Section IL, 1914 1309] Trans. R.S.C. 



Matthew Arnold as Poet. 



By Pelham Edgar, Ph.D. 



Presented by Nathanael Burwash, F. R.S.C. 



(Read May 26, 1914) 



Matthew Arnold's poetry wears well, and he enjoys the excep- 

 tional privilege of being a classic who is still read. A clamorous 

 popularity he can never have, — his tone is too quiet, his thought 

 too discreetly tempered by an emotion that knows none of the cres- 

 cendos of passion and disdains the facile appeal to our sentimental 

 weaknesses. He is in spite of the crispness of his utterance curiously 

 evasive, and the seeker for a positive message of encouragement 

 must patch up a doctrine for himself elsewhere. Arnold in a well- 

 known essay discovered the secret of Gray in the phrase, — "He 

 never spoke out." May we not say of Arnold the poet that he never 

 made up his mind, or only at best made up his mind that it was 

 necessary to make up his mind ? His verse presents the problem 

 of a severed personality: his prose volumes propose the solution. 

 And because he thought that in these latter he had discovered a 

 valid method for confronting our doubts, he was fatuously inclined 

 to imagine that the importance of his work lay there. We who are 

 perhaps sceptical of his solutions cherish rather that portion of his 

 career when the springs of verse still flowed to ease the overcharged 

 fountains of his mind. For contagious optimism, buoyancy, passion, 

 or for the serene content that the vision of a completer wisdom bestows 

 we must go elsewhere — to Shelley, to Wordsworth, to Browning, 

 to Goethe. Yet moods of the mind there are when Arnold appeals 

 to us if not as the supreme yet as the most satisfying poet of our 

 time, when his pensive elegiac grace, his "sense of tears in mortal 

 things" rouses in us a quick responsive sympathy, and when his fever 

 of unrest and the thirsting of his soul for peace are the faithful image 

 of our own divided natures. 



His earliest verses already present the problems which grew 

 more urgent as the years advanced, and the opening poem, "Quiet 

 Work" indicates the only solution that his poetry was capable of 

 yielding. These are not striking verses, but there is much of Arnold 

 in them. An eager though not slavish Wordsworthian, he seeks in 

 nature a counterpoise for his own anxiety of soul, and for the feverish 



