312 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



Hellénise. Greek thought and French thought are to aid us in the 

 process, and to give us for crude fixedness and dogmatic strength 

 the flexibility of mind requisite to our harmonious development. 

 Similarly he finds the modern world at large infected with romantic 

 fervours, himself likewise smitten with the universal contagion. 

 Therefore he will preach and practise moderation, sanity, abnegation. 

 The brow may be flushed, but the brain must be cool, the pulse may 

 beat feverishly, but some sage physician, a Wordsworth or a wiser 

 than he, a Goethe must lay his tempering hand upon it, and stay 

 its throbbing ardours. And nature, whose intimate beauties he 

 knew so well and described with such loving fidelity and with such 

 felicity of touch as few English poets could rival and none overmatch, 

 nature in her large cosmic aspects is for him only the wisest of physi- 

 cians, with her unwearying calm counselling us to moderation, and 

 with her continuity rebuking our ephemeral desires. 



Arnold's refusal to philosophise, or shall we say rather to sophis- 

 ticate nature may denote the poverty of his mind upon the mystical 

 side, but it is richly compensated in the region of pure description 

 where he is under no constraint to read into nature meanings which 

 after all may be mere translations of our own labouring minds. He 

 would not anthropomorphise God, he will not except in playful 

 allegory anthropomorphise nature. And the gain in sanity, clearness 

 and fidelity is noteworthy. Arnold by virtue of his limitations no 

 less than by virtue of his qualities is among the greatest of our des- 

 criptive poets. He is never bent on making literature out of natural 

 effects, but is satisfied if with a few delicate touches he can give us 

 a background in harmony with the mood and tone of his poem. For 

 Arnold's poems as a whole are rather studies of particular moods 

 than presentations of public actions, and mood and landscape are 

 generally so fused that the weakening of one would imply the dis- 

 integration of the other. 



Though Arnold's range in poetry is somewhat severely limited 

 at once by his fastidiousness and his incapacity, yet within these 

 bounds there is still sufficient scope for purposes of classification. 

 We naturally find in his volume poems that represent an effort to 

 embody one of his favourite theories, namely, that a great action is 

 the essential thing in poetry, and that modern poets have gone astray 

 in their neglect of this precept, and in their eagerness to compensate 

 the defect of action by the brilliant elaboration of individual passages. 

 In this division of his poetry falls "Meropc," which may stand for 

 the miscarriage of his theories, and "Sohrab and Rustum" and "Balder 

 Dead" which represent these theories successfully and even trium- 

 phantly applied. All the poems of this group labour under the 



