Culture & Anarchy. Arnold Matthew

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СКАЧАТЬ and Powers,

       Impulse and Reason, Freedom and Control.

      Then he must learn that

      To its own impulse every action stirs.

      He must live by his own light, and let earth live by hers. The forces of nature are to be in this respect his teachers—

      But with joy the stars perform their shining,

       And the sea its long moon-silvered roll;

       For self-poised they live, nor pine with noting

       All the fever of some differing soul.

      But, though he is to learn from Nature and love Nature and enjoy Nature, he is to remember that she

      never was the friend of one, Nor promised love she could not give;

      and so he is not to expect too much from her, or demand impossible boons. Still less is he to be content with feeling himself "in harmony" with her; for

      Man covets all which Nature has, but more.

      That "more" is Conscience and the Moral Sense.

      Man must begin, know this, where Nature ends;

       Nature and man can never be fast friends.

      And this brings us to the idea of Duty as set forth in his poems, and Duty resolves itself into three main elements: Truth—Work—Love. Truth comes first. Man's prime duty is to know things as they are. Truth can only be attained by light, and light he must cultivate, he must worship. Arnold's highest praise for a lost friend is that he was "a child of light"; that he had "truth without alloy,"

      And joy in light, and power to spread the joy.

      The saddest part of that friend's death is the fear that it may bring,

      After light's term, a term of cecity:

      the best hope for the future, that light will return and banish the follies, sophistries, delusions, which have accumulated in the darkness. "Lucidity of soul" may be—nay, must be, "sad"; but it is not less imperative. And the truth which light reveals must not only be sought earnestly and cherished carefully, but even, when the cause demands it, championed strenuously. The voices of conflict, the joy of battle, the "garments rolled in blood," the "burning and fuel of fire" have little place in Arnold's poetry. But once at any rate he bursts into a strain so passionate, so combatant, that it is difficult for a disciple to recognize his voice; and then the motive is a summons to a last charge for Truth and Light—

      They out-talk'd thee, hiss'd thee, tore thee?

       Better men fared thus before thee;

       Fired their ringing shot and pass'd,

       Hotly charged—and sank at last.

      Charge once more, then, and be dumb!

       Let the victors, when they come,

       When the forts of folly fall,

       Find thy body by the wall!

      But the note of battle, even for what he holds dearest and most sacred, is not a familiar note in his poetry. He had no natural love of

      the throng'd field where winning comes by strife.

      His criticism of life sets a higher value on work than on fighting. "Toil unsevered from tranquillity," "Labour, accomplish'd in repose"—is his ideal of happiness and duty.

      Even the Duke of Wellington—surely an unpromising subject for poetic eulogy—is praised because he was a worker,

      Laborious, persevering, serious, firm.

      Nature, again, is called in to teach us the secret of successful labour. Her forces are incessantly at work, and in that work they are entirely concentrated—

      Bounded by themselves, and unregardful

       In what state God's other works may be,

       In their own tasks all their powers pouring,

       These attain the mighty life you see.

      But those who had the happiness of knowing Arnold in the flesh will feel that they never so clearly recognize his natural voice as when, by his criticism of life, he is inculcating the great law of Love. Even in the swirl of Revolution he clings to his fixed idea of love as duty. After discussing the rise and fall of dynasties, the crimes of diplomacy, the characteristic defects of rival nations, and all the stirring topics of the time, he abruptly concludes his criticism with an appeal to Love. "Be kind to the neighbours—'this is all we can.'"

      And as in his prose, so in his poetry. Love, even in arrest of formal justice, is the motive of The Sick King in Bokhara; love, that wipes out sin, of Saint Brandan—

      That germ of kindness, in the womb

       Of mercy caught, did not expire;

       Outlives my guilt, outlives my doom,

       And friends me in the pit of fire.

      The Neckan and The Forsaken Merman tell the tale of contemptuous unkindness and its enduring poison. A Picture at Newstead depicts the inexpiable evils wrought by violent wrong. Poor Matthias tells in a parable the cruelty, not less real because unconscious, of imperfect sympathy—

      Human longings, human fears,

       Miss our eyes and miss our ears.

       Little helping, wounding much,

       Dull of heart, and hard of touch,

       Brother man's despairing sign

       Who may trust us to divine?

      In Geist's Grave, the "loving heart," the "patient soul" of the dog-friend are made to "read their homily to man"; and the theme of the homily is still the same: the preciousness of the love which outlives the grave. But nowhere perhaps is his doctrine about the true divinity of love so exquisitely expressed as in The Good Shepherd with the Kid—

      He saves the sheep, the goats He doth not save. So rang Tertullian's sentence . . . . . . . . But she sigh'd, The infant Church! Of love she felt the tide Stream on her from her Lord's yet recent grave. And then she smiled; and in the Catacombs, With eye suffused but heart inspirèd true, On those walls subterranean, where she hid Her head 'mid ignominy, death, and tombs, She the Good Shepherd's hasty image drew— And on His shoulders not a lamb, a kid.

      So much, then, for his Criticism of Life, as applied in and through his poems. It is not easy to estimate, even approximately, the effect produced by a loved and gifted poet, who for thirty years taught an audience, fit though few, that the main concerns of human life were Truth, Work, and Love. Those "two noblest of things, Sweetness and Light" (though heaven only knows what they meant to Swift), meant to him Love and Truth; and to these he added the third great ideal, Work—patient, persistent, undaunted effort for what a man genuinely believes to be high and beneficent ends. Such a "Criticism of Life," we must all admit, is not unworthy of one who seeks to teach his СКАЧАТЬ