CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tiiis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013267830 
 
PR 583.B87SM """"•""'"'"'* 
 
 A f futfy of Clough, Arnold, Rossetti, and 
 
 3 1924 013 267 830 
 
FOUR POETS 
 
WORKS BY THE SAME 
 AUTHOR 
 
 The Poetry of Robert 
 
 Browning 
 Tennyson : His Art and 
 
 Relation to Modern Life 
 The Gospel of Joy 
 The Kingship of Love 
 The Old Testament and 
 
 Modern Life 
 The Life Superlative 
 
A STUDY OF 
 
 Clough, Arnold, 
 Rossetti and Morris 
 
 With an Introduction on the Course 
 of Poetry from 1822 to 1852 
 
 By 
 
 STOPFORD A. BROOKE 
 
 SIR ISAAC PITMAN AND SONS, LTD. 
 NO. 1 AMEN CORNER, E.C. ^ # 1908 
 
Printed by Sir Isaac Pitman 
 & Sons, Ltd., London, Bath 
 AND New York - - 1908 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 INTRODUCTORY ..... 1 
 
 ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH ... 26 
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD . . . . .49 
 
 DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI ^ . . . 126 
 
 c 
 WILLIAM MORRIS . .178 
 
Four Poets 
 
 Clough, Arnold, Rossetti, Morris 
 
 INTRODUCTORY 
 
 When B5Ton and Shelley died, the impulse given to 
 poetry by the ideas concerning man which we now 
 call democratic, was exhausted for a time in English 
 poetry. At the same time the impulse given to 
 poetry by the hatred of them had also been exhausted. 
 There was no passion for or against these ideas left 
 in the nation. And England, thus deprived of 
 animating conceptions concerning man — derived 
 either from the far past or from the present — 
 sank into a dreary commonplace. 
 
 Then Keats, who had felt this exhaustion before 
 the death of Byron and Shelley, finding no ideas in 
 the present, recovered for poetry the ideas of the 
 past. He called on England to Mve for beauty, and 
 bade her find it in the myths of Greece, and in the 
 stori.es of romance. In these, he thought — ^recast 
 so as to manifest the power of love, truth and beauty 
 — ^the poet would receive into his heart the impas- 
 sionating ideas of the past, realise the deep emotion 
 he needed for his work, and give to men the high 
 pleasure which is the use and honour of his art. He 
 has done that for us, he has secured to English 
 poetry a devotion to beauty. But in his own time 
 his effort failed. There was no response. Charmed 
 he never so wisely, England, a deaf adder, stopped her 
 
 1 
 
 2 — (2278) 
 
2 FROM 1822 TO 1832 
 
 ears. The poetry of Keats awakened no new poetic 
 life in England of his time ; it had no children then. 
 
 There was one man, however, who might be called 
 a younger brother of Keats, and whom we cannot 
 class among those who merely kept poetry alive in 
 the years which followed the deaths of Shelley, 
 Byron and Keats. Charles Wells stands on a higher 
 level than the poets of that weak parenthesis which 
 ended with the rise of Browning and Tennyson in 
 the famous years of 1830 to 1833, when romance 
 was re-born both in France and England. Inferior 
 in genius and in art to Keats, he was his personal 
 friend, and drank of his spirit. But the deadness 
 of the time seized on him and he only produced a 
 single poem — the drama of Joseph and his Brethren. 
 As Keats revealed afresh the beauty of the Greek 
 and mediaeval stories, so Wells unfolded the beauty 
 of a Hebrew tale, recast it for modern thought and 
 feeling, and filled its outlines with modem imagina- 
 tions. Nevertheless, and this marks his power and 
 taste, he did not injure its simplicity. 
 
 When we have read the drama, the old story stiU 
 stands apart with quiet steadfastness. It is not 
 spoiled by its new clothing. Yet what we read is 
 Western not Eastern, not Hebraic but romantic. 
 The events are the same, but the atmosphere is 
 changed. The characters are fuUy developed, and 
 distinguished each from each in modern fashion. 
 The great situations are worked out with a close 
 analysis, and into a great complexity quite apart 
 from the Hebrew genius. The oruciment is lavish, 
 and the scenery, which the Hebrew story does not 
 touch, is invented, both for Palestine and Egypt, 
 with all the care, observation, and pleasure of a poet 
 
INTRODUCTORY 3 
 
 who had read the nature-poetry of Shelley and 
 Wordsworth and walked hand in hand with Keats, 
 his lover and friend, through the landscape of England. 
 
 The book was pubhshed a year after the death of 
 Keats, under the pseudonym of H. L. Howard. It 
 fell out of sight for nearly fifty years when Rossetti, 
 in Gilchrist's Life of Blake, spoke of it as " poetry of 
 the very first class whose time will surely come." 
 Thirteen years afterwards, in 1876, Mr. Swinburne 
 republished it with a preface, in which he over-topped 
 Rossetti's praise by praise of his own ; but neither 
 of these fine artists have succeeded in securing for it 
 the general admiration and reading it deserves. 
 
 The Story of Joseph, ranging from the pastoral 
 Ufe of a wandering tribe to the Ufe and government 
 of a settled kingdom, psissing, as it follows the fortunes 
 of Joseph, through a multitude of events, characters, 
 and types of men, and holding in it the fates of the 
 Jewish people, is one of the great stories of the world, 
 and worth an epic treatment. Charles Wells did 
 not feel the world-wide elements in it, but he felt its 
 varied and profound humanity, and naturally, feel- 
 ing this side more than the other, he chose to make 
 of it a drama, not an epic. Into this subject, enlarged 
 by imaginative invention, he could interweave all 
 he knew and loved of human Ufe. And the poem is 
 indeed remarkable for a distinctive, even a weighty 
 representation, in imaginative forms, of the great 
 forces of the hfe of mankind ; of the moral passions, 
 high aims, grave issues and temptations of individual 
 characters. In the beginning the treatment of these 
 matters is rapid, even superficial, but the latter part 
 is dignified workmanship ; as if the writer's life had 
 been solemnized by misfortune into endurance. 
 
4 FROM 1822 TO 1832 
 
 The most difficult part of his subject to treat was 
 the temptation of Joseph by Phraxanor, the wife 
 of Potiphar ; and it proves the power of Wells that 
 it is the finest passage in the poem. Art demanded 
 that she should be sensual, yet not trivial or base ; 
 that there should be qualities in her nature which 
 should hft her, in an imperious personality and 
 passion, above the vulgarity of mere immorality. 
 And there is in her, as conceived by the poet, so great 
 an intellectueil power in her passion, so frank and bold 
 a will, without one trace of hypocrisy, that she seems, 
 at a far lower dramatic level, to draw towards Shake- 
 speare's Cleopatra, yet without her vanity, her petu- 
 lance, her flashes of cowardice and courage. She has 
 no repentance, no hesitation ; her wrath is as deep as 
 her furious love, and both are as intellectual as they 
 are sensual. His hand rarely weakens as he draws 
 her ; there is scarcely a line which does not add a 
 fresh touch to the portraiture. Moreover, she is set 
 off by the sketch of her attendant, who is a gracious 
 and tender woman, as unUke her mistress as a prim- 
 rose of the spring is to the crimson rose of summer. 
 The scene with Joseph is managed with reticent 
 dexterity, and the fidelity of Joseph is saved from the 
 awkwardness of the situation by the noble ideals, 
 alike intellectual, moral and personal, which Wells, 
 following the story, has given to the character of 
 this leader of men. 
 
 To read the whole drama is to wonder why the poet 
 wrote so httle. Had he been justly praised he might 
 have done higher work, but total silence greeted his 
 effort, and he also went into silence. This proves that 
 he had not that genius which cannot rest without 
 production, on which pubhc indifference has no 
 
INTRODUCTORY 5 
 
 influence, and public blame none except fresh 
 impelling. Wells was not of that great crew. He 
 put so much into this poem that he exhausted his 
 genius in it. There are those who, like the fabled 
 aloe, only flower once. Moreover, it is a character- 
 istic of such persons that they have not enough of 
 art to stay their hand when they have said enough. 
 Wells begins and continues the various parts of his 
 subject with power, but the power fails into a cer- 
 tain weakness when he closes them. Thoughts and 
 impressions thin out, not only in weight but in 
 imagination, and the verse itself, mostly fuU and 
 solemn in sound, loses then its strength in a sweetness 
 too delicate to last. In this magniloquent weakness, 
 he is hke some of the Elizabethans, whom indeed 
 he studied. He resembled them in audacious 
 picturesqueness, in inventiveness, in opulent creation 
 of varied characters, and in their love of pageantry. 
 The pageant of the glory of Joseph passing through 
 the city is a splendid invention, blazing with colour 
 and Ught, and companied, step by step, with human 
 interest. Finally, the poem places him within the 
 poetic period in which Shelley, Keats and Bjnron 
 wrote. He is too good to be classed among the poets 
 who, after the death of Shelley and Byron did no 
 more than keep poetry aUve till Tennyson and 
 Browning appeared. 
 
 These poets were imitative, sensational, and 
 sentimental, not possessed by any large or animat- 
 ing ideas. They were possessed only by themselves ; 
 they Hved in their own shadow and wrote only 
 about it. And they naturally became imitators not 
 creators, rivers that were soon lost in the sand, pale 
 reflections of a glory gone. 
 
6 FROM 1822 TO 1832 
 
 There was, iirst, a set that imitated Wordsworth, 
 who sang of the life of the country ; pleasant kindly 
 poets like John Clare, whose three volumes a lazy, 
 rustic squire, yet a lover of country sights and sounds, 
 might read with sympathy, and learn how to deal 
 gently with the poor, and wisely with the land. 
 
 Again, there was a set of small versifiers who imi- 
 tated Byron. They sang with exquisite feebleness of 
 guilty heroes, they sought to be as world-forsaken, 
 as desolately cynical, as their model, and they caught 
 his easy music up. Every clerk in a merchant's 
 house, every fantastic lover, made B37ronic songs ; 
 and the imitation lasted till 1840-50, when Tennyson 
 had taught the imitators a new method. 
 
 But the men who were at this time imitated by 
 those who had in their breast some true poetic fire 
 were Shelley and Keats. These inspired Thomas L. 
 Beddoes and George Darley. Beddoes, born in 1803, 
 did " all his poetic work," says Mr. Gosse, " between 
 1821, when he published the Improvisator e, and 1826, 
 when he practically finished Death's Jest Book." 
 Beddoes was himself aware of the exhaustion of the 
 time. The disappearance of Shelley, he declares, 
 " has been followed by instant darkness, of which 
 whether the vociferous Darley is to be the comet, or 
 tender, full-faced L. E. L. the milk and watery morn, 
 I leave to astrologers to determine. But I prophesy 
 nothing but fog, rain, blight in due succession." The 
 blight fell upon himself. In a few years his inven- 
 tion and power decayed. He took to medicine, 
 misanthropy, and closed in madness. His poems are 
 for the most part fragmentary efforts of a power which 
 had no power to concentrate itself. It is not that his 
 song does not flow unbidden from his lips, as Mr. 
 
INTRODUCTORY 7 
 
 Gosse thinks, it is that it is too unbidden, not shaped 
 within into clearness, not fed by thought ; and its 
 spontaneous utterance, desperately striving by 
 repeated forms of the same idea to express the idea 
 and never lucidly expressing it, was never dominated 
 by the mastery of art crjdng to him, " Choose the best 
 form and reject the rest." The Bride's Tragedy has 
 not stuff enough in it to furnish more than a single act, 
 and it is thinned out into five. There are a few fine 
 passages, but not a single perfect one, and the passion 
 in it is torn to rags. As to Death's Jest Book, it is a 
 chaos of crude elements huddled together, with some 
 noble things ill expressed contained in it, but chiefly 
 made up of those bitter playings of his diseased fancy 
 with death and its revolting forms, which prophesied 
 his insanity, and which, whenever they predominate 
 in poetry of any time, proclaim the death of that 
 poetry. For life, and the will to Uve eagerly, are the 
 breath and fire of poetry. 
 
 His lyrics have been highly praised. They are 
 based on Shelley, and on the Ij^rics of the Ehzabethan 
 Dramatists which Lamb's Specimens had now brought 
 into prominence — a book which touched Darley as 
 well as Beddoes, and was a mighty power in Charles 
 Wells. But the Ijnrics of Beddoes have not enough 
 in them either of humanity or of Nature. The best 
 of them are the lightest, those thrown off in a moment 
 of impulsive fancy. Of the poems, the one I like 
 best is on the story of Pygmalion, a close imitation, 
 even to the tricks of rhythm, of Keats' Endymion. 
 
 Charles Darley has been classed among the imitators 
 of Shelley, but not quite justly. An Irishman, born 
 near Dubhn in 1795, his first poem. The Errours of 
 Ecstasie, was probably written in Ireland. His 
 
8 FROM 1822 TO 1832 
 
 Silvia, a fairy drama half in prose, published in 1827, 
 is a pretty, graceful thing, fuU of colours and clinking 
 verse. There is not one weighty thought or word 
 in it. Its treatment of Nature is hght and pleasant ; 
 the characters are quite boneless. There is, however, 
 a description of the faery host in array for festival 
 which is delightfully fancied, elfish, gay and glancing. 
 Nepenthe, another poem of his, is justly characterized 
 by Mr. RoUeston as an " indescribable rhapsody." 
 He will live by one lyric — " It is not Beauty I 
 demand " — ^which Palgrave, not knowing who had 
 written it, classed in the Golden Treasury among 
 the anonymous writers of the time of Milton from 
 1616 to 1700. It is worthy of the Elizabethan 
 lyrics, and Darley's imitation of the Elizabethans 
 passed in it from imitation into creation. This visita- 
 tion of the Elizabethans is the only Enghsh thing 
 about him. He was Irish, with the Irish strength 
 and weakness, and in England the Irish strength 
 diminished and the Irish weakness grew. He is an 
 Irish poet writing in an English atmosphere ; thai 
 is at the root of him. It is out of the question to 
 class him as a follower of Shelley, or to place him in 
 the roll of English poets. He might be compared 
 with Thomas Moore, but Moore was far above him. 
 In fancy he approached Moore, but he was more 
 superficial, and he was less national. As to his art, 
 the less said about it the better. 
 
 Contemporary with these unoriginal poets in this 
 short exhausted period were the sentimentalists — 
 httle rivulets of poetry that assumed to be rivers. 
 They received a gracious welcome from a society 
 which did not desire to be disturbed by ideas, which 
 
INTRODUCTORY 9 
 
 imagined that the materialism it loved to Uve in 
 would continue for ever, and which was quite willing 
 to indulge a dainty sympathy for the suffering of the 
 world and the starvation of the English poor, provided 
 no one was bold or ill-mannered enough to ask them 
 to surrender a single pleasure or a single guinea. 
 They Uked to read about pain and trouble in the past ; 
 they hated to read about it in the present. When 
 suffering was known to be over, and made no claim on 
 them — to read of it gave a pleasant flavour to their 
 luxury and to their degraded peace. Therefore they 
 accepted with a barren gratitude Mrs. Hemans, 
 Letitia Ehzabeth Landor, and others who wrote 
 graceful, pathetic, perfumed stories, and pretty lyrics 
 about spring and love and sorrow, and little deeds of 
 valour, and such rehgion as their society could accept ; 
 religion which promised them in heaven a pleasant 
 extension of their agreeable life on earth. 
 
 Mrs. Hemans had a real poetical turn. Her poetry 
 is musical, her love of nature commonplace but truly 
 felt, her copiousness powerless. She had little intel- 
 lect, and the great matters of humanity did not 
 touch her at all. She was widely read, and loved ; 
 ^but all that fame and affection are now gone, so swift 
 is the perishing of the superficial, of that which has 
 no national ideas behind its work. Yet, if we desire 
 to possess an historical example in poetry of this 
 period, we may find in some hbrary on some dusty 
 shelf the volume which contains the Forest Sanctuary 
 and some short lyrics by Mrs. Hemans. These mark 
 her pretty capacity, and they embody the sentimental 
 elements of this worn-out poetic period. 
 
 Once more, a small set of poets belonging to this 
 time undertook the defence and propagation of 
 
10 FROM 1822 TO 1832 
 
 those orthodox views in theology which Shelley had 
 attacked, which Keats ignored, and which Byron 
 had accepted and hated. The best of these was 
 Robert Pollok, who pubhshed in 1827 his Course of 
 Time, a long poem in ten cantos, describing with many 
 episodes and illustrations the condition of man before 
 the last judgment, and the tremendous event itself. 
 It had a certain harsh and hateful power, but its 
 doctrine was as unspeakable as the Turk. The one 
 inference to be drawn from it is, that it was indeed 
 a mercy that a soul hke Shelley's should, in the realm 
 of poetry, have denoimced a theology which violated 
 every principle of humanity, and have recalled the 
 hearts of men to love and forgiveness as the ground 
 of religion. 
 
 These then were the poetic elements in the air of 
 this parenthesis in the story of our poetry. But 
 England was not to remain a prey to exhaustion, 
 a land without ideas, a nation without national 
 emotions on high matters of human progress, a 
 forest with no full-voiced birds to sing in its trees. 
 The democratic ideas, in a new form and fitted to 
 existing circumstances, began to burn again in the 
 poetry, the philosophy, the rehgion, the social and 
 political realms of England. Deep-seated, wide- 
 spreading emotion, accompanied by serious thinking, 
 stirred the country and the towns, even the univer- 
 sities ; and the deaf opposition of the baser con- 
 servative elements in society only deepened the 
 excitement. The state of the oppressed and starving 
 poor, whether in the country or in the towns, awoke 
 the wrath of Ebenezer Elhott, the Com Law Rhymer, 
 and in 1827 his passionate poetic indictment of the 
 shameless wealth and comfort, bought by the misery 
 
INTRODUCTORY 11 
 
 of the workers, ran fax and wide. He, like Words- 
 worth and Crabbe, was the poet of poverty. But he 
 carried it farther than these men. He began the 
 crusade against its evils which has continued to the 
 present day. The return to Nature which Words- 
 worth sang was good ; but Elliott asked, " What 
 have the poor to return to ? The life they hve is 
 wholly unnatural, not according to Nature." Nor 
 has the voice his poetry began ever failed since, till 
 quite lately, in EngUsh song. A cloud like a man's 
 hand was rising, fuU of menacing fire, into the dead 
 grey sky of England. Th^ democratic ideas were 
 at work again, and their first instalment was the 
 Emancipation of the CathoHcs, the Reform Bill, and 
 the Repeal of the Corn Laws, events which were the 
 pioneers of a mighty progress. They stirred England 
 to its depths. Men could no longer complain that 
 there was no national passion in the country ; and 
 this national passion for new ideas fled, like an angel 
 with wings of fire, over the brains and into the souls 
 of the old men who saw visions and the young men 
 who dreamed dreams. Those who were by nature 
 poets received the national emotion, and it stimulated 
 their own. They woke to use both these emotions 
 on their own subjects, and before four years had 
 passed by, Tennyson and Browning began the new 
 hfe of English poetry. Nor was reUgion unaffected. 
 Just at the same time these poets began, two great 
 reUgious movements took their rise. Liberal theo- 
 logy began with Maurice ; sacerdotal theology with 
 Keble and Newman. One only of these movements 
 had at first a poet, but he had already written in 
 Oxford, in 1827, Tht Christian Year. Both move- 
 ments were full of passion and thought. Both have 
 
12 FROM 1822 TO 1832 
 
 not only deeply influenced England, but have also 
 done her great and lasting good ; and both illustrate 
 afresh the work of the ideas of the Revolution — the 
 one in its attraction to those ideas ; the other in 
 its repulsion from them. Thus England emerged 
 from her vile condition of careless and heavy slumber 
 full of sensual dreams. And with her waking, Poetry 
 awoke. And the light of Thought was in her eyes, 
 and the fire of Love in her heart, and of them was 
 Beauty born. 
 
 Elliott and Keble were the precursors of this 
 awakening. Elliott began as a poet of Nature. 
 " Farewell," he cried, " to the town and its horrors ; 
 let me hve on the breast of Nature." The passion 
 of Wordsworth was strong in him; he had also 
 read and loved, but did not justly admire, Keats and 
 Shelley. But as he grew older, he was drawn aside 
 from contemplation of Nature by the misery of the 
 poor, by the starvation the Corn Laws, the manu- 
 facturers and the indifferent landlords imposed on the 
 people. Wordsworth, he thought, had only touched 
 the comfortable poor. Crabbe gave him more truth, 
 and was nearer to his heart — " Crabbe, whose dark 
 gold is richer than it seems " — ^but Byron had most 
 power over his soul. Byron's anger, force, love of 
 freedom, even his gloom, suited one who had to sing 
 the stern and crying suffering of the people. 
 
 Elliott quite understood that Byron would not 
 have cared about the Enghsh labourer. But the 
 revolutionary spirit in B3n:on, his fierce scorn of the 
 oppressor, and his dying effort to free Greece, made 
 him a spirit of power in a mind hke Elliott's. Soon, 
 leaving Byron, he took his individual turn, and 
 
INTRODUCTORY 13 
 
 concentrated and consecrated himself as the Poet 
 of the Poor. And well he did that duty, voicing their 
 silent pain and wrath with unbroken courage, truth, 
 and fervour. At first he wrote poems of some 
 length, after the manner of Robert Bloomfield ; 
 and if we wish to know the state of rural England 
 in those days, we cannot do better — and this will 
 illuminate the merely pohtical histories with the 
 Ught of reality — ^than read the Patriarch of the Village 
 and The Splendid Village. There, in a lurid Ught, 
 but a true one, the rustic England of those times is 
 drawn ; and its miseries were only less than those 
 of the peasants of France before the Revolution. 
 Then, as the struggle against the Corn Laws deepened, 
 EUiott wrote rough, keen, rousing lyrics, close to 
 the very truth of things, the passion of which smote 
 hke a dagger, the reality of which could not be 
 more lucidly expressed. What he saw, he wrote. 
 But this denunciation, and aU the fierceness of his 
 poetry, were reheved throughout by a gracious love 
 of natural beauty, a joy in the lovely and quiet world 
 which knit him to the past poets, and carried him 
 forward into those who were to come. Moreover, 
 the springs of pity and tenderness were deep in him, 
 and with these, the fountain of a strong and hmnble 
 faith in God. These saved the poetry, gave it that 
 high and loving note which lifted it above the angers 
 of denunciation, and enabled it to live. 
 
 I have often thought that, bad as things are still 
 in town and country, and much as I wish that the 
 poetry of our own day should now enter into the 
 battle — ^the progress made in social good during the 
 last seventy years of the last century has been so great, 
 and so well founded on steady and well organized 
 
14 FROM 1822 TO 1832 
 
 ideas, that it deserves greater praise than has been 
 given to it. To read the Coronation Ode, ynittea for 
 the Shef&eld Working Men's Association, and to 
 compare it with the profound feeling which ran 
 through the nation at the death of the Queen, is to 
 realize this change. If the people had been suffering 
 even half as bitterly as they were suffering when the 
 Queen was crowned, nothing like that which we have 
 seen when she died could have taken place. I quote 
 this ode of his, even though, as poetry, it is not good. 
 It is not, of course, an attack on the Queen, but a 
 cry against the misery, the oppression, and the past 
 policy of the country. Its sad and terrible note 
 sounds almost incredible in our ears. 
 
 CORONATION ODE. 
 
 Victoria, cypress-crown'd I thou, good in vain ! 
 How the red wreath, with which thy name is bound — 
 The page which tells the first deeds of thy reign, 
 Black, and blood-blotted — cheer the Calmuck hound, 
 Whose growl o'er Brunswick hails thee, cypress-crown'd ! 
 
 Canada weeps — and yet her dead are free ! 
 
 Throned o'er their blood ! who would not be a Queen ? 
 
 The Queen of new-made graves, who would not be ? 
 
 Of glory's royal flowers the loveliest seen ! 
 
 So young ! yet all that the deplored have been 1 
 
 Here too, O Queen, thy wo-worn people feel 
 
 The load they bear is more than they can bear I 
 
 Beneath it twenty million workers reel I 
 
 A^ile fifty thousand idlers rob and glare. 
 
 And mock the sufferings which they yet may share I 
 
 The drama soon will end. Four acts are past : 
 
 The curtain rises o'er embracing foes. 
 
 But each dark smiler hugs his dagger fast ! 
 
 While Doom prepares his match, and waits the close ! 
 
 Queen of the Earthquake ! would'st thou win or lose ? 
 
 Still shall the Car of Juggernaut roll on. 
 
 O'er broken hearts and children born in vain, 
 
 Banner'd with fire ! while " thousand men as one " 
 
 Sink down beneath its coward wheels of pain. 
 
 That crush out souls, through crunching blood and brain. 
 
INTRODUCTORY 15 
 
 Stop ! — for to ruia Antoinette was led, 
 
 By men, who only when they died awoke ! 
 
 Base nobles who o'er France vain darkness spread. 
 
 And, goading her faint steeds with stroke on stroke. 
 
 Loaded the wain — until the axles broke I 
 
 Stop ! — " for the blasting engine's iron Laws," 
 
 Then saved not thrones from outraged Heav'n's control. 
 
 When hunger urg'd up to the cannon's jaws 
 
 A sea of men, with only one wild soul ! 
 
 Hark 1 — still I hear the echo of its roll 1 
 
 We can scarcely listen to it without feeling that the 
 main ideas of the Revolution, so long silent in Eng- 
 land, were again arising into life. What would 
 England make of them ? What would they become 
 in the New Poetry they prophesied and stimulated ? 
 The answer poetry gave was no obscure one. The 
 ideas changed their manner ; they changed the form of 
 their demands ; they were modified by circumstances ; 
 but they Uved on. They became, not a furious 
 menace from without, but a spirit moving slowly 
 from within, working in quiet ways, infiltrating 
 themselves into almost every sphere of human 
 thought, and moving with dignity, and yet with 
 passion, through the poets from this time till 
 about 1870, when again they began to change their 
 form. 
 
 Keble was another precursor of the awakening. 
 That awakening was destined in poetry to be greatly 
 interested in ideas of religion, and one species of these 
 ideas arose in 1827 with the publication of The 
 Christian Year. In this book Keble created a new 
 method and a new aim in religious poetry. The 
 reUgious poets of the Eighteenth Century were more 
 hymn-writers than poets, but the greater part of 
 Keble's work was quite apart from the inevitable 
 
16 FROM 1822 TO 1832 
 
 conventionality of the hymn, even when it was written 
 by Cowper. Nor was it fantastic, like that of Herbert, 
 or philosophical hke that of Vaughan or More. It 
 was simple, moving on the common meadow-paths 
 of gentle devotion ; and its only philosophy was that 
 of the heart of humble men seeking communion with 
 God. At the same time, it bound up with itself a 
 set of large rehgious ideas. It seized on, and brought 
 into poetry the mighty, emotionalizing traditions 
 of the Church from the earhest times ; the weight and 
 passion of two thousand years of thought and 
 associated action. It had not force enough to repre- 
 sent the thousandth part of this, but what it did 
 grasp redeemed religious poetry from the narrow 
 hmits which confined it to prayer and praise alone. 
 Moreover, it brought rehgious poetry out of the closed 
 sphere of the inner life into the home, into the trials 
 and temptations of the social life of men and women. 
 The range of devotional poetry was thus expanded. 
 Again, he brought religious feeling into union with the 
 new love of nature for her own sake. The mountains, 
 rivers, woods, and plains, the glories of the morning, 
 evening and nightly sky, are in his pages, gently, 
 serenely felt. And he used the tender grace, the 
 beauty of the scenery of Palestine, which then began 
 to be well known, to enhance the poetry which dealt 
 with the Gospel History. Many of the poems in the 
 Christian Ygar begin with refined, delicate and deeply- 
 felt descriptions of Nature which are, as symbohsm 
 or as teaching, carried on by gracious gradation into 
 the spiritual Ufe. These passages, in their academic 
 peace and dehcate feehng, faintly echo Gray, but 
 their loving observation of nature is as true as that 
 of Tennyson. No one has used Nature better in the 
 
INTRODUCTORY 17 
 
 service of the soul. This also was an expansion of 
 the poetry of religion, and it was in harmony with 
 the ideas of the new time.. 
 
 As to the poetry itself, it was possessed of a sweet 
 melody, and the melody was varied into many forms. 
 Its grip on the matters it treated was not always 
 strong ; it wavered, and lost its hold only too often ; 
 but that is a frequent fault in poets who Uve in con- 
 templation. I have said that it extended reUgious 
 poetry into the home and social hfe of men, but it 
 did this tentatively, and was, naturally enough and . 
 chiefly, the poetry of a cloistered soul. But it was, in 
 its own sphere, felicitous, seeking a small perfection, 
 and sufficiently imaginative, though in it the imagina- 
 tion never soared. Above all, it was pervaded by 
 the charm of quiet ; of delicate thought and twilight 
 emotion. Historically, it did a great work for the 
 religious movement it was the first to define. Newman 
 added to its poetry some of his own which, though 
 it has taken a high place in the minds of many, 
 seems to be gravely overrated. 
 
 These poets opened out the dawn of a new poetic ^J°'^85o^^ 
 world, aiid in a few years the sun arose in Tennyson 
 and Browning, moved not only by their own native 
 genius but by the passion of England, now at last 
 awakened into keen life by fresh social, political, 
 artistic, and religious ideas. On them, and their 
 relation to their time and its movements, I have 
 written at large. What I wish now to do, before I 
 come to a discussion of the new elements which 
 entered poetry with Clough and Arnold, is, leaving 
 Tennyson and Browning aside, to follow the ideas of 
 the lesser poets who, in this great awakening, sang 
 
 3— (2S78) 
 
18 FROM 1832 TO 1850 
 
 the imaginative thinking of mature men, and the 
 devious aspirations of the young. 
 
 In the ten years which preceded 1842 when Tenny- 
 son collected his poems for the first time, when 
 Browning had pubhshed Paracelsus and Sordello, 
 there was, first, one set of poets who rather reverted 
 to Wordsworth than belonged to the new time. They 
 had nothing to do, however, with the half-dead 
 period on which I have written ; their poetry was of 
 a steady, temperate, highly cultivated quahty. 
 Thought and emotion belonged to it, but it was too 
 philosophic, too much afraid of emotion, and of too 
 curbed an imagination to become of a great or uni- 
 versal influence. It reacted from the more impassioned 
 work of Shelley, Keats and 'Byron, to that of Words- 
 worth — to Wordsworth, not as the youthful poet, 
 but as the poet of the Excursion. Such poetry as 
 that written wildly and loosely by Beddoes and 
 Darley, such sentimentalism as that which flowed 
 from Mrs. Hemans or L. E. L. were painful to men who 
 had now begun to live among great events, and his- 
 torical movements of thought. Again, in this new 
 noise of the world, which grew louder and fiercer from 
 1830, this type of men took refuge in the silent love 
 of Wordsworth for quiet things, and not least in his 
 spiritual communion with Nature, to whose resting- 
 places they fled, in brief holidays, from the storm 
 and stress of affairs. Moreover, Wordsworth's ener- 
 getic grasp of the fundamental elements of man's 
 nature, his firm hold on its great and universal truths, 
 appealed not only to middle-aged men, seeking 
 severely for truth in great confusion, — ^the confusion 
 of a world newly awakened from sleep — but also to 
 young men at the Universities, who were deeply 
 
INTRODUCTORY 19 
 
 moved by the prospect of a life so full of warring 
 elements, on which they were about to enter. The 
 poets who voiced this reaction to Wordsworth were 
 only a small school, but they expressed the feeUng 
 of a large number of persons at this time. The most 
 representative of them was Sir Henry Taylor, whose 
 Philip Van Arteveldt was published in 1834. This 
 drama, which may fairly be called philosophical, 
 deals with government, popular disturbance, wars 
 and their conduct, in an age crowded with sudden and 
 bold activities ; and is full of action, of various types 
 of men, and of thought on pubhc affairs. And love, 
 treated with some statehness, even with humour 
 and pathos, legitimate and illegitimate, runs through 
 its seriousness as a secondary not as a principal part 
 of Ufe. The interlude, between the two parts of the 
 drama, is a well-wrought study of a woman who had 
 loved too much and too often for her place ; a creature 
 of impulse and fire, with a born obhquity in her 
 nature. Its lyric form, its natural description of 
 Italy, its revelation of a wildered woman's soul, 
 and her pathetic self-judgment, is the best poetry 
 in the book. In it Taylor let his imagination loose ; 
 in the drama he curbed it so closely that it lost charm. 
 He subordinated his poetry to his intellect, and his 
 other dramas are subject to a similar criticism. 
 
 Another school of poets which arose in this excited 
 time was the school to which was afterwards given 
 the nickname of Spasmodic by persons who were 
 incapable of writing its poetry. It had a great 
 vogue. Bailey's Festus was praised, and justly, by 
 excellent judges. Sydney DobeU's Balder, and The 
 Roman, and the Poems of Alex. Smith received ovations 
 in their day. After fuUy fifteen years, Professor 
 
20 FROM 1832 TO 1850 
 
 Aytoun's Firmilian, a Spasmodic Tragedy, exaggerat- 
 ing grossly the faults of the school, killed it. But 
 Festus still continues to claim our admiration for 
 its high poetic qualities. It was published in 1839 ; 
 and was begun when Bailey was twenty years old. 
 He enlarged it till he died. It embodied a new 
 theology, neither of Newman nor of Maurice, but 
 a layman's theology freed from the limits of authority, 
 of tradition, and of conventional morality. 
 
 The unbridled thinking, and unmixed self-conscious- 
 ness of this time — each man thinking himself a 
 universe — ^were naturally strongest in the young men, 
 and strongest of all in young poets. That Words- 
 worthian reversion on which I have dwelt, with its 
 philosophy and quietudes, left the hot-tempered, 
 passionate, aspiring, egotistic young men quite 
 unrepresented. It suited grave men or premature 
 young men, like Stuart Mill, but it stirred rebellion 
 in the impetuous, who felt that it left half of Ufe 
 untouched. And the new wine in the land, the 
 emotions of ideas growing into form, and shaping 
 themselves into new circumstances, deepened, as 
 all national movements will, the natural excitement 
 of poetic young men, thirsting for fame and love. 
 Therefore, their poems begin, for the most part, 
 with vast soliloquies, many pages long, which describe 
 their soul, its ineffable powers and aims ; and their 
 own passion to reach the top of fame, not only in 
 poetry, but in everything. Again, the hunger for love 
 in many forms, moral and immoral, was raised by 
 these poets into a kind of religion. It was necessary, 
 they thought, for their full development as poets that 
 they should go through, in many different women, 
 varied aspects of love in its joys, its miseries, and 
 
INTRODUCTORY 21 
 
 its remorse. Nothing could be more unlike the 
 view of love which Wordsworth, Scott, Byron, Shelley 
 or Keats expressed. With them it was not the whole 
 of hfe, and it was always naturally treated. These 
 new poets whipped it into a morbid prominence, 
 sometimes into an imaginative sensuaUty which 
 pretended to be religious. It was a not unnatural 
 reaction from a school which looked on passion in 
 love as unworthy of a true philosophy of life, or from 
 a school which made it into pretty sentiment. The 
 senses, the appetites are part of human nature. 
 They also are to be presented in poetry, but there, 
 if art represents their base extremes, such art has 
 ceased to be art, and has passed into the science of 
 morbid conditions. 
 
 Another element in this poetry was an over-assertive 
 individuality. Each of these poets, to his own think- 
 ing, contained all nature and all human nature. To 
 investigate and represent the finity of themselves 
 was their deepest interest, and ought to be the deep- 
 est interest of the world. Some even seem to think 
 that they ought to have in their hands all knowledge 
 and all power ; the poet, they declare, is the true 
 governor of the world. Each, at least, believed him- 
 self to be the first of poets. Their egotism is unhmited, 
 but it is the product of their time. Individuahsm, as 
 in all periods of quickened life in a nation, had now 
 become one of the ruling ideas of public and personal 
 life. It appears, but modified by true genius, in 
 Paracelsus and Sordello, and in many poems of 
 Tennyson. It continued, and very fully, to display 
 itself in the work of Clough and Arnold ; nor did it 
 lessen much till Morris and Rossetti carried poetry 
 into another atmosphere, in which the personal 
 
22 FROM 1832 TO 1850 
 
 soul was made of less importance. Moreover, it 
 was quite in harmony with the whole drift of political 
 and social opinion. The glorification of individual 
 freedom to act as it pleased, independent of the 
 interests of the whole — ^the opposite doctrine to that of 
 collectivism — ruled the internal politics of the State, 
 of trade, and of all social questions from 1832 to 1866, 
 when the first blow was concisely administered to 
 individualism. These poems were the exaggerated 
 exposition in art of this individuaUsm. 
 
 Then again, this claim of the poets to absolute 
 freedom of self-development made them claim full 
 freedom for national development and for the over- 
 throw of all oppression. The democratic ideas, 
 scarcely represented by Tennyson or Browning, were 
 ever since 1832 quite awake in England. They grew 
 hotter as the years went on. The reactionary work 
 of the French monarchy, the oppression of North 
 Italy by Austria, the condition of Rome and Naples, 
 the treatment of Poland, the state of the poor and 
 the working men of England, multiplied the power of 
 those ideas. They broke into fierce revolt in 1848 ; 
 and they were represented by these poets. Sydney 
 Dobell's Roman, published in 1849, an indictment 
 of Austria's villainies in Italy, and a claim for a 
 united Italy, with Rome as its centre, ran from 
 edition to edition, and was only one example of 
 poetry filled with S3mipathy for the struggle for free- 
 dom on the Continent. Clough shared in this 
 excitement. Arnold receded from it. 
 
 But even more than by fame, love and freedom, 
 these poets were moved by theology, and into their 
 theology each intruded his own special individuality. 
 The theological excitement had begun in and about 
 
INTRODUCTORY 23 
 
 1830 in the Universities, and had now extended over 
 the whole of religious England. Tennyson and 
 Browning shared in it, but with a dignity of genius 
 that separated them from the rest. Clough and 
 Arnold were closely involved iij it, and all the minor 
 poets of this time took part in the battle. But 
 these poets, whom I now discuss, represented it in 
 separate, individual, unchartered forms — as it ex- 
 pressed itself in the excited souls of laymen who 
 owned no authority of church or sect, and followed 
 no especial form of creed. They made theology in its 
 relation to Hfe, even more than love, the subject- 
 matter of their poetry. But they were not temperate, 
 concise, or conscious of the limitations of thought, 
 hke the greater poets ; they were sensational, end- 
 lessly fluent, and claimed to be at home in regions 
 of thought beyond the sight of man. The problems 
 of theology are discussed by them at such portentous 
 length that one can only explain the great vogue of 
 their poems by a universal excitement on the subject 
 in religious society. The best of them was Festus. 
 It opens, Hke Goethe's Faust, with God and Satan 
 in colloquy, and Satan is allowed to tempt Festus. 
 It ends with Festus being made King of all humanity 
 and with the immediate destruction of the whole 
 human race. He has, before this, visited with Lucifer 
 Heaven itself and HeU, and all the inhabited planets, 
 and is the friend of several archangels. The scenes, 
 are set in Space, in Elsewhere, in Everywhere, in 
 Chaos, and in various parts of the earth, where he 
 develops, with a perfect serenity of conscience, a 
 complete series of different affections for different 
 women. At the end of the poem is the last judgment, 
 and it is worth noting that he was the first of the poets 
 
24 FROM 1832 TO 1850 
 
 to teach universal redemption. All the human race 
 are saved ; evil has only existed for the development 
 of good ; and since the work of Satan has been God's 
 instrument to draw forth good, he and all the rebel 
 host are called back by God to take their original 
 places in heaven. Embrassons nous, mes enfants, 
 disait le hon Dieu, tout s'explique. 
 
 This universaHsm was only one of the various 
 phases of religious thought which arose in this time 
 of intellectual excitement, and were naturally repre- 
 sented by the poets. Indeed, more and more, 
 theories and questions of reUgion caught hold of the 
 poetry of England from 1840 to 1860. In Memoriam 
 appeared in 1850. The controversy between New- 
 man and his opponents was stUl hot in Oxford in 
 the forties, and had extended far and wide over 
 England. A liberal theology, into whose tenets I 
 need not enter here, had then well begun, and gathered 
 disciples round it year after year. The authority of 
 the Church was set up against the claim a large class 
 of men made to complete freedom of investigation, 
 criticism, worship and behef. Others tried to hold 
 the balance between these two extremes, to discover 
 and pave a via media, but instead of one via media, 
 different thinkers made many. And beyond the 
 main schools of rehgious thought, there were 
 guerrilla schools that fought for their own hand. 
 Out of the religious struggle there arose, not only a 
 host of questions concerning doctrinal theology 
 which excited the intellect as much as the passions 
 of men, but also multitudinous questions concerning 
 the problem of human Ufe — its origin, its end, its 
 conduct, its relation to God and His relation to it, 
 whether our will in it was free or subject to necessity, 
 
INTRODUCTORY 25 
 
 whether its happenings mastered us or we them — 
 old questions in new shapes. Was its evil good or 
 its good evil, was life itself illusion or reality, what 
 attitude in it was the true attitude of the soul ? — A 
 hundred minor problems clashed together like a 
 swarm of atoms. As long as men had faith in the 
 authority of a Church or a Book which revealed the 
 origin and destiny of man in God's will, the divine 
 conduct and sacred laws of being, the redemption of 
 the world by the sacrifice and resurrection of Christ — 
 so long men felt that hope and peace might be 
 attained in the midst of this turmoil of thought, so 
 long they beUeved that into the darkness Ught could 
 arise and prevail. But now, at this very time, the 
 discoveries of science, and especially of geological 
 science, threw doubt on the authority of the Book, 
 and historical criticism, coming from Germany, threw 
 doubt on the Gospel History on which the authority 
 of the Church reposed. Wherever men read and 
 thought, the disturbance which already existed was 
 now deepened, and, as the years went on to the 
 sixties, it deepened more and more. 
 
 Into the midst of this whirlpool of thoughts and 
 hopes and passions, political, social, ideal, democratic, 
 but chiefly religious and theological, Clough and 
 Arnold were cast. They came up to Oxford between 
 1836 and 1840, and remained there, absorbing 
 Oxford and its battlings of thought into their very 
 marrow : and they represent the tempestuous 
 tossing of their time, especially in their early poems, 
 far more than Tennyson or Browning, seated above 
 the strife and moving on larger lines, were capable 
 of doing. 
 
ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 
 
 Of all the poets who played on England as on a harp, 
 Clough was one of the most personal. He was even 
 more personal than Arnold, who could detach himself 
 at times from himself. But Clough was never self- 
 detached in his poetry, even when he tried to be so. 
 He contemplated his soul and its sensitive and 
 bewildered workings incessantly, and saw in them 
 the image of that which was going on in the soul 
 of the younger men in England. Sometimes he is 
 intensely part of the spiritual strife he is conscious 
 of, because he is so conscious of it in himself ; some- 
 times he watches it from without, as a Press corre- 
 spondent might the battle he describes ; sometimes, 
 in the course of a single poem, he flits from the 
 inside to the outside position, or from the outside 
 to the inside ; but always it is the greater image 
 of his own soul that he watches in the struggle of 
 the whole ; always he is intimately close to th^/ 
 trouble or calm, the wondering or the anchoring 
 of the eager, restless, searching, drifting being within, 
 whom he did not wish to be himself, ^o one is more 
 intimate, more close, more true to this inward life. It 
 is this which makes him so interesting and so much a 
 favourite with those who hke him. They see a man 
 in much the same condition as they are, or have been, 
 themselves ; they feel that he has been quite true to 
 himself in it, and has done his very best to tell the 
 truth — and to read true things said truly is always 
 a keen, if sometimes a sorrowful pleasure. Moreover, 
 no obscurity, no vagueness, troubles the reader. We 
 
 26 
 
ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 27 
 
 are conscious that he has striven with all his might 
 to render the matter in question into the most lucid 
 form he can ; and few have put remote and 
 involved matters of the soul into such simple words 
 as Clough. 
 
 Again, we see, through aU the confused trouble 
 he describes, and in spite of all the wavering and 
 uncertainty, that he has one clear aim — that of get- 
 ting out of the storm, if possible, into some bright 
 light and quiet air. He does not like the confusion 
 and the questioning, and the trouble, but desires to 
 be qiiit of them, if this can be done truthfully. He 
 will not shut his eyes to any difificulty, nor retire to 
 his tent while the battle is going on, nor pretend there 
 is no confusion, for the sake of light and sweetness. 
 Truth to himself first — then he will be fit to see the 
 Truth itself, if it be possible. But it is his aim, his 
 hope, his impassioned desire, even in despair, to see 
 it at last. That Truth is, he believes ; and he sets 
 himself to work his way to it through the tangled 
 forest of Ufe. 
 
 It fortifies my soul to know 
 That, though I perish, Truth is so : 
 That, howsoe'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. 
 
 To a certain degree then, he was above scepticism. 
 He did not think it a fine condition ; the last thing 
 he imagined was that there was any reason for 
 being proud of it ; nevertheless he would not move 
 one inch out of it till his reason and conscience 
 together told him he might leave this or that ques- 
 tion behind. The only thing he knew was that 
 there was a dear solution to be found somewhere, 
 
28 FOUR POETS 
 
 sometime, in the Truth itself. Even the star of that 
 knowledge was sometimes overwhelmed in clouds. 
 He kept his head and heart however ; he was finally 
 master in his soul. He moved amid the disorganised 
 army of his thoughts and emotions, Uke a great 
 captain who sees and knows the troubled state of 
 his army, and the desperate and broken ground 
 over which it has to advance ; who visits every 
 regiment and knows the wants of each ; who has 
 entered every tent, who is aware of the fears, doubts, 
 failures and despairs of every man — ^but who is 
 determined to lead the army on, because he knows 
 that, far away, there is a safe and quiet resting- 
 place — soft grass and clear streams within a fortified 
 defence — ^where he can camp them at last, order 
 them, and restore their spirit. Sometimes he is 
 all but hopeless ; whence he has brought the armies 
 of his soul he cannot tell ; whither they are going 
 he cannot teU ; all is doubt and trouble ; but again, 
 there are hours of rest when the place whither he is 
 going and its far off hght are clear ; at times he feels 
 a proud joy in the fighting forwards ; at times nothing 
 hves but exhaustion, yet he never thinks of surrender. 
 Here is a poem which puts this life of his into clear, 
 gentle, but impassioned form. 
 
 Where lies the land to which the ship would go ? 
 Far, far ahead, is all her seamen know, 
 And where the land she travels from ? Away, 
 Far, far behind, is all that they can say. 
 
 On sunny noons upon the deck's smooth face. 
 Linked arm in arm, how pleasant here to pace ; 
 Or, o'er the stern reclining, watch below 
 The foaming wake far widening as we go. 
 
 On stormy nights when wild north-westers rave. 
 How proud a thiug to fight with wind and wave ! 
 The dripping sailor on the reeling mast 
 Exults to bear, and scorns to wish it past. 
 
ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 29 
 
 Where lies the land to which the ship would go ? 
 Fax, far ahead, is all her seamen know. 
 And where the land she travels from ? Away, 
 Far, far behind, is all that they can say. 
 
 Whence and whither our ship came, and goes, and 
 the ship of all humanity, we cannot know, though 
 we may hope to know. We live by faith, not know- 
 ledge. Sometimes the battle is illuminated and 
 rejoiced by sudden outflamings of faith ; again, it is 
 darkened by absolute despair. Faith in God rushes 
 up one day through the crust of doubt and drowns 
 every sceptical thought ; the next day, there is no 
 God. Christ is not risen ; the day after He is risen. 
 There is no rest, no clear heaven, no knowledge of 
 whence and whither — ^nothing but tossing to and fro. 
 Even when he falls back on duty, a voice in his heart 
 tells him it is not enough. He must find the unknown 
 Perfect his soul desires. 
 
 At last, he is enraged with his condition. Life is 
 sUpping away in overthinking, in this way and that 
 dividing the swift mind. The soul, while he is young, 
 is growing old in a diseased confusion. Is this Ufe, 
 he asks, this the end of our stay on earth ? 
 
 PERCHfi PENSA ? PENSANDO S'INVECCHIA. 
 
 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 ? 
 
 There are those who are not troubled by any such 
 questions, simple folk who beheve and have peace, 
 
30 FOUR POETS 
 
 and Clough praises their life and thinks them true 
 and happy ; at moments he can feel with them, but 
 not for long. There are others who find peace and 
 power to live and work by giving up all questions of 
 this kind as hampering hfe and useless for good. 
 But Clough was not of that temper, and could not 
 enter its region. He did his duty, but a tender 
 intensity of passion urged him beyond it to find 
 his rest in perfection. He was the image and the 
 expression of thousands who lived in that disturbed 
 time, when criticism and science set the battle in 
 array against the set theology. It is the image and 
 the expression, even now, after the battle has raged 
 for sixty years, of the condition of a number of 
 persons who are impassioned to find a faith by which 
 they can hve, who desire to beheve but are unable, 
 who are equally unable to find peace in unbelief. 
 Thus moving, like a Hamlet, through the strifes of 
 theology and religion, he resembles Hamlet in another 
 way. When the Prince is suddenly flung into the 
 storm of action, he takes momentarily a fierce part 
 in it, and enjoys it, till overthinking again seizes on 
 him. Clough repeats this in his life, and his poetry 
 is touched with it. 
 
 These are the causes of the pleasure with which we 
 read Clough's earher poetry — its clear image of a 
 certain type of men and women in a spiritually 
 troubled time, its close contact with and intimate 
 expression of the constantly debating soul, its truth- 
 fulness, its sanity amid scepticism, its statement of 
 aU sides of the matter in hand, its personal humanity, 
 and its sympathy with man, its self-mastery and its 
 clear aim. There is also plenty of good matter of 
 thought and of emotion worthily controlled — great 
 
ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 31 
 
 things in poetry, provided they are expressed poeti- 
 cally. But the poetry itself is not of a high quality ; 
 its level is only a third of the way towards greatness ; 
 it is imaginative, but the imagination in it never 
 soars and never is on fire, never at a white heat ; on 
 the contrary, its play is gentle, soft, touched, like an 
 autumn evening when summer has just died, with 
 tender, clear, brooding light. The greater number 
 of these poems are such as a man who lived in a 
 constant atmosphere of trouble and battle might 
 write, when, wearied with the strife, he enjoyed 
 an hour of forgetful rest after trouble, and of sheathing 
 of the sword after battle ; and I do not know of any 
 other poet of whom this may be said so truly. In 
 that he is alone — that is the distinction of these 
 early poems. And this clear, soft, brooding note 
 is just as clearly struck in the poems which have 
 nothing to do with the trouble of the soul, but with 
 matter of the affections. I quote this little idyll : 
 how grave it is, and tender ; what an evening light 
 rests upon it ; not the Hght of Italy, but of the north- 
 ern sky among the mountains. What self-control 
 breathes in it ; what a quiet heart, quiet, not by the 
 absence of passion, but by self-restraint, and by that 
 on which Clough so often dwelt and which subdued 
 his poetry so often — by the sense of the inevitable, 
 of a fate which, hemming us in on every side, imposes 
 on us its will, and ignores our struggle and our pain ; 
 
 ITE DOMUM SATURiE, VENIT HESPERUS. 
 
 The skies have sunk, and hid the upper snow, 
 (Home, Rose, and home, Provence and La Palie), 
 The rainy clouds are filing fast below. 
 And wet will be the path, and wet shall we. 
 Home, Rose, and home, Provence and La Palie. 
 
32 FOUR POETS 
 
 Ah dear, and where is he, a year agone. 
 
 Who stepped beside and cheered us on and on ? 
 
 My sweetheart wanders far away from me. 
 
 In foreign land or on a foreign sea. 
 
 Home, Rose, and home, Provence and La Palie. 
 
 The lightning zigzags shoot across the sky, 
 (Home, Rose, and home, Provence and La Palie,) 
 And through the vale the rains go sweeping by ; 
 Ah me, and when in shelter shall we be ? 
 Home, Rose, and home, Provence and La Palie. 
 
 Cold, dreary cold, the stormy winds feel they 
 O'er foreign lands and foreign seas that stray. 
 (Home, Rose, and home, Provence and La Palie.) 
 And doth he e'er, I wonder, bring to mind 
 The pleasant huts and herds he left behind ? 
 And doth he sometimes in his slumbering see 
 The feeding kine, and doth he think of me. 
 My sweetheart wandering wheresoe'er it be ? 
 Home, Rose, and home, Provence and La Palie. 
 
