at last the poet's sphere!'" (line 127), and observes, "Arnold can scarcely be said to be happy in his choice of illustrations. What are cows and elms and grass to one like Lessing, who is interested only in the paint­ ing of human action, and not of ordinary human action at that, but of ideal action in the Aristotelian sense of the word ideal. . . ?" ( The New Laokoon, p. 45.) The point is, of course, that Arnold was trying to extend Lessing's conceptions, to make them usable for the later nineteenth century.

THE IDEA OF POETRY

nature itself, surrounded but not destroyed by the swarming city. More simply, of course, the prospects visible in the park provide the speaker with concrete examples for his theorizing. The two men walk on fresh grass under "unblacken'd elms"; cattle of a Homeric fairness are nearby, and the towers of Westminster Abbey are visible in the distance. Not far off is the crowded "Ride," and beyond it the stir of London; as emblematic landscape it is richly suggestive. The speaker's argument begins with an orderly ex­ position of what are called the "spheres" of painting and music, that is, the definable limits within which the various kinds of artist must work. For the painter (and here the argument follows Lessing closely) the task is that of catching and bringing into one "aspect" a per­ ception of external nature: 'In outward semblance he must give A moment's life of things that live; Then let him choose his moment well, With power divine its story tell.' (lines 57-60) For each of his examples, the speaker finds a correlative in his immediate surroundings. The sight of the cattle on the grass, which is a static view, suggests the limita­ tions of painting. The passage on music, by contrast, alludes to ethereal stirrings and sweet sounds: the breeze plays on "the sparkling waters," waves plash, "mimic boats" approach their haven; music is described as natural sound, "In laws by human artists bound" (line 76). The notable characteristic of the musician's sphere is its depth and extensiveness:

THE IDEA OF POETRY

'The inspired musician what a range, What power of passion, wealth of change! Some source of feeling he must choose And its lock'd fount of beauty use, And through the stream of music tell Its else unutterable spell; To choose it rightly is his part, And press into its inmost heart.1 (lines 81-88) The composer's freedom is suggested by the repetition of the word "choose," and the expansiveness and clar­ ity of his materials contrast sharply with the strict limi­ tations of the poet's condition (the verb for him is "must"). The walkers reach—almost literally—the poet's sphere when they find themselves in the Ride. The resting cattle are far off; faint music is heard in the distance, but they are in the midst of "Men, with their stream of life." This is a world of seemingly purpose­ less, unordered movement. "Behold, at last the poet's sphere!" the speaker remarks and, having suggested the complexity and confusion of the poet's materials, he turns back to his friend's original question: "But who," he asks, "suffices here?" The long concluding passage of the Epilogue, a defense of poetry, is a partial answer to this question. The section is, more truly than other parts of the poem, an epilogue to Lessing; it treats those issues which are touched on in the Laokoon, but not clarified, and to one of Lessing's principal concepts, that of movement, Arnold gives a large, new signifi­ cance. In this final section, too, the reader is often re• 91

THE IDEA OF POETRY

minded of the tone and ideas of Resignation. The way of the supreme poet is defined by a series of distinctions, and again the prerequisite to genuine poetry is con­ sidered (as it was in The Strayed Reveller and in Resig­ nation) to be the distancing of experience, the being in, but not of, life. More is required of the poet than of the painter or the composer. He shows "the aspect of the moment," though not as clearly as the painter; and expresses "the feeling of the moment," though with less profundity than the composer, 'But, ah! then comes his sorest spell Of toil—he must life's movement tell! The thread which binds it all in one, And not its separate parts alone. The movement he must tell of life, Its pain and pleasure, rest and strife; His eye must travel down, at full, The long, unpausing spectacle; With faithful unrelaxing force Attend it from its primal source, From change to change and year to year Attend it of its mid career, Attend it to the last repose And solemn silence of its close.' (lines 139-152) Here, nearly twenty years after the publication of To α Friend, is an amplified statement of the doctrine of "wholeness." But the emphasis on movement sounds the theme of the passage and suggests the new per­ spective in which the persistent problems are to be

THE IDEA OF POETRY

placed, the fresh apprehension which is the justification of the poem. "Movement" is the complex, shifting proc­ ess of life, the source of the poet's most useful experi­ ence. But though it is the fount of energy, it is also the Many, rather than the One; to be in it completely is to be distracted by multitudinousness. It is particularly interesting that this eloquent dis­ cussion is based on a limited aesthetic concept: the no­ tion of movement that the reader derives from Lessing applies only to the mode of literary art; it describes the dynamic aspect of poetry in contrast to the static arts of painting and sculpture. Arnold, however, brings to this notion his own reflections on art and experience and thereby extends it, builds on it, gives it a moral and spiritual dimension. The movement that animates the ideal poetic art is of several kinds: the figurative move­ ment that literature can describe, the temporal move­ ment that occurs when a single poem transpires in ac­ tual time, and the movement of life itself which the poet "must tell of." The conception is highly sophisti­ cated, but entirely consistent with Arnold's earlier the­ ories. It may be thought of, for example, as an extension in human terms of the conception of the "general life" in Resignation , that "placid and continuous whole . . . / which does not cease." (cf. lines 189ff.) As in earlier poems, too, the natural metaphor for this aspect of reality is a stream. In the passage I have just quoted the metaphorical comparison is suggested only by ad­ jectives and by such a phrase as, "its primal source." In the passage which follows and concludes the poem the stream metaphor dominates, and in these lines this most often iterated of Arnoldian images is more richly

THE IDEA OF POETRY

developed, more complex in connotation than anywhere else in his poetry. Here too is the notion, familiar to the reader of Resig­ nation and The Strayed Reveller, of the poet experienc­ ing many kinds of lives: 'The cattle rising from the grass His thought must follow where they pass; The penitent with anguish bow'd His thoughts must follow through the crowd. Yes! all this eddying, motley throng That sparkles in the sun along, Girl, statesman, merchant, soldier bold, Master and servant, young and old, Grave, gay, child, parent, husband, wife, He follows home, and lives their life.1 (lines 153-162) But the key to poetic achievement is, as always for Ar­ nold, the manner in which "living" is performed, the spe­ cial way in which the wise poet uses his experience. The last two sections of the Epilogue contrast the unsuccess­ ful poet, swamped by life, with the rare, supreme poet who both contains and removes himself from life's pro­ fuse activity. Those souls who are fascinated and con­ trolled by movement are described by the figure of im­ mersion: they enter the wave and go "With its uncon­ querable flow"; or in their weakness wander from the stream and then: 'In pain, in terror, in distress, They see, all round, a wilderness. Sometimes a momentary gleam

THE IDEA OF POETRY

They catch of the mysterious stream; Sometimes, a second's space, their ear The murmur of its waves doth hear.' (lines 175-180) Such fitful artists, however, cannot render experience as well as either the painter or the musician. "The stream of life's majestic whole / Hath ne'er been mirror'd on their soul." Again, the poets' false aims are defined as Romantic excess. The rare true poets follow the course of the life-stream without being in it, or wan­ dering distractedly away from it. And by this sureness of direction, this untiring attendance on life's move­ ment, they combine and transcend the powers of painter and musician. The process is one of fusion: '. . . their eye Drinks up delighted ecstasy, And its deep-toned, melodious voice For ever makes their ear rejoice. They speak! the happiness divine They feel, runs o'er in every line; Its spell is round them like a showerIt gives them pathos, gives them power.' (lines 193-200) This figurative conception of following aright the stream of life manages to incorporate without stress several of Arnold's guiding principles. Here are the ideas of steadiness, of objectivity, of that joy which it is the chief function of poetry to communicate, and of the quality that Arnold elsewhere called "energy." The great poets, then, who exemplify these qualities go be-

THE IDEA OF POETRY

yond the achievements of the finest artists or musicians: "Beethoven, Raphael, cannot reach / The charm which Homer, Shakespeare, teach." "And brightest," the po­ em concludes, "is their glory's sheen, / For greatest hath their labour been." The friend who found so few "fine successes" among the poets' work has been an­ swered. Poetry has been both defined and justified. I feel a special desire to defend the Epilogue to Leesing's Laocoon, because its obvious weaknesses are so typical of the difficulties Arnold's poetry presents to the modern reader. There is nothing immediately ingratiat­ ing about this poem: its tetrameter couplets are some­ what jingly; the rhymes seem to be too close together, and occasionally sound forced. And perhaps most notice­ able is a lack of color. Browning, for example, in such a poem as Fra Lippo Lippi, includes as much exposition of theory as Arnold, but in Browning's poem the rich trappings, the costumes, the dramatic movement of Lippo's speech enchant the reader into accepting his long disquisition on aesthetic naturalism. Arnold lacked the talent to create so vivid a setting, but there is also an intentional uncompromisingness in his method, an austerity which is part of his excellence. It is as if he would not deign to receive our attention on any but a very high level of seriousness. It was, I think, part of his intention to avoid at all costs an exaggerated inten­ sity or lurid coloring that might lend a specious interest to his poetic ideas. However, the reader who is ready to accept Arnold's tone and to grant a place in literature to his kind of poetry need not, in the case of the Epilogue, be pre­ pared for the last sacrifice. In the final sections of the

TEE IDEd OF POETRY

poem the verse rises above sequential statement; from the level of heightened, but still simple, speech, the tone soars to eloquence, and we see that our accession to the argument of the poem is somehow an achievement of tone as well as of image and statement; that the dramatic pattern, subdued as it is, has worked its effect on us; that the desultory conversation giving way to reflection becoming increasingly deep, and finally to passionate assertion, follows the rhythm of the thinking mind. IN THE volume of 1867 the Epilogue was followed by Bacchanalia, or the New Age, and though their posi­ tions were reversed in later editions, they are obviously companion pieces. When the poems are read together the conception of the poet's role expressed in Baccha­ nalia appears as a supplement to the ideas of the Epi­ logue·, the poem that took its departure from Lessing's treatise was naturally concerned with the materials and inodes of poetic creation; the imagistic poem that fol­ lows turns to a consideration of the attitude the poet should take to his own time and to the past. In structure Bacchanalia is remarkable—in fact, to my knowledge, unique. It is made up of two symmetri­ cal parts and a four-line conclusion. The first part de­ scribes the peaceful close of a pastoral day, timeless and unlocalized; the serenity of a summer evening is evoked in poetic language reminiscent of Gray. Then, abruptly, the meter changes from tetrameter couplets to a twostress dactylic line, as the coming of a procession of Maenads—the Bacchanalia—is described. The rout, characterized by this rapid, jarring line, has destroyed

THE IDEA OF POETRY

the evening quiet. One shepherd, however, remains aloof from the revel and, when he is asked whether he does not find the music and the appearance of the Mae­ nads lovely, he answers only, —Ah, so the quiet was! So was the hush! In the second part of the poem a legendary historical conception parallels the pastoral scene: the end of an epoch is imaged as a quiet evening; then, with another shift to the meter of the Bacchic frenzy, the "new age" is described as a wild intrusion, shattering the tran­ quility of the epoch's close. Instead of a shepherd, it is now a poet who stands apart, and who is asked why he does not join the procession of the New Age, and whether he does not see that the flush of genius on the cheeks of the artists of the moment is heavenly. He answers, —Ah, so the silence was! So was the hush! Though this balance of parts may at first seem merely ingenious, the symmetry penetrates to the essential lan­ guage of the poem. The method is unique because the relationship between the two halves of Bacchanalia is that between the two elements of a single metaphor. Part I is the vehicle of a metaphorical comparison of the course of historical epochs to days and nights, of the poet's fretful present age to the Bacchic rout, and of the wise poet to the tranquil shepherd; but though both tenor and vehicle are given in full they are not explicit-

THE IDEA OF POETRY

Iy connected. Then, throughout the poem are further parallels that help to point an ironic contrast. The only triplet, for example, in the first part is the rhyme, "again," "plain," and "wain," which is pastoral in its associations; in the second part a triplet also comes within the first ten lines, but the rhyme words are "fought," "thought," and "wrought." There is, too, a description in the first part of the scented evening air: And from the thyme upon the height, And from the elder-blossom white And pale dog-roses in the hedge, And from the mint-plant in the sedge, In puffs of balm the night-air blows The perfume which the day forgoes. (Parti, 10-15) This is matched in Part Il by lines which, in echoing this description, compare the fame of fragile spirits, recognized only in the stillness at the end of an epoch, to the delicate odors of evening: And in the after-silence sweet, Now strifes are hush'd, our ears doth meet, Ascending pure, the bell-like fame Of this or that down-trodden name, Delicate spirits, push'd away In the hot press of the noon-day. (Part II, 13-18) And, to give one more example, the "first-born" star of Part I, rising "on the pure horizon," bringing the eve­ ning, is matched in Part II by the allusion to rare great

THE IDEA OF POETRY

men, described as "one or two immortal lights," which "Rise slowly up into the sky / To shine there everlast­ ingly."59 The method of figurative comparison which Arnold evolved in Bacchanalia makes it possible for the reader to discover intricate links between the things compared, to see connections which could not have been revealed by simple metaphor. This evolving comparison of sub­ stantial and accidental aspects of both terms of a meta­ phor requires the kind of response that a reader must give to Metaphysical imagery. For Arnold, and for most of his contemporaries, true wit writing in the Meta­ physical manner was impossible, but Bacchanalia does have some of the dramatic effect of seventeenth-century poetry; in it the reader is made to feel, as he is in read­ ing Donne or Herbert, that he is active in the poem, that the intricate comparisons by which poetic meaning is communicated are realized by him rather than made by the writer. It is a further advantage of the complexity of Ar­ nold's structure that a temporal relationship is implied by the parallelism of parts. The Epilogue to Lessing's Laocoon had turned ultimately to the question of the poet and the nature of movement; its successor considers the poet's relation to time, present and past. The two parts of Bacchanalia describe two kinds of temporal 69

The process of figurative comparison in this particular passage is more than ordinarily complex. There are, as it were, three ranges of comparison: the great men are immortal in a figurative sense; they are conceived as "immortal lights," which are, in turn, compared to actual stars. We have a metaphor metaphorically rendered.

THE IDEA OF POETRY

succession: one—the alternation of day and night—is a timeless change, the course of nature; the other—the succession of epochs of human culture—is accidental and without fixity. Perhaps too, in tracing the implica­ tions of the poet's comparisons, we are meant to give thought to the more banal figures he has rejected: one epoch comes to an end, which is an evening, but the new age is compared not to a dawn, but to a Bacchic rout. In this respect the conception is typical of Ar­ nold's poetry; this indeterminate evening in history is that poignant moment "between two worlds, one dead, / The other powerless to be born."60 It is the world of the sciolists, who have succeeded the masters of past years, but offer only an "exulting thunder," and "tire­ less powers"—as the poet put it in Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse. In Bacchanalia, however, there is no indignant condemnation of the present in favor of an imagined past; the evening has its peaceful charms, and indeed implies a dawn to come. The wise poet re­ jects, not his age, but the frenzied rout, besotted by ad­ miration for modern achievements. Arnold's poetry does not suggest that a good future is impossible; though his tone is not optimistic, it is never hopeless. The poem has, as coda, a sententia which applied its meanings to contemporary literature: The world but feel the present's spell, The poet feels the past as well; Whatever men have done, might do, Whatever thought, might think it too. eo

See Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse, originally pub­ lished in Fraser's Magazine in 1855, and first reprinted in the volume of 1867.

THE IDEA OF POETRY

The Epilogue to Lessing^s Laocoon defined the poet's modes of expression and the material with which he worked; it added further insights to Arnold's persistent reflection on the fine balance the poet must achieve between the flux and disorder of his experience and the coherence of his personal vision. Bacchanalia defines the position the poet should take in regard to his own age and to ages past. As in Resignation, the poet is con­ ceived as detached from, yet living in the stream of life; he observes the Bacchic rout, the turmoil of the present, and feels its spell; but by keeping in mind the beauty and richness of the past, by making its quietness a refuge from distraction, he can save himself and his art. TRADITIONALLY the elegy has offered poets an oppor­

tunity to expatiate on the value and nature of their art. It is surprising, therefore, that the five impressive elegiac poems in the volume of 186761 touch so briefly on the idea of poetry. Obermann Once More, unlike the earlier poem on Senancour, has to do with history rather than literature, so that Heine^s Grave is, in fact, the only one of this group which explicitly treats poetics. In what is, for the most part, a glowing tribute to Heine's work, the point is made that he "Had every other gift, but wanted love."62 "Charm," the poem continues: 611 refer to Thyrsis, Rugby Chapel, Heine's Grave, Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse, and Obermann Once More. 92 J. B. Orrick observed that Arnold was incorrect in attribut­ ing this judgment to Goethe; he reminds us that Goethe's re­ mark, as reported in Eckermann's Gesprache mit Goethe, had reference to Platen. Publications of the English Goethe Society, n.s., Vol. iv, London, 1928, pp. 28-29.

THE IDEA OF POETRY

. . . is the glory which makes Song of the poet divine, Love is the fountain of charm. How without charm wilt thou draw, Poet! the world to thy way? Not by the lightnings of wit— Not by the thunder of scorn! These to the world, too, are given; Wit it possesses, and scornCharm is the poet's alone. Hollow and dull are the great, And artists envious, and the mob profane. We know all this, we know! Cam'st thou from heaven, O child Of light! but this to declare? Alas, to help us forget Such barren knowledge awhile, God gave the poet his song! (lines 103-120) The quality of charm is presumably much the same as the joy that Arnold celebrated in his 1853 preface: "it is not enough that the Poet should add to the knowl­ edge of men, it is required of him also that he should add to their happiness." However, the assertion, as it is made in HeineiS Grave is not particularly effective. "Charm" is, to begin with, a vague word, and one does not immediately see its inexorable dependence on love. What is lacking is a realization of the conception in the language and structure of the poem. ARNOLD'S poems on poetry are not uniformly success-

THE IDEA OF POETRY

fill, but one cannot study them without realizing that they form a very imposing and unique group: there is, in fact, no other poetry in English which explores a literary theory in such fullness and depth, and em­ bodies it with such clarity. Arnold, one feels, discovers his views through his poems, achieves in them an un­ derstanding not to be found in prose analysis. Eloquent and influential though the Essays in Criticism are, they do not contain what is most original and useful in Ar­ nold's thought about poetry: his subtle appreciation and multivalued judgment of the Romantic accomplish­ ment, his view of suffering and of its transmutation into art, his belief in the necessity to distance and objectify experience; not one of these—his most striking literary insights—is fully expressed in the critical essays. But in the conflation of poems I have regarded as a group, we discern an intellectual construction which is not only learned and complex, but directly relevant to prob­ lems poets continue to face. These poems, with the theory they put into practice, demonstrate a way of ex­ pressing abstract speculation; the best of them reveal a special kind of thought, disclose an idea which is conceptually solid, but which cannot be reached or com­ municated by any language but that of genuine poetry.

CHAPTER II

What pitfalls there are in that word Nature. Literature and Dogma

T

HERE is no serious poet who has not written about the physical universe, and no poet of any kind who has not possessed, however feebly, some idea of nature. Yet, in modern literature particularly, we recognize a distinct group of "nature poets," a group to which Wordsworth, for example, seems obviously to belong, and to which Goethe, less obviously, does not. Arnold cannot be called, in the accepted sense of the word, a nature poet; he loved and found solace in the outdoor world; his knowledge of plants and birds was extensive, and he observed carefully. But he believed that to be a poet of stream and woodland was to "avert [one's] ken / From half of human fate," and much of his writing represents a conscious opposition to the popular modes of nature poetry. Arnold's treatment of nature was shaped primarily by his rejection of Ro­ mantic influences, informed always by his philosophical dualism and his humanistic spirit. English nature poetry has tended to be of two kinds: descriptive, or subjectivist. The descriptive poet uses the details of natural scenery either as simple decoration or as pleasing evidence of his topographical or botani­ cal knowledge. The recording of the shapes and colors of the earth is, in this kind of poetry, an end in itself,

T H E I D E A O F JV AT U B E

and the reader's gratification is in the felicitous ac­ curacy with which the poet expresses his observations. Thomson and Cowper anticipate this tendency, and per­ haps the most developed examples of it are certain cele­ brated passages in the works of Tennyson. What I have called—for want of a better word—the subjectivist at­ titude, is best represented by Wordsworth and Cole­ ridge. Their poetry may find its occasion in the country ramble or the musing observation of a daisy or a celan­ dine, though its ultimate concern is not descriptive, but psychological: its characteristic subject is the way in which the poet's imaginative faculty works on the ma­ terials of nature, his connection with, or separation from, the phenomenal world. These poets begin with what Ruskin called "the faithful representation of all objects of ... natural beauty," but they attempt to join the appreciation of "nature's beauteous forms" with a sense of the universal mind; by a keen and loving regard of externals, they suggest, the poet may see into the life of things. Their poetry sometimes expresses a rather simple nature faith (though not as often as Words­ worth's careless admirers have thought), but its real tendency is toward transcendentalism. For both Ruskin and Gerard Manley Hopkins, writing years after the Lake Poets, and unlike each other in most respects, the artist's patient submission to the precise detail of nature was the springboard for an intuitive leap or religious in­ sight into a sphere of transcendent value. Arnold was aware of all these views and practices, but committed himself to none of them. One could as­ semble from his collected poems a pleasant gallery of carefully delineated landscapes (indeed one of its ad• 1 06 ·

T H E

I D E A OF N A T U R E

mirers described The Scholar-Gipsy as "a perfect reper­ tory of Oxfordshire botany"), but Arnold had little re­ spect for this kind of poetry; when he condemned Ten­ nyson for dawdling with "the painted shell of the uni­ verse" he was speaking from a fundamental conviction. He also never shows that interest in natural science which is a corollary to description, and which appears in various ways in the poetry of Tennyson, Meredith, and Hardy. It may be that Arnold's remoteness from science is no more than the ignorance fostered by his Rugby education; the natural sciences were not in the curriculum at Rugby and Dr. Arnold remarked—equivo­ cally—that "physical science, if studied at all, seems too great to be studied έν παρίργω.1 In his later prose, Mat­ thew Arnold spoke at length about something he called "science," but it seems clear that the whole bent of his training and thought was away from the procedures of scientific observation and experiment. The continual analysis of minute facts, the assembling of innumerable observations would represent for him the capitulation 1 The

full passage—in a letter to Dr. Greenhill—reads:

"If one might wish for impossibilities, I might then wish that my children might be well versed in physical science, but in due subordination to the fulness and freshness of their knowledge on moral subjects. This, however, I believe can­ not be, and physical science, if studied at all, seems too great to be studied ev *ap(pyo>·. wherefore, rather than have it the principal thing in my son's mind, I would gladly have him think that the sun went round the earth, and that the stars were so many spangles set in the bright blue firmament." A. P. Stanley, The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, D.D., 2 vols., London, 1844, n, 31.

T H E I D E A O F JV A T U B E

to that multitudinousness which he believed the poet must avoid. And though Arnold felt that nature contained spiritu­ al meanings and that they could be discovered and ex­ pressed, he was distrustful of metaphysics in general and skeptical of any creed derived from nature. The faith in nature which Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Byron—different as they were from each othershared, is foreign to Arnold. His interest in nature is— in the favorable sense of the word—abstract. He tried to arrive in his poems at an idea of nature, to define the values it holds for man, and to determine what man's relationship to the universe of things should be. His poetry is philosophical: he is concerned with the prob­ lem of appearance and reality, with the relations be­ tween subject and object and, above all, he is, like Goethe, engaged in expressing a highly cosmopolitan ethical conviction. Arnold's achievement in his poems on nature is to present afresh, and with lucidity and rigor, some of the fundamental beliefs of classical hu­ manism.

In Harmony with Nature There are two influential treatments of Arnold's po­ ems on nature which I must at least mention at the be­ ginning of my discussion. Joseph Warren Beach2 was, in general, disapproving; he found the poems "lacking in the warmth and richness that marked the romantic treatment of nature"; he made it appear to Arnold's 2 See The Concept of Nature in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry, New York, 1936, pp. 397-405.

T H E I D E A O F JV A T U B E

disadvantage that he "exhibits too dim a sense . . . of the complex and massive implications of the term na­ ture to Wordsworth's generation," and that he has "lit­ tle of the positive faith of the nature-poets."3 This judg­ ment is incontrovertible but, I think, irrelevant. To condemn Arnold for not having the same ideas and in­ terests as some of his predecessors is to impose a strangely authoritarian critical standard. I hope to show that Arnold's nature poems are viable and congenial precisely because they do not embody a stale or warmedover Wordsworthianism. The other influential critic is Lionel Trilling who, attacking Arnold from a different direction, made objections of another sort.4 He found Arnold's ideas on nature confused and inconsistent. I do not agree with this judgment either, since I believe that what has been taken for confusion is more often logical discrimination. I find—let me say at once—an impressive consistency of viewpoint in the nature po­ ems both early and late. The early sonnet, In Harmony with Nature (1849) is the appropriate beginning for this discussion. It states with monolithic clarity the humanist tenet that under­ lies all the poems in which Arnold treats of external nature: 'In harmony with Nature?' Restless fool, Who with such heat dost preach what were to thee, When true, the last impossibility— To be like Nature strong, like Nature cool! Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more, And in that more lie all his hopes of good. 3 Beach, 4 See

pp. 397, 402, 403. Matthew Arnold, pp. 82-95.

T H E I D E A OF N A T U R E

Nature is cruel, man is sick of blood; Nature is stubborn, man would fain adore; Nature is fickle, man hath need of rest; Nature forgives no debt, and fears no grave; Man would be mild, and with safe conscience blest. Man must begin, know this, where Nature ends; Nature and man can never be fast friends. Fool, if thou canst not pass her, rest her slave! The heart of the poet's statement is in the second quat­ rain. The notion that man must find within himself the power to rise above his own lower passions and to face the mutability of the natural world, is one that Arnold often returned to. There were several classical state­ ments of the idea; Arnold quoted from one in his essay on "The Literary Influence of Academies," remarking that, according to Cicero: "Man alone of living crea­ tures ... goes feeling after 'quid sit ordo, quid sit quod deceat, in factis dictisque qui modus'—the discovery of an order, a law of good taste, a measure for his words and actions. Other creatures submissively follow the law of their nature; man alone has an impulse leading him to set up some other law to control the bent of his nature."5 But in the works of those writers Arnold is known to have read there is a statement that bears even more directly on his sonnet. According to Epictetus, God: ". . . brought man into the world to take cog­ nizance of Himself and His works, and not only to take cognizance, but also to interpret them. Therefore, it is 5 Complete Prose Works, hi, 236. The editors of Commen­ tary call attention to this passage in relation to In Harmony •with Nature (see p. 3 1 ) .

T H E I D E A OF N A T U R E

beneath man's dignity to begin and end where the irra­ tional creatures do: he must rather begin where they do and end where nature has ended in forming us; and nature ends in contemplation and understanding and a way of life in harmony with nature. See to it then that ye do not die without taking cognizance of these things."8 If we compare Epictetus' maxim with Arnold's son­ net it becomes clear that two "natures" are involved, a higher and a lower. I shall return to this point later, since it is the essential one in understanding Arnold's poems on this subject, but first I should like to bring together a number of early statements of Arnold's thought. Another sonnet in the volume of 1849, Re­ ligious Isolation, expresses an ethical principle similar to that of In Harmony with Nature: Do thou, whom light in thine own inmost soul (Not less thy boast) illuminates, control Wishes unworthy of a man full-grown. What though the holy secret, which moulds thee, Mould not the solid earth? though never winds Have whisper'd it to the complaining sea, Nature's great law, and law of all men's minds?— To its own impulse every creature stirs; Live by thy light, and earth will live by hers! (lines 6-14) This is a warning, addressed—it seems certain—to Clough, against a belief in the harmonious parallelism 6

Epictetus, the Discourses and Manual, translated by P. E. Matheson, 2 vols., Oxford, 1916, i, 61. (The passage occurs in t h e D i s c o u r s e s , B o o k i , Chapter 6 . )

• I l l -

THE IDEA OF MATURE

between man and nature, in that very harmony which so much Romantic nature poetry celebrated. The con­ dition achieved by the wise man—here somewhat misleadingly called "religious isolation," but elsewhere called "self-dependence" or "resignation"—is founded on the recognition of a dualistic universe; man's moral task is to discover his inner light and be guided by it.7 In the notebooks belonging to the years around 1849 there are passages that underlie the early poems on man and nature. In one apothegm Arnold asserts the superi­ ority of man's inner guide to the vagaries of external nature: "We have a will as a refuge to which when weary & despondent in following the sinuous recurrent indecisive leading of nature, we may take ourselves & gain therefrom an arbitrary definite direction if we will. But those who have a strong sense of nature cannot do this with good conscience."8 And one might consider as amplification of the advice given to Clough in Re­ ligious Isolation the thoughts on self-reliance that the young poet committed to his commonplace book: "I will not ask, are you sure you are mended in this or that particular? but I will ask, are you sufficient for that new, that self contained, abundant life, which we should 7

The persistence of this idea in Arnold's writings, and its connection with Stoic thought, is made clear by its repetition in a late sonnet on Marcus Aurelius, Worldly Place (published in the volume of 1867). The sonnet concludes, . . . when my ill-school'd spirit is aflame Some nobler, ampler stage of life to win, I'll stop, and say: 'There were no succour here! The aids to noble life are all within.' 8

Yale MS., f. 42.

T H E I D E A OF

JfATUBE

be mended into . . . are you sure that, with you, be­ neath the [illegible word] outside, ripens a capacity of substantial life!"9 These reflections emphasize what is implicit in the poetry: that art and conduct must be guided by the same principles. Sufficiency for a "self-contained, abun­ dant life" is to exist in the healthy work of art as well as in the philosophy of the wise and prudent man. His manuscript notes remind us further that the distrust of multiplicity and instability, the celebration of the steady and the whole which informs all Arnold's prac­ tice and theory, entail a skepticism of the beguiling indirections of nature. In everything he writes Arnold shows that his commitment to a humanist interpretation of nature is not temporary or aberrant (as some care­ less critics have suggested), and that his version of humanism is not restricted to ethics or epistemology. Extended to the field of art, his convictions shape cer­ tain principles of poetics and recommend a certain kind of poetry. Both in the early sonnets and in the later poems on nature, Arnold is not merely concerned to avoid "Wordsworthian fervor" or to challenge the pro­ jective vision expressed by such a writer as Coleridge. He wrote consciously "un-Romantic" poetry as a means of finding new ways to look at nature, new questions to ask about it. This poetry is not so much a statement of faith as an organ of critical inquiry; this being the case, it seems perverse to blame Arnold for lacking "the positive faith of the nature poets."10 When we under­ stand what he was doing, we may be inclined to praise 8

Ycde MS., f. 43. Beach, 0. 403.

10 See

THE IDEA OF NATURE

in his poetry a quality which the first-generation Eng­ lish Romantics rarely achieved—true intellectual sophis­ tication. In connection with the Romantic faith one more pas­ sage from Arnold's manuscript notes is relevant: When we have noticed similar phenomena to man in provinces of the natural and spiritual world, we gladly place the two operations in juxtaposition; as to do so not only gives a livelier sense of the inward operation & graves it clearer in the memory; but also awakes in us a pleasurable feeling of affinity & cor­ respondence between ourselves & nature [illegible word] we never cease to apprehend the existence. But the sense of likeness must first strike us: and the facts prove themselves and suggest correspondence: while analogists assume correspondence & order us to infer likeness and the fact of similar operation in one sphere if they point out operation in the other."11 Here the detached, critical spirit plays with the prin­ cipal tenet of nature-faith. Arnold judges the inferred correspondence between the natural and the spiritual world to be a wishful operation of the mind. His interest is in how we see nature, in man's foolish tendency to project human values and emotions into the natural world, and to construct an illusive vision of himself in harmony with it. To use poetry as a means of analyzing these delusions was to run counter to the accepted lit­ erary modes of the nineteenth century, but in doing so Arnold was not so much interested in being novel as he » Yale MS., f. 41.

THE IDEA OF NATURE

was in reclaiming an imposing tradition of western thought. The lucid, regulative view of the world which Ar­ nold strove for represents a conflation of ideas to be found in the philosophy of the Stoics and of Spinoza, and in the poetry of Goethe. Arnold pointed out more clearly than anyone else had that Spinoza's views lay behind Goethe's, and were influential because they rep­ resented a modern version of Stoicism. This attitude is made clear in several passages of "Spinoza and the Bible" where Arnold suggests that Goethe admired Spinoza because he found in his work a "denial of final causes, and . . . a stoicism not passive, but active": "Spinoza first impresses Goethe and any man like Goe­ the, and then he composes him; first he fills and satisfies his imagination by the width and grandeur of his view of nature, and then he fortifies and stills his mobile, straining, passionate poetic temperament by the moral lesson he draws from his view of nature. And a moral lesson not of mere resigned acquiescence, not of melan­ choly quietism, but of joyful activity within the limits of man's true sphere."12 This is the sort of statement that one is tempted simply to present with the com­ ment that all of Arnold is in it. It is, of course, a very perceptive appreciation of Spinoza, but it is more im­ portant as a definition of Arnold's own view of nature and of the influence he would want his writings to have. The experience here described, beginning with an im­ pression and ending with a moral lesson—and a lesson of a special kind—is what Arnold thought the experi­ ence of genuine poetry should be. 12

Complete Prose Works, in, 177.

