XIX*^ Century Classics

XIX*^ Century Classics EDITED BY CLEMENT K. SHORTER ALARIC AT ROME AND OTHER POEMS /K^U^yC^ iL^^^. f ' , ' ALARIC AT ROME AND OTHER POEMS BY MATTHEW ARNOLD IVITH AN INTRODUCTION BY RICHARD GARNETT, C.B., LL.D LONDON: WARD, LOCK ^ BOWDEN, LTD- NEW YORK AND MELBOURNE. MDCCCXCVI CHISWICK PRESS :—CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO. TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON. EDITORIAL NOTE. THE PRESENT VOLUME IS COMPOSED OF THE CONTENTS OF MR. MATTHEW ARNOLD'S FIRST FOUR VOLUMES, "ALARIC," "CROMWELL," "THE STRAYED REVELLER," AND " EMPEDOCLES ON ETNA," AND THAT PORTION OF THE FIFTH WHICH HAD NOT PREVIOUSLY APPEARED IN THE EARLIER VOLUMES. TO THESE HAS BEEN ADDED THE SONNET "TO THE HUNGARIAN NATION," WHICH FIRST APPEARED IN THE "EXAMINER" FOR 1849, AND HAS NEVER HITHERTO BEEN REPRINTED. THE ORIGINAL ARRANGEMENT OF THE POEMS IN EACH VOLUME HAS BEEN OBSERVED. INTRODUCTION. HE incontestable importance of Matthew Arnold's T place in English poetical literature arises not merely from the beauty of much of his poetry, but from his peculiar distinction as one of the few eminent English poets who are enrolled among the legislators of their art, not more by the indirect influence of their metrical compositions, than by the authority univers ally accorded to their critical utterances. Coleridge, the most penetrating critic Britain ever possessed, is too casual and desultory to rank among legislators, and the two poets who admit of most profitable comparison with Arnold in this respect are Dryden and Wordsworth. Each of the three had definite con victions on the subject of poetry which he exemplified in his own practice; and each, along with error and exaggerated truth, contributed elements to the forma tion of a poetical ideal which can never be ignored. To a certain extent Arnold's work was a corrective of that of Wordsworth, the great emancipator of English poetry. In overthrowing a merely conventional ortho doxy, Wordsworth had inevitably given somewhat of a shock to those great models and eternal principles by whose cormpt following this conventionalism had been vii Introdu6lion. engendered. It was Arnold's mission to restore the balance, inculcating alike by example and precept the cardinal doctrines of antiquity, that form is of equal importance with matter, and that the value of a poem consists more in the force and truth of the total impression, than in isolated fine thoughts sparkling forth in the heat of composition. This, substantially, was Matthew Arnold's critical gospel, a deliverance interesting as an episode in the eternal strife between Classic and Romantic, and valuable as a corrective of tendencies inherent in the English genius. This is not generally architectonic, it overwhelms with afflu ence of thought and imagery, but the shaping hand is too often absent. Arnold thought that much of the characteristic English indifference to form arose from indiscriminate admiration of Shakespeare; but the truth is that while fancy, passion, and reflection come to gifted Englishmen by nature, the sense of symmetry usually has to be engrafted upon them. We are a nation of colourists, and great colourists, except by determined efforts, rarely became good draughtsmen. Arnold's admonition, therefore, was most serviceable, it may be ranked with Wordsworth's protest against the conventionalities of his day, and was perhaps even more valuable; for while Wordsworth assailed an aberration which in course of time would have cor rected itself, Arnold denounced ingrained vice and besetting sin. It was, moreover, eminently seasonable, appearing in 1853, when there did seem a real danger of English poetry becoming an assemblage of purple patches upon a core of perishable wood, the very definition of a scarecrow. This did not, however viii Introdudlion. arise as Arnold thought, from a special infirmity in the age, whose imperfections he greatly exaggerated, but from the abuse of what was best in it. The infinite significance of even the humblest human life was beginning to be recognized as it had never been before, but a discovery invaluable in the social sphere had not unnaturally generated the dangerous artistic heresy that what is good enough for a novel is also good enough for a poem. 1853, the date of Arnold's memorable preface, was also the period, not indeed of the culminating, but of the too exclusive influence of Shelley and Keats, who were receiving their long withheld recompense with usury. These great poets, in their more mature productions, rather surpass than fall short of the ordinary English standard of sym metrical construction, but their architecture is ob scured by the splendour of their painting, and too many had come to confound the art of poetry with the art of phrasing. To such Matthew Arnold's remonstrance came like an exorcism, and its weight was greatly enhanced by the method of its delivery; not poured as from