 The thunder bellows far from snow to snow, 
 (Home, Rose, and home, Provence and La Palie,) 
 And loud and louder roars the flood below. 
 Heigh-ho ! but soon in shelter shall we be : 
 Home, Rose, and home, Provence and La Palie. 
 
 Or shall he find before his term be sped. 
 Some comelier maid that he shall wish to wed ? 
 (Home, Rose, and home, Provence and La Palie.) 
 For weary is work, and weary day by day 
 To have your comfort miles on miles away. 
 Home, Rose, and home, Provence and La Palie. 
 
 Or may it be that I shall find my mate, 
 And he returning see himself too late ? 
 For work we must, and what we see, we see. 
 And God he knows, and what must be, must be. 
 When sweethearts wander far away from me. 
 Home, Rose, and home, Provence and La Palie. 
 
 The sky behind is brightening up anew, 
 (Home, Rose, and home, Provence and La Palie,) 
 The rain is ending, and our journey too ; 
 Heigh-ho ! aha I for here at home are we : — , 
 
 In Rose, and in, Provence and La Palie. 
 
 There may be, he thinks, inevitable partings, how- 
 ever true men and women be to one another. Life 
 moves us to an end of which we know nothing, which 
 we cannot master. 
 
ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 33 
 
 This is a favourite motive of his, as indeed it was 
 of Matthew Arnold. They must have discussed it 
 a hundred times at Oxford. We may exercise our 
 will on circumstance, but it is of no avail. We try, 
 and try again and yet again, but a httle thing, of 
 which we take no note, turns us from the goal. At 
 last we grow wearied of being bafHed, and give up 
 the thing we desired ; and then, in the hour when 
 we have released ourselves from pursuing, we wonder, 
 as we look back, whether we really cared for the 
 thing we pursued, or whether the person we pursued 
 cared for us. A series of slight pressures of circum- 
 stance on a dreamy and sensitive soul drifts the 
 will away from its desired goal, and each of the 
 drifts is accepted. Clough must have felt that this 
 was the position of a part of his soul, perhaps with 
 regard to matters of thought, certainly so far as the 
 affections were concerned ; or, if that is assuming 
 too much, he must at least have sympathized keenly 
 with this position in others. At any rate, he knew 
 aU about it. It is a frequent motive in his poems, 
 and one whole poem, the Amours de Voyage, is a 
 careful study of this matter of the heart. Clough 
 seems to take a personal delight in the slow, subtle, 
 close drawing, week Tjy week, of the wavering, 
 wandering, changeful drifting of the heart of the hero, 
 in love, into pursuit, and out of love — never one 
 moment's resolution, never an hour of grip on circum- 
 stance, never one bold effort to clench the throat of 
 Fate, Many are involved in similar circumstances, 
 and have a similar temper ; and the result in 
 the poem is the exact result of a soul in that 
 condition. And it seemed, I suppose, to Clough 
 that it would be well to paint their condition, to 
 
 4— (2278) 
 
34 FOUR POETS 
 
 show its folly, its evil and its end. " Go, little 
 book," he says — 
 
 " ' Go, and if curious friends ask of thy rearing and age, 
 Say, ' I am flitting about many years from brain 
 
 unto brain of 
 Feeble and restless youths born to inglorious days.' " 
 
 Of course, we need not believe in the inevitableness 
 of the position, nor indeed did Clough finally. When 
 he recorded it, he recorded what he had felt and 
 known in himself, but he had passed out of it. Only, 
 what he had then attained — for I think he speaks of 
 himself — " that happiness was to be found in know- 
 ledge, that faith passed, and love passed, but that 
 knowledge abided " — was not, it seems, a much better 
 position. Knowledge, to be sure, is a good thing, but 
 it is a foundation for hfe which is always shifting. 
 Its abiding is only for a short time, and its professors 
 have to relay their foundations. And in the moral 
 realm, in the conduct of Ufe, to say nothing of the 
 spiritual realm, knowledge, or what passes for know- 
 ledge, is frightfully insecure, and is attended with 
 one fatal comrade, with pride in itself. 
 
 This is always true : " Knowledge puffeth up, but 
 Love edifieth " ; and if I may judge from the bulk 
 of his poetry, Clough came to that at last. As to 
 this insistence on fate, on the inevitable in circum- 
 stance, it is not an image of true hfe. Man is not 
 master of the whole of fate, for he is not able to see 
 all, but a great deal of what he thinks inevitable is 
 in his hands. If he cannot climb over obstacles, he 
 can get round them ; that is, if he have cotirage, 
 and chose to exercise his will ; to be what he was made 
 to be — a cause in the -universe. Fate, as they call it, 
 seems herself to remove the obstruction, if we take her 
 
ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 35 
 
 gaily and boldly. If we march up to the barrier, 
 we find it to be mere cloud through which we 
 go easily to the other side. It is always wise to 
 disbelieve in obstacles. 
 
 If the gentleman in the Amours de Voyage, when 
 he found that he had just missed his love at Florence, 
 had not waited to analyse his feehngs, and then 
 arrived too late at the next town where she had been, 
 and then paused to analyse again his sensations, and 
 then was the victim of a mis-directed letter, and then 
 gave up his pursuit ; had he knit his heart into 
 any resolution, instead of saying " Whither am I 
 borne," he would easily have found the girl, and 
 found his happiness. Fate ? nine-tenths of fate are 
 in our own hands, but we let the other tenth master 
 us, and then fate fiUs the nine-tenths which was in 
 our power with her own sombre self. This is our 
 punishment, and we deserve it. 
 
 Well, it is a good thing to have the whole matter 
 laid before us with such remarkable closeness and 
 veracity as Clough has done in this poem. Its hero 
 is a characteristic type : cultivated, retiring, dishking 
 society. He has been thrown in the past, hke Clough, 
 into a world of jarring strife and noise, of mental 
 and spiritual disturbance. Sensitive, refined till he 
 thrills at a touch, angry with the circumstances 
 of hfe which call him to act — when action, which 
 forces him into contact with vulgar reahty out of 
 philosophic dreams, is as repugnant to him as it was 
 to Hamlet " a cursed spite " of fate — ^he welcomes 
 any change, any chance, which takes him out of the 
 world of strife and effort. This also was the case with 
 Clough himself, from whom the hero of the poem 
 is partly drawn. 
 
36 FOUR POETS 
 
 He was wearied with the strife within ; he sought 
 the world without ; he welcomed the chance of em- 
 ployment elsewhere. He left Oxford, and afterwards 
 went to America. There he gathered pupils around 
 him at Cambridge, and wrote for the reviews. The 
 things he wrote were not of any high quality ; they 
 have not even subtlety ; they have no distinction. 
 Uncontent still, he came back, his friends having 
 found him a place in the Education Office, to England. 
 And then, his career being decided for him, and his 
 drifting boat anchored by another hand than his own, 
 he settled down to the prim ways, and regular work, 
 and consistent routine of a government office, with its 
 pleasant hoUdays. And then, too, he married, and 
 loved his wife, his children and his home ; and 
 gathered love around him, and found that love did 
 abide and edify. His humour was set free from 
 sorrow. The questions which had so deeply per- 
 plexed him were still subjects of careful thought, 
 but they tormented him no more. He passed, we 
 are told, " from the speculative to the constructive 
 phase of thought," and would have, had he lived, 
 expressed his matured conceptions of life in a more 
 substantial way. He was happy and useful. He 
 was always oppressed with the " sadness of the world, 
 and the great difficulties of modern social life," but 
 he turned his mind steadily, in this atmosphere of 
 love and happiness, and with the deep experience 
 they gave him, to help towards this solution. I wish 
 he had had time to record in poetry his conclusions, 
 but office work is a great disintegrator of poetic 
 creation, and very little was done, and that not good 
 as poetry, before the blind Fury came with the 
 abhorred shears, and slit the thin-spun life. 
 
ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 37 
 
 He was only forty-three years old. The tales pub- 
 lished under the title of Mari magna were written 
 during the last holidays of his hfe, while he searched 
 for health, and the last of them when he was dying. 
 They are for the most part concerned with the 
 question of marriage : its true end, its trials, fitness 
 for it, and other matters. They have their own 
 interest, but their main interest, like that of all the 
 poems, is Clough's revelation of his character. He 
 was, with that sensitive nature of his, a reserved 
 msm ; but when he wrote poetry, the unconscious 
 disclosure of his soul — the piece of human nature he 
 knew best, and in which he was most interested — 
 was so fine and accurate and all the more attractive 
 because it was done unawares — that it fascinates 
 even those readers who do not think highly of the 
 poetry. 
 
 There is, however, another element in it which 
 has its own fascination. This is the ceaseless change 
 of mood within one atmosphere, like the ceaseless 
 change of cloud scenery in a day of the same kind of 
 weather from morning to evening. We never can 
 tell what is coming in a poem, what the next verse 
 will bring out, what new turn will be given to the 
 main matter. Moreover, from day to day his mood 
 varied. He might be sarcastic on Monday, depressed 
 on Tuesday, gently humorous with hfe on Wednesday, 
 despairing on Thursday, joyous with hope and strong 
 in fortitude on Friday, idyUic on Saturday, sceptical 
 on Sunday morning, religious on Sunday evening, 
 and subtle, deUcate and tender every day. This has 
 its own attraction for certain people, and those who 
 like him, like him dearly. 
 
 Then, he had an excellent, Ught-flitting, kindly 
 
38 FOUR POETS 
 
 humour. Sometimes it was broad enough, as in 
 that poem about money, written in Venice, in the 
 character of a vulgar rich man, two verses of which 
 I quote. 
 
 As I sat at the caf6, I said to myself, 
 They may talk as they please about what they call pelf. 
 They may sneer as they like about eating and drinking, 
 But help it I cannot — I cannot help thinking 
 
 How pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho. 
 
 How pleasant it is to have money. 
 
 I sit at my table en grand seigneur. 
 And when I have done, throw a crust to the poor ; 
 Not only the pleasure, one's self, of good living. 
 But also the pleasure of now and then giving. 
 So pleasant, etc. 
 
 Sometimes his humour touches hghtly and softly the 
 
 comfortable, thoughtless life, as in these two verses 
 
 on the gondola — 
 
 Afloat ; we move. Delicious ! Ah ! 
 What else is like the gondola ? 
 This level floor of liquid glass 
 Begins beneath us swift to pass. 
 It goes as though it went aione 
 By some impulsion of its own. 
 How light it moves, how softly ! Ah, 
 Were all things like the gondola ! 
 
 With no more motion than should bear 
 A freshness to the languid air ; 
 With no more efiort than exprest 
 The need and naturalness of rest. 
 Which we beneath a grateful shade. 
 Should take on peaceful pillows laid. 
 How light we move, how softly ! Ah, 
 Were life but as the gondola ! 
 
 So live, nor need to call to mind 
 Our slaving brother here behind! 
 
 Sometimes it is a humorous mock at his own want 
 of decision and force, as in that poem which wonders 
 how Columbus could ever have conceived, or, rather, 
 ever have carried out his conception of a world beyond 
 the apparent infinity of waters. " How in God's 
 
ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 39 
 
 name did Columbus get over ? " is the first line of the 
 poem, and it ends by insisting that no one who had 
 guessed that there was a world beyond the great 
 waters would ever have gone sailing on, and that he 
 himself could never have done it. " 'Tis a pure 
 madness, a pure wonder to me." The Bothie also 
 is full of quaint, observant humour. All the Oxford 
 elements of his day are there ; hked, even loved, 
 but held up to gentle, subtle ridicule, delicately 
 touched, but touched home. Oxford's young enthu- 
 siasm is pictured in the pupils, its quiet temper in 
 the tutor, its dress, its ways of talk, the beginning 
 of its sestheticism, its hereditary self-satisfaction, 
 its variety of youthful intellect, its high sense of 
 honour and morality, its manliness, its noisy athlet- 
 icism, its sense that Oxford is, on the whole, though 
 a doubt may now and then intrude, the mother, and 
 the father, too, of the intellectual universe ; and its 
 reading-parties, with a tutor, the incubator of states- 
 men, poets, philosophers, radical emigrants, and 
 conservative squires, all fitted to replenish the earth 
 and subdue it, to counsel and lead the world. 
 
 The poem, written in broken-boned hexameters, 
 belongs to his early time. It is his longest effort. 
 Four young men, with a grave tutor, form a reading 
 party in the Highlands. They go to a sporting 
 function at the Laird's, and Phihp Hewson, the radical 
 and revolutionist of the party, in whom Clough, no 
 doubt, sketched his own opinions at this time, meets 
 there a Highland girl, the daughter of a small farmer 
 near Braemar. The farmer invited Hewson to visit 
 him if he should come that way. He falls in love 
 with the girl, begs her to marry him, and sends for the 
 tutor to guarantee his character. The girl refuses at 
 
40 FOVR POETS 
 
 first ; their stations in life are different. She will 
 be, she thinks, in his way. The farmer doubts on 
 the same grounds. Will his daughter be happy ? 
 But Philip does not desire to hve in this burdened, 
 denaturalized England ; his opinions (and they may 
 represent a dream of Clough's) lead him to a freer hfe, 
 close to Mother Earth, in a new land. Will she come 
 with him, taking a plough, a tool-box, a few books, 
 pictmes, and £500 to New Zealand ? The tutor 
 thinks he could not do better ; the girl is charming, 
 intelligent, a true-hearted woman ; both are in love, 
 love based on mutual reverence ; and PhiUp is 
 a hard worker, who will put all his theories to the 
 test in an eager life in a fresh country. So they 
 marry ; and Clough, whom the social subject of 
 marriage engaged all his life, airs his views in tender 
 converse between PhiUp and Elsie, mixed, as is 
 always the case in his work, with a certain high 
 reasonableness, to which their love gives beauty. 
 
 There is a true love of Nature, especially of Scottish 
 scenery, in the poem. Clough loved the mountains. 
 Wales and the Highlands were dear to him. He 
 wandered alone, meditating, among the glens ; it 
 was his great pleasure to have his contemplation 
 broken by Nature's sudden shocks of mild surprise, 
 and to weave what he saw into what he thought. 
 His friend, Frank Palgrave, who wrote a gentle, 
 distinguished memoir of him, said that his mind was 
 " haunted like a passion " by the loveHness of poetry 
 and scenery; that by his "acceptance in the natural 
 landscape, he had inherited a double portion of the 
 spirit of Wordsworth. He loved Nature, not only 
 for its earthly sake, but for the divine and the eternal 
 interfused with it." This seems too strongly said. 
 
ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 41 
 
 but it is the judgment of a friend. Clough may have 
 loved Nature as much as Wordsworth, but he had not 
 Wordsworth's power of expressing his love. His 
 descriptions are ill-composed ; the spiritual passion 
 he felt sUghtly appears in them. In the Bothie, 
 the halting metre mangles the description ; indeed, 
 here, as in the whole of his poetry, the execution 
 lags behind the conception. Art had not thrown 
 her mantle over this man ; the language does not 
 enhance or upUft the thought ; it rather depresses 
 and lowers it ; and, though we always understand 
 him, which is a blessed gift to us, considering what we 
 suffer from others, we wish that the clearness of the 
 poem had been accompanied by a finer composition 
 and workmanship. Palgrave even goes so far as to 
 say that " one feels a doubt whether in verse he chose 
 the right vehicle, the truly natural mode of utterance." 
 If that means that Clough woiild have perhaps done 
 better to write in prose, I am sure, though it sounds 
 bold to say so, that the critic is wrong. I have been 
 surprised by the inferiority of Clough's prose to his 
 poetry. His prose does not rise beyond the level 
 of the ordinary review ; his soul is not Hving in 
 it. On the contrary, in his poetry, though it does 
 want art, and does not seek for it, there is a spirit 
 always moving — a delicate, fantastic, changing 
 spirit; a humanity, with a touch here of Ariel, and 
 there of Puck ; a subtle sound and breathing such as 
 one hears in lonely woods and knows not whence it 
 comes, and a melody of verse which his friend Matthew 
 Arnold never arrived at ; and these qualities prove, 
 as I think, that prose was not the true vehicle of his 
 thought, and that poetry was. I cannot conceive 
 that even the mocking argtmients of the Fiend in 
 
42 FOUR POETS 
 
 Dipsychus would be half as well expressed in prose. 
 There is a short prose dialogue at the end of that poem. 
 To read it and compare it with the poetry is proof 
 enough of this. As to the impassioned utterances of 
 the soul in Dipsychus struggling to hold its inmiortal 
 birthright against the tempter who cries : " Claim 
 the world ; it is at your feet " — some passages of 
 which are qtiite remarkable in spiritual, I do not 
 mean religious, poetry — they would be impossible in 
 prose. Prose could not reach their feeUng, nor the 
 delicate interlacing of their thinking. It is in describ- 
 ing the half-tones of the spirit's Hfe as well as of the 
 life of the heart, in touching with the delicate finger the 
 dim, delicate regrets and hopes and fears which flit 
 before us Hke moths in twihght, in following with soft 
 and subtle tread the fine spun threads of a web of 
 thought, in recording the to and fro questions and 
 answers of our twofold self within, and passing from 
 one to another, each different as light and darkness — 
 with distinctive power and pleasure in the play — ^it is 
 in these remote, unsailed-on seas of feeling and contem- 
 plation that Clough's best work is done, and very few 
 have done the same kind of work so weU. The best 
 of this kind is written in the region of the spirit, 
 but he loved also to write, as we have seen, of remote 
 regions of the affections, where Destiny, as it were, 
 played her part in bringing together, and in dividing, 
 lovers and friends ; and the pathetic quiet, the still 
 submission to the parting, and the silent, sorrowful 
 hope that Destiny may again unite those she has 
 divided, are as simply told as they are tenderly felt. 
 Here is a poem which uses a common occurrence — 
 one of his favourite methods — to enshrine a sad, 
 and not too common an experience in life. 
 
ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 43 
 
 QUA CURSUM VENTUS 
 
 As ships, becalmed at eve, that lay 
 With canvas drooping, side by side. 
 
 Two towers of sail at dawn of day 
 
 Are scarce long leagues apart descried ; 
 
 When fell the night, up sprung the breeze. 
 And all the darkling hours they plied, 
 
 Nor dreamt but each the self-same seas 
 By each was cleaving, side by side : 
 
 E'en so — ^but why the tale reveal 
 
 Of those, whom year by year unchanged. 
 
 Brief absence joined anew to feel. 
 
 Astounded, soul from soul estranged ? 
 
 At dead of night their sails were filled. 
 And onward each rejoicing steered — 
 
 Ah, neither blame, for neither willed, 
 Or wist, what first with dawn appeared ! 
 
 To veer, how vain ! On, onward strain. 
 Brave barks ! In light, in darkness too. 
 
 Through winds and tides one compass guides — 
 To that, and your own selves, be true. 
 
 But O blithe breeze ; and O great seas, 
 Though ne'er, that earliest parting past. 
 
 On your wide plain they join again, 
 Together lead them home at last. 
 
 One port, methought, alike they sought. 
 One purpose hold where'er they fare, — 
 
 O bounding breeze, O rushing seas ! 
 At last, at last, unite them there. 
 
 I may have quoted more of this poetry than is in 
 proportion in a short essay, but I feel that Clough 
 has been too much neglected ; and the reading of the 
 whole of this intimate history of a soul, struggling to 
 light in a time of great spiritual trouble, is hkely to 
 be of use to many who, in our changed circumstances, 
 are going through a similar kind of trouble, and 
 for similar reasons, to that which Clough endured. 
 
 The trouble did not last all his life. He attained 
 a harbour of peace, when he took life by the right 
 handles. The inward storm retreated over the 
 
44 FOUR POETS 
 
 mountains, and at eventide there was a clear quiet. 
 Had he lived, he might have made music for us out 
 of the peace as soft and clear as his earlier music 
 was sad and harsh, and yet, in the harshness, tender. 
 When he was less within his own soul — ^that ill- 
 fortuned dwelling for us — and moved in and out 
 among men, his hopes for man, his faith in God, his 
 love of natural humanity, revived, and with them 
 came restoration of the calm he had lost. Even in 
 1849, about the year he left Oxford, where self-con- 
 templation has her natural seat for those who care 
 for it, he had begun to look beyond his inner soul to 
 humanity, and to think that if he did not get on, 
 others might ; if truth did not dawn on him, it might 
 have risen on others ; that in the world there might 
 be fighters who had won the field, though he had been 
 put to flight ; that his strife might have unconsciously 
 helped them to their victory ; that the struggle, 
 though so dark and despairing, was not without its 
 good ; — and he used concerning this more hopeful 
 thought a noble image in the poem I now quote. 
 What the image suggested became true as the years of 
 the century went on. It is even truer now. We 
 have a closer, more faithful grasp on truth than 
 Clough could have ; we have a diviner and a clearer 
 hope. And what the last verse says was realised also, 
 one is glad to think, in his own life. 
 
 Say not, the struggle nought availeth. 
 The labour and the wounds are vain, 
 
 The enemy faints not, nor faileth, 
 And as things have been they remain. 
 
 If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars ; 
 
 It may be, in yon smoke concealed. 
 Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers. 
 
 And, but for you, possess the field. 
 
ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 45 
 
 For while the tired waves, vainly breaking, 
 Seem here no painful inch to gain, 
 
 Far back, through creeks and inlets making, 
 Comes silent, flooding in, the main. 
 
 And not by eastern windows only, 
 
 When daylight comes, comes in the light ; 
 
 In front, the sun climbs slow, how slowly. 
 But westward, look, the land is bright. 
 
 These happier, more hopeful words belong to 1849. 
 He died in 1860. A kinder, gentler, more delicate 
 soul has rarely lived among us. The Tennyson 
 children used to call him the Angel-child. His fan- 
 tastical spirit, his finer thought which would have 
 hked to have danced on Ufe's common way, the Ariel 
 in him, would seem to have fitted him for fairyland, 
 were it not that the sore trouble of the world, and 
 the mystery of God's way with it, were, in that 
 tempest-tossed time, too much for him. He was 
 forced to enter the battle with eyes which saw too 
 many things at the same time. The confusion 
 might have overwhelmed him, but the other side of 
 his natmre came to his help. His Ughtheartedness, 
 it is true, departed, save at happy intervals, but he 
 never allowed its absence to injure his association 
 with his friends. And then, to meet his distress, 
 he had great allies within — profound love of and 
 beUef in truthfulness, no self-deceit ever touched 
 his soul ; a set and honest manliness, a rooted scorn 
 of the temptations and the base things of the world ; 
 a great love of freedom and a deep sympathy with 
 men who strove for it ; a soul which honoured the 
 ideals and the vital causes of humanity ; a love of 
 natural hfe and a longing to see the divine in it ; 
 a fresh dehght in the sweetness and beauty of earth 
 
46 FOUR POETS 
 
 and sky and sea ; and a humility which touched 
 with its grace all whom he met. His sarcasm, which 
 grew out of the bitterness of his struggle, out of his 
 silent, passionate, tormented inner life, bit only on 
 himself, and spared the world ; and when it fell on 
 the world's follies, it was so mixed with happy humour 
 that it half-healed the wound it gave. He had his 
 martyrdom, but he was mart5Ted for us, and the 
 blood of these mart5n:s is the seed of that invisible 
 Church which rises yearly, beyond all our creeds and 
 scepticisms, into fuller weight and power. 
 
 His literary position is rather a solitary one. He 
 has no parents and no children. I seem, however, 
 to trace in some of his religious poems the poetic 
 influence of Keble. What is plain is : that he stands 
 between the absence of art in poetry which marked 
 men Hke Bailey and Alexander Smith — ^in their 
 long, uncomposed, intemperate, and self-conscious 
 poems — ^and a man like Matthew Arnold, who made 
 a study of his art, who was excessively conscious of 
 being an artist, who worked out a theory of his art 
 on the bed of which, like Procrustes, he strained out 
 or shortened his poems ; who rarely, therefore, was 
 spontaneous ; who questioned his emotion till it grew 
 cold instead of yielding to the angels of impulse whose 
 wings brushed his shoulder, and whose celestial colours 
 glimmered before his eyes. Arnold's art was too 
 conscious of itself to be great art, but he forced the 
 lesser poets of his time to study and practise their 
 art with conscientious care. In our own time we 
 have had somewhat too much of the art of poetry 
 pursued as if it were a science. In many ways it 
 has passed into the artificial ; but also since his time 
 no poet has dared to neglect it, dared to write without 
 
ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 47 
 
 care and study of what has been done in the past 
 by the great masters. But he did this more by his 
 art-criticism in prose than by art-example in his 
 poetry. He was an artist in poetry more by study 
 than by nature. 
 
 Clough wrote side by side with Arnold, but was 
 not influenced by Arnold's demand for artistic 
 excellence. He wrote what came to him with aU 
 the carelessness, but without the natural genius, of 
 Walter Scott. He did not obey, though he knew, 
 what noble art demanded. Yet, he reached a higher 
 place among the poets than his natural gift, alone, 
 would have given him. And he owed this, I think, 
 to the steady, informing, temperance-insisting culture 
 of a great university. He was a scholar and had 
 studied and loved the Greek and Roman models of 
 what high poetry is. He might — since he had no 
 poetic genius, only a gentle and charming talent — 
 have been enslaved by a scientific art, a slavery from 
 which genius saves a man, and have become one of 
 the literary prigs of poetry who prate of art but 
 cannot practise it ; who gain the whole world of a 
 chque's applause and lose their soul as poets. He 
 was saved from this by the strength of the passion 
 with which he wrote, by his truthfulness which did 
 not condescend to modify his ideas and by his love 
 of clearness. But though he had this one artistic 
 merit of clearness, he was, unhke a true artist, in- 
 different to beauty of form, to excellence, to dehcate 
 choice and arrangement of words and music. He 
 spent no trouble on his work. His poetry, therefore, 
 with aU its persom' charm, remains in the porch, 
 not in the temple, of the Muses. 
 
 That was his position, and it was just as well, for 
 
48 FOUR POETS 
 
 the sake of the minor poetry of the time, and for the 
 sake of the poets who were to follow, that Matthew 
 Arnold set himself deliberately to ask what art ought 
 to do in poetry, in what it consisted, what was its 
 right aim, and what were its fitting subjects. His 
 poetry, then, its relation to his time, what he was as 
 a poet, what ideas and what delight were in his poetry, 
 is the matter of the following essay. 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 Matthew Arnold, who is loved as a poet by so 
 many of us, and justly loved ; whom we do not read 
 continuously as we read the greater poets, but who 
 suits us so weU in certain circumstances of the inner 
 life ; who, in them, reflects and strengthens us ; 
 whose poetry, always unimitative and underived, 
 rose clear out of his own soul ; who stood alone with 
 a ill-hidden scorn for other English poetry in his eyes 
 — ^was worthy of more acceptance as a poet than he 
 received in his lifetime, and has his own distinct 
 chair in the general assembly and church of the 
 first-bom of England. 
 
 He was unfortunate in the time in which he began 
 to be a poet, if any man who has a strong will, a 
 clear aim, a joyous temper, and a bold faith, can be 
 called unfortunate at any time. Arnold had a strong 
 will, but it was not strong enough to master within 
 himself the sceptical spirit of his age (which, however 
 useful, is not poetical), or the unpoetic spirit of 
 self-analysis, which, in men of the poetic tempera- 
 ment, naturally accompanies the habit of scepticism. 
 Inquiry is a good thing, but it is prosaic. It is true 
 that Arnold grew into a clear aim, but he was at first 
 too contemptuous of the world in which he lived, 
 and too apart from it to give it that sympathy with 
 its good, which is one of the needs be of a poet's 
 power. He had courage, but it was not the courage 
 of faith or of hope ; he had Uttle firm faith or hope in 
 God, or in man, or, I may say, in himself. He had 
 insight into the evils, the dullness, the folhes, the 
 
 49 
 3— («a7«) 
 
50 FOUR POETS 
 
 decay and death of the time at which he wrote ; 
 but he had Uttle insight into its good, into the hopes 
 and ideas which were arising in its darkness, or the 
 life which was collecting itself together under its 
 decay. His temper, therefore, was not joyous, nor 
 was it in sympathy with the -temper of the whirling 
 but formative time in which he began, and continued, 
 to write poetry. I do not say he was at daggers 
 drawn with the elements of his world ; he did not 
 fight with them in the fierce way in which Byron and 
 Shelley fought with those of their day ; but he sat 
 apart from them in a silent, brooding, wrathful, 
 even contemptuous opposition. When he spoke 
 against them in poetry, it was not so much to attack 
 or vilify them, but to glorify the spirit which was the 
 enemy of their turbulence. He did not see the ele- 
 ments of life and of far-off peace in the turbulence, 
 and he never gave it sympathy. At times he could 
 not bear it, and he fled away, Uke Obermann, into the 
 sohtudes of nature to commune with his own soul. 
 It was not a wise thing to do, but he thought it 
 eminently wise ; and perhaps it was the only thing 
 he was then capable of doing. In later Ufe he modi- 
 fied his view and felt that he had been too quick to 
 condemn his world. But he was too proud to say 
 that he had then been too bhnd to be able to divide 
 the good from the evil in the turmoil, or that he had 
 not then seen its good. 
 
 His earher poetry then — ^since he and his world 
 were so inharmonious — was, with a few exceptions, 
 too much a poetry of opposition. He could not 
 sufficiently disentangle himself from the pressure of 
 his age, and he hated that pressui-e. Under it his 
 poetry contended, mourned, and analyzed. And it 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 51 
 
 suffered, as poetry, from this perturbing element. 
 Had he possessed the animation, like that of birds 
 in spring, which marks the great poets, he wotJd have 
 neutralized this element. But he had it not ; he 
 could not hft himself into that bright, magnanimous 
 air, in whose clearness a poet sees, and is able to love 
 and help, the good as well as the evil, the joy as well 
 as the trouble, of humanity. 
 
 Arnold sat by the tomb where he thought the true 
 life of England lay dead, and mourned over its 
 disappointed hopes. He did not hear the angel of 
 the nation say, " What is best in England has arisen, 
 and has gone before you into Galilee." It was not 
 his to understand — " Let the dead past bury his 
 own dead." Only at intervals the clouds lifted for 
 him, and he saw through mist the flush of dawn ; 
 but he had not heart enough to follow that gleam. 
 He had settled down in these early days into a stoic 
 sadness, as yet unilluminated by humour. It had 
 a certain moral force, a grim tenacity of duty, a stern 
 resolution to fight on, were the heavens themselves 
 to fall ; and this makes his poetry dear and useful 
 to men and women even now who may still be in his 
 condition. But the condition did not develop his 
 art, as it might have been developed in a happier 
 world. Absence of joy limited, it even maimed, 
 his creative energy. It repressed in him the powers 
 of faith and hope. And the want of these powers, 
 without which creativeness is weak, prevented him 
 aU his life long from being as complete or as great a 
 poet as either Tennyson or Browning, 
 
 Without the fuU energy of these powers, his poetry 
 suffers in melody, in charm, in unconsciousness, in 
 natural exquisiteness of expression (there is some 
 
52 FOUR POETS 
 
 art-exquisitiveness of expression), in imaginative 
 ardour, except when he was writing mournfully. In 
 the Elegy, where his genius was quite at ease, he is 
 excellent. Nothing better has been done in that way 
 for two centuries than the Scholar Gipsy and Thyrsis. 
 Indeed, all his best verse has this elegiac note, or 
 nearly all. I should like, among a few others, to 
 except the Strayed Reveller, into the inconsequence 
 of whose enchanted intoxication I wish he had oftener 
 wandered. 
 
 It was a pity, then, he was so unfortunate in the 
 time at which he began and continued to write, for 
 had he not been burdened with its fierce questionings 
 and turmoil, had he found himself in an age of sweet- 
 ness and light, when life was keen and keen for high 
 things, he had been a greater poet. He might then 
 have spoken to the universal in man, " seen life 
 steadily and seen it whole," as he said of Sophocles. 
 Steadily he did see it, but not as a whole. That he 
 could not do. He is the poet of a backwater, of a 
 harbour, of a retired garden, not of the full, swift 
 river, not of the open sea, not of the king's highway. 
 He is so far like Hamlet that he was not able to grasp 
 the nettle of the world so that it should not sting. 
 The sad, philosophic, poetic imagination of Hamlet 
 was also his, but he had more moral power, a closer 
 grasp on realities, than Hamlet. And he had this 
 power because he clasped stoicism — ^which Hamlet 
 could not do — ^to his breast. 
 
 The power of stoicism lies in the appeal it makes 
 to the moral endurance of the soul in resolute, 
 un-violent resistance to the tyranny of outward and 
 inward evil. It bids us claim our moral individuaUty 
 as the conqueror of fate and of the outward world. 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 53 
 
 The claim is high, and uplifts the character of the 
 claimer. " The fates are hard on me," the stoic 
 says, " but they shall not subdue my soul. Things 
 are dark as night, but there shall be light within. 
 Pain is here, but it does not touch my real self. It 
 is not I that suffer, but the shell of me. I do not 
 understand why the world is so wrong and so troubled, 
 but one thing I do understand, that I need not be 
 wrong or troubled, and that I will not be. The furies 
 of the gods may hunt me down, but my soul remains 
 imconquered, even by the gods." 
 
 There is no doubt of the power which is hid in that 
 position, and it has transferred itself to a great deal 
 of Arnold's poetry. It makes his language resonant, 
 clear ; his thought, his matter, weighty ; and it 
 brings into his poetry a moral passion which at times 
 reaches a lofty exaltation. Moreover, its spirit 
 proceeds outward from the poetry, as should be 
 the case with any fine art work, into the lives of a 
 number of men and women who are battling with 
 fate, who do not understand why things are so 
 awry, who find no brightness in Ufe, but whose soul 
 passionately answers the stoic's appeal to keep 
 themselves, in spite of fate, unsubdued in right, clear 
 in their own thought, and unconquered by evil. 
 " I am I," they say, " and everything else is indiffer- 
 ent." It is to that class of men and women that 
 Matthew Arnold speaks with power, and wiU continue 
 to speak, it may be, for centuries to come. 
 
 But this power has the weakness which follows on 
 pride. It thicks itself powerful, and in the thought 
 loses some of its strength. If it' belong to an 
 artist, it makes him not only intrude it into his art, 
 but also over-conscious of the artist-elements in his 
 
54 FOUR POETS 
 
 nature. Arnold shared more than was fitting in 
 this weakness, and it lowers the excellence of many 
 of his poems. It helps to place him below the 
 poets who are unconscious, in the rush of their 
 creation, of themselves ; who, lost in the glory and 
 grief of what they see, break into song without know- 
 ing why or how they sing ; whose work is prideless, 
 for they behold face to face the infinities of that they 
 try to express ; who leave any work they have 
 finished behind them without considering it, and pass 
 on, unconcerned, to new things. Rarely, if ever, 
 does Arnold's poetry make that impression upon us. 
 It has too much pride in itself ; it is too self-conscious 
 of its artistic effort, and this lowers its imaginative 
 power ; and too conscious of its being moral and 
 teaching moraUty, and this lowers its influence as art. 
 Then, again, the stoic position which gave him 
 the power of which I have spoken, made him weak, 
 on another side, as a poet. It often isolated him 
 too much from the mass of men, very few of whom 
 are stoics either in philosophy or practice. A certain 
 touch of contempt for ordinary humanity entered 
 into his work. His appeal was so far to the few, not 
 to the many ; to a class, not to the whole ; to the 
 self-centred, not to those who lose their self in love. 
 In this way also, he became too self-involved, and, 
 troubled with the restlessness and noise of man, took 
 refuge in the solitudes of his own heart. Owing to 
 this self-involvemeiit — ^which, though it was modified 
 towards the end of his poetic life, was an integral part 
 of his nature — he was very rarely, if ever, swept by 
 any high passion out of himself altogether. He 
 could not feel, tiU later in life, the greater waves of 
 human emotion, save once perhaps with regard to 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 55 
 
 England's vast imperial toil, breaking upon his heart. 
 Into the infinite hopes, the infinite possibilities of 
 man — into that country where the greater poets 
 hve, his early poetry entered only for moments, and 
 then his sceptical self-consciousness recalled him 
 from it, and bade him consider how little the history 
 of his own soul supported the far-off hopes for man 
 into which he had been momentarily hurried by 
 poetic imagination. The highest, the most inspiring 
 passion which can thrill a poet was therefore not 
 his in the first years of his poetry. This self-involve- 
 ment and this isolation from the universal hope of 
 man are the great weakness inherent in stoicism, and 
 when they belong to an artist, they enfeeble his art. 
 Only by drinking incessantly at the deep wells of com- 
 mon humanity does a poet win the power to rejoice in 
 his creative work, and the love which enables him to 
 continue it till old age. Arnold, in the end, even 
 though he did gain much self -forgetful sympathy with 
 humanity, found his poetic power fail. His vein was 
 exhausted. He took to prose. But the greater 
 men, not isolated from but intimately mixed with all 
 men, if not in life, yet by the imagination of love ; 
 not self-involved but self-forgetful— love the whole 
 movement of mankind, even the noise and restless- 
 ness of it, appeal to and win the universal love they 
 give, are always impassioned by the divinity which 
 they see everywhere in man, think nothing common 
 or unclean, and hve, eagerly creating to the close. 
 However, there is something to say on the other 
 side. Arnold was too human to be the finished 
 stoic. The stoic demand for duty, for obedience to 
 the eternal laws of right, was always with him. It 
 often fills his poetry with an austere beauty. It 
 
56 FOUR POETS 
 
 adds much of its dignity, even to poems where, like 
 a serpent round the witch it loves, he winds round 
 and round himself, and saves them from failure. So 
 far he was pure stoic. 
 
 But the stoic demand of indifference to pain and 
 trouble, of the independence of the soul of all the 
 fates of men — Arnold could not fulfil. His stoicism 
 broke down into sadness for himself and for the world. 
 The pain was too great not to cry out, not to afflict 
 the soul. It sought expression, and it foxmd it in 
 his poetry. 
 
 The stoic might think this a weakness, unworthy 
 of a philosopher. But in a poet, this deep emotion 
 of sadness, felt in himself and for himself, but felt 
 far more for the labouring and laden world, is not 
 a weakness but a strength, A poet may have a 
 philosophy, but the proper mistress of his house is 
 poetry. If his philosophy seek to be mistress, poetry 
 shakes her celestial pinions, and flies away. But 
 when Arnold, violating his stoicism, expressed his 
 pain with cries, his philosophic weakness became 
 poetic strength. He came back to high natural 
 art and feeling ; he did the natural thing ; and, 
 indeed, it is one of the paradoxes of life, the truth of 
 which the stoic forgets or does not know, that till 
 pain is expressed, it cannot be fully conquered. 
 The stoic who hides it in his breast or pretends that 
 it does not exist, never conquers it or its evil. But 
 the poet, expressing pain as well as pleasure, becomes 
 at one with all who feel pain. Conscious then of 
 his brotherhood with man, and far more conscious 
 of it than by sympathy only with man's pleasure, 
 strength and passion flow into his poetry. Men 
 feel themselves expressed, sympathized with, and 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 57 
 
 empowered, by the noble representation of their 
 trouble, and send back to the poet their gratitude 
 and sympathy, till he, conscious of their affection, is 
 himself uplifted and inspired. Then his poetic 
 power, fed by human love, increases. A fuller emo- 
 tion, a wider thought, a knowledge of life deepened 
 by imagination into something far more true than 
 any intellectual philosophy of life can give, — ^fill 
 his verse with the unsought for, revealing phrases, 
 which seem to express, with strange simplicity, the 
 primary thoughts of Being, to speak from the secret 
 place where the laws of the universe abide. 
 
 The stoic tends to be un-human, but is contin- 
 ually like Arnold self -humanized ; and the break- 
 down of Arnold's stoicism into sadness for the world, 
 and his expression of it, was a progress in him, 
 not a retrogression. The higher levels of song, 
 where joy lives because of the presence of faith 
 and hope, he did not reach ; but this mingling in his 
 poetry of stoicism and of the sad crying which denies 
 stoicism, of the spirit which isolates itself from the 
 crowd of men in lonely endurance and the spirit 
 which breaks down from that position into sympathy 
 with men, gives to Arnold's poetry a strange passion, 
 a stimulating inconsistency, an element of attractive 
 surprise — ^the atmosphere changing from poem to 
 poem and within the same poem — and a solitary 
 distinction. No other poet is built on the same lines. 
 Few have been so self-centred, and none pleases 
 us more whenever we are in that mood in which, 
 dividing ourselves from all mankind, we choose 
 to cherish our own personality, to sit in its silent 
 chambers, to reject, the Not-me, to believe that in 
 our own being is the imiverse, that nothing exists 
 
58 FOUR POETS 
 
 beyond ourselves. To that strange mood, which 
 may have its good if it last a short time, but which 
 has certainly its own naughtiness, Arnold speaks, 
 and has revealed its thoughts in a poetry full of 
 subtle and impassioned charm. It came out of the 
 depths of his nature ; but he could not always remain 
 in these soUtudes of the soul. He fled from them 
 into sympathy with the sorrow and confusion of 
 men ; and the mingling of these two opposites — 
 and they are frequently mingled, even in single 
 poems — gives this uncommon note of distinction to 
 his poetry ; a human cry, shrill and piercing as of a 
 soul divided, beating between two moods, and angry 
 with the indecision. The instrument on which he 
 plays is like a viohn played by a regretful artist in 
 a lonely room. 
 
 These are considerations concerning his poetry 
 which arise out of his character. There are others 
 which arise from the condition of the world when he 
 began to write. It was a time, (and I repeat what I 
 have already said in writing of Clough.) when the 
 old foundations of the Christian faith were no longer 
 accepted without inquiry. They were dug down to, 
 exposed to the dry hght of science, and to a searching 
 investigation. The criticism of German scholars had 
 thrown the gravest doubt on the history of the Gospels ; 
 scientific discoveries and historical criticism had in- 
 vaded the Old Testament ; and both had begun to 
 shatter that behef in the inspiration of the Bible on 
 which so much of English reUgion reposed in peace. 
 The stormy waves these investigations awakened had 
 reached Oxford when Arnold and Clough were students, 
 and they were first disturbed, then dismayed, and 
 finally thrown into a scepticism which profoundly 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 59 
 
 troubled them. Their skies were darkened ; the old 
 stars had gone out in the heavens, and no new stars 
 had arisen. They staggered bUndly on, and at last fell 
 back on their own souls alone, on the unchallengeable 
 sense of right they felt therein, on the imperative of 
 duty and on resolution to obey it. Nothing else was 
 left. But much more had been ; and it was with bitter 
 and ineffable regret that they looked back on the 
 days when they were at peace, when the sim shone 
 upon their way. With what intimate naivetd Clough 
 expressed this trouble, and what cure he found for 
 it, has been already considered. With Clough it 
 was extremely personal. Arnold generalized it far 
 more ; he extended its results all over life ; it drove 
 him in after days, not now, to consider world-wide 
 questions, the fates and fortunes of the whole race. 
 Fifteen years after his earUest book of poetry he 
 emerged from the trouble I have described. His 
 long strife ended in a quiet force which looked steadily 
 on the problems of Ufe. He looked with eyes, purged 
 from personal consideration, at the pressure of every 
 kind of trouble on the human family, and asked 
 why it was and to what end. And he never let 
 the question go tiU he found his solution for it, and 
 gave it to the world in hope that it might help and 
 comfort others. In the process, he reconstituted, 
 for himself, the theology of his youth. And then, 
 feeling, as he did, that in faith in God, in worship, 
 in a right and graceful spirit of love, and in righteous- 
 ness of conduct, was the true foundation of Ufe, 
 he devoted himself, in prose, to clear away from 
 reUgion those forms of it which violated intellec- 
 tual or moral truth, and to establish what was eternal 
 in it, beyond controversy, and fitted for God to be, 
 
60 FOUR POETS 
 
 and for man to believe and love. With that, into 
 which he passed from poetry, we have nothing to do 
 here. What we are in contact with now is his early 
 religious trouble, and its distress breathes through all 
 his youthful poetry. 
 
 Again — and this belongs to his personal feeling 
 against mob turbulence and chattering theories — 
 Oxford, when he was there, was filled with the noise 
 of controversy between the High Churchmen and 
 their opponents. Both were intolerant one of 
 another, and the battle raged with confused tumult, 
 not only between these two hot-headed parties, but 
 also between both of them united against the Neolo- 
 gians, as the critical school was then called. Clough, 
 greatly disturbed by the loss of his faith, was not 
 much disturbed by the noise of the contest in which 
 he lost it. He rather liked the smoke and the roar of 
 fighting ; the revolutionary atmosphere he breathed 
 with pleasure. But Arnold was of another temper. He 
 hated noise, quarrel, confusion ; he loved tranquillity, 
 tolerance, clearness, plainness, moderation, ordered 
 thought, and passions brought under control, 
 especially those passions which belong to theological 
 contests of the intellect. He had much ado to keep 
 down his natural abhorrence of this tumultuous 
 shouting about things which even then seemed to him 
 to have nothing to do with the weightier matters of 
 the Law or the Gospel. " It is a sorrowful time," 
 he might have said, " to live in ; the outward noise 
 about things indifferent doubles my inward trouble." 
 
 Then again, the year before he published his first 
 volume of poems, the whole continent was disquieted, 
 and even England shared in that disquiet. France, 
 Italy, Germany, Austria broke into revolution ; 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 61 
 
 the Chartist movement threatened revolution in 
 England. The accredited order which in 1815 had 
 restored so many of the evils the French Revolution 
 had shaken, was again (to leave out 1830) broken 
 into by popular fury, and with a confusion of thought 
 and an ignorance of what was to replace the old, 
 which jarred on ever5^hing which Arnold thought 
 wise and practical. Clough hked it; he wrote 
 rejoicingly from Paris, with whose revolution he 
 lived ; he stayed at Rome when the people set up a 
 repubhc and fought the French. But Arnold had 
 no belief in the popular cries, and he hated the dis- 
 turbance and the noise. Out of these, he thought, 
 no salvation comes. And weariness of the turmoil 
 fell upon him, and desire that he had been born at 
 another and a quieter time. By this also his personal 
 sadness was deepened, and it drove him into a longing 
 for sohtude and calm outside the tortured world. 
 
 We can trace these impressions all through his first 
 three volumes of poems ; and we can read what wa;s 
 his temper with regard to revolutionary Europe in 
 the two sonnets addressed to Clough, entitled To a 
 Republican Friend. The first says how far he agrees 
 with his friend, and it would not have been thought 
 worth much by the enthusiasm of Clough. The 
 second says where he parts from his friend ; and it is 
 full of his suppressed anger with, and disbelief in, 
 the revolutionary movement. More impressive than 
 these, more personal, expressing that which was 
 deepest in him at this time, that which he most 
 desired — ^and more important for our knowledge 
 of him, because he chose it as a preface to his third 
 volume, published three years after his first — ^is the 
 sonnet with which the volume of 1849 opens — 
 
62 FOUR POETS 
 
 One lesson. Nature, let me learn of thee. 
 One lesson which in every wind is blown. 
 One lesson of two duties kept at one. 
 Though the loud world proclaim their enmity — 
 Of toil unsevered from tranquillity 1 
 
 To work with Nature's constancy, but without 
 turbulent passion, hke her sleepless ministers 
 " Their glorious tasks in silence perfecting," to stand 
 apart from fierce explosions like the Revolution, 
 was his desire ; but he forgot that Nature sometimes 
 works by explosions, relieving by them her over- 
 burdened breast, and that revolutions are in a strict 
 analogy with her volcanic outbursts. Yet Arnold 
 would have disliked Nature's catastrophes and 
 blamed her for them. His work was to be, he hoped, 
 done with patience, trusting his own soul, choosing 
 one clear aim, and confident that in following it 
 sincerely he would best assist the world. It was 
 for that he praised the Duke of WeUington. He had 
 a vision, Arnold thought, of the general law, saw 
 what he could and could not do, and followed the 
 one thing he saw. That made, among all the fret 
 and foam of Europe acting without sight of a clear 
 goal, the splendour of his place in history. But 
 to fulfil this resolve clearness of vision was the great 
 need, that clearness which all his life was Arnold's 
 deep desire. In a noble sonnet. To a Friend, he asked 
 who are they who support his mind in these bad 
 days ? They are Homer, whose clear soul, though 
 his eyes were blind, saw man and hfe so weU ; and, 
 for the inner strength of the soul, Epictetus, whose 
 friendship he had lately won ; and, for the just and 
 temperate view of hfe, Sophocles — 
 
 Whose even-balanced soul, 
 From first youth tested up to extreme old age. 
 Business could not make dull, nor passion wild ; 
 Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole : 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 63 
 
 All Greeks ; for Arnold bent his poetic effort to that 
 Hellenic spirit which, by temperance and the clear- 
 ness ensuing from it, and by the desire to make the 
 world better, made the artist-work of the Greeks so 
 nearly perfect. 
 
 But to return to the sonnet on Nature (Quiet 
 Work). It is plain that its view of Nature is quite 
 different from that of the poets who preceded Arnold. 
 It contains that scientific conception of Nature, 
 already far more than half embodied, which declared 
 that all its developments could be correlated under 
 one energy and were forms of that energy, ourselves 
 included. Belief in this theory made a mighty change 
 in aU poetry written by men who were sufficiently 
 educated to realize it, and it influenced a good deal of 
 Arnold's poetry from the beginning to the end. Not 
 altogether ; he sUpt out of the theory where it 
 pleased him. At one point, even now, (and this 
 is illustrated in another sonnet — In Harmony with 
 Nature) he rebelled against it, at the point where it 
 subjected man, as only a part of Nature, to its law. 
 He was willing to be taught by the course of Nature. 
 He was not willing to be mingled up with her. 
 
 Know, man hath all that Nature hath, but more. 
 And ia that more lie all his hopes of good. 
 
 We are different from her ; we move on in a straight 
 line, he might have said. Nature goes round and 
 round. " We begin," he did say, " where Nature 
 ends " ; and he recurs elsewhere to the same thought. 
 
 These are some of the cries of his first poems, 
 when he was but twenty-seven. It is plain, then, 
 that the racking trouble of man's disobedience to 
 law, his necessary restlessness and the confused noise 
 
64 FOUR POETS 
 
 that attended it — ^in contrast with Nature's obedience, 
 tranquillity and steady toil — ^were heavily pressed on 
 Arnold by the circumstances of his time. He found 
 no solution of the problem now, none in reasoning, 
 none in warring religions and philosophies. " I will 
 listen no more to them," he thought ; " I will fall 
 back on my own soul ; know the worst and endure 
 it austerely, holding fast to the power of righteousness 
 within. Of that I may be sure. The will is free, 
 the seeds of Godlike power are in us. Within, we 
 may be what we will." 
 
 This did not solve the question, but it gave a noble 
 basis for life, and the worry of the question might be 
 laid by. What we can, we will secure. Then wait, 
 and as the world goes on the question may solve itself. 
 At least, if the solution come, those who wait quietly 
 in patient righteousness obeying law, will be capable 
 of seeing it. Even if we are mixed up with a blind 
 Nature, with matter alone, have ourselves no divine 
 origin, and no end beyond the elements, there is that 
 in us which is ready for either fate, and which is above 
 both, and can choose how to meet the one or the other. 
 There is a remarkable poem — In Utrumque Paratus — 
 which, on a higher poetic level than most of the other 
 poems in this first volume, puts this view before us. 
 It begins by supposing that the universe has its 
 course in God's thoughts — 
 
 If in the silent mind of One all pure. 
 
 At first imagined lay 
 The sacred world ; and by procession sure 
 From those still deeps, in form and colour drest, 
 Seasons alternating, and night and day. 
 The long-mused thought to north, south, east and west 
 
 Took then its all-seen way. 
 
 If this be true, and thou, man, awaking to the con- 
 sciousness that the world of Nature is thus caused 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 65 
 
 of God, wishest to know the whole of life and thine 
 own life in it, oh, beware. Only by pure and solitary 
 thought thou shalt attain, if thou canst attain ; and 
 the search will sever thee from the pleasant human 
 world into a painful solitude. The verse in which 
 Arnold tells this is so prophetic in its excellence of 
 his best poetry, so full of his distinctive note, that I 
 quote it — 
 
 Thin, thin the pleasant human noises grow ; 
 
 And faint the city gleams ; 
 Rare the lone pastoral huts — marvel not thou ! 
 The solemn peaks but to the stars are known. 
 But to the stars, and the cold lunar beams ; 
 Alone the sun arises, and alone 
 
 Spring the great streams. 
 
