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 LOS ANGELES
 
 STUDIES 
 IN INTERPRETATION 
 
 KB A TS—CL O UGH 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM HENRY HUDSON 
 
 Professor of English Literature in the Leland 
 Stanford jFttnior Uiiiversity 
 
 ciD 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 
 
 London : 24 Bedford Street, Strand 
 1896
 
 Copyright, i8q6 
 
 HY 
 
 G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 
 Entered at Stationers' Hall, London 
 
 Ube 1:nict;erboc(;ct- press, "new ]!?orb
 
 JOHN KEATS. 15 
 
 It should be borne in mind, however, that 
 when we undertake to describe Keats's mental 
 attitude towards modern tendencies, practical 
 or speculative, as an attitude of evasion, the 
 merely negative elements in this statement 
 are those which point towards the most sig- 
 nificant results. This fact has indeed been 
 anticipated in what we have already said, but 
 it is important enough to justify a word of re- 
 emphasis. Keats's unsympathetic contact with 
 the modern world involved little of active pro- 
 test or antagonism. If he could not enter into 
 the spirit of his age, he did not, on the other 
 hand, habitually set himself against it ; if he 
 was not inspired by the revolutionary fervor of 
 Shelley, neither was he driven to expostulate 
 with Wordsworth, or to jeer with Byron. Place 
 Keats alongside of his characteristic antithesis 
 among our great modern writers, Thomas Car- 
 lyle, and his position at once by contrast be- 
 comes clear. A spirit of intense revulsion from 
 the enlightenment of the century and all its 
 works certainly characterized poet and prophet 
 alike ; but this spirit of revulsion revealed it- 
 self in totally different ways. Carlyle faced 
 
 tion of Keats's Works, Vol. i., appendix). Keats studied 
 Dryden's versification carefully, and with considerable ad- 
 vantage, before he wrote Lamia ; and the marked contrast on 
 the formal side between this later poem, and the "slip-shod" 
 Endyniion is exceedingly instructive. The reader will remem- 
 ber Byron's unmeasured denunciation of Keats on the score of 
 the latter's antagonism to Pope.
 
 l6 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 the Ugly facts by which he found himself beset 
 with dogged courage and unflagging energy ; 
 he wrestled with all the most vital issues of his 
 age ; poured out the vials of his wrath upon the 
 new science, the new industrialism, the new de- 
 mocracy ; and raised his voice — the voice of one 
 crying in the wilderness — against the shams and 
 simulacra, the faithlessness and godliness of 
 modern life. Keats, on the contrary, simply 
 left these things alone. He turned his back 
 upon a world which was thus for Carlyle the 
 arena of a mighty spiritual conflict. The 
 changing order of the nineteenth-century world 
 absorbed all Carlyle's attention. By Keats it 
 was simply ignored. The one pulled with a 
 giant's strength against the stream of tendency. 
 The other gathered flowers upon the bank, and 
 carelessly let the turbid torrent roll by. 
 
 And here it should be remembered that in 
 Keats's own view of the matter, it was no part 
 of the poet's duty or function to assume the 
 prophetic role, and undertake the guidance and 
 leadership of men. For Carlyle, the poet was 
 a direct emissary of God, a vatcs, a seer. 
 " Every great poet is a teacher," wrote Words- 
 worth ; " I wish to be considered as a teacher 
 or as nothing." Shelley, as might be expected, 
 was consistent in his assertion of the poet's 
 high responsibilities and far-reaching influence. 
 " Poets," he declares, in the closing passage of 
 his impassioned Defence, " are the hierophants
 
 JOHN KEATS. 1/ 
 
 of an unapprehended inspiration ; the mirrors 
 of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts 
 upon the present ; the words which express 
 what they understand not ; the trumpets which 
 sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire ; 
 the influence which is moved not, but moves. 
 Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the 
 world." With 'Arnold and Lowell and Brown- 
 ing poetry has this same vital quality, this 
 direct bearing upon the immediate and actual 
 things of life ; while no reader is likely to for-' 
 get the young Tennyson's large claim, in the 
 poet's behalf, to divinely-given insight and 
 power : 
 
 " The poet in a golden clime was born, 
 With golden stars above ; 
 Dower'd with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, 
 The love of love. 
 
 He saw thro' life and death, thro' good and ill, 
 
 He saw thro' his own soul. 
 The marvel of the everlasting will 
 
 In open scroll 
 
 Before him lay." 
 
 But Keats's interpretation of his art had noth- 
 ing sacerdotal or apocalyptic about it. He did 
 not pose as a seer, nor did he ever show the 
 slightest tendency towards the didacticism upon 
 which Wordsworth fixed his mind. " To justify
 
 1 8 STUDIES IN- INTERPRETATION. 
 
 the ways of God to men " ; to throw Hght 
 upon the entangled problems of human life ; 
 to sound the battle-cry of progress, firing the 
 strong with fresh enthusiasm, and bringing the 
 stragglers into line and step — all this was alien 
 to his view of the gay science and its place and 
 influence in our noisy, bustling world. Poetry 
 for him meant relief from life's strain, sunshine 
 lig-liting its darkness, music amid its harsh dis- 
 cord and confusion — " a thing of beauty," and, 
 as such, " a joy forever." His highest purpose 
 was to keep unfurled 
 
 " Love's standard on the battlements of song " — ' 
 
 his accepted ideal, the love of " the principle 
 of beauty in all things " ; the noblest conceiva- 
 ble result of poetry the gentle moving away, 
 from time to time, of the pall by which our 
 spirits are so constantly darkened. Thus he 
 could write in remonstrance to Shelley, poet 
 and would-be reformer — " You will, I am sure, 
 forgive me for sincerely remarking that you 
 might curb your magnanimity, and be more of 
 an artist, and load every rift of your subject with 
 ore." Life has " burrs and thorns " in plenty, 
 but it is the business of poetry to set them 
 aside, not to feed upon them. Its great end is 
 
 " that it should be a friend 
 To soothe the cares and lift the thoughts of man " ; 
 
 ' Endymion, Book ii.
 
 JOHN KEATS. 1 9 
 
 and that end accomplished, the poet's proper 
 work is done. This inspiring principle of all 
 his writing reaches something like definite 
 formulation in Sleep and Poetry, and in the 
 following passage is given perhaps its dis- 
 tinctest enunciation : 
 
 " Yet I rejoice : a myrtle fairer than 
 E'er grew in Paphos from the bitter weeds 
 Lifts its sweet head into the air, and feeds 
 A silent space with ever-sprouting green. 
 All tenderest birds there find a pleasant screen, 
 Creep through the shade with jaunty fluttering. 
 Nibble the little cupped flowers, and sing. 
 Then let us clear away the choking thorns 
 From round its gentle stem ; let the young fawns, 
 Yeaned in after times, when we are flown, 
 Find a fresh sward bene:.l!i it, overgrown 
 With simple flowers ; let there nothing be 
 More boisterous than a lover's bended knee ; 
 Naught more ungentle than the placid look 
 Of one who leans upon a closed book ; 
 Naught more untranquil than the grassy slopes 
 Between two hills. All hail, delightful hopes ! 
 As she was wont, th' imagination 
 Into most lovely labyrinths will be gone. 
 And they shall be accounted poet kings 
 Who simply tell the most heart-easing things." 
 
 Recoiling thus from both the temper and the 
 mood of modern life, Keats consciously left the 
 obstinate questions that came up for considera-
 
 20 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 tion, the ancient problems in their modern 
 shapes, the party-cries, the distracting tumult 
 of practical affairs, the fierce death-grapple of 
 old and new in religion, morality, society, to 
 take care of themselves ; while, far from the 
 rush and turmoil, he lingered in his fairyland 
 of fancy, in the bower he had fashioned for 
 himself, 
 
 u^ " Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet 
 breathing." 
 
 III. 
 
 Before passing on to inquire a little more 
 closely into Keats's temperamental peculi- 
 arities as self-revealed in his work, we may 
 here pause a moment to notice the ob- 
 vious fact that the characteristic trend of his 
 genius is shown in the broadest possible Avay 
 both by his habitual choice of material, and by 
 his treatment of such material when chosen. 
 The themes of by far the greater proportion of 
 his poems belong, it need hardly be said, to the 
 past — to the " beautiful tales which have come 
 down from the ancient times of that beautiful 
 Greece," * or the literature and legend-lore of 
 the romantic middle ages. The texture of his 
 work is thus not woven out of the stuff fur- 
 nished by his own time. All these themes are, 
 
 ' Letter to his sister, Fanny, Sept. lo, 1817 (Forman's edi- 
 tion, Vol. iii., p. 78).
 
 JOHN KEATS. 21 
 
 moreover, handled in a singularly artistic and 
 objective spirit — a spirit at once unmodern and 
 unyouthful. It Avould of course be absurd to 
 maintain that in Endymioit, Lamia, Hyperion, 
 The Eve of St. Agnes, Isabella, analysis would 
 bring to light no trace of modern coloring, no 
 touch of specifically modern sentiment or 
 thought. In the romantic poems especially 
 these qualities are often manifest even to the 
 superficial and uncritical reader. Yet their 
 relative absence — in other words, the creative 
 impersonality of all these poems — must none 
 the less be set down as remarkable, particularly 
 when the age of the writer is taken into ac- 
 count. To make this point clear, one has only 
 to contrast La Belle Dame sans Merei with. Wil- 
 liam Morris's Hill of Venus in The Earthly 
 Paradise. The former stands before us as a 
 piece of well-nigh flawless artistic creation, un- 
 pervaded by modern feeling, unmarred by lyric 
 egoism. The latter, subtly and weirdly beau- 
 tiful as it is, is bathed in a " phantasmagoric 
 golden haze " which often passes " into twilight 
 sadness," and which, as Mr. Stedman says of 
 the stories of The Earthly Paradise taken as a 
 whole, belongs to the poet and his age, not to 
 the old wonder-tale itself.* 
 
 But the artistic objectivity of Keats's work is 
 exhibited in another equally important way. 
 In no case does the writer consciously or un- 
 ' The Nature of Poetry, p. 131.
 
 22 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 consciously make his poetry the vehicle for 
 the exposition of any new theory concerning 
 life or man. In this direction particularly the 
 remarkable generic difference separating the 
 work of Keats from the larger body of our 
 modern verse, with its highly subjective char- 
 acter and its insistence on ulterior purposes and 
 meanings, is very vividly brought out. On this 
 question much might be said by way of illus- 
 tration ; but it will be sufificient if we here 
 refer to the contrast presented, for example, 
 between such poems as Hyperion upon the one 
 hand, and the PrometJiais Unbound of Shelley 
 and the PromctJieus of Lowell, upon the other. 
 Shelley, distinctly repudiating any attempt " to 
 restore the lost drama of -^schylus," and in- 
 spired, as he confesses, by the " moral intent of 
 the fable," deliberately turns his superb drama 
 into a choral prophecy of a regenerated world.* 
 In the same way Lowell, just as distinctly 
 enunciating his belief that every poem should 
 contain a truth of philosophy, found himself 
 attracted to the often-treated subject of the 
 Titan's struggle against Zeus by reason of its 
 modern capabilities, and thus produced a work 
 which, in his own words, overruns " with true 
 radicalism and anti-slavery."* It is not difficult 
 to surmise to what new-world purposes such a 
 story as that of the downfall of the old Satur- 
 
 ' See his preface. 
 
 "^ Letters^ Vol. i., pp. 71-73.
 
 JOHN KEATS. 23 
 
 nian dynasty, undertaken in Hyperion, would 
 have lent itself in the hands of either of the 
 just-mentioned writers. The modern poet can, 
 indeed, rarely borrow a subject from the life of 
 the past without in some way breathing into 
 it a modern spirit, even if he does not, as often 
 happens, select it expressly for its aptness as a 
 medium for some latter-day gospel which he 
 may feel called upon to expound. Thus Ten- 
 nyson saturates the Idylls of the King with, the 
 spiritual atmosphere of the nineteenth century ; 
 thus even Browning, with his strong historical 
 sense, everywhere reveals our present tendency 
 towards investigation, analysis, the probing for 
 theory and solution ; thus — to take only a 
 couple of instances from minor writers — Lewis 
 Morris tags his stories from Hades with latter- 
 day morals, and Robert Buchanan cannot touch 
 the legends of Pan, Proteus, and Balder with- 
 out impressing upon them a significance which 
 belongs not to their own epoch, but to ours. 
 The method of Keats was the objective and 
 artistic method in its purest form. He was 
 drawn towards his material, not by reason of 
 its real or fancied spiritual implications or bear- 
 ings, but wholly and solely on account of its 
 beauty ; and so long as a story appealed to his 
 imagination, he never stepped aside to raise 
 any question regarding what it was intended, 
 or could be interpreted, to prove. It is of 
 course true that some of the legends by which
 
 24 STUDIES IX INTERPRETATION. 
 
 his genius was fascinated — especially the myth 
 of Endymion — having grown up out of the 
 moral consciousness of the race, were themselves 
 already endowed with a certain subtle and far- 
 reaching ideal significance. But this has noth- 
 ing to do with the point now under discussion. 
 Our thesis is simi)ly that Keats took these 
 stories as he found them, with or without any 
 latent meaning, as the case might be ; and that, 
 so accepting them as they came down to him 
 from the past, he never sought to relate them 
 in any way to the special movements or prob- 
 lems of the period in which he lived. 
 
 Mr. Stedman has laid it down as a general 
 principle that " where a work survives as an 
 exception to the inherent temper of a people, 
 it is likely to exhibit greatness " ; ' and he refers 
 to the Book of Job as a remarkable illustra- 
 tion. It is manifest that we may extend this 
 principle by saying that when the body of a 
 poet's work stands out before us as an exception 
 to the general temper and tendencies of such 
 poet's era, it is certain to have unusual claims 
 upon critical attention, since it can only have 
 preserved its vitality and power by reason of 
 an unusually strong endowment of original life. 
 And the poetry of Keats may certainly be 
 indicated as an interesting case in point. 
 ' Nature of Poei7-y, p. 86.
 
 JOHN KEATS. 25 
 
 IV. 
 
 Passing now from the consideration of these 
 more superficial manifestations of Keats's aloof- 
 ness from the general drift and spirit of his 
 time, we need refer only in brief to certain of 
 those more positive declarations concerning his 
 position and point of view, which are to be 
 found here and there in his works. It is 
 obvious that, for the reasons already assigned, 
 such positive declarations will be found to be 
 at once exceedingly rare and relatively speak- 
 ing meagre and unimportant. None the less 
 they demand a moment's attention. 
 
 A foremost place among the passages now to 
 be noted must of course be given to the familiar 
 lines in Lamia which serve to sum up the poet's 
 antagonism to the spirit of science in a kind of 
 formulated denunciation : 
 
 " Do not all charms fly 
 At the mere touch of cold philosophy ? 
 There was an awful rainbow once in Heaven ; 
 We know her woof, her texture ; she is given 
 In the dull catalogue of common things. 
 Philosophy will clip an angel's Avings, 
 Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, 
 Empty the haunted air and gnomed mine, 
 Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made 
 The tender-person'd Lamia melt into a shade.'
 
 26 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 Emphatic as these hnes are ia themselves, they 
 jrain stranfje sitrnificance from their context. 
 At the beginning of the second part of the 
 poem Keats has intimated that 
 
 " Had Lycius Hved to hand liis story down 
 He might have given the moral a fresh frown " ; 
 
 and indeed we can hardly doubt but that his 
 own interpretation of his singular experiences 
 would have differed very considerably from that 
 implied in the above citation. Lycius, let us 
 remember, is saved from being seduced by the 
 serpent-woman into making complete shipwreck 
 of his life only by the knowledge and wisdom 
 of the old sage Apollonius, who at a critical 
 moment comes to his rescue, strips off the 
 mask of illusion, and lays bare the reality of 
 things. This, to say the least of it, is a curious 
 occasion to choose for an attack on science. Is 
 knowledge to be abused if it reveals falsehood 
 as falsehood, points out the hidden danger 
 lurking under some fair and attractive disguise, 
 and thus snatches us from perils wherein we 
 should otherwise be ensnared ? To inveigh 
 against " philosophy " because it will not allow 
 us to remain in undisturbed possession of 
 pleasant and mischievous illusions, must be de- 
 scribed as merely childish ; yet such is certainly 
 the only inference to be drawn from Keats's 
 spirited protest when read in immediate con-
 
 JOHN KEATS. 2/ 
 
 nection with the story of the poem. It is 
 evident, of course, that Keats can have had 
 only a very imperfect reahzation of the larger 
 bearings of his assertions. He thinks only of 
 the destruction of Lamia's womanly fascination 
 and the collapse of the romance of Lycius's 
 life ; and the logical issue of the questions 
 arising from the incidents described, does not 
 seem greatly to interest him. Yet Vv^e know 
 that on other occasions he spoke with equal 
 unguardedness and extravagance. We have 
 Haydon's word for it that three years before 
 the poem now referred to saw the light — and it 
 should be remembered that this fine work was 
 one of its author's latest and most mature pro- 
 ductions — Keats and Lamb, while dining with 
 him (Haydon) had agreed together that " New- 
 ton had destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow 
 by reducing it to the prismatic colours." ' Along 
 with this episode we may refer to the poet's 
 further lamentation over the fact that the age 
 of wonder has gone — that " the goblin is driven 
 from the hearth and the rainbow is robbed of 
 its mystery." ^ 
 
 For Keats, therefore, knowledge emphatically 
 
 ' This is what Haydou called " the immortal dinner." The 
 anecdote is given by the artist in his Autobiography, and is 
 reproduced in Forman's edition of Keats, Vol. ii., pp. 36- 
 37, note. 
 
 ^ Essay on Kean as a Shakespearian Actor, in Forman's 
 edition of Keats, Vol. iii., p. 6.
 
 28 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 meant disillusion. To cxpkiin the processes of 
 nature was to remove them once for all from 
 the soft dreamy atmosphere of poetry, through 
 which they loomed dim but beautiful, into the 
 lurid white glare of actuality, where they stood 
 out gaunt, naked, angular, revolting. Thus 
 with an emotional nature fatally out of harmony 
 alike with the intellectual achievements and the 
 intellectual temper of his age, he turned back 
 upon the past, clinging with obstinate per- 
 sistency to that old order of ideas, to that cos- 
 mology of marvel and mystery, which he felt 
 to be slipping from the grasp of the world, v/ith 
 all that beautiful accumulation of legend and 
 myth which in tlic course of ages had come to 
 cluster about it. For him " glory and loveli- 
 ness " had indeed " passed away " from a 
 generation disenchanted by knowledge — a gen- 
 eration that knows not " Flora and old Pan " — 
 a generation to which the visions of " high 
 romance " no longer make appeal. 
 
 " Helicon ! 
 O fountained hill ! old Homer's Helicon ! 
 That thou would'st spout a little streamlet o'er 
 These sorry pages ; then the verse would soar 
 And sing above this gentle pair, like lark 
 Over his nested young : but all is dark 
 Around thine aged top, and thy clear fount 
 Exhales in mists to heaven. Ay, the count 
 Of mighty Poets is made up ; the scroll 
 Is folded by the Muses ; the bright roll
 
 JOHN KEATS. 29 
 
 Is in Apollo's hand : our dazed eyes 
 
 Have seen a new tinge in the western skies : 
 
 The world has done its duty. Yet, oh yet, 
 
 Although the sun of poesy is set, 
 
 These lovers did embrace, and we must weep 
 
 That there is no old power left to steep 
 
 A quill immortal in their joyous tears." ' 
 
 But while Keats had thus to seek his inspira- 
 tion in the past, his relation to the past itself 
 was inevitably characterized by his tempera- 
 mental limitations of interest and horizon. He 
 sought in it the revelation of the beauty in 
 v.'hich the present seemed to him to be so sadly, 
 so grimly deficient ; to any other message borne 
 down to him along the ages his spiritual ear 
 was closed. For the great movements of men 
 in history ; for the struggles, the experiments, 
 and the failures ; for the colossal tragedies that 
 have been played out upon the world's vast 
 stage ; for all the manifestations of ambition 
 and power, of courage and devotion to forlorn 
 hopes, of faith unshaken by difficulty, and pur- 
 poses unbent by danger, with which the blood- 
 stained annals of our race are filled ; — to such 
 things his nature made but little response. 
 Carlyle denounced the age of science, utili- 
 tarianism, and democracy as pusillanimous and 
 cowardly, as godless and insincere ; and he 
 praised the past for its great men, its noble 
 
 ' Endymion, Book ii.
 
 30 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATIOX. 
 
 deeds, its heroisms, its faith. Keats found 
 modern hfe dull, sordid, unpoctic, ugly, and in 
 the record of by-gone days he looked only for 
 the romantic, the picturesque. Thus there is 
 but slight exaggeration of his position in the 
 familiar lines which open the second book of 
 Endyniion : 
 
 " O sovereign power of love ! O grief ! O balm ! 
 All records, saving thine, come cool and calm 
 And shadowy through the mist of passed years : 
 For others, good or bad, hatred and tears 
 Have become indolent ; but touching thine, 
 One sigh doth echo, one poor sob doth pine. 
 One kiss brings honey-dew from buried days. 
 The woes of Troy, towers smothering o'er their 
 
 blaze, 
 Stiff -holden shields, far -piercing spears, keen 
 
 blades. 
 Struggling, and blood, and shrieks — all dimly fades 
 Into some backward corner of the brain ; 
 Yet, in our very souls, we feel amain 
 The close of Troilus and Cressid sweet. 
 Hence, pageant history ! hence, gilded cheat ! 
 Swart planet in the universe of deeds ! 
 Wide sea, that one continuous murmur breeds 
 Along the pebbled shore of memory ! 
 Many old rotten-timber'd boats there be 
 Upon thy vaporous bosom, magnified 
 To goodly vessels ; many a sail of pride. 
 And golden-keel'd, is left unlaunch'd and dry. 
 But wherefore this ? What care, though owl did 
 
 fly
 
 JOHiV KEATS. 31 
 
 About the great Athenian admiral's mast ? 
 What care, though striding Alexander past 
 The Indus with his Macedonian numbers? 
 Though old Ulysses tortur'd from his slumbers 
 The glutted Cyclops ? What care ? Juliet leaning 
 Amid her window-flowers, sighing, weaning 
 Tenderly her fancy from its maiden snow, 
 Doth more avail than these ; the silver flow 
 Of Hero's tears, the swoon of Imogen, 
 Fair Pastorella in the bandit's den, 
 Are things to brood on with more ardency 
 Than the death-day of empires." 
 
 Little allowance has to be made in reading 
 this charming passage for the exaggeration of 
 the mood induced by the theme upon which 
 the poet was then at work. It would indeed be 
 fatuous to press over closely upon words which 
 were never meant to bear the strain of too seri- 
 ous an interpretation, or to attempt to deduce 
 a solemn and definite criticism of life from the 
 detached verses of a writer from whom it is 
 vain to look for systematic or carefully sus- 
 tained thought. There is ever a danger lest 
 we should persist in trying Keats before a mod- 
 ern philosophical tribunal the jurisdiction of 
 which he himself would have been the first to 
 repudiate. Yet the entire body of his work 
 appears to justify us in finding in the above- 
 cited lines an expression of the feeling which 
 characterised him through life. And how, in 
 fact, should we expect Keats to manifest any
 
 32 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATIOX. 
 
 interest in certain large aspects of the life and 
 human activity of the past when it was pre- 
 cisely the corresponding aspects of life and 
 human activity as revealed under the form and 
 fashion of his own age that he persistently 
 turned from with unconcealed dissatisfaction 
 and disgust? 
 
 It remains for us but to touch in this connec- 
 tion upon the interesting question of Keats's 
 instinctive Platonism — an illustration of that 
 "natural afifinity " of the poet "with the Greek 
 mind " * of which we shall have something more 
 to say a little later on. 
 
 It is at this point, indeed, that we find Keats's 
 hatred of the position and rationalistic temper 
 of modern thought perhaps most clearly and 
 consistently formulated. How far the trans- 
 cendental principle, several times distinctly 
 enunciated by him, is to be interpreted as the 
 merely spontaneous outcome and expression of 
 a personal, innate idiosyncrasy, or how far, on 
 the other hand, it may possibly be traced back 
 to the more or less conscious absorption of ideas 
 from the atmosphere he breathed and the books 
 he fed upon, it would not be easy to decide. 
 But there are few issues of philosophical im- 
 portance upon which he expressed himself with 
 such settled conviction as upon this of the 
 supremacy of feeling in the quest of truth. 
 
 ' R. C. Jebb, The Growth and Influence of Classical Greek 
 Poelry, p. 244.
 
 JOHN KEA TS. 33 
 
 His distrust of intellectual processes was pro- 
 found ; his faith in the imaginativ^e faculty — in 
 immediate intuition — unbounded. It was thus 
 that he reached the large conception of things 
 revealed in the ever-memorable lines which 
 close the great Ode on a Grecian Urn: 
 
 " Cold Pastoral ! 
 When old age shall this generation waste, 
 
 Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe 
 Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st, 
 
 ' Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty ' — that is all 
 Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." 
 
 This does not mean — as is sometimes hastily in- 
 ferred — that Keats deliberately placed beauty 
 before truth, or desired to sacrifice the latter to 
 the former. But it does mean that he held the 
 two to be ultimately and fundamentally identi- 
 cal, and that for him the highest revelation of 
 truth was to be sought under the form of 
 beauty. Nor is this all. His Platonism carries 
 him to the further principle that by holding 
 fast to the beautiful we possess the final secret 
 of the true. His one recognized road to reality 
 was thus the primrose path of the imagination. 
 " What the Imagination seizes as Beauty must 
 be Truth, whether it existed before or not " — 
 thus he states his thesis in a letter to his 
 friend, Benjamin Bailey ; adding, in striking 
 phrase, that " Imagination may be compared to
 
 34 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 Adam's dream — he awoke and found it true.* " 
 Here, as elsewhere, he put emotional apprehen- 
 sion before intellectual verification, and made 
 intuition, not the logical faculty, the guide to, 
 and ultimate criterion, of truth. So far, then, 
 as we are able to establish anything like a phil- 
 osophical basis for his thought, we find Keats 
 in fundamental antagonism to the traditions of 
 enlightenment and the scientific spirit of his 
 time. 
 
 V. 
 
 We will now address ourselves to a brief con- 
 sideration of one of the most important ques- 
 tions confronting the student of Keats's work — 
 his general treatment of nature. 
 
 To dwell upon the large place which nature 
 everywhere occupies in his verse would be su- 
 perfluous ; for him, as the most casual reader is 
 very soon made aware, " the poetry of earth is 
 never dead." Nor is it necessary to exemplify 
 or discuss at length the faithful clearness of his 
 vision and the magical quality of many of his 
 graphic touches. That fine felicity of turn and 
 phrase, which can be neither missed nor ex- 
 plained, that genuine accent of the poetic 
 tongue which belongs only to those who are 
 natives to the language, are in particular to be 
 caught everywhere in his luxuriant pictorial pas- 
 
 ' Forman's edition of Keats, Vol. iii., pp. go-gi.
 
 JOHN KEATS. 35 
 
 sages and in his occasional snatches of descrip- 
 tion. It is true that in weaving into his verse 
 the glory and the loveliness of the external 
 world, he often loses himself in mere opulence 
 of detail — that, save in such instances as the 
 Ode to Antuinn and Hyperion, his transcripts 
 habitually lack that true sense of proportion 
 and perspective, that firm subjection of minutiae 
 to general effect, in a word, that power of com- 
 position which mark the best workmanship of 
 Wordsworth and Tennyson. But in the mar- 
 vellous fifth stanza of the Ode to a Nightingale, 
 in the splendid opening of Hyperion, and in 
 such memorable phrases as 
 
 " I who still saw the horizontal sun 
 
 Heave his broad shoulder o'er the edge o' the 
 world " ' ; 
 
 and 
 
 " The good-night blush of Eve was waning slow " ^ ; 
 
 and 
 
 " Like rose leaves with the drip of summer rains " ' ; 
 
 and 
 
 " Like new flowers at morning song of bees " * ; 
 
 ' Endymion, Book i. 
 
 ^ Ibid., Book iv. 
 
 ^ Sonnet : " After dark vapors have oppress'd our plains." 
 
 '' Lamia, Book ii.
 
 36 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 to pick only a few from the countless lines that 
 linger in the memory, wc feel that in the 
 natural magic of description Keats at his best 
 is worthy to take a place beside Shakespeare 
 himself. 
 
 But when from the observation of these 
 manifest facts, and from the perusal of some of 
 those ever fresh and charming transcripts from 
 nature Avhich are so freely scattered about his 
 pages, we pass on to inquire a little more par- 
 ticularly into the spiritual characteristics re- 
 vealed by them, we find the poet marked by 
 the power and the limitations already noticed, 
 — we find, in other words, that, as might have 
 been anticipated, his attitude towards the out- 
 ward world harmonizes completely with his 
 general attitude towards life. 
 
 It should be remarked incidentally that Keats 
 had a Greek fondness for conceiving the forces 
 of nature under human forms of transcendant 
 loveliness. The world of his imagination was 
 peopled with the bright figures of nymphs and 
 fauns, dryads and hamadryads ; and the use 
 which he makes of these differs entirely from 
 the dry and conventional uses to which they 
 had been put by writers of the so-called pseudo- 
 classic school: They are so real and living to 
 him that they do not for a moment remind us 
 of the " supernatural machinery" about which, 
 in discussing the epic, Bossu and Boilcau, Dry- 
 den and Addison and Pope had found so much
 
 JOHN KEA TS. 37 
 
 to say. It should, moreover, be borne in mind 
 that Keats was perhaps the first of our EngHsh 
 poets to follow — it must be assumed uncon- 
 sciously — the lead of Goethe and Schiller in 
 connecting, after the manner of the Greeks 
 themselves, the figures of classic mythology 
 directly with nature and its activities, in lieu of 
 relating them narrowly to man, as was the uni- 
 versal habit of poets from the renaissance down- 
 ward.' If we had no other evidence before us 
 beyond that furnished by the Ode to Pan in the 
 first book of Endyniion {ih.Q "pretty piece of 
 paganism " which Wordsworth damned with 
 faint praise), we should still be able to realize 
 something of that wonderful power of spon- 
 taneous sympathy with Hellenic ways of look- 
 ing at things which remains, when all is said, one 
 of the most marvellous characteristics of Keats's 
 genius. 
 
 But it is with his more direct relation to 
 nature that we are now particularly concerned ; 
 and here, once again, we observe immediately 
 the poet's characteristically objective spirit and 
 the absence in his work of the peculiarly modern 
 note. He revels with the keenest sensuous en- 
 joyment in all the beauties of natural sights and 
 sounds ; he luxuriates in the multifarious de- 
 lights of field and forest, cloud and stream ; he 
 stands breathless in the presence of the great 
 silent mountains ; his whole temperament re- 
 
 ' Kingsley, Essay on Alexander Smith and Alexander Pope. \/
 
 38 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 sponds to the " eternal whispers " of the sea. 
 But of any conception of a spiritual relation with 
 nature — of any Wordsworthian or Shelleyan 
 feeling of a deep and intimate union between 
 the soul of man and the soul immanent in the 
 external universe — of anything of this kind, 
 Keats's poetry shows hardly a trace. In the 
 material beauty of the world — in the appeal 
 which the bright show of things made to his 
 highly strung and finely developed senses — he 
 found both his sphere and his limitation. Na- 
 ture for him had no spiritual message, no ethical 
 meaning. lie loved her with a passionate, all- 
 absorbing love ; but she was to him a beautiful 
 soulless mistress, and not the solemn, veiled 
 prophetess before whom Wordsworth offered 
 up his vows, nor the great mysterious mother 
 of Shelley's rapt and gorgeous visions. 
 
 No student of Wordsworth needs to be re- 
 minded of the sundry passages of deep autobio- 
 graphical value in which that poet describes the 
 changes which came over his relations with 
 nature as his knowledge of life deepened and the 
 " mellower years " gradually brought him " a 
 riper mind." In the Lines Composed a Feiv Miles 
 Above Tintern Abbey, and again with more de- 
 tail in the first and second books of TJie Prelude, 
 he sets forth the three principal stages in the 
 growth of his love for nature. First came the 
 boyish stage of coarse animal pleasure, with its 
 glad movements of physical vitality, its tingling
 
 JOHN KEA TS. 39 
 
 delight in the various elements which minis- 
 tered to its simple, unsophisticated life. This 
 phase of inner experience little by little gave 
 way to a growing sense of the manifold beauty 
 of form and color revealed to the attentive eve 
 by the rich external world. Then, indeed, he 
 could declare, nature was to him " all in all." 
 Daily " the common range of visible things " 
 grew more and more dear to him, but the early 
 charm of incidental association weakened, and 
 nature itself 
 
 " intervenient till this time 
 And secondary, now at length was sought 
 For her own sake," 
 
 Yet even this stage proved to be one simply of 
 transition. He came presently, he tells us, in 
 words too familiar to need lengthy quotation, 
 
 " To look on Nature, not as in the hour 
 Of thoughtless youth ; but hearing oftentimes 
 The still sad music of humanity, 
 Nor harsh nor greeting, though of ample power 
 To chasten and subdue." 
 
 In these later days of calm peacefulness and 
 meditation, he remained consistent in his devo- 
 tion to " the meadows and the woods and 
 mountains," but the character of his feeling 
 had been modified. It had ripened into the 
 closest and most intimate love — a love which.
 
 40 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 as he himself tells us, was profoundly religious 
 in its quality. And at this time he came to 
 realize how much his mature mind had itself 
 brought to nature, and felt well pleased to 
 recognize in her and in the language of his 
 senses, as they responded to her noble and 
 benign influence, 
 
 " The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, 
 The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul 
 Of all my moral being." 
 
