What voices are these on the clear night-air?

What lights in the court-what steps on the stair?... yet some must also have reflected that the great masters, having to tell a story, choose their one metre and, having chosen, so adapt and handle it that it tells all. Sohrab and Rustum indeed tells itself perfectly, from its first line to its noble close. But Sohrab and Rustum is, and professes to be, an episode. Balder is little more, and most readers find Balder, in spite of its fine passages and general dignity, long enough. Arnold-let it be repeated-was not a bard; not a Muse-intoxicated man. He had not the bardic, the architectonic, gift. 'Something of the worldling' in him forbade any such fervour as, sustained day after day for years, gave the world Paradise Lost, and incidentally, no doubt, made Milton's daughters regret at times that their father was not as ordinary men.

Nor had Arnold an impeccable ear for rhyme (in The New Sirens, for instance, he rhymes 'dawning' with 'morning'): and if we hesitate to follow the many who have doubted his ear for rhythm, it is not for lack of apparently good evidence, but because some of his rhythms which used to give us pause have come, upon longer acquaintance, to fascinate us: and the explanation may be, as we have hinted, that they follow the French rather than the Italian use of accent, and are strange to us rather than in themselves unmusical. Certainly the critics who would have us believe that The Strayed Reveller is an unmusical poem will not at this time of day persuade us by the process of taking a stanza or two and writing them down in the form of prose. We could do the same with a dozen lines of The Tempest or Antony and Cleopatra, were it worth doing; and prove just as much, or as little.

Something of Arnold's own theory of poetry may be

extracted from the prefaces of 1853 and 1854. They contain, like the prefaces of Dryden and of Wordsworth, much wisdom; but the world, perhaps even more wisely, refuses to judge a poet by his theory, which (however admirable) seldom yields up his secret. Yet Arnold had a considered view of what the poet should attempt and what avoid; and that he followed it would remain certain although much evidence were accumulated to prove that he who denounced 'poetry's eternal enemy, Caprice,' could himself be, on occasion, capricious. He leaves the impression that he wrote with difficulty; his raptures, though he knew rapture, are infrequent. But through all his work there runs a strain of serious elevated thought, and on it all there rests an air of composure equally serious and elevated—a trifle statuesque, perhaps, but by no means deficient in feeling. No one can read, say, the closing lines of Mycerinus and fail to perceive these qualities. No one can read any considerable portion of his work and deny that they are characteristic. Nor, we think, can any one study the poetry of 1850 and thereabouts without being forced to admit that it needed these qualities of thoughtfulness and composure which Arnold brought to it. He has been criticised for discovering in Tennyson a certain ‘deficiency in intellectual power.' But is he by this time alone in that discovery? And if no lack of thoughtfulness can be charged against Browning as it cannot-is not Browning violent, unchastened, far too often energetic for energy's sake? Be it granted that Arnold in poetical strength was no match for these champions: yet he brought to literature, and in a happy hour, that which they lacked, insisting by the example of his verse, as well as by the precepts of his criticism, that before anything becomes literature it must observe two conditions -it must be worth saying, and it must be worthily written.

Also he continued, if with a difference, that noble Wordsworthian tradition which stood in some danger of perishing-chiefly, we think, beneath the accumulation of rubbish piled upon it by its own author during his later years. That which Matthew Arnold disinterred and repolished may have been but a fragment. His page has not, says Mr Watson, 'the deep, authentic mountain-thrill.' We grant that Arnold's feeling for Nature has not the Wordsworthian depth: but so far as it penetrates it is genuine. Lines such as

While the deep-burnish'd foliage overhead

Splintered the silver arrows of the moon...

may owe their felicity to phrase rather than to feeling. The Mediterranean landscape in A Southern Night may seem almost too exquisitely elaborated. Yet who can think of Arnold's poetry as a whole without feeling that Nature is always behind it as a living background?-whether it be the storm of wind and rain shaking Tintagel

I forgot, thou comest from thy voyage

Yes, the spray is on thy cloak and hair...

or the scent-laden water-meadows along Thames, or the pine forests on the flank of Etna, or an English garden in June, or Oxus, its mists and fens and 'the hush'd Chorasmian waste.' If Arnold's love of natural beauty have not those moments of piercing apprehension which in his master's poetry seem to break through dullness into the very heaven: if he have not that secret which Wordsworth must have learnt upon the Cumbrian mountains, from moments when the clouds drift apart and the surprised climber sees all Windermere, all Derwentwater, shining at his feet; if on the other hand his philosophy of life, rounded and complete, seem none too hopeful, but call man back from

eager speculations which man will never resign: if it repress, where Browning encouraged, our quest after

Thoughts hardly to be pack'd

Within the narrow act,

Fancies that broke through language and escaped... yet his sense of atmosphere, of background, of the great stage on which man plays his part, gives Arnold's teaching a wonderful comprehension, within its range. "This,' we say, 'is poetry we can trust, not to flatter us, but to sustain, console.' If the reader mistake it for the last word on life his trust in it will be illusory. It brings rather that

lull in the hot race

Wherein he doth for ever chase

That flying and elusive shadow, rest.

An air of coolness plays upon his face,

And an unwonted calm pervades his breast;

And then...

(if after protesting against italics in poetry we may italicise where, for once, Arnold missed the opportunity)

he thinks he knows

The hills where his life rose,

And the sea where it goes.

SWINBURNE

I

How were the roses so fresh and so fair!

I do not suppose that anybody now alive (I speak of lovers of poetry) who was not alive in 1832 and old enough then to enjoy the first perfect work of Tennyson, has had such a sensation as that which was experienced in the autumn of 1866 by readers of Mr Swinburne's Poems and Ballads. And I am sure that no one in England has had any such sensation since.

"HUS wrote Mr George Saintsbury, some twenty

Two years ago, in a volume called Corrected Impres

sions: and it is certain that no one survives today to compare the emotional experiences of 1832 and 1866, to report to us. Indeed of the men who in 1866 were old enough to wage war over Poems and Ballads the greater number pre-deceased its author, and by this time a very few remain. Mr Saintsbury, who happily survives (but will not be called 'Doctor'), was an undergraduate in 1866. He tells us:

The autumn must have been advanced before [the book] did come out, for I remember that I could not obtain a copy before I went up to Oxford in October, and had to avail myself of an expedition to town to 'eat dinners' in order to get one. Three copies of the precious volume, with 'Moxon' on cover and John Camden Hotten' on title-page, accompanied me back that night, together with divers maroons for the purpose of enlivening matters on the ensuing Fifth of November. The