presence

of

of narrative, dramatic, and lyric verse, as these in turn illustrate more or less clearly the didactic and descriptive elements. Hence, although the three great divisions of verse are here illustrated, Arnold cannot be said to have been a versatile and voluminous writer of poetry. His three longest narrative or epic poems, so called, are of the nature of semi-epics, and his dramas are confined to " Merope" and "Empedocles on Etna "; the latter having but two acts, and "Merope" not conforming to the accepted fullness of a play. At this point, Arnold and Emerson come into natural comparison, as to the relative amount of prose and verse which they respectively wrote, the poems of each being contained in a single volume as compared with several volumes of prose. In a wonderful degree Arnold resembles Lowell here, and Coleridge and Southey and Scott and Landor; some literary features common to Arnold and Lowell both in verse and prose being well worth the notice of the student.

A mere specific examination of Arnold's poetry is now in place, and discloses the following char

acteristics:

1. Classic taste is at once discernible by every impartial reader of the verse before us, nor would

any tribute that the reader might pay to it have been more pleasing to the author himself. As in prose, so in poetry, this was a feature that he would under no consideration sacrifice for any apparent temporary advantage, however strongly urged. This sense of form in itself and in its relation to the subject-matter was in a degree the central principle of his literary life and work — a conscientious warfare against Philistinism, an exaltation of the humanities whenever opportunity offered, an insistence that there should be the manifest presence of Hellenic art and culture in every worthy literary product. He believed, with Keats, that beauty and truth were inseparably connected; that even prose literature should be made artistically attractive, while poetry as a fine art could not be said to exist without the pervading presence of the æsthetic. Hence, to quote from Arnold's verse in confirmation of this fact or to refer the reader to certain poems as exemplifying it would be quite invidious, in that this element of verbal refinement is inherent in all the verse. In this respect poetry, with Arnold, was simply the best medium known to him through which he could fitly express his deepest sense of beauty and art. It is in this light that the meters of Ar

nold's poetry should be studied, exhibiting as they do all the standard varieties of feet and line from the couplet on to blank verse and related forms; the selection of the pentameter measure for any given poem depending in part upon the theme and content of the poem and in part upon its fitness as the medium of an attractive rhythmical movement and effect. It is thus that in such narrative poems as Sohrab and Rustum " and "Balder Dead" we have blank verse, while in such as "Tristram and Iseult blank verse gives place to the rhyming couplet and quatrain. Before dismissing this feature it is in place to state that. in verse, as in prose, literary technique at times appears to be so pronounced as to become an end in itself, and thus lose its peculiar charm and defeat its own ends; the art of the poet appearing on the face of the poem, and to that extent impairing the spontaneous and natural influence of the thought. It is here that Arnold and Keats are seen to be similar, and to some extent Arnold and Lowell; while the verse of Emerson, as a rule, fails less frequently in this respect than does the classical verse of Arnold.

2. A second excellent feature of Arnold's verse is its pronounced mental type. Nor is what is

called "intellectuality" the only way of expressing this feature. The poetry is as a whole sensible, marked by strong thought and the presence of good judgment in its utterance. We are not alluding here to the scholarship of Arnold in this or that particular branch of liberal study, nor to the fact that a certain amount of learning appears in his verse, but are noting that it is an order of verse from a man who thinks before he writes and as he writes, whose faculties are healthfully at work in authorship and completely under control as he writes, so that on the reader's part there is required a corresponding mental activity. Here we note a characteristic complementary of the one just mentioned, taste under the control of mind, what Dowden has called "mind and art" in one expression. Hence, Arnold could not have indorsed those views of verse which make it purely impassioned or imaginative, as Shelley's poetry is "the language of the imagination," or Milton's poetry is "simple, sensuous, and passionate." He would say, with Elliott, "Poetry is impassioned truth," or, with Mill, "It is the influence of the feelings over our thoughts," the element of thought being essential.

Here, again, Arnold overreached himself in em

phasizing the intellectual element of verse, even though believing thereby his own statement in "The New Sirens,"

"Only, what we feel, we know."

He sometimes knew more than he felt or could make his reader feel, so that there is to this extent the absence of a profound and sustained poetic impulse. Feeling involves intensity; Arnold is too infrequently an intense poet, illustrating one of his lines in "Resignation,"

"Not deep the poet sees, but wide."

To this extent Arnold is an Augustan poet of the eighteenth century too reserved when we expect him to be demonstrative, holding in check as if by force of will those more natural impulses that arise and appeal for expression. Hence there are times when we must study Arnold's verse though we should prefer simply to read it at sight, as an exercise of pure enjoyment for leisure hours.

3. A further merit is seen in the line of personality, a decided merit in any author, and never more welcome than in these days of an easygoing imitation of writers and schools. Arnold's home training at Rugby was all in the direction of a manly independence of view. Thomas Arnold