CHAPTER V.

THE OXFORD CHAIR.

On the 5th of May 1857, Mr. Arnold was elected by Convocation to the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford. His unsuccessful competitor was the Reverend John Ernest Bode, author of Ballads from Herodotus, and a thoroughly orthodox divine. It is a curious fact, illustrating the difference between ancient and modern Oxford, that all Mr. Arnold's predecessors in the chair were clergymen. All his successors have been laymen. The Professorship was founded in 1808. The emoluments were trifling, not more than a hundred pounds a year. On the other hand, the duties were not heavy, while the statutory obligation to lecture in Latin, to which Milman and Keble were subject, had been removed. His inaugural lecture was, however, severely classical in tone. Its subject was "The Modern Element in Literature," and in it Mr. Arnold dwelt upon the close intellectual sympathy between Greece in the days of Pericles and the England of his own day. Both ages, he said, demanded intellectual deliverance, and obtained it from literature, especially from poetry. Thus, comparing the Periclean with the Elizabethan age, he showed how much more modern a historian was Thucydides than Raleigh. But the writers most akin to our own were, he contended, the

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Greek dramatic poets, especially Sophocles and Aristophanes. Latin poetry, being essentially imitative, did not interpret the time as Greek poetry did. This lecture was not published till February 1869, when it appeared in Macmillan's Magazine. It was followed by others on the same subject, which have never been published at all. Athough Mr. Arnold retained his Professorship for ten years, he disliked, as is well known, the title of Professor. It classed him, as he plaintively remarked, with Professor Pepper of the Polytechnic, Professor Anderson, "The Wizard of the North," and other great men with whom he could not aspire to rank. He never as Professor resided in Oxford. He wished to be considered a man of letters and of the world, provided with an honourable and advantageous platform from which to expound his ideas.

The real inauguration of Mr. Arnold's Professorship was his tragedy called "Merope," which appeared in 1858 with an elaborate and justificatory Preface. In this Mr. Arnold described England as the stronghold of the romantic school, and renewed the plea for classical principles which he had put forward in the Introduction to his Collected Poems. The story of Merope, the widowed queen of Messenia, whose son Æpytus avenges upon Polyphontes the murder of Cresphontes, his father, was well known to antiquity. Aristotle cites as specially dramatic the scene where Merope is on the point of killing Æpytus, not recognising him for her son, but believing him to be her son's destroyer. Euripides made it the subject of a play, but only a few fragments have come down to us. Maffei, Voltaire, and Alfieri successively dramatised it, altering it more or less to suit modern taste. Mr. Arnold adhered more

strictly to the authority, such as it is, of Hyginus, but omitted, as too revolting, the marriage of Merope with Polyphontes, who slew her husband. He seems to have forgotten that this was an incident in the greatest of all plays, and that the master of human nature had not shrunk from presenting Gertrude as the wife of Claudius. This Preface contains an attack upon French Alexandrines, which is quite unnecessary, and a criticism of Voltaire as a playwright which is a little out of place, though the comparison with Racine is good. But by far the best part of it is that which describes, with admirable brevity and clearness, the rise of the Greek drama. No one save Aristotle has explained in fewer words, or with more picturesque lucidity, the growth of the complete play from the chorus and the messenger. The chorus was originally part of the audience to whom the narrative was addressed, though they were the only part of the audience who ventured to interrupt. "The lyrical element," as Mr. Arnold well says, "was a relief and solace in the stress and conflict of the action," like the comic scenes which, as Coleridge observed, Shakespeare interposed after great tragic events. Mr. Arnold's ideas were excellent. It was in carrying them out that he failed. To criticise "Merope" is to dissect a corpse. 4vxápiov eî Báoτačov νεκρὸν, would be a better motto than φιλοκαλοῦμεν μer' evredeías, which is the actual one. In vain does Mr. Arnold make Polyphontes a wise and strong king, endeavouring by years of virtuous rule to expiate the crime into which ambition has betrayed him. He does not excite our interest, nor does Merope, nor pytus, nor any of them. The imitation is very skilful.

Merope" is far more strictly Greek in tone and style than "Atalanta in Calydon," which is not really Greek at all. But it has not the sweep, the ring, the melody, nor the sensuous beauty of that fascinating, though irregular drama. It is the form without the spirit, the body without the soul. "Merope" purports to be a Greek play in English dress. It is really a prize poem of inordinate length. Mr. Arnold himself hoped great things from it. "I must read 'Merope' to you," he says in a letter to Mrs. Forster of the 25th of July 1857. "I think and hope it will have what Buddha called the character of Fixity, that true sign of the Law." But literature is not law, and requires something more than fixity, something, as Carlyle would say, quite other than fixity. "Merope" had a kind of success, and not the kind which the author least valued. Dr. Temple, the new Headmaster of Rugby, an excellent judge, admired it. So did George Henry Lewes, so did Kingsley, and so, with some reservations upon the choice of a subject, did Froude. It even sold well. But the general public never took to it, and few competent critics would now, I think, say that they were wrong. There are good lines here and there, such as the gnome

"For tyrants make man good beyond himself,"

and the thoroughly Greek antithesis

"Thy crown condemns thee, while thy tongue absolves,"

and the characteristic couplets

"To hear another tumult in these streets,
To have another murder in these halls."

"So rule, that as thy father thou be loved;
So rule, that as thy foe thou be obey'd."

But the unrhymed choruses are harsh almost beyond

belief, as, for instance

"She led the way of death.
And the plain of Tegea,
And the grave of Orestes-
Where, in secret seclusion
Of his unreveal'd tomb,
Sleeps Agamemnon's unhappy,
Matricidal, world-famed,
Seven-cubit-statured son-

Sent forth Echemus, the victor, the king.”

Perhaps the best of the choric lines are the following, which express one of Mr. Arnold's favourite ideas :

"Yea, and not only have we not explored
That wide and various world, the heart of others,
But even our own heart, that narrow world
Bounded in our own breast, we hardly know,
Of our own actions dimly trace the causes."

:

But how heavy and lifeless are these verses compared with the simple stanza in "Parting"

"Far, far from each other

Our spirits have grown ;

And what heart knows another?
Ah! who knows his own?"

Mr. Arnold was anxious that "Merope" should be shown to Robert Browning, whose "Fragment of a Hippolytus," that is, "Artemis Prologises," he justly admired. But Mr. Browning, as we have seen, had the good taste to prefer "Empedocles," with which "Merope" was republished in 1885. Mr. Arnold considered Mrs. Browning as "hopelessly confirmed in her aberration from health, nature, beauty, and truth." The judgment was severe, but at this distance