 Now, for the critic of Keats there is particu- 
 lar interest in the passages in which Words- 
 worth expounds the characteristics of the second 
 stage of his spiritual unfolding, above touched 
 on. Take the following lines from his Tititern 
 A bbey : 
 
 " I cannot paint 
 What then I was. The sounding cataract 
 Haunted me like a passion : the tall rock, 
 The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, 
 Their colours and their forms, were then to me 
 An appetite ; a feeling and a love 
 That had no need of a rtnwter charm 
 By thought supplied, nor any interest 
 Unborrow" d from the eye " : 
 
 and it is obvious that the language employed, 
 and especially the phrases which we have itali- 
 cized, are throughout applicable to Keats. At
 
 JOHN KEATS. 4 1 
 
 the same time we may more clearly define the 
 attitude and feeling of our own poet by con- 
 trasting any one or more of the countless pas- 
 sages in which Wordsworth analyzes and dwells 
 upon his final temper and outlook. The clos- 
 ing verses of his ode on The Intimations of 
 Imuiortality may be here chosen by way of a 
 single illustration : 
 
 " The clouds that gather round the setting sun 
 Do take a sober colouring from an eye 
 That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality ; 
 Another race hath been, and other palms are won. 
 Thanks to the human heart by which we live, 
 Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears, 
 To me the meanest flower that blows can give 
 Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." 
 
 Would Keats, had he lived, have presently 
 passed out of the secondary stage described by 
 Wordsworth, into one in which for him, too, 
 the glorious show of things might have been 
 fraught with an infinite spiritual significance? 
 in which, to " the ear of faith " the universe 
 might have yielded " authentic tidings " of the 
 " central peace, subsisting at the heart of end- 
 less agitation " ? ' in which the feeling with 
 which he " walked with nature," might have 
 come to partake of the character of " religious 
 love"?' This is an interesting and important 
 
 * The Excursion, Book iv. 
 ^ The Prelude, Book ii.
 
 42 STUDIES IiV INTERPRETATION. 
 
 question, but wc shall find it most convenient 
 to leave it until, in connection with a larger 
 problem, it comes up for discussion in another 
 part of our study. 
 
 It remains but to point out that the large 
 body of Keats's nature-poetry is highly inter- 
 esting in yet another way. It shows but little 
 tendency towards that modern subjectivity of 
 treatment which, since Mr. Ruskin's famous 
 criticism, we have been in the habit of calling, 
 not very happily it is to be feared, the " pa- 
 thetic fallacy." ' Mr. Ruskin, here as so often 
 elsewhere, pushed his theory to quite unjusti- 
 fiable extremes, and though much of his discus- 
 sion is remarkably luminous and suggestive, 
 'much, on the other hand, is radically specious 
 and confused. None the less we are thank- 
 ful to him for emphasizing the difference 
 " between the ordinary, proper, and true ap- 
 pearances of things to us, and their extraordin- 
 ary, or false appearances, when we are under 
 the influence of emotion, or contemplative 
 fancy." That " all violent feelings " tend " to 
 produce in us a falseness in all our impressions 
 of external things," is of course unquestionable ; 
 and that this disturbance of vision — this con- 
 stant imputation of personal mood to natural 
 phenomena, is furthermore not only a salient 
 characteristic of the mass of our modern poetry, 
 but is also to be considered as a direct result of 
 
 * Modern Painters, Vol. iii., Chap. xii.
 
 JOHN KEATS. 43 
 
 certain of the sophisticating mental habits of 
 our time, is hardly less obvious.' Now the 
 point here to be noticed is that of this species 
 of " pathetic fallacy," in its more morbid de- 
 velopments, the poetry of Keats as a whole is 
 singularly free. 
 
 In poetic analogy Keats of course indulges 
 freely, connecting natural phenomena not only 
 with one another but also with human feelings 
 
 o 
 
 ' Mr. Alfred Austin gives an admirable account of this sub- 
 jective interpretation of nature in his Fortunat::s the Pessimist 
 (Act I, Scene iii.) : 
 
 " The unmeditative primrose asks not why 
 It blooms then fades, nor doth the bluebell feel 
 The pathos of its passing ; but man comes, 
 And with unquiet questioning infects 
 The woodland with its woe. The impulsive note 
 Sung by yon cuckoo conscienceless, when heard 
 By human ear, sounds like melodious guilt, 
 The mocking Mephistopheles of Love. 
 The nightingale that bubbleth 'mong the leaves 
 With such sweet insolicitude it asks 
 No dullard night to sleep away its song, 
 Misread by melancholy man, bewails 
 A woe it understands not, thoughtless bird. 
 Thus staid reflection's shadow falls athwart 
 The cheerful seeming of the spring, and makes 
 May sadder than December." 
 
 Compare Mr. William Watson's Changed Voices and his epi- 
 gram beginning " For metaphors of man we search the skies." 
 The fine stanza in Coleridge's Ode to Dejection is too familiar 
 to need more than passing reference. An interesting discus- 
 sion of the whole question of the " pathetic fallacy" is given 
 by Mr. Roden Noel in his essay on " The Poetic Interpreta- 
 tion of Nature " ( IVordsworthiana, ed. by William Knight).
 
 44 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 and experiences. The evening-star becomes for 
 him an " amorous glow-worm of the sky " ; ' 
 sweet peas stand " on tiptoe for a flight " ;" the 
 curve of a river suggests the " crescent moon " ; ' 
 — and so on ; and the illustrations might be 
 indefinitely multiplied. So, too, with the other 
 kind of analogy. The slow backward move- 
 ment of a spent wave is described by him, 
 through his own sense of lethargy, as " way- 
 ward indolence " ; ^ tall oaks " dream all night 
 without a stir " ; ' the autumn sun is seen by 
 him " smiling at eve upon the quiet sheaves " ; * 
 while " the moving waters " of the ocean have 
 " their priest-like task of pure ablution " ' to 
 perform. But there is manifestly a funda- 
 mental distinction between this imaginative 
 striking out of suggestive correspondences, 
 this subtle fusion of phenomenon and phe- 
 nomenon, and such a saturation of nature with 
 human feeling as results in the more or less com- 
 plete distortion of the thing seen by the emo- 
 tional medium through which it is observed. 
 In the phrases just quoted, the poet's eye is 
 clear and steady, and his touch certain and firm, 
 though his imaginative insight enables him to 
 
 ' Ode to Psyche. 
 
 ^ " I stood tiptoe upon a little hill." 
 
 ' Endymion, Book i. 
 
 '^ Ibid., ii. 
 
 * Hyperion, Book i. 
 
 * Sonnet : " After dark vapours." 
 
 ' Ibid., " Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art."
 
 JOHN KEATS. 45 
 
 discern symbols and analogies which to ordi- 
 nary vision remain unrevealed. But the case is 
 entirely altered when, in a highly self-involved 
 mood, we concern ourselves primarily not with 
 nature, but with ourselves, and when, having 
 our eyes less upon the object than upon our 
 own state, we become powerless to describe the 
 simplest fact or scene without the imputation 
 of purely personal coloring. It is open to us 
 if we will to follow Keats so far as to assert, as 
 he appears to do in a remarkable passage in the 
 first book of Eiidymion,'' that all natural beauty 
 runs its roots far down into the rich sub-soil of 
 human experience. Yet we are still bound to 
 realize that to treat nature as the vital and im-" 
 mediate source of feelings which we ourselves 
 have thrust upon her out of our own lives, is a 
 practice to be held as morbid in origin, no mat- 
 ter how striking and dramatically effective it 
 may sometimes be in its results. 
 
 Now it is to be noted, as we have said, that 
 of this characteristic modern tendency, the 
 poetry of Keats shows very little trace. His 
 habit was to describe things as he saw them, 
 without seeking to read into them the joys and 
 sorrows of the human lot. His treatment of 
 nature is therefore marked, to use Mr. Ruskin's 
 
 ' See towards the close of the book, the lines — " Just so may- 
 love," etc. An interesting side-light is thrown on the general 
 question of the anthropomorphic basis for what we call natural 
 beauty, by Mr. Lafcadio Uearn's chapter "Of the Eternal 
 Feminine " in his Out of the East.
 
 46 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 phrase, by an " exquisite sincerity," which is 
 doubly significant in a young modern writer as 
 being, like the characteristics already specified, 
 at once unmodern and unyouthful. Fresh and 
 unsophisticated by temperamental endowment, 
 he could take the outward world simply and 
 frankly, as it stood revealed to him through the 
 senses, and his strong artistic craving found 
 ample satisfaction in its ever-renewed beauty, 
 its ever-living charm. He desired from it no 
 spiritual revelation, no ethical message ; neither 
 did he attempt to force it to become tiie plas- 
 tic recipient and mouthpiece of his individual 
 moods and fancies. 
 
 The most striking illustration of Keats's atti- 
 tude towards nature, and one moreover of 
 crucial importance, will be found in his treat- 
 ment of autumn. So familiar have we all be- 
 come with the mood of gentle brooding melan- 
 choly habitually associated with this season of 
 the year — with the pensiveness that steeps all 
 thought and feeling in a twilight beauty of its 
 own, as the sight of rcddenmg leaf, and patter- 
 ing chestnut, and mellowing field brings to us 
 the poignant suggestion of the evanescence of 
 all earthly loveliness, — that we seldom pause to 
 remind ourselves that the sadness of an October 
 morning is fundamentally due to the projection 
 into nature of an element directly derived from 
 human experience. The changes of the later 
 year belong, like the changes of the earlier, to
 
 JOHN KEA TS. 47 
 
 the regular cycle of the seasons; and if the 
 bursting blossoms of May thrill us with a new 
 and subtle joy, while the leafless trees of Octo- 
 ber, standing gaunt and spectral against the 
 dull-red sunset sky, breathe into our spirits an 
 insidious melancholy, a sense of the passing of 
 love and hope, an evasive suggestion of sorrow 
 so delicate as to be nearly akin to joy,-- -it is 
 mainly because we look at these natural mani- 
 festations of the cosmic processes everywhere 
 at work around us through the medium of 
 human feeling, pervading them with a rich ex- 
 pansive meaning that in reality appertains to 
 our own lives. Take the superb lines from the 
 song in The Princess : 
 
 " Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean, 
 Tears from the depth of some divine despair, 
 Rise in the heart and gather to the eyes 
 In looking on the happy autumn fields. 
 And thinking of the days that are no more " — 
 
 or take again, from the works of the same great 
 master, the flawlessly perfect vignette in In 
 Mcnwriam — the stanza beginning — ' 
 
 " Calm is the morn without a sound, 
 Calm as to suit a calmer grief : " 
 
 and we have autumn treated in the characteris- 
 tically modern, and therefore to most of us, the 
 sympathic way. Or choose, for its close paral- 
 
 '§xi.
 
 48 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 lelism to Kcats's own ode, the finely-sustained 
 Autiunii of Mr. William Watson, and once more 
 we find the poet studying the landscape and its 
 details through a disturbing haze of sentiment 
 arisinsf from the heated or morbid condition of 
 his own mind :   
 
 " Thou burden of all songs the earth hath sung. 
 Thou retrospect in Time's reverted eyes, 
 Thou metai)hor of everything that dies, 
 That dies ill-starred, or dies beloved and young 
 
 And therefore blest and wise, — 
 O, be less beautiful, or be less brief, 
 Thou tragic f;plendour, strange and full of fear ! 
 In vain her pageant shall the summer rear? 
 At thy mute signal, leaf by golden leaf, 
 
 Crumbles the gorgeous year. 
 
 " For me, to dreams resign'd, there come and go, 
 'Twixt mountains draped and hooded night and 
 
 morn. 
 Elusive notes in wandering wafture borne. 
 From undiscoverable lips that blow 
 
 An immaterial horn ; 
 And spectral seem thy winter-boding trees, 
 Their ruinous bowers and drifted foliage wet — 
 O Past and Future in sad bridal met, 
 O voice of everything that perishes. 
 
 And soul of all regret." 
 
 These splendid verses are from first to last 
 entirely subjective ; they quiver with scnti-
 
 JOfIN KEATS. 49 
 
 ment ; they are fashioned from the stuff of 
 human experience ; the poet's eye is really 
 more upon himself than upon the things of the 
 outer world. Contrast, now, the interpretation 
 of nature through the writer's mood, exempli- 
 fied in the above passages, with the almost 
 absolute aloofness of such stanzas as these : 
 
 " Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, 
 Close bosom friend of the maturing sun ; 
 Conspiring with him how to load and bless 
 With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves 
 
 run ; 
 To bend with apples the moss'd cottage trees, 
 And fdl all fruit with ripeness to the core ; 
 To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells 
 With a sweet kernel ; to set budding more 
 And still more, later flowers for the bees, 
 Until they think warm days will never cease. 
 For summer has o'erbrimm'd their clammy cells. 
 
 Where are the songs of spring ? Ay, where are 
 
 they ? 
 Think not of them, thou hast thy music too— 
 While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day. 
 And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue ; 
 Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn 
 Among the river sallows, borne aloft 
 Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies ; 
 And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn ; 
 Hedge-crickets sing ; and now with treble soft
 
 50 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft ; 
 And gathering swallows twitter in the skies." 
 
 In these admirable lines there is but a single 
 fallacious touch, and that of the most super- 
 ficial kind — " Then in a wailful choir the small 
 gnats mourn." Otherwise the description is 
 perfect in its sheer objectivity. The following 
 sentences from Keats's letter to Reynolds of 
 the 22d September, 1819, should be read care- 
 fully in connection with it : 
 
 " How beautiful the season is now. How 
 fine the air — a temperate sharpness about it. 
 Really, without joking, chaste weather — Dian 
 skies. I never liked stubble-fields so much as 
 now — aye, better than the chilly green of the 
 spring. Somehow, a stubble-plain looks warm, 
 in the same way that some pictures look warm. 
 This struck me so much in my Sunday's walk 
 that I composed it." ' 
 
 Place this passage alongside of the ode itself, 
 to which it furnishes an admirable introduction, 
 and the simple, direct, unsophisticated sensu- 
 ousness, the characteristic naivete of Keats's 
 whole relation to nature, is made very clear.^ 
 
 ' Forman's edition of Keats's Works, Vol. iii., p. 329. 
 
 "^ Of another kind of fallacy in the handling of nature, how- 
 ever, the Ode I0 a Nightingale furnishes a rather striking 
 example. A common and effective motif in poetry is tliat of 
 contrasting the continuity of existence of what we call nature 
 with the ephemeral life of the individual man. Ordinarily tlie 
 sharp contrast liius instituted is between the cosmic totality of
 
 JOHN KEATS. 5 I 
 
 VI. 
 
 We will now endeavor to bring these various 
 aspects of Keats's genius into vital relation with 
 one another by tracing them to their common 
 source in the poet's peculiar temperament, as 
 it is revealed to us throughout his verse, and 
 even more strikingly, or at any rate more posi- 
 tively, in many of his letters. 
 
 Every student of German literature is famil- 
 iar with Heinrich Heine's famous antithesis of 
 the Hebrew and the Hellene. Thrown out orig- 
 inally for polemical purposes,' his theory was, 
 
 things around us — Nature the vast and undying — and the tiny 
 span of our personal career ; but in the ode in question the 
 separate man is set over against the ^c'^if;'^/ bird. The implied 
 fallacy is of course the same in either case. Perhaps it would 
 be fair to ask whether a similar sentiment would not dominate 
 the poetry of the rose, supposing the short-lived individual 
 flower could only put on record its feelings as it looked out on 
 the continuous cycle of corporate human life — on Man the 
 vast and undying. It should be remembered, however, that 
 this species of fallacy is very far indeed from being the pro- 
 duct of modern conditions of life and thought. It is to be 
 found imbedded in much of the most primitive literatures, 
 while perhaps the purest expressions ever given to it are those 
 well-known to readers of the later classic poets, Theocritus, 
 Bion, Moschus, Catullus. Instance the beautiful lines of the 
 last-named writer — 
 
 " Soles occidere et redire possunt, 
 Nobis quum simul occidit brevis lux 
 Nox est perpetua una dormienda." 
 
 ^ In his Ludwig Borne, 1840. An anticipation of this prin- 
 ciple of division may be found in Schiller's suggestive essay 
 Ueber naive unci setrtimentalische Dichtiing, 1795-96. 
 
 >
 
 52 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 that mankind as a mass is divisible into two 
 large categories — those in whom the moral and 
 spiritual nature is in the ascendant, and those 
 in whom the aesthetic or artistic nature is in 
 the ascendant. In the one group we have men 
 "of ascetic temperaments, hostile to art, and 
 seeking only spiritual development " ; in the 
 other group, " men filled with the warmth of 
 life, loving display, and realistic in character." 
 The fundamental antagonism here presented, 
 therefore, is between the ascetic and spiritual 
 nature, which Heine calls Jewish, Christian, or 
 preferably Nazarene ; and the sensuous or artis- 
 tic nature which he defines as Hellenic, Greek, 
 or Pagan. The keynote of the one is spiritu- 
 ality, and its ideal religious culture ; the key- 
 note of the other is beauty, and its ideal 
 aesthetic culture. 
 
 Pressed upon closely, the distinction here 
 presented, like all such distinctions, would 
 readily lend itself to abuse. It can never be 
 too often or too strongly repeated that life is 
 altogether too rich and large and Protean a 
 thing to be packed away snugly into the cast- 
 iron terms of any doctrinaire formula whatso- 
 ever. Particularly, of course, in the midst of a 
 civilization so complex in its sources, and so 
 eclectic in its character, as our own, must there 
 be danger in the random employment of 
 phrases pointing back to periods of culture 
 which, after all, have been permanently out-
 
 JOHN KEATS. 53 
 
 grown. It is well enough to indicate a man's 
 spiritual affinities by such words as^gothic," 
 " classic," " puritan," and the like ; and by the 
 discriminating use of such epithets we may 
 often touch upon large and important truths. 
 Yet we must never lose sight of the fact that 
 the definitions thus offered can, in the nature 
 of things, be nothing more than approximate. 
 The narrowest and most one-sided product of 
 modern conditions is none the less a citizen of 
 his century, and cannot altogether denaturalize 
 himself ; his bias may be strong, yet the forces 
 of his being will of necessity be modified and 
 partially transformed by the multitudinous in- 
 fluences that play about his daily life. Thus 
 in no precise sense can any man be described 
 as going back to the point of view of a past 
 century. Despite proclivity and association, 
 character and discipline, by countless subtle 
 and often unrecognized threads of thought and 
 feeling the age in which he lives will hold him 
 firmly as its own. 
 
 Nevertheless, handled with proper caution, 
 and accepted as having reference only to broad 
 and general characteristics, Heine's formula 
 may be found at least suggestive. There are 
 men whose lives are wholly dominated by the 
 idea of morality ; for whom existence is earn- 
 est, strenuous, severe — a field of ceaseless con- 
 flict and tireless exertion; who care little or. 
 nothing for beauty, as such ; who look at
 
 54 STUDIES nv INTERPRErATIOiY. 
 
 humanity and its problems from the religious 
 and etliical side. Sucli men we may not un- 
 fairly describe as Hebrews or Nazarenes. Just 
 so, at the opposite pole of temperament and 
 character, there are others in whom the master- 
 passion is the passion for beauty ; by whom the 
 world is valued only by reason of its loveliness; 
 to whom the moral problems of the individual 
 and the race make no appeal ; whose stand- 
 point throughout is the aesthetic standpoint. 
 For such men the word pagan, discharged, of 
 course, of any reproachful connotation, is no 
 unfitting designation. Between these two ex- 
 tremes no real sympathy is possible. The 
 Nazarene must needs regard the pagan as sen- 
 suous, superficial, deficient in moral earnest- 
 ness ; to the pagan, on the other hand, the 
 Nazarene will not fail to appear narrow, big- 
 oted, gloomy, ascetic. And just as of the one 
 class we have a powerful representative in 
 Thomas Carlyle, a true giant of the old fervent 
 prophetic race, so of the other class we could 
 hardly find a more interesting example than 
 our own poet, John Keats. 
 
 We have already guarded ourselves in a gen- 
 eral way against the misinterpretation of such 
 a statement. Two points of a more special 
 character must now be insisted on. In the 
 first place, we chose the word " pagan," instead 
 of the partially synonymous words " Hellenic" 
 and " Greek," in order that we may hold clearly
 
 JOHN KEA TS. 55 
 
 in view the fact that we are deahng with tem- 
 perament and mental outlook, and not with 
 any questions connected with form and style. 
 With an intuitive rapidity and certainty which, 
 considering the limitations and disadvantages 
 of his education, fall little short of divination, 
 Keats assimilated the simple sensuousness, the 
 frank, spontaneous joyousness, the devotion to 
 beauty, the intimate good-fellowship with na- 
 ture, which we have in mind when we speak of 
 the pagan spirit ; the restraint, temperance, 
 self-repression, and austerity which character- 
 ized Hellenic art — the qualities which we em- 
 phatically call classic — he, on the other hand, 
 never learned to know. The difference in this 
 respect between his own work and the work of 
 such thoroughly disciplined classicists as Lan- 
 dor and Arnold, is sufficiently marked. How 
 curiously un-Greek, how curiously Gothic, is 
 such a sentence as this from one of his letters 
 to Reynolds : 
 
 " If you understand Greek, and would read 
 me passages now and then, explaining their 
 meaning, 't would be, from its mistiness, per- 
 haps a greater luxury than reading the thing 
 itself."' 
 
 " From its mistiness " ! — what a strange touch 
 
 in such a connection ! Keats's style is, indeed, 
 
 as un-Hellenic as possible — it is ultra-romantic. 
 
 In his love of imaginative detail — in his florid 
 
 ' 27 April, 1S18 (Forman's edition of Kcats^ Vol. iii., p. 146).
 
 56 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 luxuriance, excess, extravagance, and occasional 
 faults against proportion and good taste — in 
 his persistent tendency not to outline only, 
 but to paint in, to follow every thought, and 
 pursue " conception to the very bourn of 
 Heaven"; — in all these familiar characteristics 
 he testifies to the direct influence of his tech- 
 nical models, the Elizabethans, and particularly 
 of Spenser. It should not be forgotten that he 
 absorbed Homer through the version of Chap- 
 man, and that thus his knowledge of Greek 
 poetry, always second-hand knowledge, was col- 
 ored deeply by the same formal medium. 
 
 In the second place, as it is almost needless 
 to say, Keats's paganism was spontaneous and 
 temperamental, and not at all of the reasoned 
 or philosophic order. It was never worked out 
 by him into, and certainly should not be re- 
 garded by us as, a methodized interpretation 
 of life. His poetry lacks the deep Hellenic 
 fervor, the wellnigh spiritual rapture and glow 
 of some of the work of Swinburne, whose na- 
 ture has always been keenly responsive to 
 " the fair humanities of old religion," and for 
 whom, as for the true Greek, earth and sea are 
 still the " great sweet mothers of man." The 
 accent of Hcrtha, Thalassius, The Garden of 
 Proserpine, is to be caught seldom indeed in 
 Keats's verse. Nor is this all. His paganism 
 is not only non-philosophic and non-religious; 
 it is also throughout of the non-militant char-
 
 JOHN KEATS. 57 
 
 acter. His poetry has been described as " a 
 wail and a remonstrance " over the passing 
 away of the beautiful mythology which he 
 loved so well ; but, though we may detect 
 something of the wail in it, of the remonstrance 
 it contains but little. For polemical neo-pagan- 
 ism, for the systematic revolt of the modern 
 man against the asceticism of Christianity, the 
 mysticism of theology, the tyranny of church 
 and priestcraft, we have to go to men like 
 Swinburne and Carducci. There was little in 
 the nature of Keats to inspire such magnificent 
 utterances of reaction and challenge as are to 
 be found, for instance, in the Hymn to Man of 
 the one and the Inno a Satana of the other.' 
 
 ' One such positive utterance, constituting as it does an ex- 
 tremely instructive exception to the above general statement, 
 should, however, be noted. In the following Sonnet VVriilcn 
 in Disgust of 'Vulgar Superstitions we have a very decided ex- 
 pression of Keats's total lack of sympathy with the popular 
 forms and accompaniments of the religious feeling of his own 
 day : 
 
 " The church bells toll a melancholy round, 
 Calling the people to some other prayers, 
 Some other gloominess, more dreadful cares, 
 More hearkening to the sermon's horrid sound. 
 Surely the mind of man is closely bound 
 In some black spell ; seeing that each one tears 
 Himself from fireside joys, and Lydian airs, 
 And converse high of these with glory crown'd. 
 Still, still they toll, and I should feel a damp — 
 A chill as from the tomb, did I not know 
 That they are dying like an outburnt lamp ;
 
 58 STUDIES IJV IXTERPRETATIOX. 
 
 It is our purpose, therefore, in speaking of 
 the paganism of Keats to direct attention to 
 the predominance in his genius of the purely 
 aesthetic element, and the almost complete 
 absence from it of the elements we describe as 
 religious and ethical ; to the man's high single- 
 hearted devotion to beauty in all its sensuous 
 manifestations ; to his antique zest for life, 
 and intimate comradeship with nature ; and 
 especially to his fine freedom from the sophisti- 
 cation so profoundly characteristic of our mod- 
 ern world. " The riddle of the painful earth," 
 never pressed upon him for solution ; and in 
 his frank, fresh, nature there was little taint of 
 what Carlyle called " inquisitorial metaphysics " 
 — the vialadie du Steele, the disease of thought. 
 Others might find themselves driven to exhaust 
 their energies in futile probings after theories 
 
 That 't is their sighing, wailing, ere they go 
 Into oljlivion ; — that fresh flowers will grow, 
 And many glories of immortal stamp." 
 
 Keats's treatment of the real church-bell here, should be con- 
 trasted with his appreciation of the romantic beauty of the 
 vesper chime in The Eve of St. Mark, where it will be re- 
 membered the appeal is made to him through the imagination. 
 I'or a man of Keats's temper there must necessarily have been 
 something peculiarly harsh and repulsive about the ugly and 
 disagreeable manifestations of the religious life common to 
 puritanism in its modern forms of evangelicalism and dissent. 
 It took the larger sympathy of a man like Browning (see 
 Christmas Eve and Easter Day') lo grasp the spiritual reality 
 for which, in their hard, or grotesque, or distorted fashions, 
 such things as these none the less stand.
 
 JOHN KEATS. 59 
 
 and explanations. To Keats, life was a fact, 
 while to most of us, it is an enigma. 
 
 Once indeed, with a firm and strong hand, he 
 touched upon the dark problematical underside 
 of nature, having seen her for a moment, not in 
 her robe of matchless beauty, but as Tennyson 
 saw her — " red in tooth and claw " : 
 
 " 'T was a quiet eve, 
 The rocks were silent, the wide sea did weave 
 An untumultuous fringe of silver foam 
 Along the fiat brown sand ; I was at home 
 And should have been most happy ; — hut I saw 
 Too far into tJie sea, where every maw 
 The greater or the less feeds ever more. — 
 But I saw too distinct into the core 
 Of an eternal fierce destruction, 
 And so from happiness I was far gone. 
 Still am I sick of it, and tho' to-day 
 I 've gather'd young spring leaves and flowers gay 
 Of periwinkle and wild strawberry, 
 Still do I that most fierce destruction see, — 
 The shark at savage prey — the hawk at pounce — 
 The gentle robin like a pard or ounce, 
 Ravening a worm " — 
 
 But, then, the thought growing too heavy for 
 him, he breaks off with characteristic im- 
 patience — 
 
 " Away, ye horrid moods ! 
 Moods of one's mind. You know I hate them well. 
 You know I 'd rather be a clapping bell
 
 6o STUDIES JN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 In some Kamtschatkan missionary church, 
 
 Than with such horrid moods be left i' the lurch." ' 
 
 Here for a moment, then, Keats gives expres- 
 sion to the " horrid mood," in which the 
 problem of nature had come between himself 
 and the beauty of nature — the mood in which 
 the torturing spirit of inquiry into the meaning 
 of things had threatened to disturb his simple 
 unquestioning enjoyment of things as he 
 actually found them. "Do not all charms fly 
 at the mere touch of cold philosophy ? " Is not 
 knowledge synonymous with disenchantment ? 
 wisdom with sorrow? Alas, such is the con- 
 clusion of the whole matter ! Then — 
 
 " It is a flaw 
 In happiness to see beyond our bourn, — > 
 It forces us in summer skies to mourn. 
 It spoils the singing of the nightingale." 
 
 The position here assumed is a simple one. 
 The joy of life is jeopardized the moment 
 thought intrudes ; the loveliest fact of the 
 world loses half its delicate charm if we allow 
 ourselves to theorize about it. There is but 
 one way out of our difficulty. Let us hold 
 ourselves free from thought and theory. 
 Beauty and romance may thus, but thus only, 
 be still to us a possession for ever. 
 
 ^Epistle to John Hamilton Reynolds (1818). Compare 
 Edwin Arnold's Light of Asia, Book ii.
 
 JOHN KEA TS. 6 1 
 
 Fully to appreciate the profound significance 
 of such a conclusion, we must remember that 
 Keats's philosophical credo, so far as it was 
 ever formulated by him, was one of cheerless 
 and chilling negativism. It receives its one 
 distinct utterance in the Sonnet Written npon 
 the Top of Ben Nevis, a poem which, grim enough 
 in itself, derives added grimness from its asso- 
 ciation with his unfortunate Scottish tour. 
 
 "Read me a lesson, muse, and speak it loud 
 Upon the top of Nevis, blind in mist ! 
 I look into the chasms, and a shroud 
 Vaporous doth hide them, — just so much, I wist 
 Mankind do know of Hell ; I look o'erhead. 
 And there is sullen mist, — even so much 
 Mankind can tell of Heaven ; mist is spread 
 Before the earth beneath me, — even such. 
 Even so vague is man's sight of himself ! 
 Here are the craggy stones beneath my feet, — 
 Thus much I know, that, a poor witless elf 
 I tread on them, — that all my eye doth meet 
 Is mist and crag, not only on this height, 
 But in the world of thought and mental might ! " 
 
 The first comment on such a poem is likely 
 to be, that this is the philosophy of absolute 
 negation — dark and dismal as the Scottish mist 
 in which the verses were composed ; ' and to 
 
 ' For the circumstances under which this sonnet was written, 
 see Lord Houghton's statement in his Life and Letters of 
 Keats, or in Forman's edition of Keats's Works, Vol. ii., p. 
 312, note.
 
 62 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 this criticism one would hardly fail to add some 
 expression of surprise at finding such an atti- 
 tude towards life adopted by a poet whose 
 work, as a whole, would never be connected 
 with so joyless and uninspiring a creed. How 
 comes it, we may well ask, that, accepting the 
 above sonnet as a genuine expression of Keats's 
 deepest thought concerning man's relation to 
 himself and the universe, we none the less dis- 
 cover no taint of its bleak and dreary skepticism 
 in the great body of his verse ? The damp 
 mountain-fog may indeed be taken to sym- 
 bolize tiie intellectual principles here for once 
 set forth ; but is not the true, the characteristic 
 atmosphere of his poetry, after all, that of the 
 fresh and sunny valleys of the south-lands far 
 away ? ' 
 
 ' It should be noted that Keats's work is frequently imbued 
 with that subtle sadness which, as has been frequently pointed 
 out (very clearly by Edgar Allan Poe amongst others), is insepara- 
 ble from the apprehension of beauty in its highest manifesta- 
 tions. The touch of mutability upon all things earthly — the 
 pathos inherent in the thought that life is fleeting, happiness 
 transient, hope visionary — the solemn reminder, renewed with 
 every day's experiences, that as mortals we move in a world of 
 mortality, " where nothing lasts, where all that we have loved 
 or shall love, must die" (Amiel, Journal, i6 Nov., 1864), — 
 to the large and tender melancholy implied by all this, the 
 genius of Keats was not and could not be unresponsive. For 
 this is the true melancholy of the pagan nature, which clings 
 the more passionately to all the world can offer of loveliness 
 and joy from its poignant realization of the haunting fact that 
 these things are but momentary — that beyond the sunshine 
 there is the blank darkness, and beyond the music llie great un-
 
 JOHN KEATS. 63 
 
 Here we impinge upon a fact of cardinal 
 importance. It is manifest that Keats's philo- 
 sophical negativism touched in but slight de- 
 gree, if at all, the deep wellsprings and sources 
 of his existence. His religious creed — if on the 
 strength of the poem now referred to, his crude 
 and loose theorizings may be dignified by such a 
 name — was " of his life a thing apart " ; it did 
 not permeate, saturate, modify the woof and 
 texture of his being. The craving for spiritual 
 satisfaction, perennial and insistent with men of 
 a different temperament from his, he for his 
 part rarely experienced ; while the need to un- 
 derstand the world rationally, and to reach some 
 explanation of its purpose and meaning, had for 
 him nothing of an imperative character. With 
 such matters as these, the essential forces of his 
 character had nothing whatever to do. .There 
 
 broken silence. (Compare many of Swinburne's poems ; e.g., 
 Anima Anccps.) Such pervasive sadness is of the very 
 essence of the Ode on a Grecian Urn, and it finds definite 
 expression in the Ode ott Alelaiicholy, in the closing stanza of 
 which the poet tells us that — 
 
 " She dwells with Beauty — Beauty that must die ; 
 And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips 
 Bidding adieu ; and aching Pleasure nigh, 
 Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips : 
 Ay, in the very temple of Delight 
 Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine, 
 Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue 
 Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine : 
 His soul shall taste the sadness of her might, 
 And be among her cloudy trophies hung."
 
 * 
 
 64 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 were moods, indeed, in which, not the sensuous 
 beauty, but the pain and travail of life forced 
 themselves upon him ; but these were after all 
 but moods — " horrid moods " — to be repudiated 
 as quickly as possible. There were seasons 
 when he too found himself confronted by the 
 obstinate questionings of his age ; but while 
 others brooded over them in vain search for 
 light and satisfaction, his nature enabled him 
 simply to throw them off. At first this habit 
 of dismissing the harder and sharper facts of 
 life was apparently spontaneous and unreasoned 
 — an affair of temperament merely. But as time 
 went on, and such facts gradually came more 
 and more to compel attention, he began to raise 
 this practice of evasion to the plane of a delib- 
 erate and conscious purpose, and to find in it 
 the true secret of poetic strength and greatness. 
 