T H E IDEA OF JfdTURE

In Goethe, then, Arnold found the best modern rep­ resentative of the humanist tradition, the one truly ad­ mirable poet of his time. The tone of Arnold's nature poems is almost exactly that of Goethe's; they contain the same mixture of lyricism and exhortation, the same kinds of philosophical definition. The parallels are drawn even closer when Arnold, assuming a knowledge of Goethe on the part of his readers, designs his poems as extensions or adaptations of Goethe's motifs. In Harmony with Nature, for example, echoes Das GottIiche:ls the German poem begins with the famous lines, "Edel sei der Mensch, / Hilfreich und gut!" and goes on to assert that man's nobility, his helpfulness in prac­ tical action, and his virtue set him apart from the rest of creation. The poet praises those higher beings whose existence we can only surmise, and suggests that we learn to believe in them by the example man provides. Nature, however, is indifferent to moral distinctions: Denn unfiihlend 1st die Natur: Es leuchtet die Sonne trber Bos' und Gute, Und dem Verbrecher Glanzen wie dem Besten Der Mond und die Sterne.14 18

The poem is usually dated 1783. A connection between it and Arnold's sonnet was observed by Beach (see pp. 398399 ), but he felt that the poem did "not represent Goethe in his typical feeling towards nature"—a view which is not shared by the generality of Goethe scholars (nor by this reader). 14 Samtliche Gedichte, i, 324-325.

TEE IDEA OF NATURE

[For Nature is unfeeling. The sun shines on the wicked as well as on the good, and the moon and stars shine on the best man as they do on the sinner.] The poet goes on to consider the indifference of the ele­ ments, and of fortune, which is blind to human worth. The section concludes with an image that is reflected in various ways in Arnold's poetry, Miissen wir alle Unseres Daseins Kreise vollenden. We must all complete the circle of our existence. After this resigned acceptance the poet returns in his con­ cluding stanzas to the hopeful note with which the po­ em began, and makes what is surely one of the most resonant statements of the humanist faith in modern literature: Man alone, the poet pronounces, can achieve the seemingly impossible; he alone is able to make dis­ tinctions, to choose and to judge: Er kann dem Augenblick Dauer verleihen. Er allein darf Den Guten lohnen, Den Bosen strafen, Heilen und retten, Alles Irrende, Schweifende Nutzlich verbinden."

(lines 40-47)

[He can lend permanence to the moment. He alone can 15

Lines 40 and 41, which affirm the ability of the creative mind to achieve eternality, help to place this poem in the main-

T H E IDEA OF NATURE

reward the good, punish the bad, heal and save, and bind into a useful whole all that is undirected and dis­ connected.] In its conclusion Goethe's poem fulfills the implica­ tions of its title; the poet does, in fact, ascribe divinity to man who, by his nobility and his untiring search for the useful and the just, becomes an image of those gods of which we have otherwise only a premonition. Arnold, though he admired the grandeur of this view, could not share Goethe's Promethean assurance; he emphasized the need for humility rather than pride in human en­ dowments, not having, as he well knew, Goethe's verve. But it is on these disparities, as well as on the resem­ blances, that it is profitable to reflect. I should consider Goethe's work to stand more or less explicitly behind all of Arnold's treatments of poetic man and his place in nature.

In Utrumque Paratus The early poems in which Arnold makes the tradi­ tional humanist distinction between the moral and the natural spheres oppose the general drift of Romantic idealism and question the Romantic faith in nature. An­ other aspect of this group of poems is the skeptical treatment of man's sentimental desire to find in the exstream of Goethe's thought. The commentary of James Boyd, for example (Notes to Goethe's Poems, 2 vols., Oxford, 1944, i, 205 ), points out the repetition of this idea in the later lyric, Vermaehtnis, where Goethe says, "Der Augenblick ist Ewigkeit," and in the final chorus in Heaven in Faust II.

T E E IDEA OF NATURE

ternal world a reflection of his moods and hopes, and sup­ port for his self-esteem. In treating this theme, Arnold raises, for the perturbation of the tender-minded, the old question of illusion and reality. In Utrumque Paratus —also in the volume of 1849—is the most striking ex­ ample; it is a poem clearly consistent with Arnold's statements of the humanist ethic, but giving to a philo­ sophical insight a lyrical and poignant expression. As a critique of two opposing metaphysical systems the po­ em sets itself the most serious of tasks, but by an adroit control of tone, the achievement of a manner detached, speculative, gently ironic, the poet makes it a work of sophisticated wit, and avoids the mire of philosophical exposition. Because it is elliptical in expression, the po­ em is obscure; and because it is obscure it has been un­ popular; it has not, I think, ever been adequately in­ terpreted.18 The title, a phrase from a line of Virgil,17 concerns 16

The discussion of the poem in Commentary comprises merely a reprinting of the alternate last stanza, and a brief statement of its meaning. Arnold himself may have had mis­ givings about the reception of In Utrumque Paratus; after the volume of 1849 he did not reprint the poem until 1869, and then with a new, simpler (but, fortunately, temporary) final stanza. It is interesting that Swinburne wrote, in connection with the poem, "For its recovery I believe that I may take some credit to myself, and claim in consequence some thanks from all serious students of contemporary poetry." (Essays and Studies, London, 1875, p. 127, nl. Quoted in Commentary, p. 55.) 17 The source, Aeneid, n, 61, is the description of the deceit­ ful Sinon, who has just been captured by Trojan shepherds: . . . fidens animi atque in utrumque paratus, seu versare dolos seu certae occumbere morti.

THE

IDEA OF

J V ΛT U R E

the necessity for us to accept one or the other explana­ tion of the universe. The alternatives are the two myths by which man has explained his origin and relation to nature; whether the Idealist or the Materialist explana­ tion is true, we must accede—the poem ultimately sug­ gests—to the uncertain and lonely position in which man, according to either view, is placed. In form, the poem is perfectly balanced: the first three stanzas de­ scribe the view of Platonic Idealism, the concluding three, the Materialist view. The first line sets an in­ quiring, analytic tone: it begins, If, and the second, antiphonal, half of the poem begins, "But, if . . ." The poet makes no attempt to harmonize the two systems or to choose between them; we are, however, made to feel that one is beautiful and poetic and the other harsh and difficult. And it is characteristic of Arnold to imply that it is the harsh one that is most likely to be true. The first stanza offers a vision of a "sacred world" which lay at first imagined in the mind of God: If, in the silent mind of One all-pure, At first imagined lay The sacred world; and by procession sure From those still deeps, in form and colour drest, Seasons alternating, and night and day, The long-mused thought to north, south, east, and west, Took then its all-seen way . . . Creation, orderly and purposeful, is succeeded by process in which change follows its predetermined There is, perhaps, some significance in the fact that the pas­ sage describes a stoical acceptance of victory or death, but I don't think Arnold meant his title to be significantly allusive.

THE IDEA OF NATURE

course. The rhythm and imagery conduce to the sense of serene and harmonious development. The poet then turns to the task of the man who wakes to life in such a world. Transforming the Platonic ladder to a moun­ tain stream, he suggests that man must follow the stream, mounting to the pure, high sources of life: O waking on a world which thus-wise springs! Whether it needs thee count Betwixt thy waking and the birth of things Ages or hours—O waking on life's stream! By lonely pureness to the all-pure fount (Only by this thou canst) the colour'd dream Of life remount! 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. (lines 8-21) In the second stanza the mountain peak and the ascent to the absolute represent the lovely austerity of the Idealist view. The loneliness, the stars, the cold moon, the fount itself evoke the clarity and pureness of that philosophy. However, when the poet turns to consider Materialism he counters the earlier images: "Earth,/ Rocking her obscure body to and fro," takes the place of "One all-pure"; the "solemn peaks" give way to "solemn clouds." In the system described in the second

THE IDEA OF MATURE

half of the poem, man finds confusion and perplexity in place of the luminous certainties of Platonism: But, if the wild unfather'd mass no birth In divine seats hath known; In the blank, echoing solitude if Earth, Rocking her obscure body to and fro, Ceases not from all time to heave and groan, Unfruitful oft, and at her happiest throe Forms, what she forms, alone; O seeming sole to awake, thy sun-bathed head Piercing the solemn cloud Round thy still dreaming brother-world outspread! O man, whom Earth, thy long-vext mother, bare Not without joy—so radiant, so endow'd (Such happy issue crown'd her painful care) — Be not too proud! (lines 22-35) According to this philosophy man is not on a moun­ tain peak with a clear view of things, but in a cloud above which he may only seem to rise to the light of understanding. And the universe, rather than issuing harmoniously from the divine mind, is the product of the fitful and unending labor of matter. New forms of life emerge continually; man can know little, but—the poet affirms—there is still cause to rejoice. The syntax effects an elaborate qualification: the creation of man from earth is achieved "not without joy." However, the poet offers no comfort, but turns his cool regard on man's pretensions and illusions. The irony that we are made to realize is that the universe of the Materialists

THE

IDEA OF NATURE

is more dependent on appearance than is that of the Idealists. It seems that man is the only fragment of the cloud of matter that has intelligence; but if nothing exists but matter in motion, we can gain knowledge only through the senses. The question, then, is: how can we know? Man's "brother-world," inanimate mat­ ter, is "still dreaming"; it has not, presumably, waked to self-awareness. But since it can dream it may at some time in the eternal evolution of matter also wake and become animate. The references to seeming, sleeping, dreaming prepare for the moral warning—surely the chief point of the poem—with which the fifth stanza concludes. The position is that of the Stoics: man is the product of joy, gifted with spirit and intelligence, but he must be humble. Since (and in this, I think, is the stinging novelty of Arnold's poem) the scientific, Ma­ terialist view leads to more illusions than Idealism does, man must learn anew to distinguish between appearance and reality; if he accepts the scientific view he must avoid the pride of thinking himself uniquely intelligent and capable of development. There is nothing in this poem to warrant our ascrib­ ing to Arnold either of these views of nature; but though Idealism is presented with wistful sympathy, it is clear that the opposing system is the modern one. The poet enjoins a chastened, though undespairing, acceptance of the order of things, an attitude of sad lucidity. The spirit of In Utrumque Paratus, serious, sharply ironic, yet humane, is an example of Arnold's finest tone. The concluding stanza, which is not easy to under­ stand, expands and makes more precise the injunction, "Be not too proud!":

THE IDEA OF MATURE

Oh when most self-exalted, most alone, Chief dreamer, own thy dream! Thy brother-world stirs at thy feet unknown, Who hath a monarch's hath no brother's part; Yet doth thine inmost soul with yearning teem. —Oh, what a spasm shakes the dreamer's heart! too, but seem.'

(lines 36-42) When man's self-awareness and moral consciousness are at their fullest, when—in other words—he is most exalted over lesser nature, he must then attempt the clarity of vision that will show him that he dreams. "Own thy dream" has, I believe, several meanings: first, man must recognize that even he is not yet fully awake; second, he must own that it is mere illusion on his part to conceive himself the uniquely conscious monarch of nature; and third (though this is more doubtful) man's knowledge of the natural world is so slight and distorted as to resemble a dream. The allu­ sion in lines 39-40 is probably to modern man's claim to find satisfaction in being a part of nature, in cor­ responding to it. The poet reminds him, however, that he cannot have things both ways; if he exalts his unique intelligence he cannot also have the pleasure of claiming brotherhood with the lower forms. Yet man yearns to be part of the natural world that surrounds him. Con­ sidered in relation to the Romantic desire to be in har­ mony with nature, or—more ambitiously—one in spirit with it, the lines have a wider implication. The poet makes no judgment, but merely points out an inconsist­ ency in the dreamer's conception of things. In the last

TEE IDEA OF NATURE two lines, the dreamer, assumed to be momentarily awake, stirs with the agony of realization. He is the victim of his own perception; freed in a flash of insight from his prideful self-absorption, he can comprehend the possibility that his existence may itself be merely a function of his own perception or, one must think, of another perception of which he is unaware. In retrospect one can see that the two parts of In Utrumque Paratus are related by ironic contrast. The poet gives no answers, but with wry insight shows how the question of appearance and reality, the fundamental problem of Idealist metaphysics, is also acute for the thoughtful Materialist, who is subject to the illusionism for which the Idealist is usually castigated. The posi­ tion to which the reader is led, the kind of understand­ ing this poem brings him to, are characteristic of Ar­ nold's method in both prose and poetry. It is the neces­ sity for balance, for delicate avoidance of excess or de­ ficiency, the difficulties of all serious thought that we must become aware of. The peculiar pitfalls of the mod­ ern position are dramatically set forth, and with the evocation of the qualm of the Materialist, the wracking uncertainty as to his own abiding reality, the poem ends. When, twenty years after its first appearance, Ar­ nold reprinted In Utrumque Paratus in the collected edi­ tion of 1869, he replaced the last stanza with one that was less difficult than the original, but which lacked its richness of implication. The original conclusion was, fortunately, restored in the next edition of the poems (in 1877), but the short-lived alternate ending deserves a minor place in a discussion of Arnold's poetic treat­ ment of nature. It reads as follows:

THE IDEA OF JfATUBE Thy native world stirs at thy feet unknown, Yet there thy secret lies! Out of this stuff, these forces, thou art grown, And proud self-severance from them were disease, O scan thy native world with pious eyes! High as thy life be risen, 'tis from these; And these, too, rise. This stanza, which concentrates on the evolutionary motif of the poem, may have appealed to Victorian readers who liked to see vaguely scientific ideas re­ flected in poetry. But the emendation weakened the poem; by giving explicit treatment to the notion of mat­ ter evolving toward consciousness, Arnold jettisoned all the sardonic and complex reflections on self-deception and the inverted pride of the Materialist. The stanza does, however, have the negative value of showing where Arnold's interests and talents really lay. The theme of spiritual evolution stimulated Tennyson to some of his best flights, but when Arnold tries to take it up he mars the intellectual sophistication of his po­ em; his poetic thought is best when it has a critical point, when it can make its object flash with multiple implications.

The General Life Humanism can be roughly defined as the search for an ethic which is rationally binding, but independent of religious or metaphysical sanctions. It is more diffi­ cult, however, to find a single definition that fits the humanist conception of nature. The traditional view would affirm the supremacy of reason and deny that

TEE IDEA OF NATURE

moral and intellectual values can be derived from the external world. But many humanists have nevertheless believed that unique and perceptible goods rest in nature, and that communion with it may influence man toward a perception of truth. It is this ambiguity, or— as it might better be called—double perception, ex­ pressed in Arnold's poems on nature, which has led critics to accuse him of contradicting himself. Though a notion of self-sufficiency (of the sort suggested by In Harmony with Nature) may at first sight seem in­ congruous with conceptions of the "general life" and of the joy and wisdom to be learned from nature, I can see no fundamental inconsistency in Arnold's attitudes. In the total context of the nature poems a single, though complex, idea is clearly outlined. The sonnet Quiet Work, which appeared as the first piece in the volume of 1849 (and in most subsequent editions of the poems), is important to this discussion: One lesson, Nature, let me learn of thee, One lesson which in every wind is blown, One lesson of two duties kept at one Though the loud world proclaim their enmity— Of toil unsever'd from tranquillity! Of labour, that in lasting fruit outgrows Far noisier schemes, accomplish'd in repose, Too great for haste, too high for rivalry! Yes, while on earth a thousand discords ring, Man's fitful uproar mingling with his toil, Still do thy sleepless ministers move on, Their glorious tasks in silence perfecting; Still working, blaming still our vain turmoil, Labourers that shall not fail, when man is gone.

THE IDEd OF NATURE

This is not precisely the view of In Harmony with Nature, in which the speaker asserts that "man hath all which Nature hath, but more." The subject here is what we learn from nature before we go beyond it. Epictetus affirmed that man must begin as irrational creatures did by putting himself in harmony with nat­ ural process, but that his reason required that he not end where the beasts did. In Arnold's view nature is in­ sufficient to the highest ethic, but we must nevertheless learn what it has to teach. If we accept this rather sim­ ple (and traditional) distinction we can see how Ar­ nold's notion of the "general life" is a way of conveying the fullness and depth of nature's lesson. The 1849 volume was concluded by Resignation, in which the vision of the wise poet is described as follows: Before him he sees life unroll, A placid and continuous whole— That general life, which does not cease, Whose secret is not joy, but peace; That life, whose dumb wish is not miss'd If birth proceeds, if things subsist; The life of plants, and stones, and rain, The life he craves—if not in vain Fate gave, what chance shall not control, His sad lucidity of soul. (lines 189-198) Somewhat farther on in the poem it is explained that those who have become genuinely resigned "have conquer'd fate": They, winning room to see and hear, And to men's business not too near,

TEE IDEA OF NATURE

Through clouds of individual strife Draw homeward to the general life. (lines 249-252) At least twice in later poems Arnold expressed con­ ceptions like that of the general life. In his final speech Empedocles, speculating on a possible immortality of consciousness, considers the frustrations of human life in which our minds and thought .. . keep us prisoners of our consciousness, And never let us clasp and feel the All But through their forms, and modes, and stifling veils. And we shall be unsatisfied as now; And we shall feel the agony of thirst, The ineffable longing for the life of life BafiSed for ever .... ( π , lines 3 5 2 - 3 5 8 ) In this passage the "All" and the "life of life" are the same as the general life of Resignation. The fact that Empedocles, who is—it must be remembered—a dra­ matic character, and one who is about to kill him­ self, desires an almost perfect fusion of man's being with the All, does not substantially modify the concep­ tion. The wise man—and one test of wisdom is, pre­ sumably, the ability to continue to live—would simply strive for the best sense possible of the general life. In A Wish (first published in 1867) the speaker imagines the kind of illumination that may come short­ ly before death, when he can see Bathed in the sacred dews of morn The wide aerial landscape spread—

T H E I D E A OF

ΛT U RE

The world which was ere I was born, The world which lasts when I am dead; Which never was the friend of one, Nor promised love it could not give, But lit for all its generous sun, And lived itself, and made us live. There let me gaze, till I become In soul, with what I gaze on, wed! To feel the universe my home; To have before my mind—instead Of the sick room, the mortal strife, The turmoil for a little breath— The pure eternal course of life, Not human combatings with death! Thus feeling, gazing, might I grow Composed, refresh'd, ennobled, clear; Then willing let my spirit go To work or wait elsewhere or here! (lines 33-52) For the essentials of his concept of the general life Arnold is once more indebted to Goethe and Spinoza, and ultimately to Lucretius and Heraclitus. Some years ago Carleton Stanley commented on "the Lucretian ring in Resignation," and cited as a parallel Lucretius' "characteristic couplet," Alid ex alio reficit Natura nec ullam Rem gigni patitur nisi morte adjuta aliena.18 18

Matthew Arnold, p. 50.

T H E I D E A OF N A T U R E

And certainly the reflections of Heraclitus' τταντα χωρεί are equally obvious. However, to the extent that the general life means more than eternal movement, to the extent—in fact—that it has puzzled critics, it reflects the poetic insights of Goethe. Arnold's treatment of na­ ture is not identical with Goethe's; he does not, for example, dally with Leibnizian monadology or with the metaphysics of Schelling, but his work is impreg­ nated with the Goethian spirit. Underlying all of Ar­ nold's formulations is Goethe's notion of the Weltall and of the exalted oneness with nature which the wise man could achieve. In his essay on Winckelmann, Goe­ the spoke of that rare state in which man's healthful nature works as a whole, when through the enjoyment of this harmony he feels an ecstatic unity with the uni­ versal All.19 In such poems as Dauer im Wechsel (1803), Eins und Alles (1821) and Vermachtnis, which belongs to Goethe's last years and was written as a clarification is "Winckelmann und sein Jahrhundert," Gedenkausgabe, xiii, 417. The passage reads: Wenn die gesunde Natur des Menschen als ein Ganzes wirkt, wenn er sich in der Welt als einem grossen, schonen, wiirdigen und werten Ganzen fiihlt, wenn das harmonische Behagen ihm ein reines freies Entziicken gewahrt, dann wiirde das Weltall, wenn es sich selbst empfinden konnte, als an sein Ziel gelangt aufjauchzen und den Gipfel des eigenen Werdens und Wesens bewundern. Denn wozu dient alle der Aufwand von Sonnen und Planeten und Monden, von Sternen und Milchstrassen, von Kometen und Nebelflecken, von Gewordenen und werdenden Welten, wenn sich nicht zuletzt ein glucklicher Mensch unbewusst seines Daseins erfreut? • 1 31 *

THE IDEA OF JidTUBE

of Eins und Alles, we find many of Arnold's motifs foreshadowed. In the first of these, for example, Goe­ the describes universal change, first as it is perceived in the external world, for which his image is the stream of Heraclitus: "Ach, und in demselben Flusse / Schwimmst du nicht zum zweitenmal"; and then in man's own being. The final stanza, which has given commentators a good deal of trouble, is an affirmation of the permanence which the wise man—and particu­ larly the artist—may create out of his understanding and acceptance of mutability: Lass den anfang mit dem Ende Sich in Eins zusammenziehn! Schneller als die Gegenstande Selber dich voriiberfliehn. Danke, dass die Gunst der Musen Unvergangliches verheisst, Den Gehalt in deinem Busen Und die Form in Deinem Geist.20 [Let, then, the beginning and the end unite themselves more swiftly than the material forms themselves fly past. Give thanks that the gracious gift of the Muses assures eternality for that which is held within your heart, and for the form conceived by your spirit.] Goethe's poet is strikingly like the wise poet of Resig­ nation; he too sees the flux of things as a "continuous whole" (this I take to be the meaning of Goethe's be­ ginning and end united), and in a manner only im­ plied in Arnold's poem, but triumphantly affirmed in 20 Samtliche

Gedichte, I, 513.

THE IDEA OF NATURE

Dauer im Wechsel, the artist may achieve a vision of eternity, but in order to do so his art must be whole, drawing on moral worth (Gehalt) within the heart and Form, which is of the intellect. This union of faculties is, of course, precisely that which Arnold continually stressed. Eins und Alles, though it expresses a notion of the spiritual universe which Arnold certainly did not share, must also have influenced the conception of the general life. In the opening lines of his poem Goethe imagines the Alles or "limitless," as he also calls it, to be per­ meated by the spirit of the creator. Man's joyful aim must be first to perceive, then to find himself at one with the Alles or Weltgeist. Goethe's idea is very clearly derived from Spinoza; Arnold, however, who had no interest in the pantheistic tendencies of Spinoza's thought, borrowed the notion of the universe as it was conceived in Eins und Alles, but omitted the all-per­ vading deity. The concluding stanzas of Goethe's poem describe the eternal movement, the process of universal creation and destruction in which the moment only ap­ pears to stand still: Das Ewige regt sich fort in alien: Denn alles muss in Nichts zerfallen, Wenn es in Sein beharren will.21 [The Eternal moves continually through all things, for all things must fall into nothingness if they persist in being.] The moment described in Resignation which, in the eye of God is "but a quiet watershed / Whence, equally, the 21 Samtliche

Gedichte , I, 514.

T H E I D E A OF N A T U R E

seas of life and death are fed" (lines 257f.), is little more than an extension of Goethe's conception. The fine paradox of Goethe's concluding lines is not re­ flected anywhere in Arnold's poetry, but I should say that the notion of Nichts being a condition of Sein is a component of the idea of changing changelessness upon which Resignation is built. Goethe in later life had misgivings as to the inter­ pretations provoked by the last lines of Eins und Alles, and resolved to set things straight.22 Vermachtnis, which he wrote in 1829, begins, "Kein Wesen kann zu nichts zerfallen!," and affirms the joy of existence and of submission to those eternal laws, preservers of the living treasures from which the properties of the All arise. The same notion seems to underlie Arnold's poetry: in Resignation, "That general life, which does not cease, / Whose secret is not joy, but peace;" defines a world process different from Goethe's only in being more pronouncedly Stoical.

The Youth of Nature and The Youth of Man The Youth of Nature (1852) embodies a conception 22 See

Eckermann, Gesprache mit Goethe, Gedenkausgabe, 312: Goethe lieset mir das frisch entstandene, tiberaus herrliche Gedicht: Kein Wesen kann zu nichts zerfallen—. "Ich habe," sagte er, "dieses Gedicht als Widerspruch der Verse: Denn alles muss zu nichts zerfallen, wenn es im Sein beharren will—geschrieben, welche dumm sind und welche meine Berliner Freunde, bei Gelegenheit der naturforschenden Versammlung, zu meinem Arger in goldenen Buchstaben ausgestellt haben."

XXIV,

THE IDEA OF NATURE

very close in spirit to that of the general life. Read casually, this poem might seem to contradict the tenets of humanism and give support to critics who have com­ plained of Arnold's intellectual confusion. Its general subject is the relation between poetry and nature. The speaker, imagined to be in the Lake Country, begins by mourning the death of Wordsworth, who "lent a new life to these hills." He then goes on to ask whether the qualities of the external world which fill us with joy— the beauty, grace, and charm to which we respond— are in nature, or merely creations of the poet. At this point Nature herself intervenes and answers the young speaker reprovingly: 'Loveliness, magic, and grace, They are here! they are set in the world, They abide; and the finest of souls Hath not been thrill'd by them all, Nor the dullest been dead to them quite. The poet who sings them may die, But they are immortal and live, For they are the life of the world. Will ye not learn it, and know, When ye mourn that a poet is dead, That the singer was less than his themes, Life, and emotion, and I?1 (lines 79-90) It appears that the "life of the world" in this passage means something like the general life. Nature herself insists that her attributes are eternal and—one might say—naturally aesthetic. The argument of the poem flatly rejects the notion of a projective apprehension of nature; Arnold cannot assert, as Coleridge did, "Ours

THE IDEA OF MATURE

is her wedding garment, ours her shroud!" But neither does he suggest that ethical values are to be derived from nature; in the external universe man may find beauty, grace, magic, but not moral good. The Youth of Nature, therefore, though it celebrates the values of the surrounding world, does not contradict the rigorous message of the humanistic sonnets. In spite of its elo­ quent praise of Wordsworth and its recognition of the joys he described, the poem detaches itself from the Wordsworthian position. Nature goes on, in her address to the speaker, to indicate another source of aesthetic value, the "unlit gulph" of the self, which in its vastness, grandeur and gloom appears to be another sanc­ tum of the general life.28 This suggested harmony be­ tween the life within and those beauties the poet is able to find in nature provides a clear example of Arnold's dualism: man is part of nature, but he is ethically selfreliant. The Youth of Nature, however, must be read with its companion-piece, The Youth of Man,24, which treats of the individual's developing consciousness of the ex­ ternal world. The action of the second poem, as is so 28

This particular passage of The Touth of Nature is dis­ cussed at greater length on pp. 182-183. 24 Arnold seems to have been dissatisfied with the structure of The Youth of Man. The poem first appeared in the volume of 1852 immediately after The Youth of Nature in what is es­ sentially its final form. In 1853, however, two fragments were carved from it and printed independently: lines 51-60 were called Richmond Hill, and lines 112-118, The Power of Youth. In 1855, and thereafter, the poem was reassembled and again placed immediately after The Youth of Nature, which had been dropped from the volume of 1853.

TEE IDEA OF NATURE

often the case with Arnold's partly dramatic lyrics, takes place within the mind of the speaker and moves toward a moment of revelation. The setting is finely evoked; the "castled house," the lawns, the perfumed evening air, and an English valley confront a man and woman standing on a high balustraded terrace. This is almost the setting of Dover Beach, but in The Youth of Man the couple is aged, and they contemplate not the immense sea, but the gentle Thames: And there in the dusk by the walls, With the grey mist marking its course Through the silent, flowery land, On, to the plains, to the sea, Floats the imperial stream. (lines 83-87) The speaker of the poem is only vaguely defined; he does not participate in action or show any development of awareness; he simply possesses the truths he enun­ ciates. A person of ripe years, he is a seer-like figure who stands like an exhibitor before his moral showcase inviting the attention of Nature (whom he addresses directly) to his situation and that of the woman at his side, these two who stood in the same garden years ago when they were young and proud and felt that man was king of the world and Nature nothing. They now stand, grown old, sorrowful and humble, feeling for a moment "how Nature was fair," and regretting their weary and unprofitable lives. Though The Youth of Man is marred by a flatness and overexplicitness of statement, the moral question it explores is a subtle one. The man and woman when

THE IDEA OF NATURE

young were involved in a self-delusion not unlike the kind the poet warned against in In Utrumque Paratus. They said: 'We are young, and the world is ours; Man, man is the king of the world!' Nature, they could say in their vanity, 'Hath neither beauty, nor warmth, Nor life, nor emotion, nor power. But man has a thousand gifts, And the generous dreamer invests The senseless world with them all. Nature is nothing; her charm Lives in our eyes which can paint, Lives in our hearts which can feel.' (lines 26-27 and 30-37) As they grow older, however, they learn that they change but that nature does not, and in a moment of poignant revelation, . . . the mists of delusion, And the scales of habit, Fall away from their eyes; And they see, for a moment, Stretching out, like the desert In its weary, unprofitable length, Their faded ignoble lives. (lines 105-111) Unfortunately, Arnold seems unable, after this poign­ ant definition of existential ennui, to derive from the characters and situation of his poem the conclusion he

T H E I D E A OF

M A T U R E

wishes to draw. He weakens his effect by descending to an explicit message; in the final lines the poet speaks, urging the young to spiritual action while they are still vigorous: Sink, O youth, in thy soul! Yearn to the greatness of Nature; Rally the good in the depths of thyself! (lines 116-118) On the surface the implications of The Youth of Man seem to conflict with the humanist view of nature, but actually, I would suggest, there is not so much contra­ diction here as a discrimination of attitudes. If we pro­ ceed further in defining Arnold's idea of nature, and look again for the revealing parallels in the poetry of Goethe, we can see how clear and congruous his no­ tions were. For Arnold—and this is the key to the mat­ ter—there were two external natures matched by two forms of self-consciousness in man. The lower form is the living, changing nature around us; the higher is the universal cosmic process, the general life in which change assumes permanence.25 In man's inner life Ar­ nold distinguishes (always by implication) between a lower form of self-involvement, that condition in which we are subject to the senses, to the change and fretfulness of the everyday world, to a potentially morbid self-consciousness which produces anguish rather than joy; and a higher form of self-awareness which involves a sinking into the depths of the self and an achieving 25 The distinction Arnold made between these two natures is very well defined by William Robbins in his Ethical Idealism, of Matthew Arnold, Toronto, 1959, p. 121.

THE IDEA OF NATURE

of unity with the cosmic order. Arnold's view could be diagrammed as a triangle, with the base representing the lower, phenomenological level on which man and nature are distinct; at this level man can find charm, comfort, a certain solace in the natural world, but not ethical value or spiritual insight; at a higher level (the apex), however, man and nature are one; in his deepest being he is a part of cosmic nature and he may best achieve awareness of this permanent life by clearing and purifying his own vision. The conclusion to The Youth of Man, then, implies that moral insight is achieved by yearning "to the great­ ness of Nature," a process that is linked with the rally­ ing of the good in the depths of the self. The difficulty is that the poem does not furnish an explanation of this process, and to understand its meaning we have to refer to other poems of the volume of 1852—particularly to Self-Dependence, which effectively fuses several of Ar­ nold's most prominent themes. The situation of this poem is the familiar one of an anguished observer con­ templating nature, trying to find some meaning in it, but it is an achieved poetic work in a way that The Touth of Man is not. With cool irony the poet disposes of the Romantic view of the self, and argues that man's way of realizing his higher self is by coming to know the higher nature. In Fragen, one of the lyrics from Die Nordsee, Heine constructed a situation that appears to be a point of departure for Self-Dependence. Arnold's poem is, in fact, so much like Heine's that one is tempted to read it as a variation on the older poet's theme. Fragen begins:

T H E I D E A OF NATURE

Am Meer, am wusten, nachtlichen Meer Steht ein Jiingling-Mann, Die Brust voll Wehmut, das Haupt voll Zweifel, Und mit diistern Lippen fragt er die Wogen: Ό lost mir das Ratsel des lebens, Das qualvoll uralte Ratsel, Woriiber schon manche Haupter gegriibelt. .. .'2e [By the wild sea, at night, a young man stands, his heart full of melancholy, his mind of confusion. And with sad lips he demands of the waves: 0, solve for me the riddle of life, the terrifying, age-old riddle over which so many minds have already brooded.] He goes on to ask what the purpose of man is, whence he comes and whither he goes. But the waves merely continue to murmur, the wind to blow, and the clouds to fly. The stars blink, indifferent and cold, and a fool waits for his answer. Es murmeln die Wogen ihr ew'ges Gemurmel, Es weht der Wind, es fliehen die Wolken, Es blinken die Sterne gleichgiiltig und Kalt, Und ein Narr wartet auf Antwort. [The waves murmur their eternal murmur; the wind blows, the clouds fly; the stars blink, indifferent and cold—and a fool waits for the answer.] Both Heine and Arnold make ironic use of the styl­ ized situation of the young man of sensibility posed in melancholy contemplation asking for comfort from na28 Buch der Lieder, ed., Walther Killy, Frankfurt and Ham­ burg, 1961, p. 177. Fragen is the seventh poem in the second cycle of Die Nordsee.

