Bend ye on these, indeed, an unmoved eye, 'Or is it that some Power, too wise, too strong 'Or in mid-heaven, perhaps, your golden cars, * * * * 'Into the silence of the groves and woods 'Ye men of Egypt, ye have heard your king. Of the great Gods is plain; and ye must bring Their pleasure, to their feet; and reap their praise, Who does not recognise in this passage an imitation of the majestic music of Wordsworth's 'Laodamia' by one who has felt the beauty of that poem and has aimed at repeating its effects? Once more, we find Mr. Arnold struck with the melody of another considerable writer, and accurately reproducing it. The passage we subjoin is from the conclusion of the same poem of Mycerinus,' in which, if the rhyme be 'after' Wordsworth, in the blank verse he does homage to Tennyson: 'There by the river banks he wander'd on From palm-grove on to palm-grove, happy trees, Flush'd guests, and golden goblets foam'd with wine; 'So six long years he revell'd night and day; Mycerinus, pp. 58-60. No reader of Enone, or Ulysses, or the Morte d'Arthur, can have any doubt as to the original which suggested these very picturesque and harmonious lines. It is the manner of Mr. Tennyson, caught and employed by a man of taste and ability. We do not desire to pursue Mr. Arnold through the various poems of this volume merely for the purpose of showing the originals to whom he is indebted. But in a right estimate of his powers it ought not to be forgotten that he is thus indebted, and indebted even to a greater degree than a careless perusal might perhaps disclose. For not only in such passages as we have quoted is the style and manner of another writer unconsciously caught or directly imitated; but often where the manner is his own, and the treatment appears to be original, we may detect the recollection of some beautiful passage lurking in Mr. Arnold's mind, and forming the theme as it were for a graceful and melodious variation. The following little poem, for instance, is one of the sweetest in Mr. Arnold's whole volume: With echoing straits between us thrown, The islands feel the enclasping flow, The nightingales divinely sing, Oh, then a longing like despair Is to their farthest caverns sent; For surely once, they feel, we were Now round us spreads the watery plain, Should be, as soon as kindled, cool'd? A God, a God, their severance ruled; The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea.'-Pp. 187, 188. Beautiful verses indeed. But would they have been written but for the famous passage in Christabel?-- Alas, they had been friends in youth, To keep the hollow heart from paining, The marks of that which once hath been.' Here it is not the manner of Christabel which is imitated, but the thought of Coleridge, which is suggested by Mr. Arnold's poem. We could not carry on this kind of examination in detail, without occupying a great deal more space than is now at our disposal, for where the likeness is not of style, but of thought, the parallel passages require to be set out at length, and the attention must be drawn to those parts which are intended to be compared. In general, however, we may say that there are but a few of Mr. Arnold's poems which do not inevitably remind us of the works of some former writer, either in their language, or in the thoughts of which their language is the expression. In this, however, Mr. Arnold does not differ from the multitude of young verse-writers, of whose productions 'the public little knows, the publisher too much,' and who, after a certain period of friendly praise and moderate social success, pass to the trunkmakers, and are forgotten. He does differ from them in the quantity of original matter which he blends with, or superadds to the stores of others, and in the fine taste and poetical feeling which all his productions display. He differs from them also in the possession of a wide learning and varied accomplishment, which furnish him with an abundance of allusion, and a fertility of unexpected yet appropriate illustration, no less interesting than delightful. Above all, he stands alone in his sedulous cultivation of the classical writers, as the best sources of poetical inspiration, and the highest teachers of the poetical art. He appears to be a finished scholar, intimately acquainted with the great works of Greece and Rome, and passionately fond of their characteristic beauties. Homer, and the Attic tragedians, especially Sophocles, are however those amongst the classics whom he regards with the deepest veneration; a veneration shown not only by an occasional verse or stanza, but in elaborate attempts to reproduce their style, in a selection of classical subjects for his own compositions, and a pretty frequent adoption of classical epithets, or epithets formed upon a classical analogy, into all his poems, whether of an antique or modern cast. Mr. Arnold has not escaped the dangers inevitably attendant on such a course. It is true that he has occasionally transferred to his own poems some of the great qualities which he so admires in his Greek models. The clear descriptive