But Man, dares arrogate The glory, for himself, of endless days! Places familiar grown, Will spread out their consuming skirts Over thy gentle shrubs: And thou wilt bow thine innocent head, Not vainly stubborn, under the load of death; Yet not ere then, shall it be bent In futile supplication cowardly Unto thy future slayer; neither self-lifted Nor above the waste-where not thy choice never be again. We are Even his natural enemies Leopardi's like shall sorry, and yet we are glad. must forgive him for existing, since he is alone of his curious class. Most of us feel at least remotely akin to him, however, and admire ourselves for our rare, not to be duplicated poet-relative. Matthew Arnold offers opportunities of clever comparison. So does Heine. But Leopardi alone is Leopardi, and if we want to embrace all things nobly human, whether glad or sad, we shall be obliged to spend a little hour of devotion at his private shrine. II. "OBERMANN," OF SENANCOUR, AND MATTHEW ARNOLD; OR, MORALS DIVORCED FROM THEOLOGY.* Surely no one that knows Matthew Arnold as poet, critic, theological amateur, and political freelance can accuse him seriously of having drawn his culture exclusively from one book. Who has oftener emphasized the value of wide reading? And yet there does seem to be great truth in the sweeping statement that every man, be his reading never so wide, can still point to a halfdozen men and books as the fashioners of his essential self. There may be many minor influences bearing with all their vigor upon his sensitive spirit, but above them there are some that direct the tendency of all; that serve as living centers of assimilation; that are the real architects of his genius at large, imposing on all acquired materials an individuality in virtue of their new relative worth and office in a vital whole. Thus we feel that Sophocles rather than Eschylus was master-poet for Arnold, that Wordsworth, the placid and passionless, naturally outshone in his heaven of art, the electric, impulsive, farsweeping Goethe. Every student of Matthew Arnold must have felt the sweet necessity of his poetry as a genuine expression of soul. Various estimates of his achieve The translations in the present paper are made from the well known edition of Senancour's "Obermann," with a preface by George Sand, published by Charpentier, Paris. ment exist, to be sure. Some people prefer his prose to his verse, others extol his verse and condone his prose. One thing, however, is plain. The critic and poet in him are forever inseparable; different offices Was not poetry to him creative criti of one soul. cism of life? Did he not hold that poetry is the judge of civilization, in showing up the eternally beautiful, and setting side by side with it, either in the poem itself, or, at least, by suggestion in the mind of the intent reader, all that in the actual is unlovely, unsound, impure, and in need of radical reform-thus censuring it, shaming it, and imposing upon it the doom of the world's eternal scorn? This unity of poet and critic can not but have suggested to the reader of Arnold the fact that Obermann, so affectionately praised by him, exercised no inconsiderable influence upon the man and the critic, because so dear to the poet in youth and mature years. It may have been an unconscious infiltration only, but it must have been important. Goethe, the critic, Wordsworth, the poet, both masters of themselves, and kings in divers ways of spiritual calm; Sophocles, the Olympian, and Homer, the unspeculatively serene, these helped him to attain what he so ardently craved of the stars-sublime self-independence, the power to. do lofty duty without the sympathy of men. But, we can be sure—and to us, we dare say, it is comforting— this attainment was like that of Paracelsus, illusory. He who brought, at a decisive hour, this sympathy, who soothed his fever of bitter unrest, was Obermann, not they. Sainte Beuve may have been his master in criticism, but Obermann was an intimate, a brother in youth, a second, sweeter, never-forgotten self. The present paper is not intended to be a dogmatic restatement, in perpetually varied terms, of the opinion that Senancour had a great share in the making of our poet and critic. It attempts a more modest but far more arduous task. In a series of selected morsels of Obermann, translated to give the intimate sense rather than to render the expression, this paper will attempt to furnish those who have not the opportunity, or leisure, of obtaining it for themselves. some evidence of the affinity we venture to affirm, and of the influence we would suggest as probable. We will not weary the reader with continual quotations from Arnold, or with repeated flashes of generalizaion more or less brilliant. On the whole, we shall confine ourselves to Senancour and his marvelous Obermann. As the reader is doubtless aware, the object of our present scrutiny is a collection of letters purporting to be those of a spirit astray, perplexed, but fully conscious of high capability and mission, to a friend, practical, happy in his home, genially conservative in faith and opinion. Such a collection of letters can not, of course, pursue one line of thought persistently; the two characteristic topics of the book are constantly interwoven. These we must artificially separate, so far as possible, to make them clear at the first glance, reminding the reader, however, that we are examining Obermann for evidence of his kinship with Arnold, and not attempting to criticize Senancour's work for its own sake. We should otherwise have to dwell on the grace and witchery of the style, the sweet suddenness of transition from nature to man and from man to nature; we should have to reprehend all its didactic digressions as artistic blunders, as plains of prose among the highlands of poetry and sentiment, On the contrary, from these very digressions we shall have to draw largely, while what is best in the work must be dismissed with a few tations at the close of our paper. quo Obermann then deals with two great subjects; the considerations of practical ethics and the need of their reconstruction occupy his mind; his soul is engaged with the emanations of beauty from nature, those secret suggestions, not mechanically allegorical, but direct interferences with the spirit of man, experienced in the midst of mountains and valleys, forests, birds, and waters, and under the eternal sky. And so we find constant efforts at evolving some theory of the moral regeneration of mankind, which has become imperative because of the inroad made upon tradition by science and the spirit of individual liberty. We have equally frequent hints how to obtain the comfort of ever-present nature, not seen through frigid mytholog-· ical media, but felt as a portion of ourselves, bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh, spirit of our spirit—twin births, man and nature-the conscious and unconscious of the same universal mother. Both these phases of the work might be separately found elsewhere, but their fusion, so intimate and significant, is what constitutes Obermann's originality of attitude, and makes one feel that Arnold, whose life-work was also the manifestation and advocacy of these two phases of spiritual activity-(the one in his rationalized theology, the other in his literary essays, and both in his poetry-natural magic and moral profundity being always what he strove to enshrine in classic |