 On this subject let us allow Keats to speak 
 for himself. Writing on the 22d December, 
 1817, to his brothers George and Thomas, he 
 refers to a discussion which he had then lately 
 had with his friend Dilke, and continues : 
 
 " At once it struck me what quality went to 
 form a man of achievement, especially in litera- 
 ture, and which Shakespeare possessed so enor- 
 mously — I mean negative capability, that is, 
 [when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, 
 iLj / mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reach- 
 
 4^ ^J /!" 
 
 j[p^ ;c^V instance, would let go by a fine isolated veri 
 
 fcrv-JU-^M li''''S ^fter fact and reason. Coleridge, for
 
 JOHN KEATS. 65 
 
 similitude caught from the penetraHum of 
 mystery, from being incapable of remaining 
 content with half knowledge. This pursued 
 through volumes would perhaps take us no fur- 
 ther than this, that with a great poet the sense 
 of beauty overcomes every other consideration, 
 or rather obliterates all consideration." ' 
 
 It is hardly too much to say that in this re- 
 markable passage — the expression, it will be 
 noted, of a purely artistic nature — Keats re- 
 veals the final secret of his relations with life. 
 Temperamentally endowed with the power of 
 throwing off our modern burden of doubt and 
 difficulty, he looked out upon the world refus- 
 ing to pay any heed to those intrusive questions 
 by which its charm is broken and its gladness 
 marred — refusing to allow his frank enjoyment 
 of its sunshine and music to be interfered with 
 by our everlasting and " irritable reaching after 
 fact and reason." His standpoint was thus as 
 far as possible removed from that of the philo- 
 sophical theorist or the ethical inquirer. These 
 have their own angle of vision ; but from the 
 multitudinous and entangled problems which 
 life throws upon their hands, it is at once the 
 poet's privilege and his duty to hold himself 
 aloof. 
 
 " As to the poetical character itself (I 
 mean that sort of which, if I am anything, I 
 
 ' Forman's edition of Keats's Works, Vol. iii., pp. 99-100. 
 The italics are Keats's own. 
 5
 
 (i^ STUDIES JN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 am a member, that sort distiiii^uished from the 
 Wordsworthian, or egotistical sublime ; which is 
 a thing per se, and stands alone), it is not itself 
 — it has no self — it is everything and nothing — 
 it has no character — it enjoys light and shade 
 — it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or 
 low, rich or poor, mean or elevated — it has as 
 much delight in conceiving an lago as an Imo- 
 gen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher de- 
 lights the cameleon poet. It does no harm 
 from its relish of the dark side of things, any 
 more than from its taste for the bright ones, 
 because they both end in speculation." ' 
 
 All this simply gives us a reasoned statement 
 of principles the roots of which, as fundamental 
 intuitions, run deep down into the sub-soil of 
 Kcats's nature. H is ideal of the poet and of the 
 poet's attitude towards life, therefore, represents 
 the unchecked bias of a temperament which, 
 for him, rendered such an ideal practically pos- 
 sible. And it is in terms of this central fact in 
 Keats's rare and striking personality, that the 
 various characteristics of his genius above 
 touched on — his power of self-detachment from 
 circumstances by which nearly all his great con- 
 temporaries were profoundly influenced, his 
 imaginative escape into the legendary past, his 
 indifference to the moral aspects of existence, 
 and to the ideas and problems of his own age, 
 
 ' Letter to Woodhouse, Oct. 27, 1818, in Forman's edition 
 of Keats's Works, Vol. iii., pp. 233-34.
 
 JOHN KEATS. 6/ 
 
 his spontaneous sympathy with pagan habits of 
 thought, his objective handling of nature— have 
 one and all to find ultimate interpretation. 
 
 VII. 
 
 No study of Keats, and particularly, there- 
 fore, no such study as the foregoing, in which 
 attention has been fixed almost exclusively 
 upon the essential as distinguished from the 
 technical elements of his work, can close with- 
 out due recognition of the pathetic fact, that 
 to him, as to few indeed among his compeers 
 in genius, were denied " the years that bring 
 the philosophic mind." It would manifestly 
 be unsafe to speculate upon the changes that, 
 Keats's thought might have undergone had 
 he lived to reach even middle life ; but that 
 changes would have come over him, and that 
 such changes would have been great and far- 
 reaching, seems absolutely certain. We know 
 how rich and spontaneous his genius was ; and 
 we know, moreover, that his whole nature was 
 permeated by a rare power of growth. The 
 high, manly tone of all his self-criticism, his 
 mingled humility and self-assertion, would 
 alone be sufificient to show this. " My own 
 domestic criticism," he writes to Hessey, " has 
 given me pain without comparison beyond 
 what ' Blackwood ' or the ' Quarterly ' could 
 possibly inflict ; and also when I feel I am 
 right, no external praise can give me such a
 
 68 STUDIES JiV INTERPRETATION. 
 
 glow as my own solitary rcpcrccption and ratifi- 
 cation of what is fine. J. S. is perfectly right 
 in regard to the ' slip-shod Endymion.' That 
 is no fault of mine. No ! though it may sound 
 a little paradoxical, it is as good as I had power 
 to make it by myself. Had I been nervous 
 about its being a perfect piece, and with that 
 view asked advice, it would not have been 
 written ; for it is not in my nature to fumble. 
 I will write independently. I have written in- 
 dependently without judgment. I may write 
 independentl}', and luith judgment hereafter. 
 The Genius of Poetry must work out its own sal- 
 vation in a man. It cannot be matured by law 
 .and precept,' but by sensation and watchfulness 
 in itself. . . . 'In Endymion ' I leaped head- 
 long into the sea, and thereby have become 
 better acquainted with the soundings, the quick- 
 sands, and the rocks, than if I had stayed upon 
 the green shore, and piped a silly pipe, and took 
 \sic\ tea and comfortable advice." ' 
 
 And again : 
 
 " If poetry comes not as naturally as the 
 leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all. 
 . . . If ' Endymion ' serves me as a pioneer 
 perhaps I ought to be content, for, thank God, 
 I can read and perhaps understand Shakespeare 
 to his depths. ... I am anxious to get 
 
 ' Compare Wordsworth's sonnet : "^ Poet I He hath put 
 his heart to school." 
 
 'Oct. 9, i8iS. Forman's Keats, Vol. iii., pp. 230-31.
 
 JOHN KEA TS. 69 
 
 ' Endymion ' printed, that I may forget it, and 
 proceed." ' 
 
 In all this, as once more in the fine and digni- 
 fied preface to Endyuiion itself, we have the 
 unmistakable utterance of the true artist — of 
 the man who will learn by trial, effort, dis- 
 appointment, failure, and rise on stepping- 
 stones of his dead self to higher things. Here 
 there is little to remind us of the mythical 
 Keats — the poor, puny, effeminate, sensual 
 weakling, Avhom Byron's cynicism, and Hay- 
 don's garrulity, and Shelley's magnificent 
 chivalry combined to keep alive in the imagi- 
 nations of an uncritical public, and who started 
 into fresh vitality under the influence of the un- 
 fortunate Fanny Brawne letters. The man who 
 could write in this way while still in the early 
 twenties, was surely capable of almost indefinite 
 development ; and lovers of Keats can hardly, 
 therefore, be blamed for their belief that had 
 he lived even to the age of Byron, he would 
 have taken his place permanently among the 
 greatest English poets of all time. There is 
 thus shown a singular lack of spiritual appre- 
 hension in the brilliant lines in which Mrs. 
 Browning speaks of the writer who, within a 
 few brief years of a failing life, strode forward 
 from Endyviion to Hyperion and the Ode on a 
 Grecian Urn, as 
 
 ' Letter to Taylor, Feb. 27, 181 8, in Forman's edition of 
 Keats's Works, Vol. iii., pp. 122-23.
 
 70 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 " the man who never stepped 
 In gradual progress, like another man, 
 But turning grandly on his central self, 
 Ensphered himself in twenty perfect years, 
 And died, not young." ' 
 
 But while we recognize this vital element of 
 growth in Keats's genius, this supreme promise 
 of development, this extraordinary faculty of 
 turning failure to account, there still remains 
 the question, more pertinent to our present 
 purpose, as to whether or not there were indi- 
 cations of approaching change in the young 
 poet's relations with life. Were there any 
 signs that his thought of the world was likely 
 to become larger, more serious, more sympa- 
 thetic? — that the ethical note would presently 
 have made itself heard ? — that his pagan ca- 
 pacity for the enjoyment of sensuous beauty in 
 all its manifold forms w^ould by-and-by have 
 been sobered and modified by a more persistent 
 and a more pervasive realization of the sterner 
 actualities of existence ? 
 
 Perhaps yes — perhaps no ; it is hard to meet 
 such questions with a more definite answer than 
 this. The fundamental quality of temperament 
 is about the last thing in a man that any change, 
 no matter how profound and far-reaching, is 
 
 ^Aurora Leigh, Book i. Scarcely more successful is the 
 reference in the Vision of Poets, \\\\^xe.\\\ the lines on Keats 
 contrast almost painfully with some of the other admirable 
 pieces of characterization. I low much truer is the touch in the 
 early sonnet of Lowell — To the Spirit of Keats.
 
 JOHN KEA TS. J I 
 
 likely to affect ; and the old proverb, " once a 
 Jacobin, always a Jacobin," if not to be accepted 
 in the sense in which it is currently used, must 
 be taken none the less as pointing to a very 
 important fact. Keats was young, it is true ; 
 but it is also true that men of spiritual instinct, 
 of deeply religious nature, habitually pass, long 
 before the age at which he died, through expe- 
 riences to which he remained an entire stranger.' 
 It may, therefore, I think, be reasonably in- 
 ferred that the work of Keats's later life, 
 stronger, purer, more temperate, more human, 
 though it would surely have been, would still 
 have been work upon the general lines already 
 laid down — would still have been dominated 
 by the same note, and have partaken of the 
 same larger characteristics. 
 
 Yet there are passages in some of his later 
 letters — passages, too, that cannot be inter- 
 preted as mere expressions of abnormal mental 
 conditions resulting from ill-health and depres- 
 sion — which, read in connection with iheEpislle 
 to Reynolds, already referred to, show very 
 clearly the gradual obsession of his mind by 
 ideas alien to his common habits of thought 
 and feeling. Let one such passage sufifice us 
 here. It is a lengthy one, but its value fully 
 justifies its reproduction. 
 
   We may remind ourselves at this point that the Lines Com- 
 posed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey were written when 
 Wordsworth was only twenty-eight years of age.
 
 ^2 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 " An extensive knowledge is needful to think- 
 ing people ; it takes away the heat and fever, 
 and helps, by widening speculation, to ease 
 'the burden of the mystery,* a thing which I 
 begin to understand a little. The difference of 
 high sensations with and without knowledge, 
 appears to me this : in the latter case we are 
 falling continually ten thousand fathoms deep, 
 and being blown up again, without wings, and 
 with all the horror of a bare-shouldered crea- 
 ture ; in the former case our shoulders are 
 fledged, and we go through the same air and 
 space without fear. ... I compare human 
 life to a large mansion of many apartments, two 
 of which I can only describe [i.e., only two of 
 which I can describe], the doors of the rest 
 being as yet shut upon me. The first we step 
 into we call the Infant, or Thoughtless Cham- 
 ber, in which we remain as long as we do not 
 think. We remain there a long while, and not- 
 withstanding the doors of the second chamber 
 remain wide open, showing a bright appear- 
 ance, w^e care not to hasten to it, but are at 
 length imperceptibly impelled by the awaken- 
 ing of the thinking principle within us. We no 
 sooner get into the second chamber, which I 
 shall call the Chamber of Maiden Thought, 
 than we become intoxicated with the light and 
 the atmosphere. We see nothing but pleasant 
 wonders, and think of delaying there forever in 
 delight. However, among the effects this breath-
 
 JOHN KEATS. 73 
 
 ing is father of, is that tremendous one of sharp- 
 ening one's vision into the heart and nature of 
 man, of convincing one's nerves that the world is 
 full of misery and heartbreak, pain, sickness and 
 oppression, whereby this Chamber of Maiden 
 Thought becomes gradually darkened, and at 
 the same time, on all sides of it, many doors 
 are set open — but all dark — all leading to dark 
 passages. We see not the balance of good and 
 evil ; we are in a mist ; we are now in that state, 
 we feel the ' burden of the mystery.' To this 
 point was Wordsworth come, as far as I can 
 conceive, when he wrote Tintcrn Abbey ^ and it 
 seems to me that his genius is explorative of 
 those dark passages. Now if we live and go on 
 thinking, we too shall explore them. ... I 
 may have read these things before, but I never 
 had even a dim perception of them. . . . 
 After all, there is certainly something real in 
 the world." * 
 
 No comment is needed to emphasize the sig- 
 nificance of this remarkable passage. The ques- 
 tion inevitably arising as we read it is : Are we 
 not justified in believing that, as time went on, 
 its deeper note would gradually have crept into 
 the writer's verse ? — that little by little over his 
 bright, fresh, unsophisticated nature would have 
 stolen something of its subduing sadness, of its 
 strengthening and ennobling sense of reality ? 
 
 ^ Letter to Reynolds, May 3, 1818 ; Forman's ^ifa/j-, Vol. 
 iii., pp. 150-55-
 
 74 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 — that Keats was even then approaching a crisis 
 in his spiritual development, and that the first 
 rich output of his genius is to be held as noth- 
 ing compared with the splendid fruitage that 
 his maturer manhood would almost certainly 
 have produced ? All this must indeed remain 
 a matter of mere speculation. " What is writ is 
 writ," and our part is finally to accept with be- 
 fitting gratitude the priceless legacy left by the 
 dying youth to a world that cares too little for 
 the ideal beauty to whose service his own brief 
 life was consecrated. Yet the feeling of incom- 
 pleteness, the disturbing thought of incalculable 
 loss, will haunt us, none the less ; and we can- 
 not now close the volumes in which his memory 
 lies embalmed forever, without a profounder 
 realization of all that we mean when we speak 
 of Keats as supreme among "the inheritors of 
 unfulfilled renown."
 
 II. 
 
 ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH.
 
 II. 
 
 ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH. 
 
 UPON the republication by a Boston house 
 of a collection of poems by Alexander 
 Smith, a young Scotchman whose work 
 had then recently been attracting considerable 
 attention on the other side of the Atlantic, 
 Clough, then resident in this country, con- 
 tributed a criticism of the volume to the North 
 American Review for July, 1853-' After insti- 
 tuting some comparison between A Life Drama, 
 the most ambitious poem in the book, and 
 Keats's Endymion, the writer continued his arti- 
 cle in this remarkable and significant strain : 
 
 " We are not sorry, in the meantime, that 
 this Endymion is not upon Mount Latmos. 
 The natural man does pant within us after 
 flumina silvasque ; yet really, and truth to tell, 
 is it not upon the whole an easy matter to sit 
 
 > The article was entitled, " Review of Some Poems by 
 Alexander Smith and Matthew Arnold." It has since been 
 reprinted in Clough's Frose Remains, edited by his widow — a 
 volume to which frequent reference will be made in the pres- 
 ent study. 
 
 77
 
 78 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 under a green tree by a purling brook and in- 
 dite pleasing stanzas on the beauties of nature 
 and fresh air? Or is it, we incline to ask, so 
 very great an exploit to wander out into the 
 pleasant field of Greek or Latin mythology, and 
 reproduce, with more or less of modern adapta- 
 tion, 
 
 ' the shadows 
 Faded and pale yet immortal, of Faunas, the 
 nymphs, and the graces ' ? 
 
 Studies of the literature of any distant age 
 or country; all the imitations and qiiasi-X.x'ix.ns- 
 lations which help to bring together into a 
 single focus the scattered rays of human intel- 
 ligence; poems after classical models, poems 
 from Oriental sources, and the like, have un- 
 doubtedly a great literary value. Yet there is 
 no question, it is plain and patent enough, 
 that people much prefer Vanity Fair and 
 Bleak House. Why so ? Is it simply be- 
 cause we have grown prudent and prosaic, and 
 should not welcome, as our fathers did, the 
 Marmions and the Rokcbys, the Childe 
 Harolds and the Corsairs? or is it, that to be 
 widely popular, to gain the ear of multitudes, 
 to shake the hearts of men, poetry should 
 deal, more than at present it usually does, 
 with general wants, ordinary feelings, the obvi- 
 ous rather than the rare facts of human nature? 
 Could it not attempt to convert into beauty
 
 ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH. 79 
 
 and thankfulness, or at least into some form 
 and shape, some feeling, at any rate, of content 
 — the actual, palpable things with which our 
 every-day life is concerned ; introduce into 
 business and weary task-work a character and 
 a soul of purpose and reality ; intimate to us 
 relations which, in our unchosen, peremptorily 
 appointed posts, in our grievously narrow and 
 limited spheres of action, w^e still, in and 
 through all, retain to some central, celestial, 
 fact? Could it not console us with a sense of 
 significance, if not of dignity, in that often 
 dirty, or at least dingy, work, which it is the 
 lot of so many of us to have to do, and which 
 some one or other, after all, must do ? Might 
 it not divinely condescend to all infirmities ; be 
 in all points tempted as we are ; exclude noth- 
 ing, least of all guilt and distress, from its wide 
 fraternization ; not content itself merely with 
 talking of what may be better elsewhere, but 
 seek also to deal with what is here ? We could 
 each one of us, alas, be so much that some- 
 how we find we are not ; we have all of us 
 fallen away from so much that we still long to 
 call ours. Cannot the Divine Song in some 
 way indicate to us our unity, though from a 
 great way off, with those happier things ; in- 
 form us, and prove to us, that though we are 
 what we are, we may yet in some way, even in 
 our abasement, even by and through our daily 
 work, be related to the purer existence?"
 
 8o STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 The thought running through the above 
 passage — that poetry if it is to contend suc- 
 cessfully against the ever-growing power of 
 prose fiction, must concern itself more sympa- 
 thetically than it habitually does with the in- 
 terests and activities of the present, and cease 
 to withdraw itself into a world of dead ideas 
 and visionary hopes ; — this thought finds fur- 
 ther expression in one of Clough's miscella- 
 neous poems. Appealing to the writer of verse 
 to accept his responsibilities by becoming, in 
 the largest sense, the illuminator and interpre- 
 ter of modern life, he exclaims: 
 
 " Come, poet, come ! 
 A thousand laborers ply their task. 
 And what it tends to scarcely ask, 
 And trembling thinkers on the brink 
 Shiver, and know not how to think. 
 To tell the purport of their pain, 
 And what our silly joys contain ; 
 In lasting lineaments portray 
 The substance of the shadowy day ; 
 Our real and inner deeds rehearse. 
 And make our meaning clear in verse : 
 Come, poet, come ! for but in vain 
 We do the work or feel the pain. 
 And gather up the seeming gain. 
 Unless before the end thou come 
 To take, ere they are lost, their sum." 
 
 It is worth while to begin our study of 
 Clough with these characteristic citations, since
 
 ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH. 8 1 
 
 they help us to realize at once certain funda- 
 mental qualities of his genius upon which we 
 shall here have to lay stress — his strong sense 
 of actuality and fact ; his intense appreciation 
 of the spiritual difficulties of modern civiliza- 
 tion ; his insistence upon the poet's high place 
 and subtle power as a leader and inspirer of 
 men. Turning from the works of Keats to the 
 writings of the man with whom we have now 
 to deal, we are conscious of passing at once 
 into a totally different emotional atmosphere. 
 Clough is, in the most ample sense of the term, 
 a man of his age and country. Thrown into 
 the midst of the discord and striving, the dust 
 and din, of our nineteenth-century world, he 
 refuses from first to last to ignore or turn aside 
 from the conditions by which he finds himself 
 everywhere beset. It is not for him to seek 
 the imaginative refuge which, each in his own 
 way, Keats and Rossetti alike succeeded in 
 establishing for themselves as a way of escape 
 from the present and the real. Hideous and 
 unattractive, complex and enigmatical as civili- 
 zation may often seem to be, he will at least 
 look its facts and its possibilities fairly and 
 frankly in the face. "With him there shall be 
 no elusion, no evasion, no recourse to the 
 unsubstantial dreamland of poetic utopianism. 
 A scholar of instinct, habit, training, associa- 
 tion, he is nevertheless prepared to abandon 
 the " trim poetic academe " of his early life
 
 82 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 and to step down boldly into the arena of our 
 modern conflicts and confusions, even though 
 " his piping " ^las thereby to take a " troubled 
 sound," and his ilutc to lose for ever " its 
 happy country tone," ' And such being his 
 relation to the world of present fact he was 
 naturally impatient of the poetry which delib- 
 erately had forsaken the living impulses of to- 
 day for the shadowy mythologies of yesterday 
 or the still more shadowy promises of to-mor- 
 row — naturally prone, as wc have seen, to ac- 
 centuate his belief that the poet should stand 
 forth as guide, leader, counsellor, prophet, 
 friend, for the dumb and struggling generations 
 of our great present-day world. 
 
 Perhaps the quality in Clough's character 
 which of all others most impresses the sym- 
 pathetic student of his work, and comes into 
 clearer and clearer relief with every fresh in- 
 quiry into the circumstances and trials of his 
 life, is his splendid sanity of mind — his rare 
 intellectual clearness of vision, honesty, and 
 unflinching courage. Edgar Allan Poe once 
 complained of Bulwer Lytton " that he would 
 rather sentimentalize upon a vulgar although 
 picturesque error " than frankly accept a dis- 
 agreeable and inexorable truth.' This common 
 kind of mental cowardice was entirely foreign 
 
 ' MaUhew Arnold, Thyrsis : A Monody to Commemorate the 
 Author's Friend, Arthur Hugh Clotigh. 
 - Marginalia, xxi.
 
 ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH. 83 
 
 to Clough's genius. The roots of his whole 
 being struck firmly down into the deepest soil 
 of fact ; and to hold fast to this was for him 
 the first and last requirement of any healthy 
 thinking or living — a requirement to be fulfilled 
 at any cost. Hence his acknowledged dissatis- 
 faction with Coleridge, a teacher who, he had rea- 
 son to believe, might otherwise have proved of 
 help to him in the progress of his thought.' 
 " I keep wavering," he writes, " between admir- 
 ation of his exceedingly great perceptive and 
 analytical power, and other wonderful points,and 
 inclination to turn away altogether from a man 
 who has so great a lack of all reality and actual- 
 ity.'"' Keenly alive to the manifold dangers of 
 that kind of irresponsible speculation of which 
 the nebulous metaphysics of Coleridge furnished 
 only too glaring an example, he himself stub- 
 bornly refused to be misled by sentimental 
 caprice, the jugglery of so-called philosophy, or 
 the various popular systems of theological 
 special-pleading, into any fatal confusion of sub- 
 stance and shadow — of things as they are and 
 things as we would fain have them to be. This 
 is what Mr. R. H. Hutton must mean when he 
 says, rather narrowly, that Clough " trusted his 
 thoughts, not his feelings."' How firmly and 
 
 ' See the reference to Coleridge's " antidotive power" in 
 letter to his sister. May, 1847 {Prose Remains, p. 113). 
 
 2 Letter to Simpkinson, Feb., 1841 {Prose Remaitis, p. 88). 
 '^Clough and Atniel, in his Criticisms on Contemporary 
 ThougJit and Thinkers, Vol. i., p. 212.
 
 84 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 solidly the foundations of his nature were in 
 this Avay laid, is strikingly shown in the follow- 
 ing passage from one of his American letters : 
 
 " I think I must have been getting into a little 
 mysticism lately. It won't do: twice two are four 
 all the world over, and there 's no harm in its 
 being so ; 'tis n't the devil's doing that it is; 
 il faiit sy soiunettrc, and all right. Some of my 
 companions are too much in the religiose vein 
 to be always quite wholesome company. This 
 climate also is, I think, mystical." ' 
 
 These sentences give us a clear declaration of 
 dough's intellectual position ; and if we need 
 a commentary upon them we have only to turn 
 to a letter dated just a month later. " What I 
 mean by mysticism," he then writes, evidently 
 in explanation of the foregoing remarks, " is 
 letting feelings run on without thinking of 
 the reality of their object, letting them out 
 merely like water. The plain rule in all mat- 
 ters is, not to think of what you arc thinking 
 about the question, but to look straight out at 
 things, and let them affect you ; otherwise how 
 can you judge at all? Look at them, at any 
 rate, and judge while looking." " 
 
 We are loth to multiply quotations, yet it is 
 so important for our present purpose that we 
 should get as near as possible to the foundation- 
 principles of Clough's philosophic thought that 
 
 ' Letter of Feb. 9, 1853 {Prose Remains, pp. 202-3). 
 - Letter of March 9, 1853 {Prose Remains, p. 207).
 
 ARTHUR HUGH C LOUGH. 85 
 
 space must be found for another extract deal- 
 ing with the same general theme. Writing to 
 a friend, unnamed, in March, 1852, he thus de- 
 clares himself : 
 
 " As to mysticism, to go along with it even 
 counter to fact and to reason may sometimes 
 be tempting, though to do so would take me 
 right away off the terra firma of practicable 
 duty and business into the limbo of unrevealed 
 things, the forbidden terra incognita of vague 
 hopes and hypothetical aspirations. But when 
 I lose my legs, I lose my head ; I am seized 
 with spiritual vertigo and meagrims unutterable, 
 
 "It seems His newer will 
 We should not think at all of Him, but turn. 
 And of the world that He has given us make 
 What best we may.' 
 
 " . . . Lay not your hand upon the veil of 
 the inner sanctuary, to try and lift it up ; go, 
 thou proselyte of the gate, and do thy service 
 where it is permitted thee. Is it for nothing, 
 but for the foolish souls of men to be discon- 
 tented and repine and whimper at, that He 
 made this very tolerably beautiful earth, with 
 its logic and its arithmetic, and its exact and 
 punctual multifarious arrangements, etc, etc., ? 
 Is it the end and object of all finite creation 
 that sentimental human simpletons may whine 
 
 ' These lines with slight verbal alteration, will be found also 
 in Dipsychus, Part ii. , Scene 4.
 
 86 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 about their infinite longings ? Was it ordered 
 that twice two should make four, simply for the 
 intent that boys and girls should be cut to the 
 heart that they do not make five ? Be content, 
 when the veil is raised, perhaps they will make 
 five ! Who knows ? " ' 
 
 It would hardly be exaggerating the impor- 
 tance of these passages to describe them as for- 
 mulating for us the central principle of Clough's 
 intellectual life. It is not remarkable, therefore, 
 that to the doctrine which they embody, the 
 Avriter should recur again and again in his verse. 
 Take such lines as these from the Aiuotirs de 
 Voyage : 
 
 " What with trusting myself, and seeking support 
 
 from within me, 
 Almost I could believe I had gained a religious 
 
 assurance. 
 Formed in my own poor soul a great moral basis 
 
 to rest on. 
 Ah, but indeed I see, I feel it factitious entirely ; 
 I refuse, reject, and jnit it utterly from me ; 
 I will look straight out, see things, not try to evade 
 
 them ; 
 Fact shall be fact for me, and the Truth the Truth 
 
 as ever, 
 Flexible, changeable, vague, and multiform, and 
 
 doubtful. — 
 Off, and depart to the void, thou subtle, fanatical 
 
 tempter " — ' 
 
 ' Prose Remains, pp. 180-81. 'Canto v., 5. 
 
 3
 
 ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH. 8/ 
 
 and it is evident that although this declaration 
 is put dramatically into the mouth of Claude, 
 the unheroic hero, Claude is after all here, as 
 frequently elsewhere in the poem, the expo- 
 nent of the author's own ideas. In the solemn 
 warning of this couplet from Dipsychus — 
 
 " But play no tricks upon thy soul, O man ; 
 Let fact be fact, and life the thing it can," — ' 
 
 we have Clough once again insisting upon the 
 first article of his philosophic creed — the steady 
 acceptance of life as it actually is, with all its dis- 
 appointments, difificulties, and disenchantments ; 
 while for the remoter issues of this cardinal con- 
 viction, we have only to turn to such a passage 
 as the following, in which through the mouth 
 of Philip Hewson he deliberately enunciates his 
 undeviating faith in reality : 
 
 " Better a crust of bread, than a mountain of paper 
 
 confections. 
 Better a daisy in earth, than a dahlia cut and 
 
 gathered, 
 Better a cowslip with root, than a prize carnation 
 
 without it " ; " 
 
 or this, in which discussing, through the utter- 
 ances of another of his characters, the general 
 relations of the good and the beautiful as they 
 are manifested especially in womanhood, he 
 
 ' Scene 2. 
 
 ^ The Bothie of Tober-na- VuoUch, Canto ii.
 
 88 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 thus delivers himself of his aesthetic judg- 
 ment : 
 
 " Every woman is, or ought to be, a Cathedral, 
 Built on the ancient plan, a Cathedral pure and 
 
 perfect, 
 Luilt by that only law, that Use be suggester of 
 
 Beauty, 
 Nothing concealed that is done, but all things done 
 
 to adornment. 
 Meanest utilities seized as occasions to grace and 
 
 embellish." * 
 
 It will help us to a further appreciation of 
 the most important constituent elements in 
 dough's mental make-up — his firm, unyielding 
 grasp upon actuality, his insistence upon the 
 sanctity of fact, his dread of mysticism, his 
 hatred of vagueness and illusion — if we here 
 transcribe a paragraph or two embodying his 
 opinions concerning the eighteenth century — 
 that century of utilitarianism and cold common- 
 sense which it has been the habit of most post- 
 romantic poets to discredit and abuse. Dealing 
 with the general spirit of the age of enlighten- 
 ment and reason, and with the dominant philos- 
 ophy of the time, he writes : 
 
 " Its temper was, I suppose, narrow and ma- 
 terial ; bent upon the examination of phenom- 
 ena, it admitted only such as present themselves 
 to the lower and grosser senses ; to the notices 
 
 ' TJie Bothie of Tober-na- Vuolich, Canto v.
 
 ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH. 89 
 
 of the higher and purer it peremptorily refused 
 its attention. We cannot hvc without the im- 
 palpable air which we breathe, any more than 
 without the solid earth which we tread upon ; 
 the intimations of a spiritual world of which we 
 cannot be rigidly, and, as it were, by all our 
 senses, certified, constitute for our inner life an 
 element as essential as the plain matter of fact 
 without which nothing can be done. But it is 
 certain also that without that matter of fact 
 nothing can be done, and, moreover, very little 
 can be thought : palpable things by divine right, 
 by inevitable necessity,   and intelligent ordi- 
 nance, claim our habitual attention ; we are 
 more concerned with our steps upon the ground 
 than our inhalation of the atmosphere; stories 
 of the apparition of ghosts may very likely be 
 true, but even if they are it matters extremely 
 little. 
 
 " This austere love of truth ; this righteous 
 abhorence of illusion ; this rigorous, uncompro- 
 mising rejection of the vague, the untestified, 
 the merely probable ; this stern conscientious 
 determination without paltering and prevarica- 
 tion to admit, if things are bad, that they are 
 so ; this resolute upright purpose, as of some 
 transcendental man of business, to go thor- 
 oughly into the accounts of the world, and 
 make out once for all how they stand : such a 
 spirit as this, I may say, claims more than our 
 attention — claims our reverence.
 
 90 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION'. 
 
 " W'c must not lose it, — we must hold fast by 
 it, precious to us as Shakespeare's intellectual 
 or Milton's moral sublimities; while our eyes 
 look up with them, our feet must stay them- 
 selves firmly here. Such, I believe, is the strong 
 feeling of the English nation ; the spirit of 
 Newton and of Locke possesses us at least in 
 as full measure as that of any one of their 
 predecessors." ' 
 
 These would at any time have been coura- 
 geous and wholesome words, and at the period 
 when they were written they were especially 
 timely and appropriate ; but our concern here 
 
 ' Lecture on the Development of English Literature frvin 
 Chaucer to Words'Morth {Prose Remains, pp. 347-4S). Con- 
 trast with this the heated denunciations of Carlyle. In 
 connection with the above passage it is interesting to remem- 
 ber that Clough frankly advised one poet of his time to study 
 the prose writers of the eighteenth century. In his review of 
 Alexander Smith's volume, already cited, he writes : " It may 
 be a groundless fancy, yet we do fancy, that there is a whole 
 hemisphere, so to say, of the English language which he 
 [Smith] has left unvisited. His diction feels to us as if be- 
 tween Milton and Burns he had not read, and between Shake- 
 speare and Keats had seldom admired. Certainly there is 
 but little inspiration in the compositions of the last century ; 
 yet English was really best and most naturally written when 
 there was, perhaps, least to write about. To obtain a real 
 command of the language, some familiarity with the prose 
 writers, at any rate, of that period, is almost essential ; and to 
 write out, as a mere daily task, passages, for example, of 
 Goldsmith, would do a verse-writer of the nineteenth century 
 as much good, we believe, as the study of Beaumont and 
 Fletcher" {Prose Remains, p. 378). It cannot be denied 
 that there is much sound sense in this advice.
 
 ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH. 9 1 
 
 is neither with their boldness nor with tlieir 
 good sense, but solely with the light they 
 throw for us upon the writer's personal charac- 
 ter and bent of mind. There was, as we now 
 understand, much in Clough's nature which re- 
 sponded spontaneously and sympathetically to 
 the predominant temper of eighteenth-century 
 life and thought. The " austere love of truth," 
 the " righteous abhorrence of illusion," the stern 
 determination to admit " if things are bad, that 
 they are so " ; all these high intellectual quali- 
 ties which he above animadverts upon as 
 claiming not only attention but reverence, are 
 deeply rooted elements of his own nature which 
 may well arouse similar feelings of admiration 
 in ourselves. Mentally sane, honest, intrepid to 
 the last degree — so his life and his words alike 
 describe him : a clear and direct thinker ; a man 
 impatient of shams and figments of every kind ; 
 frank with himself no less than with others; 
 intolerant of self-deception ; with a tempera- 
 mental horror of the vague, the mawkish, the 
 sentimental ; ' always resolutely determined to 
 see fact and to make the best of it ; — such was 
 
 ^ Notice, for the interesting side-light which it throws upon the 
 integrity of Clougli's character, the following passage from one 
 of his letters to his sister : " I have not read Emilia Wynd- 
 ham, but I did read a long time ago Two Old Mens Talcs, 
 by the same author, and they certainly were, as I am told 
 Emilia VVyndham is, too pathetic a great deal. I don't want 
 to cry except for some good reason ; it is ' pleasant but wrong' 
 in my mind " {Prose Retnains, pp. 11 2-1 3).
 
