leaf "Leave things so prostitute, MR. MATTHEW ARNOLD, in the preface to the first edition of his collected poems (1853) withdrew from circulation, and gave reasons for withdrawing, his splendid Empedocles on Etna. Nothing in Mr. Arnold's career did him more honor than that fine scrupulousness leading him to decry his dramatic masterpiece as too mournful, too introspective, too unfruitful of the cheer and courage which it is the business of poets to give to the world. He says of it, that it belongs to a class of faulty representations "in which suffering finds no vent in action; in which a continuous state of mental distress is prolonged, unrelieved The play which leaves us miserable and bewildered, the harrowing social lesson leading nowhere, the transcript from commonplace life in which nothing is admirable but the faithful skill of the author,—these are bad morals because they are bad art. With them ranks the invertebrate poetry of two and three generations ago, which has bequeathed its sickly taint to its successor in popular favor, our modern minor fiction. Au "What had I on earth to do His many and unique merits have small share in the result. Now, wilful sadness, as Plato thinks, as the Schoolmen heartily thought after him, is nothing less than an actual crime. Sadness which is impersonal, reluctantly uttered, and adjusted, in the utterance, to the eternal laws, is not so. It is well to conceal the merely painful, as did the Greek audiences and the masters of their drama. That critic would be crazy, or excessively sybaritic, who would bar out the tragic from the stage, the studio, the orchestra, or the library shelf. Melancholy, indeed, is inseparable from the highest art. We cannot wish it away; but we can demand a mastery over it in the least, as well as in the greatest: a melancholy like that of Burns, truth itself, native dignity itself; or the Virgilian melancholy of Tennyson in his sweet broodings over the abysses of our unblest life, and the turn of his not hopeless thought and phrase. We can demand, in these matters, the insincerity of the too-little, rather than the cant of the too-much. The danger of expressing despondency is extreme. The maudlin shoots like a parasite from the most moving themes, and laughter dogs us in our rapt mood. It "Poore Petrarch's long-deceasÈd woes," stirred up the scepticism of one Leigh Hunt, and of the indelicate public after him. No poet can put fully into words the ache and stress of human passion: no very wise poet will ever try to do so, save by the means of reserves, elisions, evasions. The pathos which goes deep is generally a plain statement, not a reflection. The old ballad, Waly, Waly, for instance, is a terrible thing to get away from, dry-eyed. Nothing is so poignant, at times, in poetry, as a mere obituary announcement. Hear the long throbbing lines of the old elegy supposed to be by Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke: "Learning her light hath lost, Valor hath slain her knight: Or Chapman: "For now no more of Œneus' race survived: they all were gone. The heartbreaking climax of Lear, the bursting-point of so much grandeur and so much suffering, is a dying commonplace almost grotesque: "Pray you, undo this button." But to harrow us is another affair altogether. Plato could never forgive a subject not inevitable, chosen simply because it is in itself piteous or startling, and invites the rhetorical gabble which its creator, after one fashion or another, can spend upon it. The French and their followers have driven us into a demand for decency, and unmuzzled pessimism is no more decent than the things oftener named and contested by our worthiest critics. What use have we for any Muse, be she the most accomplished in the world, who lives but to be, in a charming phrase of Southey's, "soothed with delicious sorrow"? Art has little to do with her: for art is made of seemly abstinences. The moment it speaks out fully, lets us know all, ceases to represent a choice and a control of its own material, ceases to be, in short, an authority and a mystery, and prefers to set up for a mere Chinese copy of life,—just so soon its birthright is transferred. We owe our gratitude to the men of letters who deliberately undertake to be gay: for nobody expects unconscious and spontaneous gayety in books nowadays. The modern spirit has seen to that. No thanks of ours are too good even for the bold bad Mr. Henley, who is so acrid towards Americans: for he is the one living poet already famous, who has struck, and means to strike, the very note of "How happy is he born and taught," and "Shall I, wasting in despair." But if our dilettantes lament a withered wildflower, or praise a young face, they feel that they have done enough towards clearing the air, and justifying "the ways of God to man." It is inconvenient to have the large old fundamental feelings: to be energetic, or scornful, or believing. The ——"contented if he might enjoy Yet Wordsworth counts for little in this case, since he had no marked constitutional sensitiveness. The lyres of "Parnaso mount" have grown passive and unpartisan. They have ceased to rouse us, and we have ceased to wonder at them because of it. To sigh, to scowl, to whimper, is the ambition of minstrels in the magazines; of the three, whimpering is the favorite. Now, to "make a scene" is not mannerly, even on paper. Before the implacable Fates we may as well be collected. It seems less than edifying to ask the cold one, though in enchanting ——"hear it sweep Change is at hand. The Maypole is up in Bookland. 1892. |