son stands almost alone in literature as a poet, and nothing but a poet, throughout his long life. All his scholarship, all his knowledge, all the speculative power of his wonderful mind, went into poetry, and into poetry alone. Browning, though he had no profession, was as constantly in the world as Tennyson was constantly out of it. He lived two lives, the imaginative and the actual, with equal zest. Matthew Arnold was as sociable as Browning, and as genuine a poet. But he had to work for his living, and either the Education Department or the critical faculty almost dried up the poetic vein. It was not that the quality of his verse deteriorated, as the quality of Browning's did, and as the quality of Tennyson's did not. What little poetry he wrote at the end of his life was good, and in the case of "Westminster Abbey," very good. But he ceased as a poet to be productive. The energies of his mind were drawn into politics, into theology, into literary criticism. There was much in him of his father's missionary zeal. He longed to make the world better, though by other means and in other directions than Dr. Arnold's. His spiritual father was Wordsworth, from whose grave his own poetry may be said to have sprung. Wordsworth lived to be much older than Mr. Arnold, and, though his prose is exquisite, there is not much of it. In him, too, great poet as he was, the imagination dwindled and decayed. After middle age he produced little that lives. Tennyson remained to the end as magical, as imaginative, as musical, as he had ever been. We cannot estimate Matthew Arnold's greatness if we separate his poetry from his criticism. His theological and political writings prove his versatility without adding much to his permanent reputation. It is as the poet and critic, the man who practised what he preached, that he survives. He was an incarnate contradiction of the false epigram that the critics are those who have failed in literature and art. The great fault of his prose, especially of his later prose, is repetition. He had, like Mr. Brooke in Middlemarch, a marked tendency to say what he had said before. His defect as a poet was the imperfection of his ear for rhythm. But, as Johnson said of Goldsmith, "enough of his failings; he was a very great man." Such poetry as Mycerinus, such prose as the Preface of the Essays in Criticism, are enough to make a man a classic, and to preserve his memory from decay. N "Absence," 38. A Act of Uniformity, 123. INDEX "Airy, Fairy Lilian" (Tenny- son's), 74. "Alaric at Rome," quotation from, 10-11, 13. Alaric at Rome, and Other Poems, Alexandrines, French, 53, 83, 165. 142. Anderson, Professor, 52. Aristotle, 52, 53, 122, 165. marriage, 31; Empedocles on - His literary rank, 1-5; his Arnold, Poems by Matthew Arnold, Edward, 156. 149. Bowood, Wiltshire, 18. Bright, Mr. John, 56, 93, 117, 149. Burials Bill, 146, 147. Burke, 3, 71, 76-78, 80, 151, 152, 162. Burns, 47, 50, 85, 166. Butler, Bishop, 123, 124, 134, 141– Byron, Lord, 10, 11, 19, 32, 33, 73, C Cairns, Lord, 148. "Calais Sands," 101. Cambridge, University of, 134. Campbell, Mr. Dykes, 73. Carteret, Lord, 61. Catholic Emancipation, 9, 152. Biblical Criticism, 3, 68, 88, 131, Catholics, 106, 120, 122, 149, 150. Bernhardt, Sarah, 164. Catullus, 166. Celtic literature, 96-98. Cavour, 57. Centaure (Maurice de Guérin), Chamberlain, Mr., 116. Chapman, 63. |