Part 8 (1/2)

Or that description of the later season:

”Too quick despairer! Wherefore wilt thou go?

Soon will the high Midsummer pomps come on, Soon shall we have gold-dusted Snapdragon, Sweet-William with his homely cottage-smell, And Stocks, in fragrant blow.

Roses that down the alleys s.h.i.+ne afar, And open Jasmin-m.u.f.fled lattices, And groups under the dreaming garden-trees, And the pale Moon and the white Evening-Star.”

True to the ”only philosophy,” Matthew Arnold is content to indicate how for each one of us the real drama of life goes on with a certain quite natural, quite homely, quite quiet background of the strip of earth where we first loved and dreamed, and were happy, and were sad, and knew loss and regret, and the limits of man's power to change his fate.

There is a large and n.o.ble calm about the poetry of this writer which has the effect upon one of the falling of cool water into a dark, fern-fringed cave. He strips away lightly, delicately, gently, all the trappings of our feverish worldliness, our vanity and ambition, and lifts open, at one touch, the great moon-bathed windows that look out upon the line of white foam--and the patient sands.

And never is this calm deeper than when he refers to Death. ”For there” he says, speaking of that Cemetery at Firenze where his Thyrsis lies;

”For there thine earth-forgetting eyelids keep The morningless and unawakening sleep, Under the flowery Oleanders pale--”

Sometimes, as in his ”Tristram and Iseult,” he is permitted little touches of a startling and penetrating beauty; such as, returning to one's memory and lips, in very dusty and arid places, bring all the tears of half-forgotten romance back again to us and restore to us the despair that is dearer than hope!

Those lines, for instance, when Tristram, dying in his fire-lit, tapestried room, tended by the pale Iseult of Brittany, knows that his death-longing is fulfilled, and that she, his ”other” Iseult, has come to him at last--have they not the very echo in them of what such weariness feels when, only not too late, the impossible happens?

Little he cares for the rain beating on the roof, or the moan of the wind in the chimney, or the shadows on that tapestried wall! He listens--his heart almost stops.

”What voices are those in the still night air?

What lights in the court? What steps on the stair?”

One wonders if the reader, too, knows and loves, that strange fragmentary unrhymed poem, called ”the Strayed Reveller,” with its vision of Circe and the sleeping boy-faun, and the wave-tossed Wanderer, and its background of ”fitful earth-murmurs” and ”dreaming woods”--Strangely down, upon the weary child, smiles the great enchantress, seeing the wine stains on his white skin, and the berries in his hair. The thing is slight enough; but in its coolness, and calmness, and sad delicate beauty, it makes one pause and grow silent, as in the long hushed galleries of the Vatican one pauses and grows silent before some little known, scarcely-catalogued Greek Vase. The spirit of life and youth is there--immortal and tender--yet there too is the shadow of that pitiful ”in vain,” with which the brevity of such beauty, arrested only in chilly marble, mocks us as we pa.s.s!

It is life--but life at a distance--Life refined, winnowed, sifted, purged. ”Yet, O Prince, what labour! O Prince, what pain!” The world is perhaps tired of hearing from the mouths of its great lonely exiles the warning to youth ”to sink unto its own soul,” and let the mad throngs clamour by, with their beckoning idols, and treacherous pleading. But never has this unregarded hand been laid so gently upon us as in the poem called ”Self-Dependence.”

Heaven forgive us--we cannot follow its high teaching--and yet we too, we all, have felt that sort of thing, when standing at the prow of a great s.h.i.+p we have watched the reflection of the stars in the fast-divided water.

”Unaffrightened by the silence round them Undistracted by the sights they see These demand not that the world about them Yield them love, amus.e.m.e.nt, sympathy.

But with joy the stars perform their s.h.i.+ning And the sea its long, moon-silvered roll; For self-poised they live; nor pine with noting All the fever of some differing soul.”

The ”one philosophy” is, as Matthew Arnold himself puts it, ”utrumque paratus,” prepared for either event. Yet it leans, and how should it not lean, in a world like this, to the sadder and the more final. That vision of a G.o.dless universe, ”rocking its obscure body to and fro,” in ghastly s.p.a.ce, is a vision that refuses to pa.s.s away. ”To the children of chance,” as my Catholic philosopher says, ”chance would seem intelligible.”

But even if it be--if the whole confluent ocean of its experiences be--unintelligible and without meaning; it remains that mortal men must endure it, and comfort themselves with their ”little pleasures.”

The immoral cruelty of Fate has been well expressed by Matthew Arnold in that poem called ”Mycerinus,” where the virtuous king _does not_ receive his reward. He, for his part will revel and care not. There may be n.o.bler, there may be happier, ways of awaiting the end--but whether ”revelling” or ”refraining,” we are all waiting the end. Waiting and listening, half-bitterly, half-eagerly, seems the lot of man upon earth! And meanwhile that

--”Power, too great and strong Even for the G.o.ds to conquer or beguile, Sweeps earth and heaven and men and G.o.ds along Like the broad volume of the insurgent Nile And the great powers we serve, themselves must be Slaves of a tyrannous Necessity--”

Matthew Arnold had--and it is a rare gift--in spite of his peaceful domestic life and in spite of that ”interlude” of the ”Marguerite”

poems--a n.o.ble and a chaste soul. ”Give me a clean heart, O G.o.d, and renew a right spirit within me!” prayed the Psalmist. Well! this friend of Thyrsis had ”a clean heart” and ”a right spirit”; and these things, in this turbulent age, have their appeal! It was the purging of this ”hyssop” that made it possible for him even in the ”Marguerite”

poems, to write as only those can write whose pa.s.sion is more than the craving of the flesh.

”Come to me in my dreams and then In sleep I shall be well again-- For then the night will more than pay The hopeless longing of the day!”

It was the same chast.i.ty of the senses that made it possible for him to write those verses upon a young girl's death, which are so much more beautiful--though _those_ are lovely too--than the ones Oscar Wilde wrote on the same subject.

”Strew on her, roses, roses, But never a spray of yew; For in silence she reposes-- Ah! would that I did too!

Her cabined ample spirit It fluttered and failed for breath.

Tonight it doth inherit The vasty halls of death.”