THE IDEA OF NATURE

ture. S elf-Dependence, however, is a dramatic mono­ logue not, like Fragen, a mocking lyric; its speaker is exposed as the victim of a delusion, but Nature answers him with good advice, and he is more gently handled than Heine's Narr. The initial, though elementary, point to be made about Arnold's poem is that its strategy in­ volves dramatic distance; the "I" of the poem is de­ cidedly not the poet himself. The first three stanzas set the tone with precision: Weary of myself, and sick of asking What I am, and what I ought to be, At this vessel's prow I stand, which bears me Forwards, forwards, o'er the starlit sea. And a look of passionate desire O'er the sea and to the stars I send: 'Ye who from my childhood up have calm'd me, Calm me, ah, compose me to the end. 'Ah, once more,' I cried, 'ye stars, ye waters, On my heart your mighty charm renew; Still, still let me, as I gaze upon you, Feel my soul becoming vast like you!1 (lines 1-12) Arnold avoids a travesty of Romantic melancholy; the attitude of the speaker is not ridiculous, merely wrong. We are to learn from the poem that passionate yearning impedes a significant relation with nature, that though the young man's desire for calm is irre­ proachable, his wish to feel his soul becoming vast as the natural world reflects a Romantic error. Nature an-

THE IDEA OF NATURE

swers him—coolly but reprovingly: " 'Wouldst thou be as these are? Live as they.'" The distinction is essen­ tial: calm composure is to be attained through conduct, not passion; the speaker has desired a state of feeling, when he should have achieved a state of being. In the two stanzas that follow some of the notions of Quiet Work and of Religious Isolation are re-stated, and the conception of the antinatural emerges as a corollary to the Faustian delusion—that of "time's chafing prisoner" in Resignation. The waters, the stars, the vault of heaven are, according to the voice of Nature: 'Unaffrighted by the silence round them, Undistracted by the sights they see, These demand not that the things without them Yield them love, amusement, sympathy. 'And with joy the stars perform their shining, And the sea its long moon-silver'd roll; For self-poised they live, nor pine with noting All the fever of some differing soul. '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.' (lines 17-28) Again, as in Resignation, the poetry celebrates a peace which arises from an awareness of and a resting in the universal process. The conception is to be found in Goethe—and in Goethe when he is most indebted to Spinoza's thought. One of the epigrams, the so-called Zahme Xenien, which has for some time been cited as

THE IDEA OF NATURE

an analogue to Quiet Work, applies even more directly to Self-Dependence'. Wie das Gestirn, Ohne Hast, Aber ohne Rast, Drehe sich jeder Um die Eigne Last.27 [Like the stars, without haste, but without rest, let each one go his rounds with his own burden.] Perhaps the only suggestion in S elf-Dependence that jars with Arnold's earlier poetic statements is the as­ cription of joy to natural things performing their des­ tined activities. In Resignation the secret of the general life was "not joy, but peace"; however, in the later poem the joy of the stars and sea is so austere as to be almost synonymous with peace. The final stanza of Self-Dependence shifts out of the framework of dramatic projection. The concluding lines are spoken by a new voice which is in an unspecified way separate from that of the original speaker. The final lines seem to belong to a later time than the rest of the poem and to issue from a riper experience. In the editions of his poems from 1854 through 1881 Arnold set off the final stanza by extra spacing or by a row of asterisks, but in the last two editions of his poems he unfortunately allowed this typographical distinction to 27 Samtliche Gedichte, n, 613. The application of this epi­ gram to Quiet Work was, I think, originally made by H. W. Paul in his Matthew Arnold, London, 1902, p. 22 (see Com­ mentary, p. 22).

• 1 44 *

TEE IDEA OF NATURE

disappear. The reader is likely to miss the full effect of the poem if he is unaware of the special position of the last stanza, an awkwardness which may be said to il­ lustrate Arnold's inability to achieve a genuine dramatic monologue. His sense of the dramatic in poetry is high­ ly idiosyncratic: he grasped certain scenic elements, and was brilliant at schematically representing atti­ tudes of mind, but active drama was not in his power. In what I should call a genuinely dramatic poemBrowning's James Lee's Wife, or Yeats' Among School Children—the concluding illumination rises from the concrete situation of the poem, from the action in which the speaker participates. The conclusion of Self-Dependence, on the other hand, though it is impressive and though it rises naturally from the lyric argument of the poem, does not fulfill a dramatic conception. Arnold has created character, a setting and a debate, but his ending is an assertion drawn from the poet's experience, not a realization evoked by the events of the poem. Here is the final stanza: O air-born voice! long since, severely clear, A cry like thine in mine own heart I hear: 'Resolve to be thyself; and know that he, Who finds himself, loses his misery!' These lines are crucial to an understanding of the reconciliation Arnold imagined between the individual's deepest being and the cosmic order. The operative word in the concluding couplet is be. Romantic self-awareness, the paths of feeling or of psychological knowledge are not the ways to serenity; man's problem is one of

T H E IDEA OF NATURE

being. There are possible echoes here of eastern re­ ligious writings—Arnold, we know, had his period of enthusiasm for the Bhagavad Gita—f8 but there are analogues in western literature which are much closer to his thought. One of Goethe's lyrics, Proomion, af­ firms the possible unity between the higher self of man and the universe of things; the concluding stanza of Goethe's poem, though it refers to the idea and knowl­ edge of what the poet calls God, contains—I think—the germ of Arnold's notion: Im Innern ist ein Universum auch; Daher der Volker loblicher Gebrauch, Dass jeglicher das Beste, was er kennt, Er Gott, ja seinen Gott benennt, Ihm Himmel und Erden ubergibt, Ihn furchtet, und womoglich liebt.29 [Within us is also a universe; hence the laudable cus­ tom of each race, that everyone names as God, his own God, the best that he knows. To him he renders up both earth and heaven, fears him, and as much as possible, loves him.] The conception of a universal order which man may discover within himself has in Goethe's poetry a moral and humanistic cast which is much closer to Arnold's spirit than is the passivity of Hindu thought. The inner Universum is the source of our knowledge of das Beste. In his very late "Testament" (Vermachtnis, 1829) Goe­ the returned to the metaphor of an internal cosmos, a 28 See

the references to the "Oriental Poem" in Letters to Clough, pp. 69, 71, 75. 29 Samtliche Gedichte, i, 509.

• 1 46 *

T H E IDEA OF NATURE

center of absolute calm, a universe of which man's moral consciousness (Gewbsen) is the sun: Sofort nun wende dich nach innen: Das Zentrum findest du da drinnen, Woran kein Edler zweifeln mag. Wirst keine Regel da vermissen: Denn das selbstandige Gewissen 1st Sonne deinem Sittentag.80 [Now turn immediately to what is within. There, no noble-minded person can doubt, you shall find the Cen­ ter. There no rule shall be felt to be lacking for the independent consciousness is the sun of your moral day.] In the writings of Goethe, then, Arnold could find the conception of two natures—one the mutable and amoral; the other, the high cosmic order—and of an ultimate source of value within the individual. The links between the two poets help to show what has not usually been made clear, that though Arnold's nature poems eschew a Romantic nature faith they nevertheless find a unique value in nature. There is truth in the characterization of Arnold as "the least transcendental of English poets";31 but if we are not, on this account, to undervalue his achievement we must recognize that in the place of transcendence he enjoined discipline of spirit, control of the senses and feelings, a love of and submission to the natural world; in short, a philosophy which is in harmony with the humanist quest. 30

Samtliche Gediehte, I , 515. The phrase is J. W. Beach's (see Beach, p. 397), and im­ plies disapproval. 81

THE IDEA OF MATURE

The Higher Nature The notion of a higher, withdrawn but value-possess­ ing nature emerges as a dominant theme when the po­ ems of the volume of 1852 are looked at as a group. In A Summer Night, one of Arnold's finest lyrics, the con­ ception is invoked in an especially impressive way— the more impressive, perhaps, because the main sub­ ject of the poem is not nature, but the whole condition of man. This is, I think, the only English poem of Ar­ nold's time to make of the city a symbol with the depth and richness of Baudelaire's Paris. London is something more than the setting of a A Summer Night: the cramped urban landscape is an image of man's limited though possible existence; as the sky overspreads the narrow rigidities of the city streets, so the natural world surrounds man's limited being, offering its boundless freedom. The poem begins: In the deserted, moon-blanch'd street, How lonely rings the echo of my feet! Those windows, which I gaze at, frown, Silent and white, unopening down, Repellent as the world;—but see, A break between the housetops shows The moon! and, lost behind her, fading dim Into the dewy dark obscurity Down at the far horizon's rim, Doth a whole tract of heaven disclose! Man is either a prisoner confined to "some unmean­ ing taskwork," or a mad adventurer seeking an un­ known goal, "standing for some false, impossible shore."

THE IDEA OF NATURE

Is there no life, but these alone? Madman or slave, must man be one? (lines 74-75) Then in the last strophe the clear moon and the pure dark heavens, seen above the buildings that shut the speaker in, remind him of other possibilities: Plainness and clearness without shadow of stain! Clearness divine! Ye heavens, whose pure dark regions have no sign Of languor, though so calm, and, though so great, Are yet untroubled and unpassionate; Who, though so noble, share in the world's toil, And, though so task'd, keep free from dust and soil! I will not say that your mild deeps retain A tinge, it may be, of their silent pain Who have long'd deeply once, and long'd in vain— But I will rather say that you remain A world above man's head, to let him see How boundless might his soul's horizons be, How vast, yet of what clear transparency! How it were good to abide there, and breathe free; How fair a lot to fill Is left to each man still! (lines 76-92) Like the stars and sea of S elf-Dependence, these regions of sky possess the qualities man needs in order to dis­ cover himself. In its very impassibility nature manifests the serenity that man might achieve. The Second Best, a gnomic poem, contains similar notions in an undeveloped form. The "best" for man is

THE IDEA OF NATURE

discerned by nature and, it is implied, wished by nature for man. But in the mad distractions of human life even the wish for that "best" is strangled. "So," the speaker asserts, "it must be!" All that is possible to man in his strained existence is to learn to heed the impulse from "his deepest, best existence," which counsels "Hope, Light, Persistence." The poem is too little dramatized to express its attitudes persuasively, but it has the tangential interest of reinforcing the implications of some of Arnold's better poetry by explicitly affirming that nature possesses an ultimate value which is signifi­ cant to man, even though the immediate aspects of the natural world can provide neither spiritual insight nor comfort. One of the clearest examples of the continuity of Arnold's idea of nature is Morality in the 1852 volume, a poem which repeats the theme of In Harmony with Nature, but ironically re-states it in the terminology of the poems of 1852. The situation of Morality is once more that of a deluded man who hears the voice of na­ ture and, hearing the truth, is disabused of at least one of his illusions. In this colloquy, however, nature is assigned the role of a somewhat frivolous, emotional woman, conscious of her inferiority—in some respects— to humanity. It is given to man, the poem suggests, to achieve his ends only in the burden and heat of the day and through self-control, struggle, and "task'd moral­ ity." When man, having succeeded in his task, invites nature's judgment of his virtues and accomplishments, she responds, not with the censure he expected, but with signs of strong emotion:

THE IDEA OF NATURE

'Ah, child!' she cries, 'that strife divine, Whence was it, for it is not mine? 'There is no effort on my brow— I do not strive, I do not weep; I rush with the swift spheres and glow In joy, and when I will, I sleep. Yet that severe, that earnest air, I saw, I felt it once—but where?' (lines 23-30) In the last stanza nature, resolving her perplexity, re­ calls that her awareness of these human virtues comes from "some other clime" and place, indeed, "1Twas when the heavenly house I trod, / And lay upon the breast of God." Human morality, it is sardonically suggested, derives from a source higher than nature and is, in its way, divine. Arnold's intention in this poem may have been to render as narrative the key statement of In Harmony with Nature,"... man hath all which Nature hath, but more." And as the sonnet of 1849 echoes the concep­ tions of Goethe's Das Gottliche, so Morality portrays through another conceptual scheme the triangular re­ lationship between man, mutable nature, and divinity. Goethe conceived man as godlike by reason of his moral discrimination and ability to act justly and construc­ tively; by these powers he was distinguished from na­ ture, which is changeable and indifferent to good and evil. Elsewhere in his writings, however, Goethe cele­ brated the universal order in which man and nature unite in the highest spiritual felicity. Arnold's poetry expresses the same double view. • 1 51 ·

T E E IDEd

OF NATURE

A definition of man's relation to nature appears al­ most indirectly in A Southern Night (1861), the small elegy Arnold wrote for his brother William. The poet reflects on the sad and strange facts that his brother, who died at sea, is buried in Gibraltar and his brother's wife in the Himalayas. The busy, care-filled English, the poet suggests, should lie in cities, where "men's in­ cessant stream goes by"; the Mediterranean beach or the Indian hills are more suitable resting places for a crusading knight or an eastern sage. But (and once more a voice of nature intervenes to correct an illusion) the midnight breeze checks the poet's meditation; he is led to think of the dead couple, of the woman's gentle­ ness, the man's nobility: And what but gentleness untired, And what but noble feeling warm, Wherever shown, howe'er inspired, Is grace, is charm? What else is all these waters are, What else is steep'd in lucid sheen, What else is bright, what else is fair, What else serene? Mild o'er her grave, ye mountains, shine! Gently by his, ye waters, glide! To that in you which is divine They were allied. (lines 129-140) The surprising word here is divine. Arnold used the word rather loosely,32 and here he does not mean god82 See,

for example, the "divine bard" of The Strayed Rev-

• 152 ·

THE IDEA OF NATURE

like, so much as fine and pure. The concluding lines of A Southern Night make a connection, usually only hinted at in other poems, between the serene best that man can find within himself and the abstract, ultimate order and beauty of the universal process. In considering the kinds of value that Arnold dis­ cerned in the natural world I have left the discussion of Empedocles on Etna until last. Because it is Arnold's most ambitious poem, and manages to touch in some significant way on every major theme of his poetry, it is less available as evidence and example than are some of the lesser lyrics. Empedocles on Etna has also suf­ fered, more than Arnold's other poems, from the char­ acteristic vice of nineteenth-century interpretation, the tendency to take the speeches of a dramatic character as statements of the poet's own lyrical insight. Since this is a dramatic poem on the subject of despair, Empedocles' reflections are designedly lacking in calm, cheer­ fulness, and disinterested objectivity. The hero is moving toward self-annihilation, and his statements—though they are true and just as far as they go—overemphasize the negative aspects of man's condition. Empedocles' fatal despair might be described as the loss of that very power of joy that so many of Arnold's lyrics celebrate, the quiet joy that may be found in nature. In the terrible final speech of Act II, the word resounds pathetically: "a pure natural joy," "dead to every natural joy"; Empedocles concludes that he is like a man eller, the four uses of the word in the Epilogue to LeSSing1S Laocoon (lines 20, 60, 102, 197), and the poet who is made "divine" by the elevation of joy in The Youth of Nature (lines 95-98).

THE IDEA OF NATURE

Who has no minute's breathing space allow'd To nurse his dwindling faculty of joy Joy and the outward world must die to him, As they are dead to me. (ii, 272-275) Elsewhere in the poem Empedocles expresses a view of nature compatible with that of the lyric poems of the volumes of 1849 and 1852, but with the affirmative aspects left out. The philosopher retains his insight and fortitude; he has never equivocated nor been the "slave of sense," but a vital and essential connection with the outward world is impossible to him. He is too ravaged by thought and conflict to penetrate to the springs of life. Thus, in the long recital of Act I in which Pausanias receives his "lesson," Empedocles is able to in­ form the man of moderate sensibility as to what he should demand of himself and expect of the universe. The homily is true, but it is barren; it represents an improvement over the self-indulgent superstition to which Pausanias was liable, but it represents only part of the way to serene, right understanding. Empedocles emphasizes the permanent conflict between nature and mankind; even if man were just and pure, utterly with­ out sin, there would be other existences in the universe to clash with his: Like us, the lightning-fires Love to have scope and play; The stream, like us, desires An unimpeded way; Like us, the Libyan wind delights to roam at large.

THE

IDEA OF MATURE

Streams will not curb their pride The just man not to entomb, Nor lightnings go aside To give his virtues room; Nor is that wind less rough which blows a good man's barge. Nature, with equal mind, Sees all her sons at play; Sees man control the wind, The wind sweep man away; Allows the proudly-riding and the foundering bark. (i, 247-261) The passage returns us to the truisms of Das Gottliche and of Matthew 5: 45;33 but it is more than a po­ etical evocation of an indifferent nature: Empedocles suffers because he can see no more than indifference, because he has no sense of nature's joy. The source of his despair is made absolutely clear in the final speech where, after proclaiming that the outward world is dead to him, he projects his melancholy to the stars and fancies that they too have survived themselves, that they once lived and moved joyfully in an older world, "a mightier order": But now, ye kindle Your lonely, cold-shining lights, Unwilling lingerers In the heavenly wilderness, 83 "That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust."

THE IDEA OF NATURE

For a younger, ignoble world .... (ii, 288-292) But the philosopher has not deteriorated so far as to accept fully so deluded a view. In the lines that follow he corrects himself, No, no, ye stars! there is no death with you, No languor, no decay! languor and death, They are with me, not you! ye are alive— Ye, and the pure dark ether where ye ride BriUiant above me! ^ ^lsos) And in a passage of great eloquence Empedocles praises the life that is in earth and sea and sky, the "held-in joy swelling its heart,1' and concludes that his own spiritual weakness cannot lessen the values of the natural world: I alone Am dead to life and joy, therefore I read In all things my own deadness. ( I I , 320-322) It is possible, Empedocles on Etna shows us, to under­ stand the universe and still be unable to live. With all his noble wisdom, Empedocles is finally ranged with that set of Arnold's poetic characters who are ensnared by delusions and must learn in anguish what man and nature are. From all Arnold's poems in which nature is a subject a clear pattern emerges. If we read the poet patiently, and resist the desire to make his notions correspond to familiar tenets, we shall have no difficulty in seeing what he is about. The general effect of this group of po­ ems is to perform that work of construction which is • 1 56 ·

THE IDEA OF NATURE

characteristic of all Arnold's writings. He would clear away the transcendentalism and nature faith which had filtered down from earlier nineteenth-century writers and replace it with an austerely stoical ethic. But even more vigorously than his "poetic fathers," he affirms the joy which is to be found in the understanding of nature, and celebrates its power to guide and sustain the ra­ tional man.

Natures Beauteous Forms So far in this discussion of Arnold's idea of nature I have considered only the poetic expressions of a rec­ ognizably philosophical conception. There is, however, another, more conventional, aspect of the poet's ap­ proach to nature which, though it is less provocative of analysis, is important in his work: this is, simply, the description of the natural world, the practice of render­ ing in verse the facts of outdoor life. Indeed, in the com­ mon acceptance the term "nature poetry" means no more than an artistic evocation of experiences of earth, sky, and sea. Frequently the Lake Poets, and later Ten­ nyson, the Pre-Raphaelites and, even, Browning con­ sidered the accurate transcription of sensory data to be a worthy end for poetry, a means of freshening percep­ tion and directing imagination to immediate reality. With his inspired naivete Wordsworth could wish that the mountain daisy itself might know The beauty of its star-shaped shadow, thrown On the smooth surface of this naked stone!34 84 "Poems

of Sentiment and Reflection," No. XLII, lines 5-6.

T H E IDEA OF NATURE

And Tennyson prided himself on the discernment that allowed him to register in verse the precise coloring of the oxlip, and was much admired—a famous passage in Cranford tells us—for being sharp-eyed enough to ob­ serve the blackness of "ashbuds in the front of March." There have been poets and critics—and indeed there still are—who insist that these facts of perception are the best things that poetry can give us. Arnold could be, when he chose, a precise and ele­ gant descriptive poet, but in comparison with the Lake Poets or with most of his literary contemporaries, he appears as notably uninterested in the rendering of con­ crete detail. The reason is simply that he felt that a feeling for the beauty of nature, soothing and healing though it may be, was of less value than philosophical insight. In making his eloquent distinction between Wordsworth and Goethe35 he described Wordsworth as the poet of stream and woodland whose "eyes avert their ken / From half of human fate." The achievement of such a poet is priceless and inimitable; Wordsworth was a priest to us all Of the wonder and bloom of the world, Which we saw with his eyes, and were glad. (The Youth of Nature, lines 53-55) He is described as causing us to lie, ". . . as we lay at birth / On the cool flowery lap of earth."36 Goethe, how­ ever, is conceived as a modern example of the poet who knows the "causes of things," and sees beneath his feet 38 36

See pp. 75-78. Memorial Verses, lines 48-49.

TEE IDEA OF NATURE

the lurid flow Of terror, and insane distress, A n d headlong f a t e , . . . (Memorial Verses, lines 31-33) And though Arnold can assert that after Wordsworth's death there will be no poet capable of making us feel the quality of nature, the subjects of Goethe's art are, he implies, of a higher importance. In Arnold's poetry, then, natural description is always subsidiary to other matters: to the consideration of man and his fate or of man's ability to know and learn from the universe. The lyric of Arnold's which comes closest to being a descriptive nature poem is, urbanely enough, Lines Written in Kensington Gardens, in which the beauty and meaning of the "lone, open glade" is enhanced by the proximity of "the huge world, which roars hard by." This conception of nature humanized, expressed by the situation of a poet responding to the natural world from deep within a city park also appears in the Epilogue to Lessing's Laocoon, and may stand as a representative image of Arnold's poetic disposition. The Lines end with an invocation which suggests very clear­ ly the values Arnold thought man, properly guided, could find in nature: Calm soul of all things! make it mine To feel, amid the city's jar, That there abides a peace of thine, Man did not make, and cannot mar. The will to neither strive nor cry, The power to feel with others give!

THE IDEA OF NATURE Calm, calm me more! nor let me die Before I have begun to live. Generally speaking, the poems in which Arnold uses nature for descriptive rather than philosophical ends are of two kinds: in one group the natural settings are merely conventional, and in the other nature becomes what might be called a detachable symbol. In many poems—to consider the first category—the external world is simply appropriate scenery. In Obermanni Faded Leaves, or Switzerland the natural settings are harmonious with the meanings: it is obviously neces­ sary, for example, that the landscape which prompts the reflections on Senancour should be the Alpine one in which he wrote; but in all these poems the natural world furnishes a background for meditation and lyrical expression, it does not itself incite or become the ob­ ject of that meditation. Similarly, in The Scholar-Gipsy and Thyrsis the Oxfordshire countryside is rendered precisely and with love: Screen'd is this nook o'er the high, half-reap'd field, And here till sun-down, shepherd! will I be. Through the thick corn the scarlet poppies peep, And round green roots and yellowing stalks I see Pale pink convolvulus in tendrils creep; And air-swept lindens yield Their scent, and rustle down their perfumed showers Of bloom on the bent grass where I am laid, And bower me from the August sun with shade; And the eye travels down to Oxford's towers. (lines 21-30)

THE IDEA OF KATUBE

But though this, and many other passages, remind one of the Wordsworthian attitude to nature, the approach is essentially different from Wordsworth's. Arnold shows himself capable of a tender and faithful poetic transcription of natural detail, but he only practices it in his formal elegies or in those lyrics where he sounds the elegiac strain. And this is so, I think, because his notion of what nature is good for is so totally different from Wordsworth's. In The Scholar-Gipsy the land­ scape near Oxford is an important part of the poem's symbolic structure; the poet creates a cluster of elemen­ tary contrasts—present-past, thought-feeling, constric­ tion-freedom, age-youth, doubt-faith, and so forth—of which the principal one is between the fullness and vi­ tality of nature and the deprivation and arid anxiety of modern man. Living nature in its complex wholeness stands for all that fretful man has lost—and is forever losing. In Thyrsis there is the same symbolic contrast, the same nostalgic view of nature, but the freshness and immediacy of description is absent. In the monody on Clough, the poet seems to have been crushed by the weight of formal considerations. The Scholar-Gipsy laments man's loss of a certain joy in nature; it is elegiacal in an original, innovating sense. In Thyrsis, how­ ever, the natural description is merely of the kind that is traditional to the pastoral elegy. The earliest elegies evoked at length the beauties of nature: the bringing of flowers to honor the dead offered conventional poets the opportunity to ornament their verses with lists, and the course of the seasons and aspects of the weather were features of poetic ornament. More profoundly, however, • 1 61 *

THE IDEA OF NATURE

the traditional elegist celebrated the connection between man and nature; nature was conceived as mourning with the poet, suffering herself a kind of death, but sup­ porting by her perpetual regeneration man's hope of his own continuing life. Thyrsis, unfortunately, is too frozen an imitation of the pastoral elegy form to effect any vibrant affirmation of eternal life. It has a remote and muted charm, but its energy level is low. Its pecu­ liar tonality suggests what some of Arnold's other po­ ems also lead one to suspect: for him the detailed rec­ ord of a sensory response to nature is principally a means of evoking a sense of the past. The ability to respond pleasurably to the things of earth, he seems to feel, belongs to a lost time, and in his poetry extended natural description accompanies elegiac situations. As we move through life, the poetry suggests, we lose the ability to be touched by nature; for Arnold, more com­ pletely than for Wordsworth, "nothing can bring back the hour / Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower." This loss is suggested even in so undespairing a poem as Resignation, where the detailed description of nature appears only in the passage describing the walk which the speaker and his companion took when they were young and boisterous. Ten years later, as he repeats his journey, the mature man looks at nature with the steadier, grayer vision of the moral eye. Another kind of natural description in Arnold's po­ etry involves the use of what I have called detachable symbol. If, for example, we compare the scenery in The Scholar-Gipsy with the River Oxus as it appears in Sohrab and Rustum, with the sea in Dover Beach, or with the river of life in A Dream, we see that in The

THE IDEA OF NATURE

Scholar-Gipsy a sensory awareness of the outdoor world permeates every element of the poem. But the seas and rivers, even the English lawns, which appear so fre­ quently in the poetry, function in a special way: they are not there to give concreteness and immediacy to a world experienced by sense, but are, rather, symbols of a detachable kind, meant to stand as signs of some pro­ found and ineffable truth of life and death. These sym­ bols are rich in connotations, and of interest in them­ selves, but they are not directly relevant to Arnold's idea of nature. We do not mistake the river of life in The Buried Life, or the sea in which the lover of Mar­ guerite finds all men to be enisled, for features of a real landscape. The recurrent water images in Arnold's po­ etry are so potent as to be archetypal, but though they are drawn from nature, they evoke a range of feelings not involved with man's attitude toward the natural world. WHAT conclusion is one to draw after considering the whole group of Arnold's poems on nature? My prin­ cipal concern has been to show that his poetry conduces to a real idea of nature, and that this idea is sustained in all the poems he wrote. But to discover his consist­ ency and seriousness is not to establish Arnold as one of the great nature poets. There is, in fact, in these par­ ticular poems a poignancy that is not intentional: the poet's very excellence, his rigorous maintenance of standards, both emotional and intellectual, sometimes spoil his effects and deprive his accomplishments of glamor. These poems, certainly, are greatly admirable, and those that treat of man's place in nature have deep

THE IDEA OF NATURE

—and largely unregarded—meanings for twentieth-century men; considering the matter all in all, however, one feels that Arnold is perhaps too intelligent to be an in­ fluential nature poet. Sympathetic readers are willing to think, but they want to be charmed first. We recog­ nize the nobility of poetry that admonishes us as to our own self-delusions and shows us the refined dis­ tinctions of attitude that we must learn to make, but our attention strays to where the celandine is blooming. Arnold, it will be remembered, said in praise of Spinoza that he first filled and satisfied the imagination "by the width and grandeur of his view of nature," and that then he fortified and stilled the "mobile, straining" tem­ perament by his moral lesson. If Arnold is not one of the great nature poets it is, I think, because he was un­ able to accomplish this first step of filling and satisfy­ ing the imagination. But though we judge him harshly, and are occasionally impatient with the rigors of his thought and the cool insistence of his poetry, let us not forget that he took Spinoza's second step, that his po­ etry genuinely offers "a moral lesson not of mere re­ signed acquiescence, not of melancholy quietism, but of joyful activity within the limits of man's own sphere."

CHAPTER III

La vie reelle de ITiomme est en lui-meme. SENANCOUR

T

HOUGH the ways in which men think and live have always been the principal subject of litera­ ture, the Romantic interest in individual man is recog­ nizably novel. One of the least unsatisfactory means of defining Romanticism is to consider it a new expression of several kinds of self-assertion and self-exploration. It is only oversimplifying slightly to say that since the time of Rousseau the life of the individual has been the center of literary observation; Romantic writers, and those who followed them, concerned themselves with analyzing the genesis of feelings and attitudes, of in­ dividual development, and of the nuances and extremes of emotion. Rousseau—or, rather, the complex of ideas with which his name is connected—represents the sim­ plest kind of interest in the self, the desire for individual liberty and the belief that the individual's inherent rights are superior to the prescripts of religious and so­ cial tradition. Later writers extend this preoccupation to other areas. Byron became a culture hero chiefly be­ cause he celebrated certain kinds of emotional libera­ tion; one can find in his work a manifesto of the absolute integrity and metaphysical independence of the single human being. Wordsworth's Prelude, subtitled Growth of a Poet's Mind, is not only his major work, but the • 1 65 *

THE IDEA OF SELF

sign of a new direction of interest. And Goethe, whom Arnold recognized as the real master, created in this region, too, a bridge from negative to positive modes of thought. He made of his own life a symbolic pattern of descent into unhealthy introspection, followed by an awakening to the needs of the external world. Then, exploring what he called man's "universe within," he suggested new possibilities of penetrating that universe and of coming to understand its mysteries. The desire to place the source of ultimate value with­ in the individual necessarily produced distinct kinds of art and theory. To describe the underlying similarities of German Idealist philosophy, expressionistic aesthet­ ics, and visionary poetry is to trace various manifesta­ tions of Romantic self-consciousness. But the nine­ teenth-century sense of liberation, joyously expressed as the freedom of the individual, also had its terrifying side. The problem of identity pervades modern litera­ ture as both an enriching and agonizing preoccupation; the Doppelganger and other conceptions of divided or multiple personality, reflect both men's new insights and their new fears. Among Arnold's contemporaries, Tennyson was most racked by the problem of what the "I" is. His poetry suggests that he found the critical moment of human growth to be the point at which the young person realized his identity by becoming aware that the world was made up simply of himself and the "not-himself." The special flavor of Tennyson's work is partly due to the fact that this awareness continued to represent for him the actual situation of being. But even more widespread in nineteenth-century writing than the topic of identity is the set of feelings described by the term Angst. A sense of isolation and loneliness is • 1 66 *

THE IDEA OF SELF

endemic to human life, and has always been described by writers; but the expression in the literature of the recent past of what can only be called an existential loneliness is poignantly new. The anguish of the iso­ lated is one of the great themes of our century. Along with the release and, even, apotheosis of the individual came his alienation; the will to celebrate the self, to make it an object of intense awareness, freed men to new forms of joy and to a widened range of suffering.