a vase into the turbid torrent of periodical criticism, but prefixed as a confession of faith to a volume of poetry designed for and destined to endurance. It is a great reinforcement to the weight of poetical criticism when the critic is himself a recognized poet. The Goddess of Wisdom herself is not recorded to have lectured to the Muses, and the precepts of mere prose writers, however excellent, have something of the air of instructions to Hannibal in the art of war. Even ix Introdu(5tion. Aristotle qualified for his Poetics by writing a song, and a very good one. Arnold, when he came forward in 1853 to discourse on poetry, could produce sufficient credentials as the author of two poetical volumes of great though unequal merit, "The Strayed Reveller, and other Poems" (1849); ^^^ "Empedocles on Etna and other Poems" (1852). Neither of these, however, as we shall see presently, sufficiently exem plified the particular principles which he chiefly desired to enforce. His argument would have wanted the weight which theory derives from conformity to prac tice, if, upon the republication in 1853 of such of these poems as he then cared to preserve, they had not been accompanied by another so completely exemplifying his views respecting the supreme necessity of perfection of form, dignity of subject, unity of action, and sobriety of treatment that it might have been written to illus trate them. Great poems, nevertheless, cannot be composed to order, and it is much more probable that the preface grew out of the poem than the reverse. No subject could better than "Sohrab and Rus- tum" have enabled Arnold to exemplify his own precepts:—"Choose a fitting action, penetrate your self with the feeling of its situations; this done every thing else will follow." This exhortation, indeed, is insufficiently limited and defined. The action must be not only abstractedly fitting for a poet to undertake, but the poet must fit the action. Coleridge, perhaps, would have made no more of " Sohrab and Rustum " than Arnold would have made of " The Ancient Mariner;" and when at a later period Arnold X Introduftion. endeavoured to dramatize the story of Merope, the unanimous voice of criticism informed him that although the subject was undeniably fitting, and the poet ade quately penetrated by it, "everything else" had not followed. But " Sohrab and Rustum " suited him to perfection, for it is an heroic action whose greatness consists not in its grandeur, but in its pathos. Pathos is the note of all his best poems, there is hardly one of them which is not more or less an appeal for compas sion on account of the character of the incident described, or some human or spiritual sorrow, or some real or imaginary distress of the age. No more affecting incident than the involuntary death of a son by his father's hand can be found in history or fiction, and it especially impressed Arnold, from that strength in him of the parental instinct revealed by his re cently published correspondence. What he received intimately he reproduced vividly, and the conduct of his story and the tissue of his diction are masterpieces of judgment. Nothing, he rightly perceived, can be more essential to the impressiveness of a story of profound pathos than that it should be told in the simplest language, yet unrelieved simplicity through out a long narrative must wear an aspect of poverty, perhaps even of affectation. The general homeliness of the exposition, therefore, is occasionally interrupted by elaborate similes, little poems in themselves, and involving close and accurate word-painting. These for a moment suspend, but do not divert, the reader's attention to the main action, whose pathos goes on deepening with every line, until there is no modern poem, with perhaps the exception of Tennyson's xi Introdu6tion. " Edward Gray," that it is so difficult to read without tears. Arnold, nevertheless, saw that although the impression of unrelieved tragedy, created by such poems as " Edward Gray," may be right in a lyric, it would be amiss in an epic, and, since the situation itself could not be modified, he has mitigated it by the majestic concluding passage describing the course of the Oxus, emblematic of the greatness of Nature in comparison with the accidents of man's brief career, and, at its termination, of the sea in which human joys and sorrows are finally swallowed up. Besides "Sohrab and Rustum," the volume of 1853 contained another poem of length and importance, of an earlier date of composition, whose unlikeness to Sohrab adds to the probability that the writer's high and just estimate of the latter poem had much to do with moulding the doctrine of his memorable preface. " Tris tram and Iseult "is exceedingly unlike "Sohrab" in everything but poetical beauty, and entirely fails to pro duce that total impression whichArnold propounds as the chief object of the poet.

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