 92 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 Arthur Hugh Clough — in the noblest sense of 
 that much-abused term, a genuine seeker after 
 truth. 
 
 But such a summary, after all, — as our last 
 quotation taken even by itself suffices to show 
 us — represents but one side of the man's char- 
 acter. He could indeed praise the eighteenth 
 century for its cool common-sense, its hatred 
 of illusion, its repudiation of the visionary and 
 the mock-heroic, and the practical spirit which 
 dictated all its efforts in philosophy, in religion, 
 and in general life. Yet he could not but feel 
 that the view of man and nature insisted upon 
 by the great exponents of rationalism was 
 necessarily partial and one-sided. Wholesome 
 and helpful, as far as it went, and of special 
 value as a corrective to the loose and inconse- 
 quential tendencies of current speculation, it 
 nevertheless appeared to him to be faulty and 
 insufficient, because it left the entire domain 
 of the transcendental systematically out of 
 consideration. " We cannot live without the 
 impalpable air which we breathe, any more than 
 without the solid earth which we tread upon ; 
 the intimations of a spiritual world of which 
 we cannot be rigidly, and, as it were, by all our 
 senses certified, constitute for our inner life an 
 element as essential as the plain matter of fact 
 without which nothing can be done." In this 
 sentence, as we have seen, Clough enters a 
 passing protest against the narrowness and
 
 ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH. 93 
 
 superficiality of that spirit of enlightenment in 
 which he none the less found so much to 
 arouse his sympathy and respect. But there is 
 something more given us here than a mere criti- 
 cism of eighteenth-century deficiencies and lim- 
 itations. In writing these words, Clough dis- 
 tinctly enunciates the spiritual demands of his 
 own nature. He confesses that for himself, at 
 all events, — though he will have his feet always 
 firmly planted upon the solid ground of fact — 
 the impalpable air, the subtle atmosphere of 
 the religious emotion, is a fundamental essen- 
 tial of a healthy life. 
 
 Here, then, we have to supplement our char- 
 acterization of Clough's mental temper and 
 outlook by recognition of the important quali- 
 ties thus brought to our knowledge. Keen- 
 sighted, clear-headed, candid, brave, — all this he 
 was beyond question ; and for such a man the 
 ability to look out steadily upon life, to relin- 
 quish old illusions when they are shown to be 
 illusions, to bow before facts when they are 
 proven to be facts, becomes before all else the 
 guiding principle as well as the ultimate pur- 
 pose of intellectual self-discipline. But he was 
 at the same time endowed with the highest and 
 most sensitive religious nature, and the spiritual 
 cravings within him — the yearnings for some- 
 thing beyond the domain of experience and 
 proof — imperatively refused to be stifled or set 
 aside. The merely phenomenal conclusions of
 
 94 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 positive philosophy, therefore, though he was 
 intensely alive to their worth, afforded him no 
 kind of permanent satisfaction ; and to rest in 
 these conclusions, as if they were final, com- 
 plete, and all-comprehensive, was for him a 
 simple impossibility. Thus he could not 
 remain content with the simple intellectual 
 apprehension of fact as fact. Faith for him 
 must be rooted in reality, but reality must at 
 the same time be interpreted in terms of faith. 
 Frankly accepting the changing order of the 
 world, the accumulation of knowledge, the rapid 
 expansion of thought, as establishing the con- 
 ditions of speculation to which, graciously or 
 ungraciously, we must all of us at last sub- 
 mit, he none the less found himself continually 
 haunted by an ulterior question of the first im- 
 portance : — what do these things mean when 
 looked at from the point of view of the soul? 
 How do they stand related to the religious 
 hopes and aspirations of the race ? 
 
 And here, if we mistake not, we come upon 
 the real secret of dough's inner life, with its 
 struggles and disappointments, its suspense, 
 dubitation, and deep-seated unrest. His na- 
 ture was out of balance with itself. The 
 thinker within him led whither the poet often- 
 times could not follow ; the progressive intel- 
 lect had left behind it the more conserva- 
 tive feelings. The problems that met him 
 wherever he might turn, ultimately assumed 
 for him a spiritual aspect ; yet he found on his
 
 ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH. 95 
 
 hands a large mass of new knowledge which 
 emotionally he was unable to absorb. Thus he 
 discovered himself placed in a dilemma from 
 which there seemed to be no way of escape. 
 Thus he found himself haunted, in the phrase 
 of Wordsworth, which he took as the motto for 
 some of his own verses, by the " blank misgiv- 
 ings of a creature moving about in worlds not 
 realized." He could not continue to rest his 
 highest feelings upon what he knew to be illu- 
 sions — that was out of the question ; but, on 
 the other hand, he could not find in the body 
 of fresh ideas to which he had given his intel- 
 lectual subscription, the firm foundations of a 
 large and serene religious faith. To embark, 
 after the fashion of sundry perplexed philoso- 
 phers in these later times, upon a system of all- 
 round compromise — to throw dust into his 
 own eyes by adoption of the scholastic formula 
 that a principle may be at one and the same 
 time true in science and false in theology — to 
 adjust the claims of the two adverse forces of 
 his character by an adroit attempt to keep 
 knowledge and the religious emotion entirely 
 apart ; — all this was alien to the fine integrity 
 of his mind. And thus he remained as in a 
 strait betwixt two ; unable to turn his back 
 upon the new thought of his age, and all its 
 far-reaching speculative consequences ; equally 
 unable either to repudiate the religious needs of 
 his nature, or to bring these into correspond- 
 ence with the revelations of modern science.
 
 g6 STUDIES TN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 and the rapid inarch of material civilization. 
 To turn back was impossible ; but in pushinc^ 
 forward, and ever forward, how much after all 
 were we compelled to leave behind ! 
 
 " Say, will it, when our hairs are gray, 
 And wi_ntry suns half light the day. 
 Which cheering hope and strengthening trust 
 Have left, departed, turned to dust — 
 Say, will it soothe lone years to extract 
 From fitful shows with sense exact 
 Their sad residuum, small, of fact? 
 Will trembling nerves their solace find 
 In i)lain conclusions of the mind ? 
 Or errant fancies fond, that still 
 To fretful motions prompt the will, 
 Repose upon effect and cause. 
 And action of unvarying laws, 
 And human life's familiar doom, 
 And on the all-concluding tomb? 
 
 'fc> 
 
 Or were it to our kind and race, 
 And our instructive selves, disgrace 
 To wander then once more in you, 
 Green fields, beneath the pleasant blue 
 To dream as we were used to dream. 
 And let things be whate'er they seem ? 
 
 O feeble shapes of beggars gray 
 
 That, tottering on the public way, 
 
 Die out in doting dim decay. 
 
 Is it to you when all is past 
 
 Our would-be wisdom turns at last ? " ' 
 
 ' Co/'J Comfort {Poems, pp. 190-91).
 
 ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH. 9/ 
 
 II. 
 
 It will thus be seen that the so-called skepti- 
 cal quality of Clough's poetry — the fitness of 
 the phrase we shall consider directly— is largely 
 the expression of a fine, honest, and richly- 
 endowed nature thrown out of hinge within 
 itself by contact with the intellectual con- 
 ditions of modern life. Too far-sighted, alert, 
 and sympathetic to ignore the metamorphosis 
 which the forces of the age were working out 
 everywhere around him, he was at the same 
 time unable for the present to find in the new 
 science and philosophy those religious inspira- 
 tions and satisfactions without which existence 
 for him would seem barren and meaningless, 
 and thus he became the self-conscious exponent 
 of conflicting tendencies which he saw he could 
 not harmonize. It now remains for us to notice 
 that the inbred sensitiveness of his character 
 had been greatly intensified by the influences 
 of his earlier life, at school and the university — 
 influences which here demand a moment's at- 
 tention. 
 
 Born in 1819, Clough was sent, soon after he 
 had entered his eleventh year, to Rugby, 
 then under the head-mastership of the famous 
 Thomas Arnold. Here he remained till 1836 — 
 " a somewhat grave and studious boy, not with- 
 out tastes for walking, shooting, and sight-see- 
 ing, but with little capacity for play and for 
 mixing with others, and with more of varied in-
 
 98 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 tellectual interest than usual with boys." ' The 
 record of these important years speaks of his 
 later achievements in football, swimming, and 
 other athletic exercises, and of the high respect, 
 if not exactly popularity, enjoyed by him 
 among his schoolmates at large. But along 
 with all this, it lays special stress on the weight 
 of moral responsibility which the youth early 
 felt resting upon his shoulders, and which 
 naturally grew more burdensome as time passed 
 on. That young Clough, with his innate con- 
 scientiousness and high strain of character, 
 should take school-life more seriously than the 
 rank and file of his companions, was of course 
 inevitable ; but there were two special circum- 
 stances which, at that period, helped in no 
 small measure to strengthen the persistent 
 bent of his mind. During these years he had 
 no home of his own to go to in the holidays, his 
 family being still resident in America ; and the 
 consequent lack of close and unrestrained inter- 
 course with those nearest to him in blood and 
 sympathy, naturally threw him back overmuch 
 upon himself, and tended in this way to de- 
 velop the habit of self-communion to which he 
 was already only too prone. Beyond this it is 
 clear that he responded somewhat too readily 
 for his subsequent happiness and peace of 
 mind, to the powerful personal influences of 
 Dr. Arnold, who, first among modern school- 
 
 ' Memoir, prefixed to Prose Remains, p. 10.
 
 ARTHUR HUGH C LOUGH. 99 
 
 masters to deal with boys as morally responsi- 
 ble beings, carried his method to the extent of 
 making the already over-sensitive abnormally 
 alive to the difficulties of life and thestrenuous- 
 nessof duty. To one naturally so highly-strung 
 and so intensely self-conscious as Clough, the 
 constant strain of these early conditions could 
 not but give rise to many unfortunate results. 
 
 That Clough himself afterwards became 
 aware that, whatever might be said of it on gen- 
 eral principles, the discipline of his school-life 
 had been, in his case at any rate, far from 
 ideally good, may be inferred from the epilogue 
 to the first part of DipsycJuis.^ It must of 
 course be remembered that the man does not 
 here speak in his own person. The words to be 
 quoted in evidence are put by him into the 
 mouth of an imaginary uncle, who is made the 
 spokesman and representative of the older 
 school of educationalists and thinkers. But 
 Clough evidently intended us to see how certain 
 things would work when regarded from the 
 angle of vision of this interesting if somewhat 
 obstinate old person ; and although we should 
 certainly not be justified in maintaining that 
 the views enunciated by him are meant by the 
 
 ' Compare the following passage from the Memoir : ' ' That 
 a great strain and sense of repression were upon him at this 
 time is clear from a letter written after the interval of twenty 
 years. The self-reliance and self-adaptation which most men 
 acquire in mature life were, by the circumstances of his family, 
 forced upon him in his early y<^\\\.\'\"— Prose Remains, p. ii.
 
 lOO STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 author to be accepted as his own, we can and 
 must believe that they are here set down for 
 the purpose of showing the new generation the 
 kind of criticism that might reasonably be 
 passed upon their aims and methods by on- 
 lookers of an entirely different type. It was so 
 much Clough's habit to go all round every 
 question that he considered, that this attempt 
 to set forth the unfavorable side of the regime 
 under which he himself had been brought up, 
 is only another illustration of the natural out- 
 working of his character. 
 
 Here, then, is part of the conversation be- 
 tween uncle and nephew, the starting-point 
 being the first part of DipsycJius. 
 
 " I don't very well understand what it 's all 
 about," said my uncle. " I won't say I did n't 
 drop into a doze while the young man was 
 drivelling through his latter soliloquies. But 
 there was a great deal that was unmeaning, 
 vague, and involved ; and what was most plain, 
 was least decent and least moral." 
 
 " Dear sir," said I, " says the proverb — 
 ' needs must when the devil drives ' ; and if the 
 devil is to speak " 
 
 "Well," said my uncle, "why should he? 
 Nobody asked him. Not that he did n't say 
 much which, if only it had n't been for the 
 way he said it, and that it was he who said it, 
 would have been sensible enough." 
 
 " But, sir," said I, " perhaps he was n't a devil
 
 AR TH UR HUGH CL UGH. I O I 
 
 after all. That 's the beauty of the poem ; 
 nobody can say. You see, dear sir, the thing 
 which it is attempted to represent is the con- 
 flict between the tender conscience and the 
 world. Now, the over-tender conscience will, 
 of course, exaggerate the wickedness of the 
 world ; and the Spirit in my poem may be 
 merely the hypothesis or subjective imagina- 
 tion formed " 
 
 " Oh, for goodness' sake, my dear boy," in- 
 terrupted my uncle, " don't go into the theory 
 of it. If you 're wrong in it, it makes bad 
 worse ; if you 're right, you may be a critic, 
 but you can't be a poet. And then you know 
 very well I don't understand all those new 
 words. But as for that, I quite agree that 
 consciences are much too tender in your gen- 
 eration — schoolboys' consciences, too ! As my 
 old friend the Canon says of the Westminster 
 students, ' They 're all so pious.' It 's all Ar- 
 nold's doing ; he spoilt the public schools." 
 
 " My dear uncle," said I, " how can so vener- 
 able a sexagenarian utter so juvenile a paradox? 
 How often have I not heard you lament the 
 idleness and listlessness, the boorishness and 
 vulgar tyranny, the brutish manners alike, and 
 minds " 
 
 " Ah ! " said my uncle, " I may have fallen 
 in occasionally with the talk of the day ; but 
 at seventy one begins to see clearer into the 
 bottom of one's mind. In middle life one says
 
 102 STUDIES IN INTERPKETATIOX. 
 
 SO many things in the way of business. Not 
 that I mean that the old schools were perfect, 
 any more than we old boys that were there. But 
 whatever else they were or did, they certainly 
 were in harmony with the world, and they cer- 
 tainly did not disqualify the country's youth 
 for after-life and the country's service." 
 
 " But, my dear sir, this bringing the schools 
 of the country into harmony with public opin- 
 ion is exactly " 
 
 " Don't interrupt me with public opinion, 
 my dear nephew ; you '11 quote me a leading 
 article next. ' Young men must be young 
 men,' as the worthy head of your college said 
 to me touching a case of rustication. * My 
 dear sir,' said I, ' I only wish to heaven they 
 would be ; but as for my own nephews, they 
 seem to me a sort of hobbadi-hoy cherub, too 
 big to be innocent, and too simple for any- 
 thing else. They 're full of the notion of the 
 world being so wicked, and of their taking a 
 higher line, as they call it. I only fear they '11 
 never take any line at all.' What is the true 
 purpose of education ? Simply to make plain 
 to the young understanding the laws of the 
 life they will have to enter. For example — 
 that lying won't do, thieving still less; that 
 idleness will get punished ; that if they are 
 cowards the whole world will be against them ; 
 that if they will have their own way, they must 
 fight for it. As for the conscience, mamma, I
 
 ARTHUR HUGH C LOUGH. IO3 
 
 take it — such as mammas are now-a-days at 
 any rate — has probably set that agoing fast 
 enough already. What a blessing to see her 
 good little child come back a brave young 
 devil-may-care ! " 
 
 In the perusal of these strictures it is impos- 
 sible not to realize that Clough himself came to 
 understand how much there was to be said in 
 favor of the more robust methods of educa- 
 tion in general vogue before his time, and how 
 subtly his Rugby experiences had tended to 
 develop within him those characteristics of his 
 nature which he afterwards vainly strove to re- 
 press — excessive susceptibility, the habit of 
 self-analysis, and a conscientiousness pushed to 
 a morbid degree of precision. But if in this 
 respect the peculiar conditions of his school- 
 days had proved to be detrimental, still more 
 harmful were the circumstances in which he 
 found himself placed when, at the age of eigh- 
 teen, he went from Rugby to Oxford. Now 
 came indeed, as has been said, what was " essen- 
 tially the turning point of his life.'" He en- 
 tered into residence at Balliolat the time when 
 all Oxford was shaken to its foundations by the 
 great Tractarian movement, and when the per- 
 sonal power and influence of John Henry New- 
 man were at their height. To follow the history 
 of this extraordinary revival of mediaevalism in 
 religion — to trace phase by phase the changes 
 
 ' Memoir prefixed to Prose Remains, p. 13.
 
 104 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 and chances of the long stern battle waged 
 by the Puseyite party against liberalism and 
 the anti-dogmatic principle,' till such time as 
 with the secession to Rome of its supreme 
 leader, the aggressive band broke up, casting 
 its relics " like driftwood on every theological 
 or philosophical shore " ^ — all this, of course, 
 would take us outside the limits of our present 
 study. The history of the movement and its far- 
 reaching results may be read by all those who 
 care for the investigation of the religious devel- 
 opments of our time in the clear and straight- 
 forward narrative of events furnished by Dean 
 Church, and in the vivid pages of Newman 's/^/t?- 
 logia, Mr. Wilfred Ward's life of his father, and 
 Mark Pattison's Memoirs. Here we are con- 
 cerned simply with the influences exerted by 
 the conditions of that perilous and exciting 
 time upon the character and thought of Clough ; 
 and it will readily be seen that such a man as 
 we have already shown him to be, was of all 
 men the least qualified to breathe with impunity 
 the highly-charged and intoxicating spiritual 
 atmosphere of the Oxford of those momentous 
 years. While the imaginations of his contem- 
 poraries at the university were being fired 
 as by a new faith, and their minds riven in 
 
 ' "My battle was with liberalism ; by liberalism I mean 
 the anti-dogmatic principle and its development." — Newman's 
 Apologia, p. 48. 
 
 - Goldwin Smith, Ox ford and Iter Colleges, p. 82.
 
 ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH. I05 
 
 doubt by conflicting tendencies of almost equal 
 potency, Clough, carried suddenly from the 
 Rugby of Arnold to the Oxford of Newman 
 and Ward, with the latter of whom he was 
 soon linked by the ties of intimate friend- 
 ship, was naturally drawn down into the 
 seething current of speculation, and for a 
 time nearly swept off his feet. The testimony 
 of Mr. Ward himself to the disastrous con- 
 sequences of the state of things thus produced, 
 is too valuable not to be reproduced in this 
 connection. " What was before all things 
 to have been desired for him," Mr. Ward wrote 
 many years after the events to which he refers, 
 " was that during his undergraduate career he 
 should have given himself up thoroughly to his 
 classical and mathematical studies, and kept 
 himself from plunging prematurely into the 
 theological controversies then so rife at Oxford. 
 Thus he would have been saved from all injury 
 to the gradual and healthy growth of his mind 
 and character. It is my own very strong im- 
 pression that, had this been permitted, his 
 future course of thought and speculation would 
 have been essentially different from what it 
 was in fact. Drawn, as it were, peremptorily, 
 when a young man just coming up to college, 
 into a decision upon questions the most im- 
 portant that can occupy the mind, the result 
 was not surprising. After a premature forcing 
 of Clough's mind, there came a reaction. His
 
 I06 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 intellectual perplexity preyed heavily upon his 
 spirits, and grievously interfered with his stu- 
 dies." ' 
 
 That Clough himself from time to time real- 
 ized the unfortunate influence of his Oxford 
 surroundings, is made sufficiently clear by oc- 
 casional utterances in, and no less by the 
 general tone of, his letters dating from the 
 period now in question. " I truly hope to 
 escape the vortex of philosophism and dis- 
 cussion (whereof Ward is the centre), as it is 
 the most exhausting exercise in the world ; 
 and I assure you I quite makarise you at Cam- 
 bridge for your liberty from it." ^ Thus he 
 could write to his friend, J. N. Simpkinson, in 
 1839. " Oxford is, as usual, replete with New- 
 manism and Ncwmanistic gossip, from which it 
 is one blessing for you that you are preserved." ^ 
 So runs a sentence from a letter to J. P. Gell, 
 then in Hobart Town, bearing date New Year's 
 Day, 1840. But it was one thing to appreciate 
 the manifold dangers of the spiritual struggle 
 in which he had become involved, and quite 
 another thing to turn his back decisively upon 
 it. And so, for a time, " Clough was carried 
 away, how far it is impossible with any ap- 
 proach to certainty to say, in the direction of 
 the new opinions. He himself said afterwards 
 
 ' Quoted in Metnoir {Prose Remains, p. 14). 
 ' Prose Remains, p. 85. 
 ^/i>icl., p. 87.
 
 ARTHUR HUGH C LOUGH. lO/ 
 
 that for two years he had been ' Hke a straw- 
 drawn up the draught of a chimney.' " * By 
 and by the reaction came, as in a nature hke 
 his, sooner or later, it was sure to come ; and 
 with the inevitable results. For " when the 
 torrent had subsided, he found that not only 
 had it swept away the new views which had 
 been presented to him by the leaders of the 
 Romanizing movement, but also that it had 
 shaken the whole foundations of his early 
 faith." ' 
 
 To follow from this crisis onward, the sub- 
 sequent course of his religious development 
 would be unnecessary for our present purpose ; ' 
 nor are we called upon in this connection to 
 enter into any discussion of the positive results 
 of his life-long attempt towards the formula- 
 tion of a philosophic creed. The above analysis 
 was undertaken, as we premised at the outset, 
 solely with the view of setting forth as clearly 
 as possible certain of the conditions of the 
 
 ' Alemoir, p. 15. 
 
 ''Ibid., p. 15. 
 
 ^ It will be remembered that, after going through many 
 years of trouble and perplexity about the matter, Clough at 
 length, in 1848, found it imperatively necessary for the satis- 
 faction of his religious scruples, and for his general peace of 
 mind, to relinquish both his tutorship and his fellowship at the 
 university : thus committing himself to a struggle with practical 
 life for which, as the sequel showed, he was very inadequately 
 prepared. The best record of his intellectual life during this 
 period will be found in his own Oxford X^XX^xi {Prose Remains, 
 pp. 75-140).
 
 1 08 S7' UDIE S IN IN TERPRE TA TION. 
 
 man's earlier life, and of pointing out the natu- 
 ral influence of these upon a mind predisposed 
 from the start to the malady of thought. With 
 his theological opinions, as such, it will be 
 understood, we have now no special concern.' 
 It is his attitude of mind, temper, intellectual 
 outlook, and point of view, that we want to 
 understand — a matter quite apart from, and far 
 more important than any inquiry into the 
 special reasons for his acceptance or rejection 
 of this or that particular tenet or hypothesis. 
 It is obvious that a man's general way of look- 
 ing at the deeper problems of life and conduct 
 is in a sense a matter entirely distinct from the 
 
 ' The fullest and clearest statement ever made by Clough 
 himself of what may be described as the foundation-principles 
 of his religious creed, is to be found in his brief N'olcs on the 
 Religious Tradition {Prose Remains, pp. 415-21). The 
 manuscript of this essay, though undated, " may with safety 
 be referred to the last period of his life " (p. 415, note). The 
 writer simply asserts the impossibility of holding fast to the 
 historic records of Cliristianity, and takes his stand firmly upon 
 intuition and the spiritual life of the world at large. Several 
 important passages might be quoted from his letters in further 
 illustration of tliis point of view, as, e. g. : "I cannot feel 
 sure that a man may not have all that is important in Christi- 
 anity even if he does not so much as know that Jesus of Naza- 
 reth existed. And I do not think that doubts respecting the 
 facts related in the Gospels need give us much trouble. Be- 
 lieving that in one way or other the thing is of God, we shall 
 in th:: end know, perhaps, in what way and how far it was so. 
 Trust in God's justice and love, and belief in His commands, 
 as written in our conscience, stand unshaken, though Matthew, 
 Mark, Luke, and John, or even St. Paul, were to fall" {Lei-
 
 ARTHUR HUGH C LOUGH. lOQ 
 
 organized body of his philosophic thought 
 about them ; and in a case Hke Clough's it is 
 rather the question, hoiv he envisaged the 
 world, than the other question, ivhat were his 
 intellectual formulae concerning it, that is the 
 more closely allied to our own line of study 
 and interpretation. 
 
 Yet, before we leave this part of our subject, 
 we must turn back for a moment to a point 
 touched upon a short time ago, and then rele- 
 gated to another place for discussion. In de- 
 scribing the more salient qualities of Clough's 
 character and work, we almost unconsciously 
 make use of the term " skeptical." But how 
 far is such an epithet, after all, justifiable ? In 
 what sense, and with what limitations, must 
 
 ter to his Sister, May, 1847, p. 113). And again: " I cer- 
 tainly am free to tell you that while I do fully think that the 
 Christian religion is the best, or perhaps the only really 
 good religion that has appeared, on the other hand, as 
 to how it appeared, I see all possible doubt. . . . The 
 whole origin of Christianity is lost in obscurity ; if the facts 
 are to be believed, it is simply on trust, because the religion 
 of which they profess to be the origin is a good one. But its 
 goodness is not proved by them ; we find it out for ourselves, 
 by the help of good people, good books, etc. , etc. Such is 
 my present feeling, and the feeling of many. . . . I mean to 
 wait, but at present that 's what I think. A great many intel- 
 ligent and moral people think Christianity a bad religion. I 
 don't, but I am not sure, as at present preached, it is quite the 
 truth. Meanwhile, ' the kingdom of heaven cometh not of 
 observation,' but ' is in ourselves.' " {Letter, of January, 1852, 
 pp. 177-78.) Compare among Clough's poems, especially, 
 Epi-Strauss-iwn and The N'ew Sinai.
 
 I lO STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 the term be employed if it is to serve as a fair 
 and adequate definition ? 
 
 It will help us to set ourselves right on this 
 matter if, in the first place, we bear in mind 
 what we have just above said about the need 
 of distinguishing between a man's creed, be it 
 what it may, and the spirit in which such creed 
 is accepted by him. That there are thus many 
 most thorough-going skeptics within the pale 
 of the orthodox churches, and many thinkers, 
 classed as skeptics, who are not to be described 
 as such save by tacit consent to abandon the 
 true meaning of our language altogether, is a 
 proposition demanding no proof. For our- 
 selves, then, when we speak of Clough's skep- 
 ticism, we must be understood to refer to his 
 temper, not to his system of thought — to his 
 general relation to life, and not to his special 
 treatment of the creeds and principles of any 
 of the established schools of theology. It was 
 Clough's habit to weigh and consider, to probe 
 and analyze, to investigate and reserve judg- 
 ment. His "attitude was always chiefly that 
 of a learner " ' ; and standing face to face with 
 difficulties he would not shirk, and with per- 
 plexities which seemed to become only the 
 more entangled the more he strove to unravel 
 them, he was content to wait in all humbleness 
 of spirit for the help and guidance which for 
 the time being were withheld. The great in- 
 
 ' Memoir, p. i6.
 
 ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH. 1 1 1 
 
 stitutes of belief handed down from the past 
 came fraught for his judgment with no ex- 
 traneous authority ; they had to be tried anew 
 at every point in the light of clear reason, with 
 all the aids and appliances of modern knowl- 
 edge, and when they were found wanting in 
 any particular, not all the sanctity of tradition, 
 not all the glory of historic place and power, 
 could render them venerable in his eyes. The 
 validity of faith, the foundations of hope, all 
 that men have agreed to hold most sacred, 
 were for him open questions, to be searched, 
 and sifted, and tested calmly, rigorously, re- 
 morselessly. Accepting no dogma, recognizing 
 no pontifical power in the domain of thought, 
 he thus made it the purpose of his life to see 
 things for himself ; determined to follow truth 
 whithersoever it might lead him ; and equally 
 determined, when his pathway seemed to lie 
 only through darkness to a deeper darkness 
 beyond, to press forward still, patient and un- 
 dismayed. Let the light come, it would indeed 
 be welcome. Let the day tarry, he would none 
 the less bear " without resentment the divine 
 reserve." ' 
 
 It is thus that when we dwell upon Clough's 
 skepticism, we refer to the characteristic tem- 
 per of his mind — his way of approaching the 
 
 ' This fine phrase is from William Watson's poem, To Ed- 
 ward Dowden, on Receiving from Him a Copy of the Life of 
 Shelley.
 
 112 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 facts of existence, and the spirit in which he 
 confronted the larger issues involved in them. 
 All this of itself almost implies a further con- 
 sideration which must never be lost sight of — 
 that of the positive element always present in 
 Clough's intellectual life. The writer of the 
 memoir already more than once laid under 
 contribution, is particularly earnest in insisting 
 upon the fact that Clough's skepticism was not 
 of the fashionable, dilettante, indifferent, or 
 iconoclastic type. If our study of his charac- 
 ter has been at all sufficient, there is no need 
 now for us to lay emphasis upon this point. 
 Nevertheless, to avoid all possibility of misap- 
 prehension, it may be well to cite a portion of 
 what his biographer tells us of him in this 
 connection : " His skepticism was of no mere 
 negative quality — not a mere rejection of tra- 
 dition and denial of authority, but was the ex- 
 pression of a pure reverence for the inner light 
 of the spirit, and of entire submission to its 
 guidance. It was the loyalty to truth as the 
 supreme good of the intellect, and as the only 
 sure foundation of moral character. . . . 
 Such skepticism — skepticism which consists in 
 reverent waiting for light not yet given, in re- 
 spect for the truth so absolute, that nothing 
 doubtful can be accepted as truth because it is 
 pleasant to the soul — was his ... to the 
 end of his life. . . . But the skepticism 
 which assumes a negative position from intel-
 
 A R THUR H UGH CL O UGH. 1 1 3 
 
 lectual pleasure in destructive arguments, which 
 does not feel the want of spiritual support, or 
 realize the existence of spiritual truth, which 
 mocks at the grief of others, and refuses to 
 accept their honest experiences as real, was 
 never his. He never denied the reality of 
 much that he himself could not use as spiritual 
 nutriment. He believed that God spoke dif- 
 ferently to different ages and to different 
 minds.' Not, therefore, could he lay aside his 
 own duty of seeking and waiting. Through 
 good report and through evil report, this he 
 felt to be his own personal duty, and from it 
 he never flinched." '^ 
 
 III. 
 
 Such being the man, his temper, his intellec- 
 tual surroundings, we pass on to a brief investiga- 
 tion of some of the more salient characteristics 
 of his poetic production ; merely premising that 
 Clough's verse, as we should be led to expect 
 from what we have learned of the personality of 
 the writer, will everywhere be found to present 
 itself to the student as a singularly transparent 
 medium of self-revelation. It belongs througfh- 
 out to the poetry that we classify as intellectual, 
 rather than passionate or imaginative ; bears 
 
 ' Compare Clough's own statement in regard to this in Notes 
 
 on the Religious Tradition {Prose Remains, pp. 418-20). 
 
 ^Memoir, pp. 15-17. 
 8
 
 114 ^ TUDIES IN INTER PRE TA TION. 
 
 along with it upon its simplest phrases the 
 heaviest burden of thought and speculation, 
 and nowhere seeks those lighter graces of the 
 muse which are best calculated to appeal to 
 popular taste. The larger portion of it is 
 purely subjective and personal ; and the re- 
 maining parts — even the stories of the unfin- 
 ished Mari Magno—SiXQ intended as serious 
 contributions towards the study of what the 
 writer always regarded as life's most important 
 themes. Clough himself had little or no in- 
 terest in poetry " which did not touch some 
 deep question, some vital feeling in human 
 nature " ' ; and his own verse is likeiy to prove 
 acceptable only to readers who, with him, 
 would habitually turn to the poet, not for 
 splendor of language, opulence of imagery, 
 felicity of fancy, or charm of style, but for 
 earnest criticism of the ever-encroaching spir- 
 itual and social problems of the time. 
 
 In the first place, then, it may be pointed out 
 in passing that Clough's poetry as a whole is 
 naturally marked by a persistent sense of im- 
 permanence, instability, and transition — by the 
 forward-reaching spirit of a man who, himself 
 falling upon an epoch of upheaval, experiment, 
 and widespread intellectual unrest, stands tip- 
 toe to catch if may be some hint of unrealized 
 things. It is a poetry of anticipation, domi- 
 nated throughout. by the presentiment of the 
 
 ' Memoir, p. 42.
 
 ARTHUR HUGH CLOU GIL I 15 
 
 morrow — the keen foretaste of impending and 
 inevitable change. That which we call the past 
 was the living present once ; that which we call 
 the present will be the dead past by and by. 
 To-day and the things of to-day will not, and 
 cannot, abide with us ; and the new morning 
 which, willingly or unwillingly, we must all go 
 forth to meet, will bring with it many things 
 which must needs seem to us strange, and crude, 
 and perchance even repugnant. '' Every new age 
 has something new in it — takes up p. new posi- 
 tion." ' The older order of the world is break- 
 ing down under the stress of fresh thoughts, 
 ideals, necessities ; and out of the confusion 
 of actual life, it is difficult, perhaps impossi- 
 ble, even to guess as yet what new world-order, 
 if any, is likely to arise. One thing at least is 
 certain. The current which bears us so rapidly 
 forward can be turned aside by no man's 
 power; and for the large heart and brain of 
 a poet like Clough there can therefore be no 
 fact more momentous than this fact of change 
 — no question more important than the ques- 
 tion what this change will ultimately be found 
 to mean. 
 
 The note of fluctuation, the attitude of 
 eager watchfulness, the mood of inquiry, thus 
 become characteristics of the great body of 
 Clough's work in verse. To one poem alone, 
 however, shall we here refer in illustration — to 
 
 ' Letters of Parepidemus i^Prose Remains, p. 382).
 
 Il6 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION^. 
 
 a poem in which for the rest these quahtics are 
 perhaps most distinctly shown. Reprinted in 
 his collected poems the verses bear the signifi- 
 cant Heracleitean motto — navra psi- ovdiv 
 fxivei ,• while in the Letters of Parepidenms, 
 in which they were originally issued, they 
 were prefaced by an interesting paragraph, a 
 few sentences of which we here quote as the 
 best commentary available upon the poem 
 itself. 
 