The Buried Life The complex idea of the self which is explored and partially defined in Arnold's poetry reflects the various interests of his literary predecessors, but ends up by being entirely original. The poet arrives at his idea of the self—as he did at those of poetry and of nature—by accepting the more valuable aspects of the Romantic insight, but balancing and steadying them with the pre­ cepts of classical humanism. By the beginning of his poetic career Arnold had lived through several phases of self-discovery and literary indoctrination. In his later years he paid tribute—cautiously but eloquently—to the ardor of Byron, to the intoxicating effect of George Sand's self-liberating heroines, and to the melancholy egoism of Senancour. He understood the value of Ro­ mantic self-consciousness, but he moved beyond it. He contemns in his poetry the notions of the autonomous sensibility and of the supreme significance of feeling. Arnold's interest in the nature of the self is, in the strict sense, ontological. His perceptions are achieved through flashes of intuition, but once they are realized in poetry • 1 67 -

THE IDEA OF SELF

they establish what may appropriately be called a the­ ory of being. The Buried Life is the center of a constellation of po­ ems from which Arnold's idea of the self emerges. The meanings of the poem are elusive, chiefly, I think, be­ cause they are concealed by the familiar, easy conven­ tions of Romantic poetry. As he so often did, Arnold begins with a dramatic occasion which instigates re­ flection and, ultimately, insight. There is in the poem no very clearly realized place or time (such as Brown­ ing would give us); the speaker and his beloved are simply presented at the outset as being engaged in a situation from which illumination is to come. The con­ ception is not strictly dramatic, since there is no dialogue and no externalized action; in a way that is charac­ teristic of Arnold, however, the poem moves toward drama and away from purely lyrical statement. The opening lines establish the situation: Light flows our war of mocking words, and yet, Behold, with tears mine eyes are wet! I feel a nameless sadness o'er me roll. Yes, yes, we know that we can jest, We know, we know that we can smile! But there's a something in this breast, To which thy light words bring no rest, And thy gay smiles no anodyne. Give me thy hand, and hush awhile, And turn those limpid eyes on mine, And let me read there, love! thy inmost soul. Here the tone and language are "Romantic" in so familiar a way that we are liable to overlook the im-

THE IDEA OF SELF

plications of the passage. The conversation between the lovers is a "war," a word that the speaker uses ironi­ cally, but which comes to have solemn connotations. The "nameless sadness" that suddenly obtrudes is not, we are to discover, simply Schwarmerei, but grief for the lover's inevitable separateness and for the inade­ quacy of his own understanding. A nice distinction is made between the knowledge that reason gives (the word "know" is ironically repeated three times) that he and his beloved can communicate happily, and his intuitive knowledge that they are alien to each other. And yet, this lover still hopes that by gazing deep into his mistress's eyes he will be able to read her inmost soul. In the poem's second section the speaker puts as a question what he already really knows: . . . is even love too weak To unlock the heart, and let it speak? Are even lovers powerless to reveal To one another what indeed they feel? . . . and yet The same heart beats in every human breast! Then, in a final outburst of sentimental incredulity he asks whether he and his love are under the same spell, whether they too must be dumb. From line 26 to the end of the poem, the speaker him­ self corrects, or modifies, his own too naive view. It is well for us, he suggests, if we can free our hearts and unchain our lips even for a moment; "For that which seals them hath been deep-ordain'd!" He continues then to expatiate by means of fable, images, and hints of

THE IDEA OF SELF

perceptions on the paradox of men's underlying unity and irrevocable separation. In the third section (lines 26-44) the ruling law of our being is explained by a fable: Fate foresaw that man would be subject to frivolous distractions, and in order to protect his "genuine self" from his caprice, placed his true life deep and indiscernible within him. This inner self is figured in the image of a stream buried in deep recesses, the "unregarded river of our life," which Fate determined that we should not see, though it drives us on eternally. "But often," the next section, the heart of the poem, begins, . . . in the world's most crowded streets, But often, in the din of strife, There rises an unspeakable desire After the knowledge of our buried life; A thirst to spend our fire and restless force In tracking out our true, original course; A longing to inquire Into the mystery of this heart which beats So wild, so deep in us—to know Whence our lives come and where they go. And many a man in his own breast then delves, But deep enough, alas! none ever mines. (lines 45-56) The note of sadness that is struck here resounds through all Arnold's poetry. Man's restlessness and discontent are necessary to his condition; he is destined to long after an unattainable knowledge of his true self, a knowledge which is not susceptible to reason, which is only—we learn from the poem—vouchsafed in rare

TEE IDEA OF SELF

flashes of intuition. In this central passage of the poem, the meanings emerge from conjunctions of images rather than from expository statement. The original course, the heart and, finally, the stream cohere to effect a mounting awareness of the poem's object. The Buried Life begins as an account of the search for the inner source of value, but goes on to record an occasion of intuitive insight. Its operation is of a sort that we find in the best Romantic poetry and in Arnold's most suc­ cessful work: the occasion of the poem is both its sub­ ject and its achievement. The poem is the record of a moment of heightened vision, but it is—by virtue of its distinctive language—itself the instrument of that vi­ sion. THE distinction between the inner and the outer life is established by the confrontation of the stream image, with its suggestions of fluidity, depth, and sinuosity, with the hard, lifeless regularity of the "lines" accord­ ing to which men are compelled to define themselves in the tumult of social life:

And we have been on many thousand lines, And we have shown, on each, spirit and power; But hardly have we, for one little hour, Been on our own line, have we been ourselves— Hardly had skill to utter one of all The nameless feelings that course through our breast, But they course on for ever unexpress'd. (lines 57-63) The contrast suggested here between, as it were, the true and the false lives of the individual seems to re-

THE IDEA OF SELF

semble some of the familiar themes of Arnold's contem­ poraries. Clough, for example, with his "Duty—That's to say complying / With whate'er's expected here," con­ sidered the inner, integral life to be in continuous con­ flict with the outward conformity society demanded. Later George Eliot found one of her richest themes in the opposition between the autonomous moral life of the individual and the opportunities and limitations of public life. These are not, however, the kinds of distinc­ tions that Arnold makes; his conception seems to have more in common with later notions of the conscious and unconscious minds. In fact, a comparison of the sym­ bolism that Freud devised to express his analysis of personality with Arnold's image patterns reveals some remarkable similarities: both writers assume a powerful level of existence beneath the conscious layer; and in both conceptions it is implied that the submerged life has a pristine quality that the conscious life lacks. In some of his fragmentary expressions of the idea of the buried life Arnold suggests—as we shall see—that all men are unified in it. This quasi-mystical apprehension is never elaborated in Arnold's work, but it is clearly analogous to such a concept as Jung's theory of the col­ lective unconscious. However, before making extensive comparisons, we must try to define the implications of Arnold's own ideas. The image of the line appears in several places in Arnold's work. The passage that bears most closely on The Buried Life is a sentence found in the Yale manu­ script which appears to be a prose statement of lines 57 to 63 of the poem: "We have been on a thousand lines & on each have shown spirit talent even geniality

THE

IDEA OF SELF

but hardly for an hour between birth & death have we been on our own one natural line, have we been our­ selves, have we breathed freely."1 In another of the po­ ems of the 1852 volume, Too Late, the individual's "line" is conceived as enforcing his alienation from others: Each on his own strict line we move, And some find death ere they find love; So far apart their lives are thrown From the twin soul which halves their own. And emerging even more clearly in the Stanzas in Mem­ ory of the Author of uObermann" (dated 1849) is the notion of man's inability to control or even to know the course of his life: We, in some unknown Power's employ, Move on a rigorous line; Can neither, when we will, enjoy, Nor, when we will, resign. (lines 133-136) The last three sections of The Buried Life contain a very clear expression of the typical melancholy of Ar­ nold's poetry. The speaker of the poem asserts that the desire either to know or to avoid knowledge of the hid­ den self shapes and colors all our actions. In youth we struggle to act and speak in accordance with our intui­ tion of the true self, but the attempt is vain. The grow­ ing man turns (following a course that suggests Words­ worth, but with a difference) to the multitudinous dis­ tractions of daily life as a means of numbing the painful 1 Quoted

in the Commentary, p. 196.

THE IDEA OF SELF

awareness of his inability to reach or express the inner self. Yet still, from time to time, vague and forlorn, From the soul's subterranean depth upborne As from an infinitely distant land, Come airs, and floating echoes, and convey A melancholy into all our day. (lines 72-76) This passage is a crux, I think, for the understand­ ing of Arnold. Poets have expressed many different kinds of melancholy: some of it is clearly social in origin, some metaphysical, some merely adventitious. There is, for English poetry at least, something new about the kind of melancholy Arnold expressed—a fact that can best be seen by contrast with Coleridge's dejection, or with the sense of exile and frustration one finds in both Byron and Tennyson. The Angst of the speaker in The Buried Life does not come from having lost his most delicate faculty of perception, nor from incongruity or conflict between himself and other men or between his personal desires and the limitations of the age. Arnoldian melancholy is an awareness of the conditions of existence, a sense of the unfathomable inner gulf of being, which is not black or empty, but filled with tantalizingly sweet sounds, faint memories, hints of possibilities. From this poetry we infer that an aware­ ness of the "gulf"2 is, to some extent, in every man; 2

It is helpful in this connection to compare with Arnold's conception the persistent image of the gouffre in the poetry of Baudelaire. Baudelaire's melancholy, too, has less in common with the earlier Romantic poets than with Existentialist expres­ sions of Angst.

T H E I D E A OF

S E L F

some come closer than others to knowledge of or faith­ fulness to, the buried life; some waste their force on the meaningless activity that quiets inward promptings, but each is essentially thwarted, each shares the com­ mon lot. In the last two sections of the poem the speaker de­ scribes the rare moment when one feels he perceives "his life's flow"—an experience which can only be de­ scribed by hints and images. The condition for such an awareness is love, and rapport with the beloved provides a symbol of communication with the central life. It is not, however, in love, but through love that these mo­ ments of heightened vision are achieved.3 Reading clear in the beloved's eyes—the phrase echoes the opening lines of the poem— A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast, And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again. From a cluster of metaphors drawing upon several areas of experience, the meaning coalesces. The principal images are visual, but we have also a tensile sense of opening; we feel a pulse, and finally achieve the calm which follows strenuous physical action; we are lulled and cooled: The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain, And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know. 8

Some of the difficulties of doing justice to the complex meanings of The Buried Life are indicated in the obliquitous description of the poem by J. D. Jump, who says: "in 'The Buried Life,' Arnold expresses the belief that in a successful love-relationship he may discover certain values which are not

THE IDEA OF SELF

A man becomes aware of his life's flow, And hears its winding murmur; and he sees The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze. And there arrives a ltill in the hot race Wherein he doth for ever chase That flying and elusive shadow, rest. An air of coolness plays upon his face, And an unwonted calm pervades his breast. And then he thinks he knows The hills where his life rose, And the sea where it goes. In this conclusion the river image again dominates, as it did at the beginning of the poem. But the final lines bring in the sea to which the "river of our life" tends, that sea which is both death and the ambiant reservoir of being. It is characteristic of Arnold's poetry that the moment of joy and insight which his speaker describes should be unanalyzable and perhaps illusory. In this realm of perception all affirmations must be tentative; the chief comfort man can derive from his inner reserves is a fleeting vision in which he "thinks he knows" the sources and end of his being. The Buried Life has had a respectable amount of criti­ cal attention, but its significances have not been rightly assessed. As examples both of the difficulty of critical interpretation and of the important ways by which the poem relates to topics of twentieth-century speculation, readily to be found in iHiodern life.'" (Matthew Arnold, Lon­ don, 1955, p. 75.)

THE IDEA OF SELF

Lionel Trilling's two comments reward our attention. In the book which he brought out in 1939, Trilling used The Buried Life as evidence of Arnold's under­ standing of "the psychological phenomena of the dis­ tortion of purpose and self and the assumption of a manner to meet the world."4 He describes a man rum­ maging among his various selves and creating a char­ acter for himself by selection. But how, he asked, "does he know that he has made the right choice? Men feel, as they leave youth, that they have more or less conscious­ ly assumed a role by excluding some of the once-present elements from themselves. But ever after they are haunted by the fear that they might have selected an­ other, better role, that perhaps they have made the wrong choice. In his acquired Tuchtigheit, Arnold al­ ways carried this doubt of fulfillment, this question of a life that he—or the world—has wrongly buried. Under the ice that has three parts covered him flows the stream of a hidden life."5 And then Trilling quoted the passage about "our own line" and the hidden self. It is a remarkable interpretation, eloquent and in­ teresting but, I think, quite misguided. Sensing the distinction Arnold makes between a surface and a true self, Trilling has read the poem as a statement of the "role" psychology that was fashionable in the 1930's. But to do this is to transform the Arnoldian anguish into the anxiety of a liberal of entre deux guerres. There is no suggestion in Arnold's poem of several possible roles; the true inner life has not been buried either by * Matthew Arnold, p. 136. B Matthew Arnold, p. 136.

THE IDEA OF SELF

the individual's choice or by the world's, but by an ordinance of Fate. The anachronistic concept of "ful­ fillment" simply does not come up. In 1949, ten years after the publication of his book, Trilling turned again to The Buried Life in a very fine essay on Arnold.® By this time, however, the poem had ceased to be an illustration of a Meadian assumption of social roles, and had become instead an account of the isolation implicit in Arnold's active humanism. Indeed, in the period after the Second World War, Trilling finds in Arnold's poem an expression of the typical qualm of the postwar intellectual: "Strong as his social emotions were, he seems always to have been aware, often with great pain, of the sacri­ fices that are made to society. He knows that the social bonds, although they hold men safe, do not allow men easily to turn to look at themselves, let alone at each other; and although he knows that the self cannot de­ velop without society, he knows too that the develop­ ment comes at the cost of a painful pruning. In common with many men of the nineteenth-century generations, he had a sense of what is forced underground and in­ to silence or unconsciousness."7 Whereupon, Trilling quotes lines 45-48 of The Buried Life, "But often, in the world's most crowded streets, etc.," and a five-line epigram which I shall discuss later. He concludes by remarking that the "sense of isolation, of isolation even from the true self, perhaps lies at the heart of humanis­ tic exaltation of society." In interpreting any living literature the critic is right6

The introductory essay to The Portable Matthew Arnold, edited by Lionel Trilling, New York, 1949. 7 Portable, p. 5.

THE IDEA OF SELF

Iy concerned with finding insights that bear on the pre­ occupations of his own day; to recognize such bearings and to draw them out is certainly one of the legitimate activities of criticism. But comments like Trilling's are especially misleading because they are so eloquent: it is this writer's great gift—one that he shares with Ar­ nold himself—to function less as an analytic critic than as a pundit and interpreter of the mind of his day. Spe­ cific works of literature may justifiably serve Trilling, as they did Arnold, as bases from which to launch in­ vestigations of our culture, but the humbler task of try­ ing to find out just what a poem means has still to be performed. I think that patient analysis reveals that The Buried Life does not mean what Trilling thinks it does, and that he has erred by seeing Arnold first in the mode of the nineteen-thirties, and then in that of the late for­ ties. And I feel, too, that what Arnold's poem does say (in the mode of the eighteen-fifties) has more bearing on our present interest and is more original than critics have recognized. But to demonstrate this, the implica­ tions of The Buried Life will have to be examined in more detail.

The Unlit Gulph of the Self Arnold's idea of the self exists, I have said, as a con­ stellation of which The Buried Life is the center. It is characteristic of Arnold's practice that his idea should emerge from various appearances in different poems, and that it should never be definitively expressed. Cer­ tain notions of the self undergo modification, but the related passages in the various poems do not contradict

THE IDEA OF SELF

but complement each other. The only way to under­ stand Arnold's idea is to bring these passages together and to consider them as a sustained poetic attempt to clarify an ineffable conception by presenting its dis­ parate aspects. The first passage to consider is from Empedocles on Etna, a poem that treats almost every major theme of Arnold's poetry; in his final speech, Empedocles gives an extended exposition of the notion of the buried life. About to leap into the crater of the volcano, he wearily considers the pains and joys of existence and speculates on the possibility of an after-life. It may be, he con­ siders, that the mind will retain its integrity after the death of the body, and that the spirit will have to return unwillingly to live another life, to Go through the sad probation all again, To see if we will poise our life at last, To see if we will now at last be true To our own only true, deep-buried selves, Being one with which we are one with the whole world; Or whether we will once more fall away Into some bondage of the flesh or mind, Some slough of sense, or some fantastic maze Forged by the imperious lonely thinking-power. (ii, 368-376) Considered out of context these lines have a stronger ethical implication than any we find in The Buried Life. The difference of emphasis, however, reflects the dif­ ference of narrative situation. The young lover of The Buried Life is lamenting the condition of his present state; Empedocles is considering a second, more rare-

THE IDEA OF SELF

fied, life in which, his speculation runs, man might achieve some fixity of purpose, be true at last to the buried self and thereby bring it into balance with the external life. The most significant implication of the Empedocles passage is that the "probation" of our lives is specifically a test of our fidelity to the inner life. The philosopher who is about to die affirms that recognition of the "deep-buried self' is the ultimate means of unity with the whole world: within the individual is a uni­ versal entity, the realization of which is spiritual rest. In the early sonnet Religious Isolation and in SelfDependence (1852), the conception of an internal source of value is assimilated to the doctrine of Stoic austerity. The friend addressed in the sonnet is told: "Live by thy light, and earth will live by hers!" I n SelfDependences the moral lesson is delivered by the voice of Nature who reproves the speaker of the poem for indulging in melancholy and expecting nature to calm him. The speaker, when he comes to see clearly, recog­ nizes that the message of Nature is the same as that of the voice within his heart: 'Resolve to be thyself; and know that he, Who finds himself, loses his misery!' Seen as a group, the several poetic treatments of the buried life show two separate lines of speculation. The simpler and more traditional of the two is the assertion, with variations, of an inborn ethical principle. The ad­ juration "be thyself assumes the existence of something like the Stoics' true self or Guardian Spirit; if man 8

For further discussion of this poem see pp. 140-146.

THE

IDEA OF SELF

heeds the voice within, he will act well. The other line of thought, more despairing and more suggestive poeti­ cally, emphasizes the mystery of the inner gulf, the im­ possibility of our knowing the motive principle even of our own being. Both strands emerge in the linked poems, The Youth of Nature and The Youth of Man. Considering in the first of these Wordsworth's treatment of nature (the occasion of the poem was the death of Wordsworth in 1850), Arnold poses the question whether the values a poet asserts inhere in nature or are created by the poet. Nature answers, offering an unqualifiedly "realist" view: 'Loveliness, magic, and grace, They are here! they are set in the world, They abide . . . .' (lines 79-81) These qualities, then, are eternal and will outlast the voices of poets: "they are the life of the world." In the last four strophes of the poem the voice of Nature, hav­ ing established a metaphysical position, proceeds to chasten poetic vanity by explaining that the poet, far from being the creator of his themes—emotion, life, and nature—is less than any of them. In the passage describ­ ing the poet's inadequacy to express even his own feel­ ings, the conception of the unknowable self emerges. Even "at its best" the poet's voice cannot give . . . us a sense of the awe, The vastness, the grandeur, the gloom Of the unlit gulph of himself. (lines 100-102)

THE IDEA OF SELF

It is not implied that the poet fails in expressive power; rather, it is in the nature of things that he should be unable to perceive his own emotions. Inevitably, the power to feel lapses once the freshness of youth is past; but always the truest—perhaps the only true—emotions are those that stir in the gulf of the self, not to be ex­ pressed because they are incognizable. There is a fine chorus from Merope, published in 1858, which parallels The Youth of Nature in suggest­ ing that the deepest natural mystery is the obscure source of human feelings and motives. Because this tragic poem is, unfortunately, so little read, it is worth quoting the passage in full: Much is there which the sea Conceals from man, who cannot plumb its depths. Air to his unwing'd form denies a way, And keeps its liquid solitudes unsealed. Even earth, whereon he treads, So feeble is his march, so slow, Holds countless tracts untrod. But more than all unplumb'd, Unsealed, untrodden, is the heart of man. More than all secrets hid, the way it keeps. Nor any of our organs so obtuse, Inaccurate, and frail, As those wherewith we try to test Feelings and motives there. Yea, and not only have we not explored That wide and various world, the heart of others, But even our own heart, that narrow world

THE IDEA OF SELF

Bounded in our own breast, we hardly know, Of our own actions dimly trace the causes. Whether a natural obscureness, hiding That region in perpetual cloud, Or our own want of effort, be the bar. (lines 622-643) In The Youth of Man, a poetic pendant to The Youth of Nature, the poet also treats the question how man can know nature, and again allows his speaker to assert a realist philosophy. This speaker, who is assumed to be a wise and mature poet, derides as a sign of youthful arrogance the belief that man invests "the senseless world" with life, beauty, and power. In maturity he comes to realize the folly and presumption of this view, but by that time can no longer respond to nature with the ardor of youth. The mature spirit is so congealed that joy is felt only in rare moments—typically Arnoldian moments of sweet and anguished revelation—in which man feels "how Nature was fair," even while he sees how arid and unprofitable his own life has been. This waste of opportunity can be avoided, the speaker suggests, only by bringing into full play the vital pow­ ers of youth; the final stanza of The Youth of Man is an injunction to the young man whose soul still "looks through [his] eyes": Sink, O youth, in thy soul! Yearn to the greatness of Nature; Rally the good in the depths of thyself! These lines depend too much on plain exhortation to be effective as poetry, but their implications are re-

THE IDEA OF SELF

markable. Arnold here combines the notions of the in­ ner depths, the True Self, and an almost Spinozistic conception of the universe. The common denominator is found in traditional Stoic doctrine, the philosophy which most deeply influenced Arnold's thought. The speaker in The Youth of Man follows the Stoics in iden­ tifying the good within the self with the good of nature. In the poem we find something quite similar to that general concept which Seneca called "the Mind of the Universe," and which emerges in some form in all Stoic writings. In the survey of Greek philosophy with which De Natura Deorum begins, Cicero rightly describes the "most ingenious interpreter" of Stoicism, as be­ lieving "that the world itself is God, and the all-per­ vading emanation of its mind." This world-soul, ac­ cording to Chrysippus, was the all-embracing nature of things, and asserted itself as a guiding principle within the intellect and reason.9 These Stoic concepts obviously provide one of the sources of Arnold's theory, but the similarities are just strong enough to indicate the degree to which Arnold in elaborating his idea went beyond the traditional notions of the philosophers. Another band in what can be thought of as the spec­ trum of Arnold's idea of the self is found in the poem Self-Deception (also in the volume of 1852) where the mystery of man's estate is represented by a myth of creation. Newly formed man, the poem suggests, was left by his maker with Shreds of gifts which he refused in full. Still these waste us with their hopeless straining, 9

See Cicero, De Natura Deorum, x. xv. The translation quoted is by H. Owgan, London, 1885.

THE IDEA OF SELF

Still the attempt to use them proves them null. And on earth we wander, groping, reeling; Powers stir in us, stir and disappear. Ah! and he, who placed our master-feeling, Fail'd to place that master-feeling clear. Self-Deception resembles The Buried Life in its use of a partly serious fable to dramatize spiritual confusion. Certainly the "master-feeling" of the passage just quot­ ed is the same as the "own line" of The Buried Life; and both poems suggest that within us is, not so much a guiding principle, as a gulf filled with unrevealed but dimly felt powers. Another poem, Human Life, contributes to our in­ terpretation of The Buried Life by suggesting further meanings of the stream and ocean images. In the for­ mer poem life is conceived, according to the familiar figure, as a voyage, but the final stanza contains what is for Arnold an unusually technical and "witty" meta­ phor: Even so we leave behind, As charter'd by some unknown Powers, We stem across the sea of life by night, The joys which were not for our use design'd;— The friends to whom we had no natural right, The homes that were not destined to be ours. The ship in the figure is leased, as by charter, to un­ known Powers; or it is granted the right to make its blind voyage by the unknown Powers; or, alternatively, its voyage follows a course charted for it by these same Powers. The three meanings are not in conflict; the ambiguity, as in the case of all good wit poetry, adds to

THE IDEA OF SELF

our comprehension, and in this case increases our sense of the cloudiness of the arrangements attending the voyage of life. The same contrast between an immanent true self and the errant course of actual life is expressed in yet other terms in a passage in the Yale Manuscript: "Our remotest self must abide in its remoteness awful & unchanged presiding at the tumult of the [illegible word] of our being, changing thoughts contending de­ sires &c as the moon over the agitations of the Sea."10 ALL the poems and passages which outline the pattern of Arnold's inquiry into the self are now before us, and the mere number of the references suggests how per­ sistently this topic interested him. What emerges is not a clearly defined theory, but an idea which is im­ pressively original and which can be expressed only through poetry. Perhaps the best way to appreciate Ar­ nold's originality is to consider some of the things that his "self" is not. It has, in the first place, very little re­ semblance to the traditional notion of the soul. In his writings Arnold referred quite frequently to the soul (the word appears over 120 times in the poetry alone), but the notion always carries with it some conception of man's conscious being. In Empedocles on Etna, for example, the philosopher explains that he wants to die 10

Quoted in Commentary, p. 190. Tinker and Lowry con­ nect this passage with Palladium (which is discussed below). It seems to me that the implications of the imagery in the po­ em—which was published in 1867—are totally different from those of the prose passage. The manuscript seems to me to be linked, both in its affective aspects and its period of composi­ tion, with the poet's various attempts in the late forties and early fifties to develop a workable concept of the self.

THE IDEA OF SELF

Before the sophist-brood hath overlaid The last spark of man's consciousness with words— Ere quite the being of man, ere quite the world Be disarray'd of their divinity— Before the soul lose all her solemn joys, And awe be dead, and hope impossible, And the soul's deep eternal night come on. . . . (π, 29-35) And in the Fragment of Chorus of a "Dejaneira" with its Sophoclean turn, the fortunate man is described as one . . . on whom, in the prime Of life, with vigour undimm'd, With unspent mind, and a soul Unworn, undebased, undecay'd, Mournfully grating, the gates Of the city of death have for ever closed .... The soul, I should say—and other passages could be cited to support the generalization—represents for Ar­ nold the totality of man's sensory, emotional, and in­ tellectual being, as that being is active and evident. It may be hidden or neglected, but it is not by nature unknowable. Arnold's most compelling image for this conception is in the late poem Palladium (1867), a work which rises simply from one simile, the compari­ son of the soul to the statue of Pallas in a shrine high above Troy. The Palladium is distant from the battle but, according to the prophecy, is the very fate of the city: as long as the statue of the goddess stood, Troy could not fall.

THE IDEA OF SELF

So, in its lovely moonlight, lives the soul. Mountains surround it, and sweet virgin air; Cold plashing, past it, crystal waters roll; We visit it by moments, ah, too rare! The confused battle on the plain is our ordinary life, where man fancies that he puts forth all his powers, but does not know "how with the soul it fares." The poem concludes: Still doth the soul, from its lone fastness high, Upon our life a ruling effluence send. And when it fails, fight as we will, we die; And while it lasts, we cannot wholly end. The effect of this imagery is the reverse of that associ­ ated with the buried life. The image of the goddess is above the level of ordinary life—in light, not gloom. She sends out a "ruling effluence," and the legend leads us to infer that the agitated warrior could find peace and wisdom by ascending from the darkling plain to the goddess's forest shrine. Neither in his treatment of the soul nor of the self, it is worth pointing out, does Arnold make use of that idea, so familiar in Christian poetry, of the soul separate from the flesh but caged within it. Arnold's "self' has, as we have seen, only a rudi­ mentary connection with the Stoic guiding principle. He also does not mean by it any of the things that we call character, or identity, or personality. Comparison with Hume's influential though sketchy notion of "personal identity"11 shows how little he was influenced by the 11 See

A Treatise of Human Nature, Part iv, Chapter 6.

THE IDEA OF SELF

line of speculation represented by Hume's Treatise. The Romantic self, which may be known by introspection, and which invites continual scrutiny and probing, is not relevant to Arnold's idea; before he came to write po­ etry, and without the help of Carlyle's advice, he had closed his Byron and opened his Goethe, had developed his own "anti self-consciousness theory." The nearest analogue to Arnold's idea which I can find in early nine­ teenth-century thought is Hegel's conception of the "explicit individual self-existence."12 But Hegel attempts to define a "single simple self which is at once pure knowledge and knowledge of itself"; this he calls the "individual conscious life," and we see that his theories lack Arnold's sense of the incognizability of the inner life. For Hegel, the "inherent being" (Ansich) is in­ evitably consciousness.13 The closest parallels with Arnold's ideas of the self are to be found in twentieth-century writings. I have already mentioned a slight connection with the notions of Freud and Jung; the affinities with Existentialist thought are more striking. In Sartre's discussion of the self, for example, one finds definitions which clarify the special nature of Arnold's concerns. Sartre's conviction that human reality cannot be defined by patterns of conduct14 amplifies Arnold's conception of a disparity between the superficial and the profound being. And the Existentialists' conception of the "parts" which the 12 See G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, translated by J. R. Baillie, 2nd edn. rev. London, 1931, p. 649. 13 Phenomenology, p. 218. 14 See Being and Nothingness, translated by Hazel E. Barnes, London, 1957,p. 64.

T H E I D E A OF S E L F

self plays is like Arnold's "lines." For the poet the es­ sential being, unmodified by experience, unchanged by time, is manifested in the external world only through the playing of various parts, none of which completely expresses the true being. This is one of the meanings of The Buried Life, and one which, against the foil of Existentialist thought, becomes easier to understand. A sentence which Sartre calls "famous" and quotes ap­ provingly15 is beautifully congruous with the meanings of Arnold's poems: "Tel qu'en lui-meme enfin l'eternit6 Ie change." Eternity ultimately changes each man into himself. I believe it was an insight of this sort that Ar­ nold tried to capture and express. In a recent study by one of the school of Existential psychoanalysts, Dr. R. D. Laing,16 schizophrenia is de­ fined as the fragmentation of that unity of being which is necessary to full human existence. Dr. Laing posits an unembodied self, which he sometimes calls the "real" one, and contrasts it with the "false" or surface self. He analyzes a personality in which the false self "con­ sists of all those aspects of his 'being' which the inner 'self repudiates as not an expression of his self."17 Psy­ chotic disturbance is, then, seen as a deterioration of the inner or "real" self, in the course of which it loses its reality and becomes "dead, unreal, false, mechanical." In the disaster of psychotic breakdown the "false"— or surface—self becomes more extensive and more au­ tonomous. Throughout Dr. Laing's book is the assump15

Being and Nothingness, p. 57. The Divided Self: A Study of Sanity and Madness, Lon­ don, 1960. 17 The Divided Self, p. 156. 18

THE IDEA OF SELF

tion that the principal necessity for the individual is to preserve his identity, to keep—it might be said—the real self intact.18 The parallels with Arnold's formula­ tions are self-evident; in his poems on the self he was concerned with new kinds of problems; like the writers of our time, he tried to see into "that which constitutes the being of a thing; that 'by which it is what it is.'" I know of no other Victorian writer who went so deeply into this subject or whose ontological ideas have re­ tained such vitality. IN HIS later career Arnold seems no longer to have been concerned with the question of the self. As moments of insight became less frequent, poetic speculation as to the nature of the inner being appears to have ceased. In one sardonic poem, Growing Old, the poet, adopting the Stoic manner, gives a clear-eyed answer to the ques­ tion, "What is it to grow old?" After mentioning sev­ eral desolating aspects of age, he turns to the notion earlier expressed in The Youth of Man·, to grow old is to

. . . feel but half, and feebly, what we feel. Deep in our hidden heart Festers the dull remembrance of a change, But no emotion—none. No longer does the buried life manifest itself in "airs, and floating echoes"; it is npw merely a festering sore within. 18

One of Arnold's jottings in the Yale Manuscript is strik­ ingly relevant to this line of thought: "Deep suffering is the consciousness of oneself—no less than deep enjoyment. The dis­ ease of the present age is divorce from oneself."

THE

IDEd OF SELF

There is only one poem in his last collection in which Arnold returns with force to the buried life theme. In 1869 he published an epigram in the midst of one of his religious essays: Below the surface-stream, shallow and light, Of what we say we feel—below the stream, As light, of what we think we feel—there flows With noiseless current strong, obscure and deep, The central stream of what we feel indeed." This metaphor conveys very effectively the contradic­ tory features of the self which were explored in earlier poems. The figure of a stream's surface, shallow, eddy­ ing, but moving in a definite direction, captures even better than the imagery of The Buried Life the rela­ tionships among the separate but undivided layers of individual existence. The true self, which determines our course, is "obscure and deep"; it flows at its own pace into the great sea. Human existence, the metaphor implies (and here we see again the affinity with Exis­ tentialist thought), is made up of certain conditions of feeling: man has only speech about feeling, thought about feeling and, subsuming these, the current of true, unknowable feeling. A STUDY of Arnold's idea of the self finds its sufficient purpose in demonstrating that the poet did, in fact, have 19 The poem was printed in the second installment of "St. Paul and Protestantism" in the Cornhill Magazine, November 1869. There is no definite evidence as to the date of com­ position. On the basis of imagery alone I am inclined to con­ sider it an early work; the fact that it treats the subject of the

THE IDEA OF SELF

such an idea. It is an additional advantage that in trac­ ing the implications of this topic we come to understand some of the special qualities of Arnold's poetry. The group of poems I have brought together represents with surprising clarity the attitude Arnold typically assumed toward the intellectual tendencies of his own age and of the past. He scorned as an excess of sensibility the "depth-hunting" of the Romantics, their egoistic ex­ ploration of the self. But the self as a subject of poetry was as important to him as it had been to Rousseau and Senancour, and so we find him salvaging it by bringing to bear upon it the doctrines of classical ethics. The re­ sult is a penetrating and original theory of individual existence, a theory which is most fully realized when it is in the language of image, but which occasionally falls into sequential discourse. Further, I would say that the poems on the self il­ luminate the characteristic operation of Arnold's poetry. The meaning of The Buried Life, for example, is au­ tonomous, but the individual work acquires an extended implication when seen as part of a larger configuration. This is, I think, what Arnold intended; certainly it is the way his poetry usually worked. His method, as we have already seen, was to juxtapose in a number of po­ ems apprehensions which modify and amplify each other. Both within the individual poems and in the re­ lated group there is a movement which produces a kind of action rare in lyrical poetry. I would suggest that Arnold's lyrics have a dramatic quality which rests on buried life in the manner of the forties and fifties provides fur­ ther conjectural evidence for an early date.

THE IDEA OF SELF

the fact that the action they imitate is the advance to­ ward definition, an action that is participated in by the reader as well as by the personages of the poems. The idea of the self, then, is at once a subject of Arnold's poetry and the problem which causes poetry to be made.

CHAPTER IV

It doth much mischief; sometimes like a syren, sometimes like a fury. '

O

BACON

NE soon finds in reading Arnold that what is tra­ ditionally called a love poet is not the same thing as a poet who expresses an idea of love. Arnold did not choose to write about the experience of love in a com­ pelling or sympathetic way, and the reader who looks to him for a lyrical celebration of passion gets a dusty answer. But because Arnold was always concerned with the abiding influences on human conduct, he wrote about love, analyzing its effects, treating it as a facet of emotion, as one of the forms of Stourdissement to which man is subject. And because he formed an idea of love, just as he formed an idea of the self, he was among the most articulate of those poets who create a private myth by which to express their analysis of passion and of its place in human experience. The outlines of this myth emerge from the collocation of a number of po­ ems, and its implications are—not unexpectedly—har­ monious with the bearings of all Arnold's work. Like the poems on poetry, or those on nature, the poems which express Arnold's idea of love take as their point of departure the accepted literary attitudes of their time, but go on to controvert these attitudes and to affirm an urbane humanist doctrine.

