Pope, called upon at the very close of life to pronounce sentence of death, is striking; and our rather weak-nerved age is indebted to him for his firmness. The closing passage is magnificent: he may die this very night, and he dares not die if he lets Guido live. The death of the criminal is due from the Pope to society. It is due to the criminal himself; for in this swift doom lies his one chance of repentance and salvation. On this question he never hesitates. Having examined the documents with all diligence and care he is convinced of the guilt of Guido, and he never shrinks from the responsibility of his position. He is human and may err, but the fact that he did his human best is defence sufficient. This wholesome saneness of mind and resolute acceptance of responsibility are among the most prominent features of the character. The long ruminations of the Pope are not, therefore, designed to clear away doubts which do not exist. There is in them perhaps some of the discursiveness of old age; but they are never irrelevant. God's vicar upon earth, called upon, by what may prove his last act in life, to pronounce doom upon five fellow-creatures, may well pause and reflect. Browning is not telling a story, and the pause disappoints no expectation of the reader. The Pope is the embodiment of wisdom and experience summing up the meaning of the story already told, and the worth of the characters which have already revealed themselves. Thus, among other peculiarities of the plan, we get from it not only the poet's concrete conception of each character, but also his own criticism of it,-for so doubtless the Pope's must be interpreted. But the Pope's great position leads him farther. To him, whose "loaded branch" lifts "all the world's cark and care," this spectacle of human passion, of greed, hatred, love, submission, heroism, revenge, opens out the whole question of the state of the world, its present, its past, and its future; and it is his reflections upon this question that make The Pope perhaps the greatest poem Browning ever wrote. They will receive consideration elsewhere: at present it must suffice to point out that here Browning came nearer than he ever did elsewhere to the fulfilment of the magnificent promise of Paracelsus.

CHAPTER VI.

MATTHEW ARNOLD.

It was in the year 1849 that the name of Matthew Arnold was added to the list of poets. He had previously written prize poems both at Rugby and at Oxford; but verse of this description rarely counts in the work of a great man's life, and we may therefore regard The Strayed Reveller, and other Poems, as his earliest contribution to literature. From the first his work was so delicately finished and so thoughtful that it established his right to be ranked among the great poets of his time: "established" that right, not by winning general recognition, but by virtue of those inherent qualities which we must believe will at last enforce such recognition. For recognised in any due degree Arnold is not yet. Indeed, now that death, which failed to do so in Arnold's case, has given the shock necessary to raise Browning above the danger of further neglect and depreciation, it is hardly too much to say that of all great Englishmen Arnold is the one who is farthest from the place he ought to hold in the hearts of his countrymen.

Experience proves that we must stand at the distance of several generations before we can finally and with absolute justice appraise the value of poetry. A moderate space of time is, it is true, generally sufficient to reveal the true dimensions of littleness once reputed great; but it is only from afar that we can take the angles by which to measure the mountain-peaks of thought. Some of the "kings of thought," like Carlyle and Browning, speak in the voice of the tempest and the earthquake. It is such men who are sure to be saluted at first with the loudest bray; but it is not they who are likely to be longest neglected or inadequately appreciated. They demand attention and at last receive it. The world is compelled to listen; and, unlike the Hebrew prophet of old, it discovers that the voice of God speaks in the storm and the convulsion. But what of the " still small voice"? It makes no clamorous assault upon the ear, it may go on indefinitely, whispering vainly to

senses too dull by nature to hear, or so deafened by the rattle and roar of the world that they cannot hear. And yet surely there is truth as well as beauty in that old conception which finds the divine rather in gentleness than in violence.

It has proved to be so in the sphere of poetry. The polished and refined and reticent literary artists of the world, its Virgils and its Miltons, wear well; their smoothness has nothing of the nature of weakness. To this class Matthew Arnold belongs; and it is well worth while to make an effort to understand him more fully than he has yet been understood by England as a whole, because, rich as are the long rolls of English poetry in rugged strength and grandeur, they are comparatively poor in that classical purity and finish of which Arnold is our best example of recent times. He was partly the cause of his own eclipse. His excellent prose has to some extent overshadowed his still more excellent poetry. And more than that, he illustrates within his own works the way in which the loud voice drowns the lower and sweeter tones. The author of Literature and Dogma and of God and the Bible arrested the attention of men because he addressed himself openly and avowedly to current controversy; the voice of Obermann once More was heard by comparatively few. And yet the latter deals with essentially the same problems as the former, deals with them more profoundly and more wisely, and is free from the defect of a merely passing and temporary interest which is inherent in all controversy, and from which even the charm of Arnold's style will not permanently save his polemical writings.

