316 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



inconsistent prelude to the smoky end which awaits our philosopher. 

 The monologue concludes upon the characteristic Arnoldian 

 note in which neither hedonist nor enthusiast speaks, but the man 

 who, having faced the issues of existing ills, is content to confront 

 life without hope as without despair: 



I say: Fear not! Life still 



Leaves human effort scope, 



But, since life teems with ill, 



Nurse no extravagant hope; 



Because thou must not dream, thou need'st not then despair! 



The second act which passes on the summit of Etna introduces 

 us to a Byronic situation — a self-tortured soul communing in solitude 

 with the untamed elemental forces of nature. But the comparison is 

 all in Arnold's favour. The disease of which Manfred is sick is 

 egotism, and his remedy is to unpack his heart in wild and whirling 

 speeches, which disclose no problem that can be considered as even 

 remotely philosophical. The words of Empedocles have nothing of 

 the characteristic Byronic violence; but their grief is richly freighted 

 with ideas that lay beyond the limits of Byron's power. In the one 

 poem we have a tragedy of the will, in the other the infinitely subtler 

 tragedy of the intelligence. 



I have said that the great monologue illustrates almost the 

 whole range of Arnold's lyric themes. But a few types it fails to 

 illustrate. There are notably the narrative lyrics of which "The 

 Forsaken Merman" is the most memorable example, and a group 

 of interesting critical poems like the "Epilogue to Lessing's Laocoon," 

 and others like "Haworth Churchyard," and "Heine's Grave" which 

 we find grouped among the elegiac poems, but whose predominating 

 impulse is critical rather than elegiac. This type originated with 

 Arnold and virtually died with him. He cultivated also the allegori- 

 cal lyric which Shelley foreshadowed in the opening passage of the 

 "Euganean Hills." To this allegorical class for example belong 

 "A Summer Night," a poem only discreetly touched with allegory, — 

 the brazen prison of our lives from which some few of us escape to 

 the hazards of a tragic voyage upon a harbourless sea, and "The 

 Buried Life" and "The Future" which are more consistently alle- 

 gorical. 



For the most part as we have seen the problems that press for 

 lyric utterance in Arnold — and it is questionable whether problems 

 ever should press for lyric utterance, — are problems of the brain 

 and not of the heart, and the intellectual emotion they yield is designed 