epithets, the simple yet distinct pictures of Greek poetry, are not unfrequently to be found in Mr. Arnold. But his love of the ancients has led him into many a harshness and obscurity, many a bald passage intended to be austere, many a childish one intended to be simple; and has filled his poems with a multitude of affectations quite fatal to the perfect enjoyment of them. A Greek statue is a noble thing, and a portrait of a modern gentleman, by Sir Joshua Reynolds, is a noble thing, and both give pleasure to a cultivated mind; but it is an ignoble thing, and does not give pleasure, to see an Englishman straining after the postures, and attempting to wield the weapons of a Grecian hero, and imagining that he attains the faultless beauty of antique form, because he denudes himself of modern drapery. It is true, that a classical image, a heroic subject, a quaintly translated phrase from a Greek or Latin writer, (e. g. the ringing plains of windy Troy;' 'this way and that dividing the swift mind,') will, when met with in a modern poem, often from association and from an unexpected and pleasing strangeness, give singular delight to a reader acquainted with the classics! But such arts must be used sparingly, and with the skill and taste of Mr. Tennyson, who perhaps of all great modern writers most frequently employs them, or they degenerate into grotesqueness and affectation, and ceasing to be agreeable, become ridiculous. Mr. Tennyson always takes care that his antique subjects shall be treated in a thoroughly modern fashion, that the mind of the present day shall be distinctly seen moulding ancient stories and associations to its own purposes; but never for a moment striving really to imitate classical authors, or to reproduce classical modes of thought. This blending of antiquity with modernism constitutes the peculiar and unrivalled charm of such pieces as The Lotos Eaters, and Enone, and above all, Ulysses. Mr. Arnold has much of his art to learn, and a great deal of tact and experience to acquire, before he can safely indulge in so difficult and delicate a style of composition: a style in which even success is hazardous, and failure is fatal. Mr. Arnold, however, has not been content to allow his practice to speak for itself, and the faults and beauties of his verses to stand upon their own merits, and to be found out by his readers in the ordinary course. He has been induced to write a Preface, in which he favours us with a theory of poetry, which we take leave to think entirely fallacious and inadequate, based upon untenable assumptions, and conducting us to conclusions which we utterly repudiate. As a general rule, it is a great mistake for a poet to commit himself to a theory of poetry. To theorise on poetry is not his vocation, and it is seldom that he has the intellectual qualities requisite for the work. It may be a fit and interesting subject for the critical faculty to discuss the principles of art, and to endeavour to elicit from great works the laws which guided their construction. But it is the critic, not the artist, who is properly thus employed. In all the highest qualities of his art, a great man seldom works consciously by laws at all. Technical rules of course there must be in all arts, such as the laws of metre, of grammar, or of perspective; and a great artist will know all these, and use them as familiarly as we do our alphabet. But these are not laws of construction or of treatment as applied to the whole work, and the effect of any great effort of genius taken as a whole, arises from no conscious application of definite laws on the part of the artist, but from something indefinable and inexpressible, which distinguishes a great artist, a Tonτns, or creator in any kind, from his fellow-men. No artist worth a straw could tell us how his own great works had been produced. Sir Joshua Reynolds, the foremost artist-critic of modern times, analysed with acuteness, and described with eloquence, styles wholly different from his own. Inimitable and excellent as his own productions are, they are utterly unlike those which it was the chief object of his famous lectures to recommend. Wordsworth, again, wrote a celebrated essay on poetical diction, which contained a truth no doubt, but not the whole truth, and of the theory of which all his own finest poems were more or less violations. No compositions can be so flat as those which are made up like a grammatical exercise as definite examples of consciously-applied rules; while at the same time to put forth a poetical theory, especially if it is one which requires considerable power to fulfil it, is to challenge for your poems an unusual severity of critical examination, and to increase the disgrace of failure by having openly proclaimed your own standard of success. Few men's works fulfil the measure of their teaching: and the self-confidence implied in prefixing to a man's poems a kind of lecture on their characteristic excellences, and on the somewhat novel principles of taste, according to which they have been composed, and of which they are put |