[edgar] MATTHEW ARNOLD AS POET. 311 



us that we must forego our passionate hopes and crave rather "for 

 quiet and a peaceful mind." Man, the theatre of whose activities 

 is so august — the solemn hills, the eternal streams, the lonely sky — 

 spends himself in futile endeavour and craves a feverish joy for 

 which these mighty witnesses give no sufficient warrant. Endurance 

 not rapture is the secret of their strength: 



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. 



And even could the intemperate and unjustifiable prayer of man for 

 movement and an ampler sphere pierce the impenetrable ear of fate 

 it would avail us nothing. Swept onward in the dazzling eddy of 

 action our spirits have forgotten — "The something that infects the 

 world," — the secret namely that endurance and not rapture is the 

 final law of all being. 



Such poetry lowers the temperature of the reader, and the mood 

 that provoked it must have acted as a blight upon the poet himself. 

 This unprotesting stoicism infects all that Matthew Arnold has writ- 

 ten. If the poet tells us in an unguarded moment that "with joy 

 the stars perform their shining," we discover on analysis that this 

 joy is little better than the mere negation of joy, the absence of 

 striving, the freedom from all impulse to move out of the predestined 

 circle of immutable law. Perhaps that is the true way to interpret 

 the universal life; it is certainly not an inspiring way to interpret 

 the eager human impulse to advance upon untrodden paths, and it 

 is not the way adopted by those poets who conceive nature to be 

 victoriously alive, and not magnificently alien to the impulses which 

 govern human activities. Even Browning who makes few concessions 

 to the modern spirit of nature worship has given us in "Paracelsus" 

 a description of the coming on of spring to which, in its ecstasy and 

 intimate conviction of the creative raptures that thrill the pulses 

 of the awakening earth, Arnold's poetry never attains, though his 

 mind hovers intermittently over the idea of a preordained harmony 

 linking the two worlds which some disastrous chance has severed. 



An enquiry into the genesis of Arnold's view brings us round to 

 an aspect of his mind sufficiently familiar to attentive readers of his 

 prose. He complained that Carlyle in perpetually preaching conduct 

 to Englishmen was carrying coals to Newcastle. Arnold prefers to 

 say, and to say it a thousand times, that with us it is now a time to 

 Sec. I and II 1914—21 