 " We submit ourselves for instruction to 
 teachers, and they teach us (or is it our awk- 
 wardness that we learn from them ?) their faults 
 and mistakes. Each new age and each new 
 year has its new direction ; and we go to the 
 well-informed of the season before ours, to be 
 put by them in the direction which, because 
 right for their time, is therefore not quite right 
 for ours." ' 
 
 Thereupon follow the verses, which, however, 
 we here reproduce in the somewhat altered 
 form in which they are to be found in the 
 collected poems : 
 
 " Upon the water, in the boat, 
 I sit and sketch as down I float ; 
 The stream is wide, the view is fair, 
 I sketch it looking backward there. 
 
 " The stream is strong, and as I sit 
 And view the i)icture that wc quit, 
 ' Prose Remains, p. 383.
 
 AR THUR HUG IT CLOUGH. 1 1 / 
 
 It flows and flows, and bears the boat, 
 And I sit sketching as we float. 
 
 " Each pointed height, each wavy line, 
 To new and other forms combine ; 
 Proportions vary, colors fade. 
 And all the landscape is remade. 
 
 " Depicted neither far nor near. 
 And larger there and smaller here, 
 And varying down from old to new, 
 E'en I can hardly think it true. 
 
 " Yet still I look, and still I sit. 
 Adjusting, shaping, altering it ; 
 And still the current bears the boat 
 And me, still sketching as I float. 
 
 " Still as I sit, with something new 
 The foreground intercepts the view ; 
 Even the distant mountain range 
 From the first moment suffers change." 
 
 But while Clough's verse everywhere shows 
 the man's resolute facing of the facts of life, 
 and his intense realization of the changing 
 order of the modern world, it reveals at the 
 same time the inevitable fluctuations of his 
 thought and feeling as he speculates upon the 
 various spiritual problems persistently forced 
 upon the attention of his age. His poetry is 
 the poetry of moods — moods of comparative 
 hopefulness, moods of weariness and despair,
 
 Il8 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 moods of mere inquiry and deliberate reserve. 
 To the superficial reader, turning over the pages 
 of his collected works, there might even seem 
 to be the strangest inconsistencies in the utter- 
 ances of some of his shorter poems ; for his 
 sensitive nature catches up and repeats, though 
 always in tempered tones, now the sad wail of 
 some who mourn over the rapid dissolution of 
 the world's great heritage of belief, and now 
 again the glad shout of others who, boldly and 
 trustfully, press forward to meet the coming 
 day. But the wail and the shout — the song of 
 sorrow and the song of promise — alike belong 
 to the man himself, and, far from being dis- 
 cordant or incompatible, are in their own ways 
 equally expressive of his relation to the great 
 issues of the time. If there were seasons in 
 which he could not but realize that hopes may 
 be dupes, there were other occasions when he 
 felt just as strongly that fears might be liars ' ; 
 and the full revelation of each of these alter- 
 nating moods is to be found in his verse. His 
 intellectual life was made up of one long 
 struggle for settled conviction and the adjust- 
 ment of emotion to knowledge ; and his poems 
 present us with the frank personal record of all 
 the vacillation of mind, the hesitation, uncer- 
 tainty, and self-torture, the swing of feeling 
 from hopefulness to despondency and from de- 
 spondency back to hopefulness, which such a 
 ' See his poem, Say Not the Struggle Nought Availeth.
 
 ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH. I I9 
 
 struggle brought with it, to a man of Clough's 
 introspective habit, as one of its inevitable 
 results. 
 
 The contrasted poems on Easter Day, written 
 at Naples in 1849, iriay be taken to exhibit in 
 the most vivid way the author's quick and 
 delicate responsiveness to the evangel of faith 
 and hope on the one hand and to that of doubt 
 and darkness upon the other. Passing through 
 " the great sinful streets " of the Italian city, 
 the burden of a strange Easter message comes 
 borne in upon him — " Christ is not risen." 
 
 " Ashes to ashes, dust to dust ; 
 As of the unjust, also of the just — 
 
 Yea, of tliat Just One, too ! 
 This is the one sad Gospel that is true — 
 Christ is not risen ! 
 
 " Eat, drink, and play, and think that this is bliss : 
 There is no heaven but this ; 
 
 There is no hell 
 Save earth which serves the purpose doubly well, 
 
 Seeing it visits still 
 With equalest apportionment of ill 
 Both good and bad alike, and brings to one same 
 dust 
 
 The unjust and the just 
 
 With Christ, who is not risen. 
 
 " Eat, drink, and die, for we are souls bereaved : 
 Of all the creatures under heaven's wide cope
 
 I20 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION: 
 
 We are most hopeless, who had once most hope, 
 And most beliefless that had most believed. 
 Ashes to ashes, dust to dust ; 
 As of the unjust, also of the just — 
 
 Yea, of that Just One too ! 
 It is the one sad Gospel that is true — 
 Christ is not risen ! " 
 
 A mournful song, indeed for Easter morning 
 — a song which interprets more impersonally 
 perhaps than most of Clough's poems the 
 world's sense of abject desolation and despair 
 as men find themselves suddenly astray in a 
 wilderness out of which light and meaning have 
 vanished forever, with the creeds that can never 
 be vitalized again. 
 
 " And ye, ye ministers and stewards of a Word 
 Which ye would preach, because another heard — 
 Ye worshippers of that ye do not know, 
 Take these things hence and go : — 
 He is not risen ! " 
 
 But the mood changes ; and the poet, after 
 thus filling his song with all the hopelessness 
 that comes with the realization of what has 
 been lost to human life, steps before us again 
 as the exponent of the high courage that may 
 still be inspired by thought of the great reali- 
 ties that still remain. 
 
 " But in a later hour I sat and heard 
 
 Another voice that spake — another graver word.
 
 ARTHUR H UGH CL O UGH. 1 2 1 
 
 Weep not, it bade, whatever hath been said, 
 Though He be dead, He is not dead. 
 
 In the true creed 
 
 He is yet risen indeed ; 
 Christ is yet risen. 
 
 • ■••••• 
 
 " Sit if ye will, sit down upon the ground. 
 Yet not to weep and wail, but calmly look around. 
 Whate'er befell. 
 Earth is not hell ; 
 Now, too, as when it first began. 
 Life is yet life, and man is man. 
 For all that breathe beneath the heaven's high cope, 
 Joy with grief mixes, with despondence hope. 
 Hope concjuers cowardice, joy grief : 
 Or at least, faith unbelief. 
 Though dead, not dead ; 
 Not gone, though fled ; 
 Not lost, though vanished. 
 In the great Gospel and true creed, 
 He is yet risen indeed ; 
 Christ is yet risen." 
 
 Now, it is interesting to observe in this con- 
 nection that as so many of Clough's shorter 
 poems are expressive of varying personal 
 moods, so in like manner the two most per- 
 manently interesting of his three longer poems 
 are both extremely elaborate presentations 
 of natures out of balance within themselves ; 
 while in the third, The Bothie of Tober-na- 
 Vitolich, the element of inner warfare, though
 
 122 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 less prominent, still plays an important part. 
 The analysis of character disturbed by spiritual 
 conflict had a natural fascination for him ; and 
 in tracing out the details of the struggle, in 
 dissecting the motives and counter-motives in- 
 volved, in reaching down into the deep recesses 
 of troubled minds, and in weighing circum- 
 stance against circumstance and feeling against 
 feeling, he found all the keen interest inevitably 
 arising from the fact that he was working artis- 
 tically upon material largely drawn from the 
 experiences of his own life. It is not, of course, 
 intended to imply that such characters as 
 Dipsychus and Claude are for a moment to be 
 regarded simply as Clough himself masquerad- 
 ing in quasi-dramatic disguises. In the case of 
 the latter at all events such a proposition would 
 be clearly untenable. Yet in each of these 
 subtly depicted personalities there is much, 
 very much, that is manifestly auto-psycho- 
 graphical ; much that reminds us, as we study 
 the play of antagonistic forces in their prob- 
 lematical natures, that we are very near indeed 
 to the heart and brain of the man who gave 
 them life. 
 
 So interesting are the two characters now 
 referred to — Dipsychus, in the poem of that 
 name, and Claude, in the Amours de Voyage — 
 as exhibiting each in his own way Clough's 
 intense sympathy with perplexed and intro- 
 spective natures, and the extraordinary under-
 
 A A- T//[//y: HUGH CLO UGH. 1 2 3 
 
 standing which such sympathy gave him of the 
 minutest details of their spiritual strife, that 
 we shall be justified in pausing for a moment 
 to examine a little more particularly the rela- 
 tion of these dramatic characters to the poet's 
 own genius and personal contact with life. 
 
 The first-named of these poems, DipsycJins, 
 may not inaptly be described as a kind of 
 latter-day Faust. It is based upon a question 
 already raised by the writer in some verses on 
 The Music of tJie Wor'ld and of the Soul. "Are 
 there not, then, two musics unto men?" he 
 had asked in this earlier production ; — the 
 coarse and overpowering din of daily toil and 
 sordid striving; and the low, sweet melody of 
 the spiritual life. It is this question that the 
 later DipsycJius takes as its central theme ; the 
 purpose of the poem being (as we have seen 
 the author himself state it) to present a fully 
 elaborated study of idealism in its conflict with 
 the Power of the world,' of which it naturally 
 
 ' Di. Tell me thy name, now it is over. 
 
 Spirit. Oh ! 
 
 Why Mephistophiles, you know — 
 At least you 've lately called me so ; 
 Belial it was some clays ago. 
 But take your pick ; I 've got a score — 
 Never a royal baby more. 
 For a brass plate upon a door 
 What think you of Cosmocrator ? 
 
 Di. Tov'i Ko'jfxoHpdropa'i rov aioovoi rovrov. 
 And that you are indeed, T do not doubt you.
 
 124 STUDIES IN INTERrRETATION. 
 
 exaggerates the evil if not the potency. Dip- 
 sychus himself is, as the name implies, a " double 
 self " ' — a being tortured by the conflict of 
 adverse purposes, without force of will suffi- 
 cient to decide once for all upon the alterna- 
 tive offered to him, yet miserable by reason of 
 his own weakness and vacillation. He is mor- 
 bidly sensitive and introspective ; intensely 
 alive to every influence from without, and to 
 every ebb and flow of thought and emotion 
 within ; a highly-strung nature cherishing 
 dreams of transcendent splendor and prom- 
 ise, and met everywhere by realities which at 
 once seem destructive of his finest hopes and 
 his noblest aspirations. The only other char- 
 acter in the first division of the poem is the 
 Mephistophelian spirit by whom Dipsychus is 
 constantly followed, and with whom he dis- 
 cusses at great length the " vext conundrums" 
 of existence, as he finds them facing him, turn 
 wheresoever he will. This spirit objectifies 
 the anti-idealistic tendencies in the young 
 man's speculative nature. It is his business to 
 present all the lower aspects and ambitions of 
 life in their most picturesque and attractive 
 
 Sp. Ephesians, ain't it ? near the end 
 
 You 've dropt a word to spare your friend. 
 What follows, too, in application 
 Would be absurd exaggeration. 
 
 Di. The Power of this world ! Hateful unto God. 
 
 Dipsychus^ i'art ii., Scene g. 
 1 Part ii.. Scene 5.
 
 ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH. I 25 
 
 forms, to soften down the sharper edges of 
 social injustice and wrongdoing, to exhibit the 
 folly of visionary hopes and pietistic cravings, 
 and to set forth in pleasing colors the loose, 
 easy-going philosophy of existence of the 
 honwie nioycn scnsiiel — the average, every-day 
 mortal who takes things as he finds them, and 
 bothers himself but little about the finer ques- 
 tions cf right and wrong. The voice of the 
 world, of conventionality, of respectability, is 
 heard in all his utterances ; his highest standard 
 is expediency, his ultimate criterion, success. 
 He twits Dipsychus upon his indecision of 
 character ; laughs in a perfectly good-tempered 
 way at all his scruples and difificulties ; caps his 
 heroics with jingling verses of flippant humor, 
 light cynicism, or delicate burlesque ; and alto- 
 gether behaves so much as a gentlemanly and 
 quite unprincipled man of the world, that we 
 are soon made to feel that of all conceivable 
 companions for an over-speculative and inex- 
 perienced young fellow of the type of Dipsy- 
 chus, such an one is, beyond discussion, the 
 most dangerous. At length the unequal con- 
 flict ends ; idealism inch by inch gives ground, 
 and finally loses the day. " Welcome, O world, 
 henceforth, and farewell dreams ! " — with such 
 words, Dipsychus yields allegiance to his new 
 master. With what result ? The second di- 
 vision of the poem, in which the soul's tragedy 
 would have been followed to its completion, is
 
 126 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 unfortunately represented only by the merest 
 fragment ; and thus such a question can be 
 answered only by way of guess. Yet there can 
 be but little doubt as to the general direction 
 that the story would have taken. The first 
 scene of the sequel shows us Dipsychus, many 
 years later, a successful, famous, and wealthy 
 man, and into the privacy of his study intrudes 
 a woman whom long ago he had wronged. 
 She congratulates him upon his high place and 
 noble name, upon his domestic comfort, his 
 power and prosperity ; and he replies : 
 
 " Am I not rather 
 The slave and servant of the wretched world, 
 Liveried and finely dressed — yet all the same 
 A menial and a lacquey seeking place 
 For hire, and for his hire's sake doing work ? " 
 
 Judged by the canon of true happiness, the 
 man's solution of life's problem, for all its 
 imposing superficial results, can only be 
 pronounced a failure after all. 
 
 Now in reading such a poem as this, it is im- 
 possible for us not to recognize the partial 
 identification of the poet with his character. 
 Dipsychus docs not exhibit the remorseless self- 
 effacement, the determined objectivity, which 
 are the prime conditions of true dramatic 
 creation. The personal note is heard in it 
 throughout. In many of the passages put into 
 the mouth of the young idealist we detect the
 
 ARTHUR HUGH C LOUGH. 12/ 
 
 accent of the writer's voice, while the man's 
 general attitude towards the world and its 
 problems is unmistakably Clough's own/ This 
 of course must not be taken to mean that 
 Clough intended DipsycJiiis to stand as a 
 transcript from his own inner life — a mere 
 reproduction of his personal soul-drama, of 
 which, in Amiel's phrase, he had been so keen- 
 sighted a spectator. But careful study of the 
 poem makes it sufficiently clear that though 
 Dipsychus is not to be hastily accepted as an 
 elaborate piece of self-portraiture, his character 
 is none the less made up of elements which 
 Clough had had every reason to find danger- 
 ously prominent in his own intellectual consti- 
 tution. In Dipsychus, in other words, it would 
 seem that we have the exaggeration of the 
 poet's introspective and skeptical tendencies, 
 while his healthy sense of practical life, which 
 as we shall presently see, gave ballast to his 
 thought, is of set purpose eliminated almost en- 
 tirely. The central meaning of the poem thus 
 
 ' It may be pointed out as a matter of detail that Clough 
 made no attempt to obscure the personal nature of much of 
 this poem. In the opening scene, for instance, he makes 
 Dipsychus refer to the first verses on Easter Day as his own 
 production ; while in Part ii., Scene 2, some lines put into 
 the mouth of Dipsychus are reproduced almost verbatim from 
 the close of the poem The Hidden Love. Such bitter verses 
 as Duty, In the Great Metropolis, and The Latest Decalogue, 
 remind us at once of some of the utterances of the World- 
 spirit.
 
 128 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 becomes manifest. Clough was too profound 
 a student of his own life and character not to 
 be fully alive to the dangers Avhich threaten a 
 nature such as his. He knew perfectly well 
 that the habit of self-analysis may easily be 
 pushed to morbid extremes ; that healthy ex- 
 istence is only possible when the processes of 
 mental as well as o-f physical growth are in a 
 large measure left to take care of themselves ; 
 and that systematic mistrust and suspense of 
 judgment tend in the upshot to bring about in- 
 firmity of purpose and a total collapse of the 
 faith which is needed to furnish any working 
 hypothesis for life. Dipsychus may therefore 
 be described as a study made by Clough from 
 himself, in which, however, one aspect of his 
 character is thrown into exaggerated relief for 
 the purpose of emphasizing its logical tendency 
 towards self-stultification and spiritual bank- 
 ruptcy. 
 
 That the interpretation here given to the 
 poem is in the main the correct one, is shown 
 by the comments contained in the Epilogue, 
 already cited. Here special stress is laid upon 
 the weakness of will superinduced by modern 
 methods of education, and the introspective 
 habit of mind to which these give rise, and 
 upon the liability of " the over-tender con- 
 science " to " exaggerate the wickedness of the 
 world." Indecision of character, lack of 
 robustness and actuality, intellectual fasti-
 
 ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH. I 29 
 
 diousncss with all its attendant evils — these 
 are the qualities brought out as causes of the 
 downfall of the young idealist's fine-cut imper- 
 fectly-poised nature. Elsewhere, speaking now 
 distinctly for himself, Clough returns to the 
 same theme in these well weighed sentences: 
 " Between the extremes of ascetic and timid 
 self-culture, and of unquestioning, unhesitating 
 confidence, we may consent to see and tolerate 
 every kind and gradation of intermixture. 
 Nevertheless, upon the whole, for the present 
 age, the lessons of reflectiveness and the habits 
 of caution do not appear to be more needful 
 or appropriate than exhortations to steady 
 courage, and calls to action. There is some- 
 thing certainly of an over-educated weakness of 
 purpose in Western Europe — not in Germany 
 only, or in France, but also in more busy Eng- 
 land. There is a disposition to press too far 
 the finer and subtler intellectual and moral sus- 
 ceptibilities ; to insist upon following out, as 
 they say, to their logical consequences, the 
 notices of some organ of the spiritual nature ; 
 a proceeding which perhaps is hardly more 
 sensible in the grown man than it would 
 be in the infant to refuse to correct the sen- 
 sations of sight by those of the touch. Upon 
 the whole, we are disposed to follow out, if 
 we must follow out at all, the analogy of 
 the bodily senses ; we are inclined to accept 
 rather than investigate ; and to put our con-
 
 130 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 fidence less in arithmetic and antinomies than 
 
 in 
 
 " A few strong instincts and a few plain rales." ' 
 
 Now, all that we have said, by way of in- 
 terpretation, about DipsycJms, will apply with 
 even greater force to the second of the two 
 poems now in question — xSxo. Amours de Voyage ; 
 a more interesting work in itself, and one show- 
 ing in its general structure a finer quality of art. 
 If we have been justified in describing Dipsy- 
 cJiiis as a kind of latter-day Faust, we may aptly 
 call Claude, the principal figure of the Amours, 
 a modern Hamlet, cast in a quite unheroic 
 mould, and confronted by a life-problem of the 
 common and every-day order. Once more, 
 studying his dramatic character from what he 
 has found actual or potential, developed or 
 latent within himself, Clough undertakes to 
 draw for us just such a young man as he con- 
 ceives might be taken as a typical product of 
 our age of over-culture, over-refinement, over- 
 speculation. Claude is a pleasant, high-minded, 
 well-read fellow, with large interests and fine 
 enthusiasms, and many personal qualities cal- 
 culated to arouse our admiration ; but his will- 
 power is almost paralyzed by his persistent 
 skepticism. His whole life is "sicklied o'er 
 with the pale cast of thought." To try every 
 
 ' Review of Some Poems by Alexander Smith and Matthew 
 Arnold {Prose Remains, pp. 372-73).
 
 AR THUR HUGH CLO UGH. 1 3 1 
 
 circumstance, to probe and reprobe every feel- 
 ing, to go behind every judgment ; such is the 
 habit of his mind. He will take no intuition 
 upon its own validity, while as for his motives, 
 he weighs them so carefully and analyzes them 
 so keenly, that one by one they evaporate 
 " and lose the name of action." His knowledge 
 is wide and his philosophic eclecticism un- 
 bounded. His only solution for any problem 
 is to open it up again in its entirety, and re- 
 discuss it in all its bearings. To every ques- 
 tion he returns the same answer — yea, yet nay ; 
 with the possible variation, nay, yet perhaps 
 yea. He understands, of course, — for he has 
 studied himself to good purpose — that the 
 power of looking on all sides of every proposi- 
 tion must often mean lack of the power of act- 
 ing on the merits of any one of them — that a 
 certain onesidedness of character, a certain 
 limitation of vision, is a prerequisite condition 
 to anything like practical success. There 
 would be no need to remind him that the 
 apostles and martyrs were not broad men. 
 Strength, firmness, decision he admires vastly 
 in others, and Garibaldi and Mazzini he men- 
 tions always with respect and sometimes with 
 genuine feeling. But for himself, he finds it 
 impossible to make up his mind to anything. 
 There is always so much to be said on the 
 other side. 
 
 With admirable tact and skill Clough lays
 
 132 STUDIES IN IN TERPRE TA TION. 
 
 the scene of his story in Italy, during the time 
 of the futile repubhcan struggle of 1849, "when 
 from Janiculan heights thundered the cannon 
 of France."' In this way he secures a fine 
 background of practical activity against which 
 the irresolution of his hero stands out with 
 startling distinctness. The stirring events of 
 the crisis, the deeds of courage performed 
 almost beneath his eyes, the excited groups of 
 the cafe and the street corners, have a tempo- 
 rary influence upon his sensitive nature. He 
 is aroused by a brief spasm of energy, which, 
 however, finds its principal outlet in talk. He 
 feels that it is a noble thing to " offer one's 
 blood an oblation to freedom " ; he dreams of 
 ''great indignations and angers transcenden- 
 tal"; he is thankful when there is actually 
 some fighting, and rejoices that the French- 
 men are beaten and the friends of freedom 
 triumphant. Still, there are so many con- 
 siderations to be urged against his taking any 
 personal part in the fray. " Individual culture 
 is also something," for instance ; and to indi- 
 vidual culture practical soldiering, with its dis- 
 tractions, would prove a very serious obstacle. 
 Moreover, he has no musket ; if he had one, 
 
 ' It will be remembered that Clough was himself in Rome 
 during this period, and was a deeply-moved eyewitness of 
 many of the events described or referred to in his poem. His 
 letters written at this time furnish an interesting commentary 
 on the political portions of the work.
 
 ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH. 1 33 
 
 he would not know how to use it ; just at 
 present he is preoccupied with ancient marbles ; 
 he rather believes that he owes his life to his 
 own country ; and then — well, there was a fifth 
 reason, which somehow he has forgotten ; but 
 still " four good reasons are ample." More 
 than ample, we should say ; for as the swift 
 days, with their grand opportunities, slip by, 
 Claude remains inert — interested, fascinated, 
 often touched to the quick ; but still inert. 
 
 Equally skilful is the poet's management of 
 the more purely personal side of his story. 
 Claude is in love ; or, at least, he rather be- 
 lieves, for a time, that he is — for he cannot 
 after all quite satisfy himself that what he takes 
 for love may not in the end turn out to be 
 the merely " factitious " results of " juxtapo- 
 sition — and what is juxtaposition ? " Thus 
 once again what Georgina Trevellyn patly calls 
 the "shilly-shally" quality of his nature be- 
 trays him into sheer weakness and consequent 
 wretchedness. Meanwhile the object of his 
 affections, or at all events of his fancy, is pre- 
 sented to us as an admirable foil to his charac- 
 ter. She is a simple, practical-minded, straight- 
 forward little English girl, absolutely unso- 
 phisticated, full of common sense, and with a 
 way of looking at things and of dealing with 
 them the very antithesis of her strange and un- 
 satisfactory lover's. We feel as we read their 
 letters that if anything in the world could save
 
 134 STUDIES IN- INTERPRETATION. 
 
 the poor young fellow from the fate of his 
 temperament and education, it would be the 
 love and help and — let us admit it — the British 
 Philistinism, of such a girl as " juxtaposition " 
 here throws into his way. But the incipient 
 love-story of course comes to nothing. After 
 pages of epistolary self-revelation, and days 
 and nights of argument and introspection on 
 the part of Claude, circumstances intervene, 
 and put a summary close to the entire episode. 
 Claude is suddenly stung to a realization of the 
 chance he has wasted, and for a moment seems 
 to stand on the verge of definite action. But 
 the inspiration subsides once more under the 
 relentless pressure of thought. " After all, do 
 I know that I really care so about her?" he 
 inquires. " After all, perhaps, there is some- 
 thing factitious about it ; I have had pain, it is 
 true ; I have wept, and so have the actors." 
 
 With a short-sightedness rare in his criti- 
 cism, Emerson complained that Clough should 
 have made the story end so unsatisfactorily. 
 But how could it have ended otherwise ? Like 
 DipsycJius, the Amours de Voyage is both a 
 study and a warning. It is a study once again 
 of " over-educated weakness of purpose " ; it is 
 a warning against the disastrous moral results 
 which, as Clough felt so keenly, our modern 
 subjective tendencies threaten to bring in their 
 train.
 
 ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH. 135 
 
 IV. 
 
 The above considerations will help us to 
 understand another salient characteristic of 
 dough's poetry — its constant insistence upon 
 our modern need for a simpler and less sophis- 
 ticated relation with life and its facts than 
 seems possible to most cultivated men in our 
 present state of civilization. There is some- 
 thing deeply pathetic about the way in which 
 this perplexed and sensitive man of the century, 
 borne down by 
 
 " that load, which where 
 Thought is, is with it " — ' 
 
 face to face with the " vext conundrums of 
 existence," struggling to disentangle his own 
 " twisted thinkings," and unable to shake him- 
 self free from his haunting self-consciousness, 
 is to be found crying out again and again from 
 the depths of his troubled heart for more sim- 
 plicity, more healthy and direct contact with 
 reality, less examination of motive and feeling, 
 less theorizing about things. " Balzac n'a pas 
 eu le temps de vivre,'' writes Monsieur Bourget, 
 in reference to the great French novelist's 
 ceaseless activity and unremitting toil. In 
 much the same spirit Clough is always pro- 
 claiming that men have become so pre-occu- 
 pied with the problems arising out of existencCj, 
 
 ' Two Moods.
 
 136 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 that life's possibilities of enjoyment escape 
 them, its manifold chances slip by them unob- 
 served and unutilized. Could we but become 
 as children, accepting the moment for what it 
 brings us, made restless by no arricrc pens^e, 
 and harassed by no pitiless and importunate 
 questions that drive us crazy by their iteration, 
 and remain unanswered and unanswerable at 
 the last, what a heaven of happiness would 
 be open to every one of us, hour by hour, day 
 by day ! " O blessed ages of pure, spontaneous, 
 unconscious, unthinking, unreasoning life and 
 action, to you, either in the past or the future, 
 the human heart is still fain to recur — still must 
 dream, even though it be but a dream, of how 
 sweet it were to grow as the green herb, to 
 bloom as the spring flowers, to be good because 
 we cannot be otherwise, and happy because 
 we cannot help it. O, blessed ages indeed ! 
 But have such, since men were men, ever been ? 
 Or are such, while men are men, ever likely to 
 come?"' Certainly there seems but small 
 chance of such a consummation in the age in 
 which we ourselves live. Never was the world 
 further from the " negative capability " of which 
 Keats wrote — never more likely to make ship- 
 wreck of its peace and satisfaction upon the 
 
 ' Extracts from a Review of a Work Entitled Considera- 
 tions on Some Recent Social Theories. Originally published 
 in the N'orth American Review, for July, 1853. Reprinted in 
 Frose Remains, pp. 405-12.
 
 ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH. 13/ 
 
 shoals of speculation and amid the breakers of 
 thought. 
 
 Let us take, by way of illustrating Clough's 
 feeling about these matters, a passage or two 
 from the longer poems just above dealt with. 
 Here, for instance, is one in which Claude, of the 
 Amours de Voyage, expresses himself with a sud- 
 den outburst of bitterness which is the more 
 instructive by reason of the very fact that it 
 lacks entirely the youth's customary philosophic 
 placidity. 
 
 " Hang this thinking, at last ! what good is it ? 
 
 oh, and what evil ! 
 Oh, what mischief and pain ! like a clock in a sick 
 
 man's chamber, 
 Ticking and ticking, and still through each covert 
 
 of slumber pursuing. 
 What shall I do to thee, O thou Preserver of men ? 
 
 Have compassion ; 
 Be favorable and hear ! Take from me this regal 
 
 knowledge ; 
 Let me contented and mute, with the beasts of the 
 
 fields, my brothers, 
 Tranquilly, happily lie, — and eat grass like Nebu- 
 chadnezzar ! " * 
 
 This of course has the note of extravagance 
 — of extreme and unreasoning disgust. But in 
 more temperate phraseology, Claude had only 
 just before given utterance to the same reac- 
 tionary feeling. 
 
 ' Amours du Voyage, Canto iii., § lO.
 
 138 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 "Life is beautiful, Eustace, entrancing, enchanting 
 to look at ; 
 
 As are the streets of a city we pace while the car- 
 riage is changing, 
 
 As a chamber filled in with harmonious, exquisite 
 pictures, 
 
 Even so beautiful Earth ; and could we eliminate 
 only 
 
 This vile hungering impulse, this demon within us 
 of craving. 
 
 Life were beatitude, living a perfect divine satis- 
 faction." ' 
 
 Thus docs Claude more calmly define his 
 position; and in words that are strangely simi- 
 lar — for the two passages almost paraphrase 
 one another — Dipsychus deliberately declares 
 himself to the same effect. 
 
 " Yes, it is beautiful ever, let foolish men rail at it 
 
 never. 
 Yes, it is beautiful truly, my brothers, 1 grant it you 
 
 duly. 
 Wise are ye others that choose it, and hapi)y ye all 
 
 that can use it. 
 Life it is beautiful wholly, and could we eliminate 
 
 only 
 This interfering, enslaving, o'ermastering demon 
 
 of craving. 
 This wicked tempter inside us to ruin still eager to 
 
 guide us, 
 Life were beatitude, action a possible pure satis- 
 faction." ' 
 
 ' Amours dii Voyage, Canto iii., § 8. 
 ^ Dipsychus, Part ii., Scene 2.
 
 ARTHUR HUGH C LOUGH. 1 39 
 
 These, indeed, are quasi-dramatic utterances, 
 though the personal accent in them can hardly 
 be mistaken. Let us, therefore, join with them 
 a single passage in which Clough speaks very 
 distinctly for himself. He is preaching a ser- 
 mon on the old text : " This also, saith the 
 Preacher, is a sore evil that I have seen under 
 the sun." 
 
 " To grow old, therefore, learning and un- 
 learning, is such the conclusion ? Conclusion 
 or no conclusion, such, alas! appears to be our 
 inevitable lot, the fixed ordinance of the life 
 we live. The cruel King Tarchetius gave his 
 daughters a web to weave, upon the completion 
 of which he said they should get married ; and 
 what these involuntary Penelopes did in the 
 daytime, servants by his orders undid at night. 
 A hopeless and weary v/ork, indeed, especially 
 for young people desirous to get married. 
 
 " Weaving and unweaving, learning and un- 
 learning, learning painfully, painfully unlearn- 
 ing, under the orders of the cruel King Tarche- 
 tius, behold — are we to say ' our life ' ? ' Every 
 new lesson,' saith the Oriental proverb, ' is an- 
 other gray hair ; and time will pluck out this 
 also.' And what said the Preacher? ' I, the 
 Preacher, was King over Israel in Jerusalem. 
 And I gave my heart to seek and search out by 
 wisdom concerning all things that are done 
 under the heavens ; this sore travail hath God 
 given unto the sons of men to be exercised
 
 I40 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 therewith.' PcrcJid pcnsa? Pcnsando sinvcc- 
 chia,' said the young unthinking Italian to the 
 grave German sitting by him in the dihgence, 
 whose name was Goethe. Is it true ? 
 
 " To spend uncounted years of pain 
 Again, again, and yet again. 
 In working out in heart and brain 
 
 The problem of our being here ; 
 To gather facts from far and near ; 
 Upon the mind to hold them clear, 
 And, knowing more may yet appear, 
 Unto one's latest breath to fear 
 The premature result to draw, — 
 Is this the object, end, and law 
 
 And purpose of our being here ? " ' 
 
 An unintentional and indirect answer to the 
 question propounded in these verses may per- 
 haps be found in the writer's beautiful and deli- 
 cate little London Idyl. 
 
 Nor is it happiness alone, as Clough feels, that 
 we are in danger of losing through our modern 
 sophistication. We are in danger of losing ro- 
 bustness, our practical hold upon things, our 
 chances of usefulness, as well. Tell me, asks 
 Claude, in a letter to his confident, Eustace, 
 
 "Tell me, my friend, do you think that the brain 
 would sprout in the furrow, 
 
 ' Letters of Parepidemus{Prose Remains, ^^. 384-85). The 
 verses are published separately in Clough's Poems under the 
 title Perc he Pcnsa ? Pcnsando s' Invecchia.
 
 ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH. I4I 
 
 Did It not truly accept as its sumnium and ultiinmn 
 
 boniiin 
 That mere common and may be indifferent soil it 
 
 is set in ? 
 Would it have force to develop and open its young 
 
 cotyledons, 
 Could it compare, and reflect, and examine one 
 
 thing with another ? 
 Would it endure to accomplish the round of its 
 
 natural functions 
 Were it endowed with a sense of the general scheme 
 
 of existence ? " ' 
 
 The question thus raised has, it need hardly be 
 said, human and moral bearings of wide sweep 
 and significance. 
 
 And now it will not be difificuit for us to 
 understand what seems to us to be the most 
 important element in Clough's general philoso- 
 phy of life — his faith in work — hard, steady, 
 practical work — as a corrective to over-specula- 
 tion and its manifold and insidious evils. Upon 
 this point Clough has been more than once 
 misrepresented, and there is thus the more need 
 for us to lay stress upon it here. To hold fast 
 to reality, and to do something — such is the 
 gist of much of his most earnest teaching. We 
 cannot be saved from the dangers of sophistica- 
 tion by argument or theory ; to attempt this 
 
 ^Amours du Voyage, Canto iii., § 2.
 