 But if this be "not true, and Nature has never 
 known a divine birth, and thou, man, alone wakest 
 to consciousness of a great difference between thyself 
 and Nature — thou, the last and radiant birth of 
 earth's obscure working — oh, beware of pride. Think 
 that thou too only seemest ; art, like the rest, a dream. 
 Yet, since thou canst think that, since thou mayst 
 control thy pride, thou standest clear of Nature. 
 
 So, once he saw the problem of human life. Then, 
 tossed as he was from thought to thought in those 
 days when evil things held sway, he recurred, in 
 another sphere of thought, to his view of the neces- 
 sity for the steady pursuit of one aim, clearly 
 conceived in the soul. Here, he mingled it up 
 with one of the common angers of men who suffer 
 and know no reason for their pain — an anger which 
 no doubt, had stirred in him at intervals. He took 
 the story of Mycerinus, and treated it with a brief 
 nobility of imaginative and sympathetic thought 
 which was rare in so young a poet. The king's 
 
 6— {S278I 
 
66 FOUR POETS 
 
 father had been unjust, cruel, a wicked king. He had 
 lived long and happily. The son had believed in 
 justice, kindness, good government, and practised 
 them ; yet the gods condemned him to die in six 
 years. He had governed himself, sacrificed himself, 
 and this was his reward for giving up the joy of life. 
 " Then have I cleansed my heart in vain." There is 
 then no justice, no morality in the gods. Or they 
 are themselves slaves of a necessity beyond them, or 
 careless, in their leisured pleasure, of mankind. I 
 scorn them ; and, men of Egypt, if you wish to 
 please them, do wrong, indulge in injustice, be like 
 my father, then they wiU give you length of days. 
 For me, I will give my six years to revel, to youthful 
 joys, and so farewell. 
 
 Nor does Arnold, in that passing mood, altogether 
 blame him. At least, the king knew his aim and 
 followed it. It is curious to read the lines in which 
 Arnold expresses this. He would not have approved 
 the life, but he approved — since the king had 
 deliberately chosen that life — ^the firmness cind clear- 
 ness of his choice, the settled purpose of his soul — 
 
 he, within, 
 Took measure of his soul, and knew its strength. 
 And by that silent knowledge, day by day, 
 Was calmed, ennobled, comforted, sustained. 
 
 But this was the only point at which he approved 
 the king's life of pleasure. In The New Sirens, which 
 fine as it is in parts is feeble as a whole, he seems 
 to express, with obscure length, the gloom, satiety, 
 and sorrow of the soul in which mere pleasure ends, 
 the reckless following of impulse after impulse. 
 
 Another poem of fair higher quality, Ccdled The 
 Voice, dwells, in the two last verses, on the same 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 67 
 
 thought with a noble brevity and imagination. It 
 
 records an hour when the ancient cry of youth to fulfil 
 
 all joy came to him out of a forgotten time, came to 
 
 him when his heart had been long sobered by dreary 
 
 and doubtful thought, by heavy circumstance. 
 
 Sweet and far, in strange contrast with his present 
 
 trouble, like a wanderer from the world's extremity, 
 
 it asked again to be listened to. And his answer is 
 
 given in lovely poetry, in passionate revelation of 
 
 himself — 
 
 In vain, all, all in vain. 
 
 They beat upon my ear again. 
 
 Those melancholy tones so sweet and still. 
 
 Those lute-like tones which in far distant years. 
 
 Did steal into mine ear — 
 Blew such a thrilling summons to my will. 
 
 Yet could not shake it ; 
 Made my tost heart its very life-blood spill,* 
 
 Yet could not break it. 
 
 In these many ways he turiled the problem of life. 
 One would think that among them there would be, 
 brought up as he had been, a cry for freedom and 
 salvation, an appeal to the Power who is with us in 
 the night. Once at least, and suddenly as it seems, 
 Arnold, in the mouth of Stagirius, a young monk 
 to whom St. Chrysostom addressed three books, 
 made this cry. We cannot miss the personal passion 
 in these verses, nor fail to feel that they are the out- 
 burst of long-endured distress which having tried 
 many ways of escape in vain, fled at last to the 
 fatherhood of God. " I do not know Thee clearly," 
 they seem to say, " but there is that within me which 
 bids me take my chance with Thee." 
 
 Finally, to close the eventful history of this volume, 
 
 • Note. — In the first edition this line is better said — 
 Drained all the life my full heart had to spill. 
 
68 FOUR POETS 
 
 there is the last poem, entitled Resignation. It 
 represents that to which the struggle had brought 
 him, what he thought the wisest manner of life, the 
 groove in which he desired to move onwards. 
 
 He wished it, but in vain. But it never ceased to 
 be one of the moods of Ufe in which he desired to 
 hve at intervals. Yet it was well that it could 
 not be a continuous desire. Resignation is fit- 
 ting for age, for the man who has fought in the 
 battles of the world for fifty years, but not well for 
 the young who go forth to battle. And, in spite of 
 Arnold's wish for patient peace, he had the just 
 spirit of impatience with the evil ideas which were 
 oppressing the world in which he lived. When he 
 became a man, he was always a fighter. Yet those 
 who fight the most, most long at times for the rest of 
 resignation. And this poem is his record of that 
 desire, even in youth, as many other poems record 
 its recurrence in the years that were to come. 
 
 The subject is worthy of poetry, and Arnold has 
 made it worthier by the fine composition of the poem, 
 and especially by the imaginative fusion in it of 
 the mental and natural scenery. The illustrations, 
 the episode of the gipsies, the phantom grace of 
 Fausta, develop and enhance the main thought. 
 The verse is flowing, and the scenery of that walk 
 between Wythburn and Rosthwaite which many 
 know so well is drawn with his own distinctive touch 
 and feeling. We see, as we read, that it made on him 
 a new impression on this day. But we also feel, 
 that in and through the new impression, the old- 
 impression of the years before is mingled, bringing 
 with it another tenderness and Ught, — and this is a 
 dehghtful piece of fine art. 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 69 
 
 Ten years before, as a boy of seventeen, he had 
 taken the same walk with Fausta. What ten years 
 had done we read in these verses ; and the many 
 changes and wanderings of his soul during this decade 
 of life are well represented by the windings in the 
 poem of various thoughts within the unity of its 
 main thought. The hnes I quote are full of the soul 
 of Arnold at twenty-seven. Their quiet, self-con- 
 troDed, and solitary note, with their love of peace 
 and obedience, and of union not with quarrelsome 
 peirticulars but with the still movement of the general 
 life to an ordered and luminous end, is no unfitting 
 close to the struggle I have endeavoured to describe. 
 " Blame not," he cries, " Fausta, the man who has 
 seen into life, and who has attained tranquillity, but 
 for thyself "— 
 
 Rather thyself for some aim pray 
 
 Nobler than this, to fill the day ; 
 
 Rather that heart, which burns in thee, 
 
 Ask, not to amuse, but to set free ; 
 
 Be passionate hopes not ill resign'd 
 
 For quiet, and a fearless mind. 
 
 And though fate grudge to thee and me 
 
 The poet's rapt security. 
 
 Yet they, believe me, who await 
 
 No gifts from chance, have conquer'd fate. 
 
 They, winning room to see and hear, 
 
 And to men's business not too near. 
 
 Through clouds of individual strife 
 
 Draw homeward to the general life. 
 
 Like leaves by suns not yet uncnrl'd ; 
 
 To the wise, foolish ; to the world, 
 
 Weak ; — yet not weak, I might reply. 
 
 Not foolish, Fausta, in His eye, 
 
 To whom each moment in its race. 
 
 Crowd as we will its neutral space. 
 
 Is but a quiet watershed 
 
 Whence, equally, the seas of life and death are fed. 
 
 The second volume of Matthew Arnold's poems was 
 published in 1852, and its title was Empedocles on 
 
70 FOUR POETS 
 
 Mtna, and other Poems, by A. Empedocles, a Greek 
 of Sicily, one of the last of the religious philosophers, 
 is supposed by Arnold — ^in a preface to an after- 
 edition of the poem — " to have lived on into a time 
 when the habits of Greek thought and feeling had 
 begun to change, character to dwindle, the influence 
 of the sophists to prevail. Into the feelings of a man 
 so situated there entered much we are accustomed 
 to consider as exclusively modern : the calm, the 
 cheerfulness, the disinterested objectivity of the 
 genius of the earlier Greek have disappeared ; the 
 dialogue of the mind with itself has commenced ; 
 modern problems have presented themselves ; 
 we hear already the doubts, we witness the 
 discouragement of Hamlet and of Faust." 
 
 This is a sufficient description of the poem, and 
 suggests its motive. It enabled Arnold to express, 
 on the lips of Empedocles, the problems which con- 
 .fronted him in his own time, to tell with a certain 
 /passion how he felt concerning them, to relieve his 
 I heart by giving words to the profound discourage- 
 ment and confusion into which they put his soul, 
 and to suggest what means of escape from their 
 tyranny occurred to him. Empedocles escapes by 
 flinging himself into the crater of ^Etna. Had Arnold 
 been a Greek he might, perhaps, have shufiied off 
 his trouble in the same easy fashion. When a man 
 is brave, is sick of mankind and recognises no duty 
 to God, suicide is almost too facile a business. 
 
 The representation of a man beset by such feelings 
 and pains, if he is stern enough with himself to 
 represent them truly, cannot be without interest, 
 or even without passion ; but their representation, if 
 too elaborate, becomes wearisome. And Empedocles 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 71 
 
 goes over his troubles at such a severe length that 
 it is fortunate he is alone save with Pausanias, 
 who is only a shadow. Callicles would have tired 
 of him. Moreover, he sings them in so lumbering a 
 metre that we begin to conjecture that the entangled 
 melancholy of his mind had unconsciously influenced 
 his ear, and dulled it out of tune. These were the 
 real reasons, I think, why the poem displeased its 
 writer. But they were not the reasons he gave for 
 leaving it out in the volume issued in 1853, and 
 issued, for the first time, under his own name. He 
 left it out, he said, because, though the representation 
 was interesting, it did not inspirit and rejoice the 
 reader, and poetry was bound not only to add to the 
 knowledge of men, but also to add to their happiness. 
 
 " The Muses," said Hesiod, " were born to be a for- 
 getfulness of evils, and a truce from cares." This 
 happiness may be felt in the representation of the 
 most tragic, even tortured, situations, provided 
 they are full of the permanent, noble and primary 
 passions of human nature, passing onwards into 
 magnanimous action, whether of endurance of, or of 
 resistance to, human or divine oppression — into 
 action which awakens high passion and action in 
 others. Such action, represented in poetic form, 
 kindles high pleasure in us, however painful the 
 situation. 
 
 In Empedocles there is no such action. A " con- 
 tinuous state of mental distress was prolonged in it " ; 
 the atmosphere was morbid, £md the unhappiness 
 monotonous. It was not then a fit subject of 
 poetry and Arnold excluded the poem from his 
 next book. 
 
 This is a very grand reason for so simple a 
 
72 FOUR POETS 
 
 matter as the poem of Empedocles on Mtna, and 
 indeed it might lay itself open to some slight ridicule. 
 It is an example of that overweening self conscious- 
 ness of himself as an artist which sometimes deprived 
 his poetry of naturalness and of spontaneity. The 
 real reason was that Empedocles bored him, and no 
 wonder ; and that Arnold, under the mask of Empe- 
 docles, exposing all his present woes, confusions and 
 wanderings of thought, his hatreds and scorns of 
 his time, had begun to bore himself. Again, the 
 Empedocles of the poem is quite petulant with the 
 Universe, and especially with that state of man which, 
 having vast desires and conceiving noble ideals, is 
 disenabled by the gods, and apparently on purpose, 
 to realize them. It may be that this petulance, 
 when Arnold came afterwards to read of it, displeased 
 his proud taste : it certainly did not fit in with his 
 stoicism. 
 
 Two years after he wrote Empedocles, in 1853, he 
 was in a more healthy state of mind. He wrote about 
 the problems of life and their trouble, but he wrote 
 about them in short l3n:ics, some of which ended 
 with hope, even presaged joy. Later on, many 
 years later, when his foot was on firmer ground, and 
 some sunlight in his sky, he restored Empedocles 
 to its place in his collected work, at the instance of 
 Robert Browning. When he left it out, his soul was 
 too near the shipwreck of Empedocles to relish its 
 representation. He was tossed to and fro on the 
 deep, close to the rocks. But when he had escaped, 
 it was not unpleasant to see the picture he had made 
 of old of the storm and the labouring ship, and to 
 hang it up as a votive tablet in a shrine of the gods 
 of the sea. 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 73 
 
 Again, Empedocles accuses, and with all the weak- 
 ness of his type, the hopeless confusion to which the 
 gods have brought the soul of man ; and then, remem- 
 bering his philosophy, scoffs at himself and all the 
 complainers whom the course of nature and their 
 own thought have enslaved. At last, in a transient 
 excitement, having persuaded himself that he is 
 free, — and before the persuasion fails him, and lest 
 it should — ^he finishes his worry by the medicine of 
 the volcano. Arnold did not. He fought his way 
 through to no petulant conclusion, to no excited, 
 hurried surrender of the battle. In 1867, when after 
 an interval of fifteen years, he republished Empedocles 
 on JStna, he had grown into a wiser but sorrowful 
 calm. It was not the calm of the stoic, but of one 
 who, realizing with passion the sorrow of humanity 
 yet looked forward with hope, even at times with a 
 chastened joy, to its redemption. Life at least was 
 worth the living ; the battle was to be without despair. 
 It pleased him then, now that his feet were set on 
 a rock and his goings ordered, to republish this 
 picture of his youth and its disordered wavering, to 
 realise afresh how much he had gained. Moreover, 
 it pleased the artist in him to feel through all the 
 wailing of the poem, the freshness of youth in it, 
 its intensity and the* pleasure of its pain. 
 
 Even when it was written, the poem was not 
 all melancholy or monotonous. Callicles lives in 
 it as well as Empedocles — Callicles, the lyrist and the 
 poet, young and exulting in his youth, inspired by 
 the beauty of Nature and the romantic stories of 
 Greece, loving women and song, fesisting and the 
 dance — incarnate joy — yet tender of heart, wise 
 through reverence of wisdom, and with that deep 
 
74 FOUR POETS 
 
 common sense which born of love and imagination 
 is one of the first attributes of genius. When Arnold 
 created him he was half way to a higher region of 
 thought, feeling, and action than he could ever have 
 attained by stoicism on the one hand, or by wailing 
 and indignation on the other. But he did not create 
 him excellently. It is a thing half done — ^half flesh 
 and blood, half marble, like the poor prince in the 
 Arabian Nights. Callicles is but a voice, not a 
 living young man ; the voice only of the half -reaction 
 in Arnold's mind towards life and untroubled joy. 
 Callicles sings of what he sees ; of the pleasant out- 
 side of things, of the loveliness of Nature and of the 
 natural life of men and animals, but the descriptions 
 are a little too literary. He sings, and better, of the 
 beautiful legends of Greece, of Cadmus and Harmonia, 
 of Apollo and Marsyas, of the ^tnean giant, of the 
 singing of the Muses, with youthful sentiment and 
 artist charm ; and Arnold thought these songs emd 
 the temper of them so good, that when he repressed 
 the poem, he extracted and published some of them 
 as separate lyrics. Indeed, these two regions, the 
 beauty of the common world and the great stories, 
 were the homes where Arnold found some comfort 
 in his trouble, some hours of refreshment. They 
 saved him from himself. In the physical peace of the 
 one, and in the moral peace he was conscious of 
 in the other, he attained so much of the resemblance 
 of rest that he believed in its possibility. When he 
 speaks of natural beauty, he loses his self-inquiring 
 self. When he tells a fair or noble tale, the intellec- 
 tual snake which was gnawing at his entrails goes to 
 sleep, and the frigid weight of his stoicism was lifted 
 off. He forgot himself — that blessed remedy for all 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 75 
 
 the afflictions of the world. In the Strayed Reveller, 
 the Forsaken Merman, the King ai Bokhara, in 
 Sohrab and Rustum, Balder Dead, Tristram and 
 Iseult, the Church at Brou, the weary, self- 
 inquiring, self-controlling Arnold does not appear. 
 We are freed from him, and he is freed from 
 himself. 
 
 This is the noble power which the great stories of 
 the world have upon us, this, their healing and 
 exalting good. They release the soul from its own 
 despotism. They hush the heart into self-forgetful- 
 ness. They fill our being with sorrow and with joy 
 which are not om" own. And it was well for Arnold 
 that he felt their power. It was one of the enabling 
 elements in his battle towards peace and light. It 
 took him away not only from the turmoil in his own 
 soul, but also from the turmoil without, the evil of 
 which he grossly exaggerated. He was fortunate in 
 that ; far more fortunate than the great number of 
 persons whose souls, even now after so many years, 
 are sensitive to, and whose reason is troubled by. 
 the bitter problems of hfe which afflicted him. They 
 have no means of expression ; they fight alone and in 
 silence the grief that would, but cannot speak. 
 Arnold at least had the gift of expression, and he rid 
 himself by his art of a great deal of his distress. 
 No sooner did some aspect of the human question 
 rise threateningly before him, and mock him, than he 
 put it into a poem. It is reaUy curious how many 
 of the short lyrics in this second volume are dedicated 
 to fragments of that problem. One wovild think he 
 would, after Empedocles, have been a httle anxious 
 to throw off the yoke of inquiry, a little tired of walk- 
 ing up and down the alleys of yew within his soul ; 
 
76 FOUR POETS 
 
 but it is not so. He had an undying interest in 
 himself as an epitome of man. 
 
 I will touch on a few of them. One, entitled 
 Human Life, glances, in spite of its important title, 
 at only one experience of life — ^We would fain steer 
 our ship as we please, and not by the inward law. 
 But we cannot hve, we are compelled not to live, by 
 chance impulse. As the ship leaves behind it the 
 waves it divides, so we leave behind the joys not 
 designed for us, the friends not destined to be ours. 
 Unknown powers direct our course as they will, not 
 as we wiU. — ^This is only one small fragment of the 
 riddle of human life. Its title is a misnomer. 
 
 Then he asks himself in a weU-written sonnet : 
 Shall I be glad, when I am growing old, that the 
 heats of youth are left behind and I at peace ? No, 
 I shall wish its agitations, fire, and desire back again, 
 and sigh that nothing is left to youth and age save 
 discontent. — This is a common human cry, but it 
 belongs only to one type of men, and even they do 
 not feel its passion, save at intervals. Browning 
 and Tennyson would not have come to that conclu- 
 sion, nor the lovers of mankind. It also is only a 
 fragment of the problem. 
 
 In Self Deception we have another fragment. 
 We think we have great powers, and expect to 
 realize their ends. We may have had them in an 
 antenatal world, and been as eager then to use them 
 towards their perfection as we are now. But the 
 Great Power who gave us them, imposed on us a 
 rigid law, and the law baffled us. And when He sent 
 us here He left us only the stress of them, and yet 
 their full desires. And we know we shall never win 
 their fulfilment. Yet, there is a power which rules us. 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 77 
 
 and there is a chance in that, the vaguest of chances, 
 
 but a chance. — This is the Empedocles argument 
 
 over again, and it is interesting to contrast it with 
 
 Browning's view of the same aspect of the problem.' 
 
 Browning, looking out of himself with love upon 
 
 humanity, saw far and clear the certain end which 
 
 the inabiUties of life suggested, and to which they led. 
 
 Arnold, loving the personalities of his own soul 
 
 more than man, saw at this time of his life only 
 
 one dim chance for man. Gross is the film which 
 
 self-consideration draws over the eyes of the spirit. 
 
 Take another, Lines at a Death Bed. The face 
 
 of the dead is calm. , The settled loveliness of rest 
 
 is there. Is this the end of life ? this the attainment 
 
 of its desire ? Is youth so fresh and bright because 
 
 of the hope of rest in death ? No, youth desires 
 
 light and joy, life and passion, here, on this side of 
 
 death — 
 
 Calm's not life's crown, though calm is well. 
 'Tis all perhaps that man requires, 
 But 'tis not what our youth desires. 
 
 This, too, is but a fragment of the problem, enough 
 for a Ijmic, and an unfinished one. 
 
 Take another — take Courage. Our business here 
 is to tame the will to Nature's law. Renounce, 
 or endure, keeping the soul free from fear or 
 shame. That is his stoicism ; but there is room, 
 Arnold thought, for another side of the question ; 
 he could not altogether fix his thought into the stoic 
 limits. Now, in these bad times, he cries, when 
 fate and circumstance are strong, praise the strong 
 for their defiant courage, even though they do 
 not live under the law of right — and here he 
 recurs to the motive of Mycerinus — ^praise the 
 
78 FOUR POETS 
 
 younger Cato, praise Byron, for their dauntlessness. 
 For what we want now is force of soul, even in the 
 things which in themselves are blameable. Our 
 bane is faltering, indecision. We may see clear, 
 but can we act forcibly ? — That, too, is only a 
 fragment of the problem of life, a little lyric cry. 
 
 Then there is the poem of Self-dependence — a piece 
 of modern stoicism. I say modern because the 
 Nature Arnold dwells on — Nature as the revealer 
 of law moving in the universe in quietude, and teach- 
 ing us obedience and its calm — ^is a thought the 
 ancients only conjectured. They had no knowledge 
 of the constancy of energy. The close applies to 
 himself the teaching of Nature. 
 
 O air-born voice I long since, severely clear, 
 A cry like thine in mine own heart I hear : 
 " Resolve to be thyself ; and know that he, 
 Who finds himself, loses his misery." 
 
 It is a thought which grows out of the stoic position, 
 out of that weary reference to the soul alone as the 
 source of strength, that pride engendering self-con- 
 sideration, which, isolating a man, enfeebles love, 
 and, if the gods do not interfere, slays it altogether. 
 Who finds himself loses misery ? Nay, I answer, 
 gains it. Who loses himself, he alone loses misery, 
 and it is the only way to lose it. That, too, is the 
 poem of a fragment of the problem. 
 
 Kensington Gardens, a lovelier poem, has the same 
 thought at its root. He contrasts the peace of the 
 quiet meadows, trees and water with the impious 
 and raving uproar of men, the sound of which he 
 vaguely hears. Here is quietude, always new ; 
 the sheep, the birds, the flowers, the children sleep. 
 Calm soul of all things, he cries, give me — 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 79 
 
 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. 
 
 Peace ! Like Dante, but without his power, Arnold 
 sought for peace. Could he now have loved more, 
 could he have more fulfilled his prayer to feel with 
 others more than with himself, could he have not 
 had that foolish desire to know himself — the utmost 
 thing the Pagan reached — ^he would soon have 
 gained it. " Know thyself," said Socrates, and 
 man, because this dictum flattered his pride, thought 
 it the ultimate wisdom. It is rather the ultimate 
 foolishness. The true thing to say is this — " Know 
 Nature, man, and God ; get outside of thyself into 
 their glory and beauty. Only then, thou canst begin 
 to justly know thyself ; only then, at union through 
 love with all that is without thee, lost in joy, beyond 
 self-disturbance, self-inquiry, canst thou, in humility, 
 attain to peace." 
 
 Then there is another poem — The Buried Life — 
 it too, touches only one aspect, one fragment of the 
 problem of life. The poem, fuU of imaginative 
 beauty, has also its deep interest ; it touches what 
 we imagine, in the mysticism of the heart, of the sub- 
 conscious stream of our being, the unexplored tracts 
 of our nature ; the revealing of which we wait for so 
 long and so vainly. Even two lovers, Arnold 
 thought, cannot teU each other what they are. They 
 would if they could, but their buried life flows on, 
 unseen, unknown. Fate, knowing how we are led 
 astray by the apparent and confused, has ordained 
 it thus, in order that our truer life should not be 
 mastered by the apparent ; but live within itself, 
 independent of the world. We are beset with longing 
 
80 FOUR POETS 
 
 to find our actual self. In vain we strive ; yet 
 could we find it, we should be at rest. Only at times, 
 fallings from us, vanishings, airs, floating echoes, 
 " as from an infinite distant land," reveal or seem to 
 reveal the heart of the life which beats within — 
 
 A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast. 
 
 And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again. 
 
 The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain. 
 
 And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know. 
 
 A man becomes aware of his life's flow, 
 
 And hears its winding murmur ; and he sees 
 
 The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze. 
 
 And there arrives a lull in the hot race 
 
 Wherein he doth for ever chase 
 
 That flying and elusive shadow, rest. 
 
 And then he thinks he knows 
 
 The hills where his life rose. 
 
 And the sea where it goes. 
 
 Another aspect of the same thought is to be found 
 in the poem — Palladium, where the soul, as far apart 
 from our outward hfe as the Palladium was from the 
 battle round Troy, is pictured on its lonely height. 
 When it fails we die, while it Uves, we cannot wholly 
 be a victim of the world. 
 
 The best of all these battling, fragmentary poems 
 is A Summer Night. Its composition is good, its 
 arrangement clear, its thoughts well-shaped. It 
 does not wander like the rest. It is passionate 
 throughout, and it soars to a climax from which it 
 descends in peace, like a still sunset after storm. 
 The natural description with which it begins is done 
 with a delicate purity of vision. It represents 
 Arnold's temper at the point where it was changing 
 from unmixed sadness and a somewhat fierce contempt 
 of the world, into a better and wiser mind, into a 
 greater harmony with mankind, into pity for men 
 with a touch of love in the pity ; into some hope. 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 81 
 
 some faith for them, and therefore into some hope and 
 faith in God. 
 
 There are yet other poems which illustrate this 
 story of a soul in those troubled years, but enough 
 has been said of these fragments. The essence of 
 the history is concentrated in the Stanzas in Memory 
 of the Author of Obermann. This poem places Arnold 
 as he was in 1852. Fifteen years later his position 
 was not the same ; and he records the change in 
 another poem of 1867, addressed to the same person, 
 Obermann once more. The similar titles make it 
 plain that he intended to reveal the change that had 
 passed over the temper in which he viewed the world. 
 
 Obermann, as Arnold conceived him in 1852, had 
 fled from the world, in which, like Arnold, he moved 
 a stranger, to find what peace he could in the pastoral 
 life of Switzerland ; where, from a chalet on the lower 
 hUls, he saw the solemn snows of the high peaks 
 rise in ethereal purity and calm. Nature, in her 
 quiet order, might heal his heart ; and though 
 Obermaim's pain did not leave him, yet he saw his 
 way to as much peace as he could find ; and for that 
 threw everything else away. And this was some 
 attainment. Only two others, Arnold thought, 
 had been as bold, as self-certain in the whole of 
 Europe — Wordsworth and Goethe ; and Wordsworth 
 saw only half of human life, and Goethe's clear and 
 lonely soul few of the sons of men could follow. But 
 our time, he says to Obermann, is worse than 
 theirs — a hopeless tangle — and we turn for help to 
 the immovable composure of thy icy despair. Thou 
 hast renounced the world and thy life in it ; at least 
 thou hast the peace of renunciation, and the majestic 
 
 7— (2278) 
 
82 FOUR POETS 
 
 pleasures which Nature brings. Half my soul I 
 leave with thee and Nature, but the other half fate 
 takes, and forces it to abide in the world. May I 
 live there, like thee, unsoiled by wrong, unspotted 
 by the world, and bear the pain of these miserable 
 days. Rigorous is the line on which the unknown 
 power drives us ; we cannot 
 
 when we will enjoy ; 
 Nor when we will, resign. 
 
 That is his position in 1852. Many years passed 
 by, and he remembers, at the same place where 
 GUon looks down on Chillon and the lake, Obermann 
 once more, and slips, in a moment of thought, back 
 to his old desire to be in solitude and calm with him, 
 out of the warfare he has waged so long. He recalls 
 the infinite desire of his youth — that he and man 
 might reach harmonious peace in union with the 
 universal order. 
 
 And as he mused, night came down, and Obermann 
 stood beside him — 
 
 And is it thou, he cried, so long 
 
 Held by the world which we 
 Loved not, who turnest from the throng 
 
 iBack to thy youth and me ? 
 
 Dost thou turn now to me, now when the world is 
 being new born, when hopes and hearts are blossom- 
 ing ? The history of the world is the history of the 
 Rise and Fall of Ideas. We lived, of old, when one 
 set of ideas was falling into fragments. In the tur- 
 moil and confusion we could find no sure aim for life. 
 We despaired and fled from the world. But now, 
 is not the Power at hand which wiU reanimate 
 humanity ? I died wrapped in gloom, but .thou, 
 who sought me of old, do not thou despair. The 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 83 
 
 sun is risen on the earth. The present I despaired 
 
 of held in it resurrection power. But thou — 
 
 though to the world's new hour 
 Thou come with 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 prime ; 
 Though, round thy firmer manhood cast. 
 
 Hang weeds of our sad time 
 
 Whereof thy youth felt all the spell. 
 
 And traversed aU the shade — 
 Though late, though dimm'd, though weak, yet tell 
 
 Hope to a world new made I 
 
 Help it to fill that deep desire. 
 
 The want that rack'd our brain. 
 Consumed our soul with thirst like fire; 
 
 Immedicable pain ; 
 
 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 
 
 This end to help attain : 
 One common wave of thought and joy 
 
 Lifting mankind again. 
 
 The vision ended. I awoke 
 
 As out of sleep, and no 
 Voice moved ; — only the torrent broke 
 
 The silence, far below. 
 
 • * * * • 
 
 And glorious there, without a sound. 
 
 Across the glimmering lake. 
 High in the Valais-depth profound, 
 
 I saw the morning break. 
 
 This is a higher strain, but the redemption was not 
 yet fully attained. There were still hours of deep 
 depression, following on noble vision. Men recover 
 from illness of the soul with relapses. The tide ebbs 
 before it floods the strand. Oscillation is half of our 
 convalescence. And in the same book — New Poems 
 — ^in which these second Stanzas to Obermann appear, 
 are the Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse, 1867. 
 
84 FOUR POETS 
 
 The high emotion and thought of a heart, worn more 
 by sorrow for the world than, by its own pain, fills 
 these verses to the brim. The wisdom of joy is not 
 in them, but the wisdom of pain is. Yet, they look 
 forward ; waiting for light with weary eyes, with a 
 faint hope which has at least slain despair. Mean- 
 while, he cries, while we wait cind hope, allow us our 
 tears, our solitude, ovu absence from the gayer world. 
 Let its bright procession pass. Leave us to our 
 monastic peace. 
 
 Another poem, Dover Beach — one of the finest he 
 ever wrote — ^is also a poem of relapse into depression, 
 but so profoundly felt that, both in thought and 
 expression, it rises into the higher regions of poetry. 
 He hears the " grating roar of pebbles which the 
 wave sucks back " with the ebb, and the return of 
 the waves that bring 
 
 The eternal note of sadness in. 
 
 Sophocles long ago 
 
 Heard it on the Mgea.n, and it brought 
 Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow 
 Of human misery ; 
 
 He hears in it, as in the silence he lives over again 
 
 the religious tempest he had suffered — the retreat of 
 
 the ancient faith in unconquerable sadness, and in 
 
 the sadness the whole world is dark. And so great 
 
 is the darkness that while he lives in it he can do 
 
 no good to the world, and none to himself. 
 
 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, 
 
 IJqr certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain ; 
 
 And we are here as on a darkling plain 
 
 Swept with confused alarms of struggle and fight, 
 
 V^ere ignorant armies clash by night. 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 85 
 
 This temper, now in 1867, was not a constant one. 
 Hope for the world and for himself had grown almost 
 into flower within him ; and he attained through 
 hopefulness a new strength, even some rest. And 
 then, having found a haven where he could anchor, 
 and looking out on the storm, but not of the storm, 
 he used his quiet to give warning and counsel to the 
 new and excited world. 
 
 The present, he thought, may be full of vigour and 
 of a dancing life ; but when its noise is loudest, 
 retreat for a time ; remember the past and its quiet 
 beauty. Do not lose its power ; and his Bacchanalia, 
 or the New Age, compares the dance of Maenads, 
 breaking in on the shepherd's still enjo5mient of 
 the hush of Nature, with the wild orgie of the New 
 Age, scattering the charm, the dignity and the 
 peace of the past. " Rejoice in this," the new 
 men cry, as the shepherd was bid to rejoice in 
 the stormy riot of the Bacchanals. " Ah," says 
 the poet, " the shepherd thought the hush and 
 quiet beautiful, and I feel the past while I hve in 
 the present. Lovely was the silence, the hush of 
 the world, when but a few were great, and men 
 loved them ; when what was excellence was 
 known." 
 
 And Progress, another poem of warning, tells the 
 new world (which has thrown the old reUgion over- 
 board) to take care not to lose with its loss the fire 
 within, not to perish of cold. There is no religion 
 which God has not loved, which has not taught weak 
 wills how much they can do, which has not let soft 
 rain fall on the dry heart, and cried to self-weary 
 men, " Ye must be born again." Keep these things. 
 It is not in the pride of hfe that the New Age should 
 
86 FOUR POETS 
 
 excel ; it is not for its noisy movement that we should 
 
 be chiefly glad ; 
 
 But that you think clear, feel deep, bear fruit well, 
 The Friend of Man desires. 
 
 These things are written in a loftier, truer, wiser 
 music than his melancholy, troubled harp could sing 
 twenty years before. I trust I have not dwelt on 
 them too long for my readers' patience. But the 
 story is valuable because it is not only the history 
 of a single soul, but the history of thousands of 
 thoughtful English folk in those days between 1840 
 and 1870, when the discoveries of science and criti- 
 cism, and the new developments of democratic ideas, 
 changed all the habits of men's thinking, shook the 
 old fabrics to their foundations, and did not, as yet, 
 build new temples. Science changed its front, so 
 did History, Literature and Art. Theology and 
 Philosophy strove to preserve their old formation, but 
 as the years went on were forced, if they were to exist 
 at all, to change it also. And in the wildered disorder 
 of men running to and fro, searching in vain for 
 some foundation of the mind, there were only a few 
 who found it or who beheved it would be found. The 
 greater number doubted like Arnold, were restless 
 like him, or like him fell back on stoicism, or fled 
 away from the noises into silence and solitude. There 
 are many who remember those days. They lived 
 in the thick of the battle, and most of them, being 
 serious in that serious time, did their duty as they 
 could. There are many now who are too young to 
 have partaken of that strife or endured its confusion 
 of hustUng thoughts, of multitudinous efforts 
 to find truth, but they ought to know something of 
 its history, and be grateful to those who fought 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 87 
 
 so well the battle of progress, and who suffered 
 in the battle. It is because Arnold's poetry concern- 
 ing his own soul and the soul of man reflects and 
 embodies so much more closely that time of thirty 
 years than either the poetry of Tennyson or Browning, 
 that I have dwelt on it so long. It is history, and 
 interesting history. 
 
 Looking back, we see that the times were not so 
 bad as Arnold thought them to be, nor was their 
 restless movement really evil. The turmoil was not 
 caused by want of ideas, but by new ideas surging 
 into the sleepy elements of the time. It was not 
 the seething of decay and dissolution, it was the 
 heating upwards into force of new creative powers. 
 Large, formative conceptions were cast into the 
 world, and every element in that vast chaldron 
 boiled up and over in resistance or agreement. Only 
 after years, did the ebulUtion settle down, did another 
 world of thought begin to arise into a temple in which 
 men could rest and live. It is not yet half finished. 
 Every year it is being built into harmony. But we 
 owe its beginnings, and we shall owe much of its 
 beauty and of the peace of its aisles, to the wild 
 creative turmoil which Arnold thought so evil, which 
 filled him with trouble and dismay. He began to see 
 the truth of this in 1867. It was clearer to him in 
 1877, when he collected his poems. But by that time 
 he had drained dry his poetic vein. Weary when 
 he began to write, he was far more wearied as a poet 
 when he had gone through the storm. His imagina- 
 tive power was tired out. His intellectual power was 
 not. On the contrary, the sword of his intellect had 
 been tempered in the fight, ground down to exceeding 
 sharpness, and if he used it with too httle mercy on 
 
88 FOUR POETS 
 
 his foes, it was always with a certain humour, some- 
 times grim, sometimes gentle, which made even those 
 whom he satirized smile, and forgive him after their 
 pain was over. Men who loved his true poetic note, 
 who felt a new and lovely charm in such poems eis 
 the Scholar Gipsy, were sorry when poetry fled away 
 from him, when the practical reason sat in the throne 
 of imagination ; but consoled themselves by thinking 
 that he had done all he could do in poetry, that the 
 gold of that mine was exhausted, and that if he had 
 gone on, it would only have been silver that he could 
 have given us. And Westminster Abbey and Geist 
 are only silver. And then they felt how clear-eyed 
 and sensible it was of him to put aside with so much 
 ease and dignity his commerce with the Muses. It 
 is not every day that we touch a man who, having 
 reached some excellence in one of the great arts, 
 knows when he can be excellent no more, and lays it 
 by ; and, moreover, takes up new work, in other 
 realms altogether, conscious of new powers, pleased 
 to exercise them, and exercising them with a sure 
 hand. In this new work Arnold followed his own 
 advice to others. He kept his eye fixed on his sub- 
 jects. He realized his aim, and saw it, for the most 
 part, distinctly. He worked with a deep anxiety 
 to help the world forward to clearer views of hfe. 
 He hved far less within himself, and far more for the 
 sake of his feUow men. He took his share in the daily 
 drudgery of the world and brought to it " sweetness 
 and light. " He beUeved in the new age while he 
 deprecated its sensational elements, and he used all 
 his powers to lead it into a simpler, quieter and truer 
 life. Much might well be said of his prose work ; 
 of its uniqueness, of its excellence, of its keen fitness 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 89 
 
 for these later times, even when he still retained 
 somewhat in it of his old apartness — but that is not 
 my business in this essay. I pass on to those other 
 poems of his which are outside of the struggle I have 
 described, which belong to subjects more or less 
 independent of its pain. Moreover, as I have written 
 of the poems in their relation to the time in which 
 he hved, so now it is their poetry itself which, as far 
 as I can, I shall try to estimate. 
 
 " The eternal objects of poetry," said Arnold in his 
 Preface to the Poems of 1853, " are actions, human 
 actions." Excellent actions ! he goes on to say,* 
 " and excellent actions are those which most power- 
 fully appeal to the great primary human affections ; 
 feelings which are permanent and the same in the 
 race, in all dimes and at all times. Poetical work 
 belongs to the domain of our permanent passions ; 
 let it interest these, and it does hot matter whether 
 the subject is ancient or modern. But, as in the 
 ancient subjects the action is greater, the personages 
 nobler, the situations more intense, those critics are 
 wrong who say that the poet must leave the ' ex- 
 hausted past ' and draw his subjects from matters 
 of present import." 
 
 No wise critic would ever say that the poet should 
 not take his subjects from the past, or that the sub- 
 jects of the past are exhausted. But he would say 
 that the poet who wrote only of the past, ignoring 
 the present, would find that after a time his poetic 
 enthusiasm would lessen and finally die away ; or 
 
 • Note. — I do not quote the whole statement, only passages 
 from it, but I refer my readers to the book. It is too 
 long to quote in extenso. 
 
90 FOUR POETS 
 
 that he would be forced to introduce, probably un- 
 consciously, modem feeling or a modern atmosphere 
 into his record of the ancient subjects ; or, at least, 
 that he would bring the subjects nearer to us by 
 medievahsing them, as Morris did the Greek tales. 
 Moreover, he would certainly add to Greek or to 
 medieval tales, as both Morris and Keats did, the 
 modem feeUng for Nature and the modem subtlety 
 of passion. Try as he will, the poet cannot divest 
 himself of the spirit of the time in which he hves. 
 However, to support his point of view, Arnold chose 
 some of the great stories of the past for poetic treat- 
 ment. He took the fine subject of Merope, and 
 made it into a drama in the manner of the Greek. 
 He selected Sohrab and Rustum — a tale common to 
 the Eastern, Teutonic and Celtic peoples. He folded 
 in his net the story of Tristram and IseuU. He tried 
 to put the Norse mythology and sentiment into 
 the poem of Balder Dead. And then he went no 
 farther into the great subjects of the past. The 
 present seized on him. Having carefully laid down 
 his theory of the greater excellence of the ancient 
 subjects, he made three-fourths of his poetry belong 
 to the age in which he lived. His great, his dominant 
 subject, up to 1855 (New Poems was published in 
 1867), was himself face to face with his age. 
 
 His theory then faded away before the pressure on 
 his modem soul of the modern time, the modern pain. 
 But the present, at least at first, seized on him in 
 the wrong way. Afterwards, in poems which we 
 may call poems of transition, his self-isolation was 
 modified. But now, the present did not urge him 
 outside of himself to live in the thoughts and emotions 
 of the movement which surged around him. It 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 91 
 
 drove him into his own soul to consider and re-con- 
 sider what thoughts and emotions the movement 
 outside awakened into hfe within himself — ^what his 
 soul suffered from it, what hatreds, what fears, what 
 clashing ! And he closed the windows of the inner 
 house, that he might not hear or see that which 
 disturbed his meditation. I will know myself, he 
 thought, and then I may be able to understand and 
 help the world. This was his early mistake as a 
 poet. It was putting the cart before the horse. 
 
 I have said that had he lived with the movements of 
 his time, with some hope and faith and with some joy 
 in the strife, he would have been a greater poet. 
 But here there is a special thing to say, in this con- 
 nection, with regard to the poems he wrote on the 
 wide ancient subjects. Had he not been too self- 
 involved to enter with living interest into the 
 movement of the world around him, he would have 
 treated those great subjects with a fuUer mastery. 
 They are treated with a certain remoteness and 
 coldness which can only be explained by the tyranny 
 which the storms and woes of the time in which he 
 lived exercised over his self-questioning spirit. He 
 is less in the tales than in himself. He is not rapt 
 away by Sohrab and Rustum, Balder or Tristram as 
 Keats was by Lorenzo or Porphyro, or Morris by 
 the tales of the Earthly Paradise. They truly escaped 
 from their age, and brought passion to their subjects. 
 Their subjects were more to them than their self. 
 
 Nevertheless, Arnold escaped for a time from him- 
 self when he handled the noble stories of the past. His 
 poetry then, partly freed from self-inquiry and its 
 restlessness, rose into a clearer, sweeter region and 
 reached a higher level of art. When we read the 
 
92 FOUR POETS 
 
 Strayed Reveller, the Forsaken Merman, Sohrab and 
 Rusium, the Scholar Gipsy, the Church at Brou, in 
 aJl of which he more or less dismissed his self- 
 consideration, we say, feeling their excellence, 
 " What a pity he was so worried ; what a greater 
 pity that he worried himself ; what a greatest pity 
 that he allowed himself to be so tonnented by his 
 age or by himself. Yet, after all — for everything 
 has two sides — ^we have seen how interesting as history 
 as well as poetry he has made his age to us through 
 himself. When he looked into its mirror he saw his 
 own tired face, and the waves of thought that passed 
 over it. But the reflection was also that of thousands 
 who then lived and suffered and strove to find their 
 way, but who could not, like Arnold, formulate their 
 thought, or crystallize into words their feeling. And 
 in this indirect fashion he may be said to have joined 
 in the battle he hated, and to have helped the world. 
 , Might he not have escaped from the trouble of the 
 present, and his own in it, by falling in love ? Most 
 men, most poets certainly, pass in youth through a 
 period in which love leads them out of themselves, 
 and opens the gates of that vast and shining realm 
 of self-forgetfulness where art has built her noblest 
 palace. We may not say that youthful love-passion 
 brings a man into that excelling realm, or leads 
 an artist into its iimer shrine. A larger, a mightier 
 expansion of love is needed for that high citizenship — 
 a love which passes beyond one woman or one man 
 to embrace Nature, and man, and God ; but we may 
 say that love-passion opens the gates of this king- 
 dom, gives us our first experience of loss of self, and 
 affords a fleeting vision of the glory it may be to lose 
 ourselves in the whole of Love. 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 93 
 
 Arnold had but little, it seems, of that young 
 experience. It was not the natural outcome of his 
 character or of the character of Clough. This, too, 
 was a pity. Had they had more of the usual love- 
 emotion of youth, they would much sooner have 
 learnt the great lesson they needed so much, of not 
 thinking of themselves. Only here and there, by 
 fits and starts, and always mixed with retreats on 
 his own soul, love seems to have come to Arnold in 
 his poetry. And his few love-poems, half of the 
 woman and half of himself, form a sort of transition 
 between poems about himself and the others about 
 subjects beyond himself. These poems then I shall 
 briefly discuss. 
 
 It was not only the youthful feeling of love Which, 
 if we judge from his early poetry, was of small force 
 in Arnold. He seems also, in his desire for almost 
 a stoic temperance, to have felt less than other poets 
 those eager enthusiasms for nattiral beauty, for 
 human causes, for universal ideas which stir into 
 great emotion, whether of joy, aspiration or pity, 
 poets in their youth. The intense glow of young Ufe, 
 of which love-poems are only one result, was either 
 weak in him, or repressed ; and in consequence, his 
 poetic hfe was sure, sooner or later, to suffer from 
 the exhaustion at which it did arrive. He ceased to 
 write poetry. 
 
 But when that youthful fire is strong in a poet, 
 it does not burn out. It only changes the objects 
 on which it feeds, and glows with a steadier heat 
 around them. When it is not strong, it is easily 
 put out by ill-fortuned circumstances, and the poet 
 is then left without one of the elements which most 
 feed, impel and develop the youthful imagination. 
 
94 FOUR POETS 
 
 Such ill fortune, we have seen, did befall Arnold. 
 The pressure of that noisy, sceptical time ministered 
 to the chilling of what youthful fire he possessed. 
 His training also chilled it. Rigorous teachers 
 imposed on him and Clough moral and intellectual 
 responsibilities, too early for their strength, too 
 heavy for them to bear, and froze the genial current 
 of their youth. His father's mind, his father's view 
 of hfe, lay heavy on him, and all the more heavy 
 because he reverenced him so much. Duties were 
 not sufficiently mingled with natural pleasures. 
 He carried to Oxford a somewhat austere solemnity ; 
 and the love-poem, with its exalted note of ardour, 
 may have seemed to him unworthy of a serious man. 
 But he was not yet a man, and it is a misfortune to 
 a youth, much more to a blossoming poet, to antici- 
 pate the gravity of manhood. Nevertheless, if 
 Arnold had had more of youthful fire, he might have 
 saved his Hfe from these despondencies. And it is 
 that want which makes his poem of Tristram and 
 Iseult so inadequate. The story of Tristram is a 
 story of passion between the sexes. The intensity of 
 the story fades out in Arnold's poem. Thin, thin 
 as the speech of the wailing ghosts Ulysses saw in 
 Hades are the voices in that poem. Perhaps Arnold 
 felt that the wounds of Tristram, the long lapse of 
 time since the lovers had met, excused, even insisted 
 on the presence of a weakness in the expression of 
 passion. But had he known more of true emotion 
 in love, and felt the story and the atmosphere of its 
 time more truly, he would not have made this artistic 
 mistake, which he probably thought was an artistic 
 excellence. The note which is soimded in the poem 
 might suit the temper and situation of Iseult of 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 95 
 
 Brittany. It does not suit those of Tristram and 
 Iseult of Ireland. The poem is cold. 
 
 There are other poems which may be called, each 
 with its own difference, love-poems, of which the 
 most remarkable are Faded Leaves, Euphrosyne, 
 Calais Sands, and the series addressed to Marguerite. 
 The poems entitled Faded Leaves, in which aU the 
 love is unhappy, " too late or separated, or despairing 
 or longing," should not, I think, have been kept 
 among the collected poems. The subject is plainly 
 worked up and chosen from the outside. Their 
 craftmanship is weak; unfortunate phrases jar the 
 lyric sense ; there is none of the naturalness of love in 
 the series, save in one verse of the last poem. His 
 artistic sense is scarcely born in these poems, and his 
 longing for quiet intrudes its philosophy curiously 
 and unhappily into them. They must have been a 
 very youthful effort, yet, if they were so, what a 
 curious youth ! As to Euphrosyne, it is better done. 
 Browning would have Uked its motive. This is 
 sufiSciently given in the last verse: — 
 
 It was not love which heaved thy breast, 
 Fair child ! — it was the bliss within. 
 
 Adieu I and say that one at least 
 Was just to what he did not win. 
 
 Calais Sands comes nearer to reaUty, but its close 
 remains obscure. Whether the lover is to Uve 
 always apart in a sUent worship, as in one verse^ 
 or to be happy in meeting his sweetheart, as in 
 the last verse — we cannot know. One motive or the 
 other should have been chosen and completed. 
 
 No one can teU whether the series addressed to 
 Marguerite, and entitled Switzerland, records a real 
 passage of love in his life when he loved for a time 
 
96 FOUR POETS 
 
 a daughter of France who Uved in Switzerland, or 
 whether he invented the subject in order to write on 
 the matter of a love-passion which was born, hved 
 for a time and died, in a heart too restless, too un- 
 tamed, too feverish with the trouble of the world, 
 too unable to forget itself, for unforgetful happiness 
 in another. I do not hke to think that the subject 
 was invented, but there are passages — ^it may be they 
 were added afterwards — ^which are chill with that 
 intellectual or moral analysis both of which are 
 apart from love in its eager, romantic mood. On 
 the other hand, if anywhere in Arnold's poetry 
 there is youthful passion, it is here. 
 
 They begin with a poem of the first volume, 1849, 
 A Memory Picture, and record his first meeting and 
 parting with Marguerite. It ought to have been 
 collected with the others. The poems of 1852 
 record the progress of this love affair. Three years 
 had not dimmed his occasional devotion to this girl ; 
 and they close with a poem written ten years after- 
 wards, in which he remembers her, and wonders 
 where she is, as he muses on the terrace at Berne. 
 
 The second in the series as finally brought together, 
 entitled Parting, is the most interesting. Like 
 Goethe, when he fled from his slavery to Lili — and 
 Arnold imitates here the motive of Goethe's poem — 
 he calls on the mountains to receive him and release 
 him from the storm of love ; but the vision of Mar- 
 guerite, passing to and fro in the house, will not let 
 him go. At last, he seems to break away, but the 
 next poem brings them together again, only to part. 
 His love and her love faded for different reasons, 
 and they slid away from one another. It is no wonder 
 she ceased to care, for he mingled too much of his 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 97 
 
 unquiet soul with his love ; and women, in the matter 
 of love, have no patience, and for good reason, with 
 a lover whose psychology is engaged with his own 
 soul, and not with theirs. It is no wonder, on the 
 other hand, that he ceased to care, for her nature 
 was unfitted to his, and, moreover, as we are un- 
 artisticaUy informed, she had a past. Indeed, it is 
 a melancholy business. There is none of the natural 
 self-forgetfulness of early love in the poem. 
 
 As to the closing poem, which has its own grace 
 and charm, it is spoilt by the verse which wonders 
 whether she has not perhaps, in these ten years, 
 followed her light and flowery nature, and returned 
 to Paris to live an immoral Ufe. That verse should 
 be expunged ; and I do not think that the poet 
 could ever have really loved the girl, else memory 
 of tenderness and of passion past would have spared 
 her that conjecture. The greater artist would have 
 left it out, even had he thought it. But Arnold, 
 though an artist, was not a great artist. 
 
 I have said he was more of a careful artist in the 
 poems which he wrote on subjects apart from his own 
 time and his own self. He took great pains with 
 them', sometimes almost so much self-conscious 
 pains that he lost, if he ever possessed the capability 
 of it, the natural rush of a poet in creation. There 
 is an occasional artificiality in poems Uke Sohrab 
 and Rustum and Balder Dead, which bears the same 
 relation to art that Rochefoucauld said hypocrisy 
 bore to virtue. And it is especially displayed in 
 their direct imitation of the similes of the Homeric 
 poems and of their way of introducing similes. He 
 seems, like Homeric writers, to fetch them from other 
 poems, and fit them in unfitly. He introduces far 
 
 8— (2278) 
 
98 FOUR POETS 
 
 too many of them, and — sometimes excellent, some- 
 times too far apart from the thing they are supposed 
 to illustrate, sometimes hopelessly wrong in the place 
 they occupy, sometimes contradictory in detail, — 
 they weaken the passion of the poem and delay its 
 movement. In this, Arnold does not show the 
 moderation he was so fond of preaching. Then, 
 again, the just simile should only be introduced when 
 the action or the emotion is heightened, when the 
 moment is worthy, and when, as it were in a pause, 
 men draw in their breath to think what may happen 
 next, for the moment has reached intensity. The 
 simile fills that pause and allows men time to breathe. 
 But Arnold introduces his similes often lightly, about . 
 unimportant matters, where the action should not 
 pause but be rapid, when the moment is not weighty. 
 This is an artistic frivolity. 
 
