CHAPTER III.

EARLY POEMS.

AFTER taking his degree, which would have shocked his father, and winning his Fellowship, which would have delighted him, Matthew Arnold returned to Rugby, and taught classics in the fifth form. Thus began his long connection with education, which only ceased two years before his death. Dr. Arnold's successor in the headmastership of Rugby was Dr. Tait, a less brilliant scholar, but a man of great dignity and profound sagacity, whose full powers were not tested until he came to direct the Church of England, and to represent her in the House of Lords, at a period of momentous interest and importance. It is not too

much to say that no other public school in England has been governed within so short a time by three men so able, eminent, and influential as Dr. Arnold, Dr. Tait, and Dr. Temple. Two of them became Archbishops of Canterbury. The third might have eclipsed them both if he had not been cut off prematurely in the plenitude of his physical and intellectual vigour. It is curious that not one of them was a Rugby man. Many years afterwards, at a dinner given within the walls of Balliol, Mr. Arnold, with characteristic irony and urbanity, contrasted Archbishop Tait and himself as types of the Balliol man who had succeeded and the

Balliol man who had failed in life. It is probable that these few months at Rugby improved and confirmed the accuracy of Matthew Arnold's scholarship, which distinguishes his classical poems, and his "Lectures on Translating Homer." There is a good deal more to be said for gerund-grinding than Carlyle would allow.

Mr. Arnold, however, was not destined to remain long a schoolmaster. He soon became the citizen of a larger world than Rugby, and few indeed have been better qualified to instruct or to adorn it. In 1847 he was made private secretary to Lord Lansdowne, then President of the Council in the administration of Lord John Russell. Lord Lansdowne was one of those statesmen who play a great part in political history without filling a large space in the newspapers. Without striking abilities, and without ambition of any kind, he contrived by his personal tact and calm wisdom to reconcile the differences of the Whig party, to keep more brilliant men than himself out of mischief, and to lead the House of Lords. He had also the pleasant and valuable gift of recognising early promise, together with the rare and enviable power of bringing young men forward and giving them their chance. It was he who brought Macaulay into the House of Commons as Member for Calne, and to him the country owes it that Matthew Arnold had the opportunity of doing for popular education what no one else could have done. He was a real, though a very moderate, Liberal, and Matthew Arnold's politics were substantially those of his patron.

The earliest of Mr. Arnold's Letters, edited by Mr. George Russell, and published by Messrs. Macmillan, is dated the 2nd of January 1848, on his way to

B

Bowood, Lord Lansdowne's house in Wiltshire.

It

was apparently his first visit, for he tells his mother, to whom the letter is written, that he does not expect to "know a soul there." But Matthew Arnold was never shy; and Lord Lansdowne, as Macaulay testifies, was the most gracious of hosts. Of the society at Bowood, however, we have in the letters no glimpse. On this January day in the year of Revolutions the writer had come from his old home at Laleham, and he gives an enthusiastic description of the country. "Yesterday," he says, "I was at Chertsey, the poetic town of our childhood, as opposed to the practical, historical Staines; it is across the river, reached by no bridges and roads, but by the primitive ferry, the meadow path, the Abbey river with its wooden bridge, and the narrow lane by the old wall; and, itself the stillest of country towns backed by St. Ann's, leads nowhere but to the heaths and pines of Surrey. How unlike the journey to Staines, and the great road through the flat, drained Middlesex plain, with its single standing pollarded elms." No English poet, not even Wordsworth, had a more passionate love of the country than Matthew Arnold. But, unlike Wordsworth, he was an omnivorous reader, as familiar with German and French as with Latin and Greek. Writing again to his mother on the 7th of May in this same year 1848, he expresses a rather crude and hasty verdict on Heine, to whom he afterwards did more justice both in prose and verse. "I have just finished," he tells Mrs. Arnold, "a German book I brought with me here, a mixture of poems and travelling journal by Heinrich Heine, the most famous of the young German literary set. He has a good deal of power, though more trick; however, he has

thoroughly disgusted me. The Byronism of a German, of a man trying to be gloomy, cynical, impassioned, moqueur, etc., all à la fois, with their honest bonhommistic language and total want of experience of the kind that Lord Byron, an English peer with access everywhere, possessed, is the most ridiculous thing in the world." Happily, Matthew Arnold travelled soon and far from the state of mind in which he could regard the Reisebilder as "the most ridiculous thing in the world." The author of Heine's Grave knew that to speak of Heine as a man who tried to be gloomy was the reverse of the truth. Heine's model was not Byron, but Sterne, and it was beneath Matthew Arnold to bring the privileges of the peerage into literature. But there never was a more flagrant example than Byron in contradiction of the proverb Noblesse oblige, and it cannot be denied that Dr. Arnold would have highly disapproved of the Reisebilder.

On the 21st of July 1849 there appeared in the Examiner the first of Matthew Arnold's sonnets. It was published anonymously, and addressed "To the Hungarian Nation." On the 29th of July he told his mother that it was "not worth much," and from this candid opinion I, at least, am not prepared to dissent. Such lines as

"Not in American vulgarity,

Nor wordy German imbecility,"

would almost have justified a repetition of the prophecy which Dryden delivered to Swift. And yet, before the year was over, Mr. Arnold had brought out a volume which ought to have established his place in English poetry, though for some unexplained reason

it did not. The "Sonnet to the Hungarian Nation" was not republished in the lifetime of the author. It may be found in Alaric at Rome and Other Poems, edited by Mr. Richard Garnett in 1896.

The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems, by "A.," appeared in the author's twenty-seventh year. Few volumes of equal merit have made so small an impression upon the public. Although every poem in it, except one, "The Hayswater Boat," was afterwards reprinted with Mr. Arnold's sanction, and now forms a permanent part of English literature, scarcely any notice was taken of it at the time, and it was withdrawn from circulation when only a few copies had been sold. It is difficult to account for this neglect. The age was not altogether a prosaic one. Wordsworth was still alive, and still Laureate, although it was long since he had written anything that wore the semblance of inspiration. Tennyson was already famous, in spite of envious detraction and ignorant misunderstanding. Browning, though not yet popular, was ardently admired as the author of "Paracelsus " by a small circle of the best judges. Rogers was enjoying in his old age a poetical reputation which, though it may have been enhanced by his social celebrity, was yet thoroughly deserved. Matthew Arnold, unlike them all, was as true a poet as any of them, and had none of the obscurity which made Browning "caviare to the general." So far as the poem which gave its title to the book is concerned, the cold reception accorded to it was natural enough. Rhyme and blank verse have their own high and recognised positions. We may agree with Milton in holding that rhyme is "no necessary adjunct" of "poem or good verse," while