Come, dear children, come away down; Call no more! One last look at the white-wall'd town, And the little grey church on the windy shore ; She will not come though you call all day; Instances might be multiplied, but probably enough has been said to explain what is meant. Whether or not Arnold lost anything by this restraint I am not concerned to argue here: the point is that he possessed the quality, and that by reason of it he struck perhaps fewer false notes than any of his contemporaries. He has occasionally weak lines and unpleasing expressions, but they are of the nature rather of failures in execution than of defect in taste. For example, it is to be regretted that the beautiful Westminster Abbey is disfigured by the ugly word "cecity," introduced for the sake of the rhyme (and that a bad one); but no one supposes that Arnold's taste was at fault here it is rather his command of language that on rare occasions fails. This restraint is the principal element in his style, and all the other elements are related to it; his lucidity, for he would not write until he could express his thought as clearly as, from its nature, it was possible to express it; his sureness of diction, for his habit was to pause to find not merely a good word, but the best. "Haste, half-work, and disarray" in literature he loathed. The lesson his example taught was or might have been invaluable. The fact that it is still so much needed is one reason why Arnold has never been appreciated as he deserves to be. In the case of Arnold it is right and necessary to think first of all of style. The lesson of a severe and chastened but most expressive style was the one with which we could least dispense. But it was far from being the only one he had to give. On the contrary, in the substance of his thought his was pre-eminently the voice of his age. This assertion may seem paradoxical in view of the facts that he never was popular, and that in many passages he speaks of his own isolation and of his opposition to the opinions of the world. But at the same time it was the problems of his own generation, as they presented themselves to it, that interested him. If his treatment of them, or his solution, so far as he offered a solution, had been a common one, he must have been a common man. His greatness is indicated by the fact that his treatment was distinctive and personal. Arnold's thoughts and Arnold's way of viewing things are to be found nowhere but in Arnold. In Browning the one absorbing interest is character, especially in its moral aspects; and with regard to character the note of time is of subordinate importance. In Tennyson the same liberation seems to be brought about by the predominance of the artist's sense of beauty; for in that too the note of time, though not absent, sinks to an undertone. But in Arnold reflection is always wedded to artistic expression. There are poems, of the highest excellence too, of which it is difficult if not impossible to say what the thought means. Coleridge's Christabel and Ancient Mariner are examples; and perhaps Browning's Childe Roland may be another; at least the attempts at an allegorical explanation are not convincing. But this is never the case with Arnold. It is always possible to detect his thought. His characteristic mode of utterance is that which we find in the elegiac poems; and in them, and in the sonnets and lyrics only less clearly, we see that he is always occupied with the doubts and difficulties and ambitions special to his own time, and its seeming triumphs which often prove to be failures. His dominant thought is the war of contending powers in modern life. He gives utterance to the thought repeatedly, he sees the war raging everywhere. Rachel is to him typical :— Sprung from the blood of Israel's scatter'd race, To forms from antique Greece and Rome uptorn, Then, soothing with thy Christian strain forlorn, While by her bedside Hebrew rites have place Ah, not the radiant spirit of Greece alone She had one power, which made her breast its home! In her, like us, there clash'd, contending powers, Germany, France, Christ, Moses, Athens, Rome. No one else has expressed this sense of conflict, of the unexampled complexity of modern life, as finely as he. The fact or view upon which Arnold works is always seen with the eye of an intellect exceedingly clear and penetrating; but it is also seen as suffused with the "moist light" of a poetic and sensitive soul. In prose Arnold tried, as he was bound to do, to keep the light dry; in poetry he well knew that emotion was essential. Not only has his thought reference always to the present time, but it is also emphatically his own. The voice which he added to poetry was his natural voice undisguised. It is possible to get at the real Browning beneath the dramatic disguise, and at the real Tennyson beneath the semi-impersonality of the artist who is first of all an observer; but in Arnold the man himself is on the surface of his work, there is no disguise to penetrate. His self-revelation is indeed very different from that of Byron; it is quite free from the defiant and boastful and occasionally vulgar tone of the latter; and it is also free from personal detail about the facts of life. Arnold confines himself to the thoughts which life suggests. Yet in this way his selfrevelation is complete. He did not succeed in portraying other characters, but he left his own clearly stamped upon his verse. He is specially valuable because his poems are his thoughts about his time. Perhaps the time of Arnold's birth helped to make him the special exponent of the thought of the middle of the century. The early attraction of Tennyson to Byron showed that he at any rate had come under the sway of earlier forces as Arnold never did. It is true, Arnold all through life admired Byron; but he was never led away to imitate him. Browning from the first showed by his vast schemes, as revealed in Pauline and Paracelsus, and by his absorption in the study of character, that he must overleap the limits of the age. Arnold stood in years just far enough away from the forces which had their birth in the Revolution, and which he saw working themselves out, to be an observer interested in but not dominated by them. It was his fortune to belong to that English University which had the greatest share in shaping the thoughts of the generation then rising, and to be connected by blood and friendship with men who played a great part in so shaping them. And he brought with him just the disposition necessary to observe and to note the working of those forces and thoughts. Critic always, Arnold is never more a critic than in his verse. I do not refer merely to verses such as the Epilogue to Lessing's Laocoön, in which he gives utterance to literary criticism without losing the accent of exquisite poetry. There are more such pieces in Arnold than perhaps in any other poet; and he has more skilfully than any other combined the critical with the poetic spirit. But that spirit is far more widely spread through his poetry; it is indeed everywhere. Not without reason did he define poetry as "the criticism of life". This, with the added proviso that it was particularly life in his own century that he criticised, was specially Arnold's work. Not unnaturally too he held that the thing which Europe in his day most desired was criticism. There was great truth in the view; and if there was also some exaggeration it was the natural exaggeration of the man who unconsciously exalts that which he has to give. CHAPTER VII. TENNYSON AND BROWNING: THE CLOSING PERIOD. We have traced Browning and Tennyson, in the one case to the publication of The Ring and the Book, in the other to the verge of the period of the dramas. The most interesting phase of Tennyson's further development is associated with the dramas and will be dealt with subsequently; his other poems may be treated with comparative brevity. At the same time, it is important to notice carefully their principal characteristics, because on the whole less justice has been done to the work of this period than to Tennyson's earlier poetry. Individual poems, like Rizpah, have been highly and deservedly praised; but the general excellence, and in particular the strength and thoughtfulness, of the miscellaneous poetry of the last twenty years of Tennyson's life has not been duly recognised. He was fortunate far beyond either of his great contemporaries in the general appreciation of his genius in early and middle life; and his fame secured him against anything approaching neglect in his old age. But it did not secure him against a false placing of his later in relation to his earlier work. The trend of change which we have already detected in Tennyson continues down through his latest period. The object of his pursuit is still reality, not realism, and strength. In this development, which in the middle period brought gain almost unmixed, there is in later years a mingling of gain and loss. There is gain in the matter expressed by the verse, there is loss in the flow and melody and grace of style and versification. There is gain; for we find no longer that sinking to the verge of sentimentalism which is occasionally the fault of the earlier poetry. There is loss, as any one will feel who compares Sir John Oldcastle with the blank-verse of the Idylls. The style is broken and rough, almost harsh. But it should be noticed that |