 Moreover, the Homeric tradition is out of place in 
 Sohrab and Rustum. Arnold takes great pains with 
 its local colour. We have all the geography of the 
 district, and he has used the names well. He describes 
 the Tcirtar and Persian dresses, armour, tents, the 
 different aspects of the warring tribes, their manners 
 and much more, in great detail. But in this fully 
 Oriental poem the similes and the whole manner of 
 the verse are Greek. It is a mixture too odd for 
 good art. Either have no local colour or keep it 
 pure. 
 
 The story of Sohrab and Rustum, of the father who 
 unknowingly fights with and slays his son, and dis- 
 covers the misery too late, is a wide-spread tale. It 
 exists in two forms at least, in one of which the 
 discovery is made in time, in Teutonic saga. We 
 find it in Celtic saga. It was attached to the 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 99 
 
 Cuchullainn tale, and the rash hero, like Rustum, 
 slays his son. The subject is simple, full of a terrible 
 pity and a natural horror, capable of passionate treat- 
 ment, and of leaving in our minds, when wrought 
 according to nature, a sympathy with the fates of 
 men which softens and heals the heart. Arnold 
 has not missed its opportunities. The brave, lovely, 
 and tender-hearted youth is weU contrasted with 
 the worn, haughty, austere warrior ; and the pathos 
 swells from point to point, deepened by memorial 
 allusion and description, tiU it culminates in the 
 discovery that the father has slain the son. That 
 crisis is simply and passionately wrought by Arnold, 
 and both the characters, made beautiful by love and 
 endiurance of fate together, stir that high pleasure in 
 us which is compact of honour for human nature and 
 of pity for its sorrow — ^man weeping for, but enduring 
 with a constant mind, the worst the gods can infiict ; 
 tiQ we feel that man is nobler than the gods — till we 
 know that the gods whom man has previously created 
 must be replaced by a new creation. The poem 
 closes in solitary beauty. The son and the father lie 
 ^lone on the plain as night falls, between the mourn- 
 ing hosts, none daring to intrude. The dark heaven 
 is their silent tent, and their sorrow their shroud. 
 And we hear the deep river flowing by, the image of 
 the destiny of man that bears Us on, helpless, on its 
 breast, until, with it, we find the sea. 
 
 Balder Dead is by no means so fine a poem. It 
 is almost absurdly Homerized. It is far too long, 
 and made too long by irrelevant matter and descrip- 
 tions, and by repetitions. It is curiously inartistic. 
 In it, however, Arnold had found out that he was too 
 lavish of his similes. Moreover, his temper of mind 
 
100 FOUR POETS 
 
 was quite apart from that of the North. He must have 
 been incapable of apprehending it, or he would never 
 have written this poem in this fashion. He tries 
 for the mascuUne simplicity of the North, but he 
 does not gain it ; there are even times when his 
 elaborate simplicity verges towards the ridiculous, as 
 in the description of the daily battle and feast in 
 Valhalla. Odin — and it would be to his blank 
 amazement — ^is turned into the Zeus of Homer, and 
 Frea speaks hke Hera grown very old ; and exces- 
 sively curious this talk sounds to anyone who cares 
 for the northern sagas or the early northern poems. 
 It is not a true Norse poem, yet it drags in so much of 
 the northern mythology that the mind of the reader 
 is dissipated away from the main subject. Some of 
 the descriptions, however, like that of Hodur visiting 
 Frea when night had fallen on the streets of Asgard, 
 have a pictorial excellence. What Arnold has well 
 seized — ^in spite of the excess of description — ^is the 
 human emotion in the story, the bitter grief of Hodur 
 for his unconscious slaying of Balder, the grief of 
 Balder's wife, and Balder's love for her, the eagerness 
 of the gods to get Balder back, the union of Balder ^nd 
 Nanna in Hela's realm, their happiness together in 
 that shadowy place where even passion is thin ; the 
 fareweU of Hodur to Balder when they part to meet 
 no more tiU the TwiHght of the gods. The last ride of 
 Hermon to Hela's abode, his meeting with Hodur, the 
 prophecy of Balder, his weariness of blood and war 
 which half reconciles him to the world of the dead, 
 the picture of the new world of peace for which he 
 waits — ^this is the finest part of the poem, but, on the 
 whole, the subject was outside of Arnold, nor has he 
 at all grasped its significance. Nevertheless, being 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 101 
 
 thus outside of him, we are saved in it from the trouble 
 of his soul. 
 
 Tristram and Iseult I have partly characterised. 
 It does not cling and knit itself into its subject as 
 ivy round and into the oak. It swims about it 
 like a fish, hither and thither. Anything — the tapestry, 
 the storm, the firelight, the bed curtains, the dress 
 of the queen — leads it away from the central passion. 
 It is a pretty poem, with charming descriptions, 
 but sentimental, which Tristram and Iseult never 
 were. The most important part of it is where his 
 ancient love comes to visit him. There, if anywhere, 
 Arnold should be vitally clear, and in the subject. He 
 is miles and miles away from the time, the temper, 
 the characters and the passion of the matter in hand. 
 The conventions of modern society and morality rule 
 the irritating speeches of the lovers. Its ending is 
 curious. Iseult of Brittany is left with her two 
 children, and goes out to walk with them, just like 
 a modern widow in a sentimental novel, along the 
 chffs, and tells stories to the boys. Among the rest 
 she teUs the story of Merlin and Vivien, and with this, 
 which has nothing in the world to do with the subject, 
 the poem closes. This dragging in of a new tale is 
 the most inartistic thing that Arnold ever did, nor 
 is the tale well told. Indeed, it is scarcely told at 
 aU. Three- fourths of this closing part are natural 
 description, but natural description of great charm 
 and clear vision, quite modern in feeling, and strangely 
 apart from the atmosphere which surrounds the story 
 of Tristram. It reads as if Arnold, unable to invent 
 fresh matter, fell back on his remembrance of a visit 
 to Brittany, and inserted a description of the land- 
 scape, in order to fill up his space. Tristram and 
 
102 FOUR POETS 
 
 Iseult must be a youthful piece of work, and I am the 
 more driven to that opinion by its distant imitation 
 of Coleridge and Byron, notes of both of whom 
 sound clearly in its verse and manner. These are 
 the three long poems. 
 
 We turn from these long poems, for which his 
 genius was unfitted, for he had not the capacity of 
 either copious or continuous invention, to the lyric and 
 elegiac poems in which his genius is at its best, and 
 in which — ^unlike those already discussed — the sub- 
 jects have carried him away from himself. A few 
 of them belong to the Greek cycle of tales, a region 
 where he loved to dwell. 
 
 He tried to write a tragedy in the manner of the 
 Greek drama on the subject of Merope. It really 
 is a failure. Its worst fault is dullness, and though 
 he strove hard to make a great moral impression 
 emerge through the action of the drama, and leave 
 its power on the audience — an end his friend Sophocles 
 desired — he did not succeed in this because the action 
 of his play had not enough of life in it. " Good wine 
 needs no bush," we say when we read his long, inter- 
 esting, explanatory preface ; but here is an enormous 
 sign hung out over the tavern door to lead us to try 
 the wine. The landlord must have himself doubted 
 its quality. 
 
 The songs, or rather the recitations, of Callicles, 
 pubHshed in 1855 under the title of the Harp-Player 
 on Mtna, are pleasant, but only one of them — Cadmus 
 and Harmonia — ^is of the finest quaUty. Philomela, 
 which recalls the old sad tale of the palace in the 
 Thracian vale, is half Enghsh, half Greek, and full 
 of a passion rare in Arnold, half for himself, half for 
 the sorrow of the world. But far the best of these 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 103 
 
 Hellenic things is the Strayed Reveller. This is a piece 
 of pure creation, with full invention flowing through 
 it in happy ease. The scene is vividly pictured. 
 The palace, the court, the fountain, the forest and 
 the hills around the palace, are clothed in the Greek 
 beauty and clearness. We breathe that pellucid air, 
 and see the Reveller in the dewy twilight, and Circe 
 in the palace porch, and Ulysses, " the spare, dark- 
 featured, quick-eyed stranger " coming from the 
 pillared hall. This pictorial power charms us 
 through the poem. The Reveller, half drugged 
 into vision by Circe's wine, describes, with a con- 
 ciseness and illumination which save it from the 
 merely picturesque, a bright procession of countries, 
 men and the works of men — a " wild, thronging train 
 of edd3dng forms" sweeping through his soul. But 
 it is not mere description. Good matter of thought 
 Ues at the centre of the poem. The youth tells what 
 the happy gods see : — ^Tiresias the prophet, the 
 Centaurs on PeHon, the Indian drifting on the 
 mountain lake among his melon beds, the Scythian 
 on the wide steppe, the merchants ferrying over the 
 lone Chorasmian stream, the heroes sailing in Argo ; 
 — and the gods rejoice, pleased as men in a theatre 
 with the stream of human life passing them by, 
 where, unconcerned, they sit at ease. 
 
 The poet sees the same things, but not in the same 
 way. He has to bear what he sees, to feel with the 
 pain and the fates of men, to share the agony — 
 
 These things, Ulysses 
 The wise bards also 
 Behold and sing. 
 But oh, what labour ! 
 O prince, what pain I 
 
104 FOUR POETS 
 
 The gods exact this price for the gift of song, that 
 the poets become what they sing. 
 
 The poet, it is often said, by depth of sympathy, 
 suffers more than other men, a part of their pains as 
 well as his own. And this is a self-flattering theory 
 that poets hug to their breast. I have little S3mipathy 
 with the conceit. If the poet, being more sensitive 
 than other men, feel the pain and ughness of the world 
 sorely, he also is just as sensitive to its joy and beauty ; 
 and he has greater rapture than other men. All 
 things are set over one against another, and the poet 
 has no business to enlarge on his pain and to ignore his 
 joy. He is, in reahty, very well paid for his trouble. 
 Moreover, he has a great advantage over other men. 
 There are thousands just as sensitive as he, who are 
 obUged to suffer in silence ; but the poet, having 
 the gift of expression; can shape his pain into words, 
 cry loudly his lyric cry, make the world the sympa- 
 thetic witness of his woes ; and then," having expressed 
 his trouble, forget it or get rid of it, and go on, if 
 that please him, to shiver with another pain, shape 
 it in its turn, and forget it — and this he can do all 
 his hfe long. It is a pleasing amusement, and one 
 need not have much sympathy with his sorrows. 
 Those whom I do S5mipathize with are those who 
 have no voice, who appeal to no public, who live in 
 lonely trouble with the troubled world. Yet they, too, 
 have their outlet. What the poet sings truly expresses 
 them to themselves. There is always a way to 
 the coYnmon-sense of joy if only we look for it. These 
 sUent souls can read and be reUeved : but that 
 makes it all the more incumbent on the poet to take 
 care that his muse should also prophesy joy and be the 
 refreshment of care as well as the revealer of sorrow. 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 105 
 
 Arnold, though he cried out a great deal, did not 
 
 hold this sentimental view of the poet. There is a 
 
 fine passage in Resignation which enshrines another 
 
 view. It is too long to quote, but it illustrates his 
 
 poetic aim — and it belongs to his earliest poems. 
 
 The poet, to whose mighty heart 
 Heaven doth a quicker pulse impart, 
 Subdues that energy to scan 
 Not his own course, but that of man. 
 Though he move mountains, though his day 
 Be pass'd on the proud heights of sway, 
 Though he hath loosed a thousand chains, 
 Though he hath borne immortal pains. 
 Action and suffering though he know — 
 He hath not lived, if he lives so. 
 
 He sees the great ruler wisely sway the people, and 
 the just conquests of beauty, and the populous town ; 
 the whole movement of Hfe ; rejoices in it, but does 
 not say : / am alone. 
 
 He sees the gentle stir of birth 
 When morning purifies the earth ; 
 He leans upon a gate and sees 
 The pastures and the quiet trees. 
 
 * * * + « )|c 
 
 He gazes — tears 
 Are in his eyes, and in his ears 
 The murmur of a thousand years. 
 Before him he sees life unroll, 
 A placid and continuous whole — 
 That general life, which does not cease 
 Whose secret is not joy, but peace ; 
 That hfe, whose dumb wish is not miss'd 
 If birth proceeds, 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. 
 
 But that does not contain all he thought on the 
 
 matter. He tells in a sonnet of that young Italian 
 
 bride, lovely, gaily garmented, who, perishing in 
 
 an accident, was found to wear a robe of sackcloth 
 
 next her " smooth white skin." 
 
106 FOUR POETS 
 
 Such, poets, is your bride, the Muse I young, gay. 
 Radiant, adorn 'd outside ; a hidden ground 
 Of thought and of austerity within. 
 
 Again, we are told in the Epilogue to Lessings 
 Laocoon, the poet is to tell of Life's movement ; all of 
 it from source to close. It is Life's movement which 
 fascinates the poets. But it is too much for them to 
 bear or to tell. Only a gleam of it here and there can 
 they see, only now and then can they hear a murmur 
 of it ; not the whole light, not the full music. A few, 
 a very few, have seen and heard — Homer, Shake- 
 speare — and these are the greatest of mankind. 
 
 Again, Arnold says — the poet is a priest of the 
 wonder and bloom of the world. We see with his 
 eyes and are glad. But he does not see all. As 
 human life is wider than he, so Nature is greater, 
 vaster than the singer. Her mighty march moves 
 and win move on, when all our poetry of her is dead ; 
 nor can it ever express the thousandth part of her 
 over-brimming life. Yet if the poet love, he has 
 charm ; and to charm the heart of man, to loose our 
 heart in tears and joy, to give us the freshness of the 
 early world, to heal the soul, to make us see and feel 
 and know, — this is the poet's dignity and use. 
 
 But he takes another view. The poet is, by his 
 nature, alone, (and here the personaHty of Arnold 
 intrudes), and sohtude oppresses him. He flies from 
 the noise of. men which jars him. But can Life reach 
 him in the solitude, and he is to express Life ; and 
 fenced from the multitude, who will fence him from 
 himself ? He hears nothing then but the mountain 
 torrents and the beating of his own heart. Wherefore, 
 tormented in exile, he flies back into the world of men. 
 And there he is again unhappy. Absence from 
 himself (for in the turmoil of men he cannot hear 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 107 
 
 the voice of his soul) tortures him. Again he refuges 
 in silence, and again the air is too keen to breathe, 
 the loneUness unendurable. Thus, miserably bandied 
 to and fro, only death can heal the long disease of 
 his hfe. It is in that way that Arnold, in Empedocles, 
 paints the Thinker and the Poet, nor is it only in 
 Empedocles. It was a picture that he afterwards 
 changed for a brighter one ; but it represented truly 
 during periods of depression, his view of his own, 
 and of a poet's, hfe. 
 
 Of all these poems, written apart from himself, 
 one of the most delicately felt is the third part of the 
 Church of Brou, where the young prince and his 
 duchess he together, carved on their tomb ; and in 
 the silent night when the soft rain is on the roof, or 
 in the sunset when the rose and sapphire glories of 
 the great western window fall on pillar and pavement, 
 wake to cry — ^This is the bhss of Heaven, this is 
 eternity. That is a fair poem, but the most charming, 
 the most romantic, most in the world of the pure and 
 tender imagination is The Forsaken Merman. To 
 read it is to regret that he could not oftener escape 
 into that ideal region where, at least for a time, our 
 sorrows seem dreams, and the soul is healed of its 
 disease. Moreover, this poem is sweeter in melody 
 than most of his poems, as if his ear had been piurged 
 in that loftier and brighter air. There is nothing 
 stranger in a man who dwelt so much on excellence 
 in the poetic art, and who criticized failure in form 
 so sharply, than Arnold's inabihty to recognise the 
 harshness, the broken sounds, the want of harmony 
 in his own verse. How he could have left unchanged 
 verses so frequently out of tune I cannot under- 
 stand. His ear was not sensitive, but in the 
 
108 FOUR POETS 
 
 Forsaken Merman it was in tune'. It may be that it 
 derived this excellence from the good composition 
 of the piece. When the composition is good, the 
 melody of the verse is also good. One excellence 
 induces the other. And this may be said of the 
 Scholar Gipsy and of Thyrsis. They are both weU 
 composed, and the melody of the verse in them is 
 always good, and sometimes exquisite. 
 
 The mention of these two pieces brings me to the 
 elegiac poems. I have said that Arnold, having 
 sorrows at the root of his life, wrote with peculiar 
 excellence the elegy. To excel in the elegy is not 
 easy. Of course, it is easier to write than an Ode of 
 triumph or a Song of rapture like the Epithalamium 
 of Spenser ; but there are many pitfalls into which 
 a poet may fall in building an elegy, and into these 
 Arnold, being austere in thought and hating excess 
 as much as he loved temperance, and always mingling 
 thought with feeling, did not easily fall. There is a 
 severe beauty, an intellectual force, in these elegiac 
 poems which strengthens, as it intensifies, their 
 emotion, and is, as it were, the skeleton round which 
 imagination compacts their living body. 
 
 The first of these is Memorial Verses — written on 
 Wordsworth in 1850 — and they contrast his soothing, 
 healing power with Byron's force and Goethe's calm. 
 Few things have been better said, or with more 
 delightful finish, than these on the influence of 
 Wordsworth, and the roots of his power. Not quite 
 so well said, but said with more personal feeling 
 and with Arnold's long affection for the Lake country 
 made for the moment more tender by the death of 
 Wordsworth, are the verses in the beginning of the 
 poem, The Youth of Nature, where those strange lines 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 109 
 
 occur which say that the age can rear no more poets, 
 so bhnd Arnold was to the real significance of the time 
 in which he lived. 
 
 Then there are the verses on his father — Rugby 
 Chapel, 1857. They are written Uke the others 
 without rhjmie, in a form which Arnold often used, 
 and which can only be perfectly used by an artist 
 who, unUke Arnold, is a master of melody. Else 
 he falls into prose, or, being unlimited by the austere 
 rule of rhyme which ought to force concentration, 
 he lets his thought run more loosely than it should. 
 Into both these errors Arnold is sometimes betrayed 
 in these rhymeless verses. Yet the deep, controlled, 
 filial feeling with which he wrote this poem, and 
 the steadfast matter of thought concerning human 
 hfe which was born of the depth of his feeling, give 
 to it so great a sincerity and so serious a spirituality, 
 that no one can read it without being thrilled into 
 S3mipathy by its moral power, and by its pro- 
 phetic passion bettered in soul. It is an influence 
 for life ; and the close is noble — ^that close in which 
 he paints the worn and weary hosts of mankind 
 dispirited, scattered and lost in the waste, but up- 
 hfted, cheered and knit together by the great souls 
 he always thought so few, but who are many more 
 than he imagined — 
 
 Then in such hour of need 
 
 Of your fainting, dispirited race. 
 
 Ye, like angels, appear. 
 
 Radiant with ardour divine ! 
 
 Beacons of hope, ye appear ! 
 
 Languor is not in your heart, 
 
 Weakness is not in your word. 
 
 Weariness not on your brow, 
 
 Ye alight in our van ! at your voice, 
 
 Panic, despair, flee away, 
 
 Ye move tiirough the ranks, recall 
 
110 FOUR POETS 
 
 The stragglers, refresh the outworn, 
 Praise, re-inspire the brave I 
 Order, courage, return. 
 Eyes rekindling, and prayers. 
 Follow your steps as ye go. 
 Ye fill up the gaps in our files. 
 Strengthen the wavering line, 
 'StabUsh, continue our march, 
 On, to the bound of the waste. 
 On, to the City of God. 
 
 The poem on the Bronte's, Haworth Churchyard, 
 is scarcely up to the level of its subject, but that on 
 Heine is of a different and a finer quahty. It does 
 not seize the whole of Heine, but it touches his youth 
 and its happiness with grace, and his manhood, in 
 its mockery and agony, with so sympathetic a pity 
 that the very censure seems part of the pity. The 
 misery of Heine's life made most impression on Arnold, 
 and he seems to trace it to an inborn root of bitter- 
 ness. He quotes, with approval, Goethe's phrase 
 concerning some poet, and applies it to Heine, " that 
 he had every other gift, but wanted love," love which 
 is " the foimtain of charm — charm, the glory that 
 makes the song of the poet divine." And in a 
 'strange close to his poem — ^in a thought of which 
 Arnold seems to think far more highly than he ought 
 to think, for it is intolerably fantastic — ^he makes 
 Heine to be the incarnation of a momentary bitter 
 mood of the Spirit of the world. 
 
 The Spirit of the world. 
 
 Beholding the absurdity of men — 
 
 Their vaunts, their feats — let a sardonic smile 
 
 For one short moment, wander o'er his lips. 
 
 That smile was Heine I — for its earthly hour 
 
 The strange guest sparkled ; now 'tis pass'd away. 
 
 This is not as true as he thinks. Heine was much 
 more than that. Far more than half of his bitter- 
 ness was bom of lovingness the fulness of which he 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 111 
 
 could not exercise, of natural and excusable feeling 
 against his terrible fate. He cried aloud at it ; the 
 poet must speak ; but, in reality, no man could have 
 borne that fate more resolutely, nor did he lose love 
 in it. Nor could Arnold, when he wrote these lines, 
 have known the poems where Heine's better soul 
 went forth to feel with man and to fight man's battle, 
 to stand as a lonely sentinel when he could fight no 
 more, and to die alone, in the night at his outpost, 
 for the cause of the whole army. I cannot quote the 
 whole of one poem, the Enfant perdu, but here are 
 the first and the last verses — 
 
 Verlor'ner Posten in dem Freiheitskriege, 
 
 Hielt ich seit dreissig Jahren treuUch aus. \ 
 
 Ich kampte ohne Hoffnung, dass ich siege, 
 
 Ich wusste, nie komm'ich gesund nach Haus. 
 
 Eia Posten ist vacant ! — Die Wunden klafien — 
 Der Eine fallt, die Audern riicken nach — 
 Doch fall'ich unbesiegt, und meine Waffen 
 Sind nicht gebrochen — Nur mein Herze brach. 
 
 And now I touch on the two best poems he wrote^ 
 the Scholar Gipsy and Thyrsis. Both are engaged 
 with Clough, and they are suffused throughout with 
 the tenderness of that deep friendship between man 
 and man, which, begun in youth, keeps in it the 
 purple light of youth ; which, continued in man- 
 hood, wins the strength of the love which perseveres 
 through sad experience, and the beauty which is 
 bom of, and nourished by, associated memories. 
 These fill the poems with sweet emotion, enfold them 
 in an air of tenderness. Then, though in this tender- 
 ness of friendship he has escaped from self-considera- 
 tion, yet they are filled with thought concerning the 
 time they had both Uved through, the needs of their 
 age and its remedies. In this region, on which I 
 
112 FOUR POETS 
 
 must dwell further, the poems ought to be read 
 together. They illustrate and supplement one 
 another ; and whatever is said, both in retrospect 
 and prospect, however different may be the momen- 
 tary turn of thought, all is brought into unity by the 
 pervasiveness of the onp emotion of memorial and 
 loving friendship. 
 
 Then, too, another emotion fills the verse — ^that 
 love of Oxford as the home of his youthful heart, as 
 the nurse of intellect, the mother of fine causes, the 
 teacher and cherisher of the wisdom and beauty of 
 the ancients, the lover of the masters of humane 
 learning and art. That flows through these poems, 
 and is supported by so rich a local colour that not 
 even Tennyson has ever laid more fully a whole 
 countryside before us. From every field and hilltop- 
 crowned with trees we see Oxford in the verse, her 
 ancient colleges, her " dreaming spires," lovely in 
 her peace, romantic in her memories, classic in her 
 thought. Over every hill we wander in the verse, 
 in the well-known woods, through the quiet villages, 
 in the deep meadows where the flowers love their 
 life, by the flowing of the Thames; in poetry so 
 happy and so loving that each name strikes itself 
 into a landscape before our eyes. And to add to 
 the charm, Arnold has filled the landscape with 
 humanity and its work, with shepherd and reaper, 
 gipsies and scholars, hunters and oarsmen, dancing 
 maidens and wandering youths, among whom, alive 
 and gay, Thyrsis and the Scholar Gipsy, and a 
 meditative Arnold, alive and serious, move and 
 speak of the true aims, the just ideas, the grave 
 conduct, of human Ufe. The picture is delightful, 
 and the urging power of it is love — the life-long 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 113 
 
 love of an Oxford scholar for the shelter and inspira- 
 tion of his youth. In no poems that Arnold wrote 
 is his natural description better than it is in these. 
 
 His natural description to- which I now turn, 
 is always vivid, pictorial, accurate, done, to use 
 his own phrase, with his eye on the subject. The 
 adjectives which he chooses so carefully are so apt 
 and striking that they have the force of facts. What 
 can better words like these — 
 
 So have I heard the cuckoo's parting cry. 
 From the wet field, through the vext garden trees. 
 Come with the volleying rain and tossing breeze : 
 
 or these from Dover Beach — 
 
 The sea is calm to-night. 
 
 The tide is full, the moon lies fair 
 
 Upon the straits ; on the French coast the light 
 
 Gleams and is gone ; the cliSs of England stand. 
 
 Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. 
 
 Come to the window, sweet is the night air I 
 
 Only, from the long line of spray 
 
 When the sea meets the moon-blanch'd land. 
 
 Listen 1 you hear the grating roar 
 
 Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling 
 
 At their return, up the high strand. 
 
 Begin and cease, and then again begin. 
 
 With tremulous cadence slow, and bring 
 
 The eternal note of sadness in. 
 
 This, as accurate as it is poetical, is finer but not 
 truer — with " its melancholy, long, withdrawing 
 roar " — than Tennyson's verse, describing the same 
 thin^ — 
 
 The scream of a maddened beach dragged down by the 
 wave. 
 
 At least, it enables Arnold to make a more human 
 use of the natural fact than Tennyson could have 
 done. Tennyson's phrase makes the sea and the 
 stones of the beach be and feel like men, and, having 
 
 9— (Z278) 
 
114 FOVR POETS 
 
 done so, he cannot use them as illustrating the large 
 
 movement of human life. But Arnold seeing and 
 
 hearing them as pure nature, not humanized nature, 
 
 transfers the scene into an image of the spiritual 
 
 hfe of man ; and with an imagination and force 
 
 which, by their passion, reach splendour of thought 
 
 and diction. This is a frequent way of his with 
 
 Nature, and no one has done it better in English 
 
 poetry. I quote it. 
 
 -— Vxhe Sea of Faith 
 
 "9^^^nce^"loo7at the full, and round Earth's shore 
 
 Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd. 
 
 But now I only hear 
 
 Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar. 
 
 Retreating, to the breath 
 
 Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear 
 
 And naked shingles of the world. 
 
 Always it is the same in his poetry of nature. __He 
 describes the thing he sees, flower or bird, stream or 
 hiU, exactly asTEey are, without humanizing them, 
 without veihng them with any sentiment of their 
 own, without having concerning nature any philoso- 
 phy that spiritu^izes nature as the form of Tliought 
 or Love, any beKef that she is alive or dwelt in by 
 nvihg beings. Nature to Arnold is frequently the 
 nature that modern science has revealed to us — 
 matter in motion, taking an inconceivable variety 
 of form, but always, in its variety, acting rigidly 
 according to certain ways, which, for want of a wiser 
 term, we call laws. For the first time this view of 
 Nature enters into English poetry with Arnold. He 
 sees the loveliness of her doings, but he also sees their 
 terror and dreadfulness and their relentlessness. But 
 what in his poetry he chiefly sees is the peace of 
 Nature's obedience to law, and the everlasting youth 
 of her unchanging life. 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 115 
 
 IJe contrasts her calm with oiir turmoil, her quiet 
 changes of action day after day, her rest after action, 
 with our hurry, our confusion, and our noise. Calm 
 soul of things, he cries, make me calm, let the human 
 world, like thee, perfect its vast issues " in toil 
 unsevered from tranquillity." Again, he contrasts 
 the immortal life of nature with our decay and death. 
 That life existed before us, will exist after us, fulfilling 
 pauselessly its pure eternal course. Oh, he cries, 
 to be alone with that intense hfe, and in its youth- 
 fulness, to be dear, composed, refreshed, ennobled ; to 
 have its steadfast joy! Calm, with life, that was 
 the ideal he drew from Nature.* 
 Then, he also contrasts her joy and freedom with 
 , the sorrow and the slavery of our struggle towards 
 any perfection. She obeys law silently and therefore 
 is free. We do not obey, or we resent the law, and 
 suffering from its rigid restrictions, are enslaved by it. 
 This is the motive of a great number of passages in 
 Arnold's poems. In this view of Nature, he has slipped 
 out of his view of her as seen by science. Science 
 could not talk of the joy or freedom of nature. And 
 indeed, he was not faithful to the scientific view of her. 
 His conception of her wavered with his mood. He 
 
 * Once he drew from this a strange corollary. Such vast 
 life, ever evolving new things and old things in new shapes, 
 may bring us (who are in that life) back hereafter into 
 another conscious life^-may even bring together again in 
 better circumstance those who have been together here in 
 sadness and pain. At least, so I read the meaning of a 
 curious epilogue to Haworth Churchyard. 
 
 Unquiet souls ! 
 
 — In the dark fermentation of earth, 
 
 In the never idle workshop of nature, 
 
 In the eternal movement, 
 
 Ye shall find yourselves again ! 
 
116 FOUR POETS 
 
 sometimes, in a sort of reversion to Wordsworth, 
 
 speaks of her as powerful to help him, as having, 
 
 hke a mother, the heart to help him. He appeals 
 
 to her to fill him with the heahng quaUties he vainly 
 
 imputes to her. He is happily inconsequent in his 
 
 conceptions of her. 
 
 For example, there is a half-outlined conception 
 
 of nature, quite different from the rest, which 
 
 obscurely appears in a poem entitled Morality. He 
 
 seems to imagine that behind nature there is a 
 
 self-harmonious, self-conscious Life, as it were a 
 
 Demiourgos, who, putting the thoughts of the Eternal 
 
 Intelligence into form, has made the Universe and 
 
 the intelligent beings who inhabit it, and therefore, 
 
 being in nature and in man as thought, can bring 
 
 them into communion and cause nature to work and 
 
 feel with man ; and the lines which close A Summer 
 
 Night seem to be filled with that idea — 
 
 Ye heavens, whose piire dark regions have no sign 
 
 Of languor, though so calm, and though so great. 
 
 Are yet untroubled and unpassionate ; 
 
 Who, though so noble, share in the world's toil. 
 
 And, though so task'd, keep free from dust and soil ! 
 
 I will not say that your mUd deeps retain 
 
 A tinge, it maybe, of their silent pain 
 
 Who have long'd deeply once, and long'd in vain. 
 
 This thought which I suggest he conceived, is in 
 these lines obscure and wandering. It takes a clearer, 
 indeed another, consistency in Morality. Nature 
 there, in her freedom and joy, looks on our agony, 
 and, while we think she censures or despises our strife, 
 does really nothing of the kind, but, on the contrary, 
 is emotionalized by it, set into self-wonder and 
 questioning by it. Did I ever feel, she asks, the 
 eagerness to perfection, to realisation of thought in 
 form, which gives to men that earnest air ? 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 117 
 
 See, on her face a glow is spread, 
 A strong emotion on her cheek I 
 
 " Ah, child ! " she cries, " that strife divine. 
 Whence was it, for it is not mine ? 
 
 " There is no efiort on my brow — 
 I do not strive, I do not weep ; 
 I rush with the swift spheres and glow 
 In joy, and when I wUl, I sleep. 
 Yet that severe, that earnest air, 
 I saw, I felt it once — ^but where ? 
 
 " I knew not yet the gauge of time. 
 Nor wore the manacles of space ; 
 I felt it in some other clime, 
 I saw it in some other place. 
 'Twas when the heavenly house I trod. 
 And lay upon the breast of God." 
 
 This self-conscious communion of Nature with her 
 own heart, this questioning of her own being in 
 contrast with man's being, this dim remembrance 
 of herself elsewhere, hold in them a philosophic idea 
 of Nature we do not find elsewhere in the poets, 
 and the philosophic imagination is charmed to play 
 with it. It seems as if Arnold thought of the creative 
 Logos, by whose being outward nature is and con- 
 tinues, as able to pass back momentarily from his 
 existence in the natural world, which is subject 
 to the conceptions of time and space, to a remem- 
 brance of the eternity when there was neither time 
 nor space to him, when there was no material universe 
 into which he had shaped the thoughts of God, when 
 he was himself the Logos in God as yet unexpressed 
 in form, but desiring eagerly towards form. This is 
 Arnold playing with the obscure conceptions of 
 Neoplatonism. 
 
 Again, he puts into two poems, the Youth of Nature 
 and the Youth of Man, his contrast of the everlasting 
 Life of Nature with the decay and fleeting of our hfe. 
 The beauty, charm, romance we feel in Nature, are 
 
118 FOUR POETS 
 
 they, he asks, in Nature or in the poet ? In Nature, 
 he answers, and far more than in the poet ; the 
 singer is less than his theme. They were in the 
 poet when he was conscious of the immeasurable 
 glory of Nature's life. And what they were in 
 him no pencil could ever paint, no verse could ever 
 fully tell. The depth, the force, the joy, sadness, and 
 longing of them which in youth he felt were Nature's 
 depth, force, joy, sadness, and longing ; and only a 
 shred of them could he ever put into all his verse. 
 Yes, cries Nature, when all the poets who, because 
 they were part of me, thought that my life was theirs, 
 are dead dust, I remain as hving, as young as ever. 
 This is the law. Nature, rich and full in us when 
 we are young, we think to have no life but that which 
 we give her. But as years pass by, our energy fails, 
 and, hke fools, we think our decay is a decay in Nature. 
 But she watches us, silent and contemptuous. Her 
 hving beauty never sees our corruption. Therefore, 
 cries Arnold, while we are able, get into vital union 
 with the calm, and obedience and life of Nature, order 
 the soul into the spirit of her life — 
 
 Sink, O youth, in thy soul ! 
 Yearn to the greatness of Nature ; 
 Rally the good in the depths of thyself I 
 
 That is his conclusion. It would not be mine 
 from the premises, and it belongs to that part of 
 Arnold's thinking which he derived from stoicism. 
 It were better to rise out of one's soul into love of 
 the soul of the world, to lose oneself in its beauty 
 and joy and peace by self-forgetfulness, to see the 
 perfect good outside of one's self, and spring off one's 
 own shadow into union with the infinite Hght. No 
 man can change his yearning to the greatness of 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 119 
 
 Nature into possession of that greatness who is sunk 
 
 in his personal soul. But outside of that prison, 
 
 ravished by the love of the perfect — ^he retains in 
 
 decay, in old age, in death, not the misery Arnold 
 
 paints in the poem, but delight and life, even rapture. 
 
 I say no more of his poetry of Nature. I pass to 
 
 his poetry of man, and here I must risk repetition, 
 
 and take up, in this new connection, poems on which 
 
 I have already written. He cared for the beauty of 
 
 the natural world, but he cared far more for the 
 
 landscape of the soul of man. It was at first the 
 
 landscape of his own soul — ^its rivers, its buried life. 
 
 The hills where his life rose 
 Aud the sea where it goes, 
 
 the voices which called it in the night, of which he 
 first wrote with his serious stoic passion. But the 
 time came when the landscape of the soul of the 
 world, of humanity at large, engaged him far more 
 than that of the Uttle world within him. He sang 
 of man's history in the past, but chiefly of his own 
 age and country, and of the battle for life and God 
 in which he moved ; yet, even now, he still remained 
 more of an interested spectator than of a fighter. 
 It was only when he gave up verse that he became 
 a warrior hotly engaged in the fray. But whether 
 spectator or not, it is when he is writing not about 
 himself but about the soul of man travailing through 
 its foes to the City of God that he is at his best as 
 a poet. The larger subject makes the lovelier verse, 
 when one is a poet at all. Even in the earhest poems, 
 as in Resignation and in the passion of Philomela, 
 he began, as also in some of the sonnets of that time, 
 to look out beyond himself over the world of man. 
 The close of Dover Beach marks how despairing and 
 
120 FOUR POETS 
 
 pitiful was sometimes that outlook. The world, he 
 
 says, 
 
 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 at night. 
 
 Then, in another mood, hope for the world emerges 
 at the close of that noble and frowning poem, A 
 Summer Night. And then, changing again, he can 
 stand apart, and give advice to the confused and 
 toiling world. The New Age bids men keep reverence 
 for the past, and Progress bids them keep religion. 
 Guard the fire within, lest the heart of humanity 
 perish of cold. The Future, a poem as full of imagina- 
 tion as of thought, paints first all that man has lost 
 of the insight, the freshness, the calm, the vigour of Ufe 
 which filled the past ; and then, the hoarse roar of 
 the present, the huge cities, the black confusion 
 of trade, the peacelessness. What was before man 
 neglects, of what shall succeed he has no knowledge. 
 But haply, the river of Time, as it grows, may gain, 
 not the earlier calm, but a solemn quiet of its own ; 
 and as it draws to the Ocean, may, at last, allure peace 
 to the soul of man out of the infinite sea into which 
 it flows. 
 
 This is a higher, a more hopeful strain ; and it is 
 continued and strengthened in the Elegiac Poems. 
 I have said something of them already, but more 
 must now be said. I dwell now on their deep interest 
 in the hfe and history of humanity. Their poetry, 
 with a few lyric exceptions, is the best he wrote. 
 They are weighty with interesting, novel, masculine 
 and often surprising thought. They extend their 
 sjmipathy over wide areas of history and are in close 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 121 
 
 contact also with the Umited time in which he lived. 
 
 They contain admirable drawings of men and women 
 
 whom he admired and loved ; of their characters 
 
 and their influence on the world. Weighted with 
 
 grave cind clear thought, their imagination moves 
 
 with power, and with a grace which results from the 
 
 power. It grasps the higher nature of one division of 
 
 the human race, as in these celebrated hues which 
 
 describe the Orient when Rome had ceased to disturb 
 
 it ; yet the phrase is only partly true — 
 
 She let the legions thunder past, 
 And plunged in thought again. 
 
 With as much forceful insight, when he pictures the 
 
 scholar gipsy flying from the fevered world and 
 
 pursuing still the unreachable ideal, he describes 
 
 another whole class of men. And with the insight 
 
 and the force of it, what beauty of words, what 
 
 intimate love of the lovely world ! 
 
 Still nursing the unconquerable hope, 
 
 Still clutching^ the inviolable shade. 
 With a free, onward impulse brushing through, 
 
 By night, the silver'd branches of the glade — 
 Far on the forest-skirts, where none pursue. 
 
 On some mild pastoral slope 
 Emerge, and resting on the moonlit pales 
 
 Freshen thy flowers as in former years 
 
 With dew, or listen with enchanted ears. 
 From the dark dingles, to the nightingales. 
 
 I rejoice to feel in these elegies, the delicate, 
 sensitive art, the careful strength which, combined 
 with a winning grace and serious love of quiet beauty, 
 affect the soul as a still, fair autumn Italian day in 
 lands full of human history affects the senses. 
 Quietude, power, beauty and tenderness pervade 
 them. 
 
 The appreciations of Byron, Goethe and Words- 
 worth, which in a poem on Obermann he carries 
 
122 FOUR POETS 
 
 further, are not only good in themselves, but ihey 
 are applied to the story of man, and to the criticism 
 of the time in which he hved. And the tenderness 
 and gratitude with which he remembers the work of 
 Wordsworth pass into gratitude to him for the healing 
 which his verse has brought to the heart of man. 
 A greater tenderness, a deeper reverence, a personal 
 love and honour fiU, as with sweet waters, the verses 
 to his father's memory. But they also pass from 
 personal feeling into feeling for the fates of man. 
 What is the course of the life, he asks, of mortal men 
 on the earth ? Most men eddy about, blindly strive, 
 achieve nothing, and perish. But some a thirst 
 unquenchable fires, and they move to a clear goal ; 
 and of these he writes in a noble and imaginative 
 passage, with a splendour of description. Only one 
 out of many pilgrims reaches the desolate inn and 
 the gaunt landlord on the ridge of the snow-clad pass. 
 The rest have perished. But his father would not be 
 saved alone, but gave his life to bring those that were 
 lost safe to the goal. And from this he passes to 
 describe in lofty phrase those others, servants and 
 sons of God, through whom it is that mankind still 
 has faith and strength enough to march on to the City 
 of God. This is indeed a change from the days when 
 he only thought of his own soul. 
 
 Then the famous passage in the poem on Heine's 
 Grave on the Titan toil of England shows how he 
 felt beyond himself the building pains of a nation. 
 This dignified passage is hghtened and enlightened 
 by his delicate description of Heine's youth and his 
 sympathy with his joy; and finally all the poem is 
 made to thrill with its final thought concerning aU 
 humanity (thrown back from the end into all that 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 123 
 
 precedes it — ) that the Spirit in whom man exists 
 has made each of us the revealer of one or more of 
 His thoughts, discloses through us the infinite variety 
 of His Being. It is a leading thought of Fichte's, a 
 thought that arises in many, and that arose, I have 
 no doubt uncommunicated, in the soul of Arnold. 
 
 The Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse repre- 
 sent, as I have already said, a partial reaction 
 from the wider, brighter view he now takes of the 
 world to the trouble of his own life and spirit ; but 
 as they develop, they also pass from self-considera- 
 tion into consideration of the fate of the world of 
 men, and of those who shared in and were broken by 
 the Strife. Ah, he thinks at the close, with that 
 constantly recurring thought of his in which so much 
 of his inner life and of ours is hidden, let the new 
 world thunder on its noisy triumph and use its powers, 
 be proud of its turbulent hfe or oi its eternal trifling 
 — ^yet there are a few who would in quiet take their 
 bent towards "unwearied pursuit of the perfect, who 
 like Glanvil have " one aim, one business, one desire," 
 who wait in joyous unconcern for the celestial light ; 
 and they, in these unthinking days, are the refuge 
 and Hght of the world. 
 
 Then the two poems to Senancour, the writer of 
 Obermann, mingle their personal and self-revealing 
 verse with so wide a human interest that in all who 
 read them a hundred questions rise — of their own soul, 
 of the age in which they live, and of the fates of man. 
 On the great difference of the second from the first I 
 have already written, but I may dwell here on their 
 charm — charm of grave thought, ranging far and wide, 
 charm of happy word and phrase, and charm of 
 natural description. The very atmosphere of that 
 
124 FOUR POETS 
 
 lovely land, where so many hearts have been healed, 
 the flower-haunted meadows, the shimmering lake 
 below, the blue hills, the far-off snows — is in the 
 loving verse, and it is mingled with the soul of 
 Arnold and Obermann, till each mountain slope 
 and every flower upon them, and the waves of 
 the lake as they break on the shore, are of men, and 
 through men, and in men. 
 
 Of all these elegies, the Scholar Gipsy and Thyrsis 
 are the most dehghtful, dehghtful even though their 
 subject be sad. I have dwelt on the tenderness of 
 their sadness. I have not dwelt on their contempla- 
 tive beauty. They are pervaded by that retired 
 contemplation of life a man may have who, flying 
 from the storm of cities for a brief holiday, thinks the 
 brief time into an eternity, and in the eternal 
 hermitage of his soul muses on earth and human life. 
 
 These poems reach excellence, that rare thing 
 Arnold himself loves so much, to whose lonely sum- 
 mit, the artist, clinibing through rocks and mist, so 
 seldom can attain. They are pure poetry, moving 
 in a dance, serious and bright, graceful and grave in 
 turn, to the Dorian pipe, " the Dorian strain." 
 The soft recorders accompany the pastoral the 
 idyllic song, wise with thought, happy with noble 
 phrase, filled with accurate and loving description 
 of nature ; and in it hves from line to Une the 
 contemplation of humanity. 
 
 Virgil and Theocritus have been infused into their 
 manner and their verse, nor has Lycidas been quite 
 forgotten. Yet they are not imitative ; the atmo- 
 sphere, the thought, the music and the subject are 
 Arnold's own. Although this classic echo is heard 
 in them, they are modern, of the tempestuous age 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 125 
 
 when they were written by one who, while he wrote 
 them, looked on the tempest, but for their meditative 
 hour was not tossed upon its waves. Some of the 
 classic episodes seem a little out of place, especially 
 that of the Tyrian trader and the Grecian coaster 
 at the end of the Scholar Gipsy, but we are glad to 
 forgive this for the sake of their charm. Indeed, 
 whenever Arnold's poetry touches Greece, we meet an 
 especial music and grace ; but nowhere is this clear, 
 lovely and sweet air so lucid and so pure as in the 
 classic scenery and Uf e which glide in and out of these 
 two elegies. Oxford, while we read, seems not far 
 away from the flowers of Enna or the silent stream 
 of Mantua, nor is the wandering student then surprised 
 to hear Theocritus piping near the Ifiley mill, or see, 
 as he passes by, Virgil dreaming under the shade of 
 the Fyfield tree. 
 
 But Glanvil's scholar, the gipsy-hearted wanderer, V 
 a shy shade that comes and goes, who loves the lovely, 
 quiet world, pursuing ever the ineffable, is brought, 
 in a beautiful variety, into contrast with Arnold's 
 own life, and with the feverish life of his time. Beyond 
 the elegiac cry is the greater cry of humanity. Thyrsis, 
 too, closes with the same personal, ever-recurring 
 strain. Thyrsis loved the country, so did I. He felt 
 the storm of his world and went to meet it. It was 
 too much for him and he died. 
 
 Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go ? 
 
 But I was forced into the world. The way is long 
 and the Alps of truth unclimbable. I too am going ; 
 but I wander on, like the shy Scholar, like Thjrsis, on 
 the quest. The light we sought is shining still. 
 
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 
 
 In the course of the history of all the arts, and per- 
 haps most plainly in the history of poetry, similar 
 conditions recur, not in particulars, but in general 
 outline. The different circumstances of each age 
 naturally modify the conditions away from accurate 
 similarity, but in the main development of the art, 
 a time comes when it follows lines resembling those 
 it has previously followed, and this analogous con- 
 dition has been produced by similar causes. I have 
 already in other places noticed such a similarity 
 between the creation of a literary poetry — to use an 
 inadequate term — ^by Keats, and that of a similar 
 kind of poetry by Rossetti and Morris. Both poetries 
 have little to do with the age in which they were 
 written. They reject, on the whole, the present 
 and abide in the past. Their subjects are not the 
 subjects of their day, nor are they influenced to any 
 great extent by the thoughts or emotions of the 
 world around them. Their main desire is to live out- 
 side of that world, to assimilate a different realm 
 of thought and feeling, to find beauty as she was in 
 the past not as she seems to be in the present, to live 
 in the imagined not in the actual world ; and yet 
 to keep the imagined world true to the main lines of 
 nature and human nature. " Let us escape," they 
 cry, " into a lovelier earth, a purer air, a simpler and 
 more natural life." 
 
 We can trace, in the middle of the nineteenth 
 century, the beginnings of such a cry in Arnold's 
 passing endeavour to find his subjects in Greek, 
 126 
 
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 127 
 
 Norse and mediaeval story, in his reiterated longing 
 for beauty and calm, apart from the noise of warring 
 thought and low desires. We have looked back to 
 the time when in the fifties and sixties of the last 
 century the old faiths and theories of hf e were thrown 
 into the hissing furnace of scientific and historical 
 criticism, and no one knew what would emerge when 
 the amalgam had cooled. We have seen how this ' 
 confused world, and the tossed world of his own 
 heart, were too much for Arnold. He could not 
 escape from the trouble when he was young. He 
 never quite escaped from it. But Rossetti did, and 
 so did Morris. 
 
 The history of their poetry repeats the history of 
 the poetry of Keats. It had no connexion with the 
 thoughts concerning man and the war around them 
 which so deeply influenced poetry from Blake to 
 Shelley. The ideas Shelley sought to revive, those 
 also which Bj^ron drove at the heads of men, made the 
 slightest possible impression on Keats. He does 
 not, on the whole, seem to be aware of their existence. 
 The controversies, furies and passions which had 
 collected round them in the realms of social, poli- 
 tical and religious thought, and which had lashed 
 Byron and Shelley into poetic rage, were to him, if 
 ever he deigned to be conscious of them, weariness 
 and vexation of spirit. And the condition of the 
 England in which he lived and of which he said, 
 " Glory and loveliness have passed away," gave him 
 no impulse. He did not go to Italy or Greece in the 
 body, but he fled thither in the spirit. He sought 
 loveliness and young ardours in fable, in love's 
 world of myth, legend and tale. There, he thought, 
 beauty lies asleep, and I will be the young prince who 
 
128 FOUR POETS 
 
 shall awake her. And through the deep undergrowth 
 not of the briar-rose, but of thorn and thistle, hem- 
 lock and darnel, his fervid spirit pierced its way. 
 He kissed the princess and she awoke to Hfe. Together 
 they brought forth a new poetry. It was a lovely 
 child, but, unsupported, unnourished by any emotion 
 of the present, only living in the past, it never married 
 itself to any vital power in the England of its day, 
 and it had then no children. It was an episode in the 
 great epic of poetry ; and when the new movement, 
 about 1832, began with Tennyson and Browning 
 it did not foUow Keats into the beauty of the past ; 
 it knit itself to the living emotions and ideas of the 
 present. For England had then, as I have already 
 noticed in this book, awakened to fresh thought and 
 national passion, to new ideas and their attendant 
 emotions ; and out of these proceeded powers of 
 action which ran like fire through the whole body of 
 men and women who loved thoughts, and thought 
 out what they loved. 
 
 That is a slight sketch of the history of the poetry 
 of Keats. I have elsewhere expanded it, and do not 
 wish to repeat it. A similar history now unfolded 
 itself. By 1853, when Rossetti had finished the 
 poems which we find in his first volume, the ideas 
 and their impelling emotions which had begun to 
 shape themselves clearly in 1830, which had awakened 
 in England a political, religious 'and social movement, 
 and which, by their passion, had stirred Browning, 
 Tennyson and others to write poetry — ^were subjected 
 to continual attacks, rapidly developing through the 
 following years, from historical criticism and science. 
 Doubt, especially in the case of the reUgious ideas, 
 collected round them. So far as the history of 
 
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 129 
 
 poetry is concerned, the struggle took place over 
 
 religious conceptions, both those held by the orthodox, 
 
 and by the more liberal theologians. The ideas 
 
 accepted with joy from the school of which Newman 
 
 was the moving force, or from the school which 
 
 Maurice may be said to have founded, were now 
 
 denied or at least subjected to a cold investigation. 
 
 And what had been their beauty was stained, 
 
 till there was little or no pleasure and peace left 
 
 in them for the imagination. Tennyson and 
 
 Browning, however, would not let their spiritual 
 
 essence go. Browning did not descend into the arena 
 
 at all, nor was he one whit disturbed by the noise 
 
 of the contest. He went quietly on, reaUzing his 
 
 own soul and what it had to say. Tennyson did 
 
 enter into the fight, and was somewhat disturbed by 
 
 it. In Memoriam, pubhshed in 1850, records what 
 
 he thought of it during the years between 1842 and 
 
 50. Later on, his description of that dim grim 
 
 battle in the West where Arthur died, himself in 
 
 doubt, and where friend and foe were shadows in the 
 
 mist. 
 
 And friend slew friend, not knowing whom he slew, 
 And some had visions out of golden youth, 
 And some beheld the faces of old ghosts 
 Look in upon the battle 
 
 was his record of this time, and aU it meant for those 
 who, in its war, stiU held to their standards. Nor 
 indeed, when he wrote the Passing of Arthur, was 
 his own soul freed from the agony of the battle. 
 Nevertheless, he did not give way. Like St. Paul, 
 " cast down but not destroyed," there were certain 
 heights of faith and thought in his secret soul to which, 
 undismayed, and unheeding of the confused strife, 
 he retired when he pleased. But the others — down 
 
 10 — (2278) 
 
130 FOUR POETS 
 
 in the heat of the contest, on the burning sand — ^we 
 have seen in what a condition they were in the poetry 
 of Clough and Arnold. Misery and restlessness ; 
 changing and divided thoughts ; doubts and longing 
 for peace and calm ; nothing left but duty ; faith 
 retired to her interlunar cave ; the noise and confusion 
 of the battle driving men distracted who cared for the 
 ancient ideals ; even among those who had no poetic 
 instincts a certain vague distress ; beauty gone, 
 ugliness and tumtilt filling the world of thought. 
 And in common life, materialism growing ; conven- 
 tions and maxims again tyrannizing over society ; 
 art, creation, imagination, and truth utterly gone 
 out of it. This was the state of things even in 1847 
 when Rossetti began to write poetry, much more in 
 1853 when his first poems were finished, still more in 
 the sixties of the last century. 
 
