So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Such is "the eternal note of sadness," as he himself calls it, which sounds through all his verse, and which he insists is the dominant note of the various voices of the world. Partly the result of his observation of human life, and partly the truthful expression of his own experience, he seldom allows us to be out of hearing of these canticles of grief and woe over the mysteries of heaven and the miseries of earth. One of the chief reasons of the prevalence of this minor chord in Arnold's verse is found in the fact that, despite a wise parental guidance and the healthful conditions that surrounded his developing manhood, he never framed for himself and uttered to the world any consistent philosophy of life, any definite code of conduct, nor did he ever stand long enough at the right point of view of human history and belief to form a safe and satisfactory theory of life. Taking exception, as he did, to Mr. Emerson as a thinker and a man because he failed to formulate any specific system of belief and action, he himself failed therein, and even more signally, and thus found himself, as life developed, ever more and more perplexed over the unceasing mystery of the world above him and the world within him, of being and doing. Thus, in his poem "A Question," he writes: Dreams dawn and fly, friends smile and die, Like spring flowers; Our vaunted life is one long funeral. Men dig graves with bitter tears For their dead hopes, and all, Mazed with doubts and sick with fears, Such sentiments are more than despondent. They are funereal and pitiably hopeless, closing the door, perforce, to all that is bright and good. Hence Mr. Arnold, as a poet, brings to the world no message of certitude and courage and good cheer, and these are just what the world most needs and knows it needs. A lyrist of no inferior order from a purely poetic point of view, meditating day and night on the high themes of God and man, and making the apparent attempt at least to reach some stable status of faith and life, he insists on making the fact of his failure the burden of his song-and a burden, indeed, it is to author and reader, greater than either can bear; while, as we read, we wonder whether this despairing minstrel can be the son of the great-hearted Thomas Arnold, the essential embodiment of faith and manly courage. Mr. Arnold is a meditative lyrist, but on the nether side of life-the Edgar Allen Poe of British letters-reminding us of Byron and Shelley and Clough, and kindred spirits, as distinct from Milton and Wordsworth and Mrs. Browning, and all those idylists who have come to their fellows with a word of good cheer, and left them the braver and better for their singing. How mournful his answer to what is meant by "Growing Old :" It is to spend long days And not once feel that we were ever young; It is to add, immured In the hot prison of the present, month To month with weary pain. It is to suffer this, And feel but half, and feebly, what we feel; Deep in our hidden heart Festers the dull remembrance of a change, "No emotion," no word of impulse, stimulus, and quickening of spirit do we find in these and kindred lines, but a sad, sullen, and almost stoical message to those who are holding their ears close to the lyre to hear a note of assurance. It is well for British letters and the modern world that these lyrists of the lower notes are conspicuous by contrast the great volume of our native song being characterized, as it is, by faith in God and faith in man and the final triumph of the truth. It is of the meditative poets such as Arnold that Stedman is writing, as he says that "they lack that elasticity which is imparted by a true lyrical periodwhose very life is gladness. Their uppermost emotion is one of doubt and indecision, a feeling that they were born too late "-a feeling of regret, we may add, that they were born at all. |