THE IDEd OF LOVE

Since Arnold's poems are ideological, almost critical, in spirit they must be read against the background of the concepts of love which have dominated western thought. The task of summarizing this tradition has been made quite simple in our time by the existence of two influential books, Anders Nygren's Eros and Agape and Denis de Rougemont's UAmour et VOccident.1 These two studies, both tendentious in purpose and both written from well defined but opposed religious posi­ tions, manage in the course of their arguments to sketch in a vast amount of intellectual history and to clarify the course of European thought. Nygren made definitive a distinction which has for centuries been vaguely rec­ ognized between Christian love (Agape) and the love which dominated pagan thought (Eros). Agape is spon­ taneous and uncaused; it is aroused and directed with­ out regard to human merit; rather than flowing toward goodness, it creates goodness. It is, in short, theocentric. 1 Eros and Agape; A Study of the Christian Idea of Lame, Part ι translated by A. G. Hebert, Part n by Philip Watson, 3 vols., London, 1932-39. De Rougemont's book was first pub­ lished in an English translation by Montgomery Belgion as Passion and Society, London, 1940. A second, revised edition appeared in 1956, and it is to this that I shall refer. A third book provides a useful supplement to Nygren and de Rougemont. The Mind and Heart of Lorve, by M. C. D'Arcy, S.J., 2nd edn. rev., London, 1954, contains an analysis of the positions of the other two writers and is, incidentally, a useful and readable summary of contemporary thought on the subject of love. The book, however, to which my interpretations owe most is Ren6 Nelli's VAmour et Ies mythes du coeur, Paris, 1952, an unpretentious but remarkably perceptive study of the most influential "myths" of love in the European past and pres­ ent.

THE IDEA OF LOVE Eros, however, is that love, centered in man, which was celebrated in the Graeco-Roman world. It is rooted in physical passion, though it may be controlled or di­ rected by reason, and is essentially a desire to possess. In their different ways Nygren and de Rougemont are concerned to distinguish and define these two tend­ encies, to see how they have been confused with each other, and to examine the attempts, beneficent or harm­ ful, to combine the two conceptions or—as they seem at times to have been—ways of life. When we consider Arnold's poetry in the light of these fundamental dis­ tinctions we realize how completely unconcerned he was with any conception of Agape. His poetic reflec­ tions were directed wholly toward the influence of Eros, so that when we speak of love in connection with his poetry we can speak only of human, possessive love. Under the aspect of Eros there are infinite kinds of passion, but there have been only a few ideas of Ioye which have dominated a society or found some signifi­ cant cultural expression. It might be said that, up to Arnold's time, there had been only four such ideas: the Platonic, the classical-rationalist, the Provengal, and the romantic.2 And of these four attitudes, Arnold was un­ influenced by or unconcerned with two. Platonic love, for instance, which with its assertion of the possibility 2

Throughout this book I have capitalized Romantic and Ro­ manticism when I meant to refer to that complex of ideas on life and art which is a recognizable phase of our cultural history. Undoubtedly, "romantic" love is an aspect of Romanticism, but by leaving the initial letter in lower case type I hope to suggest the close relationship of the word to "romance" in the modern, erotic sense.

THE IDEA OF LOVE

of progression from the sensory world to the world of ideas, from physical desire for a particular beautiful human to the love of absolute beauty, has had a poetic appeal to men of all ages; but it plays no part in Ar­ nold's poetry. I would say also that he was not in the least influenced by Provencal love, though in its varied manifestations and through its formalized code, it has had a profound effect on literature. For Arnold's poetry the important concepts of love are the two which have historically been most clearly opposed to each other; from the conflict between the classical-rationalist and romantic ideas, he constructed the dialectic which ac­ tivates his poems on love. By "classical-rationalist" I mean the view of love held by many of the non-Platonic writers of antiquity and expressed by classical moralists in both the Epi­ curean and the Stoic traditions. The view is marked by an antipassionate bias; these thinkers fear and distrust passion, seeing it as that Eros which, in the chorus of Sophocles, invades life and makes men mad. Xenophon, in the third book of the Symposium, suggested that love bewitched the mind and advised the man who valued liberty of soul to abstain from it. Plutarch called love a frenzy and urged that we regard those who suffer from it as if they were ill, and forgive them their weak­ ness. This view of love has been historically the most durable of all; it was eloquently restated in the Renais­ sance: Bacon, for example, warns (in "Of Love") that, "Love doth much mischief; sometimes like a syren, sometimes like a fury. You may observe, that amongst all the great and worthy persons (whereof the memory remaineth, either ancient or recent), there is not one

THE IDEA OF LOVE

that hath been transported to the mad degree of love; which shows that great spirits and great business do keep out this weak passion . . . it was well said, That it is impossible to love and to be wise." Descartes gave to the traditional ethical assump­ tions a new foundation of rationalism, and in neo-clas­ sical literature—notably in the drama of seventeenthcentury France—love is represented as a disruptive force, constantly at war with reason; in passionate mat­ ters, as in all else, the wise man must tame desire and subject choice to rational control. An idea of love which involves such restraint and so secure a faith in the abil­ ity of reason to enforce its choice will, of course, flourish in societies with an accepted hierarchy of values and a fixed order of rank. In the traditional morality of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries shreds of the classi­ cal-rationalist view of love persist, but it has not en­ tirely survived the social changes of the revolutionary period and the liberating conceptions of romantic love. Like Romanticism itself, the concept of romantic love is complex and eclectic, tending to absorb all previous ideas of love and to find virtue in contradictions and strangeness. But the essential impulse of romantic love is the same on all levels of expression; it is always to­ ward the liberation of the individual. Passion, under the new dispensation, is regarded, not as a terrible and dis­ ruptive force, but as a beneficent emotion, both an end in itself and the means by which certain spiritual and transcendental values are reached. It is a principal tenet of this belief that the realization of the self is paradoxi­ cally achieved in love by merging the individual iden­ tity with that of the beloved. The essence of passionate

THE IDEA OF LOVE

love becomes, as Rene Nelli has observed, "l'echange des fatalites individuelles."3 The manifestations of these notions—in literature at least—have their unhealthy as well as their glorious sides. Since the perfect, unchanging union which true romantic lovers seek is evidently achieved only in death, eternalization is constantly celebrated, and what can only be called a disquieting attitude toward death be­ comes a feature of literary love. Keats's treatment of these themes in his poetry is perhaps the noblest exam­ ple of the tendency, but the explicit parallels in his let­ ters are less wholesome. He wrote, for example, to Fanny Brawne in the letter that matches the "Bright Star" sonnet, "I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your Loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute. I hate the world: it batters too much the wings of my self-will, and I would I could take a sweet poison from your lips to send me out of it."4 As Nelli observes, death may be the condition of that "oubli de soi . . . au prix duquel l'amour confere & ceux qui meurent pour Iui l'existence supreme."5 The most extreme artis­ tic expression of this notion is in Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, and notably in the second scene of Act II where Isolde sings of her dread of coming day and of her de­ sire to fly with her lover into an eternal night, to be united with him in a dedication to death: mit mir—dich in Verein wollt'ich dem Tode weih'n 3 Nelli,

p. 130. of July 25, 1819. The Letters of John Keats, ed., H. Buxton Forman, 4th edn., London, 1952, p. 362. " Nelli, p. 137. 4Letter

THE IDEA OF LOVE

And Tristan answers: In deiner Hand den siissen Tod, als ich ihn erkannt, den sie mir bot; als mir die Ahnung hehr und gewiss zeigte, was mir die Siihne verheiss: da erdammerte mild erhabner Macht im Busen mir die Nacht; mein Tag war da vollbracht. [In your hands I see offered me the sweet death I prize. When through high and certain premonition I was shown what expiation held in store for me, a sublime and gentle strength dawned in the darkness of my heart. My day was consummated there.] The fulfillment of romantic love is the annihilation of time, a union in the absolute. Browning, who is, with reservations, an exponent of the idea, speaks of "The instant made eternity." In several of his dramatic mono­ logues characters with whom the reader is led to sym­ pathize affirm the value of a life-giving love which it is sinful to curb or deny, and which, once yielded to, will . . . make time break, And let us pent-up creatures through Into eternity, our due. It helps, in getting a sense of the relative dryness of Arnold's poems on love, to consider the lengths to which Browning went. Now, published at the end of the po-

THE IDEA OF LOVE

et's life, is in no sense a dramatic poem, so that we are led to feel that the poet is uttering his own convictions when he asks the beloved to abandon herself completely to him: Thought and feeling and soul and senseMerged in a moment which gives me at last You around me for once, you beneath me, above me— Me—sure that despite of time future, time past,— This tick of our life-time's one moment you love me! How long such suspension may linger? Ah, Sweet— The moment eternal—just that and no more— When ecstasy's utmost we clutch at the core While cheeks burn, arms open, eyes shut and lips meet! The idea of romantic love becomes, then, a mixture of conceptions of easeful death, of eternity and ecstasy, all fused in a necessarily ineffable way. And to this is added a new worship of the female principle and of feminine sensibility. Arnold's poems on love must be read against this blend of vaguely mystical notions, and it is—in a sense—against all this that the poems are directed. Arnold accepted the romantic woman: she be­ came a significant figure in his poetic world; but all the other elements of the mystique, the belief in trans­ figuration through passion, the aspiration for death and eternity, are rejected in favor—quite simply—of a po­ etic reassertion of the classical-rationalist idea of love.

Days of Ardour and Emotion The best way to see how Arnold's attitudes toward love emerge in and through his poetry is to consider the

THE

I D E A OF LOVE

poems on love in the forms and order in which they were first published. William Michael Rossetti, review­ ing The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems in The Germ inferred from the tone of the work that its author was "no longer young," a fact which explained why "we find but little passion in the volume, only four pieces... being essentially connected with it."e Though Rossetti seems to me to have counted wrong, his con­ clusion is not unjust. After the nine sonnets with which Arnold's first book opened, there was a group of five loosely related poems treating various aspects of love in a manner which is almost blase. The first of the group, called To my Friends, who ridiculed a tender Leave-taking7 introduces a character named Margue­ rite, who is only lightly sketched in, and a speaker who confesses himself to be a forgetful and faithless lover, since he knows all too well that the joys of love vanish even as they are seized. The refrain in the original ver­ sion of the poem was, Ere the parting kiss be dry, Quick, thy tablets, Memory! The speaker wishes, in a mild way, not to lose all trace of his once-beloved, but there is an almost complacent suggestion that forgetfulness follows parting as in­ evitably as a parting follows a love affair. The verses, which are not among Arnold's more imposing achieve­ ments, conclude: The Germ, 2nd number, Feb., 1850. The poem was later called A Memory-Picture, though the original title was kept in all the editions up to the Second Col­ lected Edition of 1877, when the poem was relegated to the section called "Early Poems," and retitled. β

7

THE IDEA OF LOVE

Ah, too true! Time's current strong Leaves us fixt to nothing long. Yet, if little stays with man, Ah, retain we all we can! If the clear impression dies, Ah, the dim remembrance prize! Ere the parting kiss . .. Later, feeling perhaps that the refrain added a flipness and sense of physical immediacy to the rueful concep­ tion of love as an afiFair of the moment, Arnold revised it to: Ere the parting hour go by, Quick, thy tablets, Memory! And in 1853 the poem was made the opening lyric of Switzerland, so that I shall have to discuss it later in connection with the story of Marguerite. The same cool attitude toward love is expressed in the second poem of what might be called the 1849 se­ ries. A Modern Sappho picks up the theme of love's brevity but considers it in another perspective. The speaker in this monologue is a Sappho only in the sense that she is a forceful woman consumed by pas­ sion. Her fierce love is fixed on a man who loves some­ one else, and with anguished ingenuity the speaker perversely prays that her beloved may soon achieve the fulfillment of his love, because it will then—inevitably —exhaust itself; and that he may soon have a full meas­ ure of worldly success and pleasure so that he will all the sooner fall back, in satiety, to her. It is a perceptive study in the psychology of love; the woman's morbid

THE IDEA OF LOVE

passion is to possess, even though possession can only come when joy is past; her fulfillment will be to drop in for an after-loss. Here she speaks of her beloved and of the woman he loves: Their love, let me know, must grow strong and yet stronger, Their passion burn more, ere it ceases to burn. They must love—while they must! but the hearts that love longer Are rare—ah! most loves but flow once, and return. I shall suffer—but they will outlive their affection; I shall weep—but their love will be cooling; and he, As he drifts to fatigue, discontent, and dejection, Will be brought, thou poor heart, how much nearer to thee! For cold is his eye to mere beauty, who, breaking The strong band which passion around him hath furl'd, Disenchanted by habit, and newly awaking, Looks languidly round on a gloom-buried world. Through that gloom he will see but a shadow appearing, Perceive but a voice as I come to his side— But deeper their voice grows, and nobler their bearing, Whose youth in the fires of anguish hath died. So, to wait!— (lines 13-29) The poem is the closest thing to a genuine dramatic monologue that Arnold ever achieved. The speaker is clearly placed in what might be considered the typical

THE IDEA OF LOVE

Arnoldian setting: she stands at a balustrade looking down a terraced lawn to a river. And more significantly for the dramatic effect, there is a progressive revela­ tion of the twisted logic of passion. The woman, in fact, reminds one of some of the frenetic and self-deceiving characters of Browning's poems. But what Arnold has failed to do is to catch the voice of his speaker in the language and rhythm of his poetry. The ability to re­ veal character not only by what is said, but by how it is said is the art of dramatic projection which Arnold simply did not have. There is no individuating quality in the voice of his modern Sappho, so that her speech is indistinguishable from the language of Arnold's per­ sonal lyrics. In reading the poem one feels that great skill and intelligence have been applied to a dramatic idea, but that the whole thing falls short for the lack of—it may be—that tinge of boisterous charlatanism which Browning possessed. The woman's speech concludes: —Let my turn, if it will come, be swift in arriving! Ah! hope cannot long lighten torments like these. Hast thou yet dealt him, O life, thy full measure? World, have thy children yet bow'd at his knee? Hast thou with myrtle-leaf crown'd him, O pleasure? —Crown, crown him quickly, and leave him for me! In the context of our discussion of Arnold's idea of love it should be observed that though the scheme of the poem leads us to disapprove of the perversity of the mod­ ern Sappho's emotion, we are not moved to disclaim her ultimate judgment. Passion, it is suggested, binds man

TEE IDEA OF LOVE to illusion; in love disenchantment inevitably comes, and comes all the sooner when love is most intense. The view exhibited in this poem may be said to counter that of the young man who speaks in To my Friends·, he disclaims the value of love out of his rueful disbelief in its per­ manence and his distrustful estimate of his mistress's lightness. The woman of A Modern Sappho, however, insists on the transitoriness of love, but never doubts that her own passion will endure—and the reader tends to share her certainty. The unpleasantly skeptical sug­ gestion that only a diseased passion remains intense is one that we shall see recur in Arnold's major poetic work on the nature and effects of love. A Modern Sappho was followed by The New Sirens: A Palinode, which I have already discussed in another context (see pp. 39-54). Though I believe that the main subject of this poem is not so much love as it is intense emotional experience in general, love is among the false delights which the new sirens offer to their victims, and at the end of the poem it comes to represent that life of sensation, that belief in the supremacy of feeling, which is the most dangerous snare for the mod­ ern sensibility. The speaker, still addressing the sirens, concludes his long soliloquy: In the pines the thrush is waking— Lo, yon orient hill in flames! Scores of true love knots are breaking At divorce which it proclaims. When the lamps are paled at morning, Heart quits heart and hand quits hand.

TEE IDEA OF LOVE

Cold in that unlovely dawning, Loveless, rayless, joyless you shall stand!

—Shall I seek, that I may scorn her, Her I loved at eventide? Shall I ask, what faded mourner Stands, at daybreak, weeping by my side? Pluck, pluck cypress, O pale maidens! Dusk the hall with yew! (lines 259-266 and 271-276) The New Sirens is A Palinode, a retraction—I assume —of the praises that the speaker of the poem, and others in the past, had addressed to the sirens. He is conceived as a poet who in the morning had "Stroll'd and sang with joyful mind" in the sirens' train; but he has had an awakening. This "palinode" is a companion piece to A Modern Sappho in that it, too, presents love as a fugitive thing, an emotion which burns itself out and degrades those who harbor it. The two poems which conclude the series of 1849 only touch on the subject of love. The Voice is a song which records the poignant moment when the poet hears again the voice of someone he loved—or nearly loved— in a "bygone year."8 The first and second stanzas are 8

The editors of the Commentary remark that The Voice "be­ trays the influence of Shelley" (p. 49). This may be so, but if one is to speculate about influences, a more striking resem­ blance to Tennyson's Tears, Idle Tears should be remarked. The second stanza of Arnold's poem reads: Like bright waves that fall With a lifelike motion

T H E I D E A OF LOVE

made up of extended similes which suggest the strange familiarity of the voice, its quality of remoteness in im­ mediacy. In the last stanza the poet-speaker asserts his freedom from beguilement: In vain, all, all in vain, They beat upon mine ear again, Those melancholy tones so sweet and still. Those lute-like tones which in the bygone year On the lifeless margin of the sparkling Ocean; A wild rose climbing up a mouldering wall— A gush of sunbeams through a ruin'd hallStrains of glad music at a funeral— So sad, and with so wild a start To this deep-sober'd heart, So anxiously and painfully, So drearily and doubtfully, And oh, with such intolerable change Of thought, such contrast strange, O unforgotten voice, thy accents come, Like wanderers from the world's extremity, Unto their ancient home! It is not merely the possible echo of such lines as "So sad, so strange, the days that are no more," that makes for Tennysonian similarity; both songs have as subject the intermingling of past and present; both, in attempting to evoke a sweet an­ guish, use oxymoron as the principal rhetorical device; and both allude (though in rather different senses) to the voice of a once-beloved who is now remote. Tears, Idle Tears appeared in the original edition of The Princess in 1847, so Arnold might have read it before he wrote The Voice. Perhaps the fact that The Voice, having appeared in 1849, was not reprinted until 1877 reflects Arnold's own recognition of what he considered the detestable influence of Tennyson.

THE IDEA OF LOVE

Did steal into mine earBlew such a thrilling summons to my will, Yet could not shake it; Made my tost heart its very life-blood spill, Yet could not break it. The Voice, though it is slight, suggests several aspects of the attitude toward love that Arnold took in his po­ ems. Here any joy that can be attached to the experi­ ence of loving is already in the past. Love is regarded as an emotion which is either lost or—inevitably—in the process of being lost. It survives in the mind and heart as a disturbing or even irritating recollection. The Voice is followed in the volume of 1849 by what is now called A Question, but was originally called To Fausta. It does not really qualify as a poem about love and, indeed, its sentiments are more conventionally "po­ etical" than they are relevant to a discussion of the ideas which inform Arnold's poems. Though it verges on the sentimental, it is worth looking at if only as a reminder that its allusion to love does not conflict with the more acerb implications of the poems we have already con­ sidered. The first stanza reads: Joy comes and goes, hope ebbs and flows Like the wave; Change doth unknit the tranquil strength of men. Love lends life a little grace, A few sad smiles; and then, Both are laid in one cold place, In the grave. The reader of 1849, familiar with the love poetry of Byron and Shelley, scanning The Strayed Reveller and

THE IDEd OF LOVE

Other Poems to see how this new young poet treated love must have been taken aback by Arnold's unfashionableness. Every one of these early poems on love asserts the impermanence of passion and suggests the desirabil­ ity of avoiding it, and it would be natural for such a reader as Rossetti to think he was confronting a poet of a past generation. One suspects that Arnold himself was not happy with this group of poems; he suppressed The New Sirens, The Voice, and To Fausta (A Ques­ tion) and did not republish them until the late 1870's, but there is no evidence that he found the poems too frosty or disillusioned. In the note which accompanied the 1876 reprinting of The New Sirens9 the poet re­ ferred to the time in which it was written as "long-past days of ardour and emotion." But though these poems may be, by modern stand­ ards—and by Arnold's own—failures, they are revealing to anyone interested in the directions which his later poetry was to take. They not only offer some distinctive attitudes toward love, but sketch out a definable cast of characters. One finds, for example, a protagonist who is a sensitive and poetic young man, ardent, though somewhat stoical, subject to love, but wary of its de­ ceptions; he appears to have been shocked into disen­ chantment, and has learned to exert his will, to resist temptation. There is also a young woman, lovable and gay, somewhat teasing in manner, whom the young man has loved at some recent but unspecified time, but whom he has given up in distrust, partly—it would seem—of her character, partly of the permanence of 9 It

originally appeared in MacmillarCs Magazine for Decem­ ber, 1876, and is reprinted in Commentary, pp. 45-46.

THE IDEA OF LOVE

love itself; she, however, continues to tempt him. And along with this stylized couple is a woman who has al­ lowed herself to become the prey of passion, whose life is dominated by it and who, it is suggested, will be de­ stroyed by it. There is also only one kind of love-con­ flict in these poems. The struggle is between the temp­ tation to give in to love and the necessity, assumed rather than argued out, to abjure it. With hindsight, one can predict from the volume of 1849 a good deal of what is not going to be in Arnold's later poetry and much that will be. These poems are aggressively lacking in all the more conspicuous at­ tractions of nineteenth-century love poetry: there is no suggestion of the transfiguring power of love, of the losing-and-finding of the self in it; it is not conceived as either eternal in itself or as an eternalizing force. But on the positive side we can discern in this rather feeble work, a foreshadowing or preliminary scenario of Swit­ zerland, and the outlines of the deeper and more fully developed notions of love which were to appear in the poems of the fifties.

Switzerland All of Arnold's major love poetry belongs to the vol­ ume published in 1852, Empedocles on Etna and Other Poems. In addition to the long narrative of Tristram and Iseult, there was in this volume a section called simply "POEMS" which is the quarry for the later poem-series Switzerland and Faded Leaves. Of the sixteen poems which make up this section all but four deal with love; five of the seven poems which ultimately became Swit­ zerland are there and four of the five poems which were

THE IDEA OF LOVE

to make up Faded Leaves. Any purely literary consid­ eration of these two poem cycles has been made very difficult by a long tradition of biographical speculation and interpretation. Critics and literary historians early became seized with the idea that Switzerland, particu­ larly, was the veracious account of a youthful love af­ fair, and almost all the comment on this curiously in­ teresting poetry has been based on research into the poet's loves and life and speculation as to the existence and character of the heroine of Switzerland, Mar­ guerite. Regarded coldly, the scholars' desire to endow the young poet with a romance and to apply the most thorough research to the task of establishing the de­ tails of his love affair is typical of the post-Romantic literary sensibility. The notion of a personal reality in art is of such importance that the interest of a set of poems is greatly enhanced if they can be assumed to record the emotions of an actual situation. The attitude has its connections both with the nineteenth-century passion for history and with the desire to make art pro­ vide a transcript of reality—preoccupations which made it very difficult for poets to use or readers to understand a highly conventionalized artistic structure. It cannot be denied that biography is interesting in its own right, and if Arnold did fall in love—and out again—with a girl named Marguerite the episode would be worth recording. I shall not take time here to give an account of the few facts on which the researchers have based their stories.10 It is generally known that 10 Commentary, pp. 153-159, presents a clear preliminary argument for the existence of Marguerite. The most detailed "reconstruction" of the lady's character and her relationship to

TEE LDEd OF LOVE

Arnold wrote Clough in September, 1848, "Tomorrow I repass the Gemmi and get to Thun: linger one day at the H6tel Bellevue for the sake of the blue eyes of one of its inmates: and then proceed by slow stages down the Rhine."11 And a year after this he wrote from Swit­ zerland, sending Clough some verses which were later used in Parting, one of the Switzerland poems addressed to Marguerite. However, the poet always maintained, according to his family, that Marguerite and the events of the love poems were imaginary—a statement that I think a critic must take seriously. At the back of many researchers' minds may be the hope of finding another Annette Vallon; but Marguerite's case belongs to a dif­ ferent order of experience: the poems tell us as much about her as we need to know; she exists as a fictional heroine who engages in action of a symbolic kind, and if I were to be given tomorrow a fully authenticated, detailed biography of a flesh and blood Marguerite I cannot imagine that it would significantly affect my reading of the Switzerland poems. We already know that Arnold's characters, like everything else of which his poetry is made, are drawn from his own experience, but it is with the imaginative reality which the poet creates out of his raw experience that the serious reader must be concerned. The search for the historical Mar­ guerite has distracted scholars from attending to the process by which, over a period of twenty-five years, a variegated group of poems was arranged into two uniArnold is in Iris Sells' Matthew Arnold and France, Cam­ bridge, 1935, Chapters VII-IX. 11 Letters to Clough, p. 91.

• 2 15 ·

THE IDEA OF LOVE

fied cycles, each with distinct characters engaged in a shadowy but typically Arnoldian drama. The two poem cycles are not uniformly interesting. But though Faded Leaves is rather dull, Switzerland represents a new poetic genre and at times reaches the highest levels of Arnold's lyricism. Unfortunately, the only way to see how the two cycles took shape is to scrutinize the niggling details of publishing. I give be­ low a list of the "POEMS" as they appeared in the 1852 table of contents, with notes indicating the subsequent placing—and re-placing—of each love poem. POEMS: — THE RIVER EXCUSE INDIFFERENCE

TOO LATE ON THE RHINE LONGING THE LAKE

PARTING

ABSENCE

[Became Faded Leaves 1 in 1855] [Renamed Urania in 1869] [Renamed Euphrosyne in 1869. In reprinting always placed immedi­ ately after Excuse ( Urania) ] [Became Faded Leaves 2 in 1855] [Became Faded Leaves 4 in 1855] [Became Faded Leaves 5 in 1855] [Became Switzerland 2 in 1853. Renamed Meeting in 1857. In 1877 became Switzerland I.] [Became Switzerland 4 in 1853. In 1869 became Switzerland 3, and in 1877 Switzerland 2] [Became Switzerland 6 in 1853, Switzerland 7 in 1854, Switzerland 8 in 1857, Switzerland 5 in 1869 and, finally, Switzerland 6 in 1877]

TEE IDEA OF LOVE

DESTINY

[Not reprinted in Arnold's lifetime]

TO MARGUERITE

[Full title: To Marguerite, In Re­ turning a Volume of the Letters of Ortis. Became Switzerland 5 in 1853 (called simply, To Mar­ guerite), Switzerland 6 in 1854, Switzerland 7 in 1857 (called Iso­ lation). In 1869 renamed To Mar­ guerite. Continued. Became Swit­ zerland 5 in 1877]

HUMAN LIFE

[Not a love poem]

DESPONDENCY

[Not a love poem]

SONNET

[Renamed The WorWs Triumphs in 1853. Not a love poem]

SELF-DECEPTION

[Not a love poem]

LINES WRITTEN BY [Not reprinted in its original form. A DEATH-BED In 1867 the second paragraph was printed separately as Youth and Calm, and in 1869 the first 16 lines inserted into Part II (lines 131146) of Tristram and Iseult] A Farewell, which appeared in the last section of the volume of 1852, was not in the first (1853) version of Switzerland, but was made Switzerland 5 in 1854, Switzerland 4 in 1869 and Switzerland 3 in 1877 and thereafter. The twelve love poems in this original grouping do not project even faint outlines of the two cycles which were to emerge. Indeed, the reader of 1852 who searched for patterns might have found something quite different

THE IDEA OF LOVE

from a proto-Switzerland; though the girl who appears in four of the poems is named Marguerite, there are al­ together five distinct heroines in the twelve poems—a fact which is very important to the interpretation of Arnold's subsequent arrangements. Let me support this assertion in more detail. The girl who figures in The River is said to have "arch eyes" and a "mocking mouth." She is described as soft and passive, but graciously worthy of love. This is the first appearance of the woman who will later be the unnamed heroine of Faded Leaves, a character who is very unlike the spirited Marguerite. A third and quite distinct woman is described in Excuse (later called Urania)', the poet's "excuse" is for a girl who seems to be unmoved by the passions of lesser humans, but who is not actually cold and light-minded. If, it is suggested, she were ever to find "One of some worthier race than ours," she would show how deeply she could feel. Then she would weep, but until then she will maintain an air of mocking disdain. This superior woman did not re-appear in Arnold's poetry; by calling the poem Urania ("the heavenly one" in Greek, and one of the epithets of Aphrodite) her discriminating spirit is made to seem not merely excusable but celestial. Indifference (later called Euphrosyne) was obvious­ ly intended as a companion piece to Excuse, and pre­ sents another kind of disdainful woman—the self-suffi­ cient kind who can live happily without love: These ask no love, these plight no faith, For they are happy as they are.

THE IDEA OF LOVE

The later title (Euphrosyne is the "merry one" of the three graces) emphasizes the suggestion that though this woman is incapable of deep feeling she brings "light and warmth and joy" to those around her. The three poems that follow, Too Late, On the Rhine, and Longing, all later became part of Faded Leaves. They describe the condition of being in love rather than any particular mistress; but there are no details in these poems that are inconsonant with the girl described in The River, and the only physical detail given, the state­ ment that the beloved's eyes were "too expressive to be blue, / Too lovely to be grey," later looms as a rock of concrete detail in the vagueness of Faded Leaves. In The Lake (later called Meeting) Marguerite makes her first appearance. Without now discussing her attributes in detail, I would observe here that she is, as a character, quite distinct from the other females in the early verse, and that she is mentioned by name in all four of the poems which Arnold was later to use in Switzerland. The fifth and last of Arnold's characters of women ap­ pears in Lines written by a Death-bed, a fine poem which was later dismembered. This woman, described as she waits for death, was once beautiful but has been ravaged by passion. The poet fancies that "now the longing is o'erpast," her former beauty might have re­ turned. Her face is hidden from him as she lies on her deathbed, but he imagines that if it could be seen as death approaches it would express "A tranquil, settled loveliness, / Her youngest rival's freshest grace." Some seventeen years after this poem first appeared, Arnold

THE IDEA OF LOVE

decided to attach this description to the most passionate heroine he had ever conceived, Iseult of Cornwall, and inserted the first sixteen lines of the poem into the de­ scription of Iseult's death in Part n of Tristram and Iseult. By adding the passage to his long narrative poem, Arnold was pursuing his habit of consolidating fragments into larger poetic units whenever possible. In the rather loose arrangement of 1852 Lines written by a Deathbed serves as an effective conclusion to a group of poems on women and love, a group which ap­ pears—when one reads it without the poet's later ar­ rangements in mind—to contrast various attitudes to­ ward love by means of sketches of different kinds of women. Such a miscellany is a familiar nineteenth-cen­ tury form; Tennyson's Poems, chiefly Lyrical in 1830 had included a set of five poems describing an Adeline, a Margaret, and so forth, and the first four Idylls of the King, not published until 1859, were planned as four contrasted studies of women in love. Unlike Tennyson's first Idylls, however, the 1852 love poems are too diffuse to make their points by con­ trast and are, in any case, dominated by the four poems in which Marguerite figures. The series in its original appearance is not impressive; I suspect that Arnold's revisions and rearrangements were directed to giving the poems some integration. He presumably saw the possibility of grouping the best love poems in a series which suggested an action of sorts and formed what might charitably be considered a drama of feeling. The result, at least, was that in the 1853 volume a new se­ ries called Switzerland appears. It is highly composite, being made up of three of the four Marguerite poems of

THE IDEA OF LOVE

1852 (A Farewell was not at first included in the series), preceded by To my Friends, who ridiculed a tender Leave-taking, a poem from the 1849 volume in which a blue-eyed Marguerite figures, but which has no Swiss elements at all, and A Dream, a previously unpublished poem in which an Alpine stream becomes in the poet's dream "the river of Life."12 The five poems of the 1853 Switzerland do not fuse in­ to a genuine whole, and the action which the lyrics faintly outline would not stand the test of Arnold's own stern Aristotelianism. But the set of poems does succeed in telling a story: it describes the encounter, the joys, and the difficulties of a pair of lovers; and it is a curious fact that English literature offers no exact prototype for the lyric poem cycle as we find it in Switzerland. The Elizabethan sonnet-cycles are analogous in vaguely de­ fining a dramatis personae and leading the reader to infer an action from a set of disconnected suggestions. But the conventions of the sonnet-cycle are radically dif­ ferent from those of the nineteenth-century love lyric; the sonneteer sets out to praise his beloved as ingenious­ ly as possible, to recount the joys and sufferings which his love has brought, and either to regret his inability to attain the beloved or to rejoice in having done so. And there is, both in the sonnet itself and in the larger form, a degree of stylization which is alien to post-Ro­ mantic poetry. Switzerland might be regarded as a nine12 To

my Friends was renamed A Memory-Picture in 1857, and was dropped from Switzerland in 1877. A Dream was dropped in 1869 and not republished until 1878, when it was relegated—along with A Memory-Picture—to the section called "Early Poems."