 It was a state of things which the artist nature 
 rebelled against, as, not in identical but in similar 
 circumstances, Keats had rebelled. A whole tribe 
 of young men, to whom Rossetti and the Pre-Raphael- 
 ite movement and afterwards Morris, Bume-Jones 
 and others, gave expression, were wesiry to death 
 of all the turmoil round subjects which (as they were 
 presented to them at the moment) did not interest 
 them at all, much less excite or impel them. All that 
 Arnold wrote about with so much intensity, all the 
 waters of thought in which he struggled, were as 
 little to them as all the ideas which Byron and Shelley 
 wrote of were to Keats. They broke away from 
 them, like Keats, into another world — a new world 
 of beauty and art. 
 
 The theological contests were outside of their 
 theology which was concerned, when it existed, and 
 
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 131 
 
 for a time it did exist, not with doctrine and its battles, 
 but with the inner mystic relation between the per- 
 sonal soul and the divine, between the saints, angels 
 and spirits of the universe and their own spirit here 
 on earth. They were, in their early career, and 
 especially Rossetti, mystics by nature and grace. 
 Doubts did not trouble them at all. They either 
 believed or disbeUeved. Historical criticism and 
 science bored them to extinction. They cried 
 " Away with these follies and phantasms. That 
 which actually is, is not in them. They are in the 
 apparent, not the real world. Why should we walk 
 through their mud and lade ourselves with their 
 thick clay ? The constancy of energy, the correlation 
 of physical forces, natural selection, the struggle for 
 existence, the descent of man, whether the Bible 
 be infallible or not — if it be beautiful and instil 
 peace is all we care for — are outside our world. For 
 us, they might as well be discussed in Sirius. Let 
 us get away from this vain disquiet to quiet, from 
 futile argument to fruitful contemplation, from 
 materialism to the spiritucil, from this ugly world 
 to a beautiful one, from theological squabbles to 
 religious symbols, from fighting sects to the invisible 
 Church, from Sciente and its quarrels to the great 
 creations of imagination, from convention to truth 
 in art, from imitation of dead forms of art to Nature 
 herself. Let us leave a world, noisy, base through 
 money-seeking, torn and confused with physical and 
 mental ugHness, worried with dry criticism of history 
 and futile contentions of doctrine, to the realm of 
 pure faith, or, if we cannot or do not care to believe, 
 to that pure image of beauty which we see once more 
 rising from the Sea of Time. And for that we will 
 
132 FOUR POETS 
 
 turn back to the bygone centuries, to their thought 
 and their work, to a world noble, lovely, joyous, 
 full of passionate subjects, close to Nature, thrilling 
 with possibiUties for the imagination ; a world which 
 believed in a spiritual hfe ; which understood how 
 to love, how to forgive, how to live in honour, how 
 to despise wealth for beauty's sake ; and which, 
 inspired by great thoughts and yielding itself to 
 natural passion and its joy, created with intelligent 
 rapture, and day by day, beautiful things in all the 
 arts. 
 
 Such was the spirit of these men and such their 
 outlook on the world. It was a spirit and an outlook 
 similar (except in its somewhat transient rehgious 
 or mystic turn) to the spirit and outlook of Keats. 
 And it is well that we should know, — and especially 
 those who think sceptical criticism so vitsdly impor- 
 tant, and science and its discoveries and the analytic 
 intellect with its nose on facts, the master-powers 
 of the world at whose footstool all should bow; 
 and conclusions established by pure reasoning 
 as the only truths ; — ^that there are still a whole 
 class of men in this manifold world of ours who 
 do not care one straw for all these matters ; to 
 whom the talk about them and their discoveries 
 are practically non-existent in thought ; who would 
 not be very sorry if they were all forgotten ; who 
 live outside of them altogether, and think them 
 needless ; who abhor the money-making side of them ; 
 and who beheve that they are Ukely to do serious 
 damage — as long as they are unbalanced by the 
 things which make for imagination, beauty and the 
 spiritual Hfe — to high moraUty, to the love of per- 
 fection, to man's happiness, and to the true progress 
 
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 133 
 
 of mankind. These persons, even in these extremes, 
 it is to be hoped will not diminish. They provide 
 a counterpoise to the tyrannies of the scientific 
 intellect, they keep up the balance of power in human 
 Ufe. Silently, for they make no noise and only hve 
 their lives, they lead men into worlds where they 
 can rest ; and even in ignorance and poverty find 
 inward wealth and joy and sweet content. 
 
 In his day Rossetti, ignoring the science and caring 
 nothing for the contending faiths of the present, 
 began a new phase of that ever-recurring movement, 
 both in poetry and painting. Morris followed him 
 into the realm of the past, but separated himself 
 more determinately from a present he detested than 
 Rossetti. He never touched for years a single 
 political, religious, scientific or social interest of 
 his own time. Rossetti did ; being, as a poet, more 
 manifold than Morris. What interest they took 
 in the present was taken in its arts, not in its theo- 
 logical, critical or scientific work. Holman Hunt, 
 Millais, and afterwards Burne-Jones, flung away, 
 as artists, the traditions which ruled the art of their 
 times, and went back to. the early Italian painters 
 for the spirit in which they conceived their art and 
 the duty they owed to it. They filled their pictures 
 with thought and imaginative symboUsm, but they 
 did this within the limits of a careful and steady 
 obedience to truth — truth to their subjects and 
 truth to nature. A fresh and living movement of 
 art in painting and drawing was born from these 
 endeavours. 
 
 At the same time, and filled with a similar spirit, 
 the new poetry arose. It was indeed new. No one 
 can for a moment bring together on the same plane 
 
134 FOUR POETS 
 
 of thought or imagination, of passion or of the recep- 
 tion of sensible impressions, the poetry of Tennyson, 
 Browning, Clough or Arnold, and the poetry of 
 Rossetti or Morris. The air is different, the landscape 
 different, the manner of thinking and feeling different, 
 the subjects different, the methods and the aims 
 of art different, the inspiration drawn from 
 different sources, and the material different. It 
 was as new a poetical world as that of Keats' was 
 in his time. It was also an interlude. It had no 
 children or none of any importance. Its apartness 
 from the present made it deUghtful, but it condemned 
 it to sterility. Its analogy in that to the poetry of 
 Keats is striking. But it is much more striking in 
 the poetry of Morris than in that of Rossetti. The 
 revolt of Morris from the present was much greater. 
 Indeed, Rossetti more or less maintained that " all 
 work to be truly worthy " — and I quote words he 
 has put into the mouth of a character in the unfinished 
 story of St. Agnes of Intercession — " should be 
 wrought out of the age itself, as well as out of the 
 soul of its producer, which must needs be a soul of 
 the age." He did not, from my present point of view, 
 carry out that sentence fuUy in his work, but he 
 came closer to it than was the case with the poetry 
 Morris wrote before he became a SociaUst. The 
 modern element is plain in his treatment of Jenny, 
 though the problem is universal. The Burden of 
 Nineveh welds together in his thought London and 
 Nineveh, the religion, the future and the fates of 
 both ; and outside his thoughts, as he sees the winged 
 bull brought into the British Museum, the din and 
 crowds of London go by. At times, the political 
 interests of the world took hold upon him. The 
 
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 135 
 
 revolutionary movement of 1848 was hailed by him, 
 when priests turned white and Kings were in the 
 dust. He hears the cry of Italy, and the Last Con- 
 fession, in itself a modern poem, is thrilled throughout 
 with the Italian hatred of Austria. On the Staircase 
 of Notre Dame, on the Place de la Bastille, he feels 
 the emancipation of Paris and the world. He 
 denounced the atrocious business of 1851. He wrote 
 a half-felt Ode on the death and work of Wellington 
 in 1852. 
 
 Then, there are short poems, of a delicate and 
 majestic pity, on such sorrowful and heart-subduing 
 incidents as he touched in daily life. Between 
 Holmscote and Hurstcote is a lovely example of this. 
 Moreover, even in poems which treat subjects belong- 
 ing to a remote past, there is often a modern touch, 
 a dim reference to the temper and thoughts of the 
 modern world, which bring, floating into the antique 
 tale, a breath, a wind, from the life of the nineteenth 
 century. These wafts of modernism often give body 
 to his mystic story, and a strange clearness to the past 
 of which he writes. 
 
 • Again, among a number of poems which treat of 
 love and other passions, and belong to the common 
 life of man at any time, there are a few which are 
 concerned with the problems of hfe, moral and 
 spiritual, and which, in their mode of thought and 
 expression, are entirely modem — so modern that even 
 now, nearly fifty years after they were written, they 
 paint our souls. They are of our subtilty, our 
 obscurity, our passionate self-extension ; our hopes, 
 fears, faith and faithlessness. In many wandering 
 ways of careful thought, they ask what is our life. 
 Of these are all the sonnets which form the second 
 
136 FOUR POETS 
 
 part of the House of Life, and poems like the Card 
 Dealer, Cloud Confines, Soothsay and a few others 
 of less value. In these, love between the sexes which 
 forms so large a part of his poetry can scarcely be 
 said to exist. They knit themselves with a singular 
 force around the life of man, his death, his pain and 
 his pleasure. They are weighty with thought, 
 very subtle, yet very clear. The thinking does not 
 run along the known philosophic lines. It avoids 
 them, as if truth were not to be found on their roads. 
 It moves, on the contrary, through the windings, 
 impulses, passionate feelings of the self-neglecting 
 soul, thinking and feeding in its silences around the 
 memories, the regrets, the happiness and unhappiness 
 of its past, around the hopes and fears of its future ; 
 searching into the fierce remorse and the stern 
 demands that come from conscience ; and question- 
 ing those aspirations of the spirit towards the 
 unattainable perfection which deny and mock 
 analysis. And, above all, they ask, with reiterated 
 force — ^Why are things as they are ? What shall 
 we do, things being as they are? Soothsay is such a 
 poem. The poetry belonging to these matters is 
 perhaps the greatest, not the most beautiful, of all 
 his work. It is marked by so mascuhne a concentra- 
 tion of thought and wording that it demands the 
 closest attention and deserves it. It is not obscure 
 save to inattention. On the contrary, in spite of all 
 the infoldings of thought with thought, it is, by its 
 anxious wording, as clear as a mountain spring. 
 It is not only a poetical but an intellectual pleasure 
 to follow its intricate involutions, made beautiful at 
 every step by the play of a passionate imagination. 
 And this is poetically enhanced by the careful art. 
 
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 137 
 
 w the technique which is not satisfied by anything 
 Ites than perfection, and which, when perfection is 
 no^ reached, makes us feel that it has been struggled 
 for with the whole force and eagerness of the artist. 
 One example of this, which is most patent in the 
 sounds, is the excellent use he makes of long Latin 
 words which seem to open out and expand the thought 
 and set it into a rush like a sudden flood over 
 wide plains. Such words are chiefly adjectives, 
 but they are so used ' as to have the force of a 
 picture. 
 
 Another characteristic of this graver poetry is its 
 unwearied symbolism — ^incessant images in words, 
 in the sound of lines ; illustrations which awaken 
 emotions or ideas ; images, created by the words, 
 which leap into the vision of the soul, and bring 
 with them a hundred meanings, suggestions, memo- 
 ries and pictures. Rossetti is a master of this, and 
 it was done by him in painting as well as in poetry. 
 In poetry, he was freer than in painting, and he used 
 his freedom, sometimes too richly. He hurries one 
 symbol into another, he folds and enfolds them 
 together ; they are labyrinthine ; yet if we pursue 
 them, we reach at last their centre, and their central 
 thought, with their central emotion. Then, when 
 we reach the centre, all the involutions are under- 
 stood. There is no one clearer than Rossetti. It 
 may be that some of this clearness is owing to the 
 music of the verse. That is another characteristic 
 of his poetry. And his music does not seem to be the 
 result of laborious art, but of a native genius for sweet 
 sound. Everywhere we find this grace, in the lighter 
 as in the graver poems. I give one example from a 
 serious sonnet. Its melody flows like a soft stream — 
 
138 FOUR POETS 
 
 When vain desire at last and vain regret 
 Go hand in hand to death, and all is vain, 
 What shall assuage the unforgotten pain 
 And teach the unforgetful to forget ? 
 
 Lastly, with regard to these serious poems which 
 meet the questionings of modern life, some have said 
 that the problems they treat of are similar to those 
 of which Arnold wrote, and are met in a similar way. 
 That is not the case. The Stoic solution, for example, 
 never occurs to Rossetti. Moreover, the problems 
 are not the simple ones Arnold meets and to which 
 the intellect naturally apphes itself, but the subtle, 
 complicated questions of the spiritual and passionate 
 life which are altogether outside of the sphere of the 
 intellect, and ignore its methods. And, finally, the 
 subjects are treated, without any special reference 
 to his own soul or to his own time, from that universeil 
 point of view which considers human nature as it is, 
 independent of any personal feeUng or of any isolated 
 period. The later sonnets of The House of Life and 
 other poems of a similar kind belong to the present 
 of human nature, but they also belong to its past and 
 its future. 
 
 I turn from this discussion of the modern element in 
 Rossetti's poetry to other elements belonging to it. 
 When we read the earlier poems, beginning with the 
 Blessed Damozel, we must bring to our reading matters 
 of thought imported from Italy in the thirteenth or 
 fourteenth centuries, or from that ancient world 
 where Lancelot and Tristram Uved, or from that more 
 sacred and earlier world which gathered its emotions, 
 hke flowers round a house, over the youth of Jesus, 
 the days in Jerusalem after the Cross, and the legends 
 of the Early Church. The elements of these worlds 
 
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 139 
 
 crept into the study of his imagination, were quick 
 in his thought, and move out of his poems, even 
 when they are outside of the Christian realm, into 
 our reflection. They leave their spirit everywhere 
 in his verse, like the distant scent of lavender in 
 linen long laid by in oaken presses. 
 
 Of these elements Italy was the chief — the Italy of 
 Dante, and the poets who with him created Italian 
 poetry ; nor was modem Italy forgotten or unrepre- 
 sented. It could not have been otherwise. His 
 mother was half Italian. His father, Gabriele 
 Rossetti, was a native of the Kingdom of Naples, a 
 man of letters, a poet and patriot ; forced to flee from 
 the tyranny of Ferdinand I, and well known in 
 England as a commentator and exponent of Dante. 
 From his childhood Rossetti was trained to love his 
 father's land, and its greatest poet, and his poetry 
 as well as his painting were filled with the subjects 
 and redolent of the mysticism of the wisdom-worn 
 Italian. Yet so strong was Rossetti's clear indivi- 
 duality that no one can say he was an imitator of 
 Dante. Whatever he drew from Dante he passed 
 through the crucible of his own soul, and so mingled 
 it with his own material that the result was incon- 
 testably his own. His spirit was dominant in it, 
 not Dante's. Moreover, it was not only the austere 
 and tender spirit of Dante of which he drank deep, 
 but the pleasanter and lighter spirit of the men who 
 before and after Dante made poetry within his circle. 
 With these also he S5anpathized, but he drank more 
 of their manner, a manner which was common to them 
 all, than of their matter. For Rossetti, hke Dante, 
 was always somewhat severe, serious, even grim at 
 times, when he wrote poetry. There was, indeed. 
 
140 FOUR POETS 
 
 another side to Rossetti — a wild, mocking Bohemian 
 side, full of grim sarcastic humour, but this did not 
 intrude into either of the arts he practised. The 
 solemnities of our earthly life and of its passions more 
 than its gaiety or pleasure were in this poetry daily 
 guests. And his methods of writing, his style, his 
 correction and finish, were as severe, as strictly con- 
 scientious to his art, as those of Dante or Milton. 
 Otherwise, I do not compare him to them. The 
 limits of Dante and Milton extend beyond our ken. 
 The limits of Rossetti are clearly within our ken. 
 But within them his matter and his manner were 
 nobly grave, severe, temperate and controlled, almost 
 too controlled at times to have the ease and 
 naturalness of the greater poets. 
 
 The manner then of his work was largely influenced 
 by the early Italian poets, even by their perversity of 
 logic in amorous poetry, but was not imitated from 
 them. His vivid, intense individuality burnt up the 
 possibihty of imitation. Whatever he gripped, he 
 gripped in his own way ; and the way was origiucJ. 
 And all that I have here said concerning the Italian 
 influence in his poetry might be even more fully said 
 of his work as a painter. 
 
 Again, one might expect that his poetry would be 
 greatly influenced by mediaeval romance, especially 
 by the multitudinous tale of Arthur, with its depend- 
 encies. It may be said of him with truth that 
 he was Galahad on one side of his nature and 
 Tristram on another. But though he loved the tale, 
 and oftentimes discussed it, it scarcely ever appears, 
 even in allusion, in his poetry. The story seized on 
 contemporary poetry ; it did not seize on his ; and 
 this, hke many other things, isolates the man. The 
 
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 141 
 
 Italian genius separated him from the Celtic and 
 Teutonic elements in the cycle of Arthur. Indeed, 
 I have observed that those poets on whom the shadow 
 of Dante falls, with whom Italy dwells as a mistress, 
 are not only freed from the Celtic glamour, but out 
 of harmony with the Celtic temperament. The Latin 
 nature does not agree with the Celtic. It is too 
 serious, and life presents itself under too grave an 
 aspect for such agreement. Moreover, all through 
 the Arthurian tale — I do not speak of its later modifi- 
 cations in Germany — ^the passions, and above all the 
 passion of love and the passion of war, are lightly 
 felt in comparison with the profound and grim 
 impetuosity of the way they are felt by the Itahan 
 people. And it was so Rossetti felt them. There 
 was nothing Celtic or indeed Teutonic about him or 
 his poetry. In this also, he whoUy differed from 
 Morris who, in spite of his being partly Celtic by 
 descent, had Teutonic rather than Celtic elements 
 dominant in his nature. Except in his intense indi- 
 viduality, his extraordinary eye for colour and his 
 love for it, and in a certain, but not common, affection 
 for the wilder forms of natural scenery, Morris was 
 little of a Celt. The Arthur legend caught him, it is 
 true, but it was in its mediaeval, not in its Celtic, 
 forms. 
 
 Then again, the Celtic genius is somewhat disor- 
 dered. It does not willingly submit to the logic 
 of the imagination, nor is its imagination ridden 
 with a curb. But the Italian genius loves order, 
 strict arrsmgement of thought, fixed and chosen 
 limits wherein to exercise itself, well linked emotions 
 bound together by one dominant idea. Its imagina- 
 tion is not fettered, but it moves of its own will 
 
142 FOUR POETS 
 
 under self-chosen laws. It is also always controlled 
 for the sake of the full and clear expression of the 
 subject. And all this is sternly characteristic of 
 Rossetti's poetry. It is a pleasant exercise, when 
 one has leisure, to follow the intricate windings — 
 as of some mediaeval designer — of the imaginative 
 reason through any one of Rossetti's sonnets. We 
 cannot find anything more fiercely beaten into order, 
 yet so closely set on beauty as an end, in English 
 Uterature. It is not really EngUsh ; it is ItaHan, and 
 it divides Rossetti from his poetic comrades. There 
 is not a trace of it in Morris or in Swinburne. Though 
 he communicated to them a series of impulses from 
 his originating genius, yet he gave them nothing of 
 this ; or rather they could not receive it. He was 
 left alone with this part of himself, and severely alone 
 he remained with it. 
 
 At another point he was Italian, not English — in 
 his love-poetry. It was accused of sensualism, but 
 all its tendency is, in truth, toward a noble chastity 
 in the natural affairs of love. As to the accusation, 
 and the controversy arising from it, I will content 
 myself with sa5dng — as most inteUigent persons 
 came to say, including his accuser — ^that the accusa- 
 tion was false and unworthy. Yet I can partly 
 understand how it came to be made, though I cannot 
 understand a brother in poetry having either the 
 heart or the want of intelligence to make it. It was 
 really ItaHan and not English love-poetry which 
 Rossetti wrote, and so vitally different from the 
 EngUsh way of feeling and speaking of love-passion, 
 that, when it fell on English ears and especially on 
 Lowland Scottish ears where it touched the ingrained 
 Puritanism of a Teutonic people, it was to them like 
 
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 143 
 
 listening to a foreign tongue which because folk do 
 not understand, they think to be out of nature. It 
 was really the difference of national genius which was 
 at the root of the accusation. 
 
 The warmth, the glow, the white fire of Rossetti's 
 love-poetry, the concentration of the whole being for 
 the time of writing, to the exclusion of all else, on the 
 passion of the hour or the Ufe, which is characteristic 
 of the Italian poets, and especially of Dante, who 
 lays all the realms of feehng, spirit and intellect at 
 the feet of his love, astounded the English nature; 
 and whatever astonishes England revolts her till 
 she slowly comes to understand it. She had been for 
 a long time unaccustomed to love-poetry of this kind. 
 We shall find no parallel, not even in Burns, to 
 Rossetti's love-poetry till we get back to the EUza- 
 bethans, who themselves were deeply influenced by 
 the Italian poetry. Shakespeare's sonnets are 
 steeped in Italy, and there are no love-sonnets in 
 English Literature which in concentrated thought 
 approach those of Shakespeare, except Rossetti's. 
 
 Then, English love-poetry is chiefly concerned 
 with the growth of love, its aspirations, the results it 
 has on life while its end is as yet unattained ; or with 
 that which follows on the attainment of love — ^its 
 regrets, its quiet pleasures, its miseries, its fancies or 
 its ruin. Italian poetry and Rossetti's — even where it 
 takes similar subjects of love as English poetry — ^is 
 concerned with all these subjects raised to intensity ; 
 with love in all its forms at their height, and with aU 
 the world brought into fiery union with it. We see 
 in English love-poetry all the landscape of love's 
 country. We see in Itahan, and in Rossetti, the sun 
 of love itself which made the landscape. That is 
 
144 FOUR POETS 
 
 another reason, arising out of national difference, 
 which made this poetry, at its first appearance, 
 strange, and therefore objectionable, to English folk. 
 Moreover, and this is perhaps the most important 
 thing, EngUsh love-poetry, when it is sensuous, 
 which is rare, is for the most part unmixed with any 
 spiritual feeling ; and when it is spiritualized, which 
 is common, is kept apart from the elements of sense. 
 Except in a very few men — among whom I may 
 instance Dr. Donne, and he insists on the sensuous 
 too much for the spirit — there is little intense and 
 complete admixture of the sensuous and spiritual 
 elements of love in English poetry. There is such 
 an admixture in the best Italian poetry; even in the 
 lower poetry, in poetry frankly sensual, the spirit- 
 ualizing element steals in. But in Rossetti's love- 
 poetry this complete fusion of the spirit and the 
 sense is expressed more intimately than in any Italian 
 poetry, because he was partly Enghsh, and England 
 gave him more reticence ; and more intensely than 
 in any Enghsh poetry, because he was three-fourths 
 Italian. Those times in love between man and 
 woman when the sensuous element is lifted by pure 
 joy and emotion into the spiritual world and there 
 transfigured ; and when the spiritual element is 
 brought into the sensuous till it is made, as it were, 
 palpable, embodied, incarnated — when both sense 
 and spirit are fused into one fire — ^in those love is 
 best known, best felt and best expressed, and they are 
 of love's finest, purest, most exalted power. No one 
 in England has shaped them into words like Rossetti ; 
 and he, feehng their clear purity and beauty, 
 thought himself licensed to express them. They are 
 a thousand years away from sensualism, but the 
 
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 145 
 
 strangeness and uniqueness of them in English poetry 
 jarred at first the English nature, and especially 
 on its reserve. I am not, however, sure that this 
 revelation of the central heart of love is not too 
 intimate for words. It is there, if anywhere, that 
 I should challenge the love-poetry of Rossetti. 
 
 The love-poetry is of the finest Italian quality 
 in the Sonnets, where he was forced to pack what he 
 thought and felt into fourteen lines, and to arrange 
 its development in obedience to a strict rule. When 
 he was not thus limited his love-poetry is less excel- 
 lent. It wanders into so many side issues that its 
 passion is ravelled. It runs to so great a length in 
 consequence that the reader who expected and 
 almost hoped to be burnt alive, is only warmer 
 by its ashes. This is the case with The Stream's 
 Secret, with Love's Nocturn in spite of its many 
 fascinating verses. The Song of the Bower is far 
 better than these, true throughout to its subject. 
 Its subject is common in experience, and its feeling 
 deep, but more fitted perhaps for a woman than for a 
 man. The strength of love in the Blessed Damozel is 
 deeper, more speechless — ^all that is said is thought not 
 actually expressed by the woman — and more united, 
 than in any other love-lyric Rossetti wrought. 
 Infinite regret, infinite hope mingle their emotions in 
 it. It is illuminated by many images, many pictures, 
 but these are so fuU of the one passion, that their 
 number and variety concentrate rather than disperse 
 it. Moreover, although they adorn it with a beauty 
 not of the earth but of heaven, yet the emotions of the 
 earth are intense within the heavenly loveliness. It 
 is a mixture, strange, complex and beautiful. 
 
 Again, there are many love-l}n:ics, some light, some 
 
 II— (3S78) 
 
146 FOUR POETS 
 
 sad, on transient phases of love — ^its memories of joy 
 and sorrow, its regrets for lost opportunities, its 
 broodings on happiness which might have been and 
 was not, its ruins and its raptures in the past, its 
 despondent hopes, its changes and why they came, 
 its false economics, its true extravagance — ^l37rics such 
 as First Love Remembered, Sudden Light, Plighted 
 Promise, Three Shadows, A Little While, Spheral 
 Change, and others a few of which are hght and gay. 
 It is in the Sonnets of the first part of The House 
 of Life that Rossetti's love-poetry ought most 
 to be studied. The atmosphere which they breathe 
 and which fills them is not EngUsh. It is chiefly 
 ItaUan but not pure Itahan. It is mingled with 
 English elements, and this separates them into a 
 class apart from either England or Italy. They 
 stand alone, and this loneliness of theirs is part of 
 their charm to those readers who are fond of the 
 unique in literature. Of course they belong, therefore, 
 to the particular, not the universal, and to the 
 particularly particular, like those specialised 
 manufactures of porcelain of which only twenty or 
 thirty examples exist in the world. This rarity 
 also pleases their readers, but restricts the number 
 of them. They do not appeal, like the highest 
 poetry, to the multitude ; and this particularity 
 is enhanced by the strangeness to English readers of 
 their Italian manner of thought and imaging. That 
 manner also, in its complexity of expression and its 
 multitudinous imagery, seems to us to disperse 
 and dishevel their emotion. It is only when we are 
 accustomed to it, that we discover to our surprise 
 that it enhances it. Their elaborate thought, their 
 subtle logical intellectualism seems also to take them 
 
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 147 
 
 away from the simplicity of love, to diminish its 
 intensity, even to chill it. But this is of the very 
 nature of such Italian sonnets as those of the Vita 
 Nuova and, as before, a little trouble enables us to 
 feel that passion has entered into the intellectual 
 work, and is in it like a fire. A Sonnet itself demands 
 concentration of thought and emotion. Its form 
 creates intensity, or ought to create it. And in these 
 sonnets of Rossetti thought and emotion are packed 
 as closely as the summer sprays and leaves are packed 
 in the winter sheaths of a beechen spray. Their 
 concentration makes their heat. It is too hot for 
 flame — " each of its own arduous fulness reverent." 
 
 Their subject is Love, but Love for the most part 
 in its momentary phases. They seem to spring from 
 any daily experience ; from writing' a letter, walking 
 in a wood, a flash of sunlight, from all his mistress 
 does and is, her hands, her voice, her eyes, from the 
 changes of the seasons and the weather, from dreams 
 which picture her, and moods which recall her moods 
 — yet, however, the subject changes, one Love is 
 dominant over the changes and in it every subject 
 glows. And as the main subject is love, and beauty 
 is the form of love, each sonnet seeks at every point 
 to be and to secure beauty of form, of expression, 
 in the parts and in the whole. It is owing to this 
 seeking of beauty that their symbolism is so multitudi- 
 nous, for by symbolism beauty can most easily be 
 suggested. Into certain melodies of words, into 
 adjectives which awaken associations, into illustra- 
 tions drawn from nature, into impersonations of 
 states of the soul, Rossetti packs his s5rmbols, so that 
 not unfrequently every one of the fourteen lines of 
 the sonnet has its awakening symbol, each illuminating 
 
148 FOUR POETS 
 
 and intensifying the subject of the whole. I quote 
 the following sonnet — Soul's Beauty, It illustrates 
 what I have tried to say, and is itself a noble example 
 of his Sonnet-poetry — 
 
 Under the arch of Life, where love and death. 
 Terror and mystery, guard her shrine, I saw 
 Beauty enthroned ; and though her gaze struck awe, 
 
 I drew it in as simply as my breath. 
 
 Hers are the eyes which, over and beneath. 
 The sky and sea bend on thee, — which can draw, 
 By sea or sky or woman, to one law, 
 
 The allotted bondman of her palm and wreath. 
 
 This is that Lady Beauty, in whose praise 
 
 Thy voice and hand shake still, — ^long known to thee 
 By flying hair and fluttering hem, — ^the beat 
 Following her daily of thy heart and feet. 
 How passionately and irretrievably. 
 
 In what fond flight, how many ways and days ! 
 
 It remains to say that this love-poetry is only of 
 love between the sexes, and within a limited area 
 of that love. It seems a pity that so much good 
 poetry, subtle feeling, careful thought and art should 
 be expended on a kind of love which, however varied 
 its phases, is, when it is made the sole interest of life, 
 so fleeting, and so isolating. It is natural, even 
 needful, to pass through its house in youth, but 
 men and women have other and fairer houses to 
 dwell in permanently. All the greater poets have 
 felt this. They have written lyrics of this passion, 
 but these are only incidental. Their real work is 
 elsewhere in humanity. Rossetti gave too much to 
 this business of love. Yet, if we are to have it, it was 
 well to have it excellently done, and it is so done. 
 
 I pass on to the mysticism of his poetry. It is 
 difficult to characterize it because it was so complex. 
 It was compounded of many elements, and they 
 
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 149 
 
 frequently contradict one another. But he had a 
 way, like Ruskin and others, of inducing apparent 
 contradictories to live within him in an amiable 
 harmony. He cherished, for example, at one time 
 of his life, quite an ascetic turn, but at the same time, 
 thoroughly disliking 'the principles of asceticism, he 
 gave to the body its full value in his work. He had 
 faith in a divine love when he wrote his early poetry, 
 and he knew what he believed, and yet he had a 
 curious turn for superstition, which arises straight out 
 of fear and ignorance of the Gods. Such harbouring 
 of contradictories in one soul is characteristic of a 
 certain type of mysticism and has sometimes been 
 transferred to philosophy. 
 
 It is difficult also to explain mysticism in Rossetti, 
 because it is difficult to define mysticism itself. It 
 shows a different aspect in every man who is affected 
 by it. But generally speaking it is that temper of 
 mind and feehng which considers the apparent world 
 and aU its ways as not real, except relatively to our 
 constitution ; and the invisible world of the spirit 
 and of hfe, outside of our world of sense-perception, 
 the real world. And that is Rossetti's position as a 
 poet. It makes his poetry difficult to that large 
 class of persons who have no mystic tendency, to 
 whoni aU mysticism appears impossible. The appeal 
 then of his mysticism is to a small class at present ; 
 and though his range within its circle over many and 
 various subjects is remarkable, yet the circle itself is 
 a small one. On the whole, so widespread through 
 his poetry is this mystic element, that I doubt whether 
 he will ever come to be read extensively until the 
 spiritual view of the universe has conquered the 
 materialistic view. At present, in the midst of the 
 
150 FOUR POETS 
 
 loud yelling of the armies of materialism, Rossetti's 
 voice is not likely to be heard at large. 
 
 At first there was a touch of asceticism in his 
 mysticism, not that which crushes or despises the 
 body on the ground that all matter is evil, (that was 
 repugnant to him,) but that which restrains appetite 
 and sense-en jojmient in order to be able to contem- 
 plate more quietly and to realize more fuUy spiritual 
 ideas and the spiritual world in an impassioned 
 imagination ; and, again, in order to feel his own 
 soul in direct contact with a spiritualized world. In 
 his pursuit of the arts, he made both painting and 
 poetry partakers of this endeavour. It would be 
 easy to illustrate this effort by self-control to rise 
 above the apparent from his early painting, but that 
 is outside my subject. It is not easy to illustrate 
 this mystic asceticism from his eaxHer poetry, because 
 it only pervades it, is not defined in it. It Ungers 
 in it like a scent of unseen flowers, like a dim music 
 heard over misty waters — and this almost sensible 
 appeal to the world of the soul, chiming through the 
 verse, is especially comforting to those of the same 
 temper of mind, and secludes him as their poet. 
 Nor was it unrepresented otherwise in his family. 
 In another direction, with a clear religious passion, 
 and with that doctrinal foundation in which Rossetti 
 had no interest, his sister, Christina, was a mystic. 
 Her unreligious poems are those of a mystic. As to 
 her religious poems, and her treatment in them of 
 the soul and hfe of man, nothing so deeply felt, so 
 poetically conceived, so Ijrically pure, has been 
 written in England. 
 
 If we wish to feel what Rossetti's mysticism was in 
 the early days, when he was nineteen years old, and 
 
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 151 
 
 at the same time to know what his aspirations were 
 as an artist, and the foundations of his artistic 
 thought, it is well to read Hand and Soul, a little 
 tale published in 1850 in the Germ, a magazine 
 started to represent the principles and spread the 
 ideas of the Preraphaelite Brotherhood. It is a 
 literary jewel — opal, ruby and sapphire in one. It is 
 steeped through and through, in every sentence, in 
 every turn of expression, in thought and feeling, 
 with his personality ; written as it were by the soul 
 itself. The little book then has one of the elements 
 of a fine style. And in other points — ^in clearness, 
 in naturalness, in ease, in constant surprise, in 
 excellent arrangement — the style is as good as the 
 stuff. Moreover, with all its mysticism, the mediaeval 
 time and the mise en scene, especially the fierce swift 
 outburst of the two noble factions into wild war in 
 the streets of Pisa, are given with a masterly realism 
 which makes a dehghtful contrast with the mysticism. 
 On that realism in Rossetti I shall touch hereafter. 
 At present I refer to one more element in his poetry 
 which is indirectly linked with his mysticism. 
 
 The love of the supernatural — ^in weird, uncommon 
 or ghastly forms, of witcheries and charms, appari- 
 tions and ghostly enemies, of all that half-human, 
 half-spiritual world which hovers and works, as some 
 think, in a zone between earth and heaven — is an 
 offshoot, in a certain temper of mind, of mysticism. 
 That it is so is a matter of history. And Rossetti 
 when it pleased him to get into this world, did so 
 with a peculiar pleasure. It did not master him. 
 He dominated it, otherwise he could not have written 
 about it with such imaginative intensity, with so 
 close a grasp, as he does, for example, in Sister Helen. 
 
152 FOUR POETS 
 
 We feel, as we read, that the woman and the vengeance 
 were fact, that such a power exists, that her belief 
 in her spell is justified ; but we also feel that Rossetti 
 is master of his realization ; stands without it as its 
 maker, while he is within it, as its conceiver. He 
 believes, by imagination, in the wasting of the 
 woman's betrayer as the waxen figure melts, but the 
 high reason of the artist has no belief in it. 
 
 Having this double power over his conceptions and 
 his art, he loves to imagine and shape art-subjects in 
 this supernatural world. One of his favourite stories 
 was the story of LUith and Adam, and he wrote a 
 wUd poem upon it. One of his favourite books was 
 Sidonia the Sorceress, a book of Meinhart's. One of 
 the grimmest, weirdest of all his designs was of 
 two lovers meeting their wraiths in a wood, 
 and seeing their ghostly presentment in a light 
 half fire, half gold ; a mist of fateful flame. 
 " How we met ourselves " is its title. Rose Mary 
 is full of black magic, of evil spirits in precious stones, 
 of unearthly beings that betray men and women who 
 trust in them ; and the poetry is, to its very sound 
 and movement, veiled by a supernatural mist, hke 
 that which broods in Christahel. The studies in prose, 
 like the St. Agnes of Intercession, and the schemes 
 for poems drawn up in prose — The Orchard Pit, The 
 Doom of the Sirens, Michael Scott's Wooing, The 
 Philtre, show how much his imagination loved to 
 wander in this distant land, and how well fitted he 
 was to cope with it and impress us with its 
 atmosphere. 
 
 The only poet, at this point, with whom I can 
 compare Rossetti — not in the poetry itself, but in 
 a similar love of this kind of subject, and a similar 
 
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 153 
 
 power of creating its atmosphere — ^is Coleridge, for 
 whose few years of fine work Rossetti had a deep 
 admiration. The Ancient Manner, Christabel, The 
 Three Graves move and have their being in this 
 dusky, unhuman world and breathe its air with magic 
 ease. Nor does the parallel fail in other particulars. 
 Coleridge, too, was steeped in mysticism of the 
 noble sort ; and this, with far more distinctiveness 
 of religion than Rossetti knew, pervades his poetry. 
 And Coleridge, also, like Rossetti, while he infiltrated 
 his soul into the characters who made, or were sub- 
 jected to, his supernaturalism, so that we must believe 
 in them as we read, is yet, in his artist will and reason, 
 in his shaping power, the master of the things he 
 made ; is on a higher mystic plane than they. In that 
 higher, simpler, spiritual world he and the young 
 Rossetti Hved. From it they descended to touch 
 and vivify the lower supernatural. Into it, when 
 they had done that work, they easily re-ascended. 
 In curious opposition or contrast to this love of 
 the supernatural was Rossetti's realism, his pleasure 
 in facts, in things as they are in the present, as they 
 were in the past ; only, being an artist, he chose the 
 facts he represented for the sake of their beauty and 
 lovingness, and composed them as his imagination 
 saw them. The form was imaginative ; but the 
 materials used were so chosen and arranged as to 
 be strictly true to Nature. When Turner painted a 
 landscape, the form he gave it was conceived from 
 the impression the landscape made upon him. In 
 accordance with the emotion of that impression he 
 composed not only the whole but the detail of his 
 picture. It might or might not resemble the place 
 which had produced the impression, but it exactly 
 
154 FOUR POETS 
 
 resembled what his soul had seen and his imagination 
 had shaped within him. The beauty, the voice, the 
 spirit of the picture, the intelligence which fled through 
 it, were born out of his soul striving for beauty. 
 That was the mystic, the spiritual, the imaginative 
 part. It is analogous to that which Rossetti's 
 imaginative mysticism did for the subjects of his 
 mystical poems. 
 
 But the material which Turner painted into his 
 picture was rigidly true to Nature. The mountain 
 lines and surfaces, down to the smallest detail, were 
 true to existing mountain forms. The curves of 
 running and falling water and of waves of the sea ; 
 the outUnes of clouds in calm or storm, and the 
 swirhng and tossing of their masses and their drifts 
 of flying foam ; the bending, leap, and sturdy strength 
 of trees and their branches ; the colour and the 
 light, the mist and the distance, were all true, point 
 by point, to what he had observed and recorded in 
 note after note, of the facts of Nature. This was his 
 realism, and it could not be more sternly faithful 
 than it was to truth. It is quite analogous to that 
 which Rossetti's realism did in poetry and art. 
 Mystic religion in art, mystic mediaevalism and 
 magical supernaturalism, were combined by him 
 with a stern realism, a determined chnging to the 
 actual both in Nature and human nature. The aim 
 of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood laid down by 
 Rossetti himself in the Germ, is this, " To enforce an 
 entire, or rigid, adherence to the simphcity of Nature, 
 either in Art or Poetry." Holman Hunt did follow 
 that rule from the beginning. He follows it now. 
 He kept close, even in his largest designs, to the 
 simplicity and truth of Nature. What he mingled 
 
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 155 
 
 with it was symbolism rather than mysticism. But 
 the symbohsm was contained in accurate representa- 
 tion of natural fact, selected and arranged to contain 
 the symbols. 
 
 Rossetti did not completely follow the rule he laid 
 down. He was more complex, more unexpected 
 than the rest of his fellows, and while he painted on 
 canvas or described in words his details with truth to 
 Nature, he did not cling fast to simpHcity. He 
 drenched his work not only with symbolism but also 
 with mystic theology and mediaeval superstition. 
 The atmosphere he had the genius to add to his 
 poetry and his painting was not in Nature, nor in 
 the intellectual explanation men give to symbolism. 
 It was above and beyond both, drawn from the 
 strange incursions of his imagination into unexplored 
 lands of his own soul, into the realm some call the 
 subliminal consciousness; drawn also from a spiritual, 
 often a praeternatural, world. This is true both of his 
 poetry and his painting ; and this distinguishes him 
 from his brothers in art. 
 
 In 1848 the Pre-Raphaehte Brotherhood was formed 
 to carry this combined imagination and realism, 
 symbolism and naturalism, into art. The two primal 
 movers in it were Holman Hunt and Millais, and 
 Rossetti became, at many points, one with them. 
 They were the chiefs, the men whose power grew 
 and lasted. And all the three, with the modifications 
 which naturally belonged to three potent individual- 
 ities, followed in their early work their law with 
 consistent obedience ; and, creating a new and 
 living school, rescued the art of painting from the 
 
156 FOUR POETS 
 
 degradation into which it had fallen ; * flung aside its 
 vulgar conventions ; infused into it ardour, imagina- 
 tion, life and truth. They returned to Nature, and 
 Nature, welling over into them from her perennial fires 
 of life, day by day kindled and fanned their imagina- 
 tion into creative power, so that all subjects became 
 new in their hands. There had not been such an 
 art-awakening since Wordsworth himself returned to 
 Nature in his art, and, inspired by her, added to his 
 reahsm the passion and mystery of the spiritual world, 
 of the soul searching for beauty through infinitude. 
 In poetry that was more easy of accomplishment 
 than in painting. In painting it had chiefly to be 
 done by S5TiiboUsm ; — ^that is, the natural things 
 in the painting, whUe they were painted with exact 
 truth, were so arranged that they suggested the 
 thoughts and emotions the picture was intended 
 to convey. In the Carpenter's Shop of Millais the 
 scene is realized as it was to the smallest detail. All 
 conventions are thrown aside. The room, open to 
 the country, is a poor carpenter's room ; the bench, 
 the lathe, the table, the tools, the furniture are painted 
 directly from the things themselves. Joseph is a 
 working man ; Mary, with her ethereal face, Christ 
 and the Baptist, are such persons as might have 
 been seen by passers by in the streets of Nazcireth. 
 Their dress is the dress of the poor. Everything, 
 down to the shavings on the floor, is kept rigidly to 
 the reality. But everything is also so arranged 
 as to be ssonbohc. The hfe, the mission, and the 
 death of Christ are shadowed in the scene and its 
 accessories. The very landscape outside, where the 
 
 * Art, that is, other than landscape art. Turner had long 
 since done this work for landscape art. 
 
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 157 
 
 sheep are wandering on the hills, speaks of the great 
 Shepherd. The wound which Mary is binding up in 
 the hand of Christ, the sorrow in her face, tell the 
 story of the coming tragedy and . redemption. The 
 very arrangement of the tools is symbohc. The 
 mystic and the real mingle. 
 
 I take another picture, the Scapegoat, by Holman 
 Hunt. The acted parable, with all its profound 
 meaning, of the animal sent into the wilderness laden 
 with the sins of the people, speaks from every part 
 of the picture, but is concentrated in the slow, heavy- 
 burdened Syrian goat who labours under the spiritual 
 weight through the salt crust of the Dead Sea shore. 
 This symbolic element is the soul of the picture. 
 But the animal is painted from Nature with the 
 utmost reality. Nor is there a light or a shade on the 
 Dead Sea waters, nor a branch on the shore, nor a 
 stunted shrub, nor a cliff or valley on the sun-baked 
 mountains of Moab which was not painted with the 
 most seeing eye and with the most accurate pencil, 
 at the place itself. 
 
 There is a httle unfinished water-colour of Rossetti's 
 which used to hang near Ruskin's bed in Denmark 
 Hill, and which was the first thing he showed me 
 on the first day I visited him, very long ago. It 
 is the Passover in the Holy Family. Under a rude 
 porch, supported by unhewn doorposts made of young 
 trees, Zacharias is sprinkling the wooden hntel. 
 The blood of the lamb which Joseph had brought 
 trickles down one of the posts of the porch, near 
 which Jesus, a small boy, is standing, holding the 
 bowl of blood, and looking at the crimson stream, 
 rapt in thought. Ehzabeth is lighting the pyre, and 
 Mary gathering bitter herbs, and John fastening the 
 
158 FOUR POETS 
 
 shoes for departure, which he was not worthy to 
 
 unloose. The whole drawing, and the figures and 
 
 faces, are steeped in symbohsm. There is scarcely 
 
 a knot on the wood of the rude porch or a fold of 
 
 the garments of the folk which has not a meaning 
 
 addressed to the Christian supernaturaUsm ; — but 
 
 the landscape, the cottage, the dresses, the details 
 
 are as close as they could be made to reality. They 
 
 are conceived and drawn as they would be at the 
 
 time in the dweUing of a poor family on the slopes 
 
 of Nazareth. I might illustrate the same mingHng of 
 
 the ideal and the real, through a detailed symbolism, 
 
 from Rossetti's impassioned picture of the Virgin in 
 
 the house of St. John on the night of Good Friday, 
 
 but I refer my readers, since the picture is to be seen, 
 
 to The Girlhood of Mary. The girl, the bed, the 
 
 room, the flower, the embroidery, the walls, every 
 
 detail, are painted with the utmost reality direct 
 
 from Nature, but Rossetti has recorded their 
 
 symbolism — 
 
 — On that cloth of red 
 I' the centre is the Tripoint : perfect each. 
 Except the second of its points, to teach 
 That Christ is not yet born. The books — whose head 
 Is golden charity, as Paul hath said — 
 Those virtues are wherein the soul is rich : 
 Therefore on them the lily standeth, which 
 Is Innocence, being interpreted. 
 
 The seven-thorn'd briar, and the palm seven-leaved 
 Are her great sorrow and her great reward. 
 
 It was often his way to embody not only in painting, 
 but also in poetry, this mysticism and realism. At 
 the beginning of his poetic life he mixed them in 
 religious poems on the Gospel history ; and the 
 most relevant example of this is the beautiful poem 
 entitled Ave, which is really three pictures translated 
 
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 159 
 
 into verse. Only the three subjects, being here con- 
 ceived and worked by him as a poet, and not as a 
 painter, are radically different in the way the ideas 
 and feelings Eire represented, from any pictured 
 representation of them. The poem supports, I think, 
 my statement, but whether it does or not, it ought to 
 be read for the sake of its beauty. 
 
 The reaUsm in that poem is less than the mystic 
 supernaturalism, but it is clearly there. Nor was 
 his realistic and symbolic treatment of the Gospel 
 story ever quite given up. It arose in later years in 
 another form, when the realism was mixed with the 
 supematuraHsm, not of the Gospel story, but of the 
 mediaeval Church. The elaborate symboUsm of the 
 mediaeval religion and theology attracted him as 
 strongly as they did Dante. The beauty which 
 gathered round the conceptions of Heaven and of its 
 cosmogony, such conceptions as the Ecirthly Paradise 
 of Dante which was aU but Heaven, its mystic 
 indwellers, and the Divine Pageant which accom- 
 panied the chariot of the Church, stirred Rossetti's 
 imagination with a nameless joy. The mystic Rose 
 of the Saints in the Empyrean, the angelic choirs of 
 the Nine Spheres, adoring, and clothed with unutter- 
 able loveUness of form and colour ; the companies of 
 the Greek and Latin Fathers, the Virgin Saints and 
 Martyrs who walked together in the green fields and 
 beside the waters of Paradise, the serene beauty 
 of their ideal shapes, each charged with the thought 
 and emotion of centuries — ^these, and a hundred more 
 imaginations, iUled his soul with a heavenly pleasure 
 and inspired his thought. His imagination walked 
 in them like a queen singing to herself in a walled 
 and secret garden. The Blessed Damozel is the best 
 
160 FOUR POETS 
 
 outcome of these attractions. It is mystic through- 
 out. Yet it cUngs, as the mediaeval painters and 
 poets did, to realism. It is as clear as things are in 
 Dante. The rampart of Heaven, the gold bar over 
 the sheer depth of Space are described with close 
 reference to place and appearance. The view of aU 
 the worlds below is given, even to the look, from 
 Heaven's unfathomable height, of the earth and 
 moon. The shrine of God Himself, the Uving, mystic 
 tree of the Spirit, the groves where the Lady Mary 
 walks with her five handmaidens, and how they sit 
 garlanded and weaving into the white robes the golden 
 thread for the dead, now new-bom, the angels in their 
 level flight — are made as visible to our eyes as if they 
 were actually sepn. They are close to reality, even 
 down to the warmth of the golden parapet on 
 which her bosom leaned, and the passion with which 
 
 she cast her arms along 
 The golden barriers. 
 And laid her face between her hands 
 And wept. 
 
 A last touch of this strong reahsm ends the poem — 
 " I heard her tears." 
 
 If any poem of Rossetti's is known, that is known. 
 It is a lovely thing, as exquisite in tenderness and 
 subHmated thought as it is in form and finish. He 
 was only twenty when he wrote it, and his art is as 
 true and fine in it as in the best of the later sonnets, 
 so swiftly does genius grow to its full height. The 
 subject is noble, and appeals to universal feeling. 
 No one who has loved and lost, and waits here below, 
 or there above, but must, have cherished its main 
 thought and felt its main emotion. The ornament 
 is beautiful, and is charged with human feehng. It 
 
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 161 
 
 is not the work of fancy but of imagination piercing 
 with vital power into the heart of the subject, and 
 radiating new thought, new feeling through every 
 verse, even every line. 
 
 This kind of medisevalism, of which there are so 
 few examples in the earlier poems and many in the 
 painting, continued to appear at intervals in his 
 poetry. It traverses A Last Confession, that remark- 
 able piece of Italian modernism and fierce reality. 
 It breaks out fully in the dream the murderer teUs 
 the priest — 
 
 I know last night 
 I dreamed I saw into the garden of God, 
 Where women walked whose painted images 
 I've seen with candles round them in the church. 
 They bent this way and that, one to another. 
 Playing : and over the long golden hair 
 Of each there floated like a ring of fire 
 Which when she stooped stooped with her, and when she rose 
 Rose with her. Then a breeze flew in among them, 
 As if a window had been opened in heaven 
 For God to give His blessing from, before 
 This world of ours should set ; (for in my dream 
 I thought our world was setting, and the sun 
 Flared, a spent taper ; ) and beneath that gust 
 The rings of light quivered like forest leaves. 
 Then all the blessed maidens who were there 
 Stood up together, as it were a voice 
 That called them ; and they threw their tresses back. 
 And smote their palms, and all laughed up at once. 
 For the strong heavenly joy they had in them 
 To hear God bless the world. 
 
 That is a new imagination, built out of the concep- 
 tion of the mediaeval heaven such as Fra Angelico 
 took up from the middle age and painted, where 
 the saints and martyrs and angels dance on the 
 flowery meadows in a golden air ; but this is touched 
 not only with the rude, peasant nature of the dreamer, 
 but with modem thought expressed with modem 
 turns of words. And the laughter of the maidens 
 
 i»— (2278) 
 
162 FOUR POETS 
 
 is not of the mediaeval foundation. Dante was too 
 
 serious for that. Beatrice never laughs, but smiles ; 
 
 and her smile illumines heaven. 
 
 Then all through the Staff and Scrip — a story 
 
 borrowed from the Gesta Romanorum — through 
 
 the World's Worth, where Father Hilary climbs the 
 
 steep-coiled stair of the church among the bells and 
 
 hears the mass below, and finds his world in God alone 
 
 — a beautiful short poem — ^the religious mediaeval 
 
 atmosphere is fully realised. But it is not only the 
 
 rehgious atmosphere. A hundred touches in these 
 
 poems bring the churches of the middle ages, the 
 
 castles, moats, the gardens, the wild country round 
 
 the sohtary fortresses, the superstitions, the belief 
 
 in magic and in evil spirits, the women, the lovers, 
 
 the battles, the music, before the eyes of the mind. 
 
 Nor is that neglected which is so vivid in mediaeval 
 
 Romance : the intense colour and fantasy in design, 
 
 of glass and tapestry and raiment ; the jewelled 
 
 robes and shoes and belts; the love of gorgeous 
 
 and heraldic dress and armour. I quote a few 
 
 verses from the Bride's Prelude, which flame and 
 
 gutter while we read — 
 
 Within the window's heaped recess 
 
 The light was counterchanged 
 In blent reflexes manifold 
 From perfume-caskets of wrought gold 
 And gems the bride's hair could not hold 
 
 All thrust together ; and with these 
 
 A slim-curved lute, which now. 
 At Amelotte's sudden passing there. 
 Was swept in some wise unaware, 
 And shook to music the close air. 
 
