8i8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Arnold, is to turn from the poetry of evasion to the poetry of 

 skepticism. Here we find, as the burden of all their song, not the 

 reactionary indiif erence of the simple artist, but the eager probing 

 of the inquirer. Clough and Arnold are modern men, standing 

 face to face with the problems of modern life. There is in their 

 works no hatred of the new knowledge for itself, no intellectual 

 cowardice regarding it ; on the contrary, every fresh insight into 

 the methods of Nature and the laws of life is welcome ; but there 

 is, at the same time, painful realization of the fact that the old 

 foundations of the emotions are being sapped and undermined. 

 What will be the result ? Will science in this respect prove con- 

 structive as well as destructive ? Will new emotional bases be 

 given in place of those swept away ? Or, will all the immemorial 

 desires and aspirations and spiritual cravings of humanity be left 

 to perish in grim despair before the blighting breath of a crass 

 materialism which recognizes no sanctities and holds out no hope ? 

 These are the stubborn questions which, in one form or another, 

 are put again and again, and for the most part left unanswered, 

 in the poetry of the men to whom we now refer. 



Clough's poetry, though little read to-day, and lacking almost 

 every element of popularity, is of the utmost interest for those 

 who care for the study of literature from the point of view here 

 adopted. It was with little exaggeration that Mr. Lowell ad- 

 judged him the man who most probably "will be thought, a hun- 

 dred years hence, to have been the truest expression in verse of 

 tlie moral and intellectual tendencies, the doubt and struggle 

 toward settled convictions, of the period in which he lived." He 

 was the plaything of conflicting tendencies, which he saw he cc uld 

 not harmonize. Everywhere in his poetry the striving after truth 

 is accompanied by a distressing realization of emotions out of 

 touch and keeping with his intellectual environment. " What I 

 mean by mysticism," he writes in one of his American letters, " is 

 letting feelings run on without thinking of the reality of their 

 object, letting them out merely like water. The plain rule in all 

 such matters is, not to think what you are thinking about the 

 question, but to look straight out at the things, and let them affect 

 you." This is the sane utterance of a manly nature, alive to the 

 manifold dangers of unchecked speculation, and not to be deceived 

 by theological or metaphysical jugglery into any false sense of 

 security. To hold fast to reality that he saw was the prime re- 

 quirement, to be fulfilled at any cost ; and to seek for emotional 

 excitation in what has been proved to be no reality, but a figment 

 or shadow, would have seemed to him the willful blindness of folly 

 or the despicable subterfuge of cowardice. But was the reality 

 itself capable of furnishing scope for that emotional satisfaction 

 which his nature demanded ? Sometimes with more, sometimes 