THE IDEA OF LOVE

teenth-century equivalent of the Elizabethan sonnetcycles, but I think the only close parallel to it in English literature is the Wordsworthian constellation of lyrics. Wordsworth's "Lucy Poems" anticipate the sort of thing Arnold was to do in Switzerland, but they were not published as a connected series and are unified only by having the poet's feelings about the girl called Lucy as their common subject. Outside England, however, and outside the mainstream of poetic tradition, one finds prototypes of Switzerland so exact as to be considered as sources. I think the main influence on the Marguerite poems was the German Liedercyklus, of which about a dozen had been written by 1850, and which Arnold would certainly have known, if not in their original literary form at least in their musical settings. We can be sure, at any rate, that he knew Heine's cycles, which are among the best: Die Nordsee, for example, though different from Switzerland in subject and tone, shows some suggestive parallels of form; it is made up of two "cycles," one of twelve and the other of eleven poems. The lyrics are varied in length and meter, as Arnold's are, but they are all spoken by a single figure, a young man whose character and surroundings are realized (or unrealized) to about the same degree as those of Ar­ nold's protagonist. Heine's Verschiedene, written in the eighteen-thirties, suggests another of the instigating motifs of Switzerland·, it is a collection of eight poemseries, each devoted to an attractive woman. Heine's Seraphine and Angelique and Diane are not even as well defined as Marguerite, but such character as they have is at least evoked by a cluster of lyric poems. Three of the cycles by minor German poets are bet-

THE IDEA OF LOVE

ter known for their musical settings than for their verse, but their tenuous libretti are close in spirit to the story of Marguerite and her lover. Wilhelm Miiller's Die Schone Mullerin tells in twenty poems the sad tale of a young miller who wanders along a stream until he comes to a secluded mill where he accepts work and soon falls in love with the miller's beautiful daughter. The girl, however, is fickle and, after a term of dal­ liance, rejects the young miller in favor of a sinister hunter who has been hovering in the background. After this the young man dies of sorrow, or possibly drowns himself in the fateful brook (the event is ambiguous). This heavily stylized narrative is more naive, but no more stereotyped than that of Switzerland, and the pathos of Die Schone Mullerin might be considered a sentimentalized form of Arnoldian melancholy. Die Winterreise, another of Miiller's cycles which had the good fortune to be set to music by Schubert, is made up of twenty-four songs sung by a lover whose mistress spurns him. He feels himself an outcast from life but, finally accepting his sorrow, goes on his forlorn, despair­ ing way. Though there is only a sketchy narrative and little suggestion of character, the themes adhere to the convention of blighted love. Adalbert von Chamisso's cycle, Frauen-Liebe und Leben (set by Schumann in 1840), offers nothing new to the development of the form, but in its treatment of a woman's youthful love, her marriage, the death of her husband, and her final welcoming of love in her daughter's life, it shows how effective the Liedereyklus can be in giving lyrical ex­ pression to the succession of experiences in time and in registering emotion as it is contemplated in memory.

THE IDEA OF LOVE

The comparison of Arnold's love poems with the Liedercyklus is principally useful in suggesting that Switzerland is not so much a record of the poet's ama­ tory experience as it is an exercise in conventionalized literary form. By the eighteen-forties certain characters and situations had become standard in the German song-cycles, and Arnold may be said to have adapted Romantic themes and conventions to his own anti-Romantic uses. He could have found in the Liedercyklus a significant attempt to break through the limitations of familiar forms. The cycle is a patterned group of lyric poems which, while they retain their individual significance, assume together a new narrative or dis­ cursive meaning. And while the typical lyric poem tends to be temporally static, the cycle is notably effective in delineating a temporal sequence, expressing a series of related, but not connected, experiences in time. If, as I surmise, Arnold was casting about in 1852 for some way of giving architectonice to his diffuse series of love poems, the form of the poem-cycle with its vaguely suggested action would suit his purposes ad­ mirably. Switzerland, then, first appeared in the Poems of 1853 as a cycle of six poems introduced by To my Friends. In the twenty years that followed it appeared in four different versions, and it was not until 1877 that Ar­ nold finished adding, exercising, and reshuffling, and let stand a final version made up of eight poems. A de­ tailed study of Arnold's rearrangements is not without interest, but my interpretation of Switzerland can best be supported by a general comparison between the first version and the last. In 1853 the introductory poem de-

THE IDEA OF LOVE

scribed an unkind and faithless young man, and the opening lines, Laugh, my friends, and without blame Lightly quit what lightly came, set a tone which persisted in the cycle. This somewhat frivolous lover contemplates almost with pleasure the inevitable transformation of the experience of love into memory. He moralizes complacently: Ah, too true! Time's current strong Leaves us fixt to nothing long. Yet, if little stays with man, Ah, retain we all we can! If the clear impression dies, Ah, the dim remembrance prize! Ere the parting hour go by, Quick thy tablets, Memory! In the second poem, The Lake (later called Meeting) we learn that the speaker had met Marguerite the sum­ mer before and is now seeing her again, "unalter'd with the year." Meeting her on the dock, he "springs" once more "to make [his] choice," and once more hears a "God's tremendous voice: / 'Be counsell'd, and retire.'" But this particular lover's aims are too modest for the warning to be applicable. He concludes—with a kind of hard frivolity—: Ye guiding Powers who join and part, What would ye have with me? Ah, warn some more ambitious heart, And let the peaceful be!

THE IDEA OF LOVE

The temper of the cynical lover who appears in the first two poems is not at all consistent with the melan­ choly insights of the succeeding poems of the cycle. Some of Arnold's later changes corrected this incon­ gruity. In Switzerland, from first to last, Marguerite is as shadowy as most of the heroines of the Liedercyklus. We learn from the opening poem that she has a soft face, a graceful figure, eyes that are blue, frank, kind, and which reveal an "angelic gravity." In Parting, the fourth poem in the first version, the speaker introduces the notion that the "sea" which rolls between these lovers is their "different past": To the lips, ah! of others Those lips have been prest, And others, ere I was, Were strain'd to that breast. The lovers, we learn, are inevitably separated, and the cycle concludes (in Absence) with the young man, re­ turned to his normal surroundings, finding in the eyes of a strange woman a resemblance to his summer love. His last thoughts of Marguerite are poignant: I struggle towards the light—but oh, While yet the night is chill, Upon time's barren, stormy flow, Stay with me, Marguerite, still! The note of the opening poem is struck again in this conclusion. It is not his beloved that the lover wishes to maintain so much as a memory of her, the "clear im­ pression" which will eventually become a prized but

THE IDEA OF LOVE

"dim remembrance." Switzerland is the story of a sum­ mer romance: the Victorians called the Alps "the play­ ground of Europe," and the implication of a holiday attachment remote from the serious course of life at home is essential to Arnold's narrative. The principal effect of the rearrangements of Switzer­ land is to make the hero a more serious figure and Marguerite a lighter one. By 1877 Arnold had added A Farewell, Isolation: To Marguerite, and The Terrace at Berne and had omitted To my Friends. In its final form the cycle opens appropriately with The Lake, re-titled Meeting, in which the lovers come together, but in a state of vague apprehension. A Dream, which, with its long descriptive passages, made a diversion from the main themes, is omitted; the three poems which follow Meeting (Parting, A Farewell, and Isola­ tion: To Marguerite) present a man earnestly in search of fixity in love, tempted by passion, but fearing its confusion, and feeling even in love the immitigable separateness of every human being. The Terrace at Berne (Composed Ten Tears After the Preceding), which Arnold added in 1869 as a conclusion, has the effect of putting the episode into a safely closed past and leaving the speaker reflecting rather smugly on what might have become of Marguerite. All these changes have made for greater consistency of narrative and character. The protagonist is a morally perceptive man, capable of passion, but yearning for spiritual quiet, hoping wistfully to find some communion in love, but knowing that nothing can release him—or any man —"From isolation without end." In the case of Mar­ guerite, however, the frivolous and exotic aspects have

THE IDEA OF LOVE

been emphasized, so that she becomes a fairly conven­ tional symbol of transitory passion. In The Terrace at Berne the speaker wonders what has happened to the girl in the 10 years since he last saw her: . . . hast thou long since wander'd back, Daughter of France! to France, thy home; And flitted down the flowery track Where feet like thine too lightly come? The heavily Victorian air of this final speculation reminds us that the story of a love affair between a sen­ sitive young man of the upper middle class and a girl of less respectable origins is one of the stereotypes of nineteenth-century literature. The disproportionate em­ phasis that has been put on the presumably autobio­ graphical aspects of Switzerland has overshadowed its affinities with Wilhelm Meister and the Gretchen epi­ sodes in Faust, with Clough's Amours de Voyage and Hughes' Tom Brovm at Oxford.13 In all these stories 18

As far as I know, the only writer to stress the conven­ tional aspects of Arnold's narrative and to mention its con­ nections with other nineteenth-century love stories is Andrew S. Cairncross, in a letter to The Times Literary Supplement (March 28, 1935, p. 210). Unfortunately—it seems to me— Cairncross makes his observations only in support of the notion that Switzerland and Faded Leaves "were originally intended to form a single novelette in verse." He suggested—unconvincingly—that "they refer to two women, contrasted types, rep­ resenting passion and ideal love—Marguerite and Urania; but Arnold, before publication, decided to break up the novelette into two separate series." In a brief and eflFusive article in the Bookman, LXXVIII (1930), 109-112, H. M. Walbrook seemed, at least, to ap­ proach Switzerland as a work of literature when he wrote: "...

THE

IDEA OF LOVE

a thoughtful young man rushes into love with, but eventually renounces, a jeune fille moyenne sensuelle. By comparing the various treatments of this simple fa­ ble one could trace a kind of moral history of the nine­ teenth century. The traditional and most elementary version of the conflict involves a choice between sacred and profane love or passion and permanent affection. However, Romantic writers soon come to regard renun­ ciation as a passionate gesture in itself: in Sainte Beuve's Volupte, for example, the hero Amaury's most fervent act is to reject all his mistresses in favor of re­ ligious emotion. By 1861, when Tom Brown at Oxford was published, renunciation for moral reasons had be­ come a cliche which could be used to illustrate Dr. Arnold's idea of the Christian gentleman. Tom Brown, it will be remembered, was powerfully attracted to Pat­ ty, the daughter of a gardener and the barmaid at The Chough. He comes close to seducing the girl, but at the last moment draws back and subdues "the mischievous wild beast which lurks in the bottom of all our hearts."" Hughes, whose novels are conduct books for the newly educated middle class, was very clear about relative social position and the responsibilities that go with it. The proper Rugby boy must learn to subdue passion and to heed always that highly specialized conscience of which Dr. Arnold was one of the chief inventors. one feels that we are here in the presence of another of those consummately-wrought love-stories which poets have been in­ venting for ages, and of which more than one have survived from that identical period of mid-Victorian literature." 14 Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown at Oxford, 3 vols., London, 1861, Chapter 15.

THE IDEA OF LOVE

When Tom's sensual fit is over, the author reminds us: ... all the while .. . was there not the still small voice —never to be altogether silenced by the roarings of the tempest of passion, by the evil voices, by our own at­ tempts to stifle it—the still small voice appealing to the man, the true man within us. . . .15 But—and this is an important aspect of Dr. Arnold's teachings—Tom's conduct in love is judged from the point of view of so­ cial utility. The Oxford don who serves as his mentor calls his attention to the practical difficulties involved in crossing class lines. What will become of Patty if she submits to Tom? And what will become of Tom if he does not acquire an effective helpmate with a suit­ able social background? In the denouement, of course, Tom returns to the steady affections of Mary Porter, his childhood friend and class equal. Hughes's propagation of Rugbian teachings is a bit crude and schematic; Matthew Arnold and Arthur Clough were not disposed to make their poetry illustrate social truths so obviously. Nevertheless, both the Rugby poets produced versions of the renunciation fable. In Clough's Bothie of Tober-na-vuolich, Philip Hewson, the radical and poet, is bold enough to marry the simple Highland lass Elspie—but then they emigrate to New Zealand. Before finding Elspie, Philip had a brief pas­ sage with Katie, another maid of low degree, but he realized the unsuitability of this relationship and left her in the same way that Tom Brown was to leave Pat­ ty. In the Bothie, however, the social relationships which Hughes glossed over with lofty generalizations are explicitly defined by Philip's tutor: 15

Tom Brown, Chapter 15.

THE IDEA OF LOVE

". . . Moreover, remember it Philip, To the prestige of the richer the lowly are prone to be yielding, Think that in dealing with them they are raised to a different region, Where old laws and morals are modified, lost, exist not; Ignorant as they are, they have but to conform and be yielding." (lines 218-222) In Clough's Amours de Voyage the renunciation theme, the main one of the poem, is treated ironically. Clough's narrative is much more sophisticated than that of Switzerland, but in exploring a condition of essential unfulfillment it closely parallels what I would define as the dominant theme of Arnold's cycle. Claude, the anti-hero of the Amours, is in love—or thinks he is— with Mary Trevellyn, but he is so aware of the neces­ sity to analyze and assess his feelings that he is unable to act on them. Belatedly he makes frantic efforts, but the girl slips away from him, leaving him to ruminate on his velleities: "After all, do I know that I really cared so about her? Do whatever I will, I cannot call up her image; After all perhaps there was something factitious about it; I have had pain, it is true: have wept; and so have the actors." (lines 156-157 and 164-165) The situation of Marguerite and her lover is designed to illustrate other truths than those of either Hughes

THE IDEA OF LOVE

or Clough. The priggish hint of "different pasts" which separate the lovers of Switzerland is no more than a variation on the conventionally unsuitable attachment which threatened Tom Brown, even though the conflict suffered by Arnold's protagonist is more complex than Tom's battle with his conscience. Like Claude in the Amours, Arnold's hero is a sensitive young Englishman whose spiritual equipment is not adequate to the emo­ tional shock of love in a foreign land. But Clough is in­ terested in the problem of a moral sensibility so acute that it destroys the possibility of choice or action, and the purpose of his ironical analysis is to expose the in­ capacity of the modern will. Arnold's hero is never the object of irony, and the most important ill from which he suffers is in existence itself: the characters and nar­ rative of Switzerland, conventional though they are, embody the poet's sense of the loneliness and loss that are not only in feverish passion, but in the very joy of love. WHEN we see Switzerland as a carefully wrought arti­

ficial structure, a poem-cycle that makes use of con­ ventions that were entirely familiar to nineteenth-cen­ tury readers, we can rid ourselves of the biographical fallacy and begin to read the poetry. The conventional nature of his cycle did, in a way, give Arnold more free­ dom for originality of subject and theme: beginning with the familiar trappings of a tale of romantic love, Switzerland soon becomes a lyrical statement of the impermanence of amorous rapture, of the continually op­ posed claims of love and quietude. In Parting, which is placed second in the final version, the principal theme

TEE IDEA OF LOVE

of the cycle is most imposingly stated. The poem is a dialogue with strophe and antistrophe followed by a conclusion. In metre, imagery, and statement, the voice of enmeshing love counters that of an austere and soli­ tary Nature. The placing of the poem immediately after Meeting, which describes the lovers coming together at the beginning of the summer, emphasizes the op­ posing states of mind; the lovers are suddenly in au­ tumn, the holiday season is over, love is threatened by winter. The voice of the autumn wind, blowing toward the peaks of the Alps, counters the voice of Marguerite in an indoor, comfortable world. The "Nature" stanzas are in a short, throbbing line, Ye storm-winds of Autumn! Who rush by, who shake The window, and ruffle The gleam-lighted lake . . . which contrasts with the smooth pentameter couplets of the Marguerite stanzas: But on the stairs what voice is this I hear, Buoyant as morning, and as morning clear? The speaker of Parting assumes a characteristically Arnoldian stance; like the young lovers of The Youth of Man and Dover Beach, he is at a window looking out, placed in a domestic world, confronting the world be­ yond. The mountains represent serenity, detachment from life, escape from the confusions of love; but the terms of the speaker's conflict are not clear-cut, since the white Alps also suggest lifelessness and a separation from the commitments of human emotion. As the poem

TEE IDEA OF LOVE

opens, the speaker, standing at the window, begs the winds to take him to rarefied solitude: Ye are bound for the mountains! Ah! with you let me go Where your cold, distant barrier, The vast range of snow, Through the loose clouds lifts dimly Its white peaks in airHow deep is their stillness! Ah, would I were there! (lines 9-16) But another voice breaks in: . .. on the stairs what voice is this I hear, Buoyant as morning, and as morning clear? Say, has some wet bird-haunted English lawn Lent it the music of its trees at dawn? Or was it from some sun-fleck'd mountain-brook That the sweet voice its upland clearness took? (lines 17-22) The voice of Marguerite stands for human love and for that domesticated world of furnished interiors, Eng­ lish lawns and personal entanglements which is coun­ tered by the fierce, quiet beauty of the Alps. In the strophe which follows, the speaker's desire to be carried away by the winds seems almost desperate: "—I come, O ye mountains! / Ye torrents, I come!" But the girl appears, calling him back to warmth and the promise of joy. The speaker's conflict is between his desire for the love that Marguerite offers and his knowledge that he will find no rest in that love. This ambivalence of

THE IDEA OF LOVE

feeling—the principal subject of the poem—is most clearly expressed in the fifth stanza: . . .let me go To the clear, waning hill-side, Unspotted by snow, There to watch, o'er the sunk vale, The frore mountain-wall, Where the niched snow-bed sprays down Its powdery fall. There its dusky blue clusters The aconite spreads; There the pines slope, the cloud-strips Hung soft in their heads. No life but, at moments, The mountain-bee's hum. —I come, O ye mountains! Ye pine-woods, I come! (lines 44-58) This yearned-for purity is deathlike: the aconite not only has a beautiful blossom but is the source of a fatal poison; the unspotted mountain supports "no life." The interest of Parting, its seriousness as a poem, rises from the clarity with which the poet realizes what the opposing desires imply. The terms of the conflict, and even the imagery in which it is expressed, are not unfamiliar in Victorian poetry; it is, for example, one of Tennyson's major themes, but Tennyson usually at­ tempts a resolution in favor of domestic attachment. For Arnold the dialogue is continuous and the uncer­ tainty in the nature of existence; the only "solution" is to see and to express the dilemma with constantly in-

THE IDEA OF LOVE

creasing clarity. The conclusion of Parting is a kind of synthesis, a group of eight quatrains in which the two voices are interwoven. The speaker addresses first Mar­ guerite and then Nature, and concludes that he and Marguerite are bound to be separated: In the void air, towards thee, My stretch'd arms are cast; But a sea rolls between us— Our different past! To the lips, ah! of others Those lips have been prest, And others, ere I was, Were strain'd to that breast; Far, far from each other Our spirits have grown; And what hearts knows another? Ah! who knows his own? (lines 63-74) Consequently he will try to find in Nature the calm that brings freshness and openness of heart: Ah! calm me, restore me; And dry up my tears On thy high mountain-platforms, Where morn first appears; Where the white mists, for ever, Are spread and upfurl'd— In the stir of the forces Whence issued the world. (lines 83-90)

T E E

I D E A OF

L O V E

This refuge is apparently the source of that general life, celebrated in Resignation, which only the wise and tranquil man can know. It is a temptation to read Parting as a rejection of the perils and responsibilities of ordinary love, and certain­ ly the speaker's references to Marguerite's past and his yearning for Alpine purity appear priggish. But the aspects of Marguerite which the poet rejects are some­ thing more than fast living, and the purity he seeks is not of the Sir Galahad variety. The poem suggests that it would be delightful, and all too easy, to beguile one­ self into thinking that the lovely lips and arch smile of a girl—even, perhaps, a lifetime of domestic happinesscould provide permanent joy. For the wise man the way is more difficult: the life of the spirit imposes sepa­ ration. And though the retreat into Nature is achieved by yielding to natural forces, it nevertheless requires a disciplined renunciation. In turning away from Mar­ guerite the speaker accepts a harder lot, one which it takes strength even to desire; and the poet has man­ aged, I think, to define this choice with a detachment which completely avoids either bathos or self-pity. No matter what interpretation one makes of Switzer­ land, A Farewell (which in the final arrangement of the cycle follows Parting)1β is a strange poem. It can be used as evidence in arguing that Marguerite is fic­ tional, since the woman of the poem is furnished with no characterizing traits, and the situation it describes 16

When it was first published in 1852, the poem appeared quite separately from the group which was later re-shaped into Sxmtzerland and Faded Leaves. It was not made a part of Switzerland until 1854.

TEE IDEA OF LOVE

cannot be taken as a version of Arnold's own youthful love affair. The poem adds nothing to the dramatic unity of Switzerland, and is curiously inconsistent with Parting—to which it is intended to serve as sequel. The sensitive young lover who is the speaker of A Farewell is concerned to explain to his beloved why he is not dis­ composed at finding her cold—why, in fact, the love between them must inevitably cool. But, he says, I blame thee not!—this heart, I know, To be long loved was never framed; For something in its depths doth glow Too strange, too restless, too untamed. (lines 17-20) He recognizes the fact that women want strength and control from the men they love, and regrets his lack of masculine force. He has in the past wished his own "starting, feverish heart away," and would now wish to be free of doubt and fear, But in the world I learnt, what there Thou too wilt surely one day prove, That will, that energy, though rare, Are yet far, far less rare than love. (lines 37-40) And so the young man dismisses his beloved until such time as she can see beyond the values of mere will and energy, when—in a state of detachment not to be achieved in earthly life—they can both at last perceive their "being's whole," and understand their "true affini­ ties of soul." The conception of a state of harmonious being to • 238 •

THE IDEA OF LOVE

which the speaker looks forward draws in part on Goe­ the's notion of the elective affinity of souls; but in Ar­ nold's version the mutual recognition of the lovers does not take place until after they have shed their mortal­ ity. The speaker expresses regret for this state of things, but it is of a perfunctory sort: much, he admits, Will have been lost—the help in strife, The thousand sweet, still joys of such As hand in hand face earthly life— Though these be lost, there will be yet A sympathy august and pure; Ennobled by a vast regret, And by contrition seal'd thrice sure. (lines 66-72) And the sacrifice of these earthly satisfactions will be more than made up for by the fact that the lovers, who "were unlike here," will, in their future lives be, not exactly united, but plying "more neighboring courses." One is tempted to read the poem as intentionally ironic. Certainly the myth of heavenly reunion, which emerges in the speaker's statement without any reli­ gious or philosophical underpinnings, is incongruous with Arnold's cast of mind and with his poetic work as a whole. If it were not for the last two stanzas of A Fare­ well, one could argue convincingly that Arnold was ex­ posing in his semidramatic monologue the callowness of a young man who was afraid to love or to immerse himself in life, and who both rationalized and attempted to spiritualize his timidity by a set of unconvincing fan­ cies. I think there is some truth in the view that Arnold

THE IDEd OF LOVE

maintained dramatic distance from the protagonist of Switzerland, and made his narrative a vehicle for a dis­ enchanted study of the inevitable defeat of youthful love; but the conclusion of A Farewell expresses an at­ titude that seems so genuinely felt, that has so much emotional consistency, that we are prevented from re­ jecting the views of the speaker. The concluding lyrical outburst comes as the young man contemplates the de­ lights of the peace which he and his mistress will find in that state which he pictured for her: How sweet to feel, on the boon air, All our unquiet pulses cease! To feel that nothing can impair The gentleness, the thirst for peace— The gentleness too rudely hurl'd On this wild earth of hate and fear; The thirst for peace a raving world Would never let us satiate here. (lines 81-88) It is a strange—though moving—conclusion to a strange poem. A Farewell is, at least, consistent with the other poems which make up Switzerland in stressing the advantages of peace over fretful passion, but it fails, I think, to embody its idea. Twice iterated in the last two stanzas, the "thirst for peace" is its subject, but the speaker's desire is not expressed in action, or even in consecutive thought; it is only uttered as a momen­ tarily moving lyrical cry. THE two poems which clearly mark the climax of Swit­

zerland state most amply, and with great intensity, what

THE IDEA OF LOVE I have called the theme of the cycle: the realization that passionate love is by nature impermanent and that man's hope for a union of human hearts is no more than a delusion. Isolation: To Marguerite and To Marguerite —Continued," though they were written at different times, are complementary. In the first poem the protag­ onist (at this point in the narrative it seems misleading to refer to him as a lover) continues in the strain of A Parting. He claims that his own love has grown during his separation from his mistress, but recognizes —almost with satisfaction—that she loves him no more. So, saying a final farewell to his former beloved, he addresses himself to an eloquent consideration of his own self-deception and of the philosophical consolations which result from knowing the truth of things. The ruling image of the central stanzas is of his "lonely heart" as a moon which has made the mistake of aban­ doning for a moment its . . . remote and sphered course To haunt the place where passions reign. Having erred from his high—and chilly—course, he must now return to it with something of the shame which Luna felt when she had so far betrayed herself as to hang amorously over the sleeping Endymion. But this young man's error is less defensible than Luna's, since she had had no experience with the vanity of mortal love; he, at least, should have known from his past life the truth now so tersely told him: 111

am referring to this poem by its final title. For a list of the various titles Arnold assigned to it see p. 217.

THE IDEA OF LOVE

'Thou hast been, shalt be, art, alone.' Man's essential isolation is mitigated, the speaker suggests in an apostrophe to his lonely heart, by cer­ tain minor satisfactions, to none of which he can attach himself deeply: . . . if not quite alone, yet they Which touch thee are unmating thingsOcean and clouds and night and day; Lorn autumns and triumphant springs . . . (lines 31-34) The gratifications of human life come last in this cata­ logue. There is human sympathy, and there is even an emotion tentatively called love: And life, and others' joy and pain, And love, if love, of happier men. (lines 35-36) But this love, it must be noted, is not to be ranged un­ der the head of either Eros or Agape; it is no more than mild benevolence. And the happiness which some men achieve is, the speaker would have us know, nothing more than a pleasurable illusion. The happy men are those who Have drearrCd two human hearts might blend In one, and were through faith released From isolation without end Prolong'd; nor knew, although not less Alone than thou, their loneliness. (lines 38-42)

THE IDEA OF LOVE

IN THE course of his reshufflings of Switzerland, Ar­ nold finally linked Isolation to the poem which a per­ ceptive critic has called "the firmest and perhaps indeed the greatest of Arnold's lyrics."18 To Marguerite—Con­ tinued, as the verses beginning, "Yes! in the sea of life enisled" were at last called, is a continuation of the speaker's reflection on his essential loneliness and on the powerlessness of thought or feeling to remedy it. Though To Marguerite was part of the first version of Switzerland in 1853, it is connected with the narrative of the cycle only by its title. The poem does not have a Swiss setting; Marguerite does not appear in it, and indeed the subject of love is not even mentioned. Read by itself, the poem appears as a lament, not merely for the separation of two lovers, but for the universal, ir­ remediable separateness into which we are all born:

Yes! in the sea of life enisled, With echoing straits between us thrown, Dotting the shoreless watery wild, We mortal millions live alone. (lines 1-4) The manner in which Arnold sustains and develops this image through the whole poem has already been sufficiently admired and commented on,19 but what has 18 See

Kathleen Tillotson, "Yes! In the Sea of Life," Review of English Studies, n.s. III (1952), 346-364. Though I find one of Mrs. Tillotson's main generalizations about this poem to be unacceptable, her article seems to me as good a critical study as any poem of Arnold's has received. 19 See, for example, Tillotson, p. 347.

TEE IDEA OF LOVE

not been remarked is the odd fact that what is clearly the finest of the Switzerland poems has had to be at­ tached to the cycle by the device of a link-poem, Isola­ tion, which makes a kind of bridge between the situa­ tion of the lovers and the poet's grand lyric plaint for the loneliness of man. I do not agree with Mrs. Tillotson that To Marguerite fits into "the whole constellation of 'Switzerland' and allied poems, that is, the parting of friends that comes from 'growing apart.' "20 The isola­ tion which Arnold is concerned with is here to begin with, and not the result of what may happen in this or that relationship of love or friendship. By making this eloquent poem the climax of the Switzerland series the poet has, I think, emphasized as strongly as possible his distrust of romantic love, which is powerless, these poems suggest, to enlighten man, or to solace even that grief for which it is reputedly the specific. I do not believe, either, that M. Bonnerot is right in saying that for Arnold "I'amour fut une fenetre ouverte sur Ie mystere de la vie humaine."21 The message of Switzerland would seem to be that love helps to re­ mind us of our condition of being, but does not improve our ability to cope with it. The only love that is actually praised in these "love poems" is the Stoic benevolence of Isolation, the "love, if love, of happier men." The beautiful concluding stanza of To Marguerite suggests that, lovers or non-lovers, we are all separated from each other by an unbridgeable and predestined gulf: Who order'd, that their longing's fire Should be, as soon as kindled, cool'd? 20

Tillotson, p. 358.

21

Bonnerot, p. 78.

TEE IDEA OF LOVE

Who renders vain their deep desire?— A God, a God their severance ruled! And bade betwixt their shores to be The unplumb'd salt, estranging sea. (lines 19-24) IN ITS final arrangement Switzerland ends in a dimin­ uendo. The last two poems are Absence, which in all the versions of the cycle served as one of the conclud­ ing poems, and The Terrace at Berne (Composed Ten Years After the Preceding), which has the effect of dis­ tancing and diminishing the action, concluding it on an elegiac note. The lover in Absence, far removed from Marguerite, is reminded of her momentarily by the gray eyes of a stranger. Having experienced a shudder of recollection he goes on to lament, not that his love has faded because "A nobler, calmer train / Of wiser thoughts and feelings" has blotted passion from his brain, but because love had been senselessly erased by the passage of time, by the "petty dust" which each day brings to choke his soul:

And we forget because we must And not because we will. (lines 11-12) The advantages of having been in love, the argument seems to run, are in being able to rise rationally above passion and to heal oneself resolutely; to accept pas­ sively the healing of time is to be weak. What I have called the classical-rationalist idea of love is asserted in the imagery of the last two stanzas of Absence: the speaker's growing away from Marguerite is conceived

THE IDEA OF LOVE

as a "struggle towards the light," whereas passion is a dark storm: I struggle towards the light; and ye, Once-long'd-for storms of love! If with the light ye cannot be, I bear that ye remove. (lines 13-16) The light is, of course, the clarity of wisdom and tran­ quillity, and is to be preferred to the confused storms of passion. But in the concluding stanza a human and pathetic touch of inconsistent desire crosses the young man's cool asseverations: I struggle towards the light—but oh, While yet the night is chill, Upon time's barren, stormy flow, Stay with me, Marguerite, still! (lines 17-20) This final admission of ambivalence saves the poem from being a manifesto of intolerable moral superiority. The Terrace at Berne is a suitable concluding poem for Switzerland—so suitable, in fact, as to seem con­ trived. The speaker is imagined to have returned to Switzerland ten years after the love affair with Mar­ guerite; looking out from the terrace of his hotel at the river which descends from the Lake of Thun, he specu­ lates nostalgically on the girl's whereabouts. It appears that she was French, so her former lover asks himself whether, having returned to France, she

THE IDEA OF LOVE

. . . flitted down the flowery track Where feet like thine too lightly come? (lines 19-20) And, momentarily, he evokes a picture of Marguerite, heavily rouged, laughing riotously, in the ambiance of La Traviata. But, he goes on to consider, she may be dead, or indeed she may be nearby in Switzerland, but changed, With all thy being re-arranged, Pass'd through the crucible of time; With spirit vanish'd, beauty waned, And hardly yet a glance, a tone, A gesture—anything—retain'd Of all that was my Marguerite's own? (lines 35-40) However, the speaker concludes, "I will not know!"; for there is no profit in trying to give a "shadowy dura­ bility" to things that must die. The encounters of men and women in life are like the meeting and passing of driftwood spars "Upon the boundless ocean—plain." The truth that "Man meets man—meets, and quits again," is one the speaker knew when he was young and feels still, now that "youth is o'er." Switzerland ends, —The mists are on the mountain hung, And Marguerite I shall see no more. In spite of its wonderful parts, Switzerland is not a successful whole. I see in Arnold's continual rearrange­ ment of its parts an indication of his own dissatisfaction

THE IDEA OF LOVE

with the cycle. Even in their final order the disparate poems do not fuse; the theme and meaning are often blurred; the characters are too shadowy to embody a convincing poetic idea. It seems reasonable to conclude that, though the tenuous form of the cycle is adequate to the lyrical expression of passion or the evocation of Schmerz, it is unable to sustain either a tone of complex irony or a solid ethical scheme. But Arnold tried, it seems to me, to make Switzerland bear the weight of his idea of love; in this set of poems the first sign of love brings with it a premonition of parting, and the lover yearns less for the fulfillment of his passion than for peace and freedom from the bonds of feeling. The cycle leaves with us an impression of delicate irony, wise disenchantment, and moral seriousness; but it may be that the reader who will be convinced of the desirability of escaping from the trammels of passion must also be convinced that the poet has felt some of that passion on his own pulses.