 Against the haloed lattice-panes 
 
 The bridesmaid sunned her breast ; 
 Then to the glass turned taU and free. 
 And braced and shifted daintily 
 Her loin-belt through her cote-hardie. 
 
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 163 
 
 The belt was sflver, and the clasp 
 
 Of lozenged arm-bearings ; 
 A world of mirrored tints minute 
 The rippling sunshine wrought into 't, 
 That flushed her hand and warmed her foot. 
 
 At least an hour had Aloyse — , 
 
 Her jewels in her hair, — 
 Her white gown, as became a bride. 
 Quartered in silver at each side, — 
 Sat thus aloof, as if to hide. 
 
 Over her bosom, that lay still. 
 
 The vest was rich in grain. 
 With close pearls wholly overset : 
 Around her throat the fastenings met 
 Of chevesayle and mantelet. 
 
 It is not as good as it might be, but it illustrates 
 this element of medisevalism in his poetry, and it 
 is a painter's poetry. The room, the figures, the 
 dresses, the colour, make up a picture ; and they 
 suggest another element in Rossetti's poetry on 
 which I dwell for a moment — ^his attempt to represent 
 in poetry what he had made in painting. He wrote 
 a number of sonnets on his own pictures. I do not 
 think they are successful. I do not believe in the 
 representation through a second art-vehicle of that 
 which has been previously represented in another. 
 One of the representations is not only always weaker 
 than the other, but also lowers the imaginative level 
 of the other ; and where the attempt is dehberately 
 made to make a picture into a poem, or a poem into 
 a picture, the poem or the picture is not as freshly 
 shaped as it ought to be. The new vehicle does not 
 secure originality ; on the contrary, the new thing 
 cannot help taking something of the old, and that 
 something, when it has been felt through painting 
 and realized in painting, does not fit in with that 
 which ought to be felt through poetry and realized 
 in poetry. The same may be said when the poem 
 
164 FOUR POETS 
 
 has preceded the picture. Rossetti's sonnets on 
 his pictures are mere translations of pictures into 
 words, and I cannot read them with patience. 
 
 But this does not prevent the interest one has 
 when into poetry, the subject of which has not yet 
 been painted, the painter intrudes, and visualizes 
 in words, that which he sees in his mind as a picture. 
 This is quite different from making a poem out of a 
 finished picture. This is the spirit and eye of a 
 painter giving to the poem an additional and sub- 
 ordinate excellence, which does not interfere with 
 the distinctive poetic conception of the subject. 
 And Rossetti, in the poems where he uses the powers 
 of the painter to enhance his poetic work, has done 
 that which is unique in English poetry. There has 
 been no other poet in England who was also a painter 
 of genius, and who reaUy could use the painter's 
 gifts to adorn therewith the poet's work. 
 
 And now I return to my main subject. One of 
 the tendencies of a mystic supematuralism in religion 
 is, in certain moods of a poet, to enter into and 
 represent a magic supematuralism, such as over wide 
 classes of men in ignorant times, ends in the belief in 
 demons, in spirits who inhabit matter, in black magic, 
 in witches and gramarye. A poet like Rossetti could 
 scarcely help feeling sympathy with this common 
 tendency in human nature. Moreover, his own 
 nature had a certain pleasure in playing with these 
 things and living in their world. It was in the family. 
 Even Cristina, in Goblin Market, shows this tendency, 
 though the aim of the poem takes it out of the 
 realm of superstition. In her brother's poetry, 
 Sister Helen is the finest example of this kind of 
 work. Helen has been betrayed by her lover, who 
 
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 165 
 
 takes to himself a wife. High on her tower she has 
 made a pile of wood, and she melts a waxen man 
 before its heat, and, as the wax melts, Keith of 
 Ewem's flesh and blood melt away in fervent heat. 
 Her Uttle brother watches in the moonhght from 
 the balcony of the tower, and the two brothers of 
 the sick man, and then his father, ride for Ufe and 
 death to the foot of the tower and cry to the boy to 
 speak to Helen, " that she take away the curse, and 
 if she will not save the body to save the soul." But 
 she clings to her revenge, and slays her own soul 
 with his. Nothing can be more vivid than the 
 realization of this, and it is all the more vivid, 
 through contrast, because it is carried on by the 
 conversation of the innocent child with the guilty 
 woman. The tower, the burning pyre, the melting 
 image, the moonhght on the moors and the road, the 
 wild storm, the galloping horses, the white mane and 
 plume and grey hair of the great Baron, the pitiful 
 cry of their agony, the white soul of Ewern, dead at 
 last, that flits through the forest, lost as Helen's 
 soul is lost, are seen with such reahty that we seem 
 to stand on the balcony and look into the room, and 
 over the moorland road. Yet the whole thing is in 
 an unreal world. This is the mixture of the earthly 
 and unearthly, of the visible fact with an invisible 
 cause, of which Rossetti was such a master. It may 
 be said that the matter of the poem is out of human 
 nature. But the matter of the poem was fully 
 beUeved in the time of which he writes. And more- 
 over, so enduring are these superstitions, there are 
 those who believe it still. In my own experience I 
 have come across it twice. I used to visit, when I 
 was a curate in Kensington, a country girl from 
 
166 FOUR POETS 
 
 Devonshire who was dying of consumption. She 
 suffered sorely from stabbing pain. She implored 
 me to go down to Devonshire and to have arrested 
 another girl there who had made a waxen image of 
 her, and who every night pierced its breast with long 
 pins again and again. This was the cause of her 
 illness, and it was the girl's vengeance on her because 
 she had taken her lover away. Nothing would per- 
 suade her that her belief was untrue. She died 
 believing it. Some years afterwards two friends 
 of mine told me the following story. They were 
 dining alone with a woman whose husband had been 
 seduced from her by another woman. After dinner, 
 when they were gathered round the fire, the woman 
 rose with a dreadful look, went to a cupboard, took 
 out of it a wax figure of her betrayer, placed it 
 inside the fender, and bent over it, crying fiercely — 
 " Burn, you white Witch, bum." The subject is 
 then quite modern enough to give it an additional 
 flavour. Nor is the burning centre of the poem, the 
 hungry passion of vengeance in it, of which all the 
 rest is but the shell — the simple, sohtary intensity 
 of which never leaves us for a moment — ^less modem, 
 less capable of being felt now than it was in the past. 
 Set, unrelenting revenge, the thirst of which is never 
 slaked, exists among us now, and it would use the 
 measures Helen uses, if it could. A soul possessed 
 by it needs to be almost re-made ; and it is well to 
 have its deepset passion realized to the full here, so 
 that, seeing it as it is, we may learn how to expel it 
 from the soul. That lesson is not intended by the 
 poet, but it follows. It is, hke all the teaching of 
 the arts, indirect, and it is the more powerful for that. 
 I have only one thing more to say of the poem. 
 
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 167 
 
 It may be alleged that the subject-matter is too 
 terrible for art. But the dreadful in passion, or 
 guilt, or agony is not unfit for art if the impression 
 left at the end is one of pity or reverence for human 
 nature, such an impression as is left by the CEdipus 
 of Sophocles or the Othello of Shakespeare. This 
 saves the situation, and the soul of the audience is 
 softened, and purified from the evil extremes of the 
 passions represented. The play or the tale which 
 leaves an opposite impression of human nature, 
 which makes us mock, despise, or loathe it — that, no 
 matter how clever it may be, is not a work of art, 
 but of Uterary science. It is interesting as science, 
 it is detestable as art. Here there is nothing left 
 but pity : pity all round, pity for the fates of human 
 passion, pity for the guilty, pity for the father, for 
 the bride, pity for the souls who are lost, infinite 
 sorrow for human nature wrenched awry from 
 nobleness. It seems as if pity for Helen were 
 impossible, but it is there. 
 
 We may follow this element of magic super- 
 naturalism through the thrice-divided poem of Rose 
 Mary, especially in its third part. It is full of Rossetti's 
 suggestiveness of the lower supernatural, of his half- 
 finished beings of evil, who, when men have forced 
 their way by magic beyond the limits of the natural, 
 indulge, while they seem to serve, a set purpose 
 to betray and injure men. They live within certain 
 cruel powers of nature as in their natural home, and 
 direct these harmful powers against us. To be 
 their seeming master is to be their slave. To trust 
 them means their betrayal of our trust. It was so 
 with Macbeth, and Rose Mary and her mother are 
 also deceived. But, at the end, the poem maintains 
 
168 FOUR POETS 
 
 the lordship of the soul over these evil powers. Rose 
 Mary dies to conquer them, and she overcomes them 
 in death. 
 
 The poetry attains a higher imaginative range than 
 elsewhere in this class of Rossetti's poems. It brings 
 the spirit of the lower supernatural into the souls of 
 the mother and the girl, makes their speech and pas- 
 sions unearthly, and drenches all the natural scenery 
 with a mist of wizardry. Nay, in the very words and 
 phrases of the poem there is such a mingling of spirit 
 and matter, of the earth and heaven, and of the 
 spiritual and supernatural underneath them, that one 
 cannot tell where thought begins or ends. All things 
 are in a whirl, yet the artistic result is clear. 
 
 At the same time in which he made these incur- 
 sions into the mystic, mediaeval, niagic-haunted 
 realms, he could, when he pleased, and it proves the 
 range and power of his genius, enter, and with equal 
 power, into the problems and the sorrowful fates 
 of our real hfe. I have already touched on his 
 modernism, but I have only mentioned the poem 
 entitled Jenny. No one can mistake the reality of 
 its description, the rigid adherence to the truth of 
 the matter, the utterly un-mystic treatment of the 
 subject — and this from a man who shortly before 
 was wandering in mediaevalisms and in dim super- 
 stitions. That is worth our noting. Still more 
 notable is Rossetti's imaginative S37mpathy and in- 
 sight into the mind of the careless girl ; the finding, 
 below her light surface, of her soul ; the thought of 
 her fate, of the winter of her life's year ; the wonder 
 and sorrow of it all ; the horror it is to humanity ; 
 the contrast of her life with that of her innocent 
 sisters which makes a gobhn of the sun ; the desperate 
 
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 169 
 
 problem of this thing having been from the begin- 
 ning even until now. There is no poem which should 
 make us think more wisely, more sternly, more 
 sincerely of what has been, and is, and of what shoidd 
 be. If Rossetti had written nothing else, he did 
 well in writing this. Nothing is shirked, no false 
 veil is thrown over the truth. It is stern realism, 
 and yet, as art demands, the pity of it, the sense of 
 sorrow for the fates of men, is supreme. 
 
 But these modem things were parentheses in the 
 general story of his poetry. So far as narrative 
 poetry is concerned it had chiefly to do with the past. 
 As a painter, he could not paint a continuous story, 
 for a picture treats only a moment. As a poet, he 
 wished to tell, and out of the past, long stories which 
 seized on his fancy. He projected many such, but he 
 realized very few. The form in which he treated these 
 resembled the form of the ballad, a difficult form for 
 us moderns to use who have lost naivete which 
 Rossetti never had, and simpUcity which was also 
 far away from him. Yet he had always loved the 
 ballads ; they were one of his earUest affections, 
 and he resolved to try and use their form. He had 
 begun with the Staff and Scrip, which, save for a 
 few verses, was not a success. Then he wrote 
 Stratton Water, and afterwards the King's Tragedy 
 and the White Ship. They are aU too long for 
 excellence in this kind of poetry, and they are long 
 by the continual intrusion of unnecessary detail — 
 detail good in itself, but which overloads the build- 
 ing. These ballads are hke those later churches 
 which are so crowded all over with sculptures in the 
 wrong places that the mind is drawn away from the 
 
170 FOUR POETS 
 
 plan of the whole. Stratton Water is nearest to the 
 ballad, but the force and intensity of the subject is 
 weakened by varied descriptions of the same things 
 over and over again. The King's Tragedy, in itself 
 a fine thing, is a long story, not a ballad, and the 
 ballad metre in which it is written only makes its 
 difference from a true ballad the more remarkable. 
 Even in the description of the meeting of the King 
 and the woman-seer, to write which would please his 
 mystical temper, much detail is introduced which 
 is not quite irrelevant, but which enfeebles the 
 scene. Then, many verses say what the true ballad 
 would have said in one, and left a greater weirdness 
 on the mind. The White Ship has been highly 
 praised. It is striking in parts, but I should challenge 
 its success. On the whole, Rossetti was not good 
 at long narrative. 
 
 Moments of passion, hours in which a fate reaches 
 its climax, intense passages of psychological struggle, 
 a night's thinking all in a breath, as in Jenny, on some 
 problem which hes as it were incarnate before him ; 
 the concentration into an hour's emotions of the love 
 of years, as in the Portrait — these were the realms in 
 which his imagination and his white-hot power 
 reached their successes ; and his constant use of the 
 sonnet in which many thoughts and aspects of a 
 matter are fused into one amalgam, contains not only 
 a proof of this, but also a suggestion that he would 
 not reach excellence in the ballad or in the narrative 
 poem. If his life had depended on it, he could not 
 have written a single one of the stories in the Earthly 
 Paradise. He and Morris were in this matter at 
 opposite poles. 
 
 In all these different directions, and over many 
 
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 171 
 
 classes of subjects, Rossetti displayed his originating 
 power. He was incapable of imitation ; what he 
 did cirose clean and fresh out of his imagination. He 
 made new paths for poetry as he did for painting, and 
 along the new paths he planted trees and flowers 
 unknown before. The Last Confession has, it is true, 
 a faint odour of Browning, and Browning is the only 
 poet whom we momentarily touch in his work. Yet, 
 it is only with Browning's vivid realism that we can 
 compare the realism of Rossetti. And the comparison 
 slips away from our grasp. For Rossetti's reaUsm is 
 so interpenetrated with mystic elements that it is 
 altogether severed from Browning's. 
 
 These original ways in poetry and original species 
 of poetry are each represented by only a few examples 
 and it is a great pity he did not give us more. But 
 then, his creative energy was split into two directions, 
 not concentrated on one. He made his imagination 
 work in two arts, and he played at neither. When 
 he wrote poetry, he gave his whole soul to it ; when 
 he painted, he did the same ; and he gave an equaUty 
 of energy to both. There have been other painters 
 who wrote poetry, but it was for the amusement 
 of idle hours ; but Rossetti was as earnest a poet as 
 he was a painter. He reached an equal originality, 
 and it may be an equal excellence, in both arts, and 
 I do not know of another instance of this. And this 
 curious two-foldness in the man — ^which must have 
 strangely confused the singleness of his consciousness, 
 doubling himself continually to himself, so that his 
 weird picture of " How we met ourselves " may have 
 represented an actual psychological experience — 
 accounts for the small number of examples he gives 
 us of the different original paths he opened out for 
 
172 FOUR POETS 
 
 poetry. Having to live two lives in one, having to 
 endue another personality whenever he changed from 
 the painter to the poet or from the poet to the painter, 
 he had not time to make many examples of the new 
 species he had shaped in both his arts. It is astonish- 
 ing how distinct he kept these two personalities, and 
 how distinct was the work of each. I have said 
 that he used some of the painter's gifts to enhance 
 the work of the poet, and that is true. But they 
 were sparingly used, and were strictly subordinated 
 to the poetic conception and its form. The poems 
 are those of a poet, not of a painter, except those 
 sonnets to his own pictures, of which I take no count 
 as poems. The fact is that in all Rossetti's high 
 poetic work, even in the Portrait where one might 
 look for the painter's way, there is nothing which 
 recalls a painter's method. He conceives the subject, 
 composes it, ornaments it, sends his passion through 
 it, fuses its elements together by imagination, as a 
 poet would, not as a painter. To anyone who believes 
 in the manifoldedness of what I may call secondary 
 personalities under one will, this example of it in 
 Rossetti is full of interest. To illustrate this, I may 
 instance the Portrait, one of the most beautiful 
 of his poems. It tells how in old time he painted the 
 woman he loved, and who is now dead. But though 
 he speaks of painting, the poet, not the painter, is 
 supreme in the poem. There is not a Une of it which 
 is conceived or felt out of a painter's imagination. 
 I quote a few verses of it, not only to illustrate how 
 far apart it is from the art of painting, but also 
 because it throws light upon those elements in his 
 poetry of which I have already written. His 
 mysticism is full-fledged in it, and also his psychology. 
 
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 173 
 
 That superstitious element also into which mysticism 
 often drifts is not absent — 
 
 In painting her I shrined her face 
 'Mid m3rstic trees, where light falls in 
 Hardly at all ; a covert place 
 Where you might think to find a din 
 Of doubtful talk, and a live flame 
 Wandering, and many a shape whose name 
 Not itself knoweth, and old dew, 
 And your own footsteps meeting you, 
 And all things going as they came. 
 
 A haunted place! Wraiths of the intruders who 
 break iato it, half souls that do not know their 
 names, footfalls that are one's own yet not one's 
 own, a din of doubtful voices, wandering flames, 
 old dew — a wonderful phrase — and that incompre- 
 hensible drift of things in a world devoid of reason 
 or of cause, all things going as they came, — are all 
 mingled up with the bitter sorrow of love. 
 
 O heart that never beats nor heaves. 
 In that one darkness lying still. 
 What now to thee my love's great will 
 
 Or the fine web the sunshine weaves ? 
 
 At the end steals in the ancient love of medisevalism — 
 the mediaeval Heaven of the Blessed Damozel and the 
 Palestine of the Crusades — 
 
 Even so, where Heaven holds breath and hears 
 The beating heart of Love's own breast, — 
 
 Where round the secret of all spheres 
 All angels lay their wings to rest, — 
 
 How shall my soul stand rapt and awed. 
 
 When, by the new birth borne abroad 
 
 Throughout the music of the suns. 
 
 It enters in her soul at once 
 
 And knows the silence there for God I 
 
 Here, with her face doth memory sit 
 Meanwhile, and wait the day's decline. 
 
 Till other eyes shall look from it. 
 Eyes of the spirit's Palestine, 
 
174 FOUR POETS 
 
 Even then the old gaze tenderer : 
 While hopes and aims long lost with her 
 Stand round her image side by side. 
 Like tombs of pilgrims that have died 
 About the Holy Sepulchre. 
 
 It remains, in concluding this essay, to say a few 
 words on Rossetti's translations, and on his relation 
 to Nature-poetry. As to the translations, he was a 
 fine Italian scholar, not from the outside, but the 
 inside. ItaUan might be said to be his native tongue. 
 English also might be said to be his native tongue. 
 It is plain from his work in poetry and prose that 
 he was a master of the intimacies of English. When 
 we add to those two masterhoods that from his youth 
 he had studied, under his father and in his home, 
 Dante and the circle of poets who preceded and 
 followed him ; and, moreover, that one half of his 
 mind was in close harmony with the thoughts, feel- 
 ings, manners, and especially with the theology and 
 love-theories of the end of the thirteenth and begin- 
 ning of the fourteenth century, we can scarcely 
 conceive anyone better fitted to translate the Vita 
 Nuova and the rest of the poetic work of that time. 
 Moreover, Rossetti was a true poet, and it takes a 
 poet to translate a poet.; and, through imagination 
 impassioned by what it reads, to feel into the heart 
 of what the poet meant whom he translates ; and then, 
 transferring what he has felt into another tongue, to 
 seize the phrase, the words, which rightly represent, 
 and will awaken, a similar emotion in the EngHsh 
 reader to that which the Italian reader, such as 
 Giotto, felt of old. All this Rossetti has done as it 
 was never done before in England. 
 
 As to his Nature-poetry, Rossetti felt deeply the 
 
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 175 
 
 beauty and the terror of the world of Nature, but he 
 felt, as a poet, the beautiful and terrible landscape 
 of the soul, in its questioning, its experience and 
 its passions, above all, in the passion of love, a hun- 
 dredfold more deeply ; — and this, to such an extent, 
 that Nature is, I may say, never described for her 
 own sake, for love of her alone. She lives in his 
 poetry only as illustration of the action and feeling 
 of the heart of man. It is curious that in all the 
 hundred and one sonnets of the House of Life, and 
 in the other scattered sonnets, there is scarcely one 
 in which Nature is the main subject ; and there 
 are very few where the natural description extends 
 over a third of the Sonnet. Where it does, it is 
 to lead up to the record of some experience of the 
 inner life, or to enhance some phase of love. It 
 is much the same in the other poems. The most 
 accurate description of Nature in them is that 
 of the birds, especially of the starlings, coming home 
 at evening, in Sunset Wings, but it is only made in 
 order to image the hours of Hope, in flight towards 
 farewell. There is, however, in a single Sonnet, 
 entitled Spring, a full picture of early Spring in a 
 pastoral county which shows how well, had he chosen, 
 he could have written on natural scenery. It was not 
 only Spring that appealed to him. He loved the four 
 seasons of the year, but he loved them most as images 
 of the course of human love and human life. All his 
 happy, immanent appreciations, in one or two lines, 
 of the weather, the flowers, the life, the inner spirit 
 of the Seasons, drift into humanity. The river in that 
 pathetic poem, Down Stream, charged with the sweet 
 softness of June, and again with the dark flood 
 of winter, is yet but the image of the love and the ruin 
 
176 FOUR POETS 
 
 which were wrought beside its stream. Sometimes 
 a transient lovehness of nature, felt as if it were an 
 actual passion of the soul, seems to lose all that is 
 material and become a spiritual thing. In this 
 intimate and vital bringing together, without fusion, 
 of Nature and human passion, Rossetti is able to 
 create strange and subtle verses which seem to 
 be neither quite of Nature or of the soul, but of 
 some religion between both, where Nature appears 
 to claim the attributes of man, and man to claim 
 the energies of Nature. Nature and man are not 
 united in them ; the next moment, the next line, 
 they change places. They but touch and separate, 
 but at the moment of touching, a strange, subtly 
 mingled, apparently meaningless verse is born, which 
 leaves a clear impression on the imagination. Such 
 hues are these — 
 
 Through dark forest-boughs in flight 
 The wind swoops onwards brandishing the light. 
 The empty pastures blind with rain. 
 For leagues I saw the east wind blown. 
 Tender as dawn's first hill-fire, and intense 
 
 As instantaneous penetrating sense. 
 In Spring's first birth-hour, of other Springs gone by. 
 The sunrise blooms and withers on the hill 
 Like any lull-flower ; and the noblest truth 
 Dies here to dust. 
 
 Now and then there are separate lines of vivid 
 description of some momentary aspect or object in 
 Nature ; states of sky in cahn or storm, flowers in 
 the woods, insects and birds, — subjects common to 
 all poets, but in Rossetti's work made uncommon 
 by words so vital, so clutching on the spiritual heart 
 of the thing, and so rich in colour that one feels only 
 a painter could have found them. Indeed Nature is 
 used by him as the great painters of Italy used her 
 
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 177 
 
 in their pictures, never as the subject of their work, 
 but as part of its scenery. He introduces natural 
 objects as Signorelli does the flowery meadows in 
 his altar-piece in the National Gallery, or as Titian 
 paints the hiUs and the sea in the Bacchus and 
 Ariadne — with as deep and opulent a colour, with as 
 careful and truthful detail, but with a more resolute 
 s5nnbohsm. Sunlight in all its ways and moonlight 
 he seems to have most loved ; and perhaps it is 
 owing to the impossibihty of realizing moonlight in 
 painting, that he is so fond in his poetry of moonlight. 
 Again and again, in many various aspects the 
 moon passes through his poems. 
 
 Finally, he is not one of the greater poets. Their 
 work is of the sunlight, of the fresh air, of the wide 
 landscape, of human nature. His work is of its 
 moonlight, of perfumed air, of a precious btit a con- 
 fined landscape. It is poetry of a private chamber, 
 of an isolated glade in the forest, of an island secluded 
 in tropic seas. It is of the particular, not of the 
 universal. Only rarely does he touch the primeval, 
 natural foundations of man's nature, and when he 
 does the natural passions he describes are shown in 
 remote, involved, weird, or strange circumstances, 
 such as appeal to the experience of only a few persons. 
 This puts him as a poet on a much lower plane than 
 is occupied by poets of a larger range. But then, 
 within this enclosed garden of poetry, the flowers, 
 the paths, the waters, the buildings, are of an exqui- 
 siteness, a finish, a colour and beauty which are rare, 
 specialized, and of a seclusive charm. We walk in 
 it for a time with a lonely pleasure, and then we leave 
 it for the open country and the free air and the 
 boundless ocean of poetry. 
 
 13— (3»78) 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 The analogy I have drawn in the last, essay between 
 the history and the causes of the rise of a new kind 
 of poetry in Keats and now in Rossetti and Morris is, 
 I have said, more clearly represented in Morris than 
 in Rossetti. I have heard of persons, anxious to 
 free Morris's youthful life from the charge of 
 indifference to the problems of his day, who have 
 culled out of his letters and talk at Oxford, and 
 shortly after he left it, phrases which seem to 
 represent that he was vitally interested in the ques- 
 tions which disturbed the world of England when he 
 was young. It is true that he spoke of these questions 
 when they turned up, or when a friend interested 
 in them came from the noisy world without into the 
 quietudes of Oxford ; but by the time he wrote his 
 first book of poetry, indeed, after that journey in 
 France when he and Burns- J ones resolved to give 
 up going into the Church, his indifference to the 
 theological, poHtical, philosophic and social questions 
 of the day had risen into boredom. He ignored them 
 completely, and so did his friend, Burne-Jones. 
 And Morris cried, like Keats — " My world is disen- 
 chanted. Where shall I find loveliness ? Where does 
 Beauty sleep ? There is the healing of humanity ; 
 there is truth." This single faith and cry of his youth, 
 this identity of feeling towards the world which 
 encompassed them, knits Morris and Keats together. 
 The analogy fits closely, yet in many points they 
 differed from one another. Morris was a stronger, 
 robuster nature than Keats, healthier in body and 
 
 178 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS 179 
 
 therefore in soul. He knew clearly, as Keats knew 
 indistinctly, what he wanted to do, and to live ; and 
 when he found it out, he put aside other objects, 
 having eminently the power of rejection, and went 
 straight to his aim ; nor did he ever rest a moment 
 till he had, as far as he could, attained it. While 
 his striving to any chosen goal lasted, he saw nothing 
 else in the world. When he had reached his goal, 
 fulfilled his aim, he took up another object and 
 marched to it with the same absorption, with the 
 same intensity of will. Except, of course, in his callow 
 youth, there was nothing tentative about Morris. 
 In all this h^ differed from Keats, and most of all 
 in this — that in after life the social problems of the 
 present seized on him, and he flung himself, with his 
 native impetuosity, into the bettering of the human 
 race. The call of the present drew him out of his 
 beloved past. 
 
 Keats, had the world changed around him, 
 would — ^it is plain from his letters — ^have suffused 
 his poems with an atmosphere fit for such a time 
 and in sympathy with it. We think, with a deep 
 regret, that had he only lived ten years longer he 
 would have found himself in the midst of national, 
 poUtical and spiritual emotions, and have been, 
 thrilled by them into a poetry more vital of the present. 
 Think of Keats living in the movements of 1832 ; 
 writing with Tennyson and Browning ; moved by 
 their emotions ! He would not, indeed, have flung 
 himself, as Morris did in his after life, into the hottest 
 of the fight of humanity. He had neither the 
 fierce intensity, nor the versatility of Morris ; but 
 he would have humanized his poetry. He would 
 have felt in every vein the new emotions and their 
 
180 FOUR POETS 
 
 ideas. That fresh world would have sucked him in ; 
 and the mythology of Greece and the stories of the 
 fourteenth century would have yielded to the life of 
 the England in which he lived. This Keats had 
 begun to feel ; at this Morris arrived. 
 
 Morris had even greater reason than Keats for his 
 rejection of the present. Beauty had wholly dis- 
 appeared from hfe ; and the horrors of its absence 
 had reached their height in the first half of the nine- 
 teenth century. The vituperation of a lifetime 
 would scarcely exhaust the just abhorrence of the 
 ugUness of the first twenty years of Victoria's reign. 
 Art had all but perished : painting save among the 
 landscape painters ; sculpture and architecture were 
 mere conventions. They had neither truth to Nature, 
 nor imagination nor originality. Restoration had 
 raised its fiendish hands, and was tearing down what 
 beauty was left in the old buildings, or replacing it 
 with soulless imitation. Oxford was still fair, but its 
 devastation had begun. 
 
 Again, I have traced in this book how the great 
 excitements of 1830 and the following years exhausted 
 themselves as poetic impulse, and became first sensa- 
 tional, and then, met by historical and scientific 
 criticism, were involved in 9. scepticism, barren of 
 poetic passion, and in an intellectual analysis, barren 
 of beauty. Arnold represented what the poet be- 
 came in such a time ; and if poetry were again to 
 arise, it would have to get clear of all these questions 
 of history and science and theology. Rossetti 
 emancipated poetry, almost altogether, from these 
 chains. Morris altogether set it free. He fled away 
 from the dull world around him, beset as it was with 
 the questions of the understanding only ; and fled 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS 181 
 
 farther away, with horror, from the world outside 
 Oxford, where material aims and material ugliness 
 were wickedly despotic. He refused to live in this 
 decay ; shut his eyes to the ugliness among which he 
 lived, felt too much life in him to endure the exhaust- 
 tion of passion and beauty which characterized society, 
 was sick of the theological and political squabbles, felt 
 no sympathy with the critical or the revolutionary 
 movements — not even with 1848 — ^flung off his 
 shoulders, with a grim laugh, the whole atmosphere 
 of the time, and went, as if it were round the corner, 
 to live, and move, and have his being in the thirteenth 
 and fourteenth centuries. This was, in spirit, the 
 very thing Keats did in his time ; and, as I have said, 
 for similar reasons. And the poetry of Morris which 
 came out of it was of a similar type to that of Keats — 
 a pure romantic poetry ; a hundred miles away 
 from the human hfe of his own day ; with a touch in 
 it of mediaeval mysticism which Keats did not possess 
 so fully ; with more also of humanity, but with the 
 same supreme love of loveUness as Keats possessed ; 
 and especially, with a similar, minute, intensely 
 observant, rich and never-wearied vision and worship 
 of natural beauty, of birds and wild animals, of woods 
 and streams, and the goings on of the earth, the 
 weather and the sky. 
 
 The love of the earth and all her doings and grow- 
 ings, and of the business, moods and fancies of the 
 heavens which belonged to the earth as the great 
 mother's husband, was deep in Keats ; but it was 
 deeper in Morris. No tongue can tell how Morris 
 loved the earth ; she was his delight, his joy, his 
 refuge, his home ; the companion of his uncompanion- 
 able thoughts ; his mother from whose breasts he 
 
182 FOUR POETS 
 
 drank life, energy, food for his work, joy for his 
 imagination, and incessant beauty. No one has 
 praised her better ; and his poetry of Nature reveals 
 how close, how passionate he was in his worship. 
 She was the only thing left here and there in England 
 unspoiled for him by the commercial spirit ; unre- 
 stored by the pretenders to art ; unconventionalized 
 by the false worshippers of a false beauty. And when 
 he rowed up the Thames between the meadows filled 
 with haymakers, or walked over the downs where the 
 yews and junipers clustered in groups along the Pil- 
 grim way, he could, even in the nineteenth century, 
 believe himself still in the fourteenth. Thames was 
 unchanged, and the woods. At any moment he 
 might see a clump of spears come along the river- 
 way ; or the bowmen issue from the trees, or the 
 monk come from the grey abbey to the village green, 
 or the farmer bid his wife and girls farewell in the 
 garden, or the knight blaze the landscape into sudden 
 colour, as he rode under his banner to meet King 
 Edward. Nature, at least, in the places he loved, 
 was not out of harmony with the England of the 
 fourteenth century. 
 
 Many years afterwards, when his passionate 
 humanity had forced him into real touch with the 
 misery of great cities — a misery of sordidness and 
 ugliness and base living, as great among the richer as 
 among the poorer classes, for, save for comfort, both 
 rich and poor hved in hideous conditions — ^he was 
 not content any longer to live only in the past. He 
 came to live in the faith and hope of a better future ; 
 and, in that most imaginative of books. News from 
 Nowhere, he pciinted what England might become 
 a century or two hence under a new rdgime ; the 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS 183 
 
 foundation of which was the universal prevalence, 
 among the people, of intelligent joy in the work of 
 their hands. Out of this joy in work would arise, 
 I he thought, a desire for loveliness and its expression 
 in things made, tiU everything in the whole land 
 would be at once useful and beautiful. But in that 
 book, in which the whole world is different from ours, 
 a great deal of Nature was not different from that 
 which he saw, and we may still behold to-day. The 
 vales and hills which had been destroyed are in that 
 book rescued from smoke and dirt ; the ruin of 
 Nature by commercialism in the places where she 
 had been turned into hell is repaired ; the towns are 
 sweet and clean, the architecture is noble ; but there 
 are many places described in News from Nowhere 
 which had not in his time been ruined, and which 
 needed no repair. The reaches of the Thames which he 
 dwells on so lovingly in this book are still the same 
 as he pictured them in the fourteenth century ; as 
 they were for him round Kelmscott in the nineteenth. 
 The gardens of rustic England are the same, and the 
 summer woods ; and the soft grey skies, or the sun- 
 shine of June, or the fruitful rain-cloud — these, for 
 him, were constant. Chaucer knew them ; Morris 
 knew them ; the lovers of four generations hence 
 wiU also know them. Yes, in all his trouble and 
 striving ; in an imaginative life which spent its days 
 now in a world six hundred years ago, and now 
 in a world a hundred years hence, and then again in 
 the world which encompassed him while he lived 
 among us — ^in a life, that is, which by knowledge, 
 and in fancy, made him partaker of the changes of 
 seven hundred years — Morris had one unchanging 
 sphere of loveliness in which to rest and be happy — 
 
184 FOUR POETS 
 
 one world which never varied in its beauty, and never 
 deceived his love — ^the charmed and charming doings 
 of the earth and sky in winter and spring, in summer 
 and autumn. The most emotional expressions, 
 charged with the deep simphcity of passion, which 
 occur in all his writings are those in which he expresses 
 his love of the earth and all its doings. Here are 
 two — 
 
 " She led me close up to the house, and laid her 
 shapely brown hand and arm upon that lichened wall, 
 as if to embrace it, and cried out : ' O me, me ; 
 how I love the earth, and the seasons, and weather, 
 and all things that deal with it, and all that grows 
 out of it, as this has done.' 
 
 " She led me to the door, murmuring little above 
 her breath as she did so : ' The earth and the growth 
 of it, and the life of it ! If I could but say or show 
 how I love it ! " 
 
 And here is a piece of poetry which, in its poetic 
 reticence, is not less impassioned — 
 
 JUNE 
 
 O June, O June that we desired so. 
 Wilt thou not make us happy on this day ? 
 Across the river thy soft breezes blow 
 Sweet with the scent of beanfields far-away, 
 Above our heads rustle the aspens grey, 
 Calm is the sky with harmless clouds beset. 
 No thought of storm the morning vexes yet. 
 
 See, we have left our hopes and fears behind 
 
 To give our very hearts up unto thee ; 
 
 What better place than this then could we find 
 
 By this sweet stream that knows not of the sea. 
 
 That guesses not the city's misery. 
 
 This little stream whose hamlets scarce have names. 
 
 This far-off, lonely mother of the Thames ? 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS 185 
 
 Here then, O June, thy kindness will we take ; 
 
 And if indeed but pensive men we seem. 
 
 What should we do ? Thou wouldst not have us wake 
 
 From out the arms of this rare happy dream 
 
 And wish to leave the murmur of the stream. 
 
 The rustling boughs, the twitter of the birds. 
 
 And all thy thousand peaceful happy words. 
 
 He who would drink deep of the milk and wine of 
 the earth, and honour and love the great heavens, 
 and know the inner hf e of the seasons, and what they 
 do for us, their guests, would do well to read the intro- 
 ductions to the Tales in the Earthly Paradise. They 
 sing from March to February the story of the year. 
 They are a fit and alluring introduction to the natural 
 descriptions in the tales themselves, which, in their 
 multitude of observation and truth, will double and 
 redouble the love of English scenery. But of these 
 I must write hereafter. 
 
 This love of his kept him always ideal, always 
 romantic ; and in his poetry, simple, sensuous and 
 passionate. In one moment, when he pleased, he 
 could slip out of the worries of business, the trouble 
 of life, the quarrels of the socialist bodies, the noise 
 of the battle, into peace and joy, into pure pleasure 
 of the senses, into the spirit and simplicity of beauty, 
 and that uphfted passion for it, which " after no 
 repenting draws." No one could detach himself 
 more quickly, more completely from his surroundings, 
 and pass with greater ease into another life and time. 
 But it was his love of Nature which made the magic 
 element in which he could practise his detachments. 
 And if we need proof of this, it is enough to read the 
 beginning of John Ball and of News from Nowhere. 
 
 At present, while he was young, he lived in the Hfe, 
 the scenery, and the feeling of the thirteenth and 
 fourteenth centuries. I cannot conceive a greater 
 
186 FOUR POETS 
 
 detachment from his own time than his was in his 
 imaginative and musing youth. He lived fully, it 
 is true, in all the athleticism of the young: walking, 
 rowing, fencing and playing : but these were, even 
 more fully than now, practised in his beloved centu- 
 ries. So, whatever he did, he still moved among his 
 fellows, as if he were, by some spell, surrounded with 
 an aura of the past ; and indeed Bume-Jones and 
 Rossetti were, in this, not far behind him. It was 
 pleasant to hear Burne-Jones tell — the contrasts of 
 the scene were so strange — ^how, frequently, in the 
 long walks he and Rossetti took at night when they 
 were young, they used to go for refreshment into the 
 public-house nearest at hand, and, leaning over the 
 counter, forget where they were, seeing nothing of 
 the rough people round them, while they continued 
 their discussion of Arthur and Guenevere and Lancelot, 
 of Sir Percival and the Holy Grail. 
 
 The present disappeared from these men, but most 
 of all from Morris. Nor was the atmosphere in which 
 he lived merely imaginary. Ever since he was a 
 boy he had studied the architecture, the clothing, 
 the manners, the agriculture, the war-customs and 
 weapons, the monastic life, the manuscripts, the ways 
 of writing and illumination, the furniture, the dresses, 
 the colours of armour and heraldry, the houses, huts 
 and castles of that ancient time. His friends at 
 Oxford were astonished by his knowledge, and all 
 his life long he went on increasing it. His imagina- 
 tive musings had then accurate material to work 
 upon. The world he created was true, and became 
 so living, so actual to him, that he could, almost day 
 by day, invent stories out of its life, with a flavour of 
 Froissart in them, and with a strange reality. Three 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS 187 
 
 or four prose stories in the Oxford and Cambridge 
 Magazine prove this power of his, the best of which 
 is the Hollow Land. These, however, are over- 
 fantastic ; but there are poems of this imaginative 
 world in Guenevere, his first book, which have 
 all .the grim reahty of the wars and feuds of the 
 thirteenth century ; not tales told out of Froissart 
 or any chronicle, but invented. Of these. Sir Peter 
 Harpdon's End is one, and the Haystack in the 
 Floods another. 
 
 Yet, in spite of this active life in another world, 
 he could not altogether shake away all impressions 
 from the world of fifty years ago. He knew what 
 was around him, and it formed behind his imagined 
 life a dim background of horror and hatefulness 
 which sent into his heart waves of distress and pain. 
 They seemed to come from far away, to knit him up 
 with a dreadful story, to bring unreaUty into the 
 happy life he lived — so that he could not tell which 
 life was the true one, which was the dream, and which 
 the reality. This uncertainty as to where he was, as 
 to what world he belonged to, naturally increased when 
 in his manhood he was brought closely into contact 
 with the life lived by the poor and working people 
 of this " city of dreadful night," with the vain and 
 ugly lives of the richer classes, with all the vast 
 blunders of society. The consciousness of this drove 
 its pain into his far-off, imaginary hfe, and continu- 
 ally disturbed it. He rarely got completely away. 
 What was easy for him in his youth was very difficult 
 for him when he was forty-five. He tells at the 
 beginning of News from Nowhere how one night he 
 shpped into another world, and hved in it for many 
 
188 FOUR POETS 
 
 days. But always, he was haunted there with dim 
 whispering that he was not its actual indweller ; the 
 people he lived with seemed to know that he must 
 go back, till at last when the end draws near and he 
 must return, he describes with much subtlety of 
 feeling how this new world which had come to be very 
 real to him wavered, closed, opened again, and again 
 closed ; how the faces and voices of his friends grew 
 slowly dim, how they looked on him with sorrow, 
 and talked of his going, and how at last the dream 
 vanished, and he found himself on the dreary road 
 near Kelmscott House, and face to face with a 
 miserable man. 
 
 That book with the Dream of John Ball reveal the 
 double soul and Ufe of Morris. One may read in 
 them what filled his spirit when he was silent. It 
 was thus he felt in middle age. But when he was 
 younger, and battered with consciousness of the 
 present world, he rushed into a state of fierce resent- 
 ment, and spared in his speech no one and no thing. 
 In furies of this kind he was hke a Baresark ; and it 
 was wonderful to hear him. He was not eloquent 
 in his rages, but emphatic. And what impression 
 he then made on his young companions — when, for 
 example, he found himself before a restored church — 
 was made by furious repetition of furious phrases. 
 Then, having thus awakened, like the sleeping war- 
 rior in the cavern, and drawn his sword half from its 
 sheath, he lapsed back again into his own youthful 
 world, where men were telUng each other how Arthur 
 rode against the heathen, and Lancelot loved the 
 Queen, and the ladies went a-Maying, and the hosts 
 lay round Joyous Gard, and Tristram laid on Isolt's 
 hps the immortal kiss, and Guenevere sinned in joy. 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS 189 
 
 repented in sadness ; and where, in real war, and not 
 in legend, Chandos and Manny and the Black Prince 
 and the Free Companions fought in France and Spain 
 — where the ships with banners fljdng returned to 
 England, and the Abbeys by the river received the 
 wounded, and welcomed the merchant and t!he 
 scholar ; and the great churches rose, day by day, 
 into loveliness at the hands of workmen who invented 
 and loved their work. 
 
 This Ufe and its capacities were sufficiently imagina- 
 tive ; a thousand miles away from the sordid psycho- 
 logy of modern hterature. Out of it grew all Morris's 
 earliest poetry, not one line of which had to do with 
 any base or commonplace subject, not one line of 
 which was written under the belief that close and 
 clever description of what was ugly could, even in 
 madness, be called art. But ideal as this imagined 
 life was, it was not more ideal than the steady temper 
 of his soul. No one who met Morris for the first or 
 second time, or only met him as an acquaintance, 
 would be likely to credit him with the ideal temper, 
 and indeed he abhorred a great deal which is now 
 called ideal. He was sometimes amazingly rude, 
 gruff, and let his wraths loose without restraint. He 
 dressed Hke a rough sailor ; he liked at times to be 
 a bit of a boor. He never trimmed his speech, nor 
 his manner when he did not like people, except when 
 he wanted to push forward principles he cared for. 
 Then he subdued himself. He had not a trace of 
 luxury or fine Uving. His simplicity ran into rough- 
 ness among those who were not simple. A being 
 more apart from the conception of ideality framed by 
 the fine social folk, or by the Uttle gods of culture, 
 caimot be imagined. 
 
190 FOUR POETS 
 
 Yet if I were asked what especially characterized 
 Morris's temper of soul, all his hfe long, the views he 
 took of men and of womanhood, of hfe as it ought to 
 be hved, of his poetry and prose, of his aims for 
 craftsmanship in all the arts of life, I should say that 
 they cill arose out of, and were steeped in, the ideal 
 temper of his soul. 
 
 Sweetest nut hath sourest rind, 
 Such a nut is Rosalind. 
 
 He saw everything he cared to write about through 
 the veil of ideal beauty. What faults any subject 
 had, or any time or place he described, if they were 
 natural — that is, in the necessities of the thing — ^were 
 either unimportant to him, or were used as foils to 
 enhance the beauty he loved. He raised magnani- 
 mity, courage, strength, natural passion, natural 
 good sense in affairs, love of the commonweal as con- 
 trasted with selfish individualism, honest labour, 
 ardent fighting, frank generosity, steady persistency 
 in pursuit of a chosen goal, to the highest point in 
 men, and represented their ideal in the action and 
 hfe of his men. As to the women in his tales, of whom 
 I shall say more hereafter, I do not think in the whole 
 of hterature there is anything more ideally noble 
 than the women whom he has created out of his own 
 soul in tales such as the Roots of the Mountains and 
 the House of the Wolfings. Yes ; the humanity 
 Morris draws, when he dips his pencil in the colours 
 of his own soul, is an ideahzed humanity, and for 
 that may God be praised. 
 
 Then he ideahzed the times of which he wrote, 
 their customs, hfe, and their works. He scarcely 
 saw a single fault in the thirteenth and fourteenth 
 centuries, or in the period told of in the Northern 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS 191 
 
 Sagas. Moreover, he idealized the natural scenery 
 he loved ; and by idealizing it, made it more real 
 than it had been before to thousands of men and 
 women who had lived in it without seeing it. But 
 his idealization was balanced away from over-soft- 
 ness or preciosity by his unmitigated wrath with all 
 that was base or ugly — by his indignation with the 
 men and the things that he hated because they 
 crushed the soul and brains of men. It was refresh- 
 ing, among the smooth and excusing folk who slur 
 over what is mean, and exalt the commonplace, and 
 serve the devil up in sugar, and praise the accepted, 
 and have no individual opinions, to hear Morris 
 launch out against the things he abominated. The 
 lifeless maxims and conventions of society, the greed 
 and luxury, the base competition, by any means, 
 for wealth, the dishonesty and bad workmanship of 
 trade, the destruction by machinery of the workmen's 
 intelUgence and his love of making something out of 
 his own head — ^these, and many other revolting 
 things, he reaUzed, even more than Ruskin, for what 
 they were ; and he stripped them to the bone and 
 mocked their ugUness. The only thing in relation 
 to them which I may say he ideahzed, raising it to 
 its highest power, was his own hatred of them. It 
 became a kind of heroic phrenzy. He felt, like 
 Hercules, in these hours, as if the coat of Nessus 
 wrapped him round ; and he behaved hke Hercules. 
 But his outward words of wrath were but a faint 
 image of the vital misery his soul endured at living 
 in a world where he often felt that his struggle to 
 mend it was hopeless. 
 
 Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time, 
 Why should I strive to set the crooked straight ? 
 
192 FOUR POETS 
 
 Then it was, in order to restore his soul and to relieve 
 the pain, he flitted out of it all into communion with 
 an imagined world — ^the world of the past he pictured 
 in John Ball, the world of the future he pictured in 
 News from Nowhere. I scarcely know anything more 
 pathetic than the image of Morris, when — Shaving 
 spent a whole day in the dirty discomfort of the 
 London streets, speaking to the poor folk in their 
 hideous caverns in the rain and mist, attending small 
 SociaUst meetings and tr57ing to get the quarrelling 
 men to unite, joining processions to ask for reforms 
 he knew would not be granted, lecturing on art to 
 people who did not understand him, and returning 
 utterly wearied out and depressed — ^when, having 
 done all this, he rose next morning at six, and, while 
 the air was yet fresh and pure and the Thames that 
 flowed past his study windows at Hammersmith 
 blue under the sky of the spring, sat down to clean 
 his soul and pour dew upon it, to enable his 
 powers, and make strong his hopes, by writing of 
 the healthy, happy folk of Burgdale, of the fair 
 valley and rivers and houses, and of the wise, strong, 
 natural, honest, and loving people, who tilled their 
 land and loved it so well, and who, when the hour of 
 trial came, fought for it so joyously against the Dusky 
 men. The hours sUpped away as he wrote of his 
 ideal, and he never thought of the torment of the day. 
 But, when the writing dream was over, he went out 
 to meet the actual he hated and helped with the 
 courage and strength that he had won by living in 
 the imagined world, which men called an impossible 
 ideal, but which he felt and hoped would become a 
 reality. 
 So, in these later days at least, however ideal in 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS 193 
 
 aim, subject and form his literary work was, his soul, 
 by which he wrote^ was continuously in contact with 
 what we ought to call real life ; and it proves the 
 fineness of his nature that the misery, incapacity, 
 and all the hated things he touched to the quick, 
 did not for a single moment dim the beauty, bright- 
 ness, clearness, joy, peace and possibility of his ideal. 
 Its heaven was always beautiful, and he rose into it 
 in a moment. Thus, like this earth, he went round 
 his axis, half in light and half in shade ; night suc- 
 ceeded day within, and day the night ; a strange, 
 double hfe, whirling into sorrow and joy, hate and 
 love, rage and ravishment. And in either kind of 
 hfe, all that was done or thought or felt was fulfilled 
 with such intensity that, without any desire to be 
 apart from his fellows, the intensity, being heated 
 seven times more than it was wont to be heated in 
 others, isolated him into a separate and solitary life. 
 He was a lonely man at root ; and the sentiment of 
 this solitariness, which for the most part was silent, 
 and of which he never boasted, steals forth, uncon- 
 sciously to himself, through all his most imaginative 
 poetry and prose, and fills it with a dim, pathetic 
 atmosphere ; which, if anyone had accused him of 
 creating, he would have denied with that indigna- 
 tion which we have when someone in conversation 
 attempts to lift the veil which hides the innermost 
 shrine of our heart. 
 
 This intensity was itself a part of his ideality, one 
 of its forms. Whatever he undertook — ^poetry, tales, 
 lectures, social work, designing patterns, dyeing, 
 carpet-making, silk-weaving, tapestry, glass-painting, 
 the printing-press — ^was hfted into the ideal world 
 by his impassioned desire to make it perfect, to get 
 14— (2278) 
 
194 FOUR POETS 
 
 into it the absolute of beauty of which it was capable ; 
 and in that aspiration the intensity he gave to the 
 matter in hand was born. Whatever was in hand, it 
 was for the moment the only thing in the world to 
 do ; and he lost in it all interest for the time in any 
 other kind of work, even in the work of his dearest 
 friends. Nor was this intense desire for perfection 
 left in the vague, a mere dream of cispiration. He 
 made himself master of all that had been previously 
 done with regard to the matter in hand, whether well 
 or ill. He bought every book likely to help him, 
 ransacking with a kind of fury every source of infor- 
 mation. Then, having thrown aside all that was 
 merely mechanical or ill-wrought in the practice of 
 the past, he practised the craft with his own hands, 
 and, having learnt it, taught it to others. He 
 rejoiced in the mistakes and failures which pointed 
 out a better way of doing the thing ; experimented 
 on all the modes his predecessors had used ; and then, 
 disdaining and hating imitation, set his own genius 
 to work, invented his own ways and patterns and 
 methods ; made afresh aU the means for his work — 
 as, for example, the paper and ink for his printing— 
 and threw, every power he possessed into the joyous 
 work of creation. In this aim at perfection, in this 
 intensity, and in this creativeness, Morris, more than 
 any man of whom I know, attained joy. If his life 
 was sometimes dark, sometimes overladen, it was 
 also partaker of rapture. The word is not too strong ; 
 I use it deliberately. And it was to that becoming 
 general over England — to men making something to 
 represent their own thought with individual pleasure 
 in the making — it was to that he looked forward as 
 the basis of a new society and a new life, in which joy 
 
WILLIAM MOARIS 195 
 
 and not sorrow would be -the atmosphere of being 
 and becoming. That was one of the reasons that he 
 liked the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. He 
 had an impression, for which there were good grounds, 
 that men then made what they wanted with pleasure 
 in the making, and, having made the useful thing, 
 liked to ornament it in order to satisfy their natural 
 desire of beauty ; and thence became inventors, 
 designers, carvers, illimiinators, builders — ^when they 
 had the power. The air of Ufe was artistic. Every 
 one made his own needs ; the whole world was making ; 
 and out of that general and inteUigent activity 
 the finer artist easily and frequently arose. In every- 
 thing that was made, even in a chair, a platter, the 
 personal soul of the maker was infused and felt. 
 And when any personal soul among them was inspired 
 to more dehcate and larger issues, he rose out of the 
 lower into the higher range of makers ; became the 
 fuller artist ; illuminated his book, wove his tapes- 
 tries, painted his window, hfted his cathedral to the 
 heavens — and all with joy. With all this he was not 
 ignorant of the other side of things, of the misery 
 and oppression the poor suffered in the bygone times. 
 He knew his history ; but he knew also that this, 
 which is not true of the workman in our own day, 
 was true then, that men, when they had the means 
 to make an5^hing, rejoiced in the work of their own 
 hands, sent their soul into it, permeated it with what 
 intelligence and delight they had, satisfied partly 
 in it a hunger for beauty which their society had, 
 and ours has not. 
 