 142 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 course would only be to submerge ourselves at 
 last in quagmires of more desperate depths. 
 We must have our intellectual sanity preserved 
 or restored for us by healthy contact with the 
 world of every-day fact. Herein lies the ex- 
 planation of the final success of Philip Hewson 
 in The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich. Enthusiast 
 and dreamer as he is, he nevertheless remains 
 in firm touch with actuality, and is willing to 
 turn with simple, manly courage to the task- 
 work which it is given him to do. Contrast 
 this more sturdy apostle of the ideal with such 
 characters as Claude and Dipsychus ; mark his 
 'solution of the problem of existence and the 
 tragic issues of the intellectual struggles of 
 these others ; and the purpose of the poet be- 
 comes perfectly clear. 
 
 " Do we not work best by digging deepest ? 
 by avoiding polemics, and searching to display 
 the real thing? " he asks, in a letter to Thomas 
 Arnold (the younger).' And again, addressing 
 a nameless friend : " Enter the arena of your 
 brethren, and go not to your grave without 
 knowing what common merchants and solici- 
 tors, much more sailors and coalheavers are 
 acquainted with. Ignorance is a poor kind of 
 innocence. The world is wiser than the wise, 
 and as innocent as the innocent ; and it has 
 long been found out what is the best way of 
 taking things. 'The earth,' said the great 
 
 ' Prose Remains, p. 170.
 
 ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH. 1 43 
 
 traveller, ' is much the same wherever we go ' ; 
 and the changes of position which women and 
 students tremble and shilly-shally before, leave 
 things much as they found them. Cciinin non 
 aniimim imitant. The winter comes and de- 
 stroys all, but in the spring the old grasses 
 come up all the greener. Let us not sit in a 
 corner and mope, and think ourselves clever, 
 for our comfort, while the room is full of danc- 
 ing; and cheerfulness. The sum of the whole 
 matter is this. Whatsoever your hand findeth 
 to do, do it without fiddle-faddling ; for there 
 is no experience, nor pleasure, nor pain, nor in- 
 struction, nor anything else in the grave whither 
 thou goest. When you get to the end of this 
 life, you won't find another ready-made in 
 which you can do without effort what you 
 were meant to with effort here."" ' And once 
 more : '' Meantime, in defence of silence, I 
 have always an impression that what is taken 
 to talk with, is lost to act with ; you cannot 
 speak your wisdom and have it. . . . All 
 things become clear to me by work more than by 
 anything else. Any kind of drudgery will help 
 one out of the most uncommon either senti- 
 mental or speculative perplexity; the attitude 
 of work is the only one in which one can see 
 things properly. One may be afraid sometimes 
 of destroying the beauty of one's dreams by 
 doing anything, losing sight of what perhaps 
 
 ' Prose Remains, pp. 173-74.
 
 144 STUDIES IN IMTERPRETATION. 
 
 one may not be able to recover ; it need not 
 be so." ' With these fine words in mind, every 
 reader of Clough will turn with renewed affec- 
 tion to the noble poem in which, of all others, 
 these ideas concerning the sanctity of work, 
 find their fullest expression — Qui Laborat, Orat. 
 
 " O only Source of all our light and life, 
 
 Whom as our truth, our strength, we see and feel, 
 
 But whom the hours of mortal, moral strife 
 Alone aright reveal ! 
 
 " Mine inmost soul before Thee inly brought, 
 Thy presence owns ineffable, divine ; 
 
 Chastised each rebel self-encentred thought, 
 My will adoreth Thine. 
 
 "With eye down-dropt, if then this earthly mind 
 Speechless remain, or speechless e'en depart ; 
 
 Nor seek to see — for what of earthly kind 
 Can see Thee as Thou art ? 
 
 " If well-assured 't is but profanely bold 
 
 In thought's abstractest forms to seem to see. 
 
 It dare not dare the dread communion hold 
 In ways unworthy Thee. 
 
 " O not unowned, thou shalt unnamed forgive, 
 In worldly walks the prayerless heart prepare ; 
 
 And if in work its life it seem to live, 
 Shalt make that work be prayer. 
 
 ' Prose Remains, p. 180.
 
 ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH. I45 
 
 " Nor times shall lack, when while the work it plies, 
 Unsummoned powers the blinding film shall part, 
 
 And scarce by happy tears made dim, the eyes 
 In recognition start. 
 
 " But, as Thou wiliest, give or e'en forbear 
 
 The beatific supersensual sight, 
 So, with Thy blessing blest, that humbler prayer 
 
 Approach Thee morn and night." 
 
 We have said that Clough's poetry is a poetry 
 of skepticism, the utterance of varying moods. 
 It remains to add that the skepticism was al- 
 ways courageous, the moods, even at their 
 darkest, touched with a radiance that came 
 from faith in the upshot of things. About this 
 man and his work there was nothing mawkish 
 or sentimental. He was too sane to nurse 
 despair, too manly to harp persistently upon 
 the mouldered strings of life. Hence, in spite 
 of all its perplexity, its craving, its restlessness, 
 his verse possesses the finest inspirational 
 qualities for readers who are able to adopt, even 
 provisionally, his lofty and disinterested point 
 of view. He has nothing to tell us that will 
 serve to make life less strenuous, less complex, 
 less enigmatical ; nothing that will lighten our 
 sense of individual responsibility, or help to 
 cultivate within us that essentially vulgar tem- 
 per — the temper of easy-going optimism. But 
 the note of fortitude, of self-reliance, is to be 
 heard in all his work ; and to this fortitude, to
 
 146 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 this self-reliance, motive and purpose are given 
 by his unshaken belief that somehow, in some 
 mysterious way, a dramatic purpose runs 
 through the life of the world, moulding and 
 directing the immature and seemingly inefTec- 
 tual energies of men to issues of good as yet 
 unseen and undreamed of. 
 
 To illustrate this liigh courage and this in- 
 spiration of the larger hope in Clough's writ- 
 ings a few brief citations will suffice. 
 
 " Are you aware," he writes in one of his 
 letters from America, " that life is very like a 
 railway ? ' One gets into deep cuttings and 
 long dark tunnels, where one sees nothing and 
 hears twice as much noise as usual, and one 
 can't read, and one shuts up the window and 
 waits, and then it all comes clear again. Only 
 in life it sometimes feels as if one had to dig 
 the tunnel as one goes along, all new for one- 
 self. Go straight on, however, and one 's sure 
 to come out into a new country, on the other 
 side the hills, sunny and bright. There 's an 
 apologue for you ! " "^ 
 
 From an earlier letter the following sentences 
 may be reproduced for their expression of the 
 man's informing faith in the persistency of the 
 saving forces of the world. Their fine imper- 
 sonality will hardly escape attention. 
 
 ' The comparison of life with a railway-tunnel, from which 
 we may by and by emerge into sunshine and clear day, will 
 be found again in the Amours de Voyage, Canto v., § g. 
 
 '-' Prose Remains, p. 205.
 
 ARTHUR HUGH C LOUGH. 1 47 
 
 *' It is far nobler to teach people to do what 
 is good because it is good simply, than for the 
 sake of any future reward. . . . Besides if 
 we die and come to nothing it does not there- 
 fore follow that life and goodness will cease to 
 be in earth and heaven. If we give over danc- 
 ing, it does n't therefore follow that the dance 
 ceases itself, or the music. Be satisfied that 
 whatever is good in us will be immortal ; and 
 as the parent is content to die in the conscious, 
 ness of the child's survival, even so, why not 
 we ? There 's a creed which will sufifice for the 
 present." ' 
 
 And now for two short poems in which these 
 same principles of life and faith are set forth in 
 the distinctest possible way. 
 
 " VVhate'er you dream with doubt possest, 
 Keep, keep it snug within your breast. 
 And lay you down and take your rest ; 
 Forget in sleep the doubt and pain. 
 And when you wake, to work again. 
 The wind it blows, the vessel goes. 
 And where and whither, no one knows. 
 
 " 'T will all be well ; no need of care ; 
 Though how it will, and when, and where. 
 We cannot see, and can't declare. 
 In spite of dreams, in spite of thought, 
 'T is not in vain, and not for nought. 
 The wind it blows, the ship it goes, 
 Though where and whither, no one knows."* 
 
 ^ Prose Remains, p. 139. '^ All Is Well.
 
 14^^ STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 In the reading of these lines we feel that we 
 are able to understand the working philosophy 
 of Clough's life. Do your best, in all courage 
 and humility, holding yourself secure in the 
 faith that the heart of the universe is sound, 
 and that the processes of the world can be 
 trusted for the results. Viewing existence from 
 the standpoint of our own little experiences, 
 with their struggles, their constant failures, 
 their unrealized aspirations, their thwarted 
 aims, we may often find ourselves disheartened 
 and dismayed. At such seasons as these we 
 may seek renewal of hope in rising above the 
 level of our petty individual lives, and in sur- 
 veying man and his destiny in a more im- 
 personal way. 
 
 " It fortifies my soul to know 
 That, though I perish, Truth is so : 
 That, howso'er I stray and range, 
 Whate'er I do, Thou dost not change. 
 I steadier step when I recall 
 That if I slip, Thou dost not fall." ' 
 
 ' The poetry of Clough will never appeal to a 
 very wide circle of readers. In both matter 
 and style, it lacks the elements that ensure 
 popularity ; for it carries with it too heavy a 
 burden of thought ; and it is, moreover, taken 
 
 ' ' ' With Whom is no variableness, neither shado'M of turn- 
 ing." The later verses, ' ' Say not the struggle noitght availeth" 
 may be referred to in the same connection.
 
 ARTHUR HUGH C LOUGH. 1 49 
 
 as a whole, deficient in flexibility, warmth, and 
 color. But for the student of nineteenth- 
 century thought and its development in litera- 
 ture, his writings possess almost unique interest 
 and value. For they are the utterance of a 
 man of whom Mr. Lowell, without exaggera- 
 tion, has written: " I have a foreboding that 
 Clough, imperfect as he was in many respects, 
 and dying before he had subdued his sensitive 
 temperament to the sterner requirements of his 
 art, will be thought a hundred years hence to 
 have been the truest expression in verse of the 
 moral and intellectual tendencies, the doubt 
 and struggle towards settled convictions, of the 
 period in which he lived." ' 
 
 ' Essay on Swiitburne' s Tragedies. See also his passing judg- 
 ment in his paper On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners,
 
 III. 
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD.
 
 III. 
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 
 I. 
 
 THE subject of our study in the present 
 chapter is Matthew Arnold the poet ; 
 and it will be well to understand clearly 
 at the outset that the delightful prose works 
 through which this writer made his influence 
 so widely felt will be referred to only inci- 
 dentally, and for the light which they may be 
 found to throw upon the methods and charac- 
 teristics of his verse. An initial word concern- 
 ing the relation between these two expressions 
 of his genius will none the less be desirable at 
 the commencement of our discussion. 
 
 It cannot have escaped the observation of 
 even the most casual reader of Arnold's collect- 
 ed writings that between his verse as a whole, 
 on the one hand, and his prose, as a whole upon 
 the other, there is a profound difference of 
 tone and spiritual quality. Each is indeed 
 marked by the same note of high and firm 
 courage ; each reveals the same graciousness 
 and urbanity of phrase and manner ; each is 
 
 153
 
 154 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 evidently in equal degree the output of a 
 singularly sane and noble nature. But the one 
 is weighted down by the persistent sense of 
 misgiving, gloom, futility, and despair ; while 
 the other, taken in the mass, is wonderfully 
 strong, buoyant, cheery, and decisive. What 
 is the meaning of this remarkable difference? 
 Why should Arnold have made his prose the 
 vehicle of breezy hopefulness, and have re- 
 served his poetry as the medium of his more 
 melancholy utterances concerning human life 
 and destiny ? 
 
 A double answer may be suggested by way 
 of partial explanation. In the first place, 
 Arnold's verse is, broadly speaking, the produc- 
 tion of his earlier manhood ; while his great 
 prose work belongs to his maturer years. It is 
 natural, therefore, that the former should be 
 full of a young man's struggle, uncertainty, and 
 questioning ; and just as natural that the latter 
 should be marked by constructive effort and 
 the general settlement of thought. Arnold's 
 spiritual pilgrimage lay for a protracted period 
 along dark and difficult ways, and of the moods 
 engendered by the experiences of his specula- 
 tive conflicts his poetry is the lucid but always 
 dignified expression. But even as that poetry 
 itself shows us, his nature was at bottom too 
 practical and healthy to remain permanently 
 satisfied with merely negative results. To 
 linger by the wayside, and complain that the
 
 A/ A T THE W A RNOLD. I 5 5 
 
 road was rough, and the journey of Hfe hard and 
 toilsome, might be well enough for a season. 
 His utterances brought him a measure of relief, 
 and they helped to soothe and comfort, even if 
 they did not exactly inspire, many fellow-way- 
 farers, distracted and downhearted like him- 
 self. But the hour came when he was to feel the 
 goading impulse of manhood's sterner needs; 
 and then he turned to the task of breaking 
 new paths for his generation, pressing forward 
 himself through thicket and morass in the 
 direction wherein, as he believed, lay the 
 promise of open skies, and fresh air, and new 
 light. Of these pioneer efforts we may read the 
 record in Arnold's later prose, which palpitates 
 with the courage of the pathfinder, and the 
 exhilaration which comes from experiment and 
 adventure in the vanguard of the world's pro- 
 gressive thought. 
 
 But beyond this, when we contrast the tone 
 and spirit of Arnold's verse with the tone and 
 spirit of his prose, we find ourselves confronted 
 by an illustration, on a small and personal 
 scale, of that inevitable tendency of the emo- 
 tions to lag behind the intellect, which is ex- 
 hibited at large in the general history of 
 nineteenth - century thought. In Arnold's 
 verse, the feelings are in the ascendant, and 
 strike the keynote of his criticism upon life. 
 In his prose the intellect takes the lead, and 
 sweeps on whither the emotions might often
 
 156 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 find it difficult to follow. The one speaks for 
 the heart, and comes as a simple cry out of the 
 great darkness. The other takes its inspiration 
 from a clear brain, resolutely facing the causes 
 of the existing spiritual unrest, and striving to 
 make palpable to self and others the means 
 whereby the new era of adjustment, with its 
 larger faith and wider religious outlook, may 
 ultimately be brought about. 
 
 Taken together, the two considerations here 
 touched upon will, we think, go far to explain 
 the difference in mood and temper between 
 Arnold the poet and Arnold the essayist 
 — between the author of Dover Beach, and 
 the Stanzas to Oberinann, for example, on the 
 one hand, and the author of Culture and 
 Anarchy and God and the Bible on the other. 
 They help us at least to a partial understand- 
 ing of a preliminary question of real importance 
 — the question, namely, why, after showing 
 his high and pure gift of song in the produc- 
 tions of his earlier years, Arnold should then 
 have practically abandoned verse altogether, 
 turning to prose as the fitting medium for the 
 large constructive undertakings to which the 
 greater part of his later hfe was to be devoted. 
 
 II. 
 
 Of the formative conditions of Matthew 
 Arnold's intellectual development we need
 
 MA TTHE IV ARNOLD. I 57 
 
 speak only in brief, since they were practi- 
 cally the same as those we have already an- 
 alyzed with some approach to detail in the 
 case of his friend and spiritual kinsman, Clough. 
 As the son of Thomas Arnold of Rugby, the 
 subject of our present study naturally felt the 
 full influence of that magnetic personality 
 which, as we have seen, played so large a part 
 in the moulding of Clough's genius and charac- 
 ter. If the force and inspiration of " that great 
 teacher of historic truth, that greater teacher of 
 moral right," ' were so operative in the case of 
 a mere pupil, their potency in the case of a 
 son temperamentally impressionable and re- 
 sponsive in the highest degree, must have been 
 still more marked. Yet here we broach a curi- 
 ous question in relation to the tendency of 
 Thomas Arnold's power over the younger 
 generation — a question which Clough himself 
 touched upon with some resolution in the Epi- 
 logue to Dipsychiis, and which is forced even 
 more directly upon our attention as we come 
 to examine the intellectual differences separat- 
 ing father and son. The elder Arnold would 
 have been the last of teachers to desire to 
 foster the speculative and introspective habits 
 of mind which none the less became singularly 
 characteristic of the best of the men who went 
 out from the Rugby of his time. He was him- 
 self a thinker of the most positive order ; emi- 
 
 ' Freeman, Inaugural Lecture, 1884.
 
 158 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 nently level-headed, sane, well-balanced ; and 
 marked, as his son remembered well, by " buoy- 
 ant cheerfulness clear. " ' With little talent and 
 less inclination for abstract and metaphysical 
 discussion, he treated the theological questions 
 that grew out of the progressive conditions of 
 his age from the standpoint of sound, liberal 
 commonsense, priding himself especially upon 
 his opposition to the subtleties and vagaries of 
 Newmanism ; and finding the material for the 
 great literary undertaking of his life in the 
 doings of the Romans — a people he admired 
 greatly for their sterling practical character, 
 " their love of institutions and order, and their 
 reverence for law." " How it came about, there- 
 fore, that a man of this steady and wholesome 
 type should actually have imparted a bias so 
 different from his own to so many of the young 
 men \Vho had been thrown or drawn within 
 the magic circle of his personal power, would 
 seem indeed a puzzle without solution did we 
 not recall the fact, already dwelt on in our 
 previous essay, that his whole method and 
 system of school-government — his habit of treat- 
 ing boys as intellectually responsible beings, 
 his constant appeal to their sense of truth and 
 honor — were exactly calculated to produce that 
 scrupulousness in action, high regard for right, 
 and intense feeling of personal obligation, which 
 
 ' Rugby Chapel, November, 18^7. 
 
 * Stanley's life 0/ Dr. Arnold, Vol. i., p. 1S9.
 
 MA TTHE IV A RNOLD. 1 5 9 
 
 combined to distinguish the men of Arnold's 
 making, and led in the case of the more sensi- 
 tive among them to over-excitation of the re- 
 ligious feeling, and almost morbid irritability of 
 conscience. " It 's all Arnold's doing. He 
 spoilt the public schools " ; such we remember 
 was the comment of the outspoken old uncle 
 in the Epilogue to Dipsychus. " Dr. Arnold," 
 wrote an astute and far-sighted critic, "was 
 almost indisputably an admirable master for a 
 common English boy — the small, apple-eating 
 animal whom we know. He worked — he 
 pounded, if the phrase may be used — into the 
 boy a belief, or at any rate a floating confused 
 conception, that there are great subjects, that 
 there are strange problems, that knowledge has 
 an indefinite value, that life is a serious and 
 solemn thing. The influence of Arnold's teach- 
 ing upon the majority of his pupils, was prob- 
 ably very vague, but very good. . . . But 
 there are a few minds which are very likely to 
 think too much of such things. A susceptible, 
 serious, intellectual boy may be injured by the 
 incessant inculcation of the awfulness of life, 
 and the magnitude of great problems. It is 
 not desirable to take this world too much an 
 serieiix : most persons will not ; and the one 
 in a thousand, should not." ' All this is well 
 
 1 Walter Basehot, Air. Cloze^/i's Poems. This article con- 
 tains an admirable discussion of the influence of "Arnold- 
 ism" in leading up to and paving the way for " Newmanism." 
 
 /^
 
 l6o STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 said, and helps us to understand how it hap- 
 pened that Thomas Arnold's best pupils were 
 men who in after life were characterized, as 
 Clough and the younger Arnold were charac- 
 terized, not by their teacher's robustness, cer- 
 tainty, positiveness, and practicality, but often 
 enough by qualities the reverse of these. 
 
 Trained thus in the same early environment, 
 Arnold like Clough left the Rugby of his father's 
 regime only to enter the Oxford of Tractarian 
 days, and there undergo a similar intellectual 
 upheaval. To trace the development of his 
 mind during this difificult period of test and 
 strain is for the time being at least impossible, 
 no such data as we have before us in the pub- 
 lished memoir and letters of Clough having in 
 Arnold's case as yet been given to the world.' 
 But to the influence exerted upon his own life, 
 as upon the lives of so many of his contem- 
 poraries, by the personality and subtle power 
 of Newman, he bore emphatic testimony when 
 towards the close of his career he came to 
 speak of the voices that were in the air, inspir- 
 ing, warning, counselling, during his under- 
 graduate days. *' Who could resist," he writes, 
 
 ' It is with a certain regret that we find ourselves obliged to 
 leave the statement in the text standing, after perusal of the 
 recently published two volumes of Letters. These volumes 
 open, it will be remembered, with the year 1848, when Arnold 
 was already twenty-six years of age, and had just been ap- 
 pointed private secretary to Lord Lansdownc. The light 
 they tlinnv upon the particular and critical period of his life 
 now under discussion, is, therefore, very slight indeed.
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD. l6l 
 
 in one of his most beautiful prose passages, 
 "the charm of that spiritual apparition, gliding 
 in the dim afternoon light through the aisles 
 of St. Mary's, rising into the pulpit, and then, 
 in the most entrancing of voices, breaking the 
 silence with words and thoughts which were a 
 religious music — subtle, sweet, mournful. I 
 seem to hear him still saying — ' After the fever 
 of life, after weariness and sickness, fightings 
 and despondings, languor and fretfulness, strug- 
 gling and succeeding, after all the changes and 
 chances of this troubled, unhealthy state, at 
 length comes death, at length the white throne 
 of God, at length the beatific vision.' " ' Who, 
 indeed, could resist such personal magic as 
 this ? It is not difficult to understand the ap- 
 peal that such an influence as Newman's must 
 have made to the strongly-developed religious 
 side of Arnold's nature. But the effect of the 
 great ecclesiastic's teaching, however profound 
 it may have been at the time, did not and 
 could not prove of enduring character. In 
 later years he could insist upon the beauty and 
 sweetness, and more than these, upon the 
 strength and persistency of the Oxford tradi- 
 tion, and boldly point to the protest which the 
 Tractarian movement had made, and to a cer- 
 tain extent, as he believed, successfully made, 
 against the philistine rawness and crudity of 
 English middle-class liberalism.' But the lines 
 
 > Lecture on Emerson, in Discourses in America, 
 '^ Culture and Anarchy, Chap. i.
 
 1 62 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 which this movement had followed Arnold 
 could not adopt ; and in his case, as in the case 
 of so many others, the inevitable reaction was 
 not long delayed. Thrown back upon himself 
 for guidance and direction, he thus found him- 
 self at length taking up the skeptic's position. ; 
 It became his business to try the grounds of 
 faith and hope ; to cast aside out of the world's 
 great heritage of spiritual tradition much that 
 he realized to be no longer tenable ; and to 
 fortify himself for the acceptance of a great 
 mass of new facts and theories to which, had it 
 been possible, he would willingly have closed 
 his eyes. In later years, in Literature and 
 Dogma and God and the Bible, he was to make 
 a definite attempt towards the solution of 
 some of the most momentous problems of the 
 age ; offering these works as his own contribu- 
 tion to the new religious synthesis of which he 
 early came to feel that we are in pressing need. 
 It is natural that such constructive efforts, 
 vague and unsatisfactory as to most critics, 
 orthodox and heterodox alike, they must neces- 
 sarily seem to be, should to their author him- 
 self have brought something of the rest and 
 peace only to be found in settled faith.' But 
 
 'Mr. Samuel Wacldinyton writes: "I possess a photo- 
 graph of him [Arnold] taken nearly thirty years ago, and the 
 expression is more grave and iriste than that his features 
 usually wore in the later years of his life." In The Poets and 
 Poetry of the Century, ed. by A. H. Miles ; Vol. Kingsley to 
 Thomson, pp. 95, 96.
 
 MA TTHE W ARNOLD. 1 63 
 
 before they could be put forth, Arnold had to 
 pass through a long period of ferment, uncer- 
 tainty, and dejection ; and it was out of this 
 period, as we have said, that the greater part of 
 his poetry came. To catch the full meaning 
 of 
 
 " the undertone that flows 
 So calmly sad through all his stately lays," ' 
 
 we must, therefore, try to understand the 
 condition of his mind during this time — his 
 temper and spiritual outlook ; since in compre- 
 hension of these things alone will be found the 
 explanation of many of the predominant char- 
 acteristics of his verse. 
 
 And here once again our simplest course will 
 be to set Arnold in comparison with Clough, 
 for the two men met the changes and problems 
 of their time with fundamentally the same kind 
 of response. We have laid stress upon the fine 
 sanity of Clough's mind, upon the keenness of 
 his intellect, his hatred of illusion, his single eye 
 for truth, his unflinching courage, his undevi- 
 ating honesty. All these admirable qualities 
 will be found equally developed in the character 
 of his better-known friend. Arnold, too, was a 
 seeker after truth, impatient of sham, subter- 
 fuge, and mysticism, intolerant of the vague, 
 the fanciful, the far-fetched ; determined to 
 stand face to face with fact. As Mr. William 
 
 ' Principal J. C. Shairp, quoted in same volume, p. 86.
 
 164 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 Watson has written of him, he " brooked no dis- 
 guise." ' Intensely aHve to the changing order 
 of the world, to the gradual break-up of the 
 old, and the slow and painful incoming of 
 the new, he realized that in the midst of all the 
 upheaval of such a period of transition, there 
 was but one safe and manly course — to stand 
 firm, adhere to reality, and accept the issue be 
 that issue what it might. From the very out- 
 set of his career, therefore, his attitude was 
 definitely taken up. He knew that one cannot 
 get rid of the influences of the time-spirit by 
 turning one's back upon them, with Keats and 
 Rossetti, or attacking them with all the elo- 
 quence of vituperation with Ruskin and Car- 
 lyle. For the time-spirit and its doings, as he 
 himself phrased it, he professed the most pro- 
 found respect — in other words, he recognized 
 the inevitableness of the century's movements 
 in speculation and in society, of the lapse of 
 ancient creeds, of the influx of new knowledge, 
 ideals, fashions of life, habits of thought. 
 
 " For rigorous teachers seized my youth 
 And purged its faith and trimmed its fire ; 
 Show'd me the high white star of truth, 
 There bade me gaze and there aspire." : 
 
 thus could he write of his earlier discipline in 
 a poem to which we shall have occasion to 
 
 ' In Lalcham Churchyard,
 
 MA T THE ir A RNOLD. 1 6 5 
 
 refer more at length directly in another con- 
 nection.' With such noble singleness of pur- 
 pose, fortitute, and consistency, did he accept 
 the mark of this high calling, that the proud 
 words put into the mouth of his Empedocles 
 may fitly be applied to himself: 
 
 " Yea, I take myself to witness. 
 That I have loved no darkness, 
 Sophisticated no truth, 
 Nursed no delusion, 
 Allow'd no fear ! " 
 
 We have spoken of the intellectual differences 
 separating the elder from the younger Arnold. 
 Yet Matthew none the less shows himself his 
 father's son in his desire to keep close to prac- 
 tical life, in the simple, straightforwardness of 
 his mental processes, and in his constantly- 
 expressed distrust of mysticism, vagueness, and 
 unintelligibility. His reiterated disclaimer of 
 philosophic talent or consistency, his curious 
 dislike of elaborate metaphysical systems, his 
 everlasting insistence upon the fact that while 
 he is discussing politics, or theology, or social 
 theories, he is all the while merely a plain man 
 talking plainly to plain folk; all these familiar 
 characteristics of his later work will occur to 
 every reader as illustrations to the present 
 point. Studiously uapedantic in thought, and 
 
 * Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse.
 
 1 66 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 almost affectedly unacademic in style, the real 
 Arnold thus revealed to us has scarcely even a 
 shadowy likeness to the mythical Arnold of 
 popular thought — the Oxford fine gentleman, 
 half-scholar, half-dandy ; prophet of the kid- 
 glove persuasion, as the Daily Telegraph con- 
 ceived him ; elegant and spurious Jeremiah, 
 nursing his own melancholy, prattling of his 
 new culture, and holding himself severely apart 
 from the common herd, as he lives in the minds 
 of many others. That Arnold himself, by rea- 
 son of his aristocratic airs and occasional super- 
 cilious mannerisms, was not largely responsible 
 for the existence of this legendary distortion of 
 his individuality, cannot indeed be maintained ; 
 but it is evident that a very small amount of 
 sympathetic study of his writings — an amount 
 sufficient to take one below the surface and 
 into the deep earnest undercurrent of his work 
 — is enough to explode the vulgar myth and 
 establish the reality once for all in its stead. 
 
 It is the highest praise that Arnold can find 
 for Sophocles, " the mellow glory of the Attic 
 stage," that endowed with "even-balanced soul," 
 he "saw life steadily and saw it whole " ; ' as it 
 is the highest praise that he can find for Goethe 
 that he was strong " with a spirit free from 
 mists and sane and clear."'' Such sentences 
 
 'Sonnet To a Ericnd—'' Who prop, thou ask'st, in these 
 bad clays my niintl ? " 
 
 ^ Stanzas in Memory of the A iithor of Obermann.
 
 AfA T THE W ARNOLD. 1 67 
 
 as these bring us directly upon the enduring 
 purpose, the fixed and central aim, of Arnold's 
 intellectual self-discipline. To see life steadily, 
 and to see it whole ; to preserve his mental and 
 moral balance in the face of the most urgent 
 and perplexing external conditions ; to keep 
 the atmosphere of his thought unobstructed by 
 prejudices, premature judgments, figments of 
 fancy, tricks of feeling, delusions of sense ; such 
 from first to last remained the dominant ideal of 
 his entire career. The pursuit of such an ideal 
 might mean the unlearning of much, the resig- 
 nation of much;' it might force upon the un- 
 ready shoulders a burden of heavy thought 
 well-nigh too great to be borne ; facile and com- 
 fortable doctrines of the older faith might in 
 consequence have to be replaced by new con- 
 ceptions which for the time being might well 
 seem hard, gloomy, and uninspiring; but it was 
 no business of the earnest truth-seeker to pause 
 and count the cost of his undertaking. Reali_t^ 
 must be had at any price. ^Without reality 
 there_££aild be no salvation. 
 
 Here, then, is the first point to be noted. In 
 the case of Arnold, as in the case of Clough, 
 we have to do with a man who will play no 
 tricks upon himself, cherish no illusion, tolerate 
 no special pleading — with a man whose prime 
 business is with fact, and whose first question 
 in regard to any new development of theory or 
 
 'See Statizas from the Grande Charlrcttsc, stanza 13.
 
 1 68 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 practice will bo, not is it pleasant, or comfort- 
 able, or easy, but is it true, is it right ? "A 
 man, finally, so deeply and evidently in earnest, 
 filled with so awful a sense of the reality of 
 things and of the madness of self-deception," — 
 in such words he characterizes Bishop Butler,' 
 and in such words may we in turn characterize 
 Arnold himself. And twice he quotes * from 
 this same eighteenth-century thinker, and each 
 time with openly expressed admiration, a 
 sentence which may well be taken as the key 
 to his own intellectual position. " Things are 
 what they are, and the consequences of them 
 will be what they will be; why, then, should 
 we desire to be deceived? " " In that uncom- 
 promising sentence," so runs his comment, " is 
 surely the right and salutary maxim for both in- 
 dividuals and nations," In that uncompromis- 
 ing sentence certainly lay the accepted maxim 
 of his own life. 
 
 To illustrate what we have above said by 
 lengthy quotations from Arnold's numerous 
 writings, would be to commit ourselves to an 
 unnecessary expenditure of space ; but a single 
 reference may be made to sharpen those quali- 
 ties in the man's intellectual make-up on which 
 we here especially wish to insist. In one of his 
 
 ' Bishop Butler and the Zeitgeist {Last Essays on Church 
 and Religion, p. 237). 
 
 * In the essay just mentioned, and in the lecture on Num- 
 bers.
 
 MA TTHE W A RNOLD. 1 69 
 
 later essays, the study on Amiel and his journal 
 (first published in 1877), we have an excellent 
 opportunity of testing the fundamental lucidity 
 and saneness of his mind. There was much in 
 Amiel that he could revere ; much also that 
 seemed to him empty and unavailing ; and in 
 his personal estimation of what he found ad- 
 mirable and of what he found unsatisfactory we 
 have the clearest declaration of his own atti- 
 tude, outlook, and aims. He quotes sundry 
 passages from the journal by way of exhibiting 
 what admirers were accustomed to praise as 
 Amiel's " speculative intuition," and of which 
 the following only can be here reproduced as a 
 sample : 
 
 " This psychological reinvolution is an an- 
 ticipation of death ; it represents the life be- 
 yond the grave, the return to Scheol, the soul 
 fading into the world of ghosts or descending 
 into the region of Die Mutter ; it implies the 
 simplification of the individual who, allowing 
 all the accidents of personality to evaporate, 
 exists henceforward only in the invisible state, 
 the state of point, of potentiality, of pregnant 
 nothingness. Is not this the true definition of 
 mind? Is not mind, dissociated from space 
 and time, just this? Its development, past or 
 future, is contained in it just as a curve is con- 
 tained in its algebraical formula. This nothing 
 is an all. This piinctuin without dimensions is 
 2l piinctum salicnsT
 
 170 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 Upon such a passage what is Arnold's criti- 
 cism ? "French critics throw up their hands 
 in dismay at the violence which the German- 
 ised Amiel, propounding his speculative philoso- 
 phy, often does to the French language. My 
 objection is rather that such speculative philoso- 
 phy as that of which I have been quoting 
 specimens, has no value, is perfectly futile. 
 And Amiel's journal contains too much of it." 
 
 And now set over against these adverse com- 
 ments upon what he finds futile and of no 
 value in the journal, his entire endorsement of 
 another aspect of Amiel's thought — his forti- 
 tude in confronting actuality, his high sense of 
 the sanctity of fact. He quotes the following 
 sentences : 
 
 " Pious fiction is still fiction. Truth has su- 
 perior rights. The world must adapt itself to 
 truth, not truth to the world. Copernicus up- 
 set the astronomy of the Middle Ages ; so much 
 the worse for the astronomy. The Everlasting 
 Gospel is revolutionizing the churches ; what 
 does it matter? " 
 
 And his judgment is as significant as it is 
 brief: "This is water to our mill, as the Ger- 
 mans say, indeed." Arnold's own position 
 could hardly be more clearly defined. It is the 
 position of a man whose aim is ever to see 
 things as they really are ; of a man who in the 
 turmoil and restlessness of youth ' clung to this 
 
 ' See his interesting reference to this period in his essay on 
 George Sand (.l//.r<v/ yr.fMi'j, jip. 241, 242).
 