Faded Leaves Arnold's second cycle of love poems, Faded Leaves, first appeared in 1855. All but one of the poems (Sepa­ ration) had been in the "love group" of 1852, but once assembled the Faded Leaves group was not subjected to further rearrangement. As in the case of Switzerland, practically all the critical or scholarly attention the cycle has received has been devoted to establishing it as the record of an actual love affair, either with the putative Marguerite or the real Frances Lucy Wightman, whom Arnold married in 1851. The editors of the Commen­ tary, for example, cite a "tradition" in the Arnold family

THE

IDEA OF LOVE

which holds that the poems "were inspired by the poet's passion for Miss Wightman";22 but Mrs. Sells, to whom Marguerite has appeared—as it were—most fully fleshed, interprets Faded Leaves too as an account of Arnold's affair with the mysterious French girl.28 Sev­ eral years ago Kenneth Allott was allowed to examine two previously unrecorded manuscripts of The River, the first poem in the series, and Separation, the third. Allott's account of his examination is very interesting, since he found in the manuscript six quatrains of The Rwer which had never been published.24 These he re­ published and interpreted as evidence of a close con­ nection between Faded Leaves and Calais Sands, the one poem which indubitably refers to Arnold's court­ ship of Miss Wightman. He suggested that a reading of the full version of The River leads one "to realize how close the poem is in tone and in its handling of detail to 'Calais Sands'" and went on to suggest that the two poems were written in the same month. Allott's principal object, however, was to provide an explana­ tion for Arnold's deletion of these six stanzas (there were originally eleven) from his poem. He concluded that, unless Arnold rejected the six quatrains "on account of their inferior workmanship," some other reason had to be found. "The most likely reason is that Arnold thought the original version of The River too intimate a selfrevelation in 1852, and we are encouraged to accept this explanation when we note that Calais Sands which 22

Commentary, p. 168. Matthew Arnold and France, pp. 132-133. 24 See "Matthew Arnold's Original Version of 'The River,'" The Times Literary Supplement, March 28, 1958, p. 172. 23

THE IDEA OF LOVE

is strictly contemporary with The River and about as personal in tone, was not printed at all until New Poems (1867)." I cannot discern in the stanzas which Allott has re­ printed a self-revelation more intimate than that in any of Arnold's other poems, nor indeed do I find that the reading of the eleven-stanza version of the poem en­ hances a parallel of tonality with Calais Sands. There is, I think, nothing in Faded Leaves that requires, or even suggests, a biographical reading, and the attempt to find in its nameless, ever-so-faintly delineated heroine the lineaments of Marguerite or of Lucy leads not to­ ward literary analysis but private fantasy. It would appear that Faded Leaves was fashioned from the poems which were left over after Arnold had assembled Switzerland. The cycle has none of the structural elements which give a certain solidity to Switzerland·, there is no clearly specified setting (though one of the poems is called On the Rhine), no narrative, and no development of character. The speaker of the poems is simply the Arnoldian sensitive young man; of the heroine we learn no more than that she has Eyes too expressive to be blue, Too lovely to be grey. Faded Leaves has about it an air of modesty: it is more naive and more conventionally romantic than Switzer­ land, but though it is slighter, it has greater unity of subject and tone; each poem is a variation on the theme of love's continuance. In The River, which begins the series, the lover is conceived as more genuinely pas­ sionate than the lover of Switzerland·, his "heart is

THE IDEA OF LOVE

swoln with love unsaid," and he yearns to weep, to tell his pain, and to rest his head on the shoulder of his beloved. This tenuous joy, this partial fulfillment, is all he asks before he dies, Before this teased o'erlabour'd heart For ever leaves its vain employ, Dead to its deep habitual smart, And dead to hopes of future joy. In the second brief lyric, Too Late, the lover observes that, because we each move on our "own strict line," some potential lovers go through life without meeting that "twin soul which halves their own." "And some­ times," he continues, considering his own "harder fate," The lovers meet, but meet too late. —Thy heart is mine!—True, true! ah, true! —Then, love thy hand!—Ah no! adieu/25 No explanation for this "lateness" is given; it appears only that it is in the nature of things that love be un­ fulfilled. Separation, the one poem which was added to make up the cycle, is the most conventionally despairing of the whole set. The lovers are in a situation of "bitter departing," and the speaker refuses to listen to remarks about the "sure consolations of time." . . . if the stedfast commandment of Nature Wills that remembrance should always decay— 25

The italics did not appear in the original publication of the poem in 1852, and were added, presumably, to emphasize the dialogue. The italicized words are, of course, meant to be spoken by the lover's mistress.

THE IDEA OF LOVE

as—it is implied—it assuredly does, then the young lover will have all vestiges of his beloved immediately erased from his memory. In the last two poems there is a slight rise of feeling, so that the cycle ends on a note of faint and wistful hope. The mood of On the Rhine is summed up in the phrase, "But ah, not yet, not yet!" The speaker is recon­ ciled to the fact that someday he will be cold, "As is the eternal moonlit snow / Of the high Alps, to which I go—," but he wishes to banish thought for a while and rest mindlessly in the gaze of his beloved's "deep, soft" eyes. Ah, Quiet, all things feel thy balm! Those blue hills too, this river's flow, Were restless once, but long ago. Tamed is their turbulent youthful glow; Their joy is in their calm. And in the last poem, Longing, the speaker begs his beloved to come to him in his dreams so that by day he will be well again: For then the night will more than pay The hopeless longing of the day. The title of Faded Leaves conveys very well the tonal quality of the cycle. The poems, pleasing but a little drab, add to our understanding of Arnold's idea of love only by reinforcing what had been implied in the miscellaneous poems of 1849 and in Switzerland. Faded Leaves carries further the expression of distrust in the faiths and aspirations of romantic love. The actors in Arnold's love poems may experience brief

T H E IDEA OF LOVE

delusions of being united; their passion may bring them a fleeting satisfaction, but reason is always standing by to remind the lover that his joy and pain are equally impermanent. This message was read by an early critic of Arnold's poetry who was able to look at the love poems without being distracted by a compulsion to biographical reconstruction. Arthur Lyttelton, writing in 1878, pointed out what was most singular in these two poem cycles—a curious deficiency in Arnold's treat­ ment of love: The proud eminence of the soul in its solitude can be rudely disturbed by the passion of human love, but both in Switzerland and in Faded Leaves the effort is not so much to quell the disturbance by giv­ ing a free course to the passions and resting upon an unselfish love, as to forget, to efface the passion, and to preserve to the soul its calmness and self-posses­ sion. And there is singularly little about love in these poems. It would seem as if the very mention of a feeling which is essentially unselfish, at least in its first impulse, is foreign to the poet's purpose. Even when he appears to feel the impulse of another soul close to his . . . what is to him the fruit of this, the gain of love? Still self-knowledge and self-posses­ sion.26 Lyttelton's analysis seems to me to make precisely the right emphases in defining the general bearings of Ar­ nold's poems on love. We can only begin to understand this work of the early fifties by recognizing what is not 2e Arthur

T. Lyttelton, Modern Poets of Faith, Doubt and Paganism, and Other Essays, London, 1904, pp. 82-83.

• 2 5 3·

THE

IDEA OF LOVE

in it, by observing that the poet's idea emerges from a set of negative affirmations. In a manner that is typical of his poetic procedure, Arnold is concerned to reveal the things which love is not, the gifts which it only seems to offer. And in the course of this ironic and sometimes melancholy disclosure, the poet asserts an ideal of quietude and composure, a rational self-pos­ session which is achieved by going through and beyond the fever and turmoil of passion.

Tristram and Iseult Tristram and lseult, though it will stand as the most brilliant of Arnold's poems on love, is not an easy work to approach or to comprehend. It displays the poet's talents at their richest, and his mannerisms in their most puzzling form. It is remarkable, in the first place, that Arnold should have chosen as the vehicle for his most sustained analysis of love the legend of Tristram, a story which Denis de Rougemont was later to call, "the one great European myth of adultery."27 The po­ et's analysis is, of course, not so systematic as that of de Rougemont, who devotes a large part of his book to a critique of the Tristram legend and makes it the point of reference for his study of the "etymology of passions"; but Arnold saw—in 1852—what Wagner saw a bit later, that this particular tale held within its medieval and courtly context the germs of the romantic idea of love. English readers of the 1850's would not have been totally unfamiliar with the Tristram legend, but Ar­ nold was the first poet to make it part of the repertory 27

Passion and Society, p. 18.

THE

IDEA OF LOVE

of modern literature.28 Though Wagner had begun to work on his opera in the fifties, it was not produced un­ til 1865, while Tennyson's version of the tale in The Last Tournament was published in 1872, and Swin­ burne's Tristram of Lyonesse ten years later. The prob­ lem of the sources and analogues of Arnold's version has become staggeringly complex. I shall touch on this massive question only to emphasize how decisively Ar­ nold selected and altered the narrative material avail­ able to him. Arnold told Clough, in a letter of May 1, 1853, that his "version of Tristram and Iseult [came] from an article in the Revue de Paris, on Fauriel, I think."29 And in an earlier letter (of November, 1852) to Her­ bert Hill, an acquaintance of the Arnold family, he said: "I read the story of Tristram and Iseult some years ago at Thun in an article in a French Review on the ro­ mance literature: I had never met with it before, and it fastened upon me: when I got back to England I looked at the Morte d'Arthur and took what I could, but the poem was in the main formed, and I could not well disturb it."30 It is, then, possible to find the article by Theodore de La Villemarque in the Revue de Paris which contains a resume of the legend of Tristram and 28

Early versions of the legend appear in the Morte d'Arthur, in Dunlop's History of Fiction and in Sir Tristrem, a Metrical Romance of the Thirteenth Century by Thomas of Ercildoune, called The Rhymer, ed., Walter Scott, Edinburgh, 1804. This last work was several times reprinted in the nineteenth century. 29 Letters to Clough, p. 135. 30 Printed in a letter from R. E. C. Houghton in The Times Literary Supplement, May 19, 1921, p. 368. This passage is also printed in Commentary, p. 109.

T H E I D E A OF

LOVE

to compare it with Malory's version and see what Ar­ nold included and what he rejected.31 But the process of considering all the variables in three different narra­ tive sources of the poem and then attempting a point for point comparison with Arnold's version involves so many different elements and possible permutations that the investigation soon becomes meaningless. I think the only source problem the critic can usefully discuss is the donn6e of Arnold's poem; it is not significant that, out of five narrative episodes he chose to include three in his poems and to omit two, but it is most revealing to see how decisively he shaped the tale to his special pur­ poses, recasting it and altering its whole spirit and meaning. In La Villemarque's summary of the romance nar­ rative it is told that Tristram retires to Brittany and there marries the daughter of King Huel, who is also named Iseult, but, "Toutefois c'est en vain qu'il essaie d'oublier son premier amour, c'est en vain qu'il court Ies aventures perilleuses; au lieu d'une distraction, il y trouve une blessure mortelle. La femme du roi Marche peut seule Ie guerir; il l'envoie chercher. Mais la fille du roi de la Petite-Bretagne, qui a surpris Ie secret des amours de son mari, Iui fait accroire que la reine de 31 The

French article which tells the story of Tristram is pofcmes gallois et Ies romans de la Table-Ronde," Revue de Paris, Series 3, xxxiv (1841), 266-282. The editors of Commentary make a detailed comparison of La Villemarque's version and Arnold's (see pp. 109-113) and then go on to con­ sider also the versions given by Malory, and by Dunlop in his History of Fiction. In Ten Studies in the Poetry of Matthew Arnold, P. F. Baum makes another elaborate comparison of various possible sources and calls attention to a few small errors in the Commentary. tt Les

T H E IDEA OF LOVE

Cornouailles refuse de se rendre a ses voeux, et Tristan meurt de chagrin."82 In the narratives which Arnold would have known, Iseult of Brittany is quite insignificant. In Malory, for example, she barely appears, and when she does, her one salient action is unpleasant: she betrays Tristram at the end by lying to him about the arrival of the other Iseult, and thus hastens his death. In the Wagnerian version of the legend—the one that may be said to domi­ nate the imagination of our own time—Tristram and Iseult of Cornwall symbolize the deathly joys of a fated love. In such a view the center of the narrative must be the taking of the love potion and the mystical union of the lovers which follows. Arnold's approach, how­ ever, is completely his own; for him the point of entry into the story, the central episode, is the death of the long-separated middle-aged lovers. The high and pas­ sionate events appear in retrospect; in the foreground is the final, tranquil reunion of a man and woman wasted by passion. And in an initially startling, though quite understandable, shift of emphasis Iseult of Brit­ tany becomes the central figure of the poem. By omit­ ting the episode of her treachery (mentioned but not developed in the version of La Villemarqu6), Arnold made her a sympathetic character, and by inventing for her an ambiance, and even a family, he made her more substantial than her rival queen. The whole tendency of Arnold's treatment of the legend is toward a bal­ anced opposition, a contrast between two kinds of women and two kinds of love, an issue which is not even suggested in earlier versions. 32

Revue de Paris, Series 3, xxxiv, 275.

TEE

IDEA OF LOVE

All the formal aspects of Tristram and Iseult are contrived to emphasize polarities, to create a dialectical opposition on the level of imagery as well as narrative. For example, in some of the romances the second Iseult is called Iseult of the White Hands; elaborating on this suggestion, Arnold attaches to her a cluster of images arising from whiteness, coolness, and snow. In Part ι her "slight" fingers are described as being white "as the driven snow,11 and she is said to feel "a chilly fear." This descriptive passage ends: Who is this snowdrop by the sea?— I know her by her mildness rare, Her snow-white hands, her golden hair; I know her by her rich silk dress, And her fragile loveliness— The sweetest Christian soul alive, Iseult of Brittany. (i, 49-55) Iseult of Cornwall, however, is said to have "proud dark eyes" and raven hair, to be petulant and imperious. She is described as being in motion, while Iseult of Brittany is still, in a posture of tranquil expectation. The first Iseult is associated with the "early summer," "the breath of the May-wind"; she had "all the spring­ time" of Tristram's love, while the second has had his winter love and is associated with a mild December and with cool moonlight rather than with the hot sun. Tristram himself oscillates between sensations of fire, a "burning fever-pain," as he recalls his youthful pas­ sion, and tranquil recollections of his life with the sec-

T H E IDEA OF LOVE

ond Iseult. He passes from fierce activity to quietude as he moves from the dark Iseult to the white one. In the whole constellation of Arnold's love poems it is possible to discern a private myth which involves a contrast between two feminine types—one who is tan­ talizing, vivid, associated with movement and intense feeling (this is, of course, the Marguerite of Switzer­ land) , and another, given various names, who is steady, quiet, and calm, who offers fixity without the excite­ ment of passion. These figures, however, signify more than two kinds of love; they also stand for opposing ways of life, conflicting states of mind. The two Iseults represent the contrast between passion and devoted, serviceable love; between a strained world of violent ac­ tion and tranquil retreat. They are symbols of the same internal conflict which opposes the beguiling Margue­ rite to the austere attractions of passionless quiet. Usually in Arnold's poetry the diverse expressions of what I take to be a single conflict involve a judgment and resolution. When Romantic self-indulgence, Faustianism, is opposed to Stoic resignation, we infer where virtue is supposed to lie. But it is part of the interest of Tristram and Iseult that the antithetical tendencies of Tristram's life remain in suspension until the two Iseults come together at his deathbed. At the moment of death the passionate Iseult becomes quiet and ac­ quires A tranquil, settled loveliness, Her youngest rival's purest grace. In the fixity of death the oppositions are reconciled.

THE IDEA OF LOVE

The contrast on which this poem is built necessarily precludes any celebration of passionate love. Indeed, in Arnold's re-telling of the great legend of adultery, passion is associated only with suffering and agitation. Iseult of Cornwall is described as She who, as they voyaged, quaff'd With Tristram that spiced magic draught, Which since then for ever rolls Through their blood, and binds their souls, Working love, but working teen . . . (i, 63-67) Though the love-potion brings ecstasy it brings no joy: Let them drink it—let their hands Tremble, and their cheeks be flame, As they feel the fatal bands Of a love they dare not name, With a wild delicious pain, Twine about their hearts again! (i, 147-152) The scheme of the poem is such that its episodes of pas­ sion are projected into the past, and its single love scene is part of Tristram's dying revery—a recollection of distressful separation ended by the lovers' final part­ ing: Tristram

Chill blows the wind, the pleasaunce-walks are drearMadcap, what jest was this, to meet me here? Were feet like those made for so wild a way? The southern winter-parlour, by my fay,

THE IDEA OF LOVE

Had been the likeliest trysting-place to-day! nay—thou must not take my hand!— Tristram!—sweet love!—we are betray1d-out-planrCd. Fly—save thyself—save me!—I dare not stay."— One last kiss first!—" 'Tis vain—to horse—away!" (i, 161-169) u Tristraml-Uay,

And for this brief joy Arnold's Tristram was bound to spend a lifetime as a "love-desperate banish'd knight." The firmness of Arnold's refusal to celebrate ro­ mantic love is emphasized by comparing his version with Wagner's handling of the material in Tristan und Isolde. In the second scene of Act n (which I have al­ ready spoken of in connection with the romantic idea of love) the personal identities of the lovers is anni­ hilated in their ecstasy. Tristan sings to Isolde: Tristan du, ich Isolde, nicht mehr Tristan! And she replies, Du Isolde, Tristan ich, nicht mehr Isolde! Then, transfigured, they rejoice in a state of being, Ohne Nennen ohne Trennen neu Erkennen, neu Entbrennen; endlos ewig ein-bewusst: 261

T H E I D E A OF

LOVE

heiss ergliihter Brust hochste Liebes-Lust! [Without identities, without distinction of being; recog­ nizing ourselves anew, being inflamed with love anew; boundless, eternal, having a single consciousness:warmly glowing breast, highest ecstasy of love!] The conception of a Liebes-Lust that is endless and eternal is just what Arnold's poem seems designed to dispel. In this same climactic scene of Wagner's opera, the lovers celebrate night and, eventually, death. Isolde tells Tristan that she wishes to die in union with him, and he answers that he will receive at her hands the death which he prizes, and achieve in doing so that consummation toward which he has yearned. In comparison with Wagner's Liebestod, Arnold's view of passion seems prosaically rationalist and hu­ manistic. It is, of course, in keeping with his ethical theories and with the natural bent of his mind that he should choose in favor of life and of wise action; the glorification of the forces of night and death, the con­ ception of transfiguration through passion would be repugnant to him.83 There is a love-death scene in his poem, but its beauty is in the extinction rather than in the culmination of passion. In Part n Iseult of Corn33

It is both revealing and amusing that when Arnold saw Wagner's opera in Munich in 1886 he took a dim view of it. "I may say," he wrote his wife, "that I have managed the story better than Wagner. The second act is interminable, and with­ out any action. The hero and heroine sit on a sofa and sing to one another about light and darkness and their connection with love." (Letters, n, 374.) The Liebestod would not, of course, fulfill the Arnoldian definition of action.

THE IDEA OF LOVE

wall comes to Tristram's deathbed, "sinks upon the ground" and dies. And then, in the final version of the poem, there appears a passage which was not inserted until 1869.34 Arnold's Iseult is, like Wagner's, released into death; but the moment of joy she attains is a re­ lease from passion not into it: Yes, now the longing is o'erpast, Which, dogg'd by fear and fought by shame, Shook her weak bosom day and night, Consumed her beauty like a flame, And dimm'd it like the desert-blast. (ii, 131-135) Her quiet now is so healing that the ravages of time are erased and her face assumes once more "A tranquil, set­ tled loveliness." One may accept the notion that the theme of Arnold's Tristram and Iseult is that of passion, intrinsically de­ structive, opposed to tranquillity, and still be perplexed by the poem's formal complication, its shifts from dia­ logue to commentary to straight narration. Technically, it is one of Arnold's most adventurous and original poems—a fact which we can best appreciate by con­ sidering several of its more difficult aspects. The most notable feature of Part i, "Tristram," is the impression it gives of intense stylization—an effect which is produced by both metre and the method of narration. The poem opens realistically, and without preamble, in the chamber of the dying Tristram: 34

The passage was originally published as the first section of Lines written by a Death-bed in 1852.

THE IDEA OF LOVE T ristram

Is she not come? The messenger was sure. Prop me upon the pillows once again— Raise me, my page! this cannot long endure. —Christ, what a night! how the sleet whips the pane! What lights will those out to the northward be? The Page

The lanterns of the fishing-boats at sea. Tristram

Soft—who is that, stands by the dying fire? The Page

Iseult. Tristram

Ah; not the Iseult I desire. And then the narrator inserts his commentary: What Knight is this so weak and pale, Though the locks are yet brown on his noble head, Propt on pillows in his bed, Gazing seaward for the light Of some ship that fights the gale On this wild December night?

What Lady is this, whose silk attire Gleams so rich in the light of the fire? The ringlets on her shoulders lying In their flitting lustre vying

THE IDEA OF LOVE

With the clasp of burnish'd gold Which her heavy robe doth hold. This passage ends with what is almost a stage direction: And his [Tristram's] closed eye doth sweep O'er some fair unwintry sea, Not this fierce Atlantic deep, While he mutters brokenly: — (lines 90-94) Tristram then speaks again, but to himself, and repeats in a kind of delirium the colloquy of a time long past. It takes, perhaps, more quotations than I have given to convey the full effect of contrasting voices at the be­ ginning of the poem. I have suggested that every ele­ ment of Tristram and Iseult implies a sharply defined opposition, so it is not strange that almost the first im­ pression the poem makes on us is of the contrast be­ tween the natural speech rhythms of the characters (their dialogue is in loose iambic pentameter couplets) and the formalized, archaic, minstrel-like tone of the narrator (whose lines are in rather jarring trochaics). The contrast in tone puts the action into a distant per­ spective; it is as if the ambiguously placed narrator, by violating the dramatic proprieties, made a frame for the drama. On another plane, the disparity between the two modes of speech is even more significant. Tristram and Iseult is a very self-conscious work of art; though its principal subject is love, it also leads us to reflect on the power of artifice—in the form of ancient tales—to enhance our understanding of life. The poet is con-

THE IDEd OF LOVE

cerned, in other words, with the way in which a legend is grasped by the imagination, with the problem of making a medieval tale yield new meanings while it re­ tains its old ones. We respond, then, not merely to the story of Tristram, but also to the fact that his story has had a long life as poetry, so that part of its meaning is a function of its having been so often told. Arnold, to put it another way, makes us aware of his finding a way to use his legend; he makes us see his poetic ma­ terial as being at once both art and experience. The device of the commentator, consequently, effects a de­ tachment or dramatic irony which emphasizes the con­ trast between transient suffering and permanent art. Another crux of difficulty for many readers is the section in Part n, "Iseult of Ireland," which, like the stylized commentary of Part i, opposes the confusion of human suffering to the fixity of art. In the first pub­ lished version of his poem Arnold described a flapping "ghostlike tapestry," on which the figure of a huntsman appeared. Originally35 the tapestry and its subject were no more than aspects of the decor of the castle, but in his subsequent revisions Arnold assigned to the hunts­ man a commentary on the action. In the final version of the poem there is first a description: And on the arras wrought you see A stately Huntsman, clad in green, And round him a fresh forest-scene. On that clear forest-knoll he stays, 35 See

Commentary, pp. 116-117, where the original passage is reprinted.

THE IDEA OF LOVE

With his pack round him, and delays. He stares and stares, with troubled face .... (ii, 152-157) When the huntsman "seems to" speak he begins by echoing the phrases of the narrator at the beginning of the poem: What place is this, and who are they? Who is that kneeling Lady fair? And on his pillows that pale Knight Who seems of marble on a tomb?"1 (II, 164-167)

l

As the narrator of Part ι spoke in a highly formalized tone, reminding us that art is made out of suffering, the huntsman-speaker, himself an artifact, perpetually looks out in a "flurried" way at the dead lovers. Arnold's imaginative scheme and its implications are like those of the Ode on a Grecian Urn. In their death Tristram and Iseult have become part of art and eternity; by as­ signing his commentary to a figure in a tapestry, Ar­ nold could emphasize the ambiguous relationships be­ tween time and change, death and art. Tristram and Iseult have become monumental effigies, Cold, cold as those who lived and loved A thousand years ago. (ii, 192-193) However, the passages of Tristram and Iseult which have given readers—and apparently gave Arnold him­ self—the greatest difficulty are in the conclusion, an extremely elaborate section, resembling a piece of mu-

THE IDEΛ OF LOVE sic in which a finale is followed by a coda. First, Iseult of Brittany's widowhood is poignantly described: Yes, it is lonely for her in her hall. The children, and the grey-hair'd seneschal, Her women, and Sir Tristram's aged hound, Are there the sole companions to be found. But these she loves; and noisier life than this She would find ill to bear, weak as she is. (hi, 96-101) Then the narrator comments on the situation, first mak­ ing the moral application of his story and concluding by telling the tale of Merlin and Vivian, a tale which Iseult is said to have told her children as she wandered with them over the wintry Breton heath. We have what might be called the applicatio followed by an exemplum. Arnold was obviously uncertain as to the appropri­ ateness of his applicatio (lines 112-150); he omitted it when the poem was reprinted in 1853 and 1854, but restored it in 1857 and all subsequent editions. Critics, too, have objected to the passage on several grounds. I will say at once that I find it splendidly appropriate to Arnold's theme, and more genuinely medieval in spirit than any other part of the poem. The first section of the passage laments the slow, destructive power of "the gradual furnace of the world"—a characteristically Arnoldian image. The second section is a reflection, in high style, on the actively destructive force of passion. The narrator begins: Dear saints, it is not sorrow, as I hear, Not suffering, which shuts up eye and ear To all that has delighted them before,

THE IDEA OF LOVE And lets us be what we were once no more. No, we may suffer deeply, yet retain Power to be moved and soothed, for all our pain, By what of old pleased us, and will again. No, 'tis the gradual furnace of the world, In whose hot air our spirits are upcurl'd Until they crumble, or else grow like steel— Which kills in us the bloom, the youth, the spring— Which leaves the fierce necessity to feel, But takes away the power—this can avail, By drying up our joy in everything, To make our former pleasures all seem stale. (πι, 112-126) The subject of this passage, the fatal opposition be­ tween the living sensibility and "the world," is a type of the spiritual suffering which Arnold's poetry fre­ quently treats; but it has the air of an independent lyric and its relevance to the legend of Tristram is not im­ mediately apparent. One can understand why Arnold would have decided to delete the passage from the edi­ tion of 1853. But as my familiarity with Tristram and Iseult has grown I have come to feel that the poet's original impulse was right, and that the lines are at the heart of the poem's meanings. Arnold was not con­ cerned merely to treat the subject of passionate love, or to re-tell a legend in a charming way; he wished also, I think, to make Tristram and Iseult a means of re­ flecting on the values and uses of the tale he revived. He does not, then, only draw out the moral meaning of his story, but suggests in what is unmistakably the voice of a modern poet, the kinds of responses a reader can make to such a story.

THE

IDEA OF LOVE

The easiest response would be to react almost wholly to the pathos in the sufferings of Iseult of Brittany. In amplifying the character of the second Iseult and in placing her so close to the center of the poem, Arnold ran the risk of giving her forlorn condition too much significance, of leading the reader to consider her fate as the principal outcome of the passion of Tristram and Iseult of Cornwall. In this view the narrative would be taken as a sentimental, moralized tale on the order of a Tennysonian "domestic idyll." Indeed, one modern critic has read the poem in this way and then—obliquitously it seems—attacked Arnold for his failings. As P. F. Baum would have it, Arnold "produced in 'Tris­ tram and Iseult' a sentimental version of a great tragic story, a version as Victorian as Tennyson's Idylls which were to follow, and equally without the powerful medie­ val background which is necessary to render the tragic story intelligible and moving."36 A judgment of this kind is worth discussing as an ex­ ample of the method of condemning a poem because it does not respond to a set of false demands and unwar­ ranted assumptions. To begin with, the legend of Tris­ tram as it appears in its several medieval versions is not, either by the canons of classical or of medieval tragedy, "a great tragic story." A nineteenth-century writer who wished to make the action seem tragic could only have done so by inflating the significance of the tale, possibly by placing its events in a world governed by the values of romantic love. Whether or not Wagner intended or succeeded in doing this is not a question se Baum,

Ten Studies, p. 57.

THE IDEA OF LOVE

to be discussed here: one thing that we can be sure of is that Arnold would never have been tempted to con­ vert a tale of consuming passion to a tragic scheme. It is a virtue of his admirable lucidity to see that suffering may be intensely painful without becoming tragic. Far from having failed to bring out the tragic elements of his material, Arnold intended, I would say, to make us realize how little of genuine tragedy there is in a story like Tristram's. The objection to Arnold's treatment as "Victorian" is instructive because it, too, defines as a lapse or failure of ability what I consider to be an important feature of the poet's intention. We cannot, it must be said at once, expect any genuine "medieval background" in any poetry written after the fifteenth century; but the interest of later writers in medieval material, and the recovery and imitation of medieval literary devices greatly enriched many different forms of Victorian art and literature. The responses that we—and to a greater extent the Victorians themselves—have made to this material are necessarily ambiguous; but it may be said that when the neo-medieval is most genuinely "Victori­ an" it is most alive as art. We do not go to nineteenthcentury writers for their authentic reproductions of, say, Chaucer or Marie de France; we look, rather, for the modern artist's image of the past, for the way in which he makes his material new. Tennyson once said that when he used an old legend he made sure that there was "something modern" about his interpretation. At its best, the class of literature to which Tristram and Iseult belongs presents the spectacle of the Victorian sensibil­ ity confronting—and, in some ways, creating—the imag-

THE IDEA OF LOVE

ined past. It is, then, with the subtlety of the poet's imagination, not the scholar's, that Arnold contemplates the story of Tristram. We should rejoice that he was not tempted to try the low-grade illusionism which would produce no more than a pastiche of medieval verse. The argument in the passage I have quoted is a straightforward and notably antisentimental one. The sufferings of Iseult of Brittany, the poet tells us in the language of his own time, are not the most destructive ones; to have quiet, after all, is to be able to possess life. The suffering which destroys is of two kinds: there is the drying effect of the world, which leaves us the "necessity to feel, / But takes away the power," and there is the "tyrannous single thought, some fit / Of passion, which subdues our souls to it." These two forces have both held sway in Tristram's life, and they are both—it may be remarked—aspects of the Faustian ethos which Arnold's poems so frequently expose. The second part of the applicatio is a straightforward denunciation of passion, not only of the romantic pas­ sion of Tristram and Iseult, but of . . . ambition, or remorse, or love— This too can change us wholly, and make seem All which we did before, shadow and dream. And yet, I swear, it angers me to see How this fool passion gulls men potently; Being, in truth, but a diseased unrest, And an unnatural overheat at best. How they are full of languor and distress Not having it; which when they do possess,

THE IDEA OF LOVE

They straightway are burnt up with fume and care, And spend their lives in posting here and there Where this plague drives them; and have little ease, Are furious with themselves, and hard to please. Like that bald Caesar, the famed Roman wight, Who wept at reading of a Grecian knight Who made a name at younger years than he; Or that renown'd mirror of chivalry, Prince Alexander, Philip's peerless son, Who carried the great war from Macedon Into the Soudan's realm, and thundered on To die at thirty-five in Babylon. (lines 130-150)87 This passage draws so obviously on the language and syntax of Shakespeare's sonnets that one assumes that Arnold wanted to bring the associations of the sonnets into the ambiance of his poem. Certainly, such a line as, "Not having it; which when they do possess . . ." takes us directly to Sonnet 129, to, Enjoy'd no sooner but despised straight, Past reason hunted, and no sooner had, Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait O n purpose laid t o m a k e t h e taker m a d . . . . But the attitudes of the Sonnets, with their indignant rejection of passion personally felt, and with their stud87

The allusions at the end of this passage are somewhat confusing. The poet first refers to the story of Julius Caesar weeping when he read of the youthful conquests of Alexander the Great. There is, however, an inconsistency in introducing a later reference to Alexander. But perhaps we should not ex­ pect the narrator to be precise in his allusions.

THE IDEA OF LOVE

ied agonies, are not in Arnold's poem. In Tristram and Iseult lust is merely one kind of destructive emotion, and the effect of the narrator's comment is to widen the moral range of the poem, to ensure that we do not in­ terpret love as uniquely disturbing, but see that the diseased unrest which it produces may also follow on ambition or remorse. If we regard Arnold's conclusion as a means of confirming and then extending the sub­ ject of his poem, we may regret that the narrator's com­ ment is from the outside, explicit and undramatic, but we cannot blandly suggest that Tristram and Iseult would be better off without it. The second part of the conclusion, the exemplum, is the interpolated story of Merlin and Vivian. Since it is not directly connected with the adventures of Tristram, it has perplexed many readers. One of the first to object to the passage was Herbert Hill, who sent his com­ ments to the poet shortly after the volume of 1852 was published. Hill's letter is not available, but Arnold's un­ necessarily apologetic reply is illuminating. He wrote: ". . . the story of Merlin of which I am particularly fond, was brought in on purpose to relieve the poem which would else I thought have ended too sadly: but perhaps the new element introduced is too much."88 But I think that again the poet's original impulse had been right. The "new element" modulates the tone of the poem and makes the ending ironic rather than merely "sad." The story, a much simplified version of Vivian's spell and of Merlin's enchanted sleep in the forest of Brocelian, is told by Iseult to her children as they stroll 88 See

The Times Literary Supplement, May 19, 1932, p. 368, and Commentary, p. 124.