 IdeaUty, then, with a clear sight of good or bad 
 reahty ; intensity, with a clear knowledge and aim ; 
 joy in creation — these are quaUties which appear in 
 
196 FOUR POETS 
 
 all the art-work of Morris from a lyric to an initial 
 letter. In his youth they are unformed, but they 
 grew into finer shaping every day. There was no 
 retrogression and no exhaustion. The roots of his 
 genius were full of sap. 
 
 I have said he had joy in creation. There are 
 many who have this joy, but only for a few times in 
 their hfe. They have no plenitude ; the wells from 
 which they draw are not deep. They have created 
 half-a-dozen things, and then they repeat themselves. 
 Repetition is not creation, and their joys are over. 
 Had Morris creativeness ? Was he incessantly pro- 
 ductive of new things ? When he created, was his 
 creation full, crowded, variously enUvened with 
 freshly-invented things to be seen, felt and loved ? 
 That is one of the tests of genius. 
 
 I scarcely can point to more than a few who have 
 been more productive, inventive, creative than 
 Morris. All the arts and crafts which he practised 
 he made afresh. His work on them was not imita- 
 tive ; it was new. And he poured forth from his 
 creating hand a succession of new designs, in dl 
 branches of his work, from year to year, all his hfe 
 long, without a single repetition. He restored lost 
 arts — such as printing — but with an individual 
 inventiveness, and minute care, which made the work 
 not a restoration, but a fresh creation. His produc- 
 tiveness was like that of those untilled lands along 
 the edge of Canada and the United States, which are 
 so rich in material for com, that for years they need 
 no fertilization. But literature and especially poetry, 
 are higher arts than those of the crafts. In these 
 also Morris was as creative as in the other arts, and 
 to the creativeness he added an astonishing rapidity 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS 197 
 
 of execution. Of him the old phrase was really true 
 — " To begin is to have done half." He often wrote 
 five hundred lines of verse a day, or rather in half a 
 day. When he determined to re-cast what he had 
 written, as was the case with his long introduction — 
 The Wanderers — to the Earthly Paradise, he did riot 
 tinker at the old work, or keep it lest he should lose 
 some of its good things. He flung the whole of it 
 aside, and rewrote the thing quite freshly, so confi- 
 dent was he that his invention and productiveness 
 would not fail him, nor his ardour lessen. That is 
 not common with Uterary men. Great fecundity is 
 not their faihng. Good measure, pressed down and 
 shaken together and brimming over, we do ndt often 
 receive into our bosom. 
 
 It is pleasant to think of all Morris has created for 
 us. There is his re-cast of the Arthurian elements ; 
 it is not very good, but it is original. There are the 
 lyrics in his first book which, with all their weak- 
 nesses, seem to come out of a world unknown to us 
 before, and haunted with the things and people we 
 have not imagined. There is the story of Jason, 
 with added inventions, all the natural description 
 re-imagined, full of unwearied and minute detail, 
 and reconceived as a mediasval Greek — had he lived 
 — might have conceived it. There are the many 
 stories of the Earthly Paradise, each of them also 
 re-conceived, re-dressed, and localized in a multitude 
 of varied landscapes. There is the MoraHty of Love 
 is Enough : the Norse Sagas re-animated for us in 
 prose and poetry, and the greatest of them re-poetized 
 from end to end ; the ^neid, the Odyssey and 
 Beowulf translated for EngUsh reading, with Morris's 
 soul flitting through the translations like a dim scent 
 
198 FOUR POETS 
 
 of forgotten leaves ; the time of John Ball made real 
 to us with a modern application ; the years of the 
 coming time when society may be remade into peace, 
 happiness, and beauty, with all their possible changes, 
 told for us, in lovely scenery and with gracious people 
 — so imagined that the book is the refreshment of 
 sick and wearied men and women in this weary and 
 sick time, who as they read seem to live in the happier 
 world. There are two great stories, the first of which 
 builds for us the German life when Rome was pushing 
 at it in the second or third century, and the second 
 the life of those who lived in his invented town of 
 Burgdale, when the roving Huns came down upon 
 it, a story which I think the most beautiful prose 
 thing that he ever wrote ; not of the witching beauty 
 of the later dream-stories wholly outside of history 
 and this world where everything is frankly and freshly 
 created, but of a grave, steady, solemnized beauty, 
 lovely as much by its strength as by its grace. But 
 I need not dwell on the rest. Creativeness is at full 
 richness in Morris. Whether the creations ever rose 
 into the higher excellences of the greater men is 
 another question. It would not seem so, so far as 
 his poetry is concerned. For, first, his range was 
 hmited, though inside the range the poetry was of a 
 high excellence ; and secondly, he ceased to write 
 poetry, ceased indeed to care to write it. And none 
 of the greater poets have ever been able to do that. 
 Morris exhausted his fountain ; they could not. 
 They cared, to the end, for their special art as the 
 most loved, the most precious thing, in the world, 
 and they wrought at it till they died. 
 
 There are many more things that were made by 
 this genius, whom so many wiseacres looked on only 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS 199 
 
 as a decorator of houses, but I have said enough to 
 prove his creative power — the power which evokes 
 from the soul things unknown, unseen before, for the 
 pleasure and good of men ; which shapes and executes 
 into fine form what is conceived within, and which 
 sends a spirit through the new forms into the heart 
 of humanity ; but I have said enough on this point, 
 and I turn now to the poetry itself. What rank it 
 takes ; where hes its weakness or its power ; what 
 are the special elements which make it precious ; its 
 range and its limitations ; the originality of its 
 impulse, and the continuity of its pleasure-giving ; 
 how far it realizes beauty, and its feeUng for beauty ; 
 how close it is to human nature, and how far from it ; 
 its matter of thought, its manner and melody ; its 
 description of Nature and its love of Nature, and its 
 devel6pment — ^these are matters all of which one 
 cannot discuss in a short essay, from which one has 
 to choose a few only, or which one can only briefly 
 touch. I hope I shall not say too much or too little 
 on them. 
 
 When in 1854 Morris was twenty-two years old, 
 the sorrows of the Crimean War and the sacrifices 
 it had demanded from England had awakened the 
 country, which had too much settled on its lees, from 
 a kind of lethargy. War is an unhappy and extrava- 
 gant cure for this evil sleep in which the diseases of 
 the common weal are neglected, but in the present 
 state of the social organism it seems to be the only 
 thing which arouses the comfortable classes out of 
 a selfish into a self-sacrificing hfe, which brings 
 classes together, or which knits the nation into a 
 sense of its unity and the duties of that unity. It is 
 
200 FOUR POETS 
 
 a miserable thing that the social state should be so 
 organized that only by blood-letting and by the 
 death or sorrow of thousands can any wide-reaching 
 remedy be applied to the evils of greed, indifference 
 to public diseases, and the isolation of class from class 
 — and no indictment of our existing state of society 
 can be stronger than this. Yet so it is. War does 
 awaken a country from covetousness ; does reveal 
 mismanagement and degrade dishonesty, does unite a 
 people under the banner of ideas not of self-interest ; 
 does preach to a whole nation that pain and death 
 are better than dishonour ; and that, not only to 
 those who go to battle, but even more to those who 
 send their loved ones to the battle. The spiritual 
 result is greatest when the war is just and needful, 
 but it follows even when the war is neither one nor 
 the other. It is independent of the cause of the war. 
 The Crimean War, though a mistaken war, did kindle 
 the country into some enthusiasm for ideals, did stir 
 and strengthen the sense of duty, did awaken the 
 sense of honour, of courage for an unpersonal cause, 
 of sacrifice for the State and our fellow-men ; and 
 that so strongly that the devotion to base and selfish 
 ends was for a time lessened in England. The nation 
 was excited into unwonted and unselfish emotion. 
 Public life gained some spiritual aims. That was 
 the net result of a dreadful folly. 
 
 A certain national excitement of this kind, with 
 some ideal aims connected with it, not necessarily a 
 war-excitement, puts all men, and especially the 
 young, into a state of thrill, into such a condition that 
 the powers they possess, whatever they may be, desire 
 to exercise themselves, to shape themselves into 
 some creation. The powers of the mind and the 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS 201 
 
 imagination are then like young people who wake 
 on a summer morning and cannot rest till they are 
 moving with the morning. The national excitement 
 flows into the hearts of men. And if the men whom 
 it touches have the gift of writing poetry they will, 
 suddenly begin to exercise it. They break into 
 creation. 
 
 It by no means foUows that they will write poetry 
 on the subject of the national excitement. No, they 
 win write it on their own subjects, on the things for 
 which they care, and these may be quite apart and 
 away from the national excitement. But, neverthe- 
 less, that national excitement awakened their powers. 
 In the case of Morris, he had been driven, in disgust 
 with the Ufeless years before the war, to find his 
 interests wholly in the past, and the emotion he now 
 gained from the national excitement — even if it was 
 only fury with the idiotic mismanagement which 
 slew our soldiers like sheep — ^was employed not on 
 the causes of that excitement, or on the excitement 
 itself, but on his own subjects. The excitement 
 supplied the soil in which a new poetry could grow. 
 But the plant which came up had nothing to do with 
 any excitement in the present. It was a new thing, 
 and it seemed a stranger. 
 
 No one at Oxford or elsewhere thought it likely 
 that a new spring of poetry would arise in the fifties 
 of the last century. The general opinion was that 
 poetry had culminated in Tennyson, and that nothing 
 of another kind would be produced. Nevertheless, 
 Morris, quite unconsciously and with a strange imag- 
 ination working intensely on uncommon matter, 
 did begin something which was quite distinct in poetry. 
 He thought as highly as the rest of his friends of 
 
202 FOUR POETS 
 
 Tennyson, but he was not so wholly carried away as 
 they appeared to be. He ventured to criticise. Then, 
 too, he had read and derived some impulse from Mrs. 
 Browning and through her from Browning, to whom 
 he gave an unstinted admiration when he came to 
 know him better. So, when the desire to write verse 
 came upon him, he was not, like most young men, 
 checked into silence or imitation by the pre-eminence 
 of Tennyson. And one morning, moved by his own 
 mediaeval enthusiasms and thrilled unconsciously 
 by the national emotion which streamed in on him 
 from England, he could resist the inner impulse no 
 morp, and the fountain of verse broke forth in his 
 soul. He found his first poem. The Willow and the 
 Red Cliff, finished before he was aware of it. He read 
 it to his friends and they proclaimed him a poet. 
 " If that is poetry," he said, " it is easy to make it," 
 and for some time he produced some verse every day. 
 I do not know whether this first conviction of his 
 friends was always as sure as Canon Dixon thinks. 
 I know that Bume-Jones said that he did not feel at 
 first certain that Morris's poetical power was of that 
 quahty that would endure, but that afterwards he 
 felt assured of it. " How ? " I said. " Well," he 
 answered, " he brought me a poem one day — A Good 
 Knight in Prison — and when he had read the hues — 
 
 Now tell me you that are in love 
 From the King's son to the wood-dove — 
 
 I was sure it was all right." It is not difficult to see 
 what he meant. 
 
 Any kind of true art-passion fills every nook and 
 corner of the soul ; its flood drowns all interests but 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS 203 
 
 its own, until it has given birth to some creation. 
 Then it ebbs, and another form of art becomes the 
 ideal, and in its turn swells over the soul — a fresh 
 incoming tide. But whatever it be, nothing else, 
 for the time, seems worth doing. It is life itself, 
 and aU future life seems filled with the ideals it 
 aspires to approach. This came now on Burne- 
 Jones and Morris. Their Cathohc ideals — they had 
 actually projected a monastery — no longer hmited 
 their thoughts or hopes. And they, and the whole 
 small brotherhood of men who were gathered round 
 them, now began, brimming over with the waters 
 of immortal joy, to pursue art and literature into the 
 new paths they had discovered. They gave up 
 everything else to hve and work in this charmed 
 world. They felt, like Wordsworth, that they were 
 dedicated spirits. All day long Burne-Jones worked 
 at painting, and Morris at literature and drawing. 
 Each gave to, and received from, the other impulse 
 and criticism, and knit together a friendship which 
 lasted unbroken all their lives. 
 
 It was now 1855, and the brotherhood projected a 
 magazine to advocate their principles. This was the 
 Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, which was first 
 published in January, 1856, and lasted a year. In it 
 Morris inserted five poems previously written. " Pre- 
 viously," for he had now ceased to write verses for a 
 time. In the sim^imer of 1855 he had begun to write 
 prose tales instead of verse, and eight of these tales 
 appear in the magazine. Meanwhile, still in 1855, he 
 had made acquaintance with the work of the Pre- 
 raphaelites and read the Germ. To Burne-Jones and 
 Morris Hand and Soul became an inspiration. They 
 had not yet met Rossetti, but in that tale the profound 
 
204 FOUR POETS 
 
 personal influence which he had on all the men he 
 touched had already begun. The prose tales now 
 continued for a year or so ; but about 1856 a new 
 poetic impulse fell on Morris. One day Burne-Jones 
 read a few pages of the Morie d' Arthur at a bookstall, 
 and spoke of it to Morris, who bought it instantly. 
 They read it together, and that great book did its 
 spiritual and impeUing work upon them. Along with 
 it came the first reading of Chaucer, whom these two 
 friends went through night after night in 1856. That 
 poetry fell hke fertilizing dew on them, and for thirty 
 years, after this rapture with Chaucer, Morris scarcely 
 touched prose. Only in verse did he speak in 
 hterature, and he spoke under the mighty leading of 
 him whose poetry he loved so well ; whom he called 
 his Master, under whose influence he wrote the 
 Earthly Paradise, and the noble printing of whose 
 greatest book was the last work he did on earth. 
 
 This is a sketch, briefly touched, of how he grew 
 into a poet. As to the poetry itself, it is best to take 
 it as it was pubhshed. The Defence of Guenevere, 
 which is the title of the first book he sent forth, was 
 published in 1858. It consisted of poems written in 
 the two previous years, and of a few of the poems 
 written in 1854 and 1855. Many poems, previously 
 WTitten, were not included in it, and it is a pity that 
 some of them perished. He made a holocaust of 
 them after the publication of Guenevere. A few, 
 pubhshed in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, 
 remain, and are enough to show his early hand. All 
 of these, with the exception of one — Pray but one 
 prayer for me — belong to romance, but are somewhat 
 tinged with the manner and sentiment of the Border 
 Ballads of which he was so fond. Winter Weather 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS 205 
 
 may serve as an example of these. A knight rides 
 out to meet his enemy who has insulted his lady. 
 They tilt together under the walls of the town, and 
 the slanderer is slain. His body is borne through 
 the night and laid beneath his own castle walls. The 
 poem, with its strong individual quality, is written 
 straight out of the youthful soul of Morris, and that 
 gives it its charm. The pictures of the horses and 
 banners and weapons of war ringing and flapping 
 in the midnight stillness ; of the castle walls and 
 towers, of the chiming cities, of the wintry landscape, 
 of sudden fate and fierce revenge, are drenched in 
 the spirit of the adventurous feuds of the fourteenth 
 century. Moreover, the poem realizes the same 
 remarkable combination of an ideal subject, imagina- 
 tively conceived in complete apartness from the life 
 of his own century, with that close realism which we 
 have already observed in Rossetti's work. And, it 
 was quite new poetry, of a clear original turn and 
 opening out a fresh region in the past for imaginative 
 work. The Arthurian legend had, of course, been 
 used by modern poets before this, but the fierce 
 passions and deeds of the French and English war- 
 captains and adventurers, with their historical and 
 legendary romance, such as we find enshrined in the 
 Chronicle of Froissart, these had not, with all their 
 change and colour, been touched as yet. 
 
 Morris found out this untrodden land, and ran 
 into it with a daily joy — every day he made a new 
 poem — and he saw a multitude of events, and battles 
 and adventures therein, of whichi no chronicle told 
 him, but which he witnessed with the intellectual eye. 
 'He created their passions, their loves, their landscape ; 
 nor did he fail to create in them the spirit and life. 
 
206 FOUR POETS 
 
 the beauty and the pity, as well as the ruthlessness 
 and cruelty, of the centuries in which he dwelt. 
 What difference there is between such old stories, 
 and Morris's invented representations of them, is not 
 made by the distance of his time from them — he was 
 borne backward into the period and was a part of its 
 life — but by his individuality working within his own 
 image of the time. They were old by imaginative 
 transference of himself into another age, but in them- 
 selves they were underived from any previous poet ; 
 as original as a new island in the seas. This gives him 
 even in this early work, his specialized place as a poet. 
 There are two httle fragments of verse in the Hollow 
 Land, the first of which is like Melchisedek — ^without 
 beginning of descent or end of days — so uncaused 
 and original it is ; and the second, though a piece of 
 a Christmas carol, especially in the gorgeous colouring 
 of it, unlike even the earliest carols. 
 
 This is the first, and we cannot miss its curious 
 charm, its remoteness, its mystery of feeling and of 
 landscape — 
 
 Christ keep the Hollow Land 
 
 All the summer tide ; 
 Still we cannot understand 
 
 Where the waters glide. 
 
 Only dimly seeing them 
 
 Coldly slipping through 
 Many green-lipped cavern mouths 
 
 Where the hills are blue. 
 
 And this, which is better, is the fragment of a 
 carol sung in the snow by a sentinel under Queen 
 Swanhilda's castle — 
 
 Queen Mary's crown was gold, 
 King Joseph's crown was red, 
 
 But Jesus' crown was diamond. 
 That lit up all the bed 
 
 Maxiae Virginis. 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS 207 
 
 Ships sail through the Heaven 
 
 With red banners dress'd. 
 Carrying the planets seven 
 
 To see the white breast 
 Mariae Virginis. 
 
 A haunting note is in that little thing. It comes 
 from the world beyond the weariness of this earth ; 
 half of mediaeval mysticism, half of fairyland. 
 
 Of course, being written by a youth of twenty-two 
 years, these early poems, and those of the Defence of 
 Guenevere, are thin, not well-knit together. They 
 begin things which are not ended ; they run away 
 from the subject — Morris was never concise — ^they 
 have the faults of over-swift production. There is 
 scarcely any true composition, sustained thought, 
 or arrangement. They flow like a quick torrent over 
 broken rocks. But they are aUve with a new man 
 from end to end ; they break into a novel world ; in 
 them imagination kindles itself by its own breath 
 into liveUer flame ; their humanity is that of one man 
 — ^particular, not universal — but it is deep. The 
 passions are strong in them, natural, vivid ; they are 
 those of Morris, their web drawn out of and coloured 
 by his youth — ^imagined, not experienced — but they 
 want neither vitality nor intensity. 
 
 What I have said is to be applied to the larger 
 number of poems in the Defence of Guenevere. That 
 book may be divided into three parts — the poems 
 which concern the Arthurian legend ; those which 
 belong to a thirteenth or fourteenth century cycle of 
 events ; and those Ijrics and Ijnical pieces which 
 belong to no century of earth, but are sent down to 
 us out of the woods and lands beyond the world. 
 
 They are also a series of experiments, made by a 
 young eagle flushing his wings. Many different 
 
208 FOUR POETS 
 
 metres are chosen and worked. A rude dramatic 
 form, imitative of the miracle plays, is used. One 
 piece is almost a short drama. Narrative poetry is 
 tried, but fails to realize itself. It is strange that he 
 did not now approach success in that form of poetry 
 of which he made so great a success. There is a 
 httle faery-folk-piece which stands alone. Ballad 
 poetry also laid its hand upon him, and he tries his 
 prentice hand upon it in this book. Moreover, he 
 recreated here certain lyric forms with a refrain to 
 them which English poetry had not seen for a long 
 time. The book may be called a book of experiments. 
 Like a young man who has many lighter loves befor6 
 he settles down into the love of his Hfe, as Romeo had 
 before he met Juliet, so Morris tried many forms of 
 poetry before he settled down into narrative poetry. 
 Of the poems suggested by Malory the finest is 
 said to be King A rthur's Tomb. It suffers greatly, and 
 the others suffer more, from ill-composition, but the 
 unwearied succession of pictures and passions fitted 
 to each other, kindles, and deepens the kindling of, 
 our pleasurable pain, as we read of the riding of 
 Lancelot to his last tryst with Guenevere, and of all the 
 memories of his past love with which he fiUs his ride ; 
 and then of Guenevere dreaming into repentance 
 and prayer, and of her last speech to him in which 
 she saves his soul. A few modern touches in the 
 descriptions are not enough to dull the strong impres- 
 sion we receive of a similar temper of mind in Morris 
 to that which Malory had when he wrote his book — 
 and which Tennyson had not. The remoteness of 
 Tennyson's temper from Malory's is almost wonder- 
 ful ; and at every point of hfe it clcishes with Malory. 
 But the chief difference between Morris and Malory 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS 209 
 
 is not in the temper of their mind, but that Malory 
 tells this last story of Lancelot and Guenevere with 
 a great simpUcity of feehng and description ; and 
 Morris, Uke a young man, and like one who loved — 
 as he always loved — full ornament and minute detail, 
 fills his story with an optdence of description, and 
 with a complexity of feeUngs, which, as they are 
 richly coloured with imagery let loose to wander 
 where it will, we pardon with pleasure. Copiousness, 
 when it is imaginative, is too precious a thing to be 
 blamed. 
 
 Of the Arthurian poems this made the most im- 
 pression, but for my part, Galahad, a Christmas 
 Mystery, pleases me more. It has a wilder, a more 
 mystic charm ; the conception of Galahad is original, 
 not so finished as Tennyson's, but less frigid, more 
 human ; and when the Sangreal comes, and the super- 
 natural world of angels and saints crowds round 
 Galahad to console him, the conception, the senti- 
 ment, the landscape, and the celestial spirituality, 
 are not only in full harmony with romantic mediae- 
 valism but with something of that far-off Celtic spirit 
 out of which the first form of the Great legend grew. 
 
 It is original and human, but not mediaeval, to 
 make Galahad regret that when he rides alone he 
 had no woman (like Lancelot or Palomydes) to 
 think of, and thereby to fill the lonely forest paths 
 with memories and hopes ; no sweet meetings or part- 
 ings Uke other men. Nor is it less original to br^ng, 
 in this fashion, the vision of Christ to console him — 
 
 In this way I, 
 With sleepy face bent to the chapel floor, 
 Kept musing half asleep, till suddenly 
 A sharp bell rang from close beside the door. 
 
 And I leapt up when something pass'd me by, 
 15— (2278) 
 
210 FOUR POETS 
 
 Shrill ringing going with it ; still half blind 
 I stagger'd after ; a great sense of awe 
 
 At every step kept gathering on my mind. 
 Thereat I have no marvel, for I saw 
 
 One sitting on the altar as a throne. 
 Whose face no man could say he did not know, 
 
 And though the bell still rang, he sat alone. 
 
 With raiment half blood red, and half white as snow, 
 
 who tells him that he is not alone, for He will be 
 with him always, and those lovers whose happiness 
 he regrets, time and passion wiU weary them, but he 
 shall never be weary. " You are mine forever." 
 When the voice ceases the women of heaven come 
 to arm him — the virgin mart5^s, fuU of joy for him ; 
 Margaret of Antioch, Cecily, Lucy and Katherine. 
 Henceforth, his riding will be graced with lovelier 
 visions of womanhood than ever fled before the eyes 
 of Lancelot. The piece breaks off abruptly, but its 
 beauty of the other world, the world within this 
 world of ours where the mystic visions rise and fall, 
 is great ; nor is the human pleasure or sorrow in that 
 dream-fed region less fair and true than in this world 
 of ours, which we are so amusing as to call real. As 
 to the landscape of this piece — ^the lonely chapel, 
 the snow on the ground, the wet fern and weeds of 
 the wood, the winter wind, the bell shriUing through 
 the " forest deep," and the light of the angels stream- 
 ing over the snow — ^it fits the conception, the mysti- 
 cism, the mediaeval and spiritual romance of the time, 
 as a glove fits the hand. 
 
 A Good Knight in Prison is a piece of true romance, 
 done in a romantic manner of his own, full of pictures 
 in fine colour, of tender himianity, and in a charming 
 melody. At the end of it, midst of the tender com- 
 plaint of the knight and his memories — for the 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS 211 
 
 introducing of pictorial memories into the soliloquies 
 of his warriors is one of the methods Morris uses to 
 enliven his poems — Lancelot, with a fine stirring and 
 cla,mour of the verse, breaks into the castle and 
 delivers him. No English poet had ever done this 
 kind of thing before, and none have done it since. 
 
 In such a world was Morris at home when he was 
 twenty-five — a soul bom and bred in the fourteenth 
 century, but forced to eat and drink and sleep in the 
 nineteenth. These poems, while we think of their 
 want of finish, their abruptness of thought, their 
 huddled imagery and disconnected trains of feeling, 
 may not appear to be worth dwelling on so long ; 
 but their matter is new in poetry, so is their manner, 
 and in both the imagination is glowing with fresh 
 fire. That is the great quality, and where that is, 
 it overtops aU elaborate skill in the technic of poetry 
 and hfts its maker into a far loftier chair than all 
 these excellent masters of words and rhyme and 
 metrical arrangements occupy, who pour over us 
 floods of artistic verse without originality, with fancy, 
 with science, but not with imagination. 
 
 Of the second group of poems, originating from his 
 love of Froissart, Sir Peter Harpdon's End is the most 
 powerful — a kind of dramatic romance well but 
 bojdshly realized ; but also so fuU of a crude man- 
 nerism, neither mediaeval nor modern, of strange 
 and strained phrases, that on the whole it is disagree- 
 able. The blank verse is also as mannered and 
 abrupt as the phraseology. The characters speak, 
 even to the Lady AUce, on stilts ; and we long for 
 them to descend to that ordinary Enghsh speech 
 Morris used afterwards so well. The Little Tower, 
 with its desperate ride through the flooded lands ; 
 
212 FOUR POETS 
 
 the Riding Together, banners and, spears afloat in 
 the air in the swiftness of the ride ; its noise and 
 clash of war when the Christian band meet the Pagan 
 host, cind the tragic misery of the end ; Geffray 
 Teste Noire, with the wayside episode of the slain 
 knight and his lady unburied in the wood ; the 
 Haystack in the Floods, with its passionate realism, 
 its close touch on the brutahty of the times, even to 
 their savage ruthlessness to women, and yet the in- 
 effable pity of the tale ; Shameful Death, better told 
 and composed than the others, a record of cruel, then 
 of just, vengeance — these are living records, poign- 
 antly keen, of the miseries of the mercenary wars, 
 that other side of the shield of chivalry. I only men- 
 tion the Judgment of God, because it smacks' of 
 Browning — the only Morris poem which clearly comes 
 near to Browning's banner. And I mention this 
 because Morris himself was accustomed to say that if 
 his poems owed a debt to anyone, they owed it to 
 Browning. 
 
 All these are of his youth, and share in the over- 
 quaintness, the ill-conception, and the long-winded- 
 ness of youth, but they are true to his own impassioned 
 temper, alive with colour and the tumult of war, 
 savage in their realism, clear-eyed in their imagina- 
 tion. The most charming, however, of the poems, is 
 Rapunzel, which cannot be said to belong to any of 
 these three groups. It stands alone, drawn not 
 from the Arthurian or mediaeval story, and, as Morris 
 has conceived it, not wholly outside of the actual 
 world. The subject was given him in the old folk- 
 tale of the Sohtary Tower, the Princess who dwells 
 alone in it, and who lets down her golden hair for the 
 witch to cUmb up by, and the Prince who deUvers her. 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS 213 
 
 Morris has medisevaKzed the old tale. Its Greek 
 connexion he has entirely ignored, and its mythical 
 elements. It is remade according to Morris ; and 
 nowhere, not even in The Earthly Paradise, has he 
 remade a story more dehghtfuUy. He has added 
 enough reality to it to take it out of fairyland, and 
 yet left round it the fairy atmosphere. The Prince 
 and the Princess are quite human, and their love 
 passages full of delicate charm. The form of the poem 
 is quaint and fanciful, but clear, connected and well 
 concluded. And the incidents, the conversation, the 
 landscape are invented and varied with grace and 
 change, and so is the verse. All fits together, and 
 over it youthful love, like a sunny atmosphere in 
 early spring, breathes unity and enchantment. The 
 soul of Morris, in his dreaming youth, is there. 
 
 The third type of poems in this volume is quite 
 distinct from the rest. They are not of this world 
 at all, but, even in their immaturity, prophetic of 
 the air and light and landscape of The Wood Beyond 
 the World, out of whose star-begotten creatures he 
 made a prose romance. In this far other-world, full 
 of magic and faery, he lived in the last years of his 
 Ufe, when the fourteenth century, and the Greek 
 life in its mediaeval dress, and the early Teutonic 
 communities such as he painted in the House of the 
 Wolftngs and the Roots of the Mountains, and even 
 the Norse Saga-land and life, and the future world 
 of a regenerated humanity — Shaving been long dwelt 
 in, were finally left behind by this spiritual wanderer 
 through many times and nations ; this Ulysses of 
 the soul, who, working and walking among us, yet 
 never truly lived save far away from us, in a hundred 
 rovings of imagination. This last country he Uved 
 
214 FOUR POETS 
 
 in was described in many tales — in the Glittering 
 Plain, the Wood Beyond the World, the Well at the 
 World's End — and last of all, just before he died, 
 in that most delightful book, the Sundering Flood, a 
 very flower of imagination, yet so real that we beheve, 
 as we read, in every word of it. This is a country of 
 great rivers, hewing their way from the mountains 
 through deep gorges to the plains, of deep woods, and 
 silver lakes, and green sea waves, and many-visaged 
 weather, and cities by the sea, and tall castles, and 
 chaffering towns where knights and merchants meet, 
 of farms, and of forest land where robber bands are 
 slain and fair women wander and love, and love is long 
 and full ; where in the woods are green-clad women 
 whose life is not human but whose affections are, 
 and wizards and witches, good and bad, and magic 
 and immortal warriors, and all the wonders of faery 
 — a lovely land to live in, far away from our sordid 
 ugliness ; far away even from the earth itself, even in 
 its social regeneration — a life such as may, for all 
 we know, be Uved in some happier planet than ours, 
 hidden in some galaxy in space, but human to the 
 core. Most men, when they write tales of faerie, of 
 a world imagined, make their men and women unlike 
 ourselves, not quite human. But Morris, in all these 
 tales, rests his story on the universal passions and 
 ways of natural humanity — ^humanity, it is true, 
 freed from the conventions of either society or 
 morality, but all the more natural and real for that 
 freedom. The world in which we live, while we read, 
 is not our world, but the men and women are our- 
 selves as we are in the secret life within where we 
 ignore or despise the rules and maxims of society. 
 I know nothing more refreshing, in this overladen 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS 215 
 
 world, and when life, with its relentless goad, drives 
 us on to so many vain labours and to so many duties 
 which are not duties but conventions — to take out 
 one of these books, and slip out of it all, like some 
 released and happy spirit, into a natural world. 
 This releasing power is one of Morris's best contri- 
 butions to the good and consolation of man. And 
 the power to create such a world, under the terrible 
 pressure of our unnatural commonplace, is perhaps 
 the finest capacity of his genius. 
 
 It is in the air of this world of dream, such as Keats 
 lived in when he saw the 
 
 magic casements opening on the foam 
 Of perilous seas in fairy lands forlorn, 
 
 that certain poems in this early book were composed ; 
 and it is characteristic of the consistency and con- 
 tinuity of the elements of the soul of Morris that he 
 should recur at the end of his life, in romantic prose, 
 to the regions of which he had written, when he was 
 young, in romantic poetry. The very titles of these 
 poems take us into the atmosphere of dreaming phan- 
 tasy in which they were conceived — ^the Sailing of the 
 Sword, The Blue Closet, The Tune of Seven Towers, 
 Two Red Roses Across the Moon — ^nor is the fine, 
 half-languid, half-fiery loving of the Praise of my 
 Lady, with its Latin refrain, outside the faery world 
 of the later romances, where true and natural passion, 
 in admiration of the outward and inward beauty love 
 spiritualizes, plays so great a part. 
 
 Only one poem in the book, in its tragic passion, 
 its dreadful remorse and horror, as well as in the 
 unexplaiaed mystery of its crime of love or jealousy, 
 belongs not only to mediaeval times, but to all times. 
 
216 FOUR POETS 
 
 The Wind is its title. It might be invented by a 
 modern poet, and it is touched here and there by 
 modern thoughts. Its melody and rhythm are 
 different from all the rest, better managed, and of a 
 singular charm. And the telling of the tale and the 
 scenery of it were done in an artist hour. 
 
 Only one poem in the whole book has quite a 
 modern air, and moves in a lovely and wildering 
 melody, with an involved overlapping of thought, 
 and of changing feelings echoed by the metrical 
 changes, — ^most hke a fugue, and penetrated through- 
 out with the tremulous passion of music. It is written, 
 in spite of its two curious faults, with the grace 
 of a matured artist, and yet was one of his earliest 
 pieces, being pubhshed in the Oxford and Cambridge 
 Magazine. Summer Dawn is its name, and I quote 
 it- 
 Pray but one prayer for me 'twixt thy closed lips. 
 
 Think but one thought of me up in the stars. 
 The summer night waneth, the morning light slips. 
 Faint and grey 'twixt the leaves of the aspen, betwixt 
 the cloud-bars, 
 That are patiently waiting there for the dawn : 
 Patient and colourless, though Heaven's gold 
 Waits to float through them along with the Sun. 
 Far out in the meadows, above the young corn. 
 
 The heavy elms wait, and restless and cold 
 The uneasy wind rises ; the roses are dun ; 
 Through the long twiUght they pray for the dawn, 
 Round the lone house in the midst of the corn. 
 Speak but one word to me over the corn. 
 Over the tender, bow'd locks of the corn. 
 
 That concludes what I have to say about this first 
 book. I have dwelt on it at perhaps too great 
 length. But it is not so weU known as the poems 
 which followed it, and a great interest gathers round 
 the youthful work of one who proved so well that 
 he had that enduring power which ripens and matures 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS 217 
 
 into noble fruitage. There is a delicate exquisite- 
 ness of feeling, as of that which may quickly perish ; 
 an apartness of joy such as is never felt again ; an 
 appealing hope and promise ; all the sweetness and 
 courage of bold attempt, in the first flowers and 
 leaves of early spring, which may well image the first 
 poems of genius. Their very incompleteness sug- 
 gests completeness, prophesies the fuUness of summer, 
 and irresistibly attacks the imagination. 
 
 When we next meet Morris in print, he has ceased 
 to be immature and unfinished. He has foimd out 
 clearly what he can best do. Spring is over ; sum- 
 mer has come, and indeed he brought the summer 
 into narrative poetry ; for since Chaucer no one, 
 not Dryden, not Keats, had re-attained in England 
 the Chaucerian charm, the ghding sentiment, the 
 fluidity of narrative and of verse, in narrative poetry, 
 till Morris came. Scott may be instanced, but Scott's 
 narrative work in verse diminished in excellence and 
 in quantity as he went on. Morris increased his 
 productiveness, and its excellence was fully sup- 
 ported, till he, like Scott, gave up narrative poetry 
 and turned to prose. Indeed, no poet is likely to 
 go on writing narrative poetry all his life. For 
 poetry seeks naturally for concentration, intensity, 
 conciseness of tho:ught, action and emotion brought 
 to a burning centre — elements which, introduced 
 continually into narrative poetry, would undo the 
 very essence of that kind of poetry. When people 
 complain of the flowing looseness of Morris's tales, of 
 their minute and Ungering detail, of their expansive- 
 ness, they are complaining of things which actually 
 make the essence of narrative poetry. What do they 
 want ? Can they not understand that they must not 
 
218 FOUR POETS 
 
 have the excellences of the lyric in a narrative poem, 
 
 and that to introduce them would be wholly out of 
 
 place — would, indeed, destroy the elements of poetic 
 
 narrative ? Each form of poetry has its own customs, 
 
 laws and necessities, its own times, places, and moods 
 
 of mind in which it ought to be read. Narrative 
 
 poetry is not to be read in the great crises of life and 
 
 thought, but as Omar wished to read — 
 
 A book of Verses underneath the Bough, 
 A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread, and Thou 
 
 Beside me singing in the wilderness — 
 Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow. 
 
 Chaucer was in this the master of Morris, and 
 when Morris sent forth the Earthly Paradise com- 
 pleted, he enshrined in an epilogue the honour he 
 gave to his master in a set of verses full of tender- 
 ness ; and revealing, with that strange unreserve 
 which many poets have in verse while they are 
 reserved in hfe, the veritable temper of his soul 
 while he was yet quite young, while poetry was dear 
 to him, and Hfe a dream of love and joy, with the 
 darkness of death beyond to make love and joy too 
 dear for happiness ; while he was yet only the idle 
 singer of an empty day — 
 
 " Children we twain are, saith he, late made wise 
 In love, but in all else most childish still. 
 And seeking still the pleasure of our eyes. 
 And what our ears with sweetest sound may fill ; 
 Not fearing Love, lest these things he should kill ; 
 Howe'er his pain by pleasure doth he lay. 
 Making a strange tale of an empty day. 
 
 " Death have we hated, knowing not what it meant ; 
 Life have we loved, through green leaf and through sere. 
 Though still the less we knew of its intent : 
 The Earth and Heaven through countless year on year. 
 Slow changing, were to us but curtains fair. 
 Hung round about a little room, where play 
 Weeping and laughter of man's empty day. 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS 219 
 
 " Then let the others go I and if indeed 
 In some old garden thou and I have wrought. 
 And made fresh flowers spring up from hoarded seed, 
 And fragrance of old days and deeds have brought 
 Back to folk weary ; all was not for nought. 
 No little part it was for me to play — 
 The idle singer of an empty day." 
 
 He began this narrative poetry while he was still 
 at the University, and he began it with his usual 
 impetuosity and plenitude. He projected and did 
 a great part of a poem on the Tale of Troy — on that 
 part of the tale which, after the events of the Iliad, 
 was recorded in the lost Greek epics, and which stirred 
 the mediaeval and romantic poets into making the 
 many poems that constitute the Cycle of Troy. In 
 that cycle the Greek tales are told in the mediaeval 
 and romantic manner and with mediaeval surround- 
 ings and beliefs ; the landscapes, buildings, towns, 
 furniture, armour, warriors and women, are all 
 mediaeval. That was just what Morris wanted, 
 and he, of set purpose, mediaevalized (with the 
 inevitable modernism in natural description, and in 
 sentiment) his Greek stories both in Jason and in 
 the Earthly Paradise. The objection then, that his 
 Greek stories are not Greek in character, falls to the 
 ground. He did not, any more than Keats, intend 
 them to be classical, but romantic ; and he took 
 pains in the story of the Wanderers to invent for this 
 purpose a Greek colony in some far seas, the dwellers 
 in which, though descended from the Greeks, had 
 hved on into the fourteenth century, and, like 
 the late Greeks of Byzantium, held their old tradi- 
 tions in very different forms from those they had 
 received in ancient Greece. They are supposed 
 to tell their tales in mediaeval fashion. This 
 view is excellently laboured by Mr. Mackail in 
 
220 FOUR POETS 
 
 his Life of Morris, and Morris himself maintained 
 it. 
 
 Jason is written in that fashion. The Story of the 
 Golden Fleece was to have been one of the stories of 
 the Earthly Paradise, but it enlarged under his hand 
 till it became a separate book. PubUshed in 1867, 
 it made him at once famous, and estabhshed him as 
 a poet. That the EngUsh people, who hate long 
 things ; that the lovers of poetry, who were then 
 enamoured of the idyll and brief dramatic lyrics, 
 should read it all, was a triumph of good story-teUing. 
 It was something that the story was well known. 
 It was something more that into the known outlines 
 of the story many freshly-invented episodes were 
 introduced, so that the reader, in surprise and 
 pleasure, was lured on by rapid incident. But 
 these things do not fully account for the favour 
 with which it was read from end to end. It was, 
 first of all, excellent narrative, eminently clear, 
 flowing, well knit together, naturally wrought. It 
 never left its own level, and it preserved its own 
 atmosphere from the beginning to the close. Jason 
 is foremost in it ; we never leave his side. The 
 unity of the narrative is therefore unbroken. Boy, 
 youth, man, adventurer, warrior, lover, wanderer, 
 king, we follow him till weariness comes on his 
 maturity and success, and he is faithless to love and 
 honour. He had no pity, no shame ; he felt no 
 Nemesis press upon him. Vengeance, not oiily of 
 Medea, descends on him ; the house of life falls in 
 ruins, and the great warrior, in his exhausted sorrow, 
 in grey apathy, dies ignobly in his sleep, half-dead 
 before he dies. This irony of life, this image of the 
 victory of decay, of vanity, broods over the whole 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS 221 
 
 book. The futility of human endeavour at the last 
 was always more deep than it should have been in 
 the mind of Morris. It hes beneath many other 
 stories ; it has sunk deep into the Earthly Paradise; 
 it is the dominant note in Jason. It is human enough ; 
 and it deepens all the other human elements in the 
 story. The Greeks, no doubt, felt it profoundly in 
 the tale, but they could not have felt it more 
 profoundly than Morris. 
 
 Naturally, as it paints the whole of a man's career 
 the poem is close to humanity. Morris never wanted 
 humanity, even in his dream-romances. But here 
 he has got out of the vagueness and inexperience of 
 his earlier work into the real stuff of mankind ; out 
 of particular forms of feeling at moments of event, 
 into the universal business and passions of the world 
 of men. And weight and dignity now enter into his 
 work, nor did they ever leave it. In passion, in 
 thought, he rarely went deep in the tales, but when 
 he did, he wrote with a reality to which enough credit 
 has not been given. The most real piece of human 
 nature under the power of the passions — a true piece 
 of fine tragedy, where many passions mingle threads 
 of beauty and terror, " dyed with the hues of earth- 
 quake and echpse " — ^is contained in the last book of 
 Jason after the story of the Golden Fleece is ended. It 
 paints the desire of change in a mature man ; that 
 crisis when the worn pilgrim of Ufe, weary of good 
 and evil, desires innocence and freshness and the 
 dew of youth in a woman to renew his heart upon, 
 and seems, in such a love, to taste again the sweet- 
 ness of youth. It paints the passion of love in a 
 young girl for the man who embodies for her the 
 heroic. It paints the passions, in an experienced 
 
222 FOUR POETS 
 
 woman, of jealousy, hatred, fierce sorrow, untameable 
 revenge, wrath at betrayal of love — deepened by 
 passionate memories, intensified by conscious power, 
 contempt of weakness, and unmitigated will. It 
 paints, when Medea has had her vengeance, and left 
 Jason, stripped of everything, as naked as a wintry 
 tree, his loneliness, his days and nights of misery, 
 till misery devoured itself in lapse of time. It tells 
 then how, a broken man, he thought of active life 
 again, of new adventure, war, and kingship ; how as 
 he thought of it, the stem of Argo, under which he 
 dreamed and slept, fell, charged with the irony of 
 fate, on him ; and he died, not in the ringing ranks 
 of battle, but on the untamed edges of the shore and 
 sea, by a fameless accident. 
 
 That Morris felt that this episode was most tragic 
 and needed his finest work, most human and needed 
 his most imaginative insight, is proved by his invo- 
 cation at its beginning to his master, Chaucer, 
 for his help. The verses are full of himself, of his 
 love of Nature, of his love of the old times, of his 
 ideahty and his delight in reality, of the closeness 
 of his work to things and men, of his clear vision of 
 what he saw, and of his power to shape it into form. 
 
 So ends the winning of the Golden Fleece, 
 
 So ends the tale of that sweet rest and peace 
 
 That unto Jason and his love befell ; 
 
 Another story now my tongue must tell. 
 
 And tremble in the telling. Would that I 
 
 Had but some portion of that mastery 
 
 That from the rose-hung lanes of woody Kent 
 
 Through these five hundred years such songs have sent 
 
 To us, who, meshed within this smoky net 
 
 Of unrejoicing labour, love them yet. 
 
 And thou, O Master ! — Yea, my Master still, 
 
 Whatever feet have scaled Parnassus' hUl, 
 
 Since, Uke thy measures, clear, and sweet, and strong, 
 
 Thames' stream scarce fettered bore the bream along 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS 223 
 
 Unto the bastioned bridge, his only chain. 
 
 O Master, pardon me, if yet in vain 
 
 Thou art my Master, and I fail to bring 
 
 Before men's eyes the image of the thing 
 
 My heart is filled with : ^ou.' whose dreamy eyes 
 
 Beheld the flush to Cressid's cheeks arise. 
 
 When Troilus rode up the praising street. 
 
 As clearly as they saw thy townsmen meet 
 
 Those who in vineyards of Poictou withstood 
 
 The glittering horror of the steel-topped wood. 
 
 Jason was followed in 1868-70 by the volumes of 
 the Earthly Paradise, and this publication confirmed 
 and increased the reputation of Morris. The Apology 
 with which he prefaced the book expresses the 
 temper of mind which, whUe he wrote, lay underneath 
 the stories, and the same temper appears more fully 
 in the endings and introductions to the tales. 
 
 The first hnes of the Prologue to the whole book, 
 the story of The Wanderers, tell where the tales were 
 supposed to be written and by whom. They were 
 deUvered in an island dwelt in by Ionian Greeks who 
 had been driven there centuries before, and who 
 retained their ancient worship, language, manners 
 and traditions. To this island, after many wander- 
 ings, seafaring men from Norway, Swabia, Brittany, 
 France and England came in the fourteenth century, 
 were welcomed by the Greeks, and Uved in the peace 
 of their old age. And the time was in the latter half 
 of the century when Chaucer was alive. Morris dwells 
 on the date. 
 
 Forget six counties overhung with smoke, 
 Forget the snorting steam and piston-stroke. 
 Forget the spreading of the hideous town ; 
 Think rather of the pack-horse on the down. 
 And dream of London, small, and white, and clean. 
 The clear Thames bordered by its gardens green ; 
 Think, that below bridge the green lapping waves 
 Smite some few keels that bear Levantine staves. 
 
224 FOUR POETS 
 
 Cut from the yew-wood on the burnt-np hill. 
 And painted jars that Greek hands toiled to fill, 
 And treasured scanty spice from some far sea, 
 Florence gold cloth, and Ypres napery, 
 And cloth of Bruges, and hogsheads of Guienne ; 
 While nigh the thronged wharf Geofirey Chaucer's pen 
 Moves over bills of lading — mid such times 
 ShaU dwell the hollow puppets of my rhymes. 
 
 Having thus brought together, in an admirable frame- 
 work, the old Greek world and the fourteenth century, 
 the Greeks tell their ancient tales and the wanderers 
 theirs, meeting twice a month in the great Hall of 
 the Island State, for a year, twenty-four tales in all ; 
 and a marvellous piece of opulent inventiveness is the 
 book. 
 
 Yes, the first thing to say of the narrative poetry 
 of Morris is that it is characterised by unfailing inven- 
 tion. The main events were marked down for him 
 in the original tales, but he filled up the outlines of 
 each with a wealth of incidents, descriptions and 
 characterization, to the inventiveness of which I 
 know no parcdld in modem story-teUing poetry. 
 Take the first book of the Jason. The boy is entrusted 
 to Cheiron, the Centaur, to be educated. He meets 
 Juno when he is grown up, and is sent back to take up 
 his duty and his fate. That is the slight outline, but 
 it is filled up with such a host of small events, all 
 bearing on his future, and with so dehghtful a sketch 
 of the Centaur's life with Jason, seen so clearly and 
 told so connectedly that the book, which runs to 
 several hundred lines, is a self-rounded tale which 
 would enchant a summer night. Then, again, the 
 great adventures of the story were easy to make 
 interesting, but it was a bold thing to take Argo and 
 her crew right across from the Black Sea, through the 
 wastes of Russia, to the northern ocean ; and yet this 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS 225 
 
 dreary voyage is made interesting enough for reading 
 by an invented series of strange adventures with 
 strange folk, and by vivid descriptions of the forests, 
 the rivers and the winter. Even the crew itself have 
 no weariness of Hfe. The buoyancy of Morris sup- 
 ports them with his own vitality. And the greater 
 adventures of the tale, in themselves so exciting, are 
 embroidered, illuminated, like the background of a 
 tapestry, or the pages of a missal, with hundreds of 
 small and delicate inventions. There is not an inch of 
 the surface of the story which is not fiUed with orna- 
 ment as a summer meadow is with flowers, and none 
 of it is apart from the tale. It is kept down to its 
 due proportions. It enriches, it does not minimize 
 the interest. All this is true of the various poems 
 of the Earthly Paradise, some of which leave the 
 original outlines for a fresh creation, as in Easi of the 
 Sun, West of the Moon. The incessant invention of 
 the Prologue is another good example of this quality. 
 It is worth while to recall, as an example, the meeting 
 of the Wanderers' ship with King Edward's fleet off 
 the coast of France, and the admirable sketch of the 
 person and character of the King, of the figures of 
 the young Prince and Chandos, of the Royal ship, 
 its gorgeous sails and heraldic glories. But there are 
 a host of such inventions in every tale. This great 
 inventiveness saves the long narratives from the 
 monotony which is the greatest danger of narrative 
 poetry, a point on which it is not worth while to 
 enlarge. 
 
 Then, secondly, there is a remarkable equality of 
 excellence, an equaUty which ought to belong to 
 narrative verse. The level at which Morris begins 
 any story is supported throughout ; the atmosphere 
 
 16 — (8378) 
 
226 FOUR POETS 
 
 is not changed. The level rises where it ought to 
 rise, but it does not rise too high for this kind of 
 poetry, or for the rest of the story. Then, though it 
 rises, it never falls. I cannot recall in that vast 
 production any sinking into plainly inferior work. 
 Certain stories are not as well told as the rest ; those 
 he loved best are best told ; but even the least good 
 ones do not fall below the level at which he began them. 
 This continuity of imaginative emotion, always and 
 equally present, without haste and without rest, is 
 excessively uncommon, especially in poetry, which 
 depends so much on the unstable rise and fall of 
 emotion. Abounding vitality was a marked charac- 
 teristic of his whole life and character, of what he 
 thought, invented, worked at and proclaimed. " 'Tis 
 life whereof our nerves are scant " could not be said 
 of Morris. 
 
 Another quality of the poetry is the great clearness 
 with which the things described are seen. Every- 
 thing is seen as if in fuU sunhght, and his clear sight of 
 what he saw was accompanied by an equal lucidity in 
 its description. The execution is equal to the vision, 
 the form to the image on the mind. So defined, for 
 example, are the landscapes, so too hke pictures some- 
 times, that some of that suggestiveness is lost which, 
 in stimulating the reader's imagination to create for 
 himself worlds beyond the world described, is so high 
 and fine an element in the arts of poetry and music. 
 However, owing to the clearness of sight and execu- 
 tion, all the detail is exquisite. I know no other 
 poetry so rich, so accurate, in portraiture of flowers 
 and trees, of sweet meadows, of the waves of the sea, 
 of the flowing of rivers, of the play and work of the 
 weather, of the village houses, of the towers and walls 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS 227 
 
 of cities, of dress of men and women, of armour, and 
 furniture, of tapestries and architecture, of a hundred 
 things that we ought to see, but do not. In com- 
 parison with Morris, most of the other poets are blind. 
 Sharp, receptive and retaining were his eyes. 
 