 MA TTHE IV A RNOLD. 1 7 1 
 
 purpose as his mainstay and guiding power ; 
 and who, in maturer years, when he came to 
 write of the effects even now being wrought in 
 the midst of our present-day world by that 
 " one irresistible force . . . tlie modern spirit,'' 
 could thus summarize his opinion of contem- 
 porary movements, and our own relation to 
 them : 
 
 " Undoubtedly we are drawing on towards 
 great changes ; and for every nation the thing 
 most needful is to discern clearly its own con- 
 dition, in order to know in what particular way 
 it may best meet them. Openness and flexi- 
 bility of mind are at such a time the first of 
 virtues. Be ye perfect, said the Founder of 
 Christianity; I count not myself to have appre- 
 hended, said its greatest apostle. Perfection 
 will never be reached, but to recognize a period 
 of transformation when it comes, and to adapt 
 themselves honestly and rationally to its laws, 
 is perhaps the nearest approach to perfection 
 of which men and nations are capable. No 
 habits or attachments should prevent their try- 
 ing to do this ; nor indeed in the long run, can 
 they. Human thought, which made all insti- 
 tutions, inevitably saps them, resting only in 
 that which is absolute and eternal." ' 
 
 But now comes the question which, turn 
 whither he would, haunted Arnold during his 
 entire life ; inability to answer which satisfac- 
 torily to himself lay at the root of his early 
 
 ' Dc'THocrary {in JMix^d Essays, p. 35).
 
 172 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 hopelessness and unrest ; while efforts to an- 
 swer it in its various relations and bearings 
 constituted the final cause of his later con- 
 structive work. Given all these changes in our 
 nineteenth-century world — the widespread col- 
 lapse of the ancient foundations of faith, the 
 break-up of venerable institutions, the modifi- 
 cation of long-fixed habits, the rise of entirely- 
 new social and industrial conditions — given all 
 those facts which we have in mind when we 
 speak of the incoming of the modern spirit — 
 and how can we relate them " to our sense for 
 conduct, to our sense for beauty";' what, in 
 other words, shall we say of them when we 
 come to look at them from the standpoint of 
 the spiritual man ? Here, for Arnold, lay the 
 ultimate problem, towards the solution of 
 which all knowledge was to be regarded as 
 merely subsidiary. Let us note carefully what 
 he has to say in this connection about some of 
 the new theories of science, and our need, 
 sooner or later, of taking our emotional bear- 
 ings in respect of them. He has been referring 
 to Darwin's discussion of the origin of man, and 
 Huxley's statement of the growth of our sense 
 of law and order in nature ; and he continues: 
 " Interesting, indeed, these results of science 
 are, important they are, and we should all of 
 us be acquainted with them. But Avhat I now 
 wish you to mark is, that we are still, when they 
 
 ' Literature and Science, in Discourses in America, p. 103.
 
 MA T THE IV A RNOLD. 1 7 3 
 
 are propounded to us and we receive them, we 
 are still in the sphere of intellect and knowl- 
 edge. And for the generality of men there will 
 be found, I say, to arise when they have duly 
 taken in the proposition that their ancestor 
 was ' a hairy quadruped furnished with a tail 
 and pointed ears, probably arboreal in his 
 habits,' there will be found to arise an invinci- 
 ble desire to relate this proposition to the sense 
 in us for conduct, and to the sense in us for 
 beauty. But this the men of science will not 
 do for us, and will hardly even profess to do. 
 They, will give us other pieces of knowledge, 
 other facts about other animals and their an- 
 cestors, or about plants or about stones, or 
 about stars, and they may finally bring us to 
 those great ' general conceptions of the universe, 
 which are forced upon us all,' says Professor 
 Huxley, ' by the progress of physical science.' 
 But still it will be knowledge only which they 
 give us; knowledge not put for us into relation 
 with our sense for conduct, our sense for 
 beauty, and touched with emotion by being so 
 put ; not thus put for us, and therefore, to the 
 majority of mankind, after a certain while, 
 unsatisfying, wearying." 
 
 And then, after a parenthetical discussion of 
 the great mediaeval universities and their aims, 
 in answer to the strictures of Professor Hux- 
 ley, he thus proceeds : 
 
 " But now, says Professor Huxley, concep-
 
 174 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 tions of the universe fatal to the notions held 
 by our forefathers have been forced upon us 
 by physical science. Grant to him that they 
 are thus fatal, that the new conceptions must 
 and will soon become current everywhere, 
 and that everyone will finally perceive them to 
 be fatal to the beliefs of our forefathers. The 
 need of humane letters, as they are truly 
 called, because they serve the paramount de- 
 sire in men that good should be forever present 
 to them — the need of humane letters to estab- 
 lish a relation between the new conceptions 
 and our instinct for beauty, our instinct for 
 conduct, is only the more visible. The Mid- 
 dle Ages could do without humane letters, 
 as it could do without the study of nature, 
 because its supposed knowledge was made to 
 engage its emotions so powerfully. Grant that 
 the supposed knowledge disappears, its power 
 of being made to engage the emotions will of 
 course disappear along with it, — but the emo- 
 tions themselves, and their claim to be en- 
 gaged and satisfied, will remain. Now, if we 
 find by experience that humane letters have 
 an undeniable power of engaging the emo- 
 tions, the importance of humane letters in a 
 man's training becomes not less, but greater, 
 in proportion to the success of modern sci- 
 ence in extirpating what it calls ' mediaeval 
 thinking.' " ' 
 
 ' Literature attd Science {Discourses in America), pp. i lo-i 8.
 
 MA T THE IV A RNOLD. 1 7 5 
 
 Arnold's view of the value of humane letters 
 in relating mere knowledge to our sense for 
 conduct, our sense for beauty, may be found 
 stated at length in the lecture from which 
 these citations are made ; into these matters of 
 detail we cannot follow him now. What we 
 here have to emphasize is the fact that the ' 
 problems of modern life assumed always in his 
 hands these ulterior forms. With him, as with 
 Clough, a fine, lucid, intellectual nature was 
 offset by a religious nature equally fine, equally 
 strong, equally insistent. To see things as' 
 they are, knowing that we must adjust our- 
 selves to reality, and that there is no madness 
 comparable to the obstinacy of self-delusion, 
 this, as we have seen, was the corner-stone, the 
 firm foundation-principle of his thought. But 
 as he has just told us, the emotional part of 
 our nature insists upon its claim to be en- 
 gaged and satisfied ; it is permanent and 
 urgent ; nor, save in its full and adequate sat- 
 isfaction, can any lasting happiness be found. 
 Hence, the supreme question — How will the 
 modern spirit and its results in life and thought 
 affect this permanent and urgent part of our 
 nature ? 
 
 And now we are in a position to understand 
 that the unrest and dejection of Arnold's 
 p oetry^ like the unrest and dejection of 
 Clough's poetry, find their explanation for us 
 in the writer's inability to relate the changing
 
 176 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 dispensation of the civilized world to his im - 
 Ijc rative sense for conduct and for beaut y — or, 
 as we should put it, in his inability to translate 
 the outworkinp^s of tho modern spirit into 
 t_crins of the sp iritnril ''^'- The attitude of 
 evasion adopted by Keats and Rossetti, the 
 solutions offered by Newman and Carlyle,' 
 were for him impossible ; but during the period 
 of which his verse is the record, the weight of 
 the world's problems bore all the more heavily 
 upon his mind. The brain was steady, but 
 the heart was not at peace. His life was thus 
 shaken at its foundations; and uncertainty, 
 sadness, the feeling of loss, craving, and futil- 
 ity, became the ever-recurring themes of nearly 
 all his song. 
 
 III. 
 
 It has been pointed out by Mr. Stedman,'^ 
 that in Matthew Arnold we have an " instance 
 of an introspective nature overcoming the pur- 
 pose formed by critical judgment." In other 
 words, Arnold's poetic genius and creed were 
 in direct conflict, and the former fortunately 
 won the day. For a distinct statement of his 
 theoretical position we have but to go back to 
 the memorable preface to the second edition of 
 his earlier poems, published in 1854. Trained 
 
 ' See what he says of Newman at the beginning, and of 
 Carlyle towards the close, of his lecture on Emerson. 
 ^ The Nature and Elements of Poetry, pp. 133-36.
 
 MA T THE IV A RNOLD. I / 7 
 
 in the school of Goethe and the Greeks, he 
 there definitely enunciates his belief that objec- 
 tive art alone possesses permanent value, that 
 human action yields the one fitting material 
 for the muse. Subjective poetry — the poetry 
 of self-expression — is, as such, upon a lower 
 plane of production. Art must be preferred to 
 ourselves. And since modern verse is coming 
 to be marked and marred by ever-increasing 
 subjectivity, the one safe course for the writer 
 of to-day is to hold fast to the ancients, and 
 discipline himself upon the models furnished 
 by their characteristic works. 
 
 It was in accordance with this theory that 
 most of Arnold's more ambitious poems were 
 produced — the heroic episodes of Balder Dead 
 and SoJirab and Riisttun, and the romantic 
 story of Tristram and Isciilt. It cannot be 
 maintained that in any one of these produc- 
 tions the author scores a thorough and de- 
 cided success. Certainly the last-named work 
 is the very reverse of successful ; while, as for 
 the others, we entirely endorse Mr. Stedman's 
 judgment when he describes them as ''tours 
 de force of intellect and constructive taste." 
 Beautiful as they are in their way, with their 
 painstaking polish, their limpidity of diction, 
 their sculpturesque clearness of outline, they 
 none the less serve to show us that under 
 the influence of a carefully-considered critical 
 
 theory, Arnold deliberately placed himself in a 
 13
 
 178 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 by-way of experiment which, consistently fol- 
 lowed, would have led to the practical nullifica- 
 tion of his true genius and power. Working 
 in the direction which he had thus mapped out 
 for himself, he produced poems of a high order 
 of merit — poems marked by skill, delicate art, 
 distinction ; but nevertheless, scholar's work, 
 academic, rather laborious, and deficient in spon- 
 taneity, vitalit)-, the "note of the inevitable." 
 With such offerings as these, Arnold would 
 surely have gained repute; but his interest for 
 us, for the large majority of readers of poetry, 
 would after all have been a narrow one. He 
 certainly would not have become what a grace- 
 ful and discriminating critic has pronounced 
 him to be, " to those who care for him at all 
 . . . the most useful poet of his day." ' 
 
 It was fortunate therefore, as we have said, 
 that though by theory wedded to the ideals of 
 objective art, Arnold in practice allowed his 
 temperament for the most part to have free 
 play, for his really successful poetry belongs to 
 the school he condemned — the school of re- 
 served yet thoroughly honest self-delineation. 
 Balder Dead and SoJirab and Rust iini will always 
 secure sympathetic and appreciative readers 
 among the studious class ; but it is by reason, 
 not of these works, but of poems like Dover 
 Beach, the Stan::as from the Grande Char- 
 treuse, Buried Life, Kensington Gardens, and 
 ' Augustine Birrell, Res JudicatiT, p. 192.
 
 MA T THE W A RNOL D. 1 79 
 
 Others belonging to the same general category 
 — poems full of reflection, and throughout 
 highly personal — that Arnold holds his place 
 unmistakably among the representative poets 
 of our century. 
 
 We get nearer to the really vital element, 
 the true governing principle of Arnold's verse, 
 when we turn from his early manifesto concern- 
 ing the canons of art to his later discussions of 
 the aims and objects of poetry. Everyone is 
 familiar with his famous and much canvassed 
 definition of literature at large as criticism of 
 life, and of poetry in particular as " a criticism 
 of life under the conditions fixed for such criti- 
 cism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic 
 beauty " — a definition which, as has been well 
 said, itself stands in need of a good deal of de- 
 fining. Equally familiar is his often reiterated 
 affirmation of the high place, power, and des- 
 tiny of poetry, as when for instance he writes 
 — " In poetry . . . the spint-QJ-Qiir-. race 
 will fin d . . . as JUmp goes nn ^f ^l pc^ f^th^** 
 helps fail, its consolation and stay." ' Arnold 
 indeed was never weary ot insisting that poetry 
 is to be rightly held as a profoundly earnest, 
 important, and enduring thing, and that it is 
 to poetry that mankind will more and more 
 have to turn " to interpret life for us, to con- 
 sole, to sustain us."^ Poetry for him was 
 
 ^ T/ie Study of Poetry (iia Essays in Criticism , 2d Series, p. 5). 
 2 Ibid., p. 2.
 
 l8o STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 " nothing less than the most perfect speech of 
 man, that in which he comes nearest to being 
 able to utter the truth." ' Such was his theory 
 of the meaning and obligations of poetry, and 
 his own practice was consistently in harmony 
 with it. That poetry should be characterized by 
 the " noble and profound application of ideas 
 to life " ;" that it should be moral in the largest 
 and deepest sense of that rather uncertain 
 term ; ' that it should deal directly with life,* 
 which is itself three parts made up of conduct; 
 and that it should be based on sound and sub- 
 stantial subject-matter ; '" such were the cardinal 
 principles of his doctrine of poetry'. And by 
 strict and conscientious adherence to such 
 principles Arnold's own poetic production is 
 everywhere distinguished. His verse contains 
 
 ' Wordsworth (in Essays in Criticism, 2d Series, p. 
 12S). 
 
 ** Ibid., p. 140. 
 
 ^ Ibid., p. 142. 
 
 ''Ibid., p. 147. 
 
 ^ Instance Arnold's attitude towards Shelley, the " incurable 
 want" in whose poetry he holds to be the want of " a sound 
 subject-matter," with its consequent fault of unsubstantiality 
 ( Words-worth, in Essays, 2d series, p. 165) ; and compare the 
 entire essay on Shelley in the same volume, with its famous 
 description of that poet as a "beautiful and ineffectual angel, 
 beating in the void his luminous wings in vain." It will be 
 remembered also that Arnold expressed dissatisfaction with 
 Wordsworth's Immortality Ode, because its central idea, 
 though " of undeniable beauty as a jilay of fancy," had not 
 " the character of ])uctic truth of tiie best kind" — that is, it 
 had "no real solidity."
 
 MA TTHE W A RNOLD. 1 8 1 
 
 a " noble and profound application of ideas to 
 life " ; it is largely and deeply moral ; its dom- 
 inant note is the note of conduct ; its final 
 question, the question how to live ; its subject- 
 matter throughout eminently sound and sub- 
 stantial. 
 
 ■Thus in spite of all theories concerning the en- 
 during value of objective art, and the relative 
 worthlessness of poetry of the self-delineative 
 order ; in spite of his long training in the discip- 
 line of the Greeks, and his immense and often 
 expressed admiration of their works, Arnold was 
 the last to pretend that the present hour, with 
 its new needs and its new ideals, could ever 
 find satisfaction in lifeless imitations of the 
 great efforts of the past. He believed, indeed, 
 that, compared with the Greek poets from Pin- 
 dar to Sophocles, all other writers fall short : — 
 " No other poets," he declared, " have lived so 
 much by the imaginative reason ; no other 
 poets have made their works so well balanced ; 
 no other poets have so well satisfied the think- 
 ing power, have so well satisfied the religious 
 sense " ; he believed, therefore, that these 
 writers remain of permanent service and signifi- 
 cance for all generations. Yet he distinctly 
 disclaimed any desire to set them up " as 
 objects of blind worship " ; and just -as dis- 
 tinctly maintained that " the present has to 
 make its own^poetry, and not even Sophocles 
 and his compeers, any more than Dante and
 
 1 82 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 Shakespeare are enough for it." ' Hence we 
 detect in all his best and truest verse the char- 
 acteristically modern note. One thing that 
 attracted him especially about Marcus Aurelius 
 was the fact that Marcus Aurelius lived and 
 labored in a state of society modern in its essen- 
 tial features, " in an epoch akin to our own.'"* 
 In this way the pagan emperor was found to 
 possess immense superiority of interest over a 
 man like St. Louis. " St. Louis inhabits an 
 atmosphere of mediaeval Catholicism, which 
 the man of the nineteenth century may ad- 
 mire, indeed, may even passionately wish to 
 inhabit, but which, strive as he will, he cannot 
 really inhabit." Arnold's nature had too strong 
 a hold upon the real and the practical, to allow 
 him to make any attempt to naturalize himself 
 as a citizen of the past world. If he could write, 
 "the future of poetry is immense, because in 
 poetry, when it is worthy of its high destinies, 
 our race, as time goes on, will find an ever 
 surer and surer stay,"^ he could do so by 
 reason of his deep-rooted faith in the funda- 
 mental and vital relation of true poetry to men's 
 actual every-day life. The poetry of the pres- 
 ent, to be alive, to be real, must therefore grow 
 out of the present, and be fed by its multifari- 
 
 ' Pagan and Mediaval Religious Sentiment (in Essays in 
 Criticism, 1st Series, pp. 221-22). 
 
 ^ Marcus Aurelius (in Essays in Criticism, 1st Series, p. 355). 
 * The Study 0/ Poetry (in Essays, 2d. Series, p. i).
 
 MA T THE IV A RNOLD. I %l 
 
 ous streams of thought and feehng ; and that 
 part of the production of Arnold himself which 
 is secure of immortality — the part in which 
 " our race, as time goes on, will find an ever 
 surer and surer stay," is the part in which he 
 has allowed his genius and his temperament to 
 take their natural unimpeded course. 
 
 IV. 
 
 If there is one poem more than all others in' 
 which Arnold may be said to have given us a 
 key to his position, and at the same time to 
 have shown us how acutely that position was 
 realized by him, it is assuredly the splendid 
 Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse — a pro 
 duction which, indeed, can hardly be read toc' 
 often or too carefully as an exposition of the 
 spiritual conditions of the man and his tune 
 Here the poet finds himself, in a " showery 
 twilight gray," a visitor " to the Carthusians' 
 world-famed home " ; and we notice at once 
 that Arnold's interest in the old forms and 
 faiths of the Middle Ages is something very 
 different from the interest of Rossetti. Medi- 
 aeval Catholicism appealed to the great Pre- 
 Raphaelite master upon the imaginative or 
 aesthetic side ; he loved it for its beauty, its 
 warmth, its picturesqueness, its romantic as- 
 sociations. Arnold, on the other hand, was pre- 
 occupied with and absorbed in the purely reli-
 
 1 84 S TUDIES IN IN TERPRE TA TION. 
 
 gious element — the faith and hope out of which 
 this ancient Carthusian brotherhood had grown, 
 and for which it had so long stood as a visible 
 and palpable symbol. He expressly lingers 
 over every detail of the austerity of the ascetic 
 life upon which he has so suddenly come out 
 of the tumultuous and restless activity of 
 his own modern world. He describes for us 
 " the silent courts," the '' humid corridors," the 
 " cowl'd forms " brushing by " ghost-like in the 
 deepening night " ; " the chapel where no 
 organ's peal invests the stern and naked 
 prayer " ; the cells with their knee-worn floors ; 
 the wooden beds, presently to become the cof- 
 fins of their occupants. Such a picture con- 
 tains little indeed to arouse the interest or fire 
 the imagination of a man of Rossetti's temper ; 
 but with Arnold it is different. His quick eye 
 pierces to the heart of this strange, alien life ; 
 he is thrown inward upon himself at the mag- 
 netic touch of a faith which, no matter how 
 meaninglessly hideous and grotesque and per- 
 verted may now seem its embodiments, was 
 once full of vital and saving value. Then it is 
 that he directly questions himself, asking what 
 he can have to do in such a " living tomb." Is 
 not his presence there itself conclusive evidence 
 of his want of loyalty to those " rigorous teach- 
 ers " who had seized his youth, and at whose 
 behests he had long ago " so much unlearnt, 
 so much resigned"? But he answers with an
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 185 
 
 emphatic No. He is interested in the monas- 
 tery and its inmates as a Greek might have 
 been interested when, on some far northern 
 strand, he Hghted unexpectedly upon a " fallen 
 Runic stone " : — " for both were faiths, and 
 both are gone." And then come the solemn 
 and impressive stanzas in which Arnold de- 
 liberately defines his position : 
 
 " Wandering between two worlds, one dead, 
 The other powerless to be born,' 
 With nowhere yet to rest my head, 
 
 Like these on earth I wait forlorn. 
 Their faith, my tears, the world deride — 
 I come to shed them at their side. 
 
 " Oh, hide me in your gloom profound, 
 
 Ye solemn seats of holy pain ! 
 Take me, cowl'd forms, and fence me round, 
 
 Till I possess my soul again. 
 Till free my thoughts before me roll. 
 Not chafed by hourly false control." 
 
 Why then — to put for ourselves the question 
 which forced itself upon the poet's own mind 
   — why, then, does Arnold linger among the 
 shadows and traditions of the old Carthusian 
 monastery — he a skeptic of the later times, for 
 whom the beliefs and aspirations of the Middle 
 
 ' Compare .the almost identical phrase in the sianzas Ober- 
 ina)in Once More : 
 
 " But now the old is out of date, 
 The new is not yet born. "
 
 1 86 .S- TUDIES IN IN TERPRE TA TION. 
 
 Ages are dead beyond all possibility of resusci- 
 tation ? The answer is simple. It is because 
 he is seeking vainly for the spiritual comfort 
 which all the while he knows he can never find 
 either in the old creed, because he has out- 
 grown it, or in the new thought, because he has 
 not yet emotionally appropriated it. After all 
 that has been accomplished in the past, the 
 pangs that tortured our fathers remain as an 
 inheritance to us, their sons; and neither by 
 the " haughty scorn " of Byron, nor by the 
 " lovely wail " of Shelley, nor by the stern sad 
 moralizing of Senancour, has the world been 
 enriched with the means of lasting hope and 
 salvation. Hence, though the poet may cling 
 to some faith in the future, his thought con- 
 cerning his own generation rises but little 
 above the dull level of absolute despair. 
 
 " Years hence, perhaps, may dawn an age, 
 More fortunate, alas ! than we, 
 Which witliout hardness will be sage, 
 
 And gay without frivolity. 
 Sons of the world, oh, speed those years ; 
 But, while we wait, allow our tears ! 
 
 "Allow them ! we admire with awe 
 
 The exulting thunder of your race ; 
 You give the universe your law. 
 
 You triumph over time and space ! 
 Your pride of life, your tireless i)0wers. 
 We laud them, but they are not ours.
 
 MA TTHE W ARNOLD. 1 8/ 
 
 " We are like children rear'd in shade 
 Beneath some old-world abbey wall, 
 Forgotten in a forest-glade, 
 
 And secret from the eyes of all. 
 Deep, deep the greenwood round them waves, 
 Their abbey, and its close of graves ! " 
 
 Along with this highly personal and charac- 
 teristic poem should be read the equally per- 
 sonal and characteristic Stanzas in Memory of 
 the Aicthor of Obcrmann, dsXcd November, 1849. 
 To the subtle and potent influence of Senan- 
 cour upon his earlier thought, Arnold again 
 and again bore witness, and in the verses now 
 referred to, he speaks frankly as a disciple to 
 the spirit of a master. He declares that among 
 the thinkers who had arisen " in this our 
 troubled day," three only, as he believed, had 
 seen their pathway clear before them — Goethe, 
 Wordsworth, and Senancour himself ; and as 
 Wordsworth fails us, because he deliberately 
 averted his eyes " from half of human fate," 
 and Goethe, because his serene and splendid 
 course was one which in the nature of things 
 " few sons of men may think to emulate " ; we 
 turn to the " sadder sage," Obermann, and con 
 the lesson of his strangely fascinating pages, 
 knowing that he, too, has probed deeply into 
 '* the hopeless tangle " of our time. And what, 
 then, is the solution offered by Senancour, 
 and how does Arnold respond to his message
 
 1 88 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATIOX. 
 
 of deliverance? Scnancour can suggest only- 
 one way of escape, and that is by flight to the 
 desert ;' and for Arnold, such an abandonment 
 of the struggle of the modern world Is, like 
 Newman's retreat into the bosom of the 
 Catholic Church, " frankly speaking, impos- 
 sible." ^ 
 
 " To ihcc we come, then ! clouds are roll'd 
 When thou, O seer ! art set ; 
 Thy realm of thought is drear and cold — 
 The world is colder yet ! 
 
 " And thou liast pleasures, too, to share 
 With those who come to thee — 
 Balms floating on thy mountain-air. 
 And healing sights to see. 
 
 " How often, when the slopes are green 
 On Jaman, hast thou sate 
 By some high chalet-door, and seen 
 The summer day grow late ; 
 
 " And darkness steal o'er the wet grass 
 AVith the pale crocus starr'd 
 And reach that glimmering sheet of glass 
 Beneath the piny sward, 
 
 ' Compare the words put into Senancour's mouth in Obcr- 
 mann Once More : 
 
 " Then to the wilderness I fled — 
 There among Alpine snows 
 And pastoral huts I hid my head. 
 And sought and found repose." 
 ' The solution offered by Einpedocles — that of suicide — is 
 similarly " impossible " ; highly personal as much of the poem 
 must be taken to be.
 
 A/A TT//E W ARNOLD. 1 89 
 
 " Lake Leman's waters, far below ! 
 And watch'd the rosy light 
 Fade from the distant peaks of snow ; 
 And on the air of night 
 
 '&' 
 
 " Heard accents of the eternal tongue 
 Through the pine branches play — 
 Listen'd, and felt thyself grow young ! 
 Listen'd and wept — " 
 
 It is a seductive picture, this of the quietude 
 and placidity of the anchorite's life. The spell 
 of its peace and beauty is upon the poet as he 
 lingers over its entrancing details. But sud- 
 denly, his healthier nature asserts itself, and 
 the charm snaps. 
 
 " Away ! 
 Away the dreams that but deceive 
 
 And thou, sad guide, adieu ! 
 I go, fate drives me ; but I leave 
 
 Half of my life with you. 
 
 " We, in some unknown Power's employ, 
 Move on a rigorous line ; 
 Can neither, when we will, enjoy, 
 Nor, when we will, resign. 
 
 " I in the world must live ; but thou. 
 Thou melancholy shade ! 
 Wilt not, if thou canst see me now, 
 Condemn me, nor upbraid." 
 
 Arnold, then, finds it impossible to follow 
 Senancour to his mountain hermitage, and to
 
 1 90 S TUDIES IN INTERPRE TA TION. 
 
 seek relief from the pressure of modern 
 difficulties by systematically ignoring their 
 power. Yet returning to practical existence 
 he carries with him the stoical inspiration to 
 live his life in action, as Senancour had lived 
 his in silence and seclusion — keeping himself 
 " unspotted by the world." 
 
 " There without anger thou wilt see 
 Him who obeys thy spell 
 No more, so he but rest like thee 
 Unsoil'd ! — and so farewell." 
 
 In both of these poems it is impossible not 
 to be struck by th o m-ns^ ^^ fr'>nc;f;;Trr ..hw-M 
 for the time being dom inates the poet's thought . 
 Arnold knows that he h as fallen upon an f ra 
 of cha nge, that, in his own" words, he is a wan - 
 derer between a world that is dea d, and a world 
 that IS not yet born. This point will be made 
 more clear for us if we rememEcr that in h is 
 i nterpretation of human destiny Arn old really 
 represents a stage of doubt and uncertainty 
 between the revolutionary faith of Shelley, upon 
 the one hand, and the evolutionary faith of' 
 
 Tennyson and Browning upon the oth er. The 
 singer of The Revolt of Islam and Prometheus 
 Unboiuid could project himself imaginatively 
 into the after-times of mankind, in the firm belief 
 that " if only men throw off their shackles, 
 and assert their perfect freedom of thought 
 and action, there is reserved for them a dazzling
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD. IQI 
 
 future, in which there will be no war, no crimes, 
 no government, no disease, anguish, melancholy, 
 or resentment. Human life will be indefinitely 
 extended through the growing power of mind 
 over matter and propagation and death will 
 cease together." ' Such, indeed, was the faith 
 by which all the poets of the revolution had 
 been kindled through the rich and glowing 
 promises of the early period of continental 
 enthusiasm ; it was, moreover, a faith to which, 
 as we have seen, Shelley himself clung tena- 
 ciously, long after the reaction in thought had 
 set in, sweeping everything before it. Before 
 Arnold's time, the belief of the French doctri- 
 naires and their English disciples, in the rapid 
 and continuous amelioration of men's lot on 
 earth, had passed away like an opium-eater's 
 dream, and a period of cynicism, apathy, and 
 moral exhaustion had succeeded — a period of 
 which Senancour had been one of the most 
 eloquent exponents and of which Arnold, as 
 he himself confesses, had " felt all the spell, and 
 traversed all the shade." ^ But meanwhile the 
 old thought of progress had been taking fresh 
 form through the influence of the rising school 
 of evolutionary thinkers, who sought to sub- 
 stitute for the exploded notion of lasting 
 
 ' This summary of Godwin's doctrine of human perfectibility, 
 as given by Mr. Sully in his Pcssimisju, Chap, iii., will apply 
 equally well to the creed of his disciple and poetic interpreter. 
 
 ^ Oberinann Once More.
 
 192 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 betterment through catastrophe, the cardinal 
 thought of gradual unfolding and development. 
 " In Comtism the doctrine of historical progress 
 received a new expression ' ; while " once more 
 through the new doctrine of evolution as ex- 
 pounded by Mr. Darwin, and especially by Mr. 
 Herbert Spencer, the modern mind has grown 
 habituated in anticipating an indefinite expan- 
 sion of human capacity in the future." ' Of 
 this new and pregnant suggestion of slow and 
 orderly growth Tennyson had already become 
 the great poetic apostle. But to Arnold, in the 
 years of his young manhood, the new gospel 
 did not yield its open secret. He came too 
 late to share in the ardor of the revolutionists; 
 the milder but more solid promises by which 
 the evolutionists Mndertook to renew the faith 
 of the world, he also failed to realize. Thus 
 it was that by his own admission so much of 
 his earlier poetry was weighted down by the 
 feeling of WcltscJimcrz and collapse, repeating, 
 though in a less clamorc^us way, the minor 
 melodies of the post-revolutionary school. 
 
 It should of course be noted that Arnold's 
 despairing utterances gain added force and 
 significance from their striking contrast with 
 the average, rather superficial and easy-going, 
 optimism of his day. " My melancholy, scio- 
 lists say, is a pass'd mode, an outworn theme."* 
 
 'Sully, op. cit.. Chap. iii. 
 
 * Stanzas f I om the Grande Chartreuse.
 
 A/A T THE W A RNOLD. 1 93 
 
 The English world at large had long since 
 thrown off the apathetic mood induced by the 
 experiences of the earlier part of the century, 
 and its temper was now unusually sanguine and 
 self-satisfied. Men of the most diverse schools 
 of thought were accustomed to point with un- 
 disguised enthusiasm to all the material advan- 
 tages enjoyed by the period in which they lived. 
 Professor Dowden admirably summarizes the 
 general feeling of the time when he writes : 
 " The ten-pound householder had his vote ; 
 slavery was abolished in the colonies ; the evils 
 of pauperism were met by a poor law ; the 
 bread-tax was abolished ; the people were ad- 
 vancing in education ; useful knowledge was 
 made accessible in cheap publications ; a man 
 could travel forty miles in the time in which 
 his father could have travelled ten ; more iron, 
 more coal was dug out of the earth ; more 
 wheels were whirling, more shuttles flew, more 
 looms rattled, more cotton was spun, more cloth 
 was sold. The statistics of progress were surely 
 enough to intoxicate with joy a lover of his 
 species." * Given such facts, and where, in 
 truth, could there be any grounds for dissatis- 
 faction ? Such was the question which found 
 indignant expression in the writings of men like 
 Macaulay, in whom the shallow self-complacency 
 of the time found a ready and vigorous spokes- 
 
 ' Victorian Literature (in Transcripts and Studies, pp. l62-'- 
 
 63. 
 
 13 
 
 V
 
 ^ 
 
 194 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 man ; ' such was the question which, never 
 without calHng forth its due meed of popular 
 applause, came from the orators of the hustings 
 throughout the length and breadth of the land ; 
 such was the question which, in one or another 
 form, was continually on the lips of middle-class 
 liberals, and gave the text for many a vigorous 
 homily in the newspapers and reviews devoted 
 to the progressive cause. Yet amid all this 
 astonishing material prosperity, amid all this 
 clatter and bustle of advance, amid all the cheap 
 and windy rhetoric of the Philistines, and their 
 wholesale denunciation of sentimentalism and 
 the transcendental, there were a few incom- 
 patibles, a remnant from the grand majority, 
 who still refused to believe that everything was 
 as well as it appeared, a few dissident voices 
 raised in warning or reproach. Of these voices 
 Arnold's was one. With a manner about as 
 unlike that of the Sage of Chelsea as any man- 
 ner well could be, our own poet nevertheless 
 undertook to remind the great British public, 
 as for more than fifty years Carlyle persistently 
 reminded it, that this astonishing material 
 prosperity of which it made boast was hiding 
 from its vision issues of infinitely more vital im- 
 portance, and that by reason of its sanguine 
 temper and superficial methods of judgment, 
 
 'See, e.g., bis essay on Southey's Colloquies of Society, 
 and the concluding paragraphs of the famous third chapter of 
 his ITtstorv.
 
 MA TTHE IV ARNOLD. I95 
 
 it was in danger of substituting false for true 
 standards of national prosperity and individual 
 development. 
 
 No reader of Arnold's prose work needs to be 
 reminded of the constant appeal from material 
 to spiritual canons made in the pages of Ctiltiire 
 and Anarchy, and of many of the writer's minor 
 essays ; or of the delicate satire and pungent 
 wit with which so many of the conventional 
 doctrines of a mechanical age were dissected 
 and laid bare. Already in his poetry he had 
 turned away from " the barren optimistic soph- 
 istries" of the "comfortable moles" of his 
 generation, from the shallow materialism, and 
 facile self-confidence so characteristic of the 
 time, and had asserted as the final test of 
 development the criterion of spiritual growth. 
 In one poem, in particular, the verses entitled 
 Progress, the thought of what constitutes real, 
 as contradistinguished from merely superficial 
 advance, is very clearly set forth. 
 
 " Say ye : ' The spirit of man has found new roads, 
 And we must leave the old faiths, and walk there- 
 in ' ? 
 Leave then the Cross as ye have left carved gods, 
 But guard the fire within ! 
 