And Arnold is valuable not only for what he is in himself, but for what he adds to the other two poets. He is probably the most faultless artist of the three. Browning sometimes provokes his readers to pronounce him not an artist at all, though again he redeems himself so magnificently that it becomes almost a pain to hint censure. Tennyson had very high artistic qualities, but in a tendency to excessive ornamentation, in the redundancy of In Memoriam, in the loose structure of the Idylls of the King, and in an occasional note that sounds like affectation in his metaphors and turns of expression, he showed that there were limits to those qualities. Thus, there is affectation in the metaphor, "closing eaves of wearied eyes (In Memoriam, lxvii.), and in the intolerable translation of metropolis into "mother town" (ibid. xcviii.). One of the

most frequently quoted passages in the Idylls of the King shows in its excessive antithesis a similar failure of taste:

His honour rooted in dishonour stood,

And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true.

Arnold, narrower in his compass, within that compass makes fewer mistakes than either. Further, he is in some respects more than either of the others the voice of his own generation. That he is so may be due in part to his limitations; but be the reason what it may, the fact remains that if we wish to discover what men in the nineteenth century have thought on many important subjects, we shall do so more easily if not more surely in Arnold than in any of his contemporaries; and we shall find the way in which he gives expression to contemporary interests more lucid if not more profound.

Arnold was twenty-seven years of age when The Strayed Reveller was published. He was thus considerably older than Browning and Tennyson were when they first appeared as poets; for a difference of six years, though trifling in later life, is great between twenty and thirty. This is one reason why the chronological method is much less fruitful in the case of Arnold than it is when applied to Browning and Tennyson. At the date of his first publication he was far more mature than Tennyson, and he had far less to learn by way of experiment than Browning. Another reason for the same fact is that Arnold's whole period of poetic activity was short in comparison with the long careers of his two seniors. It began, as has been said, in 1849, and it practically ended in 1867; for the few poems published after that date cannot appreciably affect the judgment upon him.

The Strayed Reveller was withdrawn after only a few copies had been sold. So was the next work, Empedocles on Etna, and other Poems, published in 1852. Arnold's frequent changes of mind-or what must be interpreted as such-may be taken as indicating his extreme critical care, a care in his own case amounting almost to fastidiousness. It must be confessed that it is difficult to follow him; for poems are printed, omitted and reprinted in the most bewildering way. The puzzle is all the greater because in the end nearly everything reappears in the collected editions. Only eight published pieces, including the two prize poems, are omitted from the popular edition of 1890.1

1 For the bibliographical facts I am indebted to Smart's Bibliography of Matthew Arnold.

The Strayed Reveller, and other Poems proves by its contents. how wonderfully complete already was Arnold's mental and moral equipment. He never changed as Tennyson did, he never even developed in the lesser degree that Browning developed. Even if we limit the view to equal spaces of time in their work, the conclusion is still similar. There is greater difference between the Tennyson of 1833 and the Tennyson of 1842 than there is through the whole literary career of Arnold. So too the Browning of Bells and Pomegranates changed more before he published Dramatis Persona than Arnold ever did. The principal contents of this early volume, besides the piece which gave it its name, were Mycerinus, The Sick King in Bokhara, To a Gipsy Child, The Forsaken Merman, In Utrumque Paratus, Resignation, and the beautiful sonnets on Shakespeare and To a Friend. There is here the circle of Arnold's interests and of his thought nearly complete. It is true there is no specimen of what afterwards he did best of all, the elegiac, but there is plenty of the elegiac spirit. It is true also that he added much afterwards which we could ill spare; but these additions are less of the nature of fresh themes than of fresh illustrations of the themes already present in his first volume. Arnold however repeats, not with the monotony of mental sterility, but with the endless variety of commanding genius; and it is of the nature of the great thoughts in the region of which he moves that they will bear illustration indefinitely.

It is evident on the most cursory examination that Arnold has neither the magnificent optimism of Browning, nor the artistic aloofness which at first marked Tennyson. All the pieces mentioned are weighted with thought, but none of them has that firm trust in ultimate success which sustains Browning, and convinces him that the worst "apparent failure" can be no more than apparent. On the contrary, there is in them, one and all, the consciousness of a thwarting destiny. Even the sonnet on Shakespeare, alive as it is with the sense of the supreme triumph of the human intellect, has its glow darkened by reference to the "foil'd searching of mortality," and to the "weakness which impairs," and "griefs which bow". Far more deeply do the other pieces mentioned bear the traces of a spirit ill at ease, and with but little hope of finding in life the alleviation of his troubles. The poem entitled Resignation is peculiarly instructive. It differs from the others named as being, in greater