 This brings me directly, through his clear-seeing, 
 and his power of shaping in words what he saw, to 
 Morris as a poet of Nature. Nature is described by 
 him exactly as he saw her. No mystic veil is thrown 
 over her. No philosophy of her appears in Morris. 
 I have said this with regard to Arnold's nature-poetry, 
 but Arnold wavered from the position. Morris never 
 changed it. That kind of thing was repugnant to 
 him, nor indeed did his favourite, Keats indulge in 
 it. Morris was content to see things as they were. 
 A cloud was only a cloud, a stream only a stream. 
 It was enough for him that the cloud was lovely, 
 and the stream. Nor did he make out of Nature 
 texts for teaching lessons of any kind. He did 
 not use her as the prophet or the moralist has done ; 
 nor did he make analogies between her doings and 
 the doings of men in the fashion those poets and 
 preachers do, who conceive that she and man proceed 
 from the same creative thought, and therefore touch 
 and answer one another. He places man in the 
 midst of Nature's solemn, constant and lovely move- 
 ment, but she has no relation of her own to him. 
 Indifferent to us, she passes on her way, — the beautiful ' 
 and changing back-ground only of our sorrow and 
 
 joy- 
 
 What he does describe, with regard to her and us, 
 is the contrast, which Arnold also felt, between her 
 constancy, continuity, strength, her stately, quiet 
 movement, her beauty and apparent joy, and our 
 
228 FOUR POETS 
 
 inconstancy, fleetingness, weakness, hurried and 
 broken life, our enduring sorrows and our momentary 
 joys. She has no pause, and seemingly no end. 
 But we are creatures of a day, and old age is with 
 us in a moment, and Death divides us from love and 
 pleasure. Therefore let us snatch our day, and 
 take what we can, and quickly, and be brave and 
 thankful. This is a sad temper, face to face with 
 Nature ; yet it was the temper of Morris, up to 
 the close, at least, of the Earthly Paradise. The 
 lyric which some say is one of the most beautiful he 
 ever wrote — I do not agree with them — and which 
 occurs in the story of Ogier the Dane, enshrines this ; 
 but it is also enshrined in almost every one of the 
 lovely introductions to the different months in the 
 Earthly Paradise, short poems in which, were it not 
 for their want of joy and their trembling melancholy, 
 more dramatic than actual, he reached his highest 
 level in lyric poetry. 
 
 These descriptions, unUke most of the natural 
 descriptions in the tales themselves, are mixed, in 
 contrast, with human feeUng, and chiefly with the 
 varied phases of love. They are not only nature- 
 poems, but love-poems. Their main character is 
 that of sorrow. At this time of his life love seemed 
 to Morris so overshadowed with transiency and the 
 inevitableness of Death, that he could get but little 
 joy out of it. However, as time went on, and the 
 interests of the present entered into his soul, as well 
 as those of the past, this element of sadness disappears 
 from his treatment of love. The lovers in his prose 
 romances are sensible ; honestly and passionately 
 happy. Their present joy makes them careless of the 
 future ; quite thoughtless, save at moments, of death. 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS 229 
 
 As to old age, the imagination of it does not cloud their 
 youth. Suf&cient to the day is the good thereof. 
 
 It is worth while to linger a httle round these 
 poems. They are twofold. One portion of them is 
 dedicated to a description of the natural scenery of 
 the year. The twelve months are so painted, with 
 their weather, their work, their landscape, that each 
 of them seems to grow before us into a personage, 
 with a separate character. Morris does not himself 
 impersonate them, but we do under his impulse. We 
 breathe the air of their separate natures. In addition 
 to this impression — ^as in the symbolism of the 
 months round cathedral doorways, — the special 
 human work of each month is represented by Morris, 
 and imaginatively inwoven with the landscape. And 
 moreover, the distinct spirit of each month (proceed- 
 ing from Nature's doings and man's doings in each of 
 them) enters into the soul of the reader, and wakens 
 there its distinct thought and feeling, — the soul 
 transmuting the natural impression into its own 
 imaginative passion. This is a vital element in the 
 work of Morris. Nor are the landscapes left unani- 
 mated. The sky is full of flying birds, and so are the 
 woods and moors and pools. The kine feed in the 
 pastures, the bees sing from flower to flower, the 
 dragon-flies dart by, the sheep wander to their folds 
 in the evening. The blue-clad horseman rides from 
 vale to vale, the traveller hails the ferryman across 
 the swirling river. The reapers, the shepherd, the 
 ploughman, the girls in the orchard, the labourer in 
 the farm-yard, the vintagers ruddy with the juice of 
 the vine, a host of human creatures at work and play, 
 fill the landscape. This natural description is one 
 
230 FOUR POETS 
 
 side of these poems, and it is supported and enhanced 
 by a hundred descriptions of a similar kind in the 
 conduct of the stories. 
 
 The other side of these poems is personal, and has 
 to do with the affairs of love. Whether they repre- 
 sent any real experiences of Morris, one cannot of 
 course tell. They seem to be passionate. I wonder 
 if they are. They were most probably invented. 
 But the spirit of the man at this time of his life is in 
 them. Their temper is his own, and it is uniformly 
 sorrowful with regret, with the hatred of old age 
 and death. He sees in May a vision of the Lord of 
 Love go by, in bright procession, but behind them 
 he sees Eld and Death. The rest of the >vorld did not ; 
 May had so filled them that they forgot they must 
 die. June is so beautiful that hopes and fears are 
 gone. We take her beauty — but we are pensive men. 
 Then phase after phase of love is touched ; not the 
 simple, constant phases, but subtle, transient, 
 involved feelings, such as pass through a lover who 
 fears what will become of love because he has known 
 love decay in the past, because he is sure of inevitable 
 decay in the future, and because of dreadful weariness, 
 so dreadful that no world there seems 
 
 Beyond these four walls hung with pain and dreams. 
 
 Again, he has seen the death of all things, which, 
 hving, once were fair — ^image of dread eternity. 
 
 In whose void patience, how can these have part. 
 These outstretched feverish hands, this restless heart ? 
 
 Then the faint hopes of love are touched. Cast 
 nothing away you have once loved ; perchance love's 
 day may come. There may yet be a rest for me, 
 and for the world. 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS 231 
 
 These are some of the motives, most minutely 
 varied, of these poems. One would not dwell on 
 them, if the temper in which they were written did 
 not change into a healthier temper, as his life and work 
 opened out before him. This mood was transient. 
 It sometimes recurred in after days, but he had 
 conquered it. But now it pervades, not only these 
 poems, but some of the more important tales in the 
 Earthly Paradise. It fills the Prologue. The Wan- 
 derers have left the affairs of love behind, for old 
 age is on them and death near, but while they remem- 
 ber how futile was aU its striving, they are sorry it 
 is past. They see the young men and the maidens, 
 and bid them take their joy, while they can. It is 
 true they ai'e themselves at peace, but it is peace with 
 sorrow. With them, however, personal love was 
 never the first thing, but insatiable desire of the 
 perfect land. Nothing was good but pursuit, until 
 they could pursue no more. This is the temper of 
 the Prologue, but in the stories which foUow it, love 
 runs, for the most part, on well known lines, natural, 
 simple, clear, personal, unmixed with subtle, complex 
 or obscure feeling, quite unhke the love-poems on 
 which I dweU at present. 
 
 There are, however, two tales in the Earthly Para- 
 dise where the confused wanderings of love-thinking, 
 the obscure involutions of love-emotion described in 
 these short love-poems, occur again — The Death of 
 Paris and The Hill of Venus. It is difficult to 
 find one's way among the bye-ways of incessantly 
 changing feeling in the passionate converse of Paris 
 and ^none, each feeling before it is half expressed 
 being tript up by another ; but that is probably the 
 impression the poet desired to make. It is still 
 
232 FOUR POETS 
 
 more difficult to discover the real reason why Tann- 
 haiiser left Venus, but the impression, imposed on us, 
 as we read, of a human soul in a forbidden, unhuman 
 land and hopelessly lost therein, of a mortal linked 
 in passion to an immortal who has had a hundred 
 mortals' loves and will have a hundred more when 
 he is dead, of an immortal shadow in a shadow land, 
 who knows neither sorrow nor aspiration, whose high 
 godhead is dead while her lonely sensual joy survives — 
 — remains most vividly, and drives our curious think- 
 ing into incursions over undiscovered realms within 
 the soul. 
 
 Leaving these personal poems, of so remote an 
 interest, I return to his nature-poetry. The descrip- 
 tions, so opulent in colour, of so great a clearness, so 
 enHvened with animal Ufe and figures and done with 
 so careful a- love of beauty, have a general adaptation 
 to the story and the time it belongs to, but they have 
 no other relation to humanity. In this he is quite 
 modern and of his age. We may choose, as an 
 example, those in the tale — The man horn to he King, 
 and in the Story of Rhodope. The journey of Michael 
 to the Castle of the Rose takes two or three days, and 
 the successive landscapes of the countryside are 
 described with so much charm arid accuracy that we 
 see them with the rider's eyes and heart. Rhodope 
 leaves the house in the morning and walks through 
 the fields and woods to the seashore. The landscape 
 changes as she moves, and every change is described, 
 till we reach with her the sandy bay between the 
 rocky capes and hear the river meet the sea. All the 
 countryside is full of the works of men, but everywhere 
 also is the soul of Rhodope. 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS 233 
 
 Such creative vision does not belong only to a few 
 poems. It is present in every story of the book. 
 It is only, however, the modem landscapist who would 
 have seen and chosen them. When I think of all 
 Morris did in this way, of the vast number of scenes 
 he saw, recorded and invented, I am astonished by 
 his memory — ^which must almost have equalled 
 Turner's — of what he saw ; and as grateful for the 
 power by which, hke Ruskin, he has opened our eyes 
 to see, observe and keep the beauty of the world. 
 I have already said that his love of the earth, its life 
 and all the Ufe of animals and man upon it, was one 
 of the strongest psissions of his character. But that 
 which he loved the most — and wrote of with unwearied 
 pleasure both in poem and romance — was the quiet 
 river Ufe of England, its cornfield and meadow, the 
 granges and villages on its banks and on the hills 
 that looked upon it ; the woods that lived by its 
 waters and saw their image in its pools, the flowers it 
 nurtured, the birds that haunted its shallows, the 
 fuU or rippling streams that from the bases of the 
 swelling downs flowed into it. Mountain scenery, 
 with its savagery and Splendour, did not move his 
 heart deeply, not even the Icelandic scenery which 
 was loved, so far as he loved it, not so much for itself, 
 cis for the sake of those brave and honourable freemen 
 who strove for life therein from tragedy to tragedy. 
 It is remarkable that in the story of Gudrun, in the 
 Earthly Paradise, the description of Nature, so varied 
 and constant in the other tales, scarcely exists at all. 
 The wide firth, black beneath the morning star, and 
 all the waste of snow, did not please him half so much 
 as the reaches of the Thames, or the hamlets hidden 
 in the downs, or the Danish barrow on the hiU top. 
 
234 FOUR POETS 
 
 or the grey frontage of Peterborough Cathedral 
 looking over the wide fen. The island to which the 
 Wanderers came, and where the Greek folk live, is 
 really England in its natural scenery ; the doings 
 and weather of the months therein are taken from the 
 England of the fourteenth century — even to the 
 vintaging ; and half the descriptions at least in the 
 stories of the whole book are transferred direct from 
 places he had seen in England, or in Northern France. 
 Nor is this deep affection for this still scenery absent 
 from the prose romances. The Dream of John Ball, 
 and especially News from Nowhere, are thrilling 
 with it. 
 
 Celt by descent, he was not Celtic in his natural 
 description. He loved rather a Teutonic scenery, 
 when he left in poetry his beloved England. If he 
 painted only a sketch here and there of Icelandic 
 landscape — desolate plain, savage mountain gorge, 
 and fierce seas, matters which did not he close to his 
 heart — ^he painted, with a vital touch, with a wealth 
 of luminous description, and with pleasure that 
 breathes in every line, the scenery of the Teutonic 
 lands in a more temperate chme than Iceland, in 
 the Roots of the Mountains. The vaUey of Burgdale 
 lives in its reader ; I see its tillage, corn land, sweet 
 meadows, clear streams and the beautiful people 
 who live in it day by day ; and the dark woods 
 above it and the wild moorland, and beyond, the 
 mountain range. How Morris loved to get his des- 
 criptions definite ! The valley, the town, the hall, 
 the farmhouses of Burgdale, each in their relation to 
 the scenery and the waters, might be mapped out 
 in every detail from his description of them in 
 words. In the beginning of the Sundering Flood 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS 235 
 
 he has made a lucid map of the whole country of 
 which the story tells, and the country is none we 
 know. It existed only in his imagination, but 
 when we have read of it, we know it to its remotest 
 nook and smallest stream. This is enough, perhaps, 
 to say of his poetry of Nature. Each reader can say 
 for himself more than I can say. It is for us, who 
 dwell in cities over much, a blessing to possess it. 
 Even in London, we may live in the country while 
 we read. 
 
 The finest charm in the stories of the Earthly 
 Paradise is their romance. The Greek stories are told 
 in the same romantic temper as the medieval tales ; 
 that is, Morris added to the classic outhnes the ideals, 
 the longings, the passionate thoughts concerning life 
 and death and love and beauty which a modern 
 romantic would naturally feel. And this is done 
 quite frankly. There is no imitation of the classic 
 forms, or of the classic way of thought. Nor are the 
 stories Palladian, if I may use that metaphor, but 
 Gothic ; remade by fresh, individual emotion out of 
 the old material. The Love of Alcestis — to take an 
 example — can anything be less Greek and more 
 romantic than the way the tale is told by Morris ? 
 It is curious to imagine Euripides reading it. The 
 Perseus story is told with a great delight in the story 
 itself, but the telhng of it is transformed by the multi- 
 tude of details, and by dehcate windings of emotion, 
 out of all harmony with the Greek Spirit, and into 
 harmony with the romantic. The Story of Cupid 
 and Psyche, which Morris wrought with the utmost 
 care, is not so far separated from the classic temper 
 as the others, because his original was exquisitely 
 
236 FOUR POETS 
 
 done at a time when the Greek Spirit had itself become 
 partly romantic. It was bold of him to rival the 
 beauty of his original, but he has, while losing its 
 brevity and a certain stately and steady loveliness in 
 the brevity, lengthened it with so much deHghtful 
 scenery and ornament that we enjoy its romantic 
 furniture from end to end. The two Bellerophon 
 stories are almost entirely invented by Morris. The 
 whole countryside in both poems, at Argos, and in 
 Lycia, with the towns and their buildings, is so clearly, 
 so pictorially painted, that we might map out the 
 landscape. The streets and temples and palaces of 
 the cities ; their gardens, halls, pleasure-chambers ; 
 their crowds, processions, music — details which the 
 Greeks would scarcely have touched — ^would have 
 been dear to the Romance-writers. 
 
 These two poems are, however, more modem than 
 classic or romantic by a closer and more careful 
 elaboration of human character than usual ; and this 
 is due, I think, to the strong influence which the 
 strong and deep humanity of the story of Gudrun had 
 exercised upon him. Bellerophon, who is quite un- 
 interesting at the beginning, is wrought into a higher 
 ideal of manhood than any other in the book. Stheno- 
 bsea, in the invention and delineation of whose 
 character and fate, Morris has reached a high tragic 
 level, and reached it, not with the Greek reticence, 
 but with so fluent and opulent an invention that 
 romantic richness can go no further, is contrasted 
 with Philonoe's pure, delicate, natural, passionate 
 girlhood — a lovely picture — nor are the other 
 characters less carefully drawn. As to the Chimoera 
 story it is a masterpiece of suggestion. 
 
 The lighter Greek tales, of Acontius, Atalanta, 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS 237 
 
 Pygmalion, the Golden Apples and others are delightful 
 narrative, at intervals quaintly mediaeval in feeling, 
 modem in their love of natural scenery, romantic in 
 their love emotion, and Greek only in their story. 
 Of the death of Paris, which stands apart, I have 
 already said something. Of the story of Rhodope, 
 which also stands apart, it may be said that it is 
 neither Greek nor romantic, but of Morris alone. It 
 is a curious study of the soul of a woman, born into 
 a world which is not hers and in which she can love 
 no one and nothing; unawakened to life till she 
 attain the world which fits her nature — one of Morris's 
 vague, subtle, elusive imaginations. How he has 
 done it is much more interesting than the thing done. 
 A still more interesting matter in these Greek tales 
 is the way Morris conceives the Greek gods, Athena, 
 Apollo, Diana and Venus. His images of them 
 and of their thoughts are naturally according to 
 tradition, but only in part. His own imagination 
 played around them and made them new ; and that 
 which is new in them is half romantic, half of modern 
 thought ; such thought as collects around the con- 
 ception of beings who know not age or death, or the 
 useless quarrels, aspirations, moralities or hungers 
 of the life of man. I give one instance in the strange 
 song Apollo sings at the beginning of the Love of 
 Alcestis. It is pure Morris speaking through the 
 god. But it is not only in their classic realm that 
 the Greek gods are treated by Morris. In the 
 imagination of the Middle Ages, the Greek gods, 
 banished from the Christian world, lived on, as distant 
 allies of Satan, who did not understand them, in secret 
 places of the earth, whence sometimes they came 
 forth to meet in ritual procession to ancient sacred 
 
238 FOUR POETS 
 
 places ; retaining still their characters, their splendour 
 though fallen, and their beauty. Their nobleness had 
 perished ; their evil remains. In two stories — The 
 Ring Given to Venus and The Hill of Venus, Morris 
 has embodied this mediseval imagination with a fine 
 intelligence and invention. His Venus of the HiU 
 is no longer the goddess he has made in the Greek 
 tales, but the fallen power, who can give the enjoy- 
 ment of sensuous love and no more, but who retains 
 the exquisite beauty of the past ; who loves beauty, 
 but has no knowledge of moral or spiritual beauty ; 
 who has power to bring around her in phantom 
 imagery the great lovers, even of Christendom if 
 love was all in all to them, but who is totally unable 
 to understand the human longings and questionings 
 of Tannhaiiser. In this conception, there is Uttle of 
 mediaeval thinking on the matter, and a great deal of 
 Morris's imagination, curiously roving through his 
 knowledge of mediaeval legend, through his own soul, 
 and through the modern subtleties which have 
 gathered round the old simplicities of love. The 
 Venus of the Hill is still the same to-day, but the 
 Tannhaiiser of Morris is not the Knight of the Legend. 
 He is one of ourselves. 
 
 The Ring given to Venus also brings into mediaeval 
 life the Greek gods. The story is told delightfully, 
 but in the midst of its delightfulness is the terrible 
 pageant of the ancient deities, shown now in their 
 cruelty, passing by Laurence into the dawn, in pro- 
 cession from the lonely glen where their glorious 
 temple once stood among its groves. The tale of this 
 watching by the sea, of the strange company passing 
 by, of the dark Lord of them on his marvellous beast ; 
 the charactering of Iris and Mercury, of Mars and 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS 239 
 
 Venus, are done with intense imagination. I am all 
 the more sorry that Morris did not paint Apollo, 
 Athena, Artemis and Poseidon, as he thought the 
 mediaeval phantasy would have conceived them. In 
 his tales, however, the gods are still romantic, but 
 since then, they have fallen even lower than their 
 mediaeval place. In that little half-mocking, half- 
 pathetic record of Heine's, they are out in domestic 
 service in Germany. 
 
 We are in full romance in the tale of Ogier the Dane. 
 It is mixed up with the cycle of Charlemaine, with 
 Morgan le Fay, and with the land of the Ever Young, 
 where the great heroes still live and love ; and a 
 happy minghng it is. One of the Orifental tales enters 
 also into the series ; and is not so good as the rest. 
 Out of Folk-stories, worked from various variants, the 
 Man born to be King, and East of the Sun and West of 
 the Moon are borrowed. The first of these is told with 
 extraordinary charm and invention. The second is full 
 of romantic additions and incidents, and is rendered 
 more interesting by the transference of the well-known 
 beginning to a northern land with its scenery, and 
 with the home Ufe of the North such as Morris loved 
 to paint. The hero, too, possesses the character, the 
 sentiment, the sub-mysticism, the truth and tender- 
 ness of the North ; and the mystic atmosphere is 
 enhanced by the sketch made of the narrator of the 
 tale. Gregory dreams the first part, dreams that he 
 hears it told by a stranger in the haU of King Magnus. 
 In the next part of the dream, he himself teUs the tale ; 
 is himself the stranger in the hall. In the next part, 
 he dreams that he has become the actual hero of the 
 story, that the previous adventures which the 
 
240 FOUR POETS 
 
 stranger and he have told were in truth his own. He 
 it is who wins at last to happiness and love in a perfect 
 land. And then he wakes to the rude, common life 
 of the world, and cannot bear it ; but walks apart 
 trying to remember that other life and all its beauty. 
 This is that subtle mysticism of Morris, pushing itself 
 into the romantic tale, and the invention is of great 
 interest, and all the more because the motive of it is 
 repeated in some of the prose tales, notably in John 
 Ball and in News from Nowhere. Lastly, the northern 
 drift of his genius, at this time, appears in the beautiful 
 and romantic rendering of the story of Aslaug, and 
 in the noble strength with which he has told the tale 
 of Gudrun. 
 
 We are then, always, even in the northern tales, 
 still more in the Greek tales, in the land of romance ; 
 and with a perfection of story-teUing which has not 
 even been approached since Chaucer, and of which, 
 if we could get it as good, I wish we had a hundred 
 volumes more. For, as I have said, these tales have 
 a releasing power. We breathe a clean, clear atmos- 
 phere, even in the tragic tales. The men are free, and 
 the women. What oppresses them is Fate and 
 Death, not their fellow-men. Also, they are indivi- 
 duals, not mere numbers in the social prison, forced 
 into a few common grooves in order to live ; who, if 
 they break loose into individuality, are punished or 
 sacrificed. Morris abhorred as the curse of society — 
 and indeed it was part of his socialism — the withering 
 of individual thought, feehng and act ; and even in 
 his lightest story-telling we may trace the dominance 
 of that opinion. 
 
 While he was still doing this romantic work, he 
 came more closely into touch with the Icelandic sagas 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS 241 
 
 and their severity ; with the courage against fate 
 which is one of their most ennobling elements ; the 
 silent endurance of their heroes and women in sorrow 
 and death and passion ; their belief in dreams and a 
 supernatural world, their pleasure in fighting and in 
 law ; their fateful love ; their deep humanity, the 
 quietude and justice and honour of it ; their tragic 
 note, in that tragic scenery which called on all the 
 fighting manliness of those that lived in it and in the 
 hfe it shaped ; their grave view of human hfe, even 
 of their gods whose decrees they sternly endured, 
 but against whose will they often set their own in 
 fearless even moral, opposition ; their stately and 
 tragedy-making women — and he rejoiced. These 
 qualities in the Northern Muse and the Northern 
 characters seized on his imagination and fitted the 
 maturer man in whom had already grown up the 
 desire to be no longer only " the idle singer of an 
 empty day." This new element appears in his noble 
 rendering in the Earthly Paradise of the Laxdcela Saga, 
 the Story of Gudrun. The very character of the poetry 
 has altered ; also its style and its melody. It cannot 
 any longer be classed as merely narrative poetry. 
 It is not indeed epic, but it is epical. Its style ceases 
 to be romantic ; and its melody is Dorian, fit for 
 that dignified and tragic tale. This change, which 
 many persons have remarked — it could scarcely be 
 passed by — enters into his rendering of the story of 
 Bellerophon, and I wish it were more clearly and 
 plainly to be felt in the last story in the book, the 
 tale of The Hill of Venus. 
 
 When, then, the Earthly Paradise was closed and 
 pubHshed, he gave all his energy to the translation 
 of the Norse Tales, only interpolating a poem. Love 
 
 17— (2278) 
 
242 FOUR POETS 
 
 is Enough. It is a modern reanimation or remaking 
 of a Morality play — we might even call it a Miracle 
 play, one of those that represented secular subjects, 
 — it has touches of both. It is a short piece such 
 as might be acted at a wedding feast before bride and 
 bridegroom. But, save in its form, it gives no idea of 
 what such a play would have been in the fourteenth, 
 fifteenth, or sixteenth century. Its poetry is exces- 
 sively modem, and full of modern motives. But I 
 daresay Morris — ^just as he medisevalized the Greek 
 stories — chose dehberately to modernize this ancient 
 form of drama. Hating direct imitation as he did, 
 and loving to bring the new out of the old form, he 
 had a perfect right to do this ; but the form did not 
 suit his special narrative power. He was precluded 
 by it from invention of incident and scenery such as 
 animates his long stories ; and the poetry, both lyric 
 and dramatic, drags, yet is too much diluted. 
 There are some lovely descriptions of Nature in it, 
 but they are sparsely scattered. The fairy-story 
 meeting of the King and his sweetheart of whom 
 he has dreamed for years, and whom he has left his 
 throne to seek, is told with idyllic beauty. It shines, 
 both in feehng and in truth, among the rest of Love 
 is Enough, Uke Venus among the lesser stars. The 
 pastoral Ufe and loves of Joan and Giles, who are 
 spectators of the play, are done with Morris's dreaming 
 grace. Not so the love-passages of the Emperor and 
 Empress at whose wedding the play is represented. 
 These want nature and fire. Moreover, there has been 
 a great deal of researching pains spent on the verse 
 and its various metres, so much so that the poem for 
 those who read this kind of criticism is injured by 
 over-explanation. The introduction of science into 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS 243 
 
 a work of art always troubles it. Natural passion is 
 
 taken out of the verse. Even Morris himself seems 
 
 to have somewhat lost it in endeavour after various 
 
 forms of verse. Therefore, in spite of the great 
 
 technical interest of this poem, and perhaps on account 
 
 of that, reahty seems to be for the first and last time 
 
 lost in a poem by Morris. It made no impression on 
 
 the world. Critics may hereafter choose it as a kind 
 
 of Exercier Platz for their skill. We touch it and 
 
 pass it by. It is an interlude in his work. 
 
 It was now that the Muse of the North laid her 
 
 alluring hand upon him, and claimed his love. Her 
 
 nature, her teaching, her eyes, now grave, now wild, 
 
 her feeling, deep but austere, her view of life, suited 
 
 his autumn character, and he fell in love with her. 
 
 He had gone through his romantic period, and, 
 
 coming out of the other side of it, found himself alone, 
 
 somewhat desolate of heart, and needing a new 
 
 inipulse. What he felt, and how he felt, when into 
 
 him poured the flood of these new stories of human 
 
 life, is told in a poem — To the Muse of the North, 
 
 which, for its insight into the Northern nature and 
 
 his own, ought to be read throughout, but of which 
 
 I can only quote the beginning and the end. It 
 
 describes a landmark in the development of Morris, 
 
 and is to be found in Poems by the Way. 
 
 O Muse that swayest the sad Northern Song, 
 Thy right hand full of smiting and of wrong, 
 Thy left hand holding pity ; and thy breast 
 Heaving with hope of that so certain rest : 
 Thou, with the grey eyes kind and unafraid, 
 Thy soft lips trembling not, though they have said 
 The doom of the World and those that dwell therein. 
 • « * * 
 
 O Mother, and Love and Sister all in one 
 
 Come thou ; for sure I am enough alone, 
 
 That thou thine arms about my heart should'st throw, 
 
 And wrap me in the grief of long ago. 
 
244 FOUR POETS 
 
 These were the passionate elements in this new love 
 of his, but there were other elements in it which ajso 
 suited that part of his nature which was not romantic. 
 There was a roughness, grimness and fighting passion 
 in him, combined, or rather existing side by side with 
 his love of beauty, love of Nature, and love of love, 
 which found themselves at home in the northern 
 world ; and were more fully developed by his journey 
 to Iceland, in the scenery and life of which, at least in 
 memory, he revelled hke a Troll on a hohday. If 
 Iceland was once started in conversation, Morris 
 clung to it like ivy to the oak. Nothing else, for hours 
 together, was allowed into the conversation. It was 
 sometimes terrible, and he looked like Snorri Sturluson 
 himself. 
 
 I partly regretted this development, but it gave to 
 us his splendid epic rendering, in original verse, of 
 the mighty story of Sigurd, Brynhild and Gudrun — 
 the finest story perhaps in the modern world,* But I 
 only gave it this partial regret because it seemed to do 
 away with his poetry. We had afterwards, it is true, 
 the translations of Virgil's Mneid and of the Odyssey — 
 interesting and effective, but neither of them Virgilian 
 or Homeric ; but now, with the sole exception of 
 this new rendering of the Volsunga Saga, a little 
 
 * Note. — It is interesting to compare the accurate trans- 
 lation he made of the Icelandic form of the Volsunga Saga 
 with his poetical rendering of it. I do not mean in the lavish 
 ornamentation he added to the story, but in the way he added 
 his own thoughts to those portions of the tale in which the 
 Northern thoughts on human life and the gods are expressed. 
 In those additions the soul of Morris is opened to us ; and I 
 instance especially the way in which he has expanded the 
 long, sententious speech of Brynhild to Sigurd after he had 
 wakened her on the Hill of Fire. He has even inserted in it 
 thoughts which would never have occurred to a Northern 
 hero, much less to a daughter of Odinn. 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS 245 
 
 volume of lyrical poems and the verses in the prose 
 romances, the poetry of Morris closes. He is absorbed 
 in the north and the northern spirit. But after all, it 
 is best for an artist to do that which impassionates 
 him, and to take with thanks what he offers us. And 
 it is good for the English people to be brought closely 
 into contact, otherwise than by scientific scholarship, 
 with the high, courageous and human stories of our 
 northern ancestors ; to realize their free and noble 
 temper at a time when we are commercialized, and 
 have forgotten too much the manly virtues of a great 
 state ; it is good for us to hark back, in an age of 
 luxury, to a time when men lived in continual strife for 
 their lives with the cruel forces of Nature, and fought 
 to the death in desperate straits for honour and for 
 fame ; when women were honoured and played their 
 part ; and when the best religion for men was to live, 
 without fear and with justice, in fellowship with one 
 another, and then to let the gods, if they were able, 
 do their part also without favour. That is no bad 
 thing to infiltrate into the weakened blood of England. 
 I think that living in these stories nursed the 
 modern revolutionist in Morris, and added imagina- 
 tion to the energy with which he took up, in his 
 Socialism, the cause of the enslaved in England. The 
 wild poetry, the steady temper of the tales, idealized 
 and strengthened the grim realism of his four years' 
 work from street to street, from one small lecture 
 room to another ; and enabled him for a long time 
 to resist the despair which crept upon him in contact 
 with the blind and useless quarrels of which he 
 knew too many. Like Sigurd, he fought with the 
 Dragon of Capitalism, lying like Fafnir round its 
 gold ; hke Sigurd, fate and the time were against him. 
 
246 FOUR POETS 
 
 and ancient feuds ; and like Sigurd, his battle has 
 won for him an immortal name, and handed down 
 an impulse full of power and use to the future ; when, 
 not in the Communism he pictured in News from 
 Nowhere, but in a higher organization of universal 
 Labour — ^justly and quietly estabhshed by law, and 
 performed by all men — ^his hopes and faith may yet 
 be reahzed. It is the divine and human faith by 
 which we endure, and hve. He came to that view 
 in the end, but at first he felt that there would be a 
 desperate, even a sanguinary, struggle between the 
 Old and the New ; and I daresay this fighting expec- 
 tation was born in him out of the temper induced 
 by the northern stories. Could he but have set, at 
 this time, oppressive wealth and enslaved labour to 
 fight the quarrel out on Holmgang, how much he 
 would have loved it. 
 
 Moreover he found in these stories natural, even 
 primaeval, passions, seeking their natural ends in a 
 natural society ; and they appealed for treatment to 
 the second half of his nature which was not satisfied 
 with romantic food. In them he found a grimmer 
 reaHsm, a closer truth to human strife and sorrow 
 than he could isolate from the beauty of the Greek 
 or the mediseval stories; This suited him now, for 
 the problem, as they caU it, of life lay hard upon him. 
 He could not put it aside, and live with Cupid and 
 Psyche, even with Ragnar and Aslaug. And his 
 love of beauty was for a space in abeyance ; and his 
 pity for the sorrow and the unrelenting fates of men 
 uppermost. His S»ciaUsm and its propaganda were 
 simmering in his heart. No more were his four walls 
 hung with his own pain and dreams, but with the 
 pain and the dreams of the world. 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS 247 
 
 I have said that poetry concerned only with the 
 past, like that of the Earthly Paradise, and receiving 
 no emotion from the living present, is in itself often 
 of great beauty, but has no element of continuity. 
 The poet cannot go on producing it. It was so 
 with Morris. Actual human emotion flowing in 
 upon him from aU sides mastered him, and he found 
 some outlet for this in the record of the austere 
 loves, bitter revenges, fateful sorrows, undying 
 honour, heavy fighting and transient joys of the Ice- 
 landic Sagas ; and in their iron scenery. This cul- 
 minated in his rendering of the Volsunga Saga. His 
 re-creation of the tale gallops along with sufi&cient 
 rapidity to excuse its length. It is pleasant to read 
 long poems when we are lazy with enjoyment of the 
 world, and have not time to hurry, and when they are 
 ornamented enough with inventive incident and 
 detail. Those who are not capable of this temper can 
 read Morris's translation of the Icelandic version of 
 the tale. That is short enough not to give the poor 
 folk who love to hve in a hurry too much trouble. 
 But one or other ought to be read. It is a shame not 
 to know the great story. English people, whose blood 
 is Teutonic by three several strains, have little ac- 
 quaintance with the most ancient records of the 
 thoughts and Uves, the passions and manners, of their 
 ancestors. Beowulf has only lately been well put in 
 their power, but the Volsunga Saga, in its German 
 form, was open to the public sixty years ago in many 
 versions of the Niebelungen Lied. One would have 
 thought that when Morris translated and then with a 
 splendid joy and force poetized its northern form, 
 English people, who knew the stories of the origin 
 of the Jews, of Rome and Greece, would have been 
 
248 FOUR. POETS 
 
 anxious to read of their own origins. Not at all ! 
 They were interested in Jason, not in Sigurd. This 
 book of Morris was but little read when it was 
 published. It has, and no wonder, steadUy increased 
 in favour among the general public, but even now 
 it has not come home to England. 
 
 And if the beginning be too terrible, too primaeval, 
 we may read alone the Sigurd story. It is objected 
 to Morris's poem that it would have had a greater 
 epic unity had it used the story of Sigurd only, and 
 left out the barbaric prologue of Sigmund, Signy and 
 Sinfiotli ; and there is much force in the objection. 
 The art of the poem, that is, of its shaping, might 
 have then been better. But Morris, who I daresay 
 agreed with this objection when he had finished the 
 poem, liked, I conjecture, the primaeval savagery of 
 the Sigmund stOry ; and did what he liked, even 
 when he did not quite approve of what he did. For 
 my part, I am glad he wrote it. I have no wish to 
 whip the story of the Volsungs into an artistic epic. 
 It never was a piece of fine art, and I hope it never wiU 
 be subjected to its canons. It is rudely built up out 
 of many sagas, as a cathedral which ten generations 
 have worked upon, each with its own design ; and 
 the best principles to apply to its treatment, as to 
 the cathedral, are the principles of the Anti-Scrape 
 Society. And, moreover, it ought to please us, 
 overdone with our cultivated surroundings, to step, 
 at least in imagination, and with Morris growhng 
 with pleasure at our side, into that very ancient 
 country, where savagery and honour, and faithfulness 
 to love and vengeance, went together ; where Odinn 
 came to the feast, and drove the sword into the 
 Branstock ; where, one-eyed, in his blue cloak, he 
 
\ WILLIAM MORRIS 249 
 
 lopked from under his slouched hat, amidst the din 
 and swording of the battle, into the face of the fated 
 hero, and bore him, when dead, to Valhalla ; a land 
 wheie men might still become wolves ; and Signy 
 coidd lie with her own brother to beget a son who 
 shall slay her husband and his children for the sake 
 of avenging her father and her brothers, and yet die 
 with the husband she hated, rather than live with 
 those she loved and with the memory of what she had 
 done. This is a world into which, out of this world, 
 it is not unuseful to step at times. We are too forget- 
 ful of the roots of savagery in humanity, and think 
 too carelessly that they are altogether worked out ; 
 and when we meet them, to our vast surprise, in our 
 civilization, we find them worse than they were in 
 Sigmund's time, because there is not with them the 
 truth, the promise-keeping, the courage and the honour 
 which the Volsungs had. I had rather live with the 
 men and women of the Sigmund story than with 
 the wolfish men and women who ruined the French 
 Revolution by their savage bestiality, or with the 
 financial dogs who to-day plunder and destroy the 
 innocent and the fools who trust them. 
 
 Then, having done that piece of work, he was borne 
 away on the stream of Socialism, and looked forward, 
 through a violent revolution, to a changed society. 
 To dwell on this socialist struggle is not in my subject. 
 It does not take much trouble to be a Socialist now, 
 and it does not bring with it now any sacrifice. But 
 Morris did take trouble, and suffered trouble. He 
 sacrificed money, health, peace, his darling work, 
 his passion for beauty in literature and art, to his 
 convictions, and for nearly four years of unremitting 
 exertion. Were it not for the noble moral effort 
 
250 FOUR POETS 
 
 he made to regenerate society, were it not for the 
 incalculable good, which, for the cause of a better 
 world, emerged out of his work, and will continue 
 to breathe its helpful spirit into men, there would 
 be something more pathetic than usual in the fate 
 which drove this artist into this sad and weary 
 work. But we cannot mourn for that. The seeds 
 were sown ; and Morris would have said, with sad 
 content — ^The harvest is yet to be. 
 
 When this active propaganda of his was over, 
 he was able to give a fuller attention, while he 
 continued his quiet work for Sociahsm at Hammer- 
 smith, to his hterary work. He published his 
 translation of the Odyssey and got back, through it, 
 to his darling story-telling. Then he recurred to his 
 beloved centuries in the Dream of John Ball, in which 
 he expressed not only his social views, but also his 
 inner life. It paints Enghsh society as it was when 
 the feudal system was breaking up, and contrasts it 
 with what English society is now. And a noble book 
 it is. It closes with a vague hope of what society 
 might come to be. What that society was to be he 
 painted in News from Nowhere, and in it also Morris 
 opens his soul to those who can comprehend it. The 
 communism of the book is not likely ever to arise, 
 but, as we read, we may put that by. What remciins 
 is a lovely vision of a world of beauty, peace and joy, 
 where men are as happy in work as in play ; where 
 humanity and Nature are loved, and all men are 
 brothers, save when jealousy intervenes ; where, 
 above all, for that was his first principle, all work was 
 done with personal pleasure. 
 
 And in that is the charm, the use and the refresh- 
 ing of the book. It falls like dew upon our hearts. 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS 251 
 
 I declare that in the emotions these two books awaken 
 more impulse is given to the cause of a great fellow- 
 ship of men banded together to establish a righteous, 
 just, free and happy state, than wiU be given by 
 all the scientific economists of Socialism. These 
 books nourish that inward spirit, without which all 
 their science, needful as it is, is blown like chaff from 
 the threshing-floor of the earth. Morris did more 
 useful work for his cause by them than by his four 
 years' propaganda in streets and lecture rooms. 
 Then it struck him that he would picture, not a half- 
 mediaeval society such as he paints in John Ball, — 
 in whose moral and imaginative life he could not find 
 the qualities of character he wished to display, and 
 in whose society there was decay rather than vigorous 
 life — ^but another kind of social state, which should 
 have the noble and masculine quahties of the northern 
 character, without its grimness and fierceness and 
 with the love of beauty and of Nature which it did not 
 possess ; which should be youthful and full of the 
 future, with the hopes and faith of youth, and with 
 an intense love of hfe ; joyous and free ; grave in 
 counsel for the state ; brave in war for defence 
 of home ; inured to war, yet eager for peace ; 
 rejoicing in the tillage of the earth, in hunting, in 
 keeping of cattle ; devoted to home ; honouring its 
 women, and having in it women worthy of all honour 
 for intellect, for the work of daily life, for counsel and 
 for war, for love and motherhood. This he thought, 
 as I believe, would realise an ideal hfe before our sad 
 and spoiled society. And he wrote the House of the 
 Wolfings, but especially the Roots of the Mountains. 
 The first, though stronger in note, is not so imaginative 
 nor so actual a representation as the second. There 
 
252 FOUR POETS 
 
 is more possible history in it. Moreover, it contains 
 in it a supernatural element, which takes away from 
 the naturalness of the story. The second has nothing 
 of this. It is realistic enough, and the supernatural 
 does not intrude. Nor do I think there is a more 
 beautiful, more enchanting story in the world, nor, 
 with all its realism, a more ideal thing. " This " — 
 Morris is saying through all his tale — " this is the true 
 temper of the world as it ought to be ; this is the noble 
 society, and this its spirit." 
 
 We cannot go back to that kind of life, but we can 
 re-estabhsh its spirit, and love its beauty. And, 
 indeed, the love of beauty, lost to Morris in its fullness 
 in those northern tales, returns to him in these stories, 
 and never leaves him again. The love of Nature has 
 come back, and flows hke a stream through the Roots 
 of the Mountains. The descriptions of valley and 
 meadow and clear waters and mountain woods and 
 feUs are as lovely, even lovelier, than any in the 
 Earthly Paradise . and they are filled with a nobler, 
 happier, and more hopeful humanity. Fate and 
 Sorrow do not brood over them, and Death is not the 
 woeful wonder it is in the Earthly Paradise. The 
 undertone of life is happiness ; the undertone of 
 happiness is fullness of Hfe. Morbid regret does not 
 exist among the people, fuU of pleasure in their daily 
 work when they are at peace, and going to war with 
 a high heart which takes them singing into the battle. 
 
 Above all, there is in these stories, and indeed in the 
 stories which foUow, but not so fuUy as in these, a 
 representation of womanhood which is more perfect 
 than any that I know in literature. It might be 
 called ideal, but I prefer to call it real, for it is that 
 which womanhood would easily be, according to her 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS 253 
 
 nature, in a nobly organized society. And it is not 
 a representation which makes her an object of worship 
 to man, or exalts her by depreciating man. She 
 and he are naturally equal and necessary to one 
 another. It is the real, the true thing ;. but it will 
 seem unreal to our society for a long time. Some way 
 or other, one had not been led to expect this from 
 Morris. The women in the early poems, in Jason and 
 the Earthly Paradise, have charm and naturalness, 
 are never debased ; but they are the women of the 
 stories, acting and thinking in harmony with the 
 stories ; only with a grace, especially when they are 
 young, which arises from Morris, not from the story. 
 But here, in these two stories, there are three women 
 who are not goddesses, for they know and rejoice in 
 mortal love and life, but who have the moral qualities 
 of Athena in their thought and act — ^high inteUigence, 
 physical beauty, imaginative love — the woman called 
 the Sun in the House of the Wolfings, the Bride and the 
 Friend in the Roots of the Mountains. Naturalness — 
 pure natural womanhood with its sensible passion 
 nobly felt, openly acknowledged, are given to " The 
 Bride " and " The Friend," great personal beauty and 
 dignity, gentle manners, lovely dress, swiftness, 
 strength and grace. " The Sun " is of the same 
 nobility, but being a prophetess, is more removed 
 from natural humanity. All of them — even the less 
 important women in these tales, while Uving close to 
 the realities of life, are of a natural sweetness and 
 greatness. They are never apart from domestic 
 life and motherhood, but they are also never apart 
 from the interests of the community. They stand 
 in intelligence, and for advice, and wisdom, on a 
 natural level with the men. They are always 
 
254 FOUR POETS 
 
 consulted in matters which involve the safety or 
 progress of the common-weal. They even go 
 to war, and join in the battle. In matters of love, 
 they are natural, frank, chaste, and passionate. No 
 one could imagine from anything Morris says in 
 these stories that there was ever such a question as 
 the equality of the sexes. The men are men and the 
 women, women, and each are absolutely necessary to 
 one another, and to the State, and equally necessary. 
 The question of man versus woman has never occurred 
 to the dwellers in Burgdale. When we see the 
 relations of men and women in this happy place, 
 we say — this is the natural thing — this is what was 
 intended, this is civilisation; and when, in a better 
 society, womanhood reaches the heights it is capable 
 of gaining, and man steps along with her into wbirthi- 
 ness, Morris's women in these stories wUl be remem- 
 bered. They came out of his soul, and were built 
 by his imagination ; and this conception of her was 
 one of the hidden things which, unsuspected, lay like 
 pearls in the deep and solitary sea within him. 
 Womanhood should be grateful to him, but no 
 attention, as far as I know, has been bestowed 
 by women on this noble representation. 
 
 And now, like a child, who, having wandered far 
 over wild moorland and stony places, finds at last the 
 path to home, and knows that weariness wiU end, 
 Morris came back to the full-coloured dreamland of 
 his youth, where the Sword goes out to sea, and the 
 knights ride through the Hollow Land, and the red 
 roses are seen across the moon, and Gwendolen lets 
 down her golden hair to the Prince, and the Seven Stars 
 ride through Heaven. All the later romances are 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS 255 
 
 in this world beyond the world. They have no histori- 
 cal element like the House of the Wolfings or the Roots 
 of the Mountains. They began with The Glittering 
 Plain, and the passage Mr. Mackail quotes from that 
 book describes their world and its temper so accu- 
 rately, that no better image can be given of it. " She 
 had in her hand a book covered outside with 
 gold and gems, even as he saw it in the orchard-close 
 aforetime ; and he beheld her face that it was no 
 longer the face of one sick with sorrow, but glad and 
 clear and most beauteous. Now she opened the 
 book and held it before HaUbhthe and turned the 
 leaves so that he might see them clearly ; and therein 
 were woods and castles painted, and burning moun- 
 tains, and the walls of the world, and kings upon 
 their thrones, and fair women and warriors, all most 
 lovely to behold, even as he had seen it aforetime in 
 the orchard where he lay lurking amidst the leaves 
 of the bay tree. So at last she came to the place in 
 the book wherein was painted Hallblithe's own image 
 over against the image of the Hostage ; and he looked 
 thereon and longed. But she turned the leaf, and lo I 
 on one side the Hostage again, standing in a fair 
 garden of the spring with the lilies all about her feet, 
 and behind her the walls of a house, grey, ancient and 
 lovely : and on the other leaf over against her was 
 painted a sea rippled by a httle wind and a boat 
 thereon sailing swiftly, and one man alone in the boat 
 sitting and steering with a cheerful countenance ; 
 and he, who but HaUbhthe himself. Hallblithe 
 looked thereon for a while and then the king's 
 daughter shut the book, and the dream flowed into 
 other imaginings of no import." 
 It is strange to think that, while he was living 
 
256 FOUR POETS 
 
 continually in this far-off country of creative imagina- 
 tion, where the supernatural still lingered and com- 
 panied with men, where the personages and manners 
 were for the most part of that thirteenth or fourteenth 
 century which, having loved from the beginning, he 
 loved to the end ; where the women were not so lofty 
 in character as in the Roots of the Mountains, but were 
 fresh, loving, true and charming ; where his love of 
 Nature and of mediaeval colour and architecture re- 
 curred again in a flood of pleasure — ^it is strange to 
 think that in another and an outward life, he was 
 doing steadily all the practical work he had begun of 
 old, and inventing new labours. He carried on his 
 business, and added to its interests. He started the 
 Kelmscott printing press, made new founts of type, 
 new paper, new ink, and wrought the initial letters and 
 the ornaments. This was his latest passion. ' I wish 
 I had been a printer from my mother's womb," he 
 said, with almost a fierce intensity. At the same 
 time he was publishing and translating the Icelandic 
 Sagas and the Heimskringla. Then he gave a good 
 deal of time to the Society for the Preservation of 
 Ancient Buildings ; he lectured on Art, its aims, 
 its relation to work, and he pubhshed the lectures ; 
 and he steadily supported and attended the Hammer- 
 smith Socialist Society, which met in his own house. 
 Meanwhile he translated some old French romances 
 and published them. Then he took up Beowulf and 
 put that English Genesis into verse. The only poetry 
 he pubhshed in book form were the Ijnrical verses 
 in the romances, and some of the Poems by the Way, 
 and inscriptions for tapestry and pictures. But 
 though his work as a poet was done, it is a poetical 
 wbrld in which we hve in the Romances. At this 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS 257 
 
 period of life he found more freedom for imagination 
 in writing prose than he found in the strictness, 
 restrictions and difficulty of the higher art of poetry. 
 Moreover, he could not have written verse now with 
 the ease, rapidity and beauty with which he wrote 
 Jason and the Earthly Paradise. He had passed 
 through too much work, weariness and trouble. 
 
 If he did not, however, write much poetry, he now, 
 as we draw near to the close of his literary hfe, 
 collected and published some occasional poems, 
 chiefly lyrical, under the title of Poems by the Way. 
 The publication of them belongs to this later time, 
 after he had become a Sociahst. They appeared in 
 1896. Some of them were written in earlier years 
 for magazines, and other prints, and such of these 
 as he thought worth living, he now assembled in this 
 book. Taken together, they illustrate the changes 
 in his interests during a number of years. Some 
 belong to mediaeval hfe, others to the Norse and 
 Danish influence ; some to his Socialist prophecy. 
 Some link together mediaeval and northern subjects, 
 invented or borrowed, with the modern hopes, 
 aspirations and angers of his Socialism. Others Uve 
 in the world of the later stories of pure invention, 
 like Goldilocks and Goldilocks, which closes the book ; 
 and a certain number are personal lyrics of a sweet, 
 natural and subtle tenderness. The little book, 
 by this biographical interest, by its poetic charm, 
 by its revelation of the heart of Morris, and by its 
 wide range over many various subjects, is a dehght- 
 ful companion in holiday time, and ought to be pub- 
 lished in a companionable form. It is too romantic 
 for a wide circulation in this country whose fault is 
 not romance, but there must be a large remnant of 
 
 l8 — (227S) 
 
258 POUR POETS 
 
 silent persons who hunger for a healthy romance with 
 which to adorn their lives. It is too sociahstic for a 
 privileged society, clinging with aU their fierce suckers 
 to their money and their comfort, but the increasing 
 legions of Socialism ought to gladly buy it for their 
 inspiration. Nor will its romance do them any harm. 
 Socialism needs, not only strict economics, but, with 
 them, the romantic spirit. 
 
 The Socialist Lays in this book were intended to be 
 sung as chants. They are not quite successful. They 
 are too literary to be popular. The poems to which 
 a socialistic turn is given, but whose subjects, hke 
 The Folk-mote by the River, are taken from mediaeval 
 times, are far more successful, and often beautiful. 
 But the best of these sociahst poems are those taken 
 out of a poem — The Pilgrims of Hope, which made its 
 sole pubhc appearance in the Commonweal. Three 
 of them are called The Message of the March Wind, 
 Mother and Son, The Half of Life Gone. They are 
 redolent of a tender humanity ; they are fuU of 
 the sad, quiet and lonely secrets of his nature, and 
 they enshrine again his impassioned love of the earth 
 and sky and the sweet waters of England. They teU of 
 his unshaken hopes for the future when the cause shall 
 triumph, but also of the deep despondences which fell 
 upon him when he knew that he could never see 
 them realized in the present ; they teU also of the sad- 
 ness which sometimes looked back to the days before 
 the strife, when he was happier. To read The Half 
 of Life Gone is to read his very heart. It begins — 
 
 The days have slain the days, 
 
 And the seasons have gone by. 
 
 And brought me the summer again ; 
 
 And here on the grass !■ lie 
 
 As erst I lay and was glad 
 
 Ere I meddled with right and with wrong. 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS 259 
 
 Yet the despondence was only for a time ; he never 
 ceased to be a pilgrim of hope. Nor did the sorrow, 
 the bitterness or the solitude of the battle dismay 
 or lessen the courage, the grim resolve with which, 
 like his beloved Northmen, he fought the battle to 
 the end.. When the world is awakened at last, men 
 shall remember — 
 
 Of thy love and thy deeds and thy valour. 
 And thy hope that nought could quell. 
 
 I have not spoken of his Umitations as a poet. 
 They are plain, and it were an easy task to speak of 
 them. What I have tried to do, and it is the useful 
 thing, is to speak of his excellent things, and to bind 
 them up with the man himself. When we have learnt 
 to see the excellent in him, we shall see, if we shall 
 then care to do so, where his fatdts were, and where 
 his hmitations as a poet. Whatever they were, he 
 has his own place in the great roU of EngUsh poets, 
 and it is a place select ; and those who love him love 
 him well. And here to close this Essay, and to 
 bring us back to the man himself, to a true, pathetic 
 image of him, fuU of tenderness and sad courage — 
 is a httle poem written a few years before he died. 
 To read it is to love him — 
 
 The Wind's on the wold 
 And the night is a-cold. 
 And Thames runs chill 
 'Twixt mead and hill. 
 But kind and dear 
 Is the old house here. 
 And my heart is warm 
 'Midst winter's harm. 
 Rest then a rest. 
 And think of the best 
 'Twixt summer and spring, 
 When all birds sing 
 In the town of the tree. 
 And ye lie in me 
 
260 FOUR POETS 
 
 And scarce dare move, 
 
 Lest Earth and its love 
 
 Should fade away 
 
 Ere the full of the day. 
 
 I am old and have seen 
 
 Many things that have been ; 
 
 Both grief and peace 
 
 And wane and increase. 
 
 No tale I teU 
 
 Of ill or well. 
 
 But this I say. 
 
 Night treadeth on day. 
 
 And for worst and best 
 
 Right good is rest. 
 
 THE END. 
 
 Prmttd by Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, Ltd., Bath. 
 
 (2278)