POETRY AND SCIENCE. 819 



with less of hope, he approached this obstinate issue ; but the an- 

 swer of the sphinx was still, as it were, couched in riddles. Thus 

 his message to men was almost always a message of moods ; brief 

 seasons of faith alternating with other seasons in which the sense 

 of loss was so strong upon him that he was tempted to struggle to 

 save some floating remnant, worthless though it might turn out 

 to be, from the universal wreck of belief that was going on around 

 him. 



An equally characteristic and far more considerable exponent 

 of this attitude and mood of mind was Clough's friend Arnold. 

 It was his mission, too, to give poetic voice to the emotional rest- 

 lessness and craving which inevitably as we now see went 

 along with the intellectual progressiveness of his age. Arnold 

 (whose verse and prose, earlier and later, treatments of these 

 themes furnish subject-matter for most instructive contrast) has 

 given us the key to his position, while at the same time he has 

 shown us how acutely that position was realized by him in the 

 familiar lines in the splendid Stanzas from the Grande Char- ! 

 treuse, in which he describes himself as " wandering between two 

 worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born." The old faith 

 had gone with the old theories of the universe and man, and the 

 new theories of the universe and man had not yet revealed them- 

 selves in a religious light, or even shown themselves capable of 

 such revelation. For the time being they were hard, dry facts 

 of science merely ; that they would ever be more than this was 

 far from clear. Hence "the hopeless tangle of the age," the 

 " strange disease of modern life," the sense of futility and despair, 

 so characteristic of the large body of his poetic work. In the 

 wonderful poem just above referred to a poem that can hardly 

 be read too often or too carefully as an exposition of the spiritual 

 conditions of the man and his time all this is made particularly 

 clear. Why does Arnold linger among the shadows and tradi- 

 tions of the old Carthusian home he a skeptic of the later time ? 

 Because he is seeking sadly for the spiritual comfort which all 

 the while he knows he can never find, either in the old creed, 

 because he has intellectually outgrown it, or in the new, because 

 he has not yet emotionally appropriated it. Thus he must let the 

 world go its way, with some hope for the coming race of men, 

 perhaps, but for himself and his own time, none.* 



For Clough and Arnold, then, knowledge and feeling were out 

 of harmony ; yet at times they seem to have caught glimpses of 



* The skepticism of Arnold and Clough is to be found deepened to absolute despair in 

 the works of many of the minor verse-writers of the time as notably in that superb ex- 

 pression of pure pessimism The City of Dreadful Night. But conditions of space forbid 

 my following the matter into these further details. 