 " Children of men ! the unseen Power, whose eye 
 For ever doth accompany mankind. 
 Hath look'd on no religion scornfully 
 That men did ever find.
 
 1 96 S TUDIES IN IN TERPKE TA TION. 
 
 " Which has not taught weak wills how much they 
 
 can ? 
 Which has not fallen on the dry heart like rain ? 
 Which has not cried to sunk, self-weary man : 
 JVion )inist he born again ! 
 
 " Children of men ! not that your age excel 
 In pride of life the ages of your sires, 
 But that ye think clear, feel deep, bear fruit well. 
 The Friend of man desires." 
 
 Indeed, so fundamentally important, so pro- 
 foundly and essentially needful, did this ele- 
 ment of the higher life in man always seem to 
 Arnold to be, that he was tempted to prefer 
 any creed which would help to hold intact the 
 tiniest germ of such spiritual vitality to the 
 negativism which, in its scheme of human ex- 
 istence, contentedly left the divine unrecognized 
 and uncared for altogether. This comes out 
 strongly in a little poem, which is all the more 
 interesting because its momentary petulance is 
 in such curious contrast with the writer's usual 
 urbanity and self-composure. 
 
 " ' Man is blind because of sin, 
 Revelation makes him sure ; 
 Without that, who looks within, 
 Looks in vain, for all 's obscure.' 
 
 " Nay, look closer into man ! 
 Tell me, can you find indeed 
 Nothing sure, no moral jilan 
 
 Clear prescribed, wiiliuut your creed?
 
 A/A TTHE IV A RNOLD. 1 9/ 
 
 " ' No, I nothing can perceive ! 
 
 Without that, all 's dark for men. 
 That, or nothing, I believe.' — 
 
 For God's sake, believe it then ! " ' 
 
 It is in the light of these considerations that 
 Arnold's most hopeless and forlorn utterances 
 have to be interpreted. It was the thought 
 that, by reason of its pre-occupation with ma- 
 terial things, the modern world was virtually 
 losing its hold upon the unseen realities of the 
 spirit, that filled him with apprehension and 
 dejection. In Bacchanalia, or The New Age — 
 a poem which in its introductory lines contains 
 perhaps the most perfect bit of natural descrip- 
 tion to be found anywhere in the writer's verse 
 — he dwells with severity upon the noise and 
 turbulence, the extravagance and irreverence of 
 the time, and explains why the poet's voice is 
 not raised to swell the chorus of universal self- 
 glorification ; while in Dover Beach — a produc- 
 tion which, with wonderfully sustained verbal 
 felicity, gives expression to his most despairing 
 mood — he bewails the gradual breaking-away 
 of the faith which had yielded life and stimulus 
 to the generations of the past. 
 
 " The Sea of Faith 
 Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore 
 Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd. 
 But now I only hear 
 
 ' Pis- A Her.
 
 198 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, 
 Retreating, to the breath 
 
 Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear 
 And naked shingles of the world." 
 
 But the utter and unrelieved despair, here so 
 finely distilled in melody, did not enter as a 
 permanent factor into the disposition of Ar- 
 nold's mind. The mood of Dover Beach was a 
 mood above which, even in his poetic produc- 
 tion, Arnold became more and more able to 
 soar. While still seeking in verse the medium 
 of his criticism of life, and before he had yet 
 definitely committed himself to the construc- 
 tive prose efforts which were to signalize his 
 general change of temper and outlook, he had 
 reached a point of view from which the world 
 and its problems appeared to him under a 
 somewhat more favorable light. In The Fu- 
 ture— di poem written in the irregular un- 
 rhymed verse which he frequently essayed, 
 and more successfully here than in most of 
 his other similar adventures — he sets forth his 
 faith in the gradual ordering of things to finer 
 issues than the present may seem to indicate, 
 in a very definite way. In this nobly conceived 
 and splendidly sustained allegory, the history 
 of humanity is traced out under the figure of a 
 mighty, ever-flowing stream. Man is a wan- 
 derer from his birth, and as he glides down the 
 current of existence, he is fain to look now 
 backwards, now forwards, and dream
 
 MA TTHE W A RNOLD. 1 99 
 
 " Of the lands which the river of Time 
 Had left ere he woke on its breast, 
 Or shall reach when his eyes have been closed," 
 
 No one can hope to see the green earth on 
 the banks of the stream as it looked to those 
 who came from the virgin country nearer the 
 source. In verses which recall Clough's con- 
 stant yearning for a simpler and less sophisti- 
 cated relation with the world than is possible 
 to most of us to-day, Arnold tells us that no 
 maiden now can read into her bosom as clearly 
 as Rebekah read into her's as she sat at even- 
 tide by the palm-shaded well, and no bard can 
 have such a near and high vision of God as 
 came to Moses, as he lay in the night by his 
 flock, on the star-lit Arabian waste. So much 
 we have to regret — the fine and pure freshness, 
 the spontaneity, the zest and joyousness of 
 earlier life, have for ever passed from our view. 
 
 " This tract which the river of Time 
 Now flows through with us is the plain. 
 Gone is the calm of its earlier shore. 
 Border'd by cities and hoarse 
 With a thousand cries is its stream. 
 And we on its breast, our minds 
 Are confused as the cries which we hear, 
 Changing and shot as the sights which we see." 
 
 There are moments, therefore, when it is only 
 too natural that we should feel that the old re-
 
 200 STUDIES I AT INTERPRETATIOIV. 
 
 pose has fled ; that the din and confusion of 
 h'fc \\ill increase as the years go by ; that peace 
 and quietude will come not to us again. Yet 
 the future may after all hold better things in 
 store for us than we are sometimes apt to an- 
 ticipate. For 
 
 " Haply, the river of Time — 
 As it grows, as the towns on its marge 
 Fling their wavering lights 
 On the wider, statelier stream — 
 May acquire, if not the calm 
 Of its early mountainous shore, 
 Yet a solemn peace of its own. 
 And the width of the waters, the hush 
 Of the grey expanse where he floats. 
 Freshening the current and spotted with foam. 
 As it draws to the ocean, may strike 
 Peace to the soul of the man on its breast, — 
 As the pale waste widens around him, 
 As the banks fade dimmer away, 
 As the stars come out, and the night-wind 
 Brings up the stream 
 Murmurs and scents of the infinite sea." 
 
 The second stanzas to Senancour — Obermann 
 Once More — contain an even distincter enuncia- 
 tion of Arnold's more sanguine thought ; and 
 they are especially valuable to the student by 
 reason of the clearness with which in them he 
 defines his position, and emphasizes the grounds 
 of the faith that is in him. The immediate oc-
 
 MA TTHE IV A RNOLD. 20 1 
 
 casion of the production was a second visit 
 paid by the writer, many years after his first, 
 to the Alpine scenes rendered dear to him by 
 association with the memory of his early teacher; 
 and the greater part of the poem is made up of 
 verses put by Arnold into Senancour's mouth 
 for the purpose of bringing out the shifting 
 conditions of the modern world, and the fresh 
 hope that may well come to us all from the 
 careful study of them in contrast with the im- 
 mediate past. This long speech, with its broad 
 and fine interpretation of history, opens with 
 the splendid and often quoted description of 
 Roman civilization just before the rise of Chris- 
 tianity, and of the tremendous and far-reaching 
 changes wrought by the influence of the new 
 religion. Following the course of the ages, 
 Senancour is then made to portray the gradual 
 decline of living faith, and the sapping of the 
 creeds upon which the hope of the older 
 generations had been founded ; with the con- 
 sequent slow but certain lapse of mankind 
 into formalisms, moral sterility, and despair. 
 There needed, then, some vast new stimu- 
 lus to rive the dry bones of society, " and 
 with new force a new-sprung world inform." 
 Then the crisis of the revolution came. The 
 worn-out cosmos of the older order, which 
 Senancour and his contemporaries had known 
 so well, crashed into ruins. And with what 
 result ?
 
 202 STUDIES IN INTEA'PRETA 7'ION. 
 
 " The sun shone in the new-wash'd sky, 
 And what from heaven saw he ? 
 Blocks of the past, like icebergs high, 
 Float on a rolling sea ! " 
 
 What, then, was the condition of things by 
 which Senancour's generation had found itself 
 confronted ? 
 
 " The past, its mask of union on, 
 Had ceased to live and thrive. 
 The past, its mask of union gone. 
 Say, is it more alive ? 
 
 " Your creeds are dead, your rites arc dead, 
 Your social order too ! 
 Where tarries he, the Power who said : 
 See, I make all things new ? 
 
 " The millions suffer still, and grieve, 
 And what can helpers heal 
 AVith old-world cures men half believe 
 For woes they wholly feel ? 
 
 " And yet men have such need of joy ! 
 lUit joy whose grounds are true ; 
 And joy that should all hearts employ 
 As when the past was new. 
 
 " .'\h, not the emotion of that past. 
 Its common hope, were vain ! 
 Some new such hope must dawn at last, 
 Or man must toss in pain.
 
 MA TTIIE IV A RNOLD. 203 
 
 " But now the old is oat of date, 
 The new is not yet born, 
 And who can be alone elate, 
 While the world lies forlorn ? " 
 
 Senancour then refers to his own baffled 
 career, and consequent flight to the wilderness 
 of Alpine snows — an abandonment of the 
 world-problem in which, as we have already, 
 seen, Arnold for his own part found it impos- 
 sible to follow his teacher. But, as the visionary 
 speaker goes on to declare, many changes have 
 come to pass since he, Senancour, had been 
 called upon to lay down the burden of his 
 " frustrate life " ; and the men of the new gen- 
 eration need no longer be crushed down by 
 the despondency and prostration of soul which 
 had proved the inevitable portion of their 
 fathers. And so Senancour's long address 
 closes with a stimulating appeal to the young 
 poet to throw aside his inertness and despair, 
 and, inspired by fresh hope himself, to carry 
 such hope out into the expectant world. 
 
 " Despair not thou as I despair'd. 
 
 Nor be cold gloom thy prison ! 
 Forward the gracious hours have fared, 
 
 And see ! the sun is risen ! 
 
 " He breaks the winter of the past ; 
 
 A green new earth appears. 
 Millions, whose life in ice lay fast, 
 
 Have thoughts, and smiles, and tears.
 
 204 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 " What though there still need effort, strife ? 
 
 Though much be still unwon ? 
 Yet warm it mounts, tlie liour of life ! 
 
 Death's frozen hour is gone ! 
 
 " The world's great order dawns in sheen, 
 
 After long darkness rude, 
 Divinelier imaged, clearer seen. 
 
 With happier zeal pursued. 
 
 " With hope extinct and brow composed, 
 
 I mark'd the present die ; 
 Its term of life was nearly closed, 
 
 Yet it had more than I. 
 
 " But thou, though to the world's new hour 
 Thou come witli aspect marr'd. 
 
 Shorn of the joy, the bloom, the power 
 Which best -befits its bard — 
 
 " Though more than half thy years be past, 
 And spent thy youthful i^rime ; 
 
 Though, round thy firmer manhood cast, 
 Hanii weeds of our sad time 
 
 *o 
 
 " Whereof thy youth felt all tlie spell, 
 
 And traversed all the shade — 
 Though late, though dimm'd, though weak, yet tell 
 
 I-lo])e to a world new-made ! 
 
 " Help it to fill that deep desire, 
 
 The want that rack'd our brain, 
 Consum'd our heart with thirst like fire, 
 
 Immcdicaljle pain ;
 
 MA TTHE W ARNOLD. 20$ 
 
 " Which to the wilderness drove out 
 
 Our life, to Alpine snow, 
 And palsied all our word with doubt, 
 
 And all our work with woe — 
 
 " What still of strength is left, employ 
 
 That end to help attain : 
 One common wave of thought and joy 
 
 Lifting mankind again ! " 
 
 The vision ends ; but outside nature seems 
 to take up its cheering influences. The poet, 
 awaking as from sleep, gazes out across " Son- 
 chaud's piny flanks " and the " blanch'd sum- 
 mit bare of Malatrait," and behold, the dawn 
 of a new day greets him. For 
 
 " Glorious there without a sound 
 Across the glimmering lake. 
 High in the Valais-depth profound, 
 I saw the morning break ! " 
 
 V 
 
 V. 
 
 To complete this slight sketch of Arnold's 
 work as a poet, it remains to speak in brief of 
 t wo distinctive features of hi^; vpi-c;p — his irL- 
 tense feelin g for nature, and his unvarying..i ru- 
 si stence upon the supremacy of conduct and 
 duty. These familiar characteristics must de- 
 tain us for a moment, inasmuch as they are 
 both vitally related to his general philosoiok y 
 
 nnifp, dit;^,]t;c:pH in thp fni-pgning- pa^pg
 
 y\ 
 
 206 STUDIES IN INTEKPRETATION. 
 
 In his treatment of nature Arnold comes be- 
 fore us as a close follower of one of his ac- 
 knowledged spiritual masters, Wordsworth, to 
 ^-^( the inspiration, and especially to the " healing 
 
 power " of whose poetry, he more than once 
 I bore emphatic testimony. 
 
 " He spoke, and loosed our hearts in tears. 
 He laid us, as we lay at birth 
 On the cool flowery lap of earth, 
 Smiles broke from us, and we had ease ; 
 The hills were round us, and the breeze 
 Went o'er the sunlit fields again ; 
 Our foreheads felt the wind and rain. 
 Our youth return'd for there was shed 
 On spirits that had long been dead, 
 Spirits dried up and closely furl'd. 
 The freshness of the early world.' " 
 
 In these lines he indicates to us the particu- 
 lar nature of the influence which he realized 
 had been exercised over his life by him whom 
 he elsewhere speaks of as " a priest to us all of 
 the wonder and bloom of the world." " 
 r-"With Wordsworth as his guide, then, Arnold , 
 s ought in nature a temporary refuge from tj ie 
 " doubts, disputes, distractions, fears/' of h is 
 owri _^iron time " : and in communion with he r 
 e found not only relief, but als o ?^ soofhii-|cr^ 
 cons ojing. and uplifting power. 
 
 ' Memorial Verses, fSjo. 
 
   The Youth of A\xtiire — a poem which should be read along 
 with the Memorial Verses.
 
 MA T THE IV A RNOLD. 20/ 
 
 " AjDollo ! 
 What mortal could be-s ick n r sorry here ? " 
 
 exclaims Callicles, resting on a pathway-rock in 
 the forest region of Etna, in the gracious hour 
 of early dawn ; and we know that the words 
 are inspired by the poet's own experience of 
 many such an escape made from the heat and 
 turmoil of the world to scenes like these that 
 the young harp-player describes.' How closely 
 and sympathetically he lived with nature, with 
 what loving and attentive glance his eye marked 
 the changing of the seasons, the alternations of 
 day and night, of shower and sunshine, there is 
 scarcely a page of his verse that does not show. 
 He felt Jittle. indeed of the weird charm of the 
 ruHeraspects of sea and crag and sky, for his 
 muse was after all more urban than his master's, 
 and '' the deep authentic mountain-thrill " sel- 
 dom, .if_-evjer, " shook his page." "^ But that 
 within the boundaries imposed by his tempera- 
 mental limitations, his nature-poetry is of the 
 rarest excellence, no reader of Thyrsis and The 
 Scholar Gypsy needs to be told. 
 
 It is to be noted that in Arnold's case the 
 so-called moral indifference of nature to man's 
 joys and sufferings, instead of jarring upon the 
 feelings or disturbing the mind, becomes an 
 additional influence in turning his spirit nature- 
 
 ^ Empedoclt's ofi Etna, Act i., Scene i. 
 
 * William Watson, In Lalehain Churchyard.
 
 208 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 virard. What others gird against as the inscru- 
 table, unresponsive insensibility, the inflexible 
 regularity, of cosmic things, he, on the con- 
 trary, finds, not oppressive or overwhelming, 
 but full of subtle stimulus and meaning. An 
 appeal, direct, potent, irrisistible, is made by 
 them to the largely-developed stoical element 
 in his own character. To ^emulate nature in 
 y \ this respect — to possess one's own soul in 
 quietude despite the storm and turmoil, the 
 conflicts and alarms outside — thus becomes 
 ' one of his moral ideals.' He revered Goethe 
 for his insight into the " weltering strife " of 
 his epoch, and for his corresponding power of 
 so far detaching himself from " the lurid flow 
 of terror and insane distress, and headlong 
 fate " as to preserve unjeopardized his own 
 spiritual equanimity.^ In nature he seemed to 
 find not only the calmness and repose for which 
 he yearned, but also a majestic serenity and 
 composure in admirable contrast with the fret 
 and fume, the hurry and worry of our own little 
 bewildered human lives. Thus he could write, 
 touching deftly upon the poet's sensitiveness 
 and endowment of large vision : 
 
 " Before him he sees life unroll, 
 
 A placid and continuous whole — 
 
 ' See, for example, Resignation, Self -Dependence. Quiet Work, 
 r Religious Isolation, Morality. The well-known conclusion of 
 Sohrab and Rustum is interesting in this connection. 
 ^Memorial ]^erses, iSjo.
 
 MA TTHE W ARNOLD. 209 
 
 That general life which does not cease, 
 Whose secret is not joy but peace ; 
 That life whose dumb wish is not miss'd 
 If birth proceed, if things subsist ; 
 The life of plants and stones and rain, 
 The life -he craves — if not in vain 
 Fate gave, what chance shall not control. 
 His sad lucidity of soul. " 
 
 And, again, at the close of the same poem : 
 
 " Enough, we live ! — and if a life. 
 With large results so little rife, 
 Though bearable, seem hardly worth 
 This pomp of worlds, this pain of birth ; 
 Yet, Fausta, the mute turf we tread. 
 The solemn hills around us spread. 
 This stream which falls incessantly. 
 The strange-scraw'd rocks, the lonely sky, 
 If I might lend their heart a voice, 
 Seem to bear rather than rejoice. 
 And even could the intemperate prayer 
 Man iterates, while these forbear, 
 For movement, for an ampler sphere, 
 Pierce Fate's impenetrable ear ; 
 Not milder is the general lot 
 Because our spirits have forgot. 
 In action's dizzying eddy whirl'd, 
 The something that infects the world." ' 
 
 And yet, once more, in that beautiful little 
 suburban idyl, the Lines Written in Kensington 
 Gardens : 
 
 ' Resignation. 
 
 14
 
 2 1 STUDIES IN IN TERPRE TA TION. 
 
 " In the huge world which roars hard by, 
 Be others happy if they can ! 
 But in my helpless cradle I 
 
 Was breathed on by the rural Pan. 
 
 " I, on men's impious uproar hurl'd, 
 Think often, as I hear them rave, 
 That peace has left the upper world, 
 And now keeps only in the grave. 
 
 *' Yet here is peace for ever new ! 
 
 When I who watch them am away. 
 Still all things in this glade go through 
 The changes of their (]uiet day. 
 
 " Calm soul of all things ! make it mine 
 To feel, amid the city's jar, 
 That there abides a peace of thine, 
 Man did not make and cannot mar. 
 
 " The will to neither strive nor cry, 
 
 The power to feel with others give ! 
 Calm, calm me more, nor let me die 
 Before I have begun to live. " 
 
 In regard to the second point above referred 
 to — the dominance of the ethical note in 
 Arnold's work — little needs here to be said. 
 Whatever niay be our individual relation to the 
 man's life and thought, we are bound to regard 
 Arnold as the ideal teacher — as the poet who, 
 beyond all others of his generation, accepted it
 
 MA TTHE W ARNOLD. 2 1 1 
 
 as his special mission to keep the standard of 
 duty unfurled upon the battlements of song. 
 For him, conduct was the supreme, the ever- 
 imperious word. It constituted the one cen- 
 tral and abiding theme to which, no matter 
 what might be the immediate topic engaging 
 his attention, he always returned with the same 
 steady insistence, the same fine insight, the 
 same lofty and uncompromising purpose. 
 
 To Arnold, human life in its higher develop- 
 ments presented itself as a stern and strenuous 
 affair. The many might choose to abandon 
 themselves, like fools of chance, to the current 
 of outward circumstance, and trust to fate to 
 bring them safely through * ; for 
 
 " Most men eddy about 
 Here and there — eat and drink 
 Chatter, and love, and hate. 
 Gather and squander, are raised 
 Aloft, are hurl'd in the dust, 
 Striving blindly, achieving 
 Nothing ; and then they die."* 
 
 He, however, belonged to those others — the 
 small minority — 
 
 ' " We do not what we ought, 
 What we ought not we do, 
 And lean upon the thought 
 That chance will bring us through." 
 
 Empcdocles on Etna, Act i., Scene 2. 
 
 ' Rugby Chapel.
 
 212 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 " Whom a thirst 
 Ardent, unquenchable, fires, 
 Not with the crowd to be spent, 
 Not without aim to go round. 
 In an eddy of purposeless dust. 
 Effort unmeaning and vain." ' 
 
 But the path of advance to which the select 
 few — the 'remnant as distinguished from the 
 majority" — thus stand self-committed, is one 
 that leads through dangers and difficulties 
 without number — a "long, steep, journey," 
 indeed ! To " strain on " with " frowning fore- 
 heads" and " lips sternly compress'd," fighting 
 inch by inch through the darkness and the 
 tempest, often without friend or companion on 
 the perilous road — such is the only way to 
 reach the goal. But what a picture of the 
 higher life of the spirit is thus presented to us! 
 Those who would wish to see the problems and 
 responsibilities of individual existence treated 
 as matters to set little store by — as things of 
 no very serious import, which in certain moods 
 we are apt to overestimate — will not meet in 
 Arnold a poet after their own hearts. Hc_ 
 makes no attempt to lighten the burden of life 
 —it is here and we must bear it ; all he can 
 offer to do is to show us how to strengthen 
 ourselves, that we may carry it manfully, and 
 
 ' Rugby Chapel. 
 
 ' Sec the American lecture on A'umbers.
 
 Jl/A TTIIE W ARXOL.D. 2 I J 
 
 without childish petulance. That our course of 
 self-discipline must needs be fraught with infi- 
 nite pain and trial — that it will always be easy 
 for us to fail and difficult to succeed — that 
 every step we take forward and upward will be 
 the result of labors accomplished " with aching 
 hands and bleeding feet " ' — with such declara- 
 tions does Arnold come to us and strive to 
 rouse us from flippancy, nonchalance, and the 
 careless self-complacency of the average man 
 of the world. How hardly, indeed, shall any 
 of us enter into the Kingdom of God ! 
 
 And this problem of individual existence, of 
 conduct, becomes all the more arduous and 
 complicated because of the danger of extremes. 
 Most men may accept without protest the 
 " brazen prison " in which their lives are con- 
 fined, giving all their energies to " some un- 
 meaning task-work " and dying at last " unfreed, 
 having seen nothing, still unblest." From such 
 stultifying conditions a few impatiently escape ; 
 and of such few, some setting forth upon " the 
 wide ocean of life anew" loose their hold of 
 reality altogether, care not how there may 
 prevail 
 
 " Despotic on that sea 
 Trade-winds which cross it from eternity," 
 
 and thus " standing for some false, impossible 
 shore" of aspiration or fancy, make shipwreck 
 
 ' Morality.
 
 2 14 STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION. 
 
 of themselves, and perish, miserable and un- 
 availing. Thus the terrible question faces us — 
 
 " Is there no lite, save these alone ? 
 Madman or slave, must man be one ? " ' 
 
 Hemmed in on all sides as in this earth "where- 
 on we dream " by the " high uno'erleap'd 
 Mountains of Necessity," "^ we are sooner or later 
 made to realize that 
 
 " Limits we did not set, 
 Condition all we do " ^ — 
 
 and that with all our boasted freedom, our 
 spiritual yearnings, our rhetorical and conven- 
 tional phraseology, it must ever remain pro- 
 foundly true that 
 
 " To tunes we did not call our being must keep 
 chime."* 
 
 There perchance lies the central crux for 
 those who scorn to remain contented inmates 
 of the brazen prison wherein most men pass 
 their days. We are tethered fast to stern facts, 
 and the danger is lest we should wear ourselves 
 out with futile strivings for the impossible. 
 Our margin of possible endeavor is " narrower 
 
 ' A Summer Night. 
 
 ^ To a Republican Friend : Second Sonnet. 
 2 Ei7ipedocles on Etna, Act i., Scene 2. 
 * Ibid.
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 21 5 
 
 . . . than we deem ; " ' yet by the frank ac- 
 ceptation of our limitations and the careful 
 economy and direction of our powers, we shall 
 be privileged to discover 
 
 " How fair a lot to fill 
 Is left to each man still." " 
 
 Thus Arnold comes to us with his word of 
 quiet but lofty encouragement : 
 
 " But thou, because thou hear'st 
 Men scoff at Heaven and Fate, 
 Because the Gods thou fear'st 
 Fail to make blest thy state, 
 Tremblest, and wilt not dare to trust the joys there 
 are ! 
 
 " 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 ! " ^ 
 
 It is, therefore, in aiding the individual man 
 towards the solution of the doubly-complex 
 problem of his life that the world's great sys- 
 tems of morality have been of the highest ser- 
 
 ^ To a Republican Friend : Second Sonnet. 
 
 ^ A Summer Night. 
 
 ^ Empedocles on Etna, Act i., Scene 2.
 
 2l6 STUDIES IX JXTERPRETATION. 
 
 vice. " The object of systems of morality " — 
 thus Arnold himself states the matter, in his 
 essay on Marcus Aurelius — " is to take posses- 
 sion of human life, to save it from being aban- 
 doned to passion, or allowed to drift at hazard, 
 to give it happiness by establishing it in the 
 practice of virtue. ... In its uninspired as 
 well as in its inspired moments, in its days of 
 languor and gloom, as well as in its days of 
 sunshine and energy, human life has thus 
 always a clue to follow, and may always be 
 making way towards its goal." 
 
 Of the singularly high quality of Arnold's 
 own ethical teaching, and especially of the 
 moral temper by which that teaching was in- 
 spired, it is possible to speak only in terms of 
 the profoundest admiration. The clear sharp 
 ring of the noblest stoical note is heard through- 
 out his verse. Throwing us back everywhere 
 and at all times upon the element of personal 
 character, he raises us above the seemingly 
 fatal influence of . chance and circumstance; 
 points within for the ultimate secret of strength 
 and success ; ' and insists that in the perform- 
 ance of duty itself lies our one certain path — 
 not indeed to what the world calls happiness ; 
 
 ' See, e.g., Self -Dependence, Religious Isolation, Palladium, 
 and the magnificent chant of Empedocles in Empedocles on 
 Etna — one of the noblest pieces of ethical verse to be found 
 in the whole range of English literature, and fully deserving 
 of the praise which Mr. Swinburne has lavished upon it.
 
 Jl/.^ TTHE W ARNOLD. 2 I / 
 
 to tliat_ we can claim no prescriptive right;' 
 but to the fine s at i s i ac 1 1 o n " w!Tich~'BeToif gs to 
 the feeling of steady manhood, and our sense 
 of superiority to those environing forces which 
 constantly do battle against the soul. In the 
 passage just above quoted, he lays stress, it 
 will be observed, upon life's uninspired mo- 
 ments, upon the days of languor and gloom 
 through which the strongest must necessarily be 
 called upon to pass. Even then, he asserts, 
 we may still have our clue to follow, may still 
 make headway towards our goal. Truly it is 
 characteristic of the writer of these splendid 
 lines that in the mood of the lowest and most 
 abject despair that anywhere finds expression 
 in his poetry, it is to the same final conception 
 of conduct and duty, to the same central 
 thought of the pov/er and responsibility of the 
 individual, that he still returns, secure of find- 
 ing there the relief and inspiration which the 
 outer world is no longer able to yield. He has 
 sung for us, in Dover Beach, of the century's 
 collapse of faith, and of the hopelessness and 
 confusion with which his own mind is filled. 
 Does he, therefore, feel impelled to abandon 
 the conflict of life altogether — to submit him- 
 
 ^ " Could'st thou, Pausanias, learn 
 How deep a fault is this ; 
 Could'st thou but once discern 
 Thou hast no right to bliss, 
 No title from the gods to welfare and repose," etc. 
 — Empedocles on Etna, in the chant just referred to.
 
 2l8 STUDIES IN INTERPKRTATION. 
 
 self to what seems the stronger force of destiny, 
 and so float down the stream of tendency to 
 "dull oblivion" and " the devouring grave?" 
 On the contrary, it is just then that he feels it 
 most imperatively needful for his higher man- 
 hood to declare itself : 
 
 " Ah, love, let us be true 
 To one another ! for the world, which seems 
 To lie before us like a land of dreams. 
 So various, so beautiful, so new, 
 Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light. 
 Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain ; 
 And we are here as on a darkling plain 
 Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight 
 Where ignorant armies clash by night." 
 
 Joy and sorrow, light and darkness, belong to 
 the world outside us ; but " 't is in ourselves 
 that we are thus or thus." 
 
 And yet high, noble, in every way admirable 
 as Arnold's moral temper and teaching alike 
 are, it is more than doubtful whether they 
 could ever be popularized — ever be made of 
 much service to any save a few out of the 
 world's " complaining millions of men." 
 Arnold himself, as it seems to us, has passed 
 judgment on his own ethical position and out- 
 look in the fine sentences in which he discusses 
 the highly emotionalized utterances of Christian 
 morality with the classic stoicism to which con- 
 fessedly his intellectual indebtedness was so
 
 MA TTHE W A RNOLD. 2 1 9 
 
 great. " The mass of mankind," he writes, 
 " can be carried along a course full of hardship 
 for the natural man, can be borne over the 
 thousand impediments of the narrow way, only 
 by the tide of a joyful and bounding emotion. 
 It is impossible to rise from reading Epictetus 
 or Marcus Aurelius without a sense of con- 
 straint and melancholy, without feeling that the 
 burden laid upon man is well-nigh greater than 
 he can bear." ' And again : " ' Lead me, Zeus, 
 and Destiny,' says the prayer of Epictetus, 
 ' whithersoever I am appointed to go ; I will 
 follow without wavering ; even though I turn 
 coward and shrink, I will have to follow all the 
 same.' The fortitude of that is for the strong, 
 for the few ; even for them the spiritual atmos- 
 phere with which it surrounds them is bleak 
 and gray. But ' Let thy loving spirit lead me 
 forth into the land of righteousness ' ; — ' The 
 Lord shall be unto thee an everlasting light, 
 and thy God thy glory ' ; ' Unto you that fear 
 my name shall the sun of righteousness arise 
 with healing in his wings,' says the Old Testa- 
 ment ; ' Born, not of blood, nor of the will of 
 the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God ; ' 
 ' Except a man be born again, he cannot see 
 the kingdom of God ' ; ' Whatsoever is born of 
 God, overcometh the world.' says the New. 
 The ray of sunshine is there, the glow of a 
 divine warmth ; — the austerity of the sage 
 * Marcus Aurelius {Essays, i. , p. 346). 
 
 / W-^K.
 
 220 STUDIES IJV INTERrRETATIOiV. 
 
 melts away under it, the paralysis of the weak 
 is healed ; he who is vivified by it renews his 
 strength ; * all things are possible to him ' ; 
 ' he is a new creature.' " ' 
 
 Now, it is to be feared that in Arnold's 
 poetry " the mass of mankind " can hardly be 
 expected to find the tide of " joyful and bound- 
 ing emotion," which he tells us is so essential 
 for their welfare and growth. It is impossible 
 to rise from the perusal of his pages without 
 experiencing, as he confessed that he ex- 
 perienced in reading Epictetus and Marcus 
 Aurelius"a sense of constraint and melancholy," 
 a haunting feeling " that the burden laid upon 
 man is well-nigh greater than he can bear." 
 The "ray of sunshine" rarely irradiates his 
 noblest poetry ; the " glow of a divine warmth " 
 hardly ever melts " the austerity of the sage." 
 Yet we would not take leave of Arnold with 
 our emphasis upon any of the negative aspects 
 of his work. There are some to-day, there will 
 surely be still more in the future, upon whom 
 his splendid influence must needs make itself 
 felt. To a few at least in each generation, 
 Arnold will seem the ideal teacher — the most 
 helpful, the most beneficent, the most pro- 
 foundly satisfactory of guides, counsellors, 
 friends. And in an age that is prone to sen- 
 sationalism, extravagance, wild thinking and 
 wilder acting, — in an age that loves quack 
 
 ^ A/arc us A iirelius {Essays, i., p. 347).
 
 MA TTIIE W ARNOLD. 22 I 
 
 remedies, and is hysterically ready to follow 
 every self-constituted blind leader of the blind 
 — it is something indeed to have had a counter- 
 acting power such as his — so calm and so far- 
 reaching, so evenly-balanced and benign. 
 
 THE END.
 
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 Books and Their Makers 
 During the Middle As^es 
 
 A Study of the Conditions of the Production and Distribu- 
 tion of Literature from the Fall of the Roman Empire to 
 the Close of the Seventeenth Century. 
 
 By GEO. HAVEN PUTNAM, A.M. 
 
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 ments for the E.\change of Books. 
 
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 III.— The Making of Books in the Early Universities. 
 IV.— The Book-Trade in the Manuscript Period. 
 Italy.— Books in Spain.— The Manuscript Trade in France.— Manuscript 
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 I.— The Renaissance as the Forerunner of the Printing-Press. 
 11. —The Invention of Printing and the Work of the First Printers 
 of Holland and Germany. 
 III.— The Printer-Publishers of Italy. 
 
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 v.— The Later Estiennes and Casaubon. 
 VI.— Ca.xton and the Introduction of Printing into England. 
 VII.— The Kobergers of Nuremberg. 
 VIII.— Froben of Basel. 
 
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 XI.— Plantin of Antwerp. 
 XII.— The Elzevirs of Leyden and Amsterdam. 
 XIII. — Italy: Privileges and Censorship. 
 XIV. — Germany: Privileges and Book-Trade Regulations. 
 XV. — France : Privileges, Censorship, and Legislation. 
 XVI.— England : Privileges, Censorship, and Legislation. 
 XVII.— Conclusion : The Development of the Conception of Literary 
 Property. 
 
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