TEE IDEA OF LOVE

in the winter garden. Arnold remarked in a letter to Clough that "The story of Merlin is imported from the Morte d'Arthur,"se but Malory's version contains none of the main elements of the story Arnold tells. The real source is, as the editors of the Commentary have pointed out, another essay by La Villemarque in the Revue de Paris,40 "Visite au Tombeau de Merlin." But though Arnold followed the outlines of the narrative as La Villemarque gave it, he completely altered the implications of the tale. In the French version Merlin is said to have been seized by a desire to visit his love, Vivian, "car Ie terme approchait qu'il Iui avait promis." He says his farewell to Arthur and his queen, who entreat him to return soon. But Merlin replies, ominously, "Sire . . . c'est la derniere fois que vous me verrez." Then he goes off weeping and travels until he finds Vivian. They stay together for a long time, and Vivian bewitches Merlin with flattery and gets him to teach her the spell of en­ chantment. One day they wander to the forest of Brocelian, and when Merlin has fallen asleep Vivian practices her enchantments and imprisons him forever within a magic circle. But, as La Villemarque tells the story, Merlin addresses Vivian from within the circle, telling her that if she does not remain with him in his imprison­ ment she will have deceived him. And Vivian comes often to visit Merlin, and regrets having entrapped him. Arnold, it is to be observed, omitted from his adapta­ tion both the element of fatality suggested by Merlin's 89

Letters to Clough, p. 135. The letter is dated May 1,1853. Revue de Paris, Series 2, XLI ( 1 8 3 7 ) , 52-53. A part of the relevant section of the article is reprinted in Commentary, p. 123. 40See

TEE IDEA OF LOVE

farewell to Arthur, and the softened ending with a re­ morseful Vivian solacing the friend she has betrayed. The ending of La Villemarque's version of the tale is, of course, untidy, leaving the reader with a blurred moral impression. But the conception of Merlin's fated end, of his knowingly going off to find his love and his doom, is very impressive. The disadvantage of this motif for Arnold's telling of the story is that it lends a greater dignity to Merlin's attachment than would fit with Arnold's scheme. The omission reminds us how rigorously the poet has avoided any romanticized sug­ gestions of amor fata in his treatment of passionate love. The use of a brief and seemingly unconnected nar­ rative as the conclusion of a poem is strange enough to have disturbed many of Arnold's readers. But the de­ vice is one which the poet used several times and which may have had its source in medieval literature. Both The Scholar-Gipsy and Stanzas from the Grande Char­ treuse are concluded by symbolic statements of the po­ em's main theme in the form of a new episode. The extended simile of the "grave Tyrian trader" has been harshly judged as having nothing to do with the Scholar Gipsy—no more, it might be observed, than that of the "children rear'd in shade / Beneath some old-world ab­ bey wall," has to do with the agonized poet contemplat­ ing the monument of a faith that is gone. What the poet has done in both cases is to give us a situation parallel­ ing the central action of the poem and emphasizing its meanings. Arnold's Merlin story is an expanded version of the similes which concluded The Scholar-Gipsy and the Grande Chartreuse and shows more affinities than they do with the concluding exemplum in a medieval narrative. It assumes, in fact, precisely the function of

THE IDEA OF LOVE

the exempla in controlling the reader's response to the tale he has heard: the story of Merlin prevents a senti­ mental interpretation of Tristram's fate, or one that would inflate its meaning by conceiving it as tragic. Merlin is, like Tristram, the victim of a great and be­ witching passion, and of his Liebestod, or death in life, a tale is made for the amusement of children. The final suggestion Arnold's poem leaves with us is of the weary meaninglessness which follows on passion: They sate them down together, and a sleep Fell upon Merlin, more like death, so deep. Her finger on her lips, then Vivian rose, And from her brown-lock'd head the wimple throws, And takes it in her hand, and waves it over The blossom'd thorn-tree and her sleeping lover. Nine times she waved the fluttering wimple round, And made a little plot of magic ground. And in that daisied circle, as men say, Is Merlin prisoner till the judgment-day; But she herself whither she will can rove— For she was passing weary of his love.

New Poems Arnold, who could complain to Clough at the age of thirty-one that he was "three parts iced over,"41 enjoyed exaggerating the atrophy of his poetic gifts. He spoke so often of the dimming of his lyric spark that readers have taken him at his word and assumed that he pro­ duced no significant poetry after the early 1850's. In fact, of course, the New Poems of 1867 was a book of 41

Letters to Clough, p. 128.

THE IDEA OF LOVE

remarkable power—though most of the poems in it show a dryness of manner and elevated intellectuality which do not make for a wide or enthusiastic following. Ar­ nold's own account of his spiritual disabilities should be regarded more, I think, as mannered self-depreciation than as autobiography. He was only in his forties when he wrote of the true horror of growing old—as opposed, presumably, to what optimistic poets had said of the experience: It is to spend long days And not once feel that we were ever young; It is to add, immured In the hot prison of the present, month To month with weary pain. It is to suffer this, And feel but half, and feebly, what we feel. Deep in our hidden heart Festers the dull remembrance of a change, But no emotion—none. (Growing Old, 11. 21-30) And in a later poem he was not entirely serious when, mourning the death of a pet canary, he remarked that, . . . as age comes on, I know, Poet's fire gets faint and low. (Poor Matthias , 11. 77-78) These laments reflect the poet's choice as much as they do the slow work of time. As Arnold moved into middle age he became increasingly preoccupied with literary and social analysis, with history and religion. Experiences which the world calls "lyrical" or "emo-

THE IDEA OF LOVE

tional" he did not consider worthy objects of his ex­ pression. Passion, particularly, is not a topic which en­ gages his attention after the early 1850's. In the New Poems of 1867 the pathetic cry of Dover Beach, "Ah, love, let us be true / To one another!," is almost unique in using the word love,42 and the sense of union which it evokes is all the more necessary because of its precariousness in a world which Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain. One feels in reading New Poems that Arnold had had his say on the subject of love, and had—as usual—de­ fined a clear and consistent point of view. From first to last he coolly opposed the idealization of passion in which so many of his contemporaries engaged. Having rejected the ethos of romantic love, and achieved in small works and large, a recension of the classical-ra­ tionalist attitudes, he appears ready to renounce love even as a subject of poetry. In his finely admiring essay on the life and work of Joubert, Arnold expressed the attitude of his middle years in the quotations which he chose to represent the "delicacy and penetration" of his author. One of these passages he described as being "worthy of Goethe, to clear the air at one's entrance into the region of literature." The sentence expresses very well what Arnold himself had come, in the course of his poetic career, to feel the place of passionate and agonizing subjects in literature to be. Joubert had writ42

It should also be observed that there are good reasons for concluding that most of the poem was written as early as 1851.

THE IDEA OF LOVE

ten: "With the fever of the senses, the delirium of the passions, the weakness of the spirit; with the storms of the passing time and with the great scourges of hu­ man life,—hunger, thirst, dishonour, diseases and death, —authors may as long as they like go on making novels which shall harrow our hearts, but the soul says all the while, 'You hurt me'."43 For the poet who shares these feelings there is no more to say about love. 43

Complete Prose Works, in, 201-202.

I

HAVE made no attempt in this study of Arnold to map the whole terrain of his poetry, but merely have indicated its bounds and marked a path into it for the reader. A critical enterprise of this sort should at least make clear the kind of poet Arnold was. Some poets seem to receive their impression of the external world entirely through the eye, others through the nervous system; for Arnold the organ of response was most decidedly the mind, and the only way to enter the region of his poetry is to trace the lineaments of that mind as they are defined by the poet's ideas. Though these facts seemed incontrovertible, I had not anticipated that the scrutiny of the several constellations of poems from which Arnold's ruling ideas emerge would bring one round empirically to repeated assertions of the same general truths, to a continual rediscovery of his pro­ found and constructive humanism, of his rejection of both classical mimesis and Romantic expressionism. Ar­ nold was too much a man of the nineteenth century to consider the imitation of general nature to be the highest end of poetry. But he also recoiled from the Romantic tendency to approve a poetry that was a "true allegory of the state of one's own mind," and despised an art which was merely the expression of the poet's own floating moods. Arnold's principles demanded an almost unattainable precision of thought and feeling, and required that he try—at the risk of failure and un­ popularity—to create a distinctive style of poetry.

COMCLUSIOM It is Arnold's distinction to be a critical poet, not only in the sense that he was—like Dryden, Coleridge, or Eliot—an artist who practiced criticism as a means of clarifying his own literary task and creating a favor­ able atmosphere for the reception of his poetry, but in that his cast of mind and essential interests led him to use poetry as an instrument of critical analysis directed at the poet's own consciousness, at his own ways of thought and feeling about the external universe and the conduct of life. This is a rare and difi&cult accom­ plishment and I have come to believe that the fact that Arnold attempted it has more than anything else been damaging to his reputation in our time. For the hard truth is that critical poetry as Arnold practiced it runs counter to the poetic tenets held in the twentieth cen­ tury. A potent literary orthodoxy, which is now half a cen­ tury old, rests on a defense and rationalization of seventeenth-century metaphysical poetry and has supplied a program both for modern "metaphysical" verse and for certain aspects of the New Criticism. Its precepts are familiar: generally speaking, they define a poem as an autonomous formal structure, integral in its own realm of discourse. The figurative language of poetry is judged successful almost to the degree that it is based on a coherent pattern of evolved imagery which ap­ peals to what has been called "concrete" feeling. Crit­ ics of this school have characteristically insisted that "thought" in a poem must emerge from a "strain of pas­ sionate paradoxical reasoning which knits the first line to the last." The key emphases in this system of poetics

COMCLUSIOJV

are on what Eliot has called "unification of sensibility," and on a response from the reader which has been de­ scribed as a "direct, sensuous apprehension of thought," or as the "recreation of thought into feeling." For those who hold to these tenets there can be no successful po­ etry devoted to the statement of ideas; no matter how vital the thought, such work would inevitably be de­ ficient in that "passionate paradoxical reasoning" which alone can be called "poetic." This line of twentiethcentury theory has had a healthy influence in directing attention to elements of poetic texture and form which earlier critics had overlooked. But the normative aspects of the neo-metaphysical criticism (though usually un­ acknowledged by its practitioners) have been disturb­ ingly restrictive: the virtues of Romantic poetry, for example, are simply not revealed by the kind of analysis this theory favors; and most of Arnold's work—along with all poetry of statement—is rejected out of hand. Many of the objections to poetry of statement in­ volve an understandable—but now outdated—disap­ proval of the excesses of Victorian practice. The di­ dactic principles of some nineteenth-century criticism encouraged a body of verse that was no more than the rhythmic statement of elevated truisms and inflated conceptions of "Things in General." It is not difficult, however, to recognize this kind of poetry and to reject it for its total impoverishment of thought and feeling. At the other extreme there is a poetry of statement which fails on a higher level because it undertakes philosophical inquiries and reasonings which we can-

CONCLUSIOJV

not accept as the natural materials of poetry.1 We all find some truth in Mallarme's dictum, "ce n'est point avec des idees qu'on fait des sonnets, mon cher Degas, c'est avec des mots"; though our acceptance of the statement should be modified by the memory that the ultimate achievement of Mallarme1S poetic program was the blank page. Arnold was decidedly not interested in writing po6sie pure; his poetry, good and bad, was dedicated to the service of life, and life for him meant active ideas. He addressed himself to what he called "imaginative reason," writing in a way that does not ingratiate him with the admirers of Mallarme, but makes it possible for him to avoid the extremes of both the impossibly banal and the unacceptably abstruse. The essential pattern of poetry of statement is one of conceptual meaning, not, needless to say, of image, or myth, or dramatic device. It proceeds through intel­ lectual discourse, relying for its effects on the author­ ity of its ideas, on brilliance of epithet, concision and force of definition and exposition. Such poetry, it can be said without prejudice, has the virtues of good prose, but lacks the charm of intense metaphorical complexity. And yet, in spite of the accepted aesthetic theories, read­ ers demonstrably take pleasure in sheer verse statement. Patterns of thought which are suitable to expository prose, and which can only be presented in some form of sequential discourse, give poetic pleasure when they are cast in a heightened language and made rhythmic and sonorous. Lucretius was a master of poetry of state1 Here, and throughout this discussion, I am indebted to George Santayana's Three Philosophical Poets, Cambridge, Mass., 1910.

CONCLUSION

ment, and the attractions of his poem on nature are not to be accounted for by any theory which makes pas­ sionate paradox the yardstick of excellence. Dryden and Pope frequently merely stated a thought in poetry, but stated it so evocatively that it aroused a train of rele­ vant associations. One of the unregarded anomalies of modern literature is the fact that several of the poets whose work is supposed to represent the living contra­ diction of a poetry of statement are themselves impres­ sive practitioners of it. In Eliot's ripest work, Four Quartets, rhythmic, slightly heightened expository dis­ course is frequent; one of the best examples comes in the last section of Little Gidding: What we call the beginning is often the end And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. And every phrase And sentence that is right (where every word is at home, Taking its place to support the others, The word neither diffident nor ostentatious, An easy commerce of the old and the new, The common word exact without vulgarity, The formal word precise but not pedantic, The complete consort dancing together) Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, Every poem is an epitaph. And any action Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start. Only occasionally does Arnold's poetry have the elo­ quence or resonance of these lines, but the language the

COJiCLUSIOJi poet describes in this passage is much like Arnold's ideal language, and Eliot's austere straightforwardness comes close to the dominant tone of Arnold's poetry. Yeats too, though far less often than Eliot, based his poetry on simple statement. Ego Dominus Tuus is a dialogue between two selves of the poet, the romanticist (called Hic) and the dramatic, objective poet (Ille). An impressive part of the debate runs as follows: Hie. Yet surely there are men who have made their art Out of no tragic war, lovers of life, Impulsive men that look for happiness And sing when they have found it. llle. No, not sing, For those that love the world serve it in action, Grow rich, popular and full of influence, And should they paint or write, still it is action: The rhetorician would deceive his neighbors, The sentimentalist himself; while art Is but a vision of reality. What portion in the world can the artist have Who has awakened from the common dream But dissipation and despair? To emphasize the similarities of Arnold's practice to that of Eliot and Yeats it might be effective to cite the chorus from Merope which I have already quoted. I do not wish now to defend this most contemned of Arnold's works, or even to imply that Arnold wrote much verse that could stand up to Little Gidding and Ego Dominus Tuus. I would only suggest that it is capriciously doctrinaire to reject any poetry merely be­ cause it is expository. This passage from Merope is,

COJfCLUSIOJf like those I have quoted from Eliot and Yeats, poetry of unadorned statement—and, like them, it is effective poetry: Much is there which the sea Conceals from man, who cannot plumb its depths. Air to his unwing'd form denies a way, And keeps its liquid solitudes unsealed. Even earth, whereon he treads, So feeble is his march, so slow, Holds countless tracts untrod. But more than all unplumb'd, Unsealed, untrodden, is the heart of man. More than all secrets hid, the way it keeps. Nor any of our organs so obtuse, Inaccurate, and frail, As those wherewith we try to test Feelings and motives there. These three examples of successful poetry fulfill Eli­ ot's requirement that every phrase and sentence be right; and I think that in most cases where poetry of statement works it does so either by an exquisite Tight­ ness of diction or by the sheer excitement of its ideas. When such poetry fails it is by being either too platitu­ dinous or too abstract. A poet as intellectually sophis­ ticated as Arnold did not run to platitude, but he was often in danger of overabstraction. If we are to read Ar­ nold sympathetically we must begin by accepting the fact that his poetry is an attempt to apply ideas to life, and go on to consider the ways he devised to make such poems effective.

COJ^CLUSIOJf

W. Η. Auden has said that "one of the greatest prob­ lems of the poet is how to express abstract ideas con­ cretely,"2 and certainly one of Arnold's major efforts was to cast the largely intellectual action of his poems in concrete terms. When he succeeds in making his poetry a sensible expression of his ideas, Arnold's ap­ proach has something in common with the Existen­ tialists: Kierkegaard said that the true thinker set out to understand "the abstract concretely," and Gabriel Mar­ cel has spoken of the need for a genuine philosophical work to have "the sting of the real." Arnold's principal means of making his poetry concrete involve either building an image out of the objective situation of a poem, or dramatizing the process of thought itself. If we consider first what I would call the image of situation, it is apparent that Arnold practiced a kind of impressionism which looks back to the theories of Goethe and forward to Existential literature. Goethe, in a letter to Schiller, described his own need to find in external nature some Anschauung, or "thing seen," which would remove his art from the purely speculative level where, he felt, it perished, and give to his poetry a saving concreteness.8 On a relatively simple level Ar­ nold builds his poems around aspects of contemporary life vividly realized as scenes, and so charged with sig­ nificance that they come to represent a whole culture. In Heine's Grave, for one example, the sense of what 2

New Republic, LXXXX (1939), 135. The relevant passage reads: ". . . zu jedem Satze eine An­ schauung suchen muss und deshalb gleich in die Natur hinaus fliehe." Der Briefwechsel zwischen Goethe und Schiller, Gedenkausgabe, xx, 881. 8

CONC LUSIOJf Heine was as man and poet is conveyed through a series of impressionistic vignettes: we see the poet's grave in PSre Lachaise, the rural landscape of the Hartz, and the constricting world of fashion in such a way that each small scene embodies a way of life and thought. Here is the description of the drawingrooms in which Heine's life was worn away: . . . from hot Paris drawing-rooms, and lamps Blazing, and brilliant crowds, Starr'd and jewell'd, of men Famous, of women the queens Of dazzling converse—from fumes Of praise, hot, heady fumes, to the poor brain Heine's spirit outworn Long'd itself out of the din, Back to the tranquil, the cool Far German home of his youth! (lines 140-151) Both in quality and function these vignettes remind us of those in late nineteenth-century fiction, but in poetry I think only Yeats and Auden (both much influenced by Arnold) have been capable of realizing a scene of con­ temporary life in such a way that it becomes an image of cultural experience. Arnold's more complicated use of the Goethean Anschauung involves the finding of external situations which localize and direct his meditation, converting an abstract reflection into a moment of realization. As, in a famous passage in Sartre's La Nausee, the chestnut tree not only evokes the protagonist's insight into exist-

CONCLUSION

ence, but is that existence, certain locales in Arnold's poems acquire a unique and essential significance. In Rugby Chapeli to choose a modest example, the mean­ ings of the poem rise out of the situation in which the speaker finds himself: . . . The field Strewn with its dank yellow drifts Of wither'd leaves, and the elms, Fade into dimness apace, Silent;—hardly a shout From a few boys late at their play! The lights come out in the street, In the school-room windows;—but cold, Solemn, unlighted, austere, Through the gathering darkness, arise The chapel-walls, in whose bound Thou, my father! art laid. The approach to the chapel through the dim autumn evening is the external dimension of that inward dis­ covery which the elegy records. In a similar way the Grande Chartreuse and Dover Beach are features of a moral landscape, not symbols, but localities rich in associations which—for the reader as well as for the poet—provoke and convey the speculative thought. But Arnold's finest achievement as a critical poet is his making intellectual activity dramatic. When his thought most fully expresses the sting of the real—in such poems as The Strayed Reveller, Resignation, or The Buried Life—we not only follow the exposition of an idea, but become aware of the process by which the poet perceives and realizes it. The poem recreates a mo-

CO JVC L U SIOJV

ment of insight; its statement as a whole is an image of the poet's mind working on the materials of thought and perception. As I look back on the approaches I have made to Arnold's poetry, I see that a good deal of my comment devolves into an attempt to show how he made active the exposition of his ideas, how he gave a dra­ matic quality to his poems of statement. He did not always succeed as a poet: it is hard, he said, to be ex­ cellent. But in spite of the arid stretches and the early atrophy of his lyrical gifts, his poetic career represents something more grand than failure and less vulgar than success. It was Arnold's genuine and largely unheeded triumph to be one of the few poets in any language who could make a poem an active instrument of his vision, not merely the formulated result of his thought, but the means by which that thought assumed shape and life.

•291

Alexander the Great: Arnold on, 273n Allott, Kenneth, 249-250 Anouilh, Jean, Antigone, 41 Argonautica Orphica, 41n Arnold, Jane (the poet's sis­ ter), 55n Arnold, Matthew: POETRY

Absence, 216, 226, 245246 Austerity of Poetry, 85 Bacchanalia, 17, 19, 83, 86, 97-102 Balder Dead, 86 "Below the surfacestream," 193 The Buried Life, 163, 168181, 186, 191, 193, 194, 290 Calais Sands, 249-250 A Caution to Poets, 84 Despondency, 217 Destiny, 217 Dover Beach, 56, 83, 137, 162, 233, 279 A Dream, 162, 221, 227 Empedocles on Etna, 17, 25, 83, 85n, 129, 153156, 180-181, 187-188 Epilogue to Lessing^s Laocoon, 86-97, 100, 102 153n, 159 Euphrosyne, 216, 218-219

Excuse, see Urania Faded Leaves, 160, 213214, 216, 218, 219, 228n, 237n, 248-254 A Farewell, 217, 221, 227, 237-240 Fragment of a Chorus of a u Dejaneira," 188 Growing Old, 192, 278 Heine's Grave, 37-38, 102103, 288-289 Human Life, 186-187, 217 Indifference, see Euphrosyne In Harmony with Nature, 109-111, 116, 127-128, 150, 151 In Utrumque Paratus, 118126, 138 Isolation: Tο Marguerite, 227, 241-243, 244 The Lake, see Meeting Lines Written by a Death­ bed, 217, 219-220 Lines Written in Kensing­ ton Gardens, 159-160 Longing, 216, 219, 252 Meeting, 216, 219, 225226, 227, 233 Memorial Verses, 70-71, 75-78, 158-159 Merope, 86, 183-184, 286287

I N D E X ARNOLD'S POETRY, cont.

A Modern Sappho, 205208, 209 Morality, 150-151 The New Sirens, 17, 3954, 55, 62, 69, 208209, 212 Obermann Once More, 7 In, 83, 102 On the Rhine, 216, 219, 250, 252 Palladium, 187n, 188-189 Parting, 215, 216, 226, 227, 232-237, 238, 241 Persistency of Poetry, 84 Philomela, 56, 78-83 Poor Matthias, 278 The Power of Youth, 136n A Question (To Fausta), 211, 212 Quiet Work, 127-128, 143, 144 Religious Isolation, 111112,143,181 Resignation, 17, 37, 5470, 86, 87, 91-92, 93, 94, 102, 128-129, 130, 132-134, 143-144, 162, 237,290 Richmond Hill, 136n The River, 216, 218, 219, 249-251 Rugby Chapel, 83, 102n, 290 The Scholar-Gipsy, 107, 160-161, 162-163, 276 The Second Best, 149-150

Self-Deception, 185-186, 217 Self-Dependence, 140-146, 149, 181-182 Separation, 249, 251-252 Sohrab and Rustum, 162 Sonnet (The World's Tri­ umph), 217 A Southern Night, 152153 Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse, 17, 47n, 101, 102n, 276 Stanzas in Memory of the Author of uObermann," 70-75, 76, 160, 173 The Strayed Reveller, 1629, 39, 54, 55, 58, 62, 69, 70, 79, 80, 86, 92, 94, 152-153n, 290 A Summer Night, 56, 148149 Switzerland, 160, 213248, 250, 252, 253, 259 The Terrace at Berne, 227, 228, 245, 246-247 Thyrsis, 83, 102n, 160162 To a Friend, 29-36 passim, 92 To Marguerite—Continued, 217, 241, 243-245 To my Friends (A Mem­ ory-Picture ), 204-205, 208, 221, 224-225, 227 Too Late, 173, 216, 219, 251

INDEX Tristram and 18eult, 21S, 220, 254-277 Urania, 216, 218 The Voice, 209-211, 212 A Wi8h, 129-lS0 The World and the Quietist, 36-39, 59 Worldly Place, 112n Youth and Calm, 217 The Youth of Man, 136140, 182, 184-185, 192, 233 The Youth of Nature, 134lS6, 15Sn, 158, 182183, 184 PROSE

"A French Critic on Goethe," 10 "George Sand," 48-49 "Joubert," 7, 279-280 Letters of Matthew Arnold, 3n,6n Letter8 to Clough, SIn, S435, 42-46, 50-51, 63, 74, 75, 85, 146n, 215, 255, 275, 277 "The Literary Influence of Academies," 110 "On the Modem Element in Literature," 29-30 Preface to Poem8 (1853), 103 "St. Paul and Protestantism, 193n "Senancour," 71n "Spinoza and the Bible," 115

Unpubli8hed Letter8 of Matthew Arnold, 14 Yale Manuscript, 35-36, 59, 84n, 112-11S, 114, 172-173, 187, 192n

Arnold, Dr. Thomas (the p0et's father): remarks on science, 107, 229-230 Arnold, Thomas, Jr. (the poet's brother), 74 Arnold, William Delafield (the poet's brother), 152 Auden, W. H.: on abstract ideas in poetry, 288, 289 Babbitt, Irving, 9, 47; The New Laokoiin, 87-88, 89n Bacon, Francis, "Of Love," 199-200 Baudelaire, Charles, 148; image of the gouflre, 174n Baum, Paull F., 5n, 44n, 256n, 270 Beach, Joseph Warren, 108109, 113n, 116n, 147n Beethoven, Ludwig van: Arnold on, 89, 96 Beutler, Ernst, 23n Bhagavad Gita: Arnold's knowledge of, 146 Bocklin, Arnold, 45 Boileau-Despreaux, Nicolas, Art poetique, 13 Bonnerot, Louis, 36n, 52n, 62n, 71n, 86n, 244 Boyd, James, 118n Brown, E. K., 5n, lIn, 12n Browning, Robert, 3, 13, 14;

• 295 •

I N D E X ARNOLD'S PROSE, cont.

Essay on Shelley, 15; Fra Lippo Lippi, 96; James Lee's Wife, 145, 157, 168; Dis Aliter Visum, 202; Now, 202, 207 Brunetigre, Ferdinand, 9, 47 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 20, 50; Arnold on, 71, 73, 76, 108, 165, 167, 174, 190, 211 Caesar, Julius: Arnold on, 273n Cairncross, Andrew S., 228n Carlyle, Thomas, 190 Carr6, J. M., Iln Chamisso, Adalbert von, Frauen-Liebe und Leben, 223 Chateaubriand, Fraxu^ois Rene de, Rene, 73 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 271 Chavannes, Puvis de, 45 Cicero, Marcus Tullius: Ar­ nold on, 110; De Natura Deorum, 185 Clough, Arthur Hugh, 14, 29, 34, 37; his judgment of The New Sirens, 43-44, 111-112; as subject of Thyrsis, 161; conception of duty, 172; Amours de Voy­ age, 228; Bothie of Toberna-vuolich, 230-232. See also Letters to Clough (un­ der: Arnold, Matthew) Coleridge, Samuel Taylor: Arnold on, 7, 32, 44; his

conversation poems, 56, 79, 106, 108, 113, 135136, 174,282 Cowper, William, 106 Daniel, Samuel, Ulysses and the Sirens, 42 D'Arcy, M. C., 197n Degas, Edgar, 284 Descartes, Reng de, 200 Donne, John, 100 Dryden, John, 282, 285 Dunlop, J. C., History of Fic­ tion, 255n, 256n Eckermann, J. P., Gesprdche mit Goethe, 102n, 134n Eliot, George, 172 Eliot, T. S., The Waste Land, 81-82, 282, 283; Little Gidding, 285-287 Empedocles: Arnold on, 35. See also Empedocles on Et­ na (under: Arnold, Mat­ thew) Epictetus, Enchiridion, 68; Discourses, 110-111, 128 Epicurus: Arnold on, 35 France, Marie de, 271 Freud, Sigmund, 172, 190 Gide, Andre, Thesee, 41 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: Arnold on, 10-11, 48, 71, 72, 76-78, 89, 115, 158-159, 279; his Greek metres, 17n; Grenzen der

I N D E X Menschheit, 23n; Herbst, 32; Generalbeichte, 33, 34; Circe, 40-41, 62n; Dichtung und Wahrheit, 6465n; Werther, 73, 105, 108; Das Gottliche, 116118, 151, 155, 130-134; Dauer im Wechsel, 131133; Eins und Alles, 131133; Vermachtnis, 131, 134; eWinckelmann und sein Jahrhundert," 131, 139; Zahme Xenien, 143144; Proomion, 146-147, 166, 190; Wtlhelm Meister, 228; Faust, 228, 239; Briefwechsel zwischen Goe­ the und Schiller, 288, 289 Gray, Thomas, An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard, 45; The Progress of Poesy, 84, 97 Hardy, Thomas, 107 Harris, Alan, 7n Hegel, G. W. F., Phenome­ nology of Mind, 190 Heine, Heinrich: his Greek metres, 17n; Die Gdtter Griechenlands, 41; Freier Rhythmus of, 79n; Arnold on, 102-103; Fragen, 140142; Die Nordsee, 222; Verschiedene, 222, 289 Heraclitus, 130-131, 132 Herbert, George, 100 Herodotus, History, 38-39

Hill, Herbert: Arnold's letter to, 255, 274 Homer: Arnold on, 35-36, 96; Odyssey, 41 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 106 Houghton, R. E. C., 255n Hughes, Thomas, Tom Brown at Oxford, 228-232 Hulme, T. E., 47 Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature, 189-190 Hutton, R. H., 19 Johnson, E. D. H., 52n Joubert, Joseph, 7n; Pensees, essais, et maximes, 48; Ar­ nold on, 279-280 Jump, J. D., 175n Jung, C. G., 172, 190 Keats, John, Sleep and Po­ etry, 13; The Eve of Saint Agnes, 45; Arnold on, 6263, 79; letter to Fanny Brawne, 201; Ode on a Grecian Urn, 267 Kierkegaard, S0ren, 288 Killy, Walther, 14 In Laing, R. D., The Divided Self, 191-192 La Villemarque, Theodore de, "Les poSmes gallois et Ies romans de la Table-Ronde," 255-257, 275-276 Leibniz, G. W. von, 131 Lessing, G. E., 9-10, 86n; his Laokodn, 87-89, 90, 91.

INDEX See also Epilogue to Lessing's Laocoön (under: Arnold, Matthew) Lucretius, 23n, 66, De rerum natura, 130, 284-285 Lyttelton, Arthur T., 253 MallarmS, Stéphane, 284 Malory, Sir Thomas, Morte d'Arthur, 256, 257, 275 Marcel, Gabriel, 288 Marcus Aurelius: Arnold's sonnet on, 112n Mendelssohn, Felix: Arnold on, 89 Meredith, George, 107 Milton, John, 4 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus: Arnold on, 89 Müller, Wilhelm, Die Schöne Mullerin, 223; Die Winterreise, 223 Nelli, Ren6, L'Amour et les mythes du coeur, 197n, 201 Nietzsche, Friedrich, Birth of Tragedy, 27n Nygren, Anders, Eros and Agape, 197-198 Old Testament: Arnold on, 36 Orrick, James B., lln, 102n Ovid, Metamorphoses, 41n Paul, H. W., 144n Pausanius, 89 Platen, August von, 102n

Plato, Republic, 4 In Plutarch, 199 Pope, Alexander, 12; Essay on Criticism, 13, 285 Raphael, Sanzio: Arnold on, 96 Bobbins, William, 139n Rossetti, William Michael: review in The Germ, 204, 212 Rougemont, Denis de, L'Amour et POcddent, 197198, 254 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 165, 194 Ruskin, John, 106 Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin, 3; prefatory essay to Oeuvres de Virgtle, 9; Volupte, 229 St. Matthew, 155 Sand, George, 20, 50, 167. See also "George Sand" (under: Arnold, Matthew) Santayana, George, Three Philosophical Poets, 284n Sartre, Jean-Paul, VEtre et le nSant, 190-191; La NausSe, 289-290 ScheUing, F. W. J. von, 131 Schubert, Franz, Die Schone MUllerin, 223; Die Winterreise, 223 Schumann, Robert, FrauenLiebe und Leben, 223

• 298 •

INDEX Scott, Sir Walter, Sir Tristrem, 255n Seilliere, Ernest, 9 Sells, Iris, 71n, 214-215n, 249 Senancour, litienne de, 20, 50, 71-75, 167, 194. See also Obermann Once More and Stanzas in Memory of the Author of uObermannn (under: Arnold, Matthew) Seneca, 185 Shakespeare, William: Ar­ nold on, 35-36, 96; Son­ nets, 273-274 Shaw, George Bernard, Cae­ sar and Cleopatra, 40 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 108, 209n, 211 Sophocles: Arnold on, 30-32, 35, 72, 199 Spinoza, Baruch, 66, Arnold on, 115 130, 133, 164, 185 StaSl, Madame de: Joubert on, 48 Stanley, Arthur P., 107n Stanley, Carleton, 86, 130 Stoics and Stoicism, 65, 66, 68, 112n, 115, 123, 185, 199 Super, R. H., 7n Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 43; on In Utrumque Paratus, 119n; Tristram of Lyonesse, 255 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 3, 4,

7; The Poet, 13, 14, 15; Arnold on, 35, 106, 107, 126, 157, 158, 166-167, 174; Tears, Idle Tears, 209-2 IOn; Idylls of the King, 220, 255, 270, 235, 271 Thomson, James, 106 Tillotson, Kathleen, 243n, 244 Tinker, C. B. and Lowry, H. F., The Poetry of Mat­ thew Arnold, 24n, 34n, 37, 43, 44η, 52n, 55n, 83n, 84η, 110η, 119n, 144n, 173η, 187n, 209n, 212n, 214η, 255n, 256n, 266n, 274n, 275n Todi, Giacopone da, 85 Trilling, Lionel: on Matthew Arnold, 31, 109, 177-179 Virgil, Eclogue VI, 27n; Georgics II, 76-78; Aeneid, 119-120 Wagner, Richard, Tristan und Isolde, 201-202, 254255, 257, 261-263, 270; Arnold on, 262 Walbrook, H. M., 228-229n Ward, Mrs. Humphry, 55n White, Helen C., I l n Whitridge, Arnold, 14 Wightman, Frances Lucy (the poet's wife), 248-249 Wordsworth, William: Ar-

I N D E X nold on, 14, 71, 72, 75-78, 89, 135-136, 158-159, 182; Tintern Abbey, 5455, 61, 62n; The Border­ ers, 68-69, 105, 106, 108, 109, 113; "So fair, so sweet, withal so sensitive," 157, 161, 162; The Prel­

ude, 165-166, 173; "Lucy Poems," 222 Xenophon, Symposium, 199 Yeats, William Butler, 4, 12; Among School Children, 56, 69, 145; Ego Dominus Tuus, 286-287, 289