in various music on one same text. It would have been hard to resign the moving, if unhopeful, cry of Parting: O tell me, friends, while yet ye hear,- O tell me, friends, while yet ye hear! O tell me, friends, ye hardly hear,— Ye would not say, ye would not speak,— O tell me, friends, ye hardly hear! 10 Whence could we have replaced the solemn music of the appeal against dogmatizing on the Unknowable? O Thou, in that mysterious shrine Do only Thou in that dim shrine, There, or if not, at least in eyes Be Thou but there,-in soul and heart, For myself I should be loath to have lost even the unsatisfying Easter Day Odes-Christ not risen, yet risen-the Questioning Spirit; and Bethesda.12 Together with these and other work of mark, we should, worst of all, have missed from literature a genuine amalgam of verse and meditation, the soul that nature designed Arthur Clough's to be, the real man. Whether at all, or how far, he succeeded in discovering a clue to the problems he handles, whether he might not, by passing them by, have had a brighter career, and been happier personally, is a different matter. To me he never appears to have felt that, with all his self-questionings, he had pioneered a via media. But my concern here is with him as poet-thinker; and in that double capacity he has won, without asserting a right, a distinct and honoured place. I do not assert that he proclaims his views either jubilantly or convincingly. I am sure that the strain is honest, is reverent, tends to lift on high, and is the singer's own. It is all this; yet his poems, with the brilliant exception of The Bothie of Tober-Na-Vuolich, were little read in his lifetime. With the same exception, they are less read now. How few have ever heard of Dipsychus, the wayward, vexing, fascinating maze of casuistry, into which he poured his whole soul! The English public takes small delight in philosophical poetry; and such, it pronounces, is Clough's. He wanders about Victorian literature like a phantom. Sometimes, however, phantoms are more of forces than are substances; and it may happen to be so with this. It is in truth difficult to believe that a spirit so gracious, so eager to learn and teach, so open-minded, so penetrating in its insight, so star-like, so generously fiery against injustice and tyranny, and against them alone, can actually be as evanescent in its influence as the deadness of popular interest in the works it permeates would seem to prove. Poems by Arthur Hugh Clough. With a Memoir. Sixth Edition. Macmillan & Co., 1878. 1 A River Pool (Early Poems), p. 7. 2 Songs in Absence, st. 4, p. 277. 3 Tì AάTμ (Early Poems), pp. 28-9. • Dipsychus (published after Clough's death), Part II, Sc. 2, pp. 101-2. 5 Ite Domum saturae (Miscellaneous Poems), p. 334. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich, 3, pp. 171-2. Ibid., 2, p. 167. 9 Say Not (ibid.), p. 345. 8 Peschiera (Miscellaneous Poems), p. 343. 10 Parting (Early Poems), stanzas 3-4, p. 32. 11 úμvos ävμvos (Religious Poems), stanzas 3-5, pp. 52-3. 12 Easter Day (Naples, 1849) (Religious Poems), pp. 61-6. Easter Day, II, pp. 67-8. The Questioning Spirit (Poems on Life and Duty), pp. 143-4. Bethesda, a Sequel (ibid.), pp. 145–6. MATTHEW ARNOLD 1822-1888 I HAVE no ghoulish taste for visiting charnel-houses; but the Escurial is more of a tomb than a palace. There it seemed natural to descend into the royal vaults. Not among the Monarchs, where her Consort was to lie, but in an ante-chamber was the coffin of his loved and lost young Montpensier Queen and Bride. Not for her to rest with Sovereigns; for she had left no child to reign. Matthew Arnold established no dynasty, annexed no province of poetry; so, I suppose, he must repose for the present not with, though beside, the Kings of Song. Gladly I believe that he will be crowned in his grave by posterity; for I myself account him worthy. As it is, he is a king de jure rather than de facto. I cannot deny that the reading public has not yet pronounced for his enthronement. If I may modify the metaphor as to dignities, I would say that he has been Beatified, not for the present Sanctified. His poetry is not of a kind to be spontaneously popular. It is a scholar's poetry, with the drawback of being, not so much over-learned, as over-educational. It is free from eccentricity, grotesqueness, rhetoric; and its freedom has operated in its disfavour. It makes no effort to amuse with story-telling, history, or burlesque. The singer kept an abundant store of humour, if full of gall, for his brilliant prose. None diversifies his poetry, unless it be discoverable in his ten-years' ineffectual wooing of blueeyed, pale, and angelically grave Marguerite by the gleam 6 lighted lake', and on the Terrace at Berne. Though the sin of monotony cannot be charged against his verse, not many keys are touched. Such as sound are all solemn and austere. Then, no Matthew-Arnold-Cult has arisen. No congregation, however minute, of reverent disciples gathers together in his name. Persons of refinement admire. They nurse the emotion in their own breasts. They fear to vulgarize it by publishing it abroad. The controversial fame which he acquired in the concluding stages of his career has itself in a way acted adversely. The sentiment of his essays was, though in the bitter without the sweet, akin to that of his verse. In latter days his poetry often appeared to be regarded as an appendage to his essays rather than they to it. Of the limitations, in fact, to his popularity there can be no question. They were necessary results of his whole habit of mind. He had an excessive tendency towards considering the poet a preacher, towards chanting homilies on the low aims and pursuits of modern society, its tinsel, its earthiness. He laid himself open to the reproach of parading as a discoverer of the hollowness of life. He was proud of being, through his honesty, a homeless wanderer forlorn from the hearth of orthodoxy. Sometimes he philosophized when he ought to have been singing. Often his thoughts pressed forward so eagerly as to threaten to stifle one another. Not merely are his poems unrelieved by a single flash of gaiety; they are not lighted by a sparkle of joy. Lastly, and most detrimentally, he insisted upon, perhaps could not help, mixing the work of the critical with that of the creative faculty. He would sit in judgement upon the purity of his own inspiration; upon the quantity of candle-power of the tongues of fire as they alighted upon him. One and all are heavy fetters